If any of you have access to the Disney+ streaming service, can I recommend the Australian TV show Mr. Inbetween? It's got nothing to do with this song, but it is very worth watching. Only 25 minute episodes too, so they're easy to get through before you fall asleep at the end of the day.
It's 8.30 on a Saturday morning... not yet time for the nine o'clock news. Instead, here are ten pop performers to identify. You probably won't need a cunning plan to spot this week's rather obvious (to me, at least) connection...
10. Trump & Twist.
9. One of the lonely people, enjoys her patty in hot oil.
8. Lewis and Harris.
7. Swanky police club.
6. Ah, go on. Go on, go on, go on.
5. Rosy sprites.
4. Zzzzzzzz.
3. Levis rub him up the wrong way.
2. Ewan marries a virgin.
1. Will reoccur every six weeks, inside.
Bean there, done that? You can check your answers tomorrow morning.
Louise sent me the above image, which she'd found on the book of faces, in response to the news that David Cameron is rising from the dead, like a Marvel super-villain, ready to resume the reign of terror and destruction that led to his previous downfall. I mean, he's going to have to go some to beat completely destroying the country, but bad guys always like to think big, don't they?
Anyway, I was rather amused by the aged cultural reference, so I shared the image with my work colleagues on our Whatsapp group. Being teachers, they're a bunch of politically-minded so-and-sos who regularly carp on about the malevolent excesses of the Tory regime, so I figured they'd find it funny.
Only one person got the joke though. Everyone else just thought I was sharing a picture of a naked David Cameron. If they didn't think I was weird already...
In despair, I decided to consult another young person about my faux pas. So I messaged Ben.
I should also point out that a few days earlier, I'd sent Ben a disgusted message regarding the Hollywood remake of 80's TV favourite The Fall Guy, starring Ryan 'as much charisma as a plank of 2x4' Gosling in the Lee Majors role and Aaron 'Oh my god, why does this guy keep getting work?' Taylor-Johnson as Howie Munson. To say I was horrified at this desecration of my childhood is a gross understatement.
Ben replied that he'd never heard of The Fall Guy. Worse still, he was less than complimentary when I sent him a video of the opening credits featuring the classic Lee Majors-sung theme tune. Frankly, he's lucky I was still talking to him.
Rol: As a 30-something who's never seen The Fall Guy, do you understand the cultural reference in this?
Ben: David Cameron at uni with his pig-lover in the shower?
So you're not aware of Bobby Ewing in the shower and what that represents?
Dallas or Dynasty? Is that the who shot JR bit?
I'm aware of these things existing in a loose form.
Or is it the this is all a dream bit?
Dallas. They killed Bobby off. He was dead for a whole series. Ratings dived, so they brought him back to life. The explanation was, yes, the previous season had all been a dream. His resurrection happened with his wife waking up and finding him in the shower.
I kinda got there with some help.
Did the ratings return?
For a while, yes. But a lot of people were pissed off that they'd watched a whole season that was just a dream.
I'm sure I had my dinner watching something on TV There's not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn't see
Thanks though. You answered my question about how well this would be understood by a young person.
Hate to break it to you, but as I'm in my mid 30s, I'm not sure I class as a "young person".
You'll always be a young person to me.
Someone asked me, "Why is youth Wasted on the rude and uncouth? Blinded on cheap vermouth A would be poet in Duluth Long on time, short in the tooth Fantasies of John Wilkes Booth Come back when you're younger
See you had that, but I grew up in the early days of the internet where shock tactics were the shared things that are now cultural flagstones. Ask anyone my age what "goatse", "lemon party" or "meat spinner" are and you'll get nostalgia for an internet before it became corporatised. None of those are pleasant things but it represents the wider culture of the internet as a mysterious entity prior to it becoming standardised. The rise of these standardised sites can be attributed to places like blogger, Tumblr and myspace who sought tohomogenise how the internet looked and was consumed before the rise of the true current social media spaces. You just got shit telly.
That last line is a complete reduction, but I felt it hit as a good punchline.
Blow up your TV Throw away your paper Go to the country Build you a home Plant a little garden Eat a lot of peaches Try an' find Jesus on your own
I won't. But I feel like I've just seen a Lynchian glimpse behind a curtain I don't want to look behind.
Was it like the dark web?
I think dark web is exaggerating quite a bit, yet excessive gore, violence and stuff of a sexual nature was pretty much everywhere. But it wasn't for consuming content the way we use the internet now, it was just for shock. If that makes sense?
So people weren't hunting it down for kicks, it was just randomly placed to cause upset?
I spent a lot of time online in the early days of the Web. Why didn't I stumble across this shit?
The websites were passed along like folklore. The internet wasn't monetised at that point so there was no impetus to drive traffic.
Was this widely shared by your whole generation though? I wonder if it's comparable to the collective consciousness from my generation regarding the TV shows of our youth, even the ones we didn't watch.
Because there was far less choice, there was much more shared cultural knowledge back then.
These things were the early version of memes. Links sent to others in msn messenger, written on each other's schoolbooks, typed into a friend's computer in the computer room at school (before siteblocking).
Because you have to remember, my generation is the one that grew up in the world you mentioned whilst also growing up in the early days of widespread internet, meaning the habits from the former informed the way we used the internet.
Sam's generation however will experience a curated internet.
Not quite the same then. I'm consistently surprised by the lack of a shared cultural knowledge by today's teenagers. Like how many of them don't know who Homer Simpson or Indiana Jones or Darth Vader are. I know they're all older generation examples, but I knew about John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart when I was a kid. Everything is fractured now, little pockets of knowledge but very few shared cultural touchstones.
Look, the internet now is curated along two distinct lines...
1) a company wishing to monopolise visits to the internet (i.e the platform).
2) content curated by the ways in which Sam will view the internet ( i.e. logarithms).
I feel like you're just sending me pages from your thesis now.
My last point ties directly into yours though: the internet now is so curated towards likes and viewing habits (down to how long on average we stay on a single image or video, so as to then recommend more of the same to keep us engaged) that a level of shared culture isn't possible anymore.
Is this why nobody reads my blog?
The internet doesn't show you content about what you *think* you want to see anymore. It gives you stuff that you *do* engage with (positively or negatively). It needs you to stay engaged. And the data which it uses to provide you with this is based on hundreds of thousands of hours of billions of people's viewing habits.
So whilst it sounds utopian, it's not driven by enjoying, just engaging. You take a second to read how terrible that Daily Mail headline is on your Google news feed? You engaged with it. It'll show you more. But it needs time to work out why you engaged with it. So it shows you soft politically biased things in that area to see if you engage with those. If you do, you might get some alt-right stuff. It knows you're male based on how you view and men engage with alt right stuff more than women. Not engaging with that stuff enough, it'll move to testing your engagement with things until it finds where you are.
This is how so many young men end up engaged with alt right stuff. Once they begin, it'll start flooding their feeds with it. Cars - sports cars - luxury cars - alpha mindset - Andrew Tate. Comic books - whining about certain aspects - woke comics nowadays - anti woke - Andrew Tate. And it's not set up to force people into certain beliefs, but because of how we engage with the internet and the "need" to monetise it, it's the conclusion.
Populist beliefs have become far stronger across the western world since the late 90s and increase year on year. That means it gets engagement so is viewed more. And on the internet, views = money, so notoriety and fame are the same thing. As a result, people who want to be successful express extreme opinions. Those get views. People want to make money, so they replicate those views.
By no means am I saying Sam is destined to end up with those views. You're too decent a person and I know he'll learn from you. But he will be exposed to it. A lot of it. Without ever searching for it. His friends will. And some will identify with it. And people are trying to blame particular websites or certain heads of the hydra instead of dealing with having to have difficult conversations with their kids.
Is this why nobody reads my blog?
It's more that it's not monetisable, so the people who do read it or come across it will always be a small group, but they will have a level of interest in the subject matter that equals yours.
We're back with more great song titles dredged up from the darkest recesses of my hard drive... and some from yours too. Do any of them live up to their names?
For your consideration today...
1. Alice Cooper - I'm Alive (That Was The Day My Dead Pet Returned To Save My Life)
Brackets are a wonderful thing in song titles, aren't they? Although I have to admit there's a part of me that always hears the diabolical James Saville reading the title out as he used to do on the wireless, saying "open bracket... close bracket".
Sam and I were listening to an old compilation in the car last week. When Alice Cooper's Hey Stoopid! came on, Sam said, "good old Alice!"
I've also been listening to Mr. Furnier's latest record, Road. It's a lot better than a heavy rock album by a 75 year old man should be.
This one comes from way back in 1982 though, when he was younger than all of us. Taken from the wince-inducing album Zipper Catches Skin.
2. My Life Story - If You Can't Live Without Me Then Why Aren't You Dead Yet?
Jake Shillingford's My Life Story were firm favourites in my house for at least five minutes in the late 90s. This is from their third album, Joined Up Talking.
Because you can't copyright a song title - even a great one - American rockers Mayday Parade were free to write their own song with the same name, and that's the one you're more likely to come across via your search engine of choice. (Does anybody actually use Bing?) It can't hold a candle to My Life Story, if you ask me.
3. Gary Stewart - She's Actin' Single (I'm Drinkin' Doubles)
Charity Chic was keen to remind me that country songwriters are an excellent source of great titles, and he recommended one of his favourites from Gary Stewart. My hard drive is full of country singers drowning their sorrows in booze after getting dumped, but as Gary Stewart was the "king of honky tonk", he appears to have spent more time than most propping up the bar. He was also responsible for She's Got a Drinking Problem, Hey, Bottle of Whiskey and An Empty Glass (That's the Way the Day Ends) among many others.
Tragically, Gary Stewart took his own life following the death of his wife in 2003.
4. Captain Beefheart - I Wanna Find A Woman That'll Hold My Big Toe Till I Have To Go
Next up, George wants us to consider the late Don Glen Vliet, famed for his wacky song titles... well, wacky everything, I guess, including, presumably, 'bacca. We could be here all day with the likes of...
In last week’s post, I mentioned my frequently expressed
hatred of Audi drivers. Martin responded that he used to drive an Audi. Don’t
worry, Martin, we all did things we regret in our younger days. It’s good that
you can own your past transgressions, that you now see the error of your ways,
and I’m sure you’ve spent the time since making up for it – being kind to small
animals, giving more to charity, occasionally letting other drivers have their
right of way.
My reply to Martin was rather flippant, I’m afraid, and I feel I should apologise for that. I said, “And you’re also a cyclist! And yet, I still
like you. So you must be doing something right.”
I need to make it clear that I
don’t put cyclists in the same bracket as Audi drivers. Not all cyclists are
bad, but I do reserve a particular disdain for the selfish and arrogant ones,
usually MAMILs, who believe their hobby / exercise routine trumps the rights
and priorities of all other road users. There are times I feel like setting up
a desk in the middle of a cycle lane and writing my blog there, or taking the
ironing board out onto the Transpennine Cycle Trail and standing smack dab in
the middle of it while I press the creases out of my smalls. But such behaviour
would be petty. Far better to manage my grievances through mentalisation.
On the first week of my new job, just over two years ago, I
attended a course that introduced me to the concept of mentalisation. It’s not
the best of words, since whenever I hear it, I immediately think of Alan Partridge running away from his obsessive fan, or else I conjure up an image of this guy…
Mentalisation has nothing to do with either of those weird cultural reference points. Science Direct tells us…
“Mentalisation is the ability to think about states of mind
(e.g., thoughts, feelings, intentions) in the self and other people.”
Mentalisation is used a lot in therapy, but it’s also encouraged for
teachers, business people, anyone who might find themselves in a situation of
conflict with another person who appears to have opposing views, plans or
wishes to yourself.
The idea is similar to empathy, but empathy that you think about
and apply to a situation, rather than empathy that comes naturally. A quick
word on the difference between empathy and sympathy, since it’s something I get
asked a lot by students...
A friend of yours tells you what a bad time they’re having
since they lost a loved one. You can sympathise as above, without really
feeling their pain. Or you can empathise, because you care about them deeply,
you knew the person they’ve lost, or because it reminds you of a loss you
yourself suffered.
The other different between empathy and sympathy is that you can have empathy for positive emotions. Sympathy's all about the negative, "feeling sorry" for someone.
OK, mentalisation isn’t quite the same as either of those
things. It’s more cold and logical. It’s the Mr. Spock version of empathy. It asks
you to carefully assess the actions of another, to try to appreciate why they’re
acting the way they are, thereby controlling your own reaction to it.
Imagine you’re going into a difficult business meeting with
someone you know has very different goals and objectives to you. If you think
beforehand about their aims and intentions, try to understand where they’re
coming from, then you’re less likely to get pissed off when they refuse to play
ball with your plans, and you might be more willing to find a compromise that
suits everybody.
As a teacher, it’s useful to try mentalising my students. Why is little Timmy throwing his chair through the window? What’s he got going on in his life, at home or elsewhere in school? Is it a cry for help? Or did he just have George's Maths lesson the period before mine?
Let’s try and apply mentalisation to my frustration at being stuck
behind a cyclist on a narrow country lane. At five miles an hour in first gear up a steep Yorkshire hillside.
With no passing places until you get right to the top. And I’m in a rush,
because I’m late to pick Sam up from the school because the traffic has been
really bad tonight.
If I concentrate my thoughts on me in this situation – my goals,
my annoyance, how I wouldn’t have the audacity to keep on riding my bike in
this situation if there was a queue of ten cars behind me – I’m just going to get more wound up.
Instead, let’s try to mentalise that cyclist. Maybe he had a
heart attack last year and his doctor told him cycling is the best
exercise if he wants to see the other side of 60? Maybe his wife left
him a few months back and cycling is the only thing that takes his mind off his
loneliness? Maybe he’s in training for a charity bike ride to earn enough money
to fly his young son to the States for an experimental medical procedure that
might save the boy's life?
Now, admittedly, this is speculative mentalisation, since
I’ll never know the truth, and likely none of them come anywhere near the truth
(and maybe the truth is, that cyclist really doesn’t give a shit about anybody
else on the road since they’re completely devoid of empathy or the ability to
mentalise the needs of others; i.e. maybe they’re also an Audi driver), but it’s
the process that matters. It’s certainly healthier to try to mentalise
in this situation. And anger
is pointless, apparently. But we’ll get back to that another time. The main thing is to try to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes. These songs, from the perspective of cyclists, help me feel the other side of the story...
If none of that works, maybe I can try to imagine that
cyclist is a friend of mine. What if it's Martin? If I imagine that, then I know he’s
not doing this out of malicious intent, he’s just doing what he needs to do. If
I imagine it’s someone I know, someone I like and respect, then suddenly I
feel far less animosity towards them, because I know they're not doing it on purpose just to piss me off. (To be fair, some of my friends would do it on purpose just to piss me off, but that's OK when it's your friends.) Suddenly it becomes much easier to mentalise
them. There’s probably a psychological name for doing this, but I haven’t come
across it yet. I’m no expert, just a layman trying to make sense of
it all to help myself.
I take a few steps back to gain perspective, perspective, And kid myself that I can be objective, objective
