Dark rise.
"I canny change the laws of physics." It's a clearly apocryphal quote from Scotty there.
Why? Because by the 23rd century, a starship chief engineer would know very full well that you certainly can change the laws of physics. If you're a theoretical physicist you can make up whatever the heck you fancy.
While artworking something lastnight, I watched a programme on the telly viewer gizmo that I was clearly never going to understand much of. Horizon: Is everything we know about the universe wrong may have spent a very great deal of its screen time cutting away to boffins slo-mo drawing inexplicable Greek hieroglyphic maths on blackboards, but I came away from it with a very clear understanding. Namely, that I am a dumbo of amoebal proportions and theoretical physicists are brilliantly clever.
They are. If nothing else, they have invented a way to simply invent stuff they can't find but really need. How Star Trek is that?
You can make up whole chunks of stuff apparently – but the trick is, I've learned, to make up stuff that can't be disproved – because it can't be proved. Genius, eh? And believe, me, dirty great swathes of the universe are, it turns out, totally made up. Like gobbledigook is made up. Like blehbleblehbleblehbleribblesnood is made up. There. Just like that.
Well I mean, really.
There in the theoretical physics canteen it's all: "Ooh, we have a great mathematical model of the universe" one minute and then: "But we kind of need, like, WAY more gravity to make it work so we'll, um... just, like, make up some – some invisible undetectable, ah, 'dark' matter that will balance the books. Sweet."
But then it's: "Ah. Oh. Er. So we also don't really know why the universe is, er, not expanding and moving quite as it should be, according to our really great model of the universe. It should be slowing it's expansion. Like a normal bang, only bigger. It's, er, not. It shouldn't be doing that. ..So we'll have to... ah, make up some more stuff. Some undetectable, invisible, unknowable stuff... Stuff in the gaps. Stuff that IS the gaps – which, as those gaps grow, it grows (obviously) and so keeps feeding the expansion. Like a kind of... 'dark energy'. (Phew. That oughta do it. Yeah. Dark energy. Nothing is nothing, baby – nothing is always something! Little physicist's joke there, doll)."
As I climb down from my soapmox in reverence for the fine minds and likable people I saw on this little foray into the far reaches of reality, I am reminded by a chum on Facebook that theoretical physics demands the same levels of faith in bald-faced absurdity as any religion you care to name. Which gets us nowhere practical but I guess at least proves that humans rely on their imaginations to map out the universe. We're all people of faith and we're all heretics, you might say.
Of course, in answer to this, I'm sure a benevolent theoretical physicist would adopt a kindly tone when pointing out that he and his colleagues are not falling prostrate before golden calf statuettes in the desert and praying for rain but in fact feeding spectacularly complex and brilliant mathematical models of otherwise ineffable things in order to arrive at sound scientific theories of how stuff works.
..To which, I suppose, a person of strong faith might kindly add: "Don't worry, mate – you'll catch up."
---
I really have no idea how people do the maths to work out the universe. Or how just about anything around me works – if I hadn't been taught to expect the iPhone from an infancy in front of science fiction, I might be persuadable that it's fallen from heaven.
All I know is, these guys keep us all dreaming as much as they keep our feet on the ground. As one of them said with a grin: "I dreamed of going into space when I was a kid. Other worlds and far flung adventures. It lead me to do this job at a desk."
Damn right, mate. An act of service and faith.
It may not be the job of theoretical physicists to help us find the light, but they're certainly doing something rather more inspiring than just scratching about in the dark.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Full Circle.
Full Circle.
I’ve done an album. You might have heard. I appear to have been going on about it somewhat.
But, as part of ‘doing an album’ – which I hope does not become known as ‘doing a Momo’ or anything like that in the future, implying as it does that completing another epic and completely pointless creative project has finally turned my name into a verb for folly – I have also ‘done an album cover’.
On this album cover is a circle. A thick circle like a perfect letter ‘o’ with an icon of an aircraft in the bottom of the ring. It’s a kind of logo, really, in homage to airport signage and travel iconography, all of which has long prompted me to feel strangely rude.
Now, it was only after I’d taken delivery of the printed preview covers that I realised how jolly clever I’d turned out to be.
So clever, I’d not noticed myself planning it. Though I have vowed now to tell everyone it was indeed a very consciously planned bit of symbolism, obviously. Because this little logo does rather represent the fact that the music itself comes full circle, starting and ending on the same little riff of music.
See?
>TAPS FORHEAD<
Jolly clever.
Interestingly, after almost two weeks of this little musical round trip being out there among its very first reviewers, freed from the bonds of the studio and taking first skittery Bambi steps out into the jaws of the wild, I find myself pondering the idea of coming full circle.
---
I watched a BBC4 documentary yesterday. The kind that stops me in my tracks when I see it on the iPlayer – and which makes the lovely first lady of Momo glance heavenward and leave the room.
I scooched into bed with the laptop to indulge myself for 80 minutes, during a lazy Saturday recovering from staying out way past our bed time – watching the blessed Annie Mac DJing in town. I can’t imagine that we didn’t just blend in naturally with everyone else there at the Orange Rooms, you understand, but I now wonder with hindsight whether being old enough to be everyone’s parents does, in fact, show. Especially if you’re a parent that really gets off on black and white archive documentaries about Zeppelins.
D’you think that stuff shows? Okay, so I’ll admit that tweed was probably a little hot for the occasion anyway.
Yes - Zeppelins. Or, in this case, one particular Zeppelin.
Airships are another weird fetish that I suspect more people share than I once knew. I have said many times, and you have probably heard me do so wistfully yourself, while you left the room, that I have a memory of the old Goodyear blimp droning over my primary school in Bournemouth one summer.
It haunted the south coast that year I recall, and the balmy evening when it actually slid very slowly behind the trees in our back garden was like some kind of moment of worlds meeting worlds – where heavenly creatures reveal themselves to little boys and descend into their little fenced existences for a fleeting, orb-eyed moment, exhilarating their little legs into carrying them indoors shouting: “Mummymummy! You’ll never guess what’s in the garden Mummy!”
I wasn’t dragged through the catflap in an orange hue, thankfully. And Mum didn’t have to run outside and scream at a Wyoming skyscape and then climb Table Mountain to get me back. We went outside and looked up and the sheepish blimp took an underpowered age to move off, I seem to remember. Which was just fine.
Which was, in fact, just wonderful.
---
The hook is, I guess, that airships are a giant, floating, looming, spellbinding reminder of a different age – an age that had technology we now don’t. Like the seventies and Concord, or the sixties and the moon rockets. Or the eighties and Betamax video recorders – we used to be able to do this amazing stuff and now we simply can’t. Isn’t this a bit remiss?
Isn’t this a crying shame, in fact?
Or were these things all gigantic, indulgent follies?
Well, the ardent pragmatist in you is protesting that no it isn’t a shame and yes, these things were a waste of rich people's money. So boo hoo. And you're right.
But. I will have to bind and gag my lefty self here and say something awkward. Stop squirming, lefty self.
Some of the coolest things Personkind has ever actually built could only have happened thanks to the vanities of rich people. Stinking rich people.
The Renaissance may arguably have been started by a local chap called Frank, pulling on some humble hessian and popping out to the job-seeking poor massing outside 12th century Florence to lift their spirits with a few creative skits but, let’s face it, the whole idea would basically be nowhere now without your Sistines and your St Peters and your dirty-great statements of power and cash.
The Uffizi and all the galleries of Europe would be two-thirds empty today, had it not been for bored rich bastards calling over the casually creatively colossal talents of Michelangelo and the gang and asking them to spruce up the back bedroom.
And St Francis himself was, after all, the bored son of a wealthy cloth merchant. How else d’you think he could have afforded all those pets?
---
The pyramids. The palace of Versailles. Jay Leno’s car collection – so many wonderous testimonies to human ability were actually built on the backs of slaves by rich men showing off.
The problem with stuff built for rich men showing off – apart from the whole slave thing – is that a defining element is always key: economy. These things invariably need impractical great glumps of cash pumped into them to keep them afloat.
Hydrogen certainly did not bring down the Zeppelins. Heavy money bags did. Or, to be more precise, the market for very expensive, very slow air travel very quickly sprung a leek and shriveled.
Really, did you need to spend all that extra time and airfare dragging a lounge pianist and a baby grand to Rio with you?
---
Ditteke Mensink’s film isn’t about airships. It’s about one particular airship and one particular journey it took – perhaps the spiritual daddy of them all, the Graf Zeppelin and her circumnavigation of August 1929.
I’ve read about this epic tale before. I remember Hugo Eckener laying his reputation on the line by trying to prove that one of eccentric old Baron Von Zeppelin’s weirdly compelling aeronautical grandchildren could even make such a trip. Eckener was a journalist on Friedrichshafen’s local rag, when he was sent to interview the crazy bloke who kept testing giant floating sausages over the lake.
Slowly captivated by the clunky poetry of the technology, young Hugo kept hanging around the Baron’s workshops, getting to know how to pilot these giant silver fish. Twenty years later, he was himself the face of the Zeppelin corporation and, in a way, an ambassador for his tentatively re-asserting homeland.
An interesting dynamic for the tireless Eckener turned out to be how his passion for this mode of travel – which may well have ended up as much a passion to see Germany symbolically reinvigorated and freed from reparation – found itself at the mercy of rich, powerful men. A few years later, Eckener was not happy about having to put Nazi swastikas on the fins of the mighty Hindenburg – and in 1929 he was not happy about having to shift the centrepoint of the Graf Zeppelin’s epic circle of the globe from his little Bodensee town to New York, at the behest of William Randalf Hearst. But the newspaper mogul was now paying for this adventure – and for a lot of global exposure. So Hugo sucked it up. Like a sensible old hack.
What I didn’t know was the too-good-to-be-true Hollywood human dimension to the trip. Lady Grace Drummond Hay.
On a trip that was entirely a PR stunt for various posturing chaps on a giant sausage, she was the only chick on board. And like a typical chick, she missed the point and spent the whole time mooning about an ex boyfriend. Cuh.
Of course, it didn’t help that he was on the bleedin’ blimp as well.
---
Grace was, of course, the meaningful heart of the expedition by the end. I think she made the most of those windows. And her telegraphed articles back to Hearst and the NYT turned out to be newspaper gold, transforming her into a star by the time she landed back at Lakehurst.
Her frank personal memoirs, ably voiced by Poppy Elliott, structured Mensink’s film and told of a young woman determined to be strong in a man’s world, but torn by a love that could never fully be. Which you are not to dismiss as soppy narrative slop there, I should say.
There this woman was, poised to be the first to circumnavigate the globe and to scoop her own story as a journo, and at the last minute, good old uncle Bill Randy wheels in a ‘mentor’ to go with her. And, pausing not a grumpy old bastard’s moment to reflect on how dispiriting, sexist and patronising this is for the girl, wheels in specifically, the love of her life – Karl Henry von Wiegand. A man with a troubled marriage, with whom she had had an affair a while before. And over whom, she had been struggling to get ever since.
Go figure. Poor thing. Actually, poor things. Locked up in a balloon for 21 days, trying hard to both be stoic and good, but breaking apart inside as the world slid by silently underneath – this wouldn’t be a Club 18–30 holiday for anyone. Tensions of many kinds stretch tautly across the story.
And, in fact, I wonder how he felt in the years afterwards. For they continued to work together, weirdly, and were even interned in a Japanese war camp together during WWII. She subsequently died of something tropical when they were released in 1943. He brought her ashes back to England after her funeral. And went on to live with the memory of this beautiful, eloquent, famous woman, the unattainable love of his life, until he was 84. As he said to her at the end of the Graf Zeppelin trip: “My dear trust me, you’re the lucky one.”
---
Looking through two different ages of image degredation – bleaches, speckled film and low bandwidth pixelation, the images are still moving. But it is definitely another world. A world of lobsters over Siberia and of a privileged, Modern world, slipping over the real world at a safe, well table-serviced altitude.
Still, it’s quite a story. Against the odds, and despite a few hairy moments, the Graf Zeppelin slid into Lakehurst, New Jersey after 21 days. She’d circled the Earth and made it back in one piece to a hero’s welcome.
She went on to have an unblemished service record across the Atlantic, as all civil Zeppelins did for that brief interwar period of history that is now gone.
---
This is a film of 80 minutes about a trip of 21 days.
I picked up a copy of The Golden Age of Exploration afterwards and looked again at the logo on the front, of a big circle round the Earth, and I wondered if I have come full circle in my thinking about this 80 minute record of 21 tracks.
Putting yourself out there is risky. Embarking on an adventure of PR can wind up with you looking an idiot. Or looking dead, if you’re really flying a home-made balloon contraption over the Himalayas.
I’d not remembered what it is like to put out a creative statement – to step up and have the nerve to tell people you’ve made something. Something of and for you. Just you. Not for a client, to fit some brief. Just, y’know, an exploration of your soul, ‘n’shit.
I had not, I should say, taken note of how much opinion I myself have on everything creative I’ve ever bought and loved. Turns out lots of people do this. And it’s harder to take than I remember, despite being apparently mentally prepared before hand that I walk a lonely creative road.
When young Calvin Harris blared in capitals all over Twitter that reviews of his new album this summer were all done by rich kids and idiots and that they should try putting two years of love and heart into a thing and then have rich idiots stamp all over it casually, while texting their rich mates about where to have lunch, I felt his pain. And I replied in Tweet by telling him he should try putting seven years of love and heart into a thing and then have “no bastard to listen to it”. Think that helped the boy calm down.
Hearing a good number of reviews from good chums honestly giving me feedback over the last fortnight, I have honestly wondered what to change about the record. Is the mix, after all, too rich?
I’m not sure what’s tougher to suck up – that one person says “blimey, it’s just too long, mate’ or that another doesn’t mention it at all. A surprising number of chums have, it seems, lives of their own to get on with, rather than a burning desire to call the bloke who works from home and thinks too much to tell him his home-made record has shifted their view of the universe on its axis. Funny.
Bless me, I’d hoped that more of them would feel excited enough to let me know either way, though. Or it may be that some can’t find the words and are hoping I’ll never mention it. Either way, I didn’t think for one moment I’d be up at night worrying about it.
But here’s the thing. Underneath the shock of completing something and having loved ones actually get to hear it and form a passing opinion on it, even one of indifference, I think I am back where I started. Back to thinking that the record I made is, um, almost exactly as it should be. I think I do know my creative mind. Even if it turns out I'm trapped in it.
Feedback has been so far very mixed on the negative front, and pretty universal on the positive. I can’t yet say for certain that I haven’t embarrassed myself – the real hope and fear – but I strongly suspect that I haven’t. No more than ususal. Not in the music, anyway.
I think... it’s good. And deliberate sounding. And likeable. And distinctive. And very 'me', apparently. And for whatever flimsy or solid reason, some at least seem to just love it.
You have to set out, in order to arrive. Adventure is risky. And I am a total idiot. But even if your passion is for a thing that ultimately has no sustainable future, that can't ultimately stay afloat, you have to follow your heart and take a risk.
And so you learn. And hopefully enlarge your view of the world.
Maybe I’m right back where I started. But maybe that’s okay. I feel fuller.
I may be fool. But I think I can’t wait to set out again.
I’ve done an album. You might have heard. I appear to have been going on about it somewhat.
But, as part of ‘doing an album’ – which I hope does not become known as ‘doing a Momo’ or anything like that in the future, implying as it does that completing another epic and completely pointless creative project has finally turned my name into a verb for folly – I have also ‘done an album cover’.
On this album cover is a circle. A thick circle like a perfect letter ‘o’ with an icon of an aircraft in the bottom of the ring. It’s a kind of logo, really, in homage to airport signage and travel iconography, all of which has long prompted me to feel strangely rude.
Now, it was only after I’d taken delivery of the printed preview covers that I realised how jolly clever I’d turned out to be.
So clever, I’d not noticed myself planning it. Though I have vowed now to tell everyone it was indeed a very consciously planned bit of symbolism, obviously. Because this little logo does rather represent the fact that the music itself comes full circle, starting and ending on the same little riff of music.
See?
>TAPS FORHEAD<
Jolly clever.
Interestingly, after almost two weeks of this little musical round trip being out there among its very first reviewers, freed from the bonds of the studio and taking first skittery Bambi steps out into the jaws of the wild, I find myself pondering the idea of coming full circle.
---
I watched a BBC4 documentary yesterday. The kind that stops me in my tracks when I see it on the iPlayer – and which makes the lovely first lady of Momo glance heavenward and leave the room.
I scooched into bed with the laptop to indulge myself for 80 minutes, during a lazy Saturday recovering from staying out way past our bed time – watching the blessed Annie Mac DJing in town. I can’t imagine that we didn’t just blend in naturally with everyone else there at the Orange Rooms, you understand, but I now wonder with hindsight whether being old enough to be everyone’s parents does, in fact, show. Especially if you’re a parent that really gets off on black and white archive documentaries about Zeppelins.
D’you think that stuff shows? Okay, so I’ll admit that tweed was probably a little hot for the occasion anyway.
Yes - Zeppelins. Or, in this case, one particular Zeppelin.
Airships are another weird fetish that I suspect more people share than I once knew. I have said many times, and you have probably heard me do so wistfully yourself, while you left the room, that I have a memory of the old Goodyear blimp droning over my primary school in Bournemouth one summer.
It haunted the south coast that year I recall, and the balmy evening when it actually slid very slowly behind the trees in our back garden was like some kind of moment of worlds meeting worlds – where heavenly creatures reveal themselves to little boys and descend into their little fenced existences for a fleeting, orb-eyed moment, exhilarating their little legs into carrying them indoors shouting: “Mummymummy! You’ll never guess what’s in the garden Mummy!”
I wasn’t dragged through the catflap in an orange hue, thankfully. And Mum didn’t have to run outside and scream at a Wyoming skyscape and then climb Table Mountain to get me back. We went outside and looked up and the sheepish blimp took an underpowered age to move off, I seem to remember. Which was just fine.
Which was, in fact, just wonderful.
---
The hook is, I guess, that airships are a giant, floating, looming, spellbinding reminder of a different age – an age that had technology we now don’t. Like the seventies and Concord, or the sixties and the moon rockets. Or the eighties and Betamax video recorders – we used to be able to do this amazing stuff and now we simply can’t. Isn’t this a bit remiss?
Isn’t this a crying shame, in fact?
Or were these things all gigantic, indulgent follies?
Well, the ardent pragmatist in you is protesting that no it isn’t a shame and yes, these things were a waste of rich people's money. So boo hoo. And you're right.
But. I will have to bind and gag my lefty self here and say something awkward. Stop squirming, lefty self.
Some of the coolest things Personkind has ever actually built could only have happened thanks to the vanities of rich people. Stinking rich people.
The Renaissance may arguably have been started by a local chap called Frank, pulling on some humble hessian and popping out to the job-seeking poor massing outside 12th century Florence to lift their spirits with a few creative skits but, let’s face it, the whole idea would basically be nowhere now without your Sistines and your St Peters and your dirty-great statements of power and cash.
The Uffizi and all the galleries of Europe would be two-thirds empty today, had it not been for bored rich bastards calling over the casually creatively colossal talents of Michelangelo and the gang and asking them to spruce up the back bedroom.
And St Francis himself was, after all, the bored son of a wealthy cloth merchant. How else d’you think he could have afforded all those pets?
---
The pyramids. The palace of Versailles. Jay Leno’s car collection – so many wonderous testimonies to human ability were actually built on the backs of slaves by rich men showing off.
The problem with stuff built for rich men showing off – apart from the whole slave thing – is that a defining element is always key: economy. These things invariably need impractical great glumps of cash pumped into them to keep them afloat.
Hydrogen certainly did not bring down the Zeppelins. Heavy money bags did. Or, to be more precise, the market for very expensive, very slow air travel very quickly sprung a leek and shriveled.
Really, did you need to spend all that extra time and airfare dragging a lounge pianist and a baby grand to Rio with you?
---
Ditteke Mensink’s film isn’t about airships. It’s about one particular airship and one particular journey it took – perhaps the spiritual daddy of them all, the Graf Zeppelin and her circumnavigation of August 1929.
I’ve read about this epic tale before. I remember Hugo Eckener laying his reputation on the line by trying to prove that one of eccentric old Baron Von Zeppelin’s weirdly compelling aeronautical grandchildren could even make such a trip. Eckener was a journalist on Friedrichshafen’s local rag, when he was sent to interview the crazy bloke who kept testing giant floating sausages over the lake.
Slowly captivated by the clunky poetry of the technology, young Hugo kept hanging around the Baron’s workshops, getting to know how to pilot these giant silver fish. Twenty years later, he was himself the face of the Zeppelin corporation and, in a way, an ambassador for his tentatively re-asserting homeland.
An interesting dynamic for the tireless Eckener turned out to be how his passion for this mode of travel – which may well have ended up as much a passion to see Germany symbolically reinvigorated and freed from reparation – found itself at the mercy of rich, powerful men. A few years later, Eckener was not happy about having to put Nazi swastikas on the fins of the mighty Hindenburg – and in 1929 he was not happy about having to shift the centrepoint of the Graf Zeppelin’s epic circle of the globe from his little Bodensee town to New York, at the behest of William Randalf Hearst. But the newspaper mogul was now paying for this adventure – and for a lot of global exposure. So Hugo sucked it up. Like a sensible old hack.
What I didn’t know was the too-good-to-be-true Hollywood human dimension to the trip. Lady Grace Drummond Hay.
On a trip that was entirely a PR stunt for various posturing chaps on a giant sausage, she was the only chick on board. And like a typical chick, she missed the point and spent the whole time mooning about an ex boyfriend. Cuh.
Of course, it didn’t help that he was on the bleedin’ blimp as well.
---
Grace was, of course, the meaningful heart of the expedition by the end. I think she made the most of those windows. And her telegraphed articles back to Hearst and the NYT turned out to be newspaper gold, transforming her into a star by the time she landed back at Lakehurst.
Her frank personal memoirs, ably voiced by Poppy Elliott, structured Mensink’s film and told of a young woman determined to be strong in a man’s world, but torn by a love that could never fully be. Which you are not to dismiss as soppy narrative slop there, I should say.
There this woman was, poised to be the first to circumnavigate the globe and to scoop her own story as a journo, and at the last minute, good old uncle Bill Randy wheels in a ‘mentor’ to go with her. And, pausing not a grumpy old bastard’s moment to reflect on how dispiriting, sexist and patronising this is for the girl, wheels in specifically, the love of her life – Karl Henry von Wiegand. A man with a troubled marriage, with whom she had had an affair a while before. And over whom, she had been struggling to get ever since.
Go figure. Poor thing. Actually, poor things. Locked up in a balloon for 21 days, trying hard to both be stoic and good, but breaking apart inside as the world slid by silently underneath – this wouldn’t be a Club 18–30 holiday for anyone. Tensions of many kinds stretch tautly across the story.
And, in fact, I wonder how he felt in the years afterwards. For they continued to work together, weirdly, and were even interned in a Japanese war camp together during WWII. She subsequently died of something tropical when they were released in 1943. He brought her ashes back to England after her funeral. And went on to live with the memory of this beautiful, eloquent, famous woman, the unattainable love of his life, until he was 84. As he said to her at the end of the Graf Zeppelin trip: “My dear trust me, you’re the lucky one.”
---
Looking through two different ages of image degredation – bleaches, speckled film and low bandwidth pixelation, the images are still moving. But it is definitely another world. A world of lobsters over Siberia and of a privileged, Modern world, slipping over the real world at a safe, well table-serviced altitude.
Still, it’s quite a story. Against the odds, and despite a few hairy moments, the Graf Zeppelin slid into Lakehurst, New Jersey after 21 days. She’d circled the Earth and made it back in one piece to a hero’s welcome.
She went on to have an unblemished service record across the Atlantic, as all civil Zeppelins did for that brief interwar period of history that is now gone.
---
This is a film of 80 minutes about a trip of 21 days.
I picked up a copy of The Golden Age of Exploration afterwards and looked again at the logo on the front, of a big circle round the Earth, and I wondered if I have come full circle in my thinking about this 80 minute record of 21 tracks.
Putting yourself out there is risky. Embarking on an adventure of PR can wind up with you looking an idiot. Or looking dead, if you’re really flying a home-made balloon contraption over the Himalayas.
I’d not remembered what it is like to put out a creative statement – to step up and have the nerve to tell people you’ve made something. Something of and for you. Just you. Not for a client, to fit some brief. Just, y’know, an exploration of your soul, ‘n’shit.
I had not, I should say, taken note of how much opinion I myself have on everything creative I’ve ever bought and loved. Turns out lots of people do this. And it’s harder to take than I remember, despite being apparently mentally prepared before hand that I walk a lonely creative road.
When young Calvin Harris blared in capitals all over Twitter that reviews of his new album this summer were all done by rich kids and idiots and that they should try putting two years of love and heart into a thing and then have rich idiots stamp all over it casually, while texting their rich mates about where to have lunch, I felt his pain. And I replied in Tweet by telling him he should try putting seven years of love and heart into a thing and then have “no bastard to listen to it”. Think that helped the boy calm down.
Hearing a good number of reviews from good chums honestly giving me feedback over the last fortnight, I have honestly wondered what to change about the record. Is the mix, after all, too rich?
I’m not sure what’s tougher to suck up – that one person says “blimey, it’s just too long, mate’ or that another doesn’t mention it at all. A surprising number of chums have, it seems, lives of their own to get on with, rather than a burning desire to call the bloke who works from home and thinks too much to tell him his home-made record has shifted their view of the universe on its axis. Funny.
Bless me, I’d hoped that more of them would feel excited enough to let me know either way, though. Or it may be that some can’t find the words and are hoping I’ll never mention it. Either way, I didn’t think for one moment I’d be up at night worrying about it.
But here’s the thing. Underneath the shock of completing something and having loved ones actually get to hear it and form a passing opinion on it, even one of indifference, I think I am back where I started. Back to thinking that the record I made is, um, almost exactly as it should be. I think I do know my creative mind. Even if it turns out I'm trapped in it.
Feedback has been so far very mixed on the negative front, and pretty universal on the positive. I can’t yet say for certain that I haven’t embarrassed myself – the real hope and fear – but I strongly suspect that I haven’t. No more than ususal. Not in the music, anyway.
I think... it’s good. And deliberate sounding. And likeable. And distinctive. And very 'me', apparently. And for whatever flimsy or solid reason, some at least seem to just love it.
You have to set out, in order to arrive. Adventure is risky. And I am a total idiot. But even if your passion is for a thing that ultimately has no sustainable future, that can't ultimately stay afloat, you have to follow your heart and take a risk.
And so you learn. And hopefully enlarge your view of the world.
Maybe I’m right back where I started. But maybe that’s okay. I feel fuller.
I may be fool. But I think I can’t wait to set out again.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
600.
600.
Years of solitude?
Reasons to give up and go home?
Pounds heavier?
No, tweets. I posted my six hundredth tweet this morning. ..Passingly interested in what it said? Thought not. Here it is:
"DID YOU HEAR? IT'S CHUFFING DONE!"
Let's just wait a moment there.
>WRY STARE<
Yep?
>MORE WRY STARE<
Yep. Really.
I have burned the first complete and approved preview copy of The Golden Age of Exploration. It is, indeed, chuffing done.
Wanna copy?
---
Years of solitude?
Reasons to give up and go home?
Pounds heavier?
No, tweets. I posted my six hundredth tweet this morning. ..Passingly interested in what it said? Thought not. Here it is:
"DID YOU HEAR? IT'S CHUFFING DONE!"
Let's just wait a moment there.
>WRY STARE<
Yep?
>MORE WRY STARE<
Yep. Really.
I have burned the first complete and approved preview copy of The Golden Age of Exploration. It is, indeed, chuffing done.
Wanna copy?
---
Friday, January 29, 2010
Label gun to the head.
Label gun to the head.
I've tried to develop a rule. A rule about getting angry with people. One that sounds nifty and sensible, but which I find falls over immediately when it comes face to face with a particular group of people. Or my actual moral capacity.
Bankers.
Now, before embarking on my rank banking rant, the real detail of interest here is that, whatever I may think, I evidently feel the need to deploy the phrase 'group of people'.
Ah, nothing feels better when you're on your inexplicably high (and presumably wobbly) horse than to herd a group of people together and jab a finger at them repeatedly.
"THERE! THERE they are. THEY. THEM. OVER THERE. LOOK, LOOK AT THEM, all there with their, their... bloody whassnames and their, their... ruddy THINGS. JEER. JEER AT THEM."
>CONTENTED SIGH<
It's just so much simpler.
---
Somewhere in the honest light of this, my clever and upright-sounding rule about losing one's rag with someone clears its throat and meekly says this: that I should, in the heat of disagreement, take care not to label the disagree-ee with my accusations and colourful judgements.
..And then. JUST when you think you have those around you treated jolly well – with a friendly hello in the baker's (if you're in the mood), or an occasional Big Issue purchase (if you haven't already crossed the street because you didn't want to break a tenner), or an effusive thankyou to a friend who's just cooked you a free slap-up meal (after moaning before arriving about having to turn out that night) – along come some bloody, ruddy, depraved, soulless, evil, murdering bankers.
Arrived with the sole purpose of upsetting your nice moral equilibrium. The bastards.
---
Why I'm so hot under the collar about the banking system I have no idea. I can barely work Sage or send the occasional invoice. It's not like I understand a thing the markets are going on about. And our household and business has fared okay over the last year. I have not a thing to actually complain about.
But really. With so many millions of people across the world in debt up to their receding hairlines because we've all been encouraged to keep spending like the dialysis machine will implode if we don't, the corporate banking sector seems willfully disconnected from the rest of humanity.
Ah. And there. How stealthy is the private human urge to segregate – to create Them and Us. We can so nearly blame The Bankers for segregating themselves. Can't we? Can't we?
In a year of calamitous financial cock-ups that bared to all the wildly childish level of responsibility that the current, laxly-regulated global banking culture seems to stimulate, the Clever Chaps At The Top Who We Desperately Need To Retain With Reasonable Incentives – and who incidentally CAUSED the apparent near-collapse of all we pinned our fiscal hopes to – decide to keep paying themselves EXTRA payments on top of their bulging salaries. In the full glare of the media. Of us little people judging them. Jabbing our bony, underfed fingers at them.
They don't appear to care. Or they really don't see. Which are sort of the same thing.
Or, I suspect more realistically, none of the people closely involved in this whole tedious drama quite has the courage to challenge things so fundamentally. I'd be nervous. And selfishly so.
I mean, here's the point: Mercs are like, really comfortable in the back. And nicely soundproofed. You can really feel lulled to slumber in there. I'm not sure I'd want to be woken up. Would you?
---
I found myself ranting on Twitter this morning in the sort of annoying way that ruins your followers' feeds with endless repetitions of your tedious icon. For the record, here are those tweets:
I'm not in Davos, just to be clear. Much as the banking heads of Earth implored me to come and tell them again how angry they make us all.
Eloquent as my Davos speech would have been, peppered with colourful oaths and gathering purpleness of face, I fear pearls to swine.
If a group of vulgarly well-paid adults with saturated access to 24hour news media can't sense the need for SOME symbolic gestures...
ONE year. Just ONE year without bonuses. Everyone in banking - one year. The one where people are losing jobs and businesses are folding.
Is it so hard – to give up one year of EXTRA money? Is solidarity or just seemliness incomprehensible to senior banking culture? Apparently.
Use one year's bonuses across the banking sector to wipe the debts of others. Go on. Try to get your heads around that. Just ONE year.
"We must retain the brightest talent with disproportionately, offensively large additional payments." Really? Go on, really?
Banks want to attract and retain soullessness, do they? What else would a clear dependency on bonus cash at any cost do to people?
Sack the top tier of bankers. If they can't function for a humble year – a year now gone already - without bonus, lose them. Why not?
Well, yes – why not? Have a spring clean. Promote from within. Warn the new guys not to break the banking system this time, but let them have a go. A healthy step up for these chaps could still cost way less than the bloated funds pouring through the coffers of some top individuals at the moment, and they might have a few new ideas. Make the generation above sweat a little. That's capitalism, baby.
I'm an idiot. Which means I not only do not understand these things, I am also far too comfortable with failure. So, y'know – do not take my advice about anything.
But a wise-sounding wit I used to work with once said something to the effect of this: When a task you're hopeless at gets taken from you, it's just a relief, isn't it?
Ah, how I sit in the studio and soberly ponder this every day.
Anyway.
Don't strike the Banking Bastards from society. Don't write them off as humans. Invite them back into the group. Coax them back from There to Here. Relabel their foreheads from Them to Us. Then lower the label gun.
Just, for the love of all that's sensible, make some of them stop banking.
I've tried to develop a rule. A rule about getting angry with people. One that sounds nifty and sensible, but which I find falls over immediately when it comes face to face with a particular group of people. Or my actual moral capacity.
Bankers.
Now, before embarking on my rank banking rant, the real detail of interest here is that, whatever I may think, I evidently feel the need to deploy the phrase 'group of people'.
Ah, nothing feels better when you're on your inexplicably high (and presumably wobbly) horse than to herd a group of people together and jab a finger at them repeatedly.
"THERE! THERE they are. THEY. THEM. OVER THERE. LOOK, LOOK AT THEM, all there with their, their... bloody whassnames and their, their... ruddy THINGS. JEER. JEER AT THEM."
>CONTENTED SIGH<
It's just so much simpler.
---
Somewhere in the honest light of this, my clever and upright-sounding rule about losing one's rag with someone clears its throat and meekly says this: that I should, in the heat of disagreement, take care not to label the disagree-ee with my accusations and colourful judgements.
Whuh?
I mean, to me there's a difference between shouting at someone that they have been acting like something unmentionable, and shouting at someone that they are something unmentionable. Despite the fact that you've clearly mentioned it very loudly.
Really?
If you've gotten to the stage where you really are actually shouting at someone, then you've probably already entered the taped-off room labeled Academic Arguments, when it comes to exactly how you're framing the tense of your abuse as you pick up the chair.
But it's a detail of internal perspective that seems important, because it may govern how you or I see and therefore treat those around us.
Arrived with the sole purpose of upsetting your nice moral equilibrium. The bastards.
---
Why I'm so hot under the collar about the banking system I have no idea. I can barely work Sage or send the occasional invoice. It's not like I understand a thing the markets are going on about. And our household and business has fared okay over the last year. I have not a thing to actually complain about.
But really. With so many millions of people across the world in debt up to their receding hairlines because we've all been encouraged to keep spending like the dialysis machine will implode if we don't, the corporate banking sector seems willfully disconnected from the rest of humanity.
Ah. And there. How stealthy is the private human urge to segregate – to create Them and Us. We can so nearly blame The Bankers for segregating themselves. Can't we? Can't we?
In a year of calamitous financial cock-ups that bared to all the wildly childish level of responsibility that the current, laxly-regulated global banking culture seems to stimulate, the Clever Chaps At The Top Who We Desperately Need To Retain With Reasonable Incentives – and who incidentally CAUSED the apparent near-collapse of all we pinned our fiscal hopes to – decide to keep paying themselves EXTRA payments on top of their bulging salaries. In the full glare of the media. Of us little people judging them. Jabbing our bony, underfed fingers at them.
They don't appear to care. Or they really don't see. Which are sort of the same thing.
Or, I suspect more realistically, none of the people closely involved in this whole tedious drama quite has the courage to challenge things so fundamentally. I'd be nervous. And selfishly so.
I mean, here's the point: Mercs are like, really comfortable in the back. And nicely soundproofed. You can really feel lulled to slumber in there. I'm not sure I'd want to be woken up. Would you?
---
I found myself ranting on Twitter this morning in the sort of annoying way that ruins your followers' feeds with endless repetitions of your tedious icon. For the record, here are those tweets:
I'm not in Davos, just to be clear. Much as the banking heads of Earth implored me to come and tell them again how angry they make us all.
Eloquent as my Davos speech would have been, peppered with colourful oaths and gathering purpleness of face, I fear pearls to swine.
If a group of vulgarly well-paid adults with saturated access to 24hour news media can't sense the need for SOME symbolic gestures...
ONE year. Just ONE year without bonuses. Everyone in banking - one year. The one where people are losing jobs and businesses are folding.
Is it so hard – to give up one year of EXTRA money? Is solidarity or just seemliness incomprehensible to senior banking culture? Apparently.
Use one year's bonuses across the banking sector to wipe the debts of others. Go on. Try to get your heads around that. Just ONE year.
"We must retain the brightest talent with disproportionately, offensively large additional payments." Really? Go on, really?
Banks want to attract and retain soullessness, do they? What else would a clear dependency on bonus cash at any cost do to people?
Sack the top tier of bankers. If they can't function for a humble year – a year now gone already - without bonus, lose them. Why not?
Well, yes – why not? Have a spring clean. Promote from within. Warn the new guys not to break the banking system this time, but let them have a go. A healthy step up for these chaps could still cost way less than the bloated funds pouring through the coffers of some top individuals at the moment, and they might have a few new ideas. Make the generation above sweat a little. That's capitalism, baby.
I'm an idiot. Which means I not only do not understand these things, I am also far too comfortable with failure. So, y'know – do not take my advice about anything.
But a wise-sounding wit I used to work with once said something to the effect of this: When a task you're hopeless at gets taken from you, it's just a relief, isn't it?
Ah, how I sit in the studio and soberly ponder this every day.
Anyway.
Don't strike the Banking Bastards from society. Don't write them off as humans. Invite them back into the group. Coax them back from There to Here. Relabel their foreheads from Them to Us. Then lower the label gun.
Just, for the love of all that's sensible, make some of them stop banking.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
The Trojan white elephant in the room.
The Trojan white elephant in the room.
It's getting rapidly to the point where I can't turn back. There will be no hiding. It will be out there. It will be exposed.
Now, they say that when something giantically obvious but awkward exists between people, their mutual or group instinct to not mention it to eachother is like having an elephant in the room. But I doubt this. I think it's probably a poor analogy.
I think that even if you and your fellow awkwardees did instinctively swear an unspoken pact to not mention the inexplicable presence of a three-and-a-half metre tall, eight-ton African land mammal in your kitchen diner, as it casually overturned your pine dresser with an inadvertent tusk swing, the direction of your conversation would eventually slide.
I think that your noble English understatement would be somewhat undermined by the fact that your floor's integrity suddenly would be.
And anyway, I think that the elephant would be too smart to play along. I think it would politely but firmly clear its throat. And prod a trunk at the pile of letters from the WWF asking you how you intend to look after it.
---
It makes me wonder though. If the ancient Trojans had adopted this marvelously oblique and English attitude, would Troy have turned out differently – "What big horse?". Or is this attitude exactly how Troy was allowed to be finished and put on theatrical release in the first place?
I mean, surely only an unnaturally developed ability to ignore the bleedin' obvious could have gotten some of the film crew through some days of that film production, screened again lastnight on Channel 5.
You can hear the execs talking about the idea in pre-production meets and all slavering in agreement: "a huge cast of absurdly pretty, famous people, supported by a secondary cast of respected elder voice-over actors, all dressed to the nines in ancient world finery, with a bunch of epic battles and a couple of shots of Brad Pitt's butt – what's not perfect? What?"
Yeah. Right. Nothing. Except for the small detail that the whole thing's a stinking embarrassment of an idea.
Really, it's a howler. Watch it again sometime. You won't make it as far as the ruddy horse. We didn't. It's clearly a very slow horse.
And what we've learned is that the easiest elephants in the room to ignore are clearly the white ones.
----
Now. You may be wondering why I'm pondering the subject of epic ineptitude.
Well. Glad you ask. And you're there ahead of me, obviously. Because it won't be long before I'm quietly rolling out the red carpet to the premier of an epic production of my own.
Inviting the stars along. Gurning smugly at the paps outside. Winking at the reviewers. Straightening the sleek bow tie. Making the lovely first lady of Momo slip on some preposterously expensive evening wear. As if that's different to usual.
Because I have begun the final, unnerving, dispiriting process of doing the final mixes for The Golden Age of Exploration.
And I'm wondering if it's possible to hide behind the massive bulk of a white elephant when the rotten cabbages start raining onto the stage.
---
Now, now. I'm not being disingenuous. As I step back in the studio and try to take one more honest look at the canvas, like most artists, I vacillate between thinking I'm looking at a masterpiece and wondering if I'm actually staring blankly at Aphrodite at the waterhole, by that famous Parisian sculptor, Tony Hancock.
It's neither, of course. I'm exaggerating for comic effect. Really – I do that from time to time. True story. It's a collection of tunes that are, I suspect, cheekily likable.
But, as someone of a more effortlessly hip demographic might put it with withering efficiency, likeable ≠ credible.
The last time I rolled out the red carpet for a production of mine was August 2001. Just a couple of weeks before 9/11, I happily invited all and sundry down to Cranleigh's church hall for the launch event of a little 'space opera' all about an unexpected terrorist attack on an Earth of the future. Whole thing starts with a massive explosion sound. Friends came. A handful stayed and listened to the whole darned two-and-a-half hours of electronica and drama – a kind of loving cross between Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds and Blake's 7. Which, be honest, you secretly think sounds brilliant. And if I'm secretly honest back, I think was kind of groovy. It was also, after four toiling years of my life, essentially a very long bedroom demo, featuring many of my mates in lead roles, and a lot of very inadequate recording techniques, plus a number of shaky moments in the script.
I had a blast, of course. And was crushed because Chaser was basically pointless, of course.
Well, I wasn't really. But imagine the pressure now, after seven years of prep. Especially given the fact that I'm claiming The Golden Age of Exploration as more than just a worthy creative demo this time, but in fact A Musical Product That Will Actually Be Released For Purchase. All be it via iTunes to a fan base that doesn't exist beyond the Thinking Juice studio and a single inexplicable but friendly chap in the Czech Republic.
I've mixed three tracks so far. Spent most of Friday working on one enormous song near the start of the album that I'm trying to convince myself is not a wildly ill-advised bit of pop melodrama.
Dear me, three tracks in and I'm wondering if I'm wasting my time. Or whether I'll do what I always do and press on, finish it, invite people and pray they don't mention the giant white elephant in the room.
Thankfully, most of my close friends are English. Doubt they'll have the heart to say anything.
It's getting rapidly to the point where I can't turn back. There will be no hiding. It will be out there. It will be exposed.
Now, they say that when something giantically obvious but awkward exists between people, their mutual or group instinct to not mention it to eachother is like having an elephant in the room. But I doubt this. I think it's probably a poor analogy.
I think that even if you and your fellow awkwardees did instinctively swear an unspoken pact to not mention the inexplicable presence of a three-and-a-half metre tall, eight-ton African land mammal in your kitchen diner, as it casually overturned your pine dresser with an inadvertent tusk swing, the direction of your conversation would eventually slide.
I think that your noble English understatement would be somewhat undermined by the fact that your floor's integrity suddenly would be.
And anyway, I think that the elephant would be too smart to play along. I think it would politely but firmly clear its throat. And prod a trunk at the pile of letters from the WWF asking you how you intend to look after it.
---
It makes me wonder though. If the ancient Trojans had adopted this marvelously oblique and English attitude, would Troy have turned out differently – "What big horse?". Or is this attitude exactly how Troy was allowed to be finished and put on theatrical release in the first place?
I mean, surely only an unnaturally developed ability to ignore the bleedin' obvious could have gotten some of the film crew through some days of that film production, screened again lastnight on Channel 5.
You can hear the execs talking about the idea in pre-production meets and all slavering in agreement: "a huge cast of absurdly pretty, famous people, supported by a secondary cast of respected elder voice-over actors, all dressed to the nines in ancient world finery, with a bunch of epic battles and a couple of shots of Brad Pitt's butt – what's not perfect? What?"
Yeah. Right. Nothing. Except for the small detail that the whole thing's a stinking embarrassment of an idea.
Really, it's a howler. Watch it again sometime. You won't make it as far as the ruddy horse. We didn't. It's clearly a very slow horse.
And what we've learned is that the easiest elephants in the room to ignore are clearly the white ones.
----
Now. You may be wondering why I'm pondering the subject of epic ineptitude.
Well. Glad you ask. And you're there ahead of me, obviously. Because it won't be long before I'm quietly rolling out the red carpet to the premier of an epic production of my own.
Inviting the stars along. Gurning smugly at the paps outside. Winking at the reviewers. Straightening the sleek bow tie. Making the lovely first lady of Momo slip on some preposterously expensive evening wear. As if that's different to usual.
Because I have begun the final, unnerving, dispiriting process of doing the final mixes for The Golden Age of Exploration.
And I'm wondering if it's possible to hide behind the massive bulk of a white elephant when the rotten cabbages start raining onto the stage.
---
Now, now. I'm not being disingenuous. As I step back in the studio and try to take one more honest look at the canvas, like most artists, I vacillate between thinking I'm looking at a masterpiece and wondering if I'm actually staring blankly at Aphrodite at the waterhole, by that famous Parisian sculptor, Tony Hancock.
It's neither, of course. I'm exaggerating for comic effect. Really – I do that from time to time. True story. It's a collection of tunes that are, I suspect, cheekily likable.
But, as someone of a more effortlessly hip demographic might put it with withering efficiency, likeable ≠ credible.
The last time I rolled out the red carpet for a production of mine was August 2001. Just a couple of weeks before 9/11, I happily invited all and sundry down to Cranleigh's church hall for the launch event of a little 'space opera' all about an unexpected terrorist attack on an Earth of the future. Whole thing starts with a massive explosion sound. Friends came. A handful stayed and listened to the whole darned two-and-a-half hours of electronica and drama – a kind of loving cross between Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds and Blake's 7. Which, be honest, you secretly think sounds brilliant. And if I'm secretly honest back, I think was kind of groovy. It was also, after four toiling years of my life, essentially a very long bedroom demo, featuring many of my mates in lead roles, and a lot of very inadequate recording techniques, plus a number of shaky moments in the script.
I had a blast, of course. And was crushed because Chaser was basically pointless, of course.
Well, I wasn't really. But imagine the pressure now, after seven years of prep. Especially given the fact that I'm claiming The Golden Age of Exploration as more than just a worthy creative demo this time, but in fact A Musical Product That Will Actually Be Released For Purchase. All be it via iTunes to a fan base that doesn't exist beyond the Thinking Juice studio and a single inexplicable but friendly chap in the Czech Republic.
I've mixed three tracks so far. Spent most of Friday working on one enormous song near the start of the album that I'm trying to convince myself is not a wildly ill-advised bit of pop melodrama.
Dear me, three tracks in and I'm wondering if I'm wasting my time. Or whether I'll do what I always do and press on, finish it, invite people and pray they don't mention the giant white elephant in the room.
Thankfully, most of my close friends are English. Doubt they'll have the heart to say anything.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Thaw and theodicy.
Thaw and theodicy.
Fifteen days in, as the snows at last begin to subside across the treacherous, inconvenient winter wonderland of the UK, it's still hard to accept the fact that Christmas really is over and it's now 2010. After all the digging out and mucking in and helping hands and freezing feet, it's the future. We're here, living in it. Officially.
This week, however, the people most on our minds must surely be those in the Caribbean who have been blasted back to the middle ages. Of all the places to suffer a natural catastrophe of such magnitude, Haiti was perhaps the least prepared in the western hemisphere to cope with Tuesday's earthquake.
With at least 50,000 people dead as a result of that 30-second 7.0 magnitude shock, horribly close to the centre and surface of Port Au Prince, further millions have been practically displaced around the dense capital.
Think about those figures. That's like half the people of Bournemouth gone – just gone. And at least three or four times as many people who live in the entire Christchurch, Bournemouth and Poole area made homeless. Imagine every street around you shaken apart like that.
Well, you can't. Probably. Either because you don't live in Bournemouth or because you do and all you can think about at the prospect of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hitting the town is that at last the bloody Imax might fall down. Or possibly the BIC, if you're still holding that grudge.
And I'm certain that you're unlikely to be reading this from a city with most of its inhabitants living in shanty shacks trembling their way up the surrounding hillsides in the hope that one day millions of jobs will magically appear for everyone who moved there from the deforested, flooded, wrecked economies of the countryside.
So we can't realistically imagine what's going on over there, despite all the footage. Bodies piling in the street do not look the same on the telly as they do at the junction of Arnewood and Paisley Roads.
---
It's been a country of poverty and revolution, of sorts, for centuries.
The island now divided into western Haiti and eastern Dominican Republic was 'found' by heroic imperial land-nicker himself Chris Columbus in 1492 – a year in which he seemed to pack an inordinate amount in, given the woeful lack of international travel and broadband speeds at the time – and became a Spanish settlement. Everyone in Haiti today speaks French you'll notice observantly, however, because the Spanish sort of gave away the mountainous end of the island to the French near the end of the 17th century. Probably lost it in a card game or somesuch over coffee.
Interestingly, it was the first place on Earth, it seems, to have been overthrown by black slaves and to have subsequently abolished slavery. Napoleon's own brother-in-law couldn't retake the country and it became fully independent in 1804. Though why being Napoleon's brother-in-law should be any gauge of military competence is anyone's guess; Lord knows what some blokes have to do to keep their wives happy. Especially potty, pint-sized despots – they're bound to attract some high maintenance skirt.
The sad truth is that Haiti seems to have been defined by dictatorship, coups and political instability ever since. And that ALWAYS leads to financial stability and a healthy middle class, right? Especially when there's American money sewn up in the interests of the country somewhere too.
After some twenty years of military take-overs vying with fledgling democracy on and off, Haiti was famously hit by a particularly severe hurricane season for the island in 2008. Floods killed hundreds. Mudslides from the bare hills and mountains stripped of their meager wood value just slooped into the roads and towns, wrecking infrastructure. The DEC and other overseas aid agency alliances together raised some $1billion-worth of support at the time.
And today they're launching another appeal. Because today, Haiti is on its knees.
---
Interesting turn of phrase that.
It's not long before you hear the G-word somewhere in the face of such rampant, apparently very precisely unfair suffering. God. And two and a half centuries ago was no different, with one particular debate about divine purpose and suffering flaring into comedy. With absolutely no reference to Dante.
Rapier French wit, Voltaire – so cuttingly funny the French kicked him out and sent him to live in the more satirically-minded London – lampooned and lambasted Enlightenment-tinged theology of the day in his bawdy tale of Candide, published first in 1759. The absurd Dr Pangloss in this rip-roaring cross between Tom Jones and Private Eye was famously a caricature of Gottfried Leibniz – a right brain-box, polymath and contemporary rival of Newton, who also rather smugly invented the word 'theodicy'.
Nice, isn't it? Theodicy.
I imagined it was spelt theodyssey and pictured a glittering, disco gospel supergroup. Google thought I was looking for information on Homer.
Most appropriately of all, perhaps, it doesn't half sound like theo-idiocy and it's not to be confused with theodolite which was then an emerging tool of engineering, of sorts. Which is interesting because theodicy concerns itself with divine engineering, of sorts.
Put overly simply, it's the idea that God – if he is, after all, God – must know what he's doing and that therefore: "if you think THIS world's shite, you should see the ones he discarded, mate. Sheesh."
In other words, as Dr Pangloss keeps saying throughout Voltaire's biting little book, we are, dear fellows, living in the "best of all possible worlds."
..It's an argument from a very different age to ours philosophically, of course. It has, I suspect, rather lost its debatory heat for the average Celebrity Big Brother watcher.
But it still resonates a theme that is, I think, eternal – ie: "God, WTF?!"
---
As I've sat and watched the inconsolably hard images from Port Au Prince this week, lost for words, a detached, academic little part of my head has imagined countless people of faith this week trying hard once again to, as Voltaire often put it, 'let God off the hook' on this one.
The 9.0-factor Lisbon earthquake and subsequent tsunami of 1755 was the disaster that resonated for him; how could God allow such carnage? And how could posh blokes in Europe straighten their wigs calmly and try to explain away the theological injustice of it?
Interesting then, that so many of the top UK aid agencies, represented by the DEC, are faith-based, like Christian Aid, Cafod or Tearfund.
I don't know about you, but I wonder whether a little bit of anger about such horror is sort of the point. I wonder if the person who wants to shout at the sky and to prove their concern gets on a plane and goes to pull people out of the rubble and clear away the countless dead and feed the countless hungry and try to find out what human cock-ups made the situation far worse, is actually articulating God.
As perverse as it sounds, while we're sincerely tackling the intellectual pain of being alive in radio studios and online forums, God may well be out there with his sleeves rolled up, tending to the survivors.
It is perverse. In my head. But something about that idea warms the freezing cold idea of suffering in my heart. ..Which still misses the point if it doesn't warm all the way to my hands and feet; they are, I suspect God might say, the best tools to articulate love with.
And how many people need that of us today, whatever we believe.
Fifteen days in, as the snows at last begin to subside across the treacherous, inconvenient winter wonderland of the UK, it's still hard to accept the fact that Christmas really is over and it's now 2010. After all the digging out and mucking in and helping hands and freezing feet, it's the future. We're here, living in it. Officially.
This week, however, the people most on our minds must surely be those in the Caribbean who have been blasted back to the middle ages. Of all the places to suffer a natural catastrophe of such magnitude, Haiti was perhaps the least prepared in the western hemisphere to cope with Tuesday's earthquake.
With at least 50,000 people dead as a result of that 30-second 7.0 magnitude shock, horribly close to the centre and surface of Port Au Prince, further millions have been practically displaced around the dense capital.
Think about those figures. That's like half the people of Bournemouth gone – just gone. And at least three or four times as many people who live in the entire Christchurch, Bournemouth and Poole area made homeless. Imagine every street around you shaken apart like that.
Well, you can't. Probably. Either because you don't live in Bournemouth or because you do and all you can think about at the prospect of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hitting the town is that at last the bloody Imax might fall down. Or possibly the BIC, if you're still holding that grudge.
And I'm certain that you're unlikely to be reading this from a city with most of its inhabitants living in shanty shacks trembling their way up the surrounding hillsides in the hope that one day millions of jobs will magically appear for everyone who moved there from the deforested, flooded, wrecked economies of the countryside.
So we can't realistically imagine what's going on over there, despite all the footage. Bodies piling in the street do not look the same on the telly as they do at the junction of Arnewood and Paisley Roads.
---
It's been a country of poverty and revolution, of sorts, for centuries.
The island now divided into western Haiti and eastern Dominican Republic was 'found' by heroic imperial land-nicker himself Chris Columbus in 1492 – a year in which he seemed to pack an inordinate amount in, given the woeful lack of international travel and broadband speeds at the time – and became a Spanish settlement. Everyone in Haiti today speaks French you'll notice observantly, however, because the Spanish sort of gave away the mountainous end of the island to the French near the end of the 17th century. Probably lost it in a card game or somesuch over coffee.
Interestingly, it was the first place on Earth, it seems, to have been overthrown by black slaves and to have subsequently abolished slavery. Napoleon's own brother-in-law couldn't retake the country and it became fully independent in 1804. Though why being Napoleon's brother-in-law should be any gauge of military competence is anyone's guess; Lord knows what some blokes have to do to keep their wives happy. Especially potty, pint-sized despots – they're bound to attract some high maintenance skirt.
The sad truth is that Haiti seems to have been defined by dictatorship, coups and political instability ever since. And that ALWAYS leads to financial stability and a healthy middle class, right? Especially when there's American money sewn up in the interests of the country somewhere too.
After some twenty years of military take-overs vying with fledgling democracy on and off, Haiti was famously hit by a particularly severe hurricane season for the island in 2008. Floods killed hundreds. Mudslides from the bare hills and mountains stripped of their meager wood value just slooped into the roads and towns, wrecking infrastructure. The DEC and other overseas aid agency alliances together raised some $1billion-worth of support at the time.
And today they're launching another appeal. Because today, Haiti is on its knees.
---
Interesting turn of phrase that.
It's not long before you hear the G-word somewhere in the face of such rampant, apparently very precisely unfair suffering. God. And two and a half centuries ago was no different, with one particular debate about divine purpose and suffering flaring into comedy. With absolutely no reference to Dante.
Rapier French wit, Voltaire – so cuttingly funny the French kicked him out and sent him to live in the more satirically-minded London – lampooned and lambasted Enlightenment-tinged theology of the day in his bawdy tale of Candide, published first in 1759. The absurd Dr Pangloss in this rip-roaring cross between Tom Jones and Private Eye was famously a caricature of Gottfried Leibniz – a right brain-box, polymath and contemporary rival of Newton, who also rather smugly invented the word 'theodicy'.
Nice, isn't it? Theodicy.
I imagined it was spelt theodyssey and pictured a glittering, disco gospel supergroup. Google thought I was looking for information on Homer.
Most appropriately of all, perhaps, it doesn't half sound like theo-idiocy and it's not to be confused with theodolite which was then an emerging tool of engineering, of sorts. Which is interesting because theodicy concerns itself with divine engineering, of sorts.
Put overly simply, it's the idea that God – if he is, after all, God – must know what he's doing and that therefore: "if you think THIS world's shite, you should see the ones he discarded, mate. Sheesh."
In other words, as Dr Pangloss keeps saying throughout Voltaire's biting little book, we are, dear fellows, living in the "best of all possible worlds."
..It's an argument from a very different age to ours philosophically, of course. It has, I suspect, rather lost its debatory heat for the average Celebrity Big Brother watcher.
But it still resonates a theme that is, I think, eternal – ie: "God, WTF?!"
---
As I've sat and watched the inconsolably hard images from Port Au Prince this week, lost for words, a detached, academic little part of my head has imagined countless people of faith this week trying hard once again to, as Voltaire often put it, 'let God off the hook' on this one.
The 9.0-factor Lisbon earthquake and subsequent tsunami of 1755 was the disaster that resonated for him; how could God allow such carnage? And how could posh blokes in Europe straighten their wigs calmly and try to explain away the theological injustice of it?
Interesting then, that so many of the top UK aid agencies, represented by the DEC, are faith-based, like Christian Aid, Cafod or Tearfund.
I don't know about you, but I wonder whether a little bit of anger about such horror is sort of the point. I wonder if the person who wants to shout at the sky and to prove their concern gets on a plane and goes to pull people out of the rubble and clear away the countless dead and feed the countless hungry and try to find out what human cock-ups made the situation far worse, is actually articulating God.
As perverse as it sounds, while we're sincerely tackling the intellectual pain of being alive in radio studios and online forums, God may well be out there with his sleeves rolled up, tending to the survivors.
It is perverse. In my head. But something about that idea warms the freezing cold idea of suffering in my heart. ..Which still misses the point if it doesn't warm all the way to my hands and feet; they are, I suspect God might say, the best tools to articulate love with.
And how many people need that of us today, whatever we believe.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Fin. And Vin.
Fin. And Vin.
No, now I've been thinking about this and I don't believe it. I'm going to put my foot down this time. This time it's pushing it. Someone has to take a stand.
I flatly don't believe it's 12 MONTHS since I pressed Play on the Paradiso new year's epic iTunes playlist. It… can't be.
>SIGH<
>PAUSE<
>SIGHHHHHHHH<
Rubbish too, because I kind of feel I want to really, y'know, own the idea of tomorrow being a new year. A new start. A Day One. ..A Tomorrow I'm Going To Be Dead Good sort of day.
Oh don't snort. You're not helping.
>BORED FIDGET<
Ah, well. I currently have FIP on, playing some random Cuban-sounding thing by a bloke apparently called Oran Oran. Just so you know. I'm tempted to put on my last-minute-possible-favourite tune of 2009 on to make it seem more like a party – Lindstrøm's Baby Can't Stop. It's disco heaven. Very groovy. Will really get the party going. Yeah.
>EMPTY MOMENT'S GAZE<
..You, ah... you doing anything tonight?
>SUDDEN FLOUNCE TO FEET<
Oh that's it. I'm going to go and find the Adam Ant costume I was wearing this time ten years ago.
>THOUGHTFUL FREEZE<
Ten... years.
It's really ten years since the millennium started?
>SLIGHT SHOULDER SLUMP<
Well, I can hardly complain. The last ten years have been ten of the most formative and vital of my life. A fair bit of cool stuff has quietly happened in that time. Momo, for one. So perhaps the ol' Adam Ant outfit will work its charm again tonight. Even if I'm sitting on the sofa with a mug of bleedin' cocoa while wearing it, things will still seem more rock and roll as we start the new decade.
And so here's to it. Here's to turning the last ten years of learning stuff and mucking about into ten years of finally becoming a properly useful member of society.
(I said don't snort.)
Happy New Year, with important capitals, to you and the whole bally family. See you in 2010, inshallah.
Break out the cheese and wine, I feel a middle aged new year coming on. And someone PLEASE turn up that there ruddy disco...
xxx
No, now I've been thinking about this and I don't believe it. I'm going to put my foot down this time. This time it's pushing it. Someone has to take a stand.
I flatly don't believe it's 12 MONTHS since I pressed Play on the Paradiso new year's epic iTunes playlist. It… can't be.
>SIGH<
>PAUSE<
>SIGHHHHHHHH<
Rubbish too, because I kind of feel I want to really, y'know, own the idea of tomorrow being a new year. A new start. A Day One. ..A Tomorrow I'm Going To Be Dead Good sort of day.
Oh don't snort. You're not helping.
>BORED FIDGET<
Ah, well. I currently have FIP on, playing some random Cuban-sounding thing by a bloke apparently called Oran Oran. Just so you know. I'm tempted to put on my last-minute-possible-favourite tune of 2009 on to make it seem more like a party – Lindstrøm's Baby Can't Stop. It's disco heaven. Very groovy. Will really get the party going. Yeah.
>EMPTY MOMENT'S GAZE<
..You, ah... you doing anything tonight?
>SUDDEN FLOUNCE TO FEET<
Oh that's it. I'm going to go and find the Adam Ant costume I was wearing this time ten years ago.
>THOUGHTFUL FREEZE<
Ten... years.
It's really ten years since the millennium started?
>SLIGHT SHOULDER SLUMP<
Well, I can hardly complain. The last ten years have been ten of the most formative and vital of my life. A fair bit of cool stuff has quietly happened in that time. Momo, for one. So perhaps the ol' Adam Ant outfit will work its charm again tonight. Even if I'm sitting on the sofa with a mug of bleedin' cocoa while wearing it, things will still seem more rock and roll as we start the new decade.
And so here's to it. Here's to turning the last ten years of learning stuff and mucking about into ten years of finally becoming a properly useful member of society.
(I said don't snort.)
Happy New Year, with important capitals, to you and the whole bally family. See you in 2010, inshallah.
Break out the cheese and wine, I feel a middle aged new year coming on. And someone PLEASE turn up that there ruddy disco...
xxx
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Cold.
Cold.
Of course, one of the best things about Christmas is the appearance of unexpected gifts.
In that respect, tussling with the small army of nephews and nieces that one always does at this Yule-ish time of year should have rendered the element of surprise moot in the case of this particular gift – but I was none-the-less wrong-footed by the joyous outbreak of colds chez Paradiso, just a day or so after returning from the bosom of the rellies.
I am now a bit fed up with sitting about on the sofa, ashamed as I am to say such a reckless thing.
But a raspy-arse throat and sniveling, sniffing, dripping, pounding head do rather combine to lay out a chap uncomfortably. And even a chap has his things to do. Like shopping for shoes; I had not the fortification for this important task in the front-line affrontery of sales crowds yesterday. Too much. I feared the need for smelling salts as I giddied through the throngs of John Lewis.
And this nasty nasal adversary even floored the lovely first lady of Momo too – which is unfortunate, since our remarkably compatible constitutions helpfully tend to pick up different sicknesses, on the perhaps unfortunately-rare occasions we have legitimate medical excuses to bunk off a decent day's work.
Last time we were sick together was food poisoning – I remember one of us lying on the floor of the lounge and one of us on the sofa, but I can't remember which was which as we limply held pale hands and periodically made little sorrowful noises to eachother. I do remember thinking that that would be the last time I had fish pasta at Casablanca airport.
---
But today, manfully, I'm back at work. And womanfully, the lovely first lady of Momo is actually back at work, while I do this.
Can it really be a year since the spectacular Paradiso new year party, which rocked the neighbourhood with my 12-hour iTunes playlist and to which about five people came, including my mum? Can't believe it.
And what kind of year has happened in between?
Well, I'm not about to try to review it in any detail. I'd say that I'm left with a bizarrely positive feeling in the ol' gut regions about it, and about the impending new year, even though much of 2009 on paper was not an easy one.
Simply surviving the recession for another 12 months makes one feel profoundly thankful – we both kept earning this year, while others have lost work or been unable to find it in the first place. But it should be said that Momo:typo did see more than its fair share of inefficient or awkward jobs and working just as hard as normal seemed to yield less impressive full-time scores on the books. And all that went hand in hand with a surreal year for us personally.
Still, it feels as if a new road lies ahead of us beyond Thursday night, wherever we can find to spend it. And that's at least partly a simple relief. And beyond that, I can't help but feel a growing nodule of something that feels remarkably like excitement about what Momo:tempo might get up to in 2010. I should be working on skits for Sophie in the Orient instead of doing this, for example. And the preview edition covers to The Golden Age of Exploration are waiting for me at the printers.
It will be a year of change, 2010. For us. I expect to be saying goodbye to the blessed Momo Arnewood studio and trying to find another one, for one thing. And that could be the experience that breaks the Momo stiff upper lip, I imagine.
I hope, as much as anything, that it's not a year where friends drift apart. Rather, I hope we as a family will find new ways to grow together – I certainly know how much we going to need them, if not the other way around. Celebrating birthdays with conspicuously round numbers is on the cards again in the coming weeks and I know how easily life can take us away from eachother. Though I'm very aware this Christmas of how often it also gives us reasons to really need eachother.
So I'm thinking warm thoughts, not chilly, about the next 12 months. Even if I don't know quite what to do first. Apart from wipe my chuffing nose again.
Wish the kids had given me a bumper box of tissues for Christmas. That might have been a useful gift.
Of course, one of the best things about Christmas is the appearance of unexpected gifts.
In that respect, tussling with the small army of nephews and nieces that one always does at this Yule-ish time of year should have rendered the element of surprise moot in the case of this particular gift – but I was none-the-less wrong-footed by the joyous outbreak of colds chez Paradiso, just a day or so after returning from the bosom of the rellies.
I am now a bit fed up with sitting about on the sofa, ashamed as I am to say such a reckless thing.
But a raspy-arse throat and sniveling, sniffing, dripping, pounding head do rather combine to lay out a chap uncomfortably. And even a chap has his things to do. Like shopping for shoes; I had not the fortification for this important task in the front-line affrontery of sales crowds yesterday. Too much. I feared the need for smelling salts as I giddied through the throngs of John Lewis.
And this nasty nasal adversary even floored the lovely first lady of Momo too – which is unfortunate, since our remarkably compatible constitutions helpfully tend to pick up different sicknesses, on the perhaps unfortunately-rare occasions we have legitimate medical excuses to bunk off a decent day's work.
Last time we were sick together was food poisoning – I remember one of us lying on the floor of the lounge and one of us on the sofa, but I can't remember which was which as we limply held pale hands and periodically made little sorrowful noises to eachother. I do remember thinking that that would be the last time I had fish pasta at Casablanca airport.
---
But today, manfully, I'm back at work. And womanfully, the lovely first lady of Momo is actually back at work, while I do this.
Can it really be a year since the spectacular Paradiso new year party, which rocked the neighbourhood with my 12-hour iTunes playlist and to which about five people came, including my mum? Can't believe it.
And what kind of year has happened in between?
Well, I'm not about to try to review it in any detail. I'd say that I'm left with a bizarrely positive feeling in the ol' gut regions about it, and about the impending new year, even though much of 2009 on paper was not an easy one.
Simply surviving the recession for another 12 months makes one feel profoundly thankful – we both kept earning this year, while others have lost work or been unable to find it in the first place. But it should be said that Momo:typo did see more than its fair share of inefficient or awkward jobs and working just as hard as normal seemed to yield less impressive full-time scores on the books. And all that went hand in hand with a surreal year for us personally.
Still, it feels as if a new road lies ahead of us beyond Thursday night, wherever we can find to spend it. And that's at least partly a simple relief. And beyond that, I can't help but feel a growing nodule of something that feels remarkably like excitement about what Momo:tempo might get up to in 2010. I should be working on skits for Sophie in the Orient instead of doing this, for example. And the preview edition covers to The Golden Age of Exploration are waiting for me at the printers.
It will be a year of change, 2010. For us. I expect to be saying goodbye to the blessed Momo Arnewood studio and trying to find another one, for one thing. And that could be the experience that breaks the Momo stiff upper lip, I imagine.
I hope, as much as anything, that it's not a year where friends drift apart. Rather, I hope we as a family will find new ways to grow together – I certainly know how much we going to need them, if not the other way around. Celebrating birthdays with conspicuously round numbers is on the cards again in the coming weeks and I know how easily life can take us away from eachother. Though I'm very aware this Christmas of how often it also gives us reasons to really need eachother.
So I'm thinking warm thoughts, not chilly, about the next 12 months. Even if I don't know quite what to do first. Apart from wipe my chuffing nose again.
Wish the kids had given me a bumper box of tissues for Christmas. That might have been a useful gift.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Idea.
Idea.
Very nice little print campaign here.
In the car back from the MIN awards the other week, I asked quiet advertising legend, Steve J – whose first ever advert was signed off by Charles Saachi in 1975 or something – what was the one thing his years of advertising experience had taught him.
He paused thoughtfully for a heartbeat and then smirked.
"You've always got to have an idea" he said.
http://www.ibelieveinadv.com/2009/12/sooruz-merry-christmas/
Sage advice; nail the idea, and the ad will ride itself.
Very nice little print campaign here.
In the car back from the MIN awards the other week, I asked quiet advertising legend, Steve J – whose first ever advert was signed off by Charles Saachi in 1975 or something – what was the one thing his years of advertising experience had taught him.
He paused thoughtfully for a heartbeat and then smirked.
"You've always got to have an idea" he said.
http://www.ibelieveinadv.com/2009/12/sooruz-merry-christmas/
Sage advice; nail the idea, and the ad will ride itself.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Moral drilling.
Moral drilling.
If ethics or politics tutors wanted to make up a conundrum for their students, one to really bend their beans around like a kind of Kobayashi Maru No Win scenario, they'd be hard pushed to make up anything as effective as one particular one-word agenda item looming over the Copenhagen climate talks like a giant bovine methane cloud.
Brazil.
I mean, this one's like some sort of twisted boardgame for Geo-suffix nerds.
If you are one – sitting there, getting off on your global issues and your impossible political predicaments and your sickening, cynical desire to make an actual difference to this world we share with tomorrow's children and all the little woodland creatures – then you'll really be rubbing your thighs at Brazil's current teaser. You probably already know about it. You're probably writing a bloody 'blog' about it right now. You lefty, conshy pervo.
Now, I won't pretend that my own knowledge of Brazil extends much beyond the two most pertinent facts of the place – namely, that the country's cultural GDP ballooned in the late fifties with the invention of lift music, and that the female population's freakish levels of natural beauty are apparently genetically inverse to the male's – but I do know that they really have it in for Wales.
As every schoolboy knows, Brazil has been destroying areas of its rainforest that are specifically the same size as Wales since, ooh, the late seventies.
Why, is anybody's guess. People have been asking for it to be verified in double-decker buses, elephants and football pitches for a long time, but nada.
I digress.
The moral condundrum in question is this:
Brazil, right? Largest country in South America, fifth largest in the world and fifth most populous to boot – some M192 people spread unevenly over more than three million square miles of diverse geography, from Atlantic coastlines to mountain peaks, by way of lots of scrubland, low plains and altitudinous highlands. Though not the sort with tartan kilts and swearing.
Oh, and the single largest tropical forest in the world of course.
Now, if you're as ignorant as I am, you might be forgiven for thinking that a Latin American country will have its work cut out to keep its head above the Third World waterline – what with all those cocaine-filled, twin-engined planes crashed in jungle trees, and militias in the hills and what not. Right?
But Brazil is something like the tenth largest economy in the world. And, lest we forget again, it's the country that invented culturally sublime things like Bosa Nova, chic-sharp space-age architecture, football as a creative genre of ballet and all manner of spectacular ways to keep girls from Ipanema and everywhere else just about in their famous carnival outfits. It's a country of a very great deal of groovyness and even, reportedly, happiness. And it's in the middle of spending a fortune in improving its infrastructure.
The thing is, of those almost two hundred million groovy citizens of said Federative Republic, more than fifteen per-cent still live below the poverty line.
As with many countries juxtaposing fast-growing post-modern parts of themselves with almost pre-industrial parts, Brazil as a whole is made up of all kinds of parts that don't all fit together comfortably. The cities grew so fast in the late 20th century, that people flocked to them from the countryside – and found themselves living on the urban periphery in favelas. Today in Rio, for example, it's thought that one in five of the city's residents now lives in of of its six hundred police-no-go slums. Favelas represent the fastest growing populations in Brazil still.
Meanwhile, people in many of the inland areas are facing poverty that so many others left behind when they headed for the cities. And climate change predictions threaten to make some of these dry parts of Brazil uninhabitable by the end of the century.
And then there's the key factor with Brazil as far as the geography schoolboy is concerned – the rainforest. If the Amazon is the lungs of the world, how can the country find a financial way to stop the loggers, ranchers and miners tearing it apart? How do you fund such a fundamental shift in cultural finances locally – and how the hell do you police an area so utterly vast?
It's going to take more money than the middle classes in Rio or Brasilia have got, right?
Now, let's add two facts that turn this interesting but largely academic study into a right bloody moral conundrum.
Firstly, and randomly, I think, Brazil currently has a world-leading status as a green energy provider. Almost all its cars currently run on bio-fuel. A country struggling to catch up with the 'developed' world is actually leading it in eco-economic vision. A recognised pioneer in its field, renewable energy is becoming a key part in Brazil's future.
Secondly, it's just struck oil in the Campos Basin. A staggering shite-load of it.
---
So now what?
What the arsing hell do you do, when you have a green agenda pressing down on you from the rest of the world that will only dramatically hasten the swelling economic pressure from within, just as you feel your country might stand a chance of taking a more important place at the global table – when someone pipes up: "Ah, you'll never guess. Funny thing, but we've discovered enough black gold to pump a world record-breaking 100,000 barrels of crude a day into our economy. Eh? Cuh."?
Chew on THAT Copenhagen hopefuls.
---
It doesn't get us anywhere, sitting in our lounges across the UK, but watching Channel Four News' week of special reports from the balmy waterfront at Rio last week was inspiring. I have no idea what else to do now, but I can only hope – as I did with such teeth-gritted conviction about Spitting Image, 20 years ago – that some politicians were watching and feeling challenged.
If there are still journos with enough vision to turn their caravan 180° from where everyone else's lenses are currently focussed and get to the heart of an issue's impact, then maybe these people can also give the politically powerful, the scientifically informed and the financially invested a right bloody drilling about what should be done next by all of us.
If ethics or politics tutors wanted to make up a conundrum for their students, one to really bend their beans around like a kind of Kobayashi Maru No Win scenario, they'd be hard pushed to make up anything as effective as one particular one-word agenda item looming over the Copenhagen climate talks like a giant bovine methane cloud.
Brazil.
I mean, this one's like some sort of twisted boardgame for Geo-suffix nerds.
If you are one – sitting there, getting off on your global issues and your impossible political predicaments and your sickening, cynical desire to make an actual difference to this world we share with tomorrow's children and all the little woodland creatures – then you'll really be rubbing your thighs at Brazil's current teaser. You probably already know about it. You're probably writing a bloody 'blog' about it right now. You lefty, conshy pervo.
Now, I won't pretend that my own knowledge of Brazil extends much beyond the two most pertinent facts of the place – namely, that the country's cultural GDP ballooned in the late fifties with the invention of lift music, and that the female population's freakish levels of natural beauty are apparently genetically inverse to the male's – but I do know that they really have it in for Wales.
As every schoolboy knows, Brazil has been destroying areas of its rainforest that are specifically the same size as Wales since, ooh, the late seventies.
Why, is anybody's guess. People have been asking for it to be verified in double-decker buses, elephants and football pitches for a long time, but nada.
I digress.
The moral condundrum in question is this:
Brazil, right? Largest country in South America, fifth largest in the world and fifth most populous to boot – some M192 people spread unevenly over more than three million square miles of diverse geography, from Atlantic coastlines to mountain peaks, by way of lots of scrubland, low plains and altitudinous highlands. Though not the sort with tartan kilts and swearing.
Oh, and the single largest tropical forest in the world of course.
Now, if you're as ignorant as I am, you might be forgiven for thinking that a Latin American country will have its work cut out to keep its head above the Third World waterline – what with all those cocaine-filled, twin-engined planes crashed in jungle trees, and militias in the hills and what not. Right?
But Brazil is something like the tenth largest economy in the world. And, lest we forget again, it's the country that invented culturally sublime things like Bosa Nova, chic-sharp space-age architecture, football as a creative genre of ballet and all manner of spectacular ways to keep girls from Ipanema and everywhere else just about in their famous carnival outfits. It's a country of a very great deal of groovyness and even, reportedly, happiness. And it's in the middle of spending a fortune in improving its infrastructure.
The thing is, of those almost two hundred million groovy citizens of said Federative Republic, more than fifteen per-cent still live below the poverty line.
As with many countries juxtaposing fast-growing post-modern parts of themselves with almost pre-industrial parts, Brazil as a whole is made up of all kinds of parts that don't all fit together comfortably. The cities grew so fast in the late 20th century, that people flocked to them from the countryside – and found themselves living on the urban periphery in favelas. Today in Rio, for example, it's thought that one in five of the city's residents now lives in of of its six hundred police-no-go slums. Favelas represent the fastest growing populations in Brazil still.
Meanwhile, people in many of the inland areas are facing poverty that so many others left behind when they headed for the cities. And climate change predictions threaten to make some of these dry parts of Brazil uninhabitable by the end of the century.
And then there's the key factor with Brazil as far as the geography schoolboy is concerned – the rainforest. If the Amazon is the lungs of the world, how can the country find a financial way to stop the loggers, ranchers and miners tearing it apart? How do you fund such a fundamental shift in cultural finances locally – and how the hell do you police an area so utterly vast?
It's going to take more money than the middle classes in Rio or Brasilia have got, right?
Now, let's add two facts that turn this interesting but largely academic study into a right bloody moral conundrum.
Firstly, and randomly, I think, Brazil currently has a world-leading status as a green energy provider. Almost all its cars currently run on bio-fuel. A country struggling to catch up with the 'developed' world is actually leading it in eco-economic vision. A recognised pioneer in its field, renewable energy is becoming a key part in Brazil's future.
Secondly, it's just struck oil in the Campos Basin. A staggering shite-load of it.
---
So now what?
What the arsing hell do you do, when you have a green agenda pressing down on you from the rest of the world that will only dramatically hasten the swelling economic pressure from within, just as you feel your country might stand a chance of taking a more important place at the global table – when someone pipes up: "Ah, you'll never guess. Funny thing, but we've discovered enough black gold to pump a world record-breaking 100,000 barrels of crude a day into our economy. Eh? Cuh."?
Chew on THAT Copenhagen hopefuls.
---
It doesn't get us anywhere, sitting in our lounges across the UK, but watching Channel Four News' week of special reports from the balmy waterfront at Rio last week was inspiring. I have no idea what else to do now, but I can only hope – as I did with such teeth-gritted conviction about Spitting Image, 20 years ago – that some politicians were watching and feeling challenged.
If there are still journos with enough vision to turn their caravan 180° from where everyone else's lenses are currently focussed and get to the heart of an issue's impact, then maybe these people can also give the politically powerful, the scientifically informed and the financially invested a right bloody drilling about what should be done next by all of us.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Seasonal cheers.
Seasonal cheers.
This may sound daft, but we have our tree up.
Well, you know – most years, we get most of the way through December before decorating. This year, we figured we'd go for a cheering American-style month-long holiday season. Had my first mince pie; had my first listen of Christmas Crooners this morning.
But kicking off the festive sing-song is a piece of work that Tempo has spent half the summer playing with – for tonight, the ad is premiering.
At 8.50pm, The Euronics will perform their brand new electrical soul classic, This Christmas you could save – right in the middle of The X Factor on ITV1.
Do please watch and cheer on little Mr Plug and his band.
And I wish I could be a fly on the wall of my long-suffering downstairs neighbours when they hear that bleedin' tune come at them out of the telly instead of the ceiling.
This may sound daft, but we have our tree up.
Well, you know – most years, we get most of the way through December before decorating. This year, we figured we'd go for a cheering American-style month-long holiday season. Had my first mince pie; had my first listen of Christmas Crooners this morning.
But kicking off the festive sing-song is a piece of work that Tempo has spent half the summer playing with – for tonight, the ad is premiering.
At 8.50pm, The Euronics will perform their brand new electrical soul classic, This Christmas you could save – right in the middle of The X Factor on ITV1.
Do please watch and cheer on little Mr Plug and his band.
And I wish I could be a fly on the wall of my long-suffering downstairs neighbours when they hear that bleedin' tune come at them out of the telly instead of the ceiling.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Just a MIN.
Just a MIN.
So, there are jobs. Then there are pitches. Then there are award ceremonies.
And then there are the things you're trying to keep half a brain on in your real life.
As November spools past, I seem to have survived them all, even if nearly all of them have felt rather like some sort of pointless penance – like a time-wasting detention to just get through, so you can go home. Not to actually get anything for at the end. Just out.
Given the efforts involved in executing most of them, and the level of skill I and my team members all seem to have invested in them, it's interesting that the one to feel like the most fruitful was the one where all I did was fall into someone's car for five hours and get carried to a free dinner.
People always focus on the lunch. Turns out they should turn their blagging efforts to somewhere past tea time.
---
The MIN awards in Manchester this week came for me on the back of a long old week in the early-morning/late-night saddle. I was knackered, as Gel, Deb and Steve from Thinking Juice whisked me off to the North for a be-bibbed-and-tuckered freebee. And I knew that they were each just as knackered. So who, I wondered sleepily in the back seat, who exactly would be in any fit state to drive HOME again the next morning?
That I was able to swan around in a tux with them and be there when they came within a gnat's hat of winning Agency Of The Year – before being allowed to take home the South West Agency Of The Year piece of trinketry – was an honour, I should say. Those guys can hold their heads up with anyone in a room full of UK agency creatives. In truth, I think they could honestly hold them a lot higher.
If any of us could hold up our heads at all by the next morning.
It felt like one of the more rewarding moments of the last few months, not because the award was for anything I had done, but simply because being with those you care about at little key moments are, I've long believed, the real gems to be grabbed on your life journey.
A noble and dedicated philosophy that has seen me passably rich in such things and otherwise working out of my bedroom at nearly 40.
---
After today, for various reasons, I essentially just want to go to bed. Having made it this far now seems like payment enough. It may sound defeatist – but firstly, I'm a lover not a fighter, remember, and secondly, if you're not a believer in plateaus you haven't climbed high enough yet.
Not a single one of the many investments Momo's creatively made this year may bear fruit. Working your ass off isn't enough to fight the force of some narrative directions. But that's fine. There are following chapters.
Remember, Harry Potter and The Order Of The Phoenix seemed an interminable drag to read the first time. But it was essential to the rip-roaring plot denouement of the series.
Right now, I'm grateful for being given any chance to fall flat on my back for a moment.
So, there are jobs. Then there are pitches. Then there are award ceremonies.
And then there are the things you're trying to keep half a brain on in your real life.
As November spools past, I seem to have survived them all, even if nearly all of them have felt rather like some sort of pointless penance – like a time-wasting detention to just get through, so you can go home. Not to actually get anything for at the end. Just out.
Given the efforts involved in executing most of them, and the level of skill I and my team members all seem to have invested in them, it's interesting that the one to feel like the most fruitful was the one where all I did was fall into someone's car for five hours and get carried to a free dinner.
People always focus on the lunch. Turns out they should turn their blagging efforts to somewhere past tea time.
---
The MIN awards in Manchester this week came for me on the back of a long old week in the early-morning/late-night saddle. I was knackered, as Gel, Deb and Steve from Thinking Juice whisked me off to the North for a be-bibbed-and-tuckered freebee. And I knew that they were each just as knackered. So who, I wondered sleepily in the back seat, who exactly would be in any fit state to drive HOME again the next morning?
That I was able to swan around in a tux with them and be there when they came within a gnat's hat of winning Agency Of The Year – before being allowed to take home the South West Agency Of The Year piece of trinketry – was an honour, I should say. Those guys can hold their heads up with anyone in a room full of UK agency creatives. In truth, I think they could honestly hold them a lot higher.
If any of us could hold up our heads at all by the next morning.
It felt like one of the more rewarding moments of the last few months, not because the award was for anything I had done, but simply because being with those you care about at little key moments are, I've long believed, the real gems to be grabbed on your life journey.
A noble and dedicated philosophy that has seen me passably rich in such things and otherwise working out of my bedroom at nearly 40.
---
After today, for various reasons, I essentially just want to go to bed. Having made it this far now seems like payment enough. It may sound defeatist – but firstly, I'm a lover not a fighter, remember, and secondly, if you're not a believer in plateaus you haven't climbed high enough yet.
Not a single one of the many investments Momo's creatively made this year may bear fruit. Working your ass off isn't enough to fight the force of some narrative directions. But that's fine. There are following chapters.
Remember, Harry Potter and The Order Of The Phoenix seemed an interminable drag to read the first time. But it was essential to the rip-roaring plot denouement of the series.
Right now, I'm grateful for being given any chance to fall flat on my back for a moment.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
High Noakes.
High Noakes.
I stumbled across something quietly wonderful this afternoon.
Chewing over a new Monster Master Über To Do list after a hefty-ish week of mopping up various ends of jobs to go to print, I was scrolling around for some pleasant background entertainment when I found a little delight. Which induced a most unexpected little reverie.
In the smokey, dyed-diesel-plume wake of the news that the last British bastion of daring-do, splay-bursting, delta-nining chapdom has admitted a filly into its ranks, the BBC had placed some intriguing links on its homepage.
One was an interview with Flight Lieutenant Kirsty Moore, the first female pilot to join the Red Arrows Ruddy Marvelous Aerobatic Display Team – a typically British forces kind of thoroughly nice lass who seemed at a loss to explain why none of the splendid female piloting talent of the RAF has donned the Reds' flight suit and caught the keys to one of their little Hawks before.
The other was... a complete episode of Go with Noakes from 1976. The one where he flew with the Arrows for himself.
---
Clicking the Play icon, I didn't quite know what to expect, after 35 years. But as the ledge John himself strolled into shot with trusty hairy TV partner Shep, in glorious 70s Filmgrainovision – doing that double act they always did of one of them spouting even, Yorkshire train-of-thought rambling while the other looked disinterested – I felt a lump rise in my throat.
---
That was my childhood. My safe, hopeful, much-loved childhood. And how I got away with enjoying it as such for the whole time, I've never worked out.
But John Noakes' safe, clear tones – friendly but tinged with just enough adult authority, mixed perfectly with the constant possibility of a dry, silly quip – were a huge comfort to a generation of us exploring the world around us from the safety of gently irradiating new colour televisions.
I learnt more about the Red Arrows from this gloriously be-side-burned, be-sensible-haircutted 30 minutes than I remember from any other time. Why, I didn't realise it was so easy. They're making it up on a stick and a wink way more than you'd think up there. John even did it. Which means I now really want to do it.
"Here" said his pilot, "take the stick. Forget the rudders, they're just there to rest your feet on. Now, put it hard over... Whoop! Heh-heh. There. You just did a roll. Easy eh?"
Hell, yeah. Letme-letme!
As he then watched the jolly fine chaps open their season with a display over Whitby bay, I thought of all those childhood memories of standing on similar cliffs at Bournemouth, waiting for the nine red darts flash overhead from behind us in a suddent screech at precisely On Time O'clock.
And as I saw a little 70s chap sitting in his Dad's arm, in little shorts and a little home-knitted jumper, I couldn't help picturing a very similar little chap of a very similar age, in a very similar little outfit sitting expectantly in the crook of his own daddy's arm, some 300 miles south, that same afternoon probably. And I felt an echo of the same comforting thrill of formative times.
It was wonderful.
This was the same daddy, incidentally, who would, upon hearing the Black Dyke Mills Band strike up with the gloriously whimsical theme tune, always say: "Ah there are the Black Mills Dyke Band again." Every time.
Then I remembered when Go with Noakes secretly filmed at my school, just a year or two later. And I kind of wished the BBC would post up that episode, to see if I recognised any of the big-haired, be-flared youngsters from the year above me at St Katherine's CE Primary, who got to go do the adventure exercise circuit up on Hengistbury Head with television's nicest, pre-Ant & Dec double act.
I may e-mail them and ask for the whole bally series to go up.
Mean time, check this out for yourself. It'll get you high on the funny reality of your childhood. Because it wasn't just a pre-digital age daydream. You were there.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/aerialjourneys/5328.shtml?all=2&id=5328
I stumbled across something quietly wonderful this afternoon.
Chewing over a new Monster Master Über To Do list after a hefty-ish week of mopping up various ends of jobs to go to print, I was scrolling around for some pleasant background entertainment when I found a little delight. Which induced a most unexpected little reverie.
In the smokey, dyed-diesel-plume wake of the news that the last British bastion of daring-do, splay-bursting, delta-nining chapdom has admitted a filly into its ranks, the BBC had placed some intriguing links on its homepage.
One was an interview with Flight Lieutenant Kirsty Moore, the first female pilot to join the Red Arrows Ruddy Marvelous Aerobatic Display Team – a typically British forces kind of thoroughly nice lass who seemed at a loss to explain why none of the splendid female piloting talent of the RAF has donned the Reds' flight suit and caught the keys to one of their little Hawks before.
The other was... a complete episode of Go with Noakes from 1976. The one where he flew with the Arrows for himself.
---
Clicking the Play icon, I didn't quite know what to expect, after 35 years. But as the ledge John himself strolled into shot with trusty hairy TV partner Shep, in glorious 70s Filmgrainovision – doing that double act they always did of one of them spouting even, Yorkshire train-of-thought rambling while the other looked disinterested – I felt a lump rise in my throat.
---
That was my childhood. My safe, hopeful, much-loved childhood. And how I got away with enjoying it as such for the whole time, I've never worked out.
But John Noakes' safe, clear tones – friendly but tinged with just enough adult authority, mixed perfectly with the constant possibility of a dry, silly quip – were a huge comfort to a generation of us exploring the world around us from the safety of gently irradiating new colour televisions.
I learnt more about the Red Arrows from this gloriously be-side-burned, be-sensible-haircutted 30 minutes than I remember from any other time. Why, I didn't realise it was so easy. They're making it up on a stick and a wink way more than you'd think up there. John even did it. Which means I now really want to do it.
"Here" said his pilot, "take the stick. Forget the rudders, they're just there to rest your feet on. Now, put it hard over... Whoop! Heh-heh. There. You just did a roll. Easy eh?"
Hell, yeah. Letme-letme!
As he then watched the jolly fine chaps open their season with a display over Whitby bay, I thought of all those childhood memories of standing on similar cliffs at Bournemouth, waiting for the nine red darts flash overhead from behind us in a suddent screech at precisely On Time O'clock.
And as I saw a little 70s chap sitting in his Dad's arm, in little shorts and a little home-knitted jumper, I couldn't help picturing a very similar little chap of a very similar age, in a very similar little outfit sitting expectantly in the crook of his own daddy's arm, some 300 miles south, that same afternoon probably. And I felt an echo of the same comforting thrill of formative times.
It was wonderful.
This was the same daddy, incidentally, who would, upon hearing the Black Dyke Mills Band strike up with the gloriously whimsical theme tune, always say: "Ah there are the Black Mills Dyke Band again." Every time.
Then I remembered when Go with Noakes secretly filmed at my school, just a year or two later. And I kind of wished the BBC would post up that episode, to see if I recognised any of the big-haired, be-flared youngsters from the year above me at St Katherine's CE Primary, who got to go do the adventure exercise circuit up on Hengistbury Head with television's nicest, pre-Ant & Dec double act.
I may e-mail them and ask for the whole bally series to go up.
Mean time, check this out for yourself. It'll get you high on the funny reality of your childhood. Because it wasn't just a pre-digital age daydream. You were there.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/aerialjourneys/5328.shtml?all=2&id=5328
Monday, November 09, 2009
I remember 1989.
I remember 1989.
Twenty years. I guess it seems that long.
So much has happened since the Berlin wall fell in a colourful spill of people, but it's also kind of gone fast. In fact, I wonder whether the intimation in Jon Snow's tone tonight was that it's hard to imagine a world with the cold war now – a fact perhaps astonishing after so little historic time. Whatever, Channel Four News gave tonight's celebrations in the German capital a slightly misty-eyed lead story status. And rightly so.
It's poetic to suppose that of all European nations emerging from the 20th century, Germany should be the one to give the world one of the most potent symbols of reconciliation – that footage of teenagers dancing on the Brandenburg gate in November 1989.
Or was it Wind of change by The Scorpions?
Anyway – no, east and west are not fluidly one country yet. Not in the fullest sense. And I'm not sure if they can be – no slashed wound heals without a scar where the tissue knitted back together. But the practical cost, as in South Africa, is still worth paying. Surely. Living apart is ultimately more unsustainable than working together. It just is. Your identity has to be strong enough to cope with the change.
And I'm pretty sure most Germans think the same in the end. They're very sensible people. They made Wind of change the 10th best selling record in Germany of all time.
---
I remember reading something in a text book while still at school, some while more than twenty years ago. I remember that reading it at that time seemed a little shocking. Just bold. Ballsy of the writer, I thought.
Because he said something almost blithely about how history warned us that the Berlin Wall could not possibly stay standing for long. That one day it would surely fall.
Now, if you weren't around then, this statement will probably seem self evident. To be filed under 'Duh!' – along with other statements, like: 'Cod sci-fi TV soap Defying Gravity walks a fine line between likeably daft and annoyingly stupid' or: 'Gordon Brown's government is already putting things in boxes'. It's just obvious.
But, really. Back then the wall seemed immovable. Utterly. A symbol of a status quo beyond any challenge. This writer's worldly wisdom seemed simply audacious to my 15-year-old self; back then, the only way to combat the Berlin Wall from Bournemouth was to buy a nuclear bunker for the garden. I remember seeing them for sale at the Hurn air show, next to the only just retired Vulcan bomber.
And yet, just a month after my 19th birthday, down it came. Surprising everyone – not least of which the important handful of soon-to-be-former soviet state heads, which duly rolled in the coming two years.
---
Annoyingly, I almost got to go to Berlin that summer. Some church thing. I could have seen the wall in all its terrifying actuality for myself to marvel my kids about years later, if I'd been put on the right list. Or if I'd had kids.
I ended up in Düsseldorf. Singing hymns in the town square or similar. And, weirdly, Caroline happened to be passing through the city with her family at exactly the same time; I remember calling her from a phone box and almost being able to meet up. But not.
Not a great 'I remember 1989' story, I know.
Still, to celebrate, 20 years on, I'm going to Düsseldorf without her again next week. Re-live the important personal moments. ..Of how we weren't in the right place at the right time on at least a couple of counts.
While I'm there, hunting for that phone box, I may also see if I can squeeze in some site visiting with Jules for our client's show.
Either way, I know one thing. I still want to wave a flag when I see that footage. Or when I hear the 10th best selling German record of all time.
Yes, I remember it well.
Well, no. Of course I have no idea where I was on the actual night. I mean it was ages ago...
Twenty years. I guess it seems that long.
So much has happened since the Berlin wall fell in a colourful spill of people, but it's also kind of gone fast. In fact, I wonder whether the intimation in Jon Snow's tone tonight was that it's hard to imagine a world with the cold war now – a fact perhaps astonishing after so little historic time. Whatever, Channel Four News gave tonight's celebrations in the German capital a slightly misty-eyed lead story status. And rightly so.
It's poetic to suppose that of all European nations emerging from the 20th century, Germany should be the one to give the world one of the most potent symbols of reconciliation – that footage of teenagers dancing on the Brandenburg gate in November 1989.
Or was it Wind of change by The Scorpions?
Anyway – no, east and west are not fluidly one country yet. Not in the fullest sense. And I'm not sure if they can be – no slashed wound heals without a scar where the tissue knitted back together. But the practical cost, as in South Africa, is still worth paying. Surely. Living apart is ultimately more unsustainable than working together. It just is. Your identity has to be strong enough to cope with the change.
And I'm pretty sure most Germans think the same in the end. They're very sensible people. They made Wind of change the 10th best selling record in Germany of all time.
---
I remember reading something in a text book while still at school, some while more than twenty years ago. I remember that reading it at that time seemed a little shocking. Just bold. Ballsy of the writer, I thought.
Because he said something almost blithely about how history warned us that the Berlin Wall could not possibly stay standing for long. That one day it would surely fall.
Now, if you weren't around then, this statement will probably seem self evident. To be filed under 'Duh!' – along with other statements, like: 'Cod sci-fi TV soap Defying Gravity walks a fine line between likeably daft and annoyingly stupid' or: 'Gordon Brown's government is already putting things in boxes'. It's just obvious.
But, really. Back then the wall seemed immovable. Utterly. A symbol of a status quo beyond any challenge. This writer's worldly wisdom seemed simply audacious to my 15-year-old self; back then, the only way to combat the Berlin Wall from Bournemouth was to buy a nuclear bunker for the garden. I remember seeing them for sale at the Hurn air show, next to the only just retired Vulcan bomber.
And yet, just a month after my 19th birthday, down it came. Surprising everyone – not least of which the important handful of soon-to-be-former soviet state heads, which duly rolled in the coming two years.
---
Annoyingly, I almost got to go to Berlin that summer. Some church thing. I could have seen the wall in all its terrifying actuality for myself to marvel my kids about years later, if I'd been put on the right list. Or if I'd had kids.
I ended up in Düsseldorf. Singing hymns in the town square or similar. And, weirdly, Caroline happened to be passing through the city with her family at exactly the same time; I remember calling her from a phone box and almost being able to meet up. But not.
Not a great 'I remember 1989' story, I know.
Still, to celebrate, 20 years on, I'm going to Düsseldorf without her again next week. Re-live the important personal moments. ..Of how we weren't in the right place at the right time on at least a couple of counts.
While I'm there, hunting for that phone box, I may also see if I can squeeze in some site visiting with Jules for our client's show.
Either way, I know one thing. I still want to wave a flag when I see that footage. Or when I hear the 10th best selling German record of all time.
Yes, I remember it well.
Well, no. Of course I have no idea where I was on the actual night. I mean it was ages ago...
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Global outlook.
Global outlook.
So I'm sitting in a hotel in Kuwait City.
I don't know how I found myself apparently pretending to be an international, ex-pat-type business person – I'm just a simple-minded creative. I like titting about with words and tunes, and sitting about with chums and coffees. I can hardly suddenly successfully convince everyone I've actually been some big shot serious person underneath it all, all along. Can I. Really.
So what am I doing in a hotel in Kuwait City?
Well, I can't be sure, but it rather looks like what I've been doing is planning how to muck about with creative stuff for some undeniably nice people I've spent the last couple of days sitting around tables of food and coffee with, while trying not to come off as someone pretending to be some big shot serious person. That and making a lot of jokes, obviously.
And it also looks like I've found myself in the middle of a significant chunk of work out here in the desert. Between all the wonky English jokes, Julian and I have put together a very serious proposition for our emerging friends out here. It'll stretch us – it'll stretch me. But I went out on my own to enlarge my outlook – and I'm looking forward to us helping each other do just that.
---
The thing about the real global outlook – the one getting on with itself, far outside the tiny ring-fenced reality of the Nick Griffins of this world – is that it doesn't in fact look like the sleekly soulless Business section of your stock photography website. You knew it wouldn't – nothing human could possibly exist there. There in that God-awful eternity of hand shakes and thumbs up and hour glasses running out and people in suits punching the air. But I'll bet even you didn't realise the new global economy would turn out to be quite so... tacky.
The new world order would appear to be a steakhouse restaurant chain in the lobby of a business hotel chain, themed in a plastic version of the Wild West, administered by Koreans in chaps and stetsons, frequented by Arabs in kafirs and Nikes, and cleaned by the people of the Indus. Observed by middle-aged English businessmen who've married Thai women and retired to Dubai. Soon to be invested in by Russian gangsters. And speaking Mandarin.
Is this more or less frightening than 1984? Is it more or less stupid sounding now than the idea of Communist conformity or Nazi purity?
The outlook for the global economy is as multi-coloured as a tasteless fast food logo.
But it's free.
And it makes us open our eyes to eachother.
Because the reality, when you sit down in the plastic Wild West and engage it in conversation, is human shaped.
The differences between people can be perspective changing – especially if you don't want to get arrested. But I'm coming home at the end of the week reminded that the reason a simple-minded creative like me can float his little business boat on this bewildering, complex sea of change is because of the similarities underneath the stetson brim. Or the kafir folds.
A person you like is a person you like, wherever you find them. And I like this.
Even if piped karaoke covers of pop favourites forces my fingers into my ears while I'm sitting there, I shall continue to keep my eyes open.
So I'm sitting in a hotel in Kuwait City.
I don't know how I found myself apparently pretending to be an international, ex-pat-type business person – I'm just a simple-minded creative. I like titting about with words and tunes, and sitting about with chums and coffees. I can hardly suddenly successfully convince everyone I've actually been some big shot serious person underneath it all, all along. Can I. Really.
So what am I doing in a hotel in Kuwait City?
Well, I can't be sure, but it rather looks like what I've been doing is planning how to muck about with creative stuff for some undeniably nice people I've spent the last couple of days sitting around tables of food and coffee with, while trying not to come off as someone pretending to be some big shot serious person. That and making a lot of jokes, obviously.
And it also looks like I've found myself in the middle of a significant chunk of work out here in the desert. Between all the wonky English jokes, Julian and I have put together a very serious proposition for our emerging friends out here. It'll stretch us – it'll stretch me. But I went out on my own to enlarge my outlook – and I'm looking forward to us helping each other do just that.
---
The thing about the real global outlook – the one getting on with itself, far outside the tiny ring-fenced reality of the Nick Griffins of this world – is that it doesn't in fact look like the sleekly soulless Business section of your stock photography website. You knew it wouldn't – nothing human could possibly exist there. There in that God-awful eternity of hand shakes and thumbs up and hour glasses running out and people in suits punching the air. But I'll bet even you didn't realise the new global economy would turn out to be quite so... tacky.
The new world order would appear to be a steakhouse restaurant chain in the lobby of a business hotel chain, themed in a plastic version of the Wild West, administered by Koreans in chaps and stetsons, frequented by Arabs in kafirs and Nikes, and cleaned by the people of the Indus. Observed by middle-aged English businessmen who've married Thai women and retired to Dubai. Soon to be invested in by Russian gangsters. And speaking Mandarin.
Is this more or less frightening than 1984? Is it more or less stupid sounding now than the idea of Communist conformity or Nazi purity?
The outlook for the global economy is as multi-coloured as a tasteless fast food logo.
But it's free.
And it makes us open our eyes to eachother.
Because the reality, when you sit down in the plastic Wild West and engage it in conversation, is human shaped.
The differences between people can be perspective changing – especially if you don't want to get arrested. But I'm coming home at the end of the week reminded that the reason a simple-minded creative like me can float his little business boat on this bewildering, complex sea of change is because of the similarities underneath the stetson brim. Or the kafir folds.
A person you like is a person you like, wherever you find them. And I like this.
Even if piped karaoke covers of pop favourites forces my fingers into my ears while I'm sitting there, I shall continue to keep my eyes open.
Friday, October 30, 2009
X.
X.
I haven't seen a single second of it.
Not a clip. Not a pic. Not a quote.
This year's X Factor is a complete mystery to me. Who are these 'twins' people speak of with such derision? And how can I generate a Facebook campaign with even half as many signatures on it as their I bet I can find a million people who hate the twins group? Some of us can only dream of such exposure.
It's not that I took some high-minded decision not to partake in the shiny ITV1 shenanigans. I think watercooler telly is not only the most transatlantic of phrases I could have made up there, it's one of the saving graces of modern life. Something we can share with strangers.
It's just that, well... when am I ever going to be in the mood to watch a programme that is as much about toe-curling car-crash talentlessness as it is about soulless slickibility. (Yeah, chew on that, automatic spellchecker.) I mean, I have enough of all this at home.
---
One of the key daft things about working at Momo is the split personality it requires. Yes, it keeps me entertained, swapping hats as I do, but it begs the question: When am I going to knuckle down with something and start to get properly any chuffing good at it?
I've spent today generating big sheets of layout paper with numbers scribbled all over them. Next week, Julian and I are in the Middle East, trying to convince a significant client that we do in fact know our seating facilities from our articulation in the arm – and for this we obviously need to demonstrate fairly clearly that we know what we're talking about.
Now, you might say that given my preponderance of coping with too much to do by winging things shamelessly, this is an uncomfortable state of affairs for my company's creative director to find himself in.
But, while I'm putting together a strategy and a budget for something that will take a year for us to deliver to a growing international business, I'm also trying to release a record.
If nothing else, this presents a significant challenge to choice of haircut.
I mean, two more different markets I could not be trying to serve. And there is only so far the idea of 'idiosyncratic' will get you before you luck out, suddenly very obviously dressed for the wrong context.
---
Thing is, big break for Momo:typo as this gig would be, I do feel happy that we can help the client. We've done some great work for them before and we've got some great people involved, ready to jump all over it. I'm mainly just, kind of, excited. Sure – I'll need to wear a tie when operating this side of the business. This side of the business is often talking in board rooms and sensible grown up places.
But, y'know, I rarely wear a tie to these places. I prefer to be conspicuously human in formal environments – so long as I look like I know what I'm doing there in the first place. The human bit is, in fact, the whole point of my work. And these days, I'm more likely to put on a tie to go talk to some musos – a nice, trendy slim one. I think I did, in fact, recently.
It was a meeting about our little bit of conspicuously shiny ITV-type work, going out in time for Christmas.
Olu and Lou are seasoned musos, each having been signed to majors at some point in their careers and each knowing a thing or two about being very cool very naturally. I'm not sure whether they noticed and appreciated my nice trendy thin tie or not, when we met the first time to discuss Thinking Juice's little advert for the telly. I'm sure they did.
As amusing as the paying demands of advertising are, it's still hard not to feel something uncomfortably approaching serious pride in some bits of work you get to contribute to in this business. Silly does not always equal ridiculous. At least, not when you receive the cheque.
Squeezing into their roof-top studio with three brass players, or hearing the session cut of the strings part in the mix for the first time, I feel as comfortable with the work we're turning out here as I do anything grown-up enough to dress open-necked in the boardroom.
It's all a bit of a weird cross-over, I'll grant you. But I'm oddly comfortable with Momo's split personalty as I prepare for the Autumn shift.
Don't ask me what it is, but something tells me it's too soon to cut my hair.
I haven't seen a single second of it.
Not a clip. Not a pic. Not a quote.
This year's X Factor is a complete mystery to me. Who are these 'twins' people speak of with such derision? And how can I generate a Facebook campaign with even half as many signatures on it as their I bet I can find a million people who hate the twins group? Some of us can only dream of such exposure.
It's not that I took some high-minded decision not to partake in the shiny ITV1 shenanigans. I think watercooler telly is not only the most transatlantic of phrases I could have made up there, it's one of the saving graces of modern life. Something we can share with strangers.
It's just that, well... when am I ever going to be in the mood to watch a programme that is as much about toe-curling car-crash talentlessness as it is about soulless slickibility. (Yeah, chew on that, automatic spellchecker.) I mean, I have enough of all this at home.
---
One of the key daft things about working at Momo is the split personality it requires. Yes, it keeps me entertained, swapping hats as I do, but it begs the question: When am I going to knuckle down with something and start to get properly any chuffing good at it?
I've spent today generating big sheets of layout paper with numbers scribbled all over them. Next week, Julian and I are in the Middle East, trying to convince a significant client that we do in fact know our seating facilities from our articulation in the arm – and for this we obviously need to demonstrate fairly clearly that we know what we're talking about.
Now, you might say that given my preponderance of coping with too much to do by winging things shamelessly, this is an uncomfortable state of affairs for my company's creative director to find himself in.
But, while I'm putting together a strategy and a budget for something that will take a year for us to deliver to a growing international business, I'm also trying to release a record.
If nothing else, this presents a significant challenge to choice of haircut.
I mean, two more different markets I could not be trying to serve. And there is only so far the idea of 'idiosyncratic' will get you before you luck out, suddenly very obviously dressed for the wrong context.
---
Thing is, big break for Momo:typo as this gig would be, I do feel happy that we can help the client. We've done some great work for them before and we've got some great people involved, ready to jump all over it. I'm mainly just, kind of, excited. Sure – I'll need to wear a tie when operating this side of the business. This side of the business is often talking in board rooms and sensible grown up places.
But, y'know, I rarely wear a tie to these places. I prefer to be conspicuously human in formal environments – so long as I look like I know what I'm doing there in the first place. The human bit is, in fact, the whole point of my work. And these days, I'm more likely to put on a tie to go talk to some musos – a nice, trendy slim one. I think I did, in fact, recently.
It was a meeting about our little bit of conspicuously shiny ITV-type work, going out in time for Christmas.
Olu and Lou are seasoned musos, each having been signed to majors at some point in their careers and each knowing a thing or two about being very cool very naturally. I'm not sure whether they noticed and appreciated my nice trendy thin tie or not, when we met the first time to discuss Thinking Juice's little advert for the telly. I'm sure they did.
As amusing as the paying demands of advertising are, it's still hard not to feel something uncomfortably approaching serious pride in some bits of work you get to contribute to in this business. Silly does not always equal ridiculous. At least, not when you receive the cheque.
Squeezing into their roof-top studio with three brass players, or hearing the session cut of the strings part in the mix for the first time, I feel as comfortable with the work we're turning out here as I do anything grown-up enough to dress open-necked in the boardroom.
It's all a bit of a weird cross-over, I'll grant you. But I'm oddly comfortable with Momo's split personalty as I prepare for the Autumn shift.
Don't ask me what it is, but something tells me it's too soon to cut my hair.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Therapy.
Therapy.
I have no particular need of therapy at the moment. Other than as I always do, for the backdrop, bedrock barking. Things are okay, I should say – but busy.
People like busy people. It sounds credible. It's a good problem. But you can be busy being an arse, remember. And I should know.
No, I'm thinking of a type of therapy that's so universal, so multi-practical, so everyday-useful I mention it now as a helpful daily tip, should you find yourself 'busy'.
Need a pep?
Pertness pooped?
Feeling less than frisky?
Really f***ing depressed?
I defy you to find me a human condition that is not downright righted by taking the following simple steps:
1: Locate a music playing device. A proper one, not a phone. One you can annoy the neighbours with (which if you do, you can instantly return to point one to feel better again, remember).
2: Locate a playable copy of Earth Wind & FIre's tunes In the stone and Star.
3: Turn up volume a tad beyond Loud Enough.
4: Press Play.
Really. I frankly DARE you to try to prove me wrong. I would prescribe this on the NHS for people with the most fearsome personal obstacles to overcome. Only I might prescribe the whole damned Greatest Hits for hardcore cases.
Trust me. I'm not mad.
Despite being off to the physical therapy of a circuits class.
I have no particular need of therapy at the moment. Other than as I always do, for the backdrop, bedrock barking. Things are okay, I should say – but busy.
People like busy people. It sounds credible. It's a good problem. But you can be busy being an arse, remember. And I should know.
No, I'm thinking of a type of therapy that's so universal, so multi-practical, so everyday-useful I mention it now as a helpful daily tip, should you find yourself 'busy'.
Need a pep?
Pertness pooped?
Feeling less than frisky?
Really f***ing depressed?
I defy you to find me a human condition that is not downright righted by taking the following simple steps:
1: Locate a music playing device. A proper one, not a phone. One you can annoy the neighbours with (which if you do, you can instantly return to point one to feel better again, remember).
2: Locate a playable copy of Earth Wind & FIre's tunes In the stone and Star.
3: Turn up volume a tad beyond Loud Enough.
4: Press Play.
Really. I frankly DARE you to try to prove me wrong. I would prescribe this on the NHS for people with the most fearsome personal obstacles to overcome. Only I might prescribe the whole damned Greatest Hits for hardcore cases.
Trust me. I'm not mad.
Despite being off to the physical therapy of a circuits class.
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Old blogger.
Old blogger.
It's not exactly been a jolly bloggy kind of few weeks, it has to be said. The pithy mirth and incisive observation you've come to rely on, oh utterly imaginary reader, have not been bubbling in the gullet ready to spill out of the creative windpipe into an entertainingly explosive coughing fit all over the Mac monitor quite as normal. I have had indigestion. Or whatever the upright version of constipation would be, suffered metaphorically. Off-colour in some way, anyway.
Which you undoubtedly are now after that little picture.
My point is that the only news I've had and the only interesting happenings I've witnessed in that time would have been so tedious to report, I'd have had no trouble conjuring a pretty accurate atmosphere of slow death. And, like every Hollywood take on the second world war ever released, the point of all this is hardly historical realism, is it.
You come here for succinct entertainment and pseudo-clever enlightenment mixed with just a self-affacing twist of zeitgeistian insight, masquerading only flimsily as proper personal journal. There's no way I'd expect you to read what I'm REALLY doing every day, any more than you'd expect me to give you what you really want – detailed but readable proof that my life is actually fairly devoid of any truly decent stories, star-struck chance happenings, big creative achievements or half way sodding decent pay packets.
---
So yes, I've not been in the mood to rock the blog. Not had time either, really.
Not the way I wanted to start my 40th year.
For I have. Today. Today marks the completion of my 39th year on Earth and the inexorable skid through my fortieth into my actual fortieth birthday, one little year from now. I have, as my sister put it, just one year left of legitimate kidulthood.
I don't know what's more tragic – that my generation's main claim to fame is that it invented this shameful reflection on our inability to grasp responsibility, or that I would describe any occurrence of it, at any age whatsoever, as legitimate.
Age itself hasn't usually been an issue for me, I have to say. The numbers are pretty meaningless. If only they'd take the hint and consistently feel so.
The numbers are, in fact, more than meaningless – they start to sound just ridiculous. I mean, who the hell would let an arse like me near the age of 40? I'm the same time-wasting bastard I was two decades ago. What am I going to do with an adult age like 40? Really? Find a point to all this arsing about all of a sudden?
I think we all tend to be judged on track records. And there's plenty of track behind me now, apparently. And not many records.
Apart from this heavily edited and incidental blog, anyway.
I suspect I know exactly what I'll do with an adult age like 40.
Put it off for a year.
It's not exactly been a jolly bloggy kind of few weeks, it has to be said. The pithy mirth and incisive observation you've come to rely on, oh utterly imaginary reader, have not been bubbling in the gullet ready to spill out of the creative windpipe into an entertainingly explosive coughing fit all over the Mac monitor quite as normal. I have had indigestion. Or whatever the upright version of constipation would be, suffered metaphorically. Off-colour in some way, anyway.
Which you undoubtedly are now after that little picture.
My point is that the only news I've had and the only interesting happenings I've witnessed in that time would have been so tedious to report, I'd have had no trouble conjuring a pretty accurate atmosphere of slow death. And, like every Hollywood take on the second world war ever released, the point of all this is hardly historical realism, is it.
You come here for succinct entertainment and pseudo-clever enlightenment mixed with just a self-affacing twist of zeitgeistian insight, masquerading only flimsily as proper personal journal. There's no way I'd expect you to read what I'm REALLY doing every day, any more than you'd expect me to give you what you really want – detailed but readable proof that my life is actually fairly devoid of any truly decent stories, star-struck chance happenings, big creative achievements or half way sodding decent pay packets.
---
So yes, I've not been in the mood to rock the blog. Not had time either, really.
Not the way I wanted to start my 40th year.
For I have. Today. Today marks the completion of my 39th year on Earth and the inexorable skid through my fortieth into my actual fortieth birthday, one little year from now. I have, as my sister put it, just one year left of legitimate kidulthood.
I don't know what's more tragic – that my generation's main claim to fame is that it invented this shameful reflection on our inability to grasp responsibility, or that I would describe any occurrence of it, at any age whatsoever, as legitimate.
Age itself hasn't usually been an issue for me, I have to say. The numbers are pretty meaningless. If only they'd take the hint and consistently feel so.
The numbers are, in fact, more than meaningless – they start to sound just ridiculous. I mean, who the hell would let an arse like me near the age of 40? I'm the same time-wasting bastard I was two decades ago. What am I going to do with an adult age like 40? Really? Find a point to all this arsing about all of a sudden?
I think we all tend to be judged on track records. And there's plenty of track behind me now, apparently. And not many records.
Apart from this heavily edited and incidental blog, anyway.
I suspect I know exactly what I'll do with an adult age like 40.
Put it off for a year.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Yelp.
Yelp.
Here's the truth: I don't get us. Us lot – humans.
I mean, I do – I can yelp at the moon with the craziest of them. But we are mad bastards.
I mean, how is it that we can meet each other in the street on most days and more or less come off as grounded, sensible neighbours who can be trusted to help each other out in an emergency – and yet manage to produce armies of flesh-eating zombies as soon as someone rings the Oh Shit bell?
I mean, really – where do all the monsters come from? Where are we hiding them?
---
Something I'm largely ignorant of is the conflict in Sri Lanka. What sparked the Tamil Tigers' two decades or however long of dissent and fighting against the government, I don't know. I've not been to the country. I hear it's beautiful.
But lastnight, I heard just a clip of an interview with a woman who'd escaped from the final throes of the war in the north of the island, earlier this year. She described scenes of carnage beyond counting.
She said that in one place she found herself, 'everywhere was bodies'. Everywhere she looked she saw corpses. Not just fallen or left, but piled.
She ran to the local hospital. They had no more room for bodies of people – there too, they were piling them in corridors and side rooms.
Where did all these dead people come from? And, more to the point, where did their killers come from?
---
This morning, an account by a woman who walked for miles to escape the fighting in the Somalian capital Mogadishu, left me wondering the same thing. She said she was so repeatedly robbed as a refugee, and so subsequently malnourished, her dreadful appearance must have been the only thing that saved her from being raped. She said that most other women with her had been, by the time they reached the coast.
It resonates with stories from the genocide in Rwanda more than a decade ago. And perhaps, in a sense, with others from the war in the former Yugoslavia – neighbours and ordinary locals appearing to develop an overnight thirst for eachother's blood and suffering.
In the case of Sri Lanka, it was government forces apparently dishing out the death. In Rwanda and in Yugoslavia, in the broadest terms, tribal friction had embedded itself in identity like a sleeper cell, so they say.
But whatever uniform you're wearing, or given at birth, you are still you when you make your choices. Even when you're part of a system trained to execute orders.
You're still you. Aren't you?
And in Somalia? Well, it's just about every conceivable element of conflict all thrown in together, isn't it? Identity, politics, poverty, money, geography – it sounds like every slavering, blood-shot, howling vision of hell ever hallucinated. It sounds like Dante's fucking Inferno. And yet, the woman this morning could still remember 'how beautiful Mogadishu was before the fighting'.
Can anyone imagine the Dish as beautiful? From the ignorant snippets of it we digest quickly from the news, it has become another Beirut or a Belfast – a place synonymous with destruction.
---
It seems incomprehensible. I don't understand where the sheer numbers of rapists and murderers appear from, when the trumpet of chaos bleats. And the level of depravity and cruelty lept to so quickly in war zones. I can't picture that happening in Bournemouth.
I feel sure that young men and women serving with British forces in Afghanistan at the moment might be able to look me thoughtfully in the eye as I say this.
So interesting, as an aside, that two of the most level-headed, likeable and positive people to have perhaps ever appeared on Channel 4's post-supper comfort Location location location were lastnight's couple, Chris and Nikki – a major in the Paras and a flight lieutenant in the RAF, respectively. If you were looking for it, at least in the edit, there was a self-effacing note of dignity brought to the usually agonising proceedings of middle class people enjoying their freedom by whining about only having a £500,000 budget to buy a home.
I shamelessly love Phil and Kirsty. And I whine about property often. But its interesting to observe people who are trained in the art of self control – trained specifically so they can be fit to defend our right to make TV about banal comforts.
---
As the debate around healthcare in the US begins to pull in ever more inflammatory language, and a barking, screaming, hair-pulling, goggle-eyed, yelping madness seems to be supplanting the country's pragmatic conversation about how best to sustain its society, I wonder how close to childish lunacy even the most idyllic models for living really are.
Is there a better dream than America? And are more petulant, ignorant voices to be heard hollering so loudly anywhere else on Earth?
But whether Bournemouth, Beirut or Belfast; Berlin, Boston or Baltimore – we humans are the only common factor in these different scenes. And, if you think about where people in these different cities find themselves in 2009, our ability to rebuild, to transform, to totally re-invent our vision of these places, and of eachother, seems as remarkable perhaps as our lurking and utterly universal weakness for fear.
Here's the truth: I don't get us. Us lot – humans.
I mean, I do – I can yelp at the moon with the craziest of them. But we are mad bastards.
I mean, how is it that we can meet each other in the street on most days and more or less come off as grounded, sensible neighbours who can be trusted to help each other out in an emergency – and yet manage to produce armies of flesh-eating zombies as soon as someone rings the Oh Shit bell?
I mean, really – where do all the monsters come from? Where are we hiding them?
---
Something I'm largely ignorant of is the conflict in Sri Lanka. What sparked the Tamil Tigers' two decades or however long of dissent and fighting against the government, I don't know. I've not been to the country. I hear it's beautiful.
But lastnight, I heard just a clip of an interview with a woman who'd escaped from the final throes of the war in the north of the island, earlier this year. She described scenes of carnage beyond counting.
She said that in one place she found herself, 'everywhere was bodies'. Everywhere she looked she saw corpses. Not just fallen or left, but piled.
She ran to the local hospital. They had no more room for bodies of people – there too, they were piling them in corridors and side rooms.
Where did all these dead people come from? And, more to the point, where did their killers come from?
---
This morning, an account by a woman who walked for miles to escape the fighting in the Somalian capital Mogadishu, left me wondering the same thing. She said she was so repeatedly robbed as a refugee, and so subsequently malnourished, her dreadful appearance must have been the only thing that saved her from being raped. She said that most other women with her had been, by the time they reached the coast.
It resonates with stories from the genocide in Rwanda more than a decade ago. And perhaps, in a sense, with others from the war in the former Yugoslavia – neighbours and ordinary locals appearing to develop an overnight thirst for eachother's blood and suffering.
In the case of Sri Lanka, it was government forces apparently dishing out the death. In Rwanda and in Yugoslavia, in the broadest terms, tribal friction had embedded itself in identity like a sleeper cell, so they say.
But whatever uniform you're wearing, or given at birth, you are still you when you make your choices. Even when you're part of a system trained to execute orders.
You're still you. Aren't you?
And in Somalia? Well, it's just about every conceivable element of conflict all thrown in together, isn't it? Identity, politics, poverty, money, geography – it sounds like every slavering, blood-shot, howling vision of hell ever hallucinated. It sounds like Dante's fucking Inferno. And yet, the woman this morning could still remember 'how beautiful Mogadishu was before the fighting'.
Can anyone imagine the Dish as beautiful? From the ignorant snippets of it we digest quickly from the news, it has become another Beirut or a Belfast – a place synonymous with destruction.
---
It seems incomprehensible. I don't understand where the sheer numbers of rapists and murderers appear from, when the trumpet of chaos bleats. And the level of depravity and cruelty lept to so quickly in war zones. I can't picture that happening in Bournemouth.
I feel sure that young men and women serving with British forces in Afghanistan at the moment might be able to look me thoughtfully in the eye as I say this.
So interesting, as an aside, that two of the most level-headed, likeable and positive people to have perhaps ever appeared on Channel 4's post-supper comfort Location location location were lastnight's couple, Chris and Nikki – a major in the Paras and a flight lieutenant in the RAF, respectively. If you were looking for it, at least in the edit, there was a self-effacing note of dignity brought to the usually agonising proceedings of middle class people enjoying their freedom by whining about only having a £500,000 budget to buy a home.
I shamelessly love Phil and Kirsty. And I whine about property often. But its interesting to observe people who are trained in the art of self control – trained specifically so they can be fit to defend our right to make TV about banal comforts.
---
As the debate around healthcare in the US begins to pull in ever more inflammatory language, and a barking, screaming, hair-pulling, goggle-eyed, yelping madness seems to be supplanting the country's pragmatic conversation about how best to sustain its society, I wonder how close to childish lunacy even the most idyllic models for living really are.
Is there a better dream than America? And are more petulant, ignorant voices to be heard hollering so loudly anywhere else on Earth?
But whether Bournemouth, Beirut or Belfast; Berlin, Boston or Baltimore – we humans are the only common factor in these different scenes. And, if you think about where people in these different cities find themselves in 2009, our ability to rebuild, to transform, to totally re-invent our vision of these places, and of eachother, seems as remarkable perhaps as our lurking and utterly universal weakness for fear.
Friday, September 11, 2009
So Tong, then.
So Tong, then.
In a typical Friday style, I've been in the studio for a while. So long, in fact, that I have removed the empty cafetiere and mug from the little table in the window and replaced them with a full bottle of Burgundy Pinot Noir and a glass.
So it's a year since we were braving mudslides at Robin Hill country park, over on the island for Bestival. It's begun again over there now and they're forecasting great weather. And Kraftwerk. And stupid sci-fi costumes.
..What am I doing here, again?
Pouring a glass and saying cheers, actually. Turns out it's Pete Tong's last 'welcome to the weekend' tonight.
Yep, it's come around already. And it turns out too that the Essential Selection is as old as our marriage. Eighteen years.
I feel a genuine sadness. This news just makes me feel that little bit more sad than I did already.
---
How many Fridays felt that bit better because of this show? I don't want to overstate it – wait 'ill I've polished off the glass – but whether we were cooking damn fine chile or driving somewhere to meet chums, watching the sun go down in the Arnewood kitchen window or watching the countryside slip past the windscreen on some evening A-road somewhere, this was how we knew it was the weekend.
When I think back to these years and this little joyful detail of our average week, I shall probably think of listening to a live version of World Hold On from one of Pete's Ibiza shows one summer, while we were stuck in a stationary traffic jam in North London one sunny summer evening. What a strangely nice memory.
Still, sentimentality never built the future, eh.
Think I might keep this cork on my desk, though.
One more tune, mate – it's three minutes to the end of the show.
..Finally it's happened to me? From 1991? The year it started; the year we were married.
Good choice.
Somehow, we shall keep dancing.
Cheers.
In a typical Friday style, I've been in the studio for a while. So long, in fact, that I have removed the empty cafetiere and mug from the little table in the window and replaced them with a full bottle of Burgundy Pinot Noir and a glass.
So it's a year since we were braving mudslides at Robin Hill country park, over on the island for Bestival. It's begun again over there now and they're forecasting great weather. And Kraftwerk. And stupid sci-fi costumes.
..What am I doing here, again?
Pouring a glass and saying cheers, actually. Turns out it's Pete Tong's last 'welcome to the weekend' tonight.
Yep, it's come around already. And it turns out too that the Essential Selection is as old as our marriage. Eighteen years.
I feel a genuine sadness. This news just makes me feel that little bit more sad than I did already.
---
How many Fridays felt that bit better because of this show? I don't want to overstate it – wait 'ill I've polished off the glass – but whether we were cooking damn fine chile or driving somewhere to meet chums, watching the sun go down in the Arnewood kitchen window or watching the countryside slip past the windscreen on some evening A-road somewhere, this was how we knew it was the weekend.
When I think back to these years and this little joyful detail of our average week, I shall probably think of listening to a live version of World Hold On from one of Pete's Ibiza shows one summer, while we were stuck in a stationary traffic jam in North London one sunny summer evening. What a strangely nice memory.
Still, sentimentality never built the future, eh.
Think I might keep this cork on my desk, though.
One more tune, mate – it's three minutes to the end of the show.
..Finally it's happened to me? From 1991? The year it started; the year we were married.
Good choice.
Somehow, we shall keep dancing.
Cheers.
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...And THEN it's suddenly: "Sh**. We need a whole 'nother universe."
What? Do we know anything anymore?
Right. So it's 'dark flow' now, is it? Rummaging in our pocket universe and making our galaxies spin very unscientifically, apparently. Like the laws-of-physics-and-the-whole-theory-of-the-big-bang-model-of-the-universe says they shouldn't be. But are.
Oh, which means there are inestimable numbers of other universes out there in the multiverse, by the way. Just so you know. So the very end of Men in black was right.
Sheeesh. Theoretical physicists. Wish I could just make up stuff for a living.
---