Le Flâneur

Just got a calling card through the front door. We get these sort of things quite a lot. I’m going to start a collection.  It reads:

Sheikh Malick: International Clairvoyant Spiritual Leader. The 11th generation of the family member of the African medium order.

Initiated healer of well known plants in the wild sacred forest; 15 years experience in Europe. Specialises in desperate cases which seem to be unwordable. He is a specialist in bringing back your loved ones, relationship problems and court cases. He can help with sexual impotency, exams, infertility, lose weight, depression, fidelity between husband and wife and many more, like immigration problems. Satisfaction guaranteed.

Wow! Is there anything Sheikh Malick Can’t do? I particularly like the enigmatic Specialises in desperate cases which seem to be unwordable. I wonder what his rates are like.

When I first saw this piece my immediate thought was that it was a spoof. Something about the ‘living at the top of a hill in North London’ didn’t quite ring true. Then, like many others I thought it must be viral marketing for tv show ’skins’. But no, it turns out this was a genuine piece of Journalism. What a spectacular own-goal by the Guardian’s travel editor. This has surely damaged the reputation of the paper. I can’t believe that they thought the obvious nepotism would go unnoticed.

What has been interesting is the way it’s highlighted the fanaticism of the CIF crowd making one wonder what really motivates those people. A real shit-storm has ensued. Though many of the comments were pretty funny (I wish I’d been following the feed during the day), I actually find myself feeling sorry for the teenage author of the original blogpost; is he himself really deserving of that level of vitriol? I mean, there’s already a very unkind fake facebook profile for him. Maybe we should all just take a deep breath.

Nepotism is a fact of life. I worked in a mail room with a father and son for a bit and I doubt whether Guardian readers would be too bothered by that. When the nepotism arouses the jealousy of a load of frustrated writers they quickly turn to inverted snobbery for comfort. Well, we’ve all been there I suppose.

That said whoever commissioned and published the piece should be ashamed. It really was a piece of crap. A very sorry episode indeed.

I can understand that you did, you probably aren’t as flawlessly tasteful as me, but I really can’t believe that I fell for it too. I resisted the Block Party hype and laughed at Arcade Fire’s stadium prog. But CSS? Not only did I tolerate them, I actually paid for the album. I even put one of their songs on a compilation cd that I made for a girl who I was trying to court. Now, only a few months later, I hear a bar of one of their songs and instantly recoil. It may that they remind me of the rough side of a particularly debauched week in Spain this summer, or it may be that they are not ‘just a bit of fun’ any more than Robbie Williams’ Angels is ‘actually quite good’. They’re both total utter shit in their own ways, and CSS’ way, screaming art school whimsy, is only slightly less offensive than Robbie’s good bloke pop. I’ll sign off now and put my CSS cd where is belongs, somewhere between the Darren Emerson and Libertines releases, in the What The Fuck Was I Thinking section.

Not so much a post as a quick plug for the philosophy bites podcasts available form itunes. David Edmonds, who wrote the hilarious Wittgenstein’s Poker, and Nigel Warburton, of whom I’ve never previously heard, interview top names from modern philosophy on topics as diverse as Physicalism and Wine. The programs only last Ten to Twenty minutes (hence the ‘bites’ of the title) but they don’t dumb things down at all. Rather they take an irreverent issue past perspective and focus on modern ideas rather than they history of philosophy. Easily the best podcasts I’ve come across since little atoms.

You may have noticed a new page has appeared in the top right corner called ‘the list’. This is a new mammoth project we’ve undertaken to objectively and qualitatively place absolutely everything in the world in relation to everything else in an infinite borometer of goodness. You may see that so far things like ‘Jeremy Vine’ and ‘vitamin supplements’ are somewhere in the middle of the continuum, while Semisonic are bringing up the rear. At the top are things like ‘Cate Blanchett’, ‘dogs’ and ‘The Stooges’.

Our projects does bear some resemblance to British Sea Powers’ one to deem things ‘rock’ or ‘not rock’. Except ours will encompass everything even the seemingly banal. For example, are The Charlatans better than fashionably dressed teens? The answer is probably yes, for although the Charlatans are perhaps the most perpetually mediocre of bands, they’re still better than that feeling of wasted youth one experiences at the sight of happy fashionable teens buying Japanese lager in a Shoreditch off-license. But even the most cynically minded would have to admit that fashionably dressed teenagers are preferable to Christianity. At the moment the design is a bit crude but this will be refined. We welcome suggestions for new entries, and debate with regard to placement.