FROTHING SPLEEN

2012-01-06T12:24:00.000+01:00

The 2012 New Year's message from TONA: No more Mr Nice Guys

2011-12-23T18:20:00.005+01:00

It’s been quite a few days for deaths – Hitchens, the Dear Leader of North Korea, and most significantly for the Czechs of course, Václav Havel. Havel is clearly a revered figure in the Czech Republic, even so I’ve been slightly taken aback by the strength of feeling his death has generated. I don’t really want to join in too much here, from what I knew of Havel I basically liked and respected him but I’m certainly no expert, and more than enough has been written about him this week already.

The reaction to his death has left me with some mixed feelings. There’s evidently no lack of glutinous sentimentality, perhaps exacerbated by the fact that it’s Christmas – aaahh – and this is the time of year when he first became president of Czechoslovakia. There’s also no lack of hypocrisy, since he was often the object of ridicule as president among certain parts of the population. Not only hypocrisy, but in the case of current president Klaus, typically vicious opportunism: no doubt keen to avoid negative comparisons with the much-loved predecessor for whom he had utter contempt (which was quite rightly reciprocated), the incumbent grasps at the chance to bask in reflected glory.

In the midst of all this, it’s maybe not so surprising that a few dissenting voices have been raised, largely from the left. These have ranged from downright poisonous bad taste on the part of oafish, bloodthirsty Stalinists exhorting the nation to celebrate, to the more cerebral, which point out that he was no saint, who at the very least quickly reneged on his promise to serve only a single term as president. There is indeed a danger of Havel becoming the Czech equivalent of Princess Diana, and I have to hope that with Christmas Day immediately following the day of Havel’s funeral, the Czechs will (at least in this respect) return to their generally restrained, moderate selves.

Nevertheless, some of the criticisms of him strike me as somewhat mean-spirited. Although I was disappointed by his eagerness to join NATO and his slavish support for Bush’s foreign policy, I can’t agree that this entirely discredited him as a humanitarian, and have no reason to doubt the sincerity of his belief. The fact is I simply don’t agree with him on this and probably many more issues. So much for his opinions. In terms of his personality, however, I don’t find it so difficult to admire the man, and the contrast with Klaus could not be greater. Klaus, an egomaniac and slave to dogma very similar in spirit to the communists, kept his head down and worked in a bank during the years of normalisation. He subsequently dismissed Havel as a “half-socialist” and never tires of posing as the scourge of the totalitarian left, though this naturally didn’t stop him twice being elected president with the help of the communist party. Havel on the other hand, whilst evidently a flawed man, could have had quite a comfortable life had he kept his mouth shut, but was prepared to put his head on the block and suffer the consequences. RIP.

2011-08-09T11:12:00.004+02:00

“...I blame their parents...”

“...failing on the part of our schools...”

“...total lack of discipline...”

“...there can be no excuses whatsoever...”

“...opportunistic, copycat looting...”

“...mindless, recreational violence...”

“...thoroughly organised, cynical attacks...”

“...feral youth...”

“...shallow, greedy individuals...”

“...trashing their own communities...”

“...intent on causing misery...”

“...this is criminality, pure and simple, and it has to be confronted and defeated...”

“...huge sympathy for the families who have suffered...”

“...law abiding people are appalled...”

“...need for a swift, robust response...”

“...police working with the full support of the local communities...”

“...impose martial law...”

“...I see it’s mostly blacks that are at it...”

Aaaah, fuck off you bastards!!!

Tona - Shooter (live at EXIT 2011)

2011-07-14T08:50:00.000+02:00

They're back, and they're fucking evil. Damn, I wish I hadn't missed Exit this year.

2011-06-11T10:25:00.002+02:00

Has Thatcher of all people been the one to bang the final nail into the coffin of Sarah Palin's political career? Fucking hell, I'm now forced to contemplate the notion that I might actually be pleased the old bitch isn't dead!

2011-06-06T14:30:00.006+02:00

The summer is a period of glorious laziness for Czechs. In some professions this starts earlier than in others. The teaching profession, for example, is one that provides for vast expanses of sloth. By this time of the year any teaching that is going on has descended to the level of the farcically tokenistic. Lectures have of course long finished in universities, whilst in regular schools students are either taking or have already taken their exams, and so now, since attendance is mandatory, both students and teachers are irritably killing time as parties to a do-nothing pact until school breaks up at the end of June, after which there follows a summer holiday period of two full months. In language schools, where attendance is voluntary, students are few and far between at this time of the year, despite having paid for their courses. Easy money for the teachers, if rather demoralising and potentially maddening if only one student turns up to class.

Although an extreme case, teachers are not the only lazy bastards in this country. For the whole of July and August the entire republic seems to grind to a halt, as families go abroad or off to their country cottage to fart around in the garden for a couple of months. Even those who go to work during these months spend most of their time there piddling about on the internet and drinking slivovice. This is a country where many people complain of being poor in comparison with their Western counterparts, but can nonetheless evidently afford not to work for enviable lengths of time. Hey ho, if you can’t beat em, join em.

Being self-employed these days I have no choice over this anyway. During the holiday season my orders for work simply dry up, and with the superb weather we’re having it seems to have started early this year. This has suddenly left me with a bit of extra time on my hands to trawl the net, during which I’ve recently come across this little gem – which MP would you rather shag? There are sometimes quite hideous choices to be made, but with humour and a strong stomach on the part of the voter it can actually become quite addictive. It was the Guardian that drew my attention to the website, which has predictably raised eyebrows in polite, politically correct circles. Its detractors can hardly complain that it’s sexist, since, given the male/female ratio amongst MPs, men are much more widely represented here than women. However, many protest that it’s demeaning. Well I should fucking well hope so! Let’s just remember who these people are for a moment – MPs, the scum of the earth! Shouldn’t we find this opportunity to humiliate them rather empowering? After all, why should us little people be denied the pleasure of cracking off a spiteful wank over Caroline Flint, for example? Or perhaps, now that Labour are out of power, there might be added spice to giving one of those nasty, prim young Tories a good facial – Priti Patel and Penny Mordaunt are most certainly in the bank for a rainy day. These days I have more or less equal contempt for all three main political parties, so politics doesn’t really come into it that much. Labour, Tory, Lib Dem (although the best the latter can do seems to be 60 year old gilf Lynne Featherstone) are all surely thoroughly deserving of a good pasting, if you’ll pardon the expression. There’s also a personal advantage for me, living outside the UK, in that in the great majority of cases I’ve never heard these women speak, which would no doubt put me off my stroke a fair bit. There may be drawbacks – of course it’s juvenile and essentially ineffectual, furthermore it debases the wanker at least as much as the wankee. Still, even if it’s not a particularly mature or dignified way to get revenge, with the next election still 4 years away what else is left to us?

2011-05-25T18:23:00.008+02:00

I have a confession to make. For all my previous, exasperated ranting and abuse directed at the president of the USA, I’m basically in awe of him. This more or less defies logic, I can’t reasonably defend this embarrassing crush, but it is what it is. I heart Barack Obama.

Why? I’ve never been a great fan of the Democratic Party, or of smooth-talking political hopes of the so-called Left in the past. I loathed both Clinton and Blair from the moment I clapped eyes on them, which conversely means I couldn’t honestly claim to be disappointed by what they did (or more pertinently didn’t do) in office. On the other hand, with Obama I almost feel an injured lover’s sense of betrayal when he shows himself to be “just like all the others”, and proceed to scramble around in a desperate search for evidence that he isn’t. It's a masochistic, one-way relationship of the kind that can only end in tears and bitter recriminations.

Is it just his film star looks, or is there more to it? I naturally convince myself that there is. He is certainly easy on the ear, as well as the eye. Whereas Blair’s prissy delivery invariably made me suspect ulterior motives and a nasty, calculating mind, and Clinton’s easy-going southern bonhomie simply made me suspect he was the worst person in the world, Obama’s public speaking, to me at least, exudes dignity and common sense. Although this sometimes contrasts with his actual policy, he does also have an infuriating knack of handing out straws to clutch at. For example, just when he’s indulged in an act of cowardly banality such as backing down to those blatantly racist oafs demanding that he publishes his birth certificate, he then gives a glimmer of hope by doing something eminently sensible, like refusing to pander to fuckwit conspiracy theorists by publishing the pictures of bin Laden with half his head blown off. Or after his stupefyingly crass use of the US veto against a resolution which merely criticises Israeli contravention of international law, he then makes an entirely reasonable appeal for a two-state solution based on 1967 borders, cleverly suggesting that despite his past follies, he could be the first US president since 1967 to put Israel in its place. He’s a pro all right.

Unfortunately that word has a double meaning. He wants to be everyone’s buddy, constantly “reaching out” to scum who deserve to have their faces ground into the dirt: Hillary Clinton, Netanyahu, the Congress Republicans, the birthers. He’s president prick tease. No sooner has he shown the international community a flirtatious inch of decency and bravery by saying something rational about Israel for a change than he allows himself to be publicly humiliated (again) with this ferocious bitch-slap from surely one of the most vile human beings ever to have existed since Ian Paisley. For some absurd reason there’s still a part of me that’s hoping he’s just biding his time, picking his moment before he drops the intransigent bastards right in the shit and solves the Middle East crisis by finally taking an even-handed approach, but let’s face it, it’s unlikely isn’t it?

Audacity of hope? Imbecility of hope, more like. Prove me wrong, Mr President.

2011-02-09T17:00:00.004+01:00

Shock! William Hague shows himself to be a greatly superior international statesman to Nobel Prize winner Obama. What can I say except, with no irony intended, good on you Will. Obama, you fucking useless pussy.

Update/correction: Obama, you stupid fucking cunt.

thief of fire

2011-01-16T18:35:00.000+01:00

2011-01-16T17:51:00.009+01:00

Happy New Year!

It was a relatively pleasant start to the year for me anyway at the Hammersmith Apollo down in the big smoke. Normally the prospect of a proper “night out” at a venue in London on New Year’s Eve would fill me with dread, and it was certainly not how I’d expected to be seeing in the year in which I turn 40, but then I hadn’t been aware before I reached the shores of the UK that the bloody POP GROUP were going to be playing, and if this is not a cause for a re-evaluation of priorities, then surely nothing is.

In fact it was quite a major happening, with not just the Pop Group but also Shellac and headliners Sonic Youth appearing, so since James had kindly promised me a lift from Stoke Newington to Hammersmith and back, enabling us to avoid the hellish New Year’s public transport through central London, I decided to splash out 45 quid for a ticket for this special occasion. The fact that it was such a large gig did of course have the disadvantage that I’d see my favourites, who were way down the bill, early on in the evening and then have to spend the rest of the show hanging around waiting for my lift home, but I resolved to give the other bands the benefit of the doubt, which in the event was at least partly justified.

There has been a spate of bands in recent years whose reforming seems almost tailor made to my requirements as someone old enough to know who they are but not old enough to have seen them first time around, and with both Swans and the Pop Group playing within the space of a month it’s been something of an embarrassment of riches for me lately. Not least because on New Year’s Eve the Pop Group did the seemingly impossible and outperformed Swans, blew them away no less.

With the New Year and everything I’m beginning to feeling my age, frankly I’m a curmudgeonly old cunt (mind you, as my oldest friends will tell you, I was when I was 15). These days I’m unable to resist the overpowering welling up of contempt I feel for new “alternative rock” bands almost before they’ve played a note, in many cases it’s enough just to look at them with their studied style of dress and pastiche haircuts, everything about them screaming “diminishing returns on the original”. For a couple of decades now, not only chart pop but the presented alternative has been neutered, manufactured, unchallenging, fucking post-modernist, whereas it’s difficult to think of a band any more modernist than the Pop Group. As such not only the Pop Group but post-punk in general is more relevant now than ever, and it’s no wonder it’s come back to the forefront of late. Retro as avant-garde? Sad but true.

As with Swans, the Pop Group are a band who on paper could be either great or mindbendingly bad, what they’re doing is a risky enterprise and all the more commendable for it. A fairly earnest bunch of young men who paraphrased Nietzsche in their song titles, they were never shy of being polemical, which is something I approve of on the whole but has the potential to be atrocious in the wrong hands. What’s more, they’re politically correct not just ideologically but even on a musical level; by abandoning traditional “white rock” and incorporating elements of funk, dub reggae and free jazz they could have been in danger of sounding crudely cobbled together, toe-curlingly patronising, or like so many of those awful indie bands who subscribed to the “anti-rockist” dogma in the 80s, prissy and emasculated. In the case of the Pop Group, however, the outcome was more than the sum of its parts, harnessing the power of all the aforementioned musical forms together with the ferocity of punk to mount an all-out sensory attack which is compelling because of rather than despite its righteousness. I’m reminded of the simple but effective words of the great Fugazi: “yes I know this is politically correct, but it comes to you spiritually direct”. There’s no need to apologise for having a social conscience, this is evidence enough that PC need not necessarily mean anaemic; the result is that the Pop Group were/are one of the greatest bands of all time.

Back to the last night of 2010, the Pop Group were simply fucking astonishing, living up to all their promise and more. It’s difficult to imagine that they could ever have surpassed a performance like this even during their heyday in the late 70s – is it possible that, thanks to the miracles of modern technology, they may even be better these days? The auditorium was only half full, and only about half of those early birds who had turned up by that point seemed to know who the band were, all of which the Pop Group seemed to be oblivious or indifferent to, producing a blinding set from the outset of “She is Beyond Good and Evil” through to the searing finale “We Are Time”. Mark Stewart still uses his voice like a weapon, his hideous screeching both plaintive and admonishing to the bemused New Year’s partygoers, whilst the rest of the band flay us alive with a merciless sonic assault through favourites like “Thief of Fire” and the almost unbearably fierce “We Are All Prostitutes”. I can hardly remember such an impassioned performance from a band, of being so impressed almost to the point of concussion, since Thin White Rope or the Young Gods. Live music just doesn’t get much better than this.

Following that was a fairly impossible task, which Shellac fall almost laughably short of. I went into it with mixed feelings: although the Pop Group had set the bar absurdly high, they had also put me in a fairly benevolent mood, and whilst I really wanted to see Big Black (hey Steve, everybody else is reforming, come on man!) and knew I wasn’t going to, I was nevertheless willing Albini to produce something of similar majesty, which he most certainly did not. At the time it seemed tolerable enough to me in my loved-up, post-Pop Group contentment, but looking back afterwards I felt somewhat resentful. How can the man who gave us the terrifying, bludgeoning bombardment of “Atomizer” now chug out this kind of mediocrity? No doubt, smartarse that he is, Albini could reel off all kinds of pedantic, steamrollingly tedious arguments why Shellac are in fact a much better band than Big Black and why I’m wrong to regard them as a bunch of bloodless, po-faced dullards, but there’s equally no doubt that he can shove his arguments up his self-satisfied arse. Watching Shellac live you can almost hear them counting; they somehow achieve the feat of sounding bollock-achingly laborious whilst simultaneously sounding like they can’t really be bothered, clearly eager to impress on us the fact that they consider entertaining us to be beneath them. If it’s so much fucking trouble don’t bloody do it! I heard reports that they were infinitely better at their New Year’s Day show, though I’m not exactly sticking pins in my eyes for missing it. There does indeed seem something rather typically Albini-esque about playing a gig at midday on New Year’s day, something horribly puerile and undignified in its boringly contrarian perversity, coming of course from the genius who had the brainwave of calling his band Rapeman. Not only that, but there’s also a quite desperate degree of narcissism in playing to an audience whose adulation, given the fact they had traipsed across London on a cold morning on the day of the legendary mammoth hangover for the sole purpose of seeing Shellac, was thus quite obviously guaranteed and unquestioning, an audience to whom he then grumbled about the lukewarm response he received at Hammersmith the night before, as if it were the audience’s fault. After all, god forbid that anyone should turn up to one of their shows unconvinced, with an open mind, or even be interested in seeing any of the other bands on the bill. Fuck off, Steve.

Sonic Youth appear on stage for the countdown into 2011 and make me eat at least some of my earlier words by being really rather good, certainly better than when I saw them 20 years ago – in the interim period they have managed to transform themselves into a party band and surprise me by cranking out some good old rock n roll to please the punters. Unlike Albini they don’t seem to regard themselves as quite such a work of art anymore and are much better for it, they want to have fun and want us to have fun with them. I now feel a bit guilty about slagging them off in a previous post, even if they’re still, if the truth be told, not worthy of sharing a stage with Stewart and co., let alone of being the headlining band. Nevertheless, they’re mellowing (in a good way), and for a fleeting moment made me feel like I was too. All in all a satisfying performance, more or less perfectly fitting for the time of year – Happy New Year indeed.

2010-12-14T20:34:00.003+01:00

Three cheers for Kosovo, not only for its bold, unilateral declaration of independence of a few years ago, but now also for subsequently holding the recent free elections, and of course let’s applaud its people (apart from those sulking Serbian bigots who boycotted the vote) for their choice of democratically elected representatives. In fact let’s get the name of the state right; it is not Kosovo, a Serbian bastardisation which translates as blackbird’s field, but the Republic of Kosova, which in Albanian means... erm, something else. And above all let us responsible Western powers (excluding degenerates like Spain and Slovakia, who only withheld their approval because of their selfish concerns about providing a precedent for the potential secession of their own ethnic minorities) congratulate ourselves on the speed with which we rushed in to recognise the independence of this brave young democracy from fascist bully-boy Boris Tadić’s ultra-nationalist rogue state of Serbia, which, it goes without saying, still stubbornly refuses to accept the new reality. We can feel proud that this once beleaguered region is now a true part of a modern Europe, where citizens of all ethnic backgrounds can feel equal and safe, and we should now feel morally obliged to provide the new republic with fast track access to the EU. We’ve all done a damn good job.

2010-12-10T13:06:00.016+01:00

It’s been a bloody long time to wait since that sickening abomination of a Residents gig, but finally, after the abject horror of such pitiful frivolity, came the sublime bliss of the pitilessly bleak and austere. Swans are a band I’ve been in awe of for a long time, but seem to like more the older I get, and in the last year or so in particular they’ve been knocking insistently on the door of “all time favourite band” status, which no doubt reveals something about my state of mind recently. This wasn’t always the case, I remember feeling decidedly uneasy upon first hearing them as a timid sixteen year old goth suddenly confronted with a band that was authentically, deeply gothic. Trying hard not to quake in my boots, I wondered if all this alarming savagery was really necessary; soon enough the answer came back a resounding yes. Nevertheless, though I grew to love them, they remained one of those very few great bands I never got round to seeing when I had the chance – I can’t recall them ever touring when I was in my most committed gig-going phase back at university and a couple of years beyond, but I do remember passing up an opportunity to see them on their farewell tour in Prague back in 97. Soon after and ever since, at least until I heard they were touring again, I despised myself for it. What on earth was I thinking? Consequently, and with the uncomfortably nagging memories of not only the loathsome Residents but also of that comprehensively mediocre Butthole Surfers gig last year crying out to be erased or at least compensated for, this week’s concert felt like one of those rare moments of deliverance and undeserved kindness that make life worth living. The words “I’m not worthy” have never seemed more fitting.

Swans have of course been mythologised for being one of the loudest bands in the world, to the extent of making fans physically collapse or vomit at gigs. Perhaps thankfully, they evidently didn’t feel the need to prove this in Prague this time round, even if the entire room was shaking throughout the performance. Still, though they may have stopped short of inflicting actual pain they fully lived up to my expectations by producing one of the most intense live shows I’ve ever experienced. Gira these days looks like a character out of a William Faulkner novel, as if he’s just walked in from a long day sweating thanklessly in a scorching field somewhere in the bible belt. He may be as strong as an ox, with a booming, commanding voice to match, but this just makes him all the more appropriate a vehicle for a burden of torment that would crush the life out of any ordinary mortal. He has the stage presence of a man desperately struggling to remain stoical in the face of a past, present and future of remorseless toil, misery, an unforgiving religion and a Spartan, loveless existence. The thought occurs that if this were done badly it could be excruciatingly awful, the religious symbolism awkwardly clunky, the dark brute force and heart-on-sleeve presentation of suffering an unbearable exercise in tedious machismo. However, this just goes to show what a risk Swans are taking here, and the effect is the precise opposite; in the event they come across as utterly unpretentious, direct, heartfelt and as a result, truly generous. Most of the set is unknown to me, and whilst it may have been slightly disappointing not to hear some of the old favourites, up this close and in this closeted environment it may have been just too much to bear to hear him shouting “FLEX YOUR MUSCLES!” at the top of his voice. Now without Jarboe, Swans are pretty much back to their most bludgeoning, although there are discernable tunes this show is essentially about pure power, if not for its own sake. Tonight was one of those gigs that are genuinely meaningful, in fact this was nothing short of beautiful.

It seemed slightly amusing at the end to see Gira smiling and waving at the audience, but not entirely incongruous given the magnanimous spirit of the performance. Later on he strode out to sign CDs etc wearing a huge white Stetson and smoking a cigar several inches long, managing to look immensely imposing and authoritative whilst coming across as relaxed and friendly at the same time. Just before I left I even got to shake hands with the great man. Reassuringly, his hands are fucking enormous.

2010-10-21T17:39:00.027+02:00

Last night, a mere 7 minutes’ walk from my flat, I saw the Residents play live.

THE RESIDENTS!

Pause for a moment to let the monumental significance of that sink in. For this little town this was an absolutely huge event, made even more so by the fact that it was their only gig in the country. Reportedly people flew in for the concert, which was witnessed by a cosily select bunch in the cramped theatre on the town square, from Germany and even the USA. A bloke from the German contingent apparently runs a Residents museum, where he has 50 000 exhibits of Residents memorabilia. That’s the kind of obsessive devotion this band inspires. Word has it locally that this was a mammoth operation to pull off, requiring superhuman effort and all kinds of Byzantine logistical wranglings. But they did it! They got the mighty Residents to play right here, in Olomouc. The organisers and some of the punters might regard last night as the greatest night of their lives.

The only problem being that... the Residents are shit.

They are undoubtedly a cult phenomenon here, worshipped by the ex-dissident crowd for whom they belong in a similar category to the hippy-era Beatles, Doors, Beefheart, Zappa and the VU, seen as an important influence on Czech alternative rock bands such as the excellent Plastic People of the Universe and Dg. 307, who the totalitarian regime felt so uneasy about. The difficulty with some, though not all of these avid fans is that, as their straggly grey hair suggests, they’re still stuck in the early 70s, muttering bitterly about what a disgrace punk rock was (although given Johnny Rotten’s alleged appalling comments about the Plastic People at the time I do feel some sympathy with them).

The collapse of communism, immensely liberating as it must have been at the time, has eroded certainties in all kinds of respects and for all kinds of people. Even those who fought hardest against the regime and suffered the most as a consequence are frequently left with an uncomfortable sense of anomie now that the old enemy is gone. As a prime example Václav Havel is a man I have great admiration for, but in contrast with the quiet, purposeful strength of conviction he possessed as a dissident, he was often criticised for seeming inept and directionless as president, and whilst this may be a little harsh it probably contains some truth. Other, less famous individuals have retreated to dingy, smoke-filled pubs, listening to the music of their brave, rebellious youth, and in a few cases it’s difficult to escape the uncharitable thought that they secretly miss the communists, who at least gave them a focus for their sense of injustice.

This of course has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the Residents have any merit as a band, but in this country if not elsewhere it goes some way to explaining the tenacity of their grip on a certain section of the population. Otherwise what is their appeal? Is it the music, or is it something else entirely? As with the aforementioned Sonic Youth, I can’t help comparing them to their contemporaries. Whilst Beefheart, Can and Kraftwerk for example pushed musical frontiers out into entirely new territory, the Residents and also Zappa confined themselves to wacky lampooning. The intense passion of their fans’ adulation hardly seems to be reciprocated. Perhaps this is the point though, what these people want is not passion but vindication, a nod and a wink, a knowing smirk. The impression I have is that this is music for people who feel compelled to experience their entire lives through a veneer of smugly but also fearfully detached irony, who demand that any kind of challenge or subversion be in the form of goofiness, who only feel truly comfortable when tittering.

As a result of all this last night, surrounded by rapturous applause, I felt the awkwardness of the boy who’s the only one to see that the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. Maybe I’m the one that’s mad. Like Bohumil Hrabal’s writing, the Residents’ music is a big, black blind spot for me. In actual fact last night it was hardly the Residents at all and would have been more honestly described as the Resident, since it featured one member of the band backed by the Czech alt-rockers Už Jsme Doma, themselves diehard Residents devotees, who performed a fairly stirring set to warm up (although I had to duck out half way through due to a sudden and inexplicable attack of hunger). As for the main act, it started slowly and continued slowly for a substantial length of time, even if I was probably more or less alone in wishing they’d stop fannying about. Later on, far too late, there were maybe one or two redeeming features since the backing band can at least rock out a bit, but by that time I was more engrossed in deleting a 3 month backlog of text messages from my mobile phone, which I’d switched back on out of an overwhelming sense of ennui. At the end I was dearly hoping that there wouldn’t be an encore, but surprise, surprise, they weren’t quite that subversive. To take a balanced view of the performance as a whole it was a boring, facetious load of old turd.

An obvious question: why did I go? The excuses are not good enough. Maybe: it is after all a big name for this place, I wouldn’t have gone if it was further away but it was virtually on my doorstep, although having said that I won’t be going to see Deep Purple when they play here next week. Plus the fact that the Residents are renowned and adored for being unpredictable might have let loose the risible optimist in me. Also I thought Už Jsme Doma might liven things up a bit, and to be fair to them they did a little towards the end, but when all’s said and done you can’t make sugar from shite. It was stupid of me to go, and I’m now paralysed with white, bourgeois guilt at spending approximately 20 Euro on a ticket when I could have given the money to charity and spent a much more enjoyable evening staring at the crack in the paint on my living room ceiling, listening to the ominous, dwarfing silence, trembling in existential terror and contemplating the onset of another dark winter and the crushing futility of my life. An opportunity missed! Hey ho.

On a brighter note, good news, not just for me but also for two lucky lads down in Novi Sad, is that I was literally woken up this morning by the postman, bearing three tickets to see Swans in Prague in December. Now that’s a band I don’t expect much detachment or goofiness from.

2010-09-29T12:59:00.001+02:00

BYEEEEE!

The Swell Maps - Let's Build A Car

2010-09-19T12:24:00.001+02:00

Sonic Youth - Teenage Riot (1991)

2010-09-19T12:24:00.000+02:00

2010-09-19T12:21:00.021+02:00

Only about 30 years or so too late, I’ve recently made a startling musical discovery: the Swell Maps. This has brought with it a second revelation, although this was something I had already slightly suspected on occasion: that Sonic Youth were more or less superfluous.

I’ve always had a bit of a problem with smug, bohemian arty-farty types, and experimental rockers are no exception. In the past I’ve enjoyed horrifying the Impostume by announcing my preference for the Rolling Stones over the Velvet Underground. This isn’t a pose, I’m not trying to be iconoclastic here, I simply admire the former’s ability to rock out so effortlessly, and whilst I acknowledge the greatness of the latter, at times I find their too-clever-by-half knowingness a bit difficult to stomach, along with the obvious fact of them being tainted by their association with that vile charlatan Andy Warhol.

This is not intended to be an anti-intellectual polemic, some kind of musical Toryism, I acknowledge that there is a need for avant-gardism and I’m fully prepared to embrace it, within reason. Neither is it meant to be a patriotic or anti-American rant in elevating the Stones over the VU or the Swell Maps above Sonic Youth (or even – deep breath, Carl – Stiff Little Fingers over Pere Ubu!!) – in the late 80s in particular it was hairy US rock bands like Dinosaur Jr. or Mudhoney (admittedly helped along a little by Sonic Youth) who gave us a welcome antidote to the nerdy sterility of what had become of some British post-punk. Still, I’ve always found Sonic Youth somewhat tricky. Although it seems a gross exaggeration to me to claim, as some have done, that they “reinvented the guitar”, they have probably been fairly influential, but compared to some of their contemporaries there seems to be an odd lack of engagement about them, their music coming across as more of an intellectual exercise which at its worst is utterly joyless. There’s none of the punishing intensity of extreme noise terrorists like Swans or Einstürzende Neubauten, and at the other end of the spectrum, in contrast with other masterful guitar pioneers such as Hüsker Dü, they had a chronic inability, with very few exceptions, to write a decent song.

As a result I’ve tended to see Sonic Youth as one of those bands who were necessary or at least useful, without actually liking them that much. Now I’ve finally heard the Swell Maps I’m not sure even about that, since they clearly taught Sonic Youth everything they know. Finding them on youtube was an epiphany of Adverts-like proportions, and again I wondered why I’d never paid any attention to them before. Ironically, like TV Smith, Nikki Sudden is one of the few relatively big, international names I've seen play here in Olomouc, though this was many years ago. I’d seen his name mentioned in the music press once or twice before and heard he’d got some kind of vague association with the Birthday Party, so for him to be playing here of all places was most definitely an event. Nevertheless, by that time he was very much in Keith Richards/Johnny Thunders trad-rock mode, and whilst you can probably guess from the above that I have absolutely nothing against that sort of thing, the performance wasn’t hugely memorable and really gave no clue as to his previous, extraordinarily innovative work, which, since this was back in the days long before youtube existed, I continued to neglect. What I do remember from the evening is chatting to him afterwards and finding him a very amiable chap, god rest his soul.

So belated apologies to Nikki, because the Swell Maps have quite blown me away. Certainly not shy of noisy guitar experimentation, they managed to combine this with a genuine rock n roll thrill that Sonic Youth, to my ears, never provided. To be fair, Thurston Moore was entirely candid about his debt to the Swell Maps, even putting out a tune called “Eric’s Trip” in obvious homage to “Epic’s Trip”, but I now find myself wondering why he bothered picking up the guitar at all: after all, it had already been done so much better by a band who, unlike Moore and co., instinctively knew how to rock, producing belters like "Let's Build A Car" and "Helicopter Spies" and influencing not only Sonic Youth but surely also those awesome rockin' behemoths the Jesus and Mary Chain amongst others. It’s all about finding the right balance between the cerebral and the visceral, innit? Swell Maps do it for me, Sonic Youth don’t.

As the great David St. Hubbins once said, “it’s such a fine line between stupid and clever”.

2010-09-17T14:20:00.001+02:00

Fuck off, cunt

The Bronx Heart Attack American

2010-07-18T10:16:00.000+02:00

Chase & Status feat. Plan B - Pieces [Uncensored].AVI

2010-07-17T23:49:00.000+02:00

Tom Waits

2010-06-27T09:47:00.000+02:00

2010-06-25T14:20:00.009+02:00

Aahhh, football. Loved by tedious jocular twats, vacuous TV pundits, dignified, salt-of-the-earth working class men who have endured a thankless life of meaningless toil, fat tattooed couch potatoes who have never done anything ever, smug, authenticity-seeking Guardian readers, noisily irksome ladettes, stupid unreconstructed hooligans and prawn sandwich-eating business opportunists. Played by spoilt, obscenely overpaid thick cunts. The beautiful game.

I say this as someone who actually likes football, within limits. I’m fairly keen to emphasise these limits, since I’m eager to avoid falling into any of the above categories and would much rather be called a dilettante. My interest in football does not extend much beyond watching a few internationals on TV or looking at the English league tables once a month or so on the internet. The nearest I get to being a “proper” fan is going to watch Sigma Olomouc a few times a season, which I do because I’ve got nothing better to do and because it still only costs 2-3 quid a ticket, whereas both out of meanness and out of principle I wouldn’t dream of paying inflated English prices to watch Coventry City, let alone the extortionate fees of a Premier League club. Still, I grew up with football, for a while it was a childhood obsession of mine, and recently, as I go into middle-aged regression, I’ve even started playing it again.

When the World Cup or even the European Championship arrives, football also provides a marvellous occasion for us to roll out the stereotypes. Not only the fan stereotypes I’ve so shamelessly resorted to above, but also national, even racist stereotypes. And how true to life they are! It’s become an irritating cliché to talk about the ruthless Teutonic efficiency and discipline of the German team, but there certainly used to be some truth in it, even if perhaps not any more. Yesterday the Italians confirmed our prejudices in exquisite style, their preening mamma’s boys rolling around on the pitch sobbing after losing to Slovakia. Though shit at football, the French have excelled in their national sports i.e. sulky arrogance and going on strike, whilst at least in the first two matches England excelled in theirs, i.e. being shit at football, as well as overrated, and we are now gifted with the irresistible opportunity to combine this talent with our other great penchant for living in the past, harking back to the fucking war and sniggering or carping about the Germans.

These minor issues aside though, you can see where all this is heading. The Swiss. Those fucking cunts. The most boring nation ever to have existed, with a football team to match. A soulless human barricade with all the charisma of ... well the Swiss, I can’t think of anything more boring. It’s possible they could be eliminated today, but in the more likely event that they are not the consequences could be truly dire. The Spanish, for all their supposed flair, were unable to stop them. The further they are allowed to go the more unbearable they will become, the greater their monumental indifference and monstrously disproportionate self-belief will be. Footballing nations of the world unite and take note – against this team, anything goes.

2010-05-23T21:00:00.007+02:00

Now the political events have ground to a stultifying anti-climax in the UK, my attention has turned to the forthcoming general election here, due to take place next weekend, specifically to the tawdriness of the pre-election publicity.

The Czech Republic is not the most politically correct nation on earth. In certain respects, particularly regarding sexual politics, this came as something of a relief to me when I first arrived here in the mid 90s, having just escaped from the prohibitively PC culture that pervaded in British universities at the time, when even use of the word “cunt” could provoke a storm of hissy fits from gangs of revolting, self-righteous harpies. Generally though I felt pretty dismayed. It might have been amusing on Easter Monday to be handed a whip made of willow twigs by a woman asking you to beat her with it, but it was also frequently confusing and frustrating to find myself a bigger feminist than any woman I came into contact with, and despite the fact that I'm becoming more sexist as I get older (and LOVING it!) this still frequently applies.

Much worse than that was the racism. Naturally I'd encountered casual racism plenty of times before back home when I ventured outside my closeted, studenty environment, but even there it had usually been recognised to be a bit risqué and unacceptable in polite circles, whereas here I was genuinely shocked at how utterly shameless it was and how widespread throughout the entire society. The majority of racists bristled at any suggestion that they were racist, protesting along the lines of “I like black people very much, I just hate gypsies”, usually qualified with “you wouldn't understand, you haven't lived with them like we have”. This is deeply entrenched here and will not disappear quickly, nevertheless I've noticed significant improvements in this area over the years, mainly amongst younger, better travelled and more educated people eager to ape their trendy, Western counterparts, as well as in the media, where it's now at the very least required to be covert about one's racial prejudices, which is a start.

Most recently however, in the run-up to the general election, I've encountered another flagrant ism, for which the Czechs so far have no word: ageism. The subject of the latest controversy is a clip published on the internet, imploring young people to persuade their grandparents not to vote for the left. Having left-wing views on most issues I'm bound to feel irritated by this, but despite the rather ignorant tone of the clip's authors in lumping “the left” together as a single entity, I have to respect their right to free speech and acknowledge that they have a legitimate opinion. In addition they may actually have a point this time, because the present leader of the Social Democrats evidently has no qualms about the idea of cosying up to the unreconstructed Communists.

Jiří Paroubek is someone I've already mentioned several times on this blog, and I don't want to repeat myself now by detailing his many faults. What is clear is that he is extremely unpopular with Czech youth, for which he has mostly himself to blame. He's widely perceived to be an authoritarian demagogue, and this is something I can't argue with. As such he's caused enormous damage to the left in a section of society that under different circumstances might be regarded as the left's natural constituency. In the 90s, not long after the collapse of communism, it came as no surprise to me that the young and intellectually oriented tended to be in favour of not only social but also economic liberalism. Towards the end of the decade, however, as the shine of free-market idealism wore off, it was heartening for me to perceive a gradual leftward drift among this group. Now, largely down to the work of one man alone, it's back to square one, with the difference that whilst educated youth here are once again overwhelmingly opposed to the left, many now simply feel disillusioned, disenfranchised and apathetic.

In such a situation I find it hard in principle to begrudge the makers of the clip, especially in their stated aim of overcoming this apathy and encouraging young people to vote, even if it is for the right. However, having seen the clip, which demonstrates the most diabolical arrogance of youth, I fucking begrudge them all right. For those who don't understand Czech, the clip begins with the message that those who vote for the left tend to be older people, who live mainly in the country. So far so good, this is statistically true. As a result these are the people we need to remind about the evils of left wing politics. This is obviously obscenely patronising to people who lived through communism coming from those too young to remember it, but maybe still within the boundaries of acceptability. The intended humour is thoroughly embarrassing and an insult to voters of any age – internationally the right hand is used for greeting people whereas the left hand is used for wiping your arse (personally I use toilet paper), and Kundera sounds a bit like the Czech word for cunt, ha ha. Piss poor, but even so not in itself a case for censorship. What is a case for censorship is the despicable caricatures of false teeth, small brains and decrepit, demented-looking old people – imagine if that had been applied to black people, for example. The message is clearly socially divisive. Granted, I don't expect it to lead to a spate of murderous attacks on pensioners, but on the other hand if you think I'm being hysterical, I'd refer you to a recent study from Brno university which showed that OAPs are the social group most frequently discriminated against, whilst another opinion poll (both Czech only I'm afraid, and no, I'm not going to translate it for you) showed that a quarter of those aged between 15 and 29 regarded senior citizens as a burden on society, who “live at our expense”. The implication of the clip is that old people have a selective memory, essentially that they're stupid, unfashionable (possibly the worst crime of all), unable to understand democracy and modern society, that they're selfish and should shut up, move over and acknowledge that the future belongs to us.

Upon finding himself the victim of egg-pelting last year, Paroubek responded to his youthful assailants in typically high-handed fashion, telling them to “go off home for a milkshake” or words to that effect. If those words were applied to the people responsible for this clip, I'd find it hard to disagree.

2010-05-02T19:59:00.002+02:00

Did someone really say that Motorhead had no killer riffs?

2010-05-02T19:52:00.002+02:00

There's clearly a lot more to Japan than Guitar Wolf and High Rise. Truly, fascinating stuff.

2010-04-30T12:33:00.002+02:00

Stop smiling you bloody fool!

At a bit of a loose end last night, I decided to bite the bullet and watch the UK pre-election debate. I didn't expect to be particularly impressed, and the speakers more or less lived up to my expectations. On the other hand I was a little perturbed at my own reaction to the debate and the very idea of it as a whole, in that as I approach 40 I sense that I'm becoming an elitist old fart. Naturally I can't argue with the idea that politicians should be accountable, and should have to present their case to the people, man, but in a televised debate it's inevitable that presentation skills become paramount, style over content.

Gordon Brown is at an obvious disadvantage here, not only in terms of age but also of demeanour. Whilst it might be stretching it to say I began to sympathise with him, at times I couldn't help cringing at just how shit he is at playing this game. In all three debates he's come third of the three party leaders in performance ratings, and it's no surprise. Clearly whoever is coaching him is making an utter balls-up of it. By far the worst of it is Brown's horribly awkward, horribly creepy smile, which was all too painfully evident last night. It's been remarked upon before, why does nobody in his team tell him to stop doing it? Or has it now become a kind of involuntary nervous tic? I was reminded of the story about the Kennedy v Nixon debate in 1960, in which those who'd heard it on the radio thought Nixon had won, whereas those who'd seen it on TV thought the opposite, and I wondered whether Brown might have fared better if he'd appeared with a paper bag on his head.

As for the other leaders, Nick Clegg is not the new Obama. He mostly managed to come across as reasonably competent, in my view the best of the three, but his constant promotion of himself as the new and fresh candidate is already beginning to look a bit old and stale. I was slightly baffled to see the polls saying that Cameron had won the debate, since I thought he was dire. I can't pretend to be neutral here, I've always had a deep antipathy towards the Conservative party, but then again I won't be voting for any of the three main parties, so maybe I'm not all that biased. As a man who's openly modelled himself on Tony Blair, how else can he appear than as a vacuous, smarmy toff?

I realise I haven't mentioned the substance of the debate myself, but quite apart from the fact that I don't want this to become a party political rant, that is kind of my point – I wonder how many people who watched it will remember the specifics of what was actually said, or whether the most enduring image of it all, resurfacing in voters' nightmares up and down Britain, will be the Brown smile. If politics has become just another form of entertainment, it's not very good entertainment, is it?

2010-04-29T18:01:00.001+02:00

If a good riff is essentially a masochistic pleasure, that in Carl's view should make you wince, then this one does pretty well for punishment value.

2010-04-27T20:37:00.002+02:00

Just having noticed that the Impostume is having a highly entertaining riffs competition with Simon Reynolds, with all kinds of gloriously hairy bastards making an appearance, as well as a couple of genuine atrocities (Def fucking Leppard, I ask you), the question in my mind is how come you've glossed over punk's contribution to the riff? Forgive me if my choices are too obvious, but have I missed something? And how come nobody's included the greatest start to any track EVER?

2010-04-26T13:24:00.035+02:00

The last month or so I've been resisting the urge to pitch in on such an obvious topic, and especially with who else but Hitchens leading the campaign to have the pope arrested I considered any contribution from me to be pretty superfluous, but this is just too funny.

It's not really the memo itself that's so hilarious, since it's hardly the pinnacle of rapier-like wit to suggest that the pope open an abortion clinic etc. Picture the scene. A “junior civil servant” and some of his work chums, resentful at their bosses for forcing upon them the indignity of compiling a document on the utterly trivial and pointless matter of the pope's visit, which is set to cost British taxpayers - thank god(!) I'm not one of them - 20 million pounds, go out to the pub on a Friday lunchtime. Where they get pissed, angrily fucking rat-arsed, and start ranting and laughing raucously about what pompous, hypocritical cunts their bosses are, what an evil sack of shit the pope is, what child molesting scum priests are. As the beers go down, the language and the humour get cruder, the callow, beleaguered office dogsbodies get bolder. Fuck lunch, it's Friday anyway, let's just have some more beer instead and talk about this bullshit memo we've been saddled with, we can just as well do it here in the pub. That stuck up, old-school-tie wanker of an office manager and his masters in the government asked for this, they've got nobody but themselves to blame. We'll bounce some fucking ideas around all right.

Several pints later, maybe with a couple of chasers to give them the courage to face their colleagues and superiors, they roll back into the office a good two hours late, stinking of booze. Back behind their computers, charged up with the nervous excitement of juvenile rebellion, they start surreptitiously typing up the most grotesquely absurd ideas from their brainstorming session, keeping their momentum and bravery alive by sending each other sniggering e-mails or chat messages. Safety in numbers, we're all in it together. The team effort completed, they print it out, their heads still swimming, and circulate it around the office, suppressing their guffaws. Just act innocent, play dumb. Half an hour on, shortly before their shift's done and having noticed the spread of uneasy murmuring and/or incredulous mirth amongst their workmates, they're beginning to sober up fast, and inevitably their thoughts turn to the consequences of their actions. Shit, we'll never get away with this, what are we going to do? With everybody about to knock off for the weekend, the anxious pups hastily put out a cover note, stressing that under no circumstances is the memo to be shared externally. Too late! Someone in the office, either in sympathetic mischief or in vindictive outrage, has already divulged the contents to that crustiest of Tory newspapers, the Sunday Telegraph, which is going to do everything in its power to have a field day at the Labour government's expense, while certain junior civil servants are in for the bollocking of their lives.

All in all a pretty prosaic scenario, which reminds me of unwelcome school assignments that, as spotty teenagers, we used to try and sneak as much childish innuendo as we could into. No doubt it would have seemed funny to be in on it at the time, but I doubt if the people responsible are laughing much about it now. What is funny, but also, as is often the case with matters concerning the Vatican and its extended network of vice, rather tragic, is the churchy, utterly humourless, so very British and so very New-Labour reaction to it from the government and foreign office. David Miliband is “appalled” (and he's such an insipid turd that I actually believe that he wasn't secretly pissing himself at the ridiculousness of it all, like any normal person would), and we now have to deal with the terrifying prospect that, according to the BBC, some Catholics might be left “with the impression of a culture within official circles in which their Church's teaching is not taken seriously”, or even that “the pope might be regarded as a figure of fun”. God (THAT fucking word again!) forbid! So correspondingly, grovelling apologies are issued, on our behalf, to a pontiff who felt no need to apologise for recently not only attacking but encouraging active resistance with “missionary zeal” against the British government that's offered with such fawning stupidity to pay for his visit out of taxpayers' pockets. Why the righteous call to insurrection? Well, naturally not for the government's failure to regulate the banking system and for thus playing its own part in facilitating the global economic crisis, or for its controversial role in the Iraq war, but for the grave sin of promoting equality. Nevertheless, our elected representatives continue to kowtow to an institution that has systematically covered up child rape, and when cornered on the matter has decided that attack is the best form of defence with the monstrously insensitive and idiotic comparison of those who are demanding an explanation, some of them victims of Catholic pederasts, to mass murdering anti-Semites. After all, our government needs to protect its and our reputation as decent folk, and really, what's a few thousand tortured kids compared to the potentially immense damage that can be caused by a drunken office prank?

Evidently being British means always having to say you're sorry. If only we had some of the unwavering self-belief of those exalted residents of the Vatican. Fuck, do I feel proud to be British.

2010-03-20T10:58:00.002+01:00

They're at it again!

Whilst I wouldn't wish to suggest for a moment that we should lose sight of the appalling evil of recalcitrant hooligans such as North Korea, Iran, Israel etc., it's becoming increasingly clear to me that we have our very own rogue state right here in the heart of Europe. Having banned the construction of minarets, the Swiss have now taken their xenophobia a stage further by murdering asylum seekers, and this is not even the first case of its kind. Switzerland's image as a civilised, harmless, peace-loving nation has persisted for way too long – they're a bunch of greedy, vicious, isolationist, cheese-bloated cunts! The more I see, the more I find myself siding with Gadaffi. Although he's not been such a great friend to Nigeria recently either, come to think of it. Plus his face seems to be melting. Bewildering business, international relations.

2010-03-01T17:17:00.004+01:00

Nations have a habit of presenting their most unappealing character traits when abroad. Though Americans, particularly during the Bush years, have become the nation that everybody loves to hate and we're all familiar with the hackneyed gripe about the Germans leaving their beach towels out on deck chairs by the pool, and even despite the utter cuntishness of the fucking Swiss, the most obvious example of a delinquent nation abroad must be the British. So obvious that it would be a waste of time to go into any detailed description of Brit loutishness certainly, suffice to say that the British have made themselves unpopular and unwelcome in a variety of holiday destinations, with Prague, Mecca of the stag weekend, being a prime example.

Compared to the British, the Czechs get off pretty lightly. Whilst many of them are bizarrely scathing about themselves as a nation, most foreigners have no such reservations about them, since they're generally a relatively well-behaved and modest bunch. However, complaints about the Czechs abroad have surfaced in some quarters, and they're not entirely unjustified. This morning I came upon an article (in Czech, but for all its flaws Google Translate will give you a rough idea of its content) about Croats disgruntled at the sheer bloody cheek of the hordes of Czech tourists who go there every summer. Croatia has for a long time been the number 1 holiday destination for Czechs, and so it's inevitable that they've built up something of a reputation for themselves there over the years. It has the nearest Mediterranean coastline to this landlocked country, considered within driving distance, which gives rise to one grievance I've heard, not mentioned in the article: it's commonplace for Czechs to drive down to the Croatian coast through the night, with the result that a disproportionate amount of them fall asleep at the wheel and cause traffic accidents.

The main issue however relates to money, and the Czechs' unwillingness to spend it. I've mentioned before the Czech inferiority complex and rather misplaced conviction that they're impoverished, combined with a frantic desire to distance themselves from genuinely impoverished nations such as Romania or Albania. When it comes to holidays, this conviction gives way to all kinds of irrational behaviour. Whilst Czech holidaymakers are keen to enjoy the pleasures of the sun and sea, many recoil in horror at the thought of the local prices, of which they are largely ignorant. The solution to this predicament is for many of them to drive down to the Med in their modern, air-conditioned cars, with the boot full of potatoes and packets of instant soup. I even heard of one case of a Czech driving in his Mercedes to Croatia, where excellent home made wine can be bought cheaply on market stalls everywhere, his car stocked up with several litres of rancid wine of the type sold in cartons. When the Croats grumble that the cost of cleaning up after the Czechs comes to more than they actually spend down there, or that one Russian with his grandmother is worth more than a hundred Czechs, they may not be exaggerating too much.

This is a phenomenon I've experienced first hand, not only in Croatia but also in Venice, where I went for a weekend several years ago with a Czech travel agency. To be fair, I was being a bit of a cheapskate myself by going on one of these fairly gruelling overnight bus excursions, but once there I saw no reason to take the money-saving approach to extremes. Most of my fellow travellers didn't see it that way, however. I had the impression that for them a holiday is a kind of game to see how much value you can get for the money you've spent on the trip and how little you can spend when you're there, and I seriously wonder if some of them changed any of their Czech crowns at all. As far as I'm aware our small group, consisting of two Americans and myself, was the only party out of two busloads of travellers to eat out in a restaurant, in a country famed for its gastro culture. On our third and final day in Venice we had a “free” day in which we weren't constantly being ordered around by our tour guide, and so decided to have a picnic, raiding the local supermarket for typically Italian products like salami, gorgonzola, wine etc. We found a place to sit in a park, close to some Czechs from our excursion, and couldn't help noticing that they were eating stale sandwiches they'd clearly made at home and brought with them.

One evening a Czech friend of ours who was also on the trip noted, rather enviously, that we'd been out for a meal, with the comment “you foreigners can afford it”. This despite the fact that we had all been on Czech wages for several years, and coming from a man who drives a nice swish car, whereas none of us have a car at all. Is it a question of priorities (petrol over food) that prevented him from coming with us to the restaurant, or just a firmly entrenched habit and prejudice? If it's the latter, I wonder how long it will take for this part of Czech culture to change. With the economic crisis biting here, I fear Czechs will continue to be seen as pariahs in Croatia for a fair few years to come.

2010-02-26T19:47:00.005+01:00

Just in case we needed reminding, it's not only Christians who are ridiculous. Gadaffi has been relatively quiet since his zenith as the epitome of evil in the 1980s, but by declaring jihad on Switzerland of all countries he's proven there's life in the old dog yet. This puts the UN in a highly embarrassing position: naturally it feels obliged to condemn Gadaffi's comments in the strongest terms, but even condescending to respond to such absurdity seems rather... undignified.

Switzerland's a fairly novel candidate for a target of holy war, but it has rather brought this situation on itself with its silly policy of banning the building of minarets. Prior to that of course it made the diplomatic blunder of arresting one of Gadaffi's sons for battering his servants around, so the Great Leader has been ready to pounce for a while. Still, “Any Muslim in any part of the world who works with Switzerland is an apostate, is against Muhammad, God and the Koran” sounds a little hysterical, and may come as a shock to the sizeable Muslim community who live and work in Switzerland.

After all, Switzerland has fastidiously pursued a policy of neutrality and non-aggression for two centuries now, busying itself instead with banking, watchmaking, cheese etc. I thought all this was a stereotype until I actually went to Zurich a few years ago and found that about 80% of all the shops there genuinely do sell either watches, cheese, chocolate or Swiss army knives. It really is that inoffensive. Or is it? I remember coming away from the place with a slightly unpleasant taste in my mouth. For a start all the goods there are prohibitively expensive (the remaining 20% of shops are full of fur coats, Persian rugs of the finest silk etc.), as are the pubs and restaurants, of course everything runs like... clockwork, the general atmosphere is squeaky clean and very boring. And there's an edge to the blandness of Switzerland, in the amorality of their refusal to take sides even when the Nazis are butchering half of Europe, mirrored by the amorality of their “no questions asked” banking system built on gold from dictators, criminal gangs and murdered Jews, their “we're all right Jack” disdaining of the EU and most recently their xenophobia. I'm not the greatest fan of the EU or of Islam myself, but this is no more than parochial isolationism from a smug, nasty little island in the middle of Europe.

In fact, why is the UN even sticking up for this degenerate state? Surely if Gadaffi and his friends in the Muslim world decide to unleash jihad on Switzerland, the rest of us should do the decent thing and remain absolutely neutral.

2010-01-20T14:17:00.002+01:00

So it is a clash of civilisations after all. Forget those bleating anti-war pussies who tell you it's all about oil or economic imperialism, forget those gung-ho regime change zealots who tell you it's about liberating the oppressed people of the Middle East regardless of their religious persuasion, it's really much simpler than all that. It's no more than an old fashioned showdown between good and evil, between the righteous, gallant forces of Christianity and the devious, bloodthirsty Mohammedan A-rabs. Get 'em in your sights!

Thank God for Christian arms manufacturers to ensure that our aim is true, and in the best possible taste! We need not fear that our boys will suffer a crisis of identity or doubts concerning the nature of their mission with references to the bible inscribed on the sights of their guns. Unfortunately, now that some communist scum who've infiltrated the US and UK armies have had the impertinence to complain about this, the collapse of the allied forces in the region may be imminent. No doubt these godless traitors will get a sympathetic ear from Obama, who's still widely suspected of being a Muslim anyway.

And elsewhere, will the realisation that he's been supporting a Christian militia for all these years now curb Hitchens's enthusiasm for the military operation, I wonder? It's a fucked up world we live in.

2009-12-30T13:46:00.002+01:00

Over the Christmas period this year I’ve observed a few demographic changes in Earlsdon, the “posh” part of Coventry where I’m used to doing my socialising. Clearly I’m not the only one. In fact this process has been under way for quite some time – it’s now almost two years since the infamous football riot which took place outside one of my regular drinking establishments. For the reality is that this particular watering hole, in which I incidentally spent yesterday evening, has now apparently become a haunt of the Cov City hooligan “firm”. This has presented me with a dilemma: though I’m usually terrified of physical violence, the fact that I can buy 2 pints of Guinness and still get change from a fiver is just too tempting. Ah, the lure of J.D. Wetherspoon’s.

This is not the only dilemma I’m faced with. Naturally I can’t help baulking at the nimbyism and brazen snobbery of Twat Watch with its attacks on Poundland (which can be very good value for money and a welcome antidote to Britain’s revolting obsession with brand names). In addition I can’t blame the lower orders for seeking more pleasant places to drink outside of staggeringly ugly, ultra-violent Coventry city centre. On the other hand I’m wary of any spurious Burchill/Bushell style championing of crass vulgarity as awwfentick working clarse expression – Asbo-collecting chavs are still people I wish to avoid, just as the Sun is still a loathsome pile of shit and sports clothes should never be worn outdoors except for the purposes of sport, and should never, under any circumstances, be worn in combination with jewellery.

And things have stepped up a gear since two years ago. Back then it was a bunch of 50 year-old men throwing bricks in the street outside the City Arms, on a Sunday evening a month or so ago it was a murder just over the road in tacky wank bar Millsy’s (which has since been renamed “Killsy’s” by the locals – don’t you love our earthy Cov humour?).

In the end though, whatcha wanna do? Build up a barbed wire fence to keep the proles out? The trendy-lefty latter day Fabians who gave birth to Twat Watch probably congratulate themselves for not having voted Tory, thus not having contributed to the formation of the semi-criminal underclass that’s now appearing on their doorstep, but they can’t wash their hands that easily. No doubt Žižek would have a few choice words to say about them. Let’s face it, we all have our share of the blame to bear. Happy New Year folks!

UK Christmas no. 1 2009

2009-12-23T12:32:00.001+01:00

Fuck you I won't swallow your turkey!

2009-12-23T12:14:00.006+01:00

From a purely subjective aesthetic point of view I’ve always thought that "Killing in the Name Of" was a load of trite old bollocks, but apart from that, and the rather bathetic and deflatingly post-modern fact that it's a 17 year-old track rather than something a bit more "now" that's been chosen as a weapon of cultural terrorism, I couldn’t agree more with the Impostume on this issue. What on earth has happened to my country while I’ve been away? Has the UK's longest ever recession finally jolted a great, dormant British revolutionary spirit out of its slumber? Having had all optimism crushed out of me by decades of defeat under Thatcher and Blair, having seen the triumph of vacuous consumerist excess and the monstrosity of Tesco bludgeoning its way to controlling half of the entire British economy, having witnessed the grotesque orgy of fatuous, banal shit every time I turn on the TV in the UK, I suddenly find myself in a disturbingly unfamiliar position. Whatever nitpicking misgivings I may have about Rage, I feel the wind has been taken out of my carping sails, an unexpected deficiency of spleen. Can it really be the case that the British people are … gulp … fighting back?

The despair I can take, it’s the hope I can’t stand! Still, it does feel kind of sweet. And it even looks like it’s going to be a White Christmas here in Coventry. Just at the last moment, after a pretty shite 2009, a silver lining has appeared on the cloud. Flabbergasting as it may sound … A Merry Christmas to us all!

2009-11-24T17:20:00.003+01:00

Last week the Czech Republic celebrated the 20 year anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, which began on 17 November 1989. Various events were held to mark this occasion here in Olomouc, including free concerts on the town square and films of the events of 20 years ago. There was also an open air museum of communism, complete with the statues of Lenin and Stalin which previously stood in the town (modelled above by the lovely Mrs Sweney), mock queues for bananas, touts selling “Tuzex” coupons, which back in the days were the currency with which Western goods had to be bought, uniformed guards, a checkpoint, vehicles previously used by the security services and various other items to remind us of how shabby things really used to be. Disillusionment with the post-revolutionary situation has set in here with some ferocity, and it was impossible not to note how one of Olomouc's student revolutionary leaders quickly transformed himself into a high-ranking politician, who is now notorious for his alleged links to organised crime. Nevertheless, overall the celebration was intended to be an uplifting and encouraging experience, the point being that no matter how dissatisfied people might be with their lot these days, things are still nowhere near as grim as they were then – now we can look back at these things and laugh about the bad old days, but let's not forget how bad they were etc.

I have to say, never having experienced any of this, I felt slightly envious of those who had been involved in, or at least surrounded by such momentous events while I was quietly and unimaginatively beginning my university degree in the Free West. The fall of Thatcher in Britain the following year could hardly compare to the euphoria of 89 in the Eastern Bloc (in fact I remember feeling distinctly un-euphoric when the bitch went, knowing full well that the Tories were back in with a fighting chance of winning the next election). Walking around the square last Tuesday I felt that this was undoubtedly a commendable celebration. Czechoslovakia in the post-68 “normalisation” period may not have been quite such a dire and dangerous place as it was under the Nazis, but it didn't seem like much fun either and not for the first time I felt rather humbled seeing this in contrast with the lack of genuine hardship or oppression in my own life.

On the other hand I've often felt confused when I've talked to some people old enough to remember the revolutionary days and the times that preceded them. Some have of course been righteously scathing about the communists, and I've never doubted that they had good reason. In other cases however I've felt a little lost for words when a seemingly decent and likeable, if somewhat docile and unintellectual individual admitted to having been a fervent communist supporter throughout the normalisation years and even beyond, on occasion expressing nostalgic sentiments.

Last week, in our conversation class I took the opportunity to ask one of my students for his reflections on the past 20 years. My student is a bank manager, approaching sixty years of age, and contrary to the stereotypical image of bank managers, particularly in the current climate, is a thoughtful and intelligent man, with moderately left-leaning views. He started off by talking about how the banking system had changed, which was of little interest to me, but it killed some time in which we'd have otherwise probably been engaged in tedious grammar exercises. Still, what about life in general? He then went on to remark upon how there were far more goods in the shops these days and how we were now spoilt for choice, even if it has been at the price of the old securities. What else? Well, it's nice that we can travel abroad, he acknowledged. After all in the 70s and 80s we could only travel to other Soviet bloc countries, and if we were lucky enough to get a permit, to what was then Yugoslavia (which I've heard several times before and always reminds me that during my childhood, before holidays abroad became affordable for the masses, the most exotic place we ever visited was North Wales). By this point I was getting frustrated. What about political life? Hm, well you've seen our president and our other politicians, he shrugged. Even so, it must be better than the previous regime, surely? Back then most of us didn't think about it so much. Maybe a few students and bohemian dissident types (mostly a Prague-centred elite anyway) got in a flap, the rest of us got on with our work and thought about putting food on the table.

What about freedom of expression, isn't that important? At least now you can complain about the situation you're in these days, whereas before you couldn't even do that. His answer definitively closed the conversation: Czechs have always complained. Not complain as in protest, but complain as in grumble. That's how it was then, that's how it is now.

Evidently it wasn't just the party top brass who viewed political freedoms as superfluous bourgeois luxuries. I decided to open the grammar book.

2009-11-16T13:48:00.004+01:00

It's that time of year again.

Yes, I know this is yet another return to an already frenetically milked theme, but let's face it, I exhausted my “range” long ago. And with Christmas looming, it's also kind of inevitable. A few days ago my friend Martin, who works for a publishing house in Prague, sent me a copy of “The Atheist's Guide to Christmas”. Martin is naturally well aware of my views on religion and so may have thought it might appeal, but was primarily interested in whether I thought it would go down well here or not – his boss, who no doubt has a keener business sense than either of us, is apparently considering having it translated into Czech and published here.

Immediately the obvious question that came to my mind was why on earth was Martin, a Czech, asking me what I thought might sell to Czechs? I still haven't had a satisfactory answer to that one, still, it's flattering that he values my opinion so much. On the surface of things it might sound like a good idea to market the book here, since the Czech Republic is possibly the most godless country in Europe, at least in terms of the number of people who freely and unselfconsciously classify themselves as atheists. Added to that of course, Christmas comes every year, so even if it's too late to get the book translated and on the shelves for this year's Christmas frenzy, there may be potential for it to become a perennial classic, an alternative bible even.

On the other hand, I couldn't help feeling that precisely because atheism is such a commonplace, prosaic phenomenon here, the whole exercise might be rather pointless, and as such, likely to be ignored. It might be partly due to the influence of communism here that religion has simply not played a very large role in this country in recent times – although of course communism didn't prevent religion from remaining a major force in neighbouring Poland or even Slovakia. Whatever the case, Czechs generally don't have as much reason to loathe religion as much as those who have been brought up in Britain, or worse, Ireland, the USA, or Poland for that matter. Surely anyone who deliberately goes out and buys an “atheist's guide” to anything does so out of some kind of antipathy to religion, whereas few people here feel anything more than indifference.

Having briefly skimmed through the book (or pdf. file, to be more precise), I can only say that my doubts have been compounded. Not only is it replete with cultural references to 1970s Britain – how are Czechs supposed to relate to Scalextric, Raleigh bikes, Bernard Matthews turkeys or Wizzard? – but on top of all that its stated aim is to be “the atheist book it's safe to leave around your granny”. Well what's the fucking sense in that? If you're going to publish a book that's meant to appeal to those who are pissed off up to their eyeballs with religious bullshit, why then frustrate your constituency by being so bloody nice about it? There are writings by some atheist “big hitters” such as Dawkins, Derren Brown, Ben Goldacre and also some respected music critics such as David Stubbs and Simon Price, so there might be some cause for the militant atheist to hope for a bit of merciless cleric-bashing, but this has to be weighed up against the rather dispiriting fact that there are also contributions from such luminaries as Claire Rayner and Simon le Bon (which I have to admit I haven't read in any great detail, but really, for fuck's sake!). And it's also a blatantly obvious fact that whilst Dawkins might be able to construct a coherent scientific argument, he's a fucking atrocious writer and believe me, he excels himself in this particular work. The boring old tosser.

When all's said and done, what self-respecting atheist needs a “guide” to anything anyway? Surely we're adult enough to read “serious” atheist texts, and I suppose if I was being generous I might include the God Delusion in those, but frankly it's shit, so I won't. But for Christ's sake (eh?), haven't there been enough brilliant and entertaining atheist thinkers for us to consult without the need for us to turn to this cheap, patronising, bite-sized whimper of platitudes?

A waste of time, in any language.

Lollobrigida - Volim Te

2009-11-16T13:47:00.001+01:00

2009-11-03T20:35:00.018+01:00

Aaahh, don't cry!

Yeah, bite it bitch!

I didn't want to write about the evil bastard while he was at the centre of attention of the whole of Europe and so obviously loving it, but now he's finally bitten the bullet and signed the bloody thing, and so will now be shuffling ignominiously off the European centre stage, I feel quite justified about sticking the knife in his back as he does so. This isn't because I'm particularly pro-European, if anything I feel quite Eurosceptic myself (for entirely different reasons than Klaus, I hasten to add). It's also not as if I've read the Lisbon treaty myself – how many people actually have? So I can't really say whether it's a good or bad thing, I suspect I'd disapprove but don't have the intellectual rigour, or perhaps more realistically, a sufficiently high boredom threshold to find out. I certainly disapprove of the way it was forced through, the British referendum wriggled around on a legal technicality, the Irish the only nation balloted, who after voting against it were made to vote again until they said yes.

But just as I feel the usual dismally familiar mixture of resignation and disgust at the low machinations above, this is a mere minor irritant compared to the acutely personal loathing and contempt I harbour in relation to the president's recent conduct. This human pile of dog shit is one itch I am just going to have to fucking scratch. The whole affair of his dragging out the inevitable was patently about his own ego gratification and fuck all else. If the Eurocrats were abject bad losers in their response to the Irish No vote, then Klaus trumped even them by his deplorably lame attempt to throw spanners in the works at the last moment, appealing on typically pedantic, nitpicking grounds, cheapened further by his grotesque attempt to parade himself as a drum-beating patriot. Some Czechs fell for it, but a great many simply wanted to fucking puke. He still isn't as unpopular as I'd like him to be here, but the more educated sections of the population are increasingly regarding him as an appalling embarrassment afflicting the nation, whilst he's long been reviled as a clownish figure throughout the rest of Europe.

And what did he actually achieve? Well, he did negotiate an opt-out of the Charter of Fundamental Rights (cheers Vašek! Fucking rights – who needs em?), but this is no more than those other European champions of humanitarianism Britain and Poland got. He's had his moment of posturing like a cunt on a European stage, but the game's pretty much up. No doubt he'll find all kinds of ingenious ways to make our toes curl with vicarious shame and pure, naked hate throughout the rest of his presidency, and unfortunately there's plenty of fucking time left to go. But the fact is, for all his transparently empty grandstanding on this issue, he's capitulated. Choke on it.

And on the same day the European Court of Human Rights ruled that it's illegal to display crucifixes in Italian schools, which is bound to have millions of superstitious, prancing mamma's boys apoplectic with their hilariously banal fulminations. The shitbags.

Maybe I should reconsider my Eurosceptic tendencies if the EU can be used as a tool both to humiliate Klaus and antagonise vapid papist hypocrites. Not a bad day, all in all.

2009-10-04T08:27:00.001+02:00

UGGGGG!!!

Dizzee Rascal - Sirens

2009-09-24T12:10:00.001+02:00

This one's dedicated to.... the Countryside Alliance

2009-09-24T11:42:00.006+02:00

It’s been another lazy old summer for me, right enough. The Czech Republic seems to more or less close down anyway for the entirety of July and August, as these supposedly poor Central Europeans disappear to their second homes in the country for two months at a time, so there’s not much point in me hanging around either. One holiday of hiking in Slovakia, another of mostly drinking back in the UK, and finally in September when there was a danger of work coming my way, a tour of the Balkans.

All started in heartening style with what’s now become an annual visit to Novi Sad, spent as always in the excellent company of George and Sandra Almosthole and the rest of the crew centred around the mighty TONA. This year I deliberately chose to go down in September for a number of reasons – I wanted to see Novi Sad without the madness of Exit and the swarms of British either chewing their own faces off on cheap drugs or attempting to find cheap drugs, in addition to which I planned to avoid the crowded beaches and inflated prices once I got to the coast, as well as the unbearable July heat. On the first point the Exit-free Novi Sad was refreshingly calm by comparison, though still not entirely sedate despite Princess Almosthole’s newfound sobriety, whilst as far as the weather went for the first few days things were no better than on my previous visits and my Northern European constitution suffered badly as a result. The obvious highlight was the rehearsal/private gig performed by Tona in a room approximately 4 metres square, which sounded so ferocious that the normally urbane and placid Siniša announced afterwards “I feel like going out and fighting someone”. Thankfully we didn’t quite go that far, but we did head out for a rather rambunctious evening, joining up with Boris and Filip later, both of whom were on raging form. Let it be stated for the record that the diminutive Englishman was not to be defeated by the macho Serbs.

On the subject of diminutives and drinking, I detected a note of derision on the part of the Serbs for the rather less macho Czechs, including the use of diminutives in their language. When I’ve attempted to speak Serbian I’ve been exhorted to “say it like a man!”, and have learned that instead of converting the word “pivo” for beer to the admittedly twee “pivečko” as the Czechs sometimes do, the Serbs go in the opposite direction and inflate it into a butch “pivčuga” (or something). Yeah, yeah, all well and good my testosterone-fuelled Serbian friends, but can you actually drink it? Can you match your allegedly wimpish Czech cousins beer for beer? In fact if I have one reservation about Southern Europe generally it would be its lack of a pub culture. There are café bars aplenty (they might as well be bloody French!), but it seems that the further south you go, the less places there are serving decent draught beer, and I suppose that one beneficial (?) effect of this was that during my holiday I actually drank far less than I would have done if I’d stayed at home in CZ. I’ve said before and I’ll say again that one day I intend to return the favour to my Novosadian hosts, and so once Serbia’s visa requirement has been waived I’m expecting and certainly hoping for a mass influx of Serbs here in Olomouc. To that I now add the following: come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!

Provocative, moi? Hard as nails, us English.

In Novi Sad I also managed to add to my growing number of Serbian T-shirts, which make up almost half of my collection these days. Thanks to generous gifts from George and Filip I am now the proud owner of an official Tona shirt, as well as another slightly more patriotic offering which I made a tactical decision not to wear during the Albanian leg of the trip.

Next up, after a satisfyingly inebriated afternoon at Filip’s place (now that’s a Serb who CAN drink), was a very cheap and comfortable night train, couchette included, to Podgorica, on which I managed both to sleep like a baby and catch the incredible views of the Black Mountains the next morning, and from there to the superb town of Kotor, which is like a smaller, less tourist-infested Dubrovnik, and where I was able to enjoy an enormous seafood feast for very reasonable prices. After that was Ulcinj, which was little more than a stopping point for the next leg of the journey down to Tirana, and which, looking back, was probably the nadir of the trip. There was little to see here, but the main problem was that at this point I was travelling alone and it didn’t seem an easy place to meet people. Added to this was a rather uncomfortable part of an evening spent in a bar watching the football – I’d resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to find anywhere showing the England-Croatia game, so settled for Serbia-France instead. Of course this meant that I found myself surrounded by boisterous, nationalistic Serbs (in an Albanian-dominated town), some wearing “Kosovo is Serbia” T-shirts, and the fact that they were all drinking coffee (they can’t handle their beer, those Serbs) rather than anything stronger did nothing to detract from the threatening atmosphere. I left at half time and went to another place (I confess it was yet another fucking “Irish” pub, but it was the only place in town I could find serving draught beer) run by Albanians, who were a great deal less intimidating. My spirits were also lifted a little when I learned that England had beaten Croatia 5-1.

With the majority of the population of Ulcinj being Albanian, my impressions of Albania began even before I reached the border, and my first one was this: the entire economy is built upon bakeries and car washes, which reminds me that back in Coventry also my dad always goes to the Albanians to get his car washed. Over the border it was the same, one car wash next to another all along the road from Shkodër to Tirana, where I also noticed that at least every second car in Albania is a Mercedes, albeit more often than not a fairly run-down 1970s model. On the bus to Shkodër I met a couple of fellow travellers and we decided to go for a quick breakfast before heading to Tirana, though we baulked at the “local speciality”, which turned out to be sheep’s brains, opting for omelette instead. After breakfast, out on the street drivers of various minibuses departing, seemingly all at the same time, for Tirana made enthusiastic attempts to secure our custom, despite the fact that there were clearly not enough seats for the three of us and nowhere for us to store our rucksacks. Once seated in a larger bus we continued to attract a large amount of attention, including staring and laughing, from the locals, who were very friendly but evidently quite nonplussed to hear exotic foreigners speaking a weird language.

Tirana itself was immediately fairly overwhelming, not exactly pretty but definitely lively to the point of chaotic, according to my companions more like a South American city than a Southern European one. Since neither of them had much time to hang around we headed immediately for the Sky Tower – some snobs might call it a cheesy tourist experience but it’s a thoroughly worthwhile one, in a slowly revolving bar at the top of a skyscraper, a sort of horizontal version of the London Eye with the added bonus of beer on tap (even if it is pissy Tuborg). The beer may cost twice the price of a beer at ground level, but given the fact that admission’s free, it’s a bargain. After that I headed for the hostel, which contrary to the information on the flier was far from easy to find. This became a bit of a theme in Albania generally, since very often the streets literally have no name (this is not just an excuse to quote vapid U2 lyrics) and when they do there’s rarely a signpost to tell you, meaning that in almost every case it’s necessary to phone wherever you’re staying to get directions. Later on Max and Harvin, fellow Balkan enthusiasts who I met in Bosnia a couple of years ago, arrived in the city from Mother Theresa airport, and over the next day or so we got to see more of the city, including the national museum on Skanderbeg square, which boasts a superb socialist realist mural and in a burst of typically Albanian post-socialist surrealism has toddlers buzzing about on quad bikes on the square in front of the building. As well as the regular exhibits documenting the country’s origins and history, the upper floor contains amusingly trite propaganda obviously written when Enver Hoxha was still alive.

When I told people I was going to Albania I encountered the standard knee-jerk reactions from the ultra-conservative Czechs, i.e. “you’ll never come back alive, it’s full of bandits and mafia” etc. Although self-flagellating about their nation in some respects, the aspirational Czechs also have a paradoxical tendency to regard themselves as the cream of the former Eastern Bloc. It’s customary for many to whine about how they’re not as rich as the Germans or British whilst, precisely because of this misplaced inferiority complex, desperately trying to disassociate themselves from the likes of poorer countries such as Romania and Albania – probably the worst insult for Czechs would be to call them “East European”. I’d like to make it clear here that I’ve never felt safer than I did in Albania, where many people still leave their doors open, or the doors of their Mercedes unlocked with the keys in the ignition. No doubt crime does exist and there’s evidently an Albanian mafia operating internationally, but within Albania I certainly felt safer than anywhere I’ve been in Britain, or in pickpockets’ paradise Prague (though of course ALL crime in Prague is committed by Albanians, Romanians, Ukrainians and let’s not forget the gypsies).

As well as Tirana we managed to take in Berat, an extremely picturesque, Unesco-protected town in the mountains, a far cry from the typical stereotype of Albania, and Saranda, probably Albania’s biggest coastal resort, almost within swimming distance of Corfu – in total three wildly different locations. However, whilst some of the stereotypes are based on pure prejudice, others are clearly true. Albania is without doubt poor and extremely dirty. On bus journeys, in between Hoxha’s bunkers it’s common to see what, as Martin noted, looks like blue snow collecting in ravines in the mountains, which turns out to be sky-blue carrier bags full of refuse, and on urban housing estates in Saranda it seemed the norm to find cows wondering around eating rubbish from enormous piles of the stuff left to rot by the side of the road.

Albania also seems to be a country in flux. A large proportion of the buildings, cars, shops etc. are for sale, the Albanian for which is “shitet”. In addition both Tirana and Saranda are full of half-finished constructions and in places appear like building sites. Most of the time there didn’t seem to be much work going on, so whether they will ever be finished or not I have no idea. Perhaps in a few years, if or when the new buildings are completed, Saranda will become a luxury seaside destination for Western Europeans, and there is already no shortage of shops selling tourist tat, but if so it has a monumental cleaning operation ahead of itself. The deserted beach just beneath our hostel looked inviting enough from our balcony, but to attract larger numbers of holidaymakers it would first be a good idea to clear away all the fag ends, broken glass and dog shit*.

After surviving a minor earth tremor on my last night in Saranda, waking up to find the bed shaking quite dramatically, all of this was brought home to me rather brutally on the final leg of my journey in Corfu, where the difference in the standard of the beaches and towns was immediately striking, and although I’d enjoyed Albania immensely this felt like a holiday from a holiday. I ended up wishing I’d left myself more time to enjoy the island’s shamefully obvious and passé creature comforts, but I had to catch my similarly unadventurous and bourgeois flight back to Prague.

So now back to reality. And possibly to the doctor’s, if that dose of the shits I picked up down in the Balkans doesn’t clear up soon.

*Profuse thanks to Agnieszka, who may have saved me from a severely traumatic experience.

2009-08-30T11:13:00.002+02:00

Shit, ludicrously overrated bands of the 90s and beyond.

Now shut up and piss off.

BIRTH SCHOOL WORK DEATH THE GODFATHERS

2009-08-17T17:29:00.001+02:00

For recent convert Carl

2009-08-17T17:12:00.005+02:00

Great forgotten bands of the 80s: The Godfathers

Courtesy of Mr Impostume’s magnanimity, while I was down in London I received a CD copy of an album I hadn’t heard in a very long time, the mighty Hit By Hit, the Godfathers’ debut. The title itself is a nicely bold, arrogant statement of intent and given the band’s name and image a neat, if not wildly adventurous play on words, and though in reality no tune on the album came anywhere near to being a hit there’s not a single track on it that didn’t deserve to be.

Even back then the Godfathers were unashamedly retro, combining the look of the Kray Twins with no-nonsense, punky rock n roll. Emerging in the mid to late 80s, they came at a difficult time. The early 80s post-punk and synth-pop boom had petered out and the charts were almost without exception full of abysmal shit, whilst outside of the mainstream the artier of the goths could, with a little effort, cross over to the avant-garde rock of Sonic Youth, Big Black and the hip grungy and/or industrial bands that came in their wake, and fans of jangly indie pop could, with a little effort and heaps of drugs, cross over via the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays into the rave scene. Where did the Godfathers fit in? They didn’t. With their hard rock stance they could perhaps have appealed to the more yobbish end of the goth scene, but in their sharp gangster suits they made even that difficult, vaunting their withering scorn for the black-clad herd.

Hit By Hit and their second album Birth School Work Death were packed with blinding punk-pop songs overlain with muscular, heavily Steve Jones-inspired riffing and raucous terrace chanting to underline their tough, very British image, years before Britpop or before Guy Ritchie got in on the mockney villain act. It’s surely of no small significance that they were produced by Vic Maile, the man who produced the legendary Ace of Spades (which is not only possibly the greatest rock n roll album of all time but also, tellingly, head and shoulders above Motorhead’s previous recorded output). The result was that at their peak they sounded tight as fuck, so tight in fact that they seemed close to snapping. Their desperation is worn on their sleeve throughout, the lyrical content a calamitous mixture of stress, for example in “This Damn Nation”, painfully uncontrollable lust (“I Want You”, “Can’t Leave Her Alone”), and on the title track of the second album bitter resignation in the glorious line “I’ve been abused and I’ve been confused and I’ve kissed Margaret Fatcher’s shoes”, whilst the transparency of their wiseguy fronting on the thuggish “Cause I Said So” is tragically exposed by the beautiful “It’s So Hard”, which leaves little doubt that they’re not half as hard as they wish they were (although the ill-considered “Just Like You” is just plain soppy).

A large part of the thrill lies in their contradictions: A blatantly retro band who were in some ways ahead of their time, brutalised Thatcher-haters who glorified the starkest, deadliest form of capitalism (80s Britain’s counterpart to gangsta rap?), East End hardmen on the verge of tears. The Strangest Boys indeed. The revival is nigh!

2009-08-16T22:14:00.004+02:00

As usual this summer I’ve made my regular pilgrimage back to the UK, this time on a tour of some of England’s apparent swine flu blackspots, and as usual it left a bittersweet taste, so as expected my love-hate relationship with my home country continues. In fact when I actually left Britain to come and live out here there wasn’t much love-hate about it, it was more or less pure hate I felt for the place. Maybe it’s true when they say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, maybe I’ve just grown up a bit, whatever the case these days I can say there are a number of things about the country, aside from Stilton, that I value and miss.

On the surface my home town of Coventry has little to offer. Even if, rather surprisingly, the city centre didn’t seem to be quite as desperately ravaged by the recession as it did when I was back last Christmas, the place is still an ugly shit hole that has never really recovered from the war, when it was bombed to bits. Shopping trips to the central precinct never fail to leave me feeling depressed, whilst in the evening I never go there, largely because for years the place has had a reputation of being one of the most violent towns in Europe. Even Coventry has redeeming features though; as well as family and friends living there it has one or two more pleasant and lively residential areas outside of the centre as well as a fine park, and the approach to the town from the south must be one of the most impressive in the country, which admittedly makes the centre all the more disappointing.

As for London, it often seems that weather-wise the town simply cannot win. In the cold or rain it’s grey and miserable, in the hot weather it’s stifling and oppressive. Furthermore the noise and air pollution are appalling, the transport situation is dire, and of course everything’s extremely expensive. Still, it does have the advantage of being vibrant and highly ethnically diverse, which is something I miss living in the anaemically white Czech Republic. In addition it has what every great city should probably have: a river.

Aside from the parks, the Thames provides some of the few environments in London where it’s possible to get comparatively fresh air, and gave me a great deal of pleasure this time around. During my stay I spent a relaxing evening sitting outside my favourite London pub, the Trafalgar in Greenwich, which has a superb view over the river. It’s no doubt thoroughly unsound and hypocritical of me to admire the view of Canary Wharf, which is meant to embody all the vicious Thatcherite/Blairite values (see below) that I’m supposed to hate and granted, close up I think it’s vile, but for whatever politically incorrect reason, from across the river on a summer evening I find it all rather beautiful.

Another evening I spent at a cosy little gig on a boat just opposite the South Bank Centre, which surpassed my expectations in almost every way. One bonus was that in between sets, or during less interesting ones, it was possible to sit out on deck and enjoy the view of London at night. As for the gig itself, I’d gone along to see a couple of mates who were playing and until I got there wasn’t aware that Viv Albertine, formerly of the Slits, also had a brief set. Unfortunately through my own ignorance I missed the first half of it and only caught about four songs, and so it didn’t quite reach the heights of my TV Smith epiphany here in Olomouc a couple of years back, nevertheless it was almost overwhelmingly uplifting. Viv was on top form, displaying generous doses of panache and humour, as well as which she still looks quite phenomenally good, finishing off rather appropriately with a tune called “confessions of a milf”. Afterwards she was extremely charming when I (slightly drunkenly) introduced myself, and even … gulp … gave me a kiss on the cheek. Aaahh! That plus the atmosphere, the balmy breeze on deck etc., as well as the excitement and sheer relief of a punk heroine not disappointing all made me think … I love this country.

And in many ways I do, it’s just that I feel dejected about the course it’s on. The swine flu hysteria that was sweeping the nation was one thing that seems indicative of a malaise that seems to be engulfing Britain, i.e. media frenzy combined with the antiseptic cult of eternal life and health. This is obviously not a new thing, and I don’t want to take the lazy route and add my voice to those of common sense peddlers (i.e. cunts) like Jeremy Clarkson or Richard Littlejohn by whining about EU directives, meddling socialists yawn fucking yawn. I’m quite in favour of such laws as the smoking ban in pubs, or of more speed humps in built-up areas to prevent children getting killed by fans of Clarkson and readers of Littlejohn, neither do I long for a return to the days (which I remember bitterly) when schoolboys were forced to wear short trousers all fucking winter and take cold showers after PE lessons, but there are instances where the purported solution is either worse than the problem, or is itself the problem. This was quite obviously the case with swine flu, which reportedly in most cases is nothing more than a glorified cold and kills far less people than ordinary flu. But this didn’t stop the government liberally showering children with drugs, the effects of which were dubious in terms of actually preventing the bloody plague, but which themselves could cause nausea and vomiting. What’s wrong with catching a bit of flu, for fuck’s sake?

Another example is transport, particularly in the capital. It seems to me that Ken Livingstone made a major PR fuck-up as Mayor of London – he could so easily have gone down in history as the man who had the balls to introduce the congestion charge, which, though desperately inadequate, was obviously a good idea, but many will instead revile him for decades to come for being the man who, after promising not to, scrapped the Routemaster buses. A huge advantage of these was that when traffic was crawling at several times less than walking pace, or at a complete standstill, it was possible to simply hop off the bus at any point. No more. On sweltering hot days we now have to wait, for reasons of Health and Safety, until we get to the next stop, which given London’s present gridlock could take long enough to induce heart attacks in those of a less robust physical or nervous constitution. At times I was almost reduced to tears of frustration, impotent rage and even panic by some of my transport experiences, whether it was gasping for breath in traffic jams, all the passengers being kicked off the bus “because it was running late” or half the tube lines being closed for engineering works. If the situation has actually improved thanks to Livingstone I find it hard to imagine how bad it must have been before.

All this is old hat for anybody from the UK who’s reading this, so apologies to you, but this particular rant isn’t really meant for your eyes. The phrase “clone towns” is similarly something everyone in the UK will be familiar with, and the cloning process of totalitarian monopoly capitalism is a little more advanced and sinister every time I go back, with more elements of the national culture erased by giant corporations in collusion with corrupt or browbeaten councils, as the entire country is turned into a vacuous, squeaky-clean Blairite theme park. It’s obviously a process that’s not only happening in the UK and is already well established here also, which makes me fear and loathe it all the more, but so far its evil blandness can be felt more acutely back in Britain.

In connection with this I’ve sometimes found it ironic when some people in CZ, probably due to naivety rather than malicious intent, have asked me whether I don’t feel worried about Britain losing its identity amongst the waves of immigrants allegedly flocking to our shores. The answer to that is a categorical no, because it’s quite evidently not immigrants who are threatening our culture but rather this increasing global standardisation. Indeed it seems as if, whilst the indigenous population roll over meekly before the might of the chainstores, sometimes grumbling but still spending a large proportion of their income in them, it’s the immigrant communities with their own network of shops and businesses who are keeping Britain, or at least urban Britain alive. No doubt Tesco are already planning on getting their claws into the awkward “ethnic minority” segment of the market.

So having spent years out here idly slagging off my homeland it seems I’ve now become a Little Englander lamenting the loss of our national treasures, all with the luxury of living abroad. When all’s said and done how much do I really give a shit about any of this? After all… I GOT A KISS OFF VIV ALBERTINE!!!

2009-07-18T19:56:00.001+02:00

Oxymoron of the month: Slovak organisation

Last year I may have wimped out of the Slovak Partisans’ hike and scuttled off down to Exit, an experience which was also fairly punishing but in a quite different way, but this year there were to be no such excuses. The macho chest-beater in me was looking forward to the bracing challenge and pure mountain air, though I was apprehensive when I saw the weather report, indicating heavy rain, thunder and hailstorms, especially because a few days before I started to feel I might be coming down with a cold, something I attempted to stave off with slivovice, successfully I might add. In any case, there was no getting out of it, since I’d promised to be there and had friends flying in for it from England and Germany.

In the event I needn’t have worried and my Who-Dares-Wins rugged outdoor side was rewarded, since we were mostly very lucky with weather – there was rain aplenty, but to our relief we mostly managed to avoid hiking or putting up our tents in it. All round it felt like a hardworking week in which we toughed it out against the elements to overcome adversity and all of that clichéd bollocks.

So far so good, but over the years I’ve inevitably been puzzled by certain, er, traditions of this occasion. This year was the 45^th annual walk over the Low Tatras in honour of the Slovak National Uprising, which itself took place 20 years before the hike was established. Still going strong, then? Well, to be still going at all after 45 years in itself is quite an achievement, but there’s always room for improvement and in the four years I’ve taken part this is something I have yet to see.

The idea is certainly a good one – it’s a holiday which costs virtually nothing, you bring your own food, camping gear and spending money for those occasions where it’s actually possible to find outlets to spend it in. The only actual charge paid to the organisers is 25 Euro, for which they take your rucksack, tent etc. in the wagon while you hike over the peaks, plus there’s a place to camp every night. Can’t complain about value for money then, but there are a couple of drawbacks in the peculiar manner of organisation.

This year these quirks became evident right from the outset – the initial registration always takes place at a hotel in a relatively insignificant village in Central Slovakia, where it’s also possible to get a welcome goulash before the first afternoon’s (admittedly small) hike. Except that the hotel was closed and evidently had been for the best part of two years, which the organisers evidently felt was no reason to move the starting location. This was fairly characteristic of the entire setup. The organisers are mostly a rather ageing bunch who are staunchly resistant to any form of change, led by a well-meaning but slightly distant gentleman who I’m told is a university professor, the rest of them being largely hopeless pissheads.

I mentioned the alcoholic aspect of the trip a couple of years back so I won’t dwell on it now, suffice to say it’s still a dominant feature, and I’m not pretending I didn’t indulge either. In any case it’s something that is clearly not going to go away, even if it occasionally does raise alarm even in fairly regular drinkers such as myself. On the other hand there are adjustments the organisers could make, but the will is obviously not there. It’s quite evidently an outfit in decay. As a result, the amount of people attending has been steadily dwindling during the time I’ve been involved. It’s nice to see old faces and more or less the same people doing the hike each year, but there’s a need for new blood. The only way to find out about it in the first place is by word of mouth, and the number of mouths is in serious, possibly terminal decline.

A while back there was talk about setting up a website, which I personally considered an extremely good idea and offered to translate into English. Of course, I heard nothing more of it, clearly three years on it’s still in the embryonic stage. In fact information is the key issue here – there’s either a woeful lack of it or way, way too much. A few years ago it was virtually impossible to walk over some of the route due to fallen trees caused by a hurricane a good 8 months previously. The result was that on one of the days we had to walk down from the mountains and travel by train instead, but not before our lives had been put at risk over certain stretches. How difficult can it have been to find out about the state of the path in advance? Similarly, there being no website, the only information about such trifles as what equipment to bring, options for refreshments during the trip etc. is published in a rambling brochure, which is for starters hopelessly out of date, having quite possibly contained exactly the same information each year since its foundation and secondly is only available at the start of or during the walk, by which time it’s too late for any newcomers.

This stands in stark contrast with the interminable, awesomely pompous speeches made by the head of the organisation, which contain little relevant information about the state of the path, signposting and important things to look out for, but are steeped in the great Czechoslovak tradition of astonishingly punctilious, content-free fulmination, which can be experienced not only in academic circles but also on the classic bus excursions for docile pensioners and the like. A typical speech around the camp fire starts with the formalities of thanking the members of the organisation, frequently individually by name and rank, then thanking us for attendance and for behaving responsibly, and once this is out of the way we’re treated to a lengthy description of what we’ve just undergone, as if we didn’t know, with scant regard paid to what actually lies ahead. Towards the end of it there’s a chance to discuss possible improvements, when vague promises are made regarding websites etc., but it’s decidedly a token effort and by that stage virtually everyone there’s drunkenly ignoring Our Leader, who naturally carries on regardless.

The walk ends in heart-warmingly cute fashion, as we’re treated to a firework display mimicking the sound of gunfire on our approach to the final village, where flowers are then lain at the monument to the fallen partisans, followed by….. more speeches, which few people stay until the end of because they’re dying to get to the pub.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful here, it’s still good value for money and I do appreciate the work of at least the more sober members of the crew. In addition to that, I have now, on more than one occasion, suggested improvements and offered to help myself. Having said that, I haven’t yet had the chance to make any effective contribution, and so all I’ve done essentially is to rant on about it. All of which makes me wonder: am I becoming one of them?

2009-06-27T14:06:00.004+02:00

Excuse the clothes, I’ve got a funeral to go to

Back when I was at university I remember being told that one of those French Twats, probably Baudrillard or some cunt, had tried to claim that Michael Jackson represented some kind of postmodern essence though his radical transgression of boundaries, his successful blurring of distinctions between male-female, black-white, natural-synthetic, human-alien etc. within his own body. Perhaps something good may come of Michael’s tragic demise in that these smug, pompous arseholes might now shut the fuck up, at least for a day or two. RIP postmodernism? Christ, I hope so.

Bruce Springsteen - Sherry Darling

2009-06-18T10:38:00.001+02:00

The Boss got soul, no shit.

2009-06-11T20:01:00.004+02:00

Sexy brain? Get some of this then, lefties!

Judging by the results of the Euro elections Paroubek’s spiteful bid to grasp power by bringing down Topolánek’s government seems to have backfired on him badly – having wiped out Topolánek’s party in the local elections last autumn the Social Democrats slid dramatically into second place this time around, though given Paroubek’s pig-headed tenacity this electoral debacle is unlikely to be enough to dislodge the fat lump of shit from the party leadership and prevent him from marching his comrades on to an ignominious defeat in the general election this autumn.

This abrupt reversal of Topolánek’s fortunes has to be mostly attributed to Paroubek’s buffoonish ineptitude rather than any merit of his own, handed to him on a rather eggy plate. He may however have also been helped by the publication of the photograph above, which though unfortunately blurred shows him with his knob out, reportedly with a boner, at Silvio Berlusconi’s villa. Faced with a choice between Topolánek’s cock and Paroubek’s face, Czech voters have made it abundantly clear which they’d rather look at.

Nice one Mirek old son!

2009-05-29T16:57:00.005+02:00

Never trust a man with egg on his face

Following the fall of the government, Czech politics has taken another bizarre turn in the run-up to the European elections, with campaign meetings held by the Social Democrats degenerating into orgies of egg-pelting. This is not something I necessarily approve of or encourage; naturally we ought to be adults about this and acknowledge that the Social Democrats have just as much of a right to make public speeches as their opponents without getting showered in yolk. On the other hand, just as in the case of fascists getting their heads kicked in or taxi drivers getting stabbed, whilst I don’t condone such action I can’t help feeling the fuckers basically deserve it.

The primary target for these attacks has been Social Democrat leader Jiří Paroubek, and this is clearly a personal issue. He’s not the first politician in the world to have had eggs thrown at him, and the whole thing probably started fairly spontaneously rather than as some kind of orchestrated terrorism. Now though it’s gathered momentum, partly thanks to a campaign on (groan) facebook. But it would be lazy and indecently generous to Paroubek to attribute the unprecedented scale and ferocity of these protests merely to the internet. Such behaviour is far from commonplace in Czech politics, and even my own personal bête noire Václav Klaus never succeeded in provoking this kind of reaction. Personalities sometimes are important in politics, and Paroubek is evidently an extremely divisive figure who has a serious case to answer.

There is now a caretaker government of largely unknown technocrats in charge of the Czech Republic, with a general election planned for the autumn. Paroubek is still widely tipped to become the next PM, and you might expect many people to be grateful for him for sinking the weak and unpopular centre-right government of Mirek Topolánek. However, for all Paroubek’s attempts to insist that Topolánek’s party is behind the sharp turnabout in the fortunes of the dairy industry, it’s not only the right who he’s managed to offend, since it’s clear to anyone not in an acute state of denial that bringing down the government in the middle of the Czech Republic’s presidency of the EU was no more than an act of shabby opportunism, motivated by Paroubek’s gargantuan self-interest.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, or the last straw. There are plenty of other good reasons why a lot of people hate him. Many young and liberal-leaning people have never forgiven him for his response to the Czech Tek festival when he was PM in 2005: the event was admittedly illegal and probably also antisocial, but that certainly didn’t warrant the massive police brutality employed to break it up. He hasn’t been blessed with a particularly sympathetic appearance (although his new dolly-bird wife, acquired when he traded in his old boiler, insists he has a “sexy brain”), but he doesn’t help matters with his arrogant dismissal of any dissent, as well as his bullying tactics, which provide the perfect complement to his rotund, steamrolling frame. After losing the last general election in 2006 he was staggeringly ungracious in defeat, trying every low trick in the book in order to hold on to power at a time when wiser men, such as former Social Democrat leader Miloš Zeman – also a bully, though at least one with a sense of humour – would have eased back.

Most horrifying from any liberal standpoint is his casual attitude towards getting into bed with the communists, which means that there’s now a very real possibility of a government involving these murdering scum for the first time since the Velvet Revolution. Paroubek’s retort to the justifiable outrage over this issue is indicative of why he, both literally and metaphorically, has egg on his face: “People get used to all sorts of things”. Bearing that in mind it’s hard to feel much sympathy if he has to get used to a diet of raw dairy produce.

2009-05-17T20:15:00.001+02:00

What a day for rock n roll. Courtesy of the enigmatic Mr Almosthole of Europe's nether regions I've not only been alerted to the internet appearance of the ludicrously brilliant video below but also been placed in the happy position of spreading the joyous news that Novi Sad's baddest, in a fit of benign generosity, have decided to give their pulverising album away free of charge. You like machismo, sweat, claustrophobic angst and bile, eh? Think you're hard enough, do you? Go get it.

Really, how much better can things get? Er.. don't suppose you've got any gigs coming up around September have you, chaps?

Thin White Rope Live Performance in Ghent, Belgium. Song: "It's OK"

2009-05-17T19:51:00.001+02:00

Damn it's been a long time since I mentioned Thin White Rope. Thanks to Matt Abourezk for finally putting out a video of suitable picture and sound quality to fully capture the jaw-dropping magnificence of this band's live performances. Guy Kyser goes all Iggy Pop on us for the special occasion of TWR's last ever gig - after all, it was surely one of the most significant events of the 20th century.. For anyone who wasn't familiar with this band before, maybe now you can understand what I was making such a fuss about in those posts of yore. Hopefully there's more where this came from. THIS is the ideal for all rock bands to aspire to. Are you watching Gibby Haynes?

2009-05-01T13:12:00.003+02:00

Must try harder

You asked for this George…

Back in the late 80s I remember I needed a bit of persuading to get into the Butthole Surfers. I was slowly weaning myself off the ropier end of the goth stuff I’d been listening to for little other reason than that they wore a lot of black so they must have been deep, man, and was beginning to reason that if I wanted to be cool I’d have to turn my attentions to the other side of the Atlantic, hence I’d started to check out the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth among others. But the Butthole Surfers? Would I be able to handle this or would it be a bit too far out and challenging for me? The name put me off more than a bit: it sounded smirking and oafish, which was something of a leap for me to take after all the pretentious austerity or mystical preciousness of names like Bauhaus, the Cult and the Sisters of Mercy (to name some of the less shameful elements). But the serious music press I’d started reading was insistent: the Buttholes were a serious and important band, so I felt almost obliged to like them.

I hadn’t been entirely convinced by what I’d heard on John Peel but I was determined to persevere, so I went out and bought “Locust Abortion Technician”. Again the name was a tad hard to stomach, however it was genuinely weird enough to stimulate my interest and was at least considerably less “Beavis and Butthead” than the band name. The same applied to other titles: Hairway to Steven, Rembrandt Pussyhorse and particular favourites A Brown Reason to Live and Pioughd. The old goth in me still hasn’t died and to this day I detest wackiness in music, but these titles suggested more than that, charged as they were with absurdity, a grotesque, bloated hilarity. When it came to the music I had to give it a good few spins before I could truly say I liked them, but in the end my diligence paid off, I had willed myself into becoming a hip noise freak.

There were still reservations though. Whilst I loved the monstrous, bowel-scourging guitar rock and the warped, nightmarish sound experimentation, there was still way too much sniggering going on for my liking. “Hay” and “Kuntz” are difficult tracks to like, and even in the mighty “Sweat Loaf” I’m sure I’m not the only person who, during the slow section, is simply thinking “get on with it and give us the bloody riff, man”. Sure, you could argue that without the slow part it would lack the dynamics, but there’s no reason why “slow bit” should have to mean “shit bit”, and in this case it’s merely inept and shoddy. Not enough to ruin an otherwise rollicking track, though.

Fast forward to last week in Prague. I had seen the Buttholes once before, but that had been on a sunny Sunday afternoon at Reading Festival in 1989, which seemed rather an incongruous setting for their dark outlandishness. It had been enjoyable, but I was looking forward to seeing them at a proper gig, anticipating a bit more intensity. Frankly, I didn’t get it. They started well enough, with “22 going on 23”, but the rocker in me was unsatisfied. I’d been expecting to be bludgeoned, terrorised by a racket so enormously crushing it would make me spontaneously shit my pants, but this didn’t even fill the hall. Not loud enough, not heavy enough.

This was compounded by the band’s attitude, which affronted my protestant work ethic. Whereas in their prime they had successfully presented themselves as dangerously cutting-edge, their twisted, unsettling humour a result of taking way, way too much acid (these things impressed me when I was still in my teens), now they came across as nothing more than a bunch of sad, middle-aged men pissing about. It was hardly as if they’d moved on in any significant way, but still there was no “Sweat Loaf”, no “Jimi”. Few concessions to their audience, in other words. I don’t want to bang on about money, but having paid almost 30 Euro a ticket I demanded better than this, particularly when I remember paying less than half that to see a truly astonishing performance by the Young Gods a couple of years back. Fucking rock stars. Compared to their searing, viscous rectal expulsion of yore, this was a meek trickle of diarrhoea.

Anarchic? In your dreams. This was just sloppy, they were treating us with contempt. Once they toed an engaging line between silly and scary, but there’s no doubt which side of that line they’re on now. At some point they evidently fell off their surfboards and landed… you know where. I guess this kind of rock is no country for old men.

2009-04-26T13:22:00.003+02:00

What a difference a couple of years makes.

Last autumn I went to spend a weekend in Prague and meet up with my oldest friend Alan, who was over for the weekend together with his brother Andy and three of their mates, plus a female friend, a wife and a girlfriend of the group, the last of whom happens to be Czech. Dismissively sexist (or perhaps gentlemanly) as it may be of me, I’ll leave the female contingent out of this, since their role in it is more or less irrelevant, a mere catalyst at most. They’re above it, basically. Andy and the other males in the group are about 40, Alan and I are 38 and 37 respectively. Middle-aged, essentially, certainly too old to be thought of as youthful. Old enough for the small age gap between us to be pretty meaningless, right? Ah, but they were two years above us at school, and that’s what’s important. The twenty-odd years since we left are nothing compared to the monolithic two that separate us for all eternity. We might as well have still been wearing our school uniforms.

Though as individuals they all seemed like reasonable, decent people, when the group dynamics took over the vibes turned negative. Alpha-male type behaviour quickly began to assert itself. Within a short time the older top dogs were collectively treating us young pups with casual, unthinking contempt. Decisions were made on our behalf, we were ordered about: drink up, we’re going there, we’re doing this. The choice was starkly clear, either we do what we’re told and tag along behind the big boys, or fuck off. We certainly weren’t going to be party to any decision-making process. It didn’t take long before I decided to fuck off.

This was easy enough for me, since I know Prague well and have a number of friends there, and so I felt no need to make a scene and found their attitude towards me no more than mildly annoying. On the other hand I felt a surge of protective outrage concerning their treatment of Alan. Outwardly Alan wouldn’t seem like the kind of person you’d imagine needing much protection, least of all from me, but despite being a well-built, six-foot tall bullet head, he has an immensely friendly, pleasant demeanour and a corresponding good nature that certain parties evidently feel tempted to take advantage of. Those two years had cemented his status forever as a junior within the group. They were the cocksure fifth-formers who ruled the school, on the cusp of boldly heading out into the world of adulthood, Alan and I were awkward, acne-faced third years who’d just discovered the joys of furiously compulsive masturbation.

I remarked upon the situation bitterly to Alan, and later regretted it. After all, these were his mates, the people he hangs around with back home, and so this was an ongoing thing. When I fumed about the lack of respect they showed him, he probably felt I was criticising him for having put up with it for so long. I should have done the decent thing and pretended not to notice, but now it was too late. And in any case, how much choice did he have? What could he possibly do now to change the situation, to stick up for himself? It wasn’t as if there was any serious malice involved, or any systematic persecution by a particular ringleader. His response was no doubt more appropriate than mine: he just took it in his stride, with good humour, whereas I was the self-righteous little boy with a complex about his height, stomping off home in a huff. Immaturity was thrust upon me. The role-definition that emerged seemed almost entirely unconscious, and thus all the more unstoppable. In fact it had already evolved of its own accord when we were still in short trousers, now it was set in stone.

Just recently I was reminded of this seeming impossibility of reinventing ourselves when Carl, aka The Impostume, came to visit, even if this was by no means a negative experience. We’ve known each other for almost twenty years now, during the first three of which we shared various flats and houses while at university in Leeds. Carl is my senior by a little over a year, and although we didn’t go to the same school this no doubt has some small effect on our relationship. Added to that is a height difference of over a foot, which makes us look patently ridiculous standing next to one another, as well as the fact that Carl is both loudmouthed and quite extraordinarily intellectual.

The combination of all these factors, plus whatever relevant others that may exist, results in a situation in which, whilst I enjoy his company a great deal, I sometimes feel frustrated at my powerlessness to resist sliding into the persona that’s been prepared for me. Many people who know me would have good reason to regard me as a ranting, foul-mouthed, over-excitable left-wing yob, a frothing spleen in fact. But in Carl’s company I tend to become measured, stoical, conservative, a steadying influence to bring his intellectual flights of fancy back down to earth. In his words a purveyor of tub-thumping common sense, which makes me sound like a supporter of the British National Party. Suddenly I’m the straight man, a stooge even. How did that happen?

This seems to apply regardless of our positions on any given issue. Back at university I was more left-wing than Carl, on the most recent evidence he’s now to the left of me, but the style is the same as it was then: he’s entertainingly bombastic, I’m drily sceptical. When this happens I’m constantly forced to second-guess myself. Though I’m entirely sincere in my arguments whenever we debate anything and don’t try to score cheap points (usually!), isn’t there a sense of me casting myself as the hardened realist as a defence mechanism against his superior intellectual prowess? Surely there is an element of ego involved at some stage. At my worst I could be sneakily trying to win the debate by undercutting and negating the more bewilderingly complex aspects of his argument with my dour anti-intellectualism. Am I bursting bubbles of ideological hot air with my ruthless, rapier-like astuteness, or am I merely elevating ignorance and mediocrity to the status of virtues?

Am I, when all is said and done, the Dudley Moore to his Peter Cook, a vocation that surely no man could revel in? Whatever the case, unimaginative empiricist plodder that I am, I’m convinced that in this particular relationship I shall remain this way until I die.

Or is all of this just a manifestation of my Napoleon complex?

2009-04-17T11:21:00.002+02:00

UPDATE! I got an apology. An OFFICIAL APOLOGY!!! Has the spirit of Glasnost finally arrived in Olomouc city council? Think I might have it framed.

What the hell am I going to rant about now?

2009-04-15T09:08:00.009+02:00

I’m going to tell you a story. Are you sitting comfortably?

Although they’re not shy about milking the Kafka cash-cow, particularly in Prague, luring tourists into buying cheesy “I’m an intellectual” style T-shirts, the Czechs have never really seen him as one of their own, since despite living in Prague he was from a German-speaking Jewish family and all his works were written in German. Fair enough really, Mozart’s also foist upon you everywhere in Prague, as well as which Freud was born and spent the first years of his life in this country and nobody ever tries to claim that either of them were Czech. On the other hand, the link between Kafka and Prague is inextricable, and without wanting to sound pretentious, life in this country can frequently be rather, er, Kafkaesque.

As a foreigner I have my fair share of tales to tell of layers upon layers of bewildering bureaucracy, first established here by the Habsburgs and then subsequently built upon by Nazis, communists and now (theoretically) liberal-democratic paper-pushers. Many of the new generation are too young to remember the communists anyway, some now even work in spanking new offices with computers instead of hammering out reports on rusty old typewriters from the DDR, but the mind-numbing, intimidating atmosphere remains. And why would they want to change it? We’re still the little people, and that suits them fine.

I remember in the bad old days before the EU came to my rescue having to spend endless hours in government offices trying to sort out my papers. Several working days were lost every year so that I could obtain and then renew my work and residence permits. First I had to produce a clean criminal record which was no older than three months, then a contract of lease on my flat (with somewhat adjusted amounts of rent, since my landlady didn’t want to pay tax), then produce the original of my birth certificate (a copy would not do), as well as all my work-related qualifications. There was no doubt more, but I can’t remember all the details now. What I do remember was the administrative fees: my birth certificate had to be translated by an official court translator, the documents had to be rubber-stamped by a notary, then there were the extortionate government duty stamps. Nice work if you can get it.

Things stepped up a gear when I decided to try and go self-employed. The idea of fleeing from the grasp of sociopathically exploitative employers into the arms of petty-minded, spiteful apparatchiks brings to mind the words “frying pan” and “fire”, but that’s what I did. Now I not only had to sort out all my papers here in Olomouc but also make an expensive trip to the British embassy in Prague to swear by the almighty Queen that I had no criminal record back in the UK, an act which took approximately two minutes and cost approximately a hundred pounds. Still, I got the document I needed, which I then had to take along with all the other relevant documents to the other end of the country, to the regional court in Ostrava, in order to get my name in the business register (not necessary for Czechs, but mandatory for foreigners back then).

Eventually all of this got resolved and I obtained my business licence, although for a while I also remained an employee, which I thought was a sensibly cautious option in the short-term. Apparently not. A scare came in the form of a rumour that although I was an employee as well as self-employed on the side, if I still had a VC61 residence permit as an employee rather than a VC62 residence permit as a self-employed person then my business licence would be invalid and terminated. I was slightly perturbed by this, and so made a few (anonymous) phone calls to various faceless functionaries in order to determine the truth of it. Indeed, due to a change in the law it was true, I must have a VC62. I hadn’t been informed of this legal adjustment, I protested. No, we weren’t obliged to inform you (that you might find yourself unwittingly in breach of the law), was the response. Kafkaesque? I fucking ask you.

Luckily, thanks to the fact that the Czech Republic was preparing for EU accession, I was told that because I was an EU citizen (unlike my nervous American friend), my business licence would not be terminated, but that I should get a VC62 anyway. I could have kissed Romano Prodi’s arse. I decided that it would undoubtedly be a wise idea to do so, since this would also free me for good of my dependency on my employer. To apply for that, however, I had to put all my papers in order and take them to Bratislava. Why Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia? It’s not even the same country anymore! Because I was now effectively getting a new residence permit and not renewing my old one, and new residence permits can only be obtained from a Czech embassy outside the Czech Republic, regardless of the fact that I’d already been living in the Czech Republic for about 7 years. Nice logic. Anywhere but here, and Bratislava was the closest.

So once my documents were ready I got up in the middle of the night to get the train down to Bratislava to stand in a queue of ragged, frightened-looking souls outside the Czech embassy ready for opening time. I filled in the mandatory form as best I could, though parts of it were rather confusing. But then the bombshell – all my papers were fine, except for my bank account, in which I had to have a certain amount of finances. My bank account was a business account, not a personal account. At this point I lost it* and started shouting at the officious bitch behind the glass screen. Of course it’s a business account, I want a VC62 residence permit as a self-employed business person. But then the money belongs to the business, not you. I AM THE BLOODY BUSINESS! I’M SELF-EMPLOYED! THE BUSINESS IS IN MY NAME! Not good enough. Apparently I’d come to Bratislava for nothing. In the end though, my aggressive tactics actually worked. She finally agreed to take my application, but chided me repeatedly that it was all highly irregular and that I’d have to go immediately to the foreign police in Olomouc to explain my predicament, so that when they received the application we’d be able to take it from there.

This calmed me down a little, since I knew that the foreign police in Olomouc had one capable employee (out of an indeterminate number of cretins - god bless you, Mrs. Novotná). When I did go to them they were rather nonplussed themselves at first and said it all smelt of bullshit, but after some investigation found that yes, that was in fact the law, the explanation being that the Business Law and the Immigration Law contradict one another. By now I somewhat belatedly realised that I needed some legal advice, which I was lucky to receive from a student and friend of mine to whom I’m eternally grateful, who was a trainee lawyer. I resolved that by the next time I went into a government office I would know the law better than the people sitting opposite me, and given their usual level of intelligence this wasn’t difficult. The police told me that I had a couple of months to transfer my money into a personal account, which I duly did. I returned to them triumphant and armed to the teeth with legal knowledge, this time deadly certain that not even the meanest of nitpickers would find a discrepancy in my documentation. They said it would take a week to process it, but that it ought to be ok. I went back again a week later and they told me that finally my permit had been approved. YESSSSSSSS!!!! So can I have it then? No, now we have to send it all by post to the Czech embassy in Bratislava, and you have to go down there and collect it. So this is where our taxes go. At least I got to rub it in the face of the bitch who worked there. After which I went and smoked a big fat cigar.

The anti-climactic end to this story is that less than two years later the Czech Republic joined the EU and suddenly getting a residence/work permit became, by previous standards, absurdly easy. Nevertheless, at the time I had no choice. And for a long time since I’ve lived mostly in blissful ignorance of the world I once inhabited, relieved that I’d left it behind for good.

Or so I thought. Unfortunately yesterday morning I was woken up by the fat slag postwoman, who took a preposterous amount of pleasure in presenting me with an official letter from the council, informing me that apparently my business licence had expired in 2003. I immediately marched to their offices, equipped with an updated business licence that they themselves had issued to me in 2005, so I’m hoping to get away with it this time, but one never can be sure in this country. Watch this space.

Maybe I should take a leaf out of this man’s book. The Good Soldier Švejk is much more readily identified as part of the Czech national culture than Kafka. This is not something I necessarily approve of, but I have to deal with it. I don’t regard Hašek’s novel as a great work of literature, it strikes me as rather rambling and repetitive, but it indisputably captures a part of the Czech character and one which is the opposite side of the coin to Kafka’s nightmarish bureaucracy: if you like, Švejk is Josef K’s happier, dumber-but-smarter alter-ego. It’s the story of the revenge of the little man, which is achieved by acting stupid and consequently throwing spanners in the works at every opportunity. Not exactly a dignified response to utter powerlessness, in fact a deeply infantile and humiliating one, but one which is probably inevitably thrust upon the pawn in the game under the circumstances, and which is not entirely unfamiliar to any of us. Indeed, it may be the only alternative to madness.

I admit myself that although I’ve usually gone to great lengths to avoid Švejkism, and still feel a certain disgust whenever I encounter it, at times I too have, out of exhaustion, taken the easy option by playing the role of the stupid foreigner. In fact if I was smarter, or braver, or less proud, I might have been able to save a great deal of time, effort and money by doing so more often. After all there are thousands of ex-pats in this country who have never bothered to get a work or residence permit, let alone pay taxes and national insurance. Most of them won’t stay here long anyway, and won’t get a pension over here, but then there’s no guarantee I’ll get mine. And they’ll no doubt get away with it, since their own ignorant form of Švejkism (despite most of them never having heard of him) is one that suits the mandarins entirely – less work for them. Perhaps I should have gone in the direction of the Good Soldier, but now I’m on their records it’s surely too late. This war of attrition’s not over yet.

*Although I didn’t go as far as a usually mild-mannered American friend of mine who ended up screaming at the secretaries of the regional court the Czech equivalent of “I PAY YOUR FUCKING WAGES!! I COULD JUST WORK HERE ILLEGALLY AND NOBODY WOULD FUCKING KNOW!!”

Narcotic Fields - Colorize (TV live)

2009-03-26T13:09:00.001+01:00

2009-03-25T17:21:00.005+01:00

Oops, the government’s fallen. Hey ho.

What’s the big deal anyway? True, it’s spiced up somewhat by coming right in the middle of the Czech Republic’s presidency of the EU, but the cynical, self-flagellating majority in this country would merely roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders and perhaps with a slightly smug glint in their eye tell you that it just proves what they’ve known all along: compelling evidence of this country’s capacity for embarrassing itself.

In fact, although it’s the first time in the short history of the Czech Republic as an independent country that a government’s lost a vote of confidence, it almost feels like a return to a normal state of affairs. It took six months to form a government after the last general election in this country due to parliamentary deadlock, and when this eventually happened the fledgling administration had to limp by on a wafer-thin majority, inevitably dependent on defectors whose loyalty was secured on the basis of shaky, bitterly disputed and quite possibly morally questionable deals.

All that was needed was for a gentle rock of the boat or a stroke of bad luck to bring the whole edifice crashing down, and so it actually seems fairly impressive that they managed to hold out for so long. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were even a few sighs of exhausted relief from within the government. Now it will be back to square one: attempts to form a government involving more shady deals, if these fail then early elections, quite probably followed by more frantic attempts to form yet another lame duck government.

Strangely I’m not amongst those rejoicing in the chaos and schadenfreude and bidding good riddance to bad rubbish. Strangely, because I’ve never been a fan of right wing governments, and even in my own country, let alone here, particularly in the days when capitalism was still relatively youthful and communism a fresh and painful wound, I’ve often been regarded as a screaming leftie. Still, recently I’ve taken quite a shine to just-deposed PM Mirek Topolánek. He might be a bit crude, but he manages to do it in a fairly affable and blokeish way. He’s been a bit of a lad, bagging off with one of his MPs and getting her pregnant, much to the dismay of his domineering old bag of a wife, he’s hurled some choice abuse at gutter journalists, and he even briefly entertained us by growing a small but unmistakeable mullet. Most importantly, he’s vastly preferable to all the available alternatives conspiring against him, and though he may have seen off the challenge from mayor of Prague and presidential arse-licker Pavel Bém, he still has to deal with the prince of darkness himself.

There’s clearly no love lost between Topolánek and his predecessor as party leader Klaus, who has now left the party in order to have even more freedom to make a cunt of himself. The president’s latest coup has been to attend the Social Democrat party conference to hold discussions with their party leader, future presidential hopeful, rapaciously ambitious demagogue and fat ugly bastard Jiří Paroubek. These two men may be from opposite sides of the political spectrum but neither is shy about using support from murdering commie shits to further their own interests, and whilst they may be low on principle they score high on conviction, the most important conviction of all being “I AM GOD”. The parallel with Thatcher’s endorsement of Blair (whilst knifing Major) is positively eerie, though obviously no surprise, since Klaus seems intent on shadowing her every move on his own personal descent into madness.

Mirek, you may be a twat, but some of us here will miss you. In fact we may yet beg you to save us. We live in strange and disturbing times.

2009-02-26T17:23:00.008+01:00

Bad Balkan hair decade

Is there a correlation between war crimes and unmanageable or weirdly angular hair? These Serbian coiffure atrocities of the 1990s suggest that it may be so. Makes Jaromír Jágr's mullet of the time seem almost innocent. George, be glad you're bald!

2009-02-18T16:28:00.003+01:00

I’m not prejudiced, but…

The other day I had to endure a very long hour in the compartment of a train with a Jehova’s Witness with rancid fucking b.o. In other words I was subjected to a protracted insult to my morals and intelligence as well as a violent olfactory assault, both of which left a noxious, lingering stench. Didn’t anyone tell the smelly, god-bothering bastard that cleanliness is next to godliness? I can only hope the evil fucker experienced the same sense of exasperation I felt every time he bleated “it’s written in the bible”, when I inevitably responded “so what?”. And when I farted in his face.

It would be an appalling injustice to lump the Mormons in with scum like him, not only because all the Mormons I’ve met (quite a number over the last year) have been very pleasant, if misguided young men, but also because on the strength of the clip below the Osmonds are clearly well overdue for a critical rehabilitation, from toothy Jesus freaks to righteous eco-doomsayers who could fucking ROCK when they wanted to. Nevertheless, having had a certain amount of (sometimes interesting, at other times awkwardly hilarious) contact with this bunch, as well as having been pestered variously by Hare Krishnas and other human garbage, I’m starting to worry that I might be somehow acting as a magnet for religious nutters. What is it about me that screams “my heart is open to the Lord, if only one of his messengers could show me the way”? The only conclusion I can come to is that I’m obviously not fucking rude enough.

I’m not pre-judging, I’m just judging. Using the critical faculties that god gave me. All Jehova’s Witnesses are cunts and should be shot. Don’t worry Donny, my copy of the Watchtower’s already in the recycling bin.

Crazy Horses - The Osmonds

2009-02-17T15:14:00.001+01:00

Enough of the 80s already - and by the way, all you girlie Abba fans take note - THIS is where it's at.

2009-02-05T18:25:00.002+01:00

On a lighter note, thanks to the wonders of facebook a bloke I went to school with has just got in touch with me again after almost 20 years, and informs me that he's currently touring Mexico as a member of this man's backing band. Who'd have thought that, even with the affliction of having grown up in 1980s Coventry, I could be a mere handshake away from such greatness?

We are all prostitutes - The pop group

2009-02-05T15:35:00.001+01:00

If the 80s are coming back, then let it be warts n all

2009-02-05T15:28:00.002+01:00

Is this the future?

That’s one month of 2009 sweated through then, and to my surprise and relief I haven’t run out of work and been forced to eat dust yet, so an absolute bonus there. In fact in the last week I’ve even bought myself a brand new pair of skis and taken them out to the mountains for a test run, that’s how bourgeois I am. However, smug as my quips might seem, I feel far from complacent.

When I was back in Britain over Christmas the global economic crisis, no longer now referred to as a Recession but as a Depression, was something tangible that could be seen and felt, whereas here so far it’s still mostly something that’s simply feared. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of fear to go round. Maybe I should just stop listening to the radio, but I often tune in to BBC World Service when I’m doing the cooking, and the news coming from there recently has not been uplifting.

One horrifying word I’ve heard mentioned a number of times in the last couple of weeks is “eighties”. I know that I’ve eulogised the eighties a number of times here, and indeed have been guilty of a rather cosy nostalgia for my youth, just as long as I know that it’s all safely in the past. But now it’s time for me to eat my flippant words, because I know damn well that any prospect of the eighties returning is a deeply sickening one.

In Coventry, where I grew up, just like most places in Britain north of about Oxford, and plenty of places south of there too, the eighties was a dire time. Even in the suburban, largely Tory-voting part of town where I lived, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who could argue with conviction that Thatcherism was working, particularly after a drive through the city. We were surrounded by disaster, local unemployment was at 20%, there were riots in Brixton, Toxteth and nearby Handsworth, then there was the miners’ strike. Make no mistake, there was a class war going on. It was the age of the “managed decline of Liverpool”, and the region where I lived likewise saw no recognisable improvement between the two recessions of the early 80s and early 90s. Reports of “yuppies” and even an “economic miracle” seemed like they were coming from another world.

At the same time there was another world, that hateful world of the winners. The Tories, seemingly unbelievably, won three elections and the miners’ strike, and went on to win a fourth election in the 90s. All opposition to the prevailing ideology was busy tearing itself apart and was duly swept aside. The whole decade seemed like one of utter defeat. For depressed, left-wing teenagers the pop charts of the mid-80s offered little comfort, the majority of the hits reflecting the ethos of the time – slickly produced, inflated, saccharine, vacuous. The only rational choice was to become a goth and wallow on the margins in a cocoon of misery.

Having said that I don’t wish to overestimate how much things have improved since the 80s – large parts of Coventry and the rest of the country remain the kind of places no right-minded person would wish to live. Despite the fact that Britain as a whole has undeniably enjoyed better times since economically, the 80s were merely the beginning of this hideous defeat, of a process in which differences in wealth multiplied obscenely, the Labour party implemented privatisation that Thatcher could never have dreamed about and Britain generally became a much more vicious place.

Given the fact, then, that in economic terms sizeable pockets of Britain have never recovered from the blow inflicted by the 80s, and that culturally the nation remains entirely decimated by that decade, I feel more than perturbed when I hear predictions that the oncoming Depression is going to be “worse than the 80s”. Despite my initial glee at worthless, greedy banking scum getting sacked (and after all, with their money and connections I’m sure they’ll be all right Jack), “worse than the 80s” sounds almost apocalyptic to my ears. How much worse are things going to get before the inevitable ecological meltdown?

2009-01-25T11:58:00.002+01:00

Judged against British standards Olomouc is a small, tranquil town, which certainly in comparison with my home town of Coventry is pleasingly free of violence. There are unfortunate exceptions to this of course, but the violence that does occur is usually of a different type to the British classic of random psychos, or gangs of psychos, going out on the town for the sole purpose of looking for an excuse to shout “what you fuckin’ starin’ at?” before battering some innocent party over the head with a pool cue. Here any violence is more likely to be in connection with extreme right-wing politics, football hooliganism or organised crime, three groups of animals which overlap considerably.

As a result, such violence, though less commonplace, has the potential to be extremely nasty. A few days ago one such incident of the organised crime variety took place in the town centre, ending in the murder, or at the very least manslaughter of a taxi driver. I probably ought to be ashamed to say this, but the outcome of one cabbie being stabbed to death and another going to prison for a very long time strikes me as what a thicko football manager might call a “proper result”.

The desire for bloody revenge does not belong to the more noble human qualities, but few of us are immune to its charms. At times it’s tempting to believe in a vengeful god, and in fact most religious people do, the vindictive shits. As an atheist I suppose I ought to be above such baseness, but the sad fact is that I am not (hard to believe I know, usually I’m such a nice, placid sort of a chap). Well whatever, I might wish a violent death on some people, but at least I’m not stupid enough to believe in god.

The reason I hate these particular taxi drivers so much is because of an experience I had three years ago, during a particularly bitter Czech winter. There was at least a foot of snow outside, it was well below zero and my girlfriend and I had just spent the evening at the annual “beer ball”, which took place on the edge of town, and had to get a cab back to her place at about 2 in the morning. Needless to say, after a beer ball neither of us was entirely sober, and trying to be fair and evaluate everything from both sides, this may have had an influence on the events which followed. We jumped into a taxi, upon which the driver deliberately ignored all our directions, claiming “it’s all the same”, and took a circuitous route to my girlfriend’s place, which he then of course attempted to use as an excuse to overcharge us. Knowing that this was an obvious scam, as well as being a bit pissed up, I told him I’d give him two thirds of what he’d charged, because we all knew he was shamelessly trying to rip us off. The driver refused to take what I offered him, and insisted on the full inflated price, resulting in a standoff. I told him that if he wasn’t satisfied he should call the police, meanwhile unbeknown to me he sent out a distress signal to his colleagues. Within a few minutes six more taxis pulled up, and I was suddenly surrounded by seven gorillas demanding money out of me rather forcefully.

Obviously now it sounds pathetic, since the money they wanted came to less than 2 quid, but, being pissed and mouthy, I was concerned with the principle of the thing. The fact that he had called his mates and not the police convinced me even further that the taxi mafia were in the wrong, so full of Dutch courage, I refused to pay. The end result was that seven of them beat me up, not extremely badly, but I got a black eye and a few kicks in the stomach and thighs out of it. Finally, after being threatened with being dumped in the boot and driven out to a lake five miles out of town in sub-zero temperatures, I capitulated and gave them their (absurdly small) ill-gotten gains.

Afterwards I went to the police, but as you might expect, they were a fat lot of good. The taxi drivers had a very well worked out drill for making sure no witnesses saw exactly which of them had thrown the punches or dealt out the kicks, so despite me wasting several hours, and on several occasions when I could have been working, answering questions (idiot that I am, I answered them honestly) and making lengthy statements down at the police station, the police came up with fuck all.

So forgive me if I don’t don a black armband and rub ash all over my face. The papers still haven’t released the name of the deceased yet, and obviously I’m hoping that he’s one of those who gave me a kicking. Even if he wasn’t I know he was a co-owner of the firm whose drivers were responsible, and that it’s clearly company policy to beat up awkward customers. Add to this the newspaper report, which states that the man in question, who was – surprise, surprise – an ex-copper, began randomly attacking drivers from the rival, split-off taxi firm, one of whom went to report the matter to the police. In the meantime he continued to attack several more rival taxi drivers, behaving “like a psychopath”, until eventually he picked on the wrong man and was stabbed three times.

What, am I supposed to resist a snigger? Fuck it, and fuck you. That’s the kind of world these people live in, that’s the way they live and die. In keeping with the general bad taste of this post I’ll end it with a quote, appropriately enough from Taxi Driver: “One day a real rain’s gonna come and wash all this scum off the streets”.

In the meantime this wee shower will do nicely.

Pippi Loves Spunk

2009-01-15T16:39:00.001+01:00

Enjoy!

2009-01-14T13:56:00.002+01:00

Bravo! Another major EU-related debacle, and we’re still only half way through January. Apparently this work of art cost something within the region of £400 thousand, though the Czech government only put up approximately £67 thousand of this – still not an insignificant sum of money. Will they get it back? Whatever, it’s going to be a rollercoaster of a six months.

big black - bad penny

2009-01-13T19:27:00.001+01:00

For all the disco lovers out there

2009-01-10T10:32:00.005+01:00

Usually, for all my curmudgeonly exterior and grumblings about the pressure to have fun being a pain in the arse, I get sucked into “having a good time” in jovial company on New Year’s Eve, and to my enormous shame heartily enjoying it to boot. This time, however, I really started the year as I meant to go on – staying in on my own, suffering from a cold, drinking slivovice and watching reruns of Father Ted (I have to admit, I rather enjoyed that too). Naturally the runny nose and solitary New Year wasn’t anything I planned, but it seemed to capture the pessimistic, miserablist feel of the times.

Back in Blighty people really are shitting themselves! It’s ace! Nobody feels secure in their job any more, everyone’s fretting over the family finances, and on this occasion, for the first time since I’ve been living out here I didn’t feel a complete pauper on my return there. To say I felt stinking rich would be an exaggeration, but with the triple-whammy effect of the post-Christmas sales (I still remember the days when they used to be called the January sales), the economic crisis causing yet further price slashes and the pound falling through the floor, Britain is now a shopper’s paradise for Czechs. Clothes are now in many cases down to a third of the price of similar garments here, and the same also applies to some other goods. Astonishingly even the price of beer is now comparable – when I first came out here in the mid 90s I remember telling jealous and incredulous mates back home that I was paying 25p a pint while they were paying approximately £2. Now, however, out of sheer desperation J.D. Wetherspoon’s have cut the price of one of their beers to 99p, which is little more than the average price of a pint, or more precisely half-litre, here in Spleensville. Of course this means that Wetherspoon’s pubs will now be attracting even more psychos than usual and will have to spend more on cleaning their upholstery after punters have pissed themselves, but evidently they think it’s their only option. At least train services are still reassuringly overpriced, overcrowded and shit, with all trains in the entire country cancelled on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, plus all sorts of other disruptions throughout the period. Business as fucking usual there then.

No longer considered penny-pinching East European peasants in today’s recession-hit Britain, and with their country now holding the rotating EU presidency, perhaps the Czechs might be lulled into thinking they’ve finally arrived then? Maybe not. Czechs do a pretty good line in pessimism, and in some cases it’s justified. For a start, few people are foolhardy enough to believe we’re not all going to get shafted here too, even if it might be amusing to watch the Yanks and Brits suffer in the meantime before we get our dose of misery. Leaving aside the depressing issue of the President’s insanity, there’s also the rather perturbing fact that, with temperatures down to –20°C in some places, the Russians have shut off the gas supply to the country. In addition, the EU presidency is not something that most Czechs have awaited with eager anticipation, but dreaded as a period that has to be stoically muddled through with gritted teeth, all the time praying that the country doesn’t embarrass itself too much.

Things didn’t get off to the best of starts, since within a couple of days of taking over the presidency the Czechs raised eyebrows worldwide with their statement, on behalf of the entire EU, that the Israeli action in Gaza is “defensive, not offensive”. This immediately prompted other European leaders to break with the “official” EU line and condemn the Israeli offensive, with even the USA supporting UN calls for a ceasefire. Nicolas Sarkozy, seemingly convinced that he is still European führer, snubbed the Czechs further, embarking upon a separate diplomatic mission to the Middle East. In other words, prompted by the clodhopping buffoonery of the Czech administration, it took less than a week for the rest of the EU to reveal their true colours and shun the official EU leadership as that of an insignificant, tinpot little country. Hopefully Sarkozy, a worthy rival of Klaus in terms of ludicrous egomania, will at least help divert attention away from us while the matter gets swept under the carpet.

The What Republic? Happy New Year!

upside down- the jesus and mary chain

2008-12-22T17:48:00.001+01:00

Happy Christmas Jitka!

TONA - Pieces

2008-12-14T10:35:00.001+01:00

Fuckin badass riffmeisters. Would you pick a fight with these men?

2008-12-11T14:53:00.010+01:00

I might have been a bit quiet or preoccupied recently, for various reasons. First of all there’s the general pre-Christmas stress, the grim greyness of the time of year, plus the fact that it simply struck me as too depressing a capitulation to the presidential ego to fulminate yet again at the latest lamentable episode in the remorseless, inescapable self-promotion of that risible cockbag Václav Klaus. As well as that I’ve recently got round to reading some of “Is it Just Me or is Everything Shit?”, which from a personal point of view has raised an uncomfortable question or two. For a start, why did this book immediately appeal to me? The bombastic obviousness of the title, which as an added bonus contains a swear word? Yes. The fact that it’s grumbling about how vapid popular culture is, which not only appeals to the miserable sod and snob in me who considers himself above such trash, but also, as I’ve touched upon before, comforts me that I haven’t missed out on anything of value as a result of my decision to leave the UK? Yes. The book’s earthy, wise-to-your-game humour, it’s suggestion that you can have it all by being a sharp intellectual who disdains plebby consumerism on the one hand whilst still remaining a bit of a geezer on the other? Yeah mate. In the end it just ticked too many boxes, I couldn’t resist buying it. Am I that predictable and shallow? Yes.

And to be perfectly frank, as a light read I find the great majority of it highly enjoyable, for all of the above reasons I find it impossible not to identify with. That, though, is a large part of the problem, since it’s forced me to ask myself what the hell I’m doing here, as in bothering to write anything at all. The answer staring me in the face is that I’m not doing much that’s any different from the authors of the book, except that they got there earlier, did it better, and got published and paid for it – the bastards.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, at least I’ve caught up on a couple of things. I’d previously been unaware, for example, of Real Football Factories, presented by the breathtakingly embarrassing Danny Dyer. The book pretty much said it all on him too, so there’s not much point in me pitching in at this late stage, but I have to concur that he really isn’t very good. However, after I’d checked him out on youtube I was led to contemplate not only the idiot Dyer but also the more sinister figures behind him, and I began to feel that benign, euphoric sensation that perhaps I might find something to rant about after all.

Years ago I actually read The Football Factory. It’s bloody awful, in fact I’d even go so far as to say that it’s considerably worse than the film, despite Dyer’s piss-poor performance in the lead role. Naturally there’s the abysmal prose style, the facile sensationalism, the tedious celebration of yobbishness etc. The violence aside though, there’s also the equally obvious nastiness of the book’s excruciatingly laboured and self-righteous promotion of class hatred. The message rammed home ad nauseam is that salt-of-the-earth working clarse yoof might be a bit tasty and feral, getting their hedonistic kicks whatever way the system lets ’em cause they ain’t too pussy to stand up for themselves in a bit of a row, but it’s the middle class who are the real bullies. Basically it’s insultingly simpleminded, Orwellian “blue collar good, white collar bad”, hatemongering bullshit.

In the goulash of my brain this seemed to link up with another book I read recently, “What’s Left?” by Nick Cohen, which, although it didn’t pack in quite as many laughs per page as “Is it Just Me…”, I also found very readable. Cohen makes a good job of stating, with somewhat less pomposity than Hitchens, what ought to be obvious but nevertheless evidently needs saying, i.e. that fear of being culturally insensitive has prevented some on the Left from criticising non-white fascists. But he mostly skirts round the mother of all liberal hang-ups, which predates the Civil Rights movement and gender politics, let alone the war on terror – that of class guilt. Whilst he’s eager to point out that white people don’t have a monopoly on racism, he stops short of the logical analogy that the higher echelons of society in turn don’t have a monopoly on snobbery.

Though Cohen makes the observation, in reference to the vicious lout Gerry Healy of the preposterous Workers’ Revolutionary Party, that Healy “realised early in his political career that many middle-class people desperately wanted to be abused and humiliated by a self-appointed representative of the proletariat”, later on, whilst quite rightly highlighting the grotesque condescension that exists amongst certain sections of the middle-class Left towards the working class, he quotes the revolting Julie Burchill, who claims that “the English working class is now the only group of people the chattering classes are happy to hear mocked and attacked”. Sorry Nick, but where you start endorsing Burchill is where you and I part company. As always, Burchill is utterly wrong, the group of people most easily and frequently attacked by the “chattering classes” (the working classes, being people of action, presumably don’t chatter) is themselves, and Burchill and John King have made careers as professional token proles pandering to this bourgeois masochism. Essentially they’re no more than performing monkeys, dominatrix whores fulfilling the guilty wank fantasies of Guardian readers.

Going back to these “self-appointed representatives” of the proletariat, common man, Joe six-pack, whatever you want to call them, you come upon an illustrious collection of demagogues of the left and right. Those to have used their (often entirely fictitious) humble background or identification with the lower orders as a get-out-of-jail-free card, whilst persecuting the chattering classes, snooty inhabitants of ivory towers etc., include not only Healy, Burchill and King but also Garry Bushell, Thatcher, Alistair Campbell, Sarah Palin and Pol Pot. Terms such as “middle class” or “student” are used by such people as pejoratives which require no qualification. They could quite easily be substituted with “bloody Jews”. Make no mistake, anyone, whatever their own social background, who vilifies others solely on the basis of their social background, can seriously damage your health.

See, I may be a middle class liberal, but I consider myself to represent the provisional wing of that particular movement. ’Ave it, you MUPPETS!

2008-11-28T19:07:00.002+01:00

Sometimes the best advice is the hardest to take.

Cocteau Twins - Pink Orange Red

2008-11-19T17:15:00.001+01:00

The most extraordinary band of all time?

2008-11-15T16:04:00.012+01:00

Die, you fucking cunt

It could have been so easy for this utterly hateful, second-rate scum, despite his ignominious failings as a politician and human being, to end his political career on a high note. Even though he was the Prime Minister who presided over the catastrophic voucher privatisation scheme which resulted in a large proportion of the country’s wealth going into the pockets of sharp-eyed, “Harvard educated” sociopath Viktor Kožený, later taught in some Western European universities as a model of how not to privatise, even though his notorious arrogance and bloody-mindedness split his own party in two, even despite his mendacious anti-communist posturing and cheap, cowardly stereotyping of anyone to the left of Hayek as a Stalinist, all this after years of meek collaboration, later followed by deals with an unrepentant communist party in order to get elected president, despite the appalling contempt he showed for his erudite, gentlemanly predecessor and genuine dissident Václav Havel and despite his repugnant political views, president Václav Klaus nevertheless initially had unfathomably high approval ratings in his role as head of state. And since this is, or should be, essentially an apolitical, representative function, not unlike that of the British monarch, he could have quite easily gone out with dignity like a grand old man, forgiven for his mistakes and respected even by many of his opponents, remembered, however wrongly, as a swashbuckling, epoch-making conviction politician who magnificently stepped up to the helm during those confusing, heady post-revolutionary days.

Too late for all that though, the stupid cunt. Like many other recipients of outrageous political luck, and as always it’s impossible to avoid mentioning his idol Thatcher at this point, Klaus evidently feels compelled to test his good fortune against an overwhelming political death wish. All he had to do was to keep his mouth shut. But for Klaus, no enterprise is more inconceivable than that. Instead he’s used his presidency as a vehicle for his gargantuan ego, to fulminate and nitpick on every imaginable topic. Just recently he’s leapt on his party’s annihilation in the local and senate elections in order to kick his successor Mirek Topolánek while he’s down, as if we couldn’t remember just what a roaring success Klaus was as PM and party leader. Sickening though this is, not only for the very few fans of Topolánek who are left, at least it’s confined to domestic politics. Klaus, though, is no man to content himself with mere parochialism but is rather a crusading universalist, whose lightning bolts of insight demand an international stage. Hence a state visit to Ireland presented a golden opportunity, and certainly not one to be squandered by respecting protocol and decorum, thereby running the risk of him not being the centre of attention. The outcome was what the Irish Examiner called “the most embarrassing state visit in recent memory”, and one which looked suspiciously like an attempt to sabotage the Czech Republic’s forthcoming presidency of the EU. Perhaps it was a case of Klaus projecting his guilt, mindful of the fact that his Frankenstein’s monster Kožený, a wanted criminal in his homeland, is now an Irish citizen. Or maybe I should leave out the clumsy amateur psychology bullshit, the notion that Klaus would ever harbour any feelings of guilt is obvious nonsense.

As usual anyone who disagrees with Klaus is a “hypocrite”, who is inevitably likened to a communist, YAWN. The man is clearly mad, and his mania is accelerating at an alarming rate, to the increasing shame and detriment of the Czech Republic. Ah well, nothing to do with me. If I’m to choose between my country of origin and my country of residence, I feel a great deal happier about being represented by Gordon Brown and the Duke of Edinburgh. That’s how much I hate Klaus.

2008-11-12T08:23:00.003+01:00

It was probably wise of Obama not to give Joe the Plumber a good pasting before the election, but now that it’s in the bag I hope one of his first acts as president is to lock the criminal bastard up for tax evasion. In the meantime, since I don’t ever intend to run for high office I might as well spit some bile at the twat before he fades into obscurity. I might be guilty here of confusing the man himself for what he represents, but in this case I’m not sure the two can or should be separated. Yes, I know that he’s not really Joe the Plumber, since his name’s not Joe and he’s not actually a licensed plumber. So then this means that he’s not only symptomatic of the hypocrisy (and utter bloody suicidal crassness) of the Republican Party on a party political level, but that as an individual he’s a fucking liar. A liar who complains on national TV about his taxes going up under the Democrats, but doesn’t pay the ones set for him by the party he voted for anyway. A self-centred, self-righteous, whining prick with no conscience, social or otherwise. Apparently he’s now bitter about having been used by the Republicans in their promotion of not paying your taxes as the patriotic American way, of greed and ignorance as the great virtues of the common, salt-of-the-earth American. But in that case he shouldn’t have opened his fat, dishonest mouth.

Initially I expected Sarah Palin to be destined for similar obscurity, but some of the more visionary Republicans are hoping for her to stand in 2012. All I can say is: get in there girl! This hockey milf of the people has the potential to become the Republicans’ answer to Ian Duncan Smith. As the great W once said, Bring it on!

2008-11-03T14:02:00.009+01:00

Hello sailors!

Ernst Röhm. Leading member of the Nazi party until the Night of the Long Knives, the last but not the first night of his life to involve penetration by long foreign objects.

Ted Haggard, former family values preacher and head of the National Association of Evangelicals until hit by an unfortunate scandal.

Jörg Haider, former Austrian far-right leader, pictured with his handsome, orange-tanned protégé.

Richard Littejohn, British journalist and purveyor of common sense.

I'm sure there's some kind of correlation between these individuals, but I'm damned if I can work out what it might be.

2008-10-16T16:56:00.006+02:00

Milan Kundera, without doubt the best known and most popular Czech author worldwide, has long been viewed with suspicion by a great many of his compatriots. There are various reasons and motivations for this, some probably rather petty and uncharitable, some possibly a little more justified. Doubtless there’s a certain amount of resentment among those who stayed, fought and suffered whilst he was not only swanning around eating snails in France but also tended to be casually defeatist and sneeringly dismissive of the dissident community back home. For a long time he refused to allow the publication of his most internationally celebrated work, the Unbearable Lightness of Being, in his own language, a fact which can’t have helped allay the general feeling that he’d turned his back on the Czechs, and whatever the excuses he gave, the obstacles to the book’s release can hardly have been insurmountable (eventually it was published in late 2006, but it scarcely seems credible that it really had to take so long). Add to this his reclusive nature and positively paranoid defence of his own secrecy, even going so far as to visit the Czech Republic in disguise, and you have a picture of a man who hasn’t exactly bust a gut to build up his PR in his homeland.

There’s more to it than wounded patriotism though. Many simply complain that they find his work overrated, pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, misogynist etc., and despite being a fan of his earlier novels, at times I concede they may have a point – although I’m still always nonplussed when some of these detractors then go on to profess their admiration of Bohumil Hrabal, whose prose has never struck me as anything other than florid, inconsequential noise. And then of course there’s the old theme of his history, that he started out as a socialist poet, some might say a tawdry propagandist (though by no means the only one), who only later, when the wind started blowing in the direction of reform, started expressing his misgivings. However, with regard to this fact it’s worth noting that a number of prominent dissident writers have excused this as youthful folly rather than cynical careerism, having themselves been swept up in the post-war, pro-Soviet euphoria for a while. Since some of these, most notably Pavel Kohout, whose own bleating odes of the time were considerably more execrable even than Kundera’s, were also Stalinist shit-peddlers in previous incarnations, one might stop short of hailing this indulgent stance as a veritable jewel of magnanimity, but still, as a leftie, who can recall with embarrassment a juvenile attraction towards an unabashedly bloodthirsty form of Marxism, I feel inclined to agree with them. Is it so difficult to imagine that, particularly in such times, even some highly intelligent people might have actually believed in the pap they were churning out?

With the emergence of this article, however, it’s become far much more difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt. It genuinely seems that there were very serious reasons for Kundera’s wall of silence about himself and his past. Writing dodgy poetry is one thing, destroying people’s lives is another. So far his response has been to break his silence of 25 years in order to denounce (if you’ll pardon the rather sick pun) all this as an “assassination attempt”. And maybe it is, maybe the police report is fabricated and those who found it, seizing upon parallels between this apparently real-life episode and fictional ones in works such as The Joke and Life is Elsewhere, as well as his communist past and his cloistered lifestyle, have put 2 and 2 together and made 5. Maybe. But faced with a case for the prosecution such as this, which is as comprehensive as it is damning, merely spitting out “I never even knew the man” (admittedly fairly verbose by Kundera’s terse media standards) sounds pretty poor. You might be innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the law, Mr Kundera, but if you wish to salvage your credibility as a human being in the eyes of the Czechs, you’re going to have to do a lot better than that.

2008-10-04T10:03:00.004+02:00

It had to be made, sooner or later. And BOY am I looking forward to it! Just hope they found a convincing body double. Now spank my arse and call me a liberal!

2008-10-01T17:45:00.000+02:00

Damn, I wish I was smart.

I’m slightly ashamed to say that my career as Director of International Finance for Serbian rock legends TONA has got off to a rather inauspicious start, and it’s largely my own fault. Even despite the obvious fact that these grasping sacks of shit are responsible for setting off the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression (and that as well, come to think of it), I was still witless enough to place my trust in the banking system. So when the first cheque for CDs sold (yes, that’s why I was promoting it!) arrived from the US of A, I rushed down to my local branch of Fleecing Bastards Plc. to let it “rest” in my account for a while. Maybe I could even rake a bit of interest off the proceeds before I forwarded it to its rightful owners, slick wheeler-dealer type that I am. But of course I didn’t reckon with the fact that the charge for implementing this transaction would come to approximately two thirds of the amount on the cheque. Which given the value of the US dollar these days, was not much to start with.

When it comes to the global economic meltdown that’s currently taking place, don’t expect any erudite opinion from these quarters. Naturally on a personal level, whenever I hear of City types getting thrown out on the streets, Managing Directors of banks having their bonuses written off, the company Mercedes getting repossessed etc. my heart bleeds, in fact I’ve recently taken to waiting outside banks at closing time and tearfully hugging their freshly sacked former bosses as they leave for the last time. Still, though I hate to disappoint you, I’m going to have to leave it to the FT, Economist, Embezzler’s Weekly etc. to provide you with in-depth macroeconomic analysis. The very idea of banking and economics, I’m forced to admit, is something that has always bored me senseless, with the result that I know next to nothing about it.

Unfortunately, so it seems, neither do bankers or economists. Which in my mind begs an obvious question: why don’t we just fucking shoot them all?

2008-09-22T12:07:00.002+02:00

With reference to an earlier post, it seems that the Czech healthcare system was right all along to be wary of our British bovine tendencies. Though you should bear in mind that this story first appeared in the Sun, so in all probability it's a load of utter bollocks. Then again, better safe than sorry, eh nursie?

2008-09-18T14:22:00.008+02:00

Love is all around. And this is the result. Happy now?

Hideously overrated business, love.

Now what could have provoked me into such an uncharacteristically misanthropic outburst? Certainly not the two weddings I’ve been to recently, both outrageously life-affirming occasions of bonhomie and munificence that presented not only love but humanity generally in an almost unjustifiably flattering light. Also not the fact that over the last month or so I’ve had an inordinate amount of contact with ex-girlfriends, which despite inevitably triggering various memories and introspective ruminations has been an overwhelmingly positive experience. Not even the anxieties I’ve been facing in my present relationship, the details of which I don’t wish to go into (though I hasten to add that they were not caused by the aforementioned friendliness with the ex-s). Not even the fact that today, the fateful 18^th of September, is exactly thirteen years to the day since I first met one of those ex-s, five years to the day since breaking up with another of them, and nine years to the day since a person close to me embarked upon an ill-advised (and ongoing) marriage – spooky, eh?

Neither is it down to love’s capacity to turn otherwise reasonable people into simpering, beatifically complacent buffoons, or alternatively desperate, despondent shells. Everyone knows that love is blind and can make you utterly miserable, how many songs have been written about that? Painful and downright dumb as it can be, even the most embittered cynic must be thinking that surely love has some redeeming features, and far be it from me to disagree.

A problem though is that love, by its very nature, is so nebulous. It can have all sorts of manifestations, and this gives rise to all sorts of interpretations and all sorts of abuses. Because it’s so hard to define, the word “love” can become a convenient cover for assorted pretentious hippy stargazers to use in order to mask their abject vapidity. Dropping (or more often piledriving) it into a conversation can make them sound nice and caring as well as deep, man, but what does it actually mean when used by these asinine, tarot-reading imbeciles? Scratch the surface and try to get them to explain what they’re talking about and you’ll find the answer is so vague as to be completely meaningless. One big nothing. Either that or they’ll get sanctimonious and start differentiating between their “true” conception of love as opposed to shallower, inferior versions. Now it’s a competition. My love’s better than your love.

To be more precise, it’s not love itself that I object to but the constant shoving of it to the forefront of everything. Why does it have to be so damned visible? I suddenly find myself favouring the old-school stiff upper lip approach, after all reticence and awkwardness in expression of love at least betray an appealing degree of modesty, by contrast with the wholly immodest, inappropriate and frequently insincere gushing that has become the norm (and yes, I realise that in addition to making me sound like a Telegraph-reading retired colonel, all this could seem like belated apologetics with regard to my ex-girlfriends). But those of us under about 50 no longer have much of a choice, bullied as we are into following the dictum that the more people you hug, the better a person you are.

About a week ago I was struck by just how loved-up we all are these days when I opened my parents’ fridge. Yes, you read it right, a fridge. Inside was a packet of crumpets, named “Love to toast” crumpets. Mmm yes, love to toast crumpets, butter melting lusciously all over them, perhaps whilst wearing a traditional hand-knitted Aran sweater on a frosty winter’s evening, on a rocking chair by a roaring log fire, with a steaming hot mug of cocoa to wash it down. Lovely. Love it. Makes you feel all warm inside, doesn’t it? Or does it make you, like me, want to go out and stab some manipulative, overpaid advertising executive’s eyeballs out with a rusty fork? A day or so later I was in a café which was selling Wall’s ice cream and noticed that their web address is www.loveicecream.com. Ooh, the power of suggestion. Don’t you just love our ice cream? What, don’t you have any feelings? We pour all our love into it. Love our ice cream. Go on, it’ll be sure to love you back. Love us. Give us your money, and keep giving it. It’s hardly rocket science, building up a relationship with the product, placing the producer in the position of a benevolent, paternal, almost God-like provider and infantilising us as consumers. The power of love.

Most offensive of all was an eco-friendly recycled polythene bag that came into my possession, bearing the slogan “use me, re-use me & try not to lose me… love the environment. love my bag” (all in cuddly, non-hectoring lower case letters). Now in spite of my natural scepticism and pessimism I’m still generally sympathetic to green issues, but this slogan filled me with a desire to buy a chainsaw run on ultra-leaded petrol and proceed to hack down a forest. I don’t love “you”, and I never will. “You” don’t even have the right to call yourself “me”. You’re a piece of plastic. And get ready for the punch line… it turns out that this repulsive abortion was produced by Asda, who are owned by those valiant eco-warriors Wal-Mart. Lovely.

By the way, before you get on my case for owning a Wal-Mart carrier bag, I’ll have you know that it was given to me by my 94 year old grandmother, containing a lovingly prepared parcel of goodies which are unavailable out in these parts. So if you take me to task me on this, you’re basically a granny-basher. You hate frail old ladies. Don’t you have a heart?

Err… what was I saying?

Brothers, sisters, friends. As someone who cares deeply about your emotional welfare and spiritual nourishment, I implore you: can’t we please have a bit less love in the house?

PS: I was challenged recently to create a post which contained “no swearing, no punk, no Brit/Czech contrasts and no politics”. Does the above meet the criteria? No mention of Czech or punk, and it’s only political in a loose sense, like y’know everything’s political if you think about it, yeah? And do I win any prizes for not swearing, considering it’s such an emotive issue? Especially since, reviewing this post, I can’t help feeling that it would have been much better with swearing in.

Mind you, Czech punks are a right fucking bunch of right-wing cunts.

Sisters of Mercy - Dominion

2008-08-25T18:30:00.001+02:00

Anyone who wasn't a goth in the 80s is a fool, a bloody fool.

2008-08-21T18:11:00.007+02:00

Yesterday I decided it was time to do a long overdue good deed. I was down near the hospital anyway, so I went to register as a blood donor. Since I’ve been paying regular healthcare contributions and indeed receiving regular healthcare here for a number of years now, I thought this would be no problem. In fact, although my experience of any kind of official institution here had warned me not to expect red carpet treatment, I thought that given the number of posters around town calling for new blood donors, my contribution would be at least reasonably welcome.

Not so. I announced my intention to the nurse at reception, who told me that I was too late to register that day (i.e. it was after 1 pm), but that I could read through the conditions and then fill out a form when I returned to register properly. On the way out I decided to check out the list of factors excluding persons from giving blood, just to be sure. I mean, I’m of a corresponding age and weight, I’m in reasonably good health, but still, best to be on the safe side. Sailed through the first few points … never suffered from toxoplasmosis, syphilis (oh please, what do you take me for?), not an alcoholic... no way, not by Czech standards. Wait a minute though… anyone who spent more than 6 months in England or France between 1980 and 1996 is disqualified?? Having spent almost the entirety of that period in England I was a little put out by this. Could this be true? I went back to the nurse, explaining my position. She called a doctor just to check and then assured me that unfortunately yes, I was disqualified from giving blood. Why? Due to mad cow disease, regardless of the miniscule number of humans who’ve contracted it, and despite the fact that it has subsequently been detected here. I suppose it’s another of those things I can blame on Thatcher, the horrible bitch. My blood is reject. In the Czech Republic I’m officially regarded as belonging to a sub-race.

Going to watch the football in the evening, in which a dismal England were lucky to scrape a draw against a superior Czech Republic, even if it was only a friendly, did little to bolster my sense of national pride, or to erase the haunting image of cattle from my brain. Managers come and go, but that bovine lack of inspiration that pervades the England team is perennial. We deserved to lose, and in some ways I wish we had, even if it would have made my life here miserable for the foreseeable future. Nothing at all has changed, and I’m starting to despair of it ever doing so. Evidently my fellow countrymen felt similarly. At the final whistle the herd of English fans, not at all fooled by our late, scrappy equaliser, expressed their view of the performance with the only appropriate response:

BOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

2008-08-17T16:57:00.016+02:00

Photograph not posted for obvious reasons

Random pet hates: Julie fucking Burchill

I can’t explain why I clicked on this fatuous pile of crap the other day on the Guardian’s website, but foolishly I did, and it was enough to set me off. Although I’ve mostly skirted round her absurdly self-satisfied and poisonous flatulence over the years, the little I have seen has been quite enough to fuel my rampant loathing of her and certainly enough to discourage me from ever investigating her early punk writings, when she was supposedly groundbreaking.

This woman suffers from a diabolical excess of self-belief. And what of actual substance lies at the heart of all this needling portentiousness? Absolutely fuck all, nothing but Julie Burchill, which on her terms is more than sufficient. Every hateful, worthless pronouncement of hers simply screams MEMEMEMEMEMEMEME! Burchill doesn’t have opinions, merely projections of self. She approves or disapproves of any given notion not as a result of any thoughtful consideration, but wholly on the basis of how Burchillian it sounds, how far it will promote her own image to espouse it. So despite the obvious discrepancies in terms of their purported ideals, she was simultaneously able to profess her admiration for both the former Soviet Union and for Thatcher, doubtless identifying with the vacuous, bloody-minded nastiness of both and screw the ideology. After all, ideals mean having to believe in something above and beyond oneself.

The above-mentioned article (in which she claims to believe in god!) is replete with examples of this staggering egomania, though I’m sure those of a masochistic bent could find hundreds more strewn over the internet. The beginning of the article is indicative: “I’m a…, I’m a….”. This is what I believe, aren’t I clever? There’s no rationale here, this is a woman who wouldn’t recognise an argument if it hit her in the face (something I’ve often dreamed about). She merely veers from arch smugness, for example in the description of her reaction to the death of her parents, to unwarranted bullying. Attack is evidently the best form of defence, the nearest she gets to defending her views is to vilify anyone who disagrees. Better to mock your opponents’ imagined motivations/social class/appearance/whatever else comes to mind than examine their case, in which event a mediocre intellect such as hers would assuredly lose the debate. So those who’ve lost their faith when a parent dies are held up to ridicule, whilst those (like Burchill herself, might I conjecture?) who may conversely have turned to the comfort of faith as a consequence of some unhappiness or misfortune are let off the hook. Surely both are equally contemptible, or to take a more humane view which Burchill is patently incapable of, equally understandable.

Likewise atheists are described as “profoundly immature”, all convinced that they are “the first person, ever, to see with a white-hot, burning clarity straight to the heart of society's attempts to manipulate and control us all for its own ends”. Taking a historical view the conclusion of religion as opium of the people, amongst other of its evils, might be hard to avoid, which of course doesn’t in itself disprove the existence of god, but don’t tell me she really believes her own insult to human intelligence that atheists think they’re the first person ever to come to such a conclusion. Judging the rest of us by her own wretched standards she further contends, in an imperious contrast with her own implied bravery, that atheists’ prime motivation for their lack of belief is a desire to be on the winning side. Right, not due to a lack of evidence for the existence of god then? And anyway, is there something wrong with being on the winning side? Intellectually the case for atheism is unbeaten, so therefore atheists are cowards. What inaccurate fucking pointless fucking stupidity.

She ends with an outburst of such toe-curling piety and hypocrisy (about which she’s had the gall to write a book) that even hardened Burchill-watchers will be struggling to keep their breakfast down. Paraphrasing her favourite vicar, who for all I know may be an entirely decent human being, she claims that she’s “trying to be a Christian”. No you’re not, are you Julie? You didn’t have to slate those who’ve lost their faith (which you admit is “a bit un-Christian” – well, at least you waited for two whole paragraphs before you started on that, well done!). But then again of course you had to, didn’t you? Why? Because you’re Julie Burchill.

Most infuriating and perplexing is why she’s been tolerated for so long. Perhaps because, as Thatcher managed with such breathtaking hypocrisy, she plays the class card. If in doubt make a virtue out of the fact that you didn’t go to university, sneer at your detractors’ backgrounds and accuse them of intellectual snobbery (usually a fair indication that they’ve won the argument). A few years ago she accused the Guardian of “vile anti-Semitism”, but despite affecting to despise the paper and its readers she’s back there now, lapping up their middle-class milk and honey and patronising of her as some kind of exotic pet, the domesticated proletarian rentaquote battleaxe. An easy target maybe, but she’s still there, isn’t she? Scum, scum, scum.

2008-07-30T11:07:00.007+02:00

Commercial break!

Yeah, so I’m plugging my mates, what of it? And anyway, what sort of mate would I be if I didn’t? Luckily they’ve made it easy for me, because this is a beast of an album, the accomplished production shifting it up a gear from their previous recordings. It’s quite clearly one of those that fits into the category of music that has to be played fucking loud to be properly appreciated. Just as Johann Cruyff pioneered the concept of total football, TONA are exponents of total rock. Every instrument attacks, with George’s vocals used rhythmically to intensify the hit. From the outset there’s a claustrophobic, machine-like quality to the music, making you feel you’re locked in for the duration. The opener “Red Cylinder” is a choking, Motorhead-inspired anthem, and the frantic pace continues with the bluesy, ZZ Top-esque “Pieces”. Some temporary relief comes in the first half of the slower, mournful sounding “Box”, still my favourite tune, before that too gives way to fist-smashing, Bitch Magnet style riffs.

Even when it slows down, however, such as in “Go Slow”, there’s no letup in the monstrous heaviness of the impact, in fact the effect is even heightened by the knowledge that another crushing blow is about to be delivered. You can tense yourself in preparation, but you can’t escape from its relentlessly pounding, superhuman power. Elsewhere “Grafit” benefits from being sung in Serbian, possessing a greater ferocity than the previous English version, before the appropriately fluid dirge “Through Water” closes, perhaps mercifully devoid of the brute force of the rest of the album, reflecting the listener’s own feelings of being utterly drained from the experience, a soothing and strangely uplifting bandage on the wound. Nonetheless, by that time you’ve been well and truly battered.

Yes, of course it’s a macho thing (they’re Serbian, for fuck’s sake!), a slightly masochistic kick for those who love a bit of visceral aural punishment. And what kind of indie-pop wanker doesn’t? Highly recommended.

2008-07-26T11:51:00.010+02:00

Some things just have to be done.

For the second year running I couldn’t resist the lure of EXIT, and above all the superb hospitality and thoroughly uplifting company of George and Sandra Almosthole down in Novi Sad. After last year’s experience, which was not only extremely enjoyable but bordering on life-transforming, I was nevertheless initially sceptical about the prospect of another festival, all the crowds and horrendous July heat of last year having led me to thinking that maybe I’m getting a bit old for this sort of thing, added to which is the obvious fact that you can’t lose your virginity twice. But then that’s no reason to stop having sex, izzit? In the end names like Roni Size and the Sex Pistols clinched the deal for me, so another series of long train rides beckoned.

Last year I made the cretinously naïve mistake of stopping over in Budapest, largely due to fear of getting mugged on the night train, and going down to Novi Sad on the claustrophobically rammed afternoon train on the day before the festival. This year I considered myself a great deal wiser, but even so was lucky to get a seat on the night train, itself packed out by almost solidly British Exit-goers. Not much sleep there then, but plenty of time to recover before the festival and the next onslaught of sleep deprivation.

The first thing that strikes me on the first day of the festival is how few people there were compared to last year, though thinking about it that’s not so surprising – last year the magnificent Prodigy headlined the main stage on the first day, whereas this year all we get is the paltry offerings of the execrable Nightwish, followed by N*E*R*D (who the fuck are they? We don’t bother trying to find out), plus Sven Väth in the dance arena, which is ok for those on mind-numbing drugs but fucking tedious for the rest of us. In retrospect maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to open with a whimper and build up to a bang, since the Prodigy last year ensured that it was more the other way around, and with the pleasant and unexpected freedom of movement around the site on the first couple of days I wasn’t complaining. In the event the first day is spent having a few relaxing drinks in the secure knowledge that we’re not missing anything on the main stage, checking out some thumping drum n bass on one of the smaller stages and wandering the fortress looking for the relocated Elektrana stage, a process which mostly due to my own blindness and stupidity takes a matter of hours.

Next night things are warming up nicely, starting out at Elektrana to see local boy Mika Technika produce, as his name suggests, some (hugely impressive) techno. After that there’s a gap to be filled before Roni Size, during which I’m dragged, mumbling foul oaths to myself like the sulky teenager I’ve abruptly and horrifyingly mutated back into, to see the first half hour of my teenage bête noires Primal Scream, who at least do me the favour of confirming all the prejudices I’ve always had about them. Has there ever been a more offensively superfluous band in the entire history of music than Primal Scream? Don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical question. Surely even by accident a band ought to be able to produce something more original and vital than this. For the first few songs they rip off the MC5 before reverting to their favourite pastime of ripping off the Stones. Then they rip off the Jesus and Mary Chain for a bit – and no, the fact that you played drums for them doesn’t make it all right, you wanker. I’m guessing here, but later, just to show they’re abreast of the times, man, they probably switch to ripping off Leftfield or somebody with some generic, lukewarm dance piffle, but thankfully by that time George has come round to the same conclusion as me and we’re long gone. And my ears are still smarting from the days when they used to rip off the Byrds and the Pastels. Fucking cunts.

On the way to get a much needed drink we see about 30 seconds of Sham 69 performing “The Cockney Kids are Innocent”, which is no less rubbish than I expected it to be. Stupid bloody band. But all this is of no consequence, because Roni Size and Reprazent are up next. Though not alone in this, this bunch pretty much personify what’s meant by intelligent dance music, incorporating both avant-gardism and soulfulness, managing to be both tough and tender, as well as, in a good old fashioned showbiz spirit, demonstrating an accomplished capacity to work and respond to a festival crowd, bewilderingly small in number though it is. Hard workers too, since Roni Size, who almost enjoys hero status among locals as an Exit-lover from years past, plays two sets, the second of which is from 5 to 7 in the morning. Shit, wish I had more stamina, or drugs. Whatever, the first set was masterful.

By Saturday the weather’s getting truly unpleasant, for the second year on the trot I’m in Novi Sad on the hottest day of the year so far, though considering it’s July that’s hardly miraculous and I’ve nobody but myself to blame. Due to leisurely afternoon drinking we miss Gogol Bordello, who were in any case playing ridiculously early, and arrive at the main stage later, partly due to misinformation and partly egged on by the suave but inscrutable Boris, to catch Juliette and the Licks, about whom I’d previously known nothing. Wait a minute… fuckin ell… isn’t that… Juliette Lewis? By god it is. Oh dear. Damn my ignorance of popular culture. Because this is without doubt the worst gig I’ve seen in the last five years at least, and one of the worst I’ve seen in my life. Having got away with marketing herself as the bad girl of cinema by appearing in frivolous, bombastic wank like Natural Born Killers, she now thinks she can market herself as the bad girl of rawwk. Joan Jett she ain’t. Not even Suzi Quatro. More like Roxette with bells on. Indescribably dire.

A colossal waste of time too, because I want to get to the bar to get tipsy in time for my Exit faves Lollobrigida, another major draw of the Elektrana stage. Over the last twelve months Lollobrigida have evidently built up quite a following in these parts on the punk-pop-electro-trash scene, and deservedly so. Last year I remember comparing them to Fuzz Box at their peak, but Fuzz Box were a mere flash in the pan, whereas this is the real thing. This year they are even more blinding than I remember them from before, their live sound much more abrasive and invigorating than their studio recordings, with the added advantage that once again the exquisitely entertaining Filip is on hand to provide translations of their lyrics, which, if what he says is true, are absolutely fucking filthy. Naughty, naughty girls who evidently relish the prospect of a damn good spanking. As nasty as they wanna be, and without seeming to try either. For the second year running, Lollobrigida blew the roof off Exit.

It’s going to be hard for anyone to beat that, but on Sunday the place has filled up properly and is buzzing with anticipation of the Pistols, with plenty of drunken cartoon punks hanging around the streets for several hours beforehand, sweating in their studded leather jackets. First though, somewhat despite ourselves, we go to see Ministry. I hadn’t had any great expectations of Ministry before the gig, which is a good job, because they’re boring, unspeakably bloody boring. Although I can’t really claim to be disappointed, I am still left with a vague feeling of embarrassment and shame, haunted as I am by the memory of those youthful university days when I used to think the sun shone out of Al Jourgensen’s arse. And there’s still no doubt in my mind that in their heyday Ministry, Revco etc. were genuinely great, seminal bands, and the Land of Rape and Honey is probably the industrial rock album, a glorious marriage of viciously punishing electronica with thrashy, venomous, Killing Joke-inspired guitar. But to be honest, looking back, even at their best they were a bit of a cheap thrill with their soooo dangerous image as rock outlaws, twisted up with malevolent rage, randomly spewing out bile against convention, the system and yeah, you too man, who might just taunt and swear at you but might also rip your head off, shit down your neck and then laugh like a motherfucker simply because you're there, as well as which they’re all really fuurked up on druuggs. All this is ok for 18 year olds, but the adult in me (believe it or not, there is one) has to acknowledge their gaping inferiority in comparison with other, less childish rock bands of the time, and here it’s impossible for me not to mention the Young Gods, Cop Shoot Cop and Thin White Rope, as well as their also childish but nevertheless superior predecessors Big Black. Still, they plugged a fairly radical, or at least diverting, gap in the market for a while, and all would have been fine if they hadn’t so quickly degenerated into a mediocre heavy metal band, and that, folks, is all that’s on display tonight. Everything sounds the same, there are no discernable tunes, just a lot of turgid, thudding fuzz and lamentably empty pseudo-biker posturing. Highlight of the show comes when George tells me they’re packing it in after this tour, which is at least 15 years overdue but cheers me up anyway. Much more so than when they finish with their only decent tracks of the evening, “Just One Fix” and “Thieves”, which as George succinctly puts it, is “too little, too late”. Awful.

The first Yugoslav punk band from way back in the 70s, local legends Pekinška Patka (Peking, or should I now say Beijing Duck), pass by in a blur. It ought to be a momentous occasion since they haven’t played here for 27 years, and are responsible for Novi Sad’s reputation as the capital of Balkan punk. They sound quite decent and a few of the locals get excited, but if the truth be told even they are just here for the Pistols, and so, a little unfairly, the band are greeted mostly with mild impatience. Unlucky there, chaps.

These days the re-reformed Sex Pistols can’t afford to take themselves too seriously, and are really laying it on thick with the theme that they’re now grand old English patriots (Lydon’s Irish roots no longer worthy of mention), purveyors of a distinguished tradition of cheekily lampooning but essentially loyal, complementary rather than revolutionary counterculture in the spirit of Noel Coward, taking to a stage decked out in St. George’s flags to the strains of Dame Vera Lynn’s “There’ll Always Be An England”. No doubt Roger Scruton would be nodding sagely in approval, although that other great Englishman Orwell might be wincing in his grave, recalling the moment in Animal Farm when the pigs walk on two legs. Of course it could be potentially alarming, suggesting an obsequious eagerness to prove that they’ve matured sufficiently to find an accommodation with the establishment and/or a bellicose pomposity in trying to imply that the establishment has been forced to accommodate them, but their humour is their saving grace. And to be fair to them, with Sex Pistols T-shirts having been sold without irony next to Princess Diana mugs in souvenir shops on Oxford Street for the last 25 years or so, they probably have little choice other than to present themselves as one of our great national institutions, which frankly, they are. What the fuck, it’s a festival, and Ministry and Primal Scream notwithstanding, I’m in indulgent mood. The main problem with the Pistols is that they’re simply not loud enough, but with “Stepping Stone” they seem to hit their stride a bit more, and pull off a pleasing, if not astonishing performance. Again it’s nice to see a band who haven’t got so above themselves as to disdain their role as mere entertainers, and so they bring out all the classics, performing the whole of Never Mind The Bollocks plus a few more anthems to boot. If I’ve been unkind to Lydon in the past then I take at least some of it back, we all have our moments of insecurity-fuelled silliness and Johnny is on form tonight, unlike the lobotomised-looking Steve Jones he seems to be having fun, which he generously transmits to the audience, although he then almost blows it with some unimaginative between-song banter vis-à-vis US foreign policy, going on to chant out “Allah be praised” – which though surely meant ironically, is perhaps not the cleverest thing to shout to a crowd in Serbia, some of whom clearly don’t quite pick up on the irony. Well, at least the Pistols can still be controversial. They encore rather playfully with a slightly unexpected cover of “Silver Machine”, as well as “Road Runner”, after which I’m well satisfied. Seeing the 50-something Pistols play a festival in Serbia in 2008, so long after the death of punk, could have been the most excruciating kitsch, but it wasn’t. Cheers boys, Rule Britannia. Or something.

After that there’s little left except to get shitfaced and at the very tail end catch the excellent Dilinja & MC Jakes crank out some absolutely storming drum n bass before walking back to town in the blazing sunshine. For the second time in as many years Exit was a roaring success from my point of view, and compared to my admittedly long distant experience of British festivals, seemed extraordinarily well organised. Somehow this fact, coupled with the obviously vast numbers of people at the festival who were off their heads on alcohol and drugs, with all the attendant dangers therein, made it seem all the more cruelly ironic when disaster struck this year in the form of a freak accident, a woman on the campsite killed by a branch falling from a linden tree. The festival organisers seem to have taken every possible precaution to avoid such occurrences, and have been exonerated, but still, that can’t detract from the tragedy.

How many more festivals like that I’ve got left in me I don’t know, but experience teaches me never to say never, although I suspect that next year at least I’ll be giving Exit a miss. What is certain is that I will return to Novi Sad, and hope to get the opportunity as soon as possible to return the favour to my first rate hosts George and Sandra here in Olomouc, and that offer extends to all the other Novosadians I’ve met down there. I also intend to keep my promise, however rash and inebriated, as well as somewhat defiant it might have been at the time, to learn some Serbo-Croat before my next visit, indeed considering the fact the next visit will be my third, and my sixth to former Yugoslavia in total, it would be a bit rude not to at least make an effort.

All good things must come to an end, and I can’t deny that the whole Novi Sad experience left me feeling pretty drained, and so after the madness had died down a bit I managed to catch up on some much needed sleep on a very reasonably priced and comfortable night train down to Montenegro, where I enjoyed a pleasantly much less eventful few days, for which I bow down to the divine generosity of Ivona and Reluška, who ensured that as well as delightful company I also had yet another free place to lay my head.

Naturally there’s less to say about Montenegro than Exit, but my main impression was that, apart from its spectacular mountains, which made for an even more impressive train ride than that through Bosnia last year, Montenegro has one advantage over Croatia – that it’s cheap. Which for Czechs on holiday, is a pretty fundamental advantage, and an excellent opportunity to gorge on fantastic fresh seafood. In other respects however, and I hope I don’t offend anyone here, I have to concede that Montenegro came a decidedly poor second – it might have sand beaches, which some may consider an advantage in comparison with its rockier northern neighbour, but this has to be balanced against the fact that I have never before seen beaches so utterly filthy and litter-strewn. Not only that, but whilst the sublime, crystal-clear sea off the coast of Hvar for example offers wonderful opportunities for snorkelling, in the Montenegrin Adriatic, for the first and I sincerely hope the last time in my life, I encountered not only toilet paper but human shit. The ocean may be vast, but that soiled feeling is difficult to wash off. Needless to say, I kept my mouth firmly closed and my head above water the whole time while swimming. Ugh! This though was certainly not enough to spoil a holiday, which in fact after the exertions of Exit was more or less perfect, even if, probably as a direct result of those exertions, I came down with a cold (in temperatures of 40°C!) during my stay. Nose still running I bravely subjected myself to a gruelling journey home, starting with a 10-hour bus ride (would have been 8, but it broke down) up to Split, where, a couple of days after the capture of Radovan Karadžić (I’m sure Randi would have something to say about him posing as a doctor of alternative medicine), it was depressing to see T-shirts on sale promoting the Croats’ very own indicted war criminal Ante Gotovina. What with that and Croatia being so shockingly expensive (yeah right, try spending a few days in London) I didn’t hang around, and after a last seafood supper caught a refreshingly empty night train home, making the trip a total of over 36 hours since getting on the bus in Montenegro.

All in all, without a doubt the highlight of the year so far, as it was with last year. And once more, I feel a spiritually replenished but physically decimated version of my former self.

Blondie - Denis

2008-07-07T22:01:00.001+02:00

And this version ain't half a cracker too. Somehow it even seems to add to the charm that she's such a crap dancer.

randy and the rainbows - denise

2008-07-07T18:29:00.001+02:00

Words fail me

2008-07-01T18:44:00.001+02:00

Oh, to wield power. The Czech Republic is growing in stature and self-assurance by the day, intoxicated with its new-found status as a player on the international currency markets and European political stage. Only a short while ago I voiced my frustrations at the misplaced inferiority complex that pervades culture here, but perhaps soon I will be eating my words and pining for the days when bitter self-mockery was the norm. Are the Czechs suddenly about to start throwing their weight about all over Europe like loudmouthed chav verminillionaires? Can’t see it myself, but who knows, a sudden upturn in fortunes can be pure poison to those not accustomed to such a potent brew – just look at virtually any famous footballer. Thanks to the recession taking hold in the US and elsewhere in Europe, the Czech crown is continuing to rocket in value, now only 15 to the dollar (it only passed the 20 mark around the end of last year, and I remember the days when it was 40) and 30 to the pound. I don’t know anything about economics and so can’t speculate as to why exactly this is the case, but the fact is that the Czechs are now, in both relative and absolute terms, much richer than they used to be – at least until the recession hits us here, and inflation is already starting to bite.

As well as economic power, the Czechs are now politically in the position of holding the future of Europe in their hands. Following the Irish debacle, Europe awaits with baited breath on the Czechs’ decision on whether or not to kill off the Lisbon treaty. Naturally President Václav Klaus, as well as shooting his malignant, punctilious gob off about everything else from the design for the national library to the need for a new strategy in the national football team, has made his position clear on this issue too. No need to worry about an excess of humility and self-deprecation from him at any rate. Nevertheless, although it makes me want to eat my own faeces to have to say this, I may, yet again, be in agreement with this human pile of shit. Not that I’ve read the Lisbon treaty of course, neither do I know anyone who has, and I doubt that more than a fraction of the people actually voting on the issue have. Furthermore I’ve no doubt that a large proportion, if not the great majority of the people voting against the treaty so far have done so for no other reason than that they’re ignorant, nationalistic bigots. But what did you expect? That’s democracy, the tyranny of the majority! Rightly or wrongly, European people don’t want this treaty. And as Churchill said, “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. Looking at the way European leaders are trying to push the treaty through regardless of popular opposition and the Irish rejection, it’s hard to disagree with him.

Like the British government, who obviously wouldn’t dare, the Czech government isn’t going to put the issue to a popular vote, but it’ll probably make no difference anyway. Gordon Brown certainly won’t be doing his popularity any favours if he pursues his current line of refusing a referendum whilst publicly backing the treaty, and could be forgiven for privately hoping the Czech parliament fails to ratify the treaty and the whole thing gets swiftly swept under the carpet like the European Constitution before it, only for them to rename it a few years later and this time, finally ensure by whatever means necessary that there is no referendum on the issue anywhere in the world. But what will be the impact on the national self-consciousness of the Czechs?

R. Kelly - Trapped In The Closet Part 9

2008-06-27T09:51:00.001+02:00

I realise that was absolutely fucking horrible of me to post all that, so here's some light relief, the timeless classic from the innocent-until-proven-guilty apparently NOT paedophile rapist's "hip hopera". Can anyone deny the utter genius of this?

Phil Collins - Another day in paradise

2008-06-27T09:42:00.001+02:00

And the story about him evicting a bunch of travellers from his land while this was in the charts, according to the BBC, is TRUE.

Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You

2008-06-27T09:41:00.001+02:00

Suffer, bitches.

Bryan Adams- Everything I Do

2008-06-26T20:11:00.001+02:00

There's a truly repugnant array of shit on display over at the Impostume right now, so nauseating that not even this can trump it, but only equal it in the sense that once something gets this bad, it's inconceivable that anything could be worse. And this song has a particularly personal vomit value for both the Impostume and myself, since it was number 1, and thus played on the radio several times during the working day, in that dark time when the pair of us were reduced to working in a stinking turkey factory, the sole content of our 8 hour day's work consisting of grabbing turkeys off a swiftly moving conveyor belt and stuffing their legs up their bleeding, shitty arses. This is all completely true. Carl, this one's dedicated to you mate. Things could only get better, and (apologies for smugness) they have.

2008-06-13T11:38:00.003+02:00

Gordon “people skills” Brown strikes again, presenting us with another political riddle to challenge popular conceptions of left and right.

It’s been said before that it takes a supposedly “patriotic” Tory government to get away with introducing radical, anti-nationalistic measures such as Ted Heath taking Britain into the then EEC, whilst it takes a supposedly “liberal” Labour government to get away with imposing truly draconian law and order policies. However, the latest eruption of pomposity and prima donna antics from Westminster takes us into new territory. The resignation of Tory frontbencher David Davis (great Catch-22 style name! Wish my parents had been so imaginative!) as an MP over Labour’s plans to extend detention without charging is unprecedented, and surely the fact that not only the Conservatives but also the BNP are now baulking at Labour’s authoritarianism must also be a first.

What happens next could be interesting. Labour may even benefit, since if nobody stands against David Davis in his bid to regain his embarrassingly safe Tory seat – and why should they bother demeaning themselves by taking part in such a preposterous publicity stunt and foregone conclusion? – he (and his party, who are backing him) will look even sillier than he does already. Maybe with a name like that he’s beyond caring.

2008-06-11T15:35:00.007+02:00

WARNING: contains links to videos depicting individuals even more sinister than the idea of being smiled at by Gordon Brown. Vomit bags at the ready!

Now, more than ever, we are in need of this man. James Randi has been ferociously and rather stylishly ripping to shreds all kinds of quacks, astrologers, spoon-benders, homeopaths, mediums and religious nutters since the 1960s. He has had some successes, for example exposing as liars and destroying the careers of faith healer Peter Popoff and psychic jailbird James Hydrick. Uri Geller is just about hanging on by the skin of his teeth, but has now been reduced to referring to himself as an “entertainer” rather than a possessor of supernatural powers. The James Randi Educational Foundation offers a million dollars to anyone who can prove, under controlled conditions, the existence of the paranormal. Needless to say, nobody in any of these multi-million dollar industries has yet managed to claim the cash.

In general, however, Randi has been a failure, if a very noble and laudable one. More than anything else, he has proven that people everywhere are mostly execrable fools who just believe what they want to believe. Who gives a shit about evidence? There are clearly many ways around that. Incidentally Peter Popoff is making a comeback. And here, in the Czech Republic, which I’d always thought of as a supremely atheist country (another one in a long list of advantages over the demonically Catholic Poland), there’s evidence (for all that’s worth) of an influx of US style charismatic evangelism. Not in the sense of true charisma of course, but… just watch the video of these ridiculous cunts and then tell me, do you still think bin Laden’s really so bad?

Naturally things are much worse in Randi’s homeland, until recently also homeland of the mercifully now dead Jerry Falwell, still home to that family-values preacher who not long ago got caught with a male prostitute’s dick up his arse and a crack pipe in his mouth (or was it the other way round?). Not only is creationism now being taught in schools in some prohibitionist, sister-fucking redneck backwoods, but no less an institution than Yale University is now endorsing Integrative Medicine. Again, watch the video. What, I wonder, would a more fluid conception of evidence be like? What would it take to make it a little bit more watery? Large amounts of cash, perhaps? Too, too easy. Vulgar of me to mention it really.

Pity poor James Randi, who in the twilight of his life has to witness all of this. If one for a moment accepts the risible proposition that God is a wise, beneficent old man with a white beard, whose chief if not sole mission in this gargantuan, if not infinte universe, is the moral and spiritual advancement of the human race – and whose project has thus also clearly been an abject catastrophe – then…

Praise be to Randi.

Guitar Wolf - Jet Generation

2008-05-23T16:39:00.001+02:00

LOCK N LORRRRLLLL!!!

2008-05-18T21:19:00.004+02:00

Having been born and brought up on an island I still find land borders a rather difficult concept to get my head round. Before anyone protests, Scotland and Wales don’t really count, we’re all part of the same state and with only very few exceptions, speak the same language. Here though, in a small, landlocked country, there are borders all over the place. Now that CZ has been accepted into the Schengen zone the situation seems even stranger. Borders are invisible and whiz by unannounced. Not so long ago they were nigh on impossible to cross, now they’re nigh on impossible to notice. No more surly, officious border guards armed with guns and Alsatians, no more suspicious glances (and back in the days a Western passport really did almost guarantee extra scrutiny), no more cute stamps on our passports. Suddenly you’re in a different country, with a different government, language, culture and standard of living (and currency, though not for long).

You might think that the locals would have jumped at every opportunity to make use of their relatively new-found geographical mobility, but that hasn’t entirely come to fruition. Of course, people here do cross borders, but often in a very limited manner. The older generation of Czechs in particular are accustomed to a peculiarly unadventurous form of travel – the bus excursion. I’ve experienced a couple of these myself and have to acknowledge their one great advantage, i.e. they’re very, very cheap. There are disadvantages however. One is considerable discomfort, since if it’s over any longer distance it will involve an overnight bus journey both there and back in order to save money on accommodation. Nobody’s complaining here, though I felt a mixture of admiration, slight shame and trepidation on seeing the age of some of those preparing for this physical ordeal. Another drawback is the acute lack of freedom on these occasions. The atmosphere is like that of a school trip, ruled over with a rod of iron by a bossy schoolmarm tour guide* with an extreme case of verbal diarrhoea and a neat line in in-bus sleep deprivation tactics, marching her bleary-eyed lemmings through the streets at breakneck pace, bombarding them with copious volumes of sublimely uninteresting minutiae and chastising any miscreants foolhardy enough to be guilty of tardiness. The only conclusion I could draw from it was that Czech pensioners actually enjoy being treated like seven year old children.

Naturally this is not the only travel option taken by the Czechs, but the locals (and again, age plays a large role) here seem equally herd-like when it comes to their choice of destination. So although I’ve met very few Czechs who’ve never been to Croatia, I’m always surprised, given that it’s less than 100 miles from here, at how few of the people I’ve met have ever been to Poland, and the situation seemed very similar on the other side of the border. Krakow is a superb town, not so much further from here than Prague and nowadays competing with the Czech capital as a tourist destination, but probably less than a quarter of the Czechs I know have been there. (To add a note of balance, some Czechs are also surprised that I’ve never been to Stonehenge, but my answer to that is always that I’m not a fucking hippy). Why this lack of curiosity concerning their neighbours? It almost seems as if the two nations are barely aware of the other’s existence. A quite surreal example of this is the town of Český Těšín / Cieszyn, about one third of which is in the Czech Republic and the remainder in Poland. I remember the first time I was there, many years ago, when in a fumbling mixture of Czech and Polish, which are in any case fairly similar languages, I asked for directions to the station. Because in my haste and ignorance I used the Czech word for station, however, I met with blank looks. Now I don’t believe for a minute that people living in a town which is partially in the Czech Republic don’t know the Czech word for railway station, so why the attitude? It’s not as if I’d spoken to them in Russian. I quickly realised that despite the similarities of the two Slavic languages, I’d be much better off in Poland speaking English.

These days, in Krakow at least, I feel I’m between a rock and a hard place linguistically, since being the “new Prague” it’s chock-full of Brit louts and many pubs display “no stag parties” signs (in English, and no other language). Although to be frank, if I was organising a stag party, Krakow would definitely be way lower down my list than Prague. This is for the reason, mentioned earlier, that Polish beer is over twice the price of Czech beer and a fraction of the quality. I know I’m spoilt living here, Czech beer is truly fantastic, but even taking this into account Polish beer is really dreadful piss, by absolute, not relative standards. There was even one pub we went to on our recent Krakow trip where we literally could not drink it. Again this is something I do not understand. We’re all in the EU, right? We have free trade within the EU, don’t we? If the Poles can’t brew beer, and clearly they can’t, can’t they at least import Czech beer and sell it at a reasonable price? Evidently not. The reverse applies regarding vodka. Czech vodka is somewhere between bad and positively dangerous, whereas Polish vodka is of extraordinarily high quality. But can you get Zubrowka round here? Can you fuck. Absolut, Finlandia, Smirnoff? No problem. And no shortage of shops selling Zubrowka in London. Here though, you’d be more likely to find moon rocks.

Slavic brothers and sisters! Free yourselves! The greatest borders are the ones in your minds!

*On a trip to Venice several years ago now our guide, for example, gave us practical advice on clothing to wear, reminding us that “it’s better to be dry than to be wet”, as well as which she informed and entertained us by reading out Karel Čapek’s musings on Venice amongst other things. During a rare break from fulminating into the microphone she kept us awake in the bus by playing us a video of populist Czech media personality Halina Pawlowská’s guide to Vienna (see the relevance anyone?). Congratulations are due to Mr Matthew Sweney on this occasion. At breakfast in our cheap hotel we were lucky enough to be joined by a young, attractive Czech lady who had had the sense or good fortune to travel down on the other bus. Not one to miss such a golden opportunity, Mr Sweney struck up a conversation. “You’re lucky you’re not on our bus. We’ve got this right old bag of a tour guide who will just not shut up…” and went on to detail her numerous faults. “She’s my mother”, replied our tablemate.