‘Why is Punch crookit? Why wil he all ways kil the babby if he can? Parbly I won’t never know its jus on me to think on it’

Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban

‘That’s when the taxi man turned on the radio
And a Jay-Z song was on’

Party in the USA, Lukasz Gottwald/Claude
Kelly/Jessica Cornish

‘If you’re havin’ girl problems, I feel bad for you, son
I got ninety-nine problems, but a bitch ain’t one’

99 Problems, Jay-Z


Christmas Single/Time’s Informers


You can be sure this was a real stocking filler.

A transcript from the US radio campaign:

WFML: So you guys have a single just out wanna tell us a bit about it?

Andrew: Well, it has a pretty atypical structure for a pop song - verse, verse, chorus, or, AAB, if you will. The first verse is all about lying awake at night worrying about all the crap you put into your body, then waking up the next day and starting all over again. That’s the ‘thoracic guys’ in their suits and shiny shoes that scare the shit out of you at 2AM, then the next morning, they’re your bitches, cleaning your toilet in their shabby trainers, when your bad habits kick in. Then in the second verse there’s a bit of a nuclear war, and we’re down at the RSA - that’s like your VA - drinking rum and cokes and watching live footage of ICBM launches on CNN. Then we get to the chorus and it’s that bit from Othello where he is talking about a pearl richer than all his tribe, so that’s Desdemona, who he has just ‘thrown away’ as he rather euphemistically puts it, but in the song the pearl is your children who you are trying to protect from these wolves with blood red eyes crazed on porn and dope. So yeah, the song is like I’m dying, the fucking planet is dying, so fuck it, what else can you do but try and look after your own?

WFML: If we could just cool it a little with the language that would be totally awesome man.

Andrew: Oh, sorry.

WFML: It’s cool, it’s cool. Nice little song but I was going to ask you about the sub-And Justice For All period Metallica outro you have going on there. That’s got to run to three or four minutes?

Andrew: Five, I think
.
WFML: Cool, very cool. And I take it you’ll be touring to promote the single?

Andrew: Ah, nope.

WFML: We’ve been talking with Andrew Spittle of Charcoal Burners. Don’t go anywhere because when we come back we’re gonna be giving away TWO BACKSTAGE PASSES TO MILEY CYRUS!

No, none of the above happened, just like the Jay-Z song in the cab. Miley had never heard a bar of Jay-Z, only her writing team had. It would be idle to speculate what the song was in any case, but it’s not like we have anything better to do, so…you would probably put your money on 99 Problems, which was also doubtlessly the last tune stuck in Othello’s fevered head.

All we hear is Radio Ga Ga. One member of our inauspicious fleet of vehicles is an indestructible Toyota Caldina of the type favoured by terror cells, which will do several laps of Afghanistan with a frayed cambelt and no oil. Its dial is permanently set to one of those stations with a playlist untroubled by your journey through time: it will sound the same after your death as it did before you were born. I find this disconcerting in a ‘William, it was really nothing - it was your life’ type way. In fact, I choked up a little just yesterday when, of all things, the theme from Hill Street Blues came on and I found myself having to loudly sing the first verse of Shriekback’s ‘Nemesis’ over the hackneyed chord progression just to stay in my lane. Stephen King thoroughly explored the horror of car audio as a rolling mausoleum for the dead and the damned in Christine. I’m not quite sure why this should be: it is just the past, it is only memory. If you want to worry about something, try the future.

Where the nuclear threat still hangs out, chewing gum (it has quit smoking - it is in for the long haul) and quietly enjoying the fact that everyone thinks he (it has to be a he) is all washed up, a has-been, a loser. He used to be very cool, and I spent an enjoyable afternoon with my snifters and chocolate dipped icecream in the Octagon theatre as The Day After showed us all what we had to look forward to. I think I even wrote a letter to the paper expressing my twelve year old insight that nuclear war was a bad idea and we probably shouldn’t have one. Dad used to get sent these cassette tapes from some medical outfit he subscribed to and I remember listening to one from a crowd called Physicians Against Nuclear War: what, you mean to say it is actually bad for your health, as well as everything else? Then nuclear war lost its edge a little and went out of style. But now, what with Oppenheimer toting its sack of statuettes out of the Oscars, it is a little bit cool again.

But fashion, like Rust Cohle’s Time in ‘True Detective’ is a flat circle and, if Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker has anything to say about it, we will ultimately spend our time after a nuclear war doing our damnest to…have another nuclear war. Of course, we will have to build back up to it over a few centuries and millennia (Coast FM will ensure the perfect continuity of soundtrack), starting with the ‘1 Littl 1’ - gunpowder - before we graduate, again, to the ‘1 Big 1’. Fortunately for Riddley, Hoban’s crew of doomsday bedlam beggars only get as far as the ‘1 Littl 1’ - a confection of ‘yellerboy stoan’ (sulphur), pig shit (saltpeter) and charcoal. As a study in the almost genetic drive towards the acquisition of destructive power, the novel lays down a challenge to the complacency of Mutually Assured Destruction and focuses attention on the small players and would-be actors of the present day, with its dark marketplaces for, not yellerboy but yellowcake: uranium oxide. In Hoban’s novel as in our own happy wagon circle, people need entertained when the working week is done and here a resurgent Punch puppet gives a pretty good read on how the human soap opera is likely to be conducted going forwards: he just wants to eat the baby. After the show, the iron age punters roll a spliff, crawl back to the hearths and brace themselves for another nuclear winter’s day of not getting ‘dog et’ or otherwise dead.

So it seems the code, the DNA, is telling us that we use death to gain power over others. Meanwhile, death uses others to gain power over us. It is always making an example of someone. Or an example of a whole bunch of someones. The other universals are the need to tell our story, and to hear the stories of others: thanks, Riddley, for taking the trouble. Mum sat down to write her memoirs too, but (and this bothers me) made the decision to confine herself to the first 17 of her 73 years. She didn’t want to be one of time’s informers: almost everything, it seems, was better left unsaid. Her dad, whom she adored, awkwardly mixing with the ballet mums in the backstage primp and preen; the pink carnations her mum grew that were given to the Queen; the gramophone on which she would endlessly play Oklahoma and sing along. There were long happy afternoons of clothes peg dolls, bush forts and puppet shows in a neighbour’s shed, the swimming hole, the beach, a terrifying yellow-toothed rat. Then the trail peters out, at the end of the beginning. All that life and love and death stuff that just got too hard; all those babies that just wanted to grow up and be Punch. She set up a base camp in a La-Z-Boy in the corner of the lounge for the last months. Whenever you visited her she would be there, animated, engaged, setting aside her memoirs to greet you. The final time she left the house, she came home and said no, she didn’t want to sit in her chair, and went straight to her bed, which she never left. She said she wanted to be left alone.

In Charlie Kaufman’s film ‘I’m Thinking Of Ending Things’, Jesse Plemon’s character is also alone, also dying and also singing a song from Oklahoma. He too is writing a memoir, but one in which he is the star, singing ‘Lonely Room’ on the stage, as opposed to taking shit from the smartmouth schoolgirl primadonnas while he grapples with his janitor’s mop in their rehearsal, as has been the case for the previous few decades: ‘And the girl I want ain’t afraid of my arms/ And her own soft arms keep me warm/ And her long yeller hair falls across my face/ jist like the rain in a storm.’ But her long yellerboy stoan hair is, again, the Jay-Z song: it never happened. And Jake doesn’t have 99 problems now, he only has one. The same one we all have.