Father Donald & the Unicorn

Father Donald was obsessed with unicorns. I was never able to uncover the reasons behind  his morbid preoccupation. Like many obsessions, I imagine that it can be traced back to some traumatic event that must have occurred during his childhood.   

“The unicorn is ruled by lust,” was a mantra that he repeated ritually and with such florid drama that it was to became his personal sacrament. Spittle would bubble up at the corners of his mouth, as if his admiration and celibate envy of the unicorn was permeating through his veneer of disapproval, like a polluted underground spring. 

One day I couldn’t take it any more.

“Father Donald!” I exclaimed “There are no fucking unicorns! The last one died at London Zoo in 1933! It was given a state funeral and is buried not five miles from where we presently stand, in the Nave at Westminster Abbey!”

It was this outburst that saw me moved from St Giles, in the capital, to the quiet rural parish of Marshbottom where (I have unofficially been informed) I am to see out my days as a priest.   

Father Donald was excommunicated two years later, after he was discovered having sex with an antique bible that dated back to the mid 1500s. I did not ask which particular book he had chosen to penetrate. Whatever one’s opinions are of his sexual deviancy, I remember him as a gentlemen, and a gentlemen never tells.

The use of live Hip Hop performances as a tool in the early diagnosis of strokes

Enclosed below is the abstract of a study that I hope to submit for funding and peer review, with an eye towards publication in a reputable medical journal. Any criticism that you feel may improve the scope or efficacy of this research will be gratefully received. Meaningful suggestions and contributions will be fully credited in the final work.

Yours in science

backwards7

The use of live Hip Hop performances as a tool in the early diagnosis of strokes 

Author affiliations 

The second album by Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back - blew my teenage mind, although its impact has been diluted by subsequent lesser works,  released mainly during the mid-late 1990s/early 2000s. 

I think that I once saw Wyclef Jean from The Fugees out and about in London , but I can’t be sure whether it was actually him, or somebody who looked a bit like him.

Abstract

Objective: To determine whether live Hip Hop performances can play a role in the early detection of strokes.

Hip Hop and its derivations have come to dominate contemporary popular music. The genre’s emphasis on tight rhymes coming at you hard from the mic, courtesy of its most accomplished MCs, make it a reliable diagnostic tool. It is largely thanks to groundbreaking research by Flavor Flav, and his choice of an analogue clock as over-sized medallion, that we can confidently state, with a high degree of accuracy, what the time is at any given moment.  

In recent years a common feature of the live Hip Hop performance has been the incitement to “Throw your hands in the air and wave ‘em around like you just don’t care.” 

The primary aim of this ritual is to generate a party vibe. Since the inability of a subject to raise their hands above their head is also a dependable indicator of a stroke in progress, it seems likely that this well-established staple of Hip Hop performance might play a key role in the early diagnosis of strokes, and therefore hasten the speed with which medical treatment can be administered. 

Design: Meta-analysis of stroke-related symptoms among Hip Hop audiences. Control groups composed of audiences of bands such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, where open displays of enjoyment of the music, beyond a subtle nodding of the head, are frowned upon, and the arms of the audience typically remain folded throughout the performance.   

Data sources: Party Hip Hop playlists or compilations. Basically anything with phat beats on it. Dubstep and any satellite genre that sounds like Techno leaking through the wall of an adjoining residence while, outside, rain falls on the plastic roof of a bus shelter, will be discounted as unsuitable, due to the unlikelihood of such music inspiring much care-free hand-waving. 

Review methods: Randomised trials correlating a live Hip Hop audience’s participation in hand-waving rituals with incidences of strokes diagnosed at said performances. 

Great care must be taken to exclude other factors that might repress or prevent hand-waving. On a basic level these include an unwillingness to join in due to shyness, an uncooperative personality, or known conditions such as autism or depression. 

The age of participants must also be taken into account. For attendees past the age of about 35, making any kind of abandoned spontaneous movement without warming-up first is inadvisable. Even allowing for a well-implemented pre-exercise regime, violently throwing your limbs in any direction is, in general, a very bad idea for anyone who is no longer in the flower of their youth. 

When reviewing elderly audience members, a slow and deliberate raising of a subject’s hands into the air, in preference over a sudden jerking movement that might conceivably throw their back out, may indicate a prudent sense of caution, as opposed to the gradual onset of a stroke.  

   

Another factor, again related to old age, that might prevent feckless hand-waving, is that accrued knowledge and experience can make it harder not to care about things. 

We must of course recognize that a responsible, fully-licensed and accredited MC will request that the audience wave their hands around “Like you just don’t care.” He or she is not for one moment suggesting that they should cease caring; only that they convey the general impression that, at this singular point in time, the fly rhymes coming from the mic have ushered them into a communal state of euphoria, in which their everyday concerns are of secondary importance to the performance currently unfolding on the stage.

Even so, pretending that you “just don’t care” can present a major challenge for the middle-aged, when in the back of their minds linger nagging doubts about raising children in a world where the boiler keeps going out and the price of apples on the open market consistently gallops ahead of inflation. 

It should also be noted that, in a club environment, other symptoms synonymous with the onset of a stroke, such as slurred speech, may be attributable to intoxication.   

Possible outcomes: New avenues of research. Possible endorsements by Doctor Dre and sponsorship deals from trainer manufacturers such as Nike and Adidas. Greater survival and recovery from strokes among fans of Hip Hop.  

 

Makoto-cho Butterfly

Makoto-cho Butterfly. Designed by Michael LaFosse. Folded by backwards7.

LaFosse has produced numerous butterfly designs over the years. He often christens them after loved ones, or people who have exerted a strong influence on his art. This particular species has been named in honour of Mr. Makoto Yamaguchi - the founder of Origami House and tireless promoter of the art of paper-folding.

On the internet, nobody can hear you say "Hmmmvvv"

It’s Monday afternoon. In record shops the length and breadth of the UK (and also in some that occupy tethered airborne units, or are underground in basements) music lovers stand before the racks of CDs and LPs wearing well-rehearsed expressions of thoughtful bemusement. 

It is likely that some of these people will find themselves subconsciously imitating a giant set of old-fashioned scales, holding a pair of discs, one in each hand, as if attempting to judge the relative merits of two prospective purchases based upon their physical weight. Others will scan track listings, or the sleeve art itself, in search of signs and portents that might indicate one record being of superior quality to the others. There are those who will fix the cover with an intense stare in an endeavour to absorb the contents by a process of osmosis. Each of one of these modes of behaviour is a speculative attempt at answering a question that has plagued mankind since before the time of Christ: Which one of these albums is worthy of the record token that my maiden aunt sent me for my 13th birthday?

There is no greater sense of existential isolation than that felt by the record collector on a limited budget, as he or she ponders which record to buy. Such is the intensity of the situation that one will often find his or her thought processes involuntarily vocalised as an enquiry to the universe that, when written down, spells the word:  “Hmmmvvvv.” It is a contemplative sound that speaks of a mind on the cusp of making a decision, and yet unable to take the final step that would distil a handful of possibilities down to a singularity.

“Hmmmvvv” is regarded in record-buying circles as the equivalent of the Hindu/Buddhist invocation: “Om.” It has a narcotic, pseudo-religious effect upon the music fan, sending them into a deep trance-like state. You may have encountered people like this in record shops, standing rooted to the spot for hours at a time, blocking easy access to the G section of Rock and Pop, as they wrestle, on some deep ontological level, over a decision to purchase either the basic jewel case edition of the new Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, or to spend an additional £3 on the Deluxe edition, which comes with a small hardback book containing moody black and white photographs of mall security guards. Occasionally the brain’s natural defences will kick in and resolve this mental deadlock with a timely burst of common sense, in which the purchase of a remastered album by the 1980s girl group Bananarama becomes the only sensible option.

Regrettably logic does not always win out. Like a piece of scratched vinyl jumping over the same three seconds of music, many record buyers may find themselves caught in a perpetual loop of indecision. When I worked in Farmer Braithwaite’s Acid Jazz Emporium, in the fictional middle-England village of Lower Maundley* we kept a broom handle behind the counter. We would use it to gently prod customers who we judged to have descended too far into this mystic state. This gentle poking would usually be accompanied by an incitement to return to reality, phrased in archaic jazz or hippie vernacular: “Time to get back on the bus, dude.” 

So integral is “Hmmmvvv” to the record buying process that when HMV opened its doors in 1921 they chose to trade under an abbreviation of the word. Regrettably many early customers phrased the name of the store as individual letters. In doing so something very special was lost to the world. I wish that I could go back in time and repeatedly punch these people while yelling “IT’S PRONOUNCED ‘HMMMVVV!’  HMMMVVV!’”

None of the pundits who have waded into the discussion on the fall of HMV have really talked about the decline of the record buyers’ vocabulary, which is expressed as much in body language as it is in words. 

Nobody looks cool or confused when purchasing music online. Nobody ever says “Hmmmvvv” when they are deliberating choices made on the Amazon website. 

Shopping on the internet is an empty process characterised by a bored, blank expression and a vague and unfocused feeling of irritable dissatisfaction, as you mechanically drag and drop a CD compilation of incidental saxophone music from The Golden Girls into your virtual basket (When I see a member of the public using a basket in a record shop I feel pity for them. If you cannot carry your purchases to the cash register then you are not worthy of owning them). It is entirely possible that your online music shopping may be a tertiary activity, undertaken on a tablet computer, while you simultaneously watch the second season of Homeland and discuss with your partner the timing of a Saturday morning visit to DFS to pick out a sofa.  

Record buying in the flesh is a solemn act of meditation. On iTunes it feels like you are filling in a particularly boring spreadsheet. Sometimes I get the urge to fly out to the Apple HQ and drag Steve Jobs by the scruff of his turtleneck to the boarded-up facade of the nearest recently-defunct record shop. 

I want to shout in his face: “Why won’t you gaze upon what thou hast wrought?” 

Then I remember that Steve Jobs is dead. He died in 2011. He may have dealt physical music a mortal blow but he did not live long enough to see it keel over. 

* Don’t bother looking up Lower Maundley in a fictional atlas of UK towns. In 1997 I sold the village to the producers of the Radio 4 soap The Archers. They promised me that they were going to incorporate it into the show but that was all a big lie. I discovered later that the village was used to test a small nuclear weapon that the BBC were planning to deploy in a future episode of Casualty. The BBC has possessed fictional nukes since 1977. Jimmy Savile used to keep one under his bed in case the police ever came round. I don’t know why there isn’t a greater public outcry about this.

The goats on the cover of Pet Sounds were all buck naked

There are seven goats on the cover of Pet Sounds, although some of them are only partially in shot as a result of their mad scramble to push their rivals, The Beach Boys, out of the frame.

The Beach Boys are the preppy looking ones at the back. They are dressed in blazers and sensible jackets. The goats are all buck naked and the one on the far left is baring its arse to the camera. Three years later in Miami, Jim Morrison will allegedly flash his penis at the audience of a Doors show, in an attempt to shatter their fragile eggshell minds. Jim Morrison wishes that he was one of the goats on the cover of Pet Sounds.

After shooting the cover photo for Pet Sounds, the goats had a disagreement and went their separate ways. Now they sue each other all the time, even though they hardly have any money. They all have flagging solo recording careers but perform very similar music. If you’ve heard one environmentally-themed goat-folk ballad about eating your garbage, you’ve heard them all. 

One of the goats, who is called Giles (His real name is Balthazar but he changed it to make himself sound less like a male stripper) claims that he wrote the song  Eve Of Destruction about his ex-girlfriend, Eve. This is a blatant lie. Even members of Stooshe know that Eve Of Destruction was penned by P.F. Sloan and is about, goth-folk duo, All About Eve’s disastrous lip-syncing fiasco on Top of the Pops in 1988.  

One Saturday in November I was so bored that I went to the Reading Festival. Like most of the UK’s music festivals it runs all year round but is only publicised as taking place on August bank holiday.

Anyway, when I went to the Reading Festival, all seven of the Pet Sounds goats were on the bill, one after the other. That’s an entire afternoon of solid goat. I wanted to express my displeasure in the time–honoured democratic way of my people, by hurling a bottle of piss at the stage. Unfortunately, just before entering the festival I had taken a legal high and the kidney Stonehenge that had ensued was preventing me from urinating. Later the hysterical prog-rockers, Muse, were able to destroy it with their on-stage death ray, however by this time the goats had gone home and there was nobody left for me to drench in piss. 

I have just referred to the diary entry that I wrote that evening. I see that I awarded this day a disappointing one and a half star rating, so that I will know to avoid it if I ever manage to build a functioning time machine.