Entertainment used to be for the most part a pleasure most people enjoyed almost for free. People would tell tales around the fire, sing songs that had been passed through the generation, and drinking alcohol or other narcotics they produced themselves. This is how it was for most people until the beginning of the 20th century. By then there was already a leisure class that had enough money to listen to symphonies, watch theatre and buy books. Somehow, though, these simple pleasures became too simple for us and we started demanding more complex ones. New inventions at the start of the last century like Cinema, radio and later TV suddenly made the old forms of entertainment seem fairly quaint. At the same time literacy became more widespread as a result of investments made in education in the Victorian era which meant there was a ready market for tabloid newspapers and cheap paperback books. Then there was the development of copyright which meant that songs, books and designs could suddenly be “owned” by the people that produced them and they could effectively charge other people to experience them.
Today, people in the music industry speak of copyright as if it was some sort of universal law that has existed through the ages but it really only came into being in the last number of centuries. The US complains that counterfeit CDs and DVDs can be bought on the streets of places like Mexico and Vietnam but the truth is that the US didn’t grant copyright protection to foreign artists until the 1890s. Before then, the idea that music could be “owned” was a novel one. The ancient Greeks believed that music was a gift from the gods that was channeled through certain individuals (and birds) and this persisted right up until the era of Bach and Mozart (who I’m listening to right now). It wasn’t until Beethoven came along and decided that his music was expressing his own personal tortured, conflicted feelings that the idea that music belonged to anyone came into being. His life coincided with the development of sheet music which made music accessible to people who didn’t live in the cities where professional musicians played but also had serious commercial possibilities that were easily exploited, especially as a few people controlled the printing presses and was allowed in many cases only by royal decree which was often granted with arbitrary, Simon Cowell-like capriciousness. The power of copyright increased further with the invention of the gramophone, which gave people the ability to hear high-quality recordings, though at a price. It also precipitated a shift from music being composer-orientated to being performer-orientated which happened fairly suddenly… Gerswhin and Irving Berlin were more famous than any of the people who performed their work, but who knows who wrote most of elvis’s songs? Then there were improvements in recording technology that meant that the version of a song that appeared on an album was pretty much the definitive one, as anyone who’s tried to play Stairway to Heaven themselves will know.
By the time that song was written, chinks in the armour of copyright were starting to appear. Magnetic tape, which was originally invented by the Nazis to broadcast fake speeches (I’m indebted to Mr. Stephen Fry for this historical nugget) suddenly became available to almost everyone and allowed them to copy records and later CDs and share them with their friends, much to the consternation of the music industry, which started printing little skull and crossbones on LPs emblazoned with the words “Home taping is killing music… and it’s illegal” The latter was certainly true, but it wasn’t as if the people losing out were all that law-abiding themselves, except for maybe Cliff Richard. As for killing music; well, just watch TV on any given Saturday and see how many people want to make it in the music industry. Go to any singer-songwriter night or any karaoke bar and you’ll realize that the desire to perform music hasn’t been killed by the existence of magnetic tape… or mp3s.
I have over 20,000 mp3s and WMAs on this computer I’m using right now, and at most 10% were purchased through legitimate channels. The rest were ripped from other people’s CDs or copied from their hard drives. I realize that this makes my a criminal, but the idea that I owe the music industry in the region of €19,000 isnt that acceptable to me. A lot of the music I have is stuff I’m happy to have, though would never have paid €20 for a CD of. Also, the idea that I’m somehow “stealing” music is a bit ludicrous, as it’s not something that can really be owned in the way that a car or a tube of toothpaste can. Who owns the music of birds, for example? Is it the birds themselves, or do we own it because we define it as being music? (Music industry lawyers would define birdsong as “public domain” music). I watched that youtube flick of that obnoxious prick Kid Rock attacking people who download music illegally saying in his arrogant, pompous way that downloading music was the same as stealing a computer. Well, it’s not, actually. If you go into a computer store and manage to steal a computer, the shop loses the money it invested buying the computer, whereas the musical artist, if you could really call Kid Rock that, only loses the money they would have got if the album had been downloaded legitimately or purchased as a CD. It’s not rocket science, Mr. Rock. If you hadn’t been drinking whiskey from the bottle when you were 17 you might realize how fuck-headed your argument was.
His passionate defence of copyright would be even less palatable if I thought he knew about copyright is abused in the natural world by companies like Monsanto, who are able to “patent” new forms of life and then charge anyone who’s crops cross-breed with new varieties. It is horribly ironic that rich kids who are able to afford fancy computers with fast internet connections get away with breaching copyright while poor farmers in India are held to the letter of laws that they had no part in making, but the plight of those farmers is the result of taking the principal of copyright to it’s ultimate conclusion.
Actually, CDs were one of the great rip-offs in history. The record companies had the technology to digitize music but needed to come up with a way of packaging it and selling it to consumers, who would be forced to buy a whole new machine to play them on, even though they already had perfectly good machines called “turntables”. Even though CDs didn’t cost any more than records, they charged more because they were using the extra money to promote CDs by saying they were unbreakable, would last forever, sounded even better than hearing music live and lots of other patently untrue stuff. They made an awful lot of money by getting people to buy their whole record collection again, though now it’s coming back to haunt them with the ease and speed of modern ripping technology.
To be fair, the cost of legitimate downloads has come way down in price, though this is mainly because the music industry realizes that they were fighting a losing battle against a new technology. I do buy some music legitimately. I have a subscription to eMusic, which supports up-and-coming bands on smaller labels, and charges way less than iTunes, though the price differential is narrowing. 7digital and Amazon have the same range of stuff at cheaper prices. A new album on 7digital costs only €7, which is little more than the cost of a daytime cinema ticket, which average at around €5.50. 20 years ago, a new LP cost 7 POUNDS, at a time when a daytime cinema ticket could be had for around £1.50. True, LPs used to come in big, shiny folders but they also used to get scratched and worn down through overplaying. You’re probably also aware that downloading music through peer-to-peer networks puts your computer at risk of being infected and unless you’re a techie this can be extremely expensive to get fixed and it can work out cheaper just to buy the mp3s legitimately. One p2p network that’s reportedly fairly safe to use is called Shareaza. Of course you can also stream videos for free on youtube, or music on spotify for a reasonable price, though you need to have a fast web connection all the time to do this. Copying other people’s CDs or music from their hard drives onto your computer is a far safer proposition. Your computer doesn’t really know who bought the original CD. Some new CDs are rip-proof, although only until someone comes along and develops a new technology to overcome this. Until recently iTunes used to cage their mp3s with Digital Rights Management software (DRM) so they couldn’t be copied, but they were forced by commercial pressure to change this. You still can’t use an iPod as a portable hard drive, so if you are in favour of sharing music a Zen, a Zune, or an Archos makes far more commercial sense, as buying a portable external hard drive will set you back at least another
I can’t make the decision for you on what it’s defensible or not to download illegitimately. I do know that most established musicians don’t need the money all that desperately. I was pretty aghast to find out that Jimmy Page had someone who was trying to make a few bob selling knock-off Zep CDs arrested. This is a man who, in his musical prime, used to throw TVs out windows, fly around in his band’s private jet and have sex with more or less any young female that caught his eye, and now lives in a huge country estate. When his band were together, there was a progressive taxation system that forced the rich to pay at a far higher rate than the poor, but this system was smashed in the Reagan-Thatcher years and now they pay only slightly more, or less in the case of people with offshore accounts, like Bono. This soi-disant savoir of humanity actually moved his money away from Ireland, which is a bit of a tax haven itself, to the Netherlands, where taxes for artists are even lower. Then there’s Metallica, whose base player, instead of thinking how lucky he is to have made all that money playing bass in a heavy metal band, invests all his money in art to make even more money, and chastises those who download his music illigetimately.
Then there are those artists who aren’t alive anymore and whose estates receive the royalties. The “estates” in question often compromise people like Yoko Ono, Heather Mills, Courtney Love and other people who contributed nothing to lives of the artists in question. What’s worse, Ms Love fought for years to take money away from the other 2 guys in Nirvana who actually helped to produce the music and then gave all the money to some Bernie Madoff –like character who lost it all. Whether they still need our continued support is at least a matter for debate.
In the case of classical music, which makes up 11% of CD sales, the composers have generally been dead for hundreds of years. Most of the money from CD sales goes to either record company executives, conducters and soloists, while the rest of the people in the orchestra get paid fairly dismally.
It is worth supporting up-and-coming bands. Many people who make music aren’t entirely in it for the money, though they can make better music if they can focus on it entirely and don’t have some shitty day job to go to. I’m hoping that many bands will follow Radiohead and sell directly to the consumer, taking both record companies and the likes of iTunes out of the equation. While most of the really great music that’s been made has been made against the wishes of record companies who feared it wasn’t commercial enough, all of the really bad music that’s been made has been made in record company’s pursuit of the bottom line. The relationship between art and commerce has always been a messy one that may be heading for a painful separation. On the whole iTunes is probably fairly bad for music. On the positive side it does make music available to people who might not have had access to it otherwise. On the negative side, it prioritises tracks over albums and is turning music back from an album-orientated medium to a single-orientated medium, which is tragic as many of the great works of art of the last 40 years have been albums and it’s often the more obscure tracks on albums that are the most enduring.
It won’t have failed to come to your attention that seeing artists in concert has become way more expensive than buying on of their CDs. Twenty years ago it cost around the same as a CD, or twice as much as an LP, to see an established artists, now it can cost ten or more times the cost of downloading an album legitimately, and that’s before you buy the horribly overpriced soggy chips, warm beer, tacky souvenir t-shirts and washing powder to get all the puke stains out of your clothes. I think it’s good thing that people still want to see live music as it represents a desire for authenticity on some level and a desire to connect directly with an artist. On the other hand, I think some artists are compensating themselves a little too much for the loss of revenue from CD sales by charging over €100 for a concert ticket, especially when the bands in question are often 70’s and 80’s bands who bring out a best selling compilation box-set every year.
I’ve been to Electric Picnic a few times (not to put too fine a point on it, but , there are way too many skangers at Oxegen) but never felt tempted to try to sneak in for free, as it’s reportedly fairly easy to do. Even though I felt the tickets probably were slightly over-priced I still think it’s worth paying to see musicians whose music has genuinely enriched your life. On the other hand, I didn’t spend all that much on having my fortune told, getting a full-body massage or getting married in that plastic church. I did get henna’d …by myself, though I have to admit my work isn’t of a professional standard.
I have snuck into a few movies. I think it’s one of the few advantages of having soulless multiplexes instead of the charming fleapits that were still around when I was growing up. It was something I started doing in college and should have grown out of but never did. It involves spending a lot of time in the bathroom. Again I try to support films that were made by people who have a genuine love of the medium rather than just wanting to make more money. I don’t feel bad about about not supporting Hollywood studios who; in the case of the first 2 Star Wars sequels I’m actually proud I didn’t give George Lucas any of my money. Since the Reagan era, the Hollywood studios have been owned by conglomerations that are focused entirely on making money. For example, Universal Studios is owned by Vivendi, a French firm that started out in sewerage management. They invest so much money in marketing and promoting their films that they really can’t take any risks which is why so many movies are formulaic; even when an original idea manages to get made into a movie it ends up being sequelised and threequelised. Some good movies still get made, though when you pay to see them in the cinema not all that much money gets back into the hands of people who actually made the movies. Most of the money goes straight to the cinema, then a huge proportion goes to marketing movies. Another big chunk ends up as profit for the conglomeration that invested in the movie in the first place. Of then people who are involved in making movies, the actors get paid the most even though many of them are talentless idiots whose fame is a product of the same publicity departments that people fund by going into the cinema and paying to see actors with star power. The people who actually create movies, the writers and directors, actually see very little of the money that you slap down at the box office, though some of the more established directors and a very small number of writers can still “open” a movie.
People still pay quite a bit to watch movies at the cinema because of the whole experience of queuing outside, buying popcorn and fizzy drinks which can make the whole experience worthwhile even if the movie isn’t that good, which is why movie theatres can still charge such crazy prices; though relative to a concert or a fancy restaurant they still represent fairly good value for money. After all, it was during the original great depression that cinema first took off as a medium, swinging wildly between uplifting entertainments like Gold Diggers of 1933 to gritty dramas like The Public Enemy. Video stores, however, are seriously feeling the pinch, although it has to be said they were charging some insane prices when they were able to get away with it. Last year it cost as much as €5.75 to rent out a DVD for one night, though they cost only around double that to buy at retail prices. Right now they cost €2 which works out at 50c apiece if you bring 3 friends round, and a profit can still be made at that price. Trouble is, from the video stores point of view, that if you want to watch a movie in the comfort of your own home, you can pretty much do it for free on the internet. In the US they have something called Netflix which lets you stream loads of movies with near-perfect picture quality for a mere $5/month, though there’s no sign of that being introduced here. Instead, to watch movies online, you have to go onto shady websites like theonlydevice.com and watch-movies-links.net… because they have to keep changing their name to avoid being caught by the entertainment industries lawyers. They may have changed these names, but you’ll still be able to find them by doing a google search. Now that movies can be rented for a mere €2, it’s debatable whether it’s worth putting up with the crappy picture quality on most of these sites, though they do have the advantage of being online almost as soon as the films are released theatrically, or even before in the case of movies that are released here weeks after in the states, or leaked from the festival circuit. I’m hoping some movie makers will follow the Radiohead route and release their movies online, though it’s probably a more challenging proposition technically. I watched an excellent movie called Humpday online recently and enjoyed it so much that I wished I could have paid for it in some way, but right now the only channel through which I can do this is waiting for it to come out on DVD here, and then they’d only get a very small chunk of the €2 I paid there.
I don’t know why people buy DVD box sets of TV shows. Some bright spark wrote a big article in the Tribune saying they were the new books, citing as evidence that some people keep them on their bookshelves. There is the advantage that you can watch shows without any ads for stuff you don’t need, although apparently you can get fancy hard drive recorders that can tell when the ads are coming on and refuse to record them, or just let you flick through them even quicker than you could on VCRs. Or you could just stream them online, on sites like tvduck.com or tvlinksdb.com. I imagine that because over the last 10 years there’s been so much superior stuff on TV to the cinema that people want to pay for TV in some way other than buy patronizing advertisers which is indirect at best. Having said that, it’s hard to see how anyone can justify the cost of paying €500 for the complete Friends on DVD, which is what it cost when it first came out, though now it can be had for around a tenth of that price.
Some people still read books even since DVD box sets were invented. After all, you’re reading this one right now, although it’s available online as well. They’ve proved pretty enduring, as they offer something that TV and movies don’t. Jean-Paul Sartre called reading a novel a “free dream” though I actually think that’s a more apposite description of a movie, which is experienced fairly passively, unlike books, which really demand some active participation and allow you to exercise your imagination. I’m reading The Kite Runner like millions before me, but my experience will be different from everybody else’s as the way I visualize the novel will be different. If I wrote a random sentence like “my cousin visited a lawyer last Saturday ” it would conjour a different image in the mind of everyone who read it, depending on whether they have cousins and what they look like if they do, what they imagine my cousins look like of if I had any or just made that statement up, whether they have ever been to a lawyer themselves or just seen them on TV or movies, what they were up to last Saturday, where they live and what the weather was like where they were… the permutations are almost infinite.
Though not everyone has the concentration to read books and some people basically just find them boring… one survey said that one in four people read no books at all, while 50% of people read less than five a year; if you do enjoy them you are fairly lucky as it’s a pleasure you can enjoy almost for free. It certainly costs a lot to buy new books in hardcover, though relative to a lot of other things the price has come way down. Paperbacks on the other hand have been getting cheaper all the time, costing around the same as they did 10 years ago while everything else has hyperinflated. It can work out cheaper to buy a paperback than to see a movie at night, and it generally takes several times longer to read a novel, though it does make more demands on you. And you can always go to the library and get them for free, though if you want to read the new Dan Brown novel, for example, you could be waiting a while for everyone else to finish with it. Libraries became a little bit unfashionable in the 90’s and early noughties as paperbacks became cheap and bookstores suddenly became sexy, offering coffee and comfy chairs to sit on, 2-for-1 deals, soft classical music, etc, though now times are tougher libraries are seeing a rise in membership. You can also find books cheaply in charity stores and second-hand bookstore though some of the latter are struggling to survive in the age of the world wide web. Classic books suddenly became extremely cheap overnight in the 90’s with the collapse of the net book agreement which was basically a cartel between bookstores and publishers.
While books are a lot cheaper than they used to be in bookstores, they are still cheaper online, although not so much if you live here in Ireland, where Amazon charge a ludicrous £4 per book to post to. There’s an American store called Better World Books which gives it’s profits to a third world literacy fund and only charges $4 to post to here, though they don’t have the same selection as Amazon. Even so, it often works out cheaper to buy on Amazon than buying books in bookstores here, even if as much as 99.75% of the cost is taken up by postage. Of course you can also do what previous generations did and share them with your friends, or, if that’s a bit 20th Century, go onto bookcrossing.com and pass books onto others by leaving them in random places. Or donate them to charity shops and write your email address on a random page.
Setting up a reading group is a cheap way of socializing with people of common interest, though finding the people and agreeing on a book to read can be difficult.
I seriously don’t see the point of an ebook reader. I actually had a mp3 player which had a very basic ebook reader for over a year but I only managed to read 2 books on it ever, partly because it used to break up words at the end of sentences, mainly because it used to hurt my eyes more than reading a real book. The new generation of ebook readers from Amazon and Sony are reportedly easier on the eye but the prices are a long way from being competitive. Unless you read a book a day which only college professors allegedly do, it’ll take years to pay off the cost of buying one at current prices, unless you only read books that you download for free from the wonderful project Gutenberg. It’s possible to read them straight of a computer screen as well though that’s an even bigger strain on your eyes. None of the arguments in favour of buying one seem to stack up to me. If you are going travelling and don’t want to carry too many books around, the best solution is to only carry one at a time, rather than be worrying about having all your books on your ebook reader stolen. It’s one of the pleasures of travelling to find a book that you really like in some random place. In any case bookstores can be found almost everywhere there is electricity. Then you have some another really valuable possession to worry about as well as your camera and your mp3 player.
Before literacy became widespread and films and TV were with us, literature was mostly performed orally. We don’t have many of the old Spalpin Fanachs around though we do still have live literature in the form of theatre. To be honest, I don’t go there as much as I used to when I was in college when I used to get a student discount from a price that wasn’t that excessive in the first place. I remember the Everyman theatre in Cork used to have a pay-what-you-want night every week which seems impossible pre-Celtic Tiger now. It’s kind of understandable as prices have gone up everywhere else and being an actor is a notoriously fickle profession. There’s this other place in Cork called the Opera House which doesn’t really look like an Opera House from the outside and only has room for thirteen musicians in the orchestra pit. Recently they had a live webcast from the metropolitan opera in New York and charged more to see it than the cheapest seats cost in the real Met, though those cheap seats are effectively subsidized by the people paying $400 up in the front. Its cheaper to see Opera in a lot of European countries where the government subsidise it a lot and it’s not considered as hoity-toity as it is here.
I used to play a lot of video games when I was a kid but sort of lost interest in my early 20’s and now only play the ones on my phone and ones I can get for free on the internet. I have no idea how much wii, playstations and Xboxes cost or how much value for money they represent. From a parents point of view, they help keep your kids off the street though they can distract them from their studies as well… that certainly happened me. That was before the weird sub-world of online gaming that exists now, where people pay gamers in Eastern Europe to be their opponents and buy online identities… or The Sims or Second life where people spend real money on virtual stuff… it’s all very weird to me.
On the other hand, I’m totally into social networking. It’s a way you can have fun without spending any more money than the price of a computer and web connection. I have accounts with Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Fubar, HotorNot, Speedate and probably some more that are dormant though I really use just use facebook nearly all the time these days. I can see why some people don’t like it… they are afraid of getting addicted though it’s a bit too late for me to worry about that. There are issues relating to privacy as well, I’ve given access to all my personal details to anonymous people who’ve set up some application that’s given me 2 minutes of amusement, though I can’t really see what they can do with it. Giving people your credit card number to people is something you really do have to be careful about. Actually, having a credit card at all is something you have to be careful about. I’ve got into credit card debt only once but I’m someone who’s pretty careful with money as you can probably tell by now. They cost very little to have relative to the amount you can save online as you as you stay out of debt. I still have a €2000 limit that I’ve had since the Celtic Tiger years, I got it extended from €1000 simply by writing “inflation” where they asked me to cite a reason for this on the application form. When I originally applied for one, I was unemployed, but the bank just told me to leave the employment details blank on the application.
You can also save a lot of money on phone calls by using Skype or yahoo messenger and getting all your friends to do the same. I used to live with some Bulgarian guys who were contacting their relatives back home all the time that way which was great from their point of view. As it’s a relatively new technology there are still a few kinks to be ironed out and calls can break down all the time but it’s still amazing to be able to see and hear people who could be in a different continent for whatever you pay to go online. You can also send 300 free text messages from the web if you are on meteor, with no strings attached… other providers have similar offers.
Though I spend a lot of time fooling around on dating sites, I’ve never had that much luck when I’ve met up with people in real life. Oddly enough, I’ve had more luck just meeting people in bars and nightclubs. It still goes on, though apparently one bar is closing every day at the moment. It’s hard to feel sympathy for a lot of them who are basically drug dealers dealing in a legitimate drug that harms a lot of people. They were making a huge profit before the celtic tiger years started and an even bigger one afterwards… it seems we used to drink so much because we were so poor and had nothing better to do, then we drank so much because we had so much money to spend. One bar-owner in the village where I grew up was asked if she and her husband made a lot of money a night when people were spilling out onto the pavement as it was so busy. She said they didn’t make any more because they had to take on extra staff. Another local bar gave me a job the summer my father died as he was a popular local figure and it looked good for them. They paid me a fifth of what the minimum wage was when it was introduced eight years later. Prices did increase in those years, but not by 400%.
Though people are drinking less in bars, it doesn’t mean we’re drinking less overall. If anything, we’re probably drinking more as booze has got so cheap in supermarkets since the lovely Ms Harney abolished price controls. It really makes more economic sense for people to buy cheap supermarket booze, drink it at home where they don’t have to go outside every time they want a fag and then hit the clubs later. Its really hard to blame them as the mark-up on booze in bars is so outrageous. I think the country is going to become more like France where people have their friends over for wine rather than paying almost €5 for a beer in a dismal bar. Sadly, though, the reason many people drink booze is to get away from their families. There are other ways of altering your consciousness as Homer Simspon discovered that time Moe wouldn’t spot him a drink, though most of them are of questionable legal status. It’s pretty stunning that the government were planning to outlaw energy drinks like red bull when people need them to do all the work they need to do to pay off the mortgage… and a lot of them basically don’t work anyway. There are products that you can get in health food stores that really aren’t that good for your health except in the sense of raising your spirits for a short period of time. I take Guarana before going out, a natural herb that’s basically a purer form of caffeine that the Incas used when they were carrying all those rocks up the mountains to build Machu Picchu. Though it’s contained in a lot of expensive energy drinks you can get it way cheaper by buying it in tablet form. They actually sell it in Tesco’s as if to underline how unambiguous its legal status is, though the quality is poor and you’re better off getting it in Holland and Barrett. Funnily enough I found it hard to get in the US where I could only find it in some energy tablets that contained a whole load of other natural stimulants that I’d never heard of. Surprising, as people have a more fast-paced life there, for the most part. When I was travelling around there on the bus, they used to sell tiny bottles of energy drinks for $4 apiece, which I suspect was somewhat of a rip-off as the benefits of some of those herbs are unproven. Another really cheap way to get an energy boost is to eat raw root ginger. Not everyone can do this as it has such a strong, acerbic taste but if you can handle it it’s worth the brief stinging pain.
Red Bull doesn’t give me wings; it doesn’t work for everyone and just makes me feel a bit dizzy. As for non-legal stimulants, the fact that they’re not legal doesn’t stop people from taking them but it does make them way more expensive than they would be otherwise. Having said that, in spite of all the danger money that accrues from having to pass through so many middlemen, marijuana is still cheaper than beer as it takes so much less land and energy to grow, at least in places like Morocco where it grows naturally. Unfortunately it’s illegal to export it and the powers that be move heaven and earth to stop that happening and people use thousands of watts of power to grow hybridized varieties which are far more dangerous than the naturally grown form of the drug… and you never know how strong the drug actually is because nobody is obliged to tell you the THC content as they are with alcohol. It’s a mad situation that allows criminals to take money that would go into the taxation system if it was legal, it could also be labeled properly and people wouldn’t inhale toxic levels of THC anymore… but it would be tantamount to admitting that government policy has been misguided all this time, and the criminals would find some other area to ply their trade. Ironically Salvia is legal here and the government has no plans to outlaw it even though it’s just as likely to cause psychosis as marijuana and way more addictive. Asking whether it’s cheaper than alcohol is a bit of a non-sequitur as it offers a totally different sort of high. I bought some once paying €20 for what was supposed to give 2 hits but I only used a tenth, shared it between 4 people and 2 of them went completely off their faces. LSD and ecstacy have reportedly become really cheap though they are 2 drugs I’ve always been a little afraid of. LSD is a really hard drug to police as it can be made in home made laboratories and disguised with ease, though that doesn’t stop the government from trying. Ecstacy has also gotten cheap as it’s not nearly as popular as it used to be in the 90s and nowadays only skangers use it. It often gets cut with other substances and can lead to long-term depression as well. Cocaine is going to be horribly expensive as long as it remains illegal, though that’s not such a bad thing as it makes the rich idiots who take it even more obnoxiously self-absorbed than they normally are. Having said that, I’d rather people didn’t have to risk their lives carrying it inside their stomachs and that you could buy it in certain bars for a huge cost so that all the coke-heads would be confined in one space… I don’t see it happening in my lifetime though.
Although I can see the point of coke, which is that people tend to be impressed by confidence regardless of where it comes from, I can’t for the life of me see the point of tobacco. I’m given to understand that people generally start smoking in their teens because school is so boring that they need something to look forward to, even if it’s just a brief respite from the craving they have for nicotine. I was really bored at school as well, but my father had a really chronic smoking problem and he would always become frighteningly edgy when trying to give up tobacco. I realized the only way I could avoid ever being like that was never to get addicted to tobacco in the first place. Then there was the health warnings on boxes of tobacco, which have got way less subtle and more prominent since… the way it’s going in a few years there will be a box that says “Smoking Kills” with the brand name in the corner, though forbidding them does make them more appealing to some teenagers. Part of the reason that tobacco is such a drain on people’s income is that the government taxes it so much, although the taxes barely pay for the health care costs of the 50% of smokers who get lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema or any of the other manifold diseases that smoking causes. On the other hand, smoking probably saves people the cost of being in a nursing home later on in their lives. Smoking is one the worst things for the environment as tobacco sucks nitrogen out of the soil the same way watching Home and Away sucks brain cells from your head. As nitrogen is one of the 3 main elements of life, this isn’t a good thing. We don’t grow it here in Ireland as it’s not dry enough and our soil is too fertile to piss away on a poisonous drug like tobacco, so it has to be imported from places like Virginia and Tennessee where it used to be grown by African-American slaves and now gets grown by Mexican wage-slaves.
If you are unfortunate enough to be a smoker, huddling around outside in the rain under one of the outside heaters while everyone else enjoys the tobacco-free atmosphere inside the bar or workplace, all isn’t lost. You can buy nicotine patches, which can potentially save you a fortune in the long run, and there are all sorts of other treatments like hypnotherapy which can help many people. There are plenty of websites and helplines to help people with tobacco addiction. It’s often said that nicotine is more addictive and harder to get off than heroine, having been addicted to neither I really can’t say. I did read a survey in the Irish Times that said that 3% of Irish teenagers had tried heroine while “only” 0.5% got addicted; which implies that tobacco is more addictive, as more than 1 in 6 of us are hooked on it. So why aren’t we allowed buy Heroine when we’re 16? I suspect it’s because heroine causes people to become lazy, listless drop-outs whereas tobacco gives people who work in factories and other boring, dead-end jobs something to look forward to. If they die before retirement age, replacements can always be found.
It’s odd that such a great evil was tolerated in Ireland for so long when almost every other form of pleasure was frowned upon. It’s true that it doesn’t say anything about smoking in the Bible, which was written thousands of years before tobacco reached Eurasia, although you would think an omniscient deity would have known about it and warned people against it. The people who wrote the Bible clearly did have issues about sexuality which is why our extremely catholic nation used to throw women who got pregnant outside marriage into virtual prisons where they did other people’s laundry all day; why we didn’t legalise the pill till the 80s, and why so many of us still have so many hang-ups today. It wasn’t always like this; the ancient Celts were among the first to realize that women had a libido which they celebrated by creating Sheela-na-gigs. In fact, right up until the famine, we used to have a fairly easy-going attitude to sexuality which later got the blame as we were perceived to have been horribly over-populated. Logically this should have caused us to welcome contraception when it came around, but as late as the 90s one Irish supreme court judge referred to condoms as being “filthy”, though fortunately they were reasonably legal by then.
Contraception makes what used to be a potentially extremely expensive pleasure extremely cheap in monetary terms. The pill ensures that an expensive bill for the evening’s entertainment won’t arrive in nine months time, condoms can save us from a lot of the medical bills and funeral expenses that come with some of those many STDs out there. This is one of the few times in history that you can get sex for free…at least as long as you are an attractive young woman. For the rest of us it still involves a lot of drinks bought or money spent on make-up, not to mention all the psychological costs and the guilt issues that many of us have. It’s a shame that we do, as sex is probably the most natural pleasure in the world. It’s possible that we haven’t really adjusted to the reality that’s relatively new in evolutionary terms that it can be had without risk of pregnancy. After the events of 9/11 casual hook-ups increased dramatically as people thought they could die any second; in Africa where death is so prevalent that there’s no point in being scared of it, people fuck around like rabbits, though regrettably for them condoms cost a great deal more relative to income in spite of the fact that the world’s second biggest rubber forest is right in the centre of the continent. It’s interesting that we only legalized condoms here in the 80s when unemployment got up to 17% and the dole was pretty parsimonious compared to now. Did the government realize the insanity of preventing people from having the pleasure of having sex when almost every other pleasure was unaffordable? Only time will tell.
Right now, it’s easier to meet people than it ever has been. You can barely turn on your computer without being invited to join some dating site, although they don’t always turn out to be free. I didn’t really think we had a culture of swing parties here like they do in places like California… until I googled. There’s one called swing4ireland.com which lists “dogging” locations of which there are 15 listed in Cork alone. I don’t think Eamon de Valera would have approved… but he was a twisted, swivel-eyed psychopath who wasn’t even really Irish. On one level dogging sounds a bit primordial but it couldn’t really exist without the existence of modern inventions like the pill and condoms, and computers and mobile phones. It also shows how cheap sex has become in monetary terms, as up till very recently men would have had to pay a prostitute to engage in this sort of thing.
If you still can find no-one else to have sex with, it’s cheaper to have it with yourself now the internet exists. When I was growing up the only way you could view pornography was if there was a sleaze section in your local video library and the owner didn’t mind renting out porn to teenagers. Otherwise you had to go on a boat to Britain and buy some porn mags there. Staggeringly, the only porn mag which is fully legal in Ireland is Playboy, which is a bit absurd as any amount of pornography can be viewed online for free. Jack Nicholson said he had to get disconnected from the internet as there was so much porn out there, and the amount is almost infinite to all intents and purposes, as there’s more coming online faster than there is time to view it; any attempt to view it all would be heroic in it’s way. Almost all women find porn objectionable although when you ask them why you can never get a really clear answer. Many say that watching porn leads men to become sex criminals but there’s simply no evidence for this. Rates of rape are way lower in countries where porn is legal, and highest in countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh where you can’t even photograph a grown woman’s face. Many women complain, with some justification that men get paid more in almost every job, but porn is the one industry where women get paid more, and where men often end up committing suicide. I think women’s real objection to porn is that it gives men freedom over their sexuality which is something they’ve had all to themselves for most of history. Some studies actually show that men who masturbate frequently as adolescents are actually better when they finally get on the main stage (as it were). Masturbating also helps prevent prostate cancer. There is a certain degree of shame attached to it, though this probably dates from biblical times when people got married when they were thirteen or fourteen and there were barely enough people to keep the tribe who wrote the Bible alive. Today there are so many of us in the world that our seed is probably better of spilt.
With so many things becoming cheaper, you have to wonder where the all the extra money in our economy has gone. Actually, I’m pretty sure most of it has gone into the pockets of property “developers”. Some of it has gone into the bank accounts of fancy restaurant owners though. I very rarely eat in restaurants when I’m in Ireland as the prices are generally way beyond a joke. There’s one in Cork called Café Paradiso which is reputed to be the best in the British Isles and is defiantly the best I’ve been to, though I’ve only been to three or four others. Although the food is excellent, paying the E25 they ask for a main course just seems excessive. I read one piece on this restaurant in the Irish Times which contained the line “even though you won’t find any meat or fish served here, it’s not really a vegetarian restaurant” which, being meant as a compliment seemed to epitomize the attitude of the catering industry to vegetarians. But then restaurant critics always seem like they’re on a different planet to me. I remember reading one review when I was really bored that described a meal for E90 for one including wine as being ‘budget”. To put that in some sort of proportion, that’s what a third of the world’s population have to live on for 4 months of every year. That people can afford to spend that sort of money paying someone else to cook their dinner while some people are dying of malnutrition is a sad indictment on our society. But then, I really don’t like going into McDonalds either. Going into most restaurants for me is like going into a brothel and finding that all the women are less than 15 and then being made to feel like you’re putting them out when you say you’d prefer to be with an adult. Most of them hold vegetarians in complete contempt and regard us as a nuisance. Gordon Ramsey once tricked a vegetarian into eating a pizza with meat on it thinking that was funny, yet this is a man who Britain’s richest people queue up to patronize. Fortunately, we have our own places in most towns these days, you can find them on happycow.org. Vegetarian restaurants are cheaper for all the same reasons that it’s cheaper to cook food at home; the raw materials are cheaper, don’t take as long to cook and there isn’t the same culture of celebrity chefs there. The whole idea of celebrity chefs is a bit troubling to me as the Roman Republic collapsed shortly after it’s richest citizens started employing people to cook them sumptuous 7-course meals, which they would have employed slaves to cook. The parellels with today are worrying, as there is a new super-rich class which can afford to patronize the Ramseys of the world who, even if though don’t employ slaves, still treat their employees as if they were. Fancy restaurants are like a microcosm of our divided society. On the top, there are the fancy property developers and their trophy wives or girlfriends, listening to soft classical music, being waited on hand and foot. Underneath, in the kitchen, people are running around in a stygian morass of hot ovens and stoves, being yelled at by the head chef… it’s almost too good a symbol, actually.
Regrettably many people are virtually forced to eat out because they work such long hours, which is why there are so many fast food places these days. That economic bright spark whose name I can’t even bring myself to mention coined the term “Breakfast Roll man” to describe people who had to have ready made meals. A lot of the so-called economic “growth” of the last 30 years is really people paying for what they used to get for free, like having their food cooked at home, doing their own laundry rather than going to a launderette, etc.
When we used to hear the older generation saying they made their own fun we used to laugh but they may have been onto something. We’re never going to have as much money to waste as we did over the last 15 years. We need to simplify. Instead of going to fancy restaurants we should have pot-lucks. Instead of going to expensive bars we should have house parties… after all, we paid enough for the houses and even if we rent them they are still a bit overpriced. Instead of buying a big DVD collection we should rent them and then have our friends over to watch them.
It’s ironic that Bertie Ahern is an acolyte of Robert Putnam who wrote Bowling Alone, a study of modern alienation which shows how community values have been eroded. No-one in Ireland did more to atomise the population by forcing us to work longer hours, have longer commutes, and spend less time with our friends and family. Now the bubble has burst, hopefully things will get back to the sense of community we once had.
