Thursday 15 October 2009
Wednesday 14 October 2009
"Get ye coat you've pulled"...
When I was about 17 I ended up with this calamity in the Rubber Duck by the docks. She looked like Dawn French.
"I'm going to lose weight, I promise" she kept saying.
I kissed her and it felt like I was doing duck-apple in a bowl of custard. Horrendous stuff.
So I bummed her in the field by Seaforth station.
Then I went home to do some serious soul searching.
More Hideous truths...
This really did not happen to me, but to a close friend of mine.
He pulled some meffy looking sort about fifteen years his junior (always been a bit of a lothario my mate) and did the business in the back of his car on the way home.
Two weeks later there is a picture of the same bird on the front page of the Runcorn World underneath the headline "Girl Sues Nightclub After Toilet Horror".
Turns out the following week she'd sat on a bog in a popular Runcorn nightspot and her weight had been sufficient to crack the bowl in two, causing her to fall into it and sustain a 10 inch gash in one of her arse cheeks......there was even a picture of her baring the injured arse-cheek to show the stitches to the reader.
"I'm going to lose weight, I promise" she kept saying.
I kissed her and it felt like I was doing duck-apple in a bowl of custard. Horrendous stuff.
So I bummed her in the field by Seaforth station.
Then I went home to do some serious soul searching.
More Hideous truths...
This really did not happen to me, but to a close friend of mine.
He pulled some meffy looking sort about fifteen years his junior (always been a bit of a lothario my mate) and did the business in the back of his car on the way home.
Two weeks later there is a picture of the same bird on the front page of the Runcorn World underneath the headline "Girl Sues Nightclub After Toilet Horror".
Turns out the following week she'd sat on a bog in a popular Runcorn nightspot and her weight had been sufficient to crack the bowl in two, causing her to fall into it and sustain a 10 inch gash in one of her arse cheeks......there was even a picture of her baring the injured arse-cheek to show the stitches to the reader.
Tuesday 13 October 2009
Carry on casual...
Carry on Casual: Anachronisms in the UK
I have to be honest. I’ve enjoyed some of Nick Love’s previous films. Maybe that’s akin to admitting to a bad Greggs chicken pasty addiction or tells you I’m a clueless pleb with no taste but both The Football Factory and The Business, while hardly being Ken Loach or Pedro Almodovar get-your-thinking-head on efforts, gave me the odd grin. And his vastly-underrated debut effort Goodbye Charlie Bright is worth ninety minutes of anyone’s time in my opinion. But the release of Love’s big screen re-make of eighties football hooligan drama The Firm does beg one question of a director who claims to be fastidious in his attention to detail. Namely – how the fuck did they manage to get so much wrong?
I had more than a sneaking suspicion where this all might be heading the day the film was released. Love was interviewed on a Guardian blog and the accompanying picture showed him wearing what looked to these eyes like one bad striped linen blazer that might well have had Anna Wintour going weak at the knees if Roger Federer was accepting the Wimbledon mens singles trophy in it. Love (or more likely some twat of a stylist) had bastardised the jacket with a Fila BJ badge on the left tit, thus making the wearer look like a right tit. You couldn’t make it up …..
Perhaps I’m not really qualified enough to comment on this. After all, I’m not a Cockney and, unlike Love, I’m not on drinking pal terms with pricks like Guy Ritchie. But I did own at least three of the tracksuits and a version of one of the coats ported by members of the cast back in the day, whichever day it’s supposed to be. Which is the crux of the problem with The Firm. The chronology is all over the shop. Love seems to have been so determined to show the “casual” era in all its technicoloured Fila and Tacchini glory, that he’s forgotten one of the most important parts of the supposed casual ethos – getting it right. It reminds me of a great scene in an episode of Cheers where Norm Peterson and Cliff the postman have just sat through an all-day screening of sword-and-sandal epics, holding a loser-buys-the beers competition to see who could spot the most anachronisms. Norm claims victory but Cliff is not happy and, after buying the drinks, ponders out loud at the bar to no-one in particular about the crucial winner “… six? You spotted six? I’m not having that. No way was Caesar Augustus wearing a pair of Reebok …”
And neither would Caesar Augustus, Gus Caesar or any character in The Firm have been wearing blue adidas Munchen at £38 a pair, not unless he was, I believe the phrase is, Nicholas old chap, a “fackin’ toby”. Even this northern monkey, between a bout of bubonic plague and grooming the family whippet in the winter of 1989, managed to buy a pair of Munchen for what was an extortionate £25. By January, pissed off with the thick soles in comparison to the design perfection that were royal blue Gazelles (£14:99), they’d been relegated to the cubyhole. My beloved Gazelles were re-stored to playing out prominence alongside a pair of Diadora Borg Elite purchased the previous summer for £35 (over half a week’s wages at the time, or so my arl man used to say) and a year-old pair of adidas Korsika
The original television version of The Firm was set in the 1987-88 season, in the lead up to the 1988 European Championships in West Germany. The weakest part of a piss-weak plot being Gary Oldman’s character Bexy looking to lead a “national firm” that appeared to comprise of Eastenders, Only Fools and Horses and Grange Hill free transfers against the might of Hamburg and Feyenoord’s naughtiest that summer. An easy solution for Love and his writing loveys would have been to simply remove any reference to this, thus helping transport the film back to the 1982-1984 period the wardrobe is clearly meant to encapsulate. Except that the soundtrack would have then plotted up and conspired to commit more disorder. We get lead character Dominic and his mate buzzing about Yarbrough and Peoples Don’t Stop the Music, in the manner that you did when you first heard a song that really made your spine tingle, and then they are shown getting down to the same “just-breaking” classic in some East End barn of a club. No argument on that one. It’s one top tune. That had charted over here in December 1980. I’ll hazard a guess as to why it has been included. Footage available on You Tube shows Cavin Yarbrough performing the same tune stood at his keyboard while wearing a navy/cream Fila BJ Settanta tracksuit top (with a pair of impossibly tight white kecks).Which raises the possibility that Dallas Cowboys had a well-dressed mob before Chelsea (… why do I feel a dozen-page thread on this very topic on some “casuals” forum naturally beckoning …). Just to totally confuse the issue, the soundtrack then also throws up the 1977 Giorgio Moroder disco opulence of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and – god knows why – Soft Cell’s Tainted Love in the opening and closing titles. Given that the soundtrack album contains the near-forgotten 1985 gem that is Rene and Angela’s I’ll Be Good, the latter’s prominence in the film in preference to it is nothing short of criminal to this pair of ears. But I listen to stuff like the Bunnymen, Jeff Mills and David Bowie so what do I know?
If you loved this mode of dress as much as most of those involved did, then it could be argued for the defence that The Firm might be viewed as the 1980s casual generation’s Quadrophenia. Except the seaside fight scene here is on the front at Southsea rather than Brighton and involves the Pompey 6:57 v ICF. And Lesley Ash doesn’t get nailed up a back passage. Or run past a cinema advertising a film not made for another fifteen years (Heaven Can Wait). At least that’s one thing the two films have in common. Shite chronology. The one thing though, with the exception of the tracksuit overkill and Pompey not sitting down to the a la carte menu with Bexy afterwards, that Love has got more or less spot on is the fracas at Southsea. Two large mobs squaring up, loads of posturing and gesturing, things getting thrown and broken and when it does finally go off, the actual boxing being reduced to six-a-side at the front. Sorry, did I say 6:57 v ICF? That would mean Portsmouth v West Ham and we’re back to 1987-88 again. Why? Because the period 1980-1987 saw Pompey literally fighting their way up through the bottom three tiers of English professional football, while West Ham were in the First Division and the two clubs consequently never played each other until that season. And contrary to what those clowns at Boys Own seemed to think, a 1987 tear-up involving the 6:57 and any other well-dressed mob would have seen a sea of Italian denim, leather, knitwear, sweatshirts and running shoes rather than tennis wear. Tennis wear which would not have been bought or stolen from a branch of JD Sports in London as shown in the film. Because JD didn’t open a branch in London until 1989. And if they had have done so seven years earlier, it’s highly unlikely that they would have permitted young oiks to shoplift their best stock in Head bags as easily as portrayed in the film. Because if it was anything like MC Sports or Hurleys, it would have all been hung up about fifteen feet above you next to the roof. And despite the obvious help of adidas marketing, who must have wet themselves when asked to get involved in this project after Awaydays, West Ham’s top lad would not have been wearing 1999 version reissue Forest Hills. And unless it was a London thing I somehow missed in my drunken, matchday stupour, I somehow don’t think you would have seen as many full tracksuits being worn as Love would like to have everyone believe. Unless Boro were involved of course. As in “Boro have just got off the ordinary lads – load in full turkeys” (trans: young men from town in north-eastern England not normally associated with cutting edge fashion have arrived on the train, many wearing full Sergio Tacchini tracksuits). Another tracksuit big issue is the preponderance of emerald green/cream Fila BJ Settantas on show in the film. These were like the holy grail and I only saw a grand total of two in the flesh during this period. One on an Everton lad who I only knew by sight at that time but got on first-name terms with a few years after and the other on possibly a DLF head standing on the platform at Derby. The only other sighting that I can dredge up from the back of a mind full of nonsense is on the last Match of the Day of the 1987/88 season and Birmingham City winning at Southampton to stay up. Loads of young Zulus piled on the pitch from the home seats under the cameras to celebrate and one lad in the iconic green ran over to shake hands with Mick Harford
No doubt The Firm will put unslashed arses on unslashed cinema seats. Football hooliganism/football casual culture is big bucks these days. Across from the cinema I watched it in, Borders were holding a hooligan book signing, with a journalist signing copies of a book co-written with lads with an eye for a quid. And aimed at a market demograph fast becoming more familiar with the nuances of cs gas than CS Lewis’s Ordinary to Narnia. There are people who will watch The Firm, enjoy it and believe it is a true reflection of what watching football in the nasty 1980s was all about. Bluffers like a work colleague who spent that whole era playing local league football on Saturdays, discovered labels and England away games five years ago and now tells anyone who will listen what it was like being a hooligan. They will definitely see Love’s version of events as the real deal. Whether those that really were there also do so is another story. One probably already signed up by Warner Brothers and to be directed by Nick Love for release in 2012, telling how Gary Bushell and the Cockney Rejects brought acid house to East London in 1980 after witnessing Clyde Best and Mike Marsh in dayglo Fila BJ Terrindas playing six-hour Balearic sets at a Canvey Island soul weekender.
I have to be honest. I’ve enjoyed some of Nick Love’s previous films. Maybe that’s akin to admitting to a bad Greggs chicken pasty addiction or tells you I’m a clueless pleb with no taste but both The Football Factory and The Business, while hardly being Ken Loach or Pedro Almodovar get-your-thinking-head on efforts, gave me the odd grin. And his vastly-underrated debut effort Goodbye Charlie Bright is worth ninety minutes of anyone’s time in my opinion. But the release of Love’s big screen re-make of eighties football hooligan drama The Firm does beg one question of a director who claims to be fastidious in his attention to detail. Namely – how the fuck did they manage to get so much wrong?
I had more than a sneaking suspicion where this all might be heading the day the film was released. Love was interviewed on a Guardian blog and the accompanying picture showed him wearing what looked to these eyes like one bad striped linen blazer that might well have had Anna Wintour going weak at the knees if Roger Federer was accepting the Wimbledon mens singles trophy in it. Love (or more likely some twat of a stylist) had bastardised the jacket with a Fila BJ badge on the left tit, thus making the wearer look like a right tit. You couldn’t make it up …..
Perhaps I’m not really qualified enough to comment on this. After all, I’m not a Cockney and, unlike Love, I’m not on drinking pal terms with pricks like Guy Ritchie. But I did own at least three of the tracksuits and a version of one of the coats ported by members of the cast back in the day, whichever day it’s supposed to be. Which is the crux of the problem with The Firm. The chronology is all over the shop. Love seems to have been so determined to show the “casual” era in all its technicoloured Fila and Tacchini glory, that he’s forgotten one of the most important parts of the supposed casual ethos – getting it right. It reminds me of a great scene in an episode of Cheers where Norm Peterson and Cliff the postman have just sat through an all-day screening of sword-and-sandal epics, holding a loser-buys-the beers competition to see who could spot the most anachronisms. Norm claims victory but Cliff is not happy and, after buying the drinks, ponders out loud at the bar to no-one in particular about the crucial winner “… six? You spotted six? I’m not having that. No way was Caesar Augustus wearing a pair of Reebok …”
And neither would Caesar Augustus, Gus Caesar or any character in The Firm have been wearing blue adidas Munchen at £38 a pair, not unless he was, I believe the phrase is, Nicholas old chap, a “fackin’ toby”. Even this northern monkey, between a bout of bubonic plague and grooming the family whippet in the winter of 1989, managed to buy a pair of Munchen for what was an extortionate £25. By January, pissed off with the thick soles in comparison to the design perfection that were royal blue Gazelles (£14:99), they’d been relegated to the cubyhole. My beloved Gazelles were re-stored to playing out prominence alongside a pair of Diadora Borg Elite purchased the previous summer for £35 (over half a week’s wages at the time, or so my arl man used to say) and a year-old pair of adidas Korsika
The original television version of The Firm was set in the 1987-88 season, in the lead up to the 1988 European Championships in West Germany. The weakest part of a piss-weak plot being Gary Oldman’s character Bexy looking to lead a “national firm” that appeared to comprise of Eastenders, Only Fools and Horses and Grange Hill free transfers against the might of Hamburg and Feyenoord’s naughtiest that summer. An easy solution for Love and his writing loveys would have been to simply remove any reference to this, thus helping transport the film back to the 1982-1984 period the wardrobe is clearly meant to encapsulate. Except that the soundtrack would have then plotted up and conspired to commit more disorder. We get lead character Dominic and his mate buzzing about Yarbrough and Peoples Don’t Stop the Music, in the manner that you did when you first heard a song that really made your spine tingle, and then they are shown getting down to the same “just-breaking” classic in some East End barn of a club. No argument on that one. It’s one top tune. That had charted over here in December 1980. I’ll hazard a guess as to why it has been included. Footage available on You Tube shows Cavin Yarbrough performing the same tune stood at his keyboard while wearing a navy/cream Fila BJ Settanta tracksuit top (with a pair of impossibly tight white kecks).Which raises the possibility that Dallas Cowboys had a well-dressed mob before Chelsea (… why do I feel a dozen-page thread on this very topic on some “casuals” forum naturally beckoning …). Just to totally confuse the issue, the soundtrack then also throws up the 1977 Giorgio Moroder disco opulence of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and – god knows why – Soft Cell’s Tainted Love in the opening and closing titles. Given that the soundtrack album contains the near-forgotten 1985 gem that is Rene and Angela’s I’ll Be Good, the latter’s prominence in the film in preference to it is nothing short of criminal to this pair of ears. But I listen to stuff like the Bunnymen, Jeff Mills and David Bowie so what do I know?
If you loved this mode of dress as much as most of those involved did, then it could be argued for the defence that The Firm might be viewed as the 1980s casual generation’s Quadrophenia. Except the seaside fight scene here is on the front at Southsea rather than Brighton and involves the Pompey 6:57 v ICF. And Lesley Ash doesn’t get nailed up a back passage. Or run past a cinema advertising a film not made for another fifteen years (Heaven Can Wait). At least that’s one thing the two films have in common. Shite chronology. The one thing though, with the exception of the tracksuit overkill and Pompey not sitting down to the a la carte menu with Bexy afterwards, that Love has got more or less spot on is the fracas at Southsea. Two large mobs squaring up, loads of posturing and gesturing, things getting thrown and broken and when it does finally go off, the actual boxing being reduced to six-a-side at the front. Sorry, did I say 6:57 v ICF? That would mean Portsmouth v West Ham and we’re back to 1987-88 again. Why? Because the period 1980-1987 saw Pompey literally fighting their way up through the bottom three tiers of English professional football, while West Ham were in the First Division and the two clubs consequently never played each other until that season. And contrary to what those clowns at Boys Own seemed to think, a 1987 tear-up involving the 6:57 and any other well-dressed mob would have seen a sea of Italian denim, leather, knitwear, sweatshirts and running shoes rather than tennis wear. Tennis wear which would not have been bought or stolen from a branch of JD Sports in London as shown in the film. Because JD didn’t open a branch in London until 1989. And if they had have done so seven years earlier, it’s highly unlikely that they would have permitted young oiks to shoplift their best stock in Head bags as easily as portrayed in the film. Because if it was anything like MC Sports or Hurleys, it would have all been hung up about fifteen feet above you next to the roof. And despite the obvious help of adidas marketing, who must have wet themselves when asked to get involved in this project after Awaydays, West Ham’s top lad would not have been wearing 1999 version reissue Forest Hills. And unless it was a London thing I somehow missed in my drunken, matchday stupour, I somehow don’t think you would have seen as many full tracksuits being worn as Love would like to have everyone believe. Unless Boro were involved of course. As in “Boro have just got off the ordinary lads – load in full turkeys” (trans: young men from town in north-eastern England not normally associated with cutting edge fashion have arrived on the train, many wearing full Sergio Tacchini tracksuits). Another tracksuit big issue is the preponderance of emerald green/cream Fila BJ Settantas on show in the film. These were like the holy grail and I only saw a grand total of two in the flesh during this period. One on an Everton lad who I only knew by sight at that time but got on first-name terms with a few years after and the other on possibly a DLF head standing on the platform at Derby. The only other sighting that I can dredge up from the back of a mind full of nonsense is on the last Match of the Day of the 1987/88 season and Birmingham City winning at Southampton to stay up. Loads of young Zulus piled on the pitch from the home seats under the cameras to celebrate and one lad in the iconic green ran over to shake hands with Mick Harford
No doubt The Firm will put unslashed arses on unslashed cinema seats. Football hooliganism/football casual culture is big bucks these days. Across from the cinema I watched it in, Borders were holding a hooligan book signing, with a journalist signing copies of a book co-written with lads with an eye for a quid. And aimed at a market demograph fast becoming more familiar with the nuances of cs gas than CS Lewis’s Ordinary to Narnia. There are people who will watch The Firm, enjoy it and believe it is a true reflection of what watching football in the nasty 1980s was all about. Bluffers like a work colleague who spent that whole era playing local league football on Saturdays, discovered labels and England away games five years ago and now tells anyone who will listen what it was like being a hooligan. They will definitely see Love’s version of events as the real deal. Whether those that really were there also do so is another story. One probably already signed up by Warner Brothers and to be directed by Nick Love for release in 2012, telling how Gary Bushell and the Cockney Rejects brought acid house to East London in 1980 after witnessing Clyde Best and Mike Marsh in dayglo Fila BJ Terrindas playing six-hour Balearic sets at a Canvey Island soul weekender.
Friday 9 October 2009
A Big Nothing..
There's a little-known and decidedly average George Romero movie called Bruiser which, despite turning rubbish and hysterical at the end, has a creepy and intriguing premise. In it, Jason Flemyng plays a successful young marketing exec who wakes up one day to discover his face has inexplicably transformed into a smooth, white, featureless mask. He stands horrified in front of the mirror, trying to remove it but failing because it's fused to his head. He has literally become a blank.
That's the best bit of the film. After that it all goes a bit daft, as Flemyng's newfound anonymity sends him doolally and he runs around Los Angeles killing people left right and centre (mainly centre) until you just don't care any more. I'd have preferred him to stand weeping in front of the mirror for the remaining 90 minutes because I found that bit exceptionally creepy. And you know why? Because I can relate to it, that's why. Thanks for asking.
I could relate to it not because I've got a smooth, featureless face - sadly, it's more like a lumpy relief map charting myriad disappointments - but because in the past few months I've grown increasingly concerned that deep inside, underneath, in my heart, at my core, in my bones, within the very centre of my soul, lurks a terrifying, all-consuming, awful, echoing blankness.
Just to be clear, this is not the same thing as depression, which would manifest itself as an actively negative mindset. Rather it's an absence of any definable mood whatsoever. It's not like glancing at the glass of water and seeing it as half-empty; more like glancing at the glass of water and seeing it as half-full, but shrugging indifferently and staring at the wall instead of running around giggling and setting off party poppers. And to be fair, vacant indifference is the only sane reaction to a mere glass of water in the first place. It's hard to muster much enthusiasm or despair either way. Which leaping great cretin at the Department of Psychological Metaphor decided your opinion vis-a-vis a glass of water should be the barometer of character anyhow? If you want to find out who's a pessimist and who's an optimist, don't faff around filling tumblers - water's a precious resource, for Christ's sake. Just ask them. Or issue them a form with OPTIMIST and PESSIMIST printed on it, and see which box they tick. It's not rocket science.
Anyway, back to my thudding personal blankness. It's probably a bonus. On the one hand, I take absolutely no pride whatsoever in whatever meagre professional achievements I can muster, take little interest in anything outside work and am essentially just a blinking, shuffling mannequin watching events in his life merely drift past like underwhelming prizes on the Generation Game conveyor belt. And on the other, I just don't give a shit. It's a win-win situation. Or it would be, if I had any concept of "winning" in the first place.
Apparently this condition is known as "anhedonia" - the inability to derive any pleasure from things that would normally be considered pleasurable. Hand someone truly anhedonic a slice of chocolate cake, and at best they'll think, "Hmm, my tastebuds indicate this cake is delicious," rather than simply enjoying it. They subject it to Spock-like analysis, swallow it, shrug, and then crap it out a few hours later, wearing a neutral, unchanging expression throughout. Well, that's me, that is.
And it's hard to see what the cure might be. If you've fallen out of love with life - not to the point of actually disliking it, you understand, but to such a degree that you merely tolerate rather than welcome each passing day - it's surely impossible to get the spark back. Any suggestions? Religious epiphanies and extreme sports are out. I'd immerse myself in a hobby but they all look so pointless. You might as well sit alone in a shed counting numbers. I've tried cultivating a passion for the arts but that didn't work either. I mean, I quite like plays, live music, exhibitions, museums but not enough to spend more than 25 minutes journeying to see them. (*EXCEPTIONS Goodison & The Hare & Hounds). Reading's all right, but be honest - turning the pages isn't ultimately worth the effort. Perhaps serial killing would help. Yeah. That'd give everything a welcome bit of edge. Although I'm prepared to believe even that gets boring surprisingly quickly: within two weeks I'd be yawning my way through yet another humdrum strangling.
Still, it could be worse. Having listlessly Googled anhedonia, I see it's related to a hilarious spin-off condition called "ejaculatory anhedonia". Apparently it mainly affects men, and as the name suggests, the unfortunate few who suffer from it are incapable of deriving any pleasure whatsoever from orgasms. They make a bit of mess while staring impassively into the middle distance, and that's it. Like the human equivalent of a pushdown soap-dispenser. Now that would be depressing. Ah, well.
That's the best bit of the film. After that it all goes a bit daft, as Flemyng's newfound anonymity sends him doolally and he runs around Los Angeles killing people left right and centre (mainly centre) until you just don't care any more. I'd have preferred him to stand weeping in front of the mirror for the remaining 90 minutes because I found that bit exceptionally creepy. And you know why? Because I can relate to it, that's why. Thanks for asking.
I could relate to it not because I've got a smooth, featureless face - sadly, it's more like a lumpy relief map charting myriad disappointments - but because in the past few months I've grown increasingly concerned that deep inside, underneath, in my heart, at my core, in my bones, within the very centre of my soul, lurks a terrifying, all-consuming, awful, echoing blankness.
Just to be clear, this is not the same thing as depression, which would manifest itself as an actively negative mindset. Rather it's an absence of any definable mood whatsoever. It's not like glancing at the glass of water and seeing it as half-empty; more like glancing at the glass of water and seeing it as half-full, but shrugging indifferently and staring at the wall instead of running around giggling and setting off party poppers. And to be fair, vacant indifference is the only sane reaction to a mere glass of water in the first place. It's hard to muster much enthusiasm or despair either way. Which leaping great cretin at the Department of Psychological Metaphor decided your opinion vis-a-vis a glass of water should be the barometer of character anyhow? If you want to find out who's a pessimist and who's an optimist, don't faff around filling tumblers - water's a precious resource, for Christ's sake. Just ask them. Or issue them a form with OPTIMIST and PESSIMIST printed on it, and see which box they tick. It's not rocket science.
Anyway, back to my thudding personal blankness. It's probably a bonus. On the one hand, I take absolutely no pride whatsoever in whatever meagre professional achievements I can muster, take little interest in anything outside work and am essentially just a blinking, shuffling mannequin watching events in his life merely drift past like underwhelming prizes on the Generation Game conveyor belt. And on the other, I just don't give a shit. It's a win-win situation. Or it would be, if I had any concept of "winning" in the first place.
Apparently this condition is known as "anhedonia" - the inability to derive any pleasure from things that would normally be considered pleasurable. Hand someone truly anhedonic a slice of chocolate cake, and at best they'll think, "Hmm, my tastebuds indicate this cake is delicious," rather than simply enjoying it. They subject it to Spock-like analysis, swallow it, shrug, and then crap it out a few hours later, wearing a neutral, unchanging expression throughout. Well, that's me, that is.
And it's hard to see what the cure might be. If you've fallen out of love with life - not to the point of actually disliking it, you understand, but to such a degree that you merely tolerate rather than welcome each passing day - it's surely impossible to get the spark back. Any suggestions? Religious epiphanies and extreme sports are out. I'd immerse myself in a hobby but they all look so pointless. You might as well sit alone in a shed counting numbers. I've tried cultivating a passion for the arts but that didn't work either. I mean, I quite like plays, live music, exhibitions, museums but not enough to spend more than 25 minutes journeying to see them. (*EXCEPTIONS Goodison & The Hare & Hounds). Reading's all right, but be honest - turning the pages isn't ultimately worth the effort. Perhaps serial killing would help. Yeah. That'd give everything a welcome bit of edge. Although I'm prepared to believe even that gets boring surprisingly quickly: within two weeks I'd be yawning my way through yet another humdrum strangling.
Still, it could be worse. Having listlessly Googled anhedonia, I see it's related to a hilarious spin-off condition called "ejaculatory anhedonia". Apparently it mainly affects men, and as the name suggests, the unfortunate few who suffer from it are incapable of deriving any pleasure whatsoever from orgasms. They make a bit of mess while staring impassively into the middle distance, and that's it. Like the human equivalent of a pushdown soap-dispenser. Now that would be depressing. Ah, well.
Grounds for complaint...
Almost half of the teams currently playing in the Premiership have grounds that were built in the past 20 years. A handful of others are in old grounds, but which have been changed beyond all recognition from 30 years ago. A few more are desperate to move to new stadiums, with some plans already in place and others floundering on the wave of a recession. We, the fans, are never consulted on these things. Much in the way that everybody knows what the result of a referendum to bring back hanging would be, everybody knows what answers fans would give to moving grounds. Unless, of course, you are a Liverpool fan, who seem willing to move into a caravan whilst the new one is being haggled over.
History, it seems, has no place and no value.
But what is this obsession with "improving" stadiums (I'd say "stadia" but that the word just sounds a bit Deloitte and Touche)? You never hear a good word about a new ground from anybody who attended an old one, and the issue of terracing has never gone away, much to the annoyance of both clubs and the FA. After all, if we had terraces how would the greedy, corporate-driven clubs be able to justify charging up to 50 quid to watch just an hour and a half of football which isn't even guaranteed to be of average quality, never mind good?
Sadly, this isn't just an English phenomenon. I watched my first baseball game in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1996 and my last in Boston in 2007.
At the Royals Stadium in KC, I was mightily impressed with the stadium in many ways. It was new and very, very big. What it lacked, as so many do, was any sense of attachment. I felt like a customer who was being catered to, rather than a fan who was there to watch simply because I wanted to. The stadium has now been renamed the Kauffman Stadium, after the long time Royals owner (sound familiar?) and has been extended and modernised, despite only being 30 odd years old.
The New York Yankees have rebuilt Yankee Stadium, a place where more sporting history has been created than almost anywhere else on earth. It's true that they built the new one to exactly the same dimensions as the old, but it's still a new stadium. The House that Ruth Built is now the House that Steinbrenner Demolished.
In contrast, a trip to Fenway Park, Boston is a trip back to a time when the working man could still afford watching his favourite sport and the 'baccy juice was flying left right and centre. I don't remember what we paid for tickets that night but, even now, the cheapest ticket at Fenway is still only $12, or about £7. That's right, 7 quid for a ticket to a game which will last about 2 1/2 hours. Granted, the cheap tickets are quite a distance from home plate, but even those in much better stands are only $30, or about £18. Oh, and there's terracing, too. Other objections to the new Yankee Stadium aside, they haven't tried to make the fans pay for the move. The cheapest bleacher seats are just $5, about the price of a pie at Goodison. Compare this to the Emirates Stadium, which has tickets that are, on average, twice as dear as at Highbury.
Fenway - along with Wrigley Field in Chicago - is, quite rightly, seen as a national treasure, and the notion of the Red Sox ever moving out is unthinkable. There are pillars everywhere, supporting the upper tiers, and the stadium is surrounded by buildings, in the same way many English football grounds used to be, before the obsession with retail parks and hotels started. This restricts crowd numbers, but none of that matters. This is Fenway, and it will take an earthquake to bring it down.
It's sad that football clubs can't think the same way. Of course, the spiralling debts created by chairmen chasing an impossible dream means that many grounds just aren't/weren't big enough. I mean, how do you finance half a billion pounds worth of debt, if you've only got 40,000 people turning up for 19 games a season? Well, you start by charging exorbitant ticket prices knowing that, when your own fans stop turning up, there'll be a stream of Japanese and Scandinavians queuing up to take their places.
Football, as we knew it, is all but dead in this country. The stadiums are soulless, bland, flatpack affairs with barely even a nod to history. When it comes crashing down, and it will, who do you think the clubs will turn to?
History, it seems, has no place and no value.
But what is this obsession with "improving" stadiums (I'd say "stadia" but that the word just sounds a bit Deloitte and Touche)? You never hear a good word about a new ground from anybody who attended an old one, and the issue of terracing has never gone away, much to the annoyance of both clubs and the FA. After all, if we had terraces how would the greedy, corporate-driven clubs be able to justify charging up to 50 quid to watch just an hour and a half of football which isn't even guaranteed to be of average quality, never mind good?
Sadly, this isn't just an English phenomenon. I watched my first baseball game in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1996 and my last in Boston in 2007.
At the Royals Stadium in KC, I was mightily impressed with the stadium in many ways. It was new and very, very big. What it lacked, as so many do, was any sense of attachment. I felt like a customer who was being catered to, rather than a fan who was there to watch simply because I wanted to. The stadium has now been renamed the Kauffman Stadium, after the long time Royals owner (sound familiar?) and has been extended and modernised, despite only being 30 odd years old.
The New York Yankees have rebuilt Yankee Stadium, a place where more sporting history has been created than almost anywhere else on earth. It's true that they built the new one to exactly the same dimensions as the old, but it's still a new stadium. The House that Ruth Built is now the House that Steinbrenner Demolished.
In contrast, a trip to Fenway Park, Boston is a trip back to a time when the working man could still afford watching his favourite sport and the 'baccy juice was flying left right and centre. I don't remember what we paid for tickets that night but, even now, the cheapest ticket at Fenway is still only $12, or about £7. That's right, 7 quid for a ticket to a game which will last about 2 1/2 hours. Granted, the cheap tickets are quite a distance from home plate, but even those in much better stands are only $30, or about £18. Oh, and there's terracing, too. Other objections to the new Yankee Stadium aside, they haven't tried to make the fans pay for the move. The cheapest bleacher seats are just $5, about the price of a pie at Goodison. Compare this to the Emirates Stadium, which has tickets that are, on average, twice as dear as at Highbury.
Fenway - along with Wrigley Field in Chicago - is, quite rightly, seen as a national treasure, and the notion of the Red Sox ever moving out is unthinkable. There are pillars everywhere, supporting the upper tiers, and the stadium is surrounded by buildings, in the same way many English football grounds used to be, before the obsession with retail parks and hotels started. This restricts crowd numbers, but none of that matters. This is Fenway, and it will take an earthquake to bring it down.
It's sad that football clubs can't think the same way. Of course, the spiralling debts created by chairmen chasing an impossible dream means that many grounds just aren't/weren't big enough. I mean, how do you finance half a billion pounds worth of debt, if you've only got 40,000 people turning up for 19 games a season? Well, you start by charging exorbitant ticket prices knowing that, when your own fans stop turning up, there'll be a stream of Japanese and Scandinavians queuing up to take their places.
Football, as we knew it, is all but dead in this country. The stadiums are soulless, bland, flatpack affairs with barely even a nod to history. When it comes crashing down, and it will, who do you think the clubs will turn to?
Tuesday 6 October 2009
presenter biffs & student bulbs..
You’d have thought that after Alan Partridge satirised the medium so brilliantly, chat show producers would’ve learned a lesson or two in the past decade. After watching Jonathan Ross interview Graham Norton about which guests Norton would be interviewing on his own chat show, they obviously haven’t and the whole incestuous cycle now seems complete. Ross is on the way down, not because of ‘ManuelGate’ or because of his obscene wages but because his shtick has become predictable, boring, lazy and smug. Ofcourse Ross has always been these things, but resurrected himself by being incredibly rude to certain guests (easy targets usually, never the real A Listers who he sucked up to.) Likewise another great BBC talent, Norton has also found himself being paid to tone down the kind of saucy camp flim flam that made his name over on Channel 4. Together they managed to provide a telling example of how the being chained to a financially lucrative yet creatively stifling golden handcuffs deal has frittered away whatever talent they once possessed.
In the chatosphere, Ross became famous by attempting a kind of third rate version of Letterman back in the 80s. Whereas the standard British model of chat was largely centred around relatively probing and in-depth interviews by the likes of Parkinson and to a lesser degree, Russell Harty, the American versions were far zappier, more comedic, looser affairs all round. Ross was the first British chat show to attempt an admittedly third rate copy of the Letterman/Leno formula with The Last Resort. What else was there; Wogan? Norton followed the likes of Julian Clarey and Paul O’Grady with a mix of feeble smut and innuendo stretched out with tedious, suckholing interviews with so-called ‘gay icons’ and third rate cabaret.
Commissioners think that anyone can present a chat show – even the likes of Davina McCall and Charlotte Church. In the US the likes of Gary Shandling mocked the Lettermans and over here Mrs Merton and Partridge parodied UK programmes so effectively that no-one should ever attempt a chat show before watching one or both series to avoid the usual pitfalls; bad research, poor questioning, crap guests with nothing to say (but a book/film/product to plug), gormless hosts who can’t adlib but stick rigidly to pre-prepared questions, chummy backslapping sessions with showbiz chums, inane ego massaging for Hollywood stars, shite house bands, dim straight-man foils etc etc. A return to 70s style in-depth interviewing would be nice and whilst the likes of Mark Lawson can do this, he’s usually shoved away at obscure times on obscure digital formats. The mass audience, so the thinking goes, cannot stomach the kind of interview Parky used to do in his prime but now prefer fluffy exercises in product placement and cosy mutual masturbation. Ross interviewing Norton on his chat show about which guests Norton would be interviewing on his chat show is perhaps about as absurd as it gets.
Students
Well we had a couple of months where we could get served at Dorys or McCanns (it’s still McCanns OK? Tom Thumb can fuck off lid!) without being stuck behind a – what’s the collective noun for students? - an ‘irritation’ of students talking in that generic accentless, plazzy posh, middle English student voice, wearing their stupid fucking ‘Grimshaw’ outfits (50s asylum haircuts, tatty too tight cardys, ball breaking shit toppers and comedy slip ons…and that’s just the girls!) thinking saying ‘I’m gonna do Dizzee Rarscal; the Musical’ is funny and marvelling at all the pathetic, desperate ‘Freshers Week’ club posters (Trainspotting poster skits in 2009? Radical!!) and all the usual shite will be trotted out; that students provide a valuable source of income to the night-time economy and maybe that’s true; students spend money on themselves, then fuck off back to whichever nondescript Daily Mail shithole they came from after completing their studies. Students exist in their own privileged bubble and the only economy yhry contribute to are those of nobhead club promoters and er, how shall we put it ‘property developers.’ Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of a universal education system that rewards talent and hard work but today’s student masses are a very different breed to those who used to pollute ‘alternative’ discos in the 80s. At least they pretended to be political for the few years inbetween leaving public school and a job with daddy’s firm. Today’s lot with their smurf hats, berets, wacky barnets, 50s slap and La Roux haircuts think swearing in Subway is an act of defiance. Let’s hope the recession culls thousands of these clowns. See how they’re all jumping up n down now the recession is affecting THEM instead of those useless ‘chavs!’ It’s sooooo unfair! This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. All those A levels and diplomas and degrees and they can’t even get a job at Burger King. At this rate, they’ll not be able to go out on the piss six nights a week at Indiecation and help the night-time economy recover from decades of underinvestment. What will happen to us all?
In the chatosphere, Ross became famous by attempting a kind of third rate version of Letterman back in the 80s. Whereas the standard British model of chat was largely centred around relatively probing and in-depth interviews by the likes of Parkinson and to a lesser degree, Russell Harty, the American versions were far zappier, more comedic, looser affairs all round. Ross was the first British chat show to attempt an admittedly third rate copy of the Letterman/Leno formula with The Last Resort. What else was there; Wogan? Norton followed the likes of Julian Clarey and Paul O’Grady with a mix of feeble smut and innuendo stretched out with tedious, suckholing interviews with so-called ‘gay icons’ and third rate cabaret.
Commissioners think that anyone can present a chat show – even the likes of Davina McCall and Charlotte Church. In the US the likes of Gary Shandling mocked the Lettermans and over here Mrs Merton and Partridge parodied UK programmes so effectively that no-one should ever attempt a chat show before watching one or both series to avoid the usual pitfalls; bad research, poor questioning, crap guests with nothing to say (but a book/film/product to plug), gormless hosts who can’t adlib but stick rigidly to pre-prepared questions, chummy backslapping sessions with showbiz chums, inane ego massaging for Hollywood stars, shite house bands, dim straight-man foils etc etc. A return to 70s style in-depth interviewing would be nice and whilst the likes of Mark Lawson can do this, he’s usually shoved away at obscure times on obscure digital formats. The mass audience, so the thinking goes, cannot stomach the kind of interview Parky used to do in his prime but now prefer fluffy exercises in product placement and cosy mutual masturbation. Ross interviewing Norton on his chat show about which guests Norton would be interviewing on his chat show is perhaps about as absurd as it gets.
Students
Well we had a couple of months where we could get served at Dorys or McCanns (it’s still McCanns OK? Tom Thumb can fuck off lid!) without being stuck behind a – what’s the collective noun for students? - an ‘irritation’ of students talking in that generic accentless, plazzy posh, middle English student voice, wearing their stupid fucking ‘Grimshaw’ outfits (50s asylum haircuts, tatty too tight cardys, ball breaking shit toppers and comedy slip ons…and that’s just the girls!) thinking saying ‘I’m gonna do Dizzee Rarscal; the Musical’ is funny and marvelling at all the pathetic, desperate ‘Freshers Week’ club posters (Trainspotting poster skits in 2009? Radical!!) and all the usual shite will be trotted out; that students provide a valuable source of income to the night-time economy and maybe that’s true; students spend money on themselves, then fuck off back to whichever nondescript Daily Mail shithole they came from after completing their studies. Students exist in their own privileged bubble and the only economy yhry contribute to are those of nobhead club promoters and er, how shall we put it ‘property developers.’ Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of a universal education system that rewards talent and hard work but today’s student masses are a very different breed to those who used to pollute ‘alternative’ discos in the 80s. At least they pretended to be political for the few years inbetween leaving public school and a job with daddy’s firm. Today’s lot with their smurf hats, berets, wacky barnets, 50s slap and La Roux haircuts think swearing in Subway is an act of defiance. Let’s hope the recession culls thousands of these clowns. See how they’re all jumping up n down now the recession is affecting THEM instead of those useless ‘chavs!’ It’s sooooo unfair! This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. All those A levels and diplomas and degrees and they can’t even get a job at Burger King. At this rate, they’ll not be able to go out on the piss six nights a week at Indiecation and help the night-time economy recover from decades of underinvestment. What will happen to us all?
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