cost of poverty

Brilliant (& tragic) bit of povo-writing from Memoirs of a Heroinhead on the highs and lows of the Argos catalogue. We also used to flick from page to page in a rush of desire & hope (but we were disciplined: you had to choose one thing from every page, no matter how much you didn't want ladies' jewellery or shaving products). However, our sojourns into the cottonworld citadel of Argos were soft play compared with this.

True Stories Told Live

It's a nice little idea, in an upstairs room of a pub, five people get up and each get 10 minutes to tell a true story to a bunch of strangers. Anyone can have a go, although the storytellers are all vetted by the organisers beforehand, and the monthly event in Chapel Market is already so popular you have to apply for your free ticket weeks in advance. Created by David Hepworth (who launched such magazines as Just Seventeen, Q, Empire, Heat) and hosted by Canadian actor Kerry Shale, the night can't help but lean towards the mediaocracy, despite being ostensibly an egalitarian affair. Mr Shale twice referenced a previous storyteller who'd been in the army in Iraq as evidence that this wasn't just another chance for Islington media folk to yawn at each other, but the show I saw included two novelists, an Australian stand-up and the agony aunt from Cosmo, so they've got more work to be doing on that front. They are apparently hoping for a wider range of storytellers, but in any case everyone was good, the crowd were keen and it was a nice way to spend the evening.

The agony aunt was Irma Kurtz, who had told me beforehand in that quite unabashed way of Americans that she was incredibly nervous, and then got up and was slick as anything. She told a well-crafted tale from her childhood that ended with the line "and ten years later I looked at the signature on the piece of paper she'd given me and it said: Mae West!" Author Anthony McGowan told a nicely grim tale from his Leeds upbringing about shooting a dog with a crossbow, and ending by saying that he always puts dogs in his stories, and now you know why. Last up was author and journalist Alex Preston, an Oxbridge type who got the crowd onside by being self-depreciating and then told a gap yah story that was even more privileged than I'd have pinned on him at my most prejudiced, but which abruptly ended on a close shave with death that was quite poignant, for a posh boy. And we reckon his brother was Preston out of Big Brother. So a real celeb, after all.

I signed up for it at the end of the night. Of course I did, I couldn't resist a crowd that size being forced to listen to me. But whereas at the start of the night I'd have happily got up and spieled it, after watching the show the shadow of "wanting to be good" started to rear its ugly head. I tried out a tale on my cycle home and found that after 15 minutes I still hadn't got to the event at the heart of the story, so, alas, I might have to practise after all.

My new blog wot I wrote

The great thing about tumblr blogs is that you can have millions of them, for every tiny little pocket of your existence that you want to reveal, in its own completely sterile blog environment. And so it is that I present a new blog of mine where I will be posting my long-awaited photomeisterwerk 42 Views of the Gherkin, which I have been doing for so long it is practically my life's work. The more cultured of you will realise that this is my attempt at a photographic version of Hokusai's 36 Views of Mount Fuji, but set in London. This less cultured will just I don't know try and guess where I took the photos from. The mediumly cultured will probably look at the attendant google map, which tells you. Those of you that are left may like the photos, or like the idea, or both, or neither, or all four.

Angry People in Local Newspapers

A blog that does what it says on the tin. APILN provides a fairly constant stream of photos snipped from local rags around the country (and increasingly from Australia) where the subject seems to have been asked by the photographer to grimace in such a way that their tragic tale is told across their brows. Because a picture tells a thousand stories and all that. And not always the story that was intended. I love this site, partly for the photos but mainly because, by selecting stories on the basis of the pic, it offers a skewed digest of the world of local papers, full of human interest, faceless bureaucracy, mean landlords, sad kids, hard-done-by OAPs, pickled onions and grimacing.

Thank god they're in charge!

"Ireland stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking."

George Osborne, 2006      (via)

Protest education

Good account of the student protests yesterday, which mainly tallies with what I saw when I visited the march as it was still filing into Parliament Square at about 2pm, even down to the sarky cop-philosophy "debate", one of which I had to enjoy as well. The police contained a large and growing crowd in one road at the north of the square and refused to let me into the actual square because I was wearing "a student uniform", which is apparently now a coat and scarf, and therefore was a protester. The kettle was forced to open and people filled most of the square but it was obvious that it was going to be put back on and having else to do I left quickly rather than get shut in all day, which is what happened. People were basically told that if they wanted to protest at all, they'd be imprisoned into the night-time. At one point there were so many police behind barriers they looked like a demonstration themselves, perhaps one in pursuit of more overtime, Using the kettle without due  cause, straight off the bat, is a disgraceful way to police protest, and gives lie to their claims of "faciliting" protest.

The Guardian also has, amongst other stuff, a video of the rather lame molesting of the Royal car. Of course the obvious thought is that it was engineered by some shadowy media manipulator, looking for a distracting news angle, but I suspect it was just blind luck


The Telegraph, meanwhile, has a pleasingly looking-glass view of things.


Late add: 17-year-old Barnsley girl's account.

Easing quantitative easing

As if to prove that I am wasted in this job unemployment, as I asked the question about quantitatitatitative easing, my old chums at Prospect were preparing a long winded answer: Faisal Islam on The Great Money Mystery. It turns out that even though my basic question was, well, quite basic, other questions, vaguely similar to mine, were relatively sensible.

“It was one of the many measures to get confidence back in the system,” says former chancellor Alistair Darling, the man who had to sign off on the Bank of England experiment. “Nobody really knows what impact it’s having,” he says with shocking candour. “Look at the Bank of England [monetary policy committee] minutes, even they are split.”

'The effect being that the entire Olympic Park is contaminated with thorium at water-table level'

Slightly old, but still worth reading: Iain Sinclair's epic on the Olympic-sized scam crashing through east London. A stewpot of history, politics, reportage, comment and weary anger, if there is such a thing.

The Millennium Dome fiasco was a low-rent rehearsal. The holy grail for blue-sky thinkers was the sport-transcends-politics Olympiad, the five-hooped golden handcuffs, the smoke rings behind which deals could be done for casinos and malls: with corporate sponsorship, flag-waving and infinitely elastic budgets (any challenge an act of naysaying treason).

My naysaying credentials are impeccable: before we won the bid I knocked up some stickers pastiching the then ubiquitous leaflets that said "Back the Bid" showing swimmers diving off the Thames Barrier and a gymnast vaulting over the Gherkin or some such. My version had "Fuck the Bid" and showed the swimmers diving off a row of white elephants (biting satire, you see). Alas I was so convinced that we'd never win the bid - and also because I'm inveterately lazy - I never got round to printing them and quickly lost the Photoshop files. I did consider a post-bid victory version that said "(Give) Back the Bid", but by then the original leaflets had vanished down the memory hole. Anyway, let's hope that the Olympics don't suffer the same cuts as we all are going to, because that would be unsportsmanlike.

I write like

Put a portion of your writing into this writing analyser and it'll tell you which famous writer you write like.

Me? Based on the last few blog posts: Stephen King, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Conan Doyle (really?), Dan Brown.

I think I'll stop there. It was going so well.

Via (obv), where they deconstruct it until it begs for mercy.

PS. I put my most favourite recent blog post in and got James Joyce. Yeah, the famous comic writer. So maybe this semantic statistical analystical tool don't work as well as I'd hoped, or maybe I should start writing Homer in Holloway.

Dr Football

Jonathan Wilson PhD (Football Studies) will see you now.

Jonathan Wilson can explain football tactics. I don't mean talk about football tactics - lobbing 4-4-2s, 4-3-3s and 4-3-XR3is about the place like so many Rory Delap throws, provoking mayhem in the area (of your footballing brain) - Jonathan Wilson doesn't talk about tactics the way that most people do, ie. knowing precisely fuck all, Jonathan Wilson actually explains tactics, explains what was going on when one player came on, another went off, explains why 4-4-2 doesn't work anymore, explains what Capello was thinking bringing on Wright-Phillips for Lennon (well I assume he can, I haven't actually seen it, and there are limits for anybody). Jonathan Wilson may be the Prometheus of football commentary, bringing the fire of genuine knowledge to a realm of hitherto frozen wastes. So bone up now, while the football season is in rare abeyance; and you'll soon be able to unpick England's failings with more rigour than just "Heskey's fucking shit! Lampard's a cunt!"

"If your comic was an ice cream, what flavor would it be?" "Self Hatred Ripple"

I should also add that it’s very difficult to satirize the Jewish world, because just when you think you’ve made something preposterous, you pick up the newspaper and see that events have actually out-satirized what you’ve just done. So it’s always a race with reality. I’m more of a stenographer than a satirist in that regard.

Eli Valley draws comic strips. Comic strips with a Jewish flavour. An un-Zionist, shit-tired of being called self-hating or anti-semitic for offering constructive criticism of Israel's crazed pursuit of armageddon flavour. A flavour with strong hints of MAD magazine. A what if we imagined Darth Vader was half-Jewish and Luke Skywalker was actually leading the charge against any further intermarriage flavour? A yes some crazy rabbi did suggest some (possibly poetic) link between one of these strips and the Haiti earthquake flavour. A probably I need to rewrite this blogpost tomorrow but I ain't gonna so get used to it flavour. Open your taste buds! It's Ethnocentric Parochialism for the Whole Family!

A novel excuse

The Telegraph has an amusing story about the novelist E.M Forester, which says that he gave up writing novels after his first homosexual experience, at the age of 38.

After suppressing his sexuality as a young man, Forster, who was known to his friends as Morgan, lost his virginity to a wounded soldier in 1917 while working for the Red Cross in Egypt.

That sexual awakening in his late 30s led to a series of romances with working class men including a tram conductor and two policemen.

After publishing A Passage to India, arguably his greatest work, in 1924, Forster spurned the novel and most creative endeavours for the rest of his life, publishing only occasional short stories, essays and plays.

Wendy Moffat, associate professor of English at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, who uncovered Forster's secret "sex diary" while researching a new biography of the novelist, said that the energy of his early years was drained by physical fulfilment.

I love the details: he lost his virginity to a wounded soldier, while working for the Red Cross? Was the soldier was just lying on the battlefield with shrapnel wounds all over him and, well, one thing led to another? Or maybe the soldier been hit by a mortar bomb, and was just blown to buggery? And then after that 'Morgan' moved on to tram conductors and (two! at the same time?) policemen. And I love the euphemism of the "energy of his early years was drained by physical fulfilment". You bet it was.

He only started at 38, so there's hope for me then. But I knew there was a good reason to keep away from the prowling gayers - too much cock saps your creative juices. Basically they're saying that E.M stopped plugging away at his novels, cos he was too busy just plugging away. It gives the homophobes a new angle: it's for your own good, we don't want you to dry up and stop being creative! Now for the first time they can say: Don't be gay, you want to be an artist, darling! So E.M wrote some classic novels, but once he discovered buggery he stopped writing, making it one of those few times that the sword is mightier than the pen. I can just imagine his Victorian father saying to him: "Now E.M, I don't think a novelist is a suitable career for you, I think you should go into banking with Ronald." And then at 38 E.M comes home and says: "Dad, I've got some good news, and some bad news." It is true to say that a lot of creativity comes out of pain, and maybe E.M was just having such a whale of a time, so to speak, that he couldn't keep churning out the middle-class rom coms, which makes you think that perhaps it's time Richard Curtis got himself down Old Compton Street.

Of course the story is probably not true, being in the Torygraph. Their website is actually quite good, if you swerve around the comment pages, ignore the gratuitious slant on the politics stories, and take a hefty pinch of salt with the Obama-is-doomed stuff, but apart from that, it is a busy site with lots of news that doesn't appear on the Guardian or Times sites. But still a story that says gaying ended famous novelist's career does seem a bit too much like moral wishful thinking on their part. And of course it doesn't occur to them that perhaps he felt that he couldn't write about the true romance of his later years because it was illegal, and that blocked his creativity much more than a bit of rough trade round the back of the Vauxhall Tavern. Or maybe he just got to 40 and got rubbish, like the aforementioned Richard Curtis. Which is a depressing thought, but marginally less depressing than the thought that sexual fulfilment will ruin your creativity.

regrets, I've had a few

Meet the man who sold his 10% share in Apple for $800. (via)

Here's how you shred a film

Lindy West on Sex and the City 2 (via)

opportunity knockback

Gwarizm has the script of an unfilmed scene from Kids, the Harmony Korine kiddyshokafilthting from wayback in the 1990s when luminous clothing was for oh fuck knows, I can't even remember that far back. Anyway the scene is worth a read, and probably would have improved the film, which I do remember enjoying, at least for the perving over Chloë Sevigny. I actually met Harmony Korine once, very briefly, while I was walking around Camden with Samantha Morton, as you do, or at least as I did do a long time ago. I'd just bumped into a friend and was chatting to him and I looked over and Sam was talking to someone as well, who I took to be a scabby Camden lowlife punting for a bit of change. This meant that I didn't pay much attention to him, beyond wondering when he was going to go away. As soon as he had, she told me who he was and that he was hiding out in London trying to get off smack, and it was all I could do not to go: 'Fuck's sake go and get him back!' Not that I was a huge fan of Mr Korine, but cos you know he's famous and all that, and also he might have liked my script about um kids what run wild or something and fuck each other and get AIDS. Or maybe he'd have cast me in his next hit, whatever the hell that was. At the very least he could have introduced me to Chloë Sevïġnÿ.

it's finally happened #14 : "Buy the memoir based on the Twitter page"

Shit my dad says - a mildly amusing twitter feed of what one cranky old guy says to his live-at-home adult son while they sit and watch Golden Girls re-runs together - has been made into a book. The agent has obviously done a mortifyingly good job in steering what is, let's be honest, about as thin a book proposal as you can possibly imagine into a - and I quote - "brilliantly funny, touching coming-of-age memoir around the best of his quotes." Isn't this is the sort of shit they warned us would happen just before the end of days? I guess the lesson is, get 1,000,000 followers on Twitter and you can write whatever the fuck you like.

Private Eye Covered!

This is ace: get a fair-sized pic of any Private Eye cover you fancy. Some good un's, laboriously collated via an extremely irritating interface by your faithful blogger : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Well I got carried away : 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

They make up a very particular trawl through political history, with a bit of culture thrown in, and a lot of Royal piss-takes. A lot of my picks for some reason are from the Major years, which look more and more like the Seventies used to.

Who the fuck is critical bill?

One of the benefits of taking an internet pseudonym from a popular Hollywood film is that you get to share it with all sorts. There aren't actually that many criticalbills out there, but there is this lot of Detroit rock-rappers. They've been teasing me for ages with a t-shirt that says "Who the fuck is criticalbill?" but whenever I've tried to actually see it, I've come back empty-browsered. Maybe I should make it and sell it to them. Anyway in the spirit of name-sharing promotion, here's a rather jaunty ditty by them, accompanied by a tasteful, bauhaus-influenced video, called My Sewer Side. At least that's what I think he's saying. I wonder whether MTV would film me and them doing a life swap.

"You can't do anything legally except crime and prostitution."

A short film about Bernard Hare and his book Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew. The book (published in 2005) documents his time spent associating with the 'feral' teenagers of the Leeds under-class.

also posted at Metafilter

Sam The Wheels

Pentecostal minister Clovis Salmon, known in Brixton as "Sam The Wheels" due to his bike wheel-making skills, came to Britain from Jamaica in the 1950s. From the 1960s to the 1980s he used his Super-8 camera to film Brixton daily life and church scenes, including the aftermath of the 1981 riots.