| Monday, November 29, 2004 |
 | 'It sounds like she was raised by lesbian wolves in a lesbian wolf cave.'
It really annoys me that Semagic represents anchor tags with a capital "a". I'm not sure why. This is an interesting article, via , about the scion of a lesbian couple.
Brief note - "scion" is from the Old French "ciun" - a twig or offshoot. It's a word I frequently misuse, as I just did then. Strictly, a scion in terms of human heredity is the descendant of a noble or storied lineage, whereas what is significant about the subject of the article is the specific circumstance of her conception. I'm using "scion" here instinctively, as the nearest English equivalent of the Ancient Greek ernos, also meaning "twig" or "offshoot". Apologies for any inconvenience caused - it's a habit.
It's strange to think of the division between being raised in a gay or lesbian household and being raised by lesbians or gay men (or, indeed, lesbian wolves) - the aging of technology that means we now have adult children produced entirely without the unpleasant intervention of heterosexuality cropping up is strange in the same way that doctors in M*A*S*H apparently never perform CPR is strange, or that there are people walking around after surgeries that a decade ago were performed largely out of curiosity. From my (somewhat self-interested) perspective, anything that demonstrates that the family unit and the man-woman-kids unit need not be the same thing is a good thing. However, this:
When Ry spent her semester abroad in Dublin, she felt homesick for New York. She didn't care much for Dublin, but one night in particular stands out as the worst. She and her boyfriend at the time went to a gay bar that struck her as the only place she wanted to be that night, a place that promised to feel familiar in a certain way. It was a rainy night, and she and her boyfriend stood in line watching the gay men around them get in, while they did not. When Ry made a move towards the door, the doorman blocked her from entering. Ry got it - that they didn't get it, didn't get her.
confuses me. I imagine "they" (the doorman? The habitués of the club? The people of Dublin? Lazy "they" there) got her perfectly well, according to the requirements of "their" job. They got the fact that, notwithstanding feelings of estrangement from heterosociety, she wanted to go into a gay bar with her boyfriend. Given that every other bar in the vicinity was specifically designed for couples that looked straight, and that the presence of such a straight-looking couple would have been a brick through the window of the atmosphere of the gay bar, I'm not sure she gets special pleading there.
Of course, there's a lot more to safe space than that, and there's nothing like being excluded to validate feelings of exclusion, but I don't think it's as easy as "doorman bad, lady good". Some lives, you're just not going to fit in. Ry herself seems to have dealt with that - it's a shame the article goes for such a melodramatic response to what is, in effect, the tension between enjoying gay-friendly space and straight-friendly relationships, which is not, I would suggest, an unduly freakish situation.
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| Barlock
'. . . you can't think,' she was saying, 'beyond the next.
We were underground, closed-out, we'd slammed the hatch,
the two of us, him wearing everything from his stickpin to his Rolex,
me dressed to kill. The first fast batch
showed as lights over the mountains. We barely had time to catch
our breath or point before they sewed a chainstitch
across Katchukama Square and down the Street of Locks.
That's when we went to the cellar: to cobwebs on bare bricks,
a tin trunk, a rusty Barlock, empty wine-racks,
pictures in busted frames, a doll's house, Meccano, Airfix,
all the old stuff, history in a box . . .
I had plaster in my hair that made my whole scalp itch,
he looked like hell, lip bitten-through, a raw patch
on the heel of his hand from hammering home the latch.
For an hour or more we could hear the phone and the fax
cross-ringing upstairs: that, and the chiming of clocks
with the incoming overlapping. I made a bed of sacks
and lay down with him, my hand tucked tight between his legs.
I dozed and dreamed of our place in the south, the beach,
the dunes and pines, the walk between rocks
that took us to the village, no more, really, than a few shacks,
a taxi rank, a bar, where he liked to hang out with the jocks, the jacks
of all trades, patriots, punks, argufiers, the one-time rich,
two-timers, time-servers: salt of the earth, he'd say. I said the dregs.'
David Harsent
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| Monday, November 22, 2004 |
| Theoretically, this was meant to be a quiet weekend. As such, how could it begin but with horrible overindulgence both before and during birthday drinks at Milk and Honey? This tallies neatly with the latest wave of reports of apocalyptic drunkenness sweeping our streets, but I confess the only damage I was likely to do was to myself. It's something I need to remember - right now I don't have the firm, foursquare base to cut loose, and my body can't take the punishment I am used to meting out after weeks without meaningful rest.
In light of which, trying to make an early start in town on Saturday, a bold plan on the best weekend of my life, was an interesting decision. Huge breakfast in Balcans on Old Compton Street, a little recreational hat shopping, and then a late lunch with a friend who had been queuing for the grand opening of the Apple Store.
A brief aside. Why would anybody sleep outside this store on a vicious November night just to get into the store early? If it's for the discounted goodie bag, then I can just about understand it. The T-shirt, less so. But for the love of Heaven... it's Apple. They don't do special offers. They don't need to, because they have an army of frothy Apple pervs ready to pay through the nose for matching white plastic medical fetish computers. The iPod is a sign of individuality. 6 million have been sold. Think about it, lovers.
(The author reserves the right to get an iPod, an iMac, an iBook or an iOther at any moment. But for the right reasons. To express his individuality.)
So, anyway, the Apple Store, and then coffee, conviviality and general interaction. Still working on the balance between people and solitude. On Sunday, another birthday, this one in the less exclusive surroundings of a Turkish restaurant in Golders Green. It was after that that we finally tried the weasel coffee. Oh yes. weasel coffee, purchased for The Boy for his previous birthday.
As you may note from the blurb, the experience of having been eaten, covered with stomach acids and then regurgitated by weasels (or civet cats - jury still out) will, theoretically, make the coffee taste smoother and stronger. It should surprise you not at all that this is cock. It will make the coffee taste like it has been thrown up by weasels (or civet cats). This flavour is actually surprisingly similar to your expectation of it.
Anyway...the other thing about Golders Green is that, as the long miles of the Tube wind back towards the centre, claustrophobia sets in. Have you ever not been underground? Have you ever not been on the Northern Line? Diving out at Tottenham Court Road for a quick pint with , and was probably not the best of ideas, but at the time breaking the forward momentum seemed wise. I blame The Scar".
Speaking of expressing one's individuality by all means necessary, up to and including buying an iPod, these tiny Norfolk Goths, or tiny Norfolk spooky kids if you prefer, are just about the cutest thing in the world. Do you reckon they imagine that Diss is in fact, Dis, the city of Hell? Would they, in fact, be very far off?
Also rather wonderful is the apparent fact that, even when it comes to Goth names, East Anglia favours tight-knit communities. All the menfolk appear to be called Mercy. Shadow Mercy, Lucius Mercy, Lord
Mercy... them's good boys, the Mercies.
Of course, a little difference is a beautiful thing, as is the freedom to mix and match the various wonderful opportunities modern life provides for self-definition. However, just as with smoothies, some combinations just don't work. And very few combinations work if one of those combinations is batshit. Molatar Seth Pyrargent is that batshit.
Before we go on, let me make it quite clear that I have no animus against those who wish to dress as, pretend to be or believe themselves in fact to be animals. Even if you decide that you are in fact both a dragon and a werewolf, then, hey, that's a matter for your individual sense of aesthetics. On the other hand, you may want to think very, very hard before you attempt to reconcile this
life as a dragon/werewolf with life as a born-again Christian. In those terms, Molatar Seth Pyrargent might be said to be doing quite well. In those terms and those terms only.
Morrissey observed that he'd rather be lemurs than righteous or holy, but Molatar Seth Pyrargent has finally reconciled this polarity. It is only by being saved, by being righteous and holy, that one can become lemurs. It takes the power of the Lord to allow you to change shape to become the dragon/werewolf/lemurs you have always known you truly are, and it is therefore only through prayer that you can actually become a dragon. In fact, anyone who wishes to be transformed into their animal shape should be born again and baptised, as it represents their best chance of persuading God to change them into the animal of their choice.
This is an important issue for the boy Pyrargent, as he knows that God has put him on this Earth for a purpose, and he suspects he will not be able to achieve this purpose while he is a human being, as he wouldbe able to proselytise far more effectively as a thirty-foot reptile with the power to melt steel with his breath. This, it must be said, is pretty much inarguable. Oddly, however, barring his confidence that God will, at the moment where it fits His divine plan, turn him into a dragon, the boy Pyrargent's orthodoxy is almost entirely unsurprising, informed as it is by the usual rote-learning mix of inadequacy and block capitals, with a very slightly reptilian flavour.
So, on abortion:
If you've been raped, don't take your anger out on the baby. Thank God that you're still living after the attack. That baby didn't rape you - the rapist did. If you want revenge, pray to God for justice. You'll get results. That rapist will go to jail, where HE will be raped - and probably murdered. THAT should satisfy your need for vengeance!
***
On the fact of every wrong that Christians have ever done throughout history being the fault of Roman Catholics, not real Christians:
These anti-Christian people, who pretend to be much smarter than me by exhausting my patience with a criminal record of abuses by clergy and lots of clever four-letter words, are the stupid ones because they refuse to acknowledge the truth - that they are baleful sinners in desperate need of a Messiah.
***
A somewhat more dragony reason for hating role-playing games than the usual love of Satan engendered by it, with a healthy admixture of Baptiste-like self-regard, accompanied by a Baptiste-like absence of corroborating evidence:
I hate FRPG's because the people who play them irritate me. Most FRPG players are little snobs that won't let truly intelligent people like myself join their games. And if I do join their game, their characters snub mine because they are different. I get my character killed off because I made the mistake of looking different. That's why I accuse FRPG's of teaching racism.
Gnoll hate crimes, as you may be aware, have been sharply on the increase since the Third Edition rules came out.
***
The clincher, however, must be:
I hate magick. Its not only because I'm a Christian and am required to spurn the occult. I've had my own experiences with satan's enigmatic power which have scarred me for life. I see satan performing
so many false miracles and gathering many people to him through his deceitful and unimpressive supernatural stunts. I must admit, I get jealous when I see all this astrology nonsense in the newspapers and on TV. I can't even enjoy being a dragon because of its occult connotations.
Apart from the fact that he appears to be getting Satan and David Blaine (gitwizard) mixed up, the final sentence of that paragraph just kind of… you know… does it for me. How often have you been annoyed by the way that people think that your being a dragon is in some way connected with magic? Really, people can be so wilful…
The boy's ambition is remarkable. In essence, he is using his website to pitch to God the idea of turning his human flesh into a dragon's. It's a bold move.
And, speaking both of bold moves and of transformation, did anyone else notice that Kraft is apparently planning a "sustainable" coffee line, presumably for those on a budget who want to save the planet
but don't care particularly about the people who live on it. The plan is to pay a premium, still significantly lower than the Fairtrade price, to farmers who satisfy a set of ethical criteria, as yet undefined. Incremental positive progress, or a nasty piece of water-muddying triangulation? You decide. If anyone needs me, I'll be a baby
tapir.
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| Friday, November 19, 2004 |
| Who says the GOP has no sense of style? They aren't just seeking to limit access to abortifacients, but they're doing it using the best names imaginable. I mean, nobody's going to complain about Bartlett-Brownback-DeMint, are they? They'd just sound like they wanted Bart to let Mr Brown express support for mints. It would be a farce.
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| So, somebody is using me as a top trump card, and this is the picture they have drawn to accompany it:
Does that look right to you?
Elsewhere, it is being maintained as a matter of absolute fact that I am the best boyfriend the Distillers have ever had. The Internet is a curious thing.
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| Thursday, November 18, 2004 |
| "The worship of blood... Well, I can understand the young kids taking a fly at it just for kicks. But we're talking about sophisticated, mature adults."
On a tangent - blood, and the blueness of it - I am interested to see the scion of a massively interbred family complaining about social utopianism seeking to give people unrealistic aspirations through genetic engineering. I fondly hope that the fact that the heir to the throne has used it disparagingly will finally cement the fact that the phrase "Politically Correct" is used entirely by the privileged and dim to denigrate others' attempts to seek just treatment, rather than a tool of left-wing tyranny. Honestly, though? I doubt it.
Still, on the bright side, even Evangelical Christians think the Reverend Phelps is a worthless piece of shit. They're right.
On other news, I appear to have agreed to travel South America playing cocktail piano. This is disturbing.
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| Things that are making me happy this morning - two in a series of, realistically, two.
The proposition that Ben Elton is actually more hated than Osama bin Laden, on the grounds that Osama bin Laden lives his life according to a consistent set of moral principles and Ben Elton does not.
The phrase:
Jesus. Listening to all that hip hop must make you pure hip hop.
Are you hip hop?
Thank you, my lovely friends, for making the quotidian a diadem.
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| Tuesday, November 16, 2004 |
| I honestly thought I had managed to drive this experience out of my brain. Now it's back.
Damn you, God.
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| Wowser. I'd forgotten how harcore Diwali sweets are. Thank the Heavens they appear to have been tidied away overnight, or I would be buzzing like a horny hummingbird.
As it is, I'm having trouble focusing. Having returned to work after holiday full of bounce and vim, last week efficiently kicked the crap out of my head. As I find myself saying an awful lot about all sorts of things, it's not about the fall but the recovery. Protect the vitals and the rest will follow.
On the platform on Saturday, waiting for the train home, I noticed an elderly man I had exchanged a few pleasantries with at various times, also waiting for the Forest Hill train. What the Hell, thought I, and introduced myself. Fascinating fellow - he made a quibbling point about Alfred North Whitehead which I coudn't quite get hold of until after I had said goodbye (the safest expression! It's the safest expression of Western philosophy, darn it), and argued for rebuilding the Parthenon sculptures (I was dubious) and the neglect of Indian, Egyptian and other cultures in a classical education (I agreed wholeheartedly). On the whole, a very pleasant conversation, and a story the moral of which is that you can generally judge somebody by the quality of their hat (dark green trilby, in this case).
I was going to say that it's odd how unwilling I am to talk to complete strangers while waiting for trains, but then remembered that that's not odd at all.
Meanwhile, I've been looking vaguely for more Alice Oswald, after being a bit short of whelm when I saw her reading at the Purcell Rooms. Try this:
Sonnet
I can't sleep in case a few things you said
no longer apply. The matter's endless,
but definitions alter what's ahead
and you and words are like a hare and tortoise.
Aaaagh there's no description — each a fractal
sectioned by silences, we have our own
skins to feel through and fall back through — awful
to make so much of something so unknown.
But even I — some shower-swift commitments
are all you'll get; I mustn't gauge or give
more than I take — which is a way to balance
between misprision and belief in love
both true and false, because I'm only just
short of a word to be the first to trust.
I like some the choppy rhythm, and the alternating difficult rhymes - endless/tortoise, fractal/awful, commitments/balance. I really like the first sentence - it catches the "fractal fear" very well - that checking whether something is still the case will stop it from being the case. And it uses "misprision", one of my favorite words ever, in a strong ending. But the middle section feels slack, not an unimpressive feat for a sonnet, and although I can see where that "Aargh" is doing, it kills the forward momentum of the poem in the wrong way. Any recommendations?
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| Saturday, November 13, 2004 |
| The whole world plus the work of the world
Every three months or so, work gets hardcore. This time around was more hardcore than some, partly because a protective layer of employee (the one I could trust to do most of the actual stuff) hds been torn away, and partly because after a week off, the horror of the US elections and the emotional fall-out from that and its consequences, I was really not. In. The. Mood.
Still, every industry has its crunch times, and it's now over, although of course the mini-crunch begins as everything that was shelved during the crunch cycle falls out of the back of the cupboard. It's the waste as much as anything else - arriving in a hotel room knowing that in an hour I will have to shower and head out again. Not moving around the streets when anyone else is - 4 in the morning out, 5:45 back. Chatting to the cleaners. I used to pull back-to-back all-nighters when I was 19 and had tutorials two days in a row. It wasn't a great idea then, and getting a better class of takeaway doesn't make it a brilliant idea now.
Could be a lot worse, at least - the fact that nobody in Britain is supposed to enjoy their job at least means that they get to kvetch and shirk somewhat. If you find yourself actually doing what you've always wanted to do, the opportunities for abuse are incalculable. Which makes me fear for this poor French butterfly on a big, hard English wheel. In general, my hatred of jobhunting, musical CV or no, is so great that if I was currently being employed to be rabbit-punched in the kidneys by a leering Dalmatian, I'd probably resign myself to it fairly quickly. Having said which, maybe I should be considering my next move, inspired by the slightly disturbing suggestion that I had given my talent to my work and my genius to a fucking bulletin board, and a vague desire to get radical in some way or another.
Aporia. So much is happening in my life, in my head. When was this ever not the case? When will this ever not be the case? Maybe I should try to express my emotions creatively. Maybe through a flash animation. That's what Archilochus would have done, had he only the tools.
Of course, yesterday was also Remembrance Day, one of those slightly awkward feast days. The silence was observed, although signalling its beginning and end by a short blast of the fire alarm made me feel somewhat like I was in the Machine Gunners. Was that inappropriate? It's confusing these days... I think I probably accumulated a lot of good karma for at no point referring to my desperate and distraught state running between three computers - fox, chicken, bag of grain - as in any way comparable to being shell-shocked.
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| (Written yesterday)
This is what you want, this is what you get.
Oh, Christ. I thought at the time that W's call for unity was welcome, but was going to be difficult for me at least to put my shoulder behind when I keep seeing dead Iraqis. All around me. They don't know they're free. Despite the sterling efforts of the media, this remains the case. And now we can look forward to an absolute dickload more dead on all sides. Whether when you subtract the number of insurgents and Iraqi rebels killed from the number of insurgents and Iraqi rebels created you get a negative number, I'm not yet sure. I do know that the civilian population of Fallujah, and for that matter the ranks of the US and British military, will be harder to replace. Even a broad agreement on the need to combat international Tairrrrrism might not be enough to support the offensive in those terms.
Of course, it is fair to ask what exactly I or any of my pinko friends would have done in this situation. To which the answer is of course "a bake sale".
It's not been a good morning, really. On the way into work I passed a poster, tacked up with special "stop crime" stickers, asking for witnesses to the murder of David Morley. I mean, fuck. To survive one loathsome hate crime just to end up kicked to death on the South Bank.
Maybe this is just a very bad month, or maybe this is part of a trend. The progressive tendency tends to comfort itself with the knowledge that it is progressive - that, for example, the "Red states" exemplify a neanderthal trend that can be seen as the death throes of an old order before it is swamped by a new, exciting, multicultural polyverse of infinite variety.
But what if, not to put too pointy a pin in it, that's complete self-delusion? What rights the formerly oppressed have obtained are recent: how long has a woman been able to vote in the UK? Compare that to how long a scholar of King's College Canterbury has been entitled to walk on the quad. Essentially, the face of human civilisation has long been privileged, despotic, monocultural and male. Actually, quite a lot like Alan Hansen. The period during which this face have softened to create a kinder, gentler arrangement of similar features - what we cultural historians call the Hank Azaria period - is a Christmas scene carved on a grain of rice, and perhaps no more likely to survive a vigorous assault with heavy boots.
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| Tuesday, November 02, 2004 |
| Well, it's official. Democracy in Afghanistan actually works better than in the USA. The news that Kerry has just conceded depresses me immensely - unless and only unless he is just messing with Bush, and is going to keep calling every hour or so to remove or replace his hat from or in the ring, in a genius tribute to Al Gore. I can understand why he's done it, but by God could we not at least have pretended for another ten days. Every vote counted? Every vote counting?
Still and all, as a wise head on Metafilter observed, at least the collapse of the US economy is going to make DVDs cheaper, although troops may well then invade to bring those DVDs back home to a triumphant public. I am already planning a TV movie in which a TV movie based on the rescue of a heroic American soldier by special forces is rescued by special forces.
Miracles and wonders. West Ham look to sign a player who clearly only exists in Championship Manager 3 - this is generally considered a bad idea, no matter how tasty they were in the game - lest we forget, this was the thinking behind Ibrahima Bakayoko's ultimately unfulfilling time at Everton.
What an interesting world we have to look forward to. While aware of the need to retain electability, and without a majority in both houses and on the Supreme Court, Bush has managed, it seems, to create a situation in which 1 in 200 people in Iraq is now not people anymore. That's pretty good going, but I can only salivate at what we can achieve in the never-ending war on Tairrrrrrrr now that the checks and balances have checked out. I'm not fancying the 22nd Amendment's chances, either.
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