Doghead

XXII - The Incomplete Tim Key

2011-08-08T06:41:00.001-07:00

'I never shot her.'
Ned lied.
Mr Ward cradled his dog in his arms.
His knees bent under the weight.

Whether or not you find the above four lines amusing in the context that it's meant to be a poem will determine very quickly whether you will enjoy The Incomplete Tim Key. When I was in college I hung around with a character called Chris Giles, who used to draw utterly ridiculous cartoons and write very childish but very funny poems where characters had bloody silly names and they were doing bloody silly things. Tim Key reminds me a great deal of my friend Chris, the same daft, nonsensical, and above all deliberately crap verse. The serious tone Key gives his poems in their delivery is part of the charm of it all, certainly. His guest spots on Charlie Brooker's criminally underrated Newswipe show exactly the manner in which the poems need to be taken, as you can see from this:

The Incomplete Tim Key collects about 300 of his poems following a successful meeting with 'a man in his thirties', along with some extended explanations of the poetical inspirations Key draws from. Below is my favourite poem from the collection, entitled 'on the expenses scandal.' Like I said at the start, you'll either love or hate this, if it's not your bag then have a go at Sylvia Plath or something, Mr Serious.

There was a big do arranged for all the MPs to discuss how wretched they were, and to eat humble pie about the expenses fiasco.
The press were invited and everyone had to drink and mingle and apologise as much as possible.
Hoon sidestepped a hack and waddled over to Ed Balls.
'Is this wine free?' - he asked.
'Dunno.'
'Mm.'
Straw poked his beak in.
'Might not be. 'Cos we've been naughty.'
'I don't think it is free,' Widdicombe squawked, sipping from her hip flash.
'Bollocks.' Hoon winced. He replaced his wine on a tray and they 'moved through.'
The waiters served up braised venison and potatoes and fishes in sherry.
But, increasingly, the MPs declined, for fear of having to pay.
Some gritted their teeth of gnawed at their lips from hunger.
Widdcombe unwrapped her sarnies.
The Milibands winked at her and ate their little yoghurts they'd stowed in their little briefcases.
After a couple of speeches admitting they were all wankers, the MPs spilled out into the road.
Some confused, abortive hailing of black cabs ensued.
There was no guarantee these'd be freebies.
Hoon turned to Balls.
'Do you know anything about night buses?'
Balls tapped his bicycle helmet and pointed to his trouser clips.
Hoon nodded.
And he huffed.
And he set off on foot to his nearest home.

This poem was written as a reaction to all the politicians snatching money from the public to buy things to make their lives more fun. Soon it will be out of date and you will need to Google 'Geoff Hoon expenses scandal' or bend the ear of a village elder to make any sense of this one. It is political.

XXI - The Yiddish Policeman's Union

2011-08-04T04:39:00.000-07:00

Over the last few years of my workplace experience, I have had the (mis)fortune to work with a vast array of weird and wonderful people. Old people with odd eccentricities, ordinary joe public sent doolally by a urine infection, various personality disorders, drug addictions, the list goes on. One thing I can rely on is an alcoholic or three mixing things up on a daily basis. Anyone who thinks alcohol is a harmless pastime needs to spend a day in accident and emergency or various medical and surgical wards. I'm not referring to the young people binge drinking on a friday night, although they comprise a portion of NHS intake, what is certainly far more disruptive and chronic is the vast number of alcoholics in hospital on any given day. Along with diabetes, heart disease and respiratory problems, all lifestyle influenced, alcoholics are a massive strain not only on NHS funds, but also on staff time. A wandering drunk who hasn't had a drink in 12 hours and needs a detox treatment to stave off much more serious repurcussions is by all merits a fucking nightmare, and sometimes it is difficult to bear in mind that alcoholics are very ill people, and by all rights deserve treatment just like anyone else. I think there is a certain quality in alcoholics that I can empathise with. For a start, not all of them are confused, disorientated arseholes, many of them are perfectly settled, reading the paper, and have merely got to the point in life where their body can't take the abuse any more. But on top of that, I think there is a certain suicidal quality to alcoholism that the melancholic of this world can certainly relate to. See Leaving Las Vegas for the most succinct example of this (and for proof that Nic Cage is in fact a great actor, fuck you very much).

In a similar vein, detective Landsman of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union is a hugely sympathetic character, despite his faults. I think this is largely in part to Chabon's beautiful writing style, finding poetry in so much of the mundanity of this world. The Yiddish Policeman's Union takes place in an alternative world, where rather than Israel, the Jews of the world settled in the state of Alaska, albeit on a short contract, almost at the close of its tenure when the book begins. This state of uncertainty, amidst a backdrop of concrete, snow and dark skies, is a brilliant set piece for a noirish mystery surrounding a dead heroin addict and a down-on-his-luck hardboiled detective who just wants to solve one last case. All this Chandleresque intrigue comes with a heavy dollop of Jew. The banter is thick with Yiddish slang, the names are all wonderfully Hebrew, here's an example from almost the opening page:

According to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to medicate himself, tuning the tubes and crystals of his moods with a crude hammer of hundred-proof plum brandy. But the truth is that Landsman has only two moods: working and dead. Meyer Landsman is the most decorated shammes in the District of Sitka, the man who solved the murder of the beautiful Froma Lefkowitz by her furrier husbands, and caught Polodsky the Hospital Killer. His testimony sent Hyman Tsharny to federal prison for life, the first and last time that criminal charges against a Verbover wiseguy have ever been made to stick. He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker.
When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets. The problem comes in the hours when he isn't working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages of a blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union is a sprawling, messy detective novel, with enough twists and turns to keep you on your turns, but a solid sense of direction from the start. Landsman is a wonderful protagonist, full with alcoholic pathos, but retaining enough of his heroic spirit to make you root for him the whole way. That some of the scenes are solved while Landsman is deep in alchoholic stupor makes it all the more enjoyable: crime scenes seen through the veil of a painful hangover, drunken car chases, tiny moments of sobriety with the few people Landsman still cares about, tinged with an heavy blanket of regret. Moreso than the likes of Chandler, Chabon has painted a thick sense of humanity and spirit to the world of Sitka, making the reader truly care about many of its weird and wonderful Yids. The story is complex without being complicated, it is paced without being light, and the characters are well rounded without being overwrought. On top of this is a consideration of the plight of the Jewish people in a wider sense, lacking the power and security they arguably hold in contemporary Israel, the Jews of Chabon's world have no power or status. What such a feeling of dread holds for the characters of the book is as intriguing as the main story itself. The Yiddish Policeman's Union is so far my favourite book from this year, so much so I almost want to go back and read it again already, and Chabon has in the space of 400 odd pages become one of my favourite writers, although typically I have become slightly demasculated by his writing talent, which makes some of my most thought out passages seem Palniuckian in contrast. I've been reliably informed that The Yiddish Policeman's Union isn't even his best book, so with great anticipation I'll hopefully be starting The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay very soon indeed. Oy vey.

Landsman considers the things that remain his to lose: a porkpie hat. A travel chess set and a Polaroid picture of a dead messiah. A boundary map of Sitka, profane, ad hoc, encyclopedic, crime scenes and low dives and chokeberry brambles, printed on the tangles of his brain. Winter fog that blankets the heart, summer afternoons that stretch endless as arguments among Jews. Ghosts of Imperial Russia traced in the onion dome of St Michael's Cathedral, and of Warsaw in the rocking and sawing of a cafe violinist. Canals, fishing boats, islands, stray dogs, canneries, dairy restaurants. The neon marquee of the Baranof Theatre reflected on wet asphalt, colors running like watercolor as you come out of a showing of Welles's Heart of Darkness, which you have just seen for the third time, with the girl of your dreams on your arm.
"Fuck what is written," Landsman says. "You know what?" All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. "I don't care what is written. I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my had. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag."
He sits down. He lights another cigarette.
"Fuck you," Landsman concludes. "And fuck Jesus, too, he was a pussy."
"Tick a lock, Landsman," Cashdollar says softly, miming the twist of a key in the hole of his mouth.

Kingdom of Dog - I call this song 'intro'

2011-08-01T13:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel like I bore the 8 people that read this blog far too much with a) me pointing out the fact that noone reads this blog constantly and b) loads of book 'reviews' that are rarely funny, which is usually the only reason someone wants to read a review of any kind in the first place, unless they like books enough to read the opinions of someone with no qualifications to review a book other than the fact he possesses reading skills of some sort. On top of that I feel like I blast pages with biro diarrhoea all the time but rarely get to share any of my childish similes and douche chill inducing metaphors with the world outside. With that in mind - imagine yourself trying to extricate yourself from a drawn out party conversation with the only social retard in the room who is about to read you a poem about something angsty while you coo and smile in all the right places while your life blood slowly ebbs from your disappointed ears and increasingly flaccid nether region - while I write out this literary bombfuck. I call this poem Kingdom of Dog part one (ps I know it's not a poem). It's going to be in a zine I'm hoping to release later on this year, probably not by Organic Anagram, and should have 3-4 stories within, plus maybe an illustration or two. This is the opening(ish) part of one of the stories. Excuse some of the nonsensical mixing of tenses and other errors, these should get ironed out with rewrites.

Father John felt something in the air, like the trepidation before a nasty shock, that sinking gut feeling before the jump and all that adrenaline kicks in - a moment spread over weeks and months. This age of uncertainty. He had seen it in people's faces as they do everything they can just not to have to look at one another. Staring at shoes, in shop windows, or mobile phone screens. Father John used to think it was fear of each other, but the construct had become far wider than that. People didn't want to be strangers because they didn't trust each other, they stayed in their own little world because they simply didn't want to see just how scared everyone else was, unfamiliar faces in the street becoming mirrors of their own terrible mortality.

He sighed, closed the book he was reading, and began to stand to get ready for that morning's sermon. The last year had been especially uncertain for Father John, old and dedicated parishioners seemed to be dwindling week on week, the ever increasing age of the London Anglican had been the elephant in the room for
quite some time. Given the scale of scandals racking the church in the last
decade, Father John found it unsurprising that the church struggled so much with
new generations. But more simply, the world had moved faster than the church had anticipated, and the people of God were now left behind in the world's dust.

As Father John began to ready his robes, he returned to his previous train of thought. In his opinion it was the constant waiting that served to drain the collective public thoughts and energy. Sure, much of the public did their best to forget, on a friday night following a drink or five, but before long those drinks always got the better of God's children, ending swiftly in violence upon violence. As a Christian he was apprehensive about acknowledging such a thing, but there was almost a sense of Darwinian energy burning inside the public unconsciousness. Mankind holds themselves back while they type at their computer terminals, or listen to the latest pop sensation on the way home. But deep down, bubbling under the surface, behind the smiles and the handshakes, there lives a burning beast in each and every one of us, waiting for that terrible day of which everyone is afraid. The day this earthly house of cards comes tumbling down and we show one another what we're truly capable of.

Despite such thoughts dwelling heavy on Father John's countenance, he shirked his perceived responsibility of the truth in deference to his congregation. Comprised of the old, infirm and outright stupid, much of the content of his thoughts would be at best abstract and at worse abhorrent. He wondered, a little too often, if his opinions were really palatable to anyone at all.Father John stepped from the vestibule, distractedly smoothing his cassock, picking the odd hair and dust particle that sullied its sheen. His cleaning rituals and wider fixations upon his appearance served to calm his nerves. He was not by nature a great public speaker, and distraction from his speaking duties immediately prior to the task had always served him well. As he stepped up to the pulpit, he felt a heavy sense of foreboding suddenly drop through his chest and into the pit of his stomach, as if he had knocked an antique vase or nearly dropped an infant.

Simultaneously looking into the congregation, he breathed out a deep and tragic breath as the life left him, making a sound a lot like he had perhaps been winded from an invisible obstacle. The church was empty. Really and truly and sickeningly empty. There was no sound but the internal whisper of his own breathing. As if in a trance, Father John stepped down from the pulpit and walked through the aisle, instantly shutting out the whole preceding thought train while his senses focused on the failure that faced him. He tentatively stepped towards the great oak doors of the entrance, touching the knarled corners of each pew as he stepped, as if
ensurign they remained in the physical plane, still objects of substance. He
carefully stepped with the heel of each shoe, creating a small clacking sound,
explosive in that punishing silence, lost in a daze of disbelief.

Father John had made it to the front doors of his church, his workplace and home for the last 16 years. With nothing on his mind but that same heavy sense of trepidation, he stepped into the physical world, silent outside as it had been in. A stillborn world that no longer seemed to require a house of God.

Father John's stole in all his distractions had slipped from his shoulders and lay in the doorway of the dead church. Father John noticed, but didn't bother to pick it back up.

XX - The Terminal Man

2011-07-24T06:18:00.000-07:00

So it's been a bit of a stretch since my last post, and in that time I've read a literal mound of literature, and I'm chewing at the bit to tell the internet all about it. Truly, what can be more exciting than paying to sit in an internet cafe on a weekend when the weather outside is magnificent so I can tell 3 people about some books I read??!!

Anyway, onto the book that I couldn't put off telling you about any more! It's called The Terminal Man and it's fucking awful! It's so bad it's reinvigorated my taste for throwing away small amounts of money for books that I know are going to suck before I even start reading them. To put it into perspective, The Terminal Man, by literary giant Michael Crichton, makes literary adaptations of the Transformers films look like penguin modern classics. It makes Katie Price's ghost writer look like Vonnegut reborn. Imagine an episode of torchwood reduced to block colours, no words over 2 syllables long and the Tekken soundtrack playing at a deafening volume in the background and you still have a creative output more cerebral than The Terminal Man. The novel concerns a man called Benson, who suffers from a rare form of epilepsy whereby rather than fitting on the floor he instead turns into a violent sociopath who attacks anything in sight and furthermore holds a deep loathing for anything mechanised. Some genius decides what they need to do is implant a computer in his head that basically tells him off every time he gets cross. I don't know how such a thing could possibly fail, unless... Wait!! This book was written in the 1970's by a man who has no idea about plot subtleties!! Stop the fackin train!

In Crichton's defense, the book really does evoke a sense of the 1970's by being both horrifically sexist and homophobic. He actually describes a block of flats as looking like something that is 'full of hookers, full of drugs, full of fags'. In his defence, Crichton is a plot man, dammit! He hasn't got time for niceties when he's got a man with a computer in his brain who is addicted to electricity and just wants to kill shit! Have I mentioned yet that this was maybe the best 50p I've ever spent? Kirky's Mighty Ducks cap can suck it. Here's a great example of Crichton's way with words. I'm yet to decide whether his writing style is just thoughtful and inclusive of the wider world, from 5 year olds to grown up buffoons, or whether publishing companies in the 1970's just had really really low standards. Take this nugget:

Janet Ross was tall and exceptionally good looking in a lean, tanned, dark-blond way.

Please Michael, go on:

She herself felt she was too bony and angular, and she often wished she were more softly feminine. But she knew her appearance was striking, and at thirty, after more than a decade of training in a predominantly masculine profession, she had learned to use it.

Not only is Janet Ross the main character in the book, she's also a flipping doctor. And before anyone asks, yes all of the characters in this book are this two dimensional. I almost feel like Crichton was so eager to get to the part where the guy's brain fries and he starts blasting shit that he just threw anything out there to describe the other characters with as little effort as possible. Now the baddy of the tale, Harry Benson, is pretty cool and angsty, and he sort of makes the whole thing worth reading, even though I'm guessing Crichton was aiming the book at teenagers and good christians, because there's not nearly enough random bloodletting for such a story. Had there been maybe 5 more deaths and all of them ridiculous, I might have bought all my friends a copy for a present, told them to book the day off work and keep the curtains drawn, and just have a good time really. As it is, the idea and buildup of the story is more fun than the payoff at the end. The experience was like seeing two vest wearing eastern european meatheads about to go at each other with a cleaver and a bin, only to get nicked at the moment it was gonna kick off big time. The book is utterly utterly stupid, but it's way more Terminator Salvation than Judgement Day. One day I might actually re-write this book for a laugh, just to make it as truly bone headed as it deserves to be.

This passage is probably my favourite part of the book, if only because as soon as it's taken out the context of the story it becomes one of the most stupid passages committed to the english language. Isaac Asimov this is not:

George and Martha were essentially the same program with slight differences. The original George was programmed to be neutral in his response to stimuli. Then Martha was created. Martha was a little bitchy; Martha disliked most things. Finally, another George was formulated, a very loving George, who was referred to as Saint George.
Each program could respond with three emotional states - love, fear, and anger. Each could produce three actions - approach, withdrawal, and attack. All this was, of course, highly abstract. It was carried out in terms of numbers. For example, the original George was neutral to most numbers, but he disliked the number 751. He was programmed to dislike it. And by extension he disliked similar numbers - 743, 772 and so on. He much preferred numbers such as 404, 133, and 918. If you punched in one of these numbers, George responded with numbers signifying love and approach. If you punched in 707, George withdrew. If you punched in 750, George angrily attacked - according to the numbers he printed out. The numbers were translated into sentences, the actual interaction was referred to as 'the christmas game' because most of it was conducted as giving and receiving gifts - objects that had an assigned or learned emotional value, just as the numbers did.
Normal George interacting with Martha would eventually win her over, and her bitchiness would recede into the background.
But Saint George had a much worse effect on her. His loving acceptance drove her up the wall. That is, if things were working normally. Richards watched as the print-out flashed across the screen.

HELLO I'M SAINT GEORGE
HELLO
WHAT IS YOUR NAME?
MARTHA.
YOU DON'T SAY MUCH, MARTHA.
NO
BUT I LIKE YOU.
WHY I DON'T LIKE YOU.
I UNDERSTAND THAT. HOW CAN I HELP?

"It isn't printing periods consistently," Richards said. When did that start?"
"That's nothing," Gerhard said. "Just keep watching"

HELP?
YES I WOULD LIKE TO HELP YOU.
HAVE A CAT.

Richards winced. Cats were programmed to be something that both George and Martha disliked. Giving George a cat was a very hostile move.

THANK YOU
HAVE ANOTHER CAT.
THANK YOU YOU ARE VERY KIND.
HAVE ANOTHER CAT.
NO THANKYOU.
DON'T YOU LIKE CATS?
YES BUT I HAVE ENOUGH CATS.
HAVE A GORILLA.

"Really nasty," Richards said.

I DON'T WANT A GORILLA.
DON'T YOU LIKE GORILLAS?
NO THANK YOU.
YOU ARE TOO POLITE.
I AM SORRY IF I OFFEND YOU IN ANY WAY.
YOU TALK TOO MUCH.
I AM SORRY.
HAVE AN EGGPLANT.
NO THANK YOU.
DON'T YOU LIKE EGGPLANT?
NOT VERY MUCH.
HERE HAVE ANOTHER ONE.
NO THANK YOU.
I WANT YOU TO HAVE IT.
NO THANK YOU.
GO ON AND TAKE IT.
NO THANK YOU.
I INSIST.
NO THANK YOU.

"What's happening to Saint George?" Richards asked.

I INSIST THAT YOU HAVE A CUCUMBER.
I REFUSE.
THEN HAVE A BANANA.
NO.

"George is breaking down," Richards said. "He's not a saint anymore."

THEN HAVE BOTH A BANANA AND A CUCUMBER.
NO THANK YOU.
I INSIST.
GO TO HELL I WILL KILL YOU: : : : : : : : :

As you can see, exhaustive insight into the dark side of technology from the master of the mediocre, Michael Crichton. If you see this book for 50p I definately recommend you pick up a copy!

XIX - American Gods

2011-05-24T05:30:00.000-07:00

'When the people came to America they brought us with them. They brought me, and Loki and Thor, Anansi and the Lion-God, Leprechauns and Cluracans and Banshees, Kubera and Frau Holle and Ashtaroth, and they brought you. We rode here in their minds, and we took root. We travelled with the settlers to the new lands across the ocean.
'The Land is vast. Soon enough our people abandoned us, remembered us only as creatures of the old land, as things that had not come with them to the new. Our true believers passed on, or stopped believing, and we were left, lost and scared and dispossessed, to get by on what little smidgens of worship or belief we could find. And to get by as best we could.
'So that's what we've done, gotten by, out on the edges of things, where no one was watching us too closely.
'We have, let us face it and admit it, little influence. We prey on them, and we take from them, and we get by; we strip and we whore and we drink too much; we pump gas and we steal and we cheat and we exist in the cracks at the edge of society. Old gods, here in this new land without gods.
'Now, as all of you will have had reason aplenty to discover for yourselves, there are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance.
'They are aware of us, and they fear us, and they hate us,' said Odin. 'You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise. They will destroy us, if they can. It is time for us to band together. It is time for us to act.'

I love a good yarn. Give me all the fruity language and clever prose you want, but without a good story behind it it's all rather empty. Just look at the last blog post for an example of technique with no substance. I grew up obsessing and adoring folk tales and mythology - the Iliad, the golden fleece, aesops fables, arabian nights, grimms fairy tales, the list goes on. These books were full of what Joseph Campbell would call the 'Hero with a Thousand Faces' the everyman hero that would appear in limitless guises across the globe, from Oddysseus, to Jack of Fables, to Jesus Christ. Their commonalities being a hero the reader, or listener, could get behind and root for, a character that almost appealed to their own subconscious sensibilities about themselves. Neil Gaiman's American Gods is deeply immersed in this world of mythos and fantasy, but like most of his superb output, is set in a world much more familiar to our own. Gaiman is perhaps best know for his Sandman comic book series, arguably the best adult comic ever made (certainly superior to Watchmen in my humble position) and a precursor to the creation of DC's Vertigo imprint.

American Gods follows an ex-con called Shadow, from his penitentiary cell to a chance encounter with a mysterious figure called Mr.Wednesday, through 635 pages of travel around the forgotten places of America. Along the way he meets the forgotten gods of the old world now hired muscle, loneley apartment dwellers, and petty crooks and conmen. They languish in the recesses of the world's mind, swept aside by the fickle memories of mankind, now embracing the new gods of technology and commerce. The old gods have not yet given up though, and with the help of Shadow seek to wage a final confrontation with the new gods of the USA. The characters alone in American Gods make it worth the reading, from an Ifrit taxi driver, to a 6-foot tall hard drinking leprechaun, to a teenage god of technology who smokes cables. By far my favourite however was Czernobog, a hammer-wielding giant of a man, who acts as Shadow's dutiful protector based on the promise that he can one day smash out Shadow's brain with his hammer. The conversations between the two characters are superb, and have the sort of fairytale logic that really takes you into another place. Here's a beautiful example of an exchange between himself and Mr.Town, one of the new gods.

Town said, 'Whatever. You could save yourselves a lot of time and effort by going back to your homes and shooting yourselves in the heads. Cut out the middle man.'
'Fuck you,' said Czernobog. 'Fuck you and fuck your mother and fuck the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. You will not even die in battle. No warrior will taste your blood. No one alive will take your life. You will die a soft, poor death. You will die with a kiss on your lips and a lie in your heart.'

Gaiman's book is literally bursting with ideas and little plot movements and shifts. Though long, it's by no means a challenging read, and it whizzes along at such a pace it's really a dissappointment to arrive at the end. Many times the wider world can be quite off-hand about Fantasy/SF books, seeing them as an inferior model of prose. In some instances I can agree, a lot of the pulp SF, though entertaining, don't exactly fire off all cylinders. Novels like American Gods can demonstrate quite capably though that you can have your cake and eat it, there are plenty of beautifully written passages amongst all the chaos of the day. The story is rich and driven, the characters are fully fleshed out, and the book is an absolute joy to read. May it become a future HBO series.

Doghead Pamphlet Club - Slaughter/Memoria

2011-05-04T05:40:00.000-07:00

T-shirt printing 'companies' are the latest phenomenon in the increasingly dull alterna-rebel music scene. Every other day some chump prints Kate Moss with corpse paint on a t-shirt hoping to breakout at the next Drop Dead clothing company, not realising that photoshop, google image search and Stu No Rules screen printing does not a company make. Organic Anagram is made up of what I can only imagine are earnest and well meaning kids, probably Europeans living in London, who are somehow trying to assimilate 24 clothing and Greg Bennick into a single package. Their 'products', albeit grossly overpriced, at least attempt to maintain some sort of DIY hardcore credibility, although capitalism is always going to be capitalism, no matter how much you try to dress it with x-swatches and limited print runs.

For some reason, perhaps in an attempt to reconcile intellect with fashion, Organic Anagram have decided to release a book of short stories. I say book in the loosest of terms, as the thing is less pages than my last zine. I say short stories in the loosest of terms, as you get two stories, one of which isn't even in English. Andto plump the whole thing out you get a lovely gallery of holiday snaps.

Anyway, the stories man the stories, this is a book blog damnit. Well, one story could well be the best thing ever fucking written, the limited-press, low-key introduction of the next Hemingway, I have no fucking clue though cos the story is in Spanish. It might be so funny it's like A Confederacy of Dunces throwing a cream pie at Trout Fishing in America, it could be so tragic it would make me tear the page out, fashion a knife and drive it through my broken heart, hell it could even be a bit shit, but I don't know because I can't read the bloody thing. Why the guy didn't put both stories in both languages and run them concurrently on separate pages I don't know. It's not like he was pressed for a word count, the thing's only 20 odd pages long.

The first story, Slaughter (which I could read) was passable, if not good.. If it had been in a compendium of upcoming writers, I would have given it time, plodded through, and thought to myself 'not really my cup of tea' and moved on to the next. However, given this is the only piece of literature within the bastard thing that I could understand, thus in essence have paid 8 euros for the pleasure of reading, I feel I should get a bit more of my money's worth. Slaughter is tortuously over-worded, it reads like a thesaurus. I am sure the dude who wrote this is super intelligent (he can write a story in one more language than me for a start) but it doesn't do a story any favours when you can't make out a story for 4 adjectives on top of each other. The closest comparison I can come up with is something like a badly translated Gabriel Garcia Marquez where the translator is some arrogant fuck who wants to make his translation the best shit ever and just pukes a gallon of uneccessary words in for no fucking reason. The worst is the final couple of pages where the writer is clearly trying to incorporate his Bennickian hardcore philosophy with supposed cave dwellers. Wow, what a juxtaposition maaan. Here's an example:

This bleak, pessimistic commitment. We barely sleep; we just let the dark feel some solitude, resting our minds while our body is lively in the depths of the gloom. Crying is a way of expressing our real nature. We feel this shortage acutely. We were given desks in adolescence, but why wake up when we could be lying down in bed, if not for the sake of our appearance? If one is given a glimpse at the future's features, he would be starring (sic) at the void. An insignificant encounter, left to the circumstances. Let the children sleep in peace, in a room where birds don't sing at night.

And so it goes on, ad nauseum. The thing reads like one of those junk emails you get with penis enlargement links that have titles just filled with nonsesnse like 'open your door to grassroots airplane opportunities' or 'swallow life encompasses your dairy love'.

This story pissed me off a great deal mostly because I paid 8 euros for the priviledge of reading it, like people involved in this venture feel the story is worth such a sum of money. It's not, it's offensive to literature. There were semblances of a good story within slaughter, totally obstructed by overwrought word craft and a sickening sense of literary superiority. I would be hard fucking pushed to read something that pissed me off more this year.

XVIII - The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

2011-04-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

I am loathe to be 'on the pulse' of anything, but flicking through some disposable literature the other day while waiting for my personal shopper to fetch me my Prada slippers I noticed that Vice magazine seems to have published an article/interview with the author of The Final Testament James Frey. Bearing in mind his latest book has only 10,000 existing copies, and mine is signed (I should mention it is pre-signed, I never met the guy) then this blog post could be a yellow brick road that leads all the way to yours truly getting some kind of wizardy sum on ebay for this in a few months time.

That being said, it will probably go for less than I paid for it. James Frey seems to have that kind of effect on people. His first book A Million Little Pieces (or something like that, I haven't read it) was widely hailed as a deep and touching memoir of drug addiction and other such troubles, then in almost as quick a period was widely loathed and reviled for being 'mostly' made up. Oprah Winfrey even had Frey go on her programme to apologise to the people of America. Then last year he got poo pooed by everyone for wanting to set up a fiction venture where he paid post grads to write commercially appealing books for him (even though the likes of James Patterson have done this for YEARS). His latest book, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible however is all his, and seemingly looked set to cause an international stir fry (thus far a rather quiet storm - perhaps clergymen are having difficulty in picking up a copy?)

Anyway, enough snidish witticisms from me, as this book is actually rather enjoyable, certainly much more so than I expected it to be. The book follows the life of a young New Yorker by the name of Ben Zion who miraculously survives a horrific accident and goes on to be seen as the Messiah by a variety of resident New Yorkers (Judith can suck it though).

It begins:

He wasn't nothing special. Just a white boy. An ordinary white boy. Brown hair, brown eyes, medium height and medium weight. Just like ten or twenty or thirty million other white boys in America. Nothing special at all.

First time I saw him he was coming down the hallway. There was an apartment across the hall from where I lived that'd been empty for a year. Usually apartments in our project go quick. Government supports them so they're cheap, for people who aint got shit in this world, even though they always telling us different, know we ain't ever gonna have shit. There's lists for them. Long and getting longer. But nobody would live in that one. It had a reputation. The man who lived there before had gone crazy. He'd been normal. Sold souvenirs outside Yankee Stadium and had a wife and two little boys, real cute little boys. Then he started hearing voices and shit, started ranting about devils and demons and how he was the last man standing before us and at the end. He lost his job and starting wearing all white and trying to touch everybody on their head. He got his ass whooped a few times and his church told him to stop coming. He screamed at his family and played organ music all night. Cursed the demons and pleaded to the Lord. Howled like some kind of dog. He didn't ever let his family leave. We stopped hearing the music and it started smelling and Momma called the cops and they found him hanging from the shower. Wearing a white robe like a monk. Tied up with an electrical cord. They found his wife and boys with electrical tape around their ankles and wrists and plastic bags over their heads. There was a note that said we have gone to a better place. Maybe the Devil got him or the demons got him or the Lord left him. Or maybe he just got tired. And maybe they did go to a better place. I don't know, and won't probably ever know, not believing what I believe. And it didn't matter anyway. Everybody heard about it and nobody would live there. Until Ben. He came down the hall with a backpack and an old suitcase and he moved right in. He either didn't know or didn't care about what had happened before. Moved right the fuck in.

Annoying, Palanhuick-esque punctuation aside, the book really did draw me in from the start, establishing very quickly an entirely human charicature of a modern day messiah living in New York city, told through the accounts of his 'disciples'. Ben Zion is certainly an iconoclaust of the Holy Son, drinking, puking, hanging out with gun toting tramps in the New York city subways, bisexual, fornicating with pretty much anything that moves, and pretty darn critical of organised religion. People turn to him for Godly advice and time and again he replies with a simple ajunct: 'there is nothing after your time here, heaven and hell exist here on earth, so love each other'. Simple as that, and to be honest it's a philosophy that you really don't need this book to adopt. In fact, the few chapters where Frey further explores the 'love-in manifesto' are pretty much the only turgid and tiresome pages in the whole thing. In fact, skip the Judith chapter entirely because I found it a little too much, and either side of that you've got a well-paced, involving and ultimately heart breaking story. In much the same way that people see the life of Jesus as a thrilling human story and nothing more, you can see The Final Testament in much the same way.

I'm not sure Frey is going to attract much ire in response to The Final Testament, at least not in Europe and the UK. He is after all treading the same ground that Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens et al have been pursuing tediously for what seems like years now. Controversy aside, it's a pretty unique retelling of the Bible story, and sits well in contemporary society inasmuch as he's pitched it as plausibly as a retelling of the Christ story can be. The ending is definately a gut-punch, and in its way far more cruel and contemporary a punishment than crucifixion. I suppose an easy parrallel to draw would be with The Good Man Jesus and Scoundrel Christ (see Bookclub III), I would say in balance that Pullman's version is more eloquent but Frey's perhaps more involving and empathic. The Final Testament strips away the dogma and rigid certainties of the New Testament, and replaces them with ambiguity and questions. The ambiguity of The Final Testament is refeshing. Ben never admits to being the son of God, his revelations always come in the aftermath of severe epileptic seizures, his 'miracles' could be hustles just as easily, and rather than bringing Lazarus back to life he commits an act of euthanasia instead. It's this perhaps that's the most radical aspect of the book inasmuch as it goes against so many religious teachings, yet at the same time suggests such a simple alternative in order to lead a 'good life'. Don't be a dick, basically.

You look up there...
He motioned towards the altar, towards the crucifix hanging above it.
And you look at that piece of dead wood, beautifully carved, and beautifully painted, but still a piece of dead wood, and you think it represents someone, and you think that someone is me.
Yes.
I'm not him.
You are.
I am not.
Is this a test?
No.
I know that God tests our faith every day, that being tested is part of faith.
God does no such thing.
And I believe this is exactly the type of test I would expect from him.
He laughed at me.
And I want to pass the test. I want to prove myself worthy of whatever God has in store for me.
God doesn't know you exist, and doesn't care about you.
I don't believe you.
So be it, but it's true.
How do you know?
Because God speaks to me.
Literally speaks to you?
Not with some silly voice, as it happens in the Bible.
Then how?
How doesn't matter. What does.
And what is that?
That this is all a fraud. This church, every church. That the world's religions are bankrupt and meaningless. That the world itself is bankrupt. That it's all going to end.
As has been foretold.
I know every word of every holy book every written. None of them foretell what is coming.
Revelations does.
Revelations is a stone age science fiction story.
If that's so, who are you?
Who do you think I am?
Despite what you say, I believe you are Christ reborn.
I'm a final chance.
You're here to redeem and forgive us.
There will be no redemption, and no forgiveness.
You're here to resurrect the dead, redeem the living.
I'm here to ward humanity that it is going to destroy itself in the name of greed and religion. That there is no God to save any of us. There is no Devil to take us to Hell. That man's only enemy is himself, and only chance is himself.

XVII - Meat is for Pussies

2011-04-16T13:37:00.000-07:00

I feel to a certain extent that even in moving to London I have kept my personal integrity intact. It's only been two weeks, but so far I have gone to bed before 10 most nights, and both weekends have managed to stay indoors while outside the city roars. This suits me quite fine, I have no intention of becoming a shoreditch hipster or a bicycle courier just yet, biscuits and beer, a good book, and a healthy slap of spotify is all a man of my meagre stature needs to enjoy life.

While we're on the subject of personal integrity, it is probably worth mentioning that certain moralistic principles are not as intact as they used to be. Talk to me 3-4 years ago and I would have still been a happy go lucky vegan straightedge warrior, eager to fight the fight for the cat the cow and the rat (fuck the foetus), but these days I'm guzzling milk and beer (never at the same time) and hunkering down on eggs and cheese like there's no tomorrow. There's even been a few morally reprehensible occasions where I've chowed down on reindeer, fish and a steak or two (and a few bags of haribo, but what's gelatin between friends). It's time like this, when I'm soaking in the ethical mire of the turncoat, that I need a book to engage and enrage me once again, remind me what I came into this world for. It's just a shame that I expected John Joseph's book Meat is for Pussies to be the Ishmael for the 21st Century.

John Joseph, as the 3 people who read this blog already fucking know, is most famous for fronting the best hardcore band of all time, Cro-Mags, and less famous for Both Worlds (better nu metal record than Suffer Survive, pricks). He also wrote an excellent memoir of life in 1970's New York, Evolution of a Cro-Magnon which was hugely gripping and entertaining. I really was looking forward to his next effort. Straight off the bat, I'm not a fan of this book, and I feel terrible for saying so. But it's just not that good. Most of the time the book either feels like a one-sided rant or some kind of street corner hustle. Meat is for Pussies is JJ's attempt at bringing a dose of masculinity and testosterone to the pro-veggie argument. Photos of musclebound vegans abound as well as short, snappy, aggressive monologues presents the book as a sort of get straight programme for the morally inept. A large portion of the book's focus is on health and wellbeing - diet, energy levels, exercise, etc. And that's all well and good, but the book reads more like a pushy conversation in a bar between friends than a reading experience. It reads like a hashly put together zine most of the time, I read the thing literally in two hours and the book's nearly 300 pages long. The font size is large and there's a lot of white space on every page, so it's a lot shorter than it looks. Here's a brief example of what you're letting yourself in for. Think of these paragraphs, but for 150 odd pages.

Now you may say, "Man, it's too much of an inconvenience to do all that." Well, talk to my friend who has to go on kidney dialysis three days a week for five hours each day because prescription medication and a bad diet ravaged his kidneys. Or visit a cancer ward where people are having their colons or cancerous polyps ripped out of their assholes. Or go to a drug store and watch the faces of the people coming to pick up their $300 worth of medicine every week...

I'm gonna tell you something you probably already know deep down inside: you're eating like a lazy pussy. That has to change, and it will. Want to know why? You've already taken the first step by reading this book. The first step in drug rehab is admitting you're an addict. And even though I'm busting your chops like those guys at Rahway State Prison, I care about you the same way they cared about me.

I guess the best way for me to describe the thing is like an entry level book on vegetarianism. If you're a meathead from Dudley and have 'MOSH' tattooed on your shins you will probably find this book illuminating. If you are aware that Paul McCartney is a vegetarian or have heard of PETA, this book will probably not tell you anything you don't already know. And most of what it does tell you is questionable nutritional 'science'and the odd conspiracy theory. The most I got from this book is a few laughs, especially hearing some of JJ's insults in a thick New York accent with my mind's ear, and there's some cool recipes at the end of the book too. So if you see it as a cookbook with a 200 page preface you will probably get quite a lot from it.

XVI - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

2011-04-09T12:33:00.000-07:00

One week in London and I've already polished off two books. Actually, that's a bit of an exaggeration, I'd almost finished one of them so it was more like one and a bit. Anyway this post concerns that very book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Zizek. The man in my opinion is a genius, a Foucault of the 21st century, which he and probably the rest of the philosophical community would despise as a description, being comprised of little more than hyperbole and miniscule comparative relevance. All the same, Zizek is a fucking genius, and I love how his brain works. Open any of his books and you're likely to find a mish mash of world affairs, economic and political philosophy, mixed in with allusions to pop culture and society. The man blends Blade Runner and Batman with political theory, and makes it work. In parts I find some of his ideas too dense for my straight thinking brain, but Zizek always seems to be conscious in his writing being enjoyable to read as often as possible, which for someone like me is utterly refreshing.

First as Tragedy deals largely with the economic collapse of 2008 and the world post 9/11. It comprises of a critique of modern capitalist democracies and its evolution into the sort of authoritarian capitalism we see in China today. I am loathe to write much about what the book comprises because the book is so full of ideas I risk either distorting or omitting the most salient aspects of the book's message. In actual fact, were I to truly reflect on my reading experience of First as Tragedy, or other such philosophical works, I would need to do so in a much more structured and thought out format than a blog post. A zine at the very least! (Please see Doghead issue one - available free in this very blog - for my first attempt at such analysis). Suffice to say that Zizek is heavily critical of the radical measures employed by the global community to bail out the banks, and wonders, among other things, why such a financial priority is given to the very institutions that brought about the collapse in the first place. Zizek then goes on to analyse the development of communism and communist thought, arguing that even the most pure attempts at communism were poisoned and distorted before they ever acheived their true intentions, and advocates an optimistic rethinking of communist values, to 'fail better' next time.

Here follows an extract from towards the end of the book, where Zizek quite optimistically answers the Leftist question of 'what next'. As he mentioned elsewhere in the First as Tragedy, it is all to easy to criticise and lambast the centre-right for what they're doing to the world, but what needs to accompany such critique is viable, workable alternatives.

There is only one correct answer to those Leftist intellectuals who desperately await the arrival of a new revolutionary agent capable of instigating the long-expected radical social transformation. It takes the form of the old Hopi saying, with a wonderful Hegelian twist from substance to subject: "We are the ones we have been waiting for." (This is a version of Gandhi's motto: "Be yourself the change you want to see in the world.") Waiting for someone else to do the job for us is a way of rationalizing our inactivity. But the trap to be avoided here is that of perverse self-instrumentalisation: "we are the ones we have been waiting for" does not mean we have to discover how it is we are the agent predestined by fate (historical necessity) to perform the task - it means quite the opposite, namely that there is no big Other to rely on. In contrast to classical Marxism where "history is on our side" (the proletariat fulfils the predestined task of universal emancipation), in the contemporary constellation, the big Other is against us: left to itself, the inner thrust of our historical development leads to catastrophe, to apocalypse; what alone can prevent such calamity is, then, pure voluntarism, in other words, our free decision to act against historical necessity.

Beautiful words which I think my brain is still trying to get to grips with. First as Tragedy is the sort of book that many will find compelled to return to time and again, re-reading its 170 odd pages to try and understand a little bit more each time. And I expect many more will disregard as leftist-tripe or dense nonsense. Their loss.

For those who hate reading, you can check Zizek and a number of other notable philosophers on a documentary called Examined Life. The below extract is Zizek talking about waste, and it's ridiculous/mind blowing.

XV - The Cult at the End of the World

2011-04-02T08:25:00.000-07:00

When I was younger I wasn't one of those kids that had free reign of watching the telly. I remember being about 6 and sneaking into my brother's room to watch Dead Calm and my mum going ape shit. Robocop was a film that by some miracle I managed to watch the entirety of at a young age and it still kind of disturbs me to this day. By and large though my mum had a good idea what I was up to and did her best to shield me from cinematic horrors, for all the good it did. One thing she was inevitably incapable of however was shielding me from the horrors of the real world and what one human being could do to another. I remember being about 10, and starting to see the world for what it was, the crises in Kosovo and Sarajevo, the chemical attacks on the Kurds, mass starvation and civil war in Ethiopia. Then out of the blue I saw new faces on the television. Not refugees: old ladies in headscarves wailing and bony, bloated children with flies on their face, but instead businessmen and commuters with blood seeping from every orofice, killed on their morning commute to work by an invisible killer. Nerve gas they called it. In no time at all the news was going on about this Japanese death cult that masterminded the attack and wanted nothing more that the apocalypse. Needless to say I was terrified.

Aum Supreme Truth was an international movement boasting hundreds of thousands of initiates with membership including Japanese government officials, Yakuza, and even Russian military officials. A 'blind' guru, Shoko Asahara was the head, and talked constantly of armageddon. The majority of his followers were highly intelligent scientists and engineers, most of them poached from university, jaded by Japanese adult life and seeking some sort of higher purpose. Asahara combined traditional Eastern religion such as Hinduism and Buddhism with apocalyptic Christian Revelations and Science Fiction, citing Shiva as some kind of earthy end-bringer. Aum's beginnings were more modest, but Asahara eventually managed to use the cult as a way of generating millions of Yen in revenue, but it seemed the more scrutiny was put upon the cult, the more Asahara quoted the end times, and apocalyptic war at the hands of Aum as some sort of spiteful retribution on a world-ending scale.

Good news for Holy Terror bands wanting to create an authentic lyrical experience; The Cult at the End of the World is clearly well researched by David Kaplan and Andrew Marshall, with a multitude of accounts from cult members, critics and victims alike. The book explores Asahara's life and the timeline of Aum from it's modest beginnings in a single Yoga class, to a worldwide terrorist organisation responsible for a number of murders spanning years, culminating in a sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway. The relatively short lifespan of Aum is rendered in great detail, and some of the motives for such terrible acts of mass killing are explored as the book progresses. Aum experimented with all sorts of drugs and brain surgery, they lobotomised and permanently disfigured scores of people, and murdered anyone that tried to speak out against them, almost with entire impunity, thanks largely to the inability of the Japanese authorities to pin anything on them (as well as the subterranean ovens Aum disposed of the bodies in). It is truly terrifying to imagine that Aum were in talks with current and ex Russian military personnel with the aim of acquiring long range missiles and even nuclear material. Aum purchased an attack helicopter but never succeeded in constructing it.

The Cult at the End of the World is certainly sensationalist in parts, part of the difficulty in keeping a reader's interest in current affairs books I suppose is to write in such a manner as to maintain interest. One such example is the quote below, which could quite easily chill the blood, especially considering 9/11, 7/7 etc. It is worth keeping in mind just how infrequent terrorist attacks are however, at least in comparison to car accidents, heart attacks, etc. If it's of any comfort, you certainly will die, but it's not that likely going to be from Chechnyan rebels launching mustard gas or the IRA putting the ebola virus in bottles of fanta.

It would be easy to dismiss Aum as a peculiarly Japanese case, and indeed, there are conditions in Japan that shaped the cult's unique character. The straitjacket schools and workplaces, the absentee fathers and alienated youth no doubt helped fuel Shoko Asahara's rise to power. But to suggest that what happened in Japan could not happen elsewhere would be a dangerous mistake. Ineffective and bungling police, fanatic sects, and disaffected scientists are hardly limited to the Japanese.
Aum's forays into conventianal weapons - its explosives and AK47s - were alarming enough, as were the cult's eerie experiments with electrodes, drugs and mind control. But where Asahara and his mad scientists charted new ground was in their pursuit of the weapons of mass destruction. This, unfortunately, will prove Aum Supreme Truth's lasting legacy: to be the first independent group, without state patronage or protection, to produce biochemical weapons on a large scale. Never before had a sub-national group gained access to so deadly an arsenal.
As the Cold War recedes into history, we leave behind a strange stability from the balance of terror that once existed. It was a time of mutually assured destruction, when communist and capitalist superpowers divided the world neatly into two well-controlled camps. Terrorism was by and large state-sponsored and politically motivated. Now, as the new millennium approaches, we face another kind of threat, one of unrestrained killers and renegade states armed with the deadliest substances on Earth.
The word is out. A college education, some basic lab equipment, recipes downloaded from the internet - for the first time, ordinary people can create extraordinary weapons. Technology and training have simply become too widespread, too decentralized to stop a coming era of do-it-yourself machines for mass murder. We are reaching a new stage in terror, in which the most fanatic and unstable among us can acquire the most powerful weapons.

We're taking back what they stole.

2011-03-30T13:21:00.000-07:00

I've had my second bath in three days today, just to try and wash my cuts out. The dirt is hanging tough though, maybe it wants my fingers to look like seal, kissed from a rose. I look at the newly formed scars and can remember how some of them got there, others not so much. V-shaped scar on my little finger opened up from a beer bottle smashing across my hand. The zipper etchings across my inner index finger as if caused by some miniature wolverine. The bruises and cuts across each knee could have been caused by any number of things. I don't remember splitting my lip open, but it's there all the same, purple and warm to the touch. I'm sitting here now in my kitchen, a world away from the fortnight that was, listening to Gideon Coe playing all my heroes on the DAB. This time last week I would likely have been in some sort of metaphorical bin, head swimming with alcohol and music-induced rage, or happiness for that matter. If I rack my brains hard enough I could probably work out my exact place in the world back then, but that would be missing the point. Tour isn't about the precise details, it isn't about the specific faces or stages or t-shirts or anything like that. It's about the greater whole, the sense of freedom, the feeling of responsibility with a lower case 'R', a sense of a diminished world, living for the van, for the next bed, for the next beer, for the next 30 minute set and whatever chaos that brings. I'm not for the tiniest second believing that I've done anything new or revolutionary, every beer soaked venue plastered with a patchwork quilt of bands that never made it keep my feet firmly on this stale earth. I'm walking the footsteps of countless teenage dreamers and twenty something revolutionaries, who felt they had something to tell the world, through riffs or poetry or whatever. People who for however long stepped off the path chosen for them and tried to choose a direction for themselves - one clubhouse at a time. But just because it's nothing new doesn't mean it's nothing special. These last few weeks are full of memories and experiences that everyone, including myself, will take with them for the rest of our lives. We may end up sat behind a desk making money for people we never meet, or stuck in a domestic existence that saps every rebellious energy argument by argument. But one thing no-one can take from us is our experiences, they will always be ours, embarrassing, exhilarating, painful, or lost in a haze of beer and whiskey. For 10 days, we could be more like the human beings we always dreamed of being and maybe even find some fleeting moments of happiness.

XIV - J'irai Cracher sur vos Tombes

2011-02-25T14:03:00.000-08:00

She opened her eyes and I sniggered. She didn't understand. So I told her the whole story, the whole story about the kid, at any rate, how he's fallen in love with a girl, and what her father and brother had done to him afterwards. I explained to her what I'd decided to do with Lou and her - get even, two for one. I fished in my pocket and found Lou's watch; I showed it to her, and said I was sorry not have brought her one of her sister's eyes, but that they were too messed up after the special treatment-my own invention- that I'd just finished giving her.
It was hard for me to say all that. The words didn't come easily. She was there, eyes closed, lying on the ground with her skirt turned up to her waist. I felt that thing again all down my back, and my hand closed over her throat all by itself; it came; it was so violent that I let go of her and almost stood up straight. Her face was already blue, but she didn't budge. She'd let herself be strangled without lifting a finger. She must've still been breathing. I took Lou's revolver and shot her twice in the neck...

What may at first seem like a cheap exploitation/pulp fiction was in fact so much more. The book's protagonist was mixed race, and in the story seduces and murders two young white girls as revenge for the lynching of his little brother. Again, a story that has doubtless been touched on many times in the past. Only this book was first published in 1946. 7 years before Invisible Man, 14 before To Kill A Mockingbird. To modern sensibilities, the book is little more than shock value, an amoral revenge novel that is more distasteful than poignant. But to think that the words of 'Black American author' Vernon Sullivan were readily available on paperback shelves while segregation remained ever present in American towns is truly amazing.

Vernon Sullivan appears in italics because the author was in fact Boris Vian, a prolific author, jazz musician, playwrite and celebrity. J'irai Cracher sur vos Tombes was in fact a literary hoax, albeit a very well intentioned one. Vian was a strong and vocal critic of racism in all aspects of his life. After being asked to translate an American thriller into French, Vian went one better and wrote his own:

And So was born Vernon Sullivan, a young black American to racially and sexually daring to be published in the US. In ten days, Vian cracked out a brutal novella... it was published as a novel by Vernon Sullivan, translated by Boris Vian. (from Strange Attractor Vol. 2)

After a young woman was murdered, with a copy of J'irai Cracher... left beside her body, moves were made to ban the book, and Vian was later placed on trial for pornography, where he was fined and put in prison, a conviction later overturned. Such proceedings did no trouble for the book's publicity however, which was eventually translated into English and sold by the bucketload. The book was eventually adapted into film, although Vian was not quite happy with it. He died a few minutes into the first screening of the film, aged 39. Biographers are in disagreement as to what insults he hurled at the screen.

My copy of J'irai Cracher... is from the 1960's. I'm not sure when the book was last printed, but it's a bugger to get hold of. My copy, which cost 95c at the time, set me back about $60. I've read it three times through, you can manage it in an hour or so, easy. It's pretty difficult to get through at times, both because of the 'edgy' prose, but also some of the more disturbing scenes, which even to a modern reader such as myself are a bit difficult to get through. In spite of these scenes of horror and gratuity, there are some almost 'tender' moments within the mind of the protagonist, who reminds himself why he does the things he does. Just to think that in the 1940's there was a black protagonist capable of committing graphic acts of revenge against white people is really quite remarkable.

I put her brasserie and panties back on her, I dried her thighs on a corner of the bed sheet. Finally I got her into the transparent negligee. She offered no resistance; she was soft and warm in my arms.
"Beddy-bye, little sister," I told her. "I'm clearing out tomorrow morning. Try to be down for breakfast - I want to see you."
Then I pushed her out and shut the door. One thing was certain - I had those two girls exactly where I wanted them. I felt all light and joyful inside, probably because I could sense the kid smiling up at me from under his six feet of earth, so I stuck out my hand to him. It's a pretty great thing, to be able to reach out like that and make contact with your brother.

XIII - City of Sin

2011-02-05T09:18:00.000-08:00

This is the oldest business in the world, and we're not going anywhere.

Catharine Arnold, author of Necropolis and Bedlam, continues to delve into the murky underbelly of London with her new book - City of Sin - which examines the history and culture of prostitution and vice in our capital city from Roman times to modern day, going from the lowliest, near death whores of gropecunt lane (yes this was a real street name) and St James Park, all the way up to the royal courtesans and mistresses of the rich and famous. Along the way it regales stories of the early transvestites, the developing London gay scene, the development of sadomasochism, the pimps and brothels of old, as well as the varied and colourful individuals that make this particular history so interesting, and dare I say it, entertaining. While the style of the book is to a certain extent scholarly, with a modicum of references and further reading, the main 'thrust' (hur hur) of the book is aimed 'stiffly' at amusement. There's plenty to learn from the book - such as the catholic church's pivotal role in prostitution in the middle ages - but largely Arnold writes to entertain. Take this excerpt about Samuel Pepys:

Like Rochester, the diarist Samuel Pepys enjoyed London's low life to the full. But Pepys lacked the flamboyant Earl's self-destructive streak. He also lacked Rochester's patrician generosity and sexual charisma, arguing the toss with street whores and shamefully chronicling his many sexual failures. Pepys exemplified the middle-class approach to sex in Charles II's London. When not molesting the servants, such as Mary Mercer, who allows him to touch her breasts, 'they being the finest that I ever saw in my life; that is the truth of it', or visiting his mistress, Betty Lane, with a bottle of wine and a lobster for dinner, Pepys was patronizing the dockyard brothels of the Ratcliffe Highway and singing along to bawdy ballads with lyrics such as 'Shitten-come-Shite the Way to Love is!' An earthy attitude towards bodily functions is exemplified by a diary entry in which Pepys records that he was 'struck with a looseness of the bowels', dashed into a taven, paid a groat for a pot of ale and defacated in the fireplace.

City of Sin reads like a Horrible History for grown ups. There's far too many c and f bombs for it to be kid friendly, not to mention graphic sexual encounters, but Arnold's regalements of London life are for the best part spirited and strangely heart warming. She doesn't in any way shy from the horrors of a whore's life, from paedophilia, sexually transmitted disease, poverty, and death, but at the same time there is a strange celebratory undercurrent throughout, which in its frankness is quite refreshing. The world it seems has always been chocka full of strange sexual tastes, and our freedom to express them more freely in modern times is to be celebrated.

To finish, a poem, by the aforementioned earl of Rochester.

I rise at eleven, I dine at two
I get drunk before seven, and the next thing I do
I send for my Whore, when, for Fear of the Clap
I come in her Hand and I spew in her Lap.
Then we Quarrel and scold till I fall fast asleep;
When the Bitch growing bold, to my Pocket doth creep;
She slyly then leaves me - and to Revenge my Affront
At once she bereaves me of money and cunt.
I storm and I roar and I fall in a Rage,
And, missing my Whore, I bugger my Page.

XII - Lynch on Lynch

2010-12-31T07:48:00.001-08:00

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

2010-12-07T12:57:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-03T09:18:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-26T14:17:00.000-08:00

(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):

orange head and cab
kyrcki
soiled paul smith clothing and buzzing off a mic stand
a young, gothic noddy holder, looking straight at the camera
a lonely can of red stripe
some ponytailed, grizzly suit who looks totally out of place, looking straight at the camera
some gotho bird
Jonne
Lecky
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

2010-11-18T08:00:00.000-08:00

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

2010-10-27T12:38:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-16T08:46:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-03T11:14:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-28T08:05:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-15T14:45:00.000-07:00

'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

2010-08-07T03:30:00.001-07:00

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

2010-08-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

'...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

2010-07-26T15:19:00.000-07:00

(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

2010-07-11T03:45:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-07T04:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-05T08:01:00.000-07:00

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...

2010-03-22T15:36:00.000-07:00

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

The Sorrows of Young Bernard

2010-03-04T13:34:00.000-08:00

Is it appropriate to give a name to the cells that make up your colon, beyond calling them 'colonic cells'? Should we individually call each of our skin flakes after things that take our fancy? Do we name the hairs on our head, or the veins that run to our heart, or the cancer growing in our bowel? 'Of course not!' the people cry. Then why name the collection of cells that we flush out with a morning after pill? It was no more a being than our femur. And yet...

It was nothing. A fusion of two reproductive cells, that in a short space of time gathered a scientific idea of what it was to become and set to work building and forming. Unbeknownst to the diligent cells, this formation was unwanted. After six weeks of furtive construction and realisation, the cells were stopped in their path, and killed. The reasons for this are unimportant, but if it makes the moral purists out there feel better it was because the pregnancy in question stemmed from the incest rape of a minor, or for the social cohesionistas, it was rape of the financial kind, a couple incapable of raising a child in a cruel, uncaring, bourgeois world. Like that, building stopped, cells stopped in their tracks and withered away. The mass came out, in its own humiliating way, punishment enough to the mother who had to watch her instinctive calling flush down the toilet quite literally. And that was that. Back to the checkout counter, or the law degree, or life on jobseekers. But the tale is not over for the thing that could have been, not by a long shot. On the contrary, the story is neither just beginning nor ending, but floating somewhere in the infinite inbetween. To better illustrate, it would be provident to follow the cell mass into the toilet, beyond notions of purgatory and afterlife, into a future more plausible and infinitely more exciting than any notion of heaven or hell.

Travel, traverse, transcend. Onwards and upwards. Take one step forward and two steps back. The trick is not in the destination, but in the journey itself. Upon that toilet flush an opening is made to bigger and better things, far beyond the ken of mere mortals. This abortion is privy to the workings of the known universe. Don't believe the lies spun by the pro-life lobby, a terminated future is far greater than any tangible time-lined concept of life.

To tap out is to tap in, the stream full of the gazelles of the plains, those who have given their throat to the fangs of death. They know, in their dying moments, what is waiting beyond their death, beyond the meal that sustains the predator for a week or so, beyond the scraps that the buzzards pick.

Energy.

2009-09-19T09:32:00.001-07:00

I'm thinking of doing a spoken word recording, some stories I've written and that, but would really like a soundtrack accompaniement (sp?) to go with it. Something that sits in the background for the most part, but serves to unnerve the listener further. Later swans records spring to mind especially.

If anyone is interested, or knows of anyone who is interested, please get in touch, I am eager to get started with this as soon as possible.

fortress_of_solitude@hotmail.co.uk

Kingdom of Fear compilation - out now!

2009-07-16T07:34:00.000-07:00

I Am Legend

2009-02-20T06:05:00.000-08:00

I never really thought of myself as a writer, more like someone who wrote things every now and again to pass the time. But now, for my sins, a writer is what I am. I received in the post yesterday my first 'official' piece of published work, in a journal called Abraxas Unbound. The story is entitled Chorus and is a story in the style of Edgar Alan Poe, maybe a bit of Raymond Carver thrown in (just because its brief and gets to the point). It's not a particularly long or adventurous story, but it's mine nonetheless and I'm happy beyond words to be able to have something on my bookshelf with my own words inside.

If you're interested, you can pick Abraxas Unbound up from here: http://www.lulu.com/content/4617742

There's essays within by Colin Wilson as well as academia on all sorts of subjects. It's quite poetic in a way that the first issue of Doghead was almost entirely dedicated to Wilson's first book, and now here I am sharing pages with him. It's a funny old world.

Rut Roh...

2008-10-13T13:49:00.000-07:00

Today I finished the first four pages of Doghead the Second.

So, this will definately be out before the world caves in on itself.

If not, I'll kiss your bottom.

Amid the Chaos of the Day

2008-09-30T07:11:00.000-07:00

Pacing like a caged animal, left to right, right to left, drinking water habitually, not even thirsty. Can't stop moving, not even for a second, to break this momentum could let the tiredness take over, leave me an exhausted disappointment for everyone in the crowd. The only way to go is forward, so on and on I pace, waiting for the rest of the band to be ready. Finally, silence dawns, and my cue follows.

'We're called Deal With It, and this song is called War Against the Machines.' And with that I brought my fist crashing to the ground. All self control exploded into fragments moments before the song kicked in, and while the first note was struck I was already flinging myself headfirst into the crowd. I was once again running on empty, my energy coming from some deeply sickened deposit of pure survival instinct. Alternating between low singing when I could cope, and bloodcurdling screams when I ran out of juice; the first two lines of one song came out as a garble of nonsensical shouting. I had more important things on my mind, truth be told. I wanted the audience to understand and appreciate fear itself, to feel a great unease, some sort of sick fascination. I didn't care whether they loved or hated us, I just never wanted any of them to forget.

In between songs I'd pour half a bottle of water over myself, in a vain attempt to bring down my boiling blood. I'd fling the rest into the crowd with full force but no deliberation of aim. Time after time I threw myself off stage at anyone stupid/brave enough to stand close by. Grabbing people by the scruffs or collars and flinging them about like rag dolls. I had no idea where this strength was coming from, it was certainly not the sort of power I could muster on a day-to-day basis, instead was something akin to drug intoxication, like my body was riding a high on tension and rage. I throw the mic at people, take pot shots, swing my fists at full force, all the time screaming bloody murder, act after act of psychological warfare, a battle of attrition between me and the rest of the world. Noone in this town will ever fuck with us after tonight, I have neutered the lot of them, laughed in the face of their affectations and puffed chests, shown them what violence really is. I walked amongst them as we played, as though king of their realm, and they bared their bellies with no fight.

I put every last vestige of energy I had into our last set, and in 15 minutes it was all over. I felt cheated in a way, like it should have gone on for so much longer. Battles should last for days and weeks, not have to fit into a slot to let an instantly forgettable act try and fill the void. This should only have finished when I was put to rest, dead on the floor, a sigh of relief breathed out by the world at once. As it was I walked out the venue shirtless and wandered off, steam coming from me like a boiling pan. As I walked away to nowhere in particular I noticed heads turning to watch me go by, either a minor curiosity to them or a momentary distraction from conversation. I deflected their gazes. Even if they thought they knew what had just transpired inside, they had no idea whatsoever. I hated them for their ignorance, but by the same merit I paid them no heed. Ahead I could see a bench by a copse of trees, it seemed as good a place to rest as any. On sitting down the force of my surroundings hit me like a one word poem.

On the grass before me were rabbits by the tenfold, calmly feeding and socialising amidst the hubris of human culture all around, amidst the chaos of the day. The sheer contrast of what I'd experienced less than a minute before, and what I looked upon now was deeply profound, though I had no real idea how. Instead I sat and took in as much of the peaceful scene as I could, basking in its innocence and simplicity, yearning for a time in the future when I could do away with the pretensions and complexities that ruled my waking life.

I hadn't time to process this chain of thought before various people from the venue wandered up; talking and kidding around and causing a ruckus, disturbing and dispersing the rabbits with their prescence. It didn't seem right to sit there any longer.

so much for the six month plan

2008-07-21T14:17:00.000-07:00

I looked at the staff directory at my new workplace today and was astounded. Of 60 odd staff working here, at least 50 are managers! That's like a 5-1 staff to manager ratio. Boy, either the staff really need a close eye on them, or the company really likes promotions!

Alas, I fear the reality is much more mundane. It's all part of this 'streamline', work-from-home, 'open plan', modern workplace BULLSHIT. End of the day, you might be able to call yourself a 'manager', but your job's just as shitty as it was 2 years ago.

Where are there job openings for peasant? I want to sit on a haystack flinging mud at my inbred family for a sack of potatoes and a bucket of milk and catch dysentry, it's got to have more meaning than 'employer investments in people'.

barf

My first rejection!

2008-04-26T11:12:00.001-07:00

I feel like I should be bummed out. After all, they're saying my story doesn't meet the prized standards of the intellectual elite that is Black Static Magazine. But instead I feel a sort of elation. I think in a way this tiny slip of pre-written, badly-printed paper gives me the sense of legitimacy I always lacked before. I am a writer. A talentless, shitty writer, but a writer nonetheless. Here's to the hundreds of rejection letters to come and the ever increasing gloomy sulks that will inevitably follow. Lord knows I'll probably not be this stoked second time around.

Milestones of Graphics Design

2008-04-17T10:16:00.000-07:00

There are some very mundane things in this world that I nonetheless hold dear. Matches are one of those things. I think it's all tied in to machismo and primitive survivalism or something, but I find it a very satisfying pastime. Mastery of fire is something all male personalities aspire to have, and matches go some way to helping us acheive that dream.

Matches can make every one of us like Prometheus: he who stole fire from the gods. But the power of the gods doesn't necessarily come packaged with their wisdom like a tesco 2 for 1 deal. We all know some dunderhead who accidentally set fire to his room, or burnt off his own face. That's why the thoughtful people at Swedish Match decided to put a warning on the back of the box in case any of us hadn't yet heard the breaking news that fire can actually be harmful.

Now, if you're going to go with a health warning that's integral to your product, you'd likely go for something eye catching, but tasteful. Maybe hire a couple of ad guys or some dude with a graphics design Phd to come up with something. Not Swedish Matches. They went for the less conventional path of doing a picture on MS Paint of a burning stickman. It was a risky manouvre, but as you can see for yourself, the results have really paid off. The combination of the stick man's imploring eyes, its half casual, half worrisome cry for help, and its flaming arm, really create a lasting impression. I don't think you could get someone with a salary of a million pounds an hour to design something that good. And to top it all off they include a recipe for rice pudding, magnanimously trusting that their customers might one day try cooking something more inventive than sausages and beans.

Thanks to Swedish Matches I will never forget that fire kills children or that I can have my very own ricey dessert in less than two and a half hours.

I like Southland Tales

2008-04-14T05:31:00.000-07:00

Fuck you, fight me.

Unrest in Tibet

2008-03-29T14:26:00.000-07:00

Since 1950 Tibet has been under Chinese control, largely against its wishes, and this year marks 49 years since the first major uprising which lead the Dalai Lama (the head of the Tibetan state) to be exiled to India after a long and bloody struggle. This year, the Olympics are being held in Beijing. The Tibetan people, as well as allies across the world, have taken this as a prime oppertunity to re-ignite their struggle, at a time when all the world is watching.

However, since the uprising started in Lhasa about 2 weeks ago, the Chinese authorities have thoroughly censored all footage and news reports of what's going on over there. News websites, blogs, and video streaming databases are among the websites which the authorities have blocked for domestic access. In addition news teams from across the world have had great difficulty in getting into the problem areas to see what's really happening.

Guardian video journal

Despite these difficulties, news has got out of Tibet and China in small chunks. Wikileaks (jah bless the freedom of information act) is hosting over a hundred photographs and over 30 videos of events over the last fortnight.

Please be advised, some of these photographs are of a graphic and disturbing nature. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Photo gallery with Captions

Leading scientist suggests we're fucked, basically.

2008-03-15T14:31:00.000-07:00

'Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.'

James Lovelock is a bit of a kooky scientist dude. Noone ever takes anything he says seriously, like his Gaia hypothesis: that the entire planet is one big self-regulating organism. And then about 30 years later anything he says is confirmed by all those lab heads. He could be dead smug about it, only he's normally saying terrible things about how we've fucked up and we need to sort it out now. The major problem we have is he's been saying that since the 60's, which means we're now about 50 years too late to do anything about it, by his estimations.

I like Lovelock, he's got outside-the-box ideas, without being one of those nutters that thinks you can heal heart disease with fucking crystals. And he truly, genuinely believes that we're utterly utterly fucked. Which I'm not really sure how to take, to be honest.

Read the full article here, it'll only take a few minutes, and it's very interesting.

Doghead Issue 1

2008-03-11T15:52:00.001-07:00

Photobucket Album

Bloghead

2008-03-10T07:19:00.000-07:00

I thought it was about time I kept up with the Joneses.

This is going to be an online extension of the Doghead franchise. There’ll be a lot of stuff on here that’s gonna miss going into the next few issues of Doghead, either because it’s too much of-the-moment, or just because it would be superfluous to put it into a 40 page zine that could otherwise be packed full of mind erasing nonsense.

That's about it really, sorry, nothing exciting. So people reading this first post don’t feel like they’ve utterly wasted their time, here’s a picture of Tom Cruise dressed as a Nazi.

Nanu Nanu