The Importance of Being Idle

Rant, Assorted

I've just had my only post so far this week and it's a bill from British Gas. Somehow not only have they utterly failed to set up an account for me and take money from my account as requested, they've also sent me a demand for nearly £220 based on their famous "estimated reading". So they've guessed then. And quite wildly as it turns out as the amount of gas and electricity I've used is half what they guess in getting on for twice the time they suggest. Bunch of muppets. I've been on the phone, on hold, off and on since I got the bill, but either they're not answering or their new style bills are making a lot of people quite grumpy, which would be entirely understandable given that it made my heart sink when I first saw it, then it made me angry and now it's just making me fed up 'cos I can't get the bloody thing fixed. Muppets I say again.
While I'm being annoyed let's head back a few days to Christmas and recall how much we all hate and despise the awful spectacle of it's over commercialisation. It is almost the very definition of obscene they way the shops fall over themselves to squeeze every last penny out of you in their desperation, and shoppers buy into this desperation thinking that the only way to have fun is to spend as much money as possible. Anyway Christmas is finished for another year (yes I know it's only just started for Orthodox Christians but for everybody else it was weeks ago) and guess what I saw in the shops at the weekend? That's right fucking Easter Eggs. It wasn't even twelfth night and they had Easter Eggs on the shelves. I'd say it was unbelievable, but it is sadly all too believable and symptomatic of the times we live in. Maybe it's common for people to think that they somehow simultaneously live in both the best of times and the worst of times, but I can't help but look at the world we live in now and wonder what the hell is going on. I can trace the steps, I can see how we got to here from the seventies I just don't understand why nobody looked down the path and said "Wait a second, we don't want to go down there". Maybe they did, maybe there were dissenting voices and they were sidelined and ignored. All that because of Easter Eggs.
I was watching a documentary about prog rock the other night, as you do, and I was really kinda horrified to realise how much I like it. It can be, in fact almost AIMS to be, exclusive and intellectual and elitist, and I find myself loving it's rejection of the three minute pop song. In this day and age of manufactured acts it's refreshing to go back to a time when people who actually played, and played with some virtuosity, took pride and pleasure in their skill and set out to make something someone had never heard before. Maybe I just grew up at the right time, to be exposed to both the tail end and death knell of prog and the birth of it's anithesis punk, but I can't help listen to some of the old prog stuff and wonder why music went the way it did. I'd thoroughly recommend In The Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson to see what I'm talking about.

posted by BadMonkey @ 11:55 AM