Rabbit. Hey, kids, welcome to the Phile for a Monday. How are you? Okay, I'm gonna start with a very weird story... We've been worried about Lindsay Lohan for a long time now. And a recent video does very little to assuage our fear that the Mean Girls star has gone off the proverbial deep end. In a bizarre video she live-streamed to Instagram, 32-year-old Lohan approaches a family she describes as a "Syrian refugee family" in the streets of Moscow, Russia. "Hey everyone, I just want to show you a family that I met. A Syrian refugee family that I’m really worried about. They really need help," says Lohan, who seems under the influence of mind-altering substances. Speaking to the family in a mix of Arabic and English with an Arabic accent, she confronts the family, who appear to be homeless, saying "tell me your story." Speaking to the kids, she says, "You want to come with me? Come with me. I’ll take care of you guys. Do you want to stay in a hotel tonight? Do you want to watch movies? It would be so cool to watch a movie on a TV or a computer." Then she starts to berate the parents, saying, "You should not have them [your sons] on the floor, you should be a hard-working woman and you should be doing what you [can] for your children, so they have a better life,. If someone is offering them a home and a bed, which is me at the moment, give it to them. They will come back to you." She eventually attempts to lure the children away from their mother, because for some reason she believes they're victims of "child trafficking." "I won’t leave until I take you. Now I know who you are. Don’t fuck with me," she threatens, in an Arabic accent. "Look what’s happening, they’re trafficking children. You’re ruining Arabic culture by doing this." She continues, "I’m with you boys, don’t worry. The whole world is seeing this right now." You can watch the video on Twitter, where it's spreading like Mean Girl mania in 2004. Eventually, Lohan appears to put her hand on one of the kids in an attempt to kidnap him from his parents. That's when the mom took action and punched Lindsay Lohan in the face. This is a totally justifiable reaction to a stranger trying to steal your kid, even if that stranger did become a pop culture icon. The video is painful to watch, in part because Lohan's behavior is both completely inappropriate and very illegal. And in part because she's clearly not well, and should be the one getting help, not giving it. Lindsay Lohan, we beg of you... stop it. Get some help.
There were several striking visual moments that took place during the Senate committee's hearing held for Supreme court nominee and alleged gang-rapist Brett Kavanaugh. For one, there was an extremely notable difference between the composed, articulate way Dr. Christine Blasey Ford presented her powerful testimony, and the entitled and overtly angry sputtering of Kavanaugh's statement. For women, for survivors, for really anyone remotely conscionable, the obvious bias of last week's hearing... most notably the kid gloves with which Kavanaugh was handled, was beyond nauseating. Blasey Ford, a survivor of sexual assault, was forced to describe her trauma in clinical terms multiple times in detail in order to prove her integrity, meanwhile, Kavanaugh sputtered and yelled and refused to answer basic questions. Kavanaugh's wife, mother, and several "close" female friends were seated directly behind him, and all of them looked disgusted at the jail-bound pathetic excuse for a man. In fact, one particularly prescient photo captured Kavanaugh mid-scream while all the women behind him looked on in horror.
The picture immediately was deemed iconic for how perfectly it sums up the anger and horror many of us feel towards Kavanaugh's possible nomination. Perhaps the most notable part of this photo is the fact that these are the women who support Kavanaugh. I truly wonder how many of them had a change of heart when they heard him scream-crying about a calendar. The faces of each woman say SO much, I don't have much to add except a heavy head nod and a weary "same." The theatrics of the photo would be funny if it wasn't real life. People also noticed a mysterious man who looked so over it he summoned the earth to swallow him up. Honestly, all of these women and that one man sum up the current mood. Getting swallowed up by the ground sounds pretty good about now.
After a harrowing day of a sexual assault survivor bearing her soul and the accused claiming it's a "Clinton conspiracy" and crying about calendars, Republicans are going full steam ahead with putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court for life. After announcing that Kavanaugh's denials were good enough for him and that he's a yes on confirmation, survivors of sexual assault confronted Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator, and he couldn't even look them in the eye. "Don't look away from me! Look at me and tell me that it doesn't matter what happened to me, that you will let people like that go into the highest court of the land, one woman said," one woman said. "You're telling all women that they don't matter, that they should just stay quiet, because if they tell you what happened to them, you are going to ignore them," she added. Flake has made some strongly-worded speeches on the Senate floor and often pretends not to like Trump despite voting with him over 80% of the time, so he was thought to be someone who could stand up for survivors. People are applauding the protestors as heroes and ripping Flake for being a flakey flake. Alas, he chose to live up to his name.
Tomi Lahren, aka Termi Lern, aka Bigot Barbie, aka that girl in high school who was always mean to you but had a leadership role at church and hid behind adults... has made a GRAVE mistake on Twitter. In a moment of truly on-brand delusion, Termi decided it was high time she come for former First Lady Michelle Obama. Now, obviously, Termi could easily use her platform to come for alleged sexual assaulter Brett Kavanaugh, or bolster the voices of other women, but instead she spiritually channels a Baby Eva Braun by way of a script presumably written by a Fox News bot. Termi didn't merely come for Michelle, but she full-on told her to "sit down."
It didn't take long for people to respond to Termi with some cold, hard facts about the Obama administration as well as Michelle's professional qualifications. The Internet DID concede that Trump has bested Obama in arrests and indictments within his administration. However, the numbers speak for themselves when it comes to Termi's claims about the economy and border enforcement. Naturally, as with any proper Termi dragging, the responses ranged from political fact checking to more personal statements. I really have no idea what Termi expected when she came for Michelle, I can only assume she was extremely bored or getting dragged is a sexual fetish of hers.
Sexy Halloween costume purveyor Yandy.com was caught selling a sexy "Handmaid's Tale" costume... and they quickly pulled the outfit. The company claims they saw the costume as a "powerful protest message" before the backlash. Here's their statement, "Yandy always has stood, and will continue to stand, at the forefront of encouraging our customers to 'Own Your Sexy.' We support our customers being comfortable in their skin, regardless of who they are or what they choose to wear. Our corporate ideology is rooted in female empowerment, and gender empowerment overall. Over the last few hours, it has become obvious that our 'Yandy Brave Red Maiden Costume' is being seen as a symbol of women’s oppression, rather than an expression of women’s empowerment. This is unfortunate, as it was not our intention on any level. Our initial inspiration to create the piece was through witnessing its use in recent months as a powerful protest image. Given the sincere, heartfelt response, supported by numerous personal stories we’ve received, we are removing the costume from our site." And here's a screenshot of the original product listing...
I don't know if you've seen Yandy's other costumes, this one is actually modest for them. Still, many were offended by it. Not everyone is annoyed, though. Others are questioning if it's even really that much more offensive than the actual costume, which functions to cover women's body parts in shame. And some are SMDHing at the fact that anyone got worked up over this. Also, some pointed out that Yandy has some bigger fish to fry when it comes to offensive Halloween costumes. Either way, guess anyone who wants to be a leg-baring Offred is gonna have to DIY their outfit this year.
Okay, instead of doing this blog thing maybe I should be listening to this album...
I bet it's a good one. Hahaha. Are you a baby boomer? Here's a hilarious text from a baby boomer that prove the technology struggle is real.
And their willingness to admit when they've failed. After all, nobody's perfect. If I had a TARDIS I would like to go to Austria and help the kids. But knowing my luck I would be too late and someone would have trumped me. This Austrian boy received new shoes during WWII.
Look at that smile on his face. If that doesn't make you feel good what would? You know the game Connect 4? Well, there's a new version out...
Haha. That would take forever. I was thinking of getting a new tattoo but someone had the same idea as I did.
Hahahahahahaha. That's brilliant. Have you seen the new Nike ad? If not, I have to here...
So, did your child in school do anything like this?
Hey, do you know who would do a better job as president? A penguin.
Remember when Trump fist pumped on 9/11? Well, that wasn't the first time he did that...
Ha! So, one of the best things about the Internet is you can see porn for free and so easy. But the problem with that is if someone is reading a blog, such as this one, they might get bored and go to a porn site. I thought if I showed a porn pic here then they wouldn't have to leave. Then I thought what if they were at work or school. So I came up with a solution...
Going into the Blogspot Hall of Fame today is ancestralbreezes.blogspot.com. Here's a look that blog...
They don't have a logo. And it was last updated in 2015. Yikes. Anyway, go to that blog (after you finish this one of course) and tell them the Phile sent you. Okay, so, with all the anger at people wearing blackface for Halloween, you'd think that's the only offensive costume out there. Fact of the matter is, so many costumes we take for granted as "traditional" or "innocent" or "the only thing the Halloween store had left" are insensitive to many social issues and marginalized groups. To help prevent you from crossing the line of good taste, I'm gonna be showing you some commonly worn costumes you probably didn't even realize were offensive in a new pheature simply titled...
Costume: SEXY NURSE.
Why it's offensive: Let's leave aside the fact that sexualizing an entire field of medical care might not be the best idea, especially when the field in question has a history of battling sexual harassment in the workplace. This year, in light of the Obamacare controversy, a costume like this trivializes one of the most divisive issues facing this nation, one that just shuttered our government and prevented our children from visiting publicly run zoos and national parks. Hope it's worth it!
This one is a little hard. If you spot the Mindphuck let me know. Okay, so, the last few entries I introduced you to a new character that for some obvious reasons is really popular. I thought why not have her back again today. So, once again here is...
Me: Hello, professor, welcome back to the Phile. How are you?
Liz: I'm good, Jason, how are you?
Me: Not too bad. So, what sex ed do you have for us today?
Liz: There's nothing wrong with having casual sex, but sometimes it can lead to these uncomfortable things called "feelings."
Me: Oh man, I was not prepared for this at all. Go on.
Liz: Most sex ed teaches you to wait until you’re married or at the very least, in a relationship with someone you love. However, life doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes you just want to hook up with someone because you think they’re totally hot. However, when you decide you like them and they decide not to call or text you after, the emotional sting can throw you for a loop.
Me: Okay. Anything else?
Liz: The AIDS scare tactics are real.
Me: Do you have an example?
Liz: Yeah. Not sure this counts but when I was ten and asked my mom what AIDS was, she said it happened when people had sex without protection. Fair enough. Except my little brain confused "protection" with "permission."
Me: Ha. That;s funny. Professor Liz Chickasaw, kids. Thanks, Liz. Come back again soon.
Liz: Thanks, Jason. Muah.
You can die from pooping too hard.
Phact 1. Some men are allergic to their own semen and they experience flu-like symptoms after each ejaculation that can last for up to a week.
Phact 2. You will need a telescope fifty times the size of the Hubble to see objects left by humans on the moon. Even if we use the Hubble Space Telescope to look at the moon, a football stadium sized object would appear as only one pixel.
Phact 3. The Mars Opportunity rover, whose mission was planned to go for approximately ninety-one days, is still traveling across the Red Planet, having surpassed its duration of activity by nine years and ninety-four days.
Phact 4. Greek islanders from Lesbos once sued an LGBT rights group to stop using the term “Lesbian” to refer to gay women.
Phact 5. The first corn domesticated by the ancient people of Central America was popcorn.
Today's guest is is a British musician, singer, songwriter, author, DJ and radio presenter, best known as one half of the duo Everything but the Girl. His latest album "Fever Dream" is available on Spotify, iTunes and Amazon and his book Romany and Tom is the 87th book to be pheatured in the Phile's Book Club. Please welcome to the Phile... Ben Watt.
Me: Hey, Ben, welcome to the Phile. I am so glad you're here, how are you?
Ben: I'm great and fantastic and very pleased.
Me: I have to say I think Everything But The Girl was the last concert my dad and I went to together at Firestone here in Orlando. You went solo after that. What was it like working on solo albums since 2010? It took a lot of years, from 1983 before you had another solo album out.
Ben: I can't remember now. I remember doing these last couple of records.
Me: What are the big differences between your prior album "Hendra" and your latest "Fever Dreams"?
Ben: I used about ten or eleven different tunings, which makes touring quite problematic. I'd either need about ten guitars with me or a very active roadie.
Me: I love the song "Gradually," which has some very common sense lyrics. Can you tell the story behind that song?
Ben: Yeah. It's a song about what happens in a long relationship and how they change over time. How you could be with someone for a very long time who you're fond of but even in that relationship you find yourself at a different speed, you fall out over things, things take time to blow over, and relationships do kind of ebb and flow gradually over a period of time. I just wanted to try and write along those lines, that's what's behind it.
Me: "Fever Dreams" is a cool album. I like it better than some of your other stuff. I like there's real instruments on it, and it sounds more like a band. Was that what you wanted to do?
Ben: The whole record was very much an idea I had. I toured with "Hendra," having not toured live for a very long time, and I did about sixty shows and my voice got stronger and stronger, and my playing with Bernard Butler became more and more intuitive, and I had a much stronger idea what I wanted to do with the next album. I had the idea of just this four-piece band playing with very simple hollow bodied instruments. We've got double bass, simple kind of folk jazz drum kit and me and Bernard on semi-acoustic guitars. I had this sort of Pentangle meets Crazy Horse dynamics out of them, because the nature of that we were playing. I think it just forced everybody to play with a lot of tone, with a lot of dynamics, it's all about the sound of the wood and the steel in the record. I just encouraged for everybody to go for it on the songs, from very quiet to very loud, just really try to build the songs and make them more than sum of our parts in a way.
Me: Did you write with Bernard Butler as well?
Ben: No, I write very much in solitude. I do all the writing on my own first. I work hard on the tunings, chords, I write and I rewrite the lyrics, I work on the structure until I'm happy with it. I try and make sure I'm confident on the role I want to play in the song and at that point I invite Bernard in and he starts to dramatise the mood of the song with his counter-point. Once we got that together we took it to the rhythm section and we start to build up the band arrangement.
Me: Is making music to you the same as it was when you started out?
Ben: I've been around doing this a long time and I think I'm very aware the older I get and the more I work and create stuff there is past I'm leaving behind. I'm now much more interested in theme like resilience and finding the ideas of hope and optimistic ideas.
Me: Do you like to experiment musically still? Your music in the past has been all different styles.
Ben: Historically I've always been interested in new technologies to record. In my life time as a recording artist we've been through affordable synthesisers, drum machines, turn tables, sampling, plug-ins, all presented a new palate of colours. I'm always interested in turning to different ways to write songs.
Me: Did you write these new songs on guitar or piano?
Ben: It's split really.
Me: Okay... so, how do you write down ideas? Phone, computer, notebook?
Ben: I use my phone a lot. I like to fool myself I'm not working all the time. I hear these stories of people going down to the studio at ten o'clock in the morning and clock off at five, and that's just their job. I find I work a lot better if I catch myself out and sometimes I start to work on something I'm not supposed to like ten minutes before I'm supposed to go out for a meeting. I'll pick up my guitar, switch my phone on and just play. I'll come back to it and if it strikes me as something fresh then I think I might've captured something. It gets harder and harder to impress myself after awhile but that seems to work for me anyway.
Me: Were all the songs written for this album or did you have some of them for awhile?
Ben: No, everyone was written just for "Fever Dream."
Me: Okay, so, who were you musical influences growing up, Ben?
Ben: I got into João Gilberto, the a Brazilian guitarist, my dad played me his music, I discovered people like John Martyn in my teenage years who was quite influential want I wanted to do. I loved what Vini Reilly was doing with that first Durutti Column album.
Me: You worked with Robert Wyatt from Soft Machine, am I right? What was that like?
Ben: When I was about eighteen or nineteen someone played me his records on Virgin from the early 70s and I was very taken with them. In fact I was very interested in that post-psychedelic English pastoral scene. People like Robert Wyatt, Kevin Coyne, who actually produced my first single. What Richard Thompson was doing on guitar. People like that I was listening to at the time. I was just precocious enough that Robert Wyatt would want to play with me, when no one ever heard of me. I remember saying to Cherry Red do you think he'll play on my first EP and they said no. I just said get me his phone number and I'm gonna ring him up. I did and he was very, very nice and he said, "That sounds interesting, send me some music." I sent him a cassette I think in the post. He liked the demo and invited me around to his house. I just got the bus around to his house in Twickenham and we hung out for a couple of hours. It was like another world, like I said I had a jazz musician for a father and had a really bohemian upbringing. Robert was on another level, it was all like sawyer milk and African drums in the sitting room. It was great and really inspiring and he was really nice to work with.
Me: My dad was a rock singer and I got fucked out of getting any music talent, unless you count the kazoo. Do you think living with some musically made you musically?
Ben: It wasn't just my dad, I have four younger siblings, half brothers and sisters from my mums first marriage. We all lived in the same house together and I was the youngest by years so I really grew up hearing a lot of music from the early 70s. It was all my dads jazz, and my eldest brother was into Roy Harper, the next couple of brothers I had had more mainstream tastes, they liked Carole King and Paul Simon, then my sister was into more art-rock stuff like Lou Reed. There was always music going on in the house. My mum was journalist at this point, she was a show biz feature writer interviewing mostly actors and movie stars. Record companies used to send her records in the mail because sometimes she wrote about music. They got offered around the family and if nobody wanted them they'd get offered to me. I can remember being given Neil Young's "Decade," that triple album of his that came out in the mid-70s and I was only about fourteen and I was really blown away and I didn't know who he was. Do you know that record?
Me: I heard of it but never heard it I don't think.
Ben: It was like an anthology of his stuff that was put out in the mid-70s, a mixture of famous tracks and rarities. That had a big influence on me, I remember.
Me: When you first met Tracey Thorn from Everything But The Girl were you guys into the same music?
Ben: When we met Tracey had a much greater pop sensibility. She was very much into soul and disco when she was growing up, and when post and post-pink happened she was very much into bands like Buzzcocks and the Tones, Orange Juice, Distractions, that band from Manchester. Those were the kind of things in her record collection. When we met I had stuff like John Martyn and jazz records by Bill Evans. I think we had two records when we first met. One was the Duruiiti Column album and one was the first Vic Godard "Subway Sect" album. I think we bonded after those two.
Me: How was your songwriting different between you two?
Ben: Tracey had a more direct approach to songwriting, a kind of no nonsence approach. I was quite influenced by that when I met her I think.
Me: I loved her vocals and "Come On Home" is one of my favorite songs from back then. I have to dig up that single. Anyway, I said it many of times, I could never work with someone I'm in a relationship with or related to. Wait, are you guys a couple? I have no idea. Haha.
Ben: Yeah, we lived with each other for a long time and are so fond of each other we married.
Me: Lucky man. Haha. Eveeything But The Girl's biggest song was "Missing." What's the story about that song? Was anything "missing"? Haha.
Ben: That was an interesting genesis that song. I had it written and it was lying around a while, and we were recording some stuff with John Coxon actually, who co-produced some of the album that it came from, "Amplified Heart." He went on to be half of Spring Heel Jack, that kind of drum and bass duo in the 90s. We were around his studio and I was playing this song and it was actually John who said, "Can you break the chords up?" That was how the initial guitar line started. I remember we were writing the chorus for it and I had the opening "and I miss you" section, but the next line we didn't have. We went home on the first night we've been working on it and I said to Tracey, "We need the line that goes with something I kiss you like something something something." Tracey finally came up with "the desert miss the rain."
Me: Alright, let's talk about your book Romany and Tom which is in the Phile's Book Club. Tell the readers what the book is about.
Ben: It's about coping about depression in a way. I speak very openly in the book about a period of depression I suffered from a few years ago, and how I got through that. It was also something my dad, who was a jazz musician, suffered from... badly thought his life. My dad was very much stuck in his depression, especially in his later years. He found it hard to move on, and found the winter very depressing.
Me: Did writing in prose have any impact of your lyric writing at all?
Ben: Yeah, I think so, a big impact. I think my working as a lyricist has got better. I think Tracey has been a very strong lyricist since she was a teenager. Her lyrics were always to the point and I was anxious of that. I always wrote in a sort of round about way, and I think some of my early lyrics when I look back are either hit or miss. Sometimes I nailed it and sometimes it was a bit crap and that's just how I feel about them. Somewhere, I don't know if it'd after my illness in the 90s, or after I wrote "Patient" or something, but something clicked with me around the time of "Amplified Heart." I found a new way to write and since then I found it's easier to say exactly what it is that I want. Perhaps that just comes with experience. A lot of novelists don't mature until they're in the forties or fifties, they write their best novels late in life.
Me: That's a good point. Ben, thanks so much for being on the Phile. This was another interview my dad would of loved because he was a fan. Please come back again.
Ben: Thanks a lot. Cheers.
That about does it for this entry of the Phile. Thanks to Ben Watt for a great interview. The Phile will be back on Thursday with comedian Bert Kreischer. Spread the word, not the turd. Don't let snakes and alligators bite you. Bye, love you, bye.
Not if it pleases me. No, you can't stop me, not if it pleases me. - Graham Parker
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