1. Felix Da Housecat - Devin Dazzling and the Neon Fever
2. Burgess, Tim - I Believe
3. Spinbad, DJ - Frabriclive 14
4. Orbital - Blue Album
5. Armand Van Helden - A New York Mix Odessey
6. Jurassic 5 – Power in Numbers
7. Krafty Kuts and Yousef - Circus Meets Chibuku
8. Basement Jaxx - Kish Kash
9. Kasabian - Kasabian
10. Goldie Lookin' Chain - Greatest Hits
My best ever Christmas haul was the year I got a six foot snooker table, it was complemented by a number of other presents including Subbuteo, Lego, portable radio and the Roy of the Rovers annual to make it the best ever. This year, I reckon was the best since then.
Amongst the booty was a juicer, perfect for my attempt to become healthier through the aid of kitchen appliances alone. I got some diddy Altec Lansing speakers for my iPod from Emma. There was a didgeridoo from Kirsty, allowing me to finally fulfil my ambition to play an acoustic version of Aphex Twin’s techno classic, one of my all time favourite tunes. Talking of which, Spanx tracked down a mint and rare as hen’s teeth vinyl copy of Tricks of the Shade by the Goats – a favourite album (3rd in fact, but more of that later).
It was comic strips ahoy as I got a full set of Boondocks books and one of Matt Groening’s Big Book of Hell. If that wasn’t enough, I also got The Snow Patrol mix CD The Trip, with Freelance Hellraiser on the knobs, Hot Fuss by the Killers and Medulla by Bjork.
Along with some cool Christmas knitwear, a t-shirt with a lego version of Mr T on it and a copy of Top Spin, sometimes receiving is better than giving.
I wouldn’t say that Grandma’s house was hot on Christmas day, but mum did tell dad to put the leftover turkey in the car so that it wouldn’t over cook in the central heating. F'real.
One of my biggest regrets is that I don’t see enough of my friends. It’s not that we make it easy for ourselves, Katie and Australia Jo live in Australia, Penny and Mike are in Jersey, Jules has spent the last couple of years shuttling between Nottingham and New Zealand. Everyone is busy, so it usually takes a wedding to get everyone in the same room at the same time.
Worryingly, Scuff 2’s main room was empty for quite a long time. But at least it was occupied by those I most wanted to see. We hadn’t seen Penny, who for the second year running turned up as a surprise, since the 24-hour mercy dash to Russ and Sam’s wedding in July. We hadn’t seen Willy and Leo since their housewarming, and we hadn’t seen Jules since she helped me with my foot at The New Year hideaway in Derbyshire. Nobody had eyeballed Andrew for over a year.
I kept reassuring myself that as we’d managed to get nearly everyone in the same room and that this was the success we were looking for. Penny, suffering from a dose of trapped wind, was able to get down on all fours and rock rhythmically to release the discomfort in the middle of the dancefloor with nobody noticing. The party wasn’t rocking quite how we’d envisaged.
It was kicking off on the ground floor, people were getting stuck in the bar – and damn them – enjoying themselves too much to explore the rest of the venue. Then the evening pitched down a notch as a kerfuffle involving a lost sister driving around London aimlessly unfolded. The whole thing was turning into a nightmare.
But, one thing my How To DJ Properly book talks about is patience, soul destroying though it was we kept cool and cranked the music up slowly from a bit of 60’s funk and disco, to some hip hop, a Spankee deep house set, a Ruffles slightly bigger house set. As the nonsensical breakdown for Felix Da Housecat’s Watching Girls Go By wound its way up, I looked up to see the room had suddenly become pretty full.
Someone came and asked to help us dig out some records – thanks, we said, but there wasn’t enough space. There are some people here “desperate to dance to Hey Yah by Outkast”. We’d play it, we said, he wanted to know when, where, how, why. We were on a role, and back in control of the night, I rebuffed him and he retreated.
Then Spanx called it, the time had come, it was time to make people dance. I pulled out Lose My Breath by Destiny’s Child, a gargantuan tune, a sign to say that we were onto a new level. Clearing the palette with Tipsy by J-Kwon we introduced some floor slaying Beyonce.
Thousands of pounds of investment in music and music playing paraphernalia, hundreds of hours perfecting our laughable mixing skills and it took Beyonce, Wham Rap, Deee Lite and, of course, Outkast to set the party alight. But that doesn’t matter when you’ve got the whole room smiling. People were dancing, standing on chairs, and erm, doing press-ups. We mixed up Wiseguys and Sugarhill Gang, sampled and looped up the opening refrain of House of Pain’s Jump Around so it opened with a 10 second screech of horns. At one point Spanx simply got bored of a tune, stopped it and put on something new. Liberation!
The tunes pitched up to Do Your Thing by Basement Jaxx as the witching hour approached. There was time for one more tune, and it was obvious which it was to be. I sampled up the opening blast of Beyonce, introducing it in time with the final thuds of the Jaxx. There was a whoop of delight from the dancefloor, somebody recognised a tune coming in. The Jaxx closed out and Beyonce, for the second time, went back on and everyone wigged out.
The landlord said we had two more tunes before he’d have to turn us off. But that was it, that was the peak, people may have wanted more, and we could have given them more, but they weren’t getting it.
We won.
When people ask where I’m from I say Oxford, even though I’ve never lived closer than 15 miles from the city. If pushed, I’ll say I’m from Thame, where I’ve lived longest, even though I’ve lived in Aylesbury for about five years. Most people have heard of Oxford, some of Aylesbury, few of Thame. Oxford is convenient shorthand for the region I’m from.
I find visiting Thame an anxious affair, walking down the High Street (the widest in the world, or something) is a rat run through the past. I find myself staring into the eyes of people my age trying to peel back about 15 years, through the wrinkles, fat and babies, to work out whether I went to school with them or not.
Not that I’ve ever bumped into anyone. What would I say if I did? Do I give bland platitudes? Potted histories? Reminisces? Or is it time to deconstruct shared pasts and really get down to it. I’m more confident, outgoing and, obviously, funnier than I was at school, do I return to the ‘type’ they once knew? I’m reasonably successful in what I do; do I tell these people? If I do, then will they think, as I do, how the bloody hell has he getting away with that, unless they’re proportionally more successful than I am, which they probably are. And what if they read this site… which I know some do.
Christmas, of course, increases the likelihood of an encounter as people return home to their family. Jacques Perretti’s article in The Guardian’s Guide on Saturday promised to empathise with my predicaments as he described what it was like to return home for Christmas. What’s more, Perretti is from Beaconsfield, not that far from where we live.
What started out with me thinking that I could just post the link and tell people that this was how I feel, ended with me wanting to hunt the dog down. Perretti paints an utterly fictitious picture of his home town. He has to give his train ticket to a ticket inspector “BY HAND”, he gets into a Nissan Micra Mini-cab driven by an old school chum (whose life consists of three marriages and a burnt down hotel, allegedly). He makes claims about people driving around in White GTi’s, that Christmas in the Home Counties is stuck in the 50’s and that the in-town entertainment consists of fighting and setting fire to each other. His final claim is that on returning to his local pub, the answer his old school mates give to the question how are things round here is “Alright if it weren’t for the Pakis.” The article was illustrated with a cartoon of three men drinking pints in Ku Klux Klan hoods.
I don’t know which train Perretti caught to get to this version of Beaconsfield but if it departed from platform 9 and three-quarters I wouldn’t be surprised. Beaconsfield is very much like Thame, a beautiful town, affluent, prime commuter belt. Broadly speaking the inhabitants are well travelled, educated, and liberal. These are all luxuries a town’s affluence affords, sadly this doesn’t satisfy Perreti’s jaundice view. There may not be the ethnic mix of, say, Brixton but the reasons are economic, not social. OK, so it hasn’t got a gay fetish Grime Garage club night, but it really isn’t the other world he paints.
Perretti paints a fictitious world – stations have automatic barriers, the mini-cabs outside the station are identical to those that sit outside every London club on a Saturday night. I’ve not seen a white GTi in years, nor a fight or fire. As for overt racism, I’m not naive enough to think that it doesn’t happen, but I live in the region, and don’t see it. He was either unfortunate… or lying.
Presumably this distortion is hiding the subtext that he wants everyone to know that he must be cool because he’s living in London. The kind of person who gets excited by going to work in his jeans, and living next door to black people (they’re so real… and nice…), he’s a Londoner because he can describe the tube map by the name of the line, not its colour on the map. Perreti wants us to believe he’s escaped from some middle class ghetto, forgetting that it’s he’s a product of the town. It seems that home is where the heart is, but not, necessarily, where your brand is.
The audience in the Creation Theatre Company’s version of A Christmas Carol was resolutely drawn from the Oxford boho elite, and us. The company have carved a neat niche for themselves by placing an ornate mirrored tent in the car park of Cowley’s BMW plant, some kind of post-modern art meeting commerce type statement, perhaps.
The tent is small and intimate; the cast charge around the packed audience. As Ebenezer is lead through his Christmas nightmare rain pounds down on the canvas giving the whole thing a highly atmospheric charge.
Good though it was it did feel like I was watching the DVD of the show, stuck on one of the special additional feature commentaries. At every turn Emma would lean over and whisper in my ear the equivalent movements from the Muppet version of the tale.
To prefix The Phantom of the Opera with the chillingly exacting qualifier ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber’s’ is not a good start for the ‘lavish film production of the smash hit west end snore’, but it is particularly difficult to articulate the a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e g-a-r-b-a-g-e the film turns out to be.
Of course, I should have known, I’ve seen Starlight Express, but with a clear blue print in Moulin Rouge, it surely isn’t that difficult to produce a modern musical film which is, at least, a decent waste of time.
Minnie Driver’s histrionics as diva Carlotta and Jennifer Ellison’s girly charm aside, the entire cast have been painted grey, unlike La Rouge which is spectacular in pace, rich in colours and bold in characters.
Most unforgivable is the appalling technical production – the dubbing and sounding mixing makes the songs flat and distant. The signature song – The Phantom of the Opera – should be a journey of horror, love, lust and beauty taken by the virginal soprano Christine into the menacing Phantom’s lair. Whilst the rest of the orchestration is classical, this song switches to a vague mid paced electroclash soundtrack which reaches its crescendo with a god awful pomp rock guitar solo. I found myself involuntarily crying ‘Oh God no’ at every agonising turn.
The director can’t decide whether the narrative should be played through song alone or with a mixture of speech included. It switches between the two approaches throughout finally deciding, wrongly, that the whole thing should be done sung. The story gets lost (you can’t hear the lyrics) and the supposedly touching, tender moments are more painful than having your testicles pulled. It makes you prey for double DVD box sets of extended versions of Scooby Doo 2 and Barbed Wire for Christmas.
Getting home from a hard day’s work and serenading your girlfriend with poetry.
OK, so the poet was Jay Z and the verse was “If you’re having girl problems I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems but my bitch ain’t one”.
But you’ve got to say the sentiment is there.
Inexplicably, Oxford have recently appointed ‘The World’s Third Best Coach’ Ramon Diaz as their new manager. Whilst this claim is dubious there is no doubt he’s a big name having managed River Plate, winning the Copa Libertaros and the Argentine league title five times. It wouldn’t be that much of an outlandish claim that he was the South American equivalent of Arsene Wenger… only more successful.
Anyhow, he doesn’t speak English, so Radio Oxford (who now insist on playing Ricky Martin’s Living La Vida Loca every time his name is mentioned) were running the equivalent of a caption competition for him, playing one of his Spanish quotes and asking people, hilariously, to guess what he was saying.
Tony from Kidlington came on, the last caller on the show, he’d had a couple of hours to think up his answer, a wicked play on words, and now his time had come. Tony, the county is listening, you’re on.
“I thought that because Oxford haven’t scored many goals this season that he’s talking about scoring more goals, but it’s being misinterpreted as scoring more own goals, because, like, we scored, you know, an own goal against Rochdale a few weeks ago.”
It was, at best, a work in progress, Tone’s suggestion was conceptually sound, but lacked the clever interplay of words and puns that would have made him a winner. Still, you’ve humiliated yourself, time to get on with your weekend, eh Tone? … Tone?
Tone hadn’t finished, talking over the presenters attempts to move on and finish the show…
“…yeah I think there could be quite a lot of misinterpretation, that’s my main worry, he’s clearly a good coach but…”
The show’s end music began to wash over Tone as he expanded his concept to encapsulate the three strategic pillars of his answer which were underpinned by sound philosophical constructs drawn from the great thinkers of Ancient Greece. He’s probably still talking now.
The best quote from BBC Three’s ‘Story of Bohemian Rhapsody’ has to be Bob Geldof’s…
“’Mama, just killed a man’, wow, really I’m there, so what happened?… well nothing happens we just go off and sing a load of rubbish for seven and a half minutes.”
Best bit of BBC One’s ‘Story of Band Aid 20’ was the exchange between Joss Stone, who thought the guru behind the idea was Bob Gandalf, and Justin Hawkins of The Darkness…
JS “So where are you from?”
JH “Lowestoft… Home of rock, what about you?”
JS “Cornwall, home of soul”
And, on Radio Five, did I really hear the spokesman for the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution explain the need for a drastic cut in commercial fishing using references to The Blue Planet and Finding Nemo?
Nina is the disembowelled spelling dominatrix on Hard Spell, BBC’s new prime time Edutainment show (Christ, I didn’t realise edutainment is actually a word). She is also a news reader on ITN. She is also friends with Vixstah.
Last week whilst having a curry with Gill and George, some old University buddies, the subject of Hard Spell came up. “I know the woman that announces the words” I said in a ‘I’ve been to one more wedding, one more baby naming party and been out to dinner with her one more time than you’, kind of way.
George’s eyes lit up, suddenly he was exalting her radiant beauty, fantasising about dates with her, daydreaming about articles in Hello in their ‘beautiful home’ together, and what it would be like going out for dinner with Ulrika Johnson and her husband.
Such is the seduction of fame, Nina’s new profile which, let’s face it, is not yet on Elton John’s level and our very distant association with her really seems to generate a unnatural reaction in people. A couple of days earlier, Emma was discussing the show with people at work. It’s the talk of the school staff room. Emma threw in that she knew Nina, suddenly whenever the programme is mentioned, rather than questioning the relative merits of humiliating children who can’t spell ‘emollient’ someone will breathily pipe up that Emma has a connection with fame. It’s got to the point where she daren’t explain that the link is tenuous for fear of a lynching.
Just wait until I tell people that my dad is friends with SKY Sports newsreader Dave Bobin, or that I went to school with stand-up comedian and Challenge TV regular panellist Rob Deering.
On Tuesday night Alex Ferguson celebrated his 1000th game in charge of Manchester United with a Champion’s League win over Lyon in front of 67,000 fans. His two strikers cost a combined £40 million.
Alex Ferguson’s first game in charge was a 2-0 defeat against Oxford United in November 1986.
Since that day, Ferguson has won one Champions League title, eight Premiership titles, five FA Cup’s, one Cup Winners’ Cup and one League Cup. He has also been knighted.
Since that day Oxford United have slipped down the leagues and are now 21st in the bottom professional league in the country. On Saturday they were beaten 1-0 by Rochdale with a last minute goal which came off the back of the goalkeeper’s head.
Go fig.
Musically, I wasn’t mad keen on the first Band Aid record. I’m pretty sure the family had a copy or two and I wouldn’t ever try to deny its impact just because the participants weren’t very cool. I just didn’t like it. I always preferred USA for Africa’s We Are The World, though it still teases my sensibilities to admit it.
We Are The World? Let’s face, you’re not, are you?
The new version’s OK, a marginal improvement bar the Dizee Rascal bit. Sadly it’s the want of fifty-something year old men to think the way to modernise and update music is to introduce ‘rap’, because after all it is a genre that is only, at least, twenty-five years old. That, or lay a 4/4 house beat over the top (See: The recent remix of Lou Reed’s Satellite of Love).
Along with the song, the history of the whole event has been re-written. Firstly, the original concept actually wasn’t that high profile. First I remember of it was an afterthought announcement at the end of a local news bulletin. There was no precedent to it, so nobody really knew who or how many stars would turn up to the recording. Geldof was a has-been punk and the Boomtown Rats were a distant memory. As a spectacle it had little more impact than a Radio 1 Roadshow. It was only afterwards, when Geldof had pulled it off, that the impact started to hit.
They’ve also largely ignored the fact that a remake has already been done by the Kylie and Jason era pop clan. There was nothing wrong with that version, but the participants weren’t that cool and the fashions not as retro as the original.
The thing that’s really bugging me, however, is Bono and That Line. No mention of the new version is complete without a mention that Bono has recreated “His famous line”. In 1984 U2 were very much at the edgy end of the pop spectrum. The omnipotent rock giants of 1984 were McCartney, Queen and Elton John, the Blues, Girls Alouds and Westlifes were Duran Duran, Wham and Bananarama. U2 were the Franz Ferdinand of their time, local pockets of fervent support, bags of potential, but nowhere near the real major league.
Bono’s Line had no more, or less significance than Simon Le Bon’s nasally whine or Paul Young’s tissue thin vocal croak. It was U2’s performance at Live Aid that started to join the pockets of support for the band and turn it them into a global phenomenon. Now they are these rock behemoths, the line has acquired a significance it never had before. Not that the whole thing needs any hype or angle, it was one of the most significant events of the decade, and perhaps the only time the whole world has been united against one cause. Oh how I loved when they cut to Live Aid Russia and the poor soviet techies had managed to plug the sound into one TV channel and the pictures into another meaning we listened for ten minutes to appalling soft rock whilst watching old women picking cherries on a farm.
A genuine conversation from a re-branding workshop we’ve just done at work.
“We want to be all things to all people.”
“Yes, so perhaps our logo should be lots of different colours, like a kaleidoscope or a rainbow”
“And we want to be approachable, but credible. We want to give people a warm fuzzy feeling, but know they are going to get good service”
“Maybe we need an icon or figurehead, a friendly face?”
“What? Like Mickey Mouse? He’s warm and cuddly.”
“Yes, an animal would be good. Ooh what’s that animal that always changes colour”
“A chameleon?”
“Yes, that could be our figurehead”
“But they’re not warm and cuddly”
“Well, we could make it more cuddly, ooh, how about putting a chameleon in a waistcoat?“
The Northern Line was an interesting place to be on Saturday afternoon. Sitting opposite me was a battered vicar in his eighties talking to a scrawny man with a regulation Marine’s flattop crew cut wearing a blue uniform, white gloves and holding a bugle.
Amongst the smattering of Arsenal and Tottenham fans returning from the North London Derby were a gaggle of Arsenal stewards straight from the 1950’s in red and white ties and thickly greased hair. Sitting amongst them were blue rinsed old ladies and nice girls who do well in their studies clutching union jacks returning from the Lord Mayor’s Show.
Dominant, however, were about 20 kids talking loudly and animatedly amongst themselves. At Archway the doors opened and the Vicar bade farewell to the bugle man and made for the door. He signalled to the kids who were clearly in his charge. The battalion of twenty North London Boys Brigade plus all their marching band paraphernalia, made for the exit. Ten made it through before the beeps threatened to close the door. The frail vicar valiantly stood in front of the door preventing it from closing. The rest of the battalion piled through the gap he created (and partly filled). For a moment, the vicar, disappeared under a flurry of teenagers, drums, and twirling batons. Eventually he regained his composure and with a bony hand directed the boys to the exits.
Bugle man stayed on for the next stop, when his cue to exit came, his afternoon’s bugling done, he ambled off to who knows what. A wife? A cup of tea? A disturbing obsession with paramilitary organisations? An imprisoned Danish student?
The rich tapestry of London.
Guy Fawkes night is a big night at Emma’s school. The whole village congregate for a music and fireworks spectacular. Emma is usually followed around the muddy field by past and present pupils demanding her attention and pointing at me. Friday was no different; she was quickly surrounded by a swarm of last year’s class who have been scattered to the four corners of the local secondary school world. From the gloom appeared two former pupils, Anna, and Jeremy, a plump mildly autistic boy, dressed in a red and yellow Harry Potter jumper and scarf. Emma greets them.
“Hello Anna, how’s St Joseph’s? and Jeremy, have you come straight from Hogwarts?”
Then on Saturday, Emma was looking at the TV listings and complaining that BBC were dedicated two and a half hours Paula Radcliffe’s next race; entitled “Paula’s Return”. ‘How can they justify that amount of time just on one race’.
I explained that the New York Marathon would be very difficult to complete it in any less time.
Having bought it religiously for years, I rarely buy the NME now. I’ll buy the Christmas special or the issues when they do the best 50 LP’s of all time etc. I gave up when I realised their understanding of ‘dance’ music stretched little beyond Trip Hop and no hip hop artist could escape without a comparison the De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising. I also sussed the editorial style, which, when assessing a new band’s style always listed two peers that you had heard of (to help you) and one that you hadn’t (to make them look cool).
“Gobstopper’s sound is not unlike early Joy Division, Blur and Flungebuckets Christmas Retention Programme”
I decided I didn’t want to read a magazine written by isolationist sixth formers dressed like Robert Smith. I’ve never regretted the decision, in fact whenever I’ve bought it I’ve found it as informative as the Tesco top 100 CD chart. Ooh the coolest bands on the planet are The Strokes, The White Stripes and, crikey, Nirvana.
I bought it this week for the Peel tribute, in which it praises his style of playing records in their entirety without speaking over them because it “allowed people to tape the songs off the radio, which is what people used to do before file swapping” Jeez where’s my Zimmer frame?
Anyway, here are my favourite Peel facts from their list of 50: -
• A massive Captain Beefheart fan, in 1969 Peel volunteered himself to chauffeur him around the Midlands gig circuit. At one point, Beefheart, ordered Peel to stop the car with the words “John I want to hug a tree”.
• Ater giving The Damned exposure on his show, he received a letter from the drummer’s mum thanking him for “helping Christopher’s career”.
• Part of his show was The Pigs Big 78 which involved his wife choosing a 78rpm record for him to play.
• He hated Essex drivers so much he’d drive around the county to avoid them.
• With the wide range of music played, Peel would get annoyed when his Festive 50 were always made up of white boys with guitars. When Nirvana topped the poll in 1991 with ‘Smell’s Like Teen Spirit’ he cancelled the poll altogether. A Phantom 50 was later broadcast through the year, one a week.
• In 1997 he ran a Festive 31 due to the paucity of votes
• He deleted the first 5000 words of his autobiography by mistake
• The only band ever to be bumped down the Festive 50 were The Dawn Parade who had something like 20 times as many votes as anyone else due to Internet vote rigging. He let them be Number 50 for sheer cheek.
• At www.planetbods.org/radio/peel.live you can find the John Peel Sweet Eating Game. It involved eating a sweet whenever he played a record at the wrong speed, mumbled incomprehensibly about a family member, was caught by surprise by the end of a track or played a record so obscure it’s only available at one shop in Oslo.
The thing about John Peel was his relevance, whether it was dad’s Elvis and Beatles generation or my indie pop and acid house generation Peelo was all over it. The announcement of his death appears to have been greeted with uniform shock. Peel was hardly old, but he wasn’t young either, he was omnipotent in music terms and rather like the music he championed, I suppose we all assumed he would last forever.
Peel was unique, able to traverse the musical generations without effort or embarrassment. The musical tastemakers of today – Pete Tong and Tim Westwood, for example, have had their moments, but as their favoured genres become marginalised, so will they. This never worried Peel, his ability to avoid getting sucked into the industry side of music (and it’s inevitable trends and fads) meant it’s always been about the music. The industry outputs may dip and peak, but there is always good music available somewhere – Peel knew that and had a voracious appetite for finding it.
The news was broken by our Nervy Cerebral Manager who had heard it on the radio in the car. He, like everyone reacted by positioning himself in a Peel context announcing that he was a punk at University (one, we teased, who supported Anarchy in the UK as long as it was within a structured community and observed the rule of law – “Of course” he replied going crimson). In tribute, he then burst into a chorus of Uptown Top Rankin’.
My dad and I agree about “one thing” apparently; that George Bush is evil. A victory for Bush endorses his right wing Christian radicalism, further polarising global politics, legitimising the ‘affirmative action’ of those disenfranchised by his aggression. His “You’re either with us or you’re a terrorist” attitude creates a vacuum in the middle where liberalism perishes and his ideological war is accelerated. Or as dad says; he represents everything that is wrong about America.
On the other hand, baseball represents everything that is right about America, and the Red Sox winning the World Series represents everything that is right about Baseball. The sport is resolute about its traditions and history which are involved and romantic. Major League Baseball is wholly democratic, players negotiate salaries and terms collectively, it preserves individual liberty – it’s a team game but you are judged on your individual merits. It is international and multicultural – it’s not unusual to find Japanese, Ecuadoreans, and Cubans in any team and I don’t mean Ecuadorian-Americans, I mean Ecuadorians who were born in Ecuador.
Why do Americans deny their own national identity by authenticating themselves with claims of being Irish or African or whatever?
Anyway, the great thing about Baseball is that no matter what level you watch, it always looks like its being played by pub players in the park on a Sunday. Most of the time the ball flies off the top of the bat and into the crowd, or scuffs along the floor. You can be rubbish at Baseball and still look like a pro (although, unlike you, they do occasionally throw the ball at 100 mph or welly it out of the ground). The great thing about the Sox though is that they are, almost to a man, shaggy barrel chested barflies which, despite the rampant modernisation of sports science today (coupled with the fact they wear almost identical uniforms) means a modern baseball professional looks no different to the hard drinking hard living players of the twenties. Football fans who hit their early thirties must come to terms with the fact they will never play professionally, a baseball fan reach his late forties before that happens.
Regular readers will know of my love hate relationship with Michael Moore. Something that will make the man himself sit up and think, when you’ve got a Ruffles on your tail it’s got to be a worry. I loved Bowling for Columbine, but thought Stupid White Men was, generally, pish. So it’s one-all with Moore’s latest venture in the cinemas.
Moore’s central argument in Fahrenheit 9/11 still makes a lot of sense, America is built on rampant capitalism, capitalism’s central theme is greed, and those who are more successful at being greedy use corporately funded fear and alienation (or more specifically, the fear of being alienated) to maintain their position. I agree with all this, although you could argue that the land of the free, means you are equally free to succeed and fail by any means necessary and it’s just that Bush and his cohorts are better than most at succeeding. Perhaps the true argument should be that the model of the American Dream is fundamentally flawed, for which all Americans must take responsibility – but Moore isn’t brave enough to make that kind of accusation.
Fahrenheit 9/11 isn’t a great documentary in itself; it’s a bit one paced and his central argument barely develops as the film progresses. Moore’s clearly struggled to get together decent footage to support what he’s saying (either that or his deliberately used grainy TV footage to give it that gritty ‘urban warrior’ feel). His interviewing style is frustratingly leading, expressing his own personal feelings as questions that his hand picked acolytes are happy to agree with.
It’s difficult to know what Moore’s objective truly is; this isn’t an intelligent commentary on the state of America and therefore the world post 9/11. If that’s what it’s supposed to be then it will fail to rouse the chattering liberal middle classes. If it’s a wake-up call or call to arms to America’s great unwashed, then the message itself is sound (watching the aggressive recruitment of troops for Iraq in mid-America shopping malls will raise a few eyebrows) but its stylistic execution is unlikely to draw people away from Spiderman 2. If it’s simply a historical social documentary, it’s really quite poor, but if it’s just another voice to add to the anti-republican cause then I suppose it’s sound, if undeserving of the publicity it’s had.
