Author: Scott Andrews

Reclusive former writer of absurd nonsense. Occasional contributor to #newsbiscuit

Phone Hacking – How To Become A Boring Egomaniac

Last Sunday saw the closure of the News Of The World.  After 168 years the newspaper finally shut it’s doors for good after becoming caught up in a scandal which has rocked journalism to it’s very core and created a band of boring twittering arrogant celebrities who have been jostling by all forms of social media for the moral high ground.

Six years ago the News Of The World employed a number of journalists who were complicit in hacking peoples voicemail pins and listening to their messages.  In some cases they were also hacking emails.  The moral tidal wave which eventually destroyed the News Of The World was due to the fact that they had hacked the mobile phone of a young girl who had been murdered.  Undoubtably morally reprehensible behaviour, to even those who have somewhat flexible morals.

Every second another celebrity crawled out of the woodwork to share their disgust over the NOTW scandal.  Each comment more useless than the last.  The end result being that the media steamroller crushed the remnants of the NOTW.  The witchhunt crushed around 200 jobs.  The number of arrests stand at less than 10 percent of those employed at the newspaper.  Not a single member of those employed at the NOTW at the time of its closing has been arrested.  Each of the arrests pertain to ex-staff members who worked at the NOTW six years ago as do each of the allegations.

To be a successful newspaper you must respond and adapt to the wants of your readers.  As long as I can remember the Sunday newspapers were filled with investigative stories.  And pictures of famous women on holiday minus their bikini tops.  There is a reason that a newspaper lasts 168 years and that is that it responded and adapted to the demands of the time.  To some degree the media of our nation represents the people of our nation, otherwise it would never have been so popular.  Why so many people are in denial about this I don’t know?

We live in a time when our government uses the very same practices as the NOTW.  The key difference being that they justify such actions as vital to National Security.  Every day phones are being tapped and hacked.  Emails too.  Private conversations are being recorded.  To feign outrage, and deem such actions as immoral whilst staying silent about around 97% of the governments of the world doing the exact same thing is ridiculous.

In the coming weeks the Sun will move to a 7 day week and attempt to fill the void left by the departure of the NOTW.  The Government will demand inquiries very quietly from the corners of their mouth.  People will forget.  The PR machine will win.  And life will continue in the same pattern as once was.  This is inarguable, like gravity and bread always landing butter side down when you drop it.  What kind of victory will it be then?

The celebrity campaign has cost 200 people their livelihoods.  So far not a single one of those people have been proven to be guilty of a single crime.  Yet many still laud it as a worthy achievement.  A 168 year old newspaper has been crushed into non existence.  In the coming weeks another will emerge to take it’s place.  Targeting the exact same demographic, selling the very same stories of tits and sleaze.  Yet many still champion themselves as slayers of the dragon.  Newspapers may well be subject to tighter restrictions and less freedoms, whilst the governments which sit in judgment continues to hack and tap the phones of their citizens.  What kind of victory is that? A rather hollow one.

Art Is Dead

Last week the American artist Cy Twombly passed away aged 83.  Upon hearing the news of his passing I like many others uttered the words “Who?”.  As is the way of the 21st century, I switched on my laptop and immediately googled him.  Unsurprisingly, as befitting all acclaimed talents of whichever field they happen to inhabit, he was rather popular.  Reading through news headlines he was lauded as

‘a key figure in modern art’

‘one of the most significant artists of the last 50 years’

‘a fraud’

Yet still I had no idea who he was, and what kind of artist he was, so my next port of call was Wikipedia where I discovered that he freely scribbled many of his paintings.  About closer scrutiny I can say that much of his artwork, to my untrained eye looked not dissimilar to the scrawling of a three year old child.  However I am in no way an expert on art, therefore I shall close this paragraph by merely stating that to be a successful artist, someone has to want to buy your work.

One of the most amazing phenomena in the cycle of life is observing how in death, people become much greater than they were when they lived.  Whether it be an uncle, a statesman or a musician.  Why as people we feel the need to dishonestly elevate people to greatness I don’t know but we do need it, as if it’s an almost integral part of our grieving process.  It’s amazing that people have been dying for thousands of years and all we have is around 20 unoriginal epitaphs to describe them with.

The last 100 years have seen two major changes in all artistic pursuits.  The first is that we have seen the introduction of marketing into art.  Whereas 300 years ago a true artist would sell one piece in his lifetime and live his whole life in poverty and only be acknowledged a long time after he passed now the game is different.  A musician dying is a wonderful opportunity to release a best of album, a painter dying is a wonderful opportunity to encourage the national museum to finally hold that retrospective they have been promising and a writer dying can create a buzz which can make their last novel a bestseller.  Death is fantastic for the arts.

In the meantime we have witnessed the death of experimental art.  Nowadays the only art we see is Generic.  Whether its the next big modern artist embalming his dead grandmother up a whale’s arsehole and hanging it from a glass tank in the middle of the Tate, or the next great self help millionaire who is going to help you be sexier than anyone in 60 days or the next big singer who has spent eleven times the GDP of Indonesia on cosmetic surgery in order to have the look.  Due to the blatant lack of new, no one even tries to produce new, instead they produce the new old rather than the old new.  Whether it be contemporary abstract futuristic cubism, or the how to quit smoking, lose 55 kilos and get a man or the next new rock indie folk punk funk hop sensation.  Very little of it is actually new.  That’s not to say that there is nothing new.  It’s just harder to see.

Life has changed, the world has moved on.  The Bohemian in me is saddened by the death of artistic pursuits.  We have replaced the romantic notion of the world with a practical one which involves texting and blogging and facebooking and twittering.  There are so many modern distractions that fewer people visit galleries, or read books or buy Cd’s.  Eventually newness is going to come to an end entirely and then the world will implode on itself and all which will be left will be a large rock and a cockroach called Brian.

Doctors Appointments And Other Excuses

This week has been interrupted by doctor’s appointments and other work so progress is slowing.  A couple of months ago I had an operation and now it seems it wasn’t an overwhelming success so there is a chance I will have to go back to hospital.  It will be a massive kick in the teeth and will most certainly disrupt my progress.  I mention it although I do not wish to focus on that, instead I want to focus on the experience instead.

Ending up in a hospital bed as I neared the conclusion of my novel was wonderfully ironic.  The reason being that the hero of my story, Norman, ends up in hospital in the penultimate section of the book.  It was almost direct research.  My stay enabled me to check out how my protagonist’s feelings matched my own.  In hindsight I believe my feelings and Norman’s were not entirely dissimilar.  Although our circumstances were completely different.  I now find it hard to separate my opinion’s from Norman’s.  To some degree it makes me proud.

When I re-read the fore mentioned scenes in my very own hospital bed I was taken by one line in particular

For most people lying in a hospital bed, comfort is the thing they both need and lack the most.

It’s peculiar, as now it seems almost like I saw the future.  For example, one day I was scheduled to have a test under local anaesthetic.  Due to an administrative error I was starved before the test as they thought I was due to have an operation.  In preparation for the test they actually shaved the wrong part of my body.  These were not massive mistakes, none the less they hardly served to make me feel better.  Thankfully there were some staff members who went above and beyond the call of duty to try and make me smile.  One nurse who had previously worked in England would not let the orderlies serve me tea without running to the staff room to fetch me milk.

Fact.  Psychologically hospitals are dreary places which each and everyone of acknowledges as a place where people go to get fixed or die.  That pessimistic thought remains with us whether we are a visitor or a patient.  Fact.  Spending the vast majority of one’s time in bed is psychologically tiring.  Essentially the doctors and nurses force you to impersonate the behavioral patterns of a chronically depressed individual.  Fact.  Starvation, even in the form of a dieticians advice does little to lift the mood.  Fact.  Grapes, flowers and balloons do not make everything better.

It’s obvious that there are reasons why hospitals are ran this way and I am no one to advise them how to take care of business.  I am not advocating that all doctors should dress up like clowns, or that all flowers should squirt water or vodka nor and I am suggesting that you give loved ones explosive grapes.  The one suggestion I can prescribe is smiles and silliness.  That if you visit a loved one in hospital do your level best to listen carefully,  lift their mood, and do cartwheels down the corridor as you leave.

A Novel Lesson

When I embarked on the mission of writing a novel I never realised that I would end up changing as person because of it.  Since I was young I have always dreamed of one day writing a novel and last year with my thirtieth birthday looming on the horizon and an idea rattling around inside my brain I finally sat down and did it.  Four months on I had finished the first draft of my novel and had no idea what to do next.

That brings me to the next 10 months.  In that time I have picked it up and put it down umpteen times.  I have crossed out full stops and later reinstated them.  I have changed words once, twice and more.  All the while in the back of mind the words ‘it’s impossible to polish shit’ have lingered.

Now I am full of doubts and self loathing.  Today I wrote what is essentially the last new scene.  The creative element is officially complete.  There will be no more new scenes, or paragraphs or anything else for that matter.  I feel a mixture of sadness tinged with fear.  The fear that I have wasted a great deal of time over the last year.

I told myself at the beginning of this process that I would complete it before I am 30.  I will be 31 in just under half a year.  I also promised myself that once I complete this I will join the adult world and stop living in my imagination.  I am not entirely sure what that entails or how exactly one goes about doing something as brave and reckless as that but I am sure there is a self help book I can purchase on the Internet.  A little voice in my head keeps asking me whether that is why I have stretched out and stalled this process for as long as possible.  That it is merely an extension of my immaturity.  Maybe it’s right.  Maybe I have.

What I do know is that come rain or shine I do not regret my attempt to write a novel.  I have learnt many things about myself.  The most important being a sense of pride in the fact that I have stuck at something and now the end is in sight.  Shame it took me thirty years and eighty thousand words to learn it.

A Smart Way To Utilise Your Time

I should be editing right now.  Yet I am not.  I have created a distraction to avoid doing what I should be doing.  I am an expert at this by now.  I have been doing this for over nine months after all.  It’s quite sad.

So this is my new look blog.  The previous one had a lot to do with cats.  This will have something to do with lemons.  It’s a great excuse to avoid doing what I should be doing.  And now it’s time to break for lunch.