A Public Exercise in Detachment

During my time spent in America - my solo Stateside odyssey - I spent a large amount of solitary time in bars, cafes and in restaurants. Anyone travelling independently for a considerable length of time can't really avoid such situations even if they want to. For a lot of people the prospect of being alone in such situations may seem unpleasant or undesireable, somehow outside of 'acceptable' social conventions even. Personally, I've grown to enjoy it.

It is strange how so readily people who travel alone are prepared to latch onto another, with a persistancy that I find beguiling and often an unwelcome irritation. Not always of course, it pivots around the twin determinants of mood and circumstance. That said, I would always be much more content by myself, if the alternative were to be cemented in the company of people with whom conversation is stilted, perfunctory and awkward. Laboured company for the sake for alleviating solitude is not something I'm interested in.

It is interesting to observe though, the obsessive-compulsive attachment people have developed to new technologies as a means of suppressing self-conscious feelings that would otherwise seep awkwardly to the fore. Watch next time when one half of a couple in a restaurant or bar rises to go to the toilet or to get more drinks. Within a matter of seconds the tragic victim of this desertion will have sought easy refuge with their phone or iPod; checking messages, posting tweets or updating statuses. What is it about the psychology of those in public environments that gives them cause to delve into the safe realm of the online world as soon as they become marooned in its physical equivalent?

The same thing happens in other social situations. When two strangers enter a lift for instance, or when waiting at the same bus shelter. Such close proximity breeds self-consciousness and it is only a matter of agonising microseconds before one of them will elope into the alternate ether of connectivity.

'So what?' you might ask. Surely its better than just sitting there twiddling your thumbs or looking gormlessly around at your surroundings? I'd argue not at all. Next time you find yourself in a situation like this - a friend or colleague has to dash away early from the coffeeshop or a partner attempts to shuffle his or her way through to the bar - fix yourself with mental sturdiness and refuse to give in to that technological habit, however niggling the urge. All it represents is a social crutch, the same as smoking used to be - the preoccupying ritual of holding, lighting and smoking a cigarette.

I'm reminded of a quote by a French intellectual - I don't recall precisely which one - who said, "what's the world coming to when an afternoon spent staring out of a window is considered a waste of time?" It might be argued that a whole afternoon is slightly unnecessary, but I recommend next time you are alone in a public place, taking a handful of moments to glance around at your surroundings. Pick at random something completely incongruous or banal; something thriving along unnoticed in its ordinariness; it could be a coffee machine or ceiling fan, 'Exit' sign or wall panel. Stare at it and try, maybe for just half a minute, to devote all your concentration on the observation on it. With an open mind you might just glimpse something, some fresh angle or nuance, that with increased effort begins to bleach away the inherent mundanity to offer a clean interpretation that had hitherto remained concealed.

I do believe that from time to time we could all benefit from a concerted re-engagement with our fundamental realities instead of succumbing to the compulsive habit of technological distraction. Sometimes its easy to suspect that the more reassuringly connected we are with the online landscape, the more readily psychological barriers are erected between ourselves and genuine human connection.

Books with the greatest impact

These are a handful of the books that have had the greatest impact on me during my life. All of these have played a substantial part in inspiring my own literary aspirations.

Roald Dahl - 'Charlie & the Chocolate Factory'

As far as I can recall this was the first 'novel' that I ever read, at the perhaps precocious age of 4 (speaking somewhat immodestly), and in the following formative years I must have revelled in it time and time again. The sense of magical adventure brims with a relentless energy, it races along like the sugar longboat down the chocolate river with Dahl's fervent imagination flailing off into countless avenues that you long for him to stop off at and develop further. The boyhood ecstasy at discovering that mythical 'Golden Ticket' - essentially an exit, an escape route from harsh reality - surely must speak profoundly to everyone.

Stephen King - 'The Shining'

Whilst not being the first King novel I read - that was 'Insomnia' - this was the horror hook on which I was ensnared around the age of 14 until eventually managing to wriggle free almost 2 years later. In the interim period I must have read almost exclusively Stephen King. The film became seared into my brain after being scared senseless by it at age 11 - to this day no film since has had such a profound effect on me. The book had a lot to live up to therefore, and King's constantly imaginative prose and vivid character portrayals didn't disappoint. Indeed the two versions, book and film, are such different entities that each have their merits over the other. Whilst the film is, in my view, a flawless achievement by Kubrick, what I enjoyed about the book was the much more forensic examination into Jack Torrence's troubled past (aggression and alcoholism, essentially human, issues) and consequent damaged psyche that result in his gradual unravelling at the hands of the Overlook Hotel's equally disturbed history.

Irvine Welsh - 'Trainspotting'

This was another book I gravitated to as a result of my fondness for the film adaptation, and again I found there was just as much, if not more, about the novel to appreciate. Given that I'd been gorging myself on Stephen King's often production-line ouevre for so long, first encountering Welsh's gritty, sardonic writing style was - pardon the cliche - a real slap in the face. Instead of ghouls, demonic forces and axe murderers, here was a writer who was seemingly writing from the very gutter; with all the filth and grime of degenerate reality embedded under the fingernails of the prose. Substance abuse, Scottish council estates, scummy pubs, prejudice and violence - it all burned from the pages with a vitriolic wit that I found almost as compulsive as the subject matter. After 3 or 4 revisits, I still find it just as entertaining and now credit it as being the novel that exposed me to harsh fictional realism, wrenched me from my King-induced apathy and made me passionate about literature again.

George Orwell - '1984'

I forget at what age I first read this book, having been pressured to by my father, but I'm certain I failed to understand it. Several re-readings later, I consider this book to be something of a sacred text for me; the sheer weight of the ideas and concepts that come tumbling from every page is staggering, and the pervading sense of despair and hopelessness is more palpable than any other book I can think of. The final 'interrogation' section is as disturbing and visceral as I believe fiction has achieved, and for a book to have had such a lasting impact on society is surely something all writers can only fantasise about.

JG Ballard - 'Crash'

Whilst I don't believe this to be Ballard's most ingenious work (that, for me, is 'The Atrocity Exhibition' or several of his short stories), it was 'Crash' that first introduced me to Ballard and is still perhaps the single strongest influence on my own writing. Indeed, as far as my relationship to literature (and perhaps outlook on society itself) is concerned there is my life pre and post 'Crash'. I can remember precisely where I was and what my frame of mind was as I sat down and began reading the first page. I recall closing the book at the bottom of the first page and sitting back swimming in a very odd sense of dual emotions. On the positive side - I knew just from a single page that I had discovered a writer who's fervent imagination and body of work would captivate and inspire me from then onwards. The same feeling you get when you see a great film or hear a musical artist's work for the first time; that striking sense that your life has just been enriched somehow by that discovery. The other sensation I felt however was a crushing sense of inadequacy - here was a writer who seemed to be saying everything I wanted to say only decades earlier and far better than I would most likely ever be capable of!

Culture - December

Books Read:

Emily Bronte - 'Wuthering Heights'
Iain Banks - 'Espedair Street'
H.G. Wells - 'The Time Machine - and other stories'
Primo Levi - 'The Drowned and the Saved'
Mark Kermode - 'It's Only a Movie: Reel-Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive' (auto-biography)

Films Watched:

'Jacob's Ladder' (Adrian Lyne)
'Jeremy' (Arthur Barron)
'Che (Part 1)' (Steven Soderburgh)
'Che (Part 2)' (Steven Soderburgh)
'The Man Who Would Be King' (John Huston)
'Office Space' (Mike Judge)
'The Inbetweeners Movie' (Ben Palmer)
'The Graduate' (Mike Nicholls)
'The Last Detail' (Hal Ashby)
'On the Waterfront' (Elia Kazan)


Albums Played:

Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross - 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' (OST)
The Kills - 'Blood Pressures'
Tune-Yards - 'W H O K I L L'
Bon Iver - 'Bon Iver'

Students as Consumers - Guardian competition entry

This is an entry to a Guardian blog competition focussing on the idea that with rising tuition fees, universities will become overly consumerist.


Picture the university of tomorrow as being a realm of consumerism, a marketplace of education where everything is for sale. This university has, in essence, become less a sanctum of learning and self-discovery, and more a vast conformist shopping centre.

Forgetting for a moment tuition fees, the learning process whilst at university is intrinsically collectivist - everyone is entitled to and receives the same calibre of education as each other, leaving it to the students themselves to determine their level of individual engagement. Suppose then, that capitalistic tendencies begin to develop; slowly at first, like water seeping into cracks but, with similar alacrity, gradually exfoliating their way into the institutional core. Once this slow gain is fully established, universities will have become a true arena of consumerism.

Instead of, or perhaps on top of, tuition fees, there will be pay-as-you-go lectures; each student swiping members cards upon their entrance, the fee being debited accordingly before leaving. Cottoning on to the money-making potential for such pedagogic trading; learning materials, lecturer ‘face time’, and facilities will all be available on a tiered scale of quality to cost. More lucrative exam pointers? Pay this fee. Want your coursework assessed faster and with more detailed feedback? This is the extra surcharge...

Naturally, students will resort to means of avoiding getting caught in such a spider’s web of exploitative fees. In the same way that the digital era sent the creative arts industries into spasms of shock, so the next frontier of piracy will be education. Lecture attendances will drop as materials are redistributed illegally amongst the online fraternity. It will then be down to desperate sales experts to conjure up incentive schemes to entice larger audience numbers once again – bargain tutorials, 2-for-1 lectures, special discounts on learning materials, and so on.

Perhaps regimented degree courses will lose their foothold on the marketplace and instead, greater consumer choice will result in students being free to pick and choose from a whole spectrum of academia, as though they were passing from shop to shop on the High Street. A morning spent examining forensic samples could be followed by an afternoon analysing private company accounts. Indeed, why be confined by a single institution? With the adequate funds you could, for example, study English at Oxford for two days each week, coupled with three days of History at Durham, and then maybe the odd afternoon of Sports Science at Loughborough.

Of course with this tidal shift will come consumer’s rights. Students will develop expectations and adopt the indignation of disgruntled shoppers waving receipts in the air and demanding full cash refunds if they fail to be adequately met.

If students will inevitably feel disenfranchised by these developments then so too will university staff. They will be forced to enrol in swathes of customer services training, whilst sales teams will take up residence in the offices of professors, extolling the virtues of new marketing techniques. University deans will become slaves to charts and spend hours in boardrooms tossing forth strategies on how to escalate the sales figures of second year Anthropology modules.

No longer will lecturers simply be able to rely on their expertise within their chosen field; they will be required to possess a showmanship zeal for which they will be constantly rated alongside their rival colleagues. Instead of simply relying on tired Powerpoint slides, each lecture must be a performance, a revelatory experience captured on a hundred iPhones.

In the final analysis, the university of tomorrow will be the realisation of a revolution, whereby old-fashioned meritocracy is torn down by the almighty modern hands of purchase power.

An Americanisation of Scale

I experienced a very odd sensation the first time I walked into the centre of Harrogate, my hometown, since landing back from my adventure in America. Walking around, I found myself feeling like I had become strangely elongated in some way, that my proportions were no longer appropriate for my surroundings, almost like a giant interloper within a Lilliputian town.

The same familiar streets seemed to have shrivelled away in size and length, as though the whole town had found itself needing to drastically de-scale itself in light of the harsh economic climate. Shopping streets now appeared little more than atrophied cul-de-sacs, the cenotaph like a concrete pine cone trying to retain its sense of pride in the centre of the town. As far as I could tell, cuts in council funding had apparently resulted in superfluous storeys being swiped off of buildings and unnecessarily wide roads forced to undergo drastic reductive surgery.

Was it really that much of a surprise though, the vast inflating of my mind towards geographical scale since America? After being dwarfed in New York City, and after 3 months in Los Angeles - less a city, more a gigantic urban Sahara - it was surely inevitable that returning to the modest English spa town of Harrogate would feel akin to suddenly marching around a rather quaint model village.

I remember as a young boy being intimidated, and often frustrated, at the seemingly never-ending road on which my family and I lived. The junction at the end of the road seemed like a distant light signalling the end of a tunnel that never appeared to get any closer, like a mirage on the horizon that may or may not be translated into a physical reality, you just had to persevere along the pavement and see what happened. The grass field along which the road ran parallel seemed, to my younger self, like a colossal green ocean across which it felt a great risk to set sail in case a Christmas or birthday might go by before you made it safely back again. Now I traverse along and across both expanses in a matter of minutes, barely in the time of a single song on my iPod; and so I lament the death of my sense of childhood scale - whatever indeed was left of it, perhaps only as nostalgic residue - which has now become so permenently engorged by America.

Instead of going to America and gaining any physical weight due to burgers, fries and donuts; my scale perception has instead become obese through an over-indulgence on skyscrapers, freeways and urban sprawl.

In the Jobscentre

So this is what it looks like from the inside. The local jobscentre, where I now find myself sat, legs and arms crossed in a self-contained embrace on a cold Monday morning. This is the kind of morning to inspire suicide; the sky outside is a water-surface reflection of the ennui surging within me, close to breaching the levees of my self-respect. If only every single Monday morning like this could be amassed together, swept up like a dropped deck of cards, if only it were possible to trade them in for something more appealing; a desperate haggle at the marketplace of time.

Indeed this must be one of the most depressing places I've ever found myself inside. It is a place of migraine-bright lights, un-ironed shirts, grainy coffee in styrofoam cups, and dog-eared posters tacked to walls advertising minimum wage hospitality jobs. The automatic doors give way to another lumbering layabout who slobs in, hands plumbing the depths of jeans pockets and scowling at the very presence of the day.

The jobless and the staff are separated by a discreet yet tangible barrier; those without jobs are shepherded to a central atrium of cheap furniture - a holding pen around which is wrapped a ring of staff desks. These desks are cluttered with a liberal array of bureaucratic paraphenalia, almost as if an attempt were being made to further highlight the gulf between those in the room.

The staff laugh with frugal economy at the occasional joke made by a colleague, the kind of mirthless banter exchanged to try and mask the crushing Monday morning depression that all are labouring under. All the while keeping their glances orbiting around the perimeter of the holding pen lest they should meet the gaze of someone languishing inside, thereby provoking some kind of dormant rage, the nature of which is most unwelcome on such a dismal morning. There's nothing like a random outburst of pent-up violence to irreparably ruin someone's day.

The jobless sit stubborn-faced on the sofas; stranded survivors on an island of their own circumstance, cut off from the rest of civilised society, able to view it through protracted lens but unable to play any meaningful or useful role in it. Each one works harder than is their want in order to avoid catching the eye of anyone else in the group, as though by ignoring all others the fact of their own presence in such a place can be allowed to slink by unacknowledged. Its easier to remain silent and aloof in such a place, or else you might begin to find an identity within it. No one here knows you outside of this environment, therefore - to them - you belong here, in the same sense that you associate them with this place and nowhere else. This is no place for making friends or seeking to inspire comradry. One man in his late-forties stares at the tips of his dirty shoes with the intensity of an aggressive drunk squaring up for a pub brawl. A young woman to my left appears edgy and agitated, hands shaking slightly as she grips her mobile phone in the grim hope that it might somehow teleport her into some other reality.

As I drift in and out of my own musings, I realise that the reason there appears to be such a division between the staff and jobless is because the holding pen is set into the floor by almost a couple of metres, like a swimming pool drained of all water. This had previously escaped my notice due to an ingenius lighting-and-mirror trick which no doubt councils up and down the country spent months and considerable funds in the pursuit of its inception.

As the staff begin to congregate around the rim of the shallow pit, a bell is sounded and the tension finally begin to ratchet to a head amongst those contained. Whilst before they would have sooner stabbed out their eyes with the pens held on desk-leashes than catch the gaze of another, now each man realises the situation that has been subtlely manufactured and the staring-down between them now begins, seeing the others as real opponents for the first time. The 5 or 6 captives, myself included, begin to shuffle around the fringes, our backs to the walls of the pit, our sense of self-preservation now unfurling around us like peacocks bearing their feathers.

The stand-off reaches an apex of intensity and suddenly one woman breaks out of her anxious side-step and lunges at the young girl to my side. Together they erupt in a fit of screaming, hair-pulling and scratching. Eager not to be entirely pre-empted by the women, the older man throws a punch at the bloke next to him wearing a grimy denim jacket. I have to wheel around to avoid the flailing wrecking-ball fists being swung by an overweight man in his late-30s, and quickly counter with a couple of darting jabs to his lower abdomen. With Fatty temporarily winded I skip around the two scrapping women and land an effective clothesline arm swipe to knock Denim to his knees.

The smell of sweat and blood mingles with the scent of grey synthetic carpet fibres scuffed up by the stamping feet of the staff. They have formed a collective braying audience, united with clenching fists and shouting encouragements. I almost expect them to break out with the classic playground chant of "Fight, fight, fight!", but they are too preoccupied with negotiating and closing hastily-made wagers between themselves.

I taste the bitter bile at the back of my throat as Fatty, returning strong and newly invigorated with violence, slams his brick wall of a forehead into the bridge of my nose, letting fly a jet stream of blood. Encouraged by the rising cheers from the sidelines, he hoists himself up out of the pit and prepares to launch himself off in an explosion of showboating panache and aggression. He leaps from his corner pulpit amidst the strip-light glare at the climax of a gathering storm of hand-claps...

"Mr Brooks please..."

I'm back in the black cloud of a Monday morning and rise, summoned from the holding pen. I cast a fleeting cursory glance around the sour faces of the others left sat there - society's detritus - and feel a surge of unjustified smugness. I'm not one of you, I don't belong here with you and this is last Monday morning that we will spend in each other's company. I approach the table of a staff member, who's facial expression hovers undecided between a smile and a grimace, and we sit down to business without shaking hands.

20 of my favourite musical artists

In no particular order

1. Aphex Twin
2. The Beatles
3. Led Zeppelin
4. U2
5. Pink Floyd
6. Nine Inch Nails
7. The Fall
8. Oasis (circa 1994-97)
9. Can
10. Joy Division
11. Jeff Buckley
12. Manic Street Preachers (circa 1991-95 - Richey Edwards years)
13. Brian Eno
14. Radiohead
15. The Smiths
16. Jon Hopkins
17. David Bowie
18. Gyorgy Ligeti
19. Kraftwerk
20. The Brian Jonestown Massacre

20 of my favourite films

1. '2001 (A Space Odyssey)' (S. Kubrick)
2. 'A Clockwork Orange' (S. Kubrick)
3. 'Aguirre - Wrath of God' (W. Herzog)
4. 'Apocalypse Now' (F. F. Coppola)
5. 'Blow-Up' (M. Antonioni)
6. 'Brazil' (T. Gilliam)
7. 'Easy Rider' (P. Fonda & D. Hopper)
8. 'The Evil Dead' (S. Raimi)
9. 'Get Carter' (M. Hodges)
10. 'Goodfellas' (M. Scorsese)
11. 'Monty Python & the Holy Grail' (T. Jones & T. Gilliam)
12. 'Possession' (A. Zulawski)
13. 'Reservoir Dogs' (Q. Tarantino)
14. 'Shallow Grave' (D. Boyle)
15. 'The Shining' (S. Kubrick)
16. 'Stalker' (A. Tarkovsky)
17. 'Taxi Driver' (M. Scorsese)
18. 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' (T. Hooper)
19. 'The Wicker Man' (R. Hardy)
20. 'Withnail & I' (B. Robinson)

Down and Out in Hollywood, CA

I moved to Los Angeles aged 24. It was the early 60s and California seemed like the centre of the whole universe. I was born in Boston, to a line of trawler-men stretching back 3 generations. But with every day older I grew the stronger my resolve to locate the escape route intensified. Movies were my passion and I had my heart firmly set on acting. Everyone I knew said I looked like a young Marlon Brando, and that all I had to do was head west to the land of the stars and I'd soon ascend into the same constellation.
............
I hit the road on the Greyhound, riding the rickety route cross country. A couple of my fellow passengers, as luck would have it, were guys my age who were also heading to Hollywood in a hopeful bid to realise their dreams. There was Jack, who shared the acting aspirations that I did, and Bobby who was a writer, his suitcase crammed full of draft scripts hammered out over the years whilst growing up. The world was ours, every revolution of the bus wheels taking us closer to our true calling.
.............
The first years were promising; I secured an agent on my third day in the city - something I took great pains to laud over Jack for the years after (he took 8 days) - and soon landed small parts in various mini-series, commercials and ill-fated pilots. It wasn't much but it just about covered the rent, and besides, I was confident my big break was languishing just around the corner.
............
After a while, the gaps between auditions and filming began to grow like a steadily receding hairline, and I started working on the side as a waiter in a fancy West Hollywood restaurant. It was the kind of place where big-time movie producers would have business lunches and discuss new project propositions over countless Bloody Marys. All the while I felt like I was there on the fringes, ear pressed up against the wall but without the helping hand or a ladder tall enough to see me scale it. One particularly painful situation stood out when, as I was serving drinks I overheard a sharp-suited executive gushing to some generic bright young thing about how he could be "the next Marlon Brando".

As the years wore on and the glorious 60s dissolved into the grim 70s, I parted ways with my agent and the auditions and opportunities slowly dried up. I once again craved the same escape route I had needed out of Boston, only this time there was no where further to go, and steadily I found that exit in drink. Women came and went out of my life - my looks still had their advantages. Gradually they too began to fade and wear; no longer were the Brando comparisons made my way.
...........
The Hollywood streets were harsh, and the studios and big names gradually fled to Burbank or further afield, leaving only a sidewalk full of stars in their wake. But I was determined not to give up on my dream. I attended more and more auditions but to no avail. They could sniff the desperation on me, almost as pungent as the cheap booze on my breath, and eventually my calls and follow-up enquiries were met with nothing but a firmly closed door. The wall had grown to a height far beyond my reach.
..............
Now my life is spent hauling my trolley along the sidewalks. A trolley full of my meagre possessions bound in dirty plastic bags. My skin is tattooed with years of grime, I've not shaved in I don't know how long. My clothes are ragged and torn, with years of piss and shit engrained in the stitching. I spend most of my time beneath a Downtown overpass where the closest I have to friends huddle round a trash can full of flames, on a good night passing between us a bottle of liquor or cheap wine. We recount our endless stories of how we arrived in LA all those decades ago, with our eyes ablaze with ambition. The city was kind to many who made the trip; we were the ones to whom it was not. These guys are just the same as me and I find a warm catharsis in that knowledge. They were aspiring actors, writers, directors, musicians, who spent years racing round corners chasing that big break and be rewarded with the life of Beverly Hills estates, premieres and adoration. In the end the only thing to break was our resolve.

I've not heard from my Greyhound buddies in a while. Last I heard, Bobby was down and out over on Venice Beach. That guy was the best damn writer I ever knew. He maintains to anyone who'll give him half a chance that a handful of his scripts were picked up by various studios and minor alterations made that cut him out of any entitlement to the shows' success. Jack I've not heard about in a long time. There were rumours he'd fallen victim to the needle but I can't be sure. If it wasn't the needle it would likely only have been something else.
.............
But me, I hold tightly to the belief that fame and fortune can come to a man late in life. My Indian summer is surely just behind the next band of rain clouds. Out there in the movie company production offices in the steel and glass high-rises, a new project is being conceived and blueprinted. A new kind of performance is required, and a new kind of actor to deliver it. The film business is as turbulent as white water rapids and the audiences who bankroll it all are fickle in their demands.
..........
Some day soon the conveyor belt of plastic starlets and pretty-boy hunks will stagger to a halt and then it'll be my time to rise to the fore. The premieres will await, with tuxedos, champagne and limosines, and I will be sure to linger long in the warm glow of the spotlight. And it'll be everything I thought it would be. And it'll all be worth this perpetual waiting.

Culture - November

Books Read:

Paul Auster - 'The New York Trilogy'
Albert Camus - 'The Plague'
J.G. Ballard - 'Cocaine Nights'
T.S. Eliot - 'Selected Poems'


Films Watched:

'The Rum Diary' (Bruce Robinson)
'Inside Job' (Charles H. Ferguson)
'Gran Torino' (Clint Eastwood)
'The Premature Burial' (Roger Corman)
'The Dead Zone' (David Cronenberg)
'The Adventures of Tintin - The Secret of the Unicorn' (Steven Spielberg)
'Scandal' (Michael Caton-Jones )
'The Man with X-Ray Eyes' (Roger Corman)

Albums Played:

Motorhead - 'Ace of Spades'
Noel Gallagher - 'Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds'
Kasabian - 'Velociraptor!'
The Fall - 'Ersatz G.B.'
Dinosaur Jr. - 'Where You Been'
Goldie - 'Timeless'
Mercury Rev - 'All Is Dream'
Lisa Hannigan - 'Passenger'

Gigs Attended:

Motorhead @ Manchester Apollo

Thoughts on the 'Occupy' Movement

Whilst walking past the City Hall just opposite the Colorado River the other day, I noticed the modestly-sized 'Occupy Austin' camp, just one of many such sit-in protests that have spread out from New York and, so I'm aware, to around the world. Part of me almost feels a sense of remorse for my not playing a part somehow, being that those involved, in effect, represent my generation taking a stand.

............

I've often bemoaned the fact that my generation has pretty much nothing to show for itself artistically or culturally; we leave barely any footprint aside from being the first to allow ourselves to become lulled into a state of perpetual inertia and detachment by the internet and new technologies. If you look back over the generations there has always been a distinct unifying 'scene' or 'movement' that defines that generation - the Beatniks of the 50s, the Civil Rights movement, mods & rockers, the flower children of the 60s, the punks of the 70s, the ravers of the 80s, and then I suppose the whole 'Cool Brittania' thing in the 90s. These were, I imagine, exhilarating and exciting times to be young and actively involved.

............

With this whole 'Occupy Wall Street' thing, you get the sense that, whilst no where near (as yet) the aforementioned movements, at least it is an example of this generation saying something for themselves as a united body. And so I feel mildly guilty for being so removed from it all. But only mildly.

..........

As far as I can tell, the 'manifesto' of the protests is that there just isn't one. Whilst this apparant lack of focus was used against them at first, it seems they have now embraced their 'catch-all' discontent and harnessed it as a means of expressing their widespread frustration. But the problem is, it doesn't appear that these people have any idea as to what they seek to achieve or what they expect to happen as a result of their action. There are people protesting about the greed of the banks, gay rights, animal rights, environmentalism, and even the role of capitalism itself. This is broad spectrum protesting and it remains to be seen as to how any satisfactory resolution can be achieved.

............

The protestors say they have been inspired by the uprisings in the Middle East and that this, quite rightly, is a prime demonstration of the fact that with the will of a unified people, a nation's entire system can be packed up and rolled off-stage like film studio set-pieces. The difference, I feel, is that those in the Middle East were charged with a definite and definable cause - their lack of liberty under dictorial regimes. The end goal was revolution and liberation from their oppressors. The problem with the weathly and materialistic West is that we have grown so accustomed to our comfortable democratic and capitalist societies that we can have no comprehension of what our version of a revolution would entail. If, somehow, free markets and capitalism were put in shackles as some wild-eyed idealists are calling for - what then??

............

It seems to me that people are protesting about a lack of jobs because if they can't get a job they won't be able to afford the next product Apple releases. Its protesting in an attempt at sustaining their hitherto comfortable lives which, until now, has shrouded them in a state of lethargy. Its no use arguing that there is a lack of clear focus because, 'there's a lot to be angry about' because, unlike the clearly defined end game of the Arab Spring, there surely is nothing that any figure of power can do that will send those protestors into jubilent celebration at having realised their aim. Its akin to athletes running a race in which none of them are sure whereabouts in the stadium the finishing line is; all of them have their sights set on different corners of the track.

..........

As far as I can tell, from a slightly cynical onlooker's perspective, is that these people have awoken from the collective apathy of their upbringings and are suddenly asking why the world isn't perfect, expecting explicitly clear answers from somebody. For the moment, I remain puzzled as to what those precise answers could be that they wish to receive, and if indeed they can be given by anybody that will send them home content off the streets from around the world.

Culture - October

Books Read:

Charles Bukowski - 'Love is a Dog from Hell' (poetry)
John Steinbeck - 'The Grapes of Wrath'
Lawrence Ferlinghetti - 'A Coney Island of the Mind' (poetry)
William Faulkner - 'The Sound and the Fury'

Films Watched:

'Howl'
'Island of Lost Souls' + 'Dr. Jekyl & Mr Hyde' (double bill @ Eygptian Theater, Hollywood)
'The Talented Mr. Ripley' (Anthony Minghella)

Gigs Attended:

Jesse Dayton Band @ The Broken Spoke - Austin, Texas
The St. Peter Street Playboys @ Preservation Hall - New Orleans, Louisiana
B.B. King All-Stars Band @ B.B. King's Blues Club - Memphis, Tennessee
The Drums @ The Drunken Unicorn - Atlanta, Georgia

Culture - September

Books Read:

John Fante - 'Ask the Dust'
Charles Bukowski - 'The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946-1966' (poetry)
J.G. Ballard - 'The Kindness of Women'
Charles Bukowski - 'Factotum'
Irvine Welsh - 'Reheated Cabbage - Tales of Chemical Degeneration' (short stories)
Jean-Paul Sartre - 'Nausea'
Charles Bukowski - 'Women'

Films Watched:

'The Bucket List' (Rob Reiner)
'Apollo 18' (Gonzalo Lopez-Gallago)
'The Wrestler' (Darren Aronofsky)
'A Short Film About Love' (Kyrstof Kieslowski)
'Stalker' (Andrei Tarkovsky)
'127 Hours' (Danny Boyle)
'Dirty Harry' (Don Siegel)
'The Sacrifice' (Andrei Tarkovsky)
'Paranormal Activity' (Oren Peli)
'The Black Dahlia' (Brian DePalma)
'Naked Lunch' (David Cronenberg)
'Leaving Las Vegas' (Mike Viggis)

Gigs Attended:

LA Guns @ Whisky a-Go-Go, Los Angeles

Culture - August

Books Read:

Friedrich Neitzsche - 'Beyond Good and Evil' (non-fiction)
Bret Easton Ellis - 'Imperial Bedrooms'
Charles Bukowski - Tales of Ordinary Madness' (short stories)
Will Self - 'Walking to Hollywood: Memories from Before the Fall'
Hunter S. Thompson - 'The Great Shark Hunt' (non-fiction)

Films Watched:

'Rocky' (John G. Avildsen)
'Toy Story 3' (Lee Unkrich)
'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' (Jim Sharman) (Naurt Theatre midnight screening, with 'Sins Of The Flesh' live cast)
'The Fighter' (David O. Russell)
'The King's Speech' (Tom Hooper)
'One Day' (Lone Scherig)
'The Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter'
'Frost/Nixon' (Ron Howard)
'Stagecoach' (John Ford)

Concerts Attended:

John Williams & LA Philharmonic Orchestra @ Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, CA

Culture - July

Theatre:

'Spiderman - Turn off the Dark' (Foxwoods Theatre, Broadway, NYC)

Books Read:

J.G. Ballard - 'Crash' (re-read)
William S. Burroughs - 'Junky'
F. Scott Fitzgerald - 'Tender is the Night'
Charles Bukowski - 'Mockingbird Wish Me Luck' (poetry)


Films Watched:

'Midnight Cowboy' (John Schlesinger)
'The Adjustment Bureau' (George Nolfi)
'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' (Howard Hawks)
'In The Heat Of The Night' (Norman Jewison)
'The Tree of Life' (Terence Malick)
'Factotum' (Bent Hamer)
'Monsters' (Gareth Edwards)

Gigs attended:

Jon Hopkins & King Creosote @ Mercury Lounge, NYC
U2 '360 Tour'@ New Meadowlands Stadium, New Jersey

Albums been playing:

AC/DC - 'Back in Black'
U2 - 'The Joshua Tree'

Untitled

The weight of responsibility has been shifted; I’m left spinning like an avalanche of wheels. A loathsome 4 year bed of nails has been endured and now been reclaimed. But a bed nonetheless, and one I fear I seek to debase in exaggerated overtones. This was not tenacity’s work, nor grim determination, but fear of the failure and hence an instinctive grip onto my circumstance. I learnt to shift my weight to ease the pressure of the nails.

But now that is over, and yet I am more hopelessly lost than ever. No, I never lost my grip but my parapet has evaporated and into thin air I am cast after all, legs pedalling like a demented cyclist, fingers chasing elusive rungs.

I’m left in an overpriced cave of a room with a tiny window that hangs the sky in its portrait frame. I lie with the familiar acrid taste of having gone too far; outside the trees are alive with a riot of birdsong. My head hurts like bare feet on a pebble beach; my nerves are piano-wire taut.

I spend minutes or hours combing the shoreline of my memory, trying to locate detail from amongst the washed-up debris. I cling to odd fragments in an effort at stitching them into some kind of sense I can feel sure and ashamed of.

After several hours or maybe days, I start to wonder whether the world still remains beyond my postage stamp of sky. Maybe the world ended and in my sordid lethargy I missed the roll call, was unable to respond to my name on the register as civilisation lined up to be neatly packed away into storage. Maybe the world was silenced by an agitated voyeur flicking through video clips on some far-flung web channel.

Outside, the trees have limbered up from the ground and begun an improvised ballet on the tiptoes of their roots. The buildings have given up and laid down their weary concrete heads in sporadic retirement. Bridges and railway lines have started to rebel, bulging and contorting in a structural tsunami hundreds of miles in length.

Outside, still success is a top-shelf commodity, power still caressed and cajoled by lovers anxious should anyone receive more of a share than they. The hungry still long to be fed, the lonely still long for love, the righteous still believe they’re right. The mad still think they’re sane, the sane still think everyone but them has lost their minds.

And still here I am, alone and waiting for my name on that register, still waiting for that next comforting bed of nails to be delivered, because without there is only nothing. And I fear I have not the time to wait for nothing to fall back into favour.

Culture - June

Gigs attended:

41st Glastonbury Festival

Films Watched:

'The Big Lebowski' (Joel Coen)
'There Will Be Blood' (Paul Thomas Anderson)
'The Bicycle Thieves' (Vittorio De Sica)
'The Firm' (Alan Clarke)
'Elephant' (Alan Clarke)
'L.A. Confidential' (Curtis Hanson)
'Lost in Translation' (Sofia Coppola)

Books Read:

Charles Bukowski - 'The Last Night of the Earth Poems'
J.G. Ballard - 'Concrete Island'
Franz Kafka - 'The Complete Short Stories'
Jack Kerouac - 'On the Road' (re-read)
Charles Bukowski - 'Hollywood'

Albums been playing:

Queens of the Stone Age - 'Songs for the Deaf'
Chemical Brothers - 'Singles 93-03'
U2 - 'Achtung Baby'
The Fall - 'Fall Heads Roll'
The Joy Formidable - 'A Balloon Called Moaning'
Dry The River - 'Bible Belt'
Anna Calvi - 'Anna Calvi'
Foster the People - 'Torches'

A Happy Family

Burrowed away in every room
Hiding from the world
and from each other,
they immolate themselves again
with their private chaos.
Trapped inside their own lives
Scorched by their close proximity
Searching for a fleeting glimpse
that might offer respite
from the shards of animosity
once again firmly in flux.
The doors are all closed
Whilst silence shrouds each room
Every ear remains alert
to any adjacent twitch
As if the smallest sound might hint
at the regret and conciliation
languishing within.
Another day buried in the
same old bitterness
Pushed out to sea
on the raft of ennui
and recrimination;
steered by expectations so misguided
and listing with heavy words
spent with such ease.
Each folds into harsh twisted sleep
Hoping to at least
play host to dreams
of happier times.

Culture - May

Gigs Attended -

Roger Waters = 'The Wall Tour', Manchester MEN Arena

Films Watched -

'Stroszek' (Werner Herzog)
'Alphaville' (Jean-Luc Godard)
'Lolita' (Stanley Kubrick)
'Audition' (Miike Takeshi)
'Nostalghia' (Andrei Tarkovsky)
'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' (Robert Enrico)
'Pink Floyd - The Wall' (Alan Parker)

Books Read -

John Steinbeck - 'Travels With Charley' (non-fiction)
Jorge Luis Borges - 'Labyrinths'
Franz Kafka - 'The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika)'
J.G. Ballard - 'A User's Guide to the Millennium' (non-fiction)
Yevgeny Zamyatin - 'We'

Albums been playing -

Eluvium - 'Similes'
The Fall - 'Hex Education Hour'
The Fall - 'Slates EP'
God Is An Astronaut - 'All Is Violent, All Is Bright'
Friendly Fires - 'Pala'
Amon Duul II - 'Tanz der Lemminge'
Pink Floyd - 'The Wall'
Can - 'Delay 1968'
Brian Eno - 'Music for Films'
Brian Eno - 'Discreet Music'
Arctic Monkeys - 'Suck it and See'
The Prodigy - 'World's on Fire' (live)
Paul Simon - 'Graceland'

Culture - April

Films Watched -

'Heart of Glass' (Werner Herzog)
'Fata Morgana' (Werner Herzog)
'Five Easy Pieces' (Bob Rafelson)
'The Battle of Algiers' (Gillo Pontecorvo)
'Andrei Rublev' (Andrei Tarkovsky)
'The Seventh Seal' (Ingmar Bergman)
'Elephant' (Gus van Sant)
'Escape from Alcatraz' (Don Siegel)
'United 93' (Paul Greengrass)
'The Lives of Others' (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)
'The French Connection' (William Freidkin)
'Rome, Open City' (Roberto Rossellini)
'Saturday Night Fever' (John Badham)
'Source Code' (Duncan Jones)
'Brassed Off' (Mark Herman)
'Paths of Glory' (Stanley Kubrick)
'Mirror' (Andrei Tarkovsky)
'Carrie' (Brian DePalma)
'Scanners' (David Cronenberg)
'Breathless' (Jean-Luc Godard)
'Barfly' (Barbet Schroeder)


Books Read -

Henry Miller - 'Tropic of Cancer'
Sigmund Freud - 'The Freud Reader' (edited by Peter Gay)
Franz Kafka - 'The Trial'
Ernesto 'Che' Guevara - 'The Motorcycle Diaries'
Charles Bukowski - 'You get so alone at times that it just makes sense' (poetry)
Vladimir Nabakov - 'Lolita'

Albums been playing -

Explosions in the Sky - 'Take Care, Take Care, Take Care'
Lykke Li - 'Wounded Rhymes'
Tame Impala - 'Innerspeaker'
Deerhunter - 'Halcyon Digest'
Friendly Fires - 'Friendly Fires'
Eluvium - 'Talk Amongst the Trees'
Can - 'Tago Mago'
Can - 'Landed'
Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band - 'Safe as Milk'
Igor Stravinsky - 'The Firebird Suite'
Goldie - 'Timeless'
Jon Hopkins - 'Contact Note'
Gyorgy Ligeti - Ligeti Project Vol. II'
Gram Parsons & The Flying Burrito Brothers - 'The Gilded Palace of Sin'

Culture - March

Films Watched -

'The Pianist' (Roman Polanski)
'Gangs of New York' (Martin Scorsese)
'Thelma & Louise' (Ridley Scott)
'Severance' (Christopher Smith)
'A Beautiful Mind' (Ron Howard)
'A Bronx Tale' (Robert De Niro)
'The Battleship Potemkin' (Sergei Eisenstein)
'An Inconvenient Truth' (Davis Guggenheim)
'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' (Robert Weine)

Books Read -

Charles Bukowski - 'The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (and other stories)'
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 'The Double'
William Golding - 'Lord of the Flies'
James Joyce - 'Dubliners'
Thomas Hardy - 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles'

Albums been playing -

Radiohead - 'The King of Limbs'
Elbow - 'Build a Rocket Boys!'
Beady Eye - 'Different Gear, Still Speeding'
The Brian Jonestown Massacre - 'Tepid Peppermint Wonderland'
Can - 'Ege Bamyasi'
Can - 'Future Days'
David Bowie - 'Low'
Esben and the Witch - 'Violet Cries'
Jon Hopkins - 'Insides'
Kraftwerk - 'Electric Cafe'
Kraftwerk - 'Radio-Activity'
Mogwai - 'Hardcore will never die, but you will'
Skinny Puppy - 'Singles Collection'
Spacemen 3 - 'Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs to'

....

Life: I drink to it and because of it.

The Question of Insanity

Increasingly I catch myself ruminating on the nature of my own mind, my very presence in this waking reality. Sometimes my conscious will have so entirely detached itself from my surroundings that it takes an act of will to wrench it back into some kind of focus. Almost as if I have torn apart the flimsy fabric of reality upon which we all project our daily thoughts and lives.

The way I see it, this fabric is stretched too thin across all our perceptions, it can’t take an inconceivable amount of effort to be able to punch right through and into something entirely different, gazing through a diffracted lens that might throw out the colours to paint reality anew.

And so I ponder the question of insanity. How can the essence of madness be defined in any logical or reasonable way I often wonder. Surely to get close to a definition we have to be able to assume that society and civilization as we know it represents some kind of sanity, or human consciousness enshrined in normality. But this can also be cast into considerable doubt. I have slowly begun to realise that madness is all relative to perception, unique in each and every instance.

Is the man who all of a sudden snaps and takes a gun to shoot up the town any more insane than the man who just sits tight and lets the world play him for a fool day after day? Being able to gauge a true impression on mental instability is all a matter of reassessing existing impressions and prejudices; attempting to recapitulate madness into mundane routine. Real insanity is everywhere you look, a fresh salience of vision is all that’s required.

True insanity is waking up, rubbing the sleep from morning eyes and setting out to work at a job that chips away a little piece of your resilience with every hour that ticks by. Like ocean waves striking and retreating from the cliff face, there is no let up, no release. No release from the constant grief and jealousy and stress and humiliation. The only thing that gets you through it is the knowledge that someone somewhere has fallen victim to this ritual erosion whilst your mind has remained strong and untapped for the duration of another day.

Real insanity is placing our lives in the hands of men who went mad with their own influence and self-importance long ago. We conspire to the positioning of men into the status and high office from which they wield power over us day and night. Belief in a free society and the existence of real democracy is as good a sign of insanity as any – to honestly invest hope that the figureheads of our government would do all they can to enshrine justice and democratic transparency is a delusion of the gravest kind.

Grand madness is devoting your life to an almighty god, praying that you may enter his kingdom of heaven; a place god would have abandoned in disgust and disappointment long ago if only he could be trusted to exist.

Madness is eliciting the sympathies and confidences of others, in approaching strangers with smiles, in greeting relatives, in seeking refuge.

To covet material possessions and adorn oneself with exclusive branded plumage, these are surely the obsessions of lunatics.

Insanity is taking up arms in anger and revenge, in ignoring tragedy like a minor oversight, in doubting the bile and wretched potential of associates.

Insanity is auctioning off the state bit by bit like vital organs in a hospital jumble sale; to allow prisons, schools and forests to be melted down into franchises, swallowed up by conglomerations and drained of all noble intent.

Insanity is the oceans of blood and tsunami of pain from millennia teeming with man’s fight against man. Hate provoked by race, sex, religion blooms only in the minds of the deranged.

Madness is child-rearing on a planet of billions.

Madness is destruction in a world of beauty.

Madness is fanaticism and addiction, dreams of flight and unjustified wealth.

Madness is the highway divide between casino and slum.

Madness is giving yourself up for love, surrendering yourself to tradition, isolating yourself from passion.

Insanity is money. Money is the straitjacket by which all men are restrained. The very nature of society decrees that the jacket be bound tighter for some than others, and still tighter for others, until the jacket is too tight to give life real worth. For a minority the shackles of the straitjacket are loose enough to allow free movement, and in turn this allows the controlled suppression of the majority. A myriad of lives are spent in the futile endeavour of wriggling and squirming those shackles loose. But at the end of the day we are all just bound by the same lunacy of money, the ecstasy of gold.

Insanity is a life lived in strict order, followed to the letter of habit, grazing through fads and fashions, always glancing back over one shoulder, a slave to regret, a victim of discontent, a casualty of violent ennui. The monotony of routine and technology-induced apathy is the padded cell within which we are confined. Breaking through the parameters of these imposed walls requires a denial of needs, desires and responsibilities, heralding in the perfect revolt to liberate one’s own mind.

Insanity is not something we risk descending into; it’s what we need to ascend from.

The Day Breaks

Every morning I awake with the haze of
Promise hanging above my head
The morning dew is punctuated by the
Sharp light as the day yawns and offers so much
Anything can be filtered through the parameters of possibility.
That creative spark feels revitalised, feels fresh,
I feel like I have my little portion of genius
My own allotted quota of talent,
Held hostage somewhere in my gut
Or in my heart.
It’s in there and it’s never so ripe as in the
First breaths of the day, as though it plans
To sneak up on me and run amok through
All natural sensibilities.
I switch on my computer, lock into the internet
Immerse myself in rolling news, gossip blogs,
Status updates, online auctions and opinion pieces.
And the fog it slowly seems to lift
It clears and fades away, to leave a view
Of the horizon as far as the eye can see.
Only with this salience of vision
I can feel that little burning ember, that spark
Dying inside just a little bit.
But then I think –
Maybe it was never there at all,
And all I’d been trying to do
Was cling onto the fog
And chase away the harsh clarity of the day.

The Retirement Home for Deposed Middle Eastern Dictators

Into the evening air had crept a chill as the sun was busy unfurling its crimson wings over the horizon stretch. Scattered seabirds casually grazed on the sand of the shoreline, occasionally making a swooping pass over the benign waves of the azure sea.

On the sheltered balcony a calm respite had taken hold of the small group sat in pensive surveillance over the landscape before them. Ordinarily they bickered and argued about their respective politics and pasts, but often at this late-evening stage they were content to sit in languid introspection, smoking cigars and passing between them carafes of fine wine.

It was here on the secluded outskirts of the Red Sea coastal town Sharm-el-Sheikh that the deposed dictators of their respective homelands had been settled; a tranquil and isolated setting for their imposed retirement from the world stage. Having now fallen from their former glories each had become more refined and exuded a quiet wisdom, yet still managed to establish some semblance of influence, as though desperately clinging to some vestige of power.

By and large the retirement home staff were happy to indulge in these odd whims that arose from time to time, usually extending to little more than stating a preference for a vintage wine to be ordered in or a certain meat to be procured. Perhaps, in retirement each man envisaged his own individual role in the home as being still somehow significant to the outside world.

The former Egyptian president Mubarak was happiest challenging either Ben Ali of Tunisia or the ex-monarch of Jordan, Abdullah to an afternoon game of chess on the balcony whilst Bahrain’s Hamad Al Khalifa was more inclined to sit and read religious scriptures for hours on end.

The old eccentric Gaddafi was altogether a more lively presence. He would wile away hours watching the rolling news displayed on the TV and constantly refresh the social media feeds on his laptop computer, as though keeping a continual watch over the technological influences that had been utilised to bring about his downfall. Whilst the others had succumbed to a lethargic benevolence, Gaddafi still harboured bitterness for the “rebel dogs” who had sparked the uprising; his feelings towards the leaders of the West who had betrayed him matched only by the ire directed at Al-Qaeda, who he claimed were still chemically corrupting the minds of the Libyan youth. Often at times of quiet contemplation such as this evening, Gaddafi would still be less peaceful than the others; his eyes would fidget over the assembly of seabirds dotting the shoreline like his new society of minions to repress.

On an almost daily basis they sat together engrossed in the news bulletins as if faithfully awaiting a sudden call for their reinstatement to power. All of them were silently glad to see the reports of carnage and civil war plaguing the city streets of their countries, as the struggle for aggressive dominance continued amongst the people. They mumbled to themselves about this being the real liberty they deserved, as families became militant and attacked their neighbours, and rebel groups fiercely defended their own territorial strongholds.

The group would, in these moments of fleeting congeniality, exchange silent glances with an almost smug telepathy. Each of them was eagerly awaiting the day when those who in their violent greed had conspired against them, would repent their sins and travel from far and wide to kneel before them and beg for forgiveness.

Hold out your hands man, you’ll get kicked into line...

(This was written using the 'Cut-Up Technique' used to devasting effect throughout his career by William S. Burroughs)

We were getting ready to leave but the metallic din from my agitated housemates had started to drain down all my shoes and wallet, already ‘Metal Machine Music’ playing by L. Reed, glass of red wine and nearly enough pretensions for close to two days as
I really dunno what’s the matter with me now.

Been aurally violated, smashed and so in this way I spend the next 48 hours believing the different harmonic capabilities of a lethargic stupor as I mourn the subtle nuances of power tools and realise that money is tight but time is tighter.

Only impatient shouts permeate through before being spat out into the world moping and whining. Left eye still puffed up and sore from the time I had gotten so drunk that I’d stumbled around trying to beat the queue to the Union and feeling pretty fucked-off from that couple yet again. I’d been listening to a whole flask of gin whispers.

Sometimes other such avant-garde white noise sunk deep into a depressive malaise only shattered by a claw hammer. You wouldn’t flippantly waste precious time with this orchestra of pneumatic drills, 4 more months of student living, steel on steel. Check mirror reflection. Other night’s debauchery – characters and visions gestating.

Unable to take out my contact lens that refuses to freeze into settlement. I have been frantically clawing at my red raw half-baked lunacies based on some plastic film that had long since acquiesced to mass technologies and the alternative internet landscape.

I stagger down the stairs to a psychological destruction of humanity which is about to play out. There’s one of the great works, an example of who is supposedly out tonight but provides me with an escape route from this bad fucking idea to seek out career, a nice office job, taking on now without a fuck, and need to have started a pension plan, et cetera, et cetera, for future action looking quite promising just thinking about it all.

Predictable thing for me to go and do tonight is to get through, other than my head I will be curled up in foetal despair, with ideas and themes to get out, and for quite some time I stood there, my mind all flowing liquidity. Eye in search of that elusive piece of narrative or plot structure, fallen to the carpet just to spite me.

Virtual Coma Theory is about how to join the others, I’m unsure how tonight’s ‘cyber universe’ will precipitate this girl I’ve been making slow progress on. If tackled precisely it could be the state I’m in right now, it would be contemporary fiction in its finest chance meeting. Truth is, I’ve been months with the predictable horrors of forcing the groundwork here where the prospects and responsibilities for my own future would be frustrating and yet utterly fucking bored.

Ah well, in the meantime, distracted with ambitions of ‘writering’, a feeling that will come tomorrow, tugging my hair as the chaotic maelstrom of white noise coagulates with the hangover fog to batter and erode my senses and pride just like before.

I Believe in Reality (TV)

This is the edited version of the final report submitted to the enquiry panel, comprising the key points to be considered when reaching a summary verdict on the catalysts and causes of the tragic events of 19th March 2011 of which we are all aware.


1. Celebrity Culture

Celebrity is the twenty-first century religion. Our deities are on movie screens, on magazine covers and on television. Our day-to-day lives have become increasingly saturated by the warped manifestos, the twisted ideologies of the celebrity and their place in our society. Through escalation it has reached the point where we continue to obsess and wallow in the lives of others without ever even being aware of it anymore; it serves as a reflex, an unpleasant voyeuristic habit. The same voyeuristic habit that gives us cause to peer over neighbours’ fences, or decelerate past road traffic accidents. It is what provokes us to invest such a substantial portion of our waking consciousness in absorbing and soaking up this celebrity maelstrom like affectless sponges.

Whilst many endow themselves with cynicism and a vested sense of superiority to the people they elevate from ‘no-one’ to ‘someone’; we may know them to be no better than the court jester of centuries gone by perhaps; yet still we are magnetised into their orbit with a compulsion that is both unwarranted and reckless. In an era of celebrity dieticians, socialites, businessmen, weather forecasters, property developers, chefs, publicists, farmers, anything, nothing – we reflect a society that has truly begun to depart from the true straits of reality.

If Warhol’s 1968 statement that, ‘in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes’ was true for the twentieth century; in the twenty-first it might well be more apt to state that – ‘in the future everyone will be famous for 15 seconds’, since everyone already is famous; everyone can be their own movie star, porn star, sports star, guitar hero, if only they believe it.

However, in the reality TV and internet age there is a proliferation of false idols and ‘vacant celebrities’ – those who achieve their fame and status as a result of doing absolutely nothing of any discernible value. We have become immersed in a never-ending carnival of the desperate and the moronic, where people are encouraged to conform to all others, abuse all self-worth, and surrender all credibility for the reward of fame.


2. Reality Television

At its core, the appeal of the reality talent show and those who willingly participate, is to emulate and aspire towards adulation, the elevation of status and prestige from the doldrums of dull everyday existence to a new plateau of idolatry. The twenty-first century celebrity has aspirations only of celebrity in and of itself; it is seen as an intensely desirable commodity, something that is un-purchasable, un-downloadable, and – so we are led to believe – largely un-achievable.

The shows themselves serve as the factory production line through which ordinary people are processed and reprogrammed, wrangling their meagre ‘talents’ to the world like weary car dealers before being left at the mercy of the baying audience. Reality TV makes an art-form out of idiocy and depravity; the lower the contestant is seen to be willing to sink for audience approval, the greater the adulation, the higher the praise. The glorification of these individuals’ shameless self-promotion and desperation is writ large in bright neon appendage and served up to the public as their ‘comatose entertainment.’

It is my belief that the reason for the popularity of reality TV and talent shows comes down to people’s innate sense of personal repression and of being downtrodden by external governance and by unwelcome forces at work and at home that can serve to erode any individual’s sense of pride, purpose or positive well-being. If this is true then it must explain the incredible capriciousness with which these pseudo-celebrities are forged and then destroyed, often overnight or within the blinking of an eye.

As befits entertainment, humans desire to be witnesses to ritualistic humiliation – going back to the days of gladiatorial Rome or floggings in the street – purely to provide upward momentum to our own sense of dignity and respect that slowly continues to sink in a mire of self-loathing. We love to see tone-deaf victims led to the slaughter of a waiting audience in a singing contest; we love to see people caged and left to fuck and fight one another.

By routing for and attaching ourselves to those individuals who progress somewhat through these competitions, we amplify our love and affection for them; in effect it is the Story of Creation turned on its head – we create the gods out of our own fickle imagery. Since, if you were compelled to scratch beneath the surface, there would be no real worth to these individuals in their guise as ‘celebrities’, there is no basis on which to offer such affection. As such the relationship between ‘celebrity’ and audience is tragically doomed, as we realised with such horror in the events that have since transpired.

As a useful analogy in which to refocus the scenario, envisage the least desirable and most painful relationship situation between two lovers (save for actual physical or mental abuse being inflicted). It would not be uncommon for everyone at some point in their romantic lives to be an unwilling host to a league of anxieties and fears relating to whether or not they are worthy of their partner; whether or not they meet up to their high standards, imaginary or not. This is a breeding ground for paranoia that can work to corrode any and all pre-existing equality in the relationship. Each day that dawns could be the day that he/she decides to leave. Each person to whom they offer a smile could be one they abandon you for.

It is this core paranoia that takes a stranglehold upon each of these talent show ‘contestants’; they can feel the warm glow of the audience’s love and care, but this is precisely because they only bask in it at that very moment. What captures the public imagination today can be cast to the annals of memory by tomorrow; what strikes a chord now can easily be tuned out. It is this clinging sense of abandonment and scorn that I believe triggered the tragic events which shall now be examined in more detail.


3. The Events of 19th March 2011

On the day in question, the victims were in large assembly for a special one-off live broadcast of the reality TV talent show ‘--------‘ which had arrived at the finale of its 4-month-long tenure. An emotional climatic performance had been arranged by the show’s producers which would see the competition winner joined in collaboration by a vast ensemble of the show’s previous contestants who had lost out on the grand prize.

The production team had made allowance for 50-70 of these ‘losing contestants’ to take part in the performance and indeed that is how it proceeded on the night. However, what had not anticipated was the impromptu arrival of up to 200 more people who had also been unlucky participants in previous series of the show dating back up to 4 years hence.

Studio staff have since said to me that before managing to barricade themselves inside the spacious assembly room backstage, all the individuals had a funeral pallor, an ashen-faced quality as though they were being shot in an alternate light to everyone else.

At 8:42pm the 50-70 contestants took part in the song rendition with the series’ winner in front of the judges and live audience. At 8:46pm they began to make their way to the backstage holding area where the 200-or-so others had been waiting, supposedly in something akin to a trance; utterly unresponsive towards those staff members who attempted to enquire as to their motives for being there.

At 8:49pm the staff members and production team were forcibly expelled from the assembly room which was then apprehended for the entirety of the events that followed. The room was re-entered by security staff and members of the Metropolitan Police Force at approximately 9:35pm, where they found the floor strewn with bodies of the recently deceased, numbering 252 in all. Since internal CCTV equipment had been disabled during that time period it is not known precisely the methods that were enforced to carry out the murders, except that every single person was found to have ingested a lethal dose of cyanide poison in capsule form. As no sounds of commotion or resistance were heard by those outside the assembly room it can only be deduced that this was an act of ‘revolutionary suicide’ on a Jonestown-esque scale.

In the anguish that has inevitably ensued in the media it has been all-too-easy to condemn those involved as reckless imitators or, even more flippantly, as ‘sore losers’; but I fear that the reality of their mental well-being was much more severe and are themselves as a whole, largely blameless.

It must be appreciated that each one of these individuals had entered the competition proceedings with an identical lust for fame, attention and adulation from the public which could be deemed unhealthy. Over the varying courses of their time in the limelight they became heroes to many, elevated to false status by the media, and worshipped by fans who had stated themselves as such with the minimum of provocation or cause to warrant it.

Upon their slow but steady demise from the contest, that glorious light was shone elsewhere, the fickle audience spurned and cast them aside. Instead of the celebrity high-life that they had been foolishly exposed to over the course of several weeks, they were now expected to retire gracefully back to the squalor of mundane everyday existence; back to the supermarket checkouts, the sales pitches, the cleaner’s cupboards, the office staffrooms that they had tasted permanent escape from. Instead of receiving that continued celebrity love and respect, they became viewed through mocking, derisive eyes and cruel sneers from colleagues and peers who until recently had been cheering on their success from their homes. Forever resigned to a life as a ‘loser’, they became someone who had had their chance, had their modicum of fame, and couldn’t stomach the reality of sinking back into the same uninspiring person’s skin they had previously inhabited.

But where exactly does the blame lie in this tragic event? I refer to a fascinating rumination by the writer W.G. Sebald, who states that – ‘we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.’

In an analogical sense I would decree that the same can be said of the contemporary celebrity culture. With the lauding of ‘nobodies’ into instantaneous ‘stars’, we conspire to the creation of people we both envy and aspire to in equal measures. By the same subconscious logic we view these individuals with their downfall kept very much in mind. Their fall from grace we anticipate during the ascendency, before conspiring in wrenching them down into their demise. We might fantasise of them as car crash casualties, or suicidals, or assassination victims, or cancer patients, or as drowned versions of themselves washed up on a beach upon which we relax and control the tides.

I say that we the people are to blame! We must learn from this tragedy, this massacre of the disaffected, the jilted lovers of our media; no longer should we reward ignorance, applaud stupidity and indulge the wild fantasies of the everyman.

I conclude that with society’s health fracturing with the malaise of self-imposed fame, the only viable solution is isolation.