Blog Comment Whore....

Why do I do it?

I must spend several hours a day posting rubbish like this (on Blind Flaneur's effort) on blogs belonging to people I have no connection with other than that they happen to have chanced upon my blog rather than any of the other billion or so that they might have:


The 27 used to be a nice route. We used to be able to pick it up at the bottom of our road in Twickenham and go all the way to Archway for 4 pence. Christ knows why you'd want to do that, mind - but you could. Then again, I can't see why anyone would want to buy a record by Rod Stewart, but people still do. Though I doubt you can pick one up for 4 pence. Bloody charity shops - they're worse than HM bloody V. My late father once opened the door to Rod Stewart - on the Archway Road as it goes. It wasn't this that killed him, by the way - it was progressive heart disease, but the door thing might well have been a contributory factor. It must've been quite a shock I imagine, opening the door to find a pre-fame Rod Stewart standing there with a tea chest bass and a Scotland scarf demanding "can Kenny come out to play?" We'll never know now, of course. My uncle was a mate of his. Rod Stewart, that is. He was tight as arseholes, apparently - always hid at the back with his hands in his pockets, never bought a round. Rod that is - not my uncle Ken - he's a diamond when it come to buying a round. Had a trial at Brentford too Rod Stewart, not Kenny. Never really had much time for him, personally - although I do quite like the strings on Do ya think I'm sexy...

Roberta

p.s. Just a quick technical point here, BF. Being blind, was this sequence of events relayed to you by a sighted companion, or did you just make it up? Don't give up hope - it's amazing what they can do with lasers now, apparently...

Say you ponced about like that for three hours a day. That's 21 hours a week. That's almost a full working week. (If you can call it a working week when you spend 2/3s of it posting meritricious crap on blogs belonging to people you've never met etc. etc. instead of doing what you're being paid to do. Whatever that is. It's so long since I've done anything except blog that I've actually forgotten. I know it can't be very important...) I wonder if you could put it on your passport - occupation: spurious blog commentator (p/t)?? Imagine the adverts: Aimless individuals, highly unmotivated despite being in regular, full-time employment but with time on their hands are required to bombard pointlessly world wide internet weblog sites with frivolous, self-aggrandising verbage. No prospects. No supervision. No time wasters.

The other thing is I've started using the word 'cunt' in every comment I post. Must stop doing that. Imagine if there are children reading it....I really need to start setting a better example. I'm forty fucking one years old......

Envoi: S. this morning, overheard from the bathroom while she's watching the BBC Breakfast News item containing an interview with the chaps on the wrong end of the the recent bungled terror raid - "with a beard like that, I'd've fucking shot you.."

She's the funny one.

Further envoi:

I can't stop myself - just posted today at 11.02:

There's a technical term for it, BF. You are a sufferer of what we in the medical profession (I am a registered Paedophile - I know what I'm talking about and have the broken windows to prove it...) refer to as Severe Geoffrey Howeing of the Hair Syndrome. It's a relatively managable condition, but in extreme cases it can flare up into the more general and potentially life threatening affliction of Incurable Darcus Howeing of the Scalp. Once diagnosed, there is little hope for the poor victim of this awful illness. There is no cure, unfortunately, and the only known palliative care involves the patient being taken out into a field by the Secretary of State for Health and shot at dawn. You will, however be pleased to know, that this treatment IS currently available on the NHS.

HEEEEEELLLLLLPPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

xxx
'Berta
© 2006 Swipe Enterprises

Belle, Book and Candle...

I must have been ill. I'm so evidently flu-engulfed that I get sent home from work early. I'm thus denied the pleasure of spreading my germs at large throughout the ranks of the new student intake who, when they're not stabbing one another, have begun to shuffle listlessly around the campus in a manner more befitting old wretches on death row than young people in the prime of life and on the cusp of a brilliant academic career. Which is excellent because it means I can watch Billie Piper in Confessions of a Call Girl as it is screened and am thus spared the temptation of spending all of today wanking over it when I could be doing something really indulgent and aimed solely at my own self-pleasuring. Like writing.

As with most things that we men work ourselves up into a teeth-gritting, grunt-festooned triumphalist fever over before being overtaken by humiliating feelings of inferiority and worthlessness (but I'm sure Geoff will be doing his own preview of the West Ham v. Arsenal game), ITV2's adaptation Belle de Jour doesn't quite live up to the billing. It's not all Billie Piper's fault, to be fair. She looks lovely; silky, wavy hair that you'd give your signed 1980 Cup Winner's Cup final programme to have wrapped around your gonads. And, whether being eased out of her jeans or all kitted out in her 'professional' get up with all the trimmings we get to see plenty of her being fucked. Surprisingly for a fetishist, man and boy, like myself, it's when she's dressed in the former, playing the girl next door being intimately fucked and not when she's cavorting on top of a chap wearing a saddle (that's Belle cavorting on the saddle, by the way, not the chap - what do you think I am? Some kind of PERVERT???) that provides the programme's most genuinely arousing moment.

The problem is, she's just not Belle:

On the way to the meeting point, I passed a poster for Intolerable Cruelty and managed to convince myself that I looked not unlike Catherine Zeta-Jones.

But it's not so much that she's a brunette or looks like one sexy young actress a bit more than she does another. In the same way that the irritating Bristolian whimpering of Martina Topless Bird (or whatevah) on the soundtrack is preferred to (for instance) Al Green's sublime 'Belle' (itself a meditation on the conflicting lures of the sexual and the spiritual), like the programme's makers, Billie just doesn't radiate the maturity and been-there-seen-it-done-it-had-it-inserted-into-me-and-mopped-it-up-with-the-t-shirt knowingness of Belle's literary voice. Billie has the youthful good looks and general well-turned out, 'I'd give her one'-ness a high class call girl would need, but she just doesn't seem for real, man. She's a fine actress, don't get me wrong, but she's been mis-cast in this. Even Cherie Lunghi, who performs the role of Belle's agent d'un certain age here with just the right mix of playfulness and coldheartedness, would have been a more plausible choice.

But perhaps the problem is more deeply rooted. In my view, Belle de Jour worked, first and foremost, because it was a blog. You can tell a lot about blogs from their opening few words. Some just pitch you into the middle of the author's tedious existence and hope for the best:


Another day wasted. 7 hours Shuttling between the website of Spanish daily and Real Madrid mouthpiece, La Marca and the Grauniad Ulnimited's Football talk forum for an end to the Vieira nonsense.

Others provide a more seemly opening before pitching you into the middle of the author's tedious existence and hoping for the best:

In analogue times, people who were slightly drunk and at a loose end might begin writing bad poetry, or stand on a soapbox at Hyde Park Corner, or just phone the speaking clock and scream obscenities at it.

Whereas some have quite clearly been designed to have legs beyond that initial post, their beginnings like that of a novel, hold the seeds of the story that will sprout like a mighty oak out of this taut and pithy kernel:

I spent my mid-twenties merrily gallivanting around the world without a care in the world, having a ball. I was on some Thai island paradise one day with a gaggle of fellow 20something raucous females, when I declared flippantly,

"Oh, I'll probably be in my thirties saying 'I haven't had a boyfriend since I was 23'..."

But they all have one thing in common, no matter how literary or contrived they may seem. You assume that you are on the receiving end of a singular voice, a unique experience. It's just like a novel, in many respects, only you can hear this, see how it's been updated, read it almost in real time, every single day. You can find out how its author has been and what they might do tomorrow. Or they might just tell you who they wanked over or what they watched on TV. And so it was with BdJ:

Located what sounded like an excellent, small, discreet agency (word of mouth, as they say). After email contact and sending my photos, I finally arranged to meet the manager at the dining room of a central London hotel. She sounded very young and had a very strong Eastern European accent. Polish, maybe? Should I ask? Oy vey.

It is very literary, even then, looking back at that very first post. It's crying out to be read on, to be continued; to be published as a book, even. But for all that literariness, it's very real in the way that all blogs come across as being 'real' - in other words, I suppose, as the unmediated product of an individual consciousness. I still think BdJ worked best on that other small screen. For me, much of the power of the writing came from its central conceit (somewhat lost in book and televised form, in my view) that this was a blog, written by (as so often they are) a blogger.

As such, and as much as her erotic encounters entertain, we also get to see a very vivid and personal London filled with very real Londoners and the ordinary minutiae of life through the eyes of the anonymous Belle. She's sat there, as we are, on the tube, only she is probably being eyed up by a potential assaulter. She may inhabit a very different professional world from our own, but she lives in the same one that we do and it is beautifully evoked. And that's why material that might otherwise have seemed like made-to-measure smut is able to transcend the genre and become quite a powerful piece of subversion. Because the insinuation returns with every post that this could be anyone. And so, the logic sits up, pert-breasted and fiddles with its short cut skirt, anyone could be Belle.

This universality is, of course, lost in the adaptation. I've not read the book, but it strikes me that the published form would also strip the work of that initial destabilising intent. We forget, I suppose, that this is an artform in its infancy. I'm doing some research on Daniel Defoe at the moment, and it's interesting how much stick he was on the receiving end of. Novels like Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, based as they were on personal accounts of castaways and the Belle de Jour of her day, were deemed to be the work of a scandalous charlatan; Defoe was a literary freakshow proprietor who was happy to earn his coin relating and embellishing the misfortunes of others. And yet where would the novel be without Defoe? Blogs may well become one day what novels were to Defoe's time. When was the last time I read a novel that was, well, novel? And yet one is surrounded by novelty on the blogosphere. One day, perhaps, we'll be as happy to subscribe to read the author of Belle's newest work as we are now to hand over our readies for a paperback. This will no doubt come across as the embittered ranting of someone who knows he will never be published (which, to be fair, is only to be expected) but I, for one, can't wait.

L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob


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Keen, but not Peachy...

Idly flicking through Saturday's Grauniad - well, it's so *slow* the print media, isn't it? Does it *really* matter if you're a couple of days late dropping it in the recycling bin?? - I come across an article commemorating the 10th anniversary of blogging. Yes, apparently, the first entry on Scripting News was posted just over a decade ago and since then, as the piece affirms, "blogging has gone from an unnammed or even nebulous concept [so *they've* read GWAOTM too!] to helping form a nascent community and then to the fundamental evolution of the social web." No, I didn't understand a word of it either, but happy birthday anyway Blogosphere - and, if you're in on the old Gore Vidal joke, a meretricious to you too!

But to be serious for a nano second. In time-honoured, balanced journalism, two sides to every coin, "we are not a home to sanctimonious, self-important ranting here" Old Media style fairness, the Graniad [sic - it was a typo, but I think it fits the bill as we're talking about *old* Me-Jah here...] feels compelled to show that all is not sweetness and light in the whizzing cyber world of the ones and noughts. To whit, they wheel out Andrew Keen - author of CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE, (apologies for shouting, but that's *exactly* how he types it up on his *own* blog [some of you are *way* ahead of me here, but the rest of you will doubtless see the irony of that statement shortly] who says that "although it is enticing to believe that online diaries are empowering, the hype is dangerous." Yep, I can live with that. But then Keen by name, but less so by nature, he goes on:

It's seductive in the sense that it convinces people to think that they have more to say and are more interesting than they really are. The real issue is whether it adds any more to our culture. Most of it is just so transient and ephemeral.

Ah, now I get it. Before the days of the internet, when I thought I had more to say than I did and was more interesting than I really was, I was just a deluded, self-aggrandising moron. *Now* my "digital narcissism" is a threat to culture itself! Thanks for the tip off Andy - I'll buy a faster computer!

Anyway, purely in the interests of extending this over-opinionated, nowhere-near-as-interesting-as-I-like-to-think-it-is rant, I decided to find out a little bit more about Mr. Keen. First stop, AfterTV where we find not only a lovely picture of him (ahh, not a *smitch* of narcissim...) but also the following blurb:

Born in North London... attended London University ... First Class Honours degree in History....British Council Scholar... University of Sarajevo....Yugoslavia during the mid Eighties ... graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley.... fellow at the Macarthur funded Berkeley-Stanford Program on Soviet International Behaviour... lectured about politics, history and modern culture ... number of New England schools including Tufts, Northeastern and the University of Massachusetts...

The boy done good.

So, we read on:

A second confession: I am a media, culture and technology junkie. I have written extensively about music, cinema and politics for many magazines and newspapers in both America and Europe. My own media obsessions include the movies of Alfred Hitchcock, the music of Bono and U2 and the books of W.G. Sebald. My three most cherished pieces of media all happen to be called Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Sebald’s Vertigo (1999) and U2/Bono’s “Vertigo” (2004). Beyond Vertigo, I like to read other people’s anti utopian visions -- particularly those of Franz Kafka, Edmund Burke, William Gibson, George Orwell and Jorge Luis Borges. What particularly interests me about all these dystopian writers is the way that their work exposes the great seduction of their particular age.

Ahh a Vertigo stalker...I've heard of them...Anti-Utopias? Yes, a valid and interesting area of research. But U Bloody 2?!?!?

Anyway, each to their own. Then, next stop is his The Great Seduction site where we find, eventually once we've accustomed our eyes to the glare of all the plugs for CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE (I wish he wouldn't keep shouting like that...) a link to a recent interview (plugging - you guessed it - CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE, naturally). And when I say plugging, I *mean* plugging - this guy is *good* (...and coming from me, that's high praise indeed) I counted *seven* *UPPER* *CASE* plugs for his newest book, The CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE in this six question interview alone. He seems to have been given quite an easy time by blogger (?) Strumpette (which has, incidentally, always been my favourite style of pasta...) - the blog's legend reads: A Naked Journal of the PR Industry. Wow - nudity *and* PR; could there *be* any more vices in there?

All well and good - there's clearly a lot in this "digital narcissism" thing. But these are just a couple of the things he has to say that leaped out at me from the interview - the typos have been left [democratically] uncorrected (bloody bloggers, eh?):


As I demonstrate in CULT OF THE AMATEUR, the blogosphere has no formal editorial checks ot [sic] balances and is thus structurally corrupt and corrupting.

So all those comments people leave at the bottom - they're just....[..tails off..]Nevermind. But then, it transpires that Andy hasn't written this book, THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE for us "Web 2.0 radicals". No, we will probably disagree with him and make mincemeat of his theories in an ordered debate. So *this* one goes out to,

parents, business people and educators -- who are troubled by the more extreme cultural and economic consequences of the hyper democratic internet. I expose the dangers not only of "citizen media" like blogging and wikis, but also of online pornography, gambling and identity theft.

Quite so - that's the thing about this democracy lark isn't it. Like infaltion - it's OK until it goes hyper. Then you get all the peaceniks and alternative lifestyle lot out in force and next thing you know...

[... gentle clip-clop, accompanied by a lazily plucked gee-tar...]

"Ours was a peaceful town 'til those Blog rustlers turned up here with their scantily-clad goth girls splattered in feck blood and their fancy Teddy Sheringham's 666 poker nights..."(North London, eh? - I wonder, I wonder....)

But, fear not, pardners, because...

... CULT OF THE AMATEUR [yes, we get the idea by now Andy....] addresses many ordinary people's concerns about the way that the digital revolution is undermining the core tenets of American culture.

You mean there are *non* *ordinary* people out there trying to undermine our *ordinary* ambitions to be able to occupy and firebomb Middle Eastern cities without these atrocities reaching the attention of the people who not only bankroll them, but in whose collective name they are perpetrated.

Well, looky there.

So, please Andrew, tell us more. Specifically what you'd say to the bloggers in places like Iran and China who live under regimes who have more in common with that described in the post below than our own and who are fed up with being told by puny little bureaucrats and ideologues what they can and can't look at. Or say. Or think.

I think you'll find, when you can tear yourself away from The Unforgettable Fire that if you remove the hyper- what you have left tends no longer to be describable as democracy.

And one last thing - the blog thing. Alright for you, but not for the rest of us? Bono sang the following:

And I must be an acrobat
To talk like this
And act like that...

Yes, an acrobat for sure. Or, in plain language, a hypocrite.


L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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