The Anti-Room ...

I'm A Girl Gamer, Deify Me.

Now, I don’t want to pretend that I’m NOT constantly bickering with TV commercials, like an irate budgie having words with the mirror in his cage, but if there’s an ad that’s really seizing my contraband at the moment, it’s the one for Xbox Kinect’s Your Shape: Fitness Evolved.

Oh, you know the one. Smug girl makes eyes at herself in the mirror*, asks boyfriend-type “Can you tell I’ve been playing on The X Box? Maybe you should play some X Box?”, pronouncing Xbox like it’s part of an elocution exam where mispronunciation of brand names results in waterboarding... Read on at The Anti-Room ...

Culch.ie ...

The Democratisation Of Celebrity Arrives … Slowly.

... The fact that celebrity can now be gained, however fleetingly, without a squad of professional media manipulators on the payroll is both refreshing and disturbing. It’s refreshing that brilliant people are noticed and rewarded without having been vetted, homogenised, and coached into banality first by Big Business. It’s disturbing because real people are fragile, and not necessarily able to handle global attention. It was always the case that doing something out of the ordinary, good or bad, would get you the attention of your community; now your community totals 6.8 billion. That’s a lot of stares ... Read on at Culch.ie

The Anti-Room ...

Gold-digger Amnesty

Thoroughly depressed with the state of the nation, I decided to cheer myself up yesterday by listening to some nice, brainless pop music. I feel the qualifying adjective is important here, because there’s also very clever pop music out there, but that’s not of any use to me when I want myself opium’d up by dithering beats and sugarsnap lyrics, is it?

If there’s one thing stupid pop music has taught me, it’s that if there’s one career group more maligned than Fianna Fail politicians or IMFites, it’s gold-diggers. Yes. Young women (I calls ageism, for it appears biddies are disqualified from rushing men for the moolah) who are attracted to men more successful than themselves are terrible hussies altogether. Perhaps even responsible for a portion of our current economic woes! Gold-diggers: breaking bankers, one suit at a time.

See, I was bopping along to Cee-Lo Green’s wonderfully catchy “Fuck You” (“Forget You” to anyone still relying on the radio to get them their aural jollies) when I paused, took a breath, furrowed my brow. Cee-Lo’s complaint is that his ladyfriend left him for a much more affluent gentleman, one who owns a car and has no problem taking the lady for the odd spin in same. Seeing them spinning about the place makes Cee-Lo feel most disgruntled. If only he had the kind of money that could buy him a car! Then he could still be with the gold-digger, whom he still loves, but also really resents because she’s not turned on by penury... Read on at The Anti-Room

Culch.ie...

The Sobsons, or How I Lost My Dignity To A Cartoon

What’s the most potentially embarrassing mundanity in your life, the constant minor threat of your ending up only slightly red-faced in social settings, wishing the ground would open up just a few inches to your right so you can go, “Ooh, look at that unexpected hole! Dear me, that’s much more calamitous than my indiscretion”? Perhaps you have a raucous laugh. Perhaps you have a habit of popping to the shops in your slippers. Perhaps, like me, you cry easily. Really easily. Like, My God, that ad for life insurance is so well put together, Gawd bless all who worked on it, it’s a beautiful thing easily.

I do love a little weepage/seepage from time to time; it’s good for the soul and cleansing for the ducts, although it can also be rather mortifying when others around you don’t share your sentimental leanings. I also love The Simpsons. I absolutely adore The Simpsons. It’s rare that a day goes by without my catching an episode. I love when I can combine my interest in ceremonial weeping and The Simpsons, which is why I’ve put together this list. This, my friends, is my top five touching, beautiful, I’ve-just-melted-a-contact-lense Simpsons moments. There’s no real reason for it, outside of my wanting to combine my love of crying with my love of The Simpsons with my love of scribbling nonsense on culch.ie. Ready? Off we trot, then ... Read on at Culch.ie

The Anti-Room ...

Dithering Lows.

... As I’ve grown older, and stopped hanging around outside University libraries hugging my colour coordinated notebooks to my perky bosom and looking all intellectually adorable, the “flaws” of Wuthering Heights have become as apparent as janitors’ plans in a Scooby Doo adventure. I considered myself quite the little clever clogs when, at eighteen, I could genuinely nominate Emily Bronte’s gothic classic as my favourite book. While my friends succumbed to Marian Keyes and Ursula Le Guin, I scrambled up my own towering intellect and stood undulating in the hot air of its summit. I was an insufferable wally, in other words. Eleven years later, I’m starting to see cracks in the thing. Fissures. Christ, yawning chasms. And it upsets me greatly.

Where once there was a powerful story of oh-so-rosemantic consuming passion, now there is a deeply sinister tale of sociopathic vengeance. Where once was my deep respeck’ for the feisty Catherine, now festers an irritation at what an irrational hussy she was. Where once stood Heathcliff-my-Heathcliff, there now lies crumpled a right nasty fucker who you wouldn’t let clean out your eaves, let alone take pride of place in your boudoir. I once knew that Catherine and Heathcliff were the very best in star-crossed lovers, and now it seems that they were a right pair of selfish, whingey little sods with more money than sense and unfortunate access to damp, injurious weather whenever they wanted to prove a selfish, whingey point ... Read full piece at The Anti-Room.

Culch.ie...

We Had A Cold War Too, Y'know.

In a case of not so much looking back through rose-tinted glasses as looking back through a tose-tinted kaleidoscope, Bloc Party, in their track Hunting For Witches, referenced the transition from 90s to Noughties with the lyric

“90s: optimistic as a teen / Now it’s terror…”

And while the 90s was indeed a great decade to grow up in, with a slap bracelet on every wrist and a poster of Lee Sharpe on the inside of every locker door, I feel that Bloc Party are glossing over the terrible conflict of the summer of 1995, a scuffle that divided best mate from best mate and brought the spirit of football hooliganism into what was previously a foppish kind of hobby. I refer, of course, to the Blur vs Oasis War, the lowest, nastiest point of which was the release of Blur’s Country House and Oasis‘ Roll With It on the same, bloody, endless day ... Read on at Culch.ie

The Anti-Room ... 

What Katie Did Wrong

I was tempted to start this post with an explanation of who Katie Waissel is, “for those of you living in trees”, but then it occurred to me that not even the most moss-choked canopy-dweller could have escaped the X Factor 2010 convoy. X Factor updates are, at this point, like Brian Lenihan’s financial discrepancies – all over the place. The front covers of newspapers. The home pages of news sites. The stream of witticisms on Twitter. Your teenage sister’s Facebook status, with your granddad’s comments just below. Simon Cowell has created a monster, but it’s a monstrous guilty pleasure, and the entire global neighbourhood’s been feeding the bloody thing.

Katie Waissel is one of the finalists. She’s in the “Girls” category – female soloists under the age of twenty-eight. She’s blonde, ambitious and ballsy. And everyone hates her. She’s the pantomime villain, the air-kissing personification of all that is wrong with tabloid culture. Katie is not so much this year’s Marmite; she’s this year’s Festival Of Painful Inoculations. Read on at The Anti-Room