The Observer's Book of Butterflies

In search of the Little White Dot

"In the future", said Andy Warhol in 1968, "everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." He has been quoted and re-quoted on this as celebrity culture has grown exponentially ever since. These 15 minute celebrities certainly seem to find their audience in Britain as the average household owns 4.7 televisions, and the average Brit spends 26 hours a week watching TV. We are a nation of sofa louts and channel flickers, slaves to the remote controlled deity. We spend more time watching television than any other activity other than sleeping.

What makes this statistic even more worrying is a brief flick through the tv guide. It is packed with shows like X factor, Dragon’s Den, Popstars and The Apprentice which all seem to follow a common theme. What people really want to see at tea-time it seems, is someone else being the victim of a tirade of abuse and insults from someone richer and more succesful than themselves.

Elsewhere Jimmy Carr lingers menacingly over the telly schedule like a moon-faced harbinger of the cultural apocalypse, quiping one liners in between counting down the public’s 100 favourite films, comedy moments, car crashes and high-school shootings.

And at the very bottom of the tv guide in small print is perhaps the most sinister of all, the late-night game show in which the only contestants are those gullible enough to ring in for a pound a minute. The presenter (who is the love-child of a Butlins redcoat and Lucifer himself) nervously fills time as he or she waits for the winning caller, telling unrelated anecdotes and repeating the mantra "it could be your lucky night! Dave from Staines phoned in earlier tonight and won £500".

Poor Dave from Staines, lonely, bored and brainless enough to phone in, but lucky enough to escape with the cash. Spare a thought for those poor dejected others sitting alone in glum hope, their phones on constant re-dial, the pale glow of the tv illuminating their faces, bent with the torment that they know the glaringly obvious missing word in the pyramid, but are unable to get through.

This is the sad truth of television in the infancy of the 21st century, it’s all about making the most money, spending the least and assuming every viewer is an ADD sufferer with an IQ of 49. With a few hidden treasures, movies and sports programmes aside, the programmes above or ones of a similar ilk constitute the majority of the sceduling. The rest is simply panel games, property shows, programmes telling people they’re wearing the wrong clothes, programmes telling people they eat too much, aren’t fit to look after their own children, their house is filthy and they drink too much, but strangely enough none telling them they watch too much television.

It has become a cliché to criticize the Hello and Heat culture of celebrity kiss and tell and reality tv, but there is something terribly wrong with a world in which people with ideas to change things for the better and people who can educate and enliven others are overlooked in favour of people who are famous simply for being famous, or famous for being related to someone famous or famous for once having brushed past Jodie Marsh in a nightclub toilet. With this century comes the death of ideas and content. With the technology of YouTube and widespread digital tv comes the saturization of of what got people watching in the first place.

Maybe there’s a better way to spend those 26 hours a week, reading, going outside or dare I say it coming into contact with other people. So please remember to switch off your set, and for added fire protection, unplug it from the socket. Good night.

Beard of the Month

If I ever started my own magazine. It'd be called Beard Monthly. This has been so widely discussed that people I don't know have already started sending me candidates for "Beard of the Month". Here is my favourite.

A story

Notes from Underground Review

Я человек больной... Я злой человек. Непривлекательный я человек.


First published in Art and Soul Magazine 2006

In Dostoyevsky’s most popular novel, Crime and Punishment, the anti-hero Raskolnikov murders an elderly pawn-broker for his own selfish gain lead by his Übermensch-esque philosophy and a hunger to extricate himself from his impoverished surroundings. The vivid detail and chillingly accurate psychological potrait of a killer shocked an 1860s audience and secured Dostoyevsky’s fame worldwide. But the much over-looked prelude to Crime and Punishment, "Notes from Underground" premiers the character of the embittered, out-cast intellectual that would later become Raskolnikov as well as marking Dostoyevsky’s transition from semi-autobiographist and Gogol inspired novelist, to a mature writer of timeless literature in his own right.

Notes from Underground is a darkly comic novella, it follows the unamed main character (often refered to as the Underground Man) firstly through his own cynical life philosophy, and then through a serious of annecdotes (The Story of the Falling Sleet), which explain what lead him to take this unpleasant and bitter worldview, what he calls living his life "Underground".

An Underground Man is intelligent, but out of touch with his animal instincts; he would rather write a withering short story about his enemies than barge past them on the street when he is annoyed. The polar opposite of the Underground man is the "Spontaneous Man of Action", who when faced with a problem, charges at it head first like a bull. The Underground Man’s struggle to decide which role is better peppers much of the first half of the book, but a reading of the second half makes it quite clear who generally comes out on top.

Like Dostoyevsky’s short tale, "A Nasty Story", where the main character gets blind drunk at a wedding party and ends up sleeping in the bridal bed, Notes from Underground is filled with embarrasing and cringeworthy moments that make the reader’s toes curl. Although the main character is an anti-hero, you grow to sympathise with him as he decends deeper and deeper underground and into his own negative mindset.

Notes from Underground is a masterpiece in outsider literature which in Jessie Coulson’s colourful translation seems just as cogent today as the day it was written. Unlike some of Dostoyevsky’s other novels, not a single word is wasted, every end is tied up, and every idea explained. It is the first modern Russian novel, the first piece of existentialist philosophy, it is a sobering fable for any would-be melodramatic tortured artist and most of all, it is simply a brilliant book.

A Quiz

1) Would you like to do a quiz?

Not really

2) Oh...alright then

Busking

First published in Art and Soul magazine 2006

In Sean Locke’s cult radio series, "15 Minutes of Misery", the character of Honest Alf is often heard humming a well-known tune, cursing himself, then phoning up the Performing Rights Society to let them know he owes them several pence worth of royalties. I’m sure no one is really this honest, and luckily the Performing Rights Society will probably not force you to write out a cheque for 42p for singing "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" in the shower this morning, but attitudes and laws towards live music are becoming more and more uptight. If you’re wondering why some of the pubs in Peterborough have lost their live or even recorded music, it’s probably due to more expensive music licensing.

I was lucky enough to leave this all behind for a few weeks recently and, with a few other Peterborough musicians and music lovers, visit the southern Spanish city of Granada which has a thriving arts and music scene. We stayed in the caves of Sacremento, just outside of the town along with musicians from all over the world.

We’d spend the evenings playing music by the fire or reading by candle-light in the gypsy caves, which were pock-marked by the wasps that woke us up every morning. On getting up, we’d often be greeted with the sight of other artistically-minded troglodytes fashioning digeridoos from the cacti that grew locally. We’d make our way down to the labyrinth of the city below and spend the cooler parts of the day busking. The local police were known to be somewhat temperamental; they would pass us most days smiling, but we were told stories of people who were told that busking wasn’t allowed and had their instruments confiscated with a several hundred euro return fee.

Over here, the busking laws are a shade more lax, though they vary from city to city. In Peterborough, no licence is needed to take music to the streets, though there are a few simple ground rules if you intend to busk. The most important being that you must not busk on private property.

Busking isn’t just confined to the over-vociferous and under-talented you-hum-it-i’ll-play-it penny botherers that often line the streets at the time when a headache already seems to be coming on, it is a verifiable art form that adds colour and culture to a city, and when done properly, can brighten up someone’s day.

What do Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Rod Stewart, Joan Baez and Eric Clapton have in common? Apart from some very questionable haircuts, they all started their careers as buskers. Other unlikely street performers include Beck, Coldplay, comedian Bob Hope and flamenco intrumentalists of the moment, Rodrigo y Gabriela.

There are some strange attitudes to buskers, one of the most common seems to be that busking is a type of begging, that all buskers are homeless. Another image of the busker is the Dick Van-Dyke styled one man band, cymbals strapped to the inside of the knees, out of tune guitar in hand, and not much upstairs. These stereotypes are both out of touch and unrealistic, just take a short trip to Cambridge and you will see student bands filling the central square with small audiences and a wide range of musical styles being played down the cobbled streets. And here in Peterborough over the past year, we’ve had Paraguayan harpists, Guitar and harmony bands, Violinists, Gypsy jazz bands, Accordionists, and flute and cello duos.

But at times like these when all forms of live music are under threat, perhaps the days of the street musician are numbered, perhaps the much loved London busker hot-spot Covent Garden will soon be devoid of string quartets, djembe players and all other musicians, and perhaps Honest Alfs will soon be made of us all. Let’s hope not.