An email to Banksy

to: faq@banksy.co.uk
date: 11 July 2014 00:08
subject: A tale from Glastonbury 2004, or was it 2005? 2006?!

Hey Banksy,

I have a story from Glastonbury that it's fair to say I've been dining out on for quite a while so I thought I'd share it with you, saying as you're kind of the main protagonist.

It was the year you painted lots of Guantanamo inmates and a few coppers doing The Conga through The Glade. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure you did something on the perimeter fence next to the Stone Circle too. It was a good year. I don't think it rained much either, but my memory has some blank spots. It could have pissed it down all weekend to be honest.

Police line dancing, do not cross.

Having been a fan of your work for quite a while I was pretty chuffed that you were painting Glasto that year. An amateur, I brought a load of paint with the intention of making a mess but didn't really get round to it. Part timer. 

If I think about it, I imagine it was probably quite a nice time for you. A time before celebrities drove lorries of cash to auction houses to buy your paintings. A time before people removed walls so they could sell the render you'd rendered valuable by spraying paint on it. But who am I to know? Lorry loads of cash sound pretty sweet to me.

Anyway, people removing walls bearing your work brings me to the crux of my story. 

That year you also did some rats with Martini glasses and cable-tied them to fences around the 'VIP' camping areas (I swear I'm not a stalker - I just like creative vandalism). While looking at one of these pieces a thought occured to me. 

"It would be fucking awesome to have a Banksy on my bedroom wall at uni. Ok, the rats with Martini glasses are hardly coppers doing The Conga, but all the same, it would look pretty fucking sweet."

Just three cable ties. The only challenge was how I'd get it home.

Now, at the time, not that many people knew who Banksy was. Ok, not that many people know who Banksy is today, but you know what I mean. This was pre-Gaza wall and celebrities with lorry loads of cash. 

Regardless, I had a couple of little black books that were starting to come away at the spine and was quite keen to have a painting by the same person on my wall.

So I was in a quandry. I really wanted this painting, and I had a penknife in my pocket that would have made quick work of the cable-ties. On the other hand, a wheatpaste I'd bodged a couple of months earlier had disappeared wholesale and I was pretty sure someone had peeled it off and taken it home with them.

Brown Paper Plant: My first (and soon to be gone) wheatpaste.

So I'm standing there, stoned and indecisive as ever. I rationalised. Argued with myself. Gave myself a talking to.

"Street art is for the street (or a field in Somerset)," I said to nobody. 

"It's meant to be in the street and should stay in the street. It's not meant to be on my bedroom wall, it's meant to be on this fence around what's probably not actually a VIP camping area at all but a muddy field for the workers to sleep in."

And I walked away. I left the painted board cable-tied to the fence and wandered off.

Needless to say, a couple of years later when I was skint and newspapers were reporting that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt has spent a seven-figure sum on one of your paintings I was pretty pissed.

"Fuck!" I thought. "FUCK!!! What the fucking fuck was I thinking?! Why the fuck did I have to get all rational and moralistic about this. If they paid seven figures, a little rat must be worth at least four or five. BALLS!"

But time heals wounds and dries paint. Stories started appearing of people stealing your work in the middle of the night, and I realised I'd made the right decision. I'm glad I wasn't one of those twats, I'd never have forgiven myself if I'd accidentally put myself in league with the wankers who remove perfectly good walls from perfectly shitty streets and put them in fucking art galleries.

Yes, I'm sure the pile of cash would have made it easy to forget about that, but that's not really the point is it?

Sincerely,

Tom


PS. Having checked through my photos, it would appear that I was wrong about the rain that year.

Note to self: Never camp at the bottom of the hill.

Euro 2012: England take a leaf out of Newcastle's book

All talk during Euro 2012 has been about the amazing team spirit in the England camp, but the parallels with Newcastle United's amazing 5th place season don't stop there...

England go into their quarter-final against Italy tomorrow in buoyant mood, and why not? The team entered Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine with low expectations back at home, no-one expected the team to perform, few thought they would escape the group stages – yet they've proved everyone wrong.

The negative publicity and burden of media scrutiny that dogged the national side in the past have all but disappeared and the players seem to be more relaxed than under any manager since Terry Venables.

Even Rio Ferdinand says that England seem united and the cliques that used to exist in the squad have disappeared, so it's no wonder that they're fancied to overcome the Azzurri and set up a mouth-watering semi-final against Germany. Deja vu anyone?

Now it may just be me, but there are some major similarities with Newcastle United here – in both their inability to meet expectations in the past and their new-found zest for the game.

 One of Newcastle's major problems in the past – apart from those created by Freddy Shepherd and the bad decisions made by Mike Ashley at the beginning of his tenure - was the intense expectation that Kevin Keegan's amazing (first) reign brought to both the fans and the media.

We would become easily frustrated when we weren't seeing incredible no-holds-barred displays of attacking football, and the press and pundits would love sticking the knife in at every available opportunity.

 As much as it may have been a mental issue, this was one of the biggest obstacles facing England under Sven Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello, and we all know how successful their respective reigns were.

But my, haven't things changed.

At Newcastle and England, out went a lot of older players with big reputations who hadn't delivered much except inflated egos and sense of entitlement, in came a new no-nonsense manager nobody much fancied and players who just wanted to do their best for themselves and the fans.

Expectations fell and the hyper-critical media coverage stopped. With the team suddenly an underdog, a newfound togetherness appeared in the squad that became the backbone of the team.

It was this immense spirit and commitment to teammates last season that helped Newcastle punch well above their weight to finish fifth, and it seems as though the same is now happening with England.

There is a new sense of team spirit for Roy Hodgson's England

 

All talk during Euro 2012 so far has been about the great atmosphere within the England camp, and this surely has a lot to do with the absence of pressures that existed in the past.

There is something about being the underdog that is great for team morale, and Newcastle thrived in the role last year as England seem to be now.

Ashley Cole summed it up perfectly speaking to the media yesterday when he said: "We are like 11 bulldogs who never give up and basically will die on the pitch for each other. So far it seems to be working." 

Hopefully this can prove as successful for the Three Lions as it did for Newcastle in the Premier League last season.

Graffiti: Interview with Gone 161

This interview was originally published in Novel Magazine's July/August 'subcultures and the subversive' issue...

Gone 161 is the current alias of one of the most prolific and revered graffiti writers currently active in the North East. He first began spray-painting in his early teens with friends he met BMXing and his ten year career has taken him travelling to paint all over the UK and Europe. I tracked him down late one night to chat about the most subversive of art forms.





How would you describe your style of graffiti?
That’s a tough one. It’s a bit of a mixed bag of things I like really, but it’s an odd one. When I think about the graffiti writers that I like my work is nothing like theirs so I’m not even sure if I paint the style of graffiti that I like. A lot of it just comes naturally, certain shapes and letter forms that you find yourself repeating.
You would have to list influences to go in to a real style analysis but I guess first and foremost it’s the people you paint with and who you watched get up around you. And the people you hold in high esteem - I like a lot of French graffiti, a lot of Scandinavian and Italian graffiti styles too.

You got in to graffiti through BMXing. Do you see them as part of the same subculture?
Graffiti doesn’t really go in the same bracket as an extreme sport like BMXing because there’s not really a sporting element to it, but then again I would argue there’s not really that much of a sporting element to BMXing either really, especially with street riding and that sort of thing.
They’re both hobbys but there’s a lot more to it than that too. They’re lifestyles. I guess there’s an element of danger to both which compels people to push themselves and to get more involved in it. It’s quite empowering, when you risk a lot for something it becomes quite worthwhile in a way.





Do you think the empowerment comes out of rebellion and a rejection of social norms?
I guess a little bit. I never liked football when I was growing up and really disassociated myself from it because of the rivalry and everything that it brought with it where I grew up. I was always looking for something else and had a lot of energy to be used so BMXing and then graffiti as a follow on from that were natural progressions.
Riding a BMX you were always looked at as a bit of a freak and it was the same with graffiti, it was a bit of an oddball thing to do and that was nice. There weren’t as many clean cut rules to it so you had to find your own path in a way and that was exciting.

Given the massive risks involved, what are the rewards that make it worthwhile?
The rewards are really an inner thing. There’s a lot of satisfaction and feeling of self achievement. You know you haven’t wasted another night drinking where you’ve just spent all your money with no memory of it. You’ve been out and done something constructive. You can get a photograph and document it. If you know you’ve pulled off what you planned then you can get a deep sense of reward.
Obviously if you’re painting for your peers and an older, respected writer turns around and says they’ve seen what you did and it’s good then you get a little buzz inside but really you’ve got to be motivated for yourself. The people who come and go early on are the ones who are painting for their peers. The ones who stick around are the ones who are doing it for themselves because it’s what they love and it’s what they want to do with their spare time really.

How do you feel about the public perception that graffiti is nothing more than ‘pissing on lampposts’?
‘Pissing on lampposts’ sort of brutalises it a little bit but it is a brutal thing in a way. It’s a very selfish thing. Graffiti writers certainly don’t ask for any permission or approval. You do it for yourself and for other graffiti writers so in a way it becomes your own language.
Tags are never going to be understood by anyone who’s never done them before because to the untrained eye they’re not very aesthetically pleasing. Once you get into it it’s like learning to read another language. You can read it and understand it and you can see how it’s been achieved, the materials used, the people - perhaps from different countries - who have done them. You can literally see how people have moved, who’s passed through a certain part of the city centre that weekend and it’s a really addictive thing.
Personally I really find it adds to a place. I’d never want to see a tag on the side of a beautiful piece of architecture, but at the same time there’s nothing worse than a grey wall. If that grey wall is covered in graffiti, whether that’s by children or activist students or graffiti writers or whatever, that’s better than a grey wall in my opinion.





Is it easier to be a graffiti artist these days than it used to be?
There are as many pros and cons for someone who is coming up these days. All of the paint is there, the quality is so much better so you can paint quicker and easier than anyone would have imagined ten years ago. At the same time the levels of security have risen with things like CCTV, motion sensors and DNA technology.
The game is constantly advancing. It is as much as a battle as before. For every step the graffiti market makes to make the products better the technology as far as the law goes are advancing as well. Especially in England I feel that we’re seeing the tail end of serious graffiti and that we’ll be one of the first countries to eradicate it completely.

So is graffiti in a sense a game?
It’s definitely a game and I don’t think anyone is clearer with that than the authorities themselves. It’s cat and mouse, though I’m not sure exactly who is the cat and who is the mouse.

Where is the Newcastle graffiti scene at now?
A lot of people would comment that the scene is dead, that it used to be so much better and there did used to be quite a strong scene in Newcastle. It took a bit of a dive but of late I’ve seen it start to perk up a bit and there are a lot of young guys out there doing good stuff.
There’s a bit of a divide now coming between who is a writer and who is an artist. It’s an easier thing to do now, you can go and paint various permission walls and put your photos on the internet or send them to magazines and be praised for that and have that as your niche and be very happy with it. On the other side though there are always going to be the people who are going only do illegals who will go out and perhaps stir things up a bit and maybe they don’t have the same access to materials and that sort of money who are limited to the paint they can use and the time they have. I think there is going to be a cleaner divide between artistic graffiti and the more vandalistic side of it.





It seems like the quality of graffiti getting painted has declined over the years, what do you think?
It’s a problem with the buff (graffiti clean-up crews) essentially. There were pieces that were there for ten or fifteen years, maybe done when there was a lot more time to work cos security wasn’t as tight so they could spend all night there painting and they were pieces that I think everyone came to love in some way shape or form. But no the buff is so efficient that walla literally get cleaned on an almost daily basis so no-one is going to invest the time and effort in doing a 30 colour piece to see it cleaned off within four or five days, that would be madness.
That’s what the buff has brought unfortunately. The graffiti still gets done but it’s brought the quality down to chrome and blacks, throw-ups and tags. These things have replaced the beautiful full-colour pieces we used to see. It’s city economics really.

Do you think you’ll ever reach a point where you feel you’ve accomplished what you set out to accomplish as a graffiti writer?
It’s a difficult one ‘cos you set yourself goals and when you achieve those things you think somewhere in your mind you’d be content but, you know, you paint a whole car and then you want to paint a full colour whole car. You might paint the tube in London and then the next step is you want to paint every tube system in the UK and that’s the problem. There’s always a next step and a next barrier.
I can’t think of any example where someone would consider that they’ve completed a perfect lifetime of work, there will always be a new frontier. As you age and your tolerances grow you find yourself pushing yourself further and further so that barrier is set further and further back. It’s just when you decide to call it quits really, or when someone else decides to call it quits for you - which in the case of graffiti does occasionally happen unfortunately.

So does it become addictive?
Everything is addictive in a sense, but graffiti is like anything else in that it becomes more enjoyable once you start to become good at it and it’s only after those initial formative years that you gain skill and if you persist at it you can really feel the rewards.
The first time I ever did it the paint I had just blew up in my hands. I managed to get the first line of my name up but that was it the first time. I knew from that moment that I could do it though and knew it was something I was going to try to do so got more paint and more paint and it just spiralled from there really.

What do you think of painting legal walls?
There is still a level of satisfaction with permission walls but it’s never the same satisfaction as when you’ve done something under the cover of darkness. You go back the next day to see it in all its glory. Maybe there are a couple of mistakes that you hadn’t noticed but that’s part of the parcel.
The anticipation is one of the best parts of doing it. When you go back to see the work the next day and you don’t know how the colours have sat next to each other until you can see it in the day light.

Leslie Grantham Interview...

"...WE ALL DO SOMETHING STUPID"


A bright summer afternoon casts shadows in the narrow hallways of the neat Edwardian terraced houses on Ilford Road in Newcastle. Beams of light pierce the musty blackness and floating dust is illuminated as if shards of atoms vibrating in mid-air.

Leslie Grantham emerges from the dingy light, bare floorboards creaking under his feet. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he looks a lot taller than he does on television.

Appearing to stare through me, he stretches out a hand and says, with a barely noticeable smirk: “So, you’re the journalist who wants to interview me, eh?”

That same subtle slyness, at first it’s impossible to tell if this is the notorious ‘Dirty Den’ or the actor who simply played the part.

Grantham is temporarily lodging while his theatre tour of Dad’s Army: Marches On visits Newcastle and has been upstairs relaxing in his attic bedroom ahead of the final evening performance.

“Newcastle is a great city”, he says finally. “It is a fantastic, vibrant city. But you don’t want to go out on your own too late at night because you just get knocked over by the swell of people having a good time.”

It must be odd to be Leslie Grantham. As acting careers go, those which start in prison drama groups don’t usually end with a name in lights, but then Leslie Grantham doesn’t really do ‘usually’.

As he sits solemnly in his crisp stone-washed jeans and blue polo shirt he comes across as a man who has not only been there and done that, but he’s worn the T-shirt for so long it wore out and ended up being cut up to make dusters.

Playing ‘Dirty’ Den Watts in Eastenders made Grantham perhaps the most watched soap star in Britain. Some 30million people watched the 1986 Christmas special where he served his on-screen wife divorce papers, and when he returned to the show in 2003 following a 15 year absence 17million tuned in.

Typically though, he is non-plussed about this. “Sometimes being a celebrity can be a bit of a pain in the arse, but if I’ve brought a bit of pleasure into someone’s life then hey, great.”

“If people want to call me ‘Dirty Den’, or ‘Watts’ or whatever, then it’s fine”, he says. Then he adds, perhaps aware of the preconceptions people who know his history have of him, “At least I’ve done something positive people will remember me for.”

Amidst his deadpan charm, it’s easy to forget that this man is a murderer. In 1966 Grantham was a 19-year-old soldier in Osnabrück, Germany, and during a botched robbery his gun went off and killed a taxi driver. Sentenced to life, he spent a decade in English prisons after a dishonorable discharge from the army.

It would be fair to say that the former star of Eastenders has had it pretty good considering, and he’s the first to admit it.

“I was just very lucky,” he says. “I don’t get big headed or anything, I just sort of think I am lucky. And as long as they pay my wages its fine.”

These days he almost seems to just play ‘Leslie Grantham’ and there is a noticeable element of his personality mirrored in the roles he gets, probably stemming from his most famous casting.

Grantham is a hugely popular panto villain and he positively revels in it. It’s as if he were born to be the panto bad guy. He has played a crook in The Bill and recently had a cameo role as a decidedly dodgy geezer in the slasher film Deadtime, due for release in 2011. Even his part in Dad’s Army is as Private Walker, the wheeler-dealer Cockney.


“I wouldn’t say I’m typecast, I have done other things,” he argues. “But you get to my age and you just want to have fun and play fun parts. Playing bad boys are the fun parts, trust me.”

Make no mistake, Grantham knows how lucky a boy he’s been. From getting his big break on Dr Who in 1984, to recovering from that cringe-worthy moment involving a webcam in an Eastenders’ dressing room.

“I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve been out of drama school for 25 years and I’ve always had work, but it could finish in September and then I’d be out of work and down the dole queue.”

For those that are unaware, Grantham left Eastenders under a cloud after being caught on a webcam in a very compromising situation.

While he maintains that he was set up in a tabloid sting, one cannot help but feel that the “stupid thing” that “everybody does” would have been far more painful if Jane, his wife of almost 30 years and mother to his three children, had been less forgiving.

“It was a set-up,” he exclaims. “I shouldn’t have gone down that road, but we all do something stupid.”

Typically resilient, Grantham has put that shameful incident behind him and remains defiant in its wake. He is now planning to make a TV drama out of his experience, aiming to highlight the behavior of the tabloids he detests.

“I’m working on a script about it,” he says.

“Because I’m touring I haven’t sat down and written too much, but I’ve got it all there. It won’t be a personal one, it won’t be about me, but there have been several guys who have been caught up in tabloid stings over the years and I want to explore the culture and consequences of that.”

In this light, he is scathing of the way British culture, epitomized by television, has headed of late.

“It’s going to be a drama, but drama and comedy shouldn’t be separate. You watch American drama and it has comedy in it, but you watch British comedy and it doesn’t have any comedy in it.”

“British TV is just not very good at the moment. It’s full of reality television and is celebrity led. It is style over content rather than content over style, and the only one who loses out is the audience” he says.

“They’re being told what to watch and because they watch it all the time they think ‘oh yeah, that’s what I want to watch’.”

This is a problem he sees in his old haunt, Albert Square. “It was great in those days, we were doing brilliant scripts written by two brilliant people and we were only doing two episodes a week.”

“Now they’re doing four episodes a week I think the audience get cheated because it becomes dilutes and there’s nothing for them to rush home for because every story line comes around every four or five weeks.”

Sometimes Grantham is so dry you feel you can actually see him crinkling and cracking as water evaporates from his pores. It’s a wicked sense of humor that masquerades as cynicism.

“My dad used to have a saying: ‘if you offer a starving man dog poo often enough, eventually he’ll eat it’.”

For this reason, he promises he won’t be coming to a reality television screen near you any time soon.

“I keep turning down the jungle, I just couldn’t do it. Or Big Brother. I couldn’t be doing it. I’d be the only person I’d know wouldn’t I?”

His take-it-as-it-comes attitude is refreshing in the age of bargain-bin celebrity. “I’ve been offered it every year since the first one. I keep saying no, and they keep offering me more money, an extraordinary amount of money, but I just couldn’t do it.”

Then, in that sardonic tone again, he says: “I’d probably end up throwing half of ‘em, including Ant and Dec, in with the crocodiles. That would make good television though wouldn’t it? ‘Come Dine With Me on Ant and Dec’.”

Drunken Logic...

Hooray. Scotland have announced their plans to create a minimum price per unit of alcohol to try and curb the harmful effects of binge-drinking. Is it just me, or is this just one more example of the ridiculous approach UK governments have to alcohol?

I get the logic. Every weekend A&E departments up and down the country are overrun with alcohol-related injuries and police cells overcrowded with alcohol-related crimes. Brits just don't seem to understand how to have a drink without going mental and drinking themselves to death. Something simply must be done to put a dampener on this. And obviously increasing the price of alcohol means that alcoholics people can't afford as much booze so won't be able to get as drunk while alcoholics' livers will survive a few years more.

Wait a second. If a bottle of scotch is going to cost £4 more, surely that just means your average street-corner wino is going to have £4 less to spend on food. You know, that stuff essential to living that contains the nutrition bodies needs to continue fighting the against the vagaries of alcoholism. Counter-productive much? People aren't going to drink less because booze costs more, they're just going to have less money to spend on other things and be more likely to resort to crime to get it. Duh!

The British attitude to alcohol has gone mad. Instead of sensible and measured discussion, stricter and stricter laws and policies are being introduced in an attempt to pour water on the fire...

Three women walk into a supermarket to buy wine and some flowers for a friend's birthday.
The check-out girl says: "Do you have any ID?".
Two of the girls say: "Yeah, we're 27, here it is."
The checkout-girl says: "I'm sorry but I can't serve you alcohol because your other quite-clearly also 27-year-old friend, who isn't even buying the wine, doesn't have any ID with her. Bring your passport next time."

The bad joke above happened last weekend and illustrates just how crazily alcohol is treated in the UK. Three adult females on their way to a friend's house cannot buy wine and flowers because ultimately the shop are scared they could end up with a whopping fine. Does this mean if I take my six-year-old into a shop I can't buy booze because I might be buying it for him? It's exactly the same.

Civil liberties group the Manifesto Club just published a report calling for the abolition of the ridiculously strict ID policies which argues that over-zealous ID checking is 'infantilising' young adults. Their research showed most people in their late-twenties have been asked for ID more in the last two years than when they were 21. With the Tories plan to double the fine for selling alcohol to an under-age person to £20,000 this is only set to continue.

Instead of accepting that alcohol is a normal part of everyday adult life that requires a learned education from childhood, our policies are antagonising young adults while making alcohol inaccessible to children thereby giving it some undeserved mythical status that leads to a lack of understanding in later years.

Take a trip to France or Spain, and their alcohol legislation is way more relaxed than it is in the UK, yet they don't have the same sort of problems we have here. Ask someone in France what the legal age to buy alcohol is and they shrug and chuckle at the of there needing to be a legal age in the first place.

In the UK most youngsters first taste of booze comes after badgering someone outside the offy to go in and get them 2 litres of gut-rotting 'cider' that they drink while spinning round in circles down the park with their mates. Their second taste is when it all gets promptly brought back up all over the girl they were hoping to get lucky with.

In France the first taste is usually a small glass of nice red wine over dinner with their parents at the age of about 8. Notice the difference?

With a culture where quality is instilled it becomes more about drinking one or two glasses of a nice vintage as opposed to one or two litres of alcoholic chemicals. Quality versus quantity. Enjoyment versus inebriation. Naturally in this environment a responsible attitude to alcohol is fostered.

The whole thing is a fiasco. Local pubs - traditionally a safe environment for youngsters to get an education in alcohol while drinking shandies with their dad - are closing at a rate of knots because duty is so high they can't operate at a profit and there's no way they'd let a 16-year-old sit with their dad learning how to have a social drink. As a result all they can do is learn how to projectile vomit and get into fights after enjoying a bottle of cider down the park with their mates.

Cheap alcohol might be blamed for many of the problems and if people can get pissed on pocket-money then there is an issue there, but the real issue is surely the engendered culture caused by the irrationally strict policies and unreasonable duties. With alcohol prices constantly increasing an affordability gap has emerged that mirrors all of the problems caused by the usual wealth-related social divisions. There's a reason alcoholics drink bargain sherry, super-strength cider and special brew, and it's got nothing to do with the taste. Getting drunk as cheaply as possible will always occur, making booze cost a bit more won't change that, it will just re-jig the order of what is the cheapest to get drunk on.

This whole hysteria needs to stop. It has got to the stage where three women are not able to go into a supermarket and buy a bottle of wine, because one of them, a sodding accountant, hasn't thought to bring her passport with her.

I mean, what is this? Immigration control? We're talking about buying a bottle of wine, not an AK47.

Solving World Peace Just Got Easier...

A new brand of World Peacekeeper is in operation, but they're not endorsed by the UN. That much is obvious, they're Made in China for a start.

Spotted in Fenwicks - a large department store in central Newcastle with a toy floor that every parent in the city is acquainted with - these 'World Peacekeepers' come equipped to do way more than keep the peace.

Complete with bad-ass assault rifle, Rambo-esque hunting knife, 'real working parachute' and gas mask, this guy is prepared for any situation. Most probably one which involves killing enough innocent civilians until peace and order are restored by default.

With that kind of weaponry you certainly wouldn't be rushing to disagree with his notion of peace. He's not exactly Ghandi is he.

I mean, what the hell does he need a gas mask for?! Just in case the country he is trying to keep peace in, after parachuting in armed to the eyeballs, decides to go all Saddam. Hmm, fair point.

If that is the case though, he should be named 'US Marine Corps', not pissing 'peackeeper'. Perhaps he is actually a US Marine, only suffering from PTSD he has taken to calling himself a peacekeeper as a way of internally justifying his actions.

But apparently this wannabe-Action Man with a personality complex is suitable for kids aged 3+. Seriously, what parent in their right mind would buy it for their kid? Saying that, maybe none have. It was in the bargain bin with 50% off. At least he's cheap.

I just can't help but wonder what kind of message this sends to the kids playing with it about the world we live in? "Hey Barbie, look at me. I'm a peacekeeper. Check how big my gun is. Don't you dig my skinhead? I shoot people and make the world peaceful."

Faces in Odd Places #2

Found lurking in the toilets at The Baltic - An automated toilet air-freshener or a goateed robot?