Last night, I watched Wild At Heart, and tonight I watched The Straight Story. One celebrates youth, and love, and the power of the unknown, the belief in the intangible, the throwing of caution to the blouses of the gods. Two throbbing bloodsacks tearing down the highway with the top down and everything to look forward to.

It made me teary, and it made me believe in romantic love again, as the end credits rolled, and Sailor serenaded Lula on top of that beautiful old car. Sometimes I forget, and am cynical. Sometimes I am realistic. Sometimes I think I should buy a snakeskin jacket and fuck off to the dust and the bak-ed earth over West.

Sometimes I figure I’m doing just fine.

The Straight Story, in contrast, is about one old man’s journey to make his peace. It is about family. It is about kindness. It is about humanity, from cradle to grave. An old man traveling 300 miles on a lawnmower with a trailer full of wienies and a box of cigars. It made me miss my Granddads and the old lady who taught me a little piano when I was very little. It made me remember Dyffryn Nantlle, like I haven’t before. It made me want to phone my grumpy little brother and tell him I love him. It made me want to look at the stars, and listen to the night. But there is just the old orange glow, out here in Stokey, and the whir of machinery.

I like it, the glow, the machinery. But they are tricks, tricks we played on ourselves in this recent age, and they will be gone soon enough. Then it will just be bloodsacks and old men and the stars and the dust, like before, and one day even the bloodsacks will burst, and the old men will lie down.

“They want me to burn like Guy Fawkes
they wanna hear dead on arrival
they wanna destroy my character like my childhood idol Michael”
Bashy - Never See Me Fall

How did I miss this?

Morrissey Quizzed by FBI

“My view is that neither England or America are democratic societies. You can’t really speak your mind and if you do you’re investigated.”

That cartoon there, by the ever wry Nicholas Gurewitch, raises an excellent point regarding the ever-flawed on-screen depiction of vampires, I think. The perma-brooding Buffy co-star Angel, for example, sees nothing in his mirror, but surely we should see half a pound of hair gel floating about, hmm? Quite.

Ah, glories of the interweb. Mere moments after enquiring of you what all that foreign regarding myself was about earlier, a reader, one Simon Lasett writes:

“Babelfish, he say

Couldn’t agree more :)”

Me neither. Brillopad. I reward you with a story, or something, my little brother posted on his website (I nicked “brillopad” off of him an all).

The Virginity Badger

I was seven when Alwyn first called me a ‘virgin’. Alwyn was really cool – he was always the one who introduced new insults to our school. I was six when he first called me a ‘bastard’, five when he first called me a ‘cock’ and four when he first called me a ‘cunt’.

Alwyn always learnt the words from his dad, Gwyn. Gwyn was really cool too – he must have been cool to know all those words. When I used to go and stay the night in their farmhouse I’d hear him shouting them from the living room pretty much all the time: Bastard, cock, cunt. I knew what all those things were though, so they didn’t bother me anymore. But when I was seven, ‘virgin’ was a new one.

Obviously, I spent ages saying I wasn’t a virgin, but I couldn’t prove it because I didn’t know what one was. Alwyn never taught you what a word meant – you had to work it out.

I asked my sister, Sian, because I was the only one with an older sister. Sian was fifteen and she said I was a virgin, because of something to do with a ‘condom’. But I was playing Sonic The Hedgehog then, so I was only half listening.

Anyway, I thought I was really clever the next day, when Alwyn called me a virgin and I said,

“Shut it, you condom.”

But then he said,

“You’re just jealous ‘cause the Virginity Badger hasn’t come to you yet.”

And I said,

“What?”

And he told me that if you didn’t want to be a virgin, you had to put a ‘condom’ under your pillow to protect you from the Virginity Badger – so that when he came you’d be okay. That’s what a ‘condom’ was – protection. My new word, and Alwyn knew what it meant before me. That was pretty gutting. Not only that, but I’d never even heard of the Virginity Badger before. Only boring stuff like the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny.

Anyway, while Sian was away one week I went through her stuff and after loads of horrible fluffy, slimy, glittery things that I didn’t understand, I found a box with ‘condoms’ written on, and took one and put it under my pillow.

I didn’t know what I’d do with it when they came. I didn’t know what they’d do with me when they came either, but I was pretty scared.

Alwyn suddenly moved away and he never came to say goodbye and the headmaster just said he’d gone and didn’t explain it. I was pretty gutted then because my sister would get annoyed if I asked her too many questions and you don’t ask my mum questions like that, not if you don’t want a slap.

Anyway, I had that condom under my pillow for years – I even carried it around with me in my wallet. Once a teacher confiscated it in class, but I got another one before the badger had a chance to get me. One year at Centre Parks there were badgers on the patio, snorting and grunting really loud every night. I didn’t get any sleep at all. I just held on to the condom, ready to rip open the packet in case they came in and tried to get me.

When I went to big school on the mainland, I met Alwyn again and pretty much the first thing I asked him was about the Virginity Badger and he said, “You stupid bastard, it’s just your dad dressed up in a suit – like Santa Claus.” So I felt pretty stupid after that.

Anyone know what this means?

AKIRA THE DON El nuevo bad boy cibernético by Jorge Álvarez

Lo del galés Akira The Don podríamos decir que es algo así como lo de Juan Palomo, es decir, yo me lo guiso y yo me lo como, pero es que es verdad. Aparte de hacer hip hop fusionado con el primer género que se te ocurra, el chaval se hace las animaciones flash para sus vídeos y por si todavía no fuese poco trabajo, también se curra un blog que lo visitaban, hasta hace muy poquito, unas 70.000 personas. Dale la bienvenida al nuevo bad boy cibernético.

I get the nuevo bad boy bit. I like that. It’s from this article. I have a fucking huge folder of interviews and reviews and things that have appeared over the past few months, I have been going through them for the past twenty minutes and I feel a bit dirty. I am going to quit that and finish this song I’m writing about being my height.

Roll out the barrel! A nice man just came round and installed my phone line. I HAVE INTERNET IN MY GAFF!

Back in the day I used to write exhaustive accounts of my to-ings and fro-ings which might have seemed incredibly narcissistic, and it was, but if people didn’t do that sort of thing then we would have no idea about the human condition, so you can piss off, actually.

Haha.

Anyway. As I haven’t had an internet in my house for ages, I have been crap at that sort of thing for a while. It takes me fifteen minutes to walk to Netbuddy from my house, and its cold these days, AND there’s a tramp I have to avoid because I gave him twenty quid one time because his legs were bleeding puss, and he anted to check into a night clinic and not sleep outside KFC like he always does, but now every time I see him he screams out to me, “CHEEEEEEEEEIF!” and “BOSS!” in this awful bloodcurdling rasp, and hobbles after me as I wave my hands in a “I have no spare money” fashion, even though I have, like, a fiver or whatever, and prolly he could do with it more than me. It is quite depressing. When I have lots of money I have decided to buy him some new legs.

His scream reminds me of the lady in the cell above me that time they locked me up in Birmingham nick for three days. She was on her period, and spent two nights wailing “BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOS! I’m BLAY-DING!” in a trill Brummy roar to replies of, “shoot oop slag,” from the “boss”. I wonder what she’s doing today. Maybe she has new internet too, and is downloading old Nixon speeches, like me.

Anyway, the reason I mentioned the whole writing about one’s doings thing, is because I just read one of Bravecaptain’s, and it is all warm and emotive and reminds me I need to try harder, always.

ONE!

I am doing a gig, you might have noticed. I shall be flying back from South By South West specialy, with teeth missing after some Texans get me, word. Fabric it is, and the line up is thus:

DJ Yoda (A/V Show)
DJ Food
Akira the Don (live)
DJ Swamp
The Beat Monkeys
Room Two
Andy C (3hr Set)
Pendulum
Matrix
Futurebound
MCs:
E-LL & 2 Shy
Room Three
David Holmes
Paul Epworth (Phones)
Annie Mac (Radio 1)
Fri 17th Mar 06
CHIBUKU SHAKE SHAKE
Entrance
9:30pm - 5:00am
£12 (£10 nus & Fabric First Members)
Advance tickets available from TICKETWEB

Matt The Badsnake sent me that picture, by the way. It is a real thing. Safety!

“why is it that people in our country can not understand that it is not for them to question our prince and certainly not our queen who is the head of state by right of blood. there is a limit to liberalism and there is a line none of us should cross and that line is our royal family,”

Writes a lunatic called journals.aol.co.uk/faridetessami, which is a stupid name, in The Guardian’s letters page today.

“my word,” screams The Brave Captain, who sent it me, “do people still use the right of blood as a serious argument? i suppose it’s better than ‘appointed by god’ but only just. the queen’s ‘right of blood’ doesn’t stretch back too far. there was the messy abdication business with that nazi couple and before that we had hanovers, oranges, stuarts, protectorates, king arthur, king rollo, king crimson, queen latifah and king doc. so if we got rid of this queen and installed mothboy and his dark brood on the throne, would journals.aol.co.uk/faridetessami still see fit to bow and scrape and talk about rights of blood?

i suppose if he played bass at his coronation everybody would.”

Which is true. Mof kills bass dead.

TWO!

I did a mix for James Hyman’s XFM show. It was late, so it might not be on air till April now, but I shall let you know. It looks like this:

Akira The Don feat. JTWR, MissOddKidd, Solo & Narstie - Diamonds Are For Wankers
Akira The Don feat. Method Man and Redman - How High Is Chris de Burgh
Sway - Thief’s Theme Freestyle
Anth LaTue - Wishing On A Star
Gonzales - A Thousand Faces
Piranha Deathray - Parents
System Of A Down VS Wu-Tang Clan - Shame
The 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster - Love Turns To Hate
Madison - Radiate
Bill Bailey - Three Women
Pharaoh Monch & Lady Luck - Simon Says Remix
YT - What A Wicked Act
Akira The Don feat Mike, Necro & Janet - Scream
Leadbelly - Cotton Fields
RZA - Outline
JTWR feat Miss Sovereign - It’s All Your Fault
AKira The Don feat Brian & Birddogg - The Conversation
Akira The Don - Thanks For All The AIDS
Immortal Technique - Caught In A Hustle
Backworld - The Devil’s Plaything
Akira The Don feat Biggie & Oasis - Kick In The WonderWall

A few of those tracks will feature on the very soon to be unleashed ATD11.

Serious!

Yeah, I am so not dead at all. I have no internet in my house, but that is being remedied on the 27th, so look forward to thrice daily posts and high weirdness in abundance. Meanwhile, I have been making hot big songs with the increasingly sick OddKidd, Bashy, Narstie, and YT’s coming round tonight to finish a seriously big song you’ll be hearing all over your discos in about a fortnight.

I have 673 unread emails to sort through, so don’t hate on a boy. Safety first.

Sorry about the not talking to you, I have been making mixtapes and suffering computer issues and whathave you. BIG NEW TUNES! You will be glad.

Anyway, I am in a rush and OddKidd is falling asleep which is bad if she is to rap, so I shan’t hang about. But! I have a MySpace clone, and I would like your advice as to what to do with it. My clone lives here, and has 77 friends who all seem to love him very much.

So what do I do about him? Can I make him do my laundry and be nice to my ex-girlfriends and pay my rent or something? I am at a loss.

I am not going to write about Mr Wong right now, so I don’t know why I’ve alluded to him so heavily in this titling. But whatever. Perhaps he informs my spirit right now.

The songs about love are now gone. One or two might return at some point. Otherwise, if you missed it, you’ll just have to hope I get Beatles Big, and have an Anthology in the years to come.

Yesterday, I didn’t do anything musically productive, for the first time in ages. I did some shopping, ate some food, and played computer games. Serious! I kicked Hiyatchi’s ass, my friends, the old git, I whupped that old fool serious. Zef is good at avoiding things on Ultimate Spider-Man (the most beautiful thing I have seen in ages), and Michael is very good at landing on Rhino’s back. So there you go.

Today I have been assembling mixtapes (I am making three right now), bootlegging Oasis and Biggie, and appeasing my old landlord. Zef is working on my album sleeve, and Michael is acquiring Tekken characters. I met a lovely girl in Woolies.

There is a lot of rottenness going on, but I haven’t the heart to go into it today. Jeff Wells has done a great job, as ever, so go see him. That dude Cheney shot has a pellet in his liver, you know.

I think I caused a riot last night by accident, actually.

What it was, was, I was asked to DJ the launch do for this magazine, which turned out to be a rather sombre affair, with people sat on cushions watching spoken word “poetry”. Tre is loud and so is Zef, so we kept getting shushed. Anyway. Eventually, after much wishying and washying and bloody awful poetry, it was time for me to plug in and play songs, so I did, and lo people did dance, and then I was asked to switch off so someone could do some “poetry”. So I did. Then I played Aint No Fun, and a crew of ladies got excited, then I was asked again to let someone “Poet”. Annoyed now, but as the girl was in the magazine or whatever, I said OK. The girl then tried to get the crowd to be quiet by shouting at them for about 20 minutes, so eventually I put a song on and people started dancing happily again. But no! One song in, and AGAIN I am told to shut up so people could poet! I am angry now. Girl poets very badly, crowd now very pissed off and divided on party lines between poetry types and Iwannadancecomeonitsmidnighttypes. I take as much as I can and put on Pat Benetar, to squeals of delight. Am asked to be quiet so people can poet again. I unplug my laptop, and start storming out, and am begged to stay and apologised to profusely, then the mother of all bitch fights kicks off between some god awful “poet” and some girl who wanted to dance, which soon turns into an orgy of violence not unlike those barfights in old Westerns. Tre and Michael get very excited, Zef is amused. We bugger off to the Grill Room to enjoy the hospitality of Wade and everybody is very excited by my wee brothers.

5:30 am we arrive home soaking wet.

The end.

PS - read The Independent today.

PPS - Thank you for all your lovely emails. They did warm my cold black heart.

OK, it’s half an hout late, but it’s here - I present to you, for one day only, a barand new EP called Five And A Half Songs About Love. Click hither to go download it. It is very lovely indeed, and features the following songs:

Love
Nothing Ever Changes feat Narstie & Solo
Closing Time
Play Me
Take This Waltz
Joe Mangle

I would like to thank Jeres, Mary, Mothboy, Solo and Narstie and James and Zef for their help. And I hope you enjoy it.

By the by, I shall be DJing the Vomit In The Mainstream magazine launch do tonight, at my second favourite pub, The Slaughtered Lamb in Farringdon - that’s 34-35 Great Sutton St. I will be playing exclusively love songs, or my definition of that…. I am told they want us all to wear red. I shall be on between 10 and 12, so do come, else I’ll be lonely.

OK, gimme fifteen minutes - I’m just finishing the sleeve…

x

If I was a really moderate, peace loving Muslim, I would be just about ready to set fire to a whole bunch of people right now. Like, how much can one take? And since when was it in the interests of The News Of The World to report on the actual goings on of Her Majesty’s Army? Don’t celebrity coke busts usually belong on the front page? How loud can one say “hmmm?”

It is nice to be back, hmm? London is mild today, and I am in backwards world, having been active since 00:03 today. I washed up in my new flat for the first time. Felt good, bubba! I still have some clothes to put away, and have run out of room. I might have to give them to a charity shop. ‘Tis from whence most of them came, anyway.

So, Johann Hari - me and Jeres’ favourite columnist, who we both once thought to be a lesbrarian, and now know to be male, who looks about ten and seems to know just about everything - today breaks down the great fallacy of “love”. Not the love I have for the world, but that Jane Austen love, that is said to exist between a man and a woman, for all eternity. Go read, and weep, suckers.

By the way, that beautiful youth up there is me, aged sixteen, on the way to the pub. At that point in life, I wasn’t a huge fan of underwear, and had but two pairs of silk boxers, which I wore only on special occasions. That I am wearing the red ones, indicates I had a date, and a special one at that. Woo-hoo! Go sixteen year old soon-to-be-Don!

I wonder how he got on…

If you Know me, you will understand why the above picture, just issued by Marvel, from an as-yet-unpublished comic book, has me terribly excited.

Clue for the rest of you: Guy with the horns on the right.

Yes yes.

So, as evidenced a little earlier, I am very excited and glad that V For Vendetta has been made into a big whopping huge Hollywood thing, and that the trailers are uncompromising and ill, and that it is going to spark a huge hysterical row. Peep here for the amazing early cries of “hang all concerned” from our future I Was Only Following Ordersers.

I am packing now. It is 6:30am, and my car picks me up to take me to JFK airport in half an hour. At 9 a plane will fly me across the water to Greyland.

TV says: FOX NEWS ALERT! DOCTORS SAY ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER SHARON’S LIFE IN DANGER!

TV also is attempting to bully me into spending lots of money on Valentines’ Day. Apparently I need to buy bears and diamonds and things. I say, pshaw! Express yourself when you feel like it, not when TV tells you. Then it is real. Seemingly random expression is very real. Dictated expression is lame. I am sure some of you disagree. But there it is.

That is all.

“Great blood sacrifice is coming to much of the world as it takes a controlled descent into chaos, but that also brings opportunity for the few who hold the words of power. And when peace comes, it will come with strange gods.”
Jeff Wells, February 9th, 2006

Jeff Anderson got me my new mask. I have wanted one for a good while. Longtime followers of my strange deeds will recall that, for the first part of my onstage career, I always wore a mask. And, way back in my rogue days, so too I did.

I suppose I always did. And still do. Don’t we all? But anyway. I have a new mask. And Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta has been made into a movie and is coming out, and, as they shouted at me on Broadway earlier, V looks a little like me.

Not that that has much to do with anything. But, while I don’t believe in much, save people, and love, I do believe in a kind of synergy. A kind of synergy. I wonder what the actual word I have failed to muster is.

Valerie

X

from V for Vendetta
Written by Alan Moore.

Visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Last night I was driven in a Limo from sun-drenched Santa Monica to LA airport. How weird is that? I have never been in a limo before. It seemed kind of unnecessary to be honest. I am in New York now. It is fucking cold.

“dear sir!” writes Luke. “I am enjoying reading your internet words at the moment, though as ever I might not agree the provocation of thought can only be a Good Thing. I distinctly remember a popular beat combo called Crack Village once mock-crucifying a member onstage, which some might have found offensive, but hey ho.”

Well, yes. I remember this too. Druze’s brother made the cross, and a gloriful huge silver thing it was too. As it was, Lois was supposed to be crucified, but chickened out at the last minute blaming inappropriate footwear. So I had to do it, wearing a white skirt and a Tony Blair mask, as I recall. Once up there, there was a problem with the backing tape, so I ended up hanging off of this goshdarned cross for what felt like an eternity, as the crowd got restless, and began to throw things. What a stupid band we were. Anyway. Point being, in staging a mock-crucifixion, we were hardly trying to kick off world war three, now were we? Neither were we pawns in an attempt to enrage a Christian population already livid after years of mockery, murder, and genocide. No no. We were a rap band, is all.

“One thing though,” continues Luke, “from his past utterings I think we can safely say that Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s prediction of the date for all the whizzbangs to go off is probably a bit off the mark. He is, after all, a big chum of Pat Buchanan, made himself rather unpopular in the ’90s by praising Hitler, advocating military action against Russia’s southern neighbours (possibly including the invasion of, er, Iran), threatening to have Alaska back for the Russians, and demanded that Yeltsin napalm Chechenya: “Chechen villages and the entire Chechnya will be covered with blue clouds of smoke from missiles and projectiles,” quoth he.”

Which is as maybe. I don’t think Rummy is a nice man either, and he’s made some gross and strange claims in the past (”Saddam has WMDs!” “Hugo Chavez is worse than Hitler!”). But, this cacophony of voices should not be ignored.

“I’m kind of distrubed by the fact that the russian dude you quoted thinks Americans want a war,” writes Teg D. “we dont. that’s a sad lie and i dont understand why so many people in other countries think that.”

Which is a terrible thing to read, eh? But I don’t think most people think Americans want a war. They think that those that hold power over the American people want a war. And they do. Cos war makes money, and war consolidates power, and war keeps those at home in line. Amongst other things useful in a faux-democracy. As it is, those in power are fucking on the American people in the same manner they are those abroad. Psychological warfare rages all over. Aside from the fact that over 40% of the population lives beneath the poverty line, there is the huge, and rarely considered mass mind-rape that has raged since the fourties, that leaves a people confused and angered and heartbroken and stupefied, with no way of knowing how, or why. To force oneself to think that torture is necessary, is to smash one’s own brain into pieces. People over here are in bits. It is deeply disturbing, and very, very sad.

“Let me ask you something,” writes Teg G, elsewhere in his letter. “What is your position on the troops in the middle east? i dont recall reading anything you wrote about it. personally i dont suport them. the way i see it they made the choice to go and i think everyone has to live with their decissions. do you think that’s a bad way of looking at it?”

And the answer, Teg, is yeah, I do. Because most of those poor little bastards out there, shooting blindly at an “enemy” they do not understand, with crap guns and little body armour, aren’t there out of choice. They’re there because they had no choice. They’re there because they’re poor, and they got fucking piss-poor so-called educations, and joining the army was made to appear to them to be their only way out of a future of crime or poverty. They’re promised a “career”, these kids, where otherwise they have no hope of one. So they go to war, and they bleed, and they make bleed, and their brains are further destroyed, and they return home cripples, and you see them at them outside cafes, begging, faces torn apart with hate and disappointment. So, yeah, I think that’s a bad way of looking at it. They’re victims, just like the babies they murdered.

Jeff and Neil went to see Sigur Ros tonight. I didn’t. I stayed in my hotel, writing, drawing, and dipping in and out of my new Bone collection, the single biggest comic book I have ever seen. It is so good. I’d read the first few books years ago, but now they’ve put all nine volumes in one massive package. It shits on Private Eyes and Daily Shows and ATDdotcoms. It says more about love than anything you’ll read on Tuesday. Unless you read Bone.

Anyway. Last time I saw Sigur Ros - a beautiful late-summers’ night outside at the Hollywood Bowl, it was - I was moved to tears, simply by the beauty of the combined music and imagery onstage, juxtaposed with the horrorful reality of what I knew to be happening in Iraq at the time. And tonight, as the gears shift and crank, and another war moves into focus, I am again so moved, alone, in my hotel room, at my laptop, by the awesome power of humanity to create beauty, as well as ugliness. Go look at this. It is so sick. I am all excited still, cos I can draw onto a piece of plastic with a plastic pen, and it goes straight into my computer. But this is something else.

“You’d think that the concept of a touch screen allowing multiple inputs at a time (ie: use two fingers or your whole hand instead of one finger to do things) is boring,” wrote Melissa. “but shit, the stuff they’re doing in this demo is cool.”

Cool isn’t the word. It is breathtaking!

The blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it has overturned
The order of the soul
Leonard Cohen - The Future

Look! You know I am the typo king! And you know I think coke is rubbish. So please stop emailing me having a go at me for being a cokehead just because yesterday I typed “Half Coked Diary” when I meant half-cocked!

(How can one be “half coked” anyway? Either one is on coke, or one is not, surely?)

Anyway.

Before I get into the whole World War 3 business, let me direct you in the, erm, direction of some good music. Firstly, the good people at Wu-Tang Corp have put together a special mixtape in memory of Russel Jones, AKA ODB, AKA THE KING OF EMOTIVE RAP (RIP). You can download it here. And my boy Anth Latue, the geordie wonder-emcee who you’ll remember from some corking mixtape contributions over the past 18 months, has made an album, and put it on his website. Don’t let the crappy website put you off, the album is dope, and my boy’s beats are fonky as shit. Cop it here. Northern Dreams bebbe! Serious.

So. World War 3. British troops in Iran? “You can never say never in any of these situations,” says Fuher Blair.

Iran will pay “a very heavy price” if they resume full-scale uranium enrichment to build nuclear weapons, says acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

“All options, including the military one, are on the table,” says Rummy Rumsfeld

Russian parliamentary leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky told the Ekho Moskvy radio station yesterday that an attack on Iran is inevitable and that it will occur on March 28th.

“The war is inevitable because the Americans want this war,” said he. “Any country claiming a leading position in the world will need to wage wars. Otherwise it will simply not be able to retain its leading position. The date for the strike is already known — it is the election day in Israel. It is also known how much that war will cost.”

The cartoons’ publication, thinketh he, was aimed to “provoke a row between Europe and the Islamic world… It will all end with European countries thanking the United States and paying, and giving soldiers.”

Over here in the US the press is full of “why Iran is evil” stories. These have been growing in number for the past year, as we have noticed. Now we’re hitting fever pitch. Of course, Bush and Blair’s problem is that they don’t have Europe on side. Enter: Crappy Cartoons!

Four shot dead in Kabul. Condy Rice says “I don’t have any doubt that … Iran and Syria have gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and to use this to their own purposes. And the world ought to call them on it.”

A reader, Dangerfield, writes, “it has taken a welsh student rag to show all the press in the UK what they should have been doing: University of Cardiff student newspaper Gair Rhydd - which means Free Word in Welsh - was forced to recall copies after it reprinted one of the 12 cartoons originally published in a Danish newspaper…

Indeed.”

Indeed!

Many of you are writing to me saying everyone should publish the pictures and it’s a free speech issue. That many images of the Prophet have previously appeared, to little, or no protest.

The Mohammed Image Archive website contains numerous examples of previous instances of the portrayal of the prophet Mohammed. None of them show him with a bomb in his turban, but he has been used to advertise products in Germany, for instance.

“While the debate rages,” writes the site’s author, “an important point has been overlooked: despite the Islamic prohibition against depicting Mohammed under any circumstances, hundreds of paintings, drawings and other images of Mohammed have been created over the centuries, with nary a word of complaint from the Muslim world. The recent cartoons in Jyllands-Posten are nothing new; it’s just that no other images of Mohammed have ever been so widely publicized.”

And therein is the crux. So widely publicised have these crappy drawings become, there probably isn’t a practicing Muslim alive who hasn’t been deeply offended by them yet. This isn’t about freedom of expression. It’s about winding up an already outraged Muslim world, and getting the Europeans behind the globalists’ invasion of Iran.

In other news, YES TV IS FUCKING BAD FOR YOU, and YES IT BREAKS LITTLE BABANS’ BRAINS! This would be why everybody seems midly retarded and thinks me to be mad when I talk of these things. Thank you to my Mother for sheilding me from all that nonsense when I was small. If you have a TV set, parents, plese throw it away. Your babans will be mocked, as I was, for not knowing what’s going on in Neighbours, or the modern equivalent, but they will be richer for it.

On a lighter note, I had a lovely night last night. Danny Saber and I made three amazing beats, and his dear wife Helen and the lovely Carina kidnapped me and took me to The Rainbow on LA’s sunset strip. It is full of big-haired eighties leftovers, I like it. Carina gave me that bracelet you see above, with three-eyed- blobs on it. She is still unaware of the existence of The Blob. Jeff considers that significant. I wouldn’t know about that sort of thing. I just think it’s dope.

Oh, and I was in my favourite newspaper, the Independent last week. Wowza.

We are in San Francisco right now, on the thirtieth floor of the Grand Hyatt, which is next to a big tunnel, atop which sits a nice bar called Tunnel Top, which serves whiskey in pint glasses, with an inch of coke bringing the liquid level to the top of the glass. My left eyeball is bright red, which tends to indicate a decent night on the tiles, and Jeff tells me I danced an awful lot to bad house music for hours, and span ladies about like whirlygigs. I have no idea. I left that End Up place at ten or something, with the sunshine beating down on me, following a row with the stubbly lesbrarian door lady, who I mistook for a man and called dude a lot, but Jeff was still there at 2pm. He seems in remarkably good shape, however. We got up at nine and went for nice Italian food down by the docks, but I shall go back to bed now, as I am tired and confused, and we have to drive back to LA at 6am. I think I am going back to New York on Wednesday. We have a week of Grammy parties and drawing and making mixtapes and comic books ahead of us. It is not such a bad old life, for some of us.

That’s me taking a photo out of my hotel room window.

So, after a nine hour drive along the “one”, AKA the PCH, AKA the Pacific Coast Highway, we are back in LA, in Jeff’s darling wee house. Jeff is watching Saturday Night Live, which I usually find dire, but it is quite funny today. It is hard to escape TV in this US of A, you know. My mother is concerned.

“Considering I did my best to keep you away from the evils of TV as a little one,” writes she, “and you don’t have a set of your own, you seem to watch more TV than anyone I know!! Read a book or listen to a pod cast in your hotel room! Learn Swahili or something. Leeches indeed! Your brain will rot! ”

Pod Cast! See, I am all futurey, but I haven’t sussed out Pod Casts. I haven’t sussed out the iPod Jeff gave me, to be honest. It still has his stuff on it. Which is mainly Journey and Peter Frampton and Wu-Tang, which is fine, actually. But anyway.

That’s the view down from my hotel room, that is

Yeah, mam, it is true, the very little of this TV I am getting is far too much. Last night, prior to peeling the contacts from my bloodied eyeballs, I happened upon this thing, of which I have heard a very little, called Catching A Predator, in which a “news” programme called Dateline sets up dudes on the internet and shames them on national TV. Basically, these dudes sit at home, talking to what they think are teenagers on the internet, then they arrange to meet these teenagers, then they go to a house, wherein waits this Dateline dude, who grills them creepishly and confronts them with their predicament. They tend to make bizarre excuses for being there (”I was here to sell a house”), and for the viagra/cameras/magazines/outfits they are carrying (I was gon my way to a fancy dress party and thought I met get lucky”). Then they go outside, and the coppers arrest them. It is quite gross. Public hangings will be back soon, I suspect.

Cube view.

Still. That drive back was awesome. We saw the biggest waves ever, then we went through Big Sur, which is just like I imagined it, but bigger, and full of tiny black sparrows that walk right up to you and make a devilish noise. And an eagle! I also saw lots of really sick mountains, like the one below, but I only remembered Jeff’s camera at the end, plus that photo totally refused to capture the big sick moun tains big sickness. Pretty sky though, hmm? Indeed.

Totally sick mountain.

So, World War III has been boiling away for a while now. But could a cartoon of the Prophet Mohhamed be the trigger that sets it all off officially? One hopes not, obviously, but one supposes it would be befitting of these retarded days in which we live. Incidentally, Merete Eldrup, Managing Director of JP/Politikens Hus A/S, the company that published those unfunny and entirely Skygoshdarned incendiary cartoons in Denmark, is married to Anders Eldrup. That there man is a big Bush Buddy, and attendee of the last five Bilderberger meetings. Not that means anything of course.

Now look at the size of that fucking rabbit! Fat bastard! It looks like it ate you!

Anyway. As I am in La, let me dispel a myth for you: That British TV is better than American TV.

The truth is not so. Americans are much better than the British at Television, good and bad. They make the worst television. So bad can they make it! But so too, they make the best. Ours is mainly a bit crap, and super-occasionally very good. In America it is mainly awful, but there is always something really amazing on, like South Park, or The Sopranos, or Dave Chapelle, or The Daily Show, or Seinfeld, or the Young Jeezy video.

However, it is full of humiliation and torture. They’re force feeding a man leeches at the moment, and laughing at him. “It’s not good enough Kevin. Looks like Lucy’s gonna get that Hummer!”

Lucy is in a vat full of lobsters and lice. She has bile dripping out of the corners of her collagen plump lips.

She is kind of hot.

Oo-er, people! We are entering a new plateau of high weird, here in this 21st century, itself a tricky little bit of subtle deception to make us thing there haven’t been billions more, in which reality TV game shows were not a controlling factor and huge beasts flew about the skies, swooping down on occasion to feast on giant vermin, oblivious to the big white dude in the clouds and the red one with hooves beneath, who one day would plant their bones in the desert in order to trick innocent Christians into thinking the Bible to not be literal. Dark!

If I had a brand new combine harvester, I would not give you the key, as you might break it.

HAHAHAHAHA!

So I was up at Interscope yesterday, plotting, which is fun, cos it involves puffy stickers and stuff. After we went to The Viceroy, which is one of those restaurants in a hotel which is so expensive they don’t put the prices next to the items on the menu. Lou Reed was there. Lou Reed is short. I had half of Jeff’s burger and a bunch of whiskeys, thank you. We all got given a small quantity of potato and random meat on a spoon. I have no idea why. Dyana told us this story about how one time she was doing karaoke in some dive, and Whitney Houston came in a hoodie and got up and did The Greatest Love Of All. Ray told us about how Manhattan Beach has been ruined, by a load of raw sewage wot got pumped all over it for some bizzaro reason. “You can’t shake that shit,” he noted, sadly. Seems the beach is likely to be ruined and unusable for 20 years, as the sewage penetrated the sand, and it is now full of bacteria. “The shit went down,” explained Ray, usefully.

My Blackberry notes are a bit vague after that, as we hooked up with Jeff’s brother and got battered. Jeff’s brother hangs out with legions of 22 year old Californian girls and smokes bowls and does too many shots, and can’t remember a thing that happened last night, today, but is painfully aware that his girlfriend hates him and Jeff nicked half of his weed. Ah-ha ha ha. Brothers! I had a good time, between the worst club in the world and a relatively safe one, and I finally found some moustache wax, and I kept finding things to be amazed by, like dogs, those freakish inventions of human selective breeding, you used to be wolves and shit! Ah ha ha ha!

Today we went to see Danny Saber and that freak dog Wolfie and the long-suffering Helen, to make substitute music. I did some Singing. It sounded like Belle And Sebastian, before we pitched it up. In my head I have a giant, magnificent, Pavarotti voice, but in reality I have a gay indie voice.

I learn so many things here! Today I learnt that Madonna has a recurring nightmare in which she is chased by a midget weirding a knife. And Lynsey Lohan was interviewed for the part of Tom Cruise’s wife. Scary!

Anyway. Tomorrow, we are driving to San Francisco! Road Trip! Best not be any earthquakes! We know what you’re up to Jeb, you fat little shit!

What would I do without you lot?

“for the record,” writes a person calling themselves “Booty”, via MySpace, who has one friend - which is Tom, freakish grinning friend of all - and no picture, leading me to think he joined just so he could inform my dumb Limey ass: “any form of protest at the presidents address is not allowed, those are simply the rules! sheehan was asked before hand not to protest and she did! she broke the rules, end of story.”

Which is interesting to hear. I don’t like those rules, myself, but hey…

“…she was not the only one removed that night,” continues the letter. “a pro war republican was also asked to leave for wearing a pro war t-shirt!!! explain that one?”

To show no-bias, I would assume. And I wouldn’t call a T-Shirt reading “Support the Troops” a “pro-war” shirt. I would call it, if anything, a pro-troops shirt. Or a pro-persons in danger shirt. Maybe just pro-people. Whatever.

“Both women’s shirts resulted in their owners being ejected from the House chamber before President Bush’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night so basically you have carefully edited the true events, true marxist style, and concocted your own version.”

Oh, were that true! I just hasn’t heard about the “pro-war” shirt. It should also be noted that Cindy, whose shirt read “2,245 Dead. How many more?” was forcibly removed, then arrested. Beverly Young, wife of Republican Rep. Bill Young of Florida, was asked nicely to go outside, and not arrested at all. Whatever, U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer this afternoon said that neither woman should have been removed from the chamber and that, “we made a mistake… just wearing a T-shirt is not unlawful.”

Well, good. Were it, we would be living in Bizzaro world, and I would be called Eustace, or something, surely?

Booty continues:

“so what it be alright if say one night you were djng and i climbed onto your set and blocked the sound system, stopped you from working? that would be ok wouldn’t it? or would you have the burly bouncers remove me so you could continue? if that’s ok, i’ll come to your next show and protest and sit on your booth waving banners, interrupt you, block off the music, you are for freedom of speech yeah?”

Well, Booty, were you to turn up at any of my public engagements, as twere, waving a banner, yes, that would be fine. I am sure it wouldn’t stop me from working. But we are discussing T-Shirts here, aren’t we? You can wear a T-Shirt saying “Akira The Don Fucks Little Kids” for all I care. “Akira The Don Loves The Killers”. Whatever. That’s fine. But, serious, someone wearing a T-Shirt, or even waving a massive banner, is not going to stop Resident Douche from “working”. Even not being voted in didn’t do that. Impeachment wouldn’t. We are dealing with a particularly nasty Hydra here, let us never forget.

But, Booty, do continue!

“as for katrina??? ethnic cleansing? what planet are you on mate, you’ve been smoking too much weed. for your information all those poor blacks that were taken out of new orleans are not living in “concentration” camps but put up in 4-5 star hotels, cheap motels, brand new trailer parks across the USA! they are also given government cheques to support them, they have been provided with free food and clothing etc. your article was racist and uninformed.”

Well, yes, a fair few folks have been doing OK. A friend of mine followed a number of families, who have moved in with others in places as far afield as Georgia, and even New York, and are doing wonderfully, considering. But some 200,000 remain in what are, essentially, camps, and may be until 2010. In these places, the folks have been separated from their spouses, are not allowed to cook for themselves, and are not allowed to leave the premises. You can read an account of one such camp here.

Do go on thought Booty.

“mayor nagin was the one with the ultimate responsibility who could have ordered the evacuation, which he did not do. he had a fleet of hundreds of bright yellow school buses he couldve used but chose not to? he didnt listen to the governments advice nor to local meteorologists to evacuate, but thought that a cat 5 hurricane would not flood “his” city. strangely enough he managed to get his “black ass” straight out of orleans leaving “his” people to the mercy of nature and the looters. Note: the USA is a collection of states, rather like mini countries, the president did not have the executive order to just go in a remove the people (white and black), who were pretty stupid to hang around in the first place whilst a cat 5 hurricane descended on them.”

Well Booty, the Mayor did indeed order an evacuation, which those with the means, mainly white, were able to heed. Those without the means to pack up their houses and flee by car, those without cars, those unable to pay for gas (which had run out due to the scramble anyway), those in hospital, those on drugs, the old, the sick, they couldn’t move, I am afraid. So those people were left to die, by the government. “Hang in there.” That poor Mayor was doing all he could! “The national guard are on their way,” he was promised, but of course that guard took over a week to show, while Bush continued to trot around the country making the case for continued war, and playing guitar in photoshoots.

It wasn’t just that Bush didn’t go in there and drag everybody out. It was that the people of New Orleans, Mississippi, and the surrounding areas, were left to die, for over a week. When the National Guard did show up, they surrounded these places, and refused to let the Red Cross or any provisions at all in, saying they wanted people to leave, and letting in supplies would draw people back.

No water for four days. International aid refused. FEMA denying aid, cutting phone lines. Bush on tour, Cheney on holiday. So, the streets filled with bodies, dropping like flies from the heat, from starvation, from exhaustion. Some, literally, exploded. Popped like over-ripe plums in the midday sun.

“do you know that it wasnt just new orleans that was destroyed?” asks Booty, sadly. “the whole costal areas known as the gulf coast was tragically hit, about the size and mass of the UK was destroyed, can you fathom that? or has the BBC told you what to think? how could one man, a president stop a cat 5 hurricane? evacuate millions of people in a few days.”

Well, here’s the thing, Booty. Everybody knew a hurricane, of horrorful magnitude, was going to hit the Gulf Coast. That was known three weeks prior. It was all over the weather channels, and even on the mainstream news channels, like CNN and Fox. Remember the US response to the Tsunami? Wasn’t it incredible? In there like gangbusters, pow! And beside that, everybody knew those levies were, for want of a better word, rubbish. A report conducted in the sixties predicted the very eventuality that Katrina ushered in. The Bush administration actually took away money that was supposed to be paying for their repair in 2003, to pay for their war in Iraq. You can read a little about it here. Search about, there is a lot more. I haven’t time to do your research for you right now, I am afraid.

“my advice,” concludes Booty: “lay off the ganja, stop watching the BBC news for your daily propaganda and whilst you are in the USA, NYC, travel around a bit, speak to people that were actually in louisana before jumping to idiotic conclusions about genocide and concentration camps, throwing your magazines against the walls etc. next you’ll be saying that the hurricane was created by republicans using some brand new weapons system.”

Well, thanks for your advice Booty. As it is, I very rarely smoke weed these days, as I have too much to do. And I don’t watch the BBC either. I don’t own a TV! If you dig about my archives a bit, you’ll find lots of testimony from people I’ve spoken to, all around America and the world, about these things of which I speak. I talk to all sorts of people, all the time. It’s part of my job you see. And of all the people I have spoken to, who were in New Orleans when that shit went down, not one has a single good thing to say about the Bush Administration, or FEMA. Many have love for their Mayor. Anyway. I wrote a great deal about all this throughout September. All linked and referenced. Well, not all, sometimes, I like, emote. I am allowed. Have a nosey about. And, finally, I have run this before, but one more time:

“Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

My advice for you Booty? Read lots more. Start with this - it’s short, and funny, you’ll like it. It’s a historical artifact from the time of the horror: “8 Tips On How To Avoid Dealing With The Really Really Really Really Really Really Really Really Obvious Racial Dimensions of the New Orleans Tragedy, As Taught To Me By Television And The Web In The Last Week”

Oh, and regarding your final point - whilst nobody would ever believe for three seconds that anybody would actually use weather modification technology on people, let alone “their people”, we do know that, well, it exists, and a bill was passed last year making it completely legal for the US military to use it. You can read a little about it here, but I’d suggest you do your own research, and draw your own conclusions.

Peace be with you.

Oh! I nearly forgot. Good news. Mary emailed me the following:

“The religious hatred bill didn’t go through, tony lost by one vote and he couldn’t vote hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha”

Read all about it!