Monday 30 November 2015

Winter is Hereby Cancelled


I took part in the 2015 Hvitstensalong on Saturday 3rd October. : https://www.facebook.com/events/697616150368669/

The performance title was 
'Winter is Hereby Cancelled (Herved er vinteren avlyst)', a situationist intervention in the progress of the seasons (suspending leaves from branches on thread).

The biodegradable sculptural installation produced will remain until nature decides otherwise. It's at the end of the trail, beyond Ola Hvitsten's work.

Photo Ingvild Holm



Photo Ingvild Holm


Photo Jon Lundell






Thursday 19 November 2015

The Absolute Camel


When Samuel Beckett was at a rehearsal for Play in Germany, the actor wanted to know how his character had died. Beckett said that it may have been a traffic accident, or suicide, or perhaps peacefully in bed. When the actor insisted on knowing, Beckett turned to the director and said with a smirk "Ah, the Absolute Camel" (a joke of the time, since passed into desuetude: if an Englishman wrote about a camel, the title would be "The Camel", a Frenchman "The Camel and Love", and a German "The Absolute Camel").

Wednesday 7 October 2015

Salut!

Like, I'm sure, the rest of you, I'm baffled by the sight of US civilians saluting as if they're in the army (yes - I am joking, I'm well aware of the fact that most people wouldn't notice anything of the kind, or waste a second's thought on it if they did; but stick with me, this actually is going somewhere). I mean putting their hand up to their eyebrow, holding it there for a bit, and flicking it down again.

You see, civilians aren't supposed to salute like that. (I'm only talking about America, you understand, most countries don't have any rules about this type of thing.)


Presidents are the most prominent culprits, and it all seemed to start with Ronnie Reagan, if my memory serves me well

Obama continued the tradition, but he sometimes got it right.

That's the civilian salute, to the flag usually. But why did they need to invent a special salute for civilians? 
It's because civilians bare their heads as a sign of respect when they salute the flag, and in most armed forces in most countries, a salute can only be made with something for the hand to touch -  the peak of a cap or helmet. If an officer comes into contact with lower ranks who are bareheaded, they just stand to attention with their arms at their sides. The origin is supposed to be in knights in armour raising the visor of their helmets when they met, to reveal their faces and indicate they weren't about to attack.

So, given that civilians actually have their own salute, where does the idea of  saluting without a hat on come from? The answer, which I came across while perusing my copy of The Bluejackets' Manual (19th edition, United States Naval Institute ISBN 0-87021-109-9, since you ask), is, surprisingly, the US Army and Air Force. In America, only the Navy insists on a hat being worn to return a salute. Who would have thought it?

You've been very patient so far, and now I'll get to the point of this post.

The present civil salute only dates from 1942. What did everyone in America do first thing at work, school, office or police station when they were saluting the flag before then?


                               THEY GAVE A NAZI SALUTE! 


Except, of course, it's not a Nazi salute, or even a fascist salute. It's a Bellamy salute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute, and it's just one aspect of a neoclassicist tradition that prevailed across different national cultures in the early 20th century. 

The fascists and Nazis, with their Barnum-like talent for showmanship and overstated Hollywood-esque flash style, snapped up lots of early 20th century design icons and tainted them forever by their evil association. 
The neoclassicism on steroids architecture we now think of as fascist can be found in the US (1930s govt. buildings, especially post offices, complete with eagles), the Soviet Union (their New York World's Fair pavilion was like a mirror image of the one Nazi Germany built facing it), and even Britain: Walthamstow Town Hall.

And perhaps most sinisterly appealing of all, their uniforms. The cut of the notoriously glamorous SS black and silver combo (not designed by Hugo Boss, incidentally, but by an undistinguished painter and commercial artist, SS-Major Carl Diebitsch) comes from British uniforms of the First and Boer Wars, themselves inspired by shooting outfits like the Norfolk jacket worn by 19th c British landed gentry, and the distinctive contrast of the silver detail on black and the grinning skull comes from the uniform of the Prussian hussar.

We'll never be allowed to forget their evil genius for style, and we'll always be forced to endlessly re-view the Second World War because, as Kurt Vonnegut put it: 

"Our war will live forever in showbiz as other wars would not, because of the uniforms of the Nazis" (Timequake, Jonathan Cape, London 1997, p.23).

Tuesday 22 September 2015

On A Time-Based Basis

Ever noticed how things are always 'on a daily basis', rather than daily, or every day? Or a weekly basis, or whatever it might be? 


But 'on a daily basis' has only itself replaced the previously universal '24/7' as an even more long-winded way of saying 'every day'. This is part of a growing tendency for catch-phrases and colloquialisms to be more of a mouthful than the word or phrase they replace (see: http://robocono.blogspot.com/2014/10/a-lexicon-of-transatlantic-prolixity.html), a reversal of what might be called the vernacular imperative through much of history.

It parallels the proliferation of products giving an illusion of choice which conceals an actual reduction of choice that is one of the hallmarks of late model capitalism, as for example with beer, as I've already pointed out: http://robocono.blogspot.com/2015/09/booze-ocide.html

Not only are more words used to say the same thing, but the use of certain words and forms of words seems to be seen more and more as essential. Nothing new about that of course, catch phrases and words that constantly come in and go out of fashion have always been a feature of the pronouncements of journalists and spokesmen, businessmen, or 'experts' from any walk of life. That happens as a kind of overspill from what is properly called jargon - the specialised vocabulary that people working in any particular field use to communicate about their particular field with each other.

No, the thing is that ordinary people now use deracinated jargon with each other, to talk about things in daily life. Jargon often uprooted from the world of 'spokesmen' (and women of course), and usually spun out of nothing by PR functionaries, the language of the press release and the company prospectus. 

Take 'problem', for instance. Someone in some PR company in the US in the 80s decided this word has negative connotations - which, of course, it does, by definition - so they co-opted the word 'issues', previously meaning: things which have come to be (as, originally, in the specific sense of 'progeny'), or developments which have appeared and need to be discussed, in the sense of 'I would take issue with you over that'. 
This substitution became common usage among the different professions, and then spread to the general population. So now we have two words used interchangeably; one with a very specific meaning, and one which now has two meanings, with the original meaning with all its subtlety being eclipsed. Same thing with 'just', which used to mean only just, or precisely, and now substitutes in every case for 'only': 'The murderer's victim was just 18.'

For other examples of those words whose boxes have to be ticked if any statement of any length is to attain credibility or be taken seriously, I give you:

 'passion', 'icon' (in all its forms, 'iconically iconic icon' sounding horribly inevitable), 'vibrant'/ 'vibrancy'. 

These words aren't longer, or have more syllables than words they replace, because they don't replace any other words. For instance, it didn't used to be thought necessary, for, say, a job applicant to spell out in their application the fact that they had some kind of leaning towards or interest in the subject or nature of the occupation. 

Next time you hear someone say the word 'inappropriate', pause to think if they actually mean anything other than 'bad'.


Tuesday 15 September 2015

Invasion of the Traditional British Pint Snatchers


The latest on beer in The Guardianhttp://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/sep/11/brewsters-women-brewers-men-inside-micropub-world-dancing-man
All the new cliches (see http://robocono.blogspot.com/2015/06/shocking-news.htmlare there: 1. Beards - 100% hit rate for all men interviewed (both of them), 2. Citrus, 3. Pale Ale: “...the beer itself... “citrusy pale ale”, 4. Passion: the head brewer “always had a passion for pubs” and 5. Fruit Beer: ...“beer that hinted at mango and papaya”.

But there is one shocking new revelation: the head microbrewer claims English hops are “dull and a bit boring”, and we are told authoritatively that “The best hops are from New Zealand, Australia and the US, with the UK catching up mainly with blends grown to mimic the more tropical foundations”.

Passing over the question of WTF the journalist imagines a “tropical foundation” might be, the implications of this confidently stated 'fact' are staggering: although we invented the Pale Ale which is the new default setting for beer, our native hops are now considered inferior and are being crossed with other strains to make them more like foreign ones (presuming that's what “blends grown to mimic” means).

So, not only are the forces of classic late model capitalism at work to stop you getting the pint you like - by which I mean the illusion of choice concealing the operation of oligarchy, in that more and more breweries are taken over by larger ones, and their beer replaced by that of the large one while still being marketed under the old name (Thwaites, Jennings and Tetley by Marston's, too many to list by Greene King) - and more foreign hops are being used here, but 
British hops are being genetically modified to produce beer that tastes like lemon juice or tropical fruit juice


No wonder traditional Bitter is getting harder to find and the sale of Mild is under threat, it  sounds like it will soon be impossible to brew traditional British beer any more.

(For those of you who were expecting more fashion victim revelations, normal service will resume shortly...)

Before
After





Thursday 10 September 2015

More Fashion Victims

Further to my observation about people wearing their hats over their ears, in http://robocono.blogspot.com/2014/06/mens-hats-in-tv-period-dramas.html: I noticed someone wearing their baseball hat over their ears the other day, and he happened to take it off while I was doing so.

His ears were deformed! Nipped in against the skull at the top and then flaring out until a normal attitude was achieved. Since then I've noticed a significant minority of young men with ears deformed in this way.
(Not the man I noticed, by the way)
I had previously speculated that perhaps this fashion was about more than ignorance or taking gang bangers as style icons (ignorance at one remove), and that it may have something to do with the wearer being concerned about having stickie-out ears, and attempting to nip a wingnut tendency in the bud, as it were. But if that is the case, the job only gets half done, leaving them with this absurd hybrid effect.

Friday 4 September 2015

State sponsored kitsch offensive

Thanks to my friend https://www.facebook.com/richard.tellstrom, I now know the reason why the stage outfits of Swedish dansbands in the 1970s are streets ahead of the competition in Ireland and Norway when it comes to making us laugh today.

Expenses for stage outfits were tax-deductible, but only if the clothing claimed for was solely for professional use and of such an appearance that it precluded use as everyday wear.   

But it's more than just the clothes - what makes these pictures so horribly compelling is the combination of extremes, the visual oxymoron of absurdly flamboyant costumes being worn by people with yokel-like goofy faces from a village fete gurning competition.

And the names.







He's got the Schytts





Tuesday 1 September 2015

Swedo-Hibernian Parallels


It's a little-known fact that Sweden and Ireland enjoyed (if that's the right word) until quite recently, remarkably similar versions of an aspect of popular culture seminally (and that probably is the right word) involved with rural courtship rituals and, ultimately, the diversification of the national gene pool in recent modern history.

Dansbands and Showbands. These parallel phenomenons both involved the travelling of large distances by rural populations, particularly young adults of romantic and/or sexual proclivity, to attend entertainments provided by groups of musical artistes inexplicably similar in styles of dress, combination of instruments and conventions of rhythm, tempo, characteristic genre and vocal rendition (the inspirations being 60s light entertainment dancebands and Country & Western).



The venue for these events was the church or village hall, or more typically in the remote areas where the ritual had most significance, a more rudimentary structure of unique application:
in Sweden the dansbana, an outdoor wooden dancefloor and stage with a shed-like bar and snack kiosk,
in Ireland the dance hall, an adapted barn or rudimentary and hastily-constructed breeze-block and board shed, or sometimes a marquee. 

The Swedish incarnation has the edge in the stage costume department, the Irish in closeness of vocal and musical authenticity to the American sources of origin.
Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Wexford and Limerick are, of course, Viking cities, but we don't see any mobile musical genre cum rural marriage bureau phenomenon of the type of the Dans- or Showband in the former territories of the Danelaw east of the river Lea in London. 

(But, while there is no indigenous culture of peripatetic transatlantic musical schlock  and awe, this might go some way to explaining the unusual enthusiasm for Line Dancing in Essex.



Wednesday 19 August 2015

Equatorial Migration

Posts here about changing fashions in beer and the young people who follow them get by far the biggest viewer numbers.
In the interests of market research and narrowing down exactly what the attraction is, here's 
some observations about changing fashions/young people without  the beer.
Aptly titled Swedish loons

I've always been a fan of the high waist in trouserwear, from Oxford Bags to Bowie Bags (as advertised along with split knee loons, often in the same ad,  in music papers, and worn by their eponym during his Hunky Dory period), and, although not as personal wear, A-line Bags with a 3-button waistband and 3 inch turn ups, usually worn with a 3 star sweater showing some lower chest, all the way to the logical apotheosis of the full-blown Patrick Moore look.










I've regarded with grave misgivings the apparently ineluctable tide of the ever-lower waistline, at times allied with the ever-lower crotch, in that case revealing more and more of the wearer's choice of brand in underpant (fashion industry singular). 
That particular style seems to be on the wane, although at its height we saw young men voluntarily rendered unidexterous when upright by the need to keep a grip on their pants to stop them falling around their ankles.



The aftermath of that trend is still with us, and has combined with the Norman Wisdom/Pee Wee Herman-style size-too-small fashion in menswear (see: http://robocono.blogspot.no/2014/09/defibrillated-frankensteins-monsters-of.html) to produce an obligatory builder's arse effect in any level of deviation in posture from the fully upright, and displacing the back pockets to the top of the thigh so that the wearer ends up sitting on anything in the pockets.

The effect is of altering the anatomical proportions to give the appearance of having an extremely long body with severely  truncated legs. 
This effect is further enhanced by the wearing of shoulder bags with an absurdly long carrying strap, placing the bag at mid-thigh level;  as wilfully awkward and counter-intuitive as the similarly generationally-divisive practice of swinging the arms from side to side across the front of the body when walking (see: http://robocono.blogspot.no/2014/10/the-light-is-seen.html)

Simon Cowell and Jeremy Clarkson have done their best to stem the tide of the ever-falling waistband by personal example, but I'm pleased to announce a more credible champion of opposition to this craze to simulate a cartoon character body/lower limb ratio. 


I have seen the future, and its name is Leon Bridges.

“At the beginning, people didn’t understand it,” he says of his style, “especially in Fort Worth, Texas. They see a young black man wearing high-waist pants, up to his nipples, and shirt tucked in, and they’re just [his voice ascends to an astonished falsetto] ‘WHA’???????’ But eventually they started to respect it.” - Interview by Michael Hann in The Guardian

Wednesday 12 August 2015

Results of Scientific Study Confirm Blogger's Suppositions

Further to my Shocking News posts of 1st and 9th of June:
Bearded, flat hatted and dreadlocked 'hipsters' outnumber traditional CAMRA members by a ratio* of 7 to 15 in this rigorous randomised study** of UK beer drinkers conducted by a major public institution***   recently: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/gallery/2015/aug/12/great-british-beer-festival-camra-in-pictures

And another thing: why does everyone under the age of 30 say "Can I get..." in a bar, shop or restaurant when they want something, which in an equitable world would be greeted with the response "No you can't, because you don't work here. I have to get it for you."?

* An unconventional ratio involving the use of actual numbers
** of people appearing in close-up in the photographs shown in this on-line article in
*** The Guardian

Monday 29 June 2015

Plastic Yankness in Labour Leaders

Neil Kinnock signed the death certificate for his chances of being Prime Minister - and the causes of death listed on the certificate were, number one, not being a half-out-of-the-closet Thatcherite who sucked up to Murdoch, two, being bald, three, ginger, and four, Welsh - when he fist pumped and shouted "Well Alright!" on a public stage. 

David Milliband did the same thing when Paxo asked him if he was 'tough enough to be Prime Minister', and he said "Hell yes, I'm tough enough!" on public television. 
A better answer might have been something like: I don't see that 'being tough' is necessarily part of the job, Jeremy - making tough decisions, yes, but not acting like a character in a gangster film.

Blair was a half-out-of-the-closet Thatcherite who sucked up to Murdoch, but he wasn't bald, ginger or Welsh, and he replaced aitches with glottal stops to try and sound like a man of the people (as all English political leaders do now), rather than making an embarrassing attempt to sound like a Yank.

Tuesday 9 June 2015

More on 'Shocking News'


Of course, these hysterically over-hopped and violently flavoured beers are designed to be attractive to people who have been weaned on energy drinks and Sunny Delight, and who knock back Jägermeister as if it were an actual drink rather than something for hangovers that smells like pine lavatory cleaner (and probably doesn't taste much different either). 

It's the same with their hearing - the music has to be loud, they're indifferent to sound quality and they all shout, because they've damaged the cells in their inner ears by listening to in-ear bud speakers at max volume from an early age.

AND their sense of smell - the universal popularity of 'fabric conditioners' that smell like they were originally developed at Porton Down, fruit scented (??!!) cleaning products, toilet ducks, blocks and gels mean that they've been surrounded by such an all-pervading haze of 
pungent industrial byproducts, for so long, that the only smells that register are at max volume too. 

Hence the popularity of Lynx-type deodorants that smell like tear gas or urinal blocks, and which actually make your eyes water and your nose smart if your sense of smell works normally.

The Aum Shinrikyo cult's 1995 Tokyo subway atrocity was a grim precedent for the experience of travelling on public transport anywhere today when there's a young man on board. 
Or in a lift. 

Monday 1 June 2015

Shocking News

As I've said before, I'm going off beer, part of the reason being the popularity of 'craft beer' brewed by 'craft breweries'. I like English bitter brewed by English breweries like Thwaites or Fullers. When it was real ale brewed by micro breweries, like Dent Bitter, it was still ok. Now 'craft beers' are fashionable, everywhere that does decent beer is too full of young people shouting their heads off and taking all the seats, and the beer they're so keen on is undrinkable - fruit beers, and in Scandinavia, Indian Pale Ales and 'American' Pale Ales that are so bitter they're like sucking a lemon, and, in Britain, 'golden' ales that are SBTLSAL, and taste of chrysanthemum or Lynx deodorant.


The brewers compete to produce the most extreme or bizarre flavour they can, egged on by people who award prizes at beer festivals. It's like single malts versus Irish whiskey and bourbon. 
And beer's too strong now. The default setting for beer in the UK and Czechoslovakia used to be 3.5% or just above, whereas now it starts at 5.


Now look at this:

When I was in  a Young's pub recently I saw that the 'sleeve notes' on the pump badge described Young's bitter as 'the original Pale Ale', and in a Greene King pub, my wife tried their 'Indian Pale Ale', which was nothing of the kind - it was what they until recently sold as bitter. The other ales were IPA Gold, which they used to call IPA, and IPA Reserve, a stronger version of what they used to call bitter.
I also note that of the 50 beers advertised in Wetherspoon's house mag for their recent Real Ale Festival, the descriptions of 26 of them feature the words 'pale', 'golden' or 'amber-coloured'.


Where (or more importantly, when) will this madness end?

Wednesday 29 April 2015

Record Facts and Statistics


Building on the success of my earlier blog on music-related matters, http://robocono.blogspot.com/2014/09/defibrillated-frankensteins-monsters-of.html, featuring Jedward and Justin Beiber, here are some more

Record Facts* and Statistics**


1.* There are two** 'space' records with excellent starts sorely let down by the pedestrian nature of what follows: 'Telstar' and 'Intergalactic' by The Beastie Boys.

2.* Rap is nearly all rubbish. The best rap records ever made are 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised', and 'Tubthumping' by Chumbawumba , one** of which is the first rap record, and both** of which would stand out as being excellent on their own merits whatever the genre.

Saturday 14 February 2015

Nostradamus of the Airwaves





I confidently anticipate a remake of the popular 1961 Anthony Newley production updated to reflect the current surge of interest in cookery and dining generally, and gourmet organ-based cuisine promoted by top chefs such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Fergus Henderson in particular, most probably with a blockbuster West End show and  spin-off TV series. 
My tip for the updated title: "Stop the World I Want to Get Offal".



Wednesday 28 January 2015

Arcane Argot

M&S
Two examples of criminal cant whose origin you may have pondered on: 

"Moody", meaning dodgy, on the fiddle, not kosher (as in 'moody brief'). Rhyming slang, from Moody and Sankey, American revivalist preachers and hymnalists who visited the UK in the 1870s. Rhymes with 'Hanky-Panky'.

"Dock asthma": the histrionic intake of breath used to signal shock at the supposed severity of a sentence on its pronouncement.

I love 'em, me.