Mathos wrote-
Quote:Two cavemen talking.
The air we breathe is pure and not contaminated. All the food we eat is organic and tastes brilliant. The Water comes from the purest sources!
Why are we all dead, by the time we are thirty?
That's a witty way of saying what I'm saying apart from the "brilliant" solecism.
What Mathos is rejecting in his choreographed ballet, It Ain't Half Hot Mum, with no audience unless he co-opts one, is mass society. He just musn't be seen dead consuming what everybody else consumes.
He's unique don't you know.
He is petrified at the prospect of the endless, relentless, mind numbing, serial repetition of mass production and mass consumption. John Smith's Extra Smooth is not for our Mathos. Some vintage Cliquot for him I should think which he will assure us is wonderful thus proving how wise he is to have chosen to drink it when all it really means is that he can afford Cliquot and we peasants can't. Even if it tastes like earwig piss it is sure to be "wonderful" if Mathos drinks it.
He's been smoking since Mr Tebbit was a lad and now not smoking is "wonderful". (See previous posts on what smoking now is, in more detail, in his new found estimation.)
I doubt he drinks at all actually judging by his Presbyterian literary turgidities, intolerance and complete confusion. (see Caveman sketch above).
Nothing makes any sense now about anything being "unique". Even discussing the concept is a bit passe.
The "aura" which old-fashioned works of art had by being connected to unique people and things has vanished long ago and with it our own individual uniqueness. The closer to Mr Average you are the more sane you are, everywhere and in every time. And Mr Average does live, roughly, according to the tenets I present. Without a woman driving him he would. He would piss himself laughing at paying out good money to chop your way through dense foliage at 95 in the shade looking for some gumpy tribesman to give a tin of condensed milk to in the hope he will follow you like a faithful hound but with a reasonable skill at fetching and carrying thrown in. Try tipping a London taxi-driver with a tin of condensed milk for a few days of the yessirnosirs.
8 sq ft on Benidorme beach reading a day old Sun is Mr Average's idea of a holiday. That's why it's crowded. Not that I even do that. There's too many predatory females go there I'm told and they really are scary. And I don't fly on account of how absurd it is. It's like Dr Johnson's dog.
Uniqueness slowly declined throughout the 20th Century and Andy Warhol killed it stone dead. It became a relic. Atavistic.
His own appearence was a packaging. He changed his wig colour all the time. Deadpan , cool, affectless, etiolated, bloodless; like the robot's relation to the assembly line and the speed blinking shopper in the supermarket. The supermarket display reflects our image back at us. There are no interiors. "All is pretty" Andy often said if asked to make an aesthetic judgement. (Shot to death by a crazed feminist who wanted to be "something".)
It's all programmed surface. People, things, the both. The celebrity and the toothpaste are both equally valid consumables. Pete Docherty does a better job than most at it. That lad really tries to provide you with something new. Editors must love Pete.
Mathos needs to make some primitive village which he hasn't yet decided upon into a consumable item. If those guys in the village knew what I know they would have his guts for garters. Literally. He takes advantage of them never having read any decent literature. And not being able to get tins of condensed milk.
It has nothing to do with building an Empire or exploration for resources. Those are profit driven and worthy. Profit driven anyway. Mathos is paying out and comes back 5 grand light with some pictures of himself, carefully posed as is easily imagined, "in the best possible taste", with which to bore the arse off us all and us not having missed 12 weeks of the fascinating life in dear old Blighty like he has.
He wants to play at being a savage with guns. To kid himself that he is real inside and not just exterior veneer like Mr Average is. He's scared of that and it's as easy as putting on a well worn boot.
And the ironic part is that the AK47 is an archetypal product of machine production. And so is the tin of condensed milk, the revolver and the ammo. None of them could be made without all the techniques of assembly line mass production for a mass market. Savages have pointed sticks. Look at an ammo round. Fantastic R&D and machine production knocking them out like plastic spoons. Savages have blowpipes. For milk they got a goat pregnant. Mosquito nets are woven from plastic fibres. Savages get bitten. They get used to it.
Everything about it is the exploitation of our methods to play in a theme park designed to prove our methods are no good and where the only sign of them is what Mathos imports. Tribal village life as a toy for a bored English twottle who simply rejects averageness as being an unsuitable vehicle on which to display himself. You need to have some talent to do that.
If everybody took his advice Mathos would be in a deck chair on Blackpool beach with a knotted hankerchief to protect his receding hair line from the sun, licking a Wall's Ice-cream and ranting about the silly sods in intemperate language about taking the £ down against the Kyat or the Bhat and bringing back infectious germs to which his immune system is unaccustomed.
BTW. It isn't Burma. It is Myanmar now. Burma is as old fashioned as trying to be unique when you can't play a piano concerto or think up anything original.
