Insidious Lassitude

Oh YouTube, mother to so many millions of mirthsome shoddy-resolution clips of shnorkelling, strawpedo-ing, kitten kicking and beery leering that there is barely any space to left for anything which isn’t ‘the funniest thing ever’. Several million YouTube clips can’t all be the funniest thing ever. And that they amuse a countryful of office saps is perhaps quite tragic. The government need only upload a video of a man gurning into a toilet bowl to unleash a viral distraction that’ll keep the nation stupided until the next tea break whereupon the Sun can take over the stupifying baton. Though they may impact on productivity, the affect is negligible compared to the unrest that might occur if the proles weren’t distracted and stupided. Paradoxically, overall productivity is higher when the workers are chortling at YouTube every few minutes. That’s how things get done.

It’s a bit of a riddle, that one. Yeah, that’s right, I was lurching this Mia Riddle post toward a ‘mere riddle’ joke. That, my droves of dear readers, is the kind of crystaline wit that’s been cleansed from the internet and supplanted by videos of stethoscope-hung nude doctors mowing the lawn. So, Mia Riddle then. In the time it’s taken me to get round to posting this video, the high-resolution version has vanished. I imagine it was sluiced off YouTube to make space for a monkey on a spacehopper. Monkeys on spacehoppers is how things get done.

Such is my command of the comic, I could cue up a ‘Missing in Action’ witticism here if I wanted to. But I’ll forgo it for now, and get on with giving the Insidious Lassitude patronage to swoonsome Mia Riddle. It’d take but a faction of my many readers clickying the YouTube clippy for us to get the counter past 1000 views. Wow. If a million of my readers clicky it then that’ll only be about a million more than I have, and we’ll only be a million shy of the views a rude man dicking around with a lego set has garnered since afternoon Sun break. That’s a lot of millions. It’ll be a virtual uprising of unstupifying.

Mia’s often very good indeed. Which’ll explain why her videos are in a non government-subsidised YouTube backwater and her records can’t be found in shops. It’ll also explain why in America she plays to even fewer people than the crowd of a handful she can attract in Britain. Nevertheless, by the great democratisation of (usually spacehoppered) information that is the internet, you can lughole more of her music on her MySpace. And, now I’m doing MP3s and am hipping up this Insidious Lassitude vanity vehicle to be the hypest musical tastemaker in the whole of the Gumdropped virtual world, here are some fully downloadable clickers for all you hipsters and pop pickers to drown out the office snickers: 

Mia Riddle - City Song

Mia Riddle - Tigers

*****

As an addendum to yesterday’s post about - well, whatever it was about, here’s another snippet of sniping about class-alienation - replete with more Sun bashing! Excellent. This time I’ll let the famous-for-being-famous (vegetarian) Russell Brand continue the story in this stand-up clip from an Amnesty International gig.

Here’s a man so out-of-whack with the cultural leanings of those who know of him that his fame is almost as tragically of-our-times as those monkey-hoppered office goons snickering at a Wellington boot full of ice cream. What I knew of Brand was the terrific haircut that appears in the gutter newspapers everyday and the occasional snatch of attention-seeking childish TV goonery. Turns out that he’s rather more than that. Aside from all the showing-off, he’s as intelligent, left-wing, articulate, and witty as the people that read about him in gossip mags and the Sun are stupid, reactionary, illiterate, and inane. (I may be gernaralising a wee bit here.) Given his tendency for grandiloquence, arcane references, knowing snarks and informed hectoring, some chunks of his more erudite oratory (for there are attention-seeking diversions too) must be incomprensible or bewildering to your average man in the street. The average Sun reader knows no interest in socialism and animal rights, is bamboozled and stymied by literary and philosophical references, and cares not a jot for post-structuralism or thermodynamics.

Brand comes from a very working-class background and much of his schtick seems to based on the alienation of the ’feeling of not belonging to my own culture’ and the ‘perpetual embarassment of being an outsider in my own home’. This is an age-old problem that many people born (what I’m simplistically terming, for argument’s sake) working-class struggle with as they grow up educated and begin the ghetto-vaulting. Education at once liberates and estranges you. So it goes that you’re forever on the hinterlands, and culturally displaced - feeling rooted in working-class culture, but at odds with it; moving in educated circles but feeling adrift and unrooted in them. Stranded, perpetually peripheral; unhinged from each place and unaccomodated.

Around here the local WHSmith doesn’t have a rack for the Guardian. So few are sold that they sling the ones they do get in on the floor underneath the branded plastic rungs for the Mail, the Express, and the Star. Brand says he always buys the Sun alongside his morning Guardian because he still yearns to feel part of that culture and has a nostalgic fondness for it as a kind of signifier of where he came from and the ideologically uncomplicated days of childhood. But his attempts to accomodate himself are endlessly thwarted everyday he looks at it and is repulsed by what he tries to cling to as his own cultural roots. This too is familar to me, though I’ve never bought the Sun.