The acts we watched at Day 2 of Stagecoach 2011 were a mix of excellent, bad & downright offensive – ah well – you didn’t expect that I would go to a US country music festival and not be offended did you?  Day 2 was another good day of people watching.  The stuff I saw in the crowd that I found most distasteful was mainly t-shirt slogan related and here are a few examples:

·         Guy with his girlfriend wearing a t-shirt that he’d hand written on the back of “Ladies, what happens at Stagecoach stays at Stagecoach” (see pic no 2 attached)

·         Grossly ugly guy with a t-shirt reading “Free Chorizo” and featuring an arrow pointing towards his rather grubby pants (his mate next to him was wearing a green t-shirt that simply said “Stoner”)

·         Old man with a t-shirt that said “The Dixie Chicks still suck” – yeah – I’m sure they’re also losing sleep over what you think...

·         A lot of anti Obama general redneck stuff.

All of this paled into insignificance however when Jay deMarcus of Rascal Flatts (yep – that’s a band for anyone who’s wondering) stopped playing 30 minutes into their set and announced from the main stage to the 55,000 person strong, alcohol fuelled and very patriotic crowd “that sonofabitch Bin Laden is dead”.  The reaction was surprisingly flat.  I guess everyone was thinking – Wow – that took a long time.

I dread to think what Larry Gatlin from the Gatlin Brothers has made of this bit of news although I’m glad he wasn’t on stage at the time and able to announce it.  His was the musical performance that I would rate as the most offensive of the day.  He’s a pompous & odious little man, full of his own importance.  He stopped playing one of his songs to berate the audience as he’d deemed they weren’t reacting in a sufficiently excited way to being present to hear the Gatlin Bros playing one of their biggest hits.  He claims to keep politics out of his show but talks about nothing else from the stage – oh except for a story about how he & his wife used to live in a small house same as everyone else (he bizarrely included details of how small their tv was) until the day he received a phone call saying that Elvis wanted two songs he’d written and they were able to go out the next day & buy a great big house.

Earlier in the day, Rosie Flores had done her level best to get the crowd in the Palomino tent moving with her lively rockabilly mix but it wasn’t until she was joined on stage by Big Sandy (of the Fly Rite Boys – what a voice he has!) that they shifted their arses out of their portable chairs & got dancing.

The highlight of Stagecoach 2011 for me was seeing Wanda Jackson again.  Wanda is the undisputed Queen of Rockabilly and there isn’t anyone out there that can touch her.  Yesterday she was in good form and in fine voice and clearly on a high from her recent collaboration project with Jack White of the White Stripes (their album is called “The Party Ain’t Over).  She sang 3 or 4 songs from the new album, all of them appear to have been selected to make the most of Wanda’s unique voice – I’ll certainly be buying – it’ll wake me up in the mornings driving the Fig up to Derry.

Wanda played a long set yesterday & even came back on for an encore – something I’ve never seen done before at any of the Coachella family of festivals (Leonard Cohen disregarded his finish time a few years ago & just carried on playing).  She had time to tell some of her legendary stories including a few about former boyfriend Elvis.  Last time I saw her play was at Pappy & Harriet’s in Pioneertown, CA and Robert Plant was in the audience – that’s how much of a legend Wanda is.  She finished up yesterday with her famous “Let’s Have a Party” and everyone in the Palomino tent was up on their feet.  (Wanda had previously advised the crowd it would be good for them to have blood circulating to some of the places it might not have recently been.  A cursory look around confirmed that she was probably right).

Wanda always has a lovely way of interacting with the audience & making her shows very personal.  Yesterday she expressed interest from the stage in the guy beside me’s very impressive Mohican, asking him if he had to start from scratch with it every day and saying she thought keeping her own hair nice was hard enough. 

Thanks to Wanda Jackson & Kris Kristofferson for two great shows at Stagecoach 2011 – says something when the septuagenarians are clearly leading the way – long may you both reign.

Interested in your stories if you were also there or comments/questions if you weren’t.

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Sam Barbee & I were in Cardiff getting ready for a Learning Pool customer event the night President Barack Obama was elected.  Sam Barbee is American and I’ve always wished I was – although being Irish is almost the same thing.  It’s certainly closer to being American than any other nationality.  Our Irish diaspora numbers 45m in the USA.  As a child I listened to the stories my great aunts and uncles in Donegal told us about Amerikay – they’d all been to the US many times although they’d never been to Belfast or Dublin & certainly not to the GB mainland.  At the Northern Ireland Bureau St Patrick’s Day breakfast, Martin McGuinness recited a 2 line poem to illustrate our unique relationship with our cousins across the water – I can’t remember it exactly but it was something like this:

Have you been on your holidays yet this year?

No we’ve just been to America again

The morning of our Cardiff breakfast event, we were a bit tired having been up all night following the election results coming in and watching the President’s wonderful acceptance speech.  Neither of us would have missed it for anything. 

It was therefore with great excitement that I received the invite to the President’s St Patrick’s Night party at the White House along with a few others from the Northern Ireland business community (that’s us in the second photo).  The build up to the big day nearly killed me & it was a relief that I only had a week’s notice.  I had to rush out to the shops to buy something green to wear and thank goodness I did or I would have stuck out like a sore thumb (I’ve never seen as much green clothing in my life as I saw in Washington DC on 17 March).  I had an amusing incident at immigration when I was asked the purpose of my visit – the immigration officer asked to see my invite and after studying it for a long time appeared to be most impressed.  From talking to people around Washington DC it seems that the President isn’t much in evidence locally apart from on the tv – although the First Lady has a significant local presence through the many good works she’s involved in.  So what stays with me from the night itself? – the following highlights:

·         Hearing the President and the Vice President speak & being at the front with such a clear view

·         Watching the way the Vice President & the First Lady never took their eyes off the President when he was addressing the crowd

·         Being in the White House for 3 hours and being able to wander round the rooms and freely take photos of the decor, the view from the windows, the paintings and everything else (my full photo set from the evening is at this link http://bit.ly/h8VK1q)

·         The craic in the crowd whilst we were waiting for the President to appear – especially all of us being able to try on the Rose of Tralee’s tiara (thanks Clare!)

·         The mounting excitement waiting for the President – we were almost hyperventilating by the time 7pm came along

·         The pomp & circumstance of the whole evening – the pipe band, the choir, the banquet, the greenness, the beautifully dressed & polite members of the military dotted about everywhere who offered to take photos & were extremely cordial

·         The lovely people that we met who were also there as guests

·         Rather perversely I enjoyed seeing one woman spill her wine on the furniture

·         Glen Hansard of the Frames being joined by Tim Shriver for a rendition of The Auld Triangle

·         Being spontaneously hugged by Michelle Obama when I held my hand out to shake hers – I still can’t believe that – she didn’t hug anyone else and I’m glad she picked me

·         Meeting the President for a few seconds & telling him how glad I am that it’s him that’s there – Jannine’s photo is a bit of a joke but I promise you that’s the President’s nose!!!  You can tell by my face anyway

·         Realising that the President & the First Lady were as good in real life as I imagined they would be

·         Feeling the warmth from our diaspora first hand – doesn’t matter if you’re 4^th or 5^th generation guys – you’re still ours!

Thanks again to everyone that made this possible – people I knew already (Martin & Stephen & Alastair) & people I hadn’t even met that were so nice and so good to me (Kamala & Grainne).  The Learning Pool team has me down as a people collector but even with Robert Plant in the portfolio, Barack Obama’s a bit of a prize so I may give it up whilst I’m ahead.

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I’m on holiday in (rainy) Palm Springs over Christmas so my blogs are taking on a slightly different flavour.  One of my (many) holiday objectives is to go & see 15 new movies.  I’m not doing too bad as I’ve already seen five in the past week.  The one I’ve chosen to review for you today is a documentary directed by Charles Ferguson and narrated by Matt Damon called “Inside Job”.  It’s a film about the role played by political systems and academia in causing the recent banking collapse the rest of us have had to stand by and witness.  In truth, I probably wouldn’t have gone to see this film if I’d known it was a documentary – but I’m very glad I did go as I now fully realise what trouble we’re in – although I appreciate the time to know about this is way past as the music has long stopped, as George Soros so eloquently puts it in the film.  [Interesting fact about philanthropist & savagely successful currency speculator, George Soros.  In 2003 he declared that he would sacrifice his entire $14 billion fortune to defeat George Bush].

The film uses a mix of interviews, archive film and images and even diagrams for the more complex economic explanations and it conveys in layman’s language the journey whereby influential investment bankers through political lobbying encouraged deregulation of the subprime mortgage and derivatives markets.  It shows how the senior people in the financial and academic worlds are the same people that sit on & influence government boards to make laws & policy that in turn benefit them & their associates & friends.

Basically, the world that these guys inhabit isn’t the same one as the rest of us are familiar with – we’re used to poachers and gamekeepers.  These guys are all legalised poachers that over the last 10 years have been allowed by successive governments to mark their own homework, apply untruthful ratings to financial instruments and then encourage people to buy & invest in those products that were bound by their very nature to fail & plummet in value – but hey – the bankers didn’t care as they were all gambling heavily on that outcome anyway – so they won either way.

Get this – former CEO of Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson (pictured with Bush), was made Treasury Secretary by George Bush.  So, as Goldman Sachs’ CEO he lobbied heavily for deregulation and then, when things went wrong & Lehman Bros was the first to fall, he was able to recommend to George Bush that the taxpayers bail out the failed banks to the tune of $700bn instead of leaving them to accept offers from other banks, including Barclays – and benefiting massively himself along the way.  The culprits were allowed to keep their obscene bonuses (honestly, there were audible gasps of shock from the cinema audience as the bonus sums were revealed) and the same boy remains as an advisor to President Obama.

However, I guess that sort of behaviour is what we expect from the gang of alpha males that head up the banks and City establishments.  Sadder were the prominent academics “encouraged” by large consultancy fees to write economic papers & studies that would give the “right” recommendations to government committees and others.  I have no idea how the film makers managed to get them captured on film in the way that they did although I guess they used the same techniques as the politicians – appeal to their ridiculous academic vanity, stroke their pathetic egos & pay them a huge fee.  Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University, a strong supporter of financial deregulation over the years, was comical as he eventually realised he’d been had and invited the interviewer to “give it your best shot in the 3 minutes before I throw you out of my office”.  More pathetic still was Frederic Mishkin, Prof of Economics at Columbia Business School.  He was commissioned in 2006 by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce to write a paper entitled “Financial Stability in Iceland”.  He was paid $124,000 for writing it.  When the interviewer asked him why that paper now appeared on his cv as “Financial Instability in Iceland” he said he was unaware of that & “it must be a typo”.  The interviewer then asked him why he’d resigned so suddenly from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve on 31 August 2008, way before the end of his allotted term and he said he’d realised he needed to make some amendments to a text book!!!

The film left me feeling angry that politicians and high flying businessmen are allowed to collude in this way and continue to get away with it and empty that there’s so little that we can do about it as they are all as bad as each other and disappointed in Barack Obama for changing so little since coming into power.  I’m grateful to Charles Ferguson for making the film and to Matt Damon for being brave enough to narrate – good on you guys.  The film was refreshingly honest in a way that so many things aren’t because of fear of offending a sponsor or supporter.  I’d recommend a viewing if you’re interested in knowing how these things work and do please add comments below if you’ve seen the film already.

What’ve I got coming up next on my viewing schedule? – the new Coen Bros film – “True Grit” – of course.  Also starring Matt Damon but hopefully in a lighter mood this time around.