January 2007: Advance of the Celtic Kipple “Throwaway” is a sort of an ugly word. It would be better, maybe, if things-made-to-be-seen-once were referred to as “ephemeral”. In the days before everything, absolutely everything, was documented, then television and radio and cinema did their thing and slipped happily away into the ether. Some things got repeated once, and repeats were the sort of thing that made people feel cheated. It would be easy to link our new detritus-hoarding mentality to some sort of collective conservatism on the part of society – rather than our culture being uncomfortable and spiky and new, we’re trying to surround ourselves with endless stories of nice middle-class people angsting over their pretend personal problems. People surround themselves with DVDs of Green Wing (of which more anon) as insulated padding against the unknown, something which keeps out all the scary brown suicide bombers and soothes us all with demographically-approved japes. Hoarding is what we do to isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. Is this really all that different from days of – well, you know, that time that everyone seems to remember as being called “yore”? Yes, all right, nobody actually surrounded themselves with Series Two of The Good Life in the late seventies, because that would quite obviously be the silliest thing that anyone could ever do, ever: people just had better things to do, and if you told them that The Good Life would be regularly repeated in twenty-five years time they would have looked at you like you had two penises, one of which was attached to your jawbone and you regularly used in a disgusting but amusing physical trick that involved salad cream (don’t forget, by 2007 there was going to be a base on the moon, and someone from twenty-five years ago would have assumed that The Good Life would be as obsolete as… well… telephones, and motor cars, and fossil fuels, and… hey, aren’t we lagging behind a bit?). But polite society was probably more conformist back then, people actually got scandalised because Johnny Rotten said “shit” on the telly, and Mike Murphy taking the piss out of Gay Byrne was seen as the height of subversive behaviour. People still took the Church seriously, for crying out loud. Okay, nobody was so crippled by nostalgia that they actually bought Wanderly Wagon on DVD, but they did believe all that Comely Maidens Dancing At The Crossroads bollocks. The disappointment, then, isn’t that we’ve gone backwards: it’s just that we haven’t really moved on. Fuck it, I can live without the big glass bubbles on the moon – it would probably be a nice holiday destination, but I can’t see myself living there – but I could really do without the Sorchas and Becs of this world, who spend far too much of their money on frappamochachoccachinos and DVD boxsets of Desperate fucking Housewives. And then they look down on you because you like Doctor Who. Just grow up, please. Corrections to the Last Issue: - More on podcast corrections: first up, Tiffany probably isn’t making a penny from that awful Girls Aloud song, because her version was itself a cover version. The originators of the song are actually a group called Tommy James and the Shondells – which just reminds you how much better band names were back then. Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, that’s a band name. Davy Dee, Dozy, Mike, Beaky and Tich, that’s a band name. The Chalets, that’s a cluster of five holiday homes in Leitrim. Probably with “natural” stone cladding. And I ain’t going. - More on Tiffany: I was also mistaken when I said that she only had one hit. The correspondent who was good enough to point out the Tommy James and the Shondells connection also highlighted that she did a truly horrible cover version of I Saw Her Standing There – well he says it’s horrible, and given the source material I see no reason to disbelieve him – and a quick glance at Wikipedia has revealed that she had another number one with Could’ve Been, as well as informing me that I Think We’re Alone Now was ousted as Americaland’s number one single by Billy Idol’s Mony Mony… which was, by an astonishing coincidence, also written by Tommy James and the Shondells. None of this is as interesting as the question of why Wikipedia is called Wikipedia. Not the “wiki” bit – it’s a type of software, dontcha know – but the wholly unwarranted omission of the “a” from “paedia”. I mean, yes Americans are always guilty of getting rid of funny-looking letters, and they seem to be particularly intolerant of “a” going next to “e” – hence the confusion of foot-fetishists with people who like to have sex with children – but Encyclopedia is just… duller than Encyclopaedia, and therefore seems to be making the world less interesting for no good reason. Even more irritatingly, Microsoft Word is trying to convince me I’ve spelt it wrong. At least I haven’t written anything that ends in “-isation” yet. - Total Recall didn’t actually have the highest body count when it was broadcast, either. In fact it barely makes the top ten according to www.moveiebodycounts.com, although removing all the films directed by John Woo does bump it up a fair bit. I’m still sceptical, though: Total Recall’s deaths were actual proper violent deaths with blood and stuff. According to the website, though, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is way out in front with a princely total of 836 (Total Recall has a meagre 77), and that implies you can count CGI elves as legitimate countworthy bodies rather than outtakes from Quake. Fact is, Total Recall is obviously a more violent movie than Lord of the Rings, so yet again we’ve proven that science doesn’t work. - Oh yeah, and while I’m at it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Young. See, I get some things right.
	television Shameless Okay, I said Shameless wasn’t funny, and that’s not entirely fair. It’s still funny, yes. It’s just not any good. Shameless was never, say, Boys from the Blackstuff. It had a lightness of touch and a fantastic comedic edge to it, and the Krazy Kapers feel about the thing was one of the best elements. For all that though… it was a serious show. It was a programme about disenfranchisement and apathy, about a mentality of people who felt that society had rejected them and therefore tried to take society for all that they could. Frank Gallagher was the pinnacle of this idea, a drunken waster who did his best not to do anything except go to the pub and get sloshed, the repellent yet tragic product of a culture that no longer believes in valuing people who don’t have a university education. It’s a picture of society from the bottom up, of people who once had things like unions and jobs and common good to give them a feeling of being now wanted, but now end up doing crap jobs (as little as possible) to keep themselves in beer, all because the world has told them their lives don’t matter. In one of the earliest episodes, Steve (played by James McAvoy before he got all famous and stuff) sends a pissed Frank to France as a prank, reflecting his unthinking superiority complex; it all leaves the audience asking, who the hell does he think he is, treating people like animals? Even these people? Now, Frank Gallagher is a comedy drunk. And… that’s it. Shameless is, superficially, the same programme. But watching the latest series, I found it pretty much impossible to care about characters I previously used to like. They had turned into caricature versions of themselves, defined more by their quirks and respective fuckeduppednesses than actual real character traits. The show no longer seems real. As happens to a lot of telly programmes, it has stopped being an actual story and started becoming an institution, a fixture in the schedules. It comes back to the question of hoarding – when programmes are successful, the immediate response is to stop the story in the same place and rerun it every week, turning the thing into something static that people keep. Shameless was good because it was surprising. Now it does what people have decided Shameless is supposed to do. The result is a facsimile of what the programme used to be, a full-scale mockup with none of the wit or insight of the original. Shameless has been stripped of everything that made it matter. It’s worth mentioning the other programme that looks like it might become afflicted with this syndrome. The Doctor Who Christmas Special wasn’t bad, as such – but what was more worrying about it, in retrospect, was that it featured a whole shebang of set-pieces that were included for no real reason other than that’s what Doctor Who does, in the world where TV programmes become scheduling fixtures and the surface is more important than the subtexts. Fixture, sadly, means something is fixed. It’s no longer supposed to surprise its audiences; rather than the audience reacting to the programme, they demand that it does the same stuff it always does. The result is the end of Shameless as a meaningful story. It’s no longer a programme, just a place; something that, even before it has aired, has been preserved in a glass case and gloated over. Time to unplug the machine and let this one die, folks. Green Wing The Christmas Special actually aired in January for some reason, so this one’s fair game. As one of the better-known ensemble comedies of recent years, it’s maybe worth talking about the series as a whole, except that there ain’t much to say about it. I should make a confession here: much as I’ve complained about people buying DVDs of throwaway programmes, I’m on no account blameless. Obviously, there’s no point in hiding the large and worrying quantity of Doctor Who merchandise that graces my lodgings, but even if you leave that aside… I own lots of films on DVD, and there are a great many of them that I don’t really watch that often. It goes without saying that people who don’t own Blade Runner or Withnail and I have their priorities all wrong, but still; I own The Royal Tenembaums and I don’t even like that film. I do try and keep it to stuff I rewatch – I got The Royal Tenembaums on sale, and I hadn’t seen it and thought it would be good since it was by yer man who did Rushmore – but still, some of the purchases are questionable. It doesn’t seem particularly unjustifiable to own Taxi Driver, but the truth is that I only own it as an object – it’s simply not a movie you stick on to cheer yourself up, and it’ll be some time before I watch it again. So if anyone wants a free copy of Taxi Driver, drop me an email and help me feel less hypocritical. More damning, though, is the fact that I own not one, but two series of Green Wing. No, honestly. I can excuse the first by pointing out that it was an unsolicited present, but the second… well I hadn’t seen any of the second series when I bought it, so it seemed- No, I can’t get away with this. The first series of Green Wing was, largely, rather good. It’s not without its problems, lots of them: there’s the irritating Alan Statham / Joanna Clore pairing; the annoying use of slo-mo; the irritating drooling over Mac; and the rather implausible notion that four people could all fall for Caroline Todd, which smacks of a Mary-Sue of unforgivable proportions. The second series was another matter – it lost the audience with some appalling dream-sequences, and then by resetting the storyline in a way that confirmed that the series actually was going nowhere. Like Shameless, it became a programme in which it did Green Wing stuff without doing anything, and they had even more Alan Statham. The only thing to save it was the unusual conclusion, in which Mac was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and Caroline ended up running off with Guy in a way that was both surprising and undeniably right, and also strangely touching. The special wasn’t actually a Christmas Special, just a sort of 90 minute thing, and it was one of the most colossally shit pieces of television that’s been on for quite some time. Not only was it meandering, directionless toss, but it also failed in the basic requirement of actually being funny. Instead you just got increasingly shrill set-pieces, and the show went and trampled on anything interesting that happened in the second series by having Caroline and Mac get together anyway. Green Wing was never exactly cutting edge, for all the lazzi stylings, and had more in common with panto than anything genuinely new. It worked because of a very talented cast (who had a huge say in the direction of the storylines, many of the scenes being based on improvisations in rehearsal) who understood comedy. On the flipside, it could have done with trimming down to shorter length episodes and was always the sort of programme that was prone to becoming self-indulgent. If anything, the last episode smacked of self-congratulation; actors looking at each other chewing up the scenery and going oh Steve is so magnetic in this scene, all the while ignoring the dreary predictability of the secretaries doing a Lord of the Flies pastiche. Once it was uneven-but-funny, but Green Wing long since changed itself into the classic hoarder’s show: every scene made to be re-performed by people down the pub, every character constructed to enable the viewer to do a really hilarious impression of them, every storyline riffing on the same ideas without ever threatening to develop them. In short, it’s rubbish. And coming soon to a bookshelf near you. Celebrity Big Brother Yes, look, I know everyone has had a pop at it. Which does make me sort of say “well I’m definitely entitled to have a go then,” which would be true… but also, everyone’s been so fundamentally wrong about all this that I might as well point out some of the obvious bits. First up, the pathetic predictability of the media storm would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so depressing. First you had the glee at watching “celebrities” (i.e. people who happened to be going out with famous people) bitch at each other; then there was the sudden worried shock as oo-er it got sort of nasty; then Jade became the most evil person in the world, and there was much hand-wringing from the media; she came out and was taken down by exactly the same magazines who tried to convince us that a mouthy, ignorant harpy was fantastically interesting in the first place; she blubbed a bit and said she was sorry, and checked herself into some approved form of celebrehab; and now Britland can pat itself on the back, delighted at just how beautifully cleansed it is. Yawn. Some of the main objections here are almost too obvious, but they’ve got to be said so I might as well go ahead and do it. First of all, Jade emerged in Big Brother 3, which was a time when it was still actually quite interesting (no, honestly). She was horrible then, but it made people feel better about watching her if they said she was a thick chav rather than a manipulative bully, so all this Ooh-Jade-She’s-Such-A-Character was bollocks from the beginning. Drafting her back in was a bullying tactic from the start, a plot hatched by media executive types to put That Stupid Hairdresser back in the house. The same people who were so shocked at Jade using the word poppadom didn’t have any qualms at the prospect of laughing at her for being stupid – no more her fault than it is Shilpa’s for not being white – so where does their moral high ground come from? Now that she’s been largely vilified throughout every tabloid and media magazine, because Heat is now the moral arbiter of how we should behave, Britland can tell itself it doesn’t have a problem and she’s an evil aberration. No, she’s the product of a society that wants to laugh at fat thick slappers who don’t know where Switzerland is; the sort of society that can justify the relentless bullying of stupid people on the grounds that they did the bullying first. Second; it now seems that everything, even intolerance, can be collected; and in the game of Intolerance Top Trumps, racism wins in all categories (it reminds me of a game of Horror Top Trumps that was knocking back in the eighties, which actually featured Death as a card. Not surprisingly, Death scored around the 98 mark in all categories, making it pretty much invincible. Weirdly, though, it wasn’t actually the best card in any category, except in the Fear Factor section where it scored a predictable 100. In Physical Strength it could be beaten – if memory serves – by Thor, and all this does make you ask how anyone, even a Norse God with a magic hammer, could be expected to beat Death in a fight. It’s also worth mentioning that Death didn’t score as high as Dracula under the Killing Power category, and how anything has more Killing Power than Death is anybody’s guess). There was lots of talk of “social and cultural differences” rather than actual racism, which makes you wonder exactly how people define racism these days. Excuse me chaps, but I’ve got some hair that needs splitting. The central point is, however, that whether it’s racist or not is gloriously irrelevant. All very well to get high-and-mighty about Jade Goody calling whatserface Shilpa Poppadom, but how exactly is this more offensive than calling her a “stuck-up fucking cow”? Big Brother has had more than its fair share of bigots in the past, so why is it less offensive to have a sexist, misogynistic, rude ignorant twat like John McCririck than it is to have someone who does an impression of someone with an Indian accent? Big Brother abandoned any pretence at being a social experiment some time ago, and now can best be described as a freakshow, in which millions of people tune in and which people being arseholes to each other. Because it’s, y’know, funny and stuff. Either intolerance is okay, or it’s not (clue: it’s not). The really laughable thing about all this is the shock, the idea that this is in some way new. Big Brother is a show in which people are wankers to each other, and not in a fumble-behind-the-toilets sort of way. All of a sudden, the wankerishness has come in a form that the right demographic has deemed unacceptable, probably while exchanging dinner party witticisms about smelly homeless people and working-class kids in hoodies. This programme is a non-stop exercise in discrimination, for crying out loud, and for some reason it’s now more acceptable to bully fat chavs than it is to bully good-looking Indians. Way to go Britland. Good job it would never happen over here, because we’re not racist, us… even if we do have a Mad Neocon as our Minister for Justice. Well maybe we are a bit racist, but that’s only because there’s too many immigrants these days.
	film Babel The thing about Babel is that it’s dfgjlskghhj3rwqujthrjjjjjjjjjjjjjjvbl; zjc\ndkajwdszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Sorry, nodded off there. I’ll start again. There are films that try to be clever, then there are the films that try to look like they’re clever. If you look back to last year, the best example was Brokeback Mountain; a sweet but horrendously overlong love story that acted like it was Citizen Kane. Brokeback Mountain used a Big Issue to sell itself (I mean literally, not the magazine) as something that was daring and controversial, and if you opined that errrr well actually it’s a bit unremarkable then you were branded as horrendously insensitive. Now there’s Babel. It’s about language, you know. About how God looked down upon the people who spoke with one tongue, while they were building a tower for some reason, and verily he decided to confuse and confound their speech with many languages. Which was a super wheeze, let’s face it: God was so much more interesting back in the Old Testament. The amazing study of language that tales place in Babel consists of Brad Pitt shouting “She needs a Doctor,” at Random Brown Person #1, Random Brown Person #1 replies “Durka durka durka mohammed jihad,” Brad Pitt says “What did he say?” and Brad Pitt’s interpreter informs him that it translates as “I can’t believe how patronising this terrible load of arse is and surely there’s no excuse for me to be in it.” Feel the metaphysical depth, people. And it’s like that for two and a half hours. Thing That Have To Be Stamped Out, No. 1: making films about poor places that feature white middle-class people for no apparent reason. The couple this time are Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, and from the moment they appear on-screen it’s like two animated streaks of piss-flavoured misery have ghosted on screen with their pasty faces. They have a conversation which largely revolves around their baby who died of a cot death, and quickly you’re on the third variation of “we have to stop blaming ourselves” while Cate admonishes Brad not to drink the local water. Get my gun, would be my response if I actually overheard this conversation (and weirdly, a couple of kids share my sentiment). The point is that we’ve seen films like Tsotsi and City of God, and we know that it’s perfectly possible to set films in this environment without whiney attractive Americans to cut up the subtext for us and stick it gently in our mouths. As it happens, Babel doesn’t even have a subtext – it’s a film which has nothing to say – so this isn’t as annoying as it should be. Things That Have To Be Stamped Out, No. 2: Would people please stop making these films which feature fifteen intersecting stories? Robert Altman started it, of course, but it’s becoming an epidemic. Ever since Magnolia aired – a load of arse if ever there was one, which laboured under the misapprehension that a bunch of people being miserable and then having some frogs fall on them is ‘drama’ rather than ‘one of those strange dreams you have which are sort of haunting to you, but completely uninteresting to everyone else’ – there’s at least a couple of these a year. It can work, given the subject matter – it was appropriate in Traffic, for example – but all too often it seems like an excuse to jam a few half-arsed films together to make one big quarter-arsed one. In this the narratives don’t intersect or converge, they start off with a contrived link-up and then just get further away from each other. You can link them up, all right; two kids take a random pot-shot at a bus (no, really) and shoot Cate Blanchett with a rifle they recently acquired. Because of this Brad ’n’ Cate can’t get home to their kids, so the housekeeper deciders to take them with her to her son’s wedding in Mexico (no, really). Meanwhile, the guy who originally owned the rifle is from Japan, and his deaf-mute daughter is busy taking off her panties and flashing her gee at people (no, really). All of these might have made a decent film if any of them had any depth, rather than nice editing to give the appearance of depth, but as they’re all crammed together they just sort of sit there. The Japanese section probably has the most potential, but the lead actress is a bit rubbish, and besides which it barely ties in with the rest of the film at all. And if all that isn’t enough, the stories themselves are so badly told that people have to resort to being stupid to move the drama along. So we watch Cate get her shoulder sown up, in agony, after which she’s given an opium pipe to ease the pain – er, why not give it to her beforehand? Why would a doting and responsible nanny take two kids to another country, and then allow her drunken nephew to drive them back (and that’s only the fourth most stupid element of that story)? Why are we in Japan at all? What’s it for? What are you doing? What could possibly be worth all this? Two and a half hours. This isn’t a film, it’s a collectable badge of pseudo-intellectualism; the sort of thing that people from Polite Society go and see so they can say oh darling it was just so interesting at dinner parties. To be fair, it does look pretty, and the visual imagery sort of sustains some level of interest over the film’s length. But still, two and a half hours to say nothing at all isn’t really worth your time. The only reason to go and see it is if you suspect you might be attending one of those dinner parties, and need to be able to slag the thing off with complete authority. Even then, you’d be better advised to just not go to the party. Get new friends. You don’t need this. Hollywoodland The rumours were hushed, almost reverential. Can it be? Affleck? Being good? Not really being good? Not the Ben Affleck? Surely this is proof that the world’s gone mad. What next? Scarlett Joe Hansen learning to act? Paul McCartney learning to sing? Newsflash: yes, he’s very very good. Very very very good. This should probably be tempered by the fact that he’s playing a washed-up, not-very-good actor, so it might be suggested that it’s verging on method acting for poor old Ben. Anyway, he’s playing George Reeves, who was no relation to Christopher Reeve but played Superman on telly anyway – not something that he was particularly happy about, the miserable gyet. It’s a decent enough film in its own way, but it stars one too many Adrien Brodys for anyone’s taste, and besides which it’s at least twenty minutes too long. But- Actually I can’t really be bothered talking about Hollywoodland, so instead I’d like to talk about Bob Dylan. Well not just Bob Dylan, the same can apply to Leonard Cohen or Coldplay or Radiohead, which is how annoying it is when people dismiss them as “depressing”. It’s annoying partly because it’s not true – or rather, in the case of Coldplay, it is true but not in the way the person in question means – but it just presupposes that something that makes you miserable is a bad thing. People who claim they don’t have bad moods are lying. And people who get in a bad mood and try and “snap out of it” – who don’t decide to revel in their bad mood, to go home and listen to Blood on the Tracks on a loop, to go into work and answer any questions in monosyllables before shouting self-indulgently at anyone who asks them if they’re all right, to get a bottle of whisky and play a solo drinking game which involves watching Blade Runner and/or listening to Morrissey – are either repressed, or hateful, or both. I’ve met several people who call Blade Runner “depressing” (rather than the correct title, the best film ever made on Earth) and I usually end up shouting: why would you criticise something which can actually make you miserable? Are people really that afraid of themselves? Is this why they fill their mortgaged-to-the-hilt homes with crap, because flat screen tellies are more important than actually feeling sad? “Depressed” is a bit analogous to “flu” in Ireland, i.e. used for something which bears no relationship to the word in question. Someone with a runny nose sipping hot whiskey in the pub should be told, up front, that they don’t have the flu – because if they did they would be sweating, bedridden, fevered, and have lost at least half a stone in weight. Similarly, people who say they’re feeling a bit depressed need to be corrected immediately, preferably by being introduced to someone who really is depressed. Bear that in mind, and the word “depressing” becomes, self-evidently, an absurdity. The notion that a song, or a film, or a telly programme, can actually give someone depression is ridiculous. But that’s not it, either. “Depressing” has only a passing relationship with “depressed”, in much the same way that “sentiment” and “sentimentality” or “mystery” and “mysteriousness” bear little relationship to each other. “Sentiment” is a complex word that requires elaboration, and so is “mystery”. “Sentimental”, though… it’s a word of genrification that doesn’t actually mean anything, but enables the thousand-and-one subtleties to be summed up in a way that implies a generic version of real emotion. And then there’s the quasi-reversion to “sentimentality” – which doesn’t mean something that has sentiment, but has a sort of generic average of various “sentimental” emotions chucked in. And that’s the category to which depressing belongs. And it’s why I feel justified in describing Hollywoodland in the way I’ve never described a film before, i.e., depressing. It’s not bad as such, but it’s a film in which every single person is miserable for some reason or another. Centrally, it’s a piece about aging and decline, which is suffered by both Affleck and Diane Lane as the film progresses. But then you just have ridiculous quantities of misery chucked on top, as meaningfully as the emotional bits in a Richard Curtiss film. Adrien Brody has his family break up, his client’s a bitter old woman, Affleck’s wife suffers from loneliness, Bob Hoskins lived a joyless life… all the varieties of misery just end up in bland, unaffecting stew. A slightly dull stew. And a depressing stew. Blood Diamond No I’ve gone nowhere near this, and don’t intend to, but I just thought I’d mention that Microsoft has tried to get me to put the letter ‘z’ in patronising and criticising. Hmph.
	adverts Budweiser What’s the point of blogging? This isn’t an ironic question, much as it may seem to be one. The fact of the matter is that this isn’t a blog, which I get very defensive about, not least because I’ve been officially told that it isn’t a blog and bloggy-type websites won’t tell people to have a look at my site. The stumbling block isn’t the timetable – once a month is just a very infrequent blog rate, but it is technically acceptable – but that I won’t let people post comments about the articles. From my point of view this is perfectly logical; I’d like to claim it’s because the “letter to the editor” system creates an automatic quality filter, not insofar as I edit out bad letters, but because people just make more of an effort if they actually have to write a proper email to someone – but sadly, the truth is that I don’t want a website which allows comments but doesn’t get any of them anyway. My webalizer (oh look, another ‘z’) can tell me many amazing things, not least that someone found their way to this site by typing “if horses balls were lemons” into Google, but the actual number of people who visit can be interpreted to mean I’ve got about seven readers or that I’ve got five thousand. And I really don’t want to know, not because I’m worried the number will be small, but just that I don’t want to think about people actually reading all this. The fact is that I’m complaining about the excessive documentation of throwaway culture while writing a great big monthly “column” about just that – see, column is so much nicer than blog – and I hate to compound that hypocrisy by granting it a readership. Blogging is obviously fine, or would be, if so many blogs weren’t so utterly shite. The problem is the lack of structure – it is, after all, an online diary, which means that nobody edits. So right next to a half-thought-out article on Tony Blair and the cash for honours scandal you have someone complaining about their milk being stolen. It’s not even like you can enjoy the gleeful ripping open of the blogger’s personality, because these aren’t online diaries really – they’re logs, like Captain’s Log Stardate 7/9/31, in which you get a personality stolen from Doctor Cox from Scrubs and a dumping ground for crap. At this point you, dear reader whose existence I deny, can gleefully shout that I’m now complaining about digressions in blogs while digressing from what is ostensibly a review of that incredibly annoying Budweiser advert, but trust me – I’m going somewhere with this. Blogging is the big thing now, and that Budweiser advert seems like a metaphor for the average blog. What starts out as a fairly simple premise – bloke from Norn Iron decides to go to a party – becomes insanely difficult, because he keeps getting tangled in crap on the way. Even more tellingly, he doesn’t bother doing the sensible thing and just unsnagging all this stuff from his pants, as if he doesn’t want to meet anyone without his protective trail of waste. The complaint that all this is just incredibly daft misses the point – the ad is a perfect metaphor for our times, in which people only focus on the next party where they can look cool, but at the same time are unable to go anywhere without dragging their detritus after them. There’s even a cunning metaphor for global / cultural politics, since the guy has a Norn Iron accent at the start, but has clearly morphed into an American at the end. The Dublin bloke stuck in the car acts as Ireland in this allegory, trying desperately to get to the party, but still something of a laughing stock no matter how badly he tries to fit in. Unwittingly, Budweiser’s advert – clearly the least logical, most confusing and silliest advert of the year – is the most prescient ad for some time. Now that is the end of civilisation. No it’s not “civilization”. Bill Gates is getting anthrax in the post. Eircom Broadband Did I ever mention that Dave from the broadband adverts is a complete cunt? No? Good, well that’s that out of the way then.
	singles Kelis ft. Cee-Lo: L’il Star A song which opens with the line “I’m no-one special”. So why haven’t you fucked off and stopped bothering us yet? Mika: Grace Kelly Another song that’s named after a famous person for no apparent reason, like… oh… all the other ones whose name I can’t remember (do email me suggestions, I know there’s loads of them, I just can’t remember them right now). Mika is a nice fresh-faced curly-headed bloke who may or may not be gay – in that respect a bit like just about every curly headed bloke, in fact every bloke ever before they confirm whether they are or not. He’s from the Lebanon, now he’s top of the charts. The problem, obviously, is that it’s impossible to hear his name without inserting it into the song Luka by Suzanne Vega, which means that I keep getting recurring dreams in which he lives upstairs from me. Along with that creepy little girl who sits on his piano and talks with someone else’s voice, in much the same way as Linda Blair. Not cute. Not in any way. Anyway, the premise of the song is that he used to try and look like Grace Kelly, but he couldn’t quite pull it off. Then he tried a bit of Freddy. He doesn’t specify which Freddy, but Mercury would seem a better bet than Krueger. By the time he reveals his Freddy-stylings for the first time you’re already wondering if it’s a cover version of a Queen song, so why is he bothering to impart this information? It’s like Interpol having a song called We Listen To A Lot Of Joy Division. In the video, Mika celebrates his all-round falsetto cheeriness by inviting lots of people over for a big party, in which he dances around cheerfully. And it’s… like Queen. So, if you like Queen, you’ll probably like this. But if you like Queen you should be banned from buying music ever again. Or… Sometimes, I wonder if it’s my problem. I like uplifting pop, but my idea of uplifting pop isn’t actually that uplifting when I analyse it in depth. Yes, I will consistently be cheered by Chumbawumba’s Tubthumping, but that’s is a song about some bloke drinking himself to oblivion in a pub. I even like Amarillo, but that’s really about some random horny tramp who doesn’t even know where the fuck he’s going. And yet when U2 do their “positive and uplifting” thing, I immediately want to kick puppies. There are people out there who actually like it when Bono starts wailing “Can’t you see what love has done”, and I like to think they should know better. But… should they know better? If it does make them feel cheerful, then why is it a bad thing? Is it a reflection on me, that other people hear deep ’n’ soulful, but all I hear is vapid insincerity? Should I, in fact, just lighten the fuck up? There’s a part of me that wants to tap my toe whenever I hear this, and wants to grin at the “Why Don’t You Like Me” chorus (although the answer to the question is a resounding “because you hang around with Linda Blair’s creepy offspring”). But the fact is… I hate Mika. I hate him because he’s cheerful, and empty, and wide-eyed, and fashionable, and good-looking. People often tell me I dwell too much on lyrics – witness an argument I had a few days ago because I insisted that I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You by Tom Waits is a shite, trite, nasty song that romanticises a pisshead ogling women at three in the morning – but the lyrics here are instructive. The chorus is essentially Mika saying “I could be brown / blue / violet sky / hurtful / purple, I could be anything you like” (he doesn’t actually use the backslashes, but I didn’t want to write out ‘I could be’ over and over again)… and I don’t want people to be anything I like, I want them to be themselves, I want them to be uncompromising and interesting and forceful and rude and miserable. I hate Mika because he’s the classic twenty-first century boy – too cheerful, too secure, too sodding happy. If I showed him The Happiness Patrol he’d like it for all the wrong reasons. And I bet he owns Moulin Rouge on DVD. Just Jack: Starz in Their Eyes The successful follow up to their hit singles Family Fortunez and Catchphraze. What, is their computer stuck on U.S. English as well? JoJo: Too Little Too Late You might remember JoJo from her first big hit, which was called Leave (Get Out). Perhaps the most interesting thing about this song was the way that it helpfully explained the word “leave”, just in case nobody understood it the first time. It’s also interesting because she was about fourteen when it was released – JoJo was actually born in 1990, making her the most annoyingly young pop star since Hanson – even if she’s nowhere near as annoying as Hanson, because nothing is. Incidentally, Hanson have no fallen so far that they wind up playing places like The Temple Bar Music Centre, which does mean that some enterprising passerby may one day ask them to play their most famous hit, “Mmm Danon”. No? Oh, please yourselves. The video’s the standard breakup fair. Jo-Jo sits in her room looking earnestly at the camera for a fair whack of it, and spends much of the rest of the time doing her best Lindsay Lohan impression – big hair and cool sunglasses, plus one of those phones that flips open (which for some reason seem to unquestionably be the coolest – hinges must be in at the moment). What’s odd is how much of JoJo’s stuff we see. When the camera finally zooms out from the earnest-into-camera angle it becomes clear that we’re in JoJo’s bedroom, which is nothing like the seventeen year-old bedrooms I remember – there’s nowhere enough ashtrays and vomit, and far too many arty looking posters in frames. She’s got a great big teddy, a little toy robot, a sort of plastic cat-thing, a remote control for nothing in particular, and – here’s the odd bit – two huge noticeboards which appear to be crammed with pictures of her boyfriend. To me this seems like the behaviour of a stalker, but I suppose I’m just out of touch – this is Generation Kipple, who preserve every vaguely funny thing they ever did on the internet, store their diaries online for posterity (didn’t reading someone else’s diary use to be the most awful violation of privacy you could do, short of sticking one of your body parts in one of theirs?), and generally keep everything… perhaps making this sort of montage, oddly reminiscent of the brainstorming boards you used to see on Prime Suspect, is perfectly normal behaviour these days. The other thing that confuses me is that JoJo is clearly American – she has a car even though she’s seventeen, and she goes to one of those schools that appears in all those teen comedies and is marked out by the fact that it has its own all-seater stadium – but much of the video’s narrative seems to revolve around her boyfriend playing soccer… and unless I’m mistaken, that’s not exactly the most popular sport Stateside. This doesn’t just extent to slo-mos of the boyf playing soccer in the rain, but also to a scene which features him not wanting to talk to JoJo because he’s watching football. You do see him in another scene hanging out in a nightclub with a bunch of girls who appear to the The Pussycat Dolls, presumably pissing her off because she’s not Hot Like Them, but this does beg the question… why is JoJo, teddy-owning girl that she is, in a relationship that seems analogous to Jack and Vera Duckworth? And even if it is soccer-themed, why do the bits in the video where she gets all emotional, feature her doing an impression of Wayne Rooney arguing with a referee? I should probably mention that the song’s so bland I can’t remember it, and also that JoJo is nowhere near as interesting as any of her namesakes, of whom there are many. She’s definitely not as interesting as JoJo, The Amazing Dog-Faced Boy. But then again, who is?
	albums The other thing I should probably mention is that my laptop got stolen this month. This is obviously the reason I’m using someone else’s computer – hence the frequent comments about U.S. spelling – but also my excuse for not reviewing any albums this month. I did consider writing a long dissertation about everyone calling Damon Albarn’s new band a “supergroup” and pretending I’d heard the album, but it seemed like too much trouble. I suppose I could have bought it, but it’s not like anyone pays me for all this. So wait until next month and stop complaining.
	Footnotes: - Mary-Sue: a term relating to criticism of fan-fiction in particular, which refers to the author writing an idealised of his/herself into a story as a form of wish fulfillment, in the sense that a dejected, lonely housewife writes a story about Mary-Sue, a dejected lonely but secretly really passionate and interesting housewife who gets swept off her feet by a handsome stranger. All of which means that Mary-Sue got married at some point, which makes me wonder if she’s related to Peggy-Sue. I was also thinking of referring to Kelis’ giveaway first line as a Signal From Fred, but I didn’t want to confuse anyone. - Bette Davis Eyes, there’s one. Oh, and The Love of Richard Nixon, two. So pah! - Famous People Who Look A Bit Like Sci-Fi monsters, Number 2: Stephen Hawking and a Borg. What? I’m just saying, that’s all.