Writing about Brick Lane, in a hill station in the Western Ghats of Tamil Nadu

December 25, 2011 – 12:18 pm

James Joyce wrote Ulysses in Paris, Trieste and Zurich: that’s where he went wrong. Thus has relocated to Ooty, Tamil Nadu, 8500 feet up in the Western Ghats to write the definitive work on robot shops, the tribes of Bethnal Green and anything else that fills up the page. In the spirit of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I briefly acquired a large yellow motorbike, but the combination of 270 degree hairpin bends, cows, goats, trucks, buses and the truly Zen nature of road etiquette out here led me to return the hog almost before I got the stabilisers off. Is this as a sign of wisdom finally asserting itself in my third age, a surrender to weakness and timidity or a little of both? Actually, neither. I certainly gave as good as I got, scattering tribesmen as I careered round the mountains only barely in control of my Apache and my bowels, but I decided that little old men on motorbikes evoke the image of Dennis Hopper from the Blue Velvet rather than Easy Rider period after an excited group of industrial tourists Utar Pradesh requested permission to take it in turns to be photographed with the ‘old hippy.’

So now I’ve become a hermit recluse, writing down the bones from my damp fastness up here, 1000 meters (3000 feet) higher than Katmandu, in the town where Colonel Snooker (who else?) invented snooker. Daniel Taghioff, who helped me start Thusmagazine from the very desk at which I now sit, has vacated this damp but incredibly cheap and spacious hillside cottage to campaign for the Green Party of India, leaving me an ethnic minority of one. I have inherited a cook called Shankar – obviously not Ravi – who serves lunch, tea and popcorn (?) in the afternoon and cooks an evening meal before sloping off around 3 pm to get rat arsed. The altitude sickness soon subsides, the monkeys are not dangerous and apart from a genuinely startling encounter with a gang of shemales, dressed in immaculate saris but with telltale big hands and chiselled jaws (Back Passage to India?) I have been unmolested by beggars. It’s too high up and cold for malarial mosquitoes. The plusses simply pile up.

Now all I need to do is write this book, which may or may not be about robots.

By John Kelly | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Layla and other assorted love songs from Fez

June 4, 2011 – 3:33 pm

Bab Makina, Fez, a THUS place.

I’m not sure we’ve met, but your Fez seems familiar. A whirling dervish, dressed in what appears to be a Yuri Gagarin table lamp (Thus passim).

Thus has temporarily relocated to the heart and heat of the Arab world’s oldest medieval medina. I’ve been to Fez before, and I absolutely love this city, so I’m avoiding the clichéd tourist highlights; the tannery where they cure leather for bags and jackets with pigeon guano and human piss; the curly slippers; the New Age Frenchies. I’m staying in the eclectic, Thuslike Riad Damia with its vast vestibule and TWO 1940s stereograms on the edge of the oldest part of town, focused, as you’d expect, on the spiritual side. The Fez Sacred Music Festival, now in its 17th year,  started last night with a visit from royalty and a quarantaine of musicians recounting the miserable tale of Layla and Majnun – un amour fou et mystique. You can say that again.

The legend of the sloe-eyed Layla and bedouin shepherd poet, Mulawwah, who went mad (Majnun means bonkers) is a universal tale of true love thwarted by the barriers of class, cousinhood and family opposition, set in the 7th Century Arabia of the Umayyad era, only 69 years after the Hejira. It also has mystical connotations of a journey through the seven stages of emotions, desire, conquest, detachment, spiritual solitude, unity, perplexity and rebirth.

Are you with me so far?

Armand Amar composed this oratorio mundi to open the 17th Fez Festival, which has morphed from its Sufi music origins through ‘world music’ in general to become a largely Francophone celebration of the search for the spiritual through music. The 9th Century Bab Makina, a vast natural auditorium with magnificent acoustics, demands spectacle and that’s what we got. M. Amar’s fine talents as a film music composer were in evidence from the opening shimmering, evocative western and Arab strings followed by an extraordinary tympani high on the ramparts by a slip of a girl knocking seven mighty shades out of a colossal tambour. She could have gone ten rounds with Amir Khan and whupped his skinny arse. I was hooked from that moment on.

We were not in Kansas any more. The incredibly talented, beautiful Mongolian diva, Gombodorj Byambajargal, took us to the steppes with a number warbled in indescribably sweet, sour, edge of atonal, edge of space, soaring, fluting tones. Plus, she appeared to be wearing a chandelier. I’m now her newest fan, so much so that it is predicted that Ms Byambajargal may even enter the Thus Quality Hall of Fame. (Check out what has to be the strangest Tantric Tibetan/Mongol Buddhist girl group pop video you will ever see).

After a brilliant solo from what sounded like a didgeridoo – but almost certainly wasn’t – the first act concluded with an equally startling aria at the other end of the scale from Mongolian throat singing legend Enkjargal Dandarvaanchig (seen here in Jamiroquai hat playing a three stringed thingy and singing a few bars in). From the tone, I think he was Majnun’s dad, telling him in no uncertain terms to pull himself together, stop with the poetry, get a job and find a nice girl – preferably not a blood relative – with a huge dowry.  And keep a eye on the sheep. I was in the zone, as one with the plot. The subtitles helped, to be sure.

The next few acts ebbed and flowed like the Sirocco caressing the desert sands, blowing up the skirts of the Bedouin and making the camels skittish. The extensive VIP section of the crowd remained entranced as Persian, Hindi and Arab chanteurs and chanteuses sang their side of the story. The arrangements reminded me at times of House of the Flying Daggers (Thus title but a disappointing movie – you spend all your time waiting for the flying cutlery and when it comes it’s nothing like as cutting as you’d imagined). There were epic reminders of the Maurice Jarre score for Lawrence of Arabia and a tiny hint of the Fry’s Turkish Delight ads of my youth (slogan: ‘Full of Eastern Promise’) which for all I know were inspired by the tale of Layla and Majnun from the POV of confectionery. There was an excellent Turkish librettist: perhaps that’s what set that particular hare racing in my monkey mind.

The oud was oud of this world.

The seven stages of love’s passion, pain, calamity and general arsiness culminated in a glorious spiritual awakening achieved by submission to the will of, and oneness with, Allah, signified by prolonged joyful chanting from the entire cast, a bit like the end of The Sound of Music. Enlightened and uplifted, I made my way through the throng into the dark, narrow, winding streets of the mysterious medina, in completely the wrong direction, as usual.

The Fez Festival, and Fez itself, is a uniquely Thus Happening. File under ‘you had to be there.’ And make a note to do exactly that next year.

John J Kelly.

  • PS. The title of this piece, in case you didn’t know, derives from Layla, by Derek and the Dominoes, aka Eric Clapton. This song of fou d’amour  concerns one guitar hero agonising about the ethics of taking the wife of an even bigger hero, his best friend, Beatle George Harrison. The coda, by Jim Gordon, is magnificent. Patti Boyd left George after five years of Eric’s attentions,  wasn’t entirely thrilled when he wrote the song, but confirms it alludes to the story of Layla, as told  in the 12th Century Persian poem by Nizami. So there you go. Who says Paddy’s thick?
By John Kelly | Posted in Africa, Film, Media, Middle East, World music, multiculturalism | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Hints On Self-Preservation when Attacked by a War Dog

May 21, 2011 – 4:38 pm

. . . is the first published output of one of my most-admired authors, pulp cowboy and science fiction writer, JT Edson. You may not have heard of him: despite a canon of 136 published books selling more than 27 million copies, JT ceased to be published in the UK from the 1990s, partly due to his somewhat politically incorrect views. He claimed that the American Civil War was about secession, not slavery. Drawing a bead on the Guardianistas – JT never made the Booker shortlist –  he avowed that  ’liberals’ were almost certain to be intolerant of others due to their (unjustified) superiority complex. There is merit in these observations, though he loses me with his assertion that all ‘liberals’ are homosexuals. Unsurprisingly for a chronicler of the Wild West,  he was also a vocal advocate of frontier justice and capital punishment.

My contribution to the iconography of the Wild West. I designed this record cover in 1977 in homage to pulp westerns and played bass on this turkey, a rare record which fetches £250.00 in vinyl marts, largely because of its 'absurd' graphics.

In respect of his morals, JT was typical of any middle Englander –  because that’s precisely what he was. Born in Derbyshire, he spent much of his later life in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, home of the pork pie. An erstwhile postman and fish and chip shop owner when he wasn’t writing, like Dr. Johnson, he claimed he only did it for the money. The writer of ‘A Horse called Mogollon’ and ‘You’re a Texas Ranger, Alvin Fog’ was wary of horses and claimed to have no particular affinity with the United States, though he was a fierce advocate of Texan values, up to and including his generalisation that Texans were discriminated against, specifically in Kansas.

His Wild West was hewn from his imagination, the product of an overdose of Randolph Scott, John Wayne and Audie Murphy pictures when cooped up in barracks during his stint as an army attack dog trainer. His Wild West Weltenschauen was as valid as anyone else’s: John Ford was 2nd generation Irish from Maine, John Houston was Irish, the great Hollywood studio bosses were New York Jews. JT just didn’t stray far from the badlands of Coalville. That’s all she wrote.

Edson’s oeuvre was not confined to westerns.He was also an admirer/imitator/plagiarist of the great Edgar Rice Burroughs, science fiction writer best known for Tarzan, who described his start in writing, (after a stint as a pencil sharpener) thus:

“…if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.”

So it came to pass that another JT hero, James Allenvale ‘Bunduki’ Gunn, was adopted by Tarzan after his parents were murdered by the Mau Mau. Bunduki married Tarzan’s great-granddaughter, Dawn, a Roedean-educated martial artist related to Bulldog Drummond and John Wesley Hardin. The happy couple were transported to the counter-earth planet Zillikian where they fought baddies, wild west style, in the grand tradition of Buck Rogers. Dawn’s weapon of choice was a Randall fighting knife.

My favourite JT title, ‘Wagons to Backsight’ was recommended to me by my first boss, the brilliant schlock publisher Brian Babani, who employed me to put captions on Marvel Comic strips. Working from From our dream factory above the Owl Bookshop on London’s Kentish Town Road, I was Captain Jack, agony uncle/letters editor in ‘Forces in Combat‘, a weekly compendium of particularly violent comic strips – Deathlock the Demolisher, Rom the Space Knight, Nick Fury, Agent of Shield et al – and production manager/editor/colourer-in for the first Dr Who Comic.

I wrote most, if not all the brilliant cover lines on Forces in Combat issue 8. No wonder I'm burnt out 30 years on.

I sat up late into the night, ruinously drunk, with comic artist legend, Paul Neary, letrasetting headlines such as ‘Together Again for the First Time’ to describe the merging of  SpiderMan and Incredible Hulk strips in frequent showcase editions. It was left to me to fend off the tiresome protests of the Dr Who Appreciation Society, who had the power to annoy the BBC into suspending our merchandising licence, which hung by a slender thread. “What’s wrong with describing the Krynoid as a giant alien cabbage? That’s what it is. Now fuck off and get a life before I drop the lot of you out of a high window,” I’d tell the Who groupies, conveying the spirit of Brian’s message but omitting the defenestration part. What better use of a First in American Studies? I was proof positive of the value to society of a liberal humanities education.

Why oh why did I stray from the shining path of churning out words for money? JT was right: liberals ARE wankers. Look at them today, ruining the country, nancing about marrying Tories and running off with former lesbians while allegedly getting off driving bans by pretending to be their wife. To think for a time I did their bidding, drank their vinho verde. JT never had a problem with writer’s block. Neither did I in those halcyon times.

I left Marvel Comics for The Economist and lost my way.  Since then, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons, writing economic and political analysis, indictments of savage regimes, describing ‘high level’ management malarky and penning books and arts reviews.

Belatedly, I now see all this as a lower category of war crime. Re-acquaintance with Edson has reminded me on which side of the line I stand. Henceforth, there will be more along the lines of robot shops, Yuri Gagarin, skull rings, Japanese esoteric Buddhism, whippet racing, the curse of the middle classes, aquarium kitsch, the folk art of ice cream vans. Maybe then I can write a title as compelling as ‘Hints on Self-Preservation when attacked by a War Dog,’ knock predictable flaneurs like Philip Roth off their perch and turn round the ailing fortunes of the British publishing industry.

John J Kelly

By John Kelly | Posted in British identity, Celebrity, blogging | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

The person you have called is not available, loser.

May 16, 2011 – 3:24 pm

You are held in a queue until someone can be arsed . . . .

Moore’s Law postulates that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, exponentially increasing computing power, lowering costs and putting Star Trek devices within the reach of the Kalahari bushman. Though I personally think Intel founder Gordon Moore was reaching for a soundbite when he made his famous prediction 46 years ago, the general principle has held true. The average mobile phone, much less smartphone, holds more processing power than the average desktop computer of a decade ago. Much good it does us.

The Thus Law of Modern Communications states that the ability to get a timely, logical, sensible answer to a phone call decreases according to the number of technology-enabled ways people can employ to avoid responding. In the mid 1990s, US researchers coined the phrase ‘Slamdown’ to describe the reaction of 65% of callers directed to voicemail instead of a human being. Since that time, ‘developments’ in voice recognition software, menu-driven automated roulette and general customer-hating jiggery pokery have made a routine call to buy or enquire about everyday goods and services, especially from banks, financial services providers, government, utilities and, most ironic, communications providers, a time of dread, humiliation and frustration for the majority of citizens.

If we don’t hear: ‘all of our operators are busy responding to other customers,’ there is a good chance that we’ll be charged to listen to a list of options followed by a robot voice advising that the most convenient way to deal with the query is online. Finding a telephone contact number online, meanwhile, has become increasingly and deliberately difficult, as ‘customer facing’ companies herd clients into the ether, deploying the hideous doctrine of ‘planned avoidance.’ For the companies, the principal ‘advantages’ are headcount reduction and the ability to log calls to serve as evidence in the event of a legal dispute. In many cases, the customer not only bears the cost of the transaction but pays to do the company’s work – giving a meter reading, entering credit card data, buying insurance, making a travel booking etc. Customer service doyens such as the lovely RyanAir innovated by charging a premium for telephone bookings – and now actually charge a ‘service fee’ for online bookings. Companies profit from transaction cost savings: the customer loses.

WB Yeats' visionary pose, anticipating mobile phone ennui by a good 70 years: Things fall apart; the (CALL) centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Despite the fact that ‘We are helpless, helpless helpless, helpless’ should be the default call centre music on hold, instead of Vivaldi or Sounds of the Seventies, we replicate this crassness in our private lives.  Routine avoidance of personal conversation has become pernicious and commonplace – except, it seems, on public transport, where people babble on mobiles, whilst avoiding eye contact with fellow passengers. ‘Leave a message’ is the likely response to a dialled number, itself accelerating the trend towards ‘responding’ by text or email. I’m finding that increasingly people can’t be bothered to respond by email or text either. Perhaps I should change the header from: ‘Pick up the phone or I’ll chop your head off next time I see you you’ to something less strident.

In Victorian times, there were between ten and twelve mail deliveries a day, enabling multiple correspondences across the capital within 24 hours. Technology has enabled a near-instant response, but the Second Thus Law of Modern Communications states that getting a timely reply is in inverse proportion to the likelihood of finding anyone willing or able give one. We are well and truly wired into an Age of Rudeness, disabled by technology and heading inexorably towards digital oblivion. And no, the irony of writing this message on a computer hasn’t escaped me, nor has the sad fact that due to spamming ratbags, I’ve had to temporarily disable the comments feature on our website. You’ll have to Twitter. God help us.

John J Kelly

PS. Not that anyone should give a monkeys, but the twatter suing Twitter is flying down the wing in a red shirt at the age of 38. His opportunist should be red carded for giving him such bad advice and ruining his hitherto – deserved – reputation for level headedness in a world of airheads.

By John Kelly | Posted in British identity, Culture, Technology, blogging, cloud computing, consumers | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2)

Unique Will and Kate wedding souvenirs at Brick Lane Robot Shop

April 27, 2011 – 12:37 pm

Will and Kate on the great day, as depicted by the Brick Lane Robot shop's artist in residence

Although not overtly monarchist –  the Brick Lane Robot Shop has nevertheless bowed to public pressure and issued its own unique Will and Kate souvenir wedding memorabilia. In line with our recent policy of shameless product placement, our Will and Kate wedding statuette has also been inducted to the rapidly-expanding Thus Quality Hall of Fame. Observant readers might note that the couple bear a passing resemblance to San Simon and Catrina, Oaxacan Dia de Los Muertos figurines also sold on the Brick Lane site and described as: ‘this middle-aged, loving couple are clearly middle class, happy and still in love. Pity they’re dead.’ Will and Kate are neither middle aged nor dead, and for all we know, they are happy and in love (with each other) unlike Will’s ma and pa on their great day. Kate was middle class but as of tomorrow will be catapulted to the apex of the Upper Classes. Will’s mum likewise, until she fell from grace, became a slapper, then an immaculata after dying in a paparazzi-induced Paris car crash.

The Brick Lane Robot Shop’s Will and Kate Wedding Couple have also been voted ‘Best Royal Wedding Exploitation merchandise’ by our team of judges. And they have added value. After the Royal Wedding, they may well become ‘Dodi And Di at Will and Kate’s Wedding’ souvenir statuettes, particularly since Di appears to be wearing Harrods Green – but am I veering off into the hinterlands of dubious taste here?

John J Kelly

By John Kelly | Posted in British identity, Celebrity, Culture, Media, consumerism, consumers | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

Space Evil proves Japan’s superiority to China

April 17, 2011 – 5:25 pm

Space Evil (aka Mars Demon), a Shogun amongst tin robots: 'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair'

In my twin roles of Quality guru and tin robot tycoon, I’m in a unique position to settle the debate as to whether China will unseat Japan as the manufacturing powerhouse of the global economy. In terms of sheer volume, there is no debate: China is already big boss. But quality? If you want a wobbly plastic bucket, a t shirt with unintended underarm ventilation after two washes or a can opener that doubles as an instrument of digital amputation, then China’s yer man. If, on the other hand, you want a robot you can hand down to your children, then you need Space Evil. So there you have it.

In the world of tin robots, there is only one Space Evil. He is made in Tokyo by Katsumasa Miyazawa, the Hattori Hanzo of pressed tin roboteers, at Metal House, home of smoking robots. The company’s modest, succinct and – possibly mistranslated – mission statement is an understated summation of the Japanese concept of Kaizen:

“Metal House was founded in 1943 (it used to be MARUMIYA). We were the subcontractor of HORIKAWA, YONEZAWA, NOMURA,etc.The ex-president was well-known at the tin toy industry for developing SMOKY ROBOT. We succeed to his skill and dream, we put more effort into making tin toys from now on.”

Space Evil is a more evil version – insect eyes and basilisk head – of the Horikawa Star Strider robot, which Metal House also manufacture. The Chinese copy, known as Robot 2008 in the last incarnation I have seen, is admittedly less than half the price, looks superficially the same but rather like Chinese MIG fighters, is made for fewer sorties. It looks OK on the shelf but wouldn’t even save your living room, never mind the Galaxy, from imminent destruction.

On the strength of their unbending commitment to maintaining the highest standards of manufacturing quality regardless of cost and largely in the absence of a market, Metal House Robots have been inducted with full space honours to the Thus Quality Hall of Fame. I for one would spend all my disposable income, were I to have any, on limited edition robots, especially Mad Robot type M . Thus readers planning to invest in pension funds etc. should seriously consider buying a few Metal House robots instead. The value of investments can go up and down but Space Evil, Mad Robot, Piston and Engine Robots, not to mention Monster Robot 2 can go backwards and forwards, clanking, whirring, flashing and generally striking an attitude.

John J Kelly

By John Kelly | Posted in Business, Culture, Space the Final Frontier, consumers, tin toys | Comments Off

Yuri Gagarin table lamp blasts into Thus Magazine Quality Hall of Fame

April 12, 2011 – 5:13 pm

50 years ago today, the first man in space, now commemorated with a plastic table lamp. The House of Thus also has some Gagarin pencils and keyrings, but we're not selling any of them because we like Yuri and always have. He was one of us.

50 years to the day after orbiting the earth for 89 minutes in a tiny capsule jettisoned from the mighty Vostok 2 rocket, Hero of the Soviet Union Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was awarded another gong. A plastic table lamp constructed in his honour has been inducted into ThusMagazine’s Quality Hall of Fame. The event, widely leaked on the Brick Lane Robot Shop’s secretive Facebook page, has thus far attracted no comment from Russian officials, nor has it featured on BBC Radio, seemingly obsessed with Gagarin chitter chatter on this momentous day. The award judges, long time Gagarin admirers, as opposed to Yuri-come-lately bandwagoners, have stated that both the timing and the bestowing of this honour are entirely coincidental.

Yuri Gagarin table lamp - another quality object from the House of Thus. Note the Vostok 1 scale model at its apex.

The Yuri Gagarin plastic table lamp has been chosen for its unique aesthetics, its ingenious use of a 240 volt AC/DC currency transformer to power a tiny flashlight bulb and the incomprehensible but mystical symbols surrounding its base. The lamp, imported by the Brick Lane Robot Shop from a source in the Ukraine, possibly survived Chernobyl and certainly survived Parcelforce, the brutal UK shipping company which subjected it to six weeks in orbit around various depots. The lamp, which glows in an unusual combination of red and green, often buzzes when left on for more than a few minutes, suggesting preparation for lift off. In short, the Gagarin lamp fulfills most if not all of the Thus Quality Hall of Fame criteria: it is what it is because it is Thus.

I first became interested in Yuri Gagarin as a young man when a Leeds traffic cop pulled me up for allegedly speeding on my motorbike, with the words: ‘Who the fxxx do you think you are? Yuri Gagarin?’ Wearing a helmet and sharing the same physical appearance as Yuri – short, stocky, clearly highly intelligent but wearing the tragic demeanour of somehow missing out on life after displaying early promise – I could see how the policeman might have been mistaken.

I have always empathised with the first man to see the earth from space but was never given another chance to check out the details he no doubt missed on the first, all-too-brief  recce. Some say it was because he put on too much weight on his constant round of victory tour banquets and couldn’t fit in the capsule a second time round. Others say the risk of his dying in space on a second trip was simply too great for a Soviet Deputy of immense public stature and PR value. I tend to believe the latter.

Yuri visited Manchester three months after his triumphant flight – and, like me, survived the experience. He came from a poor background in Siberia, was a modest family man to the end who liked his pint and was a great fan of tinny space hardware. Apart from Siberia, we are also alike in these respects. The enduring popularity of Yuri Gagarin, apart from his brilliant name, is that he was a man of the people: everyman and superman. His achievement lit the blue touch paper under the space race, which gave us non stick pans, pens which wrote upside down and Bowie’s Space Oddity, amongst other priceless cultural adjuncts. (Incidentally, while NASA spent millions developing upside down space biros, the Soviets simply used pencils).

Yuri Gagarin hologram keyring, another life-enhancing gem you missed because you were too lazy to visit the Brick Lane Robot Shop

In celebrating Yuri’s life and achievements, we should not forget that the youth of today take space and its oddities for granted. I recently gave away a priceless holographic Yuri Gagarin keyring to my robot shop neighbour, brilliant wedding photographer Nick White, in exchange for a hideous 1960s side table used for the Robot Shop Day of the Dead skeleton Christmas Tree pageant. ‘It’s great, mate, but who the xxxx is Yuri Gagarin?”He’s the inspiration behind the Yuri Gagarin Chernobyl table lamp. That’s who. Without him, there’d be no satellite TV,’ I replied, with a heavy heart. Nastrovye, you crazy diamond.

John J Kelly

By John Kelly | Posted in British identity, Celebrity, International Affairs, Media, Space the Final Frontier, retail | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (9)

From Hero to Zero, is Gaddafi the new Whacko Jacko?

March 23, 2011 – 8:35 pm

Though I hate to say I told you so, this Thus post from August 2009 “Where’s Gordon Brown in the Libyan Desert Storm?” deals at length in customary erudite fashion with the extraordinary rehabilitation of Whacko Jacko Gadaffi, his socialite son Saif, erstwhile cocktail guest of both Mandelson and Osborne and the strange silence surrounding the release of Al Megrahi, the world’s longest surviving terminal cancer patient. I’m particularly proud of the gratuitous and childish captions, by the way.

Oh, and let’s not forget Leetle Teetch Sarkozy, pictured in the same article warmly welcoming Gadaffi to the G20 summit. Absolutely no truth whatsoever in the crazy rumours put about by the desperate sex-crazed dictator (Gaddafi, not Sarkozy) that someone put funny money into the 2007 French election campaign.

Here's Gaddafi with his mate Berlosconi and one of his 40 virgin female bodyguards - 39 if Silvio had anything to do with it

Gaddafi may have had a head start in the race for the hotly-contested title of most bonkers, loathsome and sociopathic oil-glutted dictator in the Middle East, but he was arguably given a leg up when Ronald Reagan bombed his tent in 1987 and killed his wife, kids and relatives in a vintage example of liberal intervention. Since that time, he took every opportunity to piss off ‘The West’, supporting terrorists of all stripes and persuasions, the nuttier the better. Funny he would react like that.

The rank hypocrisy of his ‘rehabilitation’ has already been discussed in my 2009 article (Oil, money, BP, fear that it might come out in the wash that Libya was at best a bit part player at best in the Lockerbie outrage plus the fact that he was a psychopathic loony). Since he was canonised by Tony Blair Gaddafi may have stopped supporting terrorist groups targeting western interests but he murderously arsed around in Africa with impunity. Moreover, the current Tsunami of cant surrounding the reasons for bombing democracy from 35,000 feet into Libya stands violently at odds with the blind eye shown to last week’s incursion by Saudi soldiers into Bahrain, killing rebels (not freedom fighters?) opposed to the weak-chinned Sheikh presiding over western interests in that boozy  Gulf bastion of R+R and general jiggery-pokery. Complicated? Not really. File under SNAFU (Situation Normal. All Fucked Up).

John J Kelly.

By John Kelly | Posted in Development, Economics, Energy, Global security, Insurgency, Intifada, Middle East, War on Terror, democracy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Sindhi truck art tin trunks win Thus Quality Award

March 21, 2011 – 10:06 am

With feeble and insincere apologies for the interruption in the awards process, I am delighted to announce that The Robot Shop’s Sindhi truckers’ tin trunks have passed all the tests and blasted into the Thus Quality Hall of Fame.

Louis Vuitton doesn't even get to platform one in comparison to the Thus Sindhi hand painted tin trunk

Only a loony or a Hounyhym (Thus passim) could find any fault with these life-affirming and unique hand painted suitcases, made in Pakistan’s Sindh region, and coincidentally available at the Brick Lane Robot Shop. Lest you accuse the award judges of bias, I refer you to sub-criterion 32 section 3, which clearly states that ‘brilliantly-painted tin objects from troubled tribal regions that find their way to the Brick Lane Robot shop will be inducted to the Thus Quality Hall of Fame.’ Sub section 4 adds: ‘even if the Brick Lane Robot Shop is allegedly owned by Thus Media Ltd, administrators of the Thus Quality Award and even if the supplier appears to be a friend and crony of the proprietor.’ So there you have it.

Sindhi handcrafted soft toy rabbit, about as unique as you're likely to get, breeding like crazy in the Brick Lane Robot Shop

Anyone lucky enough to have travelled through the Hindu Kush to the Khyber Pass – and even luckier to have come back – could not fail to notice the vibrant and eclectic gypsy paintings on the trucks and buses. These suitcases are painted in the same style and manner. Surprisingly lightweight, robust (though a bit of a chore to get through airport metal detectors), adorned with real and imaginary animals, birds, butterflies, folk symbols and the occasional ocean liner, these objects are simply wonderful. I stack them up in my Coptic St Fortress of Solitude and use them to store towels, linen, t shirts and robots, which pretty much wraps up the inventory of my life.

If you can’t afford a tin trunk, or your imagination doesn’t run to big stuff, runners-up in the award include hand-painted Sindhi enamel mugs and Aladdin-shaped enamel teapots. You can also buy fanastical elephants, rats, rabbits and teddies, hand stitched and crafted from remnants of tapestry from equally incredible rugs, which Sindh ladies scavenge then blend to make surreally wonderful soft toys. I myself have several dozen.

My next post is likely to be about product placement. On the other hand, it might be a hymn of praise to the Middle East envoy, the saintly Tony Blair, who enjoyed a spot of product placement himself in the current issue of my former publication, Prospect, in a breathtaking example of awful timing. Watch this space and buy some tin stuff before Tony achieves his objective and the Third World War intervenes.

John J Kelly

By John Kelly | Posted in Culture, conservation, consumerism, consumers, retail | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Names not numbers, Thus Spake Portmerion

March 15, 2011 – 2:33 am

….actually, not true. For once, I listened without fidgeting and kicking the seatback of the person in front. Except during the breaks, over breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, in the bar, walking on the beach, on the bus, where I talked too much – I blame the coffee – listened and enjoyed the company of  a group of interesting and informed people. I’m sure that was the point of the Editorial Intelligence ‘Names Not Numbers’ symposium, hosted in Portmerion by my extraordinary friend, Julia Hobsbawm.

I stayed in this roundy cottage in Portmerion and was given a whole lot of stuff to think about

Back from the Clough Ellis vision of Italianate Arcadia, setting for the surreal 1970s spy series, ‘The Prisoner,’ I struggled to synthesise what I heard, present it as a General Theory of Universal Knowledge, flog it to a New Age business publisher, save the planet, buy myself a converted trawler with a bikini bird crew and bother Japanese whalers (with the bikini bird crew pole dancing round the mizzen mast).

Frankly, I was plaiting sawdust until this morning, stuck at the general theory of universal knowledge bit, and not for the first time. The whole save the planet/get some cash/buy a trawler/bother the whalers with pole dancing sirens scheme looked as dead in the water as my chances of becoming foreign policy advisor after telling Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander, another Portmerion guest, that the UN resembled a second rate, more corrupt, version of FIFA. Then I awoke to the epiphany that we are names, not numbers. Every life form on the planet  has a unique individual identity, dignity and purpose. Nature indiscriminately abhors entropy. Humans, the last, lunkheaded twirl of the evolutionary dice, persist in the deadly fallacy that they are above, not a part of, creation. Their high-handed, cack-handed interventions, based on mathematically impossible attempts to exclude uncertainty and randomness from the infinite possibilities afforded by an ever-expanding series of variable circumstances will, by nature, always generate unforeseen, counter-intuitive consequences. The more binary data we collect, the greater the hubristic illusion of control in a quantum universe. We are the deadly meddlers, psychopathic intellectual delinquents with yottabytes of information but no understanding of the tendency of exosystems to deliquesce. Or something along those lines.

Just then another thought hit, me like a great wave biffing a Japanese nuclear plant: ‘Jesus, it’s 8-30 already. I need to walk the whippet. I’ll park this stuff until I’ve seen what the others have written and knock something off tomorrow after I’ve bought a few robots and done Waitrose.’

Firing up my ecologically incorrect 1972 Beetle convertible, partly compensated by its unique interior rainforest microclimate of continual damp and lichens, I was soon yomping round Hampstead Heath, London’s last great wilderness, with no sighting of any other native species apart from George Michael and packs of exotic dogs and their walkers, dressed for the mild weather in North Face Arctic survival parkas. Coffee beaker in one hand, dogpoo bag in the other – careful which one you lift to your lips – I relegated the Mission to Explain to an internal rant about Arsenal’s inability to grasp the essential notion that the purpose of football was not to create the perfect balance sheet but to win the occasional trophy. I was considering whether a latter day Christopher Marlowe would have substituted the tale of Arsene Wenger’s Icarean 49 match unbeaten run followed by six years of no silverware for Tamburlaine the Great when I thought I saw a huge white airbag, bouncing at great speed across the manicured blasted wasteland. As everyone who wasted time in front of the TV in the 1970s instead of revising knows, whenever he tried to escape Portmerion, the Prisoner was engulfed then herded back by a giant chewing gum bubble. The genius of the series was the ambivalence as to whether the village, its inhabitants and the sheepdog bubble itself (called Rover) were real/partially real or whether we were observing the Prisoner’s dream state, induced by his captors to find out how much he knew. Was this why I had been transported to Portmerion?

This will happen if you can't remember what you learned at Portmerion

Hardly. I didn’t put my hand up once to ask a clever question, fearing the bubble would drag me out as soon as I brought tin robots or whippets into the Big Conversation but nobody noticed, much less dragged me off in an airbag. My engulfing bubble on the Heath was the dread of explaining to Julia that despite inviting me to the most stimulating and sometimes surreal weekend I have spent for a very long time, in the company of some of the most stellar minds in this or any other chiliocosm, my tendency for transference activity was once again getting the better of me. For example, revelations from Nassim Taleb that the best laid plans of mice and men always conform to SNAFU were merely reinforcing my resolve to arse around in life and achieve little. My new best friend Sylvia Earle’s plangent exposition of the wanton destruction of our oceans moved me almost to tears but didn’t stop me from discussing 1950s American nudist postcards and the vanishing folk art of ice cream vans when I sat next to the great lady at dinner.

I walked on the beach with Frieda Hughes, daughter of Ted and Sylvia Plath, two of my favourite poets, an original bard herself and a painter of profound physical and psychological depth, discussing big motorbikes (Frieda rides one, in mitigation). At breakfast with Human Rights diva Baroness Helena Kennedy I turned the conversation to Glasgow hardmen. I simply frolicked in the anarchic slipstream of my heroine, Miriam Margolyes. But I was one of the lads, to all intents and purposes. The genius of Portmerion is partly the geniuses but also the Thusness of the whole shebang. We’re all names, not numbers, individuals with collective responsibility to do the best we can. Julia’s genius is her understanding of the palette of personalities.

The overarching message, if there was one, was probably wasted on me, like the time I met the Dalai Lama and spent the few seconds in the presence of a Realised Being wondering if he was wearing a Casio or a Rolex. But if you get the chance, go to the Editorial Intelligence Names Not Numbers Symposium. For a taste of the Portmerion conversation, listen to The Forum on the BBC World Service. Make an effort to see Beeban Kidron’s documentary on the Devadasi. iPod the EI podcasts. Read anything by Frieda Hughes and Sylvia Earle’s ‘The World is Blue.’ Imagine Simon Schama having a bloody good knees up in the bar at 2 am then delivering a multidimensional summary of all the big ideas of the past 2500 years six hours later. Try to understand Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan then imagine he was sitting next to you on the bus, which, by the way, was one of those executive football team coaches with leather seats and a big round sofa at the back with loads of snacks and Sky TV  . . .  Jesus, is that the bubble again? Be seeing you.

John J Kelly

PS. Here’s a handy link to all the videos and podcasts from Portmerion

By John Kelly | Posted in British identity, Celebrity, Green issues, Human rights, International Affairs, Politics, Social studies, citizens' rights, democracy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (7)