toy guns that spark. To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark

I'm reflecting on yesterday's budget, and the Tory ( and New Labour ) phrase "Britain is open for business" cropped up. The idea that rich people need more money and poor people need less will definitely play well in the Chelsea mansions that Marine Hyde described in a Guardian article recently, "even Dr Johnson would tire of modern London, where bigwigs welcome global scumbags and nobody else matters…".


This chimes well with the return of Alan LORD Sugar to our screens. Last nights Apprentice opener saw the boys beat off the girls with the tried and tested business principle, people (especially tourists ) will buy any crap. The women had a far superior product, but blew their advantage by a combination of poor product placement, lousy geography, and trying to browbeat a potential customer. Sugar then confounded everyone by firing a woman who looked every inch a future global scumbag, and saving a woman who looked as though she would have trouble selling an electric fire to an Inuit, (maybe Sugar is thinking climate change and sees a future market for her in selling air conditioning in Greenland). 


This and the return of the superbly designed Madmen will provide some respite from economic woe. Mad men with it's clever  referencing of the 1950's beat/folk/abstract expressionist/cool jazz themes has a lot to live up to if it is to match it's previous series. Both these programmes and the budget remind us that capitalism is system for persuading people to buy things they don't need, with money they haven't got.


cool jazz painting is coming on