A request to computor component designers.

Just our of interest, do you people have some award ceremony with prizes for things such as:

Best Design for inaccessable Motherboard battery

or

Most user unfriendly socket on a motherboard

Let me know, wont you.

21st Century Boy

Hollow tongue politicians and vacuum mouthed advertisers. What is worse? Flaccid lips dripping untruths or the barren absurdity of speech devoid of idea, concept, grammer, intelligence or art. Fourth rate drama with pitiful exposition, history altering and bending facts to fit until they snap under the pressure of creating puerile entertainment for the distraction of the ignorant and easy satisfaction. Morons dribbling over the spewings of idiots, where quality is rideculed, honesty rejected, second best accepted and ability turns away dejected. This shining jewel that once sent its language, explorers, artists, soldiers and prospecters, now a babble of tiny miscreants txt speek wid dey’re fumbs pasting their essays from misbegotten websites and grubbing ancient tombs. Kings come and leaders go, Dark Ages replacing the Golden Light. Men who died on the Normandy sand so you can throw your fast food box onto a shit stained, gob smacked, vomit trodden brokendown, dug up pavement. Discarded, disregarded, hard to find an answer amoung the myriad retarded. Words are absurd.

Catweazle, Clarkson and a man on wire

Just a few connections and conclusions I drew watching a few things yesterday. Firstly, Catweazle on DVD. This was a childrens’ programme first aired in 1970, a meander down Nostalgia Street for me, back to my own childhood, though I must have seen it when it was repeated a few years later. I was struck by the innocence and the freedom. Apart from the young lad Carrot befriending a weird, old bloke which would probably be enough for it not to get made these days, Carrot just jumped into the back of an old open top car, no seatbelt and then suggests Sam the driver goes off for a pint while he waits before driving back! I am not condoning drink driving, it is just the naive, innocent freedom of it all.

Later I watched Man on Wire about the French guy who high wire walked between the twin towers in New York in 1973. To get in to organise and set up they posed as workmen, office workers and journalists, creating false documentation and ID cards…can you imagine that now? They would be whipped off somewhere for questioning and have the almost impossible task of convincing the authorities they were not planning an attack. The DA at the time just said that if he did what amounted to a bit of community work all charges would be dropped. He was more than happy to do so and that was that. It seemed a finer world back then. The saddest thing was seeing the opening ceremony for the towers with a speech along the lines of them being a symbol of harmony, to bring the world together. Poignant when one considers the tragic circumstances that brought them down.

Finally, I saw the last five minutes of a programme I don’t watch: Top Gear. It had Jeremy Clarkson driving an Aston Martin and mourning the fact that because of world economics and environmental concerns such cars would soon be a thing of the past. I do not agree with most of his attitudes, tearing up the environment in a gas guzzler is a pretty selfish way of living but I do agree with his sentiment, that a sense of adventure, of fun, a spirited approach to life does seem to be lacking in our over controlled, safety conscious and secure no risk low risk culture. Not a culture that breeds free spirits like the Man on Wire.

Everyone is a (medium format) photographer.

A while back I posted my opinion that “photography” did not exist anymore: Link. Just as an addition to that, I have recently seen a 10 megapixel camera for £99.00. This “recognises” up to sixteen faces, selects the best inbuilt programme mode automatically and does just about everything for you.

The size of image that a 10mp digital camera will give you is no longer a rival for 35mm but places medium format potential in your hand, something that was not an affordable option for me when I was working as a photographer. Now that is available for less than £100, the trouble is that most people now working in photography have not got a great foundation of photographic craft, a shame given the equipment now available.

At last, comedy detective adventures printed!

After many years of thorough research, hard graft…no…there is nothing sophisticated about these two books! The humour is schoolboy, lavatorial and strewn with more innuendo than you could shake a stick at.

It is orientated towards an adult audience and the plots are, actually, welll constructed as detective mysteries…it is just the level of humour that will, in my humble opinion, prevent any prize nominations for literature!!

Available at lulu.com click here

About sums it up

I used to be a photographer but I guess I have now pretty much turned away from that medium of expression. Why?

Well, because I, personally, do not think that a “Photographer” exists any more. That is not a good thing.

It is not a bad thing. It is just progress.

sums it up

Old England….

A while back now, the group The Waterboys recorded a song called Olde England is Dyin’.

Over weight schoolboy at lunchtime riding for free on the bus back to his school clutching his polystyrene box of junk food.

mmmmm….

The Day the Music Hall Died

And tales of its bizarre resurrection

They all said Music Hall was dead and, indeed, so it was. The slow decline into dereliction of the theatres and halls that once resounded to laughter and joy in every town displays stark testament to this demise.

One of the main reasons was the growth of television as a popular medium of entertainment. Music Hall comedians could tour their act from town to town doing the same routine and using the same material to fresh audiences. Contrast that with A Morecombe and Wise TV show during their heyday: 20-30 million people heard their gags, half the population of the UK in one go. They could not do the same joke the next week. In a way that generation of comedians had the hardest time and many a good one fretted, worried and damaged or destroyed their health or their lives as a result.

Since, say, Harry Enfield’s television shows, through The Fast Show and on into Catherine Tate and Little Britain an odd thing has happened. That announcement of the demise of Music Hall has proven to be premature because in a way the style of these shows has absorbed the problems faced by Music Hall and the TV mass audience.

They all rely on catchphrases (for catchphrase read punchline). They tell a slight variation of a joke, the variation usually being the situation, and deliver the same punchline/catchphrase every time. Shall we call it a catchline?

A Music Hall Comedian told the same joke with the same punchline in a different context, i.e., a different venue in a different town.

The classic TV comedians of the 1960-1970 era had to deliver different jokes with different punchlines in an unchanging context. A familiar TV set or studio situation, which, more often than not, bore a marked similarity to a stage. Think of Eric and Ernie using the front of curtain as a place to deliver a routine. A theme, incidentally, used in the first series of The Mighty Boosh.

Which of these two descriptions best fits shows like Little Britain or Catherine Tate? I would say definition One. The difference is only in the device that they deliver a catchline we have all heard before, indeed anticipate and expect. We know it is coming but by altering the context in terms of scene, other characters and situation they still manage to amuse the audience. Sometimes you have to wonder how they manage to achieve this.

I am not dismissing this format as unfunny, some have been positively hilarious, but I do find it interesting to draw parallels with the old Music Hall and this style of comedy, which emerged, from the alternative comedy circuit of the 1980’s. If you then consider that Matt Lucas and David Walliams have enjoyed enormous success taking Little Britain on tour as a live stage show from city to city, the symmetry is almost complete. Now where did I put that washboard?