Old media in patronising outburst
How not to go about getting your book favourably reviewed.
and just because the pr knows how to use Google Alerts (and knows what an embargo is!), let's throw them off the trail by saying the book was for Pride and Prejudice Zombies. Nothing to see here, m'luv, except your dodgy attitude.
Spoof links
An inauspicious time to revive Meeja but as a place of record I thought it was worth mentioning the
Age of Stupid spoof of the FT, which came out before the broader demo/march on Saturday 28 March, ahead of the predictable spectacle (from both protestors and police) on Wednesday: visually accurate, funny and far more readable than the real thing. Start at the dog jumping over the sheep and work down.
As bruce says, echoes of the
Yes Men's New York Times. I should also say for the record that in the last few months I went not so much to the darkside as to the shocking pink, in a bid to work on some interesting world news and events (with an unfortunate surfeit of neoliberal and high-cap solutions for neoliberal and high-cap problems thrown in) and avoid the sectoral niches and love of micromanagement and personal development at the place before.
Ghost Blog
what do you do with a blog that is technically spent? well, remark at that plan for retail to colonise the traditionally-close-for-the-sabbath City. An invasion of capital by capital no less. The city was an interesting and walkable place on sundays but now they want it to be oxford street east. Should be handy for the returning Olympic watchers. there are enough strips of shops in this capital at large, and the financial services sector does not need to contribute to it.
Comedy skirting meaning
Stewart Lee is back on tour after more conspicuous times in the public eye as Springer opera man and the usual detours into writing, TV comedy and, also,
artifact curation. Naturally, the appearance of someone with a track record ensured a packed crowd in the culture-free environs of SE23, at the newly airbrushed Honor Oak by the south circular (he’d originally been down to play the more insalubrious but now-also-about-to-be-refurbed Amersham in New Cross).
Tony Law did an excellent support.
You already know whether you were likely to go and see Stewart Lee's new Edinburgh show: go if you can and beware of spoilers (misquoted ones at that) in what follows. Lee hinges his new show around having been voted 41st Best Stand Up Comedian of All Time on a Channel 4 Top 100, an excuse to meditate on the comedian's desire for approval from family, from the public. As for the former, his status cuts no ice at home: the recurring riff is his mother repetitiously and unfavourably comparing him to the lightning wit of Tom O'Connor who she saw years ago on a cruise ship:
“He was amazing Stew. He came out, he asked this man in the audience, ‘What do you do for a living?’ and the man says ‘I work in the oil industry’ and quick as a flash, Stew, Tom O'Connor says ‘Are you a sardine?’. It was hilarious. No, wait – the man says ‘I'm in oil,’ that's it, and quick as a flash, Stew, Tom O'Connor says ‘Are you a sardine?’. It was hilarious. He came out...”
With these and other citings, Lee mapped the bars of his own prison: contempt for those he needs the approval of (“you: the Public -- who, when given the chance to vote for your favourite comedy moment of all time, will invariably go for: Del Boy, falling through the bar,”); contempt for but apparent dependence on the commissioning whims of TV; contempt for his racist, ignorant and tasteless family; contempt for the spectre of the washed-up comedian, formerly critically hailed with something to say, reduced first to game shows (cf, Lee's recent appearance on 8 Out Of 10 Cats, for which his shame was palpable) then cruise ships, via sex scandal and a nervous breakdown.
Though the set included well-directed and eloquent rage against the vacuity of TV and the repulsiveness of the Littlejohn anti-PC lobby, as well as gestures towards what is obscured behind the bullshit – “beauty, truth, thought”, “the chance to feel or think something different” (with illuminated hyperlinks to Martin Luther King and Evan Parker) – I was sorry that it had to come wrapped up in self-analysis. Perhaps it was an unfortunate aspect of the need to weave together a coherent thread for an Edinburgh show; perhaps Lee genuinely can't sit down at his word processor without the broken, weeping soul of Tom O'Connor appearing before him. Perhaps Lee's furious critique of Maconie culture is all the more effective and honest if he vivisects his own dependence on and complicity with it at the same time. My fear is that, rather, his critique is needlessly blunted by this approach – by the repeated message that he is just a comedian.
The penultimate segment has Lee acting through a repetitious, Robert the Bruce-themed joke that is ridiculously drawn out, laboured and unfunny-funny; Lee in the story is an arrogant, lazy sell-out who's only interested in creativity if he gets paid for it; the 'real' Lee telling the story is a craftsman, weaving together the show's riffs in a flight of wonderful, genuinely funny, surrealism.
Lee's climactic gag combined hope and redemptive meaninglessness. “After all this seeking of approval... I got one laugh recently that meant more than anything, and that was from my 14-week-old son. And the way I got him to laugh was by balancing this small, stuffed orange giraffe on my head... and standing very still, without varying my expression, for as long as I could.” Which he did. It was a sublime moment of infant Zen, though it caused ripples of warmth among the Honor Oakers rather than out-and-out hilarity.
They're corrupt sportsmen, not jihadis
Cull puts down the surprise at the natural causes verdict for Bob Woolmer's death as a
blatant example of Islamophobia in the play-fair world of international cricket.
As the Mirror Says - Chemically Castrate the Paedos
A grim conclusion is being reached in the search for the stolen child, but that doesn't mean the ex-editor of Children Now reeling off some home truths about
slack parenthood.
