Thursday 24 September 2009

I Want The Biggest Horns Money Can Buy

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I've been digging a hole for quite a while now, it's now as deep as three men my size, maybe four. Sometime I ask my friends to come over to help me dig it, but in all honesty I prefer to dig alone. I like the satisfaction you get when you accomplished something by yourself, be it a task as menial as digging a hole. Although yesterday Goldie Hawn came over and helped me dig. We talked about the clouds and drank pink lemonade. Then we took off our tops in the heat, and started to dig some more. She tied back her wavy long blonde hair because it kept getting in her face. I let Goldie use the nice shovel that I had bought earlier that week, once I had realised how deep I planned to go. I instead used my father shovel. It had a broken handle and the black paint on the wooden shaft was peeling. I couldn't let Goldie use that could I, what would she have thought of me? By mid afternoon Goldie had left, she had to get home to start dinner. I was left alone once again to carry on digging. Usually I stop by eight thirty at night, but for some reason that day I did not feel tired, and carried on well into the night. I think this will hole will be my grave, it's the right sort of size. I don't want to buried laying on my back, I want to be stood up, in a proud sort of manner. When I'm finished digging, I think it would be best to bury something in my hole. To prove how deep I got. A photo perhaps, or some milk teeth. So everyone knows that it was my hole.

Rick Springfield - Jessie's Girl

Photo of Francis Albert Sinatra taken by Bergen County, New Jersey police force in 1938 on his arrest for seduction of and the act of adultery with a married woman. No Copyright infringement intended.

Monday 14 September 2009

Do you think they're ready for Bonnie?

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I wandered through the hallway into a room full of children, immediately gravitating towards the supposed "adult section" of the room, pushing past the private eyes that watched my entrance. The line between child and adult defined with a line of vomit strewn across the floor. It was Homecoming, or Graduation, I couldn't quite remember. The Nocturnal youth lay under a net of puberty, crawling and scratching at the rope that held them down. I walked over to the caged children, "it's mind over matter". I hoped my words would give them some solace, in their time of sexual confusion. I took a seat by the breakfast bar while people jumped and stomped on the table tops and screamed and kissed. Pouring my £7 wine into a white plastic cup. An older woman approached me. She sat down next to me and we discussed my future; where I thought my life was taking me, what path should I choose. She expressed a obvious worry about the number of youths that had crawled in. I told her to lock the doors at 10:30, after that let no more enter. She calmed her down and we poured more wine into our plastic cups. She talked about Chekhov, I hadn't read any of his work but I promised I would.

Gareth Williams And Mary Currie - The Best Weapon
SALEM - Frost



Photo of Lida Baarova, 7/9/1914 in Prague. No Copyright infringement intended

Sunday 13 September 2009

European Athletics

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He wakes up- shrugs the menacing whale away- walks to the kitchen which is full of bleached, cold light- late afternoon- yawn- covered in black and grey duvet- dragged on floor- fridge light- no milk- not black coffee- he'll puke- he aches- more bed- he can't walk to the little food den, no money- too cold- he decides not to walk at all- television- low volume- a leotarded Russian foal curves slowmotionish um over high jumping bar- um, dick won't thaw- icicled scrot- she fails, the foal, the bar wobbles- the shower will be hotter- I hope it snows- he thinks- the roads will close- bed- bed- bed- he finds some bread- into the toaster- he stares at heat- his eyes hurt- cancel, cancel, cancel- toast sucks- black furry toast jumps out- drug fag!- horror outside- outside vet's in car park- men like dogs- paranoid- a question- kiss a puddle- she saves- nothing works- poor Russian girl skinning a rabbit on a frozen lake- she removes ballet slippers- smokes- slips out of tights- I'm tired- tongue out, snowflake, he thinks- cough-cough-cough- her thundering lungs as she phelgms from a tenement into a heap of dead birds- she features in a catalogue for pale, diseased Russian princes- aches- floppy cock- Mister mute unbulged- slug slump- sickly, Prozacked grey hermaphrodite- shhh, toast cold- and the lovely swimming pool girl from ages and ever ago who snogged him in the autumn- sniff- chlorinated hair- tarry Xmas light in car park- three chimes- hour- sad anorexic ballet girl in secondhand fleece- bruised thigh- breasts shushed by jumper- sulking in bed in the blue starry pyjamas waiting for the film to end- it's too long- bad broken bed- no sleep- and that fascist weird Connecticut Aryan girl- he thinks about her pug mum- weekends wasted the whole spring- engorged overture- walrus woman- he shudders- indoor tennis- scrunching and tumbling over fake grass court- commercial lighting- chilly, daughterish hug at party- Madonna video- touching her makes him homesick- he yelps- volume horror- that song sucks with its big horny saxophone howls- sax sucks- sex sucks- he failed- sleep sucks- I miss the tenderness of hands- how they join- no drugs left- avoid- not tough- not male- return to bed- under covers led by hand past all the beasts of the forest- he sleeps- at last the light dies away- turn it over- turn off.


'Corporate Leisure' by Rut Blees Luxemburg. No copyright infringement intended.

Thursday 10 September 2009

'Ennui And Malaise' (Episodes 1-4)


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'Ennui And Malaise': A late-night, low-budget teen series yoking together the cinema of John Hughes, radical French theory and avant-garde literature in a deranged aesthetic mix while exploring the sexual adventures of two lovestruck teenage waifs- the rich and miserable Alex and his sulking, brittle girlfriend Sophie- as they drag themselves through the wasteland of adolescence by getting intergalactically fucked-up, listening to an impossibly hip soundtrack of European electronica in an obscure format and talking endlessly about forgotten branches of philosophy in the gloomy kitchen of Alex's father's flat in hour-long installments which are televisual analogues to wintery ice-cream headaches induced by frost and bad drugs. A cult hit.

Episode One: Alex and Sophie go to a fancy dress party each wearing masks of the other's face, then drink far too much rum, clumsily fuck in an empty bath and pass out before a roaring fire like dosed kittens while their homosexual friend Fox reads The Story Of The Eye aloud to a mute androgyne on a brown couch. Soundtrack: 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' by James Joyce and 'Louder Than Bombs' by The Smiths. Subtitles.

Episode Two: The legendary 'Kitchen' episode. Sophie and Alex have an argument late one night over who finished the bacon. Throughout a skinny mime holds up cue cards that dictate how the viewer should feel- for example, 'Aroused' card is held aloft when he eats biscuit crumbs from her belly button, 'Culturally Aware' card is held when a knowing reference is made to Godard's 'La Chinoise'. Soundtrack: 'Jennifer' by Faust. Subtitles.

Episode Three: After a brief discourse on the misdefinition of irony at a bowling alley where Alex has to explain to his friend Stephen that having no hands at a wake for someone killed in a car crash is not of itself ironic but merely a bleak image the episode switches to focus on Sophie's trip to Brooklyn. She takes LSD in a bathroom during a thunderstorm ('Pathetic Fallacy'/ 'Foreshadowing' intertitle), hallucinates her transformation into a badger and then into a man, leading to a digression on Nietzschean 'Ubermensch' theory before she begins performing befuddled sexual favours on the L train then gets ditched at Prospect Park where the sky explodes like a massive firework. She wakes up somewhere in Bensonhurst, eating bacon on the kerb with two skinhead fascists and licking their fingers. Soundtrack: 'Threnody For Victims Of Hiroshima' by Pendericki and Fur Alina by Arvo Part. Subtitles.

Episode Four: Sophie and Alex have anal sex one overcast afternoon then go to Paris. Both listen to the new Kompakt compilation with lukewarm joy on the metro and attend a lecture held by Slovenian philosopher and guest star Slavoj Zizek on inherent fallacies in deconstruction and the pleasure of the gaze in Lynch's Blue Velvet. Then Alex gets lost in the Montparnasse Cemetery looking for Beckett's grave and Sophie steals some animal tranquilisers from a Tintin kid. They end up fucking under a denuded tree. Contains a famous re-enactment of Cocteau's Orphee at the end. Soundtracked by 'Tigermilk' by Belle And Sebastian.


Photograph of Chloe Sevigny by Terry Richardson. No copyright infringement intended.

Wednesday 9 September 2009

The Erotic Adventures of Charles and Isobel

A wealthy industrialist couple sprawled on a beast-legged futon sob over a new video that came this overcast morning by airplane from the pornography district in working-class Sweden. The film considers the relationship between a 'young fox' and amateur pornographer, Charles, and a 'soft swan', the glorious French literature student, Isobel. The film opens in a riot of tumescence as the young lovers complete their first sexual encounter sitting on a scowling hill, kissing each other with blistered lips, then lying fucked under a duvet that covers the gradual oranging of the afternoon. Charles decides to switch from amateur to mature sexual adventure by arranging a few letters. Following hours of late-night mischief with a laptop stolen from a Dutch architecture student and Isobel's correction and conjugation of a feast of French verbs they publish a bilingual guide to the joys of sexual slumming which receives a tide of lukewarm shrugs from pornography critics and contains a collection of explicit diagrams and instructions using words like 'feather' and 'smother' narrated in a chilly, after-orgasm voice by Charles in English and a nimble, gleeful purr by Isobel en francais in simultaneous audio tracks. Unflustered by the rejection of their guide- This must be another world, one of the industrial couple thinks, such diagram and direction texts are so popular- Charles and Isobel adopt a more cultured aesthetic. In a delirious montage one fuzzy summer of amyl nitrate and animal play transforms into a miserable winter of bored fetishism and Cold War Polish opera attendance. While rubbing Isobel's bum and standing in a puddle on the pavement at intermission Charles has his great idea reflected by a sudden explosion of naughty horns from the orchestra.


'The Erotic Adventures Of Charles And Isobel' is the couple's illegitimate son; a bastard text of exquisitely mangled woodcuts of Nordic children's stories that deforms the scenes of wizards, blizzards, whales and woodsmen into 'delicious dances of smut' that become incredibly popular. Charles thus directs Isobel and himself in a film where their own midwinter meeting is unfussily repeated through the pornography lover's familiar layer of digital fuzz. The industrialists discard this repetition in narrative as an opportunity to make coffee and kiss so they miss: the innocent Isobel cadging a cigarette from the trustfund princeling Charles at a bleak midwinter train station. (A subtle deviation from the original there as that first encounter was faraway from frost, trains and fags and occurred on that hill during a heatwave) and falling into conversation with him and quickly- after Isobel's 'sweet rabbit-feet' thump through the rotten fence- fucking in the tall, sweaty grass of a layby, cars droning past, the sky grey and blue, the moon slobbering over their skin. The juxtaposition of motorways and sex is explained by Charles to Isobel during a re-take as a reference to Ballard's masterful Crash which the real couple later read aloud to each other in bed before nodding off mid-sentence, one of Charles' hands paused over Isobel's left breast as if performing a spell. They walk away from the site of their unhealthy, metallic sex the couple walk through fat dull city drizzle, to flat, to gloomy kitchen, removal of dog-scented coats then half-dressed sex over the groaning cooker until legs too tired. moval of dog-scented coats and socks then half-dressed sex over the groaning cooker several times until eyes too tired, too much secreted. He dashed out to a toy shop for twenty eight minutes while she fiddled with the television, tried on some fur-trimmed boots and stomped around the kitchen nude pretending to be a Russian spy, then consumed all the milk and biscuits with lightning speed, was struck with hiccoughs and lay on the sofa, massaging her stomach and talking to it in a soothing voice one would use for a rain-soaked kitten. When the timid tummy feline was eased she used the phone to call Alex from the stairwell who sold the drugs. He came by train with a shaggy-coated Swiss girl named C- he met at the needle exchange last week, used the toilet as C- conversed with our girl in half-breed French/ Flemish about her hiccoughs, then sold her a small bag of colourful pearls which thundered through her stomach superfast so that when her boy returned with his stuff from the toy shop (antlers with synthetic snow, a plastic crown, a bag of glow-in-the-dark stars and magic sequins and a duvet which detailed the constellations in adherence with Ptolemy) she was, how do you say, fucked up? They constructed a den in the dark, snogged and fucked, then passed out, waking just as breakfast began. A freezing and delirious Isobel, overcome by Alex's incredible chemicals, had insisted Charles let her sleep clothed as she was, Russian spy hat, snow-dusted antlers and everything, and then said he had to do something about the heater tomorrow and then murmured various French curses before flopping into the bed, aglow in the chilly winter light, slumped across the constellation of Lupus. Charles was frying out of his skull because he had a pearl on the stairwell with Alex which tasted like bacon and crackled in his stomach like thunder. He tried to argue the huge, aggressive cat which hissed at him on the bed but it was much louder and more eloquent than he was. He thought about fetching a broom from that cupboard which the black kids snuck into to huff glue but realised, No, I can't do that walk now, and began barking which would surely spook the cat away, out the window or into the corner, but the cat began hissing and screeching even more and then suddenly turned away from him and curled up on the bed. He realised then at once that the bed was also the sky. He howled, fled the bedroom, smashed his foot against a table and collapsed. The fridge buzz began taunting him and so he returned to the bedroom. He shook the cat awake and climbed into its paws for warmth. The cat rocked him back and forth and held him above the stars. I don't ever want to fall, he thought. Fading stars spiked across the window when he woke up and Isobel lay in a heap, her antlers snapped and fake snow scattered over her cheek, lost in mutter-land. Charles turned on the television and drifted through the waking stations: testcards, voids, ice skating, dead lakes, a cow... but then there was too much light. Charles phoned someone to fix the heater but the man who ordinarily fixed the heater was away of course, because, Duh, said Isobel, drowning in her duvet, They always are. The windows groaned, aching against their frames, all stiffened by frost. Isobel breathed on the window and drew her face, delicately, slowly, softly, her hair glistening against the icy glass. She watches a small girl wearing a cape disappear into the snow. Pigeons scatter. Charles climbs back into the bed. Isobel finishes her face, falls back into sleep. The sleep falls on them like frost. Light rioting overhead.

give a fuck' but was really, at that very second, at exactly the same the Thundercats theme tune roared in lurid 80s ecstasy, its visuals casting a red beam over Isobel's pale, sicklied face, standing, bruised and booted in the car park of a housing block eighteen miles away, barking at his weary wife about money or cleaning the kitchen or remembering to do something which nobody could hear because this shitty silver car was heading straight for a ditch, and he, the man who fixed the heater, shouted, trying to be heard, but his weary wife in her inherited nightie embroidered with a naval insignia said, You're not much of a Romeo, lit a fag and drew the window narrower, to stop the cold air coming in because it was upsetting their daughter, standing bleary-eyed and breathless expecting breakfast and fearing her ringworm medicine, but the cigarette made her cough, underground pool hall.
Remember 'Rejections' file.
Sleep on him like frost.

Tuesday 8 September 2009

I Was Only Sleeping...

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You get on, hopefully not the man you destroyed last week. No, it isn't. Find yourself a seat and sit down. Quietly. This is not the place for chat unless you are over 60 or insane. Sometimes you read and sometimes you listen and sometimes both. Your mind wanders. Funny how moments of inspiration come to you at the most inconvenient times. There is no pen and paper here and don't you dare ask to borrow some. A glance through a pub window shows a nanosecond's footage of a intimate kiss, they could be married, they could be brother and sister, but in that moment, in that split second, they are stripped of all being and become merely a beautiful image. Often, standing, or sitting, as a bystander is more worthwhile than acting that moment. You're distracted but you're nearly home. Walking on hind legs causes memory loss. You rush but the words are gone. Only the unshakable image remains.

Fever Ray - Keep The Streets Empty For Me
Vibes - Shake It Off
David Byrne and Brian Eno - Qu'ran

Image by Wieslaw Walkuski, King Lear