The Dawn of David Cameron
At a time when the relief maps of most politicians’ souls can only be expressed in negative figures, Josh Russell is surveying the deep dark abyss that is David Cameron
It’s getting worse and worse. I can’t even make it through a whole night anymore. It starts with a gut like millstones, grinding last night’s lasagne into so much greasy flour. Drenched in my own sweat, I flop about like a humpback beached in a shallow brackish estuary. Branches tap at the window, their leaves whispering the word ‘change’ with each gust of wind. There is the stench of pre-packaged charm, charisma that has died a slow death choked in plastic. My throat makes a fist. My sphincter trembles like a nervous Chihuahua. Even now I can feel the shape of the knowledge lay heavy in my brain, a coarse breezeblock wedged squarely between the frontal lobes. It’s out there. Waiting.
Keeping Racism on the QT
After a tempestuous week of protests and a raging media storm, Daniel Smith discusses the mutiny on the BBC’s flagship
There are some things that you cannot escape unless you are fortunate enough to live in a cave. A cave that is isolated. Away from any poorly secured wifi connections, radio transmitters or vociferously bothersome newsmongering town criers. A blissful cave of ignorance. Free from insurance comparison website advertisements, people who walk 3-abreast on pavements and those who are only slightly better - racists on TV. Unless your cavemates are a trio of rather inconsiderate pathway-hogging bigots. If you happen to be taking part in an underground version of Strictly Come Troglodyte then the chances of you being able to avoid inevitable showers of ignorant mouth muck are about as slim as a silver Rizla with a Tapeworm. For the higher-end professional recluse these things aren't going to be an issue but for those of us left to fend in the world above they come thick and fast.
Watching the Ticking Clock
Eyes bleeding, legs bowed and skin two shades off ‘Oyster Taupe’, Daniel Smith offers a sofa-side perspective of rolling news
As you sit, hunched, unwashed, blearily counting the syllables of the words in the rolling news ticker at the bottom of the BBC News 24 screen, the voices start to sink in. Stories start to take shape. It's not a big news day. It's a slow news day. The news ticker hasn’t slowed to a crawl, reflecting that nothing warrants it's continual attention. No. The scrolling ticker scuttles by at the same rate as usual (approx. 114 syllables per minute) but with nothing good for it to really grasp with its many hands and bite with its many teeth. There are no child kidnappings/discoveries. No natural disasters. No opportune celebrity homicides to condense to haiku. It just trudges along, blissfully unaware of the gravity of its cargo of letters. Like a sluggish, yet reliable postman carrying a birthday card and a letter bomb in the same unquestioning sack.
Better Living Through Advertising
An industry of lies or window to a more perfect world? Josh Russell asks whether life could do with a rebrand.
In the world of adverts we are all either young and beautiful or old and oozing with proverbial wisdom. There a very few problems that cannot be overcome with a cup of tea or a watery microwave korma. No one is ever lonely or sick; there’s no stain on the soul that can’t be shifted with a squirt of Vanish or a spoonful of Cillit Bang. Pets comfort us in our darkest hours, distracting with their boundless mischief and never once taking it upon themselves to lick all the upholstery or piss all over your new shag carpeting. People bend the dimensions of space with their flexible phone contracts. Technicolour TV screens chase each other down the street. Car headlights dance in the desert to the soundtrack of a rising sun.
It is undeniably a seductive world and one that any sensible human mind rails against like Rupert Murdoch against state-owned broadcasting. There is very little truth to the promises we are made and yet somehow, infuriatingly, it is incredibly difficult to break the hold advertising has over us. The question we have to ask ourselves is that given the fact we all know there is little actual substance lurking behind the sleek veneer, why do we fall for it time and time again? Is it that we are so desperate to part with our hard earned cash that we’ll buy any old tat endorsed by a familiar face or is there something deeper going on?
I am here to propose a new theory to you. The thrall advertising holds over us is nothing to do with gross commercialism or greed. It’s not even that we have grown used to its ubiquitous presence like an unpleasant odour in a stairwell or the hum of a laptop fan. Our love affair with advertising is based on one fundamental truth: the glossy world of adverts has it right. It’s our world that has got things wrong.
Hamsterdam
As life imitates art, Josh Russell says it’s about time we called a ceasefire on the ‘War on Drugs’
It’s late at night. Drug users roam the streets. Dealers push their products; a persistent call and response of street names yelled like the banter of twisted market criers. Children run around at waist height, trying to scavenge whatever they can. A fight breaks out, uninterrupted by onlookers. Wasted addicts are visible in every doorway; babies cry, their mother’s oblivious. The area is poorly managed; a lack of social support and community policing has reduced these few blocks to a private hell. It is one of the city’s new decriminalised zones.
Whilst this is perhaps the image that comes to mind for some when we talk of decriminalisation, more avid TV fans may recognise it as a scene from the third season of HBO’s excellent series The Wire. In the programme, tired by the losing struggle against drug dealers in his district, a Major Howard Colvin decides to act under his own initiative, putting into place zones where dealing will be tolerated. His officers encourage pushers to move away from residential corners into uninhabited safe zones that are dubbed locally as ‘Hamsterdam’, allowing the district police to focus on the violence associated with the drugs trade.
In a bizarre twist of fate, the UK Drug Policy Commission has announced in the last week that ‘smarter’ tactics are needed to reduce the harm that the drugs trade has on our society, tactics that bear a striking resemblance to David Simon’s critically acclaimed series.i It seems to be another case of life imitating art but the question that must be asked is can the reality be sweeter than the fiction?