Hot in a Cold Cause

Steven Gerrard Owes Me £50 The End

2006-08-02T11:20:00.000Z

Steven Gerrard
The Liverpool Football Club
Liverpool
Northern England

Dear Steven Gerrard

My name is Mrs. Beryl Simme and I am writing on behalf of my son Antony. As you may or may not know (it was not widely reported) Antony died two weeks ago in a tragic domestic accident. The exact details of his death remain somewhat of a mystery. It seems the poor boy was looking for something in his living room underneath a very large and heavy oak cabinet which collapsed on top of him killing him instantly - or at some point during the six days his body lay undiscovered.

I have no idea what my sweet Antony was doing under there but the police pathologist found some small pieces of potato crisp in his outstretched rigor mortised hand - he thought they may have been Doritos but he could not say for certain.

I know this news must come as a shock to you seeing as how you and Antony were such close friends. I was the proudest mother alive the day he told me about ‘Furthering Underprivileged Children’s Knowledge Of Famous Footballers ‘- the charity the two of you had set up together. Knowing that a famous footballer such as your self was involved, I, and the ladies down at the Day Centre, were more than happy to donate the £5 Antony requested of us (each), (every week).

Antony was always very interested in the plight of young children and, judging by the suitcase I found on top of his wardrobe, also in amateur photography - an interest, as it happens, he shared with his late father. Isn’t it funny how life has its own way of handing things down and relentlessly carrying on – and, of course, of sometimes just stopping abruptly, as in Antony’s case.

In an attempt to put my son’s affairs in some kind of order, I am writing to everyone in his ‘Correspondence Sent’ file and informing them of the sad situation. I am not one to pry but I did happen to notice that you owe him £50. If you still intend to pay up, may I suggest you donate the money to your and Antony’s charity - or failing that to your local camera club? I would humbly advise that you resist the temptation to consider yourself ‘off the hook’ as regards the debt as a guilty conscience can be a very cruel mistress.

Strangely, I can’t seem to find my son’s ‘Correspondence Received’ file - though I’m sure it will turn up somewhere. There is a large steel cupboard with a huge padlock in his bedroom and, when I find the key, I expect it will be in there.

I must end off now but would just like to say that you should not listen to all those things people are saying about the World Cup. At least you can hold your head up high knowing it wasn’t you who let the whole nation down. The goal you scored against Brazil was magnificent and you alone held your nerve and scored your penalty in the Quarter-final shoot-out unlike the other gutless failures who should hang their heads in eternal shame.

God bless

Mrs. Beryl Simme.

Elk joke

2006-07-28T17:33:00.000Z

William Gaddis once told me a joke. Not only me but I was there, a hot summer night several years ago in the Senate House at the University of London, so monstrously ugly a building it was used as the Ministry of Truth for the film version of 1984. Gaddis was in town, not exactly promoting his latest book, A Frolic Of His Own, the opening line of which goes

Justice? -You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

In the book a character contrives to drive over himself with his own car and comes up wanting to sue someone.

Gaddis didn't read from the book at the Senate House or from any of his other books, namely The Recognitions, JR, and Carpenter's Gothic. He hated author readings, writers performing. He thought they were demeaning to the writer and the work and the reader as well. He never gave interviews either, for probably similar reasons. After the commercial and critical failure of The Recognitions, some people of a conspiratorial nature thought that he changed his name to Thomas Pynchon.

The Recognitions came out in 1955, was over 700 pages and seemed to be about authenticity, in art, life, human feeling. This was a preoccupation of New York artists in the fifties, authentic experience, and would carry over into the sixties folk scare, as Dave Van Ronk called it, how authentic the music was seemed to matter; were you authentic? In The Recognitions there's a lot of forgery going on- forged Old Masters paintings, dollar bills, forged personalities. Authenticity is scarce on the ground, propaganda all is phony. Almost everyone is playing some sort of game and when real feeling comes up it knocks you sideways-what the hell is that doing here?

There was a big gap between The Recognitions and Gaddis' second book, JR, twenty five years, and in that time, rather than change his name to Thomas Pynchon, he made a living working in corporate New York public relations, writing scripts for industry films, speeches for executives, press releases. JR is full of New York Corporate Man and their close relatives in government and military. The opening line in JR is

-Money...? in a voice that rustled.

Those dashes mean dialogue just like in Ulysses. In fact virtually all of JR, again over 700 pages, is written in dialogue and tells the story of eleven year old JR who, operating from a pay phone in his elementary school, builds up a paper fortune using the kind of methods that would get people like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky in trouble ten years later. One character is a failed novelist, forever working on a book with no end in sight. He refers to his book as an old man waiting for him at home, sitting in a chair, banging his stick, drooling. The author has to go over to him and fluff up his pillow, keep him alive.

Robert Altman's film Nashville came out in 1975, the same year as JR. Only Altman could have made a film of JR, maybe he still could. He would have to replace JRs' phone booth with a personal computer. And here's another thing- a blog (unlovely word) these days is what those small press publications used to be years ago, magazines and papers would spring up in cities with a big bohemian scene and in New York in the fifties Jack Green started his own newspaper and called it newspaper. Jack Green didn't use punctuation, not even full stops. He just made a few extra spaces to signify the end of a sentence. He made his living as a freelance proofreader funnily enough. In 1962 Green devoted three entire issues of newspaper to the defense of The Recognitions from the US reviewers who, almost to a man, trashed it. Green thought them all lazy, complacent, fools and titled his attack on them Fire the Bastards! The Dalkey Archive published these articles many years later as a book. Jack Green was (is?) a mysterious figure, his name isn't Jack Green for one thing. Maybe he blogs, might even be the patron saint of bloggers. Does anyone read this stuff?

Back at the Senate House the man behind the event, the US cultural attaché, so often a front for spies, was saying how well a recent visit from Joseph Heller had gone, much better attended than tonight he said, pouring out the white wine to all comers. Everyone went inside the lecture room and there was Gaddis at the desk down front, looking just like Kirk Douglas, shuffling through some papers, reading out bits of stuff. He settled a few old scores. Apparently the critic George Steiner had given JR a bad review in the New Yorker and Gaddis welcomed the news that Steiner was now in some bother over plagiarism regarding a novel he, Steiner, had written about Hitler. Gaddis said something like if he waited on his porch long enough, watching the river flow, all his enemies would eventually come drifting by. Mostly he talked about the law, the theme of A Frolic Of His Own.

Afterwards in the entrance foyer the bar had been restocked, you really can't fault the US embassy when they throw a party. Gaddis was chatting to people, smoking, completely approachable so I approached him and bummed a fag. He didn't have any, he'd got his from a guy standing behind us who overheard and offered me one, a small, thin cigarillo. Someone asked Gaddis if he was seeing any of Europe on this visit and he said, " Did you ever see Breaker Morant? When the British officer offers the condemned Australian soldier a deal to escape the firing squad. 'Take the deal, said the officer, go off and see the world.' 'Nah, said the soldier, I've seen it'"

Then a cheery soul, big, bluff and posh, pink faced, pin-striped suit, bow tie, skipped up and rescued Gaddis from us, said they had to be off to the House of Lords for dinner. Which made sense. Gaddis is Yankee aristocracy, there's usually a few of them in his books, authentic old world Americans washed up on the shore of modern mechanisation. In his work, Gaddis returned to the player piano as a symbol of the dark forces of mechanisation, the ruin of art, soul, the human heart.

And here's the joke he told that night

"One day the king of Norway was out hunting. A farmer, spotting the royal party in the distance, stood up straight and tall, waved his arms and shouted as loud as he could, 'I am not an elk. I am not an elk.' The king raised his rifle and shot the farmer dead. 'But Sire, said a lackey, he said he wasn't an elk.' 'Oh, said the king, I thought he said he was an elk'."

I am music and I write the songs

2006-07-19T13:54:00.000Z

Barry Manilow wasn't included for the book Songwriters on Songwriting, a collection of interviews by Paul Zollo. Actually it came as news to me that Barry didn't write I Write the Songs but at any rate, he wasn't given the opportunity to share his thoughts along with the likes of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Townes Van Zant, Sammy Cahn, Todd Rundgren, Frank Zappa and many others on the craft, the process, the mystery. David Gates of Bread isn't in the book either nor is Neil Diamond. This is Rocksnobs approved mostly. That's OK, you've got to the draw the line somewhere.

Dylan once said, not here but somewhere, "A song is anything that gets up and walks by itself." It exists on its own terms independent of the creator or any recording made of it. Others could perform it it any style, under any circumstances and it would still have it's own undeniable identity. Many of the songwriters interviewed speak of some mysterious gift that comes to them, they know not how, when a real song appears from their hand. They can't explain it much, some say they were just the one who happened to be in the right place at the right time to receive it, to pull it out of the air.

Leonard Cohen recalls a songwriter’s chat with Dylan. He wondered how long it took Dylan to write a certain song. About fifteen minutes, said Dylan who then asked Cohen about one of his songs, how long? About five years replied Cohen. Actually, Cohen confesses to Zollo, it was more like ten years. Randy Newman leaves the LA suburbs every morning and goes downtown to an office to work. Van Zant went to Colorado in the summer or Tennessee in the winter, and came back with songs. Tom Waits writes songs with his wife, just like Slim Harpo used to do. Those kinds of relationships are built to last I would wager. There's the cut-up technique, adapted from William Burroughs, that David Bowie famously used. Experience could either count for a lot or not at all. Observation or hallucination, reporters’ notebook or dream diary, divine inspiration or outright theft, the muse or the bottle.

A songwriter friend of mine says he's basically in the scrap metal savage business. Sure, alchemy has to enter into the equation at some point but really you're just loitering around the dump, waiting to spot something shiny under the rubbish. He also said that when Paul McCartney was writing Yesterday his original dummy lyric was Scrambled Eggs. Did people want to know that? This classic song that people loved almost more than any other started life as Scrambled Eggs? It's like a member of the Magic Circle violating the primary directive - don't reveal the trick.

I started writing song lyrics a couple of years ago, been looking for a Bacharach to my David or Difford to my Tilbrook, or is that the other way round?

i'd beg for some forgiveness
but begging's not my business

Dylan brings up the true rhyme/near rhyme debate. He says it used to be a matter of pride for songwriters to get a true rhyme but nobody cares about that anymore. Close enough for jazz. Christopher Ricks says Dylan is the 20th century's greatest rhymer. Is that so? I can testify that when you come up with a rhyme you've never heard before, you feel like the best. Come up with a character voice that works perfectly and you fancy yourself the equal of Newman. Not too many of the songwriters talk about theft too much, maybe it's too obvious a thing to say out loud, an accepted piece of kit. Love and theft. Steal from your lover, steal from Howlin Wolf. Whatever works. Steal from the people whispering at the next table. If you don't pull it out of the air, who will?

The best advice in the book, and there's lots of advice, comes from Randy Newman, "Make something happen. Write something down. Do something. Go ahead. And stay there. Three hours, four hours. And good things will happen."

Absolutely, and I would imagine the best thing ever is a royalty cheque arriving one lonely morning.

Hills of Trieste (song for Jan Morris)

2006-07-13T14:16:00.000Z

woke up this morning
made my first mistake of the day
every cell in my brain
has seen better days
it usually pays
to look the other way
i remember

What do I remember?

I remember sitting alone one night in the Cafe San Marco and there was a girl in there who looked like Louise Brooks. The Cafe San Marco, cream walls and high ceiling separated by brown stucco leaf trim, long, dark wood bar in an L-shaped room, three large pillars in the middle of the main room which was lined with bookshelves and newspaper racks. Hardwood floors, black leather benches and heavy, wrought-iron tables with marble surfaces, gold-plated hatstands and and stand-up silver ashtrays scattered along the bar and around the pillars. The place had history, cheap wine and good coffee. It was dark, warm and enclosed, more Viennese than Italian.

on the hills of trieste
where the wild cats run free
so carelessly blessed
in my mild misery
on the hills of trieste
where it's no curse to feel alone
between the shining deep blue sea
and the harsh red stone
i remember

She didn't really look like Louise Brooks, she just had a Louise Brooks hairdo. The girl in the black helmut is what Kenneth Tynan called Brooks when he wrote about her. My Louise was hanging arty type fashion photographs of herself on the San Marco walls. Two chess players fell silent as she leaned across them to straighten a picture. She had a friend with her and they were both in skin tight black but Louise had a red scarf with white threading interwoven and her friend had a leopard skin scarf. They certainly had style but the photos weren't very good. Why should they be? Trieste is a small town and anyone with real talent and ambition leaves early for the big city, eager to conform to the current heat. Those who stay behind live in a certain kind of past where everything's good or, whatever isn't good isn't remembered. Not much.

on the hills of trieste
and the cafes at night
on my knees i confessed
i got drunk and felt unwell
with the devil in my stomach
cleaning his nails
everyone's drinking something red
i only remember
all the false things i said

Tynan tracked down the girl of his silent, black and white past dreams to a small town in New York and found an old woman, living off a rich man's allowance but she was no one's Marie Provost. She'd written about her contemporaries in old Hollywood and she was a good writer. Her articles were published in magazines like Film Culture and Sight and Sound and were later collected into a book, Lulu in Hollywood.

girls at the bar
crossing their legs
girls at the bar
uncrossing their legs
sun sinking down
into the wrecks
under the waves
sun sinking down
and taking me with it

A lot of people might know about Trieste because James Joyce wrote Ulysses there. Joyce exiled himself from Ireland, wound up in Rome working for a bank but an English language school had an opening in Trieste, so he went there with his pregnant wife Nora. On arrival he told Nora to wait in a small park opposite the train station while he got the lay of the land. When I went to that park there was builder's rubble everywhere, lots of roped off areas. While he was exploring the city Joyce tried to mediate in a quarrel between some sailors and prostitutes. The scene became aggravated and the cops were called. They threw the sailors and Joyce into the back of the paddy wagon and Nora had a long wait, alone, in a strange city, not knowing the language.

on the hills of trieste
they make fireworks every day
for every night of the week
except when it rains
on the hills of trieste
across the harbour scene
every colour in the night
and every dream
i remember

Ettore Schmitz worked in a bank too, in Trieste as it happens, but he married the boss's daughter and did well for himself (I might have confused this with one of his novels). Once Joyce got out of jail and took up his teaching post, Schmitz became one of his students. Joyce noted the Triestian class system- Schmitz's wife blanked Nora in the street. Earlier in his life Schmitz had literary ambitions, writing and publishing himself, two novels, Senilita (As a Man Grows Older) and Una Vita under the pen name Italo Svevo. They weren't well received, the Triestian dialect proved distasteful to Italian lit snobs and the books didn't sell either. Schmitz stayed at his bank job and put his novels in the furthest bottom drawer. But, after many years, he showed his unloved novels to Joyce, who read them and said he liked them, compared them to Anatole France. Encouraged, Schmitz took up writing again and that's how we came to have Zeno's Conscience, also known as The Confessions of Zeno, wriiten once again by Italo Svevo, the novelist of Trieste.

on the hills of trieste
and the girls in their jeans
between the thrill of the moment
and the lifelessness of routine
on the hills of trieste
where your name is not your own
i couldn't have guessed
my direction home
i remember

girls at the bar
crossing their eyes
boys in the back
practicing lies
sun sinking down
into the wrecks
under the waves
sun sinking down
and taking me with it

Zeno's Conscience tells the story of Zeno, his youth, marriage and business career. It's told by Zeno himself in the form of three separate pieces addressed to his psychiatrist. He's trying to give up smoking and is constantly announcing his last cigarette after making some crucial, life-changing decision. Zeno's Conscience wasn't received any better than Svevos' other books but Joyce worked up a few French critics on its' behalf and the Italian literary establishment had to think again.

on the hills of trieste
and in my rented room
i got up and got dressed
i got sober and felt unwell
with the angels around my heart
singing a song
about the life we used to share
can't even remember
if i was even there

In the Public Gardens of Trieste, just up the road from the Cafe San Marco there are small, sculpted busts of the city's great and good, arranged around the park, each on its own small plinth. The poet of Trieste, Umberto Saba, is there and so are Svevo and Joyce, not too far from each other. You could go there, buy an ice cream, sit on a bench, watch the kids chase the ducks around the pond, look at Svevo and Joyce, have a smoke.

on the hills of trieste
where cigarettes are sublime
and the science of laziness
has no sense of time
on the hills of trieste
reliving my dreams
i felt a pain in my chest
in a moment so serene
i remember

Svevo died from injuries suffered in a car crash. It was rumoured he asked for a last cigarette in the hospital. He didn't die in Trieste, he didn't even die in Italy. He crashed his car in France, running from the fascists. It is said that Joyce used him as the model for Leo Bloom (not Mel Brooks' Leo Bloom, a different one). Kenneth Tynan wrote about Mel Brooks in the same book that he wrote about Louise Brooks, Show People. All leads to nowhere.

man on the pier
smoking a fag
worm on a hook
taking a drag
sun sinking down
into the wrecks
under the waves
sun sinking down
and taking me with it

girls at the bar
crossing their hearts
boys in the back
just seeing stars
sun sinking down
into the wrecks
under the waves
sun sinking down
and taking me with it

Jan Morris' last book, the last book she says she will ever write, is all about Trieste, The Meaning of Nowhere. Does the meaning of nowhere in relation to Trieste mean that once there, you are constantly thinking of elsewhere? The capital city of a certain neurosis- drifting, evasive living.

woke up this morning
made my first mistake of the day
every cell in my brain
has seen better days
it usually pays
to look the other way
i remember

You could go to Trieste looking for James Joyce and end up finding Louise Brooks.

Come on and take a free ride

2006-07-03T17:58:00.000Z

The Criterion Collection have recently given their customary deluxe treatment of DVD re-issues to Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused. Lavish booklet (booklets should always be lavish), loads of mini-features and extras and, this sounds really good, a re-production of Frank Kozik's original poster. Hey Criterion, any chance of freebie?

The appearance of this new edition also comes with the revelation that Linklater had to fight with his producer for the inclusion of the scene where the players of a Little League baseball game form a line and shake hands, prefunctionally muttering "good game, good game" to each other as they pass. Apparently, the producer thought this scene slowed down the action. Aside from confirming the generally dismal nature of movie producers, the question arises, what action?

It's the last day of high school, 1976, small Texas town, and the priority of the summer- scoring front row tickets for Aerosmith, but first, get loaded and hit the party at someone's house whose parents are stupidly going away for the weekend. But shit, the old man has twigged, the parents aren't going anywhere, the party's off and there's nothing for it but to get loaded and drive around all night. Then score those Aerosmith tickets. And that's it basically.

The "good game" scene isn't the only one with resonace for some of us of a certain age. The difficult skill of flipping beer bottle caps, flared jeans so tight at the top you've got to lie down and do up the fly with pliers, lots of puffy sleeves (halter tops?), whit knee-socks, overalls and the music of course.

Here's what they listen to in their cars and bedrooms (no iPods or even Walkmans yet) on the last day of school/first day of summer: "School's Out" and "No More Mr Nice Guy" by Alice Cooper, "Sweet Emotion" by Aerosmith, "Jim Dandy" by Black Oak Arkansas, "Hurricane" by Bob Dylan, "Why Can't We Be Friends?" and "Low-Rider" by War, "Free Ride" by Edgar Winter, "Love Hurts" by Nazareth, "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath, "Fox On the Run" by Sweet, "Tush" by ZZ Top, "Right Place Wrong Time" by Dr John, "Slow Ride" by Foghat. The golden age of stadium rock.

If I start referring to these as the best years of my life remind me to kill myself.

American Graffiti was a similar movie for a previous generation. George Lucas's movie had a knowing, elegiac, end of one kind of innocence feel to it and so does Dazed and Confused but as for the times they are a changin', shatter your windows and rattle your walls, that sort of thing isn't going to happen to these kids.

The sixties rocked. We know the seventies suck but maybe the eighties are gonna be radical.

Hmmm. Shit happens.

Just remember kids, while all this Bicentennial brouhaha is going on this summer, what we're celebrating is the fact that some white, male, slave-owners didn't want to pay their taxes.

If this sort of flashy, provacative rhetoric was coming from Texas high-school teachers in 1976, you couldn't help but identify maybe Ben Affleck's O'Bannion and Nicky Katt's Clint (a man who dispels the notion that marijuana makes you mellow) going on to work for the Bush family in some capacity.

The movie is more sympathetic to the trio of nerds, Anthony, Mike and Cynthia, who aren't having the time of their lives. But that's OK, later on they'll have great careers in the creative arts or IT and all the jocks and stoners will work for them. They might even go on to make movies.

Some future stars make an early appearance here. Affleck plays a big, burly lad who takes the bizarre hazing ritual of paddling younger boys on the bum far too seriously. Like many a movie baddie, he comes to a sticky end. Parker Posey plays Darla, the school Queen Bitch and Matthew McConaughey is Wooderson, slightly older than everyone else but he can't find anything more fun than hanging with the kids

Those teenage girls. I get older, they stay the same age.

Well, yes.

Everyone gives good performances but the movie is carried by Wiley Wigans who plays Mitch, a junior high kid, younger brother of one of the senior babes. He looks a bit like Sofia Coppola and most of his day is spent trying to avoid the hazing ass-whupping, but he spends the night running around with the big boys and ends it chatting up a big girl. Way to go, Mitch. Good game.

I don't know what it is but it's weird and pissed off

2006-06-30T12:51:00.000Z

The thing to remember about The Thing is that it's all guy talk. There are no women in the U.S. scientific outpost in the South Pole, just men, getting on each others' nerves, exploiting weaknesses mercilessly, getting drunk, stoned, inflicting their differing musical tastes on each other, reduced to watching videos of old Let's Make a Deal episodes. Truly, this outpost is a bad gig.

One day a couple of crazed Norwegians land a helicopter at the base after chasing a dog across the tundra, shooting at it with rifles, machine guns, finally lobbing grenades at the poor thing until, upon landing, one accidently blows himself and the helicopter up with a dropped grenade. The other is shot dead by the U.S. camp commander after spraying the place with gunfire trying to kill the mutt. What the hell has got into these nutty Norwegians?

Well. it came from outer space, many years earlier, and has been buried under the snow and ice. The Norwegians dug it up and now it's on the loose. What does it want? Nothing conscious but what it does is invade the body of human or animal in various graphic FX ways before perfectly imitating the host being. So, once the thing's MO is sussed everyone suspects everyone else of being a murderous alien and what little social cohesion has kept these guys from killing each other breaks down completely.

John Carpenter's movie is a re-make of Howard Hawks' 1952 original and I can't say which is better because I haven't seen the original. However, despite Hawks' version being rumoured to have been script doctored by Ben Hecht , you couldn't swear in the movies in 1952 and if you were confronted by a shape-shifting alien which invades your body before exploding out with a spray of goo and gore you'd probably be swearing your head off. This, I suspect, gives Carpenter the edge.

The script is by Bill Lancaster, based on a short story called Who Goes There by John W Campbell, the photography is by Dean Cundy, the score, all throbbing doom and grandeur, is by Ennio Morricone and the special effects, maybe the best in horror movie history, are by Rob Bottin. Here's the cast; Kurt Russell is MacReady, Wilford Brimley is Blair, TK Carter is Nauls, David Glennon is Palmer, Keith Davis is Childs, Richard Dysart is Dr Copper, Charles Hallahan is Norris. Peter Maloney is Bennings, Richard Masur Is Clark, Donald Moffet is Garry, Joel Polis is Fuchs and Thomas Waites is Windows. They say each other's names constantly throughout the movie because they're good movie names that sound good when you hear them.

Jed the Dog plays the lead dog. All the dogs are good but Jed turns in a bravura performance- watchful, intense and duplicitas with a great actor's timing.

There are elements of paranoid classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers and also of the famous Alien scene where the monster first appears out of John Hurt's chest. The Thing isn't as good as those two (or three if you count the 50's original and 70's re-make of Body Snatchers) because it's all guys. Stupid, nasty, bored shitless guys who are forced to have to save the world from...what? The thing.

Steven Gerrard Owes Me £50 Part 3

2006-06-20T17:42:00.000Z

Steven Gerrard
England World Cup Squad
Shlosshotel Buhlerhohe
Baden-Baden
Germany

Dear Steven G

Congratulations on your first ever World ‘Cup’ goal – and what a cracker it was! Admittedly the game was already won (and technically over) when you scored it and in the FIFA rankings Trinidad and Tobago are on a par with countries where football is illegal, but, nevertheless, I salute your achievement. Let’s just be thankful I didn’t place a 1 – 0 Correct Score bet.

Talking of Correct Score bets, I have to confess to being a little disappointed not to have received a reply yet to my previous letter. I have read it back to myself several times now and can find nothing at which you could possibly take offence. I trust that there is a legitimate reason for your delay in paying me the £50 you owe me but I fear you may be displaying the arrogance and the disregard for the common ‘man’ that is so often found in people who manage to escape the slums by nothing other than pure chance.

I am sure you probably think that men such as I have no idea what it must be like to be a top professional footballer, but I feel it only fair to mention that I, in my day, was a pretty handy player myself. I was never actually selected to play for my school team – apart from three games in goal for the Under 15’s when there had been an outbreak of Glandular Fever – but I always considered myself an archetypal creative Number 10, a forerunner, if you like, of Paul Gascoigne and Wayne Rooney. Indeed, I often think how uncanny it is that my nickname on the pitch in those days was ‘Spazza’.

In the ‘aforementioned hitherto unanswered’ letter I made an oblique reference to Doritos. I had not intended to pursue the matter, but, of course, that was before I realised how uncooperative you were going to prove to be. Let me, if I may, take you back to that FA Cup Final: I had a handful of Doritos in my hand at the exact moment your goal crossed the line, and, just as you did to my dreams, I found myself crushing the said Doritos into a thousand useless pieces. My fifty pounds was lost and I caused quite a mess on my floor into the bargain. It is not so much the cost of the Doritos that concerns me (they were part of a ‘multi-pack’ and, as such, were very good value), it is the mess they caused. I am still, all these days later, finding stray Dorito shards and crumbs in the most unlikely places and I am worried that they may be causing a public health incident as I live in an area with a very healthy rodent population. I am not entirely sure what kind of compensation I should be seeking from you over this dangerous situation, but I am confident that you and your lawyers can come up with something.

All the best
Antony Simme

P.S. My sources inform me that you will not be taking part in the forthcoming Sweden game, so I am off to place my England to win 3 –2 Correct Score bet with a renewed confidence.

Steven Gerrard owes me £50 Part 2

2006-06-15T14:21:00.000Z

Frank Lampard
England World Cup Squad.
Shlosshotel Buhlerhohe
Baden-Baden
Germany

Dear Frank

I know I speak for the whole nation in saying we all understand that there is no point in wasting all your best stuff on the likes of Paraguay.

As you may or may not remember ‘Frank’, we met about a year ago in the Gulshan Tandoori restaurant in Islington. You, or someone who looked very like you, were sitting at the table by the door, and as I was leaving I came over and said “Hello Frank”. I think you were a little embarrassed at being ‘recognised’ as you made no reply and merely stared at me with a puzzled expression on your face. Ever since, I have always considered you a kindred spirit, as I too am of a rather retiring nature and often find myself lost for ‘words’. Because of this I feel it not too much of an imposition to ask a small favour of you.

The favour concerns your ‘mid-field’ partner Steven/Stephen Gerrard. I shan’t bore you with all the gory details but, as he has probably mentioned to you, he owes me £50. I know him to be a most decent and ludicrously wealthy man and have no doubts that he will pay up, but I think it might be a good idea if you could have a quiet word with him and remind him of the importance of doing the right ‘thing’. If you could do this for me I would consider myself very much in your debt.

I don’t know for sure that you and Steve are good friends, but it is a well-known phenomenon in football that players who have an excellent relationship on the pitch often hate each other’s guts off it. I can’t think of any specific examples of this off-hand, but I am presuming that the converse also applies.

I am, I confess, rather a fan of yours Frank, – not particularly as a football player, but I must say I have never tired of seeing your television advert for the ‘Goal’ supplement in the Sun newspaper in which you seem to hover in mid-air before blasting the ball into the old onion bag.

I appreciate you may well be busy preparing for the Trinidad and Tobago game, so please do not feel obliged to reply to this letter. However, if you fancy going to the Gulshan Tandoori again when you return from the World Cup, please let me know, as it would be good to catch up with you again.

Yours sincerely,

Antony Simme

P.S. It doesn’t have to be the Gulshan Tandoori – if you would prefer another Indian restaurant I am prepared to give it a try. After all, variety is the spice of ‘life’.

Steven Gerrard owes me £50

2006-06-13T10:12:00.000Z

Steven Gerrard
England World Cup “Squad”
Shlosshotel Buhlerhohe
Baden-Baden
Germany

Dear Mr Gerrard

I hope this letter finds you well.

Firstly, I would like to congratulate you and the rest of the ‘squad’ on your professional victory yesterday against Paraguay .

Secondly (and in truth the main reason for me writing), I would like to bring a rather delicate matter to your attention. I placed a £1 ‘Correct Score after 90 minutes’ bet at 50-1 with William Hill’s on West Ham United to beat your Liverpool side 3 goals to 2 in this year’s FA Cup Final. As you may or may not remember you scored a goal in ‘injury time ’ making the scores level and losing me £50 in the process. I am of the opinion that it was a somewhat speculative if not lucky shot, though I did read in the newspaper the following day that it was a moment of pure genius. I suppose such differences of opinion are what make football the game we all know and love.

My local branch of William Hill’s has refused to pay out on the bet even though after exactly 90 minutes the score was indeed 3-2 to ‘The Hammers’. I have written to Mr. Hill himself on the matter and expect a reply any day now.

In the meantime, as one reasonable man to another, I am sure you will agree that the only honourable course to take would be for you to pay out the £50 yourself. I am not suggesting for one minute that you scoring that equalising goal was a selfish or attention-seeking act on your part - but it is clear that you were not thinking of those less fortunate than yourself at that precise moment.

Also, I feel it would be negligent of me not to point out that £50 to you is not a great deal of money at this point in your ‘career‘. By my calculations, you are paid £50 every five minutes - and that is not only while you are at work. You are paid £50 every five minutes even while you are asleep or on the toilet.

I must make it clear that I am not an envious man. I believe in the ‘free market’ – ( I would have voted for Margaret Thatcher if I had not been living in Canada at the time ) - and I am the last person to begrudge you your obscene wages.

I would prefer, if possible, for the money to be paid in cash ( or an uncrossed postal order) since, as you may or may not know, I am having a small dispute with my Bank Manager at present over the state of my account and feel it wisest not to ‘rock the boat’ with any unnecessary deposits.

I appreciate that you must have a lot on your plate at the moment, what with a sore back and the ‘Frank Lampard Conundrum’ to contend with, but I am sure you will agree that a matter of principle such as this must always take precedence. There is also the question of what do about the ‘Doritos’ I was eating at the time of your ‘goal’, but in the spirit of compromise I am prepared to let that go for the moment.

I wish you luck with the rest of the ‘World Cup’ and look forward to your reply.

Yours sincerely,

Antony Simme

P.S. Recorded Delivery is advised when sending cash through the mail.

Who does Bob Dylan support in the World Cup?

2006-05-31T21:17:00.000Z

The obvious answer is the United States, as they're one of the thirty-two finalists, but why would anyone, even an American, want the USA to win the World Cup?

Before we get started we should address the question of whether Dylan supports anyone in the World Cup or if he's interested in the sport at all. After all a recent edition of his radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, was devoted to the theme of baseball, and at one point during the show Dylan called baseball the greatest game in the world. This proves nothing. Theme Time Radio Hour is sent out on satellite radio and available exclusively in the United States, and if history has proved anything, it's that Dylan will always pander to a particular audiences' taste. We also have to get around the fact that he wrote a song named after a baseball player, Catfish, all about the late great A's and Yankees reliever Catfish Hunter. It's almost certain that Dylan didn't write the song out of any love for baseball though; he just liked the name Catfish. Who wouldn't?

Back to the World Cup then. If Dylan isn't going for the USA, maybe somewhere with a family background. In his memoir, Chronicles, Dylan says his grandmother was from a small town in Turkey, near the Armenian border, but neither country made it to Germany this year.

Maybe he'd choose to support a country whose playing style he could relate to. The likely candidates- Brazil, too obvious. They're probably going to win anyway and if they do, Dylan, along with the rest of us, will be hoping they do it with the style of their 1970 (Blonde on Blonde) or 1982 (Highway 61 Revisited) sides. Unless you've got a very good reason never go with the favourite, you'll look like a bandwagon jumper and Dylan's' never been one of those.

Holland are a possibility but they've traditionally been an argumentative bunch- think of Dylan's difficulties with his record producers as described in a 2001 Rome interview. Speaking of Rome, Italy could be in his thoughts. In the same interview Dylan expressed an admiration for the country but, with a cloud of scandal hanging over the current squad, he will probably want to distance himself from any controversy.

No one really likes watching England play soccer, not even the English. They don't keep the ball long enough to establish any recognizable style of play and without Wayne Rooney they'll struggle even more this time around. However England tend to provide the most memorable and emotionally draining performances in major tournaments. This is comparable to Dylan's "born-again" period, best experienced by listening to the Massey Hall bootleg concert. Raw, committed and unapologetically passionate, but you wouldn't want to live there.

Now Dylan has always supported the underdog throughout his life so we'll have to consider the case of the Ivory Coast or Angola. The closest we can get to any possible impulse towards these teams is in his song Mozambique, where Dylan expressed the desire to visit that country but we can't be sure if he ever made it or was even serious. Besides, neither team is expected to go far in the tournament and there's no point in choosing to support a country that's likely to go out before the knock-out stage. The World Cup is a long event and you need to be backing a side that will take you to the final rounds if you're going to get the most out of it.

This is all speculation, we've got to get to the facts. The only known Bob Dylan song mentioning soccer is Goin' to Acapulco from the Basement Tapes, recorded with the future members of the Band. The boys join in with Dylan on the chorus, which goes

Goin' to Acapulco
Goin' on the run
Goin' down to see soccer
Goin' to have some fun
Yeah
Goin' to have some fun

In the first edition of Dylan's Lyrics this is rendered as Goin' down to see some girl. Some girl? Dylan and the Band are going down to see some some girl? What, all of them? Who would write that? In a more recent edition the lyric has been changed yet again. This time they're goin' down to see fat gut. This is just idiocy. Listen to the damn thing. It's definitely soccer and that's the end of it.

Incidentally, we might like to ponder at this point the role of the Band in this saga. We don't know if Levon Helm is playing on this particular song. He wasn't present on all the Basement Tapes recordings and as the only American in the Band, he probably wouldn't be pre-disposed to soccer. Unlike the rest of the group, who were all Canadians, and would have had more of a grasp of the sport. Dylan himself is nearly, if not secretly, Canadian, being from northern Minnesota.

OK, so Dylan and his gang are heading south to see some soccer and, if they're going to Acapulco, unfortunately they didn't think ahead. They would have found on arrival that Acapulco doesn't have a Primera Division soccer club. They would have had to have settled for a lower league game or even an amateur match, but there's no disgrace in that. In fact supporting a lower league club is often a more morally uplifting endeavour (see I took you close I got what I deserved somewhere else on this blog). There's evidence from other Basement Tapes songs that the trip was a good one- Hills of Mexico, Spanish is the Loving Tongue and The Spanish Song, an outrageous piece of drunkenness, where Dylan and the boys chase the girls around the cantina.

A few years after recording these songs Dylan would go back to Mexico to act in a Sam Peckinpah movie, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and the experience inspired him to write the song Romance in Durango (hot chilli peppers in the blistering sun) which appeared on his album Desire (see above). My vinyl copy of Desire is dedicated to Peckinpah, Allen Ginsberg and Emmett Grogan. Throw Dylan himself and violinist Scarlet Rivera into the mix and you've got a pretty tenacious five-a-side team.

So there it is- Bob Dylan will be supporting Mexico in the World Cup and, after England go out, so will I.

I took you close I got what I deserved

2006-05-27T13:23:00.000Z

The first thing to get out of the way when describing Queens Park Rangers season is the story of the boardroom. From where I was sitting (Ederslie Road Stand, Block T. Seat 93) no one really wanted to talk about it in any depth. Roll your eyes sure, shrug, curse briefly when the kids were distracted by Jude the Cat but let's just leave all these depressing events, dismal flash suits and the Sheperds Bush Serious Crime Squad investigators to their own alternative universe. We're gazing at the field of dreams, at the familiar Hoops and thinking...it's been worse.

Then at the end of the season legendary fanzine A Kick Up The R's comes out with the real low-down, all the dirt and they name names. It's too long to go into here but basically it's a cheap power struggle between old-school, muddling through, lifetime supporter chairman and Italian ex-football player agents, "Monaco based holding companies" fronted by former Brazil captain Dunga (too boring a personality for this twisted movie, should have been Edmundo), North London heavies with guns and envelopes stuffed with cash, murky agents fees going on deals for players no one wanted, low-rent shakedowns in the executive boxes, threats, beatings, extortion, "can't talk about it because it's before the courts" and Jesus Christ you'd cry if you cared enough about it.

OK we can't even talk about what happened on the pitch yet because while all that was going on we changed managers. Sort of.

Ian Holloway took us up. He's a legend and a borderline comic genius. But the new chairman and board wanted him out and the non-English speaking Argentinian Ramon Diaz in. One of the former agents, now QPR director, used to be Diaz' representative. You couldn't say Holloway was losing the plot exactly but at some point around mid season the team started playing with fear. Whether this was because of the off-field shenanigans or the creeping discontent coming off the terraces, who knows? Suddenly Holloway was given premission to talk to Liecester about becoming their manager. Really? says Ollie, well OK if that's what you want, sure. Oh well, says the new board, if you're going to look elsewhere, you're sacked. No, wait. Not sacked, we can't afford to pay you off. You're on gardening leave. And assistant Gary Waddock is in charge. Gardening leave. He's still on gardening leave. A cover of a recent Kick Up the R's put his face on the poster of the movie The Constant Gardener.

What did we look like this year? Mostly we played longball. Our wingers Lee Cook and Gareth Ainsworth were good. Potential midfield maestro Martin Rowlands and captain Kevin Gallen were almost always injured, young players coming up through the academy barely got a look in, loan players came, played indifferently, and went. Attendences were bad. Half the games this season seemed to be mid-week evening kick-offs for reasons no one could explain. The burgers in the Crown and Sceptre deteriorated as badly as our midfield creativity. We finished fourth from bottom, never close to a relegation battle.

Ah well, Cookie re-signed this week, maybe to be followed by the promising Shabazz Baidoo. Waddock says he wants to play it on the floor and use the youngsters. Might be fun next year. World Cup starts soon. While I was watching the FA Cup Final I remembered that when I was kid in Canada my first English football game on TV was the 75 Cup Final and I loved West Ham. I could have gone West Ham but didn't for some reason. I moved to London twenty years ago and started supporting QPR. Why? The whole experience was drifting into a kind of inert misery.

Then I read on a messageboard from some old-timer who was tired of scrolling through the moaning and said something like...

Look everyone, I've seen it all before, forty years man and boy, and yes this is bad but goshdarnit this is why we go for this club. We ain't the biggest, never been the best, more lows than highs, but there's a special feeling at QPR, it represents something good. We wouldn't support these clowns unless we loved them. It's always been like this. So stop whining and enjoy being QPR. You have no choice.

Amen and see you next year.

Bob and Ray and the Old Nice America

2006-05-22T13:49:00.000Z

David Halbertstam's article in Vanity Fair last year about the US government's response to the New Orleans hurricane was a sober and devastating attack on the presidency of GW Bush and was also an opportunity for the great Journalist to expound, in his trademark ponderous style, on America's degraded self-image. "We are less generous with one another", he wrote, "especially with the vulnerable among us. We are prideful of things that all too rarely reflect our better qualities. we have become a harder people, more arrogant, caring only about a certain kind of material success, the norms of which seem increasingly excessive. We are Fortress America cheering our own deeds, values and opinions while ignoring the same of others. We strut, all of us, too much. Where did our modesty go?"

Halbertstam consoled himself remembering another America, represented in a speech given by Dwight Eisenhower in June 1945 at London's Guildhall after being made an honorary Londoner. For Halbertstam the speech symbolised America at it's best- "thoughtful, tempered and respectful of others. The voice of a generous and confident man who spoke for a generous and confident nation." A nice enough, nostalgic thought for a great historical figure, and let's not forget that the General, amongst his other deeds, coined the phrase "military industrial complex" in his last speech to the nation as president, warning his country and the world what would happen if the American economy became intertwined with the interests of the arms industry. Too late! But nice try Ike.

Another couple of generous, even innocent, voices from that era were Bob and Ray, Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding, really just radio comedians, but pound for pound two of the greatest examples of the twentieth century, white, American male you could hope to come across. They started out in the 40's as serious announcers on a small Boston radio station but began to play it for laughs, satarising the medium itself, it's endless soaps, man on the street interviews, and filling-up-time studio links and in a few years were in New York as authentic national celebrities.

As a comedy duo Ray was the big bluffer, Bob the more intellectual, pessimistic, easily disappointed one. Mostly improvising live on the mic, Bob and Ray spoke with a calm, deadpan New England assurance in the voices of characters like author Alfred E Nelson (were the creators of Mad Magazine listening?) who wrote a history of the US despite having only a grade 8 education ("I relied on my memory a great deal", he explained.) or Frank and Tabetha Worley, brother and sister reunited live on a reality show after 70 years only to find they had nothing to say to one another. Or Wally Ballou, roving reporter, forever last on the scene of a breaking story, forced to go on the air with nothing to say. Or the endless radio show parodies like the soap The Gathering Dusk ("the heartwarming story of a girl who hides behind a shield of indecision because it's the safest place to hide") Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife, Tippy the Wonder Dog (a poor man's Lassie sponsored by Mushies "the great new cereal that gets soggy even without milk") or Squad Car 119 in which "the unsung heroes of the police force never actually make it to the scene of a crime.

Kurt Vonnegut was a fan. He wrote that Bob and Ray "played it as though they were intellectually, emotionally and creatively bankrupt. Doors slam as bored people leave the studio. Bob and Ray themselves would obviously leave too, if they didn't need the money so much" The radio shows are still available on audiocassette and they haven't dated. Vonnegut points out that the material is "universal and timeless because so much of it presents itself as the same dilemma- how to seem lusty and purposeful when less than nothing is going on". Vonnegut declares Bob and Ray characters "third raters all".

If Halberstam’s Eisenhower was the voice of the generous American Winner Bob and Ray is the voice of the lovable American Loser, an archetype not heard from much these days. The American Fuck-up is everywhere but that's not the same thing.

Blair's Fergusonian Strategy

2006-04-20T14:50:00.000Z

Alex Ferguson, long time manager of Manchester United, announced his retirement from football management in the early naughties (01, 02, 0?). Over the previous fifteen or so years he had transformed the club from talented under-achievers into the dominant footballing force of the era. He ruled English football, virtually unchallenged. He was then 63-ish and his plan was to stop at the end of the season during which he turned 65. The idea behind the announcement was to allow a smooth managerial transition for the club. Speculation about Ferguson's replacement was intense, nowhere more so than in the team dressing room, where the players were more interested in who would follow than in listening to their gaffer. None of the candidates quite seemed up to the job. The team's performance was adversely affected. The announcement was widely viewed as a mistake. Ferguson then announced his non-retirement, with much rejoicing from fans of the club. He is still in charge of the club, at the age of 66 or 67. While they have not revisited some of their previous heights, they and Ferguson are doing ... okay, pretty well. The episode played out over a couple of years. For fans of English football it was a hot topic.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Labour's two big hitters after John Smith's death, were to be rivals for the leadership of the party. To get them on the same ticket, a compromise was reached: Brown would take second spot to Blair; once in power, Blair would serve two terms as premier and then relinquish power to Brown. Power, of course, has a tendency to corrupt those who have it. So we can assume, as Blair's second term was coming to a close, that he would be fucked by pigs rather than honour his commitment to stand down in favour of Brown. What Blair wanted was a way to not honour his commitment without that appearing to be the case. How could he quit without quitting? Blair follows football: his support of Newcastle United, like his glottal stops, is trotted out to show that he is a man of the people, a regular bloke, a pretty straight kind of guy. He has even appeared on the BBC's saturday morning football preview show, Football Focus, a show he claims to watch whenever he can.

Ferguson had no strategy, as such, regarding the announcement of his retirement (except the stated aim of a smooth transition). Blair, familiar with the United chief's retirement saga, was inspired by it. He annouced that he would stand down as prime minister after the third election, thus honouring his widely known commitment, albeit with the slight twist that he will have been in power for two and a bit terms rather than two. That 'bit of a term', rather vague, becomes an elastic period. When, er, exactly is he to stand down? No-one knows and Blair is not saying. Blair has navigated Brown into an unique no-man's land: as long as Blair sets the agenda, any attempt by Brown to appear prime ministerial looks misplaced; if Brown does not look prime ministerial, then questions are raised about his suitability for the succession -- Brown is in a political zugzwang! Any other possible leadership contender will be rookie-like in comparison with Blair. Thus, the way is paved for Blair, at some suitable point, to announce his non-retirement and look like the saviour of the Labour Party.