callum house

Tag: blog

  • Americans

    20 July 2022

    I spent my weekend in Paris at a musical festival.

    As a Brit, I know to keep my voice down, speak French wherever possible and generally stay out of the way of the French. I, like many Brits before me, am in a country that isn’t mine. Unlike Brits of the past, I’m not looting it for all its worth, I’m just here to see Megan Thee Stallion.

    The French are relatively loud and obnoxious. Famously rude and to the point, they have no qualms about cutting lines, pushing through a crowd, or voting for a Nazi. However, I must reiterate; I’m in their country, so I suck it up and repeat “c’est okay” as they shove past me to get a better view. Don’t get me wrong, it fucks me off, but I’m a passive aggressive, socially awkward, beta male with terrible French, so what am I going to do about it?

    There’s one nation, however, who simply don’t care about all this socially constructed nonsense: the Americans.

    There are groups of them dotted around the festival, and you can see them coming from a mile away. They’re social tornados that rip through crowds of unsuspecting Europeans. The vibe changes when you’re next to a group of Americans. No one is louder or less polite.

    As I was waiting to see Megan Thee Stallion, I was stood next to a group of 19 year old girls from the USA. They were, and this isn’t malapropism, literally yelling at each other as everyone in a 10 metre radius looked on, bewildered.

    How on earth these people don’t pick up on social cues I don’t know. But yelling at each other, vocal fry and all, about which drugs they’ve done, people they know from home and where they want to visit. One of them mentioned going to the Alps later in the year, I feel like I should alert the Swiss government for fear of avalanches. It was like listening to Red Scare through one of Godspeed You! Black Emperors amplifiers. It triggered my fucking fight or flight – I hate them.

    My dad always used to say, “hate is a strong word”, but it is far from strong enough to express my feelings towards these people.

    Another older American man found his way over to them, like a fly to shit, and started hitting on them. Lapping it up, they start a conversation and, almost thankfully, at this point I go into sensory overload. The the sun is beaming down on me, I’m thirsty, I’m sweating like Patrick Bateman over Paul Allen’s business card as I try and roll a cigarette. My brain checks back in to hear the man ask what drugs they’ve done.

    “Never take molly unless it’s pink” he says. Okay, I guess that advice is okay, I’m not an active user to MDMA so I know very little about that shit. He’s just looking out for her probably. “Never touch heroin”. No shit, mate. I doubt these 19-year-old kids were about to go and inject skag in the porta-loos but go off. He went on to say that cocaine was fine, but crack wasn’t. What do you think crack is?

    As an adult, should you be recommending this to a bunch of first-time festival going kids who have never touched coke? No. I’d vouch for no.

    Do I really give a shit about all this? No of course not. I couldn’t care less. Drug chats wind me up, yes but it was more down to the fact that it was coming out of the mouths of the most irritating, loud, vexatious Americans. Am I xenophobic? Probably.

    David Bowie was afraid of Americans. He also consumed nothing but peppers and milk for a year so I’m not sure he was a model judge of character.

  • I Haven’t Got a Stitch to Wear

    May 2022

    I’m wearing a Radiohead  t-shirt today.

    I’ve had it for about 5 years, worn it to see them live, worn it to impress strangers, worn it to bed as the cotton is nice and soft.

    I thought that maybe I should stop wearing it after the band made a stand and broke the cultural apartheid in Occupied Palestine, because it went against my staunch political beliefs I hold to feel morally superior to the plebeians. But I still wear it. I like the band. In Rainbows and Ok Computer had more influence on my life than most pieces of art, why shouldn’t I wear my shirt?

    If I pin my ‘Palestinian Lives Matter’ badge, (that I got after donating to the man running the Socialist Appeal stand in the High Street; aren’t I good?), to the shirt, does it cancel out the bad? Or is that just licking your finger and wiping the scratch left from an Arab child’s pebble on your American-made tank? I think a fresh paint job may be in order.

    However, in this hyper-reactionary, overly-sensitive, snowflake-offended, daily-mandatory-pronoun-inspection world there’s one band t-shirt like no other. A shirt that strikes the fear of God into the hearts of, not only, the metropolitan liberal elite, the ‘le bacon is epic’ Redditors, the old school 80s homophobes, but above all of these, the fan itself.

    The Smiths: Meat is Murder.

    Morrissey was my hero. In Year 8 I had to write a piece for a competition on who I thought was the most important person in history. I picked Morrissey (I was beaten by a girl who wrote about Emily Davison. Morrissey could jump in front of a horse, but I struggle to imagine Davison making an album as good as Viva Hate). I cared for that man, like countless Smiths fanatics. And then he went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like the Chinese are a “sub-species”.

    Now, it’s impossible to see a piece of Smiths iconography without seeing the fat, racist, xenophobic demon that lives inside the body of our once true King. At least when it comes to wearing a Radiohead t-shirt people just think you’re a virgin, and not a racist virgin.

    Remember that elevator scene from (500) Days of Summer? That one you fawned over during your Tumblr phase, cringed at during your Twitter days, but feel somewhat indifferent towards now that you’re a twenty-something alcoholic? That scene simply could not happen today.

    Conventionally attractive white girl gets into an elevator and hears conventionally attractive white boy listening to There Is A Light That Never Goes Out and strikes up a conversation saying she likes The Smiths. I take issue with this scene in a few ways.

    1. Had the writer of this film ever seen a Smiths fan in real life? They’re either ugly, smelly, bearded mansplainers in their 40s, overweight white rockabilly women, or oddly toned Mexican men.
    2. Why was he listening to There Is A Light…, when he could be listening to Rubber Ring?
    3. The most important of all: why on earth would you admit to liking The Smiths?

    When I wear my Smiths t-shirt, I genuinely hope those around me think I’m a poser who has no idea that the design is even an album cover. I’d rather be Kendall Jenner in Slayer merch than David Duke in a hood. All I can hope is that the Pakistani sweat shop worker became curious stitching the tee and listened to Meat is Murder. I imagine they appreciated the production value compared to their earlier output, it’s hard not to.

    So why do I insist on still wearing my Smiths t-shirt? Well, I still love the music, I still love Marr and I, sort of, still love Morrissey. Only slightly less than I used to, my love.