Matthew Horne and James Corden present: Horne & Corden (a sketch show)

“Fast becoming the UK's favourite young comedy double act, writers Mathew Horne and James Corden will be performing in front of a live studio audience, as well as leaving the studio to play a host of brand new characters - including a socially awkward spin on the meeting of Spiderman and Superman in everyday situations. Oh, and watch out for Xander, an old boarding-school chum who is the most hideous, foul-mouthed, but well meaning man to ever rear his head from a person's past. Unfortunately, Xander specialises in turning up at inappropriate times to remind people of embarrassing moments they'd rather forget. Not like Horne & Corden - the memories of which you will hope to retain forever.”
--- the BBC official writeup



* * *

A television studio. An empty stage. A door. A crowd left over from Top of the Pops. A sense of electric excitement that fills the air like tear gas; we realise that we are going to see something special here. Coming off the back of their mega-hit genre-busting deconstruction of post-wave feminism ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’, Matthew Horne and James Corden are the saviours of British comedy which has stagnated in a quagmire of Stewart Lee/Ricky Gervais/Simon Pegg/Chris Morris old-boys-club nepotism. But no more. In a matter of seconds our heroes will walk through that door and dazzle millions with half an hour of pure comedy gold. I’m shaking a little bit in the knowledge that I am about to see two television De Vincis paint their Mona Lisa with paint made from comedic sketches.
There is a hiss. The crowd gasps. The door slides open and our two maestros enter. One realises straight away that these guys are professional comedians who know the first rule of live comedy – bigger is better. Deadpanning = dead AIR-ing. They go STRAIGHT for the lulz, pulling funny faces, leaping about, howling at the crowd, gurning at each other and drumming up excitement until the audience is so excited they literally can’t stay quiet. We're like children on fizzy lemonade. Eventually the applause dies down. And the show begins.


MH: Hi guys! Wow, it’s great to be here. I’m hermaphrodite straight-man scarecrow twat Matthew Horne!

The crowd goes MENTAL


JC: And I’m smug yardie manchild James Corden!

Both: And welcome to meltdown comedy turkey ‘Horne & Corden’!

More applause; one can immediately see the influence that their apparent years of work as Butlins Reps had on these two young comedians. They start off with some patter that immediately wipes all memories of Morecambe and Wise from our minds. Corden speaks to a wheelchair-bound member of the audience; one immediately begins to suspect that there’s some trickery afoot when Horne disappears. The young girl claims that she can’t afford an electric wheelchair, but being physically (and possibly mentally) disabled, she’s such a big fan of the two comedians that just coming to the show is enough to cheer her up. ‘But wait’ says Corden. ‘We’ve got a surprise for you… a new electric wheelchair!’ We cheer - but then Horne comes in with the new chair. Oh no!- he hasn’t got an electric WHEELCHAIR, he’s accidentally got an ELECTRIC CHAIR from a Texan prison!

He’s accidentally got an ELECTRIC CHAIR from a Texan prison!

He’s accidentally got an ELECTRIC CHAIR from a Texan prison!

He’s accidentally got an ELECTRIC CHAIR from a Texan prison!

(This is funny because ‘electric wheelchair’ and ‘electric chair’ are two terms that, despite being different, sound sort of similar. It’s like a visual pun. Because they sort of sound the same but really mean totally different things. The comedy comes in the mismatch between the expectations of the audience and the reality. After all, electric wheelchairs and electric chairs are like, absolutely not the same! They are different. And therein lies the comedy. This respectful and witty approach to dark subject matters like child disability and the death penalty is a promise that the show makes with us, and when we launch into the sketches we see that this promise is more than kept.)

SKETCH ONE: “The Gay Newsreader”
JC: Hello, I’m a straight newsreader in the studio! Oh no! There’s some kind of obviously-serious state-of-affairs (terrorist attack, hostage situation, etc)! Such a serious situation obviously requires an equally serious register of response. Now let’s go to our reporter out there in the field who I can only assume will be treating this situation with the reverence it deserves.

MH: Heya guys! Look at me! Being the androgynous member of the pair, I’m dressed and acting like a mincing homosexual predator stereotype from a 1950’s Christian fundamentalist propaganda leaflet!! But I’m presenting the news! How wacky! I wonder what kind of crazy antics I’ll get up to!!! Now the thing you should remember about homosexuals is that they (“we”) are all obsessed with fashion and having sex with other men.
Gunshots are heard
Oh look, a terrorist! Actually he’s quite fit you know, maybe I (being a gay man) can go and offer him my number!!! Then I can have sex with him! And we can go buy shoes! BECAUSE I’M A GAY MAN!!!!!

JC: *pulls a funny face*
MH: Well, gotta go, there’s a sale at Prada! Toodles!!!!!!!!!!
JC: Oh, you gays! What won’t you try and have sex with? (well, other than women, obviously)
End of Sketch
(Repeated week-to-week in a variety of different situations)

The joke here is that nobody would actually act like this (other than the gays). This sketch is making a satirical point, raising questions about the public acceptance of homosexuals into public roles, with the obvious implication that no, they probably shouldn’t be. Because they’ll be too interested in singing karaoke and talking about Jean Paul Gautier to do a proper job.
The sketches have started off well and don’t you worry – the quality never wavers.

SKETCH TWO: “Olympic Games"
Horne and Corden are taking part in an Olympic sport
MH: Being skinny and lithe, I’m quite good at this Olympic Sport!
JC: On the other hand, being big and fat, I tend to not be very good at this Olympic Sport!
End of Sketch
(Repeated week-to-week in a variety of different situations)

This sketch revolves around a common theme that runs throughout the series – the fact that Matthew Horne is skinny and lithe whereas James Corden is big and fat. This realisation is pretty important – without it, many of the show’s sketches (such as the one where Corden takes off his shirt, grabs his belly, shakes it about while screaming ‘WHERE DID THIS COME FROM?!?!?!?’ for four and a half minutes) are liable to simply fly over the head of casual viewers.

SKETCH THREE: “MAN BEING PUSHED OVER”
MH: I am a posh-looking businessman doing some middle class, in this case buying paté at a posh supermarket.
James Corden runs into frame and pushes him over.
JC: I pushed you over!
MH: Oh no, I fell over! I do look silly!
JC: I did it!
End of Sketch
(Repeated week-to-week in a variety of different situations)

Many sketch show precursors to Horne & Corden threw in a number recurring in-jokes for eagle-eyed viewers to spot; the exact same throwaway reference (for example, the lemon drink in TMWRNJ) would reappear constantly throughout a season, often with minor variations. What's great about Horne & Corden is that they do the same thing, except they push it another step further and more or less fill every episode with the same seven or eight sketches rotated about with minor cosmetic variations for the entire season; therefore if you liked the posh-looking businessman being pushed over in the supermarket, you are likely to LOVE the posh-looking businessman being pushed over in, say, the gym! Or the toilets! I’m looking forward to tuning in next week to see where the posh-looking businessman gets pushed over next (I hope it’s a posh gallery opening!!!). Sure, “people” may say that familiarity breeds contempt but did those people star in the Catherine Tate show or write Bafta-winning comedy 'Gavin & Stacey' or flirt with with Keith Allen’s daughter Lily Allen? No. No they didn’t. So they don’t know shit about comedy.

SKETCH FOUR: “Big Penis”
Horne is working in an office when Corden walks in
JC: Hey, Matthew Horne, guess what?
MH: What?
JC: I just had that penis enlargement surgery that you can have.
MH: Wow! Is your penis bigger?
JC: Yeah a bit. Want to see?
MH: Yeah!
James Corden unzips his flies, at which point a huge long prosthetic penis falls out of his crotch and lands on the desk
JC: Look, I had penis enlargement surgery and now my penis is bigger.
MH: Yes.
JC: We sure presented an cause-effect relationship in this sketch.
MH: Yes, because the penis is bigger. And there it is.
JC: So we’re happy with this sketch, then? This it is. This is what we’re going to broadcast to millions.
MH: Yes. Yes I am. I think that this sketch is the best that it possibly can be. We’ve written something to be proud of here. I’m going to lie on my deathbed in sixty years and think fondly back on that time when we did a sketch where the punchline was a large prosthetic penis. The joke being that you had surgery to make your penis bigger, and it was a success, and now you have a big penis. Which we’ve presented here on screen. That’s the joke. A penis. We’re getting paid thousands of pounds for this.
End of Sketch

At this point we realise that Horne & Corden have produced not just a sketch show, but an incredibly sophisticated post-modern deconstruction of the sketch show format as a whole. Just as in Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’, where the author presented the various tropes and trappings of the superhero as nothing more than a series of arbitrary nominal moral distinctions, in ‘Horne & Corden’ our two clown visionaries have dragged the sketch format down by not actually including any punchlines, jokes that aren’t puns or non-sequiteurs, or humour.

SKETCH FIVE: “Xander”
MH: I’m a posh man.
JC: I’m an obnoxious person. My name is Xander. I do obnoxious things.
MH: Oh no!
End of Sketch
Repeated week-to-week in a variety of different situations

SKETCH SIX: “Something About Superman And Spiderman”
MH: I am a posh superman.
JC: I am an obnoxious spiderman.
Both: We are doing normal everyday things that superheroes do not traditionally do.
JC: I act obnoxiously.
MH: Oh no!
End of Sketch
Repeated week-to-week in a variety of different situations

SKETCH SEVEN: “For Whatever Fucking Reason They’re Buying Clothes From A Shop”
A shop. MH or JC comes out of the front door holding a bag. He holds it aloft, proudly.
MH/JC: I HAVE JUST BOUGHT SOME INNOCULOUS-LOOKING CLOTHES
End of Sketch
Repeated week-to-week. No variety of situations. seriously thats it

SKETCH EIGHT: “Horne and Corner dress in stupid clothes and do a comedy song making fun of the Christians in which the main jokes appear to be that if you sing words really long, then sometimes the beginning of the word sounds like a swear-word (for example CUNTTTTTTTTTTT-RY), and also the fact that saying ‘touch me heavenly father’ in reference to the hymn also sounds a bit like asking your paedophile father to molest you, and concluding by singing the names of a list of celebrities (no, that’s the joke), so they repeat that four or fives times and then the show’s over and this is broadcast to the entire country”

This sketch ends the show every single time.

* * *

All in all, on my cultural barometer I would probably place 'Horne & Corden' into the same pigeon-hole as I do Robbie Williams and Rupert Everett’s performance of ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’ from Robbie’s 2001 Sinatra inspired album ‘Sing When You’re Winning’, especially the bit when Robbie and Rupert start riffing with each other and playing grabass, which is basically equivalent with me saying that it’d probably be a good idea to tie Corden and Horne to a chair and keep hurting them until they promise to never release anything they produce into the public domain ever again.
-- My Official Writeup

Oh u just mad cause I’m stylin on u

Ok so the other day I learnt that my former secondary school had received an official complaint about my facebook conduct. Because that’s a thing now. Facebook conduct. That’s a thing that exists. That’s something that can be complained about to educational establishments. Yes. The complainant was a woman who we’ll call ‘Jane Simpson’ (name changed to protect the reactionary and moronic), who was absolutely outraged about a poem I’d reposted onto a group about famous dead baby ‘Baby P’ (it’s like a codename to protect his real identity, like Captain Scarlett. Or Prince).

The group itself was a satirical group called JUSTICE FOR BABY PEA. Now let me explain: the joke in this case is that the ‘P’ in ‘Baby P’ sounds very similar to the word ‘Pea’, referring to the small green vegetable. So it’s like a pun. You know, satirical, because a lot of groups are all like ‘Justice for baby P!!!’ and this one is ‘Justice for baby Pea’, and then there was a picture of a baby dressed like a pea as well, so frankly the whole thing was a nice idea, cleverly put together, a perfect combination of opportunity for verbal wit followed up with the correct brain response and satirical nous to successfully carry through the idea, andYES I KNOW IT’S NOT VERY CLEVER and neither was the poem I reposted, which was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air lyrics but instead of talking about a young rapper being relocated to his stuffy posh Aunt and Uncle’s house in Florida, and I’m willing to accept that fact.

However.

This was the email sent.

Dear *mr headmaster*
I thought you might like to be aware of the above student's idea of a joke, as I presume if he is to be believed a student at your college. He has joined a Facebook group which has been set up to mock the death of a 17 month old baby after months of torture and has very kindly added a poem for other members' amusement. Perhaps you may not feel that this is anything you would wish to be involved with, but it may be interesting to you that this sick individual happily states that he is student at your school - which is something I presume you would not wish to be linked with. Several of the members are students at various universities - it is sickening to think that these are some of the young adults that are supposed to be also our privilaged ones.
I leave it with you to deal with as you deem necessary
Regards
Jane Simpson (a sickened campaigner for tougher measures against child abuse).

See, I like this. I like the way it’s structured. I like the way that Jane plays with conventions of language – such as in her premodifying of ‘joke’ with ‘the above student’s idea of a…’ to imply that she, indeed, doesn’t think a poem about child abuse written in the style of the theme music from a Will Smith sitcom from the 90s is any sort of thing to be laughing about. I like the dark, biting globules of sarcasm that drip like tar from ‘has very kindly added a poem for other members’ amusement’. I like the three different variants on the word ‘sick’. I like the use of dramatic irony – the build up of describing my crimes, then the sudden thematic u-turn as it hinges, swivelling the sights of criticism purely on the school who have been made guilty by association of my own misdeeds. I like the places where it formally parts company with fact. I love the fact that Jane describes herself as a ‘campaigner’, as though there’s a huge political movement dedicated to preventing ‘tougher measures against child abuse’ and she’s the one solitary firebrand left to stand up for the kids, waging a ceaseless war against the twin evils of ironic poetry and no-good beatnik teenagers, using well-aimed molotov cocktails of passive-aggressive emails and tattling to old schoolteachers.

I like to imagine the creation of this email. In my mind’s eye I see Jane surfing Facebook in the middle of the night, her jowls glittering in the darkness of her empty flat, going through every dead-child related group one-by-one until by some horrific mistyping she inadvertently lands on an ironic group. I can imagine the look on her face. It would be somewhat similar to this smilie:

D:

I can imagine the thoughts that flowed sluggishy through her mind. ‘This is it. I’ve seen moral standards slipping in my time. I’ve seen them letting homosexuals give heart transplants, lesbians drive buses, blacks present Blue Peter, and I’ve said nothing. Because things move on. But no more. NO MORE. For too long I've made myself a sacrifice to the altar of progress, but this is it. These little bastards have gone too far. I’m drawing a line in the sand HERE.’ And then I imagine her pushing the eight cats off of her computer to write the email, laughing derisively as she poured forth her bitter and unrelenting scorn, thinking ‘yeah that’s how privileged is spelt’, then concluding with the frankly bizarre linguistic and orthographic gymnastics of “these are some of the young adults that are supposed to be also our privilaged ones” and sending the email off to a schoolteacher. JOB WELL DONE. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. THE CHILDREN ARE NOW 6% SAFER THANKS TO JANE SIMPSON. YES

Now let’s get something straight. I am All For small children not being tortured to death. I think that what happened to Big P was horrific and naturally as soon as I heard, I sprinted to my computer, logged onto Facebook and joined “Justice for Baby P”, “Remebrance for Baby P”, “Baby P' .. we want justice!!”, “SIGN BOOK OF CONDOLANCE FOR BABY P”, “Baby P Killers should be hanged Drawn and Quartered”, “PETITION GROUP TO GET " BABY P" A MEMORIAL PLAQUE” “'Baby P' another child left to die by our so called public services!”, “Join The Petition To Get The Parents of Baby P Life In Prison!” etc, just to clarify my righteous sense of morally-absolutist anger. And yeah, I do believe that there are certain things that shouldn’t be laughed at, such as the mental image of thick craft-paper papercuts on the head of an erect penis, the increasingly-unhideable nature of the scars on my legs from my rampant self-harming, and – indeed – the sadistic murder of small children. Now my longtime blogging audience might find that last one difficult to reconcile with my output so far – after all we all know that there are some epic lulz to be gotten out of dead baby jokes HOW DO YOU MAKE A DEAD BABY FLOAT TWO SCOOPS OF ICECREAM ONE SCOOP OF DEAD BABY LOLolol, and yes, I’m unlikely to win an award for not inadvertently saying offensive things to girls and the disabled, but you have to realise that what’s funny in these jokes is not the actual act of the baby being cut into pieces. You idiots. What’s being mocked is the sense of disgust felt by the listeners; in imagining these perverse acts of horror, we’re transported out of our comfort zones and forced to react. It’s either LAUGH CRY FIGHT OR RUN and the easiest option is to laugh. We’re turning round and laughing at our inabilities to reconcile the horrors of the world with our own delicate sensibilities. Which is where the entire point of shock comedy comes from, and it’s why Jimmy Carr still has a career. And so we made a facebook group to make fun of the Baby P Facebook groups and we had an ironic laugh by combining the banal with the horrible. My natural reaction was to laugh. But laugh ironically, which means that I had to do air-quotes and actually pronounce the individual ‘ha’s.

Jane Simpson’s natural reaction was to cry. Actually her natural reaction was to throw her hands up in the air in an ineffectual display of horror, fall of her chair, and, in an act of self-righteous morally convenient rage, spasm every muscle in her body and suck her crusty tampon up through her uterus into her poisonous and fetid womb where it will hopefully give her some kind of ulcer. And then write an ineffectual email. And then my school formally asked me to cut all public ties to them. And my mum said that she was disappointed in my lack of morals. And you know what? All this makes me sort of wish that that baby hadn’t even been killed at all. Seriously.

This all raises a question though. Why does this sort of thing always happen to me? I’m not the only person I know who has a blog or who is on facebook but I’m the only one getting accusatory hatemail and being called ‘sick’ by middle-aged women with millipedes crawing out of their vaginas. The other kids have blogs that are objectively of a lower standard than this one, and THEY don’t have get 50 comments accusing them of massive self-harm and of having ‘less than below average looks’ which to be honest is such a diss if you think about it. Perhaps all of this is just the beginning of the anti-Tom backlash. It’s not like I haven’t expected it coming; after all you can’t fly as high and burn as brightly as I’ve been doing without being aware of the sword of Damocles hanging ever more dangerously above your head. I just guess that I’m one of those people who makes other folk Sit Up and Take Notice. I’m not like Darfur: you can’t ignore me and hope I’ll go away. I’m like Israel – people are on the streets protesting both for and against me. Arabs are dying in foreign countries over my right to exist. It’s the best and brightest flowers that are the first to get picked, after all, and if you’re a young agent provocateur like me you are BOUND to get in the face of ‘the man’ and the rest of his fat-cat blood-for-oil cronies. They’re all like ‘what do you think you’re doing’ and ‘you young rebel, put on a tie and get a job in an office and be a nine-to-five wage slave like the rest of the corporate drones!!’ and ‘you’re self pitiful, self loathing with less than below average looks and a childish attitude towards life’ and I’m just going by on my fixed wheel bike with my keffiyeh and an my American Apparel hoodie and my sweet Nikes and I’m like ‘chill out man, anyway gtg I have some more bourgeoise power-structures to deconstruct with my cutting wit and inflammatory prose’ and they’re all left wearing their brown raincoats standing in the terraced streets of Brixton and waving their fists ineffectually after me while I go off and probably hook up with some babes or something.

And really I won’t consider myself any sort of success until I’m officially branded ‘sick’ and possibly ‘vicious’ by the Daily Mail, and I suppose that this is a good start. Overall a good day’s work, all told.



* * *
in other news
SELF HARM UPDATE
so I was in the kitchen and was pretty drunk on gin and the crashing inadequacies of my life were pressing down upon me from all sides and I didn’t know what to do because my cutting blades were downstairs so I just leapt into action and took a cheesegrater to my calves for like twenty minutes until the back of my legs looked like Ronald Macdonald’s hairdo

Holy shit guys guess who I bumped into at The Bridge the other night (semi-ironic depression itp)

(I’ve re-read this post and have realised that it’s fairly easy to pinpoint the exact time when I lost interest in writing it and instead began to stare listlessly into space and contemplating my own bitter loneliness, I have marked it with an asterix, also I apologise for it in advance)

The other night I grew weary of sitting by myself in the darkness of my bedroom, listening to ‘Against All Odds’ on loop, softly weeping for hours on end and carving <3 <3 ROSIE <3 <3 on the inside of my thighs with the blade of a pencil sharpener, so I decided that the time was right to Go Out and Get Hammered at The Bridge (the twat’s nightclub of choice); the aim being to quench the agonising eternal pain of the flaming ginger train wreck that is my life with a long cooling stream of gin and tonics, tequila shots, Jaegerbombs and cheap cheap nightclub wine.

To be honest, when I put on my purple shirt and my Trendy Trousers From Topman, I thought it would be Just Another Night Out. I thought I’d just get a bit drunk, loudly out myself as a racist/homophobe/human in front of my fellow students, dance ironically a bit, pull a girl (pulling technique: stare unrelentingly into the face of the target in a neurotic attempt to achieve eye-contact for twenty five minutes, ‘accidentally’ brush up against her on the dancefloor, follow her about her like an indie Barry George), buy a kebab I didn’t want, eat half of it, throw up on myself, reconsider my circumstances, decide that my life really is an unending black pit of despair and loneliness, start listening to Linkin Park on my new iPod, and possibly conclude the night by bursting into tears and toppling over into a gutter like an ancient mossy crumbling statue of Troilus, screaming incoherent bellows of rage and loss into the chasmic depths of cruel and remorseless night sky against which my pain and heartbreak is little more than an ephemeral mote of dust.

To be honest my best-case scenario was to stand in the corner and glare at kissing couples for an hour and a half and then walk dejectedly home and lie to my diary.

But what I didn’t realise was that the night had bigger plans – and bigger surprises – in store for me! Because guess who was at the nightclub… none other than Ali Bartlam!

!!


!!!!!!

[Hmm. I guess that my problem here is that a lot of my new fans (if you define ‘fan’ as ‘any random weirdo who has come up to me out of the blue and started talking to me about my online diary’ then I have Six) don’t really know the general history of my life or the literary heritage of this blog; they won’t get my many examples of reference, allusion and implicature. It’ll be like writing a 2,500 word long essay on Milton and not having ever read the Bible (imagine that); all of my comic references to spadeface, Gnat Bell, clamclamclam, Tiffin, Hampton, SWPS, Kings, Lois the batfaced Newtgirl, The Adventures of Emoboy, MYSADDO, Steve’s all-encompassingly cavernous needle-filled vagina, rooooose, Greg I want to be bad Stoddddddart, Marios, the Oli Gill Rape Technique, The Flask, The Fleece, The Hiking Boots, KrisMas, Cassie my favourite whale Bowman, Alex nice but dim Patrick, etc, etc, will just fly over your heads. You will be sitting there and wondering what I’m talking about, who these people are, and why bumping into my exexex-girlfriend’s little sister at a shite Oxford nightclub was so significant. I mean it wasn’t really THAT significant in the general scheme of things, it’s nothing compared to the bombing of Gaza or orphans with AIDS or being powerless to stop your combined romantic hopes and dreams for the future being throttled into unconsciousness and then dashed into bloody scraps on the unyielding concrete floor of apathy and resentment, but for the purposes of this blog, and to my drunk drunk mind, meeting Ali was the most significant thing that had ever happened in to anybody ever up to this point.]

Perhaps I’d better explain.

Basically Alz and I share something of a chequered history; a united enmity that I guess could possibly be a cover for some simmering inter-sororal sexual desire but is probably more accurately described as ‘mutual unrelenting loathing’. To be honest, it’s one of those weird historical oddities like the Sharks/Jets feud; the Ali/Tom Friction been going on so long now that I don’t think anybody even remembers how it even started in the first place! If I really stretch my mind back into the cavernous darkness of history, I recall that there was some sort of disagreement at somebody’s birthday party; certain people may have inadvertently referred to certain other people as ‘the fat sister’ at a in a fit of drunken insanity madness, and then certain other people found out and screamed me out of the house party, and then the next year and a half was filled with certain people shooting certain other people murderous glances unsuccesfully hidden behind gritted smiles every time Lucia was out of the room, but really I can’t quite remember what happened. Suffice to say, Ali was one of those people who I’d really have liked to get to know better, but the fact that we both despised each other with all the heat of the sun made it difficult for us to remain in the same room for longer than ten minutes without laudanum. Like, I was trying to decide who I’d least like to be trapped in a telephone box with for a year, and decided that it’d be a tossup between Paul Flemming, Hitler, our primary school music teacher who dragged me into a bush and molested me to the rhythm of Three Blind Mice, and A-B :)

To be honest by the time we arrived at the club, my attempts to drink myself into a blissful state of comfortable numbness were going fairly well; I couldn’t really feel much of my face and the dried blood oozing from my ear canal had more or less stopped, and I was halfway through listening to Pictures of You, and at the back of my mind I was fairly sure that I still wanted to lock myself in a cupboard and never come out until the world made sense again and so I was unable to muster up any emotional reaction to seeing that the club was filled with my ex-ex-ex's friends from back in the day and was quite an anti-tom place to be, all told, and frankly by the time I actually came into contact Ali I was so elephant’s trunk that I just have this image of her in my mind as some huge totemic vision of sunglasses and glaring, looming above my puny form like something out of Lovecraft. Cthulu Bartlam perhaps

It was weird. I wasn't even sure if we were supposed to loathe each other any more. It felt like we'd both teleported in from different yet subtly connected dimensions of existance that were intrinsically opposed to each other. When we clapped eyes on each other, it was a bit like a scene in a time-travel film when the dude goes back to the eighties and meets himself as a child on a space-hopper or whatever and they look at each other and, and like suddenly the universe and the entire consciousness of chronological space-time suddenly snaps out of it and realises that this is physically impossible, it can’t happen and there’s a brief flash of light and a tiny inter-dimensional wormhole opens up inside the brains of these characters and their perception is raised to like some eighth level of Karmic Nirvana just so they can envision the myriad spectrum of quantum infinity that their co-existence has breached and suddenly all of the knowledge of matter and everything is laid bare in an endless parade of subatomic magic. It was a bit like that except instead of understanding the intricate clockwork mechanisms inside every atom I started choking on a bit of lime and some of my drink went up my nose.

*

We tried to blank each other, there was absolutely no way that was happening, then there ws a fairly awkward conversation I think and the rest of the night passed in an alcoholic blur of Jaegermeister, wine, taxis and a dark instrospective sense of unstoppable onrushing hell comparable to the dizzying sense of dread felt by the soldiers in the D-Day landing boats mere seconds before hitting the beaches, but I’m reliably informed that after having some more drinks I re-approached Ali and attempted to have a chat which I guess went well because my spine is still attached

and

yeah

alex pearce was there too, for those who don’t remember her, she made me cake once, I vaguely remember me being impressed at meeting her and her scoffing ‘why don’t you go write a blog about it’ in an ironic way and then I said ‘actually I probably will’, thinking on my feet and then she said IF YOU DO I’M GOING TO SHIT

so

err

THE END

i wonder if its possible to salvage this post by adding 'lol' at the end as some kind of semi-ironic comment on something, i was joking about the pencil-sharpener bit

* * *
~*~*~*~in other news~*~*~*~

TOM’S GIRLFRIEND UPDATE
well,

OXFORD UNIVERSITY: Just publish whatever the fuck you want

Shite Magazines of Oxford Part 1: (OH) Magazine
"Because if I'm blogging then at least some good is coming out of the crap that gets released every term"

(OH) Magazine was formed in 2008 by some students, apparently to fill the aching creative vacuum in their CVs caused by the fact that they hadn't been allowed to edit anything yet in their Oxford careers. As far as I can tell, the magazine's main remit is to serve as the backup 'sexy arts magazine' in the few times when there isn't a copy of the Isis directly to hand; I imagine that there was once a tragic incident when a student was having a stroke or something, but could have been saved if only there was a brightly coloured edgy student publication filled with unreadable opinion pieces about drugs or sex or indie music, but all of the copies of Isis were taken so the student tragically died; and so to prevent such a tragedy every happening again, a few brave undergraduates from Oriel College took it upon themselves to produce an emergency backup magazine and charge JCRs £100 for it; kind of like how nuclear power stations have an extra layer of lead-sealant on all of the radioactive chambers, just on the off-chance that the first breaks open, spewing white-hot chemical waste over the countryside and melting the tissue off any living organism in a 10 mile distance.

With such noble aspirations, it's difficult to imagine how (OH) could fail. After all, they cover all of the key bases of student life - with segments such as 'Music, Books, Film, Fashion, Art, Gay, and Misc' - it is safe to say that whatever your hobby is, there will always be something to interest you. For example if you are particularly into your music, you can read the section on the history of Reggae, if you like fashion you can check out the photos of girls wearing Topshop dresses in a field and if you were interested in being a gay you could read the gay section, specifically written for YOU (wow!) which includes such highlights as 'Tinsel Flakes', an article written by somebody who has recently read Irvine Welsh's 1993 novel 'Trainspotting': mop up the remnents of pish on an already urine encrusted lavvy seat with the last two sheets of wafer thin toilet paper. Shaking away last night, I gave a bit of thought to words and...eh...language. At least, words that a cannae say. Don't get me wrong, it's not like etc, for two pages.

Reggae. Topshop. 'The gays'. As you can see, (OH) Mag is adept at hitting the marks with the kind of inyerface no-nonsense, no bullshit journalism of the type that made Russell Brand such a popular MTV presenter in September 2001. (OH) takes our standards of what to expect of a student magazine (in terms of content, presentation and readability) and throws them right the fuck out of the window. You want edgy? How about AN ARTICLE ON PORN told from the POV of somebody having a wank!!! How about a 'Introduction to (OH)' Section that on one hand offers you the chance to Have Your Say by casually inviting readers to 'drop us a line' before metaphorically Pulling The Rug Out From Under Our Feet by adding 'But we think its fucking brilliant' !!! How about printing the word 'shit' in a title. Twice. SHIT. IN A STUDENT PUBLICATION. WHAT IS GOING ON. Hey guys look at this. It's the line.

--------

and Look at what (OH) is doing

----(OH)----

That's right IT'S CROSSING THE FUCKING LINE. I read somewhere that at (OH) HQ (which is probably some awesome den filled with fetish gear and bongs and vintage typewriters) there's just a huge rasturbation of Hunter S Thompson and Banksy and Kurt Cobain and other people that anti-conformist idiots idolise charging into riot police with FUCK YOU, SYSTEM spray-painted underneath and stuff. I have also read that one of the editorial practises is to take all articles and add the word 'fuck' or 'bastard' somewhere in the central paragraph. The result is sentences like this: 'The frames that resemble camera-work only make it clear how much closer to an aesthetically powerful film this is than most actual films. Basically, it's fucking brilliant'. woahhh, were you knocked for six by the cussing at the end there? I know I was when I first read it. My thought process was like "Hmm, frames, interesting, aestheticism, interesting, basically, hmm, OH MY GOD THEY SAID THE F WORD'. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Because that's how people talk in real life, isn't it? Swearing and that. It brings it closer to MY demographic and makes me understand and sympathize with it as an article. Clever work, (OH) editors. People say 'What's the point?' or 'It's a lazy crutch to be 'down wid da kids' and inject shock value' but to those people I say chill out, niggers! Are you retarded or something? It's the goddamn (OH) magazine! You know why its called (OH)? Because that is the shocked sound that you make when you read it (in parentheses). The shoehorning of swearing and stupid popular culture references into Every Single Article is an unorthodox editorial decision and while some may call it irritating and patronising, I do as well.

Apparently other unorthodox editorial decisions involve making up words - "the plainly repugnanty", more-or-less disregarding the concept of grammar or consistent orthography, repeatedly spelling the names of the contributors incorrectly (sorry, non standardly), neglecting to credit whole segment editors and generally aiming to make the whole thing as UNDREADABLE AS FUCKING POSSIBLE. The result of this is that actually reading a copy of (OH) magazine is a strange, often unsatisfactorily frustrating battle against the English language. Reading an article is like wading through a strong wind, walking to a distant house that may or not be filled with angry bees. That's in the highly unlikely case that somebody actually reads an article. Flicking through it, the urge to Not Read is almost overwhelming. You look at the pictures. You read the headlines. You admire the pretty colours. Maybe-JUST MAYBE- you'll read an opening paragraph, say 'oh', then drift off into a catatonic coma, pass out, keel over and accidentally stab yourself in the eye with a fork. It's physically impossible to continue. It's like the literature equivalent of staring at the Sun or listening to The Kooks or drinking a gallon of listerine.
But of course that isn't the point is it? The point was never to produce anything interesting. The point is have something to look at, to admire as an Object, place on the table, absorb, lean back and then slowly, loquaciously, masturbate slowly over its matte finish and street styling, ejaculate over the five-page cartoon about the evil teddy bear, smear the resulting sticky mess all over your face and upper body and then lean back gasping desperately as it dries into a waxy dandruff-like scale and flakes off all over the double page about the Voynich Manuscript before hurling it into the nearest roaring wood fire and slinking off to read something better, like Atlas Shrugged or the safety instructions that came with the kettle.

I can't pretend to be Objective about this, by the way. I admit that I know three people who write for this magazine, and I produced a cartoon to go in it, and it wasn't included in the final press. My main excuse is that I was specifically sought out and asked to produce the cartoon, which I obligingly did. I say 'obligingly' because I'm not going to lie, I've already reached the point when I know that writing things for most publications in Oxford is more or less beneath me. And I was giving them a break, to be honest, I really thought they'd be grateful. I was dragging the average quality of the rest of the magazine, kicking and screaming, up. There would be at least two pages that would be worth reading. And they blew it, to be honest, an action that was confirmation more than conception of my disregard for this magazine. It's just the perfect confirmation of my theory that students shouldn't be allowed to produce anything. Reading it is plain painful. Like your dad rapping at a funeral. Your mum's funeral.

I know that this post is controversial and is probably going to lose me some friends. I mean, I'm not blind, it's obvious how meteorically popular (OH) magazine has become in its first two issues. One of my friends from home saw it and said 'Hey is that a picture of some guys wearing tshirts on the front cover? Jesus this thing looks amazing I wish I went to Oxford!' and he was so impressed he dropped out of Cambridge and applied here for next year JUST so he could read it. It's already gotten so big and popular the wikipedia entry for 'Oxford University' automatically redirects to the (OH) page. In the weeks leading up to the release of a new issue of (OH), the tension in Oxford rises to unbearable levels. Fights break out. Women go into labour early. The night before an (OH) is released, the air crackles as though anticipating a thunder storm. The common room is abuzz with people who simply cannot sleep, such is their excitement at the thought of a fresh new copy of (OH) sliding through their letterbox. They drink cups of cocoa and speak of their hopes and dreams for what the new magazine will bring - possibly four pages devoted to samey doodles of farm animals by some girl who doesn't even go to Oxford any more, possibly an article on Slagsmålskubben, possibly a page with just the word 'GAY' on it in big letters. Who knows?

So maybe I'm wrong. In the wake of such overwhelming public support for (OH), perhaps I should give them another chance? Perhaps, if what I've just said is true, they truly represent the dawn of a new level of student journalism? If THIS MANY PEOPLE love and adore (OH) and think that it is the best thing to ever be released ever then maybe I should just shut up for once

...

(oh) wait

Maybe I’ll be asked to speak at the Union

I was ambushed last night. I was walking along the road, contentedly gazing into the abyss, when I passed a group of students, amongst them a few acquaintances. Now you know me, all social interaction terrifies me (eg: my college mother described me as ‘borderline autistic’ last week), so I sort of murmured ‘Hello’ as quietly as I could and scurried towards my den; but before I was five feet away a voice yelled my name. I turned round to see a stylishly-dressed man I didn’t know sprinting towards me with a manic glint in his eyes. I was in the process of deciding whether to turn and flee or kickbox him in the throat, and I had just about reached my decision when he leapt upon me, enveloping me in a tight bear hug. I literally didn’t know what to do. Attractive strangers were throwing themselves at me in the street; this was a new experience. The thought ‘This must be how Russell Brand feels’ floated momentarily through my brain.

“I’m sorry, that was probably inappropriate,” sang my attacker jovially, releasing me. My response was to take a big step back and squint suspiciously at him.
“Tom, James is like your BIGGEST FAN!” enthused one of the girls. “He’s like obsessed with your blog. He linked it on his site. He gets 600 visitors a day.”

Right. Firstly, I’ve seen ‘Misery’. I know what happens the moment you meet your ‘BIGGEST FAN’. You wake up tied to a bed with a three hundred pound woman smashing your ankles with a sledgehammer. Secondly, the fact that random people are now coming up to me in the street calling themselves my ‘biggest fan’ forces me to confront the fact that has been staring me in the face for weeks now: I am now a Minor Internet Celebrity. Naturally it’s not a complete surprise. I’ve known for a while that I’m a bit of a hero-figure amongst a wide subsection of the Oxford community (and beyond!). People look up to me. People read this blog and take it as gospel. In many cases I am become a beacon of light in the dark and cold existences of the people that fill this earth. I mean last night wasn’t an isolated occasion; in the past months a number of people – some friends, some complete strangers – have begun conversations with ‘Tom, your blog is so good’ or ‘Tom why haven’t you updated the blog’ or ‘Tom why haven’t you blogged about me/my party/the American election’ yet?’ or ‘Tom you are literally the coolest guy I have ever met’. Now usually I don’t trust people who bring stuff from The Internet up in real life. I still sort of think of this blog –and really the internet as a whole- as a guilty secret to never be discussed out loud, like masturbation or incest. I mean last night one of the girls said ‘blogged’ and ‘Chainsaw Zombie’ out loud and I physically winced – but the strange thing is that not all of these people are morbidly-obese-basement-dwelling-neckbeardy-goon-types. In fact very few of them are. Indeed, some of them are – dare I say it – ‘cool’.

For example it turns out that I may have met ‘my biggest fan’ at a house party held by his girlfriend (one of the girls) the other week; I don’t know for sure I was p drunk. Now this was a Party with a capital P. You know it’s going to be good when the Facebook invitation comes mass-mailed from a future ruler of one of the larger democracies on Earth (although the ruler in question wasn’t actually anywhere to be seen at the party itself which was a bit of a letdown). Anyway I showed up wearing a pink shirt and trakkie bs and everyone was dressed in suits, eating birthday cake with spoons, listening to music I didn’t know, and hanging out in a tent that had been set up IN THE LIVING ROOM. That’s how cool it was. Some serious Skins shit. I ended up talking to some dude in the living room who had to stop what he was doing to rub cocaine in his gums at which point I nodded into space, slipped on some imaginary sunglasses, and said ‘I.have.made.it’. Later on I was pushing stoned students onto the floor in a futile attempt to find my ipod which had fallen down a crack in the sofa when one of the girls wandered into the room, absolutely fucked on horse tranquilisers, saw me, hugged me, then cried ‘TOM I LOVE YOUR BLOG DO ONE ABOUT THIS PARTY’. Which leads me to suspect that this blogspot address and the words contained herein is the only reason I got invited to the Cool Party in the first place.

Not that I care about that. I mean in person I’m average at best. Many of my fans are far more likely to succeed in life than I am. Indeed it seems this blog is opening doors for me more than all of my aborted attempts to interact socially have thusfar. It gets me invited to parties and lets me hang out with the cultural cream of Oxford society. It gets me hugged in the street. It makes me new friends and reaffirms old relationships. And I’m sure that I could probably use ChainsawZombie to seduce a young starlet if I wanted to, in a kind of ‘Sure I’ll blog about you baby, I’ll make you INTERNET FAMOUS TOO letshavesex’. But I don’t really feel the need to. So it’s cool. The future ruling cultural elite of this country think that this blog – and probably me by extension – is literally the greatest thing since sliced bread. I shall try not to let it go to my head.

But before you start thinking ‘Man I wish I was like Tom’, be warned: there’s a drawback to being as internet popular me. The thing is, now that I HAVE all the fame and power I could possibly want I don’t know what to do with it. I’m reminded of the Spiderman quotation ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. I just don’t think that I’m responsible enough to bear the weight of the massive social kudos that has fallen upon me.

The thing is, I always wondered what it would be like if I was famous and well loved like my heroes Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Ricky Gervais. I mean, despite the occasional bouts of self-loathing and the whole crippling insecurity thing I kind of assume that I will be when I grow up. I’m just too talented and clever not to be. But I also realised the other day that in my imaginary picture of myself as a famous man, I am a completely different person. In my imagination I’ve suddenly metamorphosed into being about 18% more handsome, being the defi-defi-ition of a bad-boy, rocking an ice-dry wit and being able to seduce famous women (aim: whoever the Alexa Chung equivalent is in five years time) with a raise of an eyebrow. Other factors of Imaginary Famous Me include: wearing a trilby, sweet Nikes, constantly swinging into rooms on a rope. Whereas I realise now that if I do suddenly become a living legend my reaction to screaming fans and girls approaching me in the street will not be to wink casually, grin, sign book covers/boobs and then bed them. It will be to react exactly as I did when hugged by My First Biggest Fan – freeze solid like a rabbit in the headlights, rictus grin, narrow beads of sweat down the back of the neck, chattering teeth, immediate verbal constipation/diahhrea. I mean here was my perfect chance – a young man, a COOL INTELLIGENT YOUNG MAN, was staring up at me with love in his eyes, the love of somebody who has just met his own personal hero. He was expecting me to be wise and what did I do? I croaked ‘I write things on the internet yay’ in a silly voice and stared at him. “It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes,” said Maugham “They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved” and I worry that my underwhelming personal presence absolutely disillusioned little James’s faith in the world – and worse – his own faith in himself. Who knows what the repercussions of meeting me might be? I can see him going home and just tearing up all his books and slashing his wrists. Which would suck. Oh god I used my presence massively irresponsibly. Should I have been wackier? Should I have made a quip or something? Should I have been cool? Oh God being mildly internet famous is so hard no wonder Kurt Cobain shot himself. DAMNIT JAMES you have caused me to reinterpret my entire existence you fucker

Oh shit I just realised that my biggest fan and co will probably read this post. Well I guess it’s nice to have your personal hero writing 2000 words about meeting you. He’ll probably print this out and frame it and put it on his wall and tell people who wrote this post about him and then they will say ‘who?’ and he’ll try to describe me and completely forget what I look like because I am so nondescript. But this p much sums up the problem I have – I completely disassociated the Tom On The Blog with the Tom In Real Life. Which is a problem because people expect to see BlogTom (you know, cool sophisticated ladykiller) when in reality they get RealTom (quiet moody sarcastic borderline autistic). But how can this problem be solved? Do I change the blog to suit who I am in reality? No because then it would just be a few mumbled full stops and me typing ‘its fine Its Fine ITS FINE’ like the guy out of the The Shining. Or do I change myself to suit how I am on the blog? But surely that is worse!! It brings to mind the Updike quote ‘Fame is the mask that eats into the face beneath’. Or perhaps the Mel Brooks quote about being disappointing in person because ‘you can no longer be the edited essence of yourself’. See, I know quotes. I know quotes on the internet. But if you asked me for a quote in real life I would look blankly at you. Do I not really know any quotes? Am I just a quote blog poseur? oh fuck

I worry too much.

IN CONCLUSION What I have learnt from this experience is that Fame Is Hard. It’s really difficult to juggle artistic loyalty to yourself with a personal life while still respecting the wishes and dreams of your fans. Especially when you have Great Fans like this:



This is Tom who is my rowing pal. He always asks me when the blog will be updated. Last night at the bar he looked sadly at me for five minutes with his big puppy eyes because I hadn’t yet given him a little mention. So to please him I have included his photograph at the end of this post. I hope that he will be happier now.

Hey Guys If You Want Me to Include A Picture Of You On One Of My Posts Then Please Get In Touch Via The Comments Section. Also If You Have Any Requests For Things For Me To Write About Then Please Let Me Know And I Will Get Right On It!!!!!

Oh Fuck!!!!!!! i can’t believe I’ve started doing requests.. I always tell myself ‘don’t do anything that the fans ask you to do, they are all morons’ but no the taste of fame is in my mouth, now I just want to be loved regardless of the consequences. Please love me. Love me love me love me. Oh no Already I’m selling out artistically. Im like ricky gervais in the extras Christmas special. shit SOON I’LL BE DOING ADVERTS FOR NESCAFÉ AND WRITING WHOLE POSTS ABOUT THE GREAT TIME I HAD AT MACDONALDS this sucks

Ok time to go out and buy some milk. Holy shit I hope I don’t get mobbed on the way there *slips on dark sunglasses*

* * *

P.S. guys there’s news I HAVE A NEW GIRLFRIEND that’s right suckaz tom is hooked up that’s your news for today ☺ oh god I hope she won’t read this blog and think that fame has changed me and say ‘Tom it used to be about the blog’ and I’ll say GET OUTTA MY FACE and hurl a bottle of whiskey at her and she’ll run crying from my dressing room. Because that would be awful

OH MY GOD I’M SO FUCKING AWKWARD

I started thinking about this writing this post a few days ago when I had a really terrible stop-and-chat street conversation with a vague acquaintance. As soon as I saw him I was like ‘shit’ as I knew that he’d seen me and that we couldn’t just ignore each other (which is my standard procedure), so as we approached each other I sort of waved and said ‘Hello’ unenthusiastically; he returned the greeting. We looked at each other. I thought that was it – what else did he want from me? – so, without bothering to stop walking I played my power-card of ‘Well, see you in the bar later on!’ and started to walk off. LITTLE DID I KNOW THAT HE STILL WANTED TO MAKE BANAL SMALL-TALK and so he started talking to me when I was already well on my way out of earshot. ‘So, when did you move back?’ I clenched my fists in utter fury, stopped, turned round, nearly bumped into an old man, and yelled down the street – ‘Mid September.’ He pulled a face (?). I sort of stood there in space feeling awful, then pulled history’s most aggressive grin, gave him a thumbs up (?) and then ran off down the road.

So the post in question was basically going to be a humorous retelling of the above conversation, perhaps with some funny pictures of myself looking angry and it would have been serviceable and forgettable, but then TODAY came a revolution in social awkwardness that basically confirmed my suspicions that I must be borderline mentally defective when it comes to meeting new people; either that or a brain tumour. It was during a ‘get to know you’ tea-party for the new English Freshers in one of the third year rooms. This was pretty much my best and only chance to make a positive and lasting impression on the new year of English Students, who were all infuriatingly perky and passionate about poetry, but frankly it didn’t go so well. For one thing I was hungover and tired (and seeping blood from my thumb following an unrelated washing up accident) and thus wasn’t my usual sparky self; for another I don’t really know how to make conversation. I have like four questions I can ask in rotation and then I just say ‘well that was nice’ and then zone out, stare into the middle distance, start playing with the mechanical corkscrew, whatever means I don’t actually have to interact with another human being.

So I was standing there frowning into space wondering if it was possible to sleep standing up, when a nice-enough looking fresher girl wandered up and said something like ‘Hey, can I get you a drink’. I was surprised, panicked, blacked out, and made a snap decision with my answer. I mean, what was going through my head was that, as a member of the second years who were meant to be hosting the party to make the freshers comfortable, I should have been the one offering to get her a drink, maybe pour her some nice wine, sit her down and in a non-predatory way soothe her fears and anxieties about moving out of home for the first time and assuage her worries about the reading list, lectures, become her friend, offer her a friendly face to talk to, etc, etc. What I actually did was yell ‘DON’T SMILE AT ME I’M NOT A FRESHER I’M A SECOND YEAR’ and take two or three steps away backwards looking fierce. Apparently. ‘Apparently’ because I don’t even recall saying or doing that, all I remember is staring at a confused looking fresher, wondering what the hell was going on. This is worrying because it means that I must have literally just blacked out for a few seconds and allowed my subconscious to joyride my response, which is kind of depressing once you think about it. I mean when other people black out, their ids turn them into serial killers and rockstars; mine is just borderline rude to people. Luckily I soothed the situation over by gabbling ‘Oh, sorry, I’m Tom, hello’ about fifty thousand times and trying to shake her hand; she sort of backed away looking scared and then sat on the other side of the room shooting accusatory glances at me. I heard later that the phrase ‘serial-killer eyes’ was being bandied about. I was thinking that I’d go and apologise for being a borderline-autistic weirdo but then I reasoned that there are lots of other new freshers who haven’t even spoken to me yet, I might as well persuade them that I’m not a complete psychopath and accept that trying to salvage a friendship with this girl is a lost cause. Anyway sorry, girl.

[ninja edit: turns out that the 'fresher girl' was in fact a Third Year who everybody knew but I had just never seen before in my life. That does explain a number of things, including the expression on her face when I said 'How you finding Oxford?' and asked her what subject she was studying. I am not sure if that makes things better or worse. Anyway, sorry Third Year girl]

So anyway after that debacle I was walking home glaring at pigeons and I realised that even though the party was pretty much a confirmation of my complete inability to converse (I spend much of the rest of the afternoon sitting on the floor and squinting at anybody who tried to speak to me), it really was just a standard example of my ineptitude with people. That shit happens every day (52% ranking for my customer service at the Wine Shop woop). Because when it comes to awkward conversations – and when I say ‘awkward’ I mean ‘welp I guess I can Never Speak To You Ever Again’, I am a master. A terrible terrible master. For example who wants to hear about

The Time That I Told A Girl That I Had A Manageable But Incurable Disease In Order That She Would Let Me Go Home
So through some pure fluke I managed to meet a female, talk to her, buy her a drink or two, take her to a club, and be taken back to her room, all within one night, without accidentally insulting her appearance, kneeing her in the eye, letting her walk into a lamp-post, sending a text message about her to her, calling her sister fat, or any of the multitude of terrible things that are well within my social capabilities; anyway after being in her room for a bit I was tired and bored and kind of wanted to go back home; she turned out to be a bit creepy and kept saying things like ‘I’m fucking gorgeous’ and ‘You’re so lucky’ (no). So anyway the following conversation occurred.

Me: So, I think I might head back now.
Her: What? Why. No, stay, stay stay here, you can go in the morning.
Me: No, no. I have to get up early to do an essay.
Her: Stay here! *sits on me*
This continues for four or five more minutes until I decide that the truth won’t work on this crazy broad
Me: No, I need to go back you see. To get. My. … medication.
See I’d had like four glasses of wine, I pretty much thought that this would be fine, she’d accept my excuse and I would be on my merry way.
Her: Medication? For what.
Me: diabetes
Her: Diabetes?
Me: … yep.
Her: My grandfather died of that last week.
FACEPALM but yeah right so how was I supposed to know about that. I mean at this point the romantic mood was gone and she was glaring at me and I couldn’t be like ‘ho ho ho just joking japes’ and I just had to keep digging.
Me: Oh. What sort of diabetes did he have?
I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT DIABETES
Her: Type two. But I assume that you have Type One.
Me: yep
Her: So you’re going home to get your INSULIN?
Me: Yes. *leaves*

Yeah that was pretty awkward. But still not as bad as

The Time That I Tried To Win Back My Ex By Quoting A Speech From Rocky IV
There had been a somewhat messy breakup and I’d decided that that wasn’t working for me and that I would seduce her back using the power of Clever Rhetoric. So I dressed in a nice suit and I showed up unannounced on her doorstep and I took her into an empty room and I poured out my heart and soul in a Speech. I was semi-convinced that as I spoke, passionate music would suddenly fill the room and angels would sing and she would tear up and towards the end she would just passionately throw herself at me and all would be well. Well that was the plan. The first part went ok, like I got her alone in the room and she was listening to me expectantly. Then. I made my main error.

Basically, in the film ‘Rocky IV’, the hero (Rocky) is forced to travel to the USSR to fight Ivan Drago, the huge soviet super-boxer trained on drugs in a fancy gym (Russia!!) who killed his best friend. In one scene Rocky is lying in bed with his son (not gay) and his son is all ‘Oh Dad don’t you get scared that you are gonna die in the ring’ and then Rocky breaks out this tasty speech:

When I'm in that ring, really getting hit and my arms hurt so much I can't lift them, I'm thinking, "God, I wish this guy would hit me on the chin so I don't feel nothing anymore." Then there's another side that comes out that isn't so scared. Another side that wants to take more... that wants to go that one more round... because by going that one more round when you don't think you can… That's what makes all the difference in your life.

So I’m not entirely sure why I thought that this bit of macho father-son bonding would be an appropriate way to win back the affections of an eighteen year old girl. This was about three weeks into my campaign of winning her back through making a nuisance of myself so I guess I was running out of inspirational wooing metaphors but as soon as I said ‘Have you ever seen Rocky IV?’ I realised that this was probably the worst idea I'd ever had. But at this point I was more or less locked into the speech and I just kept speaking. Words kept coming out of my mouth. And as I said ‘we just always have to go one more round’ I realised that I’d been mistaken; this wasn’t the stupidest thing I’d ever said this was the stupidest thing that ANYBODY HAD EVER SAID IN THE HISTORY OF ORAL COMMUNICATION. Like even if some primordial cavemen who just knew the words for ‘mammoth’ and ‘rape’ had been watching me through the window, they’d still be all ‘Damn that’s one inarticulate motherfucker’. It was so bad that I trailed off halfway through, staring slackjawed into space, random vowel sounds dribbling pathetically out of my still-moving lips. I kind of tried to fill the cavernous silence by half-heartedly misquoting some Mint Royale lyrics but at this point I think the game was more or less lost. Girls just don’t get turned on by quotations in the same way that men do.

The Time That I Actually You Know What Let’s Go Back And Talk About The Rocky Thing Some More Because Seriously
I just thought about it and I honestly thing I’d never realised how monumentally terrible that conversation was until now. Like at the time I was running entirely on adrenaline and so I didn’t particularly realise the fallacious nature of using the rhetoric of a punchdrunk brain-damaged ex-bodybuilder as primo seduction material. And I didn’t pick up the non-verbal communication that the lucky object of my affections was sending – a worried expression when I mentioned Sylvester Stallone, slight pity when I tried to compare our relationship to an organised fight, a shying away and a glancing for the nearest exit as my voice grew shrill and tinny when I started to realise that maybe not everything was going to plan. All of these clues as to the true awkwardness of the conversation were instantly lost in the sullen and icy hush that fell over the room when I’d finally run out of steam with my boxing allusion. I mean bless her she tried to save me some embarrassment by halfheartedly saying ‘but um I don’t want to go…one…more…round’ so perhaps I interpreted that as being ‘Job Well Done On The Metaphor Front’. And for some reason when I finally got up and left the room I ended up STILL thinking to myself ‘Well that wasn’t the worst conversation I’ve ever had’. No. It was.

To be honest I suspect that what happened was that my subconscious mind took a step back, examined objectively the outcome of the conversation so far, said ‘Hmm’, piled all of the memories into a metaphorical dustbin, doused them in petrol, flicked a match onto them and nudged the burning mass off a ledge into a dark and forgotten corner of my consciousness. It was such an awful terrible abomination of a social interaction that my brain didn’t even try to process it. It’d be like if you opened a bottle of milk one day and found out that it was full of pustulant maggots and mewling bat-babies with the heads of snakes. You’d just hurl that bottle into the nearest tarpit and never ever mention it again. This is what I think happened to that conversation. I’ve never even thought about it up til this night and I had to actually crawl under my desk and moan in shame and horror. Seriously it was like two years of self-loathing an embarrassment reversed over my spine.

Do you know what I think that I might have repressed post-traumatic stress disorder. Could it be possible that the Rocky Incident is responsible for of my complete inability to form a coherent sentence in the presence of somebody I don’t know? I mean I went from being a happy-go-lucky little elf, merrily telling girls that they looked like newts and speaking at political rallies to shouting at freshers who startle me and making up pathetic lies about diabetes. And the tipping point may well have been about the time when I said “and its like, you have to always go on for one extra round, if you get what I mean”. It was as though my brain was like “Well we gave you the ability to enunciate long speeches and look what you did, you made us all look stupid. This is why you can’t have nice things.”

Fuck I’m going to take a vow of silence.

SERIOUSLY THOUGH.
ROCKY FOUR.
ROCKY. FOUR.
NOT EVEN A GOOD ROCKY FILM
THE ONE WHEN ROCKY ESCAPES THE KGB THEN RUNS UP THE SIDE OF A MOUNTAIN.
DRAAAAAAGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
THERE WERE LIKE SIX MUSICAL MONTAGES.

JAMES BROWN WAS IN IT


IT WAS THE ONE WHEN ROCKY ADOPTED A PET ROBOT FOR CHRIST'S SAKE

More Intellectual Discourse

I would like to think that my first year at OXFORD UNIVERSITY has changed me for the better, both academically and as a person. After a year living alone with interesting people having my mine blown wide open, I have lost so many of my preconceptions. I’m more open-minded. I’ve stopped judging people based on factors which I do not understand. I now own a Trilby. I eat poached eggs. I occasionally listen to Radiohead [which I sometimes enjoy, usually when I am hungover or asleep, which I suppose means that my appreciation of music has increased exponentially].

Basically what I’m saying is that now I am so much more grown up and mature, I think that my blogging (although I feel that I have outgrown that word too, so from now on I’d like to refer to this as ‘Web-Logging’) should follow suit. So from this post on, I will devote my web-logging to the higher pursuits – literature, opera, the arts. Food for the soul. Perhaps that is what this web-log should be renamed – ChainS-oulFood Zombie. Now I know that this announcement may raise concerns in the (lardy, clogged, emotionally dead) hearts of my vast internet readership, which according to recent statistics is exponentially escalating towards the lofty teens – after all, you guys [I will not flatter myself to believe that any good-looking girls actually have time/inclination to read this] ‘log on’ every day to read my hi-larious musings on gays, racial prejudice, zit fetishists, paedophiles, the lead singer of Crazy Town, and the obese. You live in your parents’ basements and masturbate more or less constantly to poorly animated loli-porn. You poop into socks. You probably wouldn’t enjoy details of my thesis on the heroic poetry of Spenser, or discussions of the role of Christian iconography in The Dream of the Rood, or anything mentioning Philosophy that isn’t directly connected to Harry Potter. And that’s fine, but I think that, as a student of OXFORD UNIVERSITY it behoves me to shine a light of truth into the dark fetid sliming pits of ignorance that people you call lives. But I know that change is hard, and many of you have been so enmeshed in your ruts that getting out of them is terrifying, so, rather like an animal trainer teaches a dog to beg using Pedigree Chews, I discuss fine poetry using the only thing that you idiots understand: bands I don’t particularly like.

I will also use pictures. Like this one, which is of a the English Poet Matthew Arnold:



Now Matthew Arnold is famous for a couple of poems, including ‘Dover Beach’ and another one about how we’re all floating in the sea. I probably could have written a blog about them but couldn’t be bothered to link them to Limp Bizkit or Panic! At the Disco or whatever it is that you retards listen to, so instead I’m going to briefly talk about his ‘Memorial Verses, April 1850’. The poem, a typical example of Arnold’s role as the 19th century’s answer to Emo, is a long sad bit of froth about the death of English Poet William Wordsworth, Arnold’s personal poetic hero. Kind of like how when the lead singer of The Cartoons died in a plane crash and the cast of the Fast Food Rockers released the twelve minute long instrumental version of Witch Doctor on vinyl, it acts as a kind of ‘greatest hits’ of both Wordsworth’s life, as well as mourning the passing of other poetic greats who you haven’t heard of and simultaneously mourning the fucked state of the world. For reference, here’s the poem in its entirety:

GOETHE in Weimar sleeps, and Greece,
Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.
But one such death remain’d to come;
The last poetic voice is dumb—
We stand to-day by Wordsworth’s tomb.

… blah blah blah something about an iron age blah blah blah isn’t poetry great blah blah blah I’m going to go cut myself in the toilets, blah blah blah hey guys I just used the word ‘furl’d’ I’m a POET motherfuckers blah blah blah…

Keep fresh the grass upon his grave
O Rotha, with thy living wave!
Sing him thy best! for few or none
Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.

Moving. Very moving. No, it doesn’t matter what Weimar, Goethe, Byron or Rotha are, don’t worry. Now, the few of you who actually read the above carefully, instead of just seeing verse form, instantly panicking, flailing your sausage arms in the air, flicking your Li’l Rascal Motorised Obesity Cart into reverse and careering madly into the huge stack of crumpled Diet Coke cans and empty pizza boxes in the corner of your rooms and knocking yourselves unconscious, you MAY have noticed something a little bit odd about the final words of both stanzas. That is, they don’t really rhyme. The first rhyme progression goes ‘Come -> Dumb -> Tomb’, and the second ‘Grave -> Wave, None -> Gone’. Now I don’t care where you’re from, neither ‘Dumb’ and ‘Tomb’, nor ‘None’ and ‘Gone’ have ever sounded alike eeeever. But so what. It seems in both cases that Arnold has ruined a perfectly nice bit of verse by jammin’ a word in there that sounds JUST about like enough that reading the verse aloud makes you either pause and go ‘wtf’ or, worse, twist the pronunciation to make it fit in with the last line. But its not like it was impossible to think of another rhyme. I mean the man managed to rhyme ‘eternal law’ with ‘reverential awe’, I think he’d have been able to come up with two words that rhymed with ‘dumb’ and ‘none’:

…
The last poetic voice is dumb—
And now all I can do is stand here and hum.
…
Sing him thy best! for few or none
Hears thy voice right, Wordsworth was my number one guy

see, that took me like two seconds of thinking to find rhymes that fit. Does that make me a better poet than Arnold? Probably, but the fact remains that even though MA was a total emo, he was a pretty good poet and the words he actually used, the ones that kind of rhymed, were used for a REASON. And that reason was purely for the effect that I mentioned earlier – the ‘wtf?’ and stumble over the timing and pronunciation of the rhyme. The INTENTION is to do an ugly bit of poetry, and why – because of the context of the line – Matty is presenting a new, bleak world, a world in which Wordsworth has left. The damage of Wordsworth & co’s passing is so great that it has damaged the poetry of the poem itself. I mean I can’t really believe I’ve spent this many words discussing half-rhymes, which are a pretty simple concept, but this is a very nice little bit of poetry and a concept that is seen dotted throughout the English poetic corpus. I could get very clever here and talk about the self-reflexive point of poetry, using the language and expectations of the fabric of the verse itself to support the themes beneath, bloating it to creating a narrative-structural dichotomy with the real meaning floating somewhere in between, but I fear that I would bore you and already your attention is drifting away from this lecture on half-rhymes and back onto Bittorrent to see how the download on those bikini photos of Kate Mulgrew from the beach scene of Star Trek Voyager S2E15 is going, so I’ll stop there and will introduce the MODERN YOOF CULTURE RELEVANCE to all of this, which is what got me thinking about this all over again.

Here is your second picture, which is of Mike Skinner, lead – well I want to say ‘singer’ – of the popular – well I want to say ‘band’ – “The Streets”:



Now Skinner is best known for a couple of songs, including ‘Dry Your Eyes’, ‘Don’t Mug Yourself’ and (sigh) ‘Yeah Yeah You’re Really Fit But You Know It’, but for some reason I couldn’t find a way to tie any of those to the work of Sylvia Plath, so instead I’m going to concentrate on his ‘Blinded By The Light’. In essence, this presents a quasi-Eliotian dramatic monologue (sometimes even I hate myself) detailing the onset of a narcotic stupor; the main character enters a nightclub, pops a few pills, and the rest of the song follows his slow garbled descent as his voice is drowned by the music; this is underlied with a bubbling and dangerous undercurrent of romantic infidelity and fear. Sounds pretty good eh. Unfortunately the song is blighted by some of THE WORST lyrics I have ever heard which makes me wonder whether Skinner was writing it with his feet while hanging from a rubber tyre in a tree and throwing poo at schoolchildren. This is a standard verse:

I hate coming to the entrance, just to get bars on my phone, 

You have no new messages, so why haven't they phoned? 

Menu, write message, so where are you and Simone?
Send message, Dan’s number, where've they gone? 


“Seriously. Could you not think of better words to rhyme with ‘Phone’ than ‘Simone’, ‘gone’, and ‘phoned’ again? I know you aren’t the brightest head in the shed, Mr Skinner, but COME ON”.

^ that was my initial reaction to hearing that verse. Lazy, I thought. Lazy lazy lazy. Lazy Mike Skinner, an accusation that is more-or-less compounded by the more-or-less mentally defective rhyme scheme that runs through the rest of the poem/song. But then I remembered Matthew Arnold’s apparent inability to rhyme anything with ‘none’ and I think – is Lazy Mike Skinner actually Clever Mike Skinner – is the breakdown and repetition in the rhyme scheme an intentional construct built to directly mirror the breakdown of comprehension, paranoia and addled nature of our narrator’s mind? WAS RHYMING ‘DAWN’ WITH ‘SURE’ INTENTIONAL? IS MIKE SKINNER ACTUALLY A GENIUS. IS HE THE MODERN MATTHEW ARNOLD?


DID I JUST BLOW YOUR FUCKING MIND

Ok so maybe that goes a bit overboard but it raises the question of the amount to which we credit our Artists with intelligence. I mean we only assume that Arnold’s half-rhymes were intentional because, you know, it fits in perfectly with the theme of the poem and, whatever, he’s Matthew Arnold bitchiz, he does what he wants. But they could have been a total mistake; he could have been writing his Memorial Verses in an opium haze at 3 in the morning to a deadline to get paid and fund his crack habit and simply didn’t notice them. Equally, Mike Skinner could be a dipshit who thinks that rhyming ‘beer’ ‘idea’ ‘appear’ and ‘here’ all in the course of four lines is really Neat. We have to sort of figure this out for ourselves. Which on the surface is ok because analysis and self-determination of art is an important part of our appreciation of it. I GOT NO PROBLEM WITH THAT YOU HEAR.

Unfortunately, allowing our own –often quite intelligent- interpretations of music or art to ‘pardon’ or ‘interpret’ the mistakes and failings of our artists as either intentional or ironic opens the door for a whole host of abuses, the greatest of which is the crediting of praise to certain singers who probably deserve to be strung up and tortured with weevils for their crimes against music. This naturally raises the third Popular Artist of this post, the musical group who go by the name of ‘Nickelback’, and their lead singer Chad Kroeger, and their song ‘Next Contestant’:



I can’t really be bothered at this point to detail the song, but whatever, here’s the first verse/chorus, make of it what you will:

I judge by what she's wearing
Just how many heads I'm tearing
Off of assholes coming on to her
Each night seems like it's getting worse
And I wish she'd take the night off
So I don't have to fight off
Every asshole coming on to her
It happens every night she works
Is that your hand on my girlfriend?

Is that your hand?
I wish you'd do it again
I'll watch you leave here limping
I wish you'd do it again
I'll watch you leave here limping
There goes the next contestant

Right-o. The rest of the song pretty much goes on like that – there’s some dude who is possessive about people coming onto his girlfriend, people come onto his girlfriend, he gets well angry and beats them up and they leave his girlfriend alone, his girlfriend is well happy, etc, etc.

Now when I first heard this song I thought ‘This HAS to be ironic. They have to be joking. There must be some clever twist; perhaps Chad has BROKEN UP WITH his girlfriend and he’s just a possessive and loserish ex-boyfriend. Perhaps the girl was never his girlfriend and he’s just a crazy stalker, sitting alone in the club night after night taking out his repressed macho pulsations on imaginary fights with combatants who he’ll never have the guts to fight. Perhaps this macho image that he portrays of himself is some kind of reflection on the modern condition of us as Modern Men, emasculated in a world that has moved on beyond us. Hey, this song is pretty good.’

But then I realised something: Nope. I’m wrong. It is literally just a song about Chad Kroeger being a big manly man and beating up guys who attempt to score with his fit girlfriend. That’s it. It’s just another ‘Chad Kroeger is a prick’ moment, which for some reason my inherent trust in the artistic form and my own freedom of interpretation has changed into some deep and meaningful discussion of modern man. But we know that’s not what it is. Chad Kroeger is a cock. Does that make my interpretation any less valid? Of course not, even though there’s not a shred of proof in the song itself to support it. But just because I happened to credit the song with some depth doesn’t mean that it actually has it. And it doesn’t mean that Chad Kroeger is less of a cock.

But this is the problem. I refuse to accept that Kroeger is being clever and witty just because, well, it’s Chad Kroeger, fucking look at him:


what a cock

… but at the same time I kind of automatically credit Matthew Arnold with cleverness for his half-rhymes just because he’s Matthew Arnold bitchez and he does what he wants. This isn’t really a good basis for judging poetry. We can’t really let our personal opinions of the writers interfere with how we understand their work –AFTER ALL, REMEMBER GUYS WE ANALYSE THE POETRY, NOT THE POET sez Wimsatt & Beardsley. And thus by that standard, we have to accept that the chances that Nickelback MIGHT have been being incredibly witty and have written a modern anthem to manhood in ‘Next Contestant’ are about equal with Arnold having intentionally failed to properly rhyme the last words of ‘Memorial Verses’.

…
hmm
…

You see this is why I fucking hate Intentionality. You end up inadvertently proving that Nickelback are geniuses.


'yay'



oh my god no



OMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOM


Okay allow this, fuck blogging about the arts, next post will be about zit fetishists or horse porn or something, ok guys WHO'S WITH ME