a return of sorts

to social media, then…

it’s 2012, and after 7 long years of fun and frolics (and several overly-cynical and sneering posts), i finally decided to quit facebook. it’s become such a huge part of modern online culture (no shit mate) that even as i write the ‘f’ word itself on my wee mac, auto-correct chips in and kindly offers to correct me and give the thing a capital ‘F’. like the idealistic chimp i am (tho it wanes with age, good lord…), i reject this sort of thing, a bit like how good ol’ christopher hitchens refused to spell ‘god’ with a capital ‘G’. except he had a principle, and i’m just poking my tongue out at a machine.

i even wrote some nonsense-musings on these very pages (as opposed to the intelligent, informative stuff also littered here, ahem), and although they still somehow make sense, i’ve come to think of myself during ‘the wilderness years’ since then as very much a lost little boy on a rather craply-made raft, less ‘spitting and pissing pointlessly into the wind’, more sitting there with vacant stare on the edge of my lonely vessel, water lapping at my childish brogues and seagulls taking it in turns to try and land a shit directly on my bonce. i slowly look up and shake my fist, but they’ve already fucked off. i’ll stop the metaphor there before convincing all and sundry that i’m completely insane, suffice to say that for the last one and a half years, it’s been kinda quiet.

and whilst there was no apparent hole to be filled by leaving fb, i found myself slowly becoming more open to other online tools-for-tools, and have since registered with twitter, instagram and spotify. the former is a wonderful thing, and despite the odd bit of shit that just won’t flush down the toilet despite several furious attempts (poor ellen page complaining after receiving constant pictures of avid fans’ dogs to rename after doing it once, and then helpfully tweeting each and every fucking one of them), it’s for the most part really interesting once you’re following the right people. and if they become tedious….get going on that flush!

very simple.

same with instagram. if people start posting too often what they’re having for breakfast, or their foot on yet-another-non-descript beach… off you toddle to look for the next big shiny thing.

and so if i embrace all this, why not fb? (you must be screaming…). 

how many times over the last eighteen months i’ve wondered how friends from far and wide are doing, and now with no way of finding out/gawping at their page.

and just last week, after booking a trip to my hometown back in blighty to catch up with long-lost compadres from my college days, it occurred to me while having some whimsical reminiscence to way-back-when, that i've lost touch with way too many folks from outside my little city. 

my idealistic approach of having more authentic contact in small doses (i.e. emails), and doing without the stasi-esque observation of others online has (somewhat unsurprisingly considering my pompous use of a thing much more serious) proven a tad fallible and, pseudo-intelligent language aside for a moment…… is complete bollocks.

this isn’t how things work these days, i almost hear you cry.

so, i was wrong.

very simple.

NB. i’m allowed to change my mind and edit this blog at any stage if i feel like it, just as i hear is the trend (seriously. tales of a girl who takes down new pics of herself unless they get more than twenty ‘likes’ reach me with a whiff of self-bummery even my most narcissistic friends would balk at). 

and especially if i receive a barrage of selfies to my wall / newsfeed (whatever it’s called these days..). selfies: NO. STOP.

and so now begins the humble process of trying to re-friend everyone, and then tweeting that i’ve done it with a #refriend at the end for good measure.

so, fb, you win….and my experiment failed. i embrace you (but gently, a bit like you were a homeless person).

a sermon on social networking (2011)

as the rain pelts down on a rare saturday afternoon that i had actually made plans for, the somewhat understandable urge to further vent my spleen on a subject that’s been continually bothering me for a while now slowly transposes itself into print. immediately it occurs to me however, that writing this very post, sat alone at my computer perhaps undermines the point i will try and make, but fuck it - no one reads this shit anyway...

as the novelty of the iphone has long since worn off i now tend to keep my neck at an upright angle whilst moving around town, only to see much of the rest of the world staring back down at their little mini interactive TVs instead, much as i had previously. 

granted, a lot of us on public transport not spasmodically tapping screens still often sit there with lost, vacant expressions of abject boredom anyway, but back to the point...

at the risk of sounding faintly whimsical, there’s truly something to be said for ‘unplugging’ every so often and simply observing/interacting with the world around you, without a soundtrack, and also without the need to share every thought, every fucking knee-jerk reaction that comes into your head with the rest of your social network(s) either. 

the automatic response to share has, for this miffed chimp at least, clearly become a sickness of rather epidemic proportions. 

sure, while the new-found ability to connect and share what you’re doing/thinking with the rest of the world has it’s positives (entertaining videos, news, events), more and more it feels that every time you log on to a network these days you’re confronted with a stream of pure, unadulterated, fucking noise, as if people have opened taps from their consciousness, cameras, or lonely youtube meanderings and plugged the stream straight into their computer.  

and now for an equation officially known as the guff factor: people’s ability to process and produce more and more data in turn increases the amount of spam in a network, until it becomes almost pointless searching for something interesting. and what is interesting to me, maybe isn’t interesting to you (end sentence with public shrug).

so, how to filter such noise, whilst waiting for a ‘guff on/off’ option, and without deleting your social network account(s) in disgust and/or apathy?

although ‘discipline’ manages to sound pompous immediately, i’d love a pop-up on the odd occasion asking, “wait! are you sure anyone else gives a shit?” just before you post.

hiding people from our feeds is one option on some networks, but fails to address the problem on a larger scale - twitter being a case in point. this also assumes that all posts from the offender are banal, turd-on-paper offerings, which is maybe unfair....

if there is no real way to filter information, perhaps people will eventually react to the overload of data with antipathy, but ti reckon this is a long way off.

until then, think of me as a disinterested, passive observer...adrift at sea spitting and pissing pointlessly into the wind.

it’s always nice to end with a quote, my english teacher might have said once, so here’s a peach from Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter....

"Everybody is becoming like ... a Stasi agent, constantly observing himself or his friends."

breakfast (2010)

times have changed. back when i was a lad, the morning after a big one would consist of a stumble down albert rd (oh pompey, much as i slag you off daily, you still hold a place in my heart) to cheryl’s caff for a good-old greasy fry-up. (you can have fun here and insert any working-class name in cheryl’s place, as i just made it up, haha. the name that is - the place, god’s below, really existed, and maybe still does). 

first up - the cup of tea. anyone who had ordered a coffee would be eyed with suspicion (brows firmly furrowed) for a good five seconds, before the interest waned and was quickly picked up again by a free copy of The Sun left by some sated fellow on his way out. ten minutes were allowed to pass before the standard chin-in-the-air, eyes-expectant gesture was directed at the kitchen. when the plate was finally slapped down on the table and cheryl/cath/dave/barry trundled off to find some more ketchup, what little conversation there was quickly petered out and the troughing began. what to eat first, good man - sausages? and what of the bacon? had they ruined it by saturating the salty goodness in bean juice? 

no, thankfully not. we’re ok. 

talking was kept to a minimum during the feed, albeit until the energy (from the egg, i’m willing to bet...) kicked in and sparked off a healthy tirade of abuse (yes!) against some foolish prig we remembered all dressed up from the night before, trying to get into 5th avenue with his silly hat. “what a slag!”, and other such inventive banter. 

there was always one who couldn’t finish his food, the belly-buster proving too much on top of the kebab from the night before. the cold, sad remnants left were a subtle reminder of what we just did to ourselves, and consigned to the bin or some grateful pooch somewhere below stairs. 

good times, as far as breakfasts go. or not. i find myself not wistfully gazing back but instead thinking, how disgusting. only yesterday i was trying to arrange a breakfast meet whereby i’d prepare and present, in all their glory, waffles for a couple of hungry french fancies, employing even a kitchen mixer in my efforts to please. how continental, my mum might say (actually, that’s bollocks - she’d first ask if it was a ‘lady’s influence’, in a mock-sophisticated tone). as it went, the waffles didn’t happen this time. a french work emergency (how easy it is to put the word ‘french’ before anything to change the tone), and i was out on my tod, in the cold. the sting! with my fair lady away, i had little option but to mooch on down to a nice local cafe alone, but thankfully the fucking football was on. 

a small aside here - i like football. the fuckstick however, who’s responsible for the vuvuzela’s entrance into the world of soccer.... 

so, breakfast in germany. a few years back i shuddered at the thought, the idea, the concept of eating cheese in the morning. these days, that moment of decision before the purchase in the supermarket plays far too great a role in the day for my liking. i am heartened tho, that i still get just as big a kick from staring at other shoppers’ vacant, glassy-eyed expressions as they mill round, really thinking about whether to buy limited edition, ‘african-style’ world cup pasta. 

fuck me... 

here in the german cafe, the waitresses’ withering expression - a mixture of “yes, i understand your german despite your overly-slow expression” and “you were boring before you opened your mouth” - is like a punch to the abdomen. my eyes turn to the tv screen, turn away again as the drone of several thousand (autistic?) idiots blowing relentlessly into their native plastic trumpets washes over me like a wave of dog piss.  yet...breakfast arrives, and is beautiful. latte, bagel, fruit salad and quark. 

life is good: everything’s ok once boots are filled.

support your country, lad!

well well, just as i thought i had Germans pegged as chilled-if-a-bit-excitable during football matches, blow me if they didn’t completely scupper that notion recently.

i made the ill-advised decision to go to a public screening of the germany-spain match, and had quite the fright don’t you know.

i rocked up at kick-off, sensibly avoiding the warm-up and instead filling up on pork-pies  and the like as you do, but shamefully forgetting my spastic-trumpet and mini german flag!

how i wish i could have joined in with the rest of the tribe and waved said flag with a self-mocking-but actually-fairly-gormless expression on my face.

as it was i had to sit through a sadly tedious game surrounded by a mixture of both the lazy and apathetic, and dominant, downward-fists-motion, mid-mating-season gorillas (the latter types were, terrifyingly, mostly women).

those who were clearly bored and weren’t really sure What People Do When A Game Of Football Is Boring absently and silently lolled about, slowly blinking or picking their nose in that disturbing way where the finger seems to stay poked awkwardly in the crevice until they are caught in the act by a disgusted or incredulous onlooker (me).

but it was the ones with voices that concerned me. the aggressive, once-every-two-years-when-my-country-plays-in-a-tournament, i’ll-suddenly-start-giving-a-shit types.

and here i think of england. “cam on saafgate, kick his fackin’ legs in” she cries.

“facking ‘AVE him” roars another.

“COME OOOOOOON” some dick brays from behind me.

“i’m gonna lose it in a minute” he mutters as i turn quickly back around - eyes red, knuckles white on long-empty pint glass.

i’m not sure why, but during these moments i rarely feel like mentioning that i couldn’t give a Flying Fuck whether england win or lose, and that i’m just here to hopefully see a good game (“sod off to the family section then, you raving poof”, one could argue would be the perhaps-justified response).

and back over here it's much the same....

“was soll das denn?” 

“scheiss auf deutschland...” 

our heroes battle valiantly for their €500,000 world cup winning bonus, but it’s all to no avail, and very slowly the grim realization that ‘it ain’t gonna ‘appen’ sets in, forming some hilariously vacant stares where once passionate, meaningful daggers had been.

as the final whistle goes, and people toodle off in small groups and the collective sense of togetherness that was a few seconds before so strong falls limply away, a previously silent member of the crowd suddenly starts whooping and leaping in the air, brandishing a colossal spanish flag while doing so.

i laughed, perhaps a little too loudly.

i still get a lot of stick from people back home for not giving a shit about how england fare in sport - people just don't get it.

it stems back, i guess, to my dad going - for want of a better expression - fucking berserk whenever ‘we’ scored a goal, to the point where as a young and fairly sensitive lad i would actually weep in fear of this sudden display of loud and terrifying epilepsy.

“calm down, you’re scaring the kids”, my mum once said.

true.

as passive as the old man actually is, fast forward fifteen years to the world cup in 2002, and the sight of apes throwing rubbish bins through windows (that old classic!) when france beat england can’t help but evoke somewhat negative kind of emotions in me. YES, my parents fucked on one very special night (er...) on this same, wholesome piece of land as yours, but that is really all we have in common here. 

i’ll stop paraphrasing bill hicks, you get the point.

“you cynic! you sneer! you snide cunt.”, i hear you cry.

fair call. i guess there is something I’m missing, but praise the lord my lady feels exactly the same (where were you when i needed you, surrounded by a sea of loud, bellowing oafs), so although backed into a corner i still stand tall.

chest puffed. 

chin defiant.

music print

now listen here, all you Wire-reading sailor boys.

much as the quality of the writing continues to impress, the focus in recent months, or more frustratingly since my subscription began, has been almost purely on what is amusingly described as ‘modern composition’.

eek.

(i ignorantly call it ‘noise’ but that is, i’ve since learnt, an entirely different genre i don’t like)

it all started at a party last year.

bored of watching, pointing, and laughing at faces posing awkwardly in pointless trilbies, i found myself casually perusing a copy of said magazine, and was quite happy to see madlib being extensively interviewed. not a month later, moritz von oswald on the front cover too.

hurrah, subscription ahoy.

oops. the first issue plops thru the letter box, and it’s only then that i realize that, once in the review section techno, house, and dubstep have been neatly compressed onto almost one page, and labelled somewhat bizarrely, ‘critical beats’, with hip-hop given a section of equal size just overleaf. cheers lads.

and so it is, that bar the occasionally interesting feature i all-too-oft sit there, flicking through slack-jawed at how little of it means anything to me, and have to deal with such journalistic genius as,

“the opening sounds resemble the flocking calls of wading birds”

“a contorted, metallic chord hangs, twitching, like a criminal from a gibbet”

“his appliances include a tube of coffee cans taped together to amplify the whining tones of rice cooking above a portable stove” (no, i am not making this shit up).

i’m lost.

i just can’t fathom it. 

am i a philistine?......perhaps.

accept yourself, as someone once great once put it.

OBVIOUS YET NECESSARY DISCLAIMER: 

don’t mind me, it’s great the magazine exists - it has to, i’m just pissed off that i’ve subscribed.

for a year.