| Wednesday, November 29, 2000 |
 | Readers! Specifically, Jonesy, heart of my heart and life of my life....have you ever felt the need to sing "Dare" by Stan Bush in the company of those who know exactly what happens when your hopes have all been shattered? Do you want to be able to smile enigmatically and say "That's just Prime"? Do you want to be the alphaest of alpha females ever? Young manwoman postgender lovegod(ess), there's a place you can go.
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| Tuesday, November 28, 2000 |
| Ok, perhaps a little unfair about writing groups. I had a pretty good time. There was fun to be had. This could almost be an admission of being wrong. Except I don't do those.
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| Monday, November 27, 2000 |
| Shit poetry page of the day - this could become a series - must be this, from coolandarty.com. This masterpiece is introduced as written after a girl our hero was dating decided to become a lesbian. His eloquence extends to "That kinda sucked". After a brief examination, could any one of us blame her?
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| No, give me a trusty paperback any day. They fit in your pockets, too. If you've got big pockets. And I have. Look.
Jamie looks at the flexibility of paper and the ethics of sub-stalking on the UpsideClown.
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| Writing groups are the ultimate evocation of the triumph of hope over experience. Every time, one expects them to be full of edgy, brilliant people, of about your age, with a slight gender imbalance favouring your own proclivities. Although other people are more than happy to handle the logistics, you are quickly made the warrior-monarch of the group, for your smouldering good looks as much as for your undeniable and peer-recognised talent.
In fact, they have always been set up by a middle-aged woman, usually called Sally. They are filled with people for whom this is a kooky alternative to local history at the local college of further learning.
Worst of all, the Sallys of this world never know a fucking thing about writing. This does not necessarily mean that nothing is any good. It means that there is no critical vocabulary and no will to make things better. It just turns into a grotesque circle jerk of middle-aged, middle-class mediocrity. Like Marco Negri playing for Rangers reserves - there's no pressure to improve, so why bother?
And off I go again this evening, to be disappointed. I should just stick to Lonely Hearts. The hit rate is probably comparable.
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| Saturday, November 25, 2000 |
| Some things to remember about Loughborough:
1) A medium-sized town between Leicester and Nottingham, population about 60,000.
2) Main export is unemployment. When I was younger, arrivals at the station were greeted by a mighty sign saying "Welcome to Loughborough, Home of Ladybird Books", with matching pseudoscarab. Ladybird Books having long since flown away home, this journey found me beneath an adumbration of the local steam locomotive line.
3) Who needs steam locomotives? Suddenly, London to Loughborough takes three hours. I thankyew.
4) Loughborough has one building of any real height, the Univerity Housing Block. Fine views and clear weather makes this an ideal point for potential suicides to meet and greet.
5) Loughborough will one day be a landfill site for my lovingly-preserved minor tokens of human interaction. Some would argue that it already is. The amount of crap to be waded through!
Broken tapes, broken hearts, programmes and map, notes on doors and fatal flaws, diary entries and dire rentries. All very unfortunate.
Still, over now. Other now. Lover now. Hmmmm.
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| Thursday, November 23, 2000 |
| I believe I may have exceeded even my own expectations. Let me explain.
I'm batter up on the UpsideClown today. Join me as we explore The Limits of Melissa Joan Hart.
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| Today and yesterday have been spent back in the family home, clearing out some of the detritus of my youth. It's astonishing how much someone can accumulate - every card, letter, communication down to the notes left on my door in college seem to have been saved over the last seven years, just from a lack of time for winnowing, or perhaps a desperate wish to preserve the physical evidence of personal interrelation.
No more. To quote the immortal Jello Biafra, this is all coming out, right now. Merciless destruction of my past. Except any part of it connected either to witness testimony that I have been in love, or my complete run of Excalibur.
Hey, nostalgia is just like it used to be.
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| Wednesday, November 22, 2000 |
| She weighs down the quilt at one end but releases it, slipping her legs under. Your cheek glides past her rough patch on her thigh.
You emerge at her end of the bed. She looks down at you. She will not repeat herself again.
"Always and for ever," you admit.
She takes hold of you, fiercely.
And so on
Just one of the possible endings from Life's Lottery by Kim Newman. Interesting book - a reclamation of the Fighting Fantasy paradigm of numbered paragrpahs, but actually owing far more to the "select a chapter" prototypes like "State of Emergency" from decades back. Ambitious, and largely successful, although the author's sci-fi background occasionally pokes through like a tibia.
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| Time Out's review of "Vox'n'Roll" (see below) is an object lesson in how to write a completely useless review. Jim Driver is no doubt an intelligent and well-read man. However, he is having one Hell of an off-day. I reproduce it here for purely non-profit reasons, acknowledge entirely Time Out and Mr. Driver's respective rights, and will remove this post if legally requred to do so. Like they care.
(Of the Vox'n'Roll nights at Filthy MacNasty's)But don't run away with the idea that we're talking red wine, Fay Weldon and polite applause: Vox'n'Roll leans more towards Guinness, audience interaction and hard-edged Rock'n'Roll.
No soft-edged Rock'n'Roll for this cadre of kick-botty anarchists. Having established just how hard and cool the Vox'n'Roll evenings are, Driver goes on to ennumerate about half the contibutors, concluding:
There's not a dud among them. "Vox'n'Roll" is a roller-coaster ride through the cream of contemporary fiction.
A rollercoaster ride. You may want to give your brain a few minutes to appreciate all the implications of this adventurous new metaphor. After all, "Ulysses" was not an immediate success. Consider the implication of rapid motion. Ponder the subtext of thrills and excitement. Goggle at the sheer stupidity of a mixed metaphor involving a rollercoaster ride through cream. Wonder whether a log-flume through the cream of contemporary fiction would make more or less sense. Resolve never to skip church again.
He goes on to demand to know what other collection could get away with pitting a detective mystery...against a story about the sex life of siamese twins? Or the long, fluid sentences of Will Self's hard-nosed fantasy(hard-nosed fantasy! The sheer oxymoron! The absolute lack of self-consciousness)...against the abrasive Scots dialect of Welsh's "Elspeth's Boyfriend". Driver honestly seems to believe that to put short stories of different subject matter and style in the same book is an act of shocking futurism. Bless.
After this orgasmic, running-on encomium, he concludes:
If it doesn't make you want to root out more from the writers on offer, there's no hope for you or for modern fiction.
Conversely, so long as lazy reviews splurge pointless, back-of-the-book hagiography onto intermittently interesting works, thus giving the writers no incentive to improve and the reviewer the opportunity to squeeze in that skinnychino before lunch, we are in safe hands.
God, I'm depressed. No single column has had that much impact on my mood since my care worker's strap-on.
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| Katy collects prostitute cards - the ones stuck up in London phone boxes advertising the services of city-centre ladies of the night - with a kittenish eagerness normally divested after about a fortnight in the Capital. This can make walking through central London with her a complete nightmare.
Recently, she was impressed by this slogan:
Who wants fulfilment? Denial lasts forever.
What was this card offering, and who was it designed to appeal to? Answers on a postcard...
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| Quote of the week, and perhaps of the century -
Because only men have penises, phallic symbols, even if in some sense possessed by women (as may be the case with female rulers, for instance) are always symbols of ultimately male power....This leads to the greatest instability of all for the male image. For the fact is that the penis isn't a patch on the phallus.
Go tell it on the mountain, brother. That from Richard Dyer's article "Don't Look Now", found in Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses, a collection of mid-80s cultural studies essays I recently finished reading. Greil Marcus on "We Are the World" is particularly fun - interesting to note that Lionel Richie co-wrote the song, the chorus of which involves the line "There's a choice we're making", and in the same period starred in Pepsi's promotional campaigns, the motto of which was of course "The choice for a new generation". Clearly it was a decade of choice.
Even more interesting to consider that Lionel Richie was considered the way forwards for Pepsi marketing, porn-star perm and all. The 80s were a strange country....
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| Blogger's congestion/updating problems have kept me from my keyboard. Still, there's a whole 24 hours left to check out the latest UpsideClown.
I think it starts in about 1981 when I saw Raise the Titanic, a terrible film about Raising the Titanic.
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| Monday, November 20, 2000 |
| A pleasant weekend, although my tolerance for costume parties is getting lower and lower. Beyond a certain age, the only real option is to come as somebody who just doesn't give a fuck. Abigail reckons that the party genes go into abeyance between about 24 and 44, at around about which point parties are such rare occasions that people overreact wildly at the very idea thereof. I can go with that.
Then, today, shopping in Brick Lane market. Really big markets tend to hammer home the breakneck consumption of the earth's resources. There is so much shit out there - more than could ever, in fact, be consumed. It is just produced to find itself ultimately displayed at a fraction of its marked-up price on a market stall, to an indifferent audience. Still, as humanity devoured the means of its own sustenance, the oceans rose and plague stalked the land, I got a really cool shirt, so that's OK.
Via Spitalfields to the West End, to see Memento. An interesting film rather than a great one, much funnier than I expected, but obviously all attention will be focused on the unusual treatment of time. It's surprisingly easy to follow after a few scenes - linearity is linearity, whichever way it runs.
And another David Bowie song over the end credits of a grim, noirish, fractured thriller. Seven, Lost Highway, Memento - this is getting ridiculous.
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| Friday, November 17, 2000 |
| "You will be missed, though I will always own your action figure."
These and other touching tributes can be found at the Optimus Primal Memorial. To describe this as fucked up fails even to begin to do it justice. OK, there are many things on the Internet which you may consider to be fucked up - hate sites, scat enthusiasts, horse sex. But this just wins the fucked up Olympiad, in its own, quiet Denis Neilsen way.
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| A game which has been keeping us sane in the office - "Spunky Monkey" (yes, I know, but the monkeyness in this instance is purely tangential. Based on the mainstay of top TV entertainers Ant&Dec's "Wonkey Donkey", it involves the description of an animal in a particular set of circumstances, these circumstances being summarisable with an adjective or phrase which rhymes with the animal's name. Others must then guess the animal.
"Spunky Monkey" is very similar, except that all entries must be eye-wateringly obscene. Thus, the above was the answer to the description of a higher primate covered in viscous white fluid.
Have a nice day.
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| Thursday, November 16, 2000 |
| Strange things are happening at Blogger.com today....I fear a revolt.
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| Myth is reality's Tyler Durden," he called after me. "When did you learn to speak with hyperlinks?" I called back, but he was gone.
Matt is one of those people whose ideas I don't think I could have come up with, even with a steady supply of coffee and TV. He's taking on the leopard in today's UpsideClown.
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| The bad mascara is just another version of the chewed-up cigar. I think we need to see broad depictions and stock characters to really put this charade in proper light.
The Breakfast Table provides yet another angle on the hilarious farrago that the US elections have long since ceased to be about to become. Mayhem 2000 is the Onion's take on it all.
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| Wednesday, November 15, 2000 |
| So apparently the police have driven the dope dealers from the streets of Brixton. Good news, and to be celebrated across the land. An end to the tide of lawlessness sweeping the nation.
Well. Hmmmm. Yes and no....
No more dope dealers, because the increased persecution combined with the small profit margins make it not worth their while. Crack dealers, on the other hand, have higher profit margins. They are more aggressive. Because the penalties for getting caught are so high, they are prone to edginess and violence. Suddenly, previously pleasant bits of Brixton are becoming very unpleasant.
There is, it seems, only one solution.
City planning to encourage marijuana sellers to flow back into the area, raising property prices and fighting crime.
Nice.
Top one.
Sorted.
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| And by the way, if a girl ever tries to use me to get a discount on a dress that my store sells, something tells me this relationship is probably a one-way ticket to getting me fired (and subsequently losing a girl, considering she would have lost her pipeline to low-cost apparel).
Breakup Girl is intelligent, intermittently amusing and usually good for a laugh. The people who write to Breakup Girl occasionally beggar belief, combining stupidity with that uniquely American grasp of therapese which makes meaningful communication pretty much impossible. Check this crowd to see just how picky unattractive, stupid people can get.
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| Now that he has settled into being the baldly patron of the warm arts, it's easy to forget how fucking marvellous the younger Brian Eno was. Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy), Here Come the Warm Jets and (to a lesser extent) Before and After Science are pretty much peerless examples of how to write pop music.
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| Tuesday, November 14, 2000 |
| An arrant rumour from Chris, my colleague in the continuing attempt to stuff the verucca sock of truth with the spunk of words. When Al Gore phoned up Dubya to revoke his decision to withdraw from the presidential contest, Bush was understandably somewhat incensed, and asked if he meant to go back on his word.
Pause.
"No need to get snippy," protested Gore.
This is just about the best thing ever.
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| Highlights of yesterday's G2, which I got to read on the way into work today: A Pass Notes on Inspector Morse, which briefly confuses him with Inspector Gadget. As a throwaway comment, mildly amusing. As the basis for lengthy rumination on a train too crowded to turn the pissing page, a one-way ticket to madness. Oh, and a very worthy article on the difficulties of raising a family and holding down a job, the worthy tone of which was sadly punctured by the presence of the irrationally amusing phrase "colo-rectal surgical wards".
Yes, I know it wouldn't be funny if you were in it, but that's not the point.
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| Monday, November 13, 2000 |
| Walking home today, I caught a steel-cut chill weaving between the smells of decomposing leaves and cardboard caught in the rain. It's the familiar signal - now we're really in Winter.
And, speaking of decomposition, what do you call a dumping when it isn't a dumping? Somebody and I stopped seeing each other over the course of a fairly brief phone call this evening. Match cancelled due to general lack of volition. Which just goes to show that it pays to be energetic about inertia.
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| If you are feeling squeamish, or if you've just eaten, then I wouldn't recommend that you carry on with this. But this is the last stretch and I promise that I'll stop soon. Quite simply, my heart came out of my chest.
George goes pop, bloody and squalling on the Upsideclown. Lyrical Genius.
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| Just finished: Vox'n'Roll, a collection of short stories from contributors to the Vox'n'Roll words and music nights at Filthy McNasty's on Amwell Street.
According to the (wisely uncredited) introduction, Vox'n'Roll was invented "to create pleasant and informal surroundings for authors to read their work and to stress the links between literature and music". The problem is, books can't rely on the thrill of relevance you might get from listening to Irvine Welsh reading, then sticking on "Into the Valley".
Welsh is here, flogging the same horse as ever, and the main problem with this compilation lies in underperformance. Most of the names - Hayter, Self, Blincoe, Sampson - turn in what you'd expect them to, and it's all pleasant, undemanding, and largely unmemorable. Will Self turns in the stand-out piece, a nice riff on the freedom of the air, but you'd expect that from a writer clearly more accomplished, whatever your opinion of him, than anyone else here.
Wooden spoon to Paul Charles. Murder mysteries don't need to be abject, although short story murder mysteries usually are. No time for anything except the puzzle and the revelation. But even then, this abject is above and beyond:
"Someone called this in as a domestic dispute disturbance and then a second call came in a few minutes later saying we better get here quickly, someone was dead," Irvine advised the pathologist
This is Bulwer-Lytton quality.
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| Sunday, November 12, 2000 |
| With reference to the clothing debate (see archive), and I swear this is the end of it, I woke up at 5pm today after dreaming of a family holiday in Crete (a kind of "where are they now?" TV retrospective on the family holiday on Crete in '92 which effectively served as a stiffener before the divorce proceedings, I guess), where Rachel - of whom more later - turned up in a summer dress.
Now, there are a lot of things Rachel does very well indeed - gender studies, history, obscure facts about folk music and the Transformers, being the ubergirl - but summer dresses? Not unless the Army releases a camo-print one with a bayonet pocket.
Clothing makes us what we are not.
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| The theory of the four-dimensional relationship:
Everybody has a Lost Love. The one who basically set the parameters for every subsequent relationship. The one which one wistfully believes could have lasted the long hall, except one or (hopefully) both of you were too young, and one or (probably) both of you cocked it completely.
Since the end of mine, I've been noticing that the Lost Love was right about pretty well everything. Right about Douglas Coupland. Right about Blake's 7. Right about Leonard Cohen. Even, arguably, right about Melanie.
So what? Well, at four o'clock in the morning, the what becomes absurdly transparent. The Lost Love, in this case and perhaps in every case, is you, travelling backwards from some big crunch vanishing point at the end of time. They appear different, and appear to be travelling forwards chronologically in step with you, as a perceptual side-effect of their motion. It makes perfect sense that they know your own future tastes better, ultimately, than you do, because they have just passed back through them on the way to the moment you perceive as now. It makes perfect sense that you aren't ready for those tastes - or for the Lost Love. S/he's the future, seen through the lens of the present, and who is ever truly ready for the future? Yes folks, it's a metaphor. I think.
Nobody ever said love in four dimensions was easy.
Back in the here and now, why do stockings create a universal, atavistic response apparently shared by all mankind? Where does this come from? What is gained by it? When did tubes of translucent material become an uber-turn-on? Is it universal, or are there exceptions? Inquiring minds want to know....
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| Are we not fortunate to live in the times we do? On the way into work today, I shared a train with a tiny young woman - about 5'0 - wearing the proportionately largest trousers I have ever seen. In the future, nobody will have feet....
Meanwhile, I am becoming obsessed with the idea of the Crow as an Avon lady. No, just think about it. Better still, storyboard and soundtrack it.
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| I saw Tony Ousler's Influence Machine last night in Soho Square. It's hard to describe - faces, words and the impacts of fist and forehead projected onto trees, buildings and clouds of smoke, while disembodied voices channel the spirits of mediums, communications pioneers and goggle-eyed shellshock cases. It's only on until Sunday, so I recommend taking a look at it if you have the chance.
Remind me to tell you about Marconi sometime.
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| I've seen the future and it DIRKs.
DIRK is a funny thing - funniest of all is that the sum of knowledge contained within it cannot be reduced. Once it's in, it's in. I'm in there as the "bestest friend in the world ever" of a woman who told me in the coffee bar of French Connection in Covent Garden that we shouldn't speak again. Was that three months ago? Strange to think.
Deletia is one of the keywords of the new communication. Without it, human voices cake us and we drown.
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| Thursday, November 09, 2000 |
| If you had to have sex with all of the Corrs (including the bloke), in which order would you do them?
James is not afraid to ask the tough questions on the Upsideclown.
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| Odd that I want to drive nails into pretty well every celebrity with the surname Hanson. Somebody else agrees, at least in one case. Tomorrow, Mmmmmmbop.
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| The fact is that, once the policy of containment had been laid out in the late 1940s,
American foreign policy could have been competently run by well-trained laboratory rats.
Slate has been missing from my Inbox for a while. This article by Robert Wright on the fairly simple but oddly contentious premise that stupid people are often a less than ideal choice to run the free world. Read it.
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| Dinner with Abigail tonight - or last night - of whom no doubt more later. Conversation all over the damned place, but particularly on her obsessional relationship with Sean Connery, and thus James Bond.
Theory - James Bond is actually a bit of a shit spy. He only ever gets assigned to really pretty mundane jobs - diamond smuggling, bodyguarding - which just happen to be covers for plots to take over the world. Then, as soon as high command find out that there is some bad mojo going down on a planetary scale, they try, very politely, to get him the hell off the case.
"We can't risk your feelings affecting your judgement, Bond."
"Damn it, Bond, you can barely walk, let alone fight. You're off this one."
"There's no room for revenge in this job, Bond."
"For Christ's sake, Bond, we're trying to be nice. You're a sucky spy. Go home."
So how come the world is as yet untrampled by the boot of global dictatorship? Because Bond's enemies are the shit evil geniuses. Coinsider their ways. They accumulate enough resources, money, personnel and contacts to set up high-tech bases, commandeer nuclear weapons, build space stations...you name it. The sensible evil genius goes for an IPO. The sensible genius diversifies into tech stocks. The sensible genius does not hire Begbie to guard his or her icecap-melting machine.
The evil genius did take over the world. The unobtrusive evil genius.
Sleep now.
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| Wednesday, November 08, 2000 |
| Dawn Force engage....
First up, absurdly large props - oversized, high and mighty props - to Matt for his help. Without him, this page would not exist. And the sum of human knowledge would be immeasurably the poorer. He will no doubt recur. All hail him.
So, another weblog. Thank fuck.
More later.
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Venusberg.org finds Blogger very attractive...
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elsewhere:
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moreover:
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thereafter:
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Blogadoon
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Methylsalicylate
Hammersley
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the Collective
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the author:
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and finally...
the archives
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