Eurovision Song Contest 2010

The Eurovision Song Contest 2010 in Oslo has now come and gone and the winner this year was Germany's Lena with a number entitled "Satellite", nothing very special but nowhere as bad as some other winning entries in the past few years, so I have no major gripes about it. If not the best of a bad bunch, it is certainly not the worst and it might as well be the winner as any of the others.

As a citizen of the United Kingdom, which came LAST, I have to hang my head in shame from now until such time as we can take part again in the Eurovision Song Contest when, hopefully, we will improve our position, perhaps to second from last - after all, it will be impossible to do worse than last. Last is last and anything else has to be better.

We had of course the usual show of partisanship (although slightly less than last year) on the part of the East European nations which appear not to have been told that they can actually vote for West European nations. To their credit though, there were some aberrations where the odd vote was given by an East European country or former Soviet satellite to a country other than a neighbour or Mother Russia. The worst offenders were the former constituent nations of Yugoslavia which evidently like to keep it in the family for the most part and vote for each other. Good neighbourliness it may be, but sportsmanship it's not.

Once again many of the entries were hardly distinguishable from each other in their style, format and presentation. Inspired they were not. Bland and dreary would be a better description. And since most of the songs are now sung in English (since the rules were changed to allow singing out of one's national language), it's impossible to know what country is performing just from the song. This too has contributed to their losing their particular ethnic flavour and sounding pretty much like each other. Some countries, like France, Spain and Portugal, are still bravely holding out, for which they earn my admiration,  but they are paying a terrible price for it as they languish low in the rankings every time. But there is the odd exception, of course.

It has to be said that in the early years of the contest the songs and performances had a distinctive cultural identity that provided welcome variety, in my opinion. Songs were sung in the national language of each country, in keeping with their particular cultural and national traditions, and accompanied by dances that reflected the culture of the particular country. Now, following a change in attitudes and especially in competition rules, we have ended up with an indistinguishable homogeneous mush of Western-style pop music which has no cultural identity and no connection with any country in particular. It all sounds the same and looks the same in this homogeneous global village that we have created.

In an effort to curry pan-European favour and win the contest, the competing countries have adopted the style and manner of the non-country-specific pop song which sounds the same, has the same inane lyrics and is performed in the same over-the-top fashion of something which, lacking any intrinsic merit, hopes to prevail with a backdrop of silly clownish antics. There is the usual crop of youths singing about an idealised something they know nothing about, love, and the usual expression of vacuous platitudes and inanities.

Yet for all that, the contest is prestigious, widely viewed, and can make or break reputations. As an idea, it was a good one, but unfortunately over the years it has been degraded and devalued by the steam-roller concept which annihilates variety and difference and reduces everything to just one uniformised and indistinguishable whole which began with the relaxation of the rule on the use of the national language and has progressed from there. And many of us who still watch it every year (and we are legion, it would seem), do so more out of an unhealthy curiosity and the reprehensible desire to do it down, than out of any real recognition of its worth. Long Live the Eurovision Song Contest!

Shit Begets Shit

Having come back from a leave of absence which was meant to recharge my batteries, refresh my brain cells, re-stock my store of ideas, and renew my spiritual and intellectual momentum, I find that I cannot think of anything to write about in this blog of mine which is worth writing about other than the fact that I cannot think of anything to write about in this blog of mine which is worth writing about! Or can I?

There are of course countless things to write about, but many of them are just plain boring, others are too weighty, others too trivial, others suck, and still others are too personal and would make me the laughing-stock of the world! If, that is, the whole world read my blog, but as it doesn't and as those few who do can be counted on the fingers of one hand, would it really matter? I suppose not, but standards must be maintained and pretences kept up. Self-delusion is everything when there's nothing else.

Out there in the worldwide Blogosphere countless blogs are being composed at this very moment, some interesting and entertaining and some, well, just plain trashy and an embarrassment to the author were he mature enough or intelligent enough to see it. But we are all free to write what we want and now to put it out there in the public sphere for the edification of whomever is unfortunate enough to stumble across it.

Everything exists in excess in this world... except good sense. The greatest excess in this world is of course people. And an excessive number of people create an excessive quantity of garbage in one form or another, be it tangible or intangible. The obvious consequence of excess is of course pollution, and this too is created in excess and planet-wide. As if the environment did not have its work cut out in digesting the phenomenal output of excrement (aka 'poo') produced and ejected by billions of human bottoms worldwide, an unavoidable concomitant of life, it also gets dumped on with all the rubbish and waste generated by human activities (i.e. the by-products of manufacturing etc). And so it gets double-dumped on! It's a bowl of shit whichever way you look at it.

We inhabit a world of exaggeration. We live beyond our means and we do things in excess. We have unrealistic expectations and make overblown demands and we cultivate oversensitivity and will ourselves to be offended so we can experience righteous indignation. We rail against our politicians but each one of us would probably be a thousand times worse if we were in a postion of political power, as evidenced by the ridiculous things people say when questioned in the street by some canvasser or pollster. God protect us from the common man! There's none worse than the so-called man in the street and his black-and-white views and sure-fire panaceas!

In truth the world is a confusing place. Confusing enough to drive us all mad if we could but contemplate it all. But thankfully we are by nature limited in what we can take in as part of our human consciousness and hence we are able to preserve our sanity and keep going. The world is only digestible in minute morsels and our minds can only handle snippets of the overall picture and the reality that's out there. We often choose to be aware of what we can usefully take on board in a viable way, and it is just as well, as it enables us to carry on psychologically and physically.

And yet we now live in a world of information overload. Thanks to our advanced communication technologies we are today bombarded by news and information from many quarters. Our ears are assailed by noise and our minds by information of one kind or another and in one form or another. It is a constant flow and it is much too much for us to absorb and process. There is no peace or tranquillity in our lives, no refuge from the barrage of information coming at us from a multiplicity of sources. And of course there is no escape from the mountain of obligations and debts that attach to us from just living our lives. We think we have free will and freedom of action and yet the reality is that we are so hemmed in by a myriad of restrictions and obligations that we often feel suffocated by the pressures placed upon us and the stresses that result. Our freedom is not curtailed by iron bars but our lives are constricted by an infinite number of rules and regulations, duties and obligations, and the burden of heavy debt which our modern living frequently demands of us.

The name of the beast is of course 'materialism'. Its vehicle is money. And its manifestation is goods. And we have so constructed the world that we need to have continual growth to have prosperity. How we make sense of that when the planet and its resources are finite and exhaustible is anyone's guess. We appear not to have spotted the absence of any logic in such a policy. So we worship at the altar of growth, which of course neatly brings us back to the theme of excess with which we started this commentary. In some mad sort of way everything seems to slot seamlessly into this jigsaw puzzle: materialism requires that we constantly acquire things, growth dictates that we constantly enlarge and expand, and money, the vehicle by which we stoke the fires of materialism and achieve growth, necessitates that we work to acquire it, and so we have the complete cycle, at least in simplified terms.

It is a much quoted saying that we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. But like most sayings, there is more than a grain of truth in it. The world has become a noisy place. There is no privacy any more. There is no real asylum. Communications are instant. Globalism is a reality. Money is the engine that drives all economies. Greed is the motivation that makes money work. Selfishness is the quality that allows materialism to thrive. Pollution is worldwide and its effects are changing the planet. Man's nefarious activities are threatening the survival of both plant and animal species. Human wickedness guarantees the continuance of crime. And a society that is becoming more and more amoral (if not immoral) ensures the recurrence of disasters brought on by shady dealings and dubious professional practices effected in the name of quick and easy gains, as typified by our banking systems in the recent past. The pieces are all in place and their adverse effects are constantly being felt.

That's all I'm going to say on this for now, little though it is, as I intend to return to this theme from time to time. If nothing else, it gives me the chance to have a good moan and to let off steam. It has many aspects to it, many facets, and it is an inexhaustible source of material to gripe about, rightly or wrongly. But one thing's for sure: the world's in a mess, the planet is in trouble, and humanity is in deep shit. Need I say more? Well perhaps just one thing: keep in mind that shit begets shit and that a huge proportion of the earth's biological resources or biomass has been recycled many times over, so that we can truly say that we who walk the planet today have come from.. well, how can I put this tactfully?... recycled shit! There, I've said it, and it's a sobering thought.

Absence

For anyone interested (a dubious premise), I've been away for awhile, recharging my batteries (Duracell of course), one might say, which is why I have not been blogging lately. Or to put it another way, I've been in foreign climes, sunning myself on sandy beaches, ogling the sensual señoritas, sampling the local cuisine, bathing in warm tropical waters, and generally living the life of a hedonistic heathen. Nothing out of the ordinary there, you exclaim, and you're probably right, but there's no harm in trying to throw off one's image of the boring old fart and don that of the international playboy, is there? 

And just to give flesh to my words, here I am in an exotic faraway place in tourist mode contemplating the lunch arrangements... amongst other things... Yes, it's true, enjoying oneself can be an awful drudge and has to be meticulously planned. One slip-up and you could go from enjoyment to, well, non-enjoyment! And that would be unthinkable. So you can understand now why I'm in pensive mood. I must get it right.

But now that's all in the past, albeit recent, and I'm back to work and back to reality. Time to pay for the trip and earn another one. Time to roll up my sleeves and get serious.