Me, we, I. Our pet hate.

it's all about me me me

On the way to work this morning Sophie was reading my email out of the corner of her eye as she often does on the train (clients: do not be afeared I never let her spy on confidential things, I wait till she’s asleep or doing complicated make-up manoeuvres before I write ‘those’ emails). Anyway she noticed that I was using the word “we” in a way that she approved of. In a business context not a relationship one.

An interesting discussion followed about how we both really hate it when people do the whole. Me, my, I, mine thing when talking about the work that a team of people are doing. And how it’s so much nicer when someone uses words like we, our, ours and so on.

My personal pet hate – and it is mine not ours, actually, it might be ours, I need to check – is when people talk about ‘my team’ or even worse ‘my designers’ or even even worse ‘my account man’. Those people should be hung for intent to commit slavery.

Of course one is allowed to have a personal opinion or do stuff on their own, so sometimes ‘I think’, or ‘I’m going to sort this out today’ is totally appropriate.

This may appear a bit pedantic. But if you were on the receiving end of someone claiming that you’re ‘theirs’ you might feel different.

Anyway that’s what we think.

The Beautiful Sad Sick Genius of Blue Jam

BLUE JAM/CHRIS MORRIS

I listened to almost every single episode of Chris Morris’ genius-like radio show Blue Jam when I was on holiday.

It can put you in a very strange place. But it is absolutely amazing. Some of the writing is incredible. Yes it’s undoubtedly in odd taste (I’m sure some people would say incredibly bad taste), but it stands alone in my mind as a kind of fucked-up mutoid love-child of Derek and Clive, Monty Python, the set from an early 90s chill out room, and a warped psycho-therapist.

Here’s a kind of montage of a bunch of bits from YouTube. The video isn’t supposed to move, it’s a radio show :-)

From a DJing perspective the musical selection is fantastic too. That’s the thing you don’t pick up from these isolated clips, you don’t get a sense of the sonic journey.

These YouTubed snippets don’t really do it justice. You need to get transported into the whole 60 minute experience for it to really seep into your brain like is needs to.

If you think you might be a fan there’s an excellent comedy forum with a strong Chris Morris bent over at Cook’d and Bomb’d.

In fact there’s a complete episode guide as well as download links to the whole first series – yay!: http://chilled.cream.org/boards/index.php?page=bluejam#series_1

The only thing that I think you can legitimately get hold of is the Blue Jam CD that they put out on Warp. Which is good. But marginally less good than the stuff that was on Radio 1 IMHO.

Oh and you can still get hold of the DVD of the Show JAM which was the telly version of the show. But again this isn’t as good as the radio stuff IMHO. The pictures reveal a bit too much and some of the oddness is knocked off. Plus I loved the interplay between the music and the words that a 1hr radio show gave them the space to play with.

There’s lots of snippets from Jam around on YouTube if you want to check it out. And in spite of having just said that it’s not as good as the radio there are undoubtedly moments of genius…

And it still does have that strange sense of melancholy that I love so dearly…

The sense that you’re not quite sure whether to laugh, cry or peel off your skin with a rusty penknife.

And don’t get me started on The Day Today, Brass Eye or Nathan Barley or we’ll be here forever…

Dealing With Blog Block

IMG_5999

I was chatting with Andy about blog block on Friday. Neither of us could quite explain why we were feeling it. And I’m not sure I can explain it any better now. But this diagram has some of the components and some of the relationships between them. Anyone else got a blog block diagram they’d care to share?

Judging by the diagram I should just shut myself off for a bit and go and meditate in a cave or something. Alternatively I could just drink 3 cups of really strong coffee and mainline a bunch of wanky RSS-feeds until I get really angry about something then do a massive rant.

Or I could just go about my business until something vaguely interesting crops up. To be honest I think that’s probably the best thing to do…