Using your telephone correctly

Hello Johnson.

Can you telephone call Miss James using the telephone please? If you have never used a telephone, here's what you do - pick up the handset, or receiver, and place one end to your ear. You should hear a low buzz. Then swing your face towards the concentric numbered buttons (you will see them numbered 1-0.with one in the top left, and 0 at the bottom). You need to mash your face into the buttons the same amount of times as there are letters in Miss James' name, so that's fifty nine face mashes. It'll hurt a bit, but don't worry. This is entirely natural.

When you finish mashing, you will hear a ringing tone (provided you still have the handset pressed up against your ear - if you have dropped the handset to facilitate face mashing, pick it back up and replace it against either lobe). The ringing may continue for an indeterminable amount of time, as it traverses through a semi-cut wormhole spliced through the medium of space matter, scouring the edges of the chaos void that exists in the multiverse separating both you and Miss James. There is no telling how long it may take the telephone call to make this journey, but whilst the journey is being made, you yourself, as the source of the call, will slip outside of time, so even though it may seem like the ringing has carried on for three or four months, it will, in reality, in our reality, have only been a few seconds.

After the call is made, the telephocommunication unit placed on Miss James' desk will emit a high pitched ring. This means that something has gone horribly amiss during the telephone calls epic journey through the multiverse, and the phone on Mis James' desk is likely to explode. Miss James will thus try and evacuate her desk and her office, for fear that the telephone call, whilst making it's journey, ahas picked up a 'hanger on', a kind of unwanted hitchhiking transdimensional horror, much like the one seen in Buffy The Vampire Slayer season 6 episode 3, when Buffy, newly reincarnated and returned from a heavenly plane, picks up a demonic hitchhiker on her way back, and unleashes it on the somehow still blissfully unaware town of Sunnydale. But don't worry, Buffy dealt with it. admirably.

So, I hope this helps! In no time at all, you will be a Telephone Master, and you will be able to make upwards of three calls a week, and you won't have to wear your protective headgear and biohazardous suit any more!

Congratuations, Cockwallader Merryweather Submersible Cholmondesley-Talyor Daddy-O Grooverider Johnson. You can now call yourself a woman.

Leclerq Reviews: Sam Taylor Wood - Exhibition at the Baltic

Good day my friends.

Today I review the powerful work of burgeoning artist/photographer Sam Taylor-Wood, a woman with art in her mind and thankless fans drinking her every word like the blood of Trevor Nelson at her feet. Sam Taylor-Wood has presented a selection of photographs at nouveau art-house The Baltic Mill and her season runs from 17th May until 3rd September.

Sam Taylor-Wood, who but yesterday informed me she insists on the name 'Mistress Overgrown' during all formal interviews, whilst we sipped Campari and Gin over Ice at Brian Sewell's house with Ivorian street-singer and wall builder Gilles Yapi Yapo, claims the photographs and moving art tore her soul like a mother tears the paper of a bastardised child's school report - full of callousness and hate, but with a mixture of happy inside. I did not believe her.

Taylor-Wood insists on a blasé approach to her synthi-photographicalistic imagery. Her whims take her like a small child takes a jam-tart from her mother's fresh-smelling baketray at seven every summer's morning. Her faults lie in not pinning down an idea, but instead, she places her brain at our mercy, fingering it like some devilish putty, shaping it to our ideas of hatred, compassion, honesty and lies. Her work screams of maturity left at the bottom of the garden whilst she treats her three headless dogs to a spot of lunch on a hill in Surrey. If I were to liken her work to one of the nineteenth century impressionists, I would most certainly do so to Constable, whose skills with the lithograph are not easily forgotten unless one has too much sherry. Both Constable's and Taylor-Wood's work give the impression of each artist facing east whilst the wind drives northwards. Both speak of unspeakable teachings in a wild world inhabited only by the nightmarish fantastical beings we all see deep in our nighttime slumber. Both artists display enormous balls. Or Taylor-Wood would do, if she had but the fortune to be born with a set.

The show itself is of a nautical theme, but with humourous overtones of a political nature, but without the politics. When I viewed it, a woman was heard to remark about the lack of boats, but was shushed into relative silence by a brute of a Mexican, whom I felt was there for the chance to wear his traditional sombrero without seeming foolish. It did not work for foolishness was on his face when all asked where the boats are. Of course, I spoke up and claimed that Taylor-Wood had meant the exhibition to be entirely metaphysical, that the photographs and cinematography were completed entirely by another artist, one Gerald Hughes of Bootle, near Liverpool, thus highlighting, Taylor-Wood claimed, the power of suggestion over the infinite practicality of the subtle cynicisms of the human psyche. All silenced after my proclamation and I breathed deeply, tasting the air of mystery, confusion and the hint of unwashed hoi-palloi in the air.

The artist, despite our acquaintance on the art circuit of London, Harrow, Eton and Swindon has refused to have her work shown here, so I shall instead show the true meaning and behind a selection of her work.

Photograph one: Self Portrait Suspended IV, 2004

In this photograph, Taylor-Wood shows herself levitating magically above the sparse wooden floor of a drug-den in London. I feel this was not meant as a release from the human form, but a statement against the corporalisation of Asia, and the desperation felt by the inhabitants of entire towns eaten up after the pursuit of money. I am sure you can see why, my depiction of this image is as man in a beret.

Photograph two: Self Portrait Suspended V, 2004

This photograph was pretty much exactly the same as photograph one, and, to be honest, I felt somewhat ripped off. As such, my interpretation remains exactly the same:

Photograph three: Bram Stoker's Chair VI, 2005

Taylor-Wood's third piece tore into me like a sword brandished by a man in league with Danny Glover. The shocking yet gentle image filled my head with the impossible infinity that art offers. I felt I was looking through a mirror into the centre of the world, where tunnels flocked into the head of every citizen of Oman and Papua New Guinea. I heard their life through a synthetic symphony played by a one handed George Formby wielding a Xylophone with the Middle 'C' missing. This photo gave me a reason to live until tomorrow, which is why I feel I can only interpret it as a man with a beret on.

Photograph four: Prelude in Air, 2005

A childish image of nausea, Cardiff city docks and homoeroticism balanced on a shonky chair. This is the height of Taylor-Wood's almost adolescent cry of wanting to be simultaneously ignored yet noticed across all of society, save, as is clearly obvious, the Quakers. I felt her childlike innocent reverberating off of an invisible air shield set up by a bucketfull of evil. With such feelings swirling around the photograph like a lavatory flushed on the equator, I feel the only fair way to interpret the photograph is as follows.

Photograph five: The Last Century, 2005

As these denizens of the past quaff their barbaric ales and meads, the chirpy smile of the right hand figure cuts a vicious contrast to the almost Gallic nonchalance of the bearded one, a clear comparison to biblical author Ian Fleming's alter ego, James Bond. The disparaging glances of the background cast merely advance this fact. My interpretation of this piece cuts through the quibble and pierces the heart of the matter like a art-fuelled dart fired straight from a cannon made from half-filled paint tins.

Photograph six: Still Life, 2001

This is a picture of fruit. I have farted out better photographs than this. I can only interpret this as one thing.

And there we have it. Art has been on display here, and analysed like the dead at a crime scene. Taylor-Wood fought the good fight, with a rapier made from angst and a shield from the sheet music for Lionel Richie's "Hello". She fought against a wall of oppression and inebriation the like of which has not been seen since the signing of the Magna Carta. Art took on art and I feel the real winner was us, the meagre peasants supping at the breasts of culture. I have been Romain Leclerq, you have been barely worthy of my presence. Another day of art ends - let us hope tomorrow will occur much like today, with time running in the correct direction and not disappearing chastise my father like it did yesterday. Gentlemen and women, I bid you farewell.