The Interplanetary Flaneur - Friday Flash

The interplanetary window shopper noticed that tote bags were not the only thing bearing logographical logos. Since T-shirts too evinced mottos and slogans. Projected outwards by the aspect of human bodies. “Babe” read one fleshy awning. “Foxy” exhibited another. A rapid straw poll revealed it to be the female who had best mastered (mistressed?) this pithy self-promotion. For one male’s stressed fabric, while barely stretching to cover his rotund abdomen, artlessly self-diagnosed “Beer Monster”. A second bannered the legend “I’m With Stupid!”, underscored with a cartoonishly sleeved and cuffed arm pointing to the right of him. Where could be found... nothing. Was this the point perhaps, that he was far too superior to hang around with a stupid person? Or was it more, that stupid though his absconded partner reputedly was, he still managed to give his pal the slip? But for now, these seemed like doodlings. Mere first drafts of bon mots, compared with the delicious proverbials emblazoned across female hoardings.

Here approaching was another citation, “No Angel”, with the added flourish of a halo. She slackened her progress in order to juggle with her packages, seeking to locate a distress signal emanating from somewhere deep within her bundle. He too wound his gait down, counterfeiting rifling through jacket pockets with what he took to be casual insouciance, but must have more resembled the flapping arms of an anthropomorphic chicken impression. At least that’s how he gauged the daggers being shot at him by files of pedestrians, as they arced around him, before resuturing their surgical headway. He becalmed his arms and settled for blowing his nose as his excuse for loitering.

She had by now found the instrument and was mouthing into it. Yes, just as he had initially surmised; the geometrical middle of the halo precisely, and he did mean with the utmost exactitude, cradled the lady's glandular protuberance. Or, he supposed you could say, that the protuberance transected the halo’s epicentre. Further research was mandatory. Only, by now the woman had caught his studious contemplation and whipped around on her heel, presenting her uninscribed back to him as she continued her confabulation.

He had been dabbing at his nose beyond the chafe-free threshold and so he desisted. There were plenteous messages in flow. “Forbidden Fruit” admonished one embossed in pink. “No Prisoners” counselled another in lime green. “Out Of Your League” trumpeted a third, bedecked in burgundy. This was cryptographic heaven! “Post-Modern Irony” inveigled the next, abutting a roundel target. And was the centre of the bullseye framing her nipple too? He cottoned on. These were not secret codes, rather free-ranging broadcasts. Roving sandwich boards, only without the disfiguration of such a ridiculous mantle. He had a strong inkling to digitise all this for later reclamation. But he sensed this was not a sound stratagem.

He refluxed another reflected in a boutique window, imparting just two letters, “T” and “O”. This failed to spark any recognition, so he stopped at the selfsame display as she, though he was scanning the glass pane rather than what lay beyond it. “TO”, “TO”, still not ringing any bells. Of course basic physics! A vitreous optical reversal! It was “OT”. As in Occupational Therapy! As the women ceded her vigil and chanced turn in his direction, he noticed an occluded wrinkle worming out from the penumbra of the “O”, converting it to a “Q”. “QT”, he muttered, as her gaze narrowed in passing him.

This was curious and beginning to irk him. For he had detected a constant pattern on the distaff’s side of the perusal exchange. Some had their smiles dislodged from their countenances, while others merely stared straight through him. Oh well, no time to ruminate, for along came a further sample, bearing no words, rather a line drawing (sulci and all) of a brain over each mammary. Its very incongruity forced him to ponder as to whether this ought to belong to the subset under consideration, even as she sauntered by. Was she indeed possessed of two brains? A reference to a twin, or a consort perhaps? (“I’m With Brilliant” sans directional indicator?) But then why was it that somebody else’s cerebellum held joint title over her bosom? And then it struck him, not two brains, but “Brains 2”. “Two.” “Too!” That was too much! Another level altogether. Now he fully comprehended the sliding scale of the communication engendered. Some, were more up front than others.

He was suddenly dazzled by a shard of light piercing his eye. He shielded his brow with his hand, before plucking sufficient pique to peek beneath his peak. What assailed him was a spangle of bouncing light. He reacted quickly during the waning period and appointed that he was being scintillated by a sharp reflection from a woman’s posterior. Swerving hither and thither as she walked in advance of him. Then it hit him with crystal clarity, except it being on the return swing, he was actually temporarily somewhat blinded. Something was embedded upon the non-reflective matt black material her bottom was upholstered in. Studs of some sort. Rhinestones. Sequins. Who knew? Not him certainly. That was not a canon he’d ever referenced. He was about to veer away, when he tumbled to the non-symmetrical arrangement of the tail-mounted cats’ eyes. It behoved him to penetrate the pattern, for he refused to allow himself to be further stymied in his fact-finding mission. He needed to synchronise his sway to match hers, in order to efface the parallax that was shaking his vertical hold as he zoomed in.

And then it coalesced upon his retina. Her stippled rear was speaking to him! Not literally of course. But the coloured pimples picked out a word all the same. In petite calligraphy, since the word appeared to have four syllables, when she was not exactly trailing a wide load. “Bootylicious”. ‘Booty’, he knew, referred to treasure, piratical or otherwise. Assuredly the suggestion of ill-gotten gain. A plundered yield. But ‘licious’? As he was later to discover from his user interface pandect, no such lexigraphical construction formally existed. It politely inquired as to whether he had intended one of the following: ‘luscious’; ‘loci’s’; ‘vicious’; ‘delicious’; ‘malicious’; and when it feebly proffered ‘lice’ as his possible erratum, he shut off further consultation. However, since the delineation was located proprietorially above her gluteus maximus, he gauged it as a continuation of the T-shirt telescoping trend. Or maybe even its apotheosis.

Guest Post - Vivienne Tuffnell

"Kissing Moths Not Frogs"

I'm delighted to be hosting friend and wonderful writer Vivienne Tuffnell on the occasion of her latest book, a collection of short stories called "The Moth's Kiss", several of which I had the privilege of reading as they were being written.

Viv and I share the imperative to interrogate life and our surroundings, to really dig deeper under surface appearances, although we take different stylistic approaches in our writing. But while I content myself with sitting at home and processing everything as thought experiments, Viv has a huge wealth of knowledge and experience in many different fields which she brings to her writing and being. Deeply spiritual, she has a wonderful blog about all things to do with the human psyche, both the things that damage it and the things that help heal such assaults.

Viv never veers away from dealing with deep, deep emotions and she doesn't sugarcoat the darker things in life whenever she happens to be discussing them in her writing. I can't recommend her writing enough.

Over to Viv-

Folklore fascinates me, and it's younger sibling, the urban myth comes a close second. Once you start looking at them both, you realise there is a hoard of inspiration for writing but also they're something that thread through much of modern consciousness. When it comes to superstitions, most people claim to be above it all, but there are things that seem to undermine that.

The tear-drinking moth is one of those things.

I thought it was a myth and I casually asked my brother to confirm this. His area of expertise is lepidoptera, and I grew up with bugs of all sorts so I'm deeply grateful that he stuck largely to butterflies and moths as his primary interest. He's had a room full of tarantulas since I left home, and would like to breed scorpions too. When I mentioned the moth that drinks tears he surprised me. It exists, and he sent me links to some photos of it. It looks harmless enough until you realise that this moth does not merely wait patiently for tears to spill from sleeping eyes, but rather it provokes them. It uses its sharp proboscis to poke the eye and make it water, causing serious irritation and spreads various disgusting diseases. Creepier still is the evolution of a moth that drinks not tears but blood: http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2008/10/081027-vampire-moth-evolution-halloween-missions.html

I'd be lying if I said I set out to write a story about the tear-drinking moth. I didn't. I'd got to a part in a novel I was writing where I needed to step back and look at the narrative from the outside. The novel in question is the third in a series, the first of which is The Bet, and I was trying to create a penetrating sense of menace, of that creeping sense of being watched. So I stepped outside and in a number of pieces, I became the observer, watching and waiting and plotting. Most of it is liable to sit on my hard-drive, unseen but the short story I named The Moth's Kiss for its reference to the tear-drinking moth was obviously capable of standing alone as a story in its own right.

I enjoy writing short stories; it's a very different discipline to that of writing a novel. As a result I write a few in bursts and often do nothing more with them. I've published one collection of shorts, with a theme of ancient deities interacting with the modern world, and I wondered if among the many stories stuffed onto my computer I had sufficient to produce another collection with a theme.

That's when I had the idea of The Moth's Kiss as first tale in a sequence of stories with related themes. Initially I thought of it as scary stories, but on reflection I realised that each of the selected tales dips into some well-embedded folklore and urban legends. A Devil's Pet visits the abiding belief that cats are uncanny and evil. Black Hole is entwined with some quite new beliefs, made widespread by such books as The Secret, that we can draw to ourselves what we need or deserve by merely focusing our thoughts on our goals with sufficient confidence; I took this so-called Law of Attraction and had a little fun with it. Both Green Willow and Bitter Withy  incorporate both ancient folklore of the willow tree being the champion of the discarded lover and other more recent legends, such as the oracle of iPods on shuffle.

Each of the ten stories links to some abiding belief whether ancient or modern or a combination of the two. I have heard that Einstein is said to have recommended that for intelligent children you should read them fairy-tales and for more intelligent children, read them MORE fairy-tales. I'm not convinced about the intelligence bit but fairy-tales, folklore, urban legends all emerge from various strata of the collective unconscious and point not just to our primal needs but also our collective primal fears. This is why we can be transported back millennia by a good story well told; it takes us back to a time when that prickling feeling of being watched was worth heeding for it may have meant that Smilodon or other ambush predator was lurking in the long grass licking its lips. Such a tale reminds us of our fragility even in our technological bubble and there's really nothing like being shocked by a brush with death (even fictional) to make us feel vibrantly alive again.   

The Moth's Kiss is available from Amazon UK:  USA: 

I blog at: http://zenandtheartoftightropewalking.wordpress.com/

I tweet as @guineapig66

Visual Literature

So, just what can the new digital technologies offer literature? Embedded links so that you can choose the precise path through a text, such as the collaboration behind Kafka's Wound, with archive photos, documentary, audio and an essay by Will Self. Or there's Nick Cave's vook "The Death Of Bunny Munro", a book with music videos and author readings embedded.

But these are really extras around the text, 'the making of' equivalent in movie DVDs. They do very little with the original text itself, other than frame it with these frills. The urge to click in "Kafka's Wound" kept talkin me out of what was a very sophisticated central essay by Self that demanded full concentration, so managed to work against the text.

I have always been interested in delving even further into a text, beyond that of the words and down to the very DNA of written language, the letters themselves.

I have commissioned visual literature that embed the words & letters in a visual representation. Examples can be found here, where coherent sentences emerge from the primordial soup of a jumble of letters, the play of image and words reinforcing one another.

But there is an art form that I believe offers even more to maximise the significance and contribution of the typography to the meaning of the text itself. And that art form is known as kinetic (or motion) typography. I'm not sure how well known it is, as the entry explaining it in Wikipedia is pretty skimpy. The best way to demonstrate it is simply to watch some of the videos. There's a dedicated part of the Vimeo video site to kinetic typography.

I studied them in my search for a designer to collaborate with. And I was disappointed. Not with the look of the videos, which are fantastic, but with the lack of imagination behind the choice of texts, which unfortunately in my opinion served only to widen the gap between text and representation through motion typography. The texts are often film dialogue snatches or song lyrics, and accordingly only serve to show off the art (Vimeo is after all a shop window for artists, so this is partly understandable).  Then there is the other main use of kinetic typography, in advertising and marketing videos, where the text is often dry and target-led rather than artistic.

Finally there is the example of perhaps the most viewed of all kinetic typography films, Stephen Fry talking for 6 minutes about the wonders of language, all represented by the visual echo of his spoekn text made to move. I use the word echo, but directly parrot might be more accurate. I'm not sure in this case that the visuals add anything to Fry's rich vocal rendition. Apart from movement for movement's sake, I don't think the visuals advance the text in any meaningful way that bring out new or different shades of meaning to the oral.

Writers have to think what might be the case for animating their text. Rather than that dreaded term 'added value', the reason for it must exist within the text itself. And that means thinking about the words, what about them demands to be sparked up and shoot across a screen. But it also means thinking about the letters making up those words. For kinetic typography morphs, mutates, reverses, spins, rotates, severs, disappears, magics letters in its very being.

So I have this text about dementia. A gradual loss of language ability, where words mutate into close sounding but otherwise unrelated by meaning other words as letter blindness and problems of recall set in. The perfect medium for representation in kinetic type. The text informs the animation and the animation gives extra edge and depth to the text. I'll upload it in the next few days when it's completed.

So writers, please think about your texts and whether kinetic typography can serve to give depth, resonance and complexity to them. And graphic designers, please think about collaborating with writers for some interesting texts to bring alive. Texts that may even have been written with animated typography in mind.

La La La London I Love you - 10 London songs

I posted a music video chart of songs about specific London locations, but there are plenty of songs that name London itself in the title. And as someone born, living and probably dying in this great capital city, I wanted to honour that. So here's 10 songs honouring (in most cases) my beloved city.


1) "London Calling" - The Clash
No surprises with this choice, THE London punk rock band from under the Westway, calling out London's first legitimate claim to lord it over Manchester and Liverpool as being the centre of a music force in the form of punk rock. It couldn't have happened without London's pub rock music venues, art colleges and certain clothes emporiums. Didn't last long mind, as power soon returned up North, to Manchester and even Sheffield for a while. Maybe Dubstep will reassert primacy for London music once again.



2) "London Girl" - The Jam
Imagine the provincials from satellite towns to London, travelling up to the capital every weekend to spend their pocket money in the boutiques, coffee shops and seeing their favourite bands for every post-war generation. The Jam were just such as they pilgrimaged to the capital of Mod "Carnaby Street" to stock up on Parkas and sharp It"In The City"alian suits. This early track of theirs is quite endearing two-dimensional Mod homage, nothing like the more sophisticated band they later went on to become (probably why no live footage of it on youTube). A B-Side of theirs went on to criticise the commercialisation of Carnaby Street in the same way punk bands sung about the standardization of punk through merchandising.



3) "Funky London Childhood" - T-Rex
If there ever was a better example of the rock star made by London than Marc Bolan, them I'm unsure as to who it was. Born, bred and died in London, Bolan was perfectly placed to tread the well worn path of London's Tin Pan Alley of agents, producers, record labels and itinerant musicians until he hit upon the right formula for success, in his case the Glam Rock of the 1970s. For a very good treatment of the history of London as administrative and commercial hub for modern music, read Paul du Noyer's excellent book "In The City". The irony being that most of the musicians who end up in London making their living, are not Londoners by birth. Bolan was unusual in that respect.



4) "LDN" - Lily Allen
Unless, you've reached the 21st century and by now qualify for the generations born to celebrity. Lily Allen, daughter of venerable punk comedian and now classic actor Keith, looks for her own way to make her name. So she's hooked up with some established session musicians, hits on a jaunty London-Caribbean sound and produces a feel good summer album. The start of this video was shot in my old workplace, with real staff members, at London's premier independent record shop Rough Trade Store. A couple of hit singles and promptly her music career takes a nose dive as she reverts to the celebrity persona and lives her entire life out in public via newspapers and social media.



5) "Londinium" - Catatonia
Well if you don't like it, you know what you can do Cerys don't you! You there with your baby voice. Can you tell I wasn't a fan? Personally I find London invigorating...



6) "Dark Streets Of London" - The Pogues
And still on the Celtic fringe, Shane Macgowan's Pogues duly honour their adoptive country while preserving the best of both their Irish and London roots. Macgowan truly is a rock poet of London similar to what John Cooper Clarke did for Manchester.



7) "Hold Tight London" - Chemical Brothers
The thing about capital cities, is that they have both the best and worst quality drugs. I will leave you to decide which are in evidence here. Some nice background shots of the city though.



8) "The Streets Of London" - Anti Nowhere League
See we can laugh at ourselves, as this beautiful folky song by Ralph McTell is given a right good duffing up by a band, the best thing about which could be said, was their name.



9) "City Of London" - The Mekons
The Mekons were from Leeds, but do a rather fine job here and reference Charles Dickens so can't be all bad!



10) "London Bridge" - Fergie
Hilarious and seemingly another American to confuse London with Tower Bridge: "going down like London Bridge. And no bad teeth on show anywhere in the entire video...

Friday Flash - Flash Video Bonanza!

For this week's Friday Flash, I've uploaded a home-recorded version of a flash reading I did in public, talking about the art of flash writing and reading 11 of my stories and talking about where they came from.

Hope you enjoy!

Tendering Her Resignation - Friday Flash

She gingerly lifted the soiled bandage from her shin, but still her mother winced with the discomfort. Even the faintest friction from the lint must have caused her pain, while the sting of fresh air inroading against the denuded skin could only ratchet up the agony further. She glanced at the bandage and saw the telltale red corona imprinting the white cotton. She averted her gaze and for a moment commuted it in her mind's eye as a white napkin bearing a fresh lipstick kiss before a date.

She refocused her vision and saw that her mother's ulcer was weeping again now that the compression bandage had been lifted. She started massaging her toes for her. It was the closest locus away from the wound she could caress without prompting further suffering in her mother. Tears were welling up behind her own eyes.

Gazing upon her leg it seemed as though the sore was boring through the layers of skin. But she knew the opposite dynamic was at work. Failings in the blood supply within, had starved the skin of oxygen and thereby corrupted the integrity of its tissue. A parochial suffocation.

She tore her gaze away from the suppurating wound and instead scrutinised the veins and arteries around her mother's ankles. The red and blue capillaries were raised right to the surface of her skin, like oxygen starved fish in a waterhole receding under a fierce orange sun. The reds and blues put her in mind of a road atlas, the major trunk routes and motorways out of the city. A spaghetti nexus of escape arteries that she had never taken. Held here in place by her mother's immobility and venous constriction. Her mother splayed out on her bed there, like a catafalque. Yet it might be she herself having her coffin drawn along by hearse to the cemetery at the city limits. Her body undertaking the longest journey of her life and breaching the confines of the city only once in death. As she disposed of the soiled bandage, she apprehended that it could never be lipstick, only ever blood and purulence.

It hadn't always been like this she was certain. She had seen the family portraits. Delicate colour photos sweated behind the dividing wax leaves of an old fashioned album, that suggested it was consonant with the days of sepia tints. But the evidence was still there in place. A porcelain skin so alabaster white, that the lens managed to pick out the filigree blue veins in all their delicacy. Her mother had assuredly been a beauty in her youth.

But that white skin was now bruised, burnished and livid out of all recognition. She wiped the moisture from the corner of her eye with the heel of her hand. She didn't want to get any germs on her fingers that would soon have to reapply the bandage shroud. But her good intentions were undone when she reflexively scratched her own lower leg, bringing her skin up in a chalky sheen, though there was no eruption of any efflorescence.

"Hold on Mama, I have to wash my hands clean."

As she squirted the antiseptic soap into her palms, she mused on whether the condition might be genetic. Her mother had been invalided for as long as she could remember. Certainly at an age younger than she was herself now, so that it seemed unlikely to be stalking her own vascular system. And yet her circulation had also furred up, since she rarely exercised save for errands after fresh food, clean bandages and repeat prescriptions.

Anti-septic was right. She had allowed herself to be contaminated by the stasis of her mother's plight. Caring and tending had made her utterly dependent on her mother's stagnant rhythms. She was actually the sore and her mother the lint pressing her down. She didn't mean to, but when she applied a new bandage, she pushed it with a bit more force than normal. Her mother cried out.

"I'm sorry Mama, so so sorry."

TV Comedy & "The Big Bang Theory"

Those of you who follow me on twitter may have seen my occasional expression of hostility to TV sitcoms that depend on the stupidity of characters to raise their laughs. Take a bow "Not Going Out" by Lee Mack where all the characters other than the wise-cracking Lee (basically doing his stand up act and wedging in one-liners where the script can't support them), are pig thick and much of the supposed comedy ensues from their misunderstanding, nay mangling of the English language. But Shakespeare also employed the same device of characters who were mastered by words, rather than mastering them, but they retained more dignity than Mack's characters.

But it's not limited to this particular show. Even the hugely popular "Only Fools And Horses" had a roster of ninnies and well yes fools, also overwhelmed by their ignorance. Only the scriptwriters and actor skills investing them with enough humanity and pathos I believe swayed us the audience to embrace them to our hearts.

So "The Big Bang Theory" has to be by definition, comedy at the other end of the spectrum. Four uber-nerds with brains the size of planets and a concomitant plethora of absent social skills is the heart of the comedy. So no comedy of the stupid on show here. And I want to like it, I really do. The writing is witty and clever, but not laugh out loud even though I get most of the clever science gags. The performances are also top notch, particular that of Jim Parsons as chief uber-brain Dr Sheldon Cooper. His physical performance of someone with a host of tics, neuroses and an inability to evidence most of the everyday things about relationships such as apologising, keeping a secret, compromising, is something rarely seen on mainstream TV. I am in awe of his performance week after week. Actually I am mesmerised by it, to the extent I keep coming back to the next episode. But I don't laugh all that much.

The monstrous character has a proud centrality in TV comedy. Consider Basil Fawlty for example, a man consumed by petty snobbery, delusions of grandeur, primness, sexual frustration within marriage and an inferiority, not to say fear, before his wife. Fawlty is a comedy creation of sheer genius. 

Sheldon Cooper is equally monstrous, but not one I find funny. Fawlty always loses, he is a clown who falls flat on his face. Cooper rarely loses any situation, because his behavioural demands usually cause others top kowtow to him. Falwty is highly vulnerable, Cooper almost inviolable, because he doesn't understand most of the hurt he is causing and little can penetrate him in return. Fawlty keeps trying to realise his dreams; Cooper has no dreams because his vision is so narrow and he is 'successfully' living within its narrow parameters and rarely shaken from it.

Finally, I am a little uncomfortable being asked to laugh at the antics of a domineering and dominant character who is I believe, somewhere on the Autistic-Asperger's spectrum. He is so impaired in his social interactions, that one has to believe there is a neural cause behind it rather than a psychological one. So the comedy revolves around the monstrous behaviour of a character who in all likelihood has a neurological condition underlying it all. Hmmm...

Still searching for some intelligent TV comedy for the 21st century along the lines of Fawlty Towers (which is after all nearly 40 years old now). Any suggestions?