It's Halloween horror filmathon time. Here are the films I intend to watch over this despicable season... 

Evil Dead 2

For me, the king of all horror-comedy and my personal favourite horror film. It does look a little rough around the edges these days, and the claymation bit especially looks as dated as Ray Harryhausen's classics (which I also love), but the affect of the film is not. Bruce Campbell plays our hero, Ash, attempting to survive the night against an evil entity that not only animates physically to attack him but also assaults him mentally at every opportunity. It's a a tour de force of horror film-making. The evil viscerally and audibly permeates every beam and wall of the cabin as it tries to force its way into our reality and Ash is forced to loosen his grip on his own sanity in order to stay ahead of the malevolent force. But who needs sanity when you have a chainsaw attached to your stump? "Who's laughing now!" We are. very, very much.

I should probably have left it for later in the film season but I'm impatient. It's just too good.

Rubber

Post-modern, experimental, amusing and unique, Rubber is a horror oddity. An inanimate tire comes to life and ‘realises' (literally, the tire's learning curve and reaction is masterfully directed) that it has the power to kill.  Rubber is an artful exploration of the anthropomorphised monster and of surrealist horror storytelling. It possibly drags on a little in the middle third but the film is too distinctive and weird to suffer greatly from it.

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978)

The 1970s version of this film is the best of them and probably of the bodysnatching sub-genre itself (with The Thing possibly running a close second). It is dialogically adult and its dramatic approach, especially the conceptual discussions of the main characters, bed the film in the zeitgeist and social construct of the period.  The slow, cultural replacement of Donald Sutherland's group of friends and confidantes sets up the terror of this inescapable foe, one which will replace you if you fall asleep. The end is shocking, bleak and wonderfully depressing.

Cronos

Guillermo del Toro's first venture into big-screen horror and it is, as you would expect, both dark and elegant. A bejewelled, metallic, scarab-beetle looking device is created that imbues its wearer, once its claws are sunk in to them, with immortality. Ron Perlman seeks to find the device, his search set against the touching, yet still sad, story of a young girl and her now-immortal grandfather.

Dawn of the Dead (1974)

George Romero's masterpiece, and the best of the true zombie films. By true, I mean that they are the shambolic, decayed, mindless flesheaters they should be, and none of this nonsensical free-running parkour undead that seems to be expected nowadays. In this film, with the outbreak slowly taking over the entire US, a group find and secure a mall to live in. The inevitable, inescapable fall comes, but throughout the film is replete with social commentary and bleak human analysis. THE prototypical zombie film

Let the Right One in

I only ever saw the first twenty minutes of this one (I'd downloaded a copy that only had the audio description subtitles ‘Snow patters, a wind rustles through the leaves...) however I'm fairly confident I'm going to love the rest of it.

Braindead

Before Lord of the Rings and King Kong, Peter Jackson was a gore-fest director. Bad Taste won special effects plaudits but my favourite is Braindead, a wonderful comedic horror, following a doting son who finds he is required to kill his mother, and much of the local populous due to a Sumatran Rat Monkey bite zombifying them. Weapon of choice; lawnmower...

The Shining

Still not as good as the book but, although fiercer Stephen King fans than I may decry how far it strayed from the book's premise and theme, Stanley Kubrick's Overlook Hotel is cavernous, sumptuous and, with Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall's phenomenal performances, quite terrifying. Redrum! Redrum!

Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

I remember borrowing a bootleg video of this when I was fifteen, closing the curtains and settling down to watch it before my parents came home from work. I managed to get through the first half hour before having to stop it, after deciding it was too nasty to watch alone. And it was. Bloody brilliant. Slightly dated now and the series crawled downwards in quality as they went on, but this first chapter was horrible. I owned, and loved, a Freddy Krueger knife-glove for many years...

Shadow of the Vampire

Sublime, in both concept and execution. Shadow of the Vampire follows the film director, FW Murnau, played by John Malkovich, as he struggles to complete the filming of possibly the most famous vampire film, Nosferatu. The film, being shot entirely in Romania, has an eccentric star in Max Shreck who never departs from his character, supposedly due to being a student of Stanislavski's method style of acting. However, Shreck, masterfully played by Willem Dafoe, is in truth an ancient Vampyr, and Murnau has hired him to play the lead, on the proviso that he may feed on the leading lady when the production is finished. Rich, stylish and funny (Eddie Izzard and Cary Elwes ably support), Shadow of the Vampire is a wonderful piece of metafiction horror.

Event Horizon

A horror film that actually scared me as an adult, this science-fiction horror is to some extent a Hellraiser in space, as the lost ship Event Horizon is rediscovered nine years after its experimental engine had taken it out of the known Universe. When it returns, only glimpses of the inhabitant's video-log can hint at the horrors that the crew experienced, and what it brought back with it.

The Thing (1982)

Kurt Russell is brilliant, and somehow not the typical, comedy caricature of himself he generally plays  in other films. His whisky-drinking helicopter pilot, Mac ready, serves as our focus within the Arctic scientific outpost that the alien attacks. This monster is no hulking evil but an organism that corrupts and perfectly replaces it's victims. It skulks and picks off, bides its time and multiplies. The atmosphere of tension and paranoia that is created is palpable and the explosive body-horror of the creature(s) when exposed is brilliantly realised, graphically gory and even, despite the mood of the film, humorous.

Pan's Labyrinth

Guillermo del Toro's second entry in the horror-thon and it is dark and beautiful. A true fairytale, I was in love with it from the moment, sat in the cinema, that Captain Vidal brutally smashed in an old man's teeth with a bottle. Blimey! The film's dark, magical realism offsets the visceral brutality of Ofelia's actual reality. Sorrowful, disturbing and powerful, Pan's Labyrinth is phenomenal. And the peek-a-boo ‘playing' Pale Man is horrifyingly brilliant.

A few extra titles that didn't quite make it into this season:

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare Before Christmas/Corpse Bride, An American Werewolf in London, The Frighteners, Eraserhead, Wolf Creek, The Devil's Backbone, Rec, Fido and Tucker and Dale vs Evil.

Obituary – Peter O’Toole

Originally posted on the 19th December 1013.

Peter O’Toole’s portrayal of TE Lawrence in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 is undeniably his most celebrated role and immortalised him in film history. However, he did not receive an Oscar for his performance. In fact, across his career he would receive an Oscar nomination a further seven occasions, without once winning.

Outside of his portrayal of Lawrence asking what the next most memorable screen role that Peter O’Toole played is, in part, a question of generation. To ask my parents, they would boast of his subtle performance in Goodbye Mr Chips, or his theatrical presence in The Lion in Winter. For younger generations, strong performances such as Colonel Blount in Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things, or as Priam, the wise ruler in Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy may be their more memorable film roles.

For myself, my favourite moment of his is from the opening scene to Keith Waterstone’s Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell. As the lights rise on the interior of a pub in the dead of night, O'Toole's Jeffrey Bernard wakes from under a table and begins coughing fitfully. He rises, struggling and searches for his coat. Bent double from his wheezing, he finally locates the jacket and reaches into the pocket. Still hacking wretchedly, he eventually pulls out a cigarette, raises it to his mouth, finally lights it and inhales before the coughing abates. Jeffrey Bernard breathes deeply, and begins to tell his story.

Although Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell is a stage play, I was watching the show on video. Such was the popularity of O’Toole’s performance when it ran in 1991 that tickets were exchanging hands outside the theatre for £500. The play, written by Keith Waterhouse about the life and times in Soho of his friend, the alcoholic Spectator columnist Jeffrey Bernard, detailed through many humorous, foolish and sometimes touching stories what it was to live this roguish life of alcoholic indulgence. The play’s title is a reference to the line that would regularly replace his column when he was too drunk to submit his article.

O’Toole plays the titular role with a battered grace and humour that elevates his misadventures beyond the lonely, diminished reality of the lifestyle and the reminiscences over so many dead friends, to give Bernard’s wandering homeless drunk a sense of tragic, charming grandeur.

The ease with which he carries off this performance must in some way be due to the fact that he himself had lived a similar lifestyle. Though often criticised of squandering their talents, alongside legendary drinkers Oliver Reed, Richard Harris and Richard Burton (who shares O’Toole’s record of eight Oscar nominations and no wins), O’Toole was an unrepentant hellraiser and tales of the group’s outrageous debauchery ensured O’Toole a status of beloved roguish infamy, as well as Hollywood fame.  

Peter O’Toole was awarded an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar in 2003 which he initially intended to reject, quipping that he would rather “win the lovely bugger outright.” Unfortunately, he never did, but with performances such as TE Lawrence and Jeffrey Bernard, and such a wealth of stories of his drunken excesses, he will remain an unforgettable figure. The last of the great screen hellraisers of the 60’s has died. 

Some Are Born To Sweet Delight - Dead Man

‘Well, that doesn't explain... why you've come all the way out here... all the way out here to hell.’

‘l... uh... I have a job out in the town of Machine.’

‘Machine?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s the end of the line!’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes!’

As the train makes its way across the American frontier toward the edge of civilisation, the driver portentously warns Johnny Depp’s character, William Blake what he might expect. 

‘You’re just as likely to find your own grave.’

And so begins Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, an indie film Western like none other you might have seen before. 

I was once a huge Johnny Depp fan. I still am, I guess, but my respect for him has diminished over the last decade, under the weight of the increasingly wearying Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, a paucity of great roles that he has chosen and the deteriorating quality of the creative output from his collaborations with Tim Burton.

However, in 1995 it was different; Depp was my favourite actor. I loved him, not just for his performances but also for the integrity of his choices. Attempting to exorcise his 21 Jump Street driven teen icon reputation, Depp eschewed offers to play mainstream Hollywood lead roles in favour of working with maverick indie filmmakers and embarked on a number of bizarre cinematic projects. This resulted in such wonderful film offerings as Edward Scissorhands, Arizona Dream, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Ed Wood.

As such, when he signed up to work with cult indie director Jim Jarmusch on Dead Man, I was excited. At this point I had only seen Jarmusch direct the unconventional film narratives of Mystery Train and Night on Earth so was intrigued by what he and Depp would produce together. I certainly wasn’t expecting the film to be a black and white Western.

However, to pigeonhole Dead Man as a mere Western would be an insult. The film does not fit into the easy genre divisions of the John Wayne heroic cowboy type, nor the same type of gritty realism as the Clint Eastwood or Sergio Leone models. It could be described as a metaphysical journey toward death, and the set pieces within the script format could as easily lend themselves to a stage performance. It is an oddity, a film peculiarity that is hard to categorise. Of course it is, it’s a Jim Jarmusch film.

Depp plays an accountant, William Blake, who travels across the American frontier to the town of Machine for a job, but upon arrival finds the position filled. He spends his last coins on a bottle of whiskey and is taken home by a paper-flower seller, Thel, whose ex-lover, portrayed unsettlingly by Gabriel Byrne, returns as they lie in bed. Byrne kills Thel, to which Blake clumsily manages to shoot him in reply with Thel’s gun. However, the bullet fired at her had passed through and into Blake’s chest. Wounded, he steals Byrne’s horse and escapes. Byrne’s character turns out to be the son of Mr Dickinson, the owner of Machine’s metal-works, played magnificently by Robert Mitchum, in his last screen role. Dickinson puts out a reward for his capture, dead or alive, despatching bounty hunters and the law after Blake. The chase is on.

So far, so typically cowboy film, you’d be forgiven for thinking. It is a chase film, but as the film progresses it easy to forget this. Jarmusch does not so much mesh the narrative together seamlessly as connect a series of staged scenes together, developing the odd interactions to their peak, and ending with an almost frozen vignette, such as when Thell, after being pushed to the muddy floor in Machine, looking directly at Blake, states ‘Why don’t you just paint a portrait?’’. These vignettes are beautifully composed, with cinematographer Robby Muller’s creation of a supremely rich black and white palette, producing a sumptuously crisp effect.

The entire soundtrack to the film was provided by Neil Young. Improvised, it was recorded alone in a studio, while watching the film on an early full edit. His powerful but minimalist guitar work underscores the entire film like a gathering storm, each note punctuating and inter-seaming the individual scenes. 

The narrative’s mixture of mysticism, unreality and philosophy is embodied in every scene by the array of amazing cameos that permeate the film. Each scene is supported by powerful and evocative performances by its phenomenal cast, including Crispin Glover, John Hurt, Alfred Molina, Lance Henriksen and Michael Wincott. A particularly funny scene involves Blake’s encounter with three trappers, Billy-Bob Thornton, Jarred Harris and Iggy Pop.

However, it is the film’s central relationship between Blake and his ‘Indian’ companion, played by Gary Farmer that defines the film. Farmer’s character calls himself Nobody. He is western educated, having been captured as a child and taken as a peculiarity to England. On returning, years later, his tribe take his tales for lies, calling him Exaybachay ‘he who talks loud, say nothing.’ As he explains, he prefers to be called Nobody. When he finds out that this ‘stupid fucking white man’ is called William Blake, he is taken aback, having learned the poet’s work in England. Nobody will not be dissuaded from his belief that Blake is the embodiment of the poet’s soul; ‘it is so strange that you don’t remember your poetry’, and commits to taking Blake to The Mirror Sea in order to be joined again with the Great Spirits.

But this is not just a quirky affectation applied to a stereotypical character type for the sake of humour. Jarmusch has a deep love of multiculturalism, and often inserts scenes with characters of different languages, unable to understand each other, as exampled in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and the relationship between Forrest Whittaker’s English-speaking Ghost Dog and Isaach De Bankolé’s French-speaking Raymond. Jarmusch revels in such cultural interactions and demonstrates his joy at Nobody’s childish innocence as well as venerating his natural wisdom. Furthermore, as the film progresses, through Blake’s exhausted acceptance of his situation to his transformation into the poet gunslinger Nobody sees him as, it is hard to discern what the reality of the story truly is. In the end, Blake ties his fate to his gun, fulfilling Nobody’s portentous statement, ‘That weapon will replace your tongue. You will learn to speak through it. And your poetry will now be written in blood.’

This narrative development from the East to the West, from the town of Machine to the sea is the canvas upon which Jarmusch sculpts his odd directorial musings. From the industrial to the natural, from lawlessness and order to lawlessness and mysticism, from reality to unreality, Dead Man takes us on a funny, brutal, intriguing and poignant journey. It is a masterpiece of unconventional storytelling.

‘Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.’

     -          William Blake

Work in Progress

I’m quite surprised at how broken I am. I probably don’t appear to be (who does?) but I am a mess. I guess I’m high-functioning enough to pack most of it away where it doesn’t show but recently the crazy has been bleeding into my day a bit too much. It’s odd, because it’s happening at the same time as I’m beginning to feel better about myself. I’m like Shiva; the creator and the destroyer. I know it is probably part of my final restorative purge, but it really does have arsehole timing.

There are benefits to all this self-analytical masochism. The emotional bedrock throws up stuff I probably needed to revisit. Sometimes, literally... At the beginning of one week in my office, I vomited and at the end of the week was broken down in tears. The vomiting was not lifestyle-related but rather a debilitating and retch-inducing bronchial virus. Fortunately I was alone in my office both days and, luckily, am old and foolish enough to know how to puke discretely and without mess. I rarely drink enough to be sick, so it’s generally an almost nostalgic experience, if merely horribly so. But I digress.

The breaking down was more surprising, but also healthier. It had been my best friend Jim Crow’s birthday the day before and I’d posted a song on Facebook for him, Delicate by Damien Rice. Tragically, Jim died nearly a decade ago but the song was one that he had played on the guitar quite regularly. It holds some significance to me, his family and people who knew him. The song has more resonance now as well, especially for the apt, rising notes of sorrow and loss. 

My reaction caught me by surprise though.  After posting the song, my stomach knotted and a few tears came to my eyes. I’m not at all ashamed, although I am relieved that I was alone in the office. However the sorrow kept returning, pulsing and washing over me in larger and larger waves. I closed my office door and sat on the floor behind my desk, sobbing. I hadn’t even played the song, merely posted it, but I couldn’t stop shaking. For the first time in a number of years the complete, absolute, godless realisation of loss, of Jim’s non-existence, and how I would never see my friend again hit me, and hit me, over and over. 

I would have welcomed this emotional break more had I been at home rather than in work. I remained on the floor for about half an hour until the feelings subsided enough to tidy myself up and go next  door to speak to my boss.  I told him what was happening and that I had to leave, and he was very cool and understanding about it. I think that beginning to break down again whilst trying to explain it to him probably helped my case as well.

I walked home and spent the day posting and playing all of my favourite songs that we used to listen to, so much better for being home and safely ensconced in my room. I needed the release, and it felt good to think about him so emotionally again, even reliving the pain and trauma of losing him. 

It took being broken to reach that point. And that was just one week...

I’m not suggesting that my emotional state has been a perpetual rollercoaster, I am generally quite good at working through my pain. The best way, I find, is to accept the slow, inevitability of it and wallow in its horrible, revealing torture. I was just surprised to find that the maelstrom of weirdness that permeates my daily internal world was seeping out. I was losing my grip and my ability to turn off the clamour of neurotic crazy that I had been successfully subduing in social situations previously. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually getting better, I’ve just been experiencing a mild identity crisis and misery glut, and the frequency of those dips is falling as I begin to realign. But this stuff works you over, and the self-pity pisses me off the moment it’s passed. I had periods of abject misery where I lay in bed, wondering if I would cry were I to share a moment of intimacy with a woman again. 

The moment it passes I know how pathetic I’m being. I am honestly beginning to like myself again and I can tell from the faces of my friends the points where I am actually functioning ‘normally’, especially compared to the numerous social occasions where I have fallen flat. 

I’m not worried, I am getting better, and most of the time I’m not even sad anymore. It’s hard, emotional work, building myself back up. A work in progress...

Dead Writers - Famous Last Words

Ernest Hemingway

Spoken to his wife before he killed himself.

 Voltaire

When asked by a priest to renounce Satan.

 

George Bernard Shaw

Hunter S Thompson

Henrik Ibsen 

This was his response to a nurse who said he was a little better.

 Dylan Thomas

 

Hans Christian Anderson  

Jane Austen

Jean Cocteau

 W.C. Fields

 “Carlotta” was Carlotta Monti, actress and his mistress.

 

 Leo Tolstoy

 James Joyce

H.G. Wells

 Edgar Allan Poe

'They're made out of meat' by Terry Bisson

They're made out of meat."
     "Meat?"
     "Meat. They're made out of meat."
     "Meat?"
     "There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
     "That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"
     "They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
     "So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
     "They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
     "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
     "I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat."
     "Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
     "Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?"
     "Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
     "Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
     "No brain?"
     "Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you."

     "So ... what does the thinking?"
     "You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."
     "Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
     "Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"
     "Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
     "Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
     "Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"
     "First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."
     "We're supposed to talk to meat."
     "That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.' That sort of thing."
     "They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
     "Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
     "I thought you just told me they used radio."
     "They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
     "Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
     "Officially or unofficially?"

     "Both."
     "Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
     "I was hoping you would say that."
     "It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
     "I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
     "Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
     "So we just pretend there's no one home in the Universe."
     "That's it."
     "Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
     "They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."
     "A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."
     "And we marked the entire sector unoccupied."
     "Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
     "Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."

     "They always come around."
     "And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone ..."
  


The end


By Terry Bisson


This story originally appeared in Omni April 1991 and was nominated for the Nebula Award. It is taken from the collection 'Bears Discover Fire'. You can find out more about Terry Bisson on his website, http://www.terrybisson.com/ .

Stanley Kubrick's photos of 1940s New York

Before becoming a legendary director, Stanley Kubrick was a poor kid from the Bronx who did photojournalism for Look magazine in the 1940s in and around New York City. He shot on the sly, often times his camera concealed in a paper bag with a hole in it. Of the some odd 10 000 black and white photographs he took while working at the magazine, VandM chose a total of 25, which have now been made available as prints.

These images were appropriated from mashKULTURE.net
http://english.mashkulture.net/2011/11/30/stanley-kubricks-photos-of-1940s-new-york/

Rupert Murdoch: The Next Tyrant to Fall?

On the 20^th October 2011, the world watched on YouTube as Libyan dictator General Muamar Gaddafi was pulled from a storm drain and beaten before the self-proclaimed ‘King of kings’ executed corpse was dragged through the streets. The Arab Spring uprisings brought about the fall of the last of those iconic, brutal political leaders that came to power in the 1970s and 1980s in the region. 

These are horrible images but, unsurprisingly, for a man who instigated massacres of his own people, supported international terrorism and protected the chief suspects of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, the occasion was met with little sympathy. Similarly, little sorrow was shown in the international media community for the death of other such larger-than-life tyrants of those times such as Idi Amin, Pol Pot or Saddam Hussein. These figures dominated the media of the 1980s and 1990s and their passing marks the end of an era. 

Well, almost. There is one more tyrant who could soon be the next to fall, Newscorp International founder, Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch. Comparing Murdoch to those despots mentioned above may seem unfair but for the past twenty years, Rupert Murdoch has commanded more power and influence over the western world than the others combined. Admittedly, he has never ordered someone’s execution (so far as we know) but his methods of control are more insidious. It has been speculated that Murdoch owns close to 40% of the western global media market and has used this power-base to affect control over both the British and American media and political systems for two decades.

Through Murdoch’s close relationship to Margaret Thatcher, his defection to Tony Blair’s New Labour and the recent positioning of Andy Coulson as the Conservative Party Communications Director in 2007, his ability to covertly affect governmental policy-making has continued unabated. The most recent manoeuvrings to ensure that a full takeover of BSkyB was accepted would have offered Murdoch an unprecedented level of control over the British media landscape. 

And for some time this takeover looked inevitable. No political party or famous figure has been able to risk upsetting the media mogul for fear of his political power or the incriminating stories he can release if challenged. Yet it has been this area, the invasive gathering of scandalous information that has finally proven to be the Achilles’ heel to Murdoch’s empire.

The illegal phone-hacking scandal, and in particular revelations on the hacking of murdered teenager Millie Dowler’s mobile telephone sparked a media-storm which the corporation could not escape or bully into disappearing, even forcing  Murdoch to close The News of the World, a tabloid of 168 years and one of the best-selling publications in the world. It is the loss of advertising revenue due to the universal damnation of Newscorp’s activities which has destabilised his and his lieutenants’ positions within the corporation. 

It does not matter that it is financial rather than political pressures that have weakened the business magnate’s position, Al Capone was not finally jailed for his criminal underworld activities but on charges of tax evasion. Rupert Murdoch will hopefully fall due to the universal condemnation of his tasteless and cruel tactics.

We certainly do not want to witness the horrible image of Rupert Murdoch being dragged from a storm drain, beaten then executed, but maybe it would be ok to see the journalistic equivalent? For a man who has presided over the public shaming and ruination of so many, to have his political death played out across the very tabloid newspapers he created might prove a fitting end. 

Deptford (P)Elvis

A gyrating moron twists and turns,

‘cross the dance-floor he mistakenly thinks he owns,

Toward the trio of voluminous beauties collected there

Half-stepping, and laughing, and flicking their hair.

The trio are blissfully unaware of the approaching fool,

Absorbed, as they are now, with reminiscences of school,

Of dancing, as then, to trashy 80’s songs

Older now, inflated, but with more easily visible thongs.

The idiot sidles, pelvic-thrusts, and slides his way

To his faded, nostalgic, and unsuspecting prey,

Takes one final fortifying swig of his J & D

And selects his target from the ravishing three.

He shifts his (considerable) weight and sidesteps into the group

With a dramatic dance flourish; a boogie swoop,

Meant to ingratiate him as one of ‘those fun guys’,

But his ALDI Audrey Hepburn merely rolls her eyes,

Shifts her (also considerable) weight so as to give a surreptitious wink

To her (similarly bloated) friend, the dirigible in pink,

Who laughs, pointedly and uproariously, at the audacity of men

Who think (like the pigs they are) that they’re good enough for women like them.

So she blocks him and with one last, delighted guffaw

Escorts the gaggle away from the dance-floor,

From this Pavlova Cassanova, this interloper

Who dared to stare but did not care for her

So he sucks down his humiliation, drowns the remains of his drink

And returns to the bar; his strut now more of a slink.

Restores bravado with JD, two doubles, both neat

And waits for his next chance to dance; his next crushing defeat.