One for the lexicon

I've invented a new sub-section of dance music - it's called gymnasium house. It's the type of music that evokes vivid mental images of obese women on exercise bikes at spinning classes, huge arses wobbling and banging about while the instructor shouts in time to the music '1..2..3.. ready... and FAST, FAST, FAST, FAST' while enthusiastically pumping his/her arms in the air.

What's so wonderful about it is this: if music shops and websites pick up on it, I will never waste a single moment of my life looking at CDs by those artists whose music would be found in the gym house section. 

The archetypal gym house track is this one. Others include this shame and this shambles.

So there it is - Gym House, coming soon to all good music shops and websites...

F1 Palpitations

If you didn't see Lewis Hamilton become World Champion at the Brazilian Grand Prix yesterday, here are the last couple of laps. Since Formula 1 championships are sometimes over five or more races before the end of the season, and races can often be so boring, this was a particularly tense affair. Watching Ferrari celebrating oblivious to the knowledge that they'd lost the championship on the last corner gave the same sort of childish pleasure derived from watching opposing football fans celebrating a goal that's been disallowed.

Happy Halloween

An inordinate amount of attention has already been lavished on 'Sachsgate' so I'll try to keep this short in the interest of common sanity.

This, but for the media, wouldn't be a big deal. Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross crossed the line; they apologised. The end? Of course not. You could almost here the stampede as the politically correct brigade made for their keyboards in a state of almost frenetic sexual ecstasy. Some members of Comment is Free on the Guardian's website drew some inspired comparison's, like: 'I work in the NHS, another service paid for by the public, and if I made comments like this to someone I would lose my job.' Does it get any more irrelevant than that?

The vitriol and self-righteousness being drummed up by the Daily Mail and sanctimonious airheads alike is far more detestable than Brand and Ross egging each other on until they overstepped the mark and offended one old, unfunny slapstick comedian.

This is just another case of manufactured outrage, as pointed out by Peter Tatchell  and most annoyingly, it's another example of the increasing weight society gives the notion of something being 'offensive'. Brand's jokes were juvenile and embarrassing but claiming they offended you as an average Radio 2 listener is a little far fetched. Sachs may have been offended to hear his Satanic Slut granddaughter had got off with Brand, and at the manner in which he was told, but can anybody else really be offended by the whole thing? The fact that Gordon Brown felt the need to comment is laughable; I guess he'll be wanting to table a motion relating to Gordon Ramsay's treatment of others at the next G8 summit. Then there's boring know-it-alls like Paul Gambaccini; with men like him on the Radio 2 roster, they needn't worry about the ratings now Brand's left.

People love a witch-hunt and they love feeling indignant. Acting offended is one of the easiest routes to both these things. As Stephen Fry points out, if you hear someone say 'I'm a bit offended by that' often enough the response should be 'so fucking what?'.

Stella

As one of few amongst my peers who will readily welcome Stella into my fridge and body, I thought it was fitting that I should write a short entry on the revamped artwork. The new can seems a bit classier to me, I prefer it without the gold top and horizontal red pinstripes and like the echoing of the details from the official Stella 'chalice'. As the creative director in charge of the new design puts it, 'we have focused on the logo as the 'hero' of the packaging, reinforcing the premium cues and making it more modern, ownable and distinctive.' Quite.

Lager is particularly topical today, as I've been rendered largely incapacitated by the Peroni that accompanied Sheffield Wednesday beating Sheffield United yesterday. Can't do anything but read and watch a soothing John Martyn and Danny Thompson performance.

It's art Jim, but not as we know it.

To the immediate left are two pictures. On the left of the two, there's a lovely stone cottage at Sudborough Green Lodge in Northamptonshire. On the right, is the same stone cottage as it recently became an 'art' installation. 

Over to a spokesperson for Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, who were awarded £74,000 of National Lottery funding by Arts Council England, part of which was spent on commissioning the 'inspiring' Richard Woods for the project above: 'Artist Richard Woods has clad the cottages in a unique, candy-coloured faux stone cladding makeover that reinvigorates the rural landscape.'

• When has stone-cladding of this nature ever been aesthetically pleasing?
• It's not even real stone-cladding (so at least its less permanent) and using the word 'faux' doesn't make it alluring or artistic; 'fake' would have done just fine.
• It's not unique, it's from Hansel and Gretel.
• The reason for its uniqueness in the real world is self-explanatory.
• When was it decided that nature, particularly like the area of forestry that this cottage sits in, was in any need of 're-invigoration'? "Oooh this elephant's boring, can't we paint it loads of colours?" 

This project is just the sort of self-serving, self-indulgent, vacuous, pseudo-intellectual nonsense that gives 'contemporary art' a bad name. Handed the bitter pill of the artwork itself, you're not even allowed to wash it down with a refreshing gulp of humility, for example, an admission that 'it's just a bit of fun'. Instead, you have to read on websites and press releases about it being 'daring' and 'reinvigorating' i.e. the same ad infinitum brand of justification that those in modern art circles do so well, one that's based on nothing but lots of grandiose statements about ideas that have absolutely no relation to the real world. You don't have to be talented or visionary, all you have to be is willing to exploit the fact that there's no definition of what 'art' is; anything you say is art, just, well, is art. "To me, this bloody tampon hanging from a packet of digestive biscuits really represents how the female is often considered the other in our world of constant consumption and that in some way her monthly cycle is both a cry for help and an attempt to rid herself of a form of guilt manifest in all women." Hey presto! It's that easy. Easy and really, really lazy.

More photos of the breathtaking transformation at http://www.fermynwoods.co.uk/elsewhere/forestry.htm

Crimble Gig

Those who don't believe that a virgin can give birth to a child, that a man can walk on water or that there's a being in the sky that can read your mind (as well as everyone else's, naturally) and who gives a shit about what it is you're thinking, may or may not be interested in this show on at the Bloomsbury Theatre and then the Hammersmith Apollo in December.

I already have a pair of tickets for the now sold out show on the 18th *smug* but an extra date has been added on the 21st.

Dulcet-toned, genius biologist Richard Dawkins will be there, along with Ben Goldacre, whose Bad Science column in the Guardian is a textbook exercise in hilariously dry dissection and analysis.

As most other committed Ricky Gervais fans will notice, I saw that his good friend/victim Robin Ince tops the bill as host. My hopes and dreams were fulfiiled this morning when RG confirmed on his blog that he would be making an appearance as one of the Extra Special Guests.

Financial farce forces fuckers to focus

Never one to shy away from controversy, I shall dare to suggest that the issues dominating the news at present will have very little affect on the readership of this blog. Unless your landlord happens to be a latecomer to the buy-to-let fad, has mortgaged everything thrice, including his children at his local Bradford & Bingley branch, and has temporarily unsmothered himself from the duvet to insist on a 200% rent increase, you will probably have found the turmoil only shocking in regards to the cost of an aubergine ("a quid for a bloody aubergine?!").

The only real malaise (and I only refrain from using the word 'aggravation' or, indeed, 'outrage' because I've just had two glasses of a lovely, Tim Atkin recommended M&S Rosso di Puglia - try it, it's only £4.50 (pretentious, moi?)) I've experienced from the financial crisis has been because of the horribly hateful habit amongst the media to alliterate as much as seems possible, given the restraints of time or, in the case of the press, space.

'CREDIT CRUNCH' has swiftly and reasonably become an unwelcome piece of trite and vexatious phraseology in describing current events, but no sooner had it been quietly ushered out of public view like a ropey old tart flashing her arse in an upmarket wine bar, in wanders an equally abhorrent slapper - 'MARKET MELTDOWN'.

Let's take a long, hard look at ourselves

Adolescent white noise, the OC syndrome; whatever you want to call it, here's the first batch of words that blight the vocabulary of some or most of us under the age of 30. In what could well become a regular feature, the intention is to expose those words that should affront our sense of imagination, invention, originality, clarity, brevity and, in some cases, outright decency, in the domain of speech and articulation. Of course, it wouldn't be as interesting or as potentially offensive if I didn't postulate some completely unscientific theories pertaining to the reason(s) for their occurrence and frequency. N.B. The inclusion of particular words on this list in no way exculpates the author.

• Like - Runaway winner as the most heinously over/misused word in common parlance amongst young people. Get someone between the age of 12 and 30 to report or explain anything to you and there is little chance of them making the arduous journey to the end of a sentence without saying like. I once counted seven likes in a sentence when particularly riled by a like addict who was regaling a friend with details of a past event at work. Not only is it boring to listen to, but it sounds the death knell for plenty of other perfectly good, and moreover, different words. 'He was like, "Did I ask for that?"'  instead of 'He said, "Did I ask for that?"' Most of the time it's just completely unnecessary: 'it was, like, so shit' instead of 'it was so shit'. Using 'like' in this way is either simply an import from US culture (after all, using like often whilst impersonating an American only adds to the authenticity of the impression) or has been adopted partly because of two trends amongst 'the youth', the first of which is to have no enthusiasm for anything, i.e. I'm not enthusiastic about anything, so I certainly wasn't interested enough in whatever it is I'm telling you about to be certain about what it was that was said or happened. I can, however, offer an approximation of what might have happened and I'll indicate that to you by saying like every other word. The second trend is to aim to appear stupid to your peers i.e. I like, don't know many, like, words, cuz, I like, missed school 'n' stuff and I think books are, like, boring. Good for you, but turn up to a job interview talking like that and you can show off your defective vocabulary down at the job centre. e.g. 'I was, like, totally, like, gutted and was like, "what's, like, the matter with you?"' Correct usage: I like marmite and when I eat it, I feel like making sweet, sweet love .

• Random - Let's clear something up; if something is weird or strange it does not follow on as a matter of logic that it is also random. These words aren't technically interchangeable, they are not synonyms. Secondly, if someone describes their sense of humour as random, thinking it makes them sound more interesting, they're sadly mistaken. It usually means that no-one else finds them funny and that, though they may well be 'quirky', they are so in a way which often alienates them from everybody else. e.g. 'God, sometimes I'm so random; I'm a bit zany aren't I?!' Correct usage: 'Oh, by the way Will, did I text you about the microscopic phenomena considered objectively random according to several standard interpretations of quantum mechanics?'

• Bless 'em (including variants e.g 'BLESS!' "Awww bless him!" etc.) - Undoubtedly the prize winner for most offensively banal expression in this list. Used in myriad circumstances and usually uttered in a tone of voice where the person the 'blessing' is intended for must surely expect a condescending pat on the head as an accompaniment. If someone's done something sweet, they probably don't want to be embarrassed and patronised by someone exclaiming 'AWWW bless YER! If someone's done something idiotic, they'd probably rather someone else didn't hide behind a charade of sympathy that actually sounds more like gentle mocking. And if someone's been genuinely and hurtfully unfortunate, they deserve more than a 'bless' in response to the story of their troubles. The insight I was recently granted by an occasional bless user, was that bless them/him/her is used sometimes when someone else has finished speaking and there doesn't seem to be anything to say in response - the prosecution rests. e.g. A: 'I proposed to her over dinner in Paris and she said "yes". B: 'Awwww bless!' Correct usage: Never - it's always annoying, both after a sneeze and when superstitious people do it.

• Late Doors - Early doors is bad enough; this extrapolation is unacceptable. e.g. 'I probably won't make it down there 'till late doors.' Correct usage: Never.

• Lush - A southerner's favourite. Dense Amazonian jungle is lush, as is the decor in the lobby at the Ritz. Your cold bottle of water, although refreshing, is not. e.g. 'You should have been at that facking club mate, I saw this facking lush bird.' Correct usage: See above.

• Delish' - Good grief. e.g. 'Oh, these pancakes are absolutely delish'. Correct usage: Never.

More in the vitriolic pipeline.

With love, W.

Orange Rockcorps

Between 4 and 5,000 people attended a gig at the Royal Albert Hall last Friday as reward for each giving up 4 hours of their time to work on projects designed to benefit local communities. Video footage on the Rockcorps website shows volunteers tramping through overgrown allotments, painting toilets in schools and clearing riverbanks of car tyres, amongst many other escapades. The clips also show off the smiles, laughter and general good-humoured spirit of participants, perhaps partly due to the fact that much of the work was undertaken by small groups of friends planning to attend the concert together.

So it was with nigh on total moral abandon that I deigned to attend the concert having contributed absolutely nothing in the way of time or energy to the overall effort, at any point, save maintaining a good friendship with someone working for the organisers who happened to have a spare ticket.

The gig itself was an exciting occasion (see how modestly I neglect to fully enunciate my resemblance to a modern day Jesus of Nazareth) thanks to Ludacris and Busta Rhymes, performing as the main acts for the night, and the crowd itself, that was in a frothy-mouthed frenzy when the rappers finally appeared late in the evening.

One of the important aspects of the 'Give, Get Given' concept is that those unable to afford a ticket to a gig like this one, had tickets been on general sale, could attend by 'paying' with something other than money. Almost everyone in the crowd seemed so genuinely excited and enthusiastic compared to paying crowds I've seen in the past, that I couldn't help wonder whether this method of getting a ticket has more advantages than just persuading people to work for free, or, indeed, whether those who turn up at the box office and blithely hand over their £30-100 for a concert ticket are always the die-hard fans they'd like you to think they are. There was a tangible feeling of community amongst the crowd and people seemed to have enjoyed the experience - earning and appreciating the chance to see the acts was a big part of that. 

Admittedly the event was sponsored by a multi-national corporation, but the success of the project seems to be a small star in the sky for something more humanistic, when much else is lost in the light pollution of capitalism.

Judging a book by its cover

Although reviewers at The Spectator and the Mail On Sunday claim that this novel is "sinister and bizarre - not a crime-novel for the faint-hearted" and "dark and compelling, full of perverse sex and violence" respectively, it was the deliciously noir-ish, slightly surreal front cover, with its hint of art nouveau that sucked me in. The gorgeous silver type-face is in slight relief, catching the light like the ripples of a lake on a moonlit night. It looks so good I can't help but feel it might be contraband.

Whether it's a decent book or not is an entirely different matter... but I can always glue it to the wall.

Café courage

Part of a conversation I overheard outside a café today:

Woman A: "... it's just I don't really like flapjack..."

Woman B: "No, no - it's cool; I'm up for a muffin."

One can only imagine the ensuing psychological exhaustion once you've worked yourself into a state where you feel sufficiently confident to describe yourself as 'up for a muffin'. Heaven knows what she'll be steeling herself for tomorrow.

"Yeah, I'm fine..."

Should you ever find yourself in the unenviable position of entering a restaurant in the United States, you will undoubtedly be greeted by a woman so gushing that she veritably spews out the phrase 'how ARRRRE yew?!' before the door's finished closing. 

A response to the question posed isn't even expected, and whilst you think momentarily about answering, the waitress will usually have wandered off to get you a copy of the wine list. It's not that I wish she really did care about how I'm doing but precisely because we both know she doesn't, that I find it ferociously irksome. 'You're welcome' sits happily, for me at least, in the realms of phatic claptrap that nobody takes any notice of when muttered as a polite acknowledgement. We take it as read that this phrase really is totally vacuous, and one of its numerous advantages compared with 'how are you?' is that there is no context in which a response is ever required or desired (accept perhaps in a particularly wearing piece of dialogue only imaginable in an Austen novel "I can assure you Ms Bennett, it is much gratifying to know so!" "Oh Mr Darcy! You are more the welcome than I can ever remember anyone ever being so in my entire life!").

'How are you?' is barely acceptable as a throw-away question, even between friends who could claim to have any interest in the answer; do we really want to go further and relegate it to the utter banal by using it to greet strangers we know we'll never see again? Consider how rarely you're asked the question by someone really meaning it - someone who actually wants to know if you feel happy; how the things in your life are going and what might be worrying you. You hear the question so often that interpreting it with meaning will probably leave you slightly confused for the first few moments; then you may feel so moved that you sink to the floor, weeping like a small child. The power the question has when used in this context puts the waitress's version of it to shame and shows that 'how are you?' isn't a phrase we should allow to become so devoid of meaning that we can't use it for anything else but chit-chat. It's a rare and beautiful thing when someone asks 'how are you?' and wants more than three words and a shrug. Asking a total stranger 'how are you?' because you're about to serve them food or sell them clothes is odd enough, but totally disengaging before they've even responded only serves as proof that you really don't care, even if, for some unfathomable reason, you felt obliged to ask anyway.

Names for a blog

It was with unabashed pride that I sought to name this blog 'News From Nowhere' in honour of my 19th century namesake. What a clever man I am, I thought; not only would I cast myself in some flattering intellectual light, but I would also surreptitiously tip my hat to a widely-held notion that the blogging community constitutes little more than a group of people discussing what they had for breakfast, or which new ailment has struck down the family cat. And it wouldn't even be as pretentious as it seems because William Morris really is my name!

Someone's already taken it. I haven't checked to see what the page is like, it might be too much to take, certainly this soon anyway. Thus a potentially humiliating acid test for this blog has emerged; my aim is to have one reader... and it doesn't stop there... one reader who can be bothered to comment during the blog's existence on what my substitute title is about.