[ Blue Man Sings The Whites ]

[ Wednesday, March 26, 2003 ]

[ Vision Thing ]

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)

Soundtrack to today’s outburst -
David Bowie, “Station To Station”
(1976)

[ link to this rant ]

...

[ Bang After Bang After Bang After Bang ]

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...”

Soundtrack to today’s outburst -
Sisters Of Mercy, “Vision Thing”
(1990)

[ link to this rant ]

...

[ Gold Dust ]

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…

Soundtrack to today’s outburst -
Tori Amos, “Scarlet’s Walk”
(Duh. 2002)

[ link to this rant ]

...

[ Everybody’s Happy Nowadays ]

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.

Soundtrack to today’s outburst -
Polly Jean Harvey, “Is This Desire?”
(1998)

[ link to this rant ]

...

[ O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! ]

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!

This week – "Boing, Boing, Whoops, SPLASH, Glug, Glug, Glug"

This is an image almost beyond satire.

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.

Soundtrack to today’s outburst -
The Wonder Stuff, “Eight Legged Groove Machine”
(1988)

[ link to this rant ]

...

[ This Is Where We Add The Jism ]

It’s an Apologies Special on BMStW this morning.

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.

Did you all miss me?

Soundtrack to today’s outburst -
The Cure, “Three Imaginary Boys”
(1979)

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[ Public Service Announcement ]

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...

Oh, did I mention the beer yet?

Then you want...

Clash... Of The Divots.

(A Quinn Martin production)

Coming to a town near you...

Assuming, of course, that you live in Dunstable...

This weekend...”

[/movietrailervoiceover]

News, reviews and (possibly) pictures to come as soon as I’ve recovered. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Soundtrack to today’s outburst -
Richard Thompson, “The Old Kit Bag”
(2003)

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[ Good News, Bad Noise ]

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.

And music-lovers everywhere will thank us for it.

Soundtrack to today’s outburst -
Richard Thompson, “The Old Kit Bag”
(Just in case you didn’t get the bloody link yet. 2003)

[ link to this rant ]

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[ Goth-Rock Crows ]

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.

Soundtrack to today’s outburst -
Fields Of The Nephilim, “Dawnrazor”
(1987)

[ link to this rant ]

...

[ n005p34k ]

I think what we learn from Saturday’s post is “don’t try and write at three a.m.” A valuable lesson for everyday living, I think you’ll agree.

So, because Stu’s already got dibs on the best and most rant-worthy story of the day, here’s a little snippet from the file marked “KDS 2DAY SUP W THM”.

My problem with bloody TXT messaging and L33T 5P34K 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?

Soundtrack to today’s outburst -
Suede, “Suede”
(1993)

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[ Identity Crisis ]

An even longer one today. And not even any decent misanthropy and despairing rage to get us through it, just an unfocussed ramble along the banks of the stream of consciousness. Apologies in advance.

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.

I'm to bed. Finally. Ciao for now...

Soundtrack to today’s outburst -
The Only Ones, “The Immortal Story”
(Singles collection, 1999)

[ link to this rant ]

...

[ You Know What Time It Is ]

Actually, maybe you don’t. Maybe you’ve just arrived from an alternate universe that reflects our own to the very last detail, but in which the flow of time runs in reverse. Maybe you’ve had a part of your brain injured so you no longer have any kind of long-term memory, and have to cobble together an desperate, paper-thin existence by constantly leaving yourself notes and Polaroids as reminders of what you were doing just before your mind blanked. Maybe you suffer from chronophobia, an irrational fear of time and duration. Maybe you’ve never seen this site before. I probably shouldn’t presume. Sorry. Sorry.

So. Just in case you’ve just materialised 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!

This week – "Danger Is My Middle Name"

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.

Soundtrack to today’s outburst -
David Bowie, “1. Outside”
(1995)

[ link to this rant ]

...