Made In Chelsea, Loathed Any Where

So its five in the morning and for reasons that escape my sleep deprived brain I am still awake, I’m not particularly happy about it and yet here I am tired, frustrated and bored. Unfortunately this is nothing new to me as thanks to some random neurological screw up every couple of weeks I have a few days where I get very little sleep.  I have gotten used to this little quirk of mine and try and use the time wisely. Tonight I didn’t, tonight I watched some crap on TV (well that’s a lie I watched new Peep Show and thoroughly enjoyed it though that’s probably not relevant) and browsed the internet, not really looking at anything just clicking on whatever captured my attention, I read a hilarious piece about Noah’s Ark being real and another about a Judge that sentenced somebody to ten years of going to church, again hilarious, eventually I stumbled upon an article written by Binky Felstead, whom people may know from Made In Chelsea. The title of the piece was “When Did It Become A Crime To Be Well Brought Up?” which seemed quite interesting so I was duped into reading. Before I go further I must  stress I had no idea who she was so I had know idea what I was about to read. The main intention of the “article" was to complain about the treatment of these  TV “Stars” we have today that don’t actually do anything at all and get paid ridiculous money for it. In the article she quotes critics of shows of this ilk with barbs like “MIC colleagues and I are 'gilded socialites', 'spray tanned exhibitionists', and 'privately educated, hedonistic' youngsters whose lives are a 'seemingly endless jaunt around London's most exclusive bars, restaurants and health clubs'.”

and then asks the hard hitting question: “When did it become a crime to be well brought up in financial comfortable circumstances and be lucky enough to attend a good school or university?” 

                Already she has implied that there is a link between being “well brought up” and money which just plain wrong not to mention offensive. Ask any parent working two jobs to keep food on the table, any parent that scrimps and saves all year to see their kids faces on Christmas day. Ask them if they feel they have failed their kids because they couldn’t make themselves rich but I would stand a few paces back if I were you. In fairness I think she has just misjudged why these people are hated, that’s where I would like to offer my services, I feel I could clarify a few things and as sleep alludes me what else have I got to do.

                “Do the stars of any other TV show get treated this way? By that I mean like stereotyped, gormless mannequins for other people's class prejudices and bias. Well yes, actually, they do.”

This is her next question, a perfectly reasonable one at first glance I mean who wants to be stereotyped gormless mannequins for other… hang on that doesn’t make sense.  She may be trying to say that she feels like she has been unfairly stereotyped just for other peoples prejudices, not really getting it though. The whole selling point of these kind of shows is Reality, its all about reality these days. This means that the entire show has been created around these people and their reality. The saying “if you dress like a slag” springs to mind. These people have control over how they are perceived just like we all do and if you don’t want to be viewed as a shallow narcissistic cretin maybe it’s a good idea not to act like one on national television. It all gets better from here though, now The Only Way Is Essex gets its time to shine and again its about class prejudices only this time its reversed, they are apparently hated for being “acquisitive, nouveau rich wannabes, desperately trying to get rich.” again I believe these are the words of critics. In her eyes these people are hypocrites as she states “Hang on, can you have it both ways? For what it's worth, I don't think so. It's lazy, narrow-minded and backwards looking.” Which is true but again I feel she has missed the point, I’ll get to that I promise.

                                     The next paragraph is basically defending the place she lives and I understand that, my city is a shit hole but its my little shit hole and if you don’t live there you can’t judge it. I assume a lot of people would defend the place they live and I have no opinion of Chelsea at all really other than the football team. She gleefully name drops famous artists, writers and other bohemian characters such as Singer  Sargent and Oscar Wilde ( why would you put those names in this sort of article, I mean Oscar Wilde, really) that have lived in or around Chelsea, trying to use these names to gain some credibility with those arty types that were long ago booted out, the riff raff are good for some light entertainment but you wouldn’t want them around all the time would you, imagine the house prices. Next comes one of my favourite terms ever used in the English language, reverse snobbery, oh yes the cousin of reverse racism has reared its ugly head. The feeling rich people get when the spend some time with the common folk, its not reverse snobbery, its jealousy and if rich people can’t deal with it then they should give all their money away now, I’ll look after it for them. You can’t expect people to come home from working a fourteen hour day knowing that they are still going to struggle to make the mortgage, flip on the TV only to see people on a reality TV show being portrayed (wrongly or not) in the way these shows do and expect them to be filled with joy, if I watched that trash I’d end up putting my foot throw the screen.        

                At the end of the article she leaves us on an inspiring and uplifting note, “People are either classy or they aren't, it's that simple and birth, money and position really doesn't come into it.” its just unfortunate that its utterly wrong. Of course the family your born into affects you social standing just as clearly as your families financial situation effects it. Sadly she is right about something, there is a huge class dived in this country and as long as it continues the rich will sstill protect their own little world while the poor try and escape theirs.

                The hate that shows like Made in Chelsea stirs up  though doesn’t stem from this class war because in the grand scheme of things these shows are barely a blip, they will come and go and be forgotten before even I have died, assuming I have an average enough life that is, lets not tempt fate. Off i go on a ramble, where was I, the Class divide has been around for a little longer than Made in Chelsea, only a few hundreds of years more and i'd be willing to bet that poor people haven't particularly liked entitled people for most of that time. No this hatred comes from a more depressing place, from the lie we were fed as children, you can get anything you want if you work hard enough. Its simply and sadly not true.

                  You don’t see Lord Allen Sugar or Sir Richard Branson getting the same sort of stick these “socialites” get and there is a good reason for that, they are the personification of “the dream” for most people, normal people come good through hard graft. They are viewed in this way because they make sure they are portrayed like this. No one begrudges a hard working man or women the bread that they earned themselves but they despise brats fed with silver spoons. Made in Chelsea and TOWIE exemplify this, there is no talent on the screen, no achievement, nothing and yet there they are rubbing salt into the wounds by churning out poor TV and being paid more money than brain cells.

 I wrote this mainly because it really got to me that such a poorly written, out of touch and pointless diatribe  (admittedly the same could be said about this but I haven’t slept for thirty hours so that’s my excuse) could get published purely because of who she is. We have our idols all wrong these days and now I’ve had my little rant I can sleep easy (though I probably won’t) content with the knowledge I’ve tried to do something even if it is in vain and to paraphrase Hunter S Thompson I can continue humping the dream

Hip hop: Art or Buisness

Hip Hop: Art or Buisness

 

Is there a difference between hip hop and rap? Is the music pushed to the public doing a culture a disservices. The difference to the music you can find on various internet sites and the music in the charts or on the radio is so radical that they may as well be completely different genres. The difference is a product of the industry. The artists coming up speak about their reality Chicken hawks in plush suits swoop down squawking about money and houses with their talons squarely aimed at the very soul of the music. The artists themselves have to make the choice between putting honest tracks out or making money and the result is weak music with unintelligent, irrelevant lyrics that kids grow up believing. I’m not blaming music, or anything else for that matter, for gun crime but I can’t help but feel that if the most prominent rappers in the country weren’t talking about shooting people in their tracks then maybe people would treat guns differently. It is that ugly side of the hip hop coin that forces me to defend the culture when people attack but I am getting tired of it. The only difference between artists like Fliptrix and Split Prophets (some real UK hip hop) and people like Tiny Tempa and Drake is a few million pounds in advertising and a soul because I believe that people like Dr Syntax and The Four Owls would sell just as many records as the shallow snakes if they were given that kind of exposure. It would take a massive shift in perception now, the claws are in to deep and the heart might already be poisoned beyond help but as long as there are artists putting out real music there will be people that listen. Music is a matter of taste but truth is truth, you can feel it when your hear it, it will grab your attention and refuse to let it go. All I’m saying is in our individual daily struggles next time you hear some one rapping about great parties, the women they have slept with or people they’ve shot just ask yourself how can you relate to it. Let face it life is far from one big party and I want my music to represent how life is not a distraction from what it isn’t, these days there are to many distractions and I need to get stuff done. Forty three million albums have been sold this year, which is actually a quite significant drop from last year when the numbers were a touch over fifty three million. The drop in sales is down to the amount of free music that is easily available online and even some artists have come out of their five star holes to complain that they are suffering. Maybe the big ones are suffering but I’m sure the internet has given hundreds of the independent artists out there the opportunity to reach infinitely more people and probably get most of their fan base from the people who hear their music online. Try before you buy will work as long as people still buy. We the fans have to support real music put out by real people otherwise or we can carry on saying “man that’s not it“ every time some one attacks the music based on some bullshit . For to long suits have run the music world forcing the real music to go underground while they churn out watered down swill for ridiculous profit. There are smaller labels out there putting out some real music, High Focus Records for example has a line up that is constantly putting out some really intelligent hip hop. I’ve spent the last couple of days “researching”, basically smoking and listening to what hip hop is in the UK these days. During these blissful couple of days I came across a hip hop collective by the name Concept Of Thought, three young guys out of Brighton prove beyond a doubt that the future of hip hop could be bright. I found their ten track album on their webpage, where you can listen and download if you were so inclined, and trust me once you listen to this thing you will be compelled to get a copy for yourself. Maybe it was the weed but while that album was playing I’d found myself drifting along with the music, head nodding away as if my name were Churchill. The vocals are delivered with some really smooth flow that seems to accentuate the beats perfectly but as with all good songs its not just the beat or flow. The lyrics are intelligent and with substance, which is the main thing that is missing in mainstream hip hop, more than a few times I found myself taking tracks back to hear a line again. Never in the charts do you hear an evangelical argument, I mean how would they fit that into the video, I can see it now bitches and nuns everywhere. That however is just a reflection of our society as a whole, we don’t want things that might cause us to question our reality which is why throughout the day on the radio we get bombarded with ghost written music designed to make money not move or inspire people which to me is the ultimate goal of music, maybe I am just naïve but some things just shouldn’t be about business, keep those jackals away at all costs before everything we love takes another hit. If you love hip hop get out there and support your scene, push records like the crack dealers mainstream acts love to glorify and storm shows as if they were the beaches of Normandy because hip hop hasn’t got an underground it has a resistance.

Racist Media?

Racist Media?

On Thursday the sixteenth of august I went on my break in work and was disappointed to find I had forgotten to put a book in my bag and the only thing I could read was The Sun, I should have just left it alone but with nothing better to do I began to flick through the pages. I was only really looking at the headlines until I came across an article written by Rod Liddle with the headline “Salute MP Fighting Stone Age beliefs”. Obviously it drew my attention so I read the whole thing finding myself more appalled the further I got through it. Basically it was about Africans that practise Voodoo and abuse children, gleefully he tells “there have been 83 cases over the last 10 years and many could have been stopped but for the old bill treading a little to carefully, afraid they might offend some one.” He then chose to pick out cases that involved Africans or Pakistanis clearly showing that your little white children aren’t safe as long as they are on our shores. Apparently “all of these vile practises need to be stamped out and the Neanderthal beliefs challenged”.           
            After reading this I felt so dirty that I threw the paper in the bin in an attempt to save some poor soul I work with having the misfortune to read this or worse still believing it and have spent a little time since researching child abuse cases, trust me when I tell you there are much better ways to spend your time.      
         Seen as Liddle brought up Neanderthal beliefs I thought I would like to start with the Catholic Church, I know how original is it to call a priest a peado however it has to be done. In February of this year (2012)  a Senior Cardinal of the Catholic church revealed that in the past ten years 4,000, let me say it again 4,000 cases of child abuse committed by CATHOLIC PRIESTS have been investigated.    Cardinal Levada, who is head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, went on to describe the figure as a 'dramatic increase'. Yet nobody calls for Catholicism outlawed. However I don’t want to only talk about priest as that would be unfaier. Christian parents have been convicted for beating their own children to death with crucifixes, locked them in cages and starved them. If that isn’t enough what about Christian parents that warp their own kids minds, can you imagine growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household house hold if you were homosexual or worse still Atheist, how many people under that kind of pressure have grown up hating themselves or simply taken their own lives. Every one knows all this already  though,don’t they, even if it’s only relatively recently that these matters stopped being “taken care of” internally and the perpetrators made to pay for their sins rather than simply given a slap on the wrist and moved on to another trusting community. Just to be clear I am not just priest bashing here, does anybody need reminding about Ian Huntley, baby p, the murder of James Bulger, Fred West, Mary Bell… I can keep going if needs be but I really would rather stop. By Liddles his own words should these case not be considered an anomaly and all white people are “human filth” (just to be clear that quote wasn’t taken from the article I am writing about, it came from an article he wrote for his Spectator blog in 2009) and he continued with “The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks”. An interesting side not on that quote is that thanks to a number of complaints Liddle became the first journalist to have the contents of his blog censured because he couldn’t back up his claim with statistics, shocking. Even if every word he said was true I believe that unless you are going to at least try and objectively explain the reasons behind this or solutions to the problem you are doing nothing more than inciting racial hatred, which I thought was a criminal offence according to the Incitement of Racial Hatred - Sections 17-29 Public Order Act 1986, which by the way carry the maximum penalty of seven years in prison, just a thought. How this story made t into a national newspaper is beyond me but it just tells you everything you need to know about the feelings of the editors that allowed this to be printed thinking it was a fair and unbiased piece of journalism. If you agree with Liddle that is your right but I urge you to read about the worlds history before you take the word of a BNP member as fact because whether you like it or not we are all the same and this type of thinking only holds the entire species back, so how about we sort our selves out and move forward to make every ones life better or maybe I’m wrong and you can go back to eating your curry while you moan incessantly about those damn immigrants taking over “your” country. Child abuse is just wrong no matter who's doing the abusing and to turn it into a racial issue is just illogical, offensive and dangerous and I would rather not read the opinions of sombody that has proved themselves to be a bigot time and again, save it for your BNP meetings Liddle.

Carlos

Bit of Fan fiction today, Robert Ludlums The Jackal as i see him

A man walks down the dark street towards a pay phone that sits under the only street light left that still shines. The only sounds are the distant humming of cars and glass crunching under his footsteps. in front and either side of him warehouses rise up into the night throwing tremendous shadows over everything making it look like a scene out of The Big Sleep. The man looks around as he approaches the phone, taking on an orange glow under the halogen light. The phone rings piercing the silence with its shrill tone and the man picks up the handset but doesn’t speak. For a moment there is silence on the line, it starts quietly just a little chuckle that quickly rises to a menacing deep laugh. The man spins around visibly anxious and as he does he feels a sharp pain just above his knee. Before he even has time to look down at the source of the pain another hits on his other leg and he drops to the floor, helpless. He makes no sound though even as the pain grows to an agony he couldn’t have imagined. Footsteps crunching on glass draw his attention and his hand goes to his waist to pull out a berretta m1951 how ever as he raises the gun a flash comes from the shadows down the street momentarily revealing a tall figure striding toward him. The flash was a result of the bullet that slammed into his hand sending the gun flying from his grip signalling the end for him, all he could do now was wait. It didn’t take long as his killer was already striding purposefully out of the shadows towards him.

“Who are you” the victim spat through a grimace of pain

“Another professional” he replied coldly. Nothing in his face said any emotion was being felt there was just sheer indifference.

“Who…who hired you,” the soon to be dead man demanded. The killer let out that low pitched laugh before he answered,

“ Nobody hired me” he said with a cruel smirk,

“then why, why take the risk,” anger in his voice now, if some body had paid for this he could understand it, it may even be fitting as well as ironic,

“you should be pleased you even made my list, you made it by being good at what you do… sorry did, you were good however I am better, the best and soon the whole world will know Carlos. Tonight the year of the Jackal begins.” the assassin enjoyed this moment, that wicked smile grew bigger and he raised a type 64 silenced pistol for the kill shot.

“The jackal is dead, he was killed years ago, you are an impostor and the jackal is just a myth” those were his last words as, with less noise than a loud cough, the final shot was taken. A shot directly in the centre of the throat. The Jackal bent down and retrieved a switch blade from his belt lifted his head as the man gave his last few breaths and removed the bullet that had become lodged in the pavement. This man was fading quickly now but before he could escape into death the Jackal stared into his eyes, watching the life drain away, and shouted

“The Jackal is NO myth but soon he will become a LEGEND

The Bridge

Prologue

2015

Half the city turned out that day to watch the Mayor close the bridge officially. People from both sides stood at the foot of giant steel gates that minutes later would shut signalling an end to free movement in the city. On his platform in the centre of the bridge the Mayor was finishing his speech about how the city would run more efficiently and that the gates would benefit everyone. A lot of people believed him, especially if you lived on the east side. There was a lot of happy faces that day and the TV cameras filled their lenses with these grinning idiots all afternoon whilst completely ignoring the looks of concern that were equally on show.
               At the end of his speech the Mayor strode back to the East side along with his cronies. Only one man stopped to look back at the crowds of people that were one by one disappearing from view as the barriers closed. Councilman Drake was the only person to watch the gates slam shut and as the last faces he would ever see from the East vanished he mouthed the words I’m sorry. He was unaware that his now ex wife and unborn child were watching him leave forever from what used to be their home. With a tear in her eye she touched his figure on the glass wanting just once more to touch his cheek but he was gone and there was nothing that could bring him back now.

Even before the gates we being built plans were being formed about what would come next. The politicians were content to play the long game, year by year decreasing the budget for the west side until it became nothing more than a source of cheap labour. Others had a much quicker scheme that would allow them to seize control of the city through brute force and fear.
How had it come to this? Money as ever plays its part. Even then there was a divide in the city, not a wall built between two sections but a gap in wealth and as this gap grew steadily bigger so too did the crime rate. At first almost all of the crime stayed in the west side of town, not surprising as that was where the poorest people tended to live because house prices on the east side were irresponsibly high forcing anyone who didn’t earn fifty thousand a year to live on the West side. Crime on the West side was fine, to be expected from people that couldn’t get real jobs or put drugs before their families. It was only when the muggings and beatings began taking place on the East side that anybody with the power to do anything took notice. The final straw came when the sixteen year old daughter of a councilman was mugged beaten and raped. People from both sides of the city came together, all united in their horror at this appalling crime and eventually the vicious criminal was brought to justice when one of the many honest citizens of the West side gave evidence, only that is not how the story was reported. The men of influence made it clear that the people of the West side were responsible for all the crime in the city and had to be stopped. In a perpetual state of shock and fear the doctors and teachers swallowed all they were told and begged for an answer. It came in the form of the young and ambitious Councilman Drake with a revolutionary new idea. The rest, as they say, is history.

How Does This Make You Feel

Ok this is a dream sequence i'm thinking of using to open a story but i would like some opinions on:
A) should you start a story with a dream sequence, and
B) does it make you want to continue reading because lets face it if it doesn't it would be a pretty shit start to a story.
Anyway I loved writing this because you can do what ever you want ina dream so you can create some really cool and sureal stuff, enough babbling from me, read it and advise please, i'm talking to you Hay, i'm sure your the only one who reads this shit haha.


“A sterile room with bright white walls that make you wince if you look at them for to long. It could only be a hospital waiting room but what kind of hospital and what exactly was wrong with me, I feel fine so I must be there for some one else. I look around the room as I wait. The entrance is at my back, two thick double doors shut tight, I want to get up and check they are unlocked but I resist the impulse. At the other end of the room there are another set of double doors but these are swing doors with circular windows cut out in top. To the right of the door the wall is lined with grey filing cabinets right up to the corner of the room. Just in front of the filing cabinets was an unoccupied desk that was immaculate, not so much as a pen was out of place but yet on the corner of the desk something broke the order. One of those tacky dancing flowers, the type that sings when some body claps, the petals were a bright red that stood out against the plain room it inhabited as if it were the last rebellion of a beaten soul. I find myself staring into the colours, not at the flower but actually into the colours. Somehow they surround me until all I can see was that deep red. Still it goes deeper, boring into my very core almost as if I am absorbing the colour itself. Things seem almost clearer now; I see everything as an absolute truth for the first time. I see things, visions that come from inside me out of the colour figures evolve. My wife smiles at me radiantly, her once auburn hair now shines like a ruby with such colour it seems impossible, her soft skin that once was deliciously creamy now took on the colour of blood. The crimson figure morphs, slowly changing before my eyes and some of the colour melts away to nowhere to reveal a shorter figure. I feel as though I am about to make a realisation, a moment of clarity hidden in a moment of madness. Its almost there, I can feel the truth as it approaches. I want it to find me but before it can the colour fades lighter and lighter until I’m back in the same white room only this time I’m not alone. In front of me a man in a white lab coat is staring at me in silence. I look up into his eyes and I see nothing living. Soulless eyes stare blankly back at me without blinking and the head rotates stiffly towards the double doors on the back wall. I stand up unable to stop my self, in fact I make a conscious effort to sit back down but an unseen force props me up and my legs mechanically guide me to the doors. The closer I get to the doors the more uneasy I become; I have a definite sense of dread about what I will be awaiting me. When I’m almost within reaching distance the doors swing open with a creak and a long hallway stretches out before me. My legs keep going as if I’m being sucked in. Once I am inside the hallway I hear the doors crash shut behind me and without pausing for a moment I continue on. It’s as sterilized in here as it was in the waiting room. Just as this becomes a thought in my head colours spring up on the walls. Pictures push there way out of the walls. All the way down the hall they appear as I walk past and all of them are stills taken from my life. My parents are in one, stood outside my boyhood home, in another I’m a boy in team photo from my old football squad. The first time I saw my wife, our wedding day and the birth of my son are all there for me to relive. I’m studying these pictures so intently as I pass them by that I don’t notice the end of the hallway approaching fast, bringing me to another set of doors. These doors however aren’t white; they are made out of a picture of my son walking on the other side of a road. He’s wearing his football kit sodden with mud and clutching a medal in his little hands. I stop abruptly and excruciatingly slowly a black line appears down the middle of the photograph as the doors creep open. Then just like that I am awake in my bed and soaked in sweat.”
“Hmmm, now how do these dreams make you feel?”

God Giggles

The trip had been planned for years, I would travel all over Europe for as long as it took. Five years of working in a job I hate was about to pay off and the excitement I felt was immeasurable. Pressure had been building for years and this was to be my release valve, what I had worked so hard for. So as I sat in the front seat of my car I was surprised that I was filled with a sense of dread. I had expected some trepidation but this was something else entirely. Some how I knew that something bad was going to happen on this trip. The goodbyes were said to family and the few friends I had left with unbelievable ease, I had prepared myself for difficulty in saying goodbye but there was none. While I had worked so hard to achieve this dream I had neglected the relationships I had, the people that still held faith in me would often tell me I was cold and cynical but I corrected them with one word : driven. So focused was I in succeeding that everything else fell by the way side, even so as I pulled off I had no feeling of regret, who needs people when you were constantly moving, seeing new things. I looked back one last time at the four people left in the world that still cared about me and then I was flying. Not on a plane but through my windscreen, another car coming the opposite way had lost control and struck me from the front, they would say I was dead from the moment my head smashed into the windscreen and shattered my skull but I wasn’t, i, i had just enough to time to find the regret i had misplaced, with such clarity that only imminent death can bring i saw how wrong i had been and i saw just how small my funeral was going to be, those four upside down people running towards me would be the only ones. even realising all this my final thought was still selfish, "fucking typical, if you want to make god laugh make plans"  and just like that I was hitting the floor, bouncing once, coming to rest lifeless in a mangled heap. My passport lay next to me.