Tuesday 20 November 2007

Wonders of Nature (Worm Sex, Slug Sex)

From Engels On The Family:

"If strict monogamy is the height of virtue, then the palm must go to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female organs in each of its 50-200 proglottides, or sections, and spends its whole life copulating in all its sections with itself."

(In your stomach I presume).

Amazingly beautiful grossness:


Friday 16 November 2007

I'm Not Your Customer

I find the training of staff to refer to the users of public and government services as 'customers' increasingly disconcerting. It happened to me most recently at the job centre when, trying to explain that it would have been useful for someone to tell me that I had to file my reimbursement claims before travel when informing me of the scheme, I was curtly told that "the onus is on the customer to find out." In what sense am I a customer of the job centre? If so then they are certainly failing in their 'customer service' (which presumably is the idea in at least some of these cases; 'we treat and value people as though they had money to spend with us' etc.) by apparently not providing any. If I was a real customer, then I would have the choice to take my 'business' elsewhere, but I don't. I have no choice but to deal with these petty bureaucrat assholes. They don't respect us precisely because for this dependence.

A job that I applied for recently (and didn't get) with a company with a large proportion of government welfare-to-work scheme contracts also referred to those that they helped into work as their 'customers'.* Well yes, these companies do receive disgracefully large sums of money from the government for placing these people in jobs. But the 'customers' themselves aren't paying. They are not choosing to enter into any economic contracts. Tagging people under the label of 'customers' places them involuntarily into an economy of exchange and in doing so undermines the seeming human motivation within the role of the advisor of helping people out.

The same goes for the supporters of charities. We do not buy your services. A charitable donation is precisely that. "Q: If I sponsor a child, what will I get in return?" asks an ActionAid ad. Is this really a question that needs to be asked? Are people really only buying bi-annual letters and a sense of their own morality? Conversely I seem to remember being instructed once in one of my waitressing jobs always to refer to customers as 'clients' as this term seems to make more discrete the cash-for-services implication (which is of course exactly what dining out in a restaurant is). I suppose that the seeping of business-speak into every aspect of our lives is just symptomatic of the commercialisation of everything in general. But I can't help but feel that this use of 'customer' is not so innocuous as to be just a reflection a business-based society: it is prescriptive; it alters the way in which we relate to one another, specifically it determines the nature of our human relations as one of economic exchange and in doing so subtly precludes our ability and desire to just to help one another out. Which perhaps goes some way in explaining the unhelpfulness of the job centre staff?

* An article on indymedia a couple of days ago revealing the Christian foundations and ethos of one such organisation (at least not a private company this time) 'Working Links' (from whom I also got rejected) opened my eyes to the ideologies behind these schemes. I realise now that going on about an understanding of social barriers and holistic approaches in my cover letters wasn't going to get me any interviews. According to an advertisement on Reed, welfare-to-work is one of the fastest growing sectors of graduate employment. It seems to me that money would be far better spent training those employed by the government to actually help people who want it into work that has some meaning for them and that they might stick to rather than bullying them into the first minimum wage job that comes along, instead of handing out lucrative contracts to private businesses.

Wednesday 14 November 2007

The Statue at St Pancras

I paid the new station a passing curiousity visit today. It was all very impressive and generally quite pleasant (ignoring the crowds milling about the champagne bar). The statue, however, is a hideous abomination. Called 'The Meeting Place' and also widely referred to as 'the lovers', allegedly "reflect(ing) the romance that train travel used to have" (sculptor - Paul Day). The heartache of long journeys, desperate departures and ecstatic arrivals? I failed to find any romance whatsoever in its ugly towering form. His posture is overbearingly coercive, his oversize hands groping at her flesh through conspiratorially compliant layers, the pressure of his fingertips leaving dimples in her clothes, pushing and directing her with his knee. Hers is sickeningly sincere. The shape of the 'embrace' is determined by tensions; they touch at the hips and at the forehead, his bearing down on hers and hers rising unnaturally up into his. Her calves and feet are monstrously proportioned, rising up from eye-level through horrible skewed perspectives, her left leg slightly open, inviting you to look up her skirt from beneath. The creases in her skirt around her huge flat jutting bumcheeks demonstrate the force of her pelvic thrust; his is attested to by the way the fabric of his suit seems to bunch up into his ass-crack. His suit and leather backpack combination (leaving both hands free for the grasping?) is inexplicably comical and repulsive, whilst her lack of luggage belies her seeming business attire. If I saw this particular couple indulging in this particular unsightly embrace on the platform edge I would look away in disgust.

Tuesday 13 November 2007

Polar Bear @ The Stables

Well I was going to use this post today as a space of catharsis to vent my inutterable fury at the absolute blind incompetence and arrogant pomposity of those cretinous bureaucrats at the job centre, which, given that as soon as I think about it I become consumed with outrage, could only have resulted in long inarticulate ramblings with the words ' fucking twats' interspersed at frequent intervals. But since then, two nice things have happened to me. First, a lovely young man at the bank (he was probably new) gave me an extension to my overdraft with Minimal Fuss. I just went in and asked for some money and he gave it to me. I got the bus home instead of having to walk in the freezing rain. Then tonight, by way of celebration, I went to The Stables MK, where I haven't been for a very long time, to go and watch Polar Bear. Who were quite wonderful. So I have now pocketed my rage and can instead write about the gig.

Despite the relative emptiness of the tiered auditorium (anything to do with the £15 ticket price I wonder?), a common air of unpretentious appreciation managed to join the crowd across all the empty seats to give the gig a good sense of intimacy. They started off quietly, with several more ambient numbers, blending quite beautiful fluid saxophone melodies with soft-spoken melancholy bass lines, underpinned by a depth of assorted noises, echoes and intensifying resonances coming from Leafcutter John's laptop and other surrounding instruments, including a howling cymbal channeled through the coaxing threads of a violin bow. As the pace started to pick up, proceedings were kept laid back by the soothing voice of the quite lovely and strikingly hirsute Seb Rochford, linking the set together with clearly entirely unpremeditated explanations of songs. The second half (a gig with an interval!) was altogether a little more hectic, with the chaos pad whipped out in the corner. Obviously the cue for someone up in the lighting department to start swirling the spotlights around excitedly around as though someone might mistake them for strobes. At times the artifice of the noise did seem a little mismatched with the unembellished raw chaos of the other instrumentation, particularly when it went all out on the final enlivening 'King of Aberdeen', although elsewhere sampled loops and feedback echoes added a touch of brilliant madness to tortured saxophone solos and shadowy bass lines. The polite persistence of the crowd's encore request seemed to encapsulate the demure enthusisam of the occasion, and the upbeat eccentricites of 'Beartown' left everyone feeling happliy worn out.

Monday 12 November 2007

I Knew All That Reading Dictionaries Would Come In Useful One Day


This is my new favourite game.
I like it even better than Countdown.
Especially now that its hosted by Des O'Connor.
I suppose I haven't sold it very well.

Wednesday 24 October 2007

Frameworks of Freedom

Thank goodness it looks as though the present media brouhaha concerning the review of the UK abortion laws (specifically, the possible reduction of the cut-off date from 24 to 20 weeks) is going to come to nothing. It has been utterly dismaying to witness a gathering storm of public righteous indignance being ruthlessly aggravated by a manipulative media, more intent on stirring up easy emotions than portraying a fair-sided debate. Thus a public opinion poll, cited (and possibly conducted) by GMTV's 'This Morning' this morning, put those in favour of a bringing forward of the cut-off date at an immense 95% - which would be a conclusive outcome for any issue for which public opinion had any real consequence. This figure is the inevitable result of the absolute irresponsibility with which the recent lifelike 3-D scans of foetuses (not "babies" - as the developer of this technology frequently said - the lax use of misleading language equally as irresponsible) in the womb have been cynically (mis-)used to incite natural human emotions and then harness them for the support of essentially unrelated politically dogmatic points of view (none moreso than in the deplorably unbalanced and cynically timed 'Dispatches' documentary last week, which also showed footage of abortions and aborted foetuses). As has been pointed out by many within the debate, the pictures add nothing to what we knew before. They are unscientific, unpolitical, inconclusive, and irrelevant to and obstructive of meaningful, measured debate. A picture speaks a thousand words. A moving 3-D picture of a baby conquers the possibility of discussion - of unprejudiced reasoned thought - in advance. Thankfully, despite all the shock-publicity, this is, and never should be, a matter for the general public to decide. It concerns only an extremely small number of extremely vulnerable women - whom the law must support and protect. The task of the legal system, as a system, is to accommodate, not to exclude and inhibit. Such devastating choices must be made within its bounds, not precluded by it.

Tuesday 23 October 2007

Haven't You Got Anything Useful To Do?

A little comment in a paper that I picked up yesterday ridiculed the redundancy of a new report disclosing the unshocking-by-virtue-of-its-patent-obviousness news that UK students drink too much. Or rather inadvertently revealing, in the writer's opinion, the shocking news that today's students drink far too little at only a few units over the recommended weekly allowance. I disagree with the attribution of the useless-investigation-into-the-unremarkable award to this study though - a couple of weeks ago I found a whole centrepage spread (one part of a serialisation I think) in the Mail revealing cocaine use at Boujis nightclub. Following a lengthy undercover investigation by the reporter herself:

"Revealed: The Royals' favourite nightclubs and a culture of rampant drug abuse."

Obviously she must have realised that the article was wholly un-newsworthy and that this was best disguised by using overblown investigative journalism cliches to rouse the geriatric right-wing readership into automatic grumbles about moral decline. The opening line:

"At a darkened London nightclub at 2am on a Wednesday morning, a crowd of twenty-something partygoers are dancing with utter abandon to the thumping beat of a fashionable rap song."

Seriously, that's actually what it said.

Monday 22 October 2007

Desperate Brew

I have to say that I am very much enjoying this decaf tea that I got from the British Heart Foundation stand at the charity fair. I can drink endless cups in quick succession without feeling jittery (although it doesn't do much for the problem of needing a piss every 5 minutes). I can take a cup up to bed with me if I wish. Another lonely last bastion of my misguided sense of personal integrity readily brought down by minute and insignificant new creeping pleasures.

Thursday 18 October 2007

Mastodon are Scary

“There was definitely no selling out whatsoever.” Troy Sanders told an Illinois magazine after signing to Epic. Today I received the following blog post on Myspace:

"Exclusive Mastodon Halloween Merch Now Available!"

Awesome. These T-shirts are both glow-in-the-dark... That's gonna be even more impressive in the crowd at Wembley Stadium 5 years down the line than a battered gig shirt from 1995. By far the best rock t-shirts since Pelican's gold-foil Rose Nylund design earlier this year. Available from their website... make sure you order yours in time for Hallowe'en. Definitely a more stylish costume than this incredible abomination and this strange Fork costume.

Wednesday 17 October 2007

Dubious Science

The front page of The Independent today reports the outrage at Nobel (although its controversial) scientist James Watson's outrageously racist assertions that blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites. And that (I'm paraphrasing) our social policies are all erroneously constructed and bound to fall short in their non-reflection of this fact. Its always a bit shocking when an academic of respected standing comes out with this sort of thing. Although its not entirely rare. I remember similar outrage at my uni last year when a member of the psychology dept (Dr. Philippe Rushton) came out with some similiar crap on gender - he was already well known in the controversial scientific studies stakes for having reached the same conclusions as Watson via psychological methods... something about it being a trade-off between brain size and penis size. Watson's new outburst comes not to announce the results of any fresh scientific evidence but rather the release of his new book. In which, as quoted in the Independent, he writes: "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically." Leaving aside the complex problematics of the term 'intellectual capacities', and the problems of drawing such implications from whether or not there is 'firm reason to anticipate' anything, yes of course there is biological difference between races of people that evolved apart. Strikes me though that all the responses which try to rubbish the possibility of scientifically 'proven' racial difference in such areas miss the key point - which is that, on Watson's own terms, this is totally irrelevant. If we are talking on a social level then we are talking about human beings in social terms - as members of society, as citizens. This is the framework within which the term 'intellectual capacities' gains its meaning. To talk about genetic difference of races in such terms has no valuable meaning - that concerns human beings as a species, as animals. If we are to credit human beings with human intelligence - with the ability to exist as part of a society, with the power of choice - then we are no longer talking of humans in animal terms. They are two incommensurate perspectives. Only by considering human beings from the first perspective can you have compassion, morality etc. etc. ... can you draw conclusions about the structure of society. Probably all best just ignored I think. Although I imagine that with regard to his imminent UK lecture tour the opposite will now be true.

Tuesday 16 October 2007

Bit of 'Tache and Tickle

Oh no. I appreciate that this mid-life-crisis-as-a-new-musical-direction thing had the double advantage of providing a viable coping mechanism for both the music and the ego, but I feel that this is just going too far. I'm sure if this photo was just a little more frontal we'd see some clumps of hair poking out of that shirt. How am I to maintain a sensible zero-tolerance stance on moustaches when even my long-time heroes are indulging in such revolting frivolity? Is all the world against me here? This has gone way beyond ridiculous hipsters trying to outdo each other in their poorly understood sense of irony. There's no winks or half-smiles left in it any more, irony is never so ubiquitous. Its gotten serious. Serious enough to constitute a viable image-reinvention choice for an aging Master of Aesthetics - desperate salvation through sleaze. What was wrong with just being suave?

Monday 15 October 2007

Suits & Sweets

This weekend I went to two job fairs in London - one for the charity and not-for-profit sector and the other one for graduates. Neither of them were particularly useful - the charity one had a bunch of organisations that I’d love to work for but who wouldn’t have me for my lack of experience and the grad one had a bunch of companies that would have tried to lure me into their offices with a trail of free sweets if they could have done so but all of whom there’s no way in hell I’d ever dream of pledging my services (and probably my soul) to. It struck me as a pretty sorry state of affairs that as a graduate you have to fight hard against the current not to just be channelled into dedicating yourself to the forces of evil for the indefinite future. Which likely means being unemployed. Surely certain organisations are kicking themselves in the foot by letting all the smartest/most skilled of the new generations go to work for the corporations that they are constantly pitting themselves against? For example, I attended the London demo in solidarity with the Burmese protests last weekend. Probably about half of the placards being waved about had Amnesty’s sign on them, a lot of them were protesting the continued presence of foreign business in Burma, especially Total Oil. Jobs with Amnesty are nigh on impossible for anyone of my lowly unworldly graduate stature. There were several global oil companies at the grad fair. It took several minutes of listening to one grey-faced, grey-suited twenty-something rep whose stall was declaring amazing travel opportunities before I managed to ascertain what it was that the company actually did - working with the governments (or dictatorships) of politically and economically unstable countries to promote them as attractive investment opportunities to foreign business. I politely expressed my disinterest and went to find some free humbugs to quell my rage. Something’s very skewed here. And I still have no job.

Monday 8 October 2007

Who's the White Public Dick That's a Voice for all the Racist Pricks?

I was disturbed and dismayed today walking past an ad tied to a lamp-post on campus for the university caving club. "Fancy a shaft?" it snickered. But then I cheered up instantaneously as I was reminded of ill-conceived and short-lived Robert Kilroy-Silk gameshow 'Shafted' where seemingly unsuspecting contestants decided whether or not they wanted to shaft each other. In fact, I think I gave a little chuckle as I was walking along...



I guess that it was supposed to be his comeback after everyone realised that his talkshow was a load of bollocks...



And then he went crazy...



And then he was promoted to leader of the UK Independent Party.

Sunday 7 October 2007

'Onslaught' Ad

The New Dove advert, if lacking some of the interest and incredibility of the last one, is brilliantly clear and forceful in its representation of the extreme vulnerability of young girls in the ubiquitous media face of the beauty industry. Of course, the irony of an advert condemning the violence of a culture of relentless advertising is immediately patent and rather unnerving (an advert turning on advertising in order to advertise, sort of like some fucked-up all-encompassing double denouement), despite the seeming side-stage position taken by the product to the social good of their 'campaign for real beauty' (if momentarily distracted, a read of the ad company's self-congratulations, or the fact that Dove's parent company is Unilever, can serve to remind). But then as such it has an inside position from which to communicate this important message unattainable to any other similar campaigns. This trend (Dove's use of 'real people' has been called the advertising phenomenon of the year') could not be self-sustaining within the world of beauty product advertising. Hopefully it might act as a catalyst for this sort of concern to gain high-profile media coverage outside of the advertising industry.



Saturday 6 October 2007

Napalm Death Consigned to the Dustbin of History

So apparently Telegraph readers* don't feel no love for Napalm Death no more. Source: Telegraph Twat Craig Brown's column on the unresolved rivalry between housewive's favourite Tony Blackburn and the late, great John Peel, as detailed in Blackburn's two autobiographies ('Tony Blackburn: The Living Legend' and 'Poptastic! My Life in Radio'), of which Brown professes to have read both. A fraud and merciless opportunist is the accusation levelled at the dead John Peel by the unfortunately still alive Tony Blackburn, who alleges that John Peel never actually liked any of the terrible tuneless crap that he played on his shows, but thought he could gain a following with it nonetheless. But scandalous accusations aside (given that no one who matters is ever going to read them), Brown sides with Blackburn as likely to survive Peel's inevitable historical obsolescence on the basis that only "a catchy tune and a simple lyric" will truly pass the test of time. Drawing from the bands listed in each of their autobiographies, he reasons: "Comparing these lists it seems inarguable that posterity will crown Tony Blackburn the surprising victor. Groups such as The Supremes and The Temptations who were scorned by Peelite hippies as "commercial rubbish" in the Sixties are still played by us all, whereas Napalm Death and Captain Beefheart lie untouched in old cardboard boxes at the back of the cupboard beneath the stairs."

*Old people who spray spit at you when they talk (most likely about the societal menace of 'hoodies' and immigration) - and me, when they're free in coffee shops.