BETAMAXNOMATES
'All she can do is dial and yell...'20050121
Flaming Squarepants
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love that Big Gay Sponge.
I love this idea that Spongebob cound be a ‘bad role model’ and a ‘negative influence’ on children. Personally I think that if your kids are modelling themselves on a cartoon sponge then there are probably greater issues there to be worried about.
Anyway, dedicated readers of this journal may notice that this is my first communiqué in over a week. The more critical amongst you will no doubt also have detected a marked decrease in the quality of the journal overall since, oh, late October last year.
I know, I know, it’s all gone to shit but then that was always the plan from the beginning. It’s kind of a bastard approximation of Metzger’s ‘auto-destructive’ principle of aesthetics which you can read about here. Whenever I get around to completing my blogging manifesto, outlining the underlying philosophies of public anonymity and orphaned art, I’ll publish it here and, all going to plan, this journal will internally self-combust and vanish forever into the ether(net). Or maybe it will break apart and the bits will just float in the great online limbo, ghosts of former life, random nodes of information eternally passing through.
My name is Anonymous and I’m a walking Situationist prank. Gotcha! Like that grotesque gnome-man Noel Edmonds, and I know the funny like it showed up on my doorstep the day of my birthday claiming to be my biological father.
Hmm, bullshit level higher than usual today. Time for a short rant about the medical profession.
Anyone who knows me is probably aware of my pathological mistrust of Western medicine - the Great Satan. After all, it couldn’t save Superman; what hope do we have? I simply refuse to take any remedy that hasn’t been drawn from ground-up weeds or crushed flower petals. Anything else, as far as I’m concerned, is dehumanising and against nature.
Alternative medicine has its critics too though, like the famously dead John Diamond who expired in a hospital bed in 2001, pumped full of anti-b’s and hooked up to every bip-bleeping apparatus going, all the while his sexpot wife Nigella was off banging the patron saint of BritArt and noted taste-vacuum Charles Saatchi.
How d’ya like them apples, Diamond?!
Anyway, for various reasons I have had many dealings with medical types over the past two weeks. Mostly A+E staff who, I will say, are truly great people and if this world were just, would be earning more than the Pope and Tony Hawk put together. No, my grievance is with the people at the top of the chain - dickhead consultants rolling like swine in shit-tainted kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies, happy to prescribe anything to anyone if it will secure another four-day-weekend conference/golf tournament in the Caribbean.
I had the misfortune of having to attend (as a patient) one of these earlier in the week, paying him nearly a weeks worth of my wages for a session, only to be asked to leave after ten minutes. Feeling uncharacteristically bolshy that day I insisted on staying in his office for forty minutes until I felt I had gotten something approaching value for money. And yeah, you can bet his secretary got an earful. Sure, I know it’s not really her fault, but she’s complicit in this. Eichmann was only following orders too Gwen, you over made-up, tumours-for-brains phone-jockey.
Consultants are bad people. But not as bad as people in cafes who ask if the coffee is Fair Trade. I’m sure there are lower forms of life than these, but they’re probably stewing away in petri dishes in a laboratory somewhere. I hate these people: coffee-shop-fascists flashing their grubby liberal middle-class values around like a thrift-shop pashmina or an Aldi bag-for-life.
Seriously, who gives a shit? Coffee could come from fucking Greenland for all I care. I don’t know much about ‘fair trade’ or ‘world politics’ except what I gets from t’internet and Hitchens’ monthly aneurysms in Vanity Fair but it would seem to me what these loser countries need is more ground-level investment rather than one-way ‘fair’ trade which just continues the West’s great tradition of raping Third World resources.
And besides, coffee tastes so much better when it’s sweetened with the blood of the unpaid workers. Here’s to getting a decent cappuccino at under a fiver and at untold human cost. Sounds like a bargain to me.
Anyway, on a lighter note: suicide and child abuse.
A very long conversation on suicide with some colleagues last night threw up some interesting points, amongst all the usual half-chewed carrots and digestive fluids. Someone I knew as a child committed suicide this Christmas and one of the questions raised was whether increased media coverage and general openness in discussing suicide implicitly condones or endorses the act as an acceptable life-choice?
I’m not sure it does. Take child abuse (well, obviously don’t take it if you actually are a child. Tell a grown-up - preferably one who works at the News of the World). A couple of years ago, and especially during the early 90’s when churches were being shut down and priests interred to labour camps, you couldn’t move for media coverage; at the time it seemed child abuse was on everybody’s lips (must... resist... joke).
And increased media visibility in this instance had the exact opposite effect.
Public opinion was whipped into a frenzy, something we saw again last week in Cork: the tabloid-fuelled paedo-panic, the subsequent shameless grief-binge, and the almost begrudging acknowledgement that the person arrested for this crime wasn’t some monstrous, mac-clad Uncle Charlie figure but a guy who (it appears) made a horrible mistake, and one that will have consequences for him and his family for years to come.
In the case of suicide, increased visibility has produced a less clearly defined public opinion. Previously suicides would be reported as ‘accidental deaths’ or not reported at all, and funeral services, if there were any, were brief and dispassionate. I heard that the boy who lived on my road had killed himself from a neighbour I met in the frozen foods aisle in Tesco.
I’m not really sure what I’m trying to get at here. I do think it’s better that something as devastating and bewildering as suicide is being discussed.
‘Raising awareness’ is an embarrassingly PC non-phrase used to excuse campaigns and policies that shine a floodlight on an issue without offering anything in the way of suggestion or solution. But maybe awareness is what needs to be raised here; when the Big Question of suicide is brought out in the open maybe it can drag out some of those dark, ugly thoughts that might bring a potential suicide to consider death a life-choice - that is, the ultimate life-choice, choosing death - in the first place, generating dialogue - and income for armchair psychotherapists such as myself.
Just some food for thought, undercooked and sloppily prepared as it is.
Peace out.
This entry is dedicated to all of the dead kids around the world. And to the memory of John Diamond and Christopher Reeve. And McLusky. And William Shatner, just because.
Mood: Reflective.
Music: Gone a bit folky this evening. Normally I have an allergic reaction to acoustic singer-songwriter stuff but this is in a different class. ‘Haunting’ is an adjective bandied about a lot by lazy muso-hacks slobbering over Damien Rice, the Argos Leonard Cohen. But for Gravenhurst it’s entirely apropos: ‘The Diver’ and the instrumental ‘East of The City’ in particular.
Quiet is the new loud. Quite.
I love this idea that Spongebob cound be a ‘bad role model’ and a ‘negative influence’ on children. Personally I think that if your kids are modelling themselves on a cartoon sponge then there are probably greater issues there to be worried about.
Anyway, dedicated readers of this journal may notice that this is my first communiqué in over a week. The more critical amongst you will no doubt also have detected a marked decrease in the quality of the journal overall since, oh, late October last year.
I know, I know, it’s all gone to shit but then that was always the plan from the beginning. It’s kind of a bastard approximation of Metzger’s ‘auto-destructive’ principle of aesthetics which you can read about here. Whenever I get around to completing my blogging manifesto, outlining the underlying philosophies of public anonymity and orphaned art, I’ll publish it here and, all going to plan, this journal will internally self-combust and vanish forever into the ether(net). Or maybe it will break apart and the bits will just float in the great online limbo, ghosts of former life, random nodes of information eternally passing through.
My name is Anonymous and I’m a walking Situationist prank. Gotcha! Like that grotesque gnome-man Noel Edmonds, and I know the funny like it showed up on my doorstep the day of my birthday claiming to be my biological father.
Hmm, bullshit level higher than usual today. Time for a short rant about the medical profession.
Anyone who knows me is probably aware of my pathological mistrust of Western medicine - the Great Satan. After all, it couldn’t save Superman; what hope do we have? I simply refuse to take any remedy that hasn’t been drawn from ground-up weeds or crushed flower petals. Anything else, as far as I’m concerned, is dehumanising and against nature.
Alternative medicine has its critics too though, like the famously dead John Diamond who expired in a hospital bed in 2001, pumped full of anti-b’s and hooked up to every bip-bleeping apparatus going, all the while his sexpot wife Nigella was off banging the patron saint of BritArt and noted taste-vacuum Charles Saatchi.
How d’ya like them apples, Diamond?!
Anyway, for various reasons I have had many dealings with medical types over the past two weeks. Mostly A+E staff who, I will say, are truly great people and if this world were just, would be earning more than the Pope and Tony Hawk put together. No, my grievance is with the people at the top of the chain - dickhead consultants rolling like swine in shit-tainted kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies, happy to prescribe anything to anyone if it will secure another four-day-weekend conference/golf tournament in the Caribbean.
I had the misfortune of having to attend (as a patient) one of these earlier in the week, paying him nearly a weeks worth of my wages for a session, only to be asked to leave after ten minutes. Feeling uncharacteristically bolshy that day I insisted on staying in his office for forty minutes until I felt I had gotten something approaching value for money. And yeah, you can bet his secretary got an earful. Sure, I know it’s not really her fault, but she’s complicit in this. Eichmann was only following orders too Gwen, you over made-up, tumours-for-brains phone-jockey.
Consultants are bad people. But not as bad as people in cafes who ask if the coffee is Fair Trade. I’m sure there are lower forms of life than these, but they’re probably stewing away in petri dishes in a laboratory somewhere. I hate these people: coffee-shop-fascists flashing their grubby liberal middle-class values around like a thrift-shop pashmina or an Aldi bag-for-life.
Seriously, who gives a shit? Coffee could come from fucking Greenland for all I care. I don’t know much about ‘fair trade’ or ‘world politics’ except what I gets from t’internet and Hitchens’ monthly aneurysms in Vanity Fair but it would seem to me what these loser countries need is more ground-level investment rather than one-way ‘fair’ trade which just continues the West’s great tradition of raping Third World resources.
And besides, coffee tastes so much better when it’s sweetened with the blood of the unpaid workers. Here’s to getting a decent cappuccino at under a fiver and at untold human cost. Sounds like a bargain to me.
Anyway, on a lighter note: suicide and child abuse.
A very long conversation on suicide with some colleagues last night threw up some interesting points, amongst all the usual half-chewed carrots and digestive fluids. Someone I knew as a child committed suicide this Christmas and one of the questions raised was whether increased media coverage and general openness in discussing suicide implicitly condones or endorses the act as an acceptable life-choice?
I’m not sure it does. Take child abuse (well, obviously don’t take it if you actually are a child. Tell a grown-up - preferably one who works at the News of the World). A couple of years ago, and especially during the early 90’s when churches were being shut down and priests interred to labour camps, you couldn’t move for media coverage; at the time it seemed child abuse was on everybody’s lips (must... resist... joke).
And increased media visibility in this instance had the exact opposite effect.
Public opinion was whipped into a frenzy, something we saw again last week in Cork: the tabloid-fuelled paedo-panic, the subsequent shameless grief-binge, and the almost begrudging acknowledgement that the person arrested for this crime wasn’t some monstrous, mac-clad Uncle Charlie figure but a guy who (it appears) made a horrible mistake, and one that will have consequences for him and his family for years to come.
In the case of suicide, increased visibility has produced a less clearly defined public opinion. Previously suicides would be reported as ‘accidental deaths’ or not reported at all, and funeral services, if there were any, were brief and dispassionate. I heard that the boy who lived on my road had killed himself from a neighbour I met in the frozen foods aisle in Tesco.
I’m not really sure what I’m trying to get at here. I do think it’s better that something as devastating and bewildering as suicide is being discussed.
‘Raising awareness’ is an embarrassingly PC non-phrase used to excuse campaigns and policies that shine a floodlight on an issue without offering anything in the way of suggestion or solution. But maybe awareness is what needs to be raised here; when the Big Question of suicide is brought out in the open maybe it can drag out some of those dark, ugly thoughts that might bring a potential suicide to consider death a life-choice - that is, the ultimate life-choice, choosing death - in the first place, generating dialogue - and income for armchair psychotherapists such as myself.
Just some food for thought, undercooked and sloppily prepared as it is.
Peace out.
This entry is dedicated to all of the dead kids around the world. And to the memory of John Diamond and Christopher Reeve. And McLusky. And William Shatner, just because.
Mood: Reflective.
Music: Gone a bit folky this evening. Normally I have an allergic reaction to acoustic singer-songwriter stuff but this is in a different class. ‘Haunting’ is an adjective bandied about a lot by lazy muso-hacks slobbering over Damien Rice, the Argos Leonard Cohen. But for Gravenhurst it’s entirely apropos: ‘The Diver’ and the instrumental ‘East of The City’ in particular.
Quiet is the new loud. Quite.
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