America the Pitiful?

It would be difficult, I should imagine, avoiding the single story that is dominating the world’s news outlets this morning.

Yes, that’s right; Georgina Baillie has forgiven Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand.

I, for one, am breathing a sigh of relief. I really had begun to fear that the whole affair was about to spiral out of all control, possibly ending in bloodshed. Some manner of vitriolic action group was bound to be formed, undoubtedly headed up by mothers. Mothers are much like Captain Spaulding in that regard. Whatever it is, they’re against it.

But I’ll come back to that later, unforeseeable tangents permitting.

No, of course, I am speaking about the election of Senator Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.

In the interests of full disclosure, I will hang out my tattered flag immediately. I am – prepare to hiss in an exaggerated pantomime manner, my conservative readers – a liberal. I know, I know. Shocked and stunned. Who would have imagined that any of those itinerant musical types pulled for the pinkos?

Yes, I am a card-carrying, Bush-bashing, gay-loving, long-haired (sometimes) hippie-assed son of a bitch.

Apparently, anyway; the truth is far more complex.

Growing up in Canada, under the truly dictatorial regime of my psychotic religious family, I always had a bit of a hard-on for the ideals that America purported to represent. Freedom! Oh, yes! Give me some of that. Of Choice! Of Religion! Of Marriage Partner! (Oh, wait… No. Apparently there are some restrictions on that.) I remember, for instance, weeping like a stockbroker on my first viewing of Moscow on the Hudson. But then any film in which someone escapes or rebels against a repressive regime always leaves me in floods. The climax of Dead Poets Society has the same effect to this day, so maybe it’s just Robin Williams. No, wait. I know I didn’t cry in Patch Adams. At least I hope not.

Obviously, as I’ve grown older, and despite appearances to the contrary, a little wiser I understand that hyperbole, as attractive as it is, is never the whole story.

Which is why, while I think Barack Obama has the potential to be very good for his country, and by extension the world, I certainly don’t buy into the Messianic fervour evidenced by some of his supporters. But I admire them for feeling it, because it is still considered deeply unattractive to care that deeply about anything. Cynicism rules supreme. I can’t help but warm to people who are unashamedly in love with something: be it political idealism, music or Doctor Who.

Obviously, there are limits to this. Those who are unashamedly in love with sticking the heads of their neighbours on spikes aren’t likely to attract me to their fan forum, however nattily designed.

On the other hand, I have been deeply amused by the comments on “right wing” blogs across t’Interweb this morning. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to join the mass liberal gloat – except, perhaps, drunk in private. There are some fair-minded political commentators out there who have weighed up the issues carefully and impartially and for some reason have come down on the side of a disingenuous Navy Brat and Tina Fey’s evil twin. It’s not for me to judge.)

Fair play to anyone who supported the other side and is disappointed, perhaps even fearful of the future. I say this because I understand. Four years ago – during the most horrific and emotionally devastating period of my life personally – I still lay awake all night blood gushing from my eyes with every state that fell to Dubya.

However, comments such as:

“I have spent 35 years of my life hunting and killing communists across the globe. Now, we’ve elected one as President…”

And:
“Well done, America on electing a President who favours throwing live babies in the trash.”

Make me laugh out loud.

On a more serious point, however, the biggest bone of contention I could find, recurring across approximately three gazillion posts was this:

“He’s going to raise my taxes.”

Oh. My. God.

Now, I admit that changes in the economy have never really affected me unduly. I’m flat broke most of the time, so I find it hard to tell the difference between the varying degrees. Still, no one wants to pay more tax. No one. But what, in an era of terrorism, dubious wars, complete financial chaos, lingering racial issues, homophobia, big questions on the rights of man in the modern age, enables these people – who clearly care very deeply about the Republican Party to condense the entire debate into: “He’s going to raise my taxes.” How utterly selfish and narrow-minded.

Not: “Well, I disagree with some of his policies, but I can understand that this is a historic moment for my country, and I shall watch with curiosity, my hard-fought right to dissent on call whenever I feel it is needed”

But: “He’s going to raise my taxes.”

The left are no better though. We have idiots on board in spades. The people who also completely refuse to engage in communication with the other side and are prone to making drippy, wishy-washy pronouncements that treat anyone who disagrees with them like mentally-challenged children who have just received a traumatic head injury.

At least, I say what I mean, and I’ll back it up with research.

The real problem is that we feel the need to split into teams in the first place. And then, rather than advancing the proposition that no party is ever going to completely reflect the views of that number of complex, idiosyncratic individuals, decide to adopt the views of their chosen party, come what may.

Personally, I like to take the viewpoints of individuals on a case-by-case basis, and then decide that they’re assholes.

But it is as it has always been.

Proposition 8 and the Ross/Brand case – to return to promised subplots – are both microcosms of what’s wrong with everybody, frankly. In very different ways.

To start with the less serious, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand made tits out of themselves, and some idiot somewhere fucked up royally in letting it air. How is this front page news? Andrew Sachs was rightly upset. His granddaughter was rightly pissed off. It wasn’t particularly funny, and it certainly wasn’t particularly clever.

But moral outrage? Jesus wept. You hear worse down the pub every night of the week. Doesn’t make it right, and they probably want to consider whether what they said reflects a lack of respect for women that should be privately addressed. And Miss Baillie should not neither be praised nor censured for her part in it. What she does for a living doesn’t affect the respect she deserves, nor should being the centre of such a idiotic row entitle her to the vilest, and unfortunately most common strain of fame: the tabloid star. On the other hand, having been around the industry for the last ¾ of a decade, I’m inclined to wonder what I would do if handed a golden opportunity to engage with the press. Hopefully I’ve learned that it’s no route to a lasting career, but I’ll admit the jury’s still out on that one.

Moral campaigners offend and outrage me. Due to the simple assumption that their morals must be my and, by extension, our morals. I support gay marriage, a women’s right to choose, I accept the endless grey areas that blanket human existence and try to judge people on their whole, rather than their component parts. I try to raise my children to accept people of all colours, creeds, religions and sexual orientations, provided they’re not twats. I’ve made a lot of errors of judgement over the years, and I can be a decadent, hedonistic rabble-rouser when the mood is upon me, but I’d like to believe that all of it combines to make me a moral person. And they’re my morals, hard-won through experience, emotion and thought, not out of an outdated religious text with enough sex and violence between its pages to make Harold Robbins blush.

This is the great divide between left and right, in stereotype: The right believe their way is right, and therefore should be enforced. The left believe that everyone is entitled to their own viewpoint and way of life, and that should be enforced.
How do you work with contrasting ideologies of such magnificent idiocy?

This brings us to Proposition 8. I don’t even know where to begin on this one. I’m trying to keep my feelings under control, and my response balanced.

You brain-dead, homophobic, anachronistic, bible-thumping motherfuckers. What in the name of holy fuck gives you the right to impose your views on other people’s love lives? They want the right to be themselves and you want the right to stop them. This one is not a two sides to every story situation.

You are WRONG. Not only that. You are cruel, stupid and worthless. I hope you all meet up with the fuckers who think that their penile obsession with guns obliterates the qualification about a “civilian militia” from the second amendment, and I hope they shoot you in the fucking face.
And while they do that, I will be ACTIVELY teaching my children about how two people of the same sex can fall in love and get married. And they will be better than you. They already are.
It’s going to destroy SOCIETY if same-sex marriages take place? Are you fucking insane? HAVE YOU LOOKED AT SOCIETY LATELY? It needs as much love and commitment as it can eat.
And that seems a good enough point on which to leave you. I shall be trying to calm down and forgive those mentioned above. I hope you can do the same for me.

***
Now, please buy our new album, just in case someone raises my taxes.

ist - Toothpick Bridge

An Addict Writes...

It seems a veritable age since I sat down to a keyboard to write about anything other than the new album.

“Toothpick Bridge” has, of course, been a consuming passion, with all the nervous anticipation and desperate attempts at organisation that such a pursuit entails. We put pretty much everything we had into this one, so you’ll have to excuse us if we become, on occasion, evangelical in our pursuit of your aural compliance.

That being said, those of you who have already purchased your limited edition copies have been very kind in your comments, for which I thank you. Please feel free to encourage others to do the same. “A song’s not a song,” as Neil Hannon once sung, “until it’s listened to.”

But, for the moment, on to other things:

For the last few weeks, to a greater or lesser degree, my poor addled Canadian brain has been whirling and hissing like a bad CGI tornado. Frustration is the drunken, womanising brother-in-law of ambition, after all. The closer you get to realising a life-long dream, the more irritating and ire-inducing the inevitable set-backs, delays and idiocies can become.

Part of the problem is that people like me - who, for reasons best known to leaders in the psychiatric field, choose to pursue artistic expression of any kind as a career - are as temperamentally ill-suited to the business end of their endeavour as they are suited to the creative.

Take a for instance. No, please. In fact, take two. They’re small.

Somewhere in a bedroom, hunched over an acoustic guitar and fresh from a bout of frenzied, tearful masturbation, is a young aspiring songwriter. The curtains are drawn and a mournful sound that may, or may not, be singing is leaking from lips, pock-marked with newly squeezed pimples. The words are simple and concern a boy and/or girl who has torn our protagonist’s heart from their metaphorical chest and stomped merrily upon it, whilst wearing a pair of steel-capped work boots. The music is clearly “Tears in Heaven” played backwards and badly.

Nonetheless, in that moment, something happens. The ability to turn their private aches and hormonal surges into something approaching art (albeit by a circuitous route, where there is little or no parking) forever alters the path of this person’s life. Whether they succeed or fail in the pursuit of the rock and roll dream – or, in fact, even pursue it – they have just tapped into a well of emotion down which puppies and small, moronic children have been tumbling since the dawn of time.

Flash-forward a few years and you may find that this feeling was, on the surface, fleeting. They are now working in a bank, their hair slicked-back in a grotesque parody of responsible adulthood and their eyes empty of all love, awareness or hope. Waiting at home - in the arms of an inordinately over-priced child-minder with lamentable views on race relations – is a small child conceived 18 months previously under a pile of coats at a party thrown by friends. Its mother, whose penchant for screaming hissy fits is matched only by her inability to stop screwing motorcycle policeman, is at her own job, waxing the eyebrows of middle-aged women whose one goal in life is to die before they are stricken with an original thought.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, there may be a lingering feeling that something has gone wrong, somewhere – that there was another way, a better way. But it is subsumed by the hard-wired fear of not living up to their responsibilities, of not being a useful member of society. And so they drink themselves into a stupor at the weekends, and learn to switch off the screaming voice at the back of their minds which is begging to die.

Some of us, however, can’t switch it off.

It’s an illness. No matter how dire circumstances have ever become in my life, no matter how foolish and unlikely the dreams of success have seemed, I’ve never seriously considered quitting for more than one pint at a time. Money has not been so much thin on the ground, as bulimic six feet under it. Relationships have been complicated, to say the least. Responsibilities have grown. I’ve aged, put on weight, lost weight, lost my mind, inflicted pepperings of grey upon the natural colour of my hair and still sometimes find myself sleeping in train stations in shoes that I appear to have stolen from a transient’s corpse.

I’ve considered, and in my younger years attempted, suicide. But I’ve never, ever wanted not to be a songwriter. Never ever wanted to give up that feeling you get when something you’ve written punches a listener in their solar plexus, moistens their loins, drags a howl of pent-up sorrow from the depths of their being or even just sets their well-shod feet to dancing.

That’s mad, isn’t it? It makes Sarah Palin look like a poster child for the intellectually acute. It’s nuttier than the swapped-for sandwich that made Little Jimmy’s glands swell to the size of barrage balloons.

And yet, there you have it. I’m a lifer. I see band after band drop out of the race because it gets too hard, because it didn’t work out, because they never made it. And everyone, quite sensibly, says to them, “We completely understand. Shame, but there you have it. At least you have your priorities straight.”

I do not have my priorities straight, and I probably never will, whatever happens next. If all of these irons in various fires start a conflagration of achievement hitherto unrecorded in the annals of history, I will be somewhere working on new songs. If I continue to be miserable and poverty-stricken, wearing my charity shop wardrobe and cutting my own hair, I will be somewhere working on new songs. And I will, in my heart of hearts, continue to believe that it’s worth it.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way either. I think a support group may be in order. My name is Kenton and I am a music addict.

Goddamn it. That sucks. I wonder if David Duchovny will swap with me.