Ted's Place

If you want to catch up with the latest vacuous shit from the lips of la grande fica follow the following link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4474006.stm

She doesn't say anything that interesting other than threatening the world with directing a film. Perhaps the US authorities are going to use her films in places like Abu Ghraib or Guantanomo Bay in lieu of torturing the prisoners with Metallica. Given her track record in making generally unwatchably poor, self-indulgent and commercially suicidal films I can't think anyone other than the torture-loving military will be interested in funding another of her forays into 'popular' entertainment.

Her horse-riding accident clearly left appalling scars on her mind: "I don't want to go there - I get flashbacks". Millions of vets from 'Nam would be familiar with suffering of this nature, although with much greater reason than this stupid bitch. As an aside, I don't like people saying 'don't go there' in the context of a conversation. It reminds me of 'Friends', and that is enough to put me into a towering rage. People who talk like this should be burnt at the stake.

I'm looking forward to the day when Madonna is finally honest with herself. Until then she is nothing but a lie. A pathetic, hollow lie.

Simon Jordan's column for the Observer is always intersting and polemical. This week he's having a go at the mollycoddling of players, check it out:

http://football.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,4284,1651654,00.html

"Last April a Fulham player liaison officer told the papers about some of his tasks. He said he'd been called out to Alain Goma's house because 'Goma's goldfish was swimming in the wrong direction'. He'd been called to rescue a player lost on the London Underground ('he was helpless'). He'd been called out by Fabrice Fernandes who kept waking up in the morning with a wet head, and discovered the player had been 'sleeping by an open window'."

Classic. We usually think of footballers as morons but it takes examples such as these to really give us a definite idea of just how stupid they are. It's very funny but also kind of sad, inasmuch as these dull-witted fools get paid the equivalent of most people's annual salaries in a week or two of retarded physicality.

Inspired by this morning's story on the BBC website I did a google check for something decent which summarised the whole Norwegian Black metal scene in the 90s. The following is pretty good:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,13887,1415240,00.html

There are quite a few entertaining people mentioned in this article - they'd make great characters in a film or book. Check out Dead, for instance:

"...The letter-writing also brought Mayhem into contact with Dead, a Swede who joined Mayhem when his band Morbid folded in 1988. Serious illness as a child and a near death experience convinced him that he had died and was now a being from another world. His beliefs are preserved in the vampiric lyrics he wrote for De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. Dead reputedly carried around the carcass of a crow in a jar and would inhale fumes from it before taking the stage so he could perform with the stench of death in his nostrils. He also took to donning a white greasepaint visage, designed to mimic the pallor of 13th-century plague victims."

Pretty wacky stuff.

Hey, I love this stuff. Check out the article on BBC news:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/this_world/4446342.stm

Glen Benton is one of the stupidest members of a scene which isn't characterised by a high level of intellectual achievement. But is this shit still even being debated? Every now and then some new incident occurs somewhere in the vast world in which some dumb kids do somethign stupid and they happen to listen to heavy metal so the old 'does the music make them do it' thing comes up. Fuck. Haven't we been through this already?

I guess the debate is turning on whether listening to music which is so dark and bleak and full of anger and hate tips borderline wackos over the edge which they have been teetering on for years. Well, maybe it does. But so fucking what? Maybe a cross word from a teacher in their class would do the same thing. Or the bleeping of someone's mobile phone in a crowded bus. You can't legislate out all the things you think might fractionally contribute to tipping the tiny number of loonies in any community over the edge. Should we all pay the price of missing out on this stuff because when wankers come into contact with it they go loco and kill themselves/each other? Most people would say no.

There has been a fair amount of attention given to the church burning and killing that went on in Norway in the 90s but that was pretty low-key and was really blown out of proportion by the media - it was a few middle-class boys who had nothing normal to rebel against because their lives were so damn cushy in good old Scandanivia (wealthy countries, good-looking women, liberal, progressive governments etc etc) and for some reason turned for that need (because people NEED to rebel) to black metal because it offered such a contrast to modern Scando society. Eventually most of the scene morphed into a neo-Viking thing which I thought was much more itneresting. It was actually a deeply reactionary scene: old (Pagan) values and a much older (and whiter - uh oh!) Nordic identity.

So much for rebellion.

Deicide always were a bunch of dumb American wankers and I expect Benton will come across as a mega-spastic white trash fool in the programme. Because that's exactly what the stupid fucker is. It's a real pity that he's used by the media as some kind of spokesman for the scene because although, as I mention above, the scene isn't dominated by intellectual giants, Benton is one of the crassest and stupidest musicians in the whole music industry and shouldn't be given any kind of publicity.

There was an article in yesterday's Telegraph about a tide of gay films sweeping Hollywood. At the time I read the article I assumed it was just the usual Telegraph-whipping-middle-England-into-righteous-indignation thing. But an article along the same lines appeared in the Guardian today so I am beginning to think it might actually have some basis in fact.

Check out the article:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1649398,00.html

The quote that sums it up is "The way Hollywood is rushing to reward heterosexual actors playing gay roles does not, really, reflect very well on its engagement. It is just too much like its fairly disgraceful engagement with mental and physical disability, and too much like rewarding a variety turn".

There's so much tokenism in American films. What's selling? 'Gayness' is selling - let's make lots of gay films. I think the music industry operates in the same way. Too much of both industries are focussed on what is selling rather than what is good. Coldplay hit the jackpot and before you know it there's a whole heap of similar-sounding fey shit bands being shoved down our throats. That's no different to most industries where companies are focussing on maximising revenues in a new market but I guess I (naively) expect more from those which bring arts into our communities. Like some kind of artistic integrity...

Yeah, very naive.

I never had any idea that James Dean, Cary Grant or Dirk Bogarde were gay. Is that really true? I heard a radio interview with Lauren Bacall recently and she was going on about how amazing a husband Dirk was. He was an older man when they met, on the set of some film. She never mentioned he was gay in the interview.

After my post yesterday Georgie boy briefly drifted back into consciousness (the first time since the early Seventies apparently) at which point I thought that the neverending media obsession with him and Death was going to roll and roll until I had to end it all by killing myself. Today's news is brighter though - he's heading south again and things look bleak. Apparently he didn't have a good night's sleep. Boo fucking hoo.

The Fiver printed an email yesterday from a reader who was complaining about the media obsession with pisshead Best and I will be interested to see if he's torn to pieces today. Plenty of the public respect people and things which they are taught to respect by the media. The obsession the media has with this withered sack of shit creates an impression in the minds of much of the public that he is actually worth something. Because a bunch of piss-soaked semi-literates aka the red top press corps boorishly cheer on the drinking and sexual exploits of a man who I think lost the capacity for thought and self-expression in the 60's the public at large seems to have been infected with a degree of respect or pity for the man.

Strangely, or not, I find Olli Reed a much more sympathetic character. Perhaps because he still continued acting and made a number of high-profile TV appearances (The Word and The Late Show in particular) in which he displayed a lot of craziness. Perhaps I just like my pissheads to be a bit more literate/literary and belligerent than Best. I'm a snob.

How many times do you think we'll be hearing that line about 'where did it all go wrong' when the fucker finally puts us all out of our misery and packs off into the void? Christ, it isn't worth thinking about.

Lots of big words there but the lines between all these things are becoming very blurred and today's news story in The Guardian adds to the confusion - it seems as though the Americans had plans to destroy the al-Jazeera news station in Doha, Qatar. They also destroyed the Baghdad office in 2003 despite al-Jazeera having notified the US forces of exactly where they were, leading journos to suspect that it was actively targeted.

Check out the article here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1648988,00.html

It would be easy to take one of two views: (a) aren't the Americans awful, they are constantly doing dodgy things and here they are trying to destroy our access to information, or (b) al-Jazeera are little more than a mouthpiece for various anti-Western Arab interests and don't deserve to be protected.

I find it hard to believe the Americans made a mistake with their targeting in 2003 and they had a lot to gain with knocking out al-Jazeera reporting what happened in Baghdad. But I don't think the media are such a great bunch of lads either. They hold themselves out as conscientous independent truth-seekers but how many of them are towing the editorial line which comes from who knows where? These papers are all owned by someone and that someone has an agenda.

But this story also itnerests me because it shows how important the media is now. States seem to have increasingly little control over what information we are fed. Whilst this sounds great we need to question who else is feeding us information. As you'll glean from the above, it looks to me like we are replacing one set of vested itnerests (government) with another (media).

Check out the article in today's Guardian:

http://sport.guardian.co.uk/rugbyunion/story/0,10069,1647862,00.html

Standout quote for me was: "He still tries to live by a strict code in which he imagines that every minute of his day is being recorded by a hidden video camera."

I know how he feels. Except that they call me crazy!

It's actually a very interesting article about someone who has known very high peaks and very low troughs in a relatively short space of time. He's pretty driven - I guess that goes for just about anybody at the top of their profession - and I suppose forced inaction (through injury) must be the worst thing imaginable for a sportsman like him.

For Ted, life is just a series of reminders that he's a sorry sack of shit - he always was and always will be. The peaks are drunken and the troughs are hungover.

So George Best is "desperately ill" according to doctors. And? I fail to understand why the continual ill-health of a man who hasn't contributed anything at all of interest for the last 30 years should be headline news. The quicker he dies the better. His ongoing touch and go battle with the Grim Reaper is, as well as unjustifiably high-profile, also extremely tedious.

For God's sake doctor, don't waste any more of the Earth's finite resources on this pathetic D-list has-been and let Death have his man!