An old, old question

I heard a rather distressing news story while driving to work this-morning; it does not matter what it was but it did the usual thing and made me think of all the depressing things happening to people around the world. The story itself was of a tragic accident but so many people are bereaved through the deliberate behaviour of other people. I used to lump all these people together as suffering from various forms of mental illness and of course I have not studied this in any detail, but now it just seems that notcaring about other people and laughing at the severest misfortune of others is a normal trait. Even in the advertising industry, it seems that you have to show small-minded, petty acts of vandalism to get noticed. I'm All Right Jack. For every Guinness advert there is a Vodka one, for every Ronseal (Does exactly what it says on the tin) there is a lager commercial that if it had the Genders swapped would fall foul of so many equality laws. I am getting away from the point. I am getting depressed about everything that it wrong about the world and of course I am in no position to fix it; my solutions are along the lines of the Spoof Blue Peter Presenters on Monty Python's Flying Circusssssss. Idealism is a dangerous thing. Even just acknowledging that there are these problem seems somehow naive and is enough to make anyone curl up in a corner and hum gentle melodies just to shut out all the bad stuff like junk email and pop-ups from seemingly respectable companies. Sorry! Personal preferences were breached there.

The soundtrack is The Acadamy of Ancient Music's Four Seasons which is the first CD I ever bought way back in 1987. It sounds strangely antiseptic probably because it was an early transfer of a full digital recording. I tried to select a calming set of stuff for today which is why I have La Roque 'n' Roll and Concierto de Aranjuez. However, at times like this, everything just sounds sterile so maybe I need a good punky workout instead.

Did Bateman do it? Saw the film on Saturday but could not decide whether he actually did it or just thought about doing it. The reviewers say he did but I read the book by mistake because I mistook it for another (better) book which someone recommended to me and I had to finish it to see him get caught. When he was still free at the end I was quite disturbed. The reviewers also said that there is no message other than emptiness but could it not be a metaphor for what the west does to the world and gets away with it? Reagan "lying" in it at the end was a clue I thought. I shouldn't watch these films though I have to say I was not scared by it; It was just too funny to be really scary. If it hadn't been for the sex scene, I am sure it would have only got a 15 - "contains mild butchery". The danger is all in your head - just like it may all be in Bateman's.

On to the Concerto de Orange Juice and how nice to find that it retains the beauty which I was hoping for. There is so little difference between a life of horror and upset and one of beauty and relaxation. The latter is so easy to achieve but it requires Governments to facilitate it and they seem only to facilitate what they want to and generally for themselves. Local Government especially.