I love Ray Davies' voice so so much.

I need my Kinks fix, this weekend. I listen to these beautiful songs and feel a little angry that people hardly talk about them. It's like the 60s canon has only room for four or five people, and everyone else is 'not as good'. As I discover more and more of these bands, I'm a little shocked by how many of them are generally, criminally neglected. And as the header says, the voice. Not even the Beatles had a voice like this, a voice I hear and immediately want to sing along with.

Currently stuck on 'Waterloo Sunset'. It is love.




TV is fascinating. Just yesterday I caught two very hmmworthy shows.


One: America's Next Top Model. Because tv, especially this brand of 'reality tv', is so carefully scripted, it's amazing how much shit people are capable of spouting. So we have six girls travelling to Japan to be judged on their 'commercial value', literally and literally.

One of the things they have to do is act for an advertisement for some kind of Japanese food. One of the girls can't make herself swallow it; she ducks under the table and spits the food out into a glass. Reality tv is all about moments like these. As the judges put on various faces of malicious delight barely disguised as horror, you get the sense, shit, this girl's in trouble. And she is. Tyra Banks, who hosts the programme, looking remarkably like a sour blanched b-movie vampire, shakes her head, says things: 'As a model you have to respect the product.' The others chip in gravely, clearly enjoying it. 'A model has to have humility.' 'You have to CONNECT with the product, you have to convince people.' And, here is the crucial part, 'You want to be a top model, you gotta suck it up.'

To be a top model, you have to suck it up. Because that proves your dedication. Your determination, your desperation, your reason for being.

As a model, you have to respect the product. Because as a model, you're no better than a product. Bow down before it, for it provides your livelihood. Don't shit where you eat- eat what you shit.

But wait. There's more. The Japanese client, who doesn't speak English, consults gravely with his translater, who informs the girl that she has 'insulted the client, Japanese food and culture and the Japanese people'. When that girl spat out a lump of something she couldn't swallow because it made her gag, she obviously didn't realise the symbolic portentiousness of that simple act. She failed to grin and bear it. THUS SHE INSULTED JAPAN AND ITS PEOPLE AND ITS FOOD OMG!!! Now, I'm all for certain forms of what is dismissed as 'political correctness', but the line is sometimes quite fine. This is crossing it. Does anyone with two brain cells to rub together seriously watch a tv commercial and assume that whichever actor/model is DOING THEIR JOB by HAWKING that product loves it and uses it all the time? That is fucking ridiculous. The tv ads/ reality show industry is based on lies, on hypocrisy. It is so funny that it's not funny at all, that the already dehumanised human model is supposed to bow to THE PRODUCT.

And hey, I hate sushi. Maybe I shouldn't go to Japan, because if I did I'd be polluting the country with my anti-Japan sushi-hating. Hahaha.



Two: It's the Christian channel! And, gasp, we are looking at... Biblical muppets! Longhaired Texan Samson is being milked of his secretz by falsetto-voiced Delilah! But before you laugh - cuuut. It's really a little cowboy lad watching them muppets on the teevee. And his mother is not amused. 'CHORES COME FIRST', she declares, busting a few blood vessels as she faces her lazy bum of a son. The son is not amused. He whines. Then he goes out and cuuut. Little cowboy lad meets littler cowboy lad. The following hilarious exchange occurs:

Little cowboy lad: Let's go down to the old mine-shaft.
Littler cowboy lad: But I'm afraid we'll get caught!
[they go anyway]

ARE YOU THINKING WHAT I'M THINKING? Damn straight.
Or not so straight. Giggle.