Real Cruelty in Imaginary Gardens

The world is in the grip of financial catastrophe (although the markets are stabilizing). In the US, it looks like the Republicans, led by a baffled Vietnam vet, who should really be staggering around on a New York corner, playing a casio for pennies and sympathy, and his nature-despising, uber-milf sidekick, might take the Oval Office come November (although maybe Obama is all about the long game). In Pakistan, a suicide bomber takes out half a hotel and 51 people with a truck loaded with grenades (although the keystone cop terrorists strike again – the truck can’t get through the gates, and the PM and President of the country, who are due to be at the hotel, aren’t. Stick that up your Jihad, wankers).

And I live in Somerset with my parents and without a job (only until November mind, I’m not sad. The Somerset bit, anyway), getting continually and comprehensively rejected for future employment via email. But there’s always a brightside. And here are some things that I have been enjoying over the last couple of weeks, when not participating in an extended stay at the self-pity motel, just off miserable bastard turnpike.

So put on a happy face, and find something from the list below that you might like to try to cheer yourself up, and get involved. For as Richard Wagner said: “Joy is not in things; it is in us.” And he was Hitler’s favourite composer, so think on…

(By the way, this is certainly the closest that this particular blog has come to telling you about what I had for my fucking breakfast or my seven favourite things about anal bleaching. Or whatever.)

1. Will Young’s new song, and his massive gay chin and face. I think Will Young is alright. His new song “Grace”, that I heard on Ken Bruce’s Radio 2 show (bring the noise) this morning , is excellent, and if it had been recorded forty years ago by Smokey Robinson, everyone would love it, and not just immediately assume it’s a load of old tat spewed out by a Pop Idol-winning homosexual farmhand. In fairness, he did record that truly terrible version of “Light My Fire”, but that song has always been exceptionally shit and overrated anyway. And at least the Will Young version didn’t have Ray Manzarek wanking away on his keyboard for five endless minutes, while Jim Morrison no doubt got pissed and pranced around the studio being “The Lizard King”. And by “The Lizard King” I of course mean “a cunt”.

2. Going to the beach. I went to the beach with my mother and ate a crab sandwich. And it was very pleasant. And that’s not a euphemism, you sick fucks.

3. “Revolver” by Guy Ritchie. When this film came out in 2005, it was gang-raped by the critics, and left in a cellar wearing a sack over its head, endlessly repeating the phrase “Worst Film Ever”. But it’s not. Granted, it’s not exactly “good” in the usual sense of the word (meaning something that is essentially, you know, alright and stuff); it does think that wholesale twist thievery from both “Fight Club” and “The Usual Suspects”, perhaps two of the most visible films of the last fifteen years, is both acceptable and won’t get noticed (or guessed by the audience within five minutes of the start of the film), and it does feature Ray Liotta’s naked arse rather too much. But it looks pretty, is well put together technically, has quite a good central performance from Jason Statham (if you discount the stupid voiceover), is mildy engrossing in a “this is mildly engrossing pretentious nonsensical bullshit” kind of a way. And it has an extended sequence where loads of fat, old mafia executioners get killed. And films that have extended sequences where loads of fat, old mafia executioners get killed are alright by me (see also: “The Way Of The Gun”, “Ghost Dog: Way Of The Samurai”, “Running Scared” and “The Boondock Saints”). Even if they’re a bit shit.

4. The fact that I like drum and bass again. Mainly due to getting hold of three High Contrast albums. They’re all ace, and have helped dispel somewhat the hideous memories of the last time I went to a proper drum and bass event – “Summerfest” (in September of course; good call dickheads), a sub-Homelands dance abortion in the Norfolk Showgrounds, just outside Norwich: the dance festival so good that they never did it again. One-way ticket to Pillsville mate, population me…

No. It was truly tragedy – my hat got stolen (from off my fucking head), it was populated almost exclusively with cunts wallowing in happy hardcore, and fourteen year olds more interested in going on fairground rides and then vomiting up their ketamine than dancing, you weren’t allowed to bring chewing gum into the “arena”, and had to buy it in there at £2 a packet, the drugs were rubbish anyway, supposedly “legendary” DJ Erick Morillo thought it would be a good idea to end his set with “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, which is a song incredibly effective in rapidly hastening the end of any fun you might be having, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, let alone when you’re trying to dance to funky house with some East Anglian transvestites on stilts. And the drum and bass “tent” was not so much a tent, as more of a barn. So it sounded like shit. Leaving the whole thing (very early) with similarly disheartened friends, feeling like Colonel Kurtz watching a snail crawling along a razor blade, I seemed to have made the conscious decision not to listen to drum and bass for several years. And I have generally stuck to that decision, except at parties, until now. But no longer. Go listen to High Contrast.

5. Piers Morgan’s book “The Insider”. Good lord, Piers Morgan is a cunt. The world he portrays in his book is essentially a vision of hell; Dante reworked for the Two Pints generation. “The Insider” is hopefully a work of mad fiction, scribbled down by candlelight by an insane warlock in a Cornish turret in a thunderstorm. But I fear not; I fear it is a mirror to the world around us. The world presented here is one in which grotesque, ageing, charlatan falsehood pimps (Rupert Murdoch and Max Clifford, to name but two) rule over a cowed and broken population from behind barred windows in ivory towers – towers crammed to breaking point with gold and bewildered whores, who have had been blinded with pokers and had their tongues torn out, so they may never escape or tell of the atrocities they have been party to – sending down their lies and filth through the conduit of willing, drooling lackeys, priapic with diamond-hard greed (Piers Morgan and Kelvin MacKenzie, to name but two). It is a world where life, reputation, career, idea, relationship, joy, love, spirit and hope are crushed mercilessly under the jackboots of the armies of the night, armies made up of godless mercenaries wearing the flayed skins of their victims on their backs and gorging themselves with flesh torn from the brittle bones of their victims’ still-living children. It is a world where a blowjob – delivered by a painted jezebel privateer (man or woman – I make no distinction) through morally gritted teeth, while desperately fingering the anus of fiscal renumeration, before being flipped over and suffering gladly but painfully the gangbang of avarice, and ultimately ending up on the receiving end of the bukkake of fleeting, transitory celebrity, before licking up, weeping, the semen of spiritual shame and self-hatred from the floor, while the grand-wizards and their jackal lieutenants look on and masturbate frantically with their scaled claws – will get you forty grand and a front page. It is a world where the corrupt, the shameless and the evil prosper, wallowing in vats of loot and cruelty, causing incalculable damage to the psyche of the human race, while good men die like dogs in the dust, and are left to rot beneath a doomed sun.

It is a world without hope. But it’s a fucking ace book.

6. Trying to get a van driving job in Yeovil. This really should be easier than it is proving to be. But, when you live in a village where letters literally take a week (all seven days of it) to be delivered, because the postie has to go to work on a mule or one of those eagles from “The Lord Of The Rings” or something, I still haven’t managed it yet. And my application forms are floating around somewhere. Still, at least it leaves me time to do things like…

7. Smoking cigarettes. Come on, it’s just fucking brilliant and you know it.

8. The fact that my Dad shares a birthday with Henry VIII-surviving diplomatic mechanism Anne of Cleves, refined, jolly-faced, uber-tactician Arsene Wenger, terrifying gothic visionary genius with his own statue Nick Cave, “Don’t tell him Pike!” milking, Captain Mainwaring-being Arthur Lowe, militaristic rock n roll-loving vegan Joan Jett, jail-bird rapist, extortionist and New Orleanan rapper Mystikal, gap-toothed own-tongue swallower and Brazilian footballing legend Ronaldo, Bugsy Malone and Chachi off “Happy Days”-being Scott Baio and wide-faced prostitution enforcer Billie Piper. It’s today, by the way.

9. James Delingpole’s book “How To Be Right”. James Delingpole is the rock critic for the Daily Mail. I’ll let that sink in. If there ever was a job description that exclusively required a massive twat to fit it, it was that one. Luckily, James Delingpole is a massive twat. So it works out nicely for everyone. But James Delingpole doesn’t stop at slagging off Led Zeppelin (why I oughta…) for the worst newspaper in the world. He has found time to jot down all his nasty little right-wing bullshit ideas in a book called “How To Be Right: The Essential Guide To Making Lefty Liberals History”. I found it in a discount bookshop in Poole for £2. A thoroughly embarassing thing to buy, but the nice lady in the shop put it in a grubby brown paper bag for me, like I’d bought some child pornography or something. Which is ironic, because if you actually buy child pornography in Poole they give you a certificate, a little hat with a propeller on it, and a ticker-tape parade.

Anyway, James Delingpole’s book is a hilarious list of things he hates about modern Britain, and it’s PC-gone-madness. Hilarious mainly because he is so totally the aforementioned massive twat. I’m sure you can imagine the sort of thing James Delingpole hates, but here are selected highlights anyway: David Aaronovitch, wheelchair access to public buildings, the teaching of Diwali in British schools, allowing foxes and baby seals to remain alive, that bit the BBC used to run before programmes with the dancing wheelchairs, bendy buses, Black History Month, Tony Blair (obviously), the NHS, rights for diasbled people, gypsies, dropping world debt, the environment, the EU, the UN, fair trade products, Greenpeace, human rights, immigration, Germans, not being able to hear the word “nigger” used in the film “The Dambusters” on a Saturday afternoon on the BBC, organic food, the Polish, people who think that maybe Thatcher and Reagan weren’t that nice to the poor, the NSPCC, the RSPCA, the RSPB, PETA, social workers, speed cameras, the Tate Modern, the welfare state, wind turbines and Benjamin Zephaniah. Amongst other things. James Delingpole basically thinks of himself as a slightly better educated version of Richard Littlejohn, or a more refined version of Jon Gaunt.

He is neither of these things. He is just a massive twat. And at weekends he goes to a secluded car-park somewhere in Essex with Jeremy Clarkson and Robert Kilroy-Silk. They park their Range-Rovers, headlights on, engines running, in a circle and, bathed in the golden xenon glow, have anal sex with each other atop a pile of dead disabled immigrant children.

10. The imminent arrival of Quantum Of Solace. The trailer is fantastic, as is the theme song, which Jo Whiley didn’t like, making it exponetially better. I can’t wait.

11. Slaying prostitutes with a shovel.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

– Albert Camus

“AIDS, you say? Well, chin up. There’s a light at the end of this particularly poorly tunnel. A couple of these lovely vitamin pills, a couple of times a day. Job done. You’ll be smoking fags, having unprotected sex and surviving colds in no time. What? A method of treatment using a carefully controlled combination of scientifically tested antiretroviral drugs that could extend life expectancy by thirty years after contracting the virus? Grow up, mate. Have some vitamins. Sorry? Making shitloads of cash off the back of lying to AIDS victims and sitting back on a huge pile of gold while they die? Don’t know what you’re on about. Hand over the money, eat your vitamins and fuck off.”

(You can watch an amazing documentary by Stephen Fry about HIV and AIDS here. The subject of this post, lying scumbag misery-pimp Matthias Rath isn’t in it. But he has just abandoned a libel action against The Guardian. The cunt)

I love this time of year. Only this specific year, mind you, because the recent Democratic and Republican conventions have fully got the ball rolling on the “race” for the White House. This is good for two main reasons – because the process and activity between now and the second Tuesday after the first Monday (or something), when the election takes place, is both fascinating and incredibly important for everyone in the world; and more importantly because it makes mad American rednecks come bang out of the woodwork.

And mad American rednecks are the best thing ever.

Albeit so far, most of the concentration has been on doddering sit-com dad John McCain’s odd choice of running mate in Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, who’s not overly mad, or a redneck. But she is a dick. Just ask her five children who she deemed it acceptable to name Track, Trig, Bristol, Willow and Piper. Honestly.

McCain and the Republicans in general have been routinely slated in the media for nausing their campaign directly down the shitter by appointing an unknown woman from the tundra to a role that could potentially see her implanted as commander-in-chief should McCain be assassinated, or slip on a grape in the greengrocers and die of unforseen complications later. It certainly seems strange, but Palin at least attempted to sure up her support in the best way possible – by slagging off Barack Obama and cracking weird jokes about dogs.

“When the cloud of rhetoric have passed…when the roar of the crowd fades away…when the stadium lights go out and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot – what exactly is our opponent’s plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he’s done turning back the waters are healing the planet?”, she asked, probably spurred on by the knowledge that her husband is a snow-mobile racing champion, and that one of her daughter is named after a British city that was a lynch-pin of the international slave trade.

Well, according to Obama, he seeks to accomplish a revival of the shattered US economy, a permanent withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, tax breaks for working families rather than faceless uber-corporations, an end to US dependence on oil from the Middle East, a move towards renewable power, putting more, better paid teachers in US schools and an affordable, accessible health-care system for everyone

Sarah Palin wants to drill the fuck out of Alaska and stop people having abortions.

Of course, Obama’s bold promises maybe exactly that and only that, we don’t know. It’s easy to make a speech. And he was certainly not averse to laying into McCain himself at last week’s Democratic convention. Or pretty much suggesting that he would be all over the idea of “protecting Georgia”, or taking on the Iranians. It could all be political bluster and emotional racketeering.

But it was a mighty impressive speech, nonetheless.

After outlining his manifesto, however simplistically, Obama said: “These are the policies I will pursue. And in the weeks ahead I look forward to debating them with John McCain. But what I will not do is suggest that the Senator takes his positions for political purposes. Because one of the things that we have change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other’s character and each other’s patriotism. The times are too serious. The stakes are to high for this same partisan play-book. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields maybe Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together, and some have died together under that same proud flag. They have not served a red America, or a blue America. They have served the United States of America.”

(Ahem. Excuse me; despite my woolly liberalism, I do have a certain soft spot for this kind of flag-waving, patriotic bollocks. Only in America, mind you. Couldn’t care less about England. This obtuse enjoyment stems from irritation at years of anti-American hilarious humour in this country, spearheaded by cunts like Jeremy Clarkson, but mainly from shooting an AK-47 whilst drunk in a field in Texas. An activity which definitely doesn’t confirm any stereotypes).

A moving speech, whatever your political persuasion, if you’re into America. And Sarah Palin in retort?

“What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick.”

It got a big laugh. And finally I get to the point of mad American rednecks. A “hockey mom” is a term for a middle-class woman, like Sarah Palin, who spends a lot of time taking her kids to hockey practice and doing general domestic chores while Pop goes out to earn a crust. And apparently, Sarah Palin draws the conclusion that they are also like ugly attack dogs. With lipstick on. Obviously, it’s a quip designed to draw attention to her no-nonsense, hard nosed attitude to sorting out the world’s problems by drilling for oil and telling people they can’t have abortions. It’s the sort of thing that Sharon Osbourne would probably say. And it just makes me think of an actual dog wearing lipstick, kept chained in the kennel until Bubba stumbles home from the bar to smear raw bacon fat on his balls, crack open a can of Pabst and get stuck in for the night. Not that Sarah Palin is unattractive. On the contrary, she looks precisely like a “cougar“, the kind of woman would you could find getting nailed blind by the pool boy on a website called “Mature Anal Confusion” or “Cum All Over My Life Insurance Policy”. Or something.

Apologies for such a sexist digression; we shall return to mad rednecks. They LOVED Sarah Palin at the convention. My favourite quote, as reported by the Associated Press, was from Chuck Gast, a Republican delegate from Maryland. He immediately drew a comparison with The Untouchables, with Sarah Palin as Sean Connery, tooling up to send one of their’s to the morgue: “For too many times we’ve brought knives to gunfights,” said Chuck. When asked about Palin’s own arsenal: “Yes. She brings a big gun. Like a moose gun.”

I don’t know what a moose gun is. But it sounds dope. Unlike Sarah Palin.

But all of this was but a taster for the true redneck fun to come. This was provided, specularly, by John Rich. John Rich is one half of uber-successful Texan country pop/rock duo Big and Rich. I saw Big and Rich once, at a rodeo in San Antonio, surrounded by fifty thousand bellowing cowboys and their fat wives, most of whom were wearing his and hers matching stars and stripes collared button-downs. When Big and Rich played the national anthem, the lights went down and most people cried a bit. I just got a bit scared and confused. An event earlier in the evening called “Mutton Busting“, involving sheep and eight year old children, certainly hadn’t put me in a comfortable frame of mind to start with…

Anyway, John Rich has come up with some kind of anthem of sorts for John McCain and the Republican cause. It’s called “Raising McCain” and it beggars fucking belief. Enjoy:

Now you understand why I love this time of year. And don’t get me wrong, I quite like this song and I’ve been singing it since I heard it this morning. I’d much rather listen to it than some dirge from pop-dullards The Fray, who turned up at the Democratic convention. But “Raising McCain” is fucking weird and scary.

And while we all love mad rednecks, and we know that Republicans have more fun – being hockey moms and raising McCain and such – if any Americans are reading this (utterly implausibly, admittedly), please let Obama win come November.

Please?