XII - Lynch on Lynch

I understand when people say that the things in the films are strange or grotesque, but the world is strange and grotesque. They say that truth is stranger than fiction. All the strange things in the films are triggered by this world, so it can't be all that strange. The thing I love most is absurdity. I find real humour in struggling with ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd. But I don't just find humour in unhappiness - I find it extremely heroic the way people forge on despite the despair they often feel.

David Lynch has always polarised audiences. Some find him a unique and hugely talented auteur of television and cinema, other see him as extreme, obtuse, unecessarily dense. I'm most certainly in the former camp, but I can understand the opinions of the latter. He constantly challenges audience expectations by making them work for greater answers and meaning within his work. Lynch on Lynch is by all accounts essential reading for any fans of his work, and even recommended for those yet to be won over. Lynch comes across at all times within the book as warm, open and with a homey, innocent sense of humour. The book covers everything up until Mulholland Drive, so anyone yearning for an explanation of Inland Empire will probably have to wait for the next edition. The book's set out in an interview format between editor Chris Rodley and Lynch, and some really interesting avenues are explored, from film trivia and interpretations, to reflections on transcendal meditation and music.

I originally read Lynch on Lynch while on tour in Finland, but left the book on the plane home like a tit, but went out and rebought it because I knew it would be a book I would return to time and time again. Only the other day I re-read The Elephant Man chapter after watching it on Christmas Day, and was rewarded with this exquisite interpretation of Joseph Merrick, the titular character of the film:

...you see pictures of explosions - big explosions - they always reminded me of these papillomatous growths on John Merrick's body. They were like slow explosions. And they started erupting from the bone. I'm not sure what started the explosion, but even the bones were exploding, getting the same texture, and it would come out through the skin and make these growths that were slow explosions. So the idea of these smokestacks and soot and industry next to this flesh was also a thing that got me. Human beings are like little factories. They turn out so many little products. The idea of something growing inside, and all these fluids, and timings and changes, and all these chemicals somehow capturing life, and coming out and splitting off and turning into another thing... it's unbelievable.

The book is literally bursting with such quotes that cannot help but enrich the viewing experience. I've never been a fan of director's commentaries because I feel it requires a lot of patience to sit through many films with people talking over the bits you actually want to see, so books like Lynch on Lynch really appeal to me. Some of my favourite films are by Lynch: Wild at Heart and Blue Velvet to name but two, and Twin Peaks is probably my all time favourite TV programme, so I get one hell of a kick out of flicking through this and picking up new gems every time. Who'd have thought, as a final example, that Lynch and his film crews would be 'freaking out', blasting Rammstein tapes all day on the set of Lost Highway?

To finish, a short quote that succincly lays out Lynch's attitudes to his films. I hope those of you who are still scratching your head at Lost Highway or Mullholland Drive can perhaps take some comfort from this.

Chris: The movie is full of obvious clues, but there are many other things that are important visual and audio indicators that are not obvious. So at times it does seem as if you're delighting in teasing or mystifying the viewer.
Lynch: No, you never do that to an audience. An idea comes and you make it the way the idea says it wants to be, and you just stay true to that. Clues are beautiful because I believe we're all detectives. We mull things over and we figure things out. We're always working this way. People's minds hold things and form conclusions with indications. It's like music. Music starts. A theme comes in, it goes away and when it comes back it's so much greater because of what's gone before.

But audiences have struggled with trying to work the movie out and, at a certain point, they just want you to tell them what it all means - to you.
Yeah, and I always say the same thing: I think they really know for themselves what it's about. I think that intuition - the detective in us - puts things together in a way that makes sense for us. They say intuition you an inner knowing, but the weird thing about inner knowing is that it's really hard to communicate that to someone else. As soon as you try, you realise that you don't have the words, or the ability to say that inner knowing to your friend. But you still know it! It's really frustrating. I think you
can't communicate it because the knowing is too beautifully abstract. And yet poets can catch an abstraction in words and give you a feeling that you can't get any other way.
I think people know what Mulholland Drive is to them but they don't trust it. They want to have someone else tell them. I love people analysing it but they don't need me to help them out. That's the beautiful thing, to figure things out as a detective. Telling them robs them of the joy of thinking it through and feeling it through and coming to a conclusion... The frames are always the same on the film - it's always the same length and the same soundtrack is always running along it. But the experience in the room changes depending on the audience. That's another reason why people shouldn't be told too much, because 'knowing' putrefies that experience.

on King David and Butlins

Good Day Today by threeminutesthirtyseconds

Above is a brand new song by David Lynch. It's a bit pants, but just the thought of him producing this while sitting in a dark room drinking strong coffee and eating pastries makes me feel all warm inside.

David has a strong musical history, just look at his many collaborations with Angelo Badalamenti, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Industrial Symphony No.1, Julee Cruise, etc. Some of the best soundtracks of the 20th century in my humble opinion. Then you've got last years collaboration with Dangermouse and the late Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, which is a troubling but utterly vast work of arthouse pop music. I want to like that track so much, it just has something in it that reminds me of Crystal Castles thus making me want to tear my brain out. Here's hoping he can get on the blower, give Badalamenti a call and come up with Industrial Symphony 2

Taking stock of all this, I would kill to see him curate an All Tomorrow's Parties. That shit writes itself. This Mortal Coil, Julee Cruise, Dark Night of the Soul performance with each collaborator also performing with their own band separately, Cocteau Twins, Roy Orbison (if he's still alive), Re-enactment of Industrial Symphony No.1 as the headlining act! Then you can have every episode of twin peaks getting played back to back in the cinema, a Kyle Macloughlin meet and greet, and amongst it all, Lynch strolling around with a coffee in one hand and a DV camera in the other, triumphantly filming some warped pop music/existential nightmare tale that he creates on the cuff over the weekend, culminating in the whole Butlins turning into the Black Lodge and Bob fucking up hipsters left right and centre while Werner Herzog flies over in a blimp and drops feathers from a treasure chest.

To finish, musical perfection.

XI - The Drowned World

Reflecting these intermittent flares, the deep bowl of the water shone in a diffused opalescent blur, the discharged light of myriads of phosphorescing animalcula, congregating in dense shoals like a succession of submerged haloes. Between them the water was thick with thousands of entwined snakes and eels, writhing together in frantic tangles that tore the surface of the lagoon.

As the great sun drummed nearer, almost filling the sky itself, the dense vegetation along the limestone cliffs was flung back abruptly, to reveal the black and stone-grey heads of enourmous Triassic lizards. Strutting forward to the edge of the cliffs, they began to roar together at the sun, the noise gradually mounting until it became indistinguishable from the volcanic pounding of the solar flares. Kerans felt, beating within him like his own pulse, the powerful mesmiric pull of the baying reptiles, and stepped out into the lake, whose waters now seemed an extension of his own blood-stream. As the dull pounding rose, he felt the barriers which divided his own cells from the surrounding medium dissolving, and he swam forwards, spreading outwards across the black thudding water....

It's bloody cold at the minute, isn't it? My car's breaks were frozen the other day, totally fused together. Then a few days after the snow was so high my car couldn't get off my own driveway. Overpriced trains are getting cancelled left right and centre, the panicked masses are staying at home behind bolts and wood-burning stoves, gritting firms have switched into overdrive, and Tesco is out of stock of everything but pitta breads. Like every year, this winter seems like the 'worst winter ever', but who's tallying any more? Everything is getting worse. If we didn't already have snow storms and frostbite to contend with, we've got to live with the knowledge that we also had the hottest summer 'since time began'. Going by what misery the lefty-press is chucking around, we've basically got a summer that's going to burn the eyes out of our sockets and a winter that will kill every elderly person north of Watford to look forward to next year.

In an attempt to warm my cockles, I finally got round to finishing JG Ballard's The Drowned World, which I started earlier this year. Being a fickle fucker, I tend to have at least 8 books on the go at once, one for the toilet, one for bed, one for buses and trains, one small enough to keep in my back pocket and whip out when I want to feel superior to the world-at-large, etc. The Drowned World was my 'read in the garden' book but I only got a few weeks decent weather in my garden before my stupid house blocked all the sunlight. So it gathered dust on a window sill until one of my other books got finished (appalling english, I do apologise).

Anyway, The Drowned World is a sort of Sci-fi Heart of Darkness, replete with all the colonial Conrad-style racism ofwhich we are so fond. The story follows a scientist, Kerans, living out the end times in the rooftops and penthouse suites of a now-underwater earth, the sun now so bright that it has become near-impossible to spend any length of time out of shade. Originally accompanied by soldiers assisting him with his biological research, it doesn't take long for Kerans and a couple of his associates to become stranded with only the lizards and the hellish, oppressive heat for company. Such incessant temperatures take their toll on those left behind, who find themselves going a little crazy. Part of the charm of The Drowned World is in its exploration of madness. There's no Jack Nicholson cackles or Dennis Hopper cocaine fits here, it's instead a quiet, considered descent into nincompoopia. The beauty of the book is its grasping of the inevitable early on. By page 50, Kerans is undoubtedly fucked, but it's the exploration and journey into madness that holds court.

The introduction of Strangman's gang act as an agent of change in the same way the bikers/soldiers of the Living Dead series. Before their entrance, you see equilibrium, between the survivors and the living dead, or or Kerans and the drowned world. This calm will undoubtedly resolve in death or failure, but at least the particular failure could be measured and anticipated. The outside force in Strangman however creates an unknown chaos to both the protagonist and the world around them. The drowned world itself literally ceases to be such, as Strangman serves his motives. Similarly, Kerans and Beatrice's acceptance of their fate and reunion with the new wild and untamed landscape cut short by the presence of Strangman. This particular plot development gives a unique insight into a different kind of protagonist. Heroes that exist for illogical interests, or in another sense heroes who live in a world that no longer has a need for them.

I have no idea whatsoever if the passage below makes any scientific sense, but there's no denying its eloquence. archaopsychic past, yes Mr.Ballard, that is top form use of the queens! What a lovely way to write 'loads of sunlight is making us go loopy'. Roll on summer 2011

These are the oldest memories on Earth, the time-codes carried in every chromosome and gene. Every step we've taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories - from the enzymes controlling the carbon dioxide cycle to the organisation of the brachial plexus and the nerve pathways of the Pyramid cells in the mid-brain, each is a record of a thousand decisions taken in the face of a sudden physico-chemical crisis. Just as psychoanalysis restructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs. The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old at the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.

favourite deal with it picture ever

(click for full picture)

not only does this look like it was snapped in the 1990s, but it also contains the following (from left to right):

1. orange head and cab
2. kyrcki
3. soiled paul smith clothing and buzzing off a mic stand
4. a young, gothic noddy holder, looking straight at the camera
5. a lonely can of red stripe
6. some ponytailed, grizzly suit who looks totally out of place, looking straight at the camera
7. some gotho bird
8. Jonne
9. Lecky
10. some guy who I can only imagine is turning round to his mate going 'fuck yeahuh dude'

If I didn't know this was taken in Joseph's well, I could almost imagine this was some kind of a flashmob gig or random David LaChapelle style photo shoot in a stately home. Just so bizarre.

X - Time's Arrow, or The Nature of the Offence

He is travelling towards his secret. Parasite or passenger, I am travelling there with him. It will be bad. It will be bad, and not intelligible. But I will know one thing about it (and at least the certainty brings comfort): I will know how bad the secret is. I will know the nature of the offence. Already I know this. I know that it is to do with trash and shit, and that it is wrong in time.

Tour is always great for reading. When packing for tour I always have a stack of books put to one side that I've been saving for long van rides and evenings sat behind merch tables. In a way it's one of the aspects I most look forward to about touring, like a week long toilet break where I can read away without getting cramp in my legs. As well as Time's Arrow I also managed Lynch on Lynch while away in Finland, but in true fashion I left the finished book on the plane.

Martin Amis is a national treasure, no doubt in my mind about that, just read Money and see for yourself. Since reading it for myself I've gone out of my way to pick up any Amis books I've come across, and in the process have made quite the collection for myself, mostly with hardbacks from second hand bookshops. I picked up Time's Arrow for example from Oxfam for a puny quid. The book itself is a hardback in pretty much good as new, the dust jacket is plastic wrapped and everything.

Anyway, onto the story. Amis throws you right into the deep end with this one. From the get go your in a strange situation, stuck inside a man's body, Tod, who's life appears to be moving backwards. It is a testament to Amis that the descriptions of this world are so clear and explicit. People reform food on their plates, trash collectors dump rubbish on the street, relationships start with a slap and tears and finish with flowers and flirting. Hospitals break and destroy people before throwing them out of hospital and dumping them in front of destroyed cars and house fires, which go on to rebuild them. So far so sci-fi. But Amis' unique sense of language and cynicism brings Time's Arrow into a league of its own:

People are free, then, they are generally free, then, are they? Well they don't look free. Tipping, staggering with croaked or choking voices, blundering backwards along lines seemingly already crossed, already mapped out. Oh, the disgusted look on women's faces as they step backwards through a doorway, out of the rain. Never watching where they are going, the people move through something prearranged, armed with lies. They're always looking forward to going places they've just come back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye. Lords of lies and trash - all kings of crap and trash. Signs say No Littering - but who to? We wouldn't dream of it. Government does that, at night, with trucks; or
uniformed men come sadly at morning with their trolleys, dispensing our rubbish,
and shit for the dogs.

The endpoint in Time's Arrow, it's big reveal, is in essence the beginning of the whole story. While the timeline ebbs on, heading towards a terrible secret that is hinted at throughout, Amis has quite cleverly constructed in actual fact a straightforward plot development despite the at-first confusing pole reversal. Tod, as many might gather, is not as he seems, and bit by bit reveals to the reader what he has spent much of his life running from. The final third of the novel is sickening and tragic in equal measure, the unique flow of time within the story lending an other worldly quality to some of the worst moments in recent human history. There are a lot of important ideas held within Time's Arrow, principally a terrible sense of eventuality. Tod, for example, knows of the evil he has committed in the past, and it is inevitable within the path of the book that the reader eventually will too. It won't serve anyone to reveal how the story ends (or begins for that matter), but Amis' reflections on time and history, our interpretation of events, and the interpretations of the people that actually lived through these moments in history makes for truly engaging reading. Mind expanding, thought provoking literature without proving dense or high brow. I read Time's Arrow in a single 4 hour van journey and through about 3 support band sets, in a similar vein to Night Train, Time's Arrow is a brief flash of inspiration and thought, that is quick to read but lingers on in the days to follow.

There they go, to the day's work, with their heads bent back. I was puzzled at first but now I know why they do it, why they stretch their throats like that. They are looking for the souls of their mothers and their fathers, their women and their children, gathering in the heavens - awaiting human form, and union... The sky above the Vistula is full of stars. I can see them now. They no longer hurt my eyes.

IX - The Forever War

Question one, private. Do you or do you not like Kickback?
Question two, private. Do you or do you not like starship troopers?

If the answers to the above two questions are a resounding masculine 'YEAHUH' then you quite possibly went through the exact same though process as I did when I saw The Forever War sitting on a second hand bookshelf for 50p. Never mind that it's won a Hugo and Nebula award for science fiction writing, it has the same name as a Kickback album, which was reason enough to hand over my pennies. As a quick aside, I bought this from a small shop by Devonshire Green in Sheffield, along with Nightfall by Isaac Asimov, both for 50p. They had about 3 bookshelves just for sci-fi. Needless to say I'm making return trips.

I managed to read The Forever War in about one lie-in and two baths. The words pretty much roll off the pages, there's nothing really to stump the average reader, it's got jargon, but it's more jargon for jargon's sake than important plot developments that you absolutely have to understand 100% (either that or I am a space travel genius and have no idea).

Anyway, the book basically reads like platoon in space. Super soldiers chosen for their intellectual ability and calm demeanours take to war against an alien race they've not yet seen. They use collapsed stars as jumps to get to other parts of the galaxy and fight the enemy, but at a heavy, heavy cost. 6 months of travel in soldier's years is the equivalent to hundreds or even thousands of earth years, depending on distance travelled, so every time the soldiers return home Earth has changed entirely. Furthermore the enemy they fight has often come from the future, often having faced other human troops from a human future who are also ahead of the current humans travelling through space to fight those same aliens. So there's this idea that at times soldiers are on a pathway of certain death just because of time delay. It drew parallels with the First World War to me, with the idead of some historians that the German army had begun to march to war, even though all the leaders of Europe wanted, and agreed upon, peace. They had no way to call the troops back and just had to march on to death.

The book is a heady mix of absolutely over-the-top war machismo (yeahuh) and actually quite thought provoking considerations of future human civilisation. Sometimes the action orientated sequences can get a bit caught up in themselves, and there is a kind of weird homophobic (or at the least homosceptic) undercurrent, whereby Haldeman is pretty much convinced that at some point the whole human race will be homosexual, and I'm not entirely sure what his angle is on it, dystopian? jabbing a funny finger? no clue. But overall it doesn't really spoil the story. If you're not really arsed by 'war epics', it's still worth reading for the equal amount of attention Haldeman pays to the dynamics of human society, asking plenty of moral questions along the way to give any reader some food for thought. Like I've said, it's not mind bending genius like Gravity's Rainbow, and it's not up to the detailed universe of the likes of Ringworld, but it holds its own just through sheer enjoyment. Think along the lines of If I Die in a Combat Zone (see bookclub I) but with space marines and you're pretty much there.

Sci-fi is at it's best when the stories are logical extensions of reality, or of current affairs extended to logical futuristic conclusions. There are some great passages within the book that echo the societal and political and counter-cultural attitudes of Vietnam, the Cold War, etc, and even the more current world conflicts going on today. The passage below follows the soldiers return from active duty.

"Some of you are smiling. I think you ought to reserve judgement. Earth is
not the same place you left."
He pulled a little card out of his tunic and looked at it, half-smiling. "Most of you have on the order of four hundred thousand dollars coming to you, accumulated pay and interest. But Earth is on a war footing and, of course, it is the citizens of Earth who are supporting the war with their tax dollars. Your income puts you in a 92 percent income tax bracket. Thirty-two thousand dollars could last you about three years if you're very careful.
"Eventually you're going to have to get a job, and this is one job for which you are uniquely trained. There aren't that many others available - the population of Earth is over nine billion, with five or six billion unemployed. And all of your training is twenty-six years out of date.
"Also keep in mind that your friends and sweethearts of two years ago are now
going to be twenty-six years older than you. Many of your relatives will
have passed away. I think you'll find it a very lonely world."

You can probably see how this one ends.

VIII - Nothing to Envy

Is it a North Korean Phenomenon that many have observed. For lack of chairs or benches, the people sit for hours on their haunches, along the sides of roads, in parks, in the market. They stare straight ahead as though they are waiting - for a tram, maybe, or a passing car? A friend or relative? Maybe they are waiting for nothing in particular, just waiting for something to change.

I wrote an essay about 7 years ago on the international dynamic between North Korea and the West. I imagine it was pretty naive, knowing my 19 year old self I imagine I would have gone out of my way to 'defend' the North Korean regime and pour scorn on the imperialist West. Being a lot older doesn't necessarily make me a lot wiser, but I at least can appreciate that there are so many nuances on the 'world stage' that to label anyone as a 'good guy' is folly. North Korea as a country has always fascinated me, largely because of the mystery within. Tourists are only allowed to enter at certain times of the year, under constant supervision from government officials. Journalists, of course, are given equally stringent access, and furthermore there is a total communication blockade, in part because their electricity grid is hardly ever switched on. Even countries riddled with economic and political strife are still to a certain extent either welcoming to visitors or at the very least open to journalists. North Korea is one of the few remaining exceptions to the rule. But I'm always curious as to what the world is like for North Koreans. What's normal and everyday for the North Korean people? What do they look forward to? How do they spend their time?

Barbara Demick is a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, and spent several years collecting accounts of people who had defected from North Korea for various reasons. Some political, some economical, some just by accident. These accounts range from a Dr who had become utterly disillusioned by the huge death toll from the famine in North Korea in the 1990's, and her government's inability to do anything about it. Another follows an almost Dickensian story of a street urchin who lives amongst the dead and destitude in Chongjin station, and his eventual escape to a new life in South Korea. The accounts themselves are fascinating, and range from inspiring to tragic. The sour note comes with Demick constantly trying to put her own opinions of North Korea in the way. Reading Nothing to Envy rarely feels like personal accounts, and more often than not comes across as a journalist choosing words and passages to illustrate her damnation of the North Korean regime, which is undoubtedly deserving of pages and pages of scorn, but seems to dilute the personal accounts to a certain extent.

That isn't to say that the book isn't filled with some very moving, intriguing and genuinely page-turning accounts, but that there always seems to be a shadow of critique hanging in the background. We all know that the North Korean regime is an Orwellian nightmare, that the Kim 'dynasty' would be seen in an almost farcical light if it wasn't for the fact that they are indirectly responsible for the death of millions of North Koreans, and responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands more, but it seems this book is geared to a small portion of people out there who have no idea about this country whatsoever.

I also find the exploration of people's lives in South Korea following defection rather short in comparison, yet two of the most memorable quotes for me came from the defector's lives in South Korea, for example when Demick describes one of her sources after having not seen her for a few months.

She's had plastic surgery to add the extra little crease in her eyelids to make herself look more Caucasion. It was the ultimate South Korean experience. Mrs Song had arrived.

And another account by the Dr, who ended up working as a cleaner in South Korea, on telling her employer, a university professor, that she used to be a Dr.

Dr Kim felt she had no choice but to confess. She blurted out her life story - the divorce and the loss of custody of her son, her father's suicide after Kim Il-Sung's death, the years of semistarvation, the dying children at the hospital.
"Oh my God. You're a doctor!" the professor said. The women hugged and cried together. "If I had known, I would have treated you differently."

The message behind the book seems so confused at times. It holds the every day life of the North Korean as important, but then broadcasts ideological arguments in the background. If I had known the book was the latter, I wouldn't have bothered reading it. There was just enough of the former to maintain my interest. I imagine I am spoiled by having read some of the McSweeney's Voice of Witness series, which dedicate much much more attention to varied and personal accounts, over authorial opinions, and are well worth your attention.

I feel like I've come down a bit hard on Nothing to Envy, it's by no means a bad book, but when reading it I felt misled at times. If you are completely ignorant to North Korea, then this is probably ideal. I'm still just waiting for the Ernest Hemingway of North Korea to step forward and fill my brain with bulbous prose.

Below is a rather heartbreaking account from 1999, again by Dr Kim, of her first day in China, beyond the North Korean border. One day she basically just started walking, and made it to China without even seeing anyone else. It it probably worth mentioning that in the 1990's most North Koreans who didn't starve to death survived on pulped corn cobs or tree bark, and whatever grasses and weeds they could scavenge. Often they would spend all day finding enough edible morsels to have a single meal in the evening. The UN World Food Programme rice bags mostly ended up on the black market.

Dr Kim looked down a dirt road that led to farmhouses. Most of them had walls around them with metal gates. She tried one; it turned out to be unlocked. She pushed it open and peered inside. On the ground she saw a small metal bowl with food. She looked closer - it was rice, white rice, mixed with scraps of meat. Dr Kim couldn't remember the last time she's seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog's bark.
Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn't deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

The Last Patrol

Tomorrow I'm going on my first protest in quite some time. After spending a few years of my life religiously going on marches against the war in Iraq with no effect, and after spending some time with some direct-action types who were some of the biggest buffoons I'd had the pleasure of meeting, I became a bit disillusioned with it all. But one of the only good things so far about the Tories getting back in is they've given us plenty to kick off about already. As you may or may not know, public services across the board are facing crippling cuts through austerity measures to combat the defecit. This means the people who most need public services like the national health, police, social services, welfare, and so on will find themselves with less accessibility, less facilities, less feet on the ground, and more isolation and social poverty. There is a really, really, really, really simple solution that means we can keep public services as they are and that is raise taxes. The rich people pay a lot of tax, the poor don't pay as much. If you have money, you should consider yourself fortunate and not balk at the idea of helping those less fortunate. The only way Britain can be great again is by looking after one another, not shutting the doors and thinking only of ourselves. So I am protesting tomorrow at the Tory conference, and I hope to see tens of thousands of other people there with me, although I don't hold much hope at all and probably following this I will go back to grumbling at home. Because, as I've learned over the years, if there's one thing a plutocratically elected government won't do it's listen to the people they govern.

Anyway, while I was making my banner earlier I was reminded of one of the most memorable parts of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72, a long, arduous and bleak journey through the 1972 presidential elections that all-round sod Richard Nixon won against seemingly everyone's efforts. Despite being batshit crazy, Thompson was also one of the most knowledgeable and passionate political commentators I have ever read. The guy can flit between subjects like nobodies business, and keep the readers interest through a 500 page political commentary with ease. This particular scene involves the Vietnam Veterans Against the War marching on the Republican conference that announced Nixon's candidacy, at the Fontainbleau in Miami, and contains some sound advice which has stayed with me since the first time I read it.

As I drove toward Key Biscayne with the top down, squinting into the sun, I saw the Vets... They were moving up Collins Avenue in dead silence; twelve hundred of them dressed in battle fatigues, helmets, combat boots... a few carried full-size plastic M-16s, many peace symbols, girlfriends walking beside vets being pushed along the street in slow moving wheelchairs, others walking jerkily on crutches... But nobody spoke, all the 'stop, start' 'fast, slow' 'left,right' commands came from 'platoon leaders' walking slightly off to the side of the main column and using hand signals...

The silence of the march was contagious, almost threatening. There were hundreds of spectators, but nobody said a word. I walked beside the column for ten blocks, and the only sounds I remember hearing were the soft thump of boot leather on hot asphalt and the occasional rattling of an open canteen top.

The Fontainebleu was already walled off from the street by five hundred heavily armed cops when the front ranks of the Last Patrol arrivedm, still marching in total silence. Several hours earlier, a noisy mob of Yippie/Zippie/SDS 'non-delegates' had shown up in front of the Fontainebleu and been met with jeers and curses from GOP delegates and other partisan spectators, massed behind the police lines... But now there was no jeering. Even the cops seemed deflated. They watched nervously from behind their face shields as the VVAW platoon leaders, still using hand signals, funneled the column into a tight semicircle that clocked all three northbound lanes of Collins Avenue...

For the first and only time during the whole convention, the cops were clearly off balance. The Vets could have closed all six lanes of Collins Avenue if they'd wanted to, and nobody would have argued. I have been covering anti-war demonstrations with depressing regularity since the winter of 1964, in cities all over the country, and I have never seen cops so intimidated by demonstrators as they were in front of the Fontainebleau Hotel on that hot Tuesday afternoon in Miami Beach.

There was an awful tension in that silence. Not even that pack of rich sybarites out there on the foredeck of the Wild Rose of Houston could stay in their seats for this show. They were standing up at the rail, looking worried, getting very bad vibrations from whatever was happening over there in the street. Was something wrong with their gladiators? Were they spooked? And why was there no noise?

After five more minutes of harsh silence, one of the VVAW platoon leaders suddenly picked up a bullhorn and said: 'We want to come inside.'

Nobody answered, but an almost invisible shudder ran through the crowd. 'O my God!' a man standing next to me muttered. I felt a strange tightness coming over me, and I reacted instinctively - for the first time in a long, long while - by slipping my notebook into my belt and reaching down to take off my watch. The first thing to go in a street fight is always your watch, and once you've lost a few, you develop a certain instinct that lets you know when its time to get the thing off your wrist and into a safe pocket.

Bookclub VI - Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Excerpt from the sixth 'Dating Game' show
Pretty girl cheerleader: Bachelor Number One, one of my biggest
difficulties is spelling. How do you spell relief?
Bachelor number one: F-A-R-T
Pretty girl cheerleader (without batting an eyelash): I see. Bachelor
Number Two, what nationality are you?
Bachelor number two: Well, my father is Welsh, and my mother is Hungarian,
which makes me Well-Hung!
Pretty girl cheerleader: Well, aren't you the clever one? Okay, Bachelor
Number Three, what's the funniest thing you were ever caught doing when you
thought nobody was looking?
Bachelor number three: I was caught with a necktie around my dick.

Chuck Barris. New Yorker. Creator of The Dating Game (known as blind date over here). Creator of The Newlywed Game. A household name to millions of American viewers. CIA assassin?

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind takes the autobiography and runs with it in the same way that some guy at RBS is running with your pension fund. Confessions would practically be as much at home in the Fantasy/Science Fiction section of Waterstone's (other book retailers are available) as the Autobiography. There is a lot in Confessions that beggars belief, raises eyebrows and tries to light the spark of incredulity. But it gets away with it because it is totally charming and hugely entertaining. There is a phrase that is well suited to Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: don't let the truth get in the way of a good yarn.

Truth, afterall, is such a pejorative term. Some high brows amongst us would like to pour scorn on the likes of Norman Mailer and Truman Capote for their preference of storytelling over factual accuracies. But to me, truth runs deeper, all writing is a retelling of physical reality, even the most ardent journalist or committed memorist would come far, far off the mark of reality. But writing is a creative force, at its best it conjures ideas and images of reality so we can live a form of reality in our own heads. Capote and Mailer both tap into deeper truths of the world and the human condition by in part sidestepping the reality they faced.

Now, I'm not comparing Chuck Barris to either Mailer or Capote, but, the guy knows how to tell a fucking story. Barris is responsible for some of America's best loved/most loathed gameshows, depending on who you ask. What Confessions of a Dangerous Mind unleashed on the world was a revelation that he was also a CIA operative who had committed several assassinations during the cold war, and had been awarded a presidential medal of honour for his troubles. Largely it reads like a Robert Ludlum novel wrote by Larry David, and I mean that as high praise. It's hilarious in parts, but also has a good deal of intrigue and suspense. Barris is quite clearly a bit of an arse, but he's a likeable arse, and throughout his misadventures and misdeeds (which I can imagine are painfully true), you still root for the guy.

It's widely accepted that Barris' whole 'CIA operative' schtick is poppycock, but then again most celebrities' bestsellers are pockmarked with utter blood boiling fabrication, so what does it matter when the story is this good? Make sure to watch the film adaptation as well starring Sam Rockwell; it's in my top 10 films of all time, easy. The excerpt below is taken from one of Chuck's 'hits' in Europe, and is entertainingly incredulous. Oh, I almost forgot to mention his CIA operative name is Sunny Sixkiller!!!

I left the hotel lobby and returned to the rue des Saints-Peres,
pretending to window shop, but always keeping my eyes on the green wooden doors. I saw windows filled with uncomfortable-looking Louis XIV chair, heavily framed oil paintings, and piles of twenty-four karat gold jewelry. I walked on. Kirkby and Slasky must have KGB watchdogs, I mused. The colonel wouldn't travel without them. So where were they? I scoured the street but saw nothing resembling Soviet henchmen. They probably weren't around because the colonel wasn't around. The act of attempting to trap two individuals in one suitable place was a pain in the ass. Perhaps impossible.

I turned back toward the white cement building, and instantly froze. Harry Kirby and Colonel Slasky had stepped out onto the rue des Saints-Peres. I watched the two men look up and down the street. They saw me, but I apparently meant nothing to them. Three women shoppers jostled the two men as they passed them on the narrow pavement. I watched the shoppers say "Excuse me," and Kirby smile. Slasky turned his back to me. He was looking toward the boulevard St.Germain. For what? A car? His henchmen? The women continued down the pavement toward me.

I moved quickly through the shoppers, drawing my silencer-equipped automatic out of my belt as I walked. I bumped into Colonel Slasky, spun him around, and shot him three times in the left side of his chest. I turned and shot Harry Kirby once in the face and twice in the chest. Slasky had fallen onto his side on the pavement. I bent over and put a bullet through his temple. Kirby was on his knees. I placed the end of the silencer in his ear and pulled the trigger. A small truck screeched to a stop. I crossed the street and ran toward the boulevard St.Germain. If there were screams and shouts and horns blowing, I didn't hear them.

I returned to my hotel room, locked and bolted the door, and positioned an armchair so that I could see the entire room. I checked the Ruger .22-caliber automatic and silencer that I had used on the rue des Saints-Peres. It was a funny-looking gun. Most of its barrel was the silencer. The boys at the Company called it an "assassination gun." I ejected the old magazine, oiled the automatic lightly, wiped it clean with a rag, popped in a full magazine, and rested the gun on my lap. I sat that way until dawn.

Telling you this hyperbole free, this is the worst band I ever did see

Yesterday I was privvy to a once in a blue moon event of such magnitude it deserves sharing with myself and about 3 other people. I am now the proud owner of a brand new 'worst band I've ever seen'. For nearly 7 years the mantle was held by Rotherham's finest In the Event of Neo Tokyo, a band so rubbish they actually made rotten vegetables, broken bits of rust and glass, and soiled incontinence pads seem like a michelin-star meal. For those who missed out on the spectacle, from memory the band consisted of 3 guys in ill fitting clothes (think spray-on jeans and child sized tweed jackets) actually hopping and skipping about the place while one twat ragged on a shit ibanez a bit, while another one hit a fisher price drumkit and the singer crawled around on the floor screaming and colouring in. Some of that might have been embellished, but the bit about the singer crawling around and colouring definately was not. Anyway, Neo Tokyo played some alldayer in Sheffield with some pretty straightforward punk and hardcore bands, which made their performance seem all the more ridiculous. Some arty types out there might consider thinking oh how brave of them, such heart to express themselves in the face of such bourgeois banality to which I say, NO NO NO. They weren't brave to be making such nonsense, they were more likely off their faces on the silver paint they'd sprayed on their winklepickers before hand and thought they were the most 'out there' thing since Ike landed a haymaker on Tina.

Before I focus upon the band to which I afford this most rare of accolades, I would like to allay any fears of ignorance or prejudice with a simple pre-amble: I like Animal Collective. To elaborate a little, I prefer Feels to Merriweather Post Pavilion, thought Fall Be Kind was excellent, and even went to see Panda Bear and sat through an hour and a half set of about 2 notes. If that's not enough I own some Peter Gabriel CDs. I am an open minded music dude.

With that said it's on to the award! Silver envelope please, ta.

It gives me great pleasure to bestow the crown of WORST FUCKING BAND I HAVE EVER SEEN to...

Crystal Castles!!!



It seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm at Leeds Festival (don't hate the player, hate the game) to watch some mega label name indie bands and some 'hot tipped acts', and find myself with an hour or so to burn before The Get Up Kids (get me). 'How about that NME tent I've been reading about', my id chips in. 'Sure, why not, I've heard NME definately have the pulse on what's good in the world of music' concurs my sycophantic ego. So off I trot, full of joyous apprehension, imaginations running wild with what blessings this tent of magic and wonder could hold. What's this? The crowd is packed out beyond the rather ample tent borders? While The Libertines are performing elsewhere? This could only be a wonderful, error-free augury! Loads of impressionable teenagers can't be wrong!

Then I walked in and saw through about 200 metres of total darkness some smelly bird on a stage fall off a drum kit while Scooter was playing in the background. Up she pops, takes a swig of Bombay Sapphire (what a classy alcoholic) and proceedes to squeel down a microphone like the kid at family do's that always makes too much racket while their parents stare at them like they're the most precious, precious thing. She then runs on the spot for a bit, screams for a bit more, and then falls over again. While Scooter plays in the background. And about 4,000 (probably an exagerration) people jump up and down like they're watching fucking Feeder or something. I look around me and everyone seems to be having a good time, which enrages me even more. Booing just doesn't cut it, so when the noise eventually stops I scream in anger, which some pre-teens in front of me mistake for appreciation and turn round and give me the thumbs up or something. Then they play another song that sounds like Scooter, and this bird climbs over everything and makes stupid noises. In hindsight it's like Basshunter if some posho smellies who are into shit American anime, collecting swords and sticking action figures all over their telly suddenly decided to take bear tranquilizers and make music that would really 'put it to the man'. Not since the days of Neo Tokyo have I been so utterly baffled, and so let down by my peers. Worse still, they weren't apologising for having an 'off day' or for the fact that they accidentally left the rest of the band at home, but said stuff through the microphone that I couldn't really hear but was probably telling people how fucking great they were. And the masses lapped it up like slightly sugary cream that brings luck and x-ray vision.

I would finally like to take this opportunity to say: Pitchfork, you are wrong. Vice, you are wrong. NME, you are wrong. Radio, you are wrong. Internet, you are wrong. That being said, if the internet is wrong, does that mean I'm wrong as well meaning that the internet is right, meaning that I'm still wrong? Or does it mean the internet is wrong but I'm somehow right because my thoughts pre-dating this existed before the statement about the internet being wrong so this remains pre-internet so even though the internet is eventually right it's still wrong?

On the plus side, it was good to see Rik from the young ones and the drug dealer from Pulp Fiction back in the public consciousness with their Arcade Fire collaboration.

All dogs go to heaven

It's silent tonight, there's the usual creaks and groans running through my house, and outside noises, but that's not what I mean. It's the first time I've been home for more than half an hour since yesterday morning. If it wasn't for work tomorrow I'd have stayed away longer. The house is just full of your smells, of your well-loved toys and stray hairs. Your food bowl's still out waiting for a meal that's never going to come, your lead hanging from the front door waiting for a walk that's never going to happen. The hardest thing to come to terms with is that everything to do with your existence is over. The inaction that comes with death hangs over everything like a punishment that's never going to go away. I'm not going to wake up tomorrow and have you back, or next week, or next year.

I remember the first time I held you was on the drive home from the farm that sold you. You were terrified, ears down, uncertain of us, of your environment, taken away from everything you knew. Once we got you home you tentatively explored our garden, beginning to see that maybe things weren't so bad. I remember kneeling beside you, lowering my head to your eye level, and waiting to see how you'd respond. I remember how you bounded up towards me like at that moment I was your best friend in the world, and nothing from that point could ever separate us. We were apart at times, through going to university and living in rented accomodation, but in all that time I'd come back to you and nothing ever changed. Even though I know life is fleeting, even though I've seen people come and go, see people die all around me, and even though I knew your time would come, I couldn't bring myself to envision it.

Yesterday morning was one of the worst few hours of my adult life. Never have I felt so hopeless and afraid, so utterly devoid of choice or power. As you died in my arms on that linoleum floor, I saw the same terror in your eyes that I saw that first day, the uncertainty, the bond changing from friendship to stranger through the curse of pain. But in your last moments, while I held your head, as the vet tried in vein to save you, you somehow managed to muster enough strength from your weak and bloodless body to raise your head and look me in the eyes with pure love.

You were my best mate, and I cannot conceive of the future weeks and months without you, coming into an empty house without your relieved circling and crashing tail, without our walking rituals, without you by my side wherever I happened to be. There is a hole where you used to be and I just don't know how to fill it.

I wish I could write something to give you weight and substance, but I feel the more I type, the more I cheapen what you meant to me. It was such a deep and personal thing that mere words can't encapsulate.

And yet loss is loss, a unique experience that is fundamentally shared by everyone.

For Amber, and every other friend, loved and lost.

Alan

'For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.'

Hemingway

I received a box full of photos of my dad yesterday, along with various running medals and the rucksack he was going to use on a mountain climb that never happened. I opened and looked through them all today like some form of existential birthday present: to look at the man that was to see the man I will become, or some Star Wars bullshit like that. Like almost every other experience to do with my father, I examined everything with cold detachment, feeling as much loss for a man who is no longer here as I did for a father who was never there. To me, the binding quality of the photographs is the absence of his children. Of me and my two brothers. One photo of Tom, two of Julian, none of myself. Such absence is not a matter of blame, I don't think he was a bad father anymore than I think we were good children. Circumstances merely kept us at odds for the most part. In spite of this I can see in the collection of pictures - dinner parties, trips abroad, his work in the Middle East as a young man - aspects of myself, from mannerisms to dress sense. Even the now-faded life behind his eyes. I barely knew him as more than a name spoken with spite and sadness, but I somehow feel a meaningful connection nonetheless, beyond mere family name.

Bookclub V - Imperial Bedrooms

They knew, of course, that it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster, even though if he had been Israel's case against him would have collapsed or, at the very least, lost all interest. Surely, one can hardly call upon the whole world and gather correspondents from the four corners of the earth in order to display Bluebeard in the dock. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal... this new type of criminal, who is in fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

Eichmann and the Holocaust - Hannah Arendt

The above quote is taken from Arendt's study of the Eichmann trial at Nuremberg. The book focuses on Eichmann's denial of wrongdoing, or of committing any evil, because he was simply following orders. This man allegedly held no ill-feeling to the German Jews whatsoever, yet was likely more responsible than any other individual for the final solution. Eichmann was the architect and facilitator of the largest-scale killing of human beings in history, yet acted only through self-interest, not malice. Arendt called this 'the banality of evil'. Monsters do not commit evil acts - humans do.

It is with these ideas of evil in mind that I turn to the latest Doghead tome - Imperial Bedrooms, the new book by Brett Easton Ellis. Imperial Bedrooms is less a morality tale, and more an amorality tale. 25 years after Less Than Zero, Ellis returns to Clay and the other lost children of his first novel, now faced with mid-life crises as opposed to adolescent troubles. In this short novel, Clay gets embroiled in a mess of kidnappings, torture and murder.

In a break from Less Than Zero, Clay is the book's Patrick Bateman, becoming the practitioner of evil acts rather than merely an observer. In a way, Clay is even worse than Batemen, certainly more dislikable. Floating through the book in a narcissistic, drunken haze, he don's Hamlet's cap and lets unbearable acts of violence happen to those closest to him through mere selfishness and self-pity. To me, the most striking attribute of Imperial Bedrooms is Clay's intrusion to the plot. Ellis writes as if Clay has stumbled upon a story that was never meant to be his. Characters constantly refuse to explain details to him, or to allow him to get involved. Through sheer will and debasement of all those close to him, he eventually makes himself central to the story to everyone elses detriment.

In a similar vein to Ellis' other work, the large portion of the story is mundanely simple sentencing, peppered with occasional outbursts of emotion or extreme violence. Most of the violence, even, is spoken of in matter-of-fact terms, devoid of emotion. Some misundersand Ellis and see his books as irritating and boring, but the language itself contributes to the story. The scene below could have been told a hundred different ways, but by Ellis using the sort of simple language he does it homes in on the dull, banal nature of Clay's evil.

I lean in to kiss her face.

She turns away. 'I don't want to,' she mutters

'Then get out of here,' I say. 'I don't care if you ever come back here.'

'Amanda's missing and you're-'

'I said I don't care.' I take her hand. I start pulling her toward the bedroom. 'Come on.'

'Just let it go, Clay.' Her eyes are closed and she's grimacing.

'If you're not going to do this, then you should leave.'

'And if I leave, what will happen?'

'I'll make a call to Mark. I'll make another call to Jon. I'll call Jason.' I pause. 'And I'll cancel everything.

She immediately moves into me and says she's sorry and then she's guiding me toward the bedroom and this is the way I always wanted the scene to play out and then it does and it has to because it doesn't really work for me unless it happens like this.

Despite the majority of the language being empty and throwaway, Ellis can write as beautifully as those he's been compared to - Hemingway, Carver, Bellow and Yates - when circumstance demands it. This excerpt immediately follows a truly extreme act of sexual violence, and also the moment Clay stops being the observer and truly involves himself in the sadism of the modern world.

The sky looked scoured, remarkable, a cylinder of light formed at the base of the mountains, rising upward. At the end of the weekend the girl admitted to me that she had become a believer as we sat in the shade of the towering hills - "the crossing place" is what the girl called them, and when I asked her what she meant she said, "This is where the devil lives," and she was pointing at the mountains with a trembling hand but she was smiling now as the boy kept diving into the pool and the welts glistened on his tan back from where I had beaten him. The devil was calling out to her but it didn't scare the girl anymore because she wanted to talk to him now, and in the house was a copy of the book that had been written about us over twenty years ago and its neon cover glared from where it rested on the glass coffee table until it was found floating in the pool in the house in the movie colony beneath the towering mountains, water bloated, the sound of crickets everywhere, and then camera tracks across the desert until we start fading out the yellowing sky.

Less than Zero was hailed as tapping into the lost generation of the rich LA youth, and became an 80's classic as a result. It seems with Imperial Bedrooms Ellis in response wants to smash any hope of redemption for the characters. They are beyond redemption, a product of absent parents and hedonistic upbringing. The real-life stars of the real-life adaptation of Less than Zero are rumoured to all be returning for the Imperial Bedrooms adaptation. It remains to be seen in what ways the worlds of literature, film and reality can further overlap and co-exist.

Bookclub IV - The Death of Bunny Munro

'...and she said her name was Penny Charade... I kid you not. Penny Charade... I'll never forget it... and when I told her my name she laughed and I laughed and I knew that I had this power... this special thing that all the other bastards who were flopping around in the pool trying to impress the girls didn't have... I had this gift... a talent... and it was in that moment that I knew what I was put on this stupid planet to do...'

Bunny gropes around on the bed until he finds the remote and, with a crack of static, it implodes into nothingness and he closes his eyes. A great wall of darkness moves towards him. He can see it coming, vast and imperious. It is unconsciousness and it is sleep. It moves like a great tidal wave but before it breaks over him and he is away, before he renders himself completely to that oblivious sleep, he thinks, with a sudden, terrible, bottomless dread, of Avril Lavigne's vagina.

It is needless to say that I am a Nick Cave fan, but I've said it anyway. This blog's name (as well a my zine and ill-fated label) is taken directly from a Nick Cave book: And the Ass Saw the Angel, but you all knew that already.

Anyway, sycophantic praise aside, by sheer chance I spotted The Death of Bunny Munro on a shop bookshelf on its week of release, and quite likely made some sort of yelping sound before throwing money at someone and reading it on the closest toilet to hand. Bunny, essentially, revolves around one man's descent into increasingly depraved encounters with members of the fairer sex. Bunny is a cosmetic salesman, and master cocksmith, but following his wife's suicide he finds both tasks a lot more of an uphill struggle, especially with his young son in tow. An ill-fated journey ensues as Bunny attempts to finish his client list, while a serial killer dressed as the devil slowly makes his way south...

The scope and Scale of Bunny Munro is so, so different from And the Ass... it took some acclimatising. The book's entirely set in the very real place of Brighton, Cave's place of residence for some years, which is a far cry from the hugely abstracted apocalyptic americana/australiana of And the Ass... The lyrical voice of Bunny is clearly different too, Bunny Sr sounding so much older, the world around him miserable just by its dull reality. Like everything Cave does the book is poetic and flows brilliantly, the pages bleed menace, and I often found myself castigating myself for rooting for such a horrible degenerate. Having said that, I think a bit of Bunny resides in every man, he certainly has aspects of Cave in him - just listen to Grinderman. I have to say I was left a little cold by the resolution, but then And the Ass... is one of my all time favourite books, so it was always going to be a hard book to equal.

A few months after, I noticed that an audiobook version was being released, and purchased that with almost as much relish. I actually found that I enjoyed the audio version of the book a hell of a lot more. The voice of Bunny sounded so much more genuine when put through the Aussie twang of Nick Cave. As an added bonus, the whole story has a sparse Warren Ellis/Nick Cave soundtrack, which is surely a must-have for the Nick Cave completionistas. The whole book has this unmistakeable 'road trip in hell' quality about it and for that reason it begs to be heard on a dark drive down the M1. Just look out for those cement mixers.

In honour of the audio greatness, here's a youtube link to Cave reading one of my favourite parts.

Lost Dogs - prologue

(At the rate I'm going I'll have a book's worth of unfinished crap by the end of this year.)

When he saw the flames outside, heard the screams that seemed to be so close and yet so far away at the same time, he opened his front door in case the dogs wanted to leave. He wasn't entirely sure of his decision, but felt it was fair to give them fair opportunity to leave should they so desire. They pattered up to the front, ears pricked, and let out a snort or two, the beginning of a bark then seemed to think better of it and looked up at him, ears now pinned back. He thought at first that they might have been happier in the wild, but it now seemed obvious that they were as comfortable in these four walls as him. He ruffled the fur behind their ears and closed the door, walking through the silent house, his home for what seemed at this moment like forever. Every wall, cornice, picture rail and skirting as familiar to him as his own hairs, warts and wrinkles. He ran his fingers along a wooden panel, feeling the peaks where paint drops had dried decades before, then ran them into crevices where pram handles had scuffed or bicycles had chipped, now many years since. The house was dim, lit only by the glow of the growing fires outside but even in pitch darkness he could navigate his hallway and rooms with ease. The furniture never changed position - except when he felt the need to clean. He made his way to the kitchen and the dogs bobbed behind him devotedly. He reached into the dog's sack and felt for the scoop, whereby he filled both their bowls with enough dry food for a week or so, just in case something happened and he didn't get another chance. The dogs sniffed the heap of kibble on the floor, hesistated, and crunched a few pieces between then before catching up to their master at the back door. He stood looking out into his garden, the darkness of the great unknown rendered uncertain by the fire scattered across the land. He stopped his observations momentarily to ascertain whether his running commentary was natural or whether a mere calming mechanism, like repeating a song over and over in one's head in troublesome times. He felt awfully rational and composed considering the state of things outside his front door, but on reflection he didn't suppose there was a particular way of behaving when the world was ending.

Bookclub III - The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

What you have here is a book which by all rights should be an instant classic. An eloquent and passionate critique of organised religion wrote in the form of a gospel, Philip Pullman has managed to write a book that is a damning critique of the Christian church, while simultaneously writing with much love and reverence of the source material. If the Hitchens and the Dawkins of the world feel a little overly antagonistic to your, Pullman's Good Man Jesus and Scoundrel Christ may be more up your alley.

There is a rather large clue to The Good Man Jesus... on the back cover, which in huge letters reads THIS IS A STORY, Pullman, despite writing a book in the style of one of the four gospels, makes it quite plain from the start that it is not a heretical dig, but a work of fiction. I read the book in two afternoons - while appearing quite sizeable, the layout of the text is more akin to poetry than prose, and the font size is rather large. Normally I would be unhappy about shelling 15 quid for such a short novel, but the final product is very well made, from two font colours, to the ribbon bookmark. In retelling the story of Christ, Pullman takes the man Jesus Christ and makes him into twin brothers. Jesus: a rebellious figure who sees great injustice in the world and sees a chance to bring justice to the meek, and Christ: a quiet, contemplative figure who wants to save the whole of humanity through very different means. A shadowy figure follows Christ, instructing him to document the actions of Jesus, to tell his story in a way that would give the people truth to life, existence, and God. Ironically, Christ retells Jesus' tale in a way that is not entirely truthful, in essence adding legend and miracle to the actions of a good natured, but very normal man. This book begins as the story of Jesus Christ, but ends as an insight into the creation of the Christian church.

In interviews, Pullman has talked about his Christian upbringing, and of his open admiration for the stories within the bible. The Good Man Jesus and Scoundrel Christ is not only an indictment of organised religion, but is to all intents and purposes another authentic attempt at the retelling of the Bible story. It is worth noting that 12 gospels exist, some would say more, taking into account the recently found Gospel According to Judas Iscariot. It's quite clear why some of these gospels were ommitted, such as The Gospel According to Thomas, which talks of an infant Jesus transforming his schoolmates into goats and other such nonsense. The gospels themselves were originally compiled in the 2nd century, and were authored by anonymous writers, only given titles in hindsight. To what extent are these gospels truthful? Were the miracles performed as described, or was poetic retelling of historical moments later taken for physical fact? The Good Man Jesus and Scoundrel Christ doesn't necessarily have the answers you're looking for, but then maybe the New Testament doesn't have the answers either.

Here is an excerpt from close to the end of the book, where Jesus converses with God in the garden at Gethsemane, shortly before being arrested by the Romans. The conversation develops page after page, and is really quite a passionate monologue/conversation, which I think most agnostics and atheists (perhaps even religious) will find common ground.

'Have I been deluding myself as well as everyone else? What have I been doing, telling them that its going to come, that there are people alive now who will see the coming of God's Kingdom? I can see us waiting, and waiting, and waiting... Was my brother right when he talked of this great organisation, this church of his that was going to serve as the vehicle for the Kingdom on earth? No, he was wrong, he was wrong. My whole heart and mind and body revolted against that. They still do.

'Because I can see just what would happen if that kind of thing came about. The devil would rub his hands with glee. As soon as men who believe they're doing God's will get hold of power, whether it's in a household or a village or in Jerusalem or in Rome itself, the devil enters into them. It isn't long before they start drawing up lists of punishments for all kinds of innocent activities, sentencing people to be flogged or stoned in the name of God for wearing this or eating that or believing the other. And the priviledged ones will build great palaces and temples to strut around in, and levy taxes on the poor to pay for their luxuries; and they'll start keeping the very scriptures secret, saying there are some truths too holy to be revealed to the ordinary people, so that only the priests' interpretation will be allowed, and they'll torture and kill anyone who wants to make the word of God clear and plain to all; and with every day that passes they'll become more and more fearful, because the more power they have the less they'll trust anyone, so they'll have spies and betrayals and denunciations and secret tribunals, and put the poor harmless heretics they flush out to horrible public deaths, to terrify the rest into obedience... (This goes on for quite a while)

'Lord, if I thought you were listening, I'd pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerlessw, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn, but only forgive. That it should be not like a palace with marble walls and polished floors, and guards standing at the door, but like a tree with its roots deep in the soil, that shelters every kind of bird and beast and gives blossom in the spring and shade in the hot sun and fruit in the season, and in time gives up its good sound wood for the carpenter; but that sheds many thousands of seeds so that new trees can grow in its place.'

Doghead Book Club II - Night Train

Here's what happened. A woman fell out of a clear blue sky.

Night Train is going to prove difficult reading for some. Not difficult through verbiage or structure, but difficult on a metaphysical level. Night Train is, to all intents and purposes, a crime novel. The main character Mike Hoolihan, is a homicide detective in an unnamed American city (my gut was telling me Boston when I was reading it, not that it's especially important). Hoolihan is an ex alcoholic, large framed, and female, and is investigating the suspicious suicide of the police chief's daugher. So far, so straight forward.

The intriguing thing about this short work is the direction it takes. Before even getting to the halfway point it turns from a whodunnit into a whydunnit, leaving the characters, and the reader for that matter, to face up to some difficult truths about the world. I wouldn't describe night train as revelatory, as a good deal of Martin Amis' work can be, but for a short piece of writing it gets to the point eloquently enough.

I anticipate a lot of the animosity that attracts itself to Night Train comes from a deliberately unsatisfying conclusion. Those who expect a run-of-the-mill detective yarn will be disappointed on a number of fronts. Firstly, it seems Night Train is a playful response by Amis to critics that often label him chauvanist (I've never seen it to be honest), and while I wouldn't go far as to call Night Train a work of feminism, I would say that Amis portrays the women in this book famously, and writes with warmth and sensitivity, factors not usually associated with either Amis or crime novels. Secondly, while the language, setting and foundation of the book is very much in the style of the pulp crime novel, the development thereafter will likely confound and frustrate anyone who wants a bad guy caught and punished. The evils of Night Train are existential and totally out of grasp, and the only way this book could have ended really is badly.

It's not a good starting point for someone who wants to read Amis. I would recommend Money before all else, followed by something like Time's Arrow or Yellow Dog, but at 150 pages you could quite easily read this in an afternoon and take something valuable away from it.

Here's an extract from Night Train, with a train of thought I would have loved to have seen explored in more detail above and beyond the 150 pages:

Homicide can't change - and I don't mean the department. It can evolve.
It can't change. There's nowhere for homicide to go.
But what if suicide could change?
Murder can evolve in the direction of new disparity - new dis murders
Upward disparity:
Sometime in the fifties a man made a homicidal breakthrough. He planted
and detonated a bomb on a commercial airliner: to kill his wife.
A man could bring down - perhaps has brought down - a 747: to kill his wife.
The terrorist razes a city with a suitcase H-Bomb: to kill his wife.
The president entrains central thermonuclear war: to kill his wife.
Downward disparity:
Every cop in America is familiar with the super-savagery of Christmas Day domestics. On Christmas Day, everyone's home at the same time. And it's a disaster... We call them 'star or fairy?' murders: people get to arguing about what goes on top of the tree. Here's another regular: fatal stabbings over how you carve the bird.
A murder about a diaper.
Imagine: a murder about a safety-pin.
A murder about a molecule of rancid milk.
But people have already murdered for less than that. Downward disparity has already been plumbed - been sonar-ed and scoured. People have already murdered for nothing. They take the trouble to cross the street to murder them for nothing.
Then there's the copycat, where the guy's copying the TV or some other guy, or copying some other guy who's copying the TV. I believe that copycat is as old as Homer, older, older than the first story daubed in shit on the wall of the cave. It precedes the fireside yarn. It precedes fire.
You get copycat with suicide too. Fuck yes. They call it the Werther Effect. Named after some melancholy novel, later suppressed after it burned a train of youth suicides through eighteenth-century Europe. I see the same thing here on the street: some asshole of a bass guitarist chokes on his own ralph (or fries on his own amplifier) - and suddenly suicide is all over town.
There's a recurring anxiety, with every generation, that a shoah of suicides has come, to blow the young away. It seems like everybody's doing it. And then it settles down again. Copycat is more precipitant than cause. It just gives shape to something that was going to happen anyway.
Suicide hasn't changed. But what if it did change? Homicide has dispensed with the why. You have gratuitous homicide. But you don't-

Doghead book club I - If I die in a combat zone

Given that chaps have been, and are, dedicating their time to cataloging all manner of records, trainers, tattoos, art prints, etc for the blogosphere, I thought I'd make a contribution with something that I hold a little closer to my own heart: bookywooks. Knowing me this will be updated once every 7 years, so don't hold your breath.

The first book I would like to share is If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O'Brien, purely because it's the last book I read. I last read If I die... about 5 years ago, when I was studying peace and conflict resolution at university. Reflecting back, I was rather disheartened with the course, and with my life in general, and think that my way of thinking tainted the reading experience. I disregarded it entirely back then as liberal toss, and remember getting into a little bit of a heated argument with Dave'o (no relation) over it. Long story shortened, I gave it another chance the other night and read the whole thing in about 6 hours.

If I Die in a Combat Zone is an autobiographical account of Tim O'Brien's tour of Vietnam. Before even going he was fairly liberal minded, and even did his best to get out of active service. What's refreshing about O'Brien's account is his emotional honesty (I say 'honesty' while appreciating that no work of writing can ever be truly honest, but here is not the place to dissect such an idea). This passage quite succinctly sums up O'Brien's account:

Men are killed, dead human beings are very heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are afraid and often brave, drill sergeants are boors, some men think the war is proper and just and others don't and most don't care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

And war stories are what you get. Poetically told, with at times stunning insight, but war stories are what this book contain, ranging from his frustrations in training, his self-sabotaging of going AWOL, through to his violent, bloody, and almost entirely useless tour of 'Nam. You can tell O'Brien is both left leaning, and against the war he's fighting in, but so is almost everyone fighting there, on all sides. It always seems to be a recurring theme in almost all Vietnam books I've read. Noone ever really seemed to know what they were there for. If I were recommending a book on Vietnam, I would suggest Dispatches by Michael Herr over any other, but this book taps into much the same moods and sentiments, and is certainly a useful companion piece with a different perspective.

Here's an excerpt in lieu of an MP3 or youtube clip. The following passage really stood out. It could well be a standalone piece in its own right, and in an abstract sense sums up a great deal of human struggle:

10: The Man at the Well

He was just an old man, an old Vietnamese farmer. His hair was white, and he was somewhere over seventy years, stooped and hunches from work in the paddies, his spine bent into a permanent, calcified arc. He was blind. His eyes were huge and empty, glistening like aluminium under the sun, cauterized and burnt out. But the old man got around.

In March we came to his well. He stood and smiled while we used the water. He laughed when we laughed. To be ingratiating he said 'Good water for good GIs.' Whenever there was an occasion, he repeated the phrase.
Some children came to the well, and one of them, a little girl with black hair and hoops of steel through her ears, took the old fellow's hand, helping him about. The kids giggles at our naked bodies. A boy took a soldier's rifle from out the mud and wiped it and stacked it against the tree, and the old man smiled.

Alpha Company decided to spend the day in the old man's village. We lounged inside his hut, and when re-supply brought down cold beer and food, we ate and wasted away the day. The kids administered back rubs, chopping and stretching and pushing our blood. They eyed out our C rations, and the old man helped when he could.

When the wind stopped and the flies became bothersome, we went to the well again. We showered and the old fellow helped, dipping into the well and yanking up buckets of water and sloshing it over our heads and backs and bellies. The kids watched him wash us. The day was as hot and peaceful as a day can be.

The blind old farmer was showering one of the men. A blustery and stupid soldier, blond hair and big belly, picked up a carton of milk and from fifteen feet away hurled it, for no reason, aiming at the old man and striking him flush in the face. The carton burst, milk spraying on the old man's temples and into his cataracts. He hunched forward, rocking precariously and searching for balance. He dropped his bucket, and his hands went to his eyes then dropped loosely to his thighs. His blind
gaze fixed straight ahead, at the stupid soldier's feet. His tongue moved a little, trying to get at the cut and tasting the blood and milk. No one moved to help. The kids were quiet. The old man's eyes did a funny trick, almost rolling out of his head, out of sight. He was motionless, and finally he smiled. He picked up the bucket and with the ruins of goodness spread over him, perfect gore, he dunked into the well and came up with water, and he showered a soldier. The kids watched.

it all went downhill from here...

Backstory, circa 2003 this dude used to throw drinks at us in star in leeds when we used to windmill to hatebreed and arkangel, we then dedicated a good year to winding him up, ended up in him picking a fight with tommy minns outside while the dude was wearing zebra stripe jeans. He was crying and screaming, 'don't you know who I am?' to which minns said 'aye, yer a cunt' to which captain spammo said 'no I'm vivian westwood's son'.

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: xchrisfilthx
Date: Apr 15, 2006 12:07 PM

this sounds like good stuff guys-when you getting a
demo out there? also- i'm putting an alldayer on in leeds sometime in september if you guys are up for it.
sorting a venue but bands who are playing so far:
not dead yet,
break a sweat,
xnervous wreckx,
trying to get pointing finger over if diogio sorts some stuff out and also an american band depending on who'll be over at the time. there will be no bad modern metalcore bands playing as im trying to keep it within the style of what i like and love in hardcore. all the bands will also be straight edge.
it's my first forray into putting on a gig let alone an alldayer, but i'm getting alot of advice from other promoters who've bin around a bit and want to put the effort in to make it something special.

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Deal With It
Date: Apr 16, 2006 4:48 AM

OH KEWL FUMBLES IN LIFE

we don't want to play your shitty show, you're everything that's wrong about hardcore. Hope you get drunk soon so people stop thinking you're in any way shape or form like myself. You're a five minute flash in the pan and the sooner you drop out and leave us alone the better.

xget fuckedx

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: xchrisfilthx
Date: Apr 16, 2006 5:02 AM

i'm just a guy trying to put something into what i love. if you didn't want to play you could have just said-theres no need to send messages like that. whoever replied originally i thought seemed nice and helpful.just because yeah you've probably been in the scene for ages, doesn't mean i feel any less passionate about hardcore than you. you don't own the music and who can like it or can't. everyones got to start somewhere.
good look with your future.


----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Deal With It
Date: Apr 16, 2006 5:15 AM

you don't love it, you're just in it cos you think its some fucking little social clique you can worm yourself into. I can see right through you, so can everyone else, you're as fake as jordan's tits.

it's a shame someone replied being nice and helpful, cos it probably gave an inkling anyone likes you, you don't belong here, you belong at panic at the disco shows. Believe me, you are a LOT less passionate than me or any of my friends. To you, passion is some fucking buzz word that you bat around to make yourself seem like some fucking genuine dude, when in reality you're just out to get your dick sucked and enlarge your social clique. You're a poser, I see you standing there at shows trying to get your fucking stance right or something, I mean, the very fact that you're trying so fucking hard to blend into some aethetic shows how shallow you really are.

There's nothing wrong with being a new kid on the block, there's everything wrong with being a new cunt on the block.

STRAIGHT EDGE BELONGS TO US, AND YOU WILL NEVER BE ACCEPTED.

your's truly

vegan meich

ps fight me