My Single Friend
And now we’re working with mysinglefriend.com, which means doing dating videos for the next couple of weeks. We’re invoicing for all of this. I think that makes us escorts.
Spot the Prostate
This is a clip we did for Movember recently. We spent the day in Berlin asking people ‘Konnen Sie bitte uns zeigen, wo die Prostata steht?’. Or, show us where the prostate is, please.
DIY PR in Dublin
We’re in Dublin doing our own version of PR. Fingers crossed these books end up in the right hands.
Launching Books
Hey, this is us. We were in Camden last night at the launch of Eurotash. Steve gave a wonderful speech. People weeped and fell into convulsions of laughter at the same time. It was mighty. Celebrities lined the walls and our poor arms were crippled from signing autographs. The night ended in China Town getting hustled out of a bucket of money in some mafia restaurant. We stole the chopsticks as revenge. The next stop on the tour is Dublin, where we hope to do a little hustling of our own to recoup losses.
Modonna – a tag in Berlin
Working on some videos with Movember at the moment and this is the first. That’s Sophie von Oswald in the vid too.
The Vice Guide to Gore Movies
When I was down in Switzerland for an interview with HR Giger that lasted about as long as I would in the ring with Nikolai Valuev, I met this girl called Claudia. Then I interviewed her.
Claudia Rindler probably isn’t how you imagined most Swiss girls to be. She hates sunshine, she hates Christians and she has a tattoo of Klaus Kinski’s face smiling up at her from her right arm. When Claudia pops down to the shops for her milk and cheese of a morning she takes her purple hearse that stinks of weed and sounds like thrash metal.
Claudia is a make-up artist and film director and goes under the alias, Dr. Rotten. She recently released a DVD called The Rotten Box, which has nothing to do with the time Chlamydia threatened to eat a hole through her lap, but a selection of the finest gore to come out of the Alps.
If you’re a young male out there and think that Claudia’s wry wit, fine perversions and ability with a knife make her great marriage material, we regret to inform you that you’re too late. She got married on June, 06, 2006, to the devil himself!
In porn, the storyline is a bonus but the cumshot is essential. How important is a good story in a gore movie?
It’s important but a good story is always difficult to find. If you want to make something funny, some alcohol can help. But if you are looking for something serious, it s good to have a friend who is good at writing, is a little bit twisted like you and is happy to work for beer or sexual favours.
And while we’re on the subject, is it wise to mix porn with gore?
Well you don’t really want to mix any porn, but sex yes. Sex and horror go perfectly together. There is also an unwritten law about shooting gore movies, that everyone who has sex in the movie has to die. Tough, isn’t it?
Good looking actors covered with guts and blood always look sexy though .
How do you look sexy when you’re dead?
By being prepared. No matter what you do you’ve got to always make sure your rocking a good look. It doesn’t matter that you’ve been out partying till 5am and fallen into a couple of bushes on the way home, you never know when death comes knocking at your door, so style your hair, use some make-up and always smile.
What makes for a good gore movie actor?
When it comes to choosing actors there are a couple of simple tests to determine whether they’re going to make the cut in a gore movie. If it’s a man give him a gun or a knife and ask him to turn on his best maniac face. If it’s a girl ditch the weapons, but get her to scream as loud as she can. Then, and this is probably the most important test, ask them if they’ll work for free. If the answers ‘yes’, hire ‘em on the spot.
How would you couch an actor for a scene where they have to be eaten alive for example?
1. Just before you start shooting whisper into their ear, ‘sorry it’s hard for me to say, but I lost all the money for the movie on a round of poker last night last so we can’t pay you. Are you spotting a theme yet? Gore movies don’t exactly come with fat budgets.
2. Then give them lots and lots of alcohol.
3. If neither of those things work, I ask my bulldogs for help.
If you’re going to make a gore movie, how to you go about choosing a location?
Oh I like the Scottish landscape, ruins and so on. I love these old Edgar Wallace movies with the castles. Here in Switzerland it’s not so easy to find a nice location. I think some parts of Germany in the east are cool too, because of the “ghost towns” full of empty houses and buildings they have there.
If you want to make gore movies, would you advise spending your time hanging out in accident and emergency or at black spots on motorways as research?
I have a good friend, he is doctor of forensics. He sends me pictures from real cases every so often. This inspires me a lot. I read lots of books about serial killers, that’s good inspiration too I think. It might be dangerous to hang out on a motorway.
How do you introduce gore to children?
Explain to them that it’s all fake and they’ll love it. I’ve worked many times with kids and it was always cool and always funny. A mother once told me that she couldn’t watch horror movies with her son anymore since we’d done a shoot. He was always shouting, ‘booooring! I know how they do this effect. I can see the tubes where the blood comes out,’ and so on. It ruined a healthy mother/son horror relationship.
And then, what’s the best way to kill children?
Well, I’m obsessed with jars. I think they look always cool in movies, photos or just as a decoration, that’s why I’d say it doesn’t really matter how you kill the little fuckers, so long as when you’re finished you put them in a jar.
What’s a good recipe for blood?
Go to the garden at midnight and pick some raspberries.
Cook them with a little sugar during a full moon.
Add two rotten frog legs and a cow’s eye.
Then mix them all together, dance three times around the pot and say: ‘turn to blood, turn to blood, turn to blood.’ You’ll get some nice, lovely blood… or something red and nasty at least.
Who do you think had the inspirational death of them all?
Klaus Kinski of course. He died several times in different movies and he was always great. My favourite death of his is in Nosferatu. If you’re talking about special effects then it has to be Tom Savini in Maniac. He shoots himself with a gun to the head, and it explodes with lots and lots of blood. Hell yes!
Can you go too far?
When I hear an ambulance at the set I suppose. No, I think there is no too far when you do a movie. Especialy when you do special effects. As long as no one gets hurt and everybody has fun, it’s all fine.
Raggare
Raggare: the Swedish rock’n'roll cult comes of age
The biggest pop tribe in Sweden isn’t indie kids or techno heads. It’s made up of people who adore Chuck Berry and drive vintage cars. Meet the raggare
In high summer, deep in the Swedish countryside, you could easily believe Rebel Without a Cause or The Wild One are being remade. The quiffs, classic cars and 1950s clothes aren’t for show, however. These people aren’t costumed extras, they are raggare, members of the largest pop-culture tribe in Sweden, and one of the most influential in Scandinavia.
Rock’n'roll never died for the raggare: they are still devoted to the music, the fashion, the aesthetics. For 50 years they have kept its spirit alive, but where rock’n'rollers in other countries have dwindled into small groups, in Sweden they have gone from strength to strength – there are now estimated to be half a million of them.
The first raggare would travel in convoy from one hick town to the next to beat lumps out of each other and ogle the women. There are still organised raggare brawls, but the movement is part of the mainstream now, its most visible manifestation the cheap 50s and 60s US cars the raggare still drive and the vintage clothes they wear. You can have three generations of raggare within the same family, and there was no more eloquent statement of raggare respectability than the 12 kronor commemorative raggare stamp issued by the Swedish post office a few years back.
Arboga is a town of 10,000 people, 80 miles or so west of Stockholm. It’s a dullish place, with late-night entertainment limited to a few service stations dishing out food. There’s nothing to do here, which means it’s a perfect place for raggare culture to thrive. The Burning Wheels are the smallest of three chapters of raggare from Arboga. They meet every Sunday at Georg’s Garage to rev their engines, play rock’n'roll records and talk about the 1950s, while their children run around getting ice cream handprints all over the car seats.
It wasn’t always like this, according to Georg. “We used to meet up on Sundays to have fights. We were honest fighters. No weapons, no martial arts, no kicking – and if you fell on the ground it was all over and you’d buy the guy a drink.”
The raggare didn’t confine the fighting to themselves. They singled out punks and hippies for beatings, and did it so often that the Rude Kids, a Swedish punk band, released a single called Raggare Is a Bunch of Motherfuckers. “Those were the drinking days,” Georg says. “The crazy drinking days.” If you drink too much nowadays, you’ll be kicked out of the Burning Wheels, they say.
The raggare have always tended to be drawn from country folk: farmers, petrol station owners, low-skilled workers. The growth in their numbers is the result of the differing fortunes of the US and Swedish economies over the decades: successive oil crises and a poor exchange rate saw Americans trading in gas-guzzlers for more economical models; the Swedes, relatively rich in comparison, bought their cars for a song.
For young Swedes, these giant American cars, which contrasted with the safe, boxy Volvos their parents drove, were the ultimate symbols of rebellion. And they were dirt-cheap. “They were stupid,” Georg says about the Americans. “Some of the cars were limited edition. They built maybe 70 of them and they were selling them to us for a few thousand when they were collector pieces.”
Georg picked up his first US muscle car, a black 1965 Pontiac, for $2,000 in Los Angeles in 1980. He found it in a lot, rusted and part-inhabited by a eucalyptus tree. By the time he’d shipped it home, sourced original parts, resprayed and kitted out the whole body, it was worth 20 times as much, with an engine that purred and a stereo that roared. The latter is the only concession to modernity acceptable in a raggare’s restored car; music is a huge part of the culture. “You don’t exactly want to have hip-hop playing from your car when you’re cruising,” says Martin, a farmer who drives a lime green Chevy. He listens mostly to Creedence Clearwater Revival. “That music came from a period when America was really great. You can hear it in the lyrics.”
Martin’s top-of-the-range sound system is hidden inside the glove compartment. Every weekend, in car parks and petrol station forecourts up and down Sweden, the rest of Scandinavia, and even in some parts of western Russia, raggare gangs play out their classic rock’n'roll albums until their car batteries pack in.
When the raggare have parties, they tend to have them in their garages: comfortable enough spaces, filled with pots of grease, car jacks and stacks of fenders. The more capable raggare jitterbug and twist; others shuffle from foot to foot, stopping occasionally to pull out the kink in a poodle skirt or run a comb through a greasy quiff.
Maud is the longest-standing female member of the Burning Wheels. She’s short of cash at the moment, and has to cruise around in a 20-year-old Volvo – and Volvos are to raggare what dirty overalls are to mods. “I fell in love with the scene thanks to my grandparents,” she says. “The music they listened to and the cars they drove are so attractive.” Maud is also involved with a girls-only raggare group who visit schools as part of a raggare awareness group, teaching pupils about the raggare lifestyle and the notion of respect.
When the first raggare appeared, they caused moral panic across Sweden, where they were seen as an oversexed bunch of hard partiers. As the original raggare have grown older, they’ve been trying to heal their reputation. “It’s important to be a gentleman,” says Georg. “If you want to join the Burning Wheels, you have a one-year probation period. It’s not easy to join. You have kids driving round in their parents’ Volvos calling themselves raggare when they’re not.”
That free use of the word has caused problems. Raggare get blamed when far-right gangs attack Gypsy camps and smuggle drugs. To outsiders, gangs in cars out drinking are all raggare. Not to the Burning Wheels. “We’re like craftsmen. The lifestyle is an art,” says Martin. “It’s not just drinking and driving fast. There’s responsibility with what we do.”
It’s funny how often the words respect and responsibility are used by a group who take their cues from music and films whose very purpose was to express rebellion. That’s partly the result of the Swedish government realising there was more to be gained from embracing the raggare than alienating them. In the 60s, the government made the decision to consult the raggare about decisions that might affect them – so now they pay no car or import tax on their vehicles, and Sweden has the largest collection of classic cars outside the US. Another 6,000 were imported last year alone.
When winter comes around, the majority of raggare go into hibernation. They tuck their Buicks under blankets, slip off their blue suede shoes and pull on their snowboots. And the next time they pull out of their driveway with Chuck Berry on the stereo, it’ll probably be in a nice warm Volvo.
Eurotash
Ah, I’ve been really busy recently growing a moustache and putting a book together on the same thing. The final chapter took in a diversion to the moustache world championships below.
The Swedish Dining Table and the Frigid Lamp
There was another reading last night at the Springsalon. A group of artists and performers put on a show and asked me to open it up with a little bit of fiction. I had this idea that at night while we’re all sleeping, the furniture in the house get together and party, and sometimes even hook up. So that’s where I took this story. Payment in beer again, nice.
The Swedish Dining Table and the Frigid Lamp.
You would never call him a slut but it’s fair to say that in almost ninety years of existence, the dining table at the Hasselhoff’s place had got himself around the block a few times. Born in Sweden, he was naturally good looking and when they shipped him to Germany in the fifties, he got enough compliments in that first year to last three lifetimes.
He traded homes three times before finally arriving at the Hasselhof’s place along the Ufer in Neukolln. By then he’d darkened and wrinkled and the polish no longer covered up his scratches and scars, but the cutlery and the curtains agreed that ageing had only improved him and besides amongst all the other German furnishings, his charm stuck out like a lighthouse
The Swedish Dining Table remembered events throughout his life based on whomever he was squeezing at the time. For example when JFK visited he was doing a line with a Persian rug who insisted on keeping the lights off. When McCartney announced the end of the Beatles, he had just finished a wild 48hrs with a leather suitcase on its way to Paris, and when the rest of the world was boycotting the Moscow Olympic, the table showed it’s solidarity by engaging in a short fling with a kinky Russian teacosy with bad breath.
The longest relationship he’d had was three months with a coal oven, but later he’d admit that the only reason he dated her for so long was so he could get closer to her cousin on the landing.
You see, The table regarded nothing in life as good as sex, and felt no responsibility for anyone’s feelings while he made his way from apartment to apartment sewing his wild splinters.
If the Swedish dining table were to die right then, he’d say his greatest achievement had been the time he’d made love to both a fruit bowl and an armchair after a New Years party that got completely out of hand. If he were asked his greatest failure he’d say it was the fact that on the night in question he hadn’t managed to convince the futon to join in too.
‘Once you hit 24 years of age there’s no such thing as love anymore, it’s just business.’ He’d say. And he meant it.
That is until Mr.Hasselhof had a change of fortunes and lost his job as a BMW rep and was forced to sell partially used U-Bahn tickets at Schleschies Tor station. To do this job he needed to know the city’s rail network like his own hand. At night he had to study crowd patterns, work schedules and learn English expressions like ‘day ticket?’ In order to do this he’d need a desk.
The Swedish Dining Table, once familiar with fine wines and the best foods was now a landing sight for rulers, coffee mugs and pencil shavings. He’d become the one thing all dining tables hate, a simple, boring desk.
To add injury to insult, Mr. Hasselhof drilled a hole through the surface and mounted a gangly looking office lamp in its place.
Now the lamp was one of those metallic, twisty devices not known for their good looks. On top of that, this lamp was a feminist and refused to change her appearance to satisfy male whims. From day one they hated each other.
The dining table would make wolf whistles at the vacuum while Mrs Hasselhof did the cleaning, and never tired of asking the three ducks on the wall ‘How’s it hanging?’
The Lamp would blush or turn away, disgusted that she was compelled to spend her days and nights with what she considered was no more than some 2-dimensional, sex mad, hunk of Scandinavian wood.
The Dining Table on the other hand would buck and jolt and do everything in its power to try and shake her loose from her hinge. In fairness she was cramping his style. Not even the bean cushion – who’d normally get up on a gust of wind – would touch him now that he had a lamp sticking out of his ass.
Strange things happen in the lives of furniture. While they act as if there existence is their own, they’re really only one cleaning accident away from disaster or one garage sail away from an upheaval.
Upheaval started slowly at the Hasselhoff home. The first signs were when the family began eating from Penny Markt instead of KaWeDe. Mr Hasselhof wasn’t doing so well from ticket sales. There was competition from the junkies and the tourists had all read that same Lonely Planet advice section warning them off ze Germans at train stations.
One day, he hopped on a stepladder and removed all the paintings from the wall. They were never seen again. The Dining Table wasn’t so fussed, he’d had them all several times – they were a bunch of cheap tarts. The walls could do with an upgrade. But when the bay grand piano went, the dining table started to panic.
The Lamp noticed his concern. “It’s going to be okay?” she said at a loss for words.
“Did they teach you anything in Media Markt?” said the Dining Table.
“Are you all you lamps as dumb as you are ugly? It’s a recession. We’re fucked.”
The Lamp didn’t quite know what to say so she said nothing.
In early January things hit rock bottom and the Hasselhof’s were forced to leave Neukolln and move to a cheaper home in Marzahn. Mr. Hasselhof was now collecting Hartz IV so his work desk was no longer needed. The lamp and the dining table were dumped on the street.
“What’ll we do now?” said the lamp. The Swedish Dining Table, normally so macho, felt like a lost child.
After one day, they were taken by a group of punks and brought to their squat along the Spree. They decided the Dining Table was bourgeouise so they chopped his legs off to stumps. Beneath the noise of the saw, the punks grunts and the Dead Kennedy’s record playing in the background you could just make out the Dining Table’s soft, soft weeping.
The Lamp tried her best to console him. She poured warm light on his stumps but he refused to even open his eyes and look at them. In a word, he was a broken table.
The punks covered them in candle wax and piss. From time to time they’d brawl or fuck right on top of the once proud surface. At times like these the Dining Table would lift one stump so the lamp could curl up beneath his strong body and stay safe.
Furniture, if treated well, can last several lifetimes. It became clear to the dining table and the lamp that any longer like this and they’d be nothing more than fire wood and broken metal.
They hatched a plan. Every morning at 6am the garbage men pulled up outside the squat. The next time they came by they could throw themselves out the window into the back and drive away to anywhere else.
“I don’t know if I have the strength left,” said the dining table.
“I believe in you,” said the lamp.
Now all would have gone to plan if it the bull hadn’t visited the squat the night before. The bull was the fattest punk in all Berlin and somehow he ended up passing out drunk on top of the table. The next morning they heard the rumble of the garbage truck outside.
“I can’t budge him,” said the table. “We’re stuck here.”
“Watch this,” said the lamp.
She crashed her face into the floor and her bulb smashed across the room in a million tiny, shining pieces. The glass ripped right across the Bull’s face and he jumped to his feet. In that instant, the dining table leaped onto two stumps and with energy he didn’t know he had, jumped clear through the open window and onto the back of the garbage truck.
The Garbage truck rumbled off down the lane, but the Bull followed in hot pursuit. The lamp used her mechanical arm like a slingshot and fired club mate bottles back at him.
The Bull took one right in the groin and he fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes.
The truck eventually passed the city limits and made its way East. At a traffic light, they dining table and the lamp climbed out of the back and made their way into the woods at Treptower Park.
They scurried along the edge of the river until they came across a gentle bank overlooked by fine Willow Trees.
“This is the place,” The Dining Table said.
“Can you still bear to be with me even though I don’t have a face anymore?” said the Lamp.
“Till the end of time,” said the Dining Table.
And as sunset that evening, the Dining Table and the Lamp shared their first kiss and made sweet sweet love to each other.
For the first time in his life, the Swedish Dining Table learned that sex didn’t always entail someone getting fucked and the Lamp learned that just because you’re a feminist doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a piece of wood.
In time the Dining table and the lamp grew old and ivy wrapped itself around their worn frames but they were happy, and in the tough and precarious life of a piece of household furniture that was as good as it ever got, and as good as you ever wanted it to get.
And on soft Berlin nights, if you make your way along the sweet side of the Spree to Treptower Park, you can sometimes hear the faint grunts of metal and timber.
Papal Suicide
The Short Age is a new-writing magazine in Berlin. The editor Pete Littlewood asked me to contribute something but I was all out of ideas. He suggested I write a suicide note for the not yet dead. I did one for the Pope.
It started with Ana and she wasn’t even nearly pretty. Her legs didn’t sit right for a start. They fell beneath her belly like TV cables and caused her to drag her feet to the point where the inside of her shoes rubbed right down to the sock. But she started something, and in spite of those pins, and armpits that smelled like grilled onions, I have to admit she turned me on to women.
I was all of eight years of age and I was in love. I shouted it from the corners until the day that Ana became Claudia. So I shouted Claudia for a time before eventually Claudia transformed into Rebecca who lasted until Sarah, Steffi and Salome, one after the other, became keepers of my young and wandering heart.
You know, even now, sat here years along the track, locked away behind walls, moats and Swiss Guards, I can still make out their faces in the ashtray’s reflection. But I haven’t smoked in thirty years. I haven’t let my fingers free along the cool nape of a lady in sixty years, and I haven’t as much as smelled an erection in half a century.
Back in the seminary in the early, I’d still get them. Little movements beneath the habit. I’d let my hand run through the cloth and hold it. I’d get two minutes – three tops – of proper wood before it’d crumple like cheap Eucharist beneath a weight of guilt.
One Easter, not so long ago, mid-mass, somewhere between the intercession and the supplication I felt something hard as a bullet and thought, ‘God, you old rogue, is this an act of temptation or a gift for all the lost years dedicated to your word?’ It wasn’t anything but my first stroke.
If you don’t use your talents you lose them, and I lost mine as sure as pride comes before a fall. I’m a mess. The only sensation I get from below is when my piles bite in the middle of the night. I call the house physician. He wears a dangling crucifix that climbs along my scrote when he examines me. I’d spend eternity reciting Hail Marys with my feet on hot coals for that crucifix to be a woman’s hand, and another eternity for me to be able to do something about it.
For one week now I’ve dreamt of Bavaria. I’m on a grassy slope. It’s summer. I’m young again, and so is the girl beside me. We roll into each other and kiss and the sex is so good the smell burns my nostrils. And then I wake up, alone, surrounded by my blessed statues, and cry. It’s got me so down I can barely read the Book anymore.
I fear that the only way to hold on to this dream is to stop waking. By the time you read this, it’ll be morning and there’ll be one less infallible at the breakfast table. And while the press lay siege to the Vatican and the faithful offer up prayers to the departed, I’ll be tangled up in Ana or Claudia, or maybe even Rebecca, with my white arse winking up at the sun.
Go in Peace.
Pope Benedict XVI
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