Steve Jobs Biopic a Mid-Range Design

STEVE JOBS (2015)

Directed by Danny Boyle

Universal Pictures, 122 minutes, R (language)

* * *

I'm typing this review of my Mac. I also own an iPhone, an iPad, and an iPod. Nonetheless, I have never have bought into iHype. For me, Mac products are just tools that are reliable and work across various platforms. I don't give a sqwanker's farley how elegant they look atop my desk or in my back pocket–I just want them to be useful hammers. In like fashion, I never thought Steve Jobs (1955-2011) was an infallible genius, so a revisionist film about him doesn't shatter my worldview.

Michael Fassbender was nominated for an Oscar for his titular role in Steve Jobs. He didn't win and shouldn't have—he did a very nice job (world play intended) but it wasn't an earth-moving performance. Nor did this film make the cosmos quake. It's perfectly competent and has some fine moments, but its major achievement is to walk up to the edge of histrionics and pull back just in time.

Steve Jobs is not a conventional biopic, rather it centers on three big moments in Jobs' career, two flops and a prodigal son return act. We first encounter Jobs as an obsessed bully moments before the 1984 launch of Macintosh. He hurls threats and insults at everyone as if these will magically get a crashed OS to say "Hello" when he introduces the first Macintosh to an audience waiting for him to deliver on the change-the-world promise of Apple's now legendary 1984 Super Bowl ad. All that changed was that Jobs didn't get to trash the profitable Apple II or get his way in a showdown with CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels). Instead, he got fired.

We meet Jobs again in 1988, as he prepares to debut NeXT, an almost perfect cube that had everything you'd want in a computer, except that it cost a sultan's fortune and didn't yet have a working OS. He did, however, predict Apple would have to buy NeXT for that very operating system, hence we see him for a third time in 1998 as readies the unveiling of the iMac G3, the machine that really did revolutionize personal computing. It was the moment in which Steve Jobs became Apple and Apple became Steve Jobs.  

Most of the rest of Jobs' life—the script is culled from Walter Isaacson's 2011 biography—emerges in snippets and flashbacks: the hippie-meets-libertarian days in which he, Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), and Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogan) built the first Mac; his troubled relationships with Chrissann Brennan (Katherine Waterston) and  with their daughter, Lisa; the unconvincing denials that it bothered him that he was adopted; and the various ways in which he systematically alienated those closest to him. Jobs emerges as a flesh-and-blood analog to Mr. Data—more machine than human being. The story's tragic heroine is Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), the long-suffering advertising executive who remains faithful to Jobs, even as he is self-destructing.

If you want a saintly Steve Jobs, steer clear of this film. He comes off mainly as egoistical, oblivious, deceitful, abusive, and paternally inept. From what I glean from Isaacson, these things are largely true–Jobs was always a bit of snake oil salesman who was neither programmer nor designer, just a great pitchman for ideas implemented by others. And he really was a jerk much of the time. If, on the other hand, you're fine with needed revisionism, the film has its virtues. There are superb moments that capture the cult-like behavior of the wired, hipster crowd—the ones who do buy into iHype. Plus, there are several superior performances, especially that of Ms. Winslet, who walks the fine line between vulnerable and fierce. Seth Rogan finally gets a meaty part and proves himself worthy of it. Jeff Daniels is also solid as a CEO who knows when to charm, when to stand firm, and when to cut his losses.

Some of the biographical details are Hollywoodized. Hoffman did not carry the implied torch for Jobs; others, not Jobs, forced Sculley out of Apple; Jobs' biological father was a Syrian Ph.D. student, not a restaurateur; and Jobs' wife and other three children don't even get a mention. Moreover, the film's episodic structure compresses too much vileness into too short a time frame, which serves to make Jobs more unlikable than is fair and doesn't make plausible the reevaluation of his life we are supposed to think is on the horizon. 

I guess not everything Mac can he hyped, though. This film hasn't generated the passion of a new product launch, and has earned back just a little over half of its $30 million budget. The lack of buzz is also oddly appropriate. The film is worth watching, but think of it as more mid-range Dell than iMac G3. –Rob Weir

Hochschild's Book on Spain Appeals on All Levels

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Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

Adam Hochschild

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 464 pages, 2016

This review first appeared on www.nepca.wordpress.com 

Humankind is often blind to irony, but history is not. I was just pages from finishing Adam Hochschild's searing look at the Spanish Civil War when I came upon his comment that there was but a single living survivor of the Lincoln Brigade–those 2,800 Americans who went to Spain to try to preserve the Spanish Republic. It was no small feat to be a survivor—better than a third of those idealistic black and white young men (and a handful of women) died in the conflict, a higher casualty rate than any other group. The very morning (March 6) I read Hochschild's line, the Boston Globe ran the obituary of that last survivor, 100-year-old Delmer Berg.

We owe Mr. Hochschild a debt for making sure that we don't forget the causes and motives that animated individuals such as Mr. Berg, one the many for whom the Spanish conflict the "the defining experience of their lives." (1%) Hochschild is too learned to add his voice to the legions that romanticize the Lincolns. Berg, like the book's Aristotelian tragic hero Bob Merriman, was a devoted communist. Hochschild does a superb job of explaining why individuals like Merriman, the dashing UCal economics professor who commanded the Lincoln Brigade, were drawn to the communist Popular Front. Call it a combination of realism and idealism. In the midst of the Great Depression it wasn't hard to imagine that capitalism had failed or that Soviet-style communism–less than two decades old–might be a better form of society. Berg and Merriman heroically cast their lot with comrades in the Spanish Republic, but their erstwhile patrons in Moscow proved unworthy of their affection. Although Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union was the only nation to sell weapons to the Spanish Republic, it sent them junk, exacted a high toll, and–like the proverbial fair-weather friend–was never there when most needed. Moreover, his agents in Spain were often more concerned with ferreting out Trotskyites than Nationalists. Nor did they shy from using foreign volunteers as cannon fodder; Bob Merriman died on precisely such a fool's errand. In 1949, six authors wrote the epitaph of communism and called it The God that Failed; tellingly, five of them were reporters during the Spanish Civil War.

Hochschild's unique twist to the story is to devote much of his attention to the reporters who covered the war, including such luminaries as Jay Allen, Herbert Matthews, Ernest Hemingway, George Steer, George Orwell, Martha Gellhorn, Frances Davis, Virginia Cowles, and future communist apostates Louis Fischer, André Gide, and Arthur Koestler. There are juicy tidbits, such as the way Cowles and Gellhorn used prevailing sexism to their advantage, how some editors kowtowed to pressure from the Catholic Church to whitewash Franco's crimes, how a handful such as Herbert Knickerbocker became propagandists for the Nationalists, and details suggesting that Hemingway was precisely the pompous, arrogant egoists his detractors claimed. Mostly, though, Hochschild views the journalists in a positive light. If you want to get a grasp on Franco's barbarism, read Jay Allen's dispatches on the massacre of Badajoz; if you want to understand Picasso's Guernica, read George Steer's account of its destruction.

There is a lot of heroism in Hochschild's account, but also villains galore. If communism was a failed god, one wonders what that makes Pope Pius XI, who worshiped at a fascist altar. If there is a hell, Texaco chief Torkild Rieber is suffering from its fires—he provided practically free oil for Hitler's Luftwaffe, which honed its skills in Spain. Indeed, one could imagine a host of American policymakers sweltering from the glow of Rieber's flames—the isolationists and non-interventionists who placed anti-communist zealotry and/or insistence upon neutrality above world security. (Franklin Roosevelt bears some blame as well.) Moreover, as unworthy as communism proved to be, fascism was far worse. Scale is the only thing that prevents Franco from rising to the top tier of 20^th century monsters. 

 

Hochschild is a gifted writer whose time as a writer-in-residence at the University of Massachusetts Amherst made me yearn for this book before it was anywhere near completion. His writing is refreshing because he rekindles a skill sadly lacking in a lot of historical writing: the ability to tell a good story. A tale well told informs readers far more than reams of leaden prose, arcane analyses, and esoterica. Nor does Hochschild hide behind academia's often-faux objectivity. Although he acknowledges that communism was a false god, he admits he might have embraced that faith back then. He ultimately agrees with journalist Herbert Matthews, whose reporting on Spain was urgent and openly pro-Republic partisan. Matthews (and Hochschild) viewed the Spanish Civil War as a moral test for those who reflexively dismiss questions of whether there are times in which proactive interventionism is necessary. Hochschild has written a backdoor "what if?" history. Western democracies dithered, but Hitler and Mussolini did not; they supplied Franco with pilots, soldiers, and state-of-the-art military materiel. What if, Hochschild speculates, they had been stopped in the Basque country hillsides? All counterfactual history is suspect, Hochschild's included, but one must ponder whether it's better to worship false gods or submit to real demons.--Rob Weir

Kathe Kollwitz's Moving Work on Display at Smith College

MOTHERS’ ARMS: KÄTHE KOLLWITZ’S WOMEN AND WAR

Käthe Kollwitz

Smith Museum of Art, through May 29, 2016

The Mothers 

Aristophanes’ ancient Greek comedy of Lysistrata is so often performed that you may have seen it. Its humor—drawing upon the social values of Antiquity—derives from Lysistrata’s unique strategy for ending warfare: rally women to deny sex to men until the fighting stops. German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) tried a different tactic: shame. The Smith College Museum of Art features a selection of her paintings, drawings, lithographs, graphics, and sculptures, nearly all of which touch upon themes of social justice—poverty, class oppression, and the ravages of war, as seen through the eyes women, especially mothers.

The Peasants War

Kollwitz was born into the bourgeois comfort of a religious Prussian family, but she quickly left it behind and embraced her grandmother’s socialism. A sense of loss permeates much of her work, perhaps induced by her brother’s early death, and enhanced by marrying and having two sons while still in her twenties. Socialism certainly influenced early efforts that gained notice: her 1898 series titled The Weavers, which commemorated an 1842 Silesian strike; and her homage to the 16^th century Peasants War, completed in 1908. In each case, Kollwitz was drawn to both the plight of the poor and to the deep loss felt by mothers whose young children suffered and whose older ones became combatants and casualties.

World War I deepened her anguish and left her heartbroken; her son Peter perished in the conflict. Although she was recognized as a leading voice in German art and co-founded the Women’s Art Association, the chaos and deprivations of the Weimar Republic led her deeper into the pacifist fold. If you will, they made her into an artistic Lysistrata committed to the idea that war was futile as an agent of social change and a form of male aggression that repressed women and children.

Many of Kollwitz’s works have a Pieta-like quality, with ordinary women supplanting the Madonna and offering final succor to dying husbands, sons, neighbors, and each other. The latter is not to be overlooked—log before second wave feminists spoke of communities of women, Kollwitz depicted them in mutual embraces that evoked a sense of building a mass-bodied shell against the external realm of pain. Sometimes they bear their children like offerings that will not go into the basket, as in her 1924 poster The Survivors: Fight War, not Wars; sometimes the women huddle back to back but with eyes gazing outward as in the powerful woodcut The Mothers (1923).

Of Kollwitz’s works, her woodcuts and sculptures made the most impression upon me—there is an ineffable sadness in their solidity and the somber tones of rock and black or sepia ink. The woodcuts in particular invoke the heavy outlining of Georges Rouault and the profound emotions of German expressionists such as Max Beckman, yet with a perspective that it is identifiably female. Still other evocations include Tahitian statuary and the Depression era portraits of Dorothea Lange.

The Sacrifice 

Kollwitz merged her art with her social conscious and became known as an outspoken opponent of militarism. This, of course, failed to endear her to the Nazi regime that came to power in the 1930s. Her art was removed from museum walls--though luckily not destroyed as “degenerate art”—and she was forced to resign as head of the Women’s Art Association. In a profound irony, she died on April 22, 1945, just 16 days before World War II ended. It is, though, fitting that her art lives on long whereas that failed painter, Adolph Hitler, endures only in infamy.

Of course, another distressing irony lies in the fact that somehow Kollwitz’s pieces at Smith—some of whom are now more than a hundred years old—feel so profoundly relevant for our own time of military conflict. Change a few costumes and it could be Syria. Or Afghanistan. Or Ferguson, Missouri. See this exhibit. And weep for humankind.

Rob Weir  

What the Republican Party Has Rot

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No, I don't mean "wrought."  I want to discuss the smelly variety of the word. Those who have observed the Republican Party over the past few decades should not be surprised by Donald Trump's rise to the top of the garbage heap. GOP policymakers are alarmed, but the pile has been building for a long time. Call the party's current dilemma a compost heap begun by Kevin Phillips, with spades turned by Nixon, Lee Atwater, Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, the Tea Party, Anton Scalia, and Dick Cheney. It's called the "politics of division" and it works like a Madonna or Lady Gaga concert–once you obliterate the bar of acceptability, the pressure is always on to take a bolder step in the next act. Sooner or later, though, the only step left is off the precipice.

Political parties must walk a fine line between principles and inclusiveness—a party must have policies, but it must also appeal to broad enough constituencies to compete nationwide. Hot-button issues can temporarily boost enthusiasm, but unless they go mainstream they do long-term damage. This is where today's Republican Party finds itself. It has long ridden angry white men, evangelicals, and bourgeois suburbanites, but the elephant is now on its last legs, no matter how hard the mahouts beat it. If I might torture the metaphor a tad more, there's not enough hay left to feed the elephant–dumb white dudes, zealots, and greedy suburbanites are no longer a majority. America is a multicultural society whether anyone likes it or not.

Explain, pray, how Republicans can attract women when it supports privacy rights on guns, but not for reproductive rights. How do they intend to attract Latino voters and support curtailing immigration? African Americans? If the GOP gets 10% of their votes it's a surprise; 15% triggers an automatic electoral fraud investigation. How many college-age folks–call them future voters–are attracted to the GOP's obsession with school testing and free-market solutions to the college debt crisis? They want no part of evangelical calls to repeal gay marriage or dismantle Roe v. Wade, and they

are positively apoplectic over the GOP's stance on global warming. It drives angst-ridden privatizers crazy, but a whole lot of Americans like Social Security and other federal programs. As Mitt Romney discovered in 2012, it's hard to catch up when you write off 47% of the electorate. Moreover, Obamacare is all that stands between millions of voters—that word again–and a Darwinian survival of the fittest. (Even many GOP governors grudgingly accept this.)

Many Republican leaders are concerned by the reactionary turn the party has taken. Listen to its fire-eaters, and it sounds like Republicans are devoted to restoring the rural, Middle American values of 1956. Good luck with that–81% of Americans dwell in urban areas. I could go on, but it boils down to the fact that the GOP has become the party of an overly narrow base. Single-issue voters can tilt local and state elections, but the only way the politics of division work on the national level is through fear or disgust. These too have lost their power. One of the things Rove, Cheney, Scalia, et. al. left in their wake is cynicism. Cynical people are not pleasant, but they don't scare easily. Fear of terrorism has run its course and most Americans simply want the USA to mind its own business. Plus cynics tend to put things together pretty well–like maybe there's a connection between shrinking job opportunities and reflexive support for free trade, business deregulation, and reckless investing. (Blaming unemployment on immigrants doesn't work so well with white-collar workers.)

The problem is simple: the GOP's divide-and-conquer strategies have mutated into the politics of greed—not the 1% the left trumpets; more like the 38%, which means you have to fool quite a few of the remainder. Donald Trump is the ultimate expression of the politics of greed, but the GOP has no internal answer at this point. Ted Cruz? He's even less electable and nastier, albeit a bit less crude.  And here's the ultimate GOP nightmare—regulars switch to Cruz, Trump sues that under Article I Section 2 of the Constitution that Cruz is a Birther hypocrite who is ineligible to be president, gets a district court to agree, and a 4-4 Supreme Court fails to overturn that ruling. Then what?

Things have gotten so bad that old warhorses like John Sununu, Bill Kristol, and Ben Ginsberg are talking about forming a splinter party. That's probably words over a bad hairpiece, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that the mainstream GOP will jettison its dissident elements and reinvent itself. This is precisely what the Democrats had to do when it became clear that it could not be both the party of Dixiecrats and civil rights. That was a painful amputation that opened the door for the Reagan-GWH Bush era of 1981-1993, but Democrats have held the White House for 16 of the past 24 years and will have to be incredibly inept (even by Democratic standards) to lose it this fall. It's premature to speak of the death of the Republican Party, but it's not too soon to smell the gangrene.

For St. Patrick's Day, Give Dervish a Whirl

DERVISH

Thrush in the Storm (2013)

Whirling Discs

* * * * *

Happy St. Patrick's Day! If you want to celebrate in style, forget the green beer and bad bar bands—download a few tracks from one of Ireland's best, Dervish. This veteran band has been around since 1989, and Irish music doesn't get much better than what Dervish cranks out. And you can start with this: any list of great female vocalists that doesn't have Cathy Jordan's name near the top should be ignored as rubbish.

Thrush in the Storm came out in 2013, but it's gotten a new push as a download—either single tracks or the entire shebang. I'd recommend the latter, but here's some info for those wishing to discover Dervish one track at a time. If you like sets with complex overlays, check out the instrumental titled "Green Crowned Lass," in which flutes and whistles intersect, depart, and whip up a hearty musical stew. Another Dervish instrumental staple is the patching together of tunes that start humbly, wend their way to a bridge, make a split second stop, and then leap into a heart-stopping pace. "Maggie's Lilt" is a good example of this. Shane Mitchell's accordion appears first as a flash, then disappears, and reemerges when the lilt becomes a sprint. The title tune is another example. Dervish doesn't rush at you all at once. Their sets are like Lego blocks—the pieces snap together piece by piece until the small becomes mighty; in this case, until a slow hornpipe becomes a fast reel.

A lot of Celtic bands use songs to slow the pace. Not Dervish. When Ms. Jordan steps up to the mic, it's often with bodhran in hand as she intends to command the tempo in every way imaginable. Thrush in the Storm contains mostly traditional songs, but with Jordan's twist on them. She revives "Handsome Polly," in part because it's one of the rare trad songs in which the woman is left standing at the end. In this case a dragoon captain dies of a broken heart after being spurned by a comely maid. "Snoring Biddy," which Jordan fashioned from incomplete snippets, is more gruesome in that a husband murders his wife, but Jordan's tongue-twisting treatment is so robust you may be too busy tapping your toes to notice the tragedy. A personal favorite is "Baba Chonraol," which opens with a simple drone-like arrangement until the bouzouki comes in and Jordan's voice becomes what dance sounds like. The song then evolves into a kind of nouveau medievalism that's at once ancient, yet new. Like I said, Irish music doesn't get much better than this. --Rob Weir

10,000 Maniacs Still Cranking Out Entertaining Tunes

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10,000 MANIACS

For Crying Out Loud

Noisetrade

* * * *

Confession time: I really liked 10,000 Maniacs back in the 1980s, but when Natalie Merchant left the band in 1993, I followed her and ignored the Maniacs. (Merchant's 2003 House Carpenter's Daughter is among my favorites of the new century.) I was surprised when Noisetrade offered a free download to celebrate the band's 35^th year on the road, as I had assumed 10,000 Maniacs to be defunct. I'm happy to be wrong and I'm anxious to dip into a 2015 release titled Twice Told Tales, which consists entirely of covers of traditional songs.

The Maniacs have just two members left from the original 1981 lineup: bass player Steve Gustafson and keyboardist Dennis drew, though drummer Jerry Augustyniak has been with them since 1983. Merchant's replacement, Mary Ramsey, sang with the band from 1994 to 2001, left, and returned in 2007. Though she lacks Merchant's deeper dark tones, she compensates in the higher ranges and is quite a talent in her own right. As in the 1980s, you'll find 10,000 Maniacs called things such as: college rock, soft rock, folk rock, and alt-rock. My own handle for them is sunshine pop, by which I mean they are the kind of outfit that seldom challenges us, but are always entertaining—hummable songs wrapped in jangly guitar, heavy-on-the-first-beat percussion, soupy keyboards, smooth lead vocals, and harmonies that add more texture than power. For Crying Out Loud offers seven tracks from post-Merchant albums: the sweet "Ellen" from Earth Pressed Flat (1992), the dancey "These are the Days" from Our Time in Eden (1992), and "Shinning Light" and "Love Among the Ruins" from the 1997 album named for the second song (which enjoyed modest chart success). What is especially heartening, though, is that the album's best two selections are its most recent ones. "Triangle," from the 2013 album Music from a Motion Picture is both a lovely song and a well-crafted one that opens with an acoustic guitar/piano mix, subtly adds instruments, and builds to its swelling bridges. And I'm happy to report–as noted above–that 10,000 Maniacs are still infusing new life into old songs—their cover of "She Moved through the Fair" from the new record is moodily atmospheric and has thoughtful enhancements that interject just the right among of newness without destroying the song's time-tested integrity–like a flash of electrified fiddle and some soft blips that are the electronic equivalent of underpainting.

It's welcome back time for 10,000 Maniacs. They never strayed, but I went away for a few decades. Is this stuff cutting edge? No–but in an age of white noise, failed experiments, paint-by-the-numbers power pop, running-on-empty hip hop, and brain-dead major labels, there's joy in hearing a band that just gives us our money's worth.

Rob Weir

Effie Gray Fails to Rise above Namesake Dullness

EFFIE GRAY  (2014/15)

Directed by Richard Laxton

Sovereign Films, 108 minutes, PG-13 (brief nudity)

* *

Emma Thompson has many talents, but script writing is not one of them. Effie Gray tells the story of spirited Scots lass Euphemia Gray (1828-1897) and her disastrous marriage to English art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900), one that took place in 1848 and was annulled in 1854. It is such a fascinating tale that it has been the subject of numerous well-received plays and books though, alas, this (rightly) is not among the highly regarded.

Effie is played quite well by Dakota Fanning, though Ruskin (Thompson's husband, Tom Wise) is miscast. Effie Gray begins like a classic case of cradle robbing, with Fanning looking to be about 16 and Ruskin a gray-templed man in his 40s who weds a girl of whom his parents disapproved. This is the first of numerous liberties taken. In truth, the Ruskins and Grays knew each other well, with the latter residing in a home in which Ruskin's grandfather had committed suicide. John Ruskin had literally known Effie since she was a child, but it wasn't quite as creepy as the film suggests–he was just nine years her senior, not decades, and such an age gap was hardly unusual in Victorian times. But it is true enough that Ruskin, though a brilliant intellect, was a distasteful man and likely impotent as well. Legend holds that when Effie disrobed on their wedding night, Ruskin was disgusted to see that she had pubic hair—unlike the Greek statues he admired—and never consummated a marriage that ended five plus years later with Mrs. Ruskin still intact.

The film gets the vibe of Effie's monastic existence right–the feeling of being a virtual prisoner in a life devoid of work, duty, or meaning. When she accompanies John to Venice and is allowed to explore the city, go dancing, and participate in society, the Italian light serves only to magnify her husband's coldness and Effie realizes her need to do something about her circumstances. (Hey, if you can't be romantic in Venice, carnality is off the menu!) Effie lapses into a neurasthenia made worse by the laudanum-laced  "medicine" with which her evil mother-in-law (Julie Walters) plies her and only starts to come back to life when she returns to Scotland with her husband and his protégé, pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais (Tom Sturridge). After her annulment, Effie married Millais and bore him eight children before his death in 1896.

Where to begin with the film's problems? Although the vibe is right, it's exceedingly dull to watch a film in which very little happens. Wise's Ruskin is so buttoned-down that he reacts to nothing; hence there are no big scenes and little drama other than that conveyed by Fanning's sad doe eyes. We get lots of nice scenery—Venice, the Scottish Trossachs, English manor houses–but we could get that from Google Images. Don't expect to learn a lot about art either; there's hardly a word about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and only a smattering of paintings filmed from British museum walls and snipped into the film. One is Millais's famed "Ophelia," and it's implied that Effie was its inspiration—and Ophelia's face does bear resemblance to Fanning's—but the model was actually Elizabeth Siddal, not Gray. Also wasted is a superb cast that includes cameos from heavyweights such as Walters, Claudia Cardinale, James Fox, Derek Jacobi, Emma Thompson, and David Suchet. Given the period setting of this film, one could say this is literally a case of a cast all dressed up with nowhere to go. And that's where this film went as well–after Thompson fended off two lawsuits from playwrights alleging copyright infringement, this $11 million film garnered weak reviews, and made just over $368,000 at the box office. That's a bomb by any measure.

Should you download it? It's up to you. Effie Gray isn't terrible, but that's largely because it takes more energy to create camp.  Rob Weir