© Chris Port, June 2011
Happiness. It depresses me. I don’t mean Aristotelian activity, or the pleasure of the ridiculous, but the grim convenience of wipeable plastic surfaces. Southend is an endless Ronald McDonald party for child murder victims. Sunniness bubbles on its concrete and throat-tickles from its vomit griddle pavements. Come on people and chavs - taste and judgment. We all come from c*nts. But that doesn’t mean you have to be one.
The ghastly fiction...
The Kursaal - Culture with a capital K...
New Southend College campus building. It's as though a party of North Korean architects got pissed at a Lego trade fair and decided to 'have a bash' at Western humour. Even the scummiest immigrant suburbs of Paris have more taste. I hope some dodgy masonic golf club contractor has made a killing on this 'Gateway to the Arts' practical joke building. I'd hate to think that nobody was laughing. It's made out of McDonalds furniture, for Chrissake! Maybe they're expecting students to chuck pickles at the walls to see if they stick...
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Aristotle claimed that happiness is an activity rather than a possession, doing well what is worth doing and what we are good at. In essence, virtue over venality. Most of life's problems seem to be caused by other people valuing the means of exchange (e.g. money and stuff) over the pleasurable end (letting people get on with doing what they are good at). There are a few problems with this theory (e.g. some people are ‘good’ at doing bad things) but purposeful pleasure tempered with altruistic respect would seem to be the best way forward. ‘Stuff’ is usually just a surrogate for happiness rather than a meaningful relationship with the senses. Having said that, if anybody nicked my DVD collection I’d smack ‘em in the mouth. I worked bloody hard for that AND IT’S MINE! (9/10 Aristotle).
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'Glee' is a misnomer. It's like calling typhoid 'fun'. Apparently, in the 18th century, a 'glee' was a song for unaccompanied male voices. The 21st century seems to have expanded this definition to 'unaccompanied by any talent or redeeming features whatsoever'.
Glum: A Glee Parody
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etsICMc8-Mo
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