American Fez

Ebony and Ivory and Yellow Snow

My latest CD collection of inspirational piano recordings should be in stores next month, just in time for the holidays. It is called Winters Dawn and has a blue tinted picture of an elegant coffee cup and some seasonal berries on the cover. The music reflects joyful memories of traditional Christmas gatherings at Merlin's cave in Tuscany. Obviously, I don't know if Merlin actually celebrated the birth of Christ, if he ever visited Tuscany, or even if there is a cave bearing his name in that region; but if he did, and if there is, then I have a pretty shrewd idea what a traditional Christmas there would sound like. Here is the track listing:

1. Prelude
2 Sweet Jesu Hath Ate All The After-Eight Mints
3. Non Mangiare La Giallo Neve
4. Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas The Tank Engine
5. Solstice Feet
6. Gifts Of The Magi (I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts)
7. Negro Messiah
8. Prelude (Reprise)

The All Hallows Hello

Since nobody seems to understand my George III purple urine Hallowe'en costume, I have instead decided to simply take young Vlad "trick or treating" with a large white box strapped to my back. Yes, that's right, I shall be venturing out dressed as a fridge magnet of myself.

Fat Vampires

There was some sort of assemblage of "goths" and "wiccans" at the shopping mall on Saturday. Six of them were sitting in the food court, all looking like the Ghost at the Feast amongst the ferns and formica. Friends of this gentleman, no doubt. Is it possible to be both ethereal and fat? On this evidence the answer is surely no. Mind you, I suppose it's difficult to afford finer dining after you've spent all your money on a leather wrist bands, Marilyn Manson t-shirts and a new Celtic knot tattoo. Our sense of human identity is, for better or worse, rapidly disappearing up P. T Barnum's backside.
It would be one thing if the varieties of alternative lifestyles were interesting or challenging, but unfortunately they're not. I have often thought that consumers of fantasy become enamored of escapist books and films because they have no imagination of their own. This is why those computer geeks who dress up in magician's robes on the weekends always call themselves Shakti Pendragon of the Dark Realm or whatever. Let's face it, the name Pendragon is the sword and sorcery equivalent of either Smith or Jones. Can't these people think of a more original nom-de-plume? Apparently not. Instead, some day soon, the world will simply look like a huge expanse of concrete boxes into which a load of overweight and inactive sci-fi action figures has been emptied.

Reactions to a Reactor

I, too, would be creating a civilian nuclear program if I were Iran. Safe atomic energy makes all the sense in the world, if you ask me. However, if I were Iran, I'd invite Deep Purple or someone like that to stage a reunion concert at Persepolis, featuring a state-of-the-art light show and a live satellite uplink. I'd call it the "Concert for  Zoroaster." Alas, sponsorship of such an event is, of course, the main big difference between me and Iran, besides the fact that it's a large bordered land mass and I'm just a stick of flesh with genitalia.
But putting these dissimilarities momentarily aside, if really were Iran, then I too would tell other nations to mind their own damn business if they demanded instant access to my private parts. And I too would maintain this stubborn resistance until such time as the other nations eventually all ganged up together and forced me to take my pants off in public and reveal my reactor for the inspection of all and sundry. Which is why, if I were Iran, I too would be merely scratching my hairy silos at America's solo sanctions effort.

Can you spot the irony in this post? Yes, that's right, well-spotted: I don't even like Deep Purple.

Kid's Costume Corner

Hello children. As all you sweet tooth's know, Hallowe'en is fast approaching, and I shall be dressing up entirely in shiny purple clothes on the spooky day. In shiny purple, from head to foot. I'll even be painting my face purple. Can you guess why my Hallowe'en costume will be all shiny purple? Yes, that's right! You guessed it: I'm going Trick or Treating dressed as a stream of King George III's urine. What clever children you are today!

As a reward, here are some more fun costume ideas you might like to consider: Henry VIII's liver, Mary Queen of Scots' severed head, or Edward II's bum ... but remember to ask your mom if she thinks it's OK first!

Identity Parade

The 2008 Presidential Candidates, from left to right: Barack Obama; John McCain; Rudy Guiliani; Hilary Clinton; Dennis Kucinich; John Edwards; and little Mitt Romney

Which freak will you vote for?

Harry Potter and the Senator's Wink

"J.K" Rowling, authoress of the Harry Potter schoolboy wizard novel saga, has revealed that the heavily bearded Dumbledore character is apparently gay, which I found rather odd, since I don't recall reading to my nephew any passage from any Harry Potter book featuring Dumbledore trolling in a Minneapolis airport bathroom, nor do I remember Dumbledore ever being described as a Republican senator, and surely that's what being gay is all about.
I mean, what self-respecting homosexual these days isn't a right-wing, religious nut job with a loyal wife and eight kids? Dumbledore is none of these things. So get real, Rowling, I know the Harry Potter stories are supposed to be fantasy, but they don't have to be that unrealistic.

The Triumph of Edith Templeton

Much like those safety instruction manuals in an airplane, Edith Templeton's The Surprise of Cremona was a book I saw many times but never actually read. Its elegant, glossy black spine would edge forwards on the library shelf, offering itself to me in a rather pushy and shameless manner, and I would linger there, vaguely intrigued by the title, but quickly move on to something professional and dry by Norman Douglas or Jan Morris instead of the society lady's Italian impressions.
The Surprise of Cremona didn't give a withered fig, of course. It always knew that I would love its Medusa's sense of humor and acidic charm when I finally did borrow it, on that vexatious day when there would be no other reasonable book left to choose from off that particular library shelf. And it knew that I would turn the last page with regret, thinking to myself: "I can't believe I never read that before"; mistakenly, prejudicially, and fortuitously, saving the best for last. My humblest apologies, Madame Templeton, for ever doubting you. The Surprise of Cremona, indeed!

Your Weekend English Lit Mash-Up

"Ask not for whom the bee sucks
For it sucks for Dick Swiveller."

From: The Tempestuous Meditation Shop XVII
by William Donne Dickens (1612 - 1841, via 1624)

The Acceptable Face of Vagrancy

Perhaps he once played pan flute in one of those ubiquitous Peruvian busking bands that used to fill city centers with South American sounds. Or perhaps he is an Eskimo who set off polar bear trapping in a blizzard but lost his way; aimlessly wandering from Arctic Circle to traffic circle, confused and alone, his brown face more cracked and worn than the many leather bags slung over his shoulder, until he came to a stop on Boston Common.
Huddled and hunched amongst these numerous parcels and cases, he now perches on the same park bench every day, cradling a paper bag full of stale muffins and bagels, from which he feeds his daily congregation of pigeons and sparrows. Maybe he even sleeps there.
"Good morning," he says to each commuter as we march past. "How are you? Happy today! Yes. Thank you." Then he cackles, claps and waves, and extends the same greeting to the next person rushing by. But this cheerful, recurring greeting is the only thing he extends, never his upturned palm. He never asks for money.
Most mornings, on my way to work, I too am laden down with bags, but other mornings I don't carry any at all. He always notices when I'm not, pantomiming my lack of burden with his wiry arms and shaking his head: "No bag today?" Bags are obviously very important to him, the greasy vessels into which the water of his life has been poured, even if it is stagnant and reflects nothing.
He keeps his distance from the other vagrants that litter the park, whom morning reveals hidden under their coarse gray blankets, sprawled across the grass like dead men on a battlefield, until they awake with wolfish eyes and mouths filled with bile. These rowdier, violent bums will surely find him one day, however, when some kind soul has given him something that they want. And I will feel an absence when he is gone, a missing edge piece from the jigsaw of humanity.

If It Ain't Baroque, Don't Fix It

So. The life-size, naked chocolate Jesus installation is back in the news. Frankly, I don't know where to begin with this. Plain chocolate seems a bit too minimalist for my taste. If I were the artist I'd have given him a fruit-filled center with almond sprinkles on top, but then I suppose I'd just be betraying the influence of the rococoa style.
I thank you.

Das Kubickle

At work, I was detained by a woman from Human Resources who looks like the lead singer of The Troggs, only slightly more worn. Taken at a disadvantage by her awesome ugliness, she managed to suck me into her vortex of tedium by asking how I would approach mental health issues in the office.
"With a straitjacket and a tranquilizer dart." I replied. "Or, if the items were to hand, with a large net and a pitchfork, rather like a retiarius in the Roman arena."
Silence reigned between us. Somewhere in the distance, a phone rang.
"You know," Miss Presley eventually sighed. "I'm quickly getting sick and tired of your flippant responses to everything."
I wanted to say, as Viola exclaims in Twelfth Night: "The rudeness that hath appeared in me have I learned from my entertainment." But I just shrugged instead.

File under: Wastes of time

Down Where The Drunkards Roll

There are ley lines of vagrancy in every city, the same compass points of desolation along which the homeless and the derelict have shuffled since time out of mind, guided, like the drunken sailors in Shakespeare’s Tempest, by some mentholated spirit of the air, some invisible hobo Ariel, to those old familiar concrete arenas of dejection, gloom and neglect to which they and their kind have always been drawn.
Despite the prefabricated gentrification, despite the new international hotel that used to be a prison, Cambridge Street in Boston is such a ley line, terminating in the grandly named but wholly soulless corporate wasteland of Government Center, which was once an alcoholic haze of whisky bars and burlesque theaters called Scollay Square.
Here, no doubt built over the bulldozed foundations of a seedy speakeasy, is a paved pit of ordure whose rectangular boundaries are formed by four crumbling and grimy concrete benches; and here the eternally incapacitated still gather, inaugurating their incoherent parliaments amid the stale air and broken glass, all day and everyday. Meanwhile, just twenty feet away, in the well-scrubbed halls of administration, over deodorized clerks in polyester pleated trousers are processing new social security numbers.

Battle Ye Not With Monsters...

So. Beowulf moved to America and changed his name to Beerwhoop, for the Heorot Meadhall could not compete with Planet Hollywood when it came to ice cold lager and a large selection of novelty cheeseburgers. And so much red meat did Beerwhoop devour there, and in so many steroids did he indulge, and of so much viagra did he partake, that Beerwhoop's head turned into a baboon scrotum.
"I'm beginning to feel at home here." Beerwhoop said, as he crossed Main Street, the three wiry pubes that protruded from his forehead dancing in the breeze. "I fit right in."
Meanwhile, Joey Grendel's step-mother was finishing tuning up her powerful Ford Bronco at a garage just around the corner ...

The Strolling Through Walls Players Present ...

This is how I intend to cast Waiting For Godot when I finally get the opportunity to produce and direct it in the afterlife:

Vladimir: Charles Laughton
Estragon: Robert Newton
Pozzo: The Emperor Nero
Lucky: Shirley Temple
Boy: God (ironic cameo)

Tickets are available for pre-booking, but you may want to bear in mind that I don't intend to die for at least another forty years or so.

Porphyry Inc

Like Homer's famous Ithacan Cave of the Naiades, my office has two entrances: a northern door for regular mortals, and a sacred southern portal which only I can use. "Perpetual waters through the grotto glide" here also, but most people don't seem to notice this pleasant feature, not do they remark upon the "bowls and urns of workmanship divine." The piles and piles of paper in my in-box, however, for some reason are oft commented upon.

You Are A Guaranteed Prize Winner

I am one of those "part of the problem" people who believe that climate change is a problem, but also think that Al Bore is a problem too: an up-to-no-good, good-for-nothing do-gooder who constantly jets around the world lecturing others about how their cheap, once-a-year plane flights to visit loved ones in Alaska are destroying the environment.
Consequently, I was ather dismayed this morning to learn that Bore has won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Many thousands of ordinary, uncelebrated, non-newsworthy men and women generously donate their lives attempting to allieviate suffering in all the terrible, bloody conflicts that are presently being fought all over the globe, and yet Bore wins a prize for droning on and on about the weather in his self-aggrandizing movie.
Surely it is time that the Nobel Peace Prize was renamed "The Nobel Fashion Prize" to more accurately reflect its meaning and purpose.

Elsewhere, the wonderful online magazine Spiked has a series of articles on how Bore has wormed his way back into the limelight with his fear-mongering media surge.

Goodwill To All Men

The Audubon Society, leading purveyors of avian memorabilia, have kindly sent me a glossy catalogue listing their 2007 collection of politically correct and religiously neutral greeting cards for an upcoming yet unspecified winter holiday. Most of these feature a colored drawing of some bird or other apparently frozen solid in a bleak landscape of ice and snow, with  the word "peace" splattered across the top in lurid red ink. I ordered six boxes, naturally.
And as I filled out the form, I wondered what George W. Bush thinks, during the festive season, when he receives a card from a well-wisher with, for him at least, considering current circumstances, the rather ironic message "peace" written on it. It must be bloody irritating, I should imagine.

Flowers On a Tomb

As Dr Maroon has so rightly pointed out, the subhuman stalkers at Connecticut Florists have tracked me down using a spam generator called Blog-Digger Dot Com, and they have victimized my blog by defecating their disgusting advertising into the comments section. Consequently I have decided to close the comments on all posts from now on. I don't want the diseased fungus of American commerce infecting my little corner of the internet.
Obviously I could employ one of those hieroglyphic comment authentication service things, but what's the point? I don't get that many comments anyway, so I really can't be bothered.
So thanks, Connecticut Florists, I hope all the flowers in your stores wither and die; I hope your garden ornaments crumble into unbreathable dust; and I hope a syphilitic vagrant urinates on your cash register. Your vile essence would corrupt even the most foul compost heap in the lowest pit of Hell.

Economic Analysis

As you know, the US dollar is so weak that even the Chilean peso can kick financial sand in its face. Indeed, so puny is the US dollar that the effete and ineffectual pound sterling calls it a fag every day without fear of reprisal. The US dollar also can't run properly, it fights like a girl, and it collects sea shells instead of dead frogs and bits of grimy string like the Nepalese rupee does. In fact, the US dollar is so weak that it needs the help of the Japanese yen to loosen the tops of its ketchup bottles for it. The US dollar is always made to be the squaw when the other international currencies play cowboys and Indians, except when it isn't allowed out because it's caught a slight chill helping its mom prune flowers in the garden. No longer known colloquially as "Buck," the US dollar's new nickname is "Wendy." The US dollar's favorite color is pink, especially if it's frilly. And, as Hamlet said, his pockets bulging with valuable Danish krone: "Frailty, thy name is US dollar."

What The Samuel Butler Saw

I often think that if Anthony Daniels wrote an excoriation of Mary Had A Little Lamb - "yokel slattern unable to control her indisciplined and stinking livestock" - then the New Criterion would still publish it. After all, they seem to print anything that the primly censorious former doctor writes, even third-rate whimsical ramblings about Sherlock Holmes.
I can't imagine how relentlessly humiliating it must have been to suffer as a patient in his clinic: "You have a foul and diseased liver, Mr Smith; no doubt the result of all that disgusting lager beer you and your scruffily indiscriminating kind drink. It's terminal, naturally. Good day to you. Close the door on your way out."
Fortunately, however, Daniels' constant loitering under the street lamps on the conservative side of Grub Street, often employing the name Theodore Dalrymple as an alias, has been the cause of the most profoundly true sentence I've read this year. Stephen Schwartz, also writing in the New Criterion, in response to a typical Daniels essay about George Orwell, wrote: "Suffice it to say that the publication of such an article exemplifies two increasingly common vexations of the life of the mind: first, the temptation of columnists and pundits to imagine they possess instant expertise on extremely complicated historical issues and can deliver themselves of pompous opinions without conducting any serious reading, and second ... "
Alas, I can't claim to know much about the life of the mind, or complicated issues, but I do know that the latest Daniels/Dalrymple essay is about George Bernard Shaw, whom he dismisses as "a crank." Well, it takes one to know one, eh, Tony.

Having said all this, it should be noted that Anthony Theodore Dalrymple Daniels does still write the best social criticism you will find anywhere. If only he'd keep his literary opinions to himself, especially ones about Samuel Butler.

Born Again Cretin

Outside my local subterranean locomotive station, a sweaty, red-faced man with a Christian billboard strapped across his shoulders tried to force a wad of inky literature upon me, referring to the grimy pamphlet proffered as his 'Testament.'
He said: "My family Bible is so enormous that we had to sell most of our furniture just so that it could fit into the house. Indeed, the book is so massive and heavy that its pages cannot be turned without the use of industrial haulage equipment. Consequently I am forced to read the daily lesson to my wife and thirteen children from memory. Fortunately, the word of God is both short and memorable: it's No."
"I love my neighbor so much," he continued "that I keep her imprisoned in my basement to prevent her from engaging in harlotry and shamefulness. She calls it 'sunbathing,' but, praise the Lord,  I can recognise the face of Jezebel when it winks at me. Hallelujah. Just say no and repent of thy wantoness and sin."
In return for this unsolicited advice, I thought I should reply in kind, so I sang him an old Capitoline spiritual which goes a little something like this:
'Saturn ate his children, yes Lord
Saturn ate his children, yes my Lord
Saturn ate his children, yes Lord.
Priests keep a sacrificin'
But the God's are still mad."
Alas, he had already stalked off muttering to himself before I began intoning the second verse.

Fermenting Doubt

Is it not religiously revealing that Trappist monks, who devote more time than most to the profound contemplation of God's great design, also need to completely blotto every day by brewing those extra powerful ales for which they are so justly famous? Ask the brothers themselves about this thorny theological problem and they simply draw a rather indiscreet cowl of silence over the issue. Indeed, usually so incapacitated by beer that they cannot even speak, the Trappists apparently have adopted a proud and unrepentant attitude regarding this monastic policy of inebriated omerta.

Inuit Intrusion

Why do Eskimos not construct their igloos from blocks of frozen color dye? With just a little imagination there might be some pretty psychedelic homes brightening up the otherwise bleak plains of pale, Arctic tundra. Furthermore, gossipy residents could hold interesting conversations such as:
"Where does Eskimo Nell live?"
"Over there, in that rather lurid looking scarlet igloo."
Meanwhile, I am writing an Eskimo fairy tale about an Inuit Hansel and Gretel who are ensnared by an Eskimo witch who lives in a delicious strawberry popsicle house. But fortunately bits of the paper wrapper are still frozen stuck to the outside of the popsicle house, which the kids think is "yucky." They suddenly decide that what they actually want is a chunk of fried whale blubber on a stick from Ol' Man O' Flaherty's House O' Blubber, and so they escape to witch's evil, strawberry stained clutches by going there instead. The end.