John Noakes and the Spirit of the Braying Mob

Excuse me if this isn't polished or even interesting. I don't have any careful arguments to weave and, even if I did, I'm not sure I have the care and attention needed to weave them. I guess I'm feeling a bit dejected with the world. I've been working hard all month trying to communicate with the world but the world doesn't seem all that interested in talking to me. Well, screw the world. I can at least talk to myself or, if I'm lucky, some other lone intellects out there that don't belong to a marketing scam robot or some Chinese plastics company intent on filling my comments with spam.

I wanted to write about John Noakes who, you might know, went missing (but was thankfully found) yesterday and I wanted to write about him without using the word 'celebrity'. I despise that word, which has to be the curse of our age. It has been elevated to the point that to possess 'celebrity' means that you're a special kind of person, worthy of special treatment and to be judged against lower moral or artistic standards than the rest of common humanity. For example, I was searching last week for a publisher and I came across one who advertised their interest in humour. You should know how rare that is for UK publishers, who largely take no interest in humour unless it's disguised as some postmodern pastiche of Polish pork butchers in the 1300s. This publisher therefore caught my eye, until I read that writers would have to pay to have their books published. There was, however, an exception. In the case of 'a celebrity', the publisher would be very interested in discussing an advance and contact.

It's a sign of how the world has become. Yet the truth is that people who are celebrities tend to be the dullest among us. To be a celebrity is different to being a writer, a musician, an actor, painter, poet, illustrator, inventor, sportsperson, or even a politician. It's why the very best writers, musicians, actors, painters, poets, illustrators, inventors, sportspersons, and politicians live ordinary lives. They don't wish to live like a celebrity. To be a celebrity simply means that you have fame and, really, there's nothing less interesting than a person famous only for having fame. The other day The Times dedicated a double page spread to Alan Titchmarsh, one of the dullest men on the planet and it was amazing how many dull things the dullest man on the planet had to say in what was, predictably, a very dull article. Yet still: he's famous and because he was famous, he even had his face in full colour on their colour supplement.

Welcome to the UK, 2015. For those that have: here have more. Those without, we want you to have even less.

Last weekend witnessed another visible demonstration of celebrity when Kanye West took the stage at Glastonbury. He walked out thinking, perhaps, that celebrity would do most of his work for him. It didn't. It was a risible performance, highlighting the fact that this was one of the least enjoyable Glastonbury weekends in quite a while. All the excellence was to be found well beyond the headline acts. Patti Smith produced the performance of the festival but I also enjoyed, as you might expect, the show put on by FFS on the last night, which was largely ignored by the media. The media were too busy talking about The Who, who did what The Who have always done but didn't do it with much swagger. The fact that they refused to allow the BBC to broadcast their set was small minded, greedy, or both. In future, no act should be allowed to headline (or otherwise) at Glastonbury if they make non-broadcast a condition of the performance. The question wasn't so much who but why? Why were The Who performing at Glastonbury? I think it was simply because they're a world famous act. They have 'celebrity'.

I arrived at the beginning of this week reflecting, yet again, on how celebrity is ruining our culture. If you're not a celebrity, then you're obviously nobody, and perhaps it's because of the problems associated with being a nobody that an otherwise excellent band like the Fat White Family (a bit blues, a bit Velvet Underground, a lot The Doors) have to resort to the tales of the sordid excess in order to get noticed and then heard. The same is true of writers, actors, artists, comedians. To get noticed, you must doing something in excess. You must run out on stage whilst Kanye West is performing. You must paint your work in your own excrement or blood. You must write your book whilst sitting in a cupboard for ten years and never seeing daylight...

Then John Noakes went missing.

I can't think of many people who have meant as much to me as John Noakes. Yet to describe what he did is to skirt around the phrase 'celebrity'. He was, of course, a TV presenter, which usually is a job that amounts to very little. Presenters are usually celebrities. Vernon Kaye and Claudia Winkleman are both celebrities but I can't honestly tell you of a single discernible skill either of them has to make them worth the money the BBC pays them. Cut their wage to a sixth and you'd still find people equally adept at fronting that kind of show. I'm serious. I fail to understand why the BBC think it important to pay millions to people who are merely presenters. A disembodied robotic voice could link segments together almost as well... Did I say 'almost'? Well, I meant to say 'better'.

Yet Noakes wasn't simply a presenter. He was an accidental comedian. In fact, when I think of what I like in comedy, I think about those qualities that Noakes embodied. He was relaxed and slightly unprofessional in a way you can perhaps see in the very best comedy. You see it in the Marx Brothers but also in Robin Williams or Steve Martin. Noakes made mistakes and allowed people to see his mistakes, a bit like Stewart Lee does when he highlights a mistake and weaves it into his set. Noakes was a clown but doing serious work in the very same way that Clive James would always use humour to make a deeper point. Yet beyond all of that, Noakes was simply likable and so very and utterly human. He was the best uncle many of us have ever had with any degree of regularity in our lives.

When he went missing yesterday, I was upset. I don't know why. I'm not ashamed to admit that when I tried to explain it to somebody later on, I actually found myself getting teary eyed. I didn't realise how much John Noakes meant to me. He must have meant a lot because I even used Twitter to look for updates. Perhaps I wanted to find other people who shared my upset and I was genuinely heartened to find that there were others just like me. It reminded me that not everybody on Twitter is a hate filled troll.

Yet there were, predictably, a few others who saw it as another opportunity to make cheap jokes about the disappearance of an 81 year old man suffering from Alzheimer's. They are the people who made me quit Twitter or, at least, have minimal contact with social media. They are the always-looking-for-a-laugh narcissists, who are always at your elbow playing everything for laughs. They're the Colin Hunts of the online world who give a bad name to anybody who has ever tried to make people laugh for a living.

I suppose what I find irritating about them is that I could easily be one of those people myself. When I first used Twitter, I used it as a way of writing jokes and being 'witty'. Yet you soon find it's an insatiable medium. Your best material is stolen by others and the many of the people also in the business of being funny are quite happy to steal their material from old joke books. People who aren't serious about comedy seem unable to stop trying to be funny. Serious comedians are often described as sulky and miserable when they're not on stage but that's because people assume that to have a comedic outlook on life means that you're always 'up for a laugh'. In my limited experience, it's quite the reverse. It's why I despise Twitter. It's also a place where you're always encouraged to be that little bit more edgy. When I write what I write about real people, I don't mean to hurt them. I write knowing there's a distance between my writing and the chances of their reading what I write. Twitter is very different. Your words too easily end up in their timeline, seen by their eyes. Twitter magnifies the venom and I quit the moment I realised this. I quit the moment people began confusing my comic creation with the real Richard Madeley.

Others didn't share my concerns and still don't. Twitter comedians are no comedians in my eyes. They're precisely the people I didn't want to become when I was growing up. What I wanted to be was some latter day John Noakes, who was a free spirit, fascinated by the world but never to the point of pretension. He was funny but never to the point where it would begin to wear on you. He was balanced pretty evenly in that place where the best human beings exist: good natured, interested and, above all things, simply humane.

It's why his disappearance yesterday upset me. Not because John Noakes the celebrity had gone missing. It was because I remembered John Noakes as simply the best example of a generous, witty but unashamedly joyous spirit there was when I was growing up. He's one of the best examples of our kind and of a better age, before Twitter exposed us all to the vile psychopaths who hurt people in the name of humour. I'm now at the stage when I actively despise people who try to be funny on Twitter. They're little more than piss-soaked mongrels howling at the heels of the braying mob. Yesterday reminded me that they're still out there seeking their celebrity. And the sad truth is: one day their excesses might become so great that they might indeed find it.

I've Been Followed By @CChristGarcia!

I had a pretty bad day but this evening I thought there was glimmer of goodness. I had a new follower on Twitter. That might not seem like much but, like I said, it had been a bad day. Over the past week, satire has (naturally) seen a bit of a revival on the internet and I've had quite a few hits. However, now that the world returns to normal, the interest has dropped off and traffic is back to its usual sluggish low.

Getting a new follower therefore felt like a step in the right direction. And here is my new follower and I hope you agree that CChristGarcia looks like the kind of follower you want. She runs a pretty normal Twitter account, describing herself as an 'award-winning coffee guru. Organizer. Freelance pop culture ninja. Web fanatic. Future teen idol.' She also has seven times the number of followers that I have... In fact she looks so normal that nobody in their right mind would even question if Christina Garcia was real or not.

Except I wasn't in my right mind. The woman in the photo was obviously far too attractive to be following me so I did the thing I usually do before I follow somebody back. I took their most recent tweets and stuck them through Google. Needless to say, every single Tweet had been tweeted countless times before by bigger accounts. There's not an original tweet to be seen.

Step number two: if they're faking the tweets, I wondered if they'd faked the photo. Google images quickly  told me that the picture is, in fact, of Turkish fashion model, Gizem Guler who has her own twitter account with over 31 thousand followers, all hanging off her every announcement, the majority of which are a running itinerary of  the hotels she's just arrived at.

However, I digress... The point is: even though Christina Garcia does not exist and every tweet she posts has been plagiarised from elsewhere, she's a hell of a lot more popular than I am on Twitter. That begs the question: should I fake my account with a picture of a fashion model and just what the hell do I think I'm doing bothering with bloody Twitter?

Except I'm told I need to market myself. Spread my work and my word... Get in the loop.

Oh, bollocks to the loop. I'm going to bed. I hope the world's still here when I wake up. Or perhaps I don't. I'm not certain anything exists any more. I'm pretty sure the world ended months ago. Since then, it's been machine taking to machine.

My Facial Tattoo

Today I tattooed my face simply in order to spite somebody.

I know. I know... Getting a facial tattoo is one of those things I never thought I'd do, like brazenly lying to my readership about getting a facial tattoo.

It obviously wasn't a tattoo and it wasn't my face. What I actually did was deface my blog with a bloody stupid banner which I'm now beginning to regret. I also implied that I was going to turn my blog into a ditch of moronic ultra hip Americana. [Edit: This was that banner, which I've not seen sense and removed].



I feel a bit dumb for losing my rag at the people at the Yahoo! Bing Network. What kind of man flies of the handle just because somebody says the blog they've been writing for nine years isn't of 'high enough quality' and doesn't contain enough 'original content'. I'm not sure how much original content they want. Nearly everything on this blog (minus the previous post) was created by these two hands, two grey eyes, one largish Roman nose, and sundry genitalia with tinkling bell attached. If you listen carefully, you might even hear the bell ring every time I create something new.

Tinkle. Tinkle.

I've had a strange 24 hours and it all started when I returned to Twitter about this time yesterday. I hadn't been on Twitter in a long time and I discovered that my followers had dropped to a depressing 99. I thought that a bit low given my personal record was about 8000 when I was tweeting as Richard Madeley. However, I thought I'd give Twitter another chance so I began with a single tweet.

Sony should never have made a film about a raging ego with delusions of absolute power. But enough about James Franco... #TheInterview

I then did a couple of retweets. I replied to a Martin Rowson tweet and Rowson replied which just fed the beast. I felt 'in the zone'. I was ready to publish tweet number 2...

I wish Twitter had more celebrities spouting trite condemnations of brutal dictatorships. #thingsyouneverhear #thebleedingobvious

And then tweet number 3:

Why couldn't North Korea hack 'Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever'? Wouldn't Grumpy Cat be considered a delicacy between a couple of buns?

'Ha ha!' I exclaimed, rubbing my hands together. Off to make a coffee... Milk. Coffee. Sugar. Back at the desk. Let's see how the world has responded...

My followers had dropped to 96. My three tweets had put off three people!

Not sure what I'd done wrong, I left the PC and took my coffee for a walk. When I got back, I was relieved to see that I had a new follower. Even better: she is a go go dancer.

At first I thought it was fake. If you don't use Twitter, I should explain that there are automated systems out there that create fake users and you'll usually get a couple of semi-naked women (or Christians (or semi-naked Christians)) following you if you post on certain subjects. However, I did some research and soon confirmed that my follower was indeed a real go go dancer, even if I couldn't yet understand what I'd written that would attract an American go go dancer.

Then I noticed that the email confirmation wasn't to my usual account. She hadn't followed me. She'd followed a Twitter account I'd created a long time ago when I was pretending to be one of Steve Martin's go go dancers. It went with a blog I created all about life on the road with Steve and his bluegrass banjo. I thought it was amusing but, naturally, no other bugger thought it remotely funny. Most people thought Steve Martin does indeed have go go dancers. I honestly don't know if he does. I never researched it. Perhaps he has a full chorus line of go go dancers. Perhaps that's why my blog never succeeded.

Anyway, the go go dancer hadn't followed me but had followed the version of me who is a go go dancer. Naturally, I followed her back but as myself. See. Here I am among her followers. Bet you can't spot the odd one out...



Now, I know I'm sarcastic about so much stuff but not this. I mean: I'm being followed by a go go dancer and she's everything I'm not. She even posted some pictures of herself in some thigh high red leather boots. I vow now that you'll never see me in thigh high red leather boots. Well, not until I've worked out a little. She also sings, which is pretty damn impressive. When I sing, people flee thinking it's the Archangel Gabriel loosening his lips on his celestial tuba. Here's my new follower's newest song. 160 views already on Youtube and six likes. That's more than everything I've ever done in my life. No wonder the Yahoo! Bing Network were so hard on me...

Forget AI: We Should Really Worry About Dumb People Talking To Even Dumber Machines

There was a significant moment this past week when Professor Stephen Hawking warned the world that our species faces real dangers from the advances in artificial intelligence. He wrote:

There are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved: there is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains.

The comments were significant in a number of ways, not least of which was that they managed to slip some soft science into the news agenda. When Hawking speaks, people tend to listen. Why they listen is a moot point. In a way, Hawking is our version of Albert Einstein: a non-scientist's idea of a scientist. Even if people don't understand why he's brilliant, they can recognise something about him which is obviously a mark of genius. Hawking also shares with Einstein a talent for using the media. It makes it hard to separate the tragedy of his illness, the heroic struggle to overcome those enormous difficulties, with the hard science he's actually achieved in his lifetime. I have no doubt that his reputation is well earned as a theoretical astrophysicist but I can't help but feel that there's an element of the TV scientist about some of his public comments. 'Danger, Danger, Will Robinson!' is always going to be far more exciting to hear than 'All is well, Will Robinson...' and Hawking is bright enough to know that.

Hawking's contribution to the debate about artificial intelligence is an interesting one but not, as far as I can tell, based on any particularly great insight into the field of thinking machines. He quotes "[r]ecent landmarks such as self-driving cars, a computer winning at Jeopardy! and the digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now and Cortana' as examples of the rapid rise of AI. However, all these developments are (also as far as I can tell) extensions of relatively simple advances in pattern recognition which has come about through the miniaturisation of chips. Moore's Law famously states that computer circuits double in density every two years. That roughly means that every two years the chips that drive our computers become twice as powerful. Moore's Law held for over half a century before, in recent years, it has started to slow, with the doubling now occurring every three years instead of two. Yet even if machines continue to increase in power at the rate predicted by Gordon E. Moore there's still some way to go before anything could be built approaching genuine artificial intelligence. The problems aren't simply problems that can be solved simply by throwing more memory and processing cores at it. As one of my old computing professors used to phrase it: a cow doesn't gestate its young more quickly because it's standing in a field with a dozen other cows. In other words, some problems can't simply be solved by cranking up the dial. Indeed, it might even be argued that if should a thing could happen, artificial intelligence won't be achieved using the relatively crude chip technology we use today.

The scale of the AI challenge is enormous and popularist pieces, such as the one by Hawking, merely serve the public's appetite for salacious science. There was a story a few months ago about a computer that had apparently defeated the Turing Test. The media ran the story with bold headlines and when I saw one such headline, I actually raised an eyebrow. Had a computer really tricked a person into thinking they were having a conversation with another human? I should have known, however, and once I'd read the article, I was left wondering why anybody with half an idea about the Turing Test couldn't tell that the claims were simply far too bold. The computer hadn't come anywhere close to passing the test and the result was barely more impressive than those produced by the old Eliza script of the 1960s which used to play the psychologist to the user's inputs.

True artificial intelligence is still the stuff of science fiction and, I suspect, will remain so unless there's one of those genuine leaps of technology that come along so rarely; the last one probably being the invention of the silicon chip, with everything that has come since being merely an evolution of that.

However, the debate around AI systems came to mind this evening as I was contemplating the data gathered by my blog over the course of the last week. I'm fascinated to the point of distraction by visitors. Not so much the numbers, though catch me at a weak moment and I'll say that, yes, I am addicted to page views. What interests me is to establish who or what is visiting the site. I know at times this sounds like my desperate need for affirmation but I sometimes wonder how this blog is received, perceived, and even if it's perceived at all. And I think I have good reason to be sceptical about the latter. One of the rarely expressed truths about the current internet (or, at least, I don't think I've ever read this written elsewhere but it's so obvious that it undoubtedly has) is the extent to which so much of what passes for social media is simply people talking to computers.

For example, tonight I posted a tweet. I hadn't done one in a while but I keep getting these urges to be social. So, onto Twitter I went and wrote the following:

Hmm... Who'll succeed Alan Rusbridger at The Guardian? My guess is a multigender Eco warrior privacy smurf into S&M and Coldplay.

It might not be the greatest Tweet penned by man but I was quite proud of the result of about ten seconds of thought and fingers. And within about another ten seconds, I had a message come back to me. Some Chris Martin fan account had favourited my tweet. For a moment I smiled. That was really nice of them. It was nice to know that my wit is appreciated and... and...

Hmm...

Then I realised that there was very little chance that the Chris Martin fan account was actually being manned by a Chris Martin fan. A human being -- even a Chris Martin fan -- would surely have spotted that my reference to Coldplay was actually scathing and not worth marking as a favourite. It was obvious that a computer had merely picked out the word 'Coldplay' and automatically given it the virtual thumbs up.

Now, this, in a small sense, was a victory for the computers which had fooled me into thinking that I was dealing with a human. Yet the sad truth of all this is that so many of my daily interactions are probably with computers. It's one of the reasons I don't use social media. Look beyond the likes, the up votes, the Google + scores, the follower counts and you see just one enormous machine whirring away. A human puts input in and automated systems produce the required response. They like you, they follow you, they vote you up and some even send you messages asking you to like them back. Yet none of it is real. None of it means as much as even the simplest smile.

I do occasional work for a company who believe strongly in all of this social media. They love their follower counts and work hard to get more. I merely look at their numbers and wonder what it all means. Do those thousands of votes actually mean that people like the company? The answer, of course, is no. Those numbers really represent how long they've been present on the web. The follower counts really mark their own need for affirmation and the urgency with which they play the social media game. The real people are lost in all of this. You, the person out there, reading this... You are the person I'm writing this for. I'm not asking for anything other than a connection of our minds. A shared humanity contained within these words written as I sit here at my desk at 11.53 at night and scratching three days growth of beard. And that's all that ultimately matters. How my blog feed might be digested by the machines, the media crawlers, the influence registers... They really don't interest me. Yet I also fear that mine is a lone voice in a day and age when people prefer to speak to and be read by a million computers than understood by a single human brain.

The galling part of it is knowing that these words will be read by thousands of machines and, if I'm lucky, perhaps by only three or four humans. Or perhaps it will be read by thousands of people and only a few machines. The problem is that I simply cannot tell. And in this limited sense, I think Hawking is more right than his media friendly comments probably warrant. There might come a time when AI becomes self-aware and capable of taking away our freedoms. In the meantime, however, it's the dumb systems we already have that are doing that to us, right this very moment.

Cartooning Hell: Even A Rejection Would Be Nice

Plenty of outgoing emails this morning and, so far, only one automated response suggesting that I’d managed to hit the nerve feeding raw photographs from field reporters straight into a newspaper’s command centre. My cartoon will clearly find the wrong person. I need to try again another day with another cartoon. Meanwhile, I'll have to throw last night’s effort away now that its moment has passed.

One of the biggest struggles I seem to face is simply finding the right person to talk to. Newspapers don’t list the contact details of the cartoon editor and newspapers increasingly don’t publish any email addresses of their staff. It’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed as the separation of them and us gets ever larger. It’s as if news operates at a level above that of your common man; a conviction that grows stronger every day as the people who make news always seem to know the people who report the news.

The paradox is, of course, that the media continually tell us that they’re listening. They go to great lengths to throw up their Twitter handles and to tell us to get in touch, but that’s one of the problems I realised about Twitter a long time ago. Behind this supposed utopia where everybody is equal is a great publicity machine working against our ultimate emancipation. Because social media feeds the media with free content (‘Hey! Send us your photos of the storm [whispers] but don’t expect to be paid’) it allows them to stop listening, stop seeking professional services, and to keep the controls inside a very tight circle in the heart of London.

I come from a family of news obsessives and once 24 hour news started, we rarely watched anything in the day followed by the BBC News at 6pm, 9pm and Newsnight on BBC2. Sky News used to be the best news channel but they reduced their service to a rolling 15 minute cycle of perhaps 3 news items and the BBC has become our regular source of information. It’s a shame. Sky News used to be something compelling and really special; as special, in fact, as Sky’s sports coverage or their 3D service, which I’ve had chance to glimpse a few times and is amazing at its best. They also had some of the best young journalists and come the day that the BBC retires the great John Simpson, Sky News have his ideal replacement in the even greater (in my opinion) Tim Marshall.

But I digress. Sending cartoons, articles, and books away in the hope that somebody will be willing to take a moment and look at them can be a shocking business for your self-esteem. I’d always been prepared for rejection. I’ve had enough in my time and I welcome rejection when somebody actually tells me what I'm doing wrong. However, nothing ever prepared me for the reality of the silence.

To break into the news circle as either a cartoonist of writer is extraordinarily frustrating. I end up sending work to vague sounding inboxes such as ‘the news’ or ‘tellusabout’ or simply ‘contact’, which probably aren’t read by anybody .

I thought writing books hard work but nothing was like the hard work of trying to get somebody read the damn things. It’s the same with writing essays and drawing cartoons. Selling them is the horrible side of the business when it should really be the easiest. I started last night cartoon’s about 5pm, worked on it at a relaxed (dare I saw blissfully happy) pace through the night and started to apply colour about 9pm. I was finished about 2am. It sounds like a long time and result isn’t going to set the world alight but then, I’m still learning and the time I take is time I put aside to learn this craft. Last night I also discovered that I can do a couple of things with my technology that I previously thought impossible. I wish my craft could make two breakthroughs a night. I should do some night school course on how to draw, though the thought of having to sketch some local hobo in his posing pouch doesn’t fill me with excitement given that very few of our local hobos look are as sexy as Kate Upton. But then again, neither are many cartoonists… It’s a cruel world.

More Drugs For Justin and God Take Pity on His Soul…

It takes a complete mastery of the modern telecommunications network to ensure that not much crosses this desk headed with Bieber facts or Bieber news. It means I now know too little about Justin Bieber to make any informed comments about his recent arrest. No doubt I’ll struggle to make any cogent points about him in the next 1000 hard fought words but I won’t let that stop me. No sir! I’m determined to do what I’ve set out to achieve and that’s to explain why I utterly despise Justin Bieber, a man I know next to nothing about.

I couldn’t, for example, hum you one of his songs. I couldn’t recite you a Bieber lyric or even tell you if he’s had a Number One hit in the USA or Europe. I recall some small details from news stories that have been on the TV that’s in the same room as I’ve sat brooding away in my hatred of the man. I know that he found fame on Youtube and then he was arrested driving a yellow Lamborghini. I’m also sure some things happened between those two world changing events but I don’t recall what they were. He might have had a relationship with some young actress, singer or model but there I’m really stretching my knowledge and it would be the thick end of guesswork to say if she even was an actress, singer, or model. I do, however, know he used to have a fringe worthy of Lloyd Christmas and now he’s all bad-boy with a razored look reminiscent of the less talented of Elton John’s shaved pair. I think he also owns a monkey and its name might or might not be Bubbles. However, this post isn’t about his monkey. This post is about how I utterly despise Justin Bieber, a man I know next to nothing about.

Thankfully, the reason I utterly despise Justin Bieber has nothing to do with Justin Bieber and everything to do with his fans. I suppose this blog post would more accurately be described as being about how I utterly despise Justin Bieber fans, about whom I unfortunately know quite a bit.

I know, for example, that they descended upon Twitter like a pestilence straight from Ezekiel, their meaningless yay-boo chunnering entirely destroying the social media network in the process. Perhaps they should be commended for turning a bad idea for humanity into an even worse reality but it’s hard to admire the virulency of any plague that turns a place for human communication into a wasteland of nasty hormonal squeaking. It’s hard not to prefer any form of interaction to their screeched outpouring of impotent love, completely devoid of punctuation except when they use it to produce some florid decoration reminiscent of the very worst kind of anal tattooing. Hash hash heart kiss kiss Justin!

I suppose, now I come to think about it, this blog post shouldn’t have mentioned Bieber at all but, since I have, I should say that I actually feel sorry for the poor bastard. Imagine being lusted after by millions of rat-fringed sow-eyed bitch divas, their greased pubescent skin blocked at every pore as their plastered make-up causes god knows what hormonal juices to back up into their brains where it affects them like some exotic frog venom pumped straight into their cerebellums. There is no other reason why they seem to lose all motor functions when Bieber is around. It reduces them to panting hysteria which probably smells as sickly sweet as it looks outlandish and part of the freak zone. I suppose there might be some sweat heaving Japanese businessmen out there who might pay a fortune to own their underwear sealed in a plastic bag but, make no mistake, this has nothing to do with sex. The Bieber business is classic human chemistry, one giddy build up to a glandular squeeze with results as erotic and predictable as spotting caustic soda onto the eyeballs of laboratory beagles.

Yes, the more I think about it, I feel sorry for Justin Bieber and I don’t blame him for hitting the drugs. He’s already on anxiety medication, which might surprise you given that he’s worth millions, but I think we know that the poor bastard will need to jack that up to something stronger if these sluttish Juliets keep ovulating beneath their Romeo’s window. I have no idea if he lives a life of debauched excess but the erotic potential has to be set alongside the psychological damage of being surrounded by these post-pubescent brutes, all poutiness and blusher, their trailer-trash twisted hair fashioned with all the subtlety of a Nazi rally. It’s like watching rats fighting over the most buoyant of the faecal rafts as they float through the sewer. The bitchiness, the scratching, the savage estradiol-induced fury: Beliebers identify themselves by a term that sounds like a Doomsday sect yet the reality is that their religious iconography is so utterly devoid of higher meaning. It’s like watching jellyfish reproduce, the sea erupting into a sick thick soup of sperm. Yet for Beliebers, the sad yearnings of their bodies is couched in terms of love and hearts and cherubs and unicorns and pink things such as the pink pretty boy who couldn’t harm a fly, cherub, or unicorn. There are no whiskers or whisky in the Bieber universe, just a freakishly pimple-free boy who occasionally sports a pair of glasses to make him look vulnerable. It’s all about the coquettish sideways looks and those pouty lips, as obese as slugs copulating on the corpse of a scabietic dog.

Yes, I despise Bieber fans. I despise them for combining arrogance and ignorance into one utterly despicable package. Some might say it’s the arrogance of youth but has youth ever been so brazenly misguided or wrong? Beliebers are a generational phenomenon, like the mass hysteria starlings suffer before they fly head first into plate glass. Beliebers are nothing more than a human murmuration on an epic scale, a cultish devotion to a freak of pubescence, a vain and arrogant symbol of consumerist exploitation, designed by men in offices and tested in laboratories on hormonal girls.

Most of all, they are a reminder than beneath all of humanity’s philosophy, science, and art, we are just liquid emotions that sometimes spill out from the fleshy buckets. Beliebers are our animal selves uncontrolled by logic or reason. They are the last point on the road to nothingness. Beyond them lies the void, echoing with their giddy laughter.

 

Expert Extraverts

The Guardian is running a Twitter masterclass with David Schneider. It costs £50 for three hours of advice from the ‘Twitter obsessive with over 150,000 followers’, as well as ‘the BBC’s David Levin’ who ‘is a professional tweeter responsible for accounts such as @BBCTheVoiceUK, @BBCApprentice.’

I’m interested to know what advice they could give. Not fifty pounds of ‘interested’ but interested in a general quizzical-look-to-camera sense.  As much as I hesitate to offer the obvious observation, there is a reason why they a in a position to call themselves ‘experts’ and that is because one is a celebrity and the other is tweeting on behalf of celebrities. Their only advice should be: become a celebrity and then open a Twitter account.

I wish the world were otherwise but we’ve become a culture dominated by vocal types, eager to position themselves as experts in subjects that really defy expertise. ‘Twitter expert’ sounds as meaningful as sticking ‘ghost hunter’ on your résumé. The things that determine success are intangible and generally indistinguishable from doing a psychic reading on a bowl of blancmange. Yet it’s all part of this great social media hoax that’s perpetuated on all of us. Social media is a repulsive modern phenomenon, usually pursued by horrendous Americans with half a million followers and who only ever babble on about their methods for getting even more followers. They bring nothing new, beautiful, or even entertaining into the world. They merely feed on the dreams we all have of being recognised in an increasingly alienating world. They hog the bandwidth like the millions of motivational websites that earn their repulsive creators a fortune by misleading the gullible.

I’ve spoken before about the long time I used Twitter, where I got up to around 9,000 followers by pretending to be Uncle Dick Madeley yet never broke a hundred as myself. A joke written as Madeley would be widely retweeted and commented upon. The same joke posted as myself would die an ignominious death. The conclusion is that celebrity imbues things with a quality which cannot be replicated. It’s why these Twitter experts can stand there and offer advice but the essential truth is that we live in an age of marketing when brand awareness is the only true religion.

I suppose it all feels relevant today because I’m just about to start reading a new book on my Samsung. It’s Susan Cain’s ‘Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking’ and the reason it appealed to me should be quiet obvious. I’ve always been an introvert but in recent years I’ve become more thankful that I wasn’t educated in these more ‘enlightened’ times when I would probably have been diagnosed with mild autism. Not that I think myself cold or detached but relatives sometimes say that I am. I'm not. I'm just not a big talker. The other day I was asked to do an eColour test as part of my new work. The result was that I’m ‘green/blue’ or a ‘relating thinker’. Personally, I thought the ‘science’ indistinguishable from physiognomy or even water divining. The results described me to a point but much of it was well off: I like my routines, get edgy if I change anything, but I don’t have checklists. I don’t enjoy ‘doing things by the book’ and I’m definitely not tidy. Nor am I a slow worker. In fact, I tend to work extremely quickly. It’s strange that anybody would judge me according to these criteria but that is what now happens. The real me is replaced by a corrupted version of myself, as offered by an expert website. We live in a world of experts whose credibility has never been tested but whose words carry power.

If cynicism were part of the ‘green/blue’ diagnosis then I might be less skeptical. Perhaps it comes from being an introvert. I’d like to think so given that one-third of people are apparently introverts. That statistic surprised me but also gives me some hope. I thought introverts were rarer than we are but now I can think that at least a third of you might also be introverts. Perhaps it explains the general silence on this blog, in which case, I welcome it with quiet satisfaction.

So has Twitter finally shown the middle classes that the world is ugly?

Back when I was still one of those blue-skied optimists who smiled at kittens and sang Abba hits when walking jauntily down the road, I used to enjoy Twitter as an intellectual game. Writing a funny one liner in 140 characters or less was an enjoyable routine for a year or so. It was akin to doing the daily Sudoku but with a generally funnier outcome. Then the celebrities took over. Twitter was suddenly full of every hacking newspaper columnist, unfunny comedian, and chirpy radio DJ filling the timelines with their awfully privileged banter.

With the arrival of the celebrities, Twitter lost its largely formless state. Before it hit the mainstream, Twitter was like a page of blank paper sprinkled with iron filings. There was still a sense of equality across the Twittersphere. Quality tweeting could attract an audience. After the celebrities landed with their marketing people, PR consultants, and professional social media teams, the situation was magnetised and every individual aligned themselves towards these powerful points of attraction. Twitter was suddenly another version of the real world. There were those people with power and those without and the popularity of the former had nothing to do with the quality of their tweets. Katie Price (aka Jordan) demonstrated that and still does. Her Twitter account is hugely popular, currently approaching two million followers, all waiting for her gems of wisdom such as ‘Yummie full fat milk and cornflakes 3 bowls can't be normal lol but lasts me till lunch time’ (© 2013 Katie Price).

I understand the attraction of celebrity and I guess I’m as susceptible to it as anybody, even if I like to think the people I admire have more about them than plasticised glands and ghost writers. That’s why I also understand the frustration and urge to write something biting towards celebrities I dislike. I would occasionally launch a sharp taunt towards a celebrity such as Peter Andre. Was I trolling? I never saw it that way and if my barbs were sharp they were never needlessly cruel. Yet I can see (and saw) how some unstable characters out there lacked the wits to engage in humorous taunting and took things to an extreme. For some people, violence, threats and intimidation are the only way they can express themselves. I’ve been victim to that plenty of times myself. Comments coming to me through this blog have often been foul, spiteful, and distressing but after a while I guess you become somewhat immune to them.

You might guess, then, that the current furore over Twitter doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Before Twitter got rid of the ability to watch the public Twitter timeline, I’d often sit and gaze the world’s tweets in real time. It’s no wonder they disabled that function because it didn’t take long before you would see how truly bestial we are as a species. I don’t even mean that small percentage of people who are, for want of a better word, ‘bad’. I mean huge segments of our population who demonstrated how illiteracy and stupidity prevail. I began using Twitter believing it a novel way to confine language, encourage pithy expression. I grew to realise that it’s actually the perfect way of expressing our piggish grunts, our infantile nature, our utter slavery to branding, marketing, and celebrity. Reading Twitter’s public timeline was like being trapped inside the mind of one enormous planet-sized imbecile.

Certain self-satisfied middle class commentators now want to censor Twitter because they don’t agree with what Twitter allows people to say. They are suddenly shocked about the world and our human nature which they, as columinists, are supposed to understand better than the rest of us. The debate has quite prominently been about threats of rape, which is understandable. The threats were clearly distressing for the victims. Yet these rape threats have channelled the nature of the debate into a familiar and not so helpful territory. Over at The Guardian, it’s turned into the familiar feminist bell ringing as the usual cowled figures wander the streets crying ‘bring out your misogynists’. The arguments sound tired and familiar. There’s barely an acknowledgement that men find these comments as offensive as women and that women are sometimes as guilty of posting ill-considered and sometimes offensive tweets themselves. (As an aside: the offensive comments left for me on this blog were mainly from women who wished me dead in a variety of unpleasant but imaginative ways. Hard lesson learned: never make jokes about Daniel Radcliffe.)

And that’s the point I wanted to make in my slightly rambling way. This debate shouldn’t be about gender. It’s about who we are as individuals and what we become in that silent inner world we inhabit when we’re sitting at our keyboards and are annoyed by something we read. Twitter is a pure expression of humanity at its very worst. It is the world’s inner monologue in written form: a shameful indictment of what we can be and what we’ve become.

The Stephen Fry Retweet Cartoon

The Mona Lisa

Sarkozy Demands New Internet Controls

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Here.

Steve Martin Exposed: The Secret Life of Hollywood's Most Reclusive Star

From his home, high above the smog and poor people in the Los Angeles hills, life might seem idyllic for Steve Martin, the legendary comedian, writer, banjo soloist, intellectual, and self-professed Hollywood hard man. Yet his rags-to-riches tale eclipses more than a few of the hard luck stories set in the City of Angels. Not many men have battled demons as hard and as long and few tales hide as many dark secrets – secrets that are only now being revealed by those who were once close to ‘Steve’ but are now beset by hard times and open to financial enticements from unscrupulous foreign websites.

What secrets does Steve Martin keep hidden? Why does he insist on Twittering naked except for his favourite banjo tie? Why did he say ‘no’ to the much ridiculed Scientology but ‘yes’ to the even more ridiculed Buttockology? What does he keep in a rented hangar out in the Nevada desert? And why do some people say that Steven Martin doesn’t suit a hat, though he insists on wearing one anyway?

***

Born August 14, 1945, into a Greek Orthodox family with Italian leanings, Stavros Martinee, was a large child. Some say he was the biggest in the county but that record was held by another boy called Gern Blanston who would grow up to wrestle hogs semi-professionally across the Midwest. Yet for the young Stavros, the pig pen held no special attraction. He was instead fascinated with the workings of his Uncle Pepe’s dairy farm which is where he spent so much of his childhood. Under Pepe’s guidance, Stavros learned to feed cattle, clean the barn, spit whilst leering at the neighbour’s buxom daughters, and, most importantly, discover the pleasure of handling milk-rich udders. Udders fascinated the young Martinee. Some boys have a special proficiency with the violin, maths, or sports. With the young Stavros, it was the ruminant teat. Revealing himself to be a prodigy when it came to sitting astride a three-legged stool, he could fill a bucket in sixty seconds, a county record, without spilling a drop. His skills didn’t go unnoticed. Given the chance to attend the local farming school, he enrolled when still only twelve years old and rose to the top of his class having undergone the ritual of running his genitals through a threshing machine at the tender age of fourteen.

Yet udders were not to be his life. One day whilst handling a fully-laden teat, his hand slipped and he fell awkwardly from his milking stool. Before he could react, his hand was crushed beneath the rear hoof of a one-ton Friesian. Learning to use that hand again would take many years. The family doctor encouraged the boy to take up magic and the banjo to help improve his dexterity and Stavros soon proved adept at both. No boy could saw a banjo in half quite like the young Martinee and he entertained the elders of the village many a night with the tunes he produced on a deck of cards ruffled close to their ears.

Aged 16, Stavros’s life changed forever. Whilst throwing quoits around the village duck for the purposes of polling in the local county elections, he was spotted by a travelled carnival owner and invited to tour. Aware that the young Stavros’s foreign name might impede his career in the conservative world of the carny, the showman Anglicised it and Stavros Martinee became Mrs. Edith Flankduster.

Edith would travel with the circus for four years, rising to the rank of bearded lady number three, but by the time he was nineteen years old, Edith Flankduster had already decided that he wanted a life away from punters pulling his whiskers all night. It was the early 1970s and, like many men his age, Edith wanted to shave his chin and to wear tight underwear visible beneath even tighter trousers. It would be the last time he wore a beard and the first time he would be known by his new name: Steve…

At first, he called himself Steve ‘The Scrotum’ Martin because he thought it gave him added charm. Yet life was difficult that first year. Complaints from the heavy metal band, of the same name encouraged him to drop his 'Scrotum' and he found his fortunes immediately improve. Unsure what he could do in the world with only one good uddering hand and three years of experience as a carnival freak, Steve Martin had gravitated into show business and made his début (emphasis on the accent) at the 45th Street Comedy Bar on November 23rd, 1971. People who attended his first performance remember it as one of the most memorable nights in LA’s history. It was the night that the sewers backed up and there was a terrible smell over fifteen blocks. Little else is remembered about Martin’s act, though some say it involved erotic contortions and steroid abuse. However, by 1972, the act had evolved to include four of the five jokes that would serve him well over the next two decades.

He rapidly established his popularity at local comedy clubs by buying drinks for the crowd and then, on the 17th March 1975, he declared that he would be the first comedian to fill the Hollywood Bowl. Advertising went up on March 18th, and, after a week of hectic promotion involving collecting social security and sitting in doorways rattling a tin cup and prodding a blind dog, Martin finally walked on stage to meet his adoring crowd. They’d been promised a ‘night of large breasts and motorcycle jumping’ so they were in an excited state when Martin appeared in his trademark white suit. From a distance, the suit looked like leather and his white hair resembled a crash hat. The crowd were also heavily influenced by weed, LSD, and liquorice torpedoes so they were off their guard when Martin launched into his act consisting of juggling, jokes, and yawning.

The night would go down in entertainment history as Steve Martin mesmerised his audience for the whole of the twenty seven minute set, later released on VHS for a ridiculous price for such a short show. But this would not be the last time that Martin’s business acumen proved valuable. With the consummate skill of a man trained to get the very last drop of milk from a dry teat, Martin leveraged his popularity with doped-up college kids to amass a fortune by selling merchandise such as t-shirts, records, posters, beer mats, mittens, socks, turnips, emergency rubber washers, and personalised back scratchers shaped like Martin’s badly-deformed hand (now perpetually locked in a clawhammer, though proving helpful when playing the banjo).

Friends who knew Martin at the time say that money changed him. No longer willing to run to the bathroom before the cheque for the meal arrived, he now fled the state, left no forwarding address, and started to part his hair down the middle. He was also driving around LA in a yellow Rolls Royce and guarded at all times by South American mercenaries instructed to call him ‘chief’ whenever in he was in the company of ‘tall blondes, brunettes, redheads or really cool bald chicks’.

What did he do with his money at this time? At first he wasted his money at the Playboy Mansion but eventually his began to channel his fortune into films. ‘The Jerk’ (1979) was originally planned as a cinéma vérité study of poverty in the Cuban ghetto in the years after the revolution. Problems with the script and trouble with the Cuban authorities after Martin was caught smuggling a family of refugees beneath the ‘famous comedian’s cape’ he’d adopted by that time, meant that the finished film was considered a failure. However, much to the filmmaker’s delight, it seemed to resonate with a student crowd who considered it a comedy masterpiece. It was quickly trimmed from its original running time of four hours twenty seven minutes, redubbed into English, and launched on a mainstream audience who were unaware of its art-house origins.

Again, Martin was not slow to grab the proverbial tit and he quickly milked the success of ‘The Jerk’ in order to make a succession of films, all of which found popularity among a heavily-medicated audience.

His 1982 masterpiece, ‘Roxanne’, was a critical highpoint. Originally conceived as a sex education film for the space programme and titled ‘Your Upside Down Is Heaven To Me’, it was eventually turned into a light romantic comedy starring Daryl Hannah. The script was changed and all the footage destroyed from the three weeks that Martin had spent on a closed set filming explicit sex scenes with a variety of household objects. It was during this time that Marin badly burnt the end of his nose whilst getting intimate with a lava lamp, meaning that he had to wear a prosthetic through filming. It would be the last time Martin directed himself in a lava lamp environment.

The next few years saw Martin try to establish himself with a family audience. ‘Parenthood’ (1989), ‘Father of the Bride’ (1991) and ‘Bilko’ (1996) were all big hits with people’s mothers but despite abandoning his core audience of ‘druggies, wierdos, and people who keep chickens for recreation’, these big-paying roles suited Martin as he was devoting more time to a new passion.

Steve Martin saw his first monster truck in 1988 and instantly fell in love. He described the moment with typical candour in his 1999 Rolling Stone interview in which he eloquently equated it to seeing ‘this big noise thing’. By 1993, he had the largest collection of Monster Trucks in Hollywood, though they were often hidden away from the public’s gaze in the large annex to his home that Martin claimed to have built for his art collection which he was also amassing at the time for tax purposes. The truth was that the art collection was housed in an old aircraft hangar in the Nevada desert, where they remain to this day, exposed to freezing nights and heat of the desert sun.

Martin’s next films were a series of serious dramas. The Spanish Prisoner (1997), Novocaine (2001), and Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (2005) established his reputation as an actor with a remarkable bank balance. Yet, again, Martin wasn’t satisfied and looked to abandon Hollywood as he started to spend more time playing his banjo with the notorious paramilitary folk group, the Steep Canyon Rangers.

***

Today Martin lives the life of a recluse, his only contact with the outside word being his Twitter account and occasional appearances at folk festivals where he plays the banjo and mumbles incoherently into a microphone. Allergic to poor people, Mexico, and spruce, Martin is choosy about the theatres he plays and instructs his management to levy high prices for tickets for the concerts which, true to his roots, are still only twenty seven minutes long including intervals.

Although a new younger audience has come to love ‘Uncle Steve’ through his hilarious tweets, Martin’s love affair with technology is more sordid. Unable to type due to his long standing milking injury, Martin travelled to India in 1992 where he spent six months with the guru Siri Mau Flidiahisa. There he was initiated into the mystical world of skiitatrijakjohja, derisively known in the west as ‘buttockology’. Teaching patience and promoting good circulation through the rhythmic clenching of the buttocks, the meditation techniques also taught Martin how to type using only his gonads. This he continues to do to this day, with this trademark typing errors attributed to the busy life of a Hollywood star but, in reality, caused by the sudden and rapid temperature fluctuations in the hills above Los Angeles.

Neighbours speak of hearing the clattering of his keyboard late at night as Martin works on his novels. Short in pages and large in print, each one is a masterpiece and takes him three long years to write using only his testes, but critics agree that Martin has a flare for words and hope that he will write more. Now a level three advocate of buttockology, he is currently writing his memoirs, spending long nineteen hour periods one buttock before switching to the other as words drip from his nuts.

He tours the UK with his banjo later in the year. Prices are exorbitant and he won’t be performing anywhere near his fans. ‘I don’t want those people near me,’ he was quoted as saying recently. Yet fans need not fear being deprived of Martin’s genius for very long. As one of his oldest friends said confidentially, ‘Steve’s a twisted marvellous genius of a fellow but so long as he’s got a pair of testicles and a willing audience, he’ll always put on a show’.