Earthquake Weather

Amongst the discussion this morning with the random guy in the living room was the fact that we both knew Mr. Gionotta. He was this big cape-wearing Italian guy who was over-sensitive and imagined that he had a wife, Hazel. He lied about having a wife, but he was feeling a bit like a fish in distant waters, and so J.K and V.M went over to his house to make him feel more at home.

He had no children, but he had two 5ive (the name of an awful pop band) identical sticker albums, and a book about problems with modern sexuality. Poor him.

This gave, for some reason, us the excuse to open up some Rosé at 8 am in the morning.

TV watch: 11th February 2004

I’m beginning to question the sanity of the English viewing public, who have made such tripe as Footballers’ wives, and I’m a Celebrity, Get me out of here the biggest shows going. If you have not heard of either, count yourself lucky. ‘Celebrity,’ which swept everyone apart from Germaine Greer, a few nonchalant Welsh girls and I away with excitement, was what I like to call ‘bottom of the pan’ TV; it is obstinately lowbrow, involves disgusting scenes (eating insects) and cheap laughs. What makes things even worse is that it includes twelve Z-list nonentity-’celebrities,’ who make the title a living joke. It is so sad to see people crawling to extend their fifteen seconds of fame.

The former, Footballers’ wives, is a badly-scripted excuse to show supposedly good-looking slúts and ássholes for an hour.

So, tonight, is there anything decent on? It really doesn’t count for me, because I will be working, and even if I were not, I’d be eye-deep in a book. BBC One is characteristically low-brow (trying to compete with ITV); BBC 2 is rife with faux-documentaries; I am boycotting ITV, it is that bad; Ch 4 is staid apart from seeing Frasier on its last legs; I can’t receive channel five– it appears as a blur and Carol Smilie’s cheek– just as well.

So, the TV is one long, excruciatingly bad joke to-night. Why not read Wuthering Heights instead of killing your brain cells?

12th February

Miss Congeniality

I remember having this inflicted upon me on the twenty-seven hour voyage to Spain. We were all cooped up in a coach going over, and they must have played this movie nearly six or seven times. When they were not playing Miss. Congeniality, they were playing the styling of a Señor David Bisbal. Only, Mr. Washbourne didn’t call him David Bisbal; he called him Bishbash, and so did all the kids whom we looked after. I didn’t truly watch any of those times, and considered the movie to be a rather forumalic vehicle for a star actress, but you might like it.

Father Ted

This is a classic episode of the cult sitcom, Father Ted. Holier-than-thee Bishop Brennan tells the Fr. Ted and Co to demonstrate against a blasphemous film. His efforts ensure that it’s the most successful film in the island’s history; he and Dougal chain themselves to the cinema shouting ‘down with that sort of thing,’ whilst Fr. Jack actually watches the film. A synopsis cannot do Father Ted justice.

… I was searching through a very old weblog of mine (well, it was used for about 10 days in February of this year, which is old for me!)… and I found that the person whom I had lightly chastised (Andrew Bonehill) had actually replied to the bloody thing. That was so freaking weird, to the extent that it gives to me that tingly feeling that makes me use words like ‘freaking.’ I am totally wrecked at the moment, due to a lethal cocktail of diet Pepsi and paracetamol, so I thought: why not write an entire list of people whom I would chastise, so that it’s out of the way!

First of all, there is Luke Brayley. He is probably reading this, you know, dreaming about a future that could have been [not.] He was my stalker. He pursued me like a hypochondriac pursues diamorphine. I was playing hockey one day. (Hockey was my first favourite sport. Then I had my teeth knocked out by an idiot. Equally stupid, I packed professional hockey in, and went into the low-risk reich that is professional fencing .) — He came up to me and said ‘I am your best friend, now.’ I grimaced, looked self-conscious and then went back to the field. Two days later, he was at my house, and got in. He started trying to force me onto the bed by whacking me with a big blow-up fake hammer that he got from some inbred fest. Everybody sing: magic moments!

You know, my mind associates everyone with a song. S0metimes it’s what they liked; sometimes it is the song that I would use to describe them. My associating is quite telling. When I think of Aurélie, I think of Rosalie , a beautiful rare song by Beck, sang just once. When I think of my first partner, I think of Ramshackle. When I think of Luke Brayley, blood enters my head and I think of Honey 2 da B, or however the hell it was called, by Billie Piper. On the one occassion in which I humoured him by allowing a night-visit, he continued to sing the bloody song all night. His rendition was awful. I am no Dean Martin, but god, he makes a rendition of Mr. Blobby by the Swedish chef from the Muppets seem like That Dog.’s wonderful She looks at me.

Incidentally, Petra Hayden is the greatest, if you did not know already. Totally Confused is so goddamn beautiful. Violinen uber Alles

It was the generic nature of Honey 2 da B that annoyed me; it was the way that he destroyed a song that already had no charm that pissed me off; it was the fact that he forced me to buy the damn single that made me get bodyguards; but it was the fact that he was singing it, lying on my floor, back then on November the 7th of 2001, that creeped me out seriously. So, Luke Brayley, who is now openly gay and working at a hair salon…. you were freaky when you were younger. But you were a muse, in the freaky way. Hopefully you have coped with it all and gone through psychotherapy.

Something truly obnoxious, a toad, or a weasel, or a GM toad-weasel (tweasels ™, which will soon be used to feed the Somalians, knowing Blair), squats in everyone; even in me, the not-so-holy crusader against public spectacles, has 1% of themself that expects something interesting to happen on the minute where Christmas eve becomes Christmas. Well, something has. I’ve changed my religion/sex/cereal preference/all of the above. No, to be honest, my metamorphosis was barely my tripping over a Television set that lies on my floor.

Yes, I know what you are going to say. I never watch TV; and never have, since early February. But, sick as I was last night, I had to have something to occupy my head not as strenuous as my usual activity of thinking.

– Anyway, this pretty much sums up the crap that is Christmas in England: on the radio as we speak is

On radio 4: mass. In Latin. Perfect.

On BRMB, they played one odious Christmas song, just to be the first to play one, then played ‘you can do it, put your ârse into it by Scoopy Scooby Dog Crap, then some ‘dyslexxxic’ shit from Christina Aguasucia. Telling juxtaposition, also followed by Radio 1.

The continental choice, Beacon (for it comes from the far off markets of Wolverhampton) is playing Don’t call me baby by a few forgotten Australian women. Taste the rainbow.

Radio 2 is playing reject Christmas songs, unrhyming, by some Irish guy. Wocked.

Next year in Jerusalem!!

Agh, here we go again… in the future, if– as I predict– more people are into faux-psychological babble, this will be perceived as some sort of therapy. But Jesus, how I hate Christina Aguilera. Few other things do I hate with equal passion: only anti-feminism, racism, idiocy etcetera annoy me more. I mean, if you put someone playing Aguilera in a room with me, or even her herself, there would be carnage. No joking. People act like idiots, saying ‘God, I could just kill him, etc,’ but that’s a load of batty. Anyway, she and I together, and there would be some match or another. Preferably karate; greco-roman wrestling, after all, is a contact sport .

But you know what annoys me almost more? It’s how she is called Xtina. God, that annoys me so much. It’s an idiotic brevehand that puts her in line of odiousness with ‘Xmas.’ Xtina sounds like a fúcking reject Skoda in which Jeremy Clarkson once spat while talking about the Belgians. I love the English language. However, I am a purist. Innovation is great; as long as it is not lazy or annoying ‘innovation’: because that is laze, not experimentation. I hate the way people say ‘cumftuhblee’ instead of ‘comfortably,’ for example. Poor little O. I hate the fucking fact that ‘got’ is replacing ‘have’, though these two should always have a distinct meaning. Imagine how idiotic mixing up… be and was, or sell and buy would be? That’s what people who say ‘I’ve got a lovely nose’, or, even worse, ‘got a lovely nose’, seem like to anyone with any sense. Who got the nose? Whence was it gotten? If you can’t answer these questions, you don’t use got, for crying out loud! Or I’ll come around to your house and start whacking you with a ‘first aid for English’ book.

But Xmas and CYA and Gonna and that sort of crap gets the daggers out. You may say that I am shooting down Christina Aguilera just because of her stupid abbreviated name. But no, I assure you that I am not. An Xtina by any other name would be just as skanky. As I said when I was being interrogated by a lesbian who chastised me for not liking Britney spears (future je meprise candidate) and X-Catalogue herself:

I cannot stomach sluts. Britney is a slut of the gratuitous nudity type. Christina is the slut of the skanky clothes. That sounds professional, does it not?

Also, I hate illusions to sweat. Combined with her repulsive X-image, the following lines makes me wish that I was in the 18th century:

I need that, uh, to get me off
Sweat until my clothes come off…

Sweat dripping over my body
Dance and getting just a little naughty
Wanna get dirrty
It’s about time for my arrival

But it’s not just her appearance, or her screwing Feminism with a complimentary díldo from her record company; it is her voice too. Let me demonstrate how the awful line from her famous, ‘let’s encourage illiteracy so that I have more fans’ song, Dirrrty, should be sung, using tones:

I want to get rowdy, I’m gôhng to get a little bit unruly, get it fyrd up in a hurry, I want to get dirty, it’s about time that I came to start this party.

No tones, no nasal (~) accents, no dropped subjects, nothing. Listen to how she sings it, painfully, and one gets this:

Wãa git roddy, gõna git lil b’ unrulíí, git it fadd op en a horíí, wãna git ditty, iss abow tay that I cayym o star this potty.

Come on. And do not give that old excuse to me, that ’she is experimenting with sounds to fit her rhythm.’ Hah! I can sing the Gramattical and Non-Nasally correct version in the same time as hers. Shakespeare fit rhymes in rhythm without mutilating them; so did inferior writers like Webster.

The truth remains that she’s just a slag, and because of her image you try to like her accompanying music, so that you see more of her. I could sing Spanish better after inhaling helium for two and a half weeks than her so-called Latin album. But the words are shit anyway. It’s as if the whole bloody album is centered around the fact that she allegedly learnt that tí after con becomes contigo. Impressive.

Judge her by forgetting her– or should that be herr or even herre, defying logic of English writing even more– and looking simply at her lyrics. If someone started saying to you:

Ah, heat is up
So ladies, fellas
Drop your cups
Body’s hot
Front to back
Now move your ass
I like that

How would you react? Personally, I’d beat the living crap out of them. To sum such an essay up, I was taught, one should use a succinct but powerful thought. Here is one from bornonAugust10th, who is offically my idol.

pefect song to describe this nasty tramp of a music star

Let it ring loudly.

Agh. Christmas blew like an artic wind. It was not that it was competely distressing, as I had predicted; rather that in England, one is forced to do just two things:

2) do nothing while eating too much

1) go to church, even if one has no Christian belief at all for the remainder of the year.

Anyway, I feel rather deflated at the moment. My eye pains and a dreary weakness vanquishes my strength. So, now is the right time to continue with the list of people whom I wish to slate. You don’t know any of them; but bear with me.

Amy Holmes. Yeah, she will be reading this shit within a few hours of my publishing it. Although she is not like I am, attached to computers and the wonderful people to whom they can attach one, she is probably legless on the other side of the city, vainly checking herself on Googlism.

She is not particularly one of those people who fill me with total and uncompromising rage (cf. Christina Aguilera.) Mainly due to two facts: I see her no more, and I could not really give two ducks and a dream about what the hell she thinks. But my subconscious thinks otherwise. I dreamt, a few nights ago, out of nothing, that Amanda was in the library, and that I was coming to meet her up there. Fair enough. I entered through the back door, and I saw Amy Holmes trying to say that I did something that I sure as hell did not do. She then grimaced and tried to seem nice, in the vain hope that I did not hear her slander/could not register it. My sleeping mind, in an unusually non-mad way, epitomised the essence of Amy Holmes.

I hope, in a perverse way, that she does see this, just like I hope to send a thousand Christmas cards out to random people under a fake couple’s name, just for a laugh, just to imagine their puzzlement. She is one of those people who thinks that pretending to like someone is a good replacement for liking someone. And I hate that sort of duplicity.

(PS Although you made Stephanie Archer cry, on two seperate occasions, with your rendition of Somewhere (Over the rainbow), it was probably from pain. Singing twice at a provincial secondary school is not exactly the big time, Kermit.)

Do you know what else I hate, hate, hate? It’s these people who lack the simple ability to differentiate between object and subject in their sentences. I looked on Google and found over 185,o00 pages with the disastrous words ‘whom have.’ Change that auxillary to ‘are’, and the number comes up to 356,000. I would approximate that about 90% of these ‘whoms’ are wrong. Even on governmental sites, you get such abominations as:

The Curwen family, whom are well renowned in the County of Cumbria, has occupied the site of Workington Hall since the early 13th century.

Nasty. Marginally worse is the dropping of ‘whom’ completely, which, to an ear, is like saying ‘I hate he’ or ‘I know they.’ But there seems to be some stupid urban myth going around, which makes people think that ‘whom’ is solely a posh version of ‘who.’ – yack, what ignorance.

Possibly the worst is people who take this ‘whoming’ one step further, thinking it wonderful to abuse Elizabethan English with no knowledge at all; applying their misknowledge of modern English disasterously. Take, for example, this horrendous piece, submitted by a girl who barged into my Shakespearean English class, which I teach at Stratford every summer. There were more than 110 corrections that I had to make due to this bankrupt attitude toward simple grammar.

But what I hate even more are these people who use ‘them’ instead of those, including my idiotic half-brother. I have told him 16,827 times in the years that he has been alive that ‘them’ makes no sense. He still continues to use it. He is probably the person whose English annoys me the worst in the whole of the world. Like Victoria Hopkins, he sounds as though he had eaten a bowl of exclamation points when he was younger; they breed like rabbits, and thus, he has had to spew up three exclamation points at a time to try to fight them. Hate hate hate

You know, I now realise that I’m probably transmitting the wrong message to people who might have found this exchange (if so, just scroll down; I’ve written about 200 things so far, within the last few days.) But it just has to be said. (And Christmas is wonderful, in a way; in that it makes having such bilious thoughts not only acceptable but the running thing: ’tis the season was only just a mask up.) I hate Sarah McLaughlin. Maybe even moreso than ‘X-rated-guilera.’ Yeah. That much. You know, my best male friend said to me that he wanted a female backing singer, and that– an he could choose– he should choose Christina Aguilera. I said, bluntly, that if that ever should happen, I really would never be able to listen to his music, or help him with it, again. Even though I manage him. Yet, if he had said Sarah McLoughlin, I would have totally gone into a mania. Don’t get me wrong; I’m weedling and I have little agression with me. But when I hear friends talk about Sarah McLachlan, I really go off and start practicing my boxing skills on my wall.

Why do you hate someone who I relate to so much?, some of you will say, ungrammatically. It’s simple. Two reasons. Sarah McNugget, or whatever the hell she is called, is one of the Music industry’s biggest shams. Period. (That last word is particularly relevant for McLachlan.) And, if that were not on its own bad enough, she and her faux-enigmatic sham of ‘poetry’ will forever be linked to the biggest damn turncoat in my life. Hohoho, this is going to be a fun one.

One can see her gazing, from the cover of her latest shit, as though she were in the middle of lesbian sex. That is the image that she is trying to promote to the great self-sorry masses. Yet, on the other hand, she is trying to please the scummy part of the obsessive heterosexual male contingent. She obviously writes lesbian love songs; or, if not, about a very feminised man. Her adherents, not knowing much about her apart from her songs and how ‘Oh so tortured’ she must be, think what the hell they want. Take Google: it does not tell us whether she is straight, lesbian, bisexual. Not that that matters to me: I think that gender division is a century old scam. For me, we’re all the same gender, so the divide between heterosexuality and homosexuality does not for me exist. What bothers me is these people who try to please everyone, just for their own greed. And, as you can see, she loses individuality and even simple details because of her trying to be as generic as possible. She is what I call a personification of a pidgin: she dumbs her lyrics down so much, to appeal to everyone, that they have no fidelity, no meaning in true language. That is she.

What I hate, ‘though, is the fact that she tries to act like a poët to equal Plath, or Dickinson, or Larkin, but her lyrics could have been the result of getting a ‘301 Pop Ballad Clichés’ magnet set and arranging the sentences around according to the destiny of which she preaches so much, of which she says so little. One cannot alienate one’s fanbase, can one? Anyway, here is an example from one of her ‘greatest’ songs, according to the people who praise her with vile ‘cuz she’s grates’ and the like:

You woke up screaming aloud
a prayer from your secret god
you feed off our fears
and hold back your tears

Inventive: no. Meaningful: no. Angstisch cliches per hundred: 99.9. It means nothing. OK? Everything apart from ‘you woke up’ is a cliché (wanted preferably dead, $16 reward.) It’s been slapdashly put together, and has little running link to-gether.

PS. How the **** can you not scream aloud?

Or take this one:

Listen as the wind blòws
Across the great divide
Voices trapped in yearning
Memories trapped in time
The night is my companion
And solitdue my guide
Would i spend forever here and not be satisfied?

And i will be the one
To hold you down,
Kiss you soft
I’ll take your breath away
And after I wipe away the tears
Just close your eyes dear

Convulted. Jesus. I feel humiliated. I love the Blockquote function, often using it for my own asides; yet, I have besmirched it with this shit. It’s all written so that idiots can hear a few lines and say ‘yeah, I really relate.’

And anyone who uses such shit, trying-to-seem-deep titles like Fumbling toward Ectasy ought to be rounded up by crazed Trotskyites and shot while everyone sings ‘matchsticks strike when I’m riding my bike to the dépot.’

Pages of this ramble: 1 2 3

OK. Let this be my confession. I did it. Have me executed like the six people who last week were presidents of Eritrea. Last night, I lay in bed, and watched the monstrosity that is Home Alone II: lost in New York . I still have no alibi, no reasoning why.

It was awful, as usual. Films like that grow worse tas they age; it is fact. When I think of McCauley Culkin (what a name!) I think of a wonderfully débonair ‘friend’ – i.e. someone related to one of my mother’s conquests– Steven Concannon, who, because my mother did not admit him to see some 15-rated movie when we were eight, purposely fell asleep so that he could avoid the post-film banter after the truly awful Richie Rich; how much more upmarket Power Rangers were to him!

I can remember little of the film, save for its being mawkish, involving a shoe-factory and playing baseball with the ‘normals.’ But it must have been better than Home Alone II, apart from the setting.

I never laugh at slapstick, so the first half-hour that the film spends in showing how almost divinely the child divined what the idiots-for-sale would do was a faux pas, and quite perverse, too. The weirdest thing is the misplaced Bird-woman whom Lost Child befriends, leading to some real stingers of lines, with delivery akin to what would be produced if one put a bunch of cancerous wombats on ecstasy, trying to get them to act out the first three acts of ‘All’s well that ends well.’ Yeah; that stilted. If my vocation holds not to be a writer, but rather to be a freaky bird woman who speaks in a strange Jamaican-Irish hybrid, I do hereby solemnly swear that, unlike Home Alone’s FBW, I would not pour out my heartful of clichés to random, pre-pubescent children, expec5ting in return a sort of stoic sage love-life advice. You know, I think that, if one decides to become a Hollywood Writer, one must, as a sort of long-running governmental plan implemented by Ronald Reagan in the vain hope of its making his film career look better, one must incorporate at least one Slushy And Truly Abysmal Nice storyline, or a SATAN’s, into one’s script. Schindler’s List had the relationship between a Polish parikeet and a German officer with its illuminating shorts; that gory Jesus movie that I was worced to attend with my grandmother showed how much Mary Magdalene cared for proto-communist rebels. SATAN storylines rely half on the ability to induce squirms amongst the less-taken-in, half on near absurdity in their not connecting at all with the rest of the banal storylines.

So why waste a precious few hours on something from which I can construe little of positive at all? I do not know. Mind control is perhaps the reason; the two silent seconds that adjoin every advertisement are probably subliminal messages programming us to do all sorts, from accepting licence fees to boycotting Neapolitan ice-cream. Or maybe it is because I wished to see New York; I blotted out all the schmaltz and the brat’s excessiveness, and imagine being washed up on the shore, holding a few crums of liberty.

Dear reader; you may, I suppose, have, after reading my diatribes against Aguilera & Co, considered me haughty and élitist, with little substantiation for being so. Yet, to-day, I have proven myself; I have perfected within the confines of a mere hour and a half the art– no, the science– of freeloading sugar-free Diet Coke from ridiculously dressed, mawkish joke-workers who try to bring style to the lavish combination of E-numbers and silver jumpsuits.

You may ask about my Christmas ‘holiday,’ due to the spectacular and rather excruciating range of niceties drummed into you all from an early age. I shall not follow society’s suit, in mumbling ‘Ok; quiet’ about fifty-four times. Instead, I will admit with ease that it was mind-numbingly abysmal, but brilliant compared to the horrors of other years. Christmas was a time of silent contemplation about what really matters at this time of the year: that beyond the frills and distractions of modern life, there can only be one conclusion, one final thought; and that thought is that any country whose inhabitants pay nearly seven pounds sterling for a frog on their mobile-telephones that jabbers like a less evolved, reptilians lovechild of Gerard Ford, is sick in the head. Something is rotten in the state of Britain; it has been stuck on the made-in-Equatorial Guinea couch, bought in the winter sales, and no one has bothered enough to clean it.