someone make me stop watching this crap

I have become transfixed by a spectacle of such hideousness that i am now unable to go bed for fear of missing the next gawp-worthy atrocity. I feel like a cctv operator forced to stare at a fog bound motorway across which someone has constructed particularly spikey brick wall. I'd always assumed the Grammys would be an essentially harmless musical circle-jerk: dull speeches, robotic, monochrome versions of the year's most inoffensive hits and a few quick cuts as members of linkin park are forcibly removed by security. Internet, i have been hopelessly naive. They are actually trying to destroy the fabric of music.

Where do you start? The announcer sounds like a live version of my bank's automated phone system, calling out the names of musical luminaries with all the passion of an autistic belgian accountant. Then there's the insistence on shoe-horning wildly dissonant artists into blood-curdling collaborations: Justin Timberlake dragging Al Green down to his level? ghastly. not painful enough for you? how about Stevie Wonder accompanied by the Jonas Brothers? i had to break one of my own fingers just to get through that one. I was still reeling from the vindictive cluelessness that led to Coldplay being nominated for best rock album when they ACTUALLY FUCKING WON IT! Rock? Coldplay? Awesome. Seriously, well done guys. The stage set for Katy Perry's shambolic rendition of her record executive erection maintenance device consisted of various giant plastic versions of pretty much every type of fruit. except oranges. that's a subtle as the evening has got so far.

Then there's the sheer, crushing, stilted ineptitude of the whole thing. OK the Rock is never going win a prize for Best Reading of an Autocue on a Large Translucent Plastic Island, so perhaps don't make him do a two and a half minute comedy routine containing precisely one joke. don't let mily cyrus sing live, particularly not alongside someone who can actually sing. when introducing ESTELLE, singing ESTELLE'S song American Boy with Kanye West rapping away alongside, try say, introducing ESTELLE the person who's song it is rather than the idiot with Thriller hair and a god delusion.

There has been one good bit, Radiohead playing with a marching band. but you could see the embarrassment seeping through Thom Yorke's spasmodic, "i actually have talent so don't care" dancing.

I expect my pointless self-congratulatory schmaltz to at least be effectively stage managed even if the music itself is cock. that the Grammys couldn't even manage that frankly comes as a bit of a shock. and we're expecting the music industry to sort out such complex issues as copyright and file-sharing? not to mention nurturing the next generation of genuine artists? dear christ.

I'm looking forward to next year's ceremony already. if they can top this they might actually generate some kind of musical black hole, sucking the entire monstrous edifice into itself, crushing it to the size of a higgs boson and then hurling it across the dimensions never to be seen again. and i wouldn't want to miss that.

miscellany bites

something of a pot pourri today. which is a nice way of saying i'm a bit all over the place. first up here's a very interesting (and long) article from the New York Times about the whether man is predisposed to belief in the supernatural and how this could have occurred from an evolutionary perspective. lots of juicy stuff about what "benefits" shared religious belief could have given early man and the evolution of human cognition. not exactly friday afternoon fodder i'll admit.

which is why item 2 concerns the inventive pop stylings of harlem milkshake maestress kelis. for me she veers too unpredictably between zeitgeist-nailing genius and dull as socks sub-r'n'b noodling depending on who she's working with. this is possibly a factor in her album bombing mightily in the US last year. however, the once thing she seems to have done well is to avoid "the mike skinner trap" (i.e moaning on and on about how hard it is being famous and thinking people will indentify with that as much as they did your early stuff). the single she's just released over here (lil' star) has latched itself firmly onto my consciousness. it's very simple has some great instrumentation and is just a very cheery 3 minutes of pop music.

Kelis ft Cee Lo - Lil Star
Uploaded by eusebiu

in another time i'd have had myself beaten up for listening to such lightweight guff, but there you go. i blame lily allen.

and finally, just to ensure that i've annoyed as many ppl as possible in this post, it appears that if we make it past PSV, (and we beat them 2-0 earlier in the competition), liverpool have another semi-final against chelsea to look forward to (i'm assuming they'll get past valencia). bet that'll be a boring, controversy-free match. can we play someone else now please?

full of the joys of schadenfreude

it's funny what can cheer you up isn't it? i mean, there are so many wonderful, heartening, warm-glow inducing things in the world: the news that your friend's long awaited baby has arrived, being given an extra couple of slices of chorizo by the cheery lady who made your lunchtime sandwich, an amusing anecdote in David Niven's autobiography. any of these things could be enough to stop you feeling sorry for yourself and remind you of the quixotic joy of life here on earth.

so, it is a sad reflection of the depths my black, heathen, smug-bastard soul has sunk to, that it was none of these things that made stop my self-absorbed strop.

it was Richard Dawkins being rude to creationists.

70 life-enhancing minutes of it. priceless. via the Guardian



as bill hicks would say, sit down and strap in.

you can see talk he actually gave here but that's just a boring mix of rational philosophy and science. nowhere near as fun as watching as his responses become terser and terser till he can eventually stand it no more and transmogrifies into a giant, raging, axe-wielding yeti and slaughters half of lynchburg in a bewildering orgy of atheistic destruction.

fantastic.

i was further gladdened by the cursory research i did into Liberty University, the source of all these imaginary-friend sharing lunatics. check out their statement of purpose. aside from some jolly reasonable stuff about contributing to a knowledge and understanding of other cultures, it contains this gem:

2. Promote an understanding of the Western tradition and the diverse elements of American cultural history, especially the importance of the individual in maintaining democratic and free market processes.

yeah, i remember Jesus being really hot on the free-market.

Matthew 12 vs 34: "Jesus sat down with the temple money changers and discussed the possibility of increasing their margin by introducing a traded exchange for sacrificial currency and perhaps diversifying their portfolio to include sacrificial property."

this venerable institution was setup by none other than Jerry Falwell, baptist bible-thumper extraordinaire. after the September 11 attacks he came out with the now classic, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen."

thanks jerry. we are feeling the love.

one of the other purposes of this bastion of educational rigour has been to provide academic justification for intelligent design. and they even have some "3000 year old" dinosaur (or as they call them: dragon) fossils dug up by this joker to help prove their point. to give you an idea of the strength of his argument, here's a sample quote:

"There is just no way that the theory of evolution can be reconciled with the truth of creation as recorded in the Bible."

well that's that dealt with then.

so yes, i'm a lot happier now. there's nothing like a load of intelligent, educated people spending millions of pounds, willfully disregarding logic and the accumulated knowledge of the panoply of human scientific endeavour in order to create a scientific basis for a bronze age creation myth they had the dumb luck to be brought up believing, having the piss ripped out of them to put a smile on my face.

hurrah!

now coffee...