Notes on Self-Savagery

THE SEX-SINGER! DOWNLOAD NOW!

2011-06-03T10:26:00.001Z

The Sex-Singer by The Legendary Black Mark Savage
Self-Savagery no. 567: Always give your art away for nothing, if at all possible. Free is not worth less than $2, but $2 is less than $10.

My new album. Feel free to take one. Downloads are available on a pay-what-you-will basis, meaning that I'm very happy for you to pay nothing. All of my art is priceless and worthless.

25 LIES ABOUT MYSELF WHICH ARE ALL TRUE

2009-02-03T17:25:00.002Z

Inspired by some stirling work by stirling friends on a stone-cold social networking site:

1. I went to ten schools before I was seventeen. I have lived in about as many houses as I have years. Because of this, I have frequently met new people and lied about my past to make it sound more exciting. DISCLAIMER: Some events from my life have been refashioned so often from re-tellings that even I believe some of my own stories.

2. My desire to make puns at all times is so intense that I genuinely consider it a disability.

3. I have three sisters, all of whom are smarter and more beautiful than they realise. All three are more thoughtful than I. I make up for this with grand overstatement of my abilities.

4. For years, I had a suspicion that any problems I had were caused by the fact that I was a genius.

5. I started going out with Kym when I was eighteen. That is 40% of our lives. We have been married for nearly four years, which is between 10% and 15% of our lives. We sometimes have a startling revelation that we are actually two separate people. For someone who lives inside his own skull, this is both startling and a comfort.

6. I write and I make music (see my blog and music pages in 'info' for evidence to the contrary). My dream is to have a beautiful bunker in the woods with my wife, some cats and a studio. Anyone who dreams otherwise is probably insane.

7. My Mum's Brother married my Dad's sister. Our cousins look just like us.

8. When asked to write a fifty word story at school, I wrote: 'A diplodocus has a very, very, very, very,very, very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very long neck. A combination of my sheer effrontery and a beautiful drawing of said dinosaur saved me from trouble.

9. I am a vegetarian, but I ate snails as a small child.

10. Injuries: I had an operation on my right eye when I was four or five to correct a squint. Even though it looked like I was looking over your shoulder, I was looking straight at you. FACT: If you have a lazy eye, you cannot see it by looking in the mirror. Well I couldn't: to me my eyes looked normal. Weeks after the operation I had to get stitches removed from my eyeball. Also: I once dislocated my shoulder/ broke my arm when ice-skating. I got beaten up once, and my face was so puffy I could see my cheeks and my brows.

11. I suspect that if purgatory involved a deep analysis of print-outs of statistics regarding my life, I would enjoy it. When someone says 'Do you remember when we used to always [insert activity here]?' I always wonder exactly how many times we did that particular activity. Some things I've done just once linger as if I've done them thousands of times, whereas others I did every day for years are forgotten. I'm interested in the mortifying facts, and yet in complete denial about them.

12. I was the perpetrator of a hoax email religion at college. It was called '2-d', and aimed to distress purveyors of false authenticity, a pet hate of mine, by celebrating all things obviously flimsy. I knocked out the power in half (well some) of Canterbury trying to send sonic messages to aliens. I also discovered (with fellow members of the Buns of Steel advance party) a mini Area 51 (area 51b, if you will) on the outskirts of the same city. It wasn't on any map. After we climbed the electric fence, I walked on for miles to find the source of a red light. When I got there, it turned out to be an incinerator, burning paper.

13. As a child I became obsessed with the number of letters in words. I became pretty quick at counting letters of words, and tried to use sentences that had an even distribution of letters. This was something that I only truly realised I did a couple of years ago, and tried to write a short story about it. I like the story, but the letter distribution is not even enough for my liking. Another mini-obsession involved touching a surface with my right-hand if I'd happened to have just touched it with my left. Problems would arise if the right-hand touch was much heavier than the left-hand one. This would require a complicated repeating the steps, only reversing them so that each hand had a balanced number of equally-weghted touches. I don't think I do this anymore. Talking about these with friends makes me aware that most people have similar/weirder processes.

14. I am left-handed, left-footed, and left-eyed. I am right-eared however, so if I listen to music at a loud volume, I am balanced and fall over less. When running the 200 or 400 metres at school, the bends (curving to the left) were almost impossible for me to navigate.

15. A calming habit I have is to mime cricket shots. At times of panic I mime a solid and safe forward-defensive stroke, using the back of my hand as a bat. When I'm really stressed, I'll do this to the mirror, and hold my position at the end of the movement, looking down to admire the solid position of my front leg and elbow, and see how the position of my head over the ball would mean that it would take all day for the invisible bowler to bowl me out.

16. I frequently have dreams about people I haven't seen for a while. Sometimes these include encounters that are so memorable that I don't call anybody for ages because I think I've recently spoken to them. Social networking sites only assist this fallacy.

17. I'm really tall. Despite this, I have an incredibly light footstep. I can walk in near silence.

18. I sometimes conduct commentaries/interviews in my head. They include such Billy Liar/Rupert Pupkin scenarios as being interviewed about my brilliance at something or other, or telling my parents that I am buying them houses. Sometimes, it is just an internal monologue describing what I am doing or where I am to a family member or friend. I've noticed this habit doubling since I've moved overseas.

19. I once wet myself at school. We were sitting on the mat, listening to a story, when I decided that rather than interrupting the teacher, I would just wiggle sideways until I was sitting on the stone floor, wee in my pants and then slide back to my original spot and deny all knowledge. I feel this is illustrative of my nature in ways even I cannot fathom.

20. Some nicknames I have been granted: Spud, Sparky, Sav, Savo, Savo Milosevic, Savicevic, Savits, Macho Man Randy, Fred, Lily, Shorty, Deadeye, Jarvis, Disco Mark, Elvis,

21. I lived in England until I was 29. I now live in America with my wife Kym. The reasons for moving were many, both big and small, and I don't even feel like I could articulate all of them. A big one for me personally is that once we had the idea, it loomed over me like a dare. I though that if I didn't try and live in America, I was a coward. Don't get me wrong: I know, of course, that I am a coward. I just hope that on a sliding scale from 'coward' to 'hero' that I am at least a couple of notches further from the extreme yellow left than I was a year ago.

22. Having said that, being a foreigner in the right circumstances is fun (and being English in America is, I concede, one of the easiest transitions, and surely easier than the other way round, give or take the British phobia of the terrible lands outside the island). Your most banal features from home are shiny and exotic. Your mistakes are unnoticed, or put down to translation issue. Your mundane obsessions (following a struggling football team back home) are seen as delightful eccentricities.

23. My hair doesn't actually take that long to do.

24. For years I would act out games involving kids from schools I had moved away from. It might be years of test matches using a tennis ball against a wall, or an entire football league season (with cup competitions) using a sponge ball and a settee for a goal. I'd keep pads filled with fictional statistics of these games. Some kids at some schools I may have spoken to only a couple of times, but in my long character histories they had fully-fleshed quirks and sporting personalities. I would 'act' as each member of a team, trying to perform in their true (ie my fictional true) style. I would attempt to be fair, and not make myself the best player on a team, but I would always be an unpredictable enigma (I was once banned from my own team for wearing political slogans on my shirt). This would all be recorded diligently. If you went to my school: I have possibly written your name in a notebook more times than I'd care to admit. My teenage diaries are mostly like this:

FRONT: Poetic slogans/drawings of myself in silver outfits singing on a stage/outlines of space-operas with lyrics and song-titles (one of which I attempted to record, aged sixteen- my first recording project. The musical, about a cult leader who steals the youth by co-opting all cool references and leading them Pied-Piper style into a mountain included the non-hits 'They Love Me/Him' 'Nostalgia Is Luxe' 'Cin-Fu-La' 'My Posse It Really Rocked' and 'Spaceship'. It is something I'd love to realise in full ridiculousness one day) /cut-out pictures of old movie stars such as Dietrich and Valentino/ To-do lists (a sample might be: 1. Finish song. 2. Give tape to James. 3. Write letter to Jayne. 4. Do 50 sit-ups a day. 5. Finish Crime & Punishment)

BACK: Fictional sports results.

I was in denial about the existence of the back part of these notebooks for years.

25. I can make a very good stir-fry. The day that Kym (an amazing cook and a firm critic) told me that I could make stir-fry better than her was one of my proudest.

THE SECOND DRAFT

2009-01-05T20:49:00.006Z

The elements stole my first draft. And you should know that that is something of a crying shame, for it was a kingly piece of work. Every word slid and locked into place, held by some magic. The tools of fiction were at their quickest in there. It not only told my story in an entertaining and enlightening fashion, it might have had something for someone other than myself too.
It not only told the story, but in interlocking haikus it managed to convey some power of everything I’d ever known. But a wind blew up and carried it off.
But what a draft; within it were codes and schemes. Surveillance systems were debunked, governments toppled; assassins evaded, crucial answers found.
But now they’re just mapcap theories, scribbled in invisible ink and lost; the pages are still disappearing across the beach in the wind. A whole bible of noise lost, chased across the stones, rediscovered page by page; a Hansel and Gretel trail to a big haunted house of an idea.
It started with the following; this much I remember.

Steven liked to break into houses on the Sussex Coast. His mother had died when he was small, hit by a bus, and his father had died some two years later, drunk with a broken heart. He’d walked into the sea, and washed up three miles along the coast. Steven was five. He went to live with his grandparents, who watched old movies all the time. These films filled Steven’s brain, haunted his sleep, and this fact may or may not have contributed to the present tale.

A wonderful part of my first draft dealt with the anecdote whereby a younger version of myself attempting to write an early version of my memoirs, aged seven or so, described the feeling of being an orphan as akin to ‘waiting for a wonderer to return.’
Grandad corrected me on my mistake. ‘It’s wanderer, Steven. Wanderer. Someone who wanders off.’
But Grandma saw the dramatic possibility of my word, and cut Grandad short. ‘Or did you mean wonderer, Steven, like someone who wonders why?’
They looked at me expectantly. ‘I think I mean both,’ I said.

Aah. That’s how it went. Or something. Ask the sea next time you’re on the Sussex coast. The sea ate the first version, the truest version of the story. This draft is inferior, it’s akin to development sketches of female parts I’d never seen. But it must suffice.
So the films; this is the important thing with my Grandparents. Let’s try:

Granddad had a penchant for gentlemen. Humphrey Bogart was enjoyable, but greasy. Cary Grant had it. Grandmother had a taste for the nice faces- James Stewart, Fred MacMurray; but father though them a touch soft.
There was Dietrich, who possessed some of the beauty of his mother. In Blonde Venus, she was barely plausible as a mother, and Steven supposed his own mother was like this; too beautiful, too stellar, to be plausible as a mother. That was why she’d died, he supposed. God’s will.
Oh, and Joan Fontaine in Rebecca, with Grandad’s Larry.

And then there was the woman who lived on our street, that aged, frail German, who Grandad thought was Marlene Dietrich.

'She doesn't live in Sussex' Gran said.

'I'm sure it is her,' Grandad said.

He was the straightest of die; Religion? A fearful hotch potch. Enigmas were never cultivated. But Marlene on the coast? True as true.

A convoluted interlude saw my boredom turning to crime, breaking into large flats on the seafront, watching their videos, drinking their tea. And then, inevitably, I was caught by the old lady, the cranky, would be Marlene; and the ensuing unlikely friendship was dreamt in a plausible and pretty way. I didn't evade the cliche, I embraced it, and these passages were some of the most rewarding on those papers.
And then, of course, we hear that Dietrich is dead in Paris; and of course, the flat is on the market; and we never see our Marlene again, except in our sleepy fantasies.

'Good, proud lady, that Marlene' Grandad said.

'You never met her!' Gran said.

'Perhaps not. But she kept her garden tidy and was kind to the boy,' Grandad said.

I've been through my notes to find a scent of the magic; this outline does not suffice. All I find in my extensive perusals are plundered wordlists and defected lexicons.

Now I’m gutting books, ripping their spines, to find suggestions of all that I had.

LIVE; SOB; REGRET

2008-09-04T04:56:00.001Z

Self-Savagery no. 4888: Live every day as if it is your last: in a state of frigid panic, sobbing with regret.

TURN FOREIGN

2008-06-18T00:48:00.012Z

Self-Savagery no. 4566: Move to somewhere where you are a stranger. Become foreign. Abandon comforts. Find new ones. Write yourself a love-letter everyday by moving to a new country, with a false biography. Clear your name later. Develop some personal mythologies you can shed like skin. 'I got married at 17, 18 or at 26. I came here for adventure, to evade capture, for private health reasons. I am a love exile. My hair stays this high with spit, molasses and a prayer. The estate of Howard Hughes pays for my 'promising and energetic' demos. I have been to ten schoools. I have lived in nine counties. I have played the Wizard of Oz. I have charmed Latin housewives of ill temperment with tired showtunes. I have dazzled West Indian patriarchs with my Greek jaw. I have killed the power of a town with electrical signals to Mercury, lulled empty rooms into silence with my performances, sifted through braggart obituaries for glittering epithets that might be recycled for my wide shoulders. I have peddled hoax religions through a university campus. I have lived in an alter-ego, the combustible and brave Luminous Shadow. I have recorded albums and albums of gloopy sentiment in an hour and destroyed them all in a second. I have slept on trains. I have spent the night at Guildford station with dormitory ghosts. I have stayed in. I am Sav, Savo, Superman, Elvis. I have lost at tennis to a descendent of Lord Kitchener, and won at crazy golf against a relative of the KLF. I was sired at the birthplace of Shakespeare, and born at the birthplace of Charles Dickens. My Grandfather arm-wrestled with Lee Marvin, and drank with Bodie and Doyle. Cary Grant was my Great-Uncle, Groucho Marx was just great. I have recorded an album of fairy-tale songs in the woods. I have unexpired potential. Savage is a stagename, I won it in a raffle.'

Breaking Radio silence: I am in America, writing a story about Brighton Pier, mathematics, and childhood. Portland, Oregon is the new home for my wife and myself. If, as Bono would have it, being famous is like being a beautiful woman, causing all heads to turn as you walk down a street, then being foreign (in the correct and harmless circumstances of course) is like being a smartarse child. Your borrowed jokes are buried under laughter, your opinions suddenly swagger sweetly, your behaviour is indulged. Your twitchy mannerisms are as almost as cute as your parochial words. Preserve your assets. Exaggerate your difference. Say 'bum' alot.

Our UK bank accounts stagger and wheeze under their accumulated strains, but our US ones smile with helpful cleanliness. We're running away to home, two kids who watched some films. America is a trashy genius, a petulant teen, shirking perspective and splintering judgments hourly. No summary of its lands can be true. Growing up, America was a work of collected imagination, a fictional paradise, a modern Oz. A huckleberry wilderness, full of runaways calling home for more money, lost in a spider-web roadway of lost hopes. Sad rental cars purring on ever on dark roads. All-hour breakfasts. Free coffee refills. Such a large country was always fuelled on escape myths, and Americans were always idealists. That is their curse. Whatever anyone's feelings about America, it's romance bleeds into most childhoods (Everyone there spoke like film stars. Wake them up quickly, and they'd speak in English accents, right?). In mine, Captain Kirk was an LA detective with a catchphrase (the zen-like 'It works for me') who jumped across bonnets of cars. We'd watch from under a purple blanket, Dad in the middle, my sister and I on either side.

We used to do a small, smudged version of a road trip ourselves. Every month, my Mum would drive us on a Friday from our house in Nuneaton to a service station near Oxford to meet my Dad, who would pick us up and take us down to his home (and our first home) in Portchester for the weekend. Once a month, that quiet handing over ceremony in a car park. And then the rest of the journey; different cars: Dad's car was colder, more orange, and the radio more stubborn.

The Saturday nights. The purple blanket, TJ Hooker, lights turned off.

We'd make the return trip on Sunday evening. Three hours each way, unless we'd get stuck in traffic in Newbury. None of the mythic journeys of America, the roads and motels of Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, Dean Moriarty and Humbert Humbert, Sam Cooke and Pee-Wee Herman; westward wagons, glowing motels, Tijuana weekends. We had our radio, crackling in and out of local receptions en route; we had miles of hedgerows along motorways, Sing Something Simple, the M27.

Living in a new country affects your dreams and memories. Walking in the Oregon hills I remember corners of scruffy Paulsgrove I'd not thought of for years. Grim kids from the darkest corners of my school yearbook come to my dreams, causing my mornings to be a disorientating mix of confused nostalgia and the hopeful feelings of living in a new place. New things always bring to mind older things. Oregon is Goonies country. In one dream, a girl who used to visit Foyles in London where I worked (and spend an hour talking about poor songbooks in a keen and serious way) played the part of the betrayed wife of my childish boss. She took me for a drink to ask about her husband's public embraces with his secretary. I didn't realise that I remembered her existence; in my dream, I tactfully told her what I suspected about her husband using suggestive whistles ('I think I might have seen him her in the office').

Working at Powell's Books has resurrected forgotten muscle memories too. I reach for the scanner with my right hand, where it was when I worked at Foyles in London; but it is to my left, and I scratch the air like an amputated limb.

Perhaps it is just all new places. Perhaps the fact that I am new in this place. But the breath of possibility carries on the wind; the narrative here is recent and incomplete, ready for the fingers of fresh authorship. There is a feeling in the West of America that land is still up for grabs, claims, hanging in the wind, are still to be settled. People of course are the same everywhere, and different everywhere. Like a nature documentary cameraman, it is impossible to remove your own presence from the equation (are people friendler here because I'm so obviously not from here? Or is it because they are friendler?). But Portland is, at first glance, more righteous, more militant, more politcally correct, more green, more laidback, less drunk, more of a community, happier. It's the Cloud City in Empire Strikes Back, a wet nirvana in the sky. Americans love England; but Portlanders understand why we moved here. It speaks for itself.

Compose running monologues in your skull, introducing the city to visitors. Speak to family in your head. Walk across the Burnside Bridge when the sun is out and it is spitting with rain, and with this internal commentary, a simultaneous detachment and attachment is possible. You're plugged into the architecture, yet observing yourself. Seeing for the first time, yet reporting on yourself seeing.

[Aside: Misconceptions, no.1: Americans believe the United Kingdom to be part of Europe.

They are of course mistaken. To the English, Europe is a holiday destination. Europe was defeated by Hitler. Europe wants to take something away from us, although we don't quite know what.

Misconceptions, no.2: TheEnglish are more charming, more intelligent and somehow more cultured than Americans.

We of course, know different. The 21st Century English are hilarious paupers. I promise I won't let on.]

AT LEAST TRY

2008-01-05T23:19:00.000Z

'All of us failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.'

'Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself' William Faulkner

New Year's Resolution: At least try.

SCARED FAMOUS by ARIEL PINK'S HAUNTED GRAFFITI

2007-10-17T17:14:00.000Z

Ariel Pink's in-between songs have been the most mind-blowing pop discovery of my adulthood. 2004's compilation of late 1990's recordings, The Doldrums, sits in whatever personal top ten I care to compose, immune to any whim I may trip over. His is a neon shimmer; Home recorded epics which don't dispense with glitter, melodies which break the technology's defence, playing expansively, hilariously, rudely. As puppy-dog sad, sweet, and familiar as Abba. As weird as them too, splitting the prototypical nexus of harmony into twisted catches of one hundred simultaneous choruses.

Look for Ariel Pink on Youtube and among the splinters you'll find a home-made video to one of his tunes. It is a simple shot of a TV screen, filmed crudely with a video camera as a sequence from The Simpsons plays in the dark. It is impossible to tell if he did it himself or if it is the work of a fan. It seems incredibly apt. Pink's records capture a brittle pop nostalgia; like found Wonder Years episodes on VHS, intercut with half of Repo Man and the end of Benny and Joon, not enough to keep, but you do; like European cartoons (dubbed by one eager voice, girl parts and all) seen while suffering an early romantic illness, a six week relapse with glandular fever aged nine; fretful odd daytime shows never seen again, ghostly animations partly slept through; The Monkees repeats at half-term. Pink's game show buzz is essentially a summary of low pop culture, it's architecture and accoutrements. It sounds like the best bits of other songs, a collection of jingles, like The Residents' Commercial Album tunes played over each other at double speed, or if the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were commissioned in 1974 to make 30 second synth wig-outs for every last US radio and television show, and imports too. It is the history of rock reduced: It is Squeeze squeezed, a cheaper Cheap Trick, a crashed Cars, and so on and so on, rehashes of Denver, John, and Denver, The Last Dinosaur's theme, echoing mantras from Hanna Barbera relics, all shot through with the naive self-belief of a ten-year old playing dress-up, any attic attire, an awkwardly hopeful glam.

Nostalgia is a loaded word. Pink goes beyond. He is (or his records are) open to retro-psychic possibility- Imagine! If you could rewind telly all the way back! Imagine, if telly ran an 'on this day' channel, and just showed Aug 25, 1984, for example, or December 1st, 1972, and just showed everything, adverts, inserts, news, etc, whatever they showed, slow periods, boring bits and all, even the cartoons when they were ahead of schedule. No edited high/lowlights, no contextualising, no modern commentary, no haircut judgements. The seismic shift of witnessing whole slabs of boring, wondrous culture, the million nuances forgotten, would reduce all to tears.

And so Pink goes about his business, not separating what needs to be kept from what doesn't, throwing it all together over (one imagines) thousands of tapes, an endless record. He disinters from the ancient pop texts, trash and all, salvaging drowned tunes from choppy forgotten waters, resuscitating fey homilies and spangled spazz-outs plucked from golden wrecks.

Scared Famous evokes being drugged at a fair on a wet bank holiday, a violent puppet show in a seaside town, staticky reports from aged speakers, and sticky arrests; the glowing suggestion of an uncle's fish tank, tetras sparkling, gouramis kissing, eyes open in gormless wonder. A beer garden with carved kiddy shapes. Suggestible shadows evoking benign demons. Saturday afternoons idling at the abandoned bandstand, vandalising casually, knowing that sunset will come and all this will end.

Gopacapulco starts like a Chiquitos house band turning the hook of Starman below the border, into a twitchy hokum Latino swing, before a stately chorus is unfurled. Howling At The Moon is a synth-fuelled Lou Reed impersonation, bittersweet and hilarious, Are You Gonna Look After My Boys? is the Miami Sound Machine running in the woods on heart power, sweet and catchy as a sexual injury. Beefbud is Barrett, Jesus Christ Came To Me In A Dream is the true, desperate meaning of Christmas past present and future, touching, absurd, stuffed full. Baby Comes Around is a triumphant riff interrupted by half-a-dozen Joe Meek choruses, Politely Declined and Why Can't I Be Me? are manga laments, wistful comic Frankensteins sobbing in caves. Girl In A Tree is Hall & Oates undead and undone, losing a three-legged race, Kitchen Club is a ghostly off-key cut of dub (all Ariel Pink records are dub, in some way) reggae that seems to enigmatically start some kind of (anti) sexist argument, but is all the better for only suggesting this. It may be about food. It's certainly about girls. The List (My Favorite Song) is another (likeHouse Arrest's Interesting Results) of Pink's self-querying lyrics, a lovely ham-fisted attempt to understand the meaning of song writing, the meaning of meaning.

Ultimately, it's always a romance.

Pink sends carefully crafted letters to idols and is crushed when they don't answer. He practices magic, and next to him, your love seems adult and pedestrian. You could vivify trite scripts with his Sirkian water. He's the kid who imagines himself in a relationship with Judy Garland or Lindsey Lohan or the girl next door, just good friends, hoping for more. He believes he can save them. He holds candles tightly, and writes crestfallen ouija rites and crushed odes, commuting with imaginary dead sisters. He writes false back stories for non-existent banged-up Dads, and draws on his hands in electric black. His is a dictionary that requires of him the dedication of Dr Johnson, and includes made up words from far-flung languages, gibberish to the naked eye, but displaying enough grammatical structure and craft to suggest a complex and gorgeous plan. He is a blue-eyed avatar, standing at the LA Hells mouth of pop memory, taking as much in as he can.

The fire crackles. So does the radio.

LEAVING ENGLAND III: UNCLE ROBERT

2007-10-15T22:13:00.000Z

Because of the firework feeling in his bones, Uncle Robert knew our town was the dead centre of England. 'The reason I ended up here is because it is the middle of everything,' he said.
Many experts would have contradicted him. New surveys of the land came every other year or so and the officially recognised geographical bulls-eye would move, perhaps over the hill beyond Higham, sometimes several miles in another direction. Every place ever named as the centre of the country clung to the very verdict that put them there, and disregarded all subsequent alternative suggestions. They would display their achievements and wares at fetes and carnivals, festivals and parades. But none was ever more extraordinary than the next: Neolithic flint implements, Bronze Age Burial mounds, Roman coins and Saxon suffixes were regularly polished and shown, but to us children, being from the dead centre of England only meant we were further from the sea than almost anyone.

But Uncle Robert had moved to this town as if drawn by some magnetry. And he knew it was the dead centre of England. He walked its contours, plugged himself into its vagaries, soaked up its airs. He pressed the claims of our town in varied ways. 'Have you ever noticed that our train station is far bigger than we seem to deserve or need?' he'd say. 'It is, in effect, a staging post for travellers on a journey through the middle of England, usually from South-East to North-West and back. It’s a route which is a well-set series of wires and arteries that carry fortune seekers, commuters, noise, spite and other cultural exchanges. Look on a map: Britain looks like a wounded man, leaning to the west; it’s the weight of it, that lopsided pull, with everything in the South-East, and something in the North-West, and everywhere else slipping into the wind. And it all comes through here. No matter what they say, this town is the dead centre of the country. That station marks the spot, I’m sure. You can feel it.'

According to Uncle Robert, trains were the lifeblood, the force, angels of fate to take you or usually in our case, leave you behind. They were cartographers of the invisible land; following the best taken path, preselected above man's input, along routes that predated even the tracks. Rivers meander weakly to sea, but train tracks, like roads and shipping lanes, chose themselves. He said if you build a track where it doesn’t want to go, there’ll be an accident sooner or later. 'The sinking of the Titanic proved that you can’t build a track over the North Atlantic, so we should never try. Man hasn’t the power to guide a machine down a set path. A train is actually pacing out the perimeters of nature’s power. Rome, for example, didn’t fall; it was pushed, by men who believed their petty transactions put them in Godly positions. Their folly was not ambition, but that that didn't listen to the land. If you could read the roads and lines, look for accidents as signs, you’d see how the trains tell who did it; With sensitivity, you could plot lines that would circle the truth like Injuns round wagons, they'd be driving gutters into the Earth, grooves of repetition that would bore into the earth and bore the surrounded to death.'
That’s how he'd talk. Mum said he was an Idiot's Haven't. I loved him.

We'd go to the station together, Uncle Robert, his son Tony and I, and watch as trains swung into our town and were thrown out to bigger destinations- Northampton, Birmingham New Street, Liverpool Lime Street, London Euston. We’d watch the faces as they waited to move on, drowsy disinterested abstractions through glass, like timid sketchbook preliminaries. We'd wonder how they stayed so uninvolved in the process, in the glory of travel; Uncle Robert who had travelled, and explored, and Tony and I who longed to.

While the people on the train only ever passed through, Uncle Robert had thrown his fate in with that of the town. And even though he’d come from elsewhere (and still had his busty dialect to show for it) the town seemed to respond to him, as if it couldn’t help it. The events in the town's life intertwined with his. He was born in the year they built the Old Hall, what we knew as the Co-Op Hall. That was a totem in these parts, a landmark that announced itself in an area whose qualities generally had to be coaxed and teased out. For a period, it was the only place to choose for wedding receptions. One New Years Eve, just after the war, some guests slipped on the stairs and several were killed in the crush. That was the same night that, miles away in Leeds, Uncle Robert's father was run over by a car.
Uncle Robert moved to town shortly after marrying Joan in the year they built the ring road, 1972. That road breathed life into new directions, and the Carters lived in a small house up past the hospital, a little hutch that years later we’d drive past and observe like a cute relic; diverting, langourous drives home they were too, and to see Uncle Robert see the first matrimonial home was for me one of the earliest examples of stirring nostalgia. 'The first morning we lived there,' he'd tell us, every time, 'I woke up, stretched, kissed my new wife, and turned to see on the pillow... well, you'll never guess what.'
'Your hair!' we'd chorus, amazed not by the fact that Uncle Robert's hair fell out so quickly but by the fact that he ever had any at all. He lost his front teeth when his first child, Tony, was born, but it wasn’t an incident touched by the supernatural; a combination of celebratory gins and steepling maternity ward staircases saw to them.

He smelt of Vicks and whisky, both of which were always medicinal; he’d give us a nip when we’d twist an ankle, dab both on a grazed limb, and we’d gaze at the bottles together in awe. 'Learned the power of these in King's Gym in Huddersfield in the fifties' he'd say with a wink.
Uncle Robert had been a boxer, but he drifted into wrestling in the lean years, when his honest nose had been crushed one too many times by sly jackhammers that evaded his aging defence. He clearly thought that wrestling was the lesser art, glistening as it did with cheapening pizzazz and silly non-glamorous display, but instead of getting frustrated, or looking elsewhere, he took his opportunity, and brought all his disdain for the tawdry flash of the sport into his role of the villain up at the Co-Op hall for years. He was a good sport, but disliked being forced into uncompetitive surrenders and premature dives by the demands of a crowd and their collective wish, and expectation, of a vengeful pantomime in which the villain cheats the hero and is thus punished. Despite his reservations, he had a surprising knack for increasingly creative acts of dishonour in that ring, and this endeared him to one and all, who, apoplectic at the referee’s distractibility, would bellow a warning to the dazed hero as Uncle Robert approached the groggy saint from the rear with a piece of wood or sandpaper.

Tony and I experienced these bouts only through Uncle Robert's retelling of them. We were too young for the rowdy environs of a wrestling evening, and could only superimpose his actions onto the more family-friendly visions conjured on our television on Saturday afternoons. We insisted, in our giddy re-imaginings in the garden, that the Uncle Robert could trouble not only Les Kellet, Mick McManus, Jackie Pallo, Steve Veidor, and Tibor Szakacs, but would despatch of Count Bartelli, dethrone The Royals, and destroy the smiling, handsome Johnny Saint, who we hated.

Uncle Robert's alter-ego for many years was The Tarantula. His costume consisted of red vest, red trunks and a balaclava-style mask. He had cobwebs painted in silver on his back, but didn't look like a spider. He'd let us play in the costume, one of us tripping over the trunks and vest, the other swallowed by the mask, but we rarely did, just handled it with delicacy, feeling the weight of it's hem and the gritty sparkle of the logo. 'That old thing. My straitjacket,' he'd call it, smiling. The stories were painted in by his chuckling recall. Tony and I would always cheer on our man on as he told us the tales of those times; dreaming we were there, when The Tarantula fought against the course of the crowd and the wishes of natural order.
‘The younger lads, the goodies, they’ve got to win, you both know that,’ he’d say, and we’d nod, sure that Robert would have been the greatest hero of them all if wasn't all rigged against him. The villains interested us, and there always seemed to be new ones to tell us about. The Valkyrie, a screeching sneak who The Tarantula sometimes teamed up with, a melodramatic former child nearly-star (he’d been on the stage in the war years as the bombs rained on Coventry) who wound up dead from the booze in his caravan up the A5 years later. Pirate Pete, a man who was larger than Giant Haystacks, kept puppies in his yard and could lift a mini over his head. The Mysterious Shadow could shin up a lamp-post with his hands tied behind his back, and had a cafe in town for a while before he died. We'd visit and have a bowl of ice-cream, and The Mysterious Shadow would playfight with Uncle Robert for our benefit.
'We're old now,' they'd say when we got too excited. But they fondly recalled how in the nineteen-seventies they created a merry Valhalla, stirring up boisterous crowds in gym halls, clubs and pub backrooms all over the Midlands.

Uncle Robert had his first wrestling bout at the Co-op hall in 1975. The ballroom itself had died a series of squalid deaths over decades of mismanagement, its dignity slipping and trodden into the dirt with every transformation; from celebrations of blessed unions, to ballroom dances, to bingo, wrestling, before being crushed under heel when they painted the interior black and turned the place into a grubby arcade later in the nineteen-eighties. One rainy Saturday afternoon when I was twelve a girl I didn’t even really like refused to let me kiss her there. But that night in 1975, the night of Uncle Robert's first wrestling bout, a London to Glasgow train came off the rails down by the Leicester Road Bridge, dragging up track and dirt until it came to rest on the platform, taking down part of the station roof and thirty-six souls. Uncle Robert joined the volunteers while still wearing his wrestling leotard, and blackened and thirsty, lifted rubble and twisted iron with them all night like some mythological Colossus, rueful and black.

Within a couple of years, Uncle Robert was an established name on the wrestling circuit. When the Scala and Grand cinemas both closed, there was an upsurge in popularity for the events. The Tarantula started a long rivalry with a foppish lad of upstart vulgarity, who would run through Uncle Robert’s legs. The Wasp, as he was known, was a gypsy of Italian origin whose family had come from Naples, and Carter and I would later know him as the elderly drunk who ran the sticky dodgems at the fair. In his younger days he was darkly handsome, a preening stud who the crowd adored. We knew only his slobbering approaches to teens of all genders on August Bank Holidays as the fair struck up for a last night.

Uncle Robert would tell us that he’d have to pretend not to be able to catch the greasy little Wasp, and would wink to Mrs. Carter and baby Tony in the crowd, and Tony Carter would say he remembered all this, even though he couldn’t have been more than one or two. Uncle Robert would have to pretend that the little Italian was too quick for him, and sometimes, he chuckled, The Wasp was too quick, and he didn't need to pretend at all, by that point being almost forty and overripe. By the time the Palace theatre had closed and there had been a murder down the back of the Ringway the following November, Robert had broken a leg when pinning a man from Derby (Gorgeous Geoff or Sid the Saint, depending on what day you were told the tale), a blessing of sorts, in that it gave him the shuffling limp that would give him a new name in the twilight years of his career, The Crab.

And then near the end we got to see him wrestle.
We were nine. It had been a while since Uncle Robert had been bouting, and he was roped out of retirement, he said, as a favour to an old promoter. I think he did it so that Tony and I, so thrilled by the stories, could see one played out in front of us for real. Aunt Joan, never a fan, reluctantly took Tony and I, and we all drove up to Leicester together. She tutted at the language, winced at the dusty aroma, choked on the smoke, but Tony and I stared at it all with wonder. Uncle Robert's tales may have glamorised the settings somewhat; the beery squalor and shabby ring were not what we'd expected; but to us it was the height of exoticism. We were amongst men after dark.
It was the only time I saw the old boy fight, and it was his last time. And he won, ignoring the script to pin some young upstart. He winked at us as he did a lap of honour, and we knew that he'd done it for us. It was to be his last fight.

It had to be the end, because his body wasn't up to it anymore. A couple of months previously, on the coldest night on record in our town, -22 degrees, January 1983, Uncle Robert had ripped something in his shoulder. Though this added to his villainous lean, meaning that the Crab walked more convincingly lopsided than ever, he couldn’t grapple anymore. He soldiered on a little, defiantly, and his last bout in town, a couple of months before the Leicester trip, was the same night they closed down the Ritz for good and converted it into the bingo hall. ‘The last film was ‘Blood Bath at the House of Death’. ‘It was a terrible British comedy,’ he’d say, ‘what a send-off.’

At the end, he was sad to leave. He’d toiled and entertained, achieved minor regional fame, and drew lessons from his experiences like a serum.
‘Wrestling is a medium of truth to us Brits.' he'd say. 'Its essential narrative is about right and wrong. It acknowledges failure. That’s something the Yanks won’t ever get. They think that winning and being right is the same thing.’

And then one day he slipped away after a heart attack aged fifty-four, the same night as the town’s most famous modern son, a light entertainer known to the nation through Saturday night television died. I was away on a school trip, and they didn't tell me until I got back, didn't want to disturb my break. I missed the funeral. Aunt Joan and Tony moved away shortly after that, and continued to move over the years, their radars threatened and confused in his absence. Indeed, not long after he died, there was a survey using new technologies that placed the dead centre of England some twenty miles away. This was the biggest variation I could remember, and subsequent surveys, powered by the precise mathematics of new systems, never remotely came close to suggesting our town was the centre of England again. It was as if Uncle Robert's death had thrown the country lop-sided, never to sit true again.

‘Be careful,’ he said to me once. ‘A good man’s only got twenty years of running in his legs. After that he’s a shadow, living off what he’s done. An early starter like you, he might only have nineteen years, seven, eight months left, give or take a couple of days. You should be writing books. But you’ve only got a certain time, a little noise window. Nineteen years of books in your legs, if you’re blessed.’
I nodded vaguely, and looked out across the garden night. A cheese of a moon was rising into somebody’s birthday.
‘Don’t sleep too much son’ he said, and raised an arm to ruffle the hair behind my ears. As he disappeared into the patio doors, I called him.
‘Have you ever written anything?’
‘Of course not.’ he laughed, as if it was the first time he’d considered it. ‘Waste of time.’

LEAVING ENGLAND II: PORTSLADE, SUSSEX

2007-10-09T14:44:00.000Z

I realise that my departure from London lacks the dramatic scurry of the White Russians or the Nazi-defyers. The way it should be done is to sail into New York Harbour, lose a vowel on Ellis Island, re-fashion thought in Manhattan bustle. Instead, this week I am in Portslade, Sussex, attempting a cumulative time-travel in walks around the hills and estates. I have been looking for a summary of my English childhood in the buildings and driveways. What is here?

Impenetrable pavement graffiti, BT code for drills; the font of MILL CLOSE and MILL LANE, dishevelled studies forever glanced at but never seen. Is there a national address in drippy beer garden furniture and fauna? Morse in crisp packets between slats, borrowed ballards. FORGE CLOSE, FOREDOWN CLOSE, everything close, almost fingertip. But a hazy facebook burr and whirr invades charred memories of school crushes. Is there narrative in deitrus? Coherence in chance? God in numbers? Is there more than just a string of memories prompted by letterboxes and parks? Write for long enough, and you'll charm a metaphor out of shyness. Give Shakespeare a typewriter, and eventually he'll write Twelve Monkeys; a story of time-travel and childhood reminiscence.
On my walks, I've been collating samples of England to take with me as evidence of something or other; names of shops, poster verbiage, signs seen, messages offered:

RED-FACED ROBBERS COVERED IN DYE

CUCUMBERS! TOMATOS! SALAD!

IN LOVING MEMORY OF LYNDA TIMMS 1949-2004: SHE LOVED THE WAVES.

I went to school with a Linda Timms. I don't know if she liked the waves.

BRIT SICK DI FANTASY

PARCELFORCE: PLEASE KNOCK LOUDLY AS THE BELL IS RUBBISH

FOR LOITERERS: EACH AND EVERY THURSDAY, HILLSIDE EXIT LANE ACCESS NECESSARY AND DEMANDED.

Take the first letter of each word of this last one: F L E A E T H E L A N A D

It's clear to me. It's time to Flee the Land.

LEAVING ENGLAND I: DALSTON BLOCKBUSTER

2007-10-02T19:01:00.000Z

Self-Savagery 2002: If things are going just fine, leave. Burn your bridges only if they are strong. Give up only good things.

They closed down Blockbuster in Dalston last week, the week I left London. The same branch that I wrote about in an earlier post, entitled 'TRULY SMASHED AND BLOCKED', a piece that was a failed attempt to examine a variety of nostalgias for a variety of unheralded moments; A suggestion that pointless, forgettable passings, must be marked somehow; some arbiter must look up and nod 'duly noted' before returning to important electrical doings.

Dalston's Blockbuster then: I picture it all going up in a psychedelic bonfire, melting titles together, a black mass of disinterned plots from VHS trailers, an explosion of plastic forgettables. A pixelated bomb.

As it burns, hear the concrete music of repeated reversed shootings, rough cutting of disembodied comic cliches and familiar thriller dialogues (rarely with motives beyond, as James Stewart says in Rope, 'the blonde or dollars in the mattress'), spitting and looping ad nauseum, on the fuse and off the beat, confusion breaking bones amid eternal male feuds, china wives and love interests cracking between plots, sucked under in a Hellmouth tide of pop ephemera. As it all falls, a collage of arbitrary summer blockbuster noises, looped and tensionless as a million rainy games of hangman; outlines and suggestions of grave drama, written in dim light but drawn spare and cold. The last few weeks of the store being open saw endless runs of Superman Returns one screen that still worked, sounding to the glancing ear vital and familiar, but on closer investigation a hollow treatise on a million older dreams.

The Dalston Blockbuster always had special offers that lacked specialness. DVDs skipped and brayed like asses in my machine, causing many films I borrowed from there to remain enigmas after I'd seen them: Hidden, The Right Stuff, Far From Heaven, Harry Potter 3 and 4, Pretty Persuasion, Little Miss Sunshine, Art School Confidential, Carnivale series 1, Huff series 1, Family Guy series 5. Fines grew non-existent in recent weeks, a symptom of either famine or plenty.

I picture the aftermath of the gutting flames: Friends boxsets like cakes out in the rain. Overspill from groaning messy stockrooms, grazed and shrunken echoes of prop-rooms at studio backlots, charred and dumped in the street. Cardboard cut-outs of Keanu or Angelina, five-sixths life-size, one half cinema size, five times video size, left by the pound-shops.
Overlapping mantras of the 'Haven't we seen that one?'/ 'No that was that one, this is this one' ilk echo through the empty building still.

So it's gone. Largely unnoticed. There is a bigger and better one up the road. Narrative convention in departure scenes would have me standing outside Blockbuster with my suitcase as they put the 'CLOSED' sign up in the window. I'd sigh, put on my hat and walk away.

SABOTAGE YOUR OWN CAREER

2007-08-09T18:48:00.001Z

Self Savagery no. 1764: Sabotage your own career. Self-sabotage leads to freedom. Abandon your post, play with yourself in the loo instead. Pick your own exit. Pick your own death. Do something useful: watch cricket.

Below I quote my wife, Kym Calise, partner in the ways of Self-Savagery:

'It has come to my attention that many compnies are looking to ban facebook due to the fact that people are "wasting their time on it at work". However, the productivity of the UK has not suffered in any way, in fact, the pound is stronger than ever. We have invented so much efficient technology and advanced our working day vastly over the past 30 years, that we no longer NEED to work 8 hrs a day, 5 days a week to get all our work done. Doesn't anyone else think it's crazy that we are working the same amount of hours and days (if not more) than we did in the 1950s, and yet we are using such advanced technology? Isn't that what the industrial age and the digital age were aiming for? Fewer working hours and less working days? It seems that we have arrived, but are so blinded that we simply think if someone is on facebook, they have not done their work. On the contrary; we have more 'free time' at work even after completing our tasks that we need to 'look busy', and so many of us choose to use websites such as facebook to keep ourselves occupied in the meantime.WE DO NOT NEED TO BAN FACEBOOK, WE NEED TO REDUCE THE WORLD'S WORKING DAYS.This will also benefit the NHS, as it will vastly reduce the amount of stress-related illnesses (and let's face it, aren't most illnesses stress-related?), and will hopefully reduce petty crime rates, as parents will have more time to spend with their children.Doesn't everyone want to live in a safer, better and more relaxed environment?Now spread the word....'

'Life may be not only meaningless but absurd' Thomas Nagel

ALLOW THE POET HIS METAPHOR!

2007-07-11T16:43:00.000Z

"Action is the refuge of people who have nothing whatsoever to do."Oscar Wilde.

Self-Savagery no 667: In these dull ages, a cynical sovereignty reigns. It is inevitable! Ignatius Reilly's 'Gods of chaos, lunacy and Bad Taste' will be met with such sane hate. But I beg you. If for one month alone, allow the poet his metaphor! Believe the singer! Trust the poet! Hear the politician! Love their words! Believe it all! Let their efforts wash over you like a balm! Do not interpret their discussion! Accept all at the value of their offered faces! Allow yourself this, a most educational thirty-slash- thirty-one days of your time on planet Earth.

Wittering Wildean paradoxes is clearly a fate I'll return to later. Until then, we are all Thors.

PSYCHIC PRECINCTS

2007-05-14T15:05:00.000Z

'Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness"' Anonymous contributor, Wikipedia

'That was not only his oldest memory, but his only memory of childhood. The other one, that of an old man with an old-fashioned vest and a hat with a brim like a crow's wings who told him marvellous things framed in adazzling window, he was unable to place in any period. It was an uncertain memory, entirely devouid of lessons or nostalgia, the opposite of the memory of the executed man, which had really set the direction of his life and would return to his memory clearer and clearer as he grew older, as if the passage of time were bringing him closer to it.' Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

'All my lazy teenage boasts
are now high precision ghosts
And they're coming round the track
to haunt me'
Prefab Sprout, King of Rock'n'Roll

I had a premonition of my death, and I am relieved: It is as I had hoped. The moon can't come too soon. I always wanted to die like a man, in a Paris bordello from a sexual injury, while the angels and whores stand all around reading my poetry. They'll say 'He can't shake it anymore; He can't shake it anymore...'

I will be eighty-one years old.

It was confidently predicted by a family member that I would write a book. Now my family has seen off many a flighty pre-cog who, with 'funny feelings' and dour cardigans, has come to inform us of our destinies. We don't take rash forebodings lightly; our own future radars are subtle and wise, and our own keen acumen has always sufficed. My sisters' births were pre-empted by dreamy visions. Other presentiments have been delivered as promised. And yet, I still have not written a book. This prediction hangs like a curse, a curse of a particular kind of genius, and yet it is something that I am loathe to turn my back on, as it's possibility is a comfort. Only in seeing its effects repeated in younger siblings, predicted themselves to perform great feats, does it ring hard and cold.

Self-Savagery No. 1a: Pick your prophecies and stick to them.

Many of my own premonitions come as idle boasts, romantic promises that I made to myself and grimly stuck to: I predicted at sixteen that I would never be able to drive, and at the time of writing, I still cannot. Like Oskar in Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum, who decided that he always wanted to be three years old, and so makes it happen. But unfulfilled promises loiter like spoiled ballots and screwed-up betting slips, panhandler's claims that are rotted and lost, or tales of buried Nazi booty that no-one remembers the geography of.

Often I don't know that my premontions are even premonitions until they come to pass, and I then experience them in a lucid deja-vu fashion: ah, yes, I remember now: I knew this would happen. The moments of bitter clairvoyance are often inseperable from the flimsy ideas and curiously possible futures that cloud my head at any point of the day. Most possibilities swim in my skull. This means that while it is tricky to pick the lock of the future (not in a fashion that would impress the gallery and have them crossing my palm with silver), most things that happen are not surprises.

When I dislocated and broke my arm, it felt like I thought it would. Being drunk did too. But also: I know, from the brain down through the stomach, what it feels like to fly in both a hot-air balloon and a helicopter, although I cannot remember if I have ever flown in either. I have vague childhood recollections of both: Summer days on Southsea Common or at a school fete, images bleached by the sun. These images move in tenuous delicate orbits, always just out of view, a haze of forgetful afternoons that rear up and show themselves in the most obtuse ways, and in the most unrelated places.

A notion to cling to: Inspiration, like individual and collective recall, is something that floats on the breeze, in some places tight and thin, in others hovering like huge bubbles ready to be walked through and busted without our knowledge. Invisible memorials psychically carved through the air by faceless gnomes working for years and years, yet only chipping a momentary impression into the ether for individuals to stumble through, quite unawares one day; Individuals who had been thinking of something else but who will suddenly recall the words to a school song long forgotten, or the name of a teacher, or a corner of some dowdy park visited sporadically in childhood.

A friend of mine will occasionally, in a variety of environments, smell the acrid sulphuric stench that came to his nose just moments before he fell off his bike and broke a collarbone, aged ten. Taking it as a warning, he proceeds through his days with petrified care. He cannot describe its taste; just take heed of it as a vague signpost of danger past and future.

London is a hubbub of experimental auras, waiting to smash urgent sons and their bucking and braying theorems. It can offer apparent verifications for impossible philosophies and withdraw them suddenly, like little deaths. But still, I find futures, presents and other districts to investigate, and I travel for my health, plotting geographical emotions among the sacred boroughs around me. Everything evokes something. Lush precincts do not necessarily recall lush precincts, as we know. Like a world imagined from past experiences, each new house seen is a composite of previous ones, each new face a Frankenstein of schoolmates now grown. (Even every house in a novel is based on houses I know. The house in Marquez's 100 years of Solitude is my Nan's bungalow.) My childhood is a patchwork of numerous homes, a dozen schools, several home towns dotted around England and all appear around my present, rebuilt and reconfigured in dream flashes: A newsagents on Essex Road is a replica of an Attleborough post office, a Chinese on King Henry's Walk is transplanted from a Lancing parade. The shopping centre on Kingsland Road is identical to one in Fareham, despite it's appearance. Whole swathes of Southsea have been borrowed to invent Farrringdon. Most pertinent for me is the portion of Hackney that evokes a particular subway in Nuneaton, Warwickshire that I spent many evenings loitering around when I was fourteen. It isn't anything physical or visual. Perhaps an alarm above human-hearing rings through both places, and twitches my skull. Either way, when I pass through a particular aspect of Dalston Lane I remember the feeling of romantic failure of my early teens.

The subway was magnetic, sopping with territorial graffiti and teenage excitement. It was also resolutely ordinary. There, I called a girl 'baby', and it rung so preposterously untrue from my lips, so horrifically false, that I felt the entire weighty history of love as it is rendered in lyric, poetry and prose fall in around my ears. I saw my efforts measured against other Valentinoes, against other totemic schoolboys, against anyone, and saw them to be weak. I was an imposter in love. I was fourteen.

When I later read the quote below, I realised that my moment of first comprehending this problem was then, at the subway, aged fourteen.

"The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly," because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly." Umberto Eco, Reflections on the Name of the Rose

I was hamstrung by these dizzying concepts, and didn't kiss her. Ever. And this is reminded to me every time I pass through a certain part of Dalston Lane in Hackney, like an epitaph written on the air: 'Don't be hamstrung by dizzying concepts.'

'It's been said I will write a great book,' I remember telling her, in lieu of a kiss. 'It will be an autobiography about how I am a genius.'
'Maybe you should write about something you know about instead,' she said.

WEBBUS INTERUPTUS

2007-05-03T12:29:00.000Z

I am currently enjoying a sabbatical from prolonged internet usage and abuse, enforced by a familiar modern situation, the slack internet-line supplier. Never attempt to communicate with a communications company. They are an inarticulate annexe. They are a hex. They are neglectfully cruel: Two months without broadband in the spoiled and fattened modern age is akin to growing up under strict rationing or wandering through childhood parentless in more robust times.

Anyway, I needed a break. Your sycophantic notices were making me horsesick and caused my head to swell giddily. Perfumed emails have stockpiled and expired in my absence, leaving me with an inbox of sweating olefactory unpromise and a headful of sexy rot. Thank you, all of you, I love you too.

In the interim, please see previous post, entitled 'THE COUNT' for a new story.

FIME FUNNEL

2007-03-26T18:06:00.000Z

'Time is not a darkened tunnel. Time is but a blocked up funnel.'

In which Great-Uncle Dylan-Savage settles a modern predicament with Victorian-era words!
Writing in 1894:

'In these days, a heady nation finds itself awash with nostalgia for it's past successes; We not only have resplendent pensioners reminding us of the potency of the Great Exhibition over four decades ago, but we see 14 year-olds pining for the time, now subjected to history, when they were but befreckled eight-year-olds living in fear of the very active Ripper in London's grotty Eastern ends!

By the end of the twentieth century, I suppose that adolescence will have stretched, meaning that females of thirty will not be married! And nostalgia will have exploded, meaning that pre-teens will relive in some advanced photographic contraption, the glory of their toddlerdom, and profess to feeling aged and haggard, all at but nine years old! Every person in the land will thus simultaneously see himself as old (with a long past stretching ever backward) and young (with more leisures to come). This I suggest we call the Parallel Paradox, or the Growing Down Stratagem, or somesuch snappy title. I am as much a victim as any other to this condition: I've mourned epochs I never knew; gnashed my teeth over unrequited love with dead strangers I've never met, our eras being separated by millennia. This self-regard is terminal. Might we one day spawn children who cry at birth because their wombic pasts are lost?'

Ah. When Great-Uncle Dylan-Savage speaks, the sound of tacks being struck across their bonces fills the room. For further evidence, see previous posts for trails of his particular artistic inquiry and slithery genius. Great-Uncle Dylan-Savage begets this blog, and the world.

Me? I vividly recall walking to a professional photography studio with my Mum, Dad and sister, not long before my parents' divorce. I remember my seven-year-old brain attempting to store the details of every drain and brick along the way, because I wanted to force my future self to hold onto that moment. I was completely aware at the time, not only of the fact that I would grow old and big many years from then, but that I would look back on my childhood with curiosity and wonder. This awareness threw a gauze over the whole day: As I posed with my sister in front of fictional rural scenes and smiled for the photographic record, I experienced a detachment from bodily goings-on; I was watching my own nostalgia being invented and shaped at that moment, budding and stretching for air, to return decades on. Perhaps some vague awareness of the impending separation of my parents sparked it. Looking at the photographs now, I do not see any obvious signs of the immense self-awareness I felt; There is no I-know-it's-a-dream glint in my eye, no glistening effervescence that is greater there than in any other childhood pictures. But that day, I was acutely aware, perhaps for the first time, that I myself would be looking at these pictures sometime in the future; I could see, immeasurably and uncannily, the timeline of my own life, and how it knots and loops.

My life up to the point of those photographs is a series of semi-fictionalised artefacts (eating a garden snail; pulling on a stranger's ears and shouting 'Na-Nu, Na-Nu!', autistically creating elaborate lines of toy cars) smoothed by repeated retellings at family Christmases to smooth, hard pebbles, identical in everyone's mythical imagination, even (perhaps especially) those that weren't present. As I'm known as the kid who was good, any bad behaviour is forgotten.

Since then, I've always been aware when I am dreaming. It causes me to laugh at the unreal threat of nightmare dreams and be absolutely depressed by the illusory magic of happy ones.

DARING

2007-03-19T20:44:00.000Z

Daring, n. One of the most conspicuous qualities of a man in security. (Ambrose Bierce)

... and yet, do we not live in a time where despite great comfort, wild feats of abandon, artistic or otherwise, are scarce? Conservative times, ladies and gents, conservative times.

GO MISSING

2007-03-12T20:21:00.001Z

Self-Savagery no.1100: Fudge your own final curtain. Split the band in a lengthy process that means you're forgotten before anyone notices. Don't stick around for your own funeral. Wreck your career and burn the souvenirs, and don't leave anything for sure. Disappear from public life and visit your Nan.

GO MISSING
I started fires all over, caused worry to my family, who just wanted to know that I was safe. I am the mythical Madoc, revered by the Welsh, I vanished in a huff with the booty. I divided into two, and was spared execution in the tower, when as the Princes we evaded our Uncle's pillow, becoming minor actors overseas. I am the crew of the Marie Celeste, whose telephones ring on and on unanswered, but who enjoy the hospitality of an invisible island. I am William H Bonny, Paddy Garrett never shot me, I escaped in a rented cadillac. I fraternise with Black Bart, who beats me at poker with learning he picked up before his escape in San Quentin. I am the son of Errol Flynn, and when factions of the Viet Cong took me in 1970, they fought with the Khner Rouge over what to do with me; In the confusion, I danced into the trees like my father in his prime, and built treehouses with friendly gorillas. I am Lionel 'Buster' Crabb, and I work on the Gosport ferry in Portsmouth harbour, scene of my supposed death. I keep shards of the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze in my rucksack and my pockets, and sell them on the internet to Americans. The body they found was some other John Doe, who fell from the hot walls while drunk one New Years Eve. I am Charles Lindbergh III, perennially in limbo aged three, the kidnappers demands never having been met. I am DB Cooper falling from the sky, prevented from landing by false paperwork and winds. I was Richard Bingham, Seventh Earl of Lucan, until I spent myself in Eastern boudoirs on inexpensive women. I am Roald Amundsen, not swimming in the Arctic, but running a fish restaurant in Eastbourne. I am Antoine de Saint-Exupery, not in the Mediterrainean Sea, but training a guide dog on the Isle of Wight called Little Prince. I was Amelia Earhart, radioing the other Ninety-Nines, giving the girls rousing speeches from the ether (I was not kidnapped by the Japanese, as Hollywood suggested, and I was not as softly pretty as Rosiland Russell; I never met anyone who resembled Fred MacMurray; I was not Tokyo Rose; I never saw Saipan; I was not taken by alien invaders, who did not experiment on me; I was never insane, clinically or otherwise; I simply took off over the Sun and flew, flew until the universe ended). I didn't ever see, contrary to conspiratorial supposition, the passengers and crew of the Avro Tudor IV aircraft Star Ariel that came unstuck in the Triangle of Bermuda, and I wasn't the Rockerfeller heir who grew thirsty and bored in New Guinea. I am Anna Anderson, claimant to the throne of Russia, whose DNA didn't match up to the real Anastasia (who had travels of her own, across the motels of America with a thick-eared patron at the wheel, before leaving him penniless and clotheless in Ohio).

I am Billly Pilgrim, at the beginning and the end, in Cinderella's boots and a dancing monkey's coat.

I am Ambrose Bierce, leaning against Mexican stone, waiting for the shots that shoot me to rags; I am a gringo, beating old age, disease or falling down the cellar stairs. I am hoping for epiphanies from evading being known. I am dreaming of all those who walk into the fire rather than into the spotlight. Those that spend a decade in bed or having tea at their Mum's instead of publicly grinding out results. Those that evade, by design or accident, ever being finished. I am van Gogh's destroyed canvasses, Genet's burnt manuscripts, Garbo walking away at forty-four. I am the idea that leaves the brain and expires.

TOILERS OF THE WORLD, DISBAND!

2007-03-07T11:22:00.000Z

Self-Savagery 1096: Take advice from no-one, not unless it correlates with your worldview anyway. Listen to the masters only if they say what you want to hear. And so:

'I found things became a lot easier when I didn't expect to win... You abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece' Leonard Cohen

''Struggle for life' indeed! The curse of battle and toil leads man back to the boar, to the grunting beast's crazy obsession with the search for food. You and I have frequently remarked upon that maniacal glint in a housewife's scheming eye as it roves over food in a grocery or about the morgue of a butchers shop. Toilers of the world, disband! Old books are wrong. The world was made on a Sunday!' Vladimir Nabokov

ELECTRICAL GHOSTS

2007-02-18T16:50:00.000Z

Here be errors. Not the kind you could catalogue; but not the kind you could ignore. While Dalston is as filled as the next borough with derelict hearts and alcove pissers, beggars and the homeless, they orbit the perimeter of your vision with little effect. A numbness of experience comes about if you live somewhere for long enough, rendering you untouchable by events around you. In London this is more wearying than the cost of living.
But lately, indiscreet electrical ghosts abound; there have been four powercuts in six weeks. This gets attention. It brings familes to their doorsteps to look at the dark. Number fourteen lost power altogether for several days, until a generator was towed up to sit outside and thrum away. It takes up one parking-space and fills a whole street with it's noise. It rattles the skull like a wound-down alarm, set for something you can't remember. It's churning bowels go on and on, working for twenty four hours a day.
The Jamaican who always sits on the corner tells us it's a sign. Of what? That something is coming. New rumours travel quickly, and he knows them all. It's the rats, they're eating up all the cables. Or the Gillett Street development has sucked us dry of power, or maybe the Olympics or the war. He sits and drinks, speaks to all passers-by, asks them how their 'lectric's done'. He fires questions and offers tips. He pumps all grapevines for new bulletins. I told him that I was on Kingsland High Street when the last powercut happened. I described the wave of lights dimming, from south to north, and the security alarms all chiming up a clamour at once. And then about how last week the Barclays Bank started spitting out £20 notes whenever you asked for ten, and how someone called his friends down, and within an hour there was a queue of sixty or so, taking turns, until the machine was emptied at about 2 am.
'All signs,' he said, shaking his head, sadly. 'Bad signs. The Gods are speaking in furious alphabets that no-one can read.'

Who can know. Isn't there a film about aliens who manage to take over the Earth without any citizens noticing? Or more pertinently, without any citizens raising themselves from their langour to put up a fight? In that case, humans were the phenomena not alive in the inked world, and were involved only in the illegitamate business of being dead, without knowing. Apathy killed us before violence.

'You'll never bend neutrons; you'll never tame electrodes. They'll turn on you in a flash,' a friend's Dad used to say. 'The sinking of the Titanic proved that you can’t build a track over the North Atlantic, so we should never try. Man hasn’t the power to guide a machine down a set path. A train is actually pacing out the perimeters of nature’s power. Rome, for example, didn’t fall; it was pushed, by men who believed their petty transactions put them in Godly positions. Their folly was not ambition, but that that didn't listen to the land.' He was a man who did woodwork by candlelight and handwashed his clothes. His son was laughed at by the other kids for not having new trainers or a television.

When I was ten, we were without electricity for three days. This was when we lived in Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, and the snow that settled that week meant our pipes froze and we couldn't move our car from the driveway. We listened to a battery-powered radio and competed jigsaw puzzles by torchlight. The torch was a present we had bought for my Grandad for Christmas, and was carefully placed back in it's wrapping when illumination was restored. We'd take soup heated on our gas stove round to neighbours, and go to bed early for lack of better ideas.
When the weather settled, we went sledging round at the big park on the estate. Mike had a fight with Lloyd and his friends, and I can still picture Mike standing in the middle of a group of younger children, swinging the blue sledge round his head to ward them off. They threw snowballs at him.
That sledge sticks in my head, my psyche's own mini-Rosebud, but without the weight. You can trawl memories for more than just flickers of significance and find nothing. The past runs on dubious means. It is powered by self-indulgence and deceits. Mike's Dad worked for the Electricity Board; I could attempt to trace the importance of him being in my dream the night of the first powercut (beyond a pleasant symmetry), but it's a fools game, a hall of mirrors, a gibberish acrostic. Searching for nature's pattern, for reason in thoughts, is nigh futile. Yet it entrances, and it's all we have.

When people first saw projected film, they said wondered if it meant that death would no longer be the end. They supposed that film would offer a kind of immortality to those that appeared. Instead it has proved to be a medium that provides us with ghosts. Electrical spirits flutter around our consciousness and our cities, radio and television waves moan like prayers on the wind. They inhabit a deadzone of crackling film stars, rebounding police radio messages, the spectral fizz of aged broadcasts. They are evident only in the ringing in the ears after a loud sound or in the impression in the dark left by a lamp after it is turned off, that yellow echo, that brief recollection.

And still the generator throbs. Yesterday night a drunken passer-by took to it with his boots and missed. Our lights flicker repeatedly. The other day a cyclist threw a punch at me. It could all mean nothing, just dots that don't join like some complex drunken morse.

SNOW; SUCCESS; BARBARIANS

2007-02-08T14:34:00.000Z

Self-Savagery no 1040: Don't pay attention to your ambitious drives. Don't even ignore them. Remember: Winning is only important on the battlefield and in the operating theatre. 'Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows'- Bierce; 'To be popular one must be a mediocrity'- Wilde.
I can't wait for success. So I'm going ahead without it.

Snow: An opportunity for everyone to stay at home for a day. A chance to look out of the window, have a snowball fight, make soup, anything; most of all, an opportunity to stop. And daydream. From such idle days, great comfort and genius can spring. What an opportunity.
London, England!

But do we take this chance? Not likely. Barbarians, the lot of us.

SELF-SAVAGERY no.1019

2007-02-01T11:56:00.000Z

Self-Savagery no.1019: Do nothing. If they see you, do less.

TRULY SMASHED AND BLOCKED!

2007-01-26T23:00:00.000Z

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

2007-01-26T09:36:00.000Z

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

2007-01-14T13:04:00.000Z

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

2007-01-13T23:37:00.000Z

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

2007-01-11T11:01:00.000Z

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.

HAPPY NUDE YEAR

2006-12-30T09:57:00.000Z

Self-Savagery no 1001: New Year's Resolutions are a good way of setting the goals you will fail to achieve this year. Remember- pick goals that are within your capabilities. This will render your failure all the more bitter and profound.

THE BELLS by LOU REED

2006-12-16T10:45:00.000Z

In which our indulged anti-hero, the villain of so many pieces, hears the tolling of time and seeks comfort in the warmth of jazzy arrangements and fizzing brass, and sends apologetic notes to his loved ones. It’s a series of essays on self-pity and feeling bad, but like Iggy Pop’s ‘The Idiot’ and Grace Jones ‘Warm Leatherette’, it carries an air of post-indulgence introspection, self-justification and weary humour (not to mention a mixture of traditional sounds/songforms and more unearthly ones), meaning you don’t know where you stand. The interest in sincerity and the means of expressing it (what we recognise as ‘soulful’ sounds) bring to mind the ‘plastic soul’ of Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ period, and the ensuing series of records, his best, which dealt with questions of confusion and self-expression.
But Reed is a far more salty customer than Bowie; there is more cut to his jib, more spite to his moves. His superiority complex can never be suppressed. Here he swings between his familiar warm buzzy vocal and a maggoty Ziggy Stardust yelp, which sounds like a pained and angry Gollum on ‘With You’ which might be answering Bowie’s query in ‘Be My Wife’ with a doubtful yes, but I’ll make your life hell, and you mine.
Like a jaded explorer settling into the familiar American musics and finding them an awkward fit, his voice is always a counter to the loose murky lush of the instrumentation. Opener ‘Stupid Man’ is shot full of the kind of self-hatred only the truly narcissistic can muster. ‘Disco Mystic’ strikes a perfect tempo for a brooding, hilarious sonsense nong, crawling in on it’s belly and repeating the mantra of it’s title as if daring us to either find meaning here, or an answer to refute it. ‘Families’ swoons and staggers beautifully, and Reed’s meandering vocal nearly destroys it wonderfully. It’s a seasick letter home, simultaneously a comic parody of teenage angst (‘And families that live out in the suburbs, often make each other cry’) and an apparently tearful apology to those at home whose patience has worn. It’s brilliant tension lies in not knowing whether to take an apparently sorry Reed at face value or look for fingers crossed behind his back. And as a study of confused motives, as a missive from a wronged and often wrong man, it packs more punch than preachy anger.
‘City Lights’ a beautiful meditation on the treatment of Charlie Chaplin by the United States is a release from concerns of Reed’s ego, and as such is possibly sweetest moment here, all anger restrained and tired.
Possibly the stand-out track here, ‘I Want To Boogie With You’ is a sumptuous stand-up declaration of Reed’s intent to, ‘go down town for a little romance’ with the subject of his affections. A song that is all the greater for Reed’s inability to match the honesty of the music with voice and lyrics. He’s not a Wonder or a Gaye, and his pride is stung:

‘Well I know your little baby sister
She thinks that Im a flop
But I guess that you know that its true
I spent more time at the bottom than the top
Tell your little sister
I know she wants to give me a whirl
But I dont have the time, baby
To wait till shes grown up and shes a woman, not a girl’

Reed practically invented the commentary-style lyric in pop; his detached musings on, say, ‘Heroin’ or were a true big bang. What makes ‘The Bells’ one of his best records, apart from the gorgeously full sound, is the confusion of the personas he adopts, the masks of sincerity played with here; questionable motives of a born liar trying to tell it like it is. Or not.

L'HISTOIRE DE MELODY NELSON by SERGE GAINSBOURG

2006-11-30T13:03:00.000Z

Humphrey Bogart in Nicolas Ray’s In A Lonely Place (his best performance, bar none) is a tired and cynical writer who surely knows, even as he writes the story of his love affair with Gloria Graeme, that he is killing it; for when he finishes the script, the affair will die. Beauty must be tarnished. Bogart may or may not be guilty of a murder in that film, but it’s the suspicion that kills the love; hope is futile, in retrospect. And here is Serge Gainsbourg, whispering so close to the microphone as to be almost consuming it, delivering a tale of love as old as time and money, with glorious technicolour hindsight; with the voice of a man who knows bitterly that you can’t nototiate with that most twisted of iron councils, Fate.

‘Les ailes de la Rolls effleuraient des pylônes
Quand m'étant malgré moi égaré
Nous arrivâmes ma Rolls et moi dans une zone
Dangereuse, un endroit isolé’

(‘The Rolls' wings brushed against poles
When despite myself off my path
We arrived my Rolls and I in a dangerous
Zone, an isolated place’)

So begins L’Histoire de Melody Nelson, with the narrator not in control; Not of the Rolls, or of himself, or of events. Melody Nelson, the 15 year old subject of the fourty-something narrator’s attention, will lose her virginity and then die as she flees home after their brief affair, the victim of a curse placed on the aircraft by the spurned Serge. This is how it must be. This is how it always was. Such a perfect beauty must perish.
Melody, track one of this story record, sidles in with an almost sickly, jaunty funk; it is a spare bass drums and guitar arrangement, loose and sauntering. When Gainsbourg’s voice enters, a low, resigned sigh pushed disorientatingly loud in the mix, it is an instrument that conveys the knowledge that it’s owner is himself but an instrument of the Gods. He is waiting for St. Peter’s verdict with little attention on the outcome, for he knows what it will be. This is a listlessness born of knowledge. It’s truly dangerous. He knows the handcart to Hell and Heaven follow the same dirty routes. His are spent forces. A man capable of a crime of non- passion. An Atlas who turned his burden in a ditch; a Hercules who is finished with his labour’s and still no closer to the end. He is tired of love in a way only romantics can be. He’s boxed too many rounds with those shadows, and knows the judges are bent. And from this position, we recieve the story of Melody Nelson.
Ballade de Melody Nelson, track two, is utterly sublime, with Jane Birkin as Melody finishing lines in that breathless smile of a voice, and slips by in two minutes; Valse de Melody and Ah! Melody, grander and sadder, are shorter than that. After the lengthy, meandering opening track, three gorgeous, out and out declarations of love disappear over the horizon in a blink. After the broody set up of L’Hotel Particulier, a downbeat string-led walk through the layout of the mansion where the narrator and Melody are going to find a room, the scene is set. Then, we are disturbed by a spazzy funk, and En Melody, the consumation of the romance, is jolly throwaway and all the more perverse for it. The only voice heard is Birkin’s as Melody, and she does not speak. She cackles a genuine cackle, and that death rattle of a laugh, is funny; and laughter is never funny. In place of a more earnestly romantic gesture, (like the swooning she did on Je T'aime...Moi Non Plus) this is a thumbed nose.
The tightrope between parody and melody, between love and hate, meaning and flippancy, is walked throughout Gainsbourg’s career, it’s his biggest strength, and it’s also what denies him entry into the pantheon (besides being witty in a foreign tongue). He treats pretty faces and petty faeces with equal import; high art with loud farts. And so the consumation here must be a cheeky joust, as Serge continues to drag us from the ridiculous to the sublime, becuase that is how life is with the fates, one huge joke at the romantic’s expense. In being contrary and perverse he personifies both why the English-speaking world has such disdain for foreign pop and why we are lazy fools. Expressions of confusion, emotional complexity or doubt are surely the most pertinent ones, and yet we repeatedly turn our backs. Sigh. Serge’s greatest hit, Je T’aime...Moi Non Plus could only get banned for being too raunchy in England, and then later become a symbol to us of sex-obsessed Frenchness, when in reality it is a send-up of the old-man-being-seduced-by-a-young-girl-yeah-in-your-daydreams macho-frolic, with sharp lyrics, as well as being a poignantly rendered romantic anthem in it’s own right (laughing, giggling together being the height of romance of course, you at the back). This means that it is, to these ears at least, the kind of have-your-cake-and-eat-it mind trick that only a particular streak of genius can fire. That’s the thing with the English. We think that because we’re funny that no-one else can be. And so Serge became the dirty old Frenchman in the country he least wanted to be, ours.
Love dies. Bogart offered Graeme too many embraces that smothered; displayed too many grabs and holds that conveyed murder and danger; doubts emerged, but they were doomed all along. There is no certainty greater than the certainty of killing one’s greatest love. The Rules mean that as it always was is how it shall always be. Bogart carried the countenance of a man who knew it and didn’t like it, but was powerless to stop it; the best that can happen under such sufferance is to find a sadistic pleasure in the self-destruction, the kind that Gainsbourg finds here, as he curses his love, destroys her and smiles oh so bitterly at his own failures.
And so the record ends with Cargo Culte, which musically is a retread of the opener, and repeats the introduction of Melody (‘Tu t'appelles comment ? -Melody. - Melody comment ? - Melody Nelson’). Hello as goodbye. Serge’s bitterly stinging, sweet hex on his love kills her, but he was God’s device. A heavenly choir sings, and we have the crescendo that has been denied for so long, an almost overwrought, parodic finish.

FLOAT LIKE A BUTTERFLY, BE LIKE STING

2006-11-29T22:40:00.000Z

And now a look at the new releases. Some sumptuous reviews, fresh off the slab:

IDLE BANTER 'Idle Banter's Jizz Idiocy'

If Idle Banter weren't a real live functioning group, i'd have to invent them. Prog-Jazz-Funk-Glam's very own Spinal Tap were given up for dead after the critical mauling and horrible sales of their 20th studio opus in 1996. The African-tribal inflected 'In dee Jungle' whose sleeve infamously pictured the suspiciously sucked-in paunches of drummer Vic De'ath and bassist Ed Sexie draped in full native garb and garlanded with blushing bush babes may have been a somewhat hamfisted attempt at social commentary (something about 'the blacks' as singer Gizz Black put it in a clanger of an interview with Q magazine at the time) , but the music contained within was alone enough to bury the poor sods to eye-level, containing as it did lashings of reactionary witterings about 'the dark peoples of the dark lands' over tired 'A-Wim-Bo-Way' cliches and meandering guitar solos. 'Float Like A Butterfly, Be Like Sting' was a case in point, a turgid holier-than-thou shrine to the Jamaican ex-Police saviour of the Indians, with 'Have you ever lived in a cave? It's no rave!' as the final nail in it's chorus.
So fans of the earlier, more flash and fun stff will be relieved that the recharged Idle Banter have seen their folly somewhat on Jizz Idiocy; 'Down 'er Neck' and 'Leotard Trouble' are throaty returns to the stalking-horse macho mini-dramas that gave the band such a run of hits at the arse-end of the Glam Era, albeit that these efforts are a bit more of, well, an effort. Their lyrics let them down again on the dated-before-they-were-minted 'Latte Par-tay? No Way!' a diatribe against coffee shops, and 'Celebrity Squared', a rant about, yes, celebrities, and how boring they are. The requisite lovesong, 'I Need You Baby' is the most emotionally challenging five minutes you'll have all year. The death of former guitarist Steve Handstand in 9/11 casts a shadow over the end of the album, and the closer 'Don't Leave, Steve' is the best argument for dying heard in years, it's case being furnished by a turkey of a performance by the band, all obvious sugar and weighty strings. A confusing mixture of aged bragging and phoney sensitivity then. Nothing sadder than the once non-greats becoming hasn't-beens. But if you liked the early stuff, etc etc.

SPORT AID 'Don't Fear The Keeper'

In which, yes! for the sake of the kids who can't afford hockeysticks and goalie gloves we have: the headscratching phenomenon of a record that no-one will remember next week, a Mission Impossible-style self-destructing disc made reality by virtue of being so moribund and irresponsible as to literally dig it's own grave through the CD bit in Woolworths, only to be found and treasured as a time-capsule by those vastly superior future civilisations who will take us to be, on this evidence, the crude self-loathing lumberers we truly are.
The Three Tenners, (as they are sub-hilariously billed here, a Davro of a joke that comes some sixteen years after football's brief flirt with opera circa Italia 90) Mark 'Lawro' Lawrenson, Alan 'Al' Hansen and Gary 'Gary' Lineker vomit smug audio-bile over Blue Oyster Cult's seductive death-lollop (yes, your fears are realised, for it is a cover, nay, a smothering, of the hit of yore), with all the subtlety of a Jossie's Giants counter-attack.
And yes, in the chorus, believe your weary ears, that is Peter Schmeichel in his pondourous Scando-Manc, doing the worst Schwarzenegger impression you've heard since your Dad popped out to B&Q and on his departure said 'I'll Be Back'. Oh joy. In the words of a dissenter at Live 8: 'If the lives of African children depend on Dido, then they deserve more pity than even Geldof can suck out of us'. Do the kids a favour. Lend them your old shin-pads and buy them a can of Coke instead of this.

DRIZZLE CRUMPET 'Old-fashioned Bike'
If Dali is the Elvis of Surrealism, these boys are Fish. But what does that make Marillion?

SPURIOUS MANIFESTO, POINTLESS PROJECT

2006-11-28T13:50:00.000Z

Self-Savagery 103: Write a manifesto to fit your achievement, or lack of it. Claim your failings are a deliberate act of protest. This is Self-Savagery in exelsis: justifying to yourself, not only your complete lack of success, but going so far as to claim that failure of the precise kind you know well was what you coveted all along. Once I tried, after the column Notes and Queries, to write a book called Quotes and Nearlies, which was to be composed entirely of straight lifts from everybody else’s good ideas, and some second rate ones of my own. Every time I felt the urge to touch myself I wrote instead. If you must, busy yourself with pointless projects, such as compendiums of half ideas stitched together untidily with spurious manifestos.

SHORT SHARP LESSONS

2006-11-20T19:54:00.000Z

'Not all good things say good things' Garry Mulholland on Duran Duran.

There. My clumsy rant under the banner of THE UNIMPORTANCE OF IMPORTANCE distilled into elegance. An example, to paraphrase Clive James, of the fact that all good novels would make wonderful short stories, all good stories would make amazing paragraphs, all good paragraphs would be even better sentences...

Never let it be said that editing is anything less than the highest form of creation.

SELECTIONS FROM THE KING'S NOTEBOOKS: FINAL PART

2006-11-20T09:44:00.000Z

This might be mah last entry, August 15th, year of our Lord nineteen seventy-seven, and ah hope to set a few things straight.
The truth, such as it is, can get lost in a sea of innuendoes, particularly when the principal passes into secret sanctums. And ah feel that publically, mah position has been misrepresented somewhat. Ah need to lift a few boulders off mah chest, to release the weight on this soon-to-be celestial ribcage and this soon-to-be celestial heart.
Now first, and maybe most severe: Never let it be said that towards the end ah was a tired showman sick of tired shows; Ah was always proud to be a humble singer of songs. And just sometimes, when a particular disposition or instinct swung over on me, shining it's good light, I didn't have to grapple with the words or wrestle with the form; ah found it easy. And although later on I ascertained that certain illnesses were conflicting with my main desire, to entertain the people, never let it be said that ah lost that said desire, that it was spent like a dime; because that kind of desire cannot be spent, you toss it and it comes back threefold.
And those there other rumours y'all been hearing are all falsified information, gutter chat, tired trash. Remember what is true: I am an eighth degree blackbelt in Karate. Ah am a Federal Agent. You'll find they don't give those garlands out lightly, not to anyone stuck fast on those street-peddled narcotic creations. Any problem I ever had was my black illnesses, my gippin' heart. Any medications for my multitude ailments was always prescribed, fact.
Mah fiscaliture of the purse and of the soul was what gets me down. On mah death, notations will be cited to St.Peter, and a full report will be sent to the procurator fiscal. Oh, in mah time ah have given one two many rats to one two many snakes; and most of them are still here, just awaiting for me to suggest we get out the guns and shoot some trees, or crash some cars around the gardens. And then they'll slope off, taking their wage wth them, to entertain ladies in bars with tales of The King an' how he's gone blown it all except his voice.
For all my health complaints, I humbly note that my voice is still golden; perhaps even better than ever, drilled through with just a little pain.
But who in this crowd is mah enemy? Who is the poison? Ah look them all in their pairs of pupils an' see that they all look back true and hard. Ah have to consult with higher powers on such matters, it seems, for mah instincts are surly primates who have run away to sunnier climates.
Oh, those gathered around me, ah've always treated kind-heartedly and respectfully (unlike little Lisa-Marie, who'd threaten to fire them for having girls other than their wives sitting on their knees throwing bourbon down their collars, or for not preparing her pancake to the correct hue and texture), but they're conspiring. But ah do not blame them. They are part of a grand plan, grander than any except the Lord above. Their plan is one that will see me in mah grave, shot dead. Ah do not know who leads this ring but ah know they're a-comin.
Ah turned to the scriptures, but only found fatgued psalmists with old stories; they only tell me that ah really am a peculiarly fetid monarch, fated to squalor in mah own piss at the expense of mah child and her mother. So ah turn to mah direct line with the biggest man: Help me Lord, to know the right thing. Ah'm looking for clues everywhere; in the attic, the basement. Ah know this place is bugged. But Lord, Ah know, with your due assistance, and ah say this humbly: Ah am indestructible. The numbers say ah will die murdered on August 16th 1978, tomorrow.. But ah know I can change that. Ah can break out of this grand plan that fate has created for me, and ah will.
And I realise that for oh so long, mah instincts have been dulled, mah fancies suspicious. But I vow to stop it and take control of mah own here destinies. Ah learned of mah fate when ah was visited by mah twin Jesse during one particularly fruitfal spell of slumber; Lord, you sent mah twin to see me only last night to deliver a message. And ah saw Jesse, pretty as Christ himself, and ah listerned.
Oh Jesse, ah miss you.
But back to mah peelin' front, mah ditherin reputation: Ah stand here and ah say, mah name will not be shaken down; it is strong, four syllables, rythmic and tight. Ah will fight tonight. Natural forces must be obeyed, for sure, but when they're marshalled by those that prevail toward the Satanic quarter, well, anything other than resistance is but a coward's way. Ah stand tall and offer what 'Cilla always called mah 'Fire Eyes'.
So tonight ah will play racquetball, play mah piano songs, then retire. Ah will behave as if I suspect nothin' of those around me. Ah will wait in mah bedroom, with a selection from mah righteous gun cupboard, and ah will wait. Perhaps ah will lock mahself in mah bathroom- it has only one door through which the murderers can come a-passin. And ah'll be ready.
And if ah should be shot through the gut as mah dream announced, than ah must say: ah will not die sittin'.
Ah have computated and purtained a certain humble crystal knowledge from all of this. All of us are wire-wool-brained freaks. The modern information ages as chilled as their Ice counterparts for us breathing mammals, for sure. There's wind in the wires, a conspiratorial ether, and ah can't say ah've come close to figurin' much out in mah time, except to say that ah know now that someone is a-comin' and ah am a resistin.
Ah've had psychic cosmonauts and darn good sports, authorties and invigilators, but they're all hollow! Salt-shakers! All except mah mentor, that righteous man, the gent who could dicapitate a man with his mind, whose chops are a winning argument, whose kicks will be explodin' and supposin' to inform the unrighteous of the score in this game.
But he ain't here, not now, and ah do need his counsel. Police? The police never hear, not truly. Ah'm a certified agent of this country, in it's employ, and for mah love and effort ah do not receive gainful protection, no sir. The rich are their own country. Mah pockets are laced with silver and gold, and that is mah reward and burden. Ah'm a fire hazard. And ah'm almost done. Ah'm growing paradise flowers as preparation for my reparation with the Lord. Vile indemnifications begone. The answer has not come forth Lord, not the big answerin' answers to the big questionin' questions anyhow; Ah have spoken to The Great Postman, and seen His Immortal Sack, from which feline mewings could be heard; but he did not release the rope. In immortal heaven I might well see tyings untied, and the contents spewed forth into a swirl of giddy fun games, in which golden truth is a ball of wool for that little Tigress, freed from her bag, to chase with and unravel, leaving a trail of answers behind her. Ah that little tigress.
But I digress.
Just in case this is goodbye: Lisa Marie, mah girl, ah have a new song. You'd like it, it kicks like your favourites, and swings like a tree. The words, well, the bit that counts is this:

Your Body is a temple
And I'm Jesus Christ (the Lord)
Getting angry at the traders
Who dwell inside (on board)

Your transluscent hair ribbons, Lisa-Marie, well they stick in mah throat, metaphorically speaking. And your lips, like your Daddy's, tickled by a burn, stung by a wasp. Be good. Tell your mother ah love her. Ah Cilla, I'll say it mahself, but you know you were the one. I remember your face that day we took a trip up to Santa Monica when we got ourselves a divorce. Ah remember holding your hand throughout, in the court, and you don't think I didn't notice your alarm at my hands . y'always said mah hands were soft, and right then they were as puffy as hell. Ah noticed your face. And it made me sadder than anything since my Ma went.
Well ah've been puffy for sometime and ah'm apologetic sweetheart, right to the pit of mah stomach.

Pops? Pops, Ah'm tired. Ah love you an' Ah'm tired.

THE UNIMPORTANCE OF IMPORTANCE

2006-11-19T16:41:00.000Z

Self-Savagery 102: Be aware that commentary on war and other supposedly 'serious' subjects is the quickest way to render your work tawdry and cheap. Like sticking sequins on jeans. See the difference between art about important subjects and important art. They are not the same, and frequently far far away from one another.

'How can you say that film was bad? It was about the war in Iraq! The invasion of Afghanistan! The exploitation of the Middle East by corporate greed! That's important!'
'Still a bad film.'
'But it expressed a sentiment that was entirely in keeping with your own. It expressed your exact position. You agree with the film-makers!'
'Still a bad film.'

Be strong on these matters! Be bold! Some of the worst films ever made suggest that 'rape is bad' or that 'being nice to each other is nice'. Example:

Battle Royale 2, an admittedly already predictably tired explosion of it's predecessor's thin formula, steered itself into offensively awful territiory (nay, dangerously offensive, quite something for a comedy horror-fest) with it's laughably patronising National Geographic-style footage of some poverty-stricken inhabitants of a not-named Middle Eastern state laughing and playing and thus teaching the main character about the meaning of, well, something (Poor people are happy? Brown people are nice? War is wrong? Innocence is destroyed by war? No poo, Poirot.). Thus a lame and hurried b-movie sequel becomes an unwieldy weapon; it becomes worth ignoring.

An achievement, all-round, really.

The best war films are comedies and the best comedies are war films anyway.

ADVICE, EFFORT, GOAL

2006-11-17T11:40:00.000Z

Self-Savagery no7: Elevate your worst ideas and bury the good ones. Never try.

Self-Savagery no88: Avoid acts of humility or bravery. Giving up your own life to save another is no act of courage. It is an admission of defeat. Only those who acknowledge their own inferiority can be selfless.

The following is an exchange I had with a caring and desperate young soul unblemished by failure and tarnished by ambition:
‘You must write truthfully,’ she said, admonishing some of my more pricarious and fantastical prose.
‘I do.' I replied. 'Truthful and true aren’t the same thing.’
She rolled her eyes at what she believed to be wordplay.
‘Get angry.' she said. 'Get passionate. Write from the heart. That's what the greats do.'
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,' I replied. 'You will insist on talking in this meaningless way. Besides, my heart would produce particularly drab writing. It’s only when I try to be heartless that there is a flicker.’

Self-Savagery 45: Write about what you don't know. Start with yourself.

BRUTALITY, DOROTHY, RE-ENTRY

2006-11-07T09:46:00.000Z

Self-Savagery 51: Ah, the abstract brutality of the world: You'll never take it's measure. Just when you cannot contemplate your brilliance, and the world's ignorance of this, things will change; and you will become more brilliant, and the world will turn it's back yet further.

In the words of (I believe) Dorothy, at the point when the boat is about to sink at the end of The Wizard of Oz:

'I'm feeling very strident baby
Strident on this theme
The world is just not fair babe
There is no karmic scheme'

Or, if I may indulge your patience, in the words of myself:

'If flair is combustible,
Then I will fry
Upon re-entry
My wings will melt and die'

FIRE!

2006-11-07T09:39:00.000Z

Self-Savagery no16: Fire indiscriminately. Don’t name your targets. If you must name them, pluck them randomly from a list. Attack yourself first at all costs. Turn on your friends at every opportunity. Apologise to strangers that you’ve never insulted. Change the names of fictional characters. Keep the names of real people.

FURTHER THOUGHT-FOOD FOR THEE

2006-11-02T13:23:00.000Z

Self-Savagery no 34: Remember, artists are not brave. Not unless they pique the wrath of a militant faction of a religious group, or defy an oppressive regime. In these cases, one might suggest a certain aspect of Self-Savagery is at play; death brings immortality and is indeed an excellent career choice for the lazy.

Self-Savagery no 12: Embrace whimsy. Then give her up if you’re bored. But if you set out to write something important you’re already finished. It it will inevitably be only merely good, and lapped up by the half-brains out there. They’ll say it’s brave and the people will vote you a winner. Avoid this fate at all costs. Awards only mean something if they’re decided not by the millions but by a panel (preferably no more than one) of elitist snobs, preferably ar arbitrarily as possible. All bad decisions are made my groups, all inspired ones by individuals. the masses cannot be trusted. Do not turn your back on them.

SELECTIONS FROM THE KING'S NOTEBOOKS: PART TWO

2006-11-01T12:29:00.000Z

And then, the next night, ah dreamed; ah dreamed of me and mah boys, of us all in a bar, the guys and mahself, just shooting pool, breathing in the fun, when in walked Lana Turner, and sat with Bobby; in walked Audrey Hepburn, and sat with Sal; Then Natalie came and sat with me. Ah haven't thought of her in a while, and I awoke in a river of tears, no dam.
The next day, well, y'all should know that ah like firing mah gun at the target that hangs on the door of the shed housing our supply of fireworks. Misfire, and ah set off all kinds of explosions. Lisa Marie, well often she'd come a running from the Jungle Room where she'd be watching Sesame Street; Ah'd be sitting on my lawn chair, gun still smoking.
'Don't worry, baby,' Ah'd say. 'A snake crawled out of the tree, but now it's not ging to bother anyone.'
Well, that day Lisa Marie wasn't there. An that day ah misfired big, and the shed kicked and brayed like a mule when ah hit it; the sky lit up like Chritmas, and the boys screamed out encouragin me to put more bullets into that thing, truly make it catch and hold til it burned to the ground. And ah did, and colours tainted the sky wondrously; pinks like the apron my mah would wipe mah face down with, yellows fried with butter, sad as the crushed flies ah used to kill in the yard, and just as bright and consistent, greens jittery and pokery like limericks, spitting all over, reds like poems, blues like one of them particularly fine rains, oranges brandied and warmed, cinnamon sweet, whites as a hot Christmas parcel; And golds silvers and bronzes that reflected mah Olympic wealth across the sky, not just mah value in monetary terms, no sir, but my spiritual essence, mah familial existence, mah child and her mother. Ah was laughing like a parakeet.
'Ah ain't felt this good in a while boys!' ah proclaimed. The vista was truly something to behold.
'Ah ain't seen anything this good since ah saw Audrey Hepburn in the flesh at that shebang we was at!' said Sal, pointing at a particularly pretty ensemble of colour flashing before us
'Ah ain't seen anything this good since ah first had a watery dream about Lana Turner,' said Bobby, jumping n the spot.
At that, ah shivered like a particularly frosty spirit had just walked through mah standing corpse.
Every night after this, ah dreamed about minutae of the following days that would then replay in front of mah eyes like a television movie, only now it was in the shivering realities of mah life, and not in the soggy machinations of mah dream.
Everyday, the numbers came up that ah knew would come up. Ah could have one the lottery draw for every State several times over.

Now all of this ah can scrub out as mere shiny coincidence and as the comic creation of mah tired brains. But no, ah can't, not really. Because far more severe than all this, is the unutterable fact that ah will utter: ah have forseen my death. In this dream form; ah have forseen that they will come for me, and when, and that ah will be crucially naked and unprotected on that day. Ah will be taken in by a devil, not with ruby lips and a promise, but by a gunshot from someone close to mahself; someone in mah inner circle will shoot me down.
And this seems to be something that ah will ponder for some time. It's a needle of truth that stabs mah camel and leaves me stranded in mah wilderness postulatin' and discombobulatin' about it for some time.

Let me tell you of mah dream.

Firstly, ah had the sensation that ah was not mahself; That ah was dreaming that ah was myself. That is how the dreams start; with me thinking that ah am me, Elvis, only in the dream, when of course ah am mahself in living too. It's somethin' ah remember Mr Sinatra said he dreamed all the time: That he was Mr Sinatra. 'I just need a whisky to remind myself when I wake up that I really am that shitkicker,' he'd said, laughing.
Well, in mah dream ah was dreaming of a Gracelands that ah suppose someone outside might expect- it had grand fountains of pink lemonade in the hall, and a room made of entirely rubber in which to throw ourselves; you got to it by sliding from a huge chute that started att he top of a turret in the north-east corner of the building. There was an ice-cream kitchen and a savoury one, with separate staff doing shifts of eight hours consecutive to one another, meaning that every kitchen was staffed at any deep night hour. The beds were twenty metres by twenty metres, and were soft as a boxing ring canvas. It was just how I imagine those who have never visited imagine it to be.
Into that unholy heaven, that sweet Valhalla, that sugary Babylon, came horror; in walked a shadowy gunman, disguised in a black hat, but ah was sure ah knew him, ah was sure he was a member of mah trusted entourage, one of mah righteous inner circle, disguised as Death; he bore with him one of mah larger and shinier magnums, and ah saw it pointing at me, jerking as if excitable, ah knew ah was alone. Ah knew the rest of mah boys were useless to me now; Ah knew they were just limping fidgets in the face of the biggest question that was facing me. Ah could hear them in the other rooms, dispatching the fine fare from the kitchen like it was nuts at a bar or cussed cat-eats. But ah could not shout, for ah was too scared. And anyhow, they were surely in on this whole ruinous plot to put The King in his grave.
Ah heard the shot, ah felt it enter mah soft belly, and ah cursed mahself for not being young and lithe enough to shimmy out of that cursed trajectory. Ah saw the aftermath, mah Pa's tears, Lisa-Marie, poor little girl, she was there, the newspapers, the hubbub, the fuss; Elvis shot dead, August 16th, 1978. Three days time.

That was mah dream. And this mah me a tired and twitchy vow, nervous and with a weak pulse, but aho promise this: Ah will not let it happen like this. No sir.

SELECTIONS FROM THE KING'S NOTEBOOKS: PART ONE

2006-10-19T05:50:00.000Z

Self-Savagery no. 444: Never fail as you are expected to fail. Always find new and exciting carriages of underachivement; new methods of being wrong. Never be buried in the coffin that fits.

With this in mind, a little exclusive:

SELECTIONS FROM THE KING'S NOTEBOOKS; AUGUST 1977

'The King speaks in plurals,' they're saying, 'and it ain't no Royal We.' The implications being that yours truly is losin' some of the glass coloured balls that are gathered precariously in his lap, when in all truth, folks, Ah'm only just beginning to see the light of day.
For truly, mah twin has arisen and mah future is cojoined to his. Ah is we, mah hell is his.
But how many coaches long is our train of misery? When will the whistle sound? And when, all in all, will that engine disappear into that tunnel? Ah'm feelin' right now that conspiracies abound, and that those around me have answers to these questions. Indeed, ah've been offered suggestions by various less-than-trustworhy sources. You got trust, but if you take tea like the British, an' one of mah boys talks up his Scottish parentage on one side an' his Devonish ancestry on the other, well, if you take that T from trust y'all be hearing right when y'all find that what is left is rust. And rust expands like cavities, sweetheart, it does for sure.
Ah see how the brain can terrorise itself if it is occupied with only this kind of nonsensical deliberation. Ah'm gonna ride it out on mah horse, sweat it out in racquetball, carve it out in chords on the piano... but it doesn't work. That contraption within mah skull whirrs and buzzes and ah'm tick-tick-ticking mah way to blessed confusions.
Ah have ascertained, from various nocturnal computations, that we are players in a game; Ah have forseen this in mah dreams. Of a night, Ah will sit in the chair ah have placed in Cilla's room, at least on the nights that she is not staying there, and ah will dream. Ah dream not of the wondrous and sinewy future; but of the dull tomorrow, the real-life, very next day tomorrow ; And so every word that anyone says arrives at my eardrums as old news. These hobo minds around me are speaking from a script. Their actions are directed from a supernatural page.
Mah deliberations began with the example ah will give you first; with Annie's song. Annie, mah beautiful coloured nurse, with her rainbow smile; her simple holy outook and her gorgeous bulk; ah love her like a nanny. It was her, without any realisation on her part, that aroused me to the curious happenings in mah dreams. And forthat ah will salute her eternally.
When Annie prepares me breakfast, she'll say, every time, 'batton down the hatches, a sharp wind is a'comin'', and then she'll barrel in through mah bedroom door. Every morning, the same.
But this mornin' the other day, she was muttering away to herself, instead. Indeed, she rolled into mah room quite without announcin' her dubious entry, and did not pause to check her incroachin' trajectory over mah private airspace. She just carried on a-mutterin' and a-whisperin' to hesself as she walked, smilin away but somewhere else altogether. She put the tray down on mah side table.
'What's that you sayin' there now Annie?'' Ah asked, not a little cantankerously, having had mah slumber interrupted in such an unusual fashion. Now happens ah do not like to raise mah voice to mah staff; not like mah daughter, who' d threaten to have them fired for the wrong type of pancakes of a morning. No sir, it's wrong. This was as angry as ah ever got. And Annie, such a subtle mind usually, with an eye for every nook of every personage in that there house, well, she didn't pick up on mah irate lines and carried on with herself.
She was animating, with that sing-song voice of hers, some lyrics that ah remembered immediately:

'Now this is the Law of the Jungle -- as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back --
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.'

Now the reason ah remembered so easily is that these words had been in mah very dream, the one she had awoken me from. It was a dream in which ah, along with mah mentor, spiritual advisor and karate teacher, Kang Rhee, were taking on some unblessed dark spirits in some unholy part of the United States of America; using breathing exercises, we were putting these blackened spirits up to the most irregular of examinations. And all throughout, as we set our feet and elbows into their evil personages, a-kickin' and a-punching with righteour vigour, mah master was a talkin' to me, most calmly. A lesson, it seemed, so I listened, ah committed to memory, ah examined the contents. Ah believed, at the time, to be hearing some proverb of Eastern philosophy; but upon waking, and hearing Annie sing-alinging the very same words out over mah room, ah knew that her limited education did not extend to covering any scriptures from Asian lands, God bless her heart and lungs, except those of the disciples themselves, bound up by King James.
Annie denied any knowledge of what she was saying; said she must have picked it up from one of the boys. Now ah may be in a period of suspectin' these boys around me, and so mah judgments may be bruised; and ah may reckon on the fact that ah do not know their tastes and motives as well as ah may or might; but ah am sure that they do not qoute such poetics around the other hired help. Or at any time, indeed.
Presently, mah cousin called from back home, telling me about little Johnny and his efforts at his schoolin; Ah'm interested in the little fella, he's a good kid, and ah believe we must take an interest in the educations and ruminations of our brethren and their flocks. So ah probe mah cousin further, askin' for details of said little Johnny's efforts; and upon probin' her further, she regales me with the tale of his reading to a packed school hall, a verse by an English poet by the name of Rudyard Kipling.
'You might know it, Elvis,' she said to me, 'It's all about the law of the jungle, and how the strength of a wolf is in it's pack. Ah don't recall it word for word…'
… don't worry, now, cousin, ah said, through mah shiver of horrible coincidence; don't worry yourself, for ah know the exact same poem you are referrin' to.
The whole business got me to thinkin' that ah should take a notebook with me to mah dreams, so as to heed the happenings therein. What it all meant was anyone's guess, blessed with education or otherwise. But ah knew that conventional schoolin' was not up to the task; ah knew somethin' more sinister and enraged was afoot.

HUMAN ANIMAL by WOLF EYES

2006-10-15T11:56:00.000Z

The following review was disallowed from an esteemed online music magazine because when asked for my favourite bands of each decade since the sixties, I included Abba in the 'seventies' list. It seems that as a system of weeding out rogue elements, such a quiz is second to none. I of course knew this would be the case. I of course knew that the mention of Abba would cause furrowings of their brown brows. But I listed them anyway. Self-Savagery in practice. Which reminds me:

Self Savagery no 465: A common myth is that successful people just 'act as themselves.' The truth of course, is that successful people just act at acting as themselves. Self-Savagery suggests that merely being yourself is a sure-fire way to find the land of beautiful rejection and gorgeous poverty, and so is encouraged at all times.

HUMAN ANIMAL-WOLF EYES

Or: How I learned to Stop Burrowing and Love the Womb; for within the filthy sanctuary
of their own fried brains, Wolf Eyes are settling ever more snugly into a nauseous template of churning death rattle ambience. They’ve patrolled these weirder shores for a while, volunteering for the shifts few ever seem up to and carrying out their chores with verve.
Some are out there with them, of course. Whereas a band like liars deal in a kind of spooked awe at the unknown, hoping to call up and describe spirits with their drums, Wolf Eyes are themselves concerned with producing the sound of horror; Whereas liars evoked a childlike supplication to mystical promise on their last two records, Wolf Eyes reach for the source, and conjure up the beast itself.
Why create something so horrible? A grand defence might evoke such taboo-challengers as Pasolini and the Marquis de Sade, and suggest that Wolf Eyes are providing us with a continuation of a canon that confronts and stares down our fears. As horror writer Clive Barker put it- ‘At best you can hold death at bay; you can pretend it isn’t there; but to deny it totally is a sickness.’
But stop. Wolf Eyes just a bunch of nerds amusing themselves with toys aren’t they? The musical equivalent of adolescents painting portraits in intestinal red and brown tones to scare their sisters. But what, pray tell, could be more noble and heroic than that?
Whereas liars (a band, I have to say, who sound nothing like Wolf Eyes, but who aesthetically overlap enough to offer as a counterweight) pitched their shrines with a certain naive hope to underpin the rumble of voodoo, Wolf Eyes bury theirs in spiteful dirty protests. Texture, texture, texture, dense as one thousand mantras, rendered A Burned Mind a wonderfully horrid and confused listen, the crusting fuzz borne from a genesis of, one imagines, hybrid technologies and interbred machineries.
A Million Years, the opener on Human Animal, however dispenses with the ectoplasmal fuzz from the previous record, leaving a sparse torture chamber of cranking, fidgeting metal. Thence forth emerges the sound of Satan’s coffee percolator, bringing with it a lusty brew to the boil. It seems there’s been a wiping down of the decks, a burning off of the hot stubble. But then the title track has that explosive yet buried horror of yore, drums limping like Long John Silver with the roars of the undead ringing in his head, the sounds of King Tut's curse. Not a quick predator, but a stuttering, disorientated one, like a Mummy freed after 10,000 years, but with time to kill. Gloopy production lends it the film of something more biodegradable than other processed electronica. There is jellied flesh on these bones. It’s the simultaneous directness and vagueness that captivates when Wolf Eyes are at their best; the ability to produce stompalong fratboy fuckfests and smear them with gore, rendering them appealing to both (and probably neither) fans of hardcore noise and detached ambience; two opposing schools are forced to wrestle together.
If A Million Years is Bundy in a wind-tunnel after the fact, then Lake of Roaches, charged with staticky screams, is a communiqué from a disinterested alien race. The quite deliciously titled Rusted Mange carries Wolf Eyes’ full visceral assault, with kicking kickdrums like popping eardrums, before squeals of alien birds overawe the set. Leper War evokes the cold woods, with it’s rustling noises in the distance. The Driller starts like a flatulent John Carpenter, with echoing percussion evoking a misfiring hell cart and gleaming feedback synth sounds only a dog could hear, before a stomping demon puts his size tens all over it. Bonus track and live favourite Noise Not Music, a cover of a No Fucker tune, serves simultaneously as a simple title with which to hang the whole thing on, and (to these bruised ears at least) the most direct and straight piece of work here.
‘Here am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends... with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of vice!’ So the Marquis de Sade announced proudly; and in his great claims for abusive, horrible selfish behaviour, de Sade captures what those who enjoy Wolf Eyes know; there is greatness in such putrid pathetic horror. Get stupid, children.

THE EDITOR EXCHANGES

2006-09-07T18:36:00.000Z

At this juncture I thought it prudent to include the email exchanges I recently had with the Contributing Editor of a big music magazine (Think the biggest) to highlight how robust failure is more satisfying than any sort of success. Remember kids, it's not about winning and losing, it's about right and wrong.

--------------------------------
Dear Mark,

Thanks for your interest in writing for us. Send us up some samples, we'll look 'em over! Look forward to it.

Regards, **** {Expletive deleted}
-----------------------------

Dear ****,
Find enclosed a couple of samples of my work. The Pipettes/Go-Team review was published in Latest 7 magazine in Brighton, and the Ariel Pink one is fresh off the slab. I've plenty of article ideas too. Off the top of my head, what about…
Music/'Culture:
'How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Comb' (A look at the default indie haircuts du jour and my evasion of them)
'Conscripton Or Cull? How To Stop The Spread Of Mid-Table Indie-Rock'
'Beg Steal Or Borrell- The Wrong Sort of Ambition In Music'
Film:
'Why The Only Twist-Endings I Like Are The Ones You Figure Out Before They Happen'
'Trailer Trash- How The Bits Before The Films Are Better Than The Films But Getting Worse'
TV:
'Please, Shoot The Messenger: The Fall and Decline of the Art of Television Presenting'
'Spoof! How Smartarses Destroyed Telly'

Ooh. I sound more bitter than I probably feel. I'd happily write all day on all manner of filmic filth, especially the Golden Age of Hollywood: Dietrich, Grant, Hepburn K. Or maybe nobody cares about those anymore. I've recently been musing on the novels of John Irving, Gunter Grass, Serge Gainsbourg and the French, television presenters and God.

Take care, Mark
----------------------------------------------------------
Dear Mark,
Thanks for the ideas email you sent. Some funny stuff, and it sounds like you've got lots of ideas. Maybe too many, ha-ha. Glad you've got ideas about film, as we're short in that area. As you're interested in Indie Music, maybe we could send you to review some local bands, get a feel for your style. Maybe (big maybe this, but I'm willing to pull strings for you) even squeeze you into the Razorlight gig in London next month, but you won't get paid for that one, as everyone here is killing for tickets!

Thanks, ****
----------------------------------------------------------
Dear ****
If you want me to review Razorlight, I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist on getting paid. It's the least you can do in the circumstances.

Thanks, Mark
---------------------------------------------------------
Dear Mark,
It's funny. I can't tell when you're kidding. Think you're probably pulling my leg on this one. Ha. I'll let you know as soon as I can about the list for Razorlight. If we can't get you on it, we'll split the cost of a ticket with you. So you'll only be paying for half of a ticket. That's more than we usually do for our new writers. I'm going out on a limb for you cause I reckon you've got something!

Take care, ****
--------------------------------------------------------
Dear ****,
You're right, I do have something.

Don't worry about the Razorlight gig.

Mark
--------------------------------------------------------
Dear Mark,
Haven't heard from you in a while. Razorlight tickets are 35 squid, so if you can send us a cheque for 17.50, you're in. While we respect our writers integrity, It's important to remember that we have an interest in the career of certain bands, Razorlight included. I mean, we're not asking you to lie or anything, but criticism of Johnny should be kept to a minimum. I mean, there aren't any conspiracy theories on this, we're completely independent, and as he's one of the hottest talents around, I'm sure this won't be a problem, especially for someone who is getting in for half price! And anyway, everyone knows that negativity and anger is a refuge for those who have no talent and are jealous of others, and as you're a great little writer, I'm sure you don't need to go there!

Take care ****
--------------------------------------------------------
Dear ****

I do need to go there.

Mark
-----------------------------------------------------
Dear Mark,
As we didn't get the money, we're sending someone else down to the Razorlight gig. Shame, as I like you. Reading our correspondence back, I'm not sure if you were teasing me at certain points. It seems you might be on a bit of a high horse about this whole industry. Shame. Well, best of luck in future,
****
---------------------------------------------------------

GENESIS OF SELF-SAVAGERY

2006-09-06T13:13:00.000Z

Self-Savagery No.4: Leave things unfinished to let the devil in and out. If you finish things, you can judge them for what they are, and what they often are is bloated champions. What everyone prefers is a lithe challenger, unfinished and unfussy, full of potential and needling jabs. Don’t enbalm the corpse, let it rot away.

SELF-SAVAGERY:GENESIS

This is long overdue. But then no-one said this was going to be a prolific diary. No-one said it was going to be in a sensible order.

Self-Savagery theory is named after Great Uncle Victor Dylan-Savage, who made failing at failure a lifetime success. He is chiefly known for his military service in the Boer War and his subsequent memoir, Retreat to Glory- The Coward’s Way In
Great Uncle Victor Dylan-Savage was first and foremost, to should be said, a lazy man who sought peace away from the hateful- from work, stress and other people. He was also not only a dreadful soldier, but a coward. Not a criminal, but a man who sought privacy.
He tried to desert several times and only escaped being shot by a commanding officer who smiled on him due to his ability to make him laugh with his bitter humour. He finally made good his escape one night, and charged off on the commanders horse, the fastest in the company. Unfortunately he went in the wrong direction, and troubled an advance party of the enemy, who, panicked by an apparent surprise attack, dispersed in fear. Dylan-Savage was shot through the thigh-bone, causing an injury that would see him discharged from service. When they dug the bullet from his leg, it was found to carry the slogan ‘VICTOR,’ Dylan-Savage’s Christian name. This point ruffled the feathers of the more devout members of his company and pricked the interest of his commanding officers, who saw mileage in the story of a brave hero who survived the bullet with his name on. It would be a tale to boost the morale of the troops and also of the nation far away back home. So Dylan-Savage was decorated and sent to see the Queen, whose diamond jubilee needed polishing after the war.
On his return journey, Dylan-Savage, initially hapy to escape duty, became uncomfortable with the sycophantic treatment and reverence that came from his escorts. He wanted to be left alone. He tried to talk down his achievement, saying he was a horse thief who got the Captain’s horse killed.; But they took his use of the horse to be a symbolic act of bravery, a suggestion of leadership; it said that he was worthy of promotion.
The more he tried to give up the honour, the more he was offered more. His humility was seen as a superb advert for his courage, as if all good characteristics come in clusters; all brave men are humble and witty. So he began to write the book that would sabotage his own reputation. Unfortunately it didn’t have the effect he imagined.
He produced the pamphlet, Retreat to Glory- in which he detailed exactly how he had been trying to desert his brave mates when he ran into the enemy. He included quotes from his superiors, including Corp. Smythe-Powell, who gave a glowing character reference to suggest that Dylan-Savage had ‘the taint of villainy about him, and was a lush and a liar; and if he suggests that he was attempting to desert the platoon, well I woouldn’t believe a word from his mouth.’
Despite his protests in this most honest of memoirs, the kerfuffle created was not what he expected. The nation took his protestations to their heart; Queen Victoria praised his English modesty, and his pamphlet sold everywhere. They deed not see it as a brave confessional, rather a humorous attempt to excuse himself from glory.

The more he ignored those who greeted him in the street, the more they believed in his holiness. The more he swore at kind words the more they believed they were unworthy of him; the more he ignored invitations from Buckingham Palace the more he recieved. It seemed the less he courted attention and praise the more he received. The more he sought to sabotage his reputation, the more it was raised.
For after his initial honest protestations, DS realised the yardage that existed in this false modesty. Originally his evasion from conflict was an attempt at finding peace and quiet; it bought him glory. In the aftermath, he merely wanted to deflect this embarrassing kerfuffle around him, he wanted to evade attention. But he couldn’t. So he did the next best thing- courted attention, lots of it. His false modesty was of course merely stating the truth. It meant he could never be exposed and it also meant his glory was sealed.

SELF-SAVAGERY no.3

2006-08-16T12:04:00.000Z

Self-Savagery no3: Self-Savagery is a polemic against choice. With your talents, you could be anything; that bothers you. Do nothing well to retain choice. Do everything poorly to lose it.
‘
Everyone’s a specialist these days. They’re getting better and better at less and less; One day someone will be simply superb at precisely nothing.’ Kenneth Williams

That is all for today's lesson.

NARCISSISM, ARIEL PINK AND A FRENCHMAN

2006-08-10T10:35:00.000Z

Self-Savagery no.2: To sabotage yourself truly, Narcissism is called for. Self-Savagery only works for those with delusions of grandeur, or those, like me, with real grandeur. Those who, with some application, could change the world. This possibility must exist for you to truly crush it with any poetry.

Here's a recent review, one that predates the previous entry by at least a month. We don't do things in the right order round here you know.

Ariel Pink
Luminare, Kilburn June 8th

First, the casualties: A huge Brutus causes carnage as if from a gruesome Crimean tableau upon the head of a Frenchman with the face of a poodle with Dutch Elm Disease; a one-sided fight the like of which I’ve never seen at a gig, least of all the smugly pretty Lumiere. The crowd vanishes. The Frenchman, beaten giddy, stared at the lights. Ariel Pink, oblivious, paces back and forth, immersed in some clouded melody.
Later, a request for ‘For Kate I Wait’, one of Pink's nuggety slices of drama, is met by words from Pink himself: ‘well, you can just keep on waiting. Blame Stockholm. The tapes were stolen. By Palestinian terrorists. Big Ariel Pink fans apparently.’
It all serves to highlight the brittle transience and absurdity at the heart of everything he does. Ariel Pink's music is submerged, meandering, insanely pretty; his live performances are supplemented by the four-track tape machine he recorded the songs on. As such, brilliant, unique (as in the true meaning of the word, as in never to be replicated) works now available on CD can never be performed again. The Palestinian terrorist plot rendered half of The Doldrums lost for good. There is poetry in lies and warfare. Because in an age when music doesn't get lost anymore, in an age when old sketches of great works are rediscovered and spun all over the web, Ariel Pink manages to slip between the cracks, just a little.
The debate, I imagine, in some heads, may have been something along the lines of ‘accidental-man-of-the-woods-autistic-genius or very cleverly-packaged-hipster-invention?’ but truthfully, the brilliance of The Doldrums and the subsequent records knocked that one off the minutes. Thus, the live performance, whether frustrating curio or slick performance would not detract his position in my star charts.
How would those transient songs, sucked from a rattling skull, those muffled elegies from passing car s translate? How would Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti survive in three dimensions? How about Ariel himself? How would his naivete sit with the smug beauty of the venue? Well, dressed as a troubled hero from a JT Leroy truck-stop fantasy, a witchy, sickly boy-man, he would muddle about, fidgeting fiddling, and deny himself a big entrance by conducting lengthy conversations with the sound man onstage before the show; then he'd attempt to create some kind of spectacle for himself and his two partners with bubbles and glitter, administered by themselves from the stage.
Then, the tape hissing and crackling like a comforting log fire, we begin, and the appropriation of the records work remarkably well. With additional bass and synths, the tracks wonder and wander enough to feel fresh and alive.
With a cherubic face the like of which does not exist any more (a kind of David Cassidy, Monkee-esque prettiness), he defies conventional music logic (the dur-brain assumption that pop and weird are opposite ends of a spectrum; or that ambition lies in high-fidelity recording devices), and makes widescreen Technicolor epics that dream of Eden on a tiny four-track tape. And I’m as punch-drunk as the Frenchman.

POINTS REGARDING SELF-SAVAGERY--- RULES TO SUCCESS AT ROBUST FAILURE

2006-08-09T12:42:00.000Z

‘I am now so superior to those around me, one wonders when anyone will take notice’ Kenneth Williams

‘Achievement, n. The death of endeavour and the birth of disgust’ Ambrose Bierce

The Self-Savagery manifesto, as created by Great-Uncle Dylan Savage in 1899 (and revised and expanded in later, equally ignored, editions), contains the wit and wisdom of an under-achiever. I, in this humble periodical, will aim to take up the mantle left by this great man, a blood relative of whom I can be truly proud. I will include some of his sweetest ideas in my blog, as and when I can be bothered to invent anymore. Here is the first to get you all started on the path to self-sabotage:

"Self-Savagery no.1:I am a genius. It is a miracle I have failed to succeed at anything. But I have managed, living a life of quiet failure and lazy underachievement."

Wonderful. Moving on, we begin, then, you assembled few, with a nod to those who have shaken us in recent times: The live byplay of the Vile Imbeciles; and the artwork of Dark Medulla.

VILE IMBECILES
Catch, 27th July

'Vile.' 'The Imbeciles' wasn't enough. 'Vile Imbeciles' it is then. Vile has something Victorian about it. And this lot's sharp blacksmithery has in it's designs, something of the hue of the masonic devilry in Alan Moore's From Hell; Brutal murder, but not just with excess in mind, but with a complex grand plan to reach some nirvana.
Their days are spent, I'm sure, making sonic sculputes in Tom Waits junkyard, from discarded metal, hexes and juju. Epic twisted creations, and no mistake, arcing cathedrals that on first evidence appear to be an ugly, intestinal mess, but reveal themselves to be, like the work of a demented Magic Band, to be an absurdly complicated treasure map.
'Autistic jazz' said some smartarse. 'I feel sick' said my main squeeze. 'Right in the stomach.'
Standing like a rictus puppet, Andy Huxley, without whose angular skeleton it seems 80's MB will continue their descent from kings of the strip to a fleshy puddle, is all Murnau shapes, his shadow playing across the midnight hour at Catch like a rickety-pretty Nosferatu. Huxley hasn't got Guy McKnight's lungs, but he has a fair old hoarse scowl, which swoops and weaves with the drummer's pterodactyl of a throat.. Drums have their ears boxed in, Neanderthal style, and are then ka-clicking and ka-clunking out some peculiar rock'n'roll,then a gammy morse; The bass notes huff and puff then blow our house in, only to build a new one from the rubble, a riff-walled monster, that itself will trip and fall into some spazzy foul-smelling funk; The stilletoes from Huxley's guitar emerge occasionally from the junk of a mix to stab strangers eyes out, but there's no time to muse on thes assanitions, as we're immediately taken off down a different back alley. Stop. Go. Stop. Go-go. Now he croons! It's a kicking rockabilly groove for a bar or two! But now they're dogfighting over the last pieces of flesh on the bone again, and it's an all-against-all, horribly-choreographed wrestle.
Oh, it's hard to be this right and sound so wrong, this correct and this messy.
The lady can't cope. We're off home in a daze, wondering if the ruptured guts of the assembled might be arranged into some kind of delicate pattern to spell out the word of some cursed god. Or is the plan even worse than that? Vile is the word.

DARK MEDULLA
Shangri-la Tattoo Parlour, 3rd August

Wine is gone, so it's free water. The illustrations are sublime. Siamese twins, footballing dogs, god-fearing hicks, twisted superhero fantasies. It all goes to display, in just coincidence no. 24 of the day, the exact contents of my dreams the previous night.

The dreams which prompted an idea for a graphic novel:
THE SUPERHERO WHO WAS ALWAYS LATE, AND SO RESOLVED TO SAVE THE WORLD BY RESETTING US TO THREE HOURS AGO!

BUT EVERY TIME, HE DISCOVERS:

A NEW DISADVANTAGE OF TIME TRAVEL!
OUR HERO HAS REVOLVED THE WORLD ON IT'S AXIS THE WRONG WAY TO RESET TIME TO THREE HOURS BEFORE! THIS SAVES US FROM THE BIG EVENT, BUT HAS UNFORSEEN CIRCUMSTANCES!

1.SOME PEOPLE WHO MOVED IN THOSE THREE HOURS WERE RIPPED ASUNDER! THEIR HEADS WERE FOUND AT HOME, THEIR INNARDS AT WORK! SOME, WHO STOOD IN THE SAME PLACE AS SOMEONE ELSE STOOD DURING THOSE THREE HOURS, BECAME A HYBRID SIAMESE BEING! A COJOINED TWIN!

2.WE WERE SAVED, BUT EVERYTHING WAS IN THE WRONG PLACE! A CHINESE FAMILY AWOKE IN VENTNOR! MEXICANS IN HINCKLEY!

3.THEN THERE WAS THE TIME WHEN THE ENTIRE WORLD AWOKE ON THE ISLE OF WIGHT! AND THEY DID INDEED FIT, AS THE LINE ALWAYS HAD IT! BUT WHAT A MESS! THE PANIC, THE DROWNINGS, THE OVERWORKED FERRYMEN. AND NOT ONLY THAT, BUT THE EMPTY WORLD, WITHOUT PEOPLE! AS WE REPOPULATED OUR CITIES IN A MASS EXODUS BACK TO OUR OWN FOUR CORNERS, JUST THINK! THE LOOTING! THE RIOTS!

In the fine traditions of Self-Savagery, the finer points of which will be explained in further posts, this is an idea that will never be seen through by me. Unfinished ideas are at the core of a Self-Savagery existence. 'Do not be sad, Let them down the drain, for there will be more ideas tomorrow, to ignore once again...'

But anyways, good afternoon.