Month: February 2023

Jesus: the most dangerous game

I know Americans can be weird about both religion and guns, but this one really perplexes me with what it may or may not be trying to say. Why would Christians be shooting at Jesus? Are you expected to shoot and kill your own deer for lunch? Are the pumpkins Jesus-shaped or deer-shaped, and why are they being shot at? Who even made this? Near as I can find, “FBC MV” is these people, but I don’t see a men’s ministry as such on their site. That said, I also see that not all their ministries run the whole year round, so maybe the men’s ministry does the same thing… just waiting for that time of the year just after Halloween when the Christs are ripe and plump and make for the best sport, unlike other months when they’re kind of stringy and past their peak…

It’s grim out east

A couple of shots I got of the thunderstorm moving through the area, first one from the front of the house and second from out the back. Given how frankly kind of shit my phone camera is, I’m actually quite impressed by how these came out (no photoshopping, cos my ancestral copy of PS6 won’t actually run on this Windows 11 machine so all I could do was scale the originals down a bit in IrfanView). Think I got these at a good time (about 20 minutes ago), cos it’s already looking a lot less threatening out there now compared to what it did in these pictures.

This did not age well

So, in the comments section of that post I just wrote about, one of the participants also linked to a series of articles published on a site called Grantland, a popular culture blog operated by ESPN until they got bored with it, all written by Steven Hyden about “the winners of rock ‘n’ roll”. Curious to see what else he had on the site, I spotted a piece that looked interesting…

…oh. And, well, much as Kanye looms over everyone in the picture, he comes out at number one on the list. In fairness to Hyden, it’s really only hindsight that makes this look as bad as it does now; when he wrote this in 2015, Kanye’s fascination with Hitler (which may go back a lot further than we thought at first, depending on how much credence you give to unnamed sources) was something the rest of us didn’t know about in the way we do now. Still, there’s something terrifically ironic about that picture and the article. I wonder what Hyden would make of this now, though he certainly appears to have cooled on Kanye not too long after writing that piece…

Brian Eno’s top 38 (1977)

Here‘s a rather delightful thing posted by Simon Reynolds on one of his numerous blogs, Brian Eno listing a selection of his favourite music for Sounds magazine in February 1977… some amusing choices (his own “Discreet Music”), some you might expect (Bowie, Cornelius Cardew, Kraftwerk) and others you might not (“Tattoo” by The Who?)… but for me the interesting part of the post comes in the comments section where two commenters go into a discussion about how few concessions Eno makes in his list to popular taste, what popular taste even meant at that time, and the whole concept of “artsiness”, taking the latter to indicate a given artist’s conscious ambition and/or pretensions to artistic seriousness (as opposed to the question of how actually good or bad the end result is). This turns into an evaluation of various artists and their degree of artsiness, some of which are kind of marvellous:

Beatles – ended up artsy (for all the talk of their differing personalities, the only Beatle not arty and sensitive was the gregarious, down-to-earth Ringo)
Beach Boys – Brian grew artsy, but not the others (Mike Love may genuinely despise the entire concept of art)
Stooges – artsy (codifying punk is very artsy, especially in Iggy’s formulation of modern urban white blues, plus we have We Will Fall and LA Blues)
Black Sabbath – Very difficult to determine, I find. Inventing a genre is artsy, but it feels deeply wrong to call Ozzy artsy.
Sex Pistols – I can’t say right now, I need time to think. (Jones, Cook and Matlock were resolutely not artsy, but Lydon had a fierce artsy streak. Although, the artsiest figure associated with the Pistols was McLaren, so are they artsy because of his conception of the band as a living sculpture?)
Happy Mondays – a little bit artsy but not much (there’s the New Order connection, and being the only group with a fondly remembered dancer has surely got to be worth something)
Oasis – might actually challenge Status Quo as the least artsy band imaginable

Like I said, this is not an evaluation of these acts’ quality or otherwise, but damned if that comment about Oasis doesn’t feel like a mighty burn anyway. And I know there’s a theory that Mike Love is actually not the champion scumbag of popular music he’s generally considered to be, but I’ve never seen much to suggest that the sentence “Mike Love may genuinely despise the entire concept of art” is not the definition of harsh but fair.

How about no

This sort of thing shits me to tears. I say that as someone who acknowledges the usefulness of positive thinking, but who admittedly isn’t very good at it. Mindset is obviously important. Mindset only goes so far, though, especially once it brushes up against external physical reality. The late Stella Young once put it very well: “No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp”. She loathed the platitude about the only real disability being a bad attitude as much as I do. And I do, admittedly, have something of a bad attitude if you want to call it that; it sounds a bit better than years of poorly treated depression which is nearer the truth, but I have… issues, shall we say, with the “D” word that I don’t really want to go into. WHATEVER. I do not like the bad attitude platitude. I’ve no doubt a better mindset would make it easier for me to cope with my physical reality, I’ll concede that… but it won’t change the physical reality in question.

And that physical reality is that I am disabled following the stroke I had in the afternoon of June 6 2009. That fucked me up, and continues to do so in various ways. I’ve never exactly been in great health, and I derive a certain bleak amusement from looking back at old Facebook memories from before The Incident when I’d come home from a night out, and how even then a lot of them boiled down to “good night out but goddamn my legs and feet can barely carry me”… things could be hard pre-stroke, and the older I get, the more difficult things just naturally become with age. But things are kind of made even more so by virtue of one half of my body simply not working as well as the other half.

I acknowledge that I am fairly harsh on myself a lot of the time, and I know a good deal of that is down to my frankly substandard mental health (the latter not helped by my frankly substandard physical health, of course), but I am, let’s be honest, not the most shining prospect. However, even if I liked myself more than I do… what physical change would that mental change make? Would it undo the stroke damage? What about my shitty circulation? My diabetes? Would I have more physical strength to do more things? I don’t think so somehow.

Smiling at stairs won’t turn them into a ramp. Similarly, I can’t see that smiling at myself will suddenly make my left hand and arm as flexible and functional as my right. Self love will literally not solve shit for me as long as the body doesn’t fully work like it should.

The ultimate crossover?

I always like discovering new things I didn’t previously know, and today’s was a particular what-the-fuck moment of history:

To give credit where it’s due, they weren’t kidding with that tagline: I did, in fact, not believe it when I saw this ad, and was sure it had to be some bizarre photoshop job. No way did Boy George appear on The A Team… hang on, what do you mean he did? Well. Fuck me dead.

I don’t believe it. It’s real, and I don’t believe it. I’ve now actually seen a clip of the episode where George makes his first appearance (and OH but the other George, i.e. Peppard, does not look right with that moustache) and I STILL don’t believe it. It’s just… goddamn, I know both the band and the show were struggling by the end of 1985 when I presume this would’ve been filmed for broadcast in mid-February ’86, and I’m wondering who on Earth had the bright idea of combining the two. It’s not, you know, an intuitive mix of elements, and I’d love to know what the thinking behind it was. Or, indeed, if it was.

Yedolf!

Aamon’s got a new video out, and, well, I’ve seen him use the word “eldritch” himself in the title of a couple of his other videos and I can’t think of a better word for this one either. What we have here is Alex Jones’ encounter with Kanye West late last year during the latter’s Nazi meltdown, and in which Jones was comprehensively outmonstered by him… I’ve seen a couple of commenters observe that Alex’s hideous form here becomes more human as he starts talking about his grandfather, and that’s interesting to observe; if it weren’t Alex Jones, I’d almost feel sorry for him being in that position.