BETAMAXNOMATES
'All she can do is dial and yell...'20050313
Second Next Best to Deadly
So it seems with all this recent voting hype and pre-election hoopla I forgot to vote. Oops.
I shouldn’t be so blasé about this. Its an insult to my great-great-something-or-others who died in some war in olden days. And to the feminists, who had to threaten to blow up the Grand National before the King would allow them to vote. And its not like I’ve got an excuse for not voting: I spent the day skulking around toy shops with this guy. I bought myself a Crash Test Dummy, a childhood favourite of mine, a toy that subtly educates children in the horrific, albeit apparently instantly repairable, consequences of road traffic accidents. Together with Carmageddon, my automotive awareness was skewed from an early age.
As regards the election though, I can console myself that at least a grassroots independent type got in and not government stooge Aine Brady. Brady: the Fianna Fail child, aunt to the eminently yawnsome David Kitt, a Lions Club luminary and (probable) Rod Stewart fan. You can be sure that if she ever got into power her first move would have been to anoint the sacred Rod and to ban Actimel because of, like, some weird aversion she has to bacteria or something. She would deny the Immunitas-starved their liquid culture fix and the radioactive womb-like force-field it provides of a morning.
Anyway, this is my first update in a while. Quite a while, in fact. Indeed, my absence has been so protracted some of you may have even come to suspect that I’ve been engaging in covert blogging activities elsewhere (and you’d be right, but more of that when the time comes). The lack of updates has a lot to do with business in the Real Life department - this week I’ve spent mostly having conversations with Gardai who seem to speak in the language of football commentators or characters from Morrissey songs, straight-facedly saying things like, ‘He’s knows our Achilles Heel and he goes for the jugular’. Yet my reticence also reflects on my changing attitudes to what this journal is or should be. The original principles of artistic distance and public anonymity and unanswerable opinion got muddled somewhere along the line and it became a question of entertainment rather than art. Neuro writes rather eloquently on the subject of ‘blog identity’ here and (perhaps unwittingly) reminded me how audience should never be considered in the construction of art: art is what it is whether it is experienced by anyone or not. Eventually the artist must remove him/herself from the equation for the distance to be complete and for the work to become an ‘art object’ in the truest sense. Yup, still keepin' it real.
At this juncture, I should let you know that every syllable of this journal entry you read contributes 50c to Comic Relief. Think, for reading that preceding paragraph alone, you’ve raised enough money to build an average African family their very own rocketship with enough unobtainium to travel twice round the galaxy. Give yourself a pat on the back! After all, that’s what Comic Relief is all about really, isn’t it? Fatuous self-congratulation? And why let the facts speak for themselves when Britain’s brightest young comedy stars, Lenny Henry and Ben Elton, do such a very good job instead? Funny to see the Little Britain lads lowering themselves to this, but not exactly surprising - what are Walliams and Lucas if not the Smith and Jones of the noughties? They are well and truly the Establishment now and were heading that way long before they invited Sir Elton onto the set last Friday to exchange some witless single-entendres with Dafydd. The BBC should consider changing it from ‘Comic Relief’ to ‘Comic Mercy’ and repackage the show as a kind of entertainment hospice, where once-good-now-bad comedy comes to be put out of its misery.
But then charity has to be degrading, doesn’t it? Doing the decent thing has to involve dressing as a medieval wench and being pelted with piss-drenched sponges, or having your public hair dyed red and shaved in the shape of Stephen Fry’s nose. Newsreaders and politicians have to appear as adult babies and dance in a chorus line of leather sex dwarves as the smug hosts scurry about in the background hoovering up whatever errant scraps of dignity might have hit the floor.
It’s fitting then that this years Comic Relief also featured the televisual exhumation of Chris Evans, ‘fresh’ from hosting The Brits (something else that feels part of a bygone era), reuniting him with his TFI whipping boy (and recently one of Evans’s most outspoken critics) Will Whateverhisnameis. Will hasn’t aged a day; Chris, on the other hand, is drying out in every sense of the word. His always horrible ginger hair has faded now to a grey-streaked orange furze and his haggard face, still forced into that familiar expression of manic exuberance, has the haunted look of man living on borrowed time. What the fuck Chris Evans is doing on television in 2005 is beyond me. These are the kind of thankless bingo-caller gigs that should be going to the Vernon Carrs and Jimmy Kayes of this world. Obviously someone in programming feels Chris ‘Tired and Emotional’ Evans deserves another round of second chances. And in a coincidence made in PR heaven this month also sees Evans’s barely legal cockwasher and no-hit wonder Billie Piper making her acting debut opposite Crazy Christopher Ecclestone in the new Doctor Who. What’s next, Buffalo G resurfacing in Hitch-Hikers Guide? Well, there is that two-headed monster...
Anyway, no time to tell you about my brief and rather fruitless expedition out to the newly unveiled Dundrum Town Centre with Neuro earlier in the week. There’s not a whole lot you can say about the Dundrum Centre - in fact the place itself seems to eschew any kind of considered discourse, trading only in exotic single word temptations: Bershka... Furla... Bertoni... Tesco. The whole thing is a monument to effortful cool. You could probably drop an Aborigine or a Amazonian tribesman into the Dundrum Centre and return in an hour to find them in a pair of distressed Converse Allstars, some rust-tinted Diesel bootcuts and a wide-collared shirt and lilac diamond-pattern tank top combo from Monsoon For Men - a model of suburban idiot chic. Still for all its pretensions towards designer mall status the Dundrum Centre is really about as classy as dolly troll Kerry McFadden - it's Liffey Valley with a bad dye job. And there’s even less to it than meets the eye: the upper and lower storeys comprise the considerably more chav-centric Champion, Lifestyle and Lacoste to keep the council fashionistas happy.
Keeping things townie, there’s an ad on TV for Damien Dempsey as I type this. If you haven’t had the pleasure of hearing Dempsey’s ‘music’ I suggest you get yourself experienced. It’s difficult to describe but you could imagine it as a kind of uneasy mixture of Billy Bragg and Dustin the Turkey. It’s certainly unique but, my God, it sounds fucking awful. Yet I still can’t completely dismiss Dempsey, simply because he comes so highly praised, most notably by Morrissey and Brian Eno - the former the greatest lyricist of all time, the latter the greatest musician. Dilemma.
Anyway, I think if this journal entry were an album it would be the new one from Daft Punk: long-awaited, overcooked and disappointing, a tired recycling of old ideas, dulled and blunted through repetition. Goodnight everyone, and God bless.
I shouldn’t be so blasé about this. Its an insult to my great-great-something-or-others who died in some war in olden days. And to the feminists, who had to threaten to blow up the Grand National before the King would allow them to vote. And its not like I’ve got an excuse for not voting: I spent the day skulking around toy shops with this guy. I bought myself a Crash Test Dummy, a childhood favourite of mine, a toy that subtly educates children in the horrific, albeit apparently instantly repairable, consequences of road traffic accidents. Together with Carmageddon, my automotive awareness was skewed from an early age.
As regards the election though, I can console myself that at least a grassroots independent type got in and not government stooge Aine Brady. Brady: the Fianna Fail child, aunt to the eminently yawnsome David Kitt, a Lions Club luminary and (probable) Rod Stewart fan. You can be sure that if she ever got into power her first move would have been to anoint the sacred Rod and to ban Actimel because of, like, some weird aversion she has to bacteria or something. She would deny the Immunitas-starved their liquid culture fix and the radioactive womb-like force-field it provides of a morning.
Anyway, this is my first update in a while. Quite a while, in fact. Indeed, my absence has been so protracted some of you may have even come to suspect that I’ve been engaging in covert blogging activities elsewhere (and you’d be right, but more of that when the time comes). The lack of updates has a lot to do with business in the Real Life department - this week I’ve spent mostly having conversations with Gardai who seem to speak in the language of football commentators or characters from Morrissey songs, straight-facedly saying things like, ‘He’s knows our Achilles Heel and he goes for the jugular’. Yet my reticence also reflects on my changing attitudes to what this journal is or should be. The original principles of artistic distance and public anonymity and unanswerable opinion got muddled somewhere along the line and it became a question of entertainment rather than art. Neuro writes rather eloquently on the subject of ‘blog identity’ here and (perhaps unwittingly) reminded me how audience should never be considered in the construction of art: art is what it is whether it is experienced by anyone or not. Eventually the artist must remove him/herself from the equation for the distance to be complete and for the work to become an ‘art object’ in the truest sense. Yup, still keepin' it real.
At this juncture, I should let you know that every syllable of this journal entry you read contributes 50c to Comic Relief. Think, for reading that preceding paragraph alone, you’ve raised enough money to build an average African family their very own rocketship with enough unobtainium to travel twice round the galaxy. Give yourself a pat on the back! After all, that’s what Comic Relief is all about really, isn’t it? Fatuous self-congratulation? And why let the facts speak for themselves when Britain’s brightest young comedy stars, Lenny Henry and Ben Elton, do such a very good job instead? Funny to see the Little Britain lads lowering themselves to this, but not exactly surprising - what are Walliams and Lucas if not the Smith and Jones of the noughties? They are well and truly the Establishment now and were heading that way long before they invited Sir Elton onto the set last Friday to exchange some witless single-entendres with Dafydd. The BBC should consider changing it from ‘Comic Relief’ to ‘Comic Mercy’ and repackage the show as a kind of entertainment hospice, where once-good-now-bad comedy comes to be put out of its misery.
But then charity has to be degrading, doesn’t it? Doing the decent thing has to involve dressing as a medieval wench and being pelted with piss-drenched sponges, or having your public hair dyed red and shaved in the shape of Stephen Fry’s nose. Newsreaders and politicians have to appear as adult babies and dance in a chorus line of leather sex dwarves as the smug hosts scurry about in the background hoovering up whatever errant scraps of dignity might have hit the floor.
It’s fitting then that this years Comic Relief also featured the televisual exhumation of Chris Evans, ‘fresh’ from hosting The Brits (something else that feels part of a bygone era), reuniting him with his TFI whipping boy (and recently one of Evans’s most outspoken critics) Will Whateverhisnameis. Will hasn’t aged a day; Chris, on the other hand, is drying out in every sense of the word. His always horrible ginger hair has faded now to a grey-streaked orange furze and his haggard face, still forced into that familiar expression of manic exuberance, has the haunted look of man living on borrowed time. What the fuck Chris Evans is doing on television in 2005 is beyond me. These are the kind of thankless bingo-caller gigs that should be going to the Vernon Carrs and Jimmy Kayes of this world. Obviously someone in programming feels Chris ‘Tired and Emotional’ Evans deserves another round of second chances. And in a coincidence made in PR heaven this month also sees Evans’s barely legal cockwasher and no-hit wonder Billie Piper making her acting debut opposite Crazy Christopher Ecclestone in the new Doctor Who. What’s next, Buffalo G resurfacing in Hitch-Hikers Guide? Well, there is that two-headed monster...
Anyway, no time to tell you about my brief and rather fruitless expedition out to the newly unveiled Dundrum Town Centre with Neuro earlier in the week. There’s not a whole lot you can say about the Dundrum Centre - in fact the place itself seems to eschew any kind of considered discourse, trading only in exotic single word temptations: Bershka... Furla... Bertoni... Tesco. The whole thing is a monument to effortful cool. You could probably drop an Aborigine or a Amazonian tribesman into the Dundrum Centre and return in an hour to find them in a pair of distressed Converse Allstars, some rust-tinted Diesel bootcuts and a wide-collared shirt and lilac diamond-pattern tank top combo from Monsoon For Men - a model of suburban idiot chic. Still for all its pretensions towards designer mall status the Dundrum Centre is really about as classy as dolly troll Kerry McFadden - it's Liffey Valley with a bad dye job. And there’s even less to it than meets the eye: the upper and lower storeys comprise the considerably more chav-centric Champion, Lifestyle and Lacoste to keep the council fashionistas happy.
Keeping things townie, there’s an ad on TV for Damien Dempsey as I type this. If you haven’t had the pleasure of hearing Dempsey’s ‘music’ I suggest you get yourself experienced. It’s difficult to describe but you could imagine it as a kind of uneasy mixture of Billy Bragg and Dustin the Turkey. It’s certainly unique but, my God, it sounds fucking awful. Yet I still can’t completely dismiss Dempsey, simply because he comes so highly praised, most notably by Morrissey and Brian Eno - the former the greatest lyricist of all time, the latter the greatest musician. Dilemma.
Anyway, I think if this journal entry were an album it would be the new one from Daft Punk: long-awaited, overcooked and disappointing, a tired recycling of old ideas, dulled and blunted through repetition. Goodnight everyone, and God bless.
Comments:
<< Home
Damn dawg, you saying my style is wack?
We can't all afford to employ expensive design consultants to make our site look pretty. Some of us old, old-skool schlubs still code this shit by hand, y'know.
Thank you for acknowledging my title though - I often feel that gets overlooked.
We can't all afford to employ expensive design consultants to make our site look pretty. Some of us old, old-skool schlubs still code this shit by hand, y'know.
Thank you for acknowledging my title though - I often feel that gets overlooked.
Do you think h5n1 flu is going to be a problem ?
I heard it would hit USA & Canada this fall.
Is there anything to the h5n1 flu panic ?
Post a Comment
I heard it would hit USA & Canada this fall.
Is there anything to the h5n1 flu panic ?
# posted by 
: 5:49 AM
: 5:49 AMSubscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home
Archives
200410 200411 200412 200501 200502 200503 200504 200505 200512 200601 200602 200604 200606 200607 200608 200609 200611 200702 200703 200704 200705 200706 200707 200710 200801 200806 200807 200808 200809 200811
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]