Spend some FaceTime with Infinity: Apple, BT and some other stuff

Have you seen that advert? Y’know, the one where that guy’s sitting there, leg-up, wrapped in a cast, while he’s talking to his mates on his iPhone, and they’re all like, sad and shit ‘cause it seems like they lost they’re football match—the match he’s injured for but apparently too fucking lazy to hop down to the local pitch and see? And then they’re all like “NAH MATE, WE WON!” And he’s all like “yeah!” and they’re all jumping around, except for him ‘cause he’s crippled and shit… Yeah? This one here:

As it's cut off half of it, just double-click on the video to watch it on Youtube. Sorry.

Well, anyway, it’s a lot like another iPhone ad that we saw in the paper which the characters are using the same app[lication] to talk, yet again to someone who gone done broke a limb (see below). This time it’s a kid with an injured his arm (tibia or fibula we assume) showing the cast to a guy who looks like a cross between Karl Pilkington and the evil Dad in This is England '86. We are left to connect the dots and hazard a guess that this is a father-son moment (“good” adverts always like to leave you to fill in the back story). This guess is only an educated one in so far as paedophilia in advertising is not going to win anyone over. Though, there is a side-effect in that paedophiles will see these technologies as a new avenue to explore their abuse. (We’re not joking around when we mention this by the way. It’s just true.)

Only one word could be read: End

The tagline is: “Introducing FaceTime video calling. Smile.” The name - FaceTime - is a pretty blatant signal as to what these adverts are getting at. Spending time face-to-face, meeting-up, catching-up, quality time together, etc. etc: i.e. all the very things that, according to common perception, iPhones and their techne brethren are preventing within the family unit. ("Smile." is a bit of good ol'passive-aggressive dictatorial advertising added on for good measure: DO THIS, BUY THIS, and so it goes on.)

We all know how the argument goes visa-vis the idea that we all just sit around, watching different programs on different TVs, when we want, not when it’s scheduled… We’re on the internet talking to our friends rather than being out with them in the park on the merry-go-rounds… We don’t even talk on the ‘phone anymore, we just send each other pictures of our genitalia in various postures and poses, replete with ironic accoutrements and now these expressionist dick-dances are superseding oral conversation as the main mode of communication for today’s youth...

So this is exactly what the iPhone adverts avoid like the fucking plague. They don’t want to evoke the image of technology actually in the home, when the members of this family are actually all together, at one time, in the fucking building—precisely because it’ll seem so unreal to people (the people at home) that these people (the people on screen) would actually spend time together.

And it’s not strictly the fact —DEERRRR— that no company would make a phone advert where the characters are not using their phones. Rather, these ads are directly taking on the idea that technology is pulling everyone apart. And this isn’t just Apple. Loads of companies are in on it; BT foremost among them (as we mentioned before). Across the spectrum is the narrative that we’re all apart in our lives so get this product, it’ll bring you and whoever together, OK?

As it's cut off half of it, just double-click on the video to watch it on Youtube. Sorry.

With this loneliness written into every advert, there’s no way we can look at the BT Infinity adverts and think of anything apart from the fact that the seemingly happy couple are looking to the future, and to INFINITY, because they, like everyone else in the ad, want to die. BT has hit upon the core of modern life, surely? No matter how joyous and content we may appear, we’re all so desperately sad and lonely that we haze longingly into the infinite, colourless nothing that is our death. The children of the famous BT couple have gone — where we do not know — and now they seem to be contemplating some suicide pact or waiting for the new BT to arrive. So, it’s either death or BT’s version of Infinity. The choice is yours.

We’ve got Virgin Media.

Here's to Strange Powers

We don't often go to the cinema alone. In fact it was our first time this week (OK, excuse the mixed up pronouns here). It was also part of the BFI London Film Festival to boot, which made it a little more acceptable. 'Cause, let's face it, if you're that one guy sitting on their own watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire then people are far more likely to take a disapproving view of it than seeing something really arty on the Southbank.

Not that Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields was a particularly arty movie. A documentary about--just as the name suggests--the genius (yep, genius) behind a band who have turned out much over their some 18 years, Strange Powers really tapped into our fan boy love of the band. It foregrounded Merritt's hilarious responses to interview questions or shout-outs from gig audiences, and some amazing live performances:

'Yeah! Oh Yeah!' in Cambridge

'Born on a Train' in Cambridge, again, but not the same gig

Tending more towards biography than music/ social study, this long-form film covering the creative period (and the background of) Stephin Merritt centred itself on the former's relationship with his band mate and manager Claudia Gonson. It did so without being sappy and without being too idolising. Probably this is down to the fact that it was made by a few of Stephin's friends. But that's no bad thing for the project that was undertaken.

Anyway, we thought we'd do a little "hooray" for The Magnetic Fields along the lines of a Spotify mixtape. It takes a song from each of their albums (3 for the three volumes of 69 Love Songs) as a nod to Strange Power's range. Just click on either one of the links below to get all the Magnetic goodness:

Here's to Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields

Here's to Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields

"Stan, don't forget to poke your grandmother"

Too often the Internet gets a free pass and is relegated to a weird far off mystical virtual realm that is somehow psychologically segregated from everyday life. Considering that in the past 5-10 years iPhones and Blackberry's have forced their megalomanic behemoth schlongs into our greasy hands with all the intimidating force of a grunting alcoholic PE teacher as he ushers you balls first over the Pommel Horse, this partition between the 'real' and the 'virtual' seems hopeful at best as the two have converged to the point where they are no longer that distinct, just kind of all mushy and together in a troth of shit.

Without jumping head first into academic debates between Live vs Mediated (Phelan vs Auslander) it seems that this pretense of 'what happens online stays online' acts as a convenient means of getting away with fucking murder (which can of course be funny as hell). Now this isn't to say that we here are apposed to net neutrality, open source and freedom of information and generally using the Internet as place of continual good and funny shit that doesn't take itself too seriously, quite the opposite in fact.

We here harbour a secret love of Trolling as a healthy antidote to those that take the Internet way too seriously and put it on a pedestal as the saviour of all our woes. However, to some extent the same rules of generally being not a terrible person apply online as they do, in you know, everyday life. Really, it's pretty basic stuff like; don't shout racial slurs at people in public places, don't fuck kids or look at other people fucking kids, don't declare loudly in a bar that "all women are objects and should be treated accordingly". In real life its likely that if you transgress any of these rules then someone will probably call you out on your shit (hopefully). On the web however, stuff goes unnoticed, gets lost and slips through the cracks and that means that at times people seem to reckon that their bigoted garbling won't come under any scrutiny, and for the most part they're right...

Here we handover to the website 'People who said nigger today', a website dedicated to unveiling "privileged whites using, often with intentional malice, the word nigger" online. See the web-site's FAQ for a full explanation of its purpose, but its basic function is screenshots of people being super racist on Facebook. It sounds preachy, but it manages to avoid those pitfalls through its bluntness and refusal to bow to any sense of 'oh ho doesn't the Internet produce some gems' (which it of course does), whilst avoiding any pompous, apologetic chest beating.

There' s hardly anything revolutionary about the site, or the sentiment of 'don't be fucking racist duh brain', but it does act as a nice antidote to the monstrosities of sites such as the now felled Fit-Finder (barf). Those types of site have become emblematic of an approach within the casual practices of the net that resembles a skinless, jizz covered Lizard groping and spitting its way over a pile of rotting fruit as it barks out the ramblings of a semi-senile colonel berating the 'natives'. PWSNT rather it seems is a healthy way of making visible the myth of the Internet as a separate entity where your bullshit doesn't count (not us though, we don't count, we get to do what we want, poorly and you can't say a damn thing about it).

All that being said there is nothing worse than whiny little bitches with skinned knees crying to the Internet police that someone was mean to them. A healthy general rule to go with might be 'be funny', so over to you Louis CK to explain things much better than, well, anyone.

and...

Maureen, Maureen, I'm beggin' of you, please don't take my band

She's the one at the back. Yeah, that you can barely see.

After hearing the apparently world-shattering news that Maureen Ann “Moe” Tucker was a signed-up member of the Tea Party we’ve seen a hell of a lot of commentary on the issue. There’s those who are now totally distraught over the loss of one of their idols by political association to a “movement” that’s well documented for its anti-masturbation, witchcrafting, “I’d give Anne Frank up to the Nazis ‘cause lying is a sin", socialism-is-commu-facism gestalt. Then there’s Alexis Petridis’ pseudo-formalist riposte of “separate the art from the artist”.

And, as Petridis points out, this isn’t exactly unexpected. Rightly or wrongly, there’s outcry whenever a previously radical figure suddenly appears head in The Man’s lap, throat-deep on his profit margin. Whether they’re voting for George W. Bush (yes, we’re looking at you Tom Wolfe), or gadding around LA with their puppet-self in a roofless car insured by Swiftcover, there’s a sense of betrayal— that their idols have gone against, maybe even reversed, those anti-conformist freedoms they typified, restructuring the staid taboos and rigidities that they uprooted as often as their genital appendages (we do wonder what Iggy’s puppet penis is like b/t/w).

Now, that a woman named Maureen is the latest subject at the epicentre of this cultural conjuncture should be restated. We’ve got a neighbour named Maureen; she’s a lovely old lady who we’d suspect never spent days on end stratospherically-high on LSD playing second-sexual-fiddle to Nico in one of the most celebrated rock bands of the last century. She’s kind and always asks us how we’re doing. Her husband’s a decent guy. We don’t think she likes the Tea Party. But you never know.

A true tea party.

The point being that Maureen [Tucker, not our neighbour] is a metaphor for what’s going on with this debate and kind of reveals why the thing seems never-ending. Just as no one named Maureen could be a far-out radical, the sixties and seventies rebellion of identity politics and it’s aestheticisation in popular music was never, actually, as anti-establishment as is generally thought.

Adam Curtis has been making this point for years in so far as the central tenant of individual liberty that the hopeful 68ers so readily took up and perpetuated in the name of worthy political causes was co-opted by some more active malevolent business types to leave us with self-obsessed, consuming, fearful Nixon-like societies. [Here he is making a side-line into this debate on the topic of Mad Men.]

For the theory buffs out there, the names Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and so on should ring a bell as these guys have been arguing for this way better than we ever could and concerning far more ubiquitous shit than Adam Curtis. But let’s not tumble into that whole area and let’s get back to Maureen.

To remind ourselves of just how good The Velvet Underground were, we went to listen to some CDs we found back in our old rooms (from a time before we became pirates). We listened to White Light/ White Heat and remembered that it’s actually pretty awesome—the muffled production’s pretty charming and it has a lot of the repetitive swirling melodies that they’re famous for yet they’re far more docile than is the case elsewhere which then work into the noisy finale of ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ and ‘Sister Ray’.

BUT, after that we discovered that the & Nico disc was missing. We hate that. Why not put it back in its box? It’s not hard is it? For fuck’s sake, some people have no respect for our personal, private property! Fucking hippies.

IRONY or PSYCHOPATH: 1, David Starkey

Bizarre Saturday Times this week. We know this only because we’ve gone home and Daddy reads the Times. I mean, of course Daddy reads the Times. As Jim Hacker puts it in an episode of Yes, Minister I can’t be bothered to specifically identify:

The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; The Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

And the Marilyn’s Daddy runs the country.

First of all, there was the front page of the Review, completely taken up by a feature called ‘The books you must read before you’re 21.’ So far, so unimaginative: Erica Wagner couldn’t even be arsed to make it, I don’t know, ‘21 books you must read before you’re 21’ or something at least semi-symmetrical like that. And so far, so fucking irritating. Because these lists always involve aged writers telling an imagined (and, indeed, this being the Saturday Times, also entirely imaginary) kiddie audience that they simply must read a certain book before they pass a no-longer-even-legally-entrenched arbitrary milestone, even though they didn’t actually do so themselves. Presumably because (bearing in mind this list contains contributions by Callow and Rushdie) they were chasing cock or snatch, as one does at the age of <21.

I discovered Auden at the age of 25...Here was a wonderful humane voice, and I was sorry I had not come to him earlier. Sixteen is the age to begin Auden, in my view, although sometimes it can be before that.

Your view, Alexander, even though you don’t actually know what it’s like to read Auden when you’re sixteen BECAUSE YOU CAME TO HIM WHEN YOU WERE IN YOUR MID-TWENTIES. SO HOW DARE YOU FUCKING PREACH? Parts of Auden are pretty difficult. Yeah, they mostly rhyme, but y’know, one need only glance at, y’know, part two of ONE OF HIS MOST FAMOUS GODDAM POEMS, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats,’ to realise THERE’S PROBABLY SOMETHING HERE FOR YOU EVEN WHEN YOU’RE NOT PUBESCENT:

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

What makes the feature particularly bizarre, though, is that it hinges itself, sexy picture, sexy frontpage advert, all of itself upon a contribution from Nigella goddam Lawson. A piece containing contributions from Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn and its most notable feature is, to Wagner’s mind, Nigella’s prose. Which is, inevitably, a masterful exercise in involuntary self-parody (albeit recommending an excellent book). We’ve bolded the best bits for the win:

Tonio Kröger, by Thomas Mann

It is one of those novels – though strictly speaking, a novella – that is only truly appreciated by the adolescent reader. The intensity of feeling, the overwhelming anguish and unbearable conflict that Tonio Kröger feels, needs to be met with fellow-feeling in the reader. Once you have grown up, I suspect that a lot of the book’s power, even meaning, would be lost. It’s certainly a book that poleaxed me when I read it at 18 etc. etc.

Since Saturday, we have masturbated exactly 14 times over the image of the adolescent Nigella, not yet touched by the hairy Saatchi hand, getting poleaxed. It doesn’t even hurt anymore.

Involuntary self-parody pales into insignificance, though, when placed alongside that dear man David Starkey’s comments in the Times Magazine's ‘What I’ve learnt’ section, which represent an excellent introduction to a new game we’ll be playing over the next few months: IRONY or PSYCHOPATH? The premise is simple: cite a couple of credibly quoted quotations belonging to a famous man or woman that, if not ironic, unquestionably represent the rantings of a fucking madman, and then decide whether they are in fact ironic or not. Over to you sir...

There’s no connection between a Damien Hirst and a Holbein or a Raphael. The only reason modern art exists is to decorate large banks’ foyers. So it was clever of Nicholas Sarota to commission Tate Modern – which looks exactly like a New York bank foyer.

That actually sounds rather reasonable, albeit misguided…

I despair of politicians. I put it down to the disintegration of the governing class. Aristocratic governments tend to be rather impressive. Look at the Roman Republic, or England in the 18th and 19th centuries. Look at Churchill. Democratic politics have occasional wondrous peaks, but most of the time you’ve got John Prescott.

Wait a minute, he didn’t just try to say…did he...

Gays are a bit like Jews. We’re an extraordinarily odd minority that’s had a totally disproportionate effect intellectually and culturally. But now homosexuality has been normalised, and in some ways that’s a tremendous loss.

What. The fuck?

The verdict: IRONY

These comments, although bewilderingly problematic are, we have to admit, rather droll. This, in the same interview, similarly: ‘I’ve been “the rudest man in Britain” ever since my encounter with George Austin, former Archdeacon of York, on the Moral Maze. He did a high-flown rant against Prince Charles, and as he left I said, “Don’t his fatness, his smugness and his pomposity really make you want to vomit?” It’s a great line: two Anglo-Saxon insults followed by a Latin one.’

Psychopaths are seldom droll, therefore we must rule in Starkey’s favour. Jesus what a prick though, right?

We're just saying...

(Thanks to The Guardian and Google Images for the pics)