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.