IkoStar

Ok, this absolutely definitely proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that perpetual motion machines are possible, and that they’re probably used by extra terrestrials in spaceships like these:


even though everybody especially Josh said that they were probably viral advertising for Transformers, which they weren’t… otherwise the Transformer people would have said “see, see, how clever we are. What shiney cats are we etc” and generally preened as cats are want to do, but they didn’t. Nobody did, and if that isn’t evidence, nothing is. The silence of the cats speaks volumes… to anyone with the ears to listen.

If Einstein proved anything it was that Newton was talking out of his arse and just making stuff up as he went… and yet everyone believed him, like the bleating heards of wig-wearing quadrapeds that they are. It’s a well known fact that the only reason the laws of thermodynamics have maintained such traction down the decades is the petro-chemical-prison-industrial-war-complex want to keep us under their thumbs and sell us internal combustion engines… because if everyone could generate their own power, we’d be like GODS!!! GODS!!!!
Like this:

But with laser-beams coming out of our eyes, rather than like… raccoons for example, which is what we are. Raccoons. Laser-beamless raccoons.

(Not that I have anything against raccoons etc - some of my best friends are (imaginary) raccoons - but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t prefer to be a GOD!!! but with laserbeams and psychic powers etc. And a space ship with massive bio-domes like the one of Silent Running but with hyper-drive abilities as well. Kindof like a cross between the one of Farscape (the baby one with the guns and without all those muppets and Australians and things) and the Silent Running one, but a bit more up to date and with more firepower)

Being a couple of years after this (when I was still learning to play)

And then what? This? Is that it? Eventually you turn into something… or so it appears to other people, but… it’s never that simple. It’s time to renew my passport again… like a birthday with a ten year cycle. I really need to get my shit together. I think. The points of no return are falling faster.

In the future when anti-ageing gene-therapy and whanot has been invented, I expect I’ll probably go back to looking like this:

A bit further down one of the streets where I live is a girl who sells postcards to tourists and sometimes her hair is white and sometimes it’s black.

People (ie: bloke people) come sidling up to her all day and ask for directions, even though they don’t need directions because they know where they are. “ees theese way, down there” she say, patiently. They then ask if they can take her photo, or get someone else to take her photo with them in it as well, with the excuse that she’s wearing traditional Snow White clothes but we all know the real reason: she’s absolutely fucking beautiful… and although the internet is filled with photos of beautiful girls, bagging one of the blighters yourself is a like getting a trophy of some sort, so that’s what they do. It’s a bit like wildlife photography that you could shag… in your dreams buddy, in your dreams… so they content themselves with craftily sidling up to her on false pretences and leaving with a photo, that they examine later, at their leisure. They’ve probably got hundreds of them, but most of them are of their buddies being drunk and tedious a bit like the camper van ones off Borat.

“Yes no problem” she smile tiredly. “You want postcard? Ees for mother. You write her home”

I was never sure why her hair kept changing colour like that. Maybe it was a wig that came with the Snow White costume. Did it mention hair in that story? Lips as red like cherries, eyes bluer than sky (on nice day), skin as white like snow with sun-tan. Shoes as yellow as wearable foot-bananas. I don’t think it ever mentioned hair. Hair as black like soot, or as white like whatever it was before it go soot on. It could go either way… and didn’t really affect the story that much if memory serves… not as much as the white skin anyway which is what she’s named after - which is a bit of a bungle if she’s got a tan… and she does happen to have a tan.

This is a photo of a similar one, but not the actual one, in her black-haired version state… but with similar issues with regards people who know where they’re going constantly asking for directions. etc.

So anyway, I went through this minor phase of hiding behind bushes etc and taking photos of the people taking photos, but went off the whole idea almost immediately when the black-haired version suddenly appeared on white-haired-version day… in the same place as white-haired version who was already there!!!

She went over and started talking to her and suddenly there’s two of them! and they know each other!. I ducked down behind the bushes, panicking. I’d been duped. Utterly and completely duped. I’d been played for a giddy kipper, or herring or whatever.

Why? Why would she do that to me? I don’t understand it. People are fucking weird man, I’ll never figure them out, especially the girl ones. I mean wearing wigs is one thing but pretending to be one person when you’re actually two is unbelievably crafty and devious and to what end? I must have re-read Snow-White a hundred times since, and there isn’t the slightest hint of anything like this happening.

Nothing seems real. I no longer trust the ground I walk on. I’ve stopped watching television. Unbelievable. Utterly unbelievable.

So I was thinking “If you don’t shut the fuck up, I’m going to come in there and fucking kill you”, and twenty minutes later, a head pokes round the door… “scuse me, which way it ees to hospital?”

And the row (it transpired) was her friend locking herself in the bathroom with a bottle of vodka, and a razor-blade.

She didn’t die (they hardly ever do) and I was (like) “woah… cool”, but for weeks afterward I’d find tiny little drops of blonde-girl-blood that escaped the clean-up and each time I’d feel like crying, and sometimes I would and sometimes I wouldn’t.

I don’t know where she is now. I can’t even remember her name. She can’t remember mine. Neither of us ever existed. We are free.

This is what you get if you try to access Twitter at Dubai airport:

Dubai may have

• the tallest building in the world, who cares? you can’t use Twitter
• ship-sinkingly expensive archipelagos of man-made islands, but so what? you can’t use Twitter
• any number of modern wonders, but at the end of the day they account for nothing because an ugly stain of doctrinally mandated religious morality is on the place. You’re treated as a child. Someone else decides what you’re grown up enough to see, or say

“Religious, Cultural, Moral and Political values”? Please. Give me a fucking break. These “values” allow some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet and Dubai has been built on what approximates to slave labour… and have you actually read Twitter? It’s just people talking. That is all it is. People twittering.

So I was sitting there getting all wound up about this… then remembered that I am guilty of censoring Twitter myself, after a drunken rant about (ironically) censorship. I deleted my comments because I was suffering from post-alcoholic regret/paranoia. I thought that they could have been interpreted as being aimed at a single person (they weren’t). Yea. Well. I’m not suffering from post-alcoholic regret/paranoia now. This is what I said (in response to this video)

• Who decides this censorship bollocks? It’s fucking pathetic
• It would’ve been better if he’d said “fucking fuck off you cunting cunt” like any normal UK kid
• Bleeping isn’t done to protect children. It’s to protect parents who are too fucking weak to be honest with their kids
• Seriously - Richard Burton (the real one) advocated learning the swear-words of any foreign language first. This is what kids do. I was one
• Nothing personal mind

Which I will concede is an over-reaction etc, but given how drunk I was, I think I got off fairly lightly.

Later that day I was gently reprimanded by a friend who suggested I show tolerance… and on one level he was right. I am of that (difficult) age where we feel irritated at the cheapening of the language - a major emotional objection to bleeping out expletives is that it’s an insidious American meme that is gradually infecting our culture… not that I have a problem with American memes per se (I’m a musician after all) but this one is different. It’s a meme-blocking meme.

On a more visceral level (and more importantly), it pisses me off that some cunt has decided that their “morality” trumps everyone else’s and that they have assumed the right to “protect us”. Or maybe they’re just trying to cover their arses. Maybe they’re responding to an imaginary censor that they’ve internalised by repeatedly hearing the bleep meme… but fuck them. There is a continuum (because it’s underpinned by the same arbitrarily annexed moral authority) between bleeping-expletives, to blocking Twitter, to The Bonfire of the Vanities. Every bleeped word is a byte-level-book-burning.

Ask not for whom the bleep bleeps. It bleeps for thee. You are affected.

Swearing, taboo-breaking (and the hopelessness of self-censorship) make up a fundamental strand of the UK’s evolving comedic culture - from the “ooh missus” horror of this:

to the busted-damn debacle of this:

to the unbalancing genius of this guy:

And to have some anemic cunt think (for whatever reason) that they have the right to step in with their repressed 1950s ideas of “right and wrong”… to be dictated to by someone who’s not content with repressing their own sexuality but who needs to repress everyone else’s as well… now that I really do find offensive.

When I was a kid, my mate’s dad was a member of the New Zealand Rationalist Society - it took them decades of campaigning and lobbying to free us of the ridiculous blasphemy laws - something that happened all over the globe (hand in hand with the abolition of the death penalty) in civilised countries at about the same time anyway. And now the British government has rolled them back. Now it’s illegal to say things that might offend either imaginary beings, or the self-appointed representatives of imaginary beings. It’s happened in the same aftermath of global panic over “terror” which has been the carte-blanche excuse to undermine civil and human rights across the board.

It’s bullshit and it feels like we’re going backwards.

The Janet Jackson incident (she flashed a nipple) attracted a fine of $550,000 (later appealed). It was later found that 99% of the avalanche of complaints came from a single source.
A conservative activist group concerned with (other people’s) family values.

And so on.

There are certain lines where my liberal live-and-let-live ethos fail(-whale)s and I Stop Tolerating. The measure of civilisation of a society can be gauged upon entering its prisons. For me there’s a bottom line: the anxious face of someone shivering and waiting, naked, hurt, alone and out of site in the corner of a cell somewhere. Although there’s precious little I can do - I do not (can not, will not) tolerate cruelty: no, nor censorship neither.

None of it.

click for big version

This is the last one of these I think. It’s an engraving by Hogarth - it lives on the back wall of the Lamb and Flag pub near the Garrick Club (which once banned Jeremy Paxman who goes Nyeesss and who is my hero etc. “Did you threaten to overrule him” he says. Genius).

Anyway, I’ve been going to see this picture for about the last 20 years or so. It is the most repulsive depiction of drunkenness I have ever seen, and I recognise myself in each and every character. It’s too ugly to look at for long… but it keeps luring me back. I have this phobia about accidentally being transported back in time… and this is an era for which I have a particular horror… but the scary thing is, perhaps, something that I can’t quite catch, but there are fleeting glimpses etc… the essence of what I find frightening about it, I’m gradually pulling towards myself. I am become gout, destroyer of limbs.

It would be funny but it’s not funny. You try to laugh it off or weave stories around it to make it ok… and sometimes it is ok, but if you can’t remember, how do you know? And sometimes it’s definitely, definitely not ok.

So I’m sitting in this restaurant in Brighton using the free wifi and trying to eat this dippy thing with bread that is not fit for purpose, and I feel weak and broken and paranoid. Last night I got drunk (and not even that drunk) for the forty thousandth time and shot my mouth off on various internet things, ranting etc… and although nothing was aimed at anyone in particular I feel awful. I’m sorry.

Back down the years… the first time was like being born again. Now… I don’t know. Something like the opposite, repeated in endlessly in hideous caricature.

Still, tomorrow is tomorrow. I shall be on a plane. Away, away.