Darragh McManus, author and journalist

Recently I was reading a blog which declared, in so many words, “Thank God we have a recession.” Apparently we had been labouring under the unbearable halter of prosperity; the Irish race had spent long years wandering, lost, through the desert of economic success and political tranquillity.

Things are much better now, this thinking goes. More meaningful. More real. We’re happier now that our eyes have been cleared of the cataract of materialism. We’re less pampered but more fulfilled, because life has become a greater struggle.

What utter rubbish.

I’ve even seen people claim they’d like to have lived during war time, which is even more ridiculous; you feel more ‘alive’ then, or some such nonsense. (I suppose this is an extension of that bizarre urge felt by insecure men to take up white-collar boxing. You only fully know yourself when you’re in the boxing ring, they say. Really? Well, you know how good you are at giving or taking a punch. What else?)

I literally can’t understand this mentality: this belief that surviving in times of penury, conflict or misery are somehow better than living in a pleasant, stable, comfortable society. It glorifies and romanticises what is Other, and constructs an entirely false equation: struggle = fulfilment and authenticity (that most misused of words).

I despise mindless consumerism as much as anyone else, and it’s right that we criticise and strive to make our country better; and yes, modern life is fundamentally dull and futile and unfulfilling. But so what? That’s what life is: a set period of vague, monotonous ennui, interspersed with heightened moments of beauty or dismay. Nobody promised it would, or should, get any better than that.

And how, by any logic, can war and plague and grinding poverty be considered desirable? Certainly, violence and drama make for great entertainment, but 300 or Enemy at the Gates are not real; they’re just actors and clever effects.

Real war is blood and pain and faeces and rats and tedium and depression and horror. Only someone who fetishises militarism and the vampire cult of battlefield nobility could think otherwise. Indeed, I often suspect there’s something a bit simple-minded about men who lionise war; they seem infantile, emotionally retarded.

You don’t even need actual warfare to descend into hell. A while back I read about a city in Mexico called Juarez, which has an incredible crime and murder rate (because of poverty and gang wars): last year alone more than 3,000 people were killed. This is absolutely staggering for a city considerably smaller than Dublin. And the details are truly horrifying: torture, burial alive, disgusting and unimaginable slaughter, scarcely believable.

And this is somehow a better or more fulfilling existence than shuffling along in our relatively peaceful, affluent, dull little country, where we can live some kind of normal life, whether happy or not? I don’t think so.

I’m happy to live in a boring, safe environment. More than that: in some senses I believe that coffee shops are one of the high-points of civilisation. I mean that literally: to while away an hour, drinking coffee and eating a cake and reading the paper…how blessed and privileged we are to be able to do something like that. How fortunate to live in a society that has reached such a pitch of civilisation.

The choice and freedom and security and luxury of it: medieval peasants or Soviet workers would have thought it fantastical, impossible. That anyone bar the tiny gilded minority could savour such earthly delights: how could such a thing be?

A cup of coffee and a slice of cake in a nice quiet environment, that’s all it is; and yet, what an unattainable dream it must seem to a Bangladeshi farmer mired in drudgery and destitution, or a Colombian mother wondering if her child will learn something at school today or be murdered on the way home.

There’s nothing more or less ‘authentic’ about being shelled or tortured, about having your humanity ground down and squeezed dry by economic exigencies. There’s no nobility in all of that. It’s just ugly and horrible and totally needless.

Anyone who actually does struggle for survival in such awful situations would kill to have a bland, unexciting, suburban existence where they won’t be hacked to death or raped or starved out of existence. And it’s immoral and disgusting for us to romanticise any of it.

It’s also hugely self-indulgent, and on a broader level, symptomatic of a particularly insidious strain of soul-sickness in the affluent west, prevalent among certain men. Returning to the war-fetish theme, these sad creatures believe that the modern world has been overly feminised; that there is no place anymore for ‘traditional’ male virtues (whatever those may be); that we are rearing generations of namby-pampy, pampered wimps who don’t know how to be a real man.

Apart from the fact that it’s weird and illogical to define yourself by gender anyway, there is a perfect solution for these gung-ho wannabe Iron Johns. If they honestly feel that safe, feminised, bland western society isn’t ‘real’ enough for them, there’s nothing stopping them from joining the marines and heading off to Afghanistan or Iraq.

They’ll find plenty of life-on-the-edge ‘authenticity’ and manly, musty brotherhood while crouched under heavy fire from 200 blood-crazed jihadists. I’ll just sit here and enjoy my coffee and cake, thanks.

First published in the Irish Times, April 2011

I once overheard a conversation in Whelan’s in which a guy advised his female friend that all her emotional and sexual needs could be met by the simple expedient of getting “a dog and a rabbit”. The canine for companionship, the well-known mechanical sex-aid for the other thing.

At least I presume that’s the order he meant it, and not the other way around.

Anyway, it seems like vibrators have assumed a place in women’s affections once occupied by chocolate. Though I understand you can now combine the two, in a variety of flavours and power settings, but that’s a subject for another day.

Tulisa Unspelleablename – you know, her off X-Factor – was caught with a vibrator at the airport. The Sex and the City gals had to stage an alcoholism-style “intervention” when Charlotte got addicted to hers. And Googling “vibrators” gets you a mind-blowing – in every sense – 24 million hits.

By the way, FBI, I only looked that up as research for this column, so don’t bust down my door and arrest me for crimes of degeneracy just yet. Don’t worry, guys, you’ll get your chance.

So is the vibrator about to replace woman’s best friend, i.e. man? If that Whelan’s conversation I unethically eavesdropped on is correct, then yes.

But hold on a second, girls. Before you go throwing himself out in the gutter and rushing off to splurge five hundred quid at dasgrossensexxxmekanik.com, read this – my list of the ways a man is better than any electrical sex-toy.

Yes, even those ones they brought out in the shape of Barack Obama’s head.

1. A vibrator won’t take out the rubbish.
2. Or the recycling.
3. Or that icky “green waste” bin that’s now a festering mulch of rotten food and swarming slugs, because the both of you were too drunk to remember it had to go out a fortnight ago.
4. A vibrator isn’t very warm to hug in bed, when you’re feeling “soooo cooooold” in that way Irish women have, as mocked/honoured by a Des Bishop sketch.
5. A vibrator won’t get up and change the channel when the remote is missing-in-action.
6. A vibrator won’t get up and change the channel AS-bleedin’-AP when the opening credits to Tallafornia are rolling.
7. A vibrator won’t do the shopping. Alright, so most fellas are probably stone useless at doing the shopping, and bring back Kinder Buenos and lemon-scented room-freshener instead of the carefully compiled list you had made out. But a vibrator can’t even manage that much.
8. A vibrator won’t investigate that noise you hear downstairs in the middle of the night.
9. In his jim-jam pants and ironic Bon Jovi t-shirt. Wielding a hurley like a samurai sword.
10. A vibrator can’t even pick up a hurley.
11. There’s another one: a vibrator can’t play hurling.
12. Or any sport. Even the crappy ones, like rugby.
13. Possibly snooker, now that I think about it.
14. A vibrator won’t explain the plot of the movie you’re watching. The one with the really straightforward story and clearly drawn characters and how the hell can you not follow this? Did you fall into a coma halfway through or something? YES, Jesus Christ, that’s the villain.
15. A vibrator won’t remove the decapitated carcass of a rat that’s been strewn around the utility room by the two cats for no apparent reason only to annoy you.
16. Or root around on all fours, searching for the head.
17. Or make grisly-but-amusing jokes about how the blood and entrails look like squiggles of kids’ paint.
18. A vibrator won’t do loud Al Pacino “Hoo-hah!” impersonations at hilariously inopportune moments. Like Great Aunt Annie’s funeral.
19. A vibrator can’t balance a balloon on its head for two minutes to entertain small children.
20. A vibrator won’t paint the house in summer. A vibrator won’t even promise to paint the house in summer, then conveniently “forget” until it’s too late in the year to do any painting.
21. A vibrator won’t tell you it loves you. (They’re notoriously commitment-shy.)
22. A vibrator makes even more noise than a man. Except for when he’s drunk. Then it’s like whoa, earplugs in folks, the deaf, blaring walrus has just trundled onto the beach.
23. A vibrator won’t write funny articles like this one.
24. A vibrator won’t read funny articles like this one to you as you lounge in the bath.
25. Which it didn’t run for you.
26. Sipping a nice glass of wine which it didn’t fetch for you out of the fridge.
27. A vibrator will never appreciate the violent delights of a good old-skool Schwarzenegger splatterfest. You don’t either, but that’s beside the point.
28. A vibrator can’t empathise with or understand someone.
29. A vibrator may seem like it’s listening – but is it really hearing what you say? I think not.

You know what’s the worst thing about men who make rape jokes? They’re such total pussies. Aren’t they? They’re pussies and wimpy faggots and sissy-assed little bitches.

Oh, sorry. I should apologise for the language. Obviously, as a relatively well-balanced human being, I don’t normally use these hateful words. But I wanted to speak to the kind of men who make rape jokes in their own language.

And what I mean is this: I mean that these guys are wimps. They’re weaklings and cowards. They are, by their own argot, whiny bitches and limp-wristed faggots.

They presumably think of themselves as tough guys, alpha male all the way, real men’s men. The sort of man who doesn’t just think he’s better than women, but knows it, goddamit. The sort of man who looks down on those of us who are feminist, pacifist, vegetarian, pro-gay rights, or less-than-all-man in any other way, with utter contempt.

They’re bad-ass motherfuckers, these ones, cool rebels who make their own rules, like a marine crossed with Che Guevara crossed with The Terminator.

Except, of course, they’re not. They’re bullies. Which is the complete antithesis of being a rebel, or being bad-ass, or cool, or tough, or courageous. Being a bully means you’re gutless, conformist, narrow-minded, stupid and vindictive. It means you suck up to the powerful and take it out on the weak.

And comedy is never really funny when it’s coming down the chain of power, is it? Like, a working-class stand-up slagging off a billionaire, that’s fine; Bill Gates taking the piss out of a homeless guy, not so funny.

So it is with rape jokes. Yes, yes, it’s just a joke, you say; but it’s not really funny when the joke’s being made by the powerful (men, the people who commit this crime) at the expense of the victims (women, almost always. Although all those rape-in-prison jokes? Yeah, they’re not very funny either).

Sure, rape-joke comic guy, you have the right to make these hideously off-colour gags. Just as you have the right to be a gigantic fucking asshole all your life. Sadly, you being an asshole isn’t yet illegal, and punishable by you being beaten to death with your own limbs. And neither is your rapey comedy.

But it still isn’t funny, and more than that, it still ain’t cool. It ain’t cool and it ain’t rebellious and it doesn’t mark you out as a hard man. It shows you up as a chicken-shit weasel.

You know what’d be a really cool thing for the likes of Daniel Tosh to do? Something that would show us just how tough and daring and macho they were.

Daniel Tosh, and all the other comedians who supported him on grounds of free speech and ‘get a sense of humour’ and ‘fuck you if you were offended’ et cetera et cetera…I’d like to see them go to a punk club in Moscow and tell jokes about assaulting the audience’s mothers or children. Or tell Holocaust gags in a Jerusalem club. Or go to Johannesburg and make some hilarious cracks about black people.

Never mind the rape jokes, the easy targets, some poor woman in the minority of a crowd. Front up, fellas. Grow a pair. Show us how fearless you really are.

I mean – you’re not going to pussy out, are you?

The movie industry isn’t particularly renowned for originality – witness the plethora of sequels, prequels, remakes, adaptations and ‘re-imaginings’ clogging up studio production slates and giving ire to anyone interested in seeing something new every so often. And did the world really need a prequel to The Scorpion King, Tremors or 2003’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, itself a remake of the 1974 original, which had, in turn, inspired a belated sequel (I know, it’s confusing)?

Of course it didn’t. While The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (either version) was primo horror fare, this isn’t quite The Godfather we’re talking about. And one shudders to imagine what the prequel involved: a young Leatherface paying his first visit to the hardware store for piano wire and a nail-gun? Mom and Pop Leatherface presenting their son with My First Little Chainsaw at Christmas?

Pretty pointless, really. But I’m not totally averse to the notion of prequels, providing the right source material can be found…

Triassic Park

An excitable Scottish billionaire constructs a fantastical theme park, recreating the long-gone Triassic era. All turns to disaster, however, when tourists realise that incremental changes in climate and the excruciatingly slow evolution of various strains of fern don’t make for a very exciting holiday, and visitor numbers drop vertiginously.

Terminator -1: Procreation Day

The sperm and egg which will one day become the future Sarah Conner team up to defend humankind against a relentless computer chip which can’t really do much and is rather immobile but will one day form part of the future Terminator’s CPU.

The Omen – Let’s Play the Waiting Game

Extremely slow-moving drama, with a running time of three billion years, as Lucifer hangs around the barren netherworld of his exile, smoking too much and waiting for the stars to align so some prophecy or other comes to pass and he can assume dominion over the world. Look out for the scene where the fallen angel plays chess with Death for 230 million years. Then they get bored and switch to Connect 4 for the next eight million.

Internally Debate Hard

John McClane ponders whether to visit his wife in Los Angelesor stay at home watching Moonlighting reruns instead. He then ponders whether or not to wear a vest that day. Starring Hayden Christensen as McClane and Bruce Willis as the vest.

The Matrix Reworked as Farce

Super-powerful, self-aware computers begin construction of an enormous fantasy world to enslave the human population, seemingly unaware that it would be far easier to use unthinking but equally warm-blooded animals. Like hippopotami. And that the energy-giving sun is blazing like billy-o a mere thousand feet above them, just beyond the low-lying toxic cloud.

Apollo 12 – Fairly Uneventful

Humdrum account of the not-at-all ill-fated Apollo 12 space mission, during which everything passes off pretty much as planned.

Squeak

Young Sydney Prescott begins elementary school one year to the day since her older sister was bullied to tears by a really mean girl in gym class. Now a pop culture-fixated juvenile psychopath is playing a terrifying game of cat-and-mouse involving nursery rhymes which reference themselves in a self-consciously post-modern style that initially seems clever but quickly becomes tiresome. Cameo appearance by Wes Craven as a furry pencil-case.

Willie Wonka: Oomps, I Did It Again

A thrusting young entrepreneur builds up a confectionery empire by using slave labour from a fourth world country populated by orange-faced dwarfs, and getting kids hooked by filling his products with Scrum-diddly-E-numbers. A tragic accident involving the Chocolate Swirl-o-vator and a batch of Diet Wonka Koke shatters his mind, turning him into a reclusive weirdo in a top hat.

Ocean’s 10

Surprisingly gritty account of the early lives of all those smug tools in nice suits, before they reinvented themselves as cheeky chappie ordinary decent criminals. Brad, George, Matt and whoever the hell else weld together the halves of crashed cars and beat the wrong man to death for informing on them to police, to the accompaniment of a funky David Holmes soundtrack.

Babe: Makin’ Bacon

Shortly after giving birth to a plucky little piglet called Babe, an unfortunate sow is butchered and processed into a wide variety of tasty pork products, including chops, hickory-smoked rashers and those disgusting feet things they eat in Cork.

ET the Barbarian

Aggressive, expansionist aliens with extremely long fingers send their top warrior on a mission to destabilise Earth before full-scale invasion. Entry into our atmosphere alters his brain chemistry and transforms him into a croaky-voiced peacenik.

Gladiator – Guy Who Sweeps Up the Coliseum

Stirring tale of a young slave with ambitions of becoming a mighty gladiator, ruling the amphitheatre and, like, getting all the chicks and glory and that. But it ends in tears as he gets drunk on an amphora of honey wine and slips into the tiger pit.

JFK – Magic/Johnson

A young magic bullet, minding its own business, is inveigled into a wide-ranging conspiracy to assassinate the American President. The bullet is promised, by Lyndon Johnson, Sam Giancana and Joe Pesci in a nasty wig, that nobody will ever know. But he begins to suspect he’s being set up as the patsy…

The Lord of the Rings: The Legend Begins

Ooh, let’s see…how about something like The Hobbit for a title? A doughty man-midget with hairy feet, travelling in search of adventure, comes across a magical ring which is sought by a Dark Lord who… Oh.

I’m not greatly fond of high summer, for reasons that are odd and obscure even to myself. There can be something stark and depressing about the season; time can feel sluggish, sickly somehow. It’s hard to hide away in summertime.

But it’s also the most sublime time of year in many ways, with the greatest capacity to dazzle and amaze. Where I live we get a beautiful light on summer evenings, or rather, a range of beautiful lights: from soft ochres to vivid reds, from a wash of organic colours to slashes of something so brilliant it nearly looks artificially generated.

Facing west towards the Atlantic, you can watch the sunset being played out as drama on a giant, skyscraping screen; all that’s missing are the velvet curtains rolling across as we fade to black, show’s over, time for bed.

The day dies slowly, languorously; it’s reluctant to go, it drags out the farewell, like an elemental orchestra returning with just one more refrain, one final flourish, and then another, and then just one more, and one more, and one more.

If it’s been a hot day, the sky is a bleed of orange and purple, vibrant and dramatic. If the day was a little cooler, maybe the sun is now drowning slowly, submerged in a layered sea of scarlet and tan.

Or perhaps there has been rain and shafts of warm sunlight are now breaking through the crust of cloud overhead, making the skyscape cinematic, almost painterly: off-yellows and strong shadows, a chiaroscuro of the elements.

At times like that you smile to yourself, and think: the universe likes me today.

Or maybe you just think. It’s natural to get contemplative while looking at the summer evening sun. And today (June 21^st) is the solstice, the longest day of the year, the slowest, most languorous dying into night. The longest time to look and think about light. Reflections on reflections.

To remember back: reading that popular science book a while ago, last summer actually, and how a lot of it was about light, that was the central contention, how everything basically is light; the entire universe described as light evolved to different stages: matter, radiowaves, ultraviolet, that book, this thought, you. Remembering how fascinating and literally wonderful you found that.

And that brings you onto thoughts about light and looking at light, and how we can never actually see the real thing we’re looking at, the heart of matter, because the sub-atomic interaction of the object with the light changes it ever-so-slightly, alters it so minutely that only God can tell the difference but this is philosophical not practical so it still matters. You think about the fact that what you see is infinitesimally but crucially different from what it would be if you weren’t looking.

And then you dawdle along a different mental path and arrive at this realisation: we cannot see anything in the present, because everything we see is light that’s been reflected off an object a microsecond before – or more, minutes or years or millennia more, in the case of stars.

Stars and aeons, stretching across time and space. Insignificant man struggling to impose order and will on blank chaos, struggling to draw his design across the canvas. And you think about art, visual art and its relationship to light. You think about how and why artists are so fascinated with it; how light is everything in visual art because light is everything we see – we only ever see reflected light, we literally can’t see the object itself, even before it changes.

Then you notice a slight chill in the air, maybe your skin notices before your mind does, and you think about these long, light-filled days. Light as everything we see and everything we are, everything that is.

Remembering back again, to something written years ago: “There is hope in the purity of light. Light is straight, constant, unyielding. Light wrestles tachyons and reins in the wilder elemental forces. Time bends but cannot defy light. Light is simple and unconquerable. This explains the literary fascination with light, the blinding pearl, the subconscious leitmotif. e = mc2 is not a mathematical formula: it is a poem to the universe.”

Then you notice it’s dusk; the light is almost gone. The late evening air now has that eerie twilight tint, like a blue filter placed over the world to gently usher us into darkness.

You close your eyes and finally stop looking. Show’s over. Time for bed.

Previously published in the Guardian’s Comment is Free section

Ah, summer – where would we be without it? Waiting anxiously for autumn to come along, presumably.

And where would we be without summer movies? I’m not just referring here to the annual blockbusters, but also what might broadly be termed ‘summer’ films: those with a theme, vibe or temporal placement within the warmest of all seasons. But how to spot them? Simply look out for these tell-tale clichés – sorry, I meant ‘signs’ – and enjoy the metaphorical ‘endless summer’ that is cinema:

The main character is a young boy from a damaged family who ‘learns’ something about life after finding a dead body down by the old Henderson place. Which is pretty ironical, when you think about it.

Or is an old geezer living in the endless flat plains of Kansas who feels a pressing urge to achieve ‘closure’ on certain issues before he pops his clogs somewhere around the two-hour mark.

Or is/are a group of sparky young girls hitching their way across America for some reason or other. Like, one of them is upset because her parents are divorcing, or some junk. Oddly, despite the fact that these ingénues are placing their trust in complete strangers – in a nation with the highest incidence of serial killers on the planet – nothing bad happens to them.

The film starts with a bunch of kids bursting out the doors of their high school and chucking their books in the hedge, to the strains of Alice Cooper’s School’s Out (for Summer).

Any romantic couple that hooks up at the start of the summer is doomed to tragedy. One of them will die of a terminal illness before the first leaves fall from the trees.

Something disastrous happens during the annual Fourth of July celebrations. Ideally these are taking place in a New England fishing village, and even more ideally, the something disastrous will involve one of the pods on the carousel being tampered with and flying off into the night. Its occupants are then impaled on one of the ubiquitous white picket fences.

Unattractive nerds lose their virginity to preposterously good-looking foreign exchange students. On the beach, by moonlight.

Several of the characters surf. It is, apparently, a ‘source’ and can change your life, swear to God. The best surfer in the bunch subsequently ships out to ’Nam, man, where the VC show scant regard for the fact that he needs his legs to stand up on the board, and proceed to blow them off.

A trip to Rome results in a super-hot romance with a beautiful Italian (gender directly inverse to gender of main protagonist).

All baseball games are played under a softly setting sun, golden dust drifting gently through the air as the plucky little slugger at the centre of the action hits a homer – whatever the hell that is – and stirring orchestral music sweeps the audience along in a tidal wave of emotional manipulation designed to hide the fact that the preceding 106 minutes blew the big one.

Fat men waddle about the place, sweating like Phil Spector in an overly warm witness stand, fanning their face with a paper and remarking to everybody, ‘Whew – hot enough for ya today?’

The film begins with the narrator – usually Richard Dreyfuss, for some reason – intoning, ‘After that summer, my life would never be the same again.’

There are chronic water shortages throughout New York as a steaming heatwave lays waste to the city. The cheeky little scamps in the Bronx, though, somehow find water to spray on passing convertibles, soaking/annoying the driver who responds by swearing at them in a comical way.

A huge shark eats lots of bathers in a small coastal town.

A blazing hot sun appears in shot quite frequently.

The movie has the word ‘Summer’ in the title.

The credits roll over likeable potheads, pneumatic babes in string bikinis and fun-loving off-duty cops partying on down at the beach.

Recent decades saw Premier League football transformed from a sport for the working man to a branch of the global entertainment industry. The hype, glamour, wealth, rows, tears, ridiculous diamond-cross earrings…one could as well be enjoying a Bette Davis melodrama as watching 22 athletes kicking a ball.

And with the influx of foreigners to the English game, we had exotic names to match. No longer were all players called Tommy Robson or Ronnie Smith or Ronnie Robson. Now the Premier League is a footballing Tower of (Ryan) Babel, with all nationalities and languages represented.

Many names have been so colourful, unusual and cool-sounding that they make you think less of a sweaty, dull-witted ball-player, and more of a character in some yet-to-be-produced movie…

Juan Sebastian Veron: moody first lieutenant of Man from Del Monte-style agricultural tycoon

Gustavo Poyet: dashing South American Marxist guerrilla who smokes big cheroots

Mark Viduka: loose cannon cop played by Kurt Russell in so-so actioner

Mart Poom: weedy warm-up comedian in Vegas nightclub with “connections”

Nikos Dabizas: playboy son of Greek shipping magnate; dating horse-faced minor British royal

Emerson Thome: mediocre mid-nineteenth century American novelist

Mark Fish: cheesy sports reporter on little-watched cable TV station

Alpay: semi-mythical freedom fighter based in upper Himalayan region permanently wreathed in cloud

Fabrizio Ravanelli: arrogant, annoyingly handsome Milanese racing-driver

Darius Vassell: Star Trek android with idiosyncratic technological innovation in front cortex

Finidi George: unnecessary sidekick introduced to boost merchandise tie-ins on Barney movie

Uwe Rosler: 1970s East German professional assassin who wears horrible tinted glasses

Claus Lundekvam: 1970s East German skier stripped of world title after drugs scandal. Also wears tinted glasses

Boudewijn Zenden: Jedi master in one of those dreadful Star Wars prequels

Junior Lewis: token black character in Guy Ritchie flick

Stig Inge Bjornebye: Norwegian whaler with giant white beard rivalling the original Cap’n Bird’s Eye

Ugo Ehiogu: cannibal tribal chief from xenophobic Tarzan movies of 1930s

Lauren: international supermodel of either gender, famous for a studied sort of chic indifference

Alessandro Pistone: scion of Cosa Nostra family, holed up in Sicilian mountains

Sami Hyypia: shot-putter fondly remembered for hilarious 1980s incident when he accidentally brained an official

Daniele Dichio: Fabio-style model of amazing pecs and flowing Samson-esque hair

Bernt Haas: mayor of Cologne 1982-86, involved in monumentally dull rezoning scandal

Rufus Brevett: village parson in dreary adaptation of George Elliot novel about ruinous effects of Industrial Revolution

Titus Bramble: contemporary of Rufus Brevett

Christian Ziege: avant garde Berlin dance guru creating soundscapes so impenetrable they make Aphex Twin sound like Aqua

Rio Ferdinand: sexually ambiguous Portuguese crooner with permatan and hideous frizzy hair

Shaka Hislop: Emperor of Fifth Quadrant and Overlord of Known Multiverse in daft fantasy/sci-fi epic

Martijn Reuser: mousy Brussels bureaucrat who discovers unknown inner steel in claustrophobic spy thriller

Frédéric Kanouté: despotic ruler of Central African country; loves Mercedes, child soldiers and aid money

Jürgen Macho: villainous star of unintentionally homoerotic bodybuilding-themed Bavarian drama

Vedran Ćorluka: thinly veiled Aragorn rip-off in thinly veiled Lord of the Rings rip-off, probably played by Adrian Paul

Regi Blinker: vicious East End gangster with incongruously cutesy nickname in latest Danny Dyer abomination

Nicolas Anelka: underfed maths genius who inadvertently creates world-destroying super-weapon

Nigel Quashie: hyperactive, possibly bipolar commercial radio DJ with huge joke spectacles and puppet sidekick

Jacopo Sala: Everyman main character in whimsical but profound drama about the existential struggle of quitting smoking

Zoltán Gera: metaphorically and literally faceless intergalactic assassin in Iain M Banks adaptation

Carlo Nash: grizzled, hard-drinking bounty hunter with giant moustache, working Tex-Mex border

Tony Cascarino: low-level mob bagman so fat he wheezes loudly every time he takes a breath

Sylvan Ebanks-Blake: dissolute young aristocrat cultivating opium habit in 1920s Istanbul

Tal Ben-Haim: prosperous Nazarene merchant in indescribably hokey Bible picture

Ruud van Nistelrooy: urbane Rotterdam-based fence of stolen artwork in breezy but implausible crime caper

Bosko Balaban: title character of avant-garde 1970s cartoon much-loved by Croatians and incomprehensible to everyone else

Gianfranco Zola: Renaissance artist’s apprentice who becomes favourite of one of the more saturnine Popes

Ramon Vega: sociopathic Florida hitman with fondness for lime-green shirts and keeping fingers as keepsakes

Wilson Palacios: soul legend who literally took a shot at James Brown in heated royalties row

Igor Biscan: terrifyingly enormous KGB killing machine who tries to crush Bond’s head with his steel teeth

Abel Xavier: Messianic leader of hemp-wearing commune in sandblasted post-apocalyptic desert

Marco Boogers: bin-dwelling, snot-infatuated hero of scatological Roald Dahl-style children’s story

Francisco de Pedro: ancient Cuban band leader; still plays every day outside same barrio café

Brett Angell: lead singer in poodle-metal band Harley’z Angelz, best known for cowboy ballad Love Shot Down

Savo Milosevic: veteran of Balkans war, now obnoxious grenade-toting mercenary in Predator/Aliens/Expendables mash-up

Attilio Lombardo: doughty right-hand man to Garibaldi during Italian unification wars; wore giant feather in hat

Winston Bogarde: anthropomorphised rapping biro, almost certainly played by Will Smith, in manipulative kids’ flick

Tony Vidmar: ace fighter pilot in Battlestar Galactica-type hokum, bedevilled by useless special effects

Cobi Jones: neutered, unthreatening lead in tweenie phenomenon about school-kid with secret life as pop-star

Shola Ameobi: charismatic but violently unstable leader of Black Power faction in Oz-style max-security prison

Stephane Guivarc’h: Parisian academic dying of self-loathing in intense, geologically slow-moving drama

Mixu Paatelainen: short-lived and frankly inexplicable Finnish Pokemon, introduced to boost waning popularity

Gunnar Nielsen: leather-faced, cigar-chomping drill sergeant in vaguely fascist but fun boot-camp drama

TWO coppers are looking at us, one old and heavy and the other like a character from an American teen soap. He’s got a slim neck and baby-soft skin, and he looks nervous. He flexes his shoulders and stares hard, but it’s obviously an act. He’s just a boy; this is probably his first time. I suddenly feel an invisible surge from the back, that unprompted wash of electricity, and my stomach responds – a spark, a spinal quiver of sympathy. This is the purest moment of all: the anticipation, the apprehension, my heels off the ground and a gathering frenzy in my brain. Synapses shutting down in preparation, switching to automatic. Instinct aroused, analysing data, assessing physical evidence. Readying the mechanism for action. I breathe quickly, three, four times; I shudder deliberately and clench my fists and feel ready.

Jacko has a theory, that wars are only ever fought for money. They’re the manipulation of crowd energy by a ruling elite. He says that violence is natural to the individual human being – the first man died because the second man probably bludgeoned him with a dinosaur bone – but war is the organised expression. War is cynical, unnecessary. War, he says, is the corporatisation of innate instincts. It’s artificial, an affront to whatever god made us. Jacko has theories on a lot of things. He reveres the dynamism, the possibility of the collective. We all trust Jacko. We believe him when he says we are reclaiming the collective divinity.

A shout comes from the back, carried over heads like a rock-star on a stage-dive. It floats, it bobs along, it reaches our position, just behind the men with placards. Some of the content is lost to the ether by the time we hear it, interference in the transmission. ‘On their way…pinks and greens…give them a good game…’ I strain my neck and look off toward the right, behind the phalanx of coppers in discreet riot gear, country heads and big meaty hands grasping batons. They don’t look threatening enough, the coppers; their faces are too ruddy, too friendly. Their jackets are bright yellow and none of them are wearing headgear. That’s how a riot copper should dress: World War I gas masks, those terrifying bug-eyes, dark fatigues, shiny black clubs, pistols snapped against their legs with strong Velcro. These jokers look like a bunch of farmers in a fancy dress parade.

Jacko is on the phone to one of his lads, one of the covert group who’ve infiltrated the enemy. They’re talking in code – the guy must be marching with them, right now, in our direction: ‘How much money did you get from the machine?’ ‘Was Mum at home when you called?’ ‘I’ll see you at the pool-hall later on.’ Banal, weighted words. Jacko now knows how many of them are approaching, whether they’re tooled up, how many men and how many women, if there are any television cameras accompanying them, what sort of mood they seem in. Angry, dumb enough to start a fight; restrained and self-righteous; a stoic sort of determination, maybe. They won’t be drunk or toked up, almost certainly, but neither are we; Jacko insists all of us are in our right minds when we gather.

A senior-looking copper has arrived; he confers with two or three of the plods. Pursed whispers, stern expressions. The transparent mannerisms of people who don’t want to be noticed. The senior copper takes a step towards us; he hesitates, ponders, takes another step, then stops. He sees that a flag has been unfurled, heavy canvas on a steel support, a grave twirl round the maypole. The canvas makes that whup-whup-whup sound as the wind hits it. The senior copper’s face reddens; he’s angry now. A second, unbidden charge runs through the group – happiness at his anger, a swelling anticipation. The euphoria of predictable outcomes. A few people laugh loudly. One shouts, ‘Go home, pig. You’ve no place here.’ The copper retreats, speaks into a mobile phone, confers some more.

Jacko fixes his glasses squarely on the bridge of his nose, spits on the ground, in the coppers’ general direction. He likes to wear his glasses in the rain, he says; he doesn’t dry them off until he reaches home. Walking with water on your spectacles, Jacko says, is like moving through a constantly changing prism. Light refracting on itself as you advance, blurs and bright curves. It’s a contortion of the world. He beckons me towards him, and I get nervous. Jacko has told me before that I’m too small to be here, too young at eighteen. ‘You’re puny,’ he said, ‘you have puny arms. Stay at home or you’ll get hurt.’ I want to prove my strength to everyone. They know I have courage, I want to show them I am strong. Jacko says quietly to me, ‘Go round the group. Tell everyone get ready. And be subtle.’

I nod, relieved, and make my way around the back of the gathering, my sneakers skimming the tarmac. I feel light in my feet, effervescent. Skinny jeans, tight at the ankles. I could leap the nearest building; my body’s energy glows at my fingertips. I move through the crowd, leaning in to various people, reliable people. Whispers and head gestures, equivocal commands, puzzles with predetermined answers. They nod and whisper back. They pass the message along, a hushed domino. They tense, their bodies stretching, making ready. I can feel the charge building and shifting, that crystalline rumble from somewhere in the world’s centre, deep in the belly of the animal.

I return to my place at Jacko’s side. He scratches his thin beard and sighs, impatient. The senior copper is taking on a pall of desperation. He swallows and strides towards Jacko. He looks disdainfully at all of us – I have to admire his balls – and addresses Jacko directly, man to man, that forced intimacy of control. ‘Are you the ringleader here?’ Jacko looks away from him. ‘We have a right to be here. I’m not talking to you.’ The copper flushes, fever-red rising through his face like thermometer mercury. He leans in and says, ‘If you’re looking for trouble today you’ll get it. Look at me. Do you want trouble?’ Jacko smiles at the ground.

Such assurance, such purity of faith in his own creation. I think I’m in love with Jacko, though I know he doesn’t like my type. He’s pale and self-contained, a ferocious angel born in the flaming heart of his own fall, and he is beautiful. Jacko reveals to us what the world would keep hidden. He tells us the truth and leaves us with it, solitary, to be fortified or devoured. Jacko makes us greater than what we are.

The copper walks backwards, slowly, rejoining his men. He and his lieutenant shake their heads, sadly. They close their eyes and open them with a fresh resolve. I nod like a toy dog and smile to myself: we will play today. The guy next to me starts grinding his teeth; his breath, frantic, through enlarged nostrils. Random shouts throughout the group, senseless, disordered. These are expressions of a deeper yearning. The coppers form a line in front, hard plastic shields touching, gazes determinedly above our heads. They stare out to the hope of a happy resolution, to the future, to relieved pints and exaggerated war stories later this evening. They are physically bigger than us but look disorganised, green, somehow amateurish. Their expressions betray fear and a sense of duty, a fatalistic loyalty to command. They will not move aside.

People at the rear push forward, a wave of propulsion and organic heat, chants tentatively begun and encouraged. Jacko steadies his feet against the pressure, reaches into his knapsack and pulls out an extendable steel baton. He brought this from Holland. It’s thin and economical, a brutal sheen to the handle’s curve. He says, almost to himself, ‘Alright, alright. This is it.’ The teethgrinder next to me says, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ his jawbone nearly resting on my shoulder. Then they appear, around the corner to the right, tired-looking and ill-prepared, dowdy clothes, large banners proclaiming ‘Down with Fascism,’ ‘Anti-Nazi League,’ ‘Bash the Fash!’ They’re chanting something, one of their slogans, a fairly high pitch to the accumulated voice.

They stop when they see us. The chant fades. I fix on one – a tall guy, bearded, sincerity and weakness seeping from his pores – and pull the hammer from my bag. I run my thumb along the head, that sharp-edged curve, smooth, traces of moistness. The lefties stop, stumbling on one another, a delayed ripple of surprise through their assembly. I see Jacko smile, follow the course of it, see his man on the other side, faintly returning the smile. I smile myself in understanding: they weren’t expecting us. Jacko turns to two very big guys behind him, twirls his fingers. They hoist a huge placard, the cross in the red circle, our initials underneath. Jacko snaps his feet together, makes the salute, towards the coppers and the lefties. A declaration, a provocation, righteousness and inevitability.

Jacko turns to the group, shouts, ‘Now! Yes!’ The coppers brace themselves; flexed thigh muscles, a pre-willingness to feel pain. I respect their bravery, and vow to avoid inflicting unnecessary hurt on them. I feel boundless, almighty; the goddess renewed in me. I am more than one girl now. The lefties begin to retreat, singly, clumsily, paralysed in dread. Their eyes admit what their minds will not: it is too late. There is no escape today. We are too powerful, too united; we are the devil’s breath of a brushfire sweeping at speed through a narrow valley. Jacko leads us and we become he: we become the ferocious angel sending fallen stars. Jacko starts to run, and we run with him.

Previously published at Eunoia Review

Well, there’s strange: workaday director par non-excellence, the late John Hughes, wrote short stories in his spare time and published some of them pseudonymously. Stranger still, they’re actually not all that bad; certainly not as bad as you might expect of a man who inflicted Pretty in Pink, Uncle Buck and Some Kind of Wonderful on cinemagoers.

Hughes’ fiction isn’t quite Dostoevsky, granted. But it’s nicely crafted, wryly humorous, with an easy, breezy style, reading sort of like a not-quite-as-talented Douglas Coupland.

It appears, contrary to mine and everyone else’s presumptions, that Hughes – once described as the most pathological ideas-recycler in Hollywood – really did have more than one string to his bow.

Which gets me to wondering: are there other Renaissance men and women in La La Land, their literary talents unheralded and ambitions unfulfilled? Could the greasy till of the movie industry have crushed other hands, hands yearning to pick up the quill and give life and letters to their innermost thoughts?

And I don’t mean the quasi-literary directors – yer Allens and Linklaters and Coens and Hanekes and so on – but rather those mediocre thumpers, those shills for the corporation, those rapacious vulgarians and cynical old chancers who churn out the soulless drek that has colonised our picture-houses.

I wonder does Michael Bay, for instance, ever look up from admiring his gold-plated voice-activated gunship helicopter and muse to himself, “Will I ever get around to crafting that collection of villanelles on the theme of the subjective observer’s inability to know, absolutely and in the ontological sense, whether something does not exist? Or will this damn moneymaking continue to get in the way?”

Has one of the Farrelly brothers ever said to the other, “You know what, Bobby/Peter – let’s ditch this gross-out comedy about a fat midget who can only metabolise the earwax of horses, and get cracking on that epic poem in dactylic hexameter about the lifecycle of the Jacobaea vulgaris, also known as the Ragweed, Stinking Nanny or Stammerwort, that we’ve always talked about? Come on, whaddya say, Peter/Bobby?”

Is the ludicrously named McG, right now, hunched over a rackety old manual typewriter in the bowels of a Bel Air mansion that cost all the money ever to exist in the history of mankind, hammering out a stream-of-consciousness magic-realist fable about a vagrant wandering through 15th century India in search of a persimmon tree imbued with mystical powers?

Has Renny Harlin started work yet on his homage to Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, in which the narrator now not only comments on the text but comments on the fact that he’s commenting on the text, thus creating a self-self-self-reflexive miasma of meta-textuality leavened only by pastiches of Irish lyric sagas increasingly indistinguishable from the original and thus positing the question, is a pastiche within a homage to a pastiche/homage actually a pastiche and/or homage?

And does that sentence even make any sense?

Is Brett Ratner, as we speak, bashing his temple with an old-style revolver and tearfully chugging from a bottle of sour mash as he wrestles with a fiendishly difficult, and perhaps unsolvable, artistic dilemma: does the Petrarchan or the Spenserian sonnet form better suit the subject of architectural formalism during the Kamakura Shogunate? Or is he about to lower the bar and settle for a lively, charming little volume of Wodehousian whimsy?

Being realistic about it, probably not. It’s more likely that – per my previous post about Ahn-hult Schwarzenegger – Michael or Renny or G will take a quick skim through The Iliad for Dummies and retool it as “an adrenaline-fuelled mythical thrill-ride crammed with thrilling sword-on-sword action, hot babes carrying grapes, and unintentional but nonetheless hilarious homosexual undertones”.

Readers/viewers/whoever will be exhorted to “get ready for the ball-busting, wall-to-wall thrill-ride of your life”. Cue thousands of despairing classical scholars killing themselves by the time-honoured and retro-chic consumption of hemlock.

Thanks a lot, John Hughes. Like giving the world Judd Nelson wasn’t enough.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is writing a book – and I’m so excited, I could scream. If not for the fact that the Governator would then call me a girlie-man and kick sand in my faces.

He’s been banging on about Total Recall – great title – on Twitter, asking for input and suggestions. Well, here’s one: don’t just churn out a humdrum, samey autobiography, like every other celebrity.

You’re bigger than that, Arnie. Much, much bigger.

Instead, rework a bunch of famous books in the classic Schwarzenegger style: gigantic guns, violence, action, blood, weirdly over-defined muscles, etc.

Take Homer’s Iliad. As it stands, an epic poem – shudder – that’s borderline unreadable. Retooled in Aahnhult fashion, though, it’s an adrenaline-fuelled mythical thrill-ride crammed with thrilling sword-on-sword action, hot babes carrying grapes, and unintentional but nonetheless hilarious homosexual undertones.

We even have a tag-line for the cover: “The Iliad…just got iller.”

No more messing around in Moby Dick: the whale gets taken down in the first chapter with a sonar-equipped torpedo. The rest of the book is Cap’n Arnie leading the crew in sea-shanties and vigorous on-deck callanetics programmes.

Frankenstein now has a fully-operational rocket launcher instead of a criminal’s arm fitted to his body. Heathcliffe is an undercover agent bringing down the Linton crime empire from the inside.

And say hello to Alice’s Extreme Adventures in Wonderland, Dr Jekyll Kicks Mr Hyde’s Ass, To Kill a Mockingbird and Then Make a Funny Quip About It…

The world of literature…is about to EXPLODE.