‘THAT SQUARES YOU WITH LITTLE RAY. FOR ME, YOU’RE GONNA NEED TO FIND SOME PUSSY! SOME BIG PUSSY!’
I stretch in the morning and pick up the Guardian from outside the front door. £10 a week to bribe the paperboy to come up here.
Paul Merton has been raped. He was introducing a silent film in a theatre and was raped behind the screen as the film started. The audience saw the shadows and were howling with laughter, thinking it was a stunt. It seems weird he’s still famous. Have I Got News is pretty shite now, though. Perhaps the rapist has started to judge us artistically, as well as commercially. It might be the Valium, but there’s something about that I find uplifting and I put the Wu-Tang Clan on the stereo, the Iron Flag album. Merton is in a coma or something.
Today the paper has a sci-fi writer in the insultingly titled ‘Other Lives’ section.
Ralph William Stead
Ralph Stead, who died from a stroke on Tuesday aged 74, was for much of the 1970s a household name as a novelist and screenwriter. He is best remembered for his fantasy novel Dogs of Rome, an imaginative triumph that saw the pet dogs of Roman senators weaving internecine plots against the backdrop of the struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey. Satirical in nature, its amoral Schnauzer Cassius was a damning portrait of Henry Kissinger. Stead struggled as a writer for pulp SF magazines during the 1950s but the success of Dogs of Rome propelled him onto magazine covers. Overnight he became a very wealthy man but the book had a critically mixed reception. Jacques Derrida phoned him out of the blue to tell him it was rubbish. Hollywood called, and Stead and his young wife Barbara moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 1963.
Kaprowitz, his first project, was a major success, and he won an Oscar for best original screenplay. The film is the story of an actor who plays a famous TV detective. Developing Alzheimer’s disease and believing himself to be homicide cop Mark Kaprowitz, he begins an investigation into the murder of a local waitress. The people he interviews respond to the character as if he were real, and the film received much praise at the time for highlighting how increased exposure to television was shaping the national consciousness. However, it’s rarely shown now because of its dated depiction of Alzheimer’s. The final scene reveals the whole investigation has been Kaprowitz talking to the condiments in the dining hall of a mental home, and that he himself had murdered the waitress, believing her to be Satan.
After leaving Los Angeles, Stead signed a deal to write more ‘animal histories’. Despite being poorly received by the critics, Dogs of the Aztecs, Dogs of the Mongols and The Mayans Kept Pet Monkeys all sold well, but Stead’s heart was not in his work. The books were increasingly poorly researched and perfunctory, becoming obviously autobiographical tales about Stead and his wife. Dogs of the Soux Indians focused on two dogs living with nomadic Native Americans, but their living quarters closely resembled Stead’s New York apartment. The dogs were married, went to the library and argued about an affair the female dog had had with Norman Mailer. There were only infrequent mentions of Native American matters, largely factually incorrect, and ‘Sioux’ was spelt incorrectly. One of the reasons the books continued to sell was that, when placed together, the spine of the covers as a set formed a picture by Stead’s friend Andy Warhol. It became clear after Reich Snakes! that the picture was of Stead slumped over a writing desk having shot himself in the eye, and sales tailed off.
For lunch I have a meeting with a producer from the BBC. He’s producing his show in Scotland as some kind of funding wangle; nobody Scottish will be involved. I can see this includes me. His expression holds no promise, a playground in the rain. We meet in an empty West End pub, as he is afraid of being seen with me. He tells me I have recently been voted ‘Most Offensive Comedian’ by comics questioned for some internet publicity survey.
I’m not one of those comics who googles their own name. That stuff always reminds me of Lynda La Plante’s Killer Net. Just after Prime Suspect, La Plante knocked off an exploitative sex-murder thriller, utilising an internet no rational mind would recognise. At one point a wee guy runs in and shouts to our hero, ‘You’d better get home mate! You’re being flamed in the newsgroups!’ Whenever I hear bad publicity I always think flamed in the newgroups!
The producer cat is a 50-something meat sculpture poised somewhere between career peak and heart attack. He orders an expensive mineral water and, as he does that jolly pre-business chat, pours it slowly over cubes of tap water.
He’s doing a kind of all-star sci-fi sketch show. Lots of big names doing a couple of sketches each over a series. Simon Pegg is doing one and so is Steve Coogan. There’s no way I can get on this thing and the producer is meeting me as a favour to my agent.
I met him before when he was looking for prank ideas for Balls of Steel. I suggested seeing how close we could get a cardboard cut-out of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle to Tony Blair. I only saw the actual show once and it had a guy pulling up in a car and throwing cheeseburgers at some people sat outside a café.I don’t think they were real people, those shows worry about getting sued nowadays, it seemed to be actors having cheeseburgers thrown at them.
He tells me the show is called Set Phasers to Laugh, and I have a moment of panic that I’m being set up for some hidden-camera show. I picture the abject horror of the waiter turning out to be Rio Ferdinand or, worst-case scenario, Rufus Hound.
I swing into this idea I have for a running sketch where a Lex Luthor-type supervillain is sharing a cell with a low-level black drug pusher, like a character from The Wire. He starts trying to ‘school’ the supervillain on some chump-change crime ideas but then Lex Luthor hits him with some high-concept criminal shit.
We see the guy come out of jail and start reorganising his gang with righteous supervillainous thinking. There’s a montage of them getting hold of an Infinity Gem so they can control a Sea Titan. We watch the Sea Titan collect moneys owed and then, in a huge booming voice, say, ‘THAT SQUARES YOU WITH LITTLE RAY. FOR ME, YOU’RE GONNA NEED TO FIND SOME PUSSY! SOME BIG PUSSY!’
The gang do a drive-by on a mystical-quest team of a magician, young knight, giant, dwarf and wise woman. They open up with their gats and one of them is shouting, ‘GET THE FUCKIN’ MAGICIAN – HE’S HEALING THEM, THAT MOTHERFUCKER’S HEALIN’ THEM!’
We see the gang boss having a meeting with Odin, All-father of the Norse Gods.
‘YOU HELP ME OUT ODIN AN I CAN GET GET YOU SOME GOOD PCP!’
‘WE ALREADY HAVE PCP!’ screams the Allfather. ‘HOW DO YOU THINK WE DO ALL THIS SHIT? LOKI IS JUST A PERSONIFICATION OF OUR PARANOIA.’
He gestures to ‘Loki’ a horned helmet and a cloak balanced over a big chair.
The next scene is the guy outlining a plan to his homies. They are relieved at its seeming conventionality.
‘So we just got to use guns, no laser rifles, no atomic knuckles, no infinite cube?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And we just driving the Mustang, we don’t have to ally ourselves with no paradimensional lion and ride that mutherfucker in there?’
‘That’s right. How are we going to make the getaway?’
He produces a complex starmap. ‘THROUGH THIS RIP IN TIME, MOTHERFUCKERS!’
So two black drug dealers have to escape from a bank robbery and hide out in the Wild West for a year but they’re told it’s very important that THEY DO NOT FUCK WITH TIME! They’re stuck in the Wild West with a lot of money and a lot of crack, but they just have to lay low and NOT FUCK WITH TIME! We see them sitting on the end of a bed in a Wild West bordello, clutching handfuls of cash and crack and looking at each other uneasily.
The final scene is the two guys reporting back to their boss.
‘I THOUGHT I TOLD YOU NOT TO FUCK WITH TIME, MOTHERFUCKERS!’
‘We didn’t boss, I promise …’
‘WELL, DO YOU WANT TO TELL ME WHY WASHINGTON DC IS NOW CALLED CRACK DC, MOTHERFUCKER? HOW COME I HAVE THE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO STEAL? I TOLD YOU NOT TO FUCK WITH TIME!!!’
As I’m screaming ‘DON’T FUCK WITH TIME!’ into this guy’s face, I suddenly feel happier than I have in years. My career is actually over, I can be alive again. I will be raped. Can that be so bad? It’s just something going in and out of your arse. Is the problem that someone is getting one over on you by fucking you? He’ll find no victory in my arse. I feel like crying, like holding this guy’s hands and kissing them.
That night I finally watch the first episode of The Game. It starts with shot of a buff guy in his 40s making himself a cocktail by the side of a pool. He sits in a deckchair watching the sun rise while a smoky American voiceover says, ‘When it came right down to it. As it always does. Roger wasn’t so great at The Game …’
We see his hand click at a little remote unit in his hand and a mist rises on the swimming pool. We see a close-up of a smile.
‘He made some mistakes. As we all do. Maybe he cared too much. That’s what he likes to tell himself.’
The grin tightens as he sips at his cocktail.
‘You can be living right there in the moment, then it can all just slide away from you’
The show proper begins with Derek getting in a fight at a taxi rank. The cops find a couple of grams of cocaine on him and when they get him down the cop shop he’s being given a doing. Suddenly a senior-looking guy comes in and says, ‘That’s enough, just let him go.’ When he picks up his stuff at the front desk there’s a piece of paper with a phone number written on it. He calls the number from the car park and someone on the other end says, ‘No problem Derek, just trying to keep you in The Game.’ He doesn’t understand but the voice just keeps reassuring him. ‘Just like the way you play The Game, that’s all.’ He goes back to the taxi rank and there’s no queue, and in the cab home he notices the cops have put the coke back in his wallet.
The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.
Robert Anton Wilson
Chapter 09
I have this idea that all our current technology has been around for thousands of years. The 1960s and 1970s were just a period when it was all put in cold storage for a bit so mankind could try to get a grip on our phone flirting, social networking addiction and porn use. Old cylinder recordings of Hank Williams will probably show up some day, ‘… and we’ll go sexy-textin’, baby, sexy-textin’’, or long-hidden hieroglyphs will emerge of aliens handing their mobile phones over to us, because they were doing their heads in.
The feeling of certainty we get with science comes because we have internalised religion. I have this idea that we are a decadent society in denial. We went to the moon and we’re not going back. Ignorance, in an age where information is so accessible, is an expression of that decadence. TV previews in newspapers that admit they haven’t seen the show, people dismissing films they haven’t watched, getting angry about jokes they haven’t heard. We all do it and, in a way, not showing us bin Laden’s body is the perfect way to make us believe he is dead. We feel far greater certainty about things we haven’t seen than we do about risking opinions on things we have.
Stephen Hawking said in an interview that there is no heaven. I can see why he wouldn’t believe in God – after all, it looks like God doesn’t believe in him.
Harold Camping, that California-based preacher who predicted Armageddon, was so embarrassed when the world didn’t end that he must have just wanted the ground to open and swallow everyone else up. An 89-year-old preacher doesn’t need a Bible to predict everything will end soon. Just a mirror. It was supposed to be the Rapture, where all the good people go up to heaven and the bad ones get left behind. I confess I was a little taken in and apologise for strapping myself so tightly to Michael Palin as a precaution.
It’s been reported that a solar flare in 2013 could bring the earth to a standstill. Thousands of years ago the Mayans predicted a catastrophe would hit earth in December 2012. They’re weeks out! The idiots. No one can be certain exactly when the solar flare will happen – I’m so worried, I’m going to keep a constant eye on the sun to see if it’s started. The sun is sending out a flare? I think it’s quite a bad sign for us when the universe starts signalling for help. Do you think after the flare another planet will show up with a rescue boat and huddle all the mountains and forests on board in silver blankets? There is a tense, silent ride into the galaxy until one of the oceans starts sobbing and breaks down … ‘You don’t know how terrible it was out there, we … we … had to eat Atlantis!’
The Sun even reported that sat navs and home freezers would no longer work. That’s some apocalyptic vision of the future they’ve created – a lawless land where men roam without direction trying to prepare their own Yorkshire pudding batter.
The Large Hadron Collider started and the world didn’t end – which means I’m going to have to stop using that chat-up line, and start buying condoms. The collider will close for a year at the end of 2011 so that some design flaws can be fixed. Thankfully, those design flaws mean that 2011 starts next Friday and will last a week.
In 2010 the world emitted 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. If you want to know how big 30.6 gigatonnes is, look at your children and imagine them dying from skin cancer and lack of water, and then stop asking stupid questions and just do your fucking recycling. At least after the Japanese tsunami the world will see that hydropower is a much better option than nuclear power – that wave could have provided electricity for decades.
Scientists have been told to conceive a strategy where people can survive without computers. They have started handing out pens and paper. If the internet shuts down, will that actually mean the end of the world? Won’t it just mean the end of the last 20 years? Does looking things up in The Thompsons qualify as the end of the world now?
Last year, PlayStation 3 was hit by the millennium bug ten years late. The editor of a gaming website said it was the same as the Toyota crisis – I imagine it’s annoying, mate, but in fairness, you and your family aren’t going to go crashing through a house because you can’t finish Medal of Honor. It would be weird if it was the year 2000 again – you’d have just over a year to persuade Caitlin Moran,* the inventor of Total Wipeout and Vernon Kay to all take jobs on the top floor of the Twin Towers.
Some users of the new 3DS games console have reported feeling sick – as they realise they have wasted their entire lives. It’s got a new game with Wayne Rooney in it – Pre-Evolution Soccer. You can get the Nintendo 3DS experience for your kids without the expense – simply give them a swig of Toilet Duck and let them stare at your mobile.
Apple had to pull an iPhone app that allowed you to pretend to glass someone, which is handy if you’ve already smashed your glass on an iPhone user’s face or find yourself in a brawl with the Mario Brothers.
Researchers have taught a computer to recognise sarcasm. Next, they’re going to try to teach Danny Dyer. The algorithm was taught to recognise patterns of words that are not meant to be taken literally. The words were taken from the Lib Dem election manifesto.
Cameron wants the Chinese to lift their ban on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and find out what makes their economy so dynamic. David, they’re one and the same thing. Ban them in the UK too, and we might actually get some work done for a change. Mark Zuckerberg stands to make $25 billion from the sale of Facebook. That’s unless the CIA can come up with a better offer than the Chinese government.
A model is warning Facebook users to be careful after she was duped into sending nude photographs to a man claiming to be Peter Andre. Her message is simple – you shouldn’t send explicit photographs to people unless you’re absolutely sure that they’re a celebrity that you haven’t met before.
New research claims that using the internet too much overloads your brain. It’s called ‘Divided Attention Disorder’ – your attention is divided between what you’re looking at on your computer, and whether your wife will walk in and see what you’re looking at on your computer.
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Porn could be blocked from every computer under government plans. It reminds me of when I was a young lad, and my mum put the Littlewoods catalogue out of reach on the top of the wardrobe.
Apparently if you spend hours with your laptop resting on your knees you can actually get burnt. The trick is to lift it occasionally. Porn usually does the trick. According to a new study, Britons now spend more of their internet time visiting news websites than looking at pornography, even though I am doing everything I can to unbalance these figures. Pretty much the only time I visit a news site is to find out if my internet pornography addiction has made the papers yet. Personally, I don’t see it as an either/other situation. I can watch Fiona Bruce and crack one out. Then again, I can go onto a news site and read about a train crash and crack one out.
It’s official. Attractive people are the cleverest. That explains why Wayne Rooney has Alex Ferguson spending each match shouting ‘breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out’ at him from the touchline. Wayne’s IQ has been measured but they won’t know the result for a day or two. They’re hoping they can piece together the test paper from the bits they retrieve from his litter tray. They picked Natalie Portman as an example, because she’s a looker and can speak Japanese. Anyone can fake that – you just have to try eating a couple of really hot chips.
There’s a new bra to make boobs seem bigger. I think it’s just wrong. If you do pull wearing it, ladies, there’ll be nothing but disappointment. They should invent a bra that yanks your boobs right down and in different directions. Then when you take it off they’ll ping back up and it’ll be relief all round.
Work! Consume! Die! Page 19