Category: Bitesize
But I say unto you, that whosoever looks on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
Matthew: Chapter 5, Verse 28
This is Eddie, the legend who works in the local dry cleaners up on Hackney Road.
I spotted this tat on his forearm the other day and asked him what it meant.
He said it was Arabic for ‘prisoner to music’.
You like your tunes then, yeah? I ask.
He stops, no-look hits the off-switch on the enormous dry-cleaner behind him, and stares me dead in the eye. The place falls silent.
I live for beats, my brother.
I smiled, paid and went about my day. Prisoner to music? I’d struggled hard to act surprised. With the amount of Celine and Britney that man pumps out of his speakers on the daily, I’d say prisoner to music is about right. Hey if Chumbawamba plan a reunion anytime soon, odds-on our man Eddie’s headed straight to solitary.
*
My mate Mim then pointed out his tattoo didn’t even mean anything.
Which made even more sense. When I asked him how it was pronounced he shrugged, said he didn’t have a clue, said he didn’t speak Arabic.
Today is a very special day.
Today I’d like to toast three decades worth of repressed homosexuality and wish my beloved brother Miguel the happiest of happy birthdays! He has filled my life with physical pain, but on a day like today and with an AK pressed to my temple I’ll happily admit all this is water under the bridge. Apparently blood runs thicker.
He’s the Clark Kent wannabe on the right.
How to best describe him.
Unpredictable? Violent? Offkey?
He is none of those things when he’s getting lucky. But somewhere down the line shit went a little snafu in my brother’s lovelife. Truth be told.. Ladies no longer react. These days even his Don Juan banjo routine doesn’t batt an eyelid.
But are the girls really to blame when he rocks this kinda shit?
It’s not like the rest of his garms pass the acid test.
My mother has recently started alluding to her granny credentials. But manz can’t bring theyselves to tell her the closest Miguel is getting to having a kid at the moment..
is perving the hell out of them buttnaked in public parks.
We’ve all had our dry-runs admittedly, but as he prepares for yet another month of drudgery wandering the planes of the Gobi desert, it strikes me that even Prince of Dryness Westwood would be lost for words.
J U S T K I D D I N B W U O
Cunning linguist prop-forward manna lettaz strong like bear living legend.
Let’s all raise mad beers to broheim
and wish him a poppin night and an even more poppin year
(if you’re a broad and you see him about tonight please do us all a favour and lunge him)
FELIZ CUMPLE FIERA X
Shit is deep.
Just now I was making coffee by the island at around three on a Saturday in late January and watching Christopher Eccleston break down in tears on Good Morning Britain recalling a time he had bullied a sensitive kid at school and I saw the effort he was making with his cheeks to contain his face from cracking on breakfast television and my face cracked for him, it wasn’t sadness, it was something like sadness but a lake of sadness rained over by clouds of goodness, the good was falling over the sadness and I was crying because of the beauty of everything, the unending pain of humanity, that all the time around the clock we are suffering, all of us unendingly at different times, one unending stream of suffering and I felt like I was crying for everyone, a shared pain, to be with them and share in their grief and bring them strength and to bring us all strength. And I thought how open I felt, that this whole experience that had shaken my heart in a way I had never felt, had left me open, open to emotion in a way that was so beautiful and so good. My suffering had made me aware of real suffering, and to see it as a gift, and feel the pain of being a human much more deeply, if I am suffering like this so must so many other people, and fifty times worse, and I cry for them and for us all, and for beauty despite the sorrow, and that in the depths of the pain is beauty itself. To feel so much, just to feel.
Somebody recently wrote an article for Vice about the irony that 85% of his muslim brothers who wholeheartedly called for the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, had never actually read The Satanic Verses. He ended it with the sentence, ‘The Satanic Verses is to Muslim intellectuals what Infinite Jest is to hipsters. It’s on everyone’s shelves, and they all have strong opinions on the author, but most haven’t read past the first 30 pages.’
Bulls–eye my brother.
As you can see from the above copy, I didn’t get past the end of page 2. But like many people rolling around Hackney with no socks and shoes on, I do have a weird interest in the author of the book, David Foster Wallace. In the words of the Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky who followed him around for a week in 1996 at the back end of his book tour:
He was six-feet-two, and on a good day weighed 200 pounds. He wore granny glasses with a head scarf, points knotted at the back, a look that was both pirate-like and housewife-ish. His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through school, wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated, went to writing school, published a thousand-page novel aged 32, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California’s Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46.
They recently made a film about this exact encounter, the week Lipsky spent rolling around with Foster Wallace interviewing him, called The End Of The Tour. It’s totally brilliant. Try and watch it.
Given our generation’s newfound affinity with an attention span most akin to that of a housefly, the following is going to be a long-shot. But save it for a rainy day or a cycle-ride or an especially uneventful afternoon at work. It’s an interview with David Foster Wallace’s sister Amy about her brother, and it’s amazing and heartbreaking and an insight into an incredible mind.
In 2005 he went to Kenyon College to make a speech to the graduating class of 2005. It was recorded, and now known as ‘This Is Water’.
It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard I think. And reverberated around in my brain for weeks afterwards. It touches on many things, and in twenty minutes there doesn’t seem to be a sentence out of keeping with the message of the talk. His voice is so calming that it wraps you up in a blanket and takes you smiling with lids half-closed every step of the way.
About the things staring us in the face, right under our noses, to which we have become so accustomed, we are no longer able to see them. He speaks of the importance of trying to see these things again.
There are two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning boys.. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other one and goes ‘What the hell is water?’
Happiness.
Hmmmm.
Happiness strikes me as some smarmy piece of crap prince from a Pixar film I pretend not to know the name of who’s just bounced into the room and begun spewing smarm all over the place from his eyebrows.
Hey buddy.
You can’t count on this guy. If you let him, he’ll make you feel good about yourself, but experience will tell you to be wary of him. As quickly as he comes around, he’ll drop you and move onto the next coolest guy in the banqueting hall, while you’re left there on your tod thinking what the hell happened. The problem with happiness is that it is transient. Or to use the Word Of The Day that landed on my desktop this morning, it’s ephemeral. Like the smarmy Prince’s affections, it doesn’t last.
Coming and going like you know who.
The interesting thing about happiness is that you only really begin to investigate it, once you start feeling like crap. You only start deconstructing the fickle piece of crap Prince once he’s deserted you. It strikes me that happiness can’t be a constant. Because happiness is not a permanent state. Contentment might tick that box, but contentment is a different thing altogether.
Happiness is a high.
And from great heights we must inevitably descend.
People who are perpetually happy are morons.
And it’s probably a cover up anyway.
Hundred per cent, off-camera, I bet even the Chuckle Bros had beef.
*
I’ve got a tattoo on my left arm, the last line of a poem called Desiderata.
Out of context, the line seems like a fairly banal Hallmark card kind of platitude. But what makes it interesting is that it’s the parting shot of a very long poem that touches on all sorts of incredible stuff; silence, love, death, truth, courage, and more. And the author chose to end with this.
When all was said and done, Max Ehrmann still deemed personal happiness as the grail of our worldly objectives. But crucially what he was saying wasn’t be happy. He was saying more than this. He was saying strive to be happy. Because the world is a cruel playground, and much of your time in this playground will be spent running from the 6ft 8 skinhead with the thyroid problem who’s constantly throwing rocks at your head with unerring accuracy. Every single break-time whether you like it or not. The striving is important, because odds-on there’ll be times in your life when you’ll have forgotten what happiness feels like.
You can’t be happy all the time.
Just look at the Chuckle Brothers.
Well, maybe they can.
Whatever, my point is this.
I think we should be wary of the hallowed Pursuit of Happiness.
You can’t just be happy. Perhaps you shouldn’t even strive to be happy. Because happiness should never be an objective. Happiness is a by-product of something else. Happiness isn’t the beer garden of some country pub at the back end of a 36-mile hike through the Lake District. Happiness is the fleeting moment when, rounding a corner into a glen, we see a host of golden daffodils. It’s something that creeps up behind us and taps us on the shoulder, and just as quickly as it appears, it’s gone again. If all we aim for is the beer garden, we run the risk of disappointment. The beers won’t be cold enough, and some especially red-faced man in flip-flops will be working his way through the last four yorkshire puddings left in the kitchen.
If we set out our stall on happiness, we’ll never have enough of it.
Same thing as chasing a high.
And that never ends well, however good your shit is.
Toni ever strike you as that happy?
*
Contentment on the other hand is different. Contentment doesn’t need highs.
Contentment counts its blessings, and is fine with the way things are.
Contentment is looking in the mirror, and the mirror looking back and saying yo.
Contentment is The Fonz.
I watched a lot of Happy Days without ever understanding how Fonz got to be as cool as he is. He was just cool. I don’t remember any montages of him busting around in a leather jacket as a kid, or his moms telling Richie and Chachi how her little Fonz had a tricky adolescence. All I remember was whenever he walked into a room, chicks on the soundtrack went mental. Fonz was cool. He was cool because he was content. When he looked in the mirror, he didn’t need to do shit. Not because he looked great already, but because when he looked in the mirror he knew who and what was staring back at him.
This is all a question of semantics, these are all just words, but if the search for happiness can be downgraded to being cool with contentment, then Fonz can teach us a lot.
Fonz was cool because he was true to himself.
And contentment, ergo happiness, has a lot to do with personal truth.
Like Shakespeare said..
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
The truth is one of the most difficult concepts to get our heads around, because we spend so much time trying to force-feed it with what we want to justify. So it becomes blurred and indistinct. But at the end of the day, the truth is so obvious. It’s so clear. Nothing is more simple than the truth. Our problem is that we’ve become experts at pulling the wool over our eyes and blinding ourselves to it. In 1953, a Palestinian diplomat at the League of Nations when asked a question by the League, on the rack, replied simply…
That is a very difficult thing to answer, so I will tell the truth.
Deep, deep down, 20,000 leagues under our posturing and day-to-day fronting, we know what our truth is. Each person’s truth might be unique to them, but it isn’t anything else. It’s just the truth. Like the fruits of 83% of my flatmate’s well-intentioned stints in the kitchen, the truth isn’t easy to stomach, which is why we soften it with self-pity and cheapen it with our protestations. But it’s still always there.
Kate Tempest:
And then… on the skies we can sail.
*
Every King, every councillor, every CEO, every underground carpark attendant, every Neo-Nazi, every pious priest, every Sunday League ref, every mother, father, son, daughter, pet hamster etc, resting their heads down on their pillows at night, in the depths of their solitude, knows what the hell is really going down. I think so. Beneath layer upon layer of justification and erring our inner voice is ever-present, softly whispering to us from a private interior room, what is right and what it is we know we must do. Whether we can hear it just depends on how hard we try to listen. Perhaps this is what is really meant by our moment of truth.
And guess what sets you free, apparently.
The happiest people in the world are those who have just been freed from some sort of shackle.
Forget happiness, aim for contentment, through truth.
Then we’ll get closer to radness.
This was deemed one of the all-time top dropthebeatonit moments by the fanbase.
It concerned an email altercation with my ex-girlfriend back in the day. The content caused a great deal of debate amongst the sexes, I received aggressive levels of hate-mail from the female populous and more than a few muffled fair play‘s and missed high fives from the mandem. Yet more proof if ever it was needed that the biggest chasm in our fragile world remains not rich or poor, black or white, young or old, but male and female.
*
Monday 16th April
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned I was Dog House bound for the foreseeable future.
There was me thinking I was out.
But no it seems I’m back once again.
So languishing here at the bottom of the garden, scrutching around sniffing my balls and perspiring through my tongue, I figure I might as well enjoy it while it lasts and share the root of my predicament with all you people. Below is an email thread between me and She Who Must Not Be Named. Another way of describing it would be to call it a stunning attack of vitriol based on extremely little circumstantial evidence, in response to a pretty great joke.
I’ve selected my favourite bits and blown them up for your viewing pleasure.
*
‘Stupid little email’ cut me deep since I thought it was a pretty funny email, not to mention a valid request at the time. I like it though.
*
‘Spoilt little teenage brother’ is also good. I’ll take it.
*
MacGyver-style diversion tactics, a classic for the scrapbook.
*
Repetition of the word ‘off’. Ouch.
*
Last but not least the killer parting shot. Not even any kisses at the end. Cold.
Apparently this is ‘Not on’. Which leaves me wondering what is on? As far as I’m concerned I’d hope some sausages might be currently on the grill turning and spitting nicely, and my pants be on the bed washed and neatly folded. Let’s hope this doesn’t get blown out of all proportion, but in case it does I feel there are two lessons to be learnt from this debacle. One is never mess with a man with his own blog. And in light of this and in my defence, the other comes straight from the mouth of the original gee Oscar Wilde.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about. And that is not being talked about.
*
Suffice to say the post sparked some healthy debate.
*
With some years of hindsight, it seems fitting now to mention there is not a snowball’s chance in Hades I would ever have deigned to write something like that were it not for the preternatural dopeness of said aforementioned ex-girlfriend, one I saw for breakfast this morning and whose coolness I was once again reminded of, as well as a warm fuzziness I feel to have spent all the time I did in her intimacy. Sorry again for the dirty pants and socks Skye. Still can’t believe you fell for the ‘don’t worry about all this I’ll do it’ before you left line.
Definitely still a classic for the scrapbook.
Some time in the winter of 2014 my mate Wilma and I spent 96 hours doing little more than cycle, eat, feel numb, cry, attempt to sleep, cry again, and cycle some more. We made it from the northern tip of Scotland to the little toe of Cornwall, enduring the onslaught of the coldest March since records began. Whenever the hell that was. It was an experience we won’t ever forget. We’ve tried.
But unfortunately we can’t. Because it got made into a film.
Which toured the world as part of the Bicycle Film Festival.
It came back to Brighton one weekend, so a few of us cycled down to watch the film on a big screen in front of a packed audience. It was cool watching our melons on a massive screen keep company with some pretty major bike films. Like the twelve year old hanging out with his older brother’s crew, necking Hooch. Enough time had passed for us to see the film for the first time from an onlooker’s perspective, without being so emotionally wrapped up in it. Which was a trip, and made us look anew upon the scale of our achievement. It was a pretty messed up four days.
Here it is.
That awkward moment when you start off a sentence with
that awkward moment when…
And you raise the loaded shotty to your temple like Kurt.
But all your friends are like yeah totally I feel you buddy.
And then you wake up and realise it was all a dream like Biggie, and you write something mindless and click on a little square and post it for others to peruse from the hypnotic glow of a screen, so you can continue to try and control an opinion already set in stone about you without having any direct interaction with anybody. Without realising that life has become quite strange. That it’s a whole load of blahblahblah like Jep said at the end of the movie with his eyes closed. Do something real. Like nothing. Doing nothing is real. And when we’re done listening to the sounds of the birds let’s go paint shit on the walls of 18,000 year old caves.
I’ve had the confusing privilege of being obliged – pretty much against my will, or at least having had zero say in the matter – to spend a lot of time over the past three years with my best mate’s girlfriend. It’s not like I chose to keep hanging out with the two of them. He was my flat mate. Until she stole him away from me. Now I live on my own and I’m sad.
Look how unenthused he is by the whole thing.
That’s not love etched onto his face. It’s pain.
Yes, pain.
Which isn’t all that surprising seeing as the conversational topics that spew from her pretty mouth on the regular can be boiled down to a grand total of three.
Horses.
Motorbikes
And whoever the hell is getting married in the not too distant future
And guess what’s happening next June?
They are.
They’re already fucking practising. It’s lame.
That’s not my mate’s dad. That’s him.
I know. Easy mistake to make.
You know that scene from the Shawshank Redemption when old man Brooks gets freed after doing fifty years, and starts living on the outside and finds it all very confusing and ends up wanting to reoffend because jail is the only place he feels he fits in and can make any sense of? Given the opportunity to live life over again, odds-on Brooks would’ve liked to have not done time at all. But shit panned out the way it did. Life just happened. Well, this is kind of the way I feel about Chloe.
What I’m trying to say is sometimes the things that get forced upon you have a funny way of sneaking up on you and before you know it one day you come to and you’re pretty attached to them. I put on a front but secretly I’m not that opposed to them getting married. Not at all. Who knows it might be quite cool.
I mean any girl who can do a flaming 360 on a freakin snake board is okay in my book.
a s n a k e b o a r d
There’s a coffee shop on Leather Lane in Clerkenwell called Prufrock. It’s run by a guy who won fifteen straight world barrista championships back in the day, before anyone even knew they were a thing, and you can tell, seeing as it takes them 23 minutes to make you a latte. In a good way. It’s a sweet place, but this isn’t about the coffee shop. It’s about its name.
In 1915 T S Eliot wrote a poem called The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Which is now known simply as Prufrock. I tweeted them to ask if there’s a link between the two, but they didn’t seem very interested in getting back to me. The below twitter stream is pathetic.
Last time I checked this blog wasn’t called dropthepoemonit but it’s not like I put any music up here, so indulge me because the following is legit. All of life is in this poem. In the same way the San Miguel advert below is weirdly impactful, because it’s about an old man looking back on the life he has lived.
That advert is good because it reminds us of the sacred nature of old age. We will all be that old man. And yes the old biddy causing havoc in the supermarket queue can be a ball-breaker, but she demands respect because she has seen the whole of life. The fact she might not have all her brain cells in tact mustn’t change that.
There’s something hypnotic and deeply moving about Prufrock. Its rhythm. It’s about a young man mapping out the whole of his life before him, and simultaneously looking back on it. I’d be lying if I said I understood it. But poetry isn’t so much about the poem’s meaning, rather than what you the reader decide to take from it.
If this poem doesn’t get you all…
Then you need a snickers to the forehead.
What’s more.
Eliot wrote it when he was 22.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.’
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
‘That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.’
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
I wonder if by the time I die they might be able to put gifs on gravestones.
Be so pimp in the churchyard.
Kid acing a true or false test in the most gangsta way imaginable.
Everyday is littered with tell-tale signs reminding me of the unwavering passage of time. One such sign I find particularly affecting is how far I have to scroll down the DOB year list when I’m buying a plane ticket. It’s enough to make me not want to go on fucking holiday in the first place.
Also, Discmen.
Another one I find a little stinging, is that the film Cliffhanger is so close to my heart.
Anything you watch when you’re like eight is going to have a profound affect on you, and my brother and I wore the tape in this VHS down to the nub. But the above looks so old it could be a retro Bond poster. And that makes me feel old. I envy the youth of today, with their angry birds and their snapchat and most of all their attention spans.
But no youth of today has ever watched, or will ever watch Cliffhanger. As a result, no youth of today will ever be able to describe the unbridled joy of finding the best acting performance of all time, hidden within the first five minutes of this staggering bit of cinema.
It concerns the – in almost all respects – pretty tense scene when the lady falls from the trip-line.
Strange the way Sly’s triceps can’t take the weight of an 8-stone girl, but plot inconsistencies to one side, it’s the performance of Frank the helicopter pilot that is worthy of closer inspection.
As the scene nears its disturbing finale, Sly is doing his absolute worst to keep hold of this girl who’s about to fall to her death. Looking on from the side is the husband of the lady, some hench rock-climber with even less acting prowess than Stallone, and our aforementioned man Frank.
And it’s the performance of Frank the helicopter pilot that steals the show. While this lady is very evidently on the brink of death…
Frank is absolutely creasing himself.
Check him out.
Seriously just watch the scene.
At 0:15 he’s just warming up, but it’s on 1:10 – as she’s falling – that he’s in absolute hysterics.
I don’t know if Universal weren’t paying him enough and he’d decided to botch the film in the only way he knew possible, but I mean how else can you explain this behaviour? I’ll tell you one thing. At that moment in time acting was pretty low-down on the list of Frank’s priorities.
My brother and I used to spend days rewinding and watching this again and again and again. I love the fact we weren’t alone. Someone uploaded the same scene having hit upon the magic too.
You said it brother.
So am I buddy, so am I.
*
So to all those ragamuffins born two decades after me, I can’t play angry birds – I could but I won’t – I don’t know what TickTock is, and I won’t live to see the 2070 World Cup final. But I can recall the unbridled fear of buying a porn mag, and I can tell you about Ralph Waite’s frankly unbelievable performance in the first five minutes of Cliffhanger. And that makes me feel alive.
The white team were destroying.
They had the edge in all departments. More compact. Better organised. Stronger, fitter, faster. And there, burning behind their eyes, clear to all onlookers watching from the stands, was an instinct to kill. To decimate the opposition at all costs. For three quarters they had the blues on the ropes. It was ugly.
But then something happened.
Something inexplicable. Out of keeping with all reason. By no means slowly, but as surely as sure can be, the strength of the whites evaporated. Where they had been so strong, they became shadows of their former selves. Immobile, sluggish, stationary. And the blues began to strike back. In the space of twelve glorious minutes, the deficit was caught, overturned, and decimated. Like a solitary daisy in a silent field ripping the blades of a combine harvester to shreds.
Winter is number 40.
The fat kid, eyes closed, feet cemented to the floor of the gymnasium, making the block of his life.
Spring is 14.
Suspended in air beneath the basket, unopposed, delivering the mother of all consummate game-clinching finger rolls. The one that crowns his team’s comeback. And puts the whites to bed for good for another year.
At school I got so good at drawing the Jamiroquai logo I could do it in three seconds flat, blindfolded, whilst eating a turkey lettuce and mayonnaise sandwich, with both hands.
Top JK jam of all time:
Close second.
Jai Paul is a genius.
But having released two of the most incredible tunes in the history of music, he’s now displaying a similar aptitude for disappearing off the face of the earth. For one of the most sought-after producers on the planet to have zero presence, like none, in this day and age is kind of fascinating, like playing a protracted game of hard to get with a girl who’s obsessed with you. I’m in. I’d marry him tomorrow. Without even telling him to get a new haircut.
Check out musical featherweight Caribou talking about his tune Jasmine.
To make things a little more interesting and also more of a ball-ache, him and his little brother AK have come up with a music platform called the Paul Institute. Some 80s style cryptic webpage with sound effects which you can only access by giving them your phone number, at which point they send you your own personal password by text, and then you’re in.
Cool huh.
Well I’ve lost my freaking password. So I can’t get inside.
So I can’t listen to any tunes.
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Luckily his little brother AK Paul is a little more prolific – maybe three tunes in the last four years – and less hellbent on doing his best Frodo with the Ring of Power on impression, so if you try hard enough you can access the music without needing to remember some password. From a place in the far-off depths of the Milky Way where he resides, gazing seductively back at the earth upon the setting of the sun, he just dropped some absolute fire called Watchin U.
Without a PhD in advanced computer hacking downloading it onto your desktop is a problem, but you can inbed it. And seeing as your collective happiness is my delight, here it is. For your weekend delectation. To melt through your headphones over a first sip of organic cider, to pump to the max as you scythe through traffic on your piece of crap Santander, to waft through the bedchamber as things get steamy and smoothed-out and melodic and morph from the realms of the mental to the physical.
Bedchamber music.
When it comes to NYE, the pressure is always on. Everyone’s looking for the right night. Everyone’s worried about the disappointment of a shit one. It’s that rare beast, a night with so much heady expectation that anything but an unabated smackdown is a monumental letdown. An embarrassment to take into the new year. Messing NYE up is like going down in the first round, first punch KO. What does a sorryass New Year leave in store for the drudgery of January and February, or the rest of the year for that matter.
That’s why you need to be at the right place.
You need to find the right vibe.
So there I was morosely stumbling through my options, hellbent on finding a killer vibe worthy of the best night of the year, when someone forwarded me a link to this. It slapped me clean across the face around mid-morning on some idle Monday. Proper hands in the air Always Bon Jovi concert moment. Some party in a secretive east London location accessed exclusively by lift. I mean what kind of shit party fucks around with a stairwell these days. I was down.
But what really got my gurn on was the dresscode.
Let’s have a look at this in a little more detail.
So apparently whatever it was that worked SO well last year, they’re sticking to it.
Couple of questions. Does this mean that last year’s theme was Vibey too? Or that last year’s party was simply characterized by a good vibe, hence the decision to stick to the same general plot-line. In both cases, what isn’t broken doesn’t seem to need fixing. The choice to go with Vibey is shrewd to say the least. Not only does it set things up enticingly for the new kids, last year’s crowd gets a shout out too.
Everyone’s a winner.
The exclamation mark is also a confident touch. I’m not sure VIBEY would carry the same gravitas without this kind of punctuation to round things off. It’s upbeat and care-free. A statement.
So let’s take a look at some of the suggestions.
That matching trouser and shirt combo you bought in total confidence.
Can’t remember the last time I saw someone matching their shirt with their trousers. Wait, yes I can.
I don’t even think he was being ironic (!)
This guy would fit right into Vibey.
Careful with the strobes though buddy.
Let’s see what else is on the menu.
Those five days changed my life forever.
Why the hell not.
Also an intriguing option.
I love this whole theme of recycling wacky garms.
Flea market in Berlin? 87 hours in Berghein waiting for one single specific drop off Villalobos’ 58th unreleased neck-brace bootleg reissues compendium doesn’t really leave much time between A&E, Soho House bag-pickup and the departure lounge at Schönefeld airport to visit a flea market. Let alone purchase an in-inverted-commas-vintage shirt. Let alone one that’s a touch too lairy. It’s a nice idea.
Church garms, a gold jacket, a kimono? Why wasn’t I there last year? What was I doing.
Last time I checked a couple means two, but now I’m just nit-picking. That’s not in the spirit of New Years at all is it. Word on the street is that this thing sold out months ago. I’m not surprised. If all goes to plan and these dresscode suggestions make a direct hit, this is going to be one truly unforgettable soirée. You have to hand it to the party organisers. The highest forms of art are the most elusive, but in the end they’re the ones on the tip of all our tongues. It all comes down to a simple mantra.
If anyone’s got a spare ticket please get in touch, on the comments or whatever.
Hopefully see you guys on 31st.
Remember that time JLS dressed up in the four different colours of m&m at the official unveiling of M&M World in Leicester Square.
Me neither.
Not even the presence of these dudes in colour coordination could scupper the celebration of five floors of primed retail space opening in the heart of central London dedicated solely to the promotion of a chocolate brand. M&Ms are the chocolate-coated peanuted elixir of life. No other confectionary gets anywhere as near as close to my heart – literally – they clog up my arteries on the daily.
My busy schedule made a visit out of the question until last weekend, but on the bleakest of Saturdays pissing with rain and hanging like a carthorse I made the pilgrimage.
What an entry.
Blue m&m came to greet me and I had my photo taken.
But with five floors of subterranean madness to check out and my head pounding like an AK47 round from Arnold in Commando, things started going loco fast.
Some assistant inexplicably put Red m&m on my head.
He hit the floor.
The merchandise was super weird.
Although I’m sure the garms would’ve been fresh.
Had I been a six year old girl with an insta.
No matter, the real reason any hardened fan hits up M&M World is for some hard pound chocolate injection. This is what I’d come to see. Millions upon millions of peanut m&ms organised into coloured containers for the ultimate of all pickNmix experiences.
But much like having Cotillard, Hudson and Huntington-Whitely lying on a bed in kinky lingerie beckoning you towards them, at the most inopportune moment of all stage-fright took hold and hit me square out the park.
I totally lost it.
Leaving my half-composed m&m selection to hit the floor and scatter in multiple directions, I legged it towards the till, swiping a souvenir mug in slow-motion, refusing to end the experience without at least something to show for it.
That’s when I met Jordan. By the demented smile on his face I could tell he’d been subjected to an intensive program of extreme brainwashing and mind-control. His skin displayed an acute lack of vitamin D and his eyes lacked all signs of human empathy.
He stood cemented in this pose for ten minutes, holding my shopping bag, staring straight through me. After an eternity peppered by the crescendo of m&ms being crunched I realised he was trying to hypnotise me, and it dawned on me that those who enter M&M World are destined to never leave. In a last-ditch bid to save myself from I tore the bag from his vice-like grip and ran for my life, but not before snapping this testament to his insanity.
Barging old woman and toddlers mercilessly to the side I scythed up five flights of escalator and smashing this sign with a donkey-kick on my way through the door..
.. I cleaved through the 3rd rate oxygen of Leicester Square once more, embracing the homeless and china-men alike as long lost friends, basking in the freedom that five minutes before I was convinced would never be mine again.
Do not ever go to M&M World.
By all means sit on your sofa at home and chow down enough family packs to warrant getting yourself craned to A&E through your roof, but don’t ever go there.
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Amusingly the only comment I ever received for this piece is below.
