Let's Be Having Ye.

I have received some nasty messages over the past couple of weeks, after I posted what must have been a wake up call for many of you. Like the light of day on the eyes of those who have long lived in the dark, the truth stings. Many of you followed the well-trodden, predictable road of making things personal, slinging insults about my love life and my taste in music. As I am a font of such ferocious sexual power, taking any notice of disparaging comments regarding my love life would be ridiculous. That would be like a mountain taking offence to comments about its gargantuan size. Regarding musical interests, however, I do take umbrage. Fortunately, my indignation is quickly scuppered by the safe knowledge of the extensiveness of my music collection. The odds are that my knowledge is far greater than yours, and as we know, awareness of the existence of things is the hallmark of a superior mind (ask any hipster). By showing you my music knowledge, I am demonstrating how intimately involved I am with these bands. They give me more than you could ever know and are, effectively, mine.

I like all types of music, and I refuse to bow to social pressure and say that country and western, or any other music genre, is the exception. In order to show how confident I am in my music taste, I have decided to give a random, unedited sample of what is on my music collection. I clicked 'shuffle' on my iPod and the list below is what came up. As you can see, it is a tasteful variegation of talented and inspiring musicians:


1. Hangover rhapsody – The Narcissistic Idlers

2. Consumerist blood – Anarchic Fist

3. Fish bowl universe (Bratislava remix) – Ecstasy Rainbow

4. [15 minute original guitar solo] – Riff International

5. Friendship never felt this good – Stacey Beduila

6. Forever in your death – The Matrimonial Suicides

7. Siesta Fiesta – Ricci Santiago

8. I shot a cop (and I liked it) – Capital P

9. Je m'appelle le monde – The Sacre Blues

10. Life at the Top – Circumcision Derision

11. Niggardly with the Sambos – Contro-Versey

12. Grabación 17, "Palabras de la pasión" – Get By in Spanish, Oxford University Press

13. Space Terminal Infinity – Cacophonic Ninja

14. Grandiloquent – Autologic

15. Nights of Fire – Jungle Fever

16. Rucksack Angst – The Pedantic Krankenschwesters

17. Fix You – Coldplay

18. Korean Water – Mool Jusayo

19. When the world ends, I will know then that our souls never melded – Catastrophe Salad

20. Lord, I’m so poor – Primordial Banjo

So, there's nothing left to say but shut your mouth and continue listening to whatever over-produced, pap-for-the-masses music-by-numbers you listen to on your all-too-guffawed and advertisement-riddled radio stations, you worthless, over-sensitive, cold dead mass of stultifying, derived horse shit.

Two Tributes

A few years ago, when I was more active in literary circles, I was a prominent remember of the Oscar Wilde Society in Dublin. As our beloved playwright had failed to produce anything in such a long time (a writer's skill I worked hard on last year), our societal meetings began to get stale. New members dwindled, and those that joined offered no new insights into Wildean verse, only the tired quotations you would find in tourist shops here. The tedium eroded the society's prestige, and we decided to brainstorm some ideas that would enliven our organisation and generate a new interest in our hero. One member suggested 'Gone Wilde in the Park', an afternoon of running around in the Phoenix Park, dressed only in a pair of runners. As a bunch of libidinous young men, the prospect of being naked around the fresh female members greatly appealed to us.
It occurred to us soon afterwards that we were all in poor physical shape, and as we were short on cash, we decided to join the gym together, taking advantage of the large discount for a group membership. Our first day in the gym was a disaster. We quickly ran short on breath, and we had difficulty lifting the heavy weights. A beautiful, Lycra-clad woman passed our way, swaggering with aplomb. As she glided past us, we worked our faces red, trying to impress her with our feigned manliness.
We were all in a flutter, but some of us were looking at her arse.

************

During those days, I had a depressing job in a DIY store. The sweet verse of Oscar Wilde that ran through my brain was the only thing holding back me back from ending it all under the crushing weight of a pallet of paint. Customers of the store usually fell into two categories: those who vexed you with their ignorance of DIY and those who depreciated you with belittling comments. One day, I had a customer who fit both those categories. It was in the middle of a snowy winter, and he was having trouble rolling his car safely out of his driveway. I showed him the section where we kept our sand and our salt. Not wanting to spend more money than he had to, he asked me a dozen questions, waiting for me to tell him what he wanted, namely that salt was sufficient for the job at hand. I explained at length how he could try it, but there was no guarantee of success and that the coarse sand was superior. He soon grew irritated, asking me questions about my experience of such things. The conversation eventually came around to my prominent position in the Oscar Wilde Society. The customer noted sardonically that such activities truly validated my advice on DIY matters. "Sarcasm near the lowest form of grit", I muttered under my breath. 

Wilde was played by Benedict Cumberbatch during his thirties.

In the summer break between my degrees and masters, I successfully applied for a J1 visa. I decided to use the opportunity to make a pilgrimage of Oscar Wilde's 1882 American tour. Wilde was well-received, but I had to work hard to find kindred spirits. I was lucky enough to start a conversation with a like-minded soul in a coffee shop in Leadville, Colorado (where Wilde had drunk whiskey with miners). The old man was a retired lieutenant who had fought in Korea and Vietnam, but it was his knowledge and love of a certain nineteenth century playwright that started a long and deep conversation between us. We conversed about everything, including poetry, songs, and love. He told me of how he had longed to see his sweetheart back home, when he was fighting overseas. In the Vietnam conflict, he had listened to love songs that reminded him of her, such as My Girl and The Way You Do the Things You Do. Returning home after a lengthy tour of duty, he was fortunate to become an enlisting officer, and he was able to stay with the woman he loved and eventually marry her. We spoke about certain elites who had skipped serving their country, and he told me that, if he had any say in it, no stratum of society would be immune to the draft. By this stage in the conversation, I was just listening, allowing him to perform his own personal soliloquy. With his own experiences at the forefront of his mind, he conceded that he probably couldn't bring himself to draft the singers and the poets, as their work served so well to maintain troop morale. "I can enlist anyone except the Temptations", he added with a wry smile.

************

My career as a Wildean aficionado came to a tragic ending, when I was almost bankrupted by my own ingenuity. After years of devoted attendance and organisation of society meetings, I was beginning to be recognised as a leading authority on Wilde. As is the way of our universe, especially in academic or literary circles, great forces are counterbalanced by their opposites. Mine was called Terrence Giles Fogarty, a snide little creature and a man of inherited means. In the last year of my Wilde pursuits, we clashed sabres on many occasions, debating fiercely on the true character and relevance of the playwright's works. He was an utter charlatan, as demonstrated by his ownership of Oscar Wilde: The Complete Works, Illustrated, a book so huge and small-printed that one only buys it for show. The fearsome competition pushed us to work on our own definitive guides to the Wildean corpus. Fogarty's book, from what I heard, was as bland and predictable as he was, but he had the means to self-publish. My guide was an engrossing maze of information, written in the style of choose your own adventure books. The reader was offered page choices after reading a section, and they had to turn to the page that best matched their interpretation of the literature. If they chose correctly it would lead them to continue their exploration of the writer; if they chose incorrectly they hit a dead end, where the book would carefully explain how wrong they were. After finishing the final draft, I sought publication, but to no avail. A ray of hope appeared when a fellow society member informed me of an extremely cheap publishing house, where I could get several thousand copies made for a sum of money within my reach. I scrounged and saved until I had enough cash to go to the printers. I could have got a loan to hasten publication, but I stayed true to my principle of avoiding needless debt. When I arrived at the publishing house to collect my freshly printed books, I was greeted by Fogarty himself. He assured me that he was just here to wish me well, but the smirking look on his face made told me otherwise. I was horrified to discover what Fogarty and the publishing contract's fine-print knew all along: my book was printed without page numbers, rendering it useless. My devastation soon turned to fury, and I marched up to Forgarty in the car park of the publishing house. He had just enough time to declare that, "anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of pagination", before I socked him to the ground.¹

 

---

1 Of course, my brain (as it always does) gifted me with the perfect comeback thirty minutes too late, where I would tell him that 'anyone who lives in their imagination suffers from a lack of means'.

The Logical Song

I recently received an email from an adoring fan asking me if I had a girlfriend. As per usual, she assumed that some woman had managed to encage me via a relationship, as fine specimens such as myself are such rare beasts. The reality is I have been single(ish) for a long time now. I know what you're thinking: "A lion like you can't be kept in one place for long." "Always on the look out for new prey", you say. Well, that's not exactly true. Despite my prowess with the ladies, most of my dates end in abysmal failure. They start off fine; there's usually chemistry and fun, and often there's attraction and a sense of promise. Unbeknownst to my date, however, my good graces and charm are resting on a knife's edge. All it takes is for her to say something as innocuous as, "So, what music do you listen to?", to set me off. Completely enraged, I get right up in her face and say, "Fuck. You.", before storming off, never talking to her again. The question is my trigger, and if I fail to inform my date about it, she is unlikely to avoid it. You can see my problem, right? Asking about one's music interests is a personality test in disguise (A pop personality test disguised as a pop personality test, you might say). It assumes you can gauge the person by their iPod. Well, no thank you! I'd rather not have you psychoanalyse me for listening, say, for the sake of avoiding argument, and I'm not saying I actually do, but let's say Enya or Wham!, for argument's sake.

In recent years, I have grown to see that this is solely my problem, an actual case of 'It's not you, it's me'. However, I am quite indignant about other ubiquitous assumptions about music, such as a gig being an appropriate dating option. I have never seen the great appeal of live music, especially for dates. Aside from the difficulty in finding a band or singer that both people like, there are few advantages in going to see a band play live. You will either see some unknown band or somebody famous, and both are fraught with problems. Seeing unknown bands is great fun if you enjoy not being able to talk properly for a couple of hours. While that may favour certain dates, you still have to listen to some long-haired whiner convey his suffering over a minor problem he had in a medium devoid of any artistry or decency. Famous bands come with their own set of disadvantages. For a start, they are more expensive. Why would I spend all that money just to brave the cold and listen to songs I could listen to in the comfort of my home with a cup of tea? The over-priced drinks that are sold at gigs compound the expensiveness live music; why would you ever choose that over buying alcohol in the supermarket? At home there are no crappy plastic cups, no sweaty idiots, and no sore legs from standing. Plus, with your own music collection, you get to listen to all the songs you want to hear, in the order you want to hear them. The performance is always pristine, and I never have to face the disappointment of the omission of any of my favourites. I fail to see how people tolerate listening to some tosser in the crowd ask what song was being played or confess how this one isn't of his favourites — or even worse, said toss pot enjoying the same songs you do, thereby ruining everything for you. Some of you will use 'the atmosphere' or the possibility of 'pulling' someone to promote seeing live music, but these are mirages of satisfaction. You can simulate the atmosphere by playing a live album of your favourite band; that's assuming that the atmosphere is good in the first place and you are tolerant of mister toss of the pots. Even if you do enjoy the atmosphere, what does that say about you? You love doing things in unison, under the hypnotic power of some charismatic person on a stage. That always works out well. As for 'pulling', if you are successful, congratulations, but if it involves a conversation about music (as it most usually will) then some of us will encounter problems.
If you are a rational being and you want to avoid making irrational choices, whether you are looking after your personal pleasure or financial fortunes, you will avoid live music. When enough people choose the rational course, live music will begin to disappear. Coupled with free downloads from the internet (another rational choice), music production will dwindle along with all the nonsensical chitter-chatter about it. Eventually, the decrease in the voluminous amounts of perfunctory noises emitting for people's mouth will reveal the beauty that was always there, waiting for us to cease drowning it out with cacophony and bewailing — silence.

Next time on The Fair Observations: Nigel, like the modern day Jesus that he is, edifies everyone on the insidious nature of going to the cinema and enjoying sunny days outdoors.



   
In the absence of any gratuitous 'skin' on the last post, here's a compensatory video.

The Bloggerist

With only a few days of my twenties remaining, I find myself reflecting on my past. I'm proud to say I'm wiser leaving this decade than I was when I entered it. I would like to share some lines of wisdom from the master himself, Paulo Coelho, who has taught me so much over the years. Without his edification, I may never have achieved the two-figure following on my blog.

Top 24 Coelho Gems

1. Life is like a rainbow. It is orange, red, indigo, green, violet, yellow. Sometimes it is blue.
2. When parting, we always say goodbye, but in our heart, we know that it is neither good nor bye.
3. Our sleep dreams at night, yet our dreams sleep during the day.
4. Death is merely a friend who cloaks us in eternal nothingness.
5. The universe conspires to bring about your dreams. Unless you're born in some despotic, impoverished African state, in which case the only dream you can hope for is early death.
6. Love belongs to those whose fear no longer loves them.
7. Vague, epiphanic writing frees the pockets of many souls.
8. You are you what you believe yourself to be, provided your imagination is modest and you are not insane.
9. Lust is love in disguise. Love of the vagina.
10. Destiny without Des is tiny. So, get in touch with Des.
11. Not one door closes without an other opening, as life is like a draughty, poorly designed house. So, the constant recurrence of opportunity further proves how truly shit life is.
12. The sea is a mystery. It is infinite, yet we always reach the shore. It is there in the same place, yet it moves around a bit.
13. Follow your heart, even if it involves clinging on to someone who doesn't want you. The heart knows what it wants, and she'll eventually learn to toe the line.
14. Everything happens for a reason. All your family dies; your lovers leave you; you lose your job and your health and your legs, but all this has led you to see how dire life is. Everything happens for a reason, just sometimes the reason is shit.
15. Everything happens for a reason, but sometimes things happen for a very small reason. Had life not visited us all with catastrophe after catastrophe, would you have fixed the toilet seat?
16. The most miraculous things can happen in mere minutes. As can all mundane things. And things of medium interest.
17. What is a teacher? I'll tell you: it isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows. It is also someone who teaches you something new, as nobody knows everything.
18. We pretend to be strong because we are weak. We also pretend to be weak because we are strong. We pretend to be intelligent because we are stupid. Basically, we pretend to be something because we are the opposite.
19. Say what your heart thinks. Don't try to edit it or make sense of it. Write it down. Call it a novel. Sleep on a bed made of money.
20. What are the true treasures of the world? Love, happiness, the soul. They are so ethereal and vague, everyone can latch on to them. With cash.
21. Let dreams take flight on the wings of love into the heart of destiny and the soul.
22. To realize one's destiny is a person's only obligation. [From Hitler Cried by the River, one of Coelho's lesser known works.]
23. Tautologies and vague language are like magical incantations — they somehow always come true.
24. Travel is never a matter of money but of courage. Unless you're from North Korea or broke or something.