I got home earlier than usual as the doctor was due to inspect the house. He was waiting for me outside as I pulled up, looking the place over. She was in pretty bad shape, the outside walls sweating out the infection. We’d smelled it as soon we pulled up in the taxi from the airport a few days before. Julia had refused to stay in the house until it was cured, so now we had the additional expense of a hotel.

I came up the steps to greet Doctor Hughes, hand extended.

“How’s she looking, Doc,” I asked?

“I’ll have a better idea once I go in and do some tests.”

I used my finger to gently clear some mucus out of the lock and eased the key in, careful not to injure the house further.

“The worry is that if we don’t nip this in the bud the whole street might go bad,” he said.

“Of course,” I replied, slipping off my shoes. He did the same.

We’d had to call him out last year when Julia came home drunk one night and stumbled in with her high heels on, punching a couple of holes in the hall floor. By the next morning they were beginning to suppurate. We waited nearly two days for a doctor. There’s a lot of demand for them. By the time he arrived the whole house was shaking with fever, the hall floor was awash with a foul smelling clear fluid that came bubbling up out of the holes and we could hardly move for fear of setting off a serious fit of tremors that had plates jumping off the table and, worse of all, hot tea slopping onto the floor, scalding the poor thing and adding to its discomfort. When the doctor did come to clean it up and stitch the wounds closed we’d still had to inject antibiotics into the walls and floor the every four to six hours for another two weeks until the house was back to full health.

I lead the doctor up to the infected room. Opening the door and entering the smell was terrible, sickly sweet with decay. All the walls were discoloured, their normal healthy pink tinged green, but the wall that was most infected was grey. I had moved the bed that morning so the doctor could get access to the source of the problem. He knelt and began to examine the wound.

“My fault,” I said “I was rearranging the room and I must have caught the wall with the edge of the table there. Then we went away skiing for two weeks and there it is.” I craned over the doctor’s shoulder to get a better look. There were several thick, dark grey veins running up from the wound, which now resembled a small black tar pit. They branched and divided, radiated out, laying a moist grey filigree over the wall’s flesh.

“Well, this is gangrenous, this wall,” the doctor said. “Lucky it’s an outside wall. We’re going to have to remove it and maybe dig out the infection on the lower floor if it’s spread.”

I had expected as much. “ These old houses,” I said. “ They’re more desirable, but..”

“They need more maintenance,” he agreed as he swabbed at the wound. “Believe me, I’ve seen much worse, there are plenty of people who live in houses that have been in a state of near collapse for years. Pus dripping off the ceiling into buckets, the walls covered in boils and fistulas. How they live like that I don’t know.”

I nodded. I adjusted my tie. I reached for my mobile to tell Julia we might be in the hotel a little longer.

I didn’t even want to think about how much all of this was going to cost me.

Magma. Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh 1977..Part One..

Magma. Mekanik Destruktiw kommandoh Part two.( Good Quality)

Magma. Mekanik Destruktiw kommandoh Part.3.( Good Quality)

For Keith Moline! First he gets shouted at by David Thomas, now he gets ticked off by Edward Ka-Spell! Some of us appreciate you Keith, especially that mighty nineteen minute demolition of Planet of Sound on the Black Francis thing!

Scum!

I just read “No Country for Old Men” in preparation for a viewing of the Coen brothers version of same. You would be hard pressed to call it a masterpiece (though many did), or indeed particularly impressive by McCarthy’s standards. I read everything up to “Blood Meridian” about ten years ago, then didn’t read the trilogy and caught up with him again on “The Road” which, frankly, is as good as everyone said it was. NCFOM feels slight, especially in comparison to the forbiddingly tumultuous invention of “Suttree” (incidentally one of William Gibson’s favourite novels.) If Irish writers have to choose between Beckett and Joyce then American writers (of a certain generation) have to choose between Faulkner and Hemingway and late McCarthy is certainly more in the latter camp than the former.

The obligatory “lean” “spare” style, the deliberate avoidance of not only Hemingway’s “ten dollar words” but of certain elementary prosodic courtesies to the reader i.e., the occasional substitution of “and” with a comma, produces the slightly wearing infelicities of style that over a few hundred pages make you long for a bit of prime William Gass. Not as drainingly intense as wilfully super-terse hardmen like David Peace (“I drank a pint. Fuck you. Then another. Billingsham was watching me. Fuck you. Fuck you all. Smoke in my eyes. The dead girl. Twelve years old. The hammer blows she’d suffered screaming in my head. I staggered outside and puked all over my shoes. Billingsham was behind me. Think you're a hard cunt, do you? He punched me in the face. I fell down spitting blood. Rolled into the gutter. Dead girl in her pink dress with a rosary twisted round her throat. The rain fell. No.No NO. I blacked out.” Continue for three hundred pages as reader develops migraine ) but even the elegiac reflections of the ole Sherrif aren’t especially insightful or moving, containing more than a hint of Gumpism, emphasising once again just how difficult it is to have those simple, decent, straight talking heroes who may not have studied in any fancy Colleges but have sure seen plenty a fellow like you mights be best avoiding round these here parts, come across as full of hard won wisdom as opposed to home-spun platitudes. The novel kind of stumbles to a close a good fifty or so pages after the main drama has been rather perfunctorily resolved with (SPOILER ALERT!!!!!) one of the main characters being killed offstage and the burden for the rest of the tale being carried along by the much less thrilling Sheriff, who basically brings no-one to justice and decides to retire. While it’s certainly unexpected and no doubt illustrates the radical contingency of death etc ( Mailer did a similar thing rather more effectively in “The Naked and the Dead” ) it’s a dramatic flaw, leaving the reader feeling somewhat cheated (so why did we bother with all that investment then!?) and it will be interesting to see how the adaptation plays this out. If it’s too faithful to the book then the end is going to be set in Bathos City, Texas.

I should also cheerfully point out how much I dislike the Coen brothers, whom I consider congenitally incapable of making a good (as opposed to a slick or clever) film. Expect Yet More Negativity (hereafter: YMN) from the Impostume when I do report back then!

Are those VULTURES circling above?

Let's be frank, I have about as much time for the quirky, the wacky, the zany, the madcap as….I dunno….Pol Pot, Stalin, Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, Mark K-Punk. To me, They Might Be Giants are an evil roughly on the same scale as Hitler. At night I dream of an alternative Universe, ruled over by a benign deity, in which Bogshed never existed.

I also have no time whatsoever for faux Outsider idiot-savantery of any order, or genuine Outsider idiot-savantery for that matter. And while Dan Deacon (of the deeply irritating-looking “ Wham City Crew") would appear to be a self-unstyled sweatyfatnutjob of the very kookiest order you certainly shouldn’t let that put you off his album, the deeply unamusingly titled “Spiderman of the rings” (old news to many I’m sure, out last year) an utterly scintillating slice of spangled, rushy ravetronica. Some kind of weird combination of kraut and ‘ardcore, Terry Riley meets the Prodigy circa Jilted Generation, Black Moth gone gabba. It can’t be that good! It is. It’s as good as, say, La Dusseldorf.

I reckon that when Bush does finally get ousted the US is up for a Summer of Love.

Might have to get myself over there….

….ah no, that’s right. I’m a miserable bastard.

Good. The British media's moralising ghoulishness over this was genuinely sickening.

Still. Roll on " Maddy: The Movie" with Kate Blanchette and Heath Ledger! Errr.......

Dan Deacon - CRYSTAL CAT

heavily up for this stuff.

And......2008 is off to a....well.. err.... a fairly ponderous start with this, I guess. A stormer none the less. Looking like a promising year for metal!

Hyperbole alert!

Rush and Miles Davis circa " Dark Magus" fighting in the studio as Teo Macero tries to mix in bits of "Kontakte" and Lee perry goes on a mentalist tip with the vox. Pretty much business as usula from la Volta, then. Brilliant. Especially the almost erection inducingly exciting title track*. Shows up the likes of Battles for the bunch of underperforming, sexless clodhoppers they are.

Dog's dinner or Feast of Kings? You decide.....

*sorry about that.

"cry for tommorow, cry for today/cry for the lives that we've frittered away"

David Stubbs recently did a heroic job with the sleeve notes for the re-issue of Pere Ubu’s four Fontana years’ albums, The Tenement Year, Cloudland, Worlds in Collision and Story Of My Life, albums that are largely regarded as being the point where Ubu, having drifted into terminal avant-garage inaccessibility with the Art of Walking and Song of the Bailing Man suddenly tried to have an unseemly stab at the pop mainstream. Buy the Modern Dance and Dub Housing, the early, angularly experimental stuff, rock-concrete carved into odd new modernist geometries, pre-post-punk masterpieces of urban alienation and industrial decay. Maybe have a go at the next few if you’re smitten. Forget the next twenty year’s worth.

Naturally, I beg to differ. Actually I came to Ubu late and via Thomas’ side project, the superb David Thomas and Two Pale Boys and the somewhat expanded Pale Orchestra, who substantially re-worked much of the mid-period Ubu. For me the Modern Dance and Dub Housing are slightly pointless preludes to Thomas and co getting to grips with the central myths of American art, refashioning it, attempting to distil its central tropes, trying to figure out what it all means instead of simply attempting to obliquely sidestep the issue, and in doing so tracing a distinctly American modernist tradition. There was a horribly smug riposte to Springsteen circa Born in the USA called “Cars and Girls” (by Prefab Sprout, whose first album was called Steve McQueen and had them posing on a motorbike!) whose chorus ran something like “some things hurt more, much more than cars and girls” but in these albums cars and girls are precisely what matter, and the ways in which they hurt are uniquely American. The Sproutist attempt to have your cake and eat it (among other examples) can’t help but leave me thinking that there’s a horrible condescension on the part of “smart” Europeans for the mythic substratum of American life, a certain knee jerk anti-Americanism that holds the indigenous blue-collar culture in contempt and believes it needs to be corrected by our authentic European culture, and which is really just a defence against both the potency and the universality of certain American archetypes.

I intend to have a go at expanding this further with a considered blather on the four records but first I have to figure out a rather complicated idea on the notion of tradition which may well take me The Rest Of My Life and so I will leave it for the minute with a link to this. A very good thing in my book as among other delights it gives us a two hour set from my prime Ubu circa 91, a fine companion piece to the wonderful Apocalypse Now.

Can my money just go directly to Keith Moline?

HIGH ON FIRE - Rumors of War

For Bonsai Silverback. One of last years best, the LP, wannit?

The Octopus Project - Music Is Happiness

The Brits abroad: Sexy Beast


In Jonathan Glazier’s superlative “Sexy Beast” Spain is the state of mind to which it’s central character, ex-East End bad-boy Gal Dove has yet to fully accede. The brilliance of the piece lies in the indivisibility of its different realms: Spain and England are both real places within the film and also aspects of Gal’s psyche, just as Don Logan is both a real figure and also a manifestation of everything within Gal that must be overcome in order that he be liberated fully and finally into the world of pleasure and away from Englishness’ destructive demands.

Spain versus England.

By the time we get round to Sexy Beast, eight years further along from the dark night of Naked, England has simply become a place to escape from, the Kingdom of Doom to which you only return under pain of death.

Sexy Beast’s colour-saturated Spain and Gal’s intense, erotic engagement with heat and light captures a very real English obsession with southern Spain and the Med as an enchanted realm where people really live, far from the damp and the grey, the oppressive social strictures and isolating, cramped family structures of the stoical, hedged English-way-of-death. A warm, emotive, physically expressive, unrestrained Zone of rich libidinal and affective outpouring. This is where Gal has chosen to live, in his villa, with his lovely wife Dee-Dee, his surrogate Spanish son, his extended family of Aitch and Jackie. As the film starts Gal lies raw, pink and sensitised to the sun now the armour of everyday English life has been pried off at last. There is an early conflating of both Spain and the love that Gal has found with Dee-Dee during Gal’s famed monologue on England:

The first part runs over a series of shots of Gal and his friends enjoying a barbecue:

" People say, "Don't you miss it, Gal?" I say, "What? England? Nah, fuckin' place. It's a dump. Don't make me laugh. Grey, grimy, sooty. What a shithole. What a toilet. Every cunt with a long face, shufflin' about, moanin' or worried. No thanks, not for me."

The second part, over a shot of Gal blowing a heart-shaped smoke ring toward Dee-Dee, then floating above the dark sierras with her in a passionate embrace:

"They say, "What's it like, then? Spain." And I'll say, "It's hot. Hot. Oh, it's fuckin' hot. "Too hot?" "Not for me. I love it." "

There is a direct association of Spain, heat, Dee-Dee. The implication is that (and we assume that Gal’s imaginary interlocutor is English) while “Spain” might be too hot for some, that the intensity of pleasure and fulfillment that the satisfactions of a deep love bring may overwhelm or be unattainable to certain narrow English sensibilities, Gal is able to live with it.

The Proles.

In the hands of a less skillful, less subtle director it would be easy for Sexy Beast’s central characters to be grotesques, a little more distance on them, a little more pandering to middlebrow expectations, a touch more irony in the presentation and Gal, Jackie, Dee-Dee and Aitch with their gold rings, tans, beerguts, sangria and paella could easily be caricatures.

At the start of the film the tone is a little uncertain, the title sequence, soundtracked by the Strangler’s vulgarian anthem “Peaches”, with its freeze frame shot of Winstone's crotch and prodigious gut sets up precisely those expectations, only to gradually undermine them. Glazier does this brilliantly, not by rendering his character as sympathetic by appealing to our prejudices and sensibilities but by maintaining fidelity to theirs. The monologue sequence above, rendered largely in the non-realist language of advertising, (indeed one of Sexy Beast's most marked qualities is its skillful interplay of the realist and hyperreal) with its sausages on the Costa-del-crime and a swimming pool with two interlocked hearts may offend bourgoise taste, but for Gal and Dee-Dee it is the stuff-of-dreams and Glazier renders it as such without irony. Whereas someone like Mike Leigh is incapable of depicting, or indeed imagining, the rituals and ambitions of the proles without pathos, it’s this affirmation of his characters' inner lives, a siding with the characters against (a certain section of) the audience that is a part of Sexy Beast’s sly subversion.

Gal Dove.

Gal Dove’s happiness is shattered by the arrival of his old partner in crime, Don Logan. His arrival (and the underwater tunneling job Gal is later forced to go through with) are foreshadowed in the film by a boulder crashing into Gal’s swimming pool, narrowly missing him and cracking the link between the two interlocked hearts picked out in tiles on the floor of the pool.

The symbolism is obvious, even laboured, but immediately Sexy Beast's refusal to adopt one of the standard tropes of Post-modern cinema, the it’s-all-in-the heroe's-mind non-revelation is evident. The boulder that narrowly misses Gal’s head is both an event in his psyche and a real occurrence within the character’s world. Whereas in Fight Club, for example, Tyler Durden, as Edward Norton’s ego ideal, doesn’t actually exist, for Glazier, quite rightly, the people we know, the people to whom we cleave do become part of us and do function as agents in the psyche, hence Don, when he finally arrives is both real and a part of Gal's mind. He can’t simply be rendered as fantasmatic, the battle we have in our heads is with concrete figures whose discourse we’ve incorporated and who function as a variety of psychological equivalencies, ie Don is both symbolically Gal’s superego and also the person who stands as a superego agent within Gal’s social field.

“Fight Club’s’’ more solipsistic take partially denies this, Tyler Durden is something that comes up from within, parasitical on desire, a form of false-conciousness that must be battled with alone in isolation, the veil of illusion must be torn away, whereas Sexy Beast insists on the interplay between concrete social actors and the internal world of symbolization and discourse. In standard American pomo, reality is dependent on what happens in your head, you create it. But in Sexy Beast’s more materialist take what happens in your head is dependant on the world around you. You are the people you know, you are the place you come from.

Friends

Whereas Ed Norton finally has to literally try and kill the other in his head before he can be brought on to love, with Sexy Beast’s more dialogic, materialist take, the death of Don Logan is a collaborative effort. Each member of the group has a reason to despise Don but above and beyond this, with Gal partly incapacitated, his friends must take on a role in helping him overcome and destroy Don Logan ( even the Spanish boy who helps out attempts it, but it’s finally Dee-Dee who manages to pull the trigger.) A kind of group therapy, an act of love on Gal’s behalf.

Don Logan. “ I won’t let you be happy, why should I?”

Don’s doubleness is emphasised at the film’s end, dead and buried beneath the restored hearts at the bottom of the pool he nonetheless maintains an immaterial half-life, still talking to Gal, who now, within his own mind, has finally overcome him and is capable of telling him to shut up, much to Don’s disgruntlement.

Don, like Withnail, like Johnny, is, in his own way, a master of language, but while the others are masters of soliloquy, endlessly playing to an invisible gallery, Don’s mastery is primarily over the language of others, alive to every nuance and inflection in their speech, the faintest hint of an insult or a refusal, the smallest of “ insinuendos”.

"Look, Don...

Look, Don?

It's like this.

Like what?

I'm... retired.

Are ya?

'Fraid so. I haven't... not got lots of money. I got enough. I'd do anything not to offend you, but I can't take part. I'm not really up to it.

Not up to it?

No, I'm not.

I see.

I'd be useless.

Useless.

I would be.

In what way?

In every fuckin' way.

Why are you swearin'? I'm not swearin' "

and

"What's that mean?-

What?

That stupid nodding you're doing. Is this a fuck-off, Gal?

No, course not.

Are you saying no?

No.

Is that what you're saying?

Not exactly.

What are you saying?

I'm just saying... Thanks and all that, thanks for thinking of me, but I've got to turn this opportunity down.

No, you've got to turn this opportunity yes.

I'm not match fit.

You seem all right to me.

Not really.

You look fine.

Do the job.

What?

Do the job.

No, Don.

Yes.

No.

Yes.

I can't.

Can.

I can't.

Don't do this.

Do what? What am I doin'?!

This.

This? This what?"

It’s not only Don’s tensed alertness to Gal’s speech that’s frightening, it’s also the jackknifing instability of his own discourse. Both cajoling and punishing, consoling and caustic by turns there is no solid ground with Don, no predictable syntactic chains that allow for a proper presentation of your own discourse, Not only this, but the wild imagistic absurdity and playground name-calling combined with absurd malapropisms throws both Gal and the audience into a kind of freefall, half terrifying, half thrilling.

"Talk to me, Gal. I'm here for you. I'm a good listener.

What can I say? I've said it all. I'm retired.

Shut up! Cunt. You louse. You got some fuckin' neck. Retired? Fuck off, you're revolting.

Your fuckin' suntan, you're like leather. Like a leather man. You could make a fuckin' suitcase. You look like a fat crocodile, fat bastard. You look like fuckin' Idi Amin.

State of you. You should be ashamed of yourself. Who d'you think you are?

King of the castle? Cock of the walk? "

Finest of all is Don’s threat to Aitch, a hilariously inventive and disturbing crescendo of twisted, playground poetics.

"You fucking Dr White honkin' jam-rag fucking spunk-bubble!

You keep lookin' at me, I'll put you in the fucking ground"

The rabbit

Don isn’t alone in his cave under the swimming pool of course, he’s also joined by the movie's symbol of death (drive), something that’s best summed up by the term Giant Death Rabbit. The Rabbit menaces Gal in a dream sequence, and in his later meeting with crime kingpin Teddy Bass the sequence is partially replayed, reintegrating it from the imaginary realm into the film's real-world frame brilliantly. In an early sequence both Aitch and Gal’s surrogate son fail to kill the rabbits they are hunting due to problems with their guns, and soon the Rabbit has returned in monstrous form to symbolize the world that Gal has left behind. The world of crime and its transgressive delights. Don Logan knows who Gal really is, what drives animate him.

“It's not about money with us, is it? It's the charge, the bolt, the buzz. The sheer fuck-offness, right?”

Underwater/underground


Glazier’s camera tunnels through surfaces, through barriers and walls, through character's heads, just as Gal himself must dig and tunnel, bury and wall up, submerge himself and work away in order to return to Spain and live there fully.

Gal’s early inspection of the boulder and his emerging from the pool to find Dee-Dee waiting is echoed later in his being dragged up out of the bath into Teddy Bass’s smoking underworld. England is an infernal realm, the realm of the Id and the drives, the realm of death, over which the satanic Teddy Bass ( “Mr Black Magic himself”) presides, and of which Don Logan is merely a minion.

There’s a wormhole beneath the London streets that leads the viewer back to Spain, to the moment of Don’s murder, fixing his interment and the refilling of the pool to the breakthrough into the vault that brings an end to Gal’s commitment to Teddy Bass. He gets a desultory fiver and at last he can return.

The Brits abroad.

Several years ago I had a conversation with the guy who used to cut my hair about his holiday cottage just outside Vallencia. “ They have a better idea of how to live than we do, don’t they,” he said wistfully. I started to go for a "well-its-all-relative" response but after a few seconds I just shrugged and nodded.

“Could you keep your head still please,” he asked me.

Juana Molina - No es tan cierto

For Matt! Service above and beyond the call. Woebotide us all!