TRULY SMASHED AND BLOCKED!

First wishes of the New Year come true: Wait for a day in bed and a week comes along to put you on your supine spine. I managed to work up quite a temperature towards the end of last week, without quite reaching grand-guignol self-pity and horrific spewing. Little victories must be cherished. It means my furthest wanderings have been around the heavensmouth stretch of Dalston between the Rio Cinema, which looms like a soft sainted needle, blue and beautiful, and the branch of Blockbuster video opposite, whose exterior has the design (to my mind) of the flat-rooved monoliths that line every enormo-street I saw in LA, a city that apparently has no centre, just roads leading places. The Dalston Blocky, car-park perennially flooded, might suffer in comparison with the twinkling cinema in it's environs: Unlike the dame-old Rio, giggling girlishly with age like a chanteuse who knows her good side, Blockbuster is eager but frayed; A monument to the recent past that no-one looks at; the boyband past their peak that people listen to vaguely, as their songs have a robust functionality, a use, but whom too few will miss or seek to ram into nostalgic polls in the future; Their eyes seemingly on the prize but hiding a small heart flailing for a recharge.

To my mind, Blockbuster Video haunts like recent histories, a sinking reality no-one has the measure of yet, not like penny-dreadfuls, The Falklands and cholera. Inside, infernal concussions rack the shelves: Norris, Hewitt and Gellar in the 3 for £18, Vin van Diesel in the 2 for tens, 'thinking man's action hero' not being a coveted epithet, one he quickly shirked with a series of filmic inanities, all sarky hubbub with fries. How does the colour scheme, that primary yellow and blue, seem so old? (and that meaningless tagline, now gone- 'Wow, What a Difference!') Here it covers everything like a faded gauze, except the floor which greys into black by the doorway. This week, sponsored by a bounty of unused nectar vouchers, which means free rentals, I traced every wall of that place; from the amped-up Galaxian clone on the X-box Ubermachine, buzzing and fizzing at the uniformed kids gathered around, to the embarrassed shards of some momentumless eternal sale, the choicest cuts of which the staff themselves ransacked months ago. Jurassic Park plays on the screens in there most days, a compromise between the bloodlust of the staff and concerns for the kids with their Mums, but seeming contemporous with the scene; wild and sharp as duckbills in 1993, tired and unwired now. Sometimes the sound of the televisions doesn't work. Usually it does, but the often picture hurdles awkwardly. The second screen at the back never works now, meaning that the booming sonic reports of Spielberg's T-Rex, arrive without audio-visual accompaniment, like the gunshot-like sounds heard in cities that children are told are backfiring cars.

Chain stores serve up certain piognancies. My first heartbreak was outside a McDonalds; every branch recalls this somehow, in lurid waking-dream imperfection (every one being slightly more unsatisfying than the last, every one equally horribly lit). I saw a girl from my class, aged eleven, whose countenance was worshipped by parents and teachers alike. She was held up as a hard-working example of virtuous achievement, but she'd slept with nearly every boy in the sixth-form by the time she was thirteen. 'I touched her erogenous here' one said as he crossed ther threshold of McDonalds Nuneaton, and that stuck in my skull ever since.

I moved to Watford in the year they built the Harlequin shopping Centre, 1994. It was my sixteenth birthday week. My first sight of the Harlequin was under cover of darkness, and it shone like a fort on top of the hill, full of lustrous promises of bored afternoons and tetchy, unsatisfied mini-romances with passing teenage girls. Outside, stood Blockbuster, housed, bizarrely, in a huge glass pyramid. When I saw it I believed it to be the mark of a crowning dream; it was a glamorous sentry, catching sunsets and pretending not to eye Hertfordshire shoppers as they slipped off the motorway. It quickly became apparent that it was a white elephant, an absurdity. The most stunning new architecture for miles couldn't catch a cold. The Pyramid curse. It's folly was in it's positioning. On a chaotic ring-road, with a tiny car-park that was impossible to swing into at the pace the cars would be travelling at, it soon became little more that a hollow beacon. Customers couldn't get to it. It didn't last too long as a Blockbuster, never threatening to make any money, but long enough for me to spend many Saturdays idling in it's aisles and in it's suspended mezzanine in the top of the pyramid, flicking through dated 18s and hoping to bump into Kym, who is now my wife. Being a sunny employee, she was duty-bound to say hello. Knowing that she was in my school, I'd listen to her smalltalk for signs that she might be acknowledging that she recognised me; I'd read her expression like tea-leaves, divining readouts and informations that may or may not have been sent by the user. I'd search the rows of cases for a line to feed her, look for a buzzy sentence in the plastic boxes to arrow her heart, usually finding all suggestions from the bridge to be inadequate (Blockbuster only put empty boxes on shelves) and skulk away after half an hour with a shy 'bye', to shadow-box my frustrations at the bus-stop outside. I never rented anything, wasn't even a member. This was common. For the internal dynamic there was unlike any other Blockbuster I've been to. Too few young mothers struggling with a group of eager children, too few quietly agitated Homo-Sappy-Ends in pairs looking for licking promises in the dust of an, inverted commas, comic romance; too few buffs, grim panhandling countenances slowly fading into a question over two titles they never really wanted. Mostly it was bus travellers sheltering from the rain, sad-sacs with nowhere better to go but home and teens who had sucked the Harlequin dry of fun-juice and mischief and were sombrely looking for further excitements nearby, further sockets to stick fingers into and simmer (I was, variously, all three). So the petulant and the desperate looked, stole and threw, but didn't rent. The building passed through many hands, becoming a linen emporium at one point, but no-one solved the parking problem, and the lack of success for any venture there meant the place's sullied reputation among locals grew further. The Pyramid curse.

Tom Cruise popped into the Bushey Heath branch of Blockbuster when he lived locally with Nicole Kidman. He wanted to know what he needed to join, they say. 'Two forms of ID' said the cashier, 'hilariously' according to the local press. (Didn't she know who he was?) 'Our policy is that even famous people must follow the rules' said a joyless Blockbuster statement at the time. Cruise didn't have the wit to pick up the box for Far and Away and the box for Days of Thunder. and say 'Will this do? I haven't got my passport with me.'

A vague time-travel is possible here. While around Dalston various temporalites abound, from a Carribean sixties cheer to a Victorian tracing and beyond, Blockbuster seems to render unto us the most complete time-capsule around. To me it is 1993. Unsensual, vague 1993, which houses as much pop deitrus as any other year, Death Becomes Her and another Look Whos Talking, Naff and C&C, Metallers versus ravers after school, Chakademus and pliance of oneself with dregs from the coveted booze-box in the dining room. Childs Play 3, in which a puppet replaced the dummy bullets with real ones at a military school and crushed a man in a bin lorry; a film with low horizons that weren't made for the weight of the attention after a toddler named Bulger was kidnapped and murdered by pre-pubescents. Sometimes they show trailers on the screens: forthcoming attractions, filmic events that always seem made up. One of the best birthday parties I went to was in a hired cinema. We watched a sequence of trailers for two hours. Even films that are etched into the psyche flicker in this situation: A trailer for the original Star Wars now seems so redundant as to render the film's events, which are over-familiar, somehow fresh and cryptic again.

My mother's newsagents kept videos, and I saw almost all of them. Almost every video release that came in there between 1988 and 1991. Monster Squad, K9, Drop Dead Fred. I'd spend the school holidays sitting on the shelves out the back of the shop drawing on cardboard the cover of the film I wanted to take home that night. My Robocop was a stunning graphite cowboy; My Schwarzenegger lean and interested. When I watched Robocop, I cried. My younger sister laughed at me. When I watched The Running Man, I was alone and ill. Mike came to see me after school with my homework and couldn't believe a twelve year old watched 18s.

Gaudy remembrance of these fleeting nothings. Love in less-than-important eras provides the inhabitants with humming electrical heat but a hollow discharge; A sorry attatchment to forgettables. The things that will be gone and forgotten in twenty years have a transluscent fuzz all of their own.

SHOP MEET

Self-Savagery 1006: You'll know by now of course, that you have to create your own myths and rumours.

SHOP MEET
[Transcription of a meeting with a stranger in Dalston Stationers, Kingsland Road. Sometimes you meet a walking exhibition of the idea that some of us are truly plugged into the map, genitalia first. Treasures they are, one and all.]
'Iain Sinclair's interviewing me for his book on London Geniuses,' he announced to the Kingland Road stationery shop and to the world. He looked a hard-lived one-hundred-and-five, toothless, hairless and with a stoop that carried the weight of the ideas his windmilling tongue couldn't yet ship out.
The shop-owner, guaging passage from the chatter of this visitor, said he hadn't heard of Iain Sinclair. The old man turned his attentions to me, bringing his salty pungence and the musty aroma of sharp thoughts expiring, unheard.
'I'm writing a crime story inside a psychological horror inside a nightmarish evocation of Hackney. Chapter Three: Author awakes, realising he can’t write anymore. The book turns inside-out. Experts told me it’s Britain’s only truly underground novel ever. Finished, it will be an escape pod to infinite dimensions. It's got secret formulas, lively ones. To finish it, the author runs away, meets an African mystic who gives him the ability to solve particular problems. That's real fact. There’s a quote on the back from the greatest ever. You know who that is?'
‘Jesus?’
‘No I didn’t meet him. It's Orson Welles. We met on a film which had a Spanish actor, forget his name, he was in Westerns with Dean Martin. Do you know what Welles said about me?’
He paused.
‘He said 'Ralph's like a cat tied in a bag. When you let him out he’ll either suffocate or come out screaming.' Haha! Wonderful! When you’ve got an Orson Welles endorsement, what else do you need?’
‘Did he read the book?’
‘No. Died before I started it. But ideas transcend, people are in the ether, the moon… Stephen Berkoff, friend of mine. You know him? Fine actor. Used to get the girls, Dad was a tailor. We'd go up the cafes in Stamford Hill. I was old even then, the fifties this was. Barbara Windsor, would come in, say to me ‘Ralph, I’m going to be in films,’ I’d say ‘But Barbara love, you can’t act. You’re terrible.' She became a big star, 'I told you I was going to act' she said, 'You're still terrible, Babs,' I said. And when Lionel Blair told me he was doing an Oliver Twist musical, I said it sounded awful. He sang a song, ‘boy for sale… he's going cheap…only seven guineas', and I said ‘Lionel dear, it’s terrible.’ It was a roaring success, and I said ‘Lionel, it’s still garbage. Popular garbage mind.' Anyway, don't see that lot now. Got rid of 'em to money and fame. Timewasters. Pickles. Braggarts. Forgetful liars. Nice but useless.'
He paused.
'I've just got my formulas. And when I get this book finished, you'll know, you'll feel it.'

THE VAIN SEARCH FOR GLORY: A SYMPATHISER WRITES

Self-Savagery 1003: Advice is a form of boasting. Disregard it. Don't jump! Open the box! Take the money! Find your own errors. Stir up refried Western salutations to order; find binned prophecies in the New Foundland Basin; Toast crumpets over Genevan contracts; Ignore both Unholy and Holy advice; If you find ancient blurred scriptures washed-up on the shore, posted in a bottle by a concussed genius off Cape Farewell, throw them back. Keep the empty bottle, it may come in useful. Intergalactic travellers know no more than you. Hold your gun like Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar. Hold your drink like your mother. Indulge resplendent dialoguists. Indulge the Gods of Myth. But don't believe a word.

TREATY WITH MYSELF

I'm proposing last minute changes to the treaty with Myself that will allow me to do very little in 2007, guilt-free. I listen to tales of legends and their lost years in bed with jealousy, not sympathy. In wonder I ponder what long-term illness would incapacitate me for several months, leaving me time to think and not think. But I know there is always the chance that I will buckle to the pressure and achieve. Myself's tracts on effort reform could slip through the House and leave me on the cusp of stardom. Shame.

CANON OF SELF-SAVAGERY

Career suicides/neglect BC 1000-2007AD

Van Gogh was 35 when he stalked Gauguin with a razor and then cut off the lower part of his own left ear, which he wrapped in newspaper and gave to a prostitute named Rachel in the local brothel, asking her to "keep this object carefully". He had another ear. Mozart was 34 when he contracted syphilus from a girl he didn't even like. Jesus Christ was 33 when he allowed himself to be crucified. Jean Genet threw completed manuscripts in fires. Winston Churchill rose later and drank more than Adolf Hitler. Greta Garbo retired from public life at 44. Scott Walker, the loveliest voice of his generation, spent the seventies making tired country and the eighties doing little. Peter Cook lit up Supergirl. F Scott Fitzgerald would throw stones at Ernest Hemingway's window in Paris in order to get him to come out and drink. Fitzgerald hated sitting down to write. Hemingway would burn through four pencils a day.

Self-Savagery no 1002: Be warned. Sometimes the evasion of success can throw you right into the limelight. See above.