The Stool Pigeon

The Stool Pigeon, PO Box 52129, London, E2 7XY
editor at thestoolpigeon dot co dot uk

Sir, last week I found the last dusty box of my old stuff at my mum’s and brought it back to Notts. It was full of old Viz comics I thought I’d lost. Ah, what a delight.

I decided to get all my issues of Viz together and make a list to see how far off a full set I was, minus the really rare early ones I’ll never likely afford. I haven’t missed a single issue since I started getting it in 1987, but knew some were missing. I took a look on eBay to look for odd back issues to fill gaps and found a guy selling some single issues I’d lost from the late ’90s for just a penny each - “grab a bargain” was his slogan - and I bought the three copies I needed.

His postage charge listed on each item was £2.50 (a bit steep for a comic, even recorded delivery), so I emailed him, presuming he’d combine postage for three separate sales. The twat said no.

“Combined postage is not part of the deal,” he said and demanded £7.50 P&P. I thought he was kidding, and said as much, calling it a con. His next reply was to say that the postage cost included “packaging and the cost of going to the post office etc.”. This caused me to laugh at him (via email) and tell him again he was really taking the piss and to email me a proper postage cost for around 100g of old paper and ink, and not to try and charge me for his walk up the high street. It’s not the £7.50, it’s the principle and all that, y’know...

He says, “Do you want me to raise a ‘non-paying bidder alert’ against you?”

“No,” I replied, “I want you to stop being childish and give me a sensible total postage cost for these so-called bargains, seeing as you’re going to put them all in one envelope and thus cheat me.” He never replied and it went quiet for two days.

I emailed again earlier today. I said he could have the £7.53, but ONLY if he put each comic in polythene, then in a separate, brand new padded envelope with card stiffeners, and sent each one via recorded delivery on three separate days, as per his claim for the silly money. If he refused, he could report me to eBay like a big gaylord for the non-payment of £0.03.

His wife just emailed all of the people on their list of current buyers to say her husband has fallen into serious ill health and not to send any due payments.
That’ll teach the penny-pinching fucker.

Does anyone have Viz issues 118, 127 and 144 for sale?

Simon B. Barker-Allan,
Coventry

Sir, an open letter to Son of Dave: I thoroughly enjoy your columns for The Stool Pigeon and usually find myself in concurrence with your sentiments, particularly those in the last issue regarding cultural shoplifting and that most awful of tribes, the hippies. I do, however, take some small issue regarding your idea that Al Jolson got it so very wrong, while Keith Richards got it so very right. As a fellow contributor and connoisseur of vintage American culture, I feel driven to counter.

How, as one the biggest entertainers of the 20th Century and star of the first talking movie, do you presume that Al Jolson got it “so very wrong”? A rhetorical question of course. It is because he is remembered now, by our society addled with white guilt, only for his appearances in blackface - and thus he is considered merely a freakish racist embarrassment. My presumption is that you, like most, know nothing about the minstrelsy which launched Jolson to stardom. I do not mean to defend it, but at least to raise a small understanding of it.

Minstrelsy was America’s first form of mass entertainment, created in the late 1700s not by raving southern hangmen, but by the same genteel northern classes that ended slavery. Nobody knows quite why certain theatrical performers began wearing burnt cork and singing quaint, idyllic songs about a black life that never really existed, but it became a convention that travelled and certainly caught hold. Minstrel songs like ‘Swanee’ are perhaps the only American songs in history - the national anthem is actually of British origin - to have been known by virtually every member of its nation.

Not all minstrels wore blackface and, more remarkably, not all blackface minstrels were white. There were a great amount of black minstrel performers, indeed whole troupes. Black stars of early jazz and blues, such as Cab Calloway and Bessie Smith, began their careers wearing blackface on their own black faces, as did the great Rufus Thomas. Though this doesn’t necessarily prove anything per se, it does raise a very important point regarding the idea of minstrelsy: it was a masquerade, and little more - a bizarre but benign mimicry of black plantation life as seen through the eyes of nostalgic songwriters, many of whom had never been outside of their own city districts. Though minstrelsy naturally had detractors, by and large neither performers nor audiences of any colour thought much beyond the mask or the entertainment represented - nor did it steal its material from elsewhere. It was what it was and it begat the recording industry to follow: jazz, country, blues.

What Keith Richards and his weakling cohorts represented at the outset of their careers, however, was something more sinister. Not only were they mimicking a culture of which they could never be part - and doing it pretty badly - but colluded with their label, Decca, to ensure their burgeoning fanbase were none the wiser. At a time when US R&B records were practically impossible to import, they would buy the British rights to the black American songs they covered and shelve them for the maximum five years, thus depriving audiences the opportunity to hear superior originals like the Valentinos’ ‘It’s All Over Now’ and ensuring that their own sham copies would be hits. Borrowing and stealing has been an accepted feature of the entertainment business since paper was invented, but this sort of obfuscation is devious and low indeed.

Daddy Bones,
Nottingham

Mr Bones, well researched and argued. The brighter side of minstrelism, the darker side of British rock. But I’m not interested in the facts exactly. I’m just trying to get a good argument. It’s hard to actually despise anyone with a successful body of work. Even Madonna. It’s just music. I’m sorry Mr Jolson. And I’m sorry for sucking up to the Rolling Stones. Shame on them for doing all those things you say they did.

Son of Dave,
London

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