Quick preamble because it’s a red letter day: Monmouth Coffee has finally reached Brighton, albeit in a small way. Coffee@33, so fresh on Trafalgar Street they don’t have a business card or website yet, is using Monmouth’s espresso blend and - joy of joys - they reckon they can sell me a kilo of any Monmouth single estate beans/grind without a mark-up, if I give them a week’s notice. Trafalgar Street is notoriously tough to crack, so if you’re a Brighton coffee ponce and want to taste something to compete with Red Roaster (well, better than really, though in not such nice surroundings), check it out and, once you’ve seen the light, encourage them to train down the whole range.

I know I’ve got on the Culture Show’s arse before in The Morning Star about their overall turdiness but this week takes the fucking biscuit. I was so excited about the David Simon interview. The Wire sits alongside The West Wing as my favourite TV ever and those in the know will agree, Simon is not only one of the finest television writers but has revitalised the whole art. Well…

“…he now stands accused of breaking the laws of writing for TV. David Simon has been detained by The Culture Show for questioning.” 

Geddit!?

Yes, Lauren Laverne does the eight-minute interview (with heavy clips, so less than two minutes of actual insight from the subject) in a mock-up Police interview room, using a cassette of ‘controversial’ statements and challenging him on ‘breaking TV writing laws’. For fuckedy-fuckedy-fuck’s sakes!

Laverne: “We’ve intercepted a few of your communications… That is your voice on that tape… Can you explain yourself?”

Cripes chief, can someone put the programme-makers out of my misery?

Simon patiently plays along (“This may be something you’ll have to lock me up for…”) but, Christ, I wish he’d pulled rank and told them to fuck right off. The man had fascinating, probably important themes to develop, if they’d only let him.

“Wherever an institution has been given free sway, it has devoured individuals.” 

Yesterday I watched the first episode of Generation Kill, new HBO mini-series based on the book by Rolling Stone journo Evan Wright, who was ‘embedded’ with US marines during the invasion of Iraq. Adapted by Ed Burns and David Simon, it is vivid, downbeat, realistic, without over-embellishment and, so far, bloody brilliant. They are reaching toward truth - and can TV drama do any more than that? 

Surprise, no mention of this series in the interview. And since the only actual Wire plug was Season 5 starting on the FX Channel, it makes me wonder if the BBC has bought the rights to show the whole of The Wire from Season 1 in the near future and was getting some early familiarisation in, without telling us. At least that would be cash well spent.

The thing is, like Mark Kermode, who is one of the best critics on telly, Lauren Laverne’s no gimp, she can run a show and pull off a heavyweight interview when needs be. The Chris Addison chat in the same show is absolutely fine. Now she has to face whichever monkeys are throwing out shit idea after shit idea and stand them down. It’s time to climb off the gimmicks. This was the first time I’ve seen David Simon on British TV, though admittedly I haven’t gone looking. Now wouldn’t it have been fantastic if it was a straightforward lengthy and detailed interview. I’m tired of your weak shit!

After yesterday’s blog I got an extraordinary email from a friend, who is working as a temp at the coalface of this disaster - he’s responding to enquiry phonecalls from teachers who’ve had problems with their exam results. Because he’s signed a confidentiality agreement, I’m not putting his content in the blog but it is seriously shocking what has gone on at ETS. So, a bit of digging and…

Since the news agencies haven’t put any faces or names to the ongoing exam results fiasco, here you go, this is the man to ‘talk to’ if you see him:

“Tests and quality go hand in hand. At ETS, we’re doing our part.”
Kurt Landgraf, President and CEO, ETS

Read HERE what Angelfire.com said about him as long ago as 2003. 

And an excerpt: “…In 1997, the parasite was investigated by The New York Times over concerns about the fairness and interpretation of its testing products.  In the articles emerging from that investigation, Nordheimer and Franzdelivered a stinging condemnation of ETS for its failure to correct profitable misconceptions about the meaning and precision of the tests, and for concealing the incidence of cheating.  In 1999, Education Week reporter David Hoff released details of the “non-profit’s” burgeoning wealth in an article entitled, “Testing ETS.”  Earlier, in 1985, David Owen had lambasted the company in a bitingly negative review (None of the Above).  The media has had nothing good to say about ETS, because there is nothing good to say about ETS.”

Perhaps the idiot Brits hiring ETS should have done a bit of background, say, a Google search, before selling out our education system to money-grubbing super-rich Yank corporation pretending to be non-profit.

One of Rifa’s friends, Matt, is an IT guy in the Sussex area. I’ve not met him but he’s always been a fascinating blogger. However, he’s now started to address something in his life in detail that I think makes his blog absolutely essential reading. Over the last couple of years he was put on trial under serious charges, which he had nothing to do with - and his innocence was eventually proven. But of course, his whole life was turned upside down. He’s now addressing this experience in blog installments and I think he has a lot of importance to say about the rough end of the current British justice system. Read him HERE and I’ll stick him on my blogroll.

In other news, surprise surprise, ETS, the pathetic bunch of numpties hired to mark schoolkids’ SAT exams have utterly fucked up the job, leaving tens of thousands of children without their results. Teachers and experts had warned for months that the promise of delivering all the results by the 8th July deadline was unrealistic. But the company kept insisting they’d make it, until as late as 26th June, when they finally admitted they were a heap of shit behind. Now they’re even missing the back-up deadlines and the result is chaos.

They’d left 10,000 email enquiries from their own exam markers unanswered.

Interestingly, although the fuck-up is primarily the private company’s responsibility, the face shown on the BBC story here is of public regulator, QCA boss Ken Boston. Of course he bears a fat chunk of blame and needs a good smack in the chops - but where are the names and faces of the actual ETS bosses? Why do the bleedin’ corporate cowboys themselves get such an easy ride from the Beeb? 

One big mistake everyone is making in exam marking is the belief that on-screen marking is an improvement because theoretically it speeds things up. Any media sub editor will tell you (what you probably know instinctively anyway): you simply can’t read as carefully or as focusedly onscreen. It is standard practice in newspaper and mag offices that you do your final proof-reading and assessments on paper printouts, because you catch stuff you miss onscreen. And we all know reading anything onscreen over a period of time (like, um, thousands of the same exam) is far more tiring. Given how important these ludicrous exams have been rendered by our test-obsessed society, why on earth aren’t we thinking logically about marking them!?

Any sane government would take this opportunity: sack Ken Boston (with no fatcat payoff), cancel ETS’ contract (ideally without paying them - or at least make the fines decently large) and then get rid of the useless fucking SATs altogether. They’re not fit for purpose, make kids waste good education time preparing by rote for a bunch of inane questions and overhype the supposed value of test results. They border on evil, since kids get so pent up about them. Yet they don’t even assess individual children at all - just allow schools to compare themselves with eachother. Lunatic.

At 2000 Trees Festival, Manx Stef and I had lunch with a bunch of Gloucestershire guys. Inevitably conversation slid its way around to last year’s floods. The issue the lads wanted to make clear was how poorly their local community had responded to the disaster, especially in terms of cliched assumptions like ‘pulling together’ or ‘uniting in the face of adversity’. Mains water was switched off and everyone suddenly relying on huge water containers placed in the street. Instead of polite queues and convivial atmosphere of Brits under duress, there were a lot of rows and fights about where the water should be, and how much water each person/family could take. They said a lot of people stole more than their fair share, without any media coverage, until an Asian bloke took too much, at which point he was plastered across local press and scapegoated. They also said people were very thuggish, some posting ‘guards’, some even pissing and throwing rubbish in the water containers. Their account chimes with other things we’ve heard around the UK about the flooding. 

The other day, I saw an internal email which had been sent around a small company in Lewes, warning people to keep the door shut and on latch when they went out for lunch, because of the annual visit of travellers to the area. Transient people have a negligable effect on crime rates in that town - just as many crimes take place when they’re not there. Meanwhile, the company in question trades with multinational corporations selling arms, oil and pharmaceuticals, that make thousands upon thousands of peoples’ lives drastically worse across the world in the name of profit. Sometimes, when their suppliers (designers and web programmers) find out who they’re being asked to work for, they back out on ethical grounds, despite the loss of income. 

I think the people who shout about the ‘broken society’ - the right-wing media and its frightened readership, socially conservative pricks and anti-immigrant fact benders - are the very people who caused it in the first place, with their money-grubbing, greed-oriented divide-and-rule sleight-of-hand strategy where money is more important than people.

Anything to distract from the Grand Evils of the multinationals and corporations, manipulating this unsustainable oil economy to make as much personal profit as they can, before the whole thing collapses.

On Mauritius, variants on the phrase “You eaten yet?” are standard greetings, as commonly used as “Hello!” because, during historical periods of extreme poverty, it was a way of making sure your neighbours didn’t go hungry, without them having to beg. It’s obvious that what we’ve lost through the rise of Greed Culture and Debt Culture is far, far greater than what we gain by being able to watch a massive television or drive a landrover around the city.

We all deserve to be stabbed by a hoodie.

I realise I’m struggling to be coherent on this issue but I’m trying to write something more useful and it’s not coming together yet.

It’s nice to have the attention… Drowned In Sound turned last week’s blog entry (which mentioned them) into a news story.

Read it here. And I found out today I got a good review in Bizarre, of all places. I’m even more famous than I thought!

Interesting to note these two online BBC news stories, written by the same journalist, covering this weekend’s disastrous ZOO8 festival:

Saturday, early afternoon… http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7491400.stm

Monday morning. A humbler Tigger indeed… http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7493040.stm

Given that many of the problems had already taken shape during Friday, perhaps Mr Youngs should have been a little more direct in his earlier report.

An oddly solitary summer so far, despite being very busy. During the week I keep realising I’ve done two or three daytimes in a row without actually speaking to anyone, from when Rifa leaves til when she gets home. It’s not quite loneliness - but certainly disconcertingly isolating. I’m also hamstrung half the time by a vicious cashflow fuck-up. You might’ve thought - being a stride more successful now than I’ve been before - that I’d've sorted out the money thing, but no, it only takes a couple of cock-ups and a burst tyre on the 303 to stick me right back on the line. Note to self: still not good enough at building in fiscal safety nets. Anyway it’s the mighty Tim Victor’s stag tonight and hooking up with human males is exactly what I need, though they’ll be a mess by the time I get there.

Recently, two unusual little mentions of me on Drowned In Sound have made me stop and think about the company I keep, both in life and in other peoples’ perceptions. I’ve enjoyed reading DiS forever, since it started really. Years ago, I even wrote a bunch of reviews and articles for it (under a different name - they didn’t know it was me and I didn’t review myself or anything!) and I think it anticipated the direction both music and journalism have travelled, over the last 5 years, far better than more corporate efforts like NME.com. Particularly in terms of building an interactive readership and merging conventional journalism with open source content, DiS should probably be seen as truly pioneering. Original editor Sean didn’t like my stuff but he was polite/friendly and never nasty or anything (we haven’t met in the flesh) and, over the years, some of the very best-written pieces about me (positive and negative) have been on DiS.

Anyway, these two mentions are making me ponder the difference between ‘company’ (your friends/colleagues/partners in life/musicians you actually associate with) versus ‘company’ (other musical acts outsiders might connect you with or place you beside, for whatever reason).

The first was long-standing senior Gareth’s thread about “classic DiS bands” that included me in his list, along with Idlewild, Bright Eyes, Radiohead and Reuben (!!). His slightly screwy definition of ‘classic’ was about having been heavily covered in DiS at some point but not innovating, or something (Radiohead!?) but it was well lush to be included. However, the thing that really catches my attention is the Flash Company I’m put in - because in lists like that, I’m so often the token obscure one, who fewest people have heard of. Certainly DiS readers! In those circles, even Reuben are better known than me: maybe more older acoustic/folky fans know my songs but they’ve sold out places like The Astoria.

Then the other mention was another incongrous list but this time it takes the biscuit. Gets my goat. Gears grinding. In a (really harsh) review of Luke Leighfield’s single, reviewer KK (who the fuck?) mentions me in passing, alongside Get Cape and - deep breath - pause to load up a big fat shotgun - Scouting For Fucking Girls! Obviously there’s a nasty (quite funny actually) description as well: he wants us to die (suffocating, tied up in front of a mirror I think). But that’s not important. This is important: Scouting For Girls? SCOUTING FOR CLUMPING UBER REPETITIVE INANE DUMBO PIANO BASHING DOFF-DOFF-DOFF FUCKTARDERY GIRLS!?

So. I know it’s unprofessional but I’m calling you out, “KK”, you custard-thick substandard shit-stick of a hack you… you’re not too big or too old for me to put you over my knee and give you a good hard thrashing. I’m serious. If I learn who you are, and we’re in the same room or field, and you don’t surround yourself with muscle very fast, I’m going to give you a spanking, my friend. Bare arse and everything. No belts or paddles, but you’ll pray you weren’t born. The relentless teethgrinding trite-city that is S******* F** G***s? I tell you, you’ll be wishing you’d never even typed their name out so close to mine, as your tearful friends rub antiseptic cream into your aching butt-cheeks. You are fuckked.

Anyway everyone, please don’t forget I’m now available for childrens’ songwriting workshops. ;o)

x

Most of what happened last night was excellent and still being processed. But I’ve just got to tell you this:

Last night, around midnight in SIN nightclub (that used to be Rouge) in central London, just as I was about to jump onstage to play piano with Frank, I bought a pint of orange juice and lemonade from the bar (£3). There’d been no water left in the dressing room by the time I got there (I guess a lot of bands went through that place last night and ours was the last set).

Anyway, my drink came in a plastic pint glass. I took a couple of big gulps before realising it tasted almost entirely of disinfectant. Then I smelled the glass and fuck me it stank! I didn’t have time to complain because of the impending gig and rammed bar, so I slammed it down and went on. It wasn’t in my imagination though, my friend Mel smelled the cup for me (!) and confirmed it was awful.

Then within seconds, halfway through the first song, my lips were burning.

This morning, my lips sting like fuck, a bit like when you’ve got really bad chapped lips from cold or hot weather. Cunts. Makes me nervous about what I swallowed - and you won’t find me saying that often.

Two quick examples from the last few days of what the Obama family are having to deal with and how bad the US media’s spinning can get.

In the celebrations when he got nominated, at some point Barack and Michelle Obama bumped fists. Since then, right-wing American media commentators have described that as a “terrorist fist bump”.

Secondly, I just watched Michelle Obama on ABC TV show The View. The View is a bit like Loose Women, although the US version is a bit more intelligent, with a more liberal and journalistic (or less reactionary) tone, if you can believe that. In fact, Loose Women is probably the British-ised spin-off, given the similarities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59twO1fJwtQ

Mrs Obama’s contribution is pretty interesting but the thing that made headlines was she describes her husband as “sweet, empathetic” and this got repeated as “sweet and pathetic” which has become a media story across the pond. Host Whoopi Goldberg actually picked this up at the time and was sharp enough to try to clarify - but the story still has legs.

Actually, that reminds me of an old statistic - can’t remember the source so I’ll have to look for it - that in the UK women are 10% more socially conservative than men, while in the USA, women are 10% more socially liberal. I wonder if it’s true because, if so, it would have implications for gender-based effects on culture.

Last night’s 2am text to Ms Janice Long on Radio 2, who was asking listeners for things that went wrong…

Hey J, hope yr well. my disaster: im running a music workshop tmrw, v excited. but i just burst a tyre on the a303 so im stuck til the van comes. in the rain. chris t-t in devon xx

She read it out, the sweetheart. The RAC took two-and-a-half hours and I checked into my hotel at 4.45am.