MONDO FOUR-OH
Being: cockle-picked patter on the now passing, carefully stealthed in pernicious prophecy, like digital breath on the Windows of today, or a poncho doomed to snag on the doorhandles of tomorrow, as the annum splits like a burnt print of Brigadoon.
Soul Relocation to the web. Having once been a little suspicious of weblogs (who do they think they're talking to?), I become mistrustful of anyone without one (what are they trying to hide?) Meanwhile, my meat exterior stops living like a student, bids adieu for Spitzbergen and gets a job as restaurant critic for 'Svalsbardposten'. These are the iRiches Of The iPoor. Likewise, a waning interest in museum-sized piles of trumped-up plastic where music is concerned. 'Isn't it nice when you can hold something solid in your hands?' is the pro-platter angle, but sounds like something you might hear gurgled over your shoulder on a night bus. Mostly, though, the record industry is about dressing mutton as lobster. We sit, we stare at the theatre of it all, the Libertines, the routine. Burn 'em and bin 'em. Press your Forget-Me-Nots. 'We live in a celebrity-obsessed culture', the celebrity press tend to tell us. I'm more interested in Denise who runs the launderette to tell you the truth (she does it to feel loved), but I joined the ranks of Twangers-4-Justice (not role models but they get the job done) feeling cheated by John Peel's early death, for I'd actually started listening to his show again, after an absense. He listened to demos even more, um, gut-level than my own, and the effort put in behind the scenes was evident. He had two cardinal reasons he'd pass up even a listen: (1) the band were wearing funny hats, (2) the band had the word 'keyboards' listed in their instrumentation. A synth, a solenoid, a whatnot, was fine but the term 'keyboard' was terminally offensive. Quite right. Craig from The Vines, always erratic, now officially diagnosed with A Kind Of Aspergers. Poor guy, sitting in a room with the curtains drawn, sad as a sack of microwaved bats. Not only did my ex lose her boyfriend to a Hughesian hermitage, her pop idol has also been carted off the battlefield of logic. Meyer. In a parallel life, where I can be bothered, my dissertation was on why 'Faster Pussycat' is a better American allegory than 'Kane'. Raise a jug, a couple. Then turn up the heat on The War On The War On War. 05, and someone will realise that the current approach to global terrorism is the polar opposite of the approach the government took to Northern Ireland, the one place something (partially, at least in terms of bloodspill) improved. Otherwise stay in bed and just re-run Mondo Four-oh. There you were feeling guilty about whatever utter trivia you feel guilty about. Don't bother. Nothing compares 2 the tsunami of state-sponsored goo that was 04. He's only playing dead, sarge. Huh huh - bam! Give the kid an Emmy, he won't be doing the Matt fuggin Damon for a bit. Unstopped by 'Old Europe' (which still feels centuries ahead of dumbo Ulster-Scots America and, by Christ, I feel I know you), the assistance of (did his band have 'keyboards' too?) Tone or not was a 'workaround'. Cheers, all the friendly fire was a fuck-you-pansy. Yeehar'ed insurgents (no relation to the disagreers Saddam worked Sunni Delight on, back when we used to call them 'his own people'), newsflash throat slash, rocket-bombed mosques, 'Mind The Gap' in Madrid meant a six foot crater and a bunch of morphine addicts moved a gym stuffed to the hoops with infants to molecules, the love-your-extended-family tsunami kept coming. As a recovered teenage gorehound, 04 felt cosy, comforting and more than a little retro. Some hawks will begin to coo, and those left will wonder if we need to factor in a Saddam vers 2.0 to nail this ire bucket to the floor. That or get your boots on for three thousand years of clockwork goonsmanship your eyes begin to stop even noticing. It's not as if we worship different facts, we worship different myths, for Denise's sake. Stories. But right-you-are, Sam, you wear the post-11 pants again. Now boss off back to your fake champagne and your bitch-slap porn, cause you're boring an asshole in the heads of everyone sensible. Frame Year. Te Doy Mis Ojos (Take My Eyes). Male self-grrr and the women who accommodate a status-seeking private hell, and then abscond to their sisters. 'A love story all the same,' says director Iciar Bollain. Spanish spousal horror doesn't sound like one for a back row on a hot date, and it's not. Benefitting from its lack of on-screen violence (or even drama), this film is a pressure cooker of domestic menace, all dressed up as the ups and downs of warm-blooded schmooze. Does for living rooms and kitchens what 'Jaws' did for the ocean. Male complexes, defaults and structures should never be presented as a greater problem than their female counterworks but, that said, men appear to pummel walls, punch doors, double-back and play emotional Cluedo to demean their wives, themselves and each other. Women eat too many KitKats. Choon Year. Very little. Black Dice. Someone sent me something called 'Nouvelle Vague'. The radio. Finally seeing two bands I wished I'd seen in their heyday but never could: The Pixies and the second best thing from Birmingham, The Nightingales. Fantasy is the new tweed. Feeling drawn-forth is the new pushed back, and engaged, understood, accepted and loved is the new fitted army jacket with a tightly wound striped scarf. Artichoke and halloumi kebabs with a grilled halibut in a cockle and vermouth beurre blanc is the new Home Economics. The Express (in fact, every paper*) will have a spasm when the Maggie Ladder wobbles a nanodegree, as if hustling more money out of bricks and dormer windows than one earns working has been a swell way for a country to run on empty, as if the ebbing or flowing of value contributes anything but exodus and 'confidence', and as if confidence is anything more than a trick. Meanwhile, fearless kids will cook up methods to make The Ladder collapse, collapse and keep collapsing until a four bed semi in Chiswick costs seventy five pence and I'll be at the helm. The papers will claim our actions unpatriotic, but we'll point out that patriots have moved to Spain. Ecomonics isn't complicated - if something means the average person on the average wage can afford the average spoils of an average life then it is called 'good', everything else is called 'UK 05'. Parliament. King Chuck of Kennedy. Tool him up till he's Robocop, stoke him to the eyeballs with lab-quality crank. Bring him on, wheel him in. Something for Christ's sake. Something. Meantime, Parliament will move wholesale to the web and we will all vote in chatrooms on much much much more than a Kitten-less Big Brother 6, while Chuck finally stun-bombs a deserted main chamber at the Commons in his war on Intellectual Bling. (*except the Morning Star, which no-one will buy until they explain why the NI/Eire garden fence is less apt than the Scotland/England counterpart, without resorting to spouse-level rhetoric better suited to Relate, or why having evidence of arms-destruction is 'humiliation' and not a reason to uncork a man-sized bottle of 1964 Louis Roederer Cristal.)