Okay, another lazy Sunday. The weather is quite miserable here and I’m sure the papers would be happy enough to conform to that and to piss on whatever’s left of anyone’s parade, so I’m not even going to read any of today’s headlines. I’m sure the world will be able to continue to be fucked, without me making generally unhelpful remarks from the sidelines.
So, let’s do something fun instead.
I worked through my old archives and came up with ten very weird YouTube clips, which I will present below in a sort of Top 10, be it in a more or less random order.
My question now to all of you, of course, is to add one or more of your own.
Let’s see if we can transform this silly little list into a genuine Top 100…
(Gravity: Been coming to a place near you, out of nowhere, since Newton…)
Now, this truly is a tale for our time:
“Office worker Mr Coleman, 23, was ‘tweeting’ to his followers on his Blackberry while jogging to work when he cracked his head on a heavy low-hanging branch. The force of the impact sent the dazed runner crashing to the pavement and left him with a badly bruised black eye.
“One minute I was running along posting a tweet, the next I was lying on my back on the pavement in agony. The branch came out of nowhere and hit my face hard.””
Yes, that old ‘came out of nowhere’ defence.
Also beloved by car drivers who use their mobiles while driving (and the more old-fashioned creeps who enjoy a bit of drunk-driving) and subsequently hit a dog, child, granny or cuddly E.T. crossing the road – all of whom ALWAYS came out of nowhere.
The ‘came out of nowhere’ defence also has a twin brother, called the ‘noone could have foreseen this’ gambit.
That one has been used extensively, throughout history, both by the ‘Peace at any price’ brigade and by those who’ve never seen a a fight they didn’t want to pick or join, immediately. (Humanity isn’t very good at learning from past mistakes but it wouldn’t hurt for our professional doves and hawks to be forced, each day, to watch clips of Mr Chamberlain’s trip to Munich and Colin Powell’s WMD speech at the UN, respectively.)
More recently, both the ‘came out of nowhere’ and ‘noone could have foreseen this’ defence were used by both governments and financial institutions to ‘explain’ the latest global economical meltdown.
(It’s close to being a law of nature that, whenever both these defences are used, we deal with the kind of crisis that could, in fact, have been foreseen by any toddler with merely a working knowledge of piggy banking.)
Of course, all of us are human and thus kind of stupid, so it’s good that we can fall back on these commonly used tactics – and, as long as we don’t overdo it, we maybe should allow ourselves and our fellow dumb critters the use of them.
I’d suggest anyone up till the age of ten might use them, more or less, indiscriminately. Teens probably should be given a monthly allowance, until both their zits and hormones have had time to settle down a bit.
Between the age of twenty and thirty, we might just let people get away with these lame excuses once per season but after that, until death, senility or incontinence hits, there shouldn’t be a call for this type of defence more than once a year.
One caveat though: It doesn’t matter whether you talk about the collapse of a global market system or the disintegration of an overstuffed bin bag: If you’ve used one of these two defences for either of these occasions, you’re not allowed to use any of the two, during the rest of that calendar year.
Me, I’ve been saving up mine, for the last few years but I do intend to use one of them with a vengeance, whenever the time is ripe.
It involves a baker’s dozen of beehives, an outdoors swimming pool filled with honey, a half brick and a quite elaborate pulley system.
Now, I’m not picky and I only need one individual out of the following groups of persons to walk past my house:
1) Any TV quiz or reality TV show host or TV sports analist
2) Any politician
3) Any professional PC plodder
4) Any raving Godhead, be they Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Jew
5) Any Holocaust denier, Scientologist or Elvis-shot-Kennedy-and-blew-up-the-Twin-Towers type
6) Any of the makers of ‘Mama Mia!’, ‘Dances with Wolves’, ‘Spiderman 3′, ‘The Nutty Professor’, ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ and/or ‘Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves’
7) Any of the inventors of the karaoke machine, the Crazy Frog ring tone, elevator music and speaking toilets
8) Bono
So, whenever any of the above mentioned persons will find themselves struggling not to drown in my honey pool, while beset by a horde of angry bees who don’t like their hives getting pulley-ed from over them and while sporting an angry bruise where a carefully coincidentally launched half-brick hit them…
… well, then I will simply smile politely, with a slightly puzzled look on my face and state that whatever just happened precisely:
a) came out of nowhere and
b) could not have been foreseen by anyone…
(On the Hill, in Westminster, in any self-respecting pub and wherever people roam and gather…)
Sometimes, the old ones definitely are the best. Be it Rhett Butler’s, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” to Shakespeare’s Mercutio shouting, “A plague a’ both your houses”
Which, in the following case, would be a plague on the political & business classes, on both sides of the pond.
So, yesterday, we could read that good-for-fuck-all General Motors will get another ‘loan’. Not, mind you, to ensure they will finally get their house in order. No, they will receive another $30 billion to help ’steer the company into bankruptcy next week.’
In other words, those stupid arseholes can’t even go bust without government help.
Meanwhile, in Britland, the New Labour government showed us yet again how glaringly incompetent a bureaucratic busy-body machine can be, if you give it enough silly money and monopolistic mandates to play with:
“A two-year-long, 178-page report that cost taxpayers £500,000has arrived at the unsurprising conclusion that passengers are likely to be in a “positive emotional state” if their train is punctual and announcements are audible and comprehensible, and in a “negative” frame of mind if the service is late and no one tells them why.”
You know, given the arrogant incompetence of our political and business leaders, it would almost be preferable just to give up.
To return to that famous tree we once climbed out of, select a solid enough looking branch and either hang ourselves or, preferably, all those useless shits – elected and unelected – who got us in this fine mess, in the first place.
In the meantime, right now, I’m not in the mood to spend any more time reading or commenting on ever more infuriating news stories.
So, I’m off to the park, to feed the ducks and to listen to some Leonard Cohen on my neolithic Walkman.
It’s a shame I can’t really invite my readers to come and join me in my duck feeding frenzy but at least I can leave you with a few, fitting Cohen songs to chew on. Enjoy:
Caught between work, the bar and bed, I realize time, this moment, is not a friend. You know how certain people are always waiting for you to fuck up. That’s time, when you’re not very careful: Not so much a fuck buddy as Buddy Holly’s last airplane ride.
Anyway, let’s talk time - and let’s start with Leonard again:
“It’s four in the morning, the end of december
I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better
New York is cold, but I like where I’m living
There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening.
I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert
You’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.”
There has been a fair amount of articles about racism lately, in the various international newspapers. From Republican politicians sending out ‘magic negro’ CDs, to British princes calling people their ‘Paki mates’; from the New York Post and its Obama Apegate, to the Pope’s (somewhat unsurprising) love affair with Holocaust deniers. All in all, it has been a less than delightful smorgasbord of more or less random nastiness and I have to admit that I am heartily sick of it.
Reading all that stuff can make the brain turn on itself, with bits on the right side snarling at and taking bites of bits on the left hand side and vice versa, till you become so stupid with frustrated and angry boredom that you start to foam round the mouth and shout at your computer screen.
It also makes me entertain quite violent thoughts about all types of racists. That it would be nice, for instance, if they could simply go back to where they came from, evolutionary speaking. That is, swinging from trees - or, failing that, to be hung from them.
Not nice, I know but the world would be a much better place if people like that would, as that old song has it, become ’strange fruit.’
It would be even better, of course, if you could do real magic and change each and every boring, brain-dead bigot into a love poem. One firm hit over the head with a magic wand (or cudgel) and, let’s say, that bishop that claims that there were no gas chambers in the German concentration camps was reborn or remade into this lovely Jane Hirshfield poem…:
“See how the roads are strewn
white,
as if your hand, traveling my body,
came to be that flock of blossoms,
scent of February in the dark.
See how my hips eclipse your hips,
how the moon, huge as a grain-barge, passes by.
And promises do not hold,
certainties do not hold,
the risen cries fall and fail to hold,
but my body, confusion of crossings, I give you
broadcast, to move with your hand,
where nothing is saved but breaks out in a thousand directions,
armful of wild plum, weeds.”
… and what better way to deal with the Pope who gives his blessing to Holocaust deniers than to remake him in the image of Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet LXXXl:
“And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.
No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.
Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away;
your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move
after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.”
Yes, as make-over shows go, turning hateful trolls into love poems takes some beating - and we could even expand the field, by including politicians and other perverse pests.
and all the world’s bankers and hedge funds managers into Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover beach…?‘
Plus, as a last and most impressive magic trick, we would change the whole damn, European Commission, the UN’s Human Rights Commission, the British parliament, the US Senate & Congress and, just for fun, the British Cricket Board, Pamela Anderson’s fake tits and all ABBA songs and Dan Brown novels into this one short, yet hauntingly beautiful Robert Graves poem:
She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
“Hard on the heels of a Holocaust denial row, Pope Benedict XVI has appointed an ultra-conservative bishop in Austria who described Hurricane Katrina as God’s punishment for sin and sexual excess in New Orleans.
Father Gerhard Maria Wagner, 54, a parish priest at Windischgarsten in Austria since 1988, said in the parish newsletter four years ago that the death and destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina was “divine retribution” for excessive sexual permissiveness, including tolerance of homosexuality.”
All of which made me realize that this would make for another interesting list: The worst picks in history, or some such.
Still, if you think those were marriages made in Hell, spare a moment’s thought for Paul McCartney, who chose Heather Mills for a wife and then had to cough up £24.3 million to get rid of her again…
Some casting couch cretin choosing Kevin Costner to play Robin Hood was pretty bad as well - and, staying with movies: The decision to select both the script and the leading lady of ‘The Hottie and the Nottie’ was not exactly divinely inspired (not by any God with a sane flock of believers, anyway.)
By the way, and going for the Mother of all Bad Picks: God creating man and appointing him captain of Spaceship Earth was probably not His most inspired moment either.
Okay, so, those were all some highly dubious choices and God awful decisions but here’s my question to you: What would make it on YOUR list of history’s worst picks?
(Shall I compare thee to the food of life? Play on…)
Okay, this is one of those posts where I mostly shut up - but I was reading a newspaper column that sang the virtues of certain pop lyrics, so I thought, alright, but what would a top ten of pop lyric one (or two) liners look like?
To be honest, I immediately had my number one but then I thought it wouldn’t hurt to draw things out a bit.
So, before I leave you with my number one, I’ll give you five other great lines:
One of those songs Bob Dylan really must be sick and tired of playing is, of course, “The times, they are a-changing.” “Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown”
Et cetera, et cetera.
Not a bad song but when you’ve heard it a few hundred times - or, like Dylan, must have played it a few thousand times - it does become time for the record to be a-changed.
As it is with certain records, so it is with certain news stories. The Middle East conflict, Global Warming, celebrity sex tapes, Oprah book club scandals and ‘political correctness gone mad’ stories: They keep appearing and re-appearing and never a-changing one bloody dot in our newspapers.
Then, of course, there are all those stupid revivals. ABBA revivals, Miami Vice revivals, mohawk & Mozart hairdo revivals. Every bloody day, something that was quite vile to begin with seems to be ‘back’ - like an Arnold Schwarzenegger in an extreme make-over show.
So, feeling nostalgic for a certain political era, then why not vote for a Bush Mark ll or a Clinton Part Deux?
Failing that, why not start a Crazy Frog remembrance service, or something.
All of which is just my way of saying, “I really don’t fucking need this shit” - which is what I thought when I read the following story:
“The last time Jane Fonda took the stageon Broadway, John F Kennedy was in the White House, Bob Dylan had just released his second album and the first James Bond film, Dr No, was in American cinemas.
That was in June 1963, when she finished a run of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude. More than 45 years later, she makes her Broadway comeback tonight in 33 Variations, a play, fittingly, that explores the exceptional creativity of artists late in life.”
It’s like one of those stupid horror movies, isn’t it? The monster has been shot, knifed, burned, drowned and fucked up its arse with a chain-saw and STILL it won’t lie down.
Dr Samuel Johnson once famously noted that if a man was tired of London, he was tired of life.
Though I am not particularly tired of life, I can’t say London does all that much for me. Still, there are things that do make me very tired - not to the point of wanting to lie down and die, mind you but more to the extent of wanting to pick up an Uzi and go shoot a few Hollywood executives:
“It is a truth commercially acknowledgedthat Jane Austen’s high-spirited heroines can be recast as Hollywood brats or Bollywood sirens, wittily navigating the eternal perils of class, romance and unworthy men. Few challenges, however, are as unusual as the latest foe facing Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice – a plague of the undead sent to reduce the picturesque villages of Longbourn and Meryton to smouldering ruins.
Hollywood studios are bidding to turn a radical reworking of Austen’s most popular book, now called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a parody to be published in April, into a blockbuster movie. Desperate for new ideas, studio chiefs hope “P&P&Z” will mark the bloody birth of a feral offspring of classic British literature: “monster-lit”.”
Now, normally, I don’t care all that much what Hollywood is up to - especially when they are doing yet another remake, or extreme make-over of some much loved book. As a famous writer (whose name I can’t come up with now…) once said: “They can’t spoil any of my books. The books are still there.” That’s true, of course. As it is true that, so far, no Hollywood studio has ever kidnaped people at gun point to make them watch a movie.
Still, there is something quite repugnant about Hollywood’s ever more desperate search for new formulae for blockbusters.
Anyway, this latest bit of nonsense had me wondering about other scenarios. I mean, if we really want to plough that ‘Is nothing sacred?’ field even deeper and further, what more could we dig up?
Without thinking all that particularly hard, I came up with the following three concepts:
1) A new Anne Frank movie, that also functions as a lesbian coming of age story - with full front nudity, of course
2) A reworking of ET, where our friendly alien discovers a Satanic pedophile ring
3) Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, transported to and set against the tribal slaughter in Ruanda (to a score of ABBA songs)
Ah yes, so many stories to rape and maim and so little time…
Now, if you don’t mind, I’m off to daydream about Jane Austen’s mister Darcy, turned zombie, scooping out the brains of our plucky heroine, while crooning Charles Aznavour’s ‘She’.
Before I go though, this obvious question to all (or, at least, anyone) still reading this post: What would be your idea for the ultimate and most tasteless exploitation remake?
