DeLorean Dreams

It's Saturday and so our thoughts turn to leisure. Nick is moving house so is busy. Dan and Jen are in France, having gone there on a boat, which is well cool. So what are Emma and I to do?

The obvious answer is Coventry Car Museum. Obviously. They've got a Talbot Lotus Sunbeam driven by Henri Toivonen in the 1980 RAC Rally. Oh yes.
That's a fine sight for a young man.

Anyone want to come? I thought not. Philistines.

Good Night, and Good Luck
Doug

Lust for Nancy

Saturday was tough. My band played a good set in a pub in Warwickshire, which would have been great, but for the fact that the landlord had neglected to tell his clientele the correct date of our appearance. We rocked the joint, sure, but in front of ten people it's not exactly the greatest feeling for a musician. Feedback from the audience is part of the experience, and when the band outnumber the audience, it's going to feel a bit... flat. Plus two of the audience were my Mum and Dad. I was nervous as much as I was when they saw me in the Richmond Primary nativity play in 1985 when I lost one half of my costume and had to be a shepherd dressed in a hastily tucked in bath towel.

This is merely to set the scene. After the gig I was hungry. The lack of an audience had meant we finished early, all the times were fucked up and I had not eaten for some twelve hours by this point. And as always, in this situation of hunger, time and darkness, my stomach's mind turned to fried chicken. There is nothing like a sack of dirty chicken, especially at midnight on a Saturday after a foreshortened, but still quite lengthy, rock session.

Now, when I say fried chicken, I mean of course Maryland Fried Chicken's value box - three wings, two pieces of chicken, fries and a drink for £3. Bargain. The box has a lovely list of their branches throughout the UK on the side, all of them with a Leicester phone number. Anyway, I like it and I wanted it. So after dropping off Nick I found myself driving slowly along the streets of Leicester, looking for a branch of Maryland that was open and ready to sell me fried chicken. I drove for 20 minutes out of my way like this, squinting through the sodium lights for what I needed.

This is not far from kerb crawling, only for chicken. And inevitably, had I not been unable to find such a branch, I'd have come away with a box of friend grease I'd have eaten by lamplight in a guilty hurry, like a child eating a whole packet of forbidden biscuits, because Emma was in bed and wouldn have been annoyed at me if I'd started banging about the kitchen looking for plates, salt and a fork. I'd have probably not enjoyed the experience that much, and consuming some 2000 calories in one go will leave everyone feeling a bit sick, a bit ashamed and in a bit of a funk of despair at their own gluttony. But I'm obsessed.

And obsessions, left alone, will destroy you. You'll end up starting a website dedicated to the joys of Maryland Chicken, start photographing their branches throughout the United Kingdom, start eating it every day because it has become so much a part of your life. You'll lose your friends, job and eventually self on the altar of fried chicken. But sometimes, it just happens. Through osmosis. I live in a city where every second shop is a chicken place. So it's inevitable I'll start eating it and end up with blocked arteries. Immersion is the best way to learn. To adapt. It can come from anywhere. Like my other obsession. Nancy.

Mmm. Nancy from Hollyoaks. Now I'm not a fan of the programme in any way. It's ludicrous, pretty poorly written, definately poorly acted and aimed at any audience but me. But Emma likes it, so I watch quite a lot of it and against my better judgement, even against my will I have been drawn in. I know character names, plot lines, all that. It's pop-cultural osmosis. Which has left me with Nancy. I like Nancy. Not the actress, Jessica Fox (according to Wikipedia). I remember her being in an advert for some kind of fake cappuccino a couple of years ago, and thinking 'who's that perky bint raving on about cappuccino in a packet?'. She was irritating. Like Daisy from Spaced, who I'd run away with at a moment's notice but wouldn't think twice about Jessica Hynes, especially after she did The World According to Bex. I'm not after the actress.

But the character has made herself a birdhouse in my soul. And I feel for her. she's a soap character, and so is doomed to a constant stream of bereavements, court cases and the kind of experiences just one of would leave us a gibbering wreck unable to look after ourselves and needing 24 hour care. Nancy lives through all this and remains gorgeous. She needs a break, a holiday from doom. Preferably one that involves her wearing some skimpy swimwear. Actually, no. Because that'd be out of character. Maybe a tour of European capitals - Paris, Rome, Barcelona. She'd enjoy that. And as long as she wears a skimpy croptop, I'd be very happy for her. Thunderously sexy.

But also, I'm a moral man. I have a girlfriend who I love a great deal. I have been raised to show women respect, and I am not going to exploit Nancy for short-term erotic gain. In fact, I can't. It's programmed in. I can't even enjoy a saucy dream with her in the starring role. I don't usually dream about particular people, but I had a dream last night where she helped me find my mobile phone after I lost it at work. She then agreed to be my girlfriend and smiled at me in a way that melted my heart. Game on, my dream self thought. But as soon as we got into the bedroom, she announced she had a terminal illness, retired to bed and I was suddenly jostled out of the way by a large group of wellwishers. I then woke up.

I am even uptight in my dreams. It's depressing. But I can always soothe the pain with a Marlyand Chicken Value box...

I'll be back in a minute.

Good Night, and Good Luck
Doug

Christmas Number One

This should have gone up yesterday, but my BlogPress app decided to publish the last entry three times instead. Ain't technology wonderful?

So it's happened. The 25 second wait is over, and the winner of X-Factor 2009 has been revealed. Who is it who has captured this nation's tremulous hearts over the last oh-Christ-is-it-really-that-many weeks, who has taken us on the teacup ride of their emotions with them, the dizzying highs and terrifying lows? Erm...

Turns out it's some guy from South Shields. This isn't to denigrate South Shields, a fine part of the North East, itself a fine region, sort of out of the way and very much of itself, like Seattle or Perth. I like it a great deal. But I really don't think it's worth taking the time to learn Joe McElderry's name too carefully.

The X-Factor has something of a mixed reputation for generating lasting success after all. As did Pop Idol before it. Yes, Will Young, yes, Leona Lewis and yes, Alexandra Burke (for now). But for every winner, there's a Steve Brookstein, there's a Michelle McManus and there's a... well, exactly. I can't remember that guy who won it that one time, and neither can anyone else. A stopped clock is right twice a day, but it hasn't been Chico Time for a good while now.

Really the only winners are the judges. Controversial opinion, eh? Doesn't stop it being true, though. Emma and I watched the announcement LIVE last night, and after Dermot O'Leary had finished pausing we saw the look of utter bewilderment on Joe's face as he learned that he'd been chosen out of 250,000 people to be chewed up and spat out by Simon Cowell's entertainment sausage machine. The analogy with The Jungle is, I think, apposite. Upton Sinclair would have had a field day with the X-Factor.

First, look at the human face. Last night, as Joe Thingy swam his way through the gloopy ballad that has been already picked out as this proud nation's Xman Number One single, we could see four distinct takes on events. Joe's mentor, the ever-warm Cheryl Cole, was beside herself with pride. She'd been there herself, a lifetime ago, before she became the country's sweetheart by losing a lot of weight and marrying a footballer. Well, she's so warm. We can all relate to her, if we ignore the massive wealth, army of stylists and batallion of publicists is takes to make her look so effortlessly natural. In contrast was Dannii Minogue, a woman so outrageously jealous of the younger, prettier and just overall better woman beside her, and so cripplingly embittered by her much more famous sister's successes and her own lack thereof that the botox really does struggle to cover it all up. After all, she can't even pluck a success out of this glorified fucking karaoke contest. What does that say about her? Huh? She will surely die alone as her sister bitch of a sister dances on her unmarked pauper's grave. You can see it in her eyes. The pain, the pain.

Also suffering was Louis Walsh, a man who cannot believe it has come to this. He looks bored, bewildered and just plain angry. Once upon a time , he was Ireland's answer to Brian Epstein, Phil Spector and Berry Gordy, but that was a long time ago. Now, just to survive, he's reduced to this. His face speaks of pride, passion, and constant, endless failure. He's mad, madder than Hell! But he's got to take it, again and again, and again. Because there's that man. The one we all love to hate. Oh, his comedy trousers, oh his comedy hair. Look at him stood with his arm round our Cheryl. But also, look at him as he struggles to hide the boner he's getting from the thought of all the money he's going to get from Joe's milk-white crooning, on top of all the other money he's going to be getting from Susan Boyle's exploits (before it all gets too much and she's institutionalised and he can forget all about her). Look at him and the glint in his eye. Simon Cowell.

Simon Cowell. We'll get to him in a moment. But in the meantime, consider the things you don't see. Like the 25,000 people who turned up at the NEC or Docklands Arena or the SECC to take their chance of a lick of that shiny brass ring called showbusiness. They had to go through several stages of auditions long before they got to see a judge, in front of TV company people insetad, just so they couldweed out the average and leave enough decent people to spin out 13 weeks of tortuous televised singalongs(and Swing Week, when they can all pretend to be Robbie Williams, I mean, pretend to be Frank Sinatra) plus a fair number of deluded mentalists who can be happily mocked in front of a TV audience for believing they could ever compete with The Machine. Which brings me neatly back to Simon Phillip Cowell.

Simon Cowell, Britain's 11th richest man, a self-made man who follows his own rules, but preferably no rules at all. A man unencumbered by conscience, if his treatment of Eoghan Quigg is anything to go by. After all, what 16 year old needs GCSEs if he's going to be famous? No 16 year old, that's who. School isn't cool. Signing your life away in a ten year contract you haven't read, by contrast, really, really is. Simon Cowell, a man who was visibly counting the minutes he has left to remain in the UK before the Inland Revenue can ask him for any money so he can go back into the comfort of tax exile in Mustique. Simon Cowell, a man who sees the world less as a planet and more as a series of demographic tables, with detailed statistcal analysis of our incomes, liabilities and music buying habits. Had he been alive in the 1800's, I'm pretty sure he'd have bagged enough lions, tigers and miscellaneous natives to populate Exeter. Simon Cowell, a man who fills his life with fast cars, lingerie models and silly ranch style houses in California to fill the black, beating, sucking void in the centre of his chest where his soul used to be...

Simon Cowell. It's easy to see why he generates such opprobium from modern, relevant artists such as Sting and Jay Kay. His output is beige, his attitude is smarm and hubris is his middle name. What is there to like? Not much. I don't even think he does much for charidee. But then again, even after all this, I don't hate him. Myself, I don't hate any of them, except Dannii Minogue, who really is the face of truest evil. And really, I think Sting saying as he did today that this show is putting back music decades, is a bit rich coming from a man who was last considered innovative in 1981.

But I am not keen on the impact all this is going to have on this year's winner. He's 18. He won't have a clue. He certainly won't understand all the things he's going to have to sign over the next few days, and he most definately won't realise that the £1,000,000 record deal he's getting out of all this means that he doesn't just owe Cowell his career and a go on Christmas Top of the Pops, but also a million pounds. This is how the system works.

Maybe Rage Against The Machine will be the festive number one after all. I remember hearing Bruno Brookes accidentally play the entire mix of that, way back in 1991. We drove across Dartmoor to the sound of Zac La Rocha yelling "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!" as Bruno rang his stockbroker about those Thames Water shares and the world shifted beneath his feet. Cowell had already shunted Sinitta out into the world by then. The die was pretty much cast, even all those years ago.

Sigh. It's all so dismal, and there's really very little to be done about it. On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia. But then, W C Fields would never have made it past the preliminary audition anyway.

Good Night, and Good Luck

Doug

What's in an iPhone?

The answer is apps. I have had the phone in question for about three weeks, though it could easily be far less. It feels like forever. And I know she'll never leave me, not like the others...

Anyway

I've now got something like thirty apps of various levels of utility, freeness and frivolity. One to tell me where my car is, one to tell me where North is, one to recommend a restaurant nearby (as long as I remember to live in San Francisco) and one to let me wrote these little missives to tell people about them. I know Twitter's a pain in the arse. I know literally no one in the world cares that the music I can hear as I eat my lunch is It's A Shame About Ray by The Hoosiers. And I certainly know that the reason I am writing this is because there's an app for that.

The novelty will wear off soon. Hopefully before Emma cracks and posts my lovely lovely iPhone to Tierra del Fuego. But until then I've got the Internet in my pocket. And everyone's gonna get a piece.

Good Night, andGood Luck
Doug

My Brush With Justice

I live in a nice part of town. We have an LE2 postcode, an organic deli, a second-hand bookshop and though we don't have our own Starbucks, we could easily have one of anyone wanted to open one.

We moved to this nice part of town, Emma and I, after we tired of our old flat in the less salubrious surroundings of LE5. It was a bit, well, grim. A 1970's block, designed just after the trend in buildings moved from the accomodating to the small. The bathroom was permanently mouldy, no matter how much 3 in 1 Anti-Mould product we threw at it. No light, no air, some fucker's bike always in the way of the stairs, a part time knocking shop upstairs (weekends only, £30 with a condom, £50 without), it goes on. Instead of the deli was a McDrivethrough, and instead of the ur-Starbucks there was a pub called The Poolcue and Glassing. And so one day, we left.

Now we have light, no mould and proper central heating. The cat can't go out as we're on the third floor, but otherwise, it's lovely. I'd post a picture, but I have to hoover. Summer was here, life was sweet. But with the coming of winter, today saw the jarring end of the honeymoon period.

Because we live in a broken society. A friend on Facebook said that now Yahoo have redeisgned their homepage (presumably from deliberately awful to a mere thoughtlessly rubbish) she is daily confronted with the Daily Mail headline feed. This ruins her mornings, she says, as it invariably ends with her shaking with rage at the evil of it all. I say it's like picking a scab - as lomg as it hurts, you're still alive.

But it's true, things ain't what they used to be. I am 30, and remember long hot summers, playing outside, the Atari Lynx. A happier time, when policemen could murder black people with impunity and child abuse was kept behind closed doors instead of being paraded about on the front pages of right-wing tabloids. A simpler time, when it snowed at Christmas and England lost the Ashes for eighteen years in a row. Now of course England win things and there's no snow any more, apart from last year when it did snow, and all us nostalgics were forced to learn that it's not all a winter wonderland, especially on a dual carriageway at 7:30am and everyone is stuck in the ruts left by the car in front with a running gap of nine feet and a stopping distance of eleven hundred yards. Most of all though, there's the spectre of drugs.

Drugs. Just let the word fill you with dread. Drugs. Remember Danny in Grange Hill dying of an overdose of drugs in the back of Mr. Bronson's Austin Maestro in 1986? Yeah. Drugs. In italics. I'm a man of the world, though. I went to university. I've seen marijuana being consumed. I found it made me feel a bit dizzy, then fall asleep. But some people do like a bit. And where there is demand, there will surely be supply. After all, people actually spent money to vote for Jedward long after it stopped being funny and started to get a bit sinister. And today, the supplying was going on in our flats.

For fuck sakes. We moved precisely to get away from this. The life of a drug dealer isn't like Denzil Washington in American Gangster. It's more Rigsby from Rising Damp, only without lusting after Frances De La Tour. I've seen more than my fair share of minor hashish deals go down, and to come home from work to find two nervous looking guys lurking by the lifts and skinning up a doobie was more than I wanted to see. These two guys in particular have been getting closer to our communal front door for a while. During the summer they were in the car park, transacting their business in the shade of a fruit tree. Come autumn it was in a car in the visitors bay, and now this. Dealing in the corridor. Christ.

So I rang the Police, like the civic minded individual I am. Like I said, I'm 30. Dial the two's, and then go and see Alec, our building warden. And when he went down to see whether they were still there, not only were they still there, but they were having to explain themselves to a couple of coppers. The system works. Fuck yeah. Unless the police were just after an ounce themselves. We can't rule it out. Like I said. Broken Britain.

Keep 'em peeled, as Shaw Taylor used to say.

Good Night, and Good Luck
Doug

This may or may not work.

It's a funny thing. I decided to neglect my web presence a while ago, partly because I felt I had nothing to say and partly because I totally gave up on MySpace as it's an utter heap. Also I stopped being miserable, which was at the time a major contributor to my output. Reading back on the old entries I think I come across not so much as a moaning Minnie as someone who, without broadband, would have either ended up on the central reservation of the M11 shouting at the traffic, or got my hands on some kind of Doomsday laser and dished out some serious justice on a G8 nation.

But I've got an iPhone now, and the Internet is following me about in a beguillingly useful tablet of electric joy. So why not see if I can be arsed to knock out a blog or two and maybe reclaim some of the old nerd kudos that having myspace's 144,566th most popular blog (year ending December 2007)? I also have a financial incentive, as this Blogger app cost £1.79. If I don't hammer out a blog or three, Steve Jobs wins.

And I don't want that. Not this time.