Free Britney! Or "why women can't be rock stars"

Poor Britters. Almost every vile idea western culture has cultivated about women in the last two centuries has come home to roost on the half-bright pop starlet from a trailer trash town in Louisiana. She was a fried-chicken loving, Bible-believing, pre-pubescent beauty queen once. Now she’s a combination of Ophelia, the mad woman in the attic, Rapunzel, the wicked witch of the west and a plain old hysteric.

I use that word advisedly, in the Victorian sense. A woman driven mad by her womb. Because this, surely, was the catalyst that turned her from your average drinks-too-much-and-takes-her-clothes-off-teeny bopper into a prisoner of someone else’s device. Literally. Not content with taking away her children, the court then took away her personhood – handing the 26-year-old superstar and her estimated $40M fortune to the conservatorship of her oft-estranged father Jamie Spears (himself reportedly an alcoholic).

It was a disturbing and unbelievably sexist decision made – incredibly – by a woman: Reva Goetz. Handing Britney’s estate, temporarily, over to the care of her mother, Lynn, would have made a lot more sense, if parental care was merely the issue. After all, the singer and her mother appear to have a deep and loving, if troubled, relationship. The singer and her father didn’t appear to have a relationship at all, until he suddenly petitioned the court for unhindered control over ever aspect of her life (he has access to her medical records, control over who visits her houses, he can even change the locks on the doors) and her immense fortune. The message couldn’t be clearer: an out of control woman needs a man.

Most people, even if they wouldn’t agree Britney should have been handed over to her father like – literally – a piece of chattel, would probably agree she needed some kind of intervention. In itself a temptingly paternalistic view. Imagine, for a moment, she were a man. No need to imagine, actually, just trawl your memory for the countless stories of male rock’n’roll wildness ingrained in our cultural history:

Britney romped topless in a swimming pool.
Keith Moon drove a car into one, but no one thought to lock him up.

Motley Crue’s Vince Neil killed his friend in a drink driving accident and got 30 days in jail.
Britney once drove briefly with her baby son in her lap, no harm done apart from to her reputation – yet her house arrest has just been extended to six months.

Led Zeppelin made a habit of throwing televisions out of hotel windows and they were hailed as the hottest thing on the planet.
When Britney hit a car with an umbrella the tabloids went into meltdown, tutting over her "out of control" behaviour.

Britney was accused by “insiders” of feeding her kids junk food and trying to get her toddler’s teeth whitened.
No one seems to recall that during the making of Exile On Main Street various Stones’ babies were left to wander through the French farmhouse-come-recording-studio with feeding and nappy-changing done at the random impulse of whatever groupies were hanging around at the time.

Britters, in short, hasn’t been anywhere near as mad or bad as the [male] music stars that have gone before. Yet when she transgressed she was swiftly locked up in the gilt cage of her Beverly Hills mansion. It wouldn’t happen to a man. But then, lacking the appropriate reproductive organs, men can’t be hysterics, I guess.

Interestingly, one of the arguments trotted out to ultimately justify this was her “suicidal” tendencies. Jesus lord. Kurt Cobain had suicidal tendencies. Ian Curtis had suicidal tendencies. Jim Morrison had suicidal tendencies. When a man is driven to despair and kills himself it is poetic, heroic, noble even. When a woman betrays signs of the same despair it must be because she’s crazy, dangerous, unfit to make decisions for herself.

Why? Because ultimately, she is someone’s property. Why should daddy Spears have to give up such a prime piece of stock? Who gives a damn about the feelings of the goose who laid the golden egg?

Your money or your life: US health insurers conspire to commit murder

Some days the little IHT banner in my Gmail makes me want to dance with rage. Most days, in fact. Thanks to headlines like “Patients in U.S. to foot more of the bill for vital drugs”. What fresh hell is this? I wonder. Before I even click through to read the story I feel the foul ripples of some new Social Darwinist experiment poisoning the collective consciousness.

Apparently American health insurance companies, in their infinite wisdom and compassion, have started adjusting their co-payment system (whereby the insured person pays for part of the cost of their prescription drugs) from flat fees – say $20 or $50 a prescription to percentages. Like, 25% or 30%, or more. Not, of course, for cheap, bog standard antibiotics (there’s no money to be made there, they’re in the public domain) but for exorbitantly expensive new drugs “used to treat diseases that may be fairly common, including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, hemophilia [sic], hepatitis C and some cancers.” Diseases, in other words, that are chronic, devastating and require indefinite treatment.

Usually with drugs which, as the IHT blandly reports for which“[there are] no cheaper equivalents… so patients are forced to pay the price or do without.” Think about that for a minute. This isn’t your usual, boring petty larceny on the part of the insurance companies. This is blackmail on a ferociously ambitious scale. It’s conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm. It’s attempted manslaughter (if you, the jury, are feeling generous).

They’re not just randomly jacking up the prices for everyone. The insurance companies, surely in collusion with the pharmaceutical companies, are methodically working out what drugs people literally cannot live without and which – because the pharmaceutical companies have cowed the government into ridiculously favourable intellectual property laws – there is no alterative supply for, and unapologetically telling them: your money or your life.

It would be more honest, and probably kinder, if they went round a cancer patient’s house and held a gun to their head. At least then if they couldn’t afford to pay out the end would be quick and painless.

The insurance companies are trying to use the paper-thin justification that by making the sickest people pay the most they are “holding down premiums” for people who aren’t sick – in itself, a breathtaking display of doublethink. People who aren’t sick aren’t going to be paying for prescription drugs anyway, so whether they pay a fixed fee out of zero dollars or 30% out of zero dollars it makes no odds.

Effectively, this new system benefits no-one (except the insurance companies) and flattens already struggling, vulnerable people with the financial equivalent of a cartoon anvil. Only there’s nothing funny about this. There’s nothing funny about having to choose between paying your rent or taking the drugs that will stop you bleeding to death from a bad cut, or having your muscles waste away.

The best bit? Private health insurance companies can “legally change their coverage to one in which some drugs are Tier 4 [the new, percentage co-payment] with no advance notice.” If Kafka were writing today he’d be a reporter, not a novelist.

81%

As an expat, I’m not quite sure how to take the news that 81% of Americans believe “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.” Part of me chortles: no shit, Sherlock! Why the hell do you think I grabbed my suitcase and ran, six years ago, to the first country that would give me a visa? And then hung on by my fingernails till I was finally granted citizenship, forever absolving me of the need/obligation to return to the land of my fathers?

On the other hand, even a callous, no-regrets expat like me has to admit that a lot of the shitstorm currently hovering over the lower 48 is the work of a relatively small cadre of uber-villains. I mean, the majority of Americans in the last two elections voted for the guy who didn’t end up in the White House. When that shit happens in Africa or Eastern Europe the US of A is all for sending in the cavalry to ensure free and fair elections. Which, come to think of it, may explain why the cavalry was notably absent when America was getting stitched up by a vicious oligarchy of moneyed morons with bloodlust in their eyes. Having voted for the winning candidate in the last two elections I sympathise with the millions who didn’t have a passport in hand when the bad news blew down from the top of Mount Sinai.

Living on the safe side of the Atlantic for a few years had considerably dulled my empathy, until I went back to spend thanksgiving with my family last year. The first clue something was wrong: the better-than-two-to-one dollar to pound exchange which meant I could shop like Paris Hilton on a measly freelance writer’s wage. More alarming was my ex-boyfriend telling me how his (23-year-old) friend died of complications of treatable diabetes because his call-centre job didn’t come with health insurance. That’s the sort of shit that makes you sit up, pay attention, and stop playing footsie over your scrambled eggs. Especially when you hear the same story again and again… from your sister who can’t quit work even though she’s in constant, debilitating pain because – if she did – she’d lose any medical benefits; when the woman next to you on the flight home tells you she spends over $800 per month on health coverage; when you wake up struggling for breath and pray it’s not an asthma attack coming on because in the Land Of The Free you can’t afford to be sick.

The second thing that blew my “fuck ‘em” cynicism to high heavens was the casually dispensed news item in The Oregonian that noted over 10% of Oregonians are “food insecure” – a fancy phrase for “don’t know where their next meal is coming from.” I read this between making four-cheese macaroni and bourbon orange cake for thanksgiving dinner. Clearly, not everyone is suffering. But a lot of people are. Journalistic curiosity piqued I wound up taking a very long, wet walk around industrial southeast Portland to the Oregon Food Bank, which tries to stave off the worst effects of America’s non-existent social support network. A plump, smiley blonde PR girl showed me around. The OFB is a private charity so I had to ask, “What resources would be available for people who need food if you weren’t here?” She smiled more, shook her head, didn’t understand the question. “What government programmes are there to help feed people?” I asked.

She smiled at me gently, like I’d just asked for the Tooth Fairy’s home address. “There aren’t any.”

I left the food bank and walked through the rainy dusk, simmering with anger, trying to come to terms with the inexplicable: how the richest nation on earth casually shrugs its shoulders and looks away when its own citizens don’t have enough to eat. In a way it explains America’s crude disinterest in human suffering around the globe. Fuck, if they can’t pick themselves up to feed their own population (despite spending billions creating “biofuels” to pump into the ridiculously over-sized, over-priced cars of the privileged) why should they give a damn if kids are dying in Africa?

This was in November, 2007. Things have only gotten/are only going to get worse. And yeah, hell, I can’t believe it took Americans this long to realise what a fucking raw deal they’re getting. But more than ever I feel sorry for them. The way I feel sorry for the poor bastards trying to vote themselves out of hell in Zimbabwe, or the monks in Tibet trying to have their say in the face of a tyrannical government prone to violently, inexplicably incarcerating people who have the front to disagree with their “policies.” Mostly, I guess, because – like any other escapee of a corrupt, despicable regime – I worry for those I left behind. For my fiercely smart, articulate, intractable siblings; for my mum; for that ex-boyfriend, who isn’t going to know what hit him…. Maybe, even, for the tiny part of me that wishes the door hadn’t slammed so firmly shut behind me.

Citius, Altius, Cynicus…

I’d like to the think the story running beneath the headline Olympic Athletes Struggle With Protest On Darfur would involve, say, athletes risking life and limb to hang banners of protest from the nearest sports arena. Or putting their physical talents to high-risk use by personally sprinting across a Sudanese no-man’s land to deliver food aid, or something…. What I don’t want to discover is a meek, three-page apology for a bunch of cosseted, nutritionally-enhanced, massaged, over-funded, elite athletes who are currently simpering into their sports drinks because they’re afraid – poor, docile little lambs – that suggesting genocide is a bad thing might cost them a buck.

The opening two paragraphs of the story set a heart-rending scene. Not a refugee camp in the Sudan where women face the choice between risking rape to find fuel to cook for their families or watching their children go hungry, but an oh-so-much-more-poignant dilemma: that of a young American softball player, Jessica Mendoza, torn between banking her Nike payoff or going on record saying ethnic cleansing is wrong.

“Whether speaking to a group of young softball players or plying her teammates with literature, Jessica Mendoza… does not hesitate to speak her mind about the killings in Darfur,” it says breathlessly (brave, brave Mendoza! Giving leaflets to her buddies in the changing room! It’s nothing short of heroic!)“But Mendoza stops short of publicly condemning China… because one of her sponsors, Nike, has a major marketing presence in China.”

Suddenly all is dramatically clear. The unreasonable demands of conscience balanced against the perfectly understandable need to look after her fiscal self-interest. Still, poor Mendoza is doing everything she can. The article continues with the uplifting news that “When she is not in uniform competing, Mendoza plans to wear her Team Darfur wristbands around Beijing.” Whew. There I was thinking for a second that she was just another opportunistic do-gooder, paying lip service to good causes without making any sacrifices. But oh no, not our intrepid Mendoza – she’s going to wear a wristband around Beijing. I bet the militias are disarming as we speak.

To be fair, it seems Mendoza isn’t the only athlete who’s offloaded all unnecessary baggage in the pursuit of success – including morality and a functioning cerebral cortex. Basketball player LeBron James has refused to criticize China over Darfur for fear of endangering a $90M Nike contract. Oh, and apparently it’s okay for lesser-known athletes to cop out of taking a stand because the Olympics are “their one time every four years to make money.”

God forbid anyone should be so narrow minded, so unresponsive to the needs of badminton players or synchronized swimmers or whatever as to suggest that human lives might be a little more valuable than them getting a water-bottle endorsement contract.

The moral monstrosity of this pitiful “discussion” is eye-watering. Pathetic equivocations like “There's a time and place for the issues and causes… the Olympic Games and politics don't go together,” make me want to shriek. What the fuck is wrong with these people? Have their iron-rich diets so hopelessly warped their moral compasses that they really don’t see anything wrong with sitting back in their paid-for Olympic Village suite swigging protein shakes while people are being slaughtered in Sudan? Would they be so fucking complacent if it were their families living precariously in refuge camps as the world disintegrated into hell on earth around them? Would they be so complacent if it were white people suffering? Hell no.

The only person who comes out of this article looking like he has a soul is Angolan basketball player Emanuel Neto who says, “It doesn't matter… what will happen to me. What matters… is that something has to be done.”

Too fucking right something has to be done. For starters, how ‘bout we call off the quadrennial orgy of smug jingoism and homage to steroid use that is the Olympics and spend a few of the billions poured into it feeding some of the children who are dying at a rate of 70 per day in Darfur? Or is that a little too radical for those nice, wristband sporting athletes and their “struggle”? Lord knows, no child’s life is worth losing your supply of free sneakers over.

America is number one. Yeah!

America is always saying it’s the best. (Yee-haw!) I’ve been a sceptic but finally, irrevocable proof that America really is the best country on the whole goddamn planet – at locking up its citizens.

Actually, that’s old news to anyone who pays attention to such things. The United States has, for years, not only imprisoned a greater number of people than “human rights abusers” like China and Russia, but done so by ludicrous margins. (As of 2004 the US incarcerated 726 people in 100,000; Russia 532; China a mere 118.) What makes this story fresh and relevant is a new study that shows America now imprisons more than one in every 100 adults. That’s right. The incarceration rate has vaulted to make us the proud owners of a nice round number of prisoners: 1000 in every 100,000 adults.

What a number. It is almost metric in its beauty and simplicity. So much easier to just count off one in every hundred adults and slap ‘em in the slammer (obviously an incarceration rate of less than one percent means you’re just not trying hard enough).

The temptation is to sit back and stare in wonder that those statistics, but don’t put your feet up yet fact fans. It gets better. That figure is for the entire adult population. Break it down by race and – whoop dee doo – the news is even more riveting. “One in 36 adult Hispanic men is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 adult black men is, too, as is one in nine black men ages 20 to 34” (IHT, 29 Feb 08). Don’t rush. Read that again, carefully. One in 36 Hispanic men. One in 15 adult black men. And the pièce de la résistance: one in nine black men between the ages of 20-34.

That isn’t a criminal justice system. That’s ethnic cleansing.

All in all, a proud day for George W Bush to attack Barak Obama – one of the few black men who slipped the dragnet – for saying he’d agree to meet new Cuban leader Raul Castro without preconditions (Cuba’s incarceration rate, incidentally, is roughly 80% lower than that of its “democratic” counterpart). To do so, Bush bleated, would give “great status to those who have suppressed human rights and human dignity.”

Really, Mr President? Mr Leader-of-the-free-world (and the only country apart from sworn enemy Iran to still execute minors)? I know figures aren’t your strong point, but the numbers don’t lie. If anyone should be worried about potentially dignifying those who “suppress human rights and dignity” it’s Raul Castro. His human rights record knocks America’s into a cocked hat.

“Real beauty” never looked so ugly

Approved by real women. The sticker on my bottle of Dove moisturiser smirks up at me every time I use the stuff, taunting me for forking over my cash to a grasping multinational corporation whose advertising technique makes the Nuremberg Rallies look like a soft sell.

Every time I slap on a layer of their body lotion I feel my just-out-of-the-shower freshness being tainted by the crude cynicism of that sticker. Approved by real women. I know what they mean by real women (how could I not? They’ve pumped millions into TV ads, Underground posters, magazine spreads and a flashy, multi-lingual website). They don’t mean ordinary women. Oh god help us and heaven forfend no.

They mean something much more specific. They mean “not thin”. That’s pretty much the size of it. The whole nasty, insidious campaign was kicked off to supposedly showcase “real” (i.e., a bit larger) women. Because, they bleated, women’s tiny, fragile little minds were being warped by constant bombardment with images of “unreal” (i.e., thin) women.

Needless to say this was praised (by the brain dead) as some sort of triumph for “realness.” Nobody thought to wonder how skinny women felt at being unilaterally unsexed. Because in Dove’s unabashed ad campaign the lines are clearly drawn: plump, robust, buxom, zaftig, pear-shaped, apple-shaped, chubby… it’s all good. But show up sporting a little musculature, an angular hip, or a too-defined cheekbone and you’re out of the sisterhood faster than you can say, ‘really, I eat carbs’.

The message is as clear as sky-writing. To be a bit on the pudgy side is to be honest, warm, lovely, caring, cuddly, one of the girls. Not like those nasty, whippet-like, gender-traitor bitches who refuse to embrace their inner marshmallow. It’s so pathetically transparent it would be funny – if insecure idiots didn’t take it seriously.

The Campaign For Real Beauty, as Dove so infuriatingly brands it, doesn’t signal the end of body facism. It simply shows that body facism has grown up and gotten a better PR agency. Their ads “liberate” women from unreasonable beauty standards the way Stalin “liberated” the Russian peasants. Eyeball their advertisements. Drink in the glossy swathes of hair; the flawless, dewy skin; the suspicious absence of cellulite on their full-figured models; the sparkling eyes; the blindingly perfect smiles. Read between those (photogenic) laugh lines: it’s okay to be over a size 10 as long as you are a radiant complexioned, Rapunzel-tressed, perfectly depilated would-be toothpaste model. But hey, no pressure ladies, just be real.

Not content with using this vicious double-standard bullshit to shill their “1/4 moisturising lotion” underarm deodorant and shampoo, et al Dove has, with truly breathtaking gall, set up the Dove Self-Esteem Fund. Apparently: The Fund develops and distributes resources that enable and empower women and girls to embrace a broad definition of beauty [and] provides needed resources to organisations that foster a broader definition of beauty. Who or what the fuck they’re talking about god only knows. But surely having a cosmetics company telling women how to think about beauty is sending the fox to guard the chicken coop.

At best, their “empowering” website spouts harmless, sub-Chicken Soup For The Soul drivel like, “write down things that make you feel good”, “smile inside” and “have a self day.” At worst, you can see quite clearly where the expansionist aim of their evil empire lies. In one of their surveys (reported on www.campaignforrealbeauty.com) Chinese women were the only nationality who significantly failed to agree with the statement: “The idea of beauty is often too narrowly defined by physical attributes.” This, the site notes ominously is because in China, “western beauty ideals are a newer phenomenon.” Not for long, if the money-grubbing corporate overlords of Dove have anything to do with it.

Oh and – because they want you to get involved in all this empowerment and embracing shit – you’re invited to make a donation to “support self-esteem programs around the world.” Funny, they don’t mention how much of parent company Unilver’s £3.87 billion annual profit (a 7% increase, thanks to suckers like me buying their moisturiser) is going to this worthy cause. Nor, it seems, has anyone stopped to consider is there might be things women around the world need more than some prig telling them to “smile inside.” You know, stuff like education, contraception, health care, protection from domestic violence.

Like an onion, the layers of the Campaign’s objectionability are seemingly endless, and make your eyes water. If the brazen dismissal of thin women as “not real”, or the blatant cultural imperialism, or the naked capitalism, or the cynical exploitation of women’s insecurities in the guise of empowerment isn’t enough to make you gag on your Special K bar stop for a minute and think about how goddamn patronising the whole thing is. Thank god we have Dove around to explain we shouldn’t feel suicidal if we have freckles, or are over 23 because, geez, it might never have occurred to us otherwise. Obviously, women are such helpless, brainless slaves to media that in order to stop us rushing to the toilets en masse after every meal, like so many bulimic lemmings, we need Dove and their sanitised, size 14 “real women” to help us keep our pudding down. Dear loving lord above. It’s enough to drive a real woman insane.

Goddamn hippies…


Heroin addiction and prescription pill binges are now the province of pop singers. And footballers have taken over as the new protagonists of “nasty as I wanna be” sex. So what mischief does that leave to the former kingpins of hell-raising: globally renowned rock stars?

If fearsome U2 boss Paul McGuinness, the band’s “fifth member” is any indication the answer is: whinging about money. He took the podium at Midem to unburden his soul about the evils of the “multibillion dollar [computer] industries that benefit from [the] tiny crimes” of internet file-sharers.

McGuiness blames the ills of the music industry on the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of the world. Whom he preposterously compares to magazine publishers “advertising stolen cars, processing payments for them and arranging delivery.”

This is, of course, a purely academic argument where U2 are concerned. They are not short a few bob. Their Vertigo tour was the highest-grossing concert series of 2005 pulling in $260 (more than double the revenue of the next-largest grossing tour) and their most recent LP – How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb – sold roughly eight million copies (a drop in the bucket of lifetime album sales of around 70 million).

You might think that if U2 are so exercised about the sad state of the music industry they could use some of their vast wealth and influence to explore new distribution streams, or offer their support (moral or otherwise) to innovative artists and technologies. But oh no. Much, much, much easier to bite the hand that feeds them. Much easier to take aim at the real enemy and dig right down to the rotten core of the problem, as McGuinness did when he took aim at the dangerous, subversive "hippy-ness" of the computer corporations.

"Embedded deep down in the brilliance of those entrepreneurial, hippy values seems to be a disregard for the true value of music,” he simpered. Painting, in one broad stroke, a compelling scene where a bunch of feckless long-hairs go about stealing bread from between the lips of hard-working, God-fearing Irish lads struggling to get by on just “three chords and the truth.”

Nice try, but McGuinness vision is so reality-shy as to be positively hallucinogenic. Who’s he calling a hippie? Uber-capitalist geeks like Bill Gates and Paul Allen? And what about painting U2 as embattled troubadours – upholders of the true value of music? Their understanding of the “true value of music” has helped them amass a collective fortune of 715 million Euro and recently prompted them to move their business proceedings to the Netherlands to take advantage of a tax shelter.

Nothing hippie about that. In fact, McGuinness criticism of Gates, et al smacks more of professional envy than moral outrage. U2 were happy to cosy up to Steve Jobs to release a U2 branded iPod. Now, apparently, that gravy-train has dried up and it’s crocodile tear-time. Sadly, for him, there’s nothing less attractive than a fat man crying.

I’m no Britney Spears apologist. While K-Fed is clearly a spineless, gold-digging sperm donor creep of the first order that in no way excuses Britters for jumping off the sanity wagon with both feet. In the more innocent days immediately after their break-up the fact the stripper-loving, Las Vegas addicted, foul-mouthed would-be rapper was suing for sole custody was a joke. Britney would have to work hard to fuck this up, I thought.

And has she ever! If mommy wasn’t a globally famous, imminently pap-able millionaire superstar train-wreck little Sean and Jayden would have been quietly given to a grown-up months ago. Hopefully. But of course she is, and they weren’t, and by the looks of it no one with two brain cells to rub together is going to get their hands on those poor kids any time soon. (That Kevin “I abandoned my first two children for Britney” Federline and Britney’s horrific, pushy stage-hag mother who – let’s not forget – paraded her daughters for public consumption pretty much from the moment they could walk, are plausibly the more suitable guardians is both compelling and depressing.)

Scanning the gossip column inches about the custody spat is Schadenfreude-fuelled bliss, of a sort. Stuff like a judge’s recent ruling that neither parent is allowed to drink or take drugs in the 12 hours before caring before their children (thereby ensuring JaySean get to grips with the concept of a comedown at an early age) is harrowingly funny. If it weren’t for the fact two quite innocent kids are at this moment having their tiny heads fucked up it would just be funny.

When judges start handing out instructions like that, and saying – as this one did – that Britney habitually abuses alcohol and controlled substances, you’d say the case against her is pretty well made. That and the fact she is rarely pictured looking like she’d be able to repeat her full name and address, if asked, would tend to indicate she might not be the best caretaker for two infants. But K-Fed, with an amateur fact-finder's enthusiasm for stating the bleeding obvious, has been on a mission to get everyone who’s ever shared breathing space with Britney to dish the dirt on her. He hit the mother lode (if you’ll excuse the pun) with her ex-bodyguard who apparently claimed he saw her take drugs in front of JaySean and also “alleged Britney paraded around naked in front of the children.”

Just take a second and read that again. “Britney paraded around naked in front of the children.” Mind, these are her children we’re talking about. You know, the ones that gestated in her womb. Note, also, that they are both less than three years old. Think about it. Isn’t it much weirder that her bodyguard saw her naked than that her toddler sons did?

For god’s sake – Britney is a walking disaster and, at the moment, her maternal duties are obviously not priority number one. But if the court decides to entrust her kids to the dubious care of K-Fed and co. please Jesus let it be for reasons that are saner than she is. Because what is writ large between the lines of that allegation is the really fascinating/horrible suggestion that for a mother to be unclothed in the vicinity of her small children is some how deviant.

American prudery is the wonder of the rest of the (adult) world. Only in America can you screen brutal murder while a two-second sort-of-almost-kind-of nipple flash causes total public meltdown. But surely even in America, where breasts are treated with the same sort of uneasy deference the rest of the world shows to mad cow disease, people can’t actually think a naked mother is the last word in moral degradation?

Personally, I think the fact the rest of the world has seen Britney more or less in the altogether is a lot more telling. If she could only stick to parading around naked at home, instead of displaying her front bottom every time she staggers out of a nightclub, she – and the kids – would be in a much better place.

Once again, it seems America has got their ideas about freedom all mixed up. Brits is free to make a public display of herself, ruin her career, guzzle all the booze she can get her hands on, make out with girls in hot tubs, swap underwear with strangers… but she’s going to be called to account for not swathing herself from head to toe in front of her small children? What’s a mum to do? Put on a raincoat when it’s bath time? Put the baby in the other room while she gets changed? At what point does hitherto un-noted maternal nudity clause kick in? Three years? Two? One? Should women even be allowed to give birth naked? Should they cover the baby’s eyes before they smack its bottom, just to make sure it doesn’t get an accidental flash of the land from whence it came? I bet even the Taliban never thought of that…

Whores! All of You

Across the office everyone is having kittens about an email from MTV. Apparently they’ve bought our snow job and are willing to stump up their precious airtime to publicise some masturbatory guitar exhibit we’re ‘curating’ courtesy of Fender, and a bunch of creative whores.

My boss is currently a blast furnace of egotistical joy, stoked with a dozen ideas and the heady scent of money just beyond his fingertips. Technically, I should be at least glad because if the company doesn’t make money I don’t have a job. But I can’t bring myself to give a flying fuck. Not now, or in the foreseeable future. Marketing is bullshit, obviously, and I’ve always known that. This is the first time I’ve felt that though. It’s so lame, so old hat: the ego, the money, the who’s doing a better flim flam job than whom. And the constant, exhausting lying. Lies by rote. Lies you tell when you know that they know that you’re lying but you feel obliged to lie anyway.
Christ knows my objections aren’t moral, or even ethical, at best they’re maybe aesthetic. I swear all the crawling, smarming, back-slapping, and soul-sucking eats the guts of the people who do it. You start judging everyone on what they can do for you, or how much they make. Everything is about image and status. And god, I thought I loved that all as much as the next media whore. The ‘I was in the VIP room with so-and-so’ or ‘oh yeah, I know so-and-so – but maybe I don’t really have the stomach for it.

I can’t feel anything but weary contempt for my boss, who practically wet himself with joy recounting his meeting with some aging pop star. ‘She’s so humble, she really doesn’t see herself as a star.’ Of course you stupid prick, she’s not going to pull the big I Am with you because you’re too much of a nobody to even arouse her ego sensors.

And it’s not just him. Our finance manager: “I was at this amazing party and I looked up and guess who was dancing next to me: Sting!” He looked hurt at my response: “Well, apart from that it sounds okay.”

Or my colleague who simply cannot let a name go undropped. I mention an attractive Hollywood star. “I snogged him once.” But of course…

I mean fuck, I enjoy goggling at Heat as much as the next person, but this gutless, witless, slavish pandering at the alter of ‘someone you may have heard of’ bores me to fucking tears. Where’s the door, guys? I want out.

Writing Shit…

I’m currently reading a novel on the basis of a recommendation printed in the back of Hunter S. Thompson’s magnificent political screed Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail.
The book is called Ask The Dust, and it’s by John Frante. I’d never heard of him, but I have heard of Charles Bukowski, whose glowing praise is heavily quoted in the online review on Amazon so I bought it.
And boy does the story of the semi-starved would-be literary genius, crouching in a LA flophouse hotel, living on oranges and too broke to pay rent resonate. Even with a well-fed, comfortably housed and gainfully employed would-be literary genius. The stuff about Catholic guilt, and whores, and a really long, surreal bit about a huge earthquake which might have only happened in the narrator’s imagination don’t mean much – but the writing does. The sitting at a typewriter hammering out pages and pages, trying to pin down an increasingly slippery idea that vanishes like a breath, or gives up – battered to death by keystrokes.
Yesterday’s mighty struggle to pin down a flash of an idea ended in terrible stalemate. I wanted to write about how some great museum artefacts made me stop and think how insignificant most of the petty shit I worry about is. How individuals and their daily routines are erased in an instant while great works of craft or creativity sometimes manage to transcend time.
Sound simple? Even those last two sentences took me a while. You don’t even want to see yesterday’s literary mincemeat. Left to ripen for a day it's starting to stink. Paragraphs stopping abruptly for no reason, or changing tack in midstream and beginning a new thought unbidden. Blue ink and yellow highlighting the few scattered signs of life.
I sat and wrote through most of the day at work. Wrote through virtually all of the last-days-of-Nazi-Berlin drama Downfall (probably for the best. Close attention to dozens of characters graphically and despairingly putting guns to their heads and pulling the triggers isn’t ideal Monday night viewing). Basically, wrote until all strands of thought were hacked to bits, leaving me nothing to tie together into logic. After a while I went from thinking ‘I know what I want to say, but I just can’t work out how to say it,’ to having no idea what the hell I’d been trying to say at all.
Not being able to resume work on it this morning was a relief. But rereading it is depressing. There are maybe two or three good sentences or fragments in over three pages of single-space text. Frankly, I don’t know if there’s anything there worth saving. Ask The Dust’s troubled hero’s fortunes shift when he digs a letter out of the rubbish bin and posts it to his editor, who prints it as a story. Hell, maybe I should give it a go.