Not-Writing

*****

The most frightening thing is that I have nothing to say. Not even nothing 'left', whatever that means, but that really I have always said 'nothing', I think, and I'd welcome someone leaving something but they won't, will they? No, not likely, no. I haven't written anything here for a long time because it would be too hard, too much work and I don't feel that pang anymore- this is not my voice saying this, not really, here I am, not writing again, not me, not here, clipped by a dash. Something could be dredged up, no? One of those awful bits of pseudo-French theory from a winter or two ago or a brittle little Beckett impression, shivering, dumb, soaked in- no, fuck it. And what happened to the music? That was always the reason for writing to me, in this endlessly friendly, forgiving white space: I, with careful girlish hands, lovesick and stoned, carry records through the night, without the ordinary clumsiness, stuttering or- no, fuck it. That was never the reason for writing. It was only to show off and say very inconsequential things in a very grand way, in this voice acquired by eavesdropping, thieving, assiduously raking over books by dark, haunting the grounds of Beckett's estate, standing at the bottom of Burroughs' stairwell, making sure he's nodded out before I stumble out towards- and put an ellipsis in to show you can't keep this up, break the text apart like... no!- Alice, did the telephone go? No, not tonight. See, I can't keep this up, juggling, dancing, shaking, an agony which is- ended up a dash. So what? A shower of stars.

Charlie, you did all this before, you know? All this self-conscious stopping and starting, shaking and waking, it's not new, not even for you.

*****

Why did I stop writing here when it provided me with an 'outlet', if we want to use the embarrassing term which is not clinical, not even referential, just part of a larger outlet itself, the 'waste product' of a long, long pipe. An outlet this is not, never was, no. I never had anything to say which might be considered, in the confines of this ugly, supposedly open, non-clinical term, part of an 'outlet', my blood letting, my letter writing, my not writing, never an outlet, not, all the things I wanted to let out would not come, I never hit the vein, my exhausted words, my exhausted veins- I said that once- let's forget, put it out. Writing was never an outlet. An agony which is closed, stitch by stitch, by someone else, sealed up inside you, howling, waiting to be murdered, its claws against the interior of your stomach, torn out, soaked in you, yes, and then suffocated and devoured, still shaking, my poor wolf, met by a kiss, buried by an ellipsis... In the margins of everything all the time, someone was writing, I never knew what. Another essay about doubt.

****

I am also trying to stop this whole horrible heap of words from slipping into the dark and I know that even as I hate it, I am still clinging to it, holding the poor monster closer to me than anything else, as it claws (again), bites (afresh), howls (a loud, piteous howl) and placing these parentheses around it, carelessly all over everywhere, yes, like hives full of wasps (or something better: little hutches, houses, tiny moons which keep it howling, turn the tide against it, make it sick and miserable, insane (that's what parentheses are, I allude elusively, so clever: moons, 'lunulae'- crescent-shaped objects or marks (O.E.D.) The hive bursts, the moon goes down, and stung and sunburnt, the monster escapes as usual and I call out, call out, nothing but echo, echo, and marks I don't recognise, not for a second, on the surface of the page like a bruise, coming towards me like (who cares?) No voice in my head to even read them back as if I've had a brain injury, demented, mute, uncertain of where or who I am? 'Everything we write: remains'. Ending everything with a question mark but knowing it's all unfinished in the end anyway, isn't it?

*****

I'd like to slow down, stop saying 'I' so much, in my monomaniacal intensity but dragging, listen, please, 'I' around all the time, an idiot at my ankle, is so tiring, like conversation with a donkey once, so scared by moonlight, pleading with the slow-witted donkey in this barn, idiot talking to ass under the stars, Why are we so tired? Embrace me? My arms around the donkey's neck. 'I'm so tired of sighing, Lord, let it be night'. Take me out to the lake, let me hold onto you, please, with my hands that can't do anything and my ribcage which won't disappear, my eyes that can't look, all broken, and let me be held, please, until it's all gone, all dark, for the first time I am not joking, all mouth, drown, disappear. No, I am still kicking through the waves, stuck in the womb and I am still kicking and I'd like to slow down. Dragging as if ashore, idiot and donkey there, slipping into the dark, slightly feverish, you remember? Ashore, falling all over the place, hold me up, rock me back and forth, I hope no one ever reads this. Later the idiot points towards the night and the donkey names the stars, one by one. You mutter, I'm quiet. This sudden feeling of falling in love is frightening.

* * *

So I had broken out of anti-writing even if I wasn't writing. I'm so sick of reading this writing and writing this writing which is entirely concerned with the impossibility of writing, but soon it becomes the only way to make a mark. I don't think I could ever conjure up a story and I wouldn't be able to sustain it if I did, impossibly, and I'd just have to litter stars about the page to prove the whole thing was full of mistakes, missing bits, exploding as it was written. Writing against itself, sentence by sentence gradually, then vanishing entirely, right at the end in that long white gasp. All the good anti-writing has been done by Derrida, or Blanchot, or Beckett, or- almost all writing is anti-writing in a way, I stutter, I fumble. But I'm explicitly against or for the moment abandoning writing which is 'about myself' in this strict and tedious way because I'd like to be quiet for a while, knowing I've been quiet for a long time. I'm not being clear so I will try again but the whole thing has been so trying, I feel I have tried so hard for nothing, not even ink, but a complete work of not-writing which is still just electronic, imaginary and ridiculous. Trying again, much of the work here is- too much of it feels like a game, insincere or metafictional. And there is that very trying tone of detachment which I do not like, as if I were behind a pane of glass or else a masochistic clown. And I shudder at my pretence, now, when all the intensity is gone, the fire going out, making a monster out of my measly doubt, knowing nothing. Ending here, except there will be more, always the threat of more, coming to light now.

****

New Year. Thoughts on Adultery from a loveless man.

The sick feeling of betrayl slipped down his throat like syrup declining down into the stomach, churning and pickling organs. Soon it boiled its way through the stomach wall, hacking a path through his veins like a child with a kitchen knife. Corrupting his blood and blurring his vision. Images of her like a vivid assault of his senses, the smell, the touch, how it felt to have his hand on the small of her back. Confusion gave birth to anger, which in turn grew into dispair. Not so much at the event itself, or even the two particiapting parties; but more the sense of his helplessness. The enduring notion that he could do nothing, like the weightlessness of falling.

The thought of her hazelnut skin drapped over his eyes, turning the world a sepia tone. He listened for the silence, but the quiet buzz of the moniter turned into a scream as a stop motion film of abstractions flicked through his mind. Images of her. Images of them. He was getting ill, the dulling effects of the throat lonzenge he took three hours prior had finally worn off. He could feel himself melting into the bed sheets, soon to be a damp stain of indifference. Evaporating and diffusing through the air, choking people with memories of their youth. Memories of what they could have been. Memories of what they could have changed.

"I should have said something when i was 16" he said to himself. "Before this beast evolved into something I couldn't understand let alone tame." No his own manifestation leered and snarled at him. Baring it's horrible teeth, and gnawing at the synapses in his head. There was no plan, no system of destruction, the match had been lit and subsequently the fuse. All there was left to do was pick through the bone and flesh to piece together some kind of semblance of exsistence. Could there be life in the fall out? Deformed bodies, unaturally twsited and contorted wandering through hallways of mirrors. Only witnessing the reflection they want to see. Thats what life would be like from now on, how could he face them again. How could he face anyone again. Knowing what he knows, like a bloodstained epiphany laughing at him.



photograph by Nigel Tomm

Snow

The phone woke me. It was winter, I think, and the beginning of the night. I climbed from the bed. I couldn't find the phone, I couldn't find the light. I knocked over an old chair, it banged. Good old wooden floor. I tried to follow the sound. I stalked around the room, upsetting ashtrays and piles of books. It continued to ring for a long time and I started to hate the sound. I pawed and dug, sifted and sorted. I'm probably going through the same things over and over again, I thought, not sifting or sorting at all but making it worse. I'm kneeling in the dark, ruining things. And the phone has been ringing for too long. Is there another phone, and who would call and what can I say? I don't know the things to say and it's probably plugged into the wrong thing. No one is there. It's a joke. It's the company calling to say everything must be torn down, torn out, torn- there! There. I found the phone, growling underneath an old coat. I hit it. I spoke carefully. I don't like speaking on the phone and when this call came I hadn't spoken to anyone for a long time. I can't come to the phone, I'd shout from the top of the stairs down to no one at all.

- Hello? That was the correct word.

- Hello. A girl's voice. I coughed. I walked around the dark again. I fumbled for the light, tapping and striking at the wall. Thuds, buried sounds, hollow groans and hisses from the pipes. She started to speak in a rehearsed voice. I thought of an actress talking to a mirror.

- It's Alice. We need something for the new book.

I found the light. The bulb faltered and then flickered on. Weak yellow light filled the room. My stomach hurt. I wanted to smoke. Alice is a browneyed name. I remember her- partially a bird, soft as a seal pup, smoking in the corridor, sobbing on the phone, sitting on her father's bed.

- But I don't- I shoved some bad work off the desk, looking for cigarettes. I gutted the old coat. I gutted another, found something in a pocket. I don't work anymore, I can't work anymore, I said. I had my cigarettes and my matches. I tilted the phone to strike the match to light my cigarette. It was disgusting.

- That's what Max said. I still don't know who Max is. But please, she said, her voice softening. The mirror disappeared. It can be very, very short. Tiny. A bit of a dream flickered behind my eyeballs: a river, a long black river at night, full of sludge and muck. This is my fallow period. Smoke poured out of me. I rubbed my eyeball into its socket. It began to hurt.

- Shhh.... she said.

I felt the river against my legs. And I think I hung up.

It was snowing. I rummaged through a few bags. No biscuits left. And no drugs left. My shoes will fall off in the snow, I thought, and my coat isn't thick enough. I remembered a film about an orphan dying in the snow and then someone coming and stealing his shoes. The light still worked, glowing happily in the ceiling.

It was freezing outside. Rubbish lined the streets- heaps of swollen black bags that no one can collect. Men with kits and masks came to my room after I refused to remove my rubbish. I was lying down and there was no reason to move. I told them to fuck off. I won't pay the fine, I can't. I'm poor. They took my TV which I didn't care about and wanted to get rid of anyway. When they came for my electricity and gas I moved into another room, which was empty, and stole that tenant's light and heat. Then I started moving all my old work into that room. I left my clothes because the other tenant had kept his there. If I'd moved into a woman's room I'd probably put on her clothes and swan around as a woman for a while, until I was beaten up or raped or bored. I could probably move from room to room forever and no one would know. I like my room so much, though, and I told Alice whenever she rang that all I wanted was another room, more rooms, bigger, smaller, emptier, older.

I walked to and from the supermarket. I only ate biscuits and I only drank milk. I really liked meat but I hated my kitchen. I watched endless sties of bacon sizzling in the pan and then, close to a seizure, hurled it at the window where it would settle, sticking because of all the grease. I like oil, too, I like the way it crackles. One of my shoes came off in the snow but I carried on trudging, holding it in one hand, watching my poor foot turn red and then eventually blue. I had no idea where my post-box was. I muttered like a character in a film, I know it's somewhere around here. I wondered if it was on the other side of the woods but then I started worrying about crows and ravens and wolves. If I walked through there, animals would devour me whole- at least, the little of me that was left. Snow made it impossible to tell where anything was. A blank, dead world, silent and without light, the sky and the earth the same colour: the earth of the sky entirely grey.

I think I was blind for a spell- the snow kept falling and swirling and went in my eyes. When my sight returned I was still struggling along the road. The light was no different and the snow went on swirling and falling. I staggered around, pausing to be sick and then to smoke and then to be sick again. I dragged my black foot through the snow, holding onto my shoe, and then fell down again. This went on for a while. Then the snow began to thin and the light weakened but I could walk again. Soon I found the building where my post was kept, a building exactly like mine. I trudged towards it but there was a hideous white dog blocking my way. It started barking at me, its teeth, all yellow and bared, barking over and over, sounding like the phone, a horrid black fuzz around its mouth and its useless eyes working back and forth. So I kicked it. It snarled and then started to quiver, as if it was plugged into a machine. It crackled. I walked forward and it leapt at me. It held onto my arm, making a very low throbbing sound. I struck it with the shoe until it fell away and then kicked it in the stomach, all the time very sad because I never wanted to wound a dog, even if it was white and hideous. The snow continued to fall. I stood there and smoked.Then slowly, softly the dog came to its feet. It rose like a marionette. It stared me. We entered the building together and fetched my post. I threw the dog a black biscuit and then, under the cold grey light, took a large, delicious dose. I like to feel the drug settling in my stomach, falling on me and slowing me down, wearing me out. Alice sent me a photograph of a chair. I walked back with the dog. I have no idea how long it took.

For the next three days I sat in my room and finished the package, gorging until it was impossible to move. My face and legs were totally numb, the light was dead and I was permanently half-asleep, caught on the narcotic drift. I would walk to and from the window, watch snow settle on the road, see the men work hopelessly at it with shovels, listen to the television talking in other rooms and count the red lights as they glimmered and danced in the dark. I would stroke the dog and let the room slowly fill with ash. The snow didn't stop and soon, the windows were impossible to open. Frost etched on all the glass. Children singing songs would drift past my door and I would climb back into my nest and feel myself floating on the big black broken glass of the sea. I can still hear the waves.

Eventually Alice phoned again. I surfaced, the drugs gone, the biscuits eaten, to that horrid skinny ringing sound. The dog feasted on the stuffing of my old chair as I sifted and sorted again, my feet tarred and sticky from all of his shit. I found the phone.

- Hello? I said, rubbing my foot into the wall which groaned.

- Hello. Do you have any work?

- No, I can't work. I kicked the dog to stop it stuffing itself. I was worried he would eat until his seams split.

- That's what I guessed would happen which is why I sent you the chair.

I muttered something, watching as the dog ate and ate.

- I'll interview you in my building. I can pay you.

- I only want another room, I said, again. A little room, a space, a kennel, because it's impossible for me to work anymore.

- Do you think, that old crackle covering her voice, you'd ever be able to work again?

- No, I'm finished. It's over. I read, I sleep, I eat, and all of that's hard enough, I can fatten up if I want. I can die. I don't want to work.

I hung up.

She still sends me photographs, cuttings and cassettes. They are in a heap next to the dog which ate until it was stuffed. She sent me a photograph of herself and sometimes I think about her, or masturbate, or she's the subject of an uneasy or desperate dream but it passes. We're always by that river, walking quietly, the cold tightening around our bones, our bodies shutting down. I closed the blinds and removed the lightbulb. Now I lie in the dark and smoke. I'm quiet. The snow continues to fall.

Disappearing

What I'd like to say now, in my angelhood, beautifully-fledged, pearls for teeth, gold dust for breath and absolutely NOTHING between my legs- a void, a hole, an exit, a nothing, sweet nothing at all- is about before, when a sickly slug shrivelled against my cold thighs.

That is the pretty way of saying I am a transsexual, of saying they took my head and made a nose from it, took my miserable thigh muscles and made shy, withered tits and- yes, yes- tore off my cock, cut and shaped the poor servant into a pleat and took all its roots and goo and all the red, foul, filthy shit inside it that I wanted to cut off at birth with the doctor's grinning scissors and then tried to bite off with my milk teeth in the bath with my sister (I had void envy, penis anxiety) and, yes, they disappeared it. It's a decommissioned spy, dead, once lurking in a space above my intestines, incubated in my bloated guts, long abandoned, now gone, gone, gone. Allgone. First thing I ever said but it took forever-ever to happen.

What a grand entrance, oh, flashbulb burnt out, honey. Look how I ended up uglier even than before, a swollen, bleary-eyed beast caged in a high-rise, fucked and drifting down the infinite green gloom of the hallway, hunted by gangs of anaemic skinhead children smoking cigarettes and pretty girls throwing glitter in my face as I sob, poor tormented Tiresias, oh, yes, the tower block's anguished, ancient Orlandon't, expiring, tears echoing down the stairwell. No, but you would've seen seen me on a late night broadcast when you were stoned, nodding out to soft jazz and Ceefax, badly made black n' white freeze-frames of my face (that hideous, miserable couple, before and after) cut and rushed between footage of a riot in Chicago in 1994 or slow motion CCTV shots of kids on methedrine stealing cars. And I would have a pseudonym: become again, another, finally, unfussily extinguished phoenix, I would be Girl A, no, no, Patient A, never Girl A, no. I need a pseudonym, like one of Warhol's girls. Be like Holly Woodlawn, trilling on the big black telephone, snorting speed off silver foil for breakfast as Bobby D. stares at the camera, hollow-headed Dylan scoring horse on the fire escape before walking to the cemetery with Allen- Edie, Edie, babe, you seen my copy of Time? (And one of us crows, 'Yeah, it wounds all heals!') Oh, but we pity Edie, stroke and mother her, our poor androgyne, emaciated speed freak, cooing, coming down, lost on a pillow in the kitchen. Poor little rich girl. Our walking abortion. But all that glory is gone, lost in that terrifying lap dissolve into the '80s, girls clinging to the ghost of an image, disappearing, fading into bad blood, New York winter, taking new names.

I wasn't ghost-written or imagined by a phantom. I'm not hiding, fake, finished like a book. Neon and ink names are nothing against flesh- the skin, bile, tissue and bone in everything. Girls name themselves after birds and famous tigers: no name reaches for the beauty of flesh and its soft, slow decay. What about my condition's name? I reach for the textbook and I shudder. Did I have dysphoria? Oh, yes, a million times yes, a brain in a unfamiliar skull and eventually, a dead shell. But look, look out the window! 'Condition' is inadequate. It was not a particular 'thing', or a singular residue, trauma or bruise that caused me to sob, shriek and tear at the skin which I just bragged about. There was nothing about me, howling, helpless in my hair-shirt, that could be fixed and corrected in a shot. Look out the window, over the car park: see the family in coats, cold, holding each other, walking to their car. And nothing else around at all. I don't know their names, I can barely see them, can't feel them, and if I spoke- I wouldn't, I wouldn't. It is exactly that. I was disconnected from everything: nothing had the right name. Existence is the condition and the root, the home of the disease and the sickness. Nothing else at all- all inside burned and buried. Ashes.

Fourteen Howls

First howl begin like this: Say I wasn't even tired, but louder like faraway, I wasn't even tired- howl- so skinny, gaunt, a ghost, yes, louder, first howl ends like that.

Second howl is an image: Starlight scarred across the glass. Girl flinches against the light.

Third howl on tenth floor: Miserable juveniles stealing from refrigerators, fucking on freezing floors, still scared of dogs. A howl echoes at that height. Sleet or frost on window. If you fall from the window you become an angel.

Forth howl is American woman howl: 'If it wasn't for bad luck I'd have no luck at all.'

Fifth howl responds: 'Huh?' The rabbit scratches his head, slumps against the kerb, slurps his milkshake and gives the ground a good thump. The rabbit tells someone his mother died. Listen: the silver crackles around Cassiopeia, the smog groans through the trees, and gradually all the light is exhausted.

Sixth howl is a separate howl, it concerns everywhere I have never been: Borges' house, Auschwitz, a school in a devastated district of Detroit, that abandoned room full of children's things in Bristol, Cemeterie Saint (I forget) in Paris, a television studio, various relations' graves and the woods. Where are the woods exactly? And I have never been to Kent. This list would go on forever.

Seventh howl- the halfway through howl: Two wolves have a conversation near a supermarket.

-Have you ever tried to kill yourself?

- Yes.

- How?

- I know it was tranquillisers but I do not remember so I guess really I do not know but the records say that and when I woke up there was this growling, grumbling low in my stomach that really hurt and the postman came, no, the doctor came, and said, That is because of the pills. I nodded, I did not want to speak, I was sick of words. I'm so anxious about words.

Interference: The wolves didn't say anything, they can't. Well, they can but we don't understand. I saw a wolf at a zoo once and she did not howl at all. Her eyes were pinned like they were marbles. She didn't produce a breath. Perhaps it was a model I stroked and not a wolf at all.

Eighth howl is from a starving body: Not- I don't, I didn't- I practised fasting because it's howling- it's holy. I was never, um, diagnosed an anorexic girl, and I never said anything- but I felt there was a hole there- a big, black hole, and I thought starvation would block it. Plug it. I didn't- it... and now the whole is bigger than it was, before.

Ninth howl tells a lie: Certain swans are richer than the entire Danish royal family because swans have their own economy based on things children forget in the park.

Tenth howl takes MDMA: Look at that light falling. I don't want it to stop. Oh, there's another wave. Yes, yes. Shhh....

Eleventh howl from a mother: Please, come home, come home, come home.

Twelfth howl is silent and allows for peace between the calls and lets us observe the inclination and the glittering of our stars.

Thirteenth howl is from Robert Wyatt, 1990: 'There's a lot of words that don't exist yet and I can't be bothered to wait for them to exist.'

Last howl end like this: Children always play angels. Are we anxious from them to die? So we pretend they're dead, or faraway, archived in the sky, at work in the huge black void, the great, cold night? All angels once were drowned girls, overdosing Ophelias- teenage suicides- miserable, brittle boys who faded out in cold bathrooms or stopped, asleep, and felt their voices disappearing in the dark, or exhausted their veins in flats, leapt from roofs, sick from paint, starved, collapsed, crashed, cracked... yes, last howls late at night. End like that.

Rabbit and Bear on a Rock by Paul McCarthy and frontispiece to Alice's Adventures In Wonderland by John Tenniel. No copyright infringement intended.

Failure (of a tree)

'If I say 'tree' you think of branches, leaves and perhaps, the things which might pause upon a branch or pass through the leaves like pigeons or a torch beam or the breeze and then you might imagine the surface of the trees, their skin, which is normally mutilated by men, with woodsmen, those people that tear open a wolf's stomach in your childhood, cutting cavities into the tree's side or children carving messages with little knives, as if the trees were writing to each other, saying I adore you, I fuck you, you hurt me, and you imagine all the sounds which have drifted through the tree and coiled around each branch- all the sirens, all the shouts, all the sad songs of the rooftop wires and the sobs of the distant ships- and all the animals which bristled against the bark- the stray cats, starving foxes, soaking, startled dogs- and all the trees constructed from the fabric of sleep which contain dead children or strange voices, or aren't trees at all but only smoke, only light, only something slowly exploding, coming out as rain, emerging as a star, emitted as a thought, as a spike, a strike against the black, shutdown sleeping surface of your eyeball, before I mention their territorial purpose, their transformation into fire and their gradual manipulation into a material, like fur or straw, for housing, and ask what voice would a tree have and how its speech would begin and question what exactly it would mean to have roots, what exactly it would mean to have no voice at all. And you might think of night in the space of imaginary trees, our arboretum bordering the city park, stained with light, the sky swollen with smoke, and everyone all around, following the falling sound of the television, hunting through the feverish dark, monitored by owls, fleeing the fire. Nothing at all is lost, trudging through paths and hollows and patches where the branches conduct voices like there is a choir, half-asleep, and as if every branch and voice there were only part of a phone-call, occurring each cold and lonely night.'

What I would call a failure, others never even described.

Beautiful Sheffield by Tacita Dean. No copyright infringement intended.

Ennui and Malaise Episodes 5-8

The second series of the programme famously attacked by mainstream media as 'a toxic mix of drugs, drones, deviant sex, anti-social behaviour, pointless hedonism, hopeless 'lefty' politics, leaden symbolism and teenage decadance'.

Continental philosopher, guest star and fan Slavoj Zizek wrote about the series extensively in a monograph called 'Black Milk: Television and Toxicity' published by a small Belgian press.

'Whatever one might like to say about this series- that it is indulgent, that it is pretentious, that nobody does anything but take drugs and have sex and so on, should reconsider their interpretation. The series does not say 'This is the Real', it is against the Real. Everything that happens in Ennui and Malaise is a projection of fantasy so that the person denying these images is immediately disavowing their own fantasies which involve exactly the same exhaustive explorations of sexuality, destructive devotion to libido and stuff like that.'

Episode 5: The famous New Year episode. Alex and Sophie endure the first hour of the New Year at their friend's massive townhouse in Wimbledon. Sophie sits watching hip hop videos with a pair of oversize pigeon wings tied to her back, icicled cocaine and snot hanging from her pretty nose. A gang of underfed art-school girls who talk like they're performing Einstein on the Beach make intimations of boredom throughout. Meanwhile Alex lies in a bath wearing a plastic crown, fucked out of his face on 2-CI and repeatedly touching his hands and the pale surface of the bath while someone with a megaphone recites the lyrics to Respect by Biggie Smalls. Fox, that triumphant homosexual, returns, makes a joke about getting his own spin-off on the annexed tennis courts, does a bit of coke and then gets his 'Alf' sucked by a ataraxic blonde girl who bobs her head to the rhythm of Ivor Cutler's mournful harmonium. Soundtrack: 'Heartbreaker' Maria Carey and Jay Z, 'Heartbroken' by T-2, 'Well Tuned Piano' by La Monte Young and Gruts by Ivor Cutler. Subtitles.

Episode 6: While playing The Game of Death one Saturday afternoon Alex and Sophie decide that they wish to be Situationists. They record an episode of Ren and Stimpy which they then talk over, transforming Stimpy's destruction of the lummox's hang nail into a scene where the sleeping pig of bourgeois territorialism is being slaughtered for his sins. Frequent shots of the skinny couple bathed in cold, ghosty TV light. Soundtrack: 'Broken English' by Marianne Faithfull.

Episode 7: Sophie's sister, Alice, returns from Iceland. The girls flick through magazines, smoke weed, meet Fox at a Kingston underpass where he is snogging a soldier, walk near the sea, go charity shopping, get fuzzy on the kerbs, score some drone shortly before it is illegalised and then try and sleep in the cinema. Fox gets arrested for holding a policeman's cock during an interview while Sophie and Alice climb out a bathroom window, squelch across the winter earth, finish a joint that crackles like glass, steal bikes and sleep in Hyde Park. Alex is in Bristol, shooting heroin, convinced he is dead. Soundtrack: 'Ari's Song' by Nico, 'Too Many Creeps', The Bush Tetras, 'Beat Bop', Rammellzee and K Rob, 'Christmas Time Is Here' by Vince Guraldi. Subtitles.

Episode 8: Reading their dialogue off cue cards held by a skinhead, Alex and Sophie have an argument which often falters or fails entirely. During these frequent silent passages Alex re-enacts Tilda Swinton's breakdown at the end of The Last of England, each time more and more distressed. They conclude the argument eventually, undress, bite, spit, suck and spank each other. Sophie feeds Alex honey until he throws up. She tongues him desperately straightaway afterwards. Soundtrack: Ravi Shankar's work on 'Alice in Wonderland'. Subtitles.

Images: Chloe Sevigny photographed by Terry Richardson and Franny and Zooey poster by Will Holden.