Freak, Not Chic

Oh Ralph Lauren,
Where did you find this lass
With head bigger than ass?
Her stance must be precarious,
Her tumblings onto pavements, various

Does she hail from Jupiter, Saturn or Mars,
A world where gravitational forces,
Are far stranger than ours?

Or perhaps she is simply a Photoshop disaster,
Created by a drone, who, despising his master,
Twists and contorts this poor girl’s physique,
Into something grotesque,
That makes you shout: “FREAK”

(With thanks to boingboing, as usual)

Zest for Life: Don't worry, they're seedless

It’s probably a piece of stealth marketing from the chaps at Haribo. But I like to think uber-prude Simon Simpkins might really be out there, furiously bashing off letters of complaint to German tooth rotters, before furiously bashing off, erm…

MY SWEET WRAPPER LEAVES A SOUR TASTE

The other day, while doing our weekly shop, I bought for my two children, Benjamin & Ofelia, a packet of Haribo Maoam lemon-and-lime confectionery. It was only after I was leaving the check-out that I noticed the appalling illustration on the packaging.

This consists of a lemon and a lime locked in what appears to be a carnal encounter. The lime, who I assume to be the gentleman in this coupling, has a particularly lurid and distasteful expression on his face. I demanded to see the shop manager and during a heated exchange my wife became quite distressed and had to sit down in the car park. I was told to register my complaint with the manufacturer.

I’m glad I spotted this before my young children, who are both very sensitive. My wife and I have always tried to protect their innocence – and to think all our years of careful parenting could have been wrecked by a sweet rapper makes me livid.

I received a reply from the company saying that the wrapper design had been introduced in Germany in 2002 with a view to making the fruit figures ‘more modern and lively’ to ‘better appeal to the consumer’.

It said: ‘At no point was it intended to create sexual images’ It has been shown to a number of children and adults of different age groups, none of whom has made any comments referring to sexual content. I consider this reply to be less than satisfactory. As a member of our local chruch, I’m now urging members of our flock to bycott Haribo products until this illustration is removed.

Simon Simpkins
Pontefract, West Yorks

Topical Fruit: Not welcome here

Screwed: Don't expect to be scandalized

Crash should have taught me that when a director is determined to push back the boundaries of censorship, they inevitably sacrifice plot, character and dialogue for dumb shocks. But like I said, I’m a sucker for scandal. So as soon as the Mail started to decry Lars von Trier’s Antichrist for plumbing “new depths of sexual explicitness, excruciating violence and degradation” my outrage  glands started to throb in anticipation. Mmm, delicious controversy.

If only. Sure, a dude’s Johnson pops up in the first couple of minutes and Charlotte Gainsbourg chops off her (clearly rubberised) genitalia. But more shocking than any of that physical brutality is the pseudo-psychological art house tosh that takes up most of the movie. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe spend hours pontificating the evil of nature, and Lars von Trier uses tired cinematic tricks (Gasp! Black and white slow-mo with an opera soundtrack) last seen in a Calvin Klein perfume ad. The only interesting character (spoiler alert) is a sweaty, talking fox that appears halfway through the movie and grunts in his best James Earl Jones voice that, “Chaos reigns.” Oh, the fox is also eating his own guts when he makes this wise observation.

Basil Brush: Torture porn's new hero

Still, those colossal flaws haven’t stopped some contrarian critics (“It’s art,” they declare. “Lars is a genius”) fawning over this deeply dumb movie. Here are some of their most idiotic utterances:

“At one point, the woman hears a cry. It is, she says, “the cry of all things that are to die”. It’s tempting to laugh, just as we may well laugh when a fox faces the camera and intones, “Chaos reigns”. It’s a jaw-dropping moment, utterly absurd by the norms of ‘straight’ cinema and of modern society. And yet, throughout much of history, mankind has believed in talking animals and in beasts as truth-tellers. My laughter was tinged with a fear – that I was a fool to laugh.” -Sukhdev Sandhu, The Telegraph

“It is a symbolist’s dream, or at least nightmare, which must be traversed and experienced in order to move on – but instead of giving us somewhere to go, Von Trier takes us round in circles, until we too are trapped in the dark forest, sharing in the self-torments of these lost souls.” –Anton Bitel, Channel4.com

Gainsbourg: Crap in the woods

“This, essentially, is a snapshot of the Danish director’s Id taken, allegedly, during one of his darkest depressions. And as such it seems to offer the viewer a fundamental creative choice. We can scoff and dismiss it as the last gasp ravings of a deranged opportunist. Or we can look, unflinchingly, at Von Trier’s fantastically painful mirror and acknowledge the Id within us all.” -Kevin Maher, The Times

And finally, some sense:

“Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with Antichrist.” -Todd McCarthy, Variety

Satellite of love

The shwarma and the first 60 minutes of Moon were a success.  And then the woman sitting next to me in the cinema dropped her popcorn (hang on, it gets worse) and started puking and convulsing. Unimpressed by this excellent Exorcist impression, her floppy-haired boyfriend legged it out of the cinema as fast as his skinny jeans and shredded converse would allow.

My fellow geeks were rendered immobile by this epileptic intrusion, so I was (reluctantly) forced to take action. I didn’t want her to pull a Hendrix, so I lifted up her head and shouted at a gawping French bloke a few seats down to give me a hand hauling her into the lobby.

Some 15 minutes later—after a lot of sick wiping, back stroking and general comforting—the boyfriend finally returned. In a heart-warming display of affection, he put a limp arm round her neck and said “What was all that about?” as if she’d somehow planned the whole thing. Myself and Mrs. T stood there for a further 5 minutes, thinking he’d throw his arms around us in thanks, or at least buy us a bag of pick’n'mix. But nope, gratitude was not forthcoming, so we huffily schlepped back into the auditorium and attempted to guess the what had happened in the past 20 minutes.

I guess the Moon has a funny effect on some people, eh Michael?

It's made with real hooves

The Daily Panic: Hoaxes for hipsters

In an attempt to out rebel mater and pater (punk grandees Viv Westwood and Malcolm Maclaren), Corre has joined ranks with Alabaman militiamen, Wahhabi nutjobs and sixth-form sociology students and accused the U.S. government of orchestrating 9/11. The feature trots out a series of tired, discredited claims: Building 7 was destroyed by a controlled explosion (nope); the towers were designed to withstand a jet liner crash (double nope); etc etc. The only slice of conspiracy pie the mag fails to serve up is the old “it was the Jews what done it” line.

Conspiracy theorists like Corre have founded a secular religion. Instead of creating an omnipotent bearded dude in the sky to worship, they have turned the U.S. government into an all-seeing, all-knowing deity. They refuse to embrace two obvious facts:

1) A divine hand does not guide every event on Earth.

2) The U.S. government is actually just an overstretched bureaucracy capable of catastrophic screw ups. (See: the healthcare debacle, Katrina, Iraq, etc).

To accept that a few nutters from a dusty, foreign land like Saudi Arabia could possibly come up with a simple, ingenious plan to kill huge numbers of innocents on American soil would shatter their flawed faith.

What Lies Beneath: Stick to the day job

Brendan I. Koerner nicely summed up the science behind these delusions in a recent piece for Wired magazine:

“The human brain has evolved to find patterns, which is useful when avoiding saber-toothed tigers but less so when confronted with opaque and complex events. Patrick Leman, a psychologist at the University of London who specializes in conspiracy theories, says people tend to be terrified by the fact that a few bad apples can profoundly alter the course of history. We prefer to believe that we live in a stable world where major events have understandable causes. The whole “9/11 was an inside job” theory helps many people sleep at night.”

Sleep tight Joe. But please keep your dreams to yourself.

The piece of propaganda on the left is part of an anti-terrorism campaign recently launched by London’s police force. In a series of posters, the cops advise Londoners to get in touch if they see an excess of empty Cillit Bang bottles in their neighbour’s trash (because a clean house is an Al Qaeda house), spot tourists snapping photos of bus stops or see anyone staring at surveillance cameras. (Don’t want to get banged up in Broadmoor? Always look to the gutter, never the stars)

As Canadian journalist, author and civil liberties campaigner Cory Doctorow has pointed out, this campaign actually damages the society it’s designed to protect:

“It’s hard to imagine a worse, more socially corrosive campaign. Telling people to rummage in one another’s trash and report on anything they don’t understand is a recipe for flooding the police with bad reports from ignorant people who end up bringing down anti-terror cops on their neighbors who keep tropical fish, paint in oils, are amateur chemists, or who just do something outside of the narrow experience of the least adventurous person on their street. Essentially, this redefines “suspicious” as anything outside of the direct experience of the most frightened, ignorant and foolish people in any neighborhood.”

The British government and cops are rapidly turning into the sort of babbling apocalyptic preacher mocked in the Virgin poster. They want us to view our friends, neighbours and family as sinners in waiting. We might think they’re innocent, ordinary folk, but one day they’ll detonate a nailbomb and force our nannas into burkhas. There’s nothing to fear, it seems, but everything and everyone.

Happy Slapper: Cheney's on the right

I fear that our planet has fallen into a wormhole; a weird rift in the space-time continuum where fact and fiction have got jiggy and spawned a hideous, mutant reality. Case in point: for the past week, I’ve felt like I’m strolling through an Evelyn Waugh novel. Her Maj’s Parliament is no longer populated with the rather dull, ideology-free jobsworths we got to know in the Blair years. No, overnight the average Honorable Member (with the stress on “member”) has turned into a port-swilling, cash-pocketing villain. In Waugh world, we’d encounter one of these crooks at a smoke-filled private members club somewhere in Kensington. A cigar would rest between his thin piggy lips, and his rolls of fat—swaddled in acres of tweed—would ripple with each guffaw.

Sadly, we only get to meet these greedy oafs on BBC News, where they go on and on about how their expense claims for moat cleaning (no drawbridge varnishing, though), tons of horse crap, court fees, silk cushions and mortgage payments were  “within the rules.” (Phrase of the year, surely).

Meanwhile in the U.S., one of my childhood heroes, Jesse Ventura, has transmuted from a mulleted, lycra clad pro-wrestler into an upholder of truth, justice and the American way. During an interview with Larry King, the inventor of the inverted bear hug slammed the Bush administration, shredding the idea that VP Cheney’s torture factory was in any way legal:

“I would prosecute every person who was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it, I would prosecute the people that ordered it, because torture is against the law.”

He followed that crowd pleaser with this spine cracker:

“I was waterboarded [during my training as a Navy Seal] so I know… It is torture…I’ll put it to you this way: You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.”

So, if we want to restore dignity to our own democracy, it’s clear what we need to do: Resurrect, and elect, Big Daddy.

Tyler B: Made Me a Commie

You plebeian scum probably spend your waking hours fretting over trivial, everyday issues: how to keep your job, afford to feed the cat, not resort to eating the cat because you lost your job. So it’s good to know that someone (Mr. Brûlé) has managed to stay focussed on the high-concept stuff, namely: How to gorge yourself on irrelevant, unaffordable, planet-fisting luxury goods.

In this week’s instalment of his Fast Lane FT column, bubble boy spends 800 words riffing on an upcoming international shopping spree. The column is scattered with smug, jet-setting fashionista speak. But I found that the paragraph below aroused the greatest feeling of… pleasetellmeyou’reasaschabaroncohen characterorIwillneverhavekidsincasetheyenduplikeyou (I’m sure the Germans have a better compound word for it):

Two weeks ago I was hoping to make my semi-annual pilgrimage to see Alberto at A Gi Emme (my favourite men’s store in Europe) in Como but the sun on the slopes in St Moritz was more persuasive and I didn’t manage to make the journey south. On Monday I’m heading to Tokyo but not before doing a brief tour of Paris, which is an increasingly more interesting place for menswear than London. In between meetings I’m hoping to go to APC, Kitsuné, Officine Slowear (the umbrella brand that houses Incotex trousers, Zanone knitwear, Glanshirt and Motedoro jackets), Pierre Hardy for desert boots and Old England for outerwear.

In other news, have you seen that the papers are filled with stories on the revival of Marxism? Wonder who’ll be first against the wall?

James Dean Bradfield: Not A Fascist

In an attempt to win over Welshies and self-harming indie types, the skinhead mob this week decided to soundtrack a piece of YouTube propaganda with the Manic Street Preachers’ song If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next.

Yep, the black shirts used the MSP’s tribute to the ANTI-FASCIST International Brigades in a video about London descending into a Mad Max-style multicultural crisis. (And it can be hellish here. Just the other week I had a nightmare choosing between my hoods’ Thai, Chinese, Pakistani, Turkish, Ethiopian, Ghanaian, Caribbean, French and Italian restaurants).

Defending their use of the song, a spokesmoron for the BNP told the Grauniad: “You can interpret the lyrics any way you want.” Fair enough. I’ve always found the line “So if I can shoot rabbits/Then I can shoot fascists” frustratingly ambiguous. For years, I thought James Dean Bradfield was humming about his Bugs Bunny bloodlust.

This is just the latest faux pas (apologies for the alien tongue Mr. Griffin) from Mosley’s descendants. Earlier this month, the goosesteppers printed up a Spitfire-adorned poster condemning Albion’s invasion by borscht swilling, brick laying, start work at 7am-ing Eastern Europeans. One small oversight: the WW2 fighter plane in the poster belonged to 303 Squadron. That’s a Polish squadron.

Damn those fiendish foreigners. Is nothing sacred?

So crack-huffing, Moss-boffing ex-Libertine Pete Doherty has a new album out this week. But let’s ignore this slab of indie dope, and celebrate the progenitor of pretty-boy junkie pop: Chet Baker. Pete Doherty could learn a lot from this angel-voiced jazzbo. Like Doherty, he had a penchant for heroin and honeys. (And why not? They’re so moreish).

Unlike the former Libertine, it took more than a feedbag of smack to slow his output. The trumpet-toter knocked back 6g of heroin a day. Which he topped up with cocaine, codeine, barbiturates, booze and hash. (The ultimate weight loss regime. I can see Fern Britton touting it: “After my gastric band burst, I tried The Jazz Shakes Diet. I lost 10 stone, my TV and all my jewelry).

It took an unfortunate encounter with a pavement (it met him when he fell out of  an Amsterdam hotel window in 1988) to stop then 58-year-old Baker  touring and recording.

After all that lauding, here’s some of his, erm, less appealing quirks: Baker was a serial wife-beater. A moron. (“Gee, it’s a drag about your dad”, he’s alleged to have said on meeting pianist Romano Mussolini, son of Il Duce). And apparently he stank like a tube tramp. There’s hope for you yet Mr. D.