Insidious Lassitude

For reasons that will become apparent once I conclude what is likely to be a typically droll preamble, this post was going to rely on RealPlayer for its cogency. Clearly, nobody should ever rely on RealPlayer for anything, least of all cogency. More times than not it just doesn’t work. And now is perfectly indicative of most times. ‘RealPlayer is unable to connect to the server to play your selection - would you like RealPlayer to try other ways to connect?’ it says after draining the sands of my hope through the jaws of its eggtimer. Oh, how thoughtful of you, yes please do. Excellent, what a helpful little RealPlayer you are. More jaws pinching hope, and it announces triumphantly:  ’Auto-Configure completed successfully. Your RealPlayer is now configured to playback using UDP protocol’. Yes, please, thank you. Good old UDP protocol! But then, seconds later: ‘RealPlayer is unable to connect to the server to play your selection - would you like RealPlayer to try other ways to connect?’ Oh dear, it seems I’m trapped in the spokes of a wheel. Why don’t you try Meccano, I think. Meccano never let anyone down. It’s from a time of greater certainty when men connected things in an honest and visible way using steel and muscle and hope and spirit. Meccano doesn’t rely on the interminable motherboard. It’s at the behest of man, we use it to build things. Like a computer, it’s literally stupid, but it doesn’t pretend to be sentient and speak to us like Peter Rabbit. It hasn’t been given a character and a will by some programmers in an office by a riverside. It doesn’t use it’s pseudo-character to trade in hubris and whim and spite and hudwink and New Updates. RealPLayer is a terrifying, heartless, dishonest, hope-pinching soul-stealer. Imagine being caught in its nightmarish clutches, tied to its wheel, doomed to forever listen to its triumphant pronouncements and its ingratiating simpering and its faux-humanism, ever more lachrymose sands draning in front of your eyes as a false representation of progress. Oh, glottal stop.

And so, preamble over, I was only going to mention this little piece from the Guardian of a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t get round to posting it until now, but I think the main point of the story is that David Miliband is an unctuous pillock. And that is as true now as it was two weeks ago. So I may just leave it at that. If RealPlayer’ll allow, you can hear how he’s even changed his voice to be even more repulsive and Franken. But whatever way he says it though, remember: he’s ‘working for a fairer society’. Good work Dave.

I can’t bring myself to continue this post. It’s unbecoming. I’m feeling alienated by this desperate world. But it’s music time, Lassitudinous readers. This’ll cheer us up. I just read that watching Laura Marling is like spying a young woman bare her soul for her cat. That’s the kind of soul-baring you can rely on. That’s the Meccano of soul-baring. Given that she lives in a liquorice cottage with a cat called Hansel, I suspect that some of her other songs may be slightly twee and etiolated, but, to furnish my ever-smug back-reference thread with a smothering comfort blanky of punnery, she makes a pretty good fist of hitting it out of the park here. Oh, glottal stop! 

‘How do I keep finding myself here?’ I dunno, Laura. I find I’m quite alienated and terrified by it all. If I were a taxi driver I’d say: Well, it’s an ongoing project innit Marling, the project of the self, the project of the world.

Laura Marling - Night Terror