Glob-a-log

(Only their mothers could tell them apart…)

I’ve got Leonard Cohen on my brain – again…

I don’t know why – maybe it was something I read about the Chilcot inquiry: That lukewarm affair that was supposed to take a close & stern look at all the snake oil merchants, misfits and weathervanes who bungled & lied us into the Iraq war. Or maybe it was something else entirely: So many stupid news stories, so little time

Anyway, this morning, coming out of bed, I was humming Cohen’s song ‘The Future’. (Yes, I know, ‘Closing Time’ might have been more appropriate but my sleepy brain was insisting on the former…

… and just before I started to write this (after reading yet another silly news story in the Telegraph) I was quietly singing (and searching for the words of) one of the master’s much older songs, ‘Nancy’:

It seems so long ago

Nancy was alone,

looking at the late late show

through a semi-precious stone.

In the house of honesty

her father was on trial”

Okay, Nancy was Reagan’s wife, not Bush’s (or Blair’s) daughter – but it’s nice to think about an alternative world where George & Tony would rant crazily about ghosts at the banquet, shouting ‘Iraq has murdered sleep!’, before a world wide walking forest worth of editorials would have seen them arrested and brought before the International Court of Justice.

Well, even the smallest pebble can dream of the fall of mountains – though I admit that the above scenario is about as likely to come to a theatre near you as it would be for Bush & Blair to do a John Belushi at a press conference, shouting ‘YES! YES! JESUS H. TAP-DANCING CHRIST… WE HAVE SEEN THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!”

Ah well, that was in another country and besides, James Brown is dead.

Anyway, talking of weapons of mass destruction – and that news article that had my head playing haunted house to Leonard’s ghost…

… as assault weapons go, it’s perhaps not quite up there with those famed Weapons of Mass Destruction but this one, at least, was quite real…

… and pretty personal…

… and damn well up close too:

“An American woman has been charged with third-degree assault after she squirted breast milk in the face of a female police officer. Toni Tramel, from Kentucky, had been arrested for public intoxication and was changing into her prison uniform when the incident allegedly occurred. She reportedly squirted milk straight from her breast into the face of a female deputy.”

(Then and now: Spot the differences…)

Remember Jonathan Swift and his ‘Modest Proposal’?

We now have an update for that, with a newly revised subtitle too:

“For Preventing The Citizens of Poor Greece From Being Aburden to The European Tax Payer, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public”

Here’s today’s Modest Proposal, as reported in the Guardian:

Greece must consider a fire sale of land, historic buildings and art works to cut its debts, two rightwing German politicians said today in a newspaper interview that is bound to exacerbate tensions between Athens and Berlin. The Acropolis and the Parthenon could also fall under the hammer, along with temptingly idyllic Aegean islands still under state ownership, in a rush to keep bankruptcy at bay.”

It’s an interesting idea.

It’s also kind of funny that it comes from two right wing German politicians.

Now, I’m not saying that Greece didn’t make a mess of things but for German politicians to throw stones is a bit rich.

People in glass houses and all of that – or, to be less subtle about this: People who, not so long ago, celebrated a Kristall Nacht, before setting fire to the rest of Europe, should, perhaps, not be the first ones to suggest other countries have a fire sale.

I suppose we should be grateful that, this time round, these right wing politicians are prepared to pay money for these islands, instead of invading them, like they did in 1941.

Anyway, politicians of a country that gassed God knows how many million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and psychiatric patients, and that, after the war, received a hand-out of millions and millions of American dollars through the Marshall plan, should, quite frankly, shut the fuck up if another European country runs into a spot of financial bother.

(Ghosts of Nazis whispering eni meany miney moe - or something…)

Okay, I’ve worked my way through various international newspapers but I just couldn’t find anything that caught my fancy.

Yes, there was someone who spotted Jesus’ face on a pizza sauce bucket and there was another Jesus related article that told us about a nudist church in Virginia.

I also learned that the man with the longest hair had died, though that one was trumped by a story about a man who spoke from his grave.

Also, to stick with death related matters, there was a woman whose life was saved by her size-D breast implants, one of which caught the bullet of a semi-automatic assault rifle.

Then there were those two guys in Mozambique who were caught shagging a goat, whose owner now demands they do the honourable thing and staying in Africa and staying on (sex) topic, there was this school dorm in South Africa that was closed after a reported outbreak of lesbianism.

So, Jesus, death and sex are doing just fine in the world’s Sunday papers, which hardly comes as a big surprise, but right now I can’t be bothered to comment on any of these stories.

Well, there was this one thought that sprang to my mind while I was reading a story about a guy who had seen the hand of God and wanted to shake it when he discovered that a picture of Jesus was the only thing to survive after his house burnt down.

The thought being that it was rather strange to bestow the epitaph of ‘Saviour’ on Someone who is quite happy to survive while everything around Him burns to a crisp.

Enough of that and enough of all these stories that take the sapiens out of homo sapiens. Time to put this (non)column to bed and to start cutting up the vegetables & herbs for what will, hopefully, become a glorious fish soup.

See you tomorrow.

Sorry, I have no time to write. I have to go to some (work related) party and I’m running very, very late indeed.

So, I’ll just give you a link to a video clip, where Clive James (yes, him again…) reads three short excerpts from his Cultural Amnesia book.

Here it is:

http://del.interoute.com/?id=8a6527a5-0a6b-4667-a51e-157140daf89f&delivery=stream

I know: Not exactly Saturday Night Party material but if I could I would show it in every high school, all over the world.

You’re in luck though: I just saw I had another link going – or open, or whatever you call it. Something I’d started to watch yesterday and then forgot about.

This is definitely more weekend fun stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mHc08ITjDU&feature=related

‘Kay. I really have to go now. See you tomorrow but I will leave you with this very beautiful song.

Clive James and Louis Armstrong were right: sometimes white folks can play jazz. Enjoy:

(Dawkins and Auden: Truly great minds never think alike…)

Okay, so, today, I almost decided not to write my daily post - for the first time in nearly two years…

… because, yesterday, I had to leave both Prague and my lady, to return to boring, rain-soaked Holland…

… but I quickly came to the conclusion that that would, even for me, take grandiose, self-indulgent solipsism to unacceptably toxic levels.

Not that I feel like writing much, mind you – let alone reading newspapers – but I do have something else for you. I arrived back here in Utrecht early in the evening, yesterday, which gave me time to wallow in self-pity and, when that became too boring to sustain for another pitiful minute, I sought and found some solace listening to a few pod-casts.

I ended up spending more than two hours listening to interviews – or rather: conversations – Clive James held with a number of writers, actors and philosophers.

So, since I’ve been boring everyone here with my personal Country & Western stories, the last few days, I thought it would only be fair to give you the chance to recover from those self-centred laments by listening to two of these interviews yourself. (Not that you have to restrict yourselves to those two: You can read and watch and listen to tonnes of stuff on his web site, HERE.)

You could start with these two, though.

In the first one James is talking with Richard Dawkins, about evolution, and how our creative capabilities might simply be a function of that process. They talk about language, monsters and Gods – it’s all good stuff

and you can find it HERE.

The second one is a discussion Clive James held with John Clarke about the poet W.H. Auden, which is really much fun, with lots of artistic quarrels and gossip, some good poems being read aloud and how the first world war changed the way a new generation of poets could actually write poetry (and the way the horrific crimes of the Nazi regime led Auden to the conclusion that poetry ‘makes nothing happen’.)

You find that interview HERE.

Enough from me, though. See you tomorrow

(If you haven’t read this yet: Go and buy a copy now…!)

Yesterday, I read this in the Guardian:

“The future of crime fiction lies not in inventing ever more colourful crimes but in focusing on real-life wrongdoing, according to novelist David Peace, author of the bestselling Red Riding quartet and The Damned United. “I’m drawn to when writers take on history, take on real crimes. To me there’s just so much that happens in real life that we don’t understand and we can’t even fathom. I don’t really see the point of making up crimes,” the novelist told US publishing website GalleyCat.”

Now, let me start by saying that I think David Peace is a very good writer. I haven’t read his latest book (about a football club) but I loved the Red Riding books.

I also share his deep admiration for James Ellroy.

I have to say though that I find his comments about crime writing amazingly stupid. It is entirely possible, of course, that he’s been misquoted here but if not, yea Gods.

“I don’t really see the point of making up crimes.”

Right, why-ever make anything up. What’s the use of ‘Once upon a time’, when we can look out the window and watch the real world? Why write Romeo and Juliette when we can see real romance & lust blossoming in the Big Brother house? Why write The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock when we can buy a Hallmark card for Valentine’s Day? Why write War & Peace when we can watch the news?

Idiot.

Have you seen the SuperBowl, last weekend?

No?

Well, neither did I. Life’s too short to waste half a day watching commercials, interspersed with the antics of weirdly dressed men, doing incomprehensible things with something not even shaped like a proper football.

Still, even those of us who did not watch cannot have failed to hear and/or read about the controversial choice of geriatric pop band The Who as the Half-Time musical act.

In 2003 the band’s guitarist Pete Townshend had been arrested for ‘accessing child pornography online’, so the Child Abuse Watch Group tried (and failed) to stop The Who from performing at the SuperBowl.

Why am I rehashing this tired old stuff?

Well, because I’m afraid that we may expect far worse in the time leading up to (and no doubt during) the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

I mean, if you can create a screaming row in most of the world’s newspapers when an aged guitarist who once watched child porn appears live on TV for a few minutes…

… then it’s not hard to imagine the media melt-down when the Net’s most infamous paedophile will have a starring role during the whole of those two-and-a-half snow-draped weeks in Vancouver.

As the following newspaper shows, this one is even bigger than the Michael Jackson trial:

“A Polish newspaper mistakenly identified “Pedobear”, a notorious internet meme, as one of the mascots of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The Gazeta Olsztynska published an image showing the bear alongside genuine Olympic mascots Quatchi, Sumi, Miga and Mukmuk to illustrate a feature about the Games. It appears that the newspaper lifted the picture from Google Images, unaware that it had been created as a prank by Michael Barrick, a Canadian artist and graphic designer.”

(Story story night…?)

As they say, ‘You can’t make it up’.

Although, in this particular case, you can – and some do:

“A police force spent £100,000 on ’storytelling sessions’ to encourage senior officers to share their sucesses. The sessions organised by Greater Manchester Police were supposed to improve policing, with the lessons learned pasted on a cartoon storyboard to form a ‘business strategy’.”

Granted, it is quite a bit of money – but money well spent, I’d say.

I mean, we know, from the Birmingham Six fiasco in the seventies to today’s headlines about the lying Metropolitan Police commander, that your average English copper likes a good story…

… and who can blame them? Making it up as you go along is so much easier than real detecting…

… and much more entertaining than trying to find real evidence, of course.

As my examples of old, let’s say inventive police work shows, however, some cops are not really good at it, which can (and in these cases did) lead to all kind of, quite costly, embarrassing situations.

So, it was a wise decision by Greater Manchester Police to send these senior officers to this storytelling course. We can only hope that these sessions indeed help to ‘improve policing’, the next time they want to stitch someone up.

After all, it’s not much fun to be a pig if you’re no good at telling porkies.

(Eyes that know the darkness in my soul, indeed…)

(Who’s been telling porkie pies this time then…?)

Sometimes, it’s hard to be a Muslim. I mean, look at the state of the world. When the IRA was bombing the shit out of England and knee-capping God knows how many of their own country men, did the international airlines start to strip search priests and nuns? Did the police stop & search anyone wearing a crucifix?

No, they did not – even though the IRA was much better at this whole bombing business than those demented Muslim ‘martyrs’, who would be much better off if they joined some self harm group instead.

Still, because of some imbeciles who set fire to their own shoes and underwear, all Muslims are now treated as potentially rabid dogs. Which ain’t very nice.

From Muslims now to Jews though. So, if it is, at times, hard to be a Muslim, it’s always hard to be a Jew. The writer Dan Simmons once told a story about how he and a few colleages, in 2000, were asked to write a SF story that had to be set in the year 3000.

Now, predicting what will happen in the next ten years or so is tough enough but speculating about stuff a thousand years from now is sheer madness.

Until, as Simmons wrote, he realized that, however vast the oceans of times between now and any possible then, there would always be people who would want to kill all the Jews.

Anyway, you know all of that – and I wouldn’t have brought it up if I hadn’t come upon a news story that, once again, proved that life always lands Muslims and Jews with their peanut butter side on the floor.

Here it is:

“Eating pork is at least as effective as popping a Viagra pill to spice up your romantic life, according to Argentine President Cristina Kirchner, who claims to have tested the theory. “Pork consumption improves sexual activity,” Mrs Kirchner informed a gathering of business people at a meeting at the presidential palace. “This is not a small detail,” she said at the gathering to announce a reduction in the price of pork. “Besides, some nicely grilled pork is much more gratifying than taking Viagra.”

(She should have fed him pork, I guess…)

Yesterday, I was talking to a friend in a bar. I like bar talk – if it’s about more than women, football, cars and, these days, of course, also iPhones and Macs. It’s amazing how boring people can be about those things.

Still, when the alcohol starts to ripple (as of yet gently) through the brain, and the conversation flows from the latest Stephen King to the self-portraits of Rembrandt, by way of the Second World War and EU politics and the records of Miles Davis and who was and wasn’t in Casablanca…

… then, to me at least, it’s about the best of times beer & shots money can buy…

… and yes, there is a point to all of that and I’m slowly coming to it.

So, at one random point in the evening my friend mentioned that stolen corpse of the former Cyprus president Tassos Papadopoulos. I reminded him that stealing corpses has always been the favourite pastime of a select few morons & scoundrels and I was quite amazed to learn that my friend did not know about the theft of a way more famous corpse:

“Three months after Chaplin died on Christmas, 1977, his body was stolen in an effort to extort money from his family. Chaplin’s body was recovered 11 weeks later after the grave-robbers were captured. He is now buried under 6 feet of concrete to prevent further theft attempts.”

Anyway, I was reminded of these grave robbing tales when I came upon the following story, a bit earlier today:

“Three mysterious signatures on pages of parchment bound in leather and kept under lock and key may prove the theory that William Shakespeare was a secret Catholic who spent his “lost years” in Italy.”

Talk about digging up famous graves indeed. Still, Shakespeare’s dead body has been fucked with by God knows how many necrophiliacademic chancers, who try to sell us this, that or the other latest theory about him.

So, we get speculations about his portrait, his sexuality and even his gender. We get to read about all the reasons why Shakespeare couldn’t have written what he has written…

… and now we have yet another idiot claiming that Shakespeare was a catholic…

… which, of course, is trivial beyond all other trivial pursuits. It’s like the pursuit of happiness entwined with the quest for the fountain of youth, squared by the search for an honest MP.

The point of Shakespeare is not whether he was catholic, female, black, alien and/or bisexual.

The only point worth making is that the point of Shakespeare is that he is Shakespeare.

All other speculation is as senseless and unwelcome as a plastic replica of the Tower of Pisa, thrown at the Taj Mahal.