Killer cows! You'll never go into a field again

Years ago I interviewed a solicitor who had nearly been killed by a herd of calving cows. He'd clambered over a stile and exercised his right to use a public footpath running through their field. But soon this great drama queen cow was affronted and trotted after him followed by her mooing court (comparisons with Arcatistes will not be permitted). The poor lawyer was kicked and knocked about by these great farting lumps and he only escaped because he was fit enough to make a run for it. He was destined to flee into my arms and tell me his lucrative tale. My shoulder is absorbent (but not throwaway).

I know that cows (Anna Wintour and Bridget Rowe excepted) are not normally of interest to Madame Arcati and her connoisseurs, but it's my duty to share with you all the things that intrigue me. So when I heard this morning that a Cumbrian farmer must compensate a woman "tossed around" by his herd of 40 Simmental-cross beef cows, I was reminded of the solicitor's case. Have cows, like certain elephants, developed a homicidal tendency?

A Google search reveals an alarming number of cow attacks - yet when was the last time you saw a warning sign on a farm fence? A few days ago a woman on the Yorkshire Dales was killed by cows and in another recent case a Blackpool woman, Alice Rosser, was attacked by a herd in Scotland: the cows stamped on her and broke her ribs. Apparently, in the UK, 19 people have been killed and 481 injured by cows in the past eight years. Even poor old David Blunkett MP was left with a black eye after a cow attack not long ago. Doggy Sadie couldn't save him.

Conventional wisdom has it that the cows are just protecting their calves and are spooked by victims' dogs. My own intuition tells me that cows are slowly waking up to the true character of their human captors. For generations, limpid-eyed cows assumed life was one long free lunch at the expense of pitchforked sucker yokels. OK, so even if cows of a certain age just suddenly disappeared like 30-year-old humans in Logan's Run, they'd enjoyed a subsidised life of leisure. My own feeling is that the memory of the abattoir has telepathically impinged on the DNA of cows: at long last, they now begin to understand that life is one long preparation for a hellish McDonald's fate. The cows are acting under a race memory and are out for revenge.

So next time you elect to clutter up the countryside and fuck up its biodiversity, give the killing cow fields a miss. You've been warned.

"A cow can turn on you and attack you out of the blue... I saw the horn enter Sally's mouth"

Madame Arcati is 3 today: What, no ectoplasm?

My official birthday! A little over three years ago I was in Barcelona when Madame Arcati came to me. She insisted on an afterlife, she had things to pass on. And so this blog was born on July 4, 2006. Even now there are millions of people who cannot pronounce Madame Arcati quite apart from not knowing her provenance. It is Ar-CAR-tee (not Ar-catty, Precious!). Yes, I sometimes wonder whether to continue this blog: it's fun but it makes no money and upsets a lot of pompous egotistical people not used to criticism to their face (all editors, many journos, many managers and one actor). But for reasons I don't understand, audience continues to rise, and a few of the tragic people who live vicariously through celebrities have now attached themselves to Madame Arcati, creating their own Mini-Me versions for various reasons, some fraudulent, or donned their own masks as Greek chorus avengers. Here's Madame Arcati's seance in Blithe Spirit. (Click image once to play)

Why do men of a certain age whistle tunes in public places?

Are they trying to advertise their cock-cuntedness? Send them to Dignitas!

Philip Hoare: I am so jealous of this seasoned fag hag

When I heard that Philip Hoare had won the £20,000 Samuel Johnson Prize for Leviathan a little bit of me went into a coma (I have since recovered: leave grapes at the door). It was that evil, low, green-eyed feeling you get when someone you know enjoys a great succes d'estime: to rub it in, Leviathan is a marvellous disquisition on whales: mankind's spiritual ink with the beasts and our disgraceful exploitation of them. So if I offer my congratulations to Philip please note the above. Do not be entirely taken in by my remote mwahing. Imagine how my face slips back into a scowl as it turns away and sips sour wine (white).

I first met Philip many years ago through my late friend Robert Tewdwr Moss. Arcatistes will know about Robert: follow the links below if not. He took me to a council flat, I think somewhere in north London. Before the front door was an iron security gate which may have last seen service at Alcatraz. The Philip I first met looked very much like the Philip of today at 51: slight and lean. Not overly friendly, but courteous and brisk. One felt he had been dragged from his work. This was a party at Philip's pad and I was Robert's unexpected, uninvited guest.

Later, I was to give Philip work on a Sunday tabloid: he was a dream. He'd turn up, hardly talk to anyone but smiled a lot and was amiable and distant, do the work without fuss - whatever the theme - then make his exit. He'd already written his Stephen Tennant book and Noel Coward was ahead of him. I learnt he was a son of Southampton and born Patrick Moore. Wisely he reinvented himself literarily so as to avoid association with the right-wing astronomer who has the wonky monocled eye and who refuses to die. Philip interviewed me for one of Robert's obits and misspelled my name: and people wonder why they get murdered.

In all the time I saw him I never worked out anything much about him. Sexually he struck me as neuter but there's no such thing as neuter so that couldn't be right. He's a seasoned celebrity fag hag: Neil Tennant's a close friend of his - I believe Philip toured abroad with the Pet Shop Boys - and it's reported that the Hairspray director John Waters talked him into writing Leviathan. About four years ago I saw him at a Janet Street-Porter London birthday party. He pretended not to see me so I just barged up to him and introduced him to my companion: Philip gave me that odd squeal of his (delight? horror at effrontery? a squashed toe?) and behaved himself. On my way out I cut him dead.

Never mind. Buy Leviathan. I may be an old bitch but here's the link. Here's his site.

Trailer for Philip's TV doc In Search of Moby-Dick. Click image once to play

Is Madame Arcati the internet's fool?

If you want to join the fun click here and comment. The question up for debate is: Is Madame Arcati (or her animating spirit) making a fool of him-/her-/itself on the internet? Join the debate! I have disabled comment to this ad.

Anna Wintour: 'US Vogue is not for blind people'

The editor of US Vogue, Anna Wintour, 97, says in this The September Issue movie trailer, as she casts her own fragile orbs on a magazine cover: "This type seems so large and pretentious, it looks like it's for blind people." There's sophistication for you.

For more info on the blind and partially sighted click here.

Steven 'Seething' Wells: I didn't know you but bye, then

It's already too hot to write. Already I want some cloudy bladder to open up and drench Leicester stinking Square with me in it. So just a passing thought on yet another death - that of the music/cultural/old NME writer Steven "Seething" Wells (Swells) who, like MJ and Farrah, was finally let down by almighty medical science. Did I know Swells? No. Would I have liked him in person? Probably not. I am not good with fury in the flesh. Or atheists. Why am I writing about him? Because people I admire admired him and I see he knew how to use the word cunt comically and painfully. Also, I cannot think of better company for MJ and Farrah as they drift from sleep to awakening in an afterlife I am not sure about. Read Swells' last piece for the Philadelphia Weekly - facing death he writes: "I speak as someone whose greatest craving at this exact moment is not world peace and universal democracy or a rational and global redistribution of wealth, but a can of ice cold ginger ale." I'd second that in Leicester stinking Square.

Duncan Fallowell: 'MJ just wanted to be deeply fucked'

Duncan Fallowell writes in response to my Disneyfied cockless-cuntless Michael Jackson posting below this:

Dear Madame

I don't think his songs are asexual. Many of the later ones seem to be coded confessions. Didn't he do one In The Closet? His whole act, I think, came to embody an intense yearning to be cherished and deeply fucked. Was sexual passivity ever more vocal?

Duncan Fallowell

Dear Duncan

Still trying to get a copy of your 20th Century Characters for your Jacko piece. I recall how astute you were.

I don't think his songs were asexual, either. Like many singers he masked his true romantic interests in conventional garb. His later stuff may be coded confessions. But his persona was disneyfied-asexual - as a refuge from the feared consequences of being himself.

I'm not at all sure he wanted to be deeply fucked, at least not literally. I can recall reading Jordy Chandler's court deposition: he described how MJ would blow him and eat his cum. In the sense that he wished to ingest "masculinity", this is the nearest to being "deeply fucked" I guess. But he might have needed yet more pain killers after a bout of penetrative loving. I'm not sure he wanted that level of sexual or emotional engagement. A gobble with a boy-man was as much as he could deal with. It was playtime followed by the famed sleepover.

Of course he should have gone to prison: Genet's sweaty jailhouse fantasies might then have been brought to life in MJ. Who can say?

Love as ever, MA x

Michael Jackson: Disneyfied into cockless-cuntlessness

Someone called Jonathan Margolis, who (among other things) wrote speeches for Michael Jackson, said on the radio this morning that he hoped in time people would forget about the "boring" details of MJ's life and just remember his songs.

What kind of journalist is Margolis? And doesn't he see that MJ's life of "boring" (unpalatable?) details was coded in his work and appearance? His work doesn't make much sense if you ignore the life.

Michael Jackson was a gay man. Why his libido was tragically and illegally directed only at boys on the pubertal cusp is one for highly paid psycho-babblers to guess at. If you set aside MJ's slushy cock-cunting lyrics - his performance beard, if you like - he never even pretended much to find women sexually or romantically interesting. This was obvious. Unfortunately, his vast global fan base wouldn't have been able to cope with this, his God-fearing family could never have countenanced this: MJ internalised the foreseeable rejection pre-emptively and reconfigured himself for public consumption - as a master of public image.

The result is the back catalogue to die for, a life no one but a mad man would have opted to live for. And a brood conceived in labs.

The surgically sexless chimera he became tells you of his rejection of masculinity and of cock-cuntery. The two are distinctly different things of course. But in MJ's mind they were one. As a child he was exposed to the brute cock-cunting vulgarity of his father and brothers: to be frank, they revolted him. Why this rejection embraced his colour is another question for the guessy psycho-babblers. What cannot be doubted is that in his reinvention he took the model of the cartoon - any living model scarcely matters - a cartoon fashioned for the 11-year-old put-on castrato singing voice and the gushy non-singing simpering.

This was not an image sex change as most imagine, more a compromise disneyfication of his desexualised self: this MJ neither fucked nor was fucked. He was cockless and cuntless, a monk-nun of pop. And didn't he do well!

***

Among the comments to this post I especially like La Pellegrina's who writes: "He [MJ] was some sort of renaissance eunuch who desired metamorphosis, a latterday Akhenaten... " (See comments for more). Akhenaten was the "heretic" Egyptian pharaoh suspected of being a hermaphrodite or a woman posing as a man, though his most famous wife was Nefertiti.