upon departure

The oddest thing about departure is the knowing that there is no knowing if you will return; and if you shall not return. I still recollect as clear as a bell the day I packed and left Montevideo, all done in a hurry, before Leo and Sylvia arrived to pick me up and drive me to the airport with H. Jorge in the background. Jaime Roos playing. The kick of loss, stab of tears, but through a smile, through gratitude for all that I had been given; knowing that I knew not whether there was more, knowing only what had been, grieving its loss, refusing to foreclose on its future.

on what we choose to write

It may be that the blog has been created for a new generation of people/ writers. Those who do not choose at all. Who merely are/ write. Who see no difference between the two.

on pain and misunderstanding

The blog has in no way alleviated pain or reduced misunderstandings. If anything, on many occasions, it has exacerbated them. At times it may have been a crutch, but only upon rare occasions, I hope. It has also been, on rare occasions: a knee jerk reaction, a pleasure, a cry in the dark, an affirmation, a lifebelt, the only friend I felt I had at the time, a can opener, an albatross and a window.

Amongst other things.

A kind of home in a homeless year.

on bloggers

It may be that it order to discover whether one is innately a blogger or not, it is necessary to desist for a while. As with all the other things listed below in the section on blogging, and all the other things not listed below.

on trilogies

Perhaps it is a judeo-christian thing, perhaps it is not, but there is something curiously satisfying about trilogies.

on the mismaze

Just because I choose to cease documenting the contrails of the mismaze, does not mean to say that I have left it, or can ever hope to leave it. Although it might be something to hope for, one day.

on bloggging

Will it come to be seen in years to come that one is either a blogger or one is not? In much the same way as one either takes exercise, reads poetry, drinks beer, smokes fags, has children, believes in god, believes in marriage, believes in resurrection, has a chip on one’s shoulder, likes peas and so on and so forth – or one does not?

life on mars

An extract from Shooting Stars, a comedy, written 2004

----

Erica: Sometimes I wake up and I think that maybe I’m not actually human. I look human, but I’m not sure. Do you ever think that?

Lee Er - no.

Erica: My mum and dad aren’t very human. They just sit at home and watch telly all day. Like something isn’t working quite right. I’m not saying I’m a machine, but maybe they come from somewhere else. Like Sirius.

Lee: Sirius?

Erica: It’s a star. Quite a close one.

Lee: You think you come from Sirius.

Erica: There’s more aliens than people realise. Once you know what to look for you can spot them a mile away. They’re the ones in the shop who have no feelings. They have a way of treating people which is totally non-human. I’m not one of them. I think most of them come from the death star. Because I do care a little bit. But all the same. No-one understands my feelings. Ever. Which makes me think that maybe I am one of them. An alien. But a friendly alien. From somewhere like Sirius. I can’t be precise. It’s more an intuition than a fact. (Lee fidgets) You can watch the football again when I go.

Lee: What’s this got to do with Joey?

Erica: I’m trying to find someone. Someone who makes me feel like a human. I’m sure there’s one out there somewhere. I go out and search. Sometimes I think they could be a footballer. I thought it might be Joey. You were right about him. There’s something different.

Lee: You think Joey’s an alien?

Erica: In the end I decided he wasn’t. I read that article and all it talked about was all that sentimental stuff about your dad dying, and what a nice boy he is and how plucky, and I decided he was much too human to be an alien.

Lee: You decided.

Erica: We could have been two independent life-forms colliding by some kind of freaky chance in this little corner of the universe. That’s what I’m looking for. But we’re not. He’s just another footballer picking up another girl he fancied. That’s why we’re incompatible. You can tell him that.

Lee: I don’t know what to say.

Erica: Good.

secret shoreditch garden

email

Was sent the following last week, with the message that it's "very fletcherian". Judge for yourself.

Just Once - Anne Sexton

Just once I knew what life was for.
In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;
walked there along the Charles River,
watched the lights copying themselves,
all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening
their mouths as wide as opera singers;
counted the stars, my little campaigners,
my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love
on the night green side of it and cried
my heart to the eastbound cars and cried
my heart to the westbound cars and took
my truth across a small humped bridge
and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home
and hoarded these constants into morning
only to find them gone.

encircled

In Rotherhithe station you hear water as you wait.
Dripping. Seeping. Projecting a self. You cannot
See it. You peer into the tunnel, suspended
Beneath the inscrutable flow. Southwards lurks
Daylight. A train rumbles. Stuns the water’s whisper.

If you want me to stay, he sung, danced and feinted,
Cocking a snook at th’ invisible cradle which
Crowded the room, chattering its teeth, like water.

anaesthetic

These days, my friend informs me, they’re reluctant to give you a general anaesthetic. He knows someone who had their eyeball removed under local. Hospital becomes a fully fledged David Lynch experience. To which you are invited to bring your own soundtrack. Clients can bring a favourite CD to play during the course of the operation. Get the numbed-out surround sound experience. Our only concern is…what happens if the surgeon hates your choice of music. S/he is into Mozart and you bring Motorhead. Or visa versa. This could provoke two responses. Either s/he rushes to get it over with. Or it provokes unforced errors - an evaluated side-effect of aberrant music being inflicted in the workplace over an extended period of time. Perhaps safer to keep it quiet and enjoy the experience in the cauterised silence of a hospital hum.

jose mourinho is a miserable icon

Mourinho has a job, a good job. He manages a football team. They’re doing well, very well. Everywhere he goes, he does well. He’s a very successful man. He makes a lot of money, has a lovely family, lives in a smart home, does a healthy degree of international travel, is good looking, widely admired – he has a lot going for him.

However, every time you see Mourinho, these days, he looks miserable. Like he doesn’t want to be there. When he first came to England, he used to smile and joke a bit. Nowadays, he scowls, he frets, he is quite clearly unhappy.

As such, he is a modern icon. Who does like their job? Of all the people I have known who have had a regular job, how many have enjoyed it? That includes myself in the dim, distant days of graft. All over this city, people go to work every day, make good money, do things that might be amazing or might be banal, and it makes no difference. They might be at the top of the tree or they might be collecting acorns, they still come home with a Mourinho scowl. People come from all over the world to this city in order to acquire a Mourinho scowl.

It’s another string to his bow.

Jose Mourinho is a miserable icon.

so what exactly is the strategy?

"The strategy is to win."

Tony Snow, White House press secretary, quoted Guardian

the nigerian and the uruguayan

The Nigerian works in a factory in Harlseden. I met him in a pub in Peckham. He doesn't support any particular team but he knows his football (he's got a team in Nigeria from somewhere near Port Harcourt). We chatted away merrily as you like through the second half, him noting the way Shevchenko made space for Drogba, complimenting Iniesta, noting that the Brazilians, like the Africans, play for fun more than money. Unlike the English. His name's Manu.

I don't know the Uruguayan's name but he knows his Britpop even though he doesn't rate it. Unfortunately for those who don't speak it, the article's in Spanish, but he says that Oasis and all the rest are derivative and somewhat maudling, and harks back to the halcyon days of the Sex Pistols, the Beta Band, the Jam and Steve Harley. He calls Tony Blair a hijo de puta as well as coming up with one of my favourite words of the week: toyotizado. Not exactly sure what it means but it still makes sense.

burnley road

It was 1995, towards the end of. The whole year had been rootless. Moving along the 2 bus route, from Tulse Hill to Crystal Palace to Brixton and back again. Burnley Road is just past Stockwell, heading for Brixton. I was looking through Loot. The pressure was on. I needed somewhere to live, to be settled, and I needed it soon. I was still signing on, so it was going to have to be somewhere that took DSS. Burnley Road is a typical London street – white stucco pillars, part of a faded commuter belt, been through decades of decay, probably only now on the point of regeneration. I rang the bell and it sounded like a civilised party was taking place inside. A middle aged woman came to the door. A young man carrying a glass of wine came down the stairs, followed by another woman. The woman who opened the door owned the place. She was genial. She offered me a glass of wine. She was apologetic. She had no problem with DSS, but the room had just gone. To the man walking down the stairs. Everyone seemed very happy; and very sorry for my misfortune in being one viewing too late. I didn’t stay for a glass of wine. Next week I discovered Trinity Square, future home to blinding Barry and the poisonous fridge. Since then have been past Burnley road a thousand times and more, but never walked down it once.

autumn

Strange how two people can magnetise for so long despite being so different.

Does one reed bend to the other’s breeze or is it the other way round?

Or perhaps both are harmonically rippling the will of an untraceable compass needle.

2 suns set in green park

overheard at frieze art fair

Man

(Enquiring about large scale black and white picture)

How much is that one over there?

Woman

(Manning stall)

How much is it?

Man
More or less?

Woman

Well... About two hundred -

Man

(contemplating a purchase)

Is that all ?!

Woman

(Taken aback)

To some people that's quite a lot of money -

Man

Do you think so?

Woman

Well yes. Two hundred thousand -

Man

(no longer contemplating a purchase)

Two hundred thousand ?

Woman

Pounds.

The man opts not to get his cheque book out

rare televisual immersion

The TV and I have fewer and fewer encounters nowadays. This is all down to circumstances, no doubt. Tonight, at Alice's house, we sit down to watch Merrick in Prime Suspect. I missed Alice being funny the other day. Merrick mumbles beautifully. He looks younger than the last time I saw him. He's a plausible copper, in the shiny new police station. The action cuts to a hospital. The nurse comes into shot. It's Glenda. It looks like she's not coming back, then towards the end she touchingly hands over the dead man's effects to his daughter. In the adverts, Alice says that's what's his name from Blakes Junction 7. The last time I saw him he was wearing a chef's outfit. The pub quiz player turns up as he's bound to do. Alice says she got the schoolteacher's name wrong once, called him Ricky. For years the TV is like a distant land, where things happen in a parallel universe. Then you grow up and it's like going to the pub.

ljubljana

untitled

As though to affirm the destruction of the concept the neighbour on the other side has begun to play play music with a repetitive beat every time Peckham and I collide.

friends

Every now and again you realise that the only thing that keeps you sane is the communication offered you by your friends. Their insistence on you fulfilling your obligation to remain your self, no matter how tempting it may be to become someone else.

texan panhandle

Reading Cormac McCarthy, Micah P in the background, feeling some kind of evil stab, in the bath.

micah p

Micah P wears a solid looking baseball hat low over his eyes. He wields his guitar like a chainsaw. He smokes as he plays, fingers never leaving the fret.

When I first heard Micah P I imagined him a long haired goth. Out of joint in Texas. Wearing black dresses over black jeans with scarlet nail varnish. Emaciated, as torn apart as his voice. Barely able to walk.

Micah P doesn’t look anything like that. He looks someone who comes from Texas.

I probably thought he looked like that because of the circumstances under which we bonded. I was leaning against a radiator in the middle of the night crying my eyes out. Something in the tone of his voice made me feel as though he might have behaved in a similar fashion, in a trailer someplace like Abilene, Van Horn or Anthony. A trailer which felt like the way his songs sounded which was also the way I was feeling at the time.

During the gig Micah P chatted to the audience quite a bit. He had some wry one liners. Someone called out for him to play a song called Patience, and he said into the mike, ‘I just might if you have any’. Later he looked at the crowd of Londoners and told us it was like a miracle the way things had changed. Only two and half years ago, he was living off a woman, with his life ‘not going... not going anywhere good at all.’

At the end of his last song, Patience, Micah P basically gives up singing and starts howling. His gravely voice sounds like it’s had enough of having to put feelings into words. There are more expressive ways of doing it. He chops down mike stands with his chainsaw. It doesn’t feel like an act. It feels like the sound of someone who’s been there.

luddite(s)

First the Lumiere went, the prettiest interior in London, a graceful low-slung cieling shielding a massive screen which played films that Leicester Square wouldn't want to know.

The Metro changed its name, had a refit with fine cream coloured leather seats, then disappeared off the planet with barely a goodbye.

The Lux came, saw, failed to conquer, and was sawn off at the knees.

The Swiss centre was a poor excuse for a cinema, four bite sized screens sandwiched next to one another. However, it also showed the films Leicester Square wouldn't take; and it was accessed by a lift.

Now they're going to re-vamp the NFT. The big screen at the NFT is still a comfortable place to watch a film in. They don't sell popcorn. There are no trailers or ads. The cinema gives you a hand-out with information on the film you're watching. Sometimes there won't be anything on there you'll want to see in months, but when there is, there's nowhere better to watch a film in London. Who knows what kind of audience-friendly developments will be put in place when they re-vamp it to ensure that our viewing experience is enhanced.

the asssessor

I'm standing in the bath and the phone rings.

But that's 45 minutes later.

The assessor arrives. He looks like someone's idea of an extra in a British gangster flick. He has a shaven head with sports sunglasses locked on like horns. He's fifty something, strong, purposeful.

The assessor says it won't take a moment. He walks through the flat, footstep by footstep. At first I think he's testing out the floorboards. He writes something on the back of an envelope. He doesn't talk to me. I realise he's measuring the space.

The space of the flat.

It takes five minutes, then he leaves.

I run a bath.

I got there twenty minutes before the assessor.

I was just trying to get the old laptop to go on-line. The BBC homepage came up as 15th March. Israeli commandos had stormed a Palestinian jail. Ballack had agreed to join Chelsea. It refused to refresh. I called my wife up to ask her if she knew why it wasn't working but she wasn't there.

The assessor came and left.

I had a pitta bread. Took a fearsome pleasure from eating off a brown plate, using a knife. The bath was running. I figured I might never get the chance again. To use the bath. It's a good bath. And I needed one.

Later I'd leave with two pairs of shoes in a plastic bag and one yellow llama made of salt. Retreat is a slow process.

The phone rang. I was in the bath. I stood up. Water dripped off me. It was my wife, phoning me back. She told me there was something wrong with the connection. Later I thought that didn't make sense. As the laptop had gone on-line. It was Explorer that wasn't working. But I didn't think that at the time. I was too worried she was going to realise I was in the bath. Worried that she'd hear a drip hit the water. She sensed something was up. She asked me if I was ok and I said I'm fine. Trying to conceal the steam. The towels. My wet skin. On the end of a line.

lula

The first time Lula and I came across one another he was campaigning for the presidency (again) and I was in Asuncion. Staying in a hotel with a view of nothing, with a group of Yankee tourists who were casting aspersions about what might be happening in that hotel room, as I was rooming with Matt, the only gay American in the Southern Cone, or so it seemed. We’d been to see the bottle dancing trick, and I’d broken a flip flop on the paving stones, hobbling barefoot, and now Lula was on the telly getting beaten in the 94 election.

The next morning we walked down past a smart government building to the river. Just around the corner was a slum. We walked through it to get to the riverfront. I’d seen slums in Latin America before, but out of reach, on the tops of hills, on the edge of cities you passed through in a bus. This one was right in the centre. Smoke windowed government Mercedes drove through it dragging jetskis behind them. As we left we saw a pair of sisters leaving the slum to go to school. Not a hair was out of place. Their uniforms were impeccable. They looked like they could have come out of the government building only they didn’t.

Lula wore blue denim in that election. He looked like the antithesis of corruption. He had a messy beard and seemed to have no grasp of the idea of media. He’s been a political prisoner and a Union leader and a radical. It was a surprise he was even in the race. It was less of a surprise Color won, and Lula lost. It was about the fifteenth time Lula had run for president. He always lost.

In 2002, Lula won. I can’t remember where I was. It was the first of many remarkable left-wing victories on the continent. Two years later, I went with Steve and Moises to the place where Lula was born. It doesn’t exist anymore. There’s some palm trees in a field in the middle of nowhere. His cousin took us. I don’t know if it’s his real cousin or if Lula’s the kind of guy who has a thousand cousins. He seemed real enough. He got us up at dawn and we drove from Garanhuans into the bush for hours. We saw the crossroads where Lula caught a bus to Sao Paulo, we met people tending the fields nearby who’d never heard of England. Why should they. We met an old man who said he knew Lula as a kid. Lula’s cousin had flinty eyes and a wide brimmed hat. Places don’t say much, but they can reveal the determination it might take to get out of them. Lula had a lot of that.

So Lula had made it. He’d changed he style. He now wears dapper suits and brazen ties. He looks comfortable. He plays the part. Was this some kind of pact? If so, it’s probably what you have to do to get elected these days. Save the jeans for the photo-op. A reminder of roots you’ve left behind. This weekend gone Lula went for re-election. He’s tainted by corruption slurs. Maybe they’re true, maybe it’s dirty tricks. He anticipated winning at a canter, first past the post with more than fifty percent. He didn’t. He’s got to go to the second round. Lula’s sweating again. Politics is a slippery business. He’s still fighting. We’ll see if he makes it. Or if it’s time to put the suits away.

the raincoat man

When H and I were looking for a place to live after Chelsham Road we trawled around South London, the areas we knew best. In the end we were interviewed for a place by a stout landlord, and lived on South Lambeth Road for six months. Neither of us ever really got used to the noise of traffic. I believe The Focus Group took place whilst we were there: I have a memory of the cast coming round. We bought the orange futon. It wasn’t a perfect place but it got us used to the neighbourhood – Bar Estrella, Rebatos, Di Lieto’s, things that would be staples for years to come.

When we were looking for somewhere we saw some grim places, as you do when you’re on the lower tier of the rental ladder. There was one place round the back of Oval we went to see which looked like it was designed for hamsters not humans. I remember someone else turned up. He might have looked at the flat with us, I can’t recall. What I do recall was his demeanour. He seemed like someone whose whole world had imploded. Then he told us as much. He’d split up from his wife, had to move out of his house, and now he was reduced to trawling round after work trying to find a shoebox to live in. I may have felt sorry for him, I may have not, but I do remember feeling relieved when he went his separate way. Some people seem ill-starred, and he was one of them.

disgrace

Zidane prowls the grass. The filmaker consciously captures him as a creature of the veldt, feet picking at the turf like an antelope. At the conclusion, the player hurls himself into the fray, for no apparent reason. He is sent off. The Bernabeu applauds him down the tunnel.

This is a presage of what is to come. He will carry the image of his disgrace for the rest of his days. The bullet head executing its purpose on a seeming whim, which they will call a moment of madness.

This image will live more vividly that his glory, his greatest goals, his achievements. Yet, as he walks off the pitch, he seems indifferent to his disgrace. As though knowing that disgrace is commensurate to reputation. And it is the bearer who owns the reputation, no one else. It is his to use as he sees fit.

london flip sides

In the British library, I fail to locate the Freeze catalogue, 1988, on their system. Stymied, I approach the bookish man on the desk and shamefacedly admit my incompetence. He asks for the publisher or the gallery and I cannot help him. A quick recce informs that it's not held by the library. I feel like I'm wasting his time. He gets to work on twin computers. In no time at all he's hacked into three dozen libraries, sourced five locations where the catalogue is housed, three places I can catch the Omnibus video and printed all the information out. When I thank him he looks at me as though to say that he would have been disappointed in himself if he hadn't come up with the goods.

Ten minutes walk away I go to the Brunswick centre. The Bruswick centre has always been a sanctuary of scruffy seventies utopianism. Plastic bags foundered in puddles as the wind howled through a concrete landscape. Defiant in the face of revival, an oddity, adorned with the Renoir, the second hand bookshop, a greasy cafe and not much else. A forgotten pearl in the heart of capital. Not any more. The developers have arrived. Every shop is a brand. The spaghetti western wasteland has been sliced in half, the market taking over. Bright, shiny, aspiring to sleek. Maybe in another 30 years the Brunswick centre will have rediscovered the desolation it is heir to.

the poor soul of st cross

the crown jewels of st cross

snippets

Someone who is perenially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelty upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

No one after a certain age has a right to this kind of innocence, superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.

+++

Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of events die before us - grandparents, parents, teachers and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together.


Susan Sontag - Regarding the Pain of Others

late summer in yorkshire

Another thing I remember is standing in the old red phone box at the bottom of the road in Dunnington. It was surrounded by fields on three sides with an industrial estate where I later worked for two months. N must have been in Welwyn for some reason. I think it was the beginning of the second year – I moved into the little house with the blue door before her. She was angry with me. I had the big heavy black phone receiver to my ear. I didn’t know what to say. There’s such a feeling of impotence when someone is angry with you on the phone, there’s no way of dealing with it. You just stare at the receiver and wait for the world to give you some space to breathe. Look out through the red cross hatch of the phone box at the fields and endure the words and the silence that follows. At the end she said to me, I remember it distinctly, no one else does this to me. You’re the only one who brings this out in me. I knew that in some way this meant I was special, I had a kind of cursed special status, which I knew anyway. But it didn’t help. I was torn apart, staring at the fields, just fighting to stay in the game. I thought to myself, great. Why do I have to be so special?

the year i ran away for xmas

It was 1987. I was due to spend christmas up north, for the first time. I don't know why this was the plan. Things were so difficult that festive would not have been the right word to use. And then one afternoon, maybe three days before Christmas day, something inside me snapped. Some kind of fear. I walked out to the car, the Red Renault, got in, and drove down the A1 to London, parked at Rayners Lane. George and Dorothy weren't expecting me but didn't act as though they were surprised. They booked me a plane ticket and I went to Germany. I felt so guilty. What I had done seemed evil and cowardly. It's only later that I realised it was kind of sensible. When you're at the end of your tether, it's a good idea to absent yourself from your tether, go awol, look for a safe port of call.

two by two

It had been forty days and forty nights. They had grown sick to the back teeth of water. The animals were playing up, especially the orang utangs. The orang utangs were taking the radical evolutionary persepective, agitating amongst the rest of the crew, working on the line that if god had been truly smart he’d have favoured them. They’d have taken a more simian, ecologically responsible attitude. The crew would never have ended up in the soup if the orang utangs had been running the show. Wouldn’t even have had to even get to grips with this stinking 'boat' concept.

Noah was getting worried. The food was running out. The masses were on the point of revolting. He’d forgotten what his home looked like and if something didn’t happen soon the world cup wasn’t going to take place, let alone his team standing a chance of winning it. (During on-board kick arounds the wasps had proved unexpectedly effective, using a sting and pass tactic that bemused the opposition.)

Then the dove turned up with an olive branch between its teeth. Phew, thought Noah, thank heavens for that. There is a god after all.

The dove kind of preened around on deck, acting like a superstar. The other animals stared at it. You can imagine how they were feeling. Not exactly impressed. Where had the bloody dove been the whole time? Now they knew. Swanning around on mountain tops. Whilst they’d been slumming it on a boat.

The chaffinch was the first to perk up. With a sly whisper, the chaffinch said to the blackbird, ‘Looks more like a pigeon to me.’ Noah overheard. He said ‘What?’. A general debate broke out. Most decided the dove was nothing special. Especially the pigeons. Despite the bird’s protestations, the committee came to the conclusion that it was not a dove, as recognised by pre-flood dove directives. They decided doves were probably extinct. This was some kind of albino pigeon. The pigeons treated it like a black sheep. The dove got bored and went and sat on the mainmast.

Attention turned to the olive branch. Noah could see from the tutting and the general head shaking that the creatures weren’t impressed. Even Ham and Seth joined in. The branch was passed around. In truth, it wasn’t much of a branch. More of a twig. This point was forcefully made, in particular by the giraffes and ostriches, who both claimed to have been key workers in the Eden olive branch analysis labs, which neither Noah nor his wife had ever heard of.

Disdain for the twig increased. The jackal pushed it across deck with its paw. ‘We’ve been here forty days and forty nights, and this is what they send us?’ It asked. ‘I was expecting something a bit more impressive.’ The swallows and the newts agreed. They’d been anticipating a mobile hot dog stand. The lion laughed. He’d been expecting an en-suite, all-inclusive flock of sheep. Which didn’t impress the sheep, who just baa-ed.

Overall, the consensus was they were anticipating something…better. They sent the reclassified albino pigeon packing. Told it to come back when it had something to show for itself.

Noah sighed. He went below deck and filled in his redundant pools coupon, for old time’s sake. One thing was for sure. It wouldn’t be long before they were going to need a bigger boat. He got out his tools and thought about how to build that extension.

The fact is that they never got off that boat. Every living creature, no matter what Darwin contended, is descended from that grumpy group. All of us still floating. After centuries of skilled carpentry, the boat has come to seem like something completely stable, incorporating dry land, mountains of its own, and even oceans. Noah’s ark has been extended almost as far as it can go, but it still floats on the waters of the great flood.

The early descendants of the creatures on the boat devised an alternative version of the story of the olive branch. In the bright shiny world of the new Ark, a positivistic take on the deity seemed more appropriate. They made a movie about it with all the animals gazing in mute awe at the arriving dove, saying things like, ‘My dear, I do believe it’s an olive branch’, before their sang froid went and they began to blub. Some still chuckled at what was essentially satire, but as the centuries rolled on, people began to take it literally and in the end the true story was eclipsed. Such is the power of myth.

Doves were the only species made extinct in the great flood. Sometimes scholars get together and wonder what a dove might have looked like. Most agree that they probably resembled some kind of albino pigeon.


april 2006

snippet

On a day he had wept, the master did not sing.

Confucius

ciphers

A friend of mine tells me about a play he acted in a few years ago. He says he didn’t enjoy it. He didn’t have much of a part in it, and, more to the point, it felt as though he didn’t have much of a part. He says that of course, he knows, just like I know, that actors are only ciphers, there to serve the play, bring the flame of life to the thing. But it’s no good, as an actor, if you feel like that’s all you’re there for. You need to feel like you’ve got something to offer. No matter how marginal. If you feel like a cipher you’re going to lose heart. You’re not going to enjoy it.

the world hanging by a thread

another hallmark moment

The moment I realised was at London Bridge Station. I’d been rushing to get my act together, get to Shoreditch, deal with life. Then I realised and everything stopped mattering. I felt the weight of the trivial slip away. The things that run deeper run deeper.

sometimes people do things and you've just got to take your hat off to them

You'll find this man's work sprinkled around Hoxton.
You'll find it on a wall in Gower Street.
It might still exist in Palestine.
Now it's reached the USA.
And it seems too well executed to be true.
Enlarge the image to catch the train.
Take your hat off.

8 questions

Q: What makes bacon and eggs taste even better?
A: Cooking them in the open air.

Q: If there was a international boules championship of Peckham, who would win?
A: Not me. Probably my brother.

Q: From which vantage point does Southampton look beautiful?
A: From a boat departing it. Or approaching it.

Q: How long do you have to be in the same room as a spot painting to start to get it?
A: About five minutes.

Q: Does the world belong to the meek or the mighty?
A: But what about the kingdom of heaven?

Q: You're sitting in a room having a conversation about tents. Is this an emotive topic?
A: Not on the surface if you've got a decent flysheet.

Q: If someone upsets you or pisses you off should you tell them?
A: Does the world belong to the meek or the mighty?

Q: What was the original Isle of Wight festival like?
A: Ask Devendra, he'll know.

isle of wight

back lot

Through the lens of a camera's painted toe
You discover the colour your garden grows.
Green as a river, blue as a peg, dull white
As a ghost. The grain of stone refracts right
Past you; a web page ululates. Shut it.
Or be trapped in an endless gaze of salt.



0506

out of date listing

Slightly self indulgent but I figured that there may be amongst my billions of readers one or two who would find the following authentic listings from a recent Yorkshire Post of interest:

===

The Prodigal Son: Play set in California in 1982. A young man sends for the cable guy so he can watch MTV. Stephen Joseph Theatre, Jul 28 & 31, 1.10pm. 01723 370541.
Home From the Jungle: Starring Cannon & Ball alongside guest stars The Grumbleweeds, Futurist Theatre, Mondays Jul 24-Aug 28, 8pm. 01723 365789.
Thank You For the Music: The music of the Bee Gees & ABBA, Futurist Theatre, Wednesdays Jul 26-Aug 30, 8pm. 01723 365789.
Basil Brush – The Fox Factor: A show for all the family, Futurist Theatre, Thursdays Jul 27-Aug 31, 7pm. 01723 365789.

===

storage

[verbatim in a King's Cross cafe-restaurant]

I’ve got a friend who used to be an artist until he had some kind of breakdown about ten years ago he’s American and he lives in Shoreditch just down the road from the pubs and I go and see him every now and again and he says [putting on American accent] ‘I like so and so, they’ve got storage’ and I love that expression and that’s why it’s good to talk to you I can see it in your eyes both of you the way you let things register the way you note things that you’ve got it you’ve got plenty of it you’ve got storage.

qualities of the mismaze

Someone at the weekend, on having the mismaze described to them, said, what's the point of a maze where you can see where you're going.

In fact when in a mismaze, in my experience, your focus is on the floor. You follow the line with your head down, never quite knowing where it will lead you. When you do lift your head you can see the heart of the maze, yet how you get there seems even less apparent than it did before you entered.

This particular Mismaze has other qualities. For a start it's hard to tell what it's made of. A substance whose density seems to flicker from something light to something heavy in the breath of a sigh.

It is also suspended from a piece of string. When the wind gets up in spins crazily in the breeze. When the wind dies down it's flat as a pancake.

The piece of string is ageing. It probably needs replacing. It's a little frayed. Whenever the storm gets up, microscopic fibres are severed. The mismaze careers around below. No-one knows whether the mismaze is a sentient being or not. Some say it knows what's happening. Others believe it to be impervious to feeling.

ingredients

drinking game #2

names

Someone says a name – eg Orson Welles.
The next person seated clockwise must come up with another name using the first letter of the previous surname as the first letter of a new Christian name – eg Wassily Kandinsky.
If a name is introduced which includes the same first letter for both surname and forename – eg William Wordsworth – then the direction of the game reverses.
Likewise, if a name is introduced which is generally known by just a single name – eg Watteau – the direction of the game also reverses.
In order for a name to be accepted as valid, it must be known by the one who proposes it and one other person in the game.
Whilst trying to come up with a name, the participant must drink ceaselessly until they do so.

drinking game #1

21

A group is seated around a table/ on sofas, somewhere comfortable.
In the first stage of this game someone begins to count, starting at ‘1’.
The next person located clockwise continues the count.
If someone says two numbers – eg, ‘3’,’4’ – then the count switches direction and bounces back anti-clockwise, until that is then reversed again, etc.
If someone says three numbers – eg ‘12’, ‘13’, ‘14’ – then the next person in line is jumped.
The counting stops at 21. The person who says ‘21’ must take a drink or forfeit; they must also rename a number of their choice – eg ‘7’ might become ‘currydog’.
The game recommences at ‘1’.
Every time someone lands on ‘21’ they must change a number into a word or any other chosen symbol.
Every time someone makes a mistake, the culprit must take a drink and the game recommences at ‘1’.

football

[With reference to occasional postings on Yellow Fever Pages]

I know my role when I play football. It seems god given. The stoic defender. The last line. Throwing himself at lost causes. Not a seeker of glory. No running around the pitch with your shirt over your head, awaiting kisses. Diligent, reliable, stoic.

It’s a role I’m comfortable with. It seems to suit. As a consequence the moments I find myself with a scoring chance are rare indeed. Typically, I blow them. With a self deprecating smile. Here it comes… - Blaze over the bar. Smash the ball wide. It matters not. This is not my forte. I shouldn’t even be in this part of the pitch.

The art of the striker. That selfish coolness. Selecting a spot. Calculating angles. Not rushing it. Creating time. These qualities are not endemic to my footballing nature.

Which is why when I discover them within me, I treasure them all the more.

london bridges

method in madness

I was sitting in the white cube yesterday morning, gazing out over Hoxton Square like an art god. They gave us the DVD player to play with and we watched Brontosorous and then every time we tried to watch anything else, Brontosorous came bouncing back, strings and sinews and dick. Finally between the two of us we worked out how to escape and enter the other worlds. Method in Madness came on and we watched it and we laughed because no matter how extreme it is, it's also funny. At the end you have to laugh.

But I laughed knowingly.

never know what these things mean

But they bring the tears back to my eyes, at 12.30 in the morning, just pottering around, doing my chores.

at the national

My friend seems to know everyone in the audience. We've come to see the lens grinder do his stuff on stage. Friend can't stop nodding and waving and greeting and fancy seeing you here. Our seats would have been together but due to social ramifications I now find myself seated on my own, in the upper circle, several planets from the sun of the stage. During the first interval I fight through crowds on the tiny balcony to find my friend surrounded by a conglomeration of strolling players. I barely get a chance to nod before it's back inside for the next leg. At the start of the second interval I stand up and hear my name spoken, like a question. I turn towards the speaker and see a woman I don't recognise sitting next to a man I don't recognise. She says my name again and then she says her name and I still haven't made the connection and then it all comes together.

I last saw her nearly twenty years ago, at university. I know no-one from university now, so we have no small talk catch-up. University is a strange island in the North. My last memory of the woman I'm speaking to was a kind of Summer ball. One of those absurd events where you wear suits or long frocks. I remember leaning towards her, drunkenly, a little desperately, untypically. In a high Summer garden. On some steps. Wearing a suit.

I try to work out how well we knew each other back then. Perhaps we knew each other well, better than memory permits. She tells me as we walk the crowded interval corridors that she's doing some research on Mona Hatoum. I explain why that's a strange kind of co-incidence. She's writing something on the meaning of asylum. The conversation runs out of steam. At the end of the third leg she and her partner or husband go one way, I go another. Towards the bar, to talk to the lens grinder, whilst my friend, who went to the same university, but left the year I arrived, meets another galaxy of people; and I talk to the lens grinder about how things are; and run into more friends myself.

in khartoum

My sister sleeps outside at night, in the wind. She writes:

The last few nights there have been clouds, sometimes stars. It's calm, as the city falls asleep. There are the big lights of advertising hoardings; bats rushing too and fro; swifts in the morning to wake me. Dust and grit in the bed.

Phil: Anyone else having fun out there ?

The Guardian knows the precise location of the camps where the group has been monitored in the Lake District, but cannot disclose it. The group, unaware it has been under surveillance, was not undergoing weapons or explosives training.

However, police believe they have clear evidence the men were preparing a mission of some sort, not enjoying a camping holiday. The surveillance is thought to have been by detectives from Scotland Yard's antiterrorism branch; security sources in London confirmed they were aware of it.

connections

A year ago to the day, I began the Yellow Fever Pages.
A year ago to the day, the Yellow Fever Pages inform me, I visited Stanleys.
As I did today.
A year ago I did not eat a choripan, although I might have done twelve years ago.
A choripan does not have quite the same mystique as a madelaine, yet the taste takes me back. To a square and a stray dog and empty streets at strange hours of the morning.
I walked empty streets tonight. East London pathways peopled by kids with cans.
The choripan takes me back to walking alone down unkown lanes.
As I did tonight.
A year to the day I wrote of a tap running in the garden.
Only the garden had no tap to be left running.
Stanleys has not changed a bit. It is still 'a film editing gubbins kind of place. Raw plasterwork and old time London style bods.'
Today, I saw two people carrying Stanleys bags before I went there.
Today, I saw someone carrying a Stanleys bag and in that moment I knew the phone would ring later.
Today, I revisited the Yellow Fever Pages, and knew that they would have caught up with me by now.
Today is already tomorrow, so all the dates are skewed.
The taste of a choripan takes me back to wide empty streets and a stray dog that lived in a hutch in the plaza.
The dog would walk me home, as I weaved, choripan in hand.
The dog was not called Stanley.
To the best of my knowledge.
That name was saved for the kid in the play.
Some connections are seamless.
Most are not.
It's better that way.

parties

Strange isn't it the way the parties seem to have dried up altogether of late...

who's that in the background?

every moment it is changing

Abdul Muneem Patel’s date of birth is given as 17th April 1989, according to the BBC. Which makes him just seventeen years old. Whether he was one of the supposed death-wishers, scheduled to ignite the US sky next Wednesday, or whether he’s just someone caught up in a mess not of his own making I don’t know, and I don’t suppose many of us will ever know.

At what point does a culture begin to go into a tail spin. Wherein the sophistication of its achievements signals the inevitability of its demise. A hubris, if you like. Forget about nuclear weapons. The latest attacks, if we believe what we read, were to take place using iPods, mobile phones, laptops or even digital watches. The James Bond technology that audiences from the sixties, seventies and eightees paid to gasp at is commonplace now. Like a genie released from the bottle. Any gadget is a potential weapon of mass destruction. This is part of a trend that cannot be reversed. Like the splitting of the atom.

Abdul Muneem Patel has grown up in this techno-world. In his head, it might be a world which has already crossed the tipping point. This decade’s flavour of the month may be Islamic fundamentalism, but come the day when, if, that movement becomes dormant, others will arrive to take it’s place. There will never a shortage of marginal aspirants willing to take a pot-shot at the mainstream. The trouble is that now, these would-be James Bond villains have the capacity to be bona fide James Bond villains. The tools are at our disposal.

We will forget this scare, like we forgot the last one and the one before that. We’ll be allowed to take Coca-Cola up into the blue again, sun-tan lotion, even mobile phones and iPods. Until the assailant gets through. Perhaps a kid of ten now, in another time, at another place. Geeking around on the internet, hanging with the wrong crowd, working out how easy it is to become the baddie on the screen or a hero in a book that will one day be written.

The time will come when flying seems as dangerous as it did to the early pioneers. The technological circle will have coiled in on itself. People will choose to keep their feet grounded. Public transport will be next. One cunning plan later people will inadvertently flick their TV remote to the exploding channel. Keyboards will become infected. Everything will go. They’ll dig up the airports and plant cabbages in their place.

frogs in the rye

It's 10.30 in the evening and there's a knock at the door. I tell my brother I have to eat my takeaway (such is the descent), he answers it. Norma's there. She lives next door. I've never met her before. She's an indeterminate age. There's a frog in her utility room. My brother says that's fine, his brother will sort it out. I go what? We walk out the front door and round to Norma's. Norma's house has newspapers on the floor. From 1978. Possibly. There's things there you don't want to know. Like growth. I'm sent forward to fight the frog. The back door's open. There's a black chair on wooden slats with a magazine sitting on it just outside. There's a washing machine and twelve years worth of unwashed washing. There's no sign of any frog. Norma's sorry to have caused any trouble. She hasn't. I look behind the door and in the sinks, but there might be a million hiding places for an errant frog. We go back next door, frog-free. I finish my MSG rich Chinese (such is the descent).

on aggression

I learnt a lot about aggression from Mr C. He was skilful in his usage of it. At first it worked on me, but then I realised how cynically he manipulated his willingness to lose his temper. The aggressor knows what they’re doing. It is cause and effect. I intimidate you, and you will bend to my will.

I learnt a lot about aggression from N. In the early days, it was almost a game. N would tear down a poster in a bid to get me to fight back. For many moons, I resisted the temptation. But one day I broke. The minute I broke, I joined the game, I was doomed. My self-respect was trashed. The relationship had nowhere to go but down. I knew I would never allow myself to be like that again. The aggressor retains the power, no matter how much the non-aggressor tries to change their spots.

Aggressors do not listen, because they are fundamentally caught up in their own selfish drives. This does not mean to say they are cruel or unkind people. It means they are slaves to something powerful which works within their souls. Sometimes, they can shake that off. I don’t know how. People do change. I always hoped that in some way, no matter how flawed our relationship, I might have helped N to exorcise or live with her aggression.

on the march

asymmetric warfare (nod to blackbox)

Extract from The Focus Group (1998)

+++

Mick: (TURNS TO CASS) Would you say that we have any kind of - how should I phrase this - inviolable credo, Penny ?

Cass: Not exactly a credo, Kieth. More a general drift. A set of questions. We inhabit a quadrant of our own.

Mick: Precisely. Thankyou. And if you’re going to ask, as you quite possibly are, what is that quadrant ? I’d have to say it isn’t easy to put a finger on it. The redistribution of wealth chestnut comes into play. We’re not what you’d call trickle-downers. Sticking a pin in the multi-national balloon is part and parcel. We’re pushing for new structures of societal consensus. Certain things - arms manufacture, excessive car usage, contrived democracy - will be put against the wall and despatched. And we’d aim to reappropriate some of the good things in life. Like thought. Any of this making any sense ?

David: (NODDING) Sort of -

Mick: Good. Now, the point at which you’re being brought in is this. We’re not stupid. We know that all of the above hardly represents a cakewalk. You have to send out a few smoke signals to let the others know that you’re out there on the wings. That their days are being, no matter how slowly, counted down. And to do this - to send out these signals - you do have to be prepared to break some eggs. It’s Hegelian: the group exists, it’s evolved as a phenomenon, therefore society needs us. (BEAT) Let me put it another way - it’s common knowledge that a migraine doesn’t have all that much to do with the head. It’s more down to the unacknowledged stress that the rest of the body is suffering. It’s the body’s way of reminding itself - Ow! I’m hurting! Right ?

David: Uh - right.

Mick: Good. Well, we’re aiming to be that migraine. We intend to become a localised expression of a communal pain. Exactly how we’re going to do it will be revealed if and when you sign up and we agree to have you. But if you do sign up, I think it’s only fair to warn you that, as far as we’re concerned, you’re cannon fodder. We’re going to be sending you over the top in your plimsolls. We need more bodies, and that’s exactly what you’ll be.

Cass: We’re all bodies, David. I think you should make that clear, Keith. Only - yours, David, will be a barely charted body. Which makes it no less valuable. Just less well known.

Mick: How does it sound ?

David: It sounds mad.

Mick: Mad ?

Cass: Is that a good thing or a bad thing ?

workshop

Four kids in a hall in Bow, off the Roman Road. One of them born here, one in Somalia, two in Dubai. Three of them brothers. None of them know much about acting. They know about phone jacking. Being on a bus, at the wrong time, in the wrong place. We act it out. The smallest one, l'il Pete, has got a shank he hadn't told anyone about. He needs it to defend himself. When Nasser doesn't give up his phone, Pete shanks him. We talk about it. Mustafa feels bad about it. Ahmed feels good. Pete feels paranoid. Nasser feels like he might as well be dead. I ask them how many kids they know who carry a knife. L'il Pete lies on his back and stares at the cieling. Loads, he says. I know loads. When I leave they come and shake my hand. They say they never knew acting could be so much fun.

tear

Like the desperate fool que soy I strafe the internet for a translation it refutes me. Lloras. Si. Evidamente. Correct my spelling. Busco the noun. Maybe it does not and never exists. Capaz capaz capaz My new jacket strolls some perfect corner of a non existent night. I fall asleep on one of the million buses that does not belong to the non me that I am. Somewhere in Peckham is the key to the forgetfullness of where I shall shut these eyes of mine. Hey. Todo bien. Que bien. Que enorme este tristeza in which somos yabba yabba yabba Stand in a corner and resonate. Hasta manana. Hoy. Siempre.

in reykjavik (or california)

I’m the Simon Le Bon of the Pasadena chess scene?
No way. You're the Nick Rhodes. I'm Simon Lebon.

in scarborough

Five minutes before my play opens I overhear someone sitting at a table in front of me. A white-haired, large headed man, is eulogising The Chuckle Brothers to his female companion.

Forty minutes into the play I see a woman reach for tissues to dab away a tear. This surprises me.

After the lunchtime show, the cast and company sit outside at The Alma, in the sunshine, drinking through the afternoon. A worn down, middle-aged blond woman comes over. She shouts at the two outside tables. Saying that someone has stolen her rabbit and locked it in a car. Or stolen her children and locked them in a car. Or a rabbit has driven off with her children. Or her car. She is seething. We soak up her tirade. She tells us she hates posh. Who don’t give a fuck. She swears and swivels in the sunshine, voice trailing down the street.

The American lecturer sitting at the next door table, whose wife ran off with John Hurt, says that this is unusual for Scarborough. No-one believes him. With a diffident smile, a man called Karl, drinking halves of Guinness on his own, says he’s from Yorkshire; he doesn’t do friendly.

in aleppo

Returning from time away to your city, a sense of alienation returns. There is cricket on the radio, as there always will be; my tuna and sweetcorn pitta is as idiosyncratic as ever; last night I foisted my potato salad on an unknowing world. Things seem the same but they don’t feel the same.

It’s been a long time now since they did. I live with a sense of alienation from those things which for a while seemed a part of me. That alienation is currently clearly definable, and there seems little reason why it should change with any degree of imminence. The architecture of my world was stripped away and cannot be rebuilt in a rush.

Why did this happen? Why does someone make choices that lead to this? Perhaps they are wilfully destructive. Perhaps they are casual. Perhaps it is something else. It is almost a year now since last Summer. When this alienation acquired a forced shape; longer since it took an occult shape. But an event is not the creation of a state; it is the culmination of a process. The event is one of the many possible events that could occur; it is channelled and patterned by the days, months, years, maybe even generations that have lead up to it. The event itself does not cause the alienation; it is but the manifestation of that sense of self.

And then it too, the event, becomes looped into the process which was at work, and the fall-out and the management and the negotiation – the post – seems a mirror of that which lead to it – the pre.

In Othello, Iago stays silent at the end. He offers no defence of himself. He is the wrongdoer, his guilt seems transparent. So much so that it’s easy to forget that within this tragedy, he has killed no-one, whilst the hero has throttled Desdemona.

Society puts down markers and we are measured within those markers. Society, the weight of history, makes voices shrill, and casts events in stone. It belongs to the powerful, in every sense. It has as little regard for the truth as a python for its prey.

compañeros

Tunng might be the icing on the cake. They might be the layer of marzipan beneath the icing. There might be, probably are, more layers to this cake than you could ever imagine.

A little over a year ago I was driving the mule and not quite by chance I heard Vetiver for the first time. I’m a curmudgeon in many things and new music is no exception. A natural instinct towards scepticism means modern life is indeed probably rubbish, and modern music exceptionally so. All the same…I gave Vetiver a second go. And then a third. Sooner or later, Why’s A Building Get So Tall was right there on the brain, along with all those other quirky-haunting Vetiver moments.

All well and good. Later I overhead something at a BBQ, and my friend told me that was Sufjan Stevens. It didn’t sound all that painful either. Later still, he was at a BBQ of mine and heard the Vetiver and said that sounds like Davendra. And it was. The dolphin Wildman. Who’s an occasional part of Vetiver. Vetiver were playing with M Ward. M Ward – gets under your skin. He can make you cry, if you’re sitting with the kitchen door open sipping whisky at gone midnight on a Summer’s day when the carpet’s moving under you. So can Micah P Hinson, I soon discovered. The Innocence Mission also seemed to have mastered this trick.

So far, so American. North American. The only other time this kind of thing had happened to me was a dozen years ago, when I went to the South American continent and a whole world of music opened up like a serrated Hirst cow, belly, entrails, colour, all the stuff you just want to consume, and lo it is beautiful too. That made a kind of sense to me. Here was music from a continent that didn’t feature, occult, awaiting revelation. But this other stuff, this new stuff, where were its roots? How had it sprung up on me like a leaping hare? The only thing that made perfect sense was when Davendra sung a cover of Caetano, and the two worlds collided.

Then… other strange developments. Someone played me King Creosote, told me I should listen, he was another touched by genius. I resumed my sceptical disposition, because after all, this was British music, from a collective in Perth, how’s that going to tweak the strings? It’s bound to be too…parochial. The curmudgeon disposition failed again. The twisted lyrics found their target – I’ll Fly By The Seat of My Pants – words jogging along beside me as I rode the midnight bus from Stanstead, fleeing Bari for a homecoming of a blank white sofa and an unhinged employer . My friend tried to get KC for his film, but in the end found Barbarossa, and I sat on a beach in the sun and thought, if the worse comes to the worse, this man will sing it better than it could be said. And all the aeroplanes can’t take away... And all the cars and trains cannot take these things away…. muted whistling

Somewhere along the line a whole host of others knocked on the door and demanded attention: Anti Folk; Jeffrey Lewis; Adam Green, Filthy Pedro, Ray LaMontagne; Adem; Findlay Brown and more, and more. The roots stretch back to Bert Jansch; Benji Kirkpatrick; Bob Dylan; Caetano; Silvio Rodriguez; Eliot Smith and Patti Smith who pops up on a Suffolk stage to remind me; and more and more.

This is the cake, which over a year of flux, has been given to me to partake of, to sing along to. On Saturday night with my co-explorer, in Finchley, I heard half a dozen bands, all of them tainted with this same eminent, earthy, folky, musical, listenability, (to these ears). Rounding it off were Tunng. I’d heard a bit of Tunng. I wasn’t convinced. My scepticism was fighting its corner. Electronic riffs; hard to pin down the lyrics; too clever for its own good?

Tunng are the icing on the cake. For now, until the next time. Songs of murder and betrayal, songs of jackdaws and jays, adders crawling through English fields of Eden. Sung with a maverick glee by every part of the collective, all of them there to show off their tricks. A thunder box simmers. Rattles and whistles and maracas and stray voices shimmy or thud across the scape; landscape, soundscape, all at once.

It’s hard not to be jealous of musicians. They can do things wordsmiths can only achieve in their dreams. Maybe it’s why my inclination is to wrestle with them for proof. Not give in too easily. It has been a blessing in strange times that these songs have come to me, to keep me company; have said things to me and for me, better than I could say them myself.

bombardment

We zig zag round the warehouse ways of a Northern town, looking for a takeaway. We get to the Lebanese place just as the shutters are coming down. The man closing them says he shuts at ten and he doesn't do takeaway. He looks hot and careworn. He says things aren't good, of course they're not. He's got family in the North and the South and things are bad everywhere. He doesn't want to talk about it. He wants to close up. He points to two places where we can pick something up. In one of them we get a mixed veg and a lamb curry for three pounds fifty each.

peckham chess match (knowing your rook from your elbow)

in a spitalfields pub (acknowledgements Angus Fairhurst)

personality test: do you find this image

a] Cute
b] Scary
c] Offensive
d] Reassuring in a troubled world

of course they're only stories

…I find myself catching bits of these programs and they invariably wind me up. I react to them emotionally. Their narratives have a kind of inverted effect on me. Where they seek to lull the viewer into a slippery comfort zone, they have me grinding my teeth and cursing. Why ?

Prosaically: in all of these things, set in the US, some kind of evil or lunacy inevitably needs to be treated or overcome. Last night on ER there was a particularly chilling example. A man had stolen a tank and was advancing on the hospital. They discussed the tank weaponry and showed footage of a tank crushing cars. People in those cars became patients (inevitably Latinos – crying out in Spanish, the other language)… At the end of the show, the hospital will stand, the lunatic in the tank will be apprehended, the forces of democracy will prevail. Meanwhile …on Newsnight we see – More tanks, driven by americans, causing genuine havoc. And how will this narrative be resolved?

… these pieces of TV, which all have essentially similar narrative arcs… show a menace being unleashed within society, which the valiant defenders of society shall eventually overcome, whilst – and this is important – learning a vital lesson in the course of their duties. As though the negative effects of the anti-social contains within it a redemptive element in so far as through the understanding of the anti-social mechanism (individual/ act etc), society enriches itself again and coheres and can proceed with hope towards its next test/ episode.

…the processes of history we are living through mirror exactly this. The ‘bad guys’ in Fallujah (the terrorists) shall be overcome through the force of democracy, (state force is always the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, even if that is sometimes ‘medical’ force) and the State of the Union will be strengthened through this action. We shall move onto the next episode, unconcerned by the poor *latinos* (take your pick) crushed in the tank’s wake, who have laid down their lives in the name of a more sophisticated social consensus.

...the frightening thing is that millions of people who oppose in theory thiz US attitude towards history, perpetrated over the course of the past twenty five years or more, willingly soak up the cultural imperialism being beamed into their homes every night of the week. These narratives become part of our mindset... from Tokyo to Mumbai, from Iceland to Lesotho.

From Bangladesh, 290404

four ways to circumnavigate the absence of your own bed

Live in a fantasy world.

or

Never sleep.

or

Never stay in the same place for more than two nights in a row.

or

All of the above.

progeny

There are five people in the rehearsal room. The stage manager says little, takes notes. The director gives instructions, suggestions, notes. The actors do what only actors can. The writer hears words being spoken, explored, and sits on the outside, looking for a way back to the creature he brought to life, all those months ago. He contributes snippets, knowing that his presence is no longer essential. Soon he will be gone, leaving the rest to get on with it. The creature doesn't need him anymore. It will sink or swim by itself.

coming back

Three days in the North is enough to think that the whole of the South has put on a fedora and sneaked off down a back alley.

As it once did for three years.

bill

Today I walked into Mojo's and ordered a lemon chicken ciabatta, asking for a receipt. The Yorkshirewoman behind the bar wrote one out for me. I looked it over. At the bottom of the receipt she had written my initial and surname. I stared at it, then asked her how she knew my name. She didn't. It was hers.

assuming an attacking formation for the final

i hate this man

Who is standing outside the French House in a loose fitting tailored blue shirt hanging over sawn off knee length shorts with his mop of blond hair talking to someone who looks Mark Oaten but who isn’t, drinking a pint, who says, yeah they sent me to Sao Paulo and I’ve seen some places but that is seriously the biggest shithole in the world. I stare at him. I keep staring. I send gamma rays which cook his liver and his lungs so he’s overheating and loosening his imaginary tie which feels like it’s strangling him, and sweat swoons off him, suppurating his pint which he cannot help but drink because without liquid he knows he will die within seconds, but even so he is actually melting into Dean Street, his feet diminishing into knees, waist, groin, he’s now poking out of the pavement, can’t stop talking about shitholes, and Mark Oaten who isn’t Mark Oaten is shuffling in this puddle of acquaintanceship trying to find a way to disassociate himself from this creature which cannot stop tormenting the world with its leg-less opinions.

I look away. The man gradually re-congeals. I take my hatred and put it back in its box and go and watch a crowd of engaging French people shouting at the TV in the Golden Lion.

surveyor

A moorhen dipped beneath the canal’s surface,
Pat-a-cake feet spiralled through verdigris lace.

He wished his mind worked that way, like a clear
Glass to the depths, machinations on display.

It didn’t. His mind was more like the mountains he
Surveyed. The peaks were glistening adverts for the self;

But the valleys were occult, beyond the camera’s
Eye, nefarious or kindly, you could never tell.

Mapping them didn’t help. Marks denoted peaks, zones
Of demarcation, seemingly efficient, but,

In between those marks, white masked the evasive
Valley floor. Transparency a childish dream.

He knew these things. He wasn’t a surveyor for nowt.
The moorhen burst back through the line. It did so cleanly

As though the line
Does not exist.

hippy contemplation machine

confidence

Is one of those words that no one knows what it means.
In my head now confidence looks like the casino at Carrasco. Before development.
Confidence is also something you can discover (or not discover) in the eyes of a 16 year old.
Confidence once in a while masks unconfidence.
Confident people tend to be less self conscious about their actions than unconfident people.
When the lines are drawn, the deepest line will be marked between those who have inherited confidence, those who have learnt it, those who will always be acquiring it and those who will never know it.

the newbury mancunian

The mancunian is tough as old boots. She’s twenty six and sassier than the average octogenarian. You’re thinking it, she knows it.

in the gagossian

Flies buzz silently in the severed head
Of a curious cow. Three North American
Women, one with an ankle strapped like
A footballer, wear florid dresses and stare
At flies which buzz silently round the
Severed head of the curious cow.

A watch in a bathroom graced by a
Hypothermic carcase, sinews strapped
With nylon tags, tells no time. Mandarin
Dress pronounces Damien iconic.

On an orange gloss, pinned butterflies
Riff off Garibaldi flies. The women want
More. Muscled staff cart pink and sky
Blue gloss from the wings, still wrapped
In their bounds. A triptych of collectors
Feed on the tricoloured triptych. Flies
Feed on the cow’s eyes. The dresses head to
Inspect Bacon. Butterflies and co retreat
Backstage. We have all evolved; ten minutes
Nearer to sampling the state of the cow.

dean in a white cube

[An extract from the novel Grand Prix, 2003]

The next stage will be learning how to reduce consciousness to a state of non-feeling without the help of stimulants. Still a long way to go before we become sophisticated enough to pull that one off. However, on the day Dean met Aziza, he felt as though he might have got close to an understanding of what it might be like. He’d been inspired by a visit to the Damien Hirst exhibition at the White Cube, in the shadow of the giant charity doll in Hoxton Square.

The exhibition was the latest offering from the enfant terrible of what used to be called Brit Art. Hirst became famous in the late twentieth century for chopping cows in half and painting spots on boats. His latest exhibition was more of the same. Trademark cows cut in half. Plenty of trademark gore. A few trademark spots. And in the upstairs gallery, four trademark cows’ heads floating in formaldehyde, the modern aspic. Each head had its own glass cabinet and these cabinets were then arranged in a crucifix formation, lending gratuitous religious undertones to the oeuvre. The four cows’ heads, flesh flapping in fluid, had been impaled with a dazzling array of sharp instruments: carving knives, cleavers, scissors, hatpins and sheer shards of broken glass.

Dean dwelt on the exhibition’s macabre qualities as he described it to me. His tone was reverential. I recalled the meat cleaver he’d been wielding at the Spitz gig. I guessed I must have visited the exhibition around the same time as Dean. It hadn’t impressed me all that much: it seemed exactly what you’d expect from a quack doctor who’d resorted to recycling his old tricks.

Whereas, for Dean, the exhibition had been an epiphany. He stood in the upstairs room, captivated by the four cabinets. Fascinated, he squatted and stared at the array of weapons inserted into the cows’ heads. The cabinets were knee-high, and he got right down to their level, lying on the floor and gazing into the cows’ dead eyes. What he saw, he told me, was the most accurate possible rendition of life. We’re all of us dumb animals having knives stabbed into our faces by a vengeful motherfucker artist in the name of aesthetics, only none of us realise it. When I told him that the cows were dead, that they couldn’t feel anything, he looked at me as though I’d missed the point. He told me that just because you were lucky enough to be dead doesn’t mean your memories die with you. You didn’t escape from your senses that easily. The secret was discovering how to accommodate the pain. These cows endured, day in, day out. They were the victim of a horrendous crime, but they didn’t let it get to them. That was something, he told me. Something valuable to learn from.

boxers and bratwurst

When temporary solvency rears its head a man's got to indulge.

espejo de pared 3

otra vez

espejo de pared

[stag afterglow]

Dawn scrapes the lid off the sky.
Having confessed not once not twice
But thrice. Another shot of vodka for my pains.
Purple lines married to yellow tears
Slice through the firmament. So
We danced. We fell over in our stupor.
We night tailed through taxi midnight.
We imbibed. We ascended the stage, were
Displaced, loved, neglected, revered.
We did all those things and more. You and
I. And it''s morning and once again I
Appear to have survived and the Finchley
Futon is kind to my back. Creosote spangles
Teardrops. Light is made of whites and blues.
The fancy dawn is put to bed.

Un espejo de pared looms boxed.
Los albicelestes came through.
I cheered unlike a montevidean.
In a british accent. Shout at the
Devil in the screeen, throw foreign
Words like a turn. Saying things
Drunken makes them sound like
Fluency to an untrained ear. Half
A line, how do you cut it and confess
Confess confess. But the priest fails
Me, so I chastise him, regale him with
Insults, wait for the bus, the bus
Will take us home, no matter our sins.
No matter our home. No matter.
The bus that will bring us together
When atoms melt. Welcome to
The stag. Use the Horn to counter
The Fear. Try and make par.
Wind up the bride. Do your thing.

spanish word for the day 13

Felicidad

Sometimes used as a name. As in - Come here, Felicidad. Sit down at the table. Be quiet. Why is it that you cannot help imagining that a child called by that name would grow up to have sad eyes? Be better at listening than speaking?

advantages of insomnia

It's never all that late.

spanish word for the day 4

Cumpleanos

Because it is.

(Though not any more)

spanish word for the day 8

Tonterias

Make you giggle like a chapel bell.

king meets prince

There’s a pixie taking a piss. He turns up on the heavenly stage ten minutes later, saying he’s just seen a ghost, knowing his audience should glean what he’s on about. He looks his listeners in the eye. Close enough to match the wrinkles that flirt with his eyes when we smile. In the background some fools hubbub. In the foreground, a few dozen are invited, if they wish, to dwell on his every word. At one point he sings come on Eileen. At another he suddenly slips into the Prince’s tune, beyond compare. Only a King, bold and celtic, his guitar simmering below the boil, could get away with the barely audible intensity. He’s a troubadour, singing bittersweet songs of love, jumping at the cats with nothing on, barking at the moon, not one bit ashamed. His eyes twinkle and then hide. 2001,A Space Odyssey long gone, keeps time with its regal pace. An obelisk glistens in a regency salon. Read between the lines and you’ll see persistence in the face of untold mistakes, ephemeral love, the virtue of knowing that if you stick at it, you might just get by.

spanish word for the day 7

Barbaro

To be said either in a heavily inflected English accent; or with a sense of delight.

spanish word for the day 5

Desesperado

A word that always seems almost out of reach. Until it catches up with you. At which point you will know that you are.

spanish word for the day 6

Golasso

To be screamed with many exclamation marks at either side of your breath.

spanish word(s) for the day 2

Suspiro & Boludo

Two today. One of which makes me laugh, even when I am called it.
The other of which always does exactly what it says on the tin.

quarter past

===

A friend stands outside
On the phone. Saying things
He could not say inside.
People go to bed in the
Upstairs warren. A cai
Pirinha for every decade
Resides within. The day
Is as long as the night is
As long as you keep your
Nerve. A few calls. A game
Or two. Eggs Benedict.
Optimism. Half an hour in
The park which is half an
Hour more than you really
Need. From the park. It all
Adds up. To another day.
No cause for any concern.
Manana is here already.

on this day

We are provided with the Rumsfeldian notion of 'asymmetric warfare'. There are many ways of interpreting this phrase.

on reading proust

+++

When I was abroad I could down whole pints of Proust, in one go, session by session.
Now that I’m back, I can’t even take a sip.

+++

curzon study (courtesy of mr evans)

median

Um, yes, well, they tell me (my mother tells me) that there was thunder and lightning to greet me in the darkness of my small hours arrival. (Perhaps this irregular hour prompted my subsequent insomnia). The storm broke and I arrived in its wake. The preponderance of sixes in my numerology, the devilish permutations, were not, perhaps, a good sign. In the Chinese lexicon, children born in that year should have been placed on hillsides and left for the beasts, for if they lived they would cause trouble.

That was forty years ago. Time enough for me to have screamed for England as some child might do in less than a month's time. (It's still possible). Nearly forty years ago. A few hours short.

I wrote in the Dancer (mutant butoh) about life expectancy. In other epochs, countries, climactic ages, I would be an old man by now, having weathered all that the gods had to throw at me.

In this one, I am still within touching distance of youth. (The minute beckons as I write). Rather than feeling like it's all done and dusted, I still feel as though there's a galaxy of items awaiting attention. (It manifests itself).

Ho hum.
Bring it on (and other such positivistic phraseology.)

The second half.
The next definable chunk.

See what this one has to offer.

censored skiathos journal (part 7)

+++

The wind’s up outside and it’s clouded over a little. Which, after this morning’s heat, is a relief. The clouds were very beautiful on the beach just now. Low, a duck’s egg blue, hanging just above the sea like a god-child’s scrawl. I saw a turning woman in there who might have been a jaguar. Was thankful not to be able to decipher any more of the script. Or be looking at it on drugs.

+++

Walked down to the beach after eating. First time I’ve been to the beach by evening. I don’t know why that should be. Normally I like beaches by night. I liked it tonight. At one point a small creature whistled along the shoreline. I thought it might be a rat (too dark to see anything but a blur of movement), but then it didn’t behave in a v ratlike fashion, it sort of stuck around, and a wave broke over it and it didn’t seem bothered, it just scuttled around. Then I thought it might have been a crab, but don’t know, seemed to move too fast for a crab. A mystery, all in all.

+++

Oh and writer –
What?
The greatest power in the world (little pause) – is love.
Thanks Paris.
Door shuts

Last words of Paris to me, just now, water engineer. A man I could get on with, not least because he had ‘Fuck off Paris’ finger-scrawled in the dust of his rear windscreen, noticed as he drove off.

He picked me up 15 minutes ago, turning what would have been an hour and so on’s walk into a ten minute drive. During which he told me about Thessaloniki, the North-South divide in Greece, the beauty of Crete (pronounced Cre-te, so much better), with it’s wildflowers and snow capped mountains, the negative impact of Mammon on the citizens of the South; and why I need to learn Greek, the fount of all language. Paradox, I said. Para-noia, he retorted, and I like him a lot for it.

Fuck me it picked me up, talking to someone normal. The handle for his windscreen fell of and he said he thought there was something wrong with it. Not at all I replied. He didn’t speak much English but he made an effort.

For today, has been… More thinking. When I get back they’ll say how was it and I’ll say you ever not had a conversation with anyone beside yourself for a fortnight? Not quite accurate but you get the jist.