I have just finished reading Andrew Marr’s book on post-war Britain; I have read and enjoyed ‘Moby Dick; I have been to my first opera in the Liceau in Barcelona.
Why, you may ask, do I list these intellectually acceptable ‘achievements’? What is prompting me to be even more defensively cultural than I am normally?
There are many ways of gauging the academic worth of a person and, similarly there are many ways of revealing the feet of clay which can bring a carefully constructed persona crashing to humiliation.
Just consider: a friend once said that it was ‘amusing’ to take a bottle of Hirondelle to a party (He was wrong); another friend can recite word-for-word the lyrics of any ABBA song you care to mention; another likes mushy peas from poor quality chippies; yet another likes those luridly coloured cheap sweets in the shapes of bananas and other suggestive fruit; another can’t stand the music of Phillip Glass – and so it goes on. Perfectly acceptable people with the fatal flaw that can’t be passed off as post-Modernist irony. Something which cuts to the quick; something which simply altars your whole perception of a person.
Time to come clean. Time to bite the bullet and simply reveal the black spot before Blind Pugh comes a-tapping.
We (you see I am attempting to spread the blame) have now bought installed and viewed a 42” Plasma behemoth of a television!
Spanish television does not really have an equivalent of the BBC, so the defence of “I only watch quality drama, documentaries and the news” is less than convincing.
The ‘thing’ neatly and snugly fills a yawning chasm of a gap in the wall unit which is supposedly commodious enough to accommodate your normal television, hi-fi centre and DVD player side by side.
The first film that we watched was ‘Mars Attacks!” That, in itself, speaks volumes – though I have to admit that the cinemascope screen shape with the space above and below the picture was still large enough to enjoy the film, whereas with normal televisions the compression usually means squinting at action scenes which have squeezed themselves into a glittering miniature rather than being overwhelmed by a filmic experience. I suppose that I could insert here that I am looking forward to viewing some of my DVDs on the large screen so that I can pick up details which had simply passed me by on the smaller televisions that I have possessed in the past. But who would believe me?
Certainly not me!
Sitting on a balcony which looks out onto the Middle Sea; water which links me to all the great civilizations of the past and a number of truly revolting ones today; I can indulge myself with the knowledge that I now own one of the talismanic icons of the consumer society gone mad.
It does look good though.
Why, you may ask, do I list these intellectually acceptable ‘achievements’? What is prompting me to be even more defensively cultural than I am normally?
There are many ways of gauging the academic worth of a person and, similarly there are many ways of revealing the feet of clay which can bring a carefully constructed persona crashing to humiliation.
Just consider: a friend once said that it was ‘amusing’ to take a bottle of Hirondelle to a party (He was wrong); another friend can recite word-for-word the lyrics of any ABBA song you care to mention; another likes mushy peas from poor quality chippies; yet another likes those luridly coloured cheap sweets in the shapes of bananas and other suggestive fruit; another can’t stand the music of Phillip Glass – and so it goes on. Perfectly acceptable people with the fatal flaw that can’t be passed off as post-Modernist irony. Something which cuts to the quick; something which simply altars your whole perception of a person.
Time to come clean. Time to bite the bullet and simply reveal the black spot before Blind Pugh comes a-tapping.
We (you see I am attempting to spread the blame) have now bought installed and viewed a 42” Plasma behemoth of a television!
Spanish television does not really have an equivalent of the BBC, so the defence of “I only watch quality drama, documentaries and the news” is less than convincing.
The ‘thing’ neatly and snugly fills a yawning chasm of a gap in the wall unit which is supposedly commodious enough to accommodate your normal television, hi-fi centre and DVD player side by side.
The first film that we watched was ‘Mars Attacks!” That, in itself, speaks volumes – though I have to admit that the cinemascope screen shape with the space above and below the picture was still large enough to enjoy the film, whereas with normal televisions the compression usually means squinting at action scenes which have squeezed themselves into a glittering miniature rather than being overwhelmed by a filmic experience. I suppose that I could insert here that I am looking forward to viewing some of my DVDs on the large screen so that I can pick up details which had simply passed me by on the smaller televisions that I have possessed in the past. But who would believe me?
Certainly not me!
Sitting on a balcony which looks out onto the Middle Sea; water which links me to all the great civilizations of the past and a number of truly revolting ones today; I can indulge myself with the knowledge that I now own one of the talismanic icons of the consumer society gone mad.
It does look good though.
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