A plethora of zombies…what a waste a smile is in this place…

Yes, what a waste a smile is in this place. The city. My observations, alas, of a recent ‘city weekender’ seem as poignant, (to the level of disturb), as those scribed by earlier writers of the Modern. A city evolving, say 1840’s Edgar Allan Poe’s Man of the Crowd type, hence London evokes with chilling familiarity, much of what I see in the phantasmagoric mess of it. London however is not my reference. For this entry I need not spell the namesake of location, my point is purely to focus on the metropolitan hit. So arguably as a ‘same vibe’ case scenario for most city visitations, those dreaded infestations, I feel the motto should be:

Look at the lights,

Smell the smells,

Welcome to Life’s Lucifer,

SPEND or GO TO HELL!

Hell of course is to be equated with rejection at the pearly gates, should you not comply with the above code. In shoppers’ terms, one may relate this to the immense double doors at the beginning of a ten-mile mall corridor, city centre style. Rather like being at a cross roads, the decision to step across the grid and into the heat realises a day lost to losing one’s cash. If you do not comply with this double negative, expect to be suitably spat out by a sneering sideways glance or three. Here money talks, people don’t. Labels count, smiles won’t. Situate the Cornish lass with a necessary and decisive desire not to spend. Without labels hanging off every piece of cloth or accessory like an overly adorned Christmas tree, this one is deemed to the abyss of ‘out of time-ness’. I say prepare to be snuffed or whacked when attempting to reside within the Label Culture as ‘Other’. Further, do not smile unless you bare a tooth gem or are admiring a latest tattoo.

Imagine if you will a Dizzy Rascal kind of conversation…

“Say what no Blackberry? You got no Burberry? No Gucci, Nina Ricci, Tropical tan, Lacoste or Hurley?” (Or in fact anything what rhymes with the ‘er’ or the ‘ee’?).

Yes, history is the demise of today should one fail to be seen through the obscured goggles of a ‘your worth it’ campaign. In fact, lets go for the worth-less theme. Do you fail to have the London look? (Whatever that is), has your hair lost its Mojo? (Or is that a sweet), do you have cologne that evokes the Man in you OR perfume that entices the man Into you? Are those nails bejewelled to the effect of a sabre-toothed tiger? No? Prepare to be dropped like a fallen angel. From V.I.P to R.I.P due to your own selfish nothingness identity and sensibility! So go on, buy back into the greedy Pied Pipers of Production and long may the duped swarm, horde or pack of rats, (that surely cannot all own non-rubber credit cards), scuttle on eekishly to feed on scraps reeking of mythical ‘cool’ status as they go.

A plethora of zombies, as Poe’s ‘tumultuous sea of heads,’[1]sweep the labyrinthine corridors of the centre, splitting off to designer shoes, suits, jackets and oddly the occasional book store. At the corner, a sight not to be missed for the amusement factor, reside the ‘torso tops’ I coin. Rather like the ‘muffin top’ branding of females who spill the waist, these young boys bear chests, waxed and frightfully perfect in physique. This, of course, was a necessary ploy to entice the prospective buyer into the surf brand store. Oh how cold they must have been to endure that hourly rate.

I needed coffee.

Coffee is however as ridiculously unreal as the all-surrounding aesthetic glory façade in this place. Swiftly now passing the fast food chains and unaffordable cup cake stands, one tries desperately, impossibly not to inhale the choking fat aroma of questionably freshly cooked doughnuts as you go. Not their namesake, mine. Therefore, a quick gag and coffee, yes, welcome to the world of frappé. Replace the f for a c and what have you got? On questioning a colleague of mine about this hybrid in plastic beaker with straw and ice, (with a good knowledge of the great C I hasten to add), he shrieks, “ it’s the vulgarisation of coffee!” Thank-you S, I tried it, I agree but it probably looks great in sucking plastic contextually, naturally.

So seriously how does one, this one I mean, digest the experience? The city mall, stench and sweep of feet, coffee bars and stores awash with blank expressions of ‘people in solitude on account of the very denseness of the company around?’[2]My conclusion remains the same Poe. The crowd, the experience, consumerism condensed to force the spend to bust is truly, for me, as much of a hideous reality as it was for The Man of the Crowd. The story drawn from an artist who could not see the highly apparent gaiety and delights of the masses transcends time well; the need to spell out what city life is not. A necessary comfort thank-you Poe. To be understood offers a sordid kind of ecstasy in times such as these and should one say the unnamed narrator in the unnamed coffee bar was the ‘Woman of the Crowd’…hmm interesting…

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[1] Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’ in Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, Ed. by David Galloway, (London: Penguin Classics, 1967 rep. 1986), pp. 179-188, (p 180)

[2] Ibid, p 180

Throw away culture, play, play and play on...

I refer to the very disposable everything of today…I was going to say the ‘very disposable nature’ but to avoid confusion or painful oxymoronic contradictions etc I have removed nature here. This subject is not of nature or fitting with connotations of the natural. It is simply my observation, via the usual car-crash subtlety, of an open-armed embrace to all that is immediate, consumable, artificial and junk. Yes a rather general statement, so I shall unravel the gist in the usual J. S way.

Imagine say, if you can, unwrapping that warm pat of brown, the yummy posited brown lump; melancholia in bun with a cracked half-smile, that tomorrow will look like a decompressed scrotum but is oddly still edible because it cannot rot. The recent headline in The Daily Mail ‘Year Old McDonald’s – The Happy Meal that refuses to age naturally’ states all required with a list of additives that suggest all man’s made’s. ‘If flies ignore a Happy Meal and microbes don’t compose it, then your child can’t properly metabolize it either’ we are told. The bun, needless to say, has no currents; the bread cannot roll and therefore is, by default neither. It is, like so much in the contempory, an artifice, wrapped, concealed and masquerading as a ‘present’. The singular truth here being that the sought after, worth driving for, brown pat IS present everywhere. My point; it is what it is not. As rewarding as a text message in the form of a delightful envelope i.e. there is something to tell in that little package, the content, however, rather like the burger ‘may’ leave a bitter after-taste and looks nothing like the advert. Welcome to the world, unreal and ridden with falsity almighty. Surreal, when I was a child a bun WAS a bun, it was not an Americanized term that housed a burger, it was not a butt reference to be proud of, neither was it wrapped with a sticker on saying ‘plain’. Plain E I suggest would be more appropriate, oh and lose the pickle it looks far too much like it ought to.

Who lives in a world like this? Said with a Loyd Grossmanesque accent, well we do, ever more so without question. Delightfully filling ourselves beyond the required levels of satiety to spill with spots, pocks and preservative-bound flesh dressed in unflattering belly tops. Can we continue to afford these treats? I mean really when a reward is sadly an oxymoronic Happy meal or super-sized portion of fries? (Do chips still exist?) Oh, ho ho ho Santa Ronnie stop! Our children will explode!

Alas, it does not stop. Ah no. By consuming a little more in the form of TV media ‘love your tum’ speak you can reverse those adverse effects. Take away the ‘take away’ traces with digestion aids and supplements, one for every letter in the alphabet; the fix kit is available NOW in the ever-present, which ironically rhymes with effervescent. Vitamins reference? Yes and yet another instant promise, like Viagra but a fizz-form vit-pop (like alco-pop but the pop manifests, should one say rather differently than being hard or drunk). The ad for this vit company beginning with B suggests that I too may be able to feel on top of the world as I do a dance routine on a treadmill suitably outside whilst on a half-hour lunch-break. Oh please. Surely neither yogurt nor a glass of fizz can eradicate what the trusty microbes’ sneer at.

Taking a leap from mastication to education. In the same vain can one reverse the advanced case of techno-laze? Today we exist, like floating balloons in an age where, the vast majority; emulators of ‘air heads’, need only attach themselves to the appropriate Application for the answer. One need not if there is an Application is the emblazoned message here. Great. No longer fostering the need to think, spell, calculate, even communicate via the traditional audible mode. E-mail, twitter, text, telepathy, do anything other than speak out loud appears to be the new order of things. Fingers for mouths we speak in digit dialogue with a disturbing built-in feature; a curious most constant body tick that flicks with each new message arrival. Ping! The body stiffens, removes itself from current activity to attend to that all-important personal message especially for you:

“L O”

Responding to the tone and topic do you compute? It could be argued that we have evolved into flesh-covered robots. With a touch of Tomorrow’s World reference, one now merely processes information from one piece of hand held techno-age candy gadgetry to another. Likewise, via nozzle, my hoover has a variety of attachments. My hoover, however, does not have an independent, thus able to think for itself, brain, suckers!

So, indeed why spell when Auto-Correct will accommodate all discrepancy as one writes? Because with grammar merrily adjusted, the odd suggestion of passive voice concern and so on, the computer may as well be able to say out loud as well as highlight: “write this my way”. What a disastrous readily available application that spells nothing short of Lazy re-David Byrne, the ideal accompanying track:

“ I’m lazy when I’m speaking, I’m lazy when I walk,

I’m lazy when I’m dancin’, I’m lazy when I talk”

Throw away culture cue. Who needs to do the work, research, even write when fingers can locate some ideal text or other that fits the brief? When all this information is as readily available as the burger, shovel it in, switch over to autopilot, edit, copy, paste.

Why not add this wonderfully convenient auto-tool to the even less delightful abbreviated text-speak so frequented by the avid mobile phone addict. In a world where whole words have become sliced into suggested sounds, where bites of predicted nonsense replace what you actually meant to say. Any is NOT boy, find is NOT fine nor is it amusing to be unable to swear immediately because the dam word you are spitting to say is NOT recognised-Shiv! The beauty of our precious language is passing over the hill in the same way that buns have become lost forever.

Well I realise that you cannot have your cake and eat it, progress is good but loss of language and independent thought is bad. Throw away if you can afford to but some things need to be maintained, even fought for. Yes if you truly cannot locate that word in the dictionary Google it if you must lazy! If it suits for speed do send a message but do not lose the invaluable art of conversation, unabbreviated. Interface need not be in your face by default. There is good reason why games designer Jason Rohrer states: “ […] Interaction is abstract (pushing buttons, typing). If you spend every moment virtually, you’ll grow to miss those other channels. Stepping outside into the sunshine with the smell of rain on the pavement-yes, rain has a very particular smell when it hits the pavement-will be a revelation”. [1] Oh how did progress make rain a revelation? Take it away David…

“I-I-I-I’m wicked and I’m lazy,

Ooooh, don’t you wanna save me?”

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[1] Jason Rohrer, ‘I think that depression is the most serious side effect of too much time in virtuality’, Adbusters, Journal of the Mental Environment, The Postmodernism Issue, March/April 2010. Volume 18 number 2