Wednesday 27 April 2016

Oh Rupert....


When he’s not remotely uploading baby penguin porn on to the laptops of editors that have upset him, Rupert Murdoch likes to relax by wearing a specially made ceramic urinal bonnet and having blindfolded Aboriginal boys piss in his face. All the while, and it’s this specific detail which brings the media mogul to orgasm, his latest trophy wife (at the time of writing it’s heartless ex Jagger spunkbin Jerry Hall) needs to softly coo “Time for Tubby bye bye, Time for Tubby bye bye” at the nonagenarian’s urine-speckled features.

None of that’s true, of course, but that’s unimportant. Truth is in the lie of the beholder. And when your goal is world domination, little things like dignity and people’s feelings are just minor potholes in the road.  The stresses of the megalomaniac are unknown to us, just as their wealth and power lust seem unimaginable so their problems must seem exponential too. We may quietly sympathise with the widow whose husband has died at a football match, or the mother of a missing child whose deleted voicemails give temporary hope they may yet be found but what are these worries compared to those of a man in pursuit of a controlling interest in a news channel that employs Eamonn Holmes? We all neglect things in personally turbulent times, our families, our appearance, our finances – the truth is just something we can mend at a later date.

People staring at the front pages of today’s newspapers may find themselves appalled by the lack of prominence given by Murdoch’s papers to the decisive verdicts handed out at the Hillsborough inquest yesterday. Some might say this is a final insult to those dead football fans, crushed as they were by an incompetent police force in thrall to a right-wing psychopath,  and then lied about by a press deeply in love with the same woman. Perhaps it is easier to see Murdoch and the South Yorkshire Police Force as rival lovers, both desperately yearning for the affection of a cold, distant woman. Love makes us do desperate things. It makes us believe supermodels half our age have genuine affection for our bald, wobbly, melanoma scarred bodies and not the billions in our account. It makes us rob pension funds and move our cash into our spouses names when we’ve been rumbled as a celebrity paedononce. It can even make us campaign for over a quarter of a century to clear the names of our loved ones when they have been besmirched by a national media in order to save the necks of Establishment figures. Love, love, love, love, love. It’s called love and it belongs to us.

All Murdoch has ever been guilty of is love. He craves your affection. And right now, when he refuses to issue even the slightest mea culpa, he leaves himself at his most vulnerable. Just as the shamed husband queues forlornly at the florist so the speckle headed press baron makes Sky Sports and Movies available to new customers at their lowest ever price. He can’t tell you how he feels in words. He’s not Julia Roberts, stood before Hugh Grant asking him to love her. He can’t go near Hugh Grant, not since Leveson. Truth, well what does it matter when love is at stake.

Don’t boycott his papers, don’t cancel his channels.  That’s kicking a man when he’s down, pissing in his pockets, robbing his money, slandering his name. And we’re better than that.

Tuesday 19 April 2016

Cormac McCarthy on...the Brexit


For the next month they would eat only food native to the island, they would eat no snails. They had banished the Peugeots from their garages and filled their wine cellars in with ales named things like Admiral Crichton’s Foggy Dew and Blunderbuss Familiar. They censored their speech to remove words not entirely of the vernacular. Guttural sounds, the murmurings of something primitive, fearful, mad. Their names seemed demonic, monstrous – gods of a fallen civilization now forgotten. Gove, Farage, Boris. They gave speeches to men of the same mind and age. A tribe formed, Brexit.

They spoke of the gravy train and the butter mountain and the free market. They looked to the East and shuddered. They looked to the West and were shuddered at in turn. Under a Union Jack they strode from one golf club to the next, a procession of monoglots. They marched on. They marched like men invested with a purpose that they themselves were only partly convinced of, shaking, angry and uncertain..

They spoke of Brussels as inquisitors from Spain once spoke of roasting human flesh. All day they preached their gospel to no one but those they had already converted. Their leader, thatch haired, wild and insane, eyes haunted by a gamble that he knew now would not pay off. The sound of failed dice in his voice, the mechanical rumble of a rusting roulette wheel his faltering heartbeat.

They spoke of monsters to come from the Levant, demons already here from the Carpathians. The earth beyond the white cliffs was spiteful, infectious and corrupt. The Channel was their friend, the Tunnel their foe. They said the enemy had lied. That ten, no fifty million invaders lay waiting to plunder their savings, savage their children, eradicate their culture. They were listened to, they were scoffed at, they were applauded, they were ignored. The clapping warmed their hearts by day, in restless sleep their dreams were all of running, weeping, pointing and hiding.

 

Saturday 2 April 2016

Fourfoots Top Forties volume 3

Forgot to post this on Monday.

Everything from the epic timeless Trammps to the glam wonder of Earl Brutus. Wu-Tang, Manics, Dylan, Cure etc...

https://open.spotify.com/user/fourfoot/playlist/0jnsG2ajVUeCkrFNhO5SE6