Word The Cat

I’m feeling like leaving the country more and more and its not just the weather. It’s the fault of that show everyone watches; the news. The writing’s not as good as X-Factor and there’s no Mariah Carey key changes when something important happens. I did, however, see for the first time last night reconstructions of events on the 10 o clock news. The event in question was an angry looking Pakistani man talking to two other men, the story was terrorist/islamic exteremist (we don’t call them fascists over here yet) recruiting in universities. This on the same day that one eyed jack (by which I mean he’s a prick) expressed a personal dislike for the veil. Now although Downing Street argues this is a personal view, it is concurrent with John Reid’s warning Muslim parents to be vigilent against signs of extremism which threaten to rise like acne in their children.
The lines of the ‘war on terror’ are being redrawn domestically in Britain along cultural lines in the wake of the uncontestable failure of the military virtual-media/physical-bombing dynamic. So half the time on the BBC’s flagship news programme is given over to positing British mainstream values through the simultaneous positing of non-mainsteam (i.e. extremist) bogeymen. Jack Straw calls for a debate but the only debate permitted is where the boundaries of otherness should lie (i.e. should we allow the veil), the existence, coherence and position of ‘we’ is of course taken for granted. This may well come as no suprise; national governments have always been concerned with nation-building – the fact that people continue to believe in the concept of a nation is where they draw their legitimacy from – but suprising or not it still upsets me. I don’t like to be told what I think, or what ‘we’ think, I also don’t like seeing the lazy news editors swallowing every cultural dynamic they are fed in a calucated series of speeches co-ordinated by government press offices who know exactly what they are doing. I also don’t like to see people eager to represent the ‘other’ which the government requires to argue its legitimacy leap thoughtlessly into the media spotlight (that’s the other side – and predictably also the focus of the John Reid story). This behaviour allows even lazier newspaper editors the perfect excuse to suffix every story they write with the word ‘row’ or indeed ‘race row’.
There has never been such a thing as Britishness or British values these things have only ever been a site of power (cheers Michel). The othering of muslims and the simultaneous olive branch they are offered to become ‘mainstream muslims’ is a cynical attempt by the government and the media (who I regard as lazy rather than politically engaged) to legitimate its foreign policy by drawing attention away from the fact that people want to bomb London primarily because of war crimes committed by British soldiers overseas.

Rant over, I’m done. A year from now I’ll be in Japan (where I can’t understand the news).

bug kann & plastic jam – made in 2 minutes (origin unknown remix) 128kbps 4.7mb

Lucy wandered out by the weeping willow and dipped her toes into the flourescent water. What was missing was a class-driven subtext giving the narrative spice she thought as the road wound round the corner. Her mind fell back on description as she placed and replaced words and their sounds into a scrabbled bubble several inches above her head. “Carbon Neutral Youth Hostel”, “Unreadable Tigerlilly” pink blossom under navy blue sky and twigs floating along the stream ferns turning brown as day turned into night. Text humming through the thought bubble and a soft breeze blowing from the edge of the page. The point of origin for this whole episode lay somewhere in perspective, little more than a glint in her eye, beaten down by textual pressure from a ball of dust to a diamond. The future of the episode lay in gaudiness, becoming ever uglier and less recognisable as the palette begins to blur in heavy rain. Red becomes pink becomes a bastard purple when mixed with blue, the lines that form each picture decomposing. Lucy gets to her feet and watches her hand turn into a mitten and her arm into a line. Her legs run off at some new gradient and burst out like blades of horizontal grass. The head and face should by rights go last but its her neck that’s the most sheltered spot and that gets washed away at the end, left first as two lines then a messy blur.

orca – 4am 128kbps 4.2mb