Archive for September, 2008

Don’t bother reading this one. It’s fucking rubbish.

I’m looking forward to David and Goliath and the Wooden Horse of Troy and that lot. This one seems to be mostly about killing things. The only positive thing I can say about it is that is a bit like the minutes from a maniacs meeting.

Here are some pictures that came up when I googled Leviticus. Nope, I’m not really sure what they represent either:

Exodus

Named for some reason after a Bob Marley album, or more realistically Kirk Hammett’s thrash metal band. The first thing I notice apart from the swift and merciless way the author deals with Joseph (by and by, Joseph dies) is that an editor appears to have been employed and there is much more of a structure and plot in this book. This God dude shows himself to be even more of a cunt than we previously suspected here (if you can imagine such a thing) with loads of pissing about with Egyptians. I don’t know any Egyptians, but they can’t be that bad, can they. God unleashes a bunch of plagues on them (Ten I think, but I can’t be bothered to check and I didn’t make a note of it in my notebook [oh yeah, notebook, did you just think I was making this up as I go along? Oh no, a very laboriously thought out business, this. Unlike the bloody Bible], chlamydia, television-advertisments-for-mobile-phone-text-sex, flatulence, Justin Lee-Collins, anal-rape, short-term-memory-loss, left-handedness, shoelaces-keep-coming-undone, dyslexia, and cleaning-sieves, yeah, ten. ) and then finishes it off by killing all their first born. But I’m getting ahead of myself. God chooses a lad called Moses to take care of it all for him, bad choice, I’d say. He reminds me of James May what with his general reticence to be the hero and would you want James May to be rescue your people? Exactly. So James/Moses didn’t really fancy it and god crept up on him in the night to do him in. Luckily for James/Moses his wife clocked God at it and threw a babies foreskin at him which made him stop (you think I’m making this up don’t you? I swear on the Bible I’m not. Oh yeah! That’s where I’ve heard of the Bible before, something to do with the courts.). So all foreskinned up God wanders off and Moses has to try and convince Pharoh to let his people go. What must be most irritating for Moses is that he knows Pharoh won’t. How does he know? God told him that he would make Pharoh obstinate and he would not release them. The man is a minge. It strikes me that Moses should have said “Yeah, that’s a good plan, but why don’t you just make him compliant and let us all go? Save everyone a lot of time and energy.” But he didn’t and I’m pretty good but even I can’t travel back in time and make imaginary events that never happened, not happen in a different way, so I’m sorry about that.

Anyway, yadda, yadda, yadda, passover, red/ reed sea business, manna from heaven, quails and ta-dah! Mount Sinai. In fairness up to this point it’s not too bad a read, good pacing, quite thrilling and what-not but all of a sudden any tender feelings I may have had for this book are curtailed by an interminable five page set of instructions on how to build a fucking box (this box has since gone missing. If you find it, don’t open it.). To be honest I didn’t read all of this because it was so stultifyingly tedious I fell into a coma.

God demands a great deal of offerings and sacrifices which is fine and that, but being the omnipotent, omnipresent one true God, what does he want with a few pigeons? The next part made me worry for the sanity of our author. Inside this box room god wants built to hold this box (woah, I know what you’re thinking but don’t panic, we get instructions on how to build that too. Full and detailed instructions. Very detailed.) he suggests the after sacrificing an animal (for no discernible reason) you “…Take the blood and fling it up the walls.” Exodus 29:16 (that, I have learnt is how you reference a biblical quotation, so now you can look it up to see if I’m full of shit or not.) but it gets more American Psycho in a few lines “…slaughter it, take some of the blood, and put it on the lobes of their right ears… and on their right thumbs and big toes.” Exodus 29:19-21. One can only imagine the nervous glances that were exchanged when that rule was read out. It’s like something out of The Wasp Factory (which incidentally I recommend over this book any day.).
God now transforms into a passable version of Denholm Renholm from The IT Crowd. When telling people to observe the sabbath he says that anyone caught working on the sabbath, even to light a fire, should be put to death. Essentially saying Relax or Die. (Jen, Jen, are you stressed Jen? Jen, are you stressed?)

I have also accidentally done a bit of actual, real, worth while research (for which I apologise) The ten commandments that we all know, love and live by, aren’t. No siree. The actual ten are as follows:
i. Thou shalt have no other Gods. (Okay.)
ii. Thou shalt make thee no molten Gods. (Alright.)
iii. The feast of the unleavened bread thou shalt keep. (Umm?)
iv. Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest. (We’re back on safe ground here.)
v. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the years end. (Sorry, you’ve lost me again.)
vi. Thrice in the year shall all your men children appear before the Lord God. (Slow down, I still don’t understand number v.)
vii. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven. (I think this means you can’t have ham sandwiches, but I’m not sure.)
viii. Neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning. (No slouching in front of TV after dinner saying you’ll do the washing up tomorrow. Quite a good one, that.)
ix. The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the LORD thy god. (No, sorry again, what?)
x. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk. (Come on stop pissing around, what the fuck does that mean?)
Well I looked up the last one and it means you are not allowed to boil a kid goat in milk from the mummy goat. Which sounds slightly barbaric to me anyway.
So you can’t cook a goat in milk, but nothing about killing people. Maybe priorities are different for omnipotent beings? Seriously, check it out (or don’t, I’m past caring), Exodus 34:13-28.

Hello, here we are, back to the interminable description of the box, except to spice it up a bit, instead of saying what you should do, it says what they did do. Much more exciting. Here the author literally copies what they wrote in the earlier bit but puts “So what they did, right, was…” in front of it. My pet theory (down, boy) is that he had a word count and deadline to meet which, as we professional writers (Hah!) know, is when you start to get sloppy with the quality of your work.
In summary it seems to have calmed down a lot in style, which is nice, no one lives for 900 years, for example. I think they max out at 130-140 here, so that’s more believable. Better than Genesis but still to detailed on shite we don’t need to know. More of a plot though.

Next up, Leviticus. All I know about Leviticus is that in a Manics song there is the line “Read Leviticus, Learn censorship.” I don’t know what that means, but I hope to in the next day or so. See, It’s a learning curve for me, too.

Moses, yesterday (Mt Sinai visible in background)

Max, the cuckoo child, yesterday

Delighted to Eli back, he gets better and better. My personal theory is that he is going to try and persuade Newt to chuck a raping at Cindy. Now that is teatime TV!
Tina is growing more and more sanctimonious as the seconds tick by. I despise the way she claims that she thinks everyone deserves to know that she can’t keep her knickers on and that Max, the cuckoo child belongs to Russ. Who deserves to know? No-one. Everyone would be happy all being mates and playing dis-functional families but no, she had to clear her conscience and ruin everyone’s life, the whore.
Russ = fucked.
Tina = fucked.
Jacqui = fucked.
Dom = fucked.
Tony = fucked.
Caroline Copper = fucked.
With any luck Niall will pitch up and murder Tina for us too with his magic drugs in a can of beer.
And another thing, why have Josh and Jacqui been given such big roles? They are shit.
Why does everyone feel the need to share? Wives, sisters, babies and AIDS. No good will come of this, mark my words…

P.S. I originally wanted to use a different picture to illustrate sharing, but it has been vetoed. If you contact me i will forward it to you and you can see the directors cut, as it were.

I read the bible for ten minutes, got ten minutes of stand-up material. - Ricky Gervais.

Some of you may have heard of this book, so I have decided to read it from cover to cover and let you know what it’s like. I picked up a copy in the fiction section of my local library (which, let’s be honest, is where it fucking belongs) and set about it. The plot revolves around a character called God (Hobbies: Shit-stirring, lying, petty-mindedness, spitefulness and genocide.) and his various adventures. It’s quite big and owes a lot in style to novels like ‘Trainspotting’ by Irvine Welsh, with it’s loosely linked tableaux leading to a powerful dénouement.
Due to it’s bulk I decided to break the review up. The author, in his infinite wisdom has thoughtfully broken it up for me already! Hurrah! So the first bit is called ‘Genesis’, after the Phil Collins band.

Genesis

I honestly don’t know if this is an abridged version or not, hang on, I’ll just check…
…
…
Nope, this is it, full version! Well it could have done with an editor. There is an inability to grasp the most basic story-telling ideas. Details, for example. Not only does the author skim past most important facts, in favour of banal minutiae (Abraham was 99 when he was circumcised. Great. There’s an image that will stay with me.), he spends pages listing names of the begotten in a way that can only be described as “bloody irritating.”
In the course of my research into The Bible I have been reliably informed that some people believe some, all, or more of this bunk which, may I say, knocked me sideways.
There was, it seems a flood, that wiped out everything. Except fish, obviously. The Bible is suspiciously quiet about the fate of fish during the flood. But they do mention them shortly after. I would have just kept schtum, you don’t want to go drawing attention to a glaring oversight like that. Why not send a big massive fire to destroy the world instead of a flood? Get Noah (600 at the time, yeah, years.) to build a great big fuck off fridge or ice-cube. Then the bloody fish wouldn’t get away with everything as usual. Perhaps this is why Christians eat so much fish, to punish them for evading the great flood?
Onwards, through Cain and Abel (merely a retelling of the Jeffrey Archer story. Better, in that it is shorter [Speaking of which, you know the version of Cain And Abel you’ve got in your head? That’s longer than the version here. Rip Off Britain, eh?].) to the big one, the main event, so to speak. Joseph And The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. Reimagined here as Sneaky Joe and his Shit Anorak, due I believe to budget limitations. No colours (amazingly techni- or otherwise), no songs, no Jason Donovan, Phillip Schofield, or that other cunt who’s name escapes me (I’m on the internet, I could look it up, I can’t be arsed.) and most frustratingly of all, the coat, the main item of clothing as I was lead to believe, the big kahuna, is only in it for five minutes, too. Swizz. Rip off Britain.
Genesis does end on a bit of a cliffhanger though, so I eagerly await what lies in store for me in the second book, Exodus (named after a Bob Marley album, for some reason.).

In summary then, it is not just that this story is appallingly written (it is), it’s more that it holds no relevance to anything in today’s world, I also can’t see how it held relevance to anyone in any world. It’s about a very specific group of people and is aimed at a very specific group of people. It also breaks the main rule of fantastical fiction, in that the events that occur in its universe are not believable within it’s universe!
Could have done with a better editor.

Of which more, and later.

You know in the second series of I’m Alan Partridge, Alan is trying to sell “Bouncing Back”, his autobiography, famous for containing the phrase “needless to say, I had the last laugh.” 27 times? This book is the rock n roll version of bouncing back. A bitter, rambling, self-important, ego-feeding, deluded tome. Read it for yourself and count the number of times he [Mark E Smith] is “amazed” by how people who aren’t him do things. Count the times he declares something to be “simple fact.” Or the number of times he mentions Paul Morely by name when talking about “shitty journalists.” Morely is not the only music hack to warrant a name check, though. Smith sees his life as consistently under-fire and himself continually harangued my a trimutive of media types consisting of the aforementioned Morely, Julie Burchill, and Tony Parsons. These three, deputized by Marc Riley, are the commanders of the forces against Smith and The Fall. On his side he has himself and the occasional band member, and on the other side is the entire world. Smith comes across every bit as cantankerous as he is portrayed in the media, he seems jealous, petty and recriminatory.

But then what did you expect? Sweetness and light? Sugar and spice, and all things nice? We love Mark E Smith for what he is. We all have a carefully built image of him which this book does nothing to dismantle. He is aggressive and arrogant, he did sack Marc Riley on his wedding day, he did all of the things you thought he did and more. But there is a vast gulf between him and other arrogant popstars around - Mark E Smith has every reason to be arrogant, he is as good as he thinks he is. Tell me another band who have been around for as long as The Fall and who have evolved to the extent he has, and are still relevant. The only other musician who comes close is Nick Cave (another individual who, by all accounts is just the same off duty), but unlike Cave, Smith is enjoying himself, he’s taking the piss. When he says he doesn’t give a shit, you believe him. He is genuinely doing it for himself.

Mark E Smith, yesterday

It’s an enjoyable book, funny and angry, but poorly constructed. It was ghostwritten by Austin Collings, someone I presume to be a fan. This comes across during Smiths interminable witterings when he proclaims himself a mystic or a psychic. I would suggest that this Austin Collings is somewhat in awe of Smith, probably slightly scared of him (and who wouldn’t be?) and as a result crowbars in a few to many parts specifically designed to make Mark E Smith look better. We don’t want a nice pleasant Mark E Smith! We want the utter prick we expect! It also seems that the writing style consisted of slavishly transcribing the interviews/ conversations they had for the sake of the book. This laziness is the books downfall, There is a great book to be written about Mark E Smith and The Fall, it’s a shame that it’s not this one.