the Impostume

2009-10-23T04:00:00.000-07:00

I'm very slow on this but Sam's Post-rocktoberfest is basically a great service to humanity.

2009-10-12T05:41:00.000-07:00

Good work on Blissblog re Harry! I love all his stuff pretty much (even that stuff with Eric Idle) despite hating the Beatles. GO FIGURE! Someone has youtubed Knillson here.

"Jump into the fire" is in "Goodfellas", innit!

2009-10-05T05:03:00.000-07:00

R.I.P.

y

Gracias.

2009-09-08T11:14:00.000-07:00

Here's another bit....

Welshian heroism.

In his cameo in “Trainspotting”* Irvine Welsh is wearing an Exploited t-shirt, but despite this seeming advocacy the band are noticeably missing from the film’s soundtrack, which is comprised of “cutting edge” Britpop tracks by the likes of Blur and Sleeper, a smattering of techno and some middle-brow classics by Iggy and Eno. The lumpen antagonism of The Exploited is too alienating and alienated, too politicized, to soundtrack the onscreen hi-jinks and bright-eyed enthusiasm for heroin addiction. Nonetheless, Welsh feels the need to wear it, a pennant of his deathless allegiance to/knowledge of a punk underground nowhere else glimpsed in the film.

A part of the Exploited’s micro-mystique is that they were one of the bands, along with Conflict, Discharge and the Subhumans who took punk in a different direction, away from its co-option by the mainstream, into a subaltern world of anarchist commitment. They weren’t fashionable, they weren’t post-punk in any of its currently understood senses, there were very few major labels sniffing round them, and besides, a part of their commitment demanded that they would tell them to fuck off. The Exploited signify a kind of anti-plastic-punk Real.

Yet in an essay Welsh published at the time, reprinted as part of the ten year anniversary DVD of Trainspotting, in which among other things he defends the decision to shoot Trainspotting in a non-realist fashion (about which more presently) he can name someone like Liam Gallagher as a working class hero.

Liam is a working class hero, not because he has directly done anything for/with the working class but precisely because he’s got away from them, he represents the working class not through any specific set of political positions, class politics having been, after all, relegated to the dustbin of history, but through his “attitude”, his mad-for-it hedonism, his straight talking, his punch ups, his mocking sarcasm, all nicely combined with his reverence for an unthreatening resurgent strand of contemporary Heritage culture, namely The Beatles.

Heroism, you would think, entailed some potential danger to or sacrifice on the part of the putative hero, some risk-taking: where is the heroism in getting rich and buying a mansion on the basis of a few mild epaterings of the bourgeoisie plus Trad-rock? Indeed, generally, shock was a sure career path in all forms of culture throughout the Nineties: in the newly tolerant Third way, it was a virtual demand of the system. Neo-Liberalism can’t prove its Neo or its Liberalism without it. Capitalism without conservatism is effectively that having your cake and eating it Welsh identifies in the essay, and for which the Novel’s most effective advocate is Sick Boy, in his rejection of the attachments and allegiances of old Labour and the Victorian stridency of Thatcherism.

“The socialists go on about your comrades, your class, your union and society. Fuck all that shite. The Tories go on about your employer, your country, your family. Fuck that even mair. It’s me, me, fucking me..”*

Working class heroism is Liam Gallagher’s heroism, as opposed to the evident non-heroism of defeated, uncool relics of the past like Scargill. With Trainspotting Welsh in no way changes the world he writes about but somehow, heroically reporting on it, representing it, raising it from invisibility into consciousness, better still into “coolness”, he has fulfilled a duty. In a post-Historical scenario in which the conservative notion of recognition rather than any dangerously disruptive notions of equality are in the ascendant then coolness is perhaps the greatest, if not only, gift to be bestowed upon the subaltern classes.

Welsh might read at the Edinburgh festival his character’s despise, he might appear in cameos in hip movies made of his work, he might amass a small fortune and own homes here, there and everywhere, sensibly choosing Life in its any-colour-so-long-as-it’s-Neo-Liberal variety but he will wear his Exploited t-shirt at all times as an authenticator of his attitude, of who he is inside. Having his cake and eating it, moneyed, comfortable but still underground and cool, still real.

They can’t buy your soul, man, and I’ve got a T-shirt that proves it.

* Ironically it’s exactly Welsh’s non-pretty boy panicked grimness of face and figure that punctures Trainspotting’s diegesis. Who’s this ugly bloke and what the fuck is he doing in this promo video for smack use? He appears to have wandered in from an entirely other dimension. Aha! Must be the writer!

**In the film, Sick Boy, played by the handsome Johnny Lee Miller wears a really rather nice suit and has a funky, Beckham-style haircut, somewhat unlike that of the average Edinburgh junkie circa 1986, but very post Reservoir Dogs and Three Lions friendly. He’s a more minor character than Renton who is less attractive, more uncertain, who admits finally to being a bad person but who finally gets out. Renton has, at least, the politesse to confess to his imperfections. Sick Boy is too nakedly, gloatingly avaricious and cynical to be the perfect proxy, there must be some dissembling show of humility as you rip off your friends. I am bad person, but you know, to be a winner, sometimes you have to be…..

2009-09-08T05:23:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a long piece on British film, now overdue and still being hacked away at. I seem to be obsessing over Danny Boyle perhaps rather too much. Anyway, in order to break the protracted Blog-silence and assure my non-paymasters that I'm really doing something, I'll start to post stuff. The first rough one on Trainspotting is below.

2009-09-08T05:11:00.000-07:00

The constitution of the addressee.

It’s obvious, but it bears repeating: Trainspotting is not a film about four Edinburgh junkies in the late Eighties, it’s “Alice Through the Looking Glass” for Blairites. Ewan McGregor’s “Renton” is the fantasy projection of the Poorist middle classes, representing a brief, invigorating holiday in transgression they can return from replete with all kinds of sub-cultural capital, the clothes, the drugs, the music, the bars, the terminology. The Information.

Poverty and “social exclusion” are aesthetic and discursive playgrounds: being a junkie doesn’t mean you can’t look good or riff on pop culture in a knowing way. No need to mourn anything or wring your hands over anyone’s lots, in various ways everybody is having, as a book title of the time put it, “Adventures in Capitalism”.

If Trainspotting represents an attempt to elide the working classes through an “urban pastoral” it’s one in which underclass energy and savvy feeds directly into middle-class narcissism.* “The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor”. Trainspotting’s return to the Sixties, its Beatles-referencing and by extension its Cool Brittania/Brit-Pop stylization attempts a temporal elision of the bitter Seventies and combative Eighties, back to the last time England could reasonably have been said to be “sexy”, where class seemed momentarily a mirage and the prospect of brave new heterotopias spun giddily on the horizon. After all, with the abandoning of Clause Four a new form of post war consensus has emerged, T.I.N.A. “The working class are such a disappointment,” as Kureshi and Frear’s “My Beautiful Laundrette” reminded us, whereas the underclass are just so mouth-wateringly dynamic and unthreateningly unorganized.

It’s not simply that cheeky Brit-pop skaghead Renton finally decides, through some mysterious Neo-Liberal alchemy to choose life and thereby affirm, if not exactly all the stultifying choices he rejects at the start in favour of smack, then at least a lifestyle of high consumerism, “a fucking big telly” (with the lascivious “fucking” emphasising his libidinized more-Consumerist–than-thou new hyper-Realism), it’s rather that Renton IS the middle-class audience member herself, leaping as though through force of sheer, magical yearning into the frame and the film’s world from behind the camera in the opening shot and eventually with a knowing , conspiratorial wink, melting back out of it to rejoin herself at the end. The permeability of the screen, the looking glass through which the viewer passes, is the fantasy of the permeability of social barriers in the newly classless, New Labour Britain.

This is part of the film’s obsession with choice and its casting of poverty as something which one can opt in or out of at will, bridging the gap between underclass smack-addiction and the world of big TVs at one existential stroke. Poverty is a consequence of individual lack of graft or get-up-and-go, cosily re-affirming to the gap year and trust-fund brigade that a few years of chemical romance can easily be set aside when the time comes to re-join the real world you were only ever having a little vacation from anyway.

Indeed, in much of Boyle’s work there is no social or psychological fixity, everything is fluid and opt-into and out-able for the protean middle-classes: in “Shallow Grave”, “28 Day’s Later” and “The Beach”, psychopathology, that most useful of disorders, is also a temporary state, exploited as required in order to get the job done, just one more weapon in the armoury of Late Capitalist character traits. The primal savage is always there just below the surface, handily allowing, for example, the wispy Cillian Murphy to wipe out an entire platoon of soldiers in 28 Days Later.**

One of the fantasies these films gratify is the viewers’ desire to be a complete subject, a subject who is capable of everything, who knows everything, who has experienced everything. On the one hand grounded, responsible, “realistic”, capable of making the right “choices”, on the other hand secretly exultant at having achieved apotheosis, that they are the culmination of history. There is no realm of experience or state of being, form of experience or mode of communication in which they are not potential adepts, the fantasy of polyvalent, omniscient, final and culminatory subject of the end of history is what is spoken to in Boyle’s films.

A reasonable definition of Hipsterism, of which Trainspotting, though it will have no cache among hipsters themselves, is a formative work, is the assumption that there is no position which the middle class subject can not occupy, both class and identity politics have been overcome, or at least class has been subsumed into identity and identity is for the other. The middle class assumes a kind of transcendent, post-historical emptiness into which all cultures can be incorporated. This is not simply hyper-consumerism it’s also a metaphysical claim, a claim to superiority, thus while others are bounded by ethnicity, class, gender; limited, objects, with a finite set of facets and characteristics, the hipster, viewing everything as simply a lifestyle choice, views her own not just as one lifestyle among many but the lifestyle of lifestyles.***

Trainspotting’s ethic and aesthetic are a further extension and deepening of the American ethos, so ably represented by Curtis Hanson’s “Eight Mile”, that marshalling a set of given proletarian skills: linguistic flair, a negative cultural capital of realness, soul and more-than-rugged individualism bordering on sociopathy will allow you to prevail if and only if the individual is ready. In the state of Late-Capitalist precarity the readiness is all. “Opportunity comes once in a lifetime,” Eminem’s “Release Yourself” tells us; you will have your chance, if you blow it you know who is to blame: not the system, which democratically allocates an opportunity to all, it is the individual who has been found wanting. Trainspotting’s relation to the series of Brit Films (Little Voice, Billy Eliot, the Full Monty) wittily dubbed “Dance, Prole, Dance!” by Joel Anderson will have to be teased out elsewhere, suffice to say: if you cant sing or dance then there’s always crime, the two magnificent options generally afforded to America’s Permanent Underclass are now benevolently offered up as options for the atomized working class.

Renton’s escape is via a drug deal set up and orchestrated by others, his apparent friends, who he then rips off, except for the guileless Spud, who unlike Begbie and Sick Boy is in need of a bit of charity. It doesn’t matter how you get the money, the important thing is that you put a bit back, alms for the deserving poor. Spud’s discovery of the money in the locker in the films coda is the film's final strategy in absolving Renton/the viewer. This is how you get out of poverty, crime or culture. You may need to ditch your friends along the way: so much for all that sharing of scores and junk camaraderie, so much for solidarity, so much for refusal. At the end of the day when the opportunity comes you choose life and comfortingly affirm the conservatism you tokenly attacked in your youth.

This is how to live in Cool Brittania.

As the knowledge economy gears up, as London becomes the centre of finance, as a young, sexy, globalized Britain prepares to Start up and the boom years of cheap credit, massive personal debt, seemingly ever-rising house prices and an economy organised around orgiastic consumption and compulsory positivity are about to kick in we might be tempted to a more chastening conclusion than even late sixties/mid-nineties archetype Arthur Seaton managed.

A good time can also be a form of propaganda.

*The Ballardian Continnuum, Weird Paternalism and other strategies for an alternate, anti Cool Brittania canon promoted by Fisher, Hatherly, Power and others attempts to recuperate some of the features of the traditional pastoral, a weird pastoral perhaps, forging a re-evaluation of the dynamic cultural relation between the upper and the working classes which re-elides the philistine middle class

**There’s an interesting distinction between the entry into the worlds of “Trainspotting” and “28 Day’s Later”, part of Boyle’s talent for forcing identification. Renton springs into the film and immediately we are alongside him, running with him, the first POV shot comes early, a careening descent down steps into a side street and the collision with the breaking car. In “28 Days” we emerge slowly, waking into the world with the central character, then beginning to explore its unfamiliar emptiness, the camera moving out over a series of shots, from intense close ups of his opening eyes to extended long shots of him wandering through a deserted London. We separate out and take our place back in the audience leaving our proxy behind, lost in the deserted city, all our anxious care engaged.
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*** In this respect the Ur-Hipster figure is Martin Amis.

2009-08-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

Well that Bristol takeover at Corsica Studios on Friday was neither very Purple nor very Wow, was it? In fact it looked a lot like favours–for-mates, Joker carrying his significantly less talented chums Jemmy and Guido, the set only really coming alive when he stepped up to the decks. Actually, the entire set seemed to be hung around Joker’s handful of big tunes. Last time I saw him he played for about forty five minutes and provided enough colour and contrast to the lumpen Dubstep that came before and after to shine: a short, sharp, shiny injection of sass and swagger, over two hours it kind of flags. Maybe my hardwiring is just too rusty after literally DECADES of existence but rhythmically, however vanguardist it might be on some arcane musicological* level, it sounded turgid and muddily clubfooted, meaning it’s still all about the bass and…

… heavy bass is a bit tedious, innit? I mean reliance on bass as the kinetic/galvanic element. Haven’t we had enough of dub? Is it not basically in K-Punk’s** avant-conservatism category? If you hear the term dub attached to anything these days how likely is it that it’s going to be doing anything interesting or pulse quickening? Apparently it’s not going to go away though as not only is the place pretty rammed, generally young and unusually for a dubstep night, about 60-40 male to female, but outside a young women, being held aloft by no less than Joker himself, hands me a fat wad of fliers called DubPack. Yet the most exhilarating of the post-Dubsteppers, if he really ever had much of an affiliation to it at all, Zomby, seems to have largely abandoned bass, with ravishing results.

*There’s an excellent example of what I can only call blog paranoia creep in the footnotes to Rouge's Foam’s review of Zomby. Blog Paranoia Creep is characterized by the marked suspicion that someone may have been talking specifically about YOU when they slagged off X trend/perspective/scene, tempered by the desire not to a) be seen to be arrogant enough to assume that anyone is paying the slightest bit of attention to little you b) make any enemies on the basis of an easily dismissed objection ( oh.. no.. I wasn’t thinking about you at all, actually….) and come off as a deluded, self-important hysteric. This is achieved by opening, as here, with a mini-testamonial to the writer’s standing/ importance followed by a comprehensive rebuke of everything they apparently stand for. I assume that it was occasioned by this from Matt which kind of calls into question RF’s project/area of expertise as of any use at all, as it does more or less everybody else’s too, actually, leading to a pretty Old Skool nihilation of Matt’s symptomatic defects, though frankly the tenuous claims on Matt’s check-list of sins seems instead to suggest he is in fact tilting at phantoms, some weird composite figure (Matt and the end of history/everything’s been shit since 93? He’s never been of that persuasion at all, has he?) who chimerically represents a looming, monstrous Old Guard haunting the imagination of those keen to be the New Custodians of Wonkville. Yes, you're praising it to the skies, but in the wrong way! It surely deserves better than your almost total endorsement! All of which suggest he may have been doing some magnified listening but he hasn’t been paying much attention while reading. Time for a new criticism perhaps? Ok… what will that be like, how will it…. AHHHH! You mean the stuff that precedes the footnote! Lots of description plus some pictures! A certain thoughtful professorial modesty having naturally prevented one from emblazoning the post with the title “ LOOKETH THEE UPON THE NEW CRITICISM!!!!!!" And then, hang on.. isn’t he disingenuously boasting about his emerging rep with the Lacanians down the bottom of the previous post…. surely hoary old Lacan has no place in the New Criticism?! To the scaffold with the old, if admittedly prestigious and very intellectually fashionable …although…it IS sort of gratifying in a way....

Disavowel is the new resentment, I see!

In which case, “Rouge’s Foam's work is not always worth reading, however his parapraxis-riddled footnotes……

** I love K-Punk, he's brilliant, I wish he was my Dad. I'm thinking of having costly and painful tounge extension surgery just so I can get it even further up his batty. Actually if I had it bifurcated... better still trifurcated ! I could do Reynolds and Hatherly at the same time and really extract maximum value from the depths of their erudition...

2009-08-06T05:07:00.000-07:00

I was all geared up to mock this.

2009-07-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

Spinoza? Chainsaws? Monsters? A CD comprised entirely of early Pulp b-sides?

You'd be a fool not to.

2009-07-27T00:11:00.000-07:00

Easily the best band I saw at Supersonic, leaving everything that came in their wake sounding flabby, cumbersome and old. More akin to seeing a techno set than anything, the first band to raise the hairs on my arms through sheer dymnamic invention in a long while.

2009-07-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

If we were to try and come up with a canon of Cold World* cinema then Kurosawa’s “Pulse” would certainly have to be included.

Pulse tackles the obligatory social themes of contemporary J-Horror, atomization and hyper-mediation, not to mention Japan’s extravagant suicide rate, via fears over technology as a vehicle for the return of destructive or vengeful spirits and the disease like nature of the curse, expanding them to apocalyptic levels hinted at but not fully revealed at the end of the later Ring.

Ring’s cheerless vision of the family, in which father and son meet each other in the street without acknowledgement, in which both effectively commit suicide (along with the wife/mother) by watching the cursed tape and who must then pass the death-curse on to the father/grandfather in an infinite chain of deferral, is perhaps actually more heartening than Pulses in which not only the family but any kind of compensatory peer group don’t exist at all. Did you have any friends? the heroine asks the nominal hero toward the end as all the energy is drained from the world, Japan implodes in a wave of mass suicides and they try to escape through a monumentally grey and emptied out Tokyo. Maybe one, but she died, comes the reply.

By the film’s end, as the heroine escapes with a few survivors on a ship, it’s obvious that the problem is international, a kind of Global Jonestown. Everywhere else is closed down, but the captain informs us they are still picking up signals from South America, so this is where they decide to head. It’s hard not to chuckle as this brilliant allegory for the depredations of Late Capitalism scans the globe for an alternative and finds it there. Accidental Bolivarianism.

*As an aside, Japanese doom band Corrupted (who sing in Spanish, for some reason) due to play in London and then at The Supersonic festival next week, have released a record called “ El Mundo Frio”.

2009-07-18T08:12:00.000-07:00

A thumbprint on the window of a skyscraper.

There’s a two shot sequence in Alexander Payne’s Sideways that’s as good as anything you’re likely to find anywhere. Payne’s work, Election, About Shmidt and Sideways have garnered him a rep as the middlebrow filmmaker’s filmmaker, but this shouldn’t be held against him as the fact is his sheer artfulness is often dizzying.

Sideways is easy to take for granted, it glides pleasantly and intelligently along, beautifully filmed and framed, features stellar performances from its leads, a great script: a superior, more mordant, literary Indy Rom-com and, as befits a film about quiet despair, the incremental daily defeats that swamp lives, the small concessions or acts of kindness that salvage them, Payne’s technique is often unobtrusive. An Autumnal tone-poem in dusky amber and gold Sideways is a buddy-movie in which the two opposed central characters, refreshingly, learn nothing from each other via their week long stint together wine tasting and playing golf in California in the run up to the irresponsible Jack, a kind of ludic Prince of Bad Faith, getting married. Miles, his chaperone, is a depressed would-be-writer struggling to get over his divorce and certain that life has nothing left to offer him. Much of the film’s comedy revolves around the central pairs understandable frustration with each other.

The sequence in question comes about two thirds in, after Jack has had his nose broken by the enraged Stephanie, his latest conquest, who has just discovered he’s due to get married. Nonetheless, Jack proceeds to chat up the plain, overweight waitress in the Steakhouse they’ve fetched up in who has recognized him as an actor from a hospital-set soap, much to Miles’ dismay.

He decides to head to the toilet to escape, a strategy we’ve seen him use disastrously before with Virginia Madsen, when his nerve fails and he misses the moment only to try and claw it back a few minutes later. That sequence is in itself wonderfully done, the way we the camera gets up close to Miles as he urges himself on in the bathroom mirror and then hangs back peeping between its fingers in the doorway as he goes on alone into the kitchen for the rejected kiss.

This time the effect is beautifully comic, gently absurd. Where’s the bathroom? Miles asks and is told - it's over there, past the buffalo-. The buffalo has immediate comic resonance because it emphasises the lowbrow tackiness of the restaurant and Mile’s unexpressed sense of disdain for it as well as accentuating the bovine stupidity of Jack and the girl’s exchange, which continues as Miles disappears off screen, Jack, nose in plaster, grinning in a goofily winning way up at the gullible girl. The next shot, not exactly a matching shot but a kind of visual equivalent of consonance at least, frames the stuffed Buffalo’s face up close, staring out at the audience as Miles strolls laconically down the corridor toward the bathroom. He flicks the tiniest of looks up to camera as he enters, then the camera pulls round to frame the door swinging closed and the sign MEN is held on for a few seconds. It’s a sly and subtle breaching of the fourth wall, this sudden onscreen exclamation, the quick look to camera suggesting we are either in Miles’ mind at that moment as he struggles to contain his disapproval at Jack’s “plight” (his insatiable libido) or the director’s, suddenly puncturing and punctuating the film with this exasperated aside on the audience’s behalf. Either way it’s a bravura moment that partly militates against those where the film almost gets a little too objectively-correlative for its own good (the discussion about why Miles likes Pinot, the bottle of 61 he’s got hanging a round and which is close to spoiling etc).

2009-07-12T06:49:00.000-07:00

I’m currently watching and re-watching a lot of films as part of a longer piece I’m writing on British film, so I’ve decided to start blogging some rough pieces on a variety of films, Brit and non-Brit, as I watch. Expect them to be pretty broad.

Here’s the first.

The Essential Elements of a Hip-Hop classic.

“What about homosexuality Tony? Do you like men? Do you like to dress up like a woman?”

Re-watching De Palma’s Scarface (watching it really, I last saw it when I was about fourteen) I was struck immediately by HOW camp it is.

We’d never expect De-Palma to be too far away from the operatic or melodramatic, and the film is essentially a remake of a melodrama anyway, but driven along by Moroder’s cheesily eupeptic synth motifs (tellingly, variations on a theme for both wife and sister) and Scarfioti’s extravagant sets the whole film looks to be set in the kind of revisionist Sirkian non-space that Todd Haynes, for all his gusto, was just too self-conscious to get to in Far From Heaven. The shots alternate between a kind of nostalgic, Fifties soft-focus Edward Hopper and a hyper-bright David Hockney, along with a mawkish, idealised Homesteadery in the domestic scenes with mother and sister and the requisite angelic lighting effects on Mastrantonio’s face*

From the start, with Pacino’s lispy, pouting, alternately unctuous and defiant Tony Montana being predatorily circled by tough-guy crotches ( the neophyte’s first night in the Gay bar ) until a hand strikes in across the side of his face, by his open mouth, fingering his scar, asking him if he got it from “eating pussy”, you know you’re in for a long mince down Queer street. Indeed, it’s hard not to read Pacino’s scar as an emblem not of his tough guy past or his fundamentally flawed character, the outward manifestation of the greed that undoes him, but as a symbol of his repressed gayness, a big pussy if you will, that cuts across his eye. Tony Montana is looking at the world with half a woman’s perspective. Queer eye for the straight guy. The rest of the film is a parade of camp icons, from F. Murray Abraham’s prissy henchmen through to the suavely refined aristocratic Bolivian drug-lord who tells Pacino pointedly and hilariously, twice, that Montana should never try to fuck him. Most significant of all is of course Tony’s friendship with his boy, Manolo, a doe-eyed, hip-swivelling Greaser, who he eventually kills for getting married to his sister.

There’s a couple of extremely protracted close ups, complete with over-zealous rage-motif on the soundtrack, on Tony’s Queer-eye: first when he watches Mastrantonio flirting with a guy and getting her ass grabbed (and loving it!) in the disco, another in the murder of Manny. The standard interpretation is that Manny has broken his word and Tony is obsessed with his sister as a reserve of purity in a corrupt world: not my reading. Both Tony and Manny are singularly asexual in the film, there is no sex scene between Pacino and Pfeiffer, she’s the marriage-of-convenience/trophy wife, nor equally do we ever see Manny getting laid, and his couple of onscreen attempts at picking up broads are singularly unsuccessful. In fact, his pursuit of Tony’s sister is pure Happy Days' wholesomeness, as is the cornball meringue castle they live in, all white and light compared to Montana’s blood red, fur-lined den which actually seems to have been designed to look like a huge Pussy. This could of course represent the womblike safety that Montana yearns for, but given the way the film reads from the start it’s hard not to see it as one more expression of Tony’s femininity, especially when he emerges with his little friend levelled at crotch height to repulse the men trying to invade.

If there is a more exquisitely camp moment than the scene in which Pfeiffer and Pacino marry and the assembled throng skip giddly down to gaze at the three-way symbolic tiger ( taming the beast of American capitalism, melting Pfieffer’s hauteur and burying own illegitimate desire) that Tony has bought and chained up by the lake I’d love to see it**. Montana’s rage at the end and his murder of Manny is only explicable in that he has betrayed him by refusing to live in Queer-limbo as Montana’s unrewarded fag-hag. Equally I take his sister to represent exactly that part of himself that he can not express and that must remain dormant, hence his rage in the club when she disappears off into the men’s toilets (!) to get banged by some louche, cocksure bozo. By the time we get to the film’s infamous finale in which a gang of invading boys get introduced to a shrieking and flouncing Tony’s “little fwiend” before he submits to a bukkake bullet-fest and finally (FINALLY) gets nailed from behind with a big, long, shiny shotgun the film has entered a zone of delirious, hilarious kitsch that in fairness, one should only expect from arch-Queen De-Palma.

After watching the extras, including the Def Jam homage to a Hip-Hop classic (!), I watched the deleted scenes. Yep. They deleted two takes of scene that's an expression of love between Tony and Manny, which stops just short of a kiss and is approvingly watched by an audience of Trannies, in a part of the dorm where Montana just happens to have made his bed. The implication in both scenes is that maybe Manny is a little uncomfortable with Tony’s love for him, in the second that Tony may have been “partying” with the drag queens. Either way it contains the immortal double-entendre, “Assholes drive me crazy, Manny.” There is also a later scene in which Mastrantonio is confused for his wife as he buys her a sexy-but-chaste white dress that he himself is just too short to carry off, and which she changes into in the final scene when she confronts Tony over his desire. He doesn’t want to sleep with you love, he wants to be you!

Tony Montana, a great big faggot, just waiting to get fucked.

* there is I think a kind of bleeding through from Scarface to Blue Velvet to Cronenburg’s A History Of Violence/Eastern Promise which I may well elaborate on later, especially as my post on Lynch is well overdue.

**although the sequence directly after Manny’s murder with Mastrantonio holding his corpse (after the extreme close up on Pacino’s angry face/eye and a slow motion run down the stairs in another floaty white gown for Mastrantonio) in which she tells Pacino, “we just got married yesterday, we were going to tell you today” surely isn’t going to get beaten for mordantly camp bathos anytime soon.

2009-07-09T07:02:00.000-07:00

is it the wrong moment to link to this?

2009-06-26T04:32:00.000-07:00

well, he had been looking pale.......

2009-06-19T07:42:00.000-07:00

2009-06-13T12:20:00.000-07:00

When I lived in Ramsgate about ten years ago I had two drinking cronies, Paul and Martin. I tended to drink with them separately as, while I got on with both of them, they didn’t get on especially well with each other.

Paul was old-school Left in his politics, extremely argumentative and deafeningly loud, Martin was apolitical, generous and funny. There’s no doubt that the intellectual and rhetorical force was on Paul’s side, he was bracing company for twenty minutes but then slowly the feeling began to creep over me: this is it. This is the only thing we’ll do, talk about, culture, politics, theory. More importantly we’ll only talk about it in one way, high-volume, non-stop velocity.

Paul laughed uproariously at his own jokes in the absence of anyone else’s laughter, seemed to be addressing someone behind or beyond the person immediately before him most of the time, peppered his talk with references no one else could understand, dismissed anyone he perceived as not being on his intellectual level and at the same time took a certain pride in his connections and interactions with the local underclass: buying weed and hanging out with the bad boys.

I was about the only person in the pub where we regularly drank who had any time for him at all, and even I found him deeply fatiguing, in many ways one-dimensional, stifling, irrespective of all the drugs he’d ingested in the Sixties, the sit-ins he’d participated in, the fact that he’d gone to University with Genesis P’Orridge or that one of his best friend was a widely-regarded poet. All very intellectual, but still, just not enough to get you through the night.

Women especially disliked him. A part of it was his assumption that knowledge itself was impressive and seductive: it wasn’t that he didn’t have fairly bog-standard lusts, he liked the same generically pretty girls anyone did but he was incapable of speaking to them without patronising them. His seduction technique was to try and undermine their ideas of themselves, they would grow dizzy under the spell of his furious mentation, he would crack them open and they would melt worshipfully into his arms. It never worked, and as it became apparent to him that it wasn’t working, that the girl in question was simply bored and repulsed by all this grandstanding he would become more aggressive: he would leave her wounded, if she wouldn’t gratify his ego by submitting to his superior intellect he would do his best to destroy hers. Then he would affect to have disdained her all along.

At this point I also lived with a large, extended and anarchically free-wheeling Family of Gothy, Bo-Ho painters and artists down from London, (we’ll call them the Clan). I was their favoured surrogate son at that point. They liked neither Martin, nor Paul. Paul because he exposed their intellectual hollowness, their lazy, Radio-Four-quoting lack of any real intellectual rigour, Martin because he had no especial interest in their sub-cultural capital and was always fidgeting to get away and do something more interesting. The idea that there might be a more richly multidimensional way of living than sitting round their enormous, Huysman’s style black dinner table listening to left-field music and yelling incomprehensibly at each other, or that “experiences” weren’t necessarily the things you had after ingesting large amounts of chemicals, offended them. They threw fairly extravagant parties full of artists and left-field types at which neither Paul nor Martin were particularly welcome and of which I grew increasingly bored.

My friendship with Martin was regarded as odd from both Paul and The Clan’s perspective: what I was after all was a combative, word-wielding Swans-and-Pansonic-loving drugs-and-booze-binging CerebroGoth.

What Martin had was shiny, non-partisan “people skills”, something the others deemed an irrelevance, if not an outright offence, not because they had ever had them, found them useless and abandoned them along the way but because they valorised what they had always been, socially-awkward, anxious outside a narrow domain of taste, nervous around “normal” people. Martin, however, seemed to find talking to people, almost anyone, rewarding, seemed to be able to engage with them on their own terms, patently enjoyed others. This was an enormous part of his charm, whereas the charmless Clan and the charmless Paul were thrown into a panic meeting people who might oblige them to come out of the corner they had assiduously painted themselves into and were proudly proclaiming themselves kings of. You must enter my empire, my citadel, I will not meet you on the border of yours! They regarded themselves as open-minded but their ego-world was too fiercely guarded for anything genuinely illuminating or disrupting to get in. The air was stale and heavy with desperate mutual affirmation, shot through with muffled hysteria.

The fact was that on a night out with Martin there was sense that things might happen, there was a foretaste of what I found later in Spain and in South America, that you could start the night with one group of people and end it with a completely different one, the process of moving about putting many other options and interactions in your path if you were open to them, a different model of conviviality and sociality to England’s*.

Paul seemed confident in many ways but it was a strident, inflexible confidence, underneath it there was the inability to listen to anyone else: his endless, urgent theorizing and riffing seemed neurotic, the fear that if he stopped for a moment someone might ask him how he was feeling, how his love life was going, what his hopes and fears were, ask him to tell them a joke or expose him in some way. A conversation would largely start like this : How are you? I’m reading Deleuze. Do you know Deleuze? No. Well, what Deleuze says is….

With Martin conversation was a more supple, broader medium, plus he was funny whereas Paul was dour, inquisitive where Paul was dogmatic, gentle where Paul was shrill, open where Paul was impermeable. Conversation, putting the world to rights, ideas, weren’t the entire purpose of the evening: the night was a series of possibilities, an arena of potential for finding out new things, a form of playful investigation. This was a large part of what Paul disliked in Martin, the ease with which he encountered others, his refusal to consider the question closed, his ludic qualities. Paul had read Kapital and he knew what reality was. Paul wanted converts and acolytes and got none, or at least not for long. Martin was widely loved.

One night things came to a head.

We were in disco above a hotel that was also a Language school I used to work in. Paul had been haranguing me inexhaustibly for the past few hours and when Martin turned up it was a relief. A game of pool, maybe, or table football, or a dance around. Maybe nipping out for a late night swim in the Sea, or a chat with some of the students who avoided Paul, who actually taught them, but who were friendly with Martin, who ran the local internet café. Any change of colour and tone, anything but this, was deeply welcome to me.

Paul was a big guy, almost as tall as me, Martin was all of five-foot seven. We were already drunk, Martin had come out late. Paul was loud and overbearing and could be intimidating in a way, nonetheless I would describe all three of us as physical cowards.

The conversation started approximately like this:

Martin (warily) “How are you Paul?”

Paul (bellowing) “ Alright. You still in love with the Twentieth century, are you?”

Harmless enough, really, funny in a way. Coward that I am I escaped to the bar to get Martin a drink. At some point while I was queuing up a bottle got smashed and waved around and by the time I got back Martin was visibly shaken, Paul gone.

You’re kidding me.

What the fuck was that all about?

What did you say to him?

Nothing. Really, nothing!

That was ten years ago, but still, certain things stick in your mind.

Martin’s coming up next week, as it happens.

I haven’t seen Paul in years.

*Outside ULU last week there was a Brit/Non-Brit split perfectly exemplified. Two girls were introduced to French guy by a mutual Spanish friend. Hello, they said , then immediately turned to each other and began talking furiously about an absent third party who would be joining them later as the French guy stood there looking surprised and awkward. Their eyes locked on each other they went breathlessly gabbling on, desperate to maintain the little, fearful bubble of private space until the French guy, realising he wasn’t going to get a word in stepped heavily back a few paces and began looking distractedly around, pretending he was intrigued by the ebb and flow of the crowd. The two English girls visibly relaxed, the tension went out of their postures: thank god, thank god, now we won’t have to find out anything about him until we’re good and drunk in a few hours time.

2009-06-11T02:44:00.000-07:00

Mrs Impostume once said to me in passing, when I was raging no doubt at the iniquity of it all, worked up into an ecstatic lather of righteous fury by my own rhetoric, promising that there would be a day of reckoning, let Armageddon come and wash us ALL away if necessary, “ First destroy and then we’ll see!” all that stuff…

Well, what she said to me, her face a combination of irritation, boredom and dismay was,

“I never trust anyone who hasn’t had their nose broken.”

I remember it well, we were on Nou de la Rambla at the time.

Talk away, you’re going to scuttle off back to your room with your books and your drugs to hide the moment a confrontation comes. When you come up against power in its most naked form, you’ll shrink from it and all this wonderfully impressive talking will have meant nothing,

There was a large, cold noise in my ears, the sound of something ringing hollow. The wind whistling mockingly through the gap between words and deeds.

She knew my type, you see.

2009-06-03T05:41:00.000-07:00

I don’t know much about Charlie Brooker: I know he’s on TV in some capacity (but I haven’t had a TV for about five years), that he writes a column in the Guardian, that he co-wrote the desperately muddled, unfunny Nathan Barley with Chris Morris. People I rate seem to rate him so when I saw a photocopy of an article from Monday’s Guardian on a colleague's desk I picked it up and read it.

I was surprised by how trite it was.

I’m not going to start casting aspersions on the entirety of his output on the basis of one piece, but the essence of it was: men are eternally and immutably deluded little boys, only women attain any real maturity. Ladies, take over and save us by relegating us to the playpens where we belong (and where we secretly long to be) so we can sit around masturbating, whooping senselessly and smashing each other over the head with our toys.

There is of course sufficient ironic hyperbole to offer a get out clause, but the germ of what’s being riffed on remains the same: men just don’t grow up and need women to shepherd them. This facile, shame-faced pseudo-feminism is everywhere in the culture at the moment. Check out your local video store for Family Guy season seven or Role Models, or hey, pick up Platform by Houellebequ for that matter.

Men either remain a grotesque third child for the women to rebuke and teach lessons in “responsibility” to, or if they are capable of adulthood at all it’s only once they get into a domestic situation with a suitably forgiving (but also Hot and Smart!) wife/mother. Indeed, the deeply conservative gesture in ostensibly risky and outrageous films like “Knocked Up” is that maturity is exactly that: acceding to the inevitability of the family unit. But don’t worry guys you’ll still be able to like, act retarded and shit with your buddies at the weekend. Essentially what she actually digs in you anyway is your being a “boy”, she kind of disapproves but finally can’t help but laugh and love you for your irresponsibility ('cause really she’s too serious and career minded at the end of the day and you’re the perfect antidote when sometimes she needs to be reminded to laugh at herself a little), so you won’t have to change too much either.

Who is this version of being male supposed to serve? It hardly seems to serve women’s interests given that even in the most matriarchal societies ie Norway women still do a disproportionate amount of the housework and child care. Women, take over and then you can have the additional strain of looking after us men too, but don’t worry we’ll kind of grovel around abasing ourselves so you get to feel morally superior. But is it really in men’s interests either, a deliberate cleaving to some kind of half-life, an ontological stuntedness: we are and must always be little boys. Why read books and stuff (you know you don’t want to!) when you can sit around comparing hot actresses and playing practical jokes on your friends?

Being a man is ridiculous, being a father even more absurd. Be a helpmeet or a friend, be a partner, kow-tow to your wife and child at all times, don’t be disciplinarian, learn how to compromise, learn that you need to put other people first for a change. You always fuck up anyway. Just look at the world financial system, if women had run it, it would have been nice and fair and honest, women are the Good Daddy, the Real Daddy, women are what men could be if only they weren’t always boys, the system needs a women’s hand on the tiller: then it will REALLY work, really be an ETHICAL capitalism.

More than that, women are basically the Universal Parent, the figure whose love can always be relied upon, whose forgiveness is guaranteed, ( Nobomommy, maybe). Because just as we know that for example, women are sexually much more faithful than men and don’t have men’s nasty lusts and wildly roaming sexual fantasy life ( which makes them ethically better i.e. less likely to break up the family unit) so we know that basically they’re just not as competitive and ego driven as men and are much more into “collaborating” and “communicating” both of which are unequivocally good things and must produce beneficial societies. They’re just more level-headed than men and all that stuff about them being screaming, irrational hysterics who disrupt the settled order and unto whom one should take one’s whip was plain wrong. Women, specifically women in what might be called their Bourgeoisie Late Capitalist formulation are going to save us and we men can regress even further, from men without chests to kids without brains.

Of course Brooker wants it both ways, part of the sucking up to the Holy women by treasonously revealing the essence of men is the implication that our Charlie is the Holy (if not, you know, wholly) the exception. Ironically, at the foot of the page Charlie tells us not to be discouraged by the Loaded style cover to McMafia ( the book he got halfway through this week: well, he is a man!!!!) while dishing up a wittier form of archly Loaded content.

The knee-jerk response to my objections is to say, oh so you want the fierce Victorian Patriarch back do you? No. Oh so you want militant feminists kicking your door in every time you sneak a Jazz mag out from under the mattress? Neither.

But I am sick to death of this stuff.

2009-05-29T04:42:00.000-07:00

ok, it's brilliant. give up now!

2009-05-29T04:38:00.000-07:00

plus

minus

equals

2009-05-28T04:29:00.000-07:00

Owen asked me to enlarge on why I hate Burial and Lo! Once the Baronial command is issued, I comply.

A large part of my anti-Burialism is pretty closely related to extra-musical factors that impinge on my ability to listen to him without a certain irritated sneeryness or sneeroisity or sneerfulness or sneeritude.

Welcome to “myburialconspiracytheory.co.uk.”

J’ACCUSE LE MARK K-PONQUE!

My question really is: how much more could the guy have fulfilled the blog-agenda circa 2006? And by blog agenda I basically mean the Divine Mark-K and hNTLGY.

I’m still not entirely convinced in fact that Mark isn’t Burial. Although clearly K-punk would never stoop to working with Four Tet. Unless, of course he was cunningly trying to throw me off the trail (curse you Fisher, I’ll unmask you yet!)

So even if Burial isn’t Mark, he certainly sprang fully formed from His Colossal Head and the fact that he’s discovered by Punk-pal Kode 9, put out on Hyperdub, never plays live despite the massive props he gets from all and sundry and also refuses to be photographed (fully and conveniently cleaving to Mark’s anti-facialization stance) makes me suspect even further at that point that he is entirely virtual. Plus Professor Space Ape’s on it (small world!) and it also sounds a wee bit suspiciously like Kode9’s “Memories of the Future” album.

So I’m left with this supposition, that there is, out there, floating around, some nineteen year old yoof who just happens to feel exactly the same way about late capitalism and the death of Rave / the end of Modernism as the PHD toting Dubstep bloggerati do PLUS is expressing this HNTLGCLY geistless Ziet in EXACTLY the way they would most advocate ie, via a spectral and vitiated take on the dance music of their youth. But without even really being aware of their existence. Hey, it’s just the way young people feel in 2006! They just never DJ or play live, then send off demos to Hyperdub and get an album put out.

By the time the second album comes around and he’s using two-step as a template, emphasisng the hauntologically-correct vocal science and surface crackle AND not only giving interviews where he talks about the nostalgia for the lost utopian spaces he hears in his older brother’s record collection but also appears to read M.R. James , credulity has reached breaking point. Mark’s grown this kid in a bottle. You mean there’s more than one person in the entire world who likes both Christina Aguilera AND reads M.R James! And he’s just a disenfranchised youth from the soon-to-be-submerged streets of some South London borough? You get nominated fro the Mercury and you still won’t play a live set anywhere?

Now whether or not Burial spent his time pouring over K-Punk circa 2006-2007, (I mean, I did, who didn’t?) and thought to himself, “fuck me, this is the good stuff. Someone should give musical expression to these ideas”, whether he’s an ex- student of Kode9’s who was discretely nudged in the right direction or whether he’s some FisherGoodman virtual-hybrid shouldn’t effectively make any difference unless you’re on some deeply retrograde Rockist authenticity tip. Many important bands have been heavily conceptualised/ideas lead, hey, they all are to varying degrees of self-consciousness. Fine. But Burial seemed to be sold to me as an Authentic Voice of Damaged Late Capitalist subjectivity and this raises my hackles: don’t try to con me, you think that if it’s presented as an extension of the work of a couple of arch-theorists I won’t buy it because it won’t be “Real“ enough for me, in other words it attempts to exploit what it perceives as my stupidity. It is veritably Burial’s ambiguous ontological status which delibidinizes his work.

Equally, if Burial doesn’t exist why was it thought necessary to invent him? Because reality ( “”: scare quotes provided to be used at reader’s discretion) is too busy not being as heartbroken over What Has Been Lost as it ought to be. Incovenient. And actually, strip away the Hauntalogical Authenticity adding a libidinal sheen to the whole endeavour and it all sound pretty pedestrian, pretty same-y. Are these epochal expressions of a genuine, broad ranging sensibility, the cry of damaged youth trying to wrest some last faint and fading glow from the embers of the Modernist project? To me the Burial albums share too much of early dubstep’s attempts to wish a scene and a subjectivity into being*, a scene which is consonant with all the smart ideas about what music could or should be at this stage. A Boffincore that dare not speak its name.

*That fantasy element still seems to be in place: you watch the guy with the pint ( it’s a very beery scene innit, dubstep) wobbling furiously to the dreary Italtek set at the Rythym Factory or the badly dressed gangs of fidgety Sixth formers shambling about to another identikit bassline from Pinch and you wonder what they are hearing that you’re not. I mean, who wants a melancholy, uptight dance music?** “ Good night last night?” “Aww, mate, those tunes were luGUbrious, bruv, soporific to the max!”

** Well actually, maybe I do. The significant question remains, if I hate*** dubstep so much why do I go and see/listen to so much of it? Patiently waiting for the Joker set at the Arches last Friday it clicked: if I was twenty this is what I’d be into. I.e. this is music for sexually underconfident white trainspotters who want to be cleverer than everyone else and affect a certain cool, marginal, edgy disdain but would never go anywhere there might be a fight. Or any women to talk to. A place where they can get pissed on Stella and sit on the floor in a circle. When Indy guitar rock is the new Stock, Aitken and Waterman where are all the smart, nervous, bookish kids going to go? Dubstep. Hardcore, meaning Black Flag, Continuum. Shit, maybe it’s my own ambiguous ontological status**** that de-libidinizes their work!

***I take the recent Sonic Youth ruckus/brouhaha (with the emphasis on the Ha-Ha) to largely have sprung from a quite understandable desire that people would just produce an album or two, maybe even three, hit their peak and then fuck off. Of course you can just ignore them, as presumably anyone with the remotest jot of curiosity has been with Sonic Youth’s Eternal diminishing-return since Sister at least, but the fact that they don’t have the simple human decency to slip quietly into the wings is a bit irritating. Like those yummy-mummies in leather pants and shades you see still struggling to eclipse their pubescent daughters in Waitrose. Yeah you’re probably alright still, still a looker and stuff, but that’s overshadowed by your horribly distasteful inability to bow out gracefully. *****

Why can’t more people just pack it in and go and do something else/ take a look at themselves and decide they’re basically never going to produce anything worthwhile and not bother in the first place? This isn’t about youth, if you start when you're sixty then fine, it’s about knowing when you’ve creatively peaked. It’s not just that the Career In Rock offends against rock’s Hellenism and Romanticism, it’s that it demystifies and exposes the rock dream of the moment of apotheosis without overturning it in any kind of fruitful way. Hey, we’ve gotta put our kids through college! Rock is just work, graft, punching the time card, watching the clock. The alternative to work is work.

I like to think that Richey Edwards burned his bridges rather than jumped off one. just thought, fuck this, I’ll never produce better work, I’m off to live differently, because otherwise I reduce what’s supposed to be beautiful and set above life to just another form of drudgery and money-grubbing. He wasn’t prepared to profane it. Let there be one reserve of the sacred in life.

It is a business of course and was ever thus, but that’s not the point, it can’t be seen as such. If we’re this bored by Sonic Youth now, or the Fall, or Nick Cave, imagine how bored they are by themselves. Oh my god I have to keep on being Nick Cave despite the fact that I haven’t had an idea for twenty-five years. I DON’T HAVE ANY OTHER SKILLS!!!! Cave was parodying the purgurtorial awfulness of going through the motions back in Wings of Desire (the “ don’t say “this one’s about a girl” bit).

Imagine the crushing, soul-curdling enervation that must descend the minute he/they have to get ”creative”, these days. Why can’t they just retrain as plumbers? I mean the money’s probably better. Why do they HAVE TO make a living as musicians? I’ll happily and have happily not made a living as a writer despite having written for years and in my own estimation having a fuck site more talent than half the rubbish gets in Waterstones because if you really do care about the art you approach it full of doubt, humility and trepidation, you fall horribly and continually short and offer up your own work only when you can honestly and as objectively as possible believe you may have produced something worthwhile, which means something new. How many people can honestly say: yes my art is significant. The sheer glut of deeply uninspired and bizarrely self-satsified Kulture, whether from wannabes or has-beens kind of weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living, innit?

I mean none of us wants NOT to be a writer, or a painter or a musician, cause it’s kind of alright sitting around painting and feeling cool and deeper and more interesting than everyone else, but it’s also just possible you’re boring, have been so for years and won’t ever be otherwise, even though you’ll tick by. Otherwise it’s the night shift in Tesco and the comfortless rigour of actually having taken it as seriously as you like to claim you do.

Your fantasy’s impinging on mine, you see. Do get that job in Tesco’s, wont you?

****I seem to have been through several musical volte-face recently. Most notably Flying Lotus, who I thought was just rubbish even up to the point of seeing him at Lightbox last time he played, and despite having had Los Angeles and 1983 for ages. I’m now caning them both and scouring the web for mixes. Same goes for Black Moses by Issac Hayes: a month or so ago I suggested to the Baron that it wasn’t much cop, he said it had good arrangements. I punched him in the face, he felled me with a flurry of Constructivist kung-fu. We agreed to disagree and went back to quoting Withnail and I at each other. Now it’s about the third best record I’ve ever heard.

***** but of course Late Capitalism is the domain of the Permateen. Teenhood begins at three and lasts till your mid-Eighties. You thought you’d be afforded the relief of not having to be cool once you got into your twenties, thought there’d be several distinct stages to your growth, maturation and decline each with its specific rituals and attitudes? Dude that is so pre-Post History. Now you’re 17 4EVA! The most obvious symbolic markers of the Seven Ages of man ( recently scaled back to three for your personal existentionumerical convenience) used to be clothes. When you were Fifty you didn’t dress like your teenage son/daughter, you wore age-appropriately hideous and outdated old bloke’s clobber, in your sixties, if you had any self-respect it was half-mast bri-nylon Marks and Sparks slacks lashed across your pruney duggs just under the armpits and a pair of piss-stained dun Hush Puppies. Now it’s one-style-fits-all-age-groups, you borrow your kids cargo pants and skateboard, go hang out down the car park with the other dads to talk about how that new Green Day album sucks ass compared to classic shit like the Offspring’s “Pretty Fly.”

But then you need to stay on top of that stuff cause your kids are your best friends****** anyway aren’t they? A sensible choice in the face of social atomization and given how awful and disappointing other Kidults are. The ideal situation for any healthy family is to get to some middleagemass stage as quickly as poss, where you can all relate over the same Kulture, ( Lilly Allen ABBA, Twilight, Wii, Doctor Who) no one really an adult, no-one exactly a kid. If you’re also a competitive type this is often best done by massively overestimating your kid’s intelligence and hallucinating an insane degree of cultural capital onto them. I mean not that your kid isn’t a genius or anything…

“What did you do on your third birthday Briony?”

“I went to see the rhinoceros with mummy.”

“Oh, so you took her to the Zoo. That’s nice.”

“God, no. Rhinoceros, the Ionesco play. Yeah, she loved it actually. It was either that or the Kenneth Anger season at the NFT. She insisted but I wasn’t really up to it so we did the Ionesco, yeah. Yeah, she had to explain a lot of it to ME actually, yeah (laughs and casts covetous yet angry glance at bemused, cake-smeared progeny)”

You can also reduce yourself to the status of a peer by pretending to be a tyrannically egotistical moron (ie a child) and allowing yourself to be remorselessly bullied by them in the hope of “relating” and being really more of a buddy than a nasty-wasty old parent.

You know you just had those kids to have someone else to go shopping with/for, anyway.

Importantly, in supermarkets, prove you’re a good, liberal, middle class parent by allowing them to join in, weaving about smack in the middle of the aisle dragging a shopping basket behind them, randomly pulling stuff off low shelves and leaving it scattered around while you patiently try to explain to them that no, that’s not what Mummy wants, is it darling, and it isn’t nice to leave things on the floor, is it? even though they have the cognitive capacity of plankton and the hand-eye coordination of Steven Hawkins on eight cans of Special Brew Should the couple behind you whose car park time is running out express even the slightest hint of impatience at this whole indulgent, narcissitic scenario, glare at them icily. How dare they not understand that THIS is YOUR CHILD!!!!

******I foolishly mentioned to Chris the other day that I was happy.

I’m happy, I said.

It doesn’t last, he said.

True enough. But then neither does the misery, apparently.

The author accepts no liability for the numerous factual errors in this post.

2009-05-21T08:36:00.000-07:00

"I hate Burial"

2009-05-11T01:12:00.000-07:00

I’ve always been a night owl.

I can be tired at seven but by the time ten comes around I’ve got my second wind. The night has frequency all its own, some of us are attuned to it, others are not.

Linda is not.

I have never known anyone fall asleep so quickly or wake up so completely and immediately. At ten she shuts down with soft purr, at six she starts up with a surge of static and a determined whirring, ready for work. An early bird.

Still, look at the worm she’s caught.

I run on a cycle of my own. Three or four days of shambling insomnia followed by twelve-fourteen hours of total blackout.

A few weeks ago, around three in the morning I decided to get up and go for a walk around the block. We live in a quiet residential area, Zone 2. I slipped out of the bedroom, put my trainers on in the hall, double-checked I had my keys.

I’m not sure precisely why that night I decided to leave my home. It was uncharacteristic of me.

That is the extent of my defence.

The moment I clicked the front door closed a complex thrill, more like a moment of recognition shuddered through me. I listened into the silence.

Night is a vast conspiracy.

I set off with the intention of walking down onto the main road, following it along until the petrol station, looping round through the flats, coming back along the side of the railway line home.

I have no clear recollection of having taken the knife from the kitchen. If I did so then it was simply a precautionary measure.

The main road was deserted, not a single car went past during the eleven minutes it took me to stroll to the main junction at Sandrock road, cut across the Petrol station’s forecourt to begin my journey back to the house.

A car pulled in sharply as I was exiting, the wing mirror clipping my right hand. The car was red, but in my memory it is blue. This is where, moments later, what is being referred as “the altercation” took place.

On the CCTV footage they have shown me I find it hard to connect myself to the blurred, lumbering figure in his jogging pants and hooded top. That is not my walk, those are not my limbs, that, surely, is not my face.

Yet they insist on the fact it is, and what choice do I have but to believe them?

2009-04-30T05:46:00.000-07:00

My things began moving around me in the night. Worse was to come. Now the moment my back is turned they rearrange themselves, faster than the eye or mind can catch, following some imperative of their own. Occasionally I fancy that there, at the limit of my hearing, there are sublime, cold currents and eddies of command, a language flesh is dumb to.

It was subtle at first. A cup out of the cupboard, a chair on the wrong side of the table, my telescope spun around and pointing inquisitorially back into the room. Small enough for me to imagine that the fault was mine, lapses in attention, the small patches of forgetfulness that slowly burgeon as the years steal upon you, until life is a panicked stumbling from one trough and pothole to the next.

Slowly though they have grown more restive, more determined. More and more I feel they are mocking me, calling me to something.

I turned away from my journal this morning, taking in the view, the sea cold against the shore, the blunt rocks grinding it up into glass, momentarily lost in the pale December dazzle, only to find the order of the objects in my room exactly reversed. As though I had slipped through the looking glass and was caught now forever on the other side. The table, the piano, my books and charts, all my equipment. Where would I find the strength at my age to put them all back? I retreated here to study the stars, to leave the chaos of life behind and now I am besieged by the very things which were supposed to anchor and provide for me.

Dismayed I shuffled out to the kitchen. On returning I found the room back as it should have been, except for my chair which was turned away from the window now, facing me. I paused, the teacup shaking slightly in my hand, head cocked, listening, the chair posing some question to me I could barely detect, let alone understand.

Perhaps they intend to drive me out of here, this house where I had planned to spend my last days. Where I have lived so comfortably and for so long.

Perhaps they have a use for me I have yet to fathom.

I shall sit here and wait, in this vortex of matter and soundless speech. Here in my home.

Yes. I shall wait.