The Guggenheim Museum in New York will soon exhibit what might be the work of art of our, and all, time: an 18-carat solid gold toilet – not just an “installation” in the sense of an artistic work in a gallery, but also an actual installation: the functional golden toilet will be plumbed into the museum’s sewerage system and visitors will not just look at, but sit on it: people will be able to say they literally shat all over a work of art at the Guggenheim. Read more

Feel the pulse and vibration and the rumbling force/ Somebody is out there beating on a dead horse/ She never said nothing, there was nothing she wrote/ She’d gone with the man in the long black coat – Bob Dylan

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ONE THOUGHT goes off in my own mind every time some crackpot Muslim jihadist explodes himself: that mofo just blew himself (and innocent bystanders) to bits gleefully, to rush to Heaven and reap his reward of 72 virgins; 72 virgins! As a reward! As Robin Williams (I think) said, “Anybody who thinks 72 virgins is a good thing clearly never actually had one”. You could accurately call the jihadist mindset a firetrucked-up perspective. Read more

GOD ALONE knows when last I prayed. I want to believe that the last time I did it even half-seriously– or quarter-seriously, or one-eighth seriously, or one-sixteenth – was at university, 30 years ago, when, every May or June, after liming on Paradise Beach for the preceding two-and-a-half terms, I would beseech the Almighty to let there be four questions on each paper based on the two measly topics I could manage to revise in the two days before each exam. (God unfailingly prevented me from failing, indeed, allowed me to graduate with honours.) Read more

DAVID BOWIE was why I wanted to dye my hair at age 15. Those, as Lou Reed sang, were different times and Bob Dylan & Makandal Daaga would have been-frustrated at how slowly they were-a-changin’ in Trinidad. In 1973, despite the 1970 Riots/Revolution/Pick Your Prejudice, a black person boldfaced enough to sport an afro could be gleefully mocked in public.

DAVID BOWIE was why I wanted to dye my hair at age 15. Those, as Lou Reed sang, were different times and Bob Dylan & Makandal Daaga would have been frustrated at how slowly they were-a-changin’ in Trinidad. In 1973, despite the 1970 Riots/Revolution/Pick Your Prejudice, a black person boldfaced enough to sport an afro could be gleefully mocked in public. In form four, in January, almost three full years after Black “Power”, I saw a large group of black people follow a young black couple dressed in dashiki and kinte cloth from St Mary's College to Woodford Square, taunting and jeering at the couple all the way. “Go back to Africa!” a man shouted. ”Them from America!” shouted another. “No African would dress so!”

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