The Last Patrol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bookclub VI - Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crystal Castles!!!



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

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

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

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

All dogs go to heaven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan

'For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.'

Hemingway

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

Bookclub V - Imperial Bedrooms

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

Eichmann and the Holocaust - Hannah Arendt

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

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

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

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

I lean in to kiss her face.

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

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

'Amanda's missing and you're-'

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

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

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

'And if I leave, what will happen?'

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

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

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

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

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

Bookclub IV - The Death of Bunny Munro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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