Sunday, May 14, 2006
HEY! DALEK
Seven weeks off. That's all I bloody wanted. Not 30 years fasting in the desert ; just seven weeks of pure non-bloggery, allowing me the opportunity to enjoy the sunshine and quaff Bombay Sapphire and delicious Yorkshire tea. But no chance, sucker- what do I get? A barrage of suicide threats, and now superstar DJ Jim Bunnyhausen claiming that I've culled him from the Links Bar! I knew these links would cause mayhem in the long run. Actually, I think this link was accidentally deleted when I was adding a new one for infamous troublemaker Psy...er, Doppelganger. I apologise profusely, and will update it to include Jim's blog - but I'm feeling a bit too lazy to do it now. Advertising may be banned on Resonance FM, but not here, so if you want to read Jim's blog, click on the coloured word in this sentence. Jim's also supplementing his daily diet of renegade girl guides and amyl nitrate / alcopop binges by knocking out robosexual dancefloor anthems here - but more about the curse of "myspace" in a minute or so.
I don't have anything funny to say about Ireland, I wasn't really over there for donkey derbys or excursions into Loyalist towns in the North this time round. I was mostly helping to pull weeds out of the ground and tidy up the family grave. Incidentally, if you're after some true Celtic Gothic ambience, it may be worth checking out Ahamlish Cemetery in Sligo, especially during twilight. The photo doesn't really do the dilapidated old church justice (you can glimpse a bit of sky through the roof), but it looks fantastically eerie when the sun starts to fade. However, I wouldn't recommend any Satanists head out there to piss about with magickal rituals, as the Sligo Garda take a dim view of such activities, and you're likely to find yourself in the local copshop, being slapped around 'til an eyeball comes loose.
The observant will also have noticed that the link for 'The Measures Taken' is missing. This was most likely an accident too, but in reflection, I think Owen deserved to be EXPELLED anyway, for contributing an article to Socialist Worker. However, we should perhaps overlook this sordid act in light of his recent slagging of Alan De Botton. This dullard was responsible for the book The Art of Travel, which has to rank as the biggest pile of cack I've ever read - and I've read Jane Owen's Camden Girls and Bidisha's Seahorses, so we're talking some really grim shit here.
I hadn't ventured any further than Scotland or Ireland til I was 23 ; thank God I never read The Art of Travel before then, or I'd never have boarded a plane since. This booge-wah tosser succeeds in making travelling abroad sound like some morbid ritual, and just so you don't miss the point that he's well-educated, he brings in a load of comparisons with the travelling habits of famous novelists, artists and poets to prop up what is, essentially, a tome about fuckall. So, again we get a re-hashed version of Charles Baudelaire's wanderings and journeys, dressed up as some epic voyage of intellectual discovery - when the plain truth is that Baudelaire ran around whoring and getting drugged off his trolley.
De Botton especially harps on about Gustave Flaubert, a miserable sociopath with a face like a spanked bloodhound. Flaubert was renowned for vegetating in his study, firing off venomous letters about how everyone save his enlightened self was a mindless idiot. Like most spoilt 19th-century brats, the elitist imbecile embraced the works of De Sade (a literary cross between Jonathan King and Benny Hill ; for fuck's sake, at least Sex Pistols vocalist Ronnie Biggs had the nous to bust out of jail!) as an act of rebellion. In the end he fucked off to Egypt for a holiday, much to the delight of his parents who finally got to muck his room out - one can only imagine the state of his scrunched up scrolls. Again, because The Art of Travel is being pitched to a largely middle class readership, De Botton can't help gushing favourably about Flaubert's dreary lists of the common man's crime's against intellect and beauty, and he makes out that the Frenchman's first time with a moustached prostitute was somehow "above" a simple financial sexual transaction - because, inexplicably, this mysterious, 'exotic' courtesan was somehow in possession of guru-like great spiritual wisdom! What De Botton DOESN'T tell the reader is that, after this shindig, Flaubert returned to France and wrote Salammbo, allegedly about the wars of Carthage but more a frenzied study of his own sexual hang-ups, which was slammed by the critics for being historically inaccurate. Rather than laugh them off, Flaubert did what you'd expect - he raged away in his study, disgusted at mankind's inability to recognise his godlike literary genius.
On a more mundane level, De Botton spends two pages telling the reader about a total non-event on his own trip to Barbados, where he got in a row with his girlfriend over the serving of a pudding in a restaurant, leading to a silent drive back to the hotel and bedroom doors being slammed in anger. I mean, would you really go on holiday with this sock puppet?
Enough of that. I checked out Myspace recently cos I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. It's fucking mental! 14-year old girls in states of depression cos their emo band's just broken up. What REALLY shocked me was that I hadn't been looking at it for 5 minutes when I spotted someone I went to school with. It's true! He's lying about his age and is trying to launch himself as a singer-songwriter, along the lines of James Blunt. I couldn't be bothered to download his clips, but he used to be a member of our punk band, Legion of Morons! Technically, about 16 people can claim to be 'ex-members' (we weren't really selective) though, oddly enough, he doesn't mention it on his bio. One of the jokes the cruel kids used to make about him was "What's the difference between XXXX and a condom machine? A condom machine's got Mates". However, thanks to myspace, he now has 158 friends, all of whom want some publicity off him in return. I mean, the band this blog ripped its name off is fucking on there and networking! The cunts are meant to be dead! Has the world just gone completely desperate?
Right, now can I please go away?? I have to pack for Russia. I'll be missing the Eurovision Song Contest next Saturday, but that's probably no loss, seeing as Britain's sending some repulsive kid-fiddler over to represent the country. Bye-ee!!
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=8716
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=8650
though i would like to stress none of us are actually, like, members...
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