Wednesday, March 14, 2001
Justin Currie

Rock and roll is the new comedy

Rock and roll is the new comedy.

Comedy is the new cooking.

Cooking is the new fashion while fashion is the new soap opera and soaps are the new rock and roll.

And pornography is the new football.

This means that Oasis, for example, are essentially five Benny Hills on Celebrity Ready Steady Cook making a paisley pattern onion marmalade laced with rat poison to feed to a naked Martine McCutcheon through a dirty smack syringe.

While someone fucks Kevin Keegan with a courgette and a whisk singing "it's just like playing Barnsley".

Now, on to gardening (which was the new rock and roll for a week before rock and roll became the new comedy), and where better place to start than the New York subway system. Here the underground graffitti artists (people the British used to call vandals before they realised that the original Vandals weren't quite so creative) use luminous paint so that their work appears to light up as the train passes. This without doubt merits its own Ground Force style TV show where someone like Tracey Emin could get to choose each week which set of suburbanite tossers has defaced a Victorian railway siding the most garishly and win a blanket with crap stitched on it.

Do they have limbo dancing in purgatory?

This should be our last week here in Red India, although there is still a fair bit to be done. All the children must be set free. The trails must be cleared of debris, the beasts must be tamed and the deserts, lakes and mountains must be photographed from every conceivable angle in all the lights of day.

Things would have gone a little quicker if so many strangers hadn't wandered into our realm with their lucky charms and narrative dances. The other day a man on a street corner offered me some opium. All he had was a poppy seed bagel. He was asking twenty dollars plus tip and I kicked him in the shins and ran away with his watch. Things are different here. You often shoot first and get asked questions later. Not hard questions but there's the odd tricky one about ice hockey.

At the weekend we visited a bar called Siberia which is in a subway station on West 50th Street. According to Kieron our bartender (who tended slightly to the left), a great many artists, poets and plonkers come through the mucky portals of Siberia each evening. I think we had just missed Pusherman and a woman who paints exclusively using the medium of menstrual blood. Her name was Donna Noodle or something, I forget. There'd been a Tequila by then and sometimes that blurs the odd detail. But we like Siberia with its lightless toilet and its jukebox full of attitude. As midtown Manhattan bars go it's the Bee Gees' sleeves.

Tonight we watch John Wayne on cable TV whilst Gordon rebalances one of our topsy turvy tracks on his levelling console. He is a spinner of plates in a way and yet he is absolutely nothing like a plate spinner in any sense at all. It's simply a matter of how pointless you like your similies. Like the one about Anthony Worrel Thompson's place in the world being like a stray pubic hair on a shower tile's place in a large hotel chain. Sooner or later they're both going to get wiped off into obscurity by the cleaner's cloth of public indifference and washed down the drain of memory. So yes, in a sense Gordon spins our plates and hopefully they'll still be spinning when our latest CD provisionally entitled "Dude, Where's My Bar?" reaches you this summer.