City of Slack

Daytrip To Potsdam

2012-01-26T05:46:00.000-08:00

We caught the train from Berlin to Potsdam
Half confused in the snow
We walked from the station
To the park
Tim with his scarf over his head like an old lady
Wrapped up against the cold

His mood was bleak and desperate, unhappy with his life
Before the revelation of Prozac and found self knowledge

But to me the day was magic
As we walked in the park it snowed so hard
We could hardly see the path
Like being lost in a bag of flour
‘It reminds me of that film’ I said

And then the snow stopped
And in its place was a palace
‘It reminds me of that film’ I said

Fazzle

2011-11-11T03:40:00.000-08:00

Finding a good name for something can help in life and I have now decided to name what I have previously called 'special effects' (the sensory effects of mild psychosis) 'fazzle'. I didn't consciously think of the name, it just popped into my head, but if I do some retro reasoning I'm going to say it's a combination of fucked up, fazed and dazzle - fazzle. 'I went for a walk and it calmed the fazzle right down', 'I drank too much coffee and the fazzle came on really strong'. I can feel an Urban Dictionary entry coming on...

Things to moan about 2: mild psychosis

2011-11-07T02:05:00.000-08:00

‘Mild’ psychosis, it doesn’t feel mild but, as I never become completely delusional, I’ll use that prefix. It would probably annoy psychiatrists - and that has got to be a good thing.

I’ll divide my description up into 2 parts, the sensory and the mental.

The main sensory effect I get is visual, a changing in the intensity of the way I see. Details seem too, well, detailed. Faces become somehow too real, hyper real. Colours too vivid, bright colours seeming to vibrate . And the sky, just too big. Everything has been turned up a little too much. Sometimes quite a lot too much.

It’s years since I’ve smoked spliff but I would describe the effect as been a bit like smoking a really strong skunk joint. Except you haven’t, and though those effects might be sort after by some, but I don’t want them. They make me uneasy and frightened.

When I initially flipped out in July 2008, displaying hypo-manic symptoms, one of the first changes was an increased sensitivity to colour. At the time, during The Time Of Blakean Joy, I quite enjoyed the effects. They have long since lost there appeal.

Are there any triggers for this? It happens most days, often seemingly unprompted. Though stress and anxiety, especially ‘life worry’ and when I get worked up about tinnitus, make it more likely to happen. Alcohol could temporarily calm it down, but in the long term made it a lot worse.

And the mental? There’s definitely and element of paranoia and conspiracy that creeps into my mind - usually based around tinnitus, a feeling that I might be cursed, a tendency to wander into magical thinking. The fact that the tinnitus was triggered by a medication, and that it often seems the worse possible thing that could of happened to me, the fact that it led to me starting drinking again (2 months and 7 days on the wagon, let’s count our blessings) after over a decade sober - sometimes makes me feel cursed. Like someone or something has decided to torture me. ‘Oi, Matt, watch out, we are really going to fuck with your brain.’

A teacher of mine with long term mental health problems (he had a very public breakdown while teaching me, I rather liked him) died 3 months before I flipped out - was his madness passed on to me after his death? Is there a certain degree of madness in the world that needs to be passed around? And has now been passed on to me?

And sometime I feels like something has been left to rot in my brain, leaving an unpleasant taste I can’t get rid of. I really don’t like that feeling.

Depression and suicidal thoughts are more of a problem than delusional thoughts, especially in the morning. And of course everything is aggravated by the head sound - that’s what pushes the suicide agenda to the fore relentlessly. I need to start to have strategies to deal with this. I’ve been watching the re-run of The World At War on the Yesterday channel, that might help me come up with some ideas.

Things to moan about 1: chronic tinnitus

2011-10-03T09:10:00.000-07:00

I think today might be more misery memoir than shooting the breeze. Yes, I’m having a moan. Again.

I suffer from chronic tinnitus (as written about previously here). I spend a lot of time been driven ragged by the multi-toned noises in my head. But a quick rant about its horrors may prove useful; better out than in, lets break the circle of thought through self-expression etc. So here’s a quick attempt to catalogue ‘the things that drive me mad about chronic tinnitus’.

First off there’s the morning, the fact that on waking it’s the first thing I hear. My first awareness is always ‘what’s that sound in my ear, o....it’s that sound. The bloody sound(s) which are always in my ear.’ The day starts with anxiety and frustration. Another day of this. Another day of constant distraction from the moment.

And that’s the second thing that riles me, this inability to be in the moment. The noise constantly magnifies the self, making it hard to be absorbed in anything. My focus is repeatedly brought back to the noise, to an upset self, thousands of times a day. Whatever I do takes place in a sonic fog, though fog seems the wrong word for the multiple high pitched tones. More like the interference on a badly tuned old school analog television, a constant distortion (for some reason this analogy works better than that of a badly tuned radio).

In Alcoholic’s Anonymous they sometimes have a phrase on the wall, ‘This too will pass’. The problem with the tinnitus is that it probably won’t pass, it’s been like this for nearly 3 years now. It used to depress me when I went to those meetings. The craving for alcohol may go away, but the sounds in my ear won’t every go away (and it was the sound in my ear which made me pick up the bottle again). Whatever happens - love, bereavement, success and failure, death - will take place under this constant sonic attack.

And it has effected two of what were formerly great pleasures, reading and walking in the mountains. I do still read (though at one point I gave up entirely), but it is a battle, my focus is constantly distracted - I feel like I’m only skimming the surface of the words. Absorbing a small percentage of what I once did. And the problem with the hills ? They're quite, away from the noise of traffic, the distraction of radio and television - just that sound, dominating everything.

Is there anything positive I can say? When I’m with people, I notice it less. If I’m writing something, expressing rather than absorbing, it bothers me less. I keep on using that word, absorb. Maybe that’s the thing, chronic tinnitus makes it harder to absorb the world, to relate and empathise. It makes it harder to be a human being.

Moan over. And do I feel any better? A little. Next up, the pain in the arse which is mild psychosis.

America In My Brain

2011-05-28T14:54:00.000-07:00

Where did the United States come from, when did it first form in my mind? It’s the country whose culture I have consumed more than any other: films, music, TV, books, they’ve been a cornerstone of my self and worldview. Can I imagine a world in which the dominant culture wasn’t American? Certainly not – in fact I find the thought of it quite frightening.

The first time I remember forming an idea of America (let’s call it that, though I know there’s some imperialism implicit in the phrase) is with the book Little House In The Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. My Dad claims it was earlier, watching Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book at the cinema. He said I was very frightened by the experience. Having never seen moving images before (we didn’t have a television at the time) the whole experience must have been a bit overwhelming.

But I don’t remember that, and the Jungle Book isn’t about America the place (however you might deconstruct it, though I guess it might be about imperialism? I don’t really remember). My first experience of that is with the second ‘proper’ book I ever read, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House In The Big Woods.

For decades I’ve had an interest in American conservatism, going back to Ollie North and the Iran-Contra Affair. I used to come back from a day working on a building sites in the summer of 1987, full of dust and nicotine, and enjoy watching Ollie’s endless parade of his rightness; his sheer belief in himself and his cause. I’m a person full of self-doubt, and at times self-hatred, I couldn’t help but be impressed. He was talking nonsense, but he seemed happy about it. Happiness is appealing. I guess that’s how the Nazis did so well in Germany in the 30s, they made a lot of people feel very happy. Then made them kill people.

Perhaps the origin of this interest was Wilder’s back to basics frontierswomen attitude - tinged with a racial fear of the native American - which first prompted me to be curious about this political otherness (my parents are atheist liberals, with a bit of an anarchist bent from my father). Curiously Wilder’s daughter, and thought buy some to be co-author, became one of the leading lights of American libertarianism – often mentioned in the same breath as Ayn Rand in terms of her influence.

This post could become very long….I’ll stop it there and maybe come up with a part 2.

The Booze Hotel

2011-04-02T01:19:00.000-07:00

(Note: I wrote this a few weeks ago but was too embarrassed to put it up while still struggling with the booze. I'm now firmly back on the wagon.)

I’ve been struggling with the booze again (though currently sober – honest!) – and this time I have really frightened myself. I realise I could quite easily kill myself on the drink. I’ve got some savings, they might last me a couple of years on a bottle of vodka a day. But a bottle probably is not enough in the long term, that’s what I can do now – it’s bound to go up.

I look back to The Vale of Pragmatism with some nostalgia, though I’ve no one but myself to blame. I scored some Valium off the doctor – part of me going ‘This could be useful if you ever try and come off Olanzapine, I’ll store it up’ the other part of me going ‘do not get any, it’ll only trigger substance use’. I knew in my heart of hearts that the latter voice spoke the truth. I couldn’t resist taking the Diazepam in excess and after I’d taken about 30 mg couldn’t resist starting to drink. I fucked a period of relative stability. I fucked the narrative of life being sort of okay.

So what’s this period called,? ‘Matt goes to AA to stop drowning in a sea of vodka (it’s all about the vodka with me)’, ‘Matt upsets and lies (‘I’m on the wagon *well I have been for two hours, and I drank half a bottle of vodka in an hour so I am still pissed*’) to his family and friends.’

What does the booze do? There’s part of that which gives me temporary rest from mental health problems and tinnitus, but much bigger is the madness of drinking when you are an alcoholic . I will end up in the gutter with bleeding insides if I continue to drink. And I don’t think it will take that long.

A reoccurring fantasy in this madness is that of ‘The Booze Hotel’ (which I imagine is the Holiday Inn at Old Street) – where I can go and drink myself to death. This is a sort of utopianism, a fantasy of a world without consequences – apart from one’s own death. It’s a place where the pain one would cause one’s family and friends by killing yourself aren’t there. Where there’s free wi-fi and 24 hour cable (I guess this is possible) and a Sainsbury’s round the corner for cheap Smirnoff (I’m brand loyal. Is Smirnoff Russian? Probably not, probably originally from Scunthorpe).

I also worry about the room being cleaned. Won’t it disturb my every waking moments drinking? My triple vodka for breakfast? I like drinking in bed rather than pubs, will I be forced to go to the pub while they change my sheets and towels? That could prove expensive and the whole point of The Booze Hotel is that you only have to booze, watch 24 hour BBC news, science fiction and police procedurals on the TV.

The Booze Hotel is a lie. I need to face up to this.

Fear of music and music re-found

2011-01-24T00:22:00.001-08:00

The Vale Of Pragmatism is being spread a bit thin – life seems a bit too much at the moment, something at best to be endured. This hasn’t been helped by a miserable virus, a dodgy shin (I currently walk with a limp) and a nasty acid stomach. And my wrist hurts.

But rather than dwell on this I’ll try and look to one of the positives of recent months, my rediscovery of listening to music.

One of the saddest things to occur during The 26 Months Of Hell is that I found music, once such a cause of pleasure, very difficult to listen to. *

Music seemed to laugh and scorn me, ‘this music was made by people better than you, its existence shows you up to be the little shit you surely are, listen and feel belittled.’ I also developed a fear of Damon Albarn, he became a signifier of all who were better than me – with his talent, his one time relationship with Justine Frishmann, his internationally respected status, his monkey opera. A bit bizarre, I’ve never liked his music.

Music that reminded me of hedonism was out, as I feared such activity might have contributed to my psychosis and depression, so no house or techno. Apart from when I fell of the wagon and headed down Vauxhall way…but that’s sort of another story.

Music that was overtly sexual made no sense; my libido had gone for a walk and forgotten to come home. Anything that talked about love seemed irrelevant, seemingly written for another species, one with a capacity for emotion I could no longer comprehend. Without love and sex, or at least the fantasy of them, much of the world presented to me didn’t make sense.

The result of this was that I stopped listening to music out of choice for 2 years.

The first inklings that music could one day be part of my life again was coming across - someone played it in the office at work - what has to be one of the least ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ albums of all time piece, music that seemed unable to trigger negative thought and was devoid of signifiers of my inadequacy. It was a 1955 jazz album titled Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh. Lee plays alto sax, Warne tenor.

I guess it belongs to the West Coast cool school of jazz. It is certainly devoid of the intensity of much bee-bop – though there is a Charlie Parker cover. It does swing, but is mellow and easy throughout and is probably the lease sinister album I’ve ever heard. Look at how happy they are on the album cover.

This was some months ago and slowly music has crept back in, though it’s a fairly regulated diet. Jazz features heavily, though nothing too way out or atonal. Ravi Shakar is good, and more and more classical - especially Debussy and Ravel. I like things to be more gentle and contained, or maybe just more subtle. I find most rock guitar based music un-listenable and I’m not really keen on anything with words in it. Apart from Stevie Wonder and Daryl Hall/John Oates.

But it’s good to be able to listen to music again, and maybe it’s middle age – I don’t want things to be harsh anymore. Life seems harsh enough.

Whatever, better a life with music than without.

*Just as a point of interest, during The Time Of Blakean Joy I especially enjoyed listening to The Fiery Furnaces and Afro Beat.

The Vale of Pragmatism

2011-01-16T12:33:00.000-08:00

I’ve been through The Time of Blakean Joy, stewed in The 26 Months Of Hell, experienced The Days Of Hope and now find myself in The Vale Of Pragmatism.

O well...back on the Olanzapine

2011-01-09T11:40:00.000-08:00

I’m was hoping to be medication free come the New Year, but it hasn’t worked out that way.

As December drew to a close I started to feel increasingly distressed. Everything started to go 'a bit acid’, colours were too bright and my thoughts became confused and paranoid. ‘Reality’ seemed to be becoming more and more tenuous. My tinnitus, of course, seemed increasingly frightening - making me feel like I was in some way cursed.

There’s two ways of looking at this. Firstly that the anti-psychotic medication covered up some endemic brain ‘problems’, a tendency towards what I would call a semi-psychotic state. Taking medication supposedly controls this to an extent, and when withdrawn it might be expected that an underliying condition becomes more prevalent.

The other view (and maybe they are both true to a lesser or greater extent) is that the brain becomes used to taking Olanzapine, and when you stop it goes through a bout of what is called ‘supersensitivity psychosis’. The brain's processes becoming more stable after a period of re-adjustment.

I, however, didn't seem to be becoming more stable - or didn't have the stength to tough it out - and I decided to start taking it again (5 mgs a day, which I plan to cut down to 2.5 mg). The special effects seem to of calmed down since restarting, though life is hardly a bundle of fun and there's a dull blur to everything. And Olanzapine is not something that comes without health risks, it has a reputation for killing the elderly and causing diabetes. Brilliant.

I’m not happy that my brain is an outpost for the pharmaceutical industrial complex, but I’m calling on the gods of pragmatism to send me enormous amounts of their most useful of resources, and I’m sticking to the principles laid down in The Depression Cure (the only useful book I’ve ever read on mental health, I’ll write a review of it at some point).

On the plus side I’m no longer taking Sertaline, I didn’t notice any negative effect when I ceased to consume it. I’m freaked out, but not massively depressed. I'm still able to get up in the morning, I'm holding down a job and beat my friend Brigid at tennis today. Life is hard, but I’m trying to keep it together. Some togetherness is better than none. I know what none feels like and I don't like it.

Hope, or not

2010-12-27T10:20:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to bring the narrative of the past 3 posts round to a positive end. Things have changed, up until a few days a go I thought for the better – though at the moment I feel quite uncertain.

One of the most frustrating points of this period has not being able to get up in the morning. For most of my life I’ve been a morning person, rarely up after 8 and often up at 6.30 in the summer. For 26 months I lost this ability, getting up to go to work 5 minutes before I had to leave, lying in bed till 3 or 4 of a weekend.

Then, on the 8th November (it seemed to be that specific), things began to improve. I started to be able to get up, started to be able to go for a walk in the morning before work. It happened quite quickly – there was a relative up swing to my mood. Things were still difficult, the tinnitus was still maddening, but I started to be able to do stuff, to plan to do things and carry them out. I started, 26 months after it felt like it had stopped, to have a life.

During this period I’ve also reduced my medication, first cutting out Sertaline (an SSRI I could tolerate in small doses) – to no ill effect – and then Olanzapine. I cut out the Olanzapine totally last Friday, from what should have been a sub therapeutic dose of 1.25mg a day. There shouldn’t be too much of an effect after stopping it at such a low level, but I have been on this medication for 2 and a ½ years and I’m definitely feeling a little different and uncertain since stopping it, with a tendency for dark thoughts to overcome me. Not all the time, there are times when I feel okay, but it’s prevalent enough to leave me unsettled.

Here’s hoping it will pass. I’ll try and keep busy.

More madness and misery. With vodka on the side.

2010-12-27T09:56:00.000-08:00

Having started the narrative of my madness and misery I feel the need to continue, get it off my chest, to represent in the hope it might make things better…

It’s hard to see it as narrative, most of it seems to be mulch, a constant horror ridden goo. I feel depressed, my tinnitus makes it worse, there’s no escape from it, that makes me feel more depressed. Even if the depression lifts I’m stuck with the tinnitus, which can drive people to suicide. It makes me think of suicide.

It’s the Al Qaeda tactic, the multiple attacks – it disorientates you. Not just one thing to worry about but many. I’m depressed, and I have this horrible sound in my head, plus the fabric of reality seems disturbed. The best way I can describe the ‘psychotic under belly’ is by how it changed the nature of posters on the tube – they seemed like they were about to burst into motion. The figures weren’t quite still but buzzing with a potential energy, at any point David Beckham might step down from the advert and walk among us. I can see his body primed, about to burst into movement. This becomes tiring after a month or two.

Then something else happened, I fell off the wagon for the first time in a decade.

There’s a reason I hadn’t drunk for 10 years, I’m an alcoholic. A low functioning alcoholic. An unglamorous Stella for breakfast vodka in the toilets at work booze hound.

I don’t really want to write about this too much, I find it all too embarrassing and upsetting. Drink was completely off the agenda and it came back on the agenda for a year: on, off, on, off and then totally on it. And then, a few months ago a (hopefully) full stop. I feel fairly secure in my sobriety, but not easy in it. Being around booze had ceased to bother me, now it does.

It was also very frightening. I’m still processing it. It started because the noise in my head was driving me up the wall, I couldn’t sleep so – out of the blue – I decided to go and buy three cans of Guinness. I drank them in 20 minutes and within an hour was downing double vodkas in a nightclub. A mess.

The Coming Of The Great Noise (and other tales of mentalism)

2010-12-27T01:22:00.000-08:00

Is it better to talk about things that horrify you, is a problem shared a problem halved? Or does writing about it increase the obsession, making you ruminate more on the subject. I’m going to take the risk and tell the story of The Coming Of The Great Noise. I can’t think about it anymore than I already do.

Once some friends and I were attacked by an insane ram, it was a traumatising and frightening experience – and in the days that followed we told the story over and over again, making sense of it, giving the random horror of the event some form and structure. The ‘Great Noise’ isn’t an event, an action that has come and passed, it’s a constant minute-by-minute problem – with me all the time. I try and come up with strategies to deal with it but so far am making little progress. So maybe writing about it in some detail will help, making a story will help change the meaning of the story’s object.

I’ve written about tinnitus before, about how I’d had it since I was young man, and had become completely habituated to it (i.e. it didn’t bother me at all) and that my main frustration with was that it prevented my from wearing headphones. I was quite proud of how I lived with my tinnitus and had the tale down pat of how I had got used to it. ‘You don’t focus on the sensation in you big toe all the time, why would you listen to the sound in your ears all the time. You just let it become part of the whole rather than a point of focus. You could become obsessed with the sensation in you big toe, constantly thinking about how the sock felt next to it, but it would take some effort and probably drive you mad in the process.’

Occasionally it would get worse, if I had a cold or a virus, but it always fairly quickly went back to ‘normal’.

And then the Great Noise came, at the worse possible time. But you need some context to understand this.

In the summer of 2008 I was diagnosed as having ‘probable bi-polar 2’ after a bout of hypomania. On a sensory level everything got ‘turned up’, London assumed a certain Blakean grandeur – quite pleasant in many ways. In the spirit of adventure I took myself off the local psychiatric hospital and they prescribed me the anti-psychoticOlanzapine. After a few weeks things started to calm down and I thought I could chalk it up as one of life’s more interesting experiences. Similar things had happened to me before, though nothing quite so pronounced.

About seven weeks after the start of the hypomania I fell, in the space of just a few days, into an almost comically deep depression. As the weeks went by and it didn’t shift I took myself to the doctors, he recommended the SSRI anti-depressant Citalopram to be taken alongside the Olanzapine. I took it for six weeks but it made me feel very confused, something seemed profoundly wrong with the world; reality was a fragile and sickly construct behind which horror waited. I stopped taking it and returned to the GPs, the doctor suggested I tried another SSRI (‘they’ll be something out there that can help you’), Fluoxetine (Prozac) this time. A similar effect: paranoia and disturbed feelings, very unpleasant. I stopped taking it and, really not knowing what else to do, returned to the GP. A locum decided to refer me to back to the local psychiatric hospital’s outreach team. An appointment was made for early January.

Christmas passed, I worried my family and my state of mind continued – severe depression and suicidal ideation with a nasty psychotic underbelly. A week after Xmas I saw the hospital doctor, she listened to my story, and recommended the tri-cyclic anti-depressant Clomipramine. Clutching at straws and feeling desperate I agreed to give them a go. It was a mistake.

Within a few days of taking the new pills the volume of my tinnitus increased enormously, going from a single tone to a multi-tonal sound. It was so loud that I could hear it over the tube. I stopped taking the medication (whose side effects I later found out can include tinnitus), and which was, in any case, making me feel pretty awful – but the increase in volume and the change in form stayed. The Great Noise was upon me. It seemed like the worse thing that could possibly happen.

(Coming Up: 26 months of hell, my descent into alcoholism and some things I really don’t like about chronic tinnitus)

Coping With Chronic Tinnitus – The Buddha Versus Thomas Becket

2010-12-22T14:15:00.000-08:00

My tinnitus is appalling at the moment, the high-pitched tone akin to some sort of torture. I wake up in the morning and it’s the first thing I’m aware of, when I fall asleep it’s the final thing on my mind. It’s very distressing - although my mental health is the best it’s been in several years, and I’m almost off anti-psychotic medication. I don’t know what the way forward is. It feels like my life will always have an element of horror to it while the ‘noise within’ continues at this level.

I occasionally buy self-help books, though I rarely get past the first ten pages. The Mindful Manifesto (a book which looks at the use of Buddhist style meditation as a tool for good mental health) was no different. It made me angry and upset. The tinnitus is at such a loud level it makes any form of meditation impossible, something at the core at this books programme for personal change. Once, while I had Tinnitus 1.0 (which was mild and that I completely habituated to) I meditated for 15 minutes a day for a month. It made sense, I did feel more ‘there’ and full of a greater sense of well being. Magic! But the current noise (Tinnitus 2.0) is too loud for that. I constantly strive for distraction, something that takes my mind off what’s happening in my head. I don’t want to be self aware, because at the core of my sensory perception is this terrible noise. This book seemed to scorn me, rubbing salt into my already wounded neurology.

What could be worse than this sound? To help define this I play ‘what would I swap to get rid of the tinnitus’ games. Would I lose a hand if it meant relief from the sound? A foot? A leg? I know these ruminative thoughts do me no good, but it’s hard not to get stuck in them.

What about a religious way of thinking about the noise? If I was a monk (I’m an atheist, but one who believes in the reality of religious experience) might I see tinnitus as a test of my faith in God? A torture put upon me to see if I am true believer? I wonder if tinnitus might be the primary torture in Hell? Something visited upon everyone as a matter of course, before the red-hot pokers up the bum.

I was watching a documentary on Thomas Becket the other day. Thomas was killed by some of Henry II’s knights in 1170, the famed Murder In The Cathedral. As the monks prepared his body for burial they found he was wearing a hair shirt, populated by lice and other such things. Thomas went on to become a famous martyr and was canonized three years later. Self-injuring clothing only did his reputation good.

I draw some hope from this. Surely the constant irritation of a hair shirt, containing its own micro-ecology of creepy crawlies, must be worse than chronic tinnitus? Okay, so it’s a choice, your wearing it as a form of penance, but somehow the perversion of it gives me hope that I will one day learn to cope with this horrible and intrusive sound.

Writing about it helps, I feel in a much more positive state of mind than when I started typing this. I’ll try and write some more posts about it over the next few weeks. The story of ‘The Coming Of The Great Noise’.

My Favourite Story

2010-12-03T11:35:00.000-08:00

My favourite story – I think it’s from the medieval era - is about the dog heads. There was rumoured to be a land, somewhere in the far away east, where there were villages full of beings with the head of a dog and the body of a human. Religious scholars spent long hours wondering if these creatures had a soul, if so they would have a place in heaven and be worthy of conversion to Christianity. It was eventually decided they did have souls, because they lived in villages and worked the land and no mere beast would be capable of such things.

When European travellers eventually reached China they couldn’t see any sign of the fabled man/beasts and they asked the locals if they had heard of the dog heads, ‘O yes’ they replied ‘We’ve heard of them, they live way out to the west’.

The Land of Cockaigne

2010-07-04T13:42:00.001-07:00

Another post about fantasy.

In medieval times there existed the fantasy of The Land Of Cockaigne, a mythical land of plenty in which food is available in abundance, where ‘roasted pigs wander about with knives in their backs to make carving easy, where grilled geese fly directly into one's mouth, where cooked fish jump out of the water and land at one's feet’. Hunger featured heavily in the life of the medieval peasant.

Depression and psychosis have lead to thoughts of my own Land of Cockaigne; I fantasize about a middle-class archetype of happiness – a wholesome world far removed from my own state of mind. Where people have careers and engage with their work, their jobs being an expression of identity and aspiration. Where homes - probably bought for too much money - become treasured places, filled with a collection of loved objects. Where people don’t fuck up on booze and drugs (but have good sex), where suicide and self-injury are something read about in novels rather than experienced in real life. It’s not a life of immense wealth, but it makes sense, hard work has rewards and stability is possible. I wrote, briefly, about this world here.

TV is full of this fantasy place, cooking programs especially (some hangover from the Middle Ages?); River Cottage, Jamie Oliver – there’s no desperation on display in these shows. Friends, I can watch the re-runs for hours – seeing problems been resolved through the application of a little reason, a moments’ revelation making all well.

Fantasy Future

2010-06-14T14:59:00.000-07:00

The other day Lucy reminded me of our plans for a TV game show called Fantasy Future. In some ways it was a product of the go getting noughties, a time when everyone could, apparently, achieve their goals – especially as it was the age in which we saw ‘an end to boom and bust economics’. The economy could look after its self; people could devote themselves to fulfilling their dreams and expressing themselves without fear of macro economic collapse.

The format would be quiet simple. You apply to have your fantasy future fulfilled by been given a £10,000 grant, which -if chosen- you then have 3 months to spend. At the end of the 3 months Lucy and I meet up with you to see if you have fulfilled your dream (presumably a camera crew had been following your around), if you haven't you are deemed a ‘fantasy failure’, if you succeed we have a party and proclaim you to be a ‘fantasy success’. We sing cheesy jingles as we judge you.

It could only work if people’s fantasies were quite modest, based on doing something rather than achieving some formal recognition of their talents. Struggling artist/musician types would be the best contestants. A great project is always round the corner, if only? This would be a way of helping them achieve their dreams of sending some songs to a record label, reading their poetry at a festival, or whatever.

The show would work best, and be at it’s most cruel, when it exposed chronic procrastinators. As they came up with reasons they hadn’t finished their demo Lucy and I would cheep ‘There’s always an excuse not to do’. We would become hated figures for our cruelty, our wicked put downs...people would spit at us in the street.

I’m not sure if I could stand being reviled. Maybe it would be better if it was presented by someone else, maybe by Charlie Brooker and Konnie Huq. They look like they could cope with being hated; they’ve got love on their side.

Transcendence By Water

2010-05-02T13:45:00.000-07:00

I still can’t finish my ‘Madness and Misery’ (subtitle ‘A tale of hypomania, psychotic depression and chronic tinnitus’) special, but would like to report that things do seem to be getting a little better. Yesterday I had a wonderful day by the sea in Brighton with Pete, Lucy, Nigel, Sarah and Ben. The most complete and satisfying day I’ve had in a very long time. We did all the great Brighton things: eat fish 'n' chips, rode the log flume, sat outside a trendy pub, killed zombies and generally talked nonsense, laughed and took the piss. And went to see a performance of Brian Eno’s Apollo at the Dome. Most cosmic.

So instead of the darkside I’m reminded, partly by being by the sea, of two events of great joy in my life – both of which involved water, one ambulant, one of enforced immobility.

The first time was on a beach in Tarifa in Southern Spain, where I found myself in November 1988, during a couple of months I was spending getting drunk in the Iberian Peninsula. It was becoming dark as I wondered down to the beach. I walked West, Africa in the distance across the Straits of Gibraltar. The landscape was lit by the blink of a lighthouse, becoming a twinkle the further I walked along the beach. I seemed to walk for a long time, smoking cigarettes and paddling in the sea, and felt amazed by the power of being alive - of being a person in the world. The more I walked along the beach the stronger the feeling became, until there came a time when it was right to turn around and return to the town.

The second time was many years later, in July 2003. Once again in Spain, but this time in the Pyrenees, the Picos Encantados. I was on a group-walking holiday with my Dad, but had twisted my ankle and was resting at the hotel for the day. There was a river running by the hotel and I sat by it, reading a book about the great geologist William Smith and dipping my foot in the cold mountain water to reduce the swelling. It should have been a day of frustration, missing out on a day in the beautiful Picos. But it wasn’t, it was wonderful. As the hours passed the sound of the river become more and more complex, my ears able to pick out the individual strands of sound that came from the tumbling water.

Hard to write about these things without sounding a bit of a tosser.

Malcolm Pedigree: The Golf Detective

2010-04-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

[I found this 'conceptual framework' in an old file from a decade ago, but thought I'd post it as golf is so much part of the zeitgeist at the moment, what with The Masters and Tiger Woods...]

THE CONCEPT
A golf club is perfect for hitting with, whether you hit golf balls or heads is purely a matter of taste.

NOVELS IN THE SERIES
Death at the Nineteenth Hole
A Hole in Death
Tee Time
Clubbed to Death

REVIEWS FOR DEATH AT THE NINETEENTH HOLE
“At last, in Malcolm Pedigree, we have a hero for the modern age” Hunting, Fishing and Golfing Magazine
“A Dick Francis for the golfing classes” The Telegraph
“Conrad has grasped more than any other writer the links between alienation, otherness, golf and the new economy. Read and see the world anew.” Terry Eagleton, TLS.
“Few men grasp the intricacies of female sexuality with the insight of Mr.Conrad” Marie Clare

REVIEW FOR CLUBBED TO DEATH
"After the disappointment of Tee Time Harvey’s back on form with the magnificent Clubbed to Death. Malcolm Pedigree may have cut out the booze, but he certainly hasn’t lost his taste for girls, guns and holes in one” Daily Mail

Of Madness and Mice

2010-04-06T14:25:00.000-07:00

I keep on trying to write a post about my life over the past 20 months, a tale of hypomania, psychotic depression and chronic tinnitus - a ‘Madness and Misery’ special. But I can’t quite finish it. It’s too depressing.

So instead I’m going to muse on a more pressing, or at least a less intractable, problem - the plague of mice that have invaded Slack Towers. It started with the occasional sighting and the odd bit of mouse shit on the kitchen stove. We put out the mousetraps, and have occasionally caught one, their brains mashed out by the steel bar of the trap. It’s down to me to dispose of it - my flatmate’s squeamish - though I confess I throw the mousetrap out with the mouse.

Is this decadent? Should I peel the near-decapitated mouse off the trap? Probably. My Dad, who’s from the 1940s, proudly showed me his ‘Little Nipper’ trap this weekend, bragging about how many mice it had killed over the years. Disposable fashion, disposable mouse traps. I’m a man of my times.

But the mousetraps are not proving effective, the mice seem to be populating the house at an ever more rapid rate. They’re on the stairs, in the bedrooms, scampering across the kitchen floor. And they’re becoming more brazen, happy to run about in front of us, barely acknowledging our presence. We need a more aggressive strategy to bring about their demise.

One possibility is the glue trap, a sticky pad to which the mouse gets stuck. You then have to dispose of the still live mouse. Fortunately, I’m from the countryside. Place the mouse in a plastic bag, seal it and jump up and down on the bag. Then throw it in the bin. Ferreting was a feature of my childhood.

But when talking about this with my work colleagues they felt this was unnecessarily cruel, and suggested poison as an alternative. I’m not sure if this is any better, what effect does the poison have? Is it a pleasant ‘Ooo, I feel really sleepy, just time for a nap …’ mellow death, or a ‘Arghh! My guts feel like I’ve eaten barbed wire…’ long drawn out pain ridden death. No one seemed to know the answer. And do they smell as they rot, stinking out the house from underneath the floorboards? Pete thought that they don’t have enough liquid in them to putrefy, that they just dry out. I’ve no idea if this is true or not.

Some Thoughts On Washing

2010-01-31T04:14:00.000-08:00

Should I have a wash tonight? It’s been four days since I last had one, and I have been cycling a lot. But…can I really be bothered? It’s such a hassle – all that getting wet, soaping up, drying down. And I don’t seem to smell, I change my underpants and socks every day – surely a bit of Lynx Africa under the armpits will be enough. I’ll leave it till tomorrow.

I know for many it’s shocking, this lack of commitment to daily washing (I’m a twice a week a man, well, most weeks). Some people seem outraged if you don’t shower everyday, my flat mate wouldn’t leave the house without having one. But I know I’m not alone, and none of the people I know who wash less than once a day seem to smell.

There’s an episode of Rising Damp in which Rigsby claims ‘I have a bath every Friday, whether I need it or not’ – it’s said for humorous effect, but he has a point. A good friend of mine, a nurse, showers once every two weeks in the winter. He smells fine.

When I was a child it seemed that Sunday was bath day (my brother, Dad and me sharing the water, and often the bath), and anything more seemed optional - more of an indulgent leisure activity than a necessity.

The French wash much less than the English (I can’t actually find the statistics, but there out there somewhere) – and they're the world’s sexiest people, apparently.

Maybe we should blame the obsession with cleaning on the Romans, with their belief in the civilising power of baths - winning over the ruling classes of conquered nations with the ancient world's equivalent of Radox and Head and Shoulders. Or maybe its the puritans from the other side of the Atlantic, cleanliness been seen as next to Godliness. They’re mad for the showers stateside.

I’m not in anyway suggesting that we should all stop washing and start to smell, just questioning whether it makes that much difference to our personal hygiene if we don’t bath or shower every day (or two, or three). I understand that there are physiological differences between men and women, but that’s what the bidet is for. In fact, the French invented it, presumably to avoid having a bath or a shower.

And the green issue? All that washing - terrible waste of resources.

It’s always possible people are lying about how much they wash, but I suspect not. Their looks of disgust run too deep when I tell them of my occasional washing habits. They probably call me ‘the stinky one’ behind my back...

Film: The International

2010-01-17T04:38:00.000-08:00

I find it hard to follow the plot of this sort of thriller, but I think it runs like this; bankers are making money out of international conflict, selling weapons and profiting from the debt they get countries into. Clive Owen (playing an Interpol agent) and Naomi Watts (playing some sort of New York lawyer working for the US government. A DA?) are trying to expose their lies and murderous corruption. The standard ‘there’s a bunch of conniving male bastards in charge of the world’ thing. Bankers, no one likes them, they don’t care.

So I end up watching the scenery of the film quite a lot, and here I find the film is much more interesting. The architecture is the thing. Much of the first half of the film takes place in Berlin and Milan – where we frequently see characters belittled by the size of corporate modernist architecture, the individual tiny in front of the enormity of the industrial and banking complex. The film then shifts it’s focus to New York, where’s there’s a fabulous shoot out in the galleries of the Guggenheim, iconic modernist architecture (and the revolutionary hope of the twentieth century?) is shot through with holes, machine guns firing to the backdrop of an enormous video instillation (was this an actual work of art? Or did they make something ‘in the style of something which might be at the Guggenheim’?).

The film ends in Istanbul, in its twisty ancient streets and finally on it’s rooftops. The clean lines of modernism have been replaced by the complexity of the past. We are heavy with the bloodiness of our history. There’s nothing new in the horror of man’s exploitation of man, the capital of Turkey and the former Ottoman emperor is an appropriate symbol of this.

I’m not entirely sure if I buy all this – I might be reading a little too much into it, but watching the background kept me entertained while the plot jumped about. And when I think about it, watching the background is one of the great pleasures of cinema, that and the clothes.

Kate smiled...

2009-05-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

Kate smiled as she peeled the potatoes, looking forward to the rich mash she would soon be serving up on her kitchen table. Her two children, Ruby and Louis, loved potatoes – though would probably be less impressed by the lamb chops. Not to worry, her husband Peter adored them and would happily consume whatever the children left.

She had no regrets about her new life in the country. Occasionally she would smile about past times in London, the men, the clothes, the occasional drug use. And the dancing, she did miss the dancing. But she was a great believer that properly saying goodbye to things was the best way of keeping life fresh and meaningful. It was a maxim that had stood her in good stead over the years. The important thing was to remember to say hello to something new.

Peter worked in the city, nothing too fancy – statistical analysis. It brought in a steady wage of a £100,000 a year…a lot, she guessed, but by no means a grotesque amount. Despite the recession he seemed fairly sure his job would survive – people still needed to know what the figures meant, perhaps more so now than ever.

She peeled each potato till it was gleaming white, then placed it in a pan which was half full of cold water. She worked over a colander, so when she was finished she could quickly transfer the content to the compost barrel just to the left of the kitchen door. If there was any mash left over they could fry it up for breakfast and have it with beans and egg. It was Saturday tomorrow and they usually had a fry up to get the weekend off to a good start.

Peter had just rung confirming that he’d got on the earlier train so they could all eat together; she hoped to have the food ready as soon as he got in. In order to stop the grill getting too dirty she decided to cook the chops in the oven – it took a bit longer but, in her opinion, made the meat more juicy.

Music Night

2009-05-17T14:18:00.000-07:00

Friday night was free music night round Pete’s, I’d been looking forward to it all week. On this occasion we were going to be joined by our friend Garuda, who’d come over from Kilburn on the train.

The evening started well with Peter serving up some of his legendary vegetarian lasagne - it was rich and creamy with a béchamel sauce, one of the few things he’d learnt to make during a brief stint at catering college in the early 80s. He then made some coffee and passed round a joint, nothing heavy (we were all of an age that skunk gave us palpitations) – some nice Moroccan he’d got off Andy the drummer.

Then proceedings began. Garuda got out his guitar, linking it up to a daunting set of effects, six pedals in total. I linked my Korg beat box to the mixer and fiddled about with some loops I’d made earlier. Pete set up the recording microphone and started to noodle on his synth, and then started grumbling that he didn’t want to play his electric bass ‘because it wasn’t right’. He often took a dislike to one of his various instruments so we ignored him; he’d probably change his mind later.

‘Are we ready’, I asked. Pete gave a thumbs up while G asked if we minded if he took his shirt off…a strange request as we were in South Tottenham on a winters night, but it seemed in the spirit of things, so we not only agreed but decided to take our shirts off too.

We started. Some open tuned droning form the guitar, a restrained wash from the synthesizer. I made an unobtrusive beat, gently slipping it in during a lull in the ambient noodling; trying to keep with the organic groove they seemed to be exploring. It was nice to make…pleasing.

After about 10 minutes the guitar playing became more frantic, larger and more dominant. I tried to respond by making my rhythm more aggressive, harder and with more attack. Pete had changed to electric bass, anchoring everything down with a monotonous drone.

It was then that I noticed a shadow growing over me; something was cutting out the light…I glanced up wondering if Pete was standing close in an attempt to create some rhythm section unity.

But it wasn’t Pete, because there, hovering in the middle of the room, powered by an enormous set of wings was Garuda – playing his Les Paul like nothing else mattered in the world. A sight both monstrous and beautiful. Pete was gawping too, though still managing to play steadily beneath the guitarist’s baroque offerings.

I guess we could of put down our instruments there and then, calling a halt and demanding an explanation; but somehow it seemed to make more sense to continue playing – what exactly were we going to say? ‘Sorry G, we just thought it was a nick name – we didn’t realise that you could actually turn into a winged beast’, no, it made much more sense to continue creating.

And how we played! I reigned in my sound for a moment, and then launched into a furious break beat concoction, laying down layer after layer of shuddering rhythm. Pete was looping his bass now, leaving it to run and producing mountains of squelch and groan from his keyboard.

And Garuda? Now hovering low over his equipment he was playing as if his half human/half bird life depended on it, twisting strings, e-bowing like a mutha, pressing buttons and turning knobs, it sounded like the soundtrack to the creation of the universe!

It was then that I started to feel an acute pain from the area of my shoulder blades, a sort of tearing and ripping sensation, as if the flesh itself was transforming. In agony I turned to Peter to see a look of anguish on his face…as he turned towards his keyboard I looked at his back, and there, growing out of his shoulder blades was a small set of leathery wings. I could only presume that the same grotesque transformation was taking place in my own body.

And these wings were not the magnificent flight making wings of our guitarist, they were weak and weedy, token flaps of leathery flesh, barely 4 inches across. Painful to grow, but useless for flight.

It was all becoming too much, the pain of the growths, the frantic noise, I wasn’t sure how much longer I could continue. I stripped back the beats, slowed the tempo, hoping somehow we could reverse our ghastly metamorphosis. Pete stopped the bass loops and started to make the synth sounds become more harmonic and gentle, subtly hinting to the guitarist that a more sensitive and dub like ambience may be best for all concerned.

At first he seemed not to be listening, sometimes hovering, sometime crouching over his pedals, he continued to make a grand and monstrous racket, shredding his guitar strings with abandon.

But then he slowly began to respond to our more spacious landscape, playing with a gentle lyricism, embellishing the groove rather then dominating it. And as he did so, his wings began to droop and fall, to the point where they no longer filled the room, and seemed to be sinking back inside him.

I watched what I could feel happening to me happen on Pete’s back. The leathery wings seemed to crack and fade, wilting as if they were petals on a flower. This time the sensation was less painful, though strange – slowly our fleshy extensions withdrew back to wherever they had come from.

The music calmed, everyone gently winding down the operation…till I was left with a faint beat I twisted and turned into gentle oblivion.

Pete and I looked at each other, still unnerved by the whole experience. Garuda lent forward and smiled, ‘Should we listen back to it?’

Links for 08/03/2008:

2008-03-08T11:56:00.000-08:00

Crunchy Cons: The New Consevative American Counter Culture And The Return To Its Roots A review of a book about the hippy/libertarian/conservative tendency in the US. It's the microtrend I've been predicting for years in the UK, though it never seems to quite happen (mind you the 'Greening of the Tory party' may be the start of something). Also see A Crunchy Con Manifesto.

Liberal Facism Another book, a NYT bestseller, that will be giving Nic Cohen a warm glow inside. Reminds me of Norman Tebbit at his funniest, 'People often say Hitler was right wing, but the key is in the name of his party, 'National Socialist...' '

'Someone Has To Start Wondering What the F Is Going On'An interview with Ed Burns, the co-creator of HBO's Baltimore crime epic The Wire, focusing on the criminalization of Amerika's black community. Just say no to Manichaeism!

William F. Buckley Jnr The father of modern American conservatism, is dead. Don't know who he is? This Youtube interview with him and Noam Chomsky/Woody Allen should give you an idea.

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business Let's get down to the latest pop-enconmic buzz word/pub rant/£500 a-head seminar. Chris 'Long Tail' Anderson gives us a taster of next year's must read business book. Cheery, engaging and possibly true.

The Sound of Bloody Nothing

2008-03-02T17:36:00.000-08:00

Look at them sitting there, silent and dumb – pretending to work. I despise them for their passiveness, their mute absorption. Like they’re really working - sitting there listening to Britney, Ghostface Killah, KT Tunstall, Miles Davis, god knows what. Working? They’re just having a laugh.

‘It’s part of our job, it is a music website’, they say, tapping their fingers on the desk, singing tunelessly under their roll-up smeared breaths. Idiots.

But, to be honest, I mainly despise them because I can’t join them. If I wear headphones I go mad. I can’t sleep, I become distracted and my life becomes miserable. Believe me, I’ve tried. But the distress it causes, it just isn’t worth it.

In an age where the vast majority of people’s listening is done under ‘phones, I am stuck in the pre-walkman days.

On my way home I think, ‘tonight I will listen to some music, some nice old skool jungle perhaps’ – and I go home and do just that. For everyone else it’s a stroke of the i-pod and they’re away. I’m an audio dinosaur.

There is a reason. I’ve had tinnitus for all of my adult life, damage to my left ear caused not by sticking my head in bass bins, but a nasty bout of mastoiditis when I was 20.

It was maddening at first, but as the years passed I got used to it and hardly hear it nowadays. BUT if I listen to music on headphones (and yes I have tried turning the balance to the other ear, it still happens) my brain tunes into the high-pitched sound in my left ear and magnifies the sound many times over, and drives me up the wall. The ENT doctor did explain it to me in technical terms – but the long and the short of it is I just can’t wear the bloody things.

Which means I feel lonely; sitting in the office while everyone else is busy expanding their music knowledge, checking out the hip young bands they’ve read about in London Lite - leaving me with the sound of typing as my only entertainment, surrounded by a sea of faces basking in a personalised audio paradise.

Can you be a music fan in the modern age and not wear headphones? I just can’t put the hours in. I listen to music for about 10 hours a week - about an hour each night, and about 5 at the weekend. It’s not enough. My colleagues must be putting in a good 6 hours before they even finish work…

And it’s going to get worse. With digital download this, bit torrent that, podcasts being beamed up your arse by Stuart bloody Maconie…soon no one will be talking. They’ll all be locked away behind wireless ear buds, grinning to themselves, watching their screen and listening to ‘their playlists’.

You can see where it’s leading. There I will be – god willing - in the old people’s home, gazing into the middle distance, while everyone else is locked into their personalised entertainment systems. No time to talk to me about Curly Wurlys, or who was the best looking one out of ABBA*. They’ll be too busy listening to ‘Great Advert Jingles from the 70s’ and highlights from Eurovision’s of yesteryear. ON THEIR FRACKING HEADPHONES…

*Benny

TV in the 70s

2007-11-08T10:20:00.000-08:00

It was our duty to watch television in the 1970s, no sane person could ever question its power. There wasn’t much of it and it defined childhood evenings completely. It was good for us, it told us things and made us think about the future. It made the world a better place. Adults would occasionally talk about ‘square eyes’ and ‘all this American shit’, but they were just being ignorant.

And there are a few TV memories that really stand out.

I’d had a fight with my younger brother at school, and it was clear I was going to be in trouble with my parents that evening. Ashamed and full of dread, I went and hid in the woods.

Then I remembered that The 6 Million Dollar Man (it was cheap to become a cyborg in those days) was on later, and I knew that any upset would be over by then. So I just had to put up and shut up, accept my fate and look forward to the time when Steve Austin would run across the screen in slow motion to the ‘derderderderrrrrr’ theme music, and all would be well. And it was.

My Grandma Amy was a great telly watcher. She had a colour model, with an enormous remote control. It only had two buttons (on and off, and channel changer), and you had to press down really hard to get them to work. It was like operating an enormous cigarette lighter.

Not that Amy used a lighter for her constant stream of Embassy No6; Swan-Vesta matches were her tool of ignition. She also liked Quality Street confectionary, lots of whisky in her tea at 11am, and Advocat snowballs. She was a bit of an old soak.

And a devotee of Coronation Street, she loved that show! She would attempt to use it as moral compass to explain the evils of ‘loose women’ to me, infact I think she was trying to put me off women all together. ‘See that Bet – she’s as common as muck…avoid her type’: light another fag, swig another drink, suck on another chocolate. Grandma, for no reason that I could discern, liked to think of herself as a cut above.

My first awareness of the ‘nuclear threat’ came through the Man From Atlantis. The web footed Patrick Duffy was saving the world from self-destruction, and at one point found himself in a bunker that contained a map showing the paths nuclear missiles would take to destroy the planet’s population centres. I laughed and said to my mum, ‘As if there could ever be bombs aimed at cities’ – she explained the reality of the situation, and the fear of nuclear apocalypse became firmly established in my mind.

But I haven’t had a TV for a couple of years now, and I can’t say I miss it. Video games are the new moral platform for the young, my friend’s teenage children often look as me with exasperation when I explain that I haven’t got a games console, “but why?” – surely I know it’s good for me? Like reading and TV used to be, a universal given that only fools could deny themselves.

I think they’re probably right.

JC Superstar

2007-10-25T17:02:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Clarkson has been in the news a bit of recent - a new series of Top Gear, a new book out - and it reminded me of a poem I'd written a couple of years back in which he features. It was part of of a triptych about different forms of love, in this case 'encountered love'.

Jeremy,
My Love

You showed me what I wanted
That time you picked me up in your big car
And offered me a Benson
Breaking down the barrier of the years
Making me flirt a little

I liked the way you talked
How you loved the engine and its music
Teaching me to listen
'It's beautiful' you said, and I knew that it was meant for me

You talked about your family
With sincere and steady love
Never once making me doubt what came first

So I didn't mind
When you stopped
The car
And looked at me, to go

We'd had our time, not touching
But being so close

The Killing of Chinese Bookie, a film by John Cassavetes (contains spoilers)

2007-09-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

This is what I think it’s about…

It’s about a man who isn’t happy with what he’s good at. He wants to be a good gambler – he’s not, it ruins him. He wants to be a creative, the inspired artistic director of his strip shows – but the results are just bizarre. He watches and obsesses about the choreographed pieces with the intensity of an opera maestro. Even while traveling to the murder he rings the club, wanting to know which bit of the performance is currently playing (and being confounded when the barman clearly has no idea of the narrative on the stage). Much of the original 1976 cut of the movie is taken up by Cosmo watching the painful performances.

The only time he seems competent and in control is during the killing of the ‘chinese bookie’ (really a heavily guarded crime lord). The mobsters who have set him up presume he will be killed in the process, and are visibly shocked when he not only succeeds, but survives. They send their flunkies out to kill him, but they are, in Cosmo’s own words, ‘amateurs’…and it’s true, despite taking a bullet, he makes them look foolish. Maybe he was once in the army, though such a past is never referred to.

But he doesn’t run, he returns to the bar. Watching the girls and refusing to get medical help for the bullet wound to his stomach. He’s good a killing, but he wants to be an artist, and he wants to be among what he sees as his creation. Cosmo knows being there means certain death, which he embraces as he stands outside the club in the films final shot. Welcoming, worried and waiting.

The Old Men In The Woods

2007-08-17T17:28:00.000-07:00

The old men had lived in the woods for as long as I could remember. My mother says it must be at least 30 years since they first appeared,‘What do you call them, aesthetics, aesthetes…I don’t know, but they were laughing at courting couples when I was first with your Dad…’

There were three of them. No one knew their names. They were grey haired with bushy thick eye brows and beards sprouting from their ears. But strong looking, wiry. You felt, despite their age, if they got hold of you they would keep you for as long as they cared.

I'd heard of other similar groups, though not nearby. Rich men, probably with big families and houses, who'd tired of life in the cities and decided to…I wasn’t quite sure what they'd decided. Only that they seemed certain that they were right, and maintained an air of superiority towards the people from the village.

My future oppression

2007-08-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

It’s 2038. I’m 72 and broke. My pension is worth nothing and I’ve never owned my own home. I cue up outside the ‘film’ studios everyday, hoping that I will be the one who gets chosen. The producers look us up and down with an expert eye, their researchers constantly feed back to them the latest fashionable fetishes from Peking and Mumbai - they know exactly what they’re looking for. If skinny baldies are in, I’ll earn enough to feed myself for a week. If bearded fatties are the taste of the day, I’m going to be very hungry.

Occasionally I get picked, taken into the studio and given a fig roll and some tea. Then it’s straight on to the performance. Last time I was a bank manager, refusing a young Indian man a loan. The set and suits we wore suggested the late 1980s. By the end of the story I have – of course – agreed to give him the loan, and have been given a good ‘seeing to’ for my troubles. It’s violent, but we both know we’re acting.

The storylines are always pretty much the same. At some point in the past, when Britain was more than a tourist stop over, I get uppity with a man from India or the Far East. The tables are turned, I am shown what’s for – and that’s it. But there’s a massive market for this stuff, ‘post-imperial pornographic retribution’ I once heard it described as. Whatever…it’s better than starving.

Are we genetically programmed to sneer at alpha males?

2007-08-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I was chatting to a Daily Telegraph reading acquaintance, and he brought up the old bugbear of sports day. He’d been reading about how sports days had been banned in some over sensitive ciabatta gargling schools…because they didn’t want people to feel upset or envious of people who won the races, jumps, welly throwing, whatever. This was ‘arrant nonsense’ he declared…

I couldn’t of agreed more. As I remember - did anyone care who won the 100 meters sprint other than the people who were running it? Did anyone think lesser of himself for not competing in the triple jump? The majority found the whole idea of athletic involvement absurd…I imagine the same is even more true today than it was 25 years ago.

I recently did some work for a multinational – admittedly at a fairly low level. But I couldn’t help but be surprised by how keen, driven and talented people were sneered at. Good at their job, for sure…but not worthy of respect or admiration.

Could there be a 'Darwinian' reason for this, is there an evolutionary advantage in sneering at athletic and successful people? What’s the evolutionary advantage in thinking that the alpha male who wins the fight, leads the tribe, is in anyway better than you? None. You’re not going to take him on on his own turf, your going to show him respect but, behind his back, you think he's an idiot. Surely thinking less of him makes you feel happier and boosts your chance of evolutionary success.

More cheerful, more sperm; better jokes, more sex…the piss taking gene? It’s got to give you a genetic edge…

All The President's Men

2007-03-21T12:13:00.000-07:00

I’ve been watching a lot of Robert Altman films of recent – a director with little (if any!) interest in plot, but an intense interest in the atmosphere and ‘feel’ of a film. In the end I could only watch this film to the end by trying to approach it in the same way. Hell, the President sure was guilty, we all know that (apart from, maybe, Conrad Black) – but the minutiae of why is too much for the medium of film…apart from the essential point, that Nixon used his office to investigate the Democrat party, and that was a bad thing for America.

Unfortunately what is left outside the plot is thin pickings, vibe and character is definitely not director Pakula’s focus. Leaving me with little more than an admiration for American women’s clothing of the time, a concern for the future health of Carl Bernstein’s lungs, and a desire to do some typing on an old school electric typewriter.