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

The Boss got soul, no shit.

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!

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.

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"

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?

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.

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?