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Dear Joe Record Guy (or Girl), I've been deluged with people wanting to know the results of my geography quiz (scroll down to Geography - 17th April). To back-track for a second I took it upon myself to travel the high-ways and by-ways of this land asking the simple question: "In which country would you find Mount Everest?" The purpose of my poll to was to obtain data to support or disprove my much-discussed and over-simplified cod-political theory that U.S. Foreign Policy is in a shambles because most Americans know nothing about the world beyond the borders of our country. I assumed that if there was one Geographical item Americans would know about then Everest (the world's tallest mountain) would be it. On a recent visit to Ireland I found myself laughing at the breakfast table. An article in the Sunday Tribune (apparently Europe's best designed weekly newspaper) caught my eye. It's headline was: "Fucking villagers vote against name change." The article continued: 'Residents of an Austrian village called Fucking have voted against changing the name. The 150 or so people who live in the village debated the issue after road signs kept being stolen - many by British tourists. A spokesman said: "Everyone here knows what it means in English, but for us Fucking is Fucking - and it's going to stay Fucking - even though the signs keep getting stolen."' The article concluded with this useful final sentence for people interested in Austrian cartography: 'Similar votes on a name change have recently taken place in Austrian towns Wank Am See and Petting, as well as in Vomitville and Windpassing.' Check out this little article I recently found in Time. "The health risks posed by secondhand smoke are well documented but...what is sure to fire up the tobacco lobby was a small study out of Helena Montana. When the city passed an ordinance banning indoor smoking in 2002, Helena's only heart hospital recorded a 40% drop in the number of heart attacks. What's more, when a court order lifted the ban half a year later, the heart-attack rate bounced right back." Um...for those of you who don't know Brits call cigarettes fags. Can someone tell me why, if they plan to ride naked, they are selling T-shirts? A clue - it's not in Europe... This simple question might provide us with an insight as to why it is that the USA has such a problem understanding foreign policy issues. Yesterday I was stuck in the morning commute on the way to my latest starring performance in a motion picture. I was headed towards a sleazy office in Van Nuys and I was quite excited. Before you assume that I was about to appear in a porno (with a name like Dick you'd think I'd be a shoe-in wouldn't you?) I must admit that my role was that of a hotel manager called Monty Freedman and there were no buxom lovelies with knee pads scheduled for my appearance on set. I digress. So I'm in the car and listening to Mark & Brian who are two popular morning drive-time radio hosts who specialize in schoolboy phone stunts and sycophantic interviews with has-been actors. Recently they have been running some kind of competition in which two listeners are bombarded with general knowledge questions and the winner receives the ultimate accolade - a chance to do it all over again the following day. After every morning's competition the likely lads ask each other left-over questions and of course we, the stuck-in-traffic listening public, can't help but pit ourselves against the combined brains-trust of Mark, Brian and their lesser paid co-hosts. Which brings us to Question Five. Question 5: In which country is Mount Everest? There was a moment of silence and then one of our super panel chirped up: "Austria." If five vaguely intelligent Americans don't know where Mount Everest is how can I be surprised that most Europeans feel that the biggest threat to world peace is...the United States? I shall be conducting a thorough but admittedly un-scientific poll of everyone I meet over the next week or two to see how many people get this simple Geog. 101 question right. I shall report back with the results of my survey. Until then I'll give you another clue - it's in Asia. They say everything comes in threes. Cut back to yesterday afternoon: 1) 2.30pm...I was driving in my car to pick up my newly repaired Alessis Quadraverb (don't ask) when the radio chirped up with the news that for the first time since 1935 Kodak would no longer be listed as being on the Nasdac 500 - or some other financial top 10 list - because it was felt that its performance was no longer a reflection of the current business and financial marketplace. My translation: Everyone's buying digital cameras and the K-people are fighting a losing analogue battle against the digital tide. 2) 3.25pm...Back home with my newly repaired and cuddly Qudraverb the e-mail kicked up with two messages. The first was that 4 people I knew who worked as video commisioners and had at various times given me jobs that put serious amounts of cash in my bank account had got the boot. The second was from a dear friend in London, who'd just been let go from Virgin U.K. - I told him to go and drink some beers and destroy all his Mike Oldfield albums. By the time my message arrived it appeared he'd already beaten Ommadawn into a pulp and was using Tubular Bells II as a beer-mat. 3) 530pm...The morning's post arrived as it always does at my house late in the afternoon (Go Postal!) and with it my Daily Variety with the headline: EMI faces music - label cuts 1,500 jobs. Do you feel like me that we're at a huge crossroads in our industry? I think it's safe to say that the business to which I've dedicated 40% of my life is in the worst state it's been in since I walked excitedly through the front door of Stiff Records in September 1977. It's monstrously depressing and I can hear fear in the voices of everyone I speak to. It's even possible that things could get worse before it gets better. What should we do? Perhaps there's nothing we can do...except believe. When I started my motorcycle messenger gig at Stiff all those years ago I got paid fourteen pounds a week. The hire-purchase repayments on the bright red Suzuki I needed to do the gig were seven pounds a week. The other seven quid went on rent and food. I was deliriously happy. But after a month with the company I realised that the place was a financial mess. Every week it seemed we would go under and would never re-surface. But quickly I realised that my paltry wage was paltry because I wasn't being paid to worry about bankruptcy or the tax man or Ian Dury's album sales. So I quit worrying and things got better and I worked there for five years. Moral: Dear friends, we've come this far and we can continue if we believe. Most of us are not paid enough to worry about the solutions to our ailing biz. We do great work, we just need to keep believing. For myself I know if it comes down to it I can go back to being a motorcycle messenger or a cab driver as I once was. It'll be a kick in the balls but I'll certainly have some wicked stories to tell: "The airport? Of course Madam, which terminal? Would you like to hear a story about Slash & Kenny G?" Last week someone told me to check out a hilarious web site called True Porn Clerk Stories and the quote that made my day was: "The Zen lesson of my job is this: just because I do not want to be a video clerk doesn't mean I shouldn't be the best possible video clerk I can be." O.K. everybody back to work. We can get through this. P.S. Tubular Bells II is a really, really crappy album. It doesn't even deserve to be a beer mat. And I should know - I bought a copy. If we stay youthful in our approach to the new industry (because the digital music indusrty is a new industry) then, with any luck, we'll not get hacked down during the cull! Music and visuals now go hand in hand - however you end up listening or watching it (TV, iPod, PDA, DAB, Internet, DVD, 3G whatever...). Onward and upward... personally, I can't wait for the next revolution. I just hope it doesn't revolve around gangs, bling and slappin' yer bitch up. My daughter deserves an intelligent and rebellious voice. There's one out there... somewhere. KEEP YOURSELF ALIVE - QUEEN And now thirty years later I ask myself why was it so special? And I realise I haven't got the faintest clue what Freddie was on about. Something about a "Belladonic haze" more stuff about "tea on silver trays." I would just yell out the words I knew and mumble the rest: "Keep yourself alive, keep yourself alive, something, something, something, honey, keep yourself alive." In retrospect it wasn't so much what it was about as what it wasn't about. Paul Rodgers, my other adolescent hero, would sing about what he was getting plenty of and I wasn't getting any of: girls or rather women (even better) and lots of gratuitous sex. Freddie and his lot had sprinted right past that and were already onto some higher plane and looking into some exciting future (with their first single!) that would lead them ultimately to Radio Ga-Ga and Flash. Heck this was even better than Zeppelin who were still lost in their mouldy netherworld with echoes of Tolkein and Aleister Crowley. But best of all was that guitar. All those layers and all those fingers and a solo I could sing to even if I couldn't play it yet. And then to discover that Brian May was an Astrophysics graduate and had built his guitar from a fire-place! Wow. How bloody cool was that? All I needed was an old fireplace and a saw and I too could be a guitar hero. And if I could plug myself into the mains I could have a haircut like him as well. It was clever, it was complex, it was mysterious and confusing, and I couldn't work out the words, and I couldn't figure out how it all fit together, and I had to keep playing it over and over to see if I could unlock its secrets. A bit like my first girlfriend really. And at the end as the song faded Freddie told me, most importantly, the words I desperately needed to hear as I struggled through those frightening and bewildering times: "You will survive, you will survive!" F*** OFF - WAYNE COUNTY AND THE ELECTRIC CHAIRS
1) Bruce Dickinson, the lead singer, only sings with the band part time - he's more often found in the pilot's seat of executive jets shuttling other rich people around Europe. Um - that's as much as I know. So I would have concluded that in the fiscal year ended 31st December 2003 they might have pulled in about half a million. Which only goes to show what a dickhead I am. Apparently last year they came 9th in the top ten rock earners in the UK pulling in a staggering 17.9 million pounds. That's over $32 million! That's quite a part-time job old Bruce has going for him... I have heard recently that GWB is considered the president with the worst environmental record in US history. That's quite an indictment don't you think? The other day I read an article entitled 'THE ALASKA CHAINSAW MASSACRE" by Osha Gray Davidson (Feb. 5th Rolling Stone) in which he describes the way that in 2002 the US economy paid $35 million to build roads into a unique and priceless piece of Alaskan wilderness so that the timber industry (friends and supporters of you know who) could harvest $1.2 million worth of lumber. Do we need timber this badly? Apparently not. Davidson writes: "Tree farms in the lower forty-eight provide plenty of wood to meet the country's needs, and a worldwide glut of timber has been forcing prices down for years. Today there are only 200 timber-related jobs left in southeast Alaska." It appears that these trees our governement is so happily helping to cut down to ship to Asia and turn into mulch aren't just any old trees either - many of them are Sitka Spruce trees that are at least 600 years old. That means, as Davidson so eloquently puts it, these trees were "already 100 years old when Columbus set out to find a new route to India." Let's face it this one piece of environmental insanity is just a pimple on the bottom of our incessant industrial greed. Why are we doing this to ourselves and more importantly to a world that Bush's twin daughters and you and yours will have to live in? I don't have kids. By the time all this insanity comes home to roost - and there are too many people and pollutants and not enough food & water to go around - I'll be pushing up daisies. Assuming that the environment will support them of course. I think we all need to think about what we have in this enormous and bountiful world that we live in. Davidson makes this very crucial observation about our forefathers and how we've changed the face of America & the world in the last 200 years: "From the moment they set foot here, European settlers mistook 'vast' for 'infinite' and 'abundant' for 'inexhaustible.'" We're getting to the point where infinite and inexhaustible are perhaps no longer applicable to the world in which we live. In the months to come and as the election approaches please make sure this is an issue we all discuss. (P.S. Please feel free to track down that article and tell me I'm wrong. It would make my day to find out that everything's hunk dory out in the woods.) (P.P.S. It's not just about the woods either. Try tracking down CRIMES AGAINST NATURE by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the 12/11/03 edition of Rolling Stone.) (P.P.P.S. About eighteen months ago our dear leader agreed to repeal a decision made by the Clinton government that would make the Big 5 Detroit Auto makers produce cars that were vastly more fuel efficient. I think the goal was to produce cars that would average 25 mpg. The Big 5 said they couldn't do it in the time alloted. Being an oilman GWB said OK and scrapped the law. I've just discovered this piece of trivia in the Harper's Index column of an old edition of Funny Times: The maximum number of miles a 1912 Ford Model T could go on a gallon of gas in 1912 was 35 miles. Such is progress that the maximum number of miles that Ford's most fuel efficient 2003 car can drive on a gallon of gas is 36 miles! Progress eh?) It must have been sometime in the late eighties and I was sitting in my office listening to an awful new single by a female artist whose name has long slipped from my memory - but for the sake of our tale we'll call her Veronica. There was not one redeeming feature about this piece of music and someone had asked me to write a video concept for it. I'm not known for my discerning tastes when it comes to the music I choose to do videos for - I am after all someone who found good reason to shoot not one, but two Vinnie Vincent videos - but I had to draw the line somewhere. I decided I would have nothing to do with this atrocious piece of music. |
