OH WHAT WILL I BE BELIEVING


Logo #1
Firstly, a big thank you to you all for reading what has been quite a bewildering year’s worth of subjects. When I began “Dancing with the Gatekeepers,” on 30th May 2016, my intention has always been to understand each subject that came to mind each week, and to learn something from it, confirming why the most popular articles so far range wildly from David Bowie to Donald Trump, from Quorn to the Futurist Cookbook, from big data to “legal names,” from George Orwell to word puzzles, and from the art of telling a joke to the history of the word “ain’t.”

If anyone has sought to find out more, or ask a question about something, or someone, having read my work here, then that is the best possible outcome – I only write because I am happy to admit I don’t have all the answers.


However, the first subject I featured, on how John Lennon’s flippant remark to a journalist’s question became, at the insistence of Yoko Ono, the inspired dream of a man on a flaming pie, telling Lennon to name his band, “The Beatles, with an ‘a.’” Once you know something is untrue, the persistent insistence that “ceci n’est pas une pipe” becomes a deranged fantasy. When it comes to cold facts, those that mean the world works on a base level, you should not the use joke in René Magritte’s painting “The Treachery of Images” as a way to live your life or, even worse, assert your point of view over those of others.

The two words of the last year have been “Brexit” and “Trump.” Even if I look back on this article in twenty, thirty, fifty years, I will not need any further explanation than that, and I don’t expect you may not either. I have tried not to advance a particular view about either of these – politically, I am in the centre, so if the world is substantively better for everyone after Brexit and Trump, then that is fine by me – but the one thing I should not have to be, if I did say anything about either subject, is afraid to say anything at all.


Freedom of speech is paramount in this world – all opinions should be able to be heard, then we can decide on their merit. I am not the type of person who tells people that the truth is being kept from them, or that they are blind to it, because I would need to have concrete evidence to prove that, unless I wanted to engage in conspiracy theory. When certain voices think they have been silenced, because one outlet decides they don’t want them there anymore, they should think whether that place has its own voices to protect, or whether they might have been in the wrong place to begin with. Every voice has its own place and, if requires, what it says can be tested, in a court of law.

I wrote a great number of notes for what I wanted to write about here, and quite a few of them could become their own discussion here in future weeks. It is a febrile time for thought about our own places in the world, having felt that everything has been turned upside down. However, I feel safe that things will work out better for everyone in the end, even if I don’t know why - that might just be me.

The dream that gave me the name “Dancing with the Gatekeepers” was my having recorded an album, rock and/or electronic in nature, in which one song led to my shouting “all you have are words” over and over again. Despite what others may choose to do with their words, they are all I have too.

Good luck, everyone.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

JUST A DREAM AND THE WIND TO CARRY ME

Image
On 18 th January 1994, the ocean liner SS American Star ran aground at Playa De Garcey, a remote, rocky beach at Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands. The ship, and the tug boat towing it, were caught in a hurricane, breaking the tow-lines, the crew on the ship later rescued by helicopter. It was hoped that the ship could be re-floated until, a48 hours later, the strong current broke the hull in half – six months later, the ship was declared a total loss. Becoming a popular spectacle for both sightseers and looters, the wreck of the American Star finally collapsed beneath the waves in 2013 – you can still see parts of it at low tide, but not on Google Maps. The golden age of transatlantic travel between Europe and America spanned fifty years to the early 1960s – with planes reducing commuter trips from days to hours, cruising became the market for the remaining ships, and for the passengers that did not worry about time. Now, Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 is the only liner built to wit
Read more

MAKE A BIG NOISE PLAYING IN THE STREET [242]

Image
The Commodore 64 is generally agreed to have the best sound of any 8-bit computer released in the 1980s, and its Sound Interface Device (SID) chip is one of the most distinctive sound chips made for any computer. This is borne out through games like “Last Ninja 2,” “Bubble Bobble” and Elite’s “Commando,” and through the sampling of speech found in games like the “Ghostbusters” and “Impossible Mission”: “Another visitor. Stay a while... stay forever!”  The C64 is sought out as a music synthesiser in its own right, and the SID chip is default sound that an 8-bit computer makes – considering Commodore sold seventeen million of them before they went out of business in 1994, that isn’t much of a surprise. What makes that sound so distinctive, and the SID chip so versatile, tends not to be questioned as a result. In its simplest form, an analogue synthesiser, made by companies like Moog, Yamaha and Korg, creates a sound using a wave generated by an oscillator, which is then filtered
Read more

BLANKETY BLANK, BLANKETY BLANK [117]

Image
An iconic scene of British television exists almost entirely without explanation. The scene, replayed whenever the stars met, is of Kenny Everett bending and breaking Terry Wogan’s long wand of a microphone on the BBC game show “Blankety Blank.” What must have initially been an impulsive move, the result of Wogan’s pointing it in the wrong direction for a moment, became a procession of breakages, most notably with a pair of garden shears, as Wogan presented the opportunity each time they met. The phallic connotations of the pranks were definitely not lost on the audience, or on Wogan, who would present the rest of show with his microphone cruelly cut down or bent out of shape. Anyway, why did Terry Wogan have that microphone? It is a question I have never seen asked, let alone answered – it just seemed to be accepted. I think I know the answer, and it stretches back over fifty years. For the uninitiated, “Blankety Blank” is based on “The Match Game,” an American game sh
Read more