The Star of the East
There was a pub in Shoreditch…Archive for April, 2000
road dreams: westway
For not much more than 20 bucks you can fill your big old American car full of gas and drive across Texas for 9 hours straight without stopping or turning or blinking, and never see a soul except the shadow of a good old boy in the tinted windscreen of a shiny big Mack truck, or a Stetson in the back of a two door coupe the size of a boat and twice as rusty, with only the fantastic mountains for company, painted in flat shades of earth by a desperate dali, that never never get any closer and never go away. Jack rabbits and skunk and antelope take their chances on the asphalt roulette, chased by the little twisters of the mother of a storm, and the vultures pick off the remains of the dead tyres that 18 wheelers shed along the way. For sale, for sale, sing the boards on the roadhouses and shacks and vacant lots; good home needed for a family of 4 Airstream trailers grazing a barren paddock next to a restaurant sign that is bigger than the restaurant. Things you only dream about, or see in movies, big silver things in the sky, the roadrunner, cowboys riding bareback chasing trains that whistle in the middle of the night taking steel cattle coffins of T bones to the golden arches in the east, that house out of the film Giant, and the mysterious Marfa lights; creeks with no water and towns with no people and roads with no end and tumbleweed. and the sky turns black and blue and purple and red and gold and the horizon comes down to swallow the road and you drive on into the black velvet and you are alone in your car, until the glow comes up again, and 50 miles outside El Paso you see the lights on the Mexican side of the border spread out over the desert like a vast lake of people that is getting ready to flood over the border and steal cars and eat tacos and wait tables and mop floors and clean cars, shine shoes and shovel shit. Y’all c’mon, welcome to America.
Liar, liar your pants are on fire.
April 2000
Oh, so you worked out that more than half of the internet is made up, well done. Did you never look cyber up in the dictionary or did you just cheat at scrabble? You never pretended that you were cleverer, prettier or richer than you really were? Or maybe you pretended that a world existed where prettier and richer didn’t really matter? If you’re in the latter category then you’ve probably been surfing since you were knee high to a grasshopper or was that a damb squib. The best lie ever on the internet (and haven’t there been some good ones?) is that it did indeed make you prettier and richer, now I wonder what sort of person started that one? It’s the way you tell them that counts and the beautiful thing is that now people are less likely to believe Trevor Macdonald than an anarchist with a grudge and a long list of email addresses. And to think that Red Bull gave so much enjoyment (if that’s what you can call staying up all night) to so many poor unpretty’s, how could they turn on an unsuspecting manufacturer with such venom? “we just wanted to do right by the kids” they wail, “I don’t understand teenagers.” Understanding teenagers is big growth industry but entirely pointless. if teenagers were meant to be understood they would run on logic and not hormones and Red Bull. But what good entertainment for everyone else; every time something really stupid catches the public imagination and becomes the latest craze the Understanding Teenagers Industry whirrs into action and does something really stupid. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.
Real honest to God (and it often is) stupidity is a rare and precious thing and you can’t just conjure it up out of a focus group. it must come from the heart. And here’s the good news, you don’t have to be good looking to be stupid; fortunately the same is not true for rich. So, having establised this scientific criteria for measuring success on the world wide web, let’s put it to the test. Ask yourself these questions next time you type a double-barrelled url into your explorer or was that browser? Bill Gates is not that good looking, and how rich is he? Sorry Netscape; it’s time to get married before you lose your looks. Ready2puke? Me too, and what a great way to lose weight at the last minute for my nude photo session. Let’s buy it? No let’s sell it to someone rich and stupid for big xtra money. Ching, ching.
The great thing about stupidity is that you don’t even need to own it or even necessarily see it, you just need to know that it is stupid. This is called information, or disinformation. There is a whole industry, apparently, called information technology, but the clever thing about it is that the last thing they ever deliver is information. Grey boxes, cables, acronyms you can’t understand, big piles of discs, and something called upgrades, yes, how many do you want? But the philosphy of ancients, or maybe just the key to Windows NT, or maybe just the email you sent on Mothers’ Day, well, that is a different matter, that is secret, dangerous and not for the uninitiated. the IT industry is a bit like the nuclear waste industry, It’s all about storing up as much of the raw material as you can, storing it up until you re about to burst, storing it up until you can’t hold anymore; then you have to gradually let it out like a long slow fart, quiet as you can. The Nuclear waste guys have got a slight advantage in that they can use their geiger counter to test the strength and quality of the stupid stuff they allow to escape, but the poor sods in IT haven’t got a clue until some nasty teenager gets a whiff of what they’re dropping and starts shouting from the rooftops. Hurrah, hurrah.
