So, here we are, almost a month into a new decade- and it can’t have escaped your notice. The already tepid TV that we’re subjected to over the Christmas season (except Doctor Who. Doctor who rules) was jam packed with programmes reviewing the last ten years. Someone somewhere must have thought we cared.
The ‘noughties’ were my decade. I was eleven when the clock struck midnight on January 1st 2000. I went to school and college and uni. I began to forge an adult identity out of the sticky, awkward clay of adolescence. I became aware of music and films and culture and art in a new and critical way. I (in theory) physically and emotionally matured. I grew up in the first decade of the twenty first century and, let me tell you, it was rubbish.
Standing where I was and looking back at the vibrant culture from the fifties onwards I can perhaps be forgiven for feeling a little peeved that I was born so late. There’s been no youth movements to speak of in the noughties. ‘Chav’ is an insult and ‘emo’ is a resurrection of an ‘80s subculture. Nu metal was the worst thing to happen to music ever.
Fashions just copied what had gone on in other decades. The fashion industry ran out of ideas so they started marketed things as ‘60s, ‘70s or ‘80s revival. And people actually bought it. This was also decade when you could start buying music t-shirts at Topshop. Now if you see someone in a Beatles or Rolling Stones or Jimi Hendrix t-shirt it’s actually a pretty good bet that they don’t know a single one of their songs. Of course, there are exceptions. My friend is a die hard Bowie fan and his Bowie t-shirt came from Topman, but on the whole they’re meaningless.
Mainstream music all but died as the really creative people retreated to the safe and cheap haven of the internet to market their products. There’s more artists now, but fewer are well known, and even fewer are well known and good.
Coupled, seemingly insanely, with an increase in paranoia over paedophiles the sexualisation of children reached terrifying heights. The clothes marketed to six year olds included jeans with ‘sexy’ written across the arse, thongs, padded bras, mini skirts and t-shirt bearing such delightful slogans as ‘bitch but you want it’. Barbie may have been a patriarchal tool to trap girls in tradition female roles, but at least she did stuff other than party and kiss boys like Bratz do. My Barbie had a 4x4 and went camping with Cindy and Action Man back in the ‘90s.
So much has been done to undermine women. The models got skinnier and skinnier until they started dying and the pressure to be beautiful increased as botox and plastic surgery became more readily available.
Politically speaking things have been no better. The ‘War on Terror’ has acted as the green light for our civil liberties to be systematically eroded. Health and climate change scares have been motivated, in my humble opinion, less out of concern for our welfare or that of the planet and more as a handy way of making everyone easier to control. People lost faith with their politicians and in the isolation that followed every community from the white middle classes to the Asian working classes saw an increase in extremism. Young people who’d gone to school and been friends with every race started voting for the BNP. Young Muslims whose parents had been staunch liberals were drawn into anti-West rhetoric.
And the name sucked. ‘Noughties?’ Seriosuly? It sounds like a euphemism for stealing biscuits from your Mum when you’re five.
So, yeah, 2000-2009 sucked in almost every way I can think off. Obviously there were some good bits, but this wouldn’t be a very good rant if I included the good bits, would it?
Peace and Love and enjoy the rest of 2010. x
25 January 2010
18 January 2010
Grow Up About the Army
Most people have, at some time or another, come across someone whose life story is so colourful and impressive that you can’t help but doubt them. These people are for the most part harmless. It’s a bit irritating if you’re in the wrong mood and you always wonder if they’ll take it too far and hurt someone, but no one really loses sleep over it.
Roger Day appears to be the exception to this. He was sentenced to sixty hours community service last week after attending a Remembrance Day parade wearing seventeen military medals, none of which he’d earned. He said that he’d made up his military past to impress his wife.
It was no doubt offensive and upsetting for those who had earned those medals and their
families to see an imposter marching alongside genuine soldiers, but I can’t help but feeling that sentencing the man to sixty hours community service is pushing it a bit. It is illegal to impersonate a soldier and with good reason. If you’re in the middle of a battle you don’t want the ‘soldier’ watching your back to have had no military training, especially ifthey’ve got a gun.
But after retirement? Yes, he was a twit about it and yes, I can understand the anger felt by soldiers and their families, but come on. The guy’s clearly nothing more deadly than a fantasist. He’s probably more frightened of the effect it’ll have on his wife than anything else. He’s apologised. The sentence in my opinion is far too harsh.
It is also, however, unsurprising. The view we have of our armed forces in this country is rose tinted to say the least. Soldiers are seen as saints regardless of what they have or have not done on the battlefields. In the eyes of some all you need to do is sign up for basic training to be placed on a moral pedestal high above the rest of the population. I understand that it’s a difficult job and a real tragedy when a young soldier is lost while fighting for (what they believe anyway) is the freedom of the UK, but I don’t think these people are saints.
In fact they kill people. Currently they are killing people in wars many of them do not agree with against those who are ill equipped technologically to fight against them. There have also been, and I stress here the rarity of these cases, many soldiers would not dream of acting in such a way, incidences of barbarity committed by our ‘brave boys’-as the Sun likes to call them.
The Sun, being one of the sexist pieces of chip paper in waiting currently conning people out of their money in this country, always refers to them as ‘our boys’. Never ‘our soldiers’ or ‘our army’ or even ‘our people’. They clearly do not see the scores of women who work just as hard in just as dangerous conditions as their male comrades worth mentioning. And it’s rather infantilising to the soldiers themselves. They are ‘boys’, not ‘men’. Perhaps this is because it’s easier to see them as wide eyed and innocent if they’re portrayed as children. But that’s a different rant entirely. Time to get back on topic methinks.
And then there are the moral problems many people have with the conflicts we as a nation are currently engaged in. You can stand up and blast the government for their action in Iraq and Afghanistan but even hint that the military may be at fault for following these orders and you instantly become a social pariah on the same level as Roger Day. And before anyone says anything yes I understand that the individual foot soldiers can’t question orders without severe consequences. That final remark was directed more at the higher echelons of the military.
I think we, as a country, need to grow up a bit about the army. Stop seeing them as a link to the ‘glorious age’ that is gone and is never, ever, ever coming back. Stop putting them on ridiculous moral pedestals because you’ve been brainwashed into believing that the young people who don’t risk their lives in unjust wars are pushing this nation into an obese drink induced promiscuous stupor. Stop giving out hopelessly disproportionate punishments to people who are just sad fantasists who need a slap on this risk rather than actual dangers to society.
Peace and Love. Seriously, can we all be a bit more peace and love? x
Roger Day appears to be the exception to this. He was sentenced to sixty hours community service last week after attending a Remembrance Day parade wearing seventeen military medals, none of which he’d earned. He said that he’d made up his military past to impress his wife.
It was no doubt offensive and upsetting for those who had earned those medals and their
families to see an imposter marching alongside genuine soldiers, but I can’t help but feeling that sentencing the man to sixty hours community service is pushing it a bit. It is illegal to impersonate a soldier and with good reason. If you’re in the middle of a battle you don’t want the ‘soldier’ watching your back to have had no military training, especially ifthey’ve got a gun.
But after retirement? Yes, he was a twit about it and yes, I can understand the anger felt by soldiers and their families, but come on. The guy’s clearly nothing more deadly than a fantasist. He’s probably more frightened of the effect it’ll have on his wife than anything else. He’s apologised. The sentence in my opinion is far too harsh.
It is also, however, unsurprising. The view we have of our armed forces in this country is rose tinted to say the least. Soldiers are seen as saints regardless of what they have or have not done on the battlefields. In the eyes of some all you need to do is sign up for basic training to be placed on a moral pedestal high above the rest of the population. I understand that it’s a difficult job and a real tragedy when a young soldier is lost while fighting for (what they believe anyway) is the freedom of the UK, but I don’t think these people are saints.
In fact they kill people. Currently they are killing people in wars many of them do not agree with against those who are ill equipped technologically to fight against them. There have also been, and I stress here the rarity of these cases, many soldiers would not dream of acting in such a way, incidences of barbarity committed by our ‘brave boys’-as the Sun likes to call them.
The Sun, being one of the sexist pieces of chip paper in waiting currently conning people out of their money in this country, always refers to them as ‘our boys’. Never ‘our soldiers’ or ‘our army’ or even ‘our people’. They clearly do not see the scores of women who work just as hard in just as dangerous conditions as their male comrades worth mentioning. And it’s rather infantilising to the soldiers themselves. They are ‘boys’, not ‘men’. Perhaps this is because it’s easier to see them as wide eyed and innocent if they’re portrayed as children. But that’s a different rant entirely. Time to get back on topic methinks.
And then there are the moral problems many people have with the conflicts we as a nation are currently engaged in. You can stand up and blast the government for their action in Iraq and Afghanistan but even hint that the military may be at fault for following these orders and you instantly become a social pariah on the same level as Roger Day. And before anyone says anything yes I understand that the individual foot soldiers can’t question orders without severe consequences. That final remark was directed more at the higher echelons of the military.
I think we, as a country, need to grow up a bit about the army. Stop seeing them as a link to the ‘glorious age’ that is gone and is never, ever, ever coming back. Stop putting them on ridiculous moral pedestals because you’ve been brainwashed into believing that the young people who don’t risk their lives in unjust wars are pushing this nation into an obese drink induced promiscuous stupor. Stop giving out hopelessly disproportionate punishments to people who are just sad fantasists who need a slap on this risk rather than actual dangers to society.
Peace and Love. Seriously, can we all be a bit more peace and love? x
11 January 2010
Wanna Know What's Really Terrifying?
Although we are now eleven days into 2010 I would still like to wish you all a happy New Year and I hope you all had a pleasant Christmas. See, I do have a nice bone in my body. Apologies for lack of blog last week. I'm a lazy fecker and considered it to still be my hols. And I was doing my dissertation, which I pretty much have not stopped doing since. Anyway, on with perceptive
(*cough cough*) political comment.
If you’ve been anywhere near a TV, radio, newspaper or any form of mass media it can’t have escaped your notice that for the people on board a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas day it was probably not the relaxing day they had planned. Some fool tried to blow the plane up. He failed.
Not surprising really, considering he was carrying the bomb in his underwear. Oh well, I suppose it was an original excuse as to why you’re uncomfortable on a long haul flight. He intended to ignite the powder he had stored in his trollies with some liquid. That doesn’t sound like a particularly efficient way to cause an explosion. I'd have used a fuse. Note to anti-terrorist cell, you’ll be please to know I was crap at chemistry and therefore no threat to national security.
And some brave bod jumped on him long before he could produce anything better than a few choice flames, so he only managed to singe two people’s eyebrows and one of them was his own. Kudos to that brave bod though. I think that’s how we’d all like to imagine we’d react to an attempted terrorist attack on a plane we were currently inside. And this is by no means a slight to the no doubt shaken and perplexed passengers. A terrorist attack, even a failed one, is quite frightening. If they’ve stopped shaking already they’re clearly made of stern stuff.
But, fortunately, the attack failed, although if you’ve been following the news you’d be forgiven to think that it was successful and everyone in Detroit died in a deadly fireball. Although I'm fairly sure the apparently unflappable Obama reacted in a more rational manner than George W Bush would have done it still seems to have been blown out of all proportion. No pun intended...well, maybe just a small one.
The already frankly ridiculous security measures have been stepped up. We are now subject to full body scanners that, as well as clearly having been invented by the kind of pervy old man you don’t want sat behind you on a bus, take about twenty minutes to get through. Oops, you’ve missed your flight. No holiday for you. Please bend over while we shove this special exploding underpants detector up your rectum. It sounds like something out of Black Adder. As well as powders, liquids, Jilly Cooper novels and insulin needles (have you any idea how long it would take to stab someone to death with an insulin needle? They’d die of old age first) we are only a few days away from being unable to wear our own underwear on flights. We’ll have to be provided with special airline pants with the corresponding logo emblazoned on them so if you so get arrested they know immediately who to bollock for not checking your passport.
Due to someone’s oversight somewhere Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (that’s the terrorist that is) should not even have flown. He was on a no fly list. But rather than tell those whose job it is to check such things to shape up a bit we’re now probably going to have to go through a hell of a lot more faff to get a passport. As a random aside, how exactly do those no fly lists work? There’s pretty much no one in the world with an entirely unique name. Just an aimless ponder...
It seems whatever we do terrorists are one step ahead of us. Whatever draconian measures are put in place they find a way to get around it. Kind of like organised criminals, which I suppose they are. Eventually so many restrictions are going to be put on our freedoms that the ‘civilised society’ the terrorists are apparently trying to destroy and we, the ‘good guys’, are trying to protect will be unrecognisable.
Abdullmutallab may have failed in his attempt to bomb a plane, but he has sufficiently terrorised the US (and therefore the UK by default) to merit the title terrorist. It wasn’t his ill thought through pants bomb that did it either, it was the panic stirred up by the media and the over reaction of security services eager to be seen to ‘do something’ to appease that very same fear mongering media. It’s a sad state of affairs when the terrorists don’t even need to detonate their bombs to do their work.
We should be grateful the Christmas bomb plot failed, and we should review the measures already in place. We should not use it as an excuse to make air passengers even more paranoid and ordinary members of the public more suspicious of each other. After the bombings on the London underground the general public had the right attitude. They just kept going about their daily business, determined that they would not allow themselves to be ‘terrified’. In contrast the security services overreacted and shot an innocent man to death.
Retain some perspective and stop doing the terrorists job for them.
Peace and Love x
(*cough cough*) political comment.
If you’ve been anywhere near a TV, radio, newspaper or any form of mass media it can’t have escaped your notice that for the people on board a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas day it was probably not the relaxing day they had planned. Some fool tried to blow the plane up. He failed.
Not surprising really, considering he was carrying the bomb in his underwear. Oh well, I suppose it was an original excuse as to why you’re uncomfortable on a long haul flight. He intended to ignite the powder he had stored in his trollies with some liquid. That doesn’t sound like a particularly efficient way to cause an explosion. I'd have used a fuse. Note to anti-terrorist cell, you’ll be please to know I was crap at chemistry and therefore no threat to national security.
And some brave bod jumped on him long before he could produce anything better than a few choice flames, so he only managed to singe two people’s eyebrows and one of them was his own. Kudos to that brave bod though. I think that’s how we’d all like to imagine we’d react to an attempted terrorist attack on a plane we were currently inside. And this is by no means a slight to the no doubt shaken and perplexed passengers. A terrorist attack, even a failed one, is quite frightening. If they’ve stopped shaking already they’re clearly made of stern stuff.
But, fortunately, the attack failed, although if you’ve been following the news you’d be forgiven to think that it was successful and everyone in Detroit died in a deadly fireball. Although I'm fairly sure the apparently unflappable Obama reacted in a more rational manner than George W Bush would have done it still seems to have been blown out of all proportion. No pun intended...well, maybe just a small one.
The already frankly ridiculous security measures have been stepped up. We are now subject to full body scanners that, as well as clearly having been invented by the kind of pervy old man you don’t want sat behind you on a bus, take about twenty minutes to get through. Oops, you’ve missed your flight. No holiday for you. Please bend over while we shove this special exploding underpants detector up your rectum. It sounds like something out of Black Adder. As well as powders, liquids, Jilly Cooper novels and insulin needles (have you any idea how long it would take to stab someone to death with an insulin needle? They’d die of old age first) we are only a few days away from being unable to wear our own underwear on flights. We’ll have to be provided with special airline pants with the corresponding logo emblazoned on them so if you so get arrested they know immediately who to bollock for not checking your passport.
Due to someone’s oversight somewhere Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (that’s the terrorist that is) should not even have flown. He was on a no fly list. But rather than tell those whose job it is to check such things to shape up a bit we’re now probably going to have to go through a hell of a lot more faff to get a passport. As a random aside, how exactly do those no fly lists work? There’s pretty much no one in the world with an entirely unique name. Just an aimless ponder...
It seems whatever we do terrorists are one step ahead of us. Whatever draconian measures are put in place they find a way to get around it. Kind of like organised criminals, which I suppose they are. Eventually so many restrictions are going to be put on our freedoms that the ‘civilised society’ the terrorists are apparently trying to destroy and we, the ‘good guys’, are trying to protect will be unrecognisable.
Abdullmutallab may have failed in his attempt to bomb a plane, but he has sufficiently terrorised the US (and therefore the UK by default) to merit the title terrorist. It wasn’t his ill thought through pants bomb that did it either, it was the panic stirred up by the media and the over reaction of security services eager to be seen to ‘do something’ to appease that very same fear mongering media. It’s a sad state of affairs when the terrorists don’t even need to detonate their bombs to do their work.
We should be grateful the Christmas bomb plot failed, and we should review the measures already in place. We should not use it as an excuse to make air passengers even more paranoid and ordinary members of the public more suspicious of each other. After the bombings on the London underground the general public had the right attitude. They just kept going about their daily business, determined that they would not allow themselves to be ‘terrified’. In contrast the security services overreacted and shot an innocent man to death.
Retain some perspective and stop doing the terrorists job for them.
Peace and Love x
22 December 2009
RATM: A 'Victory'?
Anyone on Facebook will probably be aware that there has been a recent internet campaign to make Rage Against The Machine’s song Killing In The Name Of Christmas number one. It was less about creating awareness for a band that had its heyday in the 1990’s and more about an amplified ‘Fuck You!’ to the X Factor. The whole point was to deny the winner of this year’s competition the Christmas number one spot. And it worked. It has become the first download only Christmas number one.
I didn’t participate for two reasons. One, I don’t really like RATM and two, I had an exact multiple of ten in my bank account and so downloading a song for £1.70 or however much it is would have meant that I couldn’t withdraw an extra tenner from the ATM.
It also struck me as being a little bit petty. I haven’t been concerned with the charts since I was about twelve and very much enjoyed Bob the Builder getting to number one. But I can appreciate the sentiment behind it. The X Factor is irritating and it does flood the charts with tedious, manufactured crap but, as I said, I don’t really give a fig about the charts. I used to give a fig about the mediocre music being released and people making money from it, but then I realised that there is still decent music out there. Either way when I started getting invited to join the Facebook group I decided I had better things to do and politely declined.
When I found out that it had actually worked I thought it was pretty funny, but that was it. As with many other things that I don’t really think are that big a deal it made front page news. Commentators were full of praise for the ‘young people who had the guts to stand up the popular culture that’s been spoon fed to them’. Few people seem to have noticed that both RATM and X Factor winner Joe McElderry are on the same record label to the profits from both are going to the same people. And joining a Facebook group while downloading a song from iTunes isn’t exactly a taxing way to make a stand.
I’ll make a confession here. When I heard that the campaign had been successful it made me a bit happy. I Tweeted (because I am a technologically minded personage of the times) that I was chuffed with the ‘people power’. I still am, a bit, but I don’t think we should fool ourselves into thinking that the yoof of today really care. There’s something depressing to see that they would rally around a campaign to unseat the X Factor but not to help Palestinian refugees or victims of AIDS or child abuse. And they won’t protest. They’ll just join a Facebook group and give Apple a few pence.
That, and a great deal of those who joined will have joined because their mates talked them into it or because it is, in certain circles, far cooler to like RATM than the X Factor. This isn’t really a victory for anyone. People will, by and large, still listen and buy the music they like and think ‘sod it’ to everyone else. I'm still of the opinion that young people are not as socially aware as they should be and they don’t care about things that, I think, they should care about.
This isn’t entirely the fault of the X Factor, although here are those who like to pretend that it is. The X Factor is just a TV programme that people will watch and if they like the music they will buy it. Apathy is not a problem that has easy answers nor can it be solved easily. But, really, is that what we should spend Christmas worrying about? Go and eat turkey and get drunk.
Peace and Love and Snow and Christmas Booze x
P.S. No ranting next week. I'm down south bonding with relatives.
I didn’t participate for two reasons. One, I don’t really like RATM and two, I had an exact multiple of ten in my bank account and so downloading a song for £1.70 or however much it is would have meant that I couldn’t withdraw an extra tenner from the ATM.
It also struck me as being a little bit petty. I haven’t been concerned with the charts since I was about twelve and very much enjoyed Bob the Builder getting to number one. But I can appreciate the sentiment behind it. The X Factor is irritating and it does flood the charts with tedious, manufactured crap but, as I said, I don’t really give a fig about the charts. I used to give a fig about the mediocre music being released and people making money from it, but then I realised that there is still decent music out there. Either way when I started getting invited to join the Facebook group I decided I had better things to do and politely declined.
When I found out that it had actually worked I thought it was pretty funny, but that was it. As with many other things that I don’t really think are that big a deal it made front page news. Commentators were full of praise for the ‘young people who had the guts to stand up the popular culture that’s been spoon fed to them’. Few people seem to have noticed that both RATM and X Factor winner Joe McElderry are on the same record label to the profits from both are going to the same people. And joining a Facebook group while downloading a song from iTunes isn’t exactly a taxing way to make a stand.
I’ll make a confession here. When I heard that the campaign had been successful it made me a bit happy. I Tweeted (because I am a technologically minded personage of the times) that I was chuffed with the ‘people power’. I still am, a bit, but I don’t think we should fool ourselves into thinking that the yoof of today really care. There’s something depressing to see that they would rally around a campaign to unseat the X Factor but not to help Palestinian refugees or victims of AIDS or child abuse. And they won’t protest. They’ll just join a Facebook group and give Apple a few pence.
That, and a great deal of those who joined will have joined because their mates talked them into it or because it is, in certain circles, far cooler to like RATM than the X Factor. This isn’t really a victory for anyone. People will, by and large, still listen and buy the music they like and think ‘sod it’ to everyone else. I'm still of the opinion that young people are not as socially aware as they should be and they don’t care about things that, I think, they should care about.
This isn’t entirely the fault of the X Factor, although here are those who like to pretend that it is. The X Factor is just a TV programme that people will watch and if they like the music they will buy it. Apathy is not a problem that has easy answers nor can it be solved easily. But, really, is that what we should spend Christmas worrying about? Go and eat turkey and get drunk.
Peace and Love and Snow and Christmas Booze x
P.S. No ranting next week. I'm down south bonding with relatives.
14 December 2009
Why We Should Call Off Christmas
I live in a little bubble. The only regular exposure I got to newspapers was when I was working and I used to flick through the ones someone else had brought in and left in the canteen on my lunch break. And the Metro, but I'm never on a bus long enough to have a proper look through, and they’re rarely in a readable condition when I get to them anyway. As a consequence of this I'm not sure if this rant applies this year as much as it had for the last few years. I assume it does. Grizzly little attention seeking whine buckets don’t, unfortunately, just disappear. And even if they have gone it irked me so much in Christmases past that I'm still going to have a good bitch about it.
Yep, it’s Christmas. I have officially resigned myself to this fact. We’re over half way through advent, there’s not a town centre in the land that can’t be seen from Jupiter and the Famous Grouse is waddling merrily across my TV screen. Happy December to us all.
However, amongst all this shiny eyed cheer there lurks a group of people determined to shout over the merry hum. They’re always there of course, it’s not just the festive season they choose to interrupt, but I feel bad for the kids when they start up about Christmas. It’s those old favourites the I-Exist-Purely-To-Be-Offended-And-Then-Write-Into-The-Daily-Mail-About-It Brigade.
According to these doom mongers our multicultural society is destroying Christmas. Judging by the smiling Santas beaming down at me from every rooftop and the endless runs of Christmas specials on TV I don’t actually think this is the case. Christmas still permeates everything from September onwards yet these cretins insist that local council do-gooders are removing Christmas in case it offends some invisible and silent minority.
They even make up their own evidence. Anyone remember the ‘Winterval’ scandal? Apparently a town centre (I think it was Birmingham, but it might have been Nottingham. Either way I'm thinking Midlands) began to advertise Winterval as a politically correct alternative to Christmas. Except they didn’t. Winterval wasn’t anything to do with replacing Christmas. It was to attract people to the city centre throughout the winter months, including December and therefore Christmas.
These people hide behind a pretence of ‘acting in the public good’ and ‘preserving the British culture’ but actually they just enjoy feeling offended. They like the thrill they get from complaining and will latch onto anything that they feel can justify their meaningless existence, even if it’s complaining that something which is clearly still there is disappearing and being replaced by something that has been removed so far from context it’s become a joke.
But supposing just for a minute they are right. Suppose Christmas really is being gradually eroded in place of something more multicultural. Suppose these idiotic grief mongers actually have something to whine about. Well, I think it would actually be a good thing.
Christmas has become a joke. It starts in August (seriously. I used to work in retail and the Christmas stock started coming in on the same wagons as the sun cream). It stresses people out and encourages them to get into debt which they can’t afford and which in the current economic climate will hang around their necks for decades. It exists purely to persuade children to guilt trip their parents into buying them expensive toys that prop up some faceless multinational corporation. Break ups, suicides, self harm, domestic violence, alcohol poisoning and people turning themselves in at the doctors with cases of stress related illness all increase over the Christmas period. People are so hung up about having ‘the perfect Christmas’ (which is an idea mostly sold to them by Coca Cola, along with Santa’s red and white suit, anyway) they can’t cope when the fantasy is revealed for what it is.
Maybe if Christmas is taken down a few thousand volts it’ll be better for everyone. Practicing Christian or not Christmas is more than the money you spend on it. If it stopped being the commercial bloodbath it’s turned into and started being more about spending a few days chilling out with your family then I really don’t see the harm in councils everywhere toning down celebrations and shops cutting back on the space they devote to presents and decorations.
This may be unbearably twee for some of you but, frankly, I don’t really care. I hate 99% of what Christmas has become and I wouldn’t really miss it if it all disappeared tomorrow. All I want is my Mum and Dad and a turkey dinner. The rest is unnecessary and I will happily sacrifice it on any altar, even that dreaded modern demon multiculturalism.
Peace on Earth and Mercy Mild x
Yep, it’s Christmas. I have officially resigned myself to this fact. We’re over half way through advent, there’s not a town centre in the land that can’t be seen from Jupiter and the Famous Grouse is waddling merrily across my TV screen. Happy December to us all.
However, amongst all this shiny eyed cheer there lurks a group of people determined to shout over the merry hum. They’re always there of course, it’s not just the festive season they choose to interrupt, but I feel bad for the kids when they start up about Christmas. It’s those old favourites the I-Exist-Purely-To-Be-Offended-And-Then-Write-Into-The-Daily-Mail-About-It Brigade.
According to these doom mongers our multicultural society is destroying Christmas. Judging by the smiling Santas beaming down at me from every rooftop and the endless runs of Christmas specials on TV I don’t actually think this is the case. Christmas still permeates everything from September onwards yet these cretins insist that local council do-gooders are removing Christmas in case it offends some invisible and silent minority.
They even make up their own evidence. Anyone remember the ‘Winterval’ scandal? Apparently a town centre (I think it was Birmingham, but it might have been Nottingham. Either way I'm thinking Midlands) began to advertise Winterval as a politically correct alternative to Christmas. Except they didn’t. Winterval wasn’t anything to do with replacing Christmas. It was to attract people to the city centre throughout the winter months, including December and therefore Christmas.
These people hide behind a pretence of ‘acting in the public good’ and ‘preserving the British culture’ but actually they just enjoy feeling offended. They like the thrill they get from complaining and will latch onto anything that they feel can justify their meaningless existence, even if it’s complaining that something which is clearly still there is disappearing and being replaced by something that has been removed so far from context it’s become a joke.
But supposing just for a minute they are right. Suppose Christmas really is being gradually eroded in place of something more multicultural. Suppose these idiotic grief mongers actually have something to whine about. Well, I think it would actually be a good thing.
Christmas has become a joke. It starts in August (seriously. I used to work in retail and the Christmas stock started coming in on the same wagons as the sun cream). It stresses people out and encourages them to get into debt which they can’t afford and which in the current economic climate will hang around their necks for decades. It exists purely to persuade children to guilt trip their parents into buying them expensive toys that prop up some faceless multinational corporation. Break ups, suicides, self harm, domestic violence, alcohol poisoning and people turning themselves in at the doctors with cases of stress related illness all increase over the Christmas period. People are so hung up about having ‘the perfect Christmas’ (which is an idea mostly sold to them by Coca Cola, along with Santa’s red and white suit, anyway) they can’t cope when the fantasy is revealed for what it is.
Maybe if Christmas is taken down a few thousand volts it’ll be better for everyone. Practicing Christian or not Christmas is more than the money you spend on it. If it stopped being the commercial bloodbath it’s turned into and started being more about spending a few days chilling out with your family then I really don’t see the harm in councils everywhere toning down celebrations and shops cutting back on the space they devote to presents and decorations.
This may be unbearably twee for some of you but, frankly, I don’t really care. I hate 99% of what Christmas has become and I wouldn’t really miss it if it all disappeared tomorrow. All I want is my Mum and Dad and a turkey dinner. The rest is unnecessary and I will happily sacrifice it on any altar, even that dreaded modern demon multiculturalism.
Peace on Earth and Mercy Mild x
10 December 2009
Frankmusik, Killa Kella and Gigantor at Manchester Club Academy. 8th December 2009
I felt older than I have ever felt in the queue for Tuesday night’s gig. Not only were people legally allowed to drink alcohol far outnumbered by those who could not (there was a fair percentage that didn’t look like they could legally consent to sex) but they were making themselves very obvious. A lot of them were drunk (illegally) and most of them were shrieking and running around. There does seem to be a trend emerging that modern 14-16 year olds need to act up to look cool. It’s fecking irritating. Once inside we were also limited to only buying one drink each as Manchester Uni Union obviously didn’t fancy getting fined for supplying alcohol to underagers.
Then it started to rain, and proceeded to start raining quite hard. Despite it being in my union I could only get in with one guest (I had three) and the other Man Uni student coming with us was running late so we stood there and shivered.
So we got inside and shook ourselves off wet dog style and huddled over our one-at-a-time drinks. The first support act was a DJ (Gigantor, so called because he appeared to be about seven feet tall and about three wide). He was alright, as far as DJs go, but from where I was sitting it appeared he was being paid to stand on the stage, twiddle knobs and drink. It’s a hard life for some. I hardly knew any of the songs he was playing and I didn’t feel like dancing anyway. I felt like I needed a Zimmer frame.
The second support act (Killa Kella) was an actual band with an actual variety of actual people doing actual musical things but were still crap. Well, I say crap, but that seems a bit harsh. They were very hip hop and I don’t know anything about hip hop. The lyrics were very repetitive though. The good hip hop I've heard is like poetry set to a beat. Perhaps I was right first time and they were crap. The fourteen year olds, still high on their one illicitly gained WKD, lapped it up though.
Finally Killa Kella left the stage and we sidled down the side of the teenagers to get closer to the stage. Frankmusik is pretty new on my musical radar and he only has one album out (and two remix albums, which smacks of old rope to me, but ho hum) so I was quite interested in seeing him live. That one album, however, is rather good and far more accomplished than most of the lyrically pointless synth pop 80’s revival nonsense that’s doing the rounds at the moment (hang your head in shame La Roux). He also turned out to be a fantastic vocalist, never faulting through the whole set and treating us to some beat boxing when technical difficulties gave us an impromptu break. As he only has one album out he had to pad the set a bit with covers (Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ was very well received) and an acoustic version of ‘Three Little Words’. That was one of the highlights of my night as I prefer the version on the remix album that is more chilled than the single version. I had hoped he would do my favourite song (‘In Step’) last, but he did ‘Better Off As Two’ instead which is also a rather good song. It was, however, quite a short set and although enjoyable, we were soon stumbling wide eyed out of the Union and back into the Manchester rain.
As I said, it was good, but I'm not sure I’ll see him again.
Peace and Love x
Then it started to rain, and proceeded to start raining quite hard. Despite it being in my union I could only get in with one guest (I had three) and the other Man Uni student coming with us was running late so we stood there and shivered.
So we got inside and shook ourselves off wet dog style and huddled over our one-at-a-time drinks. The first support act was a DJ (Gigantor, so called because he appeared to be about seven feet tall and about three wide). He was alright, as far as DJs go, but from where I was sitting it appeared he was being paid to stand on the stage, twiddle knobs and drink. It’s a hard life for some. I hardly knew any of the songs he was playing and I didn’t feel like dancing anyway. I felt like I needed a Zimmer frame.
The second support act (Killa Kella) was an actual band with an actual variety of actual people doing actual musical things but were still crap. Well, I say crap, but that seems a bit harsh. They were very hip hop and I don’t know anything about hip hop. The lyrics were very repetitive though. The good hip hop I've heard is like poetry set to a beat. Perhaps I was right first time and they were crap. The fourteen year olds, still high on their one illicitly gained WKD, lapped it up though.
Finally Killa Kella left the stage and we sidled down the side of the teenagers to get closer to the stage. Frankmusik is pretty new on my musical radar and he only has one album out (and two remix albums, which smacks of old rope to me, but ho hum) so I was quite interested in seeing him live. That one album, however, is rather good and far more accomplished than most of the lyrically pointless synth pop 80’s revival nonsense that’s doing the rounds at the moment (hang your head in shame La Roux). He also turned out to be a fantastic vocalist, never faulting through the whole set and treating us to some beat boxing when technical difficulties gave us an impromptu break. As he only has one album out he had to pad the set a bit with covers (Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ was very well received) and an acoustic version of ‘Three Little Words’. That was one of the highlights of my night as I prefer the version on the remix album that is more chilled than the single version. I had hoped he would do my favourite song (‘In Step’) last, but he did ‘Better Off As Two’ instead which is also a rather good song. It was, however, quite a short set and although enjoyable, we were soon stumbling wide eyed out of the Union and back into the Manchester rain.
As I said, it was good, but I'm not sure I’ll see him again.
Peace and Love x
7 December 2009
How To Look Ten Years Younger
How about a good rant? I haven’t had one for a while and my initial intention was to set the world to rights every Monday. Well, there’s ninety minutes of Monday left so I don’t see why I shouldn’t bother you all with my opinions.
The topic of this rant, as you’ll no doubt have guessed if you’ve read the title is How To Look Ten Years Younger. It’s a program on some two bit satellite channel, but this rant isn’t all about that. It’s the general obsession at the moment with not looking your age.
When you’re in your teens all you want to do is look older. Then you have maybe five years respite before you’re expected to want to look younger than you are. So, are we meant to believe that people are only valuable between the ages of twenty and twenty-five? According to the propaganda we’re fed day in day out you can only be successful between these ages, you can only lead a fun and fulfilling social life between these ages and you can certainly only be desirable between these ages.
Hmmm, given that most people live another sixty years after this time period that’s all a bit depressing if you ask me. There was a time when the older you were the more respected you were. Your years and your wrinkles were to be shown of with pride as it showed the life you’d led. Now when you get wrinkles you must iron your face immediately or, shock horror, someone might actually be able to tell your age. Old people are at best a figure of ridicule and at worst seen as a drain on society. The views and opinions of those in their eighties are dismissed with the same patronising simper as the demands of a five year old child.
But why? Well, clearly it’s our old friend the homogenisation of beauty rearing its head as a start. People get easier to control the narrower the criteria identified as acceptable gets. You can only be beautiful for five years. That seems pretty narrow to me.
Another theory is that we live in society that needs to hold up unattainable ideas and lifestyles in order to project a fake sense of unity and, again, to keep as many people under the thumb as they feel they can get away with.
Or maybe it’s just a fear of death.
I don’t know. I'm just speculating. All I know is that, whatever your age, you should be respected and you should walk with your head held up high. If you’re sixty show your wrinkles with pride. If you’re eighteen don’t worry because you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Enjoy it and don’t give crow’s feet a second’s thought. Don’t ever want to be ten years younger, just be thankful for all the good times you’ve had in those past ten years.
Peace and love x
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