on King David and Butlins

Good Day Today by threeminutesthirtyseconds

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

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

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

To finish, musical perfection.

XI - The Drowned World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

favourite deal with it picture ever

(click for full picture)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX - The Forever War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can probably see how this one ends.

VIII - Nothing to Envy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Last Patrol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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