We don't want to live in lisbonia -

merci mais non merci,
Dank aber kein Dank,
tak men nej tak,
grazie, ma no grazie,
dankzij maar niet dankzij,


Dzięki ale nie dzięki ! agradecimento mas não agradece ! gracias pero no gracias ! tack men nej tack.

Which is what Ireland said to it’s European neighbors today in relation to the Lisbon treaty, basically ‘thanks but no thanks ’.

Maybe not in so many words and not in so many languages but the Irish people most certainly did say "NO".

We’ve already heard Dermot Ahern Minister for Justice on the telly saying there were 'myriad' reasons for this. Some annoyed European Official (unofficially) sourly blamed the Irish media's focus on internal national issues like Bertie Ahearn's cash case, resignation and the consequent election of a new leader. I mean the cheek of us Irish to actually be concerned about our own welfare when there was a much bigger European picture to consider. I wonder what others thought were Dermot's myrid reasons, I have a few conjectures.

As any ad man will tell you, unless you are selling to rocket scientists, you must keep your message short and crisp, easy to understand and above all clear. When someone like Charlie McCreevy a Brussels based veteran politician who earns his not inconsiderable living from European affairs tells us that he hasn't read the treaty but puts the the thing smack into the center of public consciousness - things ceased being simple. When he then said he doubted if anyone else has been able to wade through it and understand any, let alone all, of it, when he's conceded that there's a whole lota complexity there beyond him, a big raft of technicality that's just too dense, then how in all conscience can he expect lay people like us to understand any of this stuff. But don't worry about that.. just vote yes.

We had all three major parties supporting this referendum. We had each of them instructing their supporters to actively support a yes vote. We had all the people who are normally interested in and involved with politics now playing politics with the rest of us. The people very unsubtley telling us exactly what it was we should be doing i.e. voting YES. They were even trying to score points from each other at the beginning, claiming the other side(s) (i.e. everyone except them) weren't doing enough to promote Lisbon. And 'make no mistake' we were told, Lisbon needed to be promoted because 'Europe was relying on us' - so while we had a choice, we really didn't have a choice at all, we simply had to vote yes, according to the majority of the Irish political system.

That was only the initial main problem, people like me who basically believe in the ideals of democracy, freedom, liberty, respect for your fellow human being, the right to rights. Your average Joe Soap basically, who loves and embraces almost all of those sorts of ideas that offer the opportunity of a collective warm and fuzzy feeling, the assumption of collective progress through trust, a real Tim Buton and Jack Nicholson's Mars Attacks style "Why can't we all just get along" sentiment. We love the idea of Lisbon. We have just had enough of politics - if it wasn't the general election, it was then Bertie, it was then a leadership issue, a cabinet selection issue, a watch out Brian Cowen, look what's happening to Gorden Brown issue, a Lisbon treaty clash of egos, you had people like BIFFO and Enda Kanty elbowing for photo ops, run the country ? I wouldn't let either of them run..... down the shop for milk.

I used to believe that anyone who wanted to be a politician, deserved to be, basically if they were attracted to the duplicity, the intermittent spotlight, the disingenuous and fickle nature of political appeasement, lobbying, courting - fascinated by prospects of suffering ridicule or being derided by sections of society to only then become of all things - a public servant - then fair play to them, off you go, stand around shoutin' each other down and out maneuvering each other to your hearts content, but do try and do a decent job of keeping the place tickin' over while you're at it.

Of course we had a big Celtic tiger wave of affluence in which the poor got poorer, the health service imploded, living standards inflated rather than rose, the education system threaded water, the country flooded with economic migrants and the the top tiers of our society snuggled up with the politicians to form a political and financial hegemonic strata that directed operations below and around about the time it all started turning sour - they decide to ask the voting population to endorse this complex idea in a secret ballot - did they really believe that people would vote yes. I don't think they did, so in a last gasp of reverse psychology:




Somebody in their wisdom decided to let Jim Corr, well known cultural philosopher, globally renowned political intellectual, to air his own views, just to prove that anyone who was considering voting 'No' would be regarded with the same respect as Jim.

Even that didn't work.

search for the creative self

Chance, temporal lobe density, childhood trauma, genetic predisposition, embracing failure, ambiguity, water logic, domain acceptance, serendipity; enablers, assistants, generators of creativity, sources of originality, ignition of imagination or simply bald ox beyond the interest or understanding of mainstream society ?

Maybe mystery is more important than knowledge, perhaps that irrepressible need to understand supersedes intuitive attraction towards fantastical imagination, could it be, that experience of being actually exceeds endeavour ? We should somehow become oblivious, ignoring ‘just do it’ embracing ‘understand it’ incorporating ‘believe it’ morphing into ‘live and create freely’.

Our industrial society is less than 300 years old. Today’s education system was designed to service that industrial society and perpetuate the educational system that feeds it. An educational system that is to creativity what agent orange was to international diplomacy.

Mathematical and mental thumbscrews wring the last drops of independent thought out of potential educational cannibals – points rise, reputations increase, buildings are erected, imagination evaporates in a cloud of more knowing, a fog of academic achievement blurs progress on a path that actually leads back to past bald ox. I’ve heard the herd before and I didn’t like what they had to say then either.

Creativity is a very precious concept, inferring as it does originality, wisdom, value, promise and much much more. Integral to creativities gestation is independence, necessary to it’s prosperity is acceptance. Such opposing notions fuel my search.

ebooks - the ‘ashtray on a motorbike’ phenomena a market might want

Can you spot the ebook above?

Without descending into a diatribe about McLuhan and co, I believe ebooks as a format and indeed art form are currently utterly immature. Fundamentally this is because the majority of those currently connected with their potential production cannot envisage/understand any viable business models for mass consumption more complicated than a ‘print book to electronic screen’.

Each of these non innovators sit waiting on the other to light the market up and speculate on innovation – the only dull spark to date being kindle. So in a similar context to what happen to TV innovation for fifty years, i.e. we simply got ‘stage’ on screen, ebooks currently lack their own dynamic properties. Apart from mobility, not needing to purchase an additional nightlight and incorporated navigation aids, ebooks in their current form are merely electronic versions of static print. The hardware standards agreement of late 2007 just ring fenced the current hardware players in an industry that doesn’t as yet know what it produces.

So apart form the low cost distributive ease of the ebook, there is little reason to believe that readers or consumers or anyone else for that matter, will actually want something even the potential seller doesn’t understand.

Back in the Black

I was going to create another blog for a specific series of writing projects I'm currently undertaking but I suddenly felt nostalgic for one of the first blogs I ever created - i.e. this one (back in early 2004) Thus I'm coming back to basics, with renewed vigor to play around with information and blogging about some of the digital media materials on my private site clevercelt while also using this blog to describe the creative processes etc that's involved with making those. The other thing of course is anything that appears here must be either public domain, creative commons or indeed my own personal copyright - no stuff belonging to anyone else (without express permission etc).

The photo above is of my son Conor's dog buddy posing for him. Buddy is the Irish Ronaldo of Jack Russels, His specialty is the four footed lunge. What with Euro2008 and all that on TV at the moment, soccer is saturating the airwaves and it's such big business it really is hard to enjoy it without getting a little cynical about the whole thing.