you dropped your wotsits

winged vermin's determined beaks
descend on crescent gardens'
cheesy wonders
dotting bright green
graminoids grown
where little dogs go
to do their business

disodiums inosinate
and guanylate:
fizzing from gizzards
to the back of your best coat

be lucky!

please, please be guilty, Piers Morgan

The main reason for this is my england thus far remaining silent about the News of the World furore is just that it's been hard to know where to start. What had been a relatively slow-burning story, albeit a compelling one, for around five years has suddenly exploded, spraying us all with an eruption of filth that for days now has shown few signs of abating. The sheer volume of sordid information has been overwhelming, with further disgusting revelations coming to light on an almost daily basis.

Unapologetically, I am celebrating the demise of News International's best-selling Sunday tabloid. Perhaps all of the hacks made redundant last week were innocent of  specifically illegal activities. But they all earned a crust while working on a rag whose output has contributed to a coarsening and dumbing down of our culture and our public life in this country. So I have no sympathy. I don't care if muck is raked legally or otherwise. It's still muck. It still degrades those who write it and those who read it. Lost your job on the News of the World? Boo fucking hoo. Try to see it as a wonderful opportunity to do something more worthwhile.

We might not all want to read a somber and serious broadsheet newspaper, but it is not to the credit of the United Kingdom that so many of its people choose to buy grubby little comic books that peddle tittle-tattle about the entertainers who are paid to divert our attention from the fact that we are merely units of production and consumption trained from infancy to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to impress people we don't like.

My fervent hope, then, is not just for News International to fail to reestablish its place in the Sunday newspaper market. No, I'd like to see all current tabloids go out of business. After all, how much would the public good be served if former News of the Screws readers are drawn to Paul Dacre's depressingly shrill and bitter organ? I also have no special wish to see either of Trinity Mirror's Sunday titles gain from Murdoch's loss, not least because, if allegations aired today (by everybody's favourite right wing libertarian blogger) have any substance, that group has not been above a little phone hacking of its own. This specific  case was actually raised last week in Parliament by Lib Dem MP Adrian Sanders, who claimed that "the Daily Mirror, when under the auspices of Piers Morgan, is suspected of using voicemail interception to reveal Sven-Goran Eriksson's affair with Ulrika Jonsson". That story, as Guido Fawkes reminds us today, was an award-winning scoop back in 2002 when the scandalously overpaid former England football manager was found to have been swapping fluids with his fellow Swede.

As Fawkes points out today, Trinity Mirror has responded to Sanders's remark with a denial. Fawkes, however, gleefully reports how former Mirror hack James 'Scottie' Scott, has long "dined out on the truth", the truth allegedly being that he (Scott) had listened to Ulrika's voicemails and thus stumbled on evidence of her affair with Eriksson and that Piers Morgan decided to credit "the illegally obtained story" to Jessica Callan, a gossip columnist who had long been criticised for failing to offer up drivel as exciting as that featured in Murdoch's papers. Morgan, then, alleges Fawkes, knew of his 'paper's use of illegal phone hacking.

I'd love this to be true and for the consequences to be serious. If any peddlers of soul-destroying crap are to end up in jail in the aftermath of the various enquiries and investigations getting underway, I would be overjoyed for that smug, preening prick Morgan to be one of them. Were further proof needed, anyone who has seen his ceaseless childish baiting of Alan Sugar and Rio Ferdinand via Twitter in recent months would know what an odious little turd Morgan really is. That he somehow got Larry King's former gig at CNN is baffling.

I heard someone the other day talking about the very large number of newspapers that have been shut down by their proprietors in the USA in recent times. It seems that when one title disappears there,  it isn't usually the case that rival publications pick up the failed 'paper's readership. Rather, it appears that the overall market shrinks a bit, with former newspaper buyers looking elsewhere for whatever it was they used to gain from the defunct title.

So I hope to see this pattern replicated here in the UK. I'd like to see the appetite for tabloid fare waning and for the red tops' influence to decline in the months and years ahead. Specifically, I hope for the baleful influence of Rupert Murdoch to be gone from these shores. It is a scandal that successive democratically elected (kinda) governments have run scared of a seedy smut peddler whose activities have been a major contributory factor in making British politics a laughing stock at home and abroad. We're somehow better than Berlusconi's Italy? Are we fuck.

For a collapse in support for tabloids generally to come about, though, the current widely felt disgust for the ghastly antics of the News of the World would surely need to infect other titles. Wouldn't it be something to discover that the Sun and the Daily Mail can be proven to have relied on illegal methods for their stories? I'd love to see a NoW-scale backlash against those newpapers. What fun that would be.

a certain double standard

"The fact that the British elite is stacked full of people from middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds helps to explain a certain double standard at work. Crimes committed by the poor will be seen as an indictment of anyone from a similar background. The same cannot be said for crimes where a middle-class individual is culpable. The mass-murdering GP Harold Shipman might have gone down as a monster, but did anyone argue that his case shone a light on life in middle-class Britain? Where were the outraged tabloid headlines and politicians' sound-bites about middle-class communities that 'really, really have to change'?"

Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (from the opening chapter, The Strange Case of Shannon Matthews)

growth

he's looking down at you too

odeon

classlessness

A few months ago, I was sitting in Abu Dhabi International Airport, feeling tired and dazed by several days of mentally draining work. I was waiting with equally drained colleagues for a red-eye flight. Abruptly, I was dragged out of the here and now and back to the 1990s by the arrival at the gate of none other than our former PM, John Major. I was not inconsiderably surprised to see him.

My strongest abiding memory of Major is the remark he made in 1990: "In the next ten years we will have to continue to make changes which will make the whole of this country a genuinely classless society." I was a confused young man at the time, paying scant attention to the nuances of public life. So I can't even speculate about whether the then Prime Minister believed a word of what he was saying. But his prediction certainly hasn't come true. Looking back, Major's assertion seems as ridiculous as John Prescott telling us later that "we are all middle class now".

A lifetime of experience, recent experiences included, tells me that Blair was wrong and that Major's prediction (if it was a real prediction made in good faith) was way off the mark.

A change that I have been able to observe, however, is the ever more common notion of conflating of  the entire (white?) British working class with a putatively widespread 'chav' underclass of feckless and toxic criminal scroungers. This is poisonous nonsense.

So I look forward to reading the book which arrived yesterday: Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones. I daresay I'll get around to some sort of review/summary on these pages in the near future.

tumblr girls

lust
for chuck taylor all-stars
in every silly colour, studded
with glass and gems
and
for high, improbable shoegasms;

they whisper
with glossy lips:
we're awkward beliebers
in the kawaii kaleidoscope
of cupcakes
and
we make heart-shaped holes from
candy-coated talons;

together they leap, gleefully mid-air colliding,
bumping patterned laddered nylon
at grazed knees
and they
want to build a fort with you and
fuck you in it,
but not really.

lowlife elite

spraying the streets of plovdiv,
buying two and a half grams of cocaine for
twenty U.S. dollars,
telling the Peace Corps kids it cost sixty

but this is old stuff, now his plans are bigger, smashing the work
of months into weeks, waking from the sleep
of the common automaton,
chasing that super-efficiency rule,
driving and smoking like crazy,
runningrunning, readingreading,
taking notes,
carrying the camera,
talkingscreaming,
slamming the doors with a gunblast,
swallowing just enough xanax and rivotril.

listen,
he can't explain this to you in the bitesize little
pieces you like:
information of a low importance index;
stupid attractive things that add
nothing

play misti for me

in shrinking Goree's
three-to-five days' rain, the
little mud mermaid tricycles,
learns "pretty", wants cherry sours, gets
atkinson's Chick-o-Stick, plays
Glad Game crutches in
the missionary barrel, plays
chthonic goddess of vegetation on
sarcophagi at the texas disco where
goat sucker dances
the contemporary legend and
Evelyn Draper
calls the show to ask
for Garner's jazz standard
this
roxy
christmas