So here is a really cool video from some guy who made a track out of samples he lifted from Alice in Wonderland.
I love this kind of thing. Something about the dark undertones really attracted me to it. We all know well the kind of subcontexts involved in Alice, and growing a tangible element like this from the seeds of psychadelia really speaks to me.
In other news, I shall NOT be wasting my time with the Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon.
Or shall I…..
Sometimes you need to take an objective look at how the world is. Its difficult at the best of times as objectivity can be highly subjective most times, you are seeing things from your point of view and its hard to let that go and drop your prejudices towards any given topic. But sometimes it pays to take a long, hard and often painful look at who people are and what motivates them.
Step back in time.
Its summer time, 2002.
Big Brother is broadcasting its usual fare of voyeuristic car crashism, featuring a fat girl with a fatter mouth who, for some reason, endeared herself to the viewing public by being annoying. People gobbled it up more eagerly than she gobbled the man parts of one of her housemates on live television. She got drunk, fell over, shouted, swore and generally made a rather large tit out of herself and still we laughed, we cried, we nodded at how normal she was and tuned in every night to see normal people doing normal things. We bought the newspapers to see this beacon of mediocrity become animated into a cultural icon through the release of a workout video and a racist tirade.
She then became all that was wrong with society. Mouthy. Drunk. Indebted. Vulgar. Unrefined. The very things that made her dear to everyone were now the things that made her stand out as everything we dared not admit to..
We saw ourselves.
And we didn’t like what we saw.
We came to realise that in putting normality on a pedestal we were faced every day with our own failings. We shunned her. We hated her. We used her as a target against which to pin our self loathing without ever coming to the realisation that it was the very likeness of ourselves that we were drawn to in the first place. Or didn’t we? Maybe that was the very thing that turned the tide in the first place. Maybe, on some deeper level, it was when we became aware that it was ourselves we were looking at did the tide turn. Maybe after we realised what we were looking at did we try to smash the mirror.
When the drunken, mouthy racist in all of us went on show we decided that we didn’t like what we saw and tried to change the channel. But there we were again. On every channel. On every newspaper. In every magazine. We were there. We were drunk. We were shouting. Our relationships were falling apart. We had no money. We had debt. We hated ourselves now that we saw her for what we all saw in ourselves and we couldn’t escape it.
Now she is going to die, and we’ll all be there too.
I’ve been trying to understand what makes people want to watch so closely, and I think I’ve figured it out. I think in seeing her die we can try to fool ourselves into believing we can see everything rotten we saw in us die with her. In some dark part of our souls we want to believe that we can forget about everything she forced us to see in ourselves and once she is gone, we can go back to watching stars fall from grace and forget about it when we change the channel because they are not like us, so we are not like them. Their failings are their own. Not ours.
I’m sure we’ll have a minutes silence when she is gone. But at the back of our minds we will be glad to see the end of a terrible era of introspection and a time in which we were forced to realise that this is what we all are. Mouthy, drunken, indebted, flawed people with a most unhealthy taste for the macabre far beyond that of anything that has walked the earth before us.
Until of course the new queen arrives to become the next cess pit into which we can dump all our failings. Big Brother 2009 is just around the corner.
Line up ye hopefuls. Reality beckons.
The BBC and Sky Television have refused to broadcast a national humanitarian appeal for aid for the people affected by the recent war on Gaza. The children who are left to drink from open sewers. The doctors with no medicine. The men and women who’s homes are now piles of rubble and faces have been burned by the white phosphorus shells. The BBC have cited impartiality issues and Sky had the following to say;
“Our commitment as journalists is to cover all sides of that story with uncompromising objectivity. That is why, after very careful consideration, we have concluded that broadcasting an appeal for Gaza at this time is incompatible with our role in providing balanced and objective reporting of this continuing situation to our audiences.”
So there it is. Feeding the starving and healing the injured are incompatible with balanced reportage.
I’m just off the phone with Sky.
I’ve cancelled my subscription. I’d like to cancel my sub to the beeb but seeming as it comes with the Sky package I wont be watching that either.
Its not much, but there you have it. I wont be complicit in any way.
Looks like it’ll be the pub for the Heineken Cup matches from here on in…
So the 876th annual academy awards are on the way, or so an ad told me last night. Clint Eastwood will be there. Which is nice, considering he’s been at them all since the start. The show will be beamed live to two billion people worldwide and all the stars will be there to humbly accept accolade or graciously accept defeat in whats sure to be a spectacular ballet of organisation, quotation, touching speeches and thrills for the whole of the Hollywood set.
Meanwhile, in the real world, two billion people with no friends will be staying in to look at a big pile of plastic surgery ridden, vacuous, undernourished, undereducated, self important, bloated, ego-maniacal, litigious (oops!) namby pamby people waffle on about how great they all are and give each-other a big pat on the back for essentially achieving nothing bar the helping of said two billion arses in geting fat from sitting on chairs to stare at said plastic surgery ridden, vacuos, undernourished, undereducated, self important, bloated, ego-maniacal, litigious (oops!) namby pamby people. In seriousness, who cares? What do any of these people contribute to your life? Who’s life is actually empty to the extent that they want to know more than you about what award some person they will never meet who lives on the other side of the planet won and what they won it for? And who in their right mind would be tired going into work because they stayed up late to look at this grool? Because that’s exactly what it is. It stops you from being hungry but offers nothing in the way of solid nutrition or anything that could be remotely useful bar the offering of equally useless fashion tips for equally plastic surgery ridden, vacuos, undernourished, undereducated, self important, bloated, ego-maniacal, litigious (oops!) namby pamby people to get their picture taken in at the opening of a fucking envelope in The Clarion. You know who I’m talking about.
I think the whole bruhaha about the Oscars (see what I did with the pic there??) offers us an insightfull peek into modern life and how we have become dependant on the one way transmission of ideas and opinion for the forming of our own opinions and the basis for our lifestyles. Remember when Friends first landed on our shores? Every bird had ‘that’ Rachael hairdo, ‘How you doin’ became a bone fide pick up line, and I’m not even going to start on that whole WASAAAAAAP shite that was hawked into our living-rooms in a beer ad. On the surface it may seem fairly innocent, but in reality we have become a society that doesn’t seem to function independently anymore. We depend on news reporters and (get this) ‘Thought Gurus’ to tell us our opinions and give us our ideas about what it means to be modern or what we should think about the societal whinge du jour, then everyone is telling you what their opinion is. I wonder how many of these people can tell you WHY their opinion is?
It seems the tabloids turned to television just in time to save us from the demise of the Church, but that’s another blog, for another day.
So I ask you to ask yourself… what do you know about the lives of the people in your favourite television program? Now ask yourself, whats your next door neighbours name?
I think my point is clear.
