Self-confidence is hard to achieve, can be tougher still if you're more than usually clever or good-looking.
Today I ran in a corridor into a woman who's both and should know it, but always bitches about mistreatment and unfairness. The harder she finds life, the more she loses sympathy, now she's losing friends. She thinks it's "unjust".
This makes it worse for her. The less people want to listen, the more she hides away and lacks confidence, it's classic. Her head is full of what everybody thinks of her apart from herself. She's made it hard to talk, difficult to help and probably knows most people say, "What she needs is a good kick up the ass."
Sometimes that even works. A friend told a bunch of us what's he's made of a guy who prides himself in cooking up recipes for life, has written a self-help guide to it, and helped himself to my mate's daughter for ages.
Wedlock has recently entered the not very young man's mind, my friend added: "Rather say this now than stand around in a few months' time with a champagne glass feeling like a hypocrite and a buffoon."
When he showed us the evidence, I told my mate he'd done all right.
 In a few months, I'd like to write a long article about how the music industry helps itself to people and what it does to some of them, particularly the bright and the beautiful. There's space for this, instead of magazine gossip coverage and star biographies.
I read lots of the music press and there's little about it; there's plenty once you start asking the musicians. The idea came when we got reminders at work to put in our holiday requests and I was told -- it seems hard to believe -- there's a backlog stashed up for me. Before anybody else does, I've put in for August, hoping it'll be really hot again and when it's fun being in a Paris empty of Parisians.
Tonight's thoughts linked up listening to Sandra, unknown to me when the half-French, half-German "one-hit wonder" made 'Close to Seven' in 1992, when we rarely watched television though it hadn't been thrown out for good.
I only have the CD because it was in the "wrong place" on the shelves at the FNAC among new music and not her kind. Odd. I didn't bother to look at the date and on listening to somebody I knew nothing about, find she sounds like a kid growing out of it, about to make more of electro-dance music than she does, the lyrics her own on songs that say something.
In fact, what sounds like a first album where real confidence is coming through, turns out to be the end of a career. 'When the Rain Doesn't Come', is more than dance-floor, don't bother with the words, song: it's about child prostitution. The woman singing it doesn't sound very far out of childhood and has a voice I'd encourage.
I did wonder about a one-name singer when I bought it. Who is she really? Really, she was a kid born in a border area that got mixed up by several wars between France and Germany, now maybe "just a mother" married to musician Michael Cretu. Long since finished, a VoW I must have heard on the radio without listening, another woman who lived in London for a while and was given a hard time for being German. Before I quit Britain, I knew some of those people. Many English people were cruel to them, the country I grew up didn't like Germans. For it's own often insular people, the Japanese and their onetime empire, of course, were "worse": that's what many wanted me to believe because they did.
Sandra's fansite tells a story in a language clearly not written by a native English speaker. It makes plenty of allusions to what did Sandra in, sketches the details of what was probably one hell of a career, in every sense of "hell".
Sandra -- the picture pinched from her place -- may have been no fashion victim. I haven't asked her, but imagine she must have felt pretty punished for being pretty and having talent. When I "confessed" to liking Kylie Minogue, not everything but parts I discovered on going back from what she's done with Nick Cave, a friend snorted: "She's manufactured!"
Who isn't? We're all manufactured in a host of different ways.
The woman I met today is manufactured, in her own mind, by the views of other people. She's turned herself into a product of their perceptions and opinions and that's a mighty vicious and destructive way to go.
No, I'm not starting a Friday F*f column. That's one way I could be manufactured: "Your place isn't a blog, Nick." I've heard that frequently enough. "You're a columnist. It's what you should be doing instead of working for the Factory."
There's just one hitch with that notion, remember?
Usually I like working for the Factory. My worst enemy there is boredom. It's a System, like any other, and the people who understand that each play it their way. Mostly our own "rules" are OK with other people. If they're not, you find out bloody fast! Journalists are great at bitching, rarely praise -- especially about their colleagues -- and are renowned for being incapable of organising a piss-up in a brewery. From a previous phase of life, I can attest to their ability to do that very well. And if others now use my name for AFP, with their own affection and curses, they know why I call it the Factory, a place that expects some journalists also to be managers, sales fiends and PR experts. That's common media practice.
Why don't I have a telly? Because most of it is crap. I miss decent documentaries but not the films. There are plenty of new ones and I've got DVDs. Even the X-Files. The news is a product. It begins with a person, a computer these days, a camera and another person or an event. It generally passes through many pairs of hands before you get to read or see it, even when it's "live".
Live is a half-truth. You may feel you're there. You're not. You're watching pictures and hearing words that have come through a production line. Some good, trustworthy journalists work for CNN. But the year CNN gave the first Gulf War a jingle, I said: "Fuck CNN!" Even when I see it forcibly at work because someone insists on having it on and I hear CNN give a "breaking story" I've just sent to them myself, along with all the other clients, I don't trust all those people between the person who wrote the story, then me, them and you. Many of them aren't journalists at all. They fiddle, they package: here's a jingle. Here's some "tough shit going down. It's really 'real', interpreted by a Today's Tough Shit expert." Oh, here's a hotel chain somewhere else. Happy holidays. Or do good business. Have a safe trip. Iraq's a nasty place.
If some "musician" took whatever conflict comes next in Africa and does a package containing the like of an Ethiopia-Eritrea trench war jingle or a DRC succession of wars jingle -- three million dead -- I will pick up my telephone and go ballistic with anger. That's a promise. I know many people have the wit and experience to know what's news and what's package but CNN doesn't make it easy. Fox makes it harder. I saw it once, that was enough.
Elections often show people prefer the wrapping paper, not the gift.
This place is what I want it to be. Often what you like it to be, whether I'm being serious or fooling around. I no longer feel guilty about an increasing lack of links to fellow bloggers. There are hundreds of thousands of them.
If I linked every week to your pieces I read when I do get bored at the Factory just to keep in with a crowd, people who come here would probably get very bored themselves. I have a number of virtual friends in the blogroll, would love the time to get involved in some of their debates and projects, but I can't do that and work and VoWs and the Quiet Revolution.
With apologies to those who feel neglected, I think we might be in for another name-change. Most of my virtual friends, no less real for being unmet, have the confidence already to blog whether or not I write about them or chip in with my comments. In the music industry and in the media, while I plan to specialise in neither, there's much more at stake. Striking out on your own with a log is one thing, making a career and a life out of music and being a journalist is another.
Both are industries, ruthless and brutal with people who lack confidence. The more I become a journalist who writes about music as well as Africa, the less I like the way many "specialised" music writers do the job. They don't. They're self-referential, often show-offs, with values I find peculiar.
The comparisons they frequently make among musicians usually say more about the reviewer than the singer-songwriter. They seem to have got forgotten an axiom of journalism: "Go to source."
Most singer-songwriters tell their own stories. I've realised it matters to read them in making music my lifeblood again, though I no longer make music and talking about them. Fame has nothing with it. Journalists are great name-droppers when they want to be, we do a job that gets us close. I've talked to Nelson Mandela, I hope soon to talk to Aimee Mann. If I do, it'll be more than a joke about autographing her songs on my iPod. They're famous, outgoing people, generous with themselves and their time, hard as nails when they have to be. Many of the women I find prettiest in the Métro bite their nails. Why?
People tell me "Looks don't matter, they're not the person." Nail-biters know that's bollocks.
Sandra I don't know at all, apart from her fansite's CV and her CD.
I could make up fictions. She's a sorry casualty or she's an empty Barbie doll wanna-be who failed. A one-hit wonder. Maybe she had something of the woman who bitched today. Not knowing, I came across half a dozen songs I liked, some I didn't, and thought she could do with an honest write-up and encouragement. Too late. Like the nude studies I get into trouble for posting here, she used her looks and the rest. Packed it her career, apart from a DVD about it.
She didn't get screwed for a living. I won't often show sex outside Indian temples, but I don't find it an ugly or shameful sight. Porn's an industrial spin-off from what some call "the oldest profession". I'm less hasty to draw conclusions about the lifestyles and feelings of any woman whose pictures you get than my most vehement "feminist" critics. I like women's looks. And I think the porn industry is to be subverted by saying "Let's take another look at looks". The industry won't vanish because it offends you, you turn your back and say "That's no part of my world. All those women are being exploited."
Are they? Like fashion models, then, people whose job it is to make you think you don't like your looks unless you wear their stuff? I'm open enough about my holes, wore a shirt today that had a more than frayed collar. It's still a shirt. I don't grow the holes on purpose and I couldn't care about the collar. I care about what's inside it. My real holes and the rest.
Some women show more of their holes than others. I won't give you pictures of bits of men being shoved into those holes because they're boring. Bodies aren't. What some people publicly do with theirs is a subject open to discussion with anybody when they don't throw insults and words like "sexploitation" at me without being sure themselves. I'm happy with my looks and would blog the outside as liberally as I did those various bits of insides during medical exams for "the Condition" a couple of years back, if I thought anyone cared. If asked, I'll find a decent photographer! I wouldn't even make you pay for the privilege... but that's just fun.
I am sure of this. Whatever really happened during Sandra's career, it must sometimes have been like today's moaning Lisa. But the latter has forgotten how to do what she needs for confidence. Sandra probably rarely even got the time, with all those big bulbs flashing, the constant media inattention, the vacuous television shows, the lot, to go to source.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has just been a vacuous idiot. Thanks to BJ, by the way, for taking my mind from Africa to the arch-outburst.
Dr Rowan Williams "launched a wide-ranging attack on the media, accusing journalists of distorting debate, contributing to a climate of national cynicism, and unjustly attacking institutions over their secretiveness. (...)
Dr Williams claimed that some aspects of current journalistic practice are 'lethally damaging', contributing to the 'embarrassingly low level of trust' in the profession" (The Guardian).
This matters, so here it it is: 'The Media: Public Interest and Common Good' (Speeches and Sermons). Don't take my word for it, take his. I think he fell into the very trap he preaches against. He must have known journalists would be up in arms and angry, but few would give the whole lot to the reader.
Dr Williams, that's our job, mate. We have to put you in context.
My context includes a weblog that that sometimes tackles your concerns as an insider.
"To conclude good journalism is one of the models of good conversation and communication in the wider social context. That is, it may be and should be at times argumentative and one-sided; but it must leave room for reply and even provide material for reply. It must work with a sharp sense of what it is that different kinds of community know and how they know it. Without this, it will move constantly further into its parallel universe. And so long as there is real work in a real world to be done by the news media, this movement into a parallel universe would be a disaster."
We live in a multiverse, Dr Williams. I write and shall more about that elsewhere. I don't feel any need for a god. Don't go out of your way to pray for me, I've not told you what I think "god" is. My faith doesn't happen to be the same as yours. But I have faith. I need faith.
Before the archbishop opens his mouth again to be an ass, venting an assault on the media and bloggers with what may seem, superficially, to make sense, Dr Williams might yet do well to rub his poor eyes and take a look at the Anglican Church, his own lack of openness -- and the message he's given an African continent that's part of his flock, about its journalists.
Go, tell journalists that in Bujumbura, be sure you find it first (Bujumbura is not BJ. It's the capital of Burundi, with people in it who told you about a civil war, 1993 -- maybe --2005). Am I being "unjust"? Whose crusade is this?
What lacks most in the "Williamsite" speech is insight into a newsroom.
He begins with a quote from 'Scoop' (Evelyn Waugh's satire on the press) and presents a caricature of his own.
I don't shit on the archbishop. I shit on some things he said because it made him a whining old chap out in the corridor. He forgot himself. Try it, Dr Williams. Go to source!Then start afresh.
Hey! Maybe I should call this place 'taliesin's lethal logorrhea'.
Would you still come?
1:48:38 AM link 
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