WHISPERING IN THE WINGS
UN/Arab League - what the fuck is the Arab League? - envoy, Kofi Annan, hustling in Damascus. I mean Urgently seeking a peaceful solution acceptable to all sides. But mainly Israel.
It is the losssss of money which concernssss me,
I mean civilian life.
Whispering Kofi Annan is back. Enough time has elapsed, presumably, since the little bit of bother about he and his son milking his position as UN Seckatry General and making some well-deserved money. Son, Kojo, was taking bungs from the UN Oil-For-Food programme in the late Mr Saddam's Iraq and acting as mouthpiece for various well-connected, head-chopping, women-stoning, coked-up playboys in the Middle East; y'know the kinda folks, Princes Charles and Andy's mates, Emirs and Princes, all manner of dictator filth. Obviously, though, seeing who his old man was, Kojo never actually did anything wrong, like Jack Straw's bug-eyed, mutant son, Will, or Lord Prescott's conniving property speculator son, David, or George Bush senior's apechild, Dubya. The sons of the powerful are all, in Jack Straw's words, Good Kids, Really.
Anyway, Kofi's back, lisping his dire and worthless platitudes over the civil war in Syria. One of the more useless UN Secretaries General - has there been a decent one, since that guy who died in a plane crash, Dag Hammersjkold ? - Annan has been wheeled-out as whispering peacemaker at large and we can, therefore, expect a further conflagration in Syria, spontaneous or orchestrated, as he does his masters' bidding, glueing a warped veneer of diplomacy over the neo-con agenda in that region. look, we sent that great man, Kofi Wotsisname, and even he couldn't sort-out that nigger shit. The other main players in the Peace charade - Spunky Bill Clinton, Tony and Imelda, even conflict-resolution experts, Gerry O'Nonce and Marty Kneecaps - must all be busy with other projects; Foundations, they call them, these murdering fuckpigs, busy hoovering-up bribes from WarCorp.
Whispering Kofi Annan and President-for-Life Ali-Basher.
There are terrorists, you know, Kofi, shooting my civilians....
Yessssss, Basher but.....isssss there sssome way we can all ........earn ssssome money? I firmly and ssssincerely believe that it makessss the world go round.
We are all men of the world, after all. Yesssss, I ssstill have the ssssame Swissssss account. Clinton? Yesssss, he'll want a tasssste. And his doxy, Hillary Trousssersssss. Blair? Of coursssssse. Bush, Carter, McCain, Romney, they all need looking after, unlessss you want to wind up, when the night comes falling from the sky, how shall we sssay, dangling in mid-air?
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GAY NEWS.
GAYS DEMAND RIGHT TO BE STRAIGHT.
I remember when AIDS - or HTLV, as it was then, Human T Cell Leukemia Virus ( I am sure that Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome was substituted for it's acronymical convenience, seeing as how we are all deemed, now, here in Ruin, to be too stupid to say, much less understand complete words ) first started stalking the sexlives, sniper-like of anybody who had sex. Which is most but by no means all of us.
All of a sudden the commentariat, drunken slags, pimps and nonces, themselves, generally speaking, all fur coat and no knickers, like Lady Barbara Amiel, the tart who broke the bank at the Filth-O-Graph or shameless gangbangers like Simon Hoggart of theArsebridger; all of them, anyone with a bully pulpit from which to sermonise was, with varying degrees of hysteria, urging safe sex on the rest of us; obsydian, tombstone-like megaliths almost crashed, nightly, through the bottoms of our TeeVee screens,
so portentous was their YouWillDie message, OhYesYouWill.
Stars and celebrities died from AIDS in a blaze of publicity. Trusts were established to commemorate victims and to mitigate the arse-blitz, to reinforce NewSodom's barricades against God's own vaulting, judgemental plague. Good for fuck all politicians leapt enthusiastically on what would become a vast, sprawling morality play, as well as a health campaign. No business like showbusiness
John and Edwina, spearheading his govament's SafeSex campaign
As a health minister I insist that you wear a johnny, Johnny.
Too fucking right I will, if I may say so, 'salright old spinsters riding bicycles but I need to be careful when I'm riding the village bicycle, as I am with you. I'm the fucking prime minister, Oh yes, indeed I most certainly am, in a not inconsiderable manner.
Impudent govament ministers and jumped-up experts and moralists seized on this relatively minor health problem to further lecture harangue, corral and bully us. The appearance of Aids gave I Know Bestism a hundred-per-cent-pure shot in the arm. Anybody could be an expert. Shit, I was one myself, briefly. And if you didn't want to be a pro-gay expert, as I styled myself, you could be an I-always-knew-it-would-happen redneck expert, these people are all diseased anyway. They need treatment. And a good punch.
I know that relatively minor health problem is an inflammatory statement to many but less than two million people dying from AIDS in 2010 compares with fifteen million children dying from hunger every year. I don't know if the San Franciscan Interior Decorators Association ever makes a hunger-quilt, as it so showily made an AIDS victims' quilt but I doubt it, too busy with the string quartet in their salons to hear the weakening howls of anguish from the other side of the world.
I mentioned before that the word community makes me long for an AK 47. Somehow, the deaths in New York and San Francisco - on top of the Stonewall defiance - strengthened and entrenched the idea of a Gay community; more separatism, more exclusion, more Me-ism. And a further fragmentation of a population which should be remorselessly unified against GlobaCorp. Black community, gay community, fat community, transgender community, foxhunting community. Bollocks, all of it. Diabetes'll kill me and it's already fucked me right up but I'm not part of a Diabetes Community. There's only one community, the planetary community.

The starving to death community.
And hunger, preventable hunger, kills more people than AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis combined. Be that as it may, I digress, the opportunity to moralise was a gold-embossed invitation to MediaMinster; now the queerbashers, like Straight Simon Hughes, could really let rip, tut-tutting, finger-wagging; but it was not just queers who got AIDS, our masters reminded us, anyone could get it. Although it was probably caused originally by a queer, further back in the fucking chain. You know, some of those queers were actually bisexual, too, and, y'know, your wife might have had a knee-trembler with one of them. You know what women are like. And she might give it to you. Or she might have caught it long before she met you, off some other lover who also did it with men. Christ, why didya marry the bitch in the first place? Dirty slut.
But in amongst all the self-loathing and fear and guilt I spied, one night on the telly, a junkie-cowboy-angel-rentboy, somewhere in Manhattan, in Bathhouse Central, the revolving door of rough, anonymous, gay sex with a cascade, a multiplicity of partners, showering one another with maybe-malign sperm. Fuck that safe sex shit, he raged, I didn't come out, upsetting my mother and father and brothers and sisters, just so's I could settle down in some monogamy shit with the same man every night; fuck no, I like risk, I love it. Here was someone from William Burroughs' fevered ejaculatory world or from the divine Last Exit to Brooklyn, here was one of the people who populate the pages of what mr verge calls Transgressive Literature but whom we usually pretend are just fictional , just some de Sadean erotomaniacal reverie, or even just rhyming coupleteers from Lou Reed's Walk On TheWild Side. Holly came from Miami Fla., hitch-hiked her way across the USA, plucked her eyebrows on the way, shaved her legs, 'n' then he was a she, said Hey, Babe, take a Walk On the Wild Side. This guy, a young man, was as real as pain, was proper queer; not a simpering showbiz Mommasboy narcissist, like Rufus fucking Wainwright, but a raging, righteous, independent Quentin Crisp punque and he spoke for lots of them, I guess. These are people I'd met, as a runaway teenager, in all-night cafes on Birmingham's Bristol Road, way back, before before. These people are the sexual underworld, these people are the business.
I don't know if he lived or died, that young man, but I really wished him well in his outlaw adventures. I have been a brinkman all, no - I lose track of time - some of my life; even as a kid, cycling downhill with my feet on the handlebars; riding on the open platform of the corporation bus, back leant on the chrome unpright, holding on to nothing, an invitation to the blues, one pothole would have thrown me into the following traffic; always standing right up to the edge of the train platform, literally and figuratively, driving cars and riding motorbikes way too fast, falling off and crashing, DOA, one time, revived by an Emergency doctor, whom I promptly, flailingly thumped, as soon as consciousness was restored and I saw him incising my chest to drain a collapsed lung; drinking too much drink and smoking too much smoke. Bring another bottle, build another joint. One time a doctor said to me Don't ever get another skull fracture, mr ishmael, your skull's like a fucking jigsaw. But it's alright, I learned my lesson well. Motherless children have a hard road, just takes time to work that out, if you've never known anything else.And of course we, all of us, must take, if it's kindly offered, shelter form the storm - shelter which some, here, have so recently and irretrieveably lost. I'm alright, now, never travel by train. Or motorbike.
I have friends in their sixties, after a lifetime of predictabilty, regularity and security, moaning about their mothers being a nuisance, and me not having known one these fifty and more years. One way and another, therefore, I am seriously sympathetic to the sexual outsider, living out on the streets, battered, mistreated and villified cruelly, even - no especially - by the worthies who dally with them, so hotly, so moistly, before scurrying home, their true passion aired, to their official wives or husbands.
The worst that happened to me, I should say, was that a Methodist minister tried to molest me, shortly after my mother died. He didn't succeed - I was big for my age and strong and his wife was downstairs but the attempt was one of the most shocking things that ever happened to me. I say he didn't succeed but noncing happens in a funny old world, maybe being able to exert brutish, breach-of-trust power over the vulnerable and get away with is thrill enough. Brian Duckworth, his name was and he and another minister ran a ring, like they do, assaulting, trading damaged children, between themselves and some Dr Barnardo's staffers. Same old story, same old song. Duckworth went on to be something big and smiley and trustworthy in Methodism, worked in Central Hall. Dead now, the bastard.
I don't mention this to make a link between homosexuality and paedophilia, even though I do think that intrinsically, in some cases, there is one. Duckworth, for instance, wasn't, to my knowledge, homosexual as such, he was married with children and as far as I know stayed that way. Just liked to molest children, just a paedophile. But there are other cases, other currents, in which gay and paedo merge, almost as an act of carelessness. In many ways, I admire gay activist Peter Tatchell, he's brave, taking on Mugabe's men and he's brave, being wrestled to the ground by Michael Portillo's goons and he's forgiven Simon Hughes when what he needs is a punch in his warty gob but when Tatchell starts talking about young gay men of twelve and thirteen and how the age of consent should be lowered to thereabouts I can't help but wonder where he's bound. I go pale, inside and out, at the shocking effrontery of such an assumption, gay young men of twelve.........Maybe I'm an old reactionary, maybe people, legally children, should be able to fuck whoever they want to from the very second that they are able to. The idea of an age of consent is, of course, unnatural, repressive of million-year old instincts but much of how we organise society is contra-natural and I think that we have to have ages of consent in the same way and for the same reason that we have speed limits on the roads - to stop people being hurt. Mr edgar recently chastised me for my use of the phrase Age-inappropriate relationships but the idea of Peter Tatchell or someone even older than he having penetrative sex with a twelve year-old - and this would be the consequence, or one of the consequences of such legislation - and the emotional damage which such behaviours might cause is poorly, inadequately described by the phrase age-inappropriate. Believe me, mr edgar, I am a Duckworth scholar in such things.
It is all murky and can be argued either way, libertarian/tolerant or what should we call it, traditional/intolerant but maybe not all gay people want to see the age of consent lowered to puberty, maybe it's just the in-yer-face segment of that community which wants to have its boy and eat him.
But the current gay issue is a message from another world, not about lowering the age of consent to twelve, it is about faux-marriage, or the unqueering of homosexuality; those making the running on this one demand that they marry, just exactly like heterosexual couples. A million miles from the oppositional Manhattan outlaw, this group is desperate to subdue and colonise the very terrain from which their predecessors fled. Anything you can do, we can do better.
Civil union confers upon gay couples all the legal protections of holy deadlock, the absence of which underpinned the movement for civil union. The term marriage, therefore, and the pursuit of the nomenclature is strictly totemic. The pursuit by some gay people of the term married couple is, in my judgement, a bitchy, spiteful, rub-their-noses-in-it hetero-bashing manouvre which should be resisted, which is an abomination. Of course we must let people live together without hindrance and with proper legal protection but let them not insist upon this dreary, spiteful wrongheaded homogenisation; wassamatter, are they no longer proud to be gay? Aren't they now demanding a right they al;ready have, the right to be straight?
Despite their aversion to participating in the biological activities which creates life, gay men, some gay men, rich, pampered, dribbling, self-indulgent old queens like Lady Sir Elton John can now buy, commission children in the market place, just as if they were sending some gofer out for a line or two of cocaine, they take no risk, they bear no pain, they create nothing, they only consume.
But that is not enough for them; they fool themselves and attempt to browbeat, to cudgel with the truncheon of equal rights, to fool everybody else that they are young parents ordinaire, wilfully heedless and expecting the rest of to be as pig-stupid ignorant as they of the fact that fucking, conception, anxiety, pregnancy, labour and delivery are the only route to parenthood. Obviously. Elton and David may primp and preen, may act as parents magnifique et formidable before their fawning, tonedeaf courtiers, when all they are is shoppers.
Frothy, empty headed, vacuous and trivial, play-acting at being alive.
And so it is, so it must be with those screeching and whining that not only must they, non-reproductive, samesexers, be treated the same but must be linguistically, terminologically indistinguishable from the breeders.
Punch in the gob, that's what they need; quick rub-down with a housebrick.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
THE ARTS SECTION
IS THERE A CELTIC CONNECTION, MR MONGOOSE?

For some years, now, BBC2 has been running a series of Transatlantic Session in which a basic band of vaguely traditional Scottish-Irish musicians joins forces with some visiting American dignitaries of the genre - some of them are quite magical but they are grown increasingly tedious;
-
I know that relatively minor health problem is an inflammatory statement to many but less than two million people dying from AIDS in 2010 compares with fifteen million children dying from hunger every year. I don't know if the San Franciscan Interior Decorators Association ever makes a hunger-quilt, as it so showily made an AIDS victims' quilt but I doubt it, too busy with the string quartet in their salons to hear the weakening howls of anguish from the other side of the world.
I mentioned before that the word community makes me long for an AK 47. Somehow, the deaths in New York and San Francisco - on top of the Stonewall defiance - strengthened and entrenched the idea of a Gay community; more separatism, more exclusion, more Me-ism. And a further fragmentation of a population which should be remorselessly unified against GlobaCorp. Black community, gay community, fat community, transgender community, foxhunting community. Bollocks, all of it. Diabetes'll kill me and it's already fucked me right up but I'm not part of a Diabetes Community. There's only one community, the planetary community.

The starving to death community.
And hunger, preventable hunger, kills more people than AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis combined. Be that as it may, I digress, the opportunity to moralise was a gold-embossed invitation to MediaMinster; now the queerbashers, like Straight Simon Hughes, could really let rip, tut-tutting, finger-wagging; but it was not just queers who got AIDS, our masters reminded us, anyone could get it. Although it was probably caused originally by a queer, further back in the fucking chain. You know, some of those queers were actually bisexual, too, and, y'know, your wife might have had a knee-trembler with one of them. You know what women are like. And she might give it to you. Or she might have caught it long before she met you, off some other lover who also did it with men. Christ, why didya marry the bitch in the first place? Dirty slut.
But in amongst all the self-loathing and fear and guilt I spied, one night on the telly, a junkie-cowboy-angel-rentboy, somewhere in Manhattan, in Bathhouse Central, the revolving door of rough, anonymous, gay sex with a cascade, a multiplicity of partners, showering one another with maybe-malign sperm. Fuck that safe sex shit, he raged, I didn't come out, upsetting my mother and father and brothers and sisters, just so's I could settle down in some monogamy shit with the same man every night; fuck no, I like risk, I love it. Here was someone from William Burroughs' fevered ejaculatory world or from the divine Last Exit to Brooklyn, here was one of the people who populate the pages of what mr verge calls Transgressive Literature but whom we usually pretend are just fictional , just some de Sadean erotomaniacal reverie, or even just rhyming coupleteers from Lou Reed's Walk On TheWild Side. Holly came from Miami Fla., hitch-hiked her way across the USA, plucked her eyebrows on the way, shaved her legs, 'n' then he was a she, said Hey, Babe, take a Walk On the Wild Side. This guy, a young man, was as real as pain, was proper queer; not a simpering showbiz Mommasboy narcissist, like Rufus fucking Wainwright, but a raging, righteous, independent Quentin Crisp punque and he spoke for lots of them, I guess. These are people I'd met, as a runaway teenager, in all-night cafes on Birmingham's Bristol Road, way back, before before. These people are the sexual underworld, these people are the business.
I don't know if he lived or died, that young man, but I really wished him well in his outlaw adventures. I have been a brinkman all, no - I lose track of time - some of my life; even as a kid, cycling downhill with my feet on the handlebars; riding on the open platform of the corporation bus, back leant on the chrome unpright, holding on to nothing, an invitation to the blues, one pothole would have thrown me into the following traffic; always standing right up to the edge of the train platform, literally and figuratively, driving cars and riding motorbikes way too fast, falling off and crashing, DOA, one time, revived by an Emergency doctor, whom I promptly, flailingly thumped, as soon as consciousness was restored and I saw him incising my chest to drain a collapsed lung; drinking too much drink and smoking too much smoke. Bring another bottle, build another joint. One time a doctor said to me Don't ever get another skull fracture, mr ishmael, your skull's like a fucking jigsaw. But it's alright, I learned my lesson well. Motherless children have a hard road, just takes time to work that out, if you've never known anything else.And of course we, all of us, must take, if it's kindly offered, shelter form the storm - shelter which some, here, have so recently and irretrieveably lost. I'm alright, now, never travel by train. Or motorbike.
I have friends in their sixties, after a lifetime of predictabilty, regularity and security, moaning about their mothers being a nuisance, and me not having known one these fifty and more years. One way and another, therefore, I am seriously sympathetic to the sexual outsider, living out on the streets, battered, mistreated and villified cruelly, even - no especially - by the worthies who dally with them, so hotly, so moistly, before scurrying home, their true passion aired, to their official wives or husbands.
The worst that happened to me, I should say, was that a Methodist minister tried to molest me, shortly after my mother died. He didn't succeed - I was big for my age and strong and his wife was downstairs but the attempt was one of the most shocking things that ever happened to me. I say he didn't succeed but noncing happens in a funny old world, maybe being able to exert brutish, breach-of-trust power over the vulnerable and get away with is thrill enough. Brian Duckworth, his name was and he and another minister ran a ring, like they do, assaulting, trading damaged children, between themselves and some Dr Barnardo's staffers. Same old story, same old song. Duckworth went on to be something big and smiley and trustworthy in Methodism, worked in Central Hall. Dead now, the bastard.
I don't mention this to make a link between homosexuality and paedophilia, even though I do think that intrinsically, in some cases, there is one. Duckworth, for instance, wasn't, to my knowledge, homosexual as such, he was married with children and as far as I know stayed that way. Just liked to molest children, just a paedophile. But there are other cases, other currents, in which gay and paedo merge, almost as an act of carelessness. In many ways, I admire gay activist Peter Tatchell, he's brave, taking on Mugabe's men and he's brave, being wrestled to the ground by Michael Portillo's goons and he's forgiven Simon Hughes when what he needs is a punch in his warty gob but when Tatchell starts talking about young gay men of twelve and thirteen and how the age of consent should be lowered to thereabouts I can't help but wonder where he's bound. I go pale, inside and out, at the shocking effrontery of such an assumption, gay young men of twelve.........Maybe I'm an old reactionary, maybe people, legally children, should be able to fuck whoever they want to from the very second that they are able to. The idea of an age of consent is, of course, unnatural, repressive of million-year old instincts but much of how we organise society is contra-natural and I think that we have to have ages of consent in the same way and for the same reason that we have speed limits on the roads - to stop people being hurt. Mr edgar recently chastised me for my use of the phrase Age-inappropriate relationships but the idea of Peter Tatchell or someone even older than he having penetrative sex with a twelve year-old - and this would be the consequence, or one of the consequences of such legislation - and the emotional damage which such behaviours might cause is poorly, inadequately described by the phrase age-inappropriate. Believe me, mr edgar, I am a Duckworth scholar in such things.
It is all murky and can be argued either way, libertarian/tolerant or what should we call it, traditional/intolerant but maybe not all gay people want to see the age of consent lowered to puberty, maybe it's just the in-yer-face segment of that community which wants to have its boy and eat him.
But the current gay issue is a message from another world, not about lowering the age of consent to twelve, it is about faux-marriage, or the unqueering of homosexuality; those making the running on this one demand that they marry, just exactly like heterosexual couples. A million miles from the oppositional Manhattan outlaw, this group is desperate to subdue and colonise the very terrain from which their predecessors fled. Anything you can do, we can do better.
Civil union confers upon gay couples all the legal protections of holy deadlock, the absence of which underpinned the movement for civil union. The term marriage, therefore, and the pursuit of the nomenclature is strictly totemic. The pursuit by some gay people of the term married couple is, in my judgement, a bitchy, spiteful, rub-their-noses-in-it hetero-bashing manouvre which should be resisted, which is an abomination. Of course we must let people live together without hindrance and with proper legal protection but let them not insist upon this dreary, spiteful wrongheaded homogenisation; wassamatter, are they no longer proud to be gay? Aren't they now demanding a right they al;ready have, the right to be straight?
Despite their aversion to participating in the biological activities which creates life, gay men, some gay men, rich, pampered, dribbling, self-indulgent old queens like Lady Sir Elton John can now buy, commission children in the market place, just as if they were sending some gofer out for a line or two of cocaine, they take no risk, they bear no pain, they create nothing, they only consume.
But that is not enough for them; they fool themselves and attempt to browbeat, to cudgel with the truncheon of equal rights, to fool everybody else that they are young parents ordinaire, wilfully heedless and expecting the rest of to be as pig-stupid ignorant as they of the fact that fucking, conception, anxiety, pregnancy, labour and delivery are the only route to parenthood. Obviously. Elton and David may primp and preen, may act as parents magnifique et formidable before their fawning, tonedeaf courtiers, when all they are is shoppers.
Frothy, empty headed, vacuous and trivial, play-acting at being alive.
And so it is, so it must be with those screeching and whining that not only must they, non-reproductive, samesexers, be treated the same but must be linguistically, terminologically indistinguishable from the breeders.
Punch in the gob, that's what they need; quick rub-down with a housebrick.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
THE ARTS SECTION
IS THERE A CELTIC CONNECTION, MR MONGOOSE?

For some years, now, BBC2 has been running a series of Transatlantic Session in which a basic band of vaguely traditional Scottish-Irish musicians joins forces with some visiting American dignitaries of the genre - some of them are quite magical but they are grown increasingly tedious;
smirking, beardy fiddlers, manic pipers and an absolutely intolerable lap slide guitar player who, regardless of suitability or taste ladles his syrupy tones over absolutely everything, join ensemble with some long-tressed Kentucky singerbabe, just as doggone purty as a picture,
or a guitar-flailing Tenneseean loon sporting a snufflers beard, the whole cloying confection intercut with commercial ethnobabble about the Music and the Roots and about NoBarriers. Fucking horsehit, really, although it has been worth looking at just in case the late Kate McGarrigle
or Mad Maestro Paul Brady - surely a cousin of Marty Kneecaps -
or some such transcendent musical jewel made a brief, sparkling appearance.
The redeeming feature of this long-running series is that there is never an appearance by gibbering hobgoblin Sir Jools Holland and his assorted headshrinkers and necromancers; that, in itself on a BBC2 music show, is a kindness.
No, laydeezangennulmen, don't laugh, I really can sing.
And I have extremeley eclectic musical tastes.
The loose underpinning of these jamborees is the supposed connection between (whte) United States music and Scotland, the best part of England - y'know, nationalism. Scotland's great influence on the world, the ethnic cleansing of the US by murderous Scots, Paddies, Germans and all the Bible thumping riff-raff of Europe, of which Scotland and Ireland appear to be so proud. Sioux, Arapaho, Navajo, Cherokee, Iriqouis and Innuit, Celtic bandits have slaughtered them by the thousand, stole their lands, desecrated their sites, raped their women and children.; Ah, but Jaysus, the music. And sure the people was starvin' at home, so they were, so why not take stuff from the Redskins, now, dem being Godless heathen savages an all, so they are.
Alongside all this nationalist tedium there is an international marketing opportunity, or should I say grassroots movement, as people all over the world discover their Celtic connection and in the true spirit of traditional musicians everywhere, sign recording contracts and hope fervently for a cross-over, number one platinum album.
I got in trouble - and a little acclaim - up here a while back for publicly lambasting the rapacious juggernaut arts movement in Scotland. Here, and especially so the further North you go, any smirking wee Fiona sawing at a tuneless fiddle is a maestro-in waiting; any sourfaced crow singing unaccompanied in Gaelic a fifteen-verse dirge about hanging or murder or betrayal - some Fathomless Grievance Blues - anyone, in fact, who, lacking taste or modesty, gets up and makes a noise in front of others deserves public subsidy, because, like the horsebeaters in BigFatPikeyWeddings, what they are doing is traditional. Not while old people are cold, ventured I. And anyway, most of it is shite; those awful accordions, Jesus fucking wept. And what is good will survive and flourish without subsidy, like the Delta Blues. Some were delighted at my heresy, others wounded deep in their morbid souls.
I shrink, therefore, from Scottish traditional music, especially performed by professional ego-tripping ponces and slappers. And I retreat even further from the overseas varieties, from Canucks claiming some spurious ancestral connection to the banks and braes o' bonny Doon; from Kentuckians ot Tennesseans blethering about Wicklow and Clare. The only good things to come from that hillbilly region were the Everly Brothers and Dolly Parton.
Mr mongoose, anyway, suggested this chanteuse, as an Evensongstress. I dunno, had he been bombarded for a decade or more with Annie Crow and the Smirking Wee Fionas, he might take a different view of this stuff.
I got in trouble - and a little acclaim - up here a while back for publicly lambasting the rapacious juggernaut arts movement in Scotland. Here, and especially so the further North you go, any smirking wee Fiona sawing at a tuneless fiddle is a maestro-in waiting; any sourfaced crow singing unaccompanied in Gaelic a fifteen-verse dirge about hanging or murder or betrayal - some Fathomless Grievance Blues - anyone, in fact, who, lacking taste or modesty, gets up and makes a noise in front of others deserves public subsidy, because, like the horsebeaters in BigFatPikeyWeddings, what they are doing is traditional. Not while old people are cold, ventured I. And anyway, most of it is shite; those awful accordions, Jesus fucking wept. And what is good will survive and flourish without subsidy, like the Delta Blues. Some were delighted at my heresy, others wounded deep in their morbid souls.
I shrink, therefore, from Scottish traditional music, especially performed by professional ego-tripping ponces and slappers. And I retreat even further from the overseas varieties, from Canucks claiming some spurious ancestral connection to the banks and braes o' bonny Doon; from Kentuckians ot Tennesseans blethering about Wicklow and Clare. The only good things to come from that hillbilly region were the Everly Brothers and Dolly Parton.
Mr mongoose, anyway, suggested this chanteuse, as an Evensongstress. I dunno, had he been bombarded for a decade or more with Annie Crow and the Smirking Wee Fionas, he might take a different view of this stuff.
-
------------------------------------------------------ THE FUNNY PAPERS. This is one of those things that we all get. A guy I used to know never bothers to write to me but instead forwards me dozens of these things, which, I presume, he receives from somebody who can't be bothered to write to him, either; it's communication, Jim, but not as we know it; in fact, it's not communication at all. I dunno what it is, some i-phenomenon, waving, not drowning, maybe. Most of them originate down there in mr mike's world and are generally from some Aussie redneck, hating Koreans, Vietnamee, all Asians, in fact and chinks, niggers, jews and abos, especially abos, who are ruining his country, immigration, welfare and women. He hates most things. This one, though, from the UK, is different and sits well, here, in these chronicles of Ruin | ||||||||||
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