‘Yeah,’ I told a friend recently. ‘Got a blog… And I’m starting to learn video editing and Photoshop… Oh, and I’m learning Flash, too. You know, so I can make cool animations, and… stuff.’
As the words passed forth from my lips and my friend made some comment, the realisation slowly dawned on me.
I’m starting to sound like a twat.
Produce your own creative efforts, master a bit of software, and - why is it? - you suddenly come off like a vacuous media prick endlessly posting bits of your 'art' into a gigantic internet plughole only to watch them disappear without trace. Unless you work in the real media, that is. But who gets to work in the real media? An industry where job opportunities for newcomers boil down to delivering roasted peanuts to the editor while they do coke lines over their Frappucinos? Oh, and that's not to mention the - pardon me - relentlessly "stiff" competition: because everyone in the media below the level of Rupert Murdoch is engaged in the kind of career fellatio that would make a Thai hooker gob up the contents of her mouth in disgust.
The media is so deafened by the sound of slurping they have had to soundproof the walls of the edit suites. And what do they call it? Oh yeah, that's right – in what is possibly the most horrendous euphemism for calculated manipulation since someone in the White House called the Iraq war a liberation – they call it “networking”.
What kind of people “network”, I wonder? Twats. That's what kind of people. Agents, groupies, wannabe stars – yes, twats. The act of standing at some party talking to people in a vaguely friendly manner in order to blowjob your way up the social hierarchy – well, you’d have to be a twat, wouldn’t you? That’s the sad truth about the media, the most powerful consciousness-shaping agency in the twenty-first century world: it’s mostly populated by the kind of scumbag whose central aspiration in life is getting a co-presenting slot on T4.
And I’m starting to sound like them.
I was reminded of this at a party I went to on Friday. Picture it: a howling February night, dark as a bad memory, me clambering off my shitty bike and into the warmth of the two-up / two-down / post-modern / retro-conversion / Victorian refit extension where chatter and electro beats were already seeping into the cold night.
The house was spotless. So was the snobbery. Everyone was dressed pure Stoke Newington. The girls wielded the kind of anti-Primark dresses that only those graduating in Theatre Studies can get away with. Blokes in tuxes milled around trying to Seem Impressive. People were in the act of committing pre-meditated style offensives. The fashion values were pure mock-Edwardian: Miss Eighteen-Sixties sipped Vodka and coke from flute glasses, twenty-somethings wandered round wondering who to be bored at next. I overheard one girl boasting that someone had written a Wikipedia page about her. Even the music was studied, somehow – the DJ was playing stuff so long out of copyright that Moby could have turned it into four or five platinum albums.
It wasn’t exactly Ibiza Nights, put it that way.
I end up cuddled by the sensual formica curves of the fitted kitchen, scrounging more drinks and chatting to the gaggle of people I’d turned up with. Ninety percent of the rest of the conversations happening were either unintelligible or fuelled by Extreme Cool. I watch a Premiere-Division Twat swaggering around the place starting fights, sexually harassing girls and injecting as much fashionable hooliganism as he could into the proceedings at the top of his voice. If you could ferment all the arrogant twattery in London, brew it up and piss it all out again into a human mould, it would look and sound something like him. You could see it so clearly: a GQ-calibre Young Bloke five years ago, now graduated to aggressive lech with alcoholic tendencies. A pissed personifcation of the Fuck You society. A tramp in Gap clothing.
What a prick.
‘He’s a prick,’ I remark to one of his mates, this annoying attractive girl.
‘He’s well safe,’ the girl says. ‘He’s wicked.’
‘I think he’s a prick,’ I say again.
‘No! You… just don’t know him.’
‘He goes around touching up total strangers.’
‘He doesn’t hurt anyone,’ she shrugs. ‘Anyway, he’s just being ironic.’
I slug back another stolen Vodka and Coke, jellify against the gleaming kitchen surface and glance around at the golden kids flirting and busily Impressing One Another.
So is this it? Is this what the cutting edge comes to? A load of Top-Shopped cokeheads barely out of their teens breathing toxic fumes of Trendiness on innocent passers-by? Are these the kind of people I need to hang out with?
I don’t stand a fucking chance.
This is where I get off. I’m not even going to try. Sorry. Because you know what? In the end, I’m just not that much of a twat. I think I’d rather languish in the faded fart-smell of obscurity instead, pissing tears of failure into a badly-lit pint. It’s got to be better than optioning your soul to E4.
Anyway, I’ve got to go now – I'm working on a few Flash video animations, and I want to get the colour right on this mashup of Rwandan children being massacred to a 1983 Wham hit.
Well weapon.
