I felt a bit sheepish about sticking that last post up. It seemed rather fatuous to be railing about anything as inconsequential as a television programme. In fact, it seemed insubstantial to be invoking 'theories' x and y as if there is any actual consequence of them in real life - post-modernity, pop culture, "culture", thingummy blah - particularly when bloggers around the world use 'virtual' space to discuss actual life-shattering matters, strikes, armed insurgency, attack by foreign powers, etc.
Then I thought, no, fuck 'em. I'm right to find Popworld objectionable, and no amount of cavilling around notions of validity can alter the fact - FACT! - that it is - in its tiny pimple on the mooning ass of western civilisation, that perpetually good idea, way - completely and appallingly offensive.
I have a privileged set of gripes, sure, but legitimate. I'm dragged out of bed against my better judgment to work a 45 hour week to cover basic food and housing costs, and then get presented at every turn with the awful truth that I live in a society that loves, craves ' "Popworld" ', the strange meta-reality that Heat magazine also depicts, the press, the alternative press reacting to it, that even the Breakfast news shows attach some sort of degree of relevance to. A society that believes things like this, from the office of the Mayor of London's Senior Policy adviser in a speech at the National Portrait Gallery:
'Contemporary Chinese culture is very dynamic and Chinese art is at the cutting edge of the international art scene. To give people a flavour of that we invited the winner of the Chinese ‘Pop Idol’ competition to turn on our lighting display and perform at Tower Bridge.' Cutting edge. Pop Idol.
Jude Woodward goes on: 'We also worked with Selfridges to bring two contemporary Chinese artists here. One was in the press when they built a city out of biscuits and cakes in the store. It took four days to build, but the public demolished it in four hours.'
I. Ask. You. Well done to that Chinese artist for holding up a crumb-specked mirror to our locust nature. We now suffer cultural indigestion.
Salaam Pax can write about their thing, this is what exercises me.
Monday, March 27, 2006
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Popworld
SEVERAL BREAKFAST COFFEES AFTER A WEEK WORKING INTEMPERATE RANT ALERT
In the context of watching saturday morning telly, and leaving aside for a moment the infinite capacity of humans to be horrible to each other with industrialised warfare, selfish consumption and all the other truly nasty things we get up to across the planet, leaving that aside, is there anything more objectionable in the universe than that pair of unfathomably supercilious fuckers who present UK Channel 4's 'Popworld'?
'The irony is, "Popworld", the cultural construct, is unfathomably, banally shit and objectionable - thefore what could be more apt than a programme called 'Popworld' which reflects this?' BE QUIET. Post-modernism is dead, its reactionary corpse twitches live on tv, referencing Top Ten Adverts programme-referencing adverts based on adverts which reference other adverts which reference a fleeting memory of an occasion when something once happened that had some sort of sense of actual real-time event without a product atached to it about it, and this sorry spectacular society - and they're not even good spectacles, they're a pair of stupid Elton John frames bought at a celebrity charity auction of faux-pseudo-80's memorabilia - is sustained by galvanic blasts of money and hapless slack-jawed with horror bored breakfasters like me.
Meanwhile, the curly haired one also presents 'Never mind the Buzzcocks' - a programme which long since pitched forward into the void which Popworld slumps sulkily at the peripheries of. Never mind the buzzcocks, let's play with ourselves endlessly instead. '"'Popworld'"' and its styled and stylised 'create more entertainers' ethic functions like a Civilisation PC god-game parody of a pastiche of a copy real life... Never mind the product, testing itself on how little it cares about the conveyor belt of distractions trundling past. Fucking wafer thin culture checking itself out all the time, twiddling its thumbs, sitting on its hands, looking bored at text messages and waiting for someone to kill it... Like that French Connection ad with the skinny bitch fight happening as as not at all rude boy pork pie hat wearing pouters rocking last season's gay football hooligan look gaze on indifferently. Let them eat coke.
'Po-mo' shit like ' ""'Popworld'"" ' does it for me. A verbatim extract from this morning's edition:
'Here's the new Coldplay Simon le Bono 80's freako video show, wasn't it all shit?'
'Yeah, the 80's were great'
'Do you mean they were shit?'
'Well isn't it great shit now?'
'Yeah, this great is so shit it's... shit'
For. the. sweet. love. of. god.
What do you actually like, you cunts?
Bah!
In the context of watching saturday morning telly, and leaving aside for a moment the infinite capacity of humans to be horrible to each other with industrialised warfare, selfish consumption and all the other truly nasty things we get up to across the planet, leaving that aside, is there anything more objectionable in the universe than that pair of unfathomably supercilious fuckers who present UK Channel 4's 'Popworld'?
'The irony is, "Popworld", the cultural construct, is unfathomably, banally shit and objectionable - thefore what could be more apt than a programme called 'Popworld' which reflects this?' BE QUIET. Post-modernism is dead, its reactionary corpse twitches live on tv, referencing Top Ten Adverts programme-referencing adverts based on adverts which reference other adverts which reference a fleeting memory of an occasion when something once happened that had some sort of sense of actual real-time event without a product atached to it about it, and this sorry spectacular society - and they're not even good spectacles, they're a pair of stupid Elton John frames bought at a celebrity charity auction of faux-pseudo-80's memorabilia - is sustained by galvanic blasts of money and hapless slack-jawed with horror bored breakfasters like me.
Meanwhile, the curly haired one also presents 'Never mind the Buzzcocks' - a programme which long since pitched forward into the void which Popworld slumps sulkily at the peripheries of. Never mind the buzzcocks, let's play with ourselves endlessly instead. '"'Popworld'"' and its styled and stylised 'create more entertainers' ethic functions like a Civilisation PC god-game parody of a pastiche of a copy real life... Never mind the product, testing itself on how little it cares about the conveyor belt of distractions trundling past. Fucking wafer thin culture checking itself out all the time, twiddling its thumbs, sitting on its hands, looking bored at text messages and waiting for someone to kill it... Like that French Connection ad with the skinny bitch fight happening as as not at all rude boy pork pie hat wearing pouters rocking last season's gay football hooligan look gaze on indifferently. Let them eat coke.
'Po-mo' shit like ' ""'Popworld'"" ' does it for me. A verbatim extract from this morning's edition:
'Here's the new Coldplay Simon le Bono 80's freako video show, wasn't it all shit?'
'Yeah, the 80's were great'
'Do you mean they were shit?'
'Well isn't it great shit now?'
'Yeah, this great is so shit it's... shit'
For. the. sweet. love. of. god.
What do you actually like, you cunts?
Bah!
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Monday, March 20, 2006
un po' di Calvino per favore
I was reading Italo Calvino's invisible cities taken from the shelf at a friend's house early one saturday morning. Lying on the sofa bed having eaten through the last train, listening to the breathing of the friend's sister, my best friend sleeping under the other quilt, we dozed through occasional cars and the sounds of children beginning to bounce around excitedly next door.
Gradually I felt my eyelids dropping and my left hand which was holding the book was growing nearer. I decided to drift off with the book open on my face and see if I could soak up some of the lines for inspiration, if the files of characters would begin to peel up and off the page and wind and snake around the side of my head, insinuate themselves across my cheeks and up under eyelids and into nostrils and round and inside the ears and into my mouth as I slept.
When I next came to my thumb was still on the page I'd been holding open. I would have liked it to be exactly on the point where it was written 'the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites'gnawing' or 'Desires are already memories' or 'every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls', but I didn't look, just closed the book and laid it on the floor and turned back on to my left and went to sleep thinking of words.
Gradually I felt my eyelids dropping and my left hand which was holding the book was growing nearer. I decided to drift off with the book open on my face and see if I could soak up some of the lines for inspiration, if the files of characters would begin to peel up and off the page and wind and snake around the side of my head, insinuate themselves across my cheeks and up under eyelids and into nostrils and round and inside the ears and into my mouth as I slept.
When I next came to my thumb was still on the page I'd been holding open. I would have liked it to be exactly on the point where it was written 'the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites'gnawing' or 'Desires are already memories' or 'every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls', but I didn't look, just closed the book and laid it on the floor and turned back on to my left and went to sleep thinking of words.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Hells Apostrophes
Hells Angels are suing Disney over a film that hasn’t even been made yet:
‘Wild Hogs is described as a story about a group of budding motorcyclists who set out on a road trip where they encounter a chapter of the Hells Angels.
The film, which features John Travolta and Tim Allen, is scheduled to begin filming later this year.’
And the Angels are not having it. What a hoo-ha. ‘But!’ Said the bored pedant as he scanned the news this morning. ‘Lurking behind this tense burgeoning courtroom drama is the overlooked issue of the curious incident of the missing apostrophe.’
Or so I thought!
A quick trip to the Hells Angels website revealed this in their FAQ:
‘Shouldn’t the Hells in Hells Angels have an apostrophe, and be Hell’s Angels? That would be true if there was only one Hell, but life & history has taught us that there are many versions and forms of Hell.’
10 out of 10 for effort, but - leaving aside the eschatological implications - this just further muddies matters grammatically. Even if there is a plurality of Hells, there’s still an apostrophe missing. Surely it should thusly be Hells’ Angels? In fact, if you follow the grammar nazi on Word, it should in fact, in fact be Hells’s Angels.
[Sidebar - The rogue ‘apostrophe-s’ of doom! Seriously, it’s pointless. St James’s Park – St Thomas’ Hospital (metrocentric conflict example). If your surname ends in ‘s’, doubly stupid. Imagine if the name was Ms Businesses, and you were writing about her businesses… Bah! Anyway…]
Hells’s Angels it is, then. Look, they started it by getting into non-bikery shit like suing cartoon and tie-in tat product magnates. They should be a bit more willing to realise the marketing potential here. The merchandise ramifications of an Angels/Disney tie-in are limitless. Hells’s Angels’s Website also suggests that if you buy Hells Angels merch, ‘Your purchases show you support the club’s philosophy of being free.’ Heh! Free purchases... With your chicken nuggets: a Sonny Barger with movable arms and pool cue accessory… Meredith Hunter/Alan Passaro characters in Tekken 6… The Walt Disney’s Wild Hogs’s Official Hells’s Angels’s Little Scientists’s Amphetamine Sulphate Production Kit…
Only kidding, obviously. The vast majority of Hells’s Angels are law-abiding citizens. Hence their sudden interest in litigation. Angels – now its time to clean up your punctuation.
Blog Frenzy!
It looks like I had a crazed spider on amphetamines burst of opinion on sunday 12th. I just posted them! They weren't all written on sunday.
Just to clear that up.
Just to clear that up.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
the footprints of a gigantic hound
more links as I find them for this ultimate pooch, who just had us rolling on the floor laughing with her/him on Crufts: Speedy the Swiss dog
The insouciance of Speedy is incredible. Part broken hip, part most casual of breed. 'Fetch!''In a minute... ok then...'
The insouciance of Speedy is incredible. Part broken hip, part most casual of breed. 'Fetch!''In a minute... ok then...'
Titus Gein
Titus Gein. Advanced techniques for hands and feet.
You don’t need a five star review to know you have to own this… Nemesis on Artemis: Titus vs Beastman. All 24 rounds of the incredible Tri-Galaxial Championship Mega-Final, the bout that sealed the myth of DVRD combat artist Titus Gein.
Packed with more easter eggs than the Billionaire Bunny’s basket, what do you want from this release? How about the closing minutes, just after the roboref has signalled that it’s true, it’s over, and who is the man, who is the daddy of them all? Titus Gein checks himself in one of the hovering plasma screens which angle themselves about the skydrome, giving the vast crowd unrestricted views of the action. He straightens the muscular arm hefting the pugistik and points it straight at one of the swarming hovercams. He nods slowly, eyes fixed to the tiny lens. Zoom… one immaculate eyebrow arches, a smile spreads over the impassive face, and the blunt glowing blue stick is raised towards the dome of the stadium far above. Ecstatic cheers of release wash over him, and his head’s back. The other arm is raised, index and little fingers extended in the traditional thanksgiving gesture to the Church of Bruce. Down his arms and snaking under the black plastisteel vest, exhausted sinews cord and flex as he slowly circles the arena, beckoning the applause, the screams, the hysterical tears.
All the other moments to thrill and thrill again to… Beastman, dazed in defeat, swearing to 30000 News Universal syndicate channels that it will never fight again. “You could be champ again, Beastie, the biggest comeback?” Robohack blips excited. Shake of the big old shaggy head… Thick voice and a thorny claw jabs towards Gein and through busted beastly lips it spits “Nah… He’s the fucking champ.”
And then the heart-stopper, who can fail to have a lump in the throat? Titus catches sight of his lover, the pop event Eurydice, in the crowd. It’s there with its backing singers, the Harmonised Triplets – the hot hot hot identical uberbabes cloned at the Beyonce & Harry Knowles Institute of Stemiotics. After mouthing something at its group to general laughter, Eurydice extends one of its willowy arms and flicks up the index and little finger in response. A mini swarm of cameras clusters about it, and Eurydice pouts coquettishly for the estimated 115 billion lifeforms watching. Roars of approval. It brushes one of its fringes back over a shoulder with a free hand and returns its gaze slowly to Titus, who kisses the end of the pugistik and points it directly at Eurydice. The crowd goes wild, freeze frame on Titus, arm outstretched to his lover, and his victory theme cranks in, headlong and wilfully baroque, the familiar metallic octave leaps and fuzz heavy tones tracking the perfectly cut fight highlights as the credits trail across the bottom of the screen….
This was the fight that brought back the 3-G trophy – the fabulous triskaidekahedral amethyst trinket the size and colour of a fiery elephant, long thought forever lost to the perma-victorious brutal and merciless Fiscalons of the Artemiserian system. Back home, an entire planet went on a six day absinthe bender in celebration, officially sanctioned by President Bruce Dickinson XXVII of the High Church of Bruce. Earth, watery central globe of the triple world of Neu-Tron, loves Austracific maniac Titus. His legendary advanced techniques for hands and feet are beyond joyful to watch. Millimetre perfect timing, coiled aggression, and a gleeful love of his combat art.
Credits trail:
Bruce Campbell, Bruce Sterling, Jean Michel Jarre, Iron Maiden, The Fucking Champs, Freddie Flintoff, The Way of the Exploding Fist, Tekken 5, The Last Ninja, Flash Gordon OST, Frank Zappa.
You don’t need a five star review to know you have to own this… Nemesis on Artemis: Titus vs Beastman. All 24 rounds of the incredible Tri-Galaxial Championship Mega-Final, the bout that sealed the myth of DVRD combat artist Titus Gein.
Packed with more easter eggs than the Billionaire Bunny’s basket, what do you want from this release? How about the closing minutes, just after the roboref has signalled that it’s true, it’s over, and who is the man, who is the daddy of them all? Titus Gein checks himself in one of the hovering plasma screens which angle themselves about the skydrome, giving the vast crowd unrestricted views of the action. He straightens the muscular arm hefting the pugistik and points it straight at one of the swarming hovercams. He nods slowly, eyes fixed to the tiny lens. Zoom… one immaculate eyebrow arches, a smile spreads over the impassive face, and the blunt glowing blue stick is raised towards the dome of the stadium far above. Ecstatic cheers of release wash over him, and his head’s back. The other arm is raised, index and little fingers extended in the traditional thanksgiving gesture to the Church of Bruce. Down his arms and snaking under the black plastisteel vest, exhausted sinews cord and flex as he slowly circles the arena, beckoning the applause, the screams, the hysterical tears.
All the other moments to thrill and thrill again to… Beastman, dazed in defeat, swearing to 30000 News Universal syndicate channels that it will never fight again. “You could be champ again, Beastie, the biggest comeback?” Robohack blips excited. Shake of the big old shaggy head… Thick voice and a thorny claw jabs towards Gein and through busted beastly lips it spits “Nah… He’s the fucking champ.”
And then the heart-stopper, who can fail to have a lump in the throat? Titus catches sight of his lover, the pop event Eurydice, in the crowd. It’s there with its backing singers, the Harmonised Triplets – the hot hot hot identical uberbabes cloned at the Beyonce & Harry Knowles Institute of Stemiotics. After mouthing something at its group to general laughter, Eurydice extends one of its willowy arms and flicks up the index and little finger in response. A mini swarm of cameras clusters about it, and Eurydice pouts coquettishly for the estimated 115 billion lifeforms watching. Roars of approval. It brushes one of its fringes back over a shoulder with a free hand and returns its gaze slowly to Titus, who kisses the end of the pugistik and points it directly at Eurydice. The crowd goes wild, freeze frame on Titus, arm outstretched to his lover, and his victory theme cranks in, headlong and wilfully baroque, the familiar metallic octave leaps and fuzz heavy tones tracking the perfectly cut fight highlights as the credits trail across the bottom of the screen….
This was the fight that brought back the 3-G trophy – the fabulous triskaidekahedral amethyst trinket the size and colour of a fiery elephant, long thought forever lost to the perma-victorious brutal and merciless Fiscalons of the Artemiserian system. Back home, an entire planet went on a six day absinthe bender in celebration, officially sanctioned by President Bruce Dickinson XXVII of the High Church of Bruce. Earth, watery central globe of the triple world of Neu-Tron, loves Austracific maniac Titus. His legendary advanced techniques for hands and feet are beyond joyful to watch. Millimetre perfect timing, coiled aggression, and a gleeful love of his combat art.
Credits trail:
Bruce Campbell, Bruce Sterling, Jean Michel Jarre, Iron Maiden, The Fucking Champs, Freddie Flintoff, The Way of the Exploding Fist, Tekken 5, The Last Ninja, Flash Gordon OST, Frank Zappa.
Benny & The Gets
Del Amitri! I mentioned them in another post. They’re one of these bands that will probably only ever be remembered (by non-Dellies, or whatever their fans call themselves) for the one song – ‘Nothing ever happens’ (‘Nothing happens at all… the needle returns to the start of the song and we all carry on like before’, which is certainly a work of genius to go in a top 5 of ‘Kill yourself because it’s Monday’ numbers, which if I were Nick Hornby would be all be listed here, but I’m not, so you can only speculate.) Having said that, without Googling – the cheater’s way to impress! - I think I can name one other song (Spit in the rain?), and I could hum another one (‘da na naa naa na naa na na na na, na naaa, naaa-na naa’), but anyway, if you want Del Amitri chat, go here:
del amitri.com
www.spiritone.com
Sorry to go round and round here, only I was thinking about Del Amitri as I whizzed across Tottenham Court Road on my velocipede recently. Gazing up and shaking my head, as I always do, at the aptly-named Dominion theatre with its gigantic Freddie Mercury fibreglass statue punching the air as We will rock you marches triumphantly into a fourth year like the cartoon hammers in The Wall, a Joycean (= fucking annoying)sequence of thoughts along the lines of 'We will rock you! Whether you like it or not... thing is, I love that tune... I used to like Ben Elton too... pre-packaged nites out... hardly 'Lifehouse', is it? rock & popcorn...' brought me to remembering that Bruce Delamitri is the name of a Tarantino-style director in one of Ben Elton's later book/play/whatever it is, Popcorn.
This witless combination of hamfisted satire and late 20th century media obsessions (actually, I’m going to put that on my homepage) kind of exemplifies where it all went wrong for Ben, or Baron Benjamin of Elton as he is now certain to become, thanks to his close links with the Royal Family. A couple of mates and I saw Ben Elton perform live stand up comedy when I was about 14. He was, to our inexperienced ears, brilliantly funny. He wasn't bad, but hindsight (and knowing a bootlegged dictaphone recording I listened to for ages afterwards virtually by heart) reveals his essentially reactionary jobbing farty persona to be, well, not a persona. Yes indeed. I mean, I will let him off to a certain extent because he co-wrote Blackadder. However…
His descent into blandness, and, latterly, unseemly collaborations, has been not precipitous but – worse – a leisurely downward amble. Shows like The Thin Blue Line and his increasingly dull novels display an admirable work ethic but detail a corresponding diminishing of content, with little in the way of anything important to discuss, or even a bit daring stylistically, like, say The Young Ones. The later chamber of horrors West End [of London] rock musicals merely lay like a fat grease spot on the napkin undulating over the contentedly stuffed gut.
I’m not just talking about Queen, but Tonight’s the Night, about Rod Stewart (‘Do Ya Think I'm Sexy sung by groupies, Hot Legs sung by masseuses, Sailing sung by sailors’ - JESUS) The Beautiful Game, about football - will you give it up? It’s a short step from Tonight’s the Night to ‘My new project, a musical about T.Rex called Dandy in the Underworld, in which Marc Bolan returns from the dead to show people that…’, and then I’m afraid I shall have to call the police.
My own new musical based on the songs of The Police - Sting, Where is Thy Death? - is coming soon. Also in the pipeline: Elton Benny & The Jets, a rock-musical about a comedy writer in his forties who rejects glam glitz and spangly suits and pseudo-political engagement and being funny in favour of banal bourgeois mating rites and doing the book for a succession of feeble yet toweringly successful musicals which allow already insanely, impossibly wealthy 70’s rock musicians to further milk a bored public for their hard-earned readies. Starring Jake Shears from Scissor Scisters, in his West End debut, as Elton Benny. One stalls seat: £49.50.
Here's Duke Fitzben Elton-Niceone talking through his motivation for assisting multi-millionares in post-career aspic populism http://www.abc.net.au/thingo/txt/s1209738.htm
I can pinpoint the exact moment I knew it was over between me and Sir Lord Benjamin of Eltonia to the juncture at which, hosting the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations, he turned to the crowd at Fuckingham Palace with that familiar elbow out microphone gesture and upturned shiny face and intoned the deathless phrase:
'Ladies and Gentlemen, will you please give it up for The Spice Girls!'
I. Ask. You. It doesn’t matter really, obviously. This sort of thing happens all the time. By which I mean me getting exercised over people becoming boring and profit-motivated and willing to do all sorts of obtrusive media tat, not the actual event of writers introducing pop bands at the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebration. That’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. Yes indeed.
del amitri.com
www.spiritone.com
Sorry to go round and round here, only I was thinking about Del Amitri as I whizzed across Tottenham Court Road on my velocipede recently. Gazing up and shaking my head, as I always do, at the aptly-named Dominion theatre with its gigantic Freddie Mercury fibreglass statue punching the air as We will rock you marches triumphantly into a fourth year like the cartoon hammers in The Wall, a Joycean (= fucking annoying)sequence of thoughts along the lines of 'We will rock you! Whether you like it or not... thing is, I love that tune... I used to like Ben Elton too... pre-packaged nites out... hardly 'Lifehouse', is it? rock & popcorn...' brought me to remembering that Bruce Delamitri is the name of a Tarantino-style director in one of Ben Elton's later book/play/whatever it is, Popcorn.
This witless combination of hamfisted satire and late 20th century media obsessions (actually, I’m going to put that on my homepage) kind of exemplifies where it all went wrong for Ben, or Baron Benjamin of Elton as he is now certain to become, thanks to his close links with the Royal Family. A couple of mates and I saw Ben Elton perform live stand up comedy when I was about 14. He was, to our inexperienced ears, brilliantly funny. He wasn't bad, but hindsight (and knowing a bootlegged dictaphone recording I listened to for ages afterwards virtually by heart) reveals his essentially reactionary jobbing farty persona to be, well, not a persona. Yes indeed. I mean, I will let him off to a certain extent because he co-wrote Blackadder. However…
His descent into blandness, and, latterly, unseemly collaborations, has been not precipitous but – worse – a leisurely downward amble. Shows like The Thin Blue Line and his increasingly dull novels display an admirable work ethic but detail a corresponding diminishing of content, with little in the way of anything important to discuss, or even a bit daring stylistically, like, say The Young Ones. The later chamber of horrors West End [of London] rock musicals merely lay like a fat grease spot on the napkin undulating over the contentedly stuffed gut.
I’m not just talking about Queen, but Tonight’s the Night, about Rod Stewart (‘Do Ya Think I'm Sexy sung by groupies, Hot Legs sung by masseuses, Sailing sung by sailors’ - JESUS) The Beautiful Game, about football - will you give it up? It’s a short step from Tonight’s the Night to ‘My new project, a musical about T.Rex called Dandy in the Underworld, in which Marc Bolan returns from the dead to show people that…’, and then I’m afraid I shall have to call the police.
My own new musical based on the songs of The Police - Sting, Where is Thy Death? - is coming soon. Also in the pipeline: Elton Benny & The Jets, a rock-musical about a comedy writer in his forties who rejects glam glitz and spangly suits and pseudo-political engagement and being funny in favour of banal bourgeois mating rites and doing the book for a succession of feeble yet toweringly successful musicals which allow already insanely, impossibly wealthy 70’s rock musicians to further milk a bored public for their hard-earned readies. Starring Jake Shears from Scissor Scisters, in his West End debut, as Elton Benny. One stalls seat: £49.50.
Here's Duke Fitzben Elton-Niceone talking through his motivation for assisting multi-millionares in post-career aspic populism http://www.abc.net.au/thingo/txt/s1209738.htm
I can pinpoint the exact moment I knew it was over between me and Sir Lord Benjamin of Eltonia to the juncture at which, hosting the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations, he turned to the crowd at Fuckingham Palace with that familiar elbow out microphone gesture and upturned shiny face and intoned the deathless phrase:
'Ladies and Gentlemen, will you please give it up for The Spice Girls!'
I. Ask. You. It doesn’t matter really, obviously. This sort of thing happens all the time. By which I mean me getting exercised over people becoming boring and profit-motivated and willing to do all sorts of obtrusive media tat, not the actual event of writers introducing pop bands at the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebration. That’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. Yes indeed.
Live 8, or, We Love Africans, They're Mostly Not Trying To Kill Us
[This was a piece I wrote in July 2005 for my zine, Conductive Jelly. It was finished about six days after the Live 8 gig, and about one day after the "7/7" bombs went off across London. Republished it here a year later in an attempt to pad out what was at the time a scanty body of bloggery.]
Live 8, or, We Love Africans, They’re Mostly Not Trying To Kill Us
It was the day of the Live 8 gig. Something unseemly about the proceedings. A big emotional display, all too human… ok, we’re not all bad. But come on. Multimillionaires telling me we can end poverty. It’s hilarious and disgusting. Their poorly thought through posturing in front of representations of Africans - a single saved Ethiopian, Birhan Woldu, holds hands with Madonna for an entire continent. The African musicians are in the Eden Project in Cornwall, driven back into the garden by the fiery sword of market forces and “musical apartheid” (Andy Kershaw). Meanwhile in Hyde Park, multimillionaires against poverty say, join us! Ignoring the interdependent nature of the twain! Or they’re revelling in the carnival, the whole psychotically dichotomised spectacular compromise. (“Poor Faulkner,” said Ernest Hemingway, “does he really think big emotions come from big words?” Big words, big spells, they’re magical multi-dimensional portals. They give us access to extra-planetary vistas of things.)
Downstairs in the company break-room, F’s having a jump about to U2. They are telling us “It’s a beautiful day – don’t let it slip away”. The tune reminds me of Sky Sports’ Saturday Soccertainment. This is a different class of distraction. We get to enjoy an afternoon and evening of variety acts while behind us weapons are loaded onto air freighters and tanks chained to trains shunt off for lands that are very far away. It’s a grim consideration, the casually pragmatic doublethink which our puppet masters sign with withered arms on all too visible sticks. “It’s behind you!” we shout with glee. “Don’t let it slip away.” Richard Ashcroft joins Coldplay for a cracked throated rendition of brilliant anthem “Bitter Sweet Symphony”. “Well it’s a bitter sweet symphony, this life. Trying to make ends meet, you’re a slave to the money, then you die.” I am also, of course, at work watching it.
Coldplay, scourge of the shareholder, also introduced a video detailing when and where to protest and to who and for why. No-one watching on the BBC got to see it. We got a rightly embarrassed Jonathan Ross discussing the miracle of modern technology with Andrew Marr. Maybe it was an attempt to get people to watch a webcast of it or go to the website to see the kind-of-entire-point-of-the-day film the BBC wouldn’t show. The way they shrugged and said nothing… I was depressingly reminded of the anti-war march in 2003, for which millions of people turned up to voice their opposition and were treated to the sight of Tony Blair leaning out of his window with the remote control, hitting the mute button, leaving two million people in Britain silently mouthing “no war” at a man without lip reading skills or conscience. And what kind of planet of 6 billion people lets itself get run by “8 men”?
I just about give up when I see “Kate’s junkie” Pete Doherty and Sir Elton John play a version of T.Rex’s “Children of the revolution”. Behind his opaque blue spectacles, Sir Elton was clearly ruing the day he’d agreed to appear, let alone with the gaunt eyeliner smudge wreck Babyshambolically gutting the steaming remnants of one of the greatest songs ever written. “Anti-climax” indeed, you weave-wearing piano-mangler. I watch the wings in the vain hope of seeing a long stick with a hook on the end appear at about Doherty’s neck height, a sign of a breeze to whip shut the keyboard lid on John’s chubby fingers. Is it really all going to be this jaw-crackingly shit?
A friend is having a barbecue and I go to that. There’s lots of food, lots of drink. Luckily, this Live 8 gig is about poverty, not famine, so I don’t let guilt figure too highly in the proceedings. This is a great tactic for avoiding the potted meat feeling of most of the afternoon’s hideousness, Dido, Travis, Keane, Joss Stone, etc etc etc. The Scissor Sisters come on and Do A New Song, the shameless whores. Yet something – call it a realisation of the true global capacity and desire of humankind to exist in a spirit of tolerance and sharing, call it a bottle & a half of red wine, three beers and a couple of spliffs – something starts to subtly shift in my head. By the time Madonna comes on the radio, talkin’ bout a revolution, we’re dancing on the picnic table in P’s garden. It’s like a tide, and I give in to it. I feel like a little ray of light. My sister’s in Hyde Park. Text messages morse in from Edinburgh, where friends have been getting sunburned in a river of white shirts on the protest march. They’re all little rays of light as well. We can do this! The Twho come on stage, and I go demented. “Won’t get fooled again” is so potent, its jaded acceptance of the power of popular rock music both to redeem and to change nothing at all.
And then, Jesus, it’s the Floyd! Their music is designed for events of this amplitude. Wish you were here and booze floated bonhomie sparks another firework display of txting, friends we’ve had and left along the way, birthday girls in Glasgow, people sat on the couch next to me… watching the crumblies atone for all our collective feverish ego displays down the years. It’s great. We go “na na naa naa, hey Juude” and wipe tears away, knowing that community is possible, is here. Then, in the cool light of day, the good people of the west lapse into the maladaptive behaviour patterns of consumption which shore up the whole creaking unjust edifice. Buying more and more pop albums, in a bizarre ritual of commemoration and displacement. Bands donate profits from increased revenue to the cause… It’s amazing theatre. But maybe not even for a moment do we ever really believe that this display of public feeling might in any way permeate the flinty hearts of the “G8” council of wizened elders, gathered like the Skeksis in The Dark Crystal while we wait for Sir Bob Gelfling to reunite a flailing, frail humanity. About a week later the fantasy appears to continue as They take a foot off the head of the drowner… only long enough to be knocked off balance by people who misunderstand our ideology of hope and compassion.
Live 8, or, We Love Africans, They’re Mostly Not Trying To Kill Us
It was the day of the Live 8 gig. Something unseemly about the proceedings. A big emotional display, all too human… ok, we’re not all bad. But come on. Multimillionaires telling me we can end poverty. It’s hilarious and disgusting. Their poorly thought through posturing in front of representations of Africans - a single saved Ethiopian, Birhan Woldu, holds hands with Madonna for an entire continent. The African musicians are in the Eden Project in Cornwall, driven back into the garden by the fiery sword of market forces and “musical apartheid” (Andy Kershaw). Meanwhile in Hyde Park, multimillionaires against poverty say, join us! Ignoring the interdependent nature of the twain! Or they’re revelling in the carnival, the whole psychotically dichotomised spectacular compromise. (“Poor Faulkner,” said Ernest Hemingway, “does he really think big emotions come from big words?” Big words, big spells, they’re magical multi-dimensional portals. They give us access to extra-planetary vistas of things.)
Downstairs in the company break-room, F’s having a jump about to U2. They are telling us “It’s a beautiful day – don’t let it slip away”. The tune reminds me of Sky Sports’ Saturday Soccertainment. This is a different class of distraction. We get to enjoy an afternoon and evening of variety acts while behind us weapons are loaded onto air freighters and tanks chained to trains shunt off for lands that are very far away. It’s a grim consideration, the casually pragmatic doublethink which our puppet masters sign with withered arms on all too visible sticks. “It’s behind you!” we shout with glee. “Don’t let it slip away.” Richard Ashcroft joins Coldplay for a cracked throated rendition of brilliant anthem “Bitter Sweet Symphony”. “Well it’s a bitter sweet symphony, this life. Trying to make ends meet, you’re a slave to the money, then you die.” I am also, of course, at work watching it.
Coldplay, scourge of the shareholder, also introduced a video detailing when and where to protest and to who and for why. No-one watching on the BBC got to see it. We got a rightly embarrassed Jonathan Ross discussing the miracle of modern technology with Andrew Marr. Maybe it was an attempt to get people to watch a webcast of it or go to the website to see the kind-of-entire-point-of-the-day film the BBC wouldn’t show. The way they shrugged and said nothing… I was depressingly reminded of the anti-war march in 2003, for which millions of people turned up to voice their opposition and were treated to the sight of Tony Blair leaning out of his window with the remote control, hitting the mute button, leaving two million people in Britain silently mouthing “no war” at a man without lip reading skills or conscience. And what kind of planet of 6 billion people lets itself get run by “8 men”?
I just about give up when I see “Kate’s junkie” Pete Doherty and Sir Elton John play a version of T.Rex’s “Children of the revolution”. Behind his opaque blue spectacles, Sir Elton was clearly ruing the day he’d agreed to appear, let alone with the gaunt eyeliner smudge wreck Babyshambolically gutting the steaming remnants of one of the greatest songs ever written. “Anti-climax” indeed, you weave-wearing piano-mangler. I watch the wings in the vain hope of seeing a long stick with a hook on the end appear at about Doherty’s neck height, a sign of a breeze to whip shut the keyboard lid on John’s chubby fingers. Is it really all going to be this jaw-crackingly shit?
A friend is having a barbecue and I go to that. There’s lots of food, lots of drink. Luckily, this Live 8 gig is about poverty, not famine, so I don’t let guilt figure too highly in the proceedings. This is a great tactic for avoiding the potted meat feeling of most of the afternoon’s hideousness, Dido, Travis, Keane, Joss Stone, etc etc etc. The Scissor Sisters come on and Do A New Song, the shameless whores. Yet something – call it a realisation of the true global capacity and desire of humankind to exist in a spirit of tolerance and sharing, call it a bottle & a half of red wine, three beers and a couple of spliffs – something starts to subtly shift in my head. By the time Madonna comes on the radio, talkin’ bout a revolution, we’re dancing on the picnic table in P’s garden. It’s like a tide, and I give in to it. I feel like a little ray of light. My sister’s in Hyde Park. Text messages morse in from Edinburgh, where friends have been getting sunburned in a river of white shirts on the protest march. They’re all little rays of light as well. We can do this! The Twho come on stage, and I go demented. “Won’t get fooled again” is so potent, its jaded acceptance of the power of popular rock music both to redeem and to change nothing at all.
And then, Jesus, it’s the Floyd! Their music is designed for events of this amplitude. Wish you were here and booze floated bonhomie sparks another firework display of txting, friends we’ve had and left along the way, birthday girls in Glasgow, people sat on the couch next to me… watching the crumblies atone for all our collective feverish ego displays down the years. It’s great. We go “na na naa naa, hey Juude” and wipe tears away, knowing that community is possible, is here. Then, in the cool light of day, the good people of the west lapse into the maladaptive behaviour patterns of consumption which shore up the whole creaking unjust edifice. Buying more and more pop albums, in a bizarre ritual of commemoration and displacement. Bands donate profits from increased revenue to the cause… It’s amazing theatre. But maybe not even for a moment do we ever really believe that this display of public feeling might in any way permeate the flinty hearts of the “G8” council of wizened elders, gathered like the Skeksis in The Dark Crystal while we wait for Sir Bob Gelfling to reunite a flailing, frail humanity. About a week later the fantasy appears to continue as They take a foot off the head of the drowner… only long enough to be knocked off balance by people who misunderstand our ideology of hope and compassion.
Funday Times
If you're feeling like you want that final straw to permanently disable your proverbial camel - in which case, by the by, perhaps you should ASK YOURSELF SOME QUESTIONS, you proverbial camel-tampering fuck - why not nip down to the shops and peruse the 'Style' section of the Sunday Times? Don't buy it, for the love of god. Just have a good read and then tell me the human race isn't doomed.
What happened was, I was at brekkie today desperate for something to read, as usual, and all there was was last week's Sunday Times 'Style' and 'Culture' sections. (No papers, owing to a long lie-in and the recent regaining of global etherweb privileges.)
In the latter, there was an article on Dave Gilmour, once guitarist with Ra Floyd, as they're known up the west coast of Scotland. He has a new album out. Dave was expressing a wish that you were here - HA! Sorry, he was also saying that he was 'contented', having rebuilt some bridges with Roger in front of everyone last year. (See 'Live 8, or...' - it's in 'previous'...)
The writer - if, indeed, this is the correct term for whatever PAUL SEXTON was doing with the words he got on tape in Dave's Sussex farmhouse - suggested that for Stadium Dave, 'modest is the new huge'. '"Right now, I just like to be smaller... I'd love the album to sell bucketloads, but I would like for it all to be a little less... important."' This, in the context of a two-page spread in the Sunday Times Culture section, is about as convincing as his red-eyed assertion in 'Liive at Pompeii' that 'We're not a drugs band anymore,' but let's move along. Later in the same section it is revealed that Dave sold his home in Little Venice to Earl Spencer in 2003 for £3.6 million (That's three point six MILLION pounds sterling) and gave all the money to charity. He has another four homes.
Clearly this is all actually real for some people, rather than the abstractions I bat away distractedly as I sit,slack-jawed, scrambled egg cooling on fork halted a matter of centimetres from my mouth. Walking home from Clapham Junction to Brixton last night entailed passing about five estate agents, and studio flats the size of Dave's guitar case were going for upwards of £190,000.
The Style section was merely horrifying. Horrifying is the new post-modern enjoying. If I were to start now on itemising its transgressions I might not be done til wednesday. ('But what has it "transgressed"?', you might ask, and I can only assert that I AM THE LAW, and the Style section of the Sunday Times makes me want to DEFECATE. ('No Judge, shit on it!'))
Now, where's the Funday Times? It's got Scooby Doo in it. Something I can believe in.
What happened was, I was at brekkie today desperate for something to read, as usual, and all there was was last week's Sunday Times 'Style' and 'Culture' sections. (No papers, owing to a long lie-in and the recent regaining of global etherweb privileges.)
In the latter, there was an article on Dave Gilmour, once guitarist with Ra Floyd, as they're known up the west coast of Scotland. He has a new album out. Dave was expressing a wish that you were here - HA! Sorry, he was also saying that he was 'contented', having rebuilt some bridges with Roger in front of everyone last year. (See 'Live 8, or...' - it's in 'previous'...)
The writer - if, indeed, this is the correct term for whatever PAUL SEXTON was doing with the words he got on tape in Dave's Sussex farmhouse - suggested that for Stadium Dave, 'modest is the new huge'. '"Right now, I just like to be smaller... I'd love the album to sell bucketloads, but I would like for it all to be a little less... important."' This, in the context of a two-page spread in the Sunday Times Culture section, is about as convincing as his red-eyed assertion in 'Liive at Pompeii' that 'We're not a drugs band anymore,' but let's move along. Later in the same section it is revealed that Dave sold his home in Little Venice to Earl Spencer in 2003 for £3.6 million (That's three point six MILLION pounds sterling) and gave all the money to charity. He has another four homes.
Clearly this is all actually real for some people, rather than the abstractions I bat away distractedly as I sit,slack-jawed, scrambled egg cooling on fork halted a matter of centimetres from my mouth. Walking home from Clapham Junction to Brixton last night entailed passing about five estate agents, and studio flats the size of Dave's guitar case were going for upwards of £190,000.
The Style section was merely horrifying. Horrifying is the new post-modern enjoying. If I were to start now on itemising its transgressions I might not be done til wednesday. ('But what has it "transgressed"?', you might ask, and I can only assert that I AM THE LAW, and the Style section of the Sunday Times makes me want to DEFECATE. ('No Judge, shit on it!'))
Now, where's the Funday Times? It's got Scooby Doo in it. Something I can believe in.
bloggit!
Well then, who'dathunk it? A 'blog'. Everyone and their dog does a blog now, it might seem. Look over to the side of the screen - blogs by dear sweet mates and people I just know, as well as the usual links to other things.
Blogs have seemed objectionable, to me, for quite a while. Ho hum. A diary. Online. Well done. You just thought of that and then committed it to the Blogosphere [Seriously, the what?] Whatever happened to circumspection? There’s such a high premium placed on generating opinion THIS VERY MINUTE... perhaps an unfortunate side-effect of being part of our DYKWIM? FCUK's sake initialism toting particle accelerator rolling news24 up-to-the-second live update instant obsolescence pick & mix society... ['Nice words Grandad, - still using them? I’ve remixed this blog using Flash, it makes your point way quicker? LOL FFS ;-P' ] Or it could be one of those ones where, as Del Amitri might have it, Nothing Ever Happens. ['My so-called life. Did some washing up today. have you ever noticed how the suds sometimes dry on the glass, but if you rinse them a bit they] zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
IAY [that’s ‘I ask you’]. Anyway, I decided to call it Slalom Speaking because I was stuck for a title and blogspot/my own unrealised scribbling frustration were hassling me. Fishing through notes, I find one of those three in the morning memos which runs:
'German Babs, Brendy, Ray... The comedy old drinking crew. PA to the stars & their slalom speaking got me thinking...'
Which struck me as being suitably 'about' the way thoughts are alinear, tend to swerve, so there you go.
Word of the day: Langlaufing
Blogs have seemed objectionable, to me, for quite a while. Ho hum. A diary. Online. Well done. You just thought of that and then committed it to the Blogosphere [Seriously, the what?] Whatever happened to circumspection? There’s such a high premium placed on generating opinion THIS VERY MINUTE... perhaps an unfortunate side-effect of being part of our DYKWIM? FCUK's sake initialism toting particle accelerator rolling news24 up-to-the-second live update instant obsolescence pick & mix society... ['Nice words Grandad, - still using them? I’ve remixed this blog using Flash, it makes your point way quicker? LOL FFS ;-P' ] Or it could be one of those ones where, as Del Amitri might have it, Nothing Ever Happens. ['My so-called life. Did some washing up today. have you ever noticed how the suds sometimes dry on the glass, but if you rinse them a bit they] zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
IAY [that’s ‘I ask you’]. Anyway, I decided to call it Slalom Speaking because I was stuck for a title and blogspot/my own unrealised scribbling frustration were hassling me. Fishing through notes, I find one of those three in the morning memos which runs:
'German Babs, Brendy, Ray... The comedy old drinking crew. PA to the stars & their slalom speaking got me thinking...'
Which struck me as being suitably 'about' the way thoughts are alinear, tend to swerve, so there you go.
Word of the day: Langlaufing
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