Never turn down an opportunity to shout, 'F**k them all!' at the top of your voice.
Avoid bigots of all descriptions.
Let your own bed become to you what the Pole Star was to sailors of old ... look forward to it.
Short(ish) poem inspired by seeing JCC, 19/08/10 at 2330 in a big town in the rain. Ahem...
"John Cooper Clarke
Comes in from the dark
Side stuck in permanent profile
A head on stilts that groans
Like a sliced Ramone
Painted on jeans
Tattered scripts mean
The perpetual illusion
Literary confusion
Lament no lamination
On notes or notation
Scribbles and stencils
Like and unleaded pencil
Mental.
John Cooper Clarke
Festival stick insect
Heroin chic defects
A lack of respect
For the untwisted word
Sexually transmitted diseases
Coughs and sneezes
The North's balmy breezes
Personal hell freezes
The absurd and the norms
On parade and reformed
Big society’s worms
Spawned
John Cooper Clarke
Needs a good meal
Needs time to heal
This walking corpse
Rides the fourth horse
Emaciated, animated
Spectral and laminated
A carbon copy punk
Drinks without being drunk
Starves without the hunger
Isn’t getting younger
is
John Cooper Clarke
John Cooper Clarke
Cigarette burns
Self harm returns
The wrong side of the razor
Unbuttoned unblazered
Glasses for lasers
Like Gollum in headlights
But I should write something trite
He was on for seven nights
Just more festival…magic
John Cooper Clarke
Shared a bed with Nico
An artists hole, a freak show
You should know
Addicted lover’s Boho
Where the disinfectant should go
It’s easier for a cat to bark
Space Shuttles to park
Feed Wheatabix to a shark
A flushed toilet to spark
Than be John Cooper Clarke
I don’t envy John Cooper Clarke
I don't want to be John Cooper Clarke.
The impermanence of pleasure
"This most recent study inquired into the well being of 136,000 people worldwide and compared it to levels of income. It found, overall, that feelings of security and general satisfaction did increase with financial status. Money, however, could not lift its possessors to the next level, and was unable to provide enjoyment or pleasure on its own. The survey, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, examined large numbers of people from almost every culture on earth, and found much the same thing. The stereotype of the rich man who finds life savorless and without pleasure was not invented simply to keep the poor happy with their lot.
Opinions and this enormous survey, however, concentrate on status and on the moment of possession. Are we satisfied and filled with pleasure when we have what we came for? Some, looking at suburban cannibals and eager consumers, would say “yes”; the survey tends to say “not necessarily”. There is a significant question to be asked about enjoyment, which we ask ourselves all the time when embarked on an enterprise of pleasure. It’s rare that we can actually pin down the specific site of pleasure; the specific moment where what William Blake called “the lineaments of gratified desire” are at their clearest.
Take the teenager determined to buy an iPad, a woman setting out to get a new handbag, a prosperous businessman who wants to add to his collection of sports watches. The setting out with the happy intention of spending; the entering of the shop; the examination of the wares; the long decision; the handing over of the money; the moment when the ownership of handbag, watch or tablet is transferred; the gloating at home; the moment when the object is displayed to others. All these steps form a process in enjoyment, but almost all of them are redolent with anticipation or with retrospective glee. The moment where bliss is at its peak, as with other pleasures of the human animal, is over in a flash, and hardly exists at all. Everything else is foreplay and memory.
Composers have always known this simple, basic truth: pleasure is half anticipation and half blissful recollection, and hardly at all about the fulfillment of the promise. The great musical statements of ecstasy, such as Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde or Schubert’s first Suleika song, are literally all half crescendo and half languid recall. We look forward to pleasure; we look back on it. The moment of pleasure itself is over in a flash, and often rather questionable. The sulking child’s question, guaranteed to destroy any outing, “Are we having fun yet?” is an irrational one; because we are always looking forward to having fun, always knowing that we have had fun."