Blog
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Iceland
The only thing that's keeping me alive is the idea that I might one day become pals with the Prime Minister of Iceland. He looks very cheerful, in fact he burst out laughing while defending Iceland's banking situation.
20:07
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Mongols
Yesterday I hired 'Mongol' from the video shop. The Mongol horde, contrary to popular belief were a bunch of cuddly teddy bears who just liked cutting each other up with swords. I would rather come across across a Mongol horde than a shoe shop assistant any day. It is because of shoe shop assistants that I haven't bought a pair of shoes for four years. Now I am watching a French film called 'Human Heart Detector'. A company psychologist mentally unravels as he discovers that all directors are ex SS.
19:05
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Eggs and Chips Blues 2
So there I was, suffering from a abcess and listening to the great man (Stravinsky 1952 conducting the Cleveland Orchestra, live). When the phone rings. 'Human contact' I think. It's an 0141 number. One of ma pals frae Glasgae an all. Scrapey breathing on the line identifies the caller as a painter friend form Fife. For the next hour I feed his ego until the corset of vanity is digging into his bloated alcoholic flesh while diminishing my own existence to a sub human level. I play the great man (Stravinsky of course) to him down the phone and he yells 'Get that fairy music off ya fuckin arse bandit!' He pontificates about his new 'work' featuring blow up dolls and tells me about his new musical vanity project (with a fellow painter's girlfriend) recording 'I'm going to Jackson' by Johnny Cash and June Carter. What with the inflated egos and the inflated dolls I was left with the dull empty feeling that always follows one of our conversations. Perhaps having an abcess and listening to Stravinsky in the afternoon isn't such a bad thing after all.
12:48
Monday, July 21, 2008
Bogus Darkmans with a bad case of the egg and chips blues
Finally I can see through everything I have ever written and done and it's all drivel. I am having one of my summertime dives and the only thing I can listen to is Stravinsky's 'A Soldier's Story'. I've never listened to Stravinsky before but I like him because he seems to be heavily influenced by jazz maaaaan and I dig that don't I? I picked it up second hand in a second hand record shop in Lower Marsh run by some broken toys. I only stumble on these things after every other hep cat in town has already moved on. And I was crying last night as Lawrence Ferlinghetti read his poem dedicated to Ezra Pound but was I? Was I really crying or is this just more bogus Darkmaaaaaanzz? Hopefully I will Donkey Punched into some kind of reality by the end of the summer. I just have to find an angry donkey.
13:17
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Le Grand Illusion and ’The Missing Model’
Reading McClaren Ross's frantic letters I feel he is (was) going to have a nervous breakdown unless he is discharged him from the army soon. He's got to get out to work on his 'Hunted Man' melodrama. His plays have really bizarre titles, like , 'The boy who might have been, with luck, the chess champion of the world.' Back in the real world Ricardo AKA Dexter Bentley calls to give me my brief for the Hello Goodbye show (on Resonance Radio) on Saturday. I've got to write a Wizard of Oz poem to advertise the Lower Marshes summer festival. I scribble a bit then try to watch 'Le Grand Illusion', my eighth attempt. Yet again, just as they arrive at camp I stop watching. Instead I find myself watching 'The Missing Model', a reality TV programme about disabled models. Much more interesting. I had the feeling that JG Ballard was also watching.
15:16
Monday, June 30, 2008
Our Mutual Friend
My favourite character in literature (for the summer at least) is Silas Wegg from Dicken's 'Our Mutual Friend'. He's a one-legged pamphleteer who's trying to wrangle money out of a man who's made his fortune in dust. He's supposed to be a baddy but I like him and think he's a brilliant comic character. I've always steered away from Dickens because he's a national institution and I thought I might be in danger of becoming one of those stary eyed book bores who go on and on about their favourite Dicken's book, but it looks like I might be heading that way anyway. This sun justs puts me on edge, it makes me feel like shoplifting. Last night the foxes kept me up all night but at least I had Julian McClaren Ross's desperate letters to pass those small hours away. His obsession with Orwell's wife is fascinating. Summer listening is Nurse with Wound's 'Shipwreck Radio Volume One. I went to Bush House to record something for the radio and I made the woman take me to the real room 101. It's now full of broken computers. What with the 1930's architecture and the plasma screens I had one of my moments and felt like I was in Orwell's 1984. It was a red letter day for me and I've still got the badge, yesterday I ate hummous off it.
14:07
Friday, January 04, 2008
Lonely Psychopaths and Urban Foxes
I've managed to escape my Young Marble Giants and Biberkopf fixation and I've been listening to Rosco by Midlake which is really outlaw music, which brought me back, again to the 'fraternity of vagabonds'. Thinking of this, I went to see the new cowboy film, 'The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford'. It got a bit of a slaggin by a reviewer in The Independent who said it was like 'watching paint dry', I knew then I would like it and I did. The film deals with (would you guess it) with the fraternity of vagabonds. It's a love story and psychodrama all rolled into one, with guns. Stange lonely psychopaths brood in empty rooms, intermittently meeting up to go on long rides across dark snow covered planes deciding whether to kill each other or not. A boy who really wants to grow up to be the thing he loves (Jesse James) kills the thing he loves. Are all cowboy stories, I wonder, really homoerotic love stories?
It's been a bit like the wild west around here lately. Just before christmas there was a shoot out in the next street and an undercover cop got shot by someone he was staking out. I didn't hear the gunshots myself but was woken up by my girlfriend rushing to the kitchen with her video camera. She sat up for three hours while the drama (police with machine guns!) unfolded and ended up with some very poetic, and much more interesting, footage of a fox sitting on the next door's shed.
On a lighter note, Biggie is back. On a darker note, some of his tongue is missing.
1:18pm
Saturday, December 22, 2007
The Young Marble Giants
My christmas book seems to have become 'How the Dead Live' by Will Self. I picked it up in a second hand book shop for a quid. It's putting a rather surreal edge on things, but maybe it's just the time of year. I've been thinking about friends who are long gone. Anyway, I've been reading the book and listening to The Young Marble Giants over and over. If only I had Biberkopf's hopeless hopefulness, but maybe not, Biberkopf did end up in a straightjacket.
8:05pm
Friday, December 14, 2007
Juddering Cadavers
Biberkopf has gone so I've been trying to do a bit of scribbling. A few lines and then I switch the telly on. I tune in to Later with Jools Holland and I'm treated to the juddering cadaver of one of the Stones, I don't know which one because they all look the same to me now. There they are, the two 'good old salt of the earth geezers', talking about the old days. I have to switch the telly off as the frightening insincerity of Holland makes me want to drill my eyeballs out and go on a binge with Biberkopf.
3:57pm
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
RAF and Jellies
Back to the b-b-b-blog. I've come out my Fassbinder phase only to go and see a film about him at the ICA. The RAF were hijacking a plane while Fassbinder and his boyfriend had hysterical arguments in their flat and I have this visual picture of Douglas Bader with a sten gun holding up a Lufthansa passenger jet, but then I snap out of it - it's the Red Army Faction not the Royal Air Force. Which reminds me, the last (actually the first) installment of B-B-Biberkopf arrived today.
Words can be easily misunderstood. I was reminded of this the other day when an artist friend told me he had a 'Plan B Interview'. I gave him my commiserations as I have experienced at first hand the misery inflicted by special Jobcentreplus initiatives. It turned out 'Plan B' is a music magazine and not a job club for the long term unemployed.
After dropping off a Cello mislaid by The Crisps in a pub, I met a woman on the bus who told me how a taxi driver had repeatedly run over her leg in Huddersfield. She said she was taking Tempazepam for the pain and anxiety. I said 'Do you sometimes see things out of the corner of your eye? And little floaty things that aren't really there?' She said 'Yes, how do you know?' I told her that Temazepam (known as jellies) were the drug of choice in many a housing estate in Scotland when I was younger. Some people found that you could get a better high injecting but the downside was that you might have to have your leg amputed if the jellies solidified in your veins. Sometimes the amount of amputees you saw when you went for a pint of milk gave you a surreal feeling as if you were an extra in a first world war movie sponsored by Adidas.
Anyway, it's back to B-B-Biberkopf.
12:42pm
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Berlin Alexanderplatz
I have been immersed in Berlin Alexanderplatz all week, the only problem has been that Amazon sent the disc with the last episodes first so I am watching it backwards. Never mind, Berlin Alexanderplatz is like a dream to me anyway. I saw it on TV when I was a kid and it made a big impression on me. Watching it now makes me feel a hundred years old. Biberkopf is a lost soul blown by misfortune through the sewers of Berlin, his only real home is the prison, he even sleeps outside it. He is desperate for fraternity, maybe the 'fraternity of vagabonds' from the Elizabethan Underworld made me remember it. Biberkopf, like all of us, only wants to belong, but he isn't allowed to (as per usual).
12:55pm
Friday, November 23, 2007
A Wendy House of Platitudes
To escape the Elizabethan underworld of rufflers and glimmer girls I decided to distract myself by walking to the supermarket for a bottle of wine. I was moving, wildebeest like, along the wine section when the jerky mannerisms of a nearby woman caught my eye. I realised it was a Scottish pal I sometimes bump into. She's very intense and I considered giving her a swerve but she had a look of such manic concentration I thought she might be under some kind of emotional strain. I walked over and said hello. 'Hi' she says 'Gerry! Look at you Gerry, you look like such an old codger these days!'. 'I suppose it's starting to look that way,' I said. Then she launched into a monologue about her boyfriend and how he can't see her today ('he has a woman friend he hasn't seen for ages and of course he must take the opportunity to meet up') then she jerked about some more. Then she wondered, 'Was I wrong about the intensity my relationship with him ?', 'Should I take that teaching post in Spain?' I said that the beginning stages of a relationship are often complex. She made a strange noise and told me a close relative had just died. I felt inadequate and wanted to escape from the wendy house of platitudes I was building. Feeling like a counterfeit crank I pretended I had studies to return to. Mumbling something about rufflers and glimmer girls I hurried away to the 'five items or less' counter.
Last night I enjoyed Jean Pierre Melville's 'Bob the Gambler' which was on TV. Oh, and Biggie has been gone for over a week. We fear the worst.
8:24pm
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Elvis’s Maybell
Tonight I was rehearsing for the gig at the Milton Arms (just around the road from the Weatherspoons in Roman Road, if anyone's interested) with the Little Spartans. It was sounding good; violins, harmoniums etc. I was even beginning to think my poems were OK when suddenly I came across the line, 'Elvis's Maybell has just been savaged', in a poem about jealousy and I thought, hold on this is too surreal, where did you get that? Then I remembered, I'd been drinking quite a bit of wine on holiday in Verona when I wrote it. It was 40 degrees and lizards were flinging themselves against the tent all night. Then it came back to me; shortly before going to Italy I read an article about a security guard's doberman going into a frenzy in the Teddy Bear Museum (which they were guarding) and destroying a lot of teddys, including Maybell, Elvis's teddy. The guard said afterwards, 'I don't know what came over her, I was just stroking Maybell and saying "ahhh lovely little Maybell" when the dog went mental', (or something along those lines). The article was accompanied by a photograph of the dog sitting miserably in a pile of fluff and teddy bear parts. This story must have stuck in my mind and resurfaced in Italy due to the heat, the wine and the lizards.
So, in a bizarre way this line does fit in with the rest of the poem because it's a tale of love and jealousy.
9:54pm
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Invisible Insurrection
In an idle quest to escape reality I went to an old haunt of mine, Calders bookshop. I found it had changed. The floor had been re-varnished and the shop had lost its musty charm and John, my friend from Glasgow, was not there. I enquired if I could have a chat with Calder and asked if he was still working downstairs. The preoccupied girl behind the counter said, 'Would you like a bag with that?' I said 'No thanks' and a part of my past came to an end. I thought to myself that Alexander Trocci would never have been allowed to sell his stuff in this new incarnation of Calders bookshop but would have been seen as just another seedy old git (like myself). In Paris, apparently, women wouldn't even look at him in the street, perhaps because of his insane heroin addiction and dreams of an invisible insurrection.
1:48pm
Monday, November 19, 2007
The Comet and the Incessant Rain
Reading 'The Waning of the Middle Ages' I suddenly realised that the 'Brethren of the Free Spirit', who believed we shouldn't work but play were the Middle Ages answer to the Situationists (or maybe vice versa). I started to think, why not, most of our roles are redundant anyhow, which then made me question my therapy sessions. I'm keeping my therapist in a job (curbing my neurotic thoughts and encouraging me to continue with my 'career' ). So all's well and good, we're both playing and maybe we are both really part of the entertainment industry.
But maybe I'm in a funny mood because of the comet and the incessant rain. Maybe there is somebody in Paris who can throw more light on this. If it comes to the worst I'll go to Calders and get that Satre book (Nutrition for Cats).
8:05pm
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Jock’s Penis
I forgot to say. A strange thing last week; my friend Jock's penis, which you too can see at 11 Princelet Street. It is indeed a small wonder.
5:15am
