Some More Incredibly Old Buggers Die

 As I'm edging inexorably onwards to becoming an incredibly old bastard myself, I think we should speak out against this conspiracy which seems to be offing people when they reach a certain age. I mean, what's going on? Is it part of the generational war which sees the young coming for our incomes, houses, free prescriptions, bus passes and comfortable footwear?

Here's mr ishmael, on Brian Wilson, the latest dead bastard.

Brian Wilson  June 20, 1942 – June 11, 2025

It's said that Ludwig van Beethoven, mad and deaf, had to be turned around to see the applause of the audience at the first performance of his Ninth Symphony; it is a poignant example of Art really being created for its own sake, written over decades, never to be heard by its composer; if you cried, you know you'd fill a lake with tears.

Biographies have revealed that he was stone mad, as well as stone deaf, how could he not be? His diaries read, Monday: engaged housekeeper, Monday afternoon, dismissed housekeeper; Tuesday morning: engaged housekeeper, Tuesday morning, dismissed housekeeper, just couldn't get the staff, those days - I know how he felt, it has been a long time since I have been even content with the efforts of anyone I have engaged to do anything for me, and if I ever was, it was only because I was stupider then than I am now.

Outside his muses, Beethoven's relationships were shit, nobody really knows who Elise was and his closest known relationship was up and down, one-sided, with his nephew, he infuriated friends and patrons alike and sank, eventually, into tragic, lonely deafness. Doesn't matter a fuck, at least not to us -  sonatas, quartets, concerti, symphonies, opera, among the greatest ever to be pulled from whoknowswhere and written down, sometimes sixteen lines at a time, for the rest of us to hear, to weep and wonder at, the quality of genius, troubled, ailing, non-conformity bursting out of the shadows, outshining wretched normalcy, provoking, captivating and enchanting the Earthbound.

I listen to the Beach Boys now and again, normally in the Summer - Little Deuce Coupe, I Get Around, Barbara Ann, Help Me Rhonda; Fun, Fun, Fun and on into the sublime God Only Knows, Good Vibrations, Heroes and Villains; perfect pop songs, albeit snippets of white, verging on redneck, Americana; Chuck Berry, sanitised in four-part harmony, carsangirls, loveanmarriage, California girls and beach parties, all summer long......Before he became too much for himself and disappeared into bed, sandpits, drugs and therapy, Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' composer, arranger, and producer, pissed all over everybody, including the Beatles, crafting his pet sounds into  popular songs and albums rated as among the best ever. Ever.

Jools Holland, however, is rubbish. He suits the BBC, though, what with his clunking, faux Edwardianism, his midget suits with too many buttons and pockets and his arse-clenchingly embarrassing interviewing style, ladeezangennulmen; he wasn't even the main man of his original band, Squeeze, a no-account bunch of Cockney wankers, still, sans Jools, performing their handful of miserable chart-toppers, in tiny concerts, unplugged, at any opportunity. Christ allfuckingmighty, bad enough we endlessly revisit the 'sixties - although there were hugely important societal changes in that overfluffed celebrity decade - the 'Seventies and 'Seventies' ensembles don't bear thinking about.  Squeeze and Jools Holland, who the fuck are they?

I don't know many people but I must have known a good half-dozen who could play better barrelhouse piano than Holland - and as for his R and B Orchestra, well, you wouldn't go and see them if they were playing in your back garden. Jools sings, but he shouldn't, he has no voice. He's like a Bruce Forsyth-lite, for our times, doing duets with the proper stars, only he can't sing or dance, like Brucie does. Rock icon, Carol Vorderman, was on the show, tonight, often it's the bints from AbsFabs, R and B legends like Krishnan Guru Murty, off Channel Four News, a charmed circle of Celebrity shits, drinking our money and cheering any old rubbish, as though any of them gave a fuck about music. Time it was scrapped and Joolsie sent off to his wardrobe studies, producer Mark Cooper sent to work on the Archers. There have been seriously important artists on the show, for sure, - although Seasick Steve isn't one of them - but Holland is an intolerable, smirking, over-promoted prick and the format - of us watching liggers, media whores and Z-list celebrity cocksuckers cheering to order - makes tabloid the occasionally excellent. Who says that this little tosser must be the vehicle through which popular music is presented, this isn't intelligent music broadcasting, this is Goddamned fucking Hobbitry.

Brian Wilson was on the Jools show tonight and he shouldn't have been. Fronting his own Beach Boys tribute band, a slew of session men, singing all the parts and playing most of them, Wilson perched on a stool, gutty and goitred, playing nothing, barely singing, waving his arms like a loony at the mental hospital long-term residents' Christmas Party, making wavey gestures with his fingers, in time to Good-good-goo-ood-Vibrations, an offence against Man and God. Lord, how the studio crowd loved it.

It doesn't matter, much, that Bob Dylan grunts and wheezes his way through his own repertoire; instrumental flawlessness, sophisticated arrangements and heavenly harmonies were never his stock-in-trade, on the contrary, swift Chaos, unrehearsed, wrought his ensemble meisterwerks, often first takes, recorded live and people, maybe too young to know any better, still visit his dreary concerts, it doesn't matter, man's a legend, people have bootlegs of his kettle boiling, his dog barking. In concert, Paul McCartney plays Beatles' songs much better than did the Beatles, and generally that's saying something. The Rolling Stones do what they've always done, play a load of old dross, illuminated by selections from their two or three exceptional albums, nobody overvalues the Stones, just as long as they get to hear Keef Richards riffing in open-G, like he was a bluesman, or something.

But Brian Wilson, tonight, (14/05/2011) a madman in an empty room full of heartless strangers; a third-rate, jive-talking emcee, who believes that his being there, gobbing, dignifies the unforgiveable, is all; and one of the very few musical  classics of our times is trashed by its composer. 

Watch it and weep.

mrs. ishmael - Unfortunately, you can't watch it, as it has been removed from Youtube. You can get the flavour of the horridness in this clip, a year later, instead, in which Brian Wilson is slightly more animated:

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And here we go with the second dead bastard. Here's mr ishmael's piece on Frederick Forsyth. It is extracted from The Book of Common Pulp, genius stuff, but too long to reproduce here. 

No, Forsyth's not the one wrote The French Lieutenant's Woman, which I thought initially - well, it is an understandable mistake - both their surnames began with an eff.) No, this eff wrote Day of the Jackal, Dogs of War, The Odessa File, fourteen other books, a memoir (that's like an autobiography, but not chronological and with frilly bits as far as I can make out) and a load of short stories.  None of which I have read, because they are all bloke's books. 

Frederick Forsyth 25 August 1938 – 9 June 2025

In his Berkshire manor house, bristling with state-of security and anti-surv measures, he had just completed his briefing of the PM and  his Joint  Chiefs of Staff; a body of men known, by those cruising  along Horse Guards Parade, as the JERCOFS.

His manservant, a former US Navy Seal captain, his housekeeper, a former lieutenant-colonel in Mossad, the  elite, shadowy Israeli counter-terror regiment and his driver, a former sergeant-major in  the SAS, had withdrawn for the night and he was alone, sipping frugally on his rare, sixty-year old single malt, the last existing case of which had been a gift from a senior royal, grateful for his assistance in thwarting a potential scandal which might have rocked the nation of Greater Ruritania, brought it to its knees.

 It had been a long day, he had briefed MI6, the CIA,  the French Surete, the White House, Downing Street, Bonn, Paris, Tel Aviv,  Karachi and the Daily Express; the free world was safe for an hour or two. In his time he had saved the life of the French president, destroyed a post-war Nazi network, defeated the KGB and killed several highly-skilled international conspirators against the West.  Time now, he reflected, for prayer. Kneeling on his prayer mat - a finely woven facsimile of Sir Charles Moore's Daily Filthograph obituary of her -  he gazed at her serene, resolute, blue-suited image and began his five-times-daily prayers to Margaret Thatcher. 

Now in his nineties, the greatest espionage commander in history showed no signs of slowing down, she wouldn't have,
 why should he? 

Let them come, wielding rusty Czech Kalashnikovs;
 let them come, with their kitchen table chemistry-set bombs, 
let them come, holding hands, like the degenerates they were, wailing that their God was good.

Even in his nineties, Frederick Forsyth was ready for them. And his God was better.

Five hours away, in Maryland, in his wooded estate, ringed with  state-of security, a solid, rangy Irish-American sat at his Colonial oaken desk briefing President Obama, wondering what the Last Great American President, LA Ronnie,  would have thought of it all, a neegra boy, - alright, he may be a decent, white supremacist at heart but a neegra boy's always a neegra boy - sitting in the Oval Office, playing President. 

He had turned, made defector, a wife-beating  Russian-Scottish submarine commander, 

who sailed his top-secret, state-of vessel right into Boston Naval Dockyard; when 9/11 made Irish terrorism - the best kind - uncool, he had single-handedly defeated the IRA militarily, paving the way for his fellow-Republican, Tony Blair's, famous Peace and Get Out Of Jail Process and after that he had masterminded the foiling of large numbers of nigger-muslim-bastard terror plots, any of which could have DestroyedCivilisationAsWhiteFolksKnowItShouldBe. Without him, successive Nine-Elevens would have swept the nation like a Kansas tornado. Senators and Congressmen, Kings and Sheiks, Princes and Prime Ministers, Security Chiefs, Field Marshals and Generals, all of them were on speed-dial in  his solid platinum LimitedEdition WogSmash iPhone.

A grateful Defence department had ringed the space above his sprawling estate with the latest MusWaster satellite-directed drones. Any Muslim, be he snooper or assassin, even a kebab delivery boy, seen approaching his  boundaries would be instantly taken-out, turned to ashes,  not even his prayer beads would survive.

In recognition of his service in saving the world several times over, making it safe for his company to develop the Chinese child slavery arm of his enterprise,  Apple's chief executive, the almost mythical inventor and ontraprenewer, Steve Skinflint,  had  designed a one-off,  world-saving-novel word-processing programme.  And his was the only copy.  The ruddy Irish-American, sitting pensive, in his  baseball cap, had only to click on the icons for ex-Navy Seals, Mossad, ex-SAS, KGB, Karachi, Tel Aviv, Moscow, London, Washington,  Sniper's Rifle and Stealth Bomber, in any order or combination and a three-hundred page novel would be wireless-printed in the office of his publisher, and then in the office of  the agent of Hollywood megastar, Harrison Wood, 

who acted in the films of the books.  The programme, known as BigBogPulp has already, several times over, flooded the world's airport bookstores with millions of copies of BigBogPulp stories, sometimes at three for the price of two, most of which had been turned into BigBogBlockbuster films. Alright, he'd had to deal with Jews, in Hollywood, and fags, too, but better them than the Ayatollah-lovin' sonsabitches in the TeeVee networks.
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In Summer 2015, for a medical treatment, I went, four days a week, to Aberdeen, determined to do some proper reading, worthy books, some on my shelves for years, others recommended to me, here. John Julius Norwich's Venice, for instance, some Lapham's Quarterlys, Paradise Lost, The Man In The High Castle  - but being away from home, in a hotel-cum-hostel among strangers, savage wee groups of terrified and bitter Shetlanders, skulking together against the Big City, I couldn't find the right frame of mind.  
I wound-up reading shite.  Thrillers.  Hotel and hospital shelves are filled with them. I never knew there were so many, nor that everything ever written by these innumerable assemblers of cliches proved,  without even having been read,  an outstanding, blockbusting, international, number one bestseller, half a billion copies sold in hardback, translated into four thousand languages - often, even before they were published - never knew that as far as Tom Clancy was concerned, Clive Cussler was the master, the man he read; that as far as Clive Cussler was concerned Tom Clancy was the master, the man he read  and so on, in a disturbing daisy chain of fulsome praise, one hack for another; yes, like Martin Amis-Teeth and Salman Rushdie-Fuck used to do. About their prize-winning tripe.

I had last read these things a lifetime ago, the spy and military thrillers, when Quiller's and Bond's and Harry Palmer's enemies had been the Reds, the Soviet Union, when the action went down in Berlin and Washington, not Kabul and Baghdad - WASPs, grammar school boys and above,  fighting Slavs, the Christian Capitalist fighting the Heathen Communist from inside a Ford Zephyr or a Zil or a smokey Trabant, with a laconic, self-deprecatory flippancy. How the thriller fiction world has changed.

In  Aberdeen, I got right into them, frenziedly reading three and four at a time, into the wee, small hours. I durst  not leave my room,  you see, so anxious and paranoid were my fellow guests about my presence among them, it reminded me of a Sunday School holiday on Anglesey, when my visit to the local shop brought utter,  chilly silence to gossipy wives, mothers, presumably, shocked and irritated by the appearance of an alien ten-year old.  It was just the same atmosphere in this Aberdeen  situation, but this time I was a big grown-up, with a glance that could strip paint. They were a parody, this gang, like something from Whisky Galore. Archie, from Lerwick, and his wee wife, Morag, accompanying him, week after week to make sure that her man, who, at sixty, couldnae cook,  got his six beefy sausage sandwich snack and his Jaffa Cakes, him down from the North for bowel cancer treatment, she force-feeding him red meat and sugar, watching protectively, leaving only to make him mugs of sweet tea, those two and endless other of their fellow islanders, scowling and fucking muttering, as though they had washed up in Hell, among foreign devils, like me.  

There was a residents' lounge, which they colonised in bitter silence, wherein they took it in turns, standing around a central table, to do a jigsaw, grunting happily as another piece was fitted into something like Noddy's Christmas Party or A Big Boat On The Sea - baby stuff, but they took it in paired turns, Norman and Ettie,  Susan and Lawrence, Mhari and Donald,  guarding it from non-Shetlanders, like treasure.

I was tempted to tell them that this facility in which they slept and gorged on animal fat, that  this, their accommodation, their transport over hundreds of miles, their health care, all fabulously expensive, were paid for by the mainland savages whom they despised,  that their islandness was only possible through the as yet unchallenged sentiment of the wider nation which supported them but there is no point in casting pearls before swine,  for they believe that tomorrow they could  return to  living off seabird eggs,  their lives lit and warmed  by lantern, selling jumpers for a living, even though, fat, lazy, stupid and drunken babies,  they would starve in a month.

 I found them difficult and graceless people, anyway, the Shetlanders, best left where they are, imagining themselves bold Viking. A Viking, myself, I consider them welcome to it, their rocky redoubt. They did drive me, however, to a fiendish amount of reading, cloistered-away from their repulsive, pampered infantilism. And I did discover a whole world with which I was only vaguely acquainted, and for that I am grateful. 

Read your book and lose yourself

In another's thoughts
He might tell you 'bout what is
Or even 'bout what is not

And if he's kind and gentle too
And he loves the world a lot
His twilight words may melt the slush
Of what you have been taught.

(Mike Heron, 1966.)

Wither, then, the popular, mainstream thriller, the pulp fiction?

There is, actually, only one Book of Common Pulp. 
 It comes as the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospel and  the Book of Kells; as the Compleat Works of Shakespeare and  the gilded, leather-bound King James Bible;  the dog-eared Penguin Lady Chatterley's Lover and the intangible, Kindle-ised Fifty Shades of Grey, and it comes, lonely, lewd and lustful, written on the cyber toilet-wall.  
We tell each other the same story, over and over and over again, of war and peace, of life and death, love and hate, feast and famine, vice and virtue, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to and the lifting-up of our eyes unto the hills.
There is a however, however.  

Never mind the plagiaristic re-hashings of whore-writers, we need not re-publish Ovid, as though we had made him up; let us leave the Book of Common Pulp on the shelf and let us build a new library.   Much as there is in the Book of Common Pulp there needs must be more; 
 if we would  trip Ruin in his stride we must write our own stories. 
Thank you for reading mine.

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