[ CRACKTOWN ]: 08

Friday

Polly: 'Fertility Industriale'

[One of a series of extracts from Leon Blackwell’s infamous autobiography “Evens”. The diary of Old Lynn’s most revered psychopath.]

Pages 113-114

I could also see several video boxes in the bag, Jeremy Beadle’s cheery molester-esque smile leering up at me. You’ve Been Framed; The Best Of… (Volumes 1 & 2), Beadle’s About (Easter Special), and a copy of the short-lived ITV series Beadle’s Prison Pranks.

Talking of Mr. B, the legendary jester is actually scheduled to appear in Cracktown next month (July 12th 2004), in a local reality tv event called Celebrity Camping Live. He’ll set up tent in a field in Gayton, sharing mess tins with such luminaries as Eamonn Holmes, Bernard Matthews, Linsey Dawn McKenzie (a big coup for West Norfolk), and Garry Bushell. The Daily Sport constantly refers to Anglia TV’s forthcoming effort as “Bootiful Big ‘uns & The Bastards.”

Believe it or not, many people who visited the shop over the years have expressed interest in such japery and gag fodder. A chap who used to come into the shop every Monday morning was a professional “Viral Goofer”; large companies would pay him £250 a time to film 30 second clips of humorously staged mishaps and faked falls (often featuring the company’s logo somewhere in the background). These companies would then sneakily attach these clips to a funny message and start an email chain for the co-workers to pass on to their friends, families, and so on. Can you beat that? Pretending to bump into a conservatory door with a can of coke in your hand. For a living. Jesus wept.

This middle-aged Goofer stopped coming in to give us his endless stream of World War II documentaries (VHS format, natch) after he broke his leg during one particularly tricky viral film. Firemen were called to his warehouse and had to cut him loose from a giant plastic vagina after he ‘pretended’ to fall into the vulva for a stunt covertly financed by Ann Summers. Not only did he break his left leg, but he allegedly suffered concussion after cracking his head on the clitoris on the way down.

There was a general assumption at the time that he was goofing for Summers’ Thermal Lubrication.

Leon Blackwell

“Evens” is available from all good bookshops now.
ISBN 1010 2020 1010 0102
£6.99 paperback.

Leon: 'Leon's Nativity'

Chat Forum Excerpt #4

Leon: 'Leon's Issues'

Sunday

Chat Forum Excerpt #3

Senior Scythe: 'High Anxiety in Old Lynn'

Leon: 'Love'

Outrage Over Local Exhibition

Florian Van Jannel. Not necessarily a household name, you might think. But that could soon change. For I can reveal that Master Jannel - a conceptual contemporary artist from Old Lynn Town – is already making his mark in the national art world this year. His forthcoming exhibition of nonsensical self-portrature and scandalous, neon-lit cartoon debaucheries is causing a very putrid stink among the country’s moral guardians. “Ban this Sick Stunt” exhaled the tired lungs of a certain right-wing tabloid this week. “I simply don’t get it” said Germaine Greer last Tuesday evening. “I will sue the little runt to kingdom come”, said Will Disney in January. Aaaaaaand so on.

Florian himself is more than slightly amused by this “press storm of locusts”, as he delicately puts it when I finally catch up with him in Old Lynn’s Artist Centre Alcohol Zone. “Some say I am a bleak genius, some say my work is merely passable. Either way? Ker-ching.” He laughs into his pint of nut-brown ale. “What I’m trying to do is shake up the moral media a bit – show them who’s boss in Cracktown. And it ain’t them, ok?”

Florian Self Portrait: 'Distort'.

Florian wowed the local arterati last year with his enigmatic sculptures of dead rodents and other roadkill ceramics, but some dissenters believe his genius has a best-before date stamped on it, and that the quality of his work is already beginning to rot. Local TV network programme Pre-Tension recently condemned his work as “mind-numbingly shallow and low level”, many of his images featuring nothing more than abject, mindless “decay fetish”. Van Jannel, however, takes such biting criticism in his stride, mentioning to whomever will listen that such disapproving critics have completely misunderstood his intentions; “I am not saying that my work is a consciously definitive damning portrait of modern society as I see it, it just happens to be a definitive damning portrait of modern society as I see it.”

“My ideas come mainly from my dreams. They’re often vulgar…sometimes kinky…always entertaining. I once dreamt I was eating a giant marshmallow… I won’t tell you how that particular anecdote ends. Suffice to say I was feverishly painting on canvas as soon as I left A&E that morning.”

His unique exhibition of backlit neon cartoon disfigurements and plainly odd photographs entitled “What God Wants I Have Already, And I’m Not Playing Ball” is to be held from February 25th to April 06th in the Old Lynn Artist Centre. Children not encouraged.

Polly Blank
[Home]
February 2012

[chat to Florian live, as soon as you read this, via accessing the chatroom node of the official Quicklime News website. He’ll be there waiting. Trust me... He’s definitely there… Go on then… Logon Rock Witch!]

Leon: 'Ye Who Enter Here'

"Evens" Book Extract #2

[Second of a series of extracts from Leon Blackwell’s shocking autobiography “Evens”. The diary of Old Lynn’s most revered psychopath.]

Pages 100-102...

1.45pm. July 13th 2005.

Walking out of the newsagents this lunchtime, I was confronted by an acned-riddled slack-jaw in a hooded tracksuit. Since when did the ‘80’s never happen? For fuck’s sake. He was mumbling something about buying a pack of cigars for him. Cigars? He looked like a Menthol Twat to me.

In his neanderthalic way of expressing himself, I could very easily ascertain that he was dead on arrival. He stuttered and bleeped, gazing off into the middle distance for some pathetic reason or other, and jittered around the square of pavement he was gelled to like a fly in bubblegum. I fleetingly thought about removing his fucking larynx with my Mother’s butter knife, but barged past him regardless.

“Hooo cunt twat. Wha ya fookin’ fink ya ar? Only asked ya fer sum ciggies. Twat. Fookin’ mummies boy, ya fookin’ queer. I know where ya fookin’ live yer kiddy-fiddlin’ twat.”

Even ignoring his repeated usage of the word ‘twat’ in quick succession, I could tell that no-one was going to rush up and ask him to step in for their Best Man speech anytime in the near future. Walking away from this creature, I could feel his eyes boring into me.

10.00pm. The same day.

Finding my hands slipped inside the warm envelope of his stomach, his innards yet to be punctured, I felt as if I knew him more “intimately” than anyone could possibly know another. Or, at the very least, more than anyone could know a person ‘external of the body’. If you get my drift?

Purely out of boredom, I swear, I kept a large tract of his intestines for 8 days. No other reason in the slightest. Just boredom. No clichéd cannibalism or “trophy taking”, or any of that True Crime Weekly banality. It’s just that real life is so dull, it is just something to do. I tend to piss about with the bodies more and more these days. I once made contact with an old school bully and ended up [1 word censored] in his mouth, post-decapitation. Just because I had the opportunity to, really. No Freudian leanings, Your Honour, I fucking swear.

Besides, he was a chav. I doubt the pathologist even noticed the [1 word censored] in the bastard’s throat.

I once spent some considerable time looking up some [1 word censored] action/[2 words censored] on the net. I kind of liked a series of clips I found that had a plumpish Swede lass eating fish n’ chips before proceeding to [8 words censored] an eager maiden. Even [1 word censored] to it a couple of times – until I read about a rumour in a [1 word censored] forum that the actresses in these films fake it by [7 words censored] prior to filming. I lost heart after that – what’s so hot about Eastern Block Helgas sliding melted curly-wurlies [6 words censored]?

Anyway, I digress once again. He was still fairly conscious by the time I had my hands around his lungs, only actually dying soon after I pulled them out into the open. His insides made that familiar trumping sound as I pulled them out of his steaming chest cavity.

After fly-tipping most of his remains the next day, I felt a definite wave of peace and contentment wash over me. I slept like a baby for 13 hours straight that night, making me late for work again - and in the doghouse with Angie.

She’s such a moody bitch anyway, but with added ammunition against you she’s simply unbearable. I once dumped a whole shed-load of unsellable paperbacks that came into the shop and Angie went ballistic, informing me in no uncertain terms that I disrespected people’s donations, blah blah blah. I didn’t even bother trying to reason with her that the books were mostly Yank wank pulp trash (Catcher… American Psycho, etc.). There was more chance of the present day Swaffham Cagework populace winning a regional “Most Intelligent Result of Inbreeding” contest than of anyone buying any of those books. Still, she had none of it...