Ingenious Ways of Wasting Time

2010-05-22T14:14:00.002+02:00

Podcast: Climate skepticism, Sarah Palin, waterbeds

Looking for acerbic wit, political banter and arguments about how certain words should be pronounced? Then check out the new podcast from yours truly and author Saci Lloyd, in which we discuss climate skeptics, Sara Palin and some other incidental nonsense.

We're Green and a bit Red and we don't know how or why popcorn happens. Go on, press play – this will be a regular thing.

Saci Lloyd, author of Carbon Diaries 2015 and 2017, talks with Graham Land about the environment, politics and other sillier topics. Hopefully it's a laugh.

Join the Facebook group for the podcast, aka 'El Pod of Cast'. More podcasts coming soon!

by Graham Land

Additional resources:

Saci Lloyd

Carbon Diaries

http://ia331213.us.archive.org/0/items/ClimateSkepticismSarahPalinWaterbeds/ClimateSkepticismPalinWaterbeds.mp3

2009-03-22T19:08:00.006+01:00

Four Legs Good...

austerity, cleanliness, compassion and truthfulness

This is the XO. Though I no longer consider myself religious, even in the more liberal use of the term, I, like the majority of humanity, have been influenced by both evangelical and philosophical features of religion.

The traits mentioned in the subtitle are collectively referred to in the Vedas as the "four legs of religion", alternately: austerity, purity, mercy, and truth or truthfulness, austerity, mercy and charity, etc. I prefer the first version as it encapsulates a very clever litmus test for the God-fearing, holy, moral, saintly, or altruistic humanists among us. Any way you slice it, it is a brilliant crystallization of qualities one should judge any "religious" person's sincerity against and four pretty great things to strive for, whoever you are. Without all of these characteristics, anyone professing credibility in the context of religion simply cannot "stand".

Pearls before swine: Do we not amuse you?

Now on with how this is relevant (albeit tenuously so) to the biggest current pop culture event and I of course mean (what else?) the final episode of Battlestar Galactica. Some have criticized the religious, mystical elements of this finale as cop-outs in relation to the "science" aspect of this shining example of science fiction. Well, Battlestar was never typical sci fi, and if you listen to its creators and watch the show, you'll see that it was always "all about the characters". So those looking for "hard" sci-fi in the finale must have just overlooked all the spiritual, supernatural elements in its five strong seasons, or hoped that the final segment would explain them all in rational, atheistic, cold technological terms. Not bloody likely.

BSG is one of the best shows (I am tempted to say the best show) ever. Not just in its genre, which it completely busted out of from the first episode onwards, but in all of TV (and film) land. But enough gushing. Those religion haters need to stand back and enjoy quality fiction, complete with symbolism, artistic representation and fantasy, like we all do when we watch Lost. Just appreciate the incredible mixture of escapism, art and social commentary. If you're not digging the God and angels thing, then take heart from the anti war or environmental messages. Read up on Asimov's Laws of Robotics, Vernor Vinge's Singularity or I.J. Good's concept of the "ultra intelligent machine" which goes all the way back to 1965. BSG is pretty relevant to this not-much-talked-about eventuality. Only thing is, the technologically facilitated horror may not come in the form of shiny (or sexy) Cylons, but rather as intelligent bacteria or nanobots. The possibility of some kind of technological intelligence usurping, threatening or morphing human control is a very likely outcome. And I'm not even saying that's a bad thing because, let's face it, people don't always do that great a job.

Suffice it to say that future elections will be between the Technocrats and the Parties of God. Let's just hope that between them they have four legs to stand on. Not a gods damn chance? Oh well, at least we have Caprica and The Plan to look forward to.

Eric Stolz is sporting Caprica pants for this fall's future noir look.

2009-02-20T17:58:00.004+01:00

I've been told a bazillion times not to exaggerate.

But alas, half dead, yet still gasping for air and doggedly clawing at the sheer walls of my mental prison, I decided to move to London Towne, crème de la crème of European capitals. And I've realized that I can't make my official debut in ill-fitting trousers. So this week I went to the tailor to do something about it. The results were impeccable. I've also started informing some of the locals about my imminent departure. The news has been received with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

And naturally there will be some difficulties at first with the transition, but I expect I'll make quite the splash in the city's more exclusive intellectual and literary circles.

2009-02-12T17:13:00.010+01:00

Domesticity Rising
Movies and Helpful Hints!

Kate Beckin-jailed: Judith Miller was a backboard abuser!

Yesterday a little dove cooed in my ear that I should really write something, and as I am usually prone to heed the advice of gentle birds, it was not a tough decision. So what should I write about? Stimulus packages? My houseplants? That chick with the Portuguese name in Slumdog Millionaire? I'll do the vacuuming and get back to you...

✜

Well. Vacuuming works so much better with a clean filter. And four years is too long to wait before you clean it. In my defense I didn't even know it had a second, internal filter. That is my "Hint from Heloise" for today. Want another? OK, white spirit vinegar is a great all-around cleaner, deodorizer and fabric softener. Seriously! It leaves clothes and sheets soft, bright and dill pickle-fresh. Much better for the "environs" than harsh detergents and ammonium-based softeners.

Now what... Micro movie reviews, anyone?

Taken: Liam Neeson in a stupid, but somewhat satisfying "You touch my daughter and I'll kill you" flick.

Benjamin Buttons: Babel was not just a fluke; Brad Pitt actually learned how to act.

Changeling: Angelina can act too! But we already knew that from A Mighty Heart.

Wanted: Angelina as a skeletal anime heroine and James McAvoy as a Ewan MacGreggor/Michael J. Fox hybrid. Silly action with a few laughs.

Slumdog Millionaire: Good, although not as great as the hype. Exciting, sweet and predictable.

Choke: Not bad, but fits extremely well into the not-nearly-as-good-as-the-book category.

Pineapple Express: Absurd and surprisingly funny!

Ghost Town: Watchable, typical romantic comedy.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas: An (obviously) sad, but fresh take on the holocaust sub-genre.

Revolutionary Road: Decent American period drama, modern day Virginia Woolf, yada yada...

The Reader: Kate scores! Ralph scores! Very good.

Doubt: Philip Seymore Hoffman is great, Meryl Streep is superb.

Nothing But the Truth: An interesting, star studded take on Valerie Plame-gate.

In Burges: Dark, violent, post-Tarantino gangster comedy about an Irish duo in Belgium. Good stuff.

Frost/Nixon: I didn't watch it because of Rebecca Hall, but I probably would have anyway.

And with that final cryptic micro review, I bid you all adieu!

Awright Freida, like I know you're like four levels above me in the attractiveness department, but l fink like we's could be like really good togeva, yeah?

Aaah you kidding, bheta? I'm like a sort of young Angelina Jolie phenotype and you are some post-pubescent Cockney incarnation of Ben Stiller. Call me when you're a real millionaire, you blaady scumdog!

2009-01-24T17:58:00.002+01:00

"Don't hate me because I'm pitiful."

On a long dark winters night, warm flask betwixt cupped palms, I counted the large wet flakes as they fluttered, seesawing past my living room window, and thought how nice it would be to catch one upon my tongue and savor the coldness as it dissipated. But a stiffness in my body stopped me from venturing out onto the balcony and kept me rooted to the sofa, legs blanketed, face aglow in the light of a solitary candle, unwilling to brave the harsh chill and occasional gusts I knew awaited outside. After all, what unrefined sensual pleasure could compare to what was already within my reach, transferred from great distances and preserved on silicon chip: Battlestar Galactica, Season 4, Episode 12.

I cling to such vestiges of escapism with the strength of a Vulcan death grip.

"I wish I was one of the Final Five"

2009-01-09T00:09:00.009+01:00

The living dead insist

...on love and happi-ness!
(for 2009)

For me 2008 closed out with a very exciting dream I had whilst dozing one morning in the guest room of my parents' home in Portugal. I was in one of those dystopic disaster scenarios where zombies are roaming the cities and infecting the panicked population. It was so real, yet not quite a nightmare; more like watching a good movie or tv show. As I do in many of my horror dreams, I (or my character) attempted suicide by self-electrocution. It didn't work, which was good thing, since the zombie anti-virus soon came out. In the end we all made it to the beach and were swimming out to sea. I was surrounded by zombies, but was as yet uninfected by the scourge. The head zombie had just become aware that the antidote was being transmitted by an immune person. The dream ended with a look of horrified realization on her face. Perfect ending to a great bit of sleep-entertainment.

Weena, you are sooo tense!

Two recommendations from 2008

Film:

But if I ain't just seen the saddest story ever transferred to celluloid: The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei. It's not a war tragedy; no villages get burned and pillaged, there are no acts of genocide. Maybe it is so affecting because it is familiar in some way, showing what is almost an inevitability for many in that line of work; poor egomaniac has-beens, who are nice guys, but can't live in mainstream society or even really survive. I'd go as far as to admit that I recognize a measure of that characteristic in myself. Sniff.

And what about the Cohen Brothers' latest effort, Burn After Reading? It's in D.C., which made me a little nostalgic, but it just isn't that good. The Big Lebowski is one of my all-time favorites, but since then the Cohen Bros haven't come close.

Music:

Santogold's "Lights Out" sounds like Missing Persons doing the Clash's "Spanish Bombs" with a dash of Eddie Grant's "Electric Avenue". In other words it's a great mix of smooth 80's New Wave. Besides, she's cool, she looks good and she's from Philly, thankfully without that awful accent they have. It's "water", not "wutter" for God's sake.

2008-12-18T23:22:00.001+01:00

Riunite, it tastes so fine

Remember when alcohol was advertised on American TV? I think I know why they stopped. When I was a little kid I wanted to try all these delicious sounding beverages: Colt 45 Malt Liquor... mmmmm... sounds like malted milk balls, licorice and guns. Martini and Rossi Asti Spumante? Yummy and yummi yumm yummé! And who could forget a decidedly less butch Bruce Willis writhing about and singing "it's wet and it's dry" about Seagram's Golden Wine Coolers? He was so cool and let's face it, the song is a hit. It's got a catchy beat and you can dance to it. Of course, now I know that all of these drinks taste like liquid evil. OK, I haven't tried hardly any of them, but I'd bet the house that Riunite on ice is like drinking Old Spice. Reunite! Reunite!

2008-12-11T00:39:00.008+01:00

Post-cologne-ialism:

Not without my toilet water

I finally got around to watching Marjane Satrapi's animated film Persepolis, a poignant, yet comical tale based on Satrapi's own life growing up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Seen through Marjane's eyes, it is above all a coming of age story; a search for identity which, despite its back drop of oppression and war, will strike a chord with anyone who felt alienated or different as a kid. Playing at torture in the streets as a young girl after hearing from her uncle about the interrogations carried out by the Shah's regime, or arguing about which band is "cool" (The Bee Gees or Iron Maiden) with black market street hawkers, are funny scenarios because they remind us what it's like to be an adolescent and how differently we interpret and prioritize at that age.

obviously metalheads

And so I was annoyed that the first article I encountered about the film after watching it was so negative. In a piece originally written for The Guaridan, Hossein Derakshan treats Persepolis solely as what he considers to be propaganda in support of the Bush Doctrine. Sorry, but people like this spoil art. I felt the same way after reading Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (which I found to be a fascinating and touching memoir with a nice dose of literary studies) and then Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi's article, which decries it as "insidious" and dismisses Nafisi as a "comprador intellectual" of the Bush regime. Get real.

Derkashan:

Satrapi's world is divided into two very separate groups: you are either with Marjane, in which case you'd are a nice, warm human being with properly drawn features; or you are against Marjane, and therefore either a black spectre with no human face features or an angry robot who represents the Iranian state. There is no one in between in Marjane's world; no shade of grey between this dichotomy of evil state versus wonderful people.

Seriously? Persepolis is critical (often humorously so) of everyone save Satrapi's own parents and grandmother, including herself. All of her contacts in Vienna are mocked mercilessly. Austria, unlike Iran, simply was not an oppressive dictatorship at that time, so the light on them is not as harsh. However, Iran's religious police are shown letting her get away with several infractions and her teachers at university tolerate her outspokenness. We are told how the U.S. and U.K. have propped up dictators and fueled lengthy, bloody wars. Lumping this story in with Bush and Sarkozy's rhetoric is irrational and ironically guilty of the "binary logic" which Derkashan accuses Satrapi of employing.

Well I guess he and Dabashi are afraid of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations concept being perpetuated with disastrous results, and who can blame them for that? But that doesn't excuse unfair, untrue characterizations of works of art, not really based on their content, but for the politics which they unfairly attach to them. It is ultra politicization which is knee-jerk, divisive and exclusionary. Deconstructionism surely provides some significant things to consider, but ultimately bogs down, side tracks and fails to deliver real meaning, at least that I can find. Taken to some postcolonialist extremes, it disqualifies everyone who's ever set food inside a classroom in the "western world" as somehow contaminated, unless they are performing the confusing rigmarole of deconstructing anything remotely western. Perhaps more importantly, it attempts to spoil art and entertainment by politicizing and polarizing it. Can we please deconstruct deconstructionism as a male, Western invention and be done with it?

Furthermore, both Nafisi and Satrapi have been criticized for portraying Iran as it was in the 1970s and 80s, and not how it is nowadays, which is presumably considerably less oppressive. Well guess what? That's when they lived there and when their works take place! If you want a book or film showcasing how liberalized Iranian society is becoming, make one yourself. I'd be interested in reading it, as I am interested in the autobiographical personal histories (key term) of Persepolis and Reading Lolita in Tehran. For the general public, I recommend both the book and the movie. You'll actually (gasp!) enjoy them.

2008-12-01T14:41:00.006+01:00

100th post!

For my centennial entry: a video of Shelter performing "Civilized Man" for MTV Brazil back in the year 2000. Some conscientious young man has kindly ripped it from the archives and uploaded it on youtube. Thank you, kind sir.

Ray Cappo - vocals
Alex Garcia-Rivera - drums
Graham Land - bass
Daniel Larsson - rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Porcell - lead guitar, backing vocals

2008-11-14T23:28:00.013+01:00

Beat Yo Beautiful Feet

"Beauty is the promise of happiness"
-Stendhal

I was introduced to this quote from Stendhal by Alain de Botton in his documentary mini series for UK Channel 4, The Perfect Home. It conveys such a depth of understanding in so few words, especially concerning the beauty of things or people that we in some way covet.

I don't find it nearly as appropriate, however, when it comes to my house plants, from which I derive significant pleasure simply by occasionally looking up at while sitting or lying my sofa. Of course, I already own my houseplants. Yet in their beauty – and my possession of it by proxy – the promise of at least some modicum of happiness is fulfilled.

Music, on the other hand, is more complicated. I do wish, somewhat childishly, that I had written and recorded some of my favorite songs. This fantasy becomes more far-fetched the more technically gifted or skilled the actual writers and performers of such material are, particularly if they are in some way fundamentally different from me. For example it's absurd to imagine myself onstage singing Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" in piercing soprano whilst hammering away on a grand piano. Yet I admit that I must have, at least at some point in time, done precisely that.

–Now moving further along these philosophical lines, hopefully not losing the thread.

In the way that nationalism illogically produces an identification with, and even sense of proprietorship of achievements one had absolutely no part in, so do some other categories of identity. In my case, I feel a great pride in the music scene of Washington, D.C., but not just its seminal hardcore genre, which I can at least claim some involvement in, but also in its perhaps best kept secret, go-go, which I was only an incidental and occasional witness to. If I had come from any other place in the U.S., I would most likely never have known a thing about go-go, though I, and maybe everyone reading this would have heard its hypnotic rhythms at some point. It is an art form that only exists (as far as I know) in the D.C. area and (at least when I was a kid) was far more prevalent in the local Black community than hip hop, for example. To give some idea, in 1986 my junior high school talent show – in the Aspen Hill area of Mongtomery County, Maryland – featured one magician, one dancer, two classic rock acts and three go-go bands.

Go-go in short, is live, funky dance music characterized by rich percussion featuring congas, cowbells and sometimes plastic paint buckets. If you spent enough time walking the streets of downtown D.C. you've probably heard go-go bucket drummers.

Though I always loved the beat, I never fell in love with that many actual go-go songs. Nevertheless, here are two gems; Junkyard Band's 1986 "The Word" (produced by Rick Rubin) and Northeast Groovers' "Fight".

As separate as I may be from this genre of music, I still feel some small connection to it, perhaps more so than if I had come from somewhere else and just happened to like a song or two. My past and the place I grew up see to that I, by virtue of no deed of my own, somehow credit myself in part with its existence. Dag.

See also: Beat Your Feet, Chuck Brown, Baltimore Club

2008-11-06T20:50:00.006+01:00

What do you do all day?

This past week, whilst reclining on my late victorian chaise longue with brass castors, nursing a cold low-alcohol "brewkowski", my MacBook delightfully nestled in my lap, I did do what I never did dare dream of doing. Ahem. That is to say, I created a myspace music page.

These songs, hitherto doomed to a life of ignoble near nonexistence, are now, by virtue of that most impertinent and least subtle corner of cyberspace, available to all with a connection to the Internets – and utterly gratis to boot. I am impatiently counting the moments until my page (as the young people are so fond of saying these days) goes viral.

Recorded in 2001 in the wilds of Västra Götaland, under a snow drift in a former mental hospital from the turn of the previous century, so far three tracks have been salvaged from the vaults of total obscurity. Recently dusted off and polished up with the help of my faithful, trusted silicon friend (my MacBook, you degenerates!) now presented in superior high fidelity for your listening enjoyment.

Anyhoos, if you missed the first blatant link because you were still reeling in the thralls of Obama-mania, here's another. And If you can't be bothered, well then just remember that old schoolyard chant:

Yo mamma, yo pappa
Yo greasy greasy grandma
She got big old teeth like Johnny Greeth
She got a big behind like Frankenstein
and that's not all
She got a bubblegum jaw!

pwnd!!!

2008-10-29T00:30:00.010+01:00

At the Movies: Spiritual Cramp

One blustery October night as I lay curled up on the sofa, blanketed in fleece, a tapenade crostini in one hand and a thoroughly chilled Bloody Mary in the other, I did enjoy a foray into the land of contemporary American independent film. Now before you jeer, Bronx cheer and deride my good taste as less than that of an Ohio housewife, let-me-just-tell-you: I watched two ambitious, charming and pretty close to damn good fillums.

First there is The Nines, a present-day Hollywood flick with a good dose of creeping surrealism, which crescendos quite nicely at the end without completely losing the intended audience (i.e., me). I don't want to spoil it so I won't elaborate beyond this hearty recommendation.

I then settled down to take in Wristcutters, a tale of post-suicide slackers living in limbo. It is appealing to someone like me; someone with vision, yet lacking in drive. To those who say it trivializes or glamorizes taking one's own life, it doesn't. Plus, it's an artistic work, not a public service announcement, so stop politicizing art. Wristcutters features Tom Waits and that blonde girl who got shot in Lost, but whose death didn't really impact the course of the show. Early on the discerning viewer may note the clever use of Christian Death and Joy Division in the soundtrack, a somewhat subtle device that isn't continued throughout the film.

Also keeping me company this autumnal season has been The Visitor, a superb drama dealing with illegal immigration in The Big Apple and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which was entertaining, yet ironically, forgetful. Hah!

Now I must take me into the Land of Nod where I dare dream of alternate realities populated by doe-eyed nymphs and seraphic-countenanced knock-outs. I bid you all goodnight.

The Nines: I'm just so gosh-darn buff

2008-10-21T19:31:00.002+02:00

En Låt Till!

This is from the same session as the previous song (Vänersborg, 2001). Footage is from a photography exhibition currently on display in Nytorv, central Copenhagen. The additional stuff is just me goofing around with a bass guitar in order to harken back to the early nineties shoegaze imagery in the vein of My Bloody Valentine. I'm not much of a singer and parts of the vocal recording make me cringe in self-revulsion, but what-eva! It's an unintentional Bob Mould imitation which at times (like when I turn the music off) sounds more like that guy from the B-52s.

Well, that's it! I don't have any more material that I'm inspired or capable of singing to so let this be my posthumous swan song. Now it's, to quote Soul 2 Soul, back to life, back to reality.

2008-10-16T23:47:00.006+02:00

More egotism

Well, what else were you expecting?

I made this video today with iMovie and recorded the vocals for the song with GarageBand in my bathroom through the built-in microphone on my MacBook. So you know it's high tech. The music was recorded in Vänersborg in 2001 for a band that fizzled out. Jonas from Division of Laura Lee is playing bass and Markku from Sparks of Seven is on drums. I'm on guitar and now, seven years later, vocals. I have a bit of time on my hands so I was inspired to do something creative. Both the song and video are sadder and more wistful than I expected. I only wish I could upload a higher quality version on youtube without the last 45 seconds being cut off. I'll try again later, but for now this will have to suffice. I may make another, more upbeat video for one other song from that 2001 session. Less self-absorbed, I promise.

Lyrics:

Kiss Them Goodbye

I was only nineteen
but all the things I'd seen
In the cold blue air
Made you stop and stare
When I walked on by
Nineteen eighty-six
Yeah, it did the trick
All those magazines
Full of teenage dreams
Better kiss them goodbye

They're only happy when I'm down
They're only smiling when I frown

Is that still you?
With all those cool tattoos
They way you hide your eyes
Behind a cheap disguise
When you walk on by
And all those girls
well they twist and twirl
All those beauty queens
of their hometown scenes
Better kiss them goodbye

They're only happy when you're down
They're only smiling when you frown

And all those cliques
Yeah they make me sick
All you girls and boys
Better hide your toys
When I walk on by
'cause I got me someone
Yeah, gonna have some fun
Next one I see making eyes at me
Better kiss them goodbye
Next guy I see making eyes at me
Better kiss him goodbye

2008-10-08T14:58:00.013+02:00

Nerdiest Post Ever

Strolling down Fifth Avenue with my classic ivy wool driving flat cap perched on my skull and the latest edition of The Economist folded under my arm, I stop at my favorite little bistro for haute cuisine. I intend to read about how this current financial crisis is in fact entirely the fault of the Democrats, and I fancy something light and refreshing with which to whet my appetite. I wave the waiter over with a flourish of my white-gloved hand and in the utmost genteel fashion ask for a Crimean Cup and a large Walter salad.

"Do you mean a Waldorf salad, monsieur?"

"Yes." I mutter and turn beet red. Blast and damn my unrefined upbringing!

Apparently I am yet not as sophisticated as I'd thought. It's this kind of situation which makes me long for a simpler time, a time when my ideal snack consisted of Slim Jims and Tang. A time occupied by an obsession with both soft and hazardous objects, when I had a preoccupation with, and a hypersensitivity to the tactile. My favorite things were either rubbery, gooey or patently destructive. Luckily, the 1970s and early 80s afforded a wide variety of such playthings.

Brown paper packages tied up with string,
These were a few of my favorite things:

Finger Pops - Foam rubber marshmallows which shoot across the room when squeezed between your thumb and forefinger. Artful in their simplicity, ingeniously fun.

Green Slime - Comes in a miniature plastic trash can. Cool on the skin, but soon covered in hair, dirt, grass and dust, which only means that you have to buy more slime.

Nerf Football and Nerf Soccer - Squeezibly soft and remarkably comforting for a rough ball game. Both mine got completely water-logged from being used in the rain, after all, they are basically giant sponges.

Gnip-Gnops (a.k.a. Clackers) - Two violently "clacking" hard plastic balls on a string. Dangerous and loud, but not nearly as much so, nor as fun, as those stone-like spheres (their name eludes me) that you smash together, producing a loud bang and flying sparks.

Sea Monkeys - Weird cousins of brine shrimp that lay dormant in a dry powder until activated with water inside a dinky clear plastic container with magnifying circles on it. They come alive, grow wings, eventually build a civilization and apparently throw 1960s-style cocktail parties. No one can adequately explain how all this happens.

Uncle Milton's Ant Farm - Some sand pressed between two panes of clear plastic. Ants are mailed after purchase of said "farm" and arrive in a couple of weeks. Those still alive escape immediately when parcel is opened and make for the dried goods. The few remaining weak stragglers are imprisoned in the plastic farm/labor camp and make do by digging an elaborate network of tunnels like the ones on Hogan's Heroes. Mine made one simple, boring L-shaped burrow. They also neglected to eat the sunflower seed I was instructed to feed them, but instead planted it and so it germinated into a handsome little sprout. Talented ant farmers.

Stretch Armstrong/ Stretch Octopus/ Stretch Monster - Soft and pliant when pulled slowly, but hard as a lump of lead when struck with your fist or hurled at your head. A true mystery of physics, so much so that I was consumed by curiosity and forced from my bed in the small hours of the night to investigate this enigma. I dissected Stretch Monster mercilessly with a butcher's knife only to find that he was full of a stinking, ruby-colored, sticky, gelatinous goop, which was not at all fun to play with. Poor green devil. As I plunged the blade into his midsection, did I hear him murmur "friend?" in shocked confusion? My act of betrayal still haunts me to this very day.

Glow-in-the-dark Silly Putty - Charge it under the light, but don't put it directly on the bulb. Next go into the bathroom and turn the lights off. Amazing glowing putty! Way more fun and cool than the flesh-colored originator, which just copies Blondie comics, turns grey and gets covered in dog hair. Similarly cool was "Kryptonite", a porous rock that glowed in the dark. I didn't care for Superman, but I loved this artificial rock!

Lawn Darts - Always found their mark, often ending up embedded in some poor merry-maker's skull. How these ultra-fun projectiles ever made it on the market is baffling.

Japanese action figures like Majingā or Kamen Rider - The most well-constructed, fun and coolest toys ever. Shot rockets, fists and plastic axes, propelled with substantial force by air and spring loaded mechanisms. My father obviously had a sophisticated eye for toys when we lived in Hiroshima, and bought us a good supply. Either that or they were given to us as gifts by his coworkers.

Miscellaneous weaponry:

-Cap guns that looked and sounded like the real thing, ideal for playing Dirty Harry or WWII games.
-Bow and arrow sets with suction cups (easily removed); arrows honed to sharpness with a pocket knife.
-Home made contraptions constructed from rubber bands and paper clips, which fired sharpened metal missiles into various targets.
-Fireworks purchased at South of the Border, enabling bottle rocket wars in local wooded areas.
-Crystal Drano bombs constructed from household goods. Very stupid.

Forget trendy brasseries. I'm off to the vintage toy store with a fist full of Euro-dollars.

2008-10-03T00:11:00.006+02:00

Acidic Sonic Snobbery

I'm a self-confessed music snob. In other words, I freely admit to turning up my nose at 99.9% of what's popular and not-so-popular, hip, square, retro, whatever. I also believe that it's really just a matter of taste, and as tempting as it might be to argue about what's good and what sucks, I realize the extensive futility of this pursuit. What makes a song or band appealing is too nuanced, multi-layered and circumstantial for logical debate, yet at the same time I know with the utmost certainty that there will never be another Smiths, nor will the hardcore scene ever again produce something that rivals Minor Threat. Sorry.

Case in point: My Bloody Valentine, who recently reunited for some tour dates. Often imitated and constantly claimed as an influence by bands that sound nothing like them and, quite frankly, suck (see, I told you I was a snob) no one has really managed to actually sound like them.

Check out this podcast of the kickoff performance for their reunion tour. Personally, I rarely like live recordings, but it still sounds great, even if at times a bit dissonant. The vocals float barely audibly above the textured noise, even much lower than on their recordings, and somehow that really appeals to me. And it is sound – far more than style, lyrical content, fidelity, production and technical proficiency – that floats my boat. Likewise, I tend to be turned off by conspicuous obscurity, collectibles or music that simply tries to be "interesting". So I am, in a sense, an ironic musical populist and (if one might judge from that last phrase) a pretentiously paradoxical "twat".

Adieu.

2008-09-25T14:58:00.006+02:00

Leslie Cheung

It's PoMo poetry
Typed on an LCD
Conceived in the shower
Half forgotten, half dreamed

The coward's way
No matter what they say
I think you're brave
And way prettier than me

When life imitates art
And festers in the heart
I still think you're brave
Just couldn't stand it anymore

In the lights of Hong Kong
A spooky swan song
And a graceful swan dive
From the 24th floor

Rouge (1987): Cheung and Anita Mui, both died 2003 in Hong Kong

2008-09-22T17:22:00.009+02:00

Drink Deep

Lately I've been reading a lot of Gothic horror for one of my literary studies courses. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is often plodding, repetitive and steeped in simplistic and mundane Christianity. Walpole's seminal Gothic work The Castle of Otranto is maybe just too old (1764), but it reads like a not-so-good Shakespeare play. Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) on the other hand, is sensual, beautiful, fascinating and easily scarier than the other two examples. So far, it wins.

In contemporary media, Goth is making a wet splash on pay TV in the form of True Blood, HBO's vampire series set in the Louisiana bayou country, an area of the world associated with the undead, thanks mostly to Anne Rice. The South's hanging moss and often dilapidated French, Georgian and Gothic revival architecture make it fertile ground for creepy creatures or "creeple people" as I like to refer to them; in deference to the dangerous toys from the 70s of the same name.

me enjoying some True Blood in the Krkonoše Mountains: omnomnomnom

True Blood's creator is Alan Ball, who also gave us the superb Six Feet Under, but so far (three episodes in) it doesn't come close to that masterpiece of the small screen. Still, it's good enough to keep me tuning in – no small achievement – and I have faith in Mr. Ball and his cast of models-turned-actors with rippling muscles. Anna Paquin (not a former model) heads up the cast quite nicely. The show is based on the premiss that vampires can now live in society more or less openly and don't need to kill people because the Japanese have invented an artificial bottled blood that will provide for all their nutritional needs: True Blood. Dark, racy, kind of funny and although a bit cheesy at times, no where near as bad as Heroes. So if you like horror and vamps, give it a chance.

All this vampiric activity has made me kind of take a fancy to the genre, which I've always at least somewhat liked, but never found particularly scary. I still don't, but I do find the myths interesting enough. I'd also like to talk to one of those people who thinks they actually are a vampire (there are plenty out there, folks) though I imagine they'd turn out to be boring, delusional fantasists. Maybe I just like the bedroom eyed, come-hither look of Eastern European vamp-women. It's always made me want to open a vein and share some sanguine, cordial refreshment or just share a sanguine cordial. Get it? Groan.

product placement 101: show the label and try not to stare at her boobs or the tattoo guy

2008-09-20T00:11:00.006+02:00

She's so hot

[fly fine rad snygg gira]

It's shoegaze night but I don't really feel like going out. I save money by staying in, anyway. Within these four walls. How often does shoegaze night happen? Ever? I'm denying myself. Self-denial, shame, humility, sloth, lethargy.

So instead I'll just post pictures of:

Emily Mortimer

Zoe Telford

Rebecca Hallclick on the pic to enlarge

If just to show that English women can look totally toothsome (dude) whilst still looking very English. Seeing is believing is salivating.

What's that you say? My blogs have gotten more and more puerile, vapid, less challenging? How dare you! After all, how can I compete with Sir Ben Kingsley doing Minor Threat? Quite simply, I can't. So I'll just embed it, like everyone else. Explanations are, of course, impossible.

Sir Ben Kingsley STOMPS into the shoes of Minor Threat's Ian MacKaye from Mean Magazine on Vimeo.

2008-09-12T11:30:00.007+02:00

Animal Magnetism

Remember those black and white magnetic scotties found in vending machines at rest stops in the US of A during the 70s and early 80s? They were right next to the magic Chinese rings and smoking pets. Those playful doggies chased each other round my kitchen table on many an occasion, let me tell you. Oh how we laughed at their antics! But those were wild, innocent times; before hair gel, pagers, Tamagotchis and beaded car seat covers. You see we didn't have much, but we made do.

There was something poignant about those little magnets: one black, one white, alternately repelling and attracting one another, frolicking and ultimately settling down, joined at the base and tucked away in their little cardboard home (sniff). Like Barack Obama and John McCain... no, scratch that... like a cute Yin Yang symbol, in perfect balance and harmony even when seemingly embattled in chaotic struggle. Well, I think you get the picture, though what it really means who among us can truly say? I believe what I'm getting at in this rambling collection of incoherent twittering is that I've lost my "mystical allure". Somewhere along one of life's back roads I hit a pothole and my hubcap of seductiveness rolled wildly off to one side, made an exuberant jump on the curb and bounced into someone's unkempt backyard, never to be seen again. It's probably lying under a rickety screen porch, covered in cobwebs, next to a rusty wheelbarrow and a half empty bag of fertilizer.

What's the point of being a solitary dog magnet if you can no longer push and pull your yang?

So what should I do? Wax my chest? Buy an Italian suit? Get a job? Get real, there's no need to panic!

Well to start, I'm exploring more sensible options such as hypnotism (specifically mesmermism) and vampirism, plus I'm experimenting with different configurations of facial hair. Believe me, you haven't seen the last of me and when you get a whiff of my new and improved pheromones, look out for a healthy Gaius Baltar-shaped ball of raw charisma right in your frackin' face, skinjobs! With all due respect, of course.

Battlestar Babes: Cylon hotties outnumber human 3 to 2

2008-08-29T17:03:00.007+02:00

Buffoonery and Tommyrot: Cuddle Party Horror

Last week I hosted my first New York-style "cuddle party" because, well... I'm just not getting enough affection and what better way to mend my damaged self-esteem than to invite random, similarly love-starved strangers into my home for a bit of innocent nuzzling and nestling? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

First came Randy, a 43 year old sanitation worker who smelled of Brut 33. I didn't like his name, nor the fact that he was male, but to be fair, he was well-scrubbed and more-or-less polite, albeit in that sad, needy way.

Next came Sandrine, who'd had a sexy French accent on the phone, but showed up looking like something that the cat threw up. Honestly, heroin chic is so 90s and the homeless look never really made it west of the U.K., so make a bloody effort, miss. How about a nice Izod pullover or something from the Land's End catalog, for instance?

The rest of the sad, motley bunch trickled into my upscale, art-deco digs as if they'd just left an N.A. meeting and thought my loft was a "soup kitchen for the soul". I did not want to snuggle with any of this riffraff, so I passed around a plate of Ritz crackers and a cheese log from Dean and Deluca and suggested we watch a DVD. I then realized to my abject terror that the only DVD I had was Shortbus, so in a panic I screamed "well it's a cuddle party, isn't it?" and threw my arms around the closest person to me, which happened to be Otto, a seven foot tall yoga teacher from Den Haag. My sudden embrace caused Otto to spill his glass of Martinelli's Non Alcoholic Sparkling Apple Cider all over my solid walnut Louis XIII coffee table.

"You stupid clumsy dork!" I yelled and rushed into the kitchen for some cleaning products.

"Schnot my folt, ash-hole!" Otto called after me and stormed out of the apartment.

When I'd returned from the kitchen she had arrived. Long dark hair, almond eyes and a polyester 80s Puma warm up suit.

"Thess ezz the cuddle porty, yeeah?" she asked in the worst Baltimore accent I've heard in a long time. "Ahm Brandy."

I barely managed to suppress a shudder at her voice, but she was so hot I forced the revulsion away and thought perhaps, with a little work, that I could even subvert it into a turn-on.

"Hi Brandy. Can I get you something to drink?"

"Yeeah, got any Rollin' Rock?"

"Uh... no"

"Oe kaay... gimme sum o thay't Martinelli's jonx, den."

"Coming right up!" I rushed gleefully into the kitchen. In my excitement I fumbled with the bottle opener and took a few moments to check my reflection in the glass of the oven window to make sure I was looking presentable. By the time I'd made it back to the living room, everyone was on the floor, paired up and in full cuddle mode. I spotted Brandy laid out on a pile of my silk Japanese cushions, spooning with some hulking figure in a flannel shirt. Randy! They had their eyes closed in blissful, affectionate rapture.

Some of the others tacitly invited me into their cuddle huddles, but I just sneered at them and walked back into the kitchen where I downed a series of Bloody Marys and read a particularly dreadful issue of New York Magazine until everyone left.

Cuddle parties... what a fruity bourgeois Sex in the City idea.

2008-08-28T01:17:00.014+02:00

Am I going to have to quote Camile Paglia yet again?

"Now is the time for all the pro-sex, pro-art, pro-beauty feminists to come out of the closet."

- Vamps and Tramps, 1994

I am a slave to the cult of beauty. I realize and accept it fully. Unfortunately, it is not in my servitude. I can't create it, at least not in the physical sense, although some have said I have a way with words. Good enough, I say. Applying Camile's quote to myself, I could be comfortable with the pro-beauty feminist label, but regarding sex and art I have mixed feelings and I've never been in the closet except when I used one as my bedroom for three months in Brooklyn during the mid 90's. I was lulled to sleep nightly by the whooshing cars of the BQE. Seriously, it was like living next to the ocean.

Maybe Leonard Cohen felt "oppressed by the figures of beauty", but I don't. And even if I did I still wouldn't sleep with Janis Joplin, but hey I'm neither a drug addict nor a rock star. I would be completely out of my element.

I remember when I lived in Gothenburg there were two girls who resembled young Beatrice Dalles. One matched her in style and stature, the other, who I got to know a bit, just had her mouth and eyes. I don't think either were aware of their Dalleian phenotype, in the bloom of youth and therefore more powerful than the original, in her present state of (dis)repair. And I'm not calling Bea a old hoe-bag or anything, it's just that time catches up with us all. No matter how many pilates we do, right Midge? I mean getting trim is fine, but sinewy gyrating lady-muscles are not really how I want to appreciate a 50 year old "queen of pop". Put on some natural linens and a raw silk head wrap or something, like Kate Bush did. Bow out gracefully or tone down your coarse sexuality to something more befitting your age group. It's just a suggestion.

I, myself, am attempting to dress more sharply, have lost 11 pounds (5 kilos) and am very happy with my new moisturizer. Look out ladies, I'm reinventing myself!

You've got something in your hair, Kate.

2008-08-26T18:28:00.000+02:00

Opening song from Trutnov

2008-08-25T23:36:00.007+02:00

Rockin' and a-rollin', splishin' and a-splashin',
Over the horizon, what can it be?

No more kings: Trutnov, 2008

I know I say this isn't a personal diary, but occasionally it becomes one when I feel like "sharing". After hanging out for several days and playing with my old buddies/band-mates (in the Czech Republic, of all places) I am ready to start a band, get signed and tour the world with reckless abandon and stars in my myopic eyes. Not.

I had a blast. Four halcyon days of laughter and music making, during which I ironically needed Halcion to sleep, due to nervous excitement. We practiced like diligent little gnomes in a dank, underground, dusty, cavernous space with green mold-covered walls, until our lungs were filled with spores and radon gas and we emerged squinting in the blinding sun like disoriented immature vampires, gasping for oxygen and craving vital ichor. Calluses, long since forgotten, reformed on my fingers and my shoulders and back ached under the weight of my instrument. I'm talking about my bass guitar, you vulgar plebs!

Anyhoo, the result of such industrious behavior was that we both "kicked out the jams" and "got this party started right". My nerves peaked before we began and then as soon as the drums thundered, the guitars crunched and the bass rumbled, I entered "the zone". [I'm now going to stop with the hackneyed clichés or I shall be forced to stop typing and punch myself in the face.] The crowd of 15,000 normally grim-faced Czechs seemed to enjoy themselves despite being rained on and the fact that 99% of them probably never heard us before. Does this make me want to renounce my renunciation of music? Heck no, I just simply enjoyed myself.

I have no ambition in this arena, no desire to promote, conduct business, schmooze, write or learn songs, mess with equipment, think about popularity, success or image. And that, along with spending quality time with old comrades, is why I had such a grand time.

Now if I could just get a book deal...

Prague city nights: Kafka, I'm not. Skateboard, I do.

2008-08-19T07:44:00.007+02:00

I can't do no more...

Seoul, 1998

I played guitar and bass from the ages of 13 until about 31, because when the numbers become reversed that way, it's time to stop. I was even "professional" for several years, in the sense that I earned most of my living through music, though I had very little training. Now it seems like I have no propensity for it whatsoever. When I pick up an instrument I can make some sounds, but I don't know any songs. It feels awkward and unnatural and makes me wonder what I was doing all those years. What drove me to write and record songs, form bands and tour the world?

I've always been the kind of person who can't simply enjoy something artistic without wanting to do it myself. Some might call this will to create and be admired a "god complex" and it surely is a manifestation of egotism, a sort of "that should be me" or "I could do that" approach to art. But what happens when you realize that you're just not that good? That you'll never make anything close to the stuff you admire? If you're like me you quit and move on. I had some great years at it, but when I stopped I really quit and life opened for me like a blossom. Albeit a very slow, night-blooming blossom, like one might find on a cereus cactus.

Since I'm both an idealist and an escapist, because I crave attention and then inexplicably shun it when it comes my way, you could call me self-contradictory. Do not underestimate the value of shame, however, as it's saved me on many occasions from behaving like a complete idiot. It's also stopped me from having too many friends, romantic encounters, professional contacts and other irritating distractions from my semi-secluded solitary existence.

Nonetheless, tomorrow I'm off to Trutnov, a small city in the Hradec Králové Region of the Czech Republic, located near the southern Polish border, to play a reunion show with a band I first performed with 19 years ago (a bizarre event I wrote about and posted here eleven days past). This event, an open air festival, which, according to their website is the "21st summer of cultic and well known festival" will probably prove to be just as bizarre, though presumably quite a contrast to a club gig in Connecticut, 1990.

After five years without touching an instrument, a couple of weeks of practicing by myself on a borrowed bass guitar will hopefully have prepared me sufficiently for the culticness and well known-ness that lie in the Karkonosze, or "Giant Mountains" of the Czech Republic. If not, I will try to fight any eventual feelings of shame or dismal failure, should they attempt plague me on my return to Scandinavia, arms full of riches courtesy of Good King Wenceslaus.

An account with pictures is forthcoming.

Dip in the Snake River, Idaho, 1998

2008-08-16T12:15:00.019+02:00

Could Dr. Seuss be the best artist ever?

As a child his poems and illustrations captured my imagination and these paintings do the same, many years later. Fantastic environments and characters with great facial expressions. I'll never forget lines like:

And what would you do ... if you met a Jibboo?

Am I regressing back into the 1970s? Perhaps I should buy some pajamas with feet in them, heat up some Swiss Miss hot cocoa with tiny marshmallows and climb in bed under velour blankets with a copy of Dr. Seuss' Sleep Book. I can almost feel the static electric shocks now...

The news
Just came in From the Country of Keck
That a very small bug By the name of Van Vleck
Is yawning so wide
You can look down his neck.

2008-08-08T10:53:00.004+02:00

Memories of the first Shelter show, The Anthrax, Norwalk Connecticut, summer of 1990

by Graham Land

from Double Cross hardcore webzine

I've just written something that more than ten people will read! It's a memoir of the first show I played in 1990 and features and accompanying YouTube video. Please click the link in the title and check it out.

2008-08-04T15:19:00.008+02:00

This American Life

If you should happen to get the chance, watch this show. An evolution of the long running radio program of the same name, this Showtime series, presented by the large-bespectaled Ira Glass, takes quick and surprising looks at examples from different segments of American society. These are people you probably would never hear about otherwise, but their stories are as interesting and as affecting as any. I really like the tone of the program: no sensationalism or strong standpoints. You get the feeling they've stumbled into someone's story, completely fresh and free of expectations. And because it's life, something always happens that you didn't expect.

Some of my favorite segments: the fourteen year-old boy who has renounced love, high school students taking their yearbook pictures and (below) how being on camera changes everything.

In other news; I've been trying to incorporate what I've discovered are D.C. area slang words (before I thought they were just American) into the English that I use online and in some social situations here in Sweden, for example with other native English speakers. I don't think anyone knows what I'm talking about. I only found out these were regional terms from looking on urbandictionary.com. I guess that's why I've never heard them on TV or elsewhere, except once or twice on The Wire, HBO's superb crime drama, which is based in nearby Baltimore.

dag – like "damn", as in Dag, that girl on Smallville is fine.
jonin' (on) – insulting, as in Dag, stop jonin' on my fake Members Only jacket.
jonx – stuff or male "stuff", as in I have the new Intellivision jonx or the girl at the laundromat grabbed my jonx.
siced – means the exact same thing as "psyched". I'm siced to play Congo Bongo on my Intellivsion tonight.
steal – to punch. Steal him in the jaw before he kicks you in your jonx.

So if you notice these in my written or spoken words, I'm just trying to keep it real. I may add a few Baltimore/ Northern MD words (even though I never used to use them much) like "hessians" or "heshers" (headbangers) as featured in the movie Heavy Metal Parking Lot (below) or "grits", which are kind of like urban rednecks. There was a fight between some skinheads and hessians but everybody ran when a bunch of grits drove up.

I can't really decide if these are more hessians or grits:

I dunno... It's this American life.

2008-08-02T00:24:00.015+02:00

Seven Songs from my Formative Years

dive into the depths of my shadowy soul...

"Jigsaw Feeling" by Siousxie and the Banshees
From their 1978 debut LP The Scream, it's close and concurrent, yet unsung compared to Joy Division's post-punk high points. Sensual, poetic, sophisticated and primal in ways I couldn't totally get when I first listened to it as a thirteen year-old, lying on the carpet in the living room in front of my parent's 1970s stereo. It feels somehow more relevant now, a slicing piece of prescient, atmospheric avant guard created in the late 70s, only approached perhaps by their more poppy 1981 single "Arabian Knights".

"She Sells Sanctuary" by The Cult
This staple of my playlist since 1985 more or less single-handedly got me into what we called "progressive" music; a term which encompassed new wave, punk, goth, etc... pretty much anything outside mainstream top 40 radio in my youth. I still love this one and never tire of it. Neo psychedelic, hippie-punk or whatever you want to call it, it's more or less perfect .

"I Don't Wanna Go Down To The Basement " by The Ramones
Whatever records they made after this one are pretty much superfluous except for maybe Animal Boy, which I loved at the time it came out, but I must confess, doesn't thrill me these days. To me this is the consummate Ramones track with a great bass line and dry, tight, amazingly appropriate production, which saved it from turning into the schlock they later repeatedly churned out.

"Spring" by Rites of Spring
Desperate and sincere. I especially love the closing lines, "If you don't now you'd better learn to believe me when I say I'm gonna build a wall around this town, around these hearts and hands". That summed up how I felt as a teenager: idealistic, passionate, romantic, sad and sentimental.

"That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" by the Smiths
From their most important album about meat being murder and all that. Every line is great, culminating with "I've seen it happen in other people's lives and now it's happening in mine". Did you really think I'd leave out a Smith's song?

"Sweetness and Light" by Lush
As I said here in January 2006, it's my song and it takes me to a magical land where no one can hurt me. Perfect mood music, glorious, textured and simply beautiful. If you don't agree you must be a bore, a wanker or a knob-end.

"Katy Song" by Red House Painters
Not exactly my formative years, since I got into them when I was 23-24, but "glass on the pavement under my shoe, without you is all my life amounts to" takes the cake. If only it could ever be true.

You spin me right round, baby

2008-07-28T22:11:00.007+02:00

It Ain't 1986

[Snarfing Material]

One quixotic summer day as I was exiting the Wheaton Public Library, having just picked up an armful of the latest dystopian science fiction Montgomery County had on offer, a teenage girl stopped to tell me that my shoes were "really cool". This was great, except that she said "excuse me, Sir" first.

Sir?? I was a young dude in the spring-time of my days, playing in bands and spending my afternoons on the tennis court shouting obscenities and whacking dead balls as far into the woods as I could. I didn't own any "adult" clothes, nor did I have a job, my own apartment or health insurance. No way was I a Sir.

That was twelve years ago.

Today I received a brand new skateboard via private delivery, which I'd ordered from a seller in the U.S.. It's an "old school" board, meaning it's concave and fish-shaped, like the ones I used to ride in the 80s. I'll admit I wasn't exactly as giddy as a schoolgirl when I opened the box and tested it out. In fact, I got a vague sense of foreboding, mixed with perhaps a few pangs of dread and a healthy dose of shame for good measure. Still, I was determined to give it the old college try. Unfortunately, it's got cheapo wheels that are skinny and hard and don't ride well on most surfaces in Scandinavia, which are built for traction in icy, snowy weather. But all things considered, it seems like an OK setup. After all, you get what you pay for and compared to the price of any half-way decent complete board I might find in the skate shops of Northern Europe, I paid precious little coin.

So with next to no ado, I decided to test it out tonight in a parking lot across the park from my building that I'd scoped earlier this week for just such a timid reintroduction to shredding. As I slunk through the unseasonably warm evening air towards my chosen proving ground I felt pretty much as I'd expected to feel; not exactly enthused, but confident enough to give it a tentative go and even try a few tricks. Over all it was noisy and rough ride, but I managed some lousy ollies (something I was never any good at anyway) a few bonelesses and one feeble street plant.

I know I tend to prattle on about getting older a lot these days, but sometimes it really hits me. Not only did I feel slightly silly as a soon-to-be thirty-six year-old wearing shorts and pushing himself around on a skateboard in front of a doctor's office (my doctor's office, by the way) but my herniated disk started acting up as soon as I began to "rip hardcore". I mean, thank God I didn't fall:

–Excuse me, Sir? Are you OK?

[groan] If you could just maybe be so kind as to hoist me onto my board and push me in the direction of the good doctor's surgery, I'll be right as rain.

–No problem. There you go.

Thank you. You're a fine young specimen. Not like those troublemakers in the park, with their hair grease and their noisy music.

–No, Sir. Bye now, Sir.

Goodbye

–And Sir? Cool shoes.

Gnarly.

We Know You Suck: the same deck I got for Xmas '86

2008-07-22T22:05:00.009+02:00

Three Series and a TV Movie

There's nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do...

Up in Town (2002)
Joanna Lumley delivers six poignant ten minute monologues about the post marital life of an aging beauty who finds herself suddenly on her own and no longer rich. Lumley has the rare combined talent for simultaneous grace, dignity and embarrassment. I should like to be just like her when I'm an older divorcee.

Gavin and Stacey (2007)
Cute Welsh Bird, Sharp-dressed English Lad. Hilarious supporting cast of characters, especially the naïve uncle as played by Rob Brydon. Mushy scenes that – had I been someone capable of human emotion – would have made me open-mouth cry. As it were I barely teared up.

Snuff Box (2006)
Incredibly rude and strangely cosy. Catchy songs and gags that still make me laugh days and weeks after I've watched; sometimes in line at a supermarket or sipping a Cabernet Rouge at an upscale wine bar in the heart of Mayfair, causing me to suck the beverage down the wrong pipe and spectacularly cough it out in a kind of red mist, all over my white Ben Sherman Original Oxford.

Wide Sargasso Sea (2006)
For my Jane Eyre-themed literature class I'm doing a multimedia presentation on Jean Rhys' novel Wide Sargasso Sea, using stills from the film and accompanying nature sounds; "Thunderstorm", "Tropical Beach", "Hard Rain", etc... Stop laughing! This TV movie is beautifully done and I'm in love with Antoinette. That is to say I would lock her in the upper level of my country manor any day.

See also: Garth Marenghi's Dark Place (2004) for mock 1980s low budget horror and He Knew He Was Right (2004) for Victorian satire with an ample dose of intrigue.

Sargasso: If you could see the you that I see when I see you seeing me...

2008-07-21T02:01:00.007+02:00

A stuffy nose.

Makes you talk funny.
Embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as say,
watching Short Bus with your parents.

A stuffy nose is brought on by sickness, weather, plants, molds, warmth, cold, dirt, dust, emotion and if you're me, just about everything else.

I got teary-eyed and stuffy-nosed when all the dancers came out for the rousing finale of Lord of the Dance. Flatley, together with the flamenco woman, simply brought the house down.

A large whiskey and ginger will block your nose and make your eyeballs float inside your head.
This is how an egg yolk feels:
trapped by a gelatinous substance;
a floating eye in a colloidal universe.

I wake up stuffy, I go to bed stuffy
I squirt steroids up each nostril and try to sniff the vapor upwards towards the source of the blockage.

The neighbors' cigarette smoke wafts up from their balconies and into my room, irritating and stuffing my nasal passages. I go for a jog and come home coughing phlegm and bunged up. Suspended in yolk, beaten and pulped, scrambled beyond recompense.

If you blow too hard your eyeballs will pop out. My neighbors must think I raise Canadian geese. In bed one nostril is blocked, the other is clear. I roll over to lie on the other side, blocked nostril to the ceiling, clear one to the floor. The stuffiness starts to move. For one brief, glorious moment as the stuffiness is migrating southerly, both passages are clear and I breath in a delicious gust through equally unclogged airways. Just one, before the bottom nostril becomes cemented shut.

Unequal nasal strata is resumed.

Nostalgia for the Algarve, 2002

2008-07-14T01:18:00.042+02:00

All Drugged up on Love and Mother Earth

"Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature."

The more Camille Paglia I read, the more I dig her. The above quote refers to the aesthetic qualities of man-made objects, but I think it takes on a more poetic character when applied to the natural beauty of the human form, as preserved in photographic prints and celluloid film, inspiring emotions that survive in the memories of a teenage boy long after he has passed into adulthood.

In eighth grade English class we watched the 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet and I fell in love with Olivia Hussey, who I was already more-or-less besotted with since seeing her in the 1982 TV movie Ivanhoe. In both she is an animated, animatronic, frozen work of art brought to life by a wonderfully complex system of steam powered motors and pneumatic air bladders. If only she could be sprung out of cold storage for the next Tolkien film.

Ariadna Gil is just about the loveliest thing to ever grace the big screen and was my major crush of the 90s. Her art survives in great films like Belle Epoque, Celestial Clockwork and Libertarias. In 2008 she still looks totally rad, thanks to a combination of organic human ecology and optical disc-based technologies. I have collected all of her film and television appearances in my "Library of Horrors".

The written word can also conserve beauty and revive it, as can music. Juliana Hatfield managed both in the grunge-soaked decade, out-creating all those greasy-haired Seattle bands by a mile and managing to be ultra-cute at the same time. "My Sister" is a triple score of pop splendor. She also has the rare distinction of being able to sing with her mouth closed.

I miss my sister, why'd she go ?
She's the one who would have taken me
To my first all-ages show.
It was The Violent Femmes and The Del Fuegos,
Before they had a record out, before they went gold,
And started to grow.

I'm assuming she mainly means the Violent Femmes in that last part, since The Del Fuegos crowning achievement was appearing in a beer commercial.

2008-07-06T02:41:00.025+02:00

Crazy, man. Dig that sub-par sound.

Cool artwork by Shelby Cinca

One balmy summer's eve as I sat on my screen porch, sipping a chilled Tom Collins and masticating on life's not-so-tender victuals, I was reminded of past loves of the non requited variety. I cannot say what spurred on such a sentimental lapse in my humor, but I think it must have been the damp fetid scent in the twilight air; a mingling of freshly charred victims of our next door neighbor's bug zapper and the decomposing compost which simmered in a heap but a few feet away. Wistful feelings seeped under the carapace of my stone-encased heart and I was transported back to my senior year of high school: she had braces on her teeth, an exclusively black and olive drab wardrobe and a hairstyle straight out of the roaring twenties. I was shy and bookish, but beneath my gawky, gangly exterior, beat the heart of a true romantic. How I worshipped her from afar. In statistics class she'd snap her gum while working out sums and I'd imagine ourselves alone in our own little demographic somewhere, far away from the pedestrian academe of public school. I with my pipe and leather-bound tomes, she with her horn-rimmed glasses and cutting social criticism. You know, I can't even recall her name? All I remember is that she preferred my friend Aaron, the guy with hair like Robert Smith from The Cure. But he didn't care, nor did he empathize with my broken heart. And so quoting Billy Shakespeare from Titus Andronicus, one day during lunch break I called out to him above the hubbub of the cafeteria,

"Aaron, thou hast hit it!"

"Would you had hit it too!" he responded, perfectly.

"And I would! I would!" I can only say now, as I stroll through the former Peoples Drug store, now called CVS (for God only knows what reason) perusing vitamin supplements and sleeping aids at two a.m. on a Thursday morning. White florescent lights highlight the ghastly generic packaging on copies of obsolete remedies from the seventies. The in house music "system" pumps a looping selection of soul-killing ballads through overhead speakers designed to convey incomprehensible public announcements, transporting me to a time and place I'd rather not go. As I'm comparing the active ingredients in tablets and gelcaps, I notice–through the fuzz of beta consciousness–that I'm singing along: what if I were Romeo in black jeans, what if I was Heathcliff, it's no myth... and realize that twenty years ago I kinda liked these songs, in the sense that if I found them on the radio dial as I was cruising across town to or from Tower Records or B. Gordon's Health Foods (the only two places I went back then) I'd make a mental note of the station and if I didn't find anything better, I'd tune back in, suffer through the rest of the song and see what came on next. I'm not aware of too many things, I know what I know if you know what I mean... A clever and effective technique that makes use of the scan feature available on most car stereos from circa 1982 onwards.

Now that I've scanned through much of what life has randomly offered me, I remember the lost loves, abandoned along the highway like hasty roadside burials, and wonder what would happen if I made an illegal U-turn, back tracked a few exists and rolled up on one of them one winter morning, windows down, a thermos full of hot toddies in the glove compartment and of course, something like 'Til Tuesday's "Voices Carry" blaring though the standard stereo system of a 1985 Toyota Corolla.

I'm in the dark I'd like to read his mind
But I'm frightened of the things I might find

And so you should be.

floppy dog on bed: Hush hush, darling, she might overhear.

2008-06-27T12:50:00.016+02:00

love-lies-bleeding

-noun
1. a South American plant with long drooping tassels of crimson flowers.
2. an amaranth, esp. Amaranthus caudatus, having spikes of crimson flowers.

painting by Rozi Demant

☩

Reprobate radicals use toothpaste for dogs, ironically. Canines can't rinse, you see, so it's perfect for dental hygiene on the go. Just spit, or if you're in need of electrolytes, swallow the foam and decrease your carbon footprint. Reduce Reuse Recycle.

Why follow arbitrary societal rules? Tear down the system from within and release your inner revolutionary. Wear your pajamas to work or school, for starters. That'll shake things up at the office. Water cooler talk has never been cooler: Did you see Frank at the board meeting today in his tartan flannels, showing off his power point?

If you're feeling particularly seditious, have pizza for breakfast and cornflakes for dinner. Mealtimes have never been so thrillingly insurgent! Chew gum in bed, wash your face with skin cream instead of soap and wear your dad's old clothes. Mutiny begins at home. How can we destroy the structures of oppression if we cannot sabotage our own careers, love–and social–lives?

Some final tips for inventive, paradoxical rebellion: write a blog and then don't promote it. Discredit and belittle yourself in a self-effacing manner by posting the ugliest picture you can find, the one where you photographed yourself doing shaky-face at two o'clock in the morning.

Viva La Revolución!

2008-06-19T22:04:00.015+02:00

Rise of the Idiots!

Nathan Barley, series one
2005

I've discovered another comic gem in TV land. This time from the intimidatingly funny mind of Chris Morris (Brasseye, The Day Today) whose satirical realism exposed absurdity in contemporary media and society before Sacha Baron Cohen became much more famous using similar techniques. And I imagine, that like Cohen and his Ali G character, Morris has been championed and sucked up to by the very elements he is mocking. Nathan Barley is a parable about how this happens; this co-opting of clever things by stupid people, the latching on of the lowest common denominator to something edgy and fresh (often due to a failure to grasp irony or satire) and then turning it into something... idiotic. And so, the clever people suffer as The Office becomes "that show with the dancing fat guy from the Internet" and instead of the crafty pranks of Brasseye we get shows like Punked, which is slang for prison rape, incidentally, something which is even less funny than the show itself.

In Nathan Barley, Julian Barratt (The Mighty Boosh) plays Dan Ashcroft, the down-on-his-luck, heroic intellectual writer, both older and grumpier than the sycophantic halfwit dross he must wade through to ply his noble craft at Sugar Ape magazine. "Suga-Rape" is dumbed-down, Larry Clark-inspired, post-slacker journalism full of sexist, dehumanizing gutter-snobbery... or wait, maybe that's Vice magazine. Well, you get the picture, as my feelings on the genre and a particular member of it are less than thinly-veiled, but this example illustrates how pinpoint accurate effective satire can be. The show's spoof websites, fashions and thumping club music could be real even if they are so obviously preposterous when presented in the context of mockery.

The problem is that some of the (real) dumb stuff can actually be funny. I laughed the first couple of times I watched Jackass. But then it became not only unfunny, but watching grown men pretend to eat poo, get kicked in the balls and vomit gallons of milk turned out to be something very hollow indeed. Unfortunately, humor which is not just at someone else's expense, but outright cruel, is an easy laugh. The media and online "revolution" have not only diversified what we watch (a good thing), but have to such a huge extent "popularized" it, which can be arguably harmless fun (Pop/American Idol, etc...) or plainly harmful fun (Bumfights, et al). Much has been written on this subject, but nothing I've witnessed has illustrated it so poignantly as Nathan Barley. It's a rallying cry which simultaneously inspires hope, despair, anger and laughter as we recognize the encroaching idiotic hoards, empowered by super-fast broadband connections, an ever increasing variety of ring tones and a seemingly endless supply of disposable income. Well done, Chris Morris.

Keeping it foolish: Vice Fashion

2008-06-09T22:16:00.003+02:00

At the start of every new year The Washington Post publishes "The List: What's in and Out" for the coming twelvemonth. Since it's summer I've decided to do my own as somewhat of an anathema to the Post's list, which I admittedly haven't bothered to read in several years, but remember as being typically annoying and effete. I've grouped mine into convenient categories, but have omitted one of the "out" sections because I don't like dissing people, at least not in such an utter, nonspecific way. I'd rather praise people wholly and criticize their shortcomings with systematic accuracy and almost irritating equity. But enough of this dalliance. On with "The List"!

Activities
IN: bike riding, swimming, walking, staying in to watch films
OUT: weight lifting, sunbathing, driving, going to see bands

Music
IN: shoegaze, folk, baroque, eighties DC post-punk
OUT: Britpop, anti-folk, house, so-called "emo"

Snacks
IN: Oreos, oranges, salt and vinegar chips
OUT: anything with nougat or hazelnuts, every other flavor of chips besides salt and vinegar

TV
IN: Battlestar Galactica, Real Time with Bill Maher, Family Guy
OUT: Top Gear, Dr. Phil, MTV

Miscellaneous
IN: rationalism, escapism, sleep, rotting leaves
OUT: The Secret, ideologues, insomnia, pollen

People who are "in":
Camille Paglia, Karl Pilkington, Michio Kaku, J.G. Ballard, Azar Nafisi, Stephen Fry, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Richard Dawkins

I'm Graham Land. See you next time on... KIDS BEAT!

2008-05-28T16:30:00.012+02:00

I suppose you were expecting Johnny Depp?

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly/Le Scaphandre et le papillon
(2007 Julian Schnabel)

I accidentally threw all my creative writing work into the trash and emptied it. I've no idea when.

I'm speaking somewhat metaphorically, though the results are quite concrete. That's the irony of living in the digital age. Mistakenly dragging an icon of a folder marked "stories" across a computer screen, placing it onto another icon that looks like a trash can and later heedlessly selecting "Empty Trash" from a pull down menu, performs a function as irreversible as any Pentagon paper shredder might. So-called "data recovery" programs have been only partially successful. My novel, in embryo, has been aborted.

"You should have taken precautions," you recriminate. I know, I know... but perhaps it's for the best. Maybe I wasn't ready to birth a novel. So I'll root around a bit more (metaphorically, of course) incubate ideas, scrawl on parchment, save on hard drives and email accounts and pray my clumsy fingers don't fumble the ball and lazily kick it down a storm drain, somewhere just out of reach and covered in slime.

☩

Last night I watched a film about a man who'd had a stroke and become paralyzed, save for the use of his left eye. He wrote an autobiographical story using that one eye, blinking (winking?) his way through the alphabet for his patient, dutiful (and of course, beautiful) transcriber. This vegetablized former editor of French Elle, surrounded by obsequious Gaulish beauties (even in that horrific state, somehow still able to toy with their hearts) died only a few days after his book was published; blinked into existence by virtue of his paralysis and hospital bed.

He managed a book, didn't he; this frozen Svengali? Well, what else was he going to do?

I suppose that I, able bodied and of more-or-less sound mind, should be able to churn out something worth someone's perusal, if not the New York Times best-seller list. I'd be gratified by an art house publishing, a small advance and a monthly column on salon.com. Still, I wouldn't say no to a sexy, French-speaking therapist, should she want to coax a chart-topper from my single flapping eye-lid, language barriers and able-bodiedness be damned.

"Ok, two across: English 80s synthpop band."

2008-05-27T12:59:00.003+02:00

A Stab at Verse

The following is a a text I wrote and recorded for a contemporary dance and music performance by Movement Sound Lab entitled "Cause without effect?" A sample can be seen here. Hopefully soon I can put up the bit with my dispassionate voice reading the text. It works rather well, I think, contributing to the surreal and somewhat futuristic tone of the performance.

In the rich dark loam
under dew-drenched ferns
three seeds awaken from their sleep.

Fronds poke out from kernels of future giants,
blind and fertile beneath the lush canopy.

The scent of air and a shaft of light to guide them
to the surface of their resting place
and place of birth.

In the heart of each seed lies the promise of a bloom.

☩

Shoots stretch skyward
through murky undergrowth;
thick with expectation.

Though mutually unaware,
the three young stalks make paths
of contrasting and corresponding movements,
to meet, touch and form bonds.

A first date, a brush of limbs.
The kiss of a petal against fresh skin.
What's new becomes familiar
and in time, dependency looms.

Intertwined and wreathed in vine
through streaks of dusty sun,
while roots drink deep and earn their keep
anchored in the earth below.

☩

The symbiotic process intensifies.
A micro ecosystem and culture of biology.
An ecological and social experiment
repeated since the dawn of time.
Of relationships between cooperating and competing life forms
within and without the common realm of experience.

Maturity, fertility.
Structures and seasons pass by.
Slowly at first, then quickly,
then imperceptibly so.

What once sprung forth
full of vigor and youth
droops and wilts until it cannot bear its own weight,
much less the weight of others.

A sinking retreat to the forest floor
is what's in store.
A soft thud in the leafy mud.
Collapse comes as relief.

For old saps with wrinkled bark,
gnarled boughs and broken vows
to never go back, never give in.
In the end must take one on the chin.

And leave leaves to feed
the next crop of young seeds
with their dreams of grandeur
in their time of greatest need.

More performances coming up in Spain, Portugal and beyond.

2008-05-23T12:47:00.017+02:00

Cinematic Snippets

Mini Movie Reviews for Impatient Patrons

Here are five not-quite-reviews I recently posted on facebook/Flixter with the purpose of providing concise and (hopefully) helpful impressions on a few films I've recently seen. For more info, each title is linked to the movie's IMDB page.

Out of the Blue/Aramoana (2007, Robert Sarkies)

4.5/5
Harrowing and frustrating to watch. Shows that realism can be very intimate and that it isn't necessary to manipulate scenes with dramatic music. The fly on the wall style can be just as (if not more) affecting.

Control (2007, Anton Corbijn)

3/5
Atmospheric, pensive and aesthetically well done, but gets a bit boring in the second half. Hyped because it's the first film by a photographer who is famous because he takes pictures of celebrities. Samantha Morton leads a talented cast, most of whom should stick to acting rather than playing music, which is my biggest peeve with this film. They literally struggle through Joy Division's songs, so if you watch this film having never heard the band, you'll wonder why anyone likes them. The guy can't dance like Ian Curtis either.

My Blueberry Nights (2007, Wong Kar Wai)

3/5
If you like this movie, go watch Wong Kar Wi's Chungking Express (1994). It's edgier, more surreal and just plain better. Blueberry Nights is kinda nice and I like looking at the actors even when something irritating and improbable is coming out of their exquisite mouths. So I'm giving this 3 stars instead of 2.5. Don't blame me, blame the tyranny of beauty.

Into the Wild (2007, Sean Penn)

4/5
Sad, yet uplifting. Tragic and inspiring. I'd never ever do anything like this (unless you count joining a cult) but I appreciate this glimpse into how attempting such a complete exit from society might transpire. Before watching, I didn't really get why someone would want to make this film, but it's all about trying to understand what goes on in someone else's head.

Audition/Ôdishon (1999, Takashi Miike)

4.5/5
Based on the novel by Ryū Murakami. Not exactly surreal, but contains that dream-like quality present in much Japanese literature. Very watchable if you're not squeamish and are interested in the more wicked aspects of human nature.

Ôdishon - I've been thinking about you.

2008-05-13T19:29:00.012+02:00

Ungrateful Hominids

It was a dark and stormy night and there was blood everywhere.

I had just arrived home from a late night session at the oxygen bar to find that two of my prized boffins had escaped from the lab and run amok throughout my converted loft apartment. I swore softly, removing my rubber galoshes and placing my water-proofed Stetson on a ceramic black panther I kept in the foyer to add a touch of old world charm to my otherwise minimalist, zen-inspired decor.

I immediately sussed the problem: I had unwittingly forgotten to change the combination to the lock on the laboratory door, thereby giving the boffins more than enough time to divine the code and wreak havoc on my personal effects. It wasn't the blood that bothered me. It was most likely not human and even if it was, my primary concern was to make sure my collection of rare ghost orchids had not been tampered with. But of course, they had been: eaten, every last one. The sleeping boffins, now curled up on the faux leather chaise longue, their angelic countenances the very pictures of innocence, cooed gently in their sleep. I couldn't bear to wake them. Not yet.

Now to find the source of all this gore. As I had suspected, it belonged to local fauna, no doubt too curious to resist flying in an open window, lured by the sent of the quickly decomposing food which had been hastily emptied from my refrigerator and scattered about the place. They'd been too slow and dull to escape the boffins' snares, ingenious little creations that they were. The fetid stench suddenly filled my nostrils, causing me to wretch violently, an emotional response as much as a physical one. My darling little flowers, so diligently had I worked to raise them, so much time and care invested, only to end up as a salad for those two fools.

Boffins are useful if kept under tight control. Their heightened senses and intellect usually lead to scientific discovery and innovations which are well worth the risks associated with keeping them. This time, however, they had gone too far. I'd lock them in the closet with no food or music for at least a week for this one, ignoring their pitiful cries and seductive pleas until finally releasing them, weak, bleary eyed and more than willing to do my bidding. I was almost looking forward to the sycophantic behavior that always follows their punishment. I turned back to where they were sleeping, ready to pounce on them with angry fists and toss them into the dark closet. But they were no longer there.

They must have heard me and made a quick escape rather than face my wrath, I thought. It was extremely rare, but not unheard of for boffins to go feral, strike out and leave their masters. I reached for my cane so I could flush them out of their hiding place and pummel them into submission, yet it was also missing. Vexed, I went about a mad search of the loft, turning over furniture and flinging about horticulture magazines with reckless abandon. When I had no longer any strength left I slumped down against the wall and surveyed the mess, which had been worsened three-fold by my frantic search. The dark red, blood-smeared black and white color scheme was striking. I decided I had to photograph it. I hoisted myself up and staggered towards the cabinet in which I kept my photographic equipment. The vision of my spartan apartment, its stark, clean lines thrown into disarray by arcing streaks of crimson and upturned mahogany tea tables, was intoxicating. I backed out on to the veranda to get a better shot. The dark, humid night contrasted sharply with the brightly lit interior. The storm had passed and left a heady bouquet in its wake. I breathed deeply, gazed into the wreckage and smiled broadly, thrilled by the spectacle before me.

After I'd snapped my way through about two thirds of a roll I was startled by a clatter in the lane below, followed by the indignant squawking of a family of birds. From my third floor perch I spotted the cause: one of the boffins had toppled over a stack of milk crates. It caught my gaze and held it for some moments before I heard the door to the veranda slam shut, trapping me outside. The other boffin! They had tricked me and locked me out of my own apartment. I was shocked and dumbstruck. After all I'd done for them, the conniving little wretches!

The reality of my situation soon became apparent. Contacting the authorities was out of the question. They'd discover my highly illegal activities and I'd be stitched up for good. Yet there was no way I'd ever get back in to the apartment, this I knew for sure. I managed to steel myself and scale down the fire escape. Once on the street the realization that I'd been bested began to fully sink in. Both boffins now stared down at me through my panoramic window, obviously thoroughly pleased with themselves. One was even wearing my Stetson, which it mockingly tipped towards me. I scowled, averted my eyes and surveyed the situation before me, the plans for the next phases of my life and research already forming in my mind. Clutching my talisman in my jacket pocket, I disappeared into the miasmic, steamy night.

2008-05-05T19:34:00.009+02:00

Yet Another Satirical Nostalgia Overdose

Last night, stretched out on my veranda, a dog-eared copy of The Thornbirds in one hand and a Bloody Mary in the other, I was reminded of the summer of '83, which I spent at the Cape with one Veronica Cavanaugh at the Cavanaugh family's summer home. We whiled away the balmy evenings ensconced on her father's boat or lying on the dock, gazing into the myriad stars above and waxing lyrical about our dream lives. Veronica would giggle hysterically at my pale amphibious legs, her eyes screwing up so she looked like Pia Zadora in the midst of some kind of ecstatic fit. Her mirth was further aided by an ever-present bottle of Martini and Rossi Asti Spumanti, her poison of choice for that year. Well, I couldn't complain, it was better than the previous "Summer of 'Ludes" during which she popped Quaaludes like they were Halloween Smarties and wore way too much blue eye-shadow.

"So I have short, skinny legs" I'd complain. "Get over it."

"They're pale and smooth... and attached to flappy froggy feet." she'd counter.

The effect wasn't helped any by corduroy Ocean Pacific shorts and Sperry Top Siders, the must-have fashion accessories of the season. Add Ray Ban Wayfarers and a long sleeve Polo with the collar flipped up and you were either hot stuff or ready to get punched in the face by a coked-up townie.

My white frog legs burned easily too and all Veronica had in the way of sun block was Ban de Soleil, "for the San Tropez tan", which other than smell delicious and turn her skin to a perfect cocoa-bean color, acted as a sort of basting juice on my tender shanks. At night I'd slather entire tubs of cooling Noxzema on my skin, its menthol vapors providing the added bonus of acting as mosquito repellent. Without Noxema, I'd not only be red and peely, but also covered in festering bug bites. How could any girl resist?

Veronica could, apparently. Because one August afternoon I stumbled upon her, upon her second cousin, Chad, in the pool shed. They didn't hear me because they'd turned the radio all the way up when "Saftey Dance" came on. I'd rushed over to join in on what I'd thought would be a good, wholesome, three-way sing-and-dance-along.

In the pool shed of all the typical places. And he was eight years older than her. And he had lines shaved in his blond head with a rat-tail down the back of his neck. And besides being a relative, his name was Chad. I almost threw up.

Through a blur of tears and Noxzema, I somehow managed to stuff my things into a Le Coq Sportif duffle bag, stumble to the bus station and climb on an late night Greyhound back to Connecticut. She'd never even kissed me and there she was, dry-humping an overgrown Ricky Schroder. Stupid, border-line incestuous, trust-funded, cocoa-bean tan, struggling actress with perfect teeth and watermelon flavored lip gloss. Oh, how I longed to taste it from her lips instead of having to sneak it from her make-up bag! Curse my translucent appendages and slavish adherence to preppy fashion. We could have been like Jack and Diane! You can't sing a "little ditty about Chad and Veronica" without reaching for a bottle of ipecac. Or rather, you wouldn't need the ipecac because you'd already be puking the contents of your liver out through your nose. They disgusted me that much.

And still do it would seem, as I sit here curled up in my Members Only jacket, pounding away at the keyboard of my vintage Wang word processor, a Canfield's Diet Chocolate Fudge soda in one hand and a "Frankie Says Relax" t-shirt wadded up in the other. Can they just invent the flux capacitor already so I can (armed with SPF 70) back-to-the-future my way into a life of Cape Cod dinner parties and cocaine-fueled lovers' tiffs about which prep school to send the twins? Oh, I resent not having such things to resent! Oh woe (woah) is me.

2008-05-04T00:23:00.013+02:00

Don't begrudge a book for its cover...

When I was a kid I used to pick up paperback fantasy and sci fi novels featuring heroines in bronze bikinis or skin-tight space suits on the cover just because, well.. just because. They pretty much invariably sucked and I probably spent more time gazing at the shapely renderings on the front than I did reading what was inside them.

You'd think I'd have changed enough by now to not make such silly choices. But apparently trolling the English paperbacks section of a second hand bookstore in a foreign country can cause old habits to resurface with several days of dull reading as the dire consequence. After two cracking good reads (Colin MacInnes' seminal Absolute Beginners and Augusten Burroughs' riotous Running with Scissors) the literary morass I'm currently wading through is William Brown Melony's 1955 work Many Loves Have I. The cover and title are fantastic, as is the subtitle embellished across the top: She Never Cared What Other People Said. The blurb from the Houston Post, "Daring... Tingling... Compelling." surely prompted 1950s Akron housewives to snatch it from the newsstand, faces burning with shame.

Now I'm scarcely a third of the way into the book, so to be fair it could turn out to be a real page-turner. And though it isn't poorly written, the text never really had a chance of being anything as interesting as the jacket, which I still can't stop staring at. But on to the stuff I lately have enjoyed reading:

Absolute Beginners (1959) is so insightful, authentic and prescient I can hardly believe that it was written when it was and by whom. Interesting? Imagine a South London version of Catcher in the Rye with the Holden Caulfield character as a silver-tongued, worldly hipster whose attitudes in terms of race, class and sexual preference are forward-thinking even by today's standards. This scooter-riding, jazz-loving teenage photographer social butterflies his way across a culturally seething urban landscape, dispensing wisdom in a vernacular that would sound fresh in any decade. Colin Macinnes, born in 1914 and cousin to Rudyard Kipling, was forty-five when the book was published. Mad. You may remember the film version and songs of the same name by both David Bowie and The Jam, but if you're like me and were (until recently) unaware of the book, do give it shot. My copy is from 1986, released to correspond with the ill-fated film and has a picture of a young Patsy Kensit on the cover. Shut up, that's not why I bought it.

Running with Scissors (2002) is a memoir chronicling author Augusten Burroughs' life growing up during the mid to late 1970s in western Massachusetts, mostly spent living with the family of his mother's psychiatrist. What this kid experiences is alternately unthinkable, amusing, mind-boggling and hilarious. I was going to lend it to my mom, but some of the scenes are simply too shocking. How would I ever look her in the eye again? Scissors has, not surprisingly, stirred up some bad feelings amongst those portrayed in the book, whose depraved insanity makes for fascinating, thoroughly entertaining reading. The film version (which I haven't yet seen, but is by most accounts another dud) features Gwyneth Paltrow. The book's cover, unfortunately, does not.

2008-04-20T01:57:00.013+02:00

Cultural Critic or Fawning Fanboy:
Deconstructing the Myth of Morrissey

Morrissey: The Jewel in the Crown (2004)
"An unauthorised documentary film packed with exclusive interviews"

Today I watched Morrissey: The Jewel in the Crown in thirteen parts on YouTube. This curiously named (Moz is a vocal anti-royalist) "unauthorized" documentary examines the solo career of the iconic lyricist and crooner largely via the recollections of former band members and producers with whom he collaborated, as well as journalists and biographers who have closely followed his career.

I consider Stephen Patrick Morrissey to be the best lyricist ever. I don't have rigorous criteria when comparing him to, say, John Lennon or Bob Dylan. I just know, like many others, that his words have moved me more than any other songwriter I've ever heard. It is a matter of personal identification and taste. The only other name I would mention in the same breath is Mark Kozelek, while still contending that Moz is in a category all his own.

That said, I do not consider myself a fanboy. I never dressed like I was in the Smiths, wore their t-shirts or even saw them or their former front man in concert. During the summer of '86 I somewhat regretfully chose to see Public Image Limited at the Warner Theater in DC and though the Smiths were playing there on my 14th birthday, I could only afford to go to one show. I kept the poster advertising both concerts on my wall for years as a reminder. Besides that I have not been one for symbolic idolatry, "Moz" tattoos, mimicry, hero worship or other types of super-fan behavior. I just love the songs.

Back to the film. The first segments of the Jewel in the Crown illustrate one of the most frustrating pitfalls of first person accounts when trying to get at the "facts" of even the most seemingly straightforward and recent events. A case in point: apparently guitarist Vini Reilly and producer Stephen Street are both totally convinced that they were each the sole author of all (or nearly all) the music on Morrissey's first solo album "Viva Hate" (1988) and that the other is a complete liar. Now I've been in bands, written songs and recorded material written by other people and it's very clear which tracks I wrote, had a hand in writing or simply played on. There has never been any conflict as far as this is concerned. These guys don't even seem to concede that there may have been some co-writing or collaboration in the studio, which is simply baffling. Perhaps musicians' egos should be taken into account when doing documentary or journalistic research. Or perhaps not.

On the surface, the viewers are encouraged to make up their own minds and this is really all we can ask for from a credible documentary. Jewel has a very "fly on the wall" feel, despite the fact that it was made in retrospect. There is very little narration, which only occurs to set the time frame for each subsequent batch of anecdotes. The conversations themselves never feature the voice of the interviewer, adding to the work's impartial tenor, though the invisible hand of the editor and silent off-screen questioner without a doubt wield great influence. This is always something to acknowledge and be conscious of when looking at this kind of work, yet I don't believe a critical analysis should discount what comes out of these people's mouths. There are no MTV style sound bites, collages of flashy editing nor dramatic musical scoring to sway one's opinion. I am left with the impression of an even handed, surprisingly non manipulative piece of work. I have already stated that I am more of an admirer of Morrissey and not a fanatic, blind follower and I think that there is a crucial difference between the two designations or perspectives. One provides insight, the other skews objectivity. In the words of feminist cultural theorist Constance Penley, "there is no better critic than a fan." I tend to agree in terms of myself (big surprise there) yet one need only look at any sporting event to see how objectively most fans view any official decisions (or criticism) against their team. So we should always be suspicious of bias when examining what an enthusiast has to say.

Despite the trouncing out of jilted musicians and even an ex-guitarist/plaintiff, a flattering if not adoring image of Morrissey nonetheless emerges, even from the aforementioned "dumpees". The mystique of the man (it feels strange referring to him as a "man", so transcendent an individual he seems, I almost want to use "figure" or "personage" if both words didn't seem a bit absurd in this context) is reenforced by the stories recounted in Jewel and the fact that the only point in which we hear Morrissey speak is a short sequence from an interview (his first on television in 17 years, according to the BBC) on Jonathan Ross' show in 2004. Jonathan's coy, but to all appearances sincere, pleas for friendship with the solitary icon are shyly rebuffed and we respect and admire this decision because we know that Morrissey must be carrying quite a burden inside to produce such honesty and lyricism in his craft. We want him to reject Ross (and continue being a reclusive, eccentric genius) but we also sympathize with the poor television presenter, because we too would like to be the exception to the rule; hanging out at Moz's pad on a rainy Tuesday afternoon discussing... what? It's just inconceivable and so it should be, because his charisma is paradoxically wrapped in both candor and mystery. Seeing him eating Cornflakes in his bathrobe (which may be a fantasy for many, but that is a digression) while flipping between Tyra and Extreme Home Makeover would certainly sully the other-worldliness that is part of his appeal. And it is this appeal that for one such as I (who may have heroes, but is also a rational human being) is so crucial. Because it is really the art that is the object of adoration and true source of the myth, even in the case of Morrissey, who seems to embody and perpetuate his own myth. He does this while still remaining interesting, year after year, as the rest of the music world loses its mystique, integrity and relevance to Internet-fueled hyper commercialism and accessibility. Whatever the trends have been, Morrissey has consistently risen above them and remains in a class all his own. And that is my critical and admiring opinion.

A short documentary on Morrissey's Latino fan base in the US called "This Charming Hombre" is also worth checking out for those of you interested in Morrissey and/or cultural studies.

2008-04-10T23:25:00.005+02:00

Michael Stipe sang about my home town and the Great Gatsby's creator is buried there.

The online "diss-fest" that is Urban Dictionary defines the place that I grew up in–Rockville, Maryland–thusly:

(typos, grammar and spelling mistakes are not mine, by the by)

1)a place where middle class kids who's parents work at NIH pose as underprivalaged urban youth.
2)the less wealthy of two middle class neighborhoods in the 3rd wealthiest county in the country, althought the popular consesus is that the kids are "ghetto."

rockvile person-- "my dad makes me drive this ghetto ass volvo to school."

flint Michigan person--"wow your parents own a car??? you must be rich!"

My dad works at NIH, but I don't think I ever posed as underprivileged and urban. Ok, maybe a couple of times, like in seventh grade when I showed up at a sleep-over birthday party wearing a nylon Puma warm up suit, which made everyone laugh. Or the summer before that when my friends and I participated in a "break off" against another bunch of kids in a nearby Latino neighborhood. The judge was an older dude from a crew called Spanish Funk. I popped and locked, did the centipede and the top-rock the best I could, but was nothing special. During the last phase of the battle my crew pulled out our coup de grâce, the "propeller": I sat on my stocky friend's shoulders and another kid climbed up to sit on my lap, facing me. The stocky friend twirled around while the other kid and I leaned backwards. The resulting effect was a 3-kid human helicopter. When we'd finished, the judge said it was even, but "that shit in the end was fresh!" and he laughed while spinning his finger in the air, giving us the victory as local girls cheered, leaning out from their bedroom windows. It was like West Side Story, or what I imagine West Side Story to be, since I've never seen it.

Rockville's second most popular definition on UD is more flattering, though still a bit disappointing, grammar and usage-wise:

a city outside of DC in Maryland, where an extreme diverse of middle class, upper class, and lower class people are all thrown together. the area is made up of just about every race and language.

So it's a global village where one might hear the prenasalized stops of Swahili weave almost seamlessly amongst sing-song Latinate dialects and gutteral glottal fricatives of Middle Eastern tongues. From the lowly cobbler's son in Toughskins jeans to the daughter of the wealthy Washington lobbyist, her fruit-scented hair catching the filtered sunlight, creating an almost angelic, even halogenic effect; all mix and mingle to the jingle of the Rockville beat. The endless strip mall that is Rockville Pike assaults the senses with a dizzying array of color, culinary delight and bumper to bumper traffic, flowing one way to chic Georgetown and the other to the wilds of Gaithersburg, where people never really stopped feathering their hair.

What I remember most about Rockville isn't faux-ghetto or miles of endless shopping in a multi-class, multicultural landscape. It's the smell of rotting leaves on Halloween, chilly winters full of fuzzy polyester sweaters and static electric shocks, summers of endless oppressive, muggy heat while cicadas drone on and on at almost deafening volume. It's where I first got into music, shaved my head and pierced my ears. Where I smoked, drank, kissed girls and then gave up all three, if only to take the third category back up again, enthusiastically, if somewhat sporadically so. But hey, it was the 80s, the mood wasn't as sanguine as the following decade would be and like all revivals, Rockville would make a comeback and then suddenly become less relevant, girls and all. Still it's nice to visit, and like the third UD entry says, it'll always be "Home of the Rockvillians and girls who know how to work it." Can't say I disagree.

2008-03-30T00:38:00.013+01:00

You don't have to have surfer hair...

To meet foxy chicks

Growing up during eighties I often dreamt of "landing" women like the Landers sisters. But into the new millennium I've sometimes felt that my pre-middle age look doesn't quite "jive" with the times. No more.

The new publicity for Nivea's "Extreme Control" shave gel and balm features a guy with a shaved head, unwaxed chest and one crooked ear. In short: me.

Alright, I'm no skin care model, but it's refreshing to see the new male face of a huge multinational beauty corporation with my phenotype plastered around town and on bus shelters of only the most fashionable of districts. I admit I stare at the giant pictures of this dude and his confident grin as I whoosh by on my Segway, balancing a grande half-soy latte in one hand and a copy of the Economist in the other. I think I know how fat women feel when confronted with Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign: pretty darn good.

To be fair, those women aren't really fat, but this guy is bald, even if Larry David wouldn't consider him to part of the "bald community" due to the fact that he shaves his head, thereby remaining ambiguous about the real extent of his hair loss. Whatever. He also has hair on his chest, which means he doesn't resemble every single hollywood actor, with their steroid/HGH-fueled bodies, freshly waxed for that "pre-teen Conan the Barbarian" look.

So if you're like me and the stuff on your head is migrating onto your torso, if the new so-called "emo" look and teens with hair moulded into the shape of a soft serve ice cream cone are getting you down, take heart. There is a male modeling campaign with someone (almost) like you in mind, just not ugly.

Sincerely,

THX 1138

2008-03-12T18:29:00.008+01:00

Culture Corner:

"your eyes on my phone..."

That's what it sounds like to me when I listen to the song "Hljómalind" by Icelandic avant-garde pop group Sigur Rós before it soars into a crescendo chorus that doesn't sound close to anything in any language I can understand, thus ending my emotional sing-a-long about eyes on my phone until the verse starts back up again. Sometimes lyrics just don't matter.

Same with "Every Single Child" or "Absentmindedmysugar 2" by Luminous Orange, the musical vehicle of one brilliant Rie Takeuchi. Whether in English or Japanese, I don't know what she's singing about, but it sounds nice. It's like if My Bloody Valentine and Lush were forced to attend music college and still managed to resist sounding like Joe Satriani. In this day and age, Luminous Orange borders on the heroic. OK, I'm exaggerating, but still.

In the art world my appreciation of John Everett Millais (1829-1926) has been rekindled thanks to a recent exposition at the Tate, which I didn't see, but read about in various weekend magazines from the UK. For several years now I've had "Ophelia" hanging over my sofa and planned on putting up "Dew-Drenched Furze" somewhere sometime, but now I find I love many of his works, poetic titles and all. Millais, a co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, has been accused of mawkishness to the point of being sickly sweet and I admit that I can detect some reason for this criticism in several of his paintings. Nevertheless, besides being a member of a very cooly named club, Millais was a master at making art which is at once very beautiful and endlessly interesting to look at. He never comes close to approaching the nauseating schmaltz of Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) or Sweden's much celebrated Carl Larsson (1853-1919) and you'll find many who admire these two artists for reasons both earnest and kitsch.

Check out Millais here and here.

I guess my point is that I don't like art (including music and film) that isn't in some way enjoyable, which I realize is dangerously close to the dreaded triteness of "I don't know art, but I know what I like." Well, excuse me for being unoriginal and not coming up with brilliantly distinctive lines like your eyes on my phone. I am, after all, but a mere admirer and a novice at that.

2008-02-21T15:38:00.011+01:00

The Bow Bells, Cause for Alarm and a Ringing Endorsement.

Rise of the Footsoldier
Zwartboek
The Street

Don't trust IMDB's rating system. If for no other reason than the fact that the atrocious Rise of the Footsoldier averages 6.9 stars. I haven't finished this movie yet, because every time I sit down to watch it I feel contemptuous that the British film industry should churn out such garbage and am compelled to switch it off again. Over a year ago I "reviewed" The Business, Nick Love's less-than-engaging portrayal of 1980's London gangsters on the sun-soaked coast of Spain. Rise of the Footsoldier treads similar ground, but on home turf: the meteoric rise and decline, etc... of a football hooligan-cum-mobster based on the biography of one Carlton Leach. It's awful, unfunny and not really appealing in any way. Just a bunch harder-than-you not quite antiheroes being vicious and sadistic and ending most of their lines with the phrase "fackin' c*nt". Yawn.

Just to give you an idea, The Business, which was lousy, but heads and tails over Footsoldier, has an IMDB rating of 6.5 stars and Sexy Beast, a dark, tense, yet blackly comical thriller from 2000, also dealing with London villains on the Costa del Sol and featuring masterful performances by great actors (Ben Kingsley and Ray Winstone among others) has merely 7 stars out of the patently available 10. One tenth of a point more for Sir Ben et al over sterioded East Enders rejects attempting to portray gritty reality by wearing wigs and provoking tiresome "which country has the 'ardest gangsters" threads on the IMDB website? How is that possible?

I guess it's not surprising that a Dutch unintentional farce dealing with the Nazi occupation of Holland entitled Zwartboek or "Black Book" scores an 8.0. The picture starts off quite ok and features decent performances by Sebastian Koch (of the excellent The Lives of Others) and Carice Van Houten in the lead roles. The two play a Nazi officer and a Jewish resistance fighter, respectively, who (wait for it) fall in love. Not bloody likely, but ok, I'll buy it for the sake of the story line. Impossible coincidences, double and triple dealings ensue as do plenty of shoot-em-ups. The film teeters between a serious WWII drama and a silly James Bondish action flick. Eventually the latter wins out and it spirals out of control leaving the discerning patron with a disappointed sneer. As far as realistic films dealing with the Holocaust go, it falls well short when measured against much better (albeit less-starred) efforts. It's no Die Fälscher (7.6 stars) or even close to the Constant Gardener-ensembled Sunshine (7.3 stars). Winner of several awards and nominated for many others, this mysteriously overrated cinematic exercise in "jumping the shark" is directed by Paul Verhoeven, who is best known for Showgirls, Basic Instinct and Robocop, which sort of makes sense after watching Zwartboek. Incidentally, he's also responsible for Starship Troopers and Total Recall, two largely unsung nuggets of politically conscious Sci Fi.

To end on a high note, I've recently become somewhat enthralled by the BBC serial drama The Street, which focuses each week on a different family living on the same street somewhere in Manchester. It could rightly be accused of being a melodrama, but a very good melodrama it would be. Top British and Irish acting talent (Jane Horrocks, Jim Broadbent and the lurvley Gina McKee to name a few) and gripping, complex stories that are affecting and keep one coming back for more. It is not light entertainment, but it is very good.

Go on, you sexy beast

2007-12-13T19:53:00.000+01:00

He took a one-hour shower.

When he emerged his wrists glistened with beads of cooling water and his fingertips were wrinkled. The skin on his abdomen had a reddish tinge as if it had been smacked by an angry palm. He picked up a large round plastic bottle, squeezed a sizable glob of vanilla scented moisturizer onto his palm and began applying it liberally to his shoulders, stomach and the insides of his thighs, avoiding the hairier parts of his body that would soak up much of the lotion before it could sink into his skin. He wiped the mirror on the medicine cabinet with a hand towel, peered into the half fogged up glass and sighed at the dark circles under his eyes. He noticed with some annoyance that there were horizontal lines on his forehead even when his brow was unfurrowed. He blew his nose on two squares of toilet paper, stepped on the pedal to open the small cylindrical brushed-steel trash can and tossed the balled up paper into the nearly full receptacle. He would have to empty it soon.

Upon emerging from the steamy bathroom a rush of cool air engulfed his naked body. He hurried across the small hallway towards the bedroom and snatched a long hooded grey fleece robe, which he then placed on the unmade bed, remembering to first put on a clean pair of blue and white striped boxer shorts. They felt crisp and fresh. He wrapped himself in the soft fleece and immediately felt warmer. After slipping a pair of cheap open-toed cotton padded slippers onto his feet he shuffled back through the hall and into the living room where he sunk into the couch, put his feet up and hoisted his laptop onto the tops of his legs. He opened a web browser, typed in the password to his email account and saw that he had received two new messages since he had last checked before his customary midmorning ablutions. The first was from an online boutique informing him that the new sneakers he'd ordered were not available in size nine and a half. He swore softly and clicked "next". He didn't recognize the sender's address nor did the name ring any bells. Cassandra.

Dear Constantine,

You might not remember me, but I got your address from a mutual friend of ours, Cornelius. He gave it to me some time ago, but I never had the guts to write before. And now, it's not with any lightheartedness or pleasure that I do so. I'm very sorry to inform you that our dear friend Cornelius is no longer with us. He suffered a terrible and sudden accident from which he could not recover. I don't think that his death was very painful, but it has come as a sharp shock to all of us here, his close, loving friends. I suppose I should tell you how it happened, though it hurts me to do so. Still, it is your right to know and I think that it's my duty to tell you.

He didn't recognize the names Constantine or Cornelius as anyone he knew and thought they sounded quite old-fashioned and out of place to be anything real or connected to his life. Still, unlike most scam emails, the story was much darker and more intriguing than the usual "third world businessman needs your bank account information in order to claim enormous inheritance", of which you are invited to share a healthy sum. He read on:

Last Saturday our group was on a picnic at Lake Luna (the small pond in the western foothills outside of our village–I think you may know it from your brief visit here, years ago) where we were taking part in interconnective, impromptu physical activities. I don't know how much you know or remember of our group, but we were engaging in something called Authentic Movement, which can best be described as somewhere between improvisational dance and the free play normally associated with small children. One important part of the Authentic Movement we do is that all participants are blindfolded. Usually some of us sit out to observe, but this time we neglected to take this precaution. I guess we all felt so comfortable and safe and we all wanted to take part because it was such a nice, peaceful day on the sand of the shores of that tiny little lake. Authentic Movement can be like entering into another world full of innocence and wonder, free from the pretenses and hang-ups of normal, mundane lives. But we should have been more careful. When the session was over and we removed our eye coverings we couldn't see Cornelius. I'm embarrassed to say that I laughed and called out to him, expecting him to be hiding somewhere nearby, ready to jump out and surprise us unawares. Maybe you don't know him in the way that he was here with us, but he could be a real joker sometimes.

It only took a few moments before Cybele, a young newcomer to our group, noticed Cornelius lying in a heap a few meters off to the side, unmoving. She let out a yelp and we all rushed to where she was pointing. We could see some blood in his curly black hair and when one of the group rolled him over he didn't make a sound or respond at all. He just flopped like rag doll. I rushed over and began to call his name, hoping he would wake up. I slapped his cheek (not hard) and tried to open his eyes, but there was no response. When I checked his pulse I was too panicked to notice if there was one or not, but when I lay my ear to his heart I was sure he was no longer alive. You already know he never woke up.

The reason that I'm writing you is not just to tell you that your old friend is no longer alive, but that I believe that he was killed on purpose. Murdered. I can hardly bear to write that word, but I can't help thinking it is so. There was a rock lying next to his shoulder, roughly the size of his head with a speck of blood on it. We've discussed and supposed that he must have tripped, fallen and hit his head on it, as Authentic Movement can get a bit spirited at times, but as I've already indicated, I have my doubts.

Constantine, please take seriously what I'm saying. There is no reason nor motive that I can think of why anyone would want Cornelius dead! But I can't fight this suspicion that is eating away at me from the inside. There is more... but I don't dare tell of it in this email. It is foolish of me to write even this much, if there is any truth to what I suspect. I will need to meet with you in person to tell you the rest. Come to the place you knew as "Hell" when you were a boy. I will see you there on Saturday, one week from now at dusk, two weeks after Cornelius' death. If I do not see you there I will not attempt to contact you further and please, do not respond to this message. I am sending it and immediately erasing this account.

Cassandra

The last paragraph made the small hairs on his arm stand up and his scalp tingle with goosebumps. "Hell" was a name given to a hidden spot he and some friends used to hang around in as a kid. It was a disused amphitheater implausibly located about half a kilometer into the woods behind a run-down shopping center. It was an ideal location for goofing around in, smoking, drinking beers and on rare occasion making out with girls; completely away from adult supervision, and therefore the perfect hideout. Names came flooding back to him: he was Constantine and Cornelius was Tran. They were silly nicknames they'd given each when joking around, playing some game where they talked in exaggerated 1950s b-movie accents, like from the poorly dubbed Hercules films. He'd originally started calling Tran "Cornelius" because of his low hairline. When his fuzzy, close-cropped hair started growing in, he looked a bit like Cornelius from Planet of the Apes. The name Cassandra still didn't ring any bells, but he imagined Tran had told this woman stories about their youthful adventures and she'd chosen a similar name to use in her email.

He closed his laptop, placed it on the Indian sesame wood coffee table and began pacing through the apartment, wringing his hands. He stopped in front of the hall mirror to examine himself. Tran was dead. Maybe murdered. And he had been asked by a stranger to meet in some godforsaken haunt from his teenage days. It sounded crazy, but of course he would go. How could he not?

2007-12-01T11:30:00.001+01:00

The Trappings of Success: A light human interest piece that could possibly grace the pages of the Sunday magazine supplement to a well known left-leaning broadsheet.

As my soon erstwhile stint as an office worker nears its close and I set my eyes towards a more southerly shore I find myself constantly contemplating not exactly what my life means to me, but more so how I might explain it to others. I'm prompted to consider how much I define myself according to what I imagine others think of me. This type of thinking is patently incongruous as I'm quite sure that no one thinks about me as much as I think about myself, not even one tenth as much. If I notice someone causally studying my cheerfully eighties Kangaroo brand shoes for two seconds I'm bound to ponder what they were possibly thinking for twenty. Cool, nerdy, sexy, gay? This egotism has scarcely changed since my formative years, which have typically come to hold a nostalgic, almost timeless quality.

When I was in junior high school I'd lie awake at night in restless anticipation about what I'd wear the next day: a Chams de Baron shirt with satin lined zippers down the sides, a new pair of pointy Doctor Marten monk shoes... freshly bleached Levis? What a sensation I'd cause walking down the hallway in those!

In reality I'd get at best a few casually interested looks and perhaps the odd compliment or cut-down from another kid, but in my head I'd be the star of my own John Hughes movie in which Mary Stuart Masterson would ditch the prom to make out with me under the bleachers. Like Nicholas Cage in Valley Girl I'd lead a rebellious rabble of stylish misfits against the Andrew MaCarthys and Lea Thompsons of the eighth grade. Preppies and Jocks would buckle under the weighty cool of street-smart skater punks and spiky haired new wavers. We don't care what you think, I'd scrawl on my notebook with painful sincerity. Ha! Suburban junior high could be a wistfully romantic place in the hormone-addled brain of a moody thirteen year old. The irony of those years is still only beginning to sink in...

Now I barely look in the mirror in the morning to check if something is hanging out of my nose before I trudge off to work, where I'll sit in front of a sixteen inch monitor to which a former employee has affixed a tiny sticker of a parrot in some attempt at marking their territory or asserting their individualism. Morning, Bob. Morning, Sue. Yes, I did have spaghetti last night. How did you know? In my ear? No way!

Such lapses in personal grooming aside, I still tend to judge the grand history of my existence by how it might look on a résumé: Short. Far too short for my age. I can't really explain to people that during most of the 1990s I played tennis every day with my DJ friend and watched all the videos in the anime (ahem, foreign film) rental section of the Rockville Tower Records. Such a life of leisure, followed by four plus years as a "mature student" at Scandinavian universities doesn't make for an easy transition to the eight hour work-a-day life of the average wage earner. In fact, a life spent daydreaming and largely lounging around being "creative" has raised my expectations about what I feel I need to believe that other people might be thinking about me. Make sense?

The thought of saying I'm working on a novel when I'm only thinking about starting to do so is becoming more appealing each day. And that's the step that comes before actually starting one. I'm a novelist. Yes, well I'm doing research for my next novel. Only one. Yes it's my first, but I'm still a novelist. Screw you, I've been to Japan.

2007-11-02T09:46:00.000+01:00

Peaked: Egoism is Unrewarding

I'm balding on top, going grey on the sides and the lower half of my face has turned yellow.

The first two are down to genes and the third is anyone's guess. I tend to think it has something to do with the daily glasses of fresh carrot juice I downed for several years, but have no evidence to support this suspicion.

One of my ears sticks out and the other is still slightly cauliflowered due to six years of on-and-off jiu jitsu, which certainly also contributed to a herniated disk in my lower back, severely limiting my comfort and sporting life as well as giving me a sometimes Doctor House-like gait.

I used to have wash-board abs, rosy cheeks and silky chestnut hair that flopped impudently in front of my eyes. 20-20 eyes, they were. (In my preteen years I received Marksman and Pro Marksman certificates from the National Rifle Association. Air guns, but still.)

Despite regular exercise I'm gaining weight. Today I am wearing a white dress shirt that I have only worn once before, almost exactly one year ago. I remember the last time because it was at a wedding. I have pictures of myself in which I can see that it fit quite loosely. Now I look in the restroom mirror at work and can see my pink skin in the spaces between buttons because the fabric is pulled so tightly across my chest and midsection. I stand back, look at my own body and it reminds me of Ricky Gervais.

Where did my youthful good looks go? It seems that they're being syphoned off somewhere, along with my physical health and mental well-being, into some sort of circular mechanism that in turn pumps increasing amounts of fat and body hair back in. Kind of a raw deal, if you ask me.

Typical middle class whingeing about getting older and longing for one's formative years, right? Oh, to be a teenager again. Not. I had horrible acne, a hairline like Eddie Munster and was typically morose as a teen. Give me my mid-twenties any day. Those were my real "salad days", when the world was my oyster. Not that I appreciated it. I was alternately love sick and easily repelled by the opposite sex in an almost Seinfeldian way. Apparently, you never realize you're peaking until you're already quite a ways down the decline, irreversibly freewheeling and moribund.

Perhaps I'm glossing over the past, forgetting the criminally bad haircuts, skin rashes and unforgivably bad fashion goofs. Sky blue bell-bottoms and a womens imitation sheep-skin coat? Birkenstocks with Wigwam socks? Hat-head and third world khadi cotton ensembles even the lamest of European backpackers would balk at.

So I guess my point is that being vain doesn't pay in the end. Hell, it didn't even pay in the beginning. Still, I've had a pretty good time turning my body into the wreck it is now. That's without drinking, smoking or illegal drugs, kids. And I think there is still a good amount milage yet to be eked out of this already decomposing carcass of a vehicle, with its knocks and pings, twinges and creaks. Problem is, unlike the analogous bicycle ride, we coast in the beginning and pedal uphill later on, huffing, straining and sweating all the more, yet somehow getting fatter, weaker and slower.

I'll continue to reminisce through rose-colored, retrograde binoculars, living vicariously through my own past potential self; what could have been, should have been and may still be, somewhere out there in the realm of (im)possibility. Most of what I consider "life" happens on the inside, anyway. Inside the mind and not to the body, however it may look or feel. Somehow this thought is comforting to me in the quiet moments I have to myself, alone in my room, thinking and dreaming and making plans.

2007-10-07T15:13:00.003+02:00

I swear it's all true...

I've just updated my CV. That's Curriculum Vitae or "course of life" for those who are lovers of Latin and résumé for Americans, from the French meaning "a look back".

And what a look back it is...

I used to be a rock star on four continents, you know. I was an animal carer in my spare time (kind of like a lion tamer), a Bonsai-sculpting Zen Master and a sports doctor, like the ones who help win Olympic medals.

Or maybe, depending on how you look at it, I used to play in filthy punk clubs before packing into a crowded van and maybe spending the night in a sleeping bag on some stranger's floor. I walked other people's dogs and changed their water to pay the bills. I also worked in a fly-by-night mall outlet that sold mass-produced shrubbery from Shanghai. Oh, and does anyone want a back rub?

My scholarly knowledge is as impressive as it is useful. There are many employers who need to know about the connections between: the Third Reich and Hindu nationalists, Fascists and ancient Rome, cyberpunk and new technology... how about historical fiction concerning the Japanese occupation of the Philippines? Did I mention that I'm really good at surfing the Internet(s) and finding stuff on the Google?

***

The other day I climbed a very steep hill behind my apartment building, made my way through a densely wooded area; rife with cobwebs and bramble bushes, until I found myself facing a six-foot stone wall. In the center of the wall, just below waist-high, was a perfectly round hole, barely large enough for me to squeeze through. I "squoze" through and ended up in a sunny green field, looking at a white horse. The horse looked back at me as if it was a holiday maker who had gone through painstaking efforts to find a secluded beach, stripped naked and was just about to take a refreshingly liberating dip, when all of a sudden a group of fat American tourists arrive, announcing "this is the top secret spot we read about in the Lonely Planet!"

I turned around, résuméd my walk by squozing back through the hole and leaving him to munch on mouthfuls of sweet Irish clover.

That's got to be worth something. Should I add it to my CV?

2007-09-19T16:50:00.000+02:00

Visiting Hours

My neighbors are strangely quiet. Almost all of their windows are boarded up, but I've seen laundry hanging in one. Or was it just a sheet to block the draft?

My end of the building is full of "luxury" apartments, yet it lacks double glazing. No lampshades or pictures on the walls of our unit either. The far end of the structure is still more or less derelict, but there are signs that renovation is underway.

This used to be a madhouse or a state mental hospital, if you prefer. The other day my cab driver recited all of the lyrics to a song about a man who was mistakenly locked up in here. The poor guy was simply drunk, not insane, you see.

Further along the way is another large dilapidated building with outdoor plumbing. Will this too be turned into flats for the ambitious first time buyer? Yesterday I walked up a hill behind it, climbed a stone wall and peered over to find an ancient water reservoir, no longer in use, yet completely blocking a potentially much easier route to the northwestern suburbs and my new place of work. Fie on the city planners of long ago, whose work survives to discourage the modern pedestrian!

If I don't find a quicker way to my job I'll have to be committed, from one madhouse to the next: trading stunning views and landmark status for cable TV, double glazing and a complete discharge of responsibility. (ooh-er)

2007-09-13T17:28:00.006+02:00

Remeron and on and on...

Press play and begin reading

It's going to end badly, isn't it?
This experiment called: Life
I'm not talking suicide, it's just going to end badly... because it always does, eventually.

These things end tragically because we don't know when to stop. We never do. We tend to push the boundaries, so to speak.

***

Thinking about being someone else makes you think about who you are.
It's obvious, isn't it? It's obvious I don't exist here, so I should go somewhere else.

Session number 35
code: m 164651
password: ddqkeym7

I woke up and everyone was speaking in a strange tongue. Familiar, but indecipherable. Incoherent lilting mumbles.

They had Velcro fasteners on their clothing. They wore Polartec leisure suits and Gortex windbreakers. Their teeth were perfect.

I attempted to open my mouth to speak, but my lips were stuck together. I forced my jaws to widen and felt my lips peel apart, allowing cool air to rush into my mouth. I cleared my throat.

"Does someone have a glass of water?" I asked, stupidly. I could plainly see that that no one did.

Peering bleary-eyed into my surroundings, I discerned that I was in a well-lit space about the size of a typical American suburban living room. Besides myself, there were four others present: two females and two males. All standing, all dressed in white. The walls, furniture and equipment (medical?) were also completely white.

"I'll get you some water", said one of the males. I couldn't place his accent.

He returned with a tall, slim glass and a large white pill with a line down the middle. "Take this. First let it melt in your mouth and then drink, but not too quickly. It's important that you stay relaxed."

I did as he said. Why shouldn't I? The pill dissolved quickly on my tongue. It tasted sweet and slightly lemony. The water was delicious.

"Where am I?" I asked, typically. Might as well.

"This is just a rest stop. A conduit station. There was a... complication with your transfer."

"My transfer to what?"

One of the females stepped forward. She had light blue eyes with kind creases that spread out from the corners. Crow's-feet. "Your transfer to the new life that you requested."

"I don't remember requesting any transfer," I grumbled, trying to raise myself off the bed. I found my body to be extremely heavy and after a brief struggle, I gave up and sank even further into the mattress than I had been when I began.

"What do you remember?" the woman asked.

"I... nothing, really."

"Nor will you remember this," she added and walked away into the white light, which was encroaching; washing out and blurring the borders of my vision. Soon there was nothing but light and I closed my eyes to see if it made any difference. I sank into a warm dark redness and fell into a welcoming sleep full of dreams about people I've never seen and places I've never been.

2007-08-27T00:13:00.000+02:00

Cruelty to Animals

Grumpy old guy who hates new music and knows more about old music than you says... Before you think you've heard something fresh and original check out:

SSQ "Walkman On"

L'Trimm "Cars That Go Boom"

Add those two to a trendy hype-fueled decadent Continental scene, run it through Apple GarageBand (tee hee) and you have some Ed Banger (oo-er) track.

Yes, I heard a song called "Pop the Glock" this past March while I was in Portugal and it reminded me of early 80's LA new wave synth plus old electro rap. In other words: old Stacey Q, Berlin, Missing Persons type stuff mixed with breakdance-era electro; i.e. Newcleus, the Gap Band's "White Horse", hell, even that song the nerds did in "Revenge of the Nerds".

Here's another one to rip:

(Photo by Johann)

2007-08-25T19:06:00.002+02:00

[Excerpt from a short story written in the spring, 2007]
...

The following morning we set out in the mule-
drawn cart towards the “forest”, which turned
out to be in a tiny valley nestled between two
walls of limestone. The walls were steep and
the valley only a few meters wide, but it ran
quite a long ways until narrowing to nothing.
Yarns said it created a unique micro climate
which was home to some unusual species of
flora and fauna.

“Tread lightly, boy. I don’t want you trampling
some as-yet-undiscovered species of tree-toad
with your clumpy Digger boots.”

The terrain of the valley was flat, but still
somewhat rocky with rich soil and a mat of
decomposing leaves. The air was wet and chilly
but a warmth radiated from the ground. I bent
down to brush some dead leaves and have a
look at the earth. It was crawling with sow
bugs and centipedes. To my left, under some
saplings which were growing at an angle just
under the sheer rock of the valley’s wall, a glint
caught my eye. I walked over, crouched down
and cleared the dirt away to uncover what
looked to be a small octagonal crystal. As I
tried to dig it out with my fingers the earth
pealed away and I realized what I’d noticed
was only the tip of a rock as thick as an axe
handle and about six inches long. I dug and
wrestled it out, dusted it off and put it into my
leather shoulder-pack.

“Boy! Come here.”

Yarns was standing in the entrance of a de-
crepit old mine shaft, framed in moss covered
timber and over-grown with vines. He brushed
away a curtain of spider silk and peered in.

“Go in.” he ordered.

I looked up at him in surprise but he only
handed me an oil lantern and pointed into the
shaft.

“This is one of the old mines. Tiny, isn’t it?
That’s because it was dug by children even smaller
than you are, about your brother’s size. Take a
look in, but don’t venture too far.”

I took the lamp, swallowed and felt beads of
sweat form on my forehead despite the chill of
damp air coming from the mouth of the shaft. I
had to bend over to enter the tunnel and could
scarcely stand upright when I got inside. It
was musty and chilly and I kept walking,
hunched over and with tiny shuffling steps.
The lantern lit up shiny black walls, my every
movement and breath echoing in the narrow
chamber. The angle of the sun was so that the
daylight didn’t reach into the tunnel and when
I looked back I couldn’t see more than a hint of
greenery outside the entrance. I felt utterly
alone and in complete privacy. It was like I
had found my own personal hide-out, in spite
of the fact that Yarns was only a few yards
away.

I noticed a formation of rocks jutting out from
the wall of the shaft a few feet ahead. It looked
like a chair that had been carved into the wall.
I decided I would sit there and take in the at-
mosphere of the passage. I noticed that I felt
sleepy and would like nothing better than to
sit in my rocky throne in this dark empty cave.
Resting there in that mine where child Diggers
had once slaved away and died in horrible ac-
cidents somehow felt good. I was a scientist
and an observer of history and no one could
make me dig for anything. I could just sit here
and be utterly alone with my thoughts.

“Grab anything of interest and look to see how
far back it might go!” yelled Yarns from the
entrance, “And get back here before you suffo-
cate.”

I emerged from my light-headed reverie and
saw that the shaft ended only a few yards from
where I sat. It had apparently collapsed or
been caved in by someone. I got up and stag-
gered toward the rubble. Something made me
stumble and made a noise much higher in pitch
than a rock would have. I shined my lantern down
to where I had kicked the object and saw a
dusty tin pillbox roughly the size of my fist. I
picked it up, turned around and made my way
back towards the opening. When I emerged,
the light was blinding, but the fresh air felt
wonderfully invigorating.

Yarns snatched the pillbox and pried it open
with his pocket knife.

“Ha! Shade snuff. They used to give it to the
miners to keep ‘em docile. Didn’t work out to
well.” He took out a pinch and smelled it. “Bit
dry, but still reasonably well-preserved. Most
likely due to the conditions inside shaft plus a
remarkably tight seal on the box. Must be at
least fifty years old.”

He handed back the box and asked if there
was anything else in there. I shook my head.

“The mine’s collapsed about 20 yards in.”

He nodded and seemed satisfied. We collected
some fungus samples and headed back to the
cottage. I never mentioned the chair carved
into the wall (if that is indeed what it was) or
the crystal that I’d found earlier. I’m not sure
why I didn’t talk about these things. It’s not
that I didn’t trust Yarns, I think I just wanted
to keep something for myself, my own personal
discoveries that no one else could lay claim to.

2007-07-27T21:39:00.000+02:00

Intro to a Story from 1996...

In the summer of 1996 while working in White Flint Mall in Bethesda, Maryland selling Bonsai trees, I scrawled this bit of fiction in a small spiral notebook. I think I was trying to write satirical cyberpunk and combine it with the hardcore scene. I found it today while cleaning out my attic and decided to transcribe the crumpled pages onto my computer. This is not a rewrite, it's exactly as it was, save for some spelling corrections.

I only ever wrote an intro. It's very silly and pokes fun at hardcore, cyberpunk science fiction and straight edge.

August 7, 2021

Toxi:

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ll be nineteen years old. I’ll have one more year to be a teenager, to do all those free-spirited teenagery things older folks always lament about, but no one actually does. In my nineteen years I’ve fallen in love once, been intoxicated six times and had sexual encounters with two people – both girls – the other kind never attracted me. Not that I’m morally against it, I’m just not interested. Suffice it to say, my 1.9 decades in this mortal coil have not exactly been rampant with romance, revel-making and debauchery. And although I crave excitement and adventure, I’m quite pleased with my past record of sinlessness. Of course by standards of say, seventy years ago I’d probably be considered a precocious drunken whore-monger, but in today’s modern America I’m as pure as the proverbially driven snow. You see, this is a conscious decision which I hold in high regard.

At the tender age of fifteen, Budweiser Ichiban in hand, black market cigarette between my lips and first love by my side, I made a revolutionary decision: to follow in the footsteps of my fraternal uncle, and go Straight Edge.

XXX

Tonight the Reptile Club was packed. Maria could barely make it from the entrance to her usual spot at the side of the stage where she entrenched herself every Friday night. But this wasn’t just any old Friday night hardcore show. This was a Fearless show. The most exciting up and coming SE band in recent years, and she was shooting them for the upcoming multi media VR CD entitled “The Adventures of Fearlessness.” This was one of the first hardcore bands to do a “multi-media”, the production being incredibly expensive for bands with only cult followings – thus Krishna-core bands found it extremely difficult.

So how could Fearless afford it? Maria casually wondered, but she didn’t much care. She didn’t share the fascination and enthusiasm a lot of young kids had for the band. She couldn’t relate to shock tactics. Maria’s age-group was far beyond shock. What can you expect from a generation whose parents watched people murder, mutilate and defecate; all for one cover charge. Shock-rock had to be replaced by realism. Relatable bands that told stories that the crowd lived. That was the hardcore tradition and that was how Maria and many other “stalwarts” liked it. However, the younger crop of kids was always prone to be taken in by gimmicks. Tough-guy bands, fanatic bands, bands that wore three-piece Armani suits with flashing armbands which alternately read: New York... Style Core... NY... SC...

Fearless had a gimmick, but she couldn’t quite say what it was. That was just it – they were so damn mysterious. Their lyrics were vague in one way, but could be seen as profound in another, if only you knew just what in particular they were so passionate about. So a bunch of confused kids simply transferred this fervor to whatever they were personally concerned about. Even if it’s nothing – it’s deeply gratifying to shout, raise a fist, stage dive and just plain be really concerned You’ll find a cause soon enough.

Maria reflected that maybe this band was innocuous, but she saw how fired up the young kids were and wondered where they would all be led. Up till now they’d done a couple of CD’s in the last 18 months . Everyone had at least one of them. Their debut was “Who’s Fearless?” followed by “Fearless in Seattle” which featured a cover shot of the band in cut-off wet suits, florescent tattoos showing, standing in a speedboat in front of the three-quarters submerged Seattle tower, peaking out from the now way below sea-level former metropolis. The CD was named after the 1990’s two-dimensional classic, “Sleepless in Seattle”.

Was this some sort of environmental statement? Maria had wondered, or rather just a clever gimmick. Maybe with this multi media we’ll all find out just what this band is on about. That’s what everyone was hoping, Maria admittedly included. After all, she liked to know a bit about the bands she was shooting, and frankly taking part in one of the first virtual reality hardcore projects was ground breaking! And of course it couldn’t hurt her career any. She was twenty one and one of the top photographers in the scene. And she really was in the scene – attending nearly every show in DC as well as frequent shows along the east and west coasts, even a trip now and then to Europe, South America or Asia, though she hadn’t been able to break in Japan yet. The home grown competition was just too fierce. Try taking a picture in a crowd where everyone else has a micro-cam every bit as good or better than yours. It’s like the whole room is one giant photo-journalism pit. The press and fans one and the same; stomping, diving and shooting. She went to the All Nippon Hardcore Fest in September 2019 and had left the first day in tears. The atmosphere was so elitist! Micro-cam rings, watches, headbands, all taking the most live shots as imaginable. So she returned to the rest of the world. Japan would have to wait. She had made a name for herself everywhere else in the scene within two years and this multi media would seal it. She would be the envy of the Japanese photo-divers.

Maria shook herself out of these thoughts. Sure she was ambitious, but now she was beginning to sound elitist herself and that was no way for a stalwart to think. “Stalwart” was the new word used in place of the passe term “old school”. You see, the scene had been around a little too long for anyone but those in their fifties to be considered truly old school. And there was just nothing cool about being fifty. Some west coast bands of the 80’s reformed a couple of years back and were subsequently laughed, booed or emergency helicoptered off stage. Some prejudices die hard.

To everyone’s relief came the term “stalwart”. Now credibility could be enjoyed without developing cataracts or liver spots. Stalwart means you’ve been around for at least six years, have strong moral hardcore principles and have been Straight Edge and vegetarian for at least three years. And you must, beyond reasonable doubt, have a cool tattoo.

Maria was quite certain her tattoo qualified. Encircling her neck in florescent electric blue were the words “Stalwart Straight Edge”. The tattoo formed a necklace of key letters spelling out the twenty-letter, three-word phrase as if each letter was a simplified, bold imprint of a single computer key. The result was a glowing ring of letters, each surrounded by blocks with rounded corners which adjoined each other. When the lights went down at a show and Maria did a front flip off the PA into the crowd below, the effect was stirring.

“Who is that incredibly stylish and classy girl who gracefully and effortlessly dives with such flair and panache?” the boys in the pit would wonder and they would happily catch her and respectfully lower her to the floor, feet first, of course. You don’t mess with a stalwart. Goosing a stalwart girl was grounds for a sound thrashing by at least six of her closest comrades and an unofficial ban on attending hardcore shows for three months. It just wasn’t worth it.

Maria checked her micro-cam – fully loaded, 500 exposures. The cam was roughly the shape and size of three silver dollars stacked upon each other. It had all the features – super zoom, split frame, infra-flash and could take up to 500 shots on one film cartridge. And it conveniently fit into your pocket, purse, or micro-cam holster, which was worn hanging just below the belt, so it could be pulled at a split second’s notice if anything worth shooting should appear on the scene. Maria was quite a quick-draw herself. And she would draw at the drop of a hat. It was rumored she once shot a drunken skinhead just for snoring too loud.

When questioned, she dispelled the rumor with a simple roll of her dark eyes and a shake of her immaculately cut bobbed hair. Gossip was a pass-time the scene never tired of.

The lights dimmed.

The anticipation was that of religious zealots. An un-initiate would expect to see a seventy year old bearded messiah take the stage rather than a fresh-faced youth with a quiff so stiff it doubled as a football helmet and a torso covered with irridescent tattoos.

Interestingly enough, if the wandering neophyte should further examine the hardcore show, the prophet metaphor would indeed seem suitable. The singers incited anger, joy, righteousness and commitment with a fervor the religious community envied. No wonder groups like the Hare Krishnas and the Moonies appealed to so many scenesters. The latter, who had particularly thrived in the Korean hardcore scene within the last two decades had secured a devout following in their highly prosperous country’s underground clubs and had set out to conquer the rest of the world. Not a bit of it. Besides a few token Moonies around the hardcore world, no one was really interested in their conservative politics or business oriented lifestyle. It would just please their grandparents too much and their parents would be unimpressed either way. It’s difficult to impress a group who becomes so easily bored. The “TV generation”...

Maria wasn’t particularly religious. She had been raised Morrissey for the first ten years of her life, but lost interest when her parents got back into Catholicism – the religion of her grandparents. She still knew her Oscar Wilde and could hardly suppress a tear when she heard “There is a Light that Never Goes Out” on the local interfaith radio show, but for the most part Straight Edge and hardcore had claimed her heart. The cult of Steven Patrick Morrissey, or as they were popularly known, “the Mozzers” had laid good foundations; Meat is Murder was a valuable precursor to the Veg Edge movement of the 1990’s. So she was a stalwart with a soft heart and a good knowledge of Yeats.

The taped music of an Amazon rain forest tribal dance began, its rhythms slowly building in intensity until the dark, sweaty club itself seemed like an exotic jungle. Kids smiled nervously at one another and shifted around anxiously. The curtain opened, a single E chord ripped its way through the percussive fabric of the Amazon. Fearless frontman Matt Fearless, sporting a “wife beater” top, his quiff making Morrissey look like Alan Alda–Maria mentally reprimanded herself for this blasphemous comparison–grabbed the mic and began one of his famous intro diatribes:

“Our countries are sinking into the sea, our brothers and sisters are dying of diseases with no cure... our sun, once revered as the source of life now burns our skin and eyes. The polluted ozone chokes our lungs. What once was farmland is now dessert. What once was fresh water is now poison... and our generation... we sit like zombies, living on alternate existence drugs and in virtual reality rooms... while the world falls apart.”

Maria contemplated the irony. She was shooting the cover of their virtual reality disk, she mused.

“It’s time for a return to Eden!”

The first furious guitar riff was like a musical machine-gun and when the drums, bass and lead joined in the result was somewhere between a Beethoven symphony and a jackhammer. Matt’s voice barked above the thunder and was chorused by the frenzied crowd.

OK, they are good, Maria admitted, not begrudgingly. There’s certainly no lack of energy.

“This is the heartbreaking story... of countless lives lived and lost... with nothing to show for at the end of the road... Once life was beautiful, the future shined so bright. Now the bleakness of existence just drags me down...”

As she furiously clicked away in the tangled mass of bodies, the refrain was chanted,
“Through courage and determination... we can change!”

a forest of pointing fingers and fists shot up, most marked with the trademark “X” either in floro-ink or tattooed – the symbol of SE, the vow against intoxication and meat-eating; the clean life.

These shots are gonna be great. A stage diver arced above, was caught and floated on a sea of hands as he swung his fist and screamed along. Maria recognized him. His name was Toxi, a stylish, low-key Straight-edger. He’d been around a while, but wasn’t a stalwart–too much of an independent and mellow character, she thought. The back of his black wet-suit top had the words “Toxi - The Toxic Avenger” emblazoned in self-illuminating silver letters. Cute. His slightly Asian features occasionally betrayed their seriousness with a half smile, as if he was sharing a secret joke with himself, which no one else was a party to. Maria took several shots of him in quick succession and then returned to Matt Fearless, whose neck tendons bulged and stretched so much he created the impression of a Komodo dragon doing Olympic squat thrusts.
Such seriousness could sometimes seem so silly too. Her thoughts lingered on Toxi. She liked his cropped black hair–fuzzy–like a chick that just hatched and was still sitting in the lower half of the egg shell. He was immaculate in loose, dressy grey tweed slacks with sharp creases down the fronts of the legs and thick cuffs resting on black rubber Mizuno trainers–the official shoes of Hardcore Volleyball League.

Hardcore volleyball, the sport that had swept the scene over the past three years. Combination hardcore show and full contact volleyball game. The game was limited to one hundred players; fifty per team. A fifteen foot high net separated the crowd. Each side, indentifiable by their own jerseys, would hit, throw, or stage-dunk-dive the ball over the net to the other’s side, accompanied by hardcore played by the band of the moment, on stage and to the side of the game. The best divers would situate themselves by the stage and the strongest moshers would be in the center of the pit, ready to catapult lighter players to the top. The object – to keep the ball on the other team’s side while displaying the coolest, hardest dance moves, flips and floorpunches as possible. Who was the coolest was decided by impartial (ahem) judges, who observed from seats suspended from the ceiling. The bulk of the points, however, were scored by where the ball was at the end of each song. If there was any doubt as to whose side the ball was on when the song ended, due to guitar feedback, etc..., the judges made the call. To make matters more furious, if any player held the ball for more than three seconds, it was thrown towards the rear of his or her team’s side. It was a highly exciting game which added a new dimension to the scene.

Maria used to play occasionally for a stalwart team, but she felt it got too openly competitive and cliquish. She liked being a stalwart, but volleyball teams had no philosophical basis. It was pure recreation as she saw it. Still, it was fun for a while. She wondered if Toxi still played and for what team...

2007-06-02T22:18:00.000+02:00

Rotten Old Life

Even when you aren't busy there are still tons of things to do. The apartment doesn't clean itself and meals refuse to cook themselves. Calories need to be burned and muscles strengthened for any progress to take place. When taste buds are gratified, waistlines increase to never before seen proportions. Happiness takes from one place in order to give to another. That's why drug addiction is bad, kids.

I once had a huge mosquito bite on my calf and it itched so much it seemed to yelp like a puppy, begging to be scratched. When I gave in I tore it to bits and it felt so good, like my only purpose in life was to scratch that mosquito bite. It was, in a way, delicious.

The mosquito bite wasn't exactly an incident so much as it is a series of events that continue to take place in a semi-conscious state, in assorted beds, in various dreams throughout my life. Countless burning itches have been quelled only to resurface as open sores which then become painful scabs. Do not shudder or turn your nose up at this crude dissection of a very ordinary, probably universal feature of humanity. You all do it and relish it in one way or another; during lazy New England summers on your parents' front porch, sweaty nights in a Thai guesthouse or on a sunny Roman holiday for two.

Hunger is kind of like an itch. It cries out for salt and fat and sugar. As I write this I am in the bloated after-glow of a hasty desposal of one of my more elaborate bachelor meals. Hunger blinded my good sense and dangerously so. Read on.

I love Mexican food and it simply does not exist in any decency outside of Mexico and the United States. I say this with the utmost certainty gleaned from years of compiling personal experience and anecdotal evidence. Nonetheless, I every so often attempt to make my own, usually with surprisingly good results. Tonight I made a black bean and rice dish with red onions, tomatoes, garlic, Habanero sauce, lemon juice and the ingredient which really brings it all together: sour cream. If you don't use sour cream in your Mexican food you are either a vegan or an idiot. Sorry, that was unfair.

In any case (and this case in particular) I was so hungry I didn't bother to smell the sour cream before lopping a dollop on my "Mexican" concoction, but while doing so I noticed a yellowing crust around the edges of the container, so I cursed and moved to hold it over the sink. While I was trying to remove the yellow bits the entire contents slid out and into the drain. I am ashamed to say I scooped as much out as I could and put it directly on my beans and rice. Shut up, that's not even the worst of it. The crème fraîche was obviously spoiled. It smelled evil, like bad breath and sour, err... cream, just not the good kind. It didn't taste right either. Unfortunately, I was so hungry after cooking for the better part of an hour that I just ate the entire plate anyway, rancid cream and all. It tasted... not quite right, but I ignored the bad and focused on the good, effectively scratching my hunger-itch.

At this moment I am not sure of my fate. I've finished eating, but I can still smell the rot on my breath and taste decay on my tongue. When I put my empty plate on the kitchen counter top I belched and vomited a tiny teaspoon of unspeakable liquid into my mouth. I fear that it may be a sinister harbinger of things to come. What the hell. Mind over matter. I have a strong stomach and besides, I've just checked the container and the expiration date is ten days from now, so I can't get sick, right? I also sniffed the inside and almost fainted. I'm going to the bathroom to either brush my teeth or be violently ill. I bid you all goodnight.

Sincerely,

Old Iron Guts

2007-03-17T01:06:00.000+01:00

What a Shame...

I haven't posted in a while, but through the pain-addled mist of my semi-dream-state I managed to make a video of a charming part of Malmö with music recorded during the winter of 2000 in what used to be a provincial, state-run mental hospital smack dab in the middle of a forest in Västra Götaland.

I hear the clip-clop of heeled shoes on brick sidewalks, like a horse on cobbled stone. An old crone posts her hate mail she's scrawled by candle light and sealed with hot red wax and a firm stamp of her crude crest. Her nails are yellow and brittle, her face soot-stained from coal fires. Her breath rattles with black bile.

She is the sole inhabitant of a run-down red brick dwelling with a wooden door so chipped and weather-beaten that one would scarcely know it had ever felt the sweep of a brush.

Knock once for luck
both good and bad
twice to curse your deadbeat dad
three knocks for something
much more arcane
and four to never be seen again.

2006-12-15T15:47:00.000+01:00

Ruminate on this...

Insomnia would be an awful name for my memoirs, however apt. Who would want to read it? Crash or Sex are such snappy one-word titles which, as well as taken, are not apt. Two word titles give you a bit more freedom, but can sound pretentious: Girl, Interrupted. Generation X. Prozac Nation. If you come up with one of those, get ready for not only a book and/or movie title, but a universal catch-phrase to be attributed to just about anything contemporary, including around a billion online screen names.

Girl, Interrupted. (F 18) says: wazzup ; )
Generation X (M 26) says: nada. jus chillin'. wussup wit u?
Girl, Interrupted. (F 18) says: *LOL*
Generation X (M 26) says: have you read Prozac Nation?
Girl, Interrupted. (F 18) says: OMG!!! WTF????? I just saw that movie last night!
Generation X (M 26) says: LOL

And so on...

You know, just because my eyes feel like they're inside my nose and my nose is always half stuffed and my brain cavity feels as if it's filled with Vaseline and I have pains in my back and legs and I lay awake half the night and spend the other half tossing and turning in dreams I cannot begin to explain:

ok I'm running through an amusement park with a short sword and this viking guy is chasing me on the roller coaster tracks. I turn around, swing my sword and his head goes flying into the air like in "Conan the Barbarian", but it comes down onto the back of my head and knocks me out cold. I wake up in a cold sweat to sirens screaming outside my window...

—doesn't mean I define myself as an insomniac. I like sleep and have many other sterling qualities.

***

My sheets are now freshly washed and smell of green tea and apple fabric softener. I love climbing into bed when the sheets are newly changed. It's cool against my face and legs and I have to pull all the blankets up close to my chin until the bed warms up.

My paperback peeks out from the duvet and rests on my bare chest. Sylvia Plath, forgive me. I read Prozac Nation before The Bell Jar. Does that make me a poser? I admit I am an aficionado of contemporary fiction and sometimes things written more than 15 years ago seem distant; in language, technology and culture (ten cents for a cab, Mr. Hemmingway??) but I also read more sci-fi than anything else. Does that make me paradoxical? Does it make me... interesting?

My memoirs could be called I'm Not Really a Hypochondriac, Look at My X-rays! or I Hate Everything I've Ever Loved just as well as Insomniac or The Ex-Pat. None of them ring true more than the other or any arbitrary title I pull out of the ether. I probably won't write memoirs anyway. I mean, come on.

Girl, Interrupted. (F 18) says: I'm so bored with New York parties, Donald
Generation X (M 26) says: Then we won't be going to the Vanderbilts, Wendy?
Girl, Interrupted. (F 18) says: Imagine that! My mother would have a fit... and we've already RSVPed.
Generation X (M 26) says: There's a new Apalachian author who'll be there. He's just written his memoirs, Life on the Sofa or some-such dither. I've been meaning to introduce him to J.P. Honeycutt... but, darling, we could say you've come down with something... Rocky Mountain spotted fever?
Girl, Interrupted. (F 18) says: You're devilish, Donald! I think I might just have to marry you this Spring after all. A real Hamptons wedding with lobster, caviar and chocolate mousse!
Generation X (M 26) says: *LOL*, Wendy. *LOL* indeed.

2006-11-04T22:13:00.000+01:00

Aaaaahhhh..... The Shut-in Lifestyle

While leafing through the various global real estate papers which I peruse with religious regularity, I came upon a paradise of modern vertical living: Metro Manila. For about the price of a cup of coffee, one can move into a hermetically sealed, self-contained Shangri-La of convenient modern living, replete with on site shops, dining and entertainment. Welcome to the new Global City.

You see, Malmö and Annelund are dragging me down. Last Wednesday it was so cold that my left ear nearly froze off and rolled down the drain beside the bike path. This on the first of November! Plus, someone keeps buzzing my apartment from the main entrance and I know it's not anyone looking for me. I hear the muffled, yet still nerve-fraying jolts coming from the other apartments on my floor and below, often accompanied by an insistent banging on the outside door. It happens at odd hours too: 2am on a weekday?? I've a mind to call the cops! People have to get up early for work, for God sake! ... Not me, of course, but other, decent people. I also smell mary jane coming from a new youthful tenant's digs and I just don't like where this neighborhood is headed. So I'm off to the mysterious Orient! The inscrutable East. I'll soon be sipping hot sake and sucking sweet opium smoke whilst luxuriating on silk cushions in a state of indescribable bliss. I'm just sure of it.

So I've bought me a ticket paid my fare, you won't see me no more, no how no where. If you'd like to visit that'd be just grand. I'll send you a card from my new native land.

Modern amenities and old world traditions combine in an atmosphere of cyber-enhanced, futuristic luxury and create an unparalleled lifestyle including air conditioning, Wi-Fi Internet and mocha frappuccinos. Suddenly Scandinavian social welfare makes me wanna barf.

*Oh, and a dream-come-true is meeting me at the airport.

2006-10-15T17:30:00.000+02:00

Tripe and Trotter
or Class Warfare in the Front Garden

One balmy Sunday evening, as the sun was making its descent o'er the western grassy hillocks, I decided that a late constitutional was in order. I donned my britches and quilted waistcoat, laced up my brogues and set out at a brisk and jaunty gait. 'Pon exiting my ingress I trod directly in an odious clump of snus (Scandinavian smokeless tobacco) and stopped dead in my tracks. I knew what it was without looking and couldn't even bear to glance downwards even if I should have deigned to do so. I quivered with suppressed rage and searched for somewhere to scrape the bottom of my shoe. In doing so my eyes happend to rest on a young hedgehog who was standing in a shadowed corner of the brick wall which surrounds my garden. After briefly considering using his spiny hide to clean my foot, I noticed with mild horror that the hedgehog was smoking a crude, hand-rolled cigarette. He was furthermore, despite the late hour, wearing a pair of down-market sunglasses.

"Looks like you've really stepped in it, gov." He piped in an irritatingly chirpy nasal squeak.

"If you're referring to the vile consommé which some uncivilized lout of ill breeding has unjudiciously spewed on my doorstep, then yes, I have as you so charmingly expressed, stepped in it"

The spiky little rodent chuckled and coughed, taking a lengthy draw on his cigarette. "Wot you need, gov, is a sense ah humour."

"I really don't think I need advice from someone who spends his days sleeping in a mudhole and his nights hunting millipedes in my compost heap." I quickly rebuttled, "And do see to it that you don't start any fires with that ghastly cheroot."

"No worries, gov, but ya might be interested in whose been spittin' that muck all over your portico."

The pointy-nosed little twerp! He certainly had me there.

"If you indeed know the identity of said scoundrel, I'd suggest you cough it up before I have my manservant spread caustic potash all over your feeding ground!"

At this the hedgehog momentarily scowled, but was quick to rebuff, "I'll jus move in with my cousin Sandra next block down then. Lives behind a Jamaican flat an' has sweet potatoes every Sunday, she does!"

Drat! "Right then, what if I offer to let you stay and for an added incentive, I'll even set out a cracker with salmon mousse after my regular Saturday evening Victorian poetry symposiums."

"Christ Almighty," he scoffed, "make it olive tapanade and you're on. Name's Brian, by the way. And you, good sir?"

"Barrington Ramsbotham, of the Highgate Ramsbothams and nephew to the Duke of Dalkeith." I announced, swelling with pride.

"Woteva. Thought you looked a bit of a sheep's ass."

Brian agreed to lay in wait for when the tobacco-spitting offender returned. When that happened, he would signal me with our secret code word: Jackanackanory! (his idea, not mine) and I was to empty my chamber pot onto the debased yob's slobbering head.

When I heard Brian squeak the code word it was two evenings later and I had just settled down in my Chinese silk smoking jacket, hot toddy in hand, with a cravat around my neck and Wagner on the victrola. I jumped up (nearly spilling my favourite beverage) and rushed to my bed-chamber where I picked up the half-full pot and sprang to the window. I'd show the uncouth Jacobite!

Seeing the hatted head in view I quickly poured the filthy brew down onto the unsuspecting philistine. As I delightedly watched it splash and engulf the figure below, I realized in abject terror that it was none other than Julian Smythe Ramsbotham: the Duke of Dalkeith! In a panic I screamed, "But uncle, you're the mysterious craven expectorator?"

"Of course, you little twerp. Before I became Duke I was a cabin boy on a Swedish steamer for six years. I've been hiding it all this time! And I dare say I've been doused with the contents of worse chamber pots that your's!"

I was dumbstruck and confounded. My feet were rooted to the floor. My uncle... a cabin boy? It explained the ritual floggings I had to endure, for sure, but worse than that it meant that I, Barrington Ramsbotham, was nothing but a commoner and no better than a hedge-dwelling, spikey, worm eating, chain-smoking little shit.

The poetry nights are over and so is the salmon mousse. Saturday evenings consist of take-away curries and lager, and sitting on the settee in front of the telly with my mate Brian and his cousin Sandra. We josh and chuckle, exchange insults and good-natured ribbings and generally have a fine time. Sometimes Uncle Jules comes 'round with a jar of tapanade for Brian and a sweet potato for Sandra. Last Saturday he also brought something for me. It was a mince pie and he insisted that I eat it then and there, at gunpoint in fact. It was positively atrocious and after I'd managed to choke it down, I asked my uncle (with some trepidation) what rancid muck had filled the evil pastry.

"The contents of the spittoons from today's matinee at the Royal East End Cabaret." He stated matter-of-factly and with more than a little satisfaction showing at the corners of his mouth.

"Touché, Uncle Julian... touché." I croaked and was sick all over poor Brian.

2006-09-25T18:51:00.000+02:00

Maintaining Social Ecology
(Conservatism)

Limhamn, Malmö, Sweden. The Öresund Residential Clinic for Spinal Injuries.

Here I spent two weeks in and out of a Hyberbaric Oxygenation Chamber, sipping prune juice and reading J.G. Ballard. A treatment usually reserved for divers who've surfaced too quickly and gotten decompression sickness, commonly known as "the bends", Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy is sometimes used to treat ischemia resulting from acute spinal trauma.

Upon entering the facility, I was given a tiny non-descript white tablet to swallow, instructed to remove my clothing, placed on a padded table and slid into a seven-foot-long clear plastic tube. As the tube was pressurized, I felt my ears pop and I began to feel light-headed. I closed my eyes to better cope with the discomfort and soon began to relax. A feeling of peace gently washed over me and I experienced a sensation like I was floating on an inflatable raft in the middle of a calm stream. The soothing sound of rain began pitter-pattering on the roof of my tube and I recognized the distinctive Amazonian calls of grosbeaks and oropendolas weave their way through my semiconscious state. Cautiously opening my eyes, I saw that I was in a placid, yet slowly moving river about 15 feet across and covered by a canopy of thick, lush vegetation. I watched two large, brightly colored parrots fly overhead before my chamber-cum-vessel was slightly rocked by a change in the water current. I glanced to my side and saw that a school of pink dolphins had taken an interest in me and my tube. Of the five dolphins, one particularly gregarious individual swam right up to my face and looked me dead in the eye. It seemed to smile at me while playfully nudging the plastic surface next to my head. Soon the other dolphins gathered round and swam beside me, guiding my floating cylinder with their noses to some as yet unknown destination downstream.

After several minutes of this rather pleasant journey I found myself deposited in a medium sized pool at the bottom of a small waterfall. The dolphins quickly swam off without so much as a nod goodbye. Bleary-eyed, I searched the surrounding glade of trees, trying to make out if there was anything or anyone amid the dense foliage of ferns, fronds and vines. Due to the rush of the waterfall I failed to hear the man who waded through the water towards my tube. I only noticed him when he pried open the plexiglass and I felt the warm mist from the waterfall on my face. The man was white, middle-aged, bald and of medium build. He was dressed in a well-cut grey suit with a crisp white shirt and wore an expression of utter kindness. I wasn’t at all disconcerted when he reached into the chamber, put his hands on my shoulders, squeezed them and said one clear and powerful word with the utmost conviction and sincerity. So convincing was the way he said it that it filled my heart with hope and inspiration. The word he spoke was: CHANGE.

I awoke being pulled from the Hyberbaric Oxygenation Chamber by two young nurses and an older, olive-skinned doctor. They held me down, telling me that everything was under control and that I’d be fine if I would just stop struggling.
“But you don’t understand!” I cried, “Everything will be better than fine! Everything will be wonderful! Nya Moderaterna have won the elections!”

2006-09-13T22:06:00.000+02:00

America's Next Top Doggerel

Nah, I'm not gonna harp on about Tyra Banks and her rag tag bunch of misfit Top Twaddle wannabees-with-giraffe-knees, but rather sift through the dross that is Anglo-American TV and pluck some pearls of boob tube glory from this ocean of blather. Not that I don't love Tyra, in fact I put her show at the top of the reality heap right next to Spike TV's Ultimate Fighter series. It's just that I have newer, more exciting discoveries to share!

1. The Wire (US): This is the most realistic, hard-boiled, complex, yet engaging cop show ever. If you don't already know that HBO corners the market on decent shows, you've obviously spent too much time wondering if Ross and Rachel will ever get back together. The Sopranos, Rome, Six Feet Under, Big Love, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage (Llooooyd!!!) already sit atop the pantheon of American TV in my opinion.
The Wire is perhaps the best of them all, but you gotta pay attention! No big stars, but serious actors who depict the drug wars of Baltimore from the perspectives of cops, dealers, junkies and politicians with profound honesty and without value judgement. The fourth season just started and that is reason to celebrate.

2. Saxondale (UK): Steve Coogan's newest comic creation is Tommy Saxondale, a middle aged ex-hardrock roadie turned pest exterminator. He's a Ford Mustang driving, grumpy, but wistful philosopher with anger management issues who always manages to say the wrong thing. A satisfying follow-up to Coogan's well-known creation, Alan Partridge, who is in my opinion the best comic character ever created.

3. Battlestar Galactica (US): That's right, it's good. This time Boomer and Starbuck are girls and I've yet to see if there is a robot dog, but I'm still waiting. I've been jonesing for a good sci-fi series since Enterprise was canceled and this one delivers, but with a decidedly more dark and melancholic tone than any of the Star Treks. Notably Edward James Olmos shines as Commander Adama. Sure, there are cheesy moments, it's Battlestar Galactica for God's sake, but if you like sci-fi give it a chance and I promise it won't disappoint.

4. Q.I. (UK): Stephen Fry hosts this impossibly difficult comedy quiz show where bright comedians are awarded points for being interesting in their responses to questions (Q.I. stands for Quite Interesting) and penalized for being obvious, usually by answering with common misconceptions, i.e. Mars is red (it's light brown) or the blue whale is the longest animal (there are siphonophores, a type of jellyfish, up to 20 meters longer than the blue whale). Q.I. is hilarious, educational and hosted by one of my heroes, so check it out.

2006-09-02T02:34:00.000+02:00

Misanthropes and Lycanthropy

There are werewolves in Annelund Park. I hear their brays and caterwauls on an almost nightly basis. This medium sized recreation area is adjacent to the inner garden of my apartment building and can be seen from my large bedroom window. Below my living room balcony, a tree-lined footpath snakes its way through the park’s northerly portion. As you can imagine, my dwelling provides two indirect vantage points and is within earshot of most werewolf activity within the vicinity of the park.

Lycanthropes are loud, rambunctious creatures. The local ones are mostly adolescents and therefore especially noisy. For instance, when they hunt they don’t just kill for food, but do it as a fun group activity. They bond over their kills.
The park provides plenty of rabbits for their meals, but I fear they may have their sights set on the neighborhood’s human population. I can just about hear them gnashing their teeth as I take my evening short cut home via the shaded footpath. Sometimes they will harass one of the old drunks, yet I don't think they’ve ever eaten one. Wrinkled ashen skin and diseased liver aren't much of a tempting repast for these young punks, I guess.

Last winter, as I was warily strolling along the path, I passed by three young werewolves who were standing under an apple tree choosing ring tones for their new mobile phones. They were arguing about which tones were free and how one went about downloading the right song. Idiots.
A fiendish looking she-wolf scrutinized me with a look I can only describe as “hungry”. Since then I’ve taken to wearing an herbal poultice around my neck in hopes of keeping them at bay. I absent-mindedly clutch it when I walk through the park.
The other day I was doing just that and a middle aged Turkish couple gave me strange looks and pulled their son closer as if I was a danger. I don’t know what their problem was as it is an accepted fact that Istanbul and it's surrounding countryside is just full of werewolves. Maybe they’re from somewhere else in Turkey and don't know this.

Perhaps I am getting paranoid. I woke up one night last week to what I thought was an anguished lycanthrope keening into the night due to being dumped by his girlfriend or overcharged by his mobile phone operator. After a few moments I realized it was just my neighbor listening to a James Blunt song on the radio, an arguably more harrowing sound.

It's just that the summer moon has been so low and so bright lately that I think I'm starting to feel its effects. It pulls my guts like it draws the seas towards it and releases them again when daylight comes. I fear I may not be able to take this much longer and might venture out to let it take my soul. But I just can't bear the thought of spending any time amongst the local wolves, with their buzzing mopeds and mp3 players full of gangsta rap and reggaeton. Maybe there are mature, sensitive and intellectual wolf covens who eat librarians and have coffee table chats about literary criticism. That's the kind of pack I could run with... something like: "Howling and colloquy for the refined lupine".

2006-08-14T14:19:00.000+02:00

A Modern Man from Mandrake

I have recently aquired a valuable addition to my collection of botanical treasures. This specimen is a rare hybrid of the southern European Mandrake (Mandragora officinarum) and the Central/South American Banyan (Ficus pertusa), which has recently been cultivated at the Carl Christiansen Center for Horticulture in Frederiksberg, a suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark.
The Mandrake is a member of the Nightshade family (Solanaceae) whose roots contain a poisonous alkaloid called hyoscyamine. The members of the Banyan family, however, contain no such poison. Through careful cross-pollination, all poisonous qualities have been bred out of this hybrid, leaving some interesting possibilities for medicinal use.
Mandrake, or Mandragora, has been used for millennia (probably beginning with the ancient Greeks) for its anesthetic, hallucinogenic and narcotic effects.

At the Christiansen Center it has been discovered that an amalgam of the potentially dangerous Mandrake and the benign Banyan is not only absent of poison, but may also prove to be of medical value. The roots contain a mild alkaloid with remarkable calming effects on the central nervous system. This alkaloid has shown to be more beneficial to patients suffering from muscle inflammation than commonly prescribed muscle relaxants and has yet to demonstrate any negative aspects.
What’s more is the alkaloid may be taken in a cold tincture or “cold brewed tea” as can be seen in the accompanying photograph. This allows the patient to keep the plant at home and alive, simply drinking daily from the water in which the “Manyan” sits. Though only in its early stages, the potential uses of this hybrid are great and far-reaching.

My own experiments of using the Manyan are largely positive. Drinking its water has produced mildly euphoric effects and has lessened muscular pain significantly. The only problem is that it tastes only slightly better than a Dr. Pepper.

2006-08-10T12:27:00.000+02:00

Let the Light of a Thousand Tiny Suns Purify Your Soul

Organic Luminescent Osteopathy or OLO is a groundbreaking therapy developed by Dr. Etienne Ratzberger of the Centre for Musculoskeletal Disorders in Bern, Switzerland. The technique involves housing live fluorescent bacteria inside furniture constructed of a special conductive plastic. The chairs and day beds are hollow and filled with living organisms which release energy (perceived as light). This energy is conducted by the chair's unique plastic housing into the patient's body and has shown in clinical studies to have a positive effect on certain musculoskeletal ailments. Trials sponsored by the Swiss Medical Association found an average of a 31% reduction in muscular inflammation and considerable relief of neurological discomfort (pain).

My personal experience was brief and therefore inconclusive. The OLO Chair comes with a pricetag beyond my means (around 26,000 USD) and 30 minute sessions at the Copenhagen Clinic for Chronic Pain begin at about $50 a pop. Add that to transportation costs from Sweden and I'm out of pocket... well, without doing the math I already know it's too much for my paltry little bank account to suffer.

Still, it's interesting to know that this is an organic treatment and that somehow these microscopic lifeforms may indeed have a positive effect on structural and muscular problems such as mine. My session felt warm and relaxing, but I can't honestly say that it was because of the bacteria or just due to the ambience of the clinic. I was imagining getting a massage from millions of glowing little masseuses whilst listening to the soothing sounds of the ocean pumped through high fidelity speakers. Oh, and they do wonderful pear and ginger smoothies.

2006-07-26T19:27:00.000+02:00

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking, Cocaine-Snorting Idiots

J.G. Ballard's engaging mystery novel Cocaine Nights explores the seedy and often shocking goings-on among the British ex-patriot inhabitants of a gated community on Spain's Costa del Sol. It's funny, surprising, exciting, philosophical and entertaining. The movie I just saw is none of those things.

Nick Love, who brought us the not-bad-but-forgettable film version of John King's hooligan novel The Football Factory, portrays stereotypical cockney gangsters who ply the drug trade during the "live fast, die numb" 1980s on the Spanish coast. The result is the painfully unfunny The Business.

With Franco and the fascists gone, the 80s saw Spain open up to European tourism and eager sun seeking ex-pats from the UK, many never bothering to learn the language beyond "cerveza". Apparently it's funny to listen to people who's voices sound like Michael Caine after drinking a snifter of sulfuric acid say "cerveza". They almost say it as much as they say "cunt"... and they say "cunt" a lot. They say "you fackin' cunt" a lot too and the film cuts away as if saying a rude word is some kind of scene-ending big laugh.

Its admittedly at least momentarily amusing to see everyone in 80s tennis gear such as little white Sergio Tacchini shorts and striped Elysee shirts. Also included for your wistful nostalgia is music by A Flock of Seaguls, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Duran Duran... you get the picture. It's fun to laugh at the kitschy 80s, but gimme at least something more more interesting to get into. This is just a post Tarantino by-way-of Guy Ritchie frozen action scene-filled inside joke with a supposedly matter-of-fact street level narrative.

My old man wrote me a letter from prison once. It said if you don't want to end up in here, stay away from crime, women and drugs. Trouble is, that don't leave you much else to do, does it?
-Frankie
(I guess that millions of so-called "chavs" and anglophiles who listen to The Streets are meant to guffaw and cheer at the recitation of lines like these.)

Look, this isn't much of a review. I don't even mention a single actor's name because I just don't see the point. The acting is fine, the film looks great, but the script sucks. I can watch a violent, crass, low-life story if it's an entertaining one. The Business isn't. It fackin' sucks.

2006-07-21T17:59:00.000+02:00

Semi Serious Post About Being Hospitalized (sad, but true this time)

As I lay in my hospital cot by the open window, brain addled by morphine and lack of sleep, fan whirring in lieu of good old-fashioned American air conditioning, I ruminated on the merits of the Swedish healthcare system:

pros:
1. Foreign nurses who pronounce the Swedish words for masturbate and x-ray in EXACTLY the same way.

"Have you jerked-off?"
(Dismayed look)... "Oh! Sure, loads of times... but not just now."

2. Healthy low fat meals served up 3x a day. In other words, boiled potatoes and peas 3x a day. Another glass of prune juice, please. Thank you, sister.

3. Listening to conversations between grumpy old male patients and young patient nurses. Hearing one, I translated it quite literally to myself and giggled through my morphine haze.

Nurse: "Now Johan, one should not cast such things at people."
Johan: "Such shit shall one cast at thee!"
(I guess you gotta know Swedish)

4. It's pretty cheap. Not exactly free, but they need to save tax money for naked gay Jesus art exhibits in state churches and short films shown on state television featuring interpretive dance, based on the plight of the Palestinian people. ahem.

5. Its nostalgic. I wore a hospital gown that was positively dickensian. I also filled my chamberpot by candlelight. No, not really, but the whole place has a 1950s quaintness about it and a marked absence of technological equipment.

cons:
1. Oh to hell with it, I'm not listing the bloody cons, there are too many! A caustic diatribe will have to suffice.

I told my GP the pain was intolerable. She added the prescription equivalent of Extra Strength Tylenol??? Why not just take 2? I'm in pain! Oh and the Nordic male supermodel of a orthopedist added a bit of opiate to the mix. I woke up screaming after a 2 hour nap. And he also said my x-rays showed a perfect spine. Perfect?? Any myopic mole can see that my spine is shaped like the Tyco Super Dooper Double Looper glow-in-the-dark race track that I got for Christmas in 1980. Just because you have dreamy eyes and high cheekbones doesn't mean I'll melt like a 19 year-old candy striper when you coquettishly flick your blond locks. Oh and the female ER doc already stuck her finger up my jacksie, so you're wasting your time.

Anyhoo, within 12 hours I was back in style. An ambulance, that is. A real emergency: we'll ignore your frantic pleas for pain relief and stick you on a gurney for 5 hours before we so much as glance in your general trajectory. In other words: "Fuck you for wasting our gasoline. Take a cab, the bill will be the same." Oh I know this, you beaurocratic butt-plugs. I also know that lying on a gurney in a private exam room is preferable to pacing amongst a herd of vomiting, hacking, groaning and wheezing riff raff who are just as angry as I am. Yuck!

Nevertheless, I am back home after a 5 day sojourn (including about 10 minutes with an actual doctor!) languishing in Europe's hottest weather of the millennium, popping pills and reading
overheardinnewyork and giggling like an idiot. Hihi... ethnic stereotypes are funny.

2006-07-04T17:54:00.000+02:00

Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Innuendo

I spent most of my youth toiling away inside the galley of a pirate schooner, which made regular rounds to and from various coves and capes, braving treacherous tropical seas. I was a bit of a brash young tear-away and was more than familiar with the first mate's stiff member. His leg, you cretin! He really used to give me a good "seeing-to". A kicking, that is.

I am quite lucky that I survived those years at sea without being keelhauled or forced to walk the plank. I remember one of the cabin boys was instructed to "get on the captain's plank", but I waited for hours by the ship's railing and he never showed up. I was told that he'd just dissapeard into the captain's cabin. Anyway, he was quiet, but no worse-for-wear the following morning. Lucky sod.

Things weren't all bad aboard the Jolly Rodger. For instance, I struck up a friendship with a strapping older chap from Trinidad. How I did relish his below deck ministerings. Get your mind out of the gutter! He was a parson who held prayer services in the cargo hold. He serviced nearly the entire crew on a weekly basis. His name was Cedric and we became bosom-buddies. His quarters were on the bow whilst mine were on the stern and he often invited me to "come up his end", sometimes when I was already there! Quite a friendly chap, old Cedric.

As a young buck I was fascinated by tales of buried treasure and sunken riches. Cedric, who was enthralled with all things Helenistic, used to talk about a great Greek column he had seen on a Mediterrenean beach. "How it proudly gleamed in the sun!" he used to recall. But I was more interested in overflowing chests and bountiful booties.

Once when the Rodger was secretly harbored at Salt Cay and I was sunning myself on the white sands, a local girl with two huge coconuts sauntered up and offered me one. Naturally I was parched so I sucked on it until no more milk would come out. She giggled and offered me the other one, but I said no, that one was enough and what would her mother say if she came home still thirsty with two empty coconuts? She replied that in her yard they were literally falling from the sky and that her daddy was the boss man of this island.
"Who's your daddy?!", I yelled and immediately passed out. They wiley wench had perverted her coconuts with some sort of stupefying opiate.

I awoke in an iron gibbet suspended from a gallows in the center of town. Someone had insultingly stuck a tiny banana in the metal grill by the front of my britches, as if to pantomime my johnson. I was starving and reached for the banana. As I was trying to unstick it a little monkey scampered up the gallows, deftly scaled down the front of the gibbet and grabbed the other end of my banana from the outside of the cage. We engaged in a tug-of-war which violently shook the gibbet; me yanking frantically at my banana, the monkey screaming and pulling at the crotch-level fruit. All the movement proved too much and the chain holding the gibbet snapped, sending me and my simian adversary crashing to the ground. My cage smashed open on impact and I found myself lying in rotten vegetables and human offal. I looked up to see the Captain staring down at me.

"Haaarr... you'll never get on my plank, boy."
"That monkey's eating my banana, captain!" I yelled and pointed towards the little imp, already half way through my precious pint-sized produce.
"I don't know what Cedric sees in you."
"We're mates sir. I'm his right-hand man."
"Haaarr... That'd be left-hand, more like" the captain sneered.

I'll never know what he meant by that.

2006-07-03T13:05:00.000+02:00

The Presence

This pinprick suffers genesis; writhing in a black ochre of its own making,
Deprived of all knowledge of self or another.
A sticky oculus cracks open to meet first light and feel its sting.
What warm oblivion beckons! A single memory tempts retreat.
Like a languid embrace in the arms of death, nonbeing would be nice… again.
But now quantity is perceived... as corpulence: thick, dark and wooly.
The newfound bulk awards desire: a luxuriant ache, yet want of a clear objective.
Who-am-I-what-am-I-save-me-from-this-oozing-soreness…
If this is what it is to be then erase me!
But it cannot rest, this it knows. It crawls it squirms toward what might bestow-
An answer, a purpose, some relief or an end:
A liquid elixir. Fortifying, aqueous friend.

I'm just not myself before my morning coffee.

2006-06-18T12:45:00.001+02:00

Futurum Warehouse Party: Rapturous Robots With Magnetic Implants

On the bus to Devon I sneezed a total of 48 times. Almost 49 if you count the dissappointing half sneeze at the end; the one that left me hanging with the unfufilled promise of a release. What a rip off. I tried looking into the sun, but no dice. It hung low on the horizon, filtered through smoke clouds from magic mushroom eating farmers burning their fields. The result was a juicy luminous blood orange, filtered and diffused by the smoke and blurry in my allergic teary-eyed vision.

Sitting in a silent electric coach, destination: Kawada Lifestyle Companions, with a malfunctioning flourescent fish companion in a box on the seat beside me. I awoke this morning to find my aquatic night light floating at the top of his bowl swimming on his side in clockwise circles. Cheap piece of Timorese junk. So rather than take it back to the Personal Property Emporium I decided to take up Kevin Kawada on his invite and get some expert cybernetic fish repair at the same time.

Kev and I used to skateboard together in suburban church parking lots, experiment with mild chemical mood transformers and talk about our hopes, dreams and girls. His dad was a robotics pioneer, but Kevin wasn't interested back then. It was all haircuts, punk gear, alchohol, highschool parties and female classmates with tight sweaters. I was into that stuff too, but less and less the parties and drink and more and more my books. We grew apart, but remained cool with each other, occaisionally meeting up to catch up on things till I moved to England. It's been 10 years now since i've seen him. Guess he got serious, moved here and took up where his pop left off.

I get off the bus in view of the complex, my feet crunching down on dusty gravel as the bus whirrs off. I make my way up the path surrounded by yellow grass. (Why not engineer some grass that doesn't dry out and die in the summer? Don't they have nanobots that do gardening?) My new navy blue ultralite synthetic sneakers are getting dirty, I note with slight annoyance, arching my eye-brow for the audience in my head.
The front door is open and there is no one inside the lobby, just a drone-bot watering a dwarf pineapple tree.I check out the list of labs and offices on the marquee above the reception desk. I find K. Kawada, 5B. Simple enough, just around the corner.
The door is marked 5B: Partybots and Personality Chips. Seriously? Inside it's a huge pristine open white space with unfinished wood floors and empty, save a vacuum bot parked in the far corner.
I hear the muffled bass beat of some kind of fast dance music emanating from a door next to the vacuum cleaner. I shuffle across the room, slowly open the door and the music pulses into my face as if I'd enterred a tacky clothing boutique in the tourist district of any major European city.
There's Kev sitting in the corner hunched over with a soldering iron and wearing welder's goggles. Looks like he's gained about 3 pounds a year since I last saw him and he was never thin. I knock on the wall to get his attention. He looks up, studies me for a second and then breaks into his big warm smile and it's like a blast from the past. I'm all smiles too.
"HEEEY!" I call and quickly walk toward him. He drops what he's doing, scoots his wheeled office chair out and springs up. "Duuuude..." he laughs and we slap hands and hug. He's a pudgier version of his old self: dark brown skin, shaved head and a permanent smile full of teeth. He's African American despite his last name, by way of his step dad who married his mom and adopted him as a young child. Oh, and one of his eyes is now a multi cam.

"So now you're a freakin' robot maker, huh?" I prod good naturedly.
"Yeah, you know... My dad passed away 6 years back and I'd already learned a lot from him, so I figured I'd give it a shot, do it my way."
"Oh man, I didn't know about your dad. Sorry."
"It's cool. They do more what he did in the rest of the complex and I get to develop my own shit here. Like that girl I sent for you. Pretty cool, right?"
"Yeah, she was. I gotta say I thought she was a sex android at first." I say, raising my brow and tucking my chin.
"Hee hee! I bet you felt lucky. Maybe I should tone her down a tad."
"I dunno, it was just surreal... "
"If you think that's surreal, I got some serious shit to show you later." he nodds.
"Alright... I guess I got all day." I agree, with no idea what he's on about. "Oh and by the way, can you fix my fish?" presenting him with my malfunctioning pet.
"Dude, why did you even buy this?"
"I dunno... it's cool looking. Besides, it was cheap and I'm not exactly rollin' in it lately."
"I hear ya. It is pretty cool looking I guess, but the hardware sucks. I'm gonna gut it and set you up."
"You're gonna gut my fish?" I'm slightly distraught at the thought.

Instead of Kevin showing me some "serious shit" we reminisce a bit, catch up on old times, discuss who had kids (neither of us do) who died, who joined the clergy, etc... and pretty soon it's dark outside.
"You should probably just stay here. Unless you got stuff to do tomorrow."
"I don't, tomorrow's Sunday" Nothing to do all week as it happens, work is pretty sporadic these days. I've always got writing projects in the works and occaisional deadlines plus I sometimes fill in doing lights at a local electro night club, but lately I've been sleeping till noon and only writing in short spurts.
"I got an apartment in the building plus a little workshop where I can fix your fish. We can grab some beers and frozen pizzas."
"Sounds cool." I don't drink or eat meat, but I figure he must have a cheese pizza and some other kind of beverage. He's got grape drink and canned kidney beans.

Besides the gastronomic shortcomings the apartment is interestingly high-tech, furture-kitch and spotless thanks to the cleaning robots that scurry about disposing of any stray bits of dirt wherever they should find them. Kev installed quiet motors and soothing lights into my glowing fish friend. He even gave it an "almost intelligent" pescine computer chip whatever that might do.
"Makes it more alive, gives it personality."
"Will it read me a bedtime story and tell me things aren't as bad as they seem?"
"Do you want it to?"
"Not really"
"Alright then"

I go to bed in the funky guest room with a bubbling belly and ghostly fish swimming hypnotically in a large glass bowl on my bedside table. It occaisionally lets a bubble bloop from its kissy round mouth as it stares at me with knowing eyes as if to say Get yourself together, G. You should be doing something useful.
Anyway, fishy face, looks like Kevin Kawada knows his stuff. Tomorrow should be interesting, whatever he has in store.

2006-05-26T12:56:00.000+02:00

Another LOTR Parody

Being that I am in the process of completing my final thesis this week, I am reminded of the defence of my last major project at the University of Roskilde in Denmark this past January.
My elfin princess-like partner and I had labored long and diligently to demonstrate Mussolini's use of ancient Roman myth and symbolism, for all the bloody good it did.

One frosty morn we did walk the gauntlet into the exam room and were greeted by a daunting trio if ever there was one: Gandalf the Grey, an evil sorceress and an orc. Damnit! Why not the hot little red head that always smiles understandingly? Why not Eowyn (the one that cut off the wraith's head and was all "I am no man, byaatch!" chop)?? Alas, 'twas not to be.

After giving confident and competent presentations, Elfy and I suffered a barrage of aggressive inquiries, many not relevant to the topic at hand. Gandalf said we did not once apply our theories to the material. I said we did too. Didn't. DID. DIDN'T! DID!
"Do not take me for some conjurer of cheap tricks!!!" he snapped and a foul wind did begin to blow about the room.
"'scuse me.. " muttered the orc and we opened a window.
"Anyways, Gandalf, I think we did pretty well and..."
"YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!!" he bellowed, emphasizing the final word by stamping his gnarled wizard stick on the floor of the lecture hall. A crack, which quickly widened into a great chasm, opened up in the center of the hall.
Since I was leaning back in my chair in the disrespectful manner of a slacker student, I tumbled backwards into the fissure and in my flailing for purchase I inadvertently grabbed hold of a loose heel strap on one of Gandalf's Birkenstock sandals. He was pulled down with me into the abyss and we engaged in a momentous struggle as we plummeted to meet the fires below.

Well, we fought for a minute, anyway. Then it was like are we ever gonna land? Free-fall actually gets boring after a while. Gandy grumbled, turned over and promptly began snoring and I took out my Motorola E100 and started playing a bootleg Pokemon game. My last guy died just as I was approaching my high score.
"Blast and gods take you all!" I screamed and hurled the phone into the approaching hell pit. Just then I landed with a thud.

I awoke on the classroom floor surrounded by onlookers, soaked in sweat and yes, I noted with a quick sniff of my fingers, my own urine. My elfin partner turned away in shame. Evidently I had fainted during my Power Point presentation. I hastily gathered my effects and made my way towards the exit.

As I hurried through the halls a voice boomed behind me "Against the power of Roskilde there can be no victory!"

Oh, f-you.

2006-05-20T13:12:00.000+02:00

For your edification and general betterment...
Karl Pilkington Videos!

I know it's not a real blog entry, but I'm finishing my thesis! Soon I'll be back amongst the prodigious and prolific with tales to put a gale in your sail. In the meantime, click the above link and watch videos of the funniest man on Old Blighty.
I suggest starting with Monkey News.

Oh and I recently discovered that the word "crap" does not originate from Thomas Crapper, inventor of the syphonic flush toilet, no not symphonic flush toilet! Now that would really be something. Anyhoo, he just had an ironically silly name.
It is speculated that the American colloquialism crapper as in "I'm going to the crapper" or "I'm gonna stick your freakin' head in the crapper until you give me my god damn money" comes from American GIs who were stationed in the UK. They saw that the toilets (syphonic flushers apparently) had the emblem of "T. Crapper" emblazoned on the sistern and invented the slang term thusly.
Fancy that.

2006-05-08T12:56:00.000+02:00

Something Fishy's Going On

On the way to the Personal Property Emporium, the most interesting thing that happens to me is a wink and a kiss blown my way by a creature of indistinct origins. I cannot help but smile shyly and look towards the sparkling tarmac, which glitters on this balmy overcast afternoon. This, the sultriest day of the spring, brings a foreboding of a sweltering summer that I am definitely not looking forward to.

She, (she?), has that green-eyed dusky look plentiful among Puerto Ricans but exotic and maybe a little intimidating on these northern streets. Black corkscrew curls frame high, defined cheek-bones and a large vampish mouth filled with very white teeth. But the skin is too smooth, too perfect and somehow lacking in natural organic luster, like an impossibly life-like mannequin you might find in a high-end recreative simulation, clothed in form-fitting lycra and street-fashion accoutrement. The kind of just-about-human diversion that rich German men use to cheat on their wives without actually cheating on them.

Her gaze is steady and she is apparently slightly amused at my bashfulness. Damn my humanity and damn her ability to mimick it. Sorry, sweetheart, a lie is a lie and I could never get passed that; I'm not one for machine love and I've never paid for it.

I continue walking and enter the Emporium in search of one of those trendy new effulgent fish gadgets. I want a swimming night light to decorate my living room window sill. I've become bored with just house plants and don't want a real live animal so I've decided to go for high-tech artwork or a glow-in-the-dark goldfish, because I have good taste and tech-savvy.

When I find the commodity I'm looking for, the "Flourecent Fish Friend" (made in East Timor and very competitively priced) I turn to make my way towards the exit of the bazaar and come face to face with the synthetic nymph herself. She's staring right at me, but not quite into my eyes, and mouthing a string of words which I can't make out because she isn't making any sound, not even a breathy whisper. I'm taken aback and not really sure how to react when she shoves something into my hand.

"Wha...what?" I manage to splutter and look down to examine what it is. A holo-card with an animated loop that repeats itself every two seconds: a young pleasant-looking woman standing next to an old fashioned robot and smiling in that pleasingly vacant way that artificial beings do, while the robot arcs its metal arm in a clumsy mechanical wave.

I look up again and the girl is gone. Guess I pegged her wrong. An android, but definitely not a sex-toy. And why couldn't she talk?
The card reads Kawada Lifestyle Companions, 18 Commercial Road, Exbourne, Devon and gives a phone number and email address. Baffled, I flip the card over. In red ink, someone has scrawled "come by ASAP, K."
I should've known.

2006-05-02T16:14:00.000+02:00

American Psychosomatic Addict Insane

Greetings earthlings! Here' I sit sipping on a virgin mai tai in my Tomas Hilfiger bathrobe and Manolo Fatchick slippers, convelescing after an EXHAUSTING couple of weeks of net surfing, shopping and... (giggles) more shopping! I know, I know, shame on me, but with all the war and suffering in this world I just felt I had to do something, right Mr. Pwesident? Gots ta keep that economy growin'! Anyhoo, let's take a little peek at what I found:

Pimpfants: Bling-blingy gangsta gear for toddlers, featuring "babybeaters" (sounds worse than it is) and silk screens of "Diva", "40 oz Milk" and "Jr Pimp Squad" printed on cheap cotton baby suits. It's stupid, annoying, degrading and sooooo HOT!

Doggles: Yes, goggles for dogs. I've got nothing to really say about this idiotic product, except that I can't imagine any dog in existence who would stand for such an indignity. I own seven pairs and I don't dare present them to my tail-wagger.

The final two "must have" products are the Retropod (recently shut down by the evil Sony corporation) and the Boost Mobiles Vintage Handset. Both products are extremely effective kitch-hipster-punch-me-in-the-face-and-steal-my-Retropod-and-Vintage-Handset accessories. I am drooling in anticipation of the next time I stroll into the Magnolia Bakery for a 12-box of cupcakes with my new vintage gear... you've heard about the long lines? I will cut in front and clock anyone who tries to stop me with my giant handset. I'm talking Naomi Campbell and Russell Crowe merged into a gestalt entity with a big ass freakin' phone! Hel-looo! Get out of my way, I want some cupcakes like those ho's from "Sex in the City" eat!

Ok, well I guess I'm shopped out (like that's even possible... tee hee) and ready to hit the tanning beds. Better be careful this time, last time I fell asleep and woke up looking like George Hamilton. I half expected to see Imelda Marcos crashed out on my bed in a pile of shoes and empty bottles of malaria drugs, but alas it was just "you-know-who" mumbling in a cupcake induced coma and dribbling on my NEW Georgio Tachini pillow cases! I counted to ten and asked myself "what would Morrissey do?" I figured he'd go out and cruise the Campo de' Fiori in search of hot young colts, so I just hit the offender with a rediculously over-sized handset, stuck some Pimpfants in it's gullet and tied it up with a pair of Doggles. Now that's what I call "smart shopping".

2006-04-19T17:26:00.001+02:00

Ye Olde Blog Shoppe
(rife with inaccuracy, anachronism and folly)

As I took my constitutional one misty morn, I did spy a lonesome guttersnipe sat betwixt the buttery and the tankard. This loathsome stumblebum did bray and keen toward my good person in some monstrous attempt at liberating me of my riches, meager as they were. I toyed with the notion of casting a shilling in the vicinity of the young snipe when I did perchance rest my eyes on a most toothsome specimen of proportions amply pleasing to my discerning palate.
This enchantress was of indeterminate maturity and breeding, but had the spritely countenance of a young seraph. My amity was direct and complete...

Until, that is, the budding siren opened her delicate beak and there gushed forth such beastly utterances as I had ever theretofore hearkened in my then pithy yet momentous existence:
"wot tha scum buggerin' shite iz you gawkin' at, you wiffy little bag a' pubic shavings?"
Naturally I was aghast and being but a mere tyro at gutter parlance I was dumbstruck... That is until the erstwhile soliciting urchin let loose a shriek of excrable laughter from his serpentine maw.
"Shut your villainous pudding hole lest I punt you into the clink wig-first you paltry little vat of nasal discharge!" I bellowed, shaking with fury.
This simply caused the brat to convulse further in his mirth, undulating in the detritus and offal of the sewer. Once again I was befuddled and could but only stand there agape in my perplexity.
Meanwhile, the harpy of celestial physiognomy ballasted me with a further weighty barrage of discourtesies:
"Look at cha! Like he's shat himself at the Dutchess' tea party. Good sir, I'll take ya 'ome wiv me ta meet me Mum if you can say two words wivout soundin' like a total fackin' village idiot!"
Now this held me in utter stupefaction, but I knew that I had to recoup my dwindling faculties forthwith. I snatched the brown phial of laudanum from my waistcoat and furiously imbibed the vile tincture. I was aflated asudden with bountious derring-do:
"My lady, I would consort with thee into the ever-lasting fires of Hades if you would only bathe and cauterize that blasphemous tongue which waggles and quavers in thine sublime embouchement. Spruce up your mush and I'll be yours for evermore."
"Wot a drippy little piss pot you are, Sir." she giggled, "Come along then!"
"Very well," I affirmed somewhat stiffly, and we trounced arm-in-arm through the filthy gullies of London Towne and into sweet venerated wedlock.
The End.

2006-04-12T00:44:00.000+02:00

OMG!!!... it's another installment of....
Interesting Facts of the Week!

Did you know that Japanese girls are now walking around in SEE-THROUGH SKIRTS?
Well if you find yourself Tokyo bound on the bullet train faced with one of these ultra-trendy articles of clothing being paraded in your face by a young dedicated follower of fashion, you may just do a double take. It's not see-through, silly, it's a silk screen of someone ELSE'S butt! And yes, I've seen the "boob t-shirts", but this is on a whole 'nother level. My only question is: why use the wedgie pic?

Another "fact" called to my attention is that Chinese cars are on the way and they only cost 9,000 to 15,000 bucks for sedans and SUV's. If they look like this sweet cabriolet (pictured) I'm sooo getting one. Unfortunately they won't, so I'll just have to make my way along the silk road and purchase one in the Peoples Republic myself. Too bad today's fortune cookie said "you have no outstanding traits". Stupid cookie... I HAVE NO OUTSTANDING TRAITS??? That's not what the Japanese photographer said when taking pictures of my backside for a research project he was doing. I believe the phrase "distinguishing features" was used... and I even had a wedgie that day, so there!

2006-04-09T17:01:00.000+02:00

I, Yoghurt

Why do futurists always refer to the coming advent of ambient intelligence and the Singularity by talking about a "yoghurt you could have a conversation with before you eat it" or some such drivel? And don't even pretend to not know what I'm driving at, you bunch of net nerds. Oh ok, just look here then.

First of all I don't want to breakfast on my friend Yoplait, who has a charming French accent, incidentally. I think that would be in rather, ahem, poor taste.

The reason they use the example of an intelligent yoghurt is because of the future possibilities of integrating micro circuitry with live bacteria (they already do something like this with DNA). Apparently micro electronics could soon help to create conscious, intelligent bacteria, presumably grown in live yoghurt cultures. THAT DOES NOT MEAN WE WILL BE EATING THE VERY SAME CHOCK-FULL-OF-NANOTECH YOGHURT WITH A SLICED UP BANANA FOR BREAKFAST! Imagine the crunchy circuits in every bite, our friendly dairy product writhing in agony as we consume its body alive! It's almost enough to make me become a vegan. Almost. After all it's not my fault if they make a talking pizza, which will of course have an amusing Italian-American dialect (at least the good ones will). Real problem is: will they still be alive and talking on the way out?

"OH!, thanks-a for nothin'! You ever been stuck in a small intestine with a German chocolate cake for 5 hours? 'Social market economy'... take a freakin' Ex Lax... ah, forgetaboutit..." *Flush*

2006-04-03T21:18:00.000+02:00

Does Shaving Your Head and Wearing Sunglasses Make You Look Like an A-Hole?

Well, not as much as wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, anyway.

Since I have no time to blog sufficiently right now, I will direct all of my faithfull readers to one Mr. Agreeable, erstwhile columnist of the now defunct Melody Maker and all around cantankerous old fire-breathing nut job. He's positively charming, and an icon of the last century. Find him here.
Oh hell, I'll just give you a taste of him right now on my very own blogger. Ladies and germs, a vintage gem of iniquity from October 13, 1990:

'I understand that Ringo Starr is to make a new album.
F*** the melting of the polar icecaps - you watch f***ing sea levels rise when they dump unsold copies of this f***ing dodo into the f***ing Atlantic! Stick to what you’re good at Ringo which is f*** all, except getting pissed till your liver squeals like a piglet caught in a f***ing catflap, you c***!'

and a couple from December 15th, 1990:

'I am interested to read the comments of EMI’s latest protégés, Forest Of Dean combo EMF, who regard themselves as a group who have “brought a new energy to the scene” with their new single, “Unbelievable”.
Yeah, well, I suppose jumping up and down pointlessly in half-mast trousers is f***ing energetic but then so is running up against a f***ing bathroom wall and crashing your f***ing forehead against the tiles repeatedly! Calm f***ing down, you twats and listen! You’re not special. You’re not f***ing talented! You’re feckless f***wits of the common or garden variety! You just happened to be the first five little c***s some record company exec saw walking down the street wearing your f***ing baseball caps backwards, whereupon he said to himself, ‘Aha! The British New Kids On The Block! They’ll do!’ Don’t you understand? You were selected at f***ing random! In two year’s time if you attempt to set foot in EMI’s head offices, unless for the f***ing purpose of picking up a fare, they’ll buzz for f***ing security! Nineties pop success is delayed f***ing obscurity and the delays are getting shorter by the f***ing year!

George Michael has -
C***! Next!'

2006-03-24T16:03:00.000+01:00

UPDATES!!!

Well I ain't got that many... Couldn't blog due to my ibook being hospitalized for the SIXTH time in less than three years. Thanks, Apple! Well, at least I haven't had to pay for anything, but why did EVERYONE else with this system fault get free replacement ibooks and powerbooks except me!?

After an exhausting day and a late night (first in nearly a fortnight with my little ibooky-wooky) I had a fitfull sleep and was plagued by terribly exciting dreams, which I cannot remember. Just my luck, I probably dreamt of Betty Boo and Scary Spice barging into my bedroom with a jumbo size box of Chocodiles. Alas, Fortuna, you are a cruel diety indeed!

Speaking of Miss Boo, which I often doo, she HAS comeback with a new outfit (band, not clothing ensemble) called WigWam. Also featuring some dude from some band called "Blur". She is still fine and I would totally check out her wigwam any day of the week. Check out a video clip here. Silly old song, it is.
And speaking of silly songs, "When You Wasn't Famous" by the Streets has idiotic lyrics and atrocious grammar and I can't get it out of my head.

When you're a famous boy, it gets really easy to get girls, it's all so easy you get a bit spoilt. So, when you try to pull a girl, who is also famous too, it feels just like when you wasn’t famous.

Oh really? Fascinating, Mr Skinner. You are as astute as you are profound. Now f-off and bring me my tea, scallywag.

I shall now, for historical purposes, post a short interview that I conducted some 2,5 years ago with Mr Streets. It was posted on friendster.com ages ago and then later on helgon.net. Please excuse the "dated" humor and slang. Anyhoo... and it goes a little somethin' like this:

i ran into mike skinner -that guy from the streets (TGFTS!!!). the following is a transcript of our conversation.

G: yo mike dawg! what’s crackin’?
MS: sorry old man, are you speaking the queen’s english?
G: yo that streets joncs in tha bomb! you gots mad flow, yo.
MS: what on earth are you blathering about? if your after money, you’re barking up the wrong tree, sunny jim.
G: uhh...sho yo right. why you trippin’? man you’re like a better rapper than carmen elektra, samantha fox and that guy from c and c music factory put together!
MS: i don’t do ”rap”, i’m make garage joints, similar to our man will smith.
G: uhh... whateva foo. alls i’m sayin’ iz that you gots mad flava. but now i’m startin' ta think you iz a straight up beeatch!
MS: excuse me! but if you continue with this garrulous behaviour i shall be forced to notify the local constabulary.
G: oh... i’m sorry mr skinner sir, i just wanted to impress you with my state-side brogue. i picked it up by eaves-dropping on swedish rap-bands such as loop troop! they’ve visited genuine american ghettos i hear!
MS: well ya betta check yo-self befo you wreck yo-self! now datz real deal holyfield, playa!

[and then he buzzed away on a plastic Chicco Vespa!]

Well, it may not stand the test of time, but interestingly enough, as luck would have it, I recently spied Sir Skinner having a brief tete-a-tete with none other than sexy simian Liam Gallager! I stayed in the shadows and eves dropped:

MS: Liam, did dyou ever noticeth dat when you is famousth it's like, easier to get girlsth?
LG: I know.
MS: An when you like, meet a bird who isth like, also famousth too, isn't it like when you wasn't famousth?
LG: You sound like fookin' Donald Duck, like.
MS: Sthorry?
LG: An' it's "weren't famous" not "wasn't". An' "also famous too" is like a fookin' double positive, like.
MS: it isth?
LG: Yeah, it's completely, like... fooked.
MS: Crwumbs!
LG: Now fook off an' get me some chocodiles, like.

2006-03-12T13:54:00.000+01:00

Quotes of the Week!

I gotta give these to Bill Maher, who often has me laughing out loud in my bachelor's apartment whilst I watch his political comedy talk show "Real Time" on my ibook. This Friday, Bill's "New Rules" segment had me guffawing and cackling like a rowdy Catholic school girl on prom night. You know; the tartan skirts, saddle shoes and hockey sticks? Never mind...

In reference to the favored film's not winning an Oscar for Best Picture:

If Brokeback Mountain taught us anything, it's that there's nothing wrong with coming in number two.

Concerning a recent news story that Dr. Phil is selling his Ferrari:

That's right, it turns out we've all been taking relationship advice from THE FAT MIDDLE-AGED BALD GUY WHO DRIVES A FERRARI!... Which of course, is Italian for "I'm not banging my wife".

Now if you don't get the first one, I'm not explaining it to you and I shall assume that the second one is clear enough. Keep 'em coming, Bill.

2006-03-03T19:39:00.000+01:00

This One Time, At Graham Camp...

This Cherokee kid called me "pale face". Seriously, it was either during riflery (I earned both pro marksman and marksman... with air guns) or archery class. I was in the sun all the time at camp; canoeing, riding horses and singing camp songs like "Sardines and Pork and Beans". That's right, we sang go-go tunes at camp. Anyway I guess the sun didn't take, so I was "pale face" for a while that year.

In 6th grade we were playing softball at gym and my girlfriend was pitching. I came up to bat and hit a solid line-drive right into her naughty place. I don't mean it went in or anything, but you could hear the smack. I was so shocked I ran towards third base instead of first and then I just slunk behind the back stop in shame.

In 11th grade I was at a 6 day orientation for this hippy-liberal school I went to for that year. I remember this smart-nerdy kid named Cosma was on a rope swing during a sort of obstacle course we were all doing. He half let go of the rope and got dragged through a mud puddle. His pants and shirt were totally muddy. The weird thing was that the next day when we were back in school after the camp he came in wearing the same dirty clothes that he had muddied several days before. ***I just looked this guy up and he's now got a phd in physics and is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon.

When I was 7 or 8 years old I had a birthday party with an indoor scavenger hunt. I found a coin on the floor and grabbed it, but then my brother said that it was his and I had to give it to him because he had seen it first. I became enraged and threw it. A scrum of kids scrambled to the carpet to grab it. Then my brother made me give him another coin because I'd thrown "his" away.

One period we had at camp was called music or dance or something and it simply consisted of this girl counselor playing records on a portable player. She would play the first track off of Michael Jackson's "Off the Wall" ("Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough") over and over. We would shake our booties whilst standing on picnic tables. Sometimes she'd also play "Morning Train" by Sheena Easton.

I was in summer camp in 1980, '81 and '82.

2006-02-26T19:31:00.002+01:00

The Brats of Belgravia

Woody Allen does his best Alfred Hitchcock in his new film "Match Point" and he does it well. When I first heard that Scarlett Johansson would be in a Woody Allen film I naturally assumed Woody's character would be doing Scarlett's in a typical Allen-plays-out-his-fantasies-on-screen romp. How refreshing then that Woody stayed behind the camera for this one.

"Match Point" isn't even a comedy. It does, however, have a few good laughs and is full of suspense that should have you twisting in your seat. Filmed exclusively in the beautiful parts of London (when Johansson's character moves to a less expensive, crime-ridden area it still looks like Kensington), it is a treat for the eyes. The young and beautiful head up the cast as moneyed silver spooned toffs who can't seem to unclench their jaws long enough complete a single moan about how dreadful or heavenly something-or-other is. Very entertaining stuff.

I sensed a strange, greasy pubescent sexual undercurrent in this film that is perhaps unintentional and indicates more about myself as a viewer than about the film itself, but it is largely what egged me on into writing about it. The protagonist/antihero is deftly played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who has a fanclub (consisting mainly of 20-something girls in pajamas) right here in Malmö. In this film I can see why they think he is the the bee's knees, although both his and Scarlett Johansson's face looked a bit sandpapery, like those of hormonal highschool kids. Maybe it was the extreme close-ups, I don't know...

Slightly Joaquin Phoenix-y Rhys Meyers' accent is one of those upperclass Irish ones that pretty much sounds English and is never remarked upon in the film. This I chalk up to subtlety and assume it is to convey this young man of humble origin's desire to be part of London high society. But what do I know anyway? Johansson, of course, is a certified "hottie", but has a bit much of the oversexualized child (I avoid the term "lolita") vibe in this film and from the start I prefered the the willowy Emiliy Mortimer, who plays super-sweetie-pie Chloe.

Sex and smarm abound, so go out and see this movie! Be warned, however, that you may leave the theater wanting to live in an expensive London penthouse and have tons of money.

2006-02-17T00:20:00.000+01:00

The Big Smoke - No More!

Take that you nicotine-sucking-exchange-student-Euro-back-packers! Breathe in a lungfull of social engineering: New Labour style!
By the Summer of 2007, all smoking will be banned in English pubs, clubs and restaurants - this includes private clubs too, you polo playing viceroys. Sir Walter Raleigh has done enough damage to this Sceptred Isle, starting with his peace pipe knock-offs stuffed full of Carolina cash crop.
Trendy London nightclubs like Ministry of Sound and Metalheadz (ok, I still live in the early to mid 90's) will now smell like sweat and shit just like their counterparts in New York and in my beloved Malmö, but smokers have had their day; time to hit the alleys and back streets like the rest of the drug addicts.

Scotland, always slightly ahead in absolutely everything, will institute a similar ban that will go into effect on March 26th of this year. "Oh aye, ye canne 'av a fag wee Jimmy, did'ye naught noo? Et'll stunt yer grooth an' tern yer fengers broon."

On the down side, 80's French sex symbol Beatrice Dalle will not be able to dine out in arguably the coolest metropolis in the world. That is unless she has the ubiquitious cigarrette surigically removed from between her fat lips, lowering her sultry coolness by at least 10%. Ah, well... we'll always have Paris, Bea. We'll always have Paris.

2006-02-15T00:24:00.000+01:00

Interesting Fact of the Week!

(by "week" I mean whenever I feel like it)

The tradition of not eating pork in Judaism and Islam (Paulist thinking kept it out of Christianity, presumably to gain more converts) has very old roots, according to some experts.
Certain anthropologists and archeologists believe that pigs were the first animals domesticated by man, preceding even canines. This happed due to the pigs propensity to eat pretty much everything. They would follow around camps of hunting humans or live by their settlements and eat their refuse.
It has been postulated that the custom of abstaining from pig flesh is due to the porcine habit of eating excrement, but according to some there may have an equally disgusting, but more macabe original motive.
It is thought that these omnivorous creatures ate human dead and that it was difficult to keep them from doing so. Even burial and cremation were not sure fire methods of stopping the little porkers. Only stone tombs would do the job.
So it is understandable that early man did not want to eat the creature that he stumbled upon gorging itself on grandma. That just ain't kosher.

2006-02-07T19:10:00.000+01:00

Sixteen, clumsy and shy : STUPID DANISH!

I'm gonna smash it up! Gonna burn it down!
On second thought I'll just eat it up with a nice lovely cup of coffee. Cream, no sugar please!

To those who have attacked embassies and boycotted Danish cheeses: I "feel ya" when it comes to rioting due to a bad cartoon. Surprised? Have you ever read "Family Circus"?? It makes NO SENSE and is NEVER FUNNY! Why is it in the comics section year after year after decade since time immemorium? I would totally declare a fatwa on that idiotic, perpetually-1954 comic if I actually cared about anything.

I don't however, totally get vilifying an entire continent due to the questionable actions of one newspaper. Yeah, thank God a major Iranian newspaper has come up with a more mature solution: The First Annual Tehran Holocaust Cartoon Contest! That'll teach all those Danish and Norwegian Jews... wait a sec... I can already see the consequences: Oslo's Dirty Zoroastrian Limrick Competition!.. wait a sec... someone's been getting their information from either a David Irving Holocaust-revisionist book or by watching Fox and Friends.

Seriously though, these cartoons are causing more unrest than one THOUSAND people drowning in the Red Sea and so far just leading to more death (of protesters) and destruction and widening cultural divide. How about a little less self righteous indignation and a bit more perspective? After all, Syrians need Danish dehydrated yoghurts and Danes need... Syrians to buy their dehydrated yoghurts. It's a give and take, really.

2006-02-06T17:12:00.000+01:00

Even Cowboys Get to be President

Having recently watched the highly touted Ang Lee film "Brokeback Mountain", I can say that it is indeed "all that" and definitely lives up to the hype. My only criticism of this masterpiece is that half the time I couldn't understand WTF Heath Ledger was saying! Foreign cinema viewers have the advantage of subtitles, but we who watch in English speaking countries (or see un-subtitled versions) are well shitted up, if you'll excuse my crudeness.
Heath is Australian and a fine actor in my estimation but I think he may have just over done the shy mumbling cowboy routine. I don't mean to say that it is unrealistic in any way. In fact it's a genuine interpretation of the archetype, but as an audience we are faced with the dificult task of making sense of his grumblings and mutterances (yes, I know that's not a real word).

I also wondered what it would be like if "Brokeback Mountain" had taken place in the turbulent, yet more open and homo-friendly society of 2006. I shall abstain from obviously offensive re-titling efforts and simply call it... "Brokeback 2006".

Jack: I gotta extra blanket if yer cold. Got it off ebay, made outta Gortex (TM).
Ennis: err... George Bush doesn't care about gayboys.
Jack: What'd you say?
Ennis: Gortex isn't shared among cowboys! ...err... not normally anyway.

Jack: I downloaded a Vin Diesel flick on my new I-Pod Video if you wanna take a gander.
Ennis: err... Fool me once, shame on... uh... shame on you...uh...
Jack: What?!
Ennis: err... You bet.

Jack: I was watchin' Dr. Phil, and it got me to thinkin'... if we was to get our own ranch, you know, just you and me...
Ennis: We found weapons of mass destruction... we found biological laboratories...
Jack (sighing): I wish I knew how to quit you.

"I'll be glad to talk about ranching, but I haven't seen the movie. I've heard about it. I hope you go... you know... I hope you go back to the ranch and the farm is what I'm about to say."

-George Bush after being asked whether he's seen Brokeback Mountain, Manhattan, Kansas, January 12th, 2006

2006-01-31T17:05:00.000+01:00

suM Noo StuFF dAt EyE LiEk!

(apologies for the irritatingly written title)

TV:
House, MD - Hugh Laurie (yes, Bertie Wooster) plays a grumpy, sarcastic, jerk-of-a genius doctor with a bright eyed threesome of young and hot assistant specialists whom he constantly rides and insults. It's increadibly engaging and he is my new hero. I even want a bum leg and a cane like Dr. House has.

Life on Mars - BBC cop show about a Manchester detective who gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973 with bell bottom slacks, a butterfly collar and the same job. He is 2006 tech-savy and used to sensitive, understanding police work (aw...) His new staff and boss aren't. Conflict interspersed with hilarity ensues. Started off "top" and consequently "I were mad for it". Hope it doesn't tank.

Music:
The Evens - Yes, I found something new that I like! I'm high-fiving my imaginary friend and kissing my pet rock with joy. The Evens are a duo featuring Amy Farina (The Warmers) and Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Embrace, Fugazi, etc...). The latter I've been a great admirer of since I was 13 so in that case it's NOT new and proves my point that new stuff is boring and meaningless!
Wistful but energetic male and female vocals, understated yet groovy drums and a baritone guitar. Check it out.
http://www.dischord.com/bands/evens.shtml

Condiments:
Habanero (green) hot sauce - I've always loved the green chili sauce but recently I've been eating the you-know-what out of it. Can't buy it in Sweden as far as i know so I'm dreading the day it runs out. My quesadillas can NOT go back to red salsa.

Podcasts:
The Ricky Gervais Podcast on Guardian Unlimited - I am addicted to this, it's so naturally funny. Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington (coiner of now classic phrases such as "I could eat a knob at night", "there's this hairy Chinese guy" and "You never see an old man eating a Twix") used to do an XFM music show, but it was the banter in between the songs that kept listeners coming back and apparently the same applies for the trio as they now do a weekly podcast sans music. It's basically them talking, insulting each other and discussing monkeys. Karl Pilkington is the best comic discovery in ages and I'm convinced it's not an act. I will write more about Karl another time.
Find the podcast here: (navigate to Ricky Gervais Podcast in the left hand column)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Listen to the dialog from the old XFM show here: http://www.xfm.co.uk/sectional.asp?id=4604
Also check: http://www.rickygervais.com/

- Graham "I wish I knew how to quit you" Land