Saturday 19 July 2008

Food

I am not a foodie. Fuck food. Food is merely petrol you need to top up with from time to time to make whichever carcass you happen to be trapped inside move around a bit & do things, & like petrol it is overpriced, overrated, smelly & facing extinction. Alex Cox got it right with Repo Man as did NASA with their inventive solution to zero-gravity lunches. No frills, no washing up, no choice, no nonsense. This, my friends, is the future: Deal with it or get off the pot...

I had the poor fortune of having to witness yet another celebrity chef reality monstrosity on the idiot's lantern last night. Yes, having: My flatmate Ursula actually enjoys making & eating the stuff while she watches other people making & eating it, can you imagine? My living room is a cross between the inner circle of Dantés Inferno & an Escher staircase. That chef what doesn't iron his face is barking contractual expletives at assorted inept celebs attempting to bolster their dwindling incomes in order to go out & buy more food (or, more likely, have it cooked for them) & then eat it. The whole shebang is utterly, utterly ridiculous & I am at the point of weeping into my Bombay Bad Boy with fury but as man of the household I exercise an heroic restraint, feigning interest for what feels like an eternity but is in fact the time from rolling opening credits to 1st ad break. Never in living memory have I been so grateful to see the Halifax's multi-talented Howard warbling his talented way across the Channel. Ursula is no fool : She instantly detects the suppressed venom & catapults herself at my Achilles heel. "Isn't it interesting how Gordon has become the object of desire for most well-adjusted modern women." Bitch. Brilliant, but Bitch nevertheless...

I am beside myself : There are more flaws in that one sentence than there are flavours of Jelly Belly (which, by the way, I highly recommend should you need a meal between treats) & the sheer volume of CPU power required to retort completely blows the processors on duty. I have to leave the room, fizzing in defeat, leaving Ursula & Gordon to enjoy their wild raspberry & mint fucking cheesecake, washed down with a half-bottle of Muscat d'Alsace or Skol lager. Whichever...

Friday 18 July 2008

The Amateur Eye

Spotted in Herne Hill shortly before I moved to Crystal Palace where the average is a reassuring 60. How many 'use poo' in your neck of the woods, readers? C'mon now, don't be shy...

Thursday 17 July 2008

Dream : 17/07/08

Just got in from a garden party with the parents of my Godchild at which I met an attractive woman who swore her sister had video-interviewed Banksy in 2002 & was going through the hoops about revealing his identity. As I have spent the best part of this year taking a couple of his paintings off walls for clients I have no respect for whatsoever (true) I recommend she keeps schtum despite the obvious financial benefits. A couple of days pass. Consciousness is regained outside a massive warehouse somewhere in North London. I am in the foyer (sorry, was brought up in a time when that word meant something) waiting for the bull-necked penguin to let me in. I casually pick up a newspaper as the penguin gets onna blowa. Article on page 6 declaring 'Banksy's Identity Revealed' & a forthcoming 'fuck-it' party at the venue outside which I am now standing. I wonder...I am half-cut, watching Mr Banks give instructions to student labourers cutting & bagging vast quantities of pills & cocaine in a sweatroom usually manned by Primark over the working week. He approaches me, an unfamiliar bonce inside his inner circle & we discuss my Russian submarine corps watch to which he has taken a fancy. Banks is wearing a Wurzel-stylee white smock & has earlobes that rest upon his shoulders. I comment on these. We laugh heartily as I exit room searching for the smallest one. My colleague Bianca approaches me in a state of distress : "Egg", quoth she, "I am pregnant, oh woe is me." I calm her down with a can of Relentless & kind words. "No, you don't understand, the baby is Banksy's & now that he is outed it can never be the same again..." I am thrown by this revelation but out of consideration I offer up a portion of my wine cellar as temporary creche which, out of consideration, she refuses. She is a true friend...

Tuesday 15 July 2008

Builder Jour

"Roobehrooobehroobehroobeh der ner ner ner nah ner.......Dooyadooyadooyadooya der ner ner ner nah ner......."

We are approaching face-off at the Hop Pole site, Tewkesbury, Spring 2008. It's the 37th time this piece-of-shit song has been aired at ear-splitting volume on Builder FM this morning, my nerves are frayed beyond language & just to up the ante a mite further everyone's favourite short-arsed Welsh Chippy has decided to join in. Again. I am perched on a scaffold staring at a C18th wallpainting, a Swann Morton scalpel shaking temptingly in my hand as our hero opens his tar-corrupted lungs wider than Mary Millington's legs & spews forth into the working environment. A brace of other Chippies & a lone Spark attempt chorus but the complexity of lyric flummoxes them temporarily. I look to my colleagues for support : Mark is oblivious, buried deep in headphones offering him 'At Home He Thinks He's A Tourist' & Bianca is single-handedly trying to figure out the point of Jenni Murray. This one I'll have to go alone, Mary mother of God... 

Chippy 2 (or Spark), in lieu of any creditable vocal contribution, straps on a hand tool & air-planes us seemlessly to the bridge "Duh'ner ner, ner ner ner ner ner, der ner ner ner ner, ner nerr..." as Chippy 1, bereft momentarily of the oxygen of publicity, lets off a spectacular fart that could blow the guy ropes off the NME tent at Glastonbury. At this point the Kaiser Chiefs magnum opus is drowned out entirely with peals of hysteria eminating from every corner of the building, rocking the scaffold/house to it's foundations. It seems I am the only person in striking distance from the massive radio with a face like a wet wednesday & hands that would prefer to be doing dishes but I am fucked if I'm going down for this. My eyes dart around inside my head, looking for a viable excuse not to be doubled up & briefly losing motor skills but I find nothing. Fortunately for everyone, the Chiefs have kindly provided a no-brainer outro, allowing Chippy 1 to pick up the baton & run with it straight through to the finishing post & me to regain a semblance of composure & personal dignity, narrowly avoiding a senseless loss of life...

It is over : All camps retreat to their original positions & a mantle of comparative quiet descends over the battleground. Chippy 1 plugs a hole with a dowel he prepared earlier & Chippy 2 helps him by watching. I return to my duties but make a mental note to boycott any products by Caterpillar in future. I turn once again to Mark & Bianca who, like extras in Dr Who, appear not to have moved one iota. When they return how can I ever explain th.."Hey Hey Wanna be a Rockstar..." (ad nauseam)

Monday 14 July 2008

Loser Magazine


In 1988 I bailed the UK for Australia to pursue a career in either film or music, didn't really care which. In reality I ended up working for 'Charlie Chan' who ran the 5 Cent photocopy shop just off Melbourne's Swanston Street, a man notorious for making a documentary called 'Sex & the Animals' which he promoted with two pigs that he kept in the shop for a bit (& photocopied them), spray painted 'sex' on one & 'animals' on t'other & paraded them outside the central nick during rush hour until he got arrested. I loved working for Charlie : He was dangerously insane, the size of a pepperpot, ancient, balding & omnipresent. Every band gigging in town would rock up at some point (unless they were signed wankers) armed with bags of shit Charlie would encourage to throw onto the copiers : Syringes, bullets, porn, mucus, semen & occasionally Farelle's tits if she could blag a guestie (Farelle & I would 'man' the shop when he was off shooting up or speaking to producers). Occasionally he would turn up at 6pm sweating like a fat girl at the disco & turf us both out, swearing he had a "meeting & could you just fuck off now. I MEAN IT." When Charlie's eyes bulged & turned ochre simultaneously we knew he did. So we did...

These mysterious meetings were never discussed. I presumed he was scoring a plethora of chemicals of some description & never gave it too much thought. However, one morning I arrived at 10am to open up (not that there was any point WHATSOEVER in being there before 3pm but he liked to make the whole caboush seem kosher) & found a massive cardboard box spewing its' innards over the sticky carpet along with the more traditional takeaway cartons, vodka bottles, suspect videos & a few pairs of stained suit trousers. Of course I inspected. The box was filled with multiple issues (1-4) of appallingly copied & stapled magazines, finished & ready for distribution. Only the last bit never happened (standard practice at Charlies). It was called 'Loser Magazine : The Magazine for YOU' & from that moment on I was hooked. 'Loser' had virtually no editorial or content, no format & nothing remotely resembling a magazine inside whatsoever. Just endless clippings from the Aussie press, above & below the salt, thrown together page after page after page. And it was hilarious. When your brain finally accepted that this was all it was, you somehow made the quantum leap & every clip became knicker-wettingly brilliant. Think Framley Examiner with real stuff & you're getting warm, yet with 'Loser' you had to join your own dots & briefly allow yourself to be possessed by the author. Fortunately I had the foresight to pilfer issues 1-4 which I still own to this day (although 3 got nicked at a Herne Hill house party also at which my gerbil Utterly Butterly was callously murdered by a certain indie musician putting a tab of acid in her water bottle). For what it's worth I'm reproducing a few pages here :





Sunday 13 July 2008

The First One

Turns out it's not good enough to sit there in the sidelines sniggering & occasionally posting one-liner comments on more finely honed sites than this one, oh no.. Apparently you have to get wet/take the plunge/dive in (etc) if you want to be a contender, Charlie. But, as any fule kno, it's always the First One that kicks up a stink, that threatens to drag the half-baked ideas that refuse to come out nicely like they did in your head straight back to obscurity where they undoubtedly belong. It's these demons we're here to see today:

"Publish vs Delete. They're evenly matched & have been training hard for this moment, Delete traditionally strongest in the earlier stages but if Publish can hold off the initial pummelling I think we could go the full five. What do you think, Tim?"

"Championship whites.  Cliff'n'Sue.  Strawberries."

Exactly. No-one said it was gonna be easy but as my grandmother used to say before she was discovered naked outside Whipsnade Reptile House "If you don't come to the party, you.....you..............you don't..........I'm sorry, dear......................sorry." Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked : Last night my friend Donald & I were trying to come up with the kind of punch-the-sky global appeal chorus that gets played on football matches & commercials, thereby saving us the effort of actually having to form a band & do gigs. We've been mooting this idea for 3 months now & have managed 2 meetings in the pub after which we forgot what the minutes were ("I thought you were supposed to be writing this up" etc..) but commitment to the cause still astonishes me after all this time. He mentioned the plight of Midge Ure, having penned the evergreen 'Vienna' with it's rabble-rousing strapline "This means nothing to me" which consequently denied him the luxury of early retirement (Mr Ure to this day is reduced to selling ice creams from a van in the Easterhouse area & doing the occasional jingle for Radio Clyde). Clearly this is something we must avoid at all costs as our collective age already nudges 90 & the rigours of endless touring, drug abuse & casual sex may well tip us over the edge (although this does have the upside of lowering said collective age).

So many good ones have been had already, godammit! "Inger-land, Inger-land" (I could have been sipping my Tom Collins in Fort Lauderdale RIGHT NOW if we'd come up with that little beauty). Anyway, Donald reckons the football market has long since been cornered & we should concentrate on product. On telly. On the radio. Billboards. Direct mail. And the rest. Look what Tim did with Persil : He single-handedly turned Unilever round, they were going to the dogs before he quite brilliantly tapped into the nations' collective unconscious & made it cool to have a loser telling us to do laundry. I know this doesn't have much to do with writing a killer chorus but that's not the point, the ethos remains the same. We'll come up with the tune later. And the words. Next meeting, wait & see...