Haven’t been doing much around here, have I? Lot of things going on the past week. For one I reckon I’m starting to get the most out of twitter. Like for instance the other night I found out that there were fireballs falling in Houston Texas, and the next day some guy I don’t know ate some meatballs in IKEA, and the cool thing is I knew about these events sooner than probably quite a few people. If you want to feel like a sci-fi supervillain just go to monitter.com, throw in some keywords and then imagine you’re absorbing crazy data streams out of people’s heads. It is not hard to do.
Secondly, there’s a project afoot. Uh. I’m not going to say anything about that yet.
Thirdly, I wanted to mention a nifty event I was at in Chapters on Tuesday – Neil Gaiman reading and Amanda Palmer ukelele-ing. Organisation was a bit dodgy, largely it seems because the staff were too busy shuffling awkwardly and going “Shucks, no one’s gonna turn up at our shop” to properly think it through, but it was a most enjoyable evening. Gaiman was reading from a book they worked on called Who Killed Amanda Palmer? and basically what you need to know is that his old school storytelling mixed with her gleeful sordidness makes for some top-notch material. Grimm fairytales but with hookers and crack, that kind of thing. You can see basically the whole show in five parts starting here.
And lastly, I’m off to Maastricht in… four hours. I’m typing fast here so I can stay awake. Exhilarating! There’s a carnival over there, you see, and I’ve been trawling Dublin’s various vintage shops (and River Island, and Tie Rack, which I don’t understand how they stay in business because surely cravats and cummerbunds aren’t exactly flying out the doors) so that I can bring the magic of Oscar Wilde’s Jakey Nephew to the streets of the Netherlands. On which note, either it’s bloody hard to get hold of a cane in Dublin or I’m just stupid.
I cannot say for certain, Dublin googler, but I will say this: if I know Katherine, and believe me I know Katherine, she’s been on the razz without telling you. What you want to do is make a big noise about being tired and getting off to bed early and so on and then crack on some black face paint and those rubber shoes you wear in PE in primary school and sneak outside the house. Hide out in some bushes, or better still a tree, because dropping out of a tree makes you feel like a proper boss ninja, and wait for her to go out the door. Then follow her until she gets to some shady-looking door, probably at the bottom of a flight of stairs – you’ll know it’s the right one because she’ll be looking around all shifty-like. DO NOT APPROACH THIS DOOR. Keep a close eye on what Katherine does because that’ll be the secret knock or dance or whatever that you need to do to get in. Now, get yourself back home and into bed because even with a hangover Katherine will realise if you’re not well rested which, remember, you should be because as far as she knows you went to bed early. Even if you’re tired and feeling cranky the next morning you have to fake it – whistle or something while you’re making breakfast because for god’s sake that woman is dangerous when she has a head on her. Wait until around half one or so and then leave the house. Actually better make it like one thirty-seven or something, if you leave at half one on the dot it’ll just look like you were waiting til that particular time and she’ll get suspicious. Anyway go back to that door you saw her go through and give the sign and then basically you can just ask the barman if Katherine was there drinking or whatever. Box him in the kidneys if you need to, he’ll crack eventually. They all crack eventually.
Thanks largely to that spectacularly gluttonous synapse that has been stuck open and hyperventilating since the first time I got a glimpse of a battered Ladybird1, I am inordinately and often uncomfortably aware that I’m supposed to be a writer. That being a given, I never really made any more than a half-arsed attempt at that whole deal with scrabbling around trying to find a calling2, but nevertheless there are odd Saturday mornings where I’m stood around in a dressing gown drinking slightly rum-tinged water from a glass I’m much too high-powered to wash and it occurs to me that some big human thing passed me by somewhere back when I was in short pants3, and I can’t help but wonder how exactly it is that other people settle on what’s going to get them up for the next whatever hundred thousand-odd mornings. Which, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, leads me to the reason I’m writing this: it would appear that people find out through the ancient ritual of taking to the streets and bothering foreigners.
Which level of blind self-assurance plays its own brand of havoc when you’re an otherwise fairly rickety 17-year-old, but despite all appearances thus far this isn’t about me so let us shall we get back to the point. [↩]
Not terribly specific, seeing as I was forced to wear such things as late as my eldest brother’s wedding, when I was 12. Golden opportunity to wear a Tiny Tux ™ and I’m garbed up like a cabin boy. [↩]
Emergency Aldi deodorant, I have some questions for you.
Why are you in some kind of space-bottle? You’re awkward to hold. I don’t know what’s going on with your… button. Is it even classed as a button? I don’t know. It’s hard to press, is the difficulty here. I’d hate to think you were blindly striving for form over function. Where is your German work ethic? Your forefathers would be ashamed.
Secondly, why do you insist that “Efficiency = 300 ml”? Sneer all you want, but I’ve had liquids of unimpeachable efficiency delivered to me in all kinds of quantities. And maybe this is something you’ve missed, but that 300ml only lasts for a fraction of one spray. The rest of your life, by your logic, is a long slide into deeper and deeper inefficiency. Who designed you, Jean-Paul Sartre?
Lastly, emergency Aldi deodorant, and this is a big one: why in god’s name are you called “Man Fever”? That’s… I don’t know where to start. I bought deodorant so I could be confident and fresh-smelling, not sweaty and delirious. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re trying to be metaphorical. Even so – whatever “man fever” figuratively represents, I’m not certain it’s a thing I would want to contract. I have a suspicion it would inhibit my rapport with the ladies, for a start.
Oh, emergency Aldi deodorant. I feel like I don’t know you at all.
I went to see eight films in January, all of which were worth seeing1. This would normally have cost me something like exactly eighty quid, but because of my Unlimited card, almost certainly the greatest invention in history, it only set me back twenty. Thrift!
(Incidentally I think I’ve worked out this fiendish scheme. Studios take a vast slice of the profits for the first couple of weeks a film is screened. Say it’s 75% – an adult ticket costs a tenner, therefore €7.50 goes to the studio, while tickets bought with the card are rung up as a sale of €3.30, so only €2.48 goes off into the nether2. Meanwhile the cinema is still collecting a steady €20 per month from everyone who has a card. Economics!)
Anyway, more or less the reason I mention this is because I happened to notice that Billy Chainsaw (that’s Bizarre’s Billy Chainsaw to you) has an enthusiastic endorsement on the poster for some yoke called The Broken. Now this strikes me as a pretty efficient use of real estate, because if a man called Billy Chainsaw likes a film then I reckon you should be able to figure out straight away what your feelings on it are going to be. Frankly all pen names should be chosen on this basis. Benjamin Black? Iain M Banks? THEY TELL ME NOTHING.
The rest of the reason I mentioned it is because while I was waiting for people to turn up I amused myself by imagining that Underworld: Rise of the Lycans was actually called Underwear: Rise of the Lycra. Readers, I have never had a more enjoyable two minutes.
I can’t off the top of my head think of a film I’ve actually regretted going to. Except Blade Trinity, obviously. You could put all my possessions in a cargo crate full of elephant dung and drop it in the middle of the Atlantic and I wouldn’t be as angry as I was after sitting through that. Go on, throw in my closest friends – wave that DVD at me and you’ll get away scot free. [↩]
In the time it took me to switch back to this window from the calculator, I forgot what the number’s supposed to be. €2.48 is three quarters of €3.30, yeah? [↩]
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