Media Flash

Gutenberg pressed and the forest got messed
It’s a paper-chase world
Eye’s down!
Hats off to the lady, though
Little Miss Radio
All move to Audio town

Don’t cook me dinner, Ma
I’m going to the cinema
Suddenly the world’s a big screen
Pop corn sellers and ice cream tellers
It’s the greatest goddam thing you ever seen!

From the science underbelly comes Logie Baird’s telly
Let’s all de-camp to home and tune in
Now you can’t make a decision
Without watching television
It’s a water-cooler wizard
You win!

VHS got giddy, though
Hooking me on video
Infra red fast forward and pause
It was whispered on the level that the Beta-max devil
Was knocking hard on radio’s doors

Time-shifting shows at home
Trumps your gramophone
All bow down to VCR
Re-runs of Sorry! and a little bit of Corrie
Tape recorders killed the radio star

Don’t blink!
Change the game
IBM’s got mainframe
Leave all the thinking to machines
Now my head is in a mess
When I’m losing games of chess
To a motherboard of silicon dreams

Suddenly I’m “free” now I have a PC
With my password, Windows and a mouse
And I’m processing words
And hanging with the nerds
There’s a dot-matrix printer in my house

Don’t call the curtain yet
Yanks have got the internet
Everyone’s a multi-media node
Firewalls, Wi-fi, router on stand-by
People talking English in code

I’m getting ever cockier
Tapping on my Nokia
SMS pushing from afar
T9 Prediction ain't foreseen my new addiction
Texting killed the radio star

Bluetooth, gigabyte
HD on satellite
44 inches flat screen
Sat Nav, hubs @ home
GPS on iPhone
RIP CD laser beam

Ethernet, Adwords
WAP, Snake, Angry Birds
Search engine spiders
MSN
Tweet, Browse,
Bill Gates
Facebook status updates
3D Avatar men

F5, GoToMeet
CNTL ALT+ DELete
Sleep
Turn it off and turn it on
Nothing kinda seedier than stalking Wikipedia
RAM
Cloud computing
Dot com

Google Earth, MP3
Cookies, blogs and 3G
iTunes streaming in my car
Paypal, Kelkoo
Anti virus, Wannadoo
Broadband killed the radio star

If you think it stops here then you haven’t learnt the lesson
From the age of information overkill
You can ban it
You can fight
But you’re chasing beams of light
Now media never ever stands still

17/05/11 GK

Panhandle: extract from Chapter 9 of MakerMeeter

extract from MakerMeeter; GKnapton

Panhandle

Pan was a bin dipper.

He loved watching old films about the California Gold Rush of 1849 where three generations of entire families upped sticks and trekked for days across the American plains, leaving everything behind. A sign hung on the outside of the door of the old house simply read "Gone west".

Those guys were able to simply re-write their lives from the bottom up. Down to every last detail. No fear. As brave as children, only adults.

Men, women and children would shovel dirt out of the ground onto a sieve pan and then finger through it for the prize that made it all worthwhile. It was a feast or famine game. You either struck gold or starved to death.

Pan liked the images of those early slag heaps. The residue of panning for gold.

When the gold ran out the temptation just ran on and on. Afterall, no one knew it had run out. They didn't have the technology we possess today. The only way you knew the gold had gone was to keep panning.

When they were sure the area was "dry" they'd pick a new spot and start all over. And years later, decades later, ever since, new jacks have been panning for glory in vain.

The vainglory of a shiny metal never seemed so apparent.

Pan loved the story of the panners.

A hundred and fifty years later a guy from England went to Cally to prospect. Everyone was in stitches. Ridiculing him. Like, yeah you're really gonna strike it lucky when the whole world and his mum have come up dry ever since those Wild West boys downed tools and beat a hasty retreat back to civilisation all those years ago.

There's no where left to prospect!

But this guy had a plan. You see, everyone prior had been panning with their hands, not with their heads.

He quickly came back laden with gold. He didn't even have to work too hard to reach it. Literally a millionaire a hundred times over, virtually over night.

See, nobody thought to pan the slag heaps of the first arrivals. Until now. It turns out that in times of plenty, we throw away an awful lot of good stuff. Stuff which, in harder times, wouldn't ever be thrown out in the first place. That goes for life in general not just gold prospectors.

This new guy's panning slag and coming up trumps. All you need is the brains and the audacity. Think first, go searching second. It seems everyone else forgot the first step and just went searching blind. But as Pan often said "there's none so blind as the man that will not see".

In this case, no one saw the sheer value in the rubbish of their predecessors. Go dipping your fingers through the rubbish of your contemporaries and you'll look crazy. You may even be a little crazy. Yet go dipping through the bins of yesteryear and you're a clever man. You're an entrepreneur of distinction.

Pan liked this learning. He liked it a lot.

He got to thinking, and soon realised that today's gold is information. Dirt. And that with dirt, the time rule doesn't apply. But the other parallels with Cally are good. For example, people throw out "gold" in times of plenty. At other times, all that gets chucked is garbage.

Now, Pan gets to thinking a little more. The way he sees it, the only people who live permanently in the good times are the rich and famous. So you can bet that the rich and famous are always creating slag heaps of significant value. Or you might say, whereas the average guys bin is just full of rubbish, the bins of the rich and famous will be full of dirt. And dirt is gold, since gold is dirt, in today's parlance.

Pan was a bin dipper. And I bet when you read that sentence right now you're feeling entirely different about Pan than when you read that sentence at the top of this chapter.

You see, that's what I like to call "perception deficit". There's a country mile between the way you see things and the way things are.

And that's just the way things are.

Whilst Walking Through the Fields in May

Whilst walking through the fields in May

The fields of misty morning dew

I saw the sunlight paint the sky

A light and lazy pastel blue

I heard the birds, the singing birds

Break out in flight across the dawn

Above the trees all gold and green

Just as the day began to yawn

I heard the paddle-patted splash of Oxford city boating crew

I heard the chimes of village church bells

Drowning under chimes anew

I saw the mist, the sinking mist

Upon the meadows, rich and deep

I spied the puff of clouds

Through which the morning heat began to seep

I felt the breeze, the dancing breeze

Give early temperance to the balm

I let the hazy spires beyond

Envelop me in summer calm

I heard the din, the hollow din

of morning shoppers leaving cars

I saw men fishing on the banks

With boxes, rods and open jars

I walked from dawn right through 'til dusk

Ten miles a stretch, not looking back

A pen, a camera, flask and fruit

A copy of Schott's Almanac

At last the sun fell through the skies

My vision stuttered to a creep

And for my prize, the longing sighs

I heard the fields fall asleep

G Knapton

(Copyright)

Love Songs in Age

I'm a child

I'm a boy

I'm a grown-ups toy

I'm a thing to be seen, never heard

I'm a school-yard bully

I'm Mulder to your Scully

I'm a homework star

I'm a nerd

I'm a teenage terror

I'm a syntax error

I'm a last minute winner

I'm a fan

I'm a library book wizard

I'm a north coast blizzard

I'm an adolescent half-grown man

I'm a gent

I'm a lover

I am weak, dear brother

I'm a stand-up comic

I'm free

I'm wrong when I am right

I'm a night club fight

I'm whoever in the world I wanna be

Book pages flutter

I'm the bread for your butter

I'm a bank of knowledge

I'm a sage

I'm the truth

Unwise

I'm the fire in my eyes

I'm me, according to my age

I'm a rapper

I'm a beast

I'm a big meat feast

I'm the PTO footer on your page

My mistakes are my mud

But I'm bad turned good

I'm the sum of all my wisdom times age

I'm a thorn to your thistle

You'll jump when I whistle

To the men in the middle

I'm the chief

I'm mental when I'm mean

I'm the ghost in the machine

I'm a chav

I'm a runner

I'm a thief

I'm Leeds

I'm Manc

I'm a septic tank

I'm a gay white nigger

I'm a fly

On the wall of your life

I'm a real house-wife

I'm my days on the planet gone by

I'm solid

I'm a rock

I'm a loud ticking clock

I'm the truth in the mirror

I am rage

I'm a saint

I'm a sinner

I'm a Booker prize winner

I'm the story, according to my age

I am old

I am weak

Now I think before I speak

I'm a bottle of vintage wine

I'm a dream

I'm a vision

I'm a head-on collision

Driving slowly down the sands of time

I'm dying in my sleep

I'm the castle and the keep

I'm no longer the big man on the stage

I have been what I have been

According to my scene

And according, forever, to my age

gknapton

Extract from the Good Book

Jeremiah 5:21-25

²¹ Hear this, you foolish and senseless people,
who have eyes but do not see,
who have ears but do not hear:
²² Should you not fear me?
Should you not tremble in my presence?
I made the sand a boundary for the sea,
an everlasting barrier it cannot cross.
The waves may roll, but they cannot prevail;
they may roar, but they cannot cross it.
²³ But these people have stubborn and rebellious hearts;
they have turned aside and gone away.
²⁴ They do not say to themselves,
‘Let us fear the LORD our God,
who gives autumn and spring rains in season,
who assures us of the regular weeks of harvest.’
²⁵ Your wrongdoings have kept these away;
your sins have deprived you of good.

Lessons In Money Get Taught

Things that are good for the soul come freely
Things that are bad get bought
Lessons in life are incremental
Lessons in money get taught

Throw-away wealth gets stacked up hourly
Valuable trust takes time
Get hooked on a life of hard endeavour
Chill out on a life of crime

Silly little things are valued highly
Stuff that you covet is not
How many times you get what you want
Comes down to the decimal dot

Trodden-on poor get ripped off royally
Decadent rich get paid
Pretty young girls get confidence crises
Ugly old men get laid

Time flies by for the people who need more
Life stands still for the bored
Sensible men die young from cancer
Old men live by the sword

Day follows night and the world keeps spinning
It’s a non-stop repetitive blast
It doesn’t make sense
Don’t lose
Keep winning
Just get all your lessons in fast

Take Me To The Marble Street Cut

from the Spit Mancunia collection

.........

by the born-again tellers and the charity sellers

in the midst of the retail throng

by the water-fight ferals

and the chavs, jons and beryls

to the beat of the brass band gong

there's a dainty little nook

you can spot it if you look

tucked in by the ATM queues

betwixt stores multi-decker

there's an alley way Mecca

running west from the Tram Stop News

I don't think I'm being silly

looking down on Piccadilly

as a circus full of mis-fits en masse

and it goes without saying

it's a price worth paying

to escape off down the Marble Street pass

where the dole queue wizards eye the

sales-desk lizards

and silence feels a light-year hence

when the benefits mullahs

are spouting as much bull as ever

oh for a break in the fence!

with the bags getting heavy

now the shops have nicked their levy

and my wallet makes the options slam shut

it's a joy

it's a blessing

like a low-cal dressing

oh take me to the Marble Street cut

roll up! roll over

kill me now

make it over

these mall-stretch maggots turn my gut

this shopping lark is wrecked

my kingdom to eject

my kingdom for the Marble Street cut

it's oh so un-British

when the Stretford skittish

and the Moss Side mothers are afoot

and I'm praying on high

to the big man in the sky

"Lord, deliver me to Marble Street cut"

what can one feel but derision

for this Arndale "vision"

that turns people into eaters

and rash ?

I just take it on the chin

this bargain base bin

is material acquisition-soaked trash

I would miss it should I blink

and yet within a wink

I am lost to the tabloid splut

and there's no one else around

on this tranquil hallowed ground

in the freedom of the Marble Street cut

don't serve shop porridge

when a little local knowledge

will jolt you from the cattle-mart rut

take heed

take your time

never waste away in line

just take off down the Marble Street cut

gknapton

copyright