Sulci Collective

Since My Man's Gone - Chanteuses

2012-01-31T17:44:00.008Z

Pop music. Girl meets boy. Falls in love. It doesn't work out. He hawks his heart elsewhere, (maybe to the devil if he's Robert Johnson). Girl left broken-hearted. Feels the need to tell someone. In song. If these chanteuses don't make you rip your own heart out in solidarity, then you have no heart!

1) Nina Simone - My Man's Gone Now

I first came across the song in a wonderfully campy OTT version sung by Jeffrey Lee Pierce and The Gun Club. I love that version, but then I heard Nina's. It was no longer a campy song anymore, let's put it that way...

2. B52s - Give Me Back My Man

The B52s, vampy beehive beach party band, when could they ever be associated with pain and heartbreak? And yet Cindy Wilson's voice all sugary sweet Stepford Wife flutters and cracks with an undertow of despair until she belts out the title line in the chorus, with a voice of broken glass.

3. Julie London - Cry Me a River

If she is to take her man back, he has to demonstrate to her that he's cried the same floods of tears over her, as she did for him. Her rich voice subtly wavers between the confident and the cracked. Breathy with both sensuality and faltering belief. This song is slow enough for Julie to take her time carefully modulating her delivery of each word. As much as I love punk and all things after, it's freneticism scarce allows for such vocal detail.

4. Poison Girls - Done It All Before

Talking of punk, this is one of those rare slow ones. Is there a more world weary female vocalist than Vi Subversa? "She's done it all before, but not with you". Ouchy!

5. Dionne Warwick - Walk On By

Another female classic I first encountered as a punk cover version courtesy of The Stranglers. But after a confident intro, Dionne's voice hovers on the edge of tremulous without ever surrendering to it. She's keeping it together, but receding ever so slightly in the mix, like she's choking everything back down, tears and words. When she speeds up the delivery at the end, it's like she's girding herself and challenging him at the same time. Delicious.

6. Janis Joplin - Piece Of My Heart

From the bottom of the bottle. Drained to the last drop and then refilled with real tears.

7. Billie Holiday - All Of Me

Talking of being 'in pieces' Billie laments like no other vocalist. the phrasing and everything are just heart-rending.

8. PJ Harvey - Rid Of Me

Such a mighty voice dripping ardour from such a tiny frame.

I challenge you play all 8 tracks uninterrupted and not remain without a tear in your eye and a little ache in your solar plexus.

Physics question

2012-01-16T19:05:00.005Z

I have only a layman's comprehension of physics. Despite that I'm boldly plunging into a new piece of writing about physics and have started to read around the subject as background. Naturally I'm stumped by the material, but there's one thing that really bugs me in my ignorance and I'd be very grateful if anyone could unravel my confusion for me. But only with recourse to words please! Any mathematical proofs will be completely over my head. Besides, equations and novels don't often make comfortable bedfellows.

Einstein's thought experiments that led to his two theories of relativity, were posited around the speed of light. The 'fixed', unvarying vantage of an observer was shown to be false at speeds approaching the speed of light. If an observer was actually travelling along a beam at light at its speed of 186,000 mps, then all sorts of strange things happen to space and time within his/her observations at that speed.

But my question is, if the observer is travelling at the speed of light, so that everything becomes the present, with no discernible past, then what happens to the light itself? If there is only the present, then is the light actually moving? Would the light not just be present everywhere simultaneously? And yet we know that light is an energy source, it originates from some star burning fuel somewhere and that the energy moves through space and time. If the observer is travelling on the light beam, then relative to him/her the light isn't moving at all?

If anyone can help sort out this muddle in my mind I'd be terribly grateful and you'd get an acknowledgement in the novel too!

Thanks in anticipation

How Schoolboy Physics Improbably Came To Lie Behind My Work In Progress

2012-01-06T18:21:00.009Z

I hated Physics at school. Even though I loved Chemistry.

Partly because the Physics teachers weren't cool, in their creased corduroys and pipe tobacco scarcely concealing their body odour. Chemistry teachers seemed normal even ranging to cool. One of them played a high level of semi-professional cricket.

Then there were the classroom-labs themselves. In Chemistry your head could sink to the surface of the bench where your eyes would rest on the exciting potential contained within the bottles of acids and alkalis ranged there. In Physics, what did you have as an equivalent? Gas taps for bunsen burners, which was odd since I don't remember ever doing an experiment involving heat in Physics. Oh yeah, there was Boyle's Law I think...

So probably it came down to the fact that I understood Chemistry, whereas Physics I couldn't make head nor tail of. I could never get to grips with solenoids and circuits because I had no idea what electricity or magnetism actually were. Where they came from. And I could never get past that incomprehension of first terms. The only part of Physics I understood was radioactivity and let's face it, that's chemistry anyway!

I was obviously aheaded down the path of Arts curricula rather than Sciences, but was advised by sciency older cousins to continue with Physics to exam level rather than Biology. I was happy to duck out of Biology before I had to take up a dissecting scalpel, so I took their advice.

But then I had to confront the same conundrum as before. A complete dearth of understanding of the subject. I was advised by the same cousins that both curriculum and exam exactly mirrored the very good textbook, Abbott's Ordinary Level Physics 4th Edition. They counselled me, all I would have to do is learn the textbook from cover to cover (except the radioactivity section, cos I understood that).

And so I did. Like times tables and Latin suffixes, I learned every page by rote. Still didn't understand a single blasted word, but I could regurgitate it in an exam. I achieved a bang middle of the road unspectacular Grade B and took my path down the Arts subjects English & History and promptly forgot every bit of Physics I had committed to surface memory. They wouldn't let me do Chemistry without either Physics or Maths, so my third A-Level was the lamentable pseudo-science that is Economics which I hated then and now looking at Governments and Bankers, doubt that it is any kind of credible academic discipline whatsoever.

After University, somewhere along the line I started reading the odd bit of popular Science. I really can't remember how I developed an interest, but it could just have been down to Stephen Hawking, whose book "A Brief History Of Time" was a real best seller that adorned bookshelves probably unopened up and down the land. I stumbled my way through it and gleaned very little understanding. But I continued plodding along with Richard Dawkins and Steven J Gould, about 2 or 3 titles a year max.

I had a trans-Atlantic flight and decided to give "A Brief History Of Time" another go for its duration. This time I grasped most of it, until the String Theory stuff right at the end which made my head feel like it was full of spaghetti.

From that point on, Physics held less fears, though I couldn't claim to understand all of it . But Stephen Hawking had cured me of my antipathy towards Physics through his wonderful writing. Complicated thoughts expressed with crystal precision and unafraid to offer a metaphor to aid understanding. Quantum Mechanics and sub-atomic particles seemed to offer me as a writer some wonderful metaphors I could employ in my writing and gradually this has all coagulated into the idea for my current work in progress. Based around the notion thrown up by Quantum Physics, that the observer influences what he/she observes, whereby my main character is involved in surveillance for his job.

And the weird thing that emerges from this new project? I bought a copy of my old school textbook, Abbott's 4th Edition and I will be reading it for research. I wonder how much will come back to me and how much I may understand this time round.

Parthenogenesis - FridayFlash

2011-12-26T19:42:00.008Z

In certain Latin countries, fathers take their sons to visit a prostitute to confirm the age of majority upon them. Probably a smut too far as far as British sensibilities are concerned, but I can render you the next best ministration. So, given what’s good for the gander is good for the gosling, this is what I’d consider doing for you. When you’re a bit older of course. I’m wagering you’ll like this and that you’ll concede your old man does boast some worthwhile merit after all. Bearing in mind you’re currently such a fan of wrestling, we'll move you on to a different form of burlesque. I can hardly contain the secret, but in time it will be all the more special.

My Best Man had procured an exotic stripper for my stag night. A self-impaler, a woman who inserted all sorts of found objects into her fundament. I think one can venture the kind of objects that are around, when men congregate in a boozing establishment such as our rugby club bar. Bottles, matchboxes, packets of pork scratchings, ketchup and pickle sachets, beer mats, pool balls, cue chalks, a cribbage board (sans spilikin pegs), a neglected shots glass (occasioning an impromptu heated discussion between us over its state of hygiene), ice cubes (which failed to rematerialise), ice tongs and the ubiquitous cigars beloved of lubricious American presidents.

All manner of aides de pleasure that help us rub along in the drinking environment were douched. With the steam arising consequently from us. Only to re-emerge and avidly get passed around and inhaled at. Or licked. The re-entry was truly tantalising and had us all teetering on tenterhooks. This was us at base camp, tracking our sherpas and pathfinders as they disappear into crevasses and over the edge. Dangling out of sight on their swinging lifelines, only to reappear triumphantly and intact at the summit, unfurling the glistening ensign of survival. Of conquest. Of colonisation.

And though many of our party at the conclusion of the act, wheedled and importuned with their tip notes to try and be granted exclusive mining rights, all of them were rebuffed with a winning smile and simultaneous fierce nostril flare. Sort of akin to her ability to swivel either breast in contrary directions, as analogued by the whipping nipple tassels. This woman had coaxed all our tongues to loll out along the ground and then proceeded to catwalk up and down their length with her stilettos.

Male hopes and fantasies so spiked, yet she remained a topic of fantastical reconstruction among us long after my wedding (effectively meaning that I had to start from the pit lane once I returned home from the honeymoon). The fabulous configurations we composed for the contents of her act, had us debating long through the night. All around us lay cues, humble mnemonics, quotidian bar optics. Yet we could barely bring ourselves to believe in the truth of these objects, in the veracity of their testimony, now outlined in the dim light truncating their solid depth. I know I haven’t played pool at the club since that evening.

And then a chance for verification. For polishing up the dreamy vision into super-sharp clarity. To wipe clear the smearing that our blurred reminiscences had conferred. Fly-Half fly boy Matty had come by a public appearance from her at a pub, in which she had a residency. Matty, like me, wanted the chance for a double take. To rectify the refraction, of eyes made watery, for pile-driving through their own aqueous humours in the press to sprawl out at the end of their stalks. I wasn’t the only one of our squad Matty asked along, but I was the only one to take up his offer. Presumably the lone musketeer not to run it up the flagpole with the wife. To my mind it can’t possibly be deemed unfaithfulness if I don’t actually do anything transgressive? Same thing Amsterdam’s Red Light district, can hardly avoid having a gander, but you still don’t have to drop off any Euros down there. Look but don’t touch should be the presiding guideline. Twice does not make a propensity. Yes the figment becomes a stitch more solidified, touched up with some detailed brushstrokes. Fixed and set more in the mind, but not to any lasting consequence. On closer inspection, she was not to persist in my faculty, as a succubus draining fealty. She would not come to represent an aide de memoire to anything beyond the marital pale. This was to be no more than scratching an itch. Lancing a boil. Laying to rest of an apparition. A one time only show. A penicillin thunderclap of reality.

And you know what? I was correct in my supposition. Upheld in my belief that it closed the book, or the sesame in this case. There were to be no local objects de pub taking up residency during her residency. For seemed she had built up a loyal and devoted following. Each invited to bring along sundry items from their familial homes for her to suction. Every patron opened up their secret hearth to offer her up a gift. An oblation. A fetish to their intimately untouched inamorata. A little desirous piece of each. How they envisioned themselves. The nub into which they abbreviated themselves.

Accordingly she encapsulated their physical beings. Enshrouded their puissance, then rebirthed it. She anointed their motifs. More lingam than eucharist. She had them eating out of the palm of her hand. Or rather she ate up what they delivered up off their palms and then handed it back to them consecrated. I imagined them at home. Ransacking their knickknacks in search of something with the right dimensions. Or conducting a forensic search for the same. Nothing too asperous nor whetted, since these are reverential votaries. I pondered on their precise choice of object. What made them plump for the snow globe, the poker chips, the bottle with miniature ship inside, the spectacles case, the referee’s whistle (no notes emitted), the nutcrackers (irony intended? - didn’t seem that sort of crowd). Enthralled and in thrall.

What would my object of choice have been?

Rebarbative Me - Friday Flash

2011-12-01T22:20:00.003Z

I have spent a tender lifetime trying to efface myself. To purge the bovine features of my father that have conferred their genetic tyranny upon me. I may bear his loathsome visage, but none of the violence that leaches from his pores and creases every time the skin blazons his disgust.

Yet that same genetic despotism ensured I could no longer continue to shrink my presence from him, once I no longer folded into the nooks and niches under tables and in cupboards. The serpentine lash of his strop unerringly bit the small of my back and rump. Places where I could never apprise myself of the lacerating damage wrought there. Physical pain wasn't visual. Psychic pain was ineffably so. Triggered at the mere sight of him. At the vision of a slightly grizzled version of myself.

To compensate, as soon as I was able, I started to grow a beard. Praying that the bristles would be tensile enough to bury my flesh from sight (having had no modelling from my father who religiously shaved everyday, whetting his razors on the dread strop. And for those hairs adhering to me after a beating, like tiny porcupine quills to prolong the scourging).

My solitary daily ritual, far removed from any ablutions, was to raise my hand to my fluff and gauge its overnight growth. For I could not bring myself to consult a mirror. Partly for fear of the hair betraying me with its feebleness, but also because I might have to engage with my eyes. And see the defeat indelibly etched there. The melding of his sadism with my masochism, I must be heaping it all upon myself right?

But the follicles proved fecund and strong. In time they occluded both me and presumably my father from my features. He of course fulminated against the beard, but he had grown sick and weak, while my transformation only seemed to embolden me. I left home for a place without mirrors. Mirrors mirror only isolation. That and duality.

I was out of his immediate clutches, but I could build no kind of life for myself. I could never look people in the face. I could scarce lift my chin from my sternum. As if the skin there was made of velcro.

However today I have made the decision for the beard to come off. To celebrate news of my father's death and my possible rebirth. I went out and purchased a small round mirror that pivoted on a stand. It resembled a squashed globe.

I laboriously cut the hair with scissors until it lent itself to razor shearing. I was thrown when my face was completely eclipsed beneath a snowdrift of shaving foam. I stared at such wonderful inchoateness for ages, until the chemicals in the cream started stinging my flesh beneath.

I started ploughing, barely able to fix my face in the tilted concavity of the mirror. The white layer stained red in places. Yet more effacement.

But gradually, the alluvium bristles were swept away and the contours of my cheeks emerged. I peered hard at the tiny mirror, barely able to frame me as I leaned right into its purlieu. With difficulty, I looked into the doppelganger's sightless eyes. It wasn't my father, but then nor was it anyone I knew either.

Does the butterfly that metamorphoses from the imago of the grub have any connection to it other than what lies within its genes?

12 Angry Men (or 11 and 1 woman)

2011-11-23T18:31:00.004Z

Pop music soundtracks all moods. The celebratory and the rousing as you punch the air in syncopation, or the downcast and the blues as you mope in your bedroom with the curtains drawn.

Then they are angry songs. It's not just the usual suspects of punks and rappers either. Who of these dozen in your view is the angriest?

1) Marianne Faithfull - "Why D'Ya Do It?"

A ditty composed for her betrayal between the sheets by Mick Jagger. Pulls no punches. Trouble is, I'm guessing Mick is flattered by it. Still, great lyrics and wonderful rancorous delivery.

2) The Bug (featuring Tippa Irie) - "Angry"

The man who puts the 'ire' back in "Irie". I don't know, the singer of "Hello Darling" isn't someone you naturally associate with vexation, but he sounds proper miffed here. Respec' to The Bug for teasing it out of him.

3) The Jam - "Mr Clean"

This one sneaks up on you as Paul Weller's flat nasals build up a portrait of a drab suburbanite, before unleashing his class bile on such a lifestyle. From the 1978 "All Mod Cons" album which was full of vitriol, before Weller himself sunk into the bourgeois smugness that was The Style Council. The impetuosity of youth eh? I prefer to remember him this way.

4) Ice Cube - "We Had To Tear This Mother Up"

Rodney King, LA Riots, nuff said. Cube declares war on the LAPD. Hard to reconcile with the Cube who acts in Hollywood family friendly movies of today.

5) Discharge - "Fight Back"

Can't decide if they were angry or just had a sore throat.

6) Nick Cave - "Scum"

Cave's usual cheery Gothic demeanour and delivery here are replaced with a song that sounds like it's sung with real feeling. I like the way he clears his throat of spittle to open up the song. A touch of class.

7) Swans - "Time Is Money Bastard"

Are you listening bankers> All Swans songs were pretty damned brutal. This is actually quite poppy. But Michale Gira sounds pi**ed off alright.

8) John Holt - "Police In Helicopter"

This one goes up to 11 when it comes to anger. It's not his voice, in which you hear the adamantine resolution, just the simple formula of an eye for an eye.

9) Dead Kennedys - "Moral Majority"

I love the slow build satire of this, before lapsing into swearing and middle fingering at the target of rage. Ah, they don't breed 'em like this any more

10) Husker Du - "Broken Home, Broken Heart"

Bob Mold gives it everything and sounds pretty irritated to say the least. A fine and much missed band.

11) Linton Kwesi Johnson - "Sonny's Lettah"

Police brutality delivered in an icy cold heat, showing that it's not all about screaming at full lung capacity.

12) Crass - "How Does It Feel (To Be The Mother Of A Thousand Dead)?"

Anarcho-punks quite angry shock. I probably wouldn't include this song, other than it got banned for being unpatriotic about the Falklands' War. It's an odd structure with the female vocal section sort of fading out to be replaced by Steve Ignorant's trademark guttural snarl.

So there you have ladies and gentlemen of the Jukebox Jury. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the angriest of them all?

Dad What Did You Do In The War?

2011-11-18T18:51:00.006Z

Why nothing of course son.

Merely through the circumstance of being born in the UK in the second half of the twentieth century. A country free from invasion, aerial bombardment and which maintains only a professional army rather than a conscripted one, augmented by weekend soldiers who also only did so voluntarily.

Mind you, having said that, British armed forces have been involved in bloody conflict every single year since the end of World War Two, save a handful.

Yet, while never having been exposed to a battlefield, war has still exerted a distant recoil on me.

The community I grew up in was concerned with the Middle East. I remember my parents giving blood to help the Israeli war effort during the Yom Kippur war in 1973. After that war our family housed injured Israeli soldiers for a holiday in Britain. Our first was a conscript who's war lasted 20 minutes until his tank was hit by a new hand-held anti-tank weapon supplied to Egypt by the Soviet Union. He'd suffered severe burns and bore skin grafts all over his body.

And yet even at whatever tender age I was then, I couldn't buy into the mythology of the Middle East's goodies and baddies as I was supposed to. I think I just wanted to keep my head below the parapet, since I knew I couldn't voice any dissenting opinion within a community that was fervently parochial. Also, I was a bit more struck with the war on my doorstep, relatively low level as it may have been.

Images of television of armoured cars, soldiers in camo with automatic rifles, patrolling eerily familiar streets, with the same makes of cars bearing the same number plates and obeying the same road signs as existed just outside my window. Northern Ireland always seemed way more relevant to my life, than Middle East colonial wars by proxy between the US & the USSR. Northern Ireland really, really troubled me for the familiarity if its settings, and this was way before I was aware occasionally it did actually spill over on to my London streets. And yet no one, save the Republicans, talked of it as a war. It bothered the hell out of me every day, even if it didn't seem to bother anyone else in Britain (outside of Glasgow).

The same thing happened with the Falklands Conflict. Not a war mind, but a conflict, due to the legal nicety that the UK hadn't declared war on Argentina and had no stated intention of invading the mainland (which would have scaled it up to a war). I remember throwing darts at the dartboard in my bedroom thinking that 6000 miles away, my country was fighting a war and yet the birds outside were singing, the cars were driving past. Everything seemed normal and undisturbed. It felt completely schizoid. I couldn't make sense of the detachment all around. The lack of televised coverage made that far away war seem even more remote.

I became politicised by the war that never happened. The third world war and mutually assured nuclear destruction. That's where I did a lot of reading and conversing and formed my world view. It was when I really turned my gaze outward from my domestic realm of school and play. Around the same time was the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia falling to the invading Vietnamese. I had been dimly aware of the Vietnam War, but I hadn't elected to invest my interest in it despite the bombardment of Hollywood movies on the subject. But the Cambodian situation, perhaps because it was so extreme, I very much did. It seared itself into me and I still religiously read any gobbet of information on that period even today. It took me 30 years to write my fictional response "1979 Gothic" to that horrendous period of history. Why did Cambodia move me and yet the wars of the Middle East, Israel and Palestine, not so much? I have no idea.

I assume there are some people who invest energy in opposing or at least taking an interest in following every single war. I'm not one of them. But I'm struck by the fact that I'll be moved by some wars but not others. Am I any different form the global media, who beat the drum for some wars, while others burn away virtually unreported.

This year, two of the best books I've read - and bear in mind I favour fiction over non-fiction- have been written by two men either side of the Russia-Checheyna conflict- sorry WARs- from the 1990s. Again, wars I was dimly aware of but unmoved by in the sense that I didn't follow them. And yet here, 15 years on I pick up 2 books by combatants in those wars and am utterly swept up (can't say blown away) by them. The first was Nicolai Lillin's "Free Fall", quite simply the best book from a battlefield I have ever read. One that updates the scene from the plethora of Vietnam memoirs, to account for the infinitely more destructive power of weapons and moves us resolutely into the 21st century. It was a dirty war, becoming elided with the global War on Terror as the Russian Federation claimed it was fighting Al Qaeda and Islamic Fundamentalists within its own borders. The other book may not even be non-fiction at all, so mesmerising and hallucinatory is German Sadulaev's book "I Am A Chechen". In truth it doesn't focus all that much on the war, but gives the contrary view of a minority culture struggling to assert its own identity. But it packs no less a punch for all that.

Again, apart from my happenstance of coming by these books, I am curious as to why now, a decade after the end of those particular wars, these books suddenly come into the light of the market. Both were published within the last year. Before that was it too soon? Not for an English-speaking audience unlikely to have had any personal stake in that conflict. Maybe it took that time to throw off the PTSD, for the combatants to rebuild their lives enough (and in exile) to feel able to write. I don't know, but the book market decided somewhere along the line that 2010-11 was the time to look back at this war. We had a spate of African child soldier books a few years back, but commercially that bird now seems to have thrown. Wonder which war will be thrown up next for the literary market?

So my thoughts on all of this are just, well conflicted. Yes we make money from misery, but I am unsure as to how and why we decide on which wars to patronise (myself included). I'm glad those books have come out. They certainly had an impact on me. And yet they are unlikely to change anything of course, for all their brilliance. Wars will still be fought. Populations on the outside will still shake their heads at the misery and awfulness of them. They may even donate money to help refugees. And future generations may or may not be influenced by observing such wars being covered by the media.

Dad, what did I do in the war? Nothing son. Other than the privileged freedom of getting utterly confused.

Speak To The Monkey Not The Organ Grinder - Friday Flash

2011-11-17T23:02:00.002Z

As with the rest of the species, I was to discover ones parents were capital betrayers.

For they were to spoon feed me the cod liver snake oil of language. The viral broadcasts of talk Radio Malt. The contagious pathogens of linguistic wheat germ. Antibody inoculations against self.

The inheritance conferred post-natally, rather than at the cessation of their own lives. The baby reins that shackle us our whole lives.

It commenced sat at my mother's knee. Insidiously. The incandescent glow in her face- her maternal pride before my imminent fall- a fleshy interrogator's beam blinding me. Effacing all my features, save for my mouth. Freud's psychosexual developmental continuum, freezing at the initial oral stage.

Mincing and dicing her own words into gobbet sounds. Mummy bird regurgitating the syllable boluses and spitting them into my mouth. Coated in her indelible mucus. All the while I still clamoured for the pulpy plasma emitted by the teat. But jabbed in my face now, was only the solid heft of language etched on the labial contortions of her moon-face. Duty eclipsing love.

Apparently it no longer sufficed for me to smile, blow raspberry bubbles nor catenate saliva strings of unadulterated joy. Now I must append clarifying sounds for such emotions. Ghee whizz.

Every day mother takes me through my facial calisthenics. To coax the pink fleshy worm from its lair in the floor of my mouth. To start waggling and perform a dance of the seven veils as it exposes my inner being, plastic and unformed as it is. Therefore it is what my mother tells me it is. The intravenous word stock she salts away under my skin.

Now that I am a fatted calf chock full of lexemes, she addresses me differently. Dice becomes splice, as I have to string them together like amino acid chains. Any avoidance of syntax is met with a scowling sin tax demand, rigidly posted on her visage. She will countenance no deviation.

So now I'm sat there bouncing up and down on her lap- no, since I am being armed with this depleted expressive ordnance let's wield it with laser precision shall we- I'm jouncing on her lap. Parading before house callers (not to be confused with bingo callers calling "House"). Each ruffled my hair or pinched my cheek as inspection, eliciting a forced/natural (depending on the pressure imparted to their gambit) performing monkey smile from organ grounded me.

As each well-wisher approached, I could feel mother's shaped breath parting my downy hair from behind as she went over my head. Sotto voce family lore delivered on each and every one of them. Their unimpeachable blood relationship to me, underscored with her tone indicating her judgement on their moral values and behaviour. I believe I only wanted to go with my own impressions, the moisture of their hands, the lingering dab of their fingers, the unmodulated pronouncement of their grip on me. But her cadences overrode every thought I might muster. They coloured each gladhandler's touch, so that caress could be turned into pinch just by her envenoming word.

While she layered the domestic realm with monochromal spite, my father took me out into the world and immediately shrunk any expanded horizons to be derived there.

We would go for walks and he would point at the clouds and name the object shaped therein. A veritable bestiary of terrifying giant creatures in spectral white. He would pounce on flowers, inform me of their poetic, lyrical names, before trepanning them as he plucked them from their coddling soil. Back home he revealed to me his collection of butterflies, each delicately staked out with a brutal, unseen pin on to a cork. To be named is to be tagged and labelled. To be held still and lifeless in place so as to uphold the name. No sliding off into grey areas of the inchoate. Purity and therefore no danger.

Nouns therefore seemed wholly pernicious to me. Stultifying, static, strangling. But my muscles developed and my body began to inhabit verbs. Father couldn't just march me hither and thither through suburbia's green killing fields. I demanded to exercise my rights, wrongs and scraped knees on the playground obstacle course. All he had to do was sit down on the bench and let me run free. He relented, albeit with a corrosive parting shot. He named the bloody apparatuses. The slide, the see-saw, the climbing frame and the roundabout. Cunning devil had ginned me. All my physical surety drained from my body.

It may have been his enunciation of the word 'swing'. My favourite playground activity as I was wont to push myself to ever vertiginous heights. And yet I had also been sternly counselled against swinging my arms when walking, a most unladylike motion. In the realm of the domestic I'd been forewarned against swinging on the furniture, "like monkeys in the arboreal". Father had painted me a picture of frightening men sat on the benches quaffing from tin cans, whom he advised me would inevitably be taking swings at each other with their fists, such was the countermanding control exerted by the "demon drink" (alcohol was always diabolic, inhibition and self-restraint divine). He had further clotted up my ears on a previous occasion about swing votes in elections, demonstrating the lack of constancy and muddied thinking of "the great unwashed".

Then there was its near cousin "spring", rhyming but no more poetic in his throttling epiglottis. An even more terrifyingly promiscuous word with a welter of inferences. Spring was first and foremost the season associated with maximal tutelage as he laid bare Nature's pullulation (sans birds and bees causality). The season when father most definitely had a spring in his strident step. Then there was the spring mechanism for the rusty rocking frog in the playground, that has since been removed by Health and Safety, for fear of being a death trap. Traps waiting to be sprung. Gaol breaks springing dangerous criminals from their incarceration. A springing leap for freedom as he demonstrates his spring heels to stay out of the clutches of law and order. Mother's blessed spring clean. Springing up, springing forth, springing back in recoil. Springing for someone as you steadfastly refuse to change your nationality to Dutch. Springing a leak, like porous language itself, unable to hold meaning through its riddled apertures. Springing from the source, in this case the primordial soup of obfuscation.

With such a variety of meaning, it appears that context is all. But I want to flow free, like a babbling brook. I don't desire word lumps and slabs to be sewn blocking up my bed. Damming and channelling the course of the flux.

But parents are the organ grinders and we the children, their dancing monkeys.

A Brief Note On Identity

2011-11-14T18:51:00.002Z

In the parochial world of man, I have a fair idea of who I am.

Aware of the helical stock where I hail from

I can trace the atavism and their heritable avatars

The lineaments which inscribe the lines of my face

The flushes, freckles and wrinkled folds of my skin

Well versed in my ethnicity, nationality, creed and culture

Their heritable language and those idiosyncratic flourishes of my own

I know who I like and like what I know

I'm informed whence my creativity and how it unfolds

I'm alert to my foes, vexatious or merely nettling

I'm cognisant where the moral voices in my head come from

While I'm also on first name terms with the delusional ones

I'm acquainted with my aspirations, ambitions and appetites

My drives and their inhibitors, my phobias even to their irrationality

My blindspots and prejudices and the adjustments I make

My fantasies, my attractions, my lusts and their objects

I apprehend my body's taints and physical failings

Possessing a map of how it will further unwind in time

Yet what I remain unenlightened to, is the identity of Man himself

Why I'm Not Pre-occupied with the Occupy Protest

2011-11-03T22:39:00.006Z

A protest against the iniquities of capitalism? Count me in ...

Only I hate camping, come out in hives when near religious institutions and well UK Occupy have got their tactics wrong haven't they?

The biggest problem is there is little they can offer up about their protest other than an ill-defined disgruntlement. Though they have garnered lots of media coverage, little of it engages with their purpose and few media outlets seem that interested in trying.

Already the counter-reformation has led to media obsessions with tents being revealed as uninhabited at night, through the use of (battlefield?) infra-red cameras and questioning whether office commuters are being tripped up on the way to work in the City in the morning. The agenda is being shunted into obscure sidings. Also, if you propound the lack of leaders and spokespersons as an organisational and political strength, it does make it hard to convey your viewpoint on serious TV news programmes.

The assembly of people under canvas say that they are debating and discussing ideas. Now this strikes me as a generational thing, because I have all my arguments against capitalism long marshalled over the years. (I've written fictional books to prove it!)But it's true that pace Thatcher and merrily continued by Blair and Brown, there has been a decreasing public space for debate among the demos, as collective and social institutions are eroded (libraries anyone?) and the Executive agglomerates more and more power to itself so that Prime Ministers can take the country into openly unpopular wars.

There really is nothing new under the sun, either about capitalism's opprobrium, or the lack of any credible economic system of organisation to replace it. There has been no new political or economic thought since John Maynard Keynes. Even the radical free marketers espousing Milton Friedman in the 1980s, were only rehashing John Bright And William Cobden's nineteenth century credo. Movements like UK Uncut and Occupy display wonderful creative organisational energy in the nature of their protest, but are completely stumped for offering up alternative systems to replace that which they're protesting.

If you were going to be both rigorous and spectacular with your approach to protest, then maybe rather than occupy a cathedral's walkup space and hit the concessions kiosk takings, maybe construct a simulacrum of the Houses Of Parliament and hold a genuine discussion of politics and constitution, which in the British case is actually to figure out what our 'invisible' constitution actually is and set it down and make it accessible for all. Symbolic and practical resistance and protest all in one. So far the only casualties of the protest have been some clergymen, as the Anglican Church is further rent down the middle by the spasming twitch of its radical rump suddenly getting a jolt. This from an institution beset by strife over gender and sexuality among its own priesthood.

But in fact we don't even need this symbolic form of protest I believe, since the means for change have already been laid, somewhat unwittingly by government themselves. Before I go on to suggest what this might be, I do commend the sentiment behind Occupy of talking and debating those areas of politics and finance that the worlds of Politics and Finance don't want us to discuss and have effectively kept us in the dark about these past 30 years. For me, a crucial precursor involves a politicisation and an education of the electorate and such debates and discussions, if there is an upswell, can only help contribute to such a process. (Hence Occupy can only be termed successful if people are inspired to go and raise these issues in their Parish councils and WI meetings and the like).

I think the government have opened up a whole can of worms with their online petitions and plebiscites. We've already had the disclosure of the details behind the Hillsborough disaster finally after 22 years of suppression of information, because the public managed to get sufficient numbers of signatures online to force the issue. There ought to come a time when people realise that rather than sign up in order to have the Parliamentary talking shop discuss a particular issue, we the people are perfectly capable of discussing it for ourselves and voting online, without recourse to craven representatives doing it on our behalf and defanging anything remotely threatening to the status quo. The will of the people directly transmitted to the Civil Service who would then expedite our actual needs.

Of course the politicians may look to withdraw online democracy if it proves too menacing to their livelihoods, but the genie is out the bottle on that one and any attempt to deny us service will make them appear as craven as Mubarek's attempts to hold on to power. And yes not every household has access to online technology (didn't Gordon Brown promise every household would be digitised by 2012 and not just its television services?). And no doubt there can be fraud and technological jerrymandering, but hey there are enough rotten boroughs up and down the realm already extant.

The two greatest barriers to this bloodless revolution, are our own will, (not grasping the nettle out of timidity or deference) AND our paucity of political education and awareness of the issues and a lack of commitment to take responsibility and get to understand the affairs of government - self-government in this case. So I do salute the faint stirrings of public debate offered by Occupy, even if they seem to be starting from a very low base. But only if such a will to debate and discuss and exchange ideas grows countrywide, can it possibly lead anywhere. But oh my, how radical a destination could it take us to?

with thanks to Alex Butterworth,Bibi van der Zee, Ted Vallance and Dan Hind for panel discussion hosted by Little Atoms that helped me order my thoughts above

Reifi Fy Fo Thumb - Friday Flash

2011-10-20T23:03:00.008+01:00

Geneticist 23:XLVI The people muttered, gnashed teeth and shook their heads and fists heavenwards at the absentee godhead. For he was yet to resurface from his siesta taken after day 6 of initial toil (a state much like death itself really). They cursed he who had seemingly abandoned his children.

Exodontics UL1 People had prostrated themselves afore the overseer sun in adoration and awe. Making his people toil under his searing whip-handed stringencies. The cooly detached adjutant moon too, had followers to the end of the earth. The storms and tempestuous winds at sea had led sailors and island races to worship vaporous sovereigns of the Main, yet their divine afflatus remained will o' the wispy. Sacred cows and their golden calf kine. Minerva and her owl, Bastet and her kitties. Pan and his ruttish kids offspringing hither and thither, causing him to be painted as the troublemaking very devil himself (there goes the neighbourhood). A veritable bestiary of divinities, but none which could come up to scratch and deliver any further miraculous creation. Nor cast sufficient a scoping eye over the realm of the earth they were supposedly charged with superintending.

LeviStubbs 4:Tops Yet man still managed to fructify and produce. He expanded and colonised. The chances of any singular beady eye having wide enough focal depth and peripheral vision to encompass the range of the species, was growing progressively less likely.

Hummers Hum:V And veritably the people threw off the reified halter they had yoked themselves under. Nietzsche beseecher what need of they for any numinous foreman? Their technology was untrammelled. It could lead them like the polestar to the outer reaches of the cosmos with their click-clack camera shutters. Their virtual reality modelling software encompassed all possible future creations and imaginings.

DueToMetronomy 00:00 Until they reified even that over and above themselves too. More laser eye than lazy eye, the Argus eyed satellites became the new elevated spy in the sky. Zooming and swooping down on their roads, their homes. Through their keyboards and personal phones. And thus did mankind plunge itself back into the realm of the Greek Gods. Capricious game players and serial sexual predators, all to yield up juicy tittle-tattle to lubricate their gossip glands. So that our major achievements withered on the grapevine, surfeited under the welter of prying and prurience

Revelation 3:IV Google Earth came to collect on his dominion. The beadiest peeper of all.

Ice Breakers

2011-10-09T17:27:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I attended an all-day set of workshops run by the really rather fabulous 26 Characters organisation, who look to produce fresh fructification by bringing writers, designers and other creatives together. Their opening publication "26 letters: Illuminating The Alphabet" was the work that launched my interest in typography and design within novel texts.

At yesterday's "Wordstock" event, they made the valid observation that at such gatherings, people tend to cohere around the people they already know and to this end they produced a menu to go with lunch that listed 26 topics of conversation to break the ice between strangers and asked that we didn't talk to people we already knew, but made new introductions.

I thought it was a reasonable idea in itself, but when i saw the questions I was convinced by their boldness that they ought to do the job rather nicely!

I'm reproducing the questions here, with my answers and please feel free to do the same on your blog if you want, but please credit 26 Characters.

1) What will be the most brilliant moment of your career?
I have a career? If life is my career, then I'd quite like to extend it by cheating death
2) Do you look before you leap, or leap before you look?
Well my feet never leave the ground, (I won't fly for example), so I'm unlikely to leap at all. But if we're talking metaphorically, then I guess even though I try and think things through, I'm not averse to the radical swerve and the unpredictable. Ornery aren't I?

3) Is the pen mightier than the sword?

As a writer you'd expect me to say yes of course. But come on, a whetted blade is way more cutting edge than the arts when it comes to effecting behaviour (if not change). Even as a political writer, I do view writing as a bit of long-distance sniping, rather than full frontal engagement when it comes to political action

4) What was the most difficult conversation of your life?

Not sure, but a surprisingly easy one was with my father in a halfway house where he was being readied for a return to society after a serious suicide attempt at checking out of it. He was trying to make sense of his actions and in our conversation I remarked that if he stayed in his unhappy marriage he would be the one to go under and if he left the marriage, then it would fell my mother. Someone was going to suffer, that was just the wretched dynamic as had evolved. It seemed to give him some clarity on the whole thing

5) Describe your dream day...

That's easy, one in which I fill all 24 hours with writing a novel. Someone would have to be on hand to put bite-sized pieces of toast in my mouth for me and break my chocolate into squares. And we'd have to suspend toilet functions for the period of 24 hours and the like. But I just know that Tweetdeck's insistent ping would yank me from full concentration. Seems we are destined to be social creatures rather than anchorites...

6) What's the biggest risk you've ever taken?

Hmmm, I'm not a great risk taker. But I've fairly consistently made some crazy purchasing decisions. I bought my parents' Sony Betamax just as VHS was crushing the life out of it in the market and needless to say I never even got it plugged into my TV. I did similar with some Hi-Fi I was bringing together. Had a fantastic amp, bought a tape deck from a music studio, but never completed the job by buying turntable or speakers. Sold off the two pieces I had for next to nothing. Readers of an earlier blog piece of mine can read about my ludicrous investment in a car before I learned to drive...

7) What don't you want to be doing in five years time?

Working for a living, but that's a dream right?

8) Is normal desirable?

I'm going to have to be really disciplined to not devote a thesis to this question. Let's just stop at NO. What is normal, who is defining it? What percentage of the population does it take to constitute the threshold of normality? Do those outside have the freedom not only to stay outside any such definition, but to criticise and dissect it? Who wants to be normal and fit into an insane society?

9) What would you ask a visitor from outer space?

If I could be his agent and would 15% be agreeable as my cut... Failing that, I'd talk to him about collapsing scale since he'd managed to cross the cosmos

10) What rules do you ignore?

As many as possible, but especially that one that states 'Thou must know what the rules are before you consciously attempt to break them'.

11) Is writing closer to thinking than speaking?

In a really significant way it isn't. Written language is largely formal, linear sentences syntactically constructed. Speech rarely is so. Having said that, my writing attempts to render the thinking mind and presenting simultaneous thoughts, the bombardment of notions, the colouring by emotion etc etc. So my answer is it should be, but largely isn't at least within literature

12) What is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen?

Even though I don't 'do' Nature, the colours in the Grand Canyon and the sunrise while waking up on a boat approaching Dubrovnik. I find some of Rothko's paintings beautiful too. I do find a certain despairing beauty among ruined/war torn buildings too, but that's just probably me. There are certain sounds in music I find beautiful, but they're kind of hard to portray in words

13) How do you break habitual behaviours?

By not habituating in the first place. And where I do, I probably have a blind spot to the fact that they're habits and therefore am never aware enough to try and change them

14) Is a picture worth a thousand words?

I'm torn on this one. Firstly I detest art works that rely on words to convey and referential meaning, even to the artwork's title. But clearly visual art can convey meanings that words can't, or only through massive over-elaboration. Mind you, I'm an author, so I'll always defend the power of the written word too. I do conceptualise my works in broad terms through things such as abstract, or cubist. All art forms are about ways of seeing after all

15) What emotions do you feel most uncomfortable with?

Another tricky one for me, though not in the 'normal' manner I would credit. My problem is that the emotional lexicon is actually very poorly defined. Both our understanding, our vocabulary, our shading of the emotional spectrum. What is an emotion and what isn't? Is fear an emotion? Is vengeance? So I feel uncomfortable with the whole darn lot of them as we currently conceive of them. To me the happy-sad spectrum of the emoticon range just about sums up the infantile nature of our understanding

16) What was the happiest moment of your life?

Well I hope it is yet to come, or I want a refund... certain ecstatic states dancing & exhausted at gigs, after sporting triumphs, (played at very low level of ability), witnessing certain achievements of my children etc

17) What is the best piece of advice you have given to someone else?

Probably that you can only do what you can do, to pursue the art of the possible and not beat yourself up about what you can't achieve and waste energy doing so. I know it wasn't my father's perennial 'Don't do what I do, do as I say'

18) What did/do you dare not say to your mother or father?

There is nothing that I wouldn't dare, but I would try and couch it in the best possible terms with their wellbeing in mind. But I would never refrain from not airing something

19) What do you fear most?

The lights going out for eternity that is death. It colours everything I do

20) Would you rather be a novel or a poem?

A novel, though not one with monolithic blocks of text. Can I have majuscules? No footnotes though

21) How do you reward yourself?

Either with the quiet inner satisfaction of a task well done, or lashings of chocolate. depends if the shops are shut at the time

22) What organisation would you refuse to work for on ethical grounds?

As a non-believer in the bounteous munificence of the free market, the quodlibets of which corporation is worse than any other is not really something I expend time in ruminating on

23) How would your friends sum up your identity?

A non-believer

24) How would you get away with a murder?

By plotting every last detail. However as I have poor eyesight, am quite clumsy and faint at the sight of blood, I don't believe I'd be much cop at it. Other than that, I could talk someone to death, but only where they had no means of escape

25&26) What is the thing you haven't done yet and why haven't you done it?

Changed the face of literature. Hey it's a marathon not a sprint

Iago Imago Magoo - Second Campaigner Challenge

2011-10-01T21:06:00.002+01:00

The Challenge is:
Write a blog post in 200 words or less, excluding the title. It can be in any format, whether flash fiction, non-fiction, humorous blog musings, poem, etc. The blog post should:
include the word "imago" in the title
include the following 4 random words: "miasma," "lacuna," "oscitate," "synchronicity,"
If you want to give yourself an added challenge (optional and included in the word count), make reference to a mirror in your post.
For those who want an even greater challenge (optional), make your post 200 words EXACTLY!

*

Mirror mirror on the wall, who's fairest of them all?

Compared to you, I would opine the imago of the miasma-loving fly that emerges from the maggot boring through rancid carrion

Whose vanity table did you adorn originally, Tamerlaine's or Stalin's?

A dreary synchronicity of cruelty, but none that can rival my own waspish tongue

A lacuna in your logic that oscitates so achingly

How so?

A mirror faithfully reflects what it's confronted with does it not? Light and optics and what noptics...

Indeed

Your glass can tarnish. Your silvered back degrades. Your focal plane slowly unhinged, your vision is not so true after all

A tad less sharply focused, but then I redeem that with the tartness of my verbal judgements

Only, you are limited by the lacuna in your vocabulary

I credit I express myself adequately. Sufficient to cut to humanity's quick

Then a maven such as yourself would know that 'imago' has a further, more modern rendering?

You're aware Freud sniffed cocaine off my vitreous body 'for medical purposes', or so he claimed

I'm more Lacanian. His positing of the 'mirror stage'. So with this big, slobbery osculation, I'm agoin' to attain the ideal form of me

Written on The Skin - friday Flash

2011-09-29T22:49:00.006+01:00

Daphne was born with a strawberry red wheal upon her angelic creamy face. Though a hemangioma unsightly yet harmless, her mint copybook was already blotted for her spotlessly jaundiced mother, who turned her back on her. Blighted in the incubator's hothouse.

In her stead, Ambrose the father struggled might and main, night and day, to rear the baby girl. Yet for all his efforts, the onset of cradle cap appeared to signal that Daphne's diaphanous halo had collapsed under its own flimsy weight and shrivelled to wreathe her crown. Unlike the rash maternal repudiation, Ambrose only gradually withdrew his defeated affection from his reptilian daughter. Signalling the singularly endearing strawberry on her cheek, being sent packing for a promiscuous outbreak of impetigo. To the untrained eye, the weeping scabs looked like herpes longing for the oedipal kiss to cast her back into a princess. The cold saw day in hell that would never be redeemed.

Deprived of human contact, Daphne cuddled up to the pet cat for affection. But for her pains contracted only ringworm, circling her leg like an ancient henge. A monument to perpetual desertion, even by her own recoiling flesh. No kisses under the mistletoe, just the pruritus of poison ivy. Daphne the honeyless sweet pea developed hives.

Hormonal eruption of adolescent acne bubbled and battled with a livid recrudescence of shingles. The tender nodules under her skin raised red raw. She tried to purge the blistering torture by bathing. Scourging the skin with soap. Rubbing, chafing it dry, rather than a soft patting, only further causing the skin to gape wide in fissures and cracks.

She rattled her eczematous abacus beads, counting off her teenage years. Rasping the chalky skin with her nails, scritch-scratching five-bar gates as she worried at the fleshy worry-beads on her arms. The roseola rosary. Her yearning carapace a desiccated river bed thirsting for water. A desquamation mark on her parched desire.

In her stewing loneliness, she reached out for a man. But each occasion she drew close, skin bumps and flakes erupted, shredding her scarfskin and shedding her resolve. The pustulent vesicles formed an archipelago along the roiling sea of her flesh. A catenation of anxiety alternatively submerged and then raised, by the tidal magma of the shifting tectonic plates of ravaging emotion. Inflamed feelings blown off and solidifying into crusts.

She took herself off to dermatologists. Despite a bombardment of salves, ointments and emollients, her skin continued to flare and rage. The hide specialists knew that the protrusions and spherules were caused by the bubbling passions beneath the rind. That there was nothing they could do for her.

And yet, she finally found herself a lover. He was colourblind, suffered from floaters, and had cataracts in both eyes, so her skin afflictions didn't register with him. She still insisted on making love with the lights off however.

Despite her newfound happiness, or perhaps because of it, psoriasis struck her. A folding in of her own skin, like a sheath of self. An immuring just for her man. Sadly he was to unwrap her from herself and she unpeeled herself yet further.

For once her lover's infidelity revealed itself with little guilt flushes in his face, the scales fell from her eyes. They tumbled on to her forearm and coated the flesh like chainmail. That inveterate male itch which demands fingerless lancing, now sprouted across her own forsaken flesh. But her burning tenderness couldn't be lanceted. Her nails like gauntlets, harrowing ridges across her pale wrists. The moraine of pared being, winding serpentine around her inviting arteries.

Time for a different type of unrequited love lettering to be inscribed on her flesh.

Artists and Writers

2011-09-12T00:09:00.008+01:00

I think in another life, I would have liked to have been a visual artist or a musician to express my creativity. But I can't draw stickmen, nor hold a note, so I have tried to channel both visual and rhythmic languages into the written word.

But when I meet an artist who is also a writer, then I am always in awe of their twin gifts. Today I interviewed just such a wonderful creative mind in Marita Hansen and tried to get inside what both gifts share and what differentiates them.

Welcome Marita -

Which did you start doing first, art or writing and what led you to take up the second one?
I started art first, then became interested in writing, probably in primary school, but more so in high school. I suppose keeping a diary and writing stories for school is what led me into writing. I also have a couple degrees in Art History, and a shared major in Italian Studies.

Are the initial processes of creating the same for both art sources, how do they differ?
I suppose they are the same in the sense of coming up with an idea. But art is definitely different in that it's very much a physical thing for me, whereas writing is cerebral. I get lost in art, not thinking about anything, just concentrating on getting something physically perfect, just right. And I always need music when I paint, but with writing I don't like distractions. However, I do visualise when I write, imagine how a scene is played out, like in a television drama. That has affected my stories very much, which I think is related to my artistic side.

"To The Point"

Do the two creative pursuits inform one another?
I tend to keep them separate, with the exception of my book covers. Plus, my art is about beauty, whereas my writing is about the harsher side of life. However, they are just different views of realism, because there is both beauty and ugliness in the world.

How do you know something is definitively a story or a painting before you sit down to approach it?
With paintings I get my ideas from photos and photocopies. The image usually catches my attention. With writing it comes organically, while I'm at the computer tapping away. Though, sometimes it may come from exercising or while I'm out and about. For instance, some woman were talking incredibly loud on the bus one day in a different language. From there I got an idea for a fantasy, but as I sat down at the computer the Singapore setting didn't work so I altered it to one of my old neigbourhoods in New Zealand. And suddenly it became realism, totally different from my original idea.

"Military Haka"

How do you see the relationship of the two forms within the body of your work? Do you ever approach something twice, once through art and the other through writing?
I suppose I have done this through creating my own book covers. I did the story then depicted the main bad guy, which I continued for my followup novel (due out in 2012). Plus, I have used specific colours and typography that symbolises both the title and story. The red in "Behind the Hood" relates to the Maori use of this colour, as well as representing blood, while the knife-like "I" relates to Tama's fascination with knives. The typography is also like graffiti, which goes with the story and nature of some of the characters. The blue in the sequel, "Behind the Tears," instead relates to the teardrop tattoos on the bad guy's face, the title, and what happens in the novel. I have also depicted the title as a tattoo, because that character has a number of them.

Do you want to say anything about image in art and image in writing?
Depending on the work, image in art (such as drawing and painting) is largely static and retrospective, whereas image in writing is animated, more alive in the sense that the story is happening right then and there as you read it. However, both art and writing evokes emotional responses, they just do it different ways.

Would you combine the two within one artefact, a novel with your artwork on some of the pages?
As said above, I have done this to a small extent by creating my cover, and I will also draw all the characters so that I can use them in a Youtube video. But inside a novel? Maybe, never say never.

Marita's cover art for her novel "Behind The Hood" available by clicking here (USA) or here (UK)

Help!

2011-08-31T19:20:00.005+01:00

I'd be very grateful if you wonderful guys out there would help me come to a decision what to name my new genre book. I'll list the possible titles and if you could vote your fave in the comment section. At the bottom I'll give a brief blurb as well, so you can actually cast 2 votes, one just on title itself (grab factor) and a second if necessary given the outline of the book.

many thanks

Marc x

The Candidate Titles are as follows:

1) The Third Eye Policeman

2) Cuban Decay

3) Procedural Death

4) The After-Image Man

5) The Sum of The Parts

6) The Death Of Procedure

7) An Eye For An Eye For An Eye

8) Dead To The World

The Blurb:

You can tell a lot about a society by its murderers... Simon Moralee has the gift of decocting the faces of murderers from the last images witnessed by their victims. His clear-up rate is 100%, but such is the dystopic society's slide into predation, how much is his work making any kind of difference? The Police minders assigned to him have nothing to do except cultivate their resentment; for with Simon's advent, all police procedure has become redundant. But when a criminal mastermind with his own psychic talents comes hunting for Simon, a deadly game is joined.

Death Masking Love - Friday Flash

2011-08-25T20:54:00.006+01:00

To mark the kindle publication of my collection of flash fiction "52FF", I've reproduced one from the book and which appeared in #fridayflash in December 2010.

She brought the end of her fingers to her mouth and moistened them in her warm saliva. The whorls of her prints glistened in the meagre light of the room. But it wasn't her own outlines she was interested in raising.

His hand lay outstretched in his sleep, palm exposed. She splayed out her fingers so as to graze each pad with his. To seal her contours with his and have them sear into hers. She would not allow that we are each born with our unique stamp woven into our fingertips. The perfect match, that seamless superimposition of one upon the other, must exist. Unfortunately, even in his sleep, his was too broad for her to span with her dainty little hand.

Undaunted, she caressed her index finger downwards and began to trail the creases and wrinkles across his palm. She wasn't a trained chiromancer, yet maintained her own superstitious credo of the significance of the lines. She understood the notions of the heart, the head, the life and fate, each having their own thread. Just she couldn't unravel them to yield the centre of the labyrinth. They refused to give up their runic Braille quite as easily as the digital phrenologists claimed.

Instead the lines offered tiny windows into how sensitively a man used his fingers. Whether the ridges and folds suggested a tendency to a closed fist, a restlessly flexing tension, or a more open-handed receptivity. The portents on this one were good.

Having crisscrossed his hand enough times to make him flinch it reflexively in his sleep, she carried on down the exposed wrist. Veins and arteries picked out against his pale skin. The hair there so fine and blond as to efface itself. Unlike on the reverse side of the forearm, where it flourished like jungle vines. But here, the red and blue lines stood out like a road map. The major trunk routes of pulsing blood and the minor tracks back to the heart. She knew that a wedding band was always on the fourth finger, because people used to believe it to have a vein leading from there all the way to the love muscle itself. With such a mish-mash of venous vermicelli in the wrist, she couldn't be sure how they could have traced it so limpidly. Before the dawn of the anatomists with their scalpels.

There was always something too fragile suggested by the upturned wrist, too vulnerable. So she moved quickly on. She found herself at the elbow and wondered at the change of skin topography. The permanent fold there raised a livid red scale. Yet here was the most symmetrical set of features on the whole skin. There could you witness the cellular architecture of the human body in all its intricacy. Tiny parallelograms, each with a facility to shrivel or stretch, to concertina and overlap their neighbour. The shuffling orchestration was simply divine. She licked the elbow with her tongue in appreciation. It tasted of interrelatedness.

When she woke up, he was gone. He hadn't even extinguished the overhead light, even though it was morning and ribbons of light were streaming through the blinds. Lashing her to the sheets. Seemed like they weren't such a good fit after all.

She stared at the indentations left in his pillow. The case rucked where it had cradled his head, bearing the sunken contours from the downward pressure. More wrinkles and creases, only this time turned inside out. Lacking for the supporting body they served. The vacated lines, the abandoned seams, having opened the quarry of her own body the night before. The death mask of another potential relationship, pressed down with airless finality.

Once, just once, she yearned to wake up and find the smooth impression of a fully-drawn face still lying on the pillow next to hers. Not having to commit the features to her wistful memory, but to be able to revisit them afresh everyday, in the flesh.

Writing Prompts

2011-08-24T19:55:00.004+01:00

Story prompts are great aren't they? They can help get the creative juices roiling, maybe even leading to the writing of a flash for Friday publication.

Whether they're the wonderful photos offered up by Icy Sedgewick. Or the word prompts freely offered at Three Word Wednesday or by Lily Childs' Prediction Challenge and others I'm not even aware of. For someone like me who loves riffing off words, what could be better than being tossed 3 words and told to weave a tale from that?

But, I love the frisson from spotting something in my everyday life that sets off a whole chain of associations that may just end up in a story. Something that drags you away from the ordinary and demands you to don your writer face, whether it's convenient then and there or not. That live alchemy, from something equally random as word or picture prompts, but personal to me in how it leaps up and grabs me by the throat. These prompts are not sought after, nor provided with writing in mind. They are everyday details and observations, but one day your mind is just in a place that transforms them from out of the ordinary.The alchemy begins the moment they leap into the imagination and start sparking ideas.

I think they probably speak in the same way as a word or picture prompt, to ideas that are already bumping and boring inside your head awaiting being given birth. But it is perhaps taking them from that context in which you experienced them that adds something a little bit extra, than to say something provided precisely to jolt the writing process.

Today I have released a collection of 52 pieces of my flash fiction on kindle. As part of the fridayflash twitter community, I wrote one a week for a year, bookended by some beforehand as I learned the art and a few afterwards as the impetus wouldn't let me go even after I achieved my goal of 52 in 52. This collection is what I hope are the best 52 of the 70 or so I wrote.

In the appendix I provide the writing prompts for all but the very experimental last 5 in the collection, which were less inspired by prompts and more by the form of language and words themselves. Most prompts were quite ordinary, sights witnessed on the London Underground, or in a supermarket. One was a single word in a review of a book. Some were fundamentally embedded in the heart of the final story, others just helped me tap into long-held ideas and probably provided the skeleton to hang them on. A couple of the stories I couldn't even remember what the prompts were.

Here are those prompts. I hope you find their genesis potentially useful for coming across your own in the rich pageant that is everyday life.

Plato's Cave: Kebab houses from both when I was at University and when I moved back to London afterwards

Caritas: After attending a charity fundraising auction, where there was the prize of being a character in a Booker winner's next novel

Death Masking Love: I've always had a thing about the smoothness of the outside of a death mask and the wrinkles reproduced inside

The Caller To The Bingo Caller's House Calls 'House': After a twitter hashtag punning game, I was struck by the violence of the rhymes for bingo numbers

In The Nursery: After talking to a child psychologist about the use of play in diagnostics

Confessional: During the 2010 General Election campaign and Prime Minister Gordon Brown's gaff when he was caught describing a voter he'd talked to on camera as 'a bigoted old woman'

Captivation: I was writing a novel with a different police interrogation scene and wondered what it would be like if the suspect started withdrawing from drugs

Loss Of Function: From the phrase 'falling in love' and reading Tom McCarthy's book "Remainder" that week

Bowing Out: The image of the bulbs around a mirror in actors' dressing rooms. I don't know why that image came to me that particular week

Totentanz: I spotted the word in a review in a publication which I was only reading because it had a short piece of my own

Digging For Australia: After failing to excite my own children's enthusiasms for beach holidays

Café Sensorium: After reading a review of a restaurant in which you eat in pitch dark and are served by the blind

8 Legged Army: The tarantula is my animal totem (along with the vulture, see below). Reading about an Amazonian tribe and their relationship to the animals of the forest

Badges: I used to collect rock band badges and pin them to a split open T-shirt I never wore. I was also a cub scout of fairly limited proficiency

Cosmologist's Hangover: Thinking back to a monster hangover at University after a day of five garden parties, working my way back to my college rooms from the furthest one away, stopping off at each of the others on the way. Why this came to me when it did I don't know, as I haven't drunk alcohol for many years

Morning Assembly: I can't remember exactly, but this may have been one of those where the story proceeded from its title. Child soldiers have always been an interest since the days of the Khmer Rouge

2 Up, 1 Down: I attended Tom McCarthy interviewing an architect for his semi-fictional Necronautical Society and it, made me consider the everyday home in ways I'd never thought about before

End of The line: Come on gentle reader, admit you scrutinise what your fellow commuters are reading on the train! Something that kindle readers will prevent us from doing in the future, as there is no readily visible cover art

Deadheading: Another commuter train inspired one. A man sat near me reading a book, with two angry looking scabs on his hairless pate

Pigeon English: I can't remember the inspiration for this, but the pidgin/pigeon homophone led to the grounded bird's eye point of view

Trespass: The anxiety abounding about identity theft and credit card fraud, brought together with the internet's affording of crafting yourself a different online personality from your real life one

Cinderella's Crystal Tips: Seeing a woman's metal ring that covered two fingers between the upper and lower knuckles. It looked like a knuckleduster...

Prometheus Northbound: Looking up at map of the Northern Line during yet another interminable journey along it and the fact that during my peripatetic youth I'd temporarily lodged at about half of the places on the map

5 Items Or Less: Queuing up in my local supermarket to pay, the whole thing came to me all of a piece as I spotted a woman with 3 stars tattooed on her foot

Crazy Gulf: Having played a round with my kids, I began to think back to the props for the holes. Why do all such courses have a clown hole?

The Names: Just something about lists constituting a narrative story in themselves

Basic Geometry: Attending a poetry recital, the word 'fuselage' really resonated in my head. Once it rattled against notions of geometry, I had the juxtaposition that lead to the Twin Towers. I wrote this almost whole on the train journey home

Fairground Attraction: Knife throwing as a metaphor for hurling insults meant to wound but not mortally. At some point I hit upon twinning it with the fire swallower and that made it into a married couple

Cysters: A way of exploring our anxieties about death and abandonment, once I'd read about the calcification of an unborn fetus inside the womb

If It Were Thee: I gutted a previous short story written in the second person that had ground to a halt. Not quite sure how I hit upon the cyborg thing, but once I did then it became all about linguistic programming

The Ties That Bind: "Mr and Mrs Smith" really wasn't a terribly good movie was it? I'd always had the idea of a serial killer who invites hit men to kill him as his series. The husband and wife thing helped me realise it here

Bad Apple: We have an apple tree in our garden. Though fecund, we only get to eat about five apples a year for many of the reasons outlined in the story. We are also plagued by urban foxes and had a rat living off the fallen fruit. Uggh!

Hard Time: I can't remember the impetus for this, but I do write about being imprisoned, or held against your will quite often

Lost Sole: I stepped off a bus and saw a lone woman's shoe on the grass verge. It jolts you out of your familiar associations when an everyday object is seen out of its regular context

De-Terence: Not sure how this became wrapped around a bouncer and I know that came before the stripping away of his youthful illusions, but I can only trace the latter to my own experiences

Bittersweet: I liked the image of injecting poison into the soft centre of a chocolate. An object associated with love, used to kill it off

Knell Quaternion: This started from the story of the Indian temple girl dancer-cum-prostitute and then rolled out into being four tales involving bells

Atlas' Daughter Inherits His Round Shoulders: Just wondered what it might be like to be called in to confirm the identity of your dead loved one

The White Elephant's Graveyard: Reading on Wikipedia about the desert resting place of decommissioned military aircraft

Statutory Statuary: Saying goodbye to visiting friends and wondering when exactly to shut the door on them and getting back to a piece of writing that was calling me. Irony was of course, I ended up writing this instead

Lunar Tic: Just something about your body clock being superimposed upon by authority. My chance to spin on the werewolf story

One Billion Virtuosos And Sos: Just considering how any literate person with access to the internet is now a writer

The Forsaken: The view from the raised platform of my local station. Given a considerable literary makeover, it's not that grim!

Dead Ringer: There would have been some news story about a celebrity lookalike that would have really annoyed me. But for the life on me, I can't remember which one. There are so many after all...

Rich Pickings: The vulture is my other animal familiar. I once stared deep into the eyes of one in a zoo and couldn't begin to describe it. Since then I'd always wanted to write a story about vultures and the increasing ubiquity of child soldiers gave me the hook to hang it on

Drying Out: Another story that may have stemmed from its title, that twin meaning of an alcoholic drying out from their addiction and the drying out of the skin as we age

Assassination City: Youth knife murders are reported every month in London

The Politicisation of Criminalisation

2011-08-21T20:20:00.007+01:00

"Police seek 30,000 Rioters" according to the Metropolitan police. Even allowing for Press hyperbole, that's an incredible jump in potential prisoners at the going rate of current sentences being handed down to the rioters who have already been identified and processed through the courts.

Given that our pre-existing prison population is 90,000, were all these 30,000, or even half of that, caught and sentenced,well you do the maths. Given a prison infrastructure that is already barely able to cope with the pre-riot inundations on its scanty resources.

So that becomes one pinch point, in the deterioration of the conditions of housing prisoners due to overcrowding.

Pinch point two, is consider the effect of some 15% of the prison population all arriving at broadly the same time into the system and all for the same sort of offences. It would seriously tilt the balance and make-up of the prisoner population.

So what? you may ask. They're all criminals of whatever stripe aren't they? Well I'd ask you to consider the potential for a politicisation of this new intake. Many arrive into the system probably already nursing the grievances that may have partly informed their actions during the riots. At the very least many are possessed of the economic and social arguments of their circumstances, even if they don't actually credit them as motives for their behaviour. Now add the overcrowding and lack of any real resources to manage a proper rehabilitation process within the prisons and their political grievances are enhanced further.

While they may also influence some of those other inmates already within the system and to politicise them about the injustices and conditions in which they find themselves within the swollen inmate numbers. Of course their arguments may also be discounted by the current inmate population. In the same way that they regard sex criminals as beyond the pale, they may reject these new prisoners and shun any unity with them. But I think they are rather more likely to find common unity of purpose. Uniting against the prison system they find themselves housed in.

Does this crucible remind you of any other eras? We don't have the prompt of Civil Rights, Race and Ethnicity, the opposition to the Vietnam War and student protest, to anything like the same degree that the US did in the 1960s. And Marxism and Maoism and the Black Panthers are not broadly percolating throughout our prison system as they were back in the 1960s US. But I think similar, less ideological preconditions exist all the same. It will focus around the reasons for disaffection and take the form of protest, violence and possibly even riot, over untenable prison conditions as it did in America. Attica, San Quentin, Soledad, Oklahoma and Idaho to name but five.

But it may well go further. The two books I offer at the head of this post, both trace the forging of an anti-authoritarian stance and more significantly an anti-authoritarian language. This was brought about by the abuse of the prison authorities and a resistance to that by the prisoners. They refused to back down in the face of whatever abuse was being heaped on them. (Jimmy Boyle's autobiography paints the same journey, only his was undertaken in complete isolation in the Scottish prison system of the late 60's and 70s, not as part of some wider political movement). The US prisoners instinctively bucked at the violence and degradation being heaped on them and became politiicsed in their analysis of the power structures underlying it all (aided by their readings in Marx et al).

What happened was that complete unwillingness to kowtow to authority found its way back on to the streets in the US and permeated the criminal classes since some of those ex-inmates were career criminals. It's the attitude that informs US gangs. It's the language of not being disrespected, of the same demonstration of status and escalation of revenge and violence as pervaded their prison life.

We are already at that point with many of the rioters, who show no fear of the authorities, as demonstrated in their actions a fortnight ago. (hardly surprising since Britain has imported many aspects of US gang culture, see my post here). I hate to think what protracted sentences, plus politicisation at whatever informal level, will wreak on their thinking here and now in the 21st century. They will eventually be released and they may just be even more unreachable than they are now. Their baleful influence may be even more widespread when they are back in the general population.

And there will be prison protests and riots over the next couple of years. That may just be the least of our problems.

Dear Mr Cameron

2011-08-15T08:19:00.003+01:00

So our Prime Minister has now pledged a zero tolerance for street crime.

Why only now?

Is this a recent conversion after being briefed about t on the causes of the riots?

Doesn't such a statement imply a previous tolerance for street crime? That while certain strata of society predate on one another up and down our communities and high streets, with petty theft, mugging as theft with violence, all the way up to knife crime, the government have been happy to turn a blind eye to this at a strategic level. The underclass preying on one another.

Only now that criminal activity suddenly agglomerated together into the riots and looting on those same high streets last week, where property and trade themselves were attacked, has the Prime Minister determined to deal with it.

How many youths have been stabbed to death on our streets over the last decade? There has been plenty of official hand wringing, but the only action has really been taken by those in the stricken communities themselves and the police struggling to get a grip on it.

I took a look at the Conservative Party's 2010 election manifesto and other than a pledge to ensure a custodial sentence for knife crime, there is no mention about cleaning up street crime or dealing with gangs.

Therefore a tolerance for both.

The Labour Party were little better in power, so it's not strictly party political.

But I do find Cameron's pronouncements particularly odious and craven. Will we now see him with the zeal of a recent convert? Or just the payer of lip service with his fingers crossed that such criminality will not rear its head in so organised a fashion as last week.

This is the opening of that same Conservative manifesto:

"A country is at its best when the bonds between people are strong and when the sense of national purpose is clear".

Well our country must be at its worst. We're all in this together are we Mr Cameron? Some more than others clearly. We all had our suspicions about the unity of financial sacrifice being a sham. But now I suspect the actual sacrifice of human life and wellbeing before criminality too, had been consciously accepted that this would only apply to certain strata of society.

Clueless Politicians And Plodding Police

2011-08-11T16:17:00.003+01:00

So the mother of all parliaments was recalled from its summer holidays to debate the riots. Today was the day for answers and leadership right?

Prime Minister David Cameron reiterated his assertion that "the fightback has begun".

Which begs the question as to why we need to be 'fighting back' in the first place?

For whatever reason the police largely stood by in a vain attempt to contain what was fast moving and highly mobile rioting. They ceded the shopping high streets to the rioters. So the police now need to reassert their authority and control.

For the first time in my life, I actually feel sorry for the police. They've always been detested by the demographic of law-breaking people who were rioting. But now they've aroused the ire of the law-abiding citizens who felt unprotected and the retailers who saw them standing uselessly by while their property was looted or torched. They're getting it in the neck from all sides.

My criticism of the police would centre on their complete failure to deal with the burgeoning gang culture that has taken hold of certain communities and their high streets.

We have imported the American model of gang culture, virtually lock stock and barrel, albeit with our more stringent gun laws, the knife is more prevalent than the gun, although depressingly that balance looks like it is shifting too. We have gang boundaries and loyalties determined by territory, graffiti marking those boundaries like a dog spoors lamp-posts. They have even adopted the bandana as part of their affiliations. What self-respecting Englishman would wear such an item, apart from a brief flowering during the 80's New Romanticism? Now it is de rigueur for signalling your colours.

The Americans have 30 years experience ahead of us. On how gangs act, the collective mentality, the petty and violent crime they indulge in, the relationship to drug dealing, the symbols and mores of them. I question whether our police have ever seriously sought to consult such expertise and actually get ahead of the game. I don't blame them for failing to be ahead of the game with the social media driving the fluidity of the riots. But their inability to interdict the gang structure and operations is an unforgivable major failing. They have been blighting our communities and streets for over a decade now and their ability to act with virtual impunity from the law has culminated in what we have seen this week. They attacked the shopping areas they know so well from prowling and predating them week after week after week. They knew which shops they wanted to hit, what goods they wanted to have. They'd done their window shopping previously and took advantage of the opportunity to now just take them.

But returning to Cameron's new catchphrase. That notion of 'fight back' also implies the need to hit back at an aggressor. Are we admitting that we are in fact engaged on a low level war?

Mrs Thatcher declared that there were elements of society antipathetic to it, who she dubbed "the enemy within". But her targets were specifically political opponents, both institutional and grass roots, but again this notion of an enemy as in a war.

The maxim of any military tactician is "Know thine enemy" yet not one single government has made any attempt to understand the mentality of those involved in the riots, for to do so would involve admitting to their own culpability in helping to foster them.

The accusation hurled against the US involvement in Vietnam, while some of its own cities burned and police were turning guns on demonstrating students and protesting prisoners, was how could the country prosecute wars abroad without recognising the ongoing war it had back home in its ghettoes? And now the fine upstanding governments of those well-know democracies of Iran, China and Libya are gleefully telling us to get our own house in order rather than sending our bombers over the countries of others and appealing to the United Nations top intervene to uphold the democratic right to protest.

If we can declare war on an abstract word such as 'terror', surely we can do the same with an abstract word but material reality, in 'deprivation'?

Of course the riots were not solely motivated by deprivation (see my earlier post). Just so you don't credit that I'm only bashing the political right, the Leader of the Opposition Labour Party Ed Milliband today asked "How do we have people among us who think it's OK to go and harm and despoil their communities in this way?" Because Mr socially-concerned, oh so unaware Milliband, the rioters don't feel any allegiance to call themselves a member of any community. They are without any stake in society whatsoever. The only things they take from their community are money and goods with menaces and a postcode by which to name their gangs.

Utterly clueless the lot of them. We get the politicians we deserve and the politicians get the citizens they deserve back.

The Riots In London

2011-08-09T19:41:00.003+01:00

"Mindless thugs" has been the loudest outcry at the rioters.

They are not mindless, they are mindset thugs and such simplistic labelling as ever allows people to not go any deeper than the surface in response.

What is this mindset?

It has developed over the last 30 years since the last set of riots. It is the same areas in flames as before. Any Londoner could have probably predicted the most likely boroughs to experience problems. That tells me nothing significant has been done to help those communities bring themselves up to a happier state. They were communities largely thrown on the scrapheap in the 80's. Sink estates with mass unemployment and educated in sink schools that were no better than holding centres for the hours of school. Now we are seeing the children and grandchildren of those original rioters and their peers from the same estates out on the street and causing mayhem. It's hardly genetic, but when the envirinment is unchanged from that of 30 years ago, it produces the same outcomes.

What has changed over the years, is the development of American style territorial gangs, largely with knife in place of gun. it's a really depressing development and has been allowed to go unchecked over twenty years. Gangs provide the 'family' membership that their own flesh and blood have abdicated from. God knows how many fatal youth on youth stabbings and shootings there have been up and down the country but particularly in London. Carrying a knife makes the individual feel indomitable. The same indomitability they feel when through force of numbers (as the gangs join forces) they come to be in control of the streets and able to do as they please.

Suddenly instead of mooching around outside the shops and malls of a weekend, all of a sudden now they can help themselves to its stock, or destroy it for whatever perceived grudge. They are already used to petty criminality, through harassing passers by, mugging and demanding with menace. They are not being organised by any 'master criminals', nor by anarchists. If anything, they are leading and these other opportunists with their own agendas are coming to the party.

Do you recall the mass gang fight on the concourse of Victoria Station when a youth was fatally stabbed? Two gangs from outside the area, one from Fulham (South-West London) and one from South London arranged to meet and fight and came fully armed. they arrived on their bikes. So these gangs are highly mobile and as we know, communicate fluidly and rapidly. They can target and organise themselves to move about the capital & keep the authorities completely off balance. They are at present taking revenge on their haunts of the High Street, places they have spent so much of their lives at just killing time. Well now they're killing these places.

Feral is an adjective bandied about. It's clumsy but not without some pertinency. Three generations of economic neglect and parental neglect has bred swathes of completely unrestrained youth. They share nothing of your values or moral codes. Judging them accordingly wouldn't even register. they are not going to own any property in their life, so have no compunction about torching that of others. They are totally lost generations. They do not care, they feel impervious to every accusation you may care to throw at them. It simply would not compute.

This is the outcome of neither an economic deprivation nor a political protest. Banks (and by extension bankers) are not being targeted, so it's hardly the outcry borne of sophisticated political analysis. Yes shops have been ransacked, but of a certain type. Electrical goods, phone shops, jewellers, bike shops, sportswear shops - these are all lifestyle items for youth that we as society have been peddlling for decades as worth owning. They already own Blackberry's, are currently wearing Hollister or Nike; what they are helping themselves to is the latest model, the latest edition, exactly how capitalism and consumerism encourages us all to keep upgrading. Chemists and supermarkets provide the fuel of drink & pills to sustain their rampage through the night hours. Those shops that aren't relevant, such as carpet shops, get torched. There is an element of 'if I can't have it, I'll make sure you can't either', in tandem with the destruction's adrenalin pumping. And the power of being able to operate over the law and to be in control of the streets.

We reap what we sow. Generations left to drift with minimal adult guidance, with little education, without any aspiration other than gross material ones, without any sense of endangerment, without any imbued moral value or sense, without any stake in society. All they needed was an opportunity to realise their own unbridled power. After the student demos suggest the path, after the cutbacks in police numbers and the detriment to moral, here was the opportunity.

Some of us have been telling the politicians for 30 years about "Broken Britain". It got reduced to a soundbite. After the 80s riots and her re-election, Mrs Thatcher's acceptance speech pledged to do something about "those inner cities". Scarce anything has been done and here we are again, geographically if not for quite the same motivations. As the Scarman Report which came out of an inquiry into the Brixton riots of that time, still has too many of its recommendations ignored; as politicians of any political stripe refuse to face up to our society's deep-rooted problems; as we hide behind outrage and lumping complex factors into buzzwords; as we continue to face up to the fundamental arrangements of our society on ownership and ruinous consumption, then we have no hope in hell of mending anything.

These generations are lost I'm afraid. What we have to do is try and mend things to prevent the next generations going the same way.

Huge Thanks To The Friday Flash Community

2011-07-19T16:23:00.006+01:00

I just wanted to express my thanks to everyone and I mean everyone, I've come into contact with through the #fridayflash community over the last 20 months.

I've met some fantastic folk and read some wonderful fiction. I've shared trepidation over blog redesigns, rejection letters, book launches with several of you via Twitter. I've weighed into debates hosted by several of you, done the odd guest blog post and generally tried to actively participate in our community. But now for me the time has come to an end, as the shortest story form is being usurped in my priorities with long-form novel writing.

I can't remember how I came by #fridayflash. Who alerted me to it, or whether it was a punt I took on a link someone posted somewhere on Twitter.

Up until then my blog was a bit derisory. I had only really posted the odd bit of various novel works in progress, completely shorn of their context and viewed by about 1 person a week. When my novel came out in October 2009, I took a decision that I would concentrate on promoting it and would not commit to any new writing for nine months while I did so. I started making videos on self-publishing trends and writing blog posts.

But somewhere around then I also started writing and posting flash fiction. I'm still not quite sure why. I'd barely ever written short stories let alone flash. My writing style shall we say, veers towards the wordy. I'd also sworn I wouldn't be writing any new prose. Well now I've written about 70 and discovered that I can still interweave even the shortest form of fiction with demanding language. I've even performed some of them live at readings. Recorded them for either audio or video. In that 9 months of promotion, (extended to 18 in reality), through writing flashes I probably wrote more regularly and more volume of words than I ever had. 70 stories around 1000 words each, that 70,000 words then and there!

Nor can I remember my first flash piece as it wasn't posted on my blog but on one of a couple of collective writing sites I was a contributor to. My earliest pieces got one or two comments, but within a month or so that had risen to double figures. You guys seemed to validate what I was trying to do with language, within a form that didn't give you much leeway for playing around with it and that gave me great heart since it had been a criticism often levelled against my longer prose. My blog traffic took huge spikes on Fridays and Saturdays. Some of you were kind enough to honour me with blog awards, which I found a little hard to accept as I still don't see myself as much of a blogger!

I'm lucky, I have 3 Fridays in four where I'm not working. That allowed me to dive into reading as many flashes from you guys as I could. Gradually I got acquainted with people's styles; who tended to write genre and those who might tackle anything, so that one had no notion of what you were about to read from week to week.

My heart gave a little kick each time MazzzinLeeds' outlandishly long gun barrel at the top of her blog hove into view, as I wondered what fiendishly clever story she would offer up this Friday. Or hit the 'play' button for Anthony (Bukowski's Basement)'s mood music to accompany reading his story, looked over by that dissolute photo of ChuckBuck himself. Laura Eno's fantastic series of Chronos, Death, a motley cast of characters and cocktails and peanuts, leaving me hungry each week for the follow up. Of Carrie Clevenger's wonderfully evocative Texas Gothic writing, Kat Del Rio's brutally frank stories of people using people usually for bad, Alison Wells, DJ Young and Penny Goring's sublime lyrical treats one could bask in endlessly and Linda (@drwasy) always signing off her comments with "Peace", while rendering her own often deeply unsettling flashes. The sometimes melancholic, always soaring prose of Rebecca Emin and Rach Carter, the politically passionate stories of Virginia Moffatt and the outrageously clever variety of Jon Wiswell and Tony Noland's work. I followed Michael Solander's trend for progressively shorter and shorter distillation of his powerful pieces. Genevieve Ching's and PJ Kaiser's effortlessly smooth transition between styles and themes. Of Mari and Marissa who I always mixed up in the early days on Twitter! And of course the Daddy of the community, the man who made it all possible, Jon Strother.

After writing 52 stories in 53 weeks, I took a break from flash for shadowing NaNoMoWr with a new novel of my own. But after completing a draft of that, I found I had a lot of new flash ideas bubbling under and so returned this January. Like me now, some of the old names had turned to pastures new. This time round I encountered the wonderful prose of Anne Michaud, the OTT muscular writing of Tommy Salami, the ebullient prose of Jason Coggins, the thoughtful pieces of Phillip Ellis and Pete Domican, the quietly affecting work of Lisamarie Lamb and the dark deeds wrought by Melissa Webb. And many more of you for which I want to express my thanks for letting me read. Another hugely admirable writer Tim Van sant and I have swapped notes on flash anthologies and the likely make up of an introduction.

So this has been a wonderfully warm and enriching experience for me. Apart from the friendships, I now also have an anthology of 52 flashes which I will bring out on Kindle over the next couple of months. I will try and dip in and out of your #fridayflash stories on offer, but I have to dedicate my Fridays to my novel work. If I have one regret bout our community, it is that it is mainly writers speaking to other writers and somehow has to try and burst through to reach 'pure' readers.

Thank you one and all for your generosity, your interest in my work and your welcoming openness in having me as part of your community.

marc xx

Fourteen Bulbs -Friday Flash

2011-07-12T22:57:00.005+01:00

She sat where she had sat countless times before. In the harsh glare of the lights fringing her mirror. Fourteen naked bulbs to show her up in all her rawness. Stark like a Noh mask.

Fourteen interrogatory lamps burning into her face. Garlanding the looking glass, festooned like wedding arch colonnades. Though she’d only ever experienced those as scenery on the theatre stage.

The lights so tightly focused, they barely penetrated the darkness beyond her. Every evening and prior to matinees and premiers, her ghostly, disembodied head floated in the mirror as she caked it in thickly layered cosmetics. The bulbs’ other function, foreshadowing the dazzle out on the stage itself. If they couldn’t efface her features here at close range, then it augured well for her characterful expressions to prevail under the spotlights, tractor beamed in the footlights.

This particular mirror seemed as venerable as she. The glass had flowed, rucked and bubbled, like her own skin corrugated with wrinkles. Tarnished where the silvered paint had chipped or turned green with verdigris. Aping her liver spots and burst blood vessels. She loved the bulbs for blasting such imperfections away under their unforgiving blare. The mirror on her dresser at home was not nearly so forgiving.

It occurred to her that in all the years sat in place, she couldn’t ever remember a single bulb having popped. The divine power of the theatre, palace of illusion.

There was a time when other bulbs popped. Those of the Press cameras. Preview nights, gala performance evenings and end-of-run parties. Fluid, promiscuous alignments of leading men and first ladies, arm in arm with supporting cast members all beaming for the lens. Dissolved at the moment of the striking of the set, as each heads on to their next role. Another theatre, different dressing rooms. The same fourteen bulb guard of honour.

Sadly she had witnessed her own mind’s bulbs pop one by one. It was getting progressively harder to recall her lines. There were no unseen stagehands inside her head to replace the burned out filaments.

Now there was a dearth of good luck telegrams wedged into the mirror frame. While the best wishes cards accompanying bouquets of flowers had also dried up.

Neither wigs, nor curlers sat on her dresser. Simply not required any more. She could not get away with counterfeiting ages other than her true one, unlike in the past. Her skin so dried and cracked. Even the greasepaint could no longer suggest any glossy suppleness. It just seemed to disappear down the fissures in her brow and cheeks as it required ever greater volumes to recongeal her face whole. Far greater preparation time was demanded, when all she wanted to do was lie down on the ottoman and rest her weary eyes.

The cubicle was smaller than she was used to. No other background hubbub of fellow actors full of life and lusts. Exercising their voices along the full range. Practising the entire gamut of human emotion and intrigue beyond the world of the play, centred instead within these tiny rooms.

For she was of such an age now, whereby she only appeared in monologues. Wistful treatises of old women looking back on unfulfilled lives. Playwrights didn’t seem to credit the venerable woman with any ability to pursue relationships still. Seemingly audiences could only feel pity, not desire, at this juncture of her life.

Her hair pulled back by the band, face blanched or greyed out in hue, these were the only effects the directors were after for her these days. Like a ghost. The bereft Trojan women. Now her appearance was as if she had ceased the make-up process at the foundation stage. Her dressing robe and protective serviette towel barely having to be removed for the performance, as she played women confined to dressing gowns, asylum smocks or wrapped in a bed sheet.

She knew it wouldn’t be too much longer that she would be able to stare into that mirror and recognise the face staring back at her. Be it disguised or unadorned by emulsion. Her ministrations complete, she flicked the light switch off. The bulbs did not die immediately. She watched the reflected light in her satellite eyes fade gradually in the mirror. Until only the spectral outline of her death mask remained square in the flat plane of glass.

She was sat where she had sat countless times before, with only the green “Exit” light to illuminate her way.

Basic Geometry - Friday Flash

2011-07-07T23:06:00.003+01:00

Alasdair is playing with his Lego bricks
A grand architect working his dinky fingers
Thinner than the plastic parallelograms he manipulates
He mounts one atop another
Feeling, friction rubbing the bulbous tips
Searching for the hidden holes beneath till they snap home
In timeworn Euclidean geometry
Mortise and tenon, interlocking and binding
The colours are charmingly brightly random
Yellow crests red underscores blue fades into black
All perched on a thin flat base
Manufactured green to suggest the verdant
When where he lives is submersed in grey concrete
He's building upwards now
Modestly ascending for the heavens in small steps
Lips pursed, tongue just extruding with rapt concentration
The master builder with no picture in his head
Virtually pre-lingual he knows words
But cannot yet assemble sentences into the air
He likes the word 'sky', unknowingly fumbling towards its suffix
As he scrapes the plastic bucket of seemingly limitless bricks
Across the floor towards closer reach
The intelligent designer just happened on some more axioms of geometry
The reach of his arm, the length of a cubit
The boxer's tale of the tape
Resolute now, fabricating vertically brick upon brick
One block in width only
A coloured DNA map of his unformed, boundless mind
A Tower of Babel beyond the forfeit of language
He has an innate discomfort of aesthetic asymmetry
When an eight stud block gets binds against studs five and six of its overlooker
He cannot abide the overhang
His jaw set firm as he repairs the lip hanging over the void
Elevating higher, yet higher towards the unfocused notion of heaven
He is amused that it sways
A basic fundamental about foundational and spreading the load
Yet the plastic edifice holds its stability
He ceases his creative hand
Perhaps his pinched fingers ache from the sustained production
He pads backwards on his posterior
To view his erection with perspective
Is he proud? Is he awe-struck?
We cannot yet be sure of his fledgeling emotional range
Now he grasps two longitudinal pieces, twelve spots both
He crosses one over the other and locks them in perpendicularly
His building soars, but now he can fly
He rams the plane into his tower
The high rise collapses beneath the assault
Just like the Jenga game his sister plays
The plane breaks apart at its fulcrum
A lesson in physics, but one beyond his tender ken
He sifts among the rubble
Apparently delighted with something about the outcome
He sets about rebuilding the structure
Assimilating what he has learned about breadth
This time he deliberately courts overhang as he fashions gaps
He has plumped for glassless windows
Holes he has recalled from watching the Jenga unfold
Though his are sightless, giving on only to the interior of his tower
But all in all, this construction is smoother, more practiced
The tower is hoisted up in double quick time
He recasts the plane
Declines to put a tail on it, maybe because he has never been on one
Pincered between his fingers, he flies it in the airspace above the column
He increases the imaginary throttle
And drives it hard into the heart of the tower
The wing-piece is stripped off, but the fuselage stays lodged
In the finally calibrated inbuilt hole
The tower wobbles, but stays standing
Yet the slow fuse of combustion has been lit within him
He skips out the room for some refreshment to slake his thirst
Some geometry, some physics, a love of destruction and a disinterest in aesthetics
Thus is the groundplan of hell laid down in his mind

Wardrobe Malfunction

2011-07-04T16:21:00.004+01:00

I can't remember the last time I had to pay for any clothes other than my smalls.

Nearly 20 years working at a record shop and its skateboarding subsidiary, meant one way and another, lots of freebie clothes.

From the skate side, slightly shop-soiled shorts, skater jeans, hoodies and Ts. Things like where the stitching on a jeans pocket was slightly awry. I got free trainers too, including the odd Nike or Vans limited edition that we were involved in designing. I even got a pair of DVS Ozzy Osbourne slippers complete with stickers (as yet still mint in their packaging - open to offers).

I do dress like the oldest skater in town, despite the fact I have never been on a board in my life.

From the record shop, mainly T-shirts of bands, either given out free as merchandising, or by the indie producers oiling a sale of their wares. Interestingly neither still happen quite so readily; the major record labels have slashed their merchandising giveaways and the indie T-shirt producers have gone out of business. Partly as they were pursued for breaches of copyright and the development of image rights.

My socks were supplemented by my wife working for the Stella Artois tennis tournament that was an annual pre-Wimbledon warm-up. For some reason she was given lots of branded white socks, which she passed on to me despite her loathing of the white sock look.

My father sees fit occasionally to try and bolster my wardrobe with brand clothes that I know he hasn't picked out (this is a man who wears bow ties for goodness sakes). I descry the taste of his femme fatale, so having your father's mistress dress you is particularly perturbing.

My suit was a dead man's hand me down (passed over?), which seeing as I only ever seem to wear it for funerals seems fitting somehow.

My wedding suit, which I can no longer fit in, was bought for me as a not-so-gentle insurance I would be respectably turned out on the day.

I can't remember quite when I bought my Doctor Martens, but it was certainly before they became a fashion brand and the price shot through the roof. However old they are, still intact and wearing well. They may well have been the last item I splashed some cash on, other than a couple of pairs of pyjamas.

But I left my record shop job 2 & 1/2 years ago. The skateboard side had been sold off a couple of years prior to that. My wife also changed jobs and no longer does the tennis. I've had no new freebies for that period. And now my clothes are starting to fall apart. My socks rip at the heel when I pull them on, the toes peep through holes in the worn weft. I have no trousers that aren't fraying at the turnup.

A few months ago my last free pair of Vans developed a hole in the sole. I went tremblingly in to shops to source myself some new trainers (sneakers/pumps as they used to be called before branding). I came out with two pairs and a dent in my credit card.

Now for the first time in 20 years I'm going to have to budget for a clothes spend. Even a couple of pairs of trainers brought me out in a cold sweat. I have no conception of choosing clothes, I've always taken what I was given. I'm going to have to run the gauntlet of low mood lighting, S/M/L/XL coloured cubes on hangars, pumping music and changing rooms.

Guys help!

Killing Time - Friday Flash

2011-06-30T16:44:00.005+01:00

Clockwatching for elevenses. The second hand and I have been fellow travellers along the orbital face for some considerable time already this morning. For all its steady lick, the spindly red needle seems to be taking an age to haul the thicker armature of the minute hand around to the witching hour, tea minus five. A burden that keeps slipping off its back and it has to go all the way round to pick it back up again. Watched kettles never boil and all that.

So on the run-in, I am down to a snail’s pace. The swiftness of a tortoise. Atlases both, with the weight of their own world upon their broad shoulders. The Native American myth - Iroquois is it-? Yes here we are (‘verification needed’) - of the giant turtle that catches the mother-angel inadvertently somersaulting from heaven, who then proceeds to sow the whole world on the creature’s back. Hosannas all round now, for the weird and wonderful parabolas of the Information Superhighway, which saves me from going totally round the bend.

For here’s me stuck in my office, sowing nothing, coaxing naught into life, other than the beady eye of a blinking cursor. Management’s vulturous iris, scanning me for inactivity. Holding my fibre optic nerve, now my mouse tumbles that circling vultures on the thermal gyre are called a kettle. I’ve milked that excuse for leaving my workstation once already this morning. Double creamed by returning to wash my mug at the sink.

Next I unearth the truffle, that the collective noun is a ‘venue’ of vultures. If only I had one such to be at for an appointed time. Whisking me out of here, so that I might further dawdle in meandering my way to the destination. Oh for a bannered headline limned into the diary template. But I am not consequential enough to merit a coloured tag all to myself. Bereft of any meeting for my line manager to sign off on my behalf. For their name to give me body.

However, though unappointed, I do in fact have someplace where I can go alright. But nothing so lofty as to deem it a venue. A bolthole just about captures the nub of it. The only question, is it yet time? The answer is posted up high on the wall above the facsimile machine. It just hasn’t transmitted itself satisfactorily to me as yet. It appears to have prolapsed.

Who’s to say that the wall clock is accurate? My desktop icon insistently begs to differ by a full four minutes. No matter how often I reset the confounded thing, back it jumps to its own silicon mediated timekeeping. Could always page the speaking clock- does that even still exist in this digital age?- but all our calls are monitored, so how incriminating might that look? I would be court-martialled and make no mistake. Padded shoulders lopped off with a letter opener. Probably my boss’s faux-jewel, imitation curved dagger brought back from an ersatz Turkish bazaar, as part of an authentic ‘taste of the Orient’ excursion. Not that I sport padded shoulders of course. I’m not one for power dressing capaciously enough to light up the national grid. Unlike some I could mention around here.

Wouldn’t surprise me if the higher-ups employed someone just to sit and stare at the server, auditing what websites we visit. I bet all our virtual preferences, are laid bare in our actual personnel files. Still, I’ve nothing to hide on that score. News, current events, isn’t that what we represent here anyway? I’m just checking up on the real life movements of some of our stilted inmates. Sorry, exhibits. Shame it forms no part of the remit of the Waxwork Museum's bought ledger team.

Don’t suppose there’s much in the way of clockwatching from any of my team-mates. (From my crossword fiend days on the London Underground, ‘team’ and ‘mate’ are anagrams of one another, but there again so are ‘tame’ and ‘meat’). Too busy adorning their eager-beaver time sheets. Constructing their baroque dams to prevent the walls of commerce from falling in. If any of them are chancing to peek at the internet, it’s probably to scout for bargain holidays in order to use up their allowance. Only as a point of principle mind. An entitlement is an entitlement after all. Something you perceive you’re owed. Certainly it’s not because travel broadens their minds. Ergo cheap, quickly tarnished letter openers. They’ll likely spend their whole time abroad, scavenging for gobbets of gossip on our more significant movers and shakers, bolted down on their plinths beneath us in the galleries. Reading the English papers from abroad to sustain them. Clodhopping carbon footprints just to stand culturally still in place.

I could always just chance it. And what if I’m caught in the act, could I in all conscience defend my corner? For instance, attribute it on the lack of synchronicity within office chronometry (see, not such a tight ship as they like to imagine). Or maybe point the finger at parallax. That, from where I’m sitting, to my eyes it certainly appeared to be eleven. Hmm, the colonnade sharpness of Roman numerals rather than curvy Arabic ones probably rebuffs that ploy. Or even pin it on the irregular spin of the earth on its axis (verification needed). It is only a meantime we proceed from after all.

My gluteus-oh-so-maximus, decompresses the air bag of my bottom back into my seat. Meantime. A time of miserly intent. Time swiped back from the credit card of life. At usurious interest. Hold all my calls. Not that I ever receive any I might honestly welcome. Only wearying demands for someone else’s money, which just happens to pass through my hands. I am dirtied by the lucre and smeared by those soliciting me for it. We were only following purchase orders... Time for a serpentine cleansing. I run my eye over the path of least supervision through the office and mobilise my facial musculature to blazon ‘unabashed’. Then dash it all, if the padding of my chair doesn’t go and clarion a great sough, when released from the burden of cupping my volume. And my mouse goes for a burton too, its cable all snarled around one of the chair’s armatured wheels. The best laid plans of mice and... Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

The clock didn't chime, but my Boss' voice did...

Sink Or Skin? - Friday Flash

2011-06-23T18:22:00.004+01:00

The skin and bone skinflint wasn't too skint to buy some skinflicks and some skunk to skin up, some heroin to skin pop and enough drink for a skinful. Skinny-dipping in a sinful sink-hole.

Persistent sinking of some of his sink-fund currency into the sinkhole of his sunken and shrunken rectitude, his addictions now had him hooked line and sinker, but he was too far sunk to possess a sinking feeling nor sink through the floor.

Four skinheads in their skintight Sta-Pressed and inked skin art, who only ever went skin deep in their prejudices, perennially looking to skin you alive with their oxblood boots and skin peelers. But he was able to duck into a skin bar and escape these snickering skinflaps by the skin of his teeth, leaving him with a skinny lip, skin abrasions and flesh nicks. Some skinny malinky skank was flashing her skinflowers at him and he felt his own skinflute tooting. He felt a rising urge to sink his sausage, but when he went to his skin-hugging pocket, only to find his sunken treasure hoard had sunk without trace.

Sink the Bismarck sunk.

Support Bands

2011-06-22T00:51:00.008+01:00

The bands who have to play warm up. While the audience are filing into the auditorium. Playing their hearts out while people buy their drinks at the bar. Or their overpriced T-shirt with the transfer that'll come off in the first machine wash. Let's salute some I saw in my gig-going days. Some surprising, some superior to the main act, each being dutifully watched by me as I sought to get my place as close to the stage for the main act as possible and defend it to the last...

1) U2 Around the time of their debut LP "Boy" I saw them supporting punkers Stiff Little Fingers. (You could say there's been a seismic shift in the bands' relative fortunes from that day). I quite liked the "Boy" album and the single "11 o Clock Tick Tock" but went off them with all subsequent releases. Even then their fans had extrapolated a religio-spiritual image for the band, for as we were entering the venue, there was a collection for the crew of a lifeboat disaster and as I punk-rockerly stormed past the bucket without contributing, I was regaled with "I hope you don't get caught out at sea with your pants down". Not a very Christian attitude I thought to myself...

2) The Smiths Again early in their career, they were supporting then Rough Trade label mates The Fall. I always thought it likely that Mark E Smith just fancied having a band sharing his soubriquet to further exalt his status. I knew the Smithws were being talked about in reverential tones as the next big thing, but when Morrisey swanned on stage and hit us at the front of the stage with his gladioli and set off my hay fever, he lost any possible patronage on my part. I've never liked The Smiths, even if that made me a social pariah at university, where all the young men in long coats mourning Ian Curtis of Joy Division's death, switched their doomy love to Morrisey and thus were able to avoid a wardrobe readjustment. Atchooo!

3) Sonic Youth They were already established as 80's New York's finest purveyors of art noise and I'd seen them headline a previous UK tour. But in a depressed alternative scene after post-punk faded away into synthesizers and foppish New Romanticism, those pimply brothers from Glasgow The Jesus And Mary Chain had whipped up a storm and were on the front pages of the music press week after week. A fuzzbox applied to classic American surf/bubblegum rock and roll didn't offer a whole hell of a lot that was new under the sun, but the fact that their headline sets lasted no more than 15 minutes and thereby frequently prompted a riot among the audience had conferred instant notoriety on them. But as always happens when you play with fire, the band get worn down by the violence and infamy and had taken a break from playing live. This gig was their first London one after that break and Sonic Youth were scandalously below them on the bill. The Youth played a knee-trembling 20 minute set and left the stage with the feedback squall still shrieking at the end of "Expressway to Yr Skull" for a full three minutes. They blew away the Chain and showed them what a wall of guitar noise really was. Part way into the Chain's opener, I found myself wishing that their set would last its normal 15 minutes. They eked it out to 25 and I felt cheated that the Youth had been forced to cut short theduration of their normal set.

4) Serious Drinking/ Millions Of Dead Cops. The Dead Kennedys, West Coast hardcore punk at its theatrical finest, were touring the UK. Newly signed labelmates Millions of Dead Cops and two UK punk bands made for a strong bill. After a plodding set from The Subhumans, MDC took to the stage. I'd already got familiar with their debut LP, but their set still just blew me away. With songs like "John Wayne Was A Nazi" and "Corporate Deathburger", well you kind of get the picture. Punk rock played at 100mph, with no let up or pause for breath. It was intense. Serious Drinking then took to the stage. A comedy punky-SKA with songs like "Love On the Terraces" and "Bobby Moore was Innocent" they were the ideal kick back antidote to MDC. Perfect for serving up the live phenomenon that were the Dead Kennedys. A truly top night's beer-and spittle-soaked entertainment. Hey don't knock it until you've tried it!

5) World Domination Enterprises/ Loop. These two groups had an honourable deal whereby they took turns to headline, with the other going on first. I was never much of a Loop fan, but they were far more popular than the ghetto World Dom. The version I saw was with Loop as the headliners, but they couldn't compete with the dub-heavy reverberations of World Dom, a three piece who made one hell of a quaking racket. The band sort of expired when their drummer became a Jehovah's Witness. Pity.

6) Swans Again The Fall had afforded a soon to be vital band an early outing as their support act. I just remember spending their entire set with my finers in my ears pressed up against the speakers because they were so loud. But when John Peel played "Clay Man" on the radio, my whole body started twitching involuntarily to the rhythm as its muscle memory kicked and and overpowered me. That's how powerful their short set had been. I was a convert and I hadn't even realised it.

7) Birthday Party. Bit of a cheat this one as they were a double headline with The Fall. The two most important underground bands of 1984 or whenever it was. The Hammersmith Palais toilets were full of people shooting up. The auditorium full of Mark E Smith clones complaining at all the Nick Cave look-alikes, and Nick Cave clones complaining about the Mark E Smith wannabees. Was I possibly the only person in there to see both bands? When the Birthday Party finished the opening set, those around me at the lip of the stage all ceded their berths to be replaced by Fall fans, I've never experienced that before. They were both great by the way.

8) A.C.Temple. Remember them? I barely do and that's despite the fact they seemed to crop up on virtually every bill I turned up to. Never making it past the first act. They weren't realy that good. I never bought any of their records (unlike say Swans or World Dom, bought on the strength of seeing them live and not knowing who they were). I salute their dogged tenacity. There were other bands always turning up on bills, like The Moodists (named by ace comic Stewart Lee as one of his favourite bands) and an early incarnation of The Shamen before they turned poppy sloppy with "E's Are Good". They were terrible as a plod rock band.

So there you have it. 7 support bands of decidedly varying calibre. Let's hear it for the warm up guys!

Class War on The Number 19 Bus

2011-06-20T18:43:00.003+01:00

I hate Monday lunchtimes.

I do the family shopping on my day off on Fridays, so that when Monday rolls around, we've run out of bread devoured over the weekend. Thus I can't make my sandwiches for lunch as I do for the rest of the working week.

So on Mondays I have to use my lunch hour to bus it over to Islington and buy a lunch.

Islington for those who don't know it, is a very mixed inner-city borough of London. Tony Blair bought a house there before moving into the Prime Minister's residence at Number 10 Downing Street. There are plenty of grand houses, but also lots of social housing and high-rise estates.

Yesterday I got on the bus and had to squeeze my way past 3 push-chairs which were the size of 2CVs. I've brought up twins, with both a double buggy and when that broke, two singles. The buggy (ies) were always folded up every time we mounted the bus, no matter how involved that became trying to ensure two kids were safely on board. So I do get a tad irritated when I see push-chairs that either haven't been, or simply can't be folded up. Irritation I keep to myself. There seemed to be about 5 mothers on the bus with their kids, evidently middle-class to hear them talk. I assumed a play group had just finished for the morning.

As we crawled towards another bus stop, I was transfixed by a woman waiting there. She removed her lit cigarette and bent down to stub it out on the pavement, presumably so as to relight it later. She did it so protractedly I thought she was going to miss the bus. Something about her laborious manner struck me as slightly compulsive behaviour and I fancied that she was an addict of some sort. Maybe she was simply addicted to cigarettes, rather than anything harder. She wore a set of pearls, though of what quality I couldn't tell, but she didn't give the impression of being ravaged by a destructive habit. It was just that curious desperation to preserve the cigarette that set my spidey senses tingling.

I turned my gaze elsewhere when she got on the bus, since I missed what must have happened next. She must have asked the mothers to move the buggies which were blocking two empty seats, so that she could sit down. For when my gaze returned, she was involved in a 'discussion' with two of the mothers. The usual 'you don't have children you don't understand' type of thing was trotted out by way of justification, when there was no way they could have known whether she'd ever been a mother or not. 'Do you expect us to walk the 5 miles to the child minder?' was a verbatim line I heard offered up as argument.

Suddenly one of the mother's male partners launched into her space and gesticulated wildly at her, raising his voice. She replied in turn, though she made no motions with her hands back at him. He called her a disgrace, challenged her to call the police if she felt threatened. When he returned to his berth, she carried on with the two mothers within her range. He sprang up again as she darted off at the next bus stop which happened also to be my own.

So there you have it. No one emerges from this set-to with any credit really. Middle class mums who did blockade the seats on a bus however unwittingly. A man who used his physical presence to bully and intimidate, albeit in the defence of his partner whom he saw as being challenged. And the cigarette woman who I just intuited before she got on the bus, was full of bristling contrariness. I don't know how she asked the buggies to be removed, of if she moved them herself. In themselves, neither would have been that provocative a gesture. But presumably once sat down, she made a throwaway comment that prompted a rebuttal from one of the mums. But that it blew up, that she was at the centre of a confrontation, really didn't strike me as surprising, due to one casual detail I noticed about her.

She could have bitten her tongue like I did. Equally she is entitled to air her opinion, but then you have to ask yourself what outcome you expect by doing so.

I just found the whole thing predictable and dispiriting. It right put me off my lunch.

I have to organise my Sundays to somehow get some fresh bread in.

10 Things I've Never Owned

2011-06-16T20:07:00.014+01:00

I'm not talking about having never owned a yacht or a pet eagle, more the everyday household items that make life a little more convenient or pleasurable. Even here I'm not talking about the ubiquitous posters of the female tennis player scratching her posterior (or its dialectical opposite, comrade Che & Charlie poster boys). Rather things that most households possess.

By never, I really mean that at no point in my life have I owned one, even though for limited periods I might have access to somebody else's. I am writing this looking back from middlish age...

1) An umbrella. Even living in rainy England, I have never owned one. Even before the commonplace of hoodies or baseball caps to keep your hair dry, I shirked the spidery strutted wind trap. Didn't like gumming up my hands having to hold things (never having been driver {though I have owned a car, so it's not in the list}, I didn't have the option of popping it in the boot or on the back seat). My wife has the asset of a voluminous handbag for fold up brollies, but even then she is always leaving them somewhere. They just aren't natural.

2) A tumble dryer. My wife and I have gone through countless laundry racks because water is a corrosive par excellence. It rots the wooden ones and rusts the metal ones, with the inevitable result that the racks collapse. Our home is too small to house a tumble dryer. It's things like this, my inability to drive, my one phobia of flying, that somewhat fortuitously means I have a relatively small carbon footprint.

3) A bicycle. I just never learned to ride. As a boy I was always in my or some friend's garden playing football in the winter and cricket in the summer, so never went pedalling around the neighbourhood. They tried to teach me at college, where student cars were banned, but my balance and reversion to primal simian fear of falling conspired to render me unteachable. No skateboards nor scooters either and this was despite me working for a skateboard company for 15 years!

4) A camcorder. Even my phone doesn't have video. Currently I don't own a camera either. Just not someone who likes to leaf back through photo albums or sit and watch home movies. Maybe I'm just weird like that. Mind you I don't like my photo being taken either. Like certain tribes I gauge the camera to steal my soul. Or something...

5) Games console. While I used to like arcade asteroids and space invaders, I cannot stand modern day video consoles. My sons are of course obsessed with them, making up for lost time as my wife and I held out against pester power for some considerable time. I loathe the compulsive nature of them; the physical passivity (WeeFit notwithstanding), the febrile involvement with shoot 'em up games. And each time a new game comes online and my son tells me to look and marvel at the amazing graphics, I do indeed look and see the emperor's new clothes. The graphics are still cartoonish rather than 'realistic'.

6) Newspapers. It might be moot to say that one owns or doesn't own something as disposable as a daily newspaper. But in all my life I have never been a reader, preferring to come by my news information by marginally less biased sources. Strange that I married into a family of journalists and for the last two years have been working in a news organisation that still thinks as much in terms of print journalism as online. Funny old world.

7) A set of weighing scales. I don't deal drugs, nor do I concern myself with a numerical marker of my own mass. I can gauge reasonably well when my bones and muscles feel discomfited with the burden they are being asked to carry around, or that I don't have a sufficient reserve of puff. I don't bake, consequently I don't have to weigh out flour. One of my twin boys however does make fine cakes and keeps asking me to invest in a set of scales.

8) CD player. Bit of an odd one this in that I always seem to be behind the trends in music delivery systems despite being a huge music fan. I used to buy records and tape them straightaway to play them on a cassette player. I was slowly building a top of the line hi-fi, but never brought it to fruition before having to sell the units to raise money and so rarely had the opportunity to play my records. When CDs came along I shunned them and continued my record-cassette nexus. Yes I loved the crackle of the grooves that were removed by digital CDs, but it wasn't just this since I don't have such a refined ear to appreciate the depth of difference. By the time I got with the programme, I just recorded CDs on to my I-tunes on my mac. Still do. Like my unplayable records, I am now building up a sizable collection of CDs I can't play since my mac eats all discs. Sigh...

9) Contact lens. despite being short sighted I am very squeamish about eyes, even looking at them for any time (that scene in "Un Chien Andalou" is a nightmare for me!), so that the thought of my fingers coming into contact with them, even with the membrane of the lens interceding is something I just cannot contemplate.

10) A Stephen King book. Or even borrowed...

5 Things I wished I still owned

1) My childhood cat. 6 months before I was born, my parents brought home a black moggy. I grew up with him, every night sleeping at the foot of my bed once I'd graduated from a cot. He lived to the ripe old age of 23. Unfortunately my wife is catphobic, so no chance of forging such a relationship with a moggy again.

2) Misty In Roots "Live At The Counter Eurovision" LP. An ex-flatmate of mine walked off with this album of mine when the flat broke up. Quite possibly the best reggae LP ever made. Don't think it ever made it on to CD.

3) Sony Betamax video recorder. Proof that I am a complete technofool, I grew up in a home that had opted for the betamax over the VHS. While not inherently foolish in and of itself, when my parents decide to yield to the inevitable and move over to VHS, I offered them £14o for the betamax, even though I didn't have anywhere of my own to live and consequently no TV to plug it into. I never got to use it and of course the brand succumbed to commercial oblivion not long after I made this useless purchase. File with my hi-fi that never left the launchpad either... I think I still have some betamax format videos somewhere.

4) A pierced ear. I got my ear pierced shortly before going up to perform at the 1985 Edinburgh Fringe. I went to work with it. I got married with it, over my wife's objections. I commissioned a jeweller to make me a specific design for a drop earring. I went back on the Tube hours later to an outside 5-a-side pitch when I realised it had fallen out while playing and I found it! Just after I started my current job my sleeper fell out and so inured to the sight of it I didn't even notice it was missing. By the time I managed to get round to buying a new one, I couldn't get it in. Despite having had the hole for 25 years. My wife is delighted.

5) An airmail envelope. Not just any envelope of course, but one in particular that I sent to a rock and roll hero of mine. Michael Gira lead singer of Swans, possibly the loudest band in the world during the mid-1980s. Gira also wrote visceral prose and I saw that he had a book out in the States through a small press and - this is the 1980s remember - I sent him a $20 I went to my bank specially to exchange. It was more than sufficient to pay for the book and I imagined plenty left over to cover P&P. I penned a short note , "I know I shouldn't send cash through the mail, but this is impossible to come by in the UK". Nothing until 6 months later my envelope is returned with to my relief, the $20 bill inside. I assumed it had simply been returned to sender as addressee had moved away. But as I was about to throw the envelope away, I twigged that my cover letter wasn't there. I scanned the red white and blue border piping on the envelope and found typed above the bottom horizontal "If you shouldn't, don't'. I wonder what became of that envelope. I never got hold of his book of stories.

Quickie Divorce (real time) - Friday Flash

2011-06-15T23:12:00.008+01:00

portmanteau	tote
combination	drawstrings
ingress	exhalation
plush	riband
foam	crepe
recesses	crinkle
moulded	atomiser
lubricant	billow
muzzle	luscious
assemblage	salve
smooth	stilettos
black	weal
steel	pumice
tapered	tallow
grooved	aromatherapy
symbiosis	cordial
indurate	ottoman
buttressed	recumbent
heft	bliss
ratchet	operatic
crosshairs	maestro
bloodless	ardour
torque	crescendo
declutch	conducting
reverberation	timpani
recoil	exultation
rupture	soaring
pithed	bodiless
perforated	suds
punctured	immersion
spatter	smirch
encore	encore
flawless	purged
dismantle	uncluttered
reconceal	divested
dematerialise	triumphant
quietus	release
contract	decree
nisi	absolute

Book Covers

2011-06-11T15:24:00.005+01:00

This wasn't the post I intended to write.

Originally I wanted to post my top 10 album covers and extol the art. But I couldn't come up with 10. I stopped buying LPs what ten, twelve years ago? CD covers being much smaller didn't quite cut it and now downloads don't even require covers if you don't opt for the thumbnail.

I'm just in the process of commissioning two different book covers and some modern-day majuscule calligraphy. The majuscules won't be able to be replicated online in any useful way, so that's destined for a print only project. The other two are book covers for kindle books I aim to have out soon.

But do I need covers for kindle editions, other than a thumbnail for online browsing? When you download, you get a poorly contrasted black and white washed out version of your original coloured design, which does no favours to any conception you might have had. There is of course no need for spine or back cover artwork either. Of course one could go to other e-service providers and maybe retain the integrity of the cover design. But what would be the point?

In the same way, perhaps more so, that I couldn't come up with 10 album covers, classical book covers also turn out to be less than precious. Kafka, Burroughs, Camus, anyone you care to mention are forever being reissued in new editions with different covers each time. My Penguin Classic Camus, all have covers bearing artwork not commissioned for the book, paintings by Magritte, Picasso and Masson merely offering some tangential relationship to the title. All my Salinger paperbacks were in an edition from 30 years ago, where the covers were just plain silver-grey, unadorned by anything but title and author name. My "Catcher In The Rye" recently fell apart from old age, so I replaced it and the cover is now some red and white combo, with a black strip for the calligraphy. It really doesn't matter a jot.

Book covers may once have mattered when browsing in a bookshop, but now? Kindle certainly places no value on them. And yet I would be loath to stop working with book designers and graphic artists and give them my commissions, because to me the cover is part of the book qua artefact. I love what the designers bring to the table. Exactly what is being eroded by the trend towards e-versions. Maybe one day my modern-day majuscules can be read on an e-reader. But until then, I will continue to strive to place part of the book's conception and creativity upon its cover(s).

Just for the record, here is my facvourite album cover of all time. But it would have made for a dull article as a chart of one.

The Cure - "Three Imaginary Boys"

Reading Between The Lines - FridayFlash

2011-06-09T18:17:00.003+01:00

Your deportment plumb-line straight I note

Every detail of you traced in my mind like a line drawing

How the lines of experience crisscross your face like a delta of dried up tributaries

Your aquiline lineaments pressed, recessed and shrouded into geological strata

Parallel lines, fault lines

Hard lines on a hard life

Contour lines countenancing

A fish caught on a longline with abated breath.

Once set early in your timeline

A ton of lines given to the pipsqueak, seeking to press all rebelliousness from you like a juice reamer, until the pips squeak

Lined up outside the headmaster's office to await further correction

His three-line whip cubed as cat o'nine tails

Laying it on the line, thick with a trowel

Trying to make you toe the line

To tread the line of least resistance

A life lived by tramlines

Guidelines on a leash

The pre-written storyline awaiting your signature on the dotted line

You learned pretty fast to draw your own line in the sand, one which saline tears could not efface

Your base camp baseline

Your shored up shoreline

A line which no one could cross

Without battle lines being drawn up

Alignments, geometric and confederate

Lines of attack, lines of asymmetry

Front line salients and invulnerabilities

You hole them plumb beneath the plimsoll line with your low blows and rabbit punches

Blindsided sightlines, they wanted to believe in you

Clotted lines of command, they were desperate to follow you

Everywhere lies behind enemy lines

To all bar you, piercing clarity as to your throughline

Crystalline clear conscience

Borderline psychotic

Preternatural cunning, ley line intuitiveness

The lines you fed your allies

The consummate actor who knows his lines like the back of his hand

And the life lines on the palms to boot

Friends bought your command performance hook, line and sinker

Until you would extend them no further lines of credit

And their lifelines ran out

Over-extended supply lines

As you cut the line on them

You lined them up for execution

They withered and perished in the line of 'friendly' fire

Still crediting themselves acting in the line of duty

Corpses and carrion picked clean all along the line

Flatlined them flat broke

As you lined your pockets with dead men's silver, your neck ringed with their gold teeth

For you the bottom line is all

Somewhere along the breadline the penny dropped for these paupers

And they drew a line under their misery

Disinclining ever to become ensnared in your traplines again.

Down the abandoned line

The decline set in

As your waistline spread

Your sleek aerodynamic lines

No longer streamlined by toned sinew

As your self-discipline dissipated

Once your rush of adrenaline could no longer be maintained

Unable to bear the loadline of your thrill seeking

Putting your life on the line time after time

Nor through the lines of cocaine you snorted

The amphetamines you mainlined

Pipelined direct to your hardened heart

The sclerotic arterial lines

The body's looming deadline

Life's killer punchline

But just so we don't have our lines crossed, there can be no misunderstanding

You bust my bloodline as unforgivingly as my noose bursts the blood vessels in your face

My aborted lineage terminated by you

Ushered prematurely across the finish line into death

Now it is you I have dangling at the end of my line

Hoist on a gantline

Plunging neckline put in, rather than on the line

Gasping, hissing down your hotline to the devil

Your new line manager for eternity

He stands second in line behind me, for the defilements I will wreak

On-line with my camcorder streaming your pain to the world

Maybe a headline in tomorrow’s newspapers

Before your very permanent deadline

*

618 words, 86 lines, 85 'lines' (1 phonetic)

30 Days Music Challenge

2011-05-31T17:06:00.008+01:00

With thanks to my friend and literary fencing partner Dan Holloway, here is my 30 day music challenge to give you a little insight into me and my likes and dislikes. Each song has a link to a YouTube video.

Day 1 Favourite song - "I Wanna Be Adored" - Stone Roses. Undoubtedly a great song, managing to suggest both rampant egoism and yet a tentative self-doubt in his voice. I'll probably have a new favourite song next week. Pop's fickle like that.

Day 2 Least favourite song - "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Paul Jones or "She's Lost Control" by Grace Jones. Such abominations of the original Joy Division meisterwerks that I can't bring myself to link to them.

Day 3 Song that makes you happy - "Come Down Easy - Spacemen 3. I've never taken recreational drugs and have little tolerance for those who do. However, Spacemen 3 made some of the most sublime stoner music ever and this track so joyously surrenders itself to ecstatic bliss that I am suffused in it too. Maybe this should be a guilty pleasure song (see day 13)?

Day 4 Song that makes you sad - "Love In Vain" - The Ruts Lead singer Malcolm Owen pledges his determination never to return to the heroin needle in a voice that drips emotion. He died of a heroin overdose

Day 5 Song that reminds you of someone - Toss up between "Kerosene" by Big Black and "Cry Me A River" by Julie London, somewhat divergent styles of music I'm sure you'll agree. Both remind me of my first girlfriend who turned me on to both artists. She had pretty eclectic tastes and I will always honour her for that. Oh yes and for being the first of course...

Day 6 Song that reminds you of somewhere - "Fire Spirit" - Gun Club. I'd gone to see these guys on the recommendation of The Fall's Mark E Smith via John Peel's radio show. I'd never heard any of their songs and turned up at the venue to find it was a sit down place with waitress service, but boy did they blow the stage away that night. I'll always remember that venue though, sadly no longer with us, but hopefully to be immortalised in my WIP...

Day 7 Song that reminds you of an event - "Decades" - Joy Division. My second ever play was performed at the Edinburgh Festival and was about a Joy Division fan still trapped in denial 5 years after his hero has committed suicide {not autobiographical in the least there ;-)} This song was the inspiration behind the play. "Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders". The play was about urban alienation and we were performing in a bus depot so periodically through the play there would be tannoy announcements about buses pulling out. Very apt.

Day 8 Song you know all the words to - "Bankrobber" - The Clash, but then there aren't all that many words in it! I do love singing along to it though much to my sons' chagrin. "My daddy was a bankrobber" - at such moments they probably wish I was and accordingly languishing behind bars...

Day 9 Song you can dance to - "Nothing Can Go Wrong" - South Central. I've never been big on dance music or rave, but this is quite catchy and besides I'm sure you're all bored with me posting 23 Skidoo's "IY" on every other music blog post I do...

Day 10 Song that helps you fall to sleep - I don't believe I possess any music that puts me to sleep. Music is supposed to reach out through the speakers, grab the top of your spine and make you want to MOOOOVE. I would imagine any Prog Rock group like Yes or Ozric Tentacles to put me to sleep, but I've never tried them. An oversight on my part perhaps, since I am actually an insomniac. Wonder if I can get hold of their CDs on an NHS prescription?

Day 11 Song from your favourite band - "Kalte Sterne" by Einsturzende Neubauten. God I loved this band. German is THE language for pop music.

Day 12 Song from a band you hate - Anything by Oasis. I'm not posting a link, I believe you can find some of their stuff on the internet somewhere... Why do I hate them? This isn't a Blur V Oasis thing, cos I was never a fan of Blur either. Actually it sort of is in an inverse way. Blur were seen as the London cool and Oasis the Northern lads' band (hence the rivalry), but even though I'm a Londoner, I acknowledge that Manchester has been the rock and roll capital of the UK for the last 35 years, yet Oasis a band from Manchester always wanted to sound like The Beatles, a band from Liverpool and that pop pickers, is tantamount to TREASON. Manchester and Liverpool hate each other more than either hates London. I think it had something to do with Liverpool charging Manchester rent to ship Manchester's manufactured textiles out to the world. Petty. Bit like my dislike of Oasis really...

Day 13 Song that is a guilty pleasure - "Jump Around" - House Of Pain, a really dumb song, from a band with a really crass Plastic Paddyness, yet that groove just gets me. Soz.

Day 14 Song that no one would expect you to love - "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" - St Etienne. I dunno, I normally like a bit of edge to my music, but Sarah Cracknell's voice on this wins me over. Mind you she's got more edge than Neil Young's reedy original.

Day 15 Song that describes you - "You've Got My Number, Why Don't You Use It" - The Undertones. Hey I'm a struggling writer, what more can I say?

Day 16 Song that you used to love but now hate - "The Knife" - Genesis. Peter Gabriel Genesis, Pink Floyd, Led Zep, I used to be into them during my formative musical years, but when punk came along I just couldn't listen to them any more because they just sounded SO SLOOOWWW. I mean this song even has a flautist on stage, what was I thinking? Seriously, I'm impressed there is actual footage of this up on YouTube. I wanted a decent live version of Pink Floyd's "Dogs" but there didn't seem to be one.

Day 17 Song that you hear often on the radio - "Can't Live Without My Radio" - World Domination Enterprises. Bit of a cheat this one as since DJ John Peel died, I don't listen to the radio for my tunes. World Dom do a marvellously OTT version of "Funkytown". Check it out.

Day 18 Song that you wish you heard on the radio - "Politicians And Paedophiles" - The Bug. The clue is in the title really, and you won't hear many more angry songs than this. Having said that, I bet there's some pirate radio station broadcasting out of a garret in a South London crack house that is playing this on the airwaves.

Day 19 Song from your favourite album - "Ghetto Of The City" - Misty In Roots. I don't really have a favourite album, but Misty In Roots "Live At The Counter Eurovision" is about as perfect an album as you can get with not one duff track on it. Thing is I no longer own it as some ex-housemate waltzed off with my vinyl copy many moons ago. Not that I would have a record player to play it on anyway.

Day 20 Song you listen to when you're angry - "To Hell With Poverty" - Gang Of Four

Day 21 Song you listen to when you're happy - "Groovy Situation" - Keith Rowe. Oh man that voice, that voice!

Day 22 Song you listen to when you're sad - "Let There Be Light" - Nas. Ugh, crushing.

Day 23 Song you want to play at your wedding - "Don't Touch Me There" - The Tubes. Hey I've had my wedding, so what's the problem? There was an outside chance, a real long shot, that The Beastie Boys could have been induced to play at my wedding as they were playing a set in Rough Trade Record Shop where I was working. But the inlaws nixed the idea... No Klezmer band either.

Day 24 Song you want played at your funeral - "Paper Planes" - MIA seems a fitting send off... "If you catch me at the border, I got visas in my name". Let's hope so eh St Peter?

Day 25 Song that makes you laugh - "Art Bitch" - CSS Being funny in a second language, nuff respec'. Check out those lyrics in the box below the vid.

Day 26 Song you can play on an instrument - "Gdansk" - Test Department. I like doing guerilla art stunts. It started at college when we played a midnight concert on the croquet lawn outside the halls of residence, running the amp cables into the basement. I couldn't and can't actually play any instruments, so I hit a beer keg with a sledgehammer in tribute to Test Dept. The problem was the rest of the band were playing "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus. Still it was all good fun until someone threatened to report us. Swot. I went on to hit an oil drum with the same sledgehammer in a play wot I wrote for the 1985 Edinburgh Festival, where we met some striking Kent miners who were performing a play about mining and de-industrialisation which Test Dept had backed. Funny that this vid has a cello piece so prominent, since I was supposed to learn the instrument at school, but I handed mine back in two pieces and the music department didn't ask me back again next term.

Day 27 Song you wish you could play - "Nice'N' Sleazy" - The Stranglers. I was always dreaming of being the bassist in a band, but couldn't even master 4 strings. There are so many low down and dirty bass riffs, but JJ.Burnel was maybe the king of them all. Did you know The Stranglers were reputed to have 3 men who were all draft dodgers in their respective countries?

Day 28 Song that makes you feel guilty - "Bombastic" - Shaggy. One isn't supposed to approve of Shaggy, or the sentiments on this song, but again, you find the right sound and I roll over and let you tickle my tummy.

Day 29 Song from your childhood - "Rhubarb And Custard" Theme Tune. Can't remember watching the show particularly, but the theme was simply awesome. Of course a bloody Rave DJ got hold of it and remixed it and it was horrible... Though I did like the version of the Rainbow theme tune by Crazed Mr Bungle.

Day 30 Your favourite song this time last year - "It Doesn't Make It Alright" - The Specials. I rediscovered the Specials last year and the plaint in Terry Hall's voice here makes me want to cry and rage all at the same time.

Bittersweet - Fridayflash

2011-05-26T22:20:00.010+01:00

The soft-centred moo has just presented me with some chocolates. Well I 'spose you can't give a fellah flowers now can you? And she bought me a drill last Christmas, but that was a thinly veiled hint. I mean, I don't buy her darning thread and needles do I? Besides, if my heart has hardened, she's the sclerotic

"What have I done to deserve these?"

These in particular? A whole confection of sins for which I seek your absolution

"Mmm, these are good. I do love a good fondant"

Fond rather than fondant. Or fondle even. Melt me please. Melt my soft centre once again

"Umm, I love the way the two tastes and textures constantly swirl around the old tastebuds"

Like we used to do round one another

"No, don't tell me, let me work it out"

So you're prepared to work that out, but not the mystery ingredients in our marriage? You'll never guess it in a thousand years. Stake your life on it

"Okay, definitely something nutty there. Slightly bitter, would I be right in saying almonds?"

My almond eyes were one of the things you fell deeply in love with. You used to say you could stare into them forever, but I've twigged you were looking at the homunculus reflection of yourself

"And what's that subtle sweet undertaste? Vying hard not to be overwhelmed by the bitterness"

Not the taste of my skin that's for sure

"It's on the tip of my tongue. Peaches? Could that be it?"

My peachy complexion. Only darkening at cheeks, chin and nipples at your touch. When we made love

"Thanks love. These are divine. Are they Belgian?"

Yeah, I'm Lady Godiva and I am undressed for you

"Where did you buy them?"

The naive, the innocent, the unwary buy lies, but these choccies have taken in something equally toxic

"Another box of chocolates? I'll be piling on the calories!"

Your body has fully held its shape from our courtship days. Mine however, having produced our own soft centres with hard heads, has lost its chewy elasticity. I have become your vanilla wife. You have become saturated with me, yet I have not nearly had my fill of you

"No, thanks. I didn't mean to sound ungrateful. Just, what's the occasion?"

Whatever you select it to be. Three months since you last made me a cup of tea, having boiled the kettle for your own coffee. Nine months since you put the children to bed or read them a story. Fifteen months since you last filled my hollow centre with your nozzle. I've got as many anniversaries as it's going to take boxes of chocolates to make you come round to appreciating

"Are they the same as the last lot? They were so very moreish"

More, more, always wanting more. Whore, whore, whore, always wanting whore

"Yummy, thanks. Gotta be careful, last time I must have really pigged out cos I found some melted chocolate fused with my sock. Ruined it was, had to chuck the pair away"

Life's truffle hunter that you are, that would have been down to me. Need to be more careful with the darning needles then. After I've finished injecting my homemade fondant fancy inside, I have to ensure I've removed every last trace

"Wow, these have got a real bitter kick on them? Did you change the recipe?"

Last time you retired to bed and I watched you in your sleep. In the twilight, your skin had a pink tinge to it, like a salmon. But that was the extent of it. I realised you needed a bigger dose. I had originally considered using arsenic. I know it accretes in the hair and fingernails. It must also be excreted through the body's fluids. I did wonder if we chanced make love again, whether you would be reinjecting the arsenic back into me. So we could succumb together. A fanciful notion of course, since you'd never unpack that flesh drill of yours and bore deep into me. So I plumped for potassium cyanide. Did you know butterfly collectors use it to kill their prey in such a way so as to preserve their beauty? So the needle pinning them to the cork doesn't despoil them

"Ooh, I feel a bit light headed. Suddenly my breathing seems very... rapid?

Yes, my research reported that to be a symptom. But it's actually only the perception of your breath quickening. See the delight with this venom, is that it embodies a certain piquancy

"I'm chilled to the bone. I can't feel-"

The cold-blooded reptile. Again a mere sensation, but an apt one. Dentists are always saying too much chocolate is bad for your teeth. That's why they have to drill and fill. Just desserts.

Caritas - friday flash

2011-05-26T22:08:00.003+01:00

It was for charity. A good cause. The best.

The award winning author had donated his renown to raise money and I had snaffled up the chance to be immortalised by him in print. Cost me a pretty penny, but everyone, including the charity was a winner right?

Though it had all been pretty tense in the auction. I tried to keep my powder dry, but my excitement had got the better of me and I'd declared my hand early. Turned into who could piss highest up the wall contest. All in the name of literature. And charity of course.

After the auction I met the great man himself. He was inordinately charming and witty as you'd expect, but I was a tad disappointed that he didn't seem to be taking me in head to foot with those intelligent dancing eyes of his. Sizing me up, getting a sense of my physical being for my character. But hey, he was the creative genius not me. I was just giving, lending him my name. He would do what he would with it.

But it was established that I would appear in a sex scene in his new novel. Nothing wrong with that at all. Way better than being a nameless stiff bumped off by a serial killer. A quick, disposable death does nothing for one's chances of immortality. Besides, we're talking about a man of letters here. He didn't write tawdry thrillers. He was an artist.

Then the great waiting period ensued. While the man composed his opus. I was dying to know how he was getting on, but I would have to wait for publication day like everyone else. No sneak previews. No proof copies. Idly I checked my e-mail daily, just to see if he'd contacted me wanting to raise a question of detail with me. But of course he never did. He was a professional and any plot or character lacuna, could be magicked away just through the prodigious power of his imagination.

Yet during the interminable hiatus my own imagination set to work. Of course I tried to picture all sorts of sexy scenarios the fictional me might be indulging in. But that threw up the occasional anxiety. What if it the sexual act was unutterably perverse? What would my work colleagues think? What would my mother think? I would be in for some merciless teasing. By my work mates that is, not my mother, she would just be appalled. Yet it was likely to be entirely manageable, after all it was just fiction and I would still be a character in an award winning writer's work and they wouldn't.

Worse perhaps would be if my character suffered from performance anxiety on the printed page. That would entail a more unflagging ribbing and might be harder to salvage any prestige. But the illustrious writer wouldn't do that to me surely? I had given the money to a good cause, a cause we both shared in and one neither of us would want to sully. There could be no doubting of anyone's motives.

My life and my reputation in his hands. I had ceded them so recklessly.

So my unbounded imagination continued to run wild. What if he was struggling with the pressure of his deadline? I was a contractual obligation, or a moral one anyway. Yet what if this book too was a contractual obligation with a publisher he was desperate to escape from? That he would just deliver up the most cursory of novels, then fly the coop and disown it as his parting shot? Consigning me to obscurity and a treatment within his pages that was little superior to a tabloid newspaper's salacious kiss and tell. The ones when you examined them, actually said nothing at all and only insinuated lewd acts because they were careful to avoid being sued for libel. I had to pull myself together. I had to banish all the nightmarish scenarios and trust to his professionalism.

Time to reassert the glorying in the scenarios I might actually be playing a part in. The sexy scenarios. I wondered about my female partner. Not to put too fine a point on it, I fantasised about her. Then I worried about the practicalities of doing just that. Here were my fantasies, only they were being conjured by somebody else's imagination. That made them more akin to his turn ons not mine. His fantasies involving me. I felt dirty. I tried to reason that there was nothing but dispassionate exercising of craft involved on his part.

Then I became troubled by the notion of paying for the privilege and pleasure of such fantasising. How close was that to an unorthodox (to say the least) form of prostitution? Without even a real flesh and blood body for my pains. Had I just paid a Charity to commission some personal pornography for me? I was beginning to regret the whole endeavour however nobly intended.

But then the day arrived. Notification of the publication date on the publisher's website. All my original enthusiasms were rekindled at a stroke. I scrutinised the thumbnail of the book's cover for a clue, but of course there was no reason to expect that it gave any indication as to my depiction within the pages (page? maybe I would be only granted a single paragraph). Expectation built.

At least the critical noises coming out about the book dispelled my crazy notions of contract filler and the like. The writing appeared up to his usual splendiferous standards.

Except in one respect. The annual Bad Sex in Literature awards had nominated the book for its lone sex scene. I couldn't understand it. I went out and bought his previous novel. Read it cover to cover. It was true. As good a writer as he was of the human condition, he couldn't write about sex for shit.

He could survive it by being a great artist. Me, I'm a laughing stock.

All in a good cause.

Etymology from www.dictionary.com

Origin:
1125–75; Middle English charite < Old French < Latin cāritāt- (stem of cāritās ),

equivalent to cār ( us ) dear (akin to caress,cherish, Kama, whore) + -itāt- -ity

30 day Book Challenge Part 2

2011-05-21T21:17:00.006+01:00

With continued props to Becky (@stupidgirl45 on Twitter) who supplied me this idea - you can read her version here

Day 15: First "chapter"book you can remember reading as a child. Not sure of this was the first, since they probably gave us something to read at school which I now can't remember for the life of me, but I was the lucky recipient of a bit of a family heirloom. My father's original hardback editions of Richmal Crompton's "Just William" books, the editions dating back to the 1930s. They were a delight and I handed them on to my cousin, now a famous kids' author in his own right. He gave them back to me a few years ago for my own son to glory in and he reads them over and over, which suggests they haven't dated. "Horrid Henry" eat your heart out.

Day 16: Longest book ever read. Bolano's "2666" and having read it I ask myself why. Definitely a case of Emperor's New Clothes to my mind. The first chapter is okay in a David Lodge sort of way and the last chapter ties some of the things together in a historical fiction sort of way. But the bits in the middle, including the relentless chapter about women murders just go on for ever and to no good purpose that I can see. Looking forward to finding a block of time to read "House Of Leaves" and "The Infinite Jest". Hope they come partially clothed at least...

Day 17: Shortest book read. "The Outsider" weighs in at 102 pages. Jenny Erpenbeck's "The Book Of Words" is a small pocketbook edition of 112 pages, so not sure how that compares, but is a very good little book about the family of a regime's chief torturer. I also enjoyed a pamphlet-like book at 80 pages called "Mr Overby Is Falling" by Nathan Tyree, but it's quite troubling as it's from the point of view of a serial killer, so it's not everyone's cup of tea.

Day 18: Book you're most embarrassed to say you like. I'm not really embarrassed as I'll defend anything I give my personal thumbs up to, but Jonathan Safran Foer seems to get plenty of clog for his novel "Everything Is Illuminated" which I enjoyed. Its tricksiness seems to have bothered people, but I revelled in that. It's not a great book and in truth I preferred his follow up about 9/11 narrated by a 10 year old boy "Up Close And Incredibly Loud", which no one else seemed to like either.

Day 19: Book that turned you on. Nicholson Baker's "The Fermata" has the premise a man can stop time for everyone else but him and as predictable as the information superhighway has coalesced around the twin pillars of sex and commerce, so the hero of the novel uses his gift to ogle women who are unaware of what he is up to. Baker also wrote a novel entirely about phone sex called "Vox", but that didn't quite do it for me. Guess that makes me more of the voyeur type... The best book about desire is Neil Bartlett's "Skin Lane". God I love this book and its sensuousness in inanimate objects.

Day 20: Book you've read the most number of times. See "The Outsider" in previous post. Once a year for ten years.

Day 21: Favourite picture book from childhood. I can't recall any of my primer books, so am going to skip straight to "Asterix and The Roman Agent". The Romans infiltrate an agent provocateur who causes strife and arguments among the redoubtable Gauls. It's really quite sophisticated.

Day 22: Book you plan on reading next. Well "House Of Leaves" may just have to wait until I've got a head space clear of my own writing. So I fancy I may just read "The Master and The Margarita" by Bulgakov. Supposed to be very funny and in the favourite comedic books in part 1 I forgot to mention Gogol's "Dead Souls". Victor Pelevin can be funny too, who said the Russians were miserablists? Not me!

Day 23: Book you tell people you've read but haven't or at least haven't finished. Probably "Ulysses". I do own up to never having read Hardy or Dickens!

Day 24: Book that contains your favourite scene. The opening to Don Delillo's "Underworld" is quite exemplary atmospheric writing, even though it's about the subject few would be that moved by. It tells the tale of a boy who bunks off school and sneaks into an important knock-out baseball game, which actually happened in history and has some endlessly played back radio commentary (much like the 1966 World Cup Final). A key hit by a batter was described as 'a shot heard around the world' in the newspapers of the time. In "Mao II" Delillo describes a mass Moonie wedding with similar breathtaking scope, balancing the mass with the individual emotion. Wonderful stuff. I'll also credit Ian McEwan for his nailing of the competitive thoughts and feelings pulsing through two squash players in "Saturday", even though the book as a whole is not so great, while the retreat from Dunkirk he describes in "Atonement" is astounding war writing.

Day 25: Favourite book read in school. Milton's "Paradise Lost", but up against Sylvia Plath poems, Tom Stoppard's "Jumpers" and Jane Austen's "Emma" I feel it didn't have a great deal of competition given my proclivities. There are some wonderful images in Milton and the character of Mammon building a counterfeit Heaven in Hell that just can't cut it has echoes even today.

Day 26: Favourite non-fiction book. "The Alphabet" by David Sacks, a history of the source of each of the 26 letters and a consideration of some of their associations and imagery. A theme elaborated on in "26 Letters" a collaboration between 26 writers and 26 designers, taking one letter per pair and designing a poster for an exhibition to bring out the life in each of their letters. Superb stuff that probably launched my interest in typography being a significant part of fiction writing.

Day 27: Favourite Fiction Book. Well, apart from the Murakami listed in part 1, it's probably Roth's "American Pastoral". Although I don't really buy into the Americans' fixation with "The Great American Novel", this truly is an epic that encapsulates all of post-war America, with its psychic splits in the 60s. I'm not a huge fan of Roth, seeing him as self-absorbed and self-obsessed, but this is a strikingly brilliant and complete novel.

Day 28: Last book you read. "Bad Intentions" by Norwegian writer Karin Fossum. I watched a BBC4 programme on Norse Noir and off the back of it the next day marched into a bookstore and bought this and the book in Day 29. The Fossum was so so. I was attracted to the claim that it concentrates on motive for the crime through the criminal's eyes, but I wasn't entirely convinced by the portrait on offer. Some of the language was a bit ropy too, but that may just be the translation, since Fossum has also written poetry.

Day 29: Book you're currently reading. The second Norse Noir I was tipped to and this one is far more satisfying. "The Snowman" by Jo Nesbo. Someone tweeted me yesterday that they'd seen Nesbo read livee and thatthe scene had stayed with her in her nightmares and I can see why. I think I'll read all his ouevre. So from the programme I discovered one out of the two authors to my tastes, a pretty fair strike rate I'd say.

Day 30: Favourite coffee table book. Huh? I have neither a coffee table, nor do I drink tea or coffee while idly browsing a book. However a very kind friend sent me "Joy Division" by Kevin Cummins which I have promised myself to read as a treat when I've finished my current work in progress. Joy Division were my favourite band and Cummins was the photographer there from the beginning so I'm anticipating a great artbook. The band certainly lent themselves to great imagery, being very associated with the de-industrialisation of Northern England in the early 1980's.

So thank you for indulging me in my personal favourites. There were plenty I would have liked to include on here but couldn't. Honourable mentions must go to Dubravka Ugresic, Jeanette Winterson, William Burroughs, David Peace, David Mitchell, Imre Kertesz, Craig Cleveneger, Kate Atkinson, Jonathan Lethem, Scarlet Thomas.

Peace and Lethem are my two favourite contemporary authors, I can't believe I couldn't get them into the 30 books!

30 Day Book Challenge

2011-05-19T22:56:00.005+01:00

I'd like to credit Becky (@stupidgirl45 on Twitter) for this idea which I have nicked and adapted for my own. You can read her original here

Day 1: Favourite Book: "Hard Boiled Wonderland And The End Of the World" by Murakami. An extraordinary book unlike no other I've read, in that it has two entirely different narrative worlds winding down to meet one another. One is a fairly straight forward Japanese noir thriller, the other a semi-mystical dystopia. Mind-expanding

Day 2: Least favourite book: Oh man too many to mention. But probably "Demo" by Alison Miller which is seemingly about political protest to the Iraq War, but actually is about a couple of Trustafarians slumming it for a bit

Day 3: Book that makes me laugh out loud: quite a competitive little category this one, but the late Steve Tesich's "Karoo" narrowly edges out Steve Toltz's "A Fraction Of The Whole". Both have a laugh on almost every page, but Saul Karoo is a more satisfying character to guide us through the laughs

Day 4: Book that makes you cry: I'm a geezer so I don't cry period. Can honestly say I don't think I've cried at a book, though I've moistened at the odd film or so. My father however claims that as a young child I laughed at the death of Bambi's mother. I have no way of verifying this

Day 5: Book you wish you could live in: "Sum - 40 Tales of the Afterlife" a wonderful small book positing 40 imaginative scenarios for life and post-life. Not only does it give the brain endless food for thought, but I'm rather taken with its notion that there is life after death, so yes please I'd like to reside there...

Day 6: Favourite young adult book: I'm sure they weren't called YA books when I was a lad. I didn't read books as a boy anyway except Asterix and Tintin. I'm a bit out of my depth here, but I'd recommend "Watchman" though it's not really about YA themes

Day 7: Book that you can quote/recite: Even though I have a good memory that got me through my exams by memorising stuff by rote, I would actually have to apply myself to learn quotes which I don't tend to do with my reading for pleasure. I never remember jokes either. But I did use to religiously (sic) read Camus "The Outsider" once a year for about ten years, so after repeated readings I managed to commit the first line to memory "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday I can't be sure"

Day 8: Book that scares you: What in a treehouse of terror sort of way, or the horror of knowing that it ever got published? Let's go with the former shall we? I don't scare that easily just through the power of art - I rarely surrender my disbelief, but the Jo Nesbo crime thriller "The Snowman" which I'm reading now is pretty neat on that front. For non-fiction, FBI Profiler Robert Ressler's "Whoever Fights Monsters" is pretty chilling in parts

Day 9: Book that makes me sick: Again, an extreme reaction I'm not really given to. I can tell you a film that I've tried to watch on several occasions and never made it past the first third and that's Polanski's "Repulsion". I think if I picked up any reality TV star's autobiography, penned at the tender age of 20 for the Tv tie in, that would make me upchuck. But this is supposition. Same thing Kenneth Branagh's autobiography (age 24), but I never read that either

Day 10: Book that changed your life: Okay, I don't do self-help right! But returning to Camus' "The Outsider", it was the first proper book that I read of my own volition and set me on my devouring course of literature. I'd been tipped off to it by a cooler older cousin who said check out the song "Killing An Arab" by the Cure and then read the Camus book, both of which I dutifully did and have never looked back

Day 11: Book from your favourite author: Kafka's "The Castle" sadly incomplete as Kafka ordered all his work to be destroyed on his death, but a tantalising piece of writing all the same. The author's control of both the fates of his characters and the journey undertaken by the reader are so deft and light. Mesmerising

Day 12: Book that is most like your life: Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground". I'm saying no more...

Day 13: Book who's main character is like you: I know how Meursault feels in "The Outsider" but I'd stop short of killing someone, plus I stay out of the sun... Probably one of Michel Houllebeq's misanthropes. #lowselfesteem

Day 14: Book whose main characters you want to marry: Actually I'd have to say my own character Karen Dash from "A,B&E". She is the strongest woman I know and she would keelhaul me every single day of our married life and I would be eternally grateful to her for doing so

When Two is Better Than One?

2011-05-14T12:20:00.005+01:00

When is two better than one? Yes you can have twin vocals or two or more lead guitars, but I like bands with twin drummers or even better, twin bassists. Here's 10 that don't include Rick Wakeman's Yes or Phil Collins Genesis.

1) Cop Shoot Cop

The best of the lot, with their hi and low end basses, their music was menacing, confrontational and chock-full of power. Tod A once slammed his bass into me at the front of the stage in a pub venue in Kentish Town. Like I say, confrontational. "Burn Your Bridges"

2) The Birthday Party

Before drummer Phil Calvert left the band, Mick Harvey who took over the drums in his absence would for certain songs go to a secondary kit and there was nothing quite as exciting as seeing the two of them thumping away, as usually the drummer in any group is concealed behind his kit. Did I prefer the early 2- drum BP from the latter? Live I did, but the songs were maybe stronger on their latter output. Harvey himself is a multi-instrumentalist maven. "Dead Joe"

3) Adam And The Ants

Another band forced to rejig after line-up changes, but unlike BP, The Ants scaled up to two drummers when their original "Dirk Wears White Socks" line up left to form Bow Wow Wow. This is the classic example of two drummers working in tandem, rather than against one another like BP. Very tribal, but despite the bombast and bloated phenomenon that The Ants became for a brief while, they still produced great songs - both incarnations though very different, were equally worthwhile in my humble opinion. "Kings Of The Wild Frontier"

4) The Fall

Perhaps inevitable that The Fall who have had more line up changes than any other band, would have dabbled with a twin drummer phase. With somewhat mixed results I feel. "KIcker Conspiracy"

5) Ned's Atomic Dustbin

I was never a big fan of Neds, even though they had twin basses. Too poppy and tuneful to my ears. Still, they were pretty big for a while. "Happy"

6) Royal Trux

A great band, but depressing to see them framed by that abomination that was "The Word". But everything else on YouTube seems to be their post-twin drummer incarnation, so whad'ya'gonna do? "Night To Remember"

7) Pere Ubu

Another twin instrument that maybe didn't best serve them, seeing as all their best songs came within their fertile first few years at the end of the 70s. "Waiting For Mary"

8) Palehorse

All right, I'll admit it. I'm a frustrated bassist. Two bassists in a band would have given cover for the fact that I couldn't play. But they say Dave Greenfield the Stranglers' keyboardist used to play all JJ Burnel's bass licks for him... Bassists have their backs to the audience way more than lead guitarists who like to show the audience their doodling and noodling. Two basses does lend itself to a certain type of music I'm sure you'll agree. Not many harmonies to be had.

9) Dos

What could be more pure than a band made up solely of two bass guitars? Bassist extraodinaire Mike Watt (Minutemen and Firehose) teams up with Kira Roessler (Black Flag). I'm not sure I'd pay to go and see it live, but hey respect to them anyway.

10) Glenn Branca

Okay I suggested at the outset that twin lead guitars was a bit clichéd. But how about when you've got 30 of them? Branca is orchestral in how he builds and layers the music and when I saw them, each guitarist on stage had a music stand which lent a touch of genius to proceedings. Here it's the orchestra nodding their heads to the music rather than the audience, but hey that's guitarists for you. "Symphony No 13"

11) Boredoms

Not to be outdone, Boredoms invite some mates round to the park. Kodo drumming it ain't.

Trespass - Fridayflash

2011-05-13T17:32:00.002+01:00

The credit card statement had been folded inside its envelope in such a way as his name and the opening part of each line of his address, including the house number, had been sliced off. They nestled behind the manilla frame cradling the transparent window. Hats off to the postman, or woman, for ensuring delivery. He or she didn't seem to have torn back the manilla in order to unshutter the full window. But he himself did so just then, so as to reveal his full name and address and ensure all was in order. It was indeed his bill.

He removed the statement and could see that it had been folded out of kilter. The edges of the pages didn't sit flush with one another, but formed small terraced strata. He idly wondered whether a machine or a human being was responsible for the folding and enveloping. He looked at the total due for the month, (paid automatically by direct debit so as to avoid incurring interest). That's odd he thought to himself.

For the total was about three times his normal monthly spend. He unfolded the statement and smoothed it flat with his hand. His eye alighted to scan the spending summary. He looked at the amounts and totted them up in his head. The arithmetic was correct. Each category, Entertainment, Household, Food And Drink, Hotels, Motoring, Other Retailers and Cash Advances, were above his carefully budgeted amounts. He never usually had anything but a zero in Hotels and for Motoring, He didn't own a car, nor did he travel anywhere. His carbon footprint was very small, though not from any ideological commitment. He had a sinking feeling. He had been cloned. Stolen. Thieved from. Defrauded.

He marched over to his jacket hanging on the peg on the back of the front door. He fumbled for his wallet from the inside pocket, but the credit card was comfortably nestled there. So the card itself hadn't been stolen, but seemingly his identity had been. He returned to the statement to peruse the detail of the individual transaction lines themselves.

The earliest listed items were recognisably his. His mobile phone account. His weekly trip to the supermarket of a Saturday. His monthly train season ticket. The £2 donation he made to sponsor an animal in the zoo, whose photo lovingly adorned a frame on his bedside table. The renewal of his annual membership to the Ramblers Association, even though he hadn't been on a country walk for some considerable time.

But then from here it all went a bit skew whiff. The first alien entry was for a restaurant and not a cheap one either, unless it was for a medium sized party of diners. He went over to his desk and looked up the restaurant on the internet. It was a seafood restaurant and he never touched seafood. He didn't trust its hygiene, coming from the polluted sea and a seabed rippling with bacteria. And yes, calling up a sample menu he could see that this was indeed a most expensive eaterie.

Though it was hard to be certain, one thing was for sure, it wasn't a single person dining out on their own. But he himself could never imagine sitting alone in a restaurant, which is why the category for dining was always followed by a zero. But not today. He gauged that the meal must have been for two people. He tried to conceive who the two could have been. The most likely was a lothario trying to impress a woman. But could he be so self-possessed as to do this with a forged credit card? He wondered if they'd had oysters.

The next item was petrol. Since the Motoring total had been quite high, he skipped down the list and found several other petrol entries. This man, or woman - no he felt that it was almost certainly a man - evidently drove a lot. He did wonder if the car was for business trips, which might then amend his supposition about the expensive meal. Maybe that was a business entertaining (which was taxable). Dipping into a finger bowl to clean off the shellfish flesh, prior to shaking hands on a deal.

He returned to the petrol stops. Each in a different location. He wrote down the names of the towns and began to plot them on a map he had of the whole country on the wall of his study. Never the same location twice. Perhaps he was a travelling salesman. He was intrigued to know whether the man would double back on any of these places within the next month. What was he saying? He had to nip this in the bud now.

Another item on the list caught his eye. Some establishment called "The Flagstaff", which after a quick mental calculation rated under Other Retailer. This category had been particularly inflated, so he returned to the internet and discovered it was a pole dancing establishment. Whatever one of those was. He delved further and became acquainted with the nature of such a venue. Ah, that explained the cash withdrawal on the same night then. The location of the enterprise also matched to one of the garage towns. As did other garage towns to "Club Wraparound" and "Perpendicular" and "Wet Gravity".

He really should... He looked at the stated credit limit. The total of the bill was two-thirds of the way to the maximum, but he figured that was not too bad a value. Not for the purchasing of vicarious pleasures. the chance to let his own imagination run amok. Maybe tomorrow he would contact the credit card company and ask them to lower the limit to what he was prepared to invest in his new proxy identity. And he would buy some pins for his wall map to keep track of his progress.

He was rather taken with his new self.

Many thanks to ian firth @mashie1964 for info on credit card summary categories

The Caller To The Bingo Caller's House Calls 'House'

2011-05-05T23:49:00.008+01:00

Time For Fun, 41 - There are 41 paving stones from your gate to the front door

Key of the Door, 21 - Your wallet has a combined total of twenty-one credit, debit and identity cards

Clickety-Click, 66 - As usual, there will be a total of 66 prizes given out by you down at the bingo tonight. Everyone's a winner, of sorts

Gateway to Heaven, 27 - Twenty-seven stairs up to the bedroom

Dancing Queen, 17 - The seventeenth step is loose and groans, so take pains to avoid it

One More Time, 79 - There are seventy-nine books in your bookshelf on the landing

Naughty, 40 - All your lightbulbs are 40 Watt energy savers

Knock at the Door, 4 - In her sleep, your wife snores four times before a whistle

Pick and Mix, 26 - The bedroom door is twenty-six inches wide, I have to turn side on to squeeze in through it

Ghandi's Breakfast, 80 - Your wife has eighty, yes eighty count 'em, dresses in the wardrobe

Coming of Age, 18 - She has eighteen different beauty creams, ointments and salves on her bedside table

The Lord is my Shepherd, 23 - William Burroughs and other occultists attribute strong magic significance behind this number. It happens to be my lucky one

Up to Tricks, 46 - There is forty-six minutes until the last game and the end of your shift

You and Me, number 3 - Your wife sleeps propped up on three pillows, one fringed

On it's Own, 1 - Now that I'm here, she can no longer be said to be all alone

Dirty Gertie, Number 30 - We all know your wife isn't called Gertie

Candy Store, 74 - She ain't called Candy either, she's not American

Rise And Shine, 29

Thee and Me, 23

Down on your Knees, 43

Droopy Drawers, 44

Ask for More, 34

Red Raw, 64

Staying Alive, 85

Get up and Run, 31

House!

Eyes down...

Clean the Floor, 54...

* * *

Okay, your wish is my control C button - here's a podcast version you can ddownload http://www.box.net/shared/ddc6ec6u0q

Hobbling Of The Foot Soldier

2011-05-03T13:21:00.007+01:00

It might seem churlish to question the narrative voice in what is after all only another brutal, grimey British gangster movie (Film Gris?), but hey I'm a writer and such things niggle me.

The movie fuses the autobiography of Carlton Leach, erstwhile football hooligan, club bouncer, drug dealer and gangster, with a portrayal of a true crime where three drug dealers who were our Carl's mates, are executed in their land rover in remote rural Essex. The movie starts off from Carlton's point of view, his rise through the ranks from terrace hoolie all the way up to serious player in the Essex underworld. But two-thirds of the way in, his voice and pov is marginalised, in favour of the three guys who eventually decorate the car's interior upholstery with their grey matter. One of these characters only appears in the film half-way through, since up until then he has been in prison. A second is shoehorned (crowbarred?) even later and yet we are sidetracked off into his story as the perspective becomes multiple, representing each of them together and apart, while Carlton remains on the fringes, bound by loyalty and friendship, but distancing himself from their drug-fuelled self-destructive path.

And even though I regard myself as a reasonably sophisticated movie watcher, this shift didn't work for me. Throughout the film are almost subliminal images of 'what if' scenarios, of members of Carlton's family and Carlton himself facing execution if he undertook a certain course of action. This makes the whole film seem to pivot entirely around his fate. And yet he backs off from action of any kind in the last third of the film and these scenarios really ought to apply to the three who did end up dead. Maybe it's supposed to embody the switch from the individual to the gang, but it veers the film wholly over from where it started into something else and ultimately serves neither.

I haven't read Leach's book "Muscle", but assume it is a straight-forward biographical narrative of events and influences in his life. For a scriptwriter to try and graft this on to a multi-perspective take on a hotly disputed crime open to many different theories as to what actually happened, suggests to me a failure of craft. It possibly could work in a book, to switch pov so radically, but in a film I think it exposes the diversity of its sources and how poorly spliced together they were.

The thing is that we actually already have films aplenty dealing with both of these subjects. "Cass" a book and film by Cass Pennant another West Ham hooligan, replicates a life very similar to that of Leach's and contains some of the same set piece events that both were present at. "Essex Boys" is a film devoted to the entire story that ends up with the land rover shootings.

And here I think, is the dispiriting truth that emerges out of all of this. There are probably more films about this ten-a-penny criminal gang than there were made about the Krays. I can count 5, yes 5, films portraying the hooligan battles between West Ham's "Inter City Firm" and Millwall's "Treatment" - "Green Street 1 & 2", "Football Factory" "Rise Of The Foot Soldier", "Cass", not to mention two fictioonalised West Hams in "ID" (Shadwell FC) and "The Firm" (The Inter-City Crew). In this parochial, navel-gazing, dire Danny-Dyered world, of glorified violence and (man-on-man) torture porn, is it any wonder that the British film industry can't revive its fortunes?

But hell I'm as guilty as the next guy of a voyeuristic pleasure in these types of movies. I've even published a novel set around a gangster premise, but I would hope that mine attempts to show the other side of this gangsterism; not the consequences for the geezer slumped in a car with a hole in his head, but for those others in his orbit - since my novel is from the view of his wife, or ex-wife as she is on one level and under the threat of it being extended to a second, permanent one. It's a novel about pain, exclusion and self-deception. It's a book about terror, but does not dwell on the actual violence that underpins it. I trust it doesn't glorify anything about the lifestyle, but explores the contours of the husks of the people consumed by it.

"So you are either with them or you are against them. Thus states the primordial credo of the thick-set men with non-surgical scars. Handed down to us priestesses with porcelain skin and fine features, to tend the everlasting flame. Dimly aware that our Prometheus had nicked and then ring-fenced it with us human shields in the first place. But Jesus, we weren’t vestal virgins, we knew why we had been chosen. I mean they weren’t going to fuck women with hips as wide as those of their mothers now were they? No, and for our part we knew that our temple was erected upon the gains of pillage, tythe, tribute and forfeiture. Tipped to the wink by the sudden swelling of numbers in our houses, of men slightly too large for their clothes. The tumescence of their cars parked in the drive. The phone ringing off the hook. All that would clue us in. But we were shrouded from the ways of their world once they left our midst. Aware of where the riches were emanating, but not the details. Whose spoils became our bejewelling. We perceived what our high priests of crime did for a living, yet we couldn’t pen a job description".
From " A,B&E"

The Royal Weeding - The Estate Of The Nation

2011-04-29T12:50:00.010+01:00

I have no particular relationship to the Royal Wedding one way or another, neither fan nor critic. I did however want to write a live story of the other side of the media-generated fairytale, seeing as we are in the midsts of a deep economic crisis, we are still fighting wars in the Middle East and Asia, Nature has stepped up her reprisals towards mankind for ravaging her (and who can blame her in our arrogance?) This is a fictional tale, written throughout the course of this Wedding day, about the other side of the festivities.

The fairytale wedding of Prince and Princess a sozzled, distant televised memory, the street parties up and down the land too had run their course for the day. Except for one.

Though there was a lack of residents now in attendance, only a knot of uniformed police at either end of the street. Preserving the scene while a couple of white-suited SOCOs went about their business. But this scene had intentionally played host to an enormous crowd a few hours earlier, so that the cast offs and parings were almost unlimited. Empty bottles, half-full glasses, paper plates, remnants of food, crushed cigarette packets. All the standard signifiers of a right royal knees up. Having to dig over the detritus of a shindig. Less searching for a needle in a haystack, than a particular shell casing at the Somme.

No doubt up and down the country, the parties had already been tidied away. Trestle, occasional and card tables had each been restored back to their surface duties in people's homes. Bucket seats, deck chairs, sun loungers had all been repatriated to the gloomy interiors of garden sheds and conservatories, having never seen so much light of day and the commerce of nestling so many different people's posteriors.

The rubble of food and drink, celebratory ribbons, confetti and ticker tape, presumably now swept into tidy little pyramids garlanding the gutters, awaiting the street cleaning leviathans. Some mounds were more prodigious than others, but all would be uniformly triangular. An ancient echo of the warning beacons that used to dot the coast of this island nation. A more modern reverberation of the street refuse lit up in desultory public protests. Guy Fawkes' bonfires were ineffably larger and more imposing.

Only the bunting would still be in place. Billowing the vestige of the good feelings and unity from earlier in the day. Overhead lines of red, white and blue arrowheads, pointing accusatorily as people congregated beneath them. A rainbow array of ethnicities who for one day at least had come together, but were fingered for their skin deep affiliations from above once they retired behind their closed front doors. Files of shark's teeth, demurring from clamping down on some choice victim morsel. The subject of some parochial grudge lodged within the community awaiting a less prestigious red letter day to spill red. Rows of flimsy plastic Union Jacks, that most ugly and cluttered of flags, blowing in the wind. For the Celtic Fringe, many wished to streamline the flag by removing their standards from it, but of course they wouldn't be having Royal Wedding parties anyway.

Pictures of the happy couple, at least where they had been left in place and not snatched away as a going home present, a reminder of the day's communal warmth. Although in this one restant fin de party scene, there is a picture of the newly weds with their eyes punched out. Unnerving, but perhaps indicative of nothing but one individual's inebriated rage uncorked, but lacking for real focus to settle upon. No one wants to start an affray at a street party of all your neighbours do they? The police treat it for trace evidence and bag it anyway.

For the party under consideration, the denizens had blocked off both entrances to their road. Impromptu barricades to keep the cars out and render the road child safe (how ironic). Not exactly the Paris Commune, but tiny evidence of what could be done. Resourcefulness in action. The collective memory in Ulster wouldn't have had to reach back too far to disinter the recipe. But this wasn't Ulster. This was Tamworth and Truro, Colchester and Carlisle.

The blockages had been struck like a theatre set by the Police as they poured in earlier in the evening. Now a less than convincing buffer had been erected by parking a car at either end and sealing both entrances with their own incident bunting. Two-colours instead of the festive three.

For today has all about securing succession. A royal heir to the throne for the generations to come. A fundamental enough instinct, that one way and another drives most parents. But here where the police are securing a crime scene, the lineage for one mother may have been irrevocably snapped. There concern is that this may be one in a succession of crimes perpetrated by the same individual. A succession they must break.

Eight hours is a long stint for any young child to be kept entertained. Even peppered with plentiful intermissions for food and drink. But as the whole street in attendance, parents were relived of superintendence duties through there being sufficient youngsters to keep each other engaged. So parents were able to let their guard down along with their hair.

Yet the evening ineluctably drew on and the crowds started to thin out. That calculation of preserving and experiencing a moment of history, balanced against the need to get children home already way past their customary bedtime. Both weighed and usually leavened by the continued wish to keep drinking and wring every last drop out of a rare bonhomie among the neighbourhood.

One mother turned around while still perched on a fold-up chair, looking to locate her young son. While there were plenty of people still milling about, there were few blindspots for him to remain screened from her eyes. The few gaggles of children certainly didn't include his capering form either. She rose wearily from the seat and began approaching the adult collocations and asking them the question even though she could see he wasn't with them. Then she approached the kids and asked them if they'd seen her son recently. None made for very good witnesses, overdrawn at the end of the day stock full of impressions and bustle, rubbing their eyes and shrugging their ahistorical shoulders.

Even though her son didn't have a key and she hadn't left the front door open, she returned there to search anywhere. She made a special scrutiny of the back garden in case he had simply taken himself off to curl asleep there. But he was nowhere to be found. Her untrusting instinct that had ensured she locked up her property this morning, hadn't translated to monitoring her son. Now she began to fear the worst.

This time when she pulled on the elbows of people wrapped up in talking, there was a panicked urgency to it. several times she spilled the drink that the people were nursing in their hands while they were talking. People shot her daggers, which barely softened when she explained what might have happened. They were drunk and felt she was likely so as well. One or two started to make cursory searches under the tables and behind bushes and shrubs along the street. But there was no coordinated posse, nor did most choose to break off their chit chat. Some unwittingly mocked her through lifting up empty bottles and glasses in the hunt for replenishing alcohol. Irritated at the edge being taken off their spiffing day. Dragged back into the grimness that the festivities had offered them a respite from.

For the street parties had been extolled and exhorted by the leader of the country himself. A temporary burst of colour from the greyness, a pomp and ceremony in a land blighted by concrete mundanities. Of course no monies were forthcoming from central funds to help the populace celebrate and transmogrify. So everyone had been encouraged to bring a bottle and a dish, confident in the assumption of a return of at least two bottles and a full stomach. The very never-never economics that had placed the country in its state of current asperity in the first place. The world owes me a living, or a plenitude of comestibles at least, sense of entitlement now being demonstrated by the late night dregs drinkers, feeling imposed upon by the desperate mother's importuning. The rapport sealed with royal approval had become unglued and society sagged back into its misanthropic gloom.

Eventually some bright spark had the idea of calling the Police. They were somewhat dilatory, unsurprising seeing as they had a myriad of street parties to deal with. When two officers finally did show, they listened to her version of the narrative of events, which had most of the details missing, since her boy had been excised from the gathering without her or anyone else seeing. They asked her for some photos of the boy, but she only possessed images on her phone. They debated whether to ask her for the phone, but she clung on to it determined it might remain an inlet for redemption. Even though her son was too young to know her number and everyone she knew was either stood around uselessly in the street, or had retired for the night.

The two officers began door-to-door inquiries, but elicited no more information than the mother had by her elbow to elbow cross-examinations. Those who had left the party to return home, were now knocked up and roused from their beds and furious for the intrusion. They blamed the mother for her rank carelessness.

The Constables called for CID and a family liaison officer who whisked the mother away back to the goad of her empty house. The detectives considered the range of possible scenarios. They discounted the boy having just wandered off, since the blockade on the street would have proved insurmountable for his tiny frame. Therefore they could only contemplate a more sinister advent. Be it he was snatched by a sexual predator and salted away to a dungeon somewhere. Or that he was now a commodity in a market for under-age flesh. Whether still as a sexual transaction, or maybe like that couple out in Portugal, to become ensconced in the bosom of a new family, but then they still didn't know that for sure either. It was unlikely that he had been kidnapped for ransom, this simply wasn't the right economic demographic. Of course the kid could already be murdered and disposed of.

What was certain that foul play was involved. Today of all days, under the gaze of the whole country, someone had weeded out a child from a mass gathering. Were they an opportunist, seizing their chance to meet their desires? This was the day for opportunists.

No, more than likely they acted out of cold, deliberate calculation. They reckoned on having the pick of children out unconcerned in the street amid the comfort of strangers and neighbours. Was he a stranger to this community, or a local? it was impossible to deduce from their doorstep interviews. He would have counted on the open camouflage of today's conviviality. Of throwing the doors open to one and all.

Back to his motivation then. His cynical carpe diem. Was he after competing for column inches? He must have known he'd never bump the Royal Couple from the front pages, that it was simply impossible to give them a run for all the money lavished on their event. But maybe he would be content with second billing?

TBC

Cysters - Friday Flash

2011-04-28T21:03:00.001+01:00

In the timeless way, a divine coveted what he supposedly could not have. Thus was a beautiful mortal woman ravished by him.

Soon life was growing in her belly. Groping blindly in their watery pellicle, the hands of two girls discovered one another and each fastened a tiny bud to her twin. From that moment, they never sundered the seal .

They started dancing and pirouetting one other, which set off a great delight in their mother. Now all three of them were melded in joy.

Through such a fusion the girls' senses passed and quickened one to another. They shared and swapped thoughts, for they could read each other without barrier nor impediment. Lacking eyes that could yet see, the sisters touched one another in order to report the beauty of the other. Outside the womb, their mother described her own features of pulchritude and the dazzling beauty of their divine father as she bent forward to whisper to her daughters.

Nearing full growth, the two started plotting for their life outside in the world. They had already sworn an oath that they would never be separated. Yet in offering up their perceptions, they descried the first difference between them. One sister knew herself to be immortal. While the other had no such sense radiating throughout her frangible body. When they occasionally collided one into the other in the swing of their convolutions, the immortal felt no pain. Whereas her sister suffered the full sting.

They abandoned sleep as they feverishly pondered this alarming discovery. Their dances too were cut short as they intently tried to resolve the riddle. Their mother fretted at the cessation of activity within. That they may have curled up and died. Her only faith, that her immortal seducer was still pledging his troth to her and his daughters, so that he must divine them to be healthy.

'Clearly the founding fund of fecundity provided by our father didn't stretch to two bodies. I'm so sorry to have claimed all the sap for myself oh sister of mine, inadvertent as it was'.

'No need for apology dearest sister heart'.

'Perhaps if I can make myself bleed some of my own vital essences on to your own flesh-'

'We both know that is not possible. Nor should you even contemplate such an act. You have to preserve yourself intact'.

'So do you sister love. For I can't bear to live without you for even a minute'.

'But you won't have to. Not for many a year yet. We shall live a full and long life together'.

'But you will leave me. In the end. I shall be bereft of your loving company. Though of course it will be infinitely worse for you once life and spirit has departed your handsome frame'.

'I believe it will be worse for you dear sister, for I will not know any different. All the shared beauty I will have, will end for me sharply and forever'.

'But not me. I credit immortality to be a worse disposition. Think of an eternity musing on what I no longer have to cherish. It is a merciless punishment to be sure'.

'You are not to think like that sister heart. Cherish the gifts we are to share while together, for that's all I have to feast on. They will be taken away from me, but you have the opportunity to preserve the memory of what we once had'.

'Day after day after day with no end. No escape from myself. No means of sharing it with you once you are gone No escape from never having you back in my arms, holding my hands as now. I simply cannot live with that knowledge'.

'But you have to. This is our respective fates. Both condemned to solitude'.

'Perhaps not. The immortal can cheat never dying, much as the mortal may cheat death'.

'How so?'

'Even immortals have to go through the process of being born of woman. There is no difference between us there'.

'Yes I suppose so. But I cannot see-'

- 'By never being born. Cling on to me, hold me like we are never going to be prised apart, even by Ajax's spear. Tighter. So much tighter. We must squeeze the breath from one another, for we are never going to leave our mother's cave'.

So the sisters clung to each other for grim non-life. They were guilty at what they might be causing their mother to feel, but their sisterly love was yet stronger. For her part, the mother could not help but notice that this time there was something amiss. Further reinforced when her consort accused her of withholding his offspring, not wanting to release them into the light of the world fearing they might repudiate her as a mere mortal. Her body had grown ugly in his eyes and if she was not going to release her infant hostages, then no part of her was any longer ravishing to him.

Scorned by her lover, rejected by her children who steadfastly refused to emerge and greet her, she began to waste away. She truly did surrender her pulchritude as she railed day and night against her own body that had betrayed her. Her skin washed away by lamentations, her heart fatally wounded by desertion.

There was no one to mourn her. For inside her belly the twins had been delighted by the cessation of nourishment passing along to them from their hostess. As the mother's hungering body turned in on itself, the girls' too started to undergo a metamorphosis. They started calcifying, as the callow membranous skin was reabsorbed into their bones. The capillaries forming the veins of the stone. Soon all movement was stopped up behind a petrous wall and they stood, hand to hand as fully-fledged statues. Once the cowling body of their dead mother fell away, their mineral cast was exposed for all to see.

Never born, yet never dying. As old as the rocks themselves.

Hollywood, Lord Of Gore - friday flash

2011-04-22T00:33:00.003+01:00

Thanatos drummed his falanges as he surveyed the sub-committee's sunken faces before him. The darkest lights of their generation, yet none of this skeletal crew could eclipse the abyssal infinity of his own current glower. None would meet his eye, huddling their skulls deep within the shroud of their cowls. Dark, his mood was positively stygian. Or negatively so.

The sub-committee had hit a brick wall. One they were unable to scale, tunnel under or simply detonate and push through. These fine, perverted minds, the brightest dark stars around, and finally they had sunk to their limits of depravity. They had platted so low, there seemed nowhere else left to plumb.

Even an old faithful like Stacy A-Po had seemed to have lost her mojo. She had been charged through the ages with religious slayings. And how she had risen to the challenge, evolving from stonings, crucifixions, witch burnings with faggots, all the way through to her meisterwerk the suicide bomber. But the tour de force of the Twin Towers had left her spent. No place else to soar. Or plummet.

Gill O'Tine's political sump had also apparently dried up. Hanging, drawing and quartering had long had its day in the dust. Heads on poles deftly booted on the other foot by being mirrored in regicide beheadings, but that too had diminished in impact and popularity. Dictators hung on lamp-posts had become debased war crime executions captured on phone cameras. Defenestrations, impalings, relay teams of sniper-assassins, even the extemporised ice pick in the head, had all been defeated at the polls.

Roman Holiday's special portfolio for genocides had lingered on past the Holocaust, through Cambodia and into Rwanda. From high tech to low, railway timetables and gas ovens, to polythene bags placed over the face and machetes, Roman's big eyes had surveyed them all, but scale ultimately steamrolled over him and left him a shadow of his former bureaucratic self. Death had become by numbers rather than by the numbers.

Criminal gain and simple stripped back sociopathy had always been a fecund wellspring. From rape, pillage and slaughter, walking the plank, cut-throats, Thuggees, acid-bath murderers, St Valentine's Day massacres to Colombian neckties, Della N Quincey had surpassed herself in her resourcefulness and enterprise. But like any corrosive talent that yields up all the rewards and riches the world has to offer, Della had become corrupted and in her venality had squandered and pawned her once priceless gifts. She was addicted to several of the illicit drugs she had introduced as a double bubble of culling addicts as well as instigating lethal gang turf wars.

And what precisely was the reason for the current malaise? That they found themselves outstripped and outdone. Every single stroke of artistry they brought to the field of death and decimation, out-trumped by a new player on the scene. A Holly Wood. There were even rumours that Della Quincey's addiction had been initiated by Ms Wood and that to score her drugs she had sold her soul to become a technical adviser to the dread Wood and traded insider knowledge.

Ms Wood however executed all her extinctions and expunctions as counterfeits. With make-up, special effects and pixels. There was not one single method of dispatch dreamed up originally by Thanatos' crew, that Ms Wood hadn't aped and recreated. In loving, voyeuristic detail. Yet the biggest slight, the greatest Indictment, was that each death was part of a narrative. It had some meaning and served to drive the story forward.

If there was one thing Thanatos had lifelong struggled to establish, it was the purposelessness of death.

A Figurative Representation of My WIP

2011-04-19T21:23:00.005+01:00

The novella is called "Unspeakable" and is about all the things that never get said that maybe ought to within the claustrophobia of a family unit. With tragic consequences.

Politics in 153 words

2011-04-10T22:25:00.006+01:00

Conservatives believe in Original Sin, that man is innately flawed and those at the bottom of society's pile can't and shouldn't be helped.

Progressives/ Socialists believe that it is only economic circumstances that prevent all people fulfilling their innate potential and such circumstances have to be ameliorated.

Liberalism originated as a belief in freedom from restrictions such as the free market and free trade. (Classical Liberalism) Then it switched to freedom from oppression, a set of rights underpinning a certain minimum quality of life (Social Liberalism).

The irony is that the Conservatives yearn for the free market and economic unrestrictiveness, but are against the human rights social programme, so they are in part Liberal. The Progressives believe in the need for human rights, but that fundamentally admits to the Original Sin view of humanity, that man acts so perniciously that we need protecting from one another.

There are no new political ideas under the sun.