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Max Gogarty's Guardian Blog and online 'bullying'

 
  

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Glenn Close But No Cigar
18:40 / 20.02.08
Lula, if you look at my usage of 'the C word' above, it was quoting Whiskey Priest, who ze hirself was quoting an unnamed poster on the Guardian's website. The adjectival usage lead on from this... Sorry if this made you feel uncomfortable.

That said, I'm not sure the problem is middle class men in skinny jeans. If anything, the tightness of their trousers might make them more sympathetic to those who are different 'down there'. Also, middle class men are statistically less likely to be misogynist than men of any other class. Really, its the proles and the nobs you have to watch out for.
 
 
Triplets
18:48 / 20.02.08
Oh dear.
 
 
Glenn Close But No Cigar
18:57 / 20.02.08
As in 'oh dear, I don't seem to be able to detect an intentionally totally fucking absurd claim when I see one'?

Triplets, do you seriously think that I'm even going to attempt to prove, statistically or otherwise, that middle class men are less inclined towards misogyny than the idle rich, or the work-sky poor? I think we can all agree that this, as with so many other things, is a matter of personal gnosis.
 
 
Mysterious Transfer Student
19:14 / 20.02.08
Amis bollock talker surprise!

The reason that America is the only First World country with a non-declining birth rate is because of all those things we hate about it, you know – [it's] patriarchal, church-going.

Hooray for patriarchal oppression! Sure helps those Japanese keep the birth rate up to snuff!

Oh, wait.
 
 
Olulabelle
19:14 / 20.02.08
Trips - everyone who used the word, obvs. People who didn't use the word don't need to include themselves in that do they?
 
 
The Idol Rich
08:30 / 21.02.08
middle class men are less inclined towards misogyny than the idle rich

Hey, don't pick on me.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
17:05 / 25.02.08
Everybody watch Joe Stretch, of Electro-punk band (We Are) Performance, read from his new novel!

Relevant in a horde of ways.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
20:27 / 25.02.08
"It's all so incredibly..."

GLITCH

"...erm, Stewart Home. Only we don't get to hear enough to get whether he's as funny as Home or not".



Parody or not? Who can tell? All I'm saying is that THAT HAT IS FUCKING DREADFUL. LOSE IT NAO.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
00:00 / 26.02.08
That clip did look like it might have been filmed in Stoke Newington. By a writer, no less - am I alone in thinking that maybe, just possibly ...?
 
 
petunia
00:26 / 26.02.08
It gets really good around clip 3, note:
- the guy's reattempts to speak his own words. his angst at getting it wrong (getting stressed out by being unable to seem like he doesn't care)
- 'film the emo kids!'

He really seems wish he enjoyed anal.

And Granny - I don't get the Stoke Newington reference but it's outside Manchester Victoria.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
11:57 / 26.02.08
I'm guessing Granny was wondering if maybe the guy's anxiety was down to him being, for want of a better word, "paranoid".
 
 
Alex's Grandma
13:36 / 26.02.08
It's fab stuff, to be sure, but has Joe Stretch really got a deal for 'Friction'? He appears to be reading from something that's about the size of the Yellow Pages; who in their right mind, one wonders, would pay anyone to write so much of that sort of material, rather than not?

(I'm going to feel especially ridiculous when Joe's all over The Guardian arts section in two months time, I suppose.)
 
 
All Acting Regiment
15:24 / 26.02.08
Mister Stretch certainly has a got a deal for Friction. i-D magazine, reviewing the tome between Edifice: the Photography of Jurgen Haabermaster and The Ironic Book of Little Lego The Jesus and Mary Chains described it as 'Kafka with cum-shots.'
 
 
Alex's Grandma
16:07 / 26.02.08
Christ ...
 
 
All Acting Regiment
16:51 / 26.02.08
You want more? One reader mentioned how they observed the front-cover blurb ('Anthony Burgess is alive and well, and living in Manchester!') and then opened the book at a random page to find 'Hold my cock'.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
19:49 / 26.02.08
If this is you and your friends 'having a laugh', AAR, good work! If not, the world, clearly, is about to end.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
20:07 / 26.02.08
The world's about to end, then - I was sure that Joe Stretch's novel was a sort of conceptual joke, but I've googled him now, and I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

I plan on attending all of his readings though.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
20:13 / 26.02.08
(It must be a joke on some level, right? It has to be ...)
 
 
Alex's Grandma
20:33 / 26.02.08
'Stained wet handbag memories from the night before haunt me in the dawn, but I push them away like they were tarts, because that's who I am, and that's what I do. I go for a fry-up. The bottle of ketchup reminds me of mother ... She never understood me, the bloody idiot. Well now I have my revenge. The salt in this caff reminds me of father, so I flush that down the lavs as well' etc, etc, etc.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
09:42 / 27.02.08
I don't see how you can call that anything less than revelatory.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
10:55 / 27.02.08
Wow. It really is like Stewart Home, without any of the...

...what's the concept I'm grasping for here?

-ah yes. Without any of the GOOD BITS.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
16:33 / 17.04.08
I actually came across Joe Stretch's novel in the local bookshop this afternoon. I was trying to find Will Self's new one, but it's not out yet. 'Friction', on the other hand, was very much there, a physical object, pulsating on the shelves.

It was one of those 'am I perverse enough? moments; I had the wad in my pocket, so I gave it some thought. But one of the characters wants 'a sex life, not a sex death', another wants to think about 'Dostoyevsky and erections, hairy armpits and firing squads', and that's just the jacket copy. In the meat of the text, every other paragraph does indeed, and as advertised, seem to refer to somebody's cock.

So I left before the money shot as it were.
 
 
Eloi Tsabaoth
16:48 / 17.04.08
I don't think you're actually supposed to buy or read it, just like you're not supposed to climb into the tank of 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' and have a tickle fight with the decomposing shark. The important thing is that it exists, lurking in all good book-shops like a rectangle of lymph.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
18:06 / 17.04.08
There were three copies on the shelf though. It's a smallish, indie bookshop, space is at a premium, so that hardly ever happens.

Either somebody at his publisher's (Vintage) is majorly behind his work, or Stretch put them there himself.

I suppose given the shop's proximity to Camden market, the latter's a distinct possibility.

I might try and e-mail Joe about it, see what he has to say, and then report back. I mean presumably he's got a website ...
 
 
Alex's Grandma
00:15 / 19.04.08
And indeed he does. Oh brave new world, which a malevolent busy-body such as myself has at hir fingertips! Miss Marple would have killed for this technology.

Predictably enough though, he seems like quite a nice young man.
 
 
Triplets
00:16 / 19.04.08
Has that stopped you before, though? Honestly? You buster.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
11:43 / 19.04.08
I think Granny specialises in turning nice young men into nasty young men - although with Stretch, it wouldn't seem to be much of a ... stretch.
 
 
Glenn Close But No Cigar
14:59 / 19.04.08
My favourite part of this review of Stretch's novel 'Friction' in the Independent is the claim that the protagonist Jason: wants to save us all by discovering "brand new ways of having sex". He's young – early 20s – so doesn't realise that it's all been tried before: by Sade.

Smooth operator indeed...

 
 
Alex's Grandma
04:51 / 20.04.08
You're possibly missing a level of irony in the review there, Glenn.

You should get your arse out of the office more; you should think about pleasuring random strangers as they exit the underground. Very f*** ing post-modern!
 
 
Glenn Close But No Cigar
15:29 / 20.04.08
I've often beat off groups of random strangers outside the Tube. Mostly they wear tabards, and speak incessantly about a shadowy organisation they call 'Scope', which I guess is something along the lines of HYDRA or AIM.
 
 
petunia
17:15 / 20.04.08
"Johnny's brain is a sex milkshake."
 
 
All Acting Regiment
16:05 / 21.04.08
Here's an interview!

4. What three rules would make up your manifesto?

Rule 1: Rage Rage against the dying of the light (whenever possible).

Rule 2: Don't just be yourself be something entirely different.

Rule 3: Kill freedom, the rule of freedom will make boring dick heads of us all.

5. If you were the dictator of a modern industrial country, what would
you abolish? What laws would you implement?


Oh I'd probably resign, or maybe I'd change my job title to "Dicktator",
that would be so fucking funny wouldn't it?, I say funny shit like that all the time hahahahahaha, that's fooking hilarious.
I wouldn't want to rock the boat, i'd just leave change to the ravages of time, I'd wear aviator shades, drive a black Mercedes, build a big bath and
fill it with page three stunnas and some water.
No, I'd probably abolish idleness, shit food, the very notion of nationhood,
fame, misery, Saturday night, US hegemony, unfunny jokes (except those that are unfunny in a funny way). I'd bring London down a peg or two and probably
get my mum a nice house. I'd make myself editor of The Sun, build lots of monorails and re-orientate the global economy so it makes people happy,
ambitious and well fed [...]
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
21:24 / 21.04.08
(blinks)

No... it's...

But... it can't...how?

(blinks)

So...it's pretentious twaddle...but he's also well down to earth he is...

Mind...blown... cannot control...bowels...skinny jeans...buckling...no....no...No!
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
22:13 / 21.04.08
Look, this whole thing of me not having a gun? Totally not working out.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
23:02 / 21.04.08
...you don't suppose FRICTION (I'm using capitals because I imagine that's what one is supposed to do) has a scene involving a party? A sexy party?

From the excerpts I've read, and the rest of it, I imagine that legendary story to be very much in the spirit of FRICTION.
 
  

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