Songs for the Bewildered: The Place Where We All Intend To Die
Back in the fun-stuffed, joy-filled, gloriously utopian days of the early 1980s, three things seemed sure and certain.
1) Nuclear Armageddon was imminent and inevitable. It was 2 minutes to midnight and jttery fingers hovered over red buttons. We were all fucked.
2) We'd soon be abandoning a borked earth and heading out into the cosmos on giant space arks. Possibly as a result of 1.
3) I'd wake, most days, to find myself caked and coated in drying urine.
All three were, I'm sure, related. Cold war politics, space opera, and my stinky wee. Key ingredients of a frazzled Zeitgeist.
It's my daughter's ongoing love affair with Bosco that has such thoughts fizzing about my brain-box. This afternoon we watched the episode where Frank Twomey returned from "the pictures" having viewed a Star Wars knock-off. He was jazzed. He was jizzed. He was excited. He wanted, he said, to build a spaceship and to head off, he said, into the depths of outer space. He, Marian and Bosco decided to sing a song that spoke of the thrills, spills and adventures that awaited them there. This is the result.
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Melancholia and poignancy absolutely drip from every flat, warbled note. Outer space suddenly doesn't sound anything like a jolly old…er…space where you'd whizz about in an X-Wing, chortling delightedly. It sounds deeply sad. And empty. A place of forced exile. A quality Marian captures upsettingly with the words…
"Past the moon,
And then soon,
We will wave the sun goodbye".
Yes, we will wave the sun goodbye as we squat in our tin-can ships gazing longingly back toward a long-disappeared earth. Tears streaming down faces half-lit by said sun's weakening rays. We're suddenly out here like Major Tom, spinning and floating and slowly asphyxiating. Mummy! I want to go home!
To make matters worse, Frank all but admits that space travel is, really, when you think about it, a metaphor for death.
"Outer Space,
Is the place,
Where we all intend to…fly".
There's a millisecond's pause between "to" and "fly" that inevitably invites the listener to jauntily sing "Where we all intend to…die!". You think subtleties like these were lost on young Bosco enthusiasts? Not a bit of it. There may have been a time, back in the giddy days of the 50s and 60s, when space seemed seductive. A place of boundless possibilities and off-world technological utopias. But by the time I was old enough to really consider such things, and worry about such things, and piss in the bed as an indirect result of such things, space just seemed horribly cold, weird and indifferent. A vast place where'd you'd lose your mind. Where you'd slowly suffocate or burn up on re-entry. Where you'd watch the tiny blue bauble of mother Earth vanish (forever) into the endlessly black distance. The place where we all intend to die.
Nobody (not even Kubrick, or Bowie, or Tarkovsky) articulated this space/death analogy as succinctly and movingly as Europe's beautiful Joey Tempest of course.
The mushroom clouds are rising. We're headed for Venus.1 The undiscovered planet, from whose bourn no traveller returns. It's game over, man. I'm off for a little cry. *Sob*2
- Snigger! [back]
- Actually, I'm off to the Irish Blog Awards in Belfast. I may see some of you there. [back]
March 18, 2011 11 Comments
Knock Knock, Open Wide…
Much to the annoyance of my "Sasanach" wife, who says it's nothing but a tawdry, second-rate knock-off of the glorious wonder that was Play School,1 our littlest one has become a hard-core Bosco junkie.2
This morning, as we sprawled contentedly (on the sofa) eating toast and enjoying the non-stop fabulousness of The Best of RTÉ's Bosco – Volume 1, I saw something that left me gravely unsettled. It was "Christmas Special" time, and there were Frank Twomey and Gráinne Uí Mhaitiú exchanging gifts and kisses in a grim studio lit by nuclear-powered über-lights. But it was neither the unexpected display of affection or the savage lighting that left me so troubled. It was their (attempted) trip though the Magic Door…
The "rules" of the Magic Door, as I'd always understood them, were simple. A single soul approaches, utters the appropriate incantation, and passes through this enchanted portal into another world. A colourful and marvellous world. A world like…a regional meat-packing plant, or the shit-encrusted monkey enclosure at Dublin Zoo.
I'd assumed the "One person enters" thing was an immutable law of physics. Like the "You have to be totes naked and alone" rule for backwards-time-travelling types in Terminator. This knowledge gave me comfort. Reassured me that though the universe I lived in was cruel and cold, it was, at least, well-ordered. But here were Frank and Gráinne, about to flagrantly defy this "truth" I'd long held sacred.
I held my breath. The (magic) door swung open. And…out came…Marian Richardson, Marcus O'Higgins and Mary Garrioch.
So not only could more than one person pass through this space between realities, beings could actually enter our world…from the other side. Granted, the invading force only consisted of three Bosco presenters on this occasion, but the point still stands. I mean, next time it could as easily be the hairy demonic entity that tried to pop through a mirror in John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness. Or Cthulhu. Or Mumm-Ra.
We're wide fucking open.
The door must be destroyed.
- Scoff! As if! [back]
- If she thinks "Boxo" (as she, understandably, calls him) is thrilling, wait till she gets a load of my 35-cassette VHS box-set of Going Strong. It'll blow her little mind. [back]
March 9, 2011 12 Comments
Will Coyotes Still Get in?
About 6 months ago, on a night (dear readers) very much like this,1 I found myself sitting, sweatily, at a giant mahogany table in my parents' "Good Room".2 Phone in hand. Preparing to talk to an 85-year-old Richard Matheson.
Look, I don't usually conduct telephone interviews in my parents' "Good Room", OK? It was very late, and I think I was worried about shouting at an 85-year-old in California (who might, after all, have been a bit deaf) and the effect that might have had on my sleeping toddler daughter and…I'm sure there was probably some other stuff too, but, anyway, there I was. Phone. Mahogany table. Sweaty head.
The reason for the call was to (hopefully) hoover up a few choice quotes for an SFX piece I was writing on The (Incredible) Shrinking Man. The reason for the sweaty head was a combination of fan-boy jitters, and an unsureness as to how Matheson would react to questions about the (absolutely unavoidable) sexual/gender subtexts of the novel.
The phone rang. A frail and barely audible voice answered. I blurted out my spiel. Who I was, what I was doing, how it had all been arranged.
Silence.
The kind of silence that feels hideously like one of those "I have no idea what the hell you're talking about" silences. Then:
"Can you hold on for a few minutes?"
I held on. For several minutes. Richard Matheson was speaking to another (unknown) man. Speaking to this other (unknown) man about the security of his property. About how there were gaps in this security. Gaps that were allowing things in.
Unknown Man: "…this here is an open area. It used to…uh…have barbed wire but it broke on the other side. So…I was wondering if you wanted that filled in?"
Matheson: "Will coyotes still get in?"
Unknown Man: "Well…if coyotes want to get in, they'll get in."
And on and on it went. I was both thrown and thrilled. Matheson was sounding just like Robert Neville. Or Scott Carey. The doomed "heroes" of his deeply paranoid (and deeply wonderful) pair of genre classics – I Am Legend (1954) and The Shrinking Man (1956). Novels absolutely dripping in angst about invasion, loss of integrity, loss of self. "I bet he'll love my question about The Shrinking Man, male diminishment, nascent feminism and the undermining of patriarchal structures!", I all-but-chuckled to myself.
Several minutes later still, after much unsuccessful (and desperate) fishing for answers I knew must be there, Richard Matheson signed off with the following:
"Don't emphasise any kind of subconscious desire on my part to make social commentary."
I assured him I wouldn't. And I didn't – in the piece at least. But I may have now.
Will coyotes still get in?
- Except significantly warmer, and brighter, and less March-like, and well, not very much like this at all. [back]
- One of those "fancy" (useless) supplemental sitting rooms that nobody ever goes near and serve only to potentially impress the kind of guests who never visit anyway. [back]
March 5, 2011 8 Comments
Images that Make Me Want to Cry: 5 – Ravish’d Brides of Unquietness
In the cavernous and deserted commercial spaces of ruined Ireland spirits linger. Grimacing spirits doom'd for an uncertain term to haunt the streets – dragging bags stuffed with ostentation & aspiration around like clanking chains. Exposed to the elements. Fading slowly. At the mercy of graffiti wags who (chortle!) decorate their foreheads with swastikas and penises. Spirits like these.1
Once-zealous advocates of "Laser Therapy" before that self-same laser spun about and became a hellish death ray. A shit Irish cover band (that never really existed) aping a Manhattanite original that was itself a fiction.2
No longer gazing toward a shiny future of swaggering consumption. But staring (vacantly) into space. Empty space. Lots and lots and lots of it.
- Currently haunting down-town Limerick. [back]
- Though one nowhere near as shallow and unifaceted as the cultural artefacts that appropriated its "4 fabulous gals on the town" motif. [back]
March 2, 2011 3 Comments
Today is just another practice session for the cup final on Friday
So yesterday. It was one of those days of Fine Gael high drama and high-larity. Firstly, I got to "enjoy" George "Let the word go forth from this time and place…" Hook breathlessly eulogising Enda Kenny as a crusading warrior-cum-entrepreneur-cum-rugby-jock demigod who hoisted high the previously "tattered standard of Fine Gael" as he seized the Triple Crown from Skeletor's decapitated head…or something.
Tumescently macho as all this was, it was still not ultra-violent and triumphant enough for the (throbbing) members of the "Fine Gael Digital Task Force". On the occasion of a certain jolly plumber’s 30th birthday they’ve channelled their pulsating and infantile power fantasies into the creation of "Go Ireland".
Its gurning hero is Nint-Enda. He runs. He jumps.1
He mercilessly fucks FG shurikens into the face of Joan Burton until she dies and her corpse turns into a pile of ashes. Really. “Tax This!”, he (really) yells as he does so. Die you fucking commie bitch!!
Fine Gael fetishists the land over are gleefully playing this as I type. Drooling as they lay brutal waste to their enemies.
Speeding Nint-Enda ever closer to his coronation at Hyrule Castle. Finger of the right hand feverishly pushing the “Throw Star” button. Fingers of the left hand frantically bringing themselves to climactic release. Cum and death and ashes and murder. And George Hook’s raging boner.2
Yesterday. It was one of those days for sicking oneself in the mouth.
- Honestly. Dynamism not done justice by action-less screen grab. [back]
- Always stiffened by exposure to “powerful men”. [back]
February 22, 2011 18 Comments
O the goodly years that might have been — now desolate and bare!
After recently revisiting the retro/manky charms of "Old Maid" and its catalogue of ineligible bachelors, I did a quick search to see how the Old Maid herself, that icon of socially-unacceptable spinsterism, had fared down the years. The resulting image haul (pictured below) is meaty enough to keep Gender Studies scholars occupied for several lifetimes. Behold a random sample.
1) Clad in black, austere, severe, surrounded by cats. Here is the Old Maid archetype. The terrifying spectre of moth-balled, odd-ball female singledom that haunts the dreams of women everywhere (or so patriarchal bastard card-mongers would have you believe). She stares vacantly into space. Impossibly empty space. Joyless and despair-filled space. Silent space punctuated only by the dull "plop" of cat shit hitting the floor.
2) Chirpy, unreasonably optimistic, and demented gargoyle. Tragically out of step with contemporary fads and fashions. Caked in cheap make-up in a late and desperate bid to hook a man. A pantomime dame, a drag queen, a disaster. A lesson to ladies everywhere. Dear God, don't leave it too late.
3) Clad in the mode of a terrifying maiden aunt, her meanings seem, at first glance, easy to unpick and unpack. But there's that roguish smile. And there's that…um…circus. Is she proud of that "Admit One" ticket she so brazenly displays? Is this an "Old Maid" content with her singular lot? Can society cope with such a creature?
4) Rich. Eccentric. Crazy cat lady. Rattling tipsily around a decaying mansion. Simple.
5) Mary Poppins with an inhuman taste for man-flesh. Crazed rictus grin revealing teeth sharpened into vampiric points. Not just sexually and socially dead, but undead. Yet still somehow predatorial. Flee, menfolk. Flee! She wants to chomp yer balls clean off.
6) Young girl thinks – "Whatever happens in my life, I must not become her".
7) Parrot shrieking the name of a lost love (drowned at sea). Animal menagerie stinking up the house with the odour of faecal matter and social maladjustment. Heart arrowed not by Cupid but by his malevolent bastard cousin. A motif that recurs in our next offering…
…which has the added non-bonus of spectacles (Ugh! Intellectual!), a bedraggled and suicidal feline, and knitting – the non-sexiest thing one can do with one's hands. You can't knit passion. You can't knit a child!
9) A greater sin than unwanted, unwonted and grossly inappropriate sexual aggression is…ice-cold, buttoned-down, purse-lipped frigidity. Who does she think she is?
10) Witch and her familiar. Drinker of infant blood. Pure evil.
February 17, 2011 7 Comments
The Campaign Poster Debaffler (vs. Campaign Jitters): 7 – The Flaccid Cock of Power
Text. Words. Boring letters written down. Talk about old hat! That shit's not going to fly with the hover-board-riding, virtual-reality-obsessed kids of today. No way. Simon McGarr, of Tuppenceworth fame, realises this. He's got his digital finger on the i-Zeitgeist of the information super highway pulse. He's effortlessly trend-surfing the netscape. He knows that audio is the new God.
And so, he asked me to record a "Debaffler" for his futuristic "Campaign Jitters" series. What could I do? Only an analogue-caveman fool would refuse. So here it is. Welcome to the future.
February 9, 2011 Leave a comment
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