Blog Strike

Today I will cease writing this blog. I will not blog another word until at least 1st January 2012.
My inspiration is a piece of ‘performance art’ (for want of a better term) called the Art Strike, which a similarly named, similarly aged prankster called Stewart Home carried out from 1990 to 1993. Google it if you’ve never heard of it.
Like my sometime associate Home I regard anything I do for fun, rather than to pay the mortgage or for my family, as an experiment, and almost everything else as an utter bore and a complete waste of time. I started the print column because I was invited to and so will continue that until I’m disinvited, but I started the blog as an experiment, so when it is not interesting to blog, not interesting to observe the reaction, then there is no reason to continue. Or maybe I’ll just observe what happens when I don’t blog, because that may also be interesting.
One reason for the Manx content has been that I never understood why nobody else was doing it when so much nonsense goes on here and, for strictly economic reasons, the local press will not talk about it. But I also never understood why, once I’d proved it could be done, nobody else joined in.
And I never understood why the level of analysis or research by commentators on local websites…......well, frankly, why there isn’t any! If I’m terribly honest, I also despair of many 'atheist' websites and organisations too, for the same reasons.
Does nobody ask the most basic questions of news stories?
Where this or that assertion, statistic or ‘fact’ comes from?
Or who?
It ought to be patently obvious to anyone who has even briefly encountered ‘media studies’ that at least 80% of the local, UK or international press is written by PR companies, government spin-meisters and pressure groups, so why do they not ask where the story came from?
Or why they planted the story?
Or why the Manx government spends millions on PR projects which they tell us are meant to improve the international image of the island, but which even the thickest, most academically illiterate marketing assistant in the naffest local company or government department should know from their sub-GCSE marketing course notes is actually a piss-poor attempt to make locals ‘think positive’?
Oh, so many questions, so little time. So, I’m off, to read books, study and try other projects I’ve had tucked away if I find the time, or just (as every disgraced Tory politician says) to spend more time with my family.
No, I’m not bored, or angry, or disheartened. No, I’m not available for anyone else’s projects which they can’t be bothered to see through themselves.
I’m just not here for the next 365 days.
If that’s a bother, it took me about 20 minutes to set this blog up from scratch with no IT experience. I did it for the same reason I churned out punk fanzines when I was 18 and have contributed to all manner of odd, obscure publications ever since.
Nobody talked about anything that related to the world I live in. So if that’s true for you, stop whining and do it yourself.
Go on punk, make my day.
See you in 2012.

Not a lot of people know this...

I nearly crashed the car coming home from work last night.
The cause was an item on Radio 4, and I’m sorely tempted to ring them up and swear at them. The item was so unbelievable that I had to watch the TV news on both BBC and ITV…… and then Channel 4 too, and I still couldn’t believe it.
The source of my amazement was hearing the voice of an invisible man – the island’s previous Bishop. A figure so obscure that when I once referred to him by name instead of his ‘proper’ title in a letter to a local newspaper the sub-editor put the title in brackets afterwards, just to ensure the Manx public knew who I was referring to.
The Right Reverend Graeme Knowles (as he now is) was a determined careerist who never really sought the Manx Anglican Area Manager job. It was just a necessary evil for him to acquire some political experience – preferably in a low risk environment – before being able to apply for the cushy London job at St. Paul’s he really wanted; and which he now has.
While stranded here on Lambeth orders, this Teflon parson was careful never to express a controversial opinion, never to take sides in an argument…. Never, in fact to do anything except nod and smile politely.
Meanwhile church membership figures plummeted, and even a Manx government report into church buildings co-commissioned and substantially dictated by church and heritage interests managed to conclude that around half of local churches are surplus to requirement. It also accidentally revealed who the diocesan management were planning to flog them to, but that’s another matter!
His final sermon was delivered to a captive audience of government bigwigs. Nobody else bothered to go: indeed most folk simply didn’t know it was on, who he was, that he’d ever arrived here or done anything - never mind that he was leaving again.
Now our Graeme has an equally pointless existence, helping Anglicans suck up to a Westminster government with no future to offer young people by inventing ever more useless ritual ‘celebrations’ for older, more privileged dullards.
Yesterday it was remembering (carefully edited) stories about the Blitz. Tomorrow ….well, I’m sure he’ll be up to something just as bland, safe, and dull as ditch water.
And just in case nobody on the Isle of Man can believe it, catch the grey one’s dull sick tones at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11209078 .
Watch, listen and laugh.

Holiday fun in Trumpton

Next Monday is our National Day here on L'Isle de Homme. Or, more precisely, the day when the triumph of English colonialism over anything vaguely resembling a Manx identity is most crushingly obvious ....to anyone except the loons who perpetuate the Tynwald Day farce.
I’ve already covered the lunacies and delusions of the ceremony itself (see last July’s Tynwald Day for Dummies ) so won’t repeat myself here.
This year, according to the local press (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Looking-ahead-to-Tynwald-Day.6376950.jp ) “organisers have decided to put an emphasis on family fun with a picture treasure hunt and a special question from Tynwald President Noel Cringle MLC.”
Actually, I have a special question in return for Noel.
Why do you bother?
For the benefit of off-island readers, Cringle is what you might get if you crossed Benny from Crossroads with a sheep, then programmed it to parrot the philosophical musings of a particularly vacuous small town Unionist politician. When not laying on Manx whimsy with a trowel as part of his doddery uncle act in Tynwald he’s abusing his privilege (and public resources) to run ‘prayer breakfasts’, at which yet-to-be-convicted war criminals and international fraudsters raise the aspirations of the most dishonest and dull-witted elements of local life (i.e. church leaders, overpaid civil servants and evangelical Christians in general).
As for the nature of the ’family fun’, you can get a taste of that by downloading the Tynwald Day programme at http://www.tynwald.org.im/ . Not, to be honest, the kind of family life to be seen anywhere else on the planet (unless you include, say, a few three-nippled kissing cousins in Alabama).
You can see just how dire it all is by noting that most of the week’s ‘entertainment’ is the Ramsey National Week (see http://www.ramseynationalweek.com/ ), which in turn is underpinning the Manx Flower Festival (see http://www.manxflowerfestival.org/ ), a particularly twee small town church fundraiser.
This isn’t to say families can’t have fun.
For example, you can snoop around all the drabbest or most startling examples of two eejits-and-a-mutt Manx ‘charities’ on the heavily censored fair field ( from which every last example of Manx democracy or independent thinking apart from Mec Vannin/the Manx National Party has now been airbrushed).
Try slipping a copy of, say, Valerie Solanas’s Scum Manifesto into the Mothers Union display of homely tracts, or slip an old Wayne County & the Electric Chairs tape into a blank case and place it next to the tape recorder on the SPUC stall. You’ll be well gone by the time If You Don’t Want To Fuck Me Baby, Baby Fuck Off blasts out at full volume instead of Pat Boone.
Or you can play our family favourite. Walk up to a Flower Festival participant church hand-in-hand in a nice family group, watch the staff salivate……
..and then turn around, run away and do something interesting instead.
Hours of innocent fun to be had – you just have to use your imagination. Which is more than the organisers of these toytown idiotfests ever do.

Too old to party, too young for a bus pass

As a retired boho, I had to shake my head sadly at a piece on the Guardian music pages entitled Why don't rock stars trash hotel rooms any more?
Honestly, musicians today – total disgrace. Don’t know why they don’t just give it up and join some pointless local government department or other.
Caroline Sullivan (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jun/03/rock-stars-hotels-caroline-sullivan ) sounds a little nostalgic for the golden days of Led Zep & Co, and has some fun at the expense of modern artists who behave like theology students and limit their demands to things like pillows with no feathers (because a band member has an allergy).
I know what she means, but then I was lucky enough to be schooled by the best at the end of that golden era. On the other hand, if I’m honest, not only do I not remember some of what they taught me, to this day I don’t know where I was when receiving instruction.
The days immediately following a 1982 after-gig party involving the early Motorhead line-up are a particular black-hole. I’m not sure I even wrote the article I was (in theory) supposed to provide to the Dublin mag Hot Press. Not that Lemmy, Philthy Animal or Fast Eddie ever worried about bad publicity – or in this case the lack of it.
But I started earlier than that. Around my 18th birthday, in fact, when a friendly college tutor invited me along to a party given by his landlord at a former village rectory in Norfolk and, for reasons he wouldn’t explain, suggested I brought my tuba. It was supposed to be a gathering of local arty types, and the host was a trad jazz trumpeter who’d started out at London art schools, so I thought no more of it.
The party started normally enough. Then, about 10 PM, there was a huge crash outside, and we emerged to find a large US car had hit the rectory gates before skidding into the duckpond. Out of the passenger door emerged a very drunk Viv Stanshall, the Bonzo Dog Dooh Dah Band singer, who I soon learned was one of the host’s old art school mates. Then Viv’s best mate Keith Moon got out of the driver’s door, and the party livened up….somewhat!
For example, at about 1 AM the village cop watched me accompanying Viv Stanshall in a 1920’s ditty, Tubas in the Moonlight as we both sat on the rectory roof, then walked off, totally flabbergasted, saying, ‘Forget it, no magistrate would ever believe me!’
If your rock education starts by partying with Keith Moon you’re never going to be normal again, or bother going to office parties when commissions from corporate publishing bores dry up (as they will) and you have to grow up and get a proper job.
But the golden age of rock excess was also, funnily enough, an age in which people may have partied hard, but also looked after each other, and even famous rockers cared more about their fans.
For example, reading in Sullivan’s piece about the sad security worries of the whiney stude faves Keane, I remember the night when The Clash’s White Riot tour hit Plymouth. After a stonking gig where the audience rioted, chasing a notorious venue’s scumbag security into the toilets and jamming the door shut with an iron bar, the hardcore fans followed the band back to the Holiday Inn, where Mick Jones and Paul Simenon opened windows and fire exits to slip them all in for the night.
No, they couldn’t afford the bill for the damage, and no, the band’s label didn’t stump up either. That’s just the way musicians earning no more than the dole behaved back then, and probably never will again.
My hedonistic days are long gone now, though every time work colleagues try to impress with small town tales of excess I’m not smiling at their antics, just passing the time until they stop talking by recalling my own.
I'm also wondering how Keith Moon or Viv Stanshall would cope in a retirement home. Or more precisely, how the management would cope with them.

(Ab?) normal service will be resumed...

It feels like a good time to laze about, read books and generally disconnect from this digital goldfish bowl thingie for a while.
Frankly, I'm bored with 'business as usual', so I'm off to play silly games with my kid, get away from this 3rd world kipper republic.......stuff like that.
Back early in September.

Bored again

It’s Parental Guidance Festival time again.
No, seriously, I’m glad I’m not only a heathen but over the hill when I see the desperate efforts of godly dull young ravers to put on Manx music events.
First we have the organisers of Mannifest putting a brave face on another abject failure (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Mannifest-rocks-the-Nunnery.5559919.jp). Still, even a long, wholewheat lecture with music is better than the original Mannifestation of this snorefest.
It started life as a Christian ‘family values’ weekend organised by Churches Together in Mann. I remember the first one was so bad the highlights included a golf tournament for godbothering dads and a marriage workshop by a local showbiz couple who everyone (but the organisers) knew were going through an ugly breakup at the time.
And tomorrow it gets worse, when local batshits and pent-up cross dullards start their annual bash, Firestarter. See www.firestarter.com and weep.
This year they’ve moved to St. John’s, which is slap bang in the middle of the island. Now, could this be because emergency services in coastal towns are so fed up of dragging ungrateful godbothers out of the sea at midnight?
It was getting to be a habit. Late night prayer meeting, go for a dip to cool off, float away blissfully on your blow-up Jesus doll……and get picked up at 1 AM by an RNLI crew with much better things to do.
To really annoy the long suffering local emergency services volunteers, the dozy batshits had a habit of going on local radio and giving sermons praising their imaginary playmate for looking after them….. but never once a “Thank You” for any of the poor sods who actually got out of bed and put out to sea within minutes.
On the other hand, there are other reasons why they might prefer St. John’s.
Only a stone’s throw from Stepford Central, where they can visit exhibitions of the bland, godly and pointless then buy overpriced tat fit only for colour blind farming families with more public money than taste. Also, the highest concentration of known BNP members in any square mile of the island.
Yup, bigots, fashion-deficient lard-arses and public freeloaders. It will be just like any other Sunday for most of them. For anyone else, St. John's is a no go area until at least next Monday.