Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Underexposed and dead wrong
I refuse to believe this works. It just looks too precarious. And where's the Joy, a?
I know why I feel inclined to move house. It's because that's usually the only time I get to have a proper clear-out. It's like if you can see a move coming upon you in the next couple of months you can just let it all slide in the meantime. But I must find some motivation from somewhere. I find comfort in clutter but this is no longer picturesque, contained happy-shambles. It is just Mess.
I very much need to sort this room out, the study/what estate agents would call without a blink the 'third bedroom'. Fucking estate agents. Not looking forward to tangling with them again. Although this time I will wear a nice jacket and look Serious, like someone who is only renting temporarily, someone with Options. I'm fortunate in having my mother's phone voice, which kicks up a plummy gear at every hurdle presented by the other end, but with estate agents I think it's important to get in their face and scowl like a person who knows what they want.
There was one agency I went to in Camden, who let and managed two of the flats I lived in a year apart (one of which I got by an amazing instance of serendipity, and then proceeded to suffer as it gave me no end of trouble culminating in bastard landlords dropping frozen spears of urine on me from their own private jet. Anyway). I used to sit there waiting for Denis, a delicious Parisian person who seemed genuinely keen to help and often bitched about how rotten estate agents were. But it was probably just his schtick. Hell, he was probably from Croydon, the fucker. So I'd wait for him to come back from a showing and roll his enormous brown eyes at me in conspiratorial manner and would watch one of the two bosses talking on the phone. Knowing the sociopathic obliviousness of such people to the reactions of others, I felt fairly safe staring at him, but I would have been compelled to stare even if I thought he would come over and poke me in the chest. His thin face was folded, always, in this expression of intense hatred and rage. The eyebrows scything in towards the top of the nose. The eyes glaring and slicing the air. The hollow cheeks conspiring with the lips in a moving sneer. And out of this face would come the most modulated, pleasant, almost unctuous tones. The voice of a smiling person. I was transfixed by this giant sustained gulf between facial and vocal expression, and was always very pleased that I never had to speak to him. I think he forced his features into some facsimile of affability if he actually had to conduct a conversation face-to-face, but he must have had to go home and confess his sins to THE DEVIL afterwards.
Yes. Bastards. I'm glad this house is not mine because I don't think I could bear them coming round and prodding at it. But then this house needs quite a few grand spending on it to make it habitable by anyone who doesn't harbour a deep and barely-rational affection for it. The bathroom suite is in three different shades of avocado.
It just occurred to me today while watching the news that I haven't shown any indication thus far that I am at all aware of world events, or any events outside my own pretty liddle cranium. The fact is that I often actively avoid the news. It's part of the whole 'small bads v. small goods' theory that I've come to adopt. I stopped reading the music press some time before I stopped writing for it regularly, and I still feel the benefits of that; then I stopped buying newspapers, almost without realising it. Recently I've hardly been watching the TV news. And I'm here to tell y'all, it's bliss. Now when I do watch it, I'm dismayed at how our TV news is becoming more tabloidy, Americanised, sensationalist. Or perhaps I just didn't pick up on it before. I can hardly bear the bad journalism, let alone the bad politics, bad things, bad badness. I keep up now with a brief check of a few sites, sporadically. When I am old they will say "don't let her watch the news, it upsets her . . . system".
In the course of my news-eschew I have been most careful to blot out the Michael Jackson trial. It wouldn't surprise me at all to hear that he had behaved in the kind of inappropriate and damaging manner that necessitates conviction, but as in plenty of other child abuse cases I think this behaviour would have been the result of a lack of conception of proper boundaries, an inability to understand the implications of selfish actions. If there was ever anyone who never had the chance to establish those, it's him. It's too easy to get out the pitchforks and start tossing 'evil' around. What I think though is that he didn't do anything beyond sleeping with boys, in the sense of sleep.
The kid's mother seems to have that particular manipulative, extortion-happy disorder of the personality which makes cancer a positive boon. If that is the case it's hard to tell whose mind is the more undone. She seems to show genuine maliciousness, whereas he has only ever seemed to me to be lost. But having stayed away from most of the leering, gluttonous coverage I'm not really in a position to back up any such incendiary comments with, er, what may or may not be the facts of the case as presented by lawyers with their own agendas and then by journalists with theirs. Sheesh, by the time the truth has been filtered through all of those oaky barrels you'll be lucky to get something you could float an ice cube in.
The thought of it all makes me terribly sad. Anyone has threads that run back through their lives as long as they can remember, things about themselves or the world that they monitor like aspects of pop culture or their own psychology, and the one thing that I have in that respect is the astonishing ugliness that Michael Jackson has always brought out in people. More than any other famous person I can think of. It's an accepted pastime now of course to shoot down 'slebs but this was always different. Rapacious and unabated. It was like; if you could go into a room and kick a person to death, and then walk out and suffer no guilt or consequence - you would want to do it, just to see how it felt. It's that streak in people that seems to come rampaging to the fore at the mention of his name. This wellspring of absolute nastiness - and righteous nastiness, too, the kind that thinks it is just and is impervious to any counter-argument. It's still gushing away now, and there is no sympathy for this person who has lived his life like a bag of broken bits. And it makes me sad, more for human nature itself than for him.
Unless he's guilty of course, in which case I will immediately change tack and join the world in gleeful teeth-grinding discreet-thigh-stroking condemnation of the multi-nosed, powdery, shoulder-padded, ageing shrieking WEIRDO FREAK. Sick. It's so sick.
In Other News, the Millennium D'oh!me is going to be rebranded - Joy! - as the O2 Arena, and play host to enormogigs by supadupastars despite having notoriously shitty acoustics. This is as well as its hopeful role as a venue for the Olympics. Please God, no. Give it to Paris, for chrissakes. People are angry about this.
Oh, and apparently the man who did the voice for Tony the Tiger has died. The man who did the voice of Shere Khan killed himself in 1972 and left this note:
Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool - good luck.
You can imagine it in that voice, can't you?
The people behind Crazy Frog, Sweety, Nessie and all other Chipmunk-throwback ringtones should probably invest in cyanide capsules now. They're at the gates. They're closing in. Alles is loss. Schnell. The cunts are going to keep 'Speed of Sound' off number one and while I do not care and have to admit it sounds a bit 'With or Without You' in the flabby midsection, it does not diminish their cuntery one iota. There should be some kind of online hostel for good songs that are wasted on the public.
I know why I feel inclined to move house. It's because that's usually the only time I get to have a proper clear-out. It's like if you can see a move coming upon you in the next couple of months you can just let it all slide in the meantime. But I must find some motivation from somewhere. I find comfort in clutter but this is no longer picturesque, contained happy-shambles. It is just Mess.
I very much need to sort this room out, the study/what estate agents would call without a blink the 'third bedroom'. Fucking estate agents. Not looking forward to tangling with them again. Although this time I will wear a nice jacket and look Serious, like someone who is only renting temporarily, someone with Options. I'm fortunate in having my mother's phone voice, which kicks up a plummy gear at every hurdle presented by the other end, but with estate agents I think it's important to get in their face and scowl like a person who knows what they want.
There was one agency I went to in Camden, who let and managed two of the flats I lived in a year apart (one of which I got by an amazing instance of serendipity, and then proceeded to suffer as it gave me no end of trouble culminating in bastard landlords dropping frozen spears of urine on me from their own private jet. Anyway). I used to sit there waiting for Denis, a delicious Parisian person who seemed genuinely keen to help and often bitched about how rotten estate agents were. But it was probably just his schtick. Hell, he was probably from Croydon, the fucker. So I'd wait for him to come back from a showing and roll his enormous brown eyes at me in conspiratorial manner and would watch one of the two bosses talking on the phone. Knowing the sociopathic obliviousness of such people to the reactions of others, I felt fairly safe staring at him, but I would have been compelled to stare even if I thought he would come over and poke me in the chest. His thin face was folded, always, in this expression of intense hatred and rage. The eyebrows scything in towards the top of the nose. The eyes glaring and slicing the air. The hollow cheeks conspiring with the lips in a moving sneer. And out of this face would come the most modulated, pleasant, almost unctuous tones. The voice of a smiling person. I was transfixed by this giant sustained gulf between facial and vocal expression, and was always very pleased that I never had to speak to him. I think he forced his features into some facsimile of affability if he actually had to conduct a conversation face-to-face, but he must have had to go home and confess his sins to THE DEVIL afterwards.
Yes. Bastards. I'm glad this house is not mine because I don't think I could bear them coming round and prodding at it. But then this house needs quite a few grand spending on it to make it habitable by anyone who doesn't harbour a deep and barely-rational affection for it. The bathroom suite is in three different shades of avocado.
It just occurred to me today while watching the news that I haven't shown any indication thus far that I am at all aware of world events, or any events outside my own pretty liddle cranium. The fact is that I often actively avoid the news. It's part of the whole 'small bads v. small goods' theory that I've come to adopt. I stopped reading the music press some time before I stopped writing for it regularly, and I still feel the benefits of that; then I stopped buying newspapers, almost without realising it. Recently I've hardly been watching the TV news. And I'm here to tell y'all, it's bliss. Now when I do watch it, I'm dismayed at how our TV news is becoming more tabloidy, Americanised, sensationalist. Or perhaps I just didn't pick up on it before. I can hardly bear the bad journalism, let alone the bad politics, bad things, bad badness. I keep up now with a brief check of a few sites, sporadically. When I am old they will say "don't let her watch the news, it upsets her . . . system".
In the course of my news-eschew I have been most careful to blot out the Michael Jackson trial. It wouldn't surprise me at all to hear that he had behaved in the kind of inappropriate and damaging manner that necessitates conviction, but as in plenty of other child abuse cases I think this behaviour would have been the result of a lack of conception of proper boundaries, an inability to understand the implications of selfish actions. If there was ever anyone who never had the chance to establish those, it's him. It's too easy to get out the pitchforks and start tossing 'evil' around. What I think though is that he didn't do anything beyond sleeping with boys, in the sense of sleep.
The kid's mother seems to have that particular manipulative, extortion-happy disorder of the personality which makes cancer a positive boon. If that is the case it's hard to tell whose mind is the more undone. She seems to show genuine maliciousness, whereas he has only ever seemed to me to be lost. But having stayed away from most of the leering, gluttonous coverage I'm not really in a position to back up any such incendiary comments with, er, what may or may not be the facts of the case as presented by lawyers with their own agendas and then by journalists with theirs. Sheesh, by the time the truth has been filtered through all of those oaky barrels you'll be lucky to get something you could float an ice cube in.
The thought of it all makes me terribly sad. Anyone has threads that run back through their lives as long as they can remember, things about themselves or the world that they monitor like aspects of pop culture or their own psychology, and the one thing that I have in that respect is the astonishing ugliness that Michael Jackson has always brought out in people. More than any other famous person I can think of. It's an accepted pastime now of course to shoot down 'slebs but this was always different. Rapacious and unabated. It was like; if you could go into a room and kick a person to death, and then walk out and suffer no guilt or consequence - you would want to do it, just to see how it felt. It's that streak in people that seems to come rampaging to the fore at the mention of his name. This wellspring of absolute nastiness - and righteous nastiness, too, the kind that thinks it is just and is impervious to any counter-argument. It's still gushing away now, and there is no sympathy for this person who has lived his life like a bag of broken bits. And it makes me sad, more for human nature itself than for him.
Unless he's guilty of course, in which case I will immediately change tack and join the world in gleeful teeth-grinding discreet-thigh-stroking condemnation of the multi-nosed, powdery, shoulder-padded, ageing shrieking WEIRDO FREAK. Sick. It's so sick.
In Other News, the Millennium D'oh!me is going to be rebranded - Joy! - as the O2 Arena, and play host to enormogigs by supadupastars despite having notoriously shitty acoustics. This is as well as its hopeful role as a venue for the Olympics. Please God, no. Give it to Paris, for chrissakes. People are angry about this.
Oh, and apparently the man who did the voice for Tony the Tiger has died. The man who did the voice of Shere Khan killed himself in 1972 and left this note:
Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool - good luck.
You can imagine it in that voice, can't you?
The people behind Crazy Frog, Sweety, Nessie and all other Chipmunk-throwback ringtones should probably invest in cyanide capsules now. They're at the gates. They're closing in. Alles is loss. Schnell. The cunts are going to keep 'Speed of Sound' off number one and while I do not care and have to admit it sounds a bit 'With or Without You' in the flabby midsection, it does not diminish their cuntery one iota. There should be some kind of online hostel for good songs that are wasted on the public.
