Kinky John: "Hey! It's Friday night! I wanna get laid...where is everybody?..."
Saturday, September 24, 2005
My Life as Vic Reeves…
In lieu of a proper post*, I have recreated my life in the medium of pictures of Vic Reeves. Not the most traditional mode of biography there is, but If one is half way through a 10-night-in-a-row, barman and kitchen porter style hell-job fest, then screen-shots of my favourite cult act from all the bizarre dvds I’m currently watching is all you’re going to get—until tomorrow night when I have ‘pencilled in’ a ‘window’ of coherent thoughts and full, well-spelt full sentences and that.
*don’t you worry they’re a comin’ one called ‘puddings and porn’ one called ‘Norwich unseen’ and more cartoons. PS as if there is ever a "proper post" from Jimmny Homunculus...-
Friday, September 16, 2005
Thursday, September 15, 2005
It may be Oscar worthy but it doesn't have a Japanese hitman called No.3 who gets off on the smell of boiled rice, is all I'm saying..
Who’d of thought it, but actually getting to bed at a reasonable hour and getting up early two days in a row increases creative productivity and reduces general madness and drunken rants. It’s like reversing the polarity of your life if you get up at the time you usually go to bed. Despite my rants, it takes very little to make me very happy. I’m a total graphic design geek so the new ‘Berliner’ format Guardian made my Monday. There was also a street party on Upper St. Giles Street on Sunday that was mostly a street full of charity shop stalls—it was a demented Jimmny dream come true, a whole street of charity shop stalls, bought Kids on DVD for 50p. Yesterday got Branded to Kill for 1.49 in Cash Converters-- it's one of my favorite films a 1960s Japanese flick about a hitman called 'no.3' who has to find out who the 'No.1' hit man is and he can only get aroused by sniffing boiled rice?! they don't make films like that anymore! Oh and a new Bizarre with a good Vic Reeves Big Night Out article, two of my obsessions in one place!
Also went to see Crash. It's ok, but I found it very contrived, (feel like using that line from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory : “that seemed a little rehearsed” and use it for every film or play I watch). I can’t quite articulate why Crash irked me so. First up the name, should there not be some sort of 60-year embargo on giving a major film the same name as another one? Cheedle’s opening line is such a Ballard-lite crapfest. The film seems to say that all races are just trying to get along and are fundamentally good as long as they work hard for the American dream, except for the Persian man, who is still a bit nuts, saved from tragedy only by the American flag fluttering in the background and the quick-thinking of his more Americanised daughter.
Small clichés in films always get me—do film characters never check the expiry date on milk—they look at the label they see it’s manky and then they sniff it and pull a horrible face—what the fuck do you expect. It reminds me of whenever you see a film character smoking a joint, they pull these crazy faces that people who genuinely smoke can’t be arsed to make. Crash's ‘ethnic’ music, be it the short burst of the hip hop that occurs when Ludacris and friend are introduced or the ‘hhhheeeaaaahheeey’ with bells in the background to denote any middle eastern nationality ever wrecks my head-like the musical cues in things like The Simple Life. It’s directed by a Paul Haggis! I thought it was a some sort of equity dodge name, like James Tripe or something, but no, he's real and he worked on Diff'rent Strokes and thirtysomething (I almost forgot about the 'trendy' lower case lettering!)
Upside, Ludacris is great, Don Cheadle is amazing as usual and deserves his place as a script-writing term. Cheadle seems to escape Hollywood's attitudes to sex and African-American male characters in movies, which I’ve called the “Denzel Washington why can’t I be a good guy and have sex conundrum”: Good Black Man=No Sex, (Denzel Washington in The Manchurian Candidate, The Siege, The Bone Collector) Bad Black Man=Sex (Denzel Washington in Training Day). It's like Hollywood can handle heroic black characters who save the day as long they don't have sex! This give-and-take in Hollywood reminds me of Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact : Hey, Morgan, you get to play the first African-American U.S. president... but the earth's about to be destroyed, sorry.
Checking imdb just drives me crazier in the trivia section for Crash “Sandra Bullock was so committed to appearing in this film, that she bought her own plane ticket to fly to the set”, wow! That must have really put a dent in her millions- 'triva' for 'Lorcan's Dull and Aimless Life: A Comedy': Lorcan so wanted to clean the industrial fryer on Friday morning he paid for his bus fare out of his own pocket"...actually I walked buses are like a luxury for me, a concept that does not compute in the world of Crash.
The user comments on imdb are all like: "maybe we should get along, and, you know, treat everyone equally, because, like, we’re all human and that", and you need this sort of lacklustre film to tell you that! Go read some humanism for fuck sake.
Monday, September 12, 2005
"Did ye get your hole last night?"
When you have a tough job ‘job humour’ is the only way to get through it. You don’t really have it in academia, as the main downtime job of academics seems to be to constantly bitch about everyone, not that that doesn’t happen in every job, but the camaraderie of shit jobs invoke a bizarre humour that is more or less just repeating mundane phrases until they’re funny, you know..kinda like The Fast Show. In my current job* it’s just throwing something from long distances into the sink and saying with an ironic measure of pride in an assured tone… “skills”. That’s it, simple effective workplace humour that, like a meme, you can’t help repeating once you’ve heard it. Hey, it may be mundane but it’s better that the work humour at a bakery I worked nights on summer holidays (12 hours a night, 6 nights a week…for tuppence a month…you were lucky etc) which simply involved going up to a coworker and asking ‘did you get your hole last night’** or referring to a bread-crumb maker which vibrated ever so slightly as 'the wanking machine'. I make up my own humour, humming the 'The Imperial March' to myself when handed big grey Ikea bowls that look supisciously like Imperial gunner helmets, and remembering Will Ferrell's Gus Chiggins sketch from Saturday Night Live when I get handed mussel bowls that look like prospector's clanky pots.
Oh, on a related bizarre old TV note, the ones at work also know who ‘Pob’ is and do occasional impressions of him, which is the kind of thing that I respect in a person over say, having a car, playing sports or being religious. I like shows that never get repeated, it’s the media version of fossils found at certain levels of the ground, if you remember Pob you are a certain age, tying to explain a wooden-headed Welsh puppet that lives inside your TV and then spits on the screen and writes his name in it to anyone not of the ‘age of Pob’ and you will look like a lunatic. Kinda like that bit in Spaced, ‘it’s too orangey for crows!…’
*main duties: getting covered in crap, wearing an apron, getting treated like a trained monkey.
**My response was: "how in sweet fuck can I 'get my hole' if I'm fucking here every night, and I'm staying at my folks place, and I'm in rural Ireland and am social outcast because I like comics rather than playing GAA football or walloping people?"
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Gavin McInnes, of Vice magazine: Goddamnit. I'm so sick of seeing people bring their computers to the bar I feel like having a temper tantrum every time I see them. Lady, you don't have internet here so the only things you could be working on are: poetry, very loose fiction, and photoshopping your dog onto a 1950s hot rod.
Feel free to say no to this…but would you shave my coin purse?…
Almost there…two more shifts until my day off!
Things that keep me going, a copy of the Family Guy movie from 'D' at work and Do’s and Don’ts: 10 Years of Vice Magazine’s Street Fashion Critiques by Suroosh Alvi, Gavin McInnes and Shane Smith…oh it rocks, £11.99 but worth it. It does make the reader extra bitchy about the goons one faces on a daily basis though, see post below!
Was trapped among the splashing hot water and sink full of discarded food until 12.45 tonight and was thinking when I get home I’m going to open a bottle of Zinfadel from these fine people at Western Wines and write a bit on the blog. I love their shiny silver bottles it makes me feel like I’m living in the future, like in 2005 or something . I have just opened it, though, and to my horror, it was their Pendulum Chardonnay! Feck I’m more of a red wine type of guy, don’t worry, like Alan Partridge said when a daddy long-legs fell into his coffee…I’m still going to drink it!. Have finally hung up my ‘apron of invisibleness’ (GEEKdom cartoon on this topic soon) for the night. I didn’t know the garb of the menial worker had such power…soon as you put it on, you are entirely invisible...I’ve seen about 6 people I knew dining and guffawing away at the place I work and I walked past unnoticed…I don’t know can the ‘help’ socialise on the job? Probably not. It’s okay, I’m happy in the kitchen gawking out at the diners..yeah you…eat your chips and get the fuck out of my sight. Post below about this…thought I’d better split the posts up a bit so as not to piss off folk with gigantic block of monkey-ramblings from chez Homunculus.
Yes, a free Pheromone table booking is available…step this way…
There is one table just in front of one of our windows, and I swear to god it must be sprayed with pheromones or something—when the waitress asks me if I want anything I say, ‘could I have a Diet Coke, and could you hose down those horny mooks about six inches from my fucking face…I know they’re customers, but fuck! If you’re going to eat out, eat out, don’t eat each other out. . Every couple that sits there is down each other’s throats and pawing each other like they’re both going to disintegrate in an apocalyptic cataclysm in the next 2 minutes. I thought that was bad until saw a smug young middle-class couple play chess on some pine travel set that was probably bought from the back of a Sunday paper supplement magazine along with some Jean Paul Satre editions under the title ‘hey fuck face to you want to look intellectual in public?…why not join our ‘intelligensia affectation club’, every month you will receive a fine item to piss off your fellow humans…a pipe, a beret, a chess set? interested? have no opinions of your own? can't just talk to a woman when you're out for a meal but want to play chess? fuck you dude! you're not Steve McQueen, chess is not acceptable public foreplay for you...just be happy you've found someone gullible enough to suck your cock and call it a day...
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Sit-Coms? Shit-Coms!!
Almost over half way through my mammoth work week of 15+ hours every day…my boss at (one of) the bars I work at is away and I’m covering day shifts then booting across town in an hour and start a night shift as a kitchen porter--cheers for the lift today 'L'. The logical thing after all that getting covered in gank would be to just go to bed, but when has ‘just going to bed’ ever been in the nature of the Jimmny?. Besides, I’m seething with rage as I have spent the last 20 minutes of work scooping tiny bits of food out of a huge sink while a manager keeps coming in and asking if I’m finished…like I’m taking this long doing this because I really enjoy doing it? Like I would wash everything and then do it again just for kicks, because I really like the sound of clanking glass and cutlery? Despite being exhausted from work I still can’t sleep, so might as well keep my nocturnal appointment with the increasingly bitter-a-rama that is the Life and Times of Jimmny Homunculus. Things will get better soon, it’s the whole ‘week in arrears’ pay thing, it feels like working for free until Friday, when I will exchange some of that coinage into the only currency that Jimmny really recognises…geeky cultural products, the imiment wishlist:
1. Vic Reeves Big Night Out on DVD ohh, can't wait..lady in HMV said Sept 26 release but Amazon says Sept 12, seriously I cannot overemphasize how looking forward to this I am....beware anyone in the UK or Republic of Ireland...I could well turn up with lots of booze and this DVD and force you to watch all 350 minutes of if...ain't no lie bubb...as anyone who was subjected to repeated showings of Big Train and the Adam and Joe Show DVD will attest.
2. Alexis Sayles Stuff on DVD-again can't wait was another favorite of mine but was always getting postponed on BBC2 Northern Ireland for some shite 'home grown' comedy like 'Provo McChuckees Dancing and Spud-eatin' Variety ShinDig.
3. Vice Do’s and Don’ts Book. looked at it many times in a book shop and must own it.
4. Suicide Girls Book the only surprise is that I haven't acquired this tome already!
By contrast, the day part of work is really quiet and I have spent most of this afternoon catching up on forgotten sitcoms.
I always feel sorry for sitcom characters, they have maybe three places they go to every day and that’s it, sure they talk about exciting scrapes like being on a runaway ship but they are clearly standing behind a stationary railing in a sou'wester as someone throws a bucket of water at them.
Paramount shows all the classics, Soap, Ink, Becker (will the Ted Danson character (what's his name?..oh yeah!, Becker) ever get to smoke that cigarette he waves around in painful sitcom shorthand for ‘I’m a cynical doctor who ironically smokes’), Mork and Mindy (my adult brain watches this and thinks…Mindy is really taking advantage of a mentally retarded guy and just tells everyone he’s ‘an alien’ that’s why he acts strange..yeah right). The Wonder Years…I caught an episode of this with with Dustin Diamond in it. What is this? some sort of parallel universe clash with Saved by the Bell, not only travelling dimensions but barriers of time and quality? that's the problem, I apply sci-fi and comics logic to sitcoms and soaps, like when Mork was introduced in Happy Days, are they all in parallel dimensions? what do the citizens of Coronation Street watch instead of Coronation Street?
Oh yeah and Bravo is showing Automan (‘sure, your secret magic friend that lives in your office computer solved the case?). So, basically I’m in sad geek heaven (do I ever leave?). The main guilty pleasure is Ned and Stacy. I have a soft spot for Thomas Haden Church because he is amazing in one of my favourite films, The Specials, seek it out! As the Mighty Strobe. It is refreshing to see a sitcom built on venom and hatred, one could not even pitch it these days…how do they even pitch sitcoms these days..I wonder.... mmmm(cue blurry shot of me stroking my chin)
Friends the pitch:
Pitcher: "err…it’s about six friends that are …err…. friends and all hang out together and that…oh yeah! They are all totally different apart from them all being white and middle-class…and all the same….Ross sometimes goes out with black girls though…em... err..coffee…lots of weddings…can we have millions of dollars? emmm…goodbye.”
Studio execs: do any of these 'friends' ever have sex?
Pitcher: 'oh god no, they talk about it a lot but then spazz out if ever they come into contact with anyone who might actaully like sex or any contact with any bodily fluid of any sort.
Studio execs: okay then here's your millions of dollars...just play down the gayness...no actually could you play up the gayness just enougth to get viewers but not enough for any gayness to actually occur?...
Pitchers: no worries boss...
Darma and Greg the pitch:
‘yeah well, emm there’s this girl who is like ‘kooky’ and ‘hippyish’ but with no discernable politics or anything and there’s this guy who’s like ‘a suit’ but is like nice and that and they’re married but like they’re totally mismatched…apart from both being quite similar and white and middle class…em….it’s not …Ned and Stacy…see, they've got different names and everything …
Will and Grace, the pitch:
‘yeah well, emm there’s this girl who is like ‘kooky’ and ‘hippyish’ but with no discernable politics or anything and she knows, like is actually friends with, a gay guy, but here’s the twist! They were like in love or something and now they share a flat and she knows a kooky woman and he knows and even gayer guy and like they’re so mismatched and kooky despite all being white and middle class…I mean..sparks will fly…it’s not Ned and Stacy or Darma and Greg…see…different names.
Studio execs: ‘Will these gay guys actually have sex?”
Pitcher: oh…em…oh god no, they’ll talk about it a lot and buy clothes and go to ‘gay bars’ but no..no cock action whatsoever...in fact they will spazz out when any actual sex is on the cards...can we have millions of dollars please?…goodbye.
Studio execs: okay then here's your millions of dollars
Thinking of some criteria for describing such shit-coms…I have come up with the following terms it's a Big Banister Show (The Cosby Show, Diff'rent Strokes) it’s a Coffee Shoper(Becker, Friends), oh! it’s a Workplacer (Ink, Spin City) it’s a Metro-Mismatcher (Will and Grace, Ned and Stacey) it’s a “ Pile of Shit but there might be some swearing or nudity” (Married with Children, Rude Awakening).
Missing in repeat action so far…ALF, Out of this World (sure, you’re dad’s gone away to his home planet, and he talks to you through your jewellery box!'…), The Misfits of Science….Perfect Strangers…A Different World…Mr Belvedere.
You see, now you know why I have to do Film and Television studies…I can only function while constantly spouting media-based trivia and somehow connecting it to the real world. A dear friend of mine back in the day called Aidan picked up on this trend while I used to come out with comparisons between mundane aspects of real-life like, I don’t know, cleaning out an oven and I’d go…"this is like Hell-Raiser!” or walking down a back street and I’d say this is like the opening sequence of Coronation Street!..and he would look at me and say,
‘It’s not like anything,…it just like real life!”
Sunday, September 04, 2005
12 cert "nudity"
No sooner is my much beloved Videoplus cold in the grave but local shit shop chain Budgens started up a DVD rental shelf. Most of the new releases are £1.99 but I've been slumming it in the 99p section and it's been a clunker-rama every time with the likes of Van Helsing, Underworld, Starship Troopers 2, and The Butterfly Effect (although I did actually like that, apart from the logic that if you don't fall in love with Ashton Kutcher you immediately enter a parallel dimension where you're a crack whore, at the least the lady in It's A Wonderful Life only became a spinster librarian for turning down hetro-bliss manlove). At the minute I'm in the middle of watching The Big Bounce and the above picture is what we see as Sara Foster gets "naked" in a film that is rated 12-cert. So under 12 year olds are now going to think that when adults take off their clothes there is nothing under there apart from digitally manipulated blurriness?
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