3 October 2003
Tim’s post about aesthetic fascists in football seems to be an expansion on the basic comment of ‘just what is it with Spurs fans?’ I’ve thought for some time that they are willingly cursed by the comment by Danny Blanchflower that ‘The game’s about glory, doing things with style’.
I’m sure at the time it seemed right, the very epitome of the Spurs way. But look where it leads you. No longer a big club, having not won the league for over 40 years and perennial champions in the alternative universe where points are awarded for artistic impression.
But help is at hand. I can reveal a way to exorcise the curse, which doesn’t involve publicity stunts involving end-of-the-pier fortune tellers. They must sign Robbie Savage.
It’s hard to think of a more unloved player than Savage. It doesn’t help looking like what would happen if Dean Gaffney and an Afghan hound were placed in Seth Brundle’s transporter chamber and merged with each other. However, he’s effective. That’s why he’s regularly picked and the clubs where he’s played value him greatly. This concentration on effectiveness would free Spurs from this curse and supplant tippy-tappiness in its stead. Which is the way it should be. Then all their ball players might actually have to come up with new and interesting ways to remain in the treatment room.
Dave Boyle in TMFD • No Comments
Geeta’s Original Soundtrack site has been on terrific form recently and here is another excellent example, where she calls for a New Pop revival. I totally agree about the need for absurdity in pop – the “what the fuck?” element that the genuinely new has in common with the outrageously cheeky or just bogglingly vast. Of course there’s generally nothing worse than forced absurdity, and I say that as someone who likes The Darkness (they stay just on the right line I reckon).
The last couple of days has been spent in a download frenzy for Popular while I still have access to a fast connection, and I reached the mid-80s, lending particular relevance to Geeta’s post. Isabel and I scanned through my spoils and it dawned on me that the particular just-post-New Pop era was the golden age of the megaballad: the young bucks of the 80s pop landscape, glistening with sweat and confidence, trying their hands at slow numbers and coming up with unashamedly colossal smoochers like “True”, “Careless Whisper”, “The Power Of Love”. Older hands got in on the act too – “Hello”, “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” (the earth-shaking Brontosaur of the Popozoic era, that one). And actually just as the dinosaurs and other prehistoric megafauna would now be simply too vast to survive, so too the megaballad seems to have died out – I’m sure part of the appeal of Christina’s “Beautiful” was how anachronistically big it sounds. R&B slow jams evolved into something more sleek and predatory, but the teen-pop ballad had a horrid 90s despite everyone’s supposed idolisation of George Michael. And now? What price a “True” from Blue?
Tom in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
REAL LIFE EXPERIMENTS #1: The Tube Train
AIM: Find out what happens if you pull the emergency handle in a London tube train.
APPARATUS: 1 Northern Line tube train with emergency handles, air conditioning and tannoy systems. 2 fellow passengers. 1 driver. 6-8 pints of Sam Smith?s Ayingerbrau lager.
METHOD: Consume lager. Board train. Sit reading book until train reaches Clapham South and stops. Wait for 90 minutes. Make sure air conditioning is loud enough that no tannoy announcements can be heard. When fellow passengers have left train in frustration after 90 minutes have passed pull all available emergency handles.
RESULTS: The Emergency Handle has no immediate dramatic effects other than to make a high pitched beeping noise, like a smoke alarm, which cuts off quickly. Pulling more than one handle causes the beeping to return but it is very quickly cut off again. The driver appeared after three emergency handles were pulled. His face had turned a reddish colour, though this faded after the tannoy inaudibility was pointed out.
CONCLUSION: Even if a train has been stopped for 90 minutes an excuse for pulling emergency handles is desirable. Train drivers like the idea of getting home as much as you do. Using an emergency handle is not particularly satisfying: future experiments might involve alarms that make more noise. The researcher views this particular experiment with a mixture of deflation and mild embarrassment.
Tom in Proven By Science • No Comments
I wish I’d read girl’s anthology comics when I was younger. At school I was a swot and a pouf anyway, so what the hell. As a fella in my 30s I am of course attempting to buy-back my youth. At flea-markets, if I see any of the range of IPC funny-strip comics from the late 70s*, I can’t resist a flip through, but, being all sexualist about it, only boys collect and keep their comics, so there are only boy-oriented comics to be found.
All I get of what was in comics for girls** are the teaser ads for NEW STORIES START THIS WEEK in other IPC comics ON SALE NOW. Each story is a fantastic permutation of horses, paranormal happenings, time-travelling victorians, diaries, orphans, ghosts, horses, magic amulets, betraying best-friends, ponies, witches and horses. Anyway, here are some tantalising ads that I recently found:
New this week in Tammy and Misty
The Sea Witches – Two girls holidaying in the Outer Hebrides stumble on an age-old terror reborn – a legendary horror that almost took their lives!
The Stone Curse – Katie, staying at her aunt’s in a remote Norfolk village, wonders why everyone is so frightened – especially of the marshes after dark
New this week in Jinty and Penny
The Ghost Dancer – Ferne Ashley leaves her wheelchair to dance in the moonlight. But will she be discovered? [pic of Ferne, sans chair, in a baroque night scene, twirling like a ballerina in her nightie]
I kid you not. That The Ghost Dancer – a story that could ironically run and run – is lost from the comic archives, just ‘cos girls don’t collect/keep comics, is a national tragedy. I want to know what happened to Ferne, goddammit.
* Whizzer & Chips, Whoopee, Krazy, Buster, Monster Fun, etc
**The odd Bunty turns up from time to time. I have one with a fantastic story about an orphaned girl’s attempts to make a kite from scraps of paper and flour-paste. Naturally her attempts are thwarted (and silently suffered through) by her cruel adoptive family.
Alan in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
The Guardian’s set of British Band Top Trumps is a dud in terms of production values – uneven cards, poor paper stock and you have to photocopy the newspaper in order to make a full pack. They get the mechanics of Top Trumps exactly right, though – arbitrary scoring and at least one category where the rankings are entirely baffling and it’s just an excuse to make favourite cards do better. (The “Killing Power” equivalent in this instance is “Style”). In Guardian-world, you might also notice, MCs don’t do “Gigs” – but then what’s a pack of Trumps without the raging arguments over what “N/A” counts as?
Tom in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
Living on the East London borderland between the Turkish Quarter and the Vietnamese Quarter (and should you choose to accept your mission) you get to discover lots about real actual Turkish Delight in all its flavours and forms. Here is a warning for those who actually LIKE it in its lemon-flavoured or rosehip or pistachio-sprinkled incarnations: the excellent shopkeepers of Lower Clapton Road stock at least one flavour which the label chooses NOT to translate (or only in teenytiny letters); this particular Delight is an attractive pinky-orange and the flavour is CARROT and this mission you may sensibly decline…
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in Pumpkin Publog • 5 Comments
A few months ago, a prominent TMFDer was on Radio 5′s breakfast show, interviewed by none other than Victoria Derbyshire. I’m not a fan of Victoria Derbyshire, she seems to embark on brief breakfast radio interview slots with a clear idea of the point she wishes to make, as opposed to inviting specialists onto the show and reacting to what they say. I’m sure she thinks she’s being challenging, making hard-hitting radio. I’m also sure that the combination of Victoria* and that Campbell fellow have driven me away from Radio 5 in the mornings. Radio 5 had investigative journalism once upon a time, too, remember that? Last night they were asking people to ring in with their pick for the greatest goal ever scored. You can probably imagine what tremendous radio that made. I mean, they even interviewed Archie Gemmill.
So anyway, A TMFDer was on Radio 5 talking about the principle of fans’ participation in the ownership of football clubs. Despite being presented with plenty of evidence to the contrary (Lincoln, Chesterfield, Barcelona, Real Madrid) Ms Derbyshire insisted that fans were too fickle to be involved in the sensible and stable running of a club. A couple of defeats and they’d be off sacking people left right and centre. The implication was that only real actual businessmen could possibly make the kind of level-headed decisions required in the corporate world of contemporary football.
This morning as the news that jittery City creditors demanded the removal of Peter Reid as manager of Leeds while fans’ groups advocated stability and giving the manager time to sort things out**, I wondered what Victoria would make of it. I didn’t wonder hard enough to bother re-tuning my radio, though.
*Imagine how tempting it was to pull my usual trick of resorting to initials here! Happily I’m above all that.
**I hope the Leeds board are decent enough to give PR an actual chance rather than letting him take the hits of the difficult month coming up (Arsenal, Man Utd, Liverpool , Blackburn) then replacing him with another sucker who’ll seem to be pulling things around when the easier ties arrive and congratulating themselves on the instant success of their decisive action’
Tim in TMFD • No Comments
QI continues to blot the midweek BBC schedules, sloshing around the comedy quiz genre in an entirely pointless, middle class way. Not that there are any comedy quiz shows that aren’t middle class; Radio 4 remains their spiritual home, where any trumped up theme is an excuse for establishment luvvies to engage in mutual masturbation and bad puns. But QI is particularly repellent. The object is to give long-winded comedy answers rather than obvious ones, which is how every other one of these shows from Never Mind The Buzzcocks to the Newsquiz works, except that they at least have a pretence of an overarching theme. QI plumbs new depths of verbose palliness – I nearly lost my dinner after witnessing Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and John Sessions reminisce about parties they’d attended. And when the guests are actually displaying their useless knowledge, the effect is of a load of sad Open University lecturers sitting in the pub and trying to get one up on each other. Alan Davies looks as if he’s had to drink himself half-unconscious just to get through each edition, with obnoxious results, while Stephen Fry peers owlishly at the autocue as if he’s never seen one before. When will producers accept that the ONLY good comedy quiz show is I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, and ever more shall be so?
Archel in Do You See • No Comments
I have never liked Turkish Delight. It tastes like jellified bubble bath (no I have never eaten jellified bubble bath, I am using my imagination). I have tried, honest I have – I’ve had the Fry’s stuff and the stuff covered in talc (spot the bathroom theme in Turkish sweetmeats) from realactual Turkey brought back by holidaying colleagues. But still it is vile. So when someone presents me with a perfectly good bar of Cadbury chocolate which has been tainted by TD, surely it’s acceptable and right to nibble the chocolate around the gooey middle and discard it (in a tidy and ladylike fashion?). No? Well I think it is.
Emma in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
I don’t really know why I still go to open mic poetry nights, as I reached the age where other people’s earnestness becomes anathema quite a while ago. But as Paul Stones, host of Howling at the Moon, said last night (though in slightly more diplomatic terms): ignore the fact that most of what people have to say is embarrassingly crap, and open your mind to what might be the nugget of truth within.
Howling is not strictly a poetry night. It’s not very strictly anything. And what always starts off as a typically British crowd, perched silently on bar stools, usually turns into a heckling mob with the most unlikely members of the audience taking the stage to tell a bad joke, recite a limerick they wrote when they were ten, decry George W. Bush, play guitar poorly, or discuss druids. And if we’re lucky the excellent MC Braniac will be there actually being funny.
Earnestness abounds, but so does chaos, which is what keeps me coming back I suppose. Trouble is, the Full Moon pub is under new management, the type that likes dark red paint and dark moody bar staff. There was a definite feeling last night that Howling might not be at home here for much longer, given that its core of performers and fans are a bunch of filthy hippies. Not being part of this core, I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to find the truth in the theatrical mumblings of a sweaty communist, or at the bottom of an overpriced bottled beer. Looking is fun though.
Archel in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
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