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Wednesday 5 May 2010

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?”


[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

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