We're taking back what they stole.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

on King David and Butlins

Good Day Today by threeminutesthirtyseconds

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

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

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

To finish, musical perfection.

XI - The Drowned World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

favourite deal with it picture ever

(click for full picture)

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

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

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