Category Archives: Misanthropy

Beatherder

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I went to a festival recently for the first time in a few years. Clearly it’s taken that length of time for me to forget a very important point- I would happily kill 95% of people at any given festival. I’m sure they’re all nice and lovely the rest of the time when their enagaged with normal grinding reality like the rest of us- but stick them in a field with a soundsystem, 48 cans of Stella and access to some industral strength ketamine and everything goes horribly, horribly wrong. They begin communicating at the sort of volume usually associated with a jumbo jet crashing on take-off and decide that 5am is the appropriate time to begin an interpetation of Massive Attack tunes on the bongos to impress a posh girl called something like Iffy.

And these are people I just paid £70 to spend a weekend camping with.

Incredibly, I still had a brilliant time. This is mainly due to the company of friends I don’t see often enough who through a combination of humour, love and understanding managed to smooth the edges off the seething rage that festival people pump into the dense black gloop that’s where my soul should be. Thanks for that guys. Appreciate it.

I was also helped by the fact that festival was everything that Glastonbury always promised to be. Impressive, really, considering that it was a festival called Beatherder I was at and not Glastonbury.

I’ve been down to the big one at Pilton a couple of times and it was great- although as an event it’s so smug and in love with itself that, for one weekend per year, it briefly overtakes Manchester as the cockiest, most-likely-to-harp-on-about-it’s-inherent-greatness place in the UK. If it could fellate itself, it would snap it’s wonderful, oh-so-cool neck doing it.

Glastonbury is brilliant, no doubt, but it likes to present this image as an insane bacchanale of decadence and music where anything can happen. Rumours always ping around the festival like Twitter after it’s received a blow to the head: “Paul McCartney and Neil Young are in the acoustic tent at 4pm!”, “I’ve just seen Kurt Cobain eat a falafel during The White Lies set”, “Glenn Miller’s plane just crashed through a timehole- he’s playing on the Pyramid Stage with Slash”- that sort of thing. The chinese whispers about what’s going on in the awful, rubbish, not-at-Glastonbury outside world are even more insane. Apparently, when news spread about Michael Jackson’s death last year it took about 30 minutes flat for the rumour to mutate into news of every single celebrity called Michael having passed away in the night; Barrymore, Buerk, Jordan, McIntyre, Portillo in a freak yachting tragedy etc, etc. And what really happens that’s a surprise? Bugger all.

Oh, and those festival twats I mentioned earlier? There’s 175,000 of the fuckers.

The truth about Glastonbury, and what actually makes it great, is that it’s lots of bands you’ve heard of playing tightly scheduled sets to ensure they get some coverage on the BBC. That and the fact that Lauren Laverne’s there.

Beatherder, this past weekend, meanwhile turned out to herald all the unexpected insanity that Glasto had to stop having when they let the BBC film it and had to put up a massive fence to stop every baghead in Europe from getting in and ransacking tents. Here’s just three things I saw there this year:

- A stall honest enough to advertise that it sells ‘Shit Cameras’
- A talent competition won by a human-beatboxer and judged by, among others, a drag queen and the woman who plays Janice Battersby on Coronation Street.
- A main stage guest appearance from GMTV’s leotard-toting Mr Motivator which featured backing dancing by a friend of mine dressed as Bertie Bassett

This is what festivals are meant to do; remove us from everyday and let us experience a different reality for the weekend. One where there’s lots of drinking, loads of live music and remarkably few consequences. Unfortunately, this also means experiencing the reality of life in a refugee camp for a few days, albeit a refugee camp where half the residents have gorged themselves on cheap speed and spend their time tripping over guy ropes and walking past tents fruitlessly yelling “DAZ!” at the top of their lungs in the hope of finding their friend who went off to have sex with that posh girl called Iffy because, disgracefully, in this alternate festival reality playing Massive Attack on the bongos in a drug induced stupor at 5am actually does get you laid.

And then instead of bongos you’re listening to sweaty tent-rutting for 3 hours as Daz bangs away at Iffy with admirable tenacity yet few results as his substance-addled brain has forgotten to tell his testicles what to do and Iffy passed out in the early stages anyway. The fucking degenerate scum. Maybe one day he’ll rut right through her pelvis and I’ll be woken by the glorious sound of Daz charging round the campsite as his mind finally caves in with all the horror while Iffy flails around in muted agony looking for her severed legs. The shits. The absolute rotting shits.

Er… Anyway, I had a point, can’t remember what it was now.

Um… yeah… I went to a festival this weekend. It was great. I’m just not sure why.

So Here It Is…

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The Germans have a word: weltschmerz.  Actually, the Germans have lots and lots of words but anyway, for now we’re just focusing on weltschmerz.  It means the feeling of realising that the real world will never live up to to the ideal of it that a person has in their head.  There’s also a word in English that means exactly the same thing.

Christmas.
Here’s the image of Xmas that’s sold to us every December:  snow, carols, food, presents, friends, family, love, peace, Morecambe and Wise, enconsed by the fire in the snug of a beautiful old pub, Slade at number 1, Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses, James Bond, Chocolate, Boxing Day football, The Queen.
Here’s the numbing reality:  frost, ice, rain, indigestion, scrums in shops, crowded trains, A My Family Christmas Special, drunken works parties stumbling around town centres, The X-Factor, people thinking they’re annoying Simon Cowell by sending Rage Against The Machine to number 1 when he’s actually just getting more publicity, Misteloe and Wine, nuts, Boxing Day defeat, The Queen.
It is, in a word, cack.  You’re only hope for any joy is in the giving and recieving of presents (or drinking mulled wine till your tongue falls out). This, however, is invariably a minefield of desperately trying to second guess what various realtives want until you just give up and buy them something from Lush (for females) or a Mock the Week DVD (males).  If only everyone was as easy to buy presents for as me (Adidas trainers or single malt scotch whisky- Islay if possible.  Thanks).
However, in the Christmas spirit I present to you the follwoing cut-out-and-keep (if you’re monitor’s made of paper) guide to 2009′s ultimate Chrimble gift ideas:
Bulimia Barbie- for the teenage girl in your life who’s fragile and still developing sense of self has been battered to death by a constant stream of air-brushed images featuring unattainable perfection and stick thin celebrities who’s diets probably make their breath smell like it should be rolling down the streets of Bophal.  This new Barbie comes with a hearty selection of realistic lovely food to stick down her plastic gullet and her hand already moulded into the ‘two-finger’ shape familiar to seasoned regurgitators.  Watch in wonder as Barbie eats every last morsel before spewing litres of authentic warm vomit down the Barbie Toilet TM (sold seperately) and, after every 25 pukes, a tooth falls out due to chronic bile erosion.  Includes 2 AA batteries.  Only £29.99.
iBreville- ultimate proof that bolting the letter ‘i’ onto the front of any product allows you to clog it up with pointless extras, this next generation sandwich toaster comes equipped with a spirit-level, dipstick, medieval witch dunker, alligator repellant kit, .pdf manual on jousting, hoover bag, DVD burner, rubber duck catapult and 3 different of vibrate settings.  All this technology has left it unable to make toasted sandwiches to any greater degree than any other sandwich toaster but the cool, crisp white design is guaranteed to make you not feel any shame in essentially paying £350 for a lump of gizmos that might as well be a neon sign saying “I Am A Shallow Tossrag”.
Suicide Adventure Day-  by the third day of Christmas you’re probably happily contemplating a blissful, self-enforced end to your life but still clinging to the meagre hope that things might get a bit better next year.  Why not, then, experience all the fun of suicide with none of the consequences with this exciting and informative adventure day?!  You’ll get to experience a number of different terminal scenarios with the guarantee that all injuries are none-life-threatening and that you’ll be brought back round to consciousness within 20 minutes ready to try your next method of welcoming oblivion.  From the sudden adrenaline thrill of the ‘High-Rise Plunge’ (simulated using a virtual reality machine and a mallet) to the tender and emotional final farewell of the ‘Dignitas Experience’ (simulated using sleeping pills and a room in a Travelodge) this is a day you’ll never forget.  Book early to avoid disappointment and to make sure you’ve got something to look forward to before you finally decide to end it all and take a train-carriage full of commuters with you.
Fuckwits- the brand new board game for all the family that allows YOU! to stuff up the planet for everyone else in a variety of EXCITING WAYS!.  Dads, why not play as the MERCHANT BANKERS who nearly sent Western civilisation to the wall and who cost you your job last year by forcing us all into a RECESSION that was none of our faults and for which they appear to have got off scot free while you’re flung on the scrap heap 7 years shy of retirement but now with no employment prospects and a woefully underfunded pension!  But look out! LITTLE Freddie’s playing as the arbiters of a celebrity obsessed culture that makes him feel less and less worthwhile every day until he finally decides to DEBASE himself before a stern-faced group of producer for Britain’s Got Talent int he hope that he can repeat the exact same ‘Ventriloquism but with his own gaping anus’ routine in FRONT of Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and millions of viewers at home who’ll make him feel justified only through their sheer naked hatred of him that masks the fact that they all wish they’d though of it fair!  But wait!  Mum’s GOT a gun!  She says she can’t take it anymore!  That she can’t live in world like this knowing what we’re capable of and seeing what we ACTUALLY have to put up with!  She’s got the special ‘weltschmerz’ card!  Hang on!  That gun didn’t even come with the game!  Where’d she get that!  Put it down dear!  Put it down!  Oh, Dear God… No… NO….!
Merry Christmas everyone.  And a Happy New Year.

Christmas.

Here’s the image of Xmas that’s sold to us every December:  snow, carols, food, presents, friends, family, love, peace, Morecambe and Wise, enconsed by the fire in the snug of a beautiful old pub, Slade at number 1, Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses, James Bond, Chocolate, Boxing Day football, The Queen.

Here’s the numbing reality:  frost, ice, rain, indigestion, scrums in shops, crowded trains, A ‘My Family’ Christmas Special, drunken works parties stumbling around town centres, The X-Factor, people thinking they’re annoying Simon Cowell by sending Rage Against The Machine to number 1 when he’s actually just getting more publicity, Misteltoe and Wine, nuts, Boxing Day defeat, The Queen.

It is, in a word, cack.  Your only hope for any joy is in the giving and recieving of presents (or drinking mulled wine till your tongue falls out). This, however, is invariably a minefield of desperately trying to second guess what various realtives want until you just give up and buy them something from Lush (for females) or a Mock the Week DVD (males).  If only everyone was as easy to buy presents for as, say,  me (size 11 Adidas trainers or single malt scotch whisky- Islay if possible.  Thanks).

However, in the Christmas spirit and to help you along, I present to you the following cut-out-and-keep (if your monitor’s made of paper) guide to 2009′s ultimate Chrimble gift ideas:

Bulimia Barbie- for the teenage girl in your life who’s fragile and still-developing sense of self has been battered to death by a constant stream of air-brushed images featuring unattainable perfection and stick thin celebrities who’s diets probably make their breath smell like it should be rolling down the streets of Bophal.  This new Barbie comes with a hearty selection of realistic lovely food to stick down her plastic gullet and her hand already moulded into the ‘two-finger’ shape familiar to seasoned regurgitators.  Watch in wonder as Barbie eats every last morsel before spewing litres of authentic warm vomit down the Barbie Toilet (TM) (sold seperately) and, after every 25 pukes, a tooth falls out due to chronic bile erosion.  Includes 2 AA batteries.  Only £29.99.

iBreville- ultimate proof that bolting the letter ‘i’ onto the front of any product allows you to clog it up with pointless extras, this next generation sandwich toaster comes equipped with a spirit-level, dipstick, medieval witch dunker, alligator repellant kit, .pdf manual on jousting, hoover bag, DVD burner, rubber duck catapult and 3 different vibrate settings.  All this technology has left it unable to make toasted sandwiches to any greater degree than any other sandwich toaster but the cool, crisp white design is guaranteed to make you not feel any shame in essentially paying £350 for a lump of gizmos that might as well be a neon sign saying “I Am A Shallow Tossrag”.

Suicide Adventure Day- by the third day of Christmas you’re probably happily contemplating a blissful, self-enforced end to your life but still clinging to the meagre hope that things might get a bit better next year.  Why not, then, experience all the fun of suicide with none of the consequences with this exciting and informative adventure day?!  You’ll get to experience a number of different terminal scenarios with the guarantee that all injuries are none-life-threatening and that you’ll be brought back round to consciousness within 20 minutes ready to try your next method of welcoming oblivion.  From the sudden adrenaline thrill of the ‘High-Rise Plunge’ (simulated using a virtual reality machine and a mallet) to the tender and emotional final farewell of the ‘Dignitas Experience’ (simulated using sleeping pills and a room in a Travelodge) this is a day you’ll never forget.  Book early to avoid disappointment and to make sure you’ve got something to look forward to before you finally decide to end it all and take a train-carriage full of commuters with you.

Fuckwits- the brand new board game for all the family that allows YOU to stuff up the planet for everyone else in a variety of EXCITING WAYS!.  Dads, why not play as the MERCHANT BANKERS who nearly sent Western civilisation to the wall and who cost you your job last year by forcing us all into a RECESSION that was none of our faults and for which they appear to have got off scot free while you’re flung on the scrap heap 7 years shy of retirement but now with no employment prospects and a woefully underfunded pension!  But look out! LITTLE Freddie’s playing as the arbiters of a celebrity obsessed culture that makes him feel less and less worthwhile every day until he finally decides to DEBASE himself before a stern-faced group of producers for Britain’s Got Talent in the hope that he can repeat the exact same ‘Ventriloquism but with his own gaping anus’ routine in FRONT of Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and millions of viewers at home who’ll make him feel justified only through their sheer naked hatred of him that masks the fact that they all wish they’d though of it first!  But wait!  Mum’s GOT a gun!  She says she can’t take it anymore!  That she can’t live in world like this knowing what we’re capable of and seeing what we ACTUALLY have to put up with!  She’s got the special ‘weltschmerz’ card!  Hang on!  That gun didn’t even come with the game!  Where’d she get that?!  Put it down dear!  Put it down!  Oh, Dear God… No… NO….!

Merry Christmas everyone.  And a Happy New Year.

There Is A Light, It’s Going Out…

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Imagine careering through a portal and ending up a few centuries in the future. Go on, imagine it. I’m not going to sit here and describe in searing detail the mind-boggling sensation of hurtling through time. Sod that. You’ll just have to imagine it for yourselves instead- it’s about time you lot started doing some of the work round here. Go on.

Done it? Good. Just so we’re all singing off the same hymn sheet- when you arrive in the future you’d feel something like Charlton Heston does in Planet of the Apes. Only without the apes.

Now imagine wandering down the future streets in your future shoes past a future Starbucks as future teens play future music on their tinny, nasty future mobile phones (some things, alas, never change). As you walk along you happen upon a big imposing building cheerily proclaiming itself to be a ‘Museum of the Past’. It could be doing this via the medium of a great big sign or the building itself could be proclaiming it by talking directly to you through some big masonry mouth. This is the future after all.

Intrigued, you wander through the entrance, past the gift shop, and take a look around. What would you expect to see when you happened upon the area dedicated to the early 21st century? What would they be commemorating from the Noughties? While you ponder this, bear in mind that museums often adopt a faintly patronising tone towards the obsolete practices and artefacts of the past- almost chuckling with incredulity at, for instance, medieval doctors trying to cure the plague with a bunch of posies and a big stick and wondering why they didn’t just google the answer instead.

This is what I think you’d see: a waxwork figurine of Jeremy Clarkson playing tapes of him doing lots of those pregnant pauses he does….. at the end of sentences; an X-Box 360 with Guitar Hero III on a constant loop of Leona Lewis songs; a mock Hygena kitchen featuring male and female figurines crying over a mortgage statement to the strains of Dizee Rascal’s ‘Dance Wit Me’ and, in a sealed, alarmed vial protected by lasers and guns, there’ll be a tiny amount of genuine, precious water as a testament to the time before it was all used up and people had to start using a system whereby rain and nourishment are downloaded off i-Tunes.

And in amongst all this there’ll be a large display dedicated to a strange human phenomenon that will have been finally killed off around the year 2010. It’ll amuse and baffle the residents of the future who will never have experienced the particular sensation described within and will merely be able to read the accompanying notes- all the while gazing upon a vista that contains details not only on how this thing felt but also how it was battered out of existence around the turn of the Millennium.

And the title of the exhibit will be ‘Romance’.

Let’s be perfectly honest with each other here- romance is very nearly dead. It’s as outdated and outmoded as steam engines, smallpox and bands with ugly but talented drummers. This state of affairs is a particular tragedy in this country as, despite what the French or Italians would have you believe, the Brits were once the most romantic nation on Earth. Just look at our movies if you don’t believe me. I dare you to watch ‘Brief Encounter’ or ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ or ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ or ‘Gregory’s Girl’ or ‘Room At The Top’ or ‘The Go-Between’ and tell me that the understatement so traditionally inherent in the people of this island- our charming brand of emotional retardation- didn’t make for romance to be, quietly, a central pillar of our very national existence. I say quietly because romance doesn’t scream from the rooftops. Instead romance creeps up on you from nowhere, romance whispers sweet nothings, romance is- in the nicest possible way- just a voice in your head. Romance, most of all, is mystery.

And mystery just can’t be tolerated any more.

Take, for example, The Jeremy Kyle Show- a daily chavapalooza of screeching involving couples comprised of alcoholics and the eletcronically-tagged arguing over the parenthood of their children. I know a number of people who say they love the show and if you’re one of those people and, whether you’re being ironic or not, I want to address this next bit directly to you:

You are a pillock. We may be friends, we may have spoken warmly in the past and shared good times but, and I really, really mean this, you’re everything that’s wrong with the world and you should be uttery ashamed. Seriously. If this is what you call entertainment then you are single-handedly reversing 2 million years of human evolution. You are that dumb. You are that pathetic. You are everything that is wrong with everything. And you owe me a tenner.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show (I’m talking to everyone again now. Welcome back. How’ve you been? You didn’t miss much), it often features a couple from a council estate going through a DNA test to prove how much bovine sex the man (and I use that term loosely) or woman (and I’m barely adhering to that term at all) of the pair has been having. I don’t know about you, but a DNA test really takes the romance out of a relationship. In terms of loving gestures it’s on a par with spending three solid weeks bellowing into your partner’s ear that they smell of eggs. But Kyle’s Bear-pit Theatre is merely the most denegrating part of a recent movement which has lead me to picture romance being nothing more in the future than a museum exhibit referenced in an overlong introduction by a man who loves the sound of his own keyboard.

There is, quite simply, too much stuff in the world that needs to be filled. It used to be a couple of television channels, a few newspapers and the occasional book that needed creative input but now everything’s gone digital and, alongside all the stations on your Sky+ box, there’s also a great big internet out there which constantly expands to accomodate an ever growing torrent of irrelevant, pointless cack. This used to just mean a dishonourable band of ham-fisted blogs but now sites like MySpace and in particular the one you’re reading this on have lead the tiniest minutiae of everybody’s life to be broadcast through the ether as though anyone else honestly gives a flying one.

Don’t get me wrong- Facebook is a good thing in so many ways. It’s allowed me to find out which of my schoolfriends grew up to be hot or work in I.T. and the opportunity to see photos of my nearest and dearest having much more fun that I ever seem to do is always likely to warm the cockles. But should I ever need to find romance again this website would kill it off with all the dead-eyed efficiency of Predator on performance-related pay.

Let me put it this way- I’m old fashioned. Without going into too much detail, my relationship with the missus began with a genuine courtship; much like they tend to do in Jane Austen novels and contrived American sit-coms. It’s a period of my life I look back on with intense joy as a time when two people slowly got to know each other and realised that something, somewhere, somehow seemed to make a connection. And that, my friends, is what happens when you embrace a bit of mystery in your life.

If we were to meet now, however, only the first couple of days would be the same as we started chatting over a bar in Sunderland. Then, in 2008, we’d simply add each other as friends on Facebook and, within mere moments, be able to see each others’ political views, religious beliefs, favourite books, status as of 5 seconds ago and previous performances on copyright-infringing Scrabble games. Years worth of discovery would be packed into a quick browse around a webpage and then, if this was you, where could you go from there?

I’ll tell you where. You’d miss that period of finding out about your beloved and then start inventing things to find out about them that didn’t even exist. You’d ponder if they’re actually a convicted sex offender, or an abscodned member of the Thrid Reich with a talented plastic surgeon, or one of those lizard people David icke keeps banging on about. Then you’d be just a small step away from claiming your significant other has banged everyone you share a postcode with and before you know it you’d be sat in front of Jeremy Kyle’s cackling bovine audience as he lorded it over you with the results of a DNA test.

This is the future. I hope you’ll be happy.