JungleLand

"T here is no country in the world that does not practice tattooing or some other form of permanent body decoration..." - Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man , 1871. --- I remember on Tattoo Fixers , a show on E4 about people getting their disastrous tattoos covered with more tasteful artwork, a man getting a zombie tattooed over his entire pelvic region. The plane of pelvic skin where one's hair would otherwise grow flashed an ominous-looking, drooling, somnambulent zombie. It looked fairly cool. But the clincher came when the audience realised he also got the entire length of his penis fully tattooed in the colour and tones of a zombie's outstretched finger. Both designs matched up to give the artwork a feral and desperate look, combining comedy with a kind of toe-curling disgust, with the longing for the safety of your bed, far, far away from anything else that could possibly bring that thing to attention. Can you imagine maintaing both: a) your dignity and b) your ...

* This post originally appeared on Manchester Metropolitan University's Postgraduate Research Blog - please take a moment to visit the blog at  https://www.manmetpgr.co.uk/category/blog/ * In John K. Toole’s cult novel, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Ignatius J. Reilly, the affable, flatulent protagonist, has an unusual tool to gauge the difficulty of an upcoming day or event. He contends that his “pyloric valve,” which usually controls the outflow of gastric contents into the small intestine, “closes” whenever he senses displeasing and deeply challenging stimuli. As such, Reilly shuts down and neglects to do the simplest of tasks set by his mother, or boss, because he “feels bloated.” Upsetting stimuli, to Reilly, often takes the form of a hapless and hopeless police officer, Angelo, who lurches from one unfortunate mishap to another. Thus, he projects his resulting misery onto Reilly. The “valve” is a comedic literary device that allows Reilly to frame his disturbing lack of mot...

My friends try and talk to me about the new Mercedes, or something. I don't know. I've never been interested in cars, or the automobile industry.  Actually, that's a lie. The production of the Model T at the turn of the twentieth century reshaped American cultural sensibilities. We have a false impression of a dull, black or grey, standardised car rolling off the factory line in 1910s America, but we owe that to monochrome TV. They were actually mass-produced in gaudy colours that would come to define collective American taste. From advertising, to penny literature, to other colourful material affects, the American cultural landscape, possibly to this day, owes itself to Henry Ford and the motor industry. I'm professionally trained as an American historian, so I have to be interested in that. As far as my friends talking about the shape of a new Japanese car - the incurvation of its rear end; the hum of its V8 that enters my body through every orifice and stings the pit...

I had been to one gig beforehand, which I hated. I don't know what I expected but it wasn't floor-to-ceiling speakers throwing out death metal, with indiscriminate lyrics that encouraged people to throw beer and piss everywhere. Needless to say, I would describe the experience as akin to someone taking a pneumatic drill to your legs, drilling through the kneecaps until the blade's exposed at the back, for no good sense other than its brutal appeal to others. It induced a kind of physical and sensory pain that I wouldn't even know how to begin to describe. I could feel the bass rattling my body as if I was a glass, just sitting there, vibrating until it fell off the proverbial table and smashed to pieces. I metamorphosed into a chrysalis, but beneath the hard shell, I was present, soft fleshed and struggling to break out. I couldn't. I was stuck. My friend recently described You Want it Darker by Leonard Cohen as a tongue that enters your ear, tickling its way down ...

In 1938, during the night known to us now as Kristallnacht , German and Austrian Jewish businesses were identified, targeted and destroyed in a co-ordinated attack. The incumbent Nazi leadership was inspired by the violent  pogroms  of 19th century Russia. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that this catalysed the making of the Jew, all over Europe and certainly not only in Germany and Austria, as Untermensch - they were adjudged as inferior, docile and worthy of eradication. But in this action of, what was callously referred to as, "sweeping up," the Nazi Sturmabteilung also "swept up" Roman Catholic, Protestant, Dissenting and others' businesses, livelihoods and, even, lives. Of this despicable act of state-sanctioned brutality, Father Coughlin, a prominent right-wing radio personality from the United States remarked: "Jewish persecution only follows after Christians themselves are persecuted."  You don't need me to deconstruct the moral ...