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The Hounds & the Imposters
Once upon a time there was a dalmatian, and then, a few moments later, there were one hundred more.
One day they were lined up in rows and instructed to sit down. All did, except one, and the dog beside him mumbled from the corner of his mouth:
“Hit the deck.”
“Why?” came the response. “Do you think it’s going to rain?”
The dog considered the cow for a moment.
“Just try to fit in.”
The two became friends, and would stand beside each other among their pack watching the sunset every evening before being called in for dinner.
Word quickly spread throughout the Black and White community, and before long a zebra arrived, looking for a new herd after having lost his own. The cow and the dogs welcomed him into their home, and joked about him having to earn his stripes.
At Christmas a panda turned up with her newborn daughter, and the animals went to great lengths to learn at least the very basics of Mandarin, so they could with more ease assist her in the rearing of the cub. The dogs played mad games with the baby while the mother rested, and the cow and the zebra endlessly chewed grass, compressing it into something vaguely representing bamboo.
Bereft of flight the penguins took their time, but waddled over eventually with great confidence and optimism, and, upon their arrival, were met with merriment and song. With them they brought letters of introduction from orcas, who, thousands of miles away, lamented their lack of legs, but wished them all the best.
All was right with the world, and from my bush I watched the hounds and the imposters make love to one another and brew their own beer. It took a while, but once I’d plucked up enough confidence I approached an elderly badger and asked him if I could join the family.
He looked me dead in the eyes and said:
“No, skunk, lest you fart and turn the whole air sour”.
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Men at Sea
It was revealed this week that one of the so-called ‘insurrectionists’ who stormed the Capitol building in Washington D.C. was Robert Stanford, a retired firefighter who allegedly threw a fire extinguisher at police officers, hitting three of them on the head. At the coal-face of what feels like the planned-obsolescence of irony, some cultural navel-gazing acts as quite the tonic. It is fitting that, in the UK, the first Great Meme of the Year should be so emphatically vague, yet so strikingly specific. A photograph of four young men posing outside of an All Bar One before a night out has become a tableau vivant, a silent nod of mutual understanding, as T.S. Elliot put it: “The still point of the turning world”.
“When presented with oat flakes arranged in the pattern of Japanese cities around Tokyo, brainless, single-celled slime moulds construct networks of nutrient-channeling tubes that are strikingly similar to the layout of the Japanese rail system. A new model based on the simple rules of the slime mould’s behaviour may lead to the design of more efficient, adaptable networks, the team contends.” - Researchers from Japan and England report Jan. 22 in Science. Watching a meme develop is a beautiful thing. Some are perfect as they are born, such as Walmart Yodelling Kid, which did not grow as it was appropriated, and is most shared in its original form. It is a meme whose perfection lies in the enacting of its happening, a boy born in 2006, singing a staple of the American Vaudeville, written in 1922, in the aisle, no, the trenches of American capitalism, dressed in the pageantry of outlaw frontier-ship, under Trump, no less. An observed cultural event such as this sleeps peacefully in its own belonging, perfect without need to be expanded upon. The four boys outside the pub in Birmingham however, have legs, all be them constricted by the tight jeans which supposedly chose them.
Having gone the orthodox route of all popular memes, (adorned with different quotes and captions by every UK meme page, each to serve their own sartorial agenda), the image had had its few days in the sun and was ready to be put into Meme Hibernation, a period after a meme’s initial success where it is shelved for a number of months, and then is briefly re-introduced to the wild, usually around a year later, and paraded across Instagram as a retro-meme, a sarcastic emblem of nouvelle-histoire. However, just before the due-date of deletion an appropriation of the meme emerged which would blow all competitors out of the water, and not only fortify the cultural capital of the image, but ensure its longevity well into the consciousness of the new year. The image has been set to the sea-shanty Wellerman, and using deep fake technology, the mouths and faces of the men have been animated to give the illusion that they are performing the piece themselves. It’s an artistic decision informed by a burgeoning internet phenomenon known as Sea Shanty TikTok, which is emerging through the increasingly popular bastard godchild of the long lost, greatly missed, Vine.
Sea Shanty Tik-Tok videos consist of a small choir of men performing shanties in tandem with one another across a series of picture-in-picture screens, seemingly unable to perform together due to Covid restrictions. “Sea shanties have a quality that breaks the rigid confines of male emotionality that feels almost radical in this moment. For all the bawdiness of some verses, they still lack the preening machismo radiating from President Donald Trump as he urged his followers to overturn the election's results. And ShantyTok is the antithesis of the performative shell that toxic masculinity requires, one that lashes out at everything to protect the fragility hidden inside” wrote Hayes Brown in the MSNBC blog. Music has always had the propensity to act as a functional object, especially in the sphere of the man, whether that be football chants designed to encourage, or dis-encourage the players, or war songs utilised to galvanise troops and instil within them a common cause. What we see here, however, is more of a reflection, or better even, a refraction of a feeling. The original function of the shanty was to give men at sea a communal vocal and emotional exercise to work alongside the repetitive nature of their duties, not unlike that of the chain-gang songs of the early American West.
The task of these songs in modernity are unemployed. Sales teams do not sing tales of past contracts signed, targets hit, or mergers old. But the image of four young men in full plume, seeking respite from the doldrums of Late Stage Capitalism, in conjunct with a piece of music from the antediluvian recesses of manhood, conjures an image of the lost man at sea, without anchor, looking for a New England. As a writer very close to this young man’s heart once so beautifully wrote: “Not celebrating the past, but mourning the future.”
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