texturbation

Chris Morris, the comedy genius behind Blue Jam, The Day Today, Brass Eye and Nathan Barley, is having a hard time funding the production of a film about British Islamic terrorism.

The Beeb and Channel 4 have reportedly knocked him back already, so now he’s asking for small donations from fans to get the project off the ground.

Some donors will get to be extras in the film.

Here are some emails he or his proxies have recently sent to me and others:

Thanks for your email offering support for the “Four Lions” project.

The response so far has been extremely encouraging and our next move depends on numbers. We won’t ask for your money until we have enough people involved to make the system work.

So whether you want to be in the film or just fancy a binge of coin chucking, please spray the news around.

And if passing this on seems like a bit of a hassle? Well think about it. Yesterday, over a hundred thousand people - alive and breathing and not passing it on just like you are thinking of not passing it on - died. It’s unlikely they were all wiped out precisely because they weren’t passing it on but its not impossible is it? Not totally statistically unimaginably impossible. Run that by yourself a couple of times before you decide not to pass it on.

Thanks

CM

And:

Dear Lion

At the moment the detonator’s going off and you’re part of it but until the effect has gone exponential, your mails are being sorted by one person so bear with me.

Many people have asked us exactly what the Four Lions project is. Clearly we can’t launch the film before its been shot, but I’ve pulled together a few paragraphs from the paperwork that’s been flying around. Its shameless hype but its accurate – unlike almost everything you will have read in the press. No one who has read the script could disagree with a word here.

In three years of research, Chris Morris has spoken to terrorism experts, imams, police, secret services and hundreds of Muslims. Even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce. At training camps young jihadis argue about honey, cry for their mums, shoot each other’s feet off, chase snakes and get thrown out for smoking. A minute into his martyrdom video, a would-be bomber looks puzzled and says “what was the question again?” On millennium eve, five jihadis set out to ram a US warship. They slipped their boat into the water and carefully stacked it with explosives. It sank.

Terrorist cells have the same group dynamics as stag parties and five a side football teams. There is conflict, friendship, misunderstanding and rivalry. Terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks.

Four Lions is a funny, thrilling fictional story that illuminates modern British jihad with an insight beyond anything else in our culture. It plunges us beyond seeing these young men as unfathomably alien. It undermines the folly of just wishing them away or alienating the entire culture from which they emerge. It understands how terrorism relates to testosterone. It understands jihadis as human beings. And it understands human beings as innately ridiculous. As Spinal Tap understood heavy metal and Dr Strangelove the Cold War, Four Lions understands modern British jihadis.

As for your offer, we’re hoping to set up a one click pay scheme soon. We’ll let you know.

Hope that helps

Deirdre Steed.

PS Please pass this on to ten more people.

I’ll probably chuck them a few quid, when the time comes.

Their email address is fundingmentalism@warpfilms.com

There’s a feng shui-based agony aunt problem page in the Malay Mail, overseen by a gurning, feckless fraudster named Lillian Too.

Dear Lillian,

I am a water ox, born in 1974. My wife was born in 1979 and is a sheep.

We got married recently. I had to do it as it was an arranged marriage, but later found out in your book that ox and sheep are incompatible. We quarrel often and I seem to have no regard for my wife, though she is kind towards me.

How can we create compatibility? We are both east group people. I want to improve my wife’s career too. She works in an educational institution that pays too little. She gives regular tuition but has few students. How can I help her? We are both sleeping in the north bedroom of the house.

Sushant Singh

So what we have here is a stumbling cock-stain who dislikes his wife, treats her like shit, and thinks this is all due to some kind of (b)ovine conspiracy of celestial farmyard interior decorators who have nothing better to do than to contrive to fuck up relationships when the marital bed faces the wrong way.

Lillian Too, in response, ignores the obvious: Hello? Arranged marriage? Sure that was a good idea?

Instead, she has the pendulous gonads to chastise her gormless acolyte for actually buying into her own churlish, irresponsible bullshit.

“You blame astrological incompatibility for all this?” she asks without irony or humility.

She then earns about half a respect point for suggesting he “make a better effort to appreciate [his] wife rather than find fault with her” before adding, in conclusion: “In the meantime, I suggest you now enhance the south-west corner of your house with a bright light. This is sure to bring better luck to your wife and perhaps that will make you happier with her.”

The letter is illustrated with a photograph of a lava lamp, that brightest of lights, no doubt available for purchase on Too’s web site.

I sometimes wonder whether I belong to the same species as these cretins.

Maybe that’s the point.

Maybe this wanker really is a literal water ox and his wife a literal sheep, yet they both somehow live in a house, are somehow able to communicate with each other, can somehow read books on feng shui and are able to compose cretinous letters to fraudulent newspaper agony aunt cunts. Maybe Lillian Too is the sheep-whispering offspring of James Herriott and Mystic Meg.

That, admittedly, seems equally unlikely.

There’s another letter on the page, from a distraught Massachusetts woman who has recently had three messy miscarriages and also, crucially, has a painting of an elephant on her living room wall, but frankly I find it far too soul-crushing to repeat.

I don’t know a helluva lot of the specifics of Islam, truth be told. More than the average British joe, I expect, but not enough to get into an argument I know for certain I can win.

I was about thirty-odd pages into the Koran shortly before I came to Asia, but I didn’t fancy carrying it through Heathrow security with me, so I left it back home largely unread.

I know from other reading that, among other things, there are angels involved, that women can legitimately be treated like chattel, and that it’s technically okay to fuck nine-year-old girls, as long as you’re married to them.

That was all I really needed to know in order to discount it as a workable hypothesis.

So it’s been interesting hanging out in an officially Muslim society for the last couple of weeks.

At first I was a little nervous. How crazy-ass Muslim would Malaysia be?

Lonely Planet offers advice on how not to inadvertently give offence in countries you visit. For Thailand, for instance, it recommends not touching people on the head or pointing at them with the soles of your feet. Buddhist nonsense.

But, since I deliberately did no homework on Malaysia before arriving, I had no idea what the equivalent local religious taboos would be.

After seeing headscarves everywhere during my first few hours in the country, I was particularly nervous about attitudes to women.

Lonely Planet could say in big red block capitals “It is an offence punishable by death to make eye contact with unrelated, unchaperoned female Muslims!” and I would be none the wiser.

I was pretty certain Malaysia was not going to be as bad as the quite horrendous medieval bigotry you hear about in places such as Saudi Arabia, but I wasn’t sure how much less bad.

*

My first night in Georgetown, arriving late, I went into a 7-11 to buy some water.

There was a young Muslim woman working the counter, well after midnight, alone. I decided to buy a can of lager as well, just to see what would happen, and she sold me it without pause.

I gave her a friendly smile, told her I had just arrived, and asked her the Malaysian words for “thank you”, which I actually already knew, and she told me they are “terima kasih” and smiled back.

I pretended not to get it a couple of times, pronouncing it incorrectly, and she gladly and cheerfully coached me for a minute or so, before I left.

Wow.

That was like… a normal conversation. I had bought alcohol from and indulged in some mild flirting with a solo female Muslim and nobody needed to get beaten with canes as a result.

Fox News totally lied to me about these people.

*

Near the 7-11, on the main drag for cheap tourist hotels and shitty, overpriced hostels, Chulia Street, there’s a massage place.

I have no reason to suspect that it’s anything less than completely legit.

But there’s a sign outside that reads, in Bahasa Malaysia and English: “Male Muslims are forbidden from receiving massages from female masseuses. Violators will be prosecuted.”

Prosecuted.

For getting a massage. A regular massage. A massage with an ambivalent ending.

Imagine.

I haven’t had a massage in Asia, but now that I know that it’s taboo – illegal, for some, even – I have a sudden urge to get one.

*

It was quite chucklesome, the long weekend after Ramadan ended, to watch hordes of vacationing Malaysian girls descend on the beach at Batu Ferrenghi to go banana-boating and paragliding and jet-skiing whilst wearing their traditional garb.

As somebody who has spent next to no time around Muslims, and had formed a vague subconscious impression of them as a generally dour bunch, it was refreshing to see them having a laugh despite the oppression of their folicular rights.

My understanding of the various forms of female head coverings in Muslim cultures is that they’re primarily there for modesty’s sake. To make the woman look less sexually attractive in public. Or, more specifically, to stop random passers-by getting uncontrollable boners and quite justifiably raping them on the spot.

Hair can do that to men, sometimes.

Apart from the obvious, I have two problems with this.

First, these women are all east Asian. I know what their hair looks like. It’s long and black and straight. There’s nothing surprising under that scarf.

Second, plenty of young Muslim women, at least in large towns and cities I’ve visited so far, otherwise wear standard western-style fashions. Shirts and tight blue jeans.

I’m guessing that the head covering, among these young Malaysian Muslims, is likely more of a tradition, rather than something consciously dictated by specifically religious conservatism.

Anyway, I stopped noticing the scarves after a while.

Way too busy staring at their arses.

I spent a day wandering Georgetown, and I picked up some of the local language.

The first seven words I learned, just from reading signs:

Taxi – Teksi
Ambulance – Ambulans
Restaurant - Restoran
Bus – Bas
August – Ogos
December – Disember
Post Code - Poskod

Bahasa Malaysia is EASY!

I jest, of course.

Even if some pidgin has sneaked into the lingo of this former British colony, everybody here speaks English-English anyway.

Not, it appears to me, through commercial necessity, in the way that locals speak English while working in the tourist areas of a comparatively homogeneous culture such as Thailand.

Georgetown doesn’t seem to be that type of place. In many ways it reminds me of Indian cities like Mumbai or Bangalore.

I was always amused when, on long train rides in India, I would watch Indians from a different state using sign language to communicate with the chai guy or the masala dosa guy, when, moments later, I would conduct the same transaction in English and in half the time.

It seems to be the same in Malaysia.

It’s a young country, 51 years since independence from the British judging from the remnants of last year’s half-century celebrations that are still scattered around town. The various ethnic groups seem to largely speak the tongue of their parents or grandparents – Chinese tor Indian languages – when around their own, with English as one of the two lingua francas when they’re in a mixed crowd.

The other night I was playing a weird game of pool, mixed with a kind of poker, with five local guys. Two were ethnic Chinese, two were ethnic Indians, and one was Malay. They all identified themselves as Malaysian, but three or four languages were spoken throughout the night, and when English was used I was convinced it wasn’t always for my benefit alone.

*

There was an op-ed in the New Straits Times this week, arguing the case for a return of Bahasa Malaysia, rather than English, as the medium for teaching mathematics and science in state schools.

The author made the case, quite convincingly I thought, that despite English being the world’s unofficial default language for science and commerce, the French, for example, seem to get by on the global stage just fine, despite teaching their kids these subjects in French.

The next day, the letters page featured a high school student begging the government not to switch back to Bahasa Malaysia. It’s hard enough as it is, he lamented in flawless written English, without having to learn it all over again in a different language.

Each night, at 7.14, when the Strait of Merlaka swallows the sun, somebody with a big amp and shitty speakers broadcasts a scratchy tape loop of Tarzan passing a kidney stone, so loudly that I feel like blowing something up, and the people of Georgetown come out to feed.

Yeah, Malaysia definitely must be Muslim.

I come to Malaysia having first made sure I know as close to nothing as possible about the place, its people, geography, language or culture.

The sum of my knowledge could probably be resolved down to a pitiful handful of bullet points.

1) The capital is Kuala Lumpur.

2) It’s south of Thailand.

3) Probably Muslim.

4) There’s a really tall building somewhere that I think was used in that crappy movie about Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones robbing some diamonds or something.

5) A mate recently visited a place called Georgetown.

6) Brits don’t need a visa.

7) From the previous two bullets I can infer that the Brits were probably in charge there at some point.

Every country I’ve been to to date I’ve known a fair bit about before crossing the border. Whether from school, the news, movies, books, or simply by reading the Lonely Planet. Not so with Malaysia.

But since Malaysia may well be my last destination before heading back to England, I am resolved to go in blind, just for the heck of it.

If you, dear reader, know a deal more about Malaysia than outlined above, you may find subsequent posts tedious, naive, ill-informed or offensive.

I don’t know enough about the place to responsibly make jokes about it yet.

But I’m going to give it a shot.

Wandering the streets of Ao Nang after closing time last night, I came across a cute little puppy.

I’d been petting it, cooing like a little girl, for a couple of minutes before I noticed that it was accompanied by a young Thai woman, who was trying to get my attention.

She wanted to know if I was looking for Good Time Cheap Price.

For a brief, glorious moment I thought she was going to let me take the dog home for the night.

But it turned out she just wanted to fuck me.

After I had taken my leave of her, it occurred to me that had she offered to let me pay to take home the dog for the night, I probably would have ripped her arm off.

Maybe I’ve spotted a gap in the market.

Dog whores.

I’d go for a bit of that.

To be clear, I’m not talking about a jam-on-my-knackers kind of situation.

I don’t want to have sex with dogs, okay?

But I’d gladly hand over a fee of not exceeding, say, ten bucks, for an evening of canine company back at the crib.

Why not?

Here, most of the dogs I’ve seen are less skanky and a hell of a lot cuter than the human prostitutes.

Both would show you a kind of mercenary affection. But you’d know all they really want is steak.

With a dog whore, you’d know before you agreed to take them home whether they had a cock.

You wouldn’t have to worry about hiding the passport, wallet or camera. Just the flip-flops.

There’d be no more or less chance of finding a wet patch on the bed in the morning.

But if there was, a dog would be less offended if you rubbed her nose in it.

Oh, and rabies can be cured.

AIDS is for life.

In one of his live shows, British comedian Jimmy Carr asks his audience to shout out two adjectives to describe French people. He explains that every time he does the show, the audience yells the same two words.

The audience calls out “smelly” and “rude”. Snap!

When he asks for two words to describe Americans, the two words are always “fat” and “stupid”.

He goes on to ask for suggestions for two adjectives we could randomly apply to people from, say, Chad or Belize or Kyrgyzstan.

I described this Carr bit to a group of American friends, last year in a San Francisco beer garden, and invited them to pick two words for the English.

It was creepy how quickly they, with remarkable synchronicity, came up with “snobby” and “effeminate”, or words to that effect (might have been “annoying fags”).

Disturbingly, these were people who’d met me.

Because I’m English, I also grew up to believe Americans are stupid. It was a given, never challenged. Even now, there’s no cheaper gag for a British standup comic, columnist or celebrity panelist than to imply that the yanks are all a few Quayles short of a Bush.

It’s all bollocks, of course.

In eight years in the US, I met hundreds of Americans, and I know for a fact that they’re individually no stupider than people from anywhere else.

I’ve met dozens of really smart Americans, just as I’ve met dozens of really idiotic Brits.

But…

But.

Collectively, America is stupid.

Get a sufficient number of averagely intelligent Americans in a room, say a room the size of the Republican National Convention, or Kansas, and their IQs drop faster than an erection in a baby abattoir.

How else to explain away polls suggesting the country is about to elect Weekend At Bernie’s into the highest office in the land, even with the knowledge that, the moment his chemo runs out, or his dicky ticker stops pumping, Martha Stewart gets to be the POTUS.

It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so terrifying.

This isn’t American Idol. You don’t vote for president based on who’s sassiest, or who has the cutest spouse, or who hunts and goes to church the most or who reminds you most of an old high-school home-ec teacher you had a crush on.

Whoever you give the job to will have the power of life and death over hundreds of millions of people.

Not just Americans. What happens if the abstinence-loving mother-of-five-grandmother-at-44 decides to stop sending condoms to sub-Saharan Africa? Tries to bring about the Second Coming by persuading Israel to nuke Tehran? Invades Venezuela?

Have we learned nothing from Bush?

Surely, the American electorate is scarier than Al Qaeda.

Please, America, don’t get us killed. Don’t risk Palin as president. Just tell the rest of the world what you want. We’ll give you anything. African diamonds. Japanese cars. Swedish women. German beer. Thai marijuana. Russian caviare. The finest Colombian cocaine. The best of English… um…

You can have Canada. Please, take it, we weren’t using it anyway.

We’ll all promise to eat at Mickey D’s every day. We’ll try to enjoy country music. We’ll grow mullets and wear our trousers round our ankles and say sidewalk and burglarize and put the month before the day and buy stocks and do drive-bys and watch Fox News with a straight face and drink Bud and take Prozac and sue someone and ride in pickups to hunt flighty woodland herbivores with Uzis and say grace and call each other dude and complain about gas prices and get breast implants and develop restless leg syndrome and put cheese on everything…

We’ll pretend American football is a real sport.

Just name it, it’s yours.

What are your demands?

“Pint of Singha, please.”

“You wan big or small?”

“Um, a pint, please.”

“Big pint or small pint?”

“What?”

“Big pint or small pint?”

“What’s the difference?”

“One big, one small.”

“But they’re both pints?”

“Yes. Both pint. Same same.”

“But the small pint is cheaper?”

“Yes.”

“Okay… I’ll have the small pint then.”

I’m sorely tempted to use their real names.

If you’ve been reading this drivel regularly, you’ve probably inferred from my liberal use of names such as Bruce, Sven, Hans, Sheila and Paddy that I don’t use the real names of fellow tourists who feature in my stories.

Not fair to air somebody’s vacation indiscretions in public simply because they happened to meet me.

So his name isn’t Dick. He is, however, a dick.

Specifically, he’s the fifth essence of dick.

He’s John Holmes.

He’s precisely the kind of English tourist cunt that I despise.

She, on the other hand, is a nice naïve girl whose experience last night emblemises the crushing disillusionment and despair one experiences almost immediately upon setting foot upon Thai soil.

I, and the Much Younger Swedish Girl I’m currently travelling with (let’s call her Agnetha), met them playing pool here in Patong, Phuket, last night.

After giving them a sound pool thrashing, several times over, we took them to the nearby Soi Crocodile, a long series of open-air bars where the ladyboys dance on the tables.

It was their first night in Thailand.

Jane’s little face lit up. Real ladyboys!

In no time, she was up there dancing with them, taking photos, looking like it was the most fun she’d had in years.

I had a pretty good idea what was coming, but I did not predict her reaction..

Five seconds after she stepped off stage and rejoined us at the bar, she was surrounded by a crowd of the becocked dancers, all demanding tip money. Aggressively.

The smile slid from Jane’s face, got caught in the rain, disappeared down a drain, and did not return for the rest of the evening.

She suddenly looked distraught, even a little afraid.

“I thought we were just having fun,” she said weakly, almost weeping.

“Welcome to Thailand,” I said.

*

Dick and Jane left before Agnetha and I, but we bumped into them on the way back to the hotel.

Jane was crying her eyes out, and Dick was yelling at her furiously.

They’d had an argument, and he’d punched her in the face.