I didn’t know Lou Reed had been tampered with by Rockland until an obituary told that he had left half a million dollars to his sister to look after their mother, Toby, 93, “who at an early age subjected him to electro-shock therapy in an attempt to ‘discourage’ his bi-sexuality.”

Toby had been following instructions from the Rockland State Hospital in upstate New York. At the time, frying patients’ brains to cure them of deviancy was standard procedure.
How could I not have known this? Nobody else asked of the appropriate generation seems to have known either, despite reverence for Lou Reed having been one of the binding substances sustaining a sub-cultural identity.
In his book, Please Kill Me: An Oral History Of Punk – didn’t know about that either – Reed describes how his parents, acting on doctors’ instructions, “put the thing down your throat so you don’t swallow your tongue, and they put electrodes on your head... to discourage homosexual feelings. The effect is that you lose your memory and become a vegetable. You can’t read a book because you get to page 17 and have to go right back to page one again.”
In merciful Ireland you’d simply be sent into the priesthood, exile or hell.
The Velvet Underground, Nico, Warhol etc. were among cool bohemian beatniks hanging out in Greenwich Village at the same time as “beat poets” Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Keruouac, Allen Ginsberg etc. Hence, certain poetical parallels. Ginsberg‘s mother, Naomi, suffered from severe mental illness herself, and spent stretches in Rockland, where Ginsberg met Carl Solomon, to whom his masterwork, Howl! is dedicated.
Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland where you’re madder than I am…
I’m with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother…
I’m with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses…
I’m with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I’m with you in Rockland
 where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha…
I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.

Just a couple of coincidentally criss-crossing lives – except that art doesn’t do coincidence. All of a sudden, in the afterglow of his going, we learn that there is more than we knew to be learnt from the life of Lou Reed.
Now away with you, and read Howl!

I’ll give over about Corrie for a while after this…
Here’s Gloria in dreamy reminiscence of a man she thought was for all time, until he was distracted momentarily and skedaddled: “Six foot three, hair the colour of gravy, did an Engelbert Humperdinck tribute act on the Costa del Sol.”
If Julian Assange and WikiLeaks never achieve anything else, they will remain entitled to our gratitude for revealing Eamon Gilmore as the most abject hypocrite in modern Irish politics.
The competition may be fierce. But Gilmore’s slithery performance in 2002 – giving the US embassy the assurance it wanted that Labour would back a re-run of the Nice referendum while publicly pledging in the most explicit terms that it would never contemplate doing any such thing – wins the prize for most despicable behaviour by a party leader this millennium so far.
Confirmation of Gilmore’s status was provided on October 15th when he told the Dáil that a US ‘plane “armed with a fixed weapon” had landed at Shannon. This was “an isolated incident…a result of an administrative error…I have noted the steps taken by the US authorities to ensure that there is no recurrence.”
What had happened was that the weapon had been externally mounted, in full view of hundreds passing through the airport. The incident was about to be publicised by the Irish Peace and Neutrality Alliance. So the Labour leader rushed into the Dáil for another trademark defence of the indefensible.
The incident had not been “isolated”. US military aircraft regularly land at Shannon for refuelling, carrying soldiers and equipment to and from the battle fields of the Middle East. Gilmore is treating the Irish people with contempt when he asks us to believe that none of the soldiers are armed and none of the equipment is of a military nature because he has had “assurances” from the US, and that there’s therefore no need to have the planes inspected – as the Irish State would have a right to do under national and international law. So our neutrality is safe…
Well, safer than Eamon Gilmore’s political career anyway.
how long is the Labour Party going to tolerate this sort of deception?

I was going to comment on the Dáil debate on Ming Flanagan’s proposals for decriminalisation of cannabis but having read the transcript I haven’t got the heart. Except to say this.
A succession of anti-weed ignorami specified the debilitating illnesses certain to be suffered by anybody taking a toke. You’d never believe from listening to them that it appears to be possible to use marijuana more days than not over half a century and still have the mental capacity to…oh I don’t know – write a fortnightly column in a respected journal.