Bush of Goats

I just watched the Susan Boyle clip from Britain’s Got Talent on YouTube.

I don’t think anyone has ever quite lived up to the title ‘Evil Pantomime Genius’ like Simon Cowell does (which isn’t to say I don’t like him- I actually find him charming and I like that he smokes), but this Guardian article meant when I watched Cowell’s latest prodigy, I had already had a peek behind the curtain. and discovered some interesting facts about the heartwarming story of Susan and Simon™.

For instance, judging by the way tedious shitpipe Piers Morgan and the strangely bovine ham, Amanda Holden acted all gaspy and ‘shocked’, you’d think they never seen or heard Susan before – like in the rehearsals, or at the auditions they would have attended. Neither would they have been, I’m sure, informed by Mr Cowell, over the six weeks prior to her arrival on stage that he’d been touting her for, that their was a sensation on the way. Only a cynic might not be surprised to learn Max Clifford had been brought on board long before she took those first faltering steps out onto the stage to meet her artfully primed public. She already has an album deal and studio time lined up as well. But such tedious inconvenient truths are not part of the myth everyone seems so engaged in creating.

So while I can hardly blame Simon Cowell for being smart enough not to miss an opportunity like Susan, all I could think was how weak reality television’s prying eye had made what might once have been an interesting story, had the makers not bothered to pretend they were invisible in the process; how they can only watch helplessly as the hideous leering machinery of media strips away Susan’s modesty to reveal her tragic plight™ in front of carefully selected socio-economically representative teenagers calling her a ‘same-face’ behind their sleeves, because, right, their preconceptions are about to be challenged, but they don’t know it, yeah?

For f*ck’s sake.

Please, reality telly makers! Stop trying to make us believe that *this* time you’ve **really** captured the essence of the human spirit with your magical electrically-powered lanterns? These are the same old ham-fisted spiritualist parlour tricks you and others of your ilk have been trying on for years. Believe it or not, some of the people who watch TV also actually know how it works! we know Star Wars wasn’t actually made in space! Please stop treating us like medieval children you can hypnotise with a mirror: you do still want to be an industry in twenty years, don’t you?

Ranting aside, regardless of whether Susan is nice or difficult, when she opened her mouth to sing… i thought she warbled quite a lot. But there it is again, the crepusculent hand of reality television – ‘oh don’t worry about that,’ leers a producer, ‘we’ll amp up the crowd, that’ll drown her out. anyway, this isn’t *about* the singing … we can sort her out a vocal coach after the fuss has died down…’

And that’ll be it, off into the blackness for Susan Boyle: lost in the machinery, singing the lead in the made for the 24hr TV musical docudrama of ‘Jodie Marsh – my suicide’.

I’m sure Susan Boyle, as she once was, was an interesting personality that anyone venturing into her remote part of the world would have been sure to remember – perhaps even as a very good singer, had they heard her perform. But now, thanks to the fucking magic of television™, we can all share in the wonder of her remarkable story, and enjoy the barely dressed commodification of interesting variables into a global singing phenomenon™ that is Miss Susan Boyle.

There is something peculiarly English about Bletchley Park.

As you can probably tell from the image above (taken in the ‘car park’) it’s in some state of disrepair.

And right now there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of where it’s headed. But right now, Bletchley Park is stood at a cross roads: it’s very close to being awarded a substantial grant from English Heritage.

But at the minute, It’s teeming with builders doing something to the roof of the original house whose scaffold is elaborately navigated by parties of the old (led by equally elderly tour guides). Tellingly, in half term week, there are very few kids. I counted less than a dozen, and they all looked like they were in the school chess club – no offence.

The part of me which is always thinking about promotion was horrified.

This isn’t some second rate stately home – this is Bletchley Park, ferchrissakes! It could claim to be the birthplace of modern cryptography and had one of the first ever digital computers installed there. It should be a geek shrine, stuffed to the gunnels with interactive stuff, not wasting away, because lazy tourists don’t understand what was achieved here.

Shouldn’t it?

See, another part of me likes the quaint, incompetent modesty of the place, and cannot imagine anything worse than Bletchley being turned into a modern attraction.

The work carried out at Bletchley during the war was intensely complex and dull and repetitive and required great fortitude and discipline to complete. Churchill said of the Bletchley team, “My geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.”

So, is their memory and achievement better served by the hard won discovery of a small, engaged minority, or by trumpeted convenience and a MacDonald’s?

Whatever its fate, hats off to they g33s3s.

I had a good meeting at the BBC yesterday and was travelling back from there, when shuffle (‘oh how I love thee managed randomness!’) threw up something by The Shins.
When it came out, ‘Chutes Too Narrow’ was on constant repeat on my iPod and was on the way to becoming one of my all time best favourite albums of the last few years ever – mostly because of James Mercer’s exquisite lyrics (‘Gold teeth and a curse for this town,’ is one of my all time favourite opening lines). But I had stopped listening to them.
Why? The drumming .
Now, I am hopelessly inept at drumming as I find the flight control required to keep all four limbs on separate trajectories virtually impossible. But I can recognise talent when I hear it (There should be a kinetic statue in space to Jon Bonham; the guy who plays for Franz Ferdinand is a genius) but the Shins skins man is not a particularly adventurous thwacker, and I”ve always found the sound a bit flat and lacklustre. I used to tut. ‘they should get another drummer – they could be huge’.
But listening now, from a different perspective, what I realise is the importance of the team: he might not be the greatest drummer, but how is it possible to calculate his value to the other members of The Shins? Maybe he acts as a moderating force, or an orchestrator. Maybe he has an ear for a musical phrase; maybe James would be lost for words if it wasn’t for his Lemon drizzle cake (I’m just speculating here: I have no idea whether he makes cakes, Lemon or otherwise). But you get the jist.
In a way, this connects back to that Tom Taylor thing I mentioned about creating software (in this case, music) and seeing how it works, then building it again with the benefits of experience: There is no one music; there is not even only one Shins album.
Hmm, *beard*.

Go find out about The Shins

I used to do a bit of DJ-ing (well, I say that, it was actually just this guy I knew). I’d started because I was trying to get closer to a central joy of clubbing, namely the moment you realise the song you are hearing is being followed by another tune you recognise. (Obv. nightclub often contain lots of other people you who also recognise the tune and are similarly excited. Plus, sometimes there were might be drugs.)

So now I don’t go to night clubs anymore, where can I get that same sensation?

Shuffle.

The iTunes random function has replaced night clubs as a way of experiencing moments of managed chance through music. (‘what about radio?’ It tries, but commercial requirements are stacked against it; and there’s the inane chatter in between, and the 20-song playlists that dominate the airwaves in service to the major labels) And so the incredibly simple, localised function of letting someone (or more accurately, ‘something’) else decide what I am listening to, whilst also allowing me to confidently predict I will like what I hear, has become iTunes greatest function.

Except, of course, it isn’t anything like entirely random, it just feels that way because I haven’t intervened in the instant of change: I’ve certainly dictated the parameters (it’s my iTunes library), but at the moment the song starts playing, I do not know what it will be.  I find this ‘fake randomness’ fascinating because it rewards in the same way as real randomness, except I’ve done something to manage chance, and thereby participated in the event: I am rewarded as both author and audience.

Which brings me onto a book I’ve been reading recently: Supernature Written in 1973 by Lyall Watson, I had been enjoying it up until last night, when the ‘curious outsider’ descended into loopy supposition.

At the start (the good part) the book points out how physicists and astronomers have long been aware of the effects of the sun  on the planets of the solar system, and are ‘only now’ (in 1973) beginning to understand the waves of incalculably complex energy thrown off by sunspots. Watson points out that this study of cosmic waves is also the basis of astrology: the belief that the position of the planets in relation to the sun and each other can fundamentally affect life on earth.

This made me wonder:

Is it possible to use astrological data in combination with other more prosaic factors (like musical preference) and produce experiences of managed randomness for the purposes of experiencing pleasure?

Don’t ask me; I don’t know. Not yet, anyway.