Radio! Who needs a radio? Ready Harry?...

So I am finally inspired to update my blog, and as is so common my inspiration is sneering derision for that which I don’t like (ie, don’t fully understand). However, I am writing this aboard a train (which is far from common) having done a days temping (which is downright rare). I feel like a proper commuter. With my computer.

Anyway, Begin Rant.

Radio One is fucking shit. This I’ve known for a long time and have accordingly avoided said station, but every now and again it’s good to reiterate your views and until yesterday I hadn’t had a good, long dose of Radio 1 for years. But yesterday I was subjected to it. I didn’t listen out of choice - lets make that absolutely clear. And in about 5 hours I heard 4 songs I liked, half of which I could take or leave.

But it’s not so much the utter lack of music to my taste that I hate so much about Radio 1, although it does annoy me to my very soul (I guess it follows that if you have a burning passion for something you have a burning loathing for its antithesis, in this case mainstream music versus underground music). Rather it’s the intellectual level at which the station aims, the homogeny of that which they deem ‘cool’ and the utter drivel spouted by the insipid, sycophantic presenters and their idiot listeners.

Every song is slobbered over with loose adjectives proclaiming the brilliance of the artist, or failing that a morsel of relevant gossip is thrown to the vacuous masses who look up from their workstations, feed, and store for later regurgitation. The artists in question invariably draw authenticity from style rather than musical brilliance, or worse they are just autotuned products, the noises they make merely replacing silence and increasing brand awareness.

I heard the whole of Jo Whiley’s show, a presenter who is deemed to have an ounce of musical credibility. Any lingering respect I had for her evaporated, though, when I heard the following segment:

Quiet, unthreatening music in a minor key fades in. Jo adopts a sullen tone and tells radioland the story of, I dunno, Jane, who has emailed in with a song request. It’s not just a song request though, it’s accompanied by a bile-enducing sob story about Jane's battle for cancer. Jane survived, which is great. She endured all the horrible stuff that many cancer sufferers have to endure, but she survived. Poor Jane / lucky Jane. Now, when she was in hospital with mere months to live (so she’d been told) she gave a lot of thought to the song that would play at her funeral, and this song is what she’d requested of Jo.

Jo obligingly played the song.

What was the song? What did Jane come up with in the depths of her illness, with death in site but time on side and none of the usual cancer remedies having any apparent effect?

Any guesses?

I’ll tell you.

The Drugs Don’t Work by The Verve.

That’s all she could come up with! Ha! Oh, sweet irony, the drugs jolly well DO work don’t they, Jane? And surely that’s a tale told with an ironic smirk to close frends, not one emailed to a radio DJ for broadcast to the nation as loose justification for a non-playlist song request! And imagine if she had died and The Drugs Don't Work WAS played at her funeral - it would have been like a posthumous cry for attention! Talk about rubbing it in!

Well, I laughed.

But it transpired that many listeners didn’t. In fact they felt compelled to text Jo Whiley in tears and laud Jane as an inspiring, amazing woman. Inspiring? For surviving cancer and requesting an obvious song from a crap radio station? If you cry at that, dear listener, you must fall to pieces at the news. If you’re inspired by that you must be overwhelmed with amazement at the plight of people like Ghandi. Ghandi. You know, the Indian fella? Overthrew the British Empire through self sacrifice and non-violent protest? No? Well I guess if it’s not repeated over muted house beats every hour during Newsbeat, followed by the moronic public's 'views' on the topic, then how could you be expected to know?

Grandiose Misnomers - Musical

Everybody is talking about (artist) - I guarantee 6 billion people were not talking about KT Tunstall, despite what the advert said.

(artists) exquisite / stunning / incredible new album - works of art worthy of such adjectives are limited to, perhaps, one a year at best.

Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me - No, because that would make her less hot. Because, dear Pussycat Dolls, you are average looking. Or 'tepid', to put it in your parlance.

Grandiose Misnomers - Retail

The Greenwich Kebab Centre - a takeaway, not a conference facility.

Georgio's International Mobile Phone Centre, Brighton - I question whether Georgio has any other branches of his internet cafe cum mobile phone unlocking store.

World of Taps - A small bathroom supplies showroom. Note the grandness of 'world' and understatement of 'taps'.

Any establishment with 'city', 'planet', 'world', etc, in the name - 'shop', 'store' or 'market' is the word they're after.

Les Hire Almost Anything (Aylesbury) - Come on, Les.

lines

The idea that we all fall somewhere along a 'gay/straight line' (with totally gay at one end and totally straight at the other) is one that most sensible people agree with these days. You know how it works - it depends where on the line you fall that dictates whether you are a fan of your own sex, the opposite one, or both. It's an elegant theory that, rather than assigning a black or white 'gay gene' or blaming society, makes balanced sense unless you're a homophobe or too insecure to accept it.

I'm wondering if such scales are applicable to other things in life. Specifically, I wonder if there is a 'sceptic/believer line'. I recon there is. Everyone has a threshold past which they default to a non-answer, an assumption or mere nonchalance.

sceptic-----------------x--believer

Given suitably high odds against something occuring, some people decide it 'must' have been dictated by an intelligence. They can't fathom the numbers involved so can't picture a scenario in which it could happen outside their frame of reference - namely the human-centric view that things only occur if previously decided upon by something sentient. Intelligent Design, for example. These people are at the believer end of the line and it doesn't take much to make them resort to assumptions.

sceptic----------x---------believer

Other people will take the same high odds and improbable occurance and simply shrug their shoulders. They can't grasp it, so they don't think about it. Alternatively, maybe they assign it a halfway explanation. For example, 'new age' healing techniques which mix diluted ancient beliefs with pseudo-scientific justifications. The justifier isn't quite happy with their answer for the improbable occurance so swing from the comfort of the arcane to the use of big words as a mask. These people are somewhere in the middle of the line and they teeter between questioning and acceptance.

sceptic--x-----------------believer

Another group of people see the odds and the improbable occurance and start breaking it down in to more understandable, rational chunks. If they can understand the processes that lead to the occurance, they can assign it meaning based on evidence. These people are at the sceptical end of the line. If they are very close to the end of the line their threshold is tiny and they will find it very hard to settle on any idea or theory for long, as everything is constantly questioned.


I'd say I am about here on the line: sceptic----x----------------believer. I very, very rarely default to an assumption or half-answer, or stop caring about a problem just because I can't understand it. But neither do I question everything to the extent that it makes me unanchored and confused to the point of unhappiness or madness! I know that things go on that are beyond my comprehension, but I don't need to lump them into a hazy and ill-defined catch-all category in order to make me feel better. My position on the sceptic-believer line means I see the universe as a beautiful, incomprehendible system. There are parts I'm fairly sure about, parts I'm not, and parts I haven't even considered yet. The closer I look the murkier it gets, but the more connected I feel and the better I can accept the mystery.

On grey days when the rain is incessant...

...I am often compelled to listen to Geodaggi by Boards of Canada. 66m6s of nostalgically emotive, often deeply edgy music that expands on their earlier sound of lush pastoralism and adds a sense of the sinister. If Music Has The Right To Children conjures up images caught on Super 8 of carefree childhood frolics in a dappled garden, Geodaggi fast-forwards a few years to when the safety net of childhood is slipping off and the wider world is creeping in. The unsettling nature of this record undulates at the edges of the tunes and draws you in exponentially, hypnotically, if you care to follow it. Vocal snippets, fuzzy instrumentation, conversations overheard and bubbling soundscapes ebb and flow, barely distinguishable, and if you cock your ear and really listen, far from identifying the sounds, you find yourself drawn into more waves of incoherence and ambiguity, so you really, really listen, and suddenly you're zoning out... then the track ends and you wonder where you are...

If thats all a bit much, you can still appreciate Geodaggi for the intricacies of the production and the sweeping, almost-there melodies. But I recommend diving in and letting your mind wander with the odd distortions and textures for a warm and fuzzy but very wonky experience!

Theres something of a cult surrounding this album - some people believe it is littered with satanic messages and other such weirdness. Indeed, some of the vocal samples talk about the apocalyptic religious sect 'branch Davidians', the track titles hint at hidden secrets and sacred geometry (The Devil is in the Details, Music is Math) and the album length mentioned above is no accident... One track is supposed to say "I hate you all" If you reverse it. I tried this by downloading the track in question and reversing it on the computer. When I pressed play, it got to just before the supposed vocal and crashed my computer! Eerie! On a second attempt, however, it played through, and the track clearly doesn't say 'we hate you all' in reverse. Ah well!

Sample tracks here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geogaddi (but for the full experience, get hold of the entire album!)

Dragons Den? Bunch Of Bastards Den more like.

Dragons Den. Great TV, but perhaps the best advertisment I've seen for not becoming a rich businessperson. Why? Because all the 'dragons' are nasty buggers who seem largely joyless in their 'status'.

Peter Jones, the ever-frowning youngun on the right, is perhaps the worst of the bunch and his website used to describe him as an 'ultrapreneur'. Say no more. Duncan Balantine, the Scottish guy, is armed with a ready quip to put every visitors dream to shame. Deborah Meaden looks like a bird of prey. They got rid of the only nice guy, Richard Fairleigh, who actually seemed to have a human side and like people who were poorer than him.

"I'm actually offended that you've wasted my time" is something they say from time to time, and that really annoys me. Fuck off home then and give the BBC back the money they're paying you to 'waste your time'. Your success in business does not demand unquestioned, humbling respect from the lowly normal folk who come before you!

Anyway, as I say, great TV though! :-p

The Evolution Solution

I don't think many people get evolution. I also think that it's quite often misrepresented in the media and in fiction, being a convenient buzzword or shortcut to explain an idea in a seemingly plausible way.

I understand evolution as being a blind, directionless system that comes about through accidental changes in genetic make-up. Those changes that are advantageous to survival inevitably propagate into subsequent generations. However, here is no goal or ideal of perfection to which evolution strives. Indeed, 'evolutionary advancement', despite being a common term, could be seen as somewhat misleading - after all, to 'advance' there needs to be something preferable than the present state of affairs to move towards. And this suggests preordained order, a grand plan. And this suggests - well, lets not go there in this post!

The fact is that every existing living species exists in a state of evolutionary perfection. That's the definition of a 'species'. A slug is as perfectly suited to it's environment as human beings are to theirs. Human beings are not the utmost peak of evolution, they are not what life has always been aiming for and striving towards. Any conceit of hierarchy of life, be it in a religious sense of reincarnation or a pseudo-scientific one of 'the next stage of mankind', is totally off the mark. We are just another animal who has found it's niche - one day we will be extinct and no longer suited to that niche.

To take some examples, I am currently watching the rather excellent remake of Battlestar Galactica. You don't need to know the story here, but the opening spiel describes how the Cylons were made by man but rebelled and evolved. The Cylons are robots who are trying to wipe out mankind, and part of their plan is to infiltrate mankind with Cylons who look, act and feel human - the 'evolution' of which the titles speak. Although nit-picky and irrelevant to the story, this statement is what set me thinking about this whole thing. The Cylons didn't evolve on any level - they simply manufactured human like versions of themselves!

A less obsessive and more general example is one I touched on above - 'the next evolutionary stage of mankind', something that's sometimes talked about in documentaries and suggested as something we need to 'work towards' and 'embrace'. Well, when 'we' get there and 'we' are the next evolutionary step, 'we' will be a new species and won't be 'us' at all. It's a misleading way to think and one that seems to suggest a sense of attachment and continuation of our species once we've evolved into somethings else. Consider that apes are no more connected to the 'next evolutionary stage of apekind' (ie, humans) than we will be to ours! The best we can hope for is that homo sapiens continues to co-exist with whatever species evolve from us.

There is an interesting argument that our species now has the power to direct our own evolution through technology and science, and I guess this is what science fiction and documentaries latch on to when they hint at 'working towards the next stage'. This isn't evolution as I understand it, though. It's design, or engineering. The blindness of biological evolution is taken away and what once was directed by the raw, automatic order-out-of-chaos that is 'natural selection' is replaced by a something intentional - 'guided selection'. This is a far less elegant and beautiful system and one that seems to be mankind doing what we do best: trying to cheat death, this time on the grandest of all scales, by steering ourselves towards a new species and away from extinction. God is no longer a sufficient top-end answer to mortality.

Similarly, there is the high percentage of our brains that we don't use. Perhaps this is untapped power that we will evolve to make use of, eh? Perhaps this will give rise to telepathy and telekenisis, and the unused brain matter evolved in the first place so that we could grow into it? Perhaps not. How could a blind force that is built on accident and immediate efficiency build something that is meant to be used in the future? Again that suggests forward thinking. Also, evolutionary change is dictated by the 'cost' to the animal, and evolving a massive brain would cost hugely and detrimentally when compared to the issues far more important to the survival of early humans, like manual dexterity and communication.

Evolution is used out of context so often in order to authenticate an out there theory because it has become a household name - it gives automatic, scientific credit to an idea. However, I'm not trying to suggest that evolution is a theory of definitive, irrefutable, cold, hard fact that can't be built upon or honed as new facts come to light. But what I've talked about here isn't a honing or tweaking of a theory, its simply getting a theory wrong. Perhaps a more interesting and timely book/documetnary/series could examine this 'new' evolution - renaming it, setting it in its own context and looking at the implications. Perhaps evolution itself is about to be extinct.

Burma

I probably pay less attention than I should to the political goings-on of the world. This is partly because the Western media can't be wholly relied upon for facts. Thank god it's a free media - I recognise the importance of that. But nevertheless each outlet, be it TV or newspaper or website, has it's views and style and agenda. Who does one listen to? The voice that rings truest to ones principles? Isn't that just preaching to the converted and providing one with neat soundbites to regurgiate during political conversations? I suppose the answer is to find the voice that seems the most balanced, or read all sides and reach ones own conclusions, and that is something I haven't invested adequate time in yet. But still the problem remains on some level - how can one be sure of balance?

What gets me most about the media, though, concerns the decisions as to what is newsworthy. Whose plight, out of the hundreds of millions of people with legitimate, desparate plights, is deemed important enough to tell the world about? Who makes these decisions, and on what basis? Of course, the answers are out there in communications policies and media studies, but whatever they are the fact remains that we are dictated to by the media - we are told what we will pay attention to. And meanwhile, those people whose stories are deemed less important fall by the wayside. Of course everyone living in a country with free press and access to adequate resources can investigate whatever they choose, but this isn't necessarily a realistic view of the media - free or otherwise. How many people will become aware of and choose to investigate Indonesia's repression and genocide in West Papua, for instance, compared to Saddam Husseins military regime?

So it is with a certain sense of joy that I see the brave and timely demonstrations in Burma at the top of the headlines in most of the media. Burma was a country I verged on visiting and that I bordered several times. I've met many people who've been, so I have secondary information about the country, its people, its society and the state it is in. I have experienced first hand some of Buddhist South East Asia and have developed a deep respect for the cultural traditions and history of the area. That the Burmese plight has been ignored by the press grates me as I have been closer to it than I have to the Middle East. So I am delighted that the voice of the Burmese people has now been deemed important enough for mass exposure.

Today, Burma was revealed as the most corrupt country in the world by the organisation Transparency. It's brutal military junta are responsible for inconceivable repression and greed. In 1988 they massacred 3,000 people who were peacefully demonstrating for basic human rights and democracy. Now, 20 years on, the monks are leading a new wave of marches across the country and normal Burmese people are joining them. This line of pacifists face the brutish might of the military and, to tie this post in with the ones I wrote about spirituality, I see the stand they are making as testimony to the good that religion/spirituality can do for a nation. The people revere the monks, the junta know they will face severe consequences if they repeat the actions of 1988 and the monk's Buddhism means they are interested only in peaceful, non-violent protest. And despite the threats, guns and tear gas, they are carrying on. To cap it all, the world's media is watching for once. To take an optimistic view, this could be a welcome leap towards revolution.

Huge respect and good luck to the people of Burma.

Just imagine...

...if the Jungle Brothers and the Chuckle Brothers swapped lives. Go on, take 10 seconds out to really think about it.

Fucking weird, eh?