No More Mr Nice Guy

Reader, I have of late (wherefore I know not) lost my nice guy image. Well, I say of late - it has been a gradual process throughout my twenties.

I used to be considered a fairly nice chap, but in reality I was just misunderstood. There's always been a rage against everything bubbling away under the surface, but when I was younger, I cared enough to hide it. Now I'm not arsed.

But who is the truly nice guy? Is it the pusillanimous milquetoast who hasn't the nerve to hold an opinion? Or is it he who cares enough be angry about the wrong in the world? (Thrill at that two-fisted rhetoric!)

Of course, the answer is the latter. If I'm angry at the way Waterstones massage the intellectual egos of their customers by encouraging them to think that reading a book makes them a cut above the proles, it's because I care about literature. If I'm furious about bland TV, it's because I care passionately about the medium. If I'm blacking out with rage at the pretentiousness of bottom-feeding indie bands, it's becuase I give a shit about music. I care enough to be furious.

On the other hand, it may well just be that I'm bitter. It could be said that life has, in customer service speak, failed to manage my expectations. What exactly do I expect from people? Many people are happy to let their intellectual needs be catered for by the Richard & Judy Book Club - who am I to criticise or deride?

It's a fair point. I wouldn't blast these people to their face. I haven't the right nor the temerity. However, you're in my gaff now. My blog, my rules. Herein you get to peer into the raging storm behind my eyes. The rules of polite social conduct don't apply.

Or maybe I'm just being sarcastic. Maybe I'm being ironic. Who can tell? What do YOU think? Comment below.

The Aesthetics of Loserdom

Reader, something terrible has happened to you. You've just given your life savings to a passing tarmac-ing gang who promptly disappeared. You've signed up for a timeshare in Belarus for six squidillion pounds a year. The local hospital has accidentally removed your arsehole and won't be able to put it right for seven years. You've been swindled by a ten year old scratter pretending to be the gas man. You live in East Hull.

Whatever it is, the local TV news crew is on its way round. They've spotted a perfect method to rile up their viewers and you're going to be the star. Only thing is, when they get there, you'll most likely be over the worst part of your upset. After all, it was almost two months ago, and they took six weeks to reply to your letter. They need to show that you're still in pain every waking minute of the day, still left slack-jawed and dumbfounded by your inexhaustible misfortune. They need to make you look tragic. How can they make you look like a victim for the camera?

Well, in the TV news and current affairs style book, there's one easy way: They're going to have you make a cup of tea. As a concerned reporter tells your pathetic tale of woe, we're going to watch footage of you filling the kettle from the tap. As he explains your decent and trusting nature, you're going to shuffle back to the worktop with kettle and put it on. As he goes over your war service and/or voluntary work, we'll cut to the kettle coming to the boil and turning itself off. As he takes us through the jarring tragedy of whatever befell you, you'll fill your lonely mug. As he tells us about your sleepless nights and panic attacks, you'll slowly and methodically stir your tea. Then you'll shuffle off to your lonely armchair, and set down your tea, and maybe look over a photo of yourself before you were such a fucking loser.

Sorry if I sound harsh, but that's what you'll be if a director ever asks to film you making tea. When you were threatening your wrongdoer that you'd get the press involved, what you didn't realise that it would cost you your self-respect. For in the imagination-free world of TV news, there's no easier way to codify a loser than to show them making tea. If your spouse is making the tea with you, then you'll look like the most pathetic specimens on telly that week. In TV land, you'll have been forgotten in about the same amount of time it takes for the kettle to boil. But your neighbours will have much longer memories...

Don't worry though - it could be worse. If a director ever asks to film you feeding ducks, then you may as well be dead.

Why Read?

* Please note from the get-go that this posting is likely to contain intellectual snobbery and sexism of a grade that may well make you vomit up all your clockwork. Readers of a sensitive disposition would do better to fuck off now. *

Last week, I went for an interview at Borders Books. Yeah, that's right - the bookshop. (As you'll note from the footnote at the end of the last post, I got sacked a couple of weeks ago, but I'll explore that particular piece of outrage-fodder when I'm feeling more sweary.) During the interview, the fella asked me various questions (as interviewers are often wont), but in amongst the usual bullshit about teamwork and time management, he asked a question that unleashed - to our mutual surprise - a moiling pot of rage that caused me to have to change my sitting position excitedly to contain it. He asked me what I thought of Waterstones.

Now let me interject at this point that I used to have a friend that worked at Waterstones a few years ago, and from time to time I'd go and meet her in the pub with her workmates. My rage against Waterstones isn't in any way related to the fact that they were the most pretentious and affected shop assistants in the country, nor was it related to the fact that I had to sit through hours and hours of them trying to remain civil with each other whilst arguing desperately about which of them was cleverest (when we all knew it was me, as I was the only one earning more than minimum wage). No, the pot of rage whose lid the interviewer had so carelessly kicked off was a relatively fresh one.

So what was my problem then? Well, I told him there was something about Waterstones that rubbed me up the wrong way. Only as I elaborated did I begin to realise what it was. I suggested that I found the atmosphere in Waterstones one of Sunday-Telegraph stuffiness, what with the thick red carpet and piped classical music. But this on its own wouldn't bother me especially. I went further. I explained that such an atmosphere seemed to be created to support the notion that reading a book made you part of some sort of elite. I suggested that Waterstones liked to make their customers feel elevated above the plebs just because they were buying a fucking book (which isn't exactly an uncommon marketing strategy), and I found the whole pretence unnecessarily jarring and exclusivist. I felt the need then to finish by opining that Borders, of course, was much more relaxed and inclusive.

A collective sigh of relief went up when I concluded and my face uncontorted. The interviewer and his note-taker may or may not have been aware of the abyss of anger they'd just skirted, but luckily they were spared having me pull them down into it. If I hadn't been so collected, I would have taken them down into the chasm into which we are now about to nosedive.

So what's my problem with people patting themselves on the back for reading? Surely the more people read, the better? Well, you'd think. On the surface this is true. However, scrape away the platitudes and truisms and you'll realise that this is wrong. Dead wrong. Because these days, most books are just ringtones with pages.

Example - the ingredients for a Richard & Judy Bookclub book of the month are as follows: Take a mundane object or profession, add it to an exotic place name, give the author a foreign-sounding name = 1 million plus sales. The following may or may not be genuine books - see if you can tell:

The Bellows-Mender of Tehran by Thebill Isgriti
A Box-Kite Above Belgrade by Lika Pudenda
The Trinidadian Cinema Projectionist's Assistant by Aureola da Silva
The Dog-Botherer of Tibilisi by Tenanz Supa
The Librarian of Pretoria by Castle Greyskull

Did you spot the genuine one? (Answers next time.) And who's reading these criminal wastes of ink? I'll tell you who: women. The pointless flow of words and punctuation amounts to a few hours of nothing but pink noise; a three-hundred-odd page journey into perfume-scented, faux-mystic soap opera. If there's any male other than Richard Madeley that reads this shit, then I shall cut my cock off in disgust.

Men, incidentally, are catered for with 'humour' titles. You know the sort of thing: Doing Some Painfully-Contrived Task Whilst Being Significantly Less Funny Than Cancer by Tony 'Bastard' Hawks, or Is It Just Me Or Is This Book Not Funny In Any Way?, etc., etc.. These are generally books that are funny in the same sort of way that radio comedy is funny (i.e. not at all), but are just as smug and self-satisfied.

But Waterstones like to make their customers think that by buying these disservices to trees, they are undertaking some huge intellectual journey that will enrich their soul and deepen their hearts. Yeah, right. And I just downloaded the Crazy Frog reading TS Eliot. Waterstones can kiss my arse. They can take their classical music and their nose-in-the-air demeanour and their stupid posh customers and their wanky magazine and their staff reviews and their recommendations of the week and fuck right off. Do yourself a favour - next time you buy a book, get it from Amazon. At least the person who fetches it from the giant, dark warehouse is going to have his feet firmly on the ground.

* I think this might be my most offensive posting to date. What do you think? Perhaps you think I haven't gone far enough. Post your comments below.

Time To Get Ill

Oh, hello! How you doing? Sorry I've not posted owt for a while, but I've been really busy. Also, I couldn't be arsed. Nevertheless, I'm here now so you might as well drop the attitude, stop scowling and make yourself comfortable. Okay? Okay.

Reader, I've been ill. No, don't panic - nothing serious, just a two-week cold, a sinus infection, a sore throat and the occasional night-terrors. I'm on the mend now, you'll be glad to hear, but there was a brief spell at the beginning of last week where I suspected I was a goner. I fought back though, and I'm not far off doctors giving me the all-clear. The moaning minnies in the terminal wards could learn a lot from me, I tell thee.

So as you'll see, I've taken my illness with characteristic verve. It'll take more than a cold to take the cut out of my jib! However, one thing I am not prepared to take lying down is that God singled me out for illness in the first place. WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS?!

I can't pretend to lead the life of a saint, but I'm kind to animals, I don't spit on the homeless and if there were more disabled people involved in my life, I'd be sure to treat them peachy, so who the holy fuck does God think he is striking me down with illness and affliction?! If he thinks he's doing a Job on me, he can forget about it - I'm not about to bend over and take it like that fanny in the Old Testament did. If God wants a fight, he can blimming well have one.

So come on, God! What are you waiting for? I'm right here. Follow me in to the toilets if you like - I'll take you anytime, anywhere. Whenver you're ready, beardy.


(Note - in between writing this and remembering to select the 'publish' option, I've been sacked from my job. Full update coming soon, but rest assured that I was in the right. Sort of.)

Putting On The Moves Without Making A Spectacle

Reader, the week before last I went to the opticians for a contact lens fitting. The optician was an attractive young girl, and being an optician was professional, hygienic and clean. We got on in a very friendly and forthright way. Pleasantries became chit-chat, chit-chat became light joshing, and then she stared deep into my eyes and asked me to look up to the ceiling.

A few moments later we were done, and I was outside blinking and all a-flutter. Unless I develop a nasty eye infection (fingers crossed), I'll probably never see her again. But thing is, I should really rather have liked to have 'done' her.

Now, in the land of TV and film, I would have suggested we go on a date, met up, had dinner, had sex, and with lots of hilarious dialogue. But in the real world, if I'd have suggested so much as walking past her in the street, the atmosphere would have turned distinctly sour. This is because, in the real world, you can't just get chatting with virtual strangers of the opposite sex and make such suggestions unless you're a complete wanker.

Why do we have these walls between us? Why this complicated dance of social mores and rules? How on earth would one put the moves on one's optician? It's a real shame. Just think of all the hygienic sex we're missing.

Reflections on Rock (part 2)

Reader, last Friday I went to see The Rakes and I met Les out of Carter USM. Already documented below is my respect for the man, if not his music. Also documented is the fearsomeness of his female company, on which I shall now elaborate.

Reader, she was dressed in a big jumper with dreadlocks in her hair, Doctor Marten boots, and (no doubt) stripey leggings. A flouncy skirt, a handful of piercings - I'm sure you're getting the (dykey) picture. Les had skipped off to empty his stately bladder, and being the well-bred young gadabout that I am, I moved on my conversation to his lass. I don't recall what question I opened with, but it was met with an abrupt (nay, rude) rejoinder and a demand for me to go and smoke elsewhere. Reader, I was floored.

I don't expect rapture from everyone I meet, but I'm afraid I have a mandate on good manners. If she didn't like smoke, then a polite request would have sufficed. If she didn't like me, then some subtle social tactic would have given me the nod to move along. But to treat me with such offhand petulance offended me and insulted me - and it really took me back.

You see, back when in the days when Les was successful, this was how indie girls used to be. They were stroppy, angry, bolshy, and dykey. They wore damp and dirty old clothes and had ugly, unwashed hair. They were often overweight and they didn't wear any make up. They listened to The Levellers, they drank cider and black and they didn't like anyone telling them what to do. They expressed their femininity by exercising their right to be unattractive. They were emancipated from the controlling shackles of the male myth of beauty, and showed it by all dressing in the same vile army surplus uniform.

They had an agenda. They were angry. They had vague but strongly-held beliefs. And by crikey, they were annoying. Indulgent, self-righteous, and outraged, they challenged our assumptions about their status as females by menas of a strange sort of social aversion therapy. Their core beliefs were not easy to ascertain, because this particular breed of female was not capable of arguing without shouting down the less righteous. To them, there was no greater crime than being caught in possession of an unreconstructed belief, and the merest accusation could undermine even the most well thought-out argument. Reason held no sway against the threat of being labelled a 'racist', or a 'sexist', or a 'homophobe', or (gasp!) a 'townie'.

In those days, the battle of the sexes was a bit like Scottish seperatism: one side is conducting a secret cultural war against an aggressive oppressor; the other isn't really bothered either way. Forget reasoned notions of how gender difference is a subtle play of myriad differences between to social-defined poles of identity - all men were cunts, and they were going to fucking pay. As I'm sure you remember, it was unbelievably tiresome.

And yet I was taken crashingly back to such impolite times by Les's angry companion, and it showed me how far we've come. Girls today can go to the gym without being called traitors. They dress better, they smell better and some of them even have better conversational skills.

But not all were willing to change, as we have seen. What happened to history's refugees when the supply of Levellers records and clompy boots dried up? Most were shipped to bypass protest sites around the country, were they can be found to this day, living in caravans, claiming benefits and agitating against the local parish council. Others escaped to academia, where they still draw frightened stares from the fresh-faced first year students. And one or two of the luckiest bagged themselves a genuine indie rock star as a guaranteed protection against the inevitable march of fashion, and as waining but comforting kudos for the dark and lonely years ahead.

Let the lesson for today be this: Never become shackled to a fashion or a harridan.

Now go in peace.

Reflections on Rock (part 1)

Reader, last Friday I went to see the Rakes at the Windmill in Brixton.

Now, I've not really got any strong feelings either way about the Rakes. Don't like 'em, don't hate 'em. To be honest, whilst they were performing, I was too busy getting up to mischief. Heard of a band called The Others? No, frankly neither had I until Friday, but whilst the Rakes were performing their own particular brand of take-it-or-leave-it guitar music, I got chatting to a member of The Others. He is either the person on the left or the person on the right below:












See, one of them is Johnny out The Others, the other is Robert Smith out The Cure, but it's quite a task to work out which is which, so similar are their appearances. You'd think with such an uncanny resemblance between the two, there'd be some element of design on the part of the younger. However, when I approached Johnny to congratulate him on his uncanny simulation of old Bob, he didn't want to know. He flat denied any similarity. In fact, he put on such a performance that you'd think I'd told him he resembled one of The Levellers.

See, Johnny out The Others is a twat. Not just a twat - if there were a competition to find the most utterly ridiculous cunt in London, Jonny could quite fairly fancy his chances. Instead of responding to my gentle joshing with polite good humour, Jonny reacted with adolescent petulance the likes of which I've not seen since secondary school. He was a character study in affected teenage oddness and laboured weirdness, utterly preposterous and cringeworthy in every way. If he'd been fourteen, I would have been willing to let it go, but in the circumstances, I pursued his objections to my observation for a good ten minutes. Eventually he flounced off in a patchouly strop.

Twenty minutes earlier, I'd met Les out of dreary 90's social indie combo Carter USM. Although I wasn't a fan of his music, I said hello and he was utterly charming in response. He was every inch the elder statesman, and only too happy to chat. (His girlfriend, on the other hand, was fearsome, but more on that in part 2). There is certainly a lesson for Jonny to learn from our Les. But then there's a lesson for all of us to learn...

Despite the fact that I've never heard of The Others, I'm told they have a strong following. Just look at some of the quotes - "Britains most worshipped new band"; "transcending the rules to create something extraordinary"; "music that inspires you and can change your life". Pretty strong stuff, eh? Thing is, I've not heard the band, but I'm willing to gamble at least three of my limbs that they produce anodyne, gutless, derivative shite. If I'm wrong, may my credibility desert me. I'm puttting it on the line here - I honestly don't need to listen to this band to write off their music without a second thought.

How can I be so sure? Well I've met the cunt for one. But The Others are simply another in a long line of bands specialising in anodyne, gutless, derivative shite for audiences that demand nothing less. Just who are we letting get ahead here?! What do these people stand for? Why are we giving them our money?! What have they got to say for themselves?!

And more pointedly, what does it say about us? How can we sleep at night knowing that cunts like Jonny are enjoying moderate success? We really should be ashamed of ourselves.