At 37 years of age, it has suddenly been revealed to me that I’ve got gay hands. I don’t know what to do about it. I mean I feel perfectly straight, a pretty young thing in shorts and a crop top is still going to get blood racing to my manly parts, but I need to know what are the implications of having gay hands?
A single gay hand of mine…
If you haven’t guessed, I was unfortunate enough to watch BBC TV last night waste even more of my licence fee with The Making of Me – John Barrowman: Why am I Gay? I was intrigued because I’d seen the trailer and the test in the MRI scanner machine looked fascinating. Unfortunately, the show was a non-starter with no questions really answered. But the piece of evidence that rocked my world was the “gay hand” theory. Apparently, in the womb, you are subjected to all manner of hormones and if you are bombarded with the correct amount of male hormone testosterone, your ring finger grows longer than your index finger. This means that you are a straight male. Too little testorerone in the womb and your ring finger will be smaller than your index finger and you will be a screaming queen.
I looked at my hands. My ring finger is smaller than my index finger – I have gay hands. The urge to go see Mamma Mia! at the cinema didn’t suddenly wash over me. For Barrowman, the news was equally upsetting – as a gay man, he has straight hands. So you sit there and watch and here these experts prod and probe and test and theorise for them to come up with nothing.
Of course, when asking the question about human sexuality, the wisest person will already have the answer. “They just are” – that covers it. But what concerns me was the apparent concreteness of human sexuality that was presented by the programme.
“I am gay and that’s it.” says Barrowman, “I was born this way.”
The thing about human sexuality is that it is pretty fluid when you analyse it. Put enough heterosexual men in a confined space without any females, and it doesn’t take long before they start bumming each other while protesting that they are straight, etc. It all comes as part of the human need for intimacy. While I am not saying that you can’t be born gay, I think the picture isn’t that clear cut. Some are born gay, some are nurtured into it, some choose it as a lifestyle for that period of their life, etc. Also, in this programme, there was zero coverage of lesbianism and I would have found it interesting how the hormone and chromosomal theories would have stacked up when it comes to women who prefer to drink from the furry cup.
One thing that I did realise was that there are no clear answers when it comes to the infinite variety of humanity and sometimes I think we should stop looking for answers to questions that don’t need answering. Of course, the follow-up show should be: John Barrowman: The Making of Me – Why am I such an irritating showoff? I’d like to see the geneticists tackle that one.
Meanwhile, something very strange occured last night. I actually took part in a interview about my music for a radio show. OK – so it is not Radio 1 or the mass media, but it was an interesting experience being on the end of the questions when, as a journalist, I usually ask them. I am dreading hearing the interview. I probably sound like a complete prat. I know I started babbling at one point and I lost my train of thought. I find it hard to articulate via the oratory hole in the lower middle of my face, instead preferring the keyboard or music to get my ideas across. Oh well, I’ll post a link when the interview airs.
Category: Diary
The tantalisingly titled Dragon Sauce (who according to my weblogs is something to do with White Denim’s UK record label www.fulltimehobby.co.uk) has this to say regarding my slight dissing of their band, White Denim:
“Sounds to me like you’re scared to come out and say you like a new band incase, in 6 months time, they aren’t regarded as credible.
sad state of affairs, especially as a journalist.
if you’ve not been excited about a new band since 1997 you’re in the wrong job.”
Firstly, it has been many, many, many, many, many, many years since I wrote about music – the mid-90s, I reckon. In those heady days, Blur were just trying to break through and Oasis were a sparkle reflected from a bead of sweat dripping down Alan McGee’s nutsack. I am not a music journalist and I have never been credible. For fuck’s sake, I list Genesis and King Crimson as a couple of my favourite bands, so that says a lot about my credibility. I don’t care for White Denim because they are a throwback to the past. I look at your website and have cut-and-pasted this quote from the band, which reinforces my opinion that most of these guitar bands are stuck in 1979.
“I think we’d all really like to turn into XTC,” quips Terebecki.
‘Nuff said, really.
As for being excited by new bands, Tortoise are an exceptional band that continue to make challenging and engaging albums. I very much doubt White Denim will be doing the same in 2019. Of course, I live to be proved wrong. So go back to peddling your inconsequential fad-culture muzak to the kids who know no better.
Meanwhile on the blog, Mr Oz has a problem indoctrinating his children with the music of Genesis:
“My little girl objected to The Lamb Lies Down en route to the childminder the other week.”
There’s your problem – the Lamb. Start her on “Selling England by the Pound” – the instrumental section of “The Cinema Show” will soon have her onside.
Regarding of my post about the band Fleet Foxes Daniel Gilbey’s-Gin asks:
Do you like them? I think they’re quite cool but missing a new band that really gets me going.
White Denim are good but don’t know if you’d dig there scuz noise.
Do I like Fleet Foxes? I like the single White Winter Hymnal and the EP Sun Giant is worth a listen as I downloaded it from the eMusic site. I’ve not taken the plunge to buy the album because I’ve heard there’s a lot of filler on it. If I see it going cheap, I might nab it. But do I actually like them? I like the idea of reclaiming mediaeval music and putting it into a modern setting and I very much like the production, although I actually have never been a big fan of the Beach Boys, there is something that resonates in the music for me. I don’t tend to champion too many modern bands because they always end up disappearing off the map (remembers Warm Jets).
Wth regards to White Denim, they actually typifiy what I dislike about the modern music scene. Most guitar bands now are ploughing the same field that those bands from 1979 were ploughing (think the Undertones and XTC) and I am sick of hearing the same spiky, three chord rock patterns thrown in my face as if it is something modern. It isn’t. With the plethora of music technology and the infinite variety of possibilities that music throws up for the creative process, that kind of music completely bores me rigid.
I am trying to remember the last time I got genuiningly excited about a band. It was probably Tortoise way back in 1997. Not been that excited since.
Of course, we have both gotten to that stage in our lives where we have heard it all before. It’s called old age. As you move towards middle age, you will start to look back at the things that made you happy when you were younger. Nostalgia is wonderful. Have a baby and do what I do…
Sunday mornings are now known as Prog Sunday in our household. During the Sunday morning feed, I subject Verity to DVDs of all my favourite progressive rock bands – such is my need to indoctrinate her into my taste in music. Some stuff she likes (a big Genesis and Peter Gabriel fan) – some stuff she’s not so keen on (King Crimson and Marillion). My daughter has been heard to shout “Da-da” whenever Phil Collins or Peter Gabriel appear on the screen – which is a little concerning.
I would suggest DHG you do the same. Have a sprog, settle down and wallow in some nostalgia.
It’s supposedly summer, but the tune that’s wowing the flock is a wintry little number:
And you can legally download this single from this here link.
I often go around this place moaning and whinging and cursing about how this business is a “house of cards”. Just one false move and it will all fall down. I talked with my accountant yesterday who said the following sentence, a sentence that echoed my own thoughts. Of course this is all speculation and supposition, but it is borne out by hard, cold financial fact.
Anyway, I am following the flow here by posting this video, but it seems apt. It’s House of Cards by Radiohead and it is an achingly beautiful performance by Thom “Cheer Up Wonky-Eye” Yorke – aided by a thick dollop of reverb and echo. It’s done with computers apparently…
While looking after Verity in the afternoons, I ‘ve been watching too many repeats of Bergerac on UKOLDDRAMA or whatever the channel is called these days. The problem with having an active imagination like mine is that you can be sitting there one moment and before you know it the creative juices kick in and your brain starts kicking up “What if…?” scenarios. And as the end credits of this particular episode of Bergerac rolled by, I had written the entire story in my head.
The Missus poses with Bergerac’s Car [6 June 2007]
Again, the problem with having an artistic bent (oooer, missus – it’s just the cut of my trousers) is that once an idea goes into that mushy piece of gloop between your ears, you have to act on it. Otherwise, it whispers at you: “Darren, I’m still here. This is how the story goes and it is really really good and I’m going to keep repeating myself over and over in your head until you do something about it”. Well that’s what happens to me, anyway.
So over the past three days, I’ve found myself writing a TV script for the show. Titled “The Return of Bergerac”, the TV script was more of a writing exercise than anything else. I’ve never written a proper script before – done a play and loads and loads of traditional fiction, but never a TV script. So it was a new discipline to learn and a really interesting way of approaching a story. I went to the BBC Writers Room microsite and had a look at some scripts on their to give me an idea of how it is done. In fact, I found the whole experience rather satisfying. In fact, I should have thought about TV writing when I was young and maybe I’d have carved out a different career trajectory, rather than the spectacular nosedive I’ve performed over the past decade plus of being stuffed by the media industry.
But my script is finished, the Missus is giving it a read-through and once that’s done I’m going to send it off to the Beeb for a laugh. They have a submissions unit. I know this script has zero chance of ever being made into a proper TV show, but the masochist in me is thrilled at the idea of the decision makers at the BBC laughing in my face and throwing my script back at me as if it were a piece of fresh monkey shit.
Of course, once it is rejected, the Internet gives me the chance to put it on the website for my single solitary reader to download and enjoy. The Internet allows us failed artistes to ejaculate our creative juices into cyberspace to be lapped up by all and sundry.
Oh well, at least it keeps me occupied and out of trouble.
So what am I doing at the moment in StudioLock? Well I have been experimenting with 5.1 surround sound mixing. I know it sounds like something only a proper studio could do, but it is surprisingly easy to achieve surround sound mixes. Firstly, you’ll need to have a sound card in your PC that has multiple outputs. I purchased a USB external soundcard for my laptop for £10 to achieve this. Of course, you will need a surround sound speaker system to connect the soundcard to. I’ve had a such a speaker setup in the living room for nearly a decade now, so it was just a matter of connecting thiings up.
I use Cakewalk Sonar 7 to do my recording. I’ve been using Sonar since 2000 and the latest version give you surround sound mixing out of the box. The tricky thing is configuring your speakers. To do this, open an audio project you are working on and go to Projects > Surround and then assign an audio channel to each speaker channel on the list. When you are happy with this, save the configuration for future use. Now you’ll need to right click and create a new Surround Bus and then click on each audio channel in your project and change the audio output from the stereo bus to the new surround bus. Following me?
Now a surround panner panel will appear in each channel that’s been designated to the surround bus. You can use your mouse to position the audio channel in the surround sound field. You can even automate panning to make the sounds whizz around, etc.
Once your mix is complete, export the audio as a multichannel RIFF audio WAV file. This can be encoded to a DVD disc for playback on a home entertainment system through a multichannel audio system. Alternatively, you can encode the audio as a multichannel Windows Media Audio file, which means you an easily distribute it via the net, but it is aimed at those who have surround speakers connected to their PC or an Xbox 360 connected to multichannel audio system.
This has been your lesson for the day…