Hot Days, Bright Lights

Sunspots

A rose is a ‘slow motion cyclone of loveliness,’ apparently.

Fabricio Collocini Loves the Whore – LIVE IN CONCERT

rambling

You’ll never Take Our Independents

Salt publishing is the nuts. Having had Arts Council support pulled, they are doing a push. Keep an eye out for Newsnight on Friday night, BBC1 11pm, doing a featuring on this.

the latest in referentialism

all that gibbers is wise

go on ranadasgupta.com and you can enter in your own message which, it says, will come up on a Post-It superimposed on the screen. There is something mesmeric (and not at all time-wasting) about hitting Refresh, Refresh, Refresh, waiting for your own message to come up, skimming through the asides.

jade goody and holocaust survivors

jade goody and holocaust survivors …

Why there is no space for George Eliot in Borges’ universe

Yann Martel has apparently been sending books to the president of Canada, Stephen Harper, a person he sees as ‘deluded by busyness’ and in need of some decent books to enrich his infrequent ‘stillnesses'; Martel posts with the books adjoining commentaries that tell Harper, and readers of www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca, what might be gained in the readings. And this is a nifty conceit. In his discussion (here) of Jorge Luis Borges’ work there is evidence of Martel’s commendable engagement as a reader, for example, something I’ve never seen discussed in talk to do with Borges, that he spies a lack of women, an 'absence of intimate relations.. warmth... genuine pain' - the feminine principle - in Fictions. But I’m not sure I can totally agree with Martel’s approximation of the ills in this particular body of writing. I’m not convinced that the extension of this finding, and other of the demands Martel makes (he suggests to Stephen Harper that the deficiencies of Borges can be learnt from also), can really be asked of Borges’ work. ‘Beyond the flash [Borges's conceptual pyrotechnics], [only once did Martel] find depth’; if Borges’ playfulness is anything it is a repudiation of the credos of realism that words are more than symbolic approximations of the real - fictions - and that the real is a thing depthed in ways that are in fact highly dissimilar to words. One of the motivations of Borges’s work, and one of the reasons he is the grandfather of writers like John Fowles, Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, and indeed postmodernism in general (for whatever you think that is worth!), is that books (and the realistnovel in particular) generally foist things on readers that are dishonest, while laying claim to a kind of ‘honesty’. This he tackles, as Swift tackled it, as Sterne tackled it. Can you have work with the question-everything, playful thrust of Borges that also involves the reader (as Martel demands) emotionally (a la Jamesian realism, a la George Eliot)? Certainly erudition and emotional connection can inhere in the same work (W. G. Sebald springs to mind, whose writing I've just got to, Nabokov, John Donne!) but Borges is more extreme, and in many ways he led the way - could signifiers have floated from their moorings without his untying of certain knots? I wonder if it would have been better to set out for Stephen Harper, instead, ideas about why there might not, in fact, be space for George Eliot in Borges’ universe.

Five Things

A couple on the platform, presumably together. The white trainers have been dirty, and cleaned, and it shows. The indentation on my finger from the ring that dear girl gave me, on my orders, has become a sore, newly. The headlights are not like diamonds, the brake lights are not like coals. We are concerned for the team.

These two would not be demonstrative, although they once were, when it began. The whiteness, by dint of being cleaned, has gone in its creases to its underneath dullness. My hand will float up if I take the ring off now. Everything is not going faster than normal. Is everything propitious to their, our, success?

They live in a house of square spaces rendered by the arrangement of square blocks now. From the ventilation holes, wrinkles spread; in them, the silt of wearing. I often consider throwing it away, upwards. Although neither has it been slowed down. What can we do?

They keep on, near each other, in the kitchen, in the carriage, doing things. Not the laces, but the stitching, which was of the same white and flush to the plastic leather composite panelling, has now collected shadows of dirt. My finger has grown around it’s fit like a tree knotting around planks. But time can be made subject to camera settings. Perhaps less scrutiny, less expectation, more applause at what they do well.

Such lovely days they had, near to each other, not knowing. The laces are just frayed. Maybe the bone has changed too. Pins of light can be made into snakes – that’s worthy of framing. Because their mentality is wrong.

Sometimes they were apart. The plastic end fobbing, which makes them insertable, has come off. How deep the constriction goes, who knows? Night time motion and lights captured and rendered for you. They seem to think that simply by dint of being at this club they will win things, because of its history and its stature in the game.

She would ring him or he her. Relacing them is a bugger. My digit has grown against it. Really, you should pay to look at it. It just makes for a remarkably dull game.

They would paint pictures of themselves to each other down the phone lines. Actually I don’t wear them that much any more, they make my feet smell. The knuckle beneath the ring looks outsized and requires snapping. It is something you’ve seen, transformed, after all. And it makes us, the fans, feel less together.

She with her eyes closed, he looking in the mirror. I tend just to prop them up on the sill of the train carriage and write about them, nowadays. But the colour of the skin, no matter the weather, always looks right against its beaten silver. And that means the way you see is transformed too. As a team, their lack of movement and of imagination is particularly embarrassing in light of their main rivals’ excoriating (not a word I got from the football press) form.

Sound carries them together. Or wear them for cycling, when it doesn’t matter. Beneath the ring, the hairs are babyish and white. You imagine more with your eyes. In a sense, the way they make us argue now, about how they could improve, does unify us.

She comes with his distinctive gasps, he pretends to be simultaneous with her peculiar gurgle. Usually they just sit in the cupboard. I keep it on because the white is beautiful as it is known. The photograph makes you look harder normally. But it’s not a unity we want.

They are together. And they really do smell. Each dent proves time, unspecifically. Why the cars can’t just be cars I’ll never know. We are concerned.

The Wayne Rooney Song

Seventy six thousand, three hundred and fifty four fans line the steep heights of a modern coliseum. Seventy six thousand, three hundred and fifty four sightlines cross-section the great space, humming on the air like heat. The football pitch is laid out beneath like clean, green sheets, a long way down and floodlit.
Soon, it’s really filled up, they’ve scored their second and the stadium is rocking.
“Genius, absolute genius,” says the man, picking his son up under the armpits and lifting him up to the light and noise. The four year old hangs there for a moment, his feet dangling.

It was Wayne Rooney, the Manchester United player. The secret was Rooney’s exceptionally high IQ, his inborn intellect which, after childhood incidents, was diverted and could be expressed only as a kind of physical intelligence - the athleticism for which he would become famous.

When I was young, I loved my mum, and my little brothers. My mental endowment had done nothing to obscure that. I loved them too much to ever let them know how superior my mind was to theirs. A many-sectioned walnut, deep brown, to their shrivelled, unabsorbent pea brains.
Coming down Windsor Street to Toxteth Library, coming along William Brown Street to the Central Library, skiving school so I could sate, rather than stunt, my curiosity. The Mersey drizzle a shared shroud, slicked steps and Georgian pillars, a revolving door. The library attendant’s knitted cardigan and the ornate, thick beige of her reading glasses. Her condescending smile for a child’s face blank and credulous as mine.
All the books I stole, never to be returned. And coming back to the house, pregnant with big books up my jumper. Saying I’d been out at football, at a mates’, whatever: all the sweet, sweet lies I told getting literature past mum.

“He’ll have a hat-trick now, I tell you. We’ll get your mam take away, shall we? Celebrate. She won’t mind about the bevvies, either, that way. Good lad.”

Fabricio Collocini Loves the Whore

When my friend was complaining to me and opening his heart about things relating to his family and how he felt powerless to the way they had shaped his unhappy character, I said to him, what about Fabricio Collocini? Fabricio Collocini is a professional footballer who plays centre half for Newcastle United and the Argentina national side - not that I had to explain this to my friend. I said, what about Fabricio Collocini, the abuse he gets, week in week out, sixty thousand or so football fans shouting unreserved abuse at his person. Imagine that, I said. After the worst and most uninteresting day, one where I suspected my creative faculties had possibly not been called into play once, a bad day at the office in every respect, I was feeling unwilling to listen to my friend’s familiar complaints to do with how powerless he feels in his life, otherwise I might have been less imaginative in my insensitivity.

This thing about Fabricio Collocini, though. God knows, this thought had never occurred to me fully formed, that Fabricio Collocini’s woes put into perspective those of self-pitying young men, but I said to him, without knowing exactly why, consider Fabricio Collocini. I could have told him to turn his mind to any professional footballer, but it was Fabricio Collocini I picked.

I do know a measure of what makes up the larger thing I don’t know about this incident - namely, why it was this particular footballer, with his distinctive complement of curly blonde hair, who came to mind - because I have been spending my mornings and evenings on crowded train carriages, not planning the day or evening ahead, not praying in the same way that I used to, but letting my mind escape like vapours and take form in the high drama and tragedy of Fabricio Collocini’s life in Newcastle.

Fabricio Collocini lands in Newcastle for the first time. He has his agent with him, a man for whom he has little affection, but who has orchestrated his transfer from Deportivo La Coruña to Newcastle and attendant forty thousand pounds a week pay rise. So, when he steps out into the astonishingly consistent grey of this part of the world, England’s north east, which he does not recognise as clouds but as a single, everywhere wash, and when the hairs on his forearms are quickly patterned by the drizzle coming across the runway though it is August, he has no one to whom he might express the drop in spirits he feels. It is a pang he has not felt since his mother waved him off to his first semi-professional footballing academy, in his early teens, all those years and a number of continents ago.

Passing through Newcastle International and its noticeably third class interior, he tells himself it could just be the crayfish sandwiches and surfeit of grapes he ate nervously on the flight, but his stomach feels as though it is being opened and his innards dragged from him, a quick, slippery, ongoing rush: the balding fabric of the chairs, the low plasterboard ceilings and finger-smudged partitions, the kicked edges of the lino - even women, in whose seductiveness Fabricio Collocini might usually look for solace, their make up is too much and their eyes look either defeated or unkind - it all speaks to Fabricio Collocini of the cruddiness he had once dreamt of avoiding by becoming an international footballing star. He keeps his shades on, but he cannot but be worried: now there is none of his previous youthfulness to pull him together and help him stride purposefully on - disquietingly absent, for the first time, is the way he used to feel like he was generating the very forces which carried him forward through life.

At Newcastle FC, later in the day, the signing of the contract and introduction to various board members and the manager pass without incident and in a babble foreign to Fabricio Collocini, even though he knows quite well and could recite whole scenes hailing from Conan The Barbarian, The Running Man, Total Recall, Twins and the Terminator franchise; to his ears, the Geordie accent has little in common with the Austrian, android clarity which Arnold Schwarzenegger’s enunciation at its most careful achieves.

Pre season training passes relatively seamlessly, also. Fabricio Collocini has an interpreter on the sidelines and for teamtalks, and he is served well by his prodigious physical talents and skill at anticipating the flow of a game. His Spanish-speaking colleagues say encouraging things, and he feels something peculiar which is to do with a feeling that they are being genuine - because he is a good player, possibly the most naturally gifted in the squad - but what they say, the way they come in and say it when he is having his calves massaged, doing squats in the gym, not able to give them his full attention, seems contrived and not at all heartfelt. He suspects the manager has probably told them they have to say these things if they want to be sure of their places in the starting eleven. They are thinking about performance-related bonuses, not him. They are footballers.

All of which is to say that, when he gets back to his multi-million pound home in a gated community, on the well-groomed outskirts of Newcastle proper, and apprehends that the colours and weaves of the imported rugs, the quartzed marble in the kitchen and bathrooms, down to the breed of dogs that greet him yappingly are all of someone else’s choosing, and it is dark, Fabricio Collocini is quite alone in the world.

What does he do? What would any man do? He rings up José Enrique Sánchez Díaz. José Enrique Sánchez Díaz is known to Newcastle teammates and fans as ‘The Bull’. The Bull, known on his club shirt simply as 'Enrique', says sin problemas. Dejalo a mi leave it to me. Jose Enrique, known to the cadre of pimps and night club owners who service him and other overpaid, time-rich footballers in the locality, as a ‘tiddler’ (an easy catch), makes a phonecall.

The next night, of the six young women who accompany Jose Enrique and his cousin, Danny, to Fabricio Collocini’s home, the one who interests Fabricio Collocini is the one who does not feign surprise or pleasure or delight at the contents and style of his mansion’s B-palatial interior. It is the one who is least theatrically thankful when, twenty five minutes and a glass of champagne each later, they go through the motions of love-making in front of the contemporary stone fireplace. It is the one who fixes him with glacial blue eyes when he comes on her collarbone and chin.

She’s the one.

The next time Jose Enrique and Danny come over, true to the straightforward romantic push-pull which Fabricio Collocini’s heart is subject to (due to days and weeks spent watching all that Schwarzenegger, bleak small hotel hours taking comfort in films whose romantic arrangements repeat, with an undeniable, almost recursive insistency, in the lives and loves of the imaginatively idle), there has been a mix up with the girls they ordered. It is one busty nineteen-year-old Asian beauty and one considerably older Norwegian madam that take it in turns with Fabricio Collocini, on the overcast Thursday afternoon in question. The Ukrainian waif with the eyes and the tattoo of barbed wire and roses the length of her left leg is not there. We interpret Fabricio Collocini’s distracted looks throughout fruits de mer and coitus to say - has she been shipped back to Eastern Europe or, worse, sent to attend some unfit, unkind, middle-aged property developer in Beresfield or endured some even worse fate, unimaginable to the love-struck?

True to the straightforward romantic dialectic at work when I imagine (at one more remove) the workings of Fabricio Collocini’s lonely heart, the progress of the pair’s relationship barely needs telling. It is not long before he has sought her employers, found the whereabouts of her shared accommodation, foxed his team physio by dislocating his shoulder, (something he can pop in and pop out at will and will always buy him time on the injury list), and taken the girl for a week of pinchos, Albariño wine and walks on the Atlantic waterfront at Coruña. Soon enough he's given her the keys to the castle - a phrase from what they quickly find out is their shared favourite movie, Twins, and one that they realise exists in the slang of English, Spanish and most Slavic tongues.

Fabricio Collocini's hope is that, like a diamond dropped in a polluted stretch of water, her presence will transform the mansion, which he has come quite quickly to despise. Soon she is there waiting when he returns from battle on Saturdays. She cooks dumplings and sings hauntingly on the loo and soon they have given away the squadron of stupid, inbred Pekinese to the local dog home who are pleased because, they say, the money they fetch could possibly save the dog home from the threat of bankruptcy and closure.

So, I have this very melodramatic and quite sketchy idea of one or two scenes that relate indirectly to Fabricio Collocini himself, the details of whose inner life I’ll never be privy to.

I don’t know Newcastle, either. I might have stopped there a few times on trains to other places, maybe even changed trains and bought a Cornish pasty in the station. I have an impression of the city that is patched together from Geordies I have met, the saying that carrying coals there would be a waste of time and the related idea of its folk as industrial workers, and, God knows, probably also somehow related to the fact that the football team itself plays in the most unlurid of kits - black and white striped shirt, black shorts, black socks.

Neither do I know Argentina. My impressions of it have to do with other things, the way Spanish in the Argentinean accent, spoken by women, sounds luxurious. The shape in the mouth of the words Tierra Del Fuego. Sierras or cordilleras or whatever it is they have there, gauchos or matreros, huge, billion-starred skies.

Not that my friend, looking more sullen than ever now, knew anything about this, about the things I know and can say about the things I don’t know, but, in my mind, it is certain that Fabricio Collocini loves the whore.

RIP

INTERVIEWER
You seem to shun literary society. Why?

UPDIKE
I don’t, do I? Here I am, talking to you. In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering. Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.

* * *

"If somebody actually makes the suggestion that if you abolish suffering you'll probably abolish the human race, because it's actually part of human nature, people don't want to hear that anymore, because it infinitely complicates our whole procedure."

bien puedo imaginar

Bolaño diciendo
"me gustaria haber relatado el apocalipsis"

What is the critic for?

if not to coin lovely phrases like
'the existential horror of stable prosperity'
that seem so in key with their subject
they bring clarity to the things that are
not their subject.

On Che

It was interesting to see Che parts 1 & 2, a (subdivided) film about something political, having recently seen Hunger and Waltz With Bashir, both of which are political films. While all three dramatise real and very divisive political moments, the latter two go to some lengths to circumvent bias, employing narrative devices to cut through the potential partisanship of their tellings. They bring us (in this reviewer's opinion, astonishingly successfully) up close with the blood and guts of these human situations. It is as though for Steve McQueen and Ari Folman, the writers and directors of Hunger and Waltz With Bashir respectively, the I.R.A hunger strike of 1981 and the I.D.F activities in Lebanon of around the same time were attractive exactly because of the difficulties of approaching subjects whose violent, forlorn realities are cordoned off, as it were, by the layers of highly emoted opinion surrounding them. Steven Soderbergh in Che parts 1 & 2 is, in contrast, concerned with presenting Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara as hero and the US as imperialist, puppet dictator-sponsoring baddie, full stop. Thence the Indians vs Cowboys, Rocky vs Apollo, David vs Goliath drama of the piece.

The strapline on the UK poster - Everyone knows the icon, few know the man - is wholly misleading. Che is throughout presented, in part 1 during the successful Cuban uprising/ revolution of 1959, in part 2 in the abortive Bolivian version eight years later, administering to the sick, rallying troops, scolding his troops when they thieve or rape, enlightening campesinos. That is, he is presented exactly as an icon - albeit one with a human touch. He is untroubled by moments of conscience that might lead us to believe in or identify with him. He is always decisive. If Soderbergh had wanted to delve into Guevara the man, he would perhaps have picked the period in between 59 and 67 (part 3, anyone?), and the (still, of course, ongoing) struggles to institutionalize La Revolución - but here we have an action movie, make no mistake. Apart from when the camera angle is the point of view of Che when he is finally gunned down, we see through his eyes, so to speak - confirming the project as one of identifying us with hero Che – and very interesting, primitive even, in relation to the major narrative contortions that Hunger and Waltz With Bashir go through to situate the viewer in relation to protagonists and events - very little attempt is made to get inside the mind. Action movies function through ciphers. The cutting room floor is the only place for the psychological, immediate, 'being there'-feeling revelations if they do not fit the obviously what-happens-next trajectory. Y punto.

Che parts 1 & 2 has tension, rip-roaring moments, beautiful shots (I especially liked the scenics of the Andean lowlands which show Bolivia for the bigger, moister rural Wales it is), some understated technical brilliance (as we have come to expect from Soderbergh when he dons his cinematographer hat), and much humour (even aside from an odd, half-hammy, half-wooden cameo from Matt Damon). But, especially in part 2, which drifts and drifts, there is a sense that Del Toro is still yet to find a film equal to his ability.

Scan of recent review for TLS

(click image to read, or dust off that telescope!)

Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Lie

To write, and to write characters and enter their minds in their situations, is to say you know them. This is not true. To affect others’ truth is, also, duplicity.

Long live the Queen, the Islanders, and all the things that come when they mix.

Long live the Upper Cut.

Long live the opposite of Fame, not Infamy, but the state in which a man turns away, his acquiescence when you approach him is also Rage.

Long live the Lambasters and the Quiet.

There was one Great Dragon and in its flaring nostrils was only a green snot.

There were two boys in whose football dreams were much Magic.

There were sixteen factory buildings whose floors were covered with empty, never filled bottles, and whose ceilings were high.

There were sixteen hundred and only sixteen hundred wrong Ideas and there was Persuasion and there were infants who, in having ready brains, when they were born hurt their Mothers, there was no finding Identity like a treasure marked X may be found, only the idea we should find it and should have found it and should affect having found it and must weep alone and buy white Audis because people no longer see in us the possibility of finding it, Plenitude, and there were moments of such Sadness they beggared even the purplest of descriptions, but not of Happiness, and there were Lies more beautiful and plentiful than the truths they tend to.

There were some Ways Through.

And there are too few of Me. This Me now.

A la puta playa

interview w Benjamin Markovits on 3am

The Extraordinary

What is interesting about extraordinary people other than that we think them extraordinary?

Inevitability thy name is a classical orchestra playing Commodore 64 tunes, in Amsterdam

Watch this.

And play with this, this, this and this.

Utter Banker

“What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”

Bertold Brecht

balls mk II

I know this isn’t really how blogdom is supposed to work, but this response to the response thread from the NY Times’ piece dated August 1st, stands alone as a definition of what’s useful about Lin’s action.

Since American art hasn’t been able to provoke moral outrage or political response from the government, the avant-garde has been relegated to academia.

An economic trespass, however, may be just what is needed to bring back the spotlight. For there’s a field worthy of vigilant defense!
— Posted by Eric Gelsinger

balls

Whoever (me) thought Damien Hirst was clever in single-handedly restructuring artist-consumer relations by cutting out Mr Gallery, Tao Lin’s in on it too now .

Hirst’s straight-to-auction stunt was precipitated by two things - i) Georgian mining magnate Boris Ivanishvili buying a Peter Doig for £5.7 million (nearly five times Sotheby’s estimate for ‘White Canoe’ and at the time, early 2007, the highest price ever paid for work by a living European artist), which showed there was new money for new work ii) the success of the charity auction in part organised by Hirst, held on St. Valentine’s day 2008 in New York for RED, a third world charity, in which Hirst’s work sold for more than that of people like Howard Hodgkin, Jeff Koons, Wilem de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

As it says here : ‘The moment to repeat Pharmacy [the selling off of bits and pieces, many of them entirely incidental to Hirst’s work, from the trendy restaurant which had had some of Hirst’s work in it] had come’.

: These showed that the time was right.

I don’t know enough about the publishing industry to guess what might have said to Lin that this was a good time to cut out Mr Agent - part of whose role is to give the writer an advance, which the writer then must ‘pay off’ with sales, before making any profit himself.

: I suppose that since writers have to be good at concealing stuff in their work, any time is a good time to demonstate the fact you understand the stuff outside your work - apart from anything, by creating a stakeholding (if small) public, Lin has recruited a devoted (if small) number of people who will sell sell sell his work, maybe even more assiduously than those traditionally pushing an author’s work.

And this kind of investment is totally NEW (I think...). Cue a tremor in bloggerville, and more publicity.

The publishing industry is a very different fish to that of visual arts - mainly, in this case, it seems to me, because one cannot ‘own’ a book exclusively (can you…….?) and even if you could, displayed in your mile-wide hallway, it wouldn’t wow your billionaire neighbours as effectively as a formaldehyde-encased calf with really big testicles.

Everything else

Si sale, sale. Si no sale, hay que volver a empezar. Todo lo demas son fantasmas.

DFW is offline now

There is something magnificently appropriate about the error msg that comes up when you try and access The Howling Fantods, authority on everything DFW.

Don’t Believe Their Eyes

Heraclitus had it that:
Now that we can travel anywhere,
we need no longer take the poets
and myth-makers for sure witnesses
about disputed facts.
and he seemed pretty sure.

"RONALDINHO JUNIOR"

Last night’s 6-0 by Arsenal’s latest teen XI was led by Mexican prodigy Carlos Vela. Here’s a piece I wrote a few years back about his compatriot Giovani dos Santos when the pair were but twinkles in their North London suitors’ eyes (the titular latter now finding himself at Arsenal’s local-ish rivals, Tottenham)…

----
The final whistle has gone, and most of the crowd has already herded out to engage the city’s legendary traffic, but a determined knot remains, braving the night air to watch three players warm down. Which players in the modern game might inspire such loyalty, such obsession? Whose magic touches might they be crooning over - Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo, Scholes? Zidane, Robinho, (the other) Ronaldo? Kaka, Shevchenko, Pirlo? Try dos Santos, dos Santos and dos Santos - this is the post match scene at the Elias Aguírre stadium in Peru where Mexico have just run out 4-0 winners over the Netherlands in the semi final of the World Cup. The Under 17 World Cup, that is.

And it was one of these three youths - brothers Jonathan, Giovani and Eder - who was instrumental in that result.

Of the three, it is the middle brother, Giovani (Gio to you and me), whose ball skills draw gasps from the transfixed stay-behinds. Performances like tonight's in Peru have had the Mexican press labeling him (with characteristic understatement) "Ronaldinho Junior".

But it doesn't take (insert your preferred footballing genius here - Rinus Michels? Graeme Le Saux?) to see why the sixteen year old has earned comparisons with last season's FIFA player of the year. With the thighs to explode past players and remarkable awareness for one so young, like the Brazil and Barcelona number 10, his game modulates between delightful nonchalance and intense joy. Gio, despite being the youngest player in the Mexico squad, is given full playmaking responsibilities, and thrives on it. Against the Netherlands, he sets up each of Mexico´s quite different four goals.

He even looks somewhat Ronaldinhian - with ringleted, oiled hair and buck teeth (although he has emerged young enough for the braces clamped over his immovable grin to not be entirely ridiculous.) Not to mention the Nike boots on his feet and sponsorship wad in his pocket. But the comparisons run deeper than orthodontry and unchecked hype, there was something peculiarly Brazilian in the way he pulled the Netherlands apart, an insouciance in the step, a demonic playfulness in the one-twos. The dreamy-eyed among us began to see barrio sand burst around his heels as he made space and time to play through-balls. And the story is the same throughout the tournament: Mexico score a competition high number of goals – 16; number of Gio assists – eleven; number of journalists and fans with that metallic smile etched in their memories…

The similarities go on. Both Ronaldinho 'senior' and Gio happen to be on a certain Barcelona F.C's books. Demonstrating the far-sightedness that has seen them enrol Argentinian starlet Leonel Messi (the leading light of this year's Under 20 World Cup), scouts deployed by the Catalan club spotted Gio at a tournament in France when he was just 12, and snapped up his budding services there and then. The Spanish press is awash with cries of foul paper shuffling over Messi, after he was brought on as a sub against Real Zaragoza, allegedly contravening La Liga's 3 non EU players limit. His E.U naturalization, it is claimed, has been fast-tracked . And Gio's profile is already such that he promptly came out saying he would be sure to get his papers in order before playing first team football. In fact, he appears a dab hand at jinking through the press; he recently told a Catalan radio station that he had no interest in playing for the clubs reported to be dangling expensive carrots, the likes of Man Utd, Arsenal, and, to a chorus of Catalan olé!, that he couldn't care less about the overtures of arch rival Real Madrid.

This composure in the limelight is also apparent on the pitch. Again, as with Ronaldinho senior, there is an unselfish streak, an ability to see that despite having a powerful shot, he is not necessarily the best option. It also helps having a more direct, one-track foil – last season's second top scorer in La Liga, Samuel Eto'o at Barcelona, and the pichichi (golden boot) in the U17 tournament, 17-year old marksman Carlos Vela. Although Gio didn't score in the tournament, when he does, he performs a little samba dance. This is a homage to his father, Gerardo dos Santos, whose nom de jouer was Zizinho… You guessed it, all this Brazilian-ness had to come from somewhere, and that's right, dad was Brazilian, a midfielder from Rio, who made his name playing for the Mexican club Americas. And yet, and yet. Mexico Under 17s go on to down Brazil 3-0 in the final. Gio has a hand in all three goals. In the absence of great young hopes Freddy Adu (U.S.A – otherwise engaged) and Anderson (Brazil - injured), Gio lifts the cup and secures the unofficial plaudit of player of the tournament. In the very un-Brazilian green and white of Mexico.

There is one more link between the Mexico U17´s creative spark and that of the Barcelona first team. Ronaldinho is also the archetypal modern playmaker in terms of his physique. Two teams who everyone accepts can play beautiful (if not necessarily winning) football – Arsenal and Barcelona – have players like Henry and Reyes, Fabregas and Hleb, Giuly and Xabi, Larsson and Eto'o, each of a similar mould. Each is 'athletic' (which really means 'physically intelligent'), each is slight, light on their feet, and each make up attacking ensembles which, when on song, are defined by their movement and fluidity, and when on song, can be untouchable. If Mexico is on the up, and Gio is its rocket fuel, there was something of this elusiveness (which riles defenders above all things) as they secured the mini Jules Rimet – they suffered 104 fouls (won 104 free kicks), second only to, you guessed it, Brazil.

When a player born in 1989 occupies column inches its not just an indicator of none of us getting much younger. Younger players are fit, and increasingly in high tempo, fifty-games-a-season conditions, in which arguably thinker-managers like Rijkaard and Wenger have a physical blueprint mapped for their playmakers, slimline, run-all-day youth is being used to advantage. Youngerns are being given opportunities and instruction at the highest level. Now that match-winners are getting younger, or is it thinner - you really can win things with kids/ waifs – Giovani dos Santos promises, sooner rather than later, to have many more crushed opposition fans leaving stadiums early than there were elated admirers that night in the Elias Aguírre, shivering and gawping after the final whistle.

Damien Hirst is so inspiring!!

I know the titles for posts shouldn't give in to irony in its many cynical and soul-sapping forms, but, Damien Hirst does demand it.

I’ve heard Hirst in the last few days saying, repeating, presumably in response to vague, repeated, insinuations about the contrast between the personal, immediate worth of his art and its monetary value, how he “tries” to make art for people in the future. Two hundred years’ time appears to be the destination of these remarkably accurate future-directed moments of vision + imagination + craft.

ie. When today’s benighted (sober?) plebs and their hastily-briefed journalistic representatives question one’s greatness, one’s response is to slyly discount their responses and the content of those obviously too-hasty briefings: you lot don’t know what you’re talking about; posterity will serve me better. (Having been thinking about DFW, but finding very little adequate to say about his suicide, I remember his stated intent to locate himself between writers he described as "avant-garde ... writing just for other writers" and those who produced "crass cynical commercial fiction", believing that both were driven by "contempt for their audience"…)

Even though the following idea is sort of a lá bent brilliance of Book of Dave and I suppose something to do with the straight brilliance of Wall-E, and not at all to cast the aspersions Hirsty so brilliantly provokes on his Self-ness or the Pixar lot, I wouldn’t have posted it had it not been for all this shite.

Here goes: Wouldn’t it be funny if the below (proof of a certain moment of vision + imagination + considerable craft, surely) was the one remaining vestige of our civilization, found in some form in, say, two hundred years’ time, along with the cockroaches and general air of misdirected-congratulation which will inevitably linger heavy in the earth’s atmosphere, built up over a couple of millennia of putting on monuments and in screens and considering beautiful the lives of emperors, politicians, artists who take themselves v v seriously and have never quite been told to their faces but rather given the repeated, fearful gifts of vaguely insinuating, deferential interviews, moments of congratulation for work which has no appropriateness to itself let alone its moment, did not need to be done.

What my screen looks like after I clean the keyboard with a wet wipe

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Great times, boys, interesting times.

saltando entre islas

Una vez estuve en las Indias, saltando entre islas (o literalmente, en el sentido de la frase hecha del inglés - ‘island-hopping’ - cuando alguien viaja entre una serie de islas y se queda por muy poco tiempo en cada una, no se yo), estaba intentando reproducir un viaje que o soñé o fue mencionado en un clase en mi cole - no me acuerdo bien, porque estuve en un accidente que tuve algo que ver con una aerodeslizador y mi cabeza y en el que o perdi gran parte de mi memoria o la capacidad de distinguir entre la verdad y la no verdad.

Este viaje fue realizado por un tío así, como Gulliver, pero no de ficción. Un tio del East India Company que fue secuestrado por piratas (pero quienes trabajaba por el gobierno - buen trabajo si lo puedes lograr) y mantenido en unas jaulas terribles por como diecinueve años. Claro que en este tiempo llego a conocer mucho del pais, o bueno, un lado del pais, la gente mala y los de mala suerte que habitaron las jaulas, numerosos lagartos y los monos también, pero también bastantes cosas sobre como funcionaba esta sociedad; paso tiempo también en las cortes de juicio intentando conseguir justicia, intentando volver a su pais, y claro que con mucho tiempo en la oscuridad de las jaulas se volvió muy sensible a todo lo que veía en la luz; agarro las cosas estas que vio en sus cinco minutos de vista y, subterrenyado (ni fucking idea de qué palabra es esa en castellano) de nuevo, las examino mucho; de este manera llego a un comprehension de la region.


Fue una sociedad mucho mas distinta de Inglaterra que las partes de las Indias a las que llegaron las leyes y la influencia buena de sus compatriotas. Por eso, de un interes esencial, aunque aqui, no nos interesa.

Cuando escapo (una experencia verdaderamente incredible, aunque aqui tampoco nos interesa) y volvio a la sociedad civil de londres y sus amigos, familia, y ex colegas, llego a ser tan fastidiado por el mogollón de preguntas que tuvieron todos sobre esos casi dos decenios ahi fuera. Las mujeras de londres, cuyos minutos tambien habían pasado en un especie de oscuridad, porque realmente no tuvieron nada en sus vidas de interes y tuvieron entonces que desarrollar imaginaciones largas y anchas como el nilo, estas se preguntaron y se preguntaron y se preguntaron, e invitaron al tio a tomar café y le preguntaron mas, despues de todas estas preguntas, un jueves volviendo a casa en la niebla fantastica de Londres, decidio escribir un cuento de sus experiencias.

Fijo su puerta con clavos y escribio por unos ocho dias sin parar, comiendo galletas saladas de marineros y una gran rodaja de membrillo de pera muy popular en este siglo y tambien (no muy conocido) muy provechoso por escritores y otros genios sin energia, bebiendo poco, y propulsado fuertemente por la promesa de una verdadera vuelta a su vida normal; su vida anterior en que no estaba casi un celebre, en que fue capaz de hablar de cosas normales, cosas inglesas, intrigas de politica, la desaparicion de la magia y el progreso de ciencia, como fue todo por las colonias, si la reina estaba finalmente embarazada o no, el tiempo de nuestra isla gris, fantasticamente gris.

Hablando de estas cosas, tomando café con leche, mirando a la variedad de gente casi infinita pasando en la calle, el tio imaginaba que iba a conseguir algo parecido a la alegria. Claro que esto, tampoco, nos interesa.

Ahi estuve, saltando entre islas, nadando a la vez en el mar verde como manzanas super lleno de pesticidas y otras cosas de nuestro mal futuro, subiendo arboles igual que montañas, y viendo todo lo que pude.

Lo que intente hacer fue fastidiar a gente mala, gente de mala suerte, lagartos y monos, para inculcar una situacion similar o a lo menos unas sensaciones similares a las de este tio del siglo dieciocho. Injurie a todo el mundo, a los viejos igual a los niños, con un insulto extra-cultural, algo para lo que no necesitas idioma, que se traduce igual: mi cuerpo desnudo. Corri gritando sin ropas con la intencion de perforar a festivos o lugubres o puramente felices, perturbe a los animales, deje mis semillas en las hijas del region, altere sueños con el hecho de mi desabrigo horrible.

Quise ser odiado y desentendido, como el, como imagino que el fue. Quise estar parte de nada, no querido, solamente a la vez la ocasion de una conexion realmente no querido, la fuente de choques y gritos.

Ocultado en mi cuevita en el bosque, escribi lo que vi, intente construir algo parecido a un comprehension del pais, para que cuando volviera a casa tener algo que decir en el pub (aunque claro que no diria a nadie esto sobre siendo sin ropas con extranjeros) aparte de que no me acuerdo bien por el hecho de esta accidente con la deslizadora etcetera etcetera. Por eso construí el edificio invencible de letras, por eso escribi.

Aunque estos escritos, aqui, no nos interesan.

Porque lo que me interesa de ese cuento (lo del tio del siglo dieciocho, no el mio, en que hay muchisimas cosas interesantes, por ejemplo las pinturas) es que empieza con como quince paginas asegurando al lector que todo el cuento fue de verdad. Exhibio copias de cartas de como aprobacion por parte de gente buena, testificando a su buen caracter, su cordura, gente como Christopher Wren el tio que construyo St Paul’s este iglesia que ves en el Tamesis como algo de una peli y la mayoridad de los edificios increibles en Oxford y Cambridge, y quien, no se, fue un amigo de un amigo del tio nuestro. Supongo o porque lo que fue incluido en los cuentos fue tan fantastico o que muy poca gente conocio el mundo que describio asi que nadie pudo probarlo. Para nosotros, hoy en dia, astronautas del internet (este continuo ni espacial ni temporal), estamos tan acostombrados a la probabilidad de que todo lo que vamos a ver va a ser improbable y nunca vamos a conocer si ‘realmente’ las cosas son como les imaginan los que les describen, supongo que por eso la historia suya me interesa.

August, ambition, Alexandr

Will Miliband gobble Gordon? Will Big Phil do Sir Alex? Will the caterpillars eat ALL the nasturtium?

What would Alexandr say if he weren’t back in the USSR, sleeping big?

Douglas Coupland’s Life After God stuff is twee, almost unbearably, but it could be worth having voices around if they remind us of the voices that are gone.

‘ “Well,” he said conclusively, “however much you pray, it doesn’t shorten your stretch. You’ll sit it out from beginning to end anyway.”
“Oh, you mustn’t pray for that,” said Alyosha, horrified. “Why d’you want freedom?...”
[The pair are doing time in a Soviet gulag]
“…In freedom your last grain of faith will be choked with weeds. You should rejoice that you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul”…
…Alyosha was speaking the truth. His voice and eyes left no doubt that he was happy in prison. ’

Wall-e as Jesus, briefly

Doubtless I’ve been filling my train rides with too much reading about literature in the light of recent Christological debate and thinking about how serious fiction can ‘dust off… the scandalousness and the intimacy - the human nature - of the long iconized, sanitized story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection’, doubtless. Doubtless Wu Tang were always wrong, as I am here, to quote themselves. Doubtless.

There’s a bit in Pixar’s latest where the eponymous robot echoes the self-sacrifice of Jesus; that the remaining human race might have a future, he holds open this machine which is about to crush this plant which is their hope of getting back to Earth. For a moment, it looks like he’s done for. No amount of solar-charging is going to bring him back. Then Eva, the girl robot with whom it’s got less than (more than?) Platonic, gives him a distressed nuzzle. Come back to life, her distressed, metal forehead-to-metal forehead nuzzle says. And back to life he comes.

God.

And the human race is going to have a future, but it wouldn’t have if he hadn’t done the thing in the machine with the plant, the self-sacrificing gesture.

It’s dramatic, I tell you.

And I was there in the cinema, in the afterwards of a big thing of popcorn plus a Sprite bigger than Kent, in the during of the film’s magnificent comedic force - mainly unverbal, all very Jacqeus le Coq physical theatre style, all timing and small robotic grunts and gestures - and I wondered this: is there anyone else here in the cinema with me who is conscious like I am of this echo? Jesus projected on the projection. Is there anyone here not conscious of it but anyway affected by it - how true is it to say that stories like those in the Bible, so dominant in shaping Western creativity in the last fifteen hundred years, echo and echo and echo? In the narrative of postmodernism - which says the few, wide and parallel boulevards of cultural history have become beehive-like, unrelated, many, leading nowhere let alone directly from previous stories to present stories - ie. so many people watch the movies and the TV nowadays and don’t have Greek, Latin or know folk tales and myths - is it right? Are cultural questions like this - where you take your own thought and think are others thinking them - ever either quantitative, qualitative or worth asking?

What I should do is work for Steven Spielberg’s press department. Steven Spielberg and me, we get it, but we really don’t get it. I wonder what Steven Spielberg had for lunch today.

Or I Wrote

‘Or I wrote, on dull afternoons when neither Buddhism nor poetry nor wine nor solitude nor basketball would avail my lazy but earnest flesh.’

THE DHARMA BUMS

open circles

I love Diarios de Futbol. There, a group of Spanish writers, some amateur, some who publish in the national press, all admirably workaholic, post pieces on football. The coverage is remarkably international, in-depth and, in a Spanish way, really poetic. Sadly, Ramon Flores does not share my distrust of everything David Beckham-related, including David Beckham the footballer. So when he says, in an otherwise nice piece of join-the-youtube-dots, that Beckham has this weekend ‘closed the circle’ - with a goal goal from the half way line at the end of his career for the LA Galaxy against Kansas City recalling his similarly distance-defying effort in the beginning for Manchester United against Wimbledon back in 1996 - I despair at all this poeticization of football and its obscuring of the implications - IT CAN NEVER BE A GOOD THING TO BE POETIC ABOUT DAVID BECKHAM, KIDS MIGHT READ THIS RAMON - perhaps because it reminds me that DB has had phenomenal moments on, as well as off, the pitch.

How the fishing bit in Jindabyne is like reading, and liking, Hemingway nowadays

In Jindabyne’s film-telling of Raymond Carver’s So Much Water So Close to Home there is group of chaps who go on a fishing trip. Up into the Australian outback/ hills (the two apparently can be mutual, the film teaches us). The terrain’s inauspicious conglom of gradient, heat and scrubbiness means the chaps have to trek, really really trek, to get to this place which is away, a long way away, from their normal lives and the eponymous town: it is a pilgrimage to Away, and it is bi-annual.

(“Can we not make ceremony of usefulness?” said Ali Smith. Do we not more often make use of quite arbitrary ceremony?)

Up and away they go a bit chubby and not really hardy enough for the ascent, but make it they do and there are suitably manly grunts of appreciation - gor Jeezus drongo we made it - to have got to this isolated, high up, far away creek where the fish are all they want. The sun pours on their shoulders and the banks. All states and all princes we.

What do they find?

What do they find?

Only a bleeding dead body!

In the bleeding creek!

Bleeding!

(More bloated than bleeding, really; day-old, snagged in the water, dark-skinned, female. Dark-skinned - darker than it looks from the picture above. Female.)

What do they do?

They register this shocking thing. They are shocked. One pukes. Another shrieks. Fairly hardy, normal outback-town guys, but the fact of death hits them.

And what do they do?

Nothing. Look at each other. Show their stunnedness. Nothing. Show their disbelief. To have come all this way?... For her to have come all this way?...

What can they do?

They decide to go fishing.

They fish.

Fishermen.

And it is beautiful. The sequence of shots goes suddenly impressionistic -- the sun on the water -- their figures stood rippling the creek -- the lines of their fishing rods lovely, slow motion shapes -- the cliffs vertiginous -- the music plaintive & healing.

What should they have done?

What does the local media think they should have done when they get back down to civilization and hear that this bunch of white guys just went fishing having found the dead, raped body of a local girl, one of the original community which was already divided from and at odds with the Gabriel Byrnes and Laura Linneys there….

(Whence the brilliant, creeping dramatic menace of the film.)

To be affected by the fishing sequence, it seems to me, and the implication, the accusation, the taking part in their ignorant sport, their active ignore-ance of the World, strikes me as similar to enjoying some of the work of Ernest Hemingway today.

Macho cunt.

Boxer man.

Too big ego.

Stupid beard and always puffing up his chest, even when the world-at-large, the educated, was and were coming to terms with the necessity of integrating anima and animus, not blanking one by the other.

The machismo many find in Hemingway and his literary descendants, “who try to elevate their macho posturings into mythic endeavors [sic]”, is a version of the generality’s aversion in Jindabyne to the group’s ‘inadequate’ response.

“he pushed his legs out deep as they would go in the robe [and] slipped down steeply into sleep” (For Whom the Bell Tolls p.79).

Kapow.

The lie of the inadequacy of a male response to worldly phenoms is given by the visceral nature of our response to an art based in physical or uncultured understanding.

Leave it be.

Indies VS Major Labels

interview I dun with foals a while back

ambience
overdubs and that kind of thing
around the sounds
sounds
doesn’t sounds like
live sound
wordly
joyous
obvious pop songs

modern day indie wu tang clan
bopping
sitek sitek sitek
where it was all raining
77 drummers onstage
way more, sort of much more impact than if you went to scala and went home

sitek sitek sitek
picky b*stard
solid music
he just kept threatening to stab us
go buy me some steak or you’re going to get f*cking stabbed, he said
some big brother-reject, careerist fame hungry thing

let us speak of shallow, shallow things

‘Am I speaking of dirty things?’ Nietzsche writes in Thus Spake Zarathustra. ‘That does not seem to me the worst thing I could do. Not when truth is dirty but when it is shallow does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.’

Paul Thomas Anderson and Love

A reading of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love and There Will Blood.

In Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love William H. Macy and Adam Sandler's characters, Donnie Smith and Barry Egan respectively, in a couple of moments of high stress express an overwhelming sensation they interpret as LOVE. If PTA's aesthetic in these two films has something to do with creating the conditions for these straightforward, untrammelled "I have love inside me" catharses - putting Macy/ Smith's and Sandler/ Egan's straightforward, society-tramelled (the blurb for PDL suggestively describes Barry Egan as 'society-impaired') characters in such circumstances that LOVE is, as it were, squeezed out of them - and they shout LOVE at their adversaries - then where does There Will Be Blood fit into this?

The deafening (? - making deaf..) of Daniel Day Lewis's (Daniel Plainview's) adopted son effectively mutes the father, disables any such vocalisation. This, it might be said, locks Plainview into a tight spiral of hate. The son's potential capacity to redeem is negated, no matter how vociferously Paul Dano's Paul Sunday offers Jesus Christ as a proxy love-recipient. Plainview sups at the earth's oily arteries, but it won't sate what being able to say "I love you" would...

Here is Emily Watson talking about how it's hard to play being "full of love"

A Hawk and a Hacksaw w/ the Hangar Ensemble @ Leeds Trinity Church on 7/5/7

Were you to become this sound at this point you would never answer your phone.

A point all at once blood-saturated and mad histories, heaths and inky lightning-rent skies – the depth of harpsichord, clavichord, trumpet, a clarinet-saxophone, double bass resonating in the pews – the babble of party corridors you have dreamt of / wished for – the raised now – the intimation, un-detailed & not at all to do with – out up down & very away from the searching for – an involvement, a congregation swaying as it is made to become the opening inhale draw of the accordion – hey, there is no rave on the other side of town, you bring your where-is-it-and-will-there-be-anyone-there agitated walk here.

And there are belled ruddy jangling men hopskip dancing all around in the air, moustachioed tinkerbells who have drunk and fought fathers – many.

And it gets into this shambling blast of solo on solo where the sax becomes an elephant, the trumpet darts out, snapping, the double bass a great dignified brass tulip (string reaching down down to bulbous and then blown out root rivers, down), the violin meanders, courses, is the forward point of a river enriching its parenthestic and dark soil, the one drum a gorilla (wiv hat) beating chest, a rolling beat thru shamboling wood clearing filled sphere, meshy with overlapping solos rising.

dialogo oído (conversation overheard) viendo a (whilst looking at)Blowup por (by) Lyle Ashton Harris @BIACS, Sevilla, Dic 06



“Hombre, la cosa funciona
Man, the thing works

es como pegan.
its like they glue.

Ella es compleja ¿sabes? piensa demasiado,
She’s complex, you know?, thinks too much,

el vé a las cosas en blanco y negro.
he sees things in black and white.

Y funciona, la cosa.
And it works, the thing.

Estarán juntos para siempre,
They’ll be together, forever,

pero siempre…
but I mean, forever…

Pregunté a mi madre
I did ask my mum

una vez
once

si esta realmente contento con el.
if she’s truly happy with him.

Es que ellos se rompieron,
The thing is the two of them split up

yo que se, para un año,
for, I don’t know, a year,

ella estaba con un tio asi, intelectual, totalmente artista
she got together with this guy, an intellectual, a complete artist

pero al final volvió a mi padre.
but in the end she went back to my dad.

Me dijó que si, se lleno intelectualmente,
She told me, yeah, he filled her up, intellectually

pero nada mas.”
but nothing more.

(image courtesy of the Rhona Hoffman Gallery)

“the transubstantiation of the faecal matter into art.”

"It's shit."
"But it's also sort of art."
"No it's literally shit is literally what it is."
('The Suffering Channel' by DFW)

Martin Herbert's Santiago Sierra iv prises apart some of the ambivalences of an artist whose art is consistently in-your-face and at the same time points to its own inefficacy as politics.

The Lisson Gallery exhibited Sierra's '21 Anthropometric Modules Made of Human Faeces by the People of Sulabh International, India, 2005-06' a couple of months back and the piece did exactly what it didn't quite say on the tin. The 'modules' were blocks, 3 metres by one metre each, of cast, long-dry shit. Shit that had been carried by members of New Delhi's scavenger class (caste?), from latrines to dumping areas, in return for a wage. The blocks looked like old, oversized breezeblocks, grey and crumbling. There were fifteen or so of them and they were presented in a state of semi-unpack, half in, half out of their crates. The inbetween-ness of the bocks' presentation, not fully arrived but unquestionably for show, signalled the way in which shit changes, was being changed as gallery-goers walked around it, by its context in a commercial gallery.

Some critics say it's all very well being political, but what difference does it make to the lives of the people being exploited? Others draw back, have conceded art's inefficacy, and call this sort of work an exploration of the issues. Perhaps there's something Janus-ish about Sierra in that he points outwards from his work at something political, and at the same time inwards to his chosen medium and its limitations. If this is the case, Sierra's tropes do as much as any current practitioner working in the area where politics and art may and may not cross.

he's on fire

literally.

I don't know much about Rodigan but seeing him makes me want to go to a dub night, to the West Indian centre in Chapeltown, say, where Zionism is another thing and where, in the bass, things like selves get sloughed off snake skin-like, easily, as they should.

No Country For Old Men preview

The Coens return to form. An adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel-for-cinema. More Miller's Crossing and Fargo than Big Lebowski and O Brother in its humour. With a twist...

Tommy Lee Jones' performance as a sheriff trailing Javier Bardem's psycopath/ force of nature sums up what for me works about this film: 'It is hard to do wisdom without pomposity, or probity without preening, but Mr. Jones manages with an aplomb that is downright thrilling'. Indeed and indeed. But he also does it with humour, amused by his deputy's alarm and innocence, a bit meta sad at his own character's overwhelmed-by-how-fucked-the-world-is sadness, enunciating McCarthy's Old Testament quotations, it seemed to me and the occasionally chortling (no other worrd for it) ICA crowd at the preview, with a keen, fun knowingness. That extra element that means NCFOM pulls off its weird, controlled admixture of absurd plus terrifying.

Fun fun fun.

what is sport?

Near the top of what is admittedly a behemoth xmas list (can Santa bring me a new, virgin planet not ravaged by homo sapiens, and will it fit in my stocking?), is the 'attractively slim' (TLS's words, not mine) 'What Is Sport' by number one diamond critical theorist Roland "the Rat" Barthes.

Here's a quotation/ gloss: Football (which Barthes came to the mystical land of Angles to experience), with the centrality in the flow of the game of the crowd's participation, creates a spectacle that provides us with "knowledge of our own passions".

A good bit of aesthetic badminton over sport/ art which I missed at the time.

no diggety

the best thing I heard EVER (or this week, at least)

This girl is 16 and FEARLESS - been a while since I heard anyone newish use 'tha' for 'the', braving inevitable Bone Thugs n Harmony connotations - but then I haven't spent that much time in Baltimore of late. Take me to Baltimore, daddy.

German humour?

Being a fan of good football by choice/ aesthetic snobbery, and a fan of the England national team by birth, I find it hard to feel disappointed about England's failure to qualify for Euro 2008. It might, eg, signal new direction in the terminally unimaginative English FA, including perhaps the removal of the uncannily Dickensian Brian Barwick. Who scares me. It is certainly somehow sad that Wayne Rooney will be 26 by the time the next major tournament comes around. Still I suppose it means he can concentrate on the more obviously glorious Champions League.

At the bottom of this article Joachim Low, the German national team manager, says its sad that "the Fatherland" of football has not qualified for a major tournament. Is this a brilliantly tongue in cheek response by a Dads Army watching German? Has sometihng been gained/ lost in translation? Or am I reading too much into it?!

1)incoherency २)understanding

Just saw superbe James Thieree show, clowning with some of the very French humour of his grandad.

Here's the Sadler's Wells snip which gives a sense of it. The bit with the rocking chair is... MAGIC (if magic is the unwilling suspension of disbelief?):



There was something really liberating in the incoherency of Au Revoir Parapluie. Having the frame of mostkulture broken. Minus narrative, superficially interiorized characters, punchlines etc, normal understanding goes out the window.

More on Zidane

Posting on Johnny Flynn, writing about people in their element, got me thinking about ol' Zizou. Here's a couple from the archives I wrote when I was working in Madrid.

Zidane COMES BACK (vs Mallorca, 9/05)

Zidane comes back
with a sultry beard
and more shaven crow’s peak.
Tan as if his convalescence was ages beside Homer,
playing keepy uppy with bleached pebbles,
conversing with a mutual gentleness, an irascibility,
volleying into the sea.
White shirt like the angel icon Adidas know he is.
Roman-
Algerian
angular
bunch
upright
slouch
of angel
willed back.
Children looking in at the bar window think mortelle and
join the Santiago Bernabéu as it holds
its 80000 breath
willing the ball to him him him
gasp
he leaves it.
It runs to Julio Baptista.
The better attacking option.
Human
perpetuation of will and
bunched enchantment of 80000
plus us.

----

Zidane GOES AWAY (vs Italy 7/06)

In terms of me, well
46 degrees today in Spain and looking around a cathedral in Toledo and reading the paper on the train and things at work are ok
you, there,
surrounded by 60 odd thousand
in significance-rich, history-compact Berlinstadion where
all the world’s eyes look and want
to be
you.
You are your own. Sharing your darkness. Rolling away. You spreading light doing things that cannot be done. You are why
we heroise.
You are our
mythic functioning.
What sadness did you intimate when you headbutted Marco Materazzi?
quite gauchely, in his chest, nearly tripping.
Yes what racist shit did he say and yes did he pinch you and had he been niggling all game
but, where did that come from?
Your last match.
The last visible point of your humble glittering.
The World Cup had been an unexpected epilogue, you were done for and physically and emotionally not right but you began again to be lit, to beguile, to conduct.
So suavely,
and the strain shown on your face
hauling ten men to the Final,
wrapping the rope about your wrist, and bleeding something for you must,
and doing it with grace,
a grace we lack… And then this.
You could have held it together.

doing your thing

With certain people there is a sense that they are doing what they are supposed to be doing. What they were made for. An apropriateness of being, an easy rapture. And when you share a space with that kind of person it is exhilarating. It is rare. Because society, at least in my experience, is such that it makes it a rare thing. I can count the times I've been near this thing on one hand: Orifice Vulgatron, the main emcee from UK hip hop outfit Foreign Beggarz, who used to go under the name of 'Drop' as dnb mc, freestyling outside a club in Leeds, in 2003 maybe (there's loads of this lot on youtube, I should dig out some old footage from Leeds parties...); in 2006 I worked in Madrid and went to Real Madrid's home matches - Zinedine Zidane, well I hardly need to add to all that's been said about the man's grace when he's running round with a football.

And I think I've come across another ONE, doing what he was made to do: check Mr Johnny Flynn. Stay tuned because I'm going to be interviewing him in couple of weeks.

BLOWUP (collage) by Lyle Ashton Harris @BIACS, Sevilla, Dec 06 / y dialogo oído Picture courtesy of the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

“Hombre, la cosa funciona

BLACK WEARING MILK

Black squadron?

es como pegan

A POLITICIAN

Pork-eating?

ella es compleja ¿sabes? piensa demasiado,

A N****R SAVIOUR

Shattered skull, scattered whole?

el vé a las cosas en blanco y negro

A YELLOW MICHAEL JACKSON

Wacking his willy on the side?

y funciona, la cosa.

STRONG MAN MELTING IN KISS

Towels for wings?

Estarán juntos para siempre,

NARCISSUS´ EYES IN THE MIRROR WANDER OFF

Mc Hammer trousers and no one looking?

pero siempre…

THE ONE HE´S BUGERRING IS DOGGY

God even if no one´s looking?

Pregunté a mi madre

LET HIM LEAVE FLOWERS AND YOUR GNAWED OFF BUNIONS STREWN

If you kiss me at gun point

una vez

HE AVOIDS THE BULL, THE RAGE

Fuck on the floor for the soldiers

si esta realmente contento con el.

HE LIES IN THE SUN IN SPEEDOES, ECSTATIC TO BE HAIRY, IN THE SUN WITH SPEEDOES

Widen those peachy buttocks

Es que ellos se rompio

HE ASKS “MAY i MAKE YOU MORE BEAUTIFUL?”

That I might crack wide

yo que se, para un año,

“WILL YOU BE THE LOVE OF MY LIFE?”

The walnut between

ella estaba con un tio asi, intelectual, totalmente artista

“WHO AM I?”

Us.

pero al final volvió a mi padre.

WHICH OF THESE

Me dijó que si, se lleno intelectualmente,

MAY I NOT BE?

pero nada mas.”

Something you can't look at in an art space

In July I went to see a friend in the final performance pieces of the class of 2007 Leeds Uni Theatre Group, and one of the pieces raised what I take to be a similar point to Richard Prince at this year's Frieze Art Fair - a point about art spaces। In the (Leeds) piece, which was more a live installation than anything - the refusal of the ‘characters’ to cross in to the usual space between them and the audience emphasized the voyeuristic aspect of being in an audience -there was a young lady, on a pedestal, getting undressed. And the 'audience' were, mostly, clearly uncomfortable to be seen looking. Hesitating to be seen looking at a young, getting-naked thing. There were other 'characters', on other pedestals, doing other things: someone holding a chocolate ice cream aloft and not letting his grin falter as it melted down his arm, someone doing a repeated series of yoga-ish stretches, someone soliloquizing grandiloquently on why she was amazing - all weird things, but all 'easier' to look at than this girl taking off her clothes. Something you (this theatre audience) didn't want to be seen to be looking at. Something you can look at in the anonymous confines of porn sites, or at a car show, or in your night dreams. Something you can't look at in the paid for sanctity of a shared art space...



What I take to be a witty point. A point worth making?

Also, Frieze is “so Capitalist its Marxist” but who cares? Culture is relentlessly commercialised, art shouldn't not be a part of culture. Well, at least not always...

Archangel

Pimp chains and LED dog tags and iced out pendants worn on smoothed, toned bodies: these things I offer. Necklaces, earrings, cheek piercings, and grillz: these ICED OUT gifts I bring. The values of my production are enhanced by the budget agreed by your label. My angles are chosen by a Director whose list of credits will look good on any press release. My set is peopled by a Cast in whose facets the image anxieties of thousands are mirrored. My face is a mask of screen – at the promo testing, on the TV, on youtube: Love as only I show how. Watch my promises:
Females will be stripped of the worrying gradations of wordly relations and character as they approach the lens in slow motion. Dancers will sweat, only to the point of sheening, in heaving clubs and less populated, reproduced VIP areas. Fountains never weary of producing jets when my swoops and arcs bless a location. The very lighting speaks of desire, eternally sustained. The extras never crowd the artists. The libidos of the stars will issue forth unattended, be captured in this issuing forth. The very movements of all on set are the intersection of physical and divine grace. Why do you smile? Have you never thought your love unworthy?
The workmanship of the video editors will be immaculate, they will get guest list at exclusive clubs in the West End. Where shots are joined together with fades, wipes and other transition effects, the eye of the showiest, pickiest label exec will find a match for the sharp suited physique that meets it in slimming mirrors of restaurant and hotel WC’s. Where shots have been timelapsed to sync movements with the tempo of the music, no jitteriness will occur. Where the Artist needed to look less height challenged in comparison with the marvellous physical specimens that comprise the Cast, rushes with shots from below have been judiciously chosen. The Artist’s face is graded, for wellness, and any unadmiring glances in his direction are not even digitized in. Though the production from beginning to end is almost entirely tapeless, the interpolation of the fields is such that none of the glitchiness associated with lower cost productions will show on the finished video, even in the shoddiest of AVI uploads. The Director of Photography and the Lighting Designers are filled with my spirit: bounce boards are set at perfect angles to cup the faces of the Cast in clear light, the Artist’s in a warming gold. Have you never wanted love more clearly delineated and controlled, and to be at a more beautiful party with less speedy coke?
Where, then, has your life been lifted? My elements are as market research-dictated as they are to do with the specificities of the lives of those involved in an inspired ensemble effort: Writers; Artists; Directors; Casting Directors; Miscellaneous Cast; Associate and Executive Producers; Editors. The cover pages of an A6 pocket notebook, brown, ink stained, wear-crinkled. The peace at the corners of the eyelids of a woman her brain plummeting in the accepting depths of dream in the last cast of evening lamplight. The ball dipping inside the crook of stanchion and cross beam beyond the outstretched gloves of the diving opposition goalkeeper. The good ascent, concurring clouds shadowing the path taken. The empty public pool on the common. The raised arms of a crowd dancing, rave whistles, raised arms the strobe in the place music its rhythm love the raised wrists of love the raised arms and the pocket book written in the impossibility of communication communicated by Gorgias’ proposal its paradoxical dance the greenness and redolent scent of weeds growing by the side of an English train track. Any escape from your sad self in anyone’s praise of what you have done. Certain moments, remembered or imagined, of the afterlife. Drawing with crayons by the brazen, abrasive light of urban summer sun, your sisters out of their godliness telling you you can’t draw. Where the woods open out to fields on the walk from Dorking to Westcott. A pollen square, by Wolfgang Laib; the bad little BMX I had Edinburgh in 2005 no bigger than any other BMX.
Such individuations I shall convert into (The Presentation of) Love In A Hip Hop or RnB Video; nothing will be lost, not a single colour tone even when encoded onto a computer screen of inferior dots per inch ratio, and the broadcasts shall be global global ones; love as only I show how. Watch me; come, press play again, delight in visual delight. Do not analyse. Why should my commercial tie ins not influence your spending choices? Diamonds and Courvoisier: do you deny that such things exist? Why do you change channels or go to click on a related video? Are not my images a stream of balm? My arms are heaped with cleavages and the latest of Lamborghinis; there is no flaw in me; no. Sit. Watch me. Your love of me is love of your Best Self; wait. Watch. I will begin again.

[TAKEN FROM 'AFTER OTHERS']
(Published in Orphan Leaf Review. 'Metamorphosis' edition)

Son of Man

Billy Westwood was bad. The moment he stepped out of his father’s gleaming, otter-like Mercedes and onto the hard bounce of the playground, you knew things would never be the same. St. John’s Church of England Primary School had been a nice school, niceness glowing brightly in its every corner. Now, with nine year old Westwood’s reign four years deep, his tyranny had darkened every level of school interaction, barring those between the teachers and between the teachers and the parents, the irritating adult element which, as everyone knows, hardly matters. Every note passed, every piece of lunch money stolen, every game of It, each and every first kiss bestowed and boob touched, dig a little deeper, and Westwood was there. Running things. Everyone knew, but no one told. No one dared.
As with all good dictators, mystery wound around William Westwood like steam after a particularly hot bath. For one thing, he wasn’t fat. This was unfathomable, given the better life he was said to enjoy as son of big time TV producer Clint Westwood. People could imagine nothing other than a superior home existence for Billy. At school, his ample packed lunches were supplemented by other children’s offerings; ongoing debt repayments, alliance proposals and reprimand allays, more often than not these came in the form of sweaty Babybels, pleasingly compact and enfoiled Marmite sandwiches, big or small Scotch eggs. A lot of scotch eggs. Enough scotch eggs to make any kid a fatty. Where did it all go? Despite the mounds of food that came his way, and the unnecessity of physical activity (it was his minions who did any of the running around required in the upkeep of his territory), he remained veiny and compact. Like a long distance runner, only littler. Just seeing his jaw clench you could tell he was skinny beneath. Tough.
Inventive too. An important factor in his primary school domination was the bizarreness of his methods. Opponents had learned to always expect something unexpected from Westwood. Allies, also, stayed on his good side less for the benefits than to avoid his weird and humiliating punishments. It was said of him that he did headstands throughout first period, and this was the creative font for his outlandish treatment of friend and foe. Whilst the others were answering “Here sir” or “Yes miss” when their names were called from the register and handing in yesterday’s homework, blood and madness collected in the still forming dish of William Westwood’s child skull. Westwoodz upside down was once found scratched onto on a number of Changing Room Two benches and gouged into the rubber edging of a table in Art Block One. The culprit was found soon enough, and during one legendary school trip to the local baths for swim lessons, his pants stolen. After lessons, in the guarded jostle of getting dressed without showing off or looking at goolies, the offender felt a quiet certainty that his recent misdemeanour was why he found himself without his undergarment, sick with the worry of everyone knowing. That certainty grew louder and more intense the chasm of worry in his belly thinner, deeper as he queued for the coach back to school. Just as he thought he might have made it through and pulled out his Top Trumps in relief, there were his pants, passing miraculously along the coach aisle, having reappeared in the hands of the Polish PE assistant. The fit young Pole then went up and down reading, enunciating with a learner’s care, the name on the sown-in name tag to identify the traumatised young scrap. Scrawls like that never happened again.
The tales that spun from Westwood’s every move grew taller and more tangled with the distance he kept from normal school activities. And of course he never went to class. What did he do with his time? Whilst the others learnt joined up handwriting and how you can make all the colours of the rainbow by mixing just the primary four, where was Billy Westwood? It was well known that he had his own, partitioned cubbyhole in an art room, and on occasion was seen engaging an art teacher in discussion of one of his secret projects. His name was always answered during register-taking; the column of red ticks that testified to his attendance all term and in every class (even Geography) was rarely, if ever, cracked by a black cross.
Other than the art room cubbyhole, Westwood was kept invisible in the oversized wooden Wendy House beside the sand pit, his headquarters. Nestled at the foot of Big Field, at Playtime the construction could usually be found surrounded by a testy mixture of underlings and supplicants. Just now, a big boy, one of Westwood’s enforcers, was crushing holly in his hand and making other, less practised children, follow suit. Onlookers hooked chins over the shoulders and forearms of others and tried not to get pushed to the front. This was the location, this the allotted time, on a moody March day bristling with the restlessness of a Spring storm: it was hither that the three McCarthy children had been summoned. Hand in hand, the younger brother and two older sisters had made their way from respective Second Period lessons, knowing that the other two would have received the same, WW-embossed note in each of their desks: a summons. Cutting across a tense game of wall ball, along the back of the portacabins where a batch of vinegar-hardened conkers was being distributed, down by the brambles and snowdrops and under the hedge - the shortest route, the line of least resistance – and out into the gaggle congregated in front of the Wendy House. The McCarthy Trio shouldered their way through the whimpers and the cackles, and the entrance to Westwood’s HQ swung open before them.
Antonia, Georgia and Justin McCarthy, The Trio as they were known, had a notoriety all of their own. Technically, they were in Westwood’s pay – they had done things for him. They liked to think of themselves, however, as potentially independent – independent as any could be – and their own sway not inconsiderable in the extra curricular spheres of St. John’s. As young Justin reached the first Easter of his school career, Antonia was approaching her last; born at two year intervals, their blood ties spanned the School’s 5 to 11 yr old stretch. Now, entering into the last semester in which their influence would be so, at its evenly spread zenith, Antonia in particular was keen to leave an impression by which The Trio, soon to be just The Duo, would be remembered.
“I heard you guys were the best”, said Westwood’s voice, Westwood’s person being hidden in the cluttered depths of the surprisingly large Wendy house interior. “But you let me down.”
“I’m afraid we don’t know what you mean,” said Justin, elected to do the talking – being the youngest, the one with fewest second teeth: the least threatening.
“You will see, when I explain,” said Westwood with menace, and there he was, seeming to materialize not at all where his voice had sounded from, making Georgia start.
As Antonia stepped forward to engage him, covering for Georgia’s fright, Westwood turned on his heel and disappeared again, in amongst the crated and covered objects peopling the Wendy House.
The Trio followed Westwood, or glimpses of Westwood, down a series of stairs. They had been descending stairs for at least twenty seconds, losing and catching sight of Westwood’s wiry frame amongst the railings and the clutter, when they heard him behind them.
“Look,” he said, his voice seeming now to rumble, “at the Easter Eggs!”
As they turned and looked, Westwood was stood to the side of the stairwell in a clearing next to a Perspex topped table that looked like the ones from the old H.E classes. What they saw before them were not the expected and recently familiar chocolate ovals in their loud foil and plastic packagings but, spread across the table, a marsh of melted chocolate, and at random intervals bits of coloured foil, rising out of the brown, drooping and forlorn; one big gloop dotted with wilting stegs of shiny aluminia.
Slamming his palms down into the sludge, lifting them from the table slowly, deliberately, Westwood wiped chocolate all down his eyes-wide face. Then, he bared his rabbity-gapped teeth. Did Billy Westwood just growl? Georgia and Justin looked up at Antonia. She showed no sign of flinching. One of Westwood’s helpers scurried forth and placed in his outstretched hand a checked tea towel, looking suspiciously like those that had gone missing from the Canteen during Christmas Holidays.
“Look… at what’s happened to the Easter Eggs” repeated Westwood, wiping his face clean, all the while with his eyes fixed on The Trio.
“They’ve melted, Billy,” said Antonia.
“That’s right, they’ve melted.”
“Well the conditions are hardly perfect,” said Georgia, emboldened by her older sibling’s refusal to budge.
It was true. They were a good eighteen or twenty feet underground by now, and the atmosphere in the unventilated Wendy House depths was decidedly close. The Trio were perspiring. Was Billy Westwood perspiring?
“We brought you the Easter Eggs, Billy. You let them melt. Anyway, you never said anything about keeping them down here. You said you’d found a charity in Mali, Billy, better than the one in Hull the school had pledged the Easter Egg donations to. More in need of chocolate.”
“That’s right, Justin. And although you negligently forewent warning me of the necessary keeping condition, it was indeed I who let them melt. Ha ha ha!” Westwood’s laughter thudded against the underground wall.

*

Back up on the ground floor, back in the gloomy spring light and with the day’s strange chill coming in, Westwood addressed the bold siblings.
“As you may have ascertained, your efforts have displeased me…”
“…But Billy…”
“…No more but Billy’s!”
“The reason we got those Easter Eggs for you Billy was because they were going to go to a good cause...”
“…Luckily for you,” interrupted Westwood, “the melting of the Eggs has given me an idea. A great idea. Luckily for the three of you, I believe the realisation of this idea may even provide you three the chance to atone.”
They felt very little, and perhaps even less than very little, compulsion to atone to Billy Westwood. There was, in fact, not much The Trio would rather not do. Not only had it turned out that the Eggs, stolen in the belief that the stealing had higher objectives, were not bound for welcoming mouths of starving West African villagers, but the planning that had gone into the theft had made the three siblings miss quite enough curfews and get behind on quite enough homework already over the past two weeks. Enough was enough. To get involved in another one of these projects… In fact the whole episode, though embarked upon with the goodest of intentions, had brought them to the conclusion that they were better off sticking to straightforward acts of charity. Stealing from the rich, so to speak, to pass onto the school bully, to then give to the malnourished, was all very well, but… By reimbursing perennial victims of lunch money mugging, by encouraging those schoolmates with crushes on the more popular and the better-looking, and by joining the pre football game amalgams so that Antonia or Georgia (as girls) would be picked last, thereby averting the being-picked-last trauma in these, such formative years – these sorts of interventions had struck them as more worthwhile. More honest. More McCarthy…
Westwood was consulting a particularly ratty looking boy, evidently in his employ, and hurriedly turned again to the three McCarthy children who were deep in thought.
“… yes, yes - a great, great idea, people. Something by which they will remember me. You will be informed.”
With that, the modulation of Westwood’s voice final, they were ushered out.
*

“Who does he think he is?” Exclaimed Justin.
“Billy Westwood, probably,” replied Georgia with the sarcasm peculiar to annoyed seven year olds; a stamp on the foot with words.
For spells of the after lunch lessons, the last of the day, the sky had succumbed to the day’s agitations, hocking up hail that then clouted the classroom windows. Now, at Hometime, sun and wind had wedged apart the gloom. Having met at the gate, The Trio advanced down the road to where their mum would be waiting.
As Georgia and Justin continued to bicker, unsettled by the lunchtime encounter, Antonia remained silent. Striding along ahead of her younger siblings, overtaking dawdlers, slaloming schoolmates who crouched to pick up and throw icy sludge about, weaving amongst remonstrating parents – Antonia’s eleven year old head was awhir with thought.
As they reached the car, she stopped the other two.
“Meeting. Upstairs bathroom. Five minutes before Teeth Brush. OK? Till then, not another word about Billy Westwood.”

*

A nightlong storm had washed away the previous day’s pressure and Tuesday lunchtime came around bright and cold, English and very Spring. The storm had brought down trees and telephone wires, and for families clumped under kitchen tables, the whole heavenly racket had made for very little sleep indeed. The usual tension on the Playground and Big Field had been tweaked by this collective lack of rest. Glances were guarded, steps watched, and on top of this, word had got out about the Easter Egg heist.
The Trio, crosslegged in Lunchtime conference, forming a nonagon of floor-flattened knees, bums and thighs, were discussing the latest, startling developments: they had just received word of Billy Westwood’s ‘plan’.
“I thought as much,” said Justin.
“Stop saying that!” said Georgia, throwing a Penguin bar to the ground and looking away in disgust.
“Come on, Justin,” rejoined Antonia, “you mean you really expected Westwood to attempt to heat the Easter Egg chocolate to 114 degrees Celsius in a… copper-pewter composite vat to provide the projectile capacity for a rocket, in which he will place himself, so that he may be shot up into the… what does he say, the welcoming arms of the sky? Was that really on the cards?”
“Not necessarily the copper-pewter composite bit.”
Whilst the Playground was abuzz with speculation, much of it indignant, on what had happened to the two hundred and fifty four Easter Eggs, the Trio’s worries were one step ahead.
The eating that normally constituted lunchtime had given way almost entirely to planning: the peanut butter sandwiches and Monster Munch, the carrot slices and cox apples had all been laid aside, and the trio were comparing the dispatches that had appeared in their desk drawers at some point between First and Second Period.
“Why wouldn’t he use just water? Why the chocolate?”
“Says here it’s to do with chocolate’s previously undiscovered ‘Catapult Properties’. Look, patent pending. He’s loco, you guys. Loco.”
“He really can draw, though. Look at this.”
Westwood’s plans, detailing the boy-despot’s intention to become St John’s first human asteroid, lay on sketched sheets between the siblings’ crossed legs and lunchtime fare. As The Trio pored and planned, important gaps remained – where would he get the materials for such an instrument? Was there space beneath the Wendy House itself for the construction of such a thing? Had it already been built? When was lift-off? Above all, how could Billy Westwood be stopped?
Spurred by these uncertainties, and by the unacceptably ignominious end intended for the Easter Egg horde, within hours The Trio had formulated a counter plan. The ultimate sting…
The rest of the week passed in a hubble of snatched conferences and eavesdropping. The plan changed very little: worms of information spooled from Westwood’s accomplices by the The Trio’s hope-adhesive promises of better times, times without the looming presence of Billy Westwood, had largely to be disregarded. In those days, Spring’s hectic ionisation seemed to reach into the very hearts and childminds of otherwise reliable informants - whatever The Trio learnt was qualified by the possibility that maybe Billy had leaked it. They made their plan and knew they would have to stick to it. This was a hard dragon to saddle. Maybe the hardest.

*

Home time on Friday came, the end of the week in School, and pupils were let out of Sixth Period classrooms. The pall of servitude in each of them, ever in Billy Westwood’s surrounds, dissipated like bad weather as they made their way up the lane with thoughts of teatime TV and a whole weekend of nothing ahead. Just then a sharp wail came from the foundations of the Wendy House. The departing children, along with the parents that awaited them, startled, turned towards Big Field and this queer cry with the loose homogeneity of a shoal. There they saw Billy Westwood, stripped to the socks, running, gambolling almost, from the Wendy House and across the short grass tract that led to the Glory Woods beside. Not only was the pasty, stick insect bully naked, but he was decorated with patches of brown – Is it paint?… Is it faeces?… Is it chocolate? And into the Glory Woods he was seen to disappear, brown smudges on white, an inverted Friesian dashing, disappearing.
As Westwood stumbled on from the close cut carpet of grass on over the uneven woodland floor, What Had Happened and What Was To Come rayed his mind unbidden, like the illuminous splashes on shellsuits favoured by his father around that time. His tiny frame, so unaccustomed to eating at all, coursed now with a galaxyish swirl of E-numbers from the remaining Easter Eggs that he had ingested, evidence that he had been obliged to destroy. Atop that frame was balanced his head, and in his head his brain, his additives-firing brain, whose cells had a liquid sensation, sloshing, as he darted forward into the undergrowth. Had the Trio outwitted him? Thank God his plans were still safe, and thanks to that same God, there might just be enough chocolate left for the Deliverer Cannon… Might there be? He had to find out. They must be prevented.
Hearing a stick crack somewhere in the woods behind him, he found himself diving down behind a nearby ash. His head beaten clear by the panic drumming upwards from his heart, he crouched there a full minute, straining to be still, straining to hear, distinguishing wood sound from wood sound, wind rustle from bird trill, bird trill from branch creek, branch creek from squirrel chatter, squirrel chatter from… whispering child voice. The Trio were behind him, he was sure. Huddling against the tree, he became convinced that his hurried escape from the Wendy House must have been seen and his course through the woods tracked, convinced in a sudden retrospective that the note left in his laboratory, purporting to be written and signed by the headmistress’s hand, had had a decidedly unjoined-up aspect to it, convinced, knowing now that The Trio had tricked him into finishing off the chocolate reserves and leading them straight to the Launch Pad deep in the School’s wooded western boundaries - What could he do? Hide? No, he could not hide. They were too many. He felt surrounded. Just then, he was struck by the notion that the retribution tridented by these three siblings was essential, necessary, given the great misproportion between the Bad He Had Done and the Very Few Years He Had Lived. He knew, then, he must be punished. An inkling came to him, seen briefly like the few frames of alien maw in the film he had glimpsed his parents watching the previous night, a clever director’s nudge, terrible and brief, of his own exclusion from an improving world – of being squeezed and slipping out from the squelching tectonics of cosmic justice as they shifted together into a closed whole.
And with that, he fled.
The chocolate-inebriation and the terror lent his flight an unevenness – an initially unswerving dash soon snaking into a fall-punctuated totter, catching his socked feet in and kicking up mud and leaves, letting out little laughs as he went. Driven on by the initial bumps of fright that looped again and again – are they going to get me? Should I, in fact, be got? – Billy’s getaway remained spurty and uneven, but as the chocolate flavouring-propulsion petered and exhaustion came, his previous concerns diminished. That is, they become previous. The clear cool of the woods, so different to the heated underground closeness in which he spent his days, the cross grades of spring freshness, so unlike the fumes of boy flatulence, paints and glues usually couching his senses, and above all the still uprightness of old, old trees all around, moved only by a breeze at their twig ends, not manipulated by or in any way subject to his own genius menace, all seemed to him somehow accepting of his entrance: the deeper into the woods he went, the more glad the woods felt and the surer he became of where he was headed, or at least of how to get there.

*

The body of William Westwood was never found. Within 20 years, with Antonia, Georgia and Justin employed in variously worthwhile activities and with the appearance and manner of St John’s pupils fastforwarded unimaginably, the kerfuffle that went with the young bully’s disappearance had settled into the managed blocks of legend. Playground and Exercise Book myths had appeared involving a fully fledged Oak tree, supposedly not present before the event, that was near to where Big Field and the Glory Woods met, near to where Billy had been seen to disappear; parents and teachers, meanwhile, had strained their imaginative parts employing an inventiveness equivalent though somehow contrary to that required when explaining away the appearance of young ones in the world. The headmistress had quickly been swept under the managerial carpet, to a post in Hull, whilst the board of governors had been quite proactive in aiding the local police’s fruitless attempts to determine just what had happened to Billy Westwood. The governors had been obliging, also, when Billy’s father insisted on shooting at the school for a TV biopic of his son’s life and nascent artistic vision.
For those twenty years the monument built to commemorate Billy Westwood, TREASURED FRIEND & DILIGENT PUPIL 1987-1991, erected on the site of the freshly flattened and gutted Wendy House, had stood with its wooden arms outstretched, imploring the sky. Whereas once children had avoided the spot in reverence and superstition, its iron pedestal was by now scratched deep and shallow with the straightforward proclamations of child lust, and served both as Hide And Seek post and generously wide cricket stumps. The elements had treated it with a similar unconcern, its varnish by now weathered the colour of off chocolate. Such was the change two decades on, and in the fevered atmosphere of the latest property boom, such was the rapidity with which building contracts were being signed and houses thrown up, no one thought to say what should happen with the boy sculpture when that section of Big Field was bought up along with the adjacent allotments. Being also that the construction of the new housing estate went on during the 2011 Summer Holidays, there was no one around to tell the site labourer not to place the statue and its pedestal unceremoniously in the big yellow skip, William Westwood’s final resting place.

There is turmoil in the streets

Before dawn the grey, black and white rain, falling and rising, awakens me; a light flashes from nothing to red, and with it there is no longer just us. Then, and in the interlude when my thinking faculty is allowed me, I am aware that this has occurred before, and I know what will happen next. Rather, that there will be a next, if not the contents of that to come. I am chosen and born once again fully manned, muscular and with tight jeans, into empty city streets, dawn or dusk, either or both. Menace here in the non-motion of the beginning, and in the initial aloneness. Soon enough there will be others with whom I may dance. My passage like a conveyer belt begins.
I go forward parenthesised by neon diners, alleyways full of shadow, smashed shop fronts, dripping gutters, the repeated stoop and light, stoop and light of lampposts. No hint of season, the rain is not temperatured. Neither is it wet. Here, only row after row of dancers, all of whom I am drawn towards, all of whom, it is understood, wish to dance. They come towards me, we engage. Then there is only us, the dance with one or more. I go on and they come, we meet. I may turn back along the path (a path), but only go so far, not all the way. Not to my beginning. To my left, the blocky foliages of backgrounds, a large, obscure vista to my right. I go onwards.
My partners are various, but singular in that I must dance with each, each will disappear, and be replaced with another, or others. A choreographed swarm of denim and kneepads surrounds me; one, in lime-coloured biker leather, engages me with a sliding entrance along the ground; others leap from motorbikes, twirling chains in lovely repeated motions; a red-clad lady cracks the air in time with a dance rope. Some have beautiful blades attached to their gloves, others leap unexpectedly, introducing new, innovative elements to the dance, but also in a way making the dance more difficult. It never lasts long, all fall, all disappear. I am left with only traces by which to remember them. The purples and blues that collage my knuckles and the mosaics of red on my forearms and face. Another goes down and disappears and I skip over him.
Aside from the performer dressed as a sort of clown, who juggles axes and laughs, and who appears to be blind, the fire-breathing fat man is an intriguing companion. I try to stay close to him, but he is insistent on running back and forth in his own diagonals, driven mad it seems to me by the streams that blaze forth from his o’d mouth and that singe me occasionally. I skip around him. His affliction makes it almost as if we are not dancing together, but against each other.
Then one of seven interstitials of peace. Surrounded by dark and whirring. There is no rain, and no non-rain. Respite, reflection: neither do my dance partners know, nor ever will they, of my beginning; their whence is my destination, that is not in doubt (it is as though my appearance has beckoned them in the same way that I have been beckoned). But since where they are going (where I came from) could only be revealed if they passed me, they could tell me nothing of my whence since with each I danced and each went no further. And I cannot let them pass. If I did, I could not go on. If where they began is where I will end then perhaps getting there will bring me back, again. Perhaps that is why I must get past them. But still that is not the what of my action. Even to be at the beginning… The at once anticipative and regenerative music of loading lifts me up.
Out onto a path (the path), through cities, beaches, ship decks, a factory and its elevator for industrial freight. The forward sequence. Finally, I will appear up in the syndicate’s final ballroom. My expression remains fixed as I dance a path. The torrent is always ahead of me.
Sometimes I am aware of a companion who is also dancing against the tide, headed in the same direction. I cannot dance with her. Occasionally she will grab me, or I her, and with our arms looped, we perform a special lunge. At other times I am her. Depending on how well I have danced, at certain intervals it is dark and whirring and there is the music of loading, I make a burnt offering in my mind in the dark and awaken again as her. The 1P halo (which I may not pluck down) floats above my head briefly, I kick over a barrel and as I look down I see that my stonewash jeans are gone, my legs are smooth and womanly and I feel faster, although weaker. I am fitted into a different frame, but I am still me, and still I know not what moves me.


The two friends shifted on the beanbags. One laid his joypad to the side, took a swig of Lilt and rubbed his right eye.
“Blaze is way better than Axel. I let him get killed because I wanted to show you this. If you pause it when she’s coming down from fly kicking, wherever you go in the room, look, I swear its like she’s looking you in the eye.”

[TAKEN FROM THE DEAR COMPUTERS COLLECTION]
(Previously published in The Lick, Summer 2007 edition)

Five things

A couple on the platform, presumably together. The white trainers have been dirty, and cleaned, and it shows. The indentation on my finger from the ring that dear girl gave me, on my orders, has become a sore, newly. The headlights are not like diamonds, the brake lights are not like coals. We are concerned for the team.

These two would not be demonstrative, although they once were, when it began. The whiteness, by dint of being cleaned, has gone in its creases to its underneath dullness. My hand will float up if I take the ring off now. Everything is not going faster than normal. Is everything propitious to their, our, success?

They live in a house of square spaces rendered by the arrangement of square blocks now. From the ventilation holes, wrinkles spread; in them, the silt of wearing. I often consider throwing it away, upwards. Although neither has it been slowed down. What can we do?

They keep on, near each other, in the kitchen, in the carriage, doing things. Not the laces, but the stitching, which was of the same white and flush to the plastic leather composite panelling, has now collected shadows of dirt. My finger has grown around its fit like a tree knotting around planks. But time can be made subject to camera settings. Perhaps less scrutiny, less expectation, more applause at what they do well.

Such lovely days they had, near to each other, not knowing. The laces are just frayed. Maybe the bone has changed too. Pins of light can be made into snakes – that’s worthy of framing. Because their mentality is wrong.

Sometimes they were apart. The plastic end fobbing, which makes them insertable, has come off. How deep the constriction goes, who knows? Night time motion and lights captured and rendered for you. They seem to think that simply by dint of being at this club they will win things, because of its history and its stature in the game.

She would ring him or he her. Relacing them is a bugger. My digit has grown against it. Really, you should pay to look at it. It just makes for a remarkably dull game.

They would paint pictures of themselves to each other down the phone lines. Actually I don’t wear them that much any more, they make my feet smell. The knuckle beneath the ring looks outsized and requires snapping. It is something you’ve seen, transformed, after all. And it makes us, the fans, feel less together.

She with her eyes closed, he looking in the mirror. I tend just to prop them up on the sill of the train carriage and write about them, nowadays. But the colour of the skin, no matter the weather, always looks right against its beaten silver. And that means the way you see is transformed too. As a team, their lack of movement and of imagination is particularly embarrassing in light of their main rivals’ excoriating (not a word I got from the football press) form.

Sound carries them together. Or wear them for cycling, when it doesn’t matter. Beneath it, the hairs are babyish and long. You imagine more with your eyes. In a sense, the way they make us argue now, about how they could improve, does unify us.

She comes with his distinctive gasps, he pretends to be simultaneous with her peculiar gurgle. Usually they just sit in the cupboard. I keep it on because the white is as beautiful as it is known. The photograph makes you look harder normally. But it’s not a unity we want.

They are together. And they really do smell. Each dent proves time is on its way. Why the cars can’t just be cars I’ll never know. We are concerned.

[TAKEN FROM THE AFTER OTHERS COLLECTION]

Questor

At the start of the game, talk to the Men and get units. Then, talk to the other Men and go to the city. Successfully complete the quests and the "A Formidable Quest" quest. Then, get a Weapon or Money (recommended). Upgrade it/them to Big Weapon/ Lots of Moneys and repeatedly kill Competitors and Usurpers. Make sure you also kill certain Friends. Carve up everything you killed. When you are back in the village, sell all the items you have then go to the cave. Get everything and give it to the effigy you do not recognize in the cave, on the left. The quest alone results in 1100UNITS for doing it with one life. This is also a good way to get points to renovate your home town, erect monuments and be remembered, and the Big Weapon can kill a Usurper in a little under ten hits.

Successfully complete all Level 1 quests. Then, select the last mission. You will need 200UNITS and plenty of irrelevant life experience to start. Start the mission and realize how wholly unprepared you are for this (dying). Wish (press Z, then Z, then right, then X) you had thought about this before. Remember and by remembering return to that (those) moments when you sat drinking various Guinesses and reading the Sports Sections of three different newspapers and instead of doing so fill that (those) Saturday morning hours with Thinking About Death. Follow this route 2 to 5. Then, go 10 to 11. On 11 you will need to dig to get the crystal. Then, return from the same route. From 10 run straight to 5. Run in zigzags to 2 (walk or run). There is nothing here that can attack you that you can defend against, nor must you attempt it.

Do the "Gathering" quest for Graveyards/Fairgrounds, where you just have to deliver the Pearl Ticket in the box. In the box, grab your candy floss and your Pearl Ticket. Go to Area 2 and search around the first portal to the other side/water ride you see on the left when entering from Area 1. You will get either a Silver Scale or a Goldbug. Just sell the Silver Scales for easy money.

Do the "Repentance" quest for Nothing, where you just have to deliver the Pearl Ticket in the box. Bring vague acquaintances, long-lost friends and dug-up long-dead pets. If you are bringing relatives from Asia Minor, bring four because they will constantly keep breaking. To get good money, enter all the caves and mine all the areas. Sell the people you know or keep them for smithing.

Love / Duplicate
Play with two players and get all the self worth you want to share, then go to the online coupling hall. Give all the self worth you want to the other player. Note: There are some bits you cannot share. Turn off the game without saving while the other player stays in the online coupling hall. Turn on the game again and you will have all the self worth that you gave away. Get back all the self worth you gave the other player and you will have doubled your self worth, more or less.

Training School
Unlock the Level 2 missions from the town mashup (the one with long nails and chemical breath) and successfully complete the "I Feel The Connection" mission to unlock the Training School, where you can fight against Gary with limited weapons, armor, and items. When you defeat other powerful monsters, you will have the option to learn their fear-inducing secrets.

Pet sister
Near the beginning of the game, look for your sister following a man around the village. Stroke her and music will play. As soon as the music stops, press X.

Easy love
Successfully complete all Level 1 quests. Then, talk to the man near your house. He is to the left of the south entrance. He will let you go to the Olympic Stadium. Once there, do everything you can (pole vault, get the company to pay for training otherwise you’ll take this other job and take your contacts with you, threaten the company, they have taken so much of you - javelin, etc.), then leave. Then, turn on the television but do not watch it. Instead, look behind it. You will see a peacock. Try going in the offline coupling hall. When you get there, you will see lots of things. Talk to the girl on the screen with the nice leotard on, and she will promise you the world, in the form of physical moments so full and disallowed that they forget the World which disallow them. Go to the shopping basket and get perfume. Take the perfume to a girl with lots of clothes on (this is your Chief Executive’s wife), diagonally to the left of the waterfall. Sit and imagine her with the nice Leotard and the world you met in discarded. When she stops talking you must give her the perfume. Practice Bashful Smile. Press Z, then X, then up, then Z (prayer to God of WayFaring Clerks Seeking Something AfterHours combination). Repeat the process again afterwards. This is an easy way to help decorate the world with things other than money, others’ fame and overdue phone bills.

Getting Monster Tooth+
Successfully complete "Attack Of The Disc Disc", a three star quest at the federation. Once you complete it, you might get an item called Medium Size Disc Ear. Sell everything from the Disc except the ear and go start a gathering quest at the federation in the lake and dump. Go directly to Area 7 and find the tall ‘tatty’ man. He will trade the Medium Size Disc Ear for a Monster Tooth+. You can trade three times, or more. A second, but more annoying way to get it is to take "The Dream Of Driving Down By The Balmy Kiwi Coast" quest at the federation. It is also a three star quest. Kill at least seven and you should get seven Monster Tooth+s.

Completing the Deliver The Ring quest
Take out all the potions, bacon and units. It is also recommended to bring more bacon and some frozen chicken kievs. Go to Area 2 and kill every Monster that jumps in there. This may take awhile and require occasional use of potions. After you kill them, go to Area 4 then to Area 4a. You will see a scene where the Shrivelled Primary School Teacher swoops in. As soon as he quits, backflip by pressing Y. After that, walk at a steady pace behind the nearest decent size rock and try to watch the Shrivelled Primary School Teacher, but make sure he cannot see you. If done correctly and you keep out of his sight, he will fly off. Stand up and run for Area 4b. When you get there, kill all the Monsters and beggars, even if they swear blind they have important things to tell you about your fate. There should only be four of them. An intermission sequence will show you where the Finger is located. Once the Monsters and beggars are dead, go up to the Hand. Do not get the Ring yet. Instead, eat all your rations (careful with chicken kievs - are they defrosted properly?) Search the Hand to find the Ring. Note: Watch your energy; if it goes all the way down you will break the Hand. Also, if you are attacked or try to use an item the Hand will swell up even more and you cant get the Ring off. It may fall and break. You should now have an easy way back to Kansas. Go to Area 4b then Area 4a then Area 4. Be careful, as Shrivelled Primary School Teacher may be in any of these areas at any time, will never die or forgive previous indiscretions. If you see him, run back to the previous area and wait for him to hear the call, when he will leave. Sometimes if you go back to Area 3 after the Monsters and beggars are killed, there will be one straggler. However, most of the time if you killed them all before you should be safe. Just watch out for the ginger one. From Area 3 go to Area 2. Then go to the pier. Go to the other box and press F to successfully deliver your first Ring (applause, grimaces).

Defeating Mother
It did not want you to do what you wanted to do. Have Level 2 (99) bullets. There is a ledge that you can climb to attack the Mother; it is the smaller ledge. The Mother will not come up, its nails are brittle. All you need to do is keep shooting it in the head. You will get 40,000 UNITS, and a clearer sense of self, for defeating it.

Defeating Father
In the first place, it took the Mother. Get a Speargun and Level 2 (99) bullets. Keep shooting at its head until it falls. You will get a lot of money, and an optimized decision making capacity, by completing this quest.

Revenge Of The Mother Quest! glitch
Start the "Revenge Of The Mother" quest. Take only your weapons, armor, and one Nautinet. Once the quest is started, go directly to Area 7 (going through Areas 1 and 8). Talk to the delivery man in Area 7 and he will give you a special mushroom for your Nautinet. Accept the offer, then just sit and wait until time runs out. It will say that you have completed the quest. The next time you try the quest you will not be able to do this trick. However, if you kill Mother, who only has one third of its normal life because of the glitch, you can do the glitch again. Afterwards you must kill it and repeat the process again to get Mother armor, a clearer sense of self, and lots of money.

[TAKEN FROM THE DEAR COMPUTERS COLLECTION]

Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon

I
There is the snapped nerve of the universe
Whence this motion.
My eyes carry this,
Turn,
Thru what was the middle eye and will enthuse out.

The impression of a young boy
pulse
pulse
pulse
judder swell skirrs
before my left eye, I ma my most damnable father
before my left eye
holding up a sage hand.

Consternation for your urge, your lust
and your removal of the sun.


II
Ecto boy I and father are fastened on that plasm banner you say is opaque invisible
Francis I feel you seeing, seeing
bleeding down.
If you see my right eye u see where I am what I am looking into.
Raptor Innocent X
tracking the motion turning enthuse
Is it a horizontal arc?
I am but man I can follow
Some vomit and olives drirl from my ear


III
I am mind gone whole,
I am over there,
there is my immanence’s sequela,
sequela is my beyond-escape. Pope Cardinal X was em, beyond-intent.

And and universe’s quick
pus is lemon colour paint between su
where again will snap,



here comes another tuurn whither, whither tossed out of mauger scarlet.

U, Francis U, let em speak yet


“Francis Bacon talking about Rembrandt in Gadfly piece, March 1998”

Conscious Tom Verlaine: Seduce and Destroy.

A coming together
I will speak my way out of this very chart, by god!
Are you auto sofa devious, mischievous, and an Evertonian too? said Tom Verlaine, handing the busker a cock-proud fifty note. Tom Verlaine, a name chosen by someone who knew someone who knew nothing, dear, conscious Tom Verlaine, directed this pot and pan-playing grimebeard to Bel Vue B&B, a million miles away. Conscious so that he made choices, he decided what he did – feeling he was about to come into a girl, he went faster and steered towards climax – feeling emotion, he decided what was good for him and acted accordingly - and now with a surge of pity for this angry destitute, it was he and he alone who took the moment by its small, sensitive hairs, and tugged, typing his PIN number into the hole in the wall which always answered his commands, giving the fifty squid and spelling out the parameters for giving, circumscribing the conditions of his kindness, if you will, telling Jack to go straight and stay in this fuckingplace, and this place only, right, it’s the one for you ¬and telling him to tell Mavis, or whatever her name happens to be, that I, conscious and now benevolent Tom Verlaine, hath sent thee.

A parting of ways:
Why don’t you take the Tube? asked the beggar
The Tube! Tom replied with whist Oh (a long whistful Oh)! I cannot bear it down there. The ghouls creeking and the ungodly silence weeping.

They got there. This is you.

Back at the flat, alone, Tom concerned himself with the newest involvement on earth, Derlei’s forthcoming production of Midsummer’s Night Dream, with Italian marionettes. Puppets, he thought, fucking puppets.

At a remove:
The others got there. Mira and Coleen, females both, displayed signs of disquiet.
Its like this ladies, the Director, who, might we not agree, is a great man, a great man, so much so that when I refer to him I do so with a big ‘D’, chose me, Conscious T, he he, to play the guy lovers who are all everything and all all total cock, it seems, pure double plus cock cock, because… you know the story of Rod Stewart getting discovered, right – he was singing along to his walkman on a train platform, to Glasgee, (Tom’s intonation going up up - they must know this one), whatever, bang there’s the CEO, hears him – elemental, rusty voiced and just grooving, bang, a star is born – the director caught me in the act too… he trailed off suggestively, his mouth crawled into a smile up one side.
No, not fucking itself, no, the preamble, the static chase, the making belle of la belle chose if you will, he he… we were at a party and he overhears me dropping one of my killers – my dear, what beautiful eyes you have – they’d look great dangling from their sockets laid out on my pillow (intonation up up) bang, he says to himself – the artist is always with his art – star born. I need love-needers, this guy knows the fuck, the great and holy F-U-C-K, he knows it inside out – which I do. Lets do it, he says to me, lets play.

A coming apart: going fast now:
So we’re rehearsing the lovers alone, two by two, this is the Director’s intention for us, so we can really get into the puppets, channel us (inclusive gesture) through our fingers (digits thrust forward) into them (hands thrown back in a ‘rest of the world’ flourish). Enchanted couplets in the jolly old bin, verse, get rid, iambs, poo, forget everything but the lovers, we are the lovers, we love, we are the love – they’re the lovers, fact, that’s who they are in the play, capital l, whatever. Correct me but, it goes from Lysander 4 Hermia, Demetrius 4 Hermia, Helena 4 Demetrius to… Lysander 4 Helena, Demetrius 4 Helena, Helena… well confused and Hermia still 4 Lysander to Demetrius 4 Helena and Lysander 4 Hermia – all together now aahh – that’s two a’s, ladies, two h’s – balance, dears, balance right? We just navigate it yeah, easy as 1 2 3, baby you and me, yeah.

Personae, contents:
Conscious Tom:
puppet-Demetrius and puppet-Lysander’s puppeteer

Mira:
puppet-Hermia’s puppeteer

Coleen:
puppet-Helena’s puppeteer


The puppet-spirits of Puck, Oberon and Bottom


Some puppets and paraphernalia, so far-unsouled

I
I actually think you guys have got some of the most spot on lines, and we’re talking about virgins, remember, yeah, so what it is addiction to something you haven’t even tried yet, something, you know you need it, ooh, superstrong, so it feels to me like there’s an overlap, the guys might say the girls’ lines, that’s how it feels to me, because I, Lysander, I so don’t see why we should ‘chose love by another’s eye’, Theseus and Egeus saying we can’t just makes me want you so much, its like giggling in class, you’d giggle so hard just because you weren’t supposed to, so when it comes to undoing Mrs Poole’s bra, ugggh... Yeah? And people will get this – ‘Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind’ – that’s you Helena, god such clarity – the mind, yeah, there’s something more involved, like magnets behind us, it just so happens its through us, ‘transparent Helena’, yeah? I want to get through, through you, ugggh, helpless, I want you and you alone…
You do not want me alone. Alone I exhibit what would dazzle you into resentment, fizzle your little wick.
Jesus Christ, Coleen, I know Helena gets pissed off, but that’s rough… is that one of hers?

III
…we’ve got to get this in: ahem, lady, ‘when I vow, I weep; and vows so born,/ In their nativity all truth appears’
They’re coming to see Shakespeare, for Christ’s sake, you can’t just call everyone ‘lady’.
But that’s what you are: lady… I am lack-love, you are fullness; I am heart-craven, you are dove raven, lady… Also, I feel (long drawn out ‘feel’ with fists clenched at belly – accelerating)… you should be able to see us, us the puppeteers that is… if you were wondering, that’s why I cut the strings off, you’ll be able to see our hands on them, they’ll be clumsier, waiting as we move our hands from their head to their foot, foot to arm so they can swoon, but it’ll be a so true clumsiness!... Coleen, sorry, I mean, Helena, how’s it going realising yourself as ‘muddy crystal’? Demetrius is going to gave difficulty saying it unless you’re being it. What? I can’t see it, but that’s not the point, is it?...

Outside the church hall rented by Derlei for rehearsals: Before union:
Coleen, hold up, Tom’s in there, he’s been here all night – its too much for him Coleen, fuck’s sake you should see the puppets – he thinks he’s devised the crucible for the engendering of ultimate love, love with a capital ‘L’ of course, all righteous, all fucking maniacal, god now he’s even got me swearing too… he thinks this is alchemy or some shit – its just puppets Coleen, puppets! I’m ringing Derek, don’t go in there.

Oberon’s unpurpled shade which is Conscious Tom Verlaine purged of his habit, heard in a dream and forgotten:
Woo is the world’s problem/ convincing her with madrigals or luring him with all things bright and sticky is less right than stepping into each other’s paths/ it being known/ your paths one-ing/ which unenforcing enforcement is the only encodement magic that can ensure precise excellent full love/ which is not/ unlike so many other notions of infinity/ a trick of the imagination/ it involves bodies/ purely OK/ double plus niceness brought and strewn steered through/ ooh/ thru u/ the you feel/ every time you fuck you unreel/ make present every other fuck and in this manner solicit something beyond your finitude/ and this is why to fuck is sacred/ Tom/ Understand/ before it is too late!

V: Words find a strange way
I:
Conscious Tom Verlaine’s right arm in a rugby sock; black buttons for eyes; thumb and forefinger as ‘mouth’.

Knee-high Her: Hermia:
tethered by a cord which prevents it from floating away: a quadruped of transparent plastic integument inflated with a chemically inert gaseous element, helium perhaps; fluorescent ringlets at its neck, wrists and ankles; dyed-fluorescent feathers attached to its back, mane-like; a dusting of tiny sequins.

Knee-high Her: Helena:
featureless totem of sea-smoothed grey stones piled up with brass washers inbetween; white sears of adhesive.

Two petitions:
Tom’s left hand feeds a strip of paper up his right forearm and out through the rugby sock ‘mouth,’ Tom’s right thumb and forefinger shredding the reel and scattering it around Hermia puppet. Braille petals.
The unshredded Braille read: you invaginating, yielding ultimately, bringing me to fruition: Infine kaleidoscopic kaleidoclashes detach in sheer flat, whiteness overlaid by continuums of electrified watercolours breathing

Tom’s left hand feeds a strip of paper up his right forearm and out through the rugby sock ‘mouth,’ Tom’s right thumb and forefinger shredding the reel and scattering it around Helena puppet. Braille petals.
The unshredded Braille read: you invaginating, yielding ultimately, bringing me to peace: Infinitesse, shattering, marched upon by wide apart eyed regiments. Savannah deluge. Fire crack clouds. Bodies swept into lush outcry overlay. Vital pyre, lyrenotes to visceral rune plucks, sudden up-pace bursted I vessel yes joy point above knowing-only mesh, as fingers into tendrils stretched, seeing to blindness developed, wings spread to swim

Tom roars:
Lady! Oh! In you I have seen it, call it essence truth niceness brought whatever it it it! Whence you sprung was blessed I believe! And at that moment I am in sight of the usually inturned flower opened! It uncrenellated! Just as heaven as you!

The upshot of the kerfuffle
During the kerfuffle the grey stones, stuck together with a certain amount of love, are knocked over. A hollow clatter in the high hall, a splayed heap. The same steeltoed boots shift the piece of scrap metal under which the orange tether was held, now the see through plastic doll is resting, neck bent, in the eaves.



(Previously Published in the ‘Farewell to Wales’ Edition of Texts’ Bones (2006))