From the BBC: “Tony Blair has met nine children named after him during a visit to Kosovo.” I had no idea Supercilious Cunt was such a popular Kosovan name.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/middle_east/10195838.stm

More than 10 people have been killed after Israeli commandos stormed a convoy of ships carrying aid to the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army says.

Last night I had a dream about the Gaza convey. In my dream, the boats were set ablaze by the Israeli navy, but one of them got through, and no one was killed. Turns out my dream underestimated the madness, the savagery.

“The people on the boats were very, very violent toward the soldiers,” Israeli military spokeswoman Lt Col Avital Leibovich was quoted by AFP news agency as saying.

Oh go fuck yourself.

Scenes of great sadness as Gordon Brown tenders his resignation as Prime Minister, bids farewell to the nation, and leaves Number 10 Downing Street for the last time.

It’s like trying to coax a fox out of a chickenhouse.

and something lobsterlike seems to have happened to his hand

This is what happens when you try and work out who Craig Revel Horwood is.

And what’s happened to Ringo’s voice?

I love the scrunched curtain & the smoke alarm. They’re so… homely.

Two Pepsi ads, a clip from CBS news, and I’m a broken man. Truly, I’m sick at us all. We suck so hard my ears just popped. Here’s what I just watched, in order:

1. A Pepsi ad, stitched to the front of the CBS clip, in which The Black Eyed Peas flute us towards a unified world – “one tribe, y’all” – in which we’re all the same, and where we’ve been is where we’re going and “the continent is called Pangea”…

The song suggests this as a way forward:

“We are one people
Let’s catch amnesia,
Forget about all that evil,
Forget about all that evil,
That evil that they feed ya…”

The ad is for the Pepsi “refresh project”…

Let’s overanalyse this. We’re told: “every Pepsi refreshes the world”, i.e. restarts it, reloads it, sets it back to square one: to Pangea, the prehistoric landmass). A singularity of prethought. And how do we get there? “Let’s get amnesia”. Stop thinking. Forget about otherness, forget about the “evil” that sets us at odds. Let’s refresh ourselves to a mindwiped oneness, with Pepsi.

We’ll come back to this.

2. The Pepsi trailer ends, the CBS clip begins. A report from a couple of years ago about a teenage Guitar Hero sensation, Chris Chike.

It’s a haunting clip, raw footage with no news commentary, in which Chike sits unblinking while his fingers blur meaninglessly across the five Guitar Hero finger pads. Rigid he sits, only his fingers move, the game screen pops and flashes, people stand around in awe, watching this bizarre dystopian hypnofeat. Blink rate zero. A new world record!

I found it plain scary. The act alienated from the music. Movement alienated from the corporeal. A deathly triumph of toyskill cheered by adults.

Then I clicked on this madness:

3. The second Pepsi ad, and a celebration on every level of brainwiping “refreshment”. The ad itself is a ‘parody’ of the famous and very brilliant SNL Roxbury sketch about barhopping coke fiends. In the ad, people nodding off wake up after a jolt of energy from the “invigorating cola” that is diet Pepsi Max. “Wake up, people!” screams the voiceover. What follows is a bafflingly (and I mean BAFFLINGLY) retarded ‘behind the scenes’ recap of the ad by the four celebrities featured in it. I cannot overstate how unprecedentedly moronic this bit of the video is.

Here’s what LL tells us about his character in the ad, explaining his motivation: “I have no energy, I’m exhausted, I’m lethargic, I’m – you know – I’m fading… quickly.” But then “I have a sip of my Pepsi Max” and the energy kicks in, “it just takes me to another level”. You have to watch the video to appreciate how bonkers this aftergame analysis is. Everyone – the celebrities, the people at whom the ad is aimed, the people who made the ad, and everyone in the world, alive and dead – even the birds on the trees are belittled by the stupidity of this advertisement.

What’s fascinating is the (barely) underlying Pepsi = cocaine message. It’s medication. And it medicates us into this state:

Busta Rhymes there, on a Coke Pepsi high. This is the state of ‘being awake’. A state of buzzing nowness, of mindless wakefulness, amnesiac consciousness. Eyes as wide as Chris Chike. Mind wide shut. UnZen zerothought. WAKE UP, PEOPLE.

And eveything suddenly seemed to me so stupid, so blank and crass – as though we’ve all been reduced to a “one tribe” unison of idiocy, we’ve crashed to some hideous Pepsi Minimum – a prehistoric senseless present. Refreshed to Coke Zero – only our fingertips twitching – alive in a grinning deathslumber. And I became sad. And I became angry. And I mean, seriously, I don’t want to labour the point or anything, but what kind of a numbnut bunch of fucktard pond scum have we become?

A trip to the gallery for the art-loving Baxter:

Last night, I went to see ‘Satyagraha’ – the much lauded Philip Glass opera – at the Colosseum.

“A landmark in recent London opera” – Andrew Clements (Guardian).

“Spellbindingly beautiful… this show as a whole is a masterpiece” – Michael Church (Independent).

It’s a big show. We had snacks for the intervals. Three acts, each about 50 or 55 minutes long. About four minutes into Act 1, I’d had enough. About six minutes in and I wanted to shout, scream, vomit, throw my shoes, end the pain. I wanted to die. It was truly, truly, truly, violently, mind-stretchingly, wretchedly awful. I hesitate to call it “shit” because turds are short, pinched-off little things that plop merrily into existence, and can flushed away. Plop, flush, done. This thing just kept coming at me. It wouldn’t stop. It was poorness given power. Weakness stretched to infinity. A clumsy idiotburp flatpuff toestub Niagra of honking nothing, sung quite well. I felt myself teetering on the void. I felt bullied, brutalized by the unrelenting badness of the music. Bad bad bad bad bad. Shut up, shut up, bad bad bad bad.

I felt like this:

The only thing that saved my mind was the knowledge that swept over me, about ten minutes in, that I didn’t have to come back in for the remaining two-thirds of gutless rapemusic. I clung to that knowledge like a dog on an iceflow, 30 miles from shore. It saved me. I left. I lived. God help me, I survived.

PS

“This opera is well named as a deeply felt commitment to passive nonviolence on the part of the audience is required to sit through a full performance” – Henry Heidt