Great movies you should see: The Last Hurrah (1958)

Fianna Fail, Boston Cumann.

Yet another must for the Political Junkie’s DVD library, The Last Hurrah   has Spencer Tracy ( Now there’s an actor) at his finest as a charismatic old school Irish American mayor seeking re-election one last time.

If you want to know how the old Democratic machines locked up the cities, and indeed how Fianna Fail used to do it, this is textbook stuff. The party is everything, with loyalty, decency and just the faintest whiff of corruption keeping the whole thing together. Very watchable, especially the ensemble of yes men the mayor surrounds himself with.

Sadly, only available on Region 1 DVD, but really, isn’t it time you invested in a multi region DVD player. It’s not like they’re dear anymore.

Pay close attention for a reference to a certain Fianna Fail politician, by the way.

Great books you should read: Company

Read this, for God's sake!
I’m often accused by friends of forcing books onto them because I liked them, and therefore buy copies of them as unwanted gifts for said friends in other to encourage the writer in my own tiny way to write more stuff that I like. It’s true.
I can’t understand why Max Barry is not huge. In fact it seems that whilst he is published in his native Australia and indeed in the US, he’s only relatively recently been published in Britain or Ireland, which I regard as bizarre given his style of humour.
Company tells a story of Zephyr Holdings, an enormous company that no one quite seems to know what it actually does. A new employee starts poking around and discovers the truth, along the way giving a funny take on how large companies function. Or don’t.

I won’t ruin the book by revealing the plot or the funnier incidents in it, just to point you towards it as an entertaining and thoughtful take on corporate culture.

 

What The West Wing taught us about politics.

Forgetting This Election Cycle With President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet | by  Alex Bauer | CineNation | Medium

A Good PA is worth his/her weight in gold.

Sometimes your opponent’s ideals are as noble as yours.

Most problems can be solved by a good long walking conversation.

There’s a Latin quotation for every occasion.

Voters will let you do the vision thing as long as you deliver on the potholes.

Surround yourself with really smart people, especially if they occasionally get up your nose and disagree with you.

Good rousing theme music never hurt anyone.

Power means occasionally having a big block of cheese in your hallway.

You won’t get everything done. Do what you can.

It’s not the scandal that gets you as much as the cover-up.

Some things are more important than getting re-elected.

Decisions are made by those who show up.

Everybody needs a Leo.

What about a Netflix for newspapers?

As newspapers and magazines vanish behind paywalls, I find myself in a conundrum. See, I understand the economics, and it’s one of the few areas I agree with Rupert Murdoch. Quality journalism can’t be free: someone has to pay for the journalists to go places and ask questions and to professionally report on that news. Everything can’t be free.

But here’s the problem: I’ve been spoilt. I want to read more than one newspaper and I don’t want to pay €20 subscriptions for a single one. I want to read The Economist, and New York magazine, and The Daily Telegraph and The Times and the New York Times and The Washington Post and The Guardian and The Independent and Der Spiegel.

So, what am I willing to pay for? Consider the Netflix option. I effectively pay €84 a year for that, but look at the choice. I feel like I’m getting value, and importantly, I’m paying-as-I-go, so I don’t take the hit of a large subscription.

So why not offer me a monthly subscription, but let me pick and swap, say, 10 of the wide selection of periodicals.

That I’ll pay for.

Thoughts on blogging.

Every year I rewrite this piece to review my experience of blogging:

I’ve been writing this blog since December 2008, and I thought that I’d scribble a bit on blogging itself and my experience of it.

Firstly, from a personal point of view, along with writing fiction (sometimes the two blend)  it is a very satisfying outlet. I see things online or on TV and want to scream at the screen, and with a blog I can get it out. Does anyone actually read it? Certainly the number of visits I get every month has risen pretty much every month since I started.

Does it make a difference? Probably not, although I have been told of one former politician who seems to partially blame me for their fall from grace. As an ex-girlfriend of mine pointed out wisely to me, if I wasn’t blogging she would have had to listen to my rants. A fair point.

Having said that, I am constantly surprised at the people I meet who read the blog. I did get a column with Dow Jones Marketwatch.com out of it, occasional invites on to radio shows and TV, the odd newspaper or magazine interview, and even get the odd stranger introducing themselves to me in the street. Also invitations to speak at things. It’s one of the curiosities of the modern media: there is a demand for people who actually think about stuff.

But what’s more amusing amusing, of course, are the people, from a political background, who actually state to me that what they tell me is “off the record”, which I find incredibly flattering.

What have I learned in these five years? What advice can I impart to a new blogger?

1. Be consistent. Either commit to regular posts or don’t bother. I have actually reduced the number of posts to maybe one every two days or so, unless something interesting pops up that warrants an instant comment. I did this because a number of regular readers pointed out that I was posting stuff faster than they could read it, that is, they only pop onto the blog every few days and were finding reams of material. But unless I have written a very long piece, I try to give readers omething new every 48 hours at least.

2. Not every post has to be a tome or a well thought out treatise on a subject of great gravity. Funny things happen to people all the time. Write about them. Don’t forget that book or new TV show you’re reading or watching.

3. You will be surprised how some posts, which you put a lot of work into, fail to take off, yet other casual posts catch people’s attention and end up being tweeted all over the place.

4. Controversial one this: don’t be afraid to recycle posts. Depends on the subject, of course, in that there’s no point running a “But where is Osama now?” post. I write a series on Irish politics, “The Occasional Guide to Irish Politics”, and I find that many of the topics remain live and unchanged years later, hardly a surprise in Irish politics, I know, but still. Recycle, but tell people you do it. I have never had a complaint. Don’t forget that not everyone pays as much attention to your blog as you do.

5. Twitter. I’m not hugely active on Twitter, as I haven’t really the time given the nature of my job. But as a means of drawing people to new posts I find it works well. But be very choosy as to what posts you highlight, as there is only so much naked self promtion people will tolerate. I tend to go for the more thoughtful ones, and get a good response.

6. Ireland needs more partisan bloggers. I don’t mean party drones pushing out the usual “My party or die” garbage, but thoughtful stuff from a party base. For example, my readership spikes every time I write a piece about the future of Fianna Fail. Not an attack on FF, but a piece on “should FF do this or that?”. I get contacted privately (a lot) by FFers on the posts, some complimentary, some critical, but it’s all robust and sincere debate. Only once has an FFer got cranky with me, outraged that I, an Irish voter, had the cheek to write about his party and that I should “mind my own business”. I asked a couple of FFers about him, and one summed him up as “Yeah, we tend to put him in a corner with a packet of crisps and a Club Orange, and try to avoid startling him with loud noises.”

7. There are some nasty types out there, but not as many as you think. The web has given every anonymous mouth-breather an opportunity to get out into the world in an attempt to wreak revenge on their frustrations, and I have attracted a few. Some would say I’m one myself. I’ve been accused of being paid money by large and secret corporations (which I would take if offered, by the way), snorting cocaine, hiding my former Progressive Democrat affiliation (seriously?) and, most bizarrely, and one poor soul regarded this as a cutting insult, liking Bearnaise sauce. Just be aware that the poor bastards are out there watching until their mother calls them down for their tea. Do not engage with the crazies, though. You make their day, and they always have more time than you, because this is all they have. Don’t forget, they regard their anonymous vomits on politics.ie as a “body of work”.

8. Recognise that not all of your audience are from your own country. About 40% of my readers are from outside Ireland (US, UK and, cough, a certain city in Belgium) so occasionally write a piece aimed at them. And don’t be afraid to invite guest bloggers. Just make sure they don’t libel anyone.

Finally, be nice to the people who take the trouble to engage with you. I try to reply to all the emails I get from people, and NEVER EVER quote non-public people without their permission. I get a lot of emails from political people telling me stuff going on in their respective parties. Some of it will be of the hatchet variety, which I don’t use, but other stuff can be very telling. Take Ogra Fianna Fail’s transformation into THE place for young gay political activists to go, for example. I was tipped off to this not by openly gay young FFers but still-in-the-closet young politicos who were surprised at how open Ogra had become.

Is blogging worth it? If, like me, you carry a notebook around with you and always have a few draft blogs knocking around in your head, yes it is. It’s the cheapest form of therapy you’ll ever find.