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.

Footnotes
  1. Scoff! As if! [back]
  2. 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?

Footnotes
  1. Except significantly warmer, and brighter, and less March-like, and well, not very much like this at all. [back]
  2. 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

Ad Nausea: This is Rugby C(o)untry

Rugby. In Limerick (where I was hatched and weaned) it's a religion. And like all religions, it's a bit shit. Well, that's not entirely fair. Hereabouts it is (admittedly) far less offensive and posho and elitist and odious than it is in much of elsewhere. Inclusive, an integral part of the local social fabric, passionately supported (by "norms") – all of this is good and all of this is pleasant.

Though I detested it (and all who played it) when I was a wimpy, long-haired, pretensions teen – I have, in recent years, tried (manfully) to set aside my prejudices and look on it more kindly. This is not always easy.

TV must take its share of the blame. Big scowly men glaring fiercely into the camera as Carmina Burana turns the pomp-o-meter up past 11. Oooh, scary! They're like warriors of the ancient world. Steely muscles hewn in the battle-fires of…er…Mordor or somewhere. Brawny arms folded, broadswords absent but implied. Grrrr! They're out there rolling around in the muck, slaughtering the unrighteous and defending us from the combined threats of quiches and poetry and feminism and stuff. Grrrr!

I know, I know – that's all part and parcel of the ludicrous, Sky Sports-inspired, over-hyping style that's become the ubiquitous contemporary default. Easily digested with a spoonful of healthy cynicism. Shit like this, however, is harder to swallow.

Fisherman (Grrr!) and Firefighters (Snarl!) – unreformed totems of trad-masculinity. They totes love rugby. But, so do, like, the working-classes. Cleaners (grrr?) and Supermarket Check-Out people (snarl?), they're all over it too. And not a sign of a besuited jock entrepreneur-type anywhere. I thought they were the backbone of the game? Apparently not. We're all rugby fans now.

And we all recognise that what sets rugby apart, of course, is its pride, its integrity, its total fucking superiority to all other sports. "Patience and humility coarse through the veins", we're breathlessly told. For "patience and humility" read "spectacular smugness and puke-inducing self-regard". This is rugby telling itself how brilliant it is. How it heroically values "honesty of effort" above all else. How it is characterised by its "camaraderie" and its rugged "determination to succeed". In other words, what it's projecting (like projectile vomit) is a reactionary vision of all that is good in men.1

They're soldiers, they're leaders, they're bastions of fair-play and decency. With big jaws. Goal-driven, success-driven, not wimpy fag losers like you and me. This is Rugby C(o)untry. This is OUR LAND. Let's all give ourselves big man-slaps on the backs (Grrr!).

Tony Robbins must be jizzing himself into a frenzy if he's watching.

Footnotes
  1. You can ignore the token women. They're just there to show the lads how much they admire them. [back]

February 11, 2011  10 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.

Listen!

[Relevant Image Here]

February 9, 2011  Leave a comment

To see a world in an old maid’s glasses, and heaven in a motorist’s slacks…

So there we were, Betty Octopus and I, in a newsagent queue. All ready to buy the reasonably-priced jellies and chocolate and water that we planned to sneak into an afternoon showing of Black Swan (like the mad, thrifty bastards that we are), when my idly-wandering eyes alighted on this.

Five seconds later and my memory centres were launched on a Proustian rocket ride back into the (usually) dim and (always) distant past. Clacton-on Sea, circa 1976. The elder sister and I shyly stand by the door of a promenade apartment as an elderly woman shuffles over to her card table. She lifts its lid and produces two small boxes. One, an "Animal Snap" game of some sort (which she places tenderly into my nervously-outstretched hand).

The other? My sister's prize? Old Maid. The exact same Old Maid. Same (glorious) font; same lurid colour scheme; same thin and sweet-smelling cardboard. 34 years…erased in an instant. I was so utterly transported I nearly forgot to buy a jumbo-bag of Maltesers.

Anyway, delicious as the exterior is/was, it is but a taster of the delights that await within. I have no idea how you play Old Maid (even after reading the enclosed instructions), so I'll take a cue from the title, and 1940s aesthetic, and assume it's all about not getting "left on the shelf", like a mad, dessicated old cat lady.

The pack is divided into pairs of hunky and eligible bachelors1 on one side (the side of right, naturally), and a lone "Old Maid" card on the other (rocking a slightly less Old-Maidy look than her *totes* frigid sister on the box).

There she waits, the patron anti-saint of non-romance – dooming all who touch her to an anguish-stuffed life of unutterable loneliness and despair. Yay! Root through the purse of any single woman of a certain age and you'll find (tucked away at the bottom) a tattered card such as this. A grim reminder of the youth, hope and dreams that now lie smashed and shattered. The Old Maid smiles, thinly. She has won…again.

What you should have done, single ladies, is picked one of these majestic specimens. They are the cardboard embodiments of all that is good in manly man. Look at all we have to offer? There is simply no need to die alone and unloved in a dank, dark house where (because of your weird, off-putting spinster-ness) your body lies undiscovered for weeks. The cats probably eat a bit of you too. All because you were too proud, or fussy, or intellectual or something. Look what you missed out on.

Proto-Top Gun studs in bulgy suits!

Big Caruso baldies with tiny feet!

Wet sucky-lemon-faced Tory minister types!

Passionate artist chaps who'd get all sexy and paint you nekkid!

Golf ball smashers!

Outdoorsy Victorians who hit fish with big sticks!

Um, lady cyclists…

And, my personal favourite, sharp-suited, pipe-smoking, dreamy motorcar enthusiasts! Look at the crease on those slacks! Swoon!

If, after all this, you still insist on turning your disdainful, womanly nose up at the above catalogue of wonders…then I suggest you grab the nearest cat and disappear into the gloom and the silence. The chaps (Tally ho!) will carry on regardless. The "Old Maid" – eternal, terrible and deathless as the deepest sea – will add another soul to her collection.

[Full Set Here]

Footnotes
  1. Steady, girls! [back]

February 7, 2011  11 Comments

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