flotsam and jetsam

Old Man Jackson

 Thanks to Breadteam for this (always so good for interesting pictures , I just steal his ) Here is an intriguing look at what Ebony Magazine thought that Michael Jackson may look like in the year two thousand. In 1985 they commissioned an artist to create a whole special of what the ravages of time would do to the big stars of the day. Imagine if this artist had turned up with a picture of what Jackson would really look like in two thousand.

 He looks quite distinguised if a tad sleazy methinks.

Q: Who's Bad? A: Not me.

 It has been an embarrassingly long time since I last put anything up on here and for that I feel ashamed. I could try and explain it away by saying that I , once again , have fallen into one those damned wormholes in time and space that instantly deposits me almost two months into the future with no recollection of my actions over the missing time but I won’t because that excuse is wearing thin these days and on more than one occasion my negligible qualifications in quantum physics have been used as a counter argument to my claims. I could even say that my life has been unexpectedly full of wonderful and interesting things that have distracted me from the business of sitting down and writing this blog. If I were to do that then it would mean that I’d have to start explaining what all these wonderful and interesting things were and frankly I don’t want to do that. This is more a platform for self flagellation in the form of humiliating remembrances.

There have been some interesting things happening in the “real” world though since I last wrote. North Korea launched a biscuit tin with a Walkman sellotaped to it into space and half the world panicked , Madonna has continued her dubious policy of aggressively repatriating African children with a zeal unseen since the days of the slave trade but without doubt the biggest story has been the self styled “King of Pop” Michael Jackson shuffling off his mortal coil ( but sort in a backwardsy/forwardsy kind of way with a little spin at the end and punctuated with an “Ow!” ) . He left behind a wake of devastated fans who had followed him since childhood , his and theirs. This got me thinking about my own childhood. Whilst never the biggest Jackson fan he did have some impact on my young life.

 I had a friend , still do in fact , called Tom that at one point was really quite into Jackson. He used to wear the black slip on shoes with white socks , attempt to Moonwalk on slippy surfaces and on occasion wear a black fedora. He also at one stage thought he was a vampire , so much so that if you made a crucifix sign with your fingers at him he’d cower , turn and hiss at you before fleeing. That was a lot of fun.

 I digress.

 On a day trip with my Dad into central London or “Big Town” as I called it then , my friend Tom and I , just shy of ten years old , went to a joke shop and bought those fake plastic knives that when you “stab” someone the blade retracts into the hilt providing hours of stab happy family fun. We’d discovered that by holding your thumb over the top of the hilt and then removing it you could produce an effect similar to that of a flick knife with the blade shooting up seemingly from nowhere. This was , like , the coolest thing ever. Walking across Waterloo Bridge and inspired by the video for “Bad” we bounded around flicking the blades at each other like little twerps and asking “Who’s Bad?” If there is one thing I’m sure of it’s that Michael Jackson never intended to glorify knife crime to a couple of impressionable boys from the London suburbs,  but somehow he had and we were now on a helter skelter ride of dangerous thrills that could only lead to prison. By letting us buy these plastic knives it was as if somehow my Dad had sanctioned our becoming criminals. Both of us felt it , although only walking a few meters ahead of my Dad , that we were “Bad” , we were dangerous and off the leash in the big city , that something had changed and we wouldn’t be the same again. “Sorry mother I can’t come home for tea. Haven’t you heard that I’m bad now? I’m bad mum , baaaad , look I’ve got the knife to prove it”.

 In a testament to my Dad’s parenting skills somehow Tom and I found ourselves alone down in the area then known as “Cardboard City” which is now the BFI Imax cinema. This was THE area for London’s homeless in the 80’s. Back then if you didn’t have a box down there then you obviously weren’t taking the whole homeless thing seriously enough and should just go back to living in house or something. It was dark , the stench of urine overwhelmed , the concrete architecture Brutalist in design , dark huddled shapes moved in the shadows , graffiti covered the walls , there may have even been an oil drum with a fire in it surrounded by men in fingerless gloves staring at the flames and passing a bottle between them. In short it was like a Billy Idol video or something from Robocop. To two street punks like us the message was clear…we were home.

 Almost at once we spotted a business woman making her way down the ramp into our “turf” clutching a briefcase oblivious to the two criminals laying in wait , ready to pounce. We hid behind a pillar and listened to her footsteps echo off the concrete walls as she got closer. “Now!” whispered Tom. We jumped out in front of the woman , revealed grey plastic blades and asked her “Who’s bad?” MJ style. Not making the immediate connection with Michael Jackson ( perhaps she was more of a Prince fan? ) she quite rightly screamed , more out of shock then genuine fear and dropped her briefcase. Instantly our bravado was replaced by sheer terror and panic at what we’d done. I found myself some 17 meters behind my legs which were already at the top of the ramp in the sunshine running back to Daddy. This was one of those moments when what was a great idea becomes instantaneously stupid and regrettable the second you realise that you hadn’t really considered the implications. ( This was just like the time I decided to hit a plate glass window with a cricket bat, just to see what would happen. This was at a friends house who had the most fearsome and consistently angry father known to mankind so I was running quite a risk in my little experiment. I was genuinely surprised when the window shattered with an almost cartoonish type sound and as his dad appeared , really thought that I might be murdered.)

 The woman’s scream had brought us back to reality with a startling jolt. Why wouldn’t she think that she was being mugged by two horrible children with flick knives? Why would she think for a second that we were just indulging in some stupid criminal fantasy inspired by the collaboration of Michael Jackson and Martin Scorsese? She’s behaved perfectly reasonably and her scream exposed us for the posing little cowards we really were. Now we were sprinting along Waterloo Bridge , gripping each others t-shirts , at least one of us bawling ( I’d like to claim it was him but I can’t really be sure ) looking for my Dad. When we found him we were tear stained, snot heavy and wild with fear. I think we made up some story to say that we’d been scared by a tramp. We stuck close to him all the way back to the station partly because we‘d scared ourselves and partly out of fear we‘d see the woman with some police and that she‘d point us out as the boys that tried to mug her. We’d be carted off to some Dickensian workhouse and never see our parents again all because of Michael Jackson.

I learnt that day that I just didn’t have the makings of a violent criminal. When I got home I put the knife in a drawer and never played with it again so frightened was I of it’s potency.

Explanation

 New words to come some. Emerged from coma recently. That is all.

From The Vaults #3 - Love In Action

 Sure we’ve all dreamt of living in a commune at some point or another , right? No? Well I have anyway, usually at around dawn after the last night at Glastonbury. Sitting on the slopes of the Stone Circle field surveying the sea of freaks and their campfires spread out before me like a medieval army preparing for battle , I find myself thinking ( and often voicing to anyone naïve enough to lend an ear ) that everyone there should just stay , that no one should go home , that together we could build a new future and the festival would never have to end. It could be beautiful , I imagine to myself.

 This new utopia would be founded on the principles we had already been living on for the past few days , love for ones fellow man , a non-stop cultural smorgasbord free and open to all , shared environmental responsibility , the disintegration of social hierarchies and finally falafels , lots and lots of falafels. Money would be outmoded and in it’s place a bartering system set up. People would trade their skills and services for food , clothing or entertainment. Being a largely skill free type of man I would try and set myself as some sort of storyteller meaning that I could always trade my drunken ramblings for lentil curries and a place by the fire.

 In this brave new world unique styles would emerge in peoples attire. I’m always interested to see how people start a festival dressed and how they end it. Along the way I tend to accumulate many magical talismans in the form of different passes , whistles and glow sticks. Make-up has made an appearance to , like the year that a core of around of five of my friends and I began sporting Ziggy Stardust-esque lightening bolts across our faces. Reasons for how and why this particular style choice were made are hazy at best but plenty of strangers were impressed/impressionable enough to want to join our gang and so we duly anointed them with our pink and yellow neon paint. There were of course many other groups roaming the festival with their own distinctive looks ( I don’t mean in the way that some groups of lads get matching football shirts printed before they embark on some campaign of terror in the Mediterranean - ie “Dunstable Boy’s - Crete 2009 “). The overall effect was not to dissimilar to the movie The Warriors only relocated to the West Country and with less bloodshed.

 As a group we’d toil the land and provide a bountiful harvest from the rich Somerset soil. Our days of commuting would be long forgotten , our old routines and anxieties shaken off us like an unwanted picture on an Etch-a-Sketch. Life would be good.

 After a time living at the commune I imagine I would take a wife ( a stunningly beautiful and sexually adventurous folk singer ) and together we’d raise a few dirty footed children. Two boys ,  Moon-Dog and Chai as well as a daughter who we’d name Eavis. We’d live happily in the leafy suburbs of the Greenfields with our delightful neighbours the ironsmith and the crystal healer. Together with them we’d spend many an evening drinking mead from wooden goblets and laughing at our silly little lives that we led before we dropped out of the system in pursuit of happiness and simplicity.

 Revelling in my idyllic future, my beautiful wife and three dirty footed children are snatched from me by a sudden wet sensation and the realization that I’ve been pouring beer into my shoe and that I’m totally shitfaced . Before me lies a scene of devastation and an immediate future that holds only motorways , hangovers and regret.

 My romantic notions of setting up a new society are hugely flawed and at least five decades too late. Realistically there is just no way that it could work. Turn the music off and all you are left with is the mournful thrum of generators , possibly the bleakest sound that I know. The soft , kaleidoscopic focus of the previous three days vanishes, turning what was a glorious Technicolor , IMAX , happy-fest into a jarring news-report from a smokey refugee camp shot on a camera phone. The reality is that even with the best of intentions any attempt at communal living at Glastonbury would falter the moment that the bands stopped turning up , the toilets stopped being emptied and the weed ran out.

 Of course some people do attempt to set up their own communes based on certain principles. Some practice polygamy , some won’t eat anything that has ever cast a shadow and some, as in the case of Charles Manson’s , have sex and murder as there central edicts ( perhaps I’m confusing communes and cults there but hey , so what? I’ve typed this far and you’ve read this far , so we’ve both invested some time… it would churlish for us to abandon this here) .

 All this has been quite a meandering preamble to something I wanted to show you. As I’ve mentioned before I like to collect strange and mysterious pieces of paper on my travels and I came across the following stapled to a telegraph pole in Brooklyn.

I admire what this person is trying to do but I do feel that her message is a bit mixed and wishy-washy. The varying sizes of type , the “hopefully eventually” doesn’t inspire confidence and the misuse of (brackets) all would make me feel uneasy about throwing my lot in with them. This poster just looks too amateur to consider joining. Not to be rude but I think this quest has fallen at the first hurdle if the leader cannot articulate themselves in a coherent fashion. Haven’t the old and ill have suffered enough without this group’s aid adding to their list of woes. This person says they’re writing a book about “Love in Action” which suggests that they perhaps should be taken more seriously but as someone who has been “writing a book” for years I know that this is an easy and impressive thing to say but a much harder thing to actually do.

“Eventually I dream having living food life style commune full of “love in action” “ Having living? What? Errm, no.

Mindful vandalism and a study into the age swap/body swap comedy genre

 Sometimes vandalism can be a wonderful thing . I don’t mean when people misguidedly deface war memorials or tear up community flowerbeds , what I mean is when people draw a well placed spunking phallus on a poster for something on at the Royal Opera House , you know , classy vandalism in the best tradition of the British school system. That’s the kind of thing that really does it for me and I think that if Banksy had any real balls , if he really wanted to subvert things , then he could do no better than to just roam the world drawing knobs on things ( legal bumpf - It is understood that should Banksy embark on such an artistic voyage then Mr Patrick James Dalton will receive 15% of any works sold ).

 I digress.

 Near my house there was an enormous poster for the post “High School Musical 3” vehicle for the acting talents of Zac Efron - “17 Again”. Two thirds of the poster were taken up by the name of the movie whilst the last third featured a large image of Efron’s smirking countenance. Underneath this in yellow paint some Friday night prankster had daubed in large letters the word “ cunt”. Daubed is perhaps the wrong word to use as the letters had been painted with some skill , perhaps even by a former student of typography. The overall effect was that you couldn’t help but stare upon the image and think to yourself “Yes, yes , this man is a cunt” This was one of the rare occasions that I didn’t have my camera in my pocket so I resolved myself to come back the next day and get photographic evidence of this vandalism.

 My thinking behind it was that if I were to show the picture to people now that they might chuckle slightly and agree with the vandals sentiments or perhaps just admire his or her artistic skills but if I were to sit on the picture for say 20 years or so then the Zac Efron story arc would’ve had time to mature and could include things such as some sort of drug hell , a homosexual scandal or even Oscar success that could give my ancient picture some sort of extra resonance. Yes that might not be the case and I may sit on a jpeg pointlessly for 20 years but then again some sort of definitive proof that Zac Efron is a cunt might emerge in that period allowing me to pull the photo out for future generations to marvel at some suburban Nostradamus’ yellow painted prediction of the future. It’s highly unlikely and improbable but the point is that I’m prepared for these eventualities however pointless , the question is are you?

 So the next morning I rose , joy in my possibly slightly autistic heart , to go get the morning papers and more importantly my photograph. Imagine my dismay when instead of the poster for “17 Again” I was greeted by a big , blank , grey space. Someone , some organisation had removed the entire poster overnight. This came as a surprise to me as I could , if you so desired , take you on a small tour of London pointing out many rude things I’ve scribbled , some dating back to my mid-teens. It’s never appeared to be high up on the agenda of London councils to remove lewd jottings from public spaces at least not that I’ve noticed anyway , so this change in tactic gave me pause for thought. Suddenly it dawned on me. Zac Efron is like a billion pre-teen , tweenage , teenage girls pin-up du jour. He is pretty much owned by Disney , a company where even sporting a moustache is regarded as a sign of being subversive , and they would not let for even one second his squeaky clean image be tarnished in the slightest as it could cost them millions. They must have a crack squad prepared for such eventualities and in case like Efron’s they must be myriad.

 Despite my disappointment I realised that the poster had to come down. I put myself in the shoes of a parent innocently driving their offspring to go swimming , to choir practice or to go and pet some seriously fucking cute baby farm animals or something. They’re driving along thinking of adult type things like sun dried tomatoes when a little voice pipes up from the back and asks “ Daddy , what’s a cunt ?”. Assuming that there isn’t an instantly fatal crash the parent will then be left questioning exactly what is being taught these days in schools or struggling to think of some kind of strategy to avoid answering the question altogether ( for the record I would find the nearest ice cream van and give the ice cream man as much cash as he could carry to let my child clamp their lips around the ice cream machine until they were violently , possibly fatally sick ).

 Like moths to the flame their young eyes would be drawn to the image of Efron and the down to an unexpected lesson in anglo-saxon that easily malleable minds would not forget in a hurry. As a result of this graffiti some children may now have Zac Efron and the word “cunt” intrinsically linked which is bizarre as many adults had already made that link without seeing the poster…this remains unexplained. What worries me is that some kids might have seen the poster , absorbed the information and now are wandering around saying things like “When I grow up I want to be a cunt like Zac Efron!”

 Since the day I saw that poster I have an almost Pavlovian response whenever I see a picture of Efron’s strangely punchable face ( this is pure jealously ,on my part , of his youth and wealth ) or the TV Ad for “17 Again” , the C word just pops into my head . I almost see the word flash up on the screen in those bright yellow letters and it‘s quite distracting. Seeing the trailer the other night though I was struck by another thought….”Haven’t I seen this movie a thousand times before?”

 The concept of the age swap/body swap movie ( hereby known as AS/BSM‘s) is far from new and has been executed with varying degrees of success over the years. For a kids and adults alike they are attractive movie going options as they offer something for all the family. The kid can revel in the possibilities for adventure, naughtiness and newfound power wielding that instant adulthood would afford them and the adult can get lost in nostalgic musings on past missed opportunities set right and the joy of irresponsibility. It’s an almost surefire winner every time for a movie studio and I think that’s why it’s a theme that has been revisited over and over since a miniature Jodie Foster starred in the original Freaky Friday.

 The thing that struck me when I saw the ad for 17 Again wasn’t just that I had seen this concept in action before it was more that I had seen certain moments before , namely and most importantly what I call the “Realisation Scream” . I was fairly sure that this was standard practice in most AS/BSM’s but in order to prove my theory totally I had to undertake some exhaustive research. I have studied the trailers of seven different AS/BSM’s , some are well known and some are lesser known but all carry the same basic thematic qualities. In my finding’s I have looked into whether there is a “Realisation Scream” included in the trailer and how far in it takes place, the “McGuffin” or the device that allows the AS/BS to take place and the life lesson that might or might not be learned by the characters involved in the swap.

 I realise that watching all of these trailers will be time consuming and pretty much pointless but then consuming type in a largely pointless manner is one of my special skills so indulge me.

The Age Swaps

Big

 This first is a classic and I mean a real classic. People make special pilgrimages to the giant toy shop F.A.O Scharwtz ( why the shop is for the attention of someone named Schwartz is unclear ) just to witness staff members recreate the famous “chopsticks” scene on their floor piano. This is way back when Tom Hanks was a funny man , way back when the very idea of his winning an Oscar would be a laughable notion and winning two Oscars a work of deep fantasy.

My finding here are thus…

 The “Realisation Scream” occurs 35 seconds into the trailer.

 The “McGuffin” is a turbaned machine called Zoltar that grants his wish at a travelling fairgorund.

 The main lessons learnt are that childhood is a precious thing that should be cherished and that it was astoundingly easy to climb the corporate ladder in 1980’s New York.

 13 Going On 30

 The next is another age swap movie but then again technically is it a time travel film? Frankly who cares. The gist of it is that in 13 Going On 30 Jennifer Garner finds herself at 13 years old wishing she was 30 instead. Lo and behold the next morning she awakes to find herself at 30 years old with no recollection of the intervening years ( I swear that this happened to me in real life but so far no one will believe me ).

My Findings…..

The “Realisation Scream” occurs only 15 seconds into the trailer.

The “McGuffin” is never truly explained though it has something to do with a cupboard and some glitter.

The moral of the story is that if you have a fat mate be nice to him as he will grow up to be a hottie who’s like totally nice and buff and stuff.

 17 Again

The final of our age swap movies. Chandler from Friends is on a collision course with his 40^th birthday , he’s divorced and his kids think he’s a dick. He reasons with himself that his life would be in a very different place if he had just scored the winning basket in some championship match 20 years before. Rather unconvincingly it emerges that as a youth Chandler from friends was Troy from High School Musical. Hilarity ensues when he finds himself 17 Again and at high school with his own children!

My Findings….

 The “Realisation Scream” occurs 51 seconds into the trailer.

 The “McGuffin” has Chandler throwing himself from a bridge and into some sort of age reversing wormhole in time and space.

 From the trailer it can be deduced that basketball really can change your life and that if you look like Zac Efron even your own daughter will want to sleep with you.

The Body Swaps

18 Again!

 No this is not a hastily rushed out sequel to the previous movie. It looks like this is a body swap comedy but it only seems to show one side of the swap story which is bizarre. George Burns stars as an 81 year man who wishes he were 18 again , wow 81 to 18 , I like what they did there. Most of the trailer is given over to excerpts from reviews (a sure sign that the movie is incapable of selling itself ) one of which from one Jeffrey Lyons of Sneak Preview comments on the movie’s young star,  “ Charlie Schlatter is a real find” which is too bad as he has been missing in action ever since. Dale Stevens from the Cincinnati Post fails in his journalistic duties using the excuse “I can’t write this review….I can’t stop laughing!”. If only he’d share the joke with the rest of us.