After getting all too serious on the subject of religion yesterday, I thought it’d be a fun idea to run off tangentially and talk about everyone’s favourite topic: kiddie porn.

I should probably cease the sensationalism and just tell you what I really want to talk about: the current fad of teenagers sending naked, or very revealing, photos of themselves to other people. It’s even garnered its own portmanteau word: sexting.

Sexting is the same as texting, only… sexing it up a little, either with a photo, or even a little video clip! People have been doing it for years now — God knows I’ve received my fair share of dirty SMSes over the years (even some very naughty photos from angles that to this day I can’t work out). The problem is, kids have started doing it too; really young kids. I’m talking about 9 year-olds taking photos of themselves in just their underwear and sending it to a friend. More worryingly they’re being sent to boyfriends and girlfriends too.

If you don’t find that idea worrying enough, it’s also quite common for children to upload photos to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo — these kids just can’t get enough!

The reason it’s come into the media spotlight is because these images could be considered offensive, illegal material. If a girl sends a lewd photo to a friend of theirs, their friend could technically be arrested on the grounds of collecting child pornography. If their friend then goes one step further and uploads the image to a website, or sends it to other friends, they are then distributing child porn! This is an even more heinous offence, an offence which can land them some jail time, and a juicy entry in the sex offenders register.

A recent report found that 10% of all imagery and photography involving under-age children is self-produced — and that startling fact was from a child protection agency that has catalogued more than 9 million articles!

The risk here, as always, is that kids don’t know the potential harm that might befall them. Long-gone are the days when children were hardly ever let out of their parents’ sight. Long-gone are the days when innocence and chastity were virtues to be extolled above all others.

But most importantly, long-gone are the days without computers and mobile phones. They are undoubtedly the root cause of the problem, and the reason I am so interested in this ‘outbreak’ of self-manufactured kiddie porn. Computers are so infinitely powerful; they put so much raw, unrefined power at our fingertips that it must come as no surprise that uneducated use of them can result in alarming situations like this.

We, as a population, know so little about just how much a computer enables you. In just 200 years the world has gone from being immensely huge and undiscovered to infinitesimally small, with every nook and cranny inspected and exposed — because of computers! Just 20 years ago you would’ve had to wait 5 days for a response to a query by mail. Today you get antsy if you have to wait more than 5 seconds for Google to return the correct result.

Kids, normal, non-prodigal kids, must surely be unaware of the self-inflicted risks they are introducing by taking photos of themselves. How can they possibly know the risks when the normal source of such  information, our parents, aren’t any wiser? In the past, parents knew what dangers their children could expect. Those potential dangers changed slowly — from poisonous plants, to motor cars, to getting into a car with a stranger with a lolly pop — so slowly that parents could easily keep a tab on developments.

Fast forward to today and it’s simply impossible to keep up with all of the possible pitfalls that your children might unwittingly stumble into. The parents don’t know, the kids don’t know, and I would bet that even the security services are playing catch-up most of the time.

I’ll leave you with this hypothetical situation (although it’s probably not all that hypothetical…)

A young girl sends an older boyfriend a naked photo of herself. The boyfriend uploads it to the internet (not maliciously, perhaps just to another male friend, who knows). Then, an online predator finds the image which helpfully had a filename that matched the girl’s real name.

This predator is only a couple of steps away from finding the girl’s address, checking out her home on Google Maps Street View, analysing the apparent security, the number of cars outside, if there’s a fence or not and… well, you get the idea.

The Internet is a predator’s haven; for your sake of your children, or your friends, tell them to value their little, still-innocent bodies a bit more.

I want to tell you a story. It’s not a particularly exciting story, but it perhaps goes some way to explaining why I didn’t kiss a girl until I was 18, and until very recently didn’t know which hole was the ‘right’ one.

You see, I was never given ‘the talk’. I can only assume this was because my parents noticed just how little testosterone I had. A soggy noodle probably had more testosterone than teenage Sebastian. My skin was clear, with spots only developing under my long, froppy fringe (bangs). When my voice finally decided to break, it took about 5 years; my balls just didn’t know when to stop their voice-deepening descent!

See! I look like a damn girl! I even have a beauty spot, like that damn super model Cindy Crawford! And I TOLD you that bowl-cut would continue to haunt me for years to come!

Looking back, I probably should’ve asked my mother for hormone injections or something; I have her to thank for my limp-wristed effeminacy that ensured my complete lack of  action at school — zero, zilch. Even if our school had a bike shed, I would’ve had no one to use it with (I made up for that when I got to college, though — I had sex behind a bike shed! Hah!) On Valentine’s Day I would always be the one sending flowers and getting nothing in return; only ’secret’ love notes from my lovely mother. I blame my young, undefined, pretty face! Moving along now… (I told you I would post a picture from my teenage years!)

I was quite afraid of girls throughout my formative years; a fear that today shows itself as an awful lack of confidence when it comes to the actual ‘pulling’ of a girl. While all of my friends were playing spin the bottle and playing that ‘5 minutes in the cupboard’ game (where you were meant to come out with switched clothes! Were we the only kids that played that game?), I was sitting at he edge of the circle, or in the corner, praying the bottle didn’t land on me. As it turns out (and I wish someone had told me sooner, as I might’ve tried to change!) girls really dig a confident guy. Above all else maybe, girls nearly always want a guy that knows what he’s doing; and that certainly wasn’t me.

So, my teenage years, with a complete lack of sex or even sexuality were dull. That isn’t to say I didn’t do anything interesting, just nothing teenagery and interesting. I won competitions, and both my education and vocabulary were both growing at an alarming rate but… but there was no damn sex! Occasionally a girl would look at me with her big eyes and look downwards, blushing… but at the time, I had no idea that she liked me. No one told me what girls do when they like you! As I’ve said before, it was only after I left school that my sister told me about all these girls that had crushes on me…

But, you know what? I don’t blame my complete lack of sexuality entirely on my apparent lack of testosterone, or my ineptitude at talking to women. Sure, it would’ve been nice to receive ‘the talk’ from my parents, or at school, but I don’t blame that either.

I blame a certain teacher. A teacher that treated sex like a sin that would send you directly to Hell, without even the briefest glimpse of Purgatory. The kind of teacher that took a black marker to our textbooks and removed everything that could in some way be related to sex — even the novels we had to read for English! I remember picking up Pride and Prejudice and finding chapter upon chapter with blacked-out blocks of text.

It’s unsurprising then, as a teenager, I might’ve thought sex was a bit like the MI5 or the secret police: you know it’s going on, somewhere, somehow, but you don’t talk about it, and you certainly don’t act upon any urges you might be experiencing.

Now, the great thing about most schools is that even if you get a bad teacher, you know that next year you’ll have a new one! You know that no matter how bad it was, and how awfully you might’ve behaved, next year things will be better — you’ll have a new teacher, and a clean slate.  It was the same logic which drove me, on the last day of the school year, to spread glue on this teacher’s chair and laugh in her face when she tried to get up to write on the blackboard.

Imagine my horror when, after a gloriously long summer break, we swung the classroom door open to find the same teacher grinning at us from behind her big, mahogany desk. Our mouths hung open in what she can only have assumed was awe, but was in fact 10 kids displaying their combined rictus of mortal terror. ‘Welcome back, little children of God, to my shrine of celibacy and all things pure’ she said. Well, she didn’t really, but that was the thought racing through all of our minds. Would we really be having another boring year of sexless education?

Sadly, we would — another year passed; another year without even a lingering hug from a girl, or a nervous grope from my shaking hands. I was now 14, and whether I liked it or not, my voice was starting to break. I was starting to find hair in new and exciting locations. I was having to stay seated behind my desk while the class emptied with increasing, and alarming (but not unpleasant) regularity.

And then, the impossible, through some wicked twist of fate became… possible. The infinitely improbable somehow occurred. Someone, up there — the God of Schadenfreude, if she exists — was obviously having a rather hearty laugh at our expense.

We had the same teacher for the third year running.

By this stage, most of the girls were already wearing burqas and avoiding unnecessary contact/communication with the boys on pain of death by stoning. The boys had pretty much forgotten what a crafty, under-the-desk erection felt like. I was fully expecting to be handed a chastity belt as I walked into her classroom for the third year running; a chastity belt that had no key and was sealed with an unbreakable resin glue.

Some way through the third year, it was someone’s birthday, and it was normal for us to have a little birthday party on Friday afternoon to celebrate — you know, some music and decorations, some cake and ice cream. Normally someone would bring in the latest-and-greatest pop album and we’d dance and laugh for hours. This time though, someone had a great idea, a great idea that would resonate through the ages: let’s make a mix tape… a mix tape with naughty songs on it. Songs like… Let’s talk about sex, by Salt-n-Pepa.

God, looking back, we were so excited about the prospect of one-upping our draconian, prude, preacher freak of a teacher. We talked about it for days in hushed whispers during class. The giggle fits which inevitably followed only resulted in the removal of yet more privileges, which eventually led us to behave. We were mortified that she might actually cancel the party and ruin our glorious, immature plans!

The day of the party finally arrived. The girls had dressed prettily. The sporadic and not wholly unwelcome erections were back. Spontaneous, girly giggles could be heard regularly; lingering touches could be felt during and after hugs. After the party, with hot, red blood coursing through our systems and with pheromones thick in the air, surely this was it. Surely this was going to be my first kiss. At worst it would be my first tentative grope. I was ready; this was it. Bring it on!

4pm came and class finished. I got the tape player out with a bounce in my step and a grin on my little (effeminate!) face. I pushed the symbol of our freedom into the machine, pressed play.

She’d got to the tape.

Somehow that witch of a woman had got to our mix tape. There was a rather severe lack of Salt-n-Pepa; instead, the soft, sultry tones of Cliff Richard wafted into the air. The soft, completely devoid-of-sexuality notes of Summer Holiday hit our ears like a sonic boom; the silence that followed was deafening. The sexual tension that had positively thrummed throughout the day dissipated in an instant. Today wasn’t going to be the day of my first kiss; it wasn’t even going to be the day of my first sweaty-palmed grope. It was to be yet another disappointing day in the life of teenage Sebastian.

Fortunately, just a few months after that party, and after three long, boring years, the winds of luck finally changed: we got a new teacher!

For years afterward though, the playing of Let’s talk about sex as loud and as often possible was the signature prank of my class — preferably from outside her window.

Upon regaining consciousness, a few specific thoughts always rush hastily along my neurons and across synapses:

‘Did I forget to use protection?’

‘She told me she was on the pill!”

and old faithful: ‘The guide said two bricks was enough…’

… and then, with clarity returning, and the nagging feeling that I’m not, and never have been a father, I realise it’s just a Jelly Baby. It’s just a Jelly baby trying, in vain, to be heard as it leaves my stomach on its final journey towards the indeterminate fate of my small intestine.

Yesterday, after my Pink Jellybaby photo, I was inspired and encouraged by some wonderful artists on Etsy to do some more Jelly Baby photos — photos that might work on postcards, or greeting cards, or … I don’t know — perhaps there are Jelly Baby fetishists out there! Fetishists that, until now, haven’t been able to find a suitable ‘fix’. Don’t mock me, don’t hate me; I’m just filling a gaping chasm in the  Soft Candy Macro Photography market!!

Without further ado, a couple of romantic Jelly Baby photos!

And then, as a proof of concept, I tried adding a caption to the third image, just so you get the idea of the (possible) comic value:

I am interested in your opinions — do you like them? Are they obnoxious, cute, romantic? Would you buy one to give to a loved one, or as some kind of … humourous greeting card?

On the off-chance that you are suddenly struck with the urge to buy 1000 (or more) for distribution purposes, please contact me, and I’m sure we can come to an arrangement — an arrangement that’s good for me, you, and the Jelly Babies I am holding hostage downstairs, under a bright studio light, melting. Excruciatingly slowly, but surely, melting.

Think of the children. Buy in bulk today!

(It’s 4am, so please forgive me for my probable lack of quality prose, or even the ability to make coherent, cogent sense… I’ll read this in the morning and bury my face in my palm no doubt)

I thought I’d write this brief review of Sweden’s latest vampire thriller fantasy film. I say latest, I mean ‘first’, but hopefully not the last — because Let the right one in is fantastic!

Without spoiling, the film stars 2 kids, with a variety of other kids (who are very well played), a bunch of adults (which are believable, but really quite unimportant to the actual story). Boy meets girl. Girl solves Rubiks Cube. Boy falls in love with girl’s apparent problem-solving abilities.

Girl is a vampire. Damn.

(I’m not really spoiling, because it’s really damn obvious that she’s a vampire from the outset: the belaboured breathing, dried blood in her hair and her totally hilariously over-sized irises are just slight hints that she might not be wholly alive. And the total evasion of sunlight…)

But hey, the boy doesn’t know much about vampires, so how was he to know?

What follows is a beautifully romantic tale of teenage exploration, with a little slice of mystical fantasy thrown in to keep you on the edge of your seat. And of course, once you’re on the edge of your seat, you have so far to recoil when the little nipper sucks the blood out of some poor soul with nary a warning.

As with most horror/thrillers, the sound effects were grimly chilling. Lots of noisy breathing and over-the-top footfalls. There’s a truly disturbing ‘death rattle’ type noise that accompanies the hungry vampire too…

It’s all very different for a horror/thriller, and I strongly encourage everyone to watch it — though, it being a vampire film, if you don’t like the sight, sound or slippery viscousity of blood, you might want to give this one a miss. Or if you don’t like the after-effects of someone pouring sulphuric acid on themselves (but that’s the only ‘Oh, how typically nasty’ effect in the film — the rest is far more tasteful).

It’s 4am, so I really should try and sleep. At least I know, without invitation, vampires can’t enter.

I hope I don’t sleep talk…

In the past couple of years, it has seemed that everything is about babies. Who is having babies, when they’re having babies, what they’re going to call their babies — and on, and on, and on. Some of the women around here have even been having ’synchronised babies’, so that they can share in the joys, woes and experiences of being a glowing mother-to-be. And of course, once they give birth, the two (possibly unfortunate?) children have the pleasure of being inexorably linked for the first few years of their life.

Let me tell you, those few formative years are important! People (often of the doctor variety) say that we don’t recall much from the first 3 years of our life, and that might be true, certainly. But it’s not all about memories and recall, it’s about something far more basic — and primal; it’s about nurture! It’s in our fledgling years that we begin to learn the difference between right and wrong; what’s safe, and what isn’t. It’s in those early years that we have have experiences that later change our entire outlook on life. Those fleeting months — those months that will go by ever so quickly — will see us discover our dreams, and harbour our first fears and anxieties.

I will write more about childhood in the future, as it’s an important topic for me, but just think about this one: we’re born without fear, and without prejudices. As children, the world is a shiny, untainted place. If only we were born with bigger legs and stronger hearts we’d be off exploring the universe without a second thought.

As you can tell, I think an awful lot rests on the early years of a child. It’s no surprise that I’m anxious about having children: I want to make sure I get it absolutely right! If I can’t get it right, I’d rather not do it at all. I can deal with self-inflicted damage, but damaging a little, baby person? I don’t think I could knowingly do that to a child.

So, because of the local baby boom, this has all been running around in my head. Then today, a family friend left her two babies with us; with my mother and sister. The girl, who is about a year old, was looked after by my sister the whole day. Truth be told, I think she enjoyed it a bit too much, and I think she’ll be wanting one of her own very soon. My mother, despite my aforementioned misgivings, insisted I spend some time with the baby boy.

‘No, no… don’t… I’ll drop him.’

‘Don’t be silly, Seb, he’s tiny, you’ll be fine!’

And so there I was, sitting at this very computer, when my mother unceremoniously plopped the child onto my knee. He grinned at me. I grinned back. A little knee bounce and another big, cheeky grin. I turned him to face my computer screen, and he grinned again, broader this time: this guy and I obviously had some common ground! We poked around my computer for a bit, showing him my blog (and the pretty photos of course), and then we played a game of ‘find his favourite kind of music’, where he proved that yet again has very good taste. Out of a line-up of Glen Campbell, Green Day and Elvis Costello, he chose Withita Lineman — what a baby!

And then, out of no frickin’ no where, just like that, my anxieties were gone. I’m not saying I clung onto the baby for the rest of the day — far from it, I was still petrified of dropping him, or teaching him some awful habit that he’d show his mother later on, like farting or picking his nose — but I did decide, there and then, that I’d probably make a great father. Maybe… just maybe I’d be good enough to nurture a child just right.

It was then, of course, that my mind turned to possible baby names. I already have a girl’s name chosen (if a possible wife happens to be reading this — sorry, you’re too late, and you get no say), but I’m still fairly open on the subject of the ideal name for my first son, and heir to my throne.

If you’ve read my ‘about‘ page, you’ve probably worked out that I aspire to rule the world. I’m well aware that conquering and ruling the world is probably not something I can do in one life time — I could certainly begin the process, but it would have to be a mantle of ownership passed down to my son: the one true heir and emperor; the heir that, unlike the meek, will actually inherit the world.

Now, an emperor of the world needs a good name. He needs a strong name. A name that instills both loyalty and admiration. A name so epic and awe-inspiring that legends and myths will manifest from the path he walks, the deeds he performs and the words he utters.

A name like Romulus, Zeus or Caesar.

Once I have a name, all I need is a wife that will bear the child. A child that will be born with legs strong enough to cross the Earth in just a few strides.

The reason I hate ignorance is because it’s the opposite of inquisitiveness.

Inquisitiveness is the reason you and I are both here today, reading this blog. Monkeys bashed  rocks against coconuts and early humans rubbed sticks together until they got warm — that’s why we’re here. The world we live in is made of energy, a force that comes in forms too numerous to list but one thing is certain: we haven’t discovered them all yet. If it wasn’t for scientists poking around at the universal fundament we’d still be hefting rocks into the air and giggling like children as they, yet again, fall to the ground.

The difference between ignorance and inquisitiveness is the number of times you fly a kite in an electrical storm. The ignorant man flies it just once and gets scared off by a near-death experience. The inventor, the thinker, flies it twice, thrice,  four times, discovering a new form of energy in the process and thus enlightening the whole of humanity.

There’s a reason the stereotypical image of the inventor is ruddy-faced and static-haired with their goggle-sized glasses askew: their appearance doesn’t matter. Straightening your spectacles can damn well wait until after your appointment with particle physics! When you’re tearing apart reality to find out what makes it tick there are more important concerns than when you last ate. For the scientist, learning the hows and the whys are all that matters; personal safety — mental and physical — is a fleetingly unimportant notion.

The more I think about it, the more my hatred for ignorance grows. Every time I hear about or see yet another ignorant pissant, another monkey-faced bigot, it’s like throwing kindling onto a very virulent, white-hot fire that’s sitting underneath my ass.

I hate ignorance. It’s very, very close to stupidity, another thing I am not so fond of.

Ignorance is in the same vein as refusing to learn because you think you already know everything. It’s the gathering of just one working set of data, a singular, monofaceted education and the righteous, indignant refusal to admit any other viewpoint as valid. They say ignorance is bliss — they, not me, not us — ‘Here’s my view of the world: accept it or get lost.’ God shaped this banana; the world is round; all men are pigs; drugs are bad for you. Ignorance is bliss only for the ignorant.

Rationally, it’s impossible to know everything, so why do people claim otherwise? Why is there a sizable subsection of society that thinks it’s wise or intelligent to stick to their poorly-educated guns? Why are there goons that will deny new research and rational arguments all the way to their shallow, but wide, graves?

I think it must be an innate human coping mechanism: we tend to glorify our traits, even if they’re negative. We exagerate stories until they contain just a grain of reality. We revel in aberration, we justify and pass it off as ‘human nature’: how did it become cool to pass out from alcohol poisoning?

Our most powerful drive though, the one that seals the deal, is the requirement to be right, the necessity to win the argument. There’s a facet of our genetic makeup that forces us to be right, even if it involves altering our, or other people’s, view of reality to make it so. The problem is, it’s the same trick of the mind that grants us the ability to ’stick to our guns’. Only it’s called stubbornness and not ignorance when you put it like that.

And therein lies the problem: stubornness — inflexibility, implacibility, remorselessness, whatever you call it — is a good trait in most circumstances. Did Caesar march into nigh-impossible battles because he was ignorant of the risks? No, of course not: he was simply a genius that hated to lose. And he never did.

It’s been a while since I last wrote about music. Listening to music, like the appreciation of all art forms, is a very personal and subjective thing. You might like rock and I might like soul, but as long as we both get what we’re looking for, who cares? Well, I care! I listen to contemporary pop and sigh. It saddens me to think that, for some people, this is as good as it gets.

If we’re not careful the King of Pop will be nothing more than an honourific title thrown around by future generations in the playground: ‘Dad says the King of Pop died recently.’ ‘Yeah, sucks. Did you hear the latest Britney Spears song? It rocks!’ Unless someone — you or I — steps in and reminds children of what real music once sounded like and where their music originally came from, we can forget all hope of there ever being another King of Pop, Soul or Rock ‘n’ Roll.

* * *

The King of Pop, Michael Jackson. Not the Baron or Prince or Godfather — the King; the top dog upon which all comparisons are made and will be for years to come. I’m not going to talk about the last 20 years of his life but instead I will focus on the first 30, the three decades that revitalised a flagging music industry. In those thirty years, Michael Jackson became the greatest and most influential musician of our time. To those amongst us that appreciate music and its power; to those of us that are prone to bouts of aural sex: we have a lot to be grateful for! I just hope I can do Michael justice and nail the most important aspects of his influential and protean career.

While certainly successful, the first ten years of his life as the lead singer of The Jackson 5 were hardly monumental. The Jackson family were recognised as a musically-gifted family and Michael was nothing more than a charismatic and spectacular performer. But he could only grow so much, restricted by Motown’s draconian production rules and an oppressive father. The Jacksons were destined, unless something changed, to be a flash in the pan — certainly one of Motown’s biggest success stories (four successive number ones is nothing to be ashamed of!), but minuscule compared to what the Jackson family in general and Michael in particular were capable of. Perhaps the most important role of the Jacksons would be to become the first black teen idols. Breaking down barriers would be a recurring aspect of Michael Jackson’s life at the forefront of the music industry.

Stifled by Motown, The Jacksons jumped ship to CBS in 1975, a move that would finally grant the band the creative freedom it required. The Jacksons produced lots of albums in the following decade, but none of them approaching the success of their early Motown hits. But for Michael, it would be a different story indeed: in 1978 he met Quincy Jones on the set of The Wiz — “I hated doing The Wiz… I did not want to do it,” Quincy said later — they didn’t know it then but Quincy’s involvement with the film would soon change musical history and forge the greatest, most influential and successful collaboration in music history. Quincy Jones is a musician and conductor whose career and incredible influence spans five decades. With 27 Grammys and countless other awards, Quincy, like the Jacksons, broke down barriers that would allow future African-Americans to succeed in the culturally-biased media industry. The scope of Quincy Jones’ work is so varied and vast that it’s hard to comprehend: we’re talking about a legend that played alongisde Miles Davis during the creation of modern jazz and bebop, but then later produced the largest-selling album of all time (Thriller). He’s worked with Sinatra, Spielberg and even Bill Cosby. However, after Bad, his production and arrangement days were over — perhaps, after five decades of musicianship, the impresario had finally set down on paper the notes and themes that had run through his head for fifty years. Perhaps it was time to make way for future generations?

But I digress: it was on the set of The Wiz that this partnership of mentor and young prodigy begun. Off The Wall was born from the marriage of orchestral jazz, soul and 70s disco. Off The Wall fused sounds and melodies and dazzlingly energetic themes that had been building up for decades but never fully exemplified until this album was mastered and distributed. It’s worth noting, though their influences were not particularly significant, that both Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney wrote tracks for Off The Wall — perhaps this shows just how much confidence these musical geniuses had in Michael?

If Quincy and Jackson’s first collaboration hadn’t quite cemented things — Off The Wall only sold 20 million copies! — their next album would prove beyond doubt that they’d hit the spot. Thriller would be the first and only album to become something more than just a finely-crafted collection of songs. The astronomical number of sales — 109 million — would thrust Thriller into the category of ‘household staple’ rather than ‘commodity’ — families would go to the supermarket to buy bread, milk and a copy of Thriller. To this day, Thriller has more than doubled the next-largest album (45 million — Dark Side of the Moon) and its universally popular appeal will no doubt continue its reign of supremacy.

The bone of contention that one usually comes across when examining Jackson’s career is thus: how much of the success was actually due to him? Did Michael’s career begin as a vehicle for Motown’s music machine and end as nothing more than the pop industry’s poster child? Is it important? If we can learn one thing from history it’s one thing: for better or worse, the outcome is what counts, not the minutia, not those that fall by the wayside. If you discount his later work and simply focus on his early-adult albums — Off The Wall, Thriller, Bad and Dangerous – you have a body of work that was not only phenomenally successful but also more influential than the creations of any other artist in the last 40 years. It’s because of Jackson that we have hip-hop and rap music. Jackson revitalised a pop industry that was suffocating under the burgeoning force of uncreative, uninspired electronica. The phenomenon of Michael Jackson caused a rebirth of popular music that inspired and influenced almost every modern R&B, funk and pop musician.

I haven’t even begun to touch on the immortal influence that Michael Jackson had on both the youth and adults of the world with his music videos and live performances. Jackson created the music video that we know today; he single-handedly launched MTV to stardom with Thriller. Jackson, through sheer artistic brilliance, destroyed the last vestiges of African-American inequality in the media. Michael Jackson’s choreographic style — oh, that white trilby, those hip-thrusts and those gloves — had an effect more profound than anything since Fosse’s jazz or Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story.

I hope that the world, the media-consuming public, can in the next few years put aside any moral objections they have to the man himself and simply focus on what he created. It is irrelevant to wonder whether he is solely to thank for his wondrous advances in music or if he was merely the focus of myriad prodigious input from Quincy Jones. The matter of the fact is thus: Michael Jackson pioneered and sat atop the pinnacle of a musical, a rich cadence that had been bubbling and building up for decades. It finally exploded with Michael Jackson’s solo albums and the world is a richer place for it. From Miles Davis to Stevie Wonder and the entire R&B, jazz and soul libraries that flutter and reside in between, Michael Jackson created, embraced and become the very embodiment of modern pop music.

* * *

The two best albums you could buy a child or musical neophyte are Davis’ Kind Of Blue and Jackson’s Off The Wall. There is no better way to be quickly brought up to speed on the roots and direction of modern music. And if you haven’t heard either of them, you are doing yourself and rest of the world an injustice!

RIP, Michael Jackson. Surely one of your sons must be reaching the age where he might show an interest in singing or dancing…

It’s hot and sticky in the UK again. I’m tired through lack of sleep and I refuse to pump myself full of caffeine just so I’m capable of coherent thought and thus bubble forth the beautiful, flowing prose that you expect from me. Instead, I went through photos from the G! Festival, a music festival that takes place on a beach in the Faroe Islands. You’ve seen a few but I have a lot (hundreds). There’ll probably be some more tomorrow. I’ve tried to prepare a nice selection of photos so there should be something for everyone!

[Image removed, as it became Dancing Light]

Hogni, a Faroese musician. Look at his smile. Maybe my favourite photo ever! (You need to see it BIG, it’s awesome) Definitely a case of right-place-right-time. And my 100mm prime lens which seems to have truly beautiful optic characteristics.

Teitur, perhaps the most famous Faroese musician, with an adoring audience. And a rather pretty sunset in the background!

If only you could see the kid on the right’s facial expression. I think we can guess though. G! Festival is for all the family!

I’ve covered the sorry state of knowledge and inherent lack of truth that plagues contemporary society.

But it didn’t start yesterday or even 100 years ago! It’s an eternally recurring theme of dumbing-down and almost-truths dispensed by nasty people posing as intellectual authorities over thousands of years. There is an endemic ‘loss of wisdom’ that has an iteratively degenerative effect, gaining more momentum with each generation.

Historically these lies, these tales, were of a philosophical or mythical nature and virtually harmless. They were stories that became true through retelling: Hercules, Romulus, Arthur. The stories were told first by the travelling bard, then more abstractly through tribalism and shamanism. Polytheism followed with its anthropomorphic (god of wine, god of war) pantheon of valiant heroes and demigods. Finally monotheism trumped them all and wrapped up with its epic, fearsomely vengeful tale of apocalyptic events.

Old wives’ tales (or fables or myths or whatever!) might’ve been lies or half-truths but they didn’t really harm anyone; they might have been ‘not ideal’, but that’s not the point — they were moving towards the ideal — they were retold to children with good intentions! The same could be said for the basic spiritual maxims of most religions: everlasting life; don’t murder; try your best not to sodomise your brother’s wife; treat others how you would like to be treated. All good but… it sadly didn’t last. Something changed. All of a sudden enforcement entered the equation. Arbitrary enforcement: rules, laws and peer pressure with little or no basis in moral/cultural advancement or ethical living. If abstract/intellectual enforcement wasn’t enough, there was a strong physical aspect too: witch-hunts, the Inquisition and the Crusades are but a few obvious examples.

Why did it happen? For thousands of years our focus had been on becoming a more advanced race. But one day, probably after the fall of Rome, we woke up and well… we fell asleep again. Life was no longer about pushing the progress of civilisation. Perhaps it was our growing understanding of human anatomy and psychology that caused the change. Maybe it was due to the formation of metropolises like Rome and the urgent need to control large groups of people quickly and easily. Personally I think the continued development of written and spoken language — and rhetoric — played a big role. Whatever it was, something snapped. No longer was storytelling used to share wisdom or morals to improve our progeny’s standard of living. Gone were the tales that frightened children away from actual dangers like dank caves or poisonous fruits.

A new breed of story started to appear, tales that weaved lies and believable half-truths into their narrative. And we know that words, both written and spoken, have a terrible power. Instead of cresting taller peaks and pushing towards new horizons people started to fear their surroundings. Authorities of knowledge slowly faded away to be replaced by scary chieftains, oppressive teachers, greedy priests and, of course, a vengeful God.

I’ve written about magic before and how it is ultimately synonymous with technology. Television was magic (find an old person that was around when television was invented and talk to them about it!) but sure enough, it very quickly became mundane. What do you think would’ve happened to the inventor of the television if he had been around in the Middle Ages? What do you think ‘witchcraft’ actually was? With such an attitude towards innovation and revolution (or evolution, hah!), is it a surprise that books, education and intellectual enlightenment all but disappeared for 1,000 years?

For a very, very long time the pursuit of knowledge and truth — science! — was frowned upon, persecuted. Scientists were shunned or burnt at the stake. Why?

Because they were dangerous. Knowledge is power.

We humans learnt just enough for the monotheistic surge to take place. We learnt how to exploit the human love of mystery with smart wit and sharp turns of dogmatic phrase. We have become a scared and tentative flock too fearful to break from the pack. In essence we learnt just enough to be dominated and no more.

And now we await — or do we create? –  the next Renaissance where veracity of knowledge is returned to us.

***

Still more to come, I think; on prejudice and ignorance. Oh, and if you’re reading this on the blog itself, remember you can double click a word to find out what it means!

There’s a very specific period of my teenage life that I remember fondly. I was about 13 and not yet set apart from my peers by height or sharp wit or beard. I was smart, having been bumped up a couple of classes, but the bullying hadn’t started yet. It was just a twelve month period, but I think we had more fun that year than any other that followed (at school anyway, university is something else entirely).

This is a story about me and the boys. The year was 1997 and we were 13. Out of a class of 12, seven of those were boys and six of them had grown up together since kindergarten, aged 1. To say that we were close would be an understatement — we were basically brothers.  We were almost inseparable at school, always perfectly in-step and full of rapid chatter as we moved from classroom to classroom, laughing at jokes we could guess the ends of and finishing each other’s sentences.

Despite our closeness, we were still very different from one another. Some of us were academically brilliant while others simply did enough to get by. I wasn’t a chatter-box back then, but I did always raise my hand in class — I was that kid (though to be fair, I did always know the answer). I wasn’t particularly playful either… but my friends were! They were complete pranksters and always up to no good! And I always stuck at the focus of the damn crossfire.

There’s a strange kind of loyalty between childhood friends. Or maybe it’s just the fact that children are capable of firing and forgetting. When you’re 13 you can pull your best friend’s pants down, but don’t try it when you’re 31.

What I’m trying to say is, as the shy, unassuming, genteel member of the group, I was always the butt of their jests, jibes and practical jokes. I could tell you a lot of stories from that year. I could tell you about our out of bounds adventures or our scary dungeon-crawling experiences beneath our Victorian-era school building. The problem is… I’d have to ask them for permission first. A lot of the stuff is probably quite illegal too, in hindsight (it’s not really a consideration when you’re a kid), so I should probably stick to just the boner-related humour — well, except one childhood erection story that I can’t tell you until two people die.

With the preamble out of the way, let’s begin! It was a history class, and I had just stepped outside the room to talk to the teacher in private. I’d been a very naughty boy and she wanted to squeeze an apology from me — something she knew would be difficult. After a few fruitless minutes we both trudged back into the classroom, she with a frown on her face, and me with a grin.

I sat down.

A chorus of giggles erupted from behind me.

The teacher turned from the blackboard and the diagram illustrating the fall of the Roman Empire to see what a bunch of boys were giggling about. I too tried to turn around.

But I couldn’t. Because they’d glued me to my damn seat.

‘Shit, I’ve been glued to my chair’ isn’t really the first conclusion you jump to in such a situation. Let’s face it, it’s not the kind of thing you really expect, even from your prankster best friends. So of course, instead of thinking rationally, I just tried to turn around with even more force.

Rrrrrippp. There went the seat of my pants. Glue, warm, sticky glue was now pooling in, on and around my smooth, hairless… bits. I still wasn’t free either; I was still very much stuck.

By this stage, the guys behind me were in hysterics. The girls to my right were also staring at the desk, my chair, my pants. They were waiting to see what the teacher would say, before breaking their boring and sensible decorum.

Now, don’t ask me to explain the next bit. It doesn’t make sense to me now, and it never makes sense when you’re a teenager, but, yes, my fragile, nervous body decided that it was perfect time for a boner. Boiiiingggg!

Thank God I’m sitting at a desk or this could be a lot worse.

I smile nervously at the girls and try to shuffle a little further under the desk. It’ll all be over within a few minutes. Well, except for the glue. Shit, the glue.

Noooo, the teacher’s walking towards me…

‘What’s going on Seb?’

Where do I start… ‘I’m, er, stuck.’ A nervous grin — mine, not hers.

She looked down at me, cowering behind my desk. She must’ve misread the weird mix of tortured emotions displayed on my my face. The following act would never — COULD never — be forgotten. Twelve years later and what she did next is still indelibly scarred upon my subconscious.

She pulled back the desk with all the aplomb and fervor of an amateur magician.

‘Ah-ha–!’

A choked cry of alarm — from her, not me.

‘JESUS CHRIST!’

There I sat, my skinny teenage todger bursting forth from within my torn, sticky, glue-caked pants.

Unable to move. Exposed to the entire classroom. The only real saving grace is that I was 13 and not 16, or it would’ve been a lot messier.