THE UNOFFICIAL EMBASSY OF IRELAND’S GUIDE TO DIPLOMACY Part 3 of 3

After a month in Kosovo, the Unofficial Embassy has shut up shop and moved home. The money ran dry and the gig was up. The ambassadors said ciao to the newest country in the world with moist eyes and trembling lips. We had enough laughs for a lifetime but we also learned some valuable lessons about diplomacy that we’d like to share with the rest of you not fortunate enough to have had your own embassy.

BE COOL
An embassy in a foreign country is no different from photos of your girlfriend’s ex in her bedroom. They’re symbols of attachment and influence. Cheeky little reminders from the past. That might explain the heavy fortifications and the paranoia. The Yanks, for example, had automatic spotlights rigged along their walls. They were bright as stadium lights and if an ambassador were to be a little tipsy on his walk home, he might mistake the lights for an alien craft. The Brits, our neighbors, had bollards at either end of the street, which was the biggest pain in the hole. Whenever you ordered pizza as it meant you had to run halfway down the road to collect it. Now, as anyone who’s ever played second fiddle before will tell you, a bitter ex is about as cool as shopping for tampons with your mother. Whereas if you can be the “I’m happy if she’s happy” guy, you steal the high moral ground and everyone likes you. As ambassadors the only thing cold about our welcome was the ice in the Guinness Martinis.

PRESS THE FLESH
It goes without saying that ambassadors should be friendly and never turn down an invitation. Invites open doors to valuable networking opportunities, drugs, and girls. That said, if you were in the game on a full-time basis, you’d really have to pick and choose your parties or you wouldn’t make it through one term. This is a picture of us at one of the many parties we attended. The big guy standing between us is Ramush Haradinaj. He’s the leader of the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo and was once the prime minister of the country. In the picture he’s holding a hurley stick, the national sport in Ireland. We used to give them out instead of business cards. Anyway, Ramush goes to us, “You know what I’m going to do with this? I’m going to hit someone over the head with it.” We didn’t laugh. He’s ex-KLA and bench presses in the middle of contract negotiations to intimidate people.

SHARE THE WEALTH
I know very little about Luxembourg. I believe they recently introduced some sort of a watered-down one-child rule as it’s getting packed over there, but really, if you asked me to describe them, I’d have to say they’re like Euro lucky dip. The Lux ambassador lived about three doors down from us in a heavily fortified cottage. The curtains were always drawn. The doors were always closed. Anything could have been going on inside. And that’s exactly the point. If you don’t show and tell every so often, people are just going to assume you’ve something to hide. Embassies should be run like backpacker hostels, where bored kids can sit up till three drinking wine out of cartons and playing Shithead for irredeemable traveller’s checks. They should let them dry their beach towels on the flagpole and call home on the ambassadors’ dime. After breakfast, we liked nothing more than strolling the wings to see how many guests we’d accumulated from the night before. I don’t want to boast, but if in nine months time we get a phone call asking us to be godfathers of a kid named Embassy, I won’t be surprised.

BE A CLOWN
Albanian is an extremely difficult language. There are all kinds of dashes, dots and squiggles jumbled alongside your common everyday alphabet, making it next to impossible for a foreigner to master. On top of that there’s dialects and accents, and a population relatively fluent in English to further complicate the matter. On the first day we learned how to say hello and thank you, then for nigh on five weeks solid, there was precious little else that came out of our mouths. We repeated the words like bird calls. The locals thought us simple, like village idiots from another land. We were light entertainment, and that brings us to the real essence of good diplomacy. Allow the rest of the world to laugh at you. It’s a brave thing to do, but it works. The best way to confront a negative stereotype is to accentuate it to the point of implausibility. And then listen for the crack as it shatters into a hundred pieces. Good diplomacy is turning a cliché to your advantage. Hence we never refused a drink, we blushed if a girl crossed our path, and we turned jigs in the street at the slightest hint of music. And then just when they were thinking these good Catholic gents were safe company for their daughters…

The Unofficial Embassy’s Guide to Kosovo Part 2 of 3

There’s no Irish embassy in Kosovo. There are no motorways or McDonald’s in Kosovo either, but sensing the easiest position to fill would be the diplomatic one, we set up a fake Irish embassy there last month. We had no power to grant visas or offer asylum, but thanks to some booze sponsors we were never more than a playlist away from hosting a good party. Here’s a few things we learned about life in Kosovo.

-In spite of the images the name conjures, Kosovo has become really safe in the past ten years. So safe that the internationals who work there recently had their salaries reduced. They’re not getting danger money anymore and they’re not happy about it. Which is a little like aid workers in Africa throwing tantrums because the famine came to an end. Anyway, it’s only when you’ve got a visitor in town and you’re explaining to them how safe the place is, and you’re boasting how even the pretty girls can walk home alone, that you stumble upon a cavalcade of twenty police cars and half the city closed off while they mop up the recently expired.

-You can smoke anywhere in Prishtina. In our last couple of days we discovered you could also smoke in the taxis and from then on every time we wanted to light up, we’d call a cab, ask him to take us round the block and savour the experience like it was still 1982. Transparency International lists Kosovo as the most corrupt country in the Balkans. Cigarettes are an easy smuggle so everyone sells them. They do the rounds of bars and cafes with trays of smokes selling Marlboros that taste like glass shards and smell like the day after Armageddon. They cost a euro or less.

-I don’t know if this is just a general niceness amongst Kosovars or some clever Anglophone who taught them the wrong expression a long time ago, but whenever you ask for a bill in Kosovo, they’ll tell you how much followed by “If you have it.” And the thing is sometimes you don’t. So when your friendly gypsy cab driver (we didn’t walk much in Kosovo, which might have been a result of all the heavy smoking, but it is possible and some people do) tells you to give him two bucks and you’ve only got a buck-fifty, he’ll say no problem and shoot you a wink. Which immediately brings us back to that whole Transparency International statistic and raises an important ethical question: if one of the outcomes of widespread corruption is that people don’t sweat over fifty cents, could some token laundering, extortion, and kidnapping benefit honest societies in the same way that parks and universal healthcare do?

-Your stories will never beat theirs. You might think the time you were stoned at a party and put a cat on the record player, or the evening you absent-mindedly climbed into bed with your girlfriend’s mother would make for clever silence fillers, but in Kosovo, this will not cut the mayo. No matter what story you tell, they can match it, and then rub it in by going one better with a sentence like: “And the whole time we’d been making out in the middle of a minefield.”

DIY EMBASSY Part 1 of 3

Kosovo gained independence from Serbia two years ago. Not everyone recognized that independence, but of the few countries that initially did, Ireland was one. As you may have heard, the Irish economy is a bit of a car wreck at the moment so they can’t afford to extend their goodwill to Kosovo and establish an embassy. We’re Irish and reasonably diplomatic so we decided to fill the void.

Now in order to be an ambassador there are a few basics you’ve got to cover. One you’ve got to get yourself a pad that reflects your country’s standing in the world. In Prishtina that’s easy as large parts of the city are abandoned–slash–too expensive for the locals. We managed to rent the former US Embassy for a song by simply choosing the option of taking it unfurnished and unheated. Prishtina is almost a mile above sea level and in winter the temperature drops below 50 degrees, so yes we’re ambassadors and we live in a mansion big enough to house a village, but we’re not shimmying round in short-shorts and polo shirts, drinking ice-tea on the veranda. No sir.

Our neighbors are the US Ambassador, the British Embassy, the German Embassy, the Turkish Embassy, and the Bulgarians, whose embassy is so small it looks like a half-finished granny flat, built for a tiny grandmother whom nobody loved.

So far, about one week into our ambassadorial career we’ve been busying ourselves trying to convince people that we’re legit, and also not get evicted for throwing parties. Most people in Prishtina live with their parents until they get married so since they found out we had a big empty mansion in town, they’ve been calling round to smoke joints and mooch our booze. Now that’s fine but the other night half the town came over. The US Ambassador’s attache complained that we were “louder than a disco.” We had to bring him over for tea and biscuits the next day, and avert our first major diplomatic incident.

Also, the British are spying on us. We found a Cadbury’s wrapper in the front garden. But even still we invited them round for our grand opening: Two TV crews, three national newspapers and a whole bunch of kids desperate for the anthems to finish so they could get inside the house and skin up. The German embassy sent their intern along to the opening to suss us out, and the British sent over their consul. She wouldn’t accept any drinks we offered her. My bet is MI5 warned her that we might spike her tea with truth serum, or roofies. She did have a handful of biscuits though which makes me think she must have been the person responsible for the Cadbury’s wrapper.

If anyone wants to come visit please do. Next week, we’re hosting a shamrock planting ceremony and turning the town’s river green. And by then we’re hoping the reggae marathon in the attic will have ended.

Some International Freeloaders have been living in my Room

This appeared in Vice a couple of days ago. It got a bit of heavy editing, so I’ve chosen to put up the unedited version here. I don’t know, the editing sped the piece up and cut the bullshit, but the poor, made-up, freeloaders didn’t deserve to be called Bastards.

The photo is courtesy of the inimitable www.steveryanphotography.com

Room Raiders

While I was away recently, my neighbour sublet my place to backpackers. I asked him to, he wasn’t being a complete gypsy. I was gone for five weeks and in that time he got four different people to take my apartment. Each one stayed around a week. I felt a little violated on my return. What had they done in there? Maybe they’d tried my clothes on, played my guitar, flicked through my dream journal? Who knows, but maybe they’d done things in my home that I would never ever get the opportunity or the balls to do.

All I had were their names but I was curious to find out more about these globe-trotting freeloaders. Luckily for me, they were messy and they left junk lying all around the place. Like a greedy palaeontologist, I assembled these abandoned clues and assigned them to the different lodgers and came up with accurate character profiles. It wasn’t easy and admittedly, racism played a massive part in each evaluation. But in the end, I feel a got a little closer to each one of them, even if we never met.

KT

The condom is none other than KT’s. KT must be a yank. No other country in the whole world is happy to have a name carrying centuries of tradition and precedent butchered into a pair of gauche letters. The condom’s hers because Americans have a preternatural fear of infection whenever they leave home. They treat a European trip like a trek across the Darien Gap but with good Internet. KT has no doubt been warned about the dangers of hooking up with a native European. Some of them aren’t circumcised her sisters will have confessed to her, and some don’t even wax their testicles, she’ll have read on Wiki. This condom has more security than an airport. Even if your nob end grew spikes and saws it would not compromise the material. It’s as safe as separate rooms. But still KT held firm and didn’t use it. KT was either saving herself for the boys back home or she’s blessed with a face as aesthetically pleasing as her name. Oh and the note’s hers too. Well, that was obvious, wasn’t it? But the snacks were gone and that leads us on to Dave.

Dave

Was probably a Brit. I’m basing that on his name, but everything else after this makes sense if we all follow this presumption. So Dave’s British and then he was most likely the owner of the Rizla and his ownership of the Rizla was almost definitely the reason my snacks from KT were nowhere to be seen.  I had my suspicions that the photo was his too. Not of him, no, but maybe given to him. The guy in the picture is in a suit. Now lets not stick a pipe in my mouth and call me ‘Sherlock’ yet, but would someone coming to Berlin and renting a really cheap room in an area of town known more for its punks than its executives be taking photos of themselves in a suit? My guess is that Dave, lovely chap that he may well be, was off scoring weed when this nice guy in the suit came along to tell him about the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ who forgives the sinners, including the weed smokers. He then gave him some literature with his photo attached. Dave read the Holy Text. It hit him like a train. He threw the rest of the Rizla into the bin and decided to follow Jesus. He took the text but left the photo behind because, while religion might be powerful enough to make a person discount science and history, it will not make an ugly German passport picture anything other than that.

Nada

Now the only Nadas I’ve ever met have been Muslim, either from Turkey or Morocco. I think Nada was reading the Blackwater book as it’s a book about how the rest of the world are giving Muslims a hard time. The sleeve describes it as‘explosive’ and calls the author a ‘one-man truth squad’.I tried reading the book but the opening page mentions the Navy SEALs three times and that got me thinking of Under Siege, and then that got me thinking about Erika Eleniak and then well, I wasn’t really thinking about anything else all day. I think Nada is probably a young, lifeguard Muslim chick backpacking around the beaches of Europe. Of all the four of them I think I’d have been happiest to have arrived home and found her still tucked up in my bed, in her Baywatch gear.

Francesco

Now I knew Francesco was Italian, because my neighbour told me. And maybe that necklace had something to do with him too. It’s the Virgin Mary, and if there’s one thing Italian men like more than touching their balls, it’s virgins. Apart from that I got nothing else on Francesco, except he was the last person to stay and he very kindly made the bed, opened the windows and left my post in a little fort on the table.

At home with HR Giger

In summer I had the pleasure of driving from Berlin to Zurich, kipping one night in a tent, only to have Giger cut an interview after only 25 minutes. Mad frustrating. It was supposed to be a VBS documentary but in the end all we got out of it was a print piece. He drank half a bottle of Jameson during the 25 minutes.

HR Giger, regardless of how many museum or galleries he fills with volumes of his other work, will almost certainly go down in history as that strange Swiss guy behind the Alien movie. During the 70s Giger produced a book called Necronomicon, which established him as the foremost fantastical artist at the time. Salvador Dali was so impressed by his work that he invited him over to Spain for a visit and stole Giger’s girlfriend in the process.

In the 80s Giger got involved in the movies and got an Oscar for his work on Alien, but after a couple of awful cinematic collaborations in the 90s he pretty much disappeared to everyone except the goths and metalheads raiding his back catalogue for tattoos.

He’s 69 now. Loathed by feminists and obscenity sticklers, Giger, the one-time king of darkness and the person Ridley Scott confessed to being petrified of meeting, is now no more scary than a grumpy old neighbor. He wears Crocs. He potters around the garden, mumbles to the cat, drops himself in front of the tube for the afternoon, and cracks open a bottle whenever he feels like it. His wife Carmen lives next door. Giger punched a hole through the wall to join the buildings. Giger’s side is painted black from floor to ceiling; Carmen’s, one assumes, ain’t so bad.

He divides his time between a castle in the Alps and his house in Zurich where he has a little train track running round the garden and right through the kitchen. When he sketches, he still likes to draw strange alien figures with hefty packages pinning fragile looking ladies to the floor, but his days of nightmarish visions and brutal hallucinations are over. He goes to bed at 5 AM and wakes at noon. The night before the interview, Giger had overdone it at the dinner table.

How was your fondue last night?
Heavy. Oh so heavy. After I always say, “Oh my God, why have I done that?” But it’s so good.

What are you doing with yourself these days?
You know I haven’t painted since the 90s? I’m quiet now. I like watching television. I like the Wire, and the Sopranos is so good.

Yesterday we met your good friend Walter Wegmüller, who helped Timothy Leary when he was on the run. He spoke about the “freaky times” back in Switzerland in the 70s. What were they like?
Ah, the freaky times. When Timothy Leary was in Switzerland, he was hoping to get asylum so he could stay here and not go back to prison in America. I was collecting signatures for him. My father was a pharmacist, you know? “What are you doing with this guy?” he asked me. It was funny. Timothy Leary was a very nice man. I didn’t meet him back then in Switzerland, but I met him later in Los Angeles when he wrote two articles for my books. They were very good and he was a very fine person.

Did you exchange ideas?
Oh not much. What could I say? He was a very intelligent man with a lot of knowledge and I’m, well, I’m just an artist.

Did you ever take LSD with him?
Ah, you know you can’t talk about that on record. LSD is still forbidden, so it’s not good to talk about those things.

You’ve said before that much of the inspiration for your art comes from dreams, and more specifically nightmares?
Everyone always wants to know about my dreams. The inspiration is mostly from literature actually. I have read so many things that have inspired me. Beckett was very much an inspiration for me. His theatre especially. I made paintings as a homage to Samuel Beckett [Homage to S. Beckett I,II,III]. They were some of the very few colored paintings I’ve done.

What other writers were an inspiration for you?
Crime writers especially. I started with Edgar Wallace and then all sorts of Western writers.

Your work comes from a much darker place than Beckett or Wallace?
Darker, yes. It came partly from Chur where I grew up; partly from the war. I was born in 1940 so I could feel the atmosphere when my parents were afraid. The lamps were always a bluish dark, so the planes would not bomb us. Switzerland and Germany are close. The targets weren’t always very well marked. I felt the fear of that very much.

Later on at a certain time I saw a lot of witchcraft books and stuff like that. H.P. Lovecraft and these kind of people. I’d say my inspiration comes from books mostly, but dreams also.

Is there any way that you can control the dreams and manipulate your surroundings from within the dream?
Yeah sometimes it happens and I can remember when I’m in a dream. Or I get the feeling like I’m out of my body. A long time ago, about 10 or even 20 years ago, I had that. But it didn’t happen to me often. Probably four or five times but yeah, that was strong.

Was it frightening?
No. It wasn’t frightening. It was just, well, I was so surprised. A dream where I can’t get enough air, that’s frightening. Or the kind of dream where I was stuck in a grave or something like that, that was frightening. But later I developed these passages paintings [Passage I-XXX] and they were very good for that. I got some sort of relief. I got no more bad dreams when I painted these passages. It was helpful.

Does that happen often?
No, not often, but I did the right thing because at the time these passage dreams were ruining my work. It was the right thing to make me feel better.

Can you tell me about the dream behind Necronomicon your book that Ridley Scott used as the template for Alien?
These things come from H.P. Lovecraft. In the 70s I was very familiar with Lovecraft.

And the Alien figure itself?
Well it all comes from the same place. I had already done Necronom IV and V, these monsters with the long heads. That’s what Ridley Scott saw. I showed them in a gallery in Paris. Jodoworsky visited the gallery and so did Ridley Scott and later on I got an invitation to do some work for movies. First it was Jodoworsky for Dune then later on it was Ridley Scott for Alien.

What ever happened with Dune?
Dune never happened with me. I was asked to do it two times. Once with Jodorowsky and then another time with Ridley Scott, but the daughter of Dino de Laurentis had the rights for Dune and she gave them to David Lynch. And David Lynch was not very happy with me.

Why’s that?
He said that I had stolen his ideas, that I’d stolen his baby. I said I liked his baby from Eraserhead. I always said very nice things about him but he was a little strange. And he was jealous because I exhibited in a New York gallery and he couldn’t. He was sour. But I like him.

Do you have a favorite Lynch movie?
Yes, I mean all of Twin Peaks. That was really fabulous. And of course it all started with Eraserhead. All the films he did were wonderful.

How much control were you given during the production of Alien?
Well Ridley Scott directed it and I hadn’t much to say. Ridley Scott knew exactly what he wanted. I was happy that he accepted my book and he showed it to all the crew like it was the bible. He said, you have to do it exactly this way, and I was happy with that. I like him very much. He’s a great guy.

Giger’s preliminary sketches for the Batmobile.

Certain other projects you did after Alien, like Poltergeist II and Killer Condom weren’t as well received, why did you choose to work on them?
After Alien things didn’t turn out so well in the movies because I didn’t get involved enough. I didn’t want to stay in another country. I had spent several months in Shepperton Studios working on Alien and wanted to be home. Later on when it came to doing these other projects I spent only a few days in the country for each one. When the movies eventually came out I thought, “Oh shit.” But I couldn’t change it. There was no more time. So I thought that’s the wrong way to work. If you work on a film you have to be there all the time and be always looking at what they’re doing otherwise they’ll do what they want. In film, everybody wants to bring his own ideas in and make his own style, so it’s terrible. I was very depressed when I saw that.

Which film made you the most depressed?
All of them. I was only pleased with Alien and with the other things I was not very happy with.

After all your involvement in Hollywood, are you filthy rich?
Ah no. I’m actually poor. I had to sell several paintings to pay for the castle. That was shit. I had to sell some very nice, very important paintings.

When did you get the castle?
I did a show in Gruyeres in 1990 and fell in love with the town. I heard that they wanted to sell the castle, so I got it at auction. It was very difficult as I’m really not rich, you know? I got the money from many different places. I was always looking for something, a place for my paintings and sculptures, and I think a castle is the right place for me, no?

Is the castle a work in progress or is it finished?
More or less I’m finished, but it’s not done so well. I mean it was done on a really small budget. I can always make it better, but what I’m doing now is putting on shows in different countries to get publicity for the castle. And to find out where my paintings are.

What happened to your paintings?
Some of them were sold and I don’t know to where, and some of them got stolen. It’s horrible.

Were they stolen from your house?
Some, yes. And during the transport to shows. That’s shit. The two paintings for Emerson Lake and Palmer, for their Brain Salad Surgery album, were stolen.

What can you do in that situation?
Nothing. I tried. I said I’ll pay 10,000 francs if someone knows anything about them. I don’t know where they are. It upsets me so much. I like those things and I did them in 1973 and Emerson Lake and Palmer even came to Switzerland to see them.

If you were rich, what would you like to do with the castle?
I’d like to buy back some paintings. There was an idea for a train set running through the castle, but it’s too crazy. It’s fantastical. It costs too much to make such a train and you could never pay if off. It would be very funny to have, but I still have to pay for the castle. I have two million I have to pay back to the bank for the castle, and that’s heavy.

The castle gets a lot of visits from young rockers and goths. They seem to look on it as a bit of temple of darkness. Do you get any bizarre requests from them?
Oh yes. I get a lot of strange people who come to see my work in Gruyeres. It’s very nice. You know people from the village they know my fans when they see them. They’re all in black. They want to marry there, do photo shoots, all kinds of stuff.

Do you think they ever have sex in the castle?
Ha, it’s possible. I don’t know. We don’t have everything so tightly controlled.

Apart from art, is there anything else you collect?
I have weapons. I never want to be without weapons. As protection. I like weapons. From a child I always had weapons.

What’s your favourite weapon?
I have a small 5mm, 22 calibre, it’s a small revolver. That was what Li (Giger’s first wife) shot herself with. It’s very small. I have three revolvers with gunpowder in the barrel. You can fill them up. That’s fun.

Would you recommend the film industry to a fine artist?
Oh no, not at all. It’s very hard to work for film and you never have time to finish things in a really good way. Films make you crazy. You know once I wanted to work in Switzerland for the film industry. That was for the movie Species. Oh that was wrong.

Why was it so bad?
These guys I was working with, they didn’t want to work on Saturday and Sunday. It was terrible. They blamed me because I wanted them to work late. Film is great. I mean, I see what they do today and it’s wonderful. They know how to do it, they have all kinds of things but it really makes you crazy.

Movember – The Prostate Exam

This is another video we did for Movember. It was probably the scariest yet, although our doctor, Professor Waxman, was very gentle with us.

 

Smell my finger

 

Recently, we were asked to make some videos for a prostate cancer charity. They wanted us to encourage men to get involved with their bums. This is what we came up with.

 

 

 

Most straight guys know next to nothing about the inside of their asshole. True, they might have dated a fruity chick with wandering fingers. And she might have lead them down the mucky path to bum wanking. And they might even have got off on it. But it’ll be quickly forgotten once that long drunk summer ends. Because bums, like alleyways in the ghetto, are nasty, dangerous places. You wouldn’t want to get caught with your fingers down one on a dark night.

 

Having a doctor slide his finger up your bum is a very humbling experience and in hindsight maybe it’s not so unpleasant. For those of you who’ve never enjoyed this rare medical pleasure before, we came up with some parallels.

 

1)    Having a dump in reverse

2)    Riding a bike with a tiny saddle

3)    Pulling your pants down in strong wind

4)    Anal sex with an Asian man

 

If you listen really carefully to the start of the video, you can just about hear the doctor say something about a big willy. That’s mine.

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.

Afterhours – a night at A&E

Myself and Brian Coldrick spent a night at Accident and Emergency in Dublin’s James Hospital. We went there after a lock-in at a bar in Kilmainham, and in spite of what the illustrations might lead you to believe, it was far from an unpleasant evening.

Dublin’s an unmerciful bore. After 2 AM, every bar in the city is closed and the only thing moving with any purpose are taxis and ambulances. The taxis are making their way out of town to the suburbs but the ambulances are heading to the most macabre after-hours in the city: St. James’ Hospital A&E.

Myself and cartoonist Brian Coldrick spent a bank holiday Saturday night there trying to catch the spirit and keep Brian’s sketchbook free from drops of heave. So if you ever find yourself bored in late night Dublin this might be the place for you.

The hospital is Dublin’s largest and traditionally its worst. It’s so bad that the nurse in charge of the sexual health clinic once said to me, “If your knob’s not dripping in gonorrhea, go private.”

It wasn’t, that time.

The A&E ward is the busiest in the country, aiding about 40,000 people a year. At night pretty much everyone through the door is drunk and in spite of the grave wounds to their bodies they’re still on the scrounge for another nip of booze or to get their end away with some young thing.

John Paul is the first victim we meet inside. He’s taken a bit of a slashing on the dancefloor in Coco’s nightclub. He’s chatting up this girl in a canary-coloured dress who doesn’t appear to be injured, so might just be there for the sights like us.

“I was dancing on me own when this girl broke a glass across me jaw,” says John Paul. “Then her fella jumped in and started knifing me all over the shop.” He’s shaken and dripping blood all over the floor, but he’s anxious for the nurses to sew him back so he can return to Coco’s. He left his jacket there.

“It was only new,” he says.

The next group through the door are Egyptian fishermen. One of them lost his finger on a net. It’s lost in that it’s not attached to the knuckle anymore, but it’s safe in a shirt pocket. His name’s Ahmed. Ahmed’s just been told that he’ll have to wait seven hours for a nurse.

“Keep my hand in air they say me,” he explains in broken English as little trickles of blood fly down his arm from his toilet-paper bandage.

There is a group of homeless men living in the corner. And why not? Two TVs and functioning, if not exactly clean, toilets. That doesn’t stop them pissing themselves anyway. The security guards come out, give them a telling off and cover the ground around them with newspapers.

Later we’re outside having a smoke with Ahmed and John Paul and the girl in the canary dress who’s now holding John Paul’s hand. Ahmed is going on about how he “can’t get no bang bang” with the ladies because he’s a Muslim when an ambulance suddenly pulls up in front. The doors slide open to reveal an old guy in pyjamas, too fat for the stretcher, bundled into the back on top of all the medical equipment.

In a flash, the cigarettes are on the ground and we’re all over at the ambulance pulling him free and throwing our bodies under his arms and legs to carry him into the ward. Ahmed’s toilet-paper bandage comes loose and John Paul’s stitches pop, and the old guy, polluted with Guinness, can’t help but piss himself with excitement. He grins, we grin. This is the famous camaraderie of A&E. A camaraderie that you can only replicate in a trench or a tank. What’s a little piss and blood between people when there are bodies on the line? The nurses thank us then and take over at the door.

John Paul decides to not get the stitches done again and goes home with the canary girl. Ahmed sits in a corner and goes asleep with his hand over his head. One of the homeless guys has found a copy of a John Le Carré novel. As we leave he clears his throat as if to spit then shoots a long stream of puke right across the centre pages. He wipes the page clean with his sleeve and keeps on reading.

And in that, perhaps, lies the lesson.

You can chase a whole sorry life away searching for something to fill the 2 AM – 6 AM weekend void, but nothing will ever complete you quite as well as a decent page-turner and a nice clean stomach.

WORDS: CONOR CREIGHTON
ILLUSTRATIONS: BRIAN COLDRICK

A day in the life of a theme park.

Myself and Steve spent a night and a day in Europe’s largest subsidized theme park. It was disgusting, not only because we were to hungover to spend our expenses on more booze, but we also forgot towels, bedding and toothbrushes and had to sleep under t-shirt blankets. Nothing would get me to do a repeat.

Euro white trash beats US white trash any day of the week. When the former group holidays, they go to Tropical Islands on the German/Polish border–an indoor holiday resort subsidized by the European Union so poor people can afford to get out of town. This is a tale about 24 hours in this sultry land.

The European Union has dumped the guts of 50 million Euro into the construction of this sultry holiday simulation for the work-shy. The Tropical Islands complex is situated inside the largest freestanding hall in the world.It rises out of the earth like a giant silver weight-loss pill. The area it’s built on was once a training ground for Nazi pilots to run dummy bombing missions of London. People can fuck, puke, and pass out on lovely beaches made of imported sand.

Apart from the slides, balloon rides, ice cream bars, and dance floors, Tropical Islands is home to the largest indoor rain forest in the world. Ingas, Annaltos, and Macarangas as tall as 15 meters shoot bravely up towards the diluted light slipping through clear sections of the shell.

The bars in Tropical Islands stay open 24 hours, and in the evening everyone congregates on top of one another down at the beach. It’s not the kind of place you’d want to let your teenage daughter out of sight for as much as a second. Fights break out in the water, afternoon drunks collapse into castles on the beach, and the howls and moans coming from the mangrove trees are not being made by monkeys.

The Islands work upon an ethically dubious system of wristband currency. While inside you don’t actually pay for anything, you just flick a wristband over a detector and clear the bill on your exit. Checking out of Tropical Islands and running through your itemized bill is like going to confession where the priest can read your mind.

The balmy climes are controlled by a series of chambers, pipes, and gauges that maintain an average temperature of 26 degrees that sometimes reaches all the way up to 40 degrees Celsius.

The brains of Tropical Islands are based in a high-tech room called the F-Matz. From this room, highly trained technicians observe and monitor the shell from a series of cameras and security posts. That said, they wouldn’t let us in the room, so all we can assume is the highly-trained technicians are no more than avid masturbators with lenses trained on camel toes and cleavage.

This is Frank. He and and Yvonne are visiting Tropical Islands on a come-down from a five-day techno festival. They only came because it was cheaper than a flight to Turkey and they don’t know how long they’ll stay. Maybe until the money runs out. Frank didn’t smuggle any booze through with him, but he did take in a half sheet of acid. He’s fucked on a couple of rolling stones.

Steffi works night shifts cleaning the beachfront. “We find all kinds of things on the beaches. People shit in the water and they shit in the plants,” she whispers looking all around like the giant grey shell above her were listening. And it probably is.

It used to be free to sleep on the fake beach. Now every night you’re in the building at all costs ten bucks. That’s probably because of couples like Frank and Yvonne who, if given the option and enough LSD, might just stay for a month. It’s been known to happen. There’s a rumor going ’round the building that a homeless man once spent five months inside Tropical Islands. He survived on people’s leftovers and avoided detection by switching clothes, shaving with a peacock claw and laying low, curled up in a giant banana tree leaf most of the day.

We ran into a bunch of ladies in a bachelorette party from Krakow who, including the bride-to-be in the veil bejewelled with mini-penises, all claimed to be married. German body builders and a group of waylaid Dubai businessmen in tartan Speedos who go around telling everyone the same joke were harassing these girls nonstop.

Q: “Why is the sky so high?”

A: “So the skyscrapers don’t touch it.”

The funniest part of the joke is the Speedos.

Two 15-year-olds in bikinis wrestle on the beachfront. Then they give each other a rub-down to clean off the sand. And then they hose each other off in the showers. All male eyes stare at them like they’re a paid attraction and everyone in Speedos makes a run for the water.

Yet the right people who go to Tropical Islands really enjoy themselves. We meet a family at the exit. Daddy’s got “BITCH” tattooed across his belly. Mummy’s got a green dragon on her tit. And the apple of their eye is covered in Batman transfers. Last night Daddy fell asleep on a bar stool and had to be carried out by security, while Junior was still up playing alone in the water at 3 AM when we were crashing. “Will you come back again?” we ask. “Almost definitely,” they say.

Going abroad just doesn’t suit some people. Foreign food, mosquitoes, working your tongue around a new language – it can be a nasty, unforgiving business. Some people want to holiday and know that sitting in the next deck chair over is a like-minded character who won’t look down on you for taking a shit in a plant and will appreciate the sexiness of your teenage daughter.

It was for people like this that Tropical Islands was conceived, and they did a good job meeting their requirements. So what if the women wear heels on the beach and the men take dips in their y-fronts? And, so what if European taxes are being spent to promote a rainforest whose primary function is to shield young copulaters? Tropical Islands is as important to the disenfranchised as free health care and paternity testing. “Go Broaden Your Mind Elsewhere,” should read a banner across the entrance.

Please buy my car

This is an article I did for Vice. It’s serious. I’m close on skint and trying to flog my car.

I’m trying to get rid of my car. It’s got outstanding speeding tickets in four countries and a really bad attitude. Instead of putting together a dull ad, I thought I’d interview it so any potential buyers would get a clear picture of the machine they might inherit. If you do decide to become the next lucky owner, the speeding tickets will stick with me–almost definitely.

Vice: Hi, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

Car: Sure, I’ve always liked Vice.

Thanks, can you maybe tell us a little bit about your early life?

Oh wow, did you know I’m 11 years old now? The old memory isn’t what it used to be. Let me see, I was bought new by a retired man in Belfast. The troubles were still going on about then. Scary times. My owner was a Protestant so of course that’s the side I was with… but politics bores me, can we move on?

Of course, lets. That was my granddad, right?

Yes it was. Good man. Old Spice and Wurther’s Originals. Snappy dresser too. You know, that was a nice start in life. In the six years he had me, I got about 20,000 on the clock and not even one crumb on the backseat. It was peachy. Plus, the ashtray was never even opened.

Who came along after that?

After your granddad died your mother bought me and I became a commuter car. I hated that, getting up every morning up at stupid o’clock just to sit in traffic listening to her evangelical music and then spend the entire day outside a factory. My only bit of company until your mother finished work was the occasional dog taking a leak on my back wheel.

How was my mother’s driving?

Surprisingly good for a blond. Apart from a couple of dings, she kept me safe for four years. Maybe there was something to all that glory, glory Jesus music after all. Never as much as looked at a cigarette either. You could have had your dinner out of my ashtray.

Then what came next?

Well you did. You put two nasty “L” plates on my front and rear windows and had all your friends come over to chain smoke inside me. Within a couple of months I had scratched doors, a loose wingmirror and all sorts of junk perched on the dashboard. I looked like something dragged out of the sea.

Sorry. Was it really that bad?

Was it that bad? You reversed into a wooden fence in Antwerp on a street big enough to turn a truck, you dumbfuck. And don’t get me started about all my indoor carpark bruises.

But there were good times, no?

Like the time your flatmate keyed me?

Hey, that was mistaken identity. She thought you were our landlord’s car. What about your future? What type of owner are you looking for next?

Maybe someone who can put my back seat to some use. What do you mean by that? Have you seen how far they recline? Man it’s as good as a friggin king size bed when you slide the seatbelts free. I’d like the next owner to be someone who can at least get some.

I did.

Not on my watch, kiddo. Falling asleep with your hand up someone’s shirt might count with your pussy-ass friends, but not me. Seen too much, these eyes.

OK, lets change direction a little. Are you fast?

Does a bear shit in the woods? These four wheels move quicker than a hot snot.

What about looks? Do you think you can you manage to get the next person who owns you laid?

Go ask your mother.

Say what?

Well I probably could have gotten someone laid if you hadn’t gone and turned me into a lollipop.

You don’t like the paint job?

Not one bit, Picasso. If it’s not the homophobes, it’s the hippie haters, and if it ain’t them, it’s some community watch group afraid that I’m some mobile kiddie-fiddler. This color scheme has made me zero friends.

So do you have any good memories at all from our two years together?

OK, OK, there was this one time when your girlfriend drove the car home from a festival as you were still over the limit. I liked her. How’d you fuck that up?

Ask her.

Anyway, she was in this summer dress and she looked real good. But the best part was these shitty plimsoles that she was wearing. I remember about halfway back to the city she slipped right out of them so there was nothing between my pedals and her tiny naked feet.

Are you trying to tell me that your favorite memory from all our time together was getting turned on by my ex-girlfriend’s feet after they’d been inside a pair of rotten shoes for three days at a festival?

And there you go turning me on again.

You’re sick.

Wouldn’t want to be any other way.

How much do you think I’ll get for you?

You’ll be lucky if you get a handshake.