Glass Half Fucked - Fashionable Cynicism

Julian Baggini: Is there a real you?

2012-01-22T09:39:00.001-08:00

Nigel Slater is Smug

2012-01-22T08:04:00.001-08:00

“I’m not sure my omelette pan is any such thing. A pan worthy of the name should probably be nonstick and have a totally smooth surface and gently curving sides. The pan in which I make mine is black steel, only nonstick because of the years of service it has given, regularly being wiped with kitchen roll rather than taking a ride in the dishwater, being used for not only omelettes and the odd frittata but for frying onions, sautéing the occasional piece of chicken or frying some fingerling-sized strips of bacon to add to a winter salad of chicory, shredded celery and roasted walnut halves.”

—	Nigel Slater, The Observer, Sunday 22 January 2012

Christ.

Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory

2012-01-11T06:02:00.000-08:00

About to read Thinking Fast and Slow by this man. Below is a one of the less ebullient quotes from the cover...

Profound . . . As Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the universe and Darwin knocked humans off their biological perch, Mr. Kahneman has shown that we are not the paragons of reason we assume ourselves to be.
(The Economist )

i'm expecting a lot.

The Zebras - You Look Ready

2012-01-11T05:52:00.001-08:00

Amazing that something so obviously great can be so overlooked.

This was posted on YouTube 9 months ago and currently has 361 views. Tragic.

Sentimentality

2012-01-11T02:15:00.000-08:00

"Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty."

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Tyler Cowen: Be wary of stories

2012-01-10T02:39:00.000-08:00

Springhill Mining Disaster

2011-09-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

A brilliantly poetic story song written by Peggy Seeger and Ewan McColl and sung best, In my opinion, by Martin Carthy. The whole song invokes a great oppressive mood but the second to last line is devastating. I listened to this as events were unfolding a the Gleision Colliery near Pontardawe. Four men tragically died after becoming trapped in a flooded mine. It makes me shudder to think of what they went through, and the God awful place that these men had to work in.

In the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia

Down in the dark of the Cumberland Mine

There's blood on the coal and the miners lie

In the roads that never saw sun nor sky.

In the town of Springhill, you don't sleep easy

Often the earth will tremble and roar

When the earth is restless, miners die

Bone and blood is the price of coal.

In the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia

Late in the year of fifty-eight

Day still comes and the sun still shines

(But it's) Dark as the grave in the Cumberland mine.

Down at the coal face, miners working

Rattle of the belt and the cutter's blade

Rumble of the rock and the walls closed round

(The) Living and the dead men two miles down.

Twelve men lay two miles from the pitshaft

Twelve men lay in the dark and sang

Long hot days in the miners tomb

(It was) Three feet high and a hundred long.

Three days past and the lamps gave out

And Caleb Rushton got up and and said

There’s no more water, or light, or bread

(So we'll) Live on song and hope instead

Listen for the shouts of the barefaced miners

Listen thru the rubble for a rescue team

Six hundred feet of coal and slag

Hope imprisoned in a three foot seam.

Eight days passes and some were rescued

Leaving the dead to lie alone

Thru all their lives they dug their grave

Two miles of earth for a marking stone.

And... The polar opposite of this great rendition, U2 pissing all over the song on the Gaye Burne Show. Just a stunningly bad attempt, amateurish and with a forced sincerity that makes me want to hide behind the sofa.

Raising Arizona - Pitch Perfect

2011-09-15T10:01:00.000-07:00

Edgar Wright said of Raising Arizona "There is more visual and verbal wit in the opening 15 minutes than some comedy writers or directors manage in their entire career." He's right. It's a contender to be my favourite film of all time and this opening 10 minutes is totally perfect. It's also the reason Nicolas Cage can do very little wrong in my book, he is incredible in it. No matter how bad he is in a film, or how bad a film he is in, he always has a touch of the H.I. McDunnough about him.

Some points:

"Don't forget his profile, Ed" "Don't forget his phone call, Ed" "Don't forget his fingers, Ed" "Don't forget the bouquet, Ed"
The way that Ed pronounces Fiancée.
The flash after McDunnough turns to the side on his bunk.
"You ate sand!?".
"Ok then".
"I'm walking in here on my knees, Ed".
"This woman, that looks as fertile as the Tennessee Valley, could not bear children. But the doctor explained that her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase."
The perfect music.

My Best Photograph: Elitch Gardens, Denver

2011-08-09T05:11:00.000-07:00

Elitch Gardens, Denver. If you click on it, it will embiggen.

Pretty certain this is the best picture I've ever taken. It's of Elitch Gardens in Denver taken during a great two weeks of skiing and mooning around in 09. I know very little about the nitty gritty of composition, even less about the technical aspects of taking photos, but this one just works. It's amazing to me how many times I can get it wrong before I succeed in getting a picture that I think is ok. My hit rate is about 1 in 30, maybe slightly higher with portraits. I still make the same stupid mistakes over and over, the main one being that I take too many random shots that have no subject. But when you get a photo that really clicks, it's a great feeling.

Denver is a strange town. I liked it a lot. Like many American cities it feels slightly empty when you walk around. As an Ameriphile (Yankophile?) I love spending time in The States but the big cities that I have visited, outside of New York and LA, have all had this feeling. It's as if there is too much space and not enough people to fill it. Even Chicago, which is an amazing place, feels a bit like it's closed for business after 7pm. There's nothing wrong with this, but my fantasy of American inner city life was based on the New York of the early 80's, I expected every American city to have side-walks thronging and with pedestrians 24/7, lines of yellow cabs and people shouting "I'm walking here!!". I'm used to people living in cramped houses on top of each other in a country with no space, it's no wonder a city with the option to stretch out luxuriously on to the plain seems a bit more diffuse. Then again, if you went to Coventry on a Tuesday night, you'd be hard pushed to find anyone either.

I imagine that this idea is also based on my British sense of where the action should be in a city. Traditionally, In the UK, the place to do most things is the city centre. You go "into town" at the weekend, that's where all the good stuff happens. In the cities I've visited in the states this tends to be less the case. I imagine that "Main Street" has slowly lost it's influence to the ubiquitous out of town malls that dominate the outskirts of many cities, it's a shitty process that drains the life and heart out of a place, of course this is slowly happening in the UK as well.

Elitch Gardens was closed when I visited Denver. I walked with my camera to a massive outdoor clothing store (REI), just outside of the central business district. I walked round for an hour and came out with an 8 Dollar discounted baseball cap. The cashier sarcastically said, "enjoy your hat" as I was leaving. I felt cheap. I saw this picture as I was walking back. I only took 3 shots but, fortunately, this one hit the nail on the head.

Correfoc flares in Mallorca

2011-08-05T05:15:00.001-07:00

St Swithin's Day

2011-07-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

Today is St Swithin's Day. If it rains today, we'll all be wet for 40 days. It's also the name of a maudlin classic by Billy Bragg that I have swooned to many times in the past. Listen to Billy Bragg – St Swithin's Day now on Spotify, best served whilst looking plaintively out of the window.

Thinking back now

I suppose you were just stating your views
What was it all for
For the weather or the Battle of Agincourt
And the times that we all hoped would last
Like a train they have gone by so fast
And though we stood together
At the edge of the platform
We were not moved by them

With my own hands
When I make love to your memory
It's not the same
I miss the thunder
I miss the rain
And the fact that you don't understand
Casts a shadow over this land
But the sun still shines from behind it.

Thanks all the same
But I just can't bring myself to answer your letters
It's not your fault
But your honesty touches me like a fire
The Polaroids that hold us together
Will surely fade away Like the love that we spoke of forever
On St Swithin's day

Dinky's Dinah, Shrewsbury: Bacon and Egg Sandwich.

2011-06-16T08:08:00.000-07:00

Egg and bacon, the king of the sandwiches. Double egg, double decker. The lack of sauce is deliberate.

There's a roadside cafe near Shrewsbury, Dinky's Dinah. If you get Dinky serving you, at least I think it's Dinky, he'll call you "young man" and make you feel like a princess. Bacon and egg sandwiches are my favourite food ever, full stop. I'm not a man to turn down a sausage if I'm in the right frame of mind, but bacon and egg go together like no other combo on Earth. The pig and the chicken, acquaintances in the farmyard, lovers in a sandwich.

This sandwich was extra special. It came loaded with two eggs rather than your standard single egg and, bonus of bonuses, 3 slices of lovely, soft, shitty white bread. Two fucking eggs! And a double decker! Getting more than you paid for, or ever expected, is such a rare occurrence. I must have been impressed because, as you can see, I took the picture after I had started eating the sandwich and it's not like me to stop eating mid scoff. Moments of small pleasure like this make life worth living.

Photographs with nowhere to go

2011-06-13T07:52:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start putting photographs up on this blog. Because I don't much like Flickr, and I don't post enough words. I don't know whether this is the best format, so I may repost them on a dedicated blog in the future, who knows? Here's the first three. From a huge amount I took on a recent trip to Greece. Cha-ching!!!

Is Happiness Nothingness?

2011-03-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a stand against myself, against my past, my present and my future.

I found this article form the New York times that I obviously found incredibly interesting!

When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays:

I've said before that I think that depression can be an illness related to perception, but I think that it can also be an illness of misdirected hyper-focus. When unhappy I become the most important creature in the world, I cannot think of anything but who I am (or believe myself to be), who I have been (or believe myself to have been) and what I am to become (or what I speculate may happen sometime in the future). When I begin to drift out of my low state I know I am feeling better because I start to have minutes and hours where I am not obsessively looking inward and analysing my situation with pity. I have minutes, followed by hours followed eventually by days where I forget to remember I am ill. I don't become "happy", I just stop being aware of myself obsessively thinking. This leads me to think that happiness, perhaps, isn't about gaining anything, it is the opposite, a lack of the presence of our internal voice. A state where, briefly, conscious thought retreats and for a moment we have no-thing to grasp on to.

For me, the moments when happiness, or perhaps joy, invades are the moments in which everything else retreats. Moments of high concentration when you are not thinking about the past, or creating various scenarios about how your future will pan out. Moments that you forget the person that you think you are. Getting lost in music, reading, exercising. This can be a moment when a great rush of your present "aliveness" fills your mind. I feel this sometimes when I am lost in music (caught in a trap!) or at the perilous apex of a roller coaster, just before the drop. Conversely it can arrive when you are concentrating hard on the thing that is there, in front of you. One aspect that I enjoy about meditation is the conscious attempt to remove all thoughts of the future and the past from my mind.

Perhaps happiness isn't a thing to be maintained, it is a mind state that we can only ever glimpse. In fact perhaps once you are aware of it, and begin to examine it, it disappears. Like, we are told, when a Buddhist briefly glimpses nirvana. We rarely say "I am happy now" but we often say "I was happiest when..." or "I was so happy then". Perhaps happiness is something that can only exist in the past, a state of mind relative to how we are feeling now? Perhaps the best we can hope for is contentment, a state of mind achievable when we become aware that all worry is temporary, even illusory, and will pass this time as it has a million times before.

Drinking and narcotics are very good at replicating these feelings. For me they obliterate everything but that which is happening NOW. It's not that drugs and alcohol make nothing matter to us, I think that they bring the present into sharp focus and relegate the past and the future to their rightful places as speculative, ephemeral concepts that shackle us in our, very sober, everyday lives. No wonder they are so addictive. Strangely, Perhaps, travelling also elicits in me similar feelings. When my starting point is in the past and my destination is some time away It is easier to for me to embrace the present. Time spent on the journey is enforced powerlessness, you can do nothing about your present reality but go with the flow. It often gives me a unique sense of pleasure.

Of course religion and faith also replicate these feelings. As well as reinforcing certainty, and therefore lessening doubt, a Christian might be absolved of responsibility for his past deeds, and guaranteed a rapturous future beyond his imagining. A belief that heaven awaits will tend to make your present life on earth of very little consequence. Joy and happiness, even bliss in this regard, come from complete absolution. You no longer have to feel guilty about your past, or constantly pensive about your future, you have been given a get out of jail free card, nothing Earthly matters.

What happiness isn't for me is the model which is sold to us everyday. An obsession with achievement for achievements sake, mundane avarice, shallow pride, the constant approval of others and, above all else, the fetishising and accumulation of objects. Why do I crave new possessions when the thousand times I have wanted something, and got what I wanted, it has never once made me content beyond the fleeting feelings of reward achieved by my making the object that was once imaginary in my life become reality. The objects I crave promise everything but always deliver almost nothing. In fact the frustration that my desire for them caused, and the subsequent disappointment with them when they failed to give me what they promised, means they are actually a cause of net unhappiness. These objects become symbols of my pointless craving and my naive optimism in thinking "this time it will be different". They are reminders that I am constantly blinded by the false promise of advertising as they join the bag of "previously desired things" that I drag through my life.

But we all know that when the worries of the future fly past the present they always turn into the worries of the past but the void that is left is never filled with calm. It is always filled with something else to be concerned about, either regret or guilt at something we have or haven't done or fear and apprehension about some terrible thing that we predict is going to happen. Both sets of fears are our minds creating realities that we can often do nothing about.

We can either seek to work hard to destroy all of our worries by dealing with them one by one, a herculean task that will never be complete, or we can attempt to become aware of the many ways in which our flawed perception differs from reality and to gain some clarifying perspective on our constant struggles. Happiness and perspective. Sometime I am filled with a terrible feeling of dread, or an impending sense of doom, apparently for no reason that I can bring to mind. In these moments the world seems like a terribly worrying place. But sometimes within moments this tangible, tasteable dread can vanish if I receive the smallest piece of good news. On another day this dreadful thought would never occur to me and I would be content. What has changed? The event that I have made large is entirely illusory; the attention and importance that I gave it at the moment of its appearance is what makes me unhappy.

I'm very interested in the Buddhist concept of being awake to the illusion (a difficult word) of individual conscious experience, and of the human perception of time, the future and the past. I am just beginning to understand the idea that these are concepts that we create and that, in turn, we use as the foundation stones of our identity; pillars on which we balance our subjective perceptions of who we are as we move through time. Maybe if we can try to grasp that these concepts are false structures that we torture ourselves with daily, then perhaps we can attempt to live more for the present, constantly mindful of our present actions and feelings and begin to grasp more often the contentment that comes simply with being alive and aware.

ISO50 Lovely poster

2011-02-01T10:04:00.000-08:00

I love this poster. Amanda thinks it's horrible. This along with tons more lovely graphic art can be found at Scott Hansen's lovely ISO 50 site. Bostin! He also makes incredible noises as the mellifluous Tycho. Check him out.

MasterChef, Stein, Foodies and the idea of quality food

2010-07-30T06:55:00.000-07:00

If we set up a food taste scale, with one being soil and 100 being manna, a terrible custard might rank as taste 10; inedible as it tastes like dog sick and has mould on it. An average custard would rank at 65, a work a day custard, custard is delicious anyway. A great custard would rank at 75, slightly more delicious, but only a slight difference from the average custard. Foodie-ism is the incredible bourgeois obsession with the minute taste differences between these slightly different variations of custard.

Custard A has been made using rinsed Andalusian cream, this custard tastes mildly bland. Custard B has been made with slightly too much Dominican sugar syrup, this custard is middlingly plain. Custard C has exactly the right ingredients, in the right combination and quantities, for this particular custard loving judge's entirely subjective taste receptors. The judge is thus able to judge that C is definitely the best custard and, because his entirely subjective senses are thought of as being better at judging the taste of custard than yours or mine, we go along with his decision.

Sometimes the judge's knowledge is so respected that he gets to bring out his own range of eggy custard tarts. We eat the over priced tarts with the knowledge that they contain custard sanctioned by a nationally televised custard expert, and feel superior to the other plebeian tart eaters in that they don't have the custard knowledge that we have attained, by proxy, through imbibing the products endorsed, but not made by, the said expert.

Stein - Cold dead eyes

The king of these fuckers is Rick Stein. A man with barely a sliver of humanity floating on a ocean of vacuity. You can tell Rick Stein is a monster by looking closely at his eyes. Whenever he stops patronising people with his random inconsequential musings there is a kind of barely concealed anger that begins to creep its way in to his blank face. An anger and a sadness. He's constantly on the verge of being short with people. Telling them what's what, setting the world to rights. Of course he is also famous for getting demonstratively angry at the standard of British cooking; over and over and over again. Episode after episode. Lionising "authentic peasant food" and belittling the lack of British "flair and imagination". All we need is "authentic British ingredients, simply cooked".

I've got news for Stein and every other patronising cook that considers themselves to be a serious gastronomic ethnographer and an arbiter of British tastes. It's only fucking food. It functions as a symbol of good taste only because people like you set apart the "good" and "bad", the "quality" and the "trash" with meaningless ad hoc associations. "Hilariously" prawn cocktail (snigger) and black forest gateaux (snort) were the height of middle class taste in 1977, but we know better now. Those foodstuffs were eaten by people who didn't understand food the way we do in the sophisticated 21st century. The best food to eat is obviously LBISC (local British ingredients, simply cooked).

MasterChef takes the concept of infinitesimally small differences between "good" and "bad" food to it's logical conclusion. Hundreds and hundreds of slight variations on the same glossy, cloying ingredients, presented to elicit the deliberately pointed responses of two fat faced nobodies, one of whom only got the job because he can distinguish between different types of vegetables. After a while every plate looks the same. But the opinions of the experts are always consistent in their banality.

Jonty Road: Her tart was delicious, the filling was perfect but the crust didn't have enough salt in it.

Veg expert: That's the second time she's left an ingredient out that, in my opinion, should be in a meal. She's out of the competition.

How much difference did that salt make? We buy into the myth of gastronomic perfection. That there exists somewhere an uber-tart. The tart that all other tarts that are created have to be measured against. But such a tart doesn't exist. All tarts are measured against each other on a subjective internal bank of tart memories. MasterChef is essentially a program about what Veg Man and Jonty Road like eating. It should be called Line Up to Please the Randomly Chosen Men that have something to do with Food.

Keith Floyd had the right idea. Show people a place, show them how to cook a food item, tell them it's easy to do and to enjoy it, eating the food with some delicious wine. End of story. What's not good is patronisingly lecturing people on what they should be eating, constantly harking back to a non existent British peasant food culture and obsessing about what the average family (for average family read the working classes) cooks for their tea. Chicken nuggets exist and people really really like eating them, it may make you feel slightly queasy, but do you know what? Hard shit. No matter how many times you call chicken nuggets tasteless cardboard processed rubbish, it won't change the fact that their popularity kind of proves that they taste nice and lots of people prefer eating them to food that you consider to be more worthwhile.

Subjective Reality: Where is the real New York?

2010-07-19T10:54:00.000-07:00

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are" Anais Nin .

"The map is not the territory" Alfred Korzybski.

For months before I visit a new place, I hold within me a sense of what the place will be like like. I imagine what the people will be like and what sights, sounds and smells that I will experience when I arrive. If I visit a new city I might study maps of the road layouts around the hotel where I am going to be staying, watch video reportage from it's streets and imagine the different types of food I will eat. For all of my in depth research, these pre-experience activities can never come close to describing the experience of actually being in the place, it is never the same. In one hour in New York you will know as much about the "New Yorkness" of New York than you could in a lifetime of study. I desperately wanted to visit New York when I was a teenager. The city as it existed in my mind was constructed from a hugely detailed database of images and sounds, friends descriptions, food tastes, films, graphic art, television shows and a hundred other secondary sources. But a construct is all that it was, and such is all pre-experience understanding in life.

But which is more real, the visceral sense experience of being alive in New York at that particular minute? Or the extensive knowledge of history and culture that a lifetime of learning about a place can bring? Are they as real as each other? Is my experience of standing on a New York street any more real that my ad-hoc collection of a priori New York knowledge? I say this because no matter how many times I am waiting to travel, no matter how much i think I know what to expect, experiencing a place first hand has always blown my previous perceptions out of the water. I will always end up saying to myself, "This place is nothing like I expected it to be."

Of course an obvious answer is to say that in order to "know", or to have more authentic understanding of a place or thing it is always better to have both prior knowledge and also direct experience of it. The trouble with this answer for me is that even though i have now been to New York a number of times, the thing that reminds me of the place the most, that gives me the Proustian rush of a whole body memory of New Yorkness, is listening to this piece of music, Angela by Bob James.

I heard this song every week whilst growing up in Coventry, years before I ever went to the States, and yet listening to it reminds me of the New York I visited 25 years later. The theme from Taxi is as much a part of my experience of New York as central park zoo and the smell of side-walk hot dogs. I consciously know that this facet of my New York knowledge relates to a vision of the place that is romanticised and created entirely for TV, but my subconscious doesn't care, it treats the experience of primary source material and secondary fictional source material as being of equal value; In fact it selects the secondary material as being more representative of the thing itself!

Unravelling the spaghetti-like network of thoughts that one has about where our understanding of any particular thing, idea or moral value comes from is practically impossible. Our views are made up of such a huge web of learning, experience and myth that the best we can hope to do is have an inkling of the stereotypes and predudices that we hold in our minds. But we don't need to understand where our prejudices and beliefs come from in absolute detail, we only need to know that our views are pretty likely to be best guess assumptions based on a limited number of the total facts available to us at any particular time. Accept that some of the feelings and beliefs that you hold dear may very well be based on shaky foundations and whenever you feel yourself drifting into a certaintist position think of Ben Goldacre's brilliant phrase and tell yourself "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that". Taking an interest in this difficult area of self knowledge and identity forces us to ask some very tricky questions about who we are and exactly what it is that we believe to be true. What is quality? What is moral? What tastes nice? Which music is the best? Is TV bad for kids? What is the best way to bring up my children? Is Israel justified in its policy towards Gaza? Does Homoeopathy work? What is truth?

I believe that Robert Anton Wilson had a sensible idea. He described himself as a "model agnostic" and believed that one should never regard "one model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial." He also said, in Cosmic Trigger, that "belief is the death of intelligence". Sage advice I think.

Herring Similar Face Confusion

2010-07-16T06:08:00.000-07:00

I was just looking at my post from last December and realized that my fat face was remarkably similar to that of Richard Herrings famous face in the image that Amanda took. Spooky!!

Depression, self perception and subjective reality

2010-05-10T16:02:00.000-07:00

When I was a teenager, I would sometimes feel when I woke up in the morning that someone had opened my skull and blanketed my brain with a thick layer of cotton wool. This brain fog felt like I was peering out of my own eyes at a world that, although I definitely knew I had seen before, I could not quite remember where. I now know that this experience has a name, depersonalization disorder, but at the time I had no idea what the hell was going on. I experienced depersonalization disorder on and off for a couple of years. It mostly stayed for an hour or two but when I was about 15 the feeling came and stayed with me for about a week. It felt a little like the opposite of deja vu. I knew everyone's names, and recognized their faces, but something intangible was missing, as if the world had been replaced overnight by an exact copy of the world that had existed the day before. I knew that I had seen the objects, places and people that made up my life before, but they elicited in my brain the wrong kind of responses; as if a particular part of me was seeing them for the first time. These feelings were the first time my perception of reality, and my perception of what it was that made "me", was altered.

In my experience depression is primarily a disorder of perception. We can live our whole lives without asking basic questions of ourselves, without beginning to perceive and challenge the constructs and fixed modes of thinking that make up our personalities. Understanding that our opinions are as much a product of our upbringing, the random accidents of our birth, our geographical location, our health, our family wealth etc. as of our continued conscious engagement with the world. Depression, very quickly, destroys any illusion that your "PERSONALITY” is something that lives in your head, a true reflection of "you". It does this by taking away the "who" of you very quickly indeed. Your personality is voided; removed. It seems like you have to start again from scratch. Now although this void is an horrendous experience in one very important way I found it enlightening. When you sink down into the rabbit hole the blinkers are off. Your perception is flipped. This new mode of perception is of course as much a construct as that which it replaced, but the important thing is the fact that you have experienced two separate personality states. You have stepped out of the box. When I was severely depressed I no longer remembered who I was before the slow slide downward. I was a essentially a different person.

Nothing has been the same since this experience. After my first, and only, major depressive episode in my teens, I lived in constant fear of that person coming back. I did not fear being "unhappy", but of feeling like, and to all intents and purposes being, a completely different person; of being haunted by something that I could not control, that destroyed the "me" and replaced it with a different, darker, "me". When I was depressed I knew that things seemed profoundly different to the way they were before the depressive event, but my memories of who I was then were no longer accessible. To ask me to recall being "happy" was like asking me to recall what it might be like for someone else to be happy. I knew what happy meant, I could imagine it, I could give it substance through associated signs, a couple hand in hand in a corn field, a smiling father, a happy baby etc but the essence of what was signified by "happy" was completely gone.

This is where my struggle with "who" I am comes from; my current interest in perception, identity and involuntary memory and my on going distrust of my instincts and decision making capabilities. I struggle with whether my words, and opinions, have any real meaning or weight. I can never say for certain whether that which I proclaim to be true is really true, or simply what I believe at any given moment in time. I am swayed Daily by the Mail and The Guardian. I think one thing that depression has taught me is an awareness of the fragile nature of ideological positions and the ease at which people can fool themselves into thinking that their opinions are "common sense". How quickly the unusual becomes normality in society; and the previously normal becomes sidelined and abnormal. Throughout our lives we encounter people who don't ever seem to have begun to truly engage with this concept. The world is one way, their perception is correct, that is how it is. The Certaintists.

Many people lack any empathy to perceive that other people are not just carbon copies ejected from the same mould but individuals with their own unique inner lives. Or the imagination to see that other people may see the world entirely differently from themselves. Not just in that they prefer cricket to football or Tory to Labour, but in profound ways that defy description. That they themselves, and our current consensus reality, is in a constant state of change.

When I'm not in a down phase I can skip past negative thoughts as if they are barely there at all, but when I feel low they trip me up time and time again. It is at these moments that the difference between my low and high states becomes most clear to me. I cannot let the negative thoughts go. I have no tools for doing so. What is effortless for the up me is impossible for the down me and the gulf between the two personalities that exist within me seems immeasurably distant. One side cannot offer solace or help to the other because when one personality appears, the other is entirely subsumed. My mind changes the world.

When a depressive episode begins to recede it sometimes feels like my knowledge of reality, or the un-knowable, subjective nature of reality, is becoming less real and more blurred. I feel that my brief insight into "the truth" such as it is, is being de-realized and that somehow I am retreating back into the forest. In that forest lies the entirely illusory comfort blanket of my un-depressed mind. This is perhaps the reason behind the great irony of how the leaden paralysis of depression can inspire great art and provoke radical thought. Because along with all of the turbulence and misery can also come a new perception and a clarity of thought that can provide a deeper understanding of the subjective quality of conscious experience and give sufferers a glimpse of the world through another's eyes.

Our perspective on the past as we get older

2010-03-02T10:01:00.000-08:00

Some people say that time appears to move faster as we get older because of the percentage of our life that we have lived. If you are a one year old, the amount of time till your next birthday is the length of time you have already been alive, literally a lifetime in your perception. If you are ninety nine the distance to your next birthday is just 1% of the time you have spent on Earth. This seems a feasible explanation to me.

Another thing, perhaps related to this, that I have noticed as I get older is the changes in my perception of the past. When I first became aware of trends in fashion and music in the 1980's the fashions of just 4 years previously seemed incredibly, immeasurably outdated. And the faces that I saw beaming at me from 50's and 60's news reels and ancient photographs and TV shows seemed to have not one thing in common with my existence. They were an alien race of people from a different world. I could not imagine they were like me, with the same feelings. The same wants and needs. I looked at their odd clothes and the strange way they held themselves for photographs. I listened to the odd way they talked to each other on camera and i saw nothing that was like me or those I knew. We had nothing in common. The same went for "old" people.

But now, with half a lifetime's perspective on change, and just how similar things can be over time, I feel an unexpected empathy with images of past generations. Images of the 60's and 50's now have different connotations. The clothes are unimportant, the music is unimportant, the style of deportment or language is unimportant. I see more similarities than differences. The past contracts and rushes to meet me and 40 years seems like no time at all to be alive.

Are changes in fashion and music less great these days? Are trends gently sliding into each other more subtly than before or am i just too old now to perceive how different things are from five years ago? Are the trends and fashions of 2010 THAT different from 15 years ago? How can I really know?

Look at the two men in this image from the Cheers intro sequence. How different are they from the usual idea of the stiff faced Edwardian photography subject? They seem as real and as close to me now as anyone from 2010. Arrogantly posing, showing off for the camera. Where are these two ghosts now?

Anyone for Puttocks? - Collings & Herrin, Duke of Yorks, Brighton

2009-12-09T06:04:00.000-08:00

Went to see Andrew Collins and Richard Herrings filth filled live podcast last night at the Duke of Yorks cinema in Brighton. It was really good. Although there was a strange element in the audience that gave the impression they had just walked in off the street expecting to see something else. You would think that, having listened to almost 100 hours of these two men talking nonsense, swearing and being amusing, they would know more exactly what to expect than at any live event they would ever pay to see; but apparently not. The audience was "flighty" but under control and the podcast was, i think, a very different beast from any that has gone before. As well as the odd audience, Rich seemed a tiny bit merry which added a sense of crackling potential to the evening. It may have been mah favourite one ever.

I'm not usually a person who is a professional "fan" of anything, but I love the Collings and Herrin podcast, as do many other thirty-something men judging by the mostly bearded and balding audience. I had hastily made a childish t shirt with the obscure mantra, "Anyone for Puttocks?" written on it, like a big twat. Not wanting my one hours worth of effort and the pound I paid for the fabric pen, to go to waste I managed to meet my idols after the festivities were over. They were both very nice and didn't look in the least bit irritated to indulge yet another grown man that should know better. I didn't want to buy any merchandise, but gave them 5 pounds for either A) a Marks and Spencer sandwich/salad and a drink or B) 5 litres of rice/oat milk. Amanda took the above picture for prosperity. I was very proud of the picture until my sister pointed out that it looks like a fully grown adult man, grinning like an idiot, wearing a meaningless homemade t shirt, in between two other anonymous adult men. 34 years old I was.

Sublime Muppet Bohemian Rhapsody

2009-11-24T10:31:00.001-08:00

A host of Muppet characters sing Bohemian Rhapsody, perhaps the most Muppet appropriate song ever written. I remember the Muppets were always on on Sunday night in the UK and we would watch it as a family after our Sunday night bath time. I still remember my mum shouting "MUPPETS!" up the stairs and leaping out of the bath to be down in time to catch the opening titles. Why has it taken 35 years to make this video? It's Brilliant.

2 Years too late: Juno is a Terrible Terrible Film

2009-11-02T09:32:00.000-08:00

Fuck me I hated Juno. What is it about it that I hated so much? I mean, I hated it perhaps more than any film I have ever seen. I have ideas, I can take a stab at guessing, but there is just something intangible, something elemental that I don't like, and it has lived in my brain since I first saw it. When I was in my arrogant early twenties and Zombie came out, I swore that I could never see eye to eye with someone that liked The Cranberries. Now I’m in my arrogant early thirties I feel exactly the same way about Juno.

I first watched Juno in the States. It hit me like a punch to the gut. It was the most irritating film I’d ever seen. I tore through the reviews looking for reviewers who thought the same as me, that hated it as much as I did but, to my horror, Juno got universally stunning press. It currently has a freshness rating of 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. I waited eagerly for the film to be released in the UK. Surely the UK press wouldn't give this blindingly fake piece of crap the time of day? Surely they would tear it to pieces? But again I was confounded to see that it got brilliant notices. So it was just me, right? I truly felt isolated, as if this was Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I just couldn't understand why people didn't see what I saw in this movie. But when I Googled "I Hate Juno" for the first time I discovered a significant undercurrent of dissent. Dissent like this Facebook group started by two shining lights of common sense in the Juno loving void that is popular opinion called Jesse Farrenkopf and Erin Cesaro. Confused people all over the world were arguing on forums and blogs with similar ideas to me. I found some reviewers that had major issues with the film; very few, but they did exist. So what was it about Juno that I found so hard to swallow? Why is it so divisive?

Some have said that Juno is shit because the dialogue is "fake" and "contrived" but I don't think that this is it. Films aren't real life, I know that, and Juno doesn't pretend to be a documentary. Juno is so arch, so knowing, so self confident in its own hip-ness and now-ness, it is a film designed to make its audience feel trendy, a back slapping roller coaster ride for the self regarding who mistake sarcasm for irony and utterly random pop culture references for a true decent, and meaningful, understanding of pop culture. People that would label themselves as trendy. They "get" Juno. It seems, on the surface, to be a perfect example of a film that they should like, so why would they not like it? It hooks the superficial in with its approximation of cool, but there is nothing, nothing at all, below the surface.

Trendy is an impossible thing to pin down. You think you have caught it but when you lift up the glass, you have killed it. When you strive to capture the essence of cool, you instantly destroy it. The system can cynically create trends, no problem at all. It can roughly document the trends of the past, obscuring the detail, but when it comes to reacting to trends or representing the presently trendy, it hasn't got a fucking clue. You start off thinking 'Brilliant, I’ve got a trendy script with hip dialogue going on here. Teenagers are going to be queuing up to see this' and, most of the time, what you've actually got is Gleaming the Cube.

The worst scene? The bit where they are discussing which bands are cool. Picking any band would have been bad. What the writer is doing here is making it known that THESE ARE THE BANDS THAT SHE LISTENS TO and THIS IS THE TYPE OF FILM THAT SHE LIKES and THIS IS WHAT IS COOL with a loud hailer. The scene seems to only exist because the writer wanted to make these statements. And who wouldn't have heard of Mott the Hoople? It like listening to your dad trying to talk about 'the hip hop' and so incredibly forced. When have you ever seen a band referenced like this in a film before that hasn’t been either ironic, or you are supposed to make value judgements about the people picking the bands? Take the films of John Hughes for instance. In all of those movies the bands are there, they are part of the fabric of the teenager’s lives, maybe on a t-shirt or on a poster, but he never mentions the current pop culture of the day. It’s suicidal. Imagine Ferris Bueller saying to Cameron ‘I’m on my Hamburger telephone, wanna come over and pick me up? We can listen to some Zigue Zigue Sputnik?’ he just wouldn’t do it!

The choice of bands for the soundtrack is as contrived as the dialogue. Look at the sparkling list of pop naives’ littering the soundtrack. Kimya Dawson? Child voiced whine-cock. Barry Louis Polisar? Faux folk nursery twat. The sugary tweeness of the list, and their close proximity to one another, means that the soundtrack runs the risk of becoming some sort of twee black hole, sucking in, and destroying forever, the reputations of any mildly decent band that comes within sucking distance. At one point I thought "what this film is missing is a twinkly Belle and Sebastian song" and low and behold, up one pops. Shame on you Stuart Murdoch. And Juno would never like Sonic Youth. Cody hangs out with people that think Sonic Youth are Cool, there is no concession made for the fact that Juno is half Cody’s age. It feels exactly like a script about teenagers written by an irritating thirty-something hipster. And, like someone loudly mentioning how many drugs they did the weekend before, or name dropping the shitty band that they got on the guest list to see, making statements about this sort of thing is a dangerous game to play. It is very easy to look like a self regarding prick.

Even great artists are capable of dropping the ball like this, sometimes. Graham Linehan, a man I love for his comedy writing, is obsessed with Guided by Voices. He inadvertently destroyed a tiny part of that which he loves so much when he put this glaring name drop in an episode of the IT crowd.

I'll make up my own mind what's cool thank you, and as good and funny as the IT Crowd is, very funny indeed, it's a sitcom, not Melody Maker. The earnestness sticks out like a sore thumb.

You could understand it if Juno was flagged as arrogant or ignorant or naive but she never is. If, when she picked up her hamburger phone and said “I’m talking on my hamburger phone” the person on the other end said:

'You’re such and arrogant loser, let me come over and see your hamburger phone, then ask you about it, then you can go "yeah I got that the other week I like it" and then move on and I will go "wow, that is an interesting pop cultural artefact she has, and she is totally not waving it in my face. I want to be as cool as her."'

But she doesn’t, she essentially shouts “EVERYONE LOOK. I’VE GOT A HAMBURGER PHONE” When she listens to music she says “EVERYONE! I’LL JUST GO AND PUT ON MY VINYL SONIC YOUTH ALBUMS, BECAUSE I ACTUALLY PREFER THEM TO CDs”.

I don't want to make judgements about Diablo Cody, she may well be a lovely person who is deeply misunderstood, but she changed her name to Diablo Cody. If I knew someone that did that, I wouldn't be their friend anymore. I would tell them they were a fucking idiot. It wouldn't take anything else. That would be enough. Honestly. Change your name to Alison James? Fine. Jackie Edwards? Fine. But Diablo Cody?

Diablo: "My name was Helen Peterson, but I changed my name to Diablo Cody"
Mum: "Why did you do that? It's a terrible name"
Diablo: "I think it makes me sound really different. It makes me stand out. I wanted a name that fitted with my internal idea of myself as a crazy, wide eyed rebel."
Mum: "Please don't do it, it will make you sound like a stripper. Or an alternative porn actress who specialises in fisting"
Diablo: “I’m also going to get loads of tattoos, what do you think about that?"
Mum: "Oh dear, then you will sound and look like a stripper or an alternative porn actress who specialises in fisting"
Diablo: "Yeah, well, about that... I’m also going to become a stripper."
Mum: "Whatever you think is best dear, we will do our best to support you"
Diablo: (interrupting) "...Fuck off you square. I'll do what I like! ...Oh, you don't mind and aren't really shocked at all. Thanks’, mum. Can you lend me a fiver?"

There are a lot of people that say the hate directed at Cody is because she is a woman. And I’m sure that there are a fair amount of misogynists that hate the attention she is getting purely because they don't want to see a woman succeed. But how many other writers do you know that get the levels of attention she has been getting? I know the names of two writers, Paul Schrader and that guy who wrote Sliver and Basic Instinct. That's it. Now that Diablo Cody exists I know the name of three writers. She is hamstrung from the start. The moment she was pushed by the studio to be a 'name writer' and given endless interview time, people start to get pissed off. She would have had to have been a preternaturally charming and witty person to get over the initial "Why the hell are they so obsessed with the writer" resentment. She is being pushed in the promotional adverts for Jennifer's Body as "The Genius Behind Juno". Add to this the obvious promotion of her "alternative" and "bad girl" persona, which would rile a few thousand extra potential viewers, and her obviously stratospheric self regard, and you begin to see that Juno being so divisive was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe it's just that the film makers tried to make something different and exciting and I just didn't get it. I like a lot of 'American independent' films. I loved Napoleon Dynamite; it made me swoon with jealousy with its spare script and brilliant execution. I liked Little Miss Sunshine. I thought it was low key and just the right side of sentimental. But Juno just stuck in my craw. I'm willing to accept that I am out of touch, but the reaction to Cody's follow up (movie), Jennifer's Body and the shear amount of people that just simply hated Juno, often for very similar reasons to myself, makes me think that I’m at least a little bit vindicated.

The Australian Jackson 5

2009-10-08T08:27:00.000-07:00

You've probably seen this by now. I love how the host just seems amazed that this could be deemed offensive. If i was in Connick Jr's position I would have just given them a 3, smiled politely and sacked my agent.

Thanks to the 'Hey Hey it's Saturday' the world now has another cultural stereotype to hang on the average Australian. Along with the traditional 'bullying sports bore' and 'insecure nationalist loud mouth' we now have the 'jaw droppingly naive racist'.

Struth! Here's another one! You could write a whole blog about blackface Australian Jackson 5 parodies.

Brighton Argus Blogger, Juliette Wills

2009-10-01T09:01:00.000-07:00

Good Lord! I think this is the most spiteful blog post i've ever read, Full English Breakfast at Tiffany's by Juliette Wills. RJ over at Amiable Dunce thinks she may just be testing the water and trying out a Garry Bushell/John Gaunt style persona for effect, I'm not so sure.

In my first blog, you might have noticed that I'm not too fond of scroungers. I don't mind those who need help receiving help, ie. those who are genuinely too sick to work because they have a chronic, debilitating illness or those who have had to give up their job to care for someone with an illness. What I object to is idiots who claim they are disabled because they have eaten too much, or those who say they 'can't' work because they're depressed or stressed. I don't believe that anyone got out of making parachutes or flying Spitfires back in the day because they were fed up, stressed out or fat. They were more likely to be unfit for work because they were underweight rather than overweight, which leads me to think that it's time rations were re-introduced. 'I can't stop stuffing myself senseless with sausages, burgers, crisps and pies – and that's just for breakfast', complain the obese. Well, how about a ration book which only allows you to purchase fruit, vegetables and a selection of carbohydrates to keep you going? And no free bus pass, so you actually have to put one swollen ankle in front of the other and walk to the shops to get it. There's an idea.

Being fat isn't a disability. Being depressed isn't a disability. Being stressed because not everyone at work thinks you're brilliant is not a disability. Slipping on a grape in a supermarket and having a bad back for a week but milking it for a year isn't a disability. Actually being disabled or chronically sick is a disability, and it's time the government stopped lumping genuinely sick and less able-bodied people who would love to be at work into the same category as those who quoff a full English breakfast followed by a doughnut, two cans of Fanta and a family bag of Wotsits then blame everyone but themselves for the fact that they can't get up the stairs. If it ended there, I wouldn't care. Eat yourself stupid, become a recluse, more room on the buses for the rest of us. But when the government hands out disability and incapacity benefit to these people, does it not make you just a bit – pardon the pun - cheesed off?

How do you think those people who have chronic illnesses or disabilities feel when they have, in many cases, had to fight for years to be award benefits which barely cover their needs, because they have had the misfortune to lose their jobs through no fault of their own? Nobody chooses to get multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, a slipped disc or lose their leg in Afghanistan, the same as nobody forces anyone to become an alcoholic, a heroin addict or morbidly obese. 'Oh, but these poor addicts, it's an illness!' cry the liberals. Is it? Did they wake up every morning and find someone standing over them, pouring whisky down their throats or waving an old spoon, some smack and a bit of foil under their noses? Does that ninth bag of Monster Munch just burst open, with said monsters landing in your mouth and slipping effortlessly into your ever expanding stomach? I don't think so.

Writing this as someone who has not one, but three chronic and debilitating illnesses (ankylosing spondylitis, sciatica and the aftermath of ulcerative colitis if you're interested), and who has undergone more surgery than Katie Price, I don't take too kindly to lazy, fat or weak people who don't know how to say no to drink, drugs or food being given taxpayer's money, never mind sympathy. Perhaps if these people had to pay their own rent, their own bills, their own bus fares and council tax, then they'd find that they simply didn't have enough cash left over at the end of the month to continue their addiction to booze, drugs or crisps. I'd like to be able to go into town and not have to argue my right to a disabled parking space because I can barely walk thanks to my hideous, agonising and crippling disease, not because I have the inability to stop shoving crisps into my mouth.

Prominent London Cunt

2009-09-28T04:01:00.000-07:00

As I was innocently flaneuring through London I was assaulted by the above unmentionable word, the word cunt. It was prominently displayed on a popular statue. I've never been so insulted in all my life! I took the photo to send to my local MP, but as I live in Brighton I doubt he'll be able to do much about it.

There's a prize if anyone can guess exactly where this enourmous lady part was displayed.

Julie Swill's Two Minutes Hate

2009-09-27T03:18:00.000-07:00

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Fat Members of the Underclass.

By Julie Swill

If you read my last blog post the more observant among you will realise that I HATE ALL SCROUNGERS but I have a particular hatred towards incapacity benefit scroungers. Now, I have nothing against people that are properly ill receiving hand outs. People like myself (who is exceptionally ill), Tiny Tim, Douglas Bader etc are fine. What I don't like are people that have non conventional, difficult to understand, complex illnesses that are really easy to stereotype; illnesses that, because they are different from my own, mean that I can really easily dismiss them without doing any research. I don't imagine that people got off making bullets or clearing bomb sites in the past because they were ‘a bit upset’ or ‘under the weather’ or just plain plump; they might of though, I’ve not really read up on it. In those days people were off work sick because they were not eating enough rather than too much! As a result of the strict rationing of fat, sugar and bread probably. As I said I’m not really very well informed on the subject.

‘Feed my face full of cakes and pizza, keep shovelling it in to my enormous, stupid mouth until I can take no more’, complain the imaginary obese people in my head. ‘It doesn’t matter that I can’t work, those hard working idiot tax payers will surely pay my way, the fools! Bring me more lard, wrapped in 50 pound notes!’ they gurgle, as they eat MY HARD EARNED MONEY. I say we devise a system where I say what people can and can’t eat. We will start with three randomly selected food stuffs that I like; Celery, eggs and water, yes, that would be best. Also, no parking vouchers for fatties, so they have to drag their disgustingly obese, flabby bodies to the supermarket and NOT TAKE UP MY PARKING SPACE!

You’re not disabled if you are obese. You’re not disabled if you are depressed. Being upset because a lot of the people you come into contact with don't really like you is not a disability. I should know. Having a crash and getting mild whiplash but pretending you’re disabled, like thousands of people probably do I imagine, is not a disability. The government should develop a system whereby they determine who is genuinely sick and allowed to claim the benefits of the welfare state, like myself, and those who are in league with the tens of thousands of fat, corpulent, sweating, dirty, lazy, ignorant, rancid, crisp eating hordes of benefit stealing scum that I imagine to exist lower down the social orders from myself.

Do you think the innocent, worthy disabled, like myself, feel good when they are forced to walk out of a job and then, even when they are coughing up blood and have no legs, are refused benefits (such as disabled parking vouchers) because all allocated money has been squandered on the council house living, feckless, Um Bongo drinking, Adidas cap wearing, mobile phone buying moaners? Nobody chooses to get dementia or the worst disease in the world, the one that I've got. Nobody wants a slipped disc (the type not caused by obesity) or to lose a limb in Afghanistan whilst fighting for our great country. The same as nobody forces anyone to become an alcoholic, a heroin addict or morbidly obese. 'Oh Lord, but addicts are victims! They are ill!' whine the experts, people that have a modicum of compassion or intelligence and those that try to understand the difficult relationships between socio-economic factors and public health. An illness? Really? Well I don’t think anyone made them glug whisky every day or forcibly injected heroin into their veins! And that is all that matters! They should have a gram of moral fibre and just say, ‘no’! I can’t imagine that it is a much harder thing to do than that. Mentally ill people, who are a bit sad, should just pull their socks up. Fat people should just not eat any more and go to the gym. Are obese people forced to eat? Are there other factors at work that cause long term drug addiction, the epidemic of obesity and the present increase in alcoholism? I don't think so. Again, I may be wrong because I’ve not really thought much about it... because IT'S JUST COMMON SENSE!

I've been ill and I know what it's like, I don't want to talk about it because I just got on with it. I don't want a shred of sympathy, nor empathy; it would make me vomit. But let’s just say I have been really poorly. Really really poorly, definitely more ill than those who SCROUNGE off our government. Oh go on then, you've twisted my arm, I’ll tell you. Well, I’ve had three PAINFUL (more painful than being fat!) and CRIPPLING (not like being a bit overweight or too lazy to walk to fridge!) illnesses. They are, in order of MOST INCONVENIENT TO ME A) REAL BACK PAIN, not made up back pain like dole scroungers get, B) NERVE PROBLEMS that caused me to feel really horrid, but keep working of course, and the MOST PAINFUL of all, C) A TUMMY PROBLEM THAT NEEDED SURGERY (Please remember I’m only telling you this in case you are interested. I don't want sympathy, as I said before, that would make me vomit). I really DO NOT LIKE IT when couch potatoes, the obese, weak people, motley fools, those that I don't care to take the time to understand, made up scapegoats and SCROUNGERS can't even stop themselves from downing gin (with taxpayer's money) in the local gin shop, smoking drugs (at YOUR expense) or buying cheap food that ISN'T EVEN CONDUSIVE TO KEEPING SLIM. Maybe if they were left unsupported, not molly-coddled and had to pay for their own housing and baseball caps and weren't given disabled parking badges THAT I SHOULD BE ENTITLED TO then every one of them would go out and get a job. But as I’ve said I’m not sure as I’m not very well informed on the subject.

The single worst impression I have ever seen. Andre Hyland does 'Russell Brand on eharmony'.

2009-09-21T08:28:00.000-07:00

Russell Brand on eHarmony

Atom.com: Funny Videos | Love Sucks | Funny Animations

Here is comedian Andre Hyland channeling the much better comedian, Russell Brand. It's an awsomely bad impression. It would be hard for an english person to get close to Brand's odd Essex/Estuary/Dot Cotton/Costermonger accent let alone a man that, i assume, is an American. What the hell is he saying? It sounds like "flelly flally flolly fleaeyes, biddle baddle boddle beeeyes".

Like Rik Mayall before him i think that Brand's manner is probably impossible to parody without looking like a twat, but watch Andre Hyland have a bloody good go, and fail, really really badly. Please be aware, this film is written by Andre Hyland, Directed by Andre Hyland, Edited by Andre Hyland and ruined by Andre Hyland. It is also an Andre Hyland Hothouse Production. Remember the name, he's going to be tiny.

The (continued) Rise of the Idiots – Super Super Magazine - Channel 4 - Monday 7th Sept

2009-09-08T13:36:00.000-07:00

I really don't know where to start with the above clip. I assumed, at first, that it was a group of art students doing a really, really out of date Nathan Barley pastiche but some cursory searching seems to reveal that, unbelievably, Super Super Magazine is very real, and so are the wacky, entirely un-ironic funsters in this edition of the Channel 4 documentary, Three Minute Wonder. Watch it.

I could write a whole treatise on why Kassette player's oversize glasses are a fucking joke. I don’t hate these people, I just think that they are all absolute fucking idiots. I’m not saying that they should conform, for all I care they can dance through Shoreditch on to Dalston and out into Walthamstow dressed from head to toe in whatever flamboyantly unexpected attire they deem suitable.

I've changed my mind. I do hate them.

And why do I hate them? Because they are self satisfied, arrogant idiots. Idiots that are convinced that what they are doing definitely has meaning and worth and obviously gain such enormous satisfaction from their perceived 'differentness' that they never, not for one minute, question whether the stuff falling out of their brains has any real worth at all.

“Young people are fashionable yeah? So…Erm? Let me think. Why don’t we do a photo article on why old people are fashionable? Why should it only be young people that are considered fashionable? It will totally confound people’s expectations!”

“London's full of tramps, yeah? Why don’t we dress some tramps in some great clothes and take photos of them? It will totally confound people’s expectations and make, like, a really profound statement about poverty.”

“Most fashion photography contains images where the clothes are the focus, yeah? So people can see and compare the clothes they would like to purchase? Well, that's really obvious. Why don’t we totally confound people’s expectations and do a shoot where we blur all of the clothes, yeah? ”

Professing to not like irony, and claiming sincerity, whilst attempting to be as ironic as possible is something that idiot hipsters have been doing for generations. Check out the clip from Fist of Fun based, I think, on the short lived 80’s anger magnet The Modern Review, then watch Dan Ashcroft lamenting the rise of the idiots in Nathan Barley, a spot on show that, brilliant though it was, was already 3 years or more out of date when it aired; a lot like Super Super magazine, which seems to be shouting about the fact that it created the horrendous shit clash that was Nu Rave 2 years after the trend has become as fashionable as rickets. Idiots move on fast.

Some of my favourite bits from the film:

The way that Kassete recorder manages to both name check that she was contacted by a fashion magazine, subtly indicating she is very fashionable, and also, through word trickery, pretend that she hadn’t a clue why they phoned her up. I don’t know why anyone would think she was following a fashion. That is just how she dresses. She’s not that shallow! That bit made my teeth hurt. Also the t shirt she is holding is an ironically shit tribal design 'like a chav might have', on the cheeks of someones arse! So unexpected!
“What did you like about us”, the nice Brummie pensioner asks. “the colours”, she manages to babble. Why did they shoot this bit in Birmingham? To confound your expectations!
I love the 'new trend' of people wearing clothes from charity shops. 'It’s completely anti-fashion, but then comes all the way round and becomes fashionable again. Ironic really. I wouldn’t expect you to understand’. And I was really impressed when she said that she wouldn’t want to wear an Armani shirt and would prefer the Armi brand copy! She’s got so much integrity. I would totally have expected her to say that the Armani shirt would be a better thing to wear, as the Armi one is a hilarious low rent copy only twats would buy! She confounded my expectations by saying the opposite to that which was expected.

I hate them for another reason as well. A reason that Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris touch on in Nathan Barley. Because they ARE the industry. They exist in all levels of the media. They are television producers making the same fashionable crap over and over again for the 'youth market' and the magazine editors writing the same old stories, as if the stories have never been written before. They're the photographers and stylists convincing the world, as they are convinced themselves, that what they are producing is exciting and new, when it in fact it's derivative and dull. They are the commissioning editors telling script writers that the latest hit comedy show is the future, and more of the same will be even funnier and they are script writers writing appallingly lazy sketch shows and thinking them innovative, when in fact they are valueless, superficial wank. They are all those rewarded for producing boring non-ideas by artless superiors in an industry constantly in thrall to the rehashed vomit of the latest generation of talent. Talent that, with rare exception, exists on un-noticed cliche, monstrous egos and fleeting and mundane trends.

Being funny is good. That’s clever. Using irony correctly, for interesting reasons, that’s good. Making interesting statements about important things, that’s good. Making challenging art that makes people think, that’s good. All of these things are really hard things to do well, and very very easy to do badly. They are done badly every second of every minute of every day.

Most people that strive to produce something interesting and worthwhile beat themselves up over their lack of ideas, the fact that what they may think or write, or film, or make, has been thought written filmed and made a million times before. A new angle on a joke. A different way to tell a familiar story. Calling yourself Kassette Playa? Wearing hilarious over sized glasses? Designing ugly t shirts with arses on? Saying that you hate irony whilst existing entirely in a twatty London fishbowl, constructed almost entirely out of irony? These are not worthy things. Of course being fun and flippant rather than worthy is not a crime. But to do them with such a lack of self knowledge, such a massively misplaced sense of self confidence is incredibly offensive to people that know clever from stupid, which I hope is most people in the country.

Who knows if Channel 4 meant it to be a joke at these naïve young things expense? They certainly gave them enough rope to hang themselves with.

PS. All of the above, and so much more, is also why the film Juno was shit. But that is another blog post.

Linda Ronstadt's Incredible Hair

2009-08-05T03:03:00.000-07:00

Didn't Linda Ronstadt had incredible hair in 1972?

Richard Herring and his Hitler Moustache, Brighton

2009-07-30T05:20:00.000-07:00

Saw Richard Herring's live show, Hitler Moustache, last night at Upstairs at the Three and Ten in Kemptown. It was an Edinburgh warm up show. I'm not a natural gig goer. Although i love stand up i find the potential for prolonged, embarrassing silences and performer humiliation way too much to bear. I'm the sort of person that has to say something, anything, to fill a void left in an stilted conversation. For me the thought of someone on a stage, being shit, in a silent room full of dispirited faces, is a vision of hell. This is why i will never go and see Rhod Gilbert (ho ho). This is also why i have never understood hecklers. To be a heckler you'd have to have a powerful combination of a staggering lack of empathy, a redundancy of compassion and leonine like confidence in your own betterness than the poor person who is attempting to entertain you. My sister told me about a time she went to see one of my favourite comedians, Simon Day at the notorious stand up hell that is Bangor university student union. Like so many comedians before him, I've heard, he died horribly and at one point said the terrible words, "I'm really sorry about this" to the tiny unamused audience. Those words, and the image of noble Simon Day, suffering in unwanted silence, have stuck with me ever since. The awk would have been incredible.

According to the Brighton Argus the Hitler Moustache set would at points make me "genuinely laugh-out-loud". This made me slightly less nervous. I would have been sorely disappointed if i went to a stand up gig and the comedian only managed to produce jokes that made me laugh internally; or, in fact, jokes that only made me pretend to laugh out loud. That wouldn't be very entertaining at all. We arrived at the venue half an hour early and had the usual gallon of wine. Then, at 8pm, made our way upstairs to the tiny room with its tiny stage. My first instinct was to sit at the back of the room, out of sight. If Richard was shit and a disappointment, i could feel sorry for him in the shadows. Amanda was up for sitting towards the back as well as she has a morbid fear of being dragged up on stage to "participate"; a hang over from too many South African childhood pantomimes perhaps? We were already hovering over the safely hidden seats when the mischievous Gods of conflict avoidance challenged me to be a better man, as they have so many times before, by presenting us with two seats directly in front of the mouse like stage. Amazingly, my love of Herring won out and we threw awk to the wind and advanced to the front.

The gig was great, i didn't feel at all awkward and was very pleased to have taken the chance and not settled for the easy option, as i would have normally. A small victory. Herring was very good making me genuinely laugh out loud pretty much all the way through. Although i do admit to falsely laughing out loud on one occasion. At one point he even singled us out, saying i looked like a bit like David Brent with my "combination of every beard style known to man" face . He also indicated that Amanda should be as creative with her ladygarden as she is on the allotment. When he left the stage i was excited to see an enormous and truly terrifying red/yellow puss mark on his back, a remnant of a recently exploded cyst. Lovely. A grand night.

Involuntary Memories - Proust, Florida Fantasy, Wildtrack and Tony Soper

2009-07-12T10:42:00.000-07:00

Involuntary memory is a powerful and profound feeling. Rather than remembering the past by thinking back, actively recalling a thing that happened in the past, the involuntary memory envelops us like a cloak at moments that seem to have the strangest cues. For a millisecond you don't merely remember a certain time or event in the past through the filter of your current consciousness ('i remember i was wearing an ugly red jumper on my 18 birthday. What was i thinking!') but you seem to actually live it again, inhabiting the different body of your 18 year old self. Perceiving through those different eyes with a 'feeling memory' of thinking with that different brain.

As we slowly move forwards in our lives, inhabiting the same bodies, we have very few chances to gather any true perspective on who we were at times in the past. It is almost impossible, without the use of consciousness altering drugs, to see our past without the distorting filter of who we are now, with our present consciousness created from the accumulation of our experiences. Yet involuntary memory shows me that i am as different from my self 10 years ago as i am from any stranger i may meet in the street. It allows for the briefest of moments, the unique opportunity of time travel.

Involuntary memory is often triggered by something. For Mirek, the protagonist in the first part of Milan Kundera's, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, it is a train rushing in front of his car at a level crossing. For Marcel Proust it was, among other things, madeleine cakes. For me it is music from the Ratso Rizo dream sequence in the film, Midnight Cowboy. Florida Fantasy.

This short piece of music was used from 78 till around 1982 on the kids wildlife programme Wildtrack and, apparently, in the late 70's to introduce the winter cricket highlights from Australia. I don't ever remember watching either of these shows but the sense of time and place that the music conjures up in me is incredibly powerful. I don't know what the memory is of, it's just a body feeling and an invocation of a certain time. The music stinks of the 70's. It is essence of 70's. If you whistle Florida Fantasy in a pub, within a minute someone will ask you what it is and then perhaps tell you that it is the music to Animal Magic. They are wrong. It seems to evoke powerful feelings in many a child of the 70's. 38 seconds in is where the real magic happens.

Exciting Update!!!
I have just read this awesome passage on another blog This one here I hope the man whose blog it is, who writes with much more clarity than me, doesn't mind me stealing it. It is a bit from Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and is brilliantly clear.

Habit weakens all things; but the things that are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten, and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again. Outside us? Inside us, more like, but stored away from our mind's eye, in that abeyance of memory which may last forever. It is only because we have forgotten that we can now and then return to the person we once were, envisage things as that person did, be hurt again, because we are not ourselves anymore, but someone else, who once loved something that we no longer care about. The broad daylight of habitual memory gradually fades our images of the past, wears them away until nothing is left of them and the past becomes irrecoverable. Or, rather, it would be irrecoverable, were it not that a few words (such as "chief undersecretary at the Postmaster General's") had been carefully put away and forgotten much as a copy of a book is deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale against the day when it may become unobtainable.

From In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002), 222

Collings and Herrin - Derek and Clive?

2009-07-01T12:28:00.000-07:00

I am pretty much obsessed with Richard Herring, For those imaginary readers that don't know who he is, he is a comedian that had moderate success in the 90's as part of the duo, Lee (as in Stuart Lee) and Herring, If you count moderate success as getting a TV show on the telly, and is now in a loose double act with Andrew Collins of the much missed radio/late night ITV partnership, Collins & Maconie.

Now, even though I really really liked the studenty Fist of Fun, the first thing Lee & Herring got on TV, I always thought that TMWRNJ, their sophomore effort I suppose, was 30 percent funny and 70 percent rushed. But what do I know. I still patiently watched every episode waiting for the jokes.

I always thought Lee and Herring were at their funniest when simply bouncing jokes off each other; with Herring playing the role of naive Somerset virgin and Lee the equally absurd worldly London trendy. Watching these episodes back now it is quite something to think that Stuart Lee went on to have the more successful post Lee & Herring career. Herring does pretty much all the leg work in the double act and is a great comic actor. His whale milk drinking, rat shagging character is really really funny. These early personas have stood both comedians in good stead, with Lee in particular carving out a very good career as 'Britain's most highly regarded stand-up comedian' (official) and a master of ball achingly knowing irony; and Herring playing the eternal, winky obsessed, 'kidult'.

Herring has been writing a daily blog, daily, for as long as I’ve been a user of the internet. I am probably one of his more recent converts, having only been reading it for a couple of years. His musings are always interesting, even when they are about poker, and are sometimes very funny. It's a real achievement that he has managed to keep the quality of his blog posts so consistently high for so long. I don’t think he has missed a day. Reading his blog is one of my great little pleasures. It's a bit like getting a comedy pamphlet delivered straight to your door every morning for free. More recently Herring has teamed up with journalist, recent radio outcast, film twerp and all round nice guy, Andrew Collins to record a weekly podcast. I have admired Collins since i was a teenager because, as he worked at the NME, I thought he must have been one of the coolest men in the world. I have since discovered that this was probably not the case.

The podcast is sometimes jaw droppingly rude and bold in a way that just would not be possible in any other medium. Just as Derek and Clive first found infamy on bootlegged cassettes, passed surreptitiously between those in the know, most notably Led Zeppelins, listening to the Collings and Herrin podcast frequently feel likes you are bearing witness to something really unique. For myself, whose comedy year zero was The Young Ones and Rik Mayall pretend farting into a microphone at the first Comic Relief event, it feels brilliantly naughty to hear some of the things that Collins & Herring, or rather their alter egos Collings and Herrin, see fit to say. Collins takes on the role of naive nice guy to Herring's vicious misanthrope and some of the off the cuff material they produce is of simply awesome quality.

My only problem with the podcast is their complete lack of self knowledge about which episodes are good and which are boring. As far as I can judge the quality varies by about 2 percentage points either way. One week there may be slightly too much dead air, but an off hand comment about Collings being bummed by a mouse whilst at Glastonbury, or offering his ball point pen to a tourist and perhaps being mistaken for a toilet trader can tip the balance either way. Anyway, enough of my yackin, Listen to my clip above that i made myself from a bit of episode 68, and then go and listen to the other 70 episodes.

Talking Heads - It Will Never Get any Better Than This

2009-06-26T05:20:00.001-07:00

Here's an absolutely sublime clip from the greatest concert movie ever made. Stop Making Sense is so good that, when it was released in 1984, questions were asked in Parliament. Sir Trevor Hives MP tabled a motion that no other music should be made from that day forth and all musicians should be made to seek alternative employment. The motion was defeated initially by 246 votes to 251. Hives sought a compromise, that all New Wave and Post Punk bands were to immediately stop being any good, and the bill was eventually passed in its altered form.

Michael Jackson. Completely dead?

2009-06-25T14:56:00.000-07:00

Christ. Reports that Michael Jackson has just gone and died. Can it be true? There is a new scary looking angel in heaven tonight if "The Peter Pan of pop" is no longer with us. Reports are conflicted at the moment, some say coma, some say dead; either way it's a earthquake level event in the history of pop culture.

Lets keep our fingers crossed and hope that Michael Jackson has had a heart attack and is in a deep coma. Then lets hope that he wakes up 100 years in to the future and has a wacky "fish out of water" style adventure.

Blog probs

2009-06-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

Will I or won't i post? The problem with any sort of creative writing is that i have to compete with the droning voice in my brain that tells me what i am writing is inane, boorish, predictable or, worst of all, glib. So far in my long life this voice hasn't been quieted. Automatic writing, in an attempt to outrun the voice, doesn't work, neither does quiet contemplation. All roads lead to procrastination and underachievment. Will a blog help me smash 20 years of writers block? The format suggests that it might and I certainly have enough half thought out opinions to sustain a decent run of posts. So lets just see how it goes from now on, eh?

I imagine that i will be posting about films, people, food, depression and music; not necessarily in that order, there will be much more bile than sugar and i'll be sure to include plenty of spelling mistakes. So join me, won't you?

Who is Virgilio Anderson?

2009-06-25T11:03:00.000-07:00

This will be my first blog post then?