Dear Web-Log

Arise Mandiba. Arise And Denote Yourself.

2011-02-15T14:15:00.006Z

From the flat summit of Hoerikwaggo,
it’s easy to spot tiny Robben Island; shimmering
like banished pancake batter on cold blue waters.
A scant 3.3 km long and only 1.9 km wide,
the Dutch colonialists were the first to use the
island’s landmass as a prison back in the mid-17th century.
The first tribal leader to be incarcerated there was
a local Khoikhoi interpreter, to whom the Dutchmen
bestowed the nickname “Harry The Beachcomber”.
Imprisoned for stealing small amounts of tobacco and alcohol,
“Harry” eventually escaped using a small wooden rowing boat.
But other tribal leaders have not always been so fortunate.
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years
of forced bondage, marooned upon Robben’s hard rock.
As a category D prisoner, Mandela was allowed
one visitor and one single letter every 6 months.
As a category D prisoner, he was forced to quarry
more than his fair share of limestone during that time.
Looking down upon that tiny island
from the flat summit of Hoerikwaggo,
I can’t help but think about what Mandela’s view
must have looked like from the opposite direction.
Did the sight of the Almighty Mountain intimidate? Or did it inspire?
To the colonizing trading power, he was a disbeliever and a terrorist.
But here was a man prepared to die in order to uphold
his inalienable right to be a human-being upon this Earth.
A man prepared to walk the long way round to freedom.
Upon water. Upon air. A man who became a giant.
A giant who became a Sky God.

Young Man Of Ethnomusicological Sorrow

2010-12-14T14:46:00.028Z

Folk music reinvents itself. That’s what it does.
Periodically, over time, it remakes itself anew.
Which is why it endures.
Sam Amidon sings other people’s songs, and for that
may both Alan and John Lomax make us truly thankful.
Lone-and-lonesome and blessed with a backwoodsman’s warble,
some say he’s from Old Vermont. Hence the twang to his accent.
Some say he could play the fiddle before
he could walk. Hence the turkey in his straw.
Out there along the railroad tracks he wanders.
In-and-out of County Jails. Hand-in-hand with The Shakers.
Off and on again with the chain-gangs.
Subdued yet soulful. Muted yet imploring. A lemon light of Angelic sound.
Warm Jonnycakes in his pockets and cedar smoke in his corn-cob pipe.
Up-plucking at our heartstrings. Vibrating the very membrane.
The songs Sam Amidon sings are old-time
songs; transformed and transformative.
And the words to these old-time songs come from who knows where;
refracted and rejiggered by this fresh-faced musical mountaineer.
And if Sam Amidon admits to not always knowing the names of
all of the notes he’s playing, then it surely behooves us to forgive him.
For his is the sound of the grain and the lumber and the hushabye.
And deep is the Smithsonian River in which he fishes.
So here's to Cisco Houston and to Blind Sonny Terry.
And here’s to Huddie Ledbetter and Moran Lee Boggs too.
And here's to Bessie Jones and The Georgia Sea Island Singers.
And here’s to all those long-lost long-ago voices that
rambled and sharecropped and moonshined afore yee.
Sam Amidon gonna die with a clawhammer in his hand, hand, hand.
That Sam Amidon gonna die with a clawhammer in his hand.

Sam Amidon at SXSW 2011

How Dry Does Your Deepest River Flow?

2010-10-01T13:33:00.000Z

Wade through the rowan and the willow
and the thousand-years of stunted oak,
and there, in the heart of the deepwood,
may you find them.
Barefoot upon ancient ground.
In a small man-made clearing.
Far from the idlers and the imbeciles,
and the petrol-pump and the pylons.
Incline your aid and your ear towards them, and be rewarded.
Hear their songs of testimony, persuasion, exhortation and warning.
Joyous and luminous. Sorrowful yet glorious.
Like young Joshuas yowling at the stubborn walls of Jericho.
Soul-searching for their suppers. Sorting wheat from chaff.
Moving the air about them. Stringing daisies on a chain.
This is the music of the wagon-wheel and the whetstone.
A lily of three-part harmonies among thornbush.
Oh Precious Lord, take my hand and lead me onwards.
As it was in the beginning, so it is now.
And thus shall it ever be so.
World without end. Amen and Alleluia.

Dry The River play 'Bible Belt' for Watch Listen & Tell

You Can Lead A Horse To Water

2010-09-15T21:15:00.010Z

Is there any animal that could
look more at home with its landscape
than the horse and the vast North American Prairies?
And yet Equus Ferus Caballus is not indigenous to these lands.
It was the Europeans who brought the first horses
to the The New World during the mid 16th century.
In return we got the potato and the rolling tobaccy.
But the Native Indian Peoples had foreseen
these strange new creatures in their visions,
and took to them like ducks may take to fresh water.
Naming them Medicine Elks and The Big Dog.
I may have grow-up amongst the countryside,
but the only people I ever remember seeing
on horseback when I was a child, were on the television.
And oftentimes, they were riding their noble steeds in black-and-white.
The Lone Ranger had Silver, whilst William S. Hart had his trusty Fritz.
Like streaks of black-and-white lightning flashing cross the sky.
Like the swiftest of black-and-white arrows whizzing from a bow.
My four-legged companion out on the trail today is Chase;
a left-brain introverted Appaloosa, standing
16-hands high, and noted for his grumpiness
as much as his irregular leopard-splotched coat.
But spotted horses have long been considered magical.
And me and Mr. Chase are working on a shared belief
in the universal force that permeates all living things.
My thighs against the fenders. My feet loose in the stirrups.
My foreign landlubbing scent upon his slick back. Upon his withers.
A switch of a comet-like tail. A flaring of
warm nostrils. An evacuation of the bowels.
The High Plains overwhelm and enchant in equal measure.
They are a sacred and haunted place, where
the winds yawn down straight from heaven.
The steady movement beneath me. The creak-creak-creak of baked leather.
It would be all to easy to enter into some kind of a trance.
To see day turn to night. Turn to day. Turn to night again.
To witness a nebula of silent spilling stars keeling overhead.
To be blessed with 350-degrees of sight. To see The Milky Way laid bare.
To dream of The Ghostdance and The Hummingbird
is to dream of a better world still yet to be re-made.
There’s no land but this land old-timer. So giddy-up
and follow those travois-tracks deep into the wanderlust.

Anti Monkey Butt Powder available here

Song Of The Rocking Z Dude Ranch

2010-09-13T21:14:00.015Z

Across The Great Divide,
in a hole between two hills,
beside the shining Little Prickly Pear,
stands the ranch of one Zackary Wirth;
eldest son of a local catskinner named “Butch”.
The Wirth family hail from faraway Germany originally.
Zackary's great-grandfather came West in search of gold dust in the year 1862,
and his grandfather was a tailor who cut meat for the military before
marrying himself a pretty Swedish courtesan in the summer of 1876.
The same year in which the Wirth family first
homesteaded this patch of swooning grassland.
Make no bones about it, Zack’s a man’s man through-and-through.
And Montanan to the core. Right to the very quick.
A God-fearing paterfamilias with a preacher-man's beard
and an infectious belly-laugh as uproarious as all hell.
A buckaroo who could ride on horseback before he could walk.
The enduring romantic appeal of the cowboy, he tells me,
lies in the spirit of independence that he’s come to embody.
That, and the underbelly of violence hitched to his wagon trails.
The gambling and the drinking and the womanizing,
and all that dagnabit cold-blooded murdering
that took place in the dirt and the dust
of the fledgling townships still sticky
from the beestings milk of their founding.
So embrace the romantic appeal while you can Zack tells me.
But don’t forget that even Duke John Wayne
sometimes died at the end of the final reel.
Zackary Wirth stands upon his quarterdeck, and watches
the clouds pick-up pace as the day ages into late afternoon.
He stands and watches the sun curdle into the far horizon over yonder.
And he breathes deep of the sagebrush and the fragrant pine aspen.
There are more cattle in The State of Montana than there are people.
And approximately 12,000 miles of asphalt; much of which follows
routes originally blazed by the annual migration of the hairy buffalow.
Montana is where people come to when they don’t wish to be found.
For there’s a awful lot of land to lose yourself in.
Just ask the notorious Hole In The Wall gang.
Land. Lots of land. Under Big Sky high above.
Roll on, thou wide and sun-bleached ocean. Roll on!
And as the old-timers used to say, if you’re going
to eat watermelon, you’d best go eat some watermelon.

Evelyn Cameron: Photographing Montana

Meet Me At The Fraternal Order Of Eagles

2010-09-10T23:12:00.010Z

I’m sat on a stool in my favourite writer’s
favourite drinking den in downtown Bozeman.
And I’m wearing brand new cowboy boots.
I’m wearing brand new cowboy boots and I’m drinking
Jack Daniels in lieu of any George Dickel. Straight-up without rocks.
This old-fashioned gin mill hasn’t changed its spots in decades.
The Friday night atmosphere is best described as fruit-fly infested.
The Friday night decor the Pantone spot colour of infected lung.
There’s a pockmarked pool table,
a vintage Ms. Pac Man arcade game,
some newer electronic slot machines and college
football playing silently on the TV’s. Go Bobcats!
Life’s little journey from darkness to darkness
offers-up a number of milestones along the way.
Today is such a day. A day on which to sip sourmash slowly.
The cowboy boots on my feet are a birthday present to myself.
Fresh out of the box and made from premium full-grain leather.
Bought this very morning from a man named Beau.
A little tight around the toes maybe. But that’ll change given time.
They just need a little breaking in is all. Just like we all do.
“Cuss if you must”, reads the bar’s motto;
“But do it with class. Because the one you’re
drinking might just wind-up being your last”.
I’ll raise a silent toast to that. And I’ll wear
my brand new cowboy boots whilst doing it.
A silent toast to 40 years aboard Spaceship Earth.
A silent toast to the family tree of procreation that preceded me.
A silent toast to the spider’s web of time and circumstance
that has brought me to this here drinking stool upon this
here September evening amongst these here Bozemanites.
A silent toast to those preparing to do-si-do another Friday night away.
A silent toast even to the Fair Maid who’s going to marry me one day.
Wherever She may be. And to whomsoever She may currently be with.

Brautigan Fishing In The Last Best Place

2010-09-10T23:02:00.011Z

The poet and writer Richard Brautigan
first came to Paradise Valley in the year 1973.
He came here to eat hotcakes, and to
dream dreams about Japanese women’s feet,
and ended-up buying himself a 40-acre ranch
close to where Hemingway once liked to fish.
The ranch consisted of a large 2-story house,
a log-cabin built shortly after the Civil War
and converted into a guest bedroom, and a
big ole red barn where Brautigan kept his typewriter.
There was an empty chicken coop and lots and lots of thistles.
Not to mention several abandoned automobiles
which often served him as makeshift day-beds.
Brautigan lost himself a lot of friends whilst in Paradise Valley.
For those were the years which he spent hanging-out with the movie-stars.
The years in which he began to drink a little too much a little too often.
But his was not a rapid freefall into bitter alcoholism and abject paranoia.
And this is not the home in which he eventually killed himself.
Brautigan lived a looney-tune life of
self-imposed semi-isolation out on the ranch.
When he was depressed, he liked to
read a biography of William Faulkner.
When he got bored, he liked to sit at the
kitchen table with his point-22 calibre rifle,
and shoot-up telephones, televisions, bath-tubs,
pinball-machines, kitchen clocks and any
other inanimate objects that he could find.
The poet Aeschylus died when an eagle accidentally
dropped a tortoise upon his head. Brautigan was not so lucky.
He had to take matters into his own hands. Much like Sylvia Plath.
Though his choice of weapon was Smith & Wesson handgun
borrowed from a Chinaman, rather than a kitchen oven.
On the day Brautigan left Paradise Valley for the last time,
he presented his good friend, the author Thomas McGuane
with a funeral urn wrapped-up in a blanket.
He told McGuane that he’d send instructions
about exactly when the item would be needed.
If The Big Goof had lived, he would’ve been 75 years old this year.
As it was, his long-legged corpse was discovered
in California on the evening of October the 26th, 1984.
It is speculated that his body may have lain undiscovered for as long as 6 weeks.
The note which he left behind contained
the following 3 words; “Messy, isn't it".

Brautigan reads 'All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace'

Here Fell The Son Of The Morningstar

2010-09-09T10:00:00.014Z

The Big Sky wears itself a scowl
as I head out East on Interstate 90.
The Thunderbird is shape-shifting. Stirring from its sleep.
Across the Yellowstone River, keeping the rail-tracks on my right.
Past the oil refinery. And the posters advertising the annual re-enactment.
Come on. Many Indians. Heap Big Village. Overwhelming odds. Be quick.
The last Paleface to see that
crazy cocksure Cavalier alive
on that hot summer’s afternoon in June 1876,
was 7th cavalry bugler Giovanni Martini;
who was handed a note, scrawled hastily
upon a sheet of paper torn from a dispatch-book.
The note requested reinforcements and ammunition packs.
But when those reinforcements eventually arrived,
a full 2 days later, the only living thing
that could be found upon the greasy grass
was a wounded horse by the name of Comanche.
And Comanche’s silence spoke more eloquently than any words.
Comanche toured the country
until his eventual death in the year 1891.
After which he was stuffed-and-mounted
with full U.S. military honours, and placed
within a dehumidifying glass cabinet, which was housed
in the natural history museum at the University of Kansas.
Whichever way you do the math, it's safe to say
that The Boy General has been a long time waiting
for those ammunition packs of his to arrive.

Friends Of The Little Bighorn Battlefield

Eadburggebyrig Creation Myth

2010-09-06T16:35:00.009Z

On angynne ða eall niw wæs and giet wæt.
Hit is fyrn sægen ‏þæt se Gamol Guma Fox
healp to saltienne middangeard to beonne.
Forðam reada foxas lufia‏‏þ to saltienne.
And ‏þæt micele geryne, anlipig bufan on widgil lyft-clut, wiste ‏þæt to soðe.
And ‏ða gomel fox saltiende wæs,
in undeop wætere ‏ða ongan he to spornanne up
micela clympran gyres ‏þe wæs growende in eard.
And his fet sealtiende hulpon to brecanne ‏þis niwe land.
And in ‏þis niwe land ‏þa feower windas
seowon ærest berecorn
and ærest hwætecorn.
And ‏þa þa Gamol Guma Fox saltiende wæs he leohtte ‏þa sunnan ‏þurh his tægl.
And he mette ‏þone monan and ealle steorras on heofonum.
To gearcigenne ‏þa worulde to ærest mancynnes cyme.
To aweccanne hie fram ‏þeostre
and in ‏þæt leoht...

Way Of The Morris: Official Website

The Annual Harvest Of The Crawdaddys

2010-08-08T22:47:00.011Z

Crayfish possess two pairs of
antennae and five pairs of legs,
and are fiercely territorial crustaceans.
Etiquette requires one to
first pinch upon the noble tail
and suck out the juices, before commencing
any decapitation, declawing or shell cracking.
Being a lazy eater, this is all a bit too much like hard work for me.
I’d be far happier with some tapas. Or a calzone.
But when in Scandinavia, in August,
one must don the paper hat and the paper bib
and play ball to the very best of one’s abilities.
So skoal to the late summer sunshine. And skoal to the Man in the Moon.
And always remember to remove the bowels before eating.
If nothing else, try and remember to remove the bowels.
Regardless of how sticky your fingers may be.

There Used To Be An Arts College Right Here

2010-06-16T20:33:00.009Z

Me and the 28-acres of medieval estate
that sit atop this particular curve in the
River Of Dart have history. We go way back.
This curious hilltop helps bind me, inform me and nourish me still.
When I think about Dartington, I think about
the Henry Moore, and the Peter Randall-Page.
I think about the blackened bark of the 2,000-year-old yew tree.
The Tiltyard’s handsome grass terraces.
And everyone’s favourite odd-toed bronze donkey.
I read my first Sam Shepard play whilst I was here.
Which changed my life.
I saw my first Almodovar film, and my
first Robert Altman film whilst I was here.
Both of which changed my life.
Whilst here, I played a transvestite for the first time.
Whilst here, I bought my first Nirvana album.
Whilst here, a visiting tutor became the first person to tell
me about something he called the “information super-highway”.
Which was, ultimately, to change all of our lives.
When I think about Dartington,
I think about the fact that I simply
wouldn’t be doing what I’d doing today
If not for the unique learning experience
I was afforded during my 4 years atop this holy summit.
It was a course that didn’t hold your hand. Or help you tick boxes.
It was a course that gave you precious space outside of the curriculum.
Space to try things out. Space to fail. Space to pick oneself up,
and fail again. Or maybe, if you were lucky, succeed.
It was a course that gave back only that which you were prepared to put in.
And education in this country in general, is
much the poorer for its closing. It really is.
To my mind, at least, the landscape here
and the college are intrinsically linked.
They share a symbiotic relationship. And so,
whilst I’ve nothing against Falmouth personally
(I’ve never been), the notion of up-sticking
and leaving this sacred soil
feels more like a death knell
than simply the end of an era.
And, as I’ve come to appreciate as I’ve gotten
slowly older and more crotchety, once these places
of genuine idiosyncrasy are gone, they’re gone forever.

When Falls The Dogtooth

2010-04-30T23:08:00.004Z

A motorway is a very strong wind.
A zombie is a small yellow flower.
Whilst a harpoon, as we all know, is a dangerous weapon.
Much like a VCR. In the wrong hands.
A pussy is a switch for turning off lights.
And a telephone looks a lot like a salt cellar.
Every family is a little dysfunctional. Let’s be honest here.
And most live their lives in glass hothouses.
Though most would hate to admit it.
So, where’s the harm in a few white lies? We’ve all done it.
And, in this day and age, if a middle-class father
wants to keep his 3 adult children safe from the
pernicious influences of the outside world,
by turning the family-home into
a fenced-off hilltop compound,
then who can blame him?
Now on your knees, and bark like a dog.
One day you’ll thank me for all this.

Trailer for Yorgos Lanthimos's film 'Dogtooth'

Who Ordered The Mono No Aware?

2010-02-21T23:31:00.017Z

So, I’ve been falling asleep in the cinema again.
The darkened room. The comfortable seat.
A cold bottle of imported beer beforehand.
Easily done for a man of my advancing years.
I fell asleep watching Michael Haneke’s ‘Time Of The Wolf’.
I fell asleep watching Wim Wender’s ‘The Wrong Move’.
I fell asleep watching Peter Brook’s ‘Marat/Sade’.
I fell asleep watching Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Le Mépris’.
I must be glutton for punishment,
for this is my second Ozu in 7 days.
And my body's buckling a little under the strain.
My throat is red raw and my brain is drowning in its own mucus.
I’m finding it somewhat hard to breathe truth be told.
Have my eyes turned pink yet? I can’t see in this light.
To be invited into a Japanese home
is to be afforded a very great honour.
And the guest always takes priority.
Remember that. And always remove your shoes upon entry.
4:3 is an aspect ratio which complements Ozu’s world of domestic interiors.
It’s all about the hearth and the home afterall.
For therein lies the hot emotional core.
A clock chimes. A wife behaves obsequiously.
A businessman pours green tea over a bowl of plain rice.
Western brand names hint at an off-screen American occupation.
The pop-and-crackle of fluff on the film print
perfectly reflecting the noise inside my weary head.
I start to hallucinate about halfway through the film.
I see a spectral figure standing in my peripherals.
He's looking straight at me. Not at the screen.
And he's addressing an audience from a lectern.
He doesn't see the young ultranationalist
drawing his wakizashi blade until it’s too late.
All things are transient. This knowledge I humbly receive.
Pathos is sometimes chastened. Eye-lines can be disconcerting.
His fate etched upon a tatami mat. Hidden behind a a shōji screen.
He rests now, peacefully, alone in the void.
Only after the door has closed behind me,
do I put my hat and my coat and my brogues back on.

Ozu's 'Tokyo Story' in 20 seconds

Inejiro Asanumaa is assassinated on national TV

In Lumine Tuo Videbimus Nosferatu Weekendium

2010-02-18T23:50:00.019Z

I almost choked to death on a bandeja platter en route.
It was a foreign body airway obstruction all of my own making.
My skin turned white. And I genuinely thought I was going to expire.
Right there, on my knees, on the floor of a restaurant in South London.
Consequently, I'm feeling lucky just to be here; sipping
blackcurrant-and-soda amongst the alumni indie swarm.
So give me some of that there Upper West Side Soweto.
And give me some of that there Polyrhythmic Ivy League Soca.
Bring on the marimbas, the tantans and the zabumbas.
Bring on the curb hip roofs and the grammatical conjunctions.
Such polite young boys from the colonies.
Such wholesome Waspish whippersnappers.
No slouching. No cussing. And no gang-signs.
Their Eyes are dotted. Their Tees are crossed. Their Kwassas are kwassed.
In Thy Light Shall We See. In Thy Light Shall We Trust.
It's only Caucasian rock-and-roll music,
but I sure derive delectation from it.

Vampire Weekend: Soirée De Poche (La Blogotheque)

Oh Mighty Pitchfork Of Catalonian Massif

2010-02-04T06:28:00.005Z

I feel desiccated from another night
of boutique 4-star hotel air-conditioning
The great outdoors, I tell myself, despite the
ungodly hour, must be doing me some good.
The make-up girl’s breath carries with it
the stale aroma of cigarette smoke and
the first thick black café solo of the day.
And when she leans in close, I can tell she didn’t
have time to take a proper shower this morning.
My sneakers, for the record, smell of day old Pyrénéean sheep shit.
In the grand scheme of things, I guess that makes us about even.
The make-up girl asks if I’m okay with her
touching and prodding my face and
restyling my hair this way and that.
And as she asks these questions, I can hear the
West Wind whistling through the gaps in her teeth,
from here all the way to the tiny principality of Andorra.
My head nods my approval, but what She doesn’t realise
is that I’ve long since left my physical form behind
and stepped onto a different plain of existence entirely.
My soul has passed through 7 stages of consciousness.
Many hands of light are busy dancing in front of my eyes.
White spots of light dance in front of my eyes.
Indigo spots of light dance in front of my eyes.
Maya blue spots of light dance in front of my eyes.
Bright green spots of light dance in front of my eyes.
Orange spots of light. Yellow spots of light. Red spots of light.
A pincushion of colours and a taste of ambrosia on my tongue.
Pyrene was a nymph who took courageous Heracles as a lover.
But she died alone, in the woods, after giving birth to a serpent.
The demigod piled-up stones to make for her a tomb,
and thus formed this great mountain range upon her corpse.
The twin forked peaks of the Pedraforca above me.
Vapour trails above me. The Dog Star above me.
The halls of Mount Ólympos always above me.

Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up

2010-01-22T09:01:00.009Z

See there; a mock orgy in the High Desert.
A 20 mule team from Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater,
writhing around in all that arid sand and volcanic dust.
Amidst the Playas and the Stardunes. Amongst the fossilized
remains of mastodons and camels and old gold prospectors.
And you may dig it. Or you may choose not to.
But the sun is beating down on them. And, man, it’s pretty far out.
And yes, it may also be in possible violation of The Mann Act of 1910.
The Girl is wearing turquoise, and has hair which snakes
all the way down her back to her naked intergluteal cleft.
The Boy has a loaded pistol in his sock. Which he removes.
Neither Girl nor Boy have had an previous acting experience.
Howls of derision await them. The front cover of ‘Rolling Stone’ awaits them.
Marriage to Dennis Lee Hopper for one.
Death in the state penitentiary for the other.
Listen, can you hear the sound of Jerry Garcia
swirling amongst those convex badland convolutions?
Roscoe Holcomb, John Fahey and The Pink Floyd too.
But stay tuned brothers and sisters, for there are going to be fireworks.
And then some. In slow-motion. And from multiple angles.
Using miniatures. And long-lenses. And the pages
of that there National Geographic
will be left blowing in the wind.

Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin TV Interview

That controversial "orgy" scene from 'Zabriskie Point'

Let The Wild Rumpus Commence

2010-01-09T23:44:00.016Z

One day, our sun will die.
And when it does, it will consume
our solar-system in a fireball of total
and utter and absolute destruction.
And no amount of terrible howling at the moon.
Or terrible gnashing at the tumbling oceans is going to change that.
And afterwards, only dust will remain.
And what comes after dust, none of us should know.
So be still. And listen. And smell all those good things there are to eat.
Good things of one kind. Or another.
And make mischief while the oxygen remains.
And try staring deep into those yellow eyes without blinking.
And feel your mouth being drawn both superiorly and posteriorly.
And notice how it makes you feel all warm
and ever-so-slighty furry inside.

'Where The Wild Things Are': official website

400% "Max" Kubrick Figure

Kim Noble Is Unwell

2010-01-06T23:23:00.006Z

The average male ejaculate contains
3 cubic-centimetres of semen, despite
what you may have heard elsewhere.
Kim Noble is a man who knows a thing or two about cubic centimetres.
His latest one-man multimedia performance contains a lot of semen.
And it’s semen all of his own making. No Methyl cellulose at work here.
No egg whites mixed with icing sugar and a splash of condensed milk.
And all because Floella Benjamin beat him in the London Marathon.
Kim Noble trained in fine-art at Sheffield Hallam University.
10 years ago, he won himself a Perrier award for “Best Newcomer”.
More recently, Kim’s been spending time at
the Maudsley hospital in Camberwell South London.
The Maudsley has it’s own Morris dancing team. I know that for a fact. 
The Maudsley is where my dead friend Sarah
once spent time as a voluntary patient.
Kim Noble once threatened to jump from London's Waterloo Bridge, but didn't.
Kim Noble once threatened to jump from Edinburgh's North Bridge, but didn't.
Many people diagnosed with a Bipolar Disorder threaten suicide,
but on average, only about 0.4 percent
of them successfully go through with it.
Personally, I could have done without the sad-faced clown's make-up
and the crumpled Superman costume with the Max Wall bald cap.
I felt it only served to hide the real Kim Noble. The raw Kim Noble.
The unyielding and unshakeable Kim Noble
that was supposedly being lain bare before us.
Is it a cry for help? Or base autoeroticism for critical-acclaim?
'Time Out' saw fit to issue Kim with 6 stars out of a possible 5.
But what do they know? I mean really? Personally, I wouldn’t trust
‘Time Out’ to know the difference if it suddenly jumped up,
and scored the flesh on their forearms with a Stanley knife.
And yes I am only saying that because they gave me a bad review once.
The average male ejaculate contains 150 mg of protein.
The average male ejaculate contains 11 mg of carbohydrates,
6 mg of fat and 3 mg cholesterol. Aswell
as traces of potassium, copper and zinc.
And all because Paul McKenna didn’t post him a signed photograph.

Kim Noble's Official Website

'Bipolar Disorder Magazine' Website

My First Proper Mexican Tasted Something Like This

2010-01-03T14:45:00.008Z

We collected the car keys in Tarzana
on the third day of the new millennium
and drove West on the 101 towards the Pacific Coastal Highway.
It was a Bank Holiday. The first Monday of a still fresh decade.
My whole life had been spent waiting for this moment.
And the open road didn’t disappoint.
We parked the two-door electric-blue
Chevy Cavalier beside the Santa Barbara Wharf,
crossed the railway tracks, and followed
an ancient Chumash Indian trail towards
the foothills of the Santa Ynez mountains.
The early afternoon sun, hot on our necks,
we made it as far as the taquería on North Milpas Street.
It’s there, that my most Divine Visitation occurred.
I broke tortilla with The Tonsured Maize God that day.
It’s there that I first heard the howler monkeys,
calling to me from far away in The Valley Of Oaxaca.
My tastebuds awoke from their coma. My stomach was reborn.
On that day, the avocado tree became my personal lotus plant.
And I knew then what had to be done.
For the next 36 hours I drove blind on the blacktop.
Past the hot springs of San Luis Obispo.
Across the span of the Bixby Bridge at Big Sur.
All the way to the golden switchbacks of San Fransisco.

Your Guide To Seasonal Affective Disorder

2009-12-30T01:16:00.002Z

Just how much longer is this going to carry on?
It’s gotten so far beyond a joke, I’ve started to
overtake myself coming back the other way.
That woman haunts my bones,
like Confederate bugles still haunt
the fields of Gettysburg Pennsylvania.
Like the great whale haunted the quaking dreams of Captain Ahab.
This year has felt like a penance at times.
My sadness firmly entrenched and deep-rooted.
Things could have turned out so differently.
Things would probably have turned out exactly the same.
Take me down to the waters of the river Jordan,
pinch my nose, hold me under
and leave me there
til my feet cease
their kicking.

Slow Is The New Quick, Just As Quiet Was The Old Loud

2009-12-17T23:55:00.008Z

If Jack and Megan White had grown-up
eating saveloys out of old newspaper, then
they might have sounded something like this.
The girl next door. The boy next door.
Rapunzel on perpendicular percussion.
Metrosexual Rockabilly on skiffle guitar.
Like old school-friends with grass-stained knees,
they coo-coo in perfect harmony as
Winter’s first snowfall flurries outside.
The yule-tide period is a notoriously
turbulent time for affairs of the heart.
I can vouch for that. Relationship meltdown is rife.
The number of break-ups suffers a razor sharp increase.
And so, Slow Club’s repertoire of busted-love strumalongs
and ballads about the impermanence of things, seem to me
to be all the more appropriate at this festive time of the year.
Between my feet, I’m cradling an exotic plant that's
still wrapped in its protective sheet of clear polythene.
It's a Euphorbia pulcherrima. Better known as a poinsettia.
It's flaming red foliage a long way from Southern Mexico
on this cold and icy December’s eve.
The girl who gave it to me, was worried
as to whether or not an exotic plant was an
appropriate gift for me to be taking along to a gig.
But I assured her that the poinsettia would be fine.
That it really wasn’t that kind of gig. And that
besides which, the seasonal bloomer might even end-up
benefitting from the whole City of Steel anti-folk musical experience.
It definitely appears to have grown a little taller since the start of the night.
But maybe that’s just my imagination?

Slow Club sing 'When I Go': Busking Bandstand Session

Twas On The Feast Of Saint Lucia

2009-12-13T18:00:00.006Z

And so the nights start drawing in.
And so the year's midnight fast approaches.
But all is not yet lost. The demons can still be kept at bay.
Pure Saint Lucy suffered a true martyr’s death in the year 304 AD.
Her punishment for refusing to marry with a man of pagan faith
was to have both her bright blue eyes
gouged out with a fork and
placed upon a golden plate.
Now, I’m not a religious man. And I’ve never been too keen on choirs.
But this is different. And it helps that that they’re singing in Swedish.
Sprigs of wild lingonberry in their hair, they cross the threshold.
A slow procession of Illuminating Grace.
Bringing with them the light and the warmth.
Bringing with them the scent of the saffron
and the gingerbread and the hot sticky glögg.
A mirage to make Shepherds quake at their sight.
A halo of candles to help steer me home.

Single White Soulmate (Maximum Length 500 words)

2009-12-08T16:06:00.007Z

I got off the train one stop early
and followed her down the busy platform.
She was wearing a patterned dress over thick tights
and a pair of loose-fitting flat-soled shoes that made her
shuffle a little as she walked towards the escalators.
Her shoulder length hazel-coloured hair
looked like it had been spun in a poppy-field
and then left to dry in the wild wind for a week.
Her cardigan had small holes in the elbows.
Her cheeks were lightly flushed.
And she was carrying just the right amount of
excess weight around the bustle and the corselette.
I followed her towards the fluorescent Way Out signs,
through the barriers and out into the glare of the streetlights.
And then she was gone. Consumed by a shoal of oily fish.
I never asked her name. We didn’t even make eye-contact.
It’s certainly possible to pick faces out of a crowd.
Godfrey Reggio’s film output is proof enough of that.
And so I continue to live in hope. And so I continue to let my gaze wander.
I’m looking for someone wearing Grandma’s hand-me-downs.
I’m looking for innovative use of multiple
hair-clips and designer spectacle frames.
I’m looking for a piercing too many about the ear
or the nose and maybe even the bottom lip.
I’m looking for lips recently stained by spaghetti gravy.
I’m looking for freckles in hard to reach places.
I’m looking for someone who scribbles
reminder notes on the back of their hand.
Someone studying the yellowing pages of a dog-eared
Picador or something published by Blacksparrow Press.
A girl you can imagine telling your darkest secrets to.
A girl you can imagine finishing all your sentences.
The kind of girl you’d dream about naming a distant star after.
The kind of girl you’d look forward to sharing a sleeping-bag with.
The kind of girl who could play the kazoomaphone
or knit herself a woolen beard. Preferably both.
But oftentimes, what we’re looking for turns out
to have there all along. Sat right beneath our noses.
Which is another way of saying, girls are a lot like philtrums.
Which is probably why the Ancient Greeks considered
the infra-nasal depression to be one of the most
erogenous spots on the human body.

I Think I Might Be Falling In Love With You

2009-11-22T10:39:00.004Z

Queen Mab would always call me
if she’d been drinking in the afternoon.
And not just once. Twice at the very least.
Sometimes 3 or 4 or 5 times in quick succession.
And each time, her attempts at conversation
would prove less and less coherent.
And would rely more and more on talk of
baby dragons and faerie folk, and questions
about what colour my wings were that day.
Or about what kind of tail I’d been born with.
Questions, I always found it impossible to answer.
She liked my smell and she liked my socks.
She liked my smile and my ears. And she particularly
liked that bit of skin just behind my ears. So she said.
I think she probably liked me a little too much.
Which was part of the problem.
Some people are destined to stick like glue and slowly
worm their way into your heart’s ventricles like a blood clot.
Whereas others, it seems, simply spin into your orbit,
oscillate for a while and then spin away again;
back into the cold dark void of space.
To punctuate the human skin and penetrate
all the way through to the heart, a blade of
at least three inches in length is required.
For this reason, I’ve set up a metal-detector at my front door.
For this reason, I’ve instigated my very own knife amnesty.

The First Of Far Too Many

2009-11-11T11:00:00.011Z

Truth, as we all know, is the first casualty of war.
Aeschylus, the father of tragedy, taught us that much.
But in terms of The Great War 1914-18, the first British casualty
was actually a young golf-caddy from North Finchley called John Parr.
John Parr was born and lived just up the road from me, and chose to lie
about his age in order to meet the minimum requirement for enlistment.
He was only 16 when he joined the 4th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment
and was assigned the role of reconnaissance cyclist.
On Friday August 21st 1914, John Parr found himself
on patrol in the village of Obourg, north east of Mons
and just over the border into Belgium. And it was there that
he encountered an advance unit from the German First Army.
It is believed that 16-year-old John Parr remained behind to hold off the enemy,
whilst a colleague returned by pedal-power to report to their superior officers.
At dawn the next day, the British army fired
their first shots in anger on the Western Front,
and young golf-caddies from far and wide
began to fall like dominoes in
their hundreds and thousands.

St Symphorien Military Cemetery:
the final resting place of Private John Parr

No Taste Like Home

2009-11-08T23:55:00.019Z

I'm an old man. I like old man's pubs.
The Holly Bush in Hampstead is one such place.
Built in the 17th century and tucked away on the
outskirts of the King’s old hunting grounds,
she offers warm respite from windswept Dickensian evenings.
Her wood panelling all dusky and varnished.
Her ceilings of decorative pressed tin.
I seek succor in her crannies and in her nooks.
And in the taste of my Homeland
which she gracefully carries on tap.
Nut brown in colour, and still brewed
in a steam-powered pagoda-style tower
on the North side of the Cotswold Hills,
Old Hooky is a sacred beer, made from the
full-bodied and fermented blood of
Arcady’s Christ-like Lord Of The Hops.
To drink of it is to summon up an ancient
topography of gently rolling pastures and
rich red soil toiled upon since time immemorial.
I give my thanks to the yeast and to the mash tuns.
To the thatch and the checkered daffodil and the men of the Morris.
I raise my elbow and drink a flowing bowl
to arch-maltster John Harris and
the 9 billow maidens
in their comely white smocks.
For tonight we’ll merry-merry be.
For tonight we’ll merry-merry be.
For tonight we’ll merry-merry be.
Tomorrow, we’ll be sober.

Old Hooky voted "Best Beer In The World"

The Hook Norton Brewery

The Holly Bush in Olde Hampstead

CAMRA: The Campaign For Real Ale

Every Red-Blooded Man's Dream Date

2009-10-27T23:59:00.006Z

I’m hardwired a little differently
from your typical red-blooded slavering
heterosexual male of the species. I must be.
Otherwise this would all feel like a much bigger deal.
Hard to believe, I know, but she wasn’t the first choice for the role.
Kate Moss was unavailable, and Peaches Honeyblossom
Michelle Charlotte Angel Vanessa Geldof was far too busy.
Or somesuch. My inside information only stretches so far.
Behind the tinted windows of the silver MPV,
there’s complimentary sugarless chewing-gum
and the bottled water is strictly carbonated.
I’ve been instructed to program the number of
today’s Close Protection Officer into my Nokia.
Just in case. Though it’s not really me that
Johnny Paparazzi is going to be interested in.
Afterall, tomorrow’s celebrity gossip pages are hardly
likely to lead with the headline; “How did a sweet girl
from Ladysmith in British Columbia, end up stepping-out
with the 1994 UK National Student Playwright of the year?”
Although, wouldn’t it be refreshingly
less jejune of them if they did?

My "date" with Pamela Denise Anderson

I Lie Here In A Strange Girl’s Apartment (After Brautigan)

2009-10-24T13:25:00.012Z

I lie here in a strange girl’s apartment, reading
a poem called ‘I Lie Here in a Strange Girl’s Apartment’,
written by an American man called Richard Gary Brautigan
who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the year 1984.
And you have to realise that I didn’t plan it this way. Not at all.
I mean, you have to realise that this is a case of purest serendipity at play.
I simply opened the book (first published in New York City 41 years ago),
turned over the page, and there it was; 14 lines long
and printed on paper now slightly mottled with age.
Lying here in a strange girl’s apartment while she takes a shower,
I find myself listening to the sound of the running water, and imagining that
it’s the sound of the Pacific ocean that I can hear coming from the other room.
I imagine the black-green kelp. I imagine the seagulls shrieking overhead.
Richard Gary Brautigan’s ‘I Lie Here in a Strange Girl’s Apartment’
is dedicated to a woman called “Marcia”. But what I don’t know,
and probably never will, is whether or not this Marcia
is the same Marcia as the Marcia who Brautigan
dated for a time, and who turned out to be the last person
he ever spoke to (on the telephone), before pointing
a loaded .44 Magnum at his troubled and quixotic head.
That Marcia, so the story goes, tried calling back later,
but repeatedly got Brautigan’s answer-machine instead.
“Hello, as you can probably tell, I’m not here right now,
but you can leave a message for when I am here,
after the beep” are the words which Marcia heard.
Over, and over, and over again.

Richard Brautigan page at 'Old Poetry Dotcom'

Saturday Morning With The Chiropidist

2009-09-24T12:00:00.003Z

My grandfather wasn’t allowed to
fight in the War because he had flat feet.
At least, that’s the story I remember being told as a child.
And so he was forced to stay behind, whilst his friends
went off to help liberate the people of France and Europe.
And all because of a couple of fallen arches.
As it turns out, my problem isn’t of a biomechanical nature afterall.
I was misled. Which is proof of why one should always seek a second opinion.
The Plester blood runs strong and true in my genes,
but my feet perhaps owe more to my
Mother’s side of the family. The Anderson side.
It’s from there, afterall, that I derive my webbed toes.
Now, whilst considered quite normal for birds and amphibians,
in human-beings the fusion of two or more digits of the feet
has always been regarded as somewhat unusual.
Not P. T. Barnum unusual, or Joseph “John” Merrick unusual,
but a talking point all the same. Something worth removing
your shoes-and-socks for if a party trick was ever required.
Affecting roughly 1 in every 2,500 people, David Cronenberg, Dan Ackroyd and
General Secretary Joseph Stalin were all born with webbed toes just like mine.
To this day, the exact cause remains unknown.
But yes, since you ask, I was always better
at swimming underwater than
any of my class-mates back at school.

What’s Wrong With This Archetypal Diluvian Scene?

2009-09-19T09:52:00.011Z

An Old Testament rain falls hard
on a newly resurfaced cul-de-sac road.
Mount Ararat, for its part, lies far off to the East.
I pray for the deluge to continue for another 149 days.
For another 5 months solid. Until such time
as the sweet chestnuts begin to leaf again.
Mayhap the good Lord will send me a pretty girl for company.
A pretty girl with hair the colour of goldfish,
and lips that smell of rose syrup and almond oil.
We could fall asleep next to each other
upon an unmade bed, with all our clothes still on,
and dream like Pharoahs as the water-levels
inch higher and higher and The Thames bursts open
its dirty banks and submerges London
like Atlantis before it
in a flurry of escaping oxygen bubbles.
Noah drank a lot of wine and lived to be 905 years old.
I don’t envy him that longevity at all. Not one bit.

The Spirit Of Old John Barleycorn

2009-08-15T10:00:00.013Z

Do you believe in giants?
Jez Butterworth surely does.
Cornish giants in particular. The likes of
Cormoran and Blunderbore, and lovelorn Bolster -
who once stained the sea waters red with his blood.
I've fond memories of Mister Butterworth,
for it was he who taught me how to roll the perfect
Peking duck pancake with hoisin sauce. But that was many years ago.
Jez is older now. And wiser. And time has tickled his beard with frost.
One of five siblings, he grew up in suburban St. Albans.
These days however, Jez lives in rural Somerset and raises pigs.
And good luck to him I say. May Queen Mab bless him always.
The West Country soil has helped him to relocate his muse,
whilst mine remains stubbornly mired
in the deepest dankest pile of hogshite.
Set in the fictional Wiltshire village of Flintock,
Jez’s new play ‘Jerusalem’ features a masterful
and mercurial lead performance by Mark Rylance.
An actor with all the poise and fury of a Raging Ballerina.
An actor who rolls his own cigarettes and drinks 8 raw eggs a week.
Based on a real-life “local” character called Mickey Doo,
Rylance is the living, breathing, belching embodiment
of an angry, disenfranchised and gelded olde England.
For amongst all the talk of of bric-a-brac and tombolas,
and floats and fetes and whirley-swirlers, the play reaches out
to the ancient lay-lines that criss-cross our faded realm
and seeks to summon up the totem spirits of Jack-O-The-Green
and poor John Barleycorn - the Christ-like lord of the hops.
The play resonates. It hums. It dances upon telluric currents.
It reminds me of blowjob I was once given
in a crop circle near Alton Barnes in 1992.
They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in.
They throwed clods of dirt upon his head.
But Johnny Rooster Byron shall rise again.
Just like the Harvest. Just like the holy Nazarene.
Here’s to the revels. Here’s to the ruckus. Here’s to the
fracas almighty and the sweet blessed Merrie-oh.
We leave the theatre with the scent of gasoline still in our hair.
And with the Wyvern dragon flying proud upon gold-tipped wings.

Royal Court trailer for 'Jerusalem'

A Ramble Around Saint James’s Park

2009-08-14T18:00:00.003Z

I’m lost in London’s oldest royal park on a Friday afternoon.
It’s the truth. My sense of direction is not what it used to be.
I stand and watch the pelicans vulning themselves beside the lake.
The Palace to the west. The Mall
and the blackened bronze of the
Boer War memorial straight ahead.
What became of the lady lepers when they disbanded the hospital in 1532?
What became of the camels and the crocodiles?
The harlots and the ragpickers and the rake hells?
I’ve been walking round in a daze for almost 9 months now.
There’s an undertow. And it’s dragging me under.

I Am An Antychryst

2009-07-31T22:44:00.007Z

If you go down in the North Rhine-Westphalia
woodlands today, you'd better not go alone.
For if you go down in the North Rhine-Westphalia
woodlands today, you'd best take along a miscarrying doe,
a fabulous talking fox and a half-dead Hitchcockian raven.
Called the most shocking movie ever shown at Cannes,
Lars Von Trier’s latest expectorate is an
act of gross Cognitive Zentropa Therapy.
Struggling with depression for the past 2 years,
the self-proclaimed Greatest Director In The World
maintains that making the movie helped save his life.
No computer programmes called Automavision on display here.
No smalltown Main Street marked out on the floor in gaffa-tape.
No strict "Vow of Chastity" rule-books to adhere to.
The writing is on the blackboard for He and for She.
The joy of Creation is in every frame.
Nature portrayed as Satan's own church.
Original sin. Chaos reigns. Grief, pain and despair. In that order.
Remember that acorns don’t cry.
Remember that Tarkovsky died from lung cancer.
Don't forget to leave the Butterkist at home.

Official 'Antichrist' website

Buy 'Gynocide' by Mariarosa Dalla Costa

Show Me The Way To The House Of The Nightingales

2009-07-20T22:57:00.008Z

So I'm driving steadily north, inland,
through steeply wooded surroundings,
following the route once taken by Hannibal and his elephants.
Away from the homogenous hotels, the golf seminars and the Easyjet-setters.
Ascending through dense swathes of cork and pine and evergreen eucalyptus.
Upwards towards the scent of fig and orange and Piri-Piri chicken.
The Four Tops on the hire-car stereo. Diana Ross & The Supremes.
The Isley Brothers, The Marvelettes and blind little Stevie Wonder.
I have my swimmers in the trunk. I have my factor-35.
I have Jimmy Ruffin and The Four Tops.
I have Jnr Walker & The All Stars singing
'How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You' from 1966.
I have the promise of cocktails and a view to die for.

Cabana Dos Rouxinois

We Have Ourselves A Lift Off

2009-07-16T21:31:00.011Z

Countdown is at tee-minus-sixty-seconds.
Feel the weight of your body on the chair.
Feel the weight of your feet on the floor.
The pressure of your clothes on your skin
and the play of oxygen on your face and hands.
Feel the dry sense of taste in your mouth, and
smell the air as it is breathed in. And then out again.
We have transferred to internal power and the transfer
is most satisfactory. Verify that. No unexpected errors.
Let form be perceived through your eyes.
Refrain from judging what you see, just let it be perceived.
Let your hearing go out beyond the furthest sound, to the
great stillness beyond. Tee-minus-thirty-seconds and counting.
Rest now. Rest in the awareness of your existence.
Existence without limit. Tee-minus-twenty-seconds. Nineteen. Eighteen.
The clock is running. Switch on. Tune in. Enjoy the ride.
Tee-minus-ten. Tee-minus-nine. Ignition sequence started.
All systems are green. All systems are go.
Farewell from The Garden of Eden.
Good luck Mr. Gorsky and Godspeed.

We Choose The Moon: an interactive re-creation of Apollo 11's flight

Tautology Of A Band Name

2009-07-14T08:20:00.024Z

These Local Natives hail from
the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Near the reservoir. East of the Hollywood Hills.
They all share a house together there.
Like the Monkees did in their syndicated TV series.
Like John, Paul, George and Ringo did in 'Help'.
They eat breakfast together around a big table.
Buy their groceries together. Do their laundry together.
They probably sing together in the shower;
where the acoustics are always so much better.
Here, tonight, on a Monday evening, they’re
playing their first gig beyond North American shores.
The narrow stage is shaking from the exuberant clatter
of their splash cymbals and their multiple drumsticks.
Here, tonight, on a Monday evening, is where it's at.
The boys in the audience have grown mustaches to mark the occasion.
The girls down the front have spent the
weekend practicing their eyelash batting.
And when these Local Natives tip their heads back,
close their eyes, and unleash upon us their
soaring 4-part desert-sand barbershop yelping,
our feet all leave the ground for a second.
And it's then that we realise, if we didn't before,
that these infectious young men probably won’t be
sharing a house together for very much longer.

Local Natives at MySpace

Local Natives: BBC Radio 1 Session

Land Of The Midnight (Or Black) Sun

2009-06-24T11:54:00.012Z

One day, not so very long ago,
She invited me to spend Midsummer with her,
across the waters, on top of sunshine mountain.
Amongst the juniper and the toadstools and the green birch.
I looked into flights. I booked the time off work.
I read Tove Jansson and watched Tartovsky’s 'The Sacrifice'.
And then she stopped returning my calls. Even when she was drunk.
And that was the end of that particular chapter.
And so when, in years to come, people ask me
where I was when I heard that The King Of Pop
had died, I’ll be able to tell them only this much;
I was out in my wooden garden, in just my underwear,
drinking a cup of redbush tea in the moonlight,
and thinking about how much closer
to the Arctic circle I should’ve been.
How I should've been counting cat’s hairballs
and collecting rain water in coffee jars.
Watching a country house slowly become a bonfire.
Watching a dry Japanese tree transform into a maypole.
Maybe next year instead? Before I turn 40.
Before the frogs start growing their ears back.

Banned 'Midsummer' Ikea Commercial

Don’t Shoot The Messager (Ne Tirez Pas Le Messager)

2009-05-30T10:29:00.002Z

I see children with their eyes scratched out.
I see angel’s wings and shrunken heads and BDSM.
Discarded yarn and woolen viscera. Please do not touch.
I see a flock of dead sparrows, arranged in lines
and embalmed in crocheted doll’s clothing.
I see Caribbean sunsets, chimeras, and stigmata.
I see roadkill in a baby’s nursery.
I see a Disney Store abattoir shop-window.
Fermentation. Emancipation. Genocide. Chiromancy.
Little Annie Messager is a Trickster. A Phoney. An Art Brut.
A Collector of oblique artifacts. A curator of curious Peep-shows.
I see me some sugar. I see me some spice.
I see me an unshaven Mound of Venus
and this cold hard rain against the windows.

Annette Messager: The Messengers Exhibition

The Far Out Recording Company

2009-05-22T17:16:00.013Z

In 1988, I left home for the first time
and went to live right beside the seaside.
I shared a chalet with a man called David,
who had a harelip and worked in the kitchen department.
In the mornings, I would clean my teeth in the tiny bathroom
whilst looking out through frosted-glass at the sand-dunes.
My gums would bleed and my eyes would itch.
I was only there for the fag-end of the summer,
but it was the longest 4 weeks of my life.
I couldn’t wait for the nights to start drawing-in again.
Before I left home, someone had given me a C90 cassette tape
onto which they had imprinted the sounds of an album entitled
‘The 8-Legged Groove Machine’, by a band that I’d never heard of.
I listened to that album from start to finish at least
once a day every day. Pausing just once to pop the lid
and turn it over. It became something of a ritualistic act.
A way of escaping to another world. A world far removed
from the salt air and the donkey derbies. A place where
buzz guitars roared and stretched calf-skin was soundly pounded.
I played that little box of tunes until the magnetic tape finally snapped.
It was music that made me want to pierce my earlobes.
It was music that helped me develop a sneering disdain
for my fellow man. Without that album, I’d no doubt have
walked out into the Atlantic one cold morning and never looked back.
When The Wonder Stuff played their farewell gig in 1994,
I was far far away; truly on the other side of the planet.
It was 82 degrees in the North Queensland sun, but
I still wore my black t-shirt my black knee-length shorts
and my cherry-red Doctor Marten boots. I calculated
the time difference. I observed a minute's silence.
When I got back to England, I cut off my hair
and split-up with my girlfriend. And things
got worse before they got better.

The Wonder Stuff's first ever TV appearance

Celebrating The Jubilant Spirit Within

2009-05-09T11:19:00.007Z

There’s a dance-off taking place on Roseberry Avenue.
The Orchard Family are clogging on a sheet of plywood.
Phil Jamison is bucking-and-winging in the Appalachian flatfoot manner.
And The Tuscarora Singers, true to their Deer Clan roots,
are stomping in an anti-clockwise direction in order
to best honour their ancestors and praise the giant turtle
upon who's mighty back the world of man was formed.
You might call them Gypsies, Hillbillies and Amerinds.
And papa woulda shot them if he knew what they’d done.
Heel and toe. Or both in unison. Two melodeons and a tinwhistle.
Mosquito dance. Robin dance. Long shirts. Smoke and hemp.
Shining-the-shoes. Snake-in-the-grass. Milking-the-cow’s-tail.
Watch and learn. And next time, bring a
wooden limberjack doll with you.

The Deer Clan Singers at MySpace

Bishop Allen Drive In Cambridge, Massachusetts

2009-05-07T23:43:00.010Z

These days, the first thing I like to do
when I get an ink stamp on the back of my fist
and walk into darkened venue, is to look around the room and
identify at least one person there who’s older than me.
Or at least one person there who looks as if they’re older than me.
Then I can relax. Then I can start to enjoy myself.
Then I can kickback and begin stomping my feet a little.
I don’t know how old Christian and Justin from Bishop Allen
are, but I do know that they’ve both appeared in low-budget
16-millimetre mumblecore movies made by Andrew Bujalski;
an old friend of theirs and former Harvard University roommate.
Now based in cooler-than-though Brooklyn, these 2 charismatic
afro-beat calypso-cowboy rock-a-hipsters have brought a touch
of the boho vogue with them to Dalston Kingsland this eve.
The joint is jumping. The boudoir is bopping. The kids are all singing along.
At the back, near the booths, someone turns to me
and asks me how I first heard about Bishop Allen.
I don’t lie. I tell them I was introduced to their music by a girl.
The same girl, I tell them, who also re-introduced me to Bukowski.
The same girl, coincidentally, who I found myself
standing behind on the escalator only yesterday.
I didn’t say hello to her, or make my presence known.
I didn’t feel it was appropriate. I kept my head down
while she played absent-mindedly with her hair.

Bishop Allen play ‘Click, Click, Click, Click’ on the streets of NYC

Official website for the movie ‘Funny Ha Ha’

Official website for the movie ‘Mutual Appreciation’

Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Extinct Supermarket

2009-05-02T09:59:00.009Z

There’s no other filmmaker in the world
who could move from images of featureless tundra
to black-and white footage of the Lone Ranger & Tonto
and back again, via an amateur etching of a monkey
sat upon the back of a goat. But Werner Herzog is a law unto himself.
Married 4 times and famous for directing his lead actors at gunpoint,
Bavaria’s most anarchic auteur stands like an iceberg in the 1am sunlight,
whilst beneath his feet, in tunnels carved out by human hands, rests
a single frozen sturgeon and a
necklace of frozen popped popcorn.

Trailer for 'Encounters At The End Of The World'

Frosty Boy frozen yoghurt: official website

Alan Moore Doesn't Watch The Watchmen

2009-03-19T23:54:00.011Z

From the moment the screen turns a beautiful shade of
smiley-face yellow, I’m confident that the next 162 minutes
are going to far exceed any of the expectations I may have had.
The Warner Bros. logo appears. Black on smiley-face yellow.
The Legendary Pictures logo appears. Black on smiley-face yellow.
The DC comics logo appears. Black on beautiful smiley-face yellow.
Prepare yourself for the smell of Nostalgia. Here comes the human bean-juice.
The dirigibles and the triangles and the
geodesic domes are all present and correct.
See there, the genetically-engineered lynx.
See there, the Gunga Diner fast-food wrappers.
See there, Jon Osterman's big blue uncut cock and shaven blue ball-sack.
Believe me, I don’t miss the presence of the psychic alien squid thing.
And I don’t miss the excerpts from ‘Tales Of The Black Freighter’ either.
I don’t even mind that Hollis Mason dies off-screen. Really I don’t.
Thing is, I can still remember the first time I saw
those magical words; “Suggested for Mature Readers Only”.
I can still remember the day I underlined the phrase
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” in a school library book.
Darren Aronofsky decided to make ‘The Fountain’, rather than run the gauntlet.
Paul Greengrass passed. Terry Gilliam went so far as to say it couldn’t be done.
If I’m losing you, then tough-titty. Either ride out
the storm or go cry in somebody else's cornflakes.
This film simply wasn’t made for you. And what’s more, I’m glad it wasn’t.
They’re even playing ‘Hallelujah’ on the soundtrack.
And what’s more, it’s the original Leonard Cohen version.

Play the retro 80's Watchmen arcade game

'Watchmen': the Saturday morning cartoon version

Sugar On The Mound

2009-03-08T23:13:00.002Z

I don’t know much about baseball,
but I do know that it’s far-and-away the most
popular sport amongst the people of the Dominican República.
Nothing else even comes close. God, Fatherland, Liberty, Baseball.
Makeshift diamonds on every empty parking lot. Jumpers for bases.
Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos is 19 years old, and a rookie pitcher
for the Quad City Swing in Davenport, Iowa. He’s a young man,
a long way from home, with an uncommon ability on the mound.
Smokeball. Curveball. Knuckleball. Okie-Dokie. Backdoor slider.
His all-time favourite ballplayer is Roberto Clemente;
a Puerto Rican who won 12 (twelve) Gold Glove Awards,
made 3,000 career base hits, and became the first Latin American
to be elected into the prestigious MLB Hall of Fame. Posthumously.
Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos is played by Algenis Perez Soto. He’s been
playing baseball since he was 9 years old. ‘Sugar’ is his film debut.
Writer/Directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck took a chance on the kid.
And the kid doesn’t let them down. He keeps his eye on the game.
The infectious sound of the bachata music follows him wherever he goes.
It’s only as the end credits complete their upwards roll
and the lights come back on, that I’m reminded
of the fact I’m sat here all alone in the cinema stalls.
But hey, it's not like this is a new experience for me or anything.
She’s stood me up before, and she’ll no doubt stand me up again.
9th inning. 2 strikes against. Oh say it ain’t so, Joe.
Go on, Joe, say it ain't over till it's over.

Official Website for the movie 'Sugar'

Tinnitus Comes From The Latin Word For Ringing

2009-03-06T23:55:00.003Z

In the narrow kitchen, between sips
of tea, is where our lips meet and linger.
There’s a solid 12-year age gap, but
that’s not the reason why my ear is bleeding.
For the ear is a complicated piece of apparatus,
and we all know that you should never put
anything smaller than your elbow into
your external acoustic meatus.
It's just that some of us choose to learn these things the hard way.
I need to avoid any high or low pressures for the next 6-8 weeks.
That means no planes. And no bathyspheres neither.
I probably shouldn’t even be drinking.
Not with the antibiotics.

The Sound Of The Perennial Long Grass Rustling

2009-02-28T23:45:00.008Z

Virginia-born Andy Cabic could’ve called his band
Palmarosa. Or Citronella. Or maybe even Sandalwood.
But he didn’t. He didn’t call his band any of those things.
And music this good, would still sound this good
whether it was played at the bottom of the deepest ocean,
or way up there; above the clouds, where only Gods were s’posed to tread.
For Vetiver sing simple songs about coming on strong and going down fast.
Songs about going fishing. Songs about the open road.
Songs that clarify. Songs that refresh. Songs about lemon trees
and rainbow skies. Songs about good times and good friends
and San Fransisco's Mission District by-the-bay.
Lilting, twirling, shimmering songs. Songs that rusticalize.
Andy Cabic wears a corduroy fisherman’s cap throughout.
A “Donovan” cap, as my dad might choose to describe it.
Like vintage Joe Orton. Like Lennon back in ‘64.
It reminds me of a corduroy fisherman’s cap I had as a child.
I had a real thing for hats when I was younger.
Hats were the first thing I ever learnt to draw.
I went everywhere in that corduroy fisherman’s cap of mine.
I flew kites with my grandfather in that hat.
Oh mamma. Oh papa. Watch me, as I follow the breadcrumbs home,
out through the tall and fragrant kuss-kuss grass, illuminated by
the new moon hung high above Primrose Hill.

Welcome to the Vetiverse

The English Folk Dance and Grime Society

2009-02-26T23:23:00.006Z

There's a (Black Man) in Cecil Sharp House.
And he’s onstage alongside a folk roots rebel man.
And he’s onstage alongside a folk roots rebel man. Ha-Ha!
In 1965, they shouted “Judas” at Bobby Zimmerman for
daring to plug-in and tune-up at The Newport Folk Festival,
and the sound of that traditionally-arranged booing lingers still.
Just ask Jim Moray. He’s been courting controversy throughout his career.
Woe indeed to the folk singer who betrays the Son of Man!
Tonight, the room takes a sharp intake of collective breath
as Moray is joined onstage in the Kennedy Hall
by a man known by the nickname Bubbz (aka Chief Bossman).
Together, they collaborate on the ancient seminal ballad
‘Lucy Wan’ (aka ‘Lizie Wan’ and sometimes ‘Fair Lizzie’),
which concerns itself with the ancient seminal taboo
of incestual acts between a sister and a brother.
Elsewhere in the set there’s some stomping hurdy-gurdy,
a sampled African mbira thumb-piano, and a re-working
of XTC’s 1984 sea-shanty singalong ‘All You Pretty Girls’.
Jim's new album ‘Low Culture’ is in stores now,
and is available for the recommended
retail price of 30 silver shekels.
See you in the Fourth level of hell.

Listen to 'Adam Ant Is Unwell' by Jim Moray

I Can't Believe You're 38 And Single

2009-02-24T09:55:00.004Z

You have to believe me when I tell you that I’m not used to this.
I’m not used to women throwing themselves at me.
And I’m certainly not used to more than 1 woman
throwing themselves at me at the exact same time.
I’m currently attracting them from as far away as 10 kilometres.
If you could see the queen butterfly
in her black cocktail dress, with the
red rose in her ice-blonde peroxide hair
smiling her champagne smile, you’d think me a fool.
And you wouldn’t be alone in that. For I’m looking at her,
and I’m thinking me a fool too. A fool in sheep’s clothing.
“I can’t believe you’re 38 and single” are the words she says
as she sits down beside me and rests her head upon my shoulder.
And I think she means it in a nice way.
Look, I’m still broken, is what I say to her.
I'm sorry, but I’m still hurting is my excuse.
But the truth is that I’m too scared.
The truth is that I’ll only disappoint.
The truth is I need to floss more regularly.
The truth is I need to trim my nasal hairs
freeze that verruca on my right big toe
and get my Templeton skin-tag removed.
It’s better this way, I tell myself. And that’s the truth of the matter.
But since when did the truth have anything to do with these things?

Talking All That Taco De Harina

2009-02-21T23:59:00.005Z

We were sitting at the window seat
of the Tex-Mex, my friend and me, and I was explaining
to her the simple secret behind an authentic burrito.
About how the rice and the pinto beans and
the sour cream and the guaca-mole and the salsa
should all be folded-up inside the soft flour tortilla,
and not simply served on the side like salad garnish.
And how the knife and the fork really only added insult to injury.
And we were sitting there, deciding whether or not
there was time to finish up here, wipe our lips
and grab one more amaretto sour each before
the long tube ride home, when a hairy face
appeared on the other side of the glass, looking in.
The hairy face was instantly familiar to us, for it belonged
to a headlining anti-folk singer, who’d just spent the evening
crooning and strumming and wiggling his zitzit tassels for us
from up upon the wooden stage of a nearby Anglican church.
I tried to warn him. Honestly I did. I stepped right outside
onto the pavement there, and I tried my best to warn him off.
And yes, I tried my best to warn his American band-mates too.
I apologized on behalf of myself and all my fellow citizens.
I explained that things were slowly changing.
That the message was slowly getting through.
But that yes, for the most part, the majority of wannabe taquerías
in this godforsaken sad little desperado shanty-town city of mine,
were still unfortunately run by the kind of chef de plúnges
who wouldn’t know a decent cochinita pibil if it were to suddenly
turn around and bite them on their güero-coloured gabacho asses.
But of course, in the end, it wasn’t anything they hadn’t heard before.
And I could see the burning hunger all around their eyes.
And I knew they hadn't eaten properly since the flight.
And so, we left them there, beneath the stars, guitars in hands,
knowing that ultimately it had to be their decision. And their decision alone.
We stopped at the first bar we came to, my friend and me,
and we ordered our amaretto sours. One each. For the road.
Made with fresh egg white, with a maraschino cherry on the top.
As if we had any kind of choice in the matter.

Video for the Herman Dune single ‘1-2-3 Apple Tree’

The Lithuanian Act Of Independence

2009-02-16T13:39:00.010Z

It’s Independence Day in Baltic Lithuania.
The yellow green and red is flying high all over town.
Today’s drive southwest to the manor house at Traku Voke
is with a new unit-driver. One I’ve not ridden with before.
He has a face like a bag of fresh turnips and he’s not wearing a seatbelt.
I tell him I’m here to film a new version of ‘Frankenstein’.
I tell him it’s a take on the true story which helped
inspire Mary Shelly to write the original gothic novel.
I point out that I’m playing the role of The Doctor, not The Monster.
It’s important, I feel, to make that distinction clear at the outset.
“Doctor Frankenstein was Lithuanian you know”, says the driver.
“Really?” I reply. Knowing full well that he was actually from Switzerland.
I don’t mention Peter Cushing. I don’t bring up Boris Karloff.
I say that in our version, Doctor Frankenstein is Italian;
a physicist called Giovanni Aldini, who came to England in
1802 to perform theatrically spectacular galvanic experiments
upon the body parts of animals and the corpses of executed criminals.
I say that in our version, this thoroughly-modern Prometheus
wears a frock-coat, some knee-breeches and a pearl earring.
The unit-driver nods and allows this information to sink in for a moment.
He looks me up and down and changes gear, before saying; “you look Italian.”
“By this”, he continues after a pause; “I mean you look like a negro.”
There is silence in the vehicle for a little while.
Snow falls effortlessly on the road in front of us.
And then, smiling like a frightened chimpanzee,
I ask through exposed gums how much further it is
to our intended destination.

Trailer for 'True Horror: Frankenstein'

"It's Alive!"

Herman Munster sings 'Dem Dry Bones'

Fikamusikkonsert-In-The-Fields

2009-01-28T23:33:00.014Z

One of the many things I love about
our Swedish cousins, is the fact that they’ve
a word in their lexicon which roughly means
“to meet-up with friends and drink some coffee”.
And that word is fika. Some fika. To fika. It’s fika time!
Now strictly speaking, a fika isn’t really a fika without
the accompaniment of something sweet on the side.
A cinnamon roll perhaps. Or a saffron bun.
Or, in tonight’s case at least, a low-key gig
in a church dedicated to the patron saint of outcasts.
Better known by the pseudonym Loney Dear,
Emil Svanängen is a multimember home-recording
one-man-band phenomenon, who appears
very much at ease up on the pulpit this evening.
For whilst other Scandinavians of his age were out
meeting girls, drinking snaps and smoking herring,
Emil was in his parent’s basement in the city of Jönköping,
armed with a minidisk microphone, various instruments and his PC.
In a recent interview, Emil described his albums as being a bit like cakes.
The kind of cake this brings to mind
is a traditional Swedish Prinsesstårta;
multi-layered and dusted with sugar.
A light green falsetto exterior giving way
to a rich swollen centre of whipped
percussion and butterfat handclaps.
If he doesn’t hook you with the spiraling glockenspiel
in ‘I Am John’, he’ll no doubt ensnare you instead with
the whistling refrain that underpins ‘I Was Only Going Out’
or the singalong section which enhances ‘The Meter Marks OK’.
Your sweet-tooth smile widening with each new overdub.
Outside, afterwards, fika-time over for another day,
we lean against the gravestones for a while
and suck on cold beers whilst a steward
sweeps-up cigarette butts at our feet.
Loney Dear has a plane to Boston Massachusetts to catch in the morning
I’ve got a radiator that needs bleeding.

Loney Dear play live on Band Busking Dotcom

Bring Me The Sunglasses Of David Samuel Peckinpah

2009-01-15T21:05:00.004Z

One day, when I’m all growed-up,
I want to be a gringo lounge lizard pianist.
I want to live in a brothel in Mexico City,
wear linen leisure suits and polyester shirts,
eat Machaca Con Huevos in a dusty pueblo,
drink Kentucky bourbon mixed with cheap champagne,
drive a beaten-up Chevy Impala convertible,
and die in a slow-motion bloodbath
reminiscent of a Kurosawa ballet.
And all because some embittered half-breed cazique
thinks it prudent to place a $1 million bounty
upon the head of the dead gigolo
who knocked-up his whore of a daughter.
All because it feels so Goddamnedly good!

Shootout sequence from 'Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia'

The Sublime Society Of All Day Breakfasts

2009-01-13T15:05:00.008Z

East of the City walls and north of the Thames,
within earshot of the chiming of Saint Mary-le-Bow’s bells
is where you’ll find the E. Pellicci greasy spoon eaterie.
Constructed out of mother-of-pearl buttons
on the original site of the Stone of Brutus,
they’ve been frying things in pigfat here for over a century.
At an elbow-room-only corner seat sit The Kray Twins;
eating liver and onion sandwiches whilst reading the gutter press.
‘Brown Bread’ Freddie Foreman is tucking into his pie and mash.
Tony and Chris Lambrianou are happily sharing a raspberry ripple.
The custard-coloured vintage Vitrolite panelling.
The Art-Deco wholegrain mustard marquetry.
The laminate wood tables. The framed family portraits.
The caged raven, beneath the counter, with its wings neatly clipped.
So long as E. Pellicci is safe, so long shall London flourish.

eggbaconchipsandbeans blog

'Classic Cafes: The Book' by Adrian Maddox

Dedicated To My Darling Violet

2009-01-11T19:15:00.006Z

A Cheyenne Indian reads T. S. Eliot
in the attic room of a large rambling
family home 60 miles northwest of Tulsa Oklahoma.
The homestead is more than a century old.
Papers and manilla envelopes litter
the floor of the first floor study.
Broken plates and china litter
the floor of the nearby dining room.
In the sitting room, next to the hi-fi turntable,
sits a vinyl copy of Clapton’s 1977 album ‘Slowhand’.
This is the home of Beverly Weston. A man with a girl’s name.
Just like Duke John Wayne.
Like the guy Johnny Cash sang about.
Like the American playwright Tracy Letts.
Beverly hasn’t published any poetry for 40 years.
Beverly is a habitual drunk. A sot. An old rummy.
His wife Violet is struggling with her equilibrium.
His 3 daughters all have man troubles of their own.
It’s clear now to all these women, that their pater familias
will never-but-never be coming home again.
Beverly’d been in the water for 3 days before they found his body.
The fish had eaten his eyes.
The fish had eaten his eyes.
The fish, I’m sorry to say, had eaten both
of his eyes.

Steppenwolf Theatre present 'August: Osage County'

Eric Clapton and friends sing 'Lay Down Sally'

Filmed In Mexico In Panavision

2009-01-09T23:53:00.008Z

So there’s me, Chuck Heston,
Richard Harris, Jimmy Coburn Junior,
Warren Oates, Rodeo Slim Pickens,
L. Q. Jones, Cannonball Taylor
and Robert Golden Armstrong.
Out on the High Road, pursuing renegade Apaches.
Out on the High Road, pursued by French Irregulars.
Bloody Sam's trademark catsup red
staining the arroyo and the whinstone
and the waters of the Rio Grande.
Claymore and Colt and mini-howitzer.
Mules and buzzards and howling prairie wolves.
Mariachi guitar, south-of-the-border harmonica
and some of that old-time bareknuckled sucker-punching.
I know they don’t make them like this anymore,
just as surely as I know that
my heart is broke right now.
It needs time alone in the hot white sun.
Time to wallow in the charcoal of old cookfires.
For she is my scar tissue. And beyond doubt my Achilles Heel.
Leaning forward, I spit into the dirt,
wipe my mouth with the back of my hand
and, taking up the trailing reins,
ride up through the low juniper
to rejoin the column
as they turn and ride on towards
the crumbling walls of Durango.

Trailer for Sam Peckinpah's 'Major Dundee'

There's Something In The Woodshed

2009-01-01T22:46:00.013Z

On the first day of another new year,
I slept through most of the 132 minutes
of Béla Tarr's noir-hewn ‘The Man From London’.
And as I slept, I dreamt of paint drying.
Thick, Hungarian, monochrome paint.
Satinwood. Eggshell. Polyurethane. Goulash.
I dreamt of Jonah in the belly of the whale.
I dreamt of Robinson Crusoe on his island of despair.
I dreamt of being held by the girl I love the most.
What woke me in the end, was the intermittent
sound of loud discordant robotic bleeping;
a technical problem with the 35mm film print.
On the screen was the image of a closed door in raw close-up.
A handle. A padlock. A deep weather-beaten grain to the wood.
The bleeping persisted. The camera remained focused on the closed door.
The bleeping didn't stop. Still, the camera remained focused on the closed door.
Now I’m at home, eating cold leftovers from the fridge.
I’m thinking about asking someone for my money back.
But as you know, that way true madness lies.

'Prologue': a short film by Béla Tarr

The Last Pause Is The Longest

2008-12-25T12:12:00.012Z

There are two kinds of silence in this world.
And no-one knew that better than Harold Pinter.
Beckett may have started it, but it was
Pinter who made the pregnant pause his own.
‘The Homecoming’ contains 224 of them.
‘The Caretaker’, by comparison, a mere 149.
I don’t owe it all to this son of a Jewish tailor,
but I certainly owe him a lion’s share.
I saw him that once in the flesh; leaving his seat
following the posthumous premiere
of my friend’s suicide-note of a stageplay.
He was taller than I’d pictured him.
With a stature befitting of a Nobel laureate.
The black cells were in his gullet even then;
steadily multiplying, though not yet diagnosed.
How I wish now that I'd asked to shake his hand.
Afterall, in the end it’s all about the ferret
under the cocktail cabinet. Or is it a weasel?
Blackout. Curtain. Applause.

Harold Pinter: official website

My Own Private Guernica

2008-12-17T16:41:00.010Z

Snow falls upon the Sierra de Guadarrama.
Shadows lengthen in the afternoon sun.
I could have gone to see Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ today,
but I just can’t face that capacious canvas right now.
I’m not really in the mood for abstracted strategic bombing.
I feel shot-thru with enough symbolic shrapnel as it is.
Instead I’m stood here, watching the street-walkers on the corner.
Counting the number of imported cigarettes smoked.
Counting the number of tricks turned.
The bull is just a bull. The dying horse is just a dying horse.
The inverted hidden harlequins are just inverted hidden harlequins.
I could have gone to see ‘The Garden Of Earthly Delights’ triptych.
Or ‘The Black Goyas’ (painted at home by a half-mad old deaf man),
but best I stay right here, partly hidden by the heavy curtains.
Collecting dust on my eyeballs. Slowly bleeding out.
A lemming on a clifftop.
A kitten in a gunny-sack.
I open the sallyport and close
the first door firmly behind me.
My white flag is unfurling.
I can feel my toes beginning to curl under.

Pablo Picasso's 'Guernica'

Take Me Back To Medicine Tail Coulee

2008-12-12T11:17:00.003Z

“Nutskaveho!" came the cry on
that hot summer's afternoon. "Nutskaveho".
"The Bluecoats are coming! They are coming!"
And the Hunkpapa, they spoke the truth,
for there were indeed plenty of pony-soldiers,
and I could clearly hear the music of their bugles.
The fighting men of the Sioux swarmed
at the Bluecoats like bees from a hive,
and very soon the smoke
of the shooting and the dust
from the many horse's hooves
began to somewhat cloud my view of the hillside.
The white Starchief was dressed finely,
in buckskin, coat and pants, and was
kneeling down with his hands resting in the dirt.
His hair was long and loose, and somewhat
like the color of the grass when the frost first comes.
He had been shot through the side, and there was
blood trickling from the corner of his open mouth.
He seemed to be watching the red figures
as they moved slowly all around him.
Then the Indians closed in, and I did not see any more.
The old men say that only the Earth and the Sky last forever.
They spoke truly. They are right.

Trailer for the stageplay 'Yellow Longhair' (2000)

A Previously Unknown Organization Identifying Itself As The Deccan Mujahideen

2008-11-29T16:46:00.013Z

My receipt from the Starboard bar
of Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace hotel
that Palm Sunday afternoon 4 years ago,
shows that we rehydrated with
a couple of Kingfishers, washed down
with bottled water from the high mountains.
I remember Formula One playing on a big-screen.
I remember complimentary packets of salted nuts.
The hotel's vaulted alabaster ceilings,
crystal chandeliers, hand-woven silk carpets,
dramatic cantilevered stairway and air-conditioning
had offered us an almost surreal respite
from the hawkers, gawkers and untouchables
outside on the streets of India's maximum city.
The next day, I remember catching an Ambassador taxi
back across the foul-smelling creek
and down through the outskirts of slumtown
to the Vee-Tee railway terminus.
There we boarded a train
which we didn’t get off of
until 36 hours later.

Browse the menu at Mumbai's Leopold Cafe

Son Nom Est Soko

2008-11-25T22:06:00.010Z

The Scala in King's Cross
used to be a cinema.
Which is a happy coincidence,
because Stéphanie Sokolinski
used to be a movie actress.
In her vegan cowgirl boots
and Betty Boop smock-frock,
she steals tonight's show right from
under the nostrils of her Scandinavian hosts.
And she gets away with it because she’s so goshdarn cute.
Hardball cute you might say.
Soft on the outside and all crunchy in the middle.
95% sugar concentration.
Just the way I like my chanteuses.

Soko at Last.fm

Soko sings 'I Will Never Love You More'

No Canines Were Harmed During The Making Of This Motion Picture

2008-11-20T17:01:00.008Z

When I make my next film, there’ll be a dog in it.
And yes, you can hold me to that.
There’s something about the way
they gaze directly down the barrel;
right into the heart of the lense
and straight through to the other side
- observing this farcical human puppet-show
in farsighted lateral shades of sepia.
Glassy-eyed like some shellshocked Tommy.
A two thousand yard stare which says;
I know God is dead, and what’s more, I knew
he was dead long before Freddie Nietzsche did.
A quiver of the snout. A lolling tongue. The faintest twitch of an ear.
What can I say? It gets me every time.
Writer/Director Kelly Reichardt certainly knows the score.
Her new film, ‘Wendy & Lucy’ stars Michelle Williams
as the eponymous Wendy, alongside Reichardt’s
very own pet dog, Lucy, as the eponymous Lucy.
Uncredited for her role in her owner's previous film, ‘Old Joy',
Lucy is a golden brown mixed-breed bitch.
What one used to call a mongrel. Or a mutt.
Her page at the International Movie Database lists her as Lucy (XXIX).
Lassie was played by a male Rough Collie.
Toto was played by a female Cairn Terrier.
The Littlest Hobo was actually played by 2 different
German Shepherds, both of whom were called London.
But let’s be honest about this, compared to Lucy,
they were all just show-offs. Sideshow acts. Circus freaks.
Lucy's from more of a Lee Strasberg kennel-of-thought.
Her recognition at this year’s Fido Awards stands testament to that.
Based on a short story by Jon Raymond, ‘Wendy & Lucy’
is set in a small town in Oregon's Cascade Mountains.
Much like the Union Pacific locomotives
that moan in the night like beached sealions,
our two heroines just happen to be passing through.
En route to Alaska in a second-hand 1987 Honda Accord.
The film cost just $300,000 to shoot and lasts for 90 minutes.
Which is about 630 minutes in dog-time.

'Wendy And Lucy' trailer

Lucy The Dog at IMDB

The Fido Awards (The Doggie Oscars)

Trailer for a short film in which I play a dog reincarnated as a man

And Thus Passes The Glory Of This World

2008-11-14T22:21:00.009Z

I've an ability to stomach
happy-clappy finger-clicky
Nu-Folk-Pop better than most.
For that reason, ‘Peaceful The World Lays Me Down’,
the debut album from Noah & The Whale,
was the soundtrack to my summer just gone.
It's tweecore mix of fiddle, brass
and gently strummed gawkiness
instantly reminiscent of the back-roads
and boulangerie’s of French-kissed Provence.
Leading man Charlie Fink sings mostly love songs.
Sometimes he gets the girl. Othertimes not.
Such is the way of these things. Sic transit gloria.
If he wasn’t headlining a sold-out gig
at Camden’s Koko this evening,
Charlie Fink would probably be sat at home
wrapped in a patchwork blanket
watching an imported Hal Ashby film
whilst sipping Earl Grey from bone china.
In 5 years time, I wonder if he'll
remember just how meteoric has been his rise.
In 5 years time, I wonder if he’ll
still be producing Laura Marling’s records.
Still be getting nominated for Mercury prizes?
In The Year 2013, Charlie Fink will still only be 27.
The same age as Jimi Hendrix was
when he choked on his own vomit.
Then same age as Brian Jones, Jim Morrison
and Janis Joplin were when they met their maker.
The same age that Kurt Donald Cobain was
when he put the muzzle of that shotgun
in his mouth and
pressed reboot.

How to play '5 Years Time' on the ukulele

'Blue Skies': Live In Session (BBC)

We All Dream Of A Team Of Carraghers

2008-11-12T20:45:00.011Z

Number 1 is Carragher.
Number 2 is Carragher.
Number 3 is Carragher.
Number 4 is Carragher.
And so it goes on. All the way to the subs bench.
Tonight at The Lane, Liddypool’s travelling army
are dreaming of a line-up comprised entirely
of their homegrown number 23, Jamie Carragher.
It’s a nice dream for sure, but with
just over half-an-hour left to play
and trailing by four goals to a solitary one,
the reality is proving somewhat harder to stomach.
When the gaffer sacrifices El Niño
in favour of a South-American left-back
with only a stunted handful of
first-team appearances to his name,
it’s clear his priorities for the season lie elsewhere.
It’s clear then that it’s going to be a longer drive
back to the European Capital of Culture than usual
for the bull-headed Kopite stood next to me;
stuck deep with a lance and dazzled by the floodlights.
I can tell he’s already thinking about where
he’s going to hit The Wife when he gets home.
Somewhere where it’s less likely to show.
Near the kidneys perhaps. Maybe the soles of the feet.
But hey, come on, what do I know?
Maybe the guy lost a son in Afghanistan.
Maybe his mother is bed-ridden and requires 24-hour home care.
Maybe he’s waiting for the results of his bone marrow biopsy.
I'm thinking I might try and leave early.
Y’know, to avoid the crush?
Afterall, some of us have got work in the morning.

Mr. Starsailor sings 'We All Dream Of A Team Of Carraghers'

Fernando Torres 'Nike' advert

The 11th Hour Of The 11th Day

2008-11-11T11:00:00.010Z

Don’t blame Gavrilo Princip for bringing
the Golden Age of Pax Britannica to an end.
He was only 19. The kid didn’t know what he was doing.
And in that, he can hardly be said to have been alone.

Black Is The New POTUS

2008-11-04T22:30:00.023Z

They’re glued to CNN at Honolulu’s Punahou College.
And on the shores of Kenya’s Lake Victoria.
And in the city of Montgomery, Alabama too.
Glued to Wolf Blitzer’s Electoral Map Calculator
and to the “live-by-hologram”
interview between Anderson Cooper and
the vocalist from the Black Eyed Peas.
Knawing their fingernails to the bone.
Counting to 270 beneath their collective breaths.
When the Commonwealth of Virginia
turns blue, the fat lady starts singing.
The cake has been baked.
The hoops have been shot.
The bellwethers have been rung.
Defeat for the elephant. To the donkey, the spoils.
Sound a fanfare of automobile-horns for the common man.
HOPE springs ever eternal. Happy days are here again.
But please, this I beg of you good people
of America The Brave;
no more grassy knolls
Magic-Bullet Theories or
Texas School Book Depositories.
No more Ambassador Hotel kitchens or Lorraine Motel balconies.
No more Leon Czolgoszs and no more Charles J. Guiteaus.
This I beg of you good people of the Land Of The Free;
please, by the grace of Almighty God
in your Heaven above, no more
of those oft-quoted sockdologizing
old man-traps.

CNN: world's first hologram interview

will.i.am's 'Yes We Can' music video

'Don't Vote' public service announcement

'More Party Animals' merchandise

The Land Without Shadows

2008-11-04T15:01:00.014Z

Stepping off the F-train at Stillwell Avenue,
I’m officially 241 days early for next year’s
Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest.
Plenty of time to get my oesophagus up to speed.
Plenty of time to line my stomach with milk.
Once overrun with rabbits, Coney Island
was immortalised by the penmanship of
Hubert Selby Junior and Joseph Heller.
This is the place Woodrow Guthrie called home.
This is what The Warriors fought all night to get back to.
I last walked the Coney boardwalk nigh on 10 years ago.
It was the morning of my 30th birthday. A watershed occasion.
I ate a blueberry ice-cream. I played some skee-ball. I dipped my feet in the water.
The abandoned Thunderbolt rollercoaster was still standing that day.
The Brooklyn Cyclones were still known as The St. Catharines Blue Jays.
And The Twin Towers still dominated
the Lower Manhattan skyline, and weren’t
all broken up into pieces and buried
along the banks of the Fresh Kills estuary
out there on the furthest horizon.

List of the gangs in 'The Warriors'

Nathan's Famous hot-dog eating contest

Marathon Changed Its Name To Snickers In 1990

2008-11-02T11:30:00.013Z

Whichever way you look at it,
you’ve got to feel a little sorry
for Pheidippides of Ancient Greece.
In 490BC, he gave his life for the
cause of long-distance foot racing
and didn’t even get a 10K named in his honour.
Of course, things were very different in those days.
Back then, there were no tracking chips
fitted to participant’s sneakers
and no volunteer “Bandit-Catchers”
employed to stop unregistered runners
from crossing the finish-line in Central Park.
No live bands lined the route back in 490BC.
And no enthusiastic spectators gathered on bleacher seating.
Poor old Pheidippides. All that way;
across fennel fields and rocky terrain,
to deliver a message of victory to his people.
26 miles and 385 yards
without so much as a PowerBar gel blast.

'Run For Your Life': The true story of
Fred Lebow and the New York Marathon

Pass Me The Melatonin Please

2008-11-01T05:30:00.009Z

It was early when I first awoke that morning.
A cold north wind was whistling around the high-rise.
Whispers of the Munsee Indians
who once laid claim to these lands.
We’d flown in Air India just the night before.
Lost 5 perfectly good hours in the process.
I remember she had her back to me;
wearing Sony walkman headphones
a sports bra and nothing else.
Running on-the-spot. Silhouetted against the glass.
Her bare feet pounding the parquet flooring.
Her Circadian Cycle all shot to hell.
It was early when I awoke, alone on the inflatable mattress.
Way too early. Far too early. Beaucoup much too early.
Outside, the snow was piled-up on the sidewalk hip-deep in places.
I sat there in shallow silence a while, propped up
by a pillow, eyes still wet with milky morning dew,
hypnotized by the veduta di fantasia illuminated behind her.
Dawn light burnishing the brownstones and skyscrapers with gold leaf.
Eldorado rebuilt on bedrock. Atlantis risen anew from the ocean floor.
A tangled mess of inlets and islands
on the very edge
of The New World;
conquered and colonized
and bent to the will of mankind.
This city of cities. This metropolis that Mammon built.
Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome made steel and concrete.
Putting a pot of cinnamon coffee on to boil,
I managed to persuade her to rejoin
me back beneath the crumpled sheets.
We made love like ancient Minoans;
cracking open our outer shells
and letting loose our astral forms
to roam amongst the space dust
- whilst 20 floors below, the background
vacuum-cleaner hum of Manna-hata
built gently towards its Gershwin crescendo.

Schenectady County, New York State Of Mind

2008-10-29T17:16:00.008Z

If a one-handed
Charlie Kaufman
stood there clapping,
in a facsimile of a lonely forest
built entirely within a metaphysical warehouse,
and there was
no-one there to hear him...
would he still make a sound?

Trailer for 'Synecdoche, New York'

Elstree’s First Human Hungry-Man Dinner

2008-10-24T09:24:00.009Z

That’s me. The Mafiya wiseguy
being slowly cooked alive in the
industrial-sized microwave on Stage 5.
The prize jamook with the rose tattooed on his chest.
I’ve been working hard on my dentalization.
Placing the consonants at the back of the front teeth.
Keeping the tongue thick and forward.
Making the L-sounds dark and heavy.
Giving the H-sounds plenty of air.
If in doubt, pout. If in doubt,
push the lips forward and think
good strong Russkaya thoughts.
Think Gorky Park. Think Vladivostok.
Think Astrakhan Oblast.
Think Sputnik 2 and Vostok 1.
Think Chechnya, Bolshevik and Stolichnaya.
I must’ve missed that day at actor’s school
when we worked on how best to simulate
having your internal organs
dielectrically superheated from the inside
by a constant stream of non-ionizing radiation.
But this much I know for certain; they forgot
to prick my skin before tossing me in here.
Think Glavnoe Upravlenie Ispravitelno-trudovykh LAGerej.
Think Komityet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosty.
Think Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski.
An average human body is between 60 and 70% water.
That’s well over half a person’s total bodyweight.
My black polyester suit is clearly Dry-Clean only.
It’s gonna be one helluva problem getting all the viscera out.

Official 'Kick-Ass' Website

'Kick-Ass' is a real-life superhero

The Sport Of Tomorrow

2008-09-27T21:30:00.016Z

In the future there will be no war.
In the future there will be only Roller Derby.
Faster than frisbee disc golf.
Sexier than competitive eating.
More violent than dwarf-tossing.
Not as Flemish as vinkenzetting.
A kind of British Bulldog on wheels,
Roller Derby is a game of Blood-and-Thunder.
A game of Pluck-and-Fidelity.
A game of Style-over-Substance.
A game of Razz-and-Matazz.
6 Blockers 2 Pivots and a couple of Jammers in the rear.
Three periods of between eight and ten minutes in length.
Each period divided into a smörgåsbord of two-minute jams.
And inbetween? Plenty of good clean unsportsladylike conduct.
Ministry of Neo-Burlesque meets Queercore riot-grrrl.
Rockabilly meets NWOBHM meets Beastie-Girls meets Cybergoth.
Kiss-curls and Monroe piercings.
Polka dots and desert camouflage.
Coloured gumshields, fishnet burn and Betty Page tattoos.
Welcome to The Thunderdrome true believers.
Welcome to Do-It-Yourself Third Wave
Skate-Punk Feminism in all its glory.
Caution: Do not interfere with Rollergirls who skate out-of-bounds.
Remember: Getting a Rollergirl in your lap
is not a right
but a privilege.

London Rollergirls official website

Official list of Rollergirl names

Pease Porridge Thursday (Citation Required)

2008-09-25T17:00:00.011Z

King Eric XIV of Sweden was
a warmongerer and a peasant-fucker.
Amongst many other things.
He was also certifiably insane,
which is why he was dethroned
and then imprisoned
before being murdered in 1577.
The murder weapon was a bowl
of peasoup, flavoured with arsenic,
and eaten with a silver spoon.
Ever since then, as a mark of respect
for this crazy-assed, bloodthirsty,
something-of-a-Renaissance-Man sonuvabitch,
it's become traditional for The Swedes
to eat peasoup each and every Thursday.
Not a cold Gazpacho or a spicy Menudo.
Not a Mulligatawny or a Cock-A-Leekie.
Thick, hearty, nutritious peasoup. With pork to taste.
Thou ancient, free and mountainous peasoup of The North.
From Norrbotten County to Gotland to the Öresund Strait.
Best served with a dollop of brown mustard.
Best followed by thin pancakes, lingonberry jam
and a cheeky snifter of hot sweet liqueur Punsch.

A traditional Swedish ärtsoppa recipe

Doing A 7th Earl Of Lucan

2008-09-23T20:23:00.017Z

When Lucky Lord Lucan disappeared
into the ether back in November 1974,
his Ford Corsair was found abandoned
on a residential street in the coastal town of Newhaven.
The interior of the vehicle was stained with fresh blood.
In the boot, detectives discovered a length of lead piping.
No-one knows for certain what happened to Lord Lucan,
but there are many theories. Some more fanciful than others.
Today, we’re filming on Lawes Avenue;
a carbon-copy residential street
not 5 minutes from where that
Ford Corsair was left marooned.
As daylight slowly ebbs, so the locals begin
emerging from the pebbledashed brickwork.
Shuffling and groaning as they come.
Steadily growing in number.
Armed with their mobile phone 3G technology,
their Mackenzie sportswear
and their Staffies-on-a-string.
White Cracker fireflies, attracted
by the buzzing lights of the Kino Flo
and the smell of human flesh from the big city.
Like something out of ‘Night Of The Living Dead’.
Like something with ‘Duelling Banjos’ as a soundtrack.
No-one knows for certain what happened to Lord Lucan.
But there are many theories. Some more fanciful than others.
Perhaps he took a ferry to Dieppe and became a scallop fisherman.
Perhaps he was simply eaten alive by the good folk of Newhaven.
Face facts, stranger things have happened.

The Lord Lucan Mystery

Wild Radishes Are Falling On My Head

2008-09-11T15:48:00.017Z

Batten down the hatches
and pack away the easels,
there’s a mistral wind
blowing in over The Bald Mountain.
It shakes the bell-tower of the old church
and rattles the grapes upon their vines.
The wind serves merely as a precursor.
An early warning system if you will.
It heralds the arrival of a storm on the horizon.
But don’t worry. There’s no need to panic.
For the dark bumpy clouds approaching
the Lubéron Massif are in no especial rush.
For Things happen a little slower around these parts.
This storm requires some time to brood a little.
Time to procrastinate. Time to shrug its shoulders.
If this were a game of pétanque,
we’d be bracing ourselves
for a thirteen-to-love whitewash.
If this were a game of pétanque,
we’d be about to be "Made Fanny" of.
Sheet lightning strafes the nearby Plateau d'Albion.
Thunderclaps echo out across the Golden Triangle.
Further up the garrigue a stray cat comes into season.
Further up the garrigue a hunting dog is ritually slaughtered.
And then, finally, a sudden drop in barometric pressure.
Starlings swarm for the safety of nesting spots.
Earthworms pour fourth from the rich red earth.
Geckos drop their tails. Fire ants self-replicate.
There’s a phrase in the local dialect for the kind
of unrelenting deluge of raindrops soon to betide us.
Literally translated, it means “wild radishes are falling”.
The hatches are all battened down.
The easels are all packed away.
The radishes start to fall upon noble Occitania.
They pommel the ochre deposits at Roussillon
They pound the hilltop enclave of Gourdes.
They pepper the melon fields of Cavaillon.
Wild radishes fall upon the tiled roof
of a converted Farmhouse
sheltering just behind
those tall cypress trees right here.
Further up the garrigue a hand chokes the engine of an old Motocross bike.
Further up the garrigue a voice on a car radio raps in Arabic and verlan.
The lights flicker once, twice, and then they go out.

The Cloud Appreciation Society

Oh Train Of Great Speed

2008-09-04T16:09:00.017Z

I’ve seen enough French New Wave to know
that the roads to Provence are piled high
with the wreckage of burning bourgeois automobiles.
The TGV high-speed locomotive is the quicker option by far.
Faster even than Japan’s famed Shinkansen bullet network.
Sculpted long ago by slow-moving glaciers
the rich rural folds of this fertile landscape
now hurtling past my window at over 500km-an-hour.
Human hands planted the potpourri of lavender fields.
Assembled the sleepy village perches hewn from local stone.
Rustic panorama sung softly into existence by troubadours.
Agricultural patchwork painted into being by Cézanne’s brushstrokes.
A true sense of place for all the senses.
The high-speed TGV locomotive is also the safer option by far.
I mean, think about it for a second; when was
the last time you heard of a cross-channel train catching fire?

The Last Live-In Vehicle Ticket Of The Weekend

2008-08-18T13:01:00.010Z

The road from the Brecon Beacons National Park
to London’s golden-paved streets, is mostly uphill.
That’s the kind of thing you notice
when you’re sat behind the wheel
of a vintage Bedford CF Autosleeper called “William”.
Versatile and reliable, William is a year younger than I am.
2.3 litre overhead camshaft 4-cylinder engine with 83 brake horsepower.
I checked his oil before we left Wales.
I checked his water too. I even greased his nipples.
Best not to take any chances, eh? We can’t afford another flat.
William’s tyre-pressure is 40 pounds per square inch at the front
and 45 pounds per square inch at the rear. He has a top speed of 55mph.
Severn View. Leigh Delamere. Membury. Reading. Heston.
Vintage valve tappets going shudder-shudder
and clack-clackety-clack-clack all the way home.

The Classic Camper Club website

Wellington Boots Must Be Worn At All Times. Void If Removed.

2008-08-17T23:15:00.017Z

10,000 of us stand in an open field,
10,000 of us stand, sheltering from relentless precipitation.
Fairylights twinkle in the conifers. Bubbles float across the stage.
The whin and the furze grow steadily more waterlogged.
I’m standing close enough to Mr. Samuel Beam,
that from this angle, it’s possible to count his nasal hairs.
This makes me all the more willing to forgive him
his occasionally indulgent folk-calypso noodling
and his seguewaying stadium-rawk tendencies.
May age not wither his honeydewed beard.
Nor nodules seek to tame his seraphim larynx.
Kenny Anderson and The King Creosotes are all wearing syrups.
Lightspeed Champion is wearing Harry Palmer glasses and a fish-fur ushanka.
Little Devon Sproule is wearing her Twin Oaks Community t-shirt.
Whilst little Laura Marling is wearing what looks like a fishing smock.
Jason Spaceman is wearing his trademark Jason Spaceman spaceglasses.
Richard Thompson is wearing his trademark black military beret.
And Badly Drawn Damon Gough is wearing his trademark chip on the shoulder.
The Bowerbirds from North Carolina are,
rather sensibly, all wearing gumboots.
And they're not alone. A lot of people are wearing gumboots this weekend.
Not the full 10,000 of us, no,
but plenty nuff vulcanized rubber all the same.
If only Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley could see us now!

Iron & Wine play 'The Trapeze Swinger'

Buy yourself a Green Man Festival frisbee

Stick To The Day Job

2008-08-16T22:00:00.007Z

The paps are all in a lather.
The liggers shall inherit the Earth.
Fully grown men who really should know better.
Fully grown men who’d do well to stop reading their own press.
You sir, are not Bono Vox. You sir, are not Shaun Ryder.
And you, Mr. Rhys Evans, are sure as hell not the Welsh Liam Gallagher.
And, more to the point, why would you want to be?
Y Peth is Welsh for The Thing. Chi Cacha is Welsh for Dog Shit.
Should’ve stayed in the pub boyos.

Y Peth's Facebook Page

The Olympic Motto Is: Swifter, Higher, Stronger!

2008-08-08T14:32:00.015Z

All eyes are on Beijing National Stadium.
An estimated one billion TV viewers worldwide.
The opening ceremony for The Games of the XXIX Olympiad
features an estimated 15,000 performers
and lasts for four-and-a-half spellbinding hours.
The Chinese, may Shangdi bless them, have pulled out all the stops.
Elsewhere, away from the media glare and the much-maligned smog,
there’s another opening ceremony going on
in the city of Hermosa Beach in Los Angeles County.
Here, in the Beach Volleyball Capital of the world,
they’re holding their very own three-day independent short film festival.
There’s a large inflatable cinema screen set-up on the manicured sand.
And the film they’ve chosen to open proceedings with, is my film.
Sure, it’s not a Silver Bear or A Golden Lion or a Hugo or a Palme d’Or,
but the organisers of this three-day independent short film festival
have chosen to award my film the gong for this year’s "Best Screenplay".
My good buddy Shawn Tyler Dufraine has kindly agreed to
jump in his Chevy K5 Blazer and drive the 5 blocks from his condo
to pick-up the prize, in my stead, from the Playhouse on Pier Avenue.
He’s no Sacheen Cruz Littlefeather, but he’s the closest thing
to an Apache Indian civil-rights protester that I can find at short notice.
The temperature in the city of Hermosa Beach today is 80°F.
Humidity is 52%. Visibility is unlimited. The wind is reportedly calm.

Hermosa Shorts Film Festival

Sacheen Cruz Littlefeather's Official Website

Tim Plester: Director's Notes Interview

The Lady In The Wheelchair

2008-08-03T14:21:00.004Z

The lady in the wheelchair will be 91 on Tuesday.
She’ll be the same age as Zsa-Zsa Gabor.
Safe to say she’s learnt a few tricks in her nine decades.
She’s been married twice and speaks at least five languages.
She knows the best way to cook a freshwater carp.
She knows that spa wafers come in a variety of different flavours.
And she no doubt knows the secret recipe for Becherovka.
This year marks the Fortieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion.
40 years since Warsaw Pact troops entered her beloved city
and brought an abrupt end to the human face of Socialism.
40 years since she took the decision to send her
2 beloved sons away to safety on foreign shores.
The lady in the wheelchair knows what happened to the
head of the Stalin statue which once towered above Letná Park.
She knows that Václav Havel was a big fan of The Velvet Underground.
And she knows that student Jan Palach has an asteroid named in his honour.

With One Final Finger In Dane's Dyke

2008-07-21T09:48:00.009Z

Upon this pebbled beach is where our story ends.
This is where I hang up my langseax knife.
Now am I housecarl. Now have I earned mine spurs.
July 1066 was a cruelly hot summer by all accounts.
July 2008 has proved itself to be anything but.
Yet we have persevered. Yet we have remained resolute.
Men of great spirit stand either side of me.
These proud men of the Shires. These plucky sokemen.
This brave Band Of Brothers beneath the banner of the wyvern.
No hairy star hangs overhead this night. No portents of doom.
Only a silvery Hay Moon rising high above the salty whale-road.
Illuminating the great chalk spur of Flamborough Head.
Reflected in the faces of those warmed by campfires.
I shall fight to the death for my king.
If my king or my earldorman shall die,
I shall take his place and fight
just as he would have fought.
If any man here see me taken with weakheart,
and run away, he shall remind me of this pledge
made here before my kith and my kin.

Now Then Now Then (But Not Just Yet)

2008-07-20T09:01:00.020Z

When I was small, I wrote to Sir Jimmy Savile three times.
I asked him if he could fix it for me to play drums with Adam & The Ants.
I asked him if he could fix it for me to pilot the Millenium Falcon.
I asked him if he could fix it for me to visit
the offices of Marvel comics in New York City.
Sir Jimmy never wrote back.
I don’t hold it against him though.
He was a busy man. He had shellsuits to dry-clean,
Cuban cigars to smoke and lank hair to get platinumized.
A member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire
and a Knight of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory,
Sir Jimmy is an esteemed Friend Of Israel,
an Honorary Royal Marine Commando
and a Freeman of the Borough of Scarborough.
He claims to have invented both hip-hop and rap music.
He also claims to have raised over £40,000,000 for charity.
Which, whatever way you choose to look at it, is a lot of sterling.
On Boxing Day 1994, Chris Morris
announced live on BBC Radio One
that Sir Jimmy had collapsed and died.
As it happens, it wasn’t true. It was just a joke.
And to this day, Sir James Wilson Vincent Savile
remains the only still-living person in the free world
to have a commemorative bench dedicated to them.
Seriously, how’s about that then?

Sir Jimmy Savile: "I Invented Zero Tolerance" clip

Greetings From The Grand Hotel Scarborough

2008-07-16T18:02:00.005Z

The term “Faded Glory” probably
best sums-up Scarborough’s Grand Hotel.
Its austere brickwork the colour of nicotine.
Its mismatched carpets pre-decimalisation.
Completed in 1867, it looms large above the seaside town,
casting long shadows over the harbour and the South Bay.
The Grand boasts 2 Restaurants, 3 bars
and the most cases of food-poisoning
of any hotel in the North Yorkshire area.
Its 4 towers represent the 4 periodic seasons.
Its 12 floors represent the 12 months of the year.
And its 52 chimneys represent the 52 calendar weeks.
Jack Torrance, an aspiring playwright, is in the room next door.
Marion Crane is taking a shower in the room right across the hall.
The emergency number to contact reception is 6666.
(The Number Of The Beast, plus an extra 6 for good measure).
I’m trying hard not to think about how many people must
have died in the bed that I’ll be sleeping in later tonight.
Check-out, it’s worth noting, is 10am sharp.

Are You Going To Scarborough Fayre?

2008-07-15T12:00:00.002Z

Cambric shirt freshly laundered and packed,
I’m ready for my journey to Scarborough Fayre.
Via Peter Sutcliffe’s old semi-detached home.
Via the nerve-centre of Hallmark Cards.
Via the silk mill, where Frederick William Jowett
founded the Independent Labour Party in 1892.
Leaving behind this Throstle’s Nest of Brontë Country.
Past the building site of Europe’s largest mosque.
Past the site of the world’s first Morrison’s supermarket.
Past thee John Smith’s brewery in Tadcaster over yonder.
Parsley, sage, rosemary
and seagull guano.

A Day Out For All The Family At Murton Park

2008-07-13T09:51:00.005Z

This recreated Dark Age settlement
just beyond the walls of Jórvík
took volunteers 9 years to construct
- using wattle and daub and plenty of elbow grease.
Today the dwellings are standing-in for the hamlet of Crowhurst;
an insignificant boghole, 8 miles from the beach at Pevensey,
where William The Bastard and
his conquistadors first put ashore.
Crowhurst and the hinterland surrounding it
were razed to the ground. Its tiny population
put to sleep by sword. And borne to their Maker.
Today's a Sunday, and the abattoir next door is closed for business.
Now, I’m not an expert on these things, but it certainly smells
as if a couple of cadavers may have been left to rot overnight.
The fetid aroma, it has to be said, only helps add to the authenticity.
It’s just a shame about the constant rumble
of traffic pounding the A64 dual-carriageway.
I’m not an expert on these things,
but I suspect I'm right in thinking
that this vital trunk road
wasn’t quite so busy back in yee olden times.

Murton Park Danelaw Village

Vivat Harold Rex Anglorum!

2008-07-02T11:49:00.009Z

The world sure is a big place;
full of many people seeking an escape
from the pressures and anxieties of everyday life.
Some choose to play World of Warcraft.
Some choose to learn Klingon (or tlhIngan).
Others still choose to dress in chainmail
and spend their weekends bashing 57 shades
of Living History hell out of each other
in muddy fields the length-and-breadth
of this Merry Olde Kingdom Of Enga-lond.
With a worldwide membership of around 600,
Regia Anglorum are one such organisation.
They're like the Sealed Knot "on acid". Or maybe bogmyrtle.
There’s Nigel and Roland and Big Joe.
There’s Johannah and Christine and Grace.
There’s Mike the field-archaeologist from South Wales.
And there’s Wōden-lookalike Kim, their self-appointed Eolder
(who doesn’t fight anymore, but takes 40% of all earnings).
Head shots are strictly banned in re-enactment combat.
As are all strikes to the hands and the feet and the joints.
When not skirmishing, members like to whittle wood,
drink mead and sew inside seams and undergarments
in a manner entirely appropriate to the period.
The gentleman playing King Harald Hardraada of Norway
is a systems-analyst from Nuneaton back in the “real world”.
He’s taken the day off work today.
Platted his hair before calling in sick.
Painted the skin around his eyes black with grease
whilst drinking a cup of tea from a polystyrene cup.
He’s promised to take a look at the stunt coordinator’s
broken laptop when we break for lunch.
But first, the small matter of the Battle Of Stamford Bridge...

Join Regia Anglorum

Ten Sixty Six And All Of That

2008-06-28T10:25:00.012Z

Welcome to the Shieldwall fellow fyrdsmen.
Chin up. Stand firm. Parry and thrust.
You're suffering from both constipation and hayfever.
Your hauberk armour is hanging wet and heavy on your shoulders.
Your Spangenhelm helmet is digging into your nasal bridge.
Your kite-shield’s rough wooden surface is skinning your knuckles.
As we all know, The Battle of Hastings
didn’t actually take place in Hastings at all.
As we all know, the area surrounding
Senlac Ridge came to be known as Battle.
And not the other way around.
Long, fierce and bloody-beyond-belief
they began fighting at dawn on October 14th
and fought for as long as the daylight lasted.
And then they fought some more.
Neither side willing to concede.
The Anglo-Saxons refusing to yield.
The Normans refusing to give up the ghost.
The sandy stream transformed into a sanguine lake.
But don’t believe everything you read on a Bayeaux embroidery.
Tall dark and and handsome, King Harold Godwinson
was only identifiable from tattoos found upon his torso.
He was beheaded and gelded. Though not in that order.
And there was likely no arrow in his eye.
Whilst the king’s body was carried from theatre
and buried beneath stones in an unknown location,
the corpses of the 5,000 Englishmen who’d died in his name
were left to rot in the open-air for the next 10 years.
As a warning. As a deterrent. Like so much cheap manure.
The wyrds remain wholly inexorable.
The wyrds go ever as they will.
Where’s a Russian linesman when you need one?

The Buddha’s Noble 12-Bar Path

2008-06-22T22:30:00.001Z

Strap it on and turn it up to 11.
Pluck it, slapp it, popp it and tapp it.
Like a snake charmer with an electric boa-contrictor.
Like a matador with a 4-string medium gauge wild bull.
Like Siegfried and Roy with a woodgrain-finished white tiger.
She tames the beast. Oh boy, she tames it but good.
Wrestles it into submission. Shows it just who’s boss.
Rest in peace Torakusu Yamaha. Your child is in safe hands.

The Chandeliers at MySpace

The Smelling Of The Greasepaint. The Roaring Of The Crowd.

2008-06-14T09:55:00.010Z

Over the past 4 weeks
I’ve developed something of a routine.
Between curtain-up and my first entrance,
stage-right, I like to make myself
a cup of fairtrade gold blend tea
and sit on my own in the basement, listening
to the crackling ripples of laughter over the intercom.
After my first exit, stage-left, I push through the
double set of heavy doors marked; “Push This Door Only”
and follow the signs for; “Toilets, Studio Bar, Cloakroom”.
Whilst waiting for my second entrance, stage-right,
I find time to plan my escape route in the event of a fire.
Our designated Assembly Point is Trafalgar Square;
beneath 1st Viscount Nelson’s Corinthian Column
and across approximately 6 lanes of fast-moving traffic.
In the gap between my second exit, stage-right,
and my third entrance, stage-left,
I return Understage to collect a bunch of flowers
and a pair of sunglasses that I bought from
a Premium Outlet Mall in Cabazon, California.
Leisurely re-ascending the 10 concrete steps,
I push through the spring-loaded door marked;
“Private, Authorized Personnel Only”
and tippy-toe through the crossover and vomitory
back to the airlock between off-stage right and the thoroughfare.
Past the photograph of Samuel Barclay Beckett (1970).
Past the photographs of Alan Bates (1962) and Brendan Behan (1952).
Past the photograph of Sir Obi-Wan "Ben" Kenobi CBE (1960).
Inbetween my third exit, stage-right,
and my fourth and final entrance, stage-right,
I undress and lay down on the rough dark blue carpet
to pull some sit-ups in my American Apparel underpants
and my UNIQLO vest. My record is 161 (during a Thursday matinee).
After my fourth and final exit, stage-right,
I pull my clothes back on, tuck myself in,
and fasten my belt using the Flash Gordonesque buckle
I bought from a hipster store in Williamsburg NYC NYC.
I return the flowers to their vase of water downstairs.
I return the sunglasses to the prop-table.
All this helps kill a little more time.
Whilst waiting backstage for my curtain-call,
I’ve been known to skin a rabbit or two.
Sometimes I turn an imperial unit of base metal into gold.
Sometimes I fold a thousand multi-coloured origami cranes.
Sometimes I memorize Pi to its 722nd decimal place.
Mostly I remotely update my social networking status.
On a good night we can be in the pub by a quarter past nine.

He's Not The Gay Messiah, He's Just A Very Naughty Boy!

2008-06-03T09:57:00.013Z

There’s late. There’s fashionably late.
And then, it’s fair to say, there’s us two.
I’ve come hotfoot direct from theatreland.
Took my bow and jumped straight in a black cab.
Rendezvoused at Waterloo station’s platform 18.
Caught the delayed 21.36 all the way to Hampton Court.
We take our seats in the historic open-air courtyard
just in time for the closing song of a 2-hour setlist.
Cultural duties fulfilled, the locals are shuffling away in droves;
clutching pacamacs and wicker Fortnum & Mason hampers.
They can’t be waiting around for any falsely-tabbed encores.
It’s a school night afterall, and they’ve got
Poggenpohl kitchens and miniature daschunds
and Eastern European home-help to get back for.
Some might call it folly, yes, but it’s not like I’m here
to see Rufus McGarrigle Wainwright perform live for the first time.
And besides which, and more to the point, the tickets were free.
I first saw Rufus play live on the eve of my 30th birthday.
As time’s arrow ticked unbendingly towards midnight,
I stood next to Leonard Cohen’s only daughter
on the well-worn floor of The Bowery’s CBGB club,
and watched Rufus sing ‘Moon Over Miami’, in French,
with his sister Martha. I didn’t pay on that occasion either.
For Miss Milla Mouse, Rufus McGarrigle Wainwright
reminds her of that summer she spent living in New York.
The summer she spent out in Greenpoint
with the transvestite and the 2 puddycats.
She first saw Rufus McGarrigle Wainwright play live
in the basement of a lesbian-and-gay bookstore
just north of Manhattan's Meatpacking District.
Afterwards, he signed her shirt while she smoked a cigarette.
She wore that shirt every day for the next week.
Rufus's affected vocal warble has certainly grown on me over the years.
Tonight, his grand piano doesn’t look at all out of place
beneath the Tudor rose and the Beaufort portcullis.
This, afterall, is a royal palace used to entertainers.
Like Rufus, King Henry VIII grew up surrounded by music.
So much so, that by the tender age of 10, he had
developed into an accomplished multi-instrumentalist.
Henry VIII could play the harp, the viola and the drums.
Though he didn’t write ‘Greensleeves’, as some might have you believe.

Rufus & Martha singing 'Nuits De Miami' in Amsterdam

Smooth Fields 6AM

2008-05-29T06:00:00.007Z

By the time civil dawn cracks open
the cold egg-sack of London’s albumin skyline,
the blood-boltered bummarees of Smithfield
have already been hard at it for a couple of hours.
Their forensic white smocks and barrowboy charm
handed down through the generations;
father to son to grandson to great-grandson.
Jainists of the world take note; livestock has been
traded at this carnivore’s Mecca for over 800 years.
The soil here is used to the taste of offal and warm viscera.
Before Tyburn’s Triple Tree became the city’s main location
for public executions, the crown’s ceremonial killing was done right here.
Devilled kidneys of William Wallace. Sweetbreads of Wat Tyler.
Umble pie of Lollard martyrs and chitterlings of Protestant poets.
Godforsaken heretics and unholy dissidents all.
Smithfield’s temperature-controlled freezing works
sit proudly atop a labyrinth of ancient tunnels.
Tunnels which lead all the way to the hollow centre of The Earth.
Down past the churning waters of the buried Fleet river,
through the hot magma and the thick mantle
to a place where a long forgotten tribe
of homo habilis wage a daily fight for supremacy
with mighty mastodons and sabre-toothed cats.
Living life just as they did at the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch.
Unchanged in approximately 2.2 million years.
The daylight breaks apart the clouds above,
burning away any lingering rheum and gound.
London awakens slowly from the blindside
and prepares to shred new hearts
and grind more bones to dust.

The House That Dennis Severs Built

2008-05-24T19:30:00.008Z

Illuminated by fading candlelight,
I stand in silence on the first floor
of a terraced Georgian house on Folgate Street.
The smell of rose-hip and pomanders permeates.
There are discarded playing cards and empty oyster shells.
There is broken bone china and an unmade four-poster bed.
Huguenot silk-weavers huddle in the basement below.
A 21-gun salute sounds in the dilapidated tenement above.
The bells of St. Mary Spital prepare to chime out the hour.
I stand here, gazing into a cracked vanity mirror
hung against a painted wall. And the face
that I can see gazing silently back at me,
illuminated by the fading candlelight,
looks as if it’s being reflected in a cloud of smoke.
Or should that be smog?
Faded at the corners and daguerreotype hazy.
And the longer I stand here, silently gazing
at this turbid looking-glass visage of myself,
the more I appear to be steadily ageing.
Like Rod Taylor trapped in a George Pál stop-frame animation.
Crow’s feet deepening at the edges of my eyes.
Capillaries cracking beneath the skin on my cheeks.
Flecks of white sprouting all about the beard-line.
Outbreak of liver spots and the onset of Type Two diabetes.
Impotence, dementia and onrushing rigor mortis.
The blowflies arriving to lay their eggs.
My body fat slowly turning to soap.
Meanwhile, away from the gas-lamps and the ticking
of the grandfather clock, away on the other side of town,
a young man lies bare-chested on the pavement near Oxford Street
- sucking early evening air through an open chest wound.
Her Majesty’s police are unrolling their plastic caution tape.
It takes a moment for the eyes to adjust back
to the third generation technology and the closed-circuit TV’s.
At the end of the day, you either see it or you choose not to.
Aut Visum Aut Sumo Non.

18 Folgate Street, Spitalfields

185-187 Oxford Street, Westminster

Breaking A Leg

2008-05-20T19:30:00.013Z

It’s opening night at Whitehall’s Trafalgar Studios,
and someone’s seen fit to hang a noose outside the stage-door.
On the winding concrete stairs down to the basement,
I pass the acclaimed American film-maker Neil LaBute.
I recognise him from his thick wirey beard,
his Mormon lumberjack shirt, and his two wedding rings.
In passing, I wish him well for his show this evening.
As I do so, I’m careful not to let out a whistle
or to mention the names of any Scottish plays.
Trust me, it’s so much easier that way.
It means neither of us have to waste time
spinning around, spitting over shoulders
and reciting lines from ‘Hamlet’ Act 1 Scene IV
or ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ Act 5 Scene II
or ‘The Merchant of Venice’ Act 3 Scene IV.
Down below, in the bowels of the building,
me and Bill Juniper are sharing a dressing room.
Bill’s busy tucking himself in
and rolling down the sleeve of his pink
Marks & Sparks "easy-iron" shirt
to hide the Trojan Records tattoo
on the inside of his right wrist.
I can tell that he's nervous about tonight.
I can tell by the bead of sweat on his upper lip.
And by the way he keep combing his hair and brushing his teeth.
Bill’s about to make his West End theatre debut.
Which makes two of us.
It’s opening night at Whitehall’s Trafalgar Studios,
and someone’s seen fit to hang a noose outside the stage-door.
Still, It could be worse. It could be a green noose.
Or a noose made entirely out of peacock feathers.
I draw a tree-of-life upon my belly button
using mascara, and prepare to tred some boards.
Trust me, it’s so much easier that way.

'Lifecoach' at Trafalgar Studios

Piccadilly Pea-Souper

2008-05-14T22:50:00.012Z

We have gathered here as a body.
We have created here a space.
Our common commitment to a drawling deadpan baritone.
Mr. Bill Callahan has blown into town on a downslope wind.
His shirts are newly pressed. His suit is freshly dry-cleaned.
Tonight we are but simple God-fearing folk,
struck dumb by a collective outbreak
of acute purulent bronchitus.
Bill’s face a jumble of ticks and gurns and poker tells.
Bill’s limbs prone to myoclonic twitches and dyspraxic dance moves.
Above his silver crown, a wooden pelican pecks at its breast.
Above the pelican, The Son Of God suffers for our sins upon the cross.
Above the crucifixion, The Messiah resides
in his Father’s House - his wounded hands open wide.
Above the east window rests the copper roof.
And above that the firmament; a gateway
to a universe bigger and more beautiful
than you or I could ever possibly imagine.

Promo video for 'I Feel Like The Mother Of The World'

A City Inside Of Me

2008-05-02T09:09:00.015Z

Before me, I see a blank place and a blank time.
And it's my blank place. And it's my blank time.
And also. And this is the thing. It’s your blank place too.
And it’s your blank time also. Do you see?
I see a man and a woman. And they're both heading towards 40.
For the sake of argument, let’s call them Christopher and Clair.
For the sake of argument, let’s call them Benedict and Hattie.
There’s no visible fire. And neither of them are sitting.
For the sake of another argument, why don’t we just
call them "me"? And why don’t we just call them "you"?
Christopher and Clair. Benedict and Hattie. Me and You.
All of us heading towards age 40. In a blank place.
At a blank time. In a blank city just like this one.
I see a blank diary in a plain paper bag.
I see a bloodstain in a plain coat pocket.
And I see a neighbour. And a little girl.
And the neighbour and the little girl I see
are dressed identically. Dressed like nurses.
One grown-up nurse. And one pre-pubescant nurse.
Emotion is detached. Dialogue is astringent.
Cryptic unease abounds. It’s all in the nuance.
In a blank time, in a blank place, blackbirds build their nests.
In a blank time, in a blank place, forget-me-nots are in bloom.
It’s okay though. It’s not real. None of this is real.
What I mean is this; they’re just actors. Really. It’ll all be okay.
And the blank place is probably just Richmond Upon Thames.
And the blank time could easily be today, or yesterday or tomorrow.
Neurobabble. Slight pause. White noise.
Franz Schubert's 'Six Moments Musicaux'.
Number 3. In F minor. Do you see?

'The City' by Martin Crimp

The Lad's Are All Of A Buncham

2008-04-26T12:30:00.013Z

Up with the skylarks we were.
Out on the old Midlands to Oxford turnpike.
Amongst the Arcadian landmarks. Damp with dew.
Awaiting the appearance of the ragman fool.
Awaiting the song of the fiddle and the squeezebox.
I grew up around this stuff. It’s in my veins.
Much like the locally-brewed Hook Norton ale.
The ruggles of latten-bells about the shins.
The knotted hankies flapping in the morning breeze.
The rosettes and the ribbons and the double-baldrics.
Part of my heritage. Part of my legacy. Part of my very folklore.
I know it doesn’t have the exotic allure of Pamplona’s
Running of the Bulls festival, or the perceived indigenous
cultural significance of a Cheyenne Nation sundance ceremony,
but like it or not, it’s ours. It’s tradition.
As distinctly English as cricket or cream tea.
Oh this Island of Majesty. Oh this precious gemstone set on Silver Seas.
Oh this demi-paradise. Oh this new Eden.
Oh this happy breed of dancing men.
Oh this realm of The Morris.

The Adderbury Village Morris Men

'The Life Of A Fool' 3-minute documentary

Man Is Man’s Delight. But Also His Bane. Twas Ever Thus.

2008-04-10T14:50:00.017Z

This isn’t a Stockholm I instantly recognise.
The tangled streets of The Gamla Stan aren’t paved
with köttbullars, lingonberries, or tubes of Kalles Kaviar.
There are no clogs, no wet snuff, no pickled herrings
and no painted wooden Dalahorses to be seen anywhere.
What we get instead are a random collection of
plain, drab, bleached-out backdrops
populated by an assortment of
plain, drab, bleached-out people
going about their plain, drab, bleached-out little lives.
Like zombies. But without the bloodlust.
A stout alcoholic woman and an Arab barber.
A disgruntled psychiatrist and a heart-broken groupie.
A kleptomaniac. A tuba player. Various business consultants.
And a shoal of grey-skinned balding Nordic men and women.
For this is the Stockholm of Roy Andersson.
A Stockholm with a distinctive visual flavour all of its own.
Just like the France of Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro
has a distinctive visual flavour all its own.
Just like the ocean and the India and the America of
Wes Anderson has a distinctive visual flavour all of its own.
Constructed from 50 single-take deadpan vignettes,
‘You, The Living’ took the veteran commercials director
three years to make, and used
an estimated 62,342 metres of film.
Benny from ABBA composed the musical score.
The incessant, recurring, futile lives of its characters
are interspersed with wistful maverick dream sequences.
Or perhaps the whole film is meant to be viewed
as nothing more than one long static waking dream?
Afterall, doesn’t "real-life" feel a lot like that sometimes?
Andersson knew Ingmar Bergman apparently.
Didn’t like him much though. They didn’t get on.
I remember reading somewhere that the Swedes drink
more cups of coffee per capita than the Italians.
But I’m not really sure if I believe that or not.

Roy Andersson's 'Du Levande'

The Scandinavian Kitchen on Great Titchfield Street, W1W

More Tales Of The Alhambra

2008-03-29T09:08:00.002Z

I don’t really know what to tell you
about Granada’s illustrious Alhambra Palace.
Washington Irving's had a chokehold on that since way back.
I mean, sure, at sundown, viewed from across the ravine,
She looks every inch the triumphal pearl
set amongst Nasrid diamonds.
But by daylight, She becomes
obscured by the rugby scrum.
And for me, there’s really only
so long you can stand
looking at ruins
whilst feigning a genuine interest
in Almohad sebkas or Almoravid palms.
Does that make me a Philistine?

Once Upon A Time In Almeria

2008-03-28T16:04:00.008Z

You don’t need me to tell you
how much Almeria’s Tabernas Desert
resembles the barren and gulch-ridden
lunar landscape of the American Southwest.
You’ll have seen it for yourself if you’ve ever
sat through a Sergio Leone spaghetti western.
Replace a ronin samurai with a lone gunslinger with no name.
Replace a Japanese village with a small New Mexican border town.
Give me a rolled cheroot in the corner of the mouth.
Give me a holstered Peacemaker with a silver rattlesnake grip.
Give me tanned boots, a thrift-store poncho and some 6-day stubble.
Give me those squinting operatic close-ups
and that whistle & whip-crackle soundtrack.
After shooting had wrapped, and the movie-makers had all gone home,
the enterprising local extras decided to buy-up
the film sets built by the Italian art department
and turn them into cotton-candy selling
Ye Olde Wild West theme parks.
There’s a trio of them in total. All within a mile of one other.
Seems that, for the moment at least, these lonely Badlands
are still just about big enough for the three of em!