Andriod Pain

This Google android phone is a big source of my pain. It allows me to hang onto remnants of my past that is fast slipping away. My wife is now 7 months pregnant and in a desperate grab to hold onto my life I have used this fucking thing to buy too many records I won't listen to and too many books I won't read. This attempt at keeping a life that will disappear extends to too many gigs and too many coffees. My pain is exacerbated by other issues since conception. My poor better half has had a sword of Damocles hanging over her from work while she struggles with morning sickness which persists. My poor mother for three weeks lay in hospital between life and death. This meant a hyper quick trip to the UK. My poor Dad in shock from my mums illness popped his clogs two months later. My beloved’s mother is now on talking terms with her and my normal source of income has fundamentally changed. So this fucking thing is the black hole source of my pain. When times are tuff and they shouldn’t be as we have a baby on the way. I turn to retail therapy on my phone.

HEAD

“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong."
C. G Jung ,Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1962

 



We live in a world beset with acronyms all in upper case WTF, LOL, OMG. If Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Briggs are to be believed. Their little four alpha-digit classification acronym displayed in a list of 16 MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) . Will list. Yours. Mine and every other person on the planets. Main cognitive sequence functions,  apparently these are set early in our life, and apparently predictive our behaviour FOREVER.

Mother and Daughter were drawn to C. G. Jung's psychological work, which sparked an interest into putting a diner time theory into a practical use. With the onset of World War II in USA, Development of the MBTI initially helped women who were entering the industrial workforce for the first time, identify the sort of war-time jobs they would be good at. This initial questionnaire grew into the MBTI, which was first published in 1962.

These little acronyms result from  asking a series of question to result in, your type, I am ENTP or sometimes an ENTJ once I was ISTJ (but I took the test with a hangover) . Based on this theory it means we can all be jammed into a job of somebody else’s choice, as your functions cannot be changed, be it fisherman, politician, criminal or actor. This also could mean somebodies type would predispose them to jump off  a high structure and this mortal coil .
This doesn’t have to be the ultimate action, but it could be part of a process everyone does, some do it sometimes, others do it regularly, some spectacularly. Creatively self-sabotaging to solve a persistent problem.  

In these days of creatively manufactured bands on the Teev the ‘Monkees’ seem an oddly innocent and talented pop group, all be it in a totally manufactured way. The mid 60s bubblegum teens that watched their zany TV show, they had been forged around, were hardly the hipsters of the era. So three years into the run a spectacular destruction was organised.  By 1968 the Svengalis of the proto boy band, hit upon the idea a stream of consciousness production. A feature film called HEAD, with a real life subplot goal, to destroy the Monkees as teen idols. But it did ultimately destroy the prefab band in the process.

The Film starts with a suicide and ends with the Band suicide, according to the promo this is most extraordinary adventure, western, comedy, and love story, mystery, and drama, musical, documentary satire ever made, with only Victor Matures hairdresser knowing what it was all about.

As a destructive film it could also have been born of either the ‘Dunging-Kruger’ effect’ another cognitive type where unskilled individuals suffer from illusory symptom’s that rates their own ability much higher than it is or its half hyphenated sibling the ‘Imposter-Syndrome’ each one setting somebody or thing on a path to implosion. HEAD was about reinvention it was created out of a stream of conciseness team meeting, its subliminal marketing plan,
deliberately didn’t mentioning the film’s stars.

It also appears to be initially conceived as a vehicle for the producers next film ‘Easy Rider’, (their new direction after the suicide) So that this film, in the ever-changing world of 1969 could be sold with the slogan "From the guys who gave you Head”.The ‘Monkees’ teenies didn’t want to see a psychedelic avant-garde film, and neither did the  New York set of the time, Having already ignored the ‘Monkees’ on TV the now ignored them in Film. Plus the misleading marketing campaign was so esoteric it with just a Head.

HEAD as a film has the , the ‘Monkees’ hoodwinked, bamboozled, chased, assaulted, mocked, trapped in a black box and reduced to dandruff in the hair of the actor Victor Mature, before ending up back where they started. In the words of the sardonic Jack Nicholson who penned a tune, "So make your choice and we'll rejoice/ In never being free!" (This bit came from Wiki)

The film had no opening credits. But a song sung by Micky Dolenz. The Carol King penned Porpoise Song has Dolenz embarking on a Psychedelic suicide being taken away by mermaids. From here there and everywhere, the film morphs into something else. But by the end it becomes pretty grim acid trip, because life sucks and we are all trapped. Production on HEAD wrapped on May 21, 1968. It cost $790,000, and recouped just $16,111 in its first year.

If the team that produced HEAD of Easy Rider were subject to the tick box mentality, that we could be being led into, These brilliant, bonkers ,rubbish , weird, angry and mad fims would never get made, It needs a crazy leap to jam people together , trying to  reduce the risk reducing us all to a tick box, places us in a box in the process. Stifling our strange and sometime bizarre behaviour, which sometimes lead to these insane failures.

Myers-Briggs, and Dunning-Kruger are about why criminals get caught, its why politicians are rubbish and why we sometimes all except less HEAD than we should. Maybe it’s should be H.E.A.D( How Everybody  Accepts Drudgery) . But before committing suicide and in the best Dunning-Kruger tradition we could all make a bonkers attempt at something and fail brilliantly meaning we all really get some HEAD.

But the porpoise is waiting good-bye, good-bye
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye