A toast to Merry England

As per usual I made the trip to Clun for the Green Man festival on May Day for a bit of merry England style folk festivaling. The festival seems to have quite a wide appeal to varying different people from all walks of life, most of them looked like your average Joe Normal's but it it was peppered with the beardy weirdies you would also expect to see at such events. So what is the appeal? Is it just an excuse for a party? Or is it that people want to get a slice of the rural life that they don't have in urban/suburban life? Or is it that people want ot connect with the past? Which ever way it always feels like a bit of a pilgramage to me as my dad is a Salopian & the Beltane May Day connections are also prominant. The festival involves a fight between Green Man & the Ice Queen & the Green Man usualy wins (last year been canceled due to flooding & look what a horrible summer we had last year, I blame that for the weather we got, that & the gulf stream being in the Med rather than on Northern Europe). I'm hoping to explore a little more of Merry England hopefully this year or at least its modern enterpretations. But I'm not the only one, it appears many people are, so is it more a quest for cultural identity where some people feel we are losing it or just an affirmation we have one? Well in which ever case any a excuse for a party is a good one. So hats off to the people who make it happen.

Voting for X Factor

I don't get it, what is the point? To vote for someone who is to lazy to put the effort into a music career in the first place to be someone else's puppet & not have their own creative input into their music or to have it severely restricted, it allows a lack of artistic merit into our music culture, it does not nurture the talent that it says it does, just stifles the creativity of any contestants that have any, though I doubt many have that, just to provides a homogenised sound & endless uninspired covers that sound very similar to the original, which is rendered a little pointless. A friend on facebook posted a good point, if the people who endlessly harp on about voting for who they want to win X Factor put as much effort into voting for who they wanted to run the country we could be in a much better place by now & I know many people who vote for X Factor candidates who don't vote. I have heard it  been called escapism & from some it is, but to most they of the people I know who call it that don't fully understand what they are escaping from, so therefore it is not escapism because you have to have a fairly decent grip on reality of the events happening in the world in the first place. Please pay attention to what is going on in the world then I will have no objections for you watching a program I care little if anything for.

50 Shades of Mummy Porn

Well how many women do you know who haven't either read it or are waiting to get it? I bet the amount is shrinking. It seems strange that what would normally pass away as a small footnote of erotica has now become a best seller. Are women becoming more desensitised to the slightly more unusual side of sexuality? Are they trying to spice things up a bit? Or trying to reinforce the idea of a bog standard sex life is actually what is needed? Or just a good bit of escapism? What ever the reason I have heard some rather interesting conversations about it & the topics it contained within, introducing people to things that they had no idea about. Is it freeing society, making people explore their sexuality more? Is it corrupting it, making people more voyeuristic? Which ever it is, it has made EL James a very wealthy woman, although what I have heard it wouldn't win much in the way of literary awards except maybe a Lemon Drizzle Dildo in the Mummy Porn Awards. I must admit I haven't read it but then again man on woman doesn't really hold that much appeal in that kind of sense. If you've read it & enjoyed it good for you, if you bought into the hype & then was sorely disappointed, you shouldn't set your standards so high for a mass marketed product. Ah the marketing that is truly the key to its success, got to love how companies can push things to people, anyone for Iceland chicken nuggets?

Drag Queens

I'm starting to find the older I'm getting the less entertaining drag queens are getting, or is it that there are too many around doing the same old thing. There are some who are funny in their own rights as comedians, but that has more to with the fact that they actually have some talent, but the scene does seem to be saturated with drag queens that do little more than mime badly to songs & yet some people still go mad for them. What is the appeal? Is the art of drag just heading into one trick pony territory? What happened to art of satire with them? Are current crop getting lazy & thinking all you have to do is put on a frock, do bad make up & flounce to Lady Gaga is enough? Because the only time that is entertaining is when a child raids their mothers bedroom, bursts in into the living room, proud as punch because they are emulating their favourite popstar & that is only funny because its cute, if you are an adult inject humour into it, be topical or at least be interesting. The original cabaret was controversial & was aware of the current climate & not just musically, in general & they had stuff to say even if it was put it in a funny, mocking way. Congratulations to all the drag queens that do still do that, to those that don't, try harder for goodness sake or you will degrade the cabaret seen as a poor shadow of what is was & what it stood for.