Sometimes I burn a CD for Olly, my eight year-old, to listen to in bed if he can’t sleep. Couple of nights ago he asked me to choose some tracks for him but specified, firmly, “no old men with guitars and no yodelling“. How’s that for an eight-word summary of my musical taste?
Unhelpful message
There were 11 weekly women’s magazines on the shelves in our local supermarket this afternoon. Take a look at these pics and see if you can find the one that doesn’t have a feature about a celebrity eating disorder or a great new diet or a dieting disaster (clue: there isn’t one).
Celebrity democracy
We make a deal with celebrities. We provide them with a good living (often an insanely lavish living) and the proper measure of adoration and they promise to lead their lives like Roman Emperors or Mediaeval Popes. They promise beauty, grace and eloquence but also decadence, arrogance and self-hate. They make a very public gift to us of their poor judgement, their indiscretion and their immaturity. And we love it. We soak it up. Celebrities act out the lives we don’t dare live. They make lifelong the infantile fantasies and unreasonable demands that the rest of us set aside as adolescents. And it fucks them up. And we love that too.
But we’re unforgiving. So when our celebrities do what the deal ultimately requires of them and flip out or get busted or lose it over a pair of underpants on a reality TV show we turn on them sharply, revoke the terms of the deal and dump them in the metaphorical gutter. In the demented hyperdemocracy of reality TV, of course, we can act on our disappointment. We can translate our momentary disillusion into a direct statement of our displeasure (at a cost of 25p plus standard network rates: ask bill-payer’s permission) and vote them out. It’s instant retribution, a kind of premium rate climate of revenge. It can’t possibly do us any good and, as a model for the democratic process, it’s rubbish. It’s about instant judgments, brutal summary action and short-term, memoryless culture. If that’s what comes after slow, increasingly irrelevant representative democracy then you can keep it.
Xmas presents we liked 1: Carl Hiaasen’s Flush
Easing myself back into blogging in ’07 with some reviews of the best Xmas toys and books and stuff (maybe some of the total rubbish too – one of my most popular entries ever is this Rainbow Art slating from a couple of years ago).
Hiaasen is a slick, funny thriller writer – one of the elite of sophisticated American thriller writers who get good reviews in the broadsheets and sell by the wheelbarrow-load in supermarkets too. His kids’ books (this is his second) are brilliant. Now that it’s OK for serious writers to knock out children’s books (see Elmore Leonard’s equally great Coyote’s In The House – the Harry Potter effect, I guess) we’re going to see lots more of these crossover works from established adult auhors.
This one is a fast and funny crime thriller with a green theme (sewage, greed, the everglades) and has the usual mix of Hiaasen types: the stoical hero, the wise rogue, the venal capitalist and assorted meatheads, innocents and sidekicks. The principal characters here, though, are kids and the environmental theme is one they easily connect with. I’m reading Flush to my seven year-old girl and eight year-old boy and it’s a real pleasure to read something that’s sharp and grown-up while still within their range.
I usually stop at one chapter per night but the kids are finding it easy to push me to read another with this one. It’s also really interesting to learn that a writer can paint a very convincing, quite dark and urban canvas without the usual cast of prostitutes, drug dealers and rapists. The wild side, here, is limited to booze and tattoos and I haven’t found myself explaining any dubious practices to the kids. The best book we’ve read together since, well, probably since the last Hiaasen: Hoot (which also has a green theme – endangered owls and greedy property developers).
Something nice for the new year
Fission is a really gorgeous, simple audio editing application for chopping up, fading and trimming audio files (like when you’re turning your record collection into MP3s and recording podcasts, for instance). Beautifully designed and does all the niggly things I’ve been trying to persuade other more complicated apps to do for ages. A proper software treat (cheaper if you’ve also got Audio Hijack Pro, an equally brilliant app for nicking RealAudio streams). OS X Only.
Xmas flickr
Bollocks. I have no idea how to mark Xmas these days. Maybe I’ll just link to all these photos of Xmas dinner from flickr.
Meanwhile…
…in an anonymous office park somewhere in the South East, young people – the brighest of their generation – confidently pilot the nation into an uncertain future…
What I don’t understand (not being a gamer) is how come it’s taken so long for the Wii‘s kind of motion/orientation stuff to show up in consumer consoles. These things have been integral parts of every VR rig since about 1985 as far as I can tell and must certainly be ¢10 components by now (what were those things called? Those little things that used to cost millions that they put inside VR gear to detect orientation? Began with a ‘p’ I think. God I’m getting old).
Update: I remembered! ‘Polhemus‘. Hah!
Palestinian? No.
I was fascinated and encouraged to read the phrase ‘Palestinian Produce’ on this pack of strawberries from the farm shop up the road but then a commenter on my flickr stream told me that the brand name Coral belongs to Israeli exporter Agrexco and that these strawberries, if they come from Palestine at all, probably come from an illegal Israeli settlement in the Jordan Valley.
So now I’m less enthusiastic about them, since they’re most likely grown on expropriated land using stolen water and the profit is returned to an Israeli comany’s bank account. So, with the help of the Internet, a product pack reveals something interesting about the dynamics of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
A page about Agrexco from a site campaigning for a boycott of Israeli produce. A report about the economic effects of the occupation (and the fence) from War on Want.
Capitalism’s dreadnought
Walking the aisles of a big branch of Toys R Us at Xmas is like being in the engine room of a battleship at speed. It’s not pretty but everything is in its place and the bloody thing works. You can practically hear the purposeful thrum of capitalism in action. The tills ping and the point of sale demos hiss steam. Stokers replenish shelves with practiced grace. I think that’s enough naval analogies for now.
Anyway, the place is a machine. This is what it must have been like for Friederich Engels to walk the mill floors of nineteenth Century Manchester. There’s a mix of dread and awe. These hyper-efficient sheds are probably the apogee of the industrial model of retail commerce that he saw being born. We’ll probably never get any better at wrangling the shiny product of a 10,000 mile supply chain into the boot of a Ford Fiesta by the North Circular.
For box shifters like Toys R Us margins are a vanishing memory and competition from lower-cost channels is corrosive and unremitting (I’m thinking U-Boats). Store closures, mergers and… er… sinkings are speeding up. Everything rests on the December numbers. The prospect of a bad Xmas in a big outlet must be enough to make a store manager weep quietly into her steaming mug of Bovril (as she paces the bridge in the half light of a steely North Atlantic dawn, probably – sorry).
It had to be King of something didn’t it?
Can’t tell you now much it cheers me up to learn that the man behind King of Shaves, my favourite shaving brand, is actually called King. I suppose whatever business he’d got into it would have wound up being ‘King of…’. King of Lawnmowers, King of Cheese, King of Pants…