The Savage Eye

We should listen to Liverpool’s Leftist leader Lily Savage.
Paul O’Grady was chattering on his Channel 4 talk show when the question of budget cuts came up: “The budget, you know, is alright if you’re not young, old, unemployed, working or on benefits. We should take to the streets. We should be vocal in our fight against oppression. We should let them know that we are not taking these draconian cuts lightly. We should fight for the rights of the elderly, of the poor, of the sick, and of the little children. Vive la revolution!”
What sensible person could disagree with that?

How do you trash a chandelier?
Charlie Sheen, star of the so-sexist-it-can’t-really-be sexist US hit comedy series Two And A Half Men went on a coked-out rampage in a New York hotel in the course of which, according to the Guardian, “a chandelier was trashed”.
How? Did he short-circuit its wiring with a fire-extinguisher? Pelt it with bottles from the mini-bar? Trampoline on the bed to grab hold and swing across the room like Tarzan of the Apes?
Reminds me of the last trashed chandelier story I know of, recounted by Keith Richards (although not in his just-published piss-poor autobiography Life.) Mickser arrived back in a Toronto hotel from a tryst with Margaret Trudeau, wife of Canadian premier Pierre, to find the room reduced to tatters and ruin and a young woman dangling from tinkling clusters of crystal and light as she swayed in an elegant arc across the ceiling while a gallimaufry of Stoners and assorted hangers-on whooped and hollered demented approval.
“Oh no!” gasped the rubber-lipped, slim-hipped sultan of strut, fluttering his hands wildly, evidently distressed, “Not the chandelier, please, not the chandelier!”
It was then that I realised Jagger wasn’t really rock and roll.
It was more recently I cottoned on to Keef.
Bring back Wee Willie Harris.

Returning over the mountain at an ungodly hour on a hellish night from seeing the National Theatre of Scotland’s sensational Black Watch again, we were stopped at a checkpoint outside Drumahoe. A stern-faced police-woman thrust her head into the car: “ID, please.”
As the Cork blond fumbled, the police-woman looked in again. “Ach, I see you are with Eamonn. Go on ahead then...”
Should I feel honoured? Or insulted?

The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (no relation) has just rescinded Beckham’s Law, the 2004 concession which allowed foreigners on €600,000-plus a year to pay just 24 per cent tax. The man in the snug underpants had been among the first to take advantage.
From next year, though, everyone will have to pay 43 per cent.
What effect the change will have on the lure of La Liga remains to be seen. One Liverpool fanzine voices approval that “Stevie G” will be less likely to skedaddle come summer.
It is hard not to be fond of Liverpool fans, given their ethical attitude to Manchester United. But a remarkable number appear to suffer from a communal defect which prompts them towards the delusion that this whinging, diving, dirty player and all-round shameless cheat is a great footballer.

“The Brits used to rule by fear. Diplock courts, torture, internment. Now the trouble is supposed to be over, but we are still living in fear.”
The woman who had sent for me was reflecting on a threat to her nephew from Republican Action Against Drugs.
“They say they want him out by midnight tonight, otherwise they’ll smash both his ankles. But where is he to go? We have nowhere to send him. How would he live?”
Like many another from these parts, she suffered more than anybody should be asked to bear in the course of the Troubles, one of the ordinary sort who stood fast and took the hits. Now she stands in her home and recounts to a stranger who can do next to nothing for her how she has been brought again to the brink of despair.
A member of her family had been ‘phoned and asked to call to a PSNI station for a message and had come flying home in a flood of tears to tell that the teenager was under immediate threat from Republican Action Against Drugs and must leave.
In an “ordinary” court, the youngster’s personal situation and experience of life might be taken into account. But that sort of stuff is seen as laughable do-goodery by righteous outfits like RAAD.
“Far more young people than you’d think have been put out of Derry in the past year. Fear stops families speaking up. They know their homes could come under attack. But people are going to have to stand up, the way we stood up before.”

The first of three volumes of Mark Twain’s autobiography has been published a hundred years – as he’d wished – after his death. If there are any global superstars round your way suffering from confusion, buy them a copy.
He writes of the US ousting Spain and occupying the Philippines in 1898 “in order to bring freedom”:
“We do not intend to free, but to subjugate. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should be our pleasure and duty to make people free, let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”