The Tesco Scribe Phenomenon

Despite being less than 100 pages long per issue, Tesco Magazine has become known as a prolific breeding ground for some of the world’s greatest authors. We will celebrate the history of this zeitgeist by a retrospective on some of those very authors, their time at the magazine, and what they did afterward.

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy first began his career by writing copy for the fashion section. He was then promoted after two years to writing the puns that go along with the fashion section, for example, in an historic issue he penned the delectable “Get Shorty” for a piece on summer holiday wear. The fashion editor promptly resigned elevating Tolstoy to that very position. Through this role he was able to bring back the trend of two-foot long beards for men, and three-foot long beards for women.
Following his time at Tesco, Tolstoy wrote something called War and Peace; however he will always be remembered as the man who transmuted the entire fashion segment into something that shook the very fabric of society.

John Milton was a young intern who worked on the ‘relationships’ section. He would often detail the haphazard ways that dates can go awry, including what to do “if your man suddenly transforms into a hellish demon.” His speciality was, however, wedding disasters; readers would write in with their nightmare tales to which he would reply with some exemplary puritan prose to set the matter right.
Some complaints had permeated the Tesco Magazine HQ about his use of the word ‘penile’, and so he was ousted just prior to his 25th birthday. He never quite got over this incident, and went onto write about it in Paradise Lost (paradise here standing as Tesco).

Herman Melville began in the ‘kids in the kitchen’ portion of the magazine. He was primarily charged with the task of making sure the children did not eat the spatulas. One day supervising a particularly debauched group of four year olds whilst waiting for the photographer to come, one of the youngsters had input a rather large chunk of cod into their gullet prompting a choking frenzy of spasmodic pulsations. The child later died in hospital. Melville returned to the scene of the episode the next day and burned all remnants of the cursed fish.
It is unknown whether this incident provoked Melville to write Moby Dick, but the fact that the child was named Ahab raises the chances.

Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol first penned a travel article on the nature of his native Ukraine, glamorising it with the repeated use of the word ‘lovely’. Gogol was sent to Germany to write a piece about lederhosen, but due to excesses of prostitutes and marzipan ended up writing Dead Souls. Despite pleading with the editor to at least print it, forgetting that it was novel-length, he was fired with no compensation.

Honore de Balzac was no further than two weeks into his employment when he produced the stunningly legendary review of ‘Tesco ready-made shepard’s pie’. In it he produced allegorical references to bourgeois monarch Louis Philippe and algae; such was the deep mental impact of this prose that most of the readership reports an almost simultaneous dropping of the magazine. Reports of readers running around in circles whilst in ecstasies of realism are as yet unfounded.

William S. Burroughs’ best known influence on this literary behemoth was that of effectuating the inclusion of the ‘free’ marquee in the top corner of the front page. However his suggestions of the offering of free sachets of mugwump jissom on the cover were less popular.
He spent most of his time as sub-editor in charge of the ‘wellbeing’ segment. His writing here mainly consisted of reviewing sun tan lotion, and it is thought that his choice for experimentation involved young male interns and a cauldron of yage. How this helped in editorialised reviewing is unspecified, but his office was known as a hive of depraved vitiation which smelled like E45.

The magazine has not only proved the starting point for a plethora of novelists and poets, well-known surrealist Salvador Dali was for a while the art director of the publication. His most important contribution was undoubtedly the issue bearing his Hypercubic Christ on the front cover, which went on to become the second highest selling edition of all time, second only to that issue with Jade from Big Brother on the cover.

The Principles of Fahology

Fahology is an exciting new field of academic research and study that aims to identify trends located within theoretical discourse on blue hue and celestial blonde hair.

Due to the unsurpassed scale of Jeff Fahey there needs to be entire academic fields dedicated to each syllable, thus we have Fahology.

Fahology is the study of the Fah aspect of Jeff Fahey, in accordance with stipulations established by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s outline on Faheyian treatises. Despite its relatively recent conception, strains of teachings on the ‘Fah’ can be traced back to Socrates, he is often cited as alluding to the subject during diatribes on piety.

A set of tangible principles have been erected to guide all eventual students of Fahology (for we know they will come in their hordes), the following are the fundamentals of it:

• Blue is the colour, and the colour is blue, never will the colour not be blue, and the colour will never be one other than blue
• All existentialist aspects in research arise from the character Michael Dobie in The Sculptress (2000)
• Never must a student of the Fah contemplate conversion to the Fay
• Never must a student of the Fah ponder the delicacies of the wild Jobe hair
• Never must a student of the Fah take thy Jeff’s name in vain
• Study of Extramarital (1999) in an Ontological context is compulsory
• Lethal Tender aka Deadly Currents (1997) t-shirts must be bought by students prior to term time, and students are required to wear them at all classes
• Key text: Genghis Gert, (2003) “Fah: a whirlwind journey into the history of all matter and energy”
• Trips to Olean, New York must be made in compliance with Sugarcoat’s study of the ‘topography of a Fah’
• Any students attempting to reach the deepest recesses of the Fah via a medium will be thoroughly punished
• Those students wishing to bring their own copy of Sketch Artist 2: The Hands That See (1992) may do so, however pristine DVD editions complete with interactive menu will be made available free of charge

Have a good time, and remember Fahey is always with you.

Quirks and Postures: Confessions of the socially ignoble

Food minimalism

I made a discovery recently, during contemplations on an article never written, that I seem to be some sort of food minimalist. This includes a number of little idiosyncrasies that have at times caused questions and awkward glances. A few of them are as follows (you’ll see how this plays into the whole minimalist theory):
Pancakes with nothing on them
Plain burgers
Crackers with little more than butter
Dry Weetabix

Also I don’t really like to smother my plate with as much as possible, two or three individual foods are more than enough. And arrangement of these is important, for example, I usually attempt to keep gravy just for meats and mashed potato, you’ll find me frequently doing battle with gravy in an attempt to save my roast potatoes from a soggy future.

Conduct

I have a tendency to be profoundly intelligent at the wrong moment, like that time in P2 when I put forth the notion that Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason would have been more appropriately titled The Critique of Pure Shite.

The War Game

At a time when hawkish neo-cons sit atop of the governmental hierarchy of the United States and relentless jihadi’s lurk in the creases of the world, Peter Watkins’ The War Game proves itself to be just as relevant today as it was during the height of the Cold War.

A faux documentary made in 1965, The War Game details the potential event of a nuclear attack on a major English city. It illustrates the build-up of preventative ground activities, such as citizens being moved out of their own homes and into the houses of other, usually uninviting, people, and the regular sandbagging procedures that we always see in these circumstances. Then we witness the actual event of the nuclear blast and the consequences to follow. It also outlines numerous discrepancies in the British government’s preparatory measures.

Set-up in many ways as a simple information film, the sort that would have been widely seen during the Second World War, the film’s grainy black and white images, matter-of-fact narration, and ‘expert’ testimonies have a powerfully profound effect in terms of replicating both the medium it aims to duplicate and reality itself. The film won the Best Documentary Oscar at the 1967 Academy Awards, although it is essentially a piece of fiction.

The film’s central point is to highlight the insanity evident in nuclear warfare, and does so expertly. Every powerful leader on the globe, whether it’s a nuclear or non-nuclear state, should watch this film; it’s a message that isn’t simply conferred by language, the images in the film of the nuclear detonation and fallout are very thought provoking. From the old ladies suffering from deep psychological trauma, to the man verging on a breakdown at the thought of his children growing up with potential radiation-induced cancers, or the young causalities with burns on their eyes and arms.

It’s fundamentally an anti-nuclear statement; it brings together parallels of the hypothetical attack with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the WW2 pummelling of Dresden. It shows the innocent face of the results of those decisions, decisions inevitably taken by a small number of individuals in high governmental positions.

To go back to my opening sentence, this film is obviously still pertinent to the world situation, regardless of the official end of the Cold War. We can see this with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty authority being flouted as the US reviews it’s stance on nuclear weapon use (concerning issues of pre-emptive attack), the desire of certain countries to attain nuclear weapons (in some cases as a preventative measure, a resurfacing of the old Cold War mentality), and rogue, countryless groups like Al-Qaeda exist, determined to push forward their militant movements. The War Game is frightening in many ways, and, hopefully, reminds us that during war (conventional or nuclear) it’s the ordinary citizens that are the ones to suffer.

The Ken Foree Debacle

Amidst an ocean of discussion on a heap of wide ranging issues, from precisely how mad was that wild-haired, ecclesiastical individual in Battle Potemkin, to which eye of Jeff Fahey’s is the entire cosmos more visible in, a certain topic of divine importance has arisen between The Duke and I, one which threatens to engulf us all.

Ken Foree, best known for thespian duties in Dawn of the Dead and From Beyond, is at the crux of the issue. Now I contend that it is pronounced ‘For-ee’, whereas The Duke postulates ‘For-ray’. Now we’ll ignore the comparisons this situation has with the Fa-hey/Fay-hey debates for now, although of course The Duke and I sit at the same table on that one.

I could perhaps entertain the idea of ‘For-ray’ if an accent were present on an ‘e’ or two, but no, ain’t no frenchification occurring here. And he’s not French nationality either, born, according to the IMDB, in Indianapolis.

As we discussed this again a couple of days ago, or yesterday, a mutual friend of ours consented that the key syllable in a surname, to him and his Irish brethren, was the first, in this case ‘For’, and so by corollary the later part/s fade into insignificance. Using this notion of anthroponymic study, it’s clear that emphasis, equal or more, needs to be attributed to the second syllable for The Duke’s interpretations to hold true, therefore it’s ‘For-ee’.

Now I’m sure this matter has yet to be fully rectified, and disputes will continue, but at least it’s out there in the public domain now.

Tri Bruce

Bruce Campbell, wandering a post-apocalyptic landscape where chins have risen to cultural apotheosis, he runs his own chin portfolio business

Bruce Dickenson, ripped from a recording studio by a troupe of minxy imps and transported to 7^th century England, he runs forever pursued by a maniacal 10ft high iron maiden

Bruce Willis, swims the flows of the subconscious in constant strive to die harder

“Fuck ye imp bastards!”/highways enlaced with mammoth billboards of chin imagery, the vicious angles extend to forbidden galaxies under spectral Terminal Invasion/chain mail badgers patrol the entrance to the jingly jangos, creaking wheels of steel and mesh capitulate the wasteland/”How the fuck can I die harder?”/office architect has erected the required Dadaist chin sculpture in geometric alliance to the harbourers of Euclid/vest paradigm/”Chin operating manual has glitches, call the lieutenant”/trapped by a regimented prospectus, the antacid conforms to the pretence, and Bruce is dragged to Moattown

Client problems:refusal of chinology principles, multiplication in chin existence, chin dissolution to entropic state/Seagal mechanisms of doubt:failure, “Must die harder!”/agents of forehead are agglomerating on edge of chin discourse/”Beard politics has no place in chinvision”, states Bruce with glints of quadrilateral in his eyes/emasculated badgers drag Bruce to his destiny/bubbles of crescendo interlock with methodologies, demarcation of hard/interceptors of forehead infiltrate furtive infinity with Bruce as deified consequence

Backfire of affairs, fringe combat initiated/crying spellbound peasants reek of Eddie/missionaries can no longer cope with dynamism of the plague of seek/forehead revolution in disassembly/chin citizenry promulgated by fresh god/air running out/failure of escape, incarceration in iron maiden immanent/champion of the crease increase/crenellations of yippee ki yay/angular monstrosities enact redemptive ban on forehead/moribund oblique in the chamber/success in transverse adamantine equivocations/chin benefactors renounce expository/demise of duration/approximation of custodial divinity

Forty of Forty

The American Society of Editors has just announced what it considers the forty best magazine covers of the last forty years. The list spans the usual publications Time, Life, Esquire etc, with a plethora of famous people and symbolic imagery on their frontpage.

Whatever validity this list does or does not have, it nevertheless does provide an interesting look back at forty years of mainstream cultural events (just check out the Nixon Tapes edition of Newsweek in 1973, the White House as a tape player! Brilliant!).

I particularly like that cover of the New Yorker (#4 on the list), I thought it was profoundly cool, go ahead and click on it for a closer look.

Check out the full list here.

The Pauly Shore diatribe

Hotel room, night – decadent wallpaper and encrusted carpet intermesh at obtuse angles – flies in vibrant coitus encircle luminance – putrefaction languishes upon a slowly multiplying ceiling – a knock at door, then ambient silence – scrap of paper with retrograde hieroglyphics, translation does not match clown portrait – tells of the In The Army Now special edition DVD.

Streets lined with paragraphs of Kafka – the commissioner tells me that weasels have infiltrated the compound, “Fucking swine!” – he lies – weasels are known for their diligence at times of depression, the one I seek disregards the ‘the’ factor - moles and voles copulate on sides of buses in choreographed arabesque rhythmic swirls - “Fuck your linearity” shouts a lush worker from the top of a flaming crane, “Obviously overdosing on the pi equation” mutters a passer-by.

Subway – pure black seeking messianic conundrum – ants roam the carriage in constant fellatio – nightmare scenarios of bibliography – conceptualised badgers with psychosomatic appendicitis prompt transduction in all senses – vestigial rudiments of the Jeffrey Combs gland – I know the weasel is close.

Darkened street corner defined by temporal harmonics – dreams of the fallen shoelace, 1921 – mist with overtures of Brechtian drama – I’m tired, cupules of the intermeshed obtuse angle – pulsing cinema beset by whores and vagrants, signs inform of the 400 Blows, followed by Jury Duty as main attraction – I’m close.

Hieroglyphics scrawled with Nietzsche moustache speak of alley – promises of Promethean typography – dreams of mysterious azure figure prompting quest – “Hey buddddddy” – archaic principles of overcoat – “I’m looking for the In The Army Now special edition DVD” – cascading Bio Domes on ocular – “I have some in my van, follow me” – witness to remembrance of my time in the panopticon – I follow – “There ya go buddddddy, this one includes my commentary track” – rushes of the expectorate into the diencephalon - “cheers.”

Chomsky tops intellectual poll

The latest issue of Prospect magazine publishes the results of its top global intellectuals poll, as voted for by readers of it and Foreign Policy. Coming straight in at number one (to do my radio impersonation) is none other than that god of the liberal left, the mighty Noam Chomsky. He received almost twice as many votes as that of second placed writer/philosopher Umberto Eco.

He certainly got my vote, although I had only heard of about 10% of the one hundred nominees. Wish they had chosen a less frightening cover image though.

The top 10:

1. Noam Chomsky
2. Umberto Eco
3. Richard Dawkins
4. Vaclav Havel
5. Christopher Hitchens
6. Paul Krugman
7. Jurgen Habermas
8. Amartya Sen
9. Jared Diamond
10. Salman Rushdie

My only question is where the fuck is Jeff Fahey!?!

Alphaville (1965) dir: Jean-Luc Godard

Alphaville brings us Jean-Luc Godard’s first, and only that I’m aware of, foray into the world of science fiction. He presents to us the dystopic city of Alphaville, set an undefined number of years in the future on another planet, where our main character Lemmy Caution has just arrived from the ambiguous ‘Lands Without’. Posing as a journalist working on a newspaper story he checks into a hotel which offers complementary, unthinking prostitutes. He soon starts to ask questions and it becomes apparent he isn’t quite who he says he is (when are they ever?).

Godard directs with his usual post-modernist chic cool that anyone who’s seen any of his films before will be well-versed in. From the obliged quick cutting to the little photographic nuances (such as the regular shots of neon letters on the screen, and complete frame colour inversions) this film has a smorgasbord of visual niceties. Not being a director to act only on a pictorial level, there is also any number of cultural allusions, such as a duo of scientist types named Heckell and Jeckell, and a professor baring the surname Nosferatu.

However, whilst there is all this contemporary hipness, the film’s main influence is clearly that of which the French New Wavers were often very fond of, namely Film Noir. Stylistically there are the dark tones, dramatic music, and gritty realism. Story has the classic mystery elements recalled from detective thrillers. Characterisation too falls in line, the lead, Caution, is a thoroughly pessimistic, downbeat individual, with the fashion sense of the typical private eye of the 40s. Moreover, Caution would not seem out of place in a Jean-Pierre Melville flick, like The Finger Man, with his remorseless maliciousness, clearly evidence of the senior French director’s influence on that particular epoch of cinema.

This dystopia shows an explicit and continual transference from a knowledge culture to that of a mechanised technocratic society where logic and reason rule. It’d be fair to assume that this is a stark message of caution (Lemmy Caution?) from Godard about our already technologically advanced existence, and its dehumanising effects; and furthermore its role in governance (a snapshot of a totalitarian state). Of course sci-fi with a political/societal message isn’t anything radically new (even then), whether it was Hollywood 50s B-movies and their commentary on the nuclear age, or similar authoritarian envisagings.

This film predates Ridley Scott’s own games with bleak futurist visions, thematically and cinematographically, with Blade Runner and, to a lesser extent, Alien. Also noticeable influences upon Sir Lucas de Star Wars THX1138-era, evident here from the white, high-tech corridors, to the forbidden, reciprocal love plot.

Beyond all that, with its general philosophising on existence and other issues, and its absorbing story arch, this film is great. Recommended for all those open-minded enough to look past the menacing presence of Hollywood; this, along with Tarkovsky’s Stalker, is perhaps my favourite example of pure science fiction in film, a flick with depth and uniqueness.

The Budding Restauranteur (originally published on Mondo Irlando, 3rd September 2005)

“Table for five!” is announced with boisterous, unrepentant demand to the girl at the desk. Or so I assume, for I am stuck behind a horde of American tourists and other stragglers, mounds of bodies all clambering in effort to reach that illustrious gateway that will hopefully lead to food and salvation.

Suddenly we are past the cast iron gates of dementia and through to paradise, or the Ramore Wine Bar in Portrush to be more precise. Turns out there is a free table, despite fleeting glances bringing back nothing but total and complete occupation on all sides and corners.

Ushered into a booth-type arrangement, we sit happily on comfy red cushioned seats. From vantage points present, plus a pleasingly strategically placed mirror setup right to my very front, I notice a number of attractive ladies, some even wearing cowboy hats and flat caps, the style only worn by men of at least eighty. What is the world of fashion throwing up these days, what trends are being resurrected and twisted into mutant forms of hyperbolic coolness?

Who the fuck knows, I’m here for food not a rundown of the latest news straight from the Milan/Paris hotline.

So food. Biological necessity. Nutritional consumption. What a dynamic and inventive species we are that we can transform even the most mundane existing requirements into something else. Protein intake – social occasion. Living prerequisite – family outing. Yes I see now. But hey, why not? If it needs to be done, we might as well build up a social construct to encase it.

Is that Donald Sutherland!?! No, it’s not. Just an admirable bearded fellow.

Anyway, centuries of etiquette, and the walls are now high and comprehensively reinforced, with eating and socialising sitting atop having a good chinwag over a game of dominos.

But enough of that, food is being forced upon the table at an alarming rate. Some foreign lady is jabbering out syllables I don’t, or cannot, recognise. Garlic fries ya say? Over there somewhere, far over there, north of salt and pepper hill please.

Ever notice when you’re minding your own business, eating away contently, you look up at a table compatriot and they are staring right at you, and of course on noticing your acknowledgement of this fact they subtly look away? How long have they been looking? What are they thinking? This guy would be better off in a trough of some sort? Ketchup on the forehead? Looking for tips, maybe they never mastered forks 101?

Speaker systems rumbling out numbers read by what I assume to be the ringmaster of this circus. Following from said messages people formerly stood at the bar disappear into the wilderness. I can only assume these to be coded messages of cultish propaganda that utilise the latest mind control technology to target specific individuals. Chances are these people will later be found working in an underground cave assembling a giant whisk.

And these toilets! Since when were toilets built like miniature nightclubs? The dark blue lighting in here is intense, I feel my t-shirt disintegrating as I use the facilities. Must leave here quickly whilst I still have skin. Some guy comes in through the door just as I’m leaving. What did he say as we passed? A murmur or gurgle was emitted, I think. Sounded like, “phenomenological ontology is overrated.” Either that or “Alright, boss?”

Over near the front desk people are still bounding over long since dead cadavers only to glimpse at the fortunes to come. Men with machetes arrive topside from deep trenches and stand guard either side of the ringmaster. They are informed of a table whose residents, a wholesome-looking family, have overstayed their welcome, and with scornful hatred in their eyes they make their move. Some tables are toppled, and girls with blonde highlighted hair are shunted into nearby desert and condiment displays.

The father, on seeing the approaching onslaught, raises and attempts to morph into an anime-esque robotic overlord. But before he has completed the ritualistic chant the men are there and the father and subsequent family are relegated to tattered limbs and fleshy lumps of crimson. God, it’s a shame I’m halfway out the door by this time, those guys looked as if they were just warming up and my misanthropic sensibilities have been on the rise of late.

So that’s the Ramore Wine Bar. Organisation of power and domination, cult of epic fashion juggernauts, propagators of neo-utensilisation, and rampaging zeitgeist of modern thought. Oh, and the chilli chicken is recommended.

The 'Students Against Note Taking' (SANT) manifesto

Now this is very specific to a university student culture, but nevertheless it does have general sociological undertones. Warning: observations are generalised and exhibit certain presumptions.

Time and time again as a student I sit in these ambient lecture theatres and am witness to the hordes in constant scribble, no quip goes amiss without its written snapshot, no rant minus its paper engraving. So then eventually this populace is left with pages upon pages of scrawl, undoubtedly never to be even merely glanced at again. Think of it in this way: you receive ten lectures, each one based on a different subject/aspect/content, and then you must write an essay set around one taught/discussed theme, thus making all those notes from other weeks obsolete. This isn’t some abstract concept, I know myself what it’s like from experience.

Also, as anyone with history in a university environment knows, to attain decent and respectable marks you must carry out academic reading beyond actual lectures, or at least attach a luscious bibliography to all scholarly work.

To those who might argue that they just want to learn, regardless of academic context, I say that this altruistic amelioration is highly dubious (they’re probably lying), and if you’re truly interested you’d do much better to actually listen to the lecturer, fucker.

Although, I can allow for minor note taking in the right circumstances, for example, names that may be of use in wider research, or erudite books that could perhaps be useful in the future.

And that brings me to the central crux that listening and paying attention is much more constructive, and something that can be nicely complemented by additional reading of the right texts.

And so I’ve began the SANT (no Gus Van elements here) movement, in order to combat such pointlessness, and to try and evolve my fellow students to a level above the ingrained institutional thinking of high/secondary school. This, as all manifestos should be, is a pragmatic set of ideas for use in the real world. The key words are listen and think.

Post thought: now I know these teachings are very student orientated but it may be possible to transpose them into other areas, perhaps gardening, or pottery. If anyone wishes to try I’d love to hear a commentary of the results, my email is over in that side column.

Jeff Fahey as cultural icon (originally published on Mondo Irlando, 7th October 2005)

Introduction

Jeff Fahey was born Jeff Fahey in 1952. The true events of his conception are mostly unknown, although academics have argued about it for almost half a century. Stories abound concerning mighty chariots in the sky, badgers the size of elephants roaming back alleys in search of their next junk fix, and a large Man Ray-esque porcelain woman carrying a pitchfork. These anecdotes are as yet unproved, and may well have historical roots in Chagatai Khanate-era Mongolia; but what we can gather from eye witness accounts and newspaper archives is that an immense earthquake came, and society’s preconceived notions of what it is to be human were shattered. This may have been metaphorical, that too is still unknown.

His mysterious origins cast Fahey into the shadows of Olean (the small New York state city where his birth occurred). He would have to wear a scarf around his miraculous blue eyes (more about these later) for fear of the local biker groups, assigned to ‘Fahey watch’, catching him and ennacting the mandatory Hare Krishna-slam wrestling move repeatedly till Fahey could no longer move.

On his tenth birthday the Fahey family moved to Buffalo. Little is known about these years in the wilderness, except that it was not spent eating buffalo.

Fahey graduated high school and decided to make an attempt to join the bohemian lifestyle. First he hitchhiked to New Orleans where he was met at the door by a burly, bearded giant of a man who said, “The beats left here a decade ago...cunt.”

Dysphoric and tired, Fahey left for Europe in hope for a bludgeon of bohemia. He was fortunate to come under the tutelage of Jean-Paul Sartre in mid-70s Paris, who taught him the basics of Existentialism and how to shave that bit at the corners of your jaw.

It was during this time that Fahey combined Sartre’s teaching with broader metaphysical dialectics resulting in what would later be known as Fahey doctrine (also called Faheyian discourse, mainly by a group of rogue Italian Futurists who later on framed it around a post-structuralist adumbration, thus creating, obviously, post-Faheyian discourse). Fahey also produced a number of critical essays on Russian literature, specialising on Pushkin.

Following a hostile parting with Sartre over a dispute on the ethics of washing machines, Fahey had a passionate love affair with Allen Ginsberg. Living in Paris 1978, the two of them indulged in the type of orificial dementia not imagined since that time a mugwump got into the White House.

Ginsberg introduced Fahey to the cinema of Godard and Truffaut at this time sparking an everlasting love affair with film. Fahey decided he needed to interpolate himself into the new wave scene and so went down to one of the major studios where he was met at the door by a burly, bearded giant of a man who said, “The French new wave ended a decade ago...cunt.”

With no prospects, a sudden and unexpected exit of Ginsberg, and a rising sense of fear and paranoia, Fahey decided to return to the US.

He had for a long time suspected that the shadowy presence he had felt was more than just simple psychosis, but it was not elucidated until that fateful plane journey back home. Upon entering the plane, as passenger witnesses later recounted, Fahey got to his seat only to find another sitting there. It was none other that Fahey’s evil doppelganger, Fayhey!

A struggle ensued and luckily Fayhey was ousted from the plane by a stewardess. But Fahey was shaken and knew simple pride damage would do nothing to prevent Fayhey one day coming for him.

Once back in the US Fahey began a hugely successful career in the motion arts, putting his European intellectual adventures behind him forever.

Hypothesis: Jeff Fahey is the most important cultural icon of the 20^th century.

When the start titles to Sketch Artist (1992) finish and we are witness to the hero protagonist of the story, Jack Whitfield, played by a certain Jeff Fahey, a number of signifiers are presented to the audience. Those blue eyes shine through all other symbols existent on screen, a juggernaut of semiotics emerges. A certain angelic harmony is the denotative aspect; those eyes say this is a man of supreme virtue. These signified denotations are most evident in films such as The Last Of The Finest aka Blue Heat aka Street Legal (1990), and Johnny 2.0 (1998), where Fahey played the unforgettable character of Johnny Dalton.

With this first layer of optical (if we can even regress it to such frivolousness) analysis scraped sufficiently, we now enter a deeper sense of what constitutes the true nature and affect of those globular masteries.

Associations of archetypal quintessence are connotatively communicated most overtly in the character of Dale Goddard (no doubt a reference to his former interests in the French new wave) in The Sweeper (1996). It, and probably Epicenter (2000), present certain deep resonances that not only act as a representation of modern cultural identity, but also play the major part in creating zeitgeists of contemporary thinking.

The symbol of Jobe’s hair in The Lawnmower Man (1992) is undoubtedly one of the most imposing signs occupying Fahey’s filmography. The inherent meaning in this symbol is understood by any individual with societal knowledge of any kind, and this is the primary reason behind car manufacturer General Motors’ recent decision to transform all headrests into model replicas of Jobe’s hair.

It’s these types of affects where we see Fahey transcending beyond his humble core into general ideology. The character of The Dutchman in Small Time aka Waiting For The Man (1996) may have been a small part but it has come to summarise all of our thinking on the subject of how media imagery interacts with mass society.

In conclusion, Jeff Fahey virtually constructed the philosophy of textual analysis and his films formed a framework for that of which no other filmic personality has ever even conceptualised mentally. With films such as Scorpius Gigantus (2005) on the release horizon, this chieftain of cerebration does not look like slowing down anytime soon.

Well here I am

A beginning, a dawn, a genesis, a birth (well maybe only a conception) is what is occurring here. I have finally entered the narcissistic, personal publishing phenomenon of the blog world, due mainly to coercive encouragement from another (I guess the term now is ‘fellow’) blogger.

I've had a few writing things stuck up on a friend's website which I'll no doubt stick up here sometime soon, hell something must go on this, well I assume so. I guess it makes sense to get my own place for conceited self-preoccupationary output.