From: POOP@CNM.COM   
      
   From :  Nick Garrett   
   Sent :  29 July 2005 13:16:02   
   To :  "Mark Brentano"   
   Subject :  If Loving You Is Wrong, I Don't Want to be Right sung by Tony and   
   Cherie and the Morning Star Community Singers   
      
      
      
      
      
      
   Massah,   
      
   First thing's first: I'm sorry to hear about you getting on the wagon. One   
   thing about alcohol I've learnt is that, like Estate Agency, it's 'location,   
   location, location' ('member when New Labour were on their 'educashun   
   educashun educashun' tip? That seems a long old while back). I got arsehole   
   pissed last night for the first time in three weeks. I'd had a bad scare: a   
   cartoonist i'm writing stuff for (in an attempt to sell) told me that if we   
   sold stuff we'd 'be in a marriage.' He seemed to savour the prospect,   
   whereas I'm not interested in that. I turned to him at the bar of the Goo   
   Sonna Mark It and said 'You're the chauffeur; I've got the map- and the mini   
   bar.' He didn't like it but I find that the older I get the less it matters   
   what you say. He scurried off to see his six year old son who'd just had his   
   ears pierced. I like the bar of the Goo Sonna- you can see the market; a   
   view I savour- and the back of the old department store which is a rather   
   nice bit of late Victorian. I sometimes drink with a boozy dustman with no   
   teeth who looks like Bully will when he's fifty-five; he's currently paying   
   Chairman Brown about fifty-percent of his income in various tax wheezes and   
   yet as he says, his dying mother was instructed at Guy's Hospital to shit   
   and piss the bed and lie in it until the nurses wish to change it. It's a   
   cinch he's paying a bigger percentage of his income than Bernie Ecclestone.   
   He has many children and grandchildren and is sort of compound of what   
   Orwell thought was best about the Working Class English. We both of us share   
   admiration for the works of Rod Stewart- though my admiration is alloyed by   
   the post-Atlantic Crossing years. He also has an acute grasp on the death of   
   the English pub and the decline in quality of bar service. Bar staff, as you   
   will have been noticing, are now uniformly impertinent and incompetent. The   
   Assistant Manager at The Shit is almost beyond belief. A death metallurgist   
   who wears make-up, he watched me struggling to give him 35p in silver on top   
   of a ten pound note so as to receive nine back--I was buying a half of   
   revolting French lager--and still gave me eight pounds sixty five back. As I   
   walked away I said loudly and fruitily 'arsehole'. Many people are   
   infuriated by him: he's a compound of ignorance, laziness, pedantry,   
   pettiness and malice- he could indeed be French. One day he's going to get a   
   bloody good hiding in that bar and when it happens and everyone is   
   empathizing noisily, I'm going to start clapping, loudly.   
   So yes, it's location. And when the Goo Sonna started filling up with   
   truculent and paranoid West Indians and their equally truculent and paranoid   
   chav counterparts I strolled to The Shit. Now, I'd had four rounds of double   
   scotches with ice cold bottles of Kronenbourg, which had cost me about   
   fourteen quid but you only get what you pay for--draught lager is a   
   revolter-- and I'd got a pleasant kick out of them. Bully was roosting in   
   the Ship and he and his missis were both drunk at half past seven and went   
   on being drunk till closing time, as did I- we were the last people in   
   there. Around the window barrel we sat for four hours with two girls who   
   were both giving it the large eye to me, and I drank Scrumpy. Having seen   
   the cover of a gossip mag on the table, I proposed the question: who would   
   you rather be (a concept that would have kept old AJ Ayer occupied through   
   the winter months) Siena Miller or Sadie Frost (in case you don't know,   
   Sienna is this year's It Girl and Law is tubbing her and not poking Frost,   
   his wife).   
   Now these were all young, attractive women and yet every one of them said   
   they'd rather be Sadie, who is now over the hill, left with the kids and   
   watching her substantial meal ticket rove the launch parties and film sets   
   of the world without her.   
   So yeah the conversation was on that level but sometimes you just can't be   
   bothered to go home.   
   Regarding the Self-Harming Wanky Left, I did a very foolish thing after the   
   7th July. I thought that at this late remove the political and governing   
   classes would suddenly realise the insanity of a country run into third   
   world laxity and imcompetence by the wanky left and do something about it.   
   Well you know what Thought did dontcha? He thought he shit himself, and when   
   he looked he found he had. So more of the same, basically.   
   Regarding open-tuning: speaking as someone who mastered the guitar in normal   
   concert tuning, Open G, Dropped G, Open D, Dropped D, Spanish, Open E, C   
   Sharp, and Hawaiian I can inform you that playing the guitar in any of them   
   requires skill and practise. Tune your guitar to Open G and strum open   
   strings. Now tune it to concert and strum a G. If you think the Concert G is   
   better than the Open G I'll be Very Surprised. The myth of open tunings   
   being easy is one borne of ignorance and the squalid petty rivalries of pub   
   musicians like Mawdsley. Tunings are merely a variation that pays dividends   
   in texture and timbre. They also made Mick and Keef very, very rich men.   
   Regarding Marx, he was a fat, pompous twentysomething with a beard and a Big   
   Idea. Re-reading the Communist Manifesto recently I was struck once more by   
   how ridiculous it was and the complete absence of any knowledge of humanity.   
   Listening to Bragg and Wheen talking about him on Radio 4, I was surprised.   
   Surprised by the fact that they'd accepted him as the greatest philospher of   
   all time without pointing out the obvious disqualifying caveat that because   
   Marx couldn't see the license for cruelty and slaughter and destruction he   
   was writing means that HE COULDN'T BE A PHILOSOPHER AT ALL.   
   That he was voted thus by Radio Four listeners doesn't surprise me.   
   Come off the wagon soon and we'll drink a few bottles of Margaux down at   
   Bishop's.   
      
   Cheerio   
      
   Nick   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)