Saturday, March 01, 2008
The nads
Doesn't it just prove how wonderful the English language is that the word 'bollocks' can be made to mean the exact opposite by the insertion of the definite article before it?
Five things that are, indeed, THE bollocks:
1. This film, Primer. It's retro-looking, achingly indie, and utterly incomprehensible if you try to watch it pissed, which I assume is how most of you watch films. (It's what I do.) Sober, it's still incomprehensible, but a little more frightening. I gather it starts making sense after three viewings, if you've an IQ above 157. Nevertheregardless, it's a supremely original piece of filmmaking and, in its own clever way, enthralling.
2. We Need To Talk About Kevin. This book won some prize or other, and although most award-winning novels tend to be awesomely self-congratulatory and profoundly unreadable in equal measure, the equivalent of copying out Paradise Lost in your own semen while orbiting Saturn, this one is a masterpiece. Gripping, awe-inspiring from start to finish, with a final twist that leaves you reeling about the room with eyes and mouth agape at the author's chutzpah, this is easily the finest example of populist highbrow literature since Dickens. Read it, and thank God that Lionel Shriver doesn't have any children in your neighbourhood.
3. Marriage. Call me a sentimental arse, but some of the rough edges have definitely been knocked off my personality since I tied the knot at a relatively late age a year and a half ago. I always thought freedom was incompatible with being hitched to another person. Now I understand that 'hitched' is what you mean it to mean.
4. A scrambled egg and bacon sandwich. You have to make this with three eggs, two rashers of bacon and one ounce of butter (not margarine, not lard or anything else) per person. Fire up a shallow saucepan on a low heat and put in the butter (French, unsalted). Once it's coated the pan, add the eggs, lightly beaten beforehand, and stir them continuously with a wooden spoon or, if you must, a spatula. Meanwhile, grill the bacon rashers, preferably in a George Foreman machine because bacon really does taste better once you've siphoned away the fat. I do like Danish bacon, but British is fine too. Don't try any other countries' offerings. While you're stirring the eggs in the pan (don't stop!), remove two slices of bread per person from the packet to let them breathe. I tend to choose wholemeal bread, but this is really a matter of taste. On no account toast the bread before serving - if you want toast you need to follow another recipe. Back to the eggs: it usually takes around five minutes to scramble three to six eggs properly. The sly trick is to add a small twist of butter to the mix about thirty seconds before taking the whole thing off the hob. Then serve it all up, adding ground pepper to taste (I advise it) and HP Sauce - note that it must be HP, not Daddies or any such pretender to the brown sauce throne; and please, for the love of God, avoid the use of tomato ketchup which in this dish is an abomination akin to the daubing of pig's blood on the walls of a mosque or a synagogue. Apply the upper layer of bread, cut diagonally and eat. Then die, because you'll never experience such ecstasy again.
5. The Waterboys. I met Mike Scott once and he's an incredibly nice guy, self-effacing and kindly. Their music is joyous, melodic and sublime, yet has a far harder edge than you'd expect, especially when you hear them live. Listen to And A Bang On The Ear and try to resist playing air-violin.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Challinor's challenge
Evidently it's etiquettesque to respond to this kind of post so I'll comply. Philip would like me to be nice for a change, so here are seven things I'm in favour of (the 'don't end a sentence with a preposition' rule was apparently imposed by Gallic linguofascists in the 18th century, so fuck that for a game of legionnaires):
1. The Labour Party
I can't let a single thought about them flit across my consciousness without falling to my knees, loosening my belt and masturbating volcanically. The Labour Party have turned what was a nation in terminal decline for a thousand years into an economic, social and sexual powerhouse. The smiles on the faces of the health staff are broader, the operation scars on the vic... the patients are less infected, and the hard-ons paraded around the halls of Whitehall are more rampant than in the 950-odd years since King Harold never recovered from that mother of all symbolic cumshots in his eye. Finally, we have a leader who will stand up against the tyranny of binocular vision. Go get 'em (from one side), Gordon! (etc, etc)
2. The Conservative Party
The sight of David Cameron on the television drives me into the streets, weeping with excitement at the new dawn he promises! O David, you are truly worthy of your namesake, opposed as you are to your political Goliath. Just sling a few of those stunningly original projectiles of yours at his forehead - those 'er... you naughty Muslim bombers' or 'umm... I think you should try to cut down on your carbon climates, chaps' or 'thank Christ, one of you has paid his son for doing nothing - now that's something I can actually understand!' - and the populace will line up behind you and usher you in come 2010. Then we can all bend over again for another five years, till Labour start nudging you and you feel the need to take down Syria. (etc, etc)
3. Sarcasm
(The sarcasm ends here)
4. Amateur dramatics
Do yourself a favour and hie you to your local am-dram group. Every town has one - every town, every village, every hamlet, every borough, even, for you townies - so you can stick that excuse. The great thing about these groups is not the excitement they allow you to experience when you stand on stage playing Willie Loman or Hamlet or the third German or whoever; it's the spirit of community they foster. My group is wonderful: we meet two or three times a week, and whether we're the lead actor or the lowliest prop supplier for that production (and we take turns), we're all equal when we're out on the street touting for revenue or in the pub knocking back the pints after a great, great show.
5. Victorian novels
I know it's not very fashionable to read these books nowadays - James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and that crowd and their drooling followers have pretty much fucked this genre over - but if you're stuck for a good read on a beach, on a long train journey or in the bay window of your Wiltshire manse on a drenched winter afternoon, you could do worse than an 'old Vic'. I've just read Bleak House for the second time, and it kicks arse, all 1,012 pages of it. Nicholas Nickelby is just as good (and features the best - and perviest - character name in all of fiction: Wackford Squeers). David Copperfield is good but overrated; Great Expectations and Hard Times are brilliant. But then so is anyone who debates Dickens, no matter what your preferences. Wilkie Collins is stunning, and Thomas Hardy astonishes... but George Eliot soars over all of them, Middlemarch triumphing as the greatest work of fiction in the history of Western literature. Mmmmm - mm! Do your mind a favour and give them a try.
6. Stevie Ray Vaughan
He was the greatest guitarist who ever lived, a shy, humble man who squeezed more elegant, complicated and downright stinking riffs out of his Fender Strat that any other human has ever managed. He would have died if he hadn't kicked his alcohol and cocaine habits in 1986; then he went on to get himself killed in a helicopter crash in 1990. Listen to what I think is his magnum opus, The Things That I Used To Do, and try to suppress the gooseflesh that creeps down your spine during the guitar solo in the middle. I dare you. Rest in peace, Stevie.
7. Michael Moore
I've always hated this bastard. His political rants are crap. Fair enough, he nailed Bush's zombie-like reaction to the news of the 9-11 attacks; but he's been skewered comprehensively as a third-rate polemicist by the counterblast film, Manufacturing Dissent. Nonetheless, I watched his latest, Sicko, last night. The problem with this bloody film is that Moore hasn't grasped anything, in years of filmmaking, about the principles of scientific analysis. To establish an idea scientifically, you have to do a power calculation. This means, to simplify things, that there's a minimum number of examples you have to offer before your hypothesis approaches credibility. Moore puts forward horrendous examples of people who have been screwed over by the American health-insurance-based system; but he uses these four or five instances to make gross generalisations about healthcare in America. The US healthcare system might be utterly awful, for all I know; it's just that Moore fails to come anywhere near proving this. More egregiously, he reveals himself to be a dualist of the sort he's always criticising. According to him in this film, everything the US ever does is wrong, and everything anyone else does - Britain, France, Canada and Cuba - is sublimely altruistic, unassailable and, well, perfect. Never mind that Britain has the lowest cancer survival rates in the Western world, far lower than those of, say, Holland, or the dreaded America (I'm happy to provide figures if anyone doubts this). Or that the rate of getting shot in the back on trying to escape the host country is just that bit higher in Cuba than in any of the other countries featured in Moore's film.
And yet... At the end of the film, right at the end, when Moore is waddling up to the Capitol in Washington on some dimwitted crusade to force the federal government to do his laundry or some such crap.... he has as the soundtrack Cat Stevens's Don't Be Shy. Now, I'm not a hippy. I was born in 1970, and as far as I was concerned when I reached adulthood in 1988 and then again in 1991, the hippies could kiss my ring, and I'm not using ecclesiastical imagery here. But I've always loved that Cat Stevens song, since about 1979, I think, when I was nine. It's always resonated in me as a sort of anthem to people like me, people who are misfits in some way - shy, awkward, afraid to ask out girls or approach potential friends, people who have minds foaming with ideas and music and joy who nonetheless never know quite how to communicate these ideas to other human beings. People who identify intensely with the Counting Crows song Mr Jones, as I do. Profoundly interesting people like, I suspect, almost all the bloggers I link to on the left there.
And listening to that utterly beautiful Cat Stevens song, written as it was in 1971, I understood that Michael Moore isn't really the irredeemable, sneering bastard I've always thought he was, even though I disagree profoundly with his politics and most of his conclusions. In fact, his perceptiveness in choosing that song makes me wonder if he hasn't started to have doubts about his own position (i.e. that the US is automatically bad in everything it does and the rest of the world is by default wonderful). My own take is: the human race is chaotic, haphazard, at times brilliant, self-destructive, good most of the time, self-serving and nasty slightly less of the time on the whole, wherever it's found, in Europe or Asia or Africa or America or wherever else. We're all in the same fucking boat, people, so let's not blow each other up in trains or bomb each other from the skies. And let's not mix our metaphors, please, for Christ's sake.
Update!
I forgot to tag people! So let's hear seven things you're in favour of, Sarah, Dr Maroon, Pat, Sam, FMC, Boudica and (ah ha ha haaaa, yeah, right) Noreen.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Boris: my heroin
While putting together the rest of the story I started in my last post, I have decided to emulate some of London's mayoral candidates and recommence using heroin.
Yes, I know. I'm sorry. 'Recommence' is such an ugly, Latinate word. I should have said 'start... again'. My bad, as they say.
I can't help it, really. The smack use, I mean. Three months of listening to the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop. Failing to dodge billboards with Kate and Pete Moss's drawn, fucked faces. Economic collapse. Utterly stupid, self-deluding, self-righteous non-entities, drunk with power, robbing us blind and clinging to their jobs because nobody gives a rat's arse, really. Our glass-eyed leader, his fingers steepled before him as his rotten, feculent dream decays before his eyes.
Vote Boris, if you can, and if you want more hard drugs on the streets. At least that way you don't have to be conscious when it all hits the fan.
I'm sorry, I think I'm going to be
aaaeeeeuuuurrrgrgghhh
Saturday, December 15, 2007
The Case of the Christmas Bracelet (part one of four)
From Foot Eater's case files, a Yuletide yarn to shiver your cockles!
ONE
Christmas of 1951 started out a real son-of-a-bitch and just got worse. On December 24 Marylou left me, raging out the door in a hurricane of shattered hopes and broken crockery, her last words ringing in my ears: ‘You’re a b___d, I hate you, I never want to see you again.’ I faced a bleak and empty New Year. Receptionists like her are hard to come by.
Then, in the afternoon, the phone rang. I was sitting on the window sill at the time, so entranced by the beautiful snowy city landscape outside that I didn’t think I’d ever turn away from it. My sill is so narrow that I get wedged in there and have to exert a real effort to extract myself off of it. Lost as I was in romantic thoughts, when I heard the shrilling of the phone I thought for a crazy moment it was someone calling to say I’d won the lottery or something, and I got so excited I managed to pull myself off. It was my doctor.
‘Foot,’ he said, ‘I know it’s Christmas Eve and all, but you really need to think about booking that liver transplant.’
‘Liver transplant, schmiver transplant,’ I said, thinking of my bank balance. I hadn’t had a real case in months.
‘Mmm. Raspy,’ he said. ‘Let me schedule you for a trachea replacement while we’re at it.’
We made small talk for a while and I thanked him for the case of bourbon and carton of Luckies he’d sent me as a Christmas present, before hanging up. He was a good old doc, really; he’d done my appendix and haemorrhoid transplants and had fixed up my heart after that comic book business three years earlier. Rumor had it he occasionally mixed up his autopsies and his prostatectomies, but nobody’s perfect.
At six o’clock that evening I was sitting in my office in my favorite – heck, my only – armchair, a bottle of Jack Daniel plugged into my normally cheery but by now terminally morose face, and thinking about wandering down to the mean streets in search of something hot and dirty to stick in my mouth (I’d just run out of cigarettes) when Pussy the cat dropped in through the window I kept cranked open a few inches despite the winter freeze to let some air in. I don’t mean my cat dropped in to let some air in; I just have difficulties with clauses and commas and the like, G-d damn it. I stared at Pussy. She was sodden and had something in her mouth. And she stank. It was a long time since I’d been in the same room with a pussy that was dripping wet and smelling of fish. I reached down and tossed her a mouse corpse I’d been meaning to throw out since last week and she dove for it, dropping what she’d brought in. I leaned forward to look at it.
It was a bracelet, gold or at any rate gold-plated, and although it was dirty with some kind of seaweed or pond scum it was still in good shape. I picked it up and rubbed it clean on my sleeve. There was something engraved on the inner surface. I peered at it in the flinty light that angled between the slats of the blinds, and the p-s turned to ice in my bl-dder.
Then, in the afternoon, the phone rang. I was sitting on the window sill at the time, so entranced by the beautiful snowy city landscape outside that I didn’t think I’d ever turn away from it. My sill is so narrow that I get wedged in there and have to exert a real effort to extract myself off of it. Lost as I was in romantic thoughts, when I heard the shrilling of the phone I thought for a crazy moment it was someone calling to say I’d won the lottery or something, and I got so excited I managed to pull myself off. It was my doctor.
‘Foot,’ he said, ‘I know it’s Christmas Eve and all, but you really need to think about booking that liver transplant.’
‘Liver transplant, schmiver transplant,’ I said, thinking of my bank balance. I hadn’t had a real case in months.
‘Mmm. Raspy,’ he said. ‘Let me schedule you for a trachea replacement while we’re at it.’
We made small talk for a while and I thanked him for the case of bourbon and carton of Luckies he’d sent me as a Christmas present, before hanging up. He was a good old doc, really; he’d done my appendix and haemorrhoid transplants and had fixed up my heart after that comic book business three years earlier. Rumor had it he occasionally mixed up his autopsies and his prostatectomies, but nobody’s perfect.
At six o’clock that evening I was sitting in my office in my favorite – heck, my only – armchair, a bottle of Jack Daniel plugged into my normally cheery but by now terminally morose face, and thinking about wandering down to the mean streets in search of something hot and dirty to stick in my mouth (I’d just run out of cigarettes) when Pussy the cat dropped in through the window I kept cranked open a few inches despite the winter freeze to let some air in. I don’t mean my cat dropped in to let some air in; I just have difficulties with clauses and commas and the like, G-d damn it. I stared at Pussy. She was sodden and had something in her mouth. And she stank. It was a long time since I’d been in the same room with a pussy that was dripping wet and smelling of fish. I reached down and tossed her a mouse corpse I’d been meaning to throw out since last week and she dove for it, dropping what she’d brought in. I leaned forward to look at it.
It was a bracelet, gold or at any rate gold-plated, and although it was dirty with some kind of seaweed or pond scum it was still in good shape. I picked it up and rubbed it clean on my sleeve. There was something engraved on the inner surface. I peered at it in the flinty light that angled between the slats of the blinds, and the p-s turned to ice in my bl-dder.
Flashback time. I was a runty nine-year-old, way back before you’d remember, before Prohibition, even, sitting on the banks of the Mississippi watching the steamers crawl by like mechanical cockroaches the size of elephants. Pappy had gone off to war in Europe and I was tasked with defending the freehold against the bandits and human varmints that threatened to come kill my momma and sister and do the uh-uh-uh thing with our hogs and carry me off to a life of white slavery in Huckleberry-Twainsville upriver. I was balanced in the crook of a tree with Pappy’s double-ought Winchester loaded and propped across my lap and a straw hat pulled low over my eyes to shield out the flies and the July sun. Except there were no flies and there weren’t no July sun neither.
Soon enough a fat guy came strolling over the river. He wasn’t Jesus, walking on water; he had a beard, I’ll allow that, but he was dressed kind of weird and his water-walking weren’t no miracle seeing how the ’Sippi was frozen over and all. ‘Hey there, you, boy,’ he hollered.
I pulled the triggers. The shot went way wild. When the noise had cleared and the blue smoke had dispersed a little, he cussed in a fashion I hadn’t never heard before and yelled, ‘Holy h-ll, boy. You some kind of a a—hole?’
‘What do you mean, sir?’ There was a queer smell in the air, like when someone makes poopy-kaka in his pants, and it wasn’t me.
‘I mean, you’re sittin out here dressed like it’s high summer.’
‘Ain’t it?’ I was getting edgy seeing how this stranger was looking at me all funny. Holding his gaze, I reloaded.
‘No. It’s late December.’ He stepped forward. He looked scared, but also astonished, sort of. He put a hand on his chest.
‘Don’t you know who I am?’
‘Naw.’ I tried to think what my Pappy would of done, even though he was over in France killing Kaisers. This guy weren’t no obvious varmint nor no prevert neither but nonetheless he was mighty weird. He started to reach inside his jacket and I decided my Pappy would of shot him so I gave him both barrels, right in the face. His head done come clean off and it was all red inside, like his clothes. He landed on his large a-s on the frozen ground. I went over to him, the blast of the shotgun still whining high in my ears, and poked the barrels at his hand till it uncurled. I saw a lollipop in his open fist. Probably a prevert after all. Round his wrist something glittered, gold. I stooped to look at it. It was a bracelet, like what medicals and asthmatics and epileptics wear. On the reverse side it said (I read good, even as a boy): Santa Claus.
'S--t,' I said. The echo of the word skittered across the iced river surface like a series of skimmed hyphens. I lit a cigarette.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
The horror, the horror
As you might imagine, a prolonged absence such as mine has resulted in a bulging womb of incipient mail-progeny. What I mean is, you fans have been sending in your letters, texts and emails of concern, devotion and, yes, love, with a freneticism that warms my cockles and at the same time makes me question your collective mental health.
I've decided to use this blog to wage war on slovenly, pig-ignorant perversions of English grammar, spelling and punctuation in the new year, and as a taster I thought I'd hold some of your missives up to ridicule. Feel free to hoist me by my own petard if you can, you ignorami.
Kicking off, sycophant@yahoo.com emails:
You're brilliant in every way. Tell me, please, do you only write comedy?
No, 'sycophant'. I watch it on television and in live settings, read it, laugh at it, deride it, appreciate it, and have nightmares about it, too.
Sir Ian McKellen writes:
Dear Foot,
Having read your blog, you seem to be obsessed with sex and death.
[lots of fascinating inside information about the theatre snipped]
Dear Sir Ian: by your sentence structure you seem to associate my having read my own blog with my preoccupation with the progenital and terminal events in life's history. Why is this? (You should know better, by the way. And Patrick Stewart's current Macbeth kicks your Lear into touch, frankly.)
Greg Dyke (g.dyke@lesbiansurnames.bbc.uk) emailed me:
Way to go, Foot Eater! Your campaign for proper English is just what we need, and a famous blogger like yourself could be just the person to permeate the national consciousness with his message of hope. Call my agent Pete.
All right: your agent's Pete.
Andrew 'Bowel' Motion, the Poet Laureate, sent me a text message that ran thus:
Parse this sentence if you will, you pretentious arsehole:
Joan is the person I am sitting between the window and.
It ends with a conjunction, yet it is entirely correct, grammatically speaking. Can't pick the bones out of that one, can you, you wanker?
No, I can't, Mr Motion; but there's a subtle distinction between incorrect and merely tedious English which you seem to have blurred in the interests of scoring a linguistic point, and for that I sentence you to a rimjob in hell. You are to give rather than receive: isn't that better?
Sunday, December 02, 2007
HE IS RETURNED
Well, I’m back.
It would take too long to explain why I’ve been away. HM Customs and Excise, Lucky Gregor’s Laundrette in Maidstone, wholly trumped-up charges, golden moles, the RSPCA and a Birmingham prison were all involved, and let’s leave it at that.
Sorry about that last post, by the way. As several people suggested, I wasn’t the author. The benighted soul responsible has been locked in a study with a bottle of whisky and a revolver and is trusted to do the decent thing.
Missed me, have you? I certainly haven’t missed you lot. What an assortment of cranks, oddballs and social lepers you are. I’m glad I never got so hooked on blogging that I felt the need to get up early in the morning to log on, or that I cried for a week once when my internet connection went down. I suppose I oughtn’t to insult you, because I’d like to ask for your help. Do any of you know how to get an electronic tag off an ankle? It was one of the conditions of my early release that I wear one of the bloody things – to tell you the truth I think they just wanted to be rid of me because I never obeyed any of the warders’ orders, but then that was because I didn’t understand their ridiculous Brummie accents ('Coom ere, Foot Ayter, yo payce oov sheet') – but it’s the very devil of a job to stalk people quietly when you’ve got a bit of rattling, beeping machinery fastened round your leg. It might be useful if you were a postman, though – dogs would have difficulty sinking their teeth into your ankle. Come to think of it, it would be handy to have if you were a terrorist trying to board a plane. The security people would be so distracted by the metal around your leg that they’d probably fail to spot the arsenal in your coat pockets. This is a bit of a naff line of humour, is it? I'm trying too hard, am I? Well, in that case, go and read the Anti-Barney's blog or El Barbudo's or somebody's, you f-
I'm sorry, I'm out of sorts: post-traumatic stress and all that. It's just that I CANNOT HANDLE ALL THESE
put the gun down. it's all right. they're only shadows. they're not going to punish you or laugh at you. have some tea
Anyway, what’s been happening out there in the world? I haven’t had time to follow the news because I spent the last couple of weeks of my captivity frantically finishing off my magnum opus, a children’s multicultural adventure book about a teddy bear named Mohammed which I hope will go a long way towards promoting harmony and understanding between the peoples of this earth.
As the great Judge Dredd has been known to say: catch you later, creeps.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
I'm not back yet; it's not December
Has anybody out there a copy of any Morbius comics from the 1970s? Morbius was a reluctant vampire who gorged himself on carotid and jugular blood while feeling guilty about it. There was a terrific 1977 comic in which he starred and which also featured Blade the vampire hunter. Top stuff. I'll pay you good money if you can point me in the direction of this excellent material.
The photo above is a bit naff but it seems even Mr Google can't come up with the 1970s goods these days, and probably wears a gay bunch of garlic around his neck to boot. You don't want to read The Judge's House by Bram Stoker, mister; it will scare your leather vest off. Aaaaaaarrrrgh!!!
