There is an Italian version of FAGS AND LAGER out now from Baldini Castoldi, it seems. It is called Paglie e Birre Chiare, which presumably is Italian for fags and lager. If you're Italian, and you like fags and lager or great novels about troubled door staff, go for it!
I mean, BLACK SHEEP can make you reassess your opinion of these supposedly docile creatures, right? What with GM and E-numbers and all, maybe they really have started eating people? It makes you think, see? When was the last time you actually walked through a field of sheep? I mean, how would you know that they're not aggressive? Personally I walk through hordes of sheep on a regular basis, and I must say I HAVE noticed the evil eye they have started giving me of late. Turn around fast enough and you'll see it. So maybe BLACK SHEEP is on to something there. Maybe BLACK SHEEP is actually, like, a documentary?
But hey, now you can rest easy. The Guardian have taken steps to quell the burgeoning mass hysteria by getting an expert's opinion:
"The reality is that sheep won't bite you. At the front of their mouths, they have teeth only on the lower jaw, so they wouldn't be able to rip the flesh off your bones even if they tried. The only way to get bitten by a sheep is to stick your fingers right into the back of its mouth to reach the cheek teeth. You'd really have to be trying."Feel OK now? Happy to walk once more amongst our woolly brethren? No? Well this should do it for you:
"And of course, they're herbivores, so they wouldn't enjoy a human intestine even if you offered them one."
A few months ago I saw a new play advertised at my local theatre. It's called BOUNCERS, and it looked right up my street, me being a purveyor of doorman literature and all. When I looked into it, I found that this was a play with a long history and a big reputation. No way was I going to miss it, so I bought tickets.
For this Saturday night.
Shite.
You've got to understand - back then, no one would have anticipated England making it to the Rugby World Cup Final. But there they are - the ragtag band of iron-willed brothers who just will not lie down (when Jonny is playing), versus the awesome team from the New World who kicked their pale arses out of sight not so long back.
Part of me thinks "Sod it. Don't go. Watch the game - which is surely the most hotly anticipated game in history in any sport - and catch the play some other time. Lisa won't mind missing a rare night out."
Another part thinks: "This is fate. This clash of interests was preordained months... nay, millenia ago and you cannot tinker with it. For whatever reason, the England Rugby Team requires that you sit this one out in a non-TV environment. They will do what they have to do, and you will come out of the theatre and find out how it went. Trust me - it'll be just as exciting."
Another part of me thinks: "Bring a little TV into the theatre. No one is going to be there anyway. Not even the cast!"
Another part of me says: "You honestly think Lisa won't mind missing a rare night out?"
Yet another part says: "Ring the theatre. Make them understand the importance of the occasion and tell them to put up a big screen instead of the play. The cast can watch it and everything."
Then there's the bit that says: "Ring up Paris just before the game. Tell them you've planted a b..." No, don't listen. Don't listen!
COME ON ENGLAND!
This Saturday night (Moscow Time) sees America's own faded former champ Evander Holyfield travel deep into enemy territory to take on Sultan Ibragimov - the WBO Heavyweight champ. If Holyfield wins it'll make him an amazing five-times heavyweight champ and get a slice of the heavyweight cake back on the USA plate. But more importantly, this is just like Rocky and Ivan Drago all over again.
Rocky was past his best and the universal underdog. Evander is 44 and has taken some beatings of late. Ibragimov is an unbeaten heavyweight built by evil scientists in a lab, just like Drago. Rocky and Evander are blue collar heroes. Sultan and Ivan are both just robots incapable of uttering only short phrases such as "You will lose," or "If he dies, he dies," or "I must break you".
OK, Evander is black and Sultan does not have a blonde flat-top, but everything else is identical. Evander will turn the crowd around and have them chanting his name at the end. Sultan will angrily proclaim his selfishness and incur the wrath of Vladimir Putin. But most importantly of all, Evander apparently has a real ROBOT in his house that glides around serving drinks and playing tinny 80s music.
Of course, the lack of recents posts here is purely so I can come across all mysterious. "I wonder what he's up to?" they'll be thinking. "Maybe he's writing the Great American Novel? Although he isn't American, so that can't be right. Saying that, what if his novel was set in America? Would that be a Great American Novel? Assuming it was great, of course."
But that person isn't very clever, so it doesn't matter what they think. A cleverer person might be thinking: "Hmm... the real gamble is not whether Gordon Brown should go for a snap general election now, but whether he should risk leaving it until next year."
Somewhere between those two, someone is possibly thinking: "I wonder if Charlie is writing something different? Like a screenplay or something? Or maybe a romance. A historical romance. The Great American Historical Romance... written by a Brit but set in Salt Lake City. Or maybe he's getting into poetry? I hear there's good money to be made in poetry these days. Or songwriting. What if he's writing a few lyrics for James Blunt?"
Meanwhile... alpaca bouncers.
I'm still here. I have not gone AWOL. I'm doing a bit of this, bit of that. Sowing my seeds of creativity hither and thither. Some will take root and others will land on the harsh and stony ground (thither) and die. But they won't drive me out of town, oh no. I'm staying. I'm finishing my coffee. Enjoying my coffee.
Especially in the crime fiction world, you hear a lot of crap from writers about technique. Draw the reader in. Make him love that protagonist. Make her hate that villain. Make them care. OK, not all of it is crap, but I find it oppressive. Anyone would think writing is not a solitary thing.
Anyway, this is all just a means of pointing you towards this interview with James Kelman, who is lumbered with no such self-consciousness:
"I never bothered about alienating readers, neither then nor now. The priority was to write the story properly. The readers could take care of themselves."
Will Smith has signed up for the proposed remake of the 1996 movie INDEPENDANCE DAY. Asked how he would justify a remake of such a recent film, he said: "In the modern world, time moves more quickly than in old-fashioned times. Therefore we don't have to wait thirty or more years before we can get away with a remake. More shit goes under the bridge. Also we thought it would be cool to make the president an African American. That's who I'm playing, actually. I've been doing intensive training with one of the world's top rousing speech experts and I can't wait to show you all my chops. And we thought it would be a fun twist to make the hotshot pilot a white man this time. Not only is he a white man now, but he is a woman. An Asian woman. Also we know more about aliens now. We know, for example, that they cannot in fact control our minds like we thought they could back in '96. It is actually our bladders that they control. So now we have the aliens making people urinate at their will, thereby giving us a new angle on the action."
Asked if he thought there would be more of an anti-war theme, Smith said: "The aliens are also going to look different this time. Instead of all those tentacles and shit, they are going to look more like us. We are going to have white ones and Asian ones and African American ones, to show that we are all the same under the skin. And there is going to be a couple of good aliens who try to sabotage the evil shit that is planned. They will be played by Cuba Gooding Jr and Lucy Liu. The evil alien boss will be Alan Rickman. Also some of the humans will have tentacles, to show that we are all the same under the skin."
In other news, John Carpenter's 1981 classic ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is going to get a remake.
NB: Those linking here from movie news sites should be aware that this post is TOTAL BULLSHIT. Apart from the bit about Escape From New York. Sheesh...
Alex Cox tells it like they don't want to hear it in the Guardian:
We are told 10 Rillington Place "brilliantly embodies the seedy degradation of the real little Britain of the time". Get Carter depicts "a Britain paralysed by strikes and a failing economy ... in short, a nation on the skids". Get Carter was made in 1971. I was a teenager then, and can assure the promoters of this depressing vision that, despite strikes and IRA atrocities, Albion was a long way from skid row. When I went to college, the government paid for it. I incurred no debt. The state owned the water pipes, the reservoirs, the airline, the lecky, the telephone system and the railways, which ran on time and were reasonably cheap. We weren't engaged in two wars of colonial aggression. Muslims weren't our enemies. And the weather was great!
SIDEWAYS I loved this. A repressed writer goes on a booze cruise with his unrestrained mate. Could there be a better tag-line than that? (Actually I made it up.)
REVENGER'S TRAGEDY
What happened to this film? It's fucking ace. Clearly a lot was taken from Baz Luhrman, but the whole idea behind this film had me slotting her in the player short of breath and with tremulous fingers, and I was not disappointed. Christopher Eccleston was brilliant and hard as nails, and it was good to see Eddie Izzard playing the least camp of the Duke's five sons. Alex Cox and Frank Cottrell Boyce pulled the perfect trick - giving us a 400 year old play and making it fresh. That's all you need to do, 400 year old play-wise. But why doesn't this film have a higher profile? Ah, I know... Thomas Middleton's name is not William Shakespeare.
ZIDANE: A 21ST CENTURY PORTAIT
I could destroy this film. I could attack it from every angle, like a turn-of-the-millenium Real Madrid side, picking at every glaring defiency bit by bit before firing home with the unstoppable fact that the directors are artists and not film directors. But... I liked it. I fucking loved this film. I want to watch it again! Ninety minutes of Zinedine Zidane's every move and gesture, totally ignoring the ball and the other players, is fine by me.
TV ADDICT
The edited video diaries of Rick Kirkham - TV news anchorman, loving father, all-round American good guy and hopeless crack addict. Rarely have I been so compelled by the fruits of our self-obsessed, self-documenting age. Absolutely harrowing viewing, but it just seemed so right that one whose whole identity is built around TV-friendliness should have a desperate need to fill himself full of crack cocaine.
Wow, never thought it would come so quick. The biggest fight in boxing is going to take place, probably in November. Trust me, non-boxing fans, you are going to know all about this fight by then. Expect major hype.
Of course, this is on top of the other biggest fight in boxing.
