The Mailbag: In The Mood for Love

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How are you doing?

This is Producer Randy, and you're listening to Here Comes the Guillotine: the Mailbag with Frankie Boyle, Susan McCabe, and Christopher MacArthur Boyd.

If you have a problem, issue, or a dire need just to be heard, then email hctg at global.com.

Enjoy the episode.

Here comes the mailbag, huh?

Uh, this is.

I really struggle with reading Irish.

I'm not as much of a, I'm trying to think of the phrase that you asked me to use earlier, a bead rattler as yourself or

Susan McCoop.

None of us know Irish.

None of us know.

BH is a V sound.

What's happening, man?

What are you doing?

You try to read it in Irish.

I'm trying to read it if it's an Irish letter.

Dear Deolve, dear dive.

I'm loving the poet.

I recently read Maurice Condé's Hiramiconon.

Heremakonon.

And it got me thinking about colonialism and how it shames naive cultures and languages and how it leaves us with a strange mix of shame and pride in our backgrounds.

I know that Scottish history is different to Irish, they are linked, but I was wondering if you could talk a bit about what parts of your culture and heritage you'd like and dislike.

TT, Slan, Maeve.

Does it or should I think she meant native instead of naive?

It's an unfortunate typo.

Should, like, the legacies of colonialism leave shame?

I don't think so.

It's kind of a new original sin, isn't it?

You're kind of born into this, the crimes of

like I love where I live in the West End.

I love all these incredible Victorian lamps and parks and buildings that were, unfortunately, the profits of the slave trade.

Yeah,

yeah.

Yeah, I mean, Glasgow benefited massively from Empire, Second City of Empire, all that stuff.

But I still like it.

I still feel bad that we enslaved people, but it wasn't me, it wasn't my family.

I mean, I don't.

It's my community.

I think that whole thing of like

on the right, you see people going, oh, we're supposed to be ashamed of this.

I don't think anyone's really asking for your shame.

Like, they're asking for

some realism.

They're asking for a re-evaluation.

In some cases, they're asking for reparations.

Yeah.

And

that's been characterized as oh shame and self-flagellation and blah blah blah.

It's quite rare to see people going, oh,

why aren't fucking British people more ashamed of the Empire?

You know what I mean?

People are actually saying, why isn't this more historically accurate?

Why is the picture that's presented to us of a lot of our history quite historically inaccurate?

Because you don't get taught about it.

Unless you really go looking for yourself.

And I mean, once you get past all that and you get past the kind of fog of

that kind of nonsense, there are kind of interesting questions.

I was watching a show last night and it had a kind of bit of colourblind casting.

It was set in maybe 1915 to about 1945 in Britain.

And

there were some upper middle class black families and stuff and you're like, there wouldn't have been a lot of

upper middle class black families in London at the time.

There would have been some.

And

would it be more interesting than colour blind casting to have the stories of the actual

people there?

You know what I mean?

That's quite a hard thing to bring up.

What's more important though, the career and the rich role for an actual black person now, or to preserve the story of somebody from the past?

Well, not even to preserve the story, but just like I think there's a there's an instinctive disinterest in working class stories, and not even just a disinterest, there's an um um

a kind of desire to cartoonify and dismiss it in some ways um and when you see representations of working class lives in the past they do tend to me to be these very hard outlines of of kind of um cliché and and

i mean and a lot of swearing and a lot and you're like god i mean growing up like swearing was really frowned on in a like a very working class background do you think so yeah i guess my granddad didn't really swear in front of me until I was an adult.

So I don't know if it's but people have conflated a lot of things together and it's ended up being this kind of cartoon and you're like, well yeah, I

wonder if

like culture hasn't just taken a really wrong turn by ignoring the new class more generally.

And through class we ignore things like race and we ignore things like feminist readings of history and all kinds of different stuff because

we're getting such a partial picture.

Do you know what I mean?

And just because Susie's not here, think of it in terms of Lord of the Rings.

We see all the fucking stories of the royalty and all that stuff.

Even Frodo is fucking employing Sam as a gardener.

What about the fucking orcs that had to build that fucking catapult, man?

There should be at least one short story for the perspective of an orc.

Who's got to shovel up fucking Denithor's bones after he's fucking burnt himself on that pyre as well.

That's somebody's job.

Who has to sexually satisfy the Uruk High?

Someone.

Someone.

Someone's

like in a pleasure division of hobbits and just small.

All those smaller beings will be sexually.

I mean, I don't want it, don't want to be too graphic, but tighter.

We don't want to be too graphic.

The Shire would actually be the centre of a massive trafficking operation, which is in fact possibly what Gandalf was doing.

And the whole story of Lord of of the Rings is him going, Don't worry, they went off on a great fucking quest.

It was four good-looking me guys.

They were pumped to death by the bannered mare.

It was kind of what we were talking about over lunch.

About that, kind of, I was talking about that Chinese, um,

the Chinese industrial heartlands.

And I was watching this, I was reading this kind of photo-journalistic thing, and it's so unusual to see

a working-class, you know, or like an industrial view of things.

Like, you only really hear about fucking Shanghai and Hong Kong and you don't actually hear about that big bit in the middle.

But this was a kind of somebody went with a camera and he was taking pictures of the most vast, insane-looking quarries and

people with fucking hard, hard, hard, hard lives that you don't really get to see a lot about.

I would like to see all the Jane Austen books, but just from the view of the servant.

You know what I mean?

Who gives a fuck about Mr.

Darcy if he's going to pump or not?

My fucking Wayne's died.

That thing in Little Women, where the poor, the poor, just live in a fucking shed at the end of their garden, and they go down to fucking help them out.

And when he catches scarlet fever or something, you're like, you can't just have the poor in a shed.

That's not enough.

It's kind of like

What Remains of the Day by Kazooie Shiguro, isn't it?

Where it's from the perspective of the

butler, who unfortunately devotes himself to butlerhood and you know it's it's good to be

if it's hard to find an identity he goes well I'll be the best butler ever but unfortunately the manna that he works for is like a prominent British Nazi during World War II who's a real Hitler enthusiast and that becomes frowned upon but even then I mean he would be in a socio-economic he would be not quite middle class but he would be a version of middle class with a lot of kind of upper middle class um as a man's ideas as a manservant whereas there would be like someone servicing him so there'd be like a prostitute that he'd get to wear Emma Thompson's fucking perfume and that he would degrade probably during

you know whenever he got his holidays with Sun or whatever and fire out

you know what's her story because you should if you're listening and I know you're actually a brain damage tape I know you're a guillotine

um

let us know whether that character did have indeed a sex worker um who you made were i think we know we know i think we all know

because

not i guess that any of these live shows but maybe in the future don't spoil it don't spoil it i don't know

um shout out to kazu shiguro did you like that book about clones what was it called

that he done it was a film as well Oh, don't tell me the name, Christopher.

I'm going to remember.

The listeners will be screaming into the wireless radios.

Andrew Garfield and fucking...

One of my favourite actors.

The woman who married the guy out of fucking Mumford and Sons.

Who starred in the life story of Lynn Barber.

That was her first movie.

Right.

That woman and him.

And they're fucking clones, but they're to donate.

They're donating.

They're actually.

Spoiler that.

Spoiler.

We don't know the name of the.

If you ever see Andrew Garfield and the woman that played Young Limbarber in that movie, then

it's not what remains of the day.

It's absolutely not remains of the day.

Maybe he was a clone.

Maybe Shiguru is trying to tell us something.

Do you ever wonder if maybe there's a kind of severance thing going on and we have cloned ourselves and

like the clone just does podcasts?

If only.

Do you know what I mean?

Do you ever wonder if this is it?

Do you know what I mean?

That's the real horror.

More than the simulation, more than God existing.

What if this is it?

Yeah.

Maybe we never leave here, and the memories of the subway, the memories of Nippon Kitchen, the memories of the China Sea are

just implants.

We never actually leave the global office and they just put Iron Brew in a wee fridge.

The Iron Brew has a kind of China Sea pill in it and something like that.

It just gives you a trip to the China Sea.

They're getting fed up in the Nippon Kitchen to a different restaurant and pill in the kitchen.

You know that film committee ends with us.

It's not that, but it's like that kind of

vibe.

It's like.

I'm looking it up.

Do you want to know?

Never let me go.

Never let me go.

I wouldn't have guessed it.

Never let me go.

And there's...

They gradually find out that they are clones who are bred to supply organs for their original self.

Yeah, which would be great.

Why were we talking about that?

Listen, hey,

we're talking about the class.

Well, class?

So, that is, I mean, that's about as low class as you can get.

You're a living organ fan.

Yeah.

Did you see

Parasite

by Bunk Boon Jung Hole?

I just thought it'd be shite.

Everybody's, I saw a lot of people saying this is amazing, who I didn't have a lot of respect for.

And I went, Do you know what?

No.

It made me cry for class-related reasons.

I just, I've never never gone there.

Tell you what, I saw a South Korean film, uh, Burning.

You should watch that.

Burning?

Burning.

Absolutely brilliant.

Yeah.

It's not, it's just a sensation burning.

It's an amazing film with a guy who's in The Walking Dead.

Oh.

Oh.

Norman Reedis?

Death Stranded himself?

No.

It's a fucking South Korean film.

What's the fucking guy from Death Stranded?

I don't know.

What's he doing in fucking the Eyeless Guy?

What that's with the the

deaf-stranded kind of set.

He's brilliant in it.

He's like a psychopath.

Really jolly kind of fucking psychopath.

He's killing folk in it.

Spoiler for Bernan.

And it's amazing.

What a great movie.

I think I just bought the Boon Jong Ho Box set.

If you know what I'm saying.

I'm excited to go into Snow Pierce.

So he always has a kind of a class.

I just don't really like those films that's wild Snow Pierce all that stuff it's just too if you haven't seen snow piercer is about a trend that is society

yeah it's sort of like sub JG Ballard all that stuff yeah and

there's a lot better Korean cinema out there and a lot better Asian cinema yeah you know one car why one car why

he's you're a romantic at heart I'm a romantic yes yeah in the mood for love etc always in the mid for love you're a fallen angel

Alright, Veronica Mercier.

No wonder people go, I don't know what the fuck they are talking about when she's not there to rain them in.

She's covered quite a distance already.

I don't, like, I think we covered pretty well that neither of us really know what the Hera McConnon is, which was in the original question.

I've looked up, it's a novel

by Maurice Condé.

The overview.

Veronica Mercier, a sophisticated Caribbean woman teaching and living in Paris, goes to a West African country to complete her search for self-identity.

There, she finds herself involved with a black man with ancestors, a cold, calculating minister for the interior and heir to the presidency.

Where is she?

Well, West African country.

Ah, West African country?

Okay.

Sounds good.

I thought it would be a, I don't know.

Herrimaconon.

I thought it was a kind of necronomicon type thing.

It was some kind of book of the dead from a class perspective.

With maybe hair in it.

Yeah.

Hair in the chromicon.

Yeah.

Maybe, you know, you just rip off bits of a hundred bodies and assemble this book of the flesh.

That's not what it ended up being.

It's a kind of challenging book, a challenging novel about

West Africa.

It's amazing how little

West African stuff there is in our culture when you consider how many West African people and West African cultural producers or people whose heritage is from there are in Britain.

Niger, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Togo, Liberia, Benin, Côte d'Ivoire.

Why is the Cote d'Ivoire flag the Irish flag?

Because it's part of Ireland.

Yeah.

They've got a Gaelic team in the All Ireland every year.

They're essentially a county.

Are they?

No.

No Terra Pass.

Well, I don't know.

It makes more sense.

How did their flag end up like that?

Are they like French, but are they left in the sun too long or something?

Côte d'Ivoire?

Yeah, that would have been the front, the old French would have been in there.

Yeah.

All right.

Yeah.

Ghana, Senegal, the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Mali.

Yeah, some fucking big, big,

big, um.

Big old bit of Africa.

Big old bit of Africa, the old west part.

Africa's big.

When you look at that in a map, you go, oh,

you guys are big.

And there's Egypt.

Is that in the west?

That's

north.

Yeah, yeah.

And all the way down to like South Africa.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Healing learned most country.

It was in a South African boy in my school, it's my high school, it was my art class.

I think it was in the year below, and my art class was a kind of inter-year class,

a composite class,

as um, someone might say.

I've never heard that term, but I like it.

It was a composite class.

But uh, I was I was a big fan of the

South African white rap duo D Antvoard.

You family with them?

Oh, of course.

Aye, aye, aye, I am a butterfly.

Be my protection.

Be my samurai.

Was the chorus to the biggest hit.

And I told them that I loved that song and couldn't believe I'd heard of it.

I guess it's like if

I went to South Africa and then I was unpopular in a South African classroom and then someone came up to me and just started doing like

Jerry Cinnamon's song.

She's a belter.

She's not just what I like.

Like, why do you know that?

Is that an actual song, or would you be in a wrong?

You don't know she's a Belter?

No, it's Jerry Cinnamon's hit single.

I listened to an entire Jerry Cinnamon album from a music podcast, Now Defunct, Enjoy an Album.

And it

did you have to knock a word off the title of

the podcast that week?

It was briefly called Denigrate an Album.

Welcome to an album.

Yeah, it's honestly,

yeah, I don't worry, I don't worry.

I'd either watch shit on Sunday just because they're shy, you know.

We don't need that smoke.

Yeah, I don't need that smoke on a mailbag episode.

Where we're just trying to deal with the legacy of colonialism

by making some confused points about

television casting,

how big is West Africa?

Kazooi Shiguno's adults.

Oh, I've forgotten about that.

And

class.

The about, I was, um,

I had done that podcast saying I didn't like Jerry Simmon on the talk subject of class and about things about Scottish identity and class that annoy me.

And I don't like that style of music because I find it quite reductive.

I just think the production's stinking, you know.

And someone was like,

It's like a dearth of influence to me, do you know what I mean?

Because it's a Scottish guy with an acoustic guitar

singing really simple music and people love it.

But he's influenced by, so he's called Jerry Cinnamon in reference to Sally Cinnamon, the Stone Rosies song.

So he's just going, I like.

It just gets worse and worse.

But the thing is, I think the Stone Rosies are a cool, interesting band because they were into Kraut Rock and they were into

Manchester music, like the Smiths and stuff.

Oh, it was a great album.

Great album.

And it's an interesting.

But it's much like the issue with a lot of Star Wars stuff that comes out, out, where Star Wars was taking influence from dog fighting films, World War II, and it was taking influence from Akira Kurosawa's black and white samurai films and all these different in space operas, Flash Gordon, taking all this stuff and making a nice big soup out of it.

Whereas stuff that's influenced by just Star Wars, it's a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

And that's kind of the issue with

him.

But I was getting a bit of hassle from some Scottish comedians because they were like, you just, you're a wee middle class wank and you don't like working class art and

basically they were like uh

I would say middle class upbringings and I was like so you like it'cause you're actually middle class but it makes you feel working class to listen to what someone who's known as like Ned Sheeran is.

Do you do you like working class art or do you like simple art that has a large working class audience?

'Cause those are two different things.

'Cause if you're in Glasgow, do you like James Kelman then?

Because James Kelman's a working class author writing about working class protagonists.

Do you read that?

Or do you just listen to Jerry Cinnamon?

I like there's a Jerry

there's a James Kelman short story where it's about a guy who goes to the cinema and he can't concentrate on the film.

He's just too obsessed with what other people in his role are thinking.

He has a panic attack and he has to go to the sweetie bit and like just stare at the driving machine and go back in and he's like, am I freaking him out?

I felt like somebody had fucking plucked

just like a bit of my brain out and then put it on a page.

I was like, that's what it's like to be an overthinker.

Do you know what I mean?

It's sort of a on some level it's about consciousness, isn't it?

It's like

from the kind of modernist tradition of this is what it's like to be a person.

Um which I would argue is not what Jerry Cinnamon is about.

Um

and but there's other ki like other bits of Scottish working class art or the working class pedagogy like Lynn Ramsey.

I mean those are fucking great movies.

Barely talked about in Scotland.

Do you know what I mean?

When do you hear anyone talking about those films?

Morvin Carla, probably the best Scottish film ever.

You know what I mean?

But people, also, people want something we can all agree on.

Do you know what I mean?

Want something that you go, well, you know what?

Nobody's going to get terribly upset by that.

And things like that just tend not to have a lot of sophistication or nuance to them, and they have their place.

Do you know what I mean?

That's good.

That's that song everybody sings at Christmas.

Fine.

Essentially, we're all monkeys living together, and it's nice to have things to agree on because then there's less conflict, and people don't want any conflict in their life.

So, if we can go, That cunt's cringe, or they're alright, that's fine, you know.

Some people are just that's alright, and they could become millionaires off of that's alright, do you know what I mean?

Because we've all agreed, okay, yeah.

Also, we're like orangutans, and our environment is shrinking,

you know.

We're laughing at the old orangutans, or I know I am.

Yeah, are we not the orangutans?

We have a group chat, and you used the orangutan emoji, and I didn't know what you meant.

I think I was just being an absurdist.

We were having a discussion, and then you slap down

an orangutan.

I have a group chat with my friend Roscoe, it's just me and him, it's not much of a group, but we use the dragon, we have a Chinese dragon, and it just means yes.

Shout out to the dragon emoji on Facebook Messenger.

Things can mean nothing.

Again, look at Jerry Cinnamon.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the signifier and the signified, you know, it's semiotics.

She's a signifier.

She's a signifier.

She knows just what I like.

I'm the signified and I'm getting the fucking right.

There's a lot of stuff.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah.

Check out the pay.

You can't actually...

That series, Jenny Cinnamon episode is actually lost to media now because it was a Patreon exclusive and the Patreon's been closed so there's no access to that.

What are we asking for?

Do we want him to do a fucking song about Foucault and fucking life as a as a present?

I mean,

you know?

Yeah,

I don't want him to not be able to do it.

Take some gear, drink some tonic wine, wear a we hat, do we dance?

Every cunt's happy.

Do you know what I mean?

We don't need his take on fucking the panopticon of fucking modern life or Guido Balls, the spectacle, or Gabor Matthews understanding the trauma.

God forbid, Jean-Baudulard

and his more advanced theories about

the now fictional nature of reality.

It's the last places we want Jerry going.

Leave him when he is.

Oh, I mean.

Suskins would have a few day with Cinnamon.

Well,

there isn't well, Leonard Suskin would say well, look the hologram of Leonard Suskin would say

there is no Jerry Cinnamon

is well there is but it's it's a projection.

There might be well it's more like if we could clarify I know people are people are really following this in the pod and it's a big thing that people want to hear about.

But what the mathematics is saying, according to Leonard Suskind, is there are the there's our universe is a projection of something.

There's a projection going on.

But we're not necessarily sure which end is which.

So we might be projecting elsewhere.

Yeah,

we might be the thing that has been projected off of as well.

That's all we know, mathematically.

String theory.

Jerry, if that helps with your fucking album,

Jerry, we're doing a live show in the lost city of Atlantis.

If you'd like to be a guest to the mer people who live there.

The sting raid manta men.

I wondered, Lawrence Fishborne.

I think his ancestors were like mermen.

He's born of the fish.

Well,

what other explanation is that?

None.

None.

Yeah.

Thank you for listening to Here Comes the Mailbag.

That was Here Comes the Guillotines Mailbag episode.

Here comes the Mailbag.

Thank you for listening to Here Comes the Guillotine Mailbag with Frankie Boyle, Susie McCabe and Christopher MacArthur Boyd.

If you have a problem, dilemma or issue that you think Frankie, Susie and Christopher can fix, email hctg at global.com.

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