Saturday, February 19, 2005

Abuses of electricity


americanbarpraha
Originally uploaded by The Salaryman.
Thursday night we were kept up by the people who live in the adjacent compartment of this butchered Victorian villa - again. They are special people. It is not clear if they work or at what - one may be Antipodean but the residents change so quickly you cannot be sure. There are several abuses of electricity and our ears that they commonly subject us to. Firstly, there may be some kind of keyboard in there that one of them plays, though their repertoire seems to consist solely of a poorly interpreted Imagine™. Practice, though skill levels have yet to approach that of a second rate pub bore, often occurs as late as midnight on a weeknight. Imagine has always been bad enough to contaminate the memory of the Beatles proper work - like being served a bowl of nasal mucus for a pudding after a passable meal.

This can be accompanied by maximum volume viewing of ITV - the channel for people who find the candy floss of BBC1 too challenging, the proper trash of Five too worrying and the other two terrestrials an alien experience. Or else the reprehensible sound of DFS adverts - Katie Melua: the music of middle-aged compulsive female masturbators, again at the wattage one associates with an improvised rave.

This night I was treated to the sounds of Jerry Show me the Money Fucking Maguire. I have encountered this vehicle for that sexually ambiguous militant Scientologist before - in intoxicated captivity. On a long haul flight and worn down with low-grade free spirits, it was thrust into my face on the tiny LCD seatback screen. As always, I did not choose to listen except for a few minutes I caught with sound by choice. Such as the moment pointless helium voiced Renee Zellweger, who really does look slightly better fattened, 'playing' the single mum of a kid so cutely annoying as to make a sensible man self administer a vasectomy with a teaspoon, blubs 'You had me at hello' to her rich, handsome suburban conquest. I'd rather watch a documentary on diseases of the foot or something.

As I listened to the cliches abounding at 1am, dreading a busy day, wondering what self defence aspects of the law had been tested aggressively, I wished I could have ripped the carpet in the hallway up and chewed out the electrics going into their flat like a wronged rodent to make the noise stop.

A better use of electricity was found by the operators of the American Bar in Prague, who have some very nice lights and a giant brass coffee machine dating from the 1890s: Here are the lights¦

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Why can't I touch it?

As I was in the midst of another pointless, hellish commute and as a very, very insane man paced up and down the carriage, performing a remarkable paranoid monologue, I noticed a headline in the bubblegummy Metro spread on the 'BRITS':

Joss Stone – The new queen of the streets

Its absurdity and obscenity struck me dumb. Well, not really as nothing surprises me that is spewed out of a mass culture so ignorant and worthless as to be beyond irony. Nonetheless, the notion of some shagtastic pixie from Devon being the new hope of soul is less believable than the Care in the Community entertainer on the tube being the next Serge Gainsbourg. This meat puppet is being compared to Aretha Franklin, yet you could find far better vocalisations than her attempts on the b-sides of the most hopeless looking, forgotten cash in disco records of the early 80s.

At least the awful Brummie bra model Jamelia, who is imitating an utterly worthless tradition, namely the overproduced, nasal ‘R and B’ that has wrecked African American music in a way even the worst disco could not, came away gongless. Not that it matters as I am sure MasterCard or whomever sews it up beforehand on the basis of a focus group.

Affable Scotsmen ripping off Gang of Four, Robbie Williams being lauded as the best songwriter of the last 25 years, lithe American popsters with obvious little designer implants to accentuate their genius in way years of spouting a plasticated shadow of ska could not, disguised Christian rockers singing a duet…

I longed in vain for a horrible accident involving defective pyrotechnics and a burst sewage pipe. And that’s just from being subjected to the media miasma on it all – much of which mentioned that ‘real’ music was back as the industry grinned and sued a few more downloaders. Hopefully Charles and Camilla will block the front pages tomorrow….