Bastarding back-fucking-up barrels.

"Write damn ye! what else are you good for!"...*

Doing a PhD is kind of like having a gangster in charge of your life. To quote Henry Hill: “That's the way it is with a wiseguy partner. He gets his money no matter what. You got no business? Fuck you, pay me. You had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. The place got hit by lightning? Fuck you, pay me.” In a PhD scenario you pay in words written and no matter how many you do it's never enough. Extenuating circumstances don’t enter into it. You could be curled up in a foetal position, your stomach in knots crying over the futility of it all, it doesn’t matter, you still have to get up, bleary eyed and cotton wool gobbed, and write the fucking PhD. You could meet the ostensible love of your live and rut like a maniac 24/7, it doesn’t matter you still have to get up, maybe with frozen peas on your bits, and write the fucking PhD. You could win the lottery, get run over, be abducted by aliens or accidentally elected the new president of an unstable South American country, it doesn’t matter you still have to write your fucking PhD.

On a less spectacular note, you could also do your back in like me from moving bastarding back-fucking barrels around.--See above!--it doesn’t matter I still have to write my fucking PhD. It’s a calling, we’re like film studies monks. It would be nice to go to a nightclub or the cinema this weekend like a normal person, perhaps one could meet that special someone, but it’s hard when you’ve got the psychological equivalent of the Ant Hill Mob poking a Tommy Gun in your back, saying: "Finish the fucking PhD...bub!" Show me a person that thinks doing his or her PhD is easy and I’ll show a person who is either a)lying or b) not thinking hard enough or c) a soulless robot from the future that is specifically programmed to write PhDs...I think I’ve met a few of them.

*a wee quote from James Joyce for high art brigade.

Homunculus HQ!

Nymphomaniac robots in a big dustbin.

These days I’m less a person and more a nebulous gas of such loosely connected entities as sleeplessness, lust, superheroes, academic writing, caffeine, and music. Don’t get me wrong it’s great. It’s my natural state. It reminds me of when I did my masters, back in 1999. Due to the insane Dublin housing boom and rent increases, I shared a room with one of my best friends (bizarrely after such an experience he still is). I wrote almost my entire MA thesis on David Cronenberg inside a walk-in wardrobe during sleepless nights before my 9-5 shifts as a general office monkey in a crooked law-adjusting firm.
My inspirational thinking to get the job done was to imagine the wardrobe was a capsule aloft in space and I could only return to earth if I finished a certain amount of words, a la the capsule-bound astronaut/DJ of Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney. The soundtrack to such exploits was invariably Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ and the ever-present Pixies / Frank Black / Breeders back catalogue.

My sister’s boyfriend gave me a CD burner recently as a belated Christmas/birthday present, and I have been enjoying the quintessential modern pleasure of promiscuous cd burning and related copyright theft. True to form my first ever iTunes download was The Pixies' “Bam Thwok”. It fills me with joy to hear these fortysomethings still sounding shit-cool among the current gaggle of tousle-haired mooks. It's funny how trends in band names go, back in the early nineties it was all single-syllables: Pulp, Blur, Cud, Verve, Curve. Now it's 'The Somethings': The Kills, The Killers, The Stills, The Hives, The Libertines etc etc. It has all the originality of Robert Ludlum book title which always has to be called 'The Something Something'.

Mood music’s all well and good, but what if your mood is frustration and lustful sleeplessness? What then! Well thankfully there are some amazing labels that I’m getting into that produce music that sounds like Nymphomaniac robots at it in a big dustbin:
Warp records (which already had my undying respect for releasing Christopher Morris’s Blue Jam) have Squarepusher, which sounds like drunken computers arguing.
On a quirkier note, there’s the excellent Oakland label Tigerbeat6 (Anything from ‘Philip K. Dick country’ has to be good!). Their compilation, "Open Up and Say..." features Cex’s track 'Stillnaut Rjyan' with the lovely lines,

My spaceship’s ON FIRE!
There’s a snake in my SPACE SUIT!
Mission control have all gone home
They say they can replace you!

Which inadvertently led to my reminiscences of that Dublin walk-in wardrobe. I told a new friend this recently, she commented, “you really are obsessed with science fiction aren’t you?” I think that’s a fair assessment, (or understatement)...I think a ‘drip-drip’ approach about revealing my other “interests” is advisable, don’t you? I'm back in the capsule tonight and will not leave until the damn Batman chapter is finished.

Alternative St Valentine's Day card design...

Feck Valentine's Day 2: A disgruntled saint writes....

Although stories vary, one of the main accepted ‘origin stories’ for St. Valentine is that he was priest who continued to offer Christian weddings while the Romans were outlawing them. He was jailed and eventually executed, before this he apparently wrote letters to the jailor’s daughter signing them…’from your Valentine’. I used to think he actually got his heart ripped out by Salome type character, which would make a better story.

The following is an open letter from St. Valentine to the sundry couples of the world for this shittest of holidays, I apologise in advance for the language, he’s a very angry saint:


To whom it concerns,

Cheers!...thanks a lot!...I get beheaded by those fecking Romans for continuing to offer Christian marriages, and you lot celebrate by being guilted into buying sundry pink plastic crap and chocolate lumps of shite to give each other. Oh and, lest we forget, you try that little bit harder in the sack with your embarrassing fumblings…to make your sweaty gruntings extra ‘special’ on St. Valentine's Day...good luck with that.

While hovering around this stinking plane the other day, I saw pink Pringles...pink fucking Pringles! I shit you not, they looked like slices of pig innards...what the fuck does that have to do with me being incarcerated in a prison and writing a love note to the jailor’s daughter. It was hardly love, I was in fucking prison for fuck’s sake, you know, death row stylee, I would have written a love note to a discarded mop if I had to suffer another month in that hole...the jailor’s daughter was the only ‘lady’ for miles around...and I’m not even sure she was a lady.

I myself will be celebrating ‘my’ day on a bed of pornography with some autoerotic sex experiments that go tragically right, (why do you only ever hear about the ones that go wrong on the news?) watching down laughing as this excuse for a holiday (i.e. it doesn’t involve eating until you burst, drinking till you puke or having sex with as many people as possible) strains all your relationships to the point of heartbreak. I might nip out and watch you all trying to get a table at Pizza Express and spending hours deciding who has the last dough ball.

Peace out, breeders….

St. Val.
x

Plank smacks and pint procrastinations….

It’s great to see young Corneilious back on the blogging job as it were, after an all too long absence. Were I a resident of some far-flung land I would think that the people he describes are the feverish fabrications of a frenzied mind...trust me they are all too real. Another electronic cohort, Steve Plume of sausage fans (no, it’s not that type of site), alerted me to this fine source of ‘anti-valentine’s’ e-cards with such messages as "It’s ok, I didn’t need that particular ventricle anyway" and "You'll do".

Anyway, knowing I would find myself at the computer at about fucking five in the morning to try and get something done before this afternoon, I was particularly garrulous to my bar customers last night. It was Super bowl Sunday and some rugby thing’s also on, oh and the Spanish football. There is something bizarre and hilarious about the look of the average straight male barfly who finds out you DON’T LIKE SPORT! It’s like 'burn the witch' time! They say things like ‘your lot did well yesterday’ and I’d go ‘I don’t know what you’re on about, is it football or rugby or something..?’ an inevitable silence follows and then they say ‘It’s the SIX NATIONS!!’. I’m like ‘fuck you! I don’t make you watch Buckaroo Banzai or The Prisoner or something, so don’t foist your bizarre 'men-running-after-balls' interests on me.

Anyway, I’d rather serve a hundred pints to those goons than serve the type of person who spends an inordinate amount of time deciding what to drink from the following (self-prescribed) options:
1. half pint of orange juice or
2. half pint of soda water with lime or
3. half pint of soda water with blackcurrant or
4. just a half pint of soda water.

This isn’t a life-changing decision by any standards, yet the facial expressions of such people is normally that of some mythical or religious character deciding which of their offspring to eviscerate. We’re talking here of things that cost between .00p and .60p. Plus why are they so miserable? They’re in a pub. Maybe it’s the Irish in me, but being in pubs is fun. I forget I’m in England, where the look on blokes’ faces when they choose their solitary pint of weak ale is like that of a condemned man choosing his execution option.

Worse than the costumers who have crippling beverage-based indecision problems, are those that seem to have indecision about being in third-level education at all. I’ve wanted to lecture and write about films ever since I knew the job existed. Not as dramatic as "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster..." but pretty damn close—I haven’t yet got to drive around with Joe Pesci and a corpse though (although with job competition in academia these days, who knows).

Anyway, these wistful mooks come up to the bar and say things like: "I did my degree and masters here and just thought I might as well do a PhD, seeing as I’m here and that". Fuck! That’s like saying "I just sort of found myself in a lumber yard and started to hit myself over the head with a plank, and as I spent four years smacking myself in the face with a bit of wood, I thought I might as well just keep smacking myself in the face with a fucking plank for another four years...while trying to decide what mediocre beverage I want".

Feck Valentine's Day...Part 1

Have you noticed a surplus of sickeningly pink plastic objects sprouting up around the place like the intestines of an as yet unborn monstrous (but cute) alien race? Can you hear a cloying gurgling noise that sounds like "I wuv ewe" in the distance? It's nearing that time of the year again that pisses off anyone with half a brain, St. Valentine's Day. As a happily single guy wandering around and minding my own business it is my duty, and of course pleasure, to launch a “Feck Valentine’s Day” campaign.

So for all you single people out there (and those in coupledom who are sick of all this commercial exploitation of your predicament), I’ll be posting some supportive rants to help us through this shitty time. To kick off the campaign, I have contacted Hallmark and other card companies with the following "Alternative Names for Valentine's", but they seem reluctant to take my changes ‘on board’ as the marketing fellas say:

· Plastic Shite Day
· Emotional Blackmail Day
· Sap-Fest
· Breeder Bonanza
· Fucker Festival
· Restaurant Exclusion day
· Let’s Just Be Friends Day
· Rejection Day
· Err, Emm I sent that Card as a Joke Day.
· Getting hit repeatedly with a Plank Day
· Crying alone in your own filth Day

So much cynicism in one so young!...'twas not always thus, send SAE for full story of heartbreak...if you could be arsed.

Senate House, one of the big smoke's big buildings...

Norwich: forward-looking wellspring of open-mindedness and multiculturalism? er...No.

Before I came to Norwich, I looked at it on the map, “mmm”, I thought, “pretty close to London and it’s got its own international airport. It must be a forward-looking wellspring of open-mindedness and multiculturalism” (hahahaha*). Upon living here for a few years, I realise that Norwich’s relative proximity to London doesn’t really matter to most of its denizens. I was first made aware of Norwich folks’ suspicion of the big smoke while serving some local old boys at the Grad Bar. When he was finished taking the piss out of Irish people using the so-called ‘wit’ of the English male**, one old boy piped up and said ‘I had to go to hospital the other day...in London!!!!...I’m not going THERE again’. Although my face was in ‘surly’ barman mode, I was cracking up on the inside. So, the only reason this guy would go to one of the most vibrant and exciting cities in the world would be if his leg was falling off or something. The common viewpoint among the Norwich elders seems to be that all the ‘bad things’, you know muggings, murders and multiculturalism, only ever happen in London.

Anyway, this rambling rant is merely an intro to discuss this weekend, when I visited London (by choice!) to see a great lecture at The University of London by Esther Leslie called ‘American comic heroes and Failure’, it was great to hear superheroes being discussed so intelligently in such an illustrious venue. See above for picture of the big building in which it occurred—my esteemed colleague, friend and housemate also pointed out that the above, Senate House, was used in the film 1984.

With a few hours to kill and not really fancying the prospect of spending £11 to see Elektra, I wandered around Leicester Square for a bit. I say Leicester Square to sound slightly respectable, but I’m sure you realise I was wandering around the sleaze-fest that is Soho. As I have held forth on previously, Channel 4 was a vital pre-adolescent portal of smut. The best way to show porn in those days was through the medium of the ‘shocking documentary expose’, which always included a shot of the intrepid reporter braving the depravity of Soho’s sex shops and strip-o-ramas. Imagine my pleasure in actually encountering such a documentary being made during my visit! A bishop or Christian Voice type mook was beng filmed silently walking through Soho and glaring at each neon-lit window and at every poor shivering girl in a doorway (like they don’t have enough to worry about without some Christian fuck judging them with disdain). Anyway, if you see such a documentary in the coming months keep an eye out for a grinning Irish ‘pornnoisseur’ with a bag full of comics in the background. Observe that smile, it is one of realisation, it is a
smile that says, "There is life outside Norwich, places where not every eligible young lady looks like Vicky Pollard hurrah!!"


*At this juncture, why not add your own longer derisive laugh, I don’t have room for three or four lines of ‘hahahaha’.
** The comedy arrows in the average English male’s humour quiver include: pointing out weaknesses in others, one-upmanship, bad word play, sexism, racism, xenophobia, and, (their favourite) homophobia: All in all, as funny as accidentally nailing your scrotum to a bit of wood.

Block the Norwich hellmouth with the tidy books!...

Abandon hope all ye who enter heeereee....

Norwich's hellish happenings?

It would be unfair to say that Norwich is hell, but it did put in a bid to become one of the new circles of hell (kind of like the Olympics or the European City of Culture). Although it got refused this honour, remnants of the city’s hellish inclinations are still to be found. The above photo I've taken is of one such gateway to hell (note the inscription "26", 2+6=8, which rhymes with "hate" and "gate"). I will post more evidence as I come across it.

This little door is one of the foremost ennui-generating stations in the United Kingdom, it lurks just as you are almost home on “The Avenues” (a haunted street of ever-changing lengths attuned to bladder fullness and/or the amount of people who are carrying you). The hell-portal expertly amplifies the exact futility of what you have ‘achieved’ at college that day, beaming it directly into the brain. Pedestrians can be often be seen attempting to curl up into a foetal position under its tiny roof to have a sob onto the damp leaves. Christ! January just gets more and more miserable, doesn’t it? Very cold, no money and just when the lusty horizon of spring and the end of January payday is in view, Hallmark cards and a loose conspiracy of sap-merchants foist St. Valentine’s Day crap on us. I’m limbering up for some choice rants on that particular ‘holiday’. On top of that my Superman mug landed on the Grad Bar floor recently and shattered into many shards of delf misery...prompting a bad poem:

Farewell to thee, my Superman mug,
You accompanied me to many a student slum.
Next time I’ll get one made from adamantium.

Still it was a present from the ex, I will now purchase a superhero merchandise mug untainted by heartbreak...I wonder do they do She-Hulk ones. Apologies for the bleakness, don't worry, there'll be more light-hearted missives on sleep deprivation, porn and comics along in the fullness of time no doubt.

The Jimmny's gonna write you up something good...

My ‘vice equilibrium’ is all out of whack…

Howdy all, I’m back in the blog saddle again after a spell in rural Ireland (dial-up land, where being online is announced by a demonic screee eeee eeeep noise, a bit like the prehistoric
Acorn Electron or Sinclair tapes.

I am also recovering from the insane stamina required to survive the alcoholic content of an Irish Christmas. It’s not just enough to be drinking, oh no, one must be drinking a beer, a wine and a brandy and/or a vodka and/or a whiskey all at once, while singing...forever...well until about 6am, although, as evidenced by the photo below*, myself and the Badbrute did manage to stay up until about 8-9am on New Year’s Eve/Day—even the Christmas aftershave is in danger at that point.

Anyway, after all that liquid excess, (or perhaps it was turning 29?) a very disturbing thought entered my head...why don’t I just quit drinking? For an Irish person, this is like saying...why don’t I just cut off my arm for a laugh, although I’m sure some Irish people have cut off their own arm for a laugh after lots of booze. The problem with giving up booze (apart from the general social outcastery of it all) is that it would upset the delicate balance of my ‘vice equilibrium’—a kind of reverse ‘healthy food pyramid’. I was a man of four simple vices (Amber Leaf roll-ups, alcohol, caffeine and sleaze). Having given up the little roll-up fellas and contemplating giving up booze, that would leave a ‘vice graph’ entirely made up of just caffeine and sleaze. I don’t think Norwich would be able to cater for my bizarre appetites. I have complained to anyone who’ll listen previously about the lacklustre state of Norwich’s few-and-far-between sleaze emporiums. I once went into one of St. Benedict Street’s so-called ‘adult shops’ and innocently asked where their DVD section was (for Film Studies research purposes of course)...they didn’t have one,I was told, If I wanted to buy dodgy DVDs, I would have to go to Great Yarmouth!! Great Yarmouth!! What is this?, the 1970s? am I going to be sent out back to watch a 8mm loop of Bernie Winters introducing topless ladies at Raymond’s Revue Bar?** As any well-meaning citizen would, I did write a letter to my local Porn Ombudsman (as I have done on numerous occasions). She has not written back as of yet, and I’m beginning to think she may not even exist. Look after your bad habits folks, that’s what they're there for...to prevent worse ones. I will keep you posted on my attempts at 'healthy living', in body perhaps, if not in mind...

* As you may have noticed, a family member in his infinite wisdom has given me a digital camera for Christmas. Expect many odd images, although I will stop short of a digital recreation of 'Mick Hucknall's Pink Pancakes'.
**As bizarre as it may seem I have actaully seen pictures of this, although I am unaware whether or not Snorbitz was in attendance.

I see the New Year!! Jimmny and Badbrute celebrate...a little bit too much.

'Helmeted Homunculus at the Ethergut Cafe'

Come back to me Channel 4! come back to Sleazeville.

We had a late license at the bar last night. I normally work Sunday nights, which is like working at the cholera wing of some WWI veterans hospital, suffice to say it's not very glamorous. I was expecting all-out debauched Friday-night carnage like the last days of Sodom or something. As always I was slightly disappointed, as it all proceeded in a very civilised but fun manner. Thankfully I had set the video to observe the sublime Friday night Channel Four comedy experience that is Peep Show when I got back. Oh to have a 'Super Hans' action figure which attached crack pipe!

I've always loved Channel 4, as a source of perverse madness--I fondly remember the illicit thrill of catching a 'Red Triangle' movie or a RuPaul cable show at some odd hour of the morning. Friday night rocks on Channel 4...until about 12 am when it all takes a nosedive and you get something like Snow Patrol live in concert, it's as if Ch4, my childhood friend, is sending me to bed! Then after 1am, there's fucking snowboarding and skiing. C'mon Ch4, know your audience! The people that like that kind of extreme sport shit aren't up at 3 am drinking 'Good King Wencesles looked Stout’ and hoping that there's going to be a documentary about Troma films or Bettie Page or something. No, the sort of people who like snowboarding are off on the slopes with impressionable ladies who think that strapping a plank to your feet and falling down a mountain is somehow impressive. Don't get me started on Ban This Filth a show that shits on the noble tradition of Eurotrash.


Anyway, I'm off now to see Blade: Trinity, for my sins. I've heard awful reviews but that's hardly stopped me from spending an hour and a half in the dark listening to loud bangs and people in leather coats hitting things before.

In your face Covenant!!

Up there with other phrases that make the average modern life a misery—"last orders at the bar", "It’s not you, it’s me", "except for viewers in (insert your area here)"—must be "press 'X' to enter side seat".

Some explanation for my hatred of this phrase may be needed. I have, after much mental stress and fleeting moments of carnage-inspired joy, finished Halo on legendary. Halo mostly consists of shooting things with various cool weapons, which rocks, the last level ‘Warning: Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Convicts’ consists mostly of getting pasted by all comers as you drive through a soon to be vaporised space ship in a dune buggy style vehicle called the Warthog which handles like shite*, keeps toppling over and seems to always land with its side seat next to you. With every second counting (before the fusion reactor of the Pillar of Autumn explodes with a temperature of one hundred million degrees!!!), the time it takes to discover you’re in the wrong fucking seat, see the horrible phrase "press 'X' to enter side seat" and get out and run around to the driver’s seat seems like aeons.

Getting into the side seat of the Warthog is like saying to all Covenant and Flood "Come ye with your needlers and shotguns! Because I’m a fucking idiot and I’ve just sat in the side seat where I can neither drive nor operate the gun turret, I’m sitting here as if on a stationary little golf cart in a lion’s den wearing a large novelty top hat made of meat".

*Check it out, I can’t even drive but I’ve watched Top Gear a few times and this is the short of crap they come out with.

Does my gun look big in this?

Feck! Christmas is yet again creeping up on us like a black cat that rifles our pockets and plies us with booze. On Saturday I began to think about Christmas shopping and attempted some leisurely browsing in the various emporia of Norwich, bad move! I was slightly hung over after consuming some of Labhaoise’s boyfriend’s brother’s festive homebrew, ‘Good King Wencesles looked Stout’. The narcotic effects of homebrew had been proven previously when said brewer and Cambridge canoe maker fell asleep half way through a bottle of my ‘Lorcale’. He had repaid the favour in full as I dozed off after only a few mouthfuls of his Christmas concoction, half way through The Mystery of the Batwoman DVD. Needless to say I did not discover what the mystery of the Batwoman was, as I similarly do not usually discover the mysteries of nonbatwomen.

Anyway, the Cornish pasty eating shopping masses of Norwich can sense weakness and as nature abhors a vacuum any slightly fragile shoppers can easily get crushed. Especially in the Works, a place that is easy to wander into yet impossible to escape, one is trapped by their 'art' books section pondering whether to get a certain book in hardback that you already have in paperback, you never know when you might need a spare copy. Ducking into an arcade, I found solace in a toy shop, where, among the action figures and similar plastic objects of desire, I observed a large portly gentleman in a Punisher T-shirt, Black trench coat, and 'Frankenboots' (beloved of Goths). He was deliberating with his troll-like missus which big plastic gun he should buy. As far as I could gather, he was judging the plastic guns by such criteria as size, realism and what noise it made. I think one can a take a comic-inspired look slightly too far. God knows what vigilante-inspired sexual shenanigans this couple get up to behind closed doors? I shuddered to think but my bad aul brain pan was way ahead of me and I already had before I tried not to--suffice to say it wasn't pretty.