Elias Nebula What He Says

TV Roundup

2012-02-07T22:39:00.004-05:00

Chris Jones, deposed cheftestant from Top Chef Texas. I started off hating him and ended up missing the poor fucking lug when he was banished from our screens. He never had a cat in hell's chance at the "great brass ring" (nor even a place at the Food and Wine "Classic" in Aspen Colorado). He had two left hands and went through life half-anaesthetized and he had an unhealthy attachment to that guy Richie, but God bless him for all his sins. He reminded me of David Foster-Wallace.

Doug Cowie would have voted for him as his Fan Favorite Winner.

Doug would of made him a winner.

Doug would of made him a champ.

Doug ought to write a book about Chris Jones.

IDEA:

Will Oldham as a character on Justified.

"Guess you ain't hyeard bout the Oldhams of Kaintuck. Brothers Ned, Paul and Will. They's sorta royalty ymight say hereabouts.

[To the tune of "The Hunters of Kentucky"]

O Kentucky

The Oldhams of Kentucky

O Kentucky

The Oldhams of Kentucky."

Will versus Boyd Crowder. Who has the bigger overbite.

Who has the better "hillbilly teeth."

Michael Nesmith - (Rare 1965 clip) Until It's Time For You To Go [HD video]

2012-02-01T14:01:00.001-05:00

The New Recuit - Michael Blessing

2012-02-01T14:01:00.000-05:00

Serge Gainsbourg chante "J'suis snob" de Boris Vian

2012-01-04T12:19:00.000-05:00

Motif Index to Top Chef

2011-12-23T11:30:00.008-05:00

For mine own writing hand, that vile and withered and mortified object at the end of my right arm, I find that the only verse worth a "hang" is that written "on the hoof/and off the cuff" (I brazenly quote from my own verse). Thus when I had finished writing down the dictated phone number for D. Oregon Morgan at his mother's house, I found I had unwittingly and miraculously written out verse:

Damian in Duns,

At his Mum's.

These happy, black ops surprizes constitute the essence of poetry ("poesy") for me. Not for me the hours in the belfry gnawing my fist over the mot juste (unlike the aforementioned Damian, when composing an e-mail - which task consumes his considerable talents for approximately 300-day stretches at a time) - nor yet for me the self-indulgent and undiscriminating "first word best word" thesis of the late Rabbi Sri Krishna Bodhisattva Ginsberg. Nor for me in fact dreaming up the entirety of "Kubla Khan". Perhaps this last does not surprise you though.

Any readers of "recent" issues of The Heliogabalian will know that Damian Morgan - absent from New York these past three or so years - remains nevertheless one of my most enduring subjects. I do not know why this is any better than you do, reader. We are as supplicants before a mute muse. She speaks not. The oracle at Delphii rasps through gibbering lips. She shuns our libations and hath crafted a hellfire for us.

________________________________________________

Speaking of best-loved motifs, the familiar motif of public grief over departed family members was really exhausted over the recent reality TV quarter.

The blonde twins on The Amazing Race said they were running the race for their father up in Heaven. I do not believe they meant this in the sense that Bill Henrickson does when he speaks of "Heavenly Father" in Big Love.

I liked those twin sisters a lot, but they were kicked off the show pretty fast for their ineptitude. Last seen trying to erect umbrellas on a beach in a tropical storm. Fortunately people on Work of Art Season Two were all too ready to take up the filiopietistical ancestor-worship motif. In the final, two out of three of the competitors made great use of their deceased fathers in creating works of art. The girl whose father was still (vexingly) alive decided to make a virtue of this disadvantage (lemonade from this lemon) and she forcibly covered her father in tape and then peeled it off, creating an effigy of her father made out of his discarded skin cells. It was peculiar, creepy, somewhat sickening, and she came last for her sins.

While this was all going on, the people on Top Chef Texas were hard-pushed to match it. This week, the challenge set for the "cheftestants" was to cook a meal inspired by the person who first got them interested in cooking. People were jumping at the opportunity to get right sentimental and sob in the "diary room". While people were milking their tear ducts for all they were worth over parents and grandparents, that one guy, Ty-Lor (stupider name even than Sucklord if you ask me) said that his inspiration was his Japanese nanny. Tom Colicchio went, "Your love for your Japanese nanny came through in your excellent chicken tenders."

Times like this I realise that Americans haven't got a clue about class dynamics at all. The English despise the rich, quite rightly, while the Americans have an utterly uncritical blind spot about wealth. They gaze upon the rich only with unfeigned awe.

This fact was brought home to me most abundantly by clueless New York magazine cloyingly cooing over some rich brat who made some self-serving youtube announcement where she said, "Although I am one of the 1% with all their attendant luxuries, I stand militantly up for my brethren in the 99%!"

In fact, every time I read a profile of some worthy in the "Occupy" movement they turn out to be some former Wall Street employee living a life of leisure, indulging in spirited protest as a curious diversion before the nightly reading of Horace. Or they are the professional crusty vermin, like Andy Sola's friend with the white dreads and the surplus store army jacket, who had travelled from America to Germany to England expressly to protest against the unfair distribution of wealth.

Anyway, as I was saying, the Dead Ancestor Motif was doing the rounds on the reality shows, and so the characters (sorry, cheftestants) on Top Chef Texas whose parents and grandparents were alive and well were feeling left-out and alienated. They sniffled sentimentally and wished that their families were dead. So one character, nothing daunted, defiantly started crying anyway because her grandparents were "getting older now" and "they won't always be around."

Yes, I thought, as she dried her eyes and carried on preparing sausages wrapped in boiled cabbage, the existence of Death is regrettable.

"Horrible Self-Realization" (Or, "Mr. Hag Told My Story")

2011-11-22T20:04:00.007-05:00

It occurred to me shockingly, spontaneously, at the age of thirty-eight, doing the washing-up:

"Have I really gone lo these many years thinking Johnny Paycheck was Merle Haggard?"

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Related Joke: Loveably out-of-date luddite confuses Blogger with Boggle.

Easy mistake to make - both are trivial and fatuous exercises involving scoring points from a random muddle of letters.

Kelly is a Headbanger (Sheena is a Punk Rocker)

2011-11-19T10:14:00.006-05:00

"Bang your head!

Bang your mother-fucking-head!"

GRAVEDIGGAZ

I read in Us Weekly that Kelly Osbourne has mussed up her hair again -- and also mucked up her brains incidentally! -- while "frugging" at the disco. Apparently she "literally" smashed her head on the old punk rock!!

She crushed the surface of her skull like a boiled egg on a "PA".

Seriously though - let me wipe these tears of laughter aside and facetiously claim to be serious - is there a pattern forming here, discernible only to the elite? They don't call 'em headbangers for nothing. First Bret Michaels smashed his head open on a descending piece of scenery, invoking unwanted brain damage, and now this. Hair metal people and their progeny are cursed to "bang their heads" to their disadvantage.

I see why Bret did it - it gave him a solid and shrewdly sentimental excuse never to remove his toupee (artfully fastened firmly to his scalp with his "trademark bandana") even when cut-throat journalists are threatening to pull it from his head. Now he can never be bullied in so unjust a way again by the "free press". Any journalist who henceforth tries to pull off his wig-and-scarf combo would be howled out of the streets called Grub and Fleet for a wanton lack of compassion. It would be like the phone-hacking scandal only ten times worse because it would be a wig-hacking scandal and it would be happening to that poor permanently brain-damaged worthy BRET MICHAELS.

Why Kelly Osbourne saw fit to diving-headbutt a Marshall stack is another matter altogether. Could be (I am merely speculating) that since she looks increasingly (and regrettably) like her wide-jawed father already she is trying to compound this magnificent emulation (this august and venerable gesture of filiopiety) by acquiring brain-damage similar to his.

But Ozzy is not brain-damaged is he? Let me correct myself. He just likes to bang his head.

_________________________________

Look at the state of the world today and this is all I have to say? A joke about Kelly Osbourne, a week late even? Still, you take it where you can get it these days, when "inspiration" strikes. Verily these are hard reduced times for "satire". My Zuccotti Park material isn't up to much.

Sam & Friends - Promo/ID/Skit/Spot - c.1961

2011-11-15T21:31:00.000-05:00

Sam & Friends - Where Hunger Is From (color)

2011-11-15T21:26:00.000-05:00

Thesmophoria

2011-11-07T09:43:00.003-05:00

Today the women at the festival

Are going to kill me for insulting them!

ARISTOPHANES.

It’s interesting the things you see when you are out on a run. When I lived in Hethersett and ran down Canns Lane, across the Wymondham road and out into the wilderness I often used to see nobody, except for maybe a faraway tractor, abstractly ploughing a distant (alternate) earth. I might run back through fields of cows and a farmyard and then over the stile and under the lichgate of the church where they say I was married-- or equally I’d run back past the King’s Head where on occasion I'd sit hugger-mugger with the locals and sup cider. The most you might see if you were lucky would be a school of ducklings that teemed recklessly all over Hethersett.

Now I don’t have the transcendental luxury of running through damp, deserted dells, sliding on ancient sod and loam; and the only church steeples on the horizon are parenthesized by chimney stacks --- those of the Polish church on Manhattan Ave or the one in that concrete Sahara of the Bozart out by Calvary Cemetery.

Nevertheless I see some different things that I wouldn’t see in Hethersett. I was on my run Friday night, around six o’clock, and it was quiet out. There was a chill wind blowing and it was that temporal hinterland between work and play, so nobody was out. I relish the solitude: I can stare squarely at the Manhattan skyline and still almost imagine I'm in Hethersett. That is until I turned I turned onto Franklin from the triangle at the top-left tip of the island. I was curving on to Eagle towards West Street when all of a sudden I was engulfed in a crazed scene. Thesmophoria. Monkee-mania. Young girls and older young girls were everywhere amassed in clumps, wandering dazed, wringing their hands and hoarse with joy in the midst of a handful of film company trailers. Out of the hubbub came a caravan of black SUVs, and as they passed the girls screamed especially vividly. All I could see was a leering weed-carrier at the wheel of one SUV, wherefore I was puzzled.

“What’s the occasion,” I asked one of the girls. “What’s the big deal.”

“It’s Justin Bieber and his bodyguard!” she gushed.

“Justin Bieber?” I said, all impressed.

(I did not say “cor - Justin Bieber’s bodyguard?”)

I squinted wistfully into the tinted window as it passed and chuckled ruefully. We meet on the level and part on the square.

As I ran homeward along West Street I thought, incredibly, “That could have been me.”

Once upon a time I held the world in the palm of my hand. I----

I went on, as an one cheated by the Lords of Life, “It should have been me. After all...”

(Pause HERE for comic effect.)

"... I was dragging my hair forward years before he did it.”

"Zilch Remix" The Monkees

2011-11-04T13:10:00.000-04:00

Zilch

2011-11-04T13:09:00.000-04:00

"They Say The King's Gone Mad."

2011-11-03T13:27:00.007-04:00

“QADDAFI PRONOUNCED MAD”

I confess to the tribunal that I had been disturbed by all the vicious footage of Qadaffi's decline and fall. Not having stayed as close as perhaps I should have to the arab street or the revolutionary underground in Tripoli over the past forty years, I couldn't in good earnest summon enough righteous angst in support of the bloodthirsty masses of crowing tweeters and Youtube snuff posters. I say, I wasn't slavering and honking a klaxxon when I heard of how they had "scourged" the Colonel with a cattle prod &c. I really couldn't seem to get into the democratic moment and share in the joys of the Arab Spring. I felt like a terrible reactionary. That is, until I read the New Yorker piece about Qaddafi's last days and I was illuminated.

I was reading it while my wife overslept. I roused her with excerpts.

“You know what they called Qaddafi towards the end of his reign?" I asked her. "They called him ‘Abu Shafshufa,' which means ‘Old Frizzhead’. His problem hair was the subject of national mirth and satire.”

Nothing daunted I went on, “The truly amazing thing is that when he had fled his compound and the rebels broke in and sacked the place, alongside all the other outrageous luxuries there abounding they found a personal hairdressing salon. Can you believe it? A hair salon for Qaddafi! And still he looked like that. Whoever was doing his hair, he should have fired them.”

Finally my wife drowsily responded, with a woman’s patented insider knowledge of such things: “He was very vain, that’s why he looked that way.”

Only now did the penny drop for me. “What, do you mean you think he intended to look that way? And he thought it looked good? My God... the man was insane.”

Oliver Reed talking about Alex Hurricane Higgins

2011-10-24T21:34:00.000-04:00

Keith Allen walks off The Late Show

2011-10-24T21:31:00.000-04:00

Nige = Mani

2011-10-22T23:24:00.003-04:00

I was in the New York Public Library, the Jewish Division, and I had to look something up on the internet. While I was at it I thought I'd check my e-mails and so I passed through the MSN site, which announced that the Stone Roses were reforming. The room, which is (quite rightly) well-policed against people making undue noise in the room, was full of orthodox jews. I stupidly clicked on the link to read about the Stone Roses reforming.

After a moment of whirring, the computer started to play a muffled audio track, presumably of the Stone Roses press conference, and I started flailing and pawing the keyboard trying to shut down the page before I got in trouble with the Shomrim.

I only remembered it days later and in a supremely dull, bored moment, dangerously close to suicide, I thought to look it up. Looking at the pictures of the "lads", I had to say: here is a cadaverous bunch indeed. Ian Brown is the obvious target for that comment, of course, but I'd actually like to draw particular attention to Mani in this instance. Is he turning into Genesis P. Orridge? Is Mani having a series of cosmetic operations to make him look like "Genesis", just as "Genesis" (real name NIGEL) had a series of unusual cosmetic operations to turn him and his wife into "thee kosmik androgyne"? Are Genesis and Mani now on a collision course in a mad struggle to look exactly like eachother? Admittedly Genesis presently looks like Mani if he had eaten the other three members of the Stone Roses -- and then had breast implants. Still stranger things have happened.

On the subject of industrial pioneer lookalikes, I was also watching the somewhat lo-fi & uncritical four-hour documentary about BOYD RICE at the Anthology Film Archive (I suspect that the CIA probably had somebody inveigled in there, duly identifying each audience member and entering their details on a special list) and as I watched BOYD hold forth on whatever subject conceivably interested him, I thought, "Simon Cowell. Boyd Rice sounds and looks like Simon Cowell."

What can I do with this information.

What will it mean for the future of the industrial--avant-garde music interface?

Judge Dread - Big Seven

2011-10-22T12:33:00.002-04:00

Wait - is he really telling the truth? Did Judge Dread really make it to Number One? Even in 1972? I guess if Lieutenant Pigeon managed it with "Mouldy Old Dough" then it's conceivable. 1972 was a good year.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

[Afterword: He was lying. He got to #8. Interestingly, he died of a heart attack walking from the stage after a performance at the Penny Theatre in Canterbury. What a coincidence - I died many a death in the Penny Theatre myself.]

Patrick Dimon - Pigeon Without A Dove

2011-10-22T12:24:00.000-04:00

WTF

"Superior Gumshoes" + "Sing We of Ordway"

2011-10-19T23:08:00.004-04:00

I just watched the final episode in the second season of Luther. Despite some of the standard and routine English drama-school histrionics (the fallacy that all psychotics speak in that same Home Counties crisp monotone) and screenwriterly excesses (too many Doctor Who fans in England methinks, combing through Apocalypse Culture looking for interesting obscure and deviant psychoses) it was pretty good. We watched a few episodes of Lewis recently, which of course suffers from the same shortcomings.

The idea's this. I had the idea for a Marvel--DC style crossover between Luther and Lewis. They could call it Lewthis. You could have John Luther taking the Oxford Tube from Notting Hill (maybe a scene of him in the MVE comics shop first - sneezing in the toxic 50p basement - getting a Boots Meal Deal for the ride) and getting caught up in some kind of bullshit rigmarole involving the usual crop of likely suspects (shrill classics students; their jaded professors; some disenchanted "townies") . I think that Hathaway and Luther would lock Holmesian horns while Lewis would just get exasperated in the presence of superior gumshoes.

It's an idea. If you could have the Punisher team up with Archie Andrews I don't see why this couldn't happen.

Secondly, I have been reading some of the immediate post-Crisis Superman reboot storyline. Always du jour, my dear - if over twenty-years out of date.

In a half savage country, out of date;

Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;

Capaneus; trout for factitious bait:

John Byrne, Roger Stern, Marv Wolfman, Jerry Ordway. The latter is really one of the great writer-artists (pray file him alongside the great singer-drummers: Christian Vander, Mickey Dolenz...). Reading this, I looked up Jerry Ordway's wikipedia entry and saw that he is one of those artists who falls into the category first noted by my honorable colleague D. OREGON MORGAN: artists who look like their own drawings. Damian originally noted this about Mike McMahon, I believe. The same is surely true of the great ORDWAY.

"Jeremiad -- Righteous Plaint." (" --Whine.")

2011-10-14T22:52:00.006-04:00

The internet contains some fascinating "factoids" and you're bound to miss a few of them. You'll be forgiven if you overlooked this one in the Bernie Winters wikipedia entry:

"Schnorbitz once fell into a swimming pool at Terry Scott's house, only to be rescued by Barbara Windsor."

In the entry it is presented as plainly and bluntly as it is here. A non-sequitur.

Never mind why I was looking up Bernie Winters and Schnorbitz on the internet.

________________________________________

Some people found my remarks about the late STEVE JOBS in a previous post "impious" and "inappropriate". Perhaps that is true. Perhaps it is not. Perhaps I didn't go far enough. I have just read a peculiar pseudo-eulogy about the man (I say "man" - in fact he's a disgraceful corpse) by the esteemed novelist and "essayist" Nicholson Bake [sic - Ed.] in the New Yorker. Nicholson "Half" ("Bake") Baker said, "Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, in a letter, that when he'd finished a novel he felt like a house after the movers had carried out the grand piano. That's what it feels like to lose this world-historical personage. The grand piano is gone."

Apart from that being an extraordinarily poor metaphor by Nabokov - and so very fucking precious - I really can't tell if Nicholson Baker is being sarcastic or not. He goes on to remark that "Jobs lived to see the Beatles on i-Tunes." He says, "When he was young, Jobs looked remarkably like James Taylor." What can he mean? Does Baker dislike the idiotic reverence shown towards Jobs even more than I do, and unlike me does he manage to meet it with unctuous sarcasm, so subtle it can scarcely be identified as such?

I can't easily understand this man BAKER. I try to discern the light in all the murk. I thought Nicholson Baker was all righteously politicized and vehemently opposed to the destruction of our libraries and our periodical archives-- read a piece by him where he rightly disdained the Kindle --- credulously believed that he had found his soapbox on this worthy subject and was dedicated to it. Now here he comes frothing after Steve Jobsworth, all done up in weeds and crepe and wringing his hands. Swears that the i-Pad is the future of communications. Extols the i-Phone.

This (and by "this," let me be clear, I mean in fact the current state of the planet and all of its motley inhabitants) is one of those situations where I feel a bit like Rip Van Winkle; like I have been asleep for twenty years and am wholly out of tune with my fellow denizens on this particular psychic plane. I first felt this way when Princess Diana unreasonably ("unseasonably") smashed her fucking head on the punk rock dashboard of her car. I was on a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley when it occurred. When I returned to England a few months later the place was quite unrecognizable. The people in weed and crepe &c and placing wreaths everywhere with a peculiar mania. Nothing was ever quite the same after that. People began setting down bouquets at every convenience and the measliest provocation. Good news for the florists - bad news for the universe.

I was watching America's Next Top Model - which "activity" is, incidentally, the dictionary definition of wantonly, petulantly wasting your time - and first they had the Kardashians on and then they would have the models dressing up as Michael Jackson. Followed the requisite gushing about "Michael" which was of such a magnitude that I had that very same thought: Have I been surreptitiously transported by mischievous cosmic interlopers to a parallel universe where all meaning and purpose is forfeit? Lady Gaga and David Foster Wallace similarly inspire me. And now the fevered clamour about Steve Jobs.

Which is to say - in the cryptic, equivocal tones of one NICHOLSON BAKE (sic) -- R.I.P.

Song for Steve Jobs (II)

2011-10-07T11:48:00.002-04:00

Another song Bob Stanley surely likes. Another golden classic of mid-late Nineties London.

What I wonder is the connection I seem to be insisting upon, between Mr. ROBERT STANLEY of LONDON and the late Mr. STEVE "BLOE" JOBS of SILICON VALLEY, CA.?

Durned if I know.

Song For the Late Steve Jobs (I)

2011-10-07T10:53:00.003-04:00

I was in Los Angeles last month, in the Farmer's Market, and I wanted to buy something for the plane back to New York, so of course I tracked down a copy of Mojo for the flight. The only time I read magazines now is on a plane. Do not ask me why. It just seems the right place and the only right place for that eccentric activity of reading magazines.

I only bought this issue because Noel Gallagher had "edited" it and Noel's always good for a laugh innit. Well innit. He always has something diverting to say at his brother's expense at the very least. In fact that's all the Gallaghers have been good for for the past twenty years: amusing interviews, pitched skirmishes betwixt brothers. Still it is a talent of sorts and I'd rather read Noel waxing wrathful than to read the drear, nebulous philosophy espoused by the lads from Radiohead for instance; or their legion of wan, weak-chinned heirs.

One article was about World of Twist, a band I used to enjoy a lot (the "only Madchester band I liked" before I let Shaun Ryder into my heart) (gruesome image, that), and that well-loved refrain, "When shall their like be seen again by such as we?" I'd once asked this question myself, with embarrassing results.

I was in the Spread Eagle in Camden with Laurence Remila and we were naturally getting drunk and riled and fell to pestering Bob Stanley. It seems like we did this quite frequently for one happy summer. Most often, of course, we were annoying Steve Diggle in the Good Mixer - but that is not germane to my story today. We were going to Bob Stanley, "Don't you ever like to kick out the jams, Bob? Don't you ever like to listen to Pussy Galore, man? Have you not read Gulcher and The Aesthetics of Rock from cover to cover as all good boys should?"

He didn't and he hadn't and I suppose he never will, but we got round to talking about other groups and I said, "You know who was a great band, World of Twist was a great band. That band: World of Twist. They were good. World of Twist out of Manchester. World of Twist. I wonder what happened to them."

I won-der who's kiss-ing her now...

"Half of them are sitting at the next table," said Bob and it was true - they were sitting right there drinking with Bob's own chic crowd (the same crowd we had dragged him away from to drone in his ear about better living through Richard Meltzer).

Speak of the devil and he shall appear.

Half of World of Twist reformed as an inferior band - with Martin Fry's brother I believe - but after all they didn't have the eminent "M.C. Shells" or the charismatic frontman Tony Ogden (now, like the late MR. JOBS, a tenant of the grave) or indeed the enigmatic "Adge". This truncated phenomenon was the group that sat down to quaff with the Saint Etienne crowd that evening.

I (might I speak of "my young self"?) was crushed inside by this turn of events. It is nice to lament over lost things ("...ubi sunt...") and wish that they were still around, just as it is grievously disappointing when they then appear right in front of you idling in a Camden pub of an evening. When Bob Stanley said, "They're right there," as if to say, the objects of your nostalgic lamentation are right before thee!, I sniffed and remarked, "Yes. So they are. Good day to you now, boy Bob. Goe back to your table, God be with thee."

And where are they now, these my old Camden nights?

("And - where did I put my Camel lights?")

Nota bene, there is a finer remix of this track, with a "chat" track from what appears to have been a documentary about Joe Meek. You can find it on the Sweets CD single. It's well worth your time. A real golden classic.

"Death Comes For the I-Pad Guy."

2011-10-07T00:08:00.008-04:00

Overheard in the comics shop today:

“The guy who invented the I-Pad is dead.”

“Sucks.”

I didn’t find it to “suck”. I found it to be okay. I felt okay about it. I found that I would endure and one day I would be all right.

Indeed I suddenly felt rich. Steve (“Mr. Bloe”) Jobs was once as rich as Croesus but now he is a mouldering corpse with very little pleasure in life. To put it unflinchingly, he’s no better off than a dead cat at the bottom of your garden or mine. No life left in him. His lack of money or not doesn't grieve him terribly.

Right verily it is said “You can’t take it with you.” He’ll be at the gates of Limbo as penniless as the rest of us. Pulling the pockets of his shroud inside-out in the universal symbol of having no money. I, on the other hand, am stoney broke too but I can walk around Greenpoint and look at the hulking sky overhead and I can breathe in the air and then wince because after all Greenpoint smells like a cheap cigarette.

Of course it does - everybody here smokes cheap cigarettes.

Really, and it’s shameful to admit this of course, but I tenderly relish it when the rich and the influential die like worms - I feel like I have won ten quid in the lottery. One of the few ways we can exercise our powers as citizens of a democratic people's republic is in outliving the rich and then philosophizing about death over their remains. That and voting.

Then I think - addressing myself - , “Yes, mate, enjoy that thought, savour that mean, vulgar, unworthy thought, crow over a defenseless carcass a while, but memento mori, we all die eventually and Steve Jobs after all probably lived a far more luxurious existence than you have until he regretfully (sic) died. Think of the dead kings of ancient Mesopotamia in their gilded palaces of gold (sic). They’re dead and redundant now, brainfood exclusively for fact-checking classicist pedants, but in their time those lads really had a whale of a time of it. And Steve Jobs probably had a lovely house. Massive. Palatial. He took a golf buggy to pick up his mail. Those are the memories you can’t take away. Although of course when you die your memories evaporate as your brain cells turn into dirt. So in a roundabout way those memories have been taken from him, or rather they will be in the next few months as his once-mighty, now-voided brain is slowly eroded by the elements - the natural pressure of the coffin lid and the dirt above it.” Here I pulled a sentimental face and moved on to another subject.

"Lost Post, Helas."

2011-09-12T13:34:00.003-04:00

I wrote a piece which I immediately deleted about how the people at Film Forum - and Americans in general - cannot pronounce Serge Gainsbourg's surname. It also contained my unique meditation on the fact that the guy who plays Gainsbourg in the biopic seems to look like him (this from the trailer), but the women who play Bardot and Jane Birkin don't. I went one step further to wonder aloud that surely it is easier to find women that look like Bardot or Jane Birkin than it is to find somebody who looks like Gainsbourg.

Not that Bardot and Birkin are not "vraiment et beaucoup chouette" but you see Birkin and Bardot types about. Not so with Serge Gainsbourg types. He wasn't a "type".

Perhaps you're starting to understand why I deleted this post.

I also made roundabout and footling comments about the existence of a fallout shelter near the Hudson Park library.

I ended it with a weak punchline about General Lafayette and Jesus Christ. When I am at a loss for a punchline I prefer to invoke Death or the Holy Trinity and in this instance I was certainly short of a coherent punchline.

Anybody who is interested can write to me personally for a copy of the original post. A full list of deleted jokes and posts (and novels and poetry cycles and solo albums) is available on request.

"Et In Arcadia Ego."

2011-09-08T21:23:00.012-04:00

I went into the city in the rainy season - on the eve of Labor Day - to see the Film Forum double-bill of The Taking of Pelham 123 and The Detective. The latter has to be one of the dumbest films I ever saw. A social-commentary murder-mystery with Frank Sinatra as the hardboiled slewfoot wrangling with the social problem of homosexuality. Anyway because it was raining so hard I really saw no point in dressing well to go into town and I slid on a Captain America t-shirt and an anorak without giving it much thought. I who once dressed so well.

Et in Camden ego--- in ski jacket and v-neck---

After the gumshoe double-bill I decided, on a whim, to go uptown to 33rd Street & see what could be seen at the Labor Day comics sale at Jim Hanley's Universe. Back issues were half-price, it was bruited. Prices like these you can't beat, it was rumoured.

I bought a few issues of Blood of the Demon, a Where Monsters Dwell and a Legion of Super-Heroes. Well, you don't care what I bought and nor should you ("and nor do I"). The funny part came when I realised that I was in the comics shop wearing a Captain America t-shirt. That's like going to a rock show wearing the band's t-shirt. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, but one of the shopworkers froze me in my steps when he said to me, "Hey man nice t-shirt, where'd'you get it?"

I stammered - truthfully - but trying to distance myself from my own t-shirt - "I don't know where it's from. My wife bought me it."

I don't know what it is or who it depicts. Who is Captain America anyway? What is this place?

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which according to belief stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday.

Emerson, "Experience."

Then the shop guy goes, "Well ask her where you got it and tell me."

"All right," I said, "yeah okay," only half paying attention to the conversation. "If I ever see you again I'll tell you that."

That didn't seem an unreasonable comment - it's not like I knew the guy and we were regularly sharing lengthy intimate chats about my wardrobe - but the two shop people recoiled at it, said it was RUTHliss. They were shocked but helplessly admiring my offhand BRUTALITAY.

"Dude that's CODE-BLOODED: 'if I ever see you again.'"

"He's HARSCH. 'I will not see you again.'"

They were both acting like we were old friends and I had just "cut them dead" in the city road --- like they were my long-suffering, hugger-mugger mates and I had just "shown them the mitten". I think what frightened them was that behind my casual remark -- as with most of my "casual remarks" -- lurked the spectre of death, hands in pockets. In my way I was saying,

"We shall not see each other you and I again to share the details of this t-shirt because God has builded him up a donjon called HELL for ones such as thee, and I am bound -- elsewhere --- I say we shall not meet again henceforward!"

"CANTANKEROUS homes!"

"I say to you that death shall catch us in the cars and vanquish us, though we mark it not; dost see it?"

"Ha -- VICIOUS. Okay seeya soon dude. Find out about that t-shirt for me."

______________________________________________________________

Return of the Bad Men. Worst part of the barfight comes after they have broken chairs and barstools over each others backs, dragged each other athwart and behind the bar, and of course smashed the requisite windows and whiskey bottles: Vance Cordell throws Sundance through a giant cobweb.

_______________________________________________________________

Comics fanboys online: always bitching about deus ex machinas. Who would've imagined this thirty years ago? Who taught them this phrase? Surely not a kindly classical civilization teacher. It just goes to show you what a little education will do. And I mean a little education.

Miss O'Dell - George Harrison

2011-08-30T08:32:00.000-04:00

Captain Sensible - Croydon 7" ( Audio Only) 1982

2011-08-29T22:39:00.000-04:00

Big Break

2011-08-29T22:38:00.001-04:00

I never knew there was a full version of the Big Break theme tune. Well, I suppose, if you ever thought about it you would presume there would be. The question is, Why would you ever think about it?

I knew it was by Captain Sensible, and I remember distinctly reading an interview with the good Captain where he went out of his way to pronounce Jim Davidson a "cunt". I found this impossible to conceive. How can he sing so earnestly the theme to Big Break and then say that Jim Davidson is a cunt?
These were innocent days - before the advent of Osama Bin Laden and mobile phones - when we believed that men were innately good chaps.

I remember being in the Lake District with Mihajlovic, and we would be jogging along the jagged tops of mountains howling songs into the wind to pass the time, and slipping up in the mud and the swamp fug, midway through a song. We decided that the most degrading situation possible to mortal man would be to slip on your ass while singing the theme to Big Break. In my memory at least this exact thing happened, almost inevitably, to Mihajlovic, returning from Grasmere to Dungeon Ghyll. He shall of course deny it, if he is still out there.

Mihajlovic - are you out there? Did you ever exist or did I imagine it all?

Have you ascended to a higher plane, as I could well believe you have?

Answers to the usual address.

Hurricane - A Humbug.

2011-08-29T22:27:00.004-04:00

Hurricane Irene was a humbug. I am not joining the baying crowd who claim that the "mainstream media" colluded to exaggerate the case. I don't even say that it was a storm in a teacup - although the few twigs strewn on the ground in McCarren Park today made me chuckle.
No: I saw Jim Watkins, exhausted and hollowed-out and made manic with anxiety and rage, babble and seethe about the advancing hell-holocaust. Jim Watkins flustered?-- Why you might say his hair had turned overnight if he wasn't so intoxicated with black hair dye. I also saw and shall testify to any court in the land that channel eleven weatherman Mr. G came back from his holiday in Spain expressly to speak in tongues on the subject of the advancing death-disk. These boon chaps were in right earnest, even as they were mouthing the most arrant bilge.

What I would say is that the reportage was a mess. The reportage was tornadic. It was all over the place. As Larry Mendte says, "This was a hurricane the size of the country of Germany." And like "the country of Germany," it was a chaotic and confusing jumble, quite incomprehensible to sane men. They were simultaneously broadcasting from the New Jersey shore, the Far Rockaways, Battery Park and up and down the Long Island shore, without any sense of narrative coherence. Except in each case they were standing on some forlorn beach staring at the tumbling surf.

We meanwhile were in Greenpoint wondering what in the blazes this had to do with us, and where exactly we fit in this poorly-assembled jigsaw. They would simply skip from Battery Park to the far Rockaways, passing silently over the borough of Brooklyn without even a wink. Had they simply said, "This is where the hurricane is. This is where it's likely headed," it might have been easier to comprehend coolly. Instead it was a chaos and Mr. G's infrared satellite shots were no help.

People were in the dark as to where the "eye" of the storm was. And what after all is the "eye"? What are the "bands" of rain? Where, pray tell, is the hurricane in all this? When I got up at eight on the fated morning of the hurricane, I heard that the "eye" was now over Manhattan. I had no idea what this signified and I still don't. As I say, it was a humbug - a South Sea bubble.

The state of reportage mirrors aptly the state of the novel. No narrative coherence in either.

Must try harder, America.

From a Country Doctor's Desk in the Eye of The Hurricane

2011-08-28T08:50:00.005-04:00

I sprung up this morning in delight - we still had electricity and the windows were intact. I flipped on the TV as a reflex; sorry to say that Rosanna Scotto was providing the best account of the day (the women on channel eleven were shuffling papers, stammering nonsense, all caught amidships).

They were showing the same sort of outdoor shots as yesterday: grey grainy images of rainy rivers and crashing surfs. It still hasn't dawned on the televisual industry that foggy shots of water in transit do not adequately convey the drama they might when you are actually there on the scene.
"Look at this large puddle in a parking lot."
"Here is some driftwood on the beach. It has been moved a few inches. This flotsam was broke quite in twain."

One guy at Fox, talking to Rosanna Scotto on videolink from Queens, was pointing at a girl, flopped desultorily, legs dangling, in a green rubber ring, floating in shallow floodwater. He spoke to her father:
"What's she doing in that ring?"
"Ahhh she's nuts."
"Whaddaya doin'?"
"Gonna have a barbecue. [Hollers into microphone] AYYY ROSANNA SCOTTO, come along to our barbecue."

ROSANNA SCOTTO: Ask him what he's going to be cooking.

This didn't advance our understanding of the hurricane much. Eventually the on-the-spot correspondent tried to get in the tube himself -- unsuccesfully -- he was last seen heading into the maelstrom, manfully trying to find "deeper water". I don't know if Mayor Bloomberg would approve of this project. He might curtly call it irresponsible. Eventually Rosanna Scotto realised this, and went from goading the correspondent to get in the tube to saying contritely, "We're sorry, that was a bad idea. Put the tube away."

Next Rosanna spoke to a lady pensioner who cannily inviegled her own political message into her account of the hurricane. Her message was: "Old people are people too."
"That's just great, Dorothea," Rosanna said (after first calling her "Irene"). Soon she was coercing the good old lady into crooning a bar of "Goodnight Irene."
Incidentally, people have been getting that song wrong in countless reports ("Come On Irene" "Goodbye Irene").

(Later, speaking to roving correspondent Steve Keeley, they discussed Dorothea again and Steve noted that the elderly people who stayed behind at home were better off than the ones who went obediently to the evacuation centres, because at the evacuation centres "they ran out of Depend adult incontinence diapers".
Rosanna said, "All right Steve that's enough."
"They were in a mess down at the evacuation centre Rosanna."
"I said that's enough Steve.")

Meanwhile, I am left wondering, has the hurricane happened or is there more yet to come? It seems unclear entirely where the eye of the storm is --- by some reports it is about to descend upon me even now. And if these be my last recorded words-----

---God save me if these be my last recorded words--- !

Deluge Descending / "Dauntless Falls"

2011-08-27T20:59:00.004-04:00

A whole day was spent in the scholarly exegesis of Mayor Bloomberg's increasingly terse online and televisual updates on Hurricane Irene. Mayor Bloomberg says not to take out your window AC - says that removing this will cause more damage than leaving it in through the hurricane. This comment puzzles me, but I am deferring to the mayor's superior experience of such matters & shall hold him to this piece of advice come what may. Also on the local government emeregency site: the mysterious preparation of a "Go Bag". This is a bag you must have around the house at all times, it is said, with contents including your spare keys and a whistle and copies of your ID documents and granola bars &c &c. What, I thought, about my notes towards sundry novels and poetry cycles? What about photographs of preferred ex-girlfriends? We do not have a Go Bag in our home.

Alternately with this I was scrutinising the various news reports on the approaching deluge. Is this how it will go when the world eventually ends (as it, after all, must)? Arthur Chien in Queens, interviewing a rambling pensioner ("I left my gun in the basement and it got wet")? Contradictory, vague, ruminating predictions; shots of people pointedly, recalcitrantly, pissing about in the sea as the cyclone comes.

Every channel had "news updates" with interchangeable soggy anchorwomen in anoraks, each standing on a beach, saying in awed tones, "If you doubt the seriousness of the situation, just look out there," and pointing to some distant foggy surf. The looming threat has not been communicated particularly well by this method. Rainfall, shifting sands and sporadic gusts of wind, it has been conclusively established, do not make for gripping television.

In Greenpoint at 9AM everybody was already about and abroad and dashing from shop to shop looking in vain for a flashlight. None were to be had. "The cupboard was bare." I triumphally grabbed the last 16-pack of AA batteries in Rite Aid - perhaps the last pack in the five boroughs. Perhaps the last in the civilized world. Small, pathetic victory, mine to have.

We went into the toy shop and my wife was seriously considering buying a glowstick.
Then she goes, "Let's get a donut at Peter Pan."
"What good is a donut?"
People were buying things they didn't need, because they were in a high state of aniticipatory panic. Donuts indeed.

"Idea For Sliding Bookshelf."

2011-08-05T14:18:00.007-04:00

On the food channel there are some strange advertisements to be observed, by those who have eyes to see. They don't seem to be aimed at the expected demographic of refined and discerning culinary Petroniuses ("elegantiae arbiter"), such as the ubiquitous Brooklyn "locavore" food bloggers. They seem more aimed at fat people in the Mid-West.

One of them advertises a versatile miniature trough for cooking meatloaf in. It seems like it could be the legendary vessel - that grail goblet - that Liam Hughes was hunting high and low after for years, in the dreamy hopes of replicating the lasagne that you could get at Centrale at Cambridge Circus (still, incidentally, the finest lasagne I have ever eaten).

In the advertisement, the loud bald gentleman selling the item crows about how you can make a "french onion meatloaf". I heard this and stared across, wide-eyed at my wife, unable to speak. Maintaining the reverent silence, she simply frowned and shook her head and that was that: another dream wordlessly dashed.

Another advert is for a spice rack - also fine for storing your numerous prescription pills, America - which is a sort of cross between a lazy susan and the bookshelves on rollers that they have in some libraries (such as in the basement at the University of East Anglia library). These bookshelves slide along on casters and the shelves themselves are inaccessible until you grab the wheel on the side of the shelf and start cranking it, at which time the shelves heavingly part and a space emerges down which you may travel and grab at the books. (You could conceivably squash somebody in these devices, in fact; and I have written rather exhaustively on this very nice subject elsewhere.)

Seeing this ingenious idea for a spice rack, I naturally began to formulate a giant version that could be employed for shelving books. Did I perhaps mention that I have too many books?

Sometimes, feeling suffocated by the stacks around me, my mind turns in desperation to this subject of alternative methods of shelving. (Other times, it turns to leaving home and riding the rail, disappearing into the Western horizon and oblivion.) There is a scene in Seijun Suzuki's superb Zigeunerweisen that features a rare alternative to the customary and very linear Western shelf, which at the time of first seeing the film I took the time to sketch, in order to one day replicate this amazing model.

I have known a few carpenters in my "short" life, none of whom would regrettably carry out my visionary projects. The carpenter is, classically, a pragmatic type, and I envy him that. One time I was talking to Carpenter John, who had recently been making a "small house" in Upstate New York. We had been discoursing pleasantly for some time upon this curious phenomenon of small houses when I somewhat uncharacteristically volunteered, hesitantly and shyly, the information that I had a book on that very subject and that John could borrow it if he liked.

"No - I wouldn't like to," he responded cheerfully.

I was so taken aback by this refreshing refusal that I barked with laughter.

How often we go through this transaction of reluctantly being "generous" and reluctantly partaking of the generosity.

Well I see that my time is up again and once again I have wondered quite far from my given subject which was, after all...

...commercials on the food channel.

"Bourdain -- Again." "(Bored -- Again.)"

2011-08-05T13:40:00.003-04:00

Anthony Bourdain is in Hong Kong. Wearing his thumb ring, the twerp, and as usual playing his lovable unregenerate degenerate card again. Bourdain really thinks he's hip because he likes the Ramones and Iggy Pop and he doesn't like Abba. Yessss - he's that lame guy. He loves to épater la bourgeoisie -- except when he is sharing amuse-bouches with Tom and Padma.

I don't understand him; in this Honk Kong [sic] food-court segment, when he is still finishing slurping on squid ink the waiter sets down the next bowl and Bourdain peers, flushed-faced, into the bowl and gushes, "Oh great... what is it?"

"Pig's knuckles," goes his host (a "food blogger" - on which more later).

"And how do you eat them?" ponders "Tony".

The hairs on my neck stood up here. Why does Anthony pretend at this stage in his career not to know what pig knuckles are? Every week on this programme he goes to a different country and tries their local cuisines, but every week he always contrives to eat a bowl of pig knuckles. Why then the pretense?

It's like in episodes of House: every week, I used to notice, when they were coming up with the various possible diagnoses of the patient, Foreman would chime in at some point with:

"Lupus?"

I assumed it was a joke the writers would have with the "ground crew" and the actors and that we the lowly viewers were just unparticipating onlookers.

(In Shadow Warriors, they seem to have a similar joke. Every time the Iga ninjas found a corpse or evidence of foul play, one of them would look at Hanzo Hattori and say, "Kouga?" That is, was it the handiwork of the rival Kouga sect of ninjas?)

Kouga?

Lupus?

"Oooh that looks nice - what is it?"

"Pig's knuckles, as well you know, Tony."

What, incidentally, is the story with all these "food bloggers"? The fat girl shilling for the "locavore" "Southron"-style barbecue joint in Brooklyn, slavering on cue on the food channel. Paid to turn up and be "talking head".

Explain it to me, in fact, the phenomenon of "bloggers" on television per se. How is it that these cretins (they are routinely cretins) can make a living out of "blogging" while I am sat here sending out well-written if poorly-conceived missives straight into the craw of oblivion & can't earn a crown for my trouble?

___________________________________________

Unrelated, but quite funny:--- I was running in the neighborhood the other day, listening to my walkman, and the Chicory Tip song "Pride Comes Before a Fall" came on. This quite-nice blatant rip-off of "Rainbow Valley" by Love Affair features the line

"There's none so blind / As those who cannot see."

Hearing this, I thought, "How very true! In fact, that is almost the dictionary definition of being blind: not being able to see!"

File alongside some of the chestnuts of Noel Gallagher's repertoire; or indeed the Bee Gees.

Speaking of the Bee Gees, the last episode of the (excellent) first series of Shadow Warriors had its most Gibb-like title yet. It was called "Intrusion! 24 Hours in the Womens' Bath."

"Storage Wars - Again."

2011-08-04T13:13:00.007-04:00

The new season of Storage Wars has been a bit peculiar so far. As Randy Jackson used to say (at every opportunity), it's been a bit "pitchy". This season Dave Hester (who I had expended some energy in rehabilitating) has not endeared himself to the "studio viewing audience at home" with his dull high bids for boring but valuable "white goods". Who fucking cares if you get a dishwasher cheap, Dave? It ain't great TV. One week he bought about thirty vending machines - and was brimming with delight. Strange to report this excitement and delirium did not transfer infectiously and irresistibly to the viewing audience at home.

The problem is that Barry Weiss and Darrell Sheets don't own a consignment store like Dave's, so there is no point in them bidding on the sort of junk that Dave can sell in his would-be dollar-tree warehouse. (In fact at this point it is unclear what Darrell's remit is, or even why he is on the show - except to bitch bitterly about Dave). Meanwhile Jarrod and Brandi do sell similar chintz, jetsam & miscellaneous bushwa to Dave, but they simply don't have as much dough as Dave so they can't compete. Consequently Dave seems to be on a winning streak by default, buying boring merchandise and then toting up how much they are worth himself. Shall we, you and I, my dear reader, "switch off our television sets and go out and do something less boring instead"?

"Sitting at home, watching TV,

Turn it off, it's no good for me.

Why don't you?

Why don't you?"

I have occasionally had to discuss Storage Wars with outside-world (i.e., "non-television character") people when the conversation has reached such a nadir that I am forced to say, just to stave off sleep, "Hey have you seen that show Storage Wars?" When I do lisp these thrice-doomed words out loud to the table, the chattering classes of New York routinely say something that would never occur to me; they say "Oh yeah I've seen that show. It's fixed."

I fail to see what the point would be of fixing a show like Storage Wars. I think that rather this is a case of "post-punk" ennui; that is, "media-savvy" kill-joys being overly, even ostentatiously, jaded. I very tediously respond to their allegations by patiently listing instances where there was nothing valuable in a locker ("When there was nothing to gain from rigs or calumny"), or when the characters ("contestants") ("real people") are hopelessly misguided in the pursuit of riches and rarities ("Fool's gold is ofttimes all they mine, milord"); but only a few sentences into my earnest testimony I notice with some sad surprise (and yet a corollary reflex of horrible familiarity) that I have become the despised bore at the table -- again -- and I pull about me my customary mantle of enigmatic introspection for the rest of the evening.

This season has also had a rush of nondescripts jockeying to become regular, featured characters on the show (which, nota bene, if it were "scripted" and fixed would be an impossibility). Like the fat bloke with the skateboard/skronk goatee. You know, Herne Bay c. 1993. Swallowed squirrel is the look. He bustles like a navvy about the forecourt and painstakingly essays to crane into shot but he is almost invariably edited out every time and his interior existence remains unknown to us the viewing audience.

Because the premise of Storage Wars is simply that in the state of California unpaid lockers are auctioned off, it seems that anybody can turn up at one of those auctions and potentially appear on TV. It is not a "closed set". Obviously this differentiates Storage Wars from Big Brother or American Idol. And lo this season the regulars have been shown, more and more frequently, grumbling about the people who have been coming to the auctions and grandstanding and pratfalling to be on TV, bidding high rubles for rubbish just so they can be seen on TV bidding against Dave or Barry.

Worse case of this was yesterday's episode with this vile, slimy, morally broken-down interloper called "Mark Balelo" who turned up at the Hollywood auction and proceeded to bid astronomic, inordinate amounts for every locker. He pushed the prices up unnecessarily for the lowest specks of dross. (Would he care, I wonder, to bid on a pile of issues of Punisher 2099 comics I have?) He swaggered and pouted and planted himself on the spot squarely, impertinently, arms folded, feet apart and then duly and right brazenly played pocket billiards in front of the womenfolk, with his wad of cash between his teeth (and his cellphone, of course, tucked under his chin). He sucked the pleasure (not to mention the carbon dioxide) out of the whole enterprise. He added nothing more to the show either - he has the personality and the face of a squashed rat-turd. But what he has, it seems in droves, is cash - which abundance he loves to advertise.

I googled this guy, because I grimly observed that he's going to be on next week's episode as well, and I thought "I hope this swaggering schnook isn't going to inveigle himself on to the show as a regular."

He certainly seems to think he is the new "character". An online site (not attached to the show's official site) already trumpets that "Mark Balelo owns and operates a successful wholesale and liquidation company in Simi Valley California. He has two beautiful children, Ashley and Brandon which [sic] are the loves of his life. Currently appearing on the popular reality show Storage Wars, Mark can usually be found at an auction bidding on merchandise and treasures unknown. His charisma and fun personality make him an instant favorite in everyone's heart. Part of Mark's corporate responsibility awareness led him to offer his company as well as personal support to one of his passions, helping children affected by Autism Spectrum Disorder." It is to be noted that this is not the TV company's official site.

Is this "charismatic" and "fun" nouveau rich Tea Party fridge magnet going to bid against all the regular characters every week, pushing everything up and outside the bounds of reason so that nobody even bothers attending the auctions anymore, and the show ends in fizzling piffling disrepute and acrimony? And if they try and bar him from attending the auctions, will he launch a "civil suit" against the television company and Dan Dotson the auctioneer, and take it "all the way to the Supreme Court"?

Where will it all end - the Hague?!

HADES?!

As an amusing addendum, I also found out, while again effortlessly mindlessly googling, that this self-same A-1 pilchard was involved in the recovery of a priceless copy of Action Comics #1 belonging to another poltroon of California extraction, the esteemed actor and adventurer Nicholas Cage, D.D.,F.R.S. One LAPD detective involved in the recovery remarked:"It's just too bad that Balelo with his big mouth thought it was necessary to contact the media."

"New Cliches."

2011-08-03T23:22:00.006-04:00

I feel like much of my time these days is spent irresistibly ("incontrevertibly") watching TV shows where a metrosexual, locavore cheftestant or a roving Brooklyn-type food-blogger is depicted in the "Southron" states, or - even worse - [shudder] the Midwest, hunkering in the barbecue pit with some inbred snaggletoothed good-old-boy as he shucks corn and douses it in melted jalapeno cheddar or as he skins a deer and dresses it in dulche de leche or as he hacks up a few slices of pork in swill and smears them through beargrease & blood gravy for the edification of the studio audience at home.

The Voltaggio Brothers in Hamhock, Texas, gingerly watching a fat bald man in a white smock as he cluelessly pushes pulled pork around in a greasy skillet, in a three minute video online.

It's become a sort of cliche of the times: authentic barbecue and mac'n'cheese for the skinny jeans set. The best burger in town &c. Also: ice cream that has a savory element to it. The meatball place now opened next door to that den of iniquity, the Charleston.

Meanwhile speaking of cliches, the former Fred Flare shop on Meserole at Leonard, which used to sell the utterly useless trinkets for home and hearth to a generation that clearly had too much money (although they didn't actually have hearths), has now been replaced by a new, more sensible enterprise. Yes, it has reopened as a tattoo parlour.

I nodded as I walked past this new gambit. "Yes," I thought, "because that is exactly what this neighbourhood needs - what the neighbourhood is after all lacking - a tattoo parlour."

"Fuckin' Chris Kattan."

2011-07-30T23:07:00.004-04:00

This evening we were in Whole Foods at Union Square, dutifully queueing up like schmucks. Whole Foods' queueing, for those readers who don't know, is eccentric but not intellectually insurmountable, at least for anybody of reasonable good sense and conscience. It is tediously democratic, at least in its ideals. But like that larger democratic experiment, the United States of America, this democracy is apt to be abused and distorted and made hostage to the machinations of tyrants and cheats and scoundrels.

The queues are colour-coordinated; there is a screen above the queueing area where numbers appear in one of four coloured areas that indicates which queue should move at which time. It is a "fair" system, if rather long-winded and prone to abuse - for which read on.

We were in the green queue. My wife says to me in a low voice, "Chris Kattan is in the blue queue." I looked round and there he was. "So he is," I said, smiling. Seeing Chris Kattan's silly face gave me a chuckle.

When our time came around, the number eleven came up in the green box which meant that we should go to cashier number eleven. So you see it isn't complex, queueing up at Whole Foods. What could be simpler. But when we got to cashier number eleven Chris Kattan had pushed in front of us and had plopped downm his shopping basket. His bored boring girlfriend was boredly dully fingering her blackberry, irritated at the moving universe.

I said, "What the fuck? Number eleven is in the green box. We're from the green queue."
"We're number eleven," Chris Kattan said, trying to brazen it out. Then he swiftly changed his tack and said, "What, should we take our stuff back?" It was clearly rhetorical. I looked to the cashier for arbitration - which was patently a bid borne of desperation.

All the bland good feelings and qualified positivity I'd ever had, however vaguely and half-heartedly, for Chris Kattan, evaporated in an instant. His diva bullshit had just irreparably blotted his previously mediocre reputation in my mind. He had been promoted. Now I actively disliked him.

What, Chris, you really can't conquer the subtleties of the Whole Foods queueing methodology? Or is it that you think that you are perhaps too much of a comedy stalwart to have to wait in the democratic system so expertly refined by the thinkers at Whole Food?

I decided to show great restraint and superiority of philosophy by not promptly calling TMZ and reporting this outrage, bringing no doubt intense media scrutiny to Chris Kattan's life and work.

Whole Foods queue is a great test of a man's character and integrity, Chris - a test that you just singularly failed at.

GO TO THE BACK OF THE QUEUE, CHRIS MATE!

"Twelve Against Thebes."

2011-07-25T22:08:00.009-04:00

I recorded this week's episode of Hoarders because I saw the trailer and the old man in this episode had tonnes of old books and comics piled up in his house, right to the ceiling. Missing the didactic point of Hoarders entirely I gasped, "Wow, he's got some great old Golden Age comics. This I gotta see!"

(Hoarders is a documentary show about people who hoard generally useless chintz and ephemera and receptacles for rat-shit in their homes. Hoarders, as I have to remind my wife regularly, are different from inveterate collectors. Inveterate collectors have excellent powers of discernment and taste while hoaders have no powers of deiscrimination nor refinement. OKAY?!)

It turned out that "Ron" (the "character" in this week's show) was a decrepit, half-blind, retired schoolteacher who looked like the present Archbishop of Canterbury. Ron's wife had left him twelve years ago whereupon he promptly span into a mental decline, distinguished by a phrenzy of buying books and comics and other allied cock + bull. He duly "reasoned" that he was buying "all the toys that he had wanted when he was a child but couldn't afford at the time." A sweet impulse - a commendable project - and of course quite insane. Now he had cancer and there was some suggestion that it had metastasized and gone to his brain.

Proof at last that brain damage leads directly to comics-collecting.

Meanwhile, oblivious to the pathos (and once more missing the point of the show), I was up against the screen squinting at the contents of Ron's various boxes and plastic bags. "Ohhh - nice Dick Tracy 'Big Little Book' there, that's got to be worth something! Not so sure about the condition though."

Next they brought in the "hoarding specialist" psychiatrist (a sort of mutant version of the late, celebrated poet laureate Ted Hughes) who lurched across the detritus piled athwart the very threshold of Ron's den and on into the house, clambering over piles of magazines. From his lofty perch atop a complete run of TV Guides "Ted" proffered his expert opinion: "You're a hazard to yourself and your neighbours, Ron. Ethically and morally, I'm bound to humanely report you forthwith to the services."
Ron pouted and grumbled, "Now they're going to make me sell all my things and they'll give me two cents on the dollar for my stuff, the swine."

This sad plaint was his refrain: They'll give me two cents on the dollar.

I thought, "What - you've tried selling your books at Strand too?"

(Still missing the didactic purpose of Hoarders.)

Next they brought in a team of twelve fully-grown, brass-necked and red-blooded professional anti-hoarding removal men to help Ron clean out his Augean stables. It was slow work as they had to check the worth and provenance of every empty egg-box, every mouldy milk carton, every used tampon with Ron before they could throw anything out. It was pathetic to see.
Reminded me a bit of myself. You know: "Maybe one day these issues of Punisher 2099 and Psi Force will be worth something."

The show ended with a stalemate.
Well, no it didn't - actually Ron threw everyone out of his house.

I sat there, reflecting sadly for a moment on the tragedy of life and consumer culture et cetera; how we store up our palaces with poxy facetiae obscura and trivial alia and ana when the real beauty of the world passes us by. Simplify, simplify. Then I thought up some funny alternate endings for this episode.

1) The twelve workmen, frustrated with Ron's refusal to throw anything out, decide to knock him unconscious and empty his house while he's out cold. Then they run away before he wakes up to an empty house.
He'd probably thank them for it. I know I would.
[Note to readers: I am joking. I wouldn't really. ]

2) They turn Ron's house over to the characters on Storage Wars and the Storage Wars people start rustling and rifling through Ron's stuff looking for valuable bargains amid all the dross and rubbage. You would have Ron running between them trying to stop them but they'd just shove him away and root through his things pulling out knick-knacks and whatnots. Barry making debonair and ironic jokes.

3) Relocate Ron to Philadelphia and employ him as a parking attendant on Parking Wars.

4) Reality show set at the Strand book buying department. You think the critturs on Hoarders are snaggletoothed trash, you ought to see the varmints lined up outside the Strand on any given day waiting to sell their trolleys full of Encyclopaedia Brittanicas. Old Ron would positively shine in their company.

Denim - Middle of the Road BBC 12.11.92)

2011-07-20T09:40:00.000-04:00

"God Will Give Them Blood to Drink." Or, "Tintin in Vietnam."

2011-07-17T14:11:00.006-04:00

Next up is Gordon's show where he goes to far-flung corners of the world and dines on snake-meat and rat shit. It seems to be a barely-concealed remake of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, without the latter gentleman's legendary "charm".

I grow weary of these shows where smirking TV chefs go to unenlightened corners of the "third" world and chucklingly indulge in rank cruelty to animals. Anthony, winkingly consuming live octopi in Flushing, Queens (and that's the third world lemme tellya). Gordon, squinting at a snake's still-beating heart in a shotglass in Patpong.

They love to take advantage of these underdeveloped countries' less humane attitudes to animal rights. What next, Gordon and Anthony? Bear-baiting - throwing donkeys off church roofs in a certain picturesque little Spanish hamlet that I know? Why stop with animal cruelty? Why not partake in the stoning of adultering whores alongside the Taliban or their equivalents across the wider planet - or go exploiting the more "liberal' attitudes to child confinement and prostitution in the Far East islands?

Where shall these lads stop in their appetite for blood and bile?
God will give them blood to drink!

That elitist beer-snob and boor ("bore") Anthony Bourdain traipses, Till Eulenspiegel-like, from one country to the next; ostentatiously choosing the most perverse dishes he can find. This translates actually as him going from country to country and almost invariably ordering that region's version of a pig knuckle sandwich. The sum of his message seems to be that pig knuckle is the best food, but that we are too low and ignorant to appreciate it. He's like a fucking CAMRA man at your elbow in a pub. He's that pedantic. Emerson: "I had as lief travel with an Express man or with Barnum as with Anthony Bourdain." Anthony, always trying to outdo the next obscurist: here he is now, gobbling a pig's-prick pickled in vinegar, with sparkling eyes. Very impressive to the "locavores" in Greenpoint, no doubt. This elistism leads him to taking some idiotic and tedious positions.

Anthony routinely singles out the working-class elements in town and painstakingly tries to superficially befriend them. Weaving through nighttime Soho with a self-proclaimed "London character" (some pissed prize pillock in a spangled suit and a pork-pie hat). Hunkering down in Spitalfields Market with some bemused, ruddy-faced men in blue striped aprons and boaters. "You and me like pig knuckles, right, good my Christian lads?"
"Yes - and we all hate Pakis stealing our jobs. Right?"
"Uh... cut!"

This reminds me of A___ S___, also an American, ( - also a boor and a bore -, ) who arrived in Norwich in 1999 and soon trumpeted abroad about how he loved to engage his local butcher in conversation. I thought to myself, "Your poor fucking butcher." Americans love to do this it seems. Those that are not outside Buckingham Palace are subjecting poor workingmen to their would-be Clapham omnibus opinions. The Englishworkingmen, tugging their forelocks and yessirring, anything to make their daily crust.

Not so with good old Henry Adams, who wrote to his brother Charles: "I will not go down into the rough-and-tumble, nor mix with the crowd... You like the strife of the world, I detest and despise it." That's refreshing to hear. I used to be quite able to squat and talk to the omnibus riders, like Walt Whitman, but that was when I was garrulous and drank like a chimney. Engaging mediocrities on all manner of subjects, marvelling as I went at the breadth of my society. Smugly internally narrating: "Regard me, you men, I am expert at mediating social strata." I have since lost that "talent" - if talent it be. Now come only the awkward exchanges with the comics-shop men; me wreathed with self-loathing. Now the fat putz from the tyre shop next door spits on the ground when I am walking past him.

"O Tempura!" Or, "Hell Hath No Fury."

2011-07-17T13:33:00.007-04:00

Gordon Ramsay was on Kitchen Nightmares, this week set at a Japanese restaurant in Southern California. The show seems to be more concerned with family counselling than cooking at this point. Gordon did his usual scathing critique of the kitchen fridges and then moved on - to matters of the boudoir.

This was a family business. Akira, the Japanese father of the family, was now a joyless, remote loner hounded and humiliated by his cold, shrewish wife-and-business-partner. There was no longer any "chemistry" betwixt the twain. This conjugal coupling was a terrible admixture of Eastern reserve and Western audacity. Still, they had a pair of great kids, who were suffering. Akira was accustomed to skulking out into the night to (he said) "do Tai Chi down by the lake".

The wife and mother was severe and doomed with long grey hair and she whispered to Gordon, "You wouldn't take Akira's side if you knew how he was when he goes out after these young painted hussies."
She was plainly quite sick of this modest, reserved man and his shy philandering among the whores of downtown LA.
She seethed at Gordon, "He isn't doing TAI CHI down by the LAKE you silly, green man! He is out pissing away our business on teenage tail you oblivious, naive patsy!"

Gordon, though scolded, is never cowed. He whispered back, "You can castrate your husband, love, and you have, but you shan't catch me!"

One evening Gordon put on his deerstalker cap and night-vision goggles and, come the witching hour, stealthily followed Akira out into the spangled neon night. He brought along a camera crew with him for this rather remarkable scene. He trailed Akira into a seedy part of LA and a strip-mall whorehouse, where Gordon confronted the errant paterfamilias in one of the alloted motel rooms.
Next ensued, confessedly somewhat strangely to the "viewing audience at home," Gordon's scathing critique of the prostitutes on offer.

"What's wrong with you Akira!!" he howled. "You're throwing away the family restaurant on a scrawny skank like this? Big boy, she looks like one of your broccoli tempura!!"
Gordon (still in deerstalker cap and goggles) next had the madam of the brothel line up all her "girls" in order of height and then he launched into a shocking, harrowing review of the girls on offer. "I don't know if I'd fuck any of you, even with Akira's dick!! Quite frankly I happen to prefer my children's blonde nanny!!" He turned to Akira again and said, "Akira, if you're going to throw away your marriage and your restaurant on floozies, and you are, at least make it worth your while!!" Then he nodded at one of the girls and said, "I'll have her. Come on Akira, let me show you how it is done."

I think that Gordon is losing sight of the original purpose of his show.

"Kage no Gundan --- Again." Or, "The Acceleration of Transparency."

2011-07-13T14:24:00.010-04:00

Still watching Shadow Warriors as a sort of lunchtime ritual.

Three observations thereon, with a preamble.

Yesterday I was in the Strand looking for a copy of Gamini Salgado's The Elizabethan Underworld which, the infallible internet said, they had a copy of it. Ensued much scouring and scowling and growling and general time-wasting; but no copy of the aforementioned book. So, refusing to accept defeat I peevishly bought a copy of Roland Barthes' Empire of Signs instead.

What do the two books have in common, answer, they have nothing in common whatsoever.

I actually can't stand Roland Barthes.

I'd completely forgotten this Barthes book existed. It brought me back to the early Nineties, that strange time (Canterbury... mon amour...) [Herne Bay, Mon Dieu] when the world was young and I was young and un-bigoted and I actually gave "continental critical theory" a chance.

I even used to carry about a copy of The Transparent Society by Vattimo upon me at all times -- and The Aesthetics of Disappearance by Virilio and Forget Foucault by Baudrillard. Phillipe Solleurs' novel, The Park in a nice Calder hardback... am I misremembering that?... Blanchot, Thomas L'Obscur... In other words, I was pretentious. I never read a word of any of them you understand my dear don't you see? - I'd as lief toil joylessly through an Alain Robbe-Grillet novel (of which I had many) - but I can still, quite tenderly, recall their covers.

I now wonder, but only very indifferently and in passing, what happened to these interesting Frenchmen after I lost interest in their shoegazing works... did they cease to exist, mere figments of my imagination? Soap bubbles that blinked and burst. Like dead ninjas, they immolated the corpses.

Well, I know that Baudrillard recklessly predicted that the year 2000 would never arrive, but undaunted by his prophecies it did arrive, and he obstinately stuck around regardless, each year a further notch against his dwindling reputation, for another seven years before dutifully falling on his sword. The G.G. Allin of the academy, let us say charitably of the late M. Baudrillard: he lived on well past being shown up for a charlatan. His paradoxes were annoyingly dependable. My impatience rather like Emerson's at Thoreau.

Although Baudrillard it hardly needs saying was no Thoreau.

To return to weightier matters-- Shadow Warriors.

Reading (that is, looking at the cover of and then glibly flipping through) Barthes' Empire of Signs, I thought: "This East-meets-West semiology gets old fast. Donald Richie should have sued." I thought, "There is more to say than these pretentious feuilletons. My book on the Chushingura. Wherefore---"

1. As I delve further into the Shadow Warriors series, which is - strictly speaking - called Hattori Hanzō: Kage no Gundan I - I am increasingly impressed. By episodes thirteen through fifteen a considerable streak of Lafcadio Hearn-ian, Kwaidan-ish gleanings from the folk fields of Muromachi-era Japan, has descended shroud-like on the show. Like the cobwebs on the wood-hag's taffeta sombrero.

Also, Sonny Chiba has refined his performances as Hanzo and his counterpart the bumbling "Mr. Han". By the end of episode sixteen (title: "Don't Get Involved with Dangerous Women") he pulls a face in this role of "Mr. Han" that encapsulates magnificently the false front of the noble time-waster. Leaning as usual over a go board, he puffs out his cheeks and his eyes are emptied of the vital light that characterises him as Hanzo Hattori. Degree zero. His face (Roland Barthes might say) refuses to signify the integrity that actually consumes him. I have to admit that I think I prefer watching him play the bungling bathhouse keeper to his scenes as a sombre ninja.

2. The titles, which I originally complained were too unwieldy, I now suppose are simply exacting translations of the originals. As a result they sound like the titles of early Bee Gees album tracks and b-sides. "The Black Hair Burned With a Grudge"; "Kill Night Spiders Even If They Are Parents" and most Gibbsian of all, "The Female Ninja's May in Shadows". You can readily imagine any of these titles being morosely crooned by the incomparable MR. ROBIN GIBB - shortly before he dolefully commits seppuku.

3. Idea: Shadow Warriors versus Sand Masters. To the victor the spoils.

"Funny Misread."

2011-07-12T22:36:00.002-04:00

Wearied by the unceasing joking of Anthony Bourdain I was flipping through the on-screen TV guide and I skimmed my eyes across the various shows on offer. In my hasty survey I conflated America's Got Talent with Everybody Loves Raymond to come up with (so I imagined, or misread) a show entitled Everybody's Got Talent.

"Sand Masters."

2011-07-11T21:20:00.002-04:00

It used to be that I'd say to my wife, "If you ever come home and find me sprawled athwart the couch watching Psychic Kids, please kill me and then gruesomely violate the corpse." Now Psychic Kids has been trumped and I can say it about Sand Masters: a reality show about people who compete from week to week at crafting sand sculptures.

"From a tribal new year in New Zealand to Fleet Week in Times Square, our sculptors are commissioned to make massive yet delicate sand sculptures for huge publicity stunts, local festivals and rich folks with money to burn. Whether it's the jungle-lined beaches of Costa Rica, the bustling back streets of Thailand, or the sky-high slopes of Aspen, these sand superstars are invited by clients like Ringling Bros & Barnum and Bailey Circus, The Royal Hawaiian Resort and Legoland to create ingenious art for important events in some of the world's most enticing locations."

Now I can watch Psychic Kids with impunity.

______________________________________________

The so-called "hipsters" of Williamsburg are hard really to speak of - at least without coughing up blood. Contumely and spleen always sound dull to the refined ear, so it's best not to speak of hipsters whatsoever. Except to note that the scavengers who sit outside THE CHARLESTON (Bedford at North Seventh) are somehow the cream of the dregs.

Dunno if there's a guidebook for irreparable douche-lords that has a list of prime hangouts for those of this deeply lame ilk, but they all gravitate to the Charleston these days it seems. This is the type who listen to metal - hipsters who listen to metal. Yes, it can happen and it does happen. They're at the Charleston. You can watch 'em while you wait for the 62 bus. Anyway, one flump in a blue trilby was in the street with a Frisbee, throwing an orange Frisbee to his confederate gonk. Worse, they were under the illusion that a Frisbee is for bouncing on the ground. The predictable melee ensued. Then the old woman on the zimmer frame wheeled past the Charleston and all the gonks, flumps, wuzzles and hoobs bent over backwards to speak to the "local character". She loves it, they love it. It's mutually beneficial this exchange, but what it adds to the greater planet's wellbeing I don't know. I cannot say. This is, I suppose, how Joe Gould maintained his legendary existence too. At least he had his Oral History of the World (Joseph Mitchell notwithstanding) - the old woman on a zimmer frame don't do much or add anything to the cultural calendar so far as I can discern. Which is why, I suppose, she is after all the patron saint of Bedford Avenue. She don't do a blessed damned thing.

That all said & done & over & done with, hipsters can still make me smile tenderly. Only today I saw a tattooed hipster with his arm in a cast and a sling. I grinned from ear to ear at that.

Kill me, I repeat, if I am ever found to be watching Sand Masters,

"Her Salopettes Haunt My Reverie."

2011-07-08T18:53:00.010-04:00

Sad, the sources of true elation in these times.

Having darted from the Times Square and the New York Public Library down through the CUNY Grads Centre and thence further downtown and through the Bobst Library, Washington Square, picking up and xeroxing as I went copies from Emerson's Topical Journals (Univ. of Missouri, three vols., 1990 - 1994) and then stray gleanings from the excellent and unparalleled Emerson Society Quarterly; getting gossipy items from sixty years ago on Jones Very and Ellery Channing the Younger and then to the McNally Jackson bookshop to pick up my edition-of-one copy of David M. Reese's Humbugs of New York (1838) from the so-called "Espresso Machine" -- and along the way passing through Other Music and buying a Bulb Records Volume One CD in the sale bin for $3 (containing the Prehensile Monkey-Tailed Skink 7"s I already have on vinyl) -- with all these acquisitions, high and low (and how low - it was a Wednesday, and the comics came out, including the lowest-KKKult-Ur shit of all, Fear Itself #4) (why I'm buying this dastardly bunk I ax yer) , the only moment of authentic child-like elation came when I emerged on to Broadway from West Third Street and saw an advertisement on the side of a phone booth for the new season of Storage Wars.

They had put Dave in the centre of the promotional shot. He may aggravate people but he has also wormed his way into the dull, remote heart of America.

Speaking of Dave, I'd meant to say this last month, but forgot -- I went to the Omar Souleyman show on North Sixth Street last month & -- it was mostly great -- . Omar Souleyman paces the stage rousing the crowd, getting them to clap. You clap along but when he has passed you think, "Is it safe to stop clapping now?" Then he wheels around and comes back up the stage rousing you again. Spent a lot of time stopping and starting clapping, limply, guiltily. Anyway, as Omar comes and goes he also goes: "Yehhhhhhhppppppp!" Who'd's'e sound like, then, if not Dave Hester from Storage Wars?
I said it first. Yepppppp!

Salopettes Haunt My Reverie

Walking home this evening in the Greenpoint rain and at the hardware store on the corner, some dirty grey salopettes were hanging dolefully outside. Grubby salopettes, grubby salopettes, stale cream-puffs who shall have thee? The sad desolate sight of them gave me another of my dull Ur-brain smiles of elation - when the Over-Soul descended again - this time at the memory of Lucy Paddock and her (as Harry Metcalf called them) "grubby salopettes".

I must have said to Harry, "Ooh yeah I liked Lucy," and Harry had said in his incredulous, scornful, proud, magnificent way, "What, Fabe, Lucy with her grubby salopettes?" He spat the phrase out in virtual disdain but I have always loved and jealously simonized the phrase ever since.

Like when Quinn Latimer said of ______ that she looked like a soccer mom, and this was meant of course as a put-down, but I just grinned stupidly and sentimentally and batted my eyelashes and blushed and pawed the gravel with my horseshoe at this and said, "Yeah - she does."

These things that are meant to be bad about women but that we actually like about them. (Vide ___ pretty much all the time.) I liked Lucy's grubby salopettes. Harry doesn't know it but there was a Thursday evening when at least three of the demimonde's most eligible stalwarts fought valiantly for the company of Lucy Paddock and I was one of them.

Paul Tebbs and Chris Dorsey were the others.

Dorsey won.

"A Slight Grudge."

2011-06-30T13:05:00.004-04:00

"The head of Kouga, Minaguchi Kisanta, has a grudge against Boss after Boss cut his arm off."

Still watching Shadow Warriors at lunchtimes - thanks fer askin. Drop on over if you're in taown. Further to my last report, Hanzo Hattori (Sonny Chiba) continues to act the goat to cover up for his noble - and obscure - intentions. Same goes for myself.

In "The Female Ninja's May in Shadows" (I confess I have grave doubts about the exactitude of these translations), to prove that he was not Hanzo Hattori but bumbling "Mr. Han" who runs the bathhouse, he fell down a flight of stairs.

But---

This is too short - it could qualify as a "tweet".

Furthermore, then, let me say...

Two annoying people in the library yesterday. Same seat, one after another. This was in the Judaica division where I have elected to sit lately and read Emerson on account it's QUIET. The first one was a businessman who kept popping gum pellets from a foil receptacle and then slurping loudly on a veritable plug of chaw while ostentatiously "reading" the newspaper by violently ("valiantly") wrenching the pages apart with windmilling arm. Sated - or his mouth filled to overflowing with his gargantuan bolus - he staggered away. Next came a sort of albino gentleman in a blue polo shirt and a signet ring on each hand, and he had a preference for whistling tunelessly under his breath, which sweet sound rose to a wheeze and this he did for hours, accompanied by the drumming of his fingertips. Are these grown men or infants in need of a trip to the "potty"?

Well and if you really want to see lunacy in its natural habitat, unfeigned, undiluted, asleep at its desk, visit the 42nd Street "Research" library some time. Lots of fun rides. Plus it's free.

"English Lessons."

2011-06-28T21:46:00.006-04:00

I was watching an Inspector Morse episode with my wife. I always get nostalgic during them. All sentimental and daft.

Oxford in the early Nineties... Mihajlovic used to cycle from Sonning Common to Oxford ... he'd pedal like a dray horse, there and back, cycling like a madman. Sweating like a pit pony in that blue topcoat of his that he scarcely ever took off. What went through his mind on those sallies? Nobody can say. Nobody ever knew what Mihajlovic was thinking.

There are people who like to cycle literally dozens of miles, I have since learnt, to my surprize. For whom it is no matter to cycle from Derbyshire to Somerset.
And that's about all I have learnt under this sun...

Yes, well, regardless of that...

We were watching Inspector Morse as I just said and John Thaw was interviewing some likely pillock in a fuggy snooker hall (it was the late 1980s, and everybody played snooker) and behind them was a poster of Ray Reardon. Quite a nice stylized photo. I'd have quite liked a photo like that for our apartment in fact. Any way, I chuckled and said to my wife, "Ha, that's Ray Reardon there. Much was made of his resemblance to..."

I trailed off without even thinking further, so inconsequential were the words emerging from my mouth.

"Who did he resemble?" asks wife. I was somewhat surprised that she had been listening to me - I certainly hadn't.

"Who? Ray Reardon? He was famous for resembling Dracula. The slicked back black hair, the widow's peak. You know. Dracula. Heh."

Feeling a new found enthusiasm for my theme, I actually essayed a further sentence on the boring but arcane subject.

"Ha. Those were some colourful characters in the world of snooker weren't they. A real bestiary of bastards. Ray Reardon, Dennis Taylor, Steve Davis, Terry Griffiths... Willie Thorne..." (Yes - I really remembered Willie Thorne.) [... Droning on, almost to myself now...] "... Cliff Thorburn, Jimmy White, Hurricane Higgins. All tenants of the grave now, I trow - or fulltime pallbearers at least those lucky few. And then there was that one especial chump, the one who could imitate all the other players... but couldn't beat them at their chosen game. The one who played the trick shots for the glue-sniffers off-season at the Reading Hexagon... curveballs for pocket change... the clown prince of the baize he was... and his wife played trickshots too, it was said--- all over town it was said. He caught her in bed with Jim Davidson and the whole 'Matchroom Mob' besides one time, it was bruited, and he only meekly offered to make them all a pot of tea. But he never won a game. Never once. Never did..."

There was a long pause. I snapped out of my peculiarly dull reverie. I unpaused Inspector Morse, and we resumed watching the murky goings-on in Oxford.

Only about half an hour later did I suddenly exclaim: "Virgo. Poor poor turd: John Virgo was his name, and it's his name yet if he still draws breath in his travesty of an existence!"

[When you live in America, the strangest things about England's recent history suddenly strike you as peculiar and worthy of comment.]

"Scylla and Charybdis."

2011-06-27T13:21:00.012-04:00

1. SCYLLA:

This weekend I was strolling around the Times Square neighbourhood of town, for predictably peurile reasons, and I thought I saw Gil Scott Heron coming the other way (in an easterly direction). I had to remember to myself that he had just died.

"Gil Scott Heron," lisps C____ D_____, that village explainer of the arts. "He was famous for saying that the Revolution would not be televised."

Pathetic really that a man can and shall be reduced to one utterance. Like Kenneth Tynan saying "fuck" on the BBC. As Emerson says, "Not much life in a lifetime."

Pathetic also that nobody has ever made the joke: "The television shall not be revolutionised."

There - I just said it.
Can I get a copyright on that.

Anyway, it reminded me also of National Public Radio's announcement of the death of Gil Scott Heron. They started: "Gil Scott Heron, the poet and performer famous for his remark that 'the Revolution will not be televised' and for his sometimes strident so-called 'slams' and 'toasts'..." and it went on in that clipped, unctuous, smug, collegiate, nasal, middle-C, degree-zero way that NPR broadcasters have, droning on without getting to any point.

I said to the radio, "Well, what is it? Is he among the living or the dead? Get to the point!"

Nothing daunted, the radio droned on with the "potted" bio, before finally - as if as an afterthought - noting that he had lately died.

Vexxing as this was, there is something entirely characteristic of NPR about this. Salient facts for on-the-go liberals who must be able to talk superficially across a broad range at parties.
Why couldn't they simply say, "Gil Scott Heron is dead."

As a Norwich graffito said, "Elvis is dead so I must go."

They say things better in Norwich.

" --THEY order, said I, this matter better in France.-- "

2. CHARYBDIS:

Naow, I was watching Charlie Rose interviewing Donald Rumsfeld on Channel Thirteen and Charlie (who I have liked and loathed in about equal measure in my time) was guilty of his old sin of interrupting the interviewee just as they are about to answer.

The more interesting and incisive the question Charlie has just asked, the stronger the likelihood - the more irresistible the temptation for him it seems - that he will roundly sabotage the question by answering it himself: pre-empting the interviewee, suddenly lurching across the desk, unravelling like a mamba, and replying before his auditor can.

In this way Charlie has pissed and frittered away literally hundreds of world exclusives.
He has, by his cack-fisted way, murdered in the cradle many a birthing revelation.
The world is by far the more ignorant - the darker - the smaller - because of this annoying, childish, vain little habit of Charlie's.

They were talking about the events of 12th September 2001 and that much-beloved chestnut, who first decided to invade Iraq? (Or is it, "Which is the prop'rest day to drink?")

Charlie said to Rumsfeld, "If [Bush] had asked you [whether to invade Iraq], what would you have said?"
Rumsfeld leaned back, paused to reflect, and began, "I think I would have said that ... that..."
Just as I was leaning into the TV to hear this historic insight, Charlie - his keen journalist "spider-sense" aglow like Commissioner Gordon's bat-phone, - butted in here and blurted, "...that we should overthrow Saddam Hussein!"

These (NPR and Public Access TV) are the twin bastions of liberal broadcasting in America.
Wonderful institutions to have.
It's a crying shame they're so dumb.

(Also worthy of note is the BBC World Service, and its plethora of hectoring presenters. "OWEN BENNETT JONES!" for instance. Can this man say anything without sounding chronically constipated? He cannot bespeak his own name without sounding like his nuts are in the very deevil's own vice ["Belial's gripe"]: "OWEN! BENNETT! JONES!"

He sounds like Nikki from Huggy Bear: "Don't fuck! You suck! Owen Bennett Jones!"

I surmise that all these BBC World Service people "came up the ranks" (that creepy and mysterious process as obscure in how it is done as the Dance of the Seven Veils - or the Mysteries of Eleusis) in an era when Jeremy Paxman was the model for journalism, and hectoring incredulously was seen as the very signature of "quality independent journalism".

Meanwhile, this morning I heard an Australian woman being interviewed whose son had been knocked unconscious by the "flunder" of the tail of a humpback whale. Said the BBC World Service lady: "What was the whale's tail like? Was it big?")

"Ombres de Ninjutsu, Shades of Chushingura."

2011-06-23T15:30:00.007-04:00

"I am embarrassed at present whenever any application is made to me that may lead to permanent engagements. For I fancy my self dependent for my degree of health upon my lounging capricious unfettered mode of life..."

EMERSON

And I had watched all the Zatoichi films, and all the Zatoichi television show episodes thus far available, and all the Lone Wolf and Cub (exquisite Tomisaburo) films and all the television show episodes of the same (the delicious Kinnosuke Nakamura) and all the Water Margin episodes and every film I could get with Kinnosuke or Tomisaburo or Katsu - then what was I left, but to watch Shadow Warriors?

I like the central conceit of Shadow Warriors, flimsy as it is, because is it is plainly the Chushingura motif (the "47 loyal ronin") relocated: a noble dynasty, unduly wronged by the corrupt times, and their exemplary leader, are biding their time before an all-out assault. They must appear to their enemies to have entirely given up the cause. This conspicuous veneer of having roundly failed and given up is signified by ostentatious loafing - hustling - gambling - bumming - leching - drawling - drooling - prattling - withdrawing into a corner with several longboxes of comicbooks. Crucially, even those closest to the participants become unsure as to whether the act remains an act. Even the widow of the sainted, departed daimyo becomes doubtful, Lord, of thy intentions.

"But, my dear,
I think I fear
That you have lost your way."

RESIDENTS.

The question is asked, again and again: What are your intentions? Whither goest thou?

I am naturally attracted to the legend that says that a man who appears to be wasting time is in fact waiting, biding his time for the truly noble event. The obvious Western instance is Prince Hal in Henry IV Part One.

All well and good - an idea for an essay in comparative studies even - but I have several complaints to make.

1) Every week, on Shadow Warriors, the Iga ninjas, who have sworn abstinence and are absolutely forbidden to fall in love, fall in love with each other.

2) Okou, the female ninja for the opposing (Koga) ninja sect, vowed to kill our hero Hanzo Hattori (SONNY CHIBA) because his father killed her father. Every week Okou fails to do so and falls further in love with Hanzo, even while conspiring vexxingly against him. What I fail to understand is that she seemingly died several episodes past in a wild conflagration and then a hail of arrows for good measure. Despite this seemingly considerable setback, she persists with her machinations each week on our terrestrial televisions regardless of a piffling little thing such as Death.

Of course, as a seasoned ("valued") reader of G.I. Joe I am fully aware that ninjas can and will fake their deaths as casually as you or I might drop our hats, even emerging unscathed from the very thick of something as seemingly incontrovertibly deleterious to one's health as a nuclear attack. Still, in my innocence, I have to wonder how it can be so?

Is this thing called Death a mere legend told abroad to frighten the credulous ploughboys, sage Kung?

3) The music for Shadow Warriors is off-putting. At the height of a frenzied skirmish, with blades and blood whirling will he and nill he, the soundtrack is a sort of late-Seventies Euro-brass slush. Put precisely, it sounds like the "Dolannes Melody" or the theme to Emmanuelle -- or Acker Bilk peforming "Aria" (each fine songs in their place). Is this really apt here, though?

[Perhaps I have belaboured my point overly, but it is extremely important that I keep my entries long, lest they slip into the "rubric" of a "tweet". I would be little better than the slime on the underbelly of a dead hipster if I were to begin writing to the order of tweets. A tweet I shall never write, good lads.

I shall - I must - only be verbose hereafter.

Yes, father - I shall write an epic. ]

"In Defence of Dave." Deluxxxe Edition

2011-06-14T08:28:00.005-04:00

[ Exclusive intro for this gold deluxe Author's Edition:

My most popular piece of writing ever isn't even available to my loyal readers here, so I have personally and laboriously dragged and pasted it from the A&E channel's site to this site. Either I cannot wrangle equal pathos out of Storage Wars that I could out of Dog the Bounty Hunter - - or even The Amazing Race - - , or (Heavens forfend) somehow, mysteriously, a level of gravitas has entered my life and I no longer have the time or patience to write about reality TV shows.

That said, one particular day in April I felt inspired to write this, withal. There are eighteen replies. Can you imagine if eighteen people replied on this site? It would be considered a whaddayacallit, a veritable Arab Spring. Piece follows----

NEBULA]

As an avid viewer of Storage Wars I have gone though the full gamut of emotions as the show goes on. I began, like many others, with a seething hatred of Dave. This can only exist so long, however, before it curdles into a sort of cottage cheese - and then becomes boring. Pure, unadulterated hatred is always dull stuff. To avoid this I found my brain mutating, evolving, and it duly began to let in a trace of sympathy for Dave. Once you do this, it is like a great weight has been lifted off your soul and you can see the world anew, like a new-born child, with a crystalline spirit-self. The Oversoul descends. Try it. You'll be surprised and delighted.

The same thing happened, for those of you who watch Top Chef, in the case of Angelo. Hated that guy, and my soul shrivelled and grew right weary. Then I saw he had his own humanity and began to like him: and my soul revived. I was actually rooting for Angelo in the All Stars season. Yes, life really can turn quite around. Again with Ron and Cristina in Amazing Race All Stars, if you must know. I even almost found myself sympathising for Luke and Margie but - no - never - not quite -

Certainly at first it seems as if Dave wins simply because he has more money and larger trucks than any of the other competitors, but then you see Barry roll on to the lot (late) in a vintage Jaguar or some souped-up muscle-car and you realise Barry is probably much richer than Dave. Yet Barry - who I like a lot - fairly stinks at instinctively bidding for the right locker, whereas Dave - however you feel about him - has the knack, the so-called "Eye That Sees."

Part of the reason Dave comes across poorly on the show is also what recommends him. He is a purist and he takes his craft seriously. Hence his disgust at Barry's sensational antics, the psychics and the midget on stilts (which, as a strategy, did not make much sense to me, actually - a midget on stilts is no taller than an average-height person). Dave may not make the best TV character, but he has his integrity. Admittedly he was churlish when Barry (for, I like to think, excellent reasons) refused to take those mangy old fur coats and passed them on to Dave. Poor old Dave's been kicked around by an alienating society for so long now - and the people on the message boards - that he don't believe he can trust a living soul and can't understand a generous act. It's sort of tragic when you think about it.

If think about it you do.

To sum up: all these Dave-haters need to rethink their agendas. You can't let yourselves become corroded and distorted and annihilated by loathing in your heart. Guy's got an immortal soul after all just like the rest of us.

Any way that was all I wanted to say.

As you were.

"Another Day Full of Dread"

2011-06-01T19:54:00.007-04:00

I got a headache from concentrating for too long and intensely on one of this "young" century's most crazy and knotty conundrums.

I was staring dully at the data on the screen biting my lip trying to rally my thoughts and still feeling my mind voided of all ability to cipher language. My numen left me like acrid water from a vase with a dead daffodil in it.

I say my mind was upended upturned and emptied out and I was as a newborn babe.

In these my investigations I was not trying to comprehend "superstring" theory, or the legerdemains of that master diabolist STEPHEN "HAWKINGS" [sic] or indeed the rumbling ramblings of that deceased scoundrel JACQUES DERRIDA - or even RICHARD ROBINSON's excellent theories on "liminal borders" in Trieste - - which is I think in Switzerland - -

I was actually...

... trying to make sense of the G.I. Joe comics bibliography.

Comics Bibliography: A Problem, an Abstract, a "Call for Papers," A View-Halloo (An Aside).

Comics bibliography is generally in a fucking shabby state. Academics are all too eager to start teaching seminars on Maus or The Dark Knight Returns or Scrooge McDuck for the essential reason that it's so easy to teach comic books and it means that everybody involved - teacher and students alike - can spend more of their precious energies on goofing off generally until the end of the world comes, as I believe it is, it's coming.

Comics bibliography, I said, is rudimentary precisely because of the patent vapidity of scholarship today. Scholars do love to wax opinionated, and high-blown, and specious, but they hate to do the back- and leg-work necessary to actually support their outlandish theories. They love to propound, in other words, but they shan't construct the bibliographies or the chronologies or the motif indexes necessary.

A while back I was trying to work out which Harvey Pekar book collections contained material from which original issues of the American Splendor comic book series. There was no information available to navigate this quagmire. No end of chaff on the broad subject of Harvey Pekar, much of it fatuous and redundant (this on the internet? You don't say); but chaff and dross was all I uncovered.

I found myself in the same boat - same skiff, different swamp - when trying to clarify which stories from the Eclipse "prestige format comic book" version of Lone Wolf and Cub were contained in which volumes of the digest-size volumes published later by Dark Horse.

Perhaps it is fair to remark here that my energies are being wasted in trivial directions and that furthermore these are not worthy texts for serious bibliography and I should carry on with my studies into Emerson's Aunt Mary. If so: all well and good. But then pray stop drooling on my shoe and prating about how comicbooks are a serious artform if ye can't be bothered to write bibliographies for 'em. Their works were deficient in their thoroughness.

Suffice it to say, if there are no bibliographies for American Splendor or Lone Wolf and Cub you can be pretty confident that no such useful scholarly apparatus exists for G.I. Joe (which is, withal, might I point out, at its high points the full equal of both Lone Wolf and Cub and American Splendor). (These high points, it scarcely needs stating, are almost solely from the desk of the excellent LARRY HAMA.)

I was trying to explicate, through the obscuring prisms of the sundry "reboots" of the ur-narrative, which storyline leads to which and where, and which narrative events and character revisions or developments were in "canon" and "continuity" and which were not.

Again you say that my energies are wasted.

Canon and continuity are in a perpetual state of flux in comics, per se, based purely on motives of profit (see, if you can be the least bit bothered, my article on the obscurities of Nineties X-Men and Cable issues). This is nowhere more evident alas than in the case of GI Joe, which (narrative continuity) seems to have been dictated, regrettably, by those elevated personages at HASBRO. That is, the men who make the toys.

This is not the place to grind my kusarigama about Hasbro and their crude philistine machinations in the narrative endeavours of that fine author LARRY HAMA. (If you like, we can provide an analogy in the form of Livy Clemens and William Dean Howells confounding the work of Mark Twain with their feminizing Victorian genteel editorial influences.)

My purpose here is simply to say that I got confused to a degree that I haven't been in years; where one's mind comes up rudely and unceremoniously against its strict limitations. "Here is the end of me; I can go no further than here by the engine of my mind or soul."

Haven't had such a stark reminder of my limits, in fact, since the time several years ago when I was trying to make sense of the Legion of Super-Heroes' so-called "continuity" (the bibliography was, happily, less of a mess). Gave it up and read Finnegans Wake for light relief.

_________________________________________

In the comics shop today, some punter said to Roger, "How you going to keep selling the comics when the DC reboots come around Roger?"

Roger stared at him dully and mouthed: "Wha?"

He hadn't read the articles yet.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/comic-book-math-dc-to-renumber-series-starting-again-with-no-1/

The articles say that DC is rebooting all their comics and starting them again at issue ones to accomodate a younger audience (one that, incidentally, fairly patently don't actually exist). Roger said as much - that the "young audience" is a fictional one - and went on with his day. "Another day full of dread."

It was an "object lesson" in how narrative strategies can directly affect the happiness of the citizens of the polis.

Why I had only been saying to TONY, at a party, that ----

But no.
But I see that I am become boring to you!

(I said to Tony that DC reboots their characters at least every ten years because they have a chronic performance anxiety about telling stories outside the very narrow perameters of the core, ur-myths. Batman fights Joker or otherwise it is Two-Face and once in a whileit can be Clayface or Killer Croc or even Penguin and thence back to Joker; Flash is forever concerned with the "Rogue's Gallery" or Reverse Flash; Green Lantern with Sinestro &c. &c. &c. No branch can stray far from the trunk lest it be pruned. They do not have the conviction, I say, to properly plunder the obscure far ends of their own stacks - as Marvel, arguably, does.)

I said: I see full well that I am boring you.

"Ain't Been Served; Ain't Getting Served."

2011-05-26T13:51:00.006-04:00

New York City. 1:30 PM.
Are You Being Served is on Channel 21.
Do you know where your children are?

Watching five minutes of Are You Being Served -- which is, after all, as much as any thinking person can sustain without imploding -- and squinting into the grey-and-brown-and-snot-green screen, I thought: "And who of this nut-brown, motley bestiary is yet counted among the living and the sensate?" These people were old, broke-down, crooked and crabbed in the late Seventies. It is too much to hope that Captain Peacock is still among the living. Ditto Mrs. Slocombe.

The great shock of course, when one views an old episode of Are You Being Served, is how young Wendy Richard ("Wendy Richards") was in it. And yet when she appeared on our screens next, in Eastenders, she was a hoar-headed half-upright revenant. I believe she is now indeed a tenant of the grave. What happened in that mysterious interim? How badly and rawly and close to the flame did she live, that the gods threw her down so low and abused her spirit-self and bade her grub in the filth for dirt and blood and garbage as her daily bread? She was a frisky pixie one minute; the next she was the she-hag of the moors.

Was WENDY stranded on an island like Odysseus, and forced to "couple" with mythological mermen? Was she obliged to do battle with Cyclopses, and Scylla and Charybdis, to scratch and claw her way back to Borehamwood and Albert Square? Did she feast meanly and jealously on human flesh? Did she slake her devalued and voided soul with sweetmeats from the grave for sustenance in her uncalendered years of dark days?

Contrast the fate of the late Ms. "Richards" with that of JOHN INMAN. He's still alive (if being John Inman can ever really be called "living"), [I just checked and actually he's dead - he died four years ago -- but my point remains I think] {perhaps it doesn't} and well and living in Florida [he isn't] {he's dead} .

[I am going to continue to pretend I don't know that John Inman is in fact dead so that I can make my regrettably somewhat compromised point.]

John Inman is Dorian Gray, while Wendy Richards was his portrait; for every crude, coarse, vulgar, Gott-verboten thing that VICIOUS JOHN did (and they have been called legion, for they are many), it was thrice-damned WENDY who saw another lock of hair turn'd hoar overnight, whose back hunched some more, who grew a horn in the centre of her forehead and felt in her craw a snaggletooth inch another inch.

(M.K. P____ I think it was who once declared an undying and vigilant and pathetic love and admiration for Wendy Richard in Are You Being Served. I think he used to extract weird joy from confessing such things to shock his crowd of young and callow friends. Now LA RICHARD is dead and M.K.P. is in love with an aged corpse. Michael, very well is it said: that death shall catch us all, even our one-time true-loves!)

[...]

Admittedly John Inman being dead, and Wendy Richard in fact outliving him by two whole years before she too submitted to vile death, reduces somewhat the puissance of my original point (to wit: that John Inman outlived all his cohorts on Are You Being Served and was alive and well in Florida), but the point can be made to a lesser degree with reference to Barbara Windsor.

Barbara Windsor is older than Methuselah, and she is certainly older than the late Wendy Richard, but BABS is still alive and well (perhaps she even lives in Florida--). Could it be that WENDY "took on" the many sins of BABS and it was those abundant manifold sick vile excesses that cruelly "done in" MS. RICHARDS?

This is of course a matter of purest speculation.

(Pause as the author checks to see if Barbara Windsor is still alive or if she died in 2002.)
__________________________________________

NOW...

As the English firmament spins further away from me and as of course our own childhoods become more strange to, and remote from, us, I find myself having to frown and try to clarify neglected memories. Jamie Oliver on TV said that his chicken and potatos and tomatos dish was "fandabidozi" and as a consequence I found myself in the peculiar position of explaining who the Krankies were to my American wife. Found myself doubting the data as I relayed it: "She was... a Scottish midget... who dressed up as a schoolboy and... pretended to be her husband's son? She was his wife, but... [hesitating; faltering...] ...but she pretended to be his son."
_____________________________________________

(Sheepish afterword. Following further rudimentary research, I have discovered that Captain Peacock is still among the living. "Which is," to quote Emerson, "what old people called - the gods visible again." That great, grand, old man! That cheat of base, grasping Charon!!!

And ---

What a mess I made of this point I had to make.)

2011-05-02T21:01:00.003-04:00

I was at the 40th Street library self-service machine taking out some Emerson-crit books and this fat guy in a Superman t-shirt says, "I know that name."
I am routinely rude to strangers, so I only with the greatest relcutance acknowledged that he was speaking to me. I stared at him as if to say, "Say it then. Say your fatuous piece."
"Ralph -- Waldo -- Emerson. I know the name."
"What do you want," I replied sourly. "A MacArthur Fellowship 'genius' award? What do you want?, the due intellectual recognition and veneration from your peers in your scholarly field? What do you want?, a lifetime achievement award from the Rocky Mountain MLA? What do you want?, a festschrift in your honour from the leading lights of American Studies? WHAT DO YOU WANT, Sacvan Bercovitch's personal 'home phone' number?!"
"I never read Emerson," he continued, in his revery. "I read Edgar Allan Poe though."
I said, "Oh well then that's all right. After all you only ever need to read one writer from the nineteenth-century after all - they're pretty interchangeable."
I looked down at his stack of library books. On the top was a Green Lantern trade paperback.

Suddenly it all made sense.

"Now I get it," I said. "You're the man who only reads DC comics.
You couldn't possibly read Emerson and Poe."

Obama Vs. Osama: Trump Trumped

2011-05-02T08:46:00.007-04:00

Shall I be that pioneer, with the first of the Obama/Osama conspiracy theories? B'lieve I shall.

Where were you when Osama's death was announced?, asks the boring man who seems to permanently dawdle around the water-cooler, always looking for a "water-cooler moment".

"I was watching Celebrity Apprentice," I answer icily. "Now let me get a cup of water."

Last night Celebrity Apprentice had droned on inconsequentially and without any clear narrative, as it usually does, for the better part of its two-hour duration. It was reaching its "climax" - the boardroom sequence in which the losing team has to fight and bellow among themselves for their "very survival". That game slapper NeNe Leakes had spent the whole episode bawling and growling incoherently at Star Jones. Donald Trump was sitting across the table from them, squinting contentedly like mad Pontius Pilate, as the black folks squabbled for his pleasure.

("Is Donald Trump a racist?" - David Letterman.)

It was all going Trump's way, then, until suddenly the broadcast was interrupted with the announcement that President Obama was about to make an "emergency statement".

"This cannot be an accident," I remarked to my wife. "Trump rides Obama about his birth certificate all week and Obama just happens to make an emergency announcement while The Celebrity Apprentice is on?"

Could it be, I merely ASK, that President Obama has had the opportunity to kill Osama Bin Laden at any time he wanted, and that he only struck yesterday - he only gave the kill-order yesterday - expressly so that he could make the announcement during Donald Trump's weekly two-hour slot on Sunday night?

Could it be, I say, that the death of Osama Bin Laden was merely a stroke of one-upmanship in that bigger battle betwixt Obama and Trump?

Mull on that a while, Mullah Omar. Here's an anecdote. When the news was broken, my wife had retreated to the shower, so when I shouted through the apartment, "Osama is dead!" she - in the shower - thought I was saying "Obama is dead!" For a moment, for her, it was a very different reality from the rest of us.
Actually, when I think about it, it is habitually a "very different reality" for my wife from "the rest of us".

[TYPE AND MOTIF INDEX OF HUMOR J1772: "One object thought to be another." Or K2150: "Innocent made to appear guilty." Subset: "School of jokes based around the amusing confusion between the similarity of the names, Obama and Osama."]

THREE QUICK JOKES.

-----Well, Osama is dead and that is that. He shan't be back any time soon. "Ding dong." We shall not see his like again, &c. I am only slightly anxious because I have been putting the blame on him for everything that has gone wrong in my personal life for the last ten years and suddenly I've lost that stand-by - that "wingman" if you like. Who to blame, now my scapegoat is gone?

-----Incidentally, in the name of fairness, I should note that Jenks Whittenberg was the first one with the news of Osama's death. He had claimed that Bin Laden was dead way back in October 2001. Certainly Jenks was slightly premature, but you have to admire his uncanny prescience withal.

-----I was a bit disappointed that Obama didn't pull Osama's decapitated head out from behind his lectern - or even (as my wife suggested) film the announcement while squatting athwart the corpse of Osama.

TO SUM UP:

"Osama Bin Laden is dead," Obama announced gravely on the television.
"That's all well and good," I responded, "but more importantly: who was fired on The Celebrity Apprentice?"

"Woodchips and Whittlings from The Store Porch Floor"

2011-04-20T22:21:00.005-04:00

Repartee on the shop floor.
I came out of my zero-thought-zone to hear the comics shop guy saying that he lived in constant denial.
That sounded about right.
He was shrill and hyperventilating so I couldn't tell if he was laughing or crying.

One of those patented comics-store wise-acres who loves to buddy it up with the shop staff responded, "Denial is a river in Egypt."

Did you just make that up.

Imagine this guy at parties.

Comic shop guy says, "Denial is also a state... the state I live in!"

Not to be outdone, never to be outdone, the customer's rejoinder was, "I live in the state of inebriation."
Comics shop guy (not to be outsmarted): "Ha! Yes: me too. I live in the two states, between the two... If I could be in two states at once I'd be in both of them. I live on the strip of land between the two..."

Yes, I thought, I believe we get the joke...

The customer was plainly the sharper wit of the two because he kept upping the ante of the joke: "The two states are pretty much one..."
The comics shop guy was simply cheerleader now, scarcely a participant at all: "Yes! You're right! Yes they are!"

I was stood there thinking, "So the joke is that you are continually drinking yourself insensible and you refuse to face head on the horrific state of your lifeless mindless life. Now explain this to me again: how is that funny?"

World Matters

2011-03-19T08:46:00.008-04:00

Our internet and phone line were down for most of the last month. While wars and earthquakes and nuclear meltdowns took place outside we were oblivious and - crucially - I could not "log" my immediate and very interesting reactions to world events. Now the Internet is returned and I can construct the following from crude notes scribbled in pencil on any handy scrap, when the "muse" possessed me.

1. JEOPARDY---

In the always-awkward biographical bit after the first commercial break, the third contestant - a male - told Alex that he baked cookies. He revealed further that, on his first date with the woman who would in due time become his wife, at the end of the date he presented her with a plate of home-baked cookies.

Alex twinkled and made some vulgar, asinine remark - lost foreverafter to scholarship alas.

I, meanwhile, ungenerously wondered aloud (to an empty room) how many women this gentleman had dated who had dumped him on the spot after the first date, when he showed up at the end of the night with a plate of homemade cookies.

The other male contestant, the chronic nervous stutterer, was asked by Alex what he would do with his winnings. The contestant took the question too seriously - too literally - and said that he would get surgery on his eyes "so I can finally get rid of these lenses I've had since fourth grade." Alex, who clearly "glories" in wearing "eyeglasses" for his part despises quotidian reality, i.e. that realm where the contestants blunderingly exceed the wonted flippant tenor of these exchanges, could really give a fuck about this guy's patent vanity. He said, "Well it's your money. Fuck it away on your self-love... I ask only that you deal with your weird inner vanity on your own time..."

STORAGE WARS---

My new favourite show is Storage Wars. I can't be bothered explaining why that is, at least not here. Suffice it to say I like all the characters on this show. They have a novelistic potential. I started off hating "Dave" but eventually (as Holden Caulfield says) "You end up missing everybody" - and thuswise I grew to like Dave.

I like Barry a lot, probably the best, but I still don't understand why, one week, he brought in a midget on stilts to give him a "strategic advantage" in looking at the contents of a storage locker. The stilts were not even very high, so it ended up that when the midget mounted the stilts he was about the height of a conventionally-sized humanoid, which - to my mind - is hardly a decisive advantage.

JUSTIFIED---

When the trailers were first playing last year for Justified, in the commercial breaks between parts of the third season of Damages, all we ever saw was Raylan Givens sneaking around corners in pursuit of Boyd Crowder. They were sneaking round twists in a house, guns cocked in hands, stealthily looking for each other. And I saw this and I thought, "What is this show? Every week Timothy Olyphant pursues this other guy around a house? It'll be like a live action version of Tom and Jerry."

Mid-way through the second season of Justified, I can only conclude: yes, it is indeed a live action version of Tom and Jerry. I am expecting Raylan Givens to drop a piano or an anvil on Boyd at some point.

Love that show man, by the way.

Tom and Jerry. Justified.

Love that show.

[Weirdly unfeigned afterword:]

SORRY IF U WUZ EXPECTIN SOMEFIN ON THE LIBYAM [sic] SHITUATION OR THE JAPANESE NUCLEAR WSTELAND [sic], ----- MAN THASS ALL I GOT.

Two Jokes.

2011-01-31T15:29:00.009-05:00

1. I didn't realise until about a month ago that Dick Van Dyke and Danny Kaye were two seperate "entities".

I understand that they are two different names, but I had never thought of the two next to each other so had been under the impression...

that...

they were one person.

Do you get what I mean? Whether I heard the name "Danny Kaye" or the name "Dick Van Dyke" on any occasion I always thought of the same mental image. A vague fuzzy signified. Whether that blurry mental image was Dick Van Dyke or Danny Kaye... or an amalgam of the two... I still don't know. I was never interested enough to scrutinise this anomaly until last month. Danny Kaye is dead and had an affair with Laurence Olivier. Right? Dick Van Dyke is still alive and well and apparently wholly heterosexual.

[...]

Now explain this again to me... which one was in The Sound of Music?

2. IDEA. Wolverine's newest super-villain opponent: Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux.

Let me put that another way:

Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux looks like she could be a super-villain opponent of Wolverine. You can imagine them in a knock-down drag-out ultra-violent brouhaha ... which Wolverine would lose.

She could be a Deadpool Max villain, man.

Pasolini e Ezra Pound

2011-01-28T11:06:00.000-05:00

"Flame Off." Or, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home."

2011-01-27T22:11:00.006-05:00

As I was mindlessly washing the dishes this evening, still mourning Johnny Storm, I was trying to imagine the scene around the Marvel Bullpen.

For years, I supposed, in the course of their high-octane power-lunches, the head honchos have been saying, "Remind me again, why'd we keep Johnny Storm around? What exactly does he do?"

That is when one continuity buff routinely pipes up: "He can set himself on fire spontaneously and set other things on fire and he can fly. When he is really peeved he goes nova."
"Yes. And that is always a highly effective tactic."
"You're being sarcastic."
"How shrewd of you to notice, my dear. Pray pass the nachos."

As I say, this conversation has gone on for literally decades, scarcely varying in any significant way. Meanwhile Johnny sticks around, achieving little of note and less still of merit. His most outstanding achievement was when he stole his hideously deformed best friend's girlfriend, who was blind, while his friend was off on a distant planet, but then it turned out she was a shape-changing alien and the whole thing was the arrantest farce.
Poor guy - I feel like I've had relationships like that.

Sometimes, a few mimosas into the Bullpen lunch, one editor will ejaculate: "Johnny Storm is a no-good bum! He loafs about the Baxter Building bachelor pad all day, living 'high on the hog' off the Marvel coffers and the wilted laurels of past, better decades! He is a no-good trust-fund bastard sucking the blood out of the Jack and Stan days! We should banish him to the Williamsburg ghetto of Brooklyn where his kind prevail!"
Then some drone goes, "What about John Byrne, John Byrne did quite a good job with Johnny."
"Good old Byrney. Mad as a hatter and mean as a copperhead but God bless him."

Then finally, this year, when the conversation came around again and the wonted ritual remarks had been and gone, somebody got incensed (squiffy) enough to shout aloud "Johnny Storm must die!" and this time there was nobody around to plead for clemency. The death sentence was blithely passed. One pissed guy at the table said, "Okay let's do it. Who knows we might even sell a few copies of Fantastic Four for the first time since the glory days of Byrne."
That's when the same drone remarks, dully, "Hey I dug Tom DeFalco's run on FF man."
"His Thor was great."
"Dude's underrated. Did you read Spider-Girl?"
&c.
Soon Johnny was forgotten, his corpse neglected under a pile of leaves. With the first wave of snow he was utterly covered and forgotten.

Now Johnny is gone and I wonder what I shall do.
Who shall "go nova" now that Johnny shan't?
There is a new star in the heavens tonight!

Okay it's true that at the age of thirty-eight the only register left to me is one of withering sarcasm. Why is that.

"Johnny's Gone to Hilo."

2011-01-25T14:00:00.011-05:00

Some of my funniest squibs and "social commentaries" erupt in the natural course of an e-mail to one Damian Morgan. (You might call him my "muse" - if you hadn't seen what he looks like!) This is one of them. Since it is of national historical import, I decided to publish it here.

HERE, WHERE SO MANY PEOPLE CAN SEE IT AND READ IT.

D.----

Maybe it'll make the cover of the Sun and the Mail (D.: "I only read the Express - for The Perishers and Flook"), maybe not, but the Human Torch (all-time "King of Boring Comics") is alas dead. He died today. Now who among ye will heat things up and fly though the air in the Marvel Universe? [More hysterically - that is, even more sarcastically:] What other heat-based-powered characters do they have?!!!

As everyone knows, if he turned his hand to it Iceman could be icy or heat-based. It is "simple thermodynamics". He could be both characters at once. He is the proverbial "twofer," wherefore pauvre Johnny is, helas, surplus to requirements.

Speaking of Boring Comics, add this: stories where the Silver Surfer returns to, or even reminisces about, his "lost" homeworld of ZENN-LA, and his "lost" ex-girlfriend who pops up with tedious regularity, SHALLA BAL.

Anything to add to a very long list?

Or a bouquet perchance for dead Johnny, gone before his time?

"It seems to me
He lived his life
Like a blowtorch in the wind."
SIR REGINALD KENNETH DWIGHT

[End of e-mail.

Footnote to the above:-- I checked and neither "The Perishers" nor "Flook" were actually ever in the Daily Express. The former was in the Mirror, the latter in the Mail. The Express however gave us the incomparable RUPERT T. BEAR.]

I should note further - and this is a sort-of "DVD-extra" exclusively for my WEBLOG readers (I should make some elaborate ego scriptor digression here in the fashion of the sadly late DAVID FOSTER WALLACE but I believe if I stay strong I can resist) that Johnny Storm was once, all laughter aside (please - no jokes about funeral pyres or baked meats for the funeral!!!), a well-written and likeable character; in the days of STAN and JACK. A late decade of bad-writing in which successive dunce fanboys write Johnny as what they imagine a "playboy" to be (that is, what they themselves wish they were in all its crassest most vulgar technicolour ) (see also: Tony Stark, sundry Punisher Max "gangsters") did for him alas and Johnny must go. He must die. He did.

Johnny's gone to Hilo.
Hiiiiilo, you,
Hiiiiilo my Johnny's gone,
What shall I do?

Still... we have the classic years to remember don't we good my lads?

Now if they'll just kill off the Invisible Girl and the Thing... and Reed Richards' infernal daughter... you have the makings of quite a good comic book there.

They could call it "The Widowerer Richards and His Omnipotent Son Franklin."

___________________________________________________

OLLA PODRIDA...

Phunny Phenomenon:

Did you ever walk away to get something and leave the DVD running because you simply couldn't be bothered to pause it? Yes - taking the time out of your busy schedule to pause and un-pause really is one of the paramount vexxations of twenty-first century living. You think, "as long as I can hear what's happening, it doesn't matter." Yeah you do it I know you do after all we all do we're all human we all do it.

I have however taken to doing this even while watching the excellent TV version of Lone Wolf and Cub; wandering off to get a pot of "Chocolate Undergound" yoghurt from the fridge while the DVD is still running. As I wonder off I think, "How in the heck I'm supposed to understand this by only listening to it? It's in Japanese." Still I do it.

Life is funny - ain't it?

WELL AIN'T IT.

SAY IT IS, DAMN YOU.

Tetego Bashi - Bob Satake

2011-01-18T13:53:00.000-05:00

Four Last Jokes for The Year.

2010-12-31T18:58:00.004-05:00

1. "The crackerjack lads at Radio Shack." ("Possibly" sarcastic.)

2. Conversation recently overheard in McCarren Park between a hipster and an old Polish man.

"Ya, this is how Polandt is holl year roundt."
"What, full of snow?"
"No - full of drunk old Polish men."

3. I forgot the third joke.

4. Man absent-mindedly says the word "espionage" when he meant to say "abolition". The consequences are - of course - hilarious.

Kraftwerk - Autobahn (TOTP 1976)

2010-12-18T22:50:00.000-05:00

Dexys Midnight Runners - Show Me [totp]

2010-12-18T22:45:00.000-05:00

Butthole Surfers - "Jimi"

2010-12-18T22:42:00.001-05:00

Adam & The Ants - 'Kings of the Wild Fronteir' on TotP

2010-12-18T22:36:00.000-05:00

Crisis at the Nexus of Infinite Realities

2010-12-16T07:59:00.010-05:00

We were watching Top Chef last night, and the judges - Padma, Tom, Tony Bourdain and a raggle-taggle crew besides - were going across New York eating at four justly-acclaimed eateries. The "cheftestants" were divided into four groups and each group was - - - well never mind that. Never mind, it isn't germane to what I want to say. It was the usual Top Chef high-octane first-rate challenge. That's all you need to know.

After eating at the first restaurant Padma, Tom, Tony et al went out of the restaurant and hailed a cab to go to the next destination. I said to my wife, wouldn't it be funny if the cab they hailed just happened to be the Cash Cab?

(The Cash Cab is the yellow taxi that tours Manhattan picking up innocent customers, whereupon the driver and quizmaster, Ben Bailey, drills them with general knowledge questions until they reach their destination. If they get three questions wrong before they reach the destination, he kicks them out. Again, this isn't entirely germane.)

What would happen if Cash Cab picked up Tom, Padma, Tony et al? Would it be an episode of Cash Cab or an episode of Top Chef at that point? Would it be a weird crossover event? Would both sides have competing camera crews in the cab, and teams of lawyers fighting for the rights to the resultant footage? Would Padma blow the game by repeatedly answering wrongly and prematurely before they had fully conferred? Would Ben Bailey and Tom Colicchio try to out-do each other for sheer wryness? Would Bourdain carry the day with his trademark swagger or would his great overblown ego threaten to destablize events?

It would be great if it happened but I guess it never will. We imagine that the stars of reality TV occupy the same reality but of course they don't. As Reed Richards sez, "There are worlds within worlds!"

As Gibby Haynes sez, "What do you know about reality? I am reality!"

(Incidentally, did anybody else notice the breakthrough occurence recently, played-out in the insignificant obscure back-pages of Tiny Titans/Archie #3?: The fabled and long-awaited meeting of Batman and Archie? DC should have made more of this. Note to continuity-fans: this was a younger Archie than the one who met Punisher in the Punisher/Archie one-shot. He was in the Bat-Cave.)

(Further note: Strange Tales II #3, published yesterday, has the best crossover yet: Harvey pekar and the Thing. It must have been one of the last stories Harvey wrote. Not quite my idea [see earlier post, re: Harvey Pekar / Wolverine crossover - actually don't, I deleted it - ] but close. Maybe the Cash Cab / Top Chef crossover can happen.)

___________________________________________________

OTHER THINGS: Does anything make you as mad as when you are trying to maneuver your mouse in a confined space? There should be a neologism for just this vexxing occasion.

W.T.U.D. ("W.T.F.?")

2010-11-09T22:13:00.007-05:00

On BBC America they show Luther starring Idris Elba as the eponymous plod and then they have a fifteen minute "extra look" (obviously the DVD extra) at Luther. Why have we come to this, by the way? They are now actually televising DVD extras.

That's beside the point.
Focus.

All I really want to say is that Idris Elba is really enthusiastic on these DVD extra looks at Luther whereas he is nowhere to be seen on the Wire extras. Like The Wire was just some poxy little thing he did, but Luther is something he is really "geared up" about.

Every week he froths and chuckles, shaking his head in sheer awe and disbelief at the "mad genius, mate" of the episode of Luther that he has just starred in, and that we have just watched. And not a word did this same Idris Elba have to say about his role as Stringer Bell in The Wire.

I'll be buried upside-down, I think, because the world has gone topsy-turvey!!!!!

___________________________________________________

New York City Marathon pass't by without many incidents of note thanks fer asking. We, as usual, went and had a "Hungry Bear" brunch at Enid's to mark the occasion, but dawdled too long in there and when we came out we had missed all the front-runners. Nothing left but middle-management.

A guy was stood at the side shouting "You're making history!" at the runners. He shouted, "You're living the American Dream!"

On every corner up Manhattan Avenue was a band, almost invariably a ska band. Every group must have its cornet player it seems. To each band, a frontman doing the patented Suggs "nutty dance" - shuffling on the spot in a pork pie hat. Americans are peculiar.

One exception was the group on the corner of Manhattan Avenue at Greenpoint Avenue. They started playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit." I thought this was hardly the right tone for the New York City Marathon, but they had changed the lyrics so it was okay. In the chorus they were singing "It's the marathon! / Keep on running!" A message we can all really get behind.

The other phenomenon observed by "this office" this year was that of people who were out jogging, wholly independent of the marathon, who nevertheless felt the perverse need to run along the marathon course or counter to it just while the marathon was going on. Strange absurd vice! Fatuous vanity!

The Wire Versus Parking Wars

2010-11-01T12:42:00.006-04:00

We just finished watching The Wire from start to finish.

Cussed and contrary as I am, much as I instinctively despise the high-middlebrow views of the general public, I have to agree with the consensus among the chattering (twittering) classes that The Wire is the best TV program ever invented.

If you're asking, my favourite moment was probably the death of Bodie. The death of Omar was simply heart-wrenching ("crunching") but you have to give em props for the way they did that. It was like the death of Christopher in the The Sopranos. Half the narrative died with it but verisimilitude prevailed. Likewise Marlo's final victory. Yes, perhaps the soft bourgeois sap in me wanted a Hollywood ending, one where Avon murderously dispatched Marlo with a "shiv" in the penitentiary, but I'll happily concede the actual ending was infinitely better.

Anyway, like everyone who came before me I now find myself in a very sad and pitiful vacuum. Where am I going to go now the show is over, now that the streets of Baltimore are closed to me? I was cycling over to Atlantic Books in downtown Brooklyn on the weekend and I was thinking, "I hope something unpleasant and Wire-ish happens to me!" Get my bike "jacked" or something. Christ at least somebody might have let my tires down while I was in the shop.

I was all excited and ready for some urban crime.

Anyway, today at lunchtime I flipped on the DVR & went over the backlist. What've we got here. We'd watched all the episodes of Community, Top Chef Patisserie (whatever it's called) and Come Dine with Me; but there were a bunch of episodes of Parking Wars. Turned one on. I thought, "Philly's not an hour down the road from Baltimore. They could have had Season Six of The Wire set in the Philadelphia Parking Authority, busting notrious rascals for parking in bus lanes."

Let no man make light of the grievous sin of parking in a bus lane. It is considerable.

You could have McNulty and Freamon "padding the beat" on the streets of Philly. Then the others fall in with them, as is the custom. Pryzbylewski working at the Impound Lot. They could have actual characters from Parking Wars interacting with the Wire characters.

It'd be like a Marvel DC crossover gone haywire. It'd be like the American Splendor/Wolverine crossover I am still harping on about even though it didn't get a single laugh last time around.

You may think it's a bad idea but couldn't they at least do a one-off crossover? For me?

{Alternatively, they could set the sixth season in the New York Public Library. I'd be happy to help in an advisory capacity.}

Jonathan Lethem, Gone From Us Too Soon.

2010-09-17T09:14:00.009-04:00

Jonathan Lethem is granting an interview at the New York Public Library. Charging hard cash for tickets to see him ruminate on sundry elevated topics I imagine. I love nothing more than to see these middlebrow middle-managers hold forth on all things collegiate.

This event is apparently his "Farewell to Brooklyn". The advertising copy says, "Jonathan Lethem is saying farewell to his friends, family and fans on this gala night of a thousand nights as he prepares to leave for that vale beyond which nobody ever returns. He is going to teach Creative Writing at the Pomona College in California."

It actually says, "Jonathan Lethem will join Paul Holdengräber for a conversation as he bids farewell to his friends and fans at his last event before leaving for his appointed position as the Roy Edward Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College in California."

I think the real copy is actually more idiotic than my burlesque.

Are we to reasonably assume from this that Mr. Lethem will never return to Brooklyn henceforth except in a coffin (which will presumably sit "in state" at the Stephen A. Schwarzman building before being carried in a funeral float to Times Square, down Broadway and over the Brooklyn Bridge)? Shall we facetiously suppose that his measly stipend as the Walt Disney Appointed Fellow will not allow him to travel back to Park Slope and its celebrated salons hereafter? That his is an exile equal only to Solzhenitsyn's interesting sojourn in the Vermont woods? (I shall not speak of my own Walden years exiled in distant Hethersett, Norfolk.) As they say around Brighton Beach, "It is to laugh!"

Is it the French or the Russians who are meant to say that.

Has anybody, incidentally, ever heard or seen footage of a personage of the foreign persuasion actually say "It is to laugh"?

Any way the puff concludes by saying that Mr. Lethem's most recent novel is entitled Chronic City. Glad to know it. I merely put it out there that perhaps Mr. Lethem has been "toking nuff chronic bad bwoy!" And following from this possibly ungenerous supposition, let us add that maybe California isn't the best place for Mr. Lethem to retreat to, indeed.

Better, try Tehran, rasta rude bwoy.

Joke: Couples in History

2010-09-07T20:50:00.008-04:00

Tristan and Isolde -- Troilus and Cressida -- Thurston and Kim.

__________________________________________

Thurston Moore and Byron Coley were on TV again last night talking about - guess what - you'll never guess - yes it was NO WAVE MUSIC. They were talking about a DNA track that they "couldn't remember the name of."

Bilge, my dears! Bollocks, dear hearts!

You knew exactly what the song was called, you were just pretending not to know because you're scared that everyone thinks you're boring professorial nerd wankers on the subject of NO WAVE MUSIC and as the years go by you begin to sound like old antiquarians - philologists - presbyterians even - like one elderly gentleman I knew in Oxfordshire who claimed he was wholly uninterested in anything "that came after the Reformation". He said "Civilization stops at Cranmer."
I said, "what about this new fellow, I believe his name is John Calvin---"
"Too modern," he said with a wave of the hand. "Boy, begone. I would return to my Aquinas now."

Reader I went.

Thurston and Byron sound a bit like that when they drone on about Glenn Branca and Arto Lindsay and Lydia Lunch, maverick blowjob queen of the Lower East Side. They are losing the kids of the i-phone era, who do not care about drone skronk anti-records. They strictly wanna hear X-Ray Spex and Raincoats derivatives. Kleenex copyists and nothing else. Meanwhile Ms. Lunch can be found even today strolling along Houston showing her thighs to passers-by.

It is her area of expertise. People used to buy Lydia Lunch records just to look at the covers.

I mean I know I did.

Those innocent days are gone - dragged away from us forever by OSAMA BIN LADEN.
_______________________________________________

Joke: "Glass Funyun."

Fall Poem / Death Valley Woolgathering

2010-09-02T08:45:00.005-04:00

"Fall Poem"

Isn't the "style icon" every Fall
Diane Keaton in Annie Hall?

__________________________________

"Charles Manson Musings"

I was watching recent clips of Charlie Manson in the dock, up to his usual cabaret. This time I was thinking, "Looks like he's had some work done."

Then later I thought, "Manson looks bad. He's looking run-down. Not his usual perky self. He must have a lot of stress in his life."

I stopped midway through this train of thought and caught myself. I went, "What stress? One thing you can't accuse Charles Manson of is keeping things bottled up."

These are my thoughts for to-day. If you tuned in wondering what I am up to these days, THIS IS THE SUM OF IT.

"Verse."

2010-08-30T20:11:00.002-04:00

A sudden acute memory
Apropos of absolutely nothing:
Liam falling head over heels
To catch a bus in Kensington.

"Joke."

2010-08-30T14:05:00.001-04:00

JOKE: French hip-hop.

__________________________________

VARIANT JOKE: People who like French hip-hop.

(Non-French people who like French hip-hop.)

"Christian Vander Eyes"

2010-08-30T09:39:00.015-04:00

People at the Fort Greene Flea Market. The men - yutzes one and all - in their shorts and Urban Outfitters t-shirts. Carrying their newfound progeny in papooses on their chests. Balding, experimenting with facial hair. Trying lobster rolls. And I went among them, as one of them, little better than them (although I had no shorts on and I had no facial hair). Standing there thinking about paying $10 for the Ree Yees Star Wars figure. Is this my lot, Christ? O is this the set I deserve?

I was flicking through the reggae vinyl. Pulling out Tenor Saw, Josey Wales, some Yellowman discs. Meanwhile some yutz-putz amalgam was listening to a stack of dub elpees on the ground. I waited for him to finish so I could listen to my discs, because you know as well as I do that the amateur listener needs to hear the reggae record before buying it. Reggae artists are not noted for their consistency. It is an unreliable wager to go in blind. But when Putz-Yutz was done he packed up the record player and tucked it under his arm as the Arab folds his tent, and "silently stole away." The record player was his, and he carries it from town to town, bazaar to bazaar, so great is his dedication to the musical arts of Kingston. I despised this bearded pillock instantly.

The salesman, who was a broad variant of Yutz-Putz (both bearded, both - like most of the men assembled there - like miniature versions of Francois Ford Copolla, Steven Spielberg or Bill Gates), said that he didn't have a record player there because his "batteries had run down". I set my stack aside and moved away. Instead I went over to the stall where the man was selling a framed letter from Charles Manson for $350 and bought an AC/DC album for $5. (I asked him if the Manson letter was to him personally, he looked at me like I was from the CIA, shifted on his seat and said, "No... a friend of mine..." I started reading some of the Manson letter. Noted with tender amusement Manson's habit, in common with Ed Long and the late Julius Caesar, of referring to himself in the third person.)

I hate the man who carries his own record player to the flea market. He is like the man who brings his own pool cue to the pub. That is, in the words of Damian Morgan, [said in peculiar high-pitched voice] "some kind of a cunt."

___________________________________________________

New Catchphrase

Another time I had been talking about "facial recognition" with my wife. She thought that a bit-part player in one episode of The Sopranos was the actor Tim Curry. I knew it wasn't but she swore it was. Impasse before the family hearth. It is a skill, the ability to recognise faces. I have it. I said, "There's an Oliver Sacks article about this in the current New Yorker, about how some people are better at reading faces and recognising traits than others" but that naturally just made her despise me more. She looked the episode up on IMDB and I was right. It was not Tim Curry.

Then I went on - rather tediously and simply because in the void of unreason I like to fill up dead air with fatuous talk - about how some people are good at facial recognition and some are not.

Earlier this year, I had been with the aforementioned Damian Morgan and his pastoral cohorts at the Antony Gormley White Cube show preview. Free beer but I don't drink beer. There was an amusing and rather endearing crowd milling around. Loathsome, of course, but loathsome with a certain charm. One bunch particularly caught our attention. There was a man dressed in a bowler hat and a scarf around his head, with piratical boots and a shabby dark suit on. He was Dickensian - if Dickens had written Treasure Island.

Dear reader, Mr. Dickens did not write Treasure Island.

With this fellow was a Pan-Asian she-male with his/her leg in a cast. Then there was a short bullet-shaped thug who simply looked Glaswegian, decked all in denim. He was obviously the "hired muscle". Who we wondered were this crowd? Art students? Adventurers? Assassins? Old Dick Tracy villains? I suspect that was their entire purpose - to prompt this question in the viewer's mind. "Behind the question is a void. The question is the answer." They circled the courtyard several times flaunting their eccentricity. And I said to Damian, "The gang's putative boss - Bowler Hat - has the eyes of Christian Vander. Mark them." Damian, who can be obstinate and perverse and loves nothing better than to contradict me - looked at him and said, "You're right." Damian (and this is my whole point) has the eye that sees. Good at facial recognition. Good chap.

The worst facial recognizer I know meanwhile is Jonny Ames-Lewis. We were sat in the Coach and Horses in the 1990s and an actor who was playing a significant character in Eastenders at the time was at the bar. I didn't even watch Eastenders, but this man's face was unavoidable given the tenor and subject of the English press. Soap stars are ubiquitous. These shows are on at prime-time four days of the week. It is a small island and certain faces recur, are unavoidable. Still, when I pointed him out and noted who he was, Jonny goes "Naaaaaaoooo! It's not him, Fabe." It so patently was the man in question that I was actually irritated by Jonny's failure to see it.

Is it connected, Dr. Sacks, that Mr. Ames-Lewis also has rather terrible spatial awareness? He veers all over the street on the rambles he would take on the City Road. He used to sit in the pub with his legs splayed and his paws curled under him like a cat, and think that nothing was amiss.

Anyway, so much for facial recognition and questions physiognomical.

We had conclusively found that the actor on The Sopranos was not Tim Curry and then I had recounted the rather boring material above. Then my wife goes, "It's like when I see someone on the subway going to work in the morning and then again coming home in the evening."

Since this was absolutely unconnected to what I had been talking about, I said "Yeah."

Then after a moment I said my new catchphrase: "No. Not my point."

"Not my point, not my problem."
___________________________________________________

Just a note here that if you enjoyed these my legends, my new book, Twice-Told Tales of the Unpopular People is now available from all "good bookstores".

"Compleat Cobblers."

2010-08-25T13:09:00.009-04:00

I have stopped watching Dog the Bounty Hunter because I think that I have seen every episode several times. Nothing more depressing than sitting through episodes trying to recall whether you have seen them or not. Waiting for a dim light of doomed recognition to bleerily alight at the bottom of your weary medulla oblongata. Waiting for a stray quip from Beth that "rings a vague bell," or a memorable facial tic, a harelip or a squint, something unique and familiar about the perp.

Now, in the absence of a regular stream of Parking Wars episodes, I have elected to watch River Monsters to feed my appetite for cable reality guff. It naturally doesn't feature the same high-grade repartee as Dog the Bounty Hunter, but on the positive side it does have gigantic freshwater fish.

The gist of this show is the same as Dog anyway: hunt down a perp, wherefore 95% of the show is wholly devoid of direction, necessarily devoted to building up the putative "thrill of the chase". When the perpetrator (or here the "fish") is finally identified, located and caught, there is that same familiar sense of anti-climax, and the corollary pang of intense self-loathing, felt by the viewer. However on River Monsters, for better or for worse, the presenter does not take the giant fish onto the back seat of an SUV, offer it a cigarette, and try to turn it to Jesus and redemption.

In today's episode, the English extreme-stunt-fisherman presenter (or "EESFP" - his name escapes me and I can't even be bothered to look it up) was hunting down a monster killer fish described in Eskimo legends. He was in Alaska. In other programs this would of course be cue for a volley of jokes about Sarah Palin but River Monsters is not that show. It never will be. If you want Sarah Palin jokes switch to Letterman.

After much exposition and shrill shilly-shallying, and interviewing less-than-credible "witnesses" (half the time I felt like I was watching Teeth Mountain testifying on Judge Judy Christ sake) the EESFP found himself in the unenviable position of trying in vain to catch a common or garden sockeye salmon. When he finally hooked one, a baby bear came over and stole it from him. I'm not making this up - it really happened. The camera crew were so vexxed by this baby bear stealing their salmon that they reported him to the authorities. Really.

I couldn't work out the relevance of the capture of this salmon to the larger narrative (which is, lest we forget, the capture of the mysterious Esquimaux Death Fish) anyway. It was not properly explained. They were trying to ascertain whether there was a "viable food source" for the Mystery Monster Fish I think, but I would have thought the mere presence of the salmon alone was sufficient to conclude that there was a food source. Anyway, after the baby bear chased them off the river they blithely abandoned the hunt for sockeye salmon with utter equanimity. They said, "Well there are pike and salmon in the river so the monster fish could obviously eat them." So what was this whole folderol scene for?

It seems to me, as a lowly layperson, a landlubber and no "piscatorean," that the whole scene was cooked up purely to get a scene with a grizzly bear hovering in the background. The presenter kept pretending to be nonplussed, prattling on about absolutely nothing, while there was a bear idling on the opposite bank of the river. Like he was a tough guy, unfazed by bears. This was just the usual prick-teasing that goes on on American television. They keep you watching narrative emptiness waiting for the punchline. Obviously they decided that the baby bear did not have the cinematic cachet that an adult one would, but still he made the EESFP and his crew look like bunglers and cowards.

So they shopped the poor bear to the park ranger.

Wonder what happened to him.

I hope he wasn't shot.

Anyway, after that - and with no "useful data" extracted from the sockeye salmon - the EESFP went up in a small plane where he interviewed a female anthropologist who told him in detail about a giant monster fish she had seen from the air last year. Why didn't they use her testimony in the first place? Without the capering on the riverbank amongst our ursine cousins?

From this "expert testimony" our intrepid guide quickly asserted that the fish was - must be - a "Massive White Sturgeon". The rapidity and ease with which he arrived at this diagnosis just from the female anthropologist's scanty and bored testimony was suspicious to my critical and cynical eyes and ears. It smacked, I say, of a put-on. Then he says, with equal blitheness, "Well I could spend forty or fifty years trying to catch a sturgeon on this body of water but you and I in televisionland don't have forty or fifty years to spare so I am going to go down to Oregon waters, there to catch a sturgeon." To anticipate his viewers' obvious disappointment, he insisted "I am still catching the same fish, just in completely different waters several thousand miles away. This is not, I repeat not, a cop-out."

This was a reductio ad absurdum if I ever I heard one. There was no proof that the Monster Fish in question was a Massive White Sturgeon except on our eminent expert's dubious say-so; his speculation would only be confirmed by catching the monster fish in question in Alaskan waters. Which he now had decided against. This journey down to Oregon was a fool's errand.

There's no point in getting angry about this. I know: don't sweat the small stuff. You keep telling me that but it's hard sometimes. So he went over to Oregon where there are literally scads of sturgeon idly booping along the sea-floor just waiting to be hooked up. He caught one in about five seconds and it was about three foot long. We all mistook it for a sprat. It swam away as soon as he tried to grab it by the jaw so he fished for another one and made a mighty production of it when he caught this one, which was I think eight foot long. Still, the one in Alaska was meant to be twenty foot long so I felt cheated some more. By ooh let's see twelve feet of fish flesh.

Then he reaches into this micro-sturgeon's mouth and says, "Look the sturgeon has no teeth, just these telescopic gums." He demonstrated this by pulling the sturgeon's gums this way and that for a while, just to demonstrate the toothlessness of the fish. The poor sturgeon just took it with Christianly good grace. He "never said a mumblin' word." This did not seem to strengthen our presenter's position from where I was sitting. This diminutive, pacific, toothless wonder was our threatening Monster Esquimaux Killer?

The conclusion was, nevertheless, that this fish - "or one like it" - was the same monster up in Alaska and that it had capsized all those Esquimaux kayaks not by ruthless biting (since teeth had it none) but by its mysterious habit of leaping out of the water and knocking Esquimaux out of their canoes. This eccentric trick, incidentally, "has never been explained. Maybe it is motivated by panic."

Maybe.

This is some "fish story" indeed! This wasn't even the tale of "the one that got away" - this was the tale of "the much smaller version of the one several thousand miles away which even that one's identification was only deduced by the idlest speculation. And which got away."

"VENATOR"

"Knee Jerk."

2010-08-15T09:23:00.004-04:00

I fulfilled a lifetime's ambition of mine the other day. I said to my general practitioner, "Physician, heal thyself."

I wonder if she had ever heard it before.

I have had jogger's knee for most of the summer, and have naturally been roundly ignoring the exercise regime set for me. My doctor was commiserating, saying that she had had lots of knee problems from her knee. She said the only solution is to knuckle under and do the exercises. Then she said that she hadn't done the exercises recently because she couldn't find the time. That's when I sprang the quotation.

"Physician, heal thyself."

Now I say it I wonder if I have said it to a doctor before.

Now I think about it, maybe I have said it to every doctor I have ever had.

Now I reflect upon it like this, maybe I say it every time I ever see a doctor.

Poem. Inspired by The Sleepy Eyes of Death Series

2010-08-12T19:00:00.008-04:00

Observation:

It is now considered de rigeur
Among the au fait ronin
To disparage the bushido
While wholly upholding it.

[Interior query:

Can you knock a man unconscious
By punching him in the stomach?]

Dead Artist - Funny Misread

2010-08-11T07:46:00.002-04:00

I was reading L Magazine and I thought I read this:

"Dash Snow - another young and ascendant artist with a sharp sense of humor who barely maintained a blurry line between his art and his hair."

Funny Eyes of Death

2010-08-10T15:02:00.004-04:00

"The sky... the sea... and the Musou-Masamune blade." RAIZA ICHIKAWA

I was watching The Sleepy Eyes of Death 1: The Chinese Jade, and in the fiftieth minute the master of karate Chen Sun (the excellent Tomisaburo Wakayama - the Japanese Lino Ventura) says to his arch-opponent, the ronin Nemuri Kyoshiro (Raizo Ichikawa), who he has a "hard-on" to battle, "Shall we fight?"

To which Raizo replies, "Not now. Let's end this rude interruption." They then fight off a cadre of inconsequential samurai.

I meanwhile misread the subtitles for a moment, and thought that Raizo had made a genuinely subversive and liberating comment: "Not now. Let's wait til the end of the film."

2010-08-10T14:30:00.007-04:00

Boring Comics: Narratological Point.

It is a commonplace in Marvel comic books, particularly ones of a certain era, to waste several pages of the narrative with empty scenes showing the super heroes' battle abilities and finesse in generic battle scenes. The locus classicus is the Danger Room scene in The X-Men.
The splash page customarily begins with the X-Men seemingly spiritedly fighting one of their most notorious foes. After numerous pages (which we, the comic's humble buyers, have plainly invested and wasted whole cents in) the scene is revealed to be an exercise and an illusion. These were mere phantsasms - robotic simulacra created by the Shiiar technology of the Danger Room. Cut to a panel of Kitty Pryde at the Danger Room controls. Eating a slice of pizza, stuck in the mid-Eighties, talking her usual Mary-Sue jive.

This generic scene purportedly establishes the powers and pecadilloes of the characters for new, first-time readers. A similar scene is the opener of literally millions of comics: Spider-Man webspinning through New York and breezily espying a mugging in a back alley.

Must we ever be made to behold this sight ever again? Spider-Man captureing the muggers, grinding them down with vapid one-liners that everybody (really, everybody) is weary of. He webs them up and further lightly humiliates them, then turns to their victims who recoil from him and call him a "nasty hooligan" or some similar synonym.

Cut to a scene of J. Jonah Jameson droning on about the "web-spinning menace"; or a Daily Bugle front page editorializing against the infamous Spinner of Webs.

Marvel Comics are boring aren't they!!! I certainly wish they had never invented the Danger Room.

Add Danger Room scenes to my list of boring comics.

Also boring: "Pantheon" storylines that deal with characters from classical mythology.

__________________________________________________

Further "English Bands That Americans Like"

The full title should be "English bands that Americans like inordinately," but I think that goes without saying. "English bands that the English ceased to listen to in 1986 but which keep coming round on American turntables."

New additions:

Elvis Costello
Echo and the Bunnymen
Nick Lowe

I thought about adding Sting and Paul McCartney to the list. Does anybody in England listen to these two redundant rascals?

Etymology, Blasphemy and Bowdler

Speaking of the Americans-as-Anglophiles, there is a quite new bar under the Williamsburg Bridge called Gordon Bennett. I was in there with Toby Spinks, sat at the bar, and I was explaining to Toby what "Gordon Bennett" signified in England. "It's an exclamation of awe or surprise." I went further than was necessary, delving as I did into the gnomic realms of etymological conjecture. I said, "It occurs to me now that the phrase may have survived and prevailed chiefly as a bowdlerization of 'God damn it'."

Profane people today are unaware that blasphemy was taken very seriously less than a century ago, at least in certain milieux. There was a New York street gang in the 1850s called The Dead Rabbits. According to the nameless author of the entry on Wikipedia,

The name has a second meaning rooted in Irish American vernacular of NYC in 1857. The word 'Rabbit' is the phonetic corruption of the Irish word ráibéad, meaning 'man to be feared'. 'Dead' was a slang intensifier meaning 'very'. Thus, a 'Dead Ráibéad' means a man to be greatly feared.

This sounds like so much blarney to me, begad and beggorah.
(Blarney? On Wikipedia? It can't be!)

Uncoincidentally, the phrase "dod rabbit" was also abroad at this time-- as a canny, insider, subversive, neutralized way of saying "God damn it". When you said it, anybody astute knew what you really meant, and yet you hadn't strictly offended genteel values by saying the real phrase. The same trick persists today after a fashion in the middle-class use of the oaths "Gosh" and "Golly" ("Cripes" and "Crumbs") ("Begad" and "Begorrah"), which avoid breaking the Third Commandment while pointing ingeniously to the blasphemies. Ambrose Bierce published under the name "Dod Grile" (for "God Riled") in his earliest writings.

I submit that the phonetic similarity between "Dod Rabbit" and "Dead Rabbit" is more convincing than some airy speculation about words from Gaelic. This Gaelic interpretation sounds to me like the wilful excesses of academe at its most academic. And yet it endures. I really should write a paper on this subject for Notes and Queries.

Evenings in the university periodical section blandly leafing through back-numbers of Notes and Queries. This, which sounds pathetic I know, also sounds beautiful to me now. Idly flicking through issues of Artforum on a Norwich night.

Anyway, I merely speculated at the bar that the same may be true of the oath "Gordon Bennett!" While I was explaining all this to Toby, mine host the bartender - a generic Williamsburg collegiate laid-back slacker stubbled t-shirted bardude - had the gall to chime in to "correct" me.

He brazenly leaned across the taps and "explained it away" by means of a fatuous scenario: "If we saw a great sports car right now, while an American would say 'Awesome!,' an English person would say 'Gordon Bennett!'"

How was this different from what I had said? He simply situated it in a rather banal context. He then added, authoritatively, that "Gordon Bennett was also a real guy."

So, of course, was Joe Shmoe a real guy; and what's your point?

I looked at him with wan, noli me tangere disdain. Mine host was a total type, known on college campuses the world over (and Williamsburg is, lest we forget, a college campus sans college). The collegiate American Anglophile dude. He has a close equivalent in Australia in Ryan Webb [see past issues of Curiosa Rubberlineana, ca. 2003-6]. He is expert in smalltalk about exotic sports and is a total bore about "guest beers". He has a preferred English football team and follows them closely. He can talk companionably to anybody, as long as they have a dedicated fondness for utter boredom.

I do not. I am not that man. Nor do I take well to being corrected on points of my own national folklore by outsiders. I said, "Pardon my mistake, Herr Doktor Bardude, I had you for a lowly cocktail shaker! I didn't realize you were the doyen of the philology department. I merely grew up in England."

What I should have said: "Gordon bleeding Bennett!"

What I should have said: "And what is the etymology of the word pillock exactly I wonder, hein?"

Some Jokes; Some Not

2010-07-26T21:08:00.003-04:00

"Adversity is the good man's shining time." EDWARD YOUNG.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

There is a standard spiel, used by Dog and his bounty-mad gang, by which they sentimentally justify their chosen avocation.

Why, Hal, 'tis my vocation, Hal; 'tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.

Lest onlookers think that Dog is a grubbing, mercenary cur, he always reminds the perp and the public and the "studio audience at home" that if he doesn't collect the bounty, he foregoes the amount and that money is stolen directly from his "children's table."

What exactly is this "children's table"? I have sometimes wondered. Do the little kids - Gary Boy and all his tiny uncles and aunts who are actually younger than he is---

"I'm my own Grandpa"

--- all sit at a miniature table that is overlaid with banknotes and coins? Is this the celebrated "children's table" so often mentioned in these speeches?

(While I am on the subject, I might as well admit that I don't have the least understanding of the basics of bounty-hunting. Why is Dog foregoing the money? Does he put the money up in the first instance? Then how does he actually earn any money? At best he would break even; at worst he would be ruined. Can anybody explain bounty-hunting to me?)

(On reflection, don't bother.)

Anyway, in the episode I watched today Beth muffed up the standard spiel. She went:

"They all think they're tough. But you know what? They're none tougher than me when it means they're gonna take the food off my children's table. Because then the lion comes out!"

[Pause. Beth turns and starts to get into her SUV. Stops. Turns and adresses the camera again.]

"The lioness."

Beth when she was saying this was putting on her so-called "street-Hawaiian" voice. She goes, "Sistah."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I was watching an episode of the show recently and they were in a very specific situation, waiting for a perpetrator who was deep in a rural, jungle area of the "Big Island" and they were going to catch him before he fled in the morning. Then some music played and the lyrics were ridiculously apt for their situation. It was like a "nu metal" song that went, more or less:

"I've got to get up early
To escape the shack
To travel through the canebrake
To escape from the bounty hunters
Whose names are Leland and Dog
Youngblood and Beth
Not forgetting Duane Lee"

"They're coming up the back roads in their SUVs
I'm on my moped
I'm an ice addict
Charged with 'paraphernalia possession'
With a history of spousal abuse."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Today, needing cheering up, I watched the Todd Phillips G.G. Allin film Hated. G.G.'s always good for a chuckle. In it, at one point, G.G. is filmed sitting in a flophouse room, idly flicking bedbugs off his pillow. He is sprawled: toothless, bald and overweight. He is talking about how he intends to "die at his peak" because "that makes your soul stronger."

I was thinking, "Die at your peak?! To look at you I'd say your peak was the late nineteenth-century! If this is your peak, God help you in your lower moments!"

Elsewhere in the documentary, they had G.G.'s mum explaining how his crazy father had named him Jesus Christ Allin, but how when G.G. went to school she was worried that he would be "ridiculed" so she changed his name...

... to Kevin.

Yes, mother. Because people named Kevin aren't ridiculed no they are not.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Idea for joke: People who are always staging "interventions" for people they know. It is their solution for everything.

PARADOX ("Pearls Before Swine").

2010-07-21T14:26:00.009-04:00

At the comics shop.

Whenever customers bring their girlfriends into the shop, the storekeeper always upbraids the swains, the suitors, for being so lame as to bring their beauties into so low a den.

" Bachelor’s Hall, Bachelor’s Hall,
I’ll always stay single, keep Bachelor’s Hall."

"What are you doing," he ejaculates, "bringing these fine purebreed fillies into this foul donjon?, this debauched bachelor den of wasted males ('mutates')? Would ye besmatter these pearls with vile dross and grit? Aye - and it seems you would."

"Whatever dude. Do you have the latest Birds of Prey dude?"

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I chose Birds of Prey for my punchline simply because it may well be the dullest comic in the creation. Three female superheroes. Barbara Gordon, Black Canary and... who? I forgot.

("Batgirl." - Damian Morgan)

A while ago the same storekeeper was giving away DC comics "free gratis". DC or Diamond Distributors had said it was okay for him to "title page" them; that is to scrap 'em, and just send back the title pages. So I was tottering over the racks when he goes, "Fabian, do you want a copy of Birds of Prey without the cover?"

I gave him such a purely disgusted, violated look that he added, plaintively, "It's free."

"Still," I said. "STILL."

And yet. And yet.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Boring comic, but quite a good story I am sure you agree. Here's another one just as good as that one and bound to go down in the annals of legendry...

Speaking of which, the last time I saw D. Oregon Morgan it was in London and we met at the MVE comics shop basement. Damian is always flat-broke but he also always has a pocketful of vouchers.

Sing a song of sixpence
A pocket full of vouchers.
Four and twenty copies
Of Secret Invasion Front Line.

I went down there and he was already in place, neck deep in slime, filth, damp rot and back-numbers. Wearing his trademark white tuxedo.

"Livingstone, I presume."
"Elementary, my dear Watson."
"Echec."
"Et mat."

Also assembled there were a few other people; the usual subterranean bottom-dwellers and mouth-breathers, all bent crooked, riffling in silence through the fifty pence bins in a cloud of spores. So our greetings were rather muted. Hadn't seen Damian in nearly a year and the first thing we said to each other was consequently very emotional. Damian goes:

"Um, Fabe, so how come Spider-Man gave away his identity in Civil War and now nobody knows who he is again?"

I coughed and tried to explain this byzantine narrative abortion at some length.

Didn't succeed.

What makes me bring this up is that Damian was steadily building him up a pile of issues of Hawkwoman. I could not believe it.

"Are you doing this simply to defy me, rascal?" I goes. "Do you do it just to damn my eyes?"

Oregon pulled up a copy of Birds of Prey, squinted at the cover condition like it was a Near Mint issue of Action Comics #1, added it to his pile, and goes, "Naturlich, my dear."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** *

One last story while I am so clearly on a roll. A few days later we met Damian and his housemate Kirk (whose special unique characteristic is that he is the oldest person I know) at the launch for some Antony Gormley show at White Cube II, Piccadilly. Yeah, we're all real art buffs. [This said in the voice of John Lydon on the Bill Grundy show.] They're all heroes of ours, ain't they? Oh yes! They really turn us on.

Kirk and Damian had been in St. James's Park that afternoon, playing Ultimate Frisbee, football golf and also their own version of badminton where you hit the shuttlecock up as high as you can and keep batting it up as high as you can. A regular paralympics ("laff-a-lympics").

I looked at them strangely and said, "It's like Don Quixote, at the end, when they all decide to become shepherds." Something pathetic and woeful about this - - something that seemed to suggest to me that the world will end in the next few years.

Everybody was enjoying the free beer except me. I don't drink beer, so I had a glass of revolting white wine from the pub nearby. Awful piss.

Speaking of awful piss, Will Self was there.

Anyway, the conversation was strictly pedestrian and quite obviously headed nowhere, so I decided to "pep" it up a bit with a wry remark to Damian about the comics. Some observation about Franken-Castle or something equally erudite. And Damian pulls up his collar and withdraws from his waistcoat his snuffbox and he heaves a big inhalation of snuff and utterly fucking ignores me.

"Do you snub me now?"

"Didn't hear what you said, Fabe."

"I was talking about the four-color funny-books, Damian."

"What's this, hey?" Kirk says. "Do you read comics, Damian?"

"I've got maybe about six back at my Mum's, Kirk," Damian said loudly and haughtily, looking the other way (where, as it happens, Will Self sprawled idling).

I nodded, coolly, and simply cooed: "And the cock crew thrice."

And you know what it did.

"THE END."

Plato's Republic / Heraclitus at the Supermarket

2010-06-30T13:56:00.011-04:00

"There are levels of reality," I remarked cryptically, as we were crossing The Boulevard to Keyfood.

"The Hills is completely scripted, whereas Keeping Up with the Kardashians is - like The Osbournes - broadly rooted in so-called reality."

I was speaking to WIFE, who watches the shows but is cynical about them. She had a non-speaking part on an episode of Run's House, which was a totally scripted and artificial bunch of bunk, so henceforth she thinks that she can speak with insider knowledge about all the reality shows. Hence my tedious, gnomic dissertation as we crossed the road to the supermarket.

I was championing Keeping Up with the Kardashians as the Platonic Ultimate Reality, while The Hills is simply the rude flickering images on the cave wall. High "chairness" versus a crude drawing of a chair. Let me qualify this dictum, however, by noting that Spencer Pratt's role in The Hills is as an ultra-radical dissenting hyper-realist. I say: Spencer is a cross between Chuck Close and Malcolm X.
Later I was washing up, reasoning, "Spencer Pratt is the most vilified man in America now because he is the only person speaking the truth about Amerikkka. What we commonly call radicalism today bears no relation to what it meant even twenty years ago. Spencer Pratt is a latter-day Josiah Warren."

Then I watched this episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians where there is a subplot where Mother Kardashian gets some "little blue pills" (obtained "innocently" from her cougar coffee morning chum) and she slips the pills in to Bruce Jenner's morning coffee. Cue Bruce and Mother locked away in the bedroom for hours upon end, purportedly engaged in gruelling "lovemaking", as the kids groan and knock on the door because they want to go to the mall.

I thought this was all real.

I thought it was really "happening".

In due course their son "accidentally" drinks Bruce's coffee and ends up with the proverbial "fatal erection home in bed". He eventually has to go to the family doctor, lest he die.

The doctor is all nervous, looking at the camera out of the "tail" of his eye, and says "if it doesn't go down, we're going to have to... herm... take him to the emergency ward." It's not clear what would need to be effected there and whether Sonny's life is at serious risk. That doesn't need explication. Doc keeps mum. Suffice it to say something terrible will happen if Mother Kardashian doesn't confess to the doctor and her assembled progeny that she slipped Bruce some little blue pills to enhance his sexual performance.

The camera lingers on mother "Kris", and we can almost read her mind by all the crazy faces she is pulling in the surgery waiting room.

When this comic confession scene happens and Bruce pretends to flip his plugs, the family and doctor all beam and chuckle and return to Rodeo Drive for a right good family feed. More fun next week.

Some point during all this I twigged that this wasn't strictly "reality teevee" and that it was staged. Before this happened I was sitting there thinking, "Why don't the cameramen or the continuity person tell the son that that he has drunken Bruce's coffee with the male performance enhancer pills?! That would solve all the problems without a profligate and superfluous visit to the doctor and it would put the poor youth's mind at rest! This makes no sense!"

Dawn cracked slowly even in my anthropoid medulla oblongata.

Crestfallen, I further deduced - by use of abacus and "flow chart" - that if that subplot was a hoax, then maybe the scene where Khloe Kardashian cuffs her sister's boyfriend across the head (and, brilliantly, refers to him as a "douche-lord") might also be a lousy put-on. My whole sense of reality came tumbling down. O you my Khloe, and have you abandoned me in the Garden too, for a scoundrelly lie? Keeping Up with the Kardashians is no more real than The Hills, it's just written by sitcom hacks rather than soap hacks. Reality is "a hard road to travel, I believe".

Whupped but not out, I still have an inviolable "inner faith" that Khloe Kardashian and Spencer Pratt can rise above this quagmire of simulacra and lead us - fiery swords in hands - to a higher plane of ultra-ontological mega-reality, if we can only have faith in that little-known quality known as "magic".

Whereafter it will naturally and inevitably follow: the divine revelation of the thrice-masked unabashed kosmik Countenance of JHVH.

(&c.)

Back to the Sea Floor; Or, "J'Accuse."

2010-06-28T09:32:00.007-04:00

I went back, bewilderingly, to the refried basement sale at Jim Hanley's Universe. I had resolved to stop buying up middling comicbooks and wasting my dwindling life on this third-rate guff. So why'd I go back?

Why'd I go back.

I went back like a reanimated cadaver to his best-loved tomb.

Anyway this time down there the place was verily alive with the fanboy's equivalent of drawing room banter. Somebody said something to the shop steward about Batman and soon half the basement was chiming in on this and other scintillating subjects.

These pillocks, seemingly to a man, could not get past the basic problem of verismilitude in the funnybooks. One major pons asinorum for them was that characters in the comics didn't age at the same rate as people in the so-called "real" world.

"Franklin Richards used to be the same age as the kids in Power Pack," one grumbled. "Now he is younger than them."

"Aunt May was born in the era of the Civil War," complained another with furrowed brow, "and yet she still lives."

I had heard similar confusion in other comicshops. At Roger's, he was reasoning with a young seeker of truth, that if the comics were in "real time" then "Peter Parker would be ten year older than I am." The unshying seeker palled and left that place fast, mumbling "I have to look into this."

John Byrne has talked at considerable length about the tedious problem of Franklin Richard's age in a hundred-page interview that I amazingly read from start to finish. Everything interesting to say about this incredibly dry (and cut-and-dried) subject is in there. Still, the comics basement men talked about it as though it were a new, fresh subject for discussion and they were the first brave pioneers to strike upon this magnificent paradox at the very heart of modern life.

Next they began to bitch that characters in the comics had a habit of dying and then coming back to life. They discovered, through the frank exchange of opinions, that this was not the case in real life. In real life, they announced with grave confidence, people who died seldom returned from that interesting state.

They went on kvetching about the unreality of comics, all the while stacking up piles of comics to buy and presumably read.

Finally, after listening in silence for some time, I had had enough. I said, "Lads, lads. It seems to me that you are in the wrong place in your quest for verisimilitude. Might I recommend the works of Emil Zola?"

A moment. Then the Mexican gentleman, checklist in hand, queried:

"Zola? That's the Kirby-era Cap nazi villain with the camera for a head and his face in his thorax, correct?"

I paused; thought regretfully of this doomed planetoid and replied:

"Eggzackly."

Flip Yr. Wig

2010-05-09T23:38:00.005-04:00

PRESENTING...

My wife's jokes about headbanger (literally! - he smashed his head in on some descending scenery on an awards show! - ) BRET MICHAELS:

1. "Bret's made it another day. Him and his wig."

2. "Bret and his wig live another day."

3. For this article, I asked: "Is it Bret with one 't' or two?"
She shot back: "I think the question you should be asking is: Is it Bret with one wig or two?"

Donald Trump was needling Bret Michaels in the boardroom. Again.
Trump sneered and goes, "These girls, Cyndi and Holly, are showing spirit. Do you have any spirit, Bret? Do you have any energy, Mr. Michaels? Do you have spunk?"

He might as well have said, "Do you have any nuts under those panties of yours? Do you have balls equal to those of Miss Cyndi Lauper?"

He was bullying Bret in front of the cameras. He all but cuffed Bret around the head and chucked him under the chin. He droned, "Shan't diddums speak? Come on Bret, I'm riding you here and you aren't even responding!"

Bret, as usual, "responded" by brimming up his old blue puppy-dog eyes full of tears. He said, "I only haven't said anything because I have a filthy temper and you none of you would want to see me if I got angry." He was actually all but quoting the Hulk at one point. "Hulk mad. You won't like Hulk when Hulk get mad."

Trump was singularly unimpressed by this threat. "That's so much hot air, dear darling douchebag," he said, busying himself with idly cleaning his desk.

"You wanna see spirit?" Bret simmered. "You want energy Mr. Trump?!! Let's you and me both take off our wigs and see what we're left with then!! Just you and me let's go!"

"Arrantest dross my dear," goes Trump. "If I wore a wig don't you think I could afford something better than this flimsy gossamer objet d'art now atop my bonce?"

"You would think so," Bret goes, pensively. "Mine was only five bucks at a joke shop and it's better than yours."

It was like Borges' description of the Falklands War: "Two bald men fighting over a blowdryer."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I'm duly disgusted by the outcome of The Amazing Race final tonight. The "gay brothers" won. They had "distinguished" themselves in the last few legs by being boorish, petulant, sneaky and whiny. Did you see the one where the one brother threw a tantrum in the back of a Chinese cab. He was on the verge of kicking the back of the driver's seat - a beloved tactic of two-year-olds the world over.

Actually only one brother was gay and the other one was often at pains to swear that he wasn't. Methinks he done protested too much. Any way for the life of me I could never quite work out which one was which from week to week.

The "heterosexual" brother was such a pillock, he kept saying, "I'm competing in the Amazing Race because it has been my brother's lifelong dream to win the Amazing Race and I'm just here to make his dream come true."

He used to say it, without fail, in every leg of the competition. You could set your clock by his saying it.

It was as though he was saying, "I couldn't give a fuck about this little competition that all you dorks are watching but my fag brother does so what the fuck let's give him his homo jollies."

This from the same brother who was having a seizure in the back of a Chinese cab, going, "We're in a race you yellow swine!!"

He used to talk about his brother like he was a child with leukemia. I'd say to my wife, "Is the one brother dying of a debilitating disease we don't know about?"

And [chuckles indulgently] she'd go, "Shove off dweeboid. I'm texting."

Any way they won.

"English is a Funny Language"

2010-05-07T17:28:00.002-04:00

So is Polish.
Shall the two ever make peace with each other?
"Shall the circle be unbroken, bye and bye Lord, bye and bye?"
PROBABLY NOT.

I had a conversation with our landlord. He was dicking around in front of the house piling up burned bricks and I recalled then that the wheelie bin that was usually there had disappeared.

I said, "F_____, what happened to the bin?"
He squinted at me through his cement-rubbery face.
He has one of those faces - it's like those toy rubber faces you can get that you hold in your fist and scrunch them up.
Do you know the ones I'm talking about.

Anyway I said, "Where's the bin?"
He "didn't compute" it.
I searched for the word. "A bin. Qu'est-ce que c'est en Francais: une poubelle." Dunno why I bothered with that - the man don't speak French.
I thought, What do the Americans call a bin?
"Trash-can."
"Garbage can."
He eventually worked it out and then "explained" the absence to me in a tongue wholly unrecorded by the excellent linguists at Oxford University. So I still don't know where the bin has gone - only that F_____ is now building a sort of brick shrine where it once was.

Strange country I'm in.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Speaking of wheelie bins, I remember hearing that they were invented by the Council of the Borough of Lewisham and were "premiered" in that same interesting diocese. I was then living in the general borough of Lewisham myself - even did time in the hospital "up to" Lewisham - so stupidly took some pride in the legend.
I now and only now wonder if this was at all true.

Bret Michaels

2010-05-04T21:45:00.002-04:00

I was talking about Bret Michaels to my wife and I suddnely cheered up because I had a theory. I said, "I bet that brain haemorrhage was caused by him smashing his fucking face in at that awards show."
"What awards show."
"That awards show where he walked into a descending piece of scenery and smashed his fucking wig off!"
Poor guy - not only has he got a haemorrhage, he's bald as a coot under that headscarf!

"We wish him a speedy recovery."

"Beth in Disguise with Glasses."

2010-04-29T13:32:00.009-04:00

Judy in disguise,
Well, what you aiming for,
A circus of horrors, yeah,
Well that's what you are.
You made me a life of ashes,
I guess I'll just take your glasses

On Dog the Bounty Hunter, Dog, Beth and Youngblood are on the "big island" planning a crafty trap. They aim to catch the female perp as she arrives at the airport. Dog goes, "We're going to have Beth sneak up on her in disguise."

You could see the incredulity in Youngblood's eyes. He was patently thinking, "What are you going to do, Dog? Give Beth radical breast reduction surgery before she leaves the house ?" Of course, proper etiquette dictated that he didn't say any such thing; but canny viewers could read the meaning in his facetious smirk.

Then Beth comes in, wearing a straw hat and some sunglasses and goes, "This is my disguise."
She said, "I didn't want to wear something too flamboyant and eye-cathing."
Staring at her colossal "bosom," which is after all Beth's most prominent attribute, Youngblood goes, "With that straw hat on you look like a completely different person!!"

No he didn't actually say that but he should have.

I should write the script for this show.

Of course it isn't scripted I'm just joking with you.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The summarised description for another episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter says:

"Dog hunts a man he knows very little about and does not like."

What else, after all, need you say?

"Hulked-Out."

2010-04-29T12:19:00.007-04:00

Or, "Hulk Smashed."

I like to think that I am a man who can concentrate sufficiently to understand basic texts and even to a degree complex ones. Post-war philosophy has long been my Achilles heel but I believe I can cope with this shortcoming manfully.

Is it that contemporary "continental" philosophy is especially complex, or is it that it is routinely boring, poorly written and wilfully introverted? I further wonder aloud, Is it a coincidence that the foremost readers and espousers of theory at university were also proud members of the juggling society?
I used to sit in the postgraduate methodology seminars, batting my bottom lip absently, listening to (no, listening around) the voice of Richard Robinson as he spoke of Heidegger and that interesting Nazi's dull textual sleights of hand, or of Deleuze and Guattari and their eccentric but nevertheless thrilling "rhizomes," and I used to think, "In less than an hour I can be drinking hard cider and shooting wicked-ass pool and we can forget this flimsy pretense for being here."

Given my proven excellences as a reader, then, I have nevertheless come to doubt my certified "powers" as I attempt to make sense of the recent Hulk storyline.

A Guggenheim "genius award" to the first person who can explain this thing to me.

It's hard to work out any of what's going on in the Marvel Universe right now. The Hulk comics are especially mind-bending, and not in a particularly good way. I don't know who's where when and I definitely do not know why.

"Riddle me this, me Trinity scholar":

The Red Hulk was a double-agent between MODOK's grisly crowd of misfits and maniacs on one side and Bruce Banner on the other. Hulk's son Skaar, meanwhile, wants to kill Bruce Banner but only when he turns into the Hulk - which Dr. Banner shan't do. He simply refuses to comply. His resolve is marvellous to behold.
Skaar and Dr. Banner are also in the Wolverine titles at the moment with Skaar double-crossing Wolverine with Wolverine's grandfather (or whatever he is) Romulus. Are you following this rubbish?
Doctor Doom was kidnapped and knocked "the fuck" out with what amounted to a "stupid bomb" so he couldn't think straight. I know the feeling. The eminent Herr fon Doom is, "simultaneously", appearing in titles across the board with a marked knack to be in a dozen places at once almost equal to Deadpool's. Out of alarmed curiosity, Who apart from me is doggedly, perversely reading Doomwar? As a general rule, any story involving the Black Panther (or Storm) is boring beyond measure. This one proves the rule entirely.
Then, in the Hulk titles, every major superhero gets turned into a "Hulked-out" version of themselves. They are really called the "Hulked-Out Heroes." I think that "Hulked-Out" should enter the common parlance, because it describes my condition quite remarkably. I am wholly hulked-out.
Regardless of me and my refined sensibilities, Deadpool-as-Hulk (yklept "Hulkpool") disappeared into the time-space continuum for to kill Deadpool. That is, to go back in time and kill himself before he became "hulked-out". Why any person would suddenly conceive of this powerful drive is not explained by the exellent craftsmen at MARVEL COMICS; but we keep on buying right along. It is a time paraodox: accept it and stare out of the window, as if you are in the postgraduate seminar again and letting the venerable Richard Robinson's paper pass over your head like gamma rays on a balmy afternoon.

Hulkpool Adrift Thru Time was actually a good story but what it added to the larger narrative escapes me. More Deadpool money for the Marvel coffers. Deadpool is in twenty titles a month - even Marvel is making embarrassed jokes about this, even as they scoop up my money into their bulging pockets using a large trowel.

At this moment in my life I don't know if the denouement of the Hulk arc has even happened or not. Has that story finished? Nobody seems quite sure.

Now to DC: Batman is finally returning from the dark confines of the, yes, the space-time continuum. Perhaps out there he'll run into "Hulkpool" and the "Dark Knight Detective" can figure out what is going on in the Hulk titles cause I can't. In their Blackest Night ("Dullest, Wettest Afternoon") maxi-crossover fiasco the sum of it was that DC brought back the Martian Manhunter. Bet you'd been missing him I know I had.

Now you're up-to-date and will have something good to say if you ever have the excellent fortune to be in a drawing room with Tinsley Mortimer or Paul Johnson Calderon.

[Portions of this article first appeared in an e-mail to Damian Morgan.]

Give Um Enough Rope Brah

2010-04-27T14:31:00.014-04:00

More Notes From the Back Seat---

Freddy, the short spare verminous wight who they caught asleep in his beat-up flat-bed truck surrounded by baggies containing "pharmaceuticals" and miscellaneous stolen plunder and a switchblade close to hand...

This was Freddy, who so wildly over-reacted when they took him to the old back-seat, like they were going to kill him when they just offered him a cigarette. Maybe Freddy thought Dog Chapman was like the Krays, who would similarly offer a foeman a cigarette, and when the foeman opened his maw to take the cigarette a Kray would punch him in the open mouth, breaking his jaw in twain. It's a handy trick to know, no doubt. But Duane Chapman is no Reggie Kray.

Freddy was being dramatic. Beth said he was "an old-style convict," which is to say institutionalized and paranoid. He thought that they were going to beat him green and yellow when they were only offering to loosen his cuffs.

YOUNGBLOOD: Freddy, are you hungry? You want something before we go in?
FREDDY (THE PERP): I'll take a rope.
YOUNGBLOOD: Nah you don't need a rope. Listen, you know what... you never know what's gonna be tomorrow.
[PAUSE]
FREDDY: No, I know what's tomorrow.
YOUNGBLOOD: Nah, brah, a rope is, it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem... The only advice I can really tell you, brah, is to start praying about it.

[Camera cuts to the harrowed, sober look on DUANE LEE'S face.]
[DOG bounces onto the back seat.]

DOG: My brother said you said something about a rope. Don't be stupid.
FREDDY: I'd let you shoot me, you know that?
DOG: But brother, I wouldn't be the one to do that. Right? I'm the guy that helps you out of the water when you're drownded. So I can't be that kind of guy.

Dialogue like this you can't buy. You couldn't make it up! My wife, who used to gamely chuckle and gasp along at the various antics and saws and cutting up and sich a gittin upstairs of Dog and his family, now haughtily disdains it as "vulgar, coarse, white trash" and "a libel on the good people of Oklahoma." Never mind that Duane Chapman was born in Colorado and the show is set in Hawaii. My wife has lost her sense of humour. Acts all hoity-toity like just watching this show will lower her IQ. Now she watches High Society and has taken Jules Kirby as her guru. Then she flips bloops and flops across the channel wavelengths and settles on watching The Hills.

I don't even hate The Hills. I find its vapidity freeing in a zen-mass-mind-ultra-suicide sort of way. Watching The Hills you know positively that no matter what befalls you hereafter it can't get worse than this moment right here sitting on the couch watching Spencer and Heidi canoodling and crooning unparalleled bollocks.

My least favourite character is Audrina.

To return to Dog, The Bounty Hunter: The difference between Dog and The Hills is that the viewer shall find illumination (nearly wrote humiliation) along the back-by-ways and the dirt-paths as we goe through the show together. Like The Amazing Race it opens up your skull with new and radical experiences. It doesn't simply confirm what you already knew (that Spencer and Heidi are voidoids and Brody Jenner is a horse's ass.) I would not likely run into a Hawaiaan wife-beating meth-gulping string-bean scum-bag on the streets where I live. In Greenpoint our wife-beaters are Polish and drink paint-stripper. Of course in Williamsburg, on Bedford Avenue, everybody seems like a character off The Hills. Plus The Hills is scripted so you shan't find folk saws like those that generously dot the above dialogue.

That said...

They should totally have a cross-over, brah.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I liked how in this one episode Beth broke Dog's pinkie finger half in two and he goes "The fuck's that for?" The editors and the censors missed that because they kept it in.
Brah I laughed dude.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Speaking of calling people "brah," when is the prop'rest time to do so prithee? I saw on one episode a man called his own wife "brah". I said to my wife, "Wife - brah - is it right to call your wife 'brah'?"
I thought "brah" was short for "brother" but wife reckoned it was Hawaiian for something more profound.

Da kine.

Urban Dictionary says:

"This is the slang term for "bro" which is slang for brother..a slang inside a slang. THIS ORIGINATED IN THE STATE OF HAWAII! for those who think that it originated in Southern California or where ever, your are miss informed [sic- E.N.]. It is the pigeon (English-Hawaiian slang) word that is used state-wide in Hawaii not only by surfers but by all people born and raised in Hawaii of all racial groups. And it pains me when I hear cali haole [sic - E.N.] tourist say it.

[Examples:]

sup brah
howsit brah
a' brah we go beach
ho brah where you stay

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brah

Subsection 4 states: "Meaning: My brother/ close associate/ cousin/ or Kama'aina (person FROM HAWAII)."

Subsection 2 says: "Hawaiian Pidgeon Talk for friend. Orgin: 60's Hawaii
In kauai my cousin started it! ha!"

The people on Urban Dictionary are always useful for penetrating the hitherto murky mysteries of vernacular. One subscriber signs himself "Da Kine Fish OutaH WataH."

Subsection 13 says "brah" is: "How one tool refers to, or greets another."

Let this be the end of this worthy meditation. I still find it peculiar that a male biped might refer to his female spousal helpmeet as "brah". It's like when Ed Long used to call his girfriend Emma Halling "man".

"Emma man, what's for dinner brah?"

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Tough old convict though he was, bedraggled and hellbound a vulture though he was, however vile a killer he was I say, by the end of the journey Dog was literally dabbing tears away from Freddy's bleary eyes. As Dog said later, with fading sensitivity, "That was sad. Ker-BLAm, ker-BLAM."
I laughed at one point when the talk descended somewhat from the arcane old hobo folk-talk noted at the start of this entry, to the transcendental-bathetic bushwa we know all too well from previous late-night back-seat bull sessions. "Tough convict at first," Dog said (sounding rather like Herbie Popnecker), "then you mentioned his little girl and all he could do is cry. Very surprised."
And here was the key, don't you see?; Dog "mentioned his little girl" and the old-style small-time hood fell quite to pieces. "How old is she Freddy?" Dog goes. "Eight," sobs Freddy. "Seven!" coos Dog, who forgot his ear-trumpet that day. "Eight," says Freddy, clearer now and through grit teeth. "She's eight years old, pretty soon she'll be thirteen," Dog carries on. Well, Dog, I think I can be more precise than you in this instance. In five years she will be thirteen. Freddy should have said, "Yeah, and...? In fifty years we'll all be dead but what's that got to do with anything?" Unfortunately Freddy was pretty much a broken man by this point, reduced to lowest, vilest plankton, and he had nothing new to add to the banter.

It's really a crying shame he didn't say that, because it's true too - - - in fifty years we probably will all be dead.

Except for Heidi and Spencer.

Crinkly Headers: Secret Origins (Or, "Secret Rogerins")

2010-04-22T22:37:00.013-04:00

Corin Depper is here. With his patented passive-aggressiveness.
Never comes out and has a row - but he foments trouble everywhere he goes, as if by magic.
I said to him, "You ever said 'Boo' to a goose, Corin?"
He goes, "Boo."

***************************************************

I was walking down through Union Square West heading north, thinking, "Apropos of boring comics, all stories involving the Shi'Ar and the Imperial Guard are boring. Also any stories containing or involving Alpha Flight. Likewise anything set in the Savage Land."

***************************************************

The scene: The Time Machine

The time: What is time, after all, in a time machine?

The circumstances: I was trading my Deadpools for numbers of Cable and (pre-Max, MU) Punisher War Journal. Slipped in a Silver Age Doctor Doom special "under the rose". Roger was generous & allowed the trade.

Sifting through some Spider-Man copies and frowning, I coughed and straightened my tie and went to Roger, "May I approach the bar and ask a question?"

Like a slip of a lad hesitantly asking one of his parents where exactly babies come from --- and why.

Roger assenting in his nebulous way, I approached the "bar" bearing a copy of an early-Nineties Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man which was warped and rippled in bumps along the tops and bottoms of the pages.

Nigh every copy I have seen of this title, between #159 and #188, is so corrugated. Also issues of GI Joe and Web of Spider-Man from the same benighted period.

I went to the bar, and showed them to Roger. "Do you mark these bumps along the header?" I asked.

Roger squinted a spell, and looked perplexed. Finally he realised that I was not complaining about the art. (Far from it - Sal Buscema was drawing this title for a long and excellent run at the time.)

When he had ascertained the source of my complaint, he remarked, "You need to see a psychiatrist."

It's going badly with you when your comics guy is remarking that you are in need of therapy. That said, Roger's proffered solution did not satisfy me. He reckoned that the comics were warped and crinkled by sitting in damp. He goes, sheepishly, "Did you get your wrinkled comics from us? Cause we used to keep our longboxes in a damp basement..."

Nice to know that my esteemed comics guy keeps his valuable back stock in a balmy subterranean mangrove swamp - a real winning recommendation there, Rodge. It isn't that though. I think it is a problem with Marvel Comics across the board (or at least certain titles) from that period, irrespective of where they come from. They aren't all from Roger's soggy basement. I just got some numbers of Punisher from Lone Star Comics in Texas and they have the same "crinkly header" problem.

Roger said, "There would have been some comment on this phenomenon among the comics community in the last thirty years. I don't think you have just discovered something that has eluded the greatest minds of the comic-collecting nation . The comics collecting fraternity is traditionally, shall we say, vigilant , ah, exacting indeed, on such minutiae concerning, ah, condition."

I kind of bridled at this, "slightually". Like I wasn't able to out-think the paltry comics buff community with my excellent eye for detail? Like I, with my larger knowledge of the universe, couldn't see beyond the petty purview of the fanboy?
"Or perhaps it's just that I'm a pioneer, and you men gathered this day in this room have not the 'eyes to see'" I yelped faintly, to dull chuckling from the room.

The fact remains that I keep finding crinkled comics from that period in select Marvel titles from a variety of sources. Should "they" ever come to notice this phenomenon, say in the pages of Overstreet or even Wizard, I hope that some honest soul will rightly attribute its original recognition to me.

[In the voice of Crispin Glover, in River's Edge:] I feel like... Cotton Mather!

Puppies "4" Sale

2010-04-05T14:36:00.004-04:00

Watched another episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter where the cops beat Dog to the suspect. Should this show be renamed Dog, That Whipped Puppy? Should this show be renamed Cringing Cur Cowed by a Rolled-Up Newspaper? Or should this show be renamed, succinctly, Cops?

Nothing daunted, after wasting fifteen minutes of my time with a case that goes nowhere, Bobby Brown and Dog and his family now rallied and went after a female petty thief. Surely even they can’t bitch this one up.

OR SO YOU’D THINK.

Perp worked out of a “video store” as a "model" and so Dog says, “Bobby you go into the store and pretend you want to hire her and get an appointment with her and then we’ll pounce.”
At this time Bobby is dressed in a t-shirt that says in large letters “Property of Bobby Brown, Bail Bonds” and he has his big bounty-hunter badge swinging from around his neck. Surreptitious as ever. He flaps into the store and soon he bounces out again, saying, “He’s setting up an appointment now.”
Here be stealth.

So they're like a bunch of Scooby-Doo detectives scurrying and panicking in the forecourt of a mini-strip-mall and they go, "Quick she's coming, let's hide!" They duck into a building and Dog goes, as they scram through the plain wooden door, "Can you see through the peep-hole." A moment later as the door shuts: "Is there a peep hole."

The room they were in was a sort of abandoned seminar room.

When they "pounced" on the girl she just passively stood there and singularly failed to enter into the excitement of the moment. It's often that way on this show; the bounty-hunters get all worked up and enthused about the job and the chase and the thrill of the hunt, the spoor of the quarry, view halloo! and tally-ho!, right up until the moment when the perp has been caught and the perp is so bored and bland that the illusion is dashed. This girl simply misunderstood the arrest warrant. She said she didn't want to check in with the police until she had paid off her cell-phone charges.
This is, I believe, precisely what Hannah Arendt had in mind when she coined the phrase "The Banality of Evil."

Another idiocy while we’re at it: On the side of my Kellogs “Smart Start” cereal box (“Dumb Start” more like - a vapid cereal we bought while they were on offer and now that I have established conclusively that I hate this shit we have about ten boxes to go) is an offer to get the DVD of Marley and Me. What I ask you could possibly go wrong with a post-suicide-attempt Owen Wilson, a labrador puppy and Jennifer Aniston as the stars. Anyway, on the side of the box it says, “Get a $3 rebate when you laugh and fall in love with Marley and Me.”
I naturally thought of the following “exchange”:
“What if I don’t laugh and fall in love with Marley and Me?”
“Then you don’t get the rebate.”

2010-04-01T14:35:00.005-04:00

Peculiar episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter I just saw.

You want to hear about it?

It was a bit like Otto Preminger’s Angel Face starring Bob Mitchum. The end was protracted and impotent – there was a false crescendo, a premature ejaculation, and then half an hour of just noodling. Like A Passage to India or Huckleberry Finn. Imperfect resolutions in each.

Leland it was who said, “I only had three hours sleep. I wasn’t even halfway through my dream.” Leave it to Leland to come up with the gnomic Heraclitean summary of the episode. Actually, isn’t that the beginning of Dante’s Commedia?

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle of the dream that is our life
I awoke to find myself
In the SUV with Dad chasing a fugitive
Who was no longer a fugitive.

The fugitive in question, one Nono, a serial beater of women (although everybody who knew him swore he was a swell all-round fellow), had gone down to the county sheriff’s “around about midnight” and had his girlfriend Mary “go his bail.” They kept quiet about this and went ahead made a deal for Nono to “give himself up” to Dog and his crew. The idea, it was surmised, was to catch Dog and his team for false arrest and so get them in turn humiliated and arrested while Mary – the schemer behind the scenes – would simultaneously collect some money off Dog for her “informing”.

A scheme worthy of Machiavelli – or the sinister minds behind the JFK assassination.

That’s complicated I realize. Imagine how I felt watching it. There were conspiracies everywhere. Beth said she was conducting “the investigation behind the investigation” and she made it a gendered issue (as they say in the academy) by solving the mystery with Mary Ellen while Dog was blundering around with this guy “Scott”. She kept making the same joke: “Girls rule, dogs drool.”

Scott was a four foot ten double-agent sent by Nono’s malicious shadow militia to sabotage the Dog camp from within. Scott was expert at this, blundering and stuttering the whole time and ballsing up any investigation with his vacillation and hemming and hawing. Dog was naturally incapable of combating this cause he’s prone to hem haw and space out vacantly himself.

Scott was so short he was like a sinister dwarf from a circus of crime. I expected him to turn up at any point in a clown suit and turn somersaults while throwing skittles at the team. But he lost out in the end because Beth donned her deerstalker and solved the conspiracy and begad she had the last laugh. She said, “Scott, we caught you out, interloper at the margins that ye are, and now you are expelled from society.” Scott, who you see had once been a bounty-hunter himself and had found a sort of kinship there that he had never felt before outside of the circus, walked across the parking lot sniffling with his head hung in shame. He looked even samller than usual, the figure he cut there as he trundled into the distance. He walked out to the perimeters of the outer city limits and then he kept walking down tords the creek. Perhaps he is still walking – or perhaps his figurative hat is floating.

I was puzzled, though, why Dog and crew would pursue Nono after they knew that his bail had been paid and his warrant had been pulled the night before. They knew he was trying to scam them, but they still showed up. For what?

To taunt him, was the reason. I watched this story unfold for an hour just to see some childish chest-puffing and drubbing at its end?

Dog and his “pound” need to really work on their narrative endings.

Sometimes the cops come into Dog the Bounty Hunter and foul up the whole story. Dog is always put out by this, largely because he doesn't get his money when the cops arrest the perp. But also it makes for a poor show. Sometimes Dog is duly obeisant and says that the cops are "our big brother" but other times - like today - he spits the word "cops" like everybody else does.

It really is important to be able to finish a narrative with a flourish.

Wisht I coulda-------

Betty, Veronica, Lois, Lana... The White Goddess

2010-03-30T13:32:00.004-04:00

I have stopped midway through watching Otto Preminger's Angel Face to put out a "call for papers" of sorts. In this film, the calculating rich brat brunette "Diane" machinates against the honest good-hearted working girl "Mary" over the male biped of choice, Frank (Bob Mitchum - a brunette). Jilted by Frank, Mary chooses to go off with Bill, who strolls over in a bow-tie and although this film is in black and white Mary tips us the wink by remarking, plainly superfluously, "come on, you red-headed double-crosser!"

Red-headed... double-crosser... bow-tie...

Sound familiar, wot?

All this dropping of conspicuous visual clues reminds me of a Mort Weisinger Superman strip. Is there a reason why, in American popular narratives of a certain era, there is frequently a scheming brunette against a farmgirl blonde, and the goofball redheaded kid?

Lana Lang... Lois Lane... Jimmy Olsen...
Betty Cooper... Veronica Lodge... Archie Andrews...

The only question here is: is Clark Kent Jughead or Reggie? (The answer is: both.)

Does this go further back, though? Is there some sort of White Goddess ur-reason why these people and their respective hair colours and sartorial choices lead us to think of certain traits? When did the collective unconsccious agree on these basic signs? Who is the original scheming brunette?

If the answer is all in Roland Barthes, I am naturally not interested.

I realise, even while noting this, that Lana is not a blonde she's a redhead and she is actually more scheming than Lois Lane. Then you have to add Lois's sister, blonde Lucy Lane, to the stew - - and Lucy is as scheming as the others, as Jimmy Olsen can attest.

I guess what I am trying to say is that in Mort Weisinger-edited Superman titles everybody is scheming, even Clark Kent. Because Mort Weisinger's is a paranoid universe populated by the sinister the doomed and the damned. On which subject, see also:

http://hoodedutilitarian.blogspot.com/2009/03/letter-to-believer-about-mort-weisinger.html

"Blago Bung"

2010-03-28T22:07:00.005-04:00

On the Celebrity Apprentice this week, I wasn't paying a lick of attention to this dross, but they were doing something like writing blurb about credit fraud protection for their assigned task. And there's Blagojevich, of all people, whispering to the useless wrestling guy, "They're misusing the strict terminology of fraud. They're not talking about bank fraud, they're talking about identity theft."

The dumb wrestler dork goes, docilely, "Duh uh yeah Rod."

He should of said, "Well you're the expert on fraudlence Rod. I mean if anybody knows the niceties of exquisite fraudlence it's you."

He didn't.

I said to Wife, "They should of had, as their concept, an advert for credit fraud where Blagojevich is dressed up as a robber in a stripey jersey and a domino mask and he is rifling through some soccer mom's handbag stealing the coppers. Or her laundry basket stealing her underwear and her knickerbockers, licking his vile lips and laughing with his little piggy eyes."

Nobody on the show says a word about Blago's shocking contumely against the state of Illinois. They accept it coolly. They would walk hand-in-hand with Idi Amin if he was a good teamplayer and troubleshooter in a boardroom setting. This after Trump fucking excommunicated Chloe Kardashian in the last season for having drunk-driven years earlier.

Sharon Osbourne did, however, note that Blagojevich's eyes are placed very close together.

Shrewd criticism indeed.

All Gravy / Daffodil Update

2010-03-28T11:17:00.005-04:00

That fat guy on SNL. When can we be shot of him?

They added a bunch of cast members to the show and I don't recognise any of them from week to week. But that fat guy-----

What exactly is his point?
What does he do all day? He hangs around in bars with his friends.
Strangers go, "So you're The Current Fat Guy on SNL. But isn't Kenan still on the show?"
"Kenan isn' t The Fat Guy. Technically he's The Black Guy."
"So he's a Fat Guy--Black Guy amalgam. Two-for-one."
"Yeah but they can't use him worth a damn. He's too fat to play Obama even. They have to use Fred Armisen to play the blacks on that show. That goes badly against Kenan. Plus you see the clip of him in the opening credits, where he is actually seen panhandling and trying to meet girls on the Brooklyn Bridge? Yeah I'd say it's rough being Kenan."
"Still it's all gravy for you, right, Fat Guy? What is your name anyway?"
"I forget...

Oh...

And yeah...

it is all gravy for me."

_______________________________

Elsewhere... those daffodils continue to secrete urea into the atmosphere.
I object, but wife just says, "Sit elsewhere."
Then wife goes, "Aren't daffodils English?"
What calumny is that- - - - - -
"They're Welsh," I say. "Leastwise they're the national bulb of the Welsh people."

Or is that the leek.

Tough "Questions".

2010-03-28T00:22:00.001-04:00

1. The fat guy on Saturday Night Live. When will they get rid of him.

2. The daffodils on the coffee table. Why do they smell of urine.

"Whither New York?"

2010-03-26T23:25:00.006-04:00

In the course of my, ah, creepy perambulations about Old New York and its precincts, I heard two markedly different views of this our city. Didn't know quite where I sat along the spectrum.

First, down in the subway at Varick Street waiting for the uptown 1 train, I was trying to read "The Farwell Murder" by Dashiell Hammett and there was a spruce fortyish gentleman of German extraction speaking to somebody on his phone. He was furious. As he was speaking, behind him was a gaggle of Hispanic halfwits shouting to each other through the bars between the platform and the no man's land outside the turnstile. Speaking above the hubbub, our friend the TEUTON says, "I want to leave this city. I have been here two weeks and I cannot take another minute. I hate this city. I hate the transport system, I hate the-- I want to leave."

I smiled. I'd felt the same possibly a thousand times since moving here a thousand days ago. The trouble is, of course, where could you go once New York has sickened you?

Didcot Parkway? Abingdon? Berwick-on-Tweed? Hethersett?!!

From there I went to the Time Machine, then to the typewriter shop down off Eight Avenue at Fourteenth Street, then to the library via Midtown Comics at Times Square.

The flipside of this was when I heaved my skull and cross bones out of the subway tonight, having been to the Utagawa Kuniyoshi show at the Japan Society and then to Trader Joes. Weighed way down with pots and pots of mocha "European style" yoghurts I weaved to the bus-stop, passing a grunge twenty-suthin trainee panhandler who was just plopping a paper cup down on the corner of Bedford and North Seventh preparing to bum for alms, fags and the evening's daily bread. And as I stood swaying in the street staring south for an oncoming Sixty Two bus, I was privileged to be there as this our newest young beggar began his illustrious career grubbing for scraps in Brooklyn. He inhaled, with young verdant lungs, and exhaled like a Bisto kid: "Ahhh, Williamsburg! So this is that famous place we've read about in the style magazines!"

So you see, one man at Varick and Houston wants to quit, another man arrives at Bedford determined to make the city his own.

One guy lives in Brooklyn. One guy lives in Sutton Place. You got a lawyer. Another guy's a doctor. Another guy dies. Another guy gets well. People are born, y'know? I envy you your youth. Go on, get laid, get drunk. Do anything. You got no choice, anyway. I mean, we're all fucked. More or less, ya know.

"Fast Talk on Low Themes at the Fire Sale"

2010-03-25T19:47:00.009-04:00

OR, "Zatoichi at the Fire Festival."

Fun things to do should be, ipso facto, fun to do, right?

And yet sometimes they are not.

You should have heard the yowling and grunting and groaning and panting and wheezing and grumbling "on the floor" at the basement sale at Jim Hanley's Universe last week. All the comics collectors were frowning, lips bunched up to denote thought, unrolling their computer-generated comics lists out and scrutinising them with squinting gazes. Their minds were, of course, quite empty. There were men painfully crouched in corners of the basement, curled up, bent over, doing the splits - anything to fit into a cranny of space; all becoming cramped and miserable. I know - I was one of them.

They had it so you could get any comic in the basement for a quarter or you could fill up a Diamond Distributors box for $25. The shopguy kept telling us, "If you discover the ideal packing methodology, you might be able to fit two hundred comics into a box." It was like an executive office puzzle to be solved by peppy get-ahead guys.

"You'll have to take the comics out of their bags and boards to fit two hundred comics into a box," was his one hint. One disgruntled comics buyer went, "Can't we just take two hundred comics out of their bags and boards, fit them in the box and then put them back in the bags and boards and get them for the straight twenty five bones?"

"Nope. They have to fit in the box. It's up to you if you want to fill the box with bags and boards or with funnybooks."

Comics fans were consternated- they love bags and boards almost as much as they love the funnybooks that go inside them, plus it seemed frankly sacrilegious for them to not put their comics in bags and boards and hermetically seal them thuswise.

I personally don't give too much of a fuck for bags and boards - although I am depressingly beginning to lean in that direction in my old age - still I was pulling comics from their bags and tossing the bags and boards over my shoulder with great gusto.

Generally there were very few smiles to be seen down in the basement, where men were doubled over heaving and pespiring like pit ponies on the threshing room floor.

I was amused to see among us the men with families treating their family members like packmules or serfs. Ignoring their children, badmouthing their wives with smart back-talk. Yes: scattered thereabouts was that vile institution - the wife or girlfriend who tries to pretend to like comics, just to please her loser dork spouse.

I have always hated this vile imposition. I like it that my wife hates my comics habit. I love it that my wife hates my guts. She's right to.

One fanboy dragged his wife and kids down to the subterranean hellchamber and this family was apt to shout back and forth across the basement to each other as though the rest of us weren't there; as if we were all invisible wraiths hovering about muddling with our lists in their "rumpus room" back in the BRONX. The family's tubby son was given a ten dollar bill to "play with" by beneficent DAD and kept tromping back and forth through the basement, forcing the crouching cramped grown men to get up and move their stashes so he could get past. I wanted to swat this fat kid in the head with my elbow, once again unable to understand the cardinal rule that says that adults can't take pot shots at children.

(Later, I was amused to hear the Dad speaking - for once - in a hushed tone, saying, "Son, could you give me back that tenner I gave you?")

Daft as this man was, he nevertheless spoke the absolute awful truth when he groaned audibly and his wife asked him what was wrong. He said, "I keep seeing comics I paid full price for going for a quarter."

"How very fucking true," I thought.

"But when did the comic come out?" asked the wife, being all philosophical.

"Two years ago."

"And haven't you got two years of pleasure out of them?"

"Ye-essss, I suppose--"

And he was apparently placated by this mewling sophistry!

For one thing, how does one get "two years of pleasure" out of a comic book? You're lucky to get ten minutes of banal amusement in fifty years out of a comicbook. And yet we stack them up and fill our homes with them and live like paupers in our own mausoleums!

Does anything have any intrinsic value?
"Gold bullion," you say with that self-satisfied way you have.

You're wrong. Gold is singularly useless as it goes. It has symbolic value but no intrinsic value.

My answer of late to this question of had been: "Issues of Deadpool."

I thought that amidst all the fluctuating markets, issues of the first series of Deadpool maintain their value rigidly, and are worth a bomb. It's what Jacques Derrida would call the transcendental signifier. But since I have been trying to sell doubles of Deadpool around this old city the past few weeks I am coming to have my doubts - and my world is slipping beneath me, all flux.

A few days later I was at the Time Machine, it was St. Patrick's Day, and Roger goes, "I bet Fabian hates this day."
I said, "Why? Because all Englishmen hate Ireland?"
Roger smiled unctuously in answer. I went up with a fistful of the day's new funnybooks and muttered, "Hella lotta new comics this week."
"Another reason to hate today," goes Roger.
"Heh," I go. "Well we don't have to buy them of course."

There was a hideous silence descended on the shop.

"What am I saying?" I said, in panicked haste. "Of course we have to buy them."

Another imploded second----

"After all, if not us, then who?"

Damian Morgan's Funniest Videos

2010-03-18T14:14:00.003-04:00

"The crimes you commit follow you to the day you die." DUANE CHAPMAN

"Next time, Leland, next time... you can be the ho and we'll be the pimp." BETH CHAPMAN

[Now isn't this spontaneous ecstasy of Beth's rather redolent of the well-known, penultimate line from Borges' "Death and the Compass"?:

"The next time I kill you... I promise you that labyrinth , consisting of a single line which is invisible and unceasing."]

I was putzing and yo-yo-ing and also yutzing about aimlessly, fast-forwarding over ads and other known knowns (as the great Donald Rumsfeld would say); in other words I was going through the archive of episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter on the DVR while I had lunch (salmon cakes) trying to work out whether I'd seen this episode or that or not. Eventually I'd twig and in every case I'd already seen the episode. It's not easy differentiating some times - I think I have mentioned this before. All the criminals look virtually identical (will this remark come to haunt me, a la Paul de Man?) and usually I only recognise an episode by the goofing-off scenes; like when Leland and Youngblood engaged in a running race.

In the top right screen as I was blandly navigating the menu was America's Funniest Videos - somebody was wheelying in a golfcart. Then a grandmother was kissing a Boston Terrier, and after that a tarantula had escaped in somebody's home and was being herded out on a spatula. There was a jigsaw on the table.

And I had one of my occasional sociology epiphanies (like when I was watching New York Noise, and I suddenly realised what it is that is wrong with the new strain of music: all the members of the new groups are of that same benighted tribe that used to become drama students)... I thought, That is what Youtube really is. It's not a "democratic revolution," it's an explosion of home video shows. And as everybody can attest, only the scum of the Earth ever used to send a video into those shows.

I used to see them strictly in passing and think, "That was patently a fake blooper. Now: what kind of person takes valuable time out of their day to painstakingly craft a fake blooper? " The types exist, yes, but they always have. Just now they have the internet.

This then got me thinking about that moribund time I had been trying to "sell" the "idea" of Deadpool to Damian Morgan, who sat there stony-faced, scowling at me across the rim of his pint like I was trying to sell him a razor strop. He said, with that effortless seeming simplicity that was always his, "Comics are never funny."

He had a point, but he bitched the advantage squarely when he went on to say that "The one pinnacle of comedy, that justly-celebrated realm of the muse Thalia, is America's Funniest Home Movies." He naturally said this through a grim and straight Glaswegian face.

When Damian laughs it is always a brief self-disgusted ejaculation, like a squirt of mayonnaise: heh!

It is not in his nature to weep with laughter, or to luxuriate in helpless groaning flailing hilarity.

Still our conversation comes back to me betimes...

when I'm.....

woolgathering...