damnedenglish

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EUROZONE EXCLUSIVE!!!

As yet to be verified, but England’s football governing body are ready to sign a certain Signor  Berlusconi as manager of the player’s wives, girlfriends & hookers in the World Cup campaign…”Pizza’a'plenty for off-the-field action there boys!” comments our Foreign Food, Football & Fisheries reporter at FFFIFA HQ.

WORLD EXCLUSIVE!!!

Rumours abound that galactic soccer-cum-underwear  pin-up “Beck’s” and musical comedy supernova Lady G@ G@ are to team up to star in a glitzy billion dollar remake of the James Bond classic “Octopussy” …

“Huh! No monetary crisis there!”  is the guarded humour from our Financial ,Creative Accounting and Corporate Expenses  Editor in Chief.

DOMESTIC NEWS SCOOP!!!

An unnamed source has tex’d the BBC to consider opening talks with the Royals for a proposed launch of  Their very own Diamond Jubilee TV soap to rival the legendary long-sell-by-date working class epic yawn “Coronation Street”….Another viewer ratings scoop for fawning Auntie Beeb?   

London Olympics supremo’s M’Lud’s Seb & Co. at the Ministry of Burning Money are demanding ,at the last minute, or is it “last orders, please”, so a drinks industry insider tells our Food, Beverages & Hospitality chief reporter, that “Strictly Binge Drinking” has to be included in the forthcoming games. A gob-smacked publican, setting up the next round of drinks , was quick to comment - ” Good news for London’s victuals trade…a sure punt for gold for the lads and lassies national team…I will be open twenty four seven….what about singles, doubles and mixed-doubles events!”  No austerity measures when it comes to boozing!

MUSIC INDUSTRY CLIMATE CHANGE WARNING!!! 

A source, said to be, close to the pop recording combo Arctic[ular] Monkeys has told our out-and-about Weather Forecast crew in the Costa del Beebo, of plans to stage their next award winning album at the North Pole!!! Brrrr!!! Not to be out chilled that other moaning troupe Ever So Coldplay are rumoured to conduct their interviews in cryogenic suspense. Brass Monkeys and Coldsore!!!

 ”Seems that frozen will be the next ” cool” muses our Culture Meddling and Climate Change correspondent. Brass Monkeys?

Tribute artiste “Beyondsense” may film his/her(?) music video on the Trans-Siberian Express we hear from a unverified music pundit. The song may well be “Baby It’s Cold Outside” originally composed in 1944, and a good time to de-frost it.

No doubt Russia’s P.M. will be puttin’ out alerts to all stations that this could be used as a platform for possible anti-government demo’s! 

More stimulating soothsayer stuff to be headline news in 2012 - from the austerity  augurs at Broadcasting House , London …TO COME

“Harvest Home”

[Adapted for our times from an Olde English volk-song] 

Your hay it is mow’d and your corn it is reap’d.
Your bellies ain’t full and your women cheap’d
Come, boys, come,
Come, boys, come.
And merrily roar to our harvest home.
And merrily roar to our harvest home.

(All together):
Harvest home, harvest home!
And merrily roar to our harvest home.
And merrily roar to our harvest home.

They’ve cheated our people, they’ll cheat them again,
So why should the blockheads have one in ten?
One in ten, one in ten,
So why should the blockheads have one in ten?
So why should the blockheads have one in ten?

(All together):
One in ten, one in ten,
So why should the blockheads have one in ten?
So why should the blockheads have one in ten?

By prating so long, like book-learn’d sots,
Till pudding and dumpling are burnt to the pot:
Burnt to pot, burnt to pot
Till pudding and dumpling are burnt to pot.
Till pudding and dumpling are burnt to pot.

(All together):
Burnt to pot, burnt to pot
Till pudding and dumpling are burnt to pot.
Till pudding and dumpling are burnt to pot.

We’ll toss off our ale till we cannot stand;
And heigh-ho for the honour of Old England;
Old England, Old England
And heigh-ho for the honour of Old England.
And heigh-ho for the honour of Old England.

(All together):
Old England, Old England
And heigh-ho for the honour of Old England.
And heigh-ho for the honour of Old England. 

(Final- All together):
Harvest home, harvest home!
And heigh-ho for the honour of Old England.
And heigh-ho for the honour of Old England!

Be it at once a fable, yet Warner’s novel says somthing that is quintessentially English. The tensions within a village, insular and shambling, disrupted by the arrival of  the charismatic Air-Vice Marshall, who represents the coming of a new age, that of Technology and its associated political change. Against the backdrop of the the Fascist ascendancy in Europe, the novel is “a love story” about relationships and the need to make sense of a new and confusing world. It is also the story of youth that is seemingly attracted to a philosophy of sorts that promises a kind of deliverance.

‘Remember that we expect from you conduct of a quite different order from that of the mass of mankind. Your purpose - to escape the bondage of time, to obtain mastery over yourselves, and thus over your environment - must never waver… This discipline has one aim, the acquisition of power, and by power freedom.’
This is the voice of the Aerodrome, ruled with an iron hand by the Air Vice-Marshal. His aim is to save humanity from itself by obliterating human error. He is dedicated to ruthless efficiency and absolute power. To Roy, the most brilliant young officer in the aerodrome, this challenging doctrine offers an escape from the muddled ideals and sexual blunders of the Village, his birthplace and the home of his unfaithful mistress.
This superb allegory is probably the only novel of its time to understand the dangerous yet glamorous appeal of fascism.
’Brilliantly imaginative … it remains the best, perhaps the only, English Kafka novel.’ Anthony Burgess, author of “A Clockwork Orange”.

More to come…in the Erzatz English Reader section >>>>>>>>>>>>>>

                                            [  click on image to enlarge ]

 “London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers  of the Empire are irresistably drained.”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as spoken by the sleuth Sherlock Holmes in ” A Study in Scarlet” [‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” ]

…as yours truely, your very own poet-in-residence gumshoe, anxiously prepares for the summer sojourn to the salubrious centre of what is England. Not planning a historic junket to the Victorian hub of Empire but to the soiled seat of puppet-power, pernicious pranks and populist paranoia. This is London’s Calling Card!

Prescriptive pills and potions all packed, to combat the anxiety and alimentary disorders that may befall an unwary traveller; with fake (Made in China) French holdall bulging with all the essential requirements for the excursion to the metropolis of meritorious mayhem, the adventure starts in earnest. With cattle-class train ticket booked, online of course, in the wishful belief that the fume-belching people carrier, due to arrive on platform 3B will make it before doomsday. Or, as is now a traditional loudspeaker announcement, the tired trolley-bus has ground to a halt due to unidentifiable excreta on the rusting rail line, or that the overhead copper-rich cables have mysteriously disappeared overnight, or bizarrely, someone’s sat-nav has misdirected the chav-SUV onto some rail junction in the cardiac arrest provincial heartland, leaving catatonic commuters staring blankly at the blinking station information screens. Cancellation, delay, cancellation ad nauseum.

Oh to be in England, now that summer’s here!

Not omitting to have the Rip-Off London Hotels pocket guide at the ready, in the vain hope that the budget hostelry one is about to spend sleepless nights is not a replica of some third-world bordello; that the water supply has not been directly pumped from Mother Thames, that one is not asphyxiated in traffic jams and the half-board repasts are not a frugal food fantasy barely enough to nourish a chinese sweatshop worker.

Of course, the multi-lingual phrasebook is a must have for those tricky moments when choosing to dine continental, in say Boris’s Bolshevik Bistro, when having ordered a Hors d’Oevres or Plat du Jour the bemused waiter is then seen escorting to your table a peroxide diva, in skyscraper hoofs, stiletto claws, spray-on tan, sans-culottes and fake eyelashes long enough to be used as car windscreen wipers. Clearly a lady of  ill-repute intent on eating you alive! Lost in translation? Did the maitre d’  mistake me for a premiership footballer? Nazdrovie comrade!

Best be mindful not to test one’s bravado and venture into uncharted territory, the inner city favelas where the natives are known to be a touch inhospitable. Those gun-totting, crack-snorting, trashed ghettos and fortress tower blocks where the social-engineering experiment is best described as a Ballardian# nightmare. The glossy, corporate celeb sponsored travel guide recommends the well-trodden routes to savour, the fairytale sights to feast the eyes, the well-worn nostalgia of times past grandeur, all so postcard friendly and posthumously defunct.

Being a connoisseur of post-modernism, and the brutalist revival, head for the architech atrocities of greed and gargantuan excess, known as Canary Wharf, the Tate (could that be Trite) Modern (Art for Export), the London Wheel-ie and other examples of  money-laundering construction gone mad. Oh yes, then on route to the 21st century  circus-ring concrete and steel of Wem-bolly-wood, the all-singing, all dancing temple to English football and on and on to the newest pleasuredrome that will showboat the forthcoming Olympiad.

To conclude the itinerary it’s a peek at that national extravagance, to top all extravagances, the most costly council property in this fair and flatulent isle, Buck’s Palace no less! An audience with HRH? Not likely, try Madame Tussauds.

…full une-diluted, une-adulterated, une-varnished version to come in next edition - be on the Ball! Wise up to the ” HOOFFF-SIDE TRAP” Honey! 

For those white Kaliesque devotees expecting a stark expose of la chanteuse du voodoo you wll be nakedly disappointed.

The literary review to follow this introduction is not an apologist’s tract on the bizarre “Kabaret” performer who has reinvented the swimsuit cum leotard cum sex-store accessories for the popular music-hall or so called “Rock Concert” or “Gig” to use the musician’s parlance. Not so much a big production peep-show as a throbbing accompaniment for a soft-porno Blondie(?) in fetish bondage kit , a savage swan lake jazz ballet gleaned from some ethnographic film archive; footage shot by inquisitive explorers in some dark and distant continent.

Our Lady of ga-ga exhibitionism is intent on doing “rip-offs” from such memorable exponents of americano-trash kultur as Alice Cooper, New York Dolls, “Madonna” and other Neo-Gothic and Gomorrah inspired acts, with no passing resemblance to the 1930’s Berlin girlkultur , Parisian erotic revues and New York raree shows . The XXX generation knows nothing else, just responding to the immediate fix,  be it sex, drugs or in the antics of their heroine of raunch’n'bankroll. More and more one is reminded of the Grand Guignol of the early to middle 20th Century#

However comical the past may be seen now, post WWII history is a repetition of the two decades following The Great War of 1914-1918. Any keen researcher should take time to ponder the realpolitik of the performance ( loosely defined) black arts and the blinkered socio-political academia states of denial as European culture descends beyond mere transgression and into the morass of moral denigration and racial miscegenation.

Written in the period of Fascist and Communist ascendancy, Henry Champly’s 1936 book “White Women, Coloured Men” is a rarity. Although a digression from the usual English/Englishness theme, the author was French -sorry to you purists!- a review of this book is included in the context that both the English and French were colonialists in Africa and Asia , with of course America now having the same ambitions.  Champly disects the relationship between the Black and Yellow races , especially males, to the White female that features prominently in this literary journey into the subconscious threads of racial tension and it’s sociological consequences.

 The book concludes with an rather poignant premise, and the reader may be at odds to understand the conclusion.

#Grand-Guignol - A theatre in the Pigalle district of Paris, France. 1897 - 1962

The theatrical productions were a frequent target of critical disgust for having the audacity to depict scenes which had all the trappings of Parisian low-life–that of vagrants, street kids, prostitutes, criminals, and “apaches,” as street loafers and con artists were called at the time–and moreover for allowing those characters to express themselves in their own language. One of the Grand-Guignol’s first productions presented  a prostitute on stage; a subsequent performance united a whore and a criminal in the enclosed space of a hotel room. Guignol was for the grown up, or grandi… Grand-Guignol was an immediate success. Little by little and almost accidentally, a new genre was unfolding. Insanity became the Grand-Guignolesque theme par excellence. Perhaps the first example of how the fascination of morbid sexual themes were presented for wider public consumption.

But what carried the Grand-Guignol to its highest level were the boundaries and thresholds it crossed: the states of consciousness altered by drugs or hypnosis. Loss of consciousness, loss of control, panic: themes with which the ordinary citizen could easily identify. The ebb and flow from one state to another was the attraction of the genre. [ Compare this with the elaborate stagings, the evermore revealing costumes, the suggestive dance routines and the incessant throbbing rhythms, of typical ga-ga set -pieces. It’s all make-believe! ]

As the Guignol’s notoriety spread, and was imitated in various artistic forms.The French erotic writer Anais Nin commented on its eventual decline in her diary: “I surrendered myself to the Grand-Guignol, to its venerable filth which used to cause such shivers of horror, which used to petrify us with terror. All our nightmares of sadism and perversion were played out on that stage. . . . The theater was empty.”

Perhaps the contemporary stage shows by la Gangrène Dame will exhaust the permissible themes of obscenity and die a death as the public and media get bored with the same hackneyed choreography and theatrical overkill. Audiences are fickle, especially in the ephemeral realms of fashion and music.

[ The review will be published in due course in the right hand column ]

Now that PR exercise in pomp & circumspect is over and done with, let’s remind a crazed nation, resorting back to Soccer( A.K.A “Football”),  what Prince-ling Will’s Pater has been up to to bring the Monarchy back to the people!

GO TO “THE GAFFERS BALL” >>>>>>>>>>>>> in the right column