Know your limits

Oh dear. A royal hot air award to the government's extraodinarily lame 'know your limits' campaign. I'm not against the public health campaigns or even the state trying to nudge people away from dangerous behaviour (though I don't expect any anti-skiing, mountain climbing or rugby playing adverts to be popping up on TV soon...). This, however, is a case study in how to turn your audience off by - variously - patronising them, talking to them in a 'check out the hit parade daddy-o' kind of way, stating the bloody obvious, over-stating the bloody obvious, and showing a total lack of comprehension of what your audience actually do. I won't bang on about specifics (except perhaps the helpful advice that you 'set a drink limit and stick to it' - obviously written by someone who has never actually been to a pub): just go on the not-so-flash flash 'night out' and see what horrors await the fool who buys a round.......

Update
Much more amusing 'dodge the stoners' game from Frank, the government's drug information service. Still probably not going to stop anyone smoking one of those marijuana cigarettes, but I like the 'you are a stoner, the TV is now your master' line.

you poor people

here's the Guardian story I was referring to earlier - Gillian Evans's hilarious article on her encounter with the 'common' folk of Bermondsey. It's gratifying to see that the site has been deluged by outraged and incredulous readers - see here - so I won't bother to add my own criticisms. There's not much need to, anyway - what can you say in response to stuff like this..?

'As time goes on, I begin to lose the polish of my posh accent, dropping consonants, blending and shortening words; my speaking tone gets coarse and louder in raucous moments. I become aware of the charisma of a new language in practice and I realise that, as the way that I speak changes and I stop talking "proper", I am becoming a person of less worth in my own eyes and that paradoxically that is a good thing.'

Somebody feed her a pot noodle! Read the whole thing, and wonder what the editor could have been thinking to let it see publication. Also wonder what kind of academic training you have to go through to observe that 'being common clearly has something to do, then, with economic position and, in particular, the experience of what it is like to be constrained by the limited availability of disposable income'...

Red Armoy

Football chants are really pants / football chants are really pants / they’re really pants / they’re really pants / oh, football chants are really pants!

Went to see Bristol City play Crewe Alexandra yesterday (the glamour, the glamour!). Actually it was a pretty decent game (‘we’ won 2-1), but the best thing was the fantastically unoriginal singing. Bristol play in red, so basically the songs are all Man Utd rip-offs, but - brilliantly - sung with a full throated ooh-arh Brizzle accent. The best one went:

Floying hoy, oh floying hoy
We’ll keep the red flag floying hoy
Oym Bristol City til I doy
We’ll keep the red flag floying hoy!

Top! Lots of ‘Red armoy! Red armoy!’ as well. And, of course, the hilariously unconvincing ‘And it’s Bristol City. Bristol City FC. They’re by far the greatest team the world have ever seen.’ It’s always great to hear the fans of basically ropey sides try to sing that one without the volume dropping in a kind of red-faced ‘okay, this bit REALLY isn’t true’ way when they get to the second bit.

At the other end of the ground, the Crewe fans hardly sang at all, but when they did they sang Blue Moon. Thieves!

Clearly footie fans just don’t have the time to come up with anything truly inspired. That, I discovered few years ago, has to be left to cricket fans (all that woozy lounging around watching tiny figures in the distance is good for something after all). At Old Trafford watching Yorkshire v Lancashire, the local fans spent at least two hours singing this little haiku-ish gem:

Go down road
Cash Giro
Go down pub get plastered
Go back home
Beat up wife
I’m a Yorkshire Bastard!

To that tune which er, George Jones used for Take Me Back to Reno (sorry that probably doesn’t help..). Anyway, slanderous sentiments aside, you have to admit it beats ‘Come - on - you … Crewe Alexandra!’

dont mention the

Veil. I promised myself I'd pay little attention to this media fad, since it seemed quite obviously to be a) a naked bid for the deputy PM position on Straw's part, and b) a cynical attempt on the press's part to appear to be dealing with global issues rather than actually try to understand the nature of the conflicts going on around the world - giving us only the usual disputes over death tolls, military unpreparedness, political fallout in the US, and very little on the way that the crises are understood - politically and intellectually - in the Middle East. (Somebody point me out the good stuff!) But I've been driven out of my silence by this priceless letter in today's Guardian - a measure of the high level of discussion throughout:

• When I first read Jack Straw's comments, I felt ambivalent. Then it all became clear. I would no more ask a woman to take off her veil than I would to take off her knickers. If its presence made me feel uncomfortable, I would regard this as my problem, not hers.

Er, so its like wearing underwear on your head? Or the thought that some women wear knickers makes you feel uncomfortable? Or did you just mishear the word 'niqab'?

The real issue here (ha! they all start like that), is what we think the public sphere should look like, and the extent to which we have an image of face-to-face relations in our head when we speak in a self-congratulatory manner of our 'core democratic values'. Clearly the veil poses a threat to a state that has grown increasingly dependent on policing to maintain social cohesion (muslim woman as hoodie), but I'd suggest that it also reveals how dependent we are on visibility for the way that we define liberal values like tolerance of difference, etc. Does the nightmare of 'parallel communties' necessarily follow from an inability to look each other in the face? Are there other forms of contact and exchange that work equally well as forms of public participation? (and does democracy really happen in an MP's surgery..?)

actually the point of this was going to be that the Guardian has been infiltrated by a bunch of kids who are allowing this kind of nonsense into publication for a laugh - there can't be any other explanation. M-A found a similar case the other day - an article by a woman who was amazed at her ability to live alongside common people; I'll dig that out tomorrow.

Hot air (Brian)

At last: a new hot air award. This one goes to John Terry for his comments following another dismal performance by England. Here's how it went:

Garth Crooks: "So John. England are no longer top of the group."

Actually that was a disappointing question. The old Garth would have said something more like: "So. John. There's a group. It's called Group E. Okay: it's one of many groups. And there are teams in all the groups around it. But it's the group England need to top to be sure of qualification for the next European Championships. Currently, England no longer top that Group. Group E. What. Do you think England need to do. About that. John?'

Er, anyway. Garth points out to Terry that England aren't top of Group E. Terry's response?

"That's right. We deserve to be at the top..."

Hold it right there. No - you don't "deserve" to be at the top, just like you didn't derserve to get past the group stages at the world cup. Unless the European Championships is now a cup awarded to the biggest bunch of over-paid, over-rated preening tossers on the continent, the current England team don't deserve to be anywhere. They were crap in Germany, and they're crap now. Hot air, John, at the end of the day..

moi, nonplussed

Well, I've got nothing much to post - except that I've just reached the 'halfway to 70' mark. Ouch! So instead, here's a rare sighting of Serge Gainsbourg in a Toxteth flat...

Jesus saves, Visa pays

Continuing the church-related theme, today's tenuous link from me is in the form of another-strange-but-true news story concerning Marty Baker, a pastor in the southern state of Georgia, who has come up with a divine idea to raise money for the Lord--ATMs, or Giving Kiosks, that relieve worshippers of their collection contributions with the swipe of a credit card.
The kiosks have started with his Protestant congregation, Stevens Creek Community Church, and are beginning to pop up in other churches across the country eager to roll with the high-tech times.
"You see, our culture lives with a debit card in their hand and so when they come into our church we need to help them and provide them with the convenience so that they can serve the Lord," Baker was reported as saying.
The first Giving Kiosk was used at Stevens Creek in March 2005 and took in $100,000 in donations that year. Two other machines have since been added in the church lobby. Baker added that churches uncomfortable with the idea of followers using their credit card in the name of God and possibly going into debt could opt for a machine that only accepts debit cards.
Which begs the question, how much credit can one get for serving the Lord?
Hallelujah.

bombed-out church

It was open after all, so I've had to change my interpretation of this work (previously 'elaborate foregrounding of the relation between urban intervention and health and safety laws'). Back to my previous gripe, which is that this otherwise beautiful piece (Matej Vogrincic's Untitled) is not so much 'for the people', whatever that may mean, but for the council, and helps to legitimate the imperatives of regeneration while it gives us something nice to look at.

Yes - what happened to the trees! I always loved this church because its overgrown state was in the process of making it a double memorial - not just to the destruction of the war but to the dereliction of the eighties and nineties, which is fast becoming a faded memory in this part of the city. Now the wood chippings replace the greenery sprouting up inside, and they'll be what we're left with after the art party people take their boats away, and it'll look too bare, and demand to be filled by something else, and then they'll fit those blue LED floor lights and someone will propose that it become a bar...

oh - and another use for your hot-air awards, James -

Reich .. Neich

Just back from a Steve Reich fest at St George’s Hall – Triple Quartet, Different Trains, Duet and a premiere of a piece by a British composer called James Barrett. Not quite sure what to make of it all. The gimmick technique used in all the Reich pieces was that the live quartet was accompanied by two recorded quartets all playing simultaneously; the effect being a kind of stringy wall of sound. The only problem was that after an hour of multi-layered melodic themes, faintly urgent two-beat rhythms and big ‘ta-da’ chord changes it all started to sound a bit like an elaborately orchestrated meditation on ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us’ by Sparks. Nothing wrong with that, of course; I just wasn’t sure if it was a good or a bad thing musicologically, like. Different Trains was based on recorded interviews by a guy who worked on the New York to LA train in the 1940s, Reich's old nanny and three holocaust survivors. Snatches of their conversation were sampled, transcribed and used as the basis for the music. However, you couldn't actually hear the words that were sampled - which was either intentional (which was interesting, but problematic in that Reich, in effect, colonised the words of the speakers for his own musical pruposes), or it was because the sound system was buggered. I couldn't tell. It had me tappin' my toes and thinking 'ah, that's interesting' a lot, but not really contemplating distance, loss, memory etc. - which is what I think I was meant to be doing. Overall it was, well, Nice – not Fast Show "Nishe!" – just Nice. Which was … nice.

Far more important news, however. I hear that clever sod Dyson has come up with a revolutionary new hand dryer. Damn his hygienic eyes. My hobby horse may be about to go up in a superfast jet of heated air!

newbie

Big welcome to Rowan, who's just signed up as our first new member! (applause). Rowan (reading off a card), you're an East Ender, keen on grime and drum and bass, church architecture, and Antonio Negri! That's fantastic (more applause)

(You'll see I bigged you up as an authority on new (Nu?) Goth trends, hence Rob's post. Don't feel that's all we've invited you on for, though...)

In the meantime, check out this campaign advert for Republican candidate Vernon Robinson for the upcoming Congressional elections - forget decent haircuts, this is what we want over here to spice up politics: "Brad Miller even spent your tax dollars to pay teenage girls to watch pornographic movies with probes connected to their genitalia. Brad Miller pays for sex, but not for body armor for our troops..." Tell it like it is, Vern! (Here's a link pointing out exactly where the lies are. All of this from plastic - top news-sourcing website.)

Hats off to goth

Not really, but I just fancied putting in a convoluted link to the hair theme earlier raised, partly to welcome any new invitees and encourage a goth rant posting and partly to see if this raised any more asinine comments about individual preference based on hair-styles, or even hair-contents...

N(h)ot air

What is the Arnolfini coming to? I went along to the new exhibition of stuff by Albert Oehlen today confident that I would return with a sure 'hot air award' winner somewhere in the instruction manual that went with the exhibition. Since the re-opening earlier in the year, they have never failed to brighten up some truly apalling exhibitions with fantastically pretentious 'straight-out-of-St Martins' explanatory notes. Not so today, sadly (although the Saatchi Gallery do a reasonable job with their 'this is what Albert Oehlen's pictures mean, okay' blurbs). The pictures were alright - a few sub-Richter bits of monochrome abstract expressionism and a load of highly pixellated screen-prints that looked like De Kooning let loose on a Commodore 64, and some collages. Which were poo. Disappointingly, the leaflet that accompanied the exhibition did its best to explain things as clearly as it could - Oehlen, apparently 'aims to demistify the painterly gestures ofmodern art by focussing on the process of painting rather than ideas of personal expression or formal presentation'. Nothing new there then. It continued 'For him, "a mess is a mess"'; which my philisitine friend suggested was a fair summing up.

Left with no obvious source of rank pomposity for me to make a cheap gag out of (and upload another of my hand dryers in honour of - I've got to do something with them), I was left with no option but to photograph the door to the Arnolfini bar. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to capture it in its full wankish glory, but a bit of random editing doesn't, I find, make the text any more or less comprehensible. I will give you the first line though: 'Concept Corner [for that is the name of the bar]. A high energy performance bar [heh heh!]. A workshop, a pose, a prediction, a position.' You can read the rest for yourself...