Notes from New Sodom

... rantings, ravings and ramblings of strange fiction writer, THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!!

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Ya Big Fat Fuckin Cheats

OK, so I'm watching dodgy late night telly last night and, flicking channels, I spot what is quite possibly the cheapest, tackiest, lamest excuse for a TV show I've ever seen. On ITV2 (needless to say) it's this show called Big Game TV. You have a presenter sitting there behind graphics of a timer counting down, the game question (e.g. picture of a fish with a speech bubble that says "Hi, I'm Wanda"... Name The Movie, Moron), a huge graphic flashing between "50,000" and "JACKPOT" and an ickle graphic down in a corner for how much you can actually win on this particular game (i.e. 1575). Bottom of the screen is the phoneline number for the drunk schmucks to call in, wait in a queue for 10 minutes racking up the phone charges, then maybe get through to the presenter so they can answer the dumb question and win some dosh.

So far, so crass. But here's the rub.

When I flick onto this show, the timer is at 6:00 mins or so, and the question for this game is a riddle:

Jim and Kim drank 30 drinks
And 5 shots in 30 bars
For every drink they had a drink
Then they were seeing stars

So I flick onto another channel... but ya know how it is with riddles. There's nada on the other side, so I end up curious, flicking back to ITV2 five mins later and see that they're still on the same game. I mean, OK, this is a late night show for drunken fuckwits but, still, surely someone should have been able to do the simple mental arithmatic by now. It's obvious, isn't it?

Well, no, I realise. The question is clearly designed to be ambiguous in its lack of punctuation and precision; there's a couple of readings open at least. My automatic reading is simple, though:

((Jim & Kim together) drank (30 drinks and 5 shots) in each of 30 bars) then (for every drink they had a drink)

Or...

((30 + 5) x 30) x 2

Aside: I've always done this sort of mental arithmatic the "easy way". I reparse this as ((30 x 30) + (5 x 30)) x 2. Actually I reparse the (5 x 30) to (3 x 50) cause that's more natural for some reason, from dealing with fifty pence coins perhaps. Weird. Anyhoo, that's (900 + 150) x 2 = 2100.

As I say, though, the cunning bastards have clearly given themselves a few extra outs. You could also say that Jim & Kim each had 30 drinks and so on (4200). You could say they had these 30 + 5 drinks between 30 bars, each or together. You could exclude the shots as "not drinks". And so on. Clearly they can choose the most awkward solution possible, stretching the logic of the language big time, in order to maximise the phoneline profits from more drunken schmucks phoning in with right answers that aren't "the" right answer. Funny enough, when the timer reaches zero, they put another minute on the clock to pump up those phoneline charges even more -- sorry, to "give someone the chance to win the money".

When some punter phones in with the 2100 answer and it's "wrong", I feel quite justified in not being that drunken schmuck; yer not scamming my money out of me ya goddamn grifting bastards. But by now I'm intrigued to see just how much they've stretched the logic, to see just how left field an answer they've come up with.

Anyhoo, finally the counter ticks down to zero (again) and the presenter reveals the right answer. And my response is WHAT THE FUCK?!?!

2147

Now, if anyone, I mean anyone, can get 2147 out of that riddle, please fer the love of Christ illuminate me, because I think that's a HUGE BIG CROCK OF FUCKING SHIT.

Ya big fat fuckin cheats, I think. They just picked a number that can't actually be reached by any reading of the riddle. That 47 fucks up any process that involves doubling as the last step to get to the final solution. Hell, I don't see how any process could get to 2147 using the numbers involved. So this is like having a question like, say, "What is the capital of Scotland?" where the obvious answer is "Edinburgh", and the sneaky answer to the trick question is "the letter 'S'"... but they say "Bogota".

I repeat: Ya big fat fuckin cheats.

I can't really say I'm outraged at drunken schmucks being swindled by these grifters; screw the morons. I can't really say I'm surprised by the act of swindling; I'm not that naive. But... this is a major fucking TV network running a bona fide SCAM. A real honest-to-God CON. Man, I really wanna know if that's in the terms and conditions these Big Game TV guys purportedly have up on their internet site (which I seem to have misremembered the URL for, cause www.biggametv.com seems entirely unrelated (UPDATE: it's www.biggame.tv -- see below))... "Warning: some of our games are rigged so that you cannot possibly win them. We just want the money from the phoneline, sucker."

I mean, if anyone can show me how you get to 2147 from that riddle, well, I'll take my hat off to these guys for their sheer cunning, but until such time all I can say is:

Ya big fat fuckin cheats.

Afterthought:

I have email addresses for contacts at the main Glasgow tabloids. Should I -- just for the sake of stirring up some shit for the morons who are dumbing down society day by day -- drop them a line about this "national TV network scamming viewers" story? Does this qualify as news or are we too far gone to give a shit? Do we just sit back and wait for the hilarious DIY Con show, you know, where the team gets sent round some senile old granny's place to fix her gutters, only to gradually find more "essential" repair work every day, until eventually they're charging her for replacing the whole fucking roof?

UPDATE:

You know that "I seem to have misremembered the URL..." caveat above? It was indeed the wrong URL (and has now been corrected). My humble apologies to the Big Game TV company which is NOT the Big Game TV company with the dodgy game show on late-night ITV2, for the irate punters I seem to have misguided in their direction. And a tip of the hat to them for being so polite in their request to please point aforesaid irate punters elsewhere.

Friday, September 23, 2005

A Wee Happy Glow

This is (again) terribly self-indulgent of me, but I can't resist linking to Jetse's review of The Chiaroscurist, over at Shortform. Hell, what are blogs for, if not self-indulgent / self-absorbed self-referentiality. Anyway, Niall Harrison's review is also pretty astute, but Jetse describes the real key idea of the story, the meaning of chiaroscuro, as:

"the modern-day dark against Michelangelo’s light... a means to bring humanity’s dark side to light..."

Reading this, I couldn't help but think "bang-on", and have a wee happy glow from the knowledge that someone "got it". And it made me realise, because Jetse draws out the references to Michelangelo, that the other figure lurking in the shadows of the story is one of the great masters I admire so much but haven't yet got round to ranting about. So...

The greatest chiaroscurist of real-world painting (IMHO) -- and perhaps the real Chiaroscurist of the story -- was also one of the great gay icons (IMHO) of all time... another Michelangelo, not Buonarotti but Caravaggio. A wild child and a knife-fighter (like Kit Marlowe), Caravaggio, so the story goes, had the words Nec Spe, Nec Metu, inscribed into his blade. No Hope, No Fear. He painted religious tableaux, like all those Renaissance painters who'd gone before him; but to my mind Caravaggio's take on these conventionalities is essentially Modern. His vision is reminiscent of both Romanticists like Delacroix and Neo-Classicists like Jacques-Louis David but he stands before them and between them. Those two warring aesthetics of the Enlightenment are united in him as, I believe, they were reunited in Modernism. He used whores and tramps as models for virgins and apostles, sinners reimagined as saints. Where Romanticism and Neo-Classicism idealise, where they render the world in bold flourishes, expressing Grand Ideas of the sublime, the rational, honour and nobility, Caravaggio brings the domestic erupting up out of the taverns and the brothels, into the canvass of our cultural environment. Like Joyce casting prostitutes as sirens, like Stevens trying to reach through the image of a bronze head of a god "almost to man", Caravaggio is cracking the artifice of grandeur, revealing the humanity at the heart of it. He speaks to this Modern Age of nihilism and existentialism, of contingency in place of absolutes. A murderer on the run for much of his life, a man who understood the darkness and the way light offers glimpses of... relief in that darkness, Caravaggio's motto is one I wholeheartedly endorse.

No Hope, No Fear.

This is, I would argue, the most concise articulation of the positive and paradoxically life-affirming nature of nihilism you will ever hear.

If God is, as Neitszche says, dead... if there is no Absolute underpinning our world with essentialist meaning, then... nothing matters. No-one here gets out alive. There is no heaven and no hell. Hope is an illusion, a delusion, and all that "pie in the sky when you die" is just one big shell-game of the soul. Sartre talks of a great existential void because of this. He talks of angst and nausea. What do I say to that?

Fuck that shit.

No Hope, No Fear, mes amigos. If nothing matters then it doesn't fucking well matter that it doesn't matter. So fucking what? Fuck cynicism. Or rather, if you call yourself a cynic then have the balls to take that cynicism to its ultimate conclusion, to be cynical about cynicism. Cynicism? What's the point in that then? Feh. There is no point. It's all a crock of shit, after all, all that old essentialist shell game. If you're going to be a true cynic, I say, then you gotta stop being a pansy-ass about it. Ditch the black beret and Galouise attitude. If your mantra is that faux-cynical "Why bother?" then, fuck it, I see that and I raise you one "Why the fuck not?". That's nihilism for ya. If you're looking down into that existential abyss, that void of meaning, and you feel angst, you feel nausea, well then, mes amigos, you're imposing an artificial and essentialist interpretation on that absence. What do you feel when you look into the face of that abyss? A fear born of one's desire to cling to the old certainties? A sadness born of nostalgia for the delusion of truth? A grief for dead ideals?

Fuck that shit.

No Hope, No Fear.

Caravaggio may have lived, strictly speaking, long before the Modern Age. He may still have believed in much of that old hokum of God and Man -- God as the Neo-Classical creator of perfection, a God of Reason, God of Light; Man as the Romantic individual, a wanderer in the wilderness, a noble savage of dark passions. But I believe Caravaggio was the harbinger of a new way of thinking, a humanist aesthetic which portrays the world and humanity and divinity within that world and that humanity, divinity as a creation of that material realm, not a transcendant force in eternal opposition to it, perhaps even no more than a metaphor. In the world created by the chiaroscurists who followed in his footsteps -- Rimbaud? Nietszche? Joyce? -- the source of light is not the utterance of a hidden, nameless, faceless God. It's the candles lit upon the altars for those we've loved and lost, the ephemeral flames of human souls which burn for a while, burn down or are snuffed out, and have to be replaced. Sure, the world is a dark, cold place, but that's why we fucking light our fires in it.

That's the light that suffuses Caravaggio's work, the light of the candle or the hearth. It's the light of the fucking furnace of fucking humanity, the fires that Joyce referred to at the end of The Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, when Stephen Daedalus sets out...

"to forge in the smithy of his soul, the uncreated conscience of his race."

It's a fucking awesomely audacious, insanely ambitious aim, to stare into the abyss, have it stare back into you as per Nietszche, and giggle in its face, and draw a moustache on it. But fuck it, I say. No Hope, No Fear, mes amigos.

God is dead. Amen and hallelujah.

Monday, September 19, 2005

Another Interview

Yes, I've been blathering on again about me, me, me. Another interview now up at PH-UK.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

A Musical Interlude

So, I'm in the closing stretch with INK and don't really have time to blog much at the moment. As a stopgap, however, here's a wee musical number courtesy of my Inner Fairy, Puck and Jack, my very own Creature From The Id. For the tune take equal parts of "Wouldn't It Be Luverly?" from My Fair Lady and "I Feel Pretty" from West Side Story. Add a dash of "O, What A Beautiful Morning" in the opening verse. Sprinkle liberally with whimsy.

SCENE: A gay night-spot somewhere in the Vellum (halfway along the Valley Of Broadway Musicals, to be precise). Enter FAST PUCK, shameless slut of a skatepunk hustler, and JACK FLASH, psychokiller secret agent and PUCK's main squeeze. PUCK gazes around at the crowd, hands on hips, eyeing up the talent.

(music begins slow)

PUCK

There's tall men and short men,
And average height.
There's fat men and skinny,
There's black and there's white.
There's red, brown and yellow,
Broad-shouldered and slight.
And all in this garden of earthly deliiiiight...

(next four lines build to crescendo)

O, I want a man...

JACK & OTHERS

I want a man...

PUCK

I want a man...

JACK & OTHERS

I want a man...

PUCK

O, I want a man tonight!

(main tune kicks in)

I want a man who has style and wit.
He's got to be charming.
He's got to be fit.
Handsome, intelligent... hopefully rich.
O, I want a man tonight!

JACK (speaking)

I have wit.

PUCK (speaking)

You have a straitjacket.

JACK (speaking)

What's your point?

PUCK

I want a man with his marbles intact -
Just for a change,
Someone less whacked.
A doctor, a lawyer, a dentist -

JACK

A Jack!

PUCK

O, I want a man tonight!

JACK (speaking)

What about -

PUCK (speaking)

Too hairy.

JACK (speaking)

Or -

PUCK (speaking)

Too bald.

JACK

Well, what are you looking for?.

PUCK

I want a man with blond hair and blue eyes,
As blond as the corn,
As blue as the skies,
Gazing adoringly up from my thighs.
O, I want a man tonight!

I want a man with a 28 waist,
A dancer, an acrobat,
Balance and grace,
To suck me and fuck me and sit on my face.
O, I want a man tonight!

JACK

You don't want much, just the moon on a stick.

PUCK

I just want love.

JACK

You just want dick.

PUCK

So sue me - or screw me, but best make it quick,
Cause I want a man tonight!

(break)

I know it's kind of corny
But I want some TLC.
I'm feeling oh so horny;
Fornication's calling me.

I want a man with eight inches at least.
Six is too little.
Ten is a feast.
I want a poet, a painter...

JACK

A priest?

PUCK

O, I want a man tonight!

(building)

O, I want a man...

JACK & OTHERS

I want a man...

PUCK

I want a man...

JACK & OTHERS

I want a man...

PUCK

I want a man; there's too many to choose!
Will it be him?
Will it be you?
This one or that one...

JACK & PUCK

Or why not the two?

PUCK

O, I want a man tonight!

(Instrumental dance sequence... with much girlish spinning, skipping and general flirty flightiness on PUCK's part, leading into JACK in Seven Brides For Seven Brothers stylee choreographed dance-off against PUCK's potential suitors. JACK, of course, outdances all of them, ending up down on one-knee in front of PUCK, arms out in "ta-da" pose. Music goes soft. PUCK gazes wistfully to the side.)

(tender, slowly)

I want a man who will love me forever.
Will he come soon?

JACK

Never say never.

PUCK

I want a man who... ah, fuck it! Whatever!
I want a man...

JACK & OTHERS

I want a man...

PUCK

I want a man...

ALL

I want a man...

PUCK

I want a man...

ALL

Toniiiiiiiight!

JACK (speaking)

So how about a threesome?

PUCK (speaking)

Now that's what I call a plan.