Brother beyond

Sad news: Plan B magazine is jumping before it gets pushed.

But the music still goes around, backwards and forwards, and so here’s my new favourite band, which had pretty much run out of puff before I was born:

Into the den

In the wake of Annie’s cruel mockery, I have decided to stop self-Googling. Instead, let’s see what happens when I throw myself into the slavering maw of Wolfram Alpha:

Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Yeah, I know how you feel.

A modest fall

Trump on Kane, by Errol Morris, via Noel Sharkbloke.

Next week, Alan Sugar discusses Ingmar Bergman.

Freedom of speech

Dan Lyons of Newsweek, quoted in The Guardian:

Writing is now worth zero. The value of what we do is worth zero.

Well, that’s put a big fat cherry on top of the weekend.

Lace majesté

Half-awake self-Googling has unearthed something of which I have no memory whatsoever; a letter to The Independent (have I ever even read The Independent?) from 1994:

Your 'Tried and Tested' feature on workboots ('Boots made for working', Review, 6 March) purported to offer an objective comparison of various examples, combining stylistic and practical considerations as its criteria. It came as something of a surprise that the legendary Dr Marten's 1460 was nudged aside by a gruesome item calling itself the Caterpillar. But the real shock was that the main problem the panel found with the dearly beloved Doc was that they take a long time to wear in.

Do these people not understand? This is the whole point] The Doc is a design classic, but, at the same time, it is a cult icon. It is the footwear that Kevin and Tracy never considered, even when they were being seduced into Levi 501s, the only piece of clothing to rival the Doc's status. It is the footwear of tribes, of skinheads, of crusties, of mid-Eighties clubbers. It is the secret sign that casts post-modern irony upon one's regimented City suit, that symbolises the switchblade beneath Julian Clary's daffy finery. And, as with all tribes, the initiation ceremony binds us.

A new pair of Docs is not just a new pair of shoes: it is a pact. After the initial choices, we have the week or two of pain, of gritted teeth, of no dancing. When purchasing, forget polish or spare laces; go for a big box of Elastoplast. Compare notes with your Doccy chums. Does talc help? Thick woolly socks, perhaps? Maybe pummelling them by hand for half an hour every evening?

But, after suffering the paces through hellfire, a bond has been forged. Not just with your fellow fans/martyrs, but with the boots themselves. They are yours. They are now comfortable. They work. They walk. You wear them to the pub, to work, to your naff brother's wedding just to make a point. And, you will wear them, love them, long after the Caterpillar has demonstrated a lifespan not much more impressive that its larval namesake.

Tim Footman

London SW4

“Kevin and Tracy”, indeed. Today, I don’t even own a pair of Docs. A fortnight of “no dancing” has stretched to many, many years, and I can’t even blame my choice of bootage.

Not quite dead

Once again, I haven’t posted for nearly a week. Several excuses, including a deadline or several. I’m not sure about the notion that Twitter has edged out blogging, but I have noticed that I‘m far more inclined these days to send a sentence into the Twitterverse than to craft a thought-out paragraph or three.

So, looking back at the 700+ posts I've written for Cultural Snow over the past three and a half years, I wonder how many of them might have been better expressed in under 140 characters.

PS: Meanwhile, from among the dead trees, Peter Preston lumps together “puerile twitters and bilious blogs”. Although I only read his article because I saw it mentioned amongst the puerility, and now I mention it again, dripping with bile.

Yes we McCann

Some years ago, I remember seeing an artist's representation of all those too-fast-to-live rock stars, and how they’d look if they’d made it into their 50s and 60s. I was particularly taken by Jimi Hendrix who, had he lived to take part the Miles Davis collaboration that still captures the imagination of people who like noodly jazz-funk-rock fusion with occasional loud bits, would now look like Lester Freamon from The Wire. Apparently.

Of course, these reconstructions can have a practical benefit, especially when it comes to working out what missing children might look like. If Madeleine McCann is still alive she will now be six years old, and her parents have released an image depicting what she might look like. Of course, what they’re really doing is acknowledging that, what with the credit crunch and Jade Goody and swine flu and Susan Boyle and everything, even the mid-market tabloids had completely forgotten about her, so they needed a useful gimmick to get her back on our radar, if not to the days when her fate was so central to our very existence.

In the absence of anything approaching solid evidence, I guess they’ll be commissioning similar images every couple of years, and the media will feel duty bound to publish them. They know what sells.

So, in 12 years’ time, will we be able to enjoy reconstructions of what Madeleine McCann might look like, pissed and bleary, snapped from the gutter, as she stumbles out of a nightclub with her knickers on display?

Antonin Scalia is a monkey fighter and he can suck my lozenge

It’s not often I find myself rooting for the Murdoch empire, but when it comes to Fox TV’s challenge to the US Federal Communications Commission policy on swearing, I’m in the same corner as nasty old Rupe.

Essentially, in the wake of St Bono offering up a wee swearie at the Golden Globes in 2003, the FCC elected to operate a zero tolerance policy against bad language on network TV. This extends even to so-called “fleeting expletives”, usually unplanned, unscripted moments on live TV when an inadvertent flip or blimey slips out, the verbal equivalent of Janet Jackson’s nipple. And now the Supreme Court has voted 5-4 to uphold the Commission’s judgement.

The most vociferous of the anti-rudeness judges is the charming Antonin Scalia, who suggests that references to “sexual or excretory activities” trump any footling need to uphold the First Amendment. Now, I’ve never quite understood what’s wrong with sexual or excretory activities. I’m not sure where Justice Scalia thinks his nine children came from: maybe the stork brought them; maybe the same stork then removed all his bodily wastes when he wasn’t looking. But personally, given the choice between Scalia’s bumptious primness, and a clapped-out rock star saying “fuck”, I know which one I find obscene. The only good thing about the man is his passing resemblance to the Angelo Muscat (the butler in The Prisoner).

And without resorting to sneering generalisations, I think it’s useful to point out that on British television, this is a joke; in the States, this is reality.