Huroo, they've torpedoed the whole shebang before it even gets started with one
of the most inexplicable casting decisions since, well, casting Keanu Reeves as
a Shakespearian villain.
I'm not going to bang on about this - if you know the comic at all you already know
what a colossal blunder it is, and if you don't know the comic, you don't care -
but for the record, I reckon I've managed to work out how
they think they're going to pull it off.
Sometime yesterday, my muse compelled me to hold forth on the subject of England
football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson and, in particular, on the endless moaning
about his tenure issuing from certain areas of the media.
To my surprise and sort've delight, pretty-damned-good footie website Football365
showed sufficient taste to post
my e-mail under the heading "Eriksson's Answers" - but for those of
you too lazy to click on a link, here's my contribution to posterity in full:
-
Sven, if you're reading this (and I think we all know that you're secretly a F365
regular), I just want to offer a bit of friendly advice regarding the constant bitching,
moaning and second-guessing that seems to be directed your way just recently.
It works like this:
NUMBSKULL: "You're handling the friendlies all wrong, why aren't you playing
Beattie / Sutton / Alan Thompson / Gareth Barry / Alan Shearer / John Barnes / Tom
Finney / whoever?"
YOU: "One defeat in competitive matches. Against the world champions. In the
World Cup quarter-final."
NUMBSKULL: "But why are you sticking with Scholes / Heskey / Cole / Nancy when
others obviously deserve their place?"
YOU: "One defeat in competitive matches. Against the world champions. In the
World Cup quarter-final."
NUMBSKULL: "And all those substitutes, you shouldn't be doing that, why are
you doing that, Sven?"
YOU: "One defeat in competitive matches. Against the world champions. In the
World Cup quarter-final."
NUMBSKULL: "Your teams are so boooooring, I'm so booooored, Sven, England are
so booooooring with you in charge..."
YOU: "Yes, things were much more interesting in the good old days when Kevin
Keegan had the job, weren't they?"
You're quite welcome, mate. Just keep those wins in games that actually matter coming,
and as far as most of us are concerned, you can swap as many people at half-time
as you like.
-
Fame. I'm gonna live for ever. I'm gonna learn how to fly...
Today, on the tenth anniversary of Bill Hicks' death, I am moved to quote.
“Here’s the deal, folks. You do a commercial, you’re off the Artistic Roll-Call
– forever. End of story, okay? You’re another corporate fucking shill, you’re another
whore at the capitalist gang-bang, and if you do a commercial there’s a price on
your head, everything you say is suspect and every word that comes out of your mouth
is now like a turd falling into my drink.”
The problem is that there are so many whores at the great capitalist gang-bang that
it’s difficult to keep track of exactly who has sold their integrity for a mess
of potage and who still remains on the side of light. When you saw John Cleese being
tolerably amusing on Comic Relief last year, did you immediately remember that he’d
forfeited his right to make statements on anything of significance with those godawful
ads he did for Sainsbury’s a couple of years ago?
I know I didn’t.
What we need – and by “we”, I mean you and me, the right-thinking citizens of the
world - is some kind self-appointed watchdog to compile a directory that allows
us, whenever we notice a celebrity striding blindly into the murky waters of Lake
Socio-Political Debate, to see if they’ve already discarded the Inflatable Rubber
Dinosaur Of Credibility.
You’ve seen what’s coming, haven’t you?
Over the coming weeks/months/whatever, I’ll be maintaining a blacklist of those
who have been struck off the Artistic Roll-Call. To add an air of authority to the
whole shabby enterprise, there will strict rules regarding who is included on the
blacklist and who is not – to whit:
Rule 1) The first rule of the Unofficial Artistic Roll-Call Blacklist is
that you do not talk about the Unofficial Artistic Roll-Call Blacklist.
Rule 2) Artists are blacklisted for receiving payment to appear in, or provide
voice-overs for, a commercial presentation of any sort whether it be on television,
in cinema, on radio, in print or on the internet. No other criteria are accepted
for blacklisting – even if the artist in question has clearly become the worst kind
of money-grubbing hypocrit (say hello, Bono), if they have never appeared in a commercial,
they remain off the list.
Rule 3) Artists will not be blacklisted simply for their music being used
in a commercial (Massive Attack and Moby escape blacklisting despite their work
being used in almost every advert, ever, for example. Although Iggy Pop escapes
blacklisting for the use of The Passenger in a Peugeot ad, he still makes the list
for personally appearing in an advert for Virgin Airlines).
Rule 4) The artist must be well-established in the public eye when they appear
in the commercial that results in their blacklist. No penalty applies to work undertaken
during the career progression phase commonly known as “I Was Young, I Needed The
Money” (the "Anthony Stewart Head Exception" or, indeed, in the event
of sudden impoverishment through no fault of their own (the so-called “Willie Nelson
Loophole”).
Rule 5) The blacklist refers to the Artistic Roll-Call. To be eligible for
blacklisting, a person must have been present on the role-call to start with - to
whit, an artist of some description. Sports personalities, reality TV "stars",
politicians and the like are not eligible.
Rule 6) There is NAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH… Rule 6.
Rule 7) The artist must be alive at the time of the commercial that results
in their blacklist (Steve McQueen, Humphrey Bogart and Martin Luther-King all escape
blacklisting for this reason, something which I’m sure they’re profoundly relieved
about).
Rule 8) All blacklistings are created equal - but some are more equal than
others. To distinguish marginal listings from those where the participant simply
smiled bright, opened wide and swallowed whatever they were paid to, each artist
will receive a rating between one and five stars on the SSCS, or Sucking-Satan's-Cock
Scale. The artist's position along the SSCS will be determined by their status at
the point of the blacklisting offence and the nature of the ad appeared in. 1 star
denotes a just-about-qualifying artist appearing in an entertaining advert, and
5 stars is awarded to a multi-millionaire with either a body of excellent work or
a track record of anti-capitalist statement behind them, appearing in the worst
kind of meritless, piece-of-shit advertising (and the wind whispers "John Cleese...").
Rule 9) The Blue Man’s decision regarding blacklisting or lack thereof is
final, and no correspondence will be entered into. Unless he feels like it. Which
he might well, because he’s normally up for an argument.
And that's it, really. The first thirty lucky members of the Roll Of Shame are up,
and the list will be updated semi-regularly as I notice names, they are suggested,
or I manage to find the fucking notes that I made regarding this last summer.
I thought I had media hypocrisy pegged. I thought I had a pretty good handle on
how it works - near-hysterical hyperbole whenever nothing's really happening, eagerly
trying to fill a thirty-minute bulletin by making the story the story. The hype
takes a back seat whenever something actually happens, though, various anchors and
talking-heads staring frankly straight into the camera as they intone solemnly attempting
to explain to us What It All Means, deriving importance by proxy of the events they
describe and all the while fantasizing about their place in History.
I thought these were things I could rely on, that they were as immutable as the
change of the seasons, that, for example, recent world events had bought us at least
a temporary reprieve from the contrived, horribly inappropriate Sport-As-War metaphors
normally so beloved of reporters.
So when I turn on my TV of a Sunday afternoon and come across Jeremy
Guscott running around the woods with members of the Queen's Own Millions Of
Pounds Of Public Money That Schools And The NHS Aren't Ever Going To See Regiment
in the run-up to the Six Nations rugby game between England and Italy, it rocks
my worldview a bit.
"One thing's for sure,"growls Jezza. "If you want
to stop England, it's going to be a war..."
No, Jeremy. See, you're getting confused now.
War's the nasty, ugly thing that's not really understood by anyone, even
supposed "experts". It's the thing with the mud and the blood and
the pain that's run by doddering
upper-class nitwits who sit miles away from where anything actually happens
and send strapping young men into harm's way. War's the thing which theoretically
has rules that both sides have to follow, but in which the main idea is in fact
to be as unpleasant as possible to your fellow human beings, the only real objective
to win, no matter what the cost.
There really aren't that many things in this world that make me angry.
No, there aren't.
Okay, there are lots of things that piss me off, that I'll grant you. There are
even more things that peeve me, and I'm not certain your Earth science has managed
to concoct an arithmetic system that's capable of expressing the number of things
that get my goat.
But actual, genuine, heavens-to-Betsy no-fooling anger? No, that's a much more elusive
beast, reserved only for the shit de la shit, the very worst horrors that humanity
has inflicted upon itself, the sort of stuff that makes your eyes water and your
gorge rise in revulsion just thinking about it. You know - like Margaret Thatcher.
Luton Town Football Club. Musical theatre. That sort of thing.
Once upon a time, if the Powers That Be wanted to keep the proletariat masses quiet,
productive, in their place and only fighting amoungst themselves, They needed the
workers to get religion.
"Don't worry that you're toiling twelve hours a day, six days a week and
dropping dead of black lung before you're forty!" sayeth the Church, "you
don't need to worry about bettering yourself, oh no, because if you chuck all your
spare cash in the collection plate, when you get to Heaven, it all gets sorted out!
No, seriously, it does! You'll get eternal bliss, and the fat idle rich bastards
who're working you to death will be, uh, passed through the eye of a needle or something.
Yeah. Something like that. I realise that we've got absolutely no way of proving
this, and that the idea that God is love and that there's some sort of underlying
natural justice to the world runs counter to every single thing you've ever seen
or experienced in your miserable fucking lives of endless labour, but hey - would
I lie to you? Now get back to work, you smelly poor people."
This clever scheme has done it's work for a couple of millennia or more, keeping
folks in their place with only a couple of relatively minor hiccups. Unfortunately
for the Powers That Be, however, the "Get Your Reward In Heaven" method
of ensuring conformity has a fatal flaw - to whit, that a fucking child of twelve
could see through it. And as time wore on, and more and more information became
readily available to the proles through sources other than their village priest,
more and more children of twelve started doing just that.
This, as you can imagine, presented a problem. But some bright spark managed to
come up with a solution for the MTV generation, one that plays better to our atrophied
attention-spans and our soulless, materialistic me-me-me-now-now-now mentality,
a religion for the 21st century:
"Don't worry that you're toiling twelve hours a day, six days a week, running
up precipitous debts living beyond your means and dying of hypothermia before you're
eighty because your pension won't run to keeping your heating on in winter!"
sayeth Camelot,
"you don't need to worry about bettering yourself, oh no, because
if you blow all your spare cash on the Lottery, you could very well get it all sorted
out right here and now! I realise you've never so much as met anyone who's ever
won big on the Lottery, and the idea that you might land the jackpot runs counter
to even rudimentary mathematical
analysis, but hey - you never know. It could be you! Now get back to
work, you smelly poor people."
I have to take my hat off to the government - they've finally managed to work out
a way to tax stupidity.
But if it was just the underlying theory behind the Lottery that I disagreed with,
if it were just another way to keep us contentedly moving on the treadmill, I'm
pretty sure it would just end up in the "Cold Contempt" section of my
mental filing-system, alongside soap-operas, the collected oeuvre of Tom Hanks,
and Gap adverts.
Luckily for this post, the Lottery also throws up plenty of specifics worthy of
my bile. For a start, there's the marketing. The patronising slogan ("It could
be you!" Yes, I suppose it could, statistically speaking. Statistically speaking,
I could get hit by lightning tomorrow as well, but I don't see weather reports which
end with Michael Fish winking at the camera and saying "Electrocution - it
could be you!"). The final sad confirmation that the Billy Connolly I loved
for most of the eighties has shuffled off this mortal coil to be replaced by some
mercenary
huckster with a stupid beard. The current, almost indescribably stupid advertising
campaign which informs us that we have more chance of winning the Lottery if we're
part of a syndicate... Well, duh. Pardon me if I'm grasping the wrong end of the
fucking stick, here, but isn't the fact that you've got more chances to win the
whole point of being in a syndicate? More people picking different numbers
equals more chance that one of those sets of numbers is a winner, yes? Fuck me,
if you really need an advert to spell that out to you, you shouldn't be trusted
with metal cutlery, much less be let out of the house with money.
No, wait, there's more. As most folk know, 28% of the money raised by the National
Lottery go toward "Good Causes" - charities or community projects vetted
by Camelot and the government. And yes, this is arguably a good thing, with the
caveat that many of these causes are things the government should be funding anyway.
However, I've lost count of the number of newspaper stories I've seen over the past
ten years protesting how
the Lottery money is being spent, whether it's right that one cause or another
should be receiving a slice of the cash.
Like anyone who plays the Lottery is doing it thinking "well, now I can sleep
sounder knowing that 28p of my money is going to make the world a better place!"
Listen, wankers. Don't you dare try to justify your fucking worship at the feet
of Mammon
to me. If you really cared that the right causes were getting your money, you could
have just given them the fucking cash yourself. But you don't. Nobody plays the
fucking Lottery for altruistic reasons, nobody. You gave up your right to decide
who benefits when you handed over your money in exchange for that-there scratchcard,
so sit down, shut up and tune in at ten to eight twice a week, when a leather-skinned
clotheshorse will grin toothily before a live studio audience as they crush the
infinitesimal hope that you've bought to take the place of your ambitions and aspirations.
[ When You Wake Up To The Fact That Your Paper Is Tory... ]
Spotted on the front page of heinous tabloid rag The Daily Mirror (I won't
link, hits will only encourage them) today - the idiotic advereporting non-story
that Whatsherface who used to be in that girl-band whose name escapes me has emerged
victorious from car-crash TV spectacle/decline-of-Western-civilisation indicator,
I'm A C-List "Celebrity", Get Me Out Of Here.
The report was headlined with the caption:
"Honest, sweet singer who loves her husband, adores her kids, and was nice
to everyone, wins. In an increasingly nasty world we say: Good on you, girl."
"In an increasingly nasty world."
Says the Mirror.
Says a newspaper who've made invasion of privacy into something of an artform. Says
a newspaper who, just to pluck one example off the top of my head, are currently
being dragged through the Press Complaints Commission after deciding it was in the
public interest to run a full-page colour photo showing footballer Marc-Vivien Foe
in the midst of his death from heart faliure on their cover.
Yes, it's an increasingly nasty world. And one of the reasons it's increasingly
nasty is because you and your right-wing, chest-beating, tits-and-football ilk are
helping to shape it that way, you fuckers.
And yes, I'm well aware that my very last post on BMStW
1.0 was complaining that the
summer is a fucking nightmare, and that I'm in danger of looking a bit like
a congenital malcontent. It's hardly my fault that the world's a sack of festering
cack, is it? Take that up with the management.
Back to the point, and in my defence my objection to the end of January/start of
February isn't meteorological (cheers, spellchecker) - it's simply that with the
birthdays of Mrs. Blue and Blue III, followed closely by Valentine's day, I have
to shop for three sodding cards within two weeks of each other.
There ought to be some sort of law to stop that sort of thing happening to anyone.
Don't misunderstand, this isn't coming from any sort of tight-fistedness, it's not
the expense I object to... although it probably should be. Two bloody quid a throw
if you're lucky for something that the object of your affection will read
once, will sit on top of their telly for a couple of days then end up either stuck
at the bottom of a box in the loft and never, ever looked at again, or else slung
in the bin? I mean, obviously it keeps money in circulation and that's the important
thing, but Jiminy fucking Cricket...
No, it's not the cost. I don't know - am I the only person in the entire world who
recoils in horror at the notion of trying to convey my feelings for those I care
about via the medium of absurdly overpriced lumps of cardboard that wouldn't look
out of place on Liberace's mantelpiece? About a dozen times a sodding year I spend
a soul-meltingly miserable half-an-hour browsing through aisle after aisle of fucking
teddy-bears clutching bunches of flowers, washed-out watercolours of sailing boats,
racing cars or football boots, garish four-colour reproductions of the latest marketing-department-spawned
cartoon-character toy-salesman and sophomor(on)ic "joke" cards that make
Gimme Gimme Gimme look like Waiting For Godot. And I wouldn't mind, I really, really
wouldn't, if I ever managed to find a card that was even within a light-year of
the sentiment I want to express.
But no. Every time, without fail, after spending far more time than the enterprise
can possibly deserve, I just end up buying the card that's on balance the least
repulsive.
"Ah, Blue Man, you old curmudgeon", you say, "It's not
just about how the card looks, is it? There's the message inside, as well!"
Oh, yes. Thanks for that. I'd almost forgotten.
Because if you do, by some miracle, manage to locate a design that doesn't make
you physically ill to behold, chances are some corporate-whore creative, every last
drop of genuine emotion mercilessly wrung from his lifeless cadaver by years vomiting
out verse on cue, will have decided that a simple "Happy Birthday" isn't
good enough for him and will instead be labouring under the misapprehension that
a couplet like;
"It's a time for celebrating and for pressies too - A time for doing
all the things that you most like to do!"
...somehow becomes less mind-meltingly trite and saccharine if it's rendered in
a "wacky" font.
Seriously, I'm interested. Is it really just me? Has anyone who's not at that moment
suffering from senile dementia, mild concussion or surgical removal of good-taste
glands ever, ever walked into a W.H. Smith's, picked up a card and said to themselves,
"Wow! It's like they're reading my mind!"
Have they bollocks. We're letting ourselves get emotionally blackmailed into spending
more and more of our disposable income every year on fucking cards that can't even
properly communicate the emotion they're blackmailing us over! It's time to make
a stand, to draw a line in the sand and say "no further!" And here and
now we have the perfect opportunity.
Instead of propping up the rotting hulk of the greeting-card industry by letting
them push their bad cover versions of love, let's all of us, today, decide that
this Valentine's Day, we're just going to tell those we care about what they
mean to us. No tricks. No anodyne poetry. No Forever-fucking-Friends. No Hallmark
safety-net between us and how we feel. Just us, warts and all.
Just a thought.
...and, er, don't worry, Mum, this doesn't mean you won't be getting a Mother's
Day card this year..
"You are witnesses at the re-birth of Blue Man Sings The Whites.
Hope you like our new direction."
I thought about having a re-design to go with the new real estate, but as anyone
who knows me can tell you, I don't re-decorate 'till the wallpaper is mouldy enough
to apply for its own passport. So I've contented myself with tidying up the HTML
a wee bit, replacing the old shite guestbook with a proper comments system and adding
the "F"AQ
that I've been tinkering with for, oooh, the last year or so.
Look, the scary bloke in the pop-up ad isn't there any more. What more do you want
from me? Gah.
I've not fixed all the links, uploaded all the pages, dotted all the i's and crossed
all the t's yet, so please bear with me while I re-configure the aft deflector screens
via a phase-relay array to emit a stream of charged dechyon particles and re-activate
the dilithium crystals that power the warp drive.
Or something.
Dammit, Jim, I'm a tubby disaffected layabout, not a software engineer!
