Honk if you love Jazz

It is, apparently, International Jazz Day.  Why jazz needs an International Day, I have no idea.  But lots of things have National and International Days and Weeks, and even Months, so why shouldn’t jazz, I suppose?  So go on, then, enjoy your Jazz Day if you love your jazz.  Go on, honk if you heart jazz, go on--honk!  Go on!  And toot and parp and then honk some more.  Let's hear some random honking, tooting, and parping for International Jazz Day!  Yay!  These noises are, after all, perfectly fitting onomatopoeic tributes to your horrendous musical taste.  I, however, have decided to mark International Jazz Day with a mean-spirited polemic against jazz and, more importantly, what jazz sometimes represents.  The following is, I should say, some reheated bile that I once spewed on Facebook.  Anyway, brace yourselves, and here we go.

Me, I cannot stand jazz.  For me, jazz is to music what warts are to the human face, what camels are to the animal kingdom, what fruit and vegetables are to eating.  Insults: ugly, hideous insults.  Of course, this is just a matter of personal opinion, and I acknowledge that you cannot help liking jazz any more than you can help having a hideously warty face.  But what really gets me about jazz, and this, admittedly, is not the fault of the genre itself, or its practitioners, but what really gets me is when jazz gets used as a cultural signifier by people who don’t actually like the music but like what they think is its image and what they therefore think their artfully constructed love of jazz says about them.  Of course I know some people actually like jazz, genuinely like it, and fair enough.  With all its jolly honking, tooting, and indeed parping, jazz is bound to appeal to some people in the same way that bright colours, spinning bow-ties, and clowns appeal to some people, and you, genuine lovers of jazz, are entirely exempted from the hate-filled claims I am about to make.  Thing is, though, let’s face it, far too many people claim to like jazz for them all to be telling the truth.  So what are they playing at, these fakers of a love of jazz?  It seems to me that in “liking” or “loving” jazz, they’re trying to show that they like and appreciate vernacular cultural forms, that they can relate to the alterity of it all, yeh, so they’re cool, man, kinda groovy, freethinking yeh, a little bit *alt.*, little bit rad, despite being a solicitor by day, while at the same time their appreciation of jazz demonstrates their impeccable aesthetic taste and intellectual discernment.  In other words, they’re trying to be non-stuck-up and non-conformist, and yet unwittingly, and indeed witlessly, they’re doing it in a totally stuck-up and conformist way.  In these ways, jazz is just a meme, and not a musical one, but, for Jazz-love-fakers, a cultural one, and is thus the opposite of what they think it is, and it says the opposite about them from what they think it does. These people live in Islington in the late 1980s and early 90s. They probably “love” contempowawy darnce as well.  And they're posh too, and talk all lah-deh-dah, like “Yah, Tarquin and I are gaying to the Montreux Jizz Festival.”  The idiots.

If you don’t believe any of the above, check out the YouTube video below of a pair of appalling drongoes doing some “Experimental Jazz” in front of a small crowd of precious gumps pretending they’re enjoying what they’re watching and hearing.  I mean look at them.  Listen to them.  That tool can’t play a trumpet any more than I can, and the drummer’s even worse.  Sounds like an avid vegan's arse blasts at the wrong end of International Mung Bean Day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT2kvMSVrFI

Really Extreme Fishing with Robson Green

Because my life is sometimes so exciting, from time to time I find myself sitting in my armchair in my slippers reading my Radio Times, with my cup of tea and my toasted tea cake to hand.  And in these circumstances, as I peruse the cornucopia* of television entertainment advertised therein, I sometimes find myself utterly at a loss to understand what on earth is going on.  [* I wasn’t totally sure I was right to use the word cornucopia here, so I checked it out on Googlepedia, and Googlepedia said this: “A goat’s horn overflowing with fruit, flowers, and grain, signifying prosperity. Also called horn of plenty,” and I thought, yes, that’s what I meant, so I left it in.]  It’s not that the programme titles are difficult to understand.  The problem is often the opposite of that—that I am left at a loss to understand what on earth is going on if I take the titles as literal descriptions of what’s in the actual programme.  I’m talking about programmes like I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here (there really is no punctuation), Embarrassing Illnesses, Embarrassing Bodies, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, The Only Way Is Essex, The Jeremy Kyle Show, and so on.  You’ve seen them too.  Of course, eventually I come to understand what these emissions comprise, either by watching them or by osmosis, the latter process involving glancing at  tabloid newspaper headlines and reading the more informative Facebook and Twitter feeds. 

But one programme I never either watched or got clues about via tabloids and social networking is this one: Extreme Fishing with Robson Green.  So, one evening recently my life got so overwhelmingly exciting that I decided to research what this programme was about by utilising the internet: the ultimate goat’s horn overflowing with fruit, flowers, and grain, signifying prosperity.  Also called a horn of plenty.  And on the internet, or horn of plenty, I discovered, to my enormous disappointment, the nature of which is explained later, that Extreme Fishing with Robson Green involves the rather un-extreme actor fishing for unusual fish in unusual places. So the four episodes of series one, for example, involved Robson Green fishing for tuna in Costa Rica, for catfish in the USA, for sardine in South Africa, for blue marlin in Spain and Portugal, that kind of thing. This was admittedly evidently exciting enough for enough viewers to tune in to prompt Channel 5 to commission a second and this time nine-part series in which Robson Green fished for things such as sablefish in Canada, hapuka in New Zealand, and arapaima and fresh-water stingray in Thailand.  Now, I think you can already see what’s happening here: inflation.  The passage of time and the imperative to improve the viewers' experiences of piscatorial extremity led to more and then more extreme fishing in more and then more extreme places.  Indeed, by the time we get to series five (tellingly but inaccurately entitled “At the Ends of the Earth”), Robson Green is fishing for six-gilled shark in Ascension Island, ruby snapper in Papua New Guinea, Pacific giant crab in New Caledonia, and silver piranha in Argentina.  In a sign that the franchise was by this time reaching the end of its natural life, series five had only six programmes.  Besides, where do you go with Extreme Fishing once Robson Green has been to “the ends of the earth”? Okay, er, Slightly More Moderate Fishing, Again, with Robson Green?  I think we can all agree, that that means, in terms of television spectacle, and therefore viewers and therefore advertising revenues, we’re going nowhere any more.

So, here’s my pitch to get commissioned a sixth and maybe seventh and maybe even endless numbers of series’ of Extreme Fishing with Robson Green.  First, I propose, and herein is the source of the enormous disappointment mentioned above, that the whole concept the show was based on initially was wrong, even possibly misleading. But it’s not too late to change.  Indeed, now they’re running out of species and places, change is a matter of survival. The problem is that the first five series were all about “what” and “where”: all very salmon fishing in the Yemen, and therefore clichéd and boring.  And indeed, it means that the species of fish and places they were fished were “Extreme,” supposedly, rather than the extremity inhering in the fishing itself.  That indeed is where things get misleading, because, presumably, when Robson Green fished for barracuda in Cuba, he used tried-and-tested local Cuban methods of barracuda-fishing.  And that of course would have been highly advisable for health and safety reasons.  In other words, then, he did “Ordinary” fishing for “Extreme” fish in “Extreme” places.  Even then, though, it requires a certain Brit-o-centrism to describe barracuda and indeed Cuba as extreme.  They’re not extreme to either barracuda or to Cubans, presumably.  I, a Briton, would certainly think it odd if the Cuban equivalent of Channel 5 had a programme entitled “Extreme Fishing with Roberto Verde” in which Roberto Verde spent a quiet afternoon mildly fly fishing on the River Avon.  But, anyway, the main point is, the newly and more accurately re-conceptualised, revamped, and far more exciting version of Extreme Fishing with Robson Green needs to get away from what and where and move on to “how.”  Yes, HOW!  That is, not what fish you fish and where you fish them, but HOW you catch the fish.  A much more exciting idea, as we’ll see.  Also, a new series conceptualised this way would be much cheaper and more environmentally-friendly to make, because you would not have to worry about expensive or endangered species or hard-to-reach and exotic locations.  The catching of the fish is the spectacle.  And if the fish-catching methods are sufficiently extreme, then no one will care if the fishing is for tiger fish in Zambia; it could as easily be about fishing for trout in the Manchester Ship Canal.  So, to give specific examples that I believe will prove beyond all doubt the enormous potential viewing appeal of a sixth series of “Extreme Fishing with Robson Green,” here are some ideas for what could feature in particular episodes:

Robson Green goes pike fishing with a pump-action shotgun.
Robson Green goes cod fishing with hand grenades.
Robson Green goes crab fishing with a pneumatic drill.
Robson Green goes blowfish fishing with a steam roller.
Robson Green goes puffer fish fishing with a hat pin.
Robson Green goes catfish fishing with a dog.
Robson Green goes tiger prawn fishing with a real tiger.
Robson Green goes goldfish fishing in steel toe-capped boots.
Robson Green goes bream fishing with a cricket bat.
Robson Green goes trout fishing with a hockey stick.
Robson Green goes chub fishing, kicking the chub on to the river bank.
Robson Green goes carp fishing, stunning the carp with head butts.
Robson Green goes swordfish fishing, grabbing the swordfish by their snouts and smashing them against a rock.
Robson Green goes fishing for leaping salmon, chopping them in half in mid-leap with a samurai sword.  
Robson Green goes fishing for electric eels, throwing them into a wood chipper.
Robson Green goes tuna fishing in an underwater car with a machine gun on the front, like in The Spy Who Loved Me.
Robson Green goes lobster fishing with a remote control Transformer Robot.
Robson Green goes mussel fishing in a gigantic It’s a Knockout pirate costume, and has three minutes to put as many mussels as he can in a couple of big red buckets using his huge foam pirate hands, and then has to run though a large paddling pool while members of the production team try to knock him over by throwing water-filled balloons at him, until he reaches a skating rink, where he has to empty the buckets and try to stand upright while smashing as many mussels as he can to smithereens with an enormous yellow rubber mallet.
Robson Green goes fishing for shark by jumping them.
End of series.

The 1970s were a Bad Thing—A BAD THING—whatever Dominic Sandbrook may say.

So, a few afternoons ago I was sitting in my armchair reading my Radio Times, with my cup of tea and my toasted tea cake to hand, and my slippers on my feet *, when I noted with interest that Dominic Sandbrook is hosting a new TV series starting this week on BBC2 about the 1970s.  Here’s a link to information on it on the BBC’s website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ghscj [* I once mentioned to my mate Nick Davies that I read something or other in the Radio Times and he went into a quite hilarious extended riff at my expense about me drinking tea and eating toasted tea cakes in my slippers etc, but you probably had to be there.]  Anyway, according to Dr. Sandbrook’s RT preview of his series, and according to TV previews I’ve seen since, the programmes aim to debunk the popular conception of the 70s as a deeply desperate and dismal decade.  Now, hmm, now, yes, hmm, now, I was born in 1965, so I was four when the 70s began and I was 15 when the albeit arbitrariness of human constructions of time brought the era to an end.  As opposed to young Sandbrook, who was 5 when the long and literally dark decade ended.  Of course that by no means means that Sandbrook is unqualified to comment on the 1970s, or else I’d have to declare myself unfit to comment on the 18th century, which I do, as my job.  Nor does it mean he is less qualified than me to talk about the 70s: I don’t doubt for a moment that his extensive research makes him much better qualified than me.  But I can’t help thinking that, well, yes, and indeed OMG, I remember the 1970s, and, yes, well, OMFG, I have to say that I am a trifle sceptical about Dr. Sandbrook's claims.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I like Dominic Sandbrook.  What I’ve read of his work strikes me as fascinating, provocative, beautifully written, informative, and popular in a good way.  And I’m also not jealous or in any resentful of the popular and commercial success he has achieved while he was in and since he left academe.  I’ve criticised popular historians before (Steve Sarson's Blog: David Starkey: what the ****? and Steve Sarson's Blog: Niall Ferguson, Niall Schmerguson.), but I did so because of what these guys said, not because of what they do.  These people and their many counterparts play invaluable roles in spreading historical knowledge and in generating interest in history among audiences way beyond what I and most academic historians can hope to reach.  And that keeps the likes of me in work.  This can be characterised as a Good Thing. 

Yet I can’t help thinking that the claims that Dominic Sandbrook claims to make represent a bit of revisionism gone a bit too far.  Sandbrook has form for this kind of thing, writing in White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (2006) that the 60s were not really all that swinging and were, contrary to popular belief, a bit rubbish.  Ironically, considering what he says of the 70s.  But, while wondering whether the imperatives of writing for a wider audience encourage a bit of over-egged but commercially friendly controversialism, I have to admit that it happens in academic history too (by “academic history” I mean history produced for a largely academic audience; I don’t mean that Sandbrook’s work is not of academic quality), and academic publishers need to make money as much as what I’m calling commercial ones do, and nowadays we UK academics exist in a marketplace where we must prove the “impact” of our “outputs”.  Even before the days of the “impact agenda,” though, we had historians making counter-intuitive and therefore attention-grabbing claims.  Such as medieval historians claiming that medieval artwork was just as good as renaissance art.  But, Oh, come on!  I mean, come on!  I mean COME ON!  COME! ON!!!!!  Have you, you who make these claims, BEEN to Florence and seen room after room after room after room after room of Madonna con Bambinos?  Those stupid and ridiculous mono-dimensional pictures, with no light and no shade, just one pan-faced Mary and one 30-year-old baby Jesus after another after another, all exactly the sodding same, and all with backgrounds of kingy-blingy gold and blue, when the whole point of this “king” is that he was born in a rickety, stinky old stable and was surrounded in his infancy by hay, mangers, mud, wood, and donkey droppings.  You’re seriously saying that this crap is comparable with a Caravaggio?  You’re seriously suggesting that these tinctured turds measure up to a Titian?  If you’re saying that then I’m saying that I’m J-Lo’s bum double.  Or, for another example, how about those who claim that the Vikings were simple peaceful farming folk?  Well, maybe some of their descendants were.  But the ones who first left their shores in longboats were long-bearded axe-wielding bastards named Harald Hard Ruler, Sweyn Forkbeard, Eric Bloodaxe, Stenkil, and Cnut, and they terrorised, pillaged, enslaved, raped, and murdered their way through the populations of these British Isles and beyond, leaving nothing in their wake but death, destruction, and half-eaten and thoughtlessly discarded chicken legs.  These can be characterised as Bad Things.

So, anyway, it seems to me that maybe Dominic Sandbrook is trying to do for the 70s what some aesthetically-challenged medievalists did for art history and what some cranially-challenged Viking skolurs did for Anglo-Saxon history.  Like I say, though, I like Dominic Sandbrook and I’m going to give his show a go.  I’m sure it’ll be fascinating and fun.  It may even convince me.  His ideas certainly, admittedly, sound more plausible than those of the medieval revisionists I’ve mentioned.  I may well write about the 1970s afterwards, one way or the other.  But beforehand, at the risk of sounding like I’m barfing up a Stuart Maconie script written by researchers for I ♥1970-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 or 9, here’s a list of Bad Things about the 1970s.  Some of them are general Bad Things that many of you will recognise, others were more personal Bad Things that I experienced myself, though you may recall similar sorts of experiences, but all of them are Bad Things.  Afterwards, in the interest of balance, however specious that concept is, I will mention some Good Things about the 70s.  But then I will conclude that overall the 1970s can be characterised as a Bad Thing.  So, here we go.

* Endless, endless, endless industrial inaction.
* Blackouts.

* Red Robbo.

* The election of Margaret Thatcher and the birth of hegemonic neo-liberal politics in the UK.

* The IRA.

* Astrid Proll, though 70s terrorists sounded sexier than the Abu Hamza types we have now.

* The oil crisis. Which, thank goodness, is now long over with.

* Pol Pot.

* Idi Amin.

* Plane hijackings, on a daily basis.

* The later stages of the Vietnam War, without the really cool soundtrack that the earlier stages had. 

* Glamorous Rock.

* Disco.

* Discos.

* Johnny Cash’s tragic “Cheese Period.”

* Chopper Bikes.
* The Ford Crapi, the Dagenham Ferrari, nuff said.

* Flares.

* Trim phones.

* Douchebags.

* Douchebags who could—and would—imitate trim phones.

* Douchebags who could, would—and did—imitate trim phones on That’s Life.

* Dogs who supposedly could say “sausages” but who could actually only growl “ghshsughshsughsh” on That’s Life. If their owners forced their jaws open and squeezed their arses hard enough.

* That’s Bloody That’s Sodding That’s Bloody Sodding Life.

* The Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Wisdom affair.

* The cutting edge of sexual liberation being represented by Sid James, that gurning geezer off On the Buses, and that quivering erection-on-legs who was in Man about the House.

* Racial politics, as represented in Love Thy Neighbour, Bernard Manning, Jim Davidson etc etc etc and et bloody and unbelievably cetera.

* TV presenters on Pebble Mill at One and Midlands Today who spoke a posh foreign language, tyelling ass for exaarmple thet aarfter the knews there will be a progremme about the potaarto femine. (That was before they invented “regional” accents in the 80s.)

* Summer-holiday-time children’s TV schedules made in That London for Them Southerners, so that the Banana Splits started two weeks after the summer holidays began in the Midlands and, even worse, ended two arse-aching and bitterness-inducing weeks after we went back to bloody buggering school while Them Southerners ponced around on their sofas or couches, or whatever they called their settees, in their mansions eating foie gras, caviar, and foxes, while enjoying the Banana Splits and talking to each other in their non-regional accents. The bastards.

* The vandalisation of the Blue Peter Garden.  By a bitter provincial.  But I can’t say who it was.  Or I’d have to kill you.

* White dog poos. What was that about? as comedians like Peter Kay say.
* Watneys Red Barrel (with not even a redeeming apostrophe).

* Double Diamond “beer”.

* Babycham “?”

* Working Men’s Clubs that smelt impossibly glamorously of darts and of beer- and urine-soaked Axminster.

* Convenience foods whereby granulated carcinogens could be turned into pooey puddings by just adding lime-encrusted tap water, and that are to this day busily concocting cancers in the intestines of everyone over the age of 32.

* Mince.  Every night.  Every sad and sodding night.  For ten years.  For ten desperate, depression-era fucking years.  

* My mum deciding that, after Egon’s barber shop closed, the hairdressers cost too much, and so she began cutting my and my brother’s hair herself, giving rise to the famous Lutterworth “Knife and Fork Job.” Pic below.

* The Queen’s Silver Jubilee, when everyone gathered for street parties and ate jelly and wore paper hats in communal rituals of moronically happy obeisance to a millennia-old harbinger of death and bringer of oppression that even the most primitive Amazonian Head Hunter would point and laugh at and that... oh... er... Diamond Jubilee....  

* The summer of 76 that was so sunny and hot that everyone had a fucking headache all the time, which was made worse by the fact that you had to talk to and be all chummy-chummy with your horrible, boring, sweaty neighbours at effing standpipes, as if we were all gruel-eating Dickensian grotesques, and yet still all happy and chipper and keep-calm-and-carry-on and make-do-and-mend and community-spirited and shit, so that photographers could take photos of us to fool future historians into thinking that, in contrast to the popular belief and indeed the very real reality that the 70s really were a Bad Thing, and despite being gruel-eating Dickensian grotesques, 1970s people were all happy and chipper and keep-calm-and carry-on and make-do-and-mend and community-spirited and shit.

Okay, so there were some good things about the 70s, and in the interest of pointlessly balanced argument I’m going to list them now.  All of them.

* Tiswas: a partial compensation for Noel Edmunds’s Multicoloured Swap Shop (why was it multicoloured? Why? Why?).  
* The Rockford Files, a more than sufficient compensation for Petrocelli, but not for Petrocelli and Starsgay and Butch combined. 
* Hill Street Blues, and the birth of the modern US police drama.
* M*A*S*H, Cheers, and the birth of the modern US sitcom.
* A Tory Prime Minister, Red Ted Heath, who talked about “the unacceptable face of capitalism,” while today no “Labour” Party leader would dare much less desire to utter such heretical words.
* And, er, that’s it.
* And anyway, even if the list were longer, one Lindisfarne Gospel does not cover a million Madonna con Bambinos.   

  The famous Lutterworth Knife and Fork Job c. 1976