No, really. Forget bunny suicides: this is the sickest, most heart-rending video to ever rape innocent eyes. Turn away now if your heart is made of less than granite; this will be too much to endure. A madly poetic, tension-filled musical Petit Guignol, this just may be the most disturbing thing you will ever see.
‘Chocolade haas’ is an episode from the preschool art project
‘Big Art For Little People’, made by Lernert Engelberts en Sander Plug,
The series is produced by Cut-n-Paste for KRO Youth,
in association with Dutch Culture Fund (Stifo).
One morning quite some while ago I was awoken by my sister, who’d been sent by my mother, walking into my room, banging the door wide open and shouting, “Wake up! Grandpa and John Lennon are both dead and Mom wants you downstairs.”
I wondered for a second how I could be held responsible.
This has, however, nothing whatsoever and in no fashion to do with what I am about to say, which is Happy Birthday to Jesus and Shane McGowan (at least one documented to be alive as we go to press)!
And now, hearken ye to the greatest Christmas song for adults that isn’t exactly a Christmas carol, Fairytale of New York. I want to hear Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty duet on this, and I want them to do it now, before they no longer qualify under the above parenthetical.
It’s hard to know whether MacGowan is better known today for Fairytale of New York, the filthy, tender duet he and the late Kirsty MacColl first belted out in 1987, or for his legendary thirst. The song, which he penned with fellow Pogue Jem Finer, returns like the debauched ghost of Christmas past to haunt pubs and clubs each December…
According to Conor McNicholas, editor of NME, the song deserves its place in history. “The world is a better place for Fairytale Of New York.” It is, he says, “a moment when pop music becomes a real work of art – it’s as much a short musical drama as it is a pop song”…
MacGowan himself, however, is well aware of the mythology that envelops him. “In Irish pubs where they still sing, Fairytale has become as much a standard as Danny Boy or The Fields of Athenry,” he wrote on a Guardian blog last Christmas. “So I’m like the writers of all those traditional standards, except I’m not anonymous. Or dead.”
And despite the drink and the drugs, the fall-outs and the punch-ups, MacGowan’s music looks likely to endure.
“He might be a drunk and a bum but Shane MacGowan still has that most precious of musical things – a unique and special legacy,” says McNicholas. “With that in your top pocket you can drink yourself off your bar stool every night as far as I’m concerned.”
It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won’t see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you
Got on a lucky one
Came in eighteen to one
I’ve got a feeling
This year’s for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true
They’ve got cars big as bars
They’ve got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It’s no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me
You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night
The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing “Galway Bay”
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day
You’re a bum
You’re a punk
You’re an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it’s our last
I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can’t make it all alone
I’ve built my dreams around you.
I will tell you a Christmas story. I will tell it as Alexander Andreievitch Masseyev told it me in his little house outside the walls of Jedda years ago one hot, damp Christmas Eve.
It was the custom among the few English people in Jedda in those days to make up a carol-singing party on Christmas Eve. For a week before, the three or four of us who had voices they were not ashamed of, and the one or two who had neither voice nor shame, practiced to the accompaniment of an old piano in the one British mercantile house in the place: an instrument whose vocal cords had not stood the excessive humidity of that climate any better than those of some of the singers. Then, on Christmas Even, the party gathered at our house where we dined and, with a lingering memory of Yuletide mummers in England, arrayed ourselves in such bits of fancy dress or comic finery as we could lay our hands on; made false whiskers out of cotton-wool or a wisp of tow, blackened our faces, reddened our noses with lip-stick supplied by the Vice-Consul’s wife, put our jackets on inside-out and sprinkled over our shoulders ‘frost’ out of a little packet bought by someone ages ago at home and kept by some miracle of sentimental pertinacity through years of exile on that desert shore.
I am no singer, but I always had a part in those proceedings. It was to carry the lantern.
Our Sudanese house-boys observed us with more admiration than amusement on their faces, and the little knot of our Arab neighbours, who always gathered about our door to watch us set out, whatever the occasion, gave not the slight4est sign of recognizing anything more comic that usual in our appearance. We made our round of th4e European houses in our Ford station-wagon; I holding my lantern on its pole outside the vehicle and only by luck avoiding shattering it against the wall as the First Secretary cut the corners of the narrow lanes. Fortunately, expect for our neighbours, who never seemed to go to bed at all (or, at least, didn’t go to bed to sleep), the True-Believers of Jedda kept early hours, and by nine or ten at night the dark sandy lanes were deserted but for pariah dogs and families of goats settled with weary wheezings to doze the still, close night away. Poor Jedda goats! Whose pasture and byre were the odorous alleys; pathetic mothers of frustrated offspring, with those brassieres which seemed at first sight such an astonishing refinement of Grundyism, but which turned out to be merely and economic safeguard – girdles not of chastity but of husbandry; with your frugal diet of old newspapers and ends of straw rope, to whom the finding of an unwanted (or unguarded) panama hat was like a breakfast of ‘Id ul Fitr; how many a curse and kick in the ribs have you earned from a night-ambling Frank for couching in that precise pit of darkness where the feeble rays of one paraffin lamp expire and those of the next are not yet born!
From the facades of the crazy, coral-built houses that hem the lanes project roshans – bow-windows of decaying wooden lattice-work – and on the plastered tops of these bow-windows the moonlight falls so clear and white this Christmas Eve that to the after-dinner eye it seems that snow has fallen…
But sometimes I do find something of moderate to severe amusement, and such is the following. For those of you who haven’t been reading People at the checkout line, Lindsay Lohan is probably the most talented of the Trainwreck Starlet Cavalcade currently lumbering through Hollywood, and probably the one with the most problems, except of course for Ms. Spears, who is in a class by herself (in so many ways). Lohan‘s father has been in and out of prison for at least a decade for a stunning variety of offences, and her mother is a notorious party cougar. Her sister is being moulded into the next sexpot, despite being 14 years old. And the boys? They’re not so pretty or potentially lucrative, so nobody cares about them.
And then there’s Perez.
Perez Hilton, the world’s most popular blogger (or, to be more specific, the author of the world’s most popular blog; everyone loves to hate Perez) was censored by YouTube yesterday, losing two of his accounts over claims he posted footage of Liza Minelli to which he did not have permission of the copyright holder. This claim appears not to be true, and his account has been reinstated, but he is, quite naturally, rather burnt about the whole experience and not thrilled with YouTube. He therefore went ahead and used a different format for his latest video about the troubled Lohan clan, a format which WP.com forbids us to use here on the ol’ raincoaster blog, but for which we have found a workaround.
Forget slow hands. There’s something the ladies like even better, and if you don’t know what it is, let’s look to Kuato, the veiny, stomach-dwelling Yoda creature from the Schwarzenschlocken meisterpiece that is Total Recall. Let’s face it, when you look like that, you’d better have some hidden talents, and we don’t mean playing the violin.
Yes, the ladies like me, and they dig on my movie star status, but sometimes not all women are impressed by that. You know that singer Shania Twain? I showed her the veins in my tiny squat head and you know? Didn’t impress her. Not much at all.
I’m not the tallest guy in the world. I don’t drive a fast car. But based on the fact that I’m located in a guy’s torso, I know of which I speak. I’m in a perfect place to give a woman pleasure with my tiny gummy mouth and gimpy, rotted hands.
You think I’m joking? Ask me what I’m doing Saturday night. Just ask.
What am I doing Saturday night? Giving some lucky lady head. All of it. My whole head.
So kids, remember. Cunnilingus is cool. Blowjobs are so last semester.
Very indirectly via kstafford (sorry, ladies, I believe he’s taken).
After ten at night, downtown in the boondocks is filled with attractive, well-dressed young couples strolling and chatting to one another and greeting friends.
After ten at night, downtown in Vancouver is filled with staggering drunks, beggars, dopey hipsters wearing secondhand clothing they haven’t even brushed the dead owner’s dandruff off, and those so outrageously obnoxious that their own mothers out in said boondocks threw them out of their basement apartments and told them to go “get some fresh air.” This is much like the tourist effect, to whit: the reason most tourists are so obnoxious is that they are not traveling because they wish to, but rather because they have been thrown out by their homes.
When I have that nagging feeling that I’m forgetting something in my apartment, that thing invariably turns out to be the keys to the place where I’m headed.
When I forget the keys to the boondock-ridden locale where I am supposed to be house-sitting, it will be on a night when I decide to take the Skytrain to the very farthest station in said boondock and walk to the house via the “scenic route” which, of course, takes place in the foothills of the Coastal Mountain range.
I must be getting fitter because, although the walk wiped me out, I no longer smell like wet pennies when I sweat, so this is an improvement.
Conrad Black has two sons, in addition to the daughter who’s been doing the “faithful supporter” thing at the trial. Funny, I read his whole autobiography and he didn’t mention them. Nor getting married, if memory serves. What a family guy!
Those graveyards that have the small, flat stones set flush into the ground? When you pass them at speed on the Skytrain on a dark and stormy night, they sparkle. Almost worth forgoing the weeping angels. Somewhere in Boondock, Ontario, my mother is sparkling. Unless it snowed; then she’s twinkling.
It is indeed possible to live off nothing but meat, cheese, caffeine and scotch for a week, but when you do
you will crave, I mean actively crave, multivitamins.
raincoaster 