Mark told La Bouche in an interview back in 2009 that he has no problem doing long distance crawls. “I’m really good at crawling. I can do about five miles a day. To me it’s like jogging” he revealed.

Mark MacGowan is well known for his mad art stunts or ‘comments’ as he likes to put it, on current affairs. Some of these have most famously included pushing a monkey nut across town with his nose to protest against student top up fees, leaving a tap running for a year and kicking a crack head around town to highlight their rights. In the last couple of years he has become a YouTube sensation for his wild rants about the Tories.

Get to Downing Street for 6pm to see Mark deliver his pig to number 10.

We don’t really do book reviews, in fact, I don’t think we’ve EVER done one. However, when we heard about ‘The Eccentropedia’ we immediately took to the blog to enthuse about such a prospect.

“Isn’t this fabulous?” We raved. “Don’t you just need to have it? The author [Chris Mikul) has long been banging up zines about the most unusual people that ever lived, and now here it is binded into one big book, thanks to unpopular culture gurus Headpress. We just hope we get an invite to the launch party as there’s absolutely nothing we love more than a room full of eccentrics.”

Anyway, a couple of months later and still no party invite but we did hear the thud of our review copy (yay) and ever since we have been hooked on reading more and more about the world’s weird and wonderfuls.

This is an ironically comprehensive guide of not just the well known eccentircs but the undersexed n the under-rated. The avanteguard, the many occult leaders, radicals and some real freaks also grace the pages, accompanied by some awesome etchings. Mikul has barely left a stone unturned in his quest to document nature’s most ourageous and I couldn’t reccomend a better stocking filler!  Pick yours up here, on Headpress’s site.

According to the Beeb

 A 72-year-old woman who sent envelopes containing white powder to parliamentary figures including Nick Clegg has been given a community order.

Ruth Augustus, who claims to be a Catholic nun, was found guilty of six hoaxes involving noxious substances in July.

She has been told she must serve a two-year community order and have mental health treatment.

The letters were intercepted at an east London mail screening centre last year.

The powder was found to be non-hazardous, the Old Bailey heard.

Augustus, of Leyton, east London, accepted that she sent envelopes with letters in them but claimed police put the white powder in.
Devil worship

Mark Kimsey, prosecuting, said three envelopes were intercepted at a mail screening centre on 17 June 2011.

One was addressed to Deputy Prime Minister Mr Clegg and on the envelope was written “devil worshipping”, “freemason”, “sex with 30 plus women”.

When Sister Ruth was asked about her motivations concerning Clegg’s package, she said he “lied about all the tuition fees and everything else, keeping those Tory millionaires and rats in government”.

She added: “He boasted about all the women he’s had sex with. He’s an atheist singing hymns in the Albert Hall.”

So healthy are sharks that humans have apparently been grinding up, eating, and uh, injecting, the endangered species in a bid to harness their immunity. Shark cartilage continues to be used as adjunctive therapy in cancer, osteoarthritis, psoriasis, and macular degeneration, despite the evidence for its effectiveness being slim.

And we moan when they munch on us…

As a result of this kinda like almost witchcraft-sounding treatment, and not to mention the fin snatching mafia (a highly lucrative ingredient in soup) the shark population is in worrying decline. Hurray, I hear you secretly sigh, eyeing up scuba diving hols in the Red Sea, fear free. But before you do, ‘jaws’ for thought: Every year around 100 shark attacks are reported worldwide, although death is quite unusual. In comparison, 100 million sharks are killed every year by humans.

Black Triange said :
“It means that their case can now go on to be heard and the WCA will be reviewed by the judiciary to test its legality and compatibility with both human rights and domestic legislation and common law protecting the rights of individuals from the actions of the State!”

La Bouche fully supports this movement and are delighted to hear of its progress. Whilst the elite are given a tax boost, this barabric attack on those with disablies is quite simply beyond unacceptable. This country can afford  welfare  for everybody in need and we will not put up with this.

First, the parties were really really tres fun – we loved the fact we were allowed to take over Kassel train station to boogie on down to a DJ whilst trains were still truckin in n out, bewildered passengers wading through the crowds with their luggage, dazzled by disco balls. Can you ever  imagine Cameron n co allowing such festivities in St Pancras? Nope, neither can we. We hung out on a platform guzzling wine n talking to lovely artists from Berlin till 3am! Marvellous eve. Other parties worth a mention was the vodka bash in the oldest gothic church in town (and we’re talking the birthplace of fairy stories here – the Grimm bro’s hometown) where we enjoyed cocktails and Pink Floyd style psychedelia on the light display front. All in all, great incentive for starting up a zine. Thank you, Documenta, for all that.

So, we encountered on our first day the increasingly familiar site of  a pop up kinda camp site, right in front of Fridericianum, the main exhibition hall. I said to my colleague, ‘I bet you that’s Occupy’ n he said ‘Nah, it’s just some artistic thing, we’re in the middle of nowhere.’ However, upon approaching the tents n having un petit chat with their residents, my suspicions were confirmed. We were informed that the anti-1% protesters  had made their way from Frankfurt (the biggest Occupy hub in Germany) to Kassel, to make a stand against both the exhibition’corporate sponsorship and general Capital/Merkelism – thus ‘Doccupy.’

In response to the tent town, dOCUMENTA’s Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev said “I welcome the ‘doccupy’ movement in Friedrichsplatz, which has grown over the last weeks. It continues the wave of democratic protests that have been spreading across many cities in the world. It enacts the possibility of re-inventing the use of public space and appears to me to be in the spirit of the moment and in the spirit of Joseph Beuys who marked documenta and its history significantly, embodying another idea of collective decision-making and political responsibility through direct democracy.”

In all fairness to dOCUMENTA, it really did incorporate some   powerful political art. We especially enjoyed the ‘Picasso in Palestine,’ whereby a film made by director Rashid Masharawi and Hourani is exhibited, documenting the process of preparing, transporting and exhibiting the work of Picasso to the occupied Palestinian territory (the only ever masterpiece to be displayed here), alongside a drawing after Picasso’s painting by Amjad Ghannam, a prisoner at the time of the painting’s arrival, that was sent to Hourani as a postcard from Glabou Central Prison.

Picasso in Palestine

We were also asked to sign petitions on the second floor of  Fridericianum to make the Earth’s ozone layer part of the ‘National Hertitage,’ thus protecting it from man-made harm. Quite a sensible idea, non?

Another crazy political piece was a photographic series (which we not allowed to photograph) by Man Ray’s lover and muse Lee Miller, who was employed by the American Army JUST after WW2 to photograph the dregs of Nazi Germany. Along with snapping a lot of dead Nazi’s, she took the unbelievable measure of posing naked in Adolf Hitler’s bath. In 1945, the year of the dictator’s death, with her apparent ‘access all areas’ pass, she nipped into his apartment in Munich and got stuck in. Well, if that’s not controversy, I just don’t know what is.

You can see a pic here

“My pre-emptive strike against the Morloch empire and Mrs [bleep]“…. a Quilla Constance exclusive to la bouche. 

pics: Below by Simon Richardson, all others by Andrew Crowe

Bonjour Bouchers! I have been spending a lot of time holed up in my country home recovering from my breast operation. Until, last week, that is…

Part 1 Meeting the man, handled by God.

LB: Tell us how it’s all got goin QC

QC: I was taking tea, scones and cocktails at my usual table in Fortnum and Mason last week feeling slightly sore following my breast reduction surgery.

Oh, did I say slightly sore?…. ****ing agony more like. So I was F+M-ing to get relief, and plenty of it.

numnumnum..aaaahhhh…numnumnum……comfort eating Quilla style …numnumbelch…that was the way I was goin’ ….

…so I gorged on mountainous, ice-cream filled jammy scones, slurped buckets of lapsang souchong tea and quaffed a bunch of idiotically monickered cocktails.

‘Sex with a leech’… ‘Bloody fairy’….. ‘Savoy corpse’….. ‘Singapore Bling’… and so on until staggering toward my favourite drink-athon finale, ‘Moanhatton’

In a haze, I mused on the success of the operation as the tearoom threatened to spin out of control.

Then the ship settled…. all became clear….

The surgeon had accidentally made a significant, magnificent contribution to the costume design [see photos]…. check the outfit featuring two white lacy chest titfers.

The next step was obvious and I needed to explore it.

Down and in… not up and out….that’s the way!

Get ‘em off! …these words, of course, having a particular resonance with my former misdemeanors.

Breast concavity surgery? Could this be the antichrist of the implant? From incubus to sucubus so to speak?

The procedure would involve cutting 2 beautiful symmetrical depressions either side of the sternum and into my chest.

Thinking on though, I realised that it might not catch on. For one thing it would make you a little short of breath.

Not good when you’ve got something to say, arguments to have, protests to stage, mud to sling etc…

The prospect of a life twittering and trolling in cyberland hammering the keypad as my only outlet did not appeal.

Toooooo dull for me my hearties.

A way around this would be to investigate an alternative lung ventilatory system, perhaps a bit like a bird’s?

I dunno.

Sounds a bit fiddly and far fetched. Y’ get me?!!!

A GM chest? No way baby…no thanks!! Must be joking…..

The idea was already waning when he walked in….

Napoli and Argentinian legend, drug fuelled maestro, portly dribbling messiah….just a few of the superlatives cascading through my cerebral cortices.

“Como eres tu?” croaked the squat moustachio’d figure in front of me.

The short legs, light blue+white shirt, the manic stare and the cry of “¡Avante!…. Gooaaalll !!!” had been immediate give-aways of course, as he frolicked through the diners and swerved past the maitre de toward me.

Just who was this footballing genius-madman whose handling in the penalty area was all the talk in women’s washrooms from Buenos Aires to Shoreditch? 

Well, I can not reveal of course, as I am gagged at present by a super injunction. 

But anyway, here my mystery man was, let’s call him ‘D’ in the flesh at Fortnum’s and in front of me….staring!….intently!!….. Yikes!!!

LB: Tell us more, tell us more….

QC: He murmured, “Yo hablo D ¿tienes un espejo”

“Sí señor” I said and passed him the mirror I’d been bursting my spots onto not 2 hours earlier.

They’d since dried out to form small, seemingly decorative, crustules on the surface of the glass.

“su crujiente…porque?” I didn’t have the heart to tell him.

He looked so cute so I took it back, scraped off the encrusting supurations and passed it back gingerly.

I was astonished to see what happened next.

D, right there in broad daylight, chopped out 2 lines of charlie drake onto my spot mirror.

Then he grabbed the straw from my Moanhattan, inserted it brain-wards, bent forward and took in a great swooping nostrilful of Columbian self-raising sherbert.

“scccccccccchhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhlooooooop ckckckckckckkkkkkkkk….aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh !!!” snorted his sinuses.

The resultant sound reverberated around the room from coaster to doily, cake to cupcake, trinket to champagne flute and causing a minor Tsunami in my cocktail on its way.

I couldn’t believe it.

The entire room went still.

After a few startled moments, one by one, slowly, but as surely as a pack of lemmings jumping off a cliff, all of the diners turned to look disapprovingly toward table 8.

Accompanied by a cry of “quieres venir conmigo?” he invited me to join him, oblivious to the outrage of Fortnum’s affronted rich, famous, powerful and their attendant slaves.

I responded: “Yo no hago las drogas D.”

I glanced at the window, only to see the paparazzi peering in from outside. Were they beginning to sniff a sensational story in the making??? Who could possibly have tipped them off??

“No, estoy machacado ya, de seguir adelante y llenar su boca arriba.” I whispered into his furry left ear, suspecting that the table was bugged.

This roughly translates as: “No, I’m mashed already, you go ahead and fill your face up.”

He promptly vacuumed up the powder, and asked for my number.

Somehow I found his cheeky, bad-boy, “I don’t care what you think, I’m ‘muy rico’ you slags so f*** you” demeanor strangely compelling. I was hooked!!

So, seduced by a tried and trusted ‘girl meets bad boy’ scenario, I promptly gave him my number, landline, address, twitter account, FB page, vital statistics, favourite gemstone, a small instruction booklet entitled: ‘Top 100 gowns I’d like to own’ by QC, a Quilla Constance limited edition bottle of Parfum Fiquelle and my bank details.

He grinned, packed his man bag and with an “adiós….hasta luego hermosa”, and pole vaulted out of the room leaving me shaken and stirred. What a mover!

LB: So, did he phone or text?

QC: The opening text was quite innocuous: “¿cómo estás”. Not being fluent in Spanish, I clicked on my Google translator app ..”muy bien, gracias” I tweeted innocently into cyberland..

His next messsage was the more racy, slightly less formal: “¿Cómo es su bebé culo?” [which translates as: how is your ass baby?]

I told him that it was much further from the floor than his and that he could “mear fuera” [p*** off] with his testosterone-driven salacious chat.

Undeterred, D pressed on…. and on….. tapping furiously, sauce upon sauce, filth upon filth through the ether until I was swooning and moist with desire.

My mobile had never bleeped and vibrated so much. It had become a regular fire hazard. So I removed all combustibles and stroked my keypad crazy…. I just had to meet this horny little critter again!!

A few days later, UPS delivered a package to my mayfair apartment.

The concierge brought the parcel to my room.

WTF was this? I tore the paper off.

The mahogany, rectilinear cuboid measuring precisely 23cm tall by 50cm square gleaming in front of me seemed such a strange gift.

Strange, that is, until D appeared at my door dressed in full Barcelona strip, regular number ten, randy legs a-twitching and raring to go…….

“mi trampolín, mi trampolín de amor”

With his unmistakeable husky croak and that trademark world cup stare, the dirty D would have to be kept on a tight leash for sure – otherwise he might sprain his ankle falling off the block during our lovemaking.

Over the next 3 weeks we were inseparable….thanks to the leash and his stash of viagra.

Eventually, we were released by my butler on his return from holiday. “Tea, m’lady?” enquired Snuffington……discretion being the better part of my valet as ever.

After taking tea together, D decided it would be best to lay low for a while and then left amidst a flurry of pappysnapping. We spoke on the ‘phone everyday for hours on end about this, that and the other.

The notorious pap-snap outside Fortnums had done it for our relationship though. All over the tabloids. Daily.

It occurred to D that our ‘phones must have been hacked by Morloch’s number one news feeder himself, Glenn Mulch-Hair.

There seemed to be so much intimate detail out there in tabloid land. Redtop headlines screamed: “D steps up!”, “Hand of God in the penalty area!” and “Gotcha!”

The block, his tackle, the leash, the texts, the tweets, entire telephone conversations, the live video feeds….all seemed to indicate that we must have been under surveillance. D was upset.

A single episode in Fortnums, 3 days of ‘bouncy castles’ and endless mobile ‘phone calls…..just the 2 of us…..there was no way details could have leaked out to the gutter press?

Or was there….?……I didn’t have the heart to tell D about my team of hackers, spies, rackateers and vagabonds nor about my DPhil in Security, Hacking and Information Technology.

He was just grist to my mill..”grano para mi molino”… so to speak.

I wanted his cash, his body, his abilty to feint, dribble, shuffle and shiffle…

….but I got more than I bargained for.

LB: Sounds like the end of part one QC?

QC: Cue ad break then: “Looking for something cool, cutting edge and in your face? Popalong to ‘Maison Twenty @ Harvey Nicks’ and spoil yourself with one of my tees. You deserve it. Being spoilt that is.”

Next time in LB: Hand of God made my baby! Quilla’s family planning dilemma.

(pic by Schnews)

A major victory has been scored against WorkFare- the Tory’s flagship forced labour programme. We bouched about this horrific  corporate enslavement scheme last month, when uni grad Kat Reilly prepared to take the government to court regarding the matter.

Ian Duncan Smith’s unpopular pet project – to bring the logic of the Victorian workhouse to 21st century Britain (main difference: this time it’s work but no house) has been met with disgust ever since it reared it’s ugy head.

Under this spectacularly harsh programme, even by Tory standards, not even terminal illness is considered a barrier from involuntary, unpaid work at such esteemed establishments as Poundland, Superdrug and Sainsburys – terminal cancer patients with more than 6 months to live could be expected to spend their remaining months, not with family and loved ones, but instead stacking shelves or flipping burgers.

People with jobs have almost as much to fear from the scheme as those out of work. Unions and many economists see the scheme is a way of replacing waged labour with unwaged, a plan to push wages further down as part of the “race to the bottom.”

The campaign against Workfare spread like wildfire on Twitter and Facebook, demos have been held around the UK outside (and inside) participating companies, and a case had been brought against it on the grounds that Workfare was against international covenants and human rights legislation on forced labour.

And then, starting about two weeks ago, cracks started appearing in Workfare. First charities (including Scope, Marie Curie and Shelter) pulled out and condemned the scheme. After the high street charities pulled out, high street retailers started to get cold feet. Sainsburys tried to quietly extricate themselves from the scheme, Tescos, Superdrug and eventually even Poundland pulled out, leaving the Tories red faced and spluttering ‘job snobs.’