Living Dangerously

So I'm working up the courage to post some actual work on this blog i. e. I'm toying with the idea of posting a short story, or excerpts of a short story and not just opinion articles. But I'm still thinking about it, I'm not sure. The only reason I've mentioned it is so that I'll be forced to actually do it because now I feel like I've semi made a commitment.

Tick tick tick tick tick

OK, mind made up now. I shall post the beggining of a short story I just started working on. It's all going to be very fresh and very raw because I literally only got the idea (for the story and for sharing its creation) last week. But anyway, it'll be a little journey with me on a work in progress. It'll also be a new experience for me because I'm intensely shy about sharing and I like to pretend I'm not working on anything so I don't have to show it to anyone.

Also, I'm working now so there'll be no sitting up all night writing and re-writing because I have to be alert in the mornings. I won't be able to deliver a dazzling piece of glory, boom, all at once. Unless I post one I've already written (and here's one I made earlier)...no. It's all about the process. We shall see it unfold together, and it would be lovely to hear any feedback or any crazy guesses on where you think the story might be going based on the first snippets.

Bedtime for me now (*sulk*) but see you again soon.

xx

The Big Bong and Other Nonsense

Disclaimer: I do not take drugs or endorse drug abuse. The views expressed here are simply a matter of principle.

Images from Google Images

Hands up who thinks journalism has gone to the dogs? Ah, I’m glad to see you all agree. Last week, the front pages of most of the newspapers were awash with cries of angst from petulant journalists. Apparently, some MPs and other people in positions of power took drugs in their youth. Big freaking deal; I don’t see how that’s newsworthy. And I don’t see how it has any bearing on their trying to enforce new drug laws now. If they were caught rolling spliffs in between sessions at parliament, and found to be passing laws based on fantabulous ideas their stoned minds came up with, then we’d have a problem. If they were eating magic mushroom risottos at lunch or using cocaine as sweetener for their lattes, then we would have every right to call them hypocrites. But for stuff they did at uni? Give them a break, guys. They weren’t responsible for the country back then; they were just students. Now that they’ve successfully waded through experimentation and found the ambition which has landed them in positions of responsibility, there are plenty of other things, I’m sure, that would have looked better on the front pages. Cue the violins…

I’m asking special permission from the powers that be, to line up every single person that slandered the poor Jacqui Smith, gag them with cold oats, jab them with truth serum, and then interrogate them as to their hallucinogenic past (or present, as the case may very well be). I’d then take their inevitable confessions of guilt, plaster them all over the front pages, and call the journalists themselves hypocrites, for calling other people hypocrites, because they spent their days at uni doing exactly what they’re trying to crucify other people for. The only hypocrites here, are the people pointing fingers. Arguably, journalists are also people in positions of power – they inform and shape opinion everyday. If they stopped ‘dabbling’ in weed thirty odd years ago, would they think it was fair for the public to cast aspersions on their morals today? Probably not. So why are they whining?

And this is not by any means, in support of drugs, please remember that. It’s just me observing, that the death toll in Iraq has obviously sky rocketed to a level that’s ubiquitous enough to be boring, the property ladder is not any easier to get onto – nothing to report there, crime has gone both up and down – they can’t decide which is which. The press has tired of its usual contingency-plan, space-filling material, so they now need to work retrospectively, to dredge up ancient personal history, which wasn’t anymore relevant to anything then than it is to anything now.

Now that ‘offenders’ are older and wiser, they have every right to try to reclassify the offence, because they have the benefit of experience. Been there, done that, know better. Who knows how many people will be saved by its being a more serious offence? Some people simply won’t touch it because they don’t want to get into trouble. It is actually responsible of them to try to address the issue. Imagine if in a few years from now, eight year olds were puffing lye in the toilets. The journalists would have a field day about how the government didn’t make enough of an effort blah blah blah. Imagine what a lame excuse it would sound like if Jacqui et all said, ‘Sorry, we felt it would be hypocritical to enforce weed laws because we smoked it as teenagers and hance didn’t feel we had a right to stop others from doing so.’ Imagine the very same journalists calling them lax lazy buggers, crying about abandoned duties to society etc. So why is it that when they are actually trying to do their duty, they get attacked?

Another stupid moment in journalism was in the Telegraph two weeks ago, when an article proclaimed that students in Tony Blair’s school were expelled or suspended for posting a clip of themselves on YouTube smoking weed. If I worked at No10, I would sue for defamation/slander/libel/the whole lot, just on principle. a) The fact that his children attend(ed) the school, doesn’t mean that he owns it and b) his kids weren’t even involved in the incident in anyway. They just used his name, as a hook for a negative story, which, in the light of his recent stepping down, is as tasteless a crime as speaking ill of the dead, if you get my drift. Was it really necessary to include the Blairs when there was no connection in any way?

Before my grandma retired, she worked as a broadcast journalist, and made history by being the first woman in Nigeria to run a TV station. She knows a thing or two about journalism. Her theory is this: opinion is free, but fact is priceless. We were equally appalled by the two stories I mentioned above. How did they pass the whole line of command and get into the papers as they were? Why didn’t the editors do something? I know we’ve come a long way from then, but in Grandma’s day, you’d have been fired for attempting to pass off such conjecture as journalism. What’s happening is that the type of reportage used to cover whimsical celebrity behaviour, is creeping up on real news. It’s potentially dangerous and needs to stop. Take a few minutes to think of the repercussions…

Incidentally, while we're on the topic of journalistic demise, those awful, purple, brain-addling evening papers need to be got rid of. Where are all the environmental campaigners? Surely these are trees we’re killing! They litter the streets and make London look messy, especially with the rain. Walking home is like one ugly plod through papier mache quicksand. We were just fine with our morning (blue) Metro and (orange) Evening Standard, thank you very much; their distribution remains a tidy, orderly affair, and doesn’t turn the city into a pictorial of chaos in hades. One would have thought that the (purple) papers pass-on value means that you don’t need such a massive print run. The poor dudes (and dudesses, if that’s a word) practically maul you at street corners, because they’ve been told they have to shift their stash – a stash that still wouldn’t be halfway dwindled if you handed three papers each to every UK resident. Plus, most days, the content is just an extension of trashy telly in print. The only thing I find interesting, is that anonymous article, ‘Life in the Square Mile’. I always used to take one, just because I had forgotten that I still have a choice; they’ve become such a large part of the Everyday, a given, like a (red) London bus. Also, because short of keeping your fists closed and shoved deep into your pockets, your eyes behind shades to minimize eye contact, and your walking pace at competition speeds, the chances of reaching a tube station between 4 and 7 pm on a week day evening un-purpled are slim to none. Ignore them and read a book instead – much better for the posterity of your mind!

Horror Scopes

Image from Google Images

This week, I have been conducting an experiment. And now I have re-proved to myself something that I know already; that all this horoscope business is pure nonsense. Why did I experiment with something I already know, you ask? Because at 8 am on the Piccadilly line, the only thing you get to read is bits and pieces over someone else’s shoulder. I have not fallen in love, quarrelled with my work colleagues, made a ton of money, or had an argument with my family; all of which a varied cacophony of myopic gypsies insisted I would encounter. Perhaps it has something to do with the quality of the viziers I experimented with; mass market visions reproduced a million times over in the free daily papers that colour the mornings blue and the evenings purple. But I know better than that really – I mean, you can’t blame the blandness of the food on the bluntness of the kitchen knife, but I was trying out this new thing where you give people the benefit of the doubt for ooh let’s see…one two three…benefit of doubt time over. Horoscope hocus pocus is all crap, and coming to an even stronger conclusion than before my little experiment, I now understand why the lives of certain people I know are messed up. It’s simple really – they live according to what those things say. How long are these things anyway? Max 300 words (and that’s being very generous and givey the benefit of the doubty) mind you; yet they cleave to it as though it’s the quiddity of life itself.

I think those things are dangerous and should be banned. Sometimes, we under estimate the potency of words, and under value our minds ability to reorganise our lives into either confirming our fears or exaggerating unrealistic notions. I feel about horoscopes the way some people feel about prosperity/doom and gloom preachers; both prevaricate from one extreme to the other. All of a sudden, your life is expected to lift off and become perfect, or your demise is waiting round the corner for you, sniggering at your expense. The brain is powerful. When we read, the words don’t just evaporate off the page and turn into some sort of silent language that our eyes receive. They go and take up residence in our SELVES. So when the stupid witch says to you, oh watch our for love today because there’s a fairy in your venus, or whatever, you smile coyly back at the guy on the train who’s smiling at you. You then think that ‘something happened’, that you ‘met someone’, when in fact, nothing happened, you didn’t meet anyone, and his smile was just the auto-programmed grimace that city people have adopted as a contingency plan for when the avoidance of eye contact with other commuters mistakenly occurs. What you can’t possibly know, the possibilities that your brain can’t then access (he might be psychotic, he might in fact be married with three kids, he might not have registered that he grimaced at you) are blocked, because the viziers words have formed a disconnect between what’s really happening and what you’re expecting to happen. Hence you see things off centre.

You trip on the pavement because you weren’t looking and all of a sudden, you knew it, you just knew something bad was going to happen today. You have a stomach ache because you chose to eat prawns in a dodgy restaurant, and wham, finally, here’s proof that someone at work wants your job, someone is trying to poison you, someone mixed printer ink with your balsamic dressing when you went to the loo. By reading these things, you sacrifice a part of your brain where objective appreciation would have resided, and fill it with paranoia in all directions, both for good and for woe. Especially in the morning. People cut veritable slices of their consciousnesses and hand them over to words which carry forces which don’t know anything. They accept that this generalisation of themselves, propounded by the astrologist or whatever, is superior to their own common sense, to their own in-built sensibility.

If these horoscope things are sooooooo fantastic, why don’t people turn to them when their relatives lie dying in hospital, when they are cash strapped and hiding under the kitchen table from debt collectors, when bombs go off? If you’re going to pray when things are bad, then you might as well ask the person you pray to for direction and guidance in the things that puzzle you. If when we pray in desperate situations, we see the radical difference it makes, why short change ourselves in the Everyday with the astigmatism of guessing? It’s all a question of perspective, really.

What say you? Feel free to agree or disagree – this is not a communist blog.

The Thing About Gigs...

Graduating from university is one of the best experiences of my life, better, even, than those lovely themed birthday parties of circa age 6 and age 7 fame. Graduation has provided the most beautiful climate in which all the aunties’ and uncles’ generous streaks can flourish. Not to say that they weren’t generous before…it’s just a trip to be getting all these gifts and gratuities when it’s not a birthday and it’s not Christmas. I think I should graduate more often. Ahem!

So anyway, yesterday morning, my cousin called. Her mum had bought us all tickets to see Lauryn Hill live in concert. Sweet, I thought. The concert was to start for 7. We were standing for three hours before Ms Hill deigned to make an appearance on stage, which didn’t go down well with me. Being new to this whole working week thing, my Sunday evenings are really precious, and I couldn’t help but blame her this morning when I woke up and a desire to molest the snooze button overwhelmed me.

But that’s beside the point. What the point is, is that I lived to see the day when I would agree with my Dad’s opinions about music. He’s long maintained that most modern music is flawed, because live performances never hold up to the studio mastered versions. In his view, it should be the other way round. Out of respect for Lauryn Hill, I’m having difficulty confessing that it was crap…but you go right ahead and put two and two together. Imagine if I didn’t have this overwhelming sympathy for Lauryn Hill, and she was some other random pop floozy, prancing round on stage with in a weird wig and a mac. Imagine what I’d have said then. But I can’t say it, so you’ll have to make the words up in your head, because I won’t have her slandered. I won’t.

After the last gig (i. e. not Lauryn’s, the one before) I went home and deleted all my music by that artiste, because he was a fraud. He played his CD and cursed along to it. That’s not what I paid for. Lauryn’s was marginally better, though not great. She kind of shout-rasp-sang along to a live band, which was her only salvation. Yes she had a sore throat, but I dare say she’d have given a better show overall, if the sound technician weren’t both deaf and incompetent in equal measure. The poor woman had to shout over the music constantly. She kept motioning to him to say that she couldn’t hear herself. Rather than adjust the volumes, he adjusted the Pringle jumper on his chest and nodded his head as though this was the culmination of his life’s work.

Apparently, there are some explosives that work through sound. They reach such unfathomable decibels that they cause matter to implode and turn to dust. This might have been what Mr Sound Guy was trying to achieve. As a result of his deafness, here is a list of places in my body where I felt pain:
kidneys
T5 lumbar vertebrae
calves
lymph nodes
frontal lobe
base of my neck
I also suffered from extreme thirst.

I don’t know what’s happening to live music, but I shall stop going. Does anyone else find that they come away disappointed? I don’t want to have to throw away all my music because the artistes have discredited their own worth. Now, unless it’s a small private gig with competent technicians and artistes who still remember what projection and mic technique are, count me out. The only live gig’s I’ll be attending will be the ones I co-ordinate on my sound system. My layman’s manipulation of graphic equalizer buttons has never yet left me with the sort of symptoms I experienced yesterday. If you've gone to a really bad gig, or have anything to say about live vs. studio music, I'd love to hear about it in your comments.

Nevertheless, I still made it to work on time. Phew!