Train Journeys
Where Beatmag Defends The Indefensible
Blackbeltjonez makes his unlikely claim for the joys of railway travel in Great Britain
There’s something about being an infrequent train-traveller that makes any potential trip a treat. The dormant journeyman in me is awoken, as when one drops friends off at the airport and shares their holiday-buzz just by being within spitting distance of aeroplanes. However unlike the mild trauma of flying, train travel often provokes sentimental feelings that lighten the heart and gladden the soul. (more…)
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Ben Sherman
Miranda Michaelides makes a sturdy defense of Ben Sherman and Lacoste, classic designer labels that have been adopted by less than classic men
Ben Sherman and Lacoste are high class, classic and successful design labels whose clothes are nowadays often seen in the UK on men who are none of those things. The fellows I’m talking about hang around in groups of four or five at the local cattle market night club-bar polishing off a few sherbets (beers) Their Saturday night may involve leery sleazing over passing women, rubbish R&B, possibly a bit of vomit on the way home, maybe a fight, and definitely the unimaginative same the next week. (more…)
Filed under: Devil's Advocate by Flexmaster Nylon
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John Major
Where Beatmag Defends The Indefensible
Writer and mysterious musical artist Nag’s Head defends the Grey Man
It’s easy to feel like one of the little people, powerless to challenge the injustice of the world. Maybe you think your life is going nowhere fast. A quick look at the rise and fall of John Major could change all of this. He proves that anyone can realise their true potential, and even reach the highest public office in a small island off the coast of Norway. His example is a beacon of hope to us all. (more…)
Filed under: Devil's Advocate by Flexmaster Nylon
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Tim Gomersall dares to make the case for Clannad
Where Beatmag Defends The Indefensible
Greetings, traveller, I am going to attempt to defend the celtic/folk/world-music/new age group, Clannad, and to a certain extent, folk music as a whole. Not the modern iteration of the term, which the music media has bastardized to describe anything with an acoustic guitar in it, but the real meaning of folk; music that keeps traditional instruments and methods alive, preserving the sounds of our past and using them in a contemporary way. Yet talk to most people about folk music these days and their minds are scarred with the images of Jack Johnson or Damien Rice. Sorry kids, but that ain’t folk music! (more…)
Filed under: Devil's Advocate by Flexmaster Nylon
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Where Beatmag Defends The Indefensible
Alexis Wheeler stands tall for the stick in the salad
Oh celery. The high-fibre spoon for pregnant women eating peanut butter, the vegetable swizzle stick for Bloody Mary sipping jet-setters, the ‘despicable’ source of roughage for youngsters who can’t bare the stuff. The ol’ green twig has become pigeon-holed as a pointless, water based, tasteless mass of green nothingness associated with country soups and a dull finger foods. (more…)
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Writer and mysterious musical artist Nag’s Head stands up for boredom.
These are infotainment saturated times, and boredom has been banished forever. Millions of dedicated media professionals work quite hard 24 hours a day to ensure that your every desire is served up on a digital dinner-plate in three seconds flat. If you’re tired of my spiel already then google ‘celebrity midget fisting’, and hey presto, you are instantly un-bored. But do you NEED all that pleasure and stimulation? No. What you NEED is some of that lovely velvet-grey ennui. (more…)
Filed under: Devil's Advocate by Flexmaster Nylon
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Where Beatmag Defends The Indefensible
Tim Gomersall discovers, against all odds, that true culinary joy is a rollmop
This is a story of discovery; a love story, pivoting on one moment of clarity that would change my life forever; an inspirational happening that could so easily have slipped me by and left a gaping hole in my life… and I would never have known!
Let me start with first impressions. It was about five years ago, while eyeing up the preserves in my local delicatessen; my first fleeting glimpse of those slimy silver tubes, with their pasty white innards ejaculating from either end. I am talking, of course, about gastronomy’s ugliest child, the rollmop. Quite simply the strangest culinary creation after the jellied eel. (In fact, I could have quite easily have picked jellied eels to talk about instead, but there is simply no defending those foul beasts and I have yet to find anyone under the age of 70 who enjoys/understands them. So I’ll stick to what I know best.) (more…)
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Where Beatmag defends the indefensible.
Thomas H Green speaks out on behalf of ‘Hotel California’
From Oasis singing, “All my dreams are made, chained to the mirror and the razor blade,” to Leonard Cohen recognizing that, “Everybody knows that you live forever, when you’ve done a line or two,” pop lyricists have acknowledged the mixed blessings of icing your head with showbiz sherbert. And that’s only a part of it – the drugs, the sex, and the debauchery have been integral to the rock myth almost as long as the music itself.
Whether it’s David Essex’ fictional alter ego Jim Maclaine blowing a dog’s mind with acid in ‘Startdust’ or W.A.S.P.’s Chris Holmes floating about his swimming pool wasted, swigging vodka while his mum ticks him off in Penelope Spheeris’ ‘The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years’, rock’n'roll patently leads people off society’s beaten track. (more…)
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Laurence Llewelyn Bowen
Where Beatmag defends the indefensible.
Miranda Michaelides of interior design company MiMi Interiors (www.mimiinteriors.com) argues the case for the most irritatingly foppish man on television – Laurence Llewelyn Bowen
Yes, he’s a ponce. Yes, he looks like a dodgy new romantic wannabe from the early 1980s. And yes, he’s incorrigibly egocentric. This is a man who has dedicated an entire page of his website to photographs of himself. One clicks on the Photographs page of his website expecting to see a gallery of his design work but instead are subjected to the worse kind of cheesy high street photography of the man himself. The images range from him looking seductively into the camera, dressed in pink rose printed pyjamas holding a single red rose to his cheek to staged images of him and his wife out boating/opening presents/at home with the kids. One wonders if these are the images on Christmas cards he sends to friends and family in the vein of the Queen or Prime Minister. This is man who either takes himself far too seriously or is happy to ridicule himself on the World Wide Web. (more…)
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