Le Flâneur

What’s happenin’?  Lamentably I still have no job which could jeopardise my plans for the summer if this situation is not turned around soon.  But today is a bank holiday so there’s not a huge amount I can do about it at the moment.  What better day than for spending a few hours on Myspace setting up my page?http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=80907487  I think it’s going to be fun: sometimes it’s good to be a Johnny-come-lately.

More evidence of Wayne Coyne’s strangeness can be found in this video.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SzWtkMVBRI&search=wayne%20coyne  He is addressing his old high school.  He tells a long story the point of which is a bit beyond me.  He is great though.  Like a caring paternal figure that has lived a life well travelled and seen strange things.  I think some auteur should give him a starring role in a film – some sort of indie-flic set in the mid-west or something.  I’d watch it.  This is enough of a screen test right here

Posted @ 16:11:26 on 29 May 2006  back to top

Sadly I keep stumbling across this television show on BBC 3 that features quite simply the most loathsome character I’ve ever come across.  It’s called Paparazzi and documents the exploits of a group of parasitic photographers as they try and capture the vital scoops that will make them huge piles of cash.  If you have a penchant for masochistic viewing then I recommend that you tune in.  The man at the centre of the industry is the truculent Australian Darryn Lyons, whose hair tells you everything you need to know about him.  A man on a mission with one of those space age phones permanently attached to his face, he dominates the screen like some sort of abominable day-glow cocaine badger.  Five minutes watching this man in action makes you want to eat your own head.  Oh the humanity!

The fast approaching world cup means requisite singing of the national anthems and crass displays of nationalism are just around the corner. This prompted me to check out this site. http://www.national-anthems.net/ It’s been said many times by many people before but I don’t mind reiterating; the British national anthem is such an embarrassing piece of crap. All national anthems are inherently ridiculous but ours really takes the biscuit on a number of levels. How I wish I were Russian or German! Such wonderful pieces of music. That our miserable little excuse of a tune is supposed to be rousing is a joke and the lyrics are just shameful.

What ever your views regarding the royal family, (personally I would get rid of them all in an instant) I think its high time we had some sort of sustained campaign to get rid of the anthem and replace it with, well, pretty much anything else would be better. This is a matter of aesthetics as much as anything else. When the current monarch finally pops her clogs in ooh I don’t know 2031 or something, is anyone going to give a toss about a by then octogenarian Charles the dissident water-colour enthusiast? Is anyone going to want to sing ‘God save our gracious King’ about that befuddled old git?

A good start for the campaign would be the axing of the nightly rendition of the anthem after the Shipping forecast on radio 4. This is of particular annoyance, you know how it is; you’re just drifting off to sleep having been transported afloat through the shipping lanes of the northern hemisphere when all of a sudden you’re rudely awakened by that drum roll of doom, your semi-conscious arm stretches out to switch off the radio knocking over a glass of water in the process, but by now its too late, it’s already entered your consciousness and a whole day is ruined. Perhaps we can build on the momentum gathered by the recent cutting of the UK theme at the beginning of the day on radio 4, though by the responses on some of the forums radio 4 listeners aren’t exactly the most progressive bunch. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/misc/uktheme_20052401.shtml Well sod the lot of them! The revolution starts here.

I’m thinking of starting a website with a petition devoted to this very cause – radio 4 would be a much better place without this shit at the end of every evening. If I achieve this one thing my life will have been worth it. At the very least it’ll annoy a lot of people. A casual look on google doesn’t reveal anything quite like it yet. There seems quite a well organised movement to replace ‘God Save the Queen’ with something specifically for England and ‘the English’, though this seems equally abhorrent to me. http://anthem4england.co.uk/ And then there is the, er, Australian republican movement… and I remember Billy Bragg expressing a similar sentiment recently. At any rate I believe the writing is on the wall. Who’s with me?

In other news I’ve completed my MA. Well the end of the taught classes anyway. Hooray! I would like to be able to say with some style and aplomb but towards the end I was just hanging on in really. It seems it’s not enough to just turn up to each seminar with a modicum of enthusiasm every week, eventually some actual work is involved. I’m looking forward to doing my dissertation now as it allows for more freedom in what I want to talk about and will hopefully represent a summation of everything I’ve learned in terms of theory and methodology. I may write about it on here a little as I think some of its themes may be of interest to the non-specialist. Something to look forward to eh?

This may be the most disturbing piece of art I’ve ever seen. ‘Head of Mussolini’ by R. A. Bertelli (1933). A ceramic construction, it portrays Mussolini’s profile from which ever direction you see it. For a while Italian fascism and futurism were happy bedfellows. I saw it at the V&A Modernism exhibition in London recently - a show that has generated a lot of column inches. The picture doesn’t really do it justice. You have to be able to move around it to register its full impact. I enjoyed the show, though as is often the case with such blockbusters, it was rammed with people making it impossible to move around as freely as one would have liked. But as a highly ambitious project though, I think it went some to displaying the multi-facetted nature of its subject matter. Perhaps more space between exhibits would have been beneficial.

Posted @ 19:48:38 on 03 May 2006 back to top