The Other Side of Everything

3. National Identity And Public Ritual

Nations are defined and maintained by their public rituals. On July 3rd 2008, I proposed that the world’s wealthiest nation, the United States of America, initiate a public holiday to be held on July 4th to lift itself out of the gloom of their financially-collapsed country.

Despite the fact that they now have a relatively conscientious leadership with all the added navel-gazing that requires, this display of fireworks, beer drinking, marching bands, macho posturing and unwanted pregnancies proved so successful that a July 4th celebration is to be held again this year.

Well done America.

The third in a series of proposals designed to make all our lives easier, more fulfilling, lovelier journeys.

2. Carry On Swearing.

Freaking, freakin’, frak, frakkin’, feck, feckin’ - all these emasculated, Bowdlerised words mean but one thing: the craven cowardice and hypocrisy of the user.

Fuck is a good, honest word. It has lasted well over a thousand years, and it is rich with usages and subtlety. English is an excellent language, with its core Anglo-Saxon giving it a realism and humanity which the Latin clothing does not hide.

If you don’t want to swear, then you don’t have to. But if you’re going to swear, do it full-heartedly, and mean it. It’s good for your health.

Join the Facebook cause The Campaign for Real Swearing. Why the fuck not?

Workplace profanity boosts morale.

Why Kids Curse

Why Swearing Feels Great

The second in a series of proposals designed to make all our lives easier, more fulfilling, lovelier journeys.

1. The Use of U.

The English language has become the second most spoken in the world because of its flexibility. It absorbs and accomodates, it does not exclude. Nonetheless, efficiencies could be made in spelling, especially where confusions arise. For example the use of “U”. In the UK we spell “neighbour” and in the US the same word drops the “U” to become neighbor.

Many of the words I use are like this - favour, honour, labour. This does not matter until Americans commit atrocities such as referring to the UK Labor Party. An equivalent mis-spelling - calling US party politicians Democats or Emocrats - would produce howls of protest and no doubt alarm music fans and dog-lovers everywhere.

Therefore I propose new spellings for every word which is conflicted in this way, taking the opportunity to reduce letters (dropping the “O”) and shorten words where possible. This will make education simpler as well as making pronunciation easier for non-native speakers.

Neighbour - can now be spelled - NAYBR
Flavour - can now be spelled - FLAVR
Honour - can now be spelled - HONR

The first in a series of proposals designed to make all our lives easier, more fulfilling, lovelier journeys.

The untimely and sudden end of Michael Jackson has sent a shockwave around the planet. In the Amazon, indians are wondering what the hell is this disturbance in the force.

I wonder what percentage of humanity were impacted by this news?

Thus we enter the Post Jackson Age, June 26th, 2009. Michael Jackson’s time of death was 2:26am. My birth date is entirely comprised of twos and sixes so I have an irrational affinity with these numbers.

There have been midsummer parties for thousands of years.

Tonight is the biggest annual party in Europe. 150,00 arrive Glastonbury’s first full night, and the madness ensues.

Even people who aren’t aware of festivals, don’t like music or don’t watch television or the use the internet can go a little crazy at this time of year in the Northern hemisphere, when the sun is high.

I suspect that without watching video evidence via live coverage of the festival, humans can sense these changes in the Force. Large “get out of it” gatherings like Glastonbury festival set off chain reactions of psychic, social similar events, which is felt by populations all the way to the Urals.

I wonder how the celebrating will be tinged with pathos at the artists brutal annihilation by fate. We’re told it was due possibly to an overdose administered by his doctor.

In the midst of life we are in death. In the middle of the summer, a chill, unnerving wind.

Stress has a peculiar way of manifesting in the Whitbread household. No, that is wrong. It actually has several ways of manifesting, depending on the severity and the longevity. I like words ending in “ity” for some reason, there is comfort in my conformity.

So I’ve been over-working, that much is certain, to the point of not taking a holiday in 14 months which is plain silly. I found my brain had turned to rodent-infested pudding

and all my thoughts were the consistency of dough with little nibbly teeth.

Spike Milligan is one of my heroes. Thank God I don’t suffer like he did from chronic manic-depression but then, I was never in a war. He made pioneering surreal radio programmes, and played the trumpet, but when he was ill he became acutely sensitive to noise. Once he was in a sanitorium in Hornsey, screaming every morning because his window was right next to where they emptied the big, clanging industrial bins.

I have suffered from recurring internet obsession since 1994. I’ve worked on balancing this tendency over the years, but, left to my own devices - and I’ll come back to that clever play on worms - I will migrate with ease towards the terminal of light which is the window on my real world, the world of digital fun, where everyone is equal and click click click clever, even after a significant break, like the one I had 13 months ago, when I went to Cyprus for most of the month of April.

I took my Nokia N95 smart-ish phone with me and somehow managed to run up a £350 bill. Most of that was GPS maps and email, but I was very aware that the small, palm-sized screen was replacing the bigger screen.

My “sane” lover and I rationed ourselves to one hour per week in a Paphos internet café, during which time I worked as intensely as I could, pretending that I was uploading photos, but actually, I was nagging a lazy bastard to fix my broken website, whilst he lied about not being able to do it knowing I was an international flight away and couldn’t prove him wrong until I got back.

You see, I was still being obsessive, even when the rest of the holiday was pretty much the mental relaxation it was supposed to be, except when my brain popped a few times, which it did a few times, because of the stress of the preceding months in which I had similarly over worked.

But during the time when I was away, at least I relaxed enough finally to have worked out that what I REALLY WANT TO DO is write musical theatre. I have tunes. I can see pictures. I have a story to tell.

So when I got back, I uploaded my photos to Flickr, and for a while, I didn’t worry as much about the internet as I had done, just got on with work and planned the next phases.

But work being what it is, I then spent most of 2008 and 2009 not really doing  what I want to do. Instead, I was

• doing business with non-internet companies who don’t know shit
• doing business with internet companies who know shit
  
• making internet videos for famous people
• making internet videos for non-famous people
• making music podcasts for a few thousand listeners
• writing songs for a couple of hundred friends.

As 2008 drew to a close, I planned in 2009 to include much more music, and thus I have proceeded. Except, what I am producing is more internet than music, because

the internet is by now the most effective way to present and promote oneself as an independent artist.

Let me just explain that you should spit that line out like the received dollop of non-nutritional wisdom it is.

MySpace pages, Facebook groups, blogs, podcasts are excellent for hobbyists. Most people considering themselves entrepreneurs using these sites need to tag themselves Micawber.

Really good, genuine cultural entrepreneurs, of whom very few exist, are the exceptions which prove the rule. The internet works very well for people like John, Stephen and Lily, who have careers with lots of conventional exposure in “old media” - press, TV, radio, music, film. For the rest of us, internet “activity” simply acts as a palliative, a way to keep the wound open, bleeding a constant draining dribble of futile hope.

Ultimately, unless you invest a huge amount in an internet business which markets in-demand products or services to millions of people, even if you work like a Trojan all the hours Zeus sends, your website is nowt but a pretty electronic business card which might enable you to get a job fixing a printer, or installing Linux on a criminally substandard server.

Whenever I see the BBC’s “Have Your Say” my mind replaces it with “Have Your Pay”. It’s a con, a scam, a plea for people to do their work for them. It’s reductionist. It’s predatory. It’s vampirism. I know the old system has failed, but this new system sucks even worse than the old one for most people, and I hate to use that word “sucks” but there is no better word.

So I am left with:

• insight telling me what I most want to do
• the means apparently at my disposal to do it
• the realisation that the skills I have developed are actually useless for my purposes
• a need to do much less internet so that I can develop the skills I actually require.

What I need to do now is to step away from the internet terminal before it becomes the graveyard of my best ideas, the terminus of all my mental bus routes, the Terminator of my past and my future. This, given my obsession, will be easier said than done, but it’s a worthy challenge.

There are good brain pops, and bad brain pops. Bad ones just reduce the brain to mush, and you take a long time to recover. Burned out. Kaput. Go and get help.

Good ones may wipe out entire ecosystems of ideas, but they produce protean gloop from which new life forms emerge.

I’m going to begin by having a break.

• Barack Obama in Cairo: the speech no other president could make | Jonathan Freedland | Comment is free | The Guardian
  Comment: "..the President's heavy and obvious reliance on the teleprompter, does undermine the heartfelt sentiment of the speech somewhat. Once again an American President demands that the Palestinians renounce violence and presents it as a demand equal to Israel ending the ongoing illegal occupation (he might have mentioned the occupation, he didn't mention it's flagrant illegality) and to DISMANTLE the existing settlements and repatriate the illegal settlers alongside halting new settlement construction.The Palestinians have not chosen violence, they have been forced into it by decades of Zionist policies which have robbed them of their dignity and their homeland and continue to do so. All the cards are in Israel's hands, the decision to renounce violence is simply not a decision at all. Mr. Obama says violence never brings about justice, has he never heard of the Irish resistance to British occupatiion? Resistance isn't a choice or a decision, it is a regrettable duty."
  (tags: Obama speech Egypt muslim world Palestine)