An everyday rant

An everyday rant, by the Barefoot Doctor, ‘doyen of universal consciousness’.

Let’s take Skyfall as an example of what’s pissing me off. Not that I give a fuck about James Bond, I’ve got my own problems.

But hasn’t anyone noticed that despite his wonderfully handsome face Daniel Craig simply doesn’t act? There’s no crackle, no sparkle when he’s in shot. Utterly flat and wooden. And yes the wide panoramic ariel shots of London and Shanghai are pretty enough but the borrowed moody lighting schema (done much better in Californication for instance), and the almost total lack of pastiche humor, which was all that ever held a Bond movie up in the first place, make it more like watching a  very boring, flat, first year offering by a film school student with a rich dad, who couldn’t quite stretch to the full deal.

And that’s how the whole world seems to be going – slick, boring, bland style over substance and anything of actual substance swiftly subsumed by the mainstream marketing machine and spat out the other end as colorless goo.

Where is the spirit of rebellion, of punk? Not so much the music, as that was like eating hyena feces, but the urge to be original rather than merely mimmic like highly sophisticated yet essentially demented chimpanzees.

For yes, the Tatler-toting party girls and boys know all the right moves to throw and accoutrements to sport, all the right expressions and clothes to wear, and the right festivals and parties to blag invites to around the world but it all seems and looks completely vapid.

Of course there is talent, talent as never seen before and there is creativity, but the marketing machine is so all-pervasive and ubiquitously insidious there’s little air for it to breathe before it becomes banalized mulch like all the rest.

And no one seems to be noticing.

No one seems to be noticing that it’ll not be long before we’re all chipped and only able to move, to procure provisions, to breathe as long as the powers that be deem it OK for us to do so.

Or if we notice we remain in denial and on it goes, this inexorable, intractable movement towards absolute homogeneity, like a herd of bovine morons slowly but surely swarming towards and over the cliff.

Meantime, all of this is still but the Tao, the Great Presence expressing itself in human form for reasons of its own and who are any of us to question its wisdom in doing so, yet perhaps, just perhaps, it actually does need us to remind it, ‘Hey Tao, you’re starting to act like a moron, wake up!’ Maybe it appreciates that.

Right now I’m staying in the wilds of Suffolk with my friend Jaguar Skills, superhero ninja DJ, so it’s not as if I”m deprived of talent and creativity, and myself am working on a number of projects, one of which is a slow-groove tune called,’The Alien has Landed’, in which the alien looks around and shouts, ‘What the fuck is going on round here? This whole planet is a lunatic asylum and everyone on it an inmate’.

Eventually the only thing to do, whether enthralled by the mediocrity being celebrated by mass culture or pushing for the new and original, is to relax, drop back within, open the heart and let love flow for and to one and all, because if anything can draw us back to the magnificent creative originality that’s our birthright to explore before it’s all too late, it’s love.