Signifying Nothing

For some reason I cannot stop going to HMV, even though it always makes me sad.


I used to love it. It was my holy place. A cathedral of undiscovered movies and albums. Racks and racks of LPs, and then CDs, that could offer up unexpected and magical things. Albums you'd never heard of, by bands you loved. Films you'd only read about, and desperately wanted to see, and suddenly here they were, stickered, 2 for £20.


I don't want any of their things anymore. But I still want to be in their shop, drifting around like those zombies in Dawn of the Dead. The 1978 version. Not the 2004 one by Zack Snyder. I like the Snyder one, but those zombies don't really 'drift'. They're more 'scampery'. If they were in HMV, they'd just knock everything over and run off without clearing it up.

"Hello. Do you have Jungle Book? No, the new one."

Like the undead inhabitants of the shopping mall in Romero's film, I shuffle about the shop, staring at things that used to mean something, clutching at a life I used to live. I think that's who we all are, in that shop, these days. People who used to live a different life.

We like to look at the DVDs and BluRays, even though we don't need them because we've got Netflix and Amazon and Tivos and torrents. We look wistfully at the games and the CDs in their shiny cases, but we don't pick them up because we download everything now. And we look at the increasing amount of figurines and T-shirts and mugs. And while we might idly toy with them, we know that, ultimately, they are useless tat.

What is it with these big headed plastic toy things?

Why does everyone love them?

The tat is there, of course, because you can't download it. Yet. Like the resurgence of vinyl, it signifies a desperation on the part of brick and mortar retailers to provide something unique. Something you can touch. A lifeline to a time when things were things, and not just the idea of things.


And it's fine, of course, living here in the future, with all the digital stuff. It's great to be able to download media - to have such incredible access to films and television and music and games. Wonderful. But there's something sad, and slightly desperate, in the way that the analogue world is trying to integrate itself with this shift in consumer habits. And something more than sad. Something worse.


There's a rack of CDs, for example, in HMV, that groups music under the banner "Trending Now!" I stood there, this morning, and looked at this rack for a little while, confused. Trending? What on earth are you talking about? Trending? Trending where?


Who's in charge of this stuff? My great aunt? "Trending is what the kids like. Things that are trending. On the Twitter. Things trend on the Twitter. So let's say our stuff is trending. Then people will be interested. Like on the Twitter."


Except it's not trending, is it, imaginary Great Aunt Marketing Manager? Trending is the opposite of what this is. Trending is a spontaneous, emergent response to things. It's a chaotic, crowd led surge of genuine interest. It can be manipulated, of course. But not controlled. It's an expression of the human psyche, like the mad, magnificent patterns formed when a flock of birds swirls beautifully into the sky.

Some birds, flocking. Or possibly photoshopped. I don't know.

As I write, things that are trending on Twitter include Kezia Dugdale, Malta and Meat Free Monday. I'm pretty sure HMV don't sell any of those things. Well, I suppose the stock is, technically, meat free. But that's just a coincidence.


Telling us that the music you want to sell is "trending" is meaningless. It's a weird, unintuitive attempt to reverse engineer the concept of what matters. A tone deaf attempt to appropriate new ideas, even though those ideas are the very antithesis of what you're all about. The culture which leads to things 'trending' is the very reason HMV, and places like it, are dying out.


As I left the store, empty handed, I saw another example of this sad, weird desperation. A poster on a wall, in a near empty food-court. It said 'Selfie Corner!" There was a little cartoon image of a smiling face, camera in hand, delighted that finally, against all odds, it had found somewhere to take a selfie.


As I looked I both understood and completely failed to understand. You want people to come into your food court. And no-one does, because they're all at home streaming Stranger Things and downloading No Man's Sky. So you grasp at language and you try to commodify it. Here. Here is where you can take your selfie. Here in this corner. Please. Here. You like taking selfies. You fill the world with them. So do it here. Here. Here. Please, God, Here.


It's like that zombie, from 1978, shuffling around, folorn and lost. Hungry, without knowing why. Biting at the living, consuming the new, hoping that, maybe, young flesh contains the cure to this rotting, fading existence. Maybe if it eats enough living tissue it will somehow catch that spark of life again.


But it won't. What was alive will just die in its mouth. It will make things worse, and it will never be satisfied. Words and phrases will lose their context. Nothing will mean anything any more. Every word anyone ever says will be caught up in the wind and snatched away, untethered from it's purpose. Lost.


Of course, I may just be over-reacting. Like I say, I did really used to like going to HMV.


This got darker than I expected.


Um...


Sorry.


Look, here's a Pop Vinyl adipose. Enjoy that.

Ruminations

My mind is full of fascinating thoughts. Because I am full of love, I share the following ones with you. Warning - none of it is in the slightest bit useful or relevant to actually achieving anything.


My thoughts...


1.

If I spent as much time watching things on my Netflix List as I do browsing Netflix for things to put on my Netflix List I would have fewer things on my Netflix List and thus it wouldn't be so intimidating that I can't face watching anything on it and so spend all my time browsing instead.

 

Too. Many. Things.



2.

There should be a sequel to the film 'Once' and it should be called 'Twice'.

Then there should be another sequel to that, but probably starring different actors, called 'Thrice'.

Then they should make a fourth one, set on a plane,  and call it... um... 'Frice'?

Then there should be a reboot of the whole thing called 'The Once'.

This is a good film and you should watch it. 

3.

The most annoyed I ever get is when I am browsing the internet and, as I go to click on a link, the page reorganises itself so I have clicked on something else. I mean, it waits until the exact microsecond I click, and then changes where everything is. The thing I was going to click on is now way down the page, and in its place is a link to something else. Something I don't give a toss about. It makes me howl with rage. I'm convinced it does it deliberately.

 

The Internet, seen here annoying someone.

4.


There should be a sequel to the film It Follows called They Follow.

Then there should be a sequel to that called We Follow.

And then He/She Follows.

And then I Follow.

It Follows is great, and quite spookington.

That's a word. It means spooky, only better.

5.

It pleases me greatly that Bates Motel - a programme about the young Norman Bates from Psycho - is an anagram of O Let Me Stab.

See?

6.

There should be a sequel to Suicide Squad, called 'We're Very Sorry'. In it, the producers of 'Suicide Squad' should apologise, for ages, to camera, for the terrible script they inflicted upon us. It wouldn't be very entertaining, but it would be better than the nonsense they made in the first place.

Lovely imagery. Awful waste of time film.

That's all. About your business now.



But Who Will Sing For Richard Neale?

Time for one of those rare blogs that isn't about death and existential angst. Who do we have to thank for this reprieve? None other than local songsmith and generally decent human being, the improbably bequiffed  Ric Neale.

This is Ric. He's trying to guess what instrument it is by touching it.

He thinks it's a harpsichord. He's close!

Ric has written, recorded and released an album of songs he wrote on his piano and sang with his voice. It's quite nice and you can find it using this link, should you so desire.

Click me to hear "All That Counts"

Anyway, that's not why we're really here. "Yes, yes," you think, "This stuff about Richard Neale is all very well Rob, but isn't there something brilliant you did which we can talk about instead?"

Glad you asked. For the album launch, Ric asked - nay demanded - that I perform a specially written poem, all about him. What a raging egotist! Luckily for him, so am I, and I quickly worked out that I could steal some of the attention rightly due to Ric by writing such a poem.

I read the poem out at the launch. Everyone agreed it was the best thing about the night and that really it would have been better if the evening was just about me, and not featured any piano at all. I'm pretty sure that's what they were saying. I did drink quite a lot of wine.

Anyway, here's the poem. If you don't know Ric, it will be almost completely meaningless. But hey - so is most of life. Don't blame me.

Poem For Ric Neale

I gaze into the perfect eyes of the man I most admire

His enviable hairline and finely chiselled face tell me

Everything is possible when in the presence of his holy fire

 

This is where I go when I want to know what’s real

I am standing before a full length mirror

My name is Richard Marshall Neale

 

I am no mortal man but rather

A being of infinite grace and wonder

Music flows from my fingers like dead skin drops from yours

Harmony and grace spring like beautiful sweat from my invisible pores

  

My voice is fine wine to your unworthy ears

My music an expensive meal

I’m the reason God invented tears

I am Richard. Marshall. Neale

 

Desired by women,

Envied by blokes

I’m Jimmy Carr with better jokes

 

I love Tom Cruise

For whom I’m often mistaken

I wrote and directed the Force Awakens

 

I’m Captain Kirk if he was cuter

I’m Paul McCartney’s music tutor

 

I’m not *the* God but I’m probably one of them

Did I ever tell you I played for Jason Donovan?

 

It’s impossible to fathom my unstoppable appeal

I am the alpha and omega

I am Ric Neale

 

I am the power

I am the glory

I am the literally never ending story

 

I’m impervious to bullets

I do not feel pain

I cannot be made wet by rain

 

I’m like Jesus but more tuneful

I’m like love only more truthful

I’m All the Young Dudes if the dudes were more youthful

 

I will be here when the human race has died away

In the ruins of these cities my songs will still play

 

Free of you peasants, finally unbound

My brilliant voice the only human sound

 

Carving statues of myself out of the trees

Finally happy in a world made of me

  

I am the full, not the partial, deal

I am the one, the only, Richard Marshall Neale

 

Fascist Bully Boy

 

When I was at school I liked English, because English was good and all the other subjects were stupid. And by 'stupid' I mean, of course, that I was no good at them.

The worst subject of all was PE, obviously. Cold, miserable bloody PE, with its mud and its shouting and its complete lack of sitting down reading a book. I was - and still am - completely rubbish at every sport. It wasn't so much that I was chosen last, as that the concept of 'last' was redefined to include 'after the eventual death of the Universe'. One of the things that worries me most about the afterlife is the possibility that I'll eventually have to be in goal for Jim McNulty's five a side team.

Next worse was languages. All languages. Because they are impossible. That's not hyperbole. I genuinely believe that they are impossible to learn. Oh, you can say some different words instead of the ones you were going to say, but that's just dicking about with sounds. A whole other system of communication, that you can think in? Poppycock. If you ever meet anyone claiming to speak another language, they are lying. They speak English and they are just trying to impress you. Have none of it. Report them to the authorities and call them 'a whore'.

Third worst was science.

Now, in principle I liked science. It was indoors, it was provably useful and it featured a great many things which you could set on fire. But our experience of science, back in the late 1980s, was subject to some form of localised teacher's crisis which meant that we never had the same person at the front of the class for more than a few weeks at a time. An array of supply teachers came and went, leaving us with little in the way of continuity. Mr. Johnson. Mr. Wright. Miss... Babadook, or something. And Mr. Pillay.

Poor old Mr. Pillay. He really didn't stand a chance. For a start, he was called 'Pillay', which, of course, sounded enough like 'Pillock' to make our adolescent minds jizz themselves with delight. Added to that was his status as our fourth or fifth supply teacher. Even relatively good students like myself had realised by then that having a supply teacher was pretty much a licence to do what the hell we liked. And so we did. I shudder to think what it must have been like trying to instil order on the selfish little bunch of pyromaniacs presented to him every Thursday morning.

To his credit, he always seemed pretty happy. He would sit at the front, grinning benignly and pretending not to know what 'pillock' meant. Maybe he was just waiting it out, knowing that we were bound for cold, bleak futures because of our frankly appalling attitudes, while he knew the love of a good woman. I don't know. Either way, I eventually got a B, but I still can't remember the difference between amps and volts. I do know that if you put too much of one of them through a resistor, it fills the classroom with smoke and gets Paul McGrath suspended.

Anyway. The reason I bring Mr. Pillay up, apart from possibly to exorcise some small measure of guilt, is because I've been thinking about language. No, not languages. We've already established that they don't exist. Especially Russian. Whoever invented that didn't even use real letters - just triangles and such.

No, language. Specifically its misuse.

You see, one of the many shameful things I did in my teenage years was to be genuinely abusive to poor old Mr. Pillay. He had issued me with a Code of Conduct. This was our school's version of lines - a print out of the school behaviour code, which a misbehaving child such as myself had to copy out on the back. Whoever devised it correctly worked out that it was a massive pain in the arse turning the thing over and over to copy the words out.

Anyway, I was even cleverer. Rather than copy it all out, I simply wrote out one sentence, again and again, on the back. Hilarity and mirth were mine as I handed back my code of conduct, covered in the phrase 'Mr. Pillay is a Fascist!'

This did not go down well. His happy grin fell away, the Head of Year was sent for and boy was I in trouble.

Did I know, asked Mr. Crowe - our terrifyingly large Head of Year - did I know what 'fascist' actually meant? Well the joke was on him, because of course I did. It meant someone who told me to do something I didn't want to. I'd learned it from television - specifically The Young Ones. I told him this, and threw in some free advice about how school might be better if it was more like television, with its creativity, its lack of PE and its relaxed attitude towards facts.

He was not impressed and rightly so. He did his best to give me some context for the words I was so carelessly throwing about, and tried to impress upon me the importance of not just using phrases for the sake of it. He said that words carried not just meanings, but the weight of their history and usage. They can be used thoughtlessly and, indeed, to avoid thinking.

I don't think I particularly listened, at the time. And I'm probably conflating some of what Mr. Crowe said with things I've learned from other people, in response to other dickish things I said. And he probably looked less like a cartoon eagle than I remember. But the essence of that encounter stays with me.

It seems that I was something of a trendsetter in my thoughtless use of 'fascist' as a catch-all insult for my intellectual opponents. I should have patented it. But then I would probably have found that I wasn't being original at all. Rather, I was just expressing a basic human instinct: why make an argument when you can use a catchphrase?

I get why this instinct exists. It's loads easier to deal with someone's point of view if you reduce it to a tiny set of ideas. And indeed, if you reduce them to a 'type' of person. Mr. Pillay could be safely ignored, because he was a fascist. That's why he resented my young, independent spirit of freedom. Not because I was an idiot. Because he was a fascist.

It's started to become a flag, for me, of a poor argument. Just look out for a regurgitated phrase and sure enough, the argument following it is likely to be half baked and tedious. And, thanks to the joys of internet arguing, this is becoming something of an epidemic.

Here's the ones that really get on my wick:


Social Justice Warrior

Dreamed up by people who don't like the fact that non-men and non-whites are encroaching upon the 'normal' world.

You don't have to follow an argument about injustice for long before someone will vomit this one up. Apparently, if you are a bloke who thinks that women get a bad deal, or a white guy who thinks non-whites suffer terrible injustice, then it's not because you've thought about it and come to an honest conclusion. No. It's because you want to impress others with your pretend virtue. Neat.



"Sticking it down our throats".

Used exclusively, it seems, by people fed up of the fact that they occasionally have to acknowledge that some people are gay. It's always seemed odd to me that a phrase with such a blatant homo-erotic charge should get used without fail by people who presumably wouldn't want anything sticking down their throat. Maybe that's the point. But how come they all use the same phrase? Was there a meeting, where approved homophobic language was set in stone?

Or is it, maybe, that mindlessly repeating half understood arguments leads to a tendency to repeat the language in which those arguments were originally made?

 Regardless, whenever I see someone complaining that gay issues are being 'thrust down their throats' I    a) dismiss their argument as derivative and thoughtless and    b) mentally picture them deep throating Freddie Mercury.



Heartless Tory / Bleeding Heart Liberal

Could we just agree that yes, there are some dickheads on both sides of the political spectrum, but there are also plenty of people who just have different opinions? And that those opinions lead to political affiliation, rather than the other way around?

My political views don't come from a desire to say the correct 'left wing' things. Rather, calling myself 'left wing' seems to be a 'best fit' way to frame the various thoughts and feelings I have on the world. I'm sure there are plenty of conservatives who feel the same - their right wing thoughts are a product of a thought process, rather than an identity.

Although they'd be lying, obviously, because they are Tories.

Joke.



Mansplaining

Ah, controversial. Plus, I'm a man, so what do I know? How dare I try to mansplain mansplaining?

Well, hopefully I'm not. And that's my point, sort of.

I think I understand the intention of this word, and I can see its value. It gives name to a phenomenon whereby men assume that they know more than women, not by virtue of actually knowing more facts, but by virtue of being more male. Is that about right?

And I guarantee I've done it. Absolutely. It's not just science teachers I'm horrible to. I bet there's plenty of times I've talked over a woman when I should have shut up and listened.

And I also bet that my theoretical understanding of 'mansplaining' seems pretty shallow compared to the experience of actually living it, all the bloody time.

Listen to me. Social Bloody Bleeding Heart Justice Warrior.

But I'm not doing 'mansplaining' now, I don't think. I'm just pointing out something I've noticed. Which is that 'mansplaining' seems to be getting used, quite a lot, to mean, 'How dare a man disagree with a woman!"

I've genuinely seen this quite a lot in online conversations. A man and a woman disagree. The woman accuses the man of doing the 'splaining. The man tries to argue that he just has a different point of view. This is, of course, just making him even more 'splainier. That's a word. Splainier. Look it up. No, don't. The dictionary will only lie.

And it sucks. Partly because it's bullshit. I've every right to disagree with a women, as long as I do it respectfully and not on the assumption that my sex makes me right. But more, it's a problem because I think it robs a potentially useful word of its true meanings. It stops 'mansplaining' having a real, proper use as a signifier of a social issue, and just becomes a slogany, argument-strangling piece of nonsense.


Feminazi

I know I've been saying we shouldn't group people by language, but... I think if anyone uses this phrase, they are probably a massive cockwomble.




Anyway. That's what I think. Of course, in saying this I'm probably using a whole load more assumptions about people, and using unhelpful words to do so. That's the problem with language, isn't it? Use it enough and it starts to accrue all sorts of secondary, stupid meanings that make it impossible to properly articulate thoughts. And once you stop being able to articulate thoughts, is it possible to really think?

Damn you language, you slippery, un-pin-downable beast. You are a pain in the arse.


Still. You're not as bad as PE. Bloody PE.

Clare

In a world without Facebook I would probably never have heard from Clare again.

She would have remained in the archives of my memory, a slow motion montage of her best moments. A girl from the late 1980s, all hair and all check shirts. Turning and smiling. Playing guitar by a campfire. Laughing nervously at my weirder jokes. Turning. And smiling.

Without Facebook I’d never have heard from her again. I wouldn’t have known that she was ill. And I wouldn’t have had a message yesterday morning telling me that she was gone.

Thanks Facebook. I think.

It’s been about 20 years since I last saw Clare, back at my first church in Bradford. We were part of a youth group, a bunch of friends who spent all their time together for a few years, as if nothing and no-one else mattered, and then drifted apart into real life.

At least I think they drifted apart. Maybe everyone else still spends all their time together, singing songs and explaining Leviticus and driving to McDonald’s at midnight. That’s entirely possible. Maybe it’s just me who drifted off.

But it seems unlikely. It was very much ‘a time’ and like all such times, it came to an end. Marriages happen. Careers happen. Slowly that process takes place whereby months and years pass and life cartwheels on, and suddenly you realise that it’s twenty years later. You tell a story or mention a name, but no-one here knows who you are talking about. Your life has shifted around you and none of the reference points are there any more.

My time at that church in Bradford – Church on the Way – is so far away now as to be a different world. With a couple of exceptions, all those relationships are gone. Social media lets me reconnect, here and there, with people I knew in the 80s. But these might as well be new friendships. We’re not the same people.

That was Better Call Saul. This is Breaking Bad. That was Happy Days. This is Joanie Loves Chachi. That was Pulp Fiction. This is that horrible insurance advert with Harvey Keitel. Some of the faces might be familiar, but everything inside has changed.

So I heard that Clare was ill. And that was weird because how could she be? She was fine, turning and smiling in that montage. The montage that passes for memory once a person drifts far into your past. And they live forever and they have good lives and they stay young. And you stay young with them.

Clare showed me how to play guitar. Well, my dad taught me the first few chords, I suppose, so when the history of rock is written, I guess that will be his claim to fame. But it was Clare I followed when I started leading worship at that youth group. She was unfussy. Sensitive. She’d just pick up her guitar and play, eyes closed. No sheet music, just a confidence in the way the chords felt.

And I would watch her fingers - I can still see them – moving around the fretboard, swift and precise. I would sit beside her, chasing those chords, trying to keep up. She’d sing the songs and we’d all sing along with her, following her lead. She made it look easy. And slowly I learned how to make it look easy too. And in doing so, learned that it wasn’t easy at all.

It’s fair to say I was in awe of her. She was only a little older than me, but we were young and small differences seemed big. Where other girls had to put up with my terrible, adolescent attempts at romance, Clare existed in a different place. I admired her. Literally. Together with my friend Ian, I created an appreciation society for her. With badges. And a newsletter. It ran to four issues. Much of the information was made up, like the fact that she used to be in Iron Maiden, but its spirit was pure and true.

She liked it. I think. In retrospect it was quite an odd thing to do. But like I say, she was unusual.

Without Facebook, she’d have stayed there, for me, forever. Guitars and newsletters and teenage nonsense. And now there’s an odd kind of grief. You can’t miss someone you’ve not seen for decades, I don’t think. And I never saw her as a grown up, changed by life and children and illness. But there’s a profound sense of wrongness and sadness that the girl I knew should be dealt so unfair a hand.

So I’ve written this. Hardly the most profound thoughts anyone will have about her life or about her passing. But an offering of memory. Turning and smiling, slow motion in amber. A memory of a girl in her early 20s who shaped little parts of who I am.

Goodnight Clare.