Stop Spamming Me, Miss Austen!

Does it really matter if something is fake these days? Isn’t it enough that something looks real and, more importantly, feels real? I'm beginning to think we should give up trying to seek the authentic. That's ‘old school’ reality. The new reality is as warped as anything found in a Philip K. Dick novel. Even my fingertips tell me what the advertisers want me to feel.

This morning, I was in Bangor's main shopping centre when I went to pop a child’s bubble that had come floating my way down the escalators. I poked at it with my finger, waiting to feel the delicious spray of cool soap fall across my hand, only to see the bubble bounce clear away. I’m embarrassed to say this but I couldn’t live with the disappointment. I couldn’t handle the rejection. So, I chased it. I chased that bubble right across the shopping centre, poking it every couple of steps and finding that it just wouldn’t pop. In the end, I had to ask a security guard to help me corner it by Woolworths where I finally managed to stamp on it, which wasn’t a satisfying end at all. But that’s what happens when reality goes awry. It took me a time to understand that this was an unpopable bubble. There should be a law against such things.

As you can see, I’m now home. Or at least I think I’m home. It’s easy to get confused when you’ve spent a morning with the fakers, the frauds, the charlatans, the insecure, and the existentially indistinct. It’s all been quite dispiriting and I can’t get breasts and bubbles out of my mind. Breasts, bubbles, breasts, bubbles. All I can think about are breasts and bubbles.

Before you ask: you’ll understand my breast fixation soon enough. Just give me time to consider if W.H. Auden ever had such problems with reality. Did he write any poems about breasts or, indeed, bubbles? I’m not sure I’ll ever know.

You might recall that I’d gone out this morning to purchase a volume of his shorter poems. In the end, I decided against buying it once I saw how thin it was. I’ll stick with my English Auden and see how I get on with that. I instead plumped for a complete collection of Wallace Steven’s verse that was tempting me from the top shelf. Mrs. Rust mentions Stevens as a text for next year but I like to be prepared. It’s a bit of a thick volume and I don’t know where to begin, but years of working as a stripper means that I’m a sucker for peeling the cover off a fine looking book.

And it was a handsome volume and in hardback too. In fact, it was so handsome that it put me in the mood to browse some more. That's why I stopped off at W.H. Smiths, intending to spend the last of the tips that had been pushed down my thong last Friday night. And that’s when I began to get seriously confused.

The magazine was stacked next to this week’s issue of The Economist. ‘When Breasts Escape’ proclaimed its headline, printed in the sort of font I really wanted to fondle. I don’t know what happens when breasts escape because I didn’t buy the magazine but it’s been a problem I’ve been considering ever since. So what exactly happen when breasts do escape? From where, exactly, do breasts break out and can we ever say that breasts have truly escaped? If so, what disguise do they adopt? Does it involve trips over the Alps and into Switzerland? And why did Gordon Jackson say ‘thank you’ to that Gestapo officer when he wished him well in English? Okay, I’m really getting a bit confused. There weren’t many breasts in The Great Escape, were there, though I seem to remember Charles Bronson looking quite buxom…

I know now that the headline struck me because it reminded me of a poem we’d read in this week’s FE class. It contained the lines:

And the whole earth would henceforth be
A wider prison unto me

The headline made me began to see what the poet had been saying; that escape is relative. A breast may escape one constricting factor but it is always bound by another, until, ultimately, it must face the fact that it cannot escape being a breast. Simple enough, you might think, but I’d also noticed that the breasts on the cover of the magazine weren’t real. I was in tricky philosophical waters. Did some breasts escape breastdom by becoming fake breasts? Or had they redrawn then boundaries of the language which imprisons them?

All confusing, I’m sure you agree. And that’s before I hit another patch of troubling philosophical waters in the form of Roger Waters.

Abandoning my book buying, I’d walked back to the car, a trip that took me past the local theatre who were advertising a Bee Gee tribute band. Apart from the fake beards, fake hair, fake tans, and a few orthodontic inaccuracies, they were the spitting image of the brothers Gibb. When I got home, I’d look them up on the internet and came across hundreds of tribute bands. My favourite title had to be ‘The Clone Roses’ but for their sound, the winner was Think Floyd.

Think Floyd sound quite like Pink Floyd. They sound like the band on a night when Waters and Gilmour had probably argued over the Pringles. But it begs the question: does it really matter that Think Floyd – or ‘The Think’ as I like to call them – are not Pink Floyd? Do we really need the real Roger Waters now the classic songs have been written? In a way, Think Floyd are better than Pink Floyd. They won’t get tired of playing the classic tracks. They won't feel the need to change the key of ‘Money’ or give it a samba beat. Are the fake Pink Floyd like fake breasts? Are they closer to ideal they pretend to be?

I was beginning to see light. Perhaps fake things are good. Fake bubbles, fake breasts, and fake Pink Floyd.

And fake spam. I forgot to mention fake spam.

I got home to find more Japanese spam in my inbox. Japanese spam has lately been causing me considerable trouble. I can never bring myself to delete it. How can I to be sure it doesn’t contain something important? Of course, my normal spam is usually computer generated gibberish but there’s no way of knowing if this Japanese spam is from a fake Japanese. It might not even make sense in Japanese. So, is it Japanese email, Japanese spam, or fake-Japanese spam? I pondered this for a while. And then I received more spam. This time it wasn't in Japanese. It contained random extracts from Emma. It began ‘Such was Jane Fairfax's history’ and then had an ad for Viagra before -- how ironic -- jumping to the end of the novel and telling me about the chaste ending.

And suddenly, it all became so clear. My whole day made sense!

Since I’m no fan of Jane Austen, this email was actually a huge improvement over the original. It had everything that Emma doesn't have: a brief beginning, a bit of sex in the middle, and a brief ending. It could also be read in a single sitting without my wanting to open a vein. It was a sobering lesson. Fakes are so much better than the original.

Grim Lessons In Reality and Tchaikovsky

Fellow Thongateers, forgive The Chipster’s silence. He’s only now feeling a little better, or at least, well enough to sit up in his sickbed, nestle himself in the cool socket formed by two neatly plumped clean pillows, and type a few words.

This strain of human flu has been a tonic if you’re the type of person who enjoys groaning for motionless hours in bed watching the football all weekend long. It’s ideal if you want to wake up at three thirty in the morning, pawing for the cold spot in your sheets, hoping that they might help ease the sweatless fever. And it’s a real blessing if you then turn on the TV and find ‘Rediscovering Tchaikovsky’ on BBC4 and it awakens a latent interest in classical music. In a way, this flu hasn’t been too bad at all. In fact, it’s been an education and I’m listening to Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony as I type. And it really isn’t ‘Pathétique’.

Yet despite all of its evident virtues, this flu has been useless if you’re a Welsh exotic dancer who has just started to blog. Even worse if you’ve wanted to say something deep and meaningful about the death of Anna Nichole Smith last week. But as I’ve said, I’m now feeling a little better. So before the paracetamol drive me to sleep, allow me to explain why I think our collective fascination with a woman known for her life in soft porn is being wrongly portrayed as the death of culture, if not civilisation itself. And I say this, not as a stripper, not even as a man, but as an average human being, albeit suffering a mild form of plague.

Anna Nichole Smith may now only be known as somebody ‘famous for being famous’, but there’s a reason so many have been fascinated by her and her death. And, odd as it may seem, I think it does us all very great credit.

That reason came to me tonight. Shivering under the duvet, I couldn’t be bothered to lift my hand to turn off the BAFTA awards. My infirmity didn’t last. I found a cure for it as soon as Jonathan Ross began his excruciating opening monologue. It also had the extremely strange symptom of making me wish that they’d get Stephen Fry back. It really was that bad. I’ve had funnier accidents with lit matches.

As I moved to turn over, my finger loitered on the remote control long enough that I saw a few of the deathly silences. Ross seemed unperturbed and you could have swabbed the man down with shame and find not a microbe sticking to him. And that’s when something suddenly unlocked the enigma of Anna Nichole Smith for me. You might call it an epiphany but I call it seeing a glaring sense.

It happened like this. Ross made a poor joke about the theatre being ‘stuffed as tightly as Daniel Craig’s trunks’ and the camera immediately cut straight to Craig in the audience. He looked stony faced. The joke wasn’t the funniest but I would have expected him to respond in some way. It’s what we humans do when somebody makes a playful joke at our expense. When I strip, there’s always one shy member of a hen party who feels embarrassed at my attention but they always smile politely. I’ve never known different. It’s just what we do.

Only Craig didn’t smile. Or he doesn’t smile. He just sat there looking… well… looking just as we would expect James Bond to look while M instructs him to kill a Cuban drug lord. I gave the matter no thought until the camera had gone to him on a couple more occasions after more of Ross’s feeble quips (he really needs better writers), and each time, Craig’s face was impassive. He stared into the middle distance looking about as pleasant as being cold-cocked by the butt end of a Walther PPK.

And that’s when it struck me. Craig has been told to act like Bond in his everyday life. That or he is just a man without a witty bone in his body. I may find it hard to believe the latter but I’m easily convinced about the former. In this culture, where francises of all kinds are so eagerly managed, it seemed only right that the current James Bond looks the part. It’s why previous Bonds have struggled so hard to establish themselves as something other than Bond: by growing beards, going bald, going back to the theatre, or dropping out of acting completely. Accepting the role of Bond means accepting the lifestyle that goes with it. It’s about adopting the personae. Craig is now Bond. And he clearly takes his job very seriously indeed.

Which suddenly made me feel a very great affection for Anna Nichole Smith.

I was never a fan but I recognised her on TV. She had the sort of beauty that makes you realise why Americans love their real meat. She has substance and was no European waif. Yet I wouldn’t post a naked picture of her here because, among other things, being around nudity all day makes me more respectful of other people’s dignity. I know as much about her as is usual to know if you’ve read the newspapers for the last decade. I know she married an ailing billionaire, who died, leaving his young wife to inherit his fortune. She spent a decade contesting the will with his family while establishing herself as a star of reality TV. Before all of this, she was famous as a Guess jeans model and I remember the stunning black and white photographs of her in film magazines of the time, not knowing who she was. She achieved some more celebrity in one of the Naked Gun films and, all along, was known as one of the decade’s faces of Playboy.

But what I now think I know about Anna Nichole Smith is that she was exactly as she appeared.

Her life was a mess. She fought weight problems. She fought addictions. She lost a son last year only days after giving birth to a new daughter. Paternity tests are now being demanded and fortunes rest on the outcome. She was no actress but used her body to achieve a kind of success in the field of glamour modelling. It would not be a guess to say that she was hardly the brightest person on the planet, but then again, who is? And this is my point.

Anna Nichole Smith was a fleck of reality that got lodged under the lens. She was the hair in the corner of the frame. Her life reminded us that the sun does not always shine on the land below the Hollywood hills. When she pouted for the cameras, it reminded us of the fraud committed in the name of glamour. It was never larger than life, but a parody of life. The same is true when she appeared incoherent at an awards ceremony like the American version of Oliver Reed but with infinitely less talent or anger. Above all, hers was a face which, despite all the abnormal things of her life, exemplified a grim troubled reality that could not be fixed by clever spin. She was the opposite to Craig.

And the strange thing I think, as the tablets kick in and I feel my head reeling, is that David Cameron could learn a few lessons from her.

Cameron may have done drugs as a young man at Eton. He chooses to neither confirm nor deny the stories, which is his choice to make and we should respect him for that. Yet what we can judge is how he decides to manage the reality. At the moment, he is Daniel Craig sitting impassively in the studio audience. He is acting the role of Prime Minister in waiting. He fears that the general public with run away if he acknowledges any wrongdoing. He won’t acknowledge reality. He wears the watches, drives the cars, inhabits the suits, all paid for by his sponsors in the Tory Party.

Yet the reason why Anna Nichole Smith’s death touched so many people is because she had a quality that the public recognises that it so abundantly lacks. Fragility can be a virtue. It made a Texan stripper into a model of imperfect grace. Perhaps it can turn our politicians into something other than those mannequins that have stood in Downing Street for the last decade. Perhaps they can become representatives of the people who put them where they are. People like you and me, and even like Anna Nichole Smith.