The Voice Of Angels

I haven’t really got anything to say at the moment. Obviously there’s always some television to bitch about but the worst has been so utterly awful of late that taking a pop at it would be like shooting fish in a barrel, with a Howitzer. Just attempting to watch something like Mutual Friends has left me feeling so lacklustre, it’s no wonder I’m back on the fags again.

With the new autumn season almost upon us, I’m not sure whether the BBC pushed the drama out to get ahead or the competition or a scheduler with a brain cell figured out how fucking appalling it was and tried to ditch it in the dying gasp of the summer schedule. If you want a make a drama that echoes thirtysomething or Cold Feet but can’t make it any better than thirtysomething or Cold Feet, you have to ask what the point is.

At least one good thing that came out of this week was I remembered to pick up Harps and Angels, Randy Newman’s first proper studio album since 1999. Whereas the great political satire on Bad Love was The Great Nations of Europe, Harps and Angels features the marvellously sly A Few Words in Defense of Our Country. The abridged lyrics ran as an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, published the day after Dubya delivered his 2007 State of the Union Address.

Of course we could spend time debating whether the final line, “Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye,” which is Newman’s farewell to the end of an empire, should be seen in relation to “Shantih shantih shantih”, the words used as a formal ending to the series of sacred Hindu treatises written in Sanskrit that bring to a close T.S. Eliot”s The Waste Land. Or we could simply sit back and listen to the song.