thereminwar

iPad “Newspaper” conceived between Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch

Everyone knows that the iPhone was not really developed as a telephonic device. Rather a hand-help touch-screen web-browsing personal organiser.  The Phone bit was the hook into an already massive global market.

Apple had an even bigger problem with the iPad.  They couldn’t try and market it as a big iPhone. That’s just ridiculous:

Was it an overpriced Kindle that you can browse the internet on? That may work but are enough people that interested in reading literature via such means?

Coming from the other side of the capitalistic arena was Uncle Rupert. Grumpily hissing about people reading his content “for free” on the Times website.  So he decided to lock it down and have people pay for it.  Fair enough, some might say.  But again are enough people that bothered about how they are informed to actually pay for it?  If you manage to get onto a tube carriage in London’s rush hour you are faced with a wall of free “Metro” rags.  It is rare to see someone who has paid for a Times, Telegraph, etc…

Now we see the natural conclusion of these two seemingly unconnected stories.  A symbiotic duopoly between ideological content and electronic means of distribution. And let’s face it, the two so desperately need each other.

So, was the iPad developed as a marketing hook into the publishing industry? Maybe. It seems to be the most compelling case for its odd existence.

Certainly it would appear that people’s choice in TV fodder is informed by their subscription to the satellite/ cable/ widescreen/ flatscreen/ HD technological sweetshop.  ”I buy into all of that gadgetry therefore I watch Sky News” is a commonly heard thought beside office coffee machines.  So why not?  Technology as a hook into the nascent electronic news media market.  Who will Google/Android hook up with? The Independent? And the other “PC World” style tablet producers? The Daily Mail? Interesting Times.

Vampire Weekend are slick!  Vampire Weekend are smart! Vampire Weekend are coming to a town near you, soon!  The preppy and wholesome New York band of Columbia University students are in the UK to tour their second album Contra and they kicked the tour off with a warm-up show at Highbury’s newly refurbished Garage on Wednesday 3rd February.

This won’t be a late show, however.  London’s parents of teenage guitar-based pop fans can rest easy. Everything will be done and dusted by 9.30pm as the mobile calls ring out to request a lift home.

But Vampire Weekend are massive.  Contra is the number one album in the Billboard Rock chart. Even if you’ve never heard of the band you will be familiar with A-Punk from their eponymous debut that was part of the radio soundtrack to 2009.

Lead singer Ezra Koenig is irritatingly confident and polished.  Especially for someone so young and who only appears to be able to play three of his guitar’s six strings.  Rostam Batmanglij, plays keyboards and guitar with a little more skill and a studied nonchalance that begins to grate after a while.  Can’t he at least pretend to be getting into it?

Chrises Tomson and Baio provide the rhythm section with a little more enthusiasm and gusto.  The African tinged indie songs chug along nicely – two albums worth of samey sounding tracks that make you wake up the next morning thinking of Paul Simon – and before you know it it’s all over. And don’t the kids just love it.

I am going to try and spread myself much too thinly this year.  Last year I was far too lazy.  Millions of brilliant ideas. Honestly.  But no end product.  So this year I aim to produce as much shit as I can.  A stupid pointless blog here, a crap video there, a bit of lame political satire everywhere.  Let’s get it on.  People can always just “not click”, which is one of the great things about the internet.

So last August, at Victoria station on a train bound for Brighton, I decided to film the journey out of the window, for a laugh.  I managed to keep it going as far as Clapham Junction before my arm started going weird.

Days later I watched the film.  Instead of boring, I found the film quite mesmerising.  Almost psychedelic.  The way the near suddenly flipped to the far;  the way the passing trains almost create a strobe effect;  the harsh beauty of the brutalist tower blocks;  the ‘dude’ bowling along Clapham Junction platform 12 right at the end.

So I decided that I do a bit of music for it and post in YouTube.  Only I never got around to it (see paragraph 1).  Until now, that is.  I had a little chuggy riff in my head for ages.  ”I can stretch that out to five minutes plus easily”, I thought. So over the week I had off at Christmas I arranged and recorded the track and attached it to the vid clip.

Here it is:

Well, the Tories started it.  They started it with a £500,000 advertising campaign of billboard posters with an airbrushed photo of Dave telling us that, “We can’t go on like this, I’ll cut the deficit not the NHS”.  Which is sort of like saying, “If you vote for us we’ll get rid of the deficit but we won’t do it by taking the money from the NHS.  We’ll just get it from somewhere else… schools, police and shit”.

So, they started it.  And then this creative executive called Clifford Singer decided to start a spoof website called www.mydavidcameron.com where people could send in their own doctored versions of the Cameron poster, for a laugh, like.

So I sent one in where I cleverly substituted Harry Enfield’s Tim Nice-But-Dim for Cameron and changed the text to something that Nice-But-Dim might say if he was running for office.

Lots of other people did the same thing and submitted funny and irreverent spoof versions of the advertisement.  I began to feel slightly inadequate that the site carried only one of my “designs”.  So I did another one.

In this example I paraphrase one of Tony Blair’s famous speech sound bites: “Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education, education”. I cleverly subvert this in reference to a) Cameron’s admiration for Blair and b) Cameron’s privileged upbringing.  Double bubble.

I know, I know, I know.  It’s childish.  It’s not addressing the issues.  It’s not going to change anything.  He’s a easy target.  Why not pick on someone your own size.  Oh.  But it is funny.  Oh yes.

We went to Broadstairs in Kent this weekend.  The fact that the BBC forecast rain, rain and more rain did not deter us.

We booked a room at a boutique-style B&B called Belvidere Place and got into our little car and tootled our way across London to the grim A13 as far as the M25 and then made the crossing of the Thames at Dartford.  After a poor tuna melt at possibly the worst service station we’ve ever visited, we arrived at Broadstairs at about 4pm.

Once unpacked we headed off out into the wet night to The White Swan in St Peters where we enjoyed some fine 1970s decor and some lovely ales.  Later with a raging appetite we arrived Restaurant 54 in Broadstairs for our evening meal.  I had a fine melt-in-the-mouth steak with home made chips while Mrs Thereminwar enjoyed a lovely roast Atlantic Cod fillet.  All washed down with a nice Sauvignon blanc.

Sunday morning, after breakfast with an unbelievably posh family, we went out into Broadstairs in the daylight. As we walked, miraculously the clouds began to part and the sun did shine down on Broadstairs (and us).  This is a proper seaside town full of beautiful Victorian and Edwardian architecture and a very attractive crescent-shaped beach cut into the chalk cliffs.  With Dickens’ Bleak House to the left and and the old bandstand to the right this is a very pleasing vista.

We strolled along the prom (no brass band, alas) to Morelli’s ice cream parlour where we enjoyed the new interior (it’s been there for 102 years but it recently had a refit in the 1950s).  All formica pastel blues and pinks.  Ice cream was top notch too.

This was all thirsty work so we popped over to the Oscar Road tea room for a nice cuppa and a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel. Anyway, time was getting on and after hanging out with some friendly seagulls on the front we got back in our little jalopy and headed off up the M2 back to lovely London, not without popping into Whitstable on the way.

All the while I thought the following:

I’d rendezvous with Janet,
Quite near the Isle of Thanet
She looked more like a gannet
She wasn’t half a prannet,
Her mother tried to ban it,
Her father helped me plan it,
And when I captured Janet,
She bruised her pomegranate.

Ian Dury & The Blockheads - Billericay Dickie

I’m not really sure what David Quantick’s beef with Morrissey is all about.  Maybe beef is the wrong word.  Saying that, Mr Quantick did cook Argentinian beef steaks in his appearance on Channel Four’s Come Dine With Me.  But I digress.

In response to the news that  Morrissey had collapsed on stage in Swindon with breathing difficulties, Quantick recently tweeted: “Ah the NHS. Secretly giving powerful enemas to racists since 1945″.  What is his beef?

Does it really go back to his review of Morrissey’s best of collection in Word Magazine in March 2008, for which he was forced to apologise for calling the bequiffed Salfordian a racist hypocrite?

To be fair, in the review, Quantick seems to reserve most of his venom for Morrissey’s choice of backing band.  He seems to see Johnny Marr as the untouchable Smith while attacking Alan Whyte and Boz Boorer for not being fit to tie his boots. Plodding hoofers to Marr’s mercurial light-fingery.

Now, I’m not being funny, but since he left the Smiths in 1987, Johnny Marr has hardly set the world alight with his musical collaborations (The The, The Pretenders, Electronic, Modest Mouse, The Cribs, anyone?).  But as it stands, his reputation as the guitarist of a generation seems preserved in aspic.  Morrissey, however, has had nothing but knockers.  In response to his musical output, that is.

As a huge fan of both Morrissey and Marr, I have taken much more enjoyment from Morrissey’s output over the last 20 years.  While nothing will touch the heights of excitement that the Smiths took me to between the years of 1983 and 1987, efforts like Suedehead, Now My Heart Is Full, The More You Ignore Me, Irish Blood, English Heart, etc. put Steven Patrick slightly ahead of John Maher in the quality product steaks (sorry, stakes).

And as for Boz Boorer, I would imagine his attitude is that he’s played with Morrissey a lot longer than Johnny Marr ever did and he’s buggered if he’s going to bust his arse playing a note-for-note facsimilie of the intro to This Charming Man night after night.

Still not sure what the Quantick thing is all about though…

Glastonbury 2009 was a lot busier and a lot more corporate than 1984.  The weather was just as good though.  Despite a downpour on Thursday night just after pitching the tent, which was state-of-the-art (sort-of) and not stolen this time; and another one on Sunday night, it was sunny and hot.  Neil Young, Nick Cave and Fleet Foxes were all highlights, Blur and Bruce Springsteen disappointing and Spinal Tap and Status Quo absolutely hilarious.  Will I go again in 2010?    Probably.

I’m excited because I’m going to the Glastonbury Festival on Thursday. I’m excited because I got free tickets.  I’m excited because, for once, I genuinely want to see all of the main headline acts: Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen and Blur.  I’m excited because the weather is supposed to be “not that bad” this year (although I may have to review that on Monday 29th June 2009).  I’m also excited because it just occurred to me that it is 25 years since I went to my first Glastonbury.

Twenty-five bloody years.  Now for someone who still likes to think of himself as being young (-ish) and “with-it” that’s a bloody long time. Shouldn’t I be looking forward to golfing weekends at my age, or getting down to embarking on some mega DIY project?  Well, fate has conspired to put me in the enviable, possibly, position of still being able to go and sit in a field for three and a half days and drink beer from a large paper cup, eat eastern-influenced cuisine from a polystyrene stray, and listen to rock ‘n’ roll music, while living in a tent. All while wearing a little plastic wrist-band like some kind of ASBO tag.

In late June, 1984 I was a clueless 17 year old with a bowl haircut and a checked shirt who had just discovered what it was like to begin breaking free from the parental shackles.  I had just finished my first year on 6th Form, had got in with a bad crowd who drank beer, smoked gear and liked alternative music and was amazed when my folks said “yes” when I told them I was hitch-hiking down to Somerset for the weekend with a friend they had never met to a place that was “well-known” in those days as somewhere where reprobates went to smoke marijuana and have sex with hippie love goddesses while in the lotus position in the middle of a stone circle.  At least that’s how I envisaged it.

My mate, Murph, and I set out from his house in Ashton-in-Makerfield at 6am on Thursday morning to go and wait at Haydock Island, where the East Lancs Road intersects with The M6, like Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise.  Six hours later, after sitting on the slip road and gouging out the cat’s eyes we finally got our first lift from, I think, a travelling business man in his company car.  Or it may have been a lorry driver.  I can’t remember.  All I remember was it was a fuck of a long time to wait for a ride.

Anyway, after a few hours we found ourselves on a Bristol City bus on the A37 towards Shepton Mallet.  On the journey we got talking with a solo festival traveller with close cropped hair dyed in a leopard-skin design.  How exciting.  Before long we were turfed off the bus in Shepton Mallet and started the walk, the convoy, the sad raggle-taggle trail down to Worthy Farm, Pilton.  But wait, we didn’t have tickets.  It didn’t matter, Murph said, we can get in over the fence.  But we didn’t need to because a clapped-out camper van pulled up and a group of hairy west-country hippies beckoned us to get it.  ”You c’n hoide unner the mahtress, we’ll get you in for nathin”.  We didn’t need any more convincing and the three of us clambered into the back while a tiny hippie girl called Titch climbed into one of the van’s minute kitchenette cupboards.

I am conviced to this day that each one of them, including the driver, had a half-full litre container of scrumpy in their hands, which they continued to thirstily swig from.  Anyway, as we approached the entranced we disappeared under the said mattress and, lo and behold, before long we were inside Glastonbury Festival.

We put our shockingly rudimentary two-man tent up (by the pylon) and went off in search of adventure.  All I can remember is being passed some kind of cigarette in the cinema tent that evening, while watching The Wall.  Next thing we knew it was daybreak.  A stumbled walk back to our base camp revealed that our tent and its contents were gone.  So much for kindly peace loving hippies!

We eventually met up with college friends who were arriving on the Friday and managed to secure sub-canvas accommodation for the weekend.  I watched Billy Bragg, Joan Baez, The Smiths, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury & The Music Students, Fela Kuti and more.

I even got a lift home from Pete Ball.  Great days.

Entering the carriage of Metromatrons; an aggregate of Metro reading automatons, reading about the new Big Brother spongs and Britney’s career and how fat we’re all becoming and how to have great sex and how to live your life like an advert and how Gordon looks so miserable. All to the coffee-table, pop-schlop rattle of nine or 10 ipods.

Must get my “Kill Yourself” t-shirt printed up. They probably would.