Gadjo Dilo’s Peccadillos #2: Big Nose Special

Yeah, in this latest instalment Gadjo Dilo plumbs the depths of his depravity and reveals that he finds women with big noses quite attractive, and he makes neither apology nor justification for this. Was it not Blaise Pascal (or was it Asterix?) who said "Cleopatra's nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed".

He’s chosen to present this latest divertissement by way of films he’d like to see made – it could have been another SomeChance film festival - as there’s nothing the camera loves more than a big conk:

Barbra Streisand in Yentl: Diesel Dyke

I watched the original with Mrs Dilo the other day; I’d seen it before and knew she’d lap up every adorable, schmaltzy, Talmudic nanosecond of it, which she did, including where Streisand, disguised as a man so she can study in the yeshiva, has to get through her wedding night with the woman she's married. The film ends with Yentl now in women’s clothes sailing for the scholarly freedoms of America. I’d dearly like to think she continues to have her pretty nose stuck in a book, perhaps going on to become the world’s first lady rabbi; but she’s already grasped the fundamentals of Feminism and she’s sailing to New York for heavens sake, anything could happen. It may come as a surprise to some that I’ll still be more attracted by Streisand’s Schnozz than by anything she might get up to there, but there’s no accounting for taste.

Sofia Loren: in The Fall of the Roman Empire #2

The Italians have foisted some rubbish on us over the years: unjustifiably expensive clothes, frothy operas, Charlie Cairoli and Joe Dolce. But the Italians I’m least fond of are footballers, people like Claudio Gentile, Romeo Benetti and Marco Materazzi, who turned our Beautiful Game into cynical gamesmanship, the plods who man-marked talented players out of the contest, fouled them when the ref's back was turned and called Zidane’s sister a slag. My punishment is to put them in a house with Sofia; she spends her time walking fragrantly from room to room, the light from the windows catching her profile most exquisitely, and making sumptious, aromatic Italian food. Punishment?? They’re locked in the attic. With (my old schoolmate) Vinnie Jones.

Rossy De Palma in ¡Tie Me Up Tie Me Down Again!

Rossy’s a big girl, has a funny face with a big nose, and she can’t really act; (she’s therefore, incidentally, the ideal gay icon). For me, ¡Tie Me Up Tie Me Down! is Almodóvar’s most enjoyable film, not because of any S ‘n’ M vibe - which is not what it’s about - but because, for all of that, it’s somehow so healthy. For one thing you have Victoria Abril and a young Antonio Banderas to look at, there’s the underlying Reichian thesis, and then there’s Rossy, looking for all the world like a Picasso painting. I envisage the sequel to this film featuring Rossy as the star, Banderas as her househusband, and Madonna (who “made” Banderas’s Hollywood career and is a greater gay icon by the can’t-act-criterion) nowhere in sight.

The Somechance Film Festival #3: Fish Cinema

As far as I’m concerned, there can never be too many films about fish:

Moby Dick: The Wilderness Years

In the original, of course, Moby meets his nemesis Cap’n Ahab and dispatches him to Davy Jones’s locker. Good finally vanquishes Evil, whatever, in what must have been the high point of his life. So what does he do now? Spend the rest of his days pottering round the ocean sucking up plankton with the rest of his fat-arse family? I don’t think so. History has shown time and time again that “special” personalities tend to fall apart once their glory-glory days are over. I reckon he’d hit the cider, take a job as an orderly in an aquatic mental hospital while he gets his head together, be seen thumbing through the pages of remaindered copies of his (ghost-written) autobiography Whale of a Time in the Baffin Island branch of Bargain Books. Think Frank Bruno, think Gazza, think Keith Chegwin.

Jaws 5: I’ve Found Nemo

From a shark’s point of view there were never enough sequels of the 1975 blockbuster: a shark doesn’t stop feeling hungry just because audiences have become bored with watching it eat. However, the franchise probably does need a shot in the arm, and what better way than by referencing a more recently popular film. Mr Great White has eaten all the suckers on the beach and is now looking for dessert, a little extra something, something wafer thin to take away the taste of factor 15 and swimming trunks. Because he fancies himself as a connoisseur – and because he’s an arse - he tracks down the world’s most famous fish, imagining this will be the culinary experience of a lifetime and a straight-to-video smash hit to boot. Like tiger penis soup – I’m guessing – a disappointment.

The Prawn Identity

A conspiracy thriller. It turns out that prawns are not really shellfish at all but bits of chicken with added fish flavour, and the CIA has been covering this up. On the other hand, their animal scientists have disseminated rumours that crab sticks are fish and that tiger prawns are actually bits of tiger. The Agency just doesn’t have enough to do these days. In a flashback, Keiko the orca from Free Willy appears in a cameo role as J. Edgar Hoover. Only for real enthusiasts, frankly.

G-G-G-G-G-Granville! (#5): The Dark Side

I’ve previously explained why stammerers are the world’s dancers, poets and cool people, but, yes, there’s also a dark side to stammering, a bedlam inhabited by shades, ciphers, liars, amoralists, freaks, ne’er-do-wells and gits, a netherworld where the sun of pleasant conversation doth never rise. But, as without darkness there cannot be light, without stammering there cannot be fluency. You and I live in symbiosis… without me, you are nothing. As I explained the more celebratory aspects of stammering through song, I shall here also.

The Toy Dolls - Keith's a Theif: Surely there's nothing more stammer-worthy than being caught for benefit fraud - I mean, it's illegal but it's not even cool! Stammering on the all appropriate words: tax, dole, court, etc .

David Bowie - Changes: “Ch-ch-ch-changes”: Bowie, bless him, is the world's least likely stammerer; he’s therefore affecting this, as he’s affected much else in his career, but the fact that he gets away with it is sinister enough in itself.

James Brown - Please Please Please: Saying "please" to a woman once should be once too often for any self-respecting stammerer. In fact most of this song from Stammering Brother No. 1 is a cry for help. Pathetic.

Talking Heads - Psycho Killer: “f-f-fa-f-f-f-f-fa-fa…… You start a conversation but you can't even finish it... I'm tense and nervous, can't relax... I hate people when they're not polite”. Yes.

The Dickies - Paranoid: Most of what comes out of The Dickies vocalist's mouth sounds like speech impediment, especially here when trying to out-Ozzie Ozzie Osbourne. “Can you help me, help me with my brain? Oh no!" No.

Darts - Come Back My Love: All doowop sounds like stammering, but Big Den Hegarty's “B-b-b-b-baby” (2:14 minutes in) sticks in the mind, and he famously looks like Frankenstein's monster, amply qualifying this song.

So, 6 stammering songs here; nothing particularly significant about that number, though if you stammer it a bit you could be invoking the number of The Beast. I bid you good evening!

TV Transylvania #3

The Director General has failed again and again to reply to my suggestions for great new programmes and I really am losing my patience. I bet he's not even read them. I bet he's sitting in a jacuzzi right now at the Trans-TV Mansion with Sofia Vicoveanca, Lidia Bejenaru, Laura Lavric and any other floozies still lying around after last Saturday night's 5 hour extravaganza of folklore and cookery. So, I've summoned up all my energies for this last attempt to get his attention. It's the big one.

At Home With The Wurzels

A reality TV show. With a bit of luck, the last one ever made. As must now be yawn-inducingly evident to anybody reading this rubbish, this place does peasantry very very well. Get Germans to make your cars, Frenchmen your food, and Italians for design, fashion and everything else that’s totally meaningless, but if you want a bit of land cultivated and not too much backtalk, employ Transylvanians. But this puts me in a dilemma, for (1) not only am I still homesick but (2) I now also have a freshly awakened taste for yokels wearing silly costumes - they look great, dance and sing, make their own hooch and they’d give you their last plate of pork dripping. The only people who can administer to both these needs and so fill this aching chasm in my soul are The Wurzels. (The concept's not as daft as it seems: think, America's awash with stumbling ex-junkies yet chose to take Brummie Ozzie Osborne to its heart). And, here’s the clincher, does anybody remember Graeme Garden on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue singing these words to the tune of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy? That’s the Anthem Of The European Union, ladies:

“I am a cider drinker,
I drinks it all of the day,
I am a cider drinker,
It soothes all me troubles away,”

(all together now, Europhiles, especially Daphne...)

“Ooh aargh ooh argh ooh aargh ooh argh ooh argh ooh aargh ooh argh aay,
Ooh aargh ooh argh ooh aargh ooh argh ooh argh ooh aargh ooh argh aay.”

Gadjo Dilo’s Peccadillos

GD likes to think of himself as a decent sort, the type of chap you’d be happy to take home to meet your parents, but, as previously stated, he is also A Man, and as a man he has certain baser desires, cravings, whims, fancies – let’s call them “needs” – that need to be addressed, especially when he’s been overworking...

National Costumes

There’s something attractive about a woman – any woman – in national costume (morris dancers excepted, obviously). I don’t demand that the missus changes into hers on a Saturday night after Match of the Day is over, but I probably wouldn’t object if she did.

Armpits

Armpits?? As I mentioned recently to Daphne Wayne-Bough, I consider the armpit - whether depilated or as sweatily hirsute as nature intended - to be a neglected erogenous zone. If I was a Turkish sultan I could fill each of my concubines’ armpits with half a pound of nutmeg butter and then take tiffin, but I’m not and I can’t think of any woman daft enough to go for this.

Lady Pole-vaulters

I had a thing for ginger, pasty-faced Russian pole-vaulter Svetlana Feofanova - I didn’t stalk her, but was off work sick in a foreign country and reduced to watching Eurosport. I don’t take aesthetic interest in other athletics events – most are just so linear - but pole vault is different. It’s the orgasmic moment when the run up's completed, the pole is straining to the max and then catapults the lass high, high, high into the heavens.

Bandages

Bandages???? In our folk dance class one of the women had a bandage round her for foot for a few weeks; a woman’s foot is hardly her most attractive feature but my eyes were aways drawn to it. What’s that all about?? I reckon it's the protective instinct: I just want to hold their poor bandaged body parts in my strong manly hands and look reassuringly into their eyes saying “It’s alright, little one... I’m here now”.

Woman who Take an Interest in Geometry

In the office where I work there are almost no distractions, but it’s near Cluj Polytechnic and we have a balcony. As I suspect is common in Eastern Europe, a large proportion of the engineering students are girls, and they often pass by with set-squares and t-squares protruding from their satchels - I’d like to think one or two of them have a complete set of French curves in there as well! It’s not that I want them to tell me about minutes and seconds of degrees etc – that would be ghastly – but, you know, just to have a general and healthy appreciation of possible angles.