Apologies for the utter lack of shiny new Blue Man-ness over the weekend – the ‘phone
here in Blue Man Towers has been playing silly-buggers, hammering my Net connection
as a by-product.
You didn’t miss much, truth be told.
This morning, though, I wrote the next chapter in my ongoing quest to find gainful
employment, with an interview for a job with a Sinister Hydra-Headed Global Mega-Corporation™.
The money is pants, as is to be expected, but as against that I’ve the genuine opportunity
to become a faceless cubicle-dwelling peon, which is perversely cool for someone
who’s read as much Dilbert as I have.
And, most exciting as all, as my interviewer was taking me for a tour around the
building, what should I spy decorating the office walls? Successories prints! Everywhere!
Oh, joy! Oh, rapture!
Just think – with luck and hard work, in six months time I, too, can dream of maybe,
just maybe picking up a Silver Star For Excellence. My entire working life has been
leading up to this.
Put on your party hats, get out your cake and fizzy-pop, because BMStW is
one week old today! They said it would never last... and, well, they’ve still got
plenty of time to be proved right.
I really feel that I ought to have some sort of regular feature or theme for Friday
nights – you know, something that goes beyond this site’s normal aim of trying to
make every third word I type something that’ll get you the sack if you’re caught
reading it at work. I reckon Fridays are the nights to go for for two reasons –
a) because I’m likely to be feeling most relaxed and creative with the weekend incoming,
and b) because anyone reading this on a Friday night will probably be too drunk
to be properly critical.
I know I will be.
So in that spirit, Blue Man Sings The Whites, in conjunction with Jose Cuervo
Especial – the tequila you can quaff between meals without ruining your appetite
- proudly presents:
The Successories.com Motivational Tool Of The Week!
God, I love Successories. Ever since
I put myself on their mailing list (using the name of a co-worker who had recently
been sacked. I wasn’t taking any chances, natch - can you imagine what their telesales
people must be like?) they’ve brought me more simple joy that I think they’ll ever
know. Just the name cracks me up – it sounds as if it should be a shop in Springfield
Mall – but the products themselves are the real treats, motivational gifts that
are carefully designed to send your staff the clear message “Start Manning The Lifeboats
Now, Because This Ship’s Being Steered By Chimps.”
Imagine if you’d worked yourself into the ground, racking up hours and hours of
overtime, neglecting your family, your friends and your health in order to achieve
some ludicrous, arbitrary goal set by your superiors, not being able to risk missing
the target for fear of losing your job in today’s harsh economic climate. Then,
in the blessed post-deadline afterglow as you’re stuffing down a King Size Mars
bar to prevent yourself keeling over from malnutrition, some cheap-suit-sporting
middle-manager approaches you with a damp smile and a watery handshake, and hands
you this little beauty... I mean... Christ. The management drone could count himself
lucky if he didn’t have to stagger back to his office with a desktop award that’s
a stunning blend of strength and elegance buried up to the solid nickel-silver medallion
in the back of his head.
The best part is that you can get these awards in three different flavours – gold,
silver
or bronze,
meaning that you can precisely select the exact degree to which you want to piss
off and patronise the peons who sweat, bleed and toil beneath your lofty notice.
Successories – Subtly Attempting To Provoke A Revolution Of The Proletariat Since
1985.
God, it’s really, really stupidly late, I’ve got absolutely nothing of interest
to say, and I’ve got to be up early tomorrow to be at the part-time accounts job
that’s helping make ends meet while I’m spending time as an Underutilised Resource.
But I promised myself I’d put in at least twenty minutes a day on this site, and
I’m not ready just yet to consign my blog to the same “I’ve Started, So I’ll Stop”
bin as karate, ballet and learning to play the harmonica.
You’re welcome to construct your own mental image of a black-belt ballet dancer
playing the Subterranean Homesick Blues, by the way.
Besides, I’ve started getting guestbook messages from people I don’t even know –
thanks, Audrey! – so it sort of seems like a bad time to let the commitment waver.
Besides, drawing total strangers into my web is the first step toward becoming the
leader of a cult of personality, which is a job I’ve always fancied, to tell you
the truth. I’m scouring the local paper for houses that have a compound-y quality
even as we speak. The career-path’s good, as well – from Oddly Charismatic Cult-Leader
you can move on to Sleazy Crony Of A Greater Evil, and then work your way up to
Super-Villain.
You gotta believe, as a wise two-dimensional rapping dog in a bobblehat once said.
More worrying, though, is the news that The Other Mrs. Blue, a.k.a. my mum, badgered
the URL for the site out of me this morning. It’s all gone very quiet from that
direction since. I can’t work out if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, and frankly
I’m too scared to ask. You’d be amazed how many more times the word “fuck” jumps
out at you from a post when you’re re-reading the piece wondering what your parents
will make of it. Sentences that you remember going something like:
“...so once William, Tarquin and I left church, we decided to go and see if old
Mrs. Smith had any errands she might need running.”
My entire afternoon was spent trudging up and down Watford High Street in the freezing
cold knocking on doors and begging for work. To add injury to repeated insult, the
ensemble I chose for this thankless humiliation included a black V-neck jumper that
makes me look like a refugee from The Village and, crucially,
my black ankle-boots which are great but I haven’t worn in a couple of months. Consequently,
by the third hour of being poked and prodded like a lab rat by various employment
agencies, said boots had added agonising blisters to the day’s previously only spiritual
pain.
It was about that point I decided to exercise the ever-popular “Fuck All This, I’m
Going Home” option.
So, in the absence of anything interesting to post today, and in homage to Nick
Hornby and Ian Dury, here’s BMStW’s Top 5 Bright Sides To Look On This Afternoon:
5) Kids watching Scooby Doo on telly when I arrived home – Daphne wearing a disturbingly
sexy French maid’s outfit for reasons that I neither know nor care about. More of
this, please.
4) Wednesday = new issue of The Onion.
3) Am not nicknamed Shrimp Head, like Chow Yun Fat’s character in The
Killer.
2) Do not live in a town named Beaver. Or in Utah. Or in a town named Beaver,
in Utah.
1) Have, at most, only another sixty years of this fucking life to put up with.
First off, cheers to Boony
for linking to me from his site - if you haven't been to his blog and had a good
chuckle at a man who claims to have a degree in mathematics yet who can't install
a simple hard-drive, then you really should.
It’s another slow day in Blue Man Towers, leaving me with two choices. Either I
can moan and bewail you with the details of my sudden terrible realisation that
in order to make ends meet I’m as like as not going to have to work my arse off
to find a job I despise paying laughable money, or else... BMStW’s Cut-Out-And-Keep*
Guide To The Top Five Worst Films Ever Made(Number 2 In An Occasional Series)
There is, in my honest opinion, a special circle of Hell’s inferno that’s reserved
for the perpetrators of bad comic-to-cinema adaptations.
It’ll be a pretty fucking crowded place by now.
I mean, something like St.
Elmo’s Fire, you can almost accept how fucking awful it is, because you’d be
an idiot to have expected anything better – it’s an eighties teen-chick-flick directed
by Joel fucking Schumacher,
for pity’s sake, how many more signposts do you need to tell you that you’re barreling
down Highway 666 bound for Suck City Central? But comic adaptations… they touch
something deep within my withered four-colour-fanboy soul, call to me in honeyed
tones – each time I tell myself that this one’s going to be different, that this
one’s going to get it right, it’s going to stick to the source material and stay
true to the innovation and depth that’s held in the still-beating heart of all good
comics.
Each time a new one comes out, I tell myself the same things, and almost every time,
I trade in ninety minutes of my remaining span on this earth in exchange for experiencing
something like Blade II.
The problem is that I want to fucking believe. I love comics, in a way that’s pure
and good and right, and so I can’t shrug off the foibles of, say, a Batman
Forever the same way that I can a Lost
In Space. The latter’s just a bad film. The former is a betrayal – because with
every bad comic adaptation that’s made, with every superhero flick that justly bombs
in the box-office, it lessens the chances that more worthy comics will be adapted,
will ever be introduced to a wider audience than just those of us who wear our hair
too long and score our fixes from poky, badly-lit, badly-merchandised shops that
smell of musty paper and dust-cover plastic and never open before midday. Every
Return Of The Swamp Thing or Batman
And Robin or The Phantom is another
nail in the coffin of ever seeing Watchmen,
or Sandman,
or Preacher,
or (God help us all) The Invisibles
on celluloid – and for that, I can never forgive them.
Now, to the biggest, pointiest nail of the lot. Let's get the good points out the
way first.
a) Spawn's cape looks brilliant. No fooling. If they gave out Oscars for Best Dramatic
Performance By A Cape In A Supporting Role, that cape would at least have gotten
a nomination. b) There's a cameo by the woman who played the sadly-missed
Jenny Calendar in Buffy. c) Um... d) Er.... e) That's it.
Don't get me wrong, it was really nice to see Miss Calendar again – an unfortunate
casualty of Joss Whedon’s admirably ballsy attitude toward killing off popular characters.
But she appears for three minutes tops, which means that most of the burden of carrying
the film falls squarely on the cape. And, no matter how good you are as a cape (and
this cape is very, very good indeed), dragging a well-hell-they-were-cheap cast
through action sequences that are not so much pedestrian as couldn't-be-arsed-to-get
off-the-sofa and a plot as boring as it is nonsensical is a big ask and the cape
isn't quite up to it.
God, I fucking hate this film. And I think it’s only fitting that John Leguizamo,
the only vaguely “name” actor on hand (unless you count Martin Sheen, which I haven’t
for about twenty years), saw his Career Dissipation Light going into high-gear almost
immediately this steaming pile of offal was released. Four years before Spawn, Leguizamo
was pulling down 4th billing opposite Al Pacino in the frankly brilliant Carlito’s
Way. A year before Spawn, Leguizamo was pulling down 4th billing opposite Robert
De Nero and Benicio Del Toro in the frankly ordinary The
Fan. A year after Spawn, Leguizamo was pulling down the billing of Voice Of
Rat #2 opposite Eddie Murphy in the frankly unbearable Dr.
Doolittle.
Instant karma’s gonna get you, John-boy.
* = BMStW takes no responsibility for damage to readers’ monitors caused whilst
trying to cut out this guide.**
** = Come to think of it, I wouldn’t bother keeping it, either.
It’s not been the most productive day here in Blue Man Towers. The root cause of
this can be traced back to the employment agency whose current sole sworn resolve
should be finding work for your humble correspondent, and yet still respond with
bovine ignorance when asked for information regarding the interview I went to last
Tuesday. “Still haven’t ‘eard anyfing...” they moo, as they have done every time
I’ve called since Wednesday, and I’ve called a lot.
Since the job was supposed to start today, I’m guessing that when the agency do
finally pull their fingers out of their collective arses (and collective arses are
never a good idea – the main reason for the failure of communism in the former Soviet
Union was the Kremlin’s insistence on implementing Marx’s idealised notion of a
Collective Arse Of The People) it’s not going to be good news.
So, it’s fair to say that I’ve been in a bit of a funk most of this weekend – as
if this site weren’t evidence enough of that. Yesterday that funk manifested itself
in sitting up ‘till four in the morning playing Madden (I lost) and watching Natural
Born Killers (great, great movie) on DVD – I picked it up cheap months ago but hadn’t
found the time to watch it.
Free time, at the moment, is not a problem.
I was woken up early this morning to take delivery of the new bed that Mrs. Blue
has been claiming that we need for quite literally years, and which we’d finally
gotten around to ordering last month. Waking up early, of course, wrote off another
day in terms of getting anything done on the job-front – having had only four hours’
sleep, I naturally wasn’t up to the rigours of chasing down gainful employment.
So instead, I’ve spent my time with the Back To The Future trilogy and providing
what little help I could with the process of constructing a flat-pack bed – my participation
hampered somewhat by the fact that I’m possibly the least handy person in the entire
universe. Anything more technical than a spoon, and I’m basically buggered.
My main contribution to the whole process, in fact, came when time to nail down
the wooden slats that support the mattress rolled around. I don’t consider myself
to be a superstitious person, but upon realising that there were thirteen of these
slats in the pack, I was suddenly consumed by the rock-solid belief that it would
be bad, bad, bad to spend the next N years of my life sleeping every night on 13
pieces of wood. Mrs. Blue told me I was being stupid, that the old bed had had 13
supports as well – which only made me feel worse. How many of the mishaps of the
last seven years might have been avoided if I hadn’t been spending eight hours a
day with my subconscious mind in such close proximity to Bad Mojo? Innocence, one
lost, can’t be regained, and with admirably childish persistence I stuck to my guns,
without being able to give any decent reason to her or myself why this should be
so important, and I should be so adamant about it (as opposed to so Adam Ant about
it, which would mean painting stripes on my face and punching people in pubs).
To her eternal credit, Mrs. Blue accepted this moment of insanity with the same
resigned grace that she accepts my dozens of other little foibles and headfits,
so we now have a solitary slat sitting nestled among the packaging debris, and I
can sleep peacefully, safe in the knowledge that whatever cruelties life throws
at me from now on, it won’t be because I’m sleeping on an unlucky – if slightly
more stable – bed.
We’ve all made it three days into this little vanity-project now, so I think we’re
all bedded in and ready to tackle a mystery that’s troubled Mankind (the collective,
not the wrestler, although so far as I know it might have troubled him, too) since
the dawn of time.
Yes, today on BMStW, we exclusively reveal the answer to the question – Science
Or Religion, Which One’s Better?
Doesn’t do to aim too low, that’s my motto.
The answer seems pretty obvious on first glance – I mean, come on, a Big
Beard In The Sky creates the world and everything in it, then magicks a bunch of
upright apes into existence and makes them the only beasties in the entire universe
who realize that He (or She, although the theological implications of a female Big
Beard escape me) exists? Does that sound remotely credible? Even for a minute?
(To realise that we’re the only ones who know about the BBitS, by the way, just
watch a wildlife documentary. Not too much Thou Shalt Not Kill-ing going on in Mama
Nature’s bosom, is there? Which brings me on to another question – shouldn’t all
committed Christians and Jews be vegetarian? Once you start accepting the death
of animals to feed and clothe us, aren’t you heading straight into I-Think-What-God-Meant-To-Say-Was
City? If you can re-interpret the words of your chosen deity to suit you, then what’s
the point of believing in anything at all? I’m genuinely interested, if someone
out there can actually point me to scripture in which God says “But Cows Are Okay,
Kill All Of Those You Like”, I’d be really grateful. But I digress...)
The slightest application of reason, then, says religion must be bullshit, which
means that science is the winner! Yay science!
Or does it?
OR DOES IT?
Science troubles me, and not just in a specific, Jurassic Park, The Stand, Frankenstein
sort of way. The most worrying thing about the world’s growing fascination with
science as the fount of all knowledge, and the concurrent decline of religious values,
is how much we accept that science, and scientists, are passing on absolute truths,
that science is making things better for us despite all the available evidence,
that whatever the problems of the world, science will make it all better.
I mean, yes, science has achieved some groovy things, but I blindly accept these
things without knowing the first thing about how they work, trusting that there
are people somewhere who could explain it all to me if I were interested – which,
of course, I’m not. Society is training us all to be consumers of science, to swallow
it down whole and without question, to take comfort in its bounty – Playstation
2, the Internet, pizza delivery – while leaving the higher mysteries to those who
claim to have more knowledge of these things.
Science, in other words, hasn’t surpassed religion – it has become religion.
Like religion, It provides both opiates and chains for the masses, the carrot and
the stick – distracting us from the essential unfairness of the world, and ensuring
that we’re punished should we try and do anything about it. It presents us with
individuals who can provide the last word in explaining why the world is the way
it is, although their answers remain incomprehensible to me and 99% of the rest
of the world – to the average man in the street, is there really any difference
between a scientist and a priest, other than the different silly costume?
Yes, you could go and get a degree in physics and take a step towards giving yourself
the tools toward understanding the world – but a faithful person would say that
you could do the same by studying theology. And in the end, it wouldn’t make any
difference – you’d still be learning a lie. At every point in history, Mankind (still
probably not the wrestler) has been convinced that what it believed at that moment
was the truth – and at every point in history, Mankind has later changed its mind.
What’re the odds that this moment, right now, is when we’ve finally gotten it right?
The question I’ve asked, then, is moot – neither science or religion is better,
because the two are the same thing seen from different angles. There’s no such thing
as absolute truth, just consensus of opinion, and we should regard anyone who claims
to have the answers with all due cynicism and suspicion. Science's growing popularity
is not due to its inherent superiority, but rather because most people will always
take the path of least resistance, and it's easier to have faith in something that
demands no commitment or moral courage on the believer's part.
Isn’t it nice to have that all cleared up once and for all? Here’s Tom with the
weather!
Two posts in a day? Lawks-a-lordy, the sky is falling, the sky is falling...
My attention was drawn by an
article on Football365 in which Trevor Francis, the manager of Crystal Palace,
is quoted complaining bitterly about a refereeing decision that cost his team a
goal in the FA Cup 5th round game against Leeds, and calling for the introduction
of video replay technology to assist in determining whether the ball has crossed
the goal-line or not.
Now, normally the only reaction this would draw from me would be a hearty guffaw
- Tricky Trev is, after all, the most graceless loser in the entire world. But I
saw the interview after the game that the article seems to be quoting, and it seemed
to me that the interviewer from Sky TV (the satellite broadcasting company owned
by Rupert Murdoch who hold the rights to English Premier League games, for non-natives)
was determined to get the answer to one question only – would Trev call for the
use of video replay to rule on disputed goals? It jarred so much with me, that I
started thinking (and we know how rarely that happens) and remembered this point
being brought up on Sky on several previous occasions - every time a halfway-questionable
decision was made, in fact - but couldn't for the life of me think of anywhere else
I'd heard it being discussed.
Mr. Interviewer was keen to stress to Tricky Trev that “the technology was available”
for video replay. I wonder how he knew? And I wonder whether a company who already
have cameras at every Premiership game might possibly be interested in picking up
a presumably lucrative contract to supply the league with video-adjudication, and
incidentally tightening their grip on English football just that little bit more?
As part of my ongoing commitment to proving just how pathetic my life truly is,
you may now find the entirety of I Am Bengal – Hear Me Roar, a story based
on a season I spent playing as the Cincinnati Bengals in Madden 2003, in BMStW’s
Archive section.
Yes, you read that correctly, it’s a piece of fiction that I spent nearly three
months writing that was inspired by pretending to play a sport on PlayStation. Don’t
judge me.
Now, with that ugly little necessity out of the way...
One of the things that most impresses me about Mrs. Blue-Man (yes, there is one.
What, you thought I lived alone and friendless, cut off from the rest of my world
by my utterly unwarranted misanthropy and bitterness? Hah.) is her dedicated commitment
to the cause of really, really bad cinema. There’s no film yet made so badly-scripted,
so poorly acted, so cheaply put-together that she won’t wring enjoyment from its
desiccated husk.
The darkest recesses of Sky Moviemax or Channel 5’s schedules hold no fear for her.
Films that would have lesser mortals running for cover draw her like a moth to a
lighthouse – Sabretooth.. The Dirty Dozen – The Fatal Mission. Hallmark Channel
TV-movies... Who knows what banality lurks in Hollywood’s collective mind? Mrs.
Blue does...
It’s in tribute to her, then, that I present the first in an occasional series –
BMStW’s Top 5 Worst Films Ever Made. I’m going in reverse order, but don’t worry,
even Number 5 is a real humdinger...
5 - St. Elmo's Fire (1985)
You might argue that this film has been particularly badly-served by the passage
of time. You might argue that yes, of course it's going to look bad through contemporary
eyes, given its strong Eighties sensibilities, its laughable Eighties fashions,
its synth-tastic Eighties music, its huge Eighties hair, and its wooden Eighties
cast.
You would, of course, be wrong. St Elmo's Fire was shit the nanosecond it was released,
and it's shit today.
You might also argue that it's unfair of me to single out this one particular effort
from the festering multi-headed boil that was the Brat Pack and their collective
oeuvre, that I could pick any one of a dozen ensemble-cast-young-adult-comedy-dramas
and whale on it until it bled from the ears.
And you'd kind of have a point. But if you're willing to look close enough at these
films, there's usually a saving grace to be found - in Young Guns, you got to see
Brat Packers getting killed. Some Kind Of Wonderful had a young Lea Thompson in
her underwear. Pretty In Pink had the classic Psychedelic Furs theme-song. The Breakfast
Club had... it had... Um... No, wait, this'll come to me in a minute...
The point is - there is no redeeming quality anywhere to be found in that twelve-car-pile-up
of a film that is St. Elmo's Fire. It's unrelentingly awful from the very first
second to the very last note of the godawful John Parr closing-credits music. The
crudely-sketched characters are, to a (wo)man, so overpoweringly obnoxious that
within ten minutes of the start of the film you can feel nothing but the purest
perfect hatred for them and all their works – you’re then asked to sit through nearly
two fucking hours of these arseholes and their thrashing histrionics as they trail
their feeble-minded way through a plot as clunky as it is clichéd, all the
time just wishing the lot of them would develop bowel cancer and suffer a long,
lingering, painfully flatulent death.
And don’t get me started on the script.
“Jules, y'know, honey... this isn't real. You know what it is? It's St. Elmo's
Fire. Electric flashes of light that appear in dark skies out of nowhere. Sailors
would guide entire journies by it, but the joke was on them...there was no fire.
There was't even a St. Elmo. They made it up. They made it up because they thought
they needed it to keep them going when times got tough, just like you're making
up all of this. We're all going through this. It's our time at the edge.”
“It’s our time at the edge.” Be still, my heaving stomach.
Put it this way - this is comfortably the worst film Demi Moore has ever appeared
in. That's right. In a CV that includes Ghost, Striptease and GI Jane (subject for
a rant at a later date – Ridley Scott - Lost The Plot?) this is the
film she doesn't like to admit to. And here's more food for thought - La Moore's
isn't the worst performance in the film by a loooong shot. Mankind has achieved
many great things in the last seventeen years – the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
rise of the Internet, Watford beating Bolton 2-0 in the 1999 First Division playoff
final – but most observers agree that Man’s greatest achievement of the late twentieth
century is collectively forgetting that Emilio Estevez ever managed to find employment
as a professional actor.
Avoid this film like you'd avoid getting a greased psychotic ferret wearing a coalminer's
helmet down your pants. That is all.
Hello, you. Wie kommen, bienvenue, welcome, c'mon in. Pull up a chair, sit
down, converse. It doesn't always look like this - sometimes, it's even worse. Welcome
to the temporary, pop-up infested home of <i>Blue Man Sings The Whites</i>,
a site set up on the not unreasonable assumption that there are hordes of people
out there who're profoundly interested in my observations on any subject upon which
I care to hold forth. My aim is for commentary that's hateful yet amusing in that
same shameful, guilty way as really good cripple joke. But just for the record,
if it comes down to a choice of one or t'other, then I'm happy to settle for just
hateful.
And I make that three direct quotes from other, infinitely superior sources
already. Remember, kids - if you can maintain your irony, then it's not plagiarism,
it's homage.
I figure if you've made it this far without the first idea of who I am, I've
probably got you hooked for life. My name's Dan, I'm a perfectly unremarkable 27-year-old
male ape-descendant living and currently not-working in Watford,
Hertfordshire. I like to think of myself as a rarity in the social bear-pit - there
are plenty of other computer nerds out there, plenty of music-snobs and plenty of
comic fanatics. The world is positively overflowing with sports geeks and film buffs,
and in these enlightened times of Games-fricking-Workshop stores on every high street,
there must be as many roleplaying saddos in this country as there have ever been.
However, my people, those of us who spread our mighty wings and embrace the full
majestic sweep of those hobbies that the Fashion Nazis have deemed hopelessly, irretrievably
"out", both now and for all time - we, my friends, we are a breed apart.
The few. The proud. The perpetually home on Friday nights. Fuck you and your parties,
fuck you and your social life, fuck you and your well-adjusted personality - what
me and mine have never had, we don't miss, okay? Okay.
SOMEWHAT BELATED DISCLAIMER - Knowing me as I do (and I like to think I know
me as well as anyone), it's only fair to warn you that I'm likely to get a bit wound
up as this thing goes on, and that means you'll probably be seeing the word "cunt"
fairly often. Also, the words "fucknut", "arsecandle", "titwank"
and "ocelot". So anyway, mum, if you're reading this - sorry.
Well, as introductions go, that beats a kick in the nuts. Just. All comments
and questions gratefully ignored - but feel free to pop a few ill-chosen and probably
badly-spelled words into The Book Of Lies should you feel the need to make your
mark on history.
