Clive singing in the 1980’s punk band Only After Death.
The spotlight never fades on Taylor Swift. But while she remains #1, memoirs and autobiographies from other musicians spring up like clover. The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards has penned an autobiography titled “Life.” Frontman Bono in the rock band U2 wrote a memoir in 2022, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.” Bruce Springsteen has come out with “Born to Run” and Rush’s lead vocalist Geddy Lee has written “My Effin’ Life.” The late Marianne Faithfull wrote both an autobiography and a memoir. Since these songwriters are getting published, I figure someone must be reading their stuff. I have in front of me on my desk a 2007 copy of The Heroin Diaries, a drug-addled, red-ink-splattered chronicle of glorious misadventure by songwriter Nikki Sixx of the legendary heavy metal band Mötley Crüe. Even on Broadway, the play “Stereophonic,” a study of a 1970’s rock band and its struggles in the studio, landed rave reviews. Clearly, the glamorous, cantankerous lives of musicians are as hot a topic today as when the Beatles ran into Marylebone Station in London in 1964 to escape screaming fans in the film A Hard Day’s Night.
Managing the Swedish rap duo realPfft, I meet Clive Flatenbad and Mutte Fjutt almost daily online over Microsoft Teams. Sitting at my laptop, seeing them in living color, the only two things separating Oxburg, Maryland from Uppsala, Sweden are a six-hour time difference and the Atlantic Ocean. Since he is eminently available and sure to please, I’m inclined to publish this interview with rap artist and lead singer Clive. I work with the dude, so I knew a lot of his backstory, but nothing like this. It feels like a college tutorial.
Born to a Swedish father and a British mum, Clive was raised in Stockholm. I consider him more than a musician. A performance artist, I think of him as G.O.A.T., the Greatest Of All Time frontman for Swedish garage bands. He sang in several back in the 1980’s, a time when thousands of wannabe rock stars dressed themselves in black leather, holed up in suburban basements and strummed guitars. When they weren’t out practicing ice hockey on frozen tennis courts, the boys were at home jamming.
Unlike John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, Clive didn’t start out in music. He became a radio disc jockey while attending college in the United States in the 1970’s. Armed with a Radio Telephone Third Class Operator Permit from the FCC, he frog-marched into a local radio station that smelled like a cigar box and created radio theater. Clowning on a one-hour show, he christened it Audiographics. A clever name, it was graphic audio. Basically, it was a series of humorous podcasts 50 years before there was such a thing as podcasts. Filled with the conflicting personalities of American AM Top 40 radio, it offered mayhem on AM. (“Typing by Radio” was a recurring gag, where Clive supposedly taught touch-typing, clack, clack, clack, over the radio.) Whether intoning a British accent à la Winston Churchill, pr-pr-producing a nasal stutter or delivering the pear-shaped, mellifluous tones of a studio announcer, Clive invented a closetful of voices.
When he got back home to Stockholm, he worked on the railroad and freelanced as a rock journalist. One fine day, his buddy from high school Björn Svensson invited him to join his radio program. Once again, Clive’s many personae fit the bill. “We were pre-recording weekly half-hour radio shows in 100% Swedish that were broadcast at 11:30 on Tuesday nights, ‘Channel U R, Underground Radio,’” Clive explains. “Audio theater that made us into heroes fashioning something fresh in 1979 on the newly-created Stockholm Neighborhood Radio, set up by the government to compete with an off-shore commercial satellite radio station broadcasting in Swedish but based in Great Britain. Accustomed to having complete control of the airwaves, the Social Democrats didn’t like foreign interference one bit.”
It was an easy step from announcing to singing, from drama to drama queen.
What motivated you to become a singer?
“Sex. When it comes to sex, Americans think Sweden is some sort of bunny patch. In questions of intimacy, the law puts all the power in the hands of strong-willed Swedish women. One result is hundreds of thousands of blue-eyed blonde teenage schoolgirls giving you hard, sexually demanding stares. You cannot touch them, the law against pedophilia is super-strict. We’re the adults in the room. That doesn’t stop them from flirting outrageously. They all want to hang out with a singer in a band, just as long as he keeps his hands to himself. If you like to flirt, Sweden is Heaven on Earth.
“I have had to explain this rule of thumb to some genuine international rock stars playing concerts in Sweden during their European tours. ‘If she’s over 18, you can bed her, but remember that she is in charge,’ I instruct them. ‘And when you are done, don’t abandon her to your roadie. Take her downstairs for coffee and buy her something nice in the hotel gift shop. Be a gentleman. That way, hopefully, she will never accuse you of rape.’”
So you became a rock star.
“I only got into the music end of things because of Björn’s radio show. You know, Björn as in Björn Borg, but not. He needed songs tailor-made to fit the dialogue. I can sing. He bought a used, monophonic ARP synthesizer and a programmable electronic drum machine. Zowie! Overnight, we became a synth band.
“Since he wasn’t any good as a musician, Björn made up for a lack of chops by going hog wild on personality. Grimacing, sweating and growling in ecstasy, he pressed a single pale finger against a single white key on the keyboard of the pre-programmed synthesizer.
“Björn collected strays, whose unhappy presence occasionally made difficulties im das home studio. One of them, a starchy German audio engineer named Willy, wanted to know how you harmonized melodies when the monophonic synth only played one chord at a time. The short answer was, you didn’t. When multi-tracking, you could add individual chords one atop another, so-called layering, but an early synth was no Hammond organ or even a piano. It made one tone and only one tone at any given moment.
“One day, a piano player named Stefan sat down at the keyboard of the ARP and let loose a humongous parade of lickety-split chords in quick progression. ‘Aha,’ complained Björn dismissively, ‘one of those keyboardists. A plinky, planky, plonky piano player.’
“It was hard to counter Björn’s hard-edged critique, because if one expressed admiration for the pianist’s virtuoso abilities, it meant Björn was a gutless wonder, the hole in the doughnut. From that day on, Björn declared ‘I’m not a musician,’ making it sound like a vulgar label. ‘I’m a natural talent,’ he claimed. Since that is what he called himself, no criticism could be applied to his musical output because, after all, he wasn’t a musician composing music, he was a natural talent creating art.”
Whoa! That sounds like total bullshit.
“Back then, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, I was all doped up on nicotine. Plus being jacked up on caffeine from umpteen mugs of coffee 24/7, a beverage known for its ergogenic and nootropic properties. Ugh!”
Come again?
“The result: I was a Dizzy Dan who couldn’t think straight. That meant Björn could sell me a load of goods. I had an inferiority complex after years of jeering abuse in grade school for being a British half-breed. Possessing low self-esteem, I accepted everything he dished out.
“While ABBA was raking in millions, Björn excused our lack of commercial success by endlessly chanting ‘One is never a prophet in his own land,’ a Jesus parable from the Bible.”
Sad, bro.
“I was mucho young and naïve.Since he was uninterested in piano lessons, Björn used the envelope function on the synthesizer to create a repetitive, fluctuating tone which he called ‘pulse music.’ Give the man credit, within a year or two, the boys in Düsseldorf, Germany christened the same musical style ‘techno’ and made it big in the dance clubs. We should have had a chunk of that, but a dilettante, Björn always found a reason not to go commercial.”
You’re pissing me off, Clive.
“Let’s remember, it was the 1980’s. Swedes had a social safety net the size of the moon and lots of disposable income. You really had to struggle to fail, but B.S. artist Björn and his cronies managed to so thoroughly blacken their reputations, they had to leave Stockholm with their tails between their legs. Declaring themselves a bohemian Artists’ Collective, they rented a farmhouse and took refuge on the island of Gotland.
“It was only a matter of time before Björn’s other buddy, yellow-haired, slow-eyed Anders, whose father is affiliated with the fish industry, arrived at the farmhouse one Spring morning. Living on the dole, guitar case and clunky red amplifier in hand, he acquired an extension cord, plugged it into an electrical outlet and fed the cord through an open window. Setting up his amplifier out of doors, facing the V in the wall where the chimney met the masonry, he tuned his candy apple red Stratocaster. Presto! Channeling Jimi Hendrix, Anders played improvised, endless guitar solos. Like, forty or fifty minutes at a time. Those musical interludes echoed for miles across the flat terrain of southern Gotland, waxing and waning ghost-like on the wind. Among the locals, no one knew where this strange guitar music was coming from. Like UFO’s, it was a mystery shrouded in uncertainty.
“The day came when southern Gotland held a rock festival. I was the lead singer in our punk band, O.A.D. Only After Death. Hetero-erotic melancholia, I got up on stage in a tattered Swedish Army uniform and growled in English:
Turn me on, turn me on, I’m a television
It’s your choice, make your decision
Turn the knob, hit the switch
Life changes in hue, death changes in pitch.
“Shazam! I knocked ’em dead. Going bonkers, the audience literally stormed the stage.”
So you were on your way?
“Southern Gotland is not exactly the center of the music universe. One good performance does not a career make. But, yeah, as a songwriter, I was a crowd-pleaser.
[Even Mutte Fjutt was involved with the band. He had a television repair shop in Uppsala where he upgraded and repaired the band’s equipment.]
“We rehearsed in the barn. Doing things the hard way, our studio equipment consisted of a used, 4-channel reel-to-reel tape recorder, only one step above a Blattnerphone.”
Never heard of it.
“Google it.
‘I need a guitar solo on every song,’ insisted Stratocaster Anders. ‘Otherwise, what’s the point of playing?’
‘What do you have in mind?’ I asked.
‘Forty-minute solos. Free form guitar improv is my specialty,’ he insisted.
‘We’re a synth band,’ countered Björn, adjusting knobs on the synthesizer before placing a ‘pie’ of dry snuff under his upper lip. ‘Our audience expects a synth solo in every song. One, at a minimum. More if need be. It’s expected.’
‘Actually, we’re a punk band,’ I pointed out.
‘Now you seem aggressive,’ scolded Björn, his fave critique. A Swede from the heartland, he bullied me constantly.
‘The bass guitar drives the rhythm section which is the motor in modern rock music,’ Max on bass mansplained. Mercifully, he didn’t demand a bass solo.
“Like the Beatles, we were a four-piece: Clive, Björn, Anders and Max. Trying to work with these rank amateurs, bathed in frustration, I found that their egomania quickly became a quagmire. It triggered in me almost daily meltdowns. Amid their endless gabbing, I had to beg them to shut up and play some music. Since I was a guest in their house, I was expected to play by their rules.”
Sounds like an ass backwards way to develop a career in pop music.
“Contacts, contacts, contacts, in Sweden it’s all a matter of who you know. A rock journo who doubled as a singer/songwriter, I got offers from record labels and professional musicians to front budding young teenage garage bands who, with the right frontman, could blossom into meaningful commercial vehicles. It happened all the time, singers went from high school choir to heavy metal bands in Swedish Norrland. Did I want to make music a full-time commitment? I was manager of a county railway station on the mainland. Wise, for once, I didn’t throw away my career at a moment’s notice.
“Björn peppered me with bad advice. ‘Musically, we are a dynamic duo. I am your muse. Without me, you are No-wheres-ville. No one has ever created music like ours!’
(Because it stinks, I thought.)
‘Our music will overthrow the music industry! No one will ever catch up with us.’
(I doubt it, I reasoned, keeping my own counsel.)
‘Our music isn’t commercial pap. We are creative geniuses. We refuse to sell out.’
(So the Beatles, Michael Jackson and the Stones have sold out to the man?)
‘This is our time! Why live a life of regret over what could have been? Never in the history of human progress has such a divine opportunity been spilled onto the laps of such worthy practitioners.’
(Maybe, but in that case, why does our music stink?)
‘I create soundscapes. It’s what I do. You should be eternally grateful that I am willing to share them with you.’
(Don’t do me any favors!)
‘I’ll be your manager. We’ll sign a contract. You can pay me by the hour.’
(Aha! Björn the money suck!)
“I discussed it with my dad, who was a personnel director in the government.
‘What’s the question?’ he asked, askance. ‘Give up a lifetime career and a pension for a stint as a singer in a rock band that only stays popular for three years? No way! What kind of lunacy is that? Sure, if you strike it rich and become an ABBA or the Beatles, but even then you are striking a deal with the devil. Money, money, money, get your head together!’
“By then, I owned three tape recorders, a mixing console, a MOSFET sound system, studio and stage speakers, microphones, reams of recording tape, a studio video camera and a U-matic video tape recorder. While I worked overtime on the railroad, my bandmates were on the island of Gotland, playing the hell out of my equipment. Me mum wanted to know who was footing the bill for all this creative tomfoolery. I was!
“Smart for once, I kept my full-time job.”
So that was the end of sex, drugs, rock and roll?
“That wasn’t my vibe. I had already done the whole drug scene in college, smoking Mary Jane and Mexican hashish to the point of confusion. Who wants to muddle through life in a daze? Then, too, I was a recovering alcoholic with visible liver damage on the X-rays. In a land of drunks, I became a teetotaler. Fed up with wild, meaningless sex, I became a monk, ruling out a host of sexually transmittable diseases. Hey, Mutte and I are still around and reasonably healthy. Take care of your bod, it’s the only one you’ve got.”
Fast forward. What’s cooking?
“Let’s be clear, Mutte and I barely make a red pfennig from our music. I don’t intend to travel under the false pretense that we are a commercial money-maker or a cash cow. Living on our pensions, music has become our hobby. It keeps us young. If Billboard ever releases The Top 2,000, you might find one of our tracks at #1,998. Yes, you will find us on TikTok, but since we don’t record TikTok videos, our audience is in the double digits. After eight years and 145 songs, our YouTube channel has eight subscribers. Eight! Tell your friends to subscribe!!!”
Hey! Let’s get realPfft’s YouTube Channel audience out of the single digits ditch, folks! It doesn’t cost anything, so SUBSCRIBE today!
“We belong to a musical rights organization that sends us royalty payments four times a year. It’s barely enough income to file it on our tax returns.
“When I read that Beyoncé and Taylor Swift are billionaires, it feels like we must be doing something muchowrong-o, but Mutte and I are who we are. Our music distributor expects us, not them, to create a following on social media. We discussed it and that ain’t gonna happen. ‘Whatever time and energy we have, let’s concentrate on producing music,’ we decided.
“The paradox of social media is that if no one sends me a text message and my phone doesn’t ring, it often feels like no one knows I exist. I end up sitting alone at home, staring out the window at acres and acres of snow.”
Your listeners are in the single digits, but they come from cities as diverse as Toronto, Bogotá, Prague, Kuala Lumpur and Johannesburg.
“Our listeners are the bright spot in our lives! Alphabetically, they’re from Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Canada, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, France, India, Indonesia, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand, UK, United Arab Emirates, USA and Vietnam.
“It’s an uphill struggle to chart in the UK, France or Japan since those markets focus on homegrown product, but we are there! Every time a fan downloads a free music file, that confirms for us that we are reaching our audience. We love the fact that our kookiest songs elicit the biggest response: Storming the Capitol, Back in the Pandemic, Speed Hump, My Broken Tooth, the funkadelic Timewarp. We often wonder how we come up with these songs, but as long as people like them, we’ll keep on ‘grinding out the hits.’
“Musical dinosaurs, Mutte and I love almost every kind of music: rock, pop, punk, rap, hip hop, soul, R & B, dance, disco, jazz, funk, fusion, metal, samba, salsa, calypso, steel drum, folk, chanson and classical. We call our genre Dino Pop.
“No klezmer, no polkas and no accordions, thanks.
“We once tried to release a K-Pop track, but our music distributor refused because we are not Korean. Wrong nationality, wrong generation.
LOL!
“Historically, music groups were at the mercy of their record labels. Record companies hired flacks who seldom understood the music or their groups. A & R dudes—Artist & Repertoire— decided what got released and when, what it sounded like, the cover art, how many copies went into the pressing and the size of the PR budget. Often, they made innocuous decisions that drove the recording artists mad.
“This unhappy situation has been passed down to today’s music distributors, who mean well but often seem clueless regarding trends, styles and technological breakthroughs. Online stores have all these irritating rules about track title formatting, capitalization, cover art content, explicit lyrics, metadata, copyrights and release dates. The music distributors ride herd on a stable of unruly, angry artists and have to right the ship according to the demands of the online stores. Now they have forbidden ‘sound alike’ covers of popular tunes, after customers complained that they had been hoodwinked into buying a track created by a tribute band instead of the original recording. Yada, yada, yada. If iTunes doesn’t like some facet of a music release, everyone falls into line, bending over backwards to satisfy iTunes. Nitpicky and hyper-focused, the online stores have all the authority.
“In the 1980’s, cassette tape became the primary format. You were no longer dependent on record companies, you could distribute your band’s music on a mixtape. The trade magazines published articles like ‘Will Home Taping Mean the Demise of the Record Industry?’
“Came the 1990’s, we got music CD’s, compact discs that you could burn on your computer. Hoo boy! Once arrogant record labels became as sweet as lambs. After firing half their staff, deeply solicitous, concerned about the welfare of their musical talent, they asked, ‘Do you need studio time? Do ya wanna cut a track? ‘Cause we can fix you up with an audio engineer and a producer if you have any jangly tunes circulating inside that head of yours.’
“Yesterday, DIY, you could take a computer, a guitar, a microphone, an interface and digital software and join the millions of musicians who were recording tracks in their bedrooms and releasing them online. Record labels were dead. After living through the age of vinyl, cassettes, CD’s and streaming, now we’re into A.I.
“I’m going bananas!”
I hear echoes of that craziness in your music.
“I like to say ‘Everything we do is comedy.’ realPfft means ‘really nothing.’ Lint. Let’s hear it for low self-esteem, dudes!
“Paul the perfectionist drove the other Beatles to distraction. More than one monumental rock band is known for huge fights in the studio. Aware of that, Mutte and I are super-careful not to stamp on each other’s toes. We are both clinical depressives, we can go into a blue funk and not compose a single note for months. Many is the time Mutte has composed instrumentals while waiting for Clive to get his sorry ass in front of a microphone. Besides being a music loops genius, Mutte is a great guy, very low-key. I’m a conspicuously live wire, a manic-depressive, so I try to tone down my assertive personality and let Mutte find his groove. Most often, he composes the music while I write the lyrics. Then we meet at the mixing console.
“We only release music that speaks to us, which means we are always going to inhabit the margins. Making a virtue of necessity, we try to breathe fresh creativity into mainstream pop’s cluttered soundscape. Time will tell whether we accumulate more gray hairs than fans!
“PrezidentOzymandias, we started out by making fun of Donald Trump, only to discover that he didn’t need us, he was pretty good at parodying himself. We stopped making fun of Trump because everyone is talking and no one is listening. ‘He’s crazy!’ or ‘He’s not crazy!’ It got old. Who cares? Alternative fact, me mum used to complain that ‘Trump is a real nothing burger.’ Mercifully, unlike MAGA, we are not fueled by insecurity and grievance. Yes, we are driven, but only by our quest for musical perfection. Our motto is ‘With realPfft in Modern Times,’ a take-off on King Carl Gustaf’s motto ‘For Sweden in Modern Times.’
“Fruity loops, Mutte has purchased some wonderful performances by female vocalists from Ghosthack in Germany. We love the fact that the same female vocal can appear in different tracks by separate bands in different countries. Anyone can buy those vocals. You can build a playlist showing how different musicians have used the identical material. Cool! Unfortunately, it drives music distributors nuts to find identical metadata spread across the globe. ‘Someone has stolen your vocal!’ warns the distributor. Well… no, not really. It’s called sharing. Loops also play havoc with copyright law, but the license to use the material is included in the purchase price.
“Everything changed with the arrival of TTS, Text-To-Speech, and now A.I.
“The music industry has a problem with artificial intelligence. The Internet is flooded with ghost artists and songs created by generative A.I. The tools have taken over the workshop! We’re in the age of push-button songwriting, anyone can dial up a song.
“In the Old Days— two years ago— Mutte used ChatGPT to produce song lyrics which he fed into the Text-To-Speech platform Uberduck and hit ‘rap.’ Uberduck provided a rapper style voice and rhythm, which Mutte fed into Suno AI which combined the vocal with an instrumental accompaniment, producing a finished track. Cut and paste music.
“Today, Mutte might feel inspired to feed a prompt into Google’s Gemini AI, ‘Write me a song about the Stockholm sewer system.’ Gemini delivers song lyrics which Mutte feeds into Riffusion/Producer.ai, a tool which creates the voice, style, rhythm, melody and rock accompaniment. Riffusion has combined these various functions, everything from soup to nuts, on a single platform. Voila! A finished track: trip-hop, IDM, Swedish house music.
“We spend a lot of time at the mixing console. Music created from electronic signals is brittle and a bear to mix. There are hi-fi and mastering issues. Still, a Brave New World, computer programs often provide our next hit song. If we don’t like the first version, we can always ask the software for a remix.
“Kuny, who does our cover artwork, feeds a prompt into Microsoft Copilot and within minutes, he has a png file containing finished cover art that used to take him days to create.
“Riding the crest of this wave, the joke is on us. The music industry talks about ‘A.I. junk’ and ‘A.I. generated noise’ on the Internet muscling out bona fide artists. Fake bands like The Velvet Sundown can attract millions of fans, their creators milking thousands of dollars in royalty payments from the industry. According to Google, current data suggests that over 30,000 A.I. generated tracks are uploaded daily to the streaming platform Deezer. That’s hundreds of thousands of songs every week.
“The figures are mind-boggling. Totally nerts. The generative A.I. website Boomy claims it has generated over 22 million songs or 15% of the world’s recorded music.
Are you afraid of being replaced by A.I.?
“Thank God realPfft released its first track in 2018. We have bona fides, we’re not an imaginary band. I love the idea of Wall-E rolling onstage at a music festival, approaching a microphone and singing its little heart out. That would be interesting music! Alvin and the Chipmunks meet Silicon Valley.
“Using A.I. as a tool, Mutte and I have become adept music producers, but we risk losing our souls. Retired, older and hopefully wiser, our creativity is a race against the clock.
“We’re big in China! And Swedish Pop is now a specific genre on Spotify.”
Are you going to do a Taylor Swift and re-record gems from your back catalog? The song Television was first recorded in 1981.
“You have a typical businessman mentality, Kevin. Let me ask Mutte and get back to you.”
Cool beans, Clive! Cool beans.
Note: Some personal names and references have been fictionalized to protect people’s privacy.
Some seven years later, rapper Clive Flatenbad in Swedish rap duo realPfft revisits President Trump’s anti-immigrant wall in southern Texas. Only to get interrupted by a phone call from the White House!
And once again, Clive’s rather nutty younger brother Tim has painstakingly moved Heaven, Earth and megabytes to edit and package the mucho raw footage which Clive & Friends brought home from their location shoot outside El Paso.
Based on the saying “Everybody likes a pretty girl,” Tim has even plundered realPfft’s photo archive, seeking images of beautiful women.
God help me, what a crew! As their manager, publicist and music publisher, I am guilty as charged for distributing this hilarious wideo creation.
“I love the smell of Victory Gin in the morning,” Todd Harrison said, sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on his socks. Outside the window, bright yellow sunlight promised the start of another glorious Spring day. The roar of omnicopters rattled the windows.
“You are such a piece of work,” Erin swore angrily. “I come here, give you what you want— what you claim you need— and never do I hear a word of thanks!”
Red hair and green eyes, she was out and out fuming.
“I wonder if they’ve chosen a parade route free of disruption this year,” Todd pondered. “Last year was such a disappointment.” He was a flag carrier in Big Kahuna’s annual birthday festival and military parade.
“You swine—”
A mile deep into Proletown, they were in a rented room on the second floor of a shop on a grubby side street littered with rubbish. The name on the shop window said Ye Olde WatchRepair, but the letters themselves had faded into ghostly outlines. On the walls upstairs, bucolic scenes of a pre-war nature sat in wooden frames, alternating with cracks in the plaster. Over everything hung the pungent odor of mice.
If they climbed upon the roof and looked south, they could see the cranes being used to build the 250-foot-high Victory Arch on the Isle of Dogs.
“I love the Orange Thunderbolt as much as any man,” Todd insisted, balancing on one foot and pulling on his trousers. “Fourth term notwithstanding, he’s the guy. Listen, they can have a 95-year-old PM if they want, but sometimes the Party makes life all but unbearable.” Searching the rickety nightstand for a smoke, he asked “Why is there a giant banner of Big Kahuna hanging on the Ministry of Injustice building? What’s up with that? Has he become a law & order freak in his old age?”
Working in the Lit Department of Miniprop, the Ministry of Propaganda, Todd had a way with words.
Erin just glared.
Th hollow clatter of a transport drone passed by overhead. “We’ve got to get out of this place, if it’s the last time we ever move,” Todd proposed.
“Again??? Blimey! ’Nough said. I’m not hearing nought!” Erin muttered, pulling the dingy bedsheet up around her chin, round as a tennis ball. Todd loved to kiss her chin, cupping it in his hands and slobbering on it.
On the flip side, sometimes it took all of her wiles just to get Todd to look up from his cellphone.
A half-read novel lay on the nightstand. “Elephant Hunting in Deepest India” screamed the title in lurid red letters. On the cover, a scantily clad damsel rode atop a wayward elephant. Todd had the disquieting sensation that he might have unknowingly contributed bits to the large language model used in the story’s creation. Some of the flowery descriptions matched his prose.
“We need to find a more secure location for our trysts,” he insisted.
“No shit, Sherlock!” sang Erin, jumping from the bed buck naked and marching to the washstand to sponge herself.
Todd heard voices from the street below. “Hoo, hoo, Big Kahuna is watching you!” they chanted, but Todd knew it was just rowdies letting off steam.
“Can you loan me any money?” he asked, not for the first time. Checking the fly strip, he plucked away the dead bodies of flies with his fingers and threw them in the rubbish bin.
“God damn drunk!” Erin griped, her Irish accent as clear as a morning breeze in May. “I never should have taken up with you!”
“It’s all O’Bannon’s fault,” countered Todd defensively. “If he hadn’t introduced us—”
“Yes, yes, blame it on an Inner Party member, why don’t you?” hissed Erin. Wiping the sponge vigorously between her legs, she worked up a lather.
“Ye Irish are as thick as thieves,” Todd commented. “I still wonder what he’s up to, y’ know.”
“I’ll tell you what he’s up to, that wanker. Free love is what he’s up to. Disseminating it among the ranks, so that his own sex crimes will look minor in comparison,” she exclaimed. Throwing the sponge into the washbowl, she marched to the dresser and pulled on her summer frock. Dressed in pink, she looked bleeding gorgeous, barefoot, her hair wild, eyes shining. Todd, hands extended like an eagle’s claws, chased her around the room, drooling. “Just you wait!” predicted Erin. “O’Bannon will throw us under the wheels of the bus, sure as beeswax.”
“I think not,” Todd claimed, only too aware that in politics, Erin was much more perceptive than he.
That’s when there came a click at the washstand and the mirror sank to the floor with a thud.
“Hey, what’s all this!” Todd howled.
The more practical of the two, Erin marched to the washstand and pulled it, screeching, along the floor. The glassy eye of a peeping tom video camera stared at them, the lens covered in dust. “Bastards,” she cursed.
“Yes, bastards!” came a cranky voice over a speaker embedded in the wall.
“Kiss me arse!” she added.
“Yes,” squawked the voice. “Kiss ye arse!”
There was a crash at the window and suddenly the room was filled with guv agents in macks and masks, storming in from window and doorway. “Hup tight! Stand thee with hands behind head!” roared a drill sergeant, teasingly drawing his truncheon down Erin’s spine and along her hip, tapping it meaningfully between her legs. “Tick tock, tick tock,” he joked. “Cat’s got paws, where’s the pussy?”
Todd and she stood helplessly still, trembling, while the guvs milled ‘round. One knocked Erin to the floor.
“Up ye go, lass,” suggested another, helping her to her feet, after which they smashed poor Todd on an elbow and knocked him on his bum.
“All right, that’s enough larking about!” O’Bannon said, coming into the room hurriedly. “Let’s wrap this up.”
“Aye, I thought t’was yer voice I heard,” Erin observed.
While Todd was lifted to a standing position, O’Bannon put on a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles and read from a printed green card, “Under Article Eight, Paragraph Two of the Charter for the Isles of Britain and Ireland, you are hereby accused of sex crimes, domestic terrorism, insurrection, thievery, bribery, unauthorized handling of explosives, conspiracy to attain handguns and attack drones, printing of unlawful leaflets and doxxing. Each charge specifically or all of the above. Now, strip!”
“Strip, is it?” complained Erin. “Aye, and we what just now got clothed,” she declared, making everyone except Todd burst out laughing.
“Take them to the Ministry of Hygienic Love,” commanded O’Bannon. Black cloth bags were placed over their heads and they were led, stumbling, downstairs and outside to a waiting van.
2
In a chilly room with steel walls, where every noise had an echo, Todd was tied up and strapped to a contraption that resembled a cross between a dental chair and a barber stool.
A busy bureaucrat, O’Bannon left him there, viewing a series of video tutorials filled with trumpeting fanfare and titled “Oceania in the Age of English Socialism.” Not surprisingly, Eastasia and Eurasia were the bad guys, while life in the British Isles resembled a kind of Garden of Eden. The fourth in a series of five was titled “Big Kahuna Is Watching You.”
Afterward, O’Bannon came back in view and in an almost kindly fashion explained the situation.
“Attention, Todd! Consider yourself privileged,” O’Bannon exclaimed, looking surprisingly morose. “I could leave your interrogation to A.I. and it wouldn’t be pretty. You will be amazed at how effective our robots have become. It’s the perfect match, soulful militants against soulless machines. Guess who wins, each and every time?
“I am taking a personal interest in your case, mostly because I know Erin’s parents, two stalwart revolutionaries of the Old School. I don’t do rehabilitations anymore unless they affect policy. So, whatever else, take these formalities seriously and consider yourself honored to be here and getting my personal treatment.”
“My bad,” agreed Todd.
“As long as we are here, let’s see if we can make some progress,” stated O’Bannon, folding shut the hand-tooled brown leather case to his cellphone, a status symbol limited to members of the Inner Party. “The alternative is seven grams of lead in the head,” he added.
“I would like to forego that eventuality,” Todd replied, croaking like a crow.
“I have been following your vlog. Who gave you permission to stream the Special Olympics?” asked O’Bannon.
“I wasn’t aware that I needed permission. I just repost with ironic emojis,” Todd explained. Eyeing various punitive torture devices hanging from the ceiling, he asked, “Is this a wax museum or what?” Only half-joking.
“You seem to have a penchant for the dog poo emoji,” O’Bannon pointed out.
“I told you, I am being ironic.”
“Why do you only have 38 followers?” O’Bannon wondered, waving away a technician in a white lab coat who seemed intent on speaking to him.
“The Net is a closed system, as you know,” Todd explained. “British Isles Only. You try scraping together followers in the UK, where everybody religiously follows Cheltenham F.C. but nought filthy else. Me followers online are a crew of dodgers. Bloody shy, thanks to your lot breathing hot and heavy and such.”
“Why post on a vlog if you don’t have an audience?” O’Bannon queried, genuinely curious. “What is this about Big Kahuna’s hair-loss remedy? Do you actually know something or is it just click bait? Is your podcast sending secret messages in code to an erstwhile opposition? Vox clamantis in deserto. You are a voice crying out in the wilderness.”
“It’s a hobby. I can’t be working for a foreign power because you can’t find a foreign power in London to save ye arse. I wasn’t aware that being a futile bloody failure online is illegal.”
That’s when O’Bannon hit him in the mouth. Once. Hard. When Todd had recovered enough to speak, he said, “I take that as a typical example of trolling.”
O’Bannon’s face went red, but at least he didn’t hit Todd again. Instead, he stood massaging his knuckles. His hand was sore. “Room 35B,” he said.
“What the fuck?!” Todd protested. “I’m British. Some rights and permissions we have. Read the Magna Carta. Bloody Irish!”
“Room 35B is the worst thing you can imagine,” heckled O’Bannon. “It varies from one individual to another. We use an algorithm to determine what you find most reprehensible, based on your online viewing history. In your case, Todd, it is listening to political speeches. As incredible as this might sound, you never participate in political rallies nor Hate Week, although you hoist the colors in Big K’s yearly procession. Why is that? Do tell.”
“No. Aye. Yes. As you say, I really hate listening to harangues. Too many family troubles growing up and like that. ‘The revolution eats its own,’ as they say. Now that we have that nailed down, how about we go to a Wimpy’s and grab some burgers?” he suggested.
“You jest,” said O’Bannon, “but this is not a jesting matter.”
“I don’t jest!” Todd protested. “On me dear old mother’s grave, I hate speeches and I love a Wimpy Triple Quarterpounder Bacon & Cheese. Now that’s a burger!”
“Untie him!” O’Bannon indicated and the technician came scurrying over in his white lab coat. He struggled with the knots.
Traversing the city in a green Ministry of Works van, avoiding the pro-Kahuna flash mobs in City Centre, they stopped off at the Ministry of War where a surly tattoo artist inked a barcode across Todd’s forehead. “Welcome to the Tribe of Ingrates,” O’Bannon announced, smirking. “The State gives you everything and you are still not satisfied.”
Once the novocaine wore off, Todd’s forehead itched terribly.
At the fast food joint, O’Bannon sat over a cup of java, brooding, while Todd fed his face. “Would you mind paying?” he asked O’Bannon. “We left our loft in such a hurry, I forgot me wallet.”
O’Bannon, sure-footed but immensely bored, plucked an evidence bag from his briefcase and handed Todd his wallet.
“Uh, now this is embarrassing,” Todd admitted, “but I don’t have any coin, you see. I’m skint. Penniless. Stony-broke be the bloke.” Holding up his wallet, he showed it to be empty.
Sighing, O’Bannon waved to the waitress. When she came over, he paid for the burger and the coffee.
“I wonder what Erin is doing right now,” Todd mused.
“Don’t worry yourself on her account,” answered O’Bannon. “A wench like that always lands on her feet. She’ll go home to Eire and get a job tending golf links.”
“Now about these charges against us,” Todd proposed, wiping his mouth daintily with a crinkly napkin. “I can understand that you are angry. Then, too, there’s all the things we said when we were at your flat in Russell Square, all that cal about throwing acid in the faces of babies, the joy of anarchistic drone attacks on municipal housing estates and such drivel, but you need to understand that Erin and I were putting on an act. We didn’t ska mean all that blarney.”
“Then why should I believe you now?” O’Bannon asked stonily, his face dour and furious. He propped an oily grey guv-issued M1911 automatic pistol on the Formica tabletop next to his cellphone. It looked enormous, sitting there among the cardboard tray, plastic utensils and paper wrapper left over from the burger.
Staring at the gun, alarmed, Todd stammered, “All I am saying is give me a chance. Seriously, mate,” he pleaded, “I really do love Big Kahuna. Carrying the banner at his birthday parade is a sure sign of my devotion, I can assure you. Only…”
“Only???” spat O’Bannon, leaning menacingly across the table. “Only what?”
“You are Inner Party, you see, old chum, while I am Outer Party. You gents get the more part of the booze and the capers and all the good stuff while the rest of us poor sods have to put up with Victory Gin, crumbly chocolate and your leavings. It says—”
“WHAT SAYS?” roared O’Bannon, bringing the waitress at a run. He waved her away.
“In the archives. At work. There’s a wine in France called a Bordeaux.”
“Yes? So?” hissed O’Bannon.
As if on cue, three rowdies, unshaven and quite drunk, stumbled through the street door, their black bomber jackets plastered with football badges. One look at O’Bannon and his pistol sent them on their way.
“Life is short,” Todd declared. “If I could procure a supply of something as meaningfully fulfilling as Bordeaux wine, Big Kahuna has in me a trusted servant for as long as we two shall live! It would affix me a place on the black market and such, you see. Ta! I have said my piece.”
Stymied, impressed and immensely irritated, O’Bannon told him, “Come to my flat next Tuesday and we’ll sort you out once and be done with it.”
Tears of gratitude pouring down his face, Todd found he really did love Big Kahuna.
For a Chinaman or Sumerian, 250 years can go by like a heartbeat. That long ago, an amazing thing worth celebrating took place in the Independent Municipality of Concord Vine in southern Massachusetts. A fidgety gentleman of the name Paulo Riviera, lantern held high, rode his black stallion by night down the cobblestones, shouting “The British are coming! The British are coming!”
Sure as foretold, by next morning a delegation from the Royal Assessor entered the rather crabby confines of the village and called to meeting the burghers thereof.
“Wine and ale shipments leaving the Port of Boston are to be further excised to finance the war on the Continent,” exclaimed Adolphus Middlemarch on behalf of King George, holding his wig atop his balding pate with a palsied hand.
“Aye, but not bloody likely!” slurred the same slovenly-dressed Paulo, now smelling markedly of gin. Cravat askew, his clothing in disarray, he pushed through the assembly and bumped up against the magistrate. “Haven’ you read the pamphlet which I have written titled Common As Dirt?” he demanded.
“Who is this man?” howled Adolphus, deeply offended.
“Don’t pay him no mind, he’s the town drunk!” explained Hiram Walker, the mayor, apologetically. “We put up with him ‘cause he’s an excellent blacksmith. Does like the sauce, though, must be said.”
“All right then, now about these stamps,” exclaimed the magistrate, pushing aside the cantankerous smithy, who was promptly sequestered by a pair of redcoats.
“Hardly seems fair,” complained the townsfolk. “We’re right heavily taxed, as is.”
“Es una indignación,” insisted Paulo, swaying like a larch in a typhoon. “Have you tried Concord Vine’s signatura claret?” he added consolingly, under the needling of the redcoats.
Say whast man will, Paulo was a patriot, one whose backstory deserves mentioning on this Semiquincentennial. Loaned out as a boy to the pristine Slocum Plantation on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, it was the hope of Paulo’s Andalusian immigrant parents that by helping him learn a trade, they would ensure their son’s future. Which they did. Assistant to the plantation blacksmith, Paulo became an excellnt artisan. All might have gone well, save the Slocum family’s second daughter, a striver and mischievous lass who bedeviled the Young Man incessantly. “My braids require your steady hand!” she could declare on a humid August afternoon, appearing in the doorway of the smithy, while crickets chirped in the fields and thunderheads gathered on the horizon.
“I c’n shoe yo’ horse fo’ yo’,” invited the boy, climbing up the ladder into the hayloft behind her attractively swaying buttocks.
“Aren’t you the tease!” she giggled, her apple cheeks blushing red as a Macintosh.
“Here now!” he protested as one of her clawlike hands latched on to his britches and pulled him atop her. “Wayload!”
Protests to no avail, she had her way with him, leading to a life of sloth. Such was oft’ the fate of our young and obstreperous nation.
Also, pirates steered their frigates into the bay, rowed ashore their longboats and plundered the plantation. Not a born militiaman, young Paulo raced to the main house, drew a sword from the Slocum family arsenal and rushed an equally junior rapscallion among the stinking pirate horde. Poor Paulo got his butt sorely whipped by the mercenary intruders, while the Slocums sought refuge further up the bay at the estate of Geo. Washington and family in Westmoreland County.
Let this be a lesson to us! Although a fairly mundane part of Colonial life and ranked high in the history books, such doings steer not our daily discourse in the halls of Congress. Light a sparkler for freedom! Blow the state budget on fireworks.
Some readers are downloading the 8th edition of Peace Now? Very Funny from this blog. Here is a newly edited 11th edition on pdf for your enjoyment. The writing is more descriptive and some repetitive material has been removed.
Nothing will ever be the same since October 7th. Written in 2016, this is a tale from a gentler time.
The Palestinians want all the land of Israel, full stop, dooming every attempt at the peace process. And amidst their foot-dragging, an Israeli game of attrition has developed where, for every year that passes, less and less of the “Occupied Territories” remains available for a Palestinian State.
Jewish writer Barry Lipowitz has decided to write about that, in a major apologia to the long-suffering Palestinians. By being born after some great Jewish writers and before some others, sandwich-man Barry has the good fortune to be christened “the greatest Jewish writer of his generation.”
He has moved to the Big Apple, home of the big publishing houses and magazine headquarters, who pay him major coin for his brilliance.
So, gathering a coterie of like-minded leftists, he and his Israeli wife Erit depart for the Promised Land, desperately determined to confirm their personal convictions, even in the face of daunting evidence to the contrary.
Unfortunately, this novella is based on a true event.
A great song… in French! Based on Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s Je t’aime… moi non plus from 1969, Swedish rappers Mutte & Clive in realPfft hope to make a dent in the French market and land a hit song. Je t’aime… hasn’t aged well and sounds lousy today, leaving a lot of room to record Le Printemps using digital production. Beyond love and porno, Le Printemps’ lyrics devolve into politics, providing a laundry list of annoying things about a certain president, set to the beat of house music.
Le Printemps
Madame, tu es vivante!
Fantastique! Je croyais que tu sois mort dans un accident de voiture.
Oui ou non?
Dis à moi. Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?
Hupp hupp!
Ça va?
Moi, j’aime la musique house
Le printemps arrive
Ce président se prend pour un roi
Il est comme Napoléon, il aime lui même sans répit
Fermer la fenêtre! il cri. Fermer la bouche!
Il est aussi en colère que Louis XIV
Distingué et agaçant
Il se vante de choper les femmes par la chatte
Il se prend pour Jésus et se bat avec le pape
Il s’en fiche complètement
De plus en plus compliqué, de moins en moins de succès
Il n’a pas reçu le prix Nobel de la paix
Tant pis
Et maintenant, il préfère la guerre
J’ai lu dans l’Associated Press que le président portera le coup de grâce
Aber, der Krieg ist vorbei ?
Les guerres viennent, les guerres s’en vont
Tous le monde veut la tranquillité, mais il n’y a pas la tranquillité
Et moi, je veux visiter Téhéran avant qu’elle ne soit réduite en cendres par les bombardements
J’adore la musique house
Ooh la-la, où est-ce qu’il y a ton main?
Tes yeux sont si belles, comme un vin spectaculaire
Tes pieds sont si petites, comme un chien
C’est le coup de foudre
Tu travailles dans un supermarché
Combiens de mois est tu ici?
Je t’aimerai toujours
Tu mange mon gateau, non?
C’est divertissant
Embrasse-moi
Ich liebe dich
Est-ce que tu veux coucher?
Springtime
Madam, you are alive!
Fantastic. I thought you had died in a car accident.
Yes or no?
Tell me
What is happening?
Hup, hup!
How are you?
Me, I love house music
Springtime arrives
This president thinks he’s a king
He’s like Napoleon, he loves himself without end
Close the window! he shouts. Shut your mouth!
He’s as angry as Louis the Fourteenth
Distinguished and annoying
He boasts about grabbing women by the pussy
He thinks he is Jesus and is fighting with the Pope
He couldn’t care less
More and more complicated, less and less success
He did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize
Too bad
And now, he prefers war
I read in the Associated Press that the president shall deliver the final blow
But the war is over ?
Wars come, wars go
Everyone wants peace and quiet, but there is no peace and quiet
And me, I want to make a trip to Tehran before it’s bombed to ashes
I adore house music
Ooh-la-la, where is your hand?
Your eyes are so beautiful, like a spectacular wine
Adagio with a Broken Baton is a short, intriguing piece of contemporary classical music. Channeling Bach, Mutte shows his chops, pulling at our heartstrings in what critics would call a bravura performance.
Another Top-40 hit by the mad musicians in realPfft! Both Swedish pop and ambient jazz, this instrumental is as fresh, happy and boisterous as a summer day. realPfft continues to push the envelope. I mean, who uses xylophones?
Fierce. Sexy. Ambient experimental jazz, this is one of realPfft’s more bizarre musical creations.
Fed up with songbirds Taylor, Nicki and Ariana, I asked Mutte & Clive to come up with something experimental.
Be careful what you wish for! Gabriella sings her heart out while Frankenstein’s laboratory bubbles in the background. A fade in the middle is followed by a whole new verse. A strange love song, it shouldn’t work, but it does.
yustyoking 
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