Hollywood Gears Up For Oscar Sequels

The movies - where historical accuracy fears to tread.

Hollywood is pondering how to cash in on the success of this year’s Oscar nominees due to the lack of any obvious sequels to the main contenders. Fortunately, the SAHIP blog’s film and media creative arm has been working overtime on some new ideas, all of which have now been bought up by the major studios. Expect to see these big screen follow-ups before the end of the year:

Argo Back For More

Feeling that their first escape was a bit of a breeze, CIA operative Tony Mendez smuggles the six Canadians he liberated from Iran back in to the country the following year to film a fake sequel to the fake sci-fi movie Argo. It’s easy to bribe the witless Iranian officials with free Argo mugs, posters and bobble-heads, because deep down they all want to be Americans really. Things almost go disastrously wrong when the crew tries to film an explicit lesbian sex scene at a mosque during Friday prayers, while the team later makes its narrow escape as Mendez takes on the Ayatollah Khomeini in dramatic hand-to-knife combat on the under-carriage of their departing Swissair jet. Based on a figment of reality.

Lincoln Rises Again

Written after the emergence of new (though currently unavailable) historical evidence that John Wilkes Booth’s shooting of Abraham Lincoln may not have been as successful as commonly thought, this movie charts the political advances made by the unstoppably progressive Lincoln as he rises from the dead three days after his ‘assassination’. Peeved by the country’s reluctance to truly accept blacks as equals, he seizes back the presidency under the moniker of his newly founded Black Power party, and institutes a minimum hourly wage of $15 for all freed slaves. While he’s at it, he persuades both Congress and the Senate to pass bills legalising gay marriage, legislating equal pay for

Plaudits For The Pensioner Who Pulverized Pizza Hut

"Oops, did I do that? Oh my!" (Pic: CAPT258)

Old people never seem to get the credit they deserve. This week an 86-year-old woman crashed her car into a Pizza Hut in Arlington, Virginia, and the story was presented as though this was all a terrible accident. The wayward octogenarian had lost control of her car after she "apparently confused the gas and brake pedals". I don't believe a word of it. She pranged the chain food outlet on purpose, and I don't blame her. Pizza Hut serves food so bad that I've seen liberated chickens strut out of there and straight back to their battery farms for better chow.

It's not just their scanty, cardboard-based pizzas that offend all right-tasting palettes. It's the miserable atmosphere, the stingy dimensions of the serve-yourself salad bowls, and the understandably depressed demeanours of their under-motivated staff that make visiting Pizza Hut akin to a gastronomic wake. That anyone voluntarily walks into this chain and hands over their own cash in exchange for a series of culinary insults testifies to the rock-bottom discernment of your average western gut. Thank heavens, some of us are fighting back. 

Our blue-rinse heroine should be given a public service award for literally trashing this anti-nutritional fodder stall of flavour disenfranchisement. Where a customer comment of 'Mediocre service' on the feedback form will win you Employee of the Month. Where a

Morrissey at the Strathmore

Financially eviscerated, and no one to blame but
 yourself (note to pedants: concert was re-scheduled)

Morrissey sings on You Were Good In Your Time, a song from a characteristically average solo effort called Years of Refusal (2009), “You were good in your time/And we thank you so/You said more in one day/Than most people say/In a lifetime…” Possibly paraphrasing his critics and former fans, it seems like a defiant, not to mention masturbatory, counter-attack to suggestions that he should call it a day. Last night at the Strathmore Concert Hall in North Bethesda, there was more than enough adulation in the air to blow away any plans he ever harboured to retire. Nonetheless, he really should. And people like me should stop spending $87.50 on tickets (including charges) just to have our view confirmed that his best songs were composed long ago, and he’s no longer much good at singing them.

Not that the concert was bad, if you forget about the price tag, and the seat high up in the balcony with a distant view of the stalwart vegetarian and his journeyman band-mates. For what it’s worth, it was much, much better than the two previous times I’ve seen him solo, at the 9.30 Club and at the sonically challenged outdoor Wolf Trap. The overall delivery was solid, the sound was strong, and like any middle-aged fool for the better days of indie-pop, I waited for the next old hit as though Steve Jobs had never invented playlists on shuffle. If I was Morrissey's music teacher making a neutral assessment, I'd give it a B minus.

It’s hard, though, to feel moved by the music when you’re stuck in a theatre seat, and the woman to your right spends the entire first half of the concert sending texts. At one point, five people directly around me were fucking about on their cell phones, and they

Top 30 Albums, 2012

At last, it's the end-of-year musical list that all stay-at-home dads long for and live for. I won't bore you with too much prose this time, having long since run out of new adjectives to describe sounds that deserve more than mere phrases. As always, this is in no way a professionally assessed list, it's a rundown of the recordings I enjoyed listening to most, in approximate order. My apologies to the thousands of artistes I never heard, or have never heard of. It was already a good enough year without me needing to hear any more.

30. Tift Merritt - Traveling Alone (Yep Roc)
Track: Traveling Alone
Listen to: ooh, I don't know. When traveling alone?

29. Cat Power - Sun (Matador Records)

Track: Cherokee

Listen to: still traveling alone, dreamily driving across vast, unpopulated midwest landscapes (never done this, but it's a plan).

28. Air - Le Voyage dans la Lune (EMI)

Track: Sonic Armada

Listen to: while watching the disconcerting 1902 sci-fi film of the same name that Air belatedly put a soundtrack to.

27. Mark Lanegan Band - Blues Funeral (4AD)

Track: The Gravedigger's Song

Listen to: while celebrating decay.

26. Amadou and Mariam - Folilo (Nonesuch)

Track: Oh Amadou

Listen to: when reading reports from northern Mali about how brutal Islamic fundamentalists are suppressing all forms of music beside religious incantations.

25. Alabama Shakes - Boys and Girls (Ato Records)

Track: Hold On

Listen to: for old-fashioned musical virtues - raw, head-ripping, down-to-the-bone brilliance.

24. Cate le Bon - Cyrk (TCG)

Track: Fold The Cloth

Listen to: when you're wishing the Velvet Underground and Nico had made a few more albums.

2012: Six Countries, Six Stadiums

This year I managed to get out the house a bit more than usual, taking me to some new places, and also back to some more familiar ones. It's sad but true - the easiest way for me to remember where I was, and when, is to mentally archive the football games I went to.

Nakivubo Stadium, Kampala - the
 crowded section (pic: SAHIP)

1. Saturday May 5. Nakivubo Stadium, Kampala, Uganda. Competition: Bell's Ugandan Super League. SC Villa v KCC. Entrance: 5000 Ugandan schillings ($2).
I enter the former national stadium at 2.45pm for a 3pm kick-off, because I'm always prompt, and you never know if there will be a rush on tickets. No worries, I'm the first person there in the 15,000 capacity ground, and the only way I know there's a game on is because there are two teams warming up. The match kicks off at 3.15, and a few hundred profoundly unenthusiastic fans drift in, reacting only to goals with begrudging applause, but never cheering good play. By half-time, a few lads have finally affixed the sponsors' boards to the perimeter fence. At the final whistle no one moves, maybe because there's lots of space in here compared with the cramped, chaotic city beyond, or maybe because someone's setting up a sound system next to a barrel of cold beers. Final score: SC Villa 2 KCC 0.

Hand-crafted seating at the national
 stadium in Bujumbura (pic: SAHIP)

2. Wednesday May 9. National Stadium, Bujumbura, Burundi. Competition: A cup game between two unidentified teams. Entrance: free.
After a meeting in one of the government buildings close by, I walk across the road late in the afternoon to take a look at the ground. The gate's half open, so I peer in, expecting to be shouted away by a groundsman, as would happen in England. Except there's a game on, with about 150 people watching. It's a neat ground, surrounded on three sides by mosaic stone seating, with a less alluring covered main stand. I see the last 20 minutes of the match, then it goes to penalty kicks, at which point, strangely, half the spectators leave. One goalkeeper aggressively taunts an opponent who's missed his kick. Bad karma, dude - the goalkeeper's team goes on to lose, prompting wild celebrations among the victors, while the remaining spectators shuffle out wordlessly. One man hits the fence in frustration, the only visible display of fan emotion. Final score: someone won on PKs.

Bukavu's Stade de la Concorde: Built in Mobutu's
 name, on this day host to honky house-dads (pic: SAHIP)

3. Saturday May 19. Stade de la Concorde, Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo. Competition: Great Lakes Peace Cup, DRC quarter-final, second leg. Espoir du Grand Lac v Umoja. Entrance: free.

In the sparse but spacious former President Mobutu Stadium, two teams of former combatants and community members battle it out on a testing surface. As by far the whitest person there, I am invited to take the ceremonial kick-off, for the first and possibly the last time in my life, praying that the anti-diarrhea tablets I had to take earlier that morning will remain effective. A clutch of small boys spend the entire game staring at me while I make small talk in broken French with the South Kivu Minister for Sport and Leisure in the VIP section (six plastic chairs on the concrete terrace cordoned off from the masses). "Tricky surface," I venture. "They're used to it," he replies tersely. Final score: Espoir du Grand Lac 1 Umoja 0 (3-1 on aggregate). More pictures here.

The Correct Methods of Jazz Education

At least half our house likes Ike

I gave up trying to influence my daughters’ musical tastes several years ago. When they were tiny, they had no choice other than to dance to the vinyl tracks I played them every night after bath-time. I compiled for my older daughter, who was four at the time, a cassette of her favoured singalongs. It included The Pogues and Ian Dury, and one day, without my knowledge, she put it in her lunch box and took it to play to her little friends at kindergarten.

That same afternoon a thunder-faced teacher met me at the door to ‘Children In The Shoe’, demanding to know why I was allowing my child to listen to “filthy, obscene” music. “I had to literally run across the room and turn it off!” she scolded. I mumbled that I’d no idea how she had such an item in her possession. This craven lie foundered on the cassette’s label, in adult handwriting, which read ‘Xxxxx’s Favourites’. I suspect it was only my daughter’s generally carefree demeanour that prevented the kindergarten from making a call to social services.

In a few years, both daughters realised their contemporaries were all listening to Shite FM, and for a long time resented me for having shielded them from the common

Copulating Carrots Tell Us All We Need To Know About Obama's America

Pure evil, in carrot form (pic: SAHIP)

For anyone still doubting the depths of moral decadence that America has sunk to under the Obama administration over the past four years, I present the following hard, raw evidence that this country has descended to new levels of sexual depravity encouraged by the permissive liberal climate – same-genre vegetables openly copulating in my fridge (see above). The disgusting and graphic picture I am duty-bound to reproduce here reflects the same kind of licentious, intra-grocery fornication that could well be happening in refrigerators across the United States right now.

Imagine my shock when I opened the fridge door with the wholesome goal of making a nourishing, vitamin-rich, family values-inspired soup, only to be confronted with this naked display of hardcore penetration by two rutting root vegetables of the same colour and the same grotesque phallic shape. And once caught, did they stop, cry out in shame and then scuttle for separate vegetable drawers? No, they unblushingly continued to interlock right in front of my eyes, as though the watching gaze of a third party was mere fuel to their unspeakable lust.

I could have shut the door, sealed off the fridge with duct tape, dragged it outside, doused it with diesel, and then set the whole loathsome device aflame. After all, the fridge is culpable too in this seething tale of seedling seediness, having provided the sluttish food items with the cold den of iniquity for their vile, whorish behaviour.

If The Republican Party Doesn’t Believe In Government, Why Does It Exist?

There’s a simple solution to the contradiction eating away at the heart of the GOP. Disband and secede to enclaves reserved exclusively for the extremely rich.

A Republican Enclave, recently

The Republican Party convention in Tampa this week has mined comical new depths of inane, conceptually bankrupt rhetoric, even by the already desperate standards set during George Bush’s government, which managed the impressive task of staying in power for eight years without passing a single act that genuinely improved life for the majority of people living in the United States. The folksy Florida theme of the week has been as simple as saying “Pray to God and all good things shall come to thee”. Speaker after speaker has claimed to come from ornery, humble roots, but thanks to hard work they ended up successful and, by proxy, stinking rich. And if everyone else just works as hard as these leading model Republicans, they’ll end up exactly the same, and America will be saved from the hardline socialists apparently rife throughout the Democratic Party (nope, I can’t name a single one either).

The contradiction at the core of what can barely be called a Republican ‘philosophy’ is that all this apparent success was achieved without help or handouts from the state (this in itself is a lie comprehensively nailed here by Charles Pierce). And yet, while denouncing big government, it wants to be the Party that governs all 50 states. How can that be done on a small scale? The answer, as all latter-day GOP administrations have discovered, is that it cannot. But there’s no need to let reality stop you posturing in the name of a phony but populist grassroots core belief.

In order to bring some genuine principle back to a Party so heartbreakingly starved of integrity, the Republicans should renounce its goal of being elected to political power and liquidate itself with immediate effect. In return for this magnanimous gesture, the

The Best Junk Shop In The World

 Junk rocks (pic: SAHIP)

I spotted this second hand shop in Zürich on Thursday night, in a back street behind the train station while on my way to meet my old football team for reunion drinks (Wacker Selnau FC - Swiss Progressive League champions, 1998 and 1999, as I'm sure you remember). It was closed, and judging by its opening times of three afternoons a week, you'll be hard pressed to find it ready for business. Even if it's open you'll find it even harder to get in, because the junk fills the entire shop, almost up to the ceiling. There's just enough room to open the door. There's no sign of a counter, let alone a till. 

I imagine the proprietor standing at the door, a weathered man in his 50s smoking a roll-up, and when someone expresses an interest in, say, the pile of LPs sticking out of the top of the heap, he dons a laconic smile and invites them to clamber inside and take a look. And then, once they've disappeared in the treasure, he calmly locks the door and doesn't return for several days. It's an ongoing artistic installation that uses slow death to mock our yearning for material steals, reflected in the turnover of surplus bric-a-brac perpetually handed down by mortals who could not take it with them to the narrow urn, or Mitteleuropa's cold, dark earth.

Junken treasures (pic: SAHIP)

I'm a hoarder myself, though my crap is much better organised, and conceals few, if any, corpses. It's mainly piles and piles of old football and music magazines, plus a few drawers of memorabilia that's meaningless to anyone besides myself. Should I depart, I imagine most of the magazines will be pulped, and the memorabilia evaluated (just in case I accidentally accrued something of worth), and then likewise pressed into trash. So I hereby state that all my band badges and postcards and football stickers and football medals and press accreditation badges, and numerous other plastic objects and figurines, be donated to the world's most genuine junk shop, somewhere in a back street of Zürich. If the owner mildly invites you in for a closer look, just throw it all on top of the pile, then run for the station. Thanks.

Feeling A Clot in the ER

I hadn’t been to the Emergency Room for six years, and only then because it was a weekend and I’d been kicked in the head while heading a football towards the bottom corner of a goal in a grassy recreational corner of Montgomery County. Although the insurance company largely paid up, I saw later from the bill that the two stitches they put in just above my left eye on a Sunday afternoon cost the best part of $1000. It was by a fair distance the most valuable goal I’ve ever scored.

"Make way, calf strain victim!"

Otherwise, I tend to avoid the Emergency Room unless I’m in a lot of pain and it’s outside of a doctor’s normal hours. You hear of stats reporting that the vast majority of all emergency room visits are not, in fact, emergencies. You don’t want to be the one sitting there with a vague ache in the head while accident victims with seconds to live are rushed past you and through several sets of double doors, as they always seem to be on television ERs. Which always makes me wonder why they have so many sets of double doors in Emergency Room buildings. Don’t you want to get people through to the operating theatre quickly? Then build corridors with fewer sets of heavy metal doors, for Christ’s sake.

Anyway, last Saturday morning I had a pain in the left leg, which had been getting worse for four days. I thought it was a football injury, but they usually get better when you apply muscle rub and scoff ibuprofen. But this was keeping me awake all night, when I was horizontal and restful, and it wasn’t just pain, it was ***ING PAIN. So bad that I got out of bed and went straight to the ER.

But pain is like love, it’s not always constant. By the time I got there, it had subsided.