Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Friday, 10 April 2009
Family Guy is Really Unfunny When They Do That Whole "Liberal Politics Are Great" Thing
Yeah...uh..that's it,really.
Thursday, 4 September 2008
Just a Cheerful Thought...
I'd advise anyone to buy, as i have now done, all the series of "Old Harry's Game" - the radio 4 comedy written and starring Andy Hamilton. It is absolutely brilliant: in the main, hilarious, and where not hilarious, thought provoking.
There's even a brilliant episode where Satan tells Marx that socialism was a crock of shit. I've never heard any criticism of socialism on any radio 4 comedy so that was really refreshing. Poor old Marx. He ends up fighting with Stalin.
Although the ethics of putting Stalin into a radio comedy programme are a little complicated...
There's even a brilliant episode where Satan tells Marx that socialism was a crock of shit. I've never heard any criticism of socialism on any radio 4 comedy so that was really refreshing. Poor old Marx. He ends up fighting with Stalin.
Although the ethics of putting Stalin into a radio comedy programme are a little complicated...
Saturday, 10 May 2008
The Movement of History
I make no excuses for projecting my own thoughts onto the world in this post. I have little else to go on, for am I no real historian nor thinker.
We live in a constantly changing world, or so we are told, and it becomes part of our day to day survival to cope with that change: we need to change our ways of living, speaking and thinking to ensure we are not separated from the community, although the community itself is increasingly vague to us. We know some people, sure, but few of us could honestly say we share the views and assumptions of the people in either our real, physical locality or our internet habitat: however much we leave approving comments on blogs we like there will always be the divergence of views caused by thought, independence and history.
For such a changing world the movement of time seems to be remarkably solid. I mean that very quickly the past, or other ways of living, begin to seem unlikely, even impossible; from tiny things like the changing coin to the vast sand-shifting of ethics. Our experience, though varied, seems to be immersed. It did not take long of governance by New Labour for a Tory government to seem almost unthinkable, and for the long years of Tory dominance of politics to seem less than a memory. In many places, with silent pits, the memories would be strong: I mean culturally, even philosophically: in the years 1999-2004 (roughly) I think, the assumptions, arguments, practicalities of Conservative government were so alien to the commentariat and swathes of the public (including, to be fair, myself) as to be meaningless, irrelevant, unexisting.
I don't know if this is making sense but the point I am making is that I think the changing world, in certain ways, makes us unable to remember. It keeps us mired in the present, and thinking of the future (at the moment), with particular regard to global warming, in a kind of fearful fascination. I would have thought we would remember more sharply things being different because it wasn't that long ago: but this is partly what is driving us to worship youth: it is not just beauty, or sexuality, or ability, but the fact that it is, at any given moment, youth which is best attuned to the state of the world at that point, best able to cope, completely unconcerned by trying to adapt. Youth fits, it works. The rest of us find it harder because we are (to greater or lesser degrees) different from the world we live in.
So the study of modern history assumes a keener aspect, and becomes more popular because it is history, it is the story of real or nearly real people in a world we can see has changed. Other types of history (say, medieval) are about other worlds, and so don't interest us so much. Modern history is about our world. The nazification of the school history syllabus and of the bookshelves is a testament to the fact that we are still trying to understand our cultural origins in that time. We see our society as evolving from that, rather than before - take the notion and enacting of human rights, though it may have its origins in the Enlightenment or French Revolution, the key document of our time is the UN Declaration of Human Rights. I think there is also a powerful part of our culture that still cannot understand how it all happened and why it all happened.
I've written on this idea before of course - that the twentieth century is not quite over, and that, possibly, we are suffering some kind of extended anxiety problems caused by 45 years of living under 4 minutes' notice of destruction (ok it was a bit longer than that until the early sixties). But that isn't entirely what i mean here. I mean a culture (though it is so mixed now as to make even the singular noun questionable) which has come into existence only five minutes ago, furnished with a history that it does not remember, but it does remember being at one point in time and at that nexus emerging into something resembling life. From there it has turned, shifted, slid, slanted and cracked so that we just do not, really, remember what it was like.
I don't mind if you think this is a lot of contradictory, muddled cobblers. It is a kind of live-thinking exercise, no pre thought has gone into this post at all except a vague sense that i'd like to put finger to keyboard. If you like it, great. If you don't, also great.
We live in a constantly changing world, or so we are told, and it becomes part of our day to day survival to cope with that change: we need to change our ways of living, speaking and thinking to ensure we are not separated from the community, although the community itself is increasingly vague to us. We know some people, sure, but few of us could honestly say we share the views and assumptions of the people in either our real, physical locality or our internet habitat: however much we leave approving comments on blogs we like there will always be the divergence of views caused by thought, independence and history.
For such a changing world the movement of time seems to be remarkably solid. I mean that very quickly the past, or other ways of living, begin to seem unlikely, even impossible; from tiny things like the changing coin to the vast sand-shifting of ethics. Our experience, though varied, seems to be immersed. It did not take long of governance by New Labour for a Tory government to seem almost unthinkable, and for the long years of Tory dominance of politics to seem less than a memory. In many places, with silent pits, the memories would be strong: I mean culturally, even philosophically: in the years 1999-2004 (roughly) I think, the assumptions, arguments, practicalities of Conservative government were so alien to the commentariat and swathes of the public (including, to be fair, myself) as to be meaningless, irrelevant, unexisting.
I don't know if this is making sense but the point I am making is that I think the changing world, in certain ways, makes us unable to remember. It keeps us mired in the present, and thinking of the future (at the moment), with particular regard to global warming, in a kind of fearful fascination. I would have thought we would remember more sharply things being different because it wasn't that long ago: but this is partly what is driving us to worship youth: it is not just beauty, or sexuality, or ability, but the fact that it is, at any given moment, youth which is best attuned to the state of the world at that point, best able to cope, completely unconcerned by trying to adapt. Youth fits, it works. The rest of us find it harder because we are (to greater or lesser degrees) different from the world we live in.
So the study of modern history assumes a keener aspect, and becomes more popular because it is history, it is the story of real or nearly real people in a world we can see has changed. Other types of history (say, medieval) are about other worlds, and so don't interest us so much. Modern history is about our world. The nazification of the school history syllabus and of the bookshelves is a testament to the fact that we are still trying to understand our cultural origins in that time. We see our society as evolving from that, rather than before - take the notion and enacting of human rights, though it may have its origins in the Enlightenment or French Revolution, the key document of our time is the UN Declaration of Human Rights. I think there is also a powerful part of our culture that still cannot understand how it all happened and why it all happened.
I've written on this idea before of course - that the twentieth century is not quite over, and that, possibly, we are suffering some kind of extended anxiety problems caused by 45 years of living under 4 minutes' notice of destruction (ok it was a bit longer than that until the early sixties). But that isn't entirely what i mean here. I mean a culture (though it is so mixed now as to make even the singular noun questionable) which has come into existence only five minutes ago, furnished with a history that it does not remember, but it does remember being at one point in time and at that nexus emerging into something resembling life. From there it has turned, shifted, slid, slanted and cracked so that we just do not, really, remember what it was like.
I don't mind if you think this is a lot of contradictory, muddled cobblers. It is a kind of live-thinking exercise, no pre thought has gone into this post at all except a vague sense that i'd like to put finger to keyboard. If you like it, great. If you don't, also great.
Friday, 18 April 2008
Where Does The End Of Me Become The Start Of You?
Somewhere at the end of my sentence, is the answer. Then, you take what I've said and you mulch it through your prejudices, be they right or left, then you add your assumptions of what I am and you conclude the brief encounter with an idea of what you think I have said, and worse, what you think I think. All of this is rather nastily mashed in social mores and the end result is that you almost certainly think that I'm a cunt. I don't mind that, per se, it is probably true, I just "feel" that it's a touch unfair. And some people's feelings count for a good deal more than many others, so depending on your ethnic or sexual characteristics, this could well be enough to earn me a "cunt" certificate from the government itself. For example, if you scream and shout and say "cunt" but you happen to be a leftist, then you're not so bad, you were just provoked; if I do it, then I am full of rage and anger and I need therapy or a prison sentence, or worse. Or I'm defending my privileges, despite owning nothing at all, or whatever, but by looking at the colour of my skin you nonetheless know what I've been through or not, so you are qualified to comment by the presence of the Guardian under your flabby arm. And if I complain then I am yet another privileged white fucker against equality, or whatever justification for discrimination you've come up with this week after too long spent in the saloon bar of one of London's rather more fashionable establishments. And the comment threads at Harry's Place will go on and on about how easy I've had it and how I've never sat on an Equality Committee in my life, and how, after all, "cunt" is fair enough comment on me.
Where you begin is where my voice ends, and where I begin is where I turn what you say into whatever I want it to be: where I see memories of myself when you speak, and where I think of what you've made me think of myself when you've spoken of your life, even though it's taken me months to make you open up such that I now know something, a very small something, of the real you, and I've immediately reinterpreted it in the light of my bizarre assumptions about life and ethics.
Where you begin is where I've thought for a long time my words end, in gentle and soft landings somewhere in your outer consciousness; that's where I think I end but whether you see me there or not, is, frankly, up to you - and I guess that the answer is that I am a shell on the seashore, glinting in the occasional sunlight, but for the most part occluded by polluted waters or industrial skies.
And it all comes back to the end of the sentence: the suggestion of irony, the lifting lilt, the downbeat self-mockery, the absence of an actual full stop. I suggest by my insecurity that you might like to know more about me, and that I would like to know more about you: but you have other things to do, and your phone is ringing in your pocket, and the tea will be getting cold in an hour or so, so I am faded to black, which is where I should be.
The end of the sentence is no more interesting than the beginning, or the endless dullness of the middle with all its subordinate clauses and hesitations. The end of the sentence goes nowhere and says nothing.
Where you begin is where my voice ends, and where I begin is where I turn what you say into whatever I want it to be: where I see memories of myself when you speak, and where I think of what you've made me think of myself when you've spoken of your life, even though it's taken me months to make you open up such that I now know something, a very small something, of the real you, and I've immediately reinterpreted it in the light of my bizarre assumptions about life and ethics.
Where you begin is where I've thought for a long time my words end, in gentle and soft landings somewhere in your outer consciousness; that's where I think I end but whether you see me there or not, is, frankly, up to you - and I guess that the answer is that I am a shell on the seashore, glinting in the occasional sunlight, but for the most part occluded by polluted waters or industrial skies.
And it all comes back to the end of the sentence: the suggestion of irony, the lifting lilt, the downbeat self-mockery, the absence of an actual full stop. I suggest by my insecurity that you might like to know more about me, and that I would like to know more about you: but you have other things to do, and your phone is ringing in your pocket, and the tea will be getting cold in an hour or so, so I am faded to black, which is where I should be.
The end of the sentence is no more interesting than the beginning, or the endless dullness of the middle with all its subordinate clauses and hesitations. The end of the sentence goes nowhere and says nothing.
You Hear Laughter Cracking Through the Walls
Spellbound by Siouxsie and the Banshees(look it up on YouTube) is one of those genuinely unsettling songs, a piece of art that makes me shiver, only very slightly, but enough to prmopt me to think of the recesses of the imagination. I also think it captures neatly an imaginative or rhetorical violence in music that had been going for some years but which had lacked a register to become anything more than loud and aggressive. Here, the implied violence is given the cloaking of Grimm's Fairy Tales or of a hundred traditional stories about fairy circles and spirits. Its negative spirituality and bursting irrationality is invasive and caught me when I first heard it as a somewhat isolated teenager in 1989 (I still have my tape recording of it made off the tv from the BBC programme "Boxpops" which used to do tracks and news from previous years on a any given subject). I don't know whether you can read it as Freudian or not, I guess you probably could. I read it as a cultural symbol: out of the depths of recession and near-economic despair, of real street violence and alienation, comes this primal elaboration of fear and uncontrol. It's a metaphor, in word, rhythm and structure: this song is reaching into human experience for a very specific cultural problem.
But anything which goes in that direction can have unexpected and haunting effects. Even this vocabulary makes my point harder to communicate: "haunting", "primal", "fear" - you could add "ghostly" and "piercing" to that list. What it's all saying is that humanity fears determinism as contradicting its most basic day-to-day assumptions; and that it fears annihilation, being made unphysical or unplaced. You could make this mean death only, or you could, a la Paul Tillich and existentialism, say that it means any radical form of challenging (of the kind that was certainly underway in 1981) which dislocates and threatens to undermine you.
Whether we exist in any meaningful sense or not, we have fears of the shadowy and the ungrasped or ungraspable: I think it's straightforward to see that it all refers to the fear of otherness, which, by its very definition, means we will not be as we are. That is hard to imagine, and it means we, as we are, will be negated. We always strive against negation, create order and physicality, but we know we are going to be negated and that in steps along the way things will happen to negate what we are and what we understand on many occasions. Those things might produce something better and finer, more worthwhile, but the process is terrifying. Hence we write songs that try to show something of the nothingness that surrounds us and we shiver for a bit, or it won't leave our heads for a while: we watch horror films and are unsettled: we tell ghost stories and are thoughtful: we emphasise our bodiedness by fucking everything in sight and inventing ethics to justify our desperation.
But anything which goes in that direction can have unexpected and haunting effects. Even this vocabulary makes my point harder to communicate: "haunting", "primal", "fear" - you could add "ghostly" and "piercing" to that list. What it's all saying is that humanity fears determinism as contradicting its most basic day-to-day assumptions; and that it fears annihilation, being made unphysical or unplaced. You could make this mean death only, or you could, a la Paul Tillich and existentialism, say that it means any radical form of challenging (of the kind that was certainly underway in 1981) which dislocates and threatens to undermine you.
Whether we exist in any meaningful sense or not, we have fears of the shadowy and the ungrasped or ungraspable: I think it's straightforward to see that it all refers to the fear of otherness, which, by its very definition, means we will not be as we are. That is hard to imagine, and it means we, as we are, will be negated. We always strive against negation, create order and physicality, but we know we are going to be negated and that in steps along the way things will happen to negate what we are and what we understand on many occasions. Those things might produce something better and finer, more worthwhile, but the process is terrifying. Hence we write songs that try to show something of the nothingness that surrounds us and we shiver for a bit, or it won't leave our heads for a while: we watch horror films and are unsettled: we tell ghost stories and are thoughtful: we emphasise our bodiedness by fucking everything in sight and inventing ethics to justify our desperation.
Saturday, 29 March 2008
Forty-What?
Many years ago I co-edited a piss-poor school rag called, in breach of every copyright law in the land, "42". It was a lot crapper than I had previously thought, as I realised when I re-read it last night. Still, at least I now know that I am a twat and have always been a twat. There has never been a time when I haven't been a smug old cunt, even if there were times when I had more hair than now, or less pounds around the middle. I have also always looked like a cunt, as I saw on some recent photos. Some of us have been cursed with this affliction: we could be 7, 14, 18, 21, or 31 and we still look like utter fucking twats. That's because we are. I've also always sounded like a cunt, as my few radio appearances prove. And as all of my acquaintances have always said. Let us modify Orwell and Amis's dictum for the fast moving twenty-first century: At twenty-five, everyone has the face he deserves.
Fucking hell, there really is no hope. None at all.
Fucking hell, there really is no hope. None at all.
Friday, 7 September 2007
Animals are Panicking
I can't readily explain what it was that brought me back to blogging, unless it were boredom: it certainly was not a desire to explain or expand upon my political obsessions, though I intend to do that too. My assumptions are of a simple class, obtained through Freudian simplicities and back pedalled reasoning.
Did I ever discuss my favourite types of pornography?
Well, time and place my friends, time and place.
My political views are easy and reactionary: I don't see why government deigns to give me rights and why I should be grateful. I _do_ see why there is no other source of rights, though we've transmuted a post-holocaust set of aspirations via Ernest Bevin into a Platonic reality of some faintly sinister kind.
Nathelees, blogging is no reason for expounding on these ignorances, nor are ignorances reasons for blogging. No. The bloghaters, whisper if you dare, are right. We blog because we are frustrated and because we want to hear what we want to hear. Yes, alright, sometimes I read the Intelligent Person's Guardian (Matt, Stumbling &c) but mostly I read the nearest equivalents to the Mail, the Torygraph and the Times (though it's dispiritingly socially liberal these days, even unto its tv reviews helpfully pointing out which tv shows show homophobia and which don't, as if anyone reads a tv review to be told what to think about human sexuality).
By the way can I just take this opportunity to tell ALL tv reviewers the following:
I don't give a fuck for your views on abortion, Mrs Thatcher, Eisenhower, President Reagan, gay rights, religion, atheism, stem cell research, the internet, blogging, corruption, sex or murder.
You are hired to discuss whether x programme is good or not. Kindly stick to this remit or fuck off. We are not so utterly ignorant that we need political point scoring in the middle of so-called professional media criticism. So fuck off. Or give me your job.
Then again, if they did, you'd get stuff like this:
Castrovalva is a pointed satire on Thatcher's Britain (c all newspapers): the characters (who, interestingly, barely seem to know who they are in this nightmarescape) stumble over invented traditions, which appear to give a conservative gloss to reality but which in fact expose the hollow and false nature of conservative fantasies....
Er...no, actually, hang on. More like this:
Logopolis suggests that technology and "progress" (c Greenpeace) is but a fig leaf for universe threatening desires. It is wholly ironic that Logopolis, the mental maths paradise, resorts to flawed and, if you observe closely, cobwebbed technology to save the universe. The implication is clear. Only the natural mind is acceptable. Technology (ie carbon footprinted wasteage) is harmful.
Erm..no that's still not right. Wait a minute...er....
Um. Anyway.
By the way, academic twats, research does not "show" anything. It might "suggest" conclusions, but it does not "show" them. I learned that in GCSE History. Shame that graduate teachers are bedazzled by self interested twats waving bits of paper and telling them that x study of 4 children in Luton "shows" that y obtains when it might well do, but we just don't, actually, know for certain.
Huh. So much for blogging as a way of expanding the mind.
Did I ever discuss my favourite types of pornography?
Well, time and place my friends, time and place.
My political views are easy and reactionary: I don't see why government deigns to give me rights and why I should be grateful. I _do_ see why there is no other source of rights, though we've transmuted a post-holocaust set of aspirations via Ernest Bevin into a Platonic reality of some faintly sinister kind.
Nathelees, blogging is no reason for expounding on these ignorances, nor are ignorances reasons for blogging. No. The bloghaters, whisper if you dare, are right. We blog because we are frustrated and because we want to hear what we want to hear. Yes, alright, sometimes I read the Intelligent Person's Guardian (Matt, Stumbling &c) but mostly I read the nearest equivalents to the Mail, the Torygraph and the Times (though it's dispiritingly socially liberal these days, even unto its tv reviews helpfully pointing out which tv shows show homophobia and which don't, as if anyone reads a tv review to be told what to think about human sexuality).
By the way can I just take this opportunity to tell ALL tv reviewers the following:
I don't give a fuck for your views on abortion, Mrs Thatcher, Eisenhower, President Reagan, gay rights, religion, atheism, stem cell research, the internet, blogging, corruption, sex or murder.
You are hired to discuss whether x programme is good or not. Kindly stick to this remit or fuck off. We are not so utterly ignorant that we need political point scoring in the middle of so-called professional media criticism. So fuck off. Or give me your job.
Then again, if they did, you'd get stuff like this:
Castrovalva is a pointed satire on Thatcher's Britain (c all newspapers): the characters (who, interestingly, barely seem to know who they are in this nightmarescape) stumble over invented traditions, which appear to give a conservative gloss to reality but which in fact expose the hollow and false nature of conservative fantasies....
Er...no, actually, hang on. More like this:
Logopolis suggests that technology and "progress" (c Greenpeace) is but a fig leaf for universe threatening desires. It is wholly ironic that Logopolis, the mental maths paradise, resorts to flawed and, if you observe closely, cobwebbed technology to save the universe. The implication is clear. Only the natural mind is acceptable. Technology (ie carbon footprinted wasteage) is harmful.
Erm..no that's still not right. Wait a minute...er....
Um. Anyway.
By the way, academic twats, research does not "show" anything. It might "suggest" conclusions, but it does not "show" them. I learned that in GCSE History. Shame that graduate teachers are bedazzled by self interested twats waving bits of paper and telling them that x study of 4 children in Luton "shows" that y obtains when it might well do, but we just don't, actually, know for certain.
Huh. So much for blogging as a way of expanding the mind.
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