Was Christ misheard?
In growing older I seem to have nodded off and found myself
in a realm where everything I once found to be cringe worthy and unworthy of serious
attention has taken a strangle hold on the western world. We have abandoned all sense of our own hubristic absurdity and dived headfirst into the hottub of comfort entertainment.
John Berger - he saw it coming
It’s pretty obvious
that digital technology makes what was once pedestrian in pace of dissemination now instantaneous - like a
match dropped onto a trail of gasoline in a western. Boom the whole barn has
gone up. First it was Star Wars. I mean that scene where they’re playing a
future jazz in a bar full of alien freaks that was quite funny and verging on resonant. I even liked
the tune enough to be able to watch it smiling. But please the whole of the
western mytho-poetic mind occupied by notions of the darkside and the whatsit
called the… oh fuck it? Republic?
So now it’s those
colouring books at the top of the Amazon best-seller list. Wow za wow
za wow za. You know it’s pretty clear that civilisation gradually replaces all
real experience with a gift wrapped equivalence but these books take the hand-crafted cookie. And you know what it’s
probably like Coleman’s mustard who claim to make most of their money from the
mustard left on the side of the plate. I mean have sales of felt tip pens suddenly spiked? Well yes probably but how many of them actually run out? So now you can give yourself an
inner creative life by owning a colOring (no u) book full of images of nature
and bucolic fantasies. But get this they’re completely made up. Yes you know
when you were at school and you perhaps had to draw something from life? Well
these pictures nimbly sidestep that inconvenience by drawing upon the most
instantaneous clichéd form of a natural object/creature that springs to mind.
So don’t worry these books will give you an inner creative life without the
hassle of shifted perception that used to come with engaging with someone else’s
processing of the world outside. None of this Paul Klee “life is the roots and the
artist the trunk and the work the branches” no no it’s straight to the grow bag
and fruiting like mad.
So why not look around and try to spot as many things that
you once felt would disappear as a result of being either shallow, kitsch, chintzy, naff, ridiculous, petty, puerile, clichéd or embarrassingly
mean-spirited. But that all sounds a bit too cool. Ironically. Chief Eye-spy.
Not wanting to get all preachy or anything but it seems that technology has thoughtfully eliminated the requirement to have an imagination and instead replaced it with a fast and easy access to fantasy. Imagination has been buried under many meters of concrete and to disguise this we are proffered the vestiges off the top of someone else's head. Just check out those tats.
"It was only an 'opeless fancy,
It passed lika an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!'
Next week petty
bureaucracy and form after form after form.
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