Apologies for having gone a few days without updating – long work-days and being
hijacked by a depressive Chelsea fan for yesterday’s FA Cup quarter-final replay
are my feeble excuses.
But the Blue Man has not been idle. Oh no indeed. In the next few days I’ll be unveiling
a few bits and pieces for the site, including a new feature that I’m very excited
about.
Well, quite excited about.
Sort’ve.
Maybe.
More news as it comes in, anyway. In the meantime, and in something of a break with
tradition, I’ve decided to field a question from the cheap seats:
aen:So, since you seem to have an opinion on just about everything in
the world, what would be your answer to improving it? Just curious. I am always
interested in other views.
Biting down my knee-jerk reaction to this enquiry (“I’d have Dave Bassett shot square
in the head, decapitated then buried at a crossroads with communion wafers stuffed
in his mouth and a stake of hawthorn wood hammered deep into his cold, black heart”)
I’ve given the question much more thought than a post on a backwater blog vanity-project
visited by a couple of dozen people strictly warrants, and this is what I’ve come
up with:
Most of the world’s problems can be traced back to the fundamental problem that,
if left to our own devices, people will naturally tend toward making decisions that
benefit us in the short term with little thought for how those decisions affect
anyone outside our immediate circle. This is because most people, myself included,
are greedy, lazy and stupid, and is the reason why capitalism has become the world’s
dominant economic system. For a communist society to operate successfully, you require
both its guiding hands and the masses being guided to be able to perceive and accept
the bigger picture, and to be able to selflessly suppress their individual wants
and needs in exchange for wider benefits that the individual in question will likely
never perceive.
In practice, this only works if the individuals in question are Vulcans.
Capitalism, on the other hand, doesn’t fool itself that people have higher qualities,
and operates on the principle that everyone does what’s best for themself at any
given time. It rewards greed, dangles the carrot of immediate reward to goad humanity
into overcoming its natural sloth, and only punishes those of us who are even more
stupid than the average idiot. Consequentially, free-market economies are, in comparison,
much more vigorous and dynamic than centrally-planned systems. And, yes, the plutocrats
at the head of the table still steal more of the pie than they can possibly eat,
just as they would in a communist regime, but crucially it’s a much, much bigger
pie, so the leftovers go further. Not so far that every plate gets a slice, but
it’s still a definite improvement.
Wow, that got off-topic pretty quickly – I think the point I was trying to make
is that people will do things that are stupid if you leave us to our own devices
(nuclear weapons, Beanie Babies), but trying to force us not to do stupid things
doesn’t work (Prohibition, the Soviet Bloc). That’s the dilemma. We’re like toddlers
in a busy kitchen – telling us to keep away from the hot oven just hacks us off
and makes us more determined to find out what’s so interesting that we have to be
kept clear of it. We don’t learn ‘till we get burned. And sometimes not even then.
So I’m torn as to what can be done to improve matters. My alter ego says that, screw
it, I should recommend anarchy, the social system that the world will adopt if and
when it grows up – no governments, no police, no laws except those that come from
within. Anarchy would be kill or cure – perhaps freedom from all rules would force
us all to realise that we have to take responsibility for our own lives and can’t
afford to pass that duty onto elected representatives who almost certainly don’t
have our best interests at heart. Perhaps, faced with the simple, unavoidable fact
that our prosperity and happiness depended on the prosperity and happiness of those
around us, we’d learn that we’re gonna reap just what we sow, and that your right
to swing your fist ends at the end of my nose. Perhaps.
Nah.
So nadgers to that, I’m going the Nazi route. Three ways to make this a better world,
you want? I got your three right here:
Sweeping Change #1 - Ban All Forms Of Nationalistic Expression
Patriotism should be outlawed. “The last refuge of the scoundrel”, Dr. Johnson called
it, and he wasn’t even halfway there. Chuck the whole lot out – flags, national
anthems, national sports teams, the royal family, everything. Patriotism is the
world’s appendicitis – we’ve evolved way beyond the point that it serves any positive
end, but now it’s hurting like hell and will probably kill us if we try and pretend
nothing’s wrong.
Even putting aside the fact that there’s not a single country on Earth whose history
is so noble, lily-white and flawless that it makes any sense taking pride in that
country’s achievements, nationalism is still divisive and poisonous. National pride
is about puffing ourselves up, and putting Johnny Foreigner down. It’s a cheap leg
up the self-esteem ladder. For example, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve
heard sneering statements about the American lack of humour – as if everyone in
Britain were Wilde reborn. As if Airplane or Rant In E-Minor or Holidays In Hell
never happened. As if we’d never seen The Vicar Of Dibley or The Thin Blue Line
or Gimme Gimme Gimme (oh, how I wish). It’s lazy, it’s smug, and it bears no resemblance
whatsoever to reality. It’s nationalism, my people, and it’s the diseased maggot
trailing pus-ridden excreta through the apple of the world.
Well, no more. From here on in, if you want to feel superior, then you, yourself,
are going to have to go out and actually achieve something. Not your ancestors.
Not Bobby Moore. Not Abraham Lincoln. You. No more coloured rags to salute or die
for, no more armies-by-proxy battling for your entertainment in football stadiums
or basketball courts or cricket grounds (the various England teams seem a bit ahead
of the game on this point, it has to be said, having stopped fighting months ago),
no more royal weddings or funerals for the proles to express just how delighted
they are to be living in a society designed to be fundamentally unjust (where was
Elton John at the Queen Mum’s planting, eh? Surely he could have come up with something
that summed the tragedy up just as appositely as his rendition of Candle In The
Wind for Diana if he’d put his mind to it. Personally, I was well up for a rousing
chorus of Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead…), no more easy excuses for being generally
shitty to our fellow human beings because they have a funny accent or differently-coloured
skin ar happen to live somewhere different to us.
Unless they happen to live in Luton, of course. But that’s a given.
Sweeping Change #2 – The Internet To Be Made Compulsory
This is, in part, tied in to Change #1. I’m aware that you can’t tell people to
stop being wankers and expect them to break the habit of several lifetimes on your
say-so. No, if there’s to be any chance of a better world, then wankers need to
be conditioned away from wankerdom (or educated out of it, for the more sensitive
liberals among you).
If there is hope, it lies on the Internet. On the homepages and the messageboards
and the mailing lists, in the journals and the chatrooms and the blogs. Never in
human history has it been possible to interact directly with so many people from
so many different cultures, never have so many information sources been available
to each and every one of us. The more we know about each other, the more we realise
how much we have in common – understanding being the only specific against fear
and, by extension, hate. Prejudice against groups is replaced by much healthier
dislike for individuals – and, anyway, we’re too pale and wasted from being sat
in front of a monitor ‘till 3 a.m. conducting a flame-war on a Babylon 5 forum with
a sixteen-year-old from Stockholm who thinks that John Sheridan was a better character
than Jeff Sinclair to be able to invade anywhere or persecute anyone.
There are fringe benefits, too. The Internet is a hotbed of lies and slander – not
least that Sheridan was a better station commander than Sinclair - and it doesn’t
take much exposure to the Net for a person to build up a healthy cynicism regarding
anything they’re told. Wouldn’t the world be a happier place if fewer people were
willing to swallow whatever party line the great and good are feeding us about their
latest petty evil or ludicrous cock-up?
The other glorious thing about the Internet, though, is the anonymity it grants.
Not only is it infinitely easier to express your true thoughts and feelings when
you don’t have to face the audience you’re expressing them to, but it also shears
away all the superficial baggage that comes with so-called “real-world” contact.
On the Internet it doesn’t matter what you look like, what you sound like or where
you are – it only matters what you think, what you like, who you are. Communities
spring up and thrive based on mutual interest and enjoyment, not on where accidents
of geography happen to have plonked us – virtual nations. E-countries. I can’t help
but feel that this has to be the way forward for humanity. And not just because
I’m a plug-ugly fat bastard.
So, yes. An hour a day on the Net for every man, woman and child in the world, leading
to a Gibson-esque cyberpunk dystopia inside a century, and the evolution of humanity
beyond physical bodies and into purely information-based life-forms within the next
millennia.
Doesn’t do to aim too low, does it?
Sweeping Change #3 – Fanatically Loyal And Ruthlessly Efficient Blue Man Kick-Murder
Squads
Well, come on. I’ve been (mostly) constructive for the better part of fifteen hundred
words, so I think I’ve earned the chance to let my hair down a bit. These people
would be the very first up against the wall when the revolution comes, and would
make my world a better place by simply not being on it.
• Dave Bassett (natch) • Every world head of state (if you punish
them all, you know you’re getting the right ones) • Neil “Dr” Fox •
People who answer the phone by picking up the receiver and barking “Talk to me!”
like they’re a tough and unconventional cop who only has forty-eight hours to break
the biggest case of their career • Dennis Leary • Anyone who has ever
worked on the editorial staff of The Sun. Or the Daily Mail, while we’re at it. •
Andy Gray • Jamie Oliver • Jerome Bettis (so that he won’t be in next
year’s Madden, the defence-wrecking bastard) • Robin Williams • Robbie
Williams • Mohammed al-Fayed • Anyone who’s ever played a character in
a film who can type at nine hundred words a minute and never hits the wrong key •
Tom Hanks • Chris Evans (haven’t heard from him in a while, but the fires
of hate still burn so very, very strong) • David Campese (same goes) •
Kevin Costner (and again) • Mountaineers • David Pleat • Bono •
Whoever is responsible for the current crime-against-humanity ad campaign for Homebase
starring Neil Morrissey and Leslie Ash • Neil Morrissey • Leslie Ash •
Gianluca Vialli (suing us, Luca? Like you need the money more than we do. Get
in the damn hole, and take…) • Ray Wilkins (…bloody Mini-Me with you) •
Mike Myers (while I think of it. Sentence commuted to life imprisonment if he
promises to never, ever do another “comedy” accent as long as he lives) •
John Cusack • People who buy yellow sports cars • Rupert Murdoch •
Anyone who has used the phrase “acceptable losses” to describe a number of dead
human beings • Trevor Francis • Pete Waterman • Mel Gibson •
Dave Bassett (I don’t care. Dig him up and kill him again) • The goon
who just questioned my orders. • The goon who hesitated to kill the first goon
who questioned my orders. • The goon who did as he was told but looked shifty,
like he was going to wait and take me on only when the time was right. • Bwahahahahahaaaaa. •
Dave Bassett (any arguments? No, didn’t think so)
Apologies for the lack of links in this post. This is due to the fact that I can't
work a computer. You can, if you can be arsed, find details on all the stuff I'm
gibbering about here on the excellent amazon.co.uk
site, or at the possibly even-more-excellent hereinmyhead.com.
Enjoy. Or don't bother.
Anyway...
One of the drawbacks of being a Black Hole Of Negativity™ is that I find it
an awful lot easier to write about things I hate as opposed to things I love.
One of the advantages of being a Black Hole Of Negativity™, though, is that
there’s usually no shortage of things in the world that I find it easy to write
about. Tom Hanks, for example.
But I live for challenge.
It’s difficult to be objective about Tori Amos’ latest album, because I’ve been
a pretty full-on Tori fanboy since first hearing the single Crucify, but, like I
say, I live for challenge, so here we go.
The elitist music snob in me, the part of me that wants to keep the artists I adore
all to myself and is secretly pleased that the bovine masses don’t “get” people
like Tori or Thompson or the Pixies, recoils from Scarlet’s Walk in horror. It’s
massively more accessible than anything she’s produced before, to the point of being
a disc I’m happy to spin as background music in an office that contains a Bee Gees
fan. Scarlet’s Walk contains none of the vocal indulgences of To Venus And Back,
or the spiky production and fiddly musical excesses that so characterised Strange
Little Girls, From The Choirgirl Hotel and Boys For Pele (the Hawai’ian volcano-god,
by the way, not the Brazilian footballer who can’t get it up). And while the usual
subject matter – spirituality, failing or failed relationships, a side-reference
to Neil “Sandman” Gaiman – is present and correct, it’s not dealt with with the
same harsh directness that made Little Earthquakes or Under The Pink such difficult,
but ultimately rewarding, listening.
Scarlet’s Walk feels terribly soft in comparison. Tori’s lyrics remain as poetic
and dense as ever, but somewhere along the line she’s lost her ability to change
up, to suddenly switch from spinning a filigree web around you to trying to bite
your throat out. The decision to produce the album herself seems to have taken the
edge of her voice, making even her obligatory á capella number sound less
Kate Bush and more Sophie Ellis-Bextor. The backing melodies are similarly restrained,
drifting along without ever getting in the way, throwing in the odd little flourish
just to remind you it’s there.
The whole album just seems… comfortable.
This is not a good thing.
Comfortable music you put on so that you can ignore it. It’s background noise. You
vaguely half-hear it being piped into Burger King. It’s transitory, and disposable,
and it assumes that you are content for your taste to be imposed upon you by this
month’s marketing campaign. Down that road lies Savage Garden’s Greatest Hits, and
I want no part of it. It’s only a short step from “comfortable” to “nice”, for crying
out loud, and then you’re really in trouble. Music isn’t meant to be nice. Music,
like poetry, is the shorthand of the soul, and as such it should be as dark and
twisted and bitter as most souls are. Tori Amos used to understand this – but now
what the hell is she playing at? Her previous release was a hit-and-miss collection
of often ill-advised covers that ranged from the sublimely deranged (I Don’t Like
Mondays) to the ridiculously disappointing (Heart Of Gold)… and now, she follows
that with a bloody concept album! Christ – didn’t Pink Floyd and Yes pretty much
beat that particular pony to death about thirty years ago? Bloody hell, Scarlet’s
Walk even includes three songs with a full orchestral string-section, normally a
sure sign that the artist in question is running out of ideas at an alarming rate
of knots.
And yet… and yet…
Ah, hell. It’s fucking beautiful. It just is. From the little guitar-hooks and gorgeous
layered vocal harmonies on the single, A Sorta Fairytale, right through to, yes,
the backing of the Sinfonia (sic) of London on Gold Dust, it’s an album that sneakily
sucks you in. Personal highlights include Strange and Pancakes - both wry, gentle
laments to poisoned love in which hints of Tori’s old sharpness can be felt – “Guess
I was in deeper than I thought I was / If I have enough love for the both of us…”
It’s not all good, of course. One of the prices you often pay for genius is inconsistency,
and tracks like Wampum Prayer and Wednesday sidle dangerously close to the self-indulgent
side of arty. Nonetheless, taken as a whole, Scarlet’s Walk stands as probably Tori’s
best album since her never-likely-to-be-topped debut. Not since the Buffy TV series
has something worked so well when so many of the constituent ingredients looked
so wrong. We can only hope it sparks a realisation in Ms. Amos that she really doesn’t
have to try so hard to make great, great music.
Or perhaps I’m just getting old. Meh. I remember when music had a proper tune, like…
This evening, as my television explains in gleeful, gloating detail exactly how
the leaders of the civilised world are risking my life in an utterly illegal and
immoral game of chicken with an egomaniacal mass-murderer, a question occurs.
How is it that in five thousand years or so of organised society, humanity has yet
to work out a system of government that doesn’t put into authority exactly the sort
of people that you don’t want wielding supreme executive power?
It’s not through lack of experiment. And yet, no matter how weird and wild the method
of picking the top dogs, almost invariably we home in on complete shitheads. If
you say that someone leads by divine right, you get shitheads. If you let the great,
the good and the wise pick, you get shitheads. If you let the bloke who’s got the
most guns, goons and gold run the show, you get shitheads. And if you let the plebs
at large choose, then hey, guess what? You got it...
Even America, who out of every nation on Earth seem to have come closest to cracking
the code, the country who have written even-handedness and restraint of government
into the very document upon which their political system is based – have lately
seen the big chair filled by a quarter-century of shitheads. To whit - a well-meaning
dolt, a gung-ho ex-Western star with creeping senility, an even more gung-ho blustering
opportunist backed up by a certified cretin, a crooked shag-monkey and now, dear
God...
Certainly, the shithead rule-of-thumb isn’t 100% true. Yes, a few decent people
slip through the net. But for every Cory Aquino you have at least a dozen Stalins,
Neros, Nixons, Mussolinis, Thatchers, Idi Amins and assorted other shitheads too
petty or fleeting for history to recall.
I have two possible hypotheses to explain the observed facts.
a) Power corrupts. Absolute power is even more of a laugh.
or
b) You can change the way that humanity decides its leaders. Unfortunately, you
can’t change humanity.
Fuck it, I know I’m preaching to the choir, here. And I’ve already deleted three
closing paragraphs as too preachy, too cliché or both. I keep coming back
to a line of Ben Elton’s, back when he was still worth reading, about how the military
is a branch of the entertainment industry these days, and the way to stop governments
throwing their weight around willy-nilly is to change the names of units and warships
so that politicians feel a bit less fucking smug announcing the commencement of
hostilities...
“It’s my grave duty to inform the House that this morning troops of the 23rd Toddler-Molesting
Division, supported by the H.M.S. Dubious Use Of The World’s Resources and aircraft
from the 17th Just Make One Little Dot On The Screen Hit The Other Little Dot, It’s
Just Like A PlayStation Game squadron embarked upon the first phase of Operation
Might Makes Right...”
Yes, there is work. And yes, after two days it’s guardedly good. Touch faux-limed-ash-veneer.
The re-adjustment from part-time to full-time employment hasn’t been too testing,
yet, and I’m still facing the world with a smile on my lips and a song in my heart.
Or something along those lines.
Today’s observation – having been sent out to get a spare set of keys cut for the
office, I ended up wandering along St. Alban’s Road in the middle of Watford – one
of the town’s major thoroughfares, but one that for various (boring) reasons, I
haven’t actually walked down in years. I was ambling fairly aimlessly, working off
a vague, fuzzy memory that there were a number of hardware shops along that street
that could sort me out keywise, lickety-split.
However, at some point in the time between my teenage years and my mid (not late.
Never late) twenties, all those hardware sellers seem to have become off-licences
(liquor stores, for the Colonials among you). “Ah,” I thought. “What a telling indicator
of the spirit of the age. Plainly as we’ve passed into the new millennium, and particularly
in these troubled times, with the hands of the Doomsday Clock sitting at five to
midnight, we’ve realised the futility of constructively building a better future
for ourselves. After all, at any time that future might be shattered at the whim
of one power-mad egomaniac or another – something we can’t influence or guard against
in any practical way. So instead, we’ve decided to settle for escaping our lives
of mundane wage-slavery and growing material and existential fear, if only in temporary
oblivion.”
Or else I’ve a shit memory. You know. One or the other.
Not mentioning it on the site was obviously the right call. For today, after nearly
two months on the scrapheap of humanity, the Blue Man finally washed up on the sandy,
balmy shores of Regular Employment Island.
Alright, technically it won't be Monday ‘till the washing-up actually happens, but
fuck it, just the realisation that we probably won’t have to sell the children to
white slavers was enough to cause an outbreak of alcohol and celebratory takeaway
food in Blue Man Towers (for sir, the Kebab Pizza – Doner meat, tomato, onion, jalapeno
peppers and creamy garlic sauce, which is just as disgusting and just as wonderful
as it sounds).
On the downside, it does mean that I’ll have to find another witty subtitle for
the site. Life is pain.
But anyway. Friday has rolled around again, as Fridays are wont to do, and that
means...
Blue Man Sings The Whites, in conjunction with Stella Artois – eight out
of ten Belgian winos who expressed a preference said their cats preferred lighter
fluid - proudly presents:
The Successories.com Motivational Tool Of The Week!
But what the hell, I'll give it my best shot anyway.
Successories’ caption for this picture of a moron bounding from one precarious,
dangerously fragile, practically frictionless islet to another with only a photographer
for assistance in the likely event that a floe should tip or shatter, depositing
said moron into the sub-zero briny deep where the immediate onset of shock will
lead almost inevitably to his doing humanity a favour by ridding the gene pool of
his half-witted, baggy-trousered, shaven-headed, Celtic-band-tattooed, coloured-sunglasses-wearing,
Blink-fucking-182-listening self, the tit, reads:
"OPTIMISM – People who attempt the difficult often obtain the impossible.”
This is plainly a misprint.
"OPTIMISM – People who attempt the difficult often die beneath the black
and frozen waters of the Arctic.”
...is a bit more like it. I'm well aware that as a stay-at-home multi-disciplined
nerd, I probably need to get out more. But here we have very firm evidence that
there are plenty of people who really, really need to get out less.
First off, apologies to everyone for being very tardy updating the site in the last
few days. This has been partly because of the ker-ay-zee fast-paced life I lead,
partly because of technical problems (I’m no expert, but I think that “BANG!” is
a bad noise for your PC to make under almost any circumstances) and partly because
of the slow-burn hangover arising from last weekend’s Clash Of The Divots.
So drunk. So very, very drunk.
The weekend was a rip-roaring success on pretty much every level apart from the
actual game. Stu,
Boony and Moo proved
to be, as suspected, utterly top blokes, and the four of us were pissing ourselves
laughing more or less from the first moment we got together ‘till the time that
Boony and I finally dragged ourselves away late on Sunday afternoon. Most of the
jokes were way too “in” (or way too drunken) to translate well, but the highlights
of the gathering for me included Pongo, The Monkey Who’s Swallowed A Plate, Stu
calling his local takeaway and ordering a pair of 12-foot pizzas (“Well, that’s
what it says on the flyer. Can’t wait to see how they get them on the scooter”),
and my attempted burning down of Stu’s house (an incident involving my rear end,
an oven and a wooden bread-board. I think that's why they call it arse-on. Ber-boom
tish!).
Oh, and watching Watford
stick it to Burnley in the quarter final of the FA Cup on Sunday afternoon wasn’t
too shabby, natch. Come, and indeed, on.
A proper write-up of the game itself, and a picture of Moo’s arse, will meander
onto the site when I’ve sufficiently recovered from the shock of the Uncontrollable
Fucking Tailspin™ that dropped me from 5th in the table to within a hair’s
breadth of relegation. Oh, for a chairman who was taking the same drugs as Stu’s
employers. His board of directors, having started the season wanting Stu to guide
Dundee to Europe, watched him prop up the table for three months
without a peep before finally voicing their concern that his “current run of
defeats might threaten his excellent league position.”
Obviously they were holding the paper upside-down.
One ever-so-slightly odd detail of the weekend was that we ended up using our net
pseudonyms for the duration, despite the fact that we’re all well aware what each
other’s given, flesh-and-blood names are. Old habits dying hard, I suppose. Besides,
being referred to as “Hornet” for a couple of days made me feel like I was in Top
Gun, without having get shouted at by a man who resembles a narky garden gnome,
or smashing my brains out on a piece of overpriced double-glazing. Which was nice.
The next wooden horse coming round the Apology Carousel is for Max, aka The Ukulele
King (I don’t know why, and I’m scared the answer might have something to do with
ukuleles), whose e-mails I’ve been meaning to reply to for more than a fortnight.
Go now, and attend to a site so much more intelligent and cultured
than mine it’s depressing. Be sure to have a look at his bad poetry, proof positive
of the old joke that a critic is like a eunuch in a harem – he knows how it’s done,
he sees it being done all the time, but there’s no way he can do it himself.
Finally – I think – apologies to Dave, a what-we-laughably-refer-to-as-the-“real”
world friend and a regular reader who relies on BMStW for his at-work entertainment.
Since you heard most of the upcoming discourse on Monday night, mate, you might
actually have to pull your finger out. Oh, and finally finally (and I mean it this
time), apologies to anyone reading this outside the UK, who like as not has never
seen the subject of my ire today, and for whom this is all likely to be a bit of
a wasted effort.
And so, without further ado...
I’ve never actually worked in advertising, thank the merciful lord, but I don’t
think that that should count against me in my claim to be a bit of an expert on
the Devil’s Own Industry. After all, no-one complained that Jane
Goodall wasn’t actually a gorilla, did they?
My credentials as an Advert Twitcher stack up as follows:
a) I’m alive. b) In the twentieth century. c) In a “developed” society. d)
And therefore spend upwards of 90% of my waking life in contact with television,
cinema, magazines, the internet, clothing, posters, places, events and people whose
raison d’être is to wrap their rose-bud lips gently around my pocket-area
and suck me dry to the very last fiscal drop. e) I can see half-a-dozen adverts
without having to swivel my chair. f) I don’t know much about the science of
ads, but I know what I hate.
I’m not a bleeding-heart liberal. I sin with my eyes wide open. I know the deal
with adverts – I offer them precious seconds of my life that I’ll never get back,
and in return they offer me fleeting, lowest-common-denominator entertainment. Which
is why I get so very angry when I keep my side of the bargain, but instead of a
“Wassup?” or that arty Dunlop ad from a few years ago that was done to Venus In
Furs, I get fobbed off with something as half-arsed as the current campaign for
Reef.
For those of you not aware of the product, it’s one of those identikit alcopops
that have been doing the rounds since some bright spark realised that the reason
more people don’t drink themselves to death is because alcohol tastes like alcohol.
Now, thanks to Hooch, Bacardi Breezer et al, it’s no longer necessary to spend years
learning to like drinking something reminiscent of Windolene, because you can have
all the irresponsibility and inflated sense of self-esteem in a flavour that even
a thirteen-year-old can enjoy!
Once again, marketing makes the world a better place for us all.
For those of you who are only too well aware of the product, but have been mercifully
spared the ad campaign, allow me to introduce a serpent to your little innocent
Garden Of Eden. The concept is a tour through the factory where Reef is being bottled
– but no ordinary factory this. Oh, no. Rather than production lines, people wearing
plastic bags over their hair and relentless, soul-destroying wage-slavery, we’re
instead presented with a bevy of leather-clad ladies and gentlemen (mostly ladies...
and on a slight digression, is “bevy” ever used except to describe a group of scantily-clad
women? Is it the collective noun? A pride of lions, a murder of crows, a bevy of
sluts, a wanker of Luton fans, a flagrant-disregard-of-international-law of marines?)
squeezing juice in ways that I’m pretty sure contravene the 1974 Health And Safety
At Work Act.
“So far so good, Dan”, you’re saying. “I thought you said there was a problem somewhere?”
Well... yeah. And the problem isn’t that the advert’s blatantly lying to me (“This
is where we add the vodka”, says one overly-made-up blonde dominatrix-type at one
point. No, it isn’t, love. The vodka’s added by some speccy little bloke
in a white coat somewhere like Slough) or that I’m now a bit worried about what
fluids other than fruit juice and vodka are finding their way into my drink, or
even that it’s hard to see who this ad’s targeted at (surely they don’t think that
wrapping a bevy up in a few scraps of burgundy leather is going to make men see
alcopops as anything but a girl’s drink? And despite the presence of a bit of fleeting,
token beefcake, I would have thought that the heavy ratio of XX-to-XY isn’t going
to do much for most women. Or is this just evidence of my sheltered life?). All
these things can be forgiven.
No, the problem isn’t in the concept. It’s in the execution. The ingredients look
okay when they’re lined up on the worksurface, it’s just that the cake’s come out
of the oven flat as a biscuit.
Don’t misunderstand, I’ve absolutely no objection to soft-core lesbian porn with
BDSM overtones popping up on my telly during prime-time in principle (and how many
times have we all said that?). But if you’re going to produce something cheap and
exploitative, then do it properly, for fuck’s sake. Put your bloody backs
into it! For crying out loud, don’t let your bevy look bored while they’re pawing
each other – this isn’t a three-day-long decadent Roman orgy, it’s a bloody thirty-second
booze ad – I signed up to be titillated, so titillate me, you bastards! God, how
hard can it be? Uh... how difficult, I mean?
Oh, and one final, final, final apology – to my mum, who probably had a heart attack
just at the title.
Finally, a ray of light in a fortnight of utter darkness and soul-destroying drudgery.
Faltering, uncertain and in danger of being snuffed out at any second, but a ray
of light all the same.
I realise I may have said this prematurely before, but gainful employment may, just
may, be wending its weary way back to Blue Man Towers. And what’s more, gainful
employment that’s a bit more gainful than the employment that a combination of being
too good and not good enough kept me from last week.
No details yet, because I don’t want to jinx it.
So... yeah. The only news I have today, I don’t want to share, which should make
for a pretty fucking kicking post, I think you’ll agree.
Nevertheless, we carry on regardless. Not like the Beautiful South song, though,
because Paul Heaton, The Beautiful South, and anyone who’s ever worked with them,
for them or regards the insipid drivel that they peddle as music deserves to be
rolled in nine different herbs and spices, boiled in oil and served up in KFC as
Popcorn Moron.
They are, to be fair, a band for people who don’t like music.
I’m not sure why most CDs are sold to people who don’t like music, because logically,
they really shouldn’t be. But there are so many “artists” (and I use the word here
in its loosest possible sense) whose success can be explained in no other way. We
live in a world where enough bovine, tabloid-brainwashed chimps actively want to
exchange good money for a Justin fucking Timberlake CD to put that talentless, know-nothing
pretty-boy at 3 in the UK album charts.
Let’s get this straight. Justin Timberlake is famous for one thing, and it’s got
nothing to do with his alleged “music” – no. Master Timberlake is famous for not
shagging Britney Spears.
How this manages to thrust someone into the realms of superstardom, I'm not too
sure. I mean, so far as I know I haven't shagged Britney Spears, and yet
people knocking on my door to offer me recording contracts have been noticably thin
on the ground.
That's as maybe, though. Buying a Justin Timberlake album is a crime. Listening
to a Justin Timberlake album is its punishment.
Become part of the resistance. This is Richard
Thompson’s new album. You’ve never heard of him, but that’s okay, because nobody
has. He’s like a British Neil Young, in that his music is guitar-based and folk-influenced,
and in that he’s been around roughly forever. He is, however, a better singer, songwriter
and guitarist than Neil Young ever was, or, in fact, than anyone ever was.
He's wry, and witty, and is the only person I know who can bring a lump to my throat
with a line as simple and deceptively innocent as "We'll always be such
good friends, you and I."
He is, in short, a musician for people who love music.
The
Old Kit Bag isn’t even the best Richard Thompson album for people who haven’t
heard anything of his before (that would be Shoot
Out The Lights, or Rumor
And Sigh), but that doesn’t matter. Go. Read some reviews. If it sounds even
vaguely the sort of thing that you might be into, find yourself a copy. Listen.
Love it. Tell your friends. Encourage them to tell their friends...
Maybe, just maybe, with luck and dedication, by this time next year the charts might
be dominated by an unassuming fiftysomething man with a regrettable penchant for
berets, and the Timberlakes, Blues and Christina fucking Aguileras of this world
might be confined to the dustbin of history along with every other flavour-of-the-microsecond
act currently tainting our collective subconscious.
A word of warning – this, and today’s
“proper” post, might be my last for a few days, because this weekend I’ll be
attending, as a 1960s Marvel comic would have it, A Startling Spectacle Of Peerless
Pageantry, A Frantic Forty-Nine Page Free-For-All Axis/Boony/BMStW
Crossover Special!
[movietrailervoiceover]
Four men...
Four PCs...
One winner...
And a whole world of trouble!
If you want action...
And drama...
And a love story that will echo down the years...
Go and watch The Empire Strikes Back again.
But if you want a bunch of pale blokes sitting in a darkened, fug-filled room...
Staring bleary-eyed at monitors and pretending to manage bad football teams...
While drinking beer...
LOTS of beer...
And using words like “pantfish”, “gazebo” and “wibble-wobble”...
For reasons that, if they aren’t clear now, aren’t going to get any more so with
explanation...
I’ve got a problem today, one that’s been bothering me since first thing this morning.
My problem, in a nutshell, is magpies. You know - crows who’ve got white streaks
in their feathers so as to better blend into their natural habitat (that habitat
being, presumably, The Electric Ballroom in Camden on a Wednesday night).
For some reason, magpies rank right up there with black cats and albatrosses in
the Superstition Stakes. A good friend of mine, normal in (almost) every other way,
feels compelled to greet any magpies that he happens to see with “Good morning,
Mr. Magpie, how’s your wife and family?”
He has no good explanation for this. Given time, I’ve learned to accept it.
And then there’s the rhyme. You know it, of course you do. ”One for sorrow, two
for joy, three for a girl and four for a boy – five for silver, six for gold, seven
for a secret never told...”
My problem is this – the rhyme only goes up to seven, and so it isn’t terribly explicit
about what you should expect when you happen to see, say, eleven of the buggers.
Are there more lines in the rhyme that have been forgotten by generations of children?
”Eight for Mars bars, nine for ducks, ten for a traditional Chinese tea-ceremony,
eleven for a Disney version of Stranger In A Strange Land...” Can I just add
things together to get to eleven? Because silver and gold are looking pretty bloody
attractive at the moment...
I don’t know. I just don’t know. What’s the use of a sodding omen if no-one tells
me what it’s an omen of?
Portents are a pain in the arse. And you can quote me on that.
My problem with bloody TXT messaging and l33t5p33k isn’t neophobia or snobbery (no,
it isn’t!) or that I’m too old to be bothered with it all (no, it sodding well isn’t,
alright?). No, my problem with the insidious rise of the text message is George
Orwell.
What am I blithering about now?
TXT language encourages you to express yourself with a handful of words and glyphs.
You didn’t reply to the person who sent you that joke about the Queen Mother’s funeral
with “THAT’S FUNNY” or “VERY AMUSING” or even “I LAUGHED SO HARD PEPSI MAX CAME
OUT OF MY NOSE” – you sent back “LOL”, because it’s quicker and easier to type and
because the person at the other end knew broadly what you meant.
LOL. Every time. From everybody. To everything. LOL.
While messaging doesn’t completely take away your ability to express yourself, to
convey nuances of concept and emotion, it certainly encourages you to give that
ability up. You voluntarily surrender the little subtle differences of diction and
language that separate you from everyone else until, at some point in the not-too-distant
future, you become part of a homogenous mob-mind, all of you mouthing the same little
finger-friendly catchphrases that your Nokia 3510 with the stripy cover and the
Dr. Who ringtone – sorry, I mean your FONE – has subconsciously conditioned you
to.
“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?
In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be
no words in which to express it.” (George
Orwell, “Nineteen
Eighty-Four”)
Your mobile ‘phone is nothing more nor less than the insidious tool of the Thought
Police, gentle reader. Destroy it now, before it’s too late.
Alright, and I’m too old to be buggering about with it. Happy now?
One of the benefits (alright, probably the only benefit) of my current Career-Challenged
status has been the extra time I’ve been able to spend with the kids - Blue Man
Jr, Mrs. Blue Jr. and Blue Man Jr. v2.0.
Whether they see it as a benefit is open to debate.
My middle child, Blue Man Jr, is a tall, deceptively deep-thinking, rail-thin ten-year-old
with a constantly perplexed expression. It’s my fervent hope that he’ll grow up
to be a Goth, something that my tubbiness and naturally rosy-cheeked complexion
stopped me ever achieving. On the way home from school this afternoon, he asked
if he could use the computer for his homework tonight.
“What do you have to do?” I asked.
“We have to write about someone who’s brought light to the world,” he replied (what
can I tell you? It’s a Catholic school).
“Who were you going to write about?”
“Princess Diana.”
Sudden moral conundrum. Do I hold forth with my actual opinion (“Son, she was a
self-obsessed publicity whore who was born into vast unearned wealth and privilege
and whose good works were only ever a side-effect of her dedicated campaign to keep
herself in the public eye. When I think of her, I think of TS Eliot - ‘the last
temptation is the greatest treason / To do the right deed for the wrong reason.’
She was the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with both British society – which
tells us that certain people are inherently superior to others merely by an accident
of birth – and with our media-driven, appearances-are-everything, consensus-reality
Western world as a whole. I’d be glad she was dead, except that her death served
both to raise this selfish, pampered harpy to near-sainthood, while at the same
time providing free publicity to people who were even more odious – James Hewitt
and Mohammed al-Fayed spring to mind. Write one word about this woman, and you are
no longer my son.”) or nod, smile and end up consumed by the nagging feeling that
I really shouldn’t have let it pass?
In the end, my face must have given me away, because B.M. Jr. looked at me askance
(that’s a trick he’s learned from his mother) and challenged me with “Well, you
think of someone who’s made the world a better place, then!”
God dammit, you’ve stumped me. Another sudden moral conundrum – do I tell my ten-year-old
son that I firmly believe that most people are rotten if you look at them deep enough,
and that pretty much anyone who’s changed the world for the better has done it by
accident (Fleming discovering penicillin) or to serve their own selfish needs (Churchill
liberating Europe)? Do I sit him down with my Bill Hicks CDs and risk him getting
expelled when he hands his essay in?
Or do I actually try and come up someone who I honestly think has improved this
miserable globe for the population in general? I’ve stalled the boy for an evening,
but even after much skull-sweat, the only names I’ve got are William Shakespeare,
Graham Taylor, George Orwell and Martin Luther-King. Not much
of a list, really, especially since the second name is unlikely to have made the
world a better place for anyone north of Garston or south of Croxley Green.
Any and all assistance in this matter greatly appreciated. Answers on a postcard
to the usual place, or the other usual place.
I make no apologies for the utter lack of all the additions I promised yesterday.
While you’re waiting for me to get my act together, go and have a look at Audrey’s
site and be awed and terrified in equal measure. I know I was.
I still haven’t given up on the notion of a cult of personality. I hope you can
all chant.
The main reason for starting this blog/journal/vanity project/whatever you want
to call it wasn’t for the hordes of moist, pliant young Bluemanettes throwing themselves
at my feet.
No, that’s just a happy coincidence.
The reason I’m doing this is, in fact, as a stepping-stone toward my long-held,
never-constructively-worked-toward dream of writing as a means of paying household
bills. The general idea is that knowing I have to spend half an hour a day updating
this site will teach me look at things in my everyday life with a view to writing
about them, training me to look at the world with a writer’s eye.
The writer in question isn’t that keen at the moment, but so what? The bastard has
to sleep sometime.
The other benefit is that I’ll hopefully start to work writing into my daily routine,
thus meaning that I’ll find it less of a strain when I come to start working on
The Novel Of The Century and teaching me to spend less of my free time in such trivial
pursuits as housework and basic personal hygiene.
This is a Good Thing for the waiting-to-be-illuminated book-buying public as a whole,
while only being a Bad Thing for those who actually have to live with me. And since,
in the words of the 20th Century’s most important philosopher,
the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, it’s my sworn intent – nay,
my moral duty! – to ignore the piles of paperwork that have been mounting up around
my computer for so long they’re turning to coal, and press on with today’s update,
right unto the very jaws of divorce!
The “routine” part of “daily routine” hasn’t really kicked in yet, either, meaning
that I’m pretty much forced to write as and when inspiration strikes, even if that
happens to be in the wee hours of the morning.
Hence... this. I think.
Something’s troubling me, and I won’t sleep ‘till I’ve gotten it off my chest.
Why do the main characters in so many American sit-coms have the same first names
as the actors playing them? Is it bizarre coincidence? Is it just tradition, or
an old charter or something, inherited from the Daddy (Mummy?) of all American sit-coms,
I Love Lucy? Or is there something
more sinister going on?
Oh, how I’m hoping for the latter. I know conspiracy theories are so 1995,
but still.
You know what I’m talking about, though? Woody the barman from Cheers.
Seinfeld. Tony Danza’s character
in Who’s The Boss. Cybill Shepherd’s
godawful eponymous series. Every
single one of the hideous adolescent-orientated Nickelodeon shows that my children
make me watch as punishment for some unknown sin in a previous life. Michael J.
Fox and Charlie Sheen’s characters in Spin
City...
(Digression 1 - the reason, by the way, that Spin City went straight to Comedy Hell
when Mr. J. Fox left the show wasn’t that Charlie Sheen has all the charisma and
comic timing of a day-old mayonnaise and lettuce sandwich, oh no. The reason it
sucked so mightily was because of the demise of the Meta-Joke™, the underlying
situation which was the foundation-stone upon which the rest of the series’ humour
was built. Even when the Meta-Joke™ wasn’t being directly played upon, it
remained in our subconscious minds, putting us into a perpetual state of Comedy
Def Con 2. Spin City’s Meta-Joke™ was, of course, that Mayor Winston was very,
very tall (Barry Bostwick,
6’4”), while his deputy was very, very short (Michael
J. Fox, 5’4”). If you take out the very, very short element, and replace it
with a man of average height (Charlie
Sheen, 5’10”), then the Meta-Joke™ breaks down and before you know it
you’ve got a series that any sane person would gouge out his own eyes with white-hot
knitting needles to avoid watching.)
(Digression 2 - One of the best things about the Internet is that if, at three o’clock
in the morning, you suddenly decide you can’t live without knowing how
tall Charlie Sheen is, you can get that vital information at the tradeoff of
a mere five minutes of your Earthly span that you’ll never get back. The wonders
of technology, eh?)
I think the word I’m looking for is aaaaaaaaanyway... I’ve given this more thought
than it probably deserves, and have come up with two working hypotheses:
i) Actors in American sitcoms are easily confused, and have problems with the idea
that they have a different name when the cameras are rolling than when they’re not.
If one uses Charlie Sheen as an example, then this theory has the unmistakable ring
of truth.
ii) The actors actually want the viewing public to blur the line between their on-
and off-screen personas for their own unknown, unspeakable reasons. This is more
understandable in some cases (if I were Jerry
Seinfeld, I’d want people to think I was as witty as a team of scriptwriters
could make me, too) than others (has Woody
Harrelson really benefited from closer association to a hayseed simpleton persona?).
This might also explain why characters in British sit-coms are rarely eponymous
with the actors playing them (would you want people thinking you were Arnold
J. Rimmer?).
My, this post has gone straight down the Digression Highway to Parenthesis City,
hasn’t it?
Bottom line, though – I have no clue. None. If anyone can shed any light onto this
odd Colonial quirk, well, you know where I am.
So. Just in case you’ve just materialized in your ratty old Police Box, it’s Friday
night. And on this site, that can mean just one thing... Blue Man Sings The Whites,
in conjunction with Piedemonte Navarra Merlot Tempranillo – this is not a wine for
drinking, this is a wine for laying down and avoiding - proudly presents: The
Successories.com Motivational Tool Of The Week!
What’s the inspiring message that’s being sent here? “Don’t Let People Tell You
Anything Is Impossible... And Don’t Let Them Tell You It’s Stupid, Pointless, Dangerous,
Irresponsible Or Something No-one In Their Right Mind Would Consider Even For A
Picosecond, Either!”
As a motivational image, then, this picture seems ideal for the laboratories of
Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Mengele, Dr.
Zachary Smith or Dr. Doom. Anyone who’s considering a career
outside the exciting and ever-growing field of Mad Science, though, might want to
look elsewhere.
B.M. Jr. went for Bob Geldof in the end, by the way. Not the
best news, but it could have been worse – he might have mentioned Sir Bob’s music.
