This dream of life

I saw this monstrosity recently:

It’s irritating enough having to listen to someone who sounds as though they’re pleading for their life, in song, while someone presses a foot with increasing force onto their windpipe. But, then I saw this:

It’s impossible to watch that and not hate yourself a little bit. You hate the people talking such preposterous nonsense, of course. That’s a given. They’re self-satisfied, irritating, and hateful. But, by having allowed yourself to listen to them, you die a little bit yourself. A ‘female zeitgeist’, indeed. ‘Encouraging women to take control and say no’, indeed.

It’s a terrible, awful, demeaning notion that Diet Coke, in the person of Duffy, represents some form of spiritual calm in a chaotic world, and that, by merely glimpsing the squeaky-voiced smug pixie as she cycles past, we plebs gain a momentary awareness of nirvana that would otherwise lie tantalisingly out of sight.

But, if Duffy is so concerned about empowering women, she should take a moment to think about the poor stage manager who passes her the Diet Coke as she comes offstage. Duffy’s got “about two minutes” before she’s due back onstage. But she needs to take some time out for herself so, although clearly in doubt about the propriety of this, as her furtive glance shows, she takes a bike and rides off into the night, with no consideration of the possible repercussions. What if someone had been surprised to find themselves walking alongside a cyclist squawking platitudes and had pushed her under a truck? What if the manager of the supermarket had called the police, because there was someone mindlessly riding around the aisles, with scant regard for the safety of ordinary shoppers? Once outside the concert venue, there are any number of ways that Duffy could be detained, not all of them, sadly, featuring horrific violence, which would prevent her from getting back within the two minutes. And then the stage manager would be frantically searching for her, and people would be shouting at the stage manager, and blaming her for losing the ‘artist’, and she might well lose her job, which doesn’t sound like a very relaxing, empowering experience to me. Not to mention the auditorium full of people who have paid to, god help us, listen to Duffy sing. How would they feel about being treated in such a casual manner? But, evidently, none of these people count. Duffy thinks they’re scum.

Well, I’d like to see how Duffy got on if her concerts had no technical support and no audience; she might feel a bit less blasé if she found herself alone on a draughty, empty stage, squealing plaintively into the darkness. What she and Diet Coke are saying is, you have no responsibility to anyone other than yourself. Do what you like and fuck everyone else. And they’re trying to present it as an ideology; just listen again to those witless morons in the second clip. No, actually, please don’t. “I’ve got to be free, I’ve just got to be free,” she squeals, just inside the frequency range of human hearing. But the worldview that this advert portrays isn’t one of freedom: it’s of an idiot throwing a can of brown pop at a human face, forever.

IN SUMMARY: someone, anyone, push her off.

Bad words

Did another open-mic poetry gig last night, this time in Leicester. I’d never been to the venue before, and was surprised to see that it was pretty busy from the off. The website had advised getting there half an hour before the start to sign up; I took this advice, rolling up at half seven, and was told that there was only one place left. Blimey, it would have been a bit galling to have travelled to Leicester and not been allowed to shout at people before I left.

Of course, I don’t shout. I’m a nice, reserved chap. You’d be astonished at the number of people who do though. There was more than ample amplification for the size of the venue (the bar) in the shape of a decent mic and two big speakers. To be frank, that was excessive; you could have spoken at a normal volume and still make yourself heard. But, then people wouldn’t have been able to indulge mic frenzy*! Really, put a mic in front of people and they’re grabbing the thing and trying to swallow it while spontaneously deciding to have a shot at that primal scream therapy they read about sometime. It doesn’t encourage you to pay close attention to the words, if I’m honest. And the words! It would be churlish to say that there weren’t people who could write and perform. There were. But brevity was an unknown concept. Almost everyone would have benefited from cutting their material ruthlessly; usually, by at least half. And also by being less wilfully cryptic; there was more than one instance of someone thinking that the primary function of poetry is to sound strange, to splice together unrelated words, awkwardly, to create meaningless metaphors, and, as a result, to communicate nothing. And when this comes in 3 or 4 minute chunks…

Anyway, it was useful to get up in front of people again and deliver some stuff. There’ll be more of this, mark my words.

*Mike Frenzy sounds like the kind of fictional pop star who would pop up in cartoon strips in the 70s. No pop star in this one, but certainly this kind of strip.

UNRELATED RANT ALERT:

I’ve spotted a new, insidious way of making daily life that tiny bit more unbearable: the sneaking, weasel, inappropriate use of ‘your’. On the train last night – at the end of the interminable announcements about what train it is, where it’s going, where the buffet car is, what it’s serving, what carriage has been designated ‘quiet’, who the person talking is, where they can be found, and, finally, their gratitude that we’re travelling with them – at the end of all that came the announcement of the next station: “Loughborough is your next station stop”. Sorry, what? “Loughborough is your next station stop”. Um, no. It isn’t. I was going to Leicester, so it wasn’t my stop. What are they talking about?

It used to be impersonal: ‘the next station stop’. There’s nothing wrong with that; every stop at some point becomes ‘the next station stop’. But someone, somewhere, has presumably decided that we’ll all feel a bit more warm towards the train company if they sound as though they’re going out of their way for us – ‘this is your next station stop. We were going to go straight through, to be honest, but we know that so many of you appreciate getting off here, so, tell you what – we’ll stop here. For you’.

I noticed this a few months back on that preposterous 60-second news update that the BBC broadcast at 8pm (because we mustn’t be without news! God, no! We must have news, constantly, continually, rolling, breaking, smashing through to us – ‘fact me till I fart’ as The Day Today so accurately put it, a long time ago, before they were out-spoofed by the actuality of today’s TV-news-candy-porn) when the presenter signed off with the phrase “that was your 60-second update”. But it wasn’t my 60-second update! I hadn’t asked for it, I didn’t want it. They were, I’m afraid, assuming a far greater amount of executive power on my part than I actually hold.

But they’re weren’t, of course. They were trying, by sleight-of-hand, to imply that we’re getting a greater service than was the case before. But we’re not; the trains are stopping at the places they always have done, and some news residue has been squeezed into a gap between some other programmes. The sum total of human happiness has not really increased. But what has happened is that I feel demeaned and a bit grubby by the implication that I’m complicit, or, worse, the agent of these ‘initiatives’. If you really want to do something for me, you can revert to the impersonal, correct, definite article, and then, if you’d be so kind, piss right off.

Oh, and while I’m on the subject, can Sainsbury’s employees be freed from the mutually humiliating decree that they have to finish all in-store announcements with the meaningless phrase ‘try something different today’. Because if I hear it much more, I might, and it might well be a different shop.

END OF RANT

Fellow blogging fun now:

Jamie’s latest post made me laugh a lot. (It should go without saying that I hope Jamie gets the good news that he deserves soon).

Graham Linehan posted this, which is preposterous and funny.

And Laurence is being self-deprecating, which is nice and polite, but unnecessary, as I’ve read some of his stuff, and he’s funny.

IN SUMMARY: My ears hurt.

Ka-Pow! Hee hee!

I was woken at 4 o’clock this morning by someone kicking a gate. I think that’s what he was doing; he might have been hitting a gate, or trying to climb over it in a slapstick manner. I don’t know precisely what he was doing with the gate as it was 4 a.m. and I was trying to pretend that I hadn’t just woken up.

I live in a block of flats in the city centre, so there’s a certain amount of noise throughout the day, though we do quite well at night. You get idiots who show their delight at the amount they’ve drunk by screaming at the tops of their voices, of course, but that’s usually around midnight or so. I can live with that. 4 in the morning is a bit off though.

I heard a bloke shouting at the gate moron, and I imagine that he must have gone soon after that, as I managed to fall asleep again. Before that, however, I was lying in bed, concocting all manner of elaborate tortures for the empty-headed fool. This is the kind of situation where I’d love to have super powers. If ever the question gets asked, people usually reply that they’d like to be able to fly, or become invisible so they could walk into changing rooms and see other people naked, but I’d like to be able to inconvenience idiots.

The gate moron had no other desire than to let people know he existed, in the most irritating way possible, so it would have been a joy, just by thinking it, to make him disappear and pop up 30 miles away, far from any kind of public transport. And in the spirit of sociability that he extended to the residents of this block of flats, I’d also make his clothes vanish, and write on his chest, in glitter, the legend ‘I am a silly twat’. Let’s see whether gate-kicking would be a priority for him in that situation.

I’ve always thought that being to magically vanish clothing would be a fabulous power to have. Not for the obvious abuses you could make of it, no – rather because if you found yourself embroiled in, or witness to, any kind of violent incident, you could simply click your fingers and, poof!, the aggressors would find themselves suddenly at a very silly disadvantage. Nothing would dissipate violent tension as quickly as seeing someone realise they were exposing the paucity of their, um, arsenal to the world. You can’t seriously threaten someone if your bits are swaying in the breeze. And, at the very least, barefoot, they’re going to be risking a stubbed toe. Chances are that they’d run off, to look for a convolutedly-secretive way home, everyone else would have a good laugh and civility would be restored. It would be a wonderfully farcical response to some very nasty behaviour. Enforced nakedness, it’s a crime beater, take my word for it.

IN SUMMARY: I’ve never been in a fight. Don’t make me.