Arthur 'Killer' Kane

I watched 'New York Doll' at the Duke Of York's cinema tonight, a touching documentary charting the brief and in many ways, tragic history of the glam rock punk band, the New York Dolls. However, mainly it focuses on Arthur 'Killer' Kane, the bassist of the band, who, when The Dolls broke up, was the only one still left alive who didn't go on to form any other significant musical project, and who totally dropped out into obscurity and poverty.

     In fact, the film opens bizarrely with him talking, in white shirt and tie and a sensible bowl haircut, about his present life and God (cut between shots of him and his wavy blonde mane, with the Dolls circa 1972, when " they looked like male prostitutes!", a photographer exclaims). We see him now riding on the bus, going to the Family History Library where he now works, three days a week, as the old ladies that work alongside him exclaim through their false teeth "we didn't know he was such a famous rock star!!" He fixes the photocopier, files records, makes the coffee.

     After the band's acrimonious break up, Arthur's alcoholism got worse and worse. He had gone from such extreme fame and a lifestyle most people couldn't even imagine, to being nothing at all, and poor. His wife eventually left him when he came home one night; stripped her naked, beat her with a table leg then jumped out of the kitchen window. He survived, but didn't walk for a year. Then, whilst in rehab, he underwent a 'road to Damascus' conversion to Mormonism. Moving between New York and LA over the years, Arthur remained broke for the whole 30 years following the break up of the New York Dolls, but became heavily involved in The Church Of Jesus Christ, and found some faith.

     Then the film takes a surprising turn. Arthur says on camera that a few days ago, out of the blue, he had received several emails off strangers saying how they can't wait to see him performing with the Dolls at the Royal Festival Hall, at Morrissey's Meltdown festival that June. He recounts how he found 'some old number for Morrissey from five years ago', rings him up, and is shocked to hear Morrissey's voice on the other end of the line.

     On camera, Morrissey talks of The Dolls with such affection, admiration and love - so often in his rare TV appearances he comes across as aloof, people loathing. But his earnestness, his heartfelt-ness is palpable. He reminisces about when he first heard the Dolls, at thirteen, and how, he says, when you are that age, and you hear something like that, it gets hold of you forever, there's no getting out of it. Him saying this especially resonated with me, since at thirteen, it was in fact Morrissey and The Smiths who took a hold of me, and I have never been cured of their music or attitude since.

     Arthur hadn't even played a note of bass in thirty years. He hasn't even seen the other two band members in probably as long. There's a touching scene where Arthur gets his guitar collection out of the pawnshop where they have been residing for the last seven years, never having had the $265 he needed to get them out. His Mormon friends had clubbed together to pay the fee.

     Another touching scene is where Arthur is in the hotel room in London, just before the gig, and he looks around the room exclaiming to the camera about all the luxuries it has in it("there's even a phone in the bathroom!"), and how the hotel room alone has more stuff in it than his entire flat.

     The Dolls play to thousands of people, and, against the common reservation that is often held when such seminal bands reform, (that basically, they will now just suck), they perform great and go down a storm.

     Arthur returns to his home. We see him back on the bus, in his white shirt and tie, on his way to the Family History Library, and to his Mormon friends. 22 days after his return, he unexpectedly dies of leukaemia, at 55.

     Fuck, what beautiful timing.

Watching the film made me miss New York again, I notice.

     I see Daniel Johnston, (the film The Devil And Daniel Johnston starts this week by the way, at the Duke of York) has an exhibition in London at the aquarium until the 20th may... If I had more than 5p to my name I'd be on the train up there to see it, it will be fantastic, I'm sure..

     Also, check out 'Brick' - a great film by Rian Johnson. Sharp, original, surreal, clever..."imagine Twin Peaks with a dialogue by Raymond Chandler"...

'This town is coming on a ghost town..'

On Monday night I had the unsettling experiences of having what I thought was an interesting and lively debate with someone I'd spoken to only a few times before, who then, in the midst of it moved right across to the other side of the room, pronouncing in front of the whole room: 'well, we don't have to like each other, do we?'. I was quite perplexed.

     Prior to this, outside in the garden, we had had a conversation about the Palace Pier. He had said how much he loved watching things burn, and how he had seen the Palace Pier on fire, a few years ago, and it was beautiful. The Helter Skelter looked like a dalek in flames, he said.

     The following morning I walked along the seafront to work. At the moment I am compelled to walk the length of Hove to Brighton and back at least once a day in order to feel human. I need to pass the tumbling West Pier, the wagging tails of the numerous dogs with their owners, The Angel statue, the odd waves of miscellaneous humanity travelling on foot, bicycles, roller skates, jogging... and the outside diners at the Meeting Place Cafe. It's a route for me where ideas and feelings grow, come into focus, are born, reborn, die away, come back again with each sight and each step.

     Today, people were swarming all over the beach, attractive women in bikinis, turning their white and polished thighs to the sun.

     As I walked past the burnt remains of the West Pier, towards the whites, reds and blues of the Palace Pier, I realised that I don't know one person who actually likes the Palace Pier other than myself - who doesn't either merely tolerate it, or wish that it would fall into the sea, or, as the man on Monday night had felt, burst into flames and be no more.

     I have found this hard to understand. I have always loved the gaudy brashness of the Palace Pier. I love the carousel, the donuts, the way it is such a terribly sad and lopsided attempt at what might be called Fun and Joy and Life, but which is in fact pitiful, fake, an air of desperation about it. The poignancy of that I find moving and strangely beautiful. The misplaced dreams of endless cities, full of countless people, turning the dirge of the wheel of their lives into glitter, sparkle, flashing lights, noise. Most of all, I love the fact that it sticks out into the sea like a bleeding thumb: into this vast black mysterious ocean is this silly, ridiculous icon of vulgarity, cheapness, and lost dreams. And it is magical how it glimmers at night-time, fairy lights against the inky dark.

     So I have never wanted it to burn down or be reconstructed into something else. Standing on the skyline next to the deathly beauty of the blackened West Pier, which is slowly collapsing into the sea, I usually think, what can be more beautful, more poignant, than the sight of those two piers, anomalies together?

     But maybe I am wrong, I have been thinking in the last few days. Maybe it would be better for it to disappear. For there to be only silence out at sea.

Maybe I want Brighton as I know it to disappear. Or to just shut up for a while, stop talking, stop bragging, stop blagging, stop it's banter about how it is on the up, how we're all going somewhere oh so special. The first time I ever came here, I noticed it: musicians on the beach, everybody having a good time, creativity exuding from every crack in the pavement. But the soul of this city isn't old enough; it's too young, too cool. It's still at that age when you think life is going to stretch on forever, and you have all the time in the world to decide what to do with your life. But I haven't got that time anymore, and the parties and the clubs and the fire-sticks twirling bore me stupid. Close down the trendy bars with their red and grey walls; ship all the tourists off to Blackpool. Let this city sleep, let it fall into its own history, let the spinning minds create somewhere else, that we may have some peace.

     I was thinking about this as I walked along, looking at the stripes of the Helter Skelter. I almost walked past a post card seller, a little white hut on the edge of the beach. I thought that maybe there would be a good post card of the West Pier I could look at. But instead, the first card that I saw was of the Palace Pier. And what do you know; it was on fire. The ghost train was burning, the night sky around, all ablaze. I've never seen a picture of it before. And the Helter Skelter did look exactly like a Dalek in flames. I bought the card for 80p, put it in my bag. Because it did look kind of beautiful, all that coloured metal going up in smoke, curling up into the night air.

Why I Like CD Covers With Drawings Of Swans On

Oh no! I have just discovered Sufjan Stevens is really fit! I much preferred it when I thought he was some kaftan wearing, beard blowing, religious nut from Kansas.

the unbearable lightness of being

Significances happen whether we notice or not. Passing incidences, light in weight, the meaning  of which could be taken up or tossed away like a rolled up piece of scrap paper. Yet today they are etched in my mind.

     Friday night I decided to spend the night alone, writing, watching a bit of TV, reading some of the books that have lain, forgotten, beside my bed for too long. That morning I'd left Tom's house with a pair of his pink striped socks, and a book. He had been getting ready to move out of his place that weekend, so I knew it was my last chance to borrow and finish this book before it was stored away in some dusty lock-up. I'd already read half of it on one of my long, sleepless nights  after my return from New York, a couple of weeks earlier. I'd read through the night until the sun came up, and then hovered my way towards bed. The book was Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 

      I first read this book when I was seventeen.  Back then, as later, I couldn't put it down. As I read, I felt like I was finding myself again. Kundera wrote in a language I understood; showed me a world I was at home in. Shortly after, the film of it came out to bad reviews. But although I thought it didn't compare to the book it struck me deeply, and I loved it.      

     The motif of the beautiful mistress's bowler hat haunted me, her black stockings, her studio. However, I was also captured by the moment when Tereza kisses Tomas' head in bed, and smells the crotch of another woman in his hair. I even named my toy dog after the ill-fated, tender furry character of Karenin. Yet most of all, as I re-read it, on Tom's couch, I was struck by the power of Tereza's recurring dreams, how she wakes, night after night, from nightmares about her husband. In one dream, Tomas has a gun - she is lined up naked with other women beside a swimming pool - he is taking pot shots at the women. As he shoots them, each one falls into the pool. In the dream she knows she is the next to be shot. She wakes up and her husband holds her hands until her crying subsides, soothing her back to sleep. In the book, this scenario goes on for years, his affairs continue, her dreams continue, and he continues to hold her hands while she shakes until she falls back to sleep again.      

So that Friday I take the book from Tom's, and go home. Unearth my huge piano keyboard from behind my writing desk and sing along to a couple of songs I feel good about. Turn on the computer and write. At five-thirty my computer thumps off, the keyboard lights go out, my answer-phone dies. My electric's run out. My mobile phone rings - it's my friend, George. I tell her I'm not coming to a gig that night as I'm knackered. She tells me in passing how she ran into Tom that afternoon, walking along in town with our friend, Olivia. I half take in her information, and then I leave my flat to buy more electric. Usually my route is up my street to Church Road but today, for some reason, I decide to walk down by the sea. As I pass the patch of green at the bottom of my road I have an absolute conviction that I’m going to bump into Tom and Olivia. I walk three or four steps forward, and then a van honks its horn. I turn around – and there they are, on the other side of the road. I cross over. 

      "Get in" Tom cries, "I'll drive you to a shop near mine – you can get electric there. I’ll drive you back home again in a bit". I get in the back. I'm in 'being alone in my flat' mode: my jumper has a stain on it and I'm not wearing a bra. But what the hell. We drive off up the hill. 

Shortly after, Olivia and I are sitting on a bench in the back garden with cups of rooibosch tea. Tom stands over us in front of a tangle of shrubs. I'm sitting in the same place as that morning - it feels odd. 

     "You are both wearing very good jumpers," Tom exclaims, randomly. 

    I feel like I know exactly what Olivia is going to say next. She says it: I am correct. The garden feels like it's bristling with deja-vu. Olivia leaves for an art opening, and I go off for electricity. Tom picks me up again and we head for mine. As we pull over outside my house, he says he wants to go to the beach to watch the sunset. This sounds like a possible invitation. I feel pulled in two directions because I want an evening alone, and so I look at my watch - it is already a quarter to eight. 

     I announce, only half joking, " but it's almost time for Eastenders". I’m embarrassed that I’d put a soap opera before a sunset, and feel like I’m being unromantic. So I say, "Let's go." If I’d been true to myself, I'd have left the van then and gone home, I’d have put the TV on and enjoyed myself. Instead, we go to Shoreham beach, the evening starts to dim and Tom and I began to drift irrevocably apart.

The weekend before that Tom and I had gone to a wedding in Dinard, France. A bunch of us had driven over there by van, taking the ferry - a mammoth journey with musical instruments lugged inside or strapped precariously to the to the roof. But it had been worth it. Dinard was a sleepy Breton town by the sea, pretty and calm, and in the middle of it, our friends took their marriage vows in a big French church. Everybody looked dapper. After champagne and the six-course meal, the music began and some of the loveliest people I know paid homage to the couple by playing guitar, piano, double bass and drum. The wedding had been highly ritualized, all of us 'standing before God'. I knew I was witnessing one of the most important moments in my friend's life.   

    Two days before the wedding, I did a Tarot reading. I’ve been doing readings regularly over the last few months, and each one has been shockingly positive and accurate. This time, for the first time, the reading was terrible. It said sorrow, deep disappointment, loss, jealousy and hardship. I couldn't believe it because my life was feeling like a magic story-line of things coming together. The day before leaving for France, I did another, hoping for a better one. It was the same. I didn't understand, but I felt the weight.     

     But the wedding turns out to be a truly wonderful affair. A powerful one too. Tom and I stay in a smaller hotel away from the main throng of people. It is a weird place - the bedroom is dark and full of oddities. An old wooden screen stands in the corner, and a case of china cups on the wall next to the bed makes it impossible for me to get past without banging my knees on the bedpost. After the final drifting away of the wedding festivities, Tom and I crawl to bed at six thirty am.      

I am dreaming. I am on a ship, and I am running. Tom tells me there is someone else, he is leaving and we meant nothing.

     I say " What about the sex?" 
    He says, turning into someone else, "It was nothing, you are just a tongue. Just a tongue."   
    Alone on the deck I sink to my knees and begin weeping. 

    I wake up choking, fighting for breath. Tom puts his hands on me to calm me, but I don't want him to touch me. I start sobbing and can’t stop. In my mind I still see him on the deck. 

     I slip half back into dreams. I'm at a 'wedding' in a churchyard - it's my wedding to the last man I loved where I thought it could be forever. It is Maytime, and cherry blossoms are falling. Everyone is dressed in suits and dresses. I see my then best friend, my 'brides' maid', in a colour photograph and standing at my side. I see my wedding dress, how thin I am and how pretty. Then I see him and her now, living together, and holding a baby who shares his name with my middle one. 

     I see my father just before their divorce, telling my mother, "I stopped loving you after the first year". I see my mother in her wheelchair, the last time I was home, saying to me, when she'd heard that my Dad was in hospital again, "If he dies, I will die". Me begging her, making her swear that she wouldn't.

     I see my father bewildered by love, unable to comprehend his children who swarm about him like tiny bees, desperate for honey. I see him upset by TV programmes and discharging himself from a hospital ward too early, without any shoes on. I see him running up a hill after my sister, to make sure she is safe, Alzheimers addling his brain. I see him arrested for shoplifting. I see him eyeing the Oriental armchair in our hallway, the one he didn't manage to steal from the house before my mother finally wouldn't let him back in again. I feel his lips against mine, and how I want to love him, I feel how wrong his love is. He is an injured mole blinking in a world of red colour. He doesn't know the way back home. His fur is old, beaten. His feet are tangled.    

     Awake now, I don’t stop crying for a long time. When I re awaken, after finally falling back into a sleep filled with disturbing images, I get up, and go to the loo. My period has come, bright and clear on the tissue.

Shoreham beach. The graffiti on the back wall is repetitive and mysterious, speaking of EYES. So many weathered coke cans. Sussex Heights glints like copper foil; the birds are landing. I ask Tom how he is feeling. 

This morning I’m woken by drills outside my house. Two of them, twenty metres apart, churning up the road. I put Sufjan Stevens on my CD player at top volume, and eventually fall back to sleep.      

     Ten thirty. I’m awoken again; this time the postman is buzzing on the downstairs door. The buzzer won't let him in, and so I trail, sleepy and muddled, down to the front door. I sign, return to bed clutching an envelope, replay the CD. The men are still drilling.     

     I awake to my heart turning over in cold daylight. A sick feeling is back: it goes from just above my navel, to the dip below my Adam's apple. A certain song has filtered into my sleep, making me open to a feeling of beauty I don't want to feel. This beauty hurts.      

     I sit up, grab the thick brown envelope I'd taken from the postman and lift the flap. It is a late birthday present from my sister. I pull out a purple patterned paper bag, a delicate string at the top. It is a gorgeous bag, sumptuous and elegant, a present from Monsoon. Inside it will either be something like a silk scarf or a voucher, I prophesy.      

     I open the bag. It is empty.  She has forgotten to put the present in.

     The song caries on playing. I think again of Shoreham beach, that previous Friday night, a pink sun dropping behind the power station, tangles of seaweed and stone, the hands we'd held together, before what I might have called a relationship, but what could have been just a ghost of a chance, ended. Before he drove me back to mine and I closed the door of the van. The most romantic place he could have taken me, he said, as we wobbled our way up the shoreline. 

     I am not Tereza. Nor am I my mother. I won't fall face first into the swimming pool. Bad dreams can be over. I am no longer married. And yes, I still feel betrayed by the ease with which he walked away, by how quickly the sun fell behind the silhouetted buildings. 

     The Monsoon bag is weightless in my hands, a beautiful gesture. 

     Nothing in it.

   

What the water wants is hurricanes,
and sailboats to ride on its back.
What the water wants is sunkiss,
and land to run into and back.
I have a fish stone burning my elbow
reminding me to know that I'm glad
that I have a bottle filled with my own teeth.
They fell out like a tear in the bag.
And I have a sister somewhere in Detroit.
She has black hair and small hands.
And I have a kettledrum.
I'll hit the earth with you.
And I will crochet you a hat.
And I have a red kite;
I'll put you right in it.
I'll show you the sky.

Sufjan Stevens

'Sister'

David

Yesterday was sickening. Today is only mild nausea with sunshine. Small whirlpools in my stomach to remind me of recent upsets and little shocks, of all the changes that are coming at me in an unhaltable tide.

      And chocolate tastes creamy in my mouth, a friend feels close on the phone, the sea is near enough for me to walk to when I finish this post, and I know the blue waves will be comforting. Today, I like the hazy sky outside my window.

     And listening to The Beach Boys "Don't Talk, Put Your Head On My Shoulder" feels good. It is reminding me of when I was 21 and I'd fall asleep to it in a vodka stupor at 7am beside my friend David on his Didsbury living room floor - the kind of drunk that's  addled but intensely clear at the same time.

     These are some of my fondest memories of my time in Manchester - my times with David. He had a star-like quality, and people wrote poems about him. Like most people I have loved, he had a death wish, and an enormous record collection. He was visibly shocked when his 27th birthday arrived, and somewhat disappointed to have survived it. He would turn up at the Corn Exchange cafe on a Saturday afternoon, where I worked part time, 'Ee-ed 'off his head. I would make him free cups of Tetley tea and nudge him when he started passing out under the table. Self obsessed, childlike, brilliant, reckless, he lived with his sister who cooked all his meals and who had platinum blonde hair and clicked her heels as she walked up the hospital wards where she worked. He was also a great writer and had an incredible way with words, saw all life through a camera lens. And I loved him.

     The first time I met David was at Sankey's Soap, a new club night at the time ,run by a couple of guys who went on to produce a successful, trendy dance music magazine. He had just got out of hospital, zig zagged razor marks up his arm. He regaled me with stories of his hospital stay, and, in particular, about his recent and unlikely conquering of a local gangster in his home town of Oldham. He'd been about to receive an almost certainly fatal battering, but survived by throwing a nearby glass ashtray at his face. David was one of the funniest people I had ever met, turning tragedy into a 'fuck it all let's breathe the stars' mentality.  He lived for rock and roll, and knew what made a good film, and he understood why Easy Listening music can be transcendent.

     Skinny, and proud, he was a geek and a muso. He was also renowned through local circles as an extremely cool person to be around, until he got too depressed, too manic. Then no one wanted to be seen with him anymore. That was one of the things that made me want to leave Manchester, that kind of superficialty.

    After I moved to Brighton I tried writing to him a few times, and he even came down to visit once. But he always was hopeless at staying in touch, his sister moved away and had a baby, dressed it in designer babyware and David became an unlikely uncle. The last I heard of him he had moved back to Oldham, was working in a factory and living with an old lady in a granny flat on a snowy hilltop.

     I don't know why I think of him today. Perhaps it's because 'Pet Sounds' was such an important, life changing, album for me. I haven't listened to it for such a long time. Perhaps I miss the North and the past.

     No, I don't think so. Those times are gone. I'm glad for it.

flying, burning, flying

Beauty happens. Then the cold air blows in from the Atlantic, the magic leaves me at the harbour and I can't hold this holding anymore. In truth, right now I need to erupt. I need to throw poetry out of my car window and watch it fly away into the night's wind. I need to quiver under a blanket made of question marks. I need to stretch my fingers towards others that can meet them, that know what my fingers are trying to say. I need my piano keyboard. I need a symphony in my bathroom coming out of the shower head. Most of all, I need a dog, I have his name all ready, and I can see our mornings together.

Tonight, I cannot take any more intellect, any more men with the right words and the coolest of knowledges, the cleverest of analyses, the most directed of penises. I feel crushed by the weight of rational hands, and estranged from those which feel warm and alive. Thinking of writing, I do not know if I can pull apart my own words to see what makes them tick, and whether they tick well enough for other people to get. I am not sure I can understand them any more rationally than I can understand what it means to breathe.

And I try and name beauty, again and again with my feeble words, but I never can. I try and hold a pen to it's name, scrawl it onto scrap paper with some kind of legiblity, but I am only ever a moth fluttering at the edge of the sun. And this is the simple truth, what I was born for all along: to live with these tiny fragile wings and to fly close to a radiant heat which burns everything else away.

So, as long as I am alive, in some form, I have no choice but to keep flying and burning, burning and flying; this is the only choice I want to make. And this is the only way I can see writing for me, this is the only thing about it that truly makes any sense, as wings towards the sun.

Given this, how do I make room for the critical analyst in me? I want to step back out into a universe I thought I had left behind when I left academia, when I decided post modernism actually just hurt, and my heart couldn't take anymore rigorous analysis without love, and so I got into Buddhism ( meditation was the bridge). But now I want that edge of critiquing again, the sharpness of judgement and definition and technicality, because I want my writing and my 'writer's mind' to be able to hold that, to be big enough and strong enough to inhabit that, because I know it could help me grow, and I want to grow, I want exposure to whatever helps this writing grow, within and without. In a way, all I need is myself and my computer, this makes me happy. But there is a world out there, of writers and poets and words and meaning, of even bigger commitment to this crazy life I seem to be carving out for myself. I want to reach it, and I want to be a part of it, and maybe even in some way, change it. And I can only do that by opening to it, and by somehow, staying myself in it, not wavering.
Also, somewhere I know that logic informs all of my writing already - with my sharp editor's mind and my infuriating perfectionism, writing is rarely a pure act of spontaneous, intuitive emotion.
However, tonight, this night, I truly cannot feel where the two can meet, and I feel protective of my inner intuitions, my gut instincts. They have been the ones who stood by me when all other reason had left...

..........

Ok, for tonight, this is my only answer:

tonight, I will come to a different place: a place of unfathomable walls, and silence.
I am taking my clothes off slowly in blue light and dancing for you, only you. I make waves with my fingers, a sapphire song with the shapes my body throws on the wall. I can see the poetess whore, and she tells truer than sentences and exclamation marks and pauses. She knows the limits to logic, how the brain murders what it finds. She doesn't care about adjectives and pro-nouns, but her body understands, her body feels the WORD within it. And there is only one reader, one looker, one pair of eyes. But there are a thousand silent faces watching, a thousand men, a thousand more women: all I want is to quicken their breath as mine quickens, for the beating heart to beat stronger and louder as the cloth falls to the floor.

Damn you, St Paul in my soul.

(I keep all blasphemy, hold it close, it is my sanctity... I cherish our pornography.)

Back into the daylight of a May morning, by a busy beach front at the Sussex coast, I have officially landed home after travelling through three time zones, via air, boat, bus and van, my backpack in various states of heaviness and lightness. Through the disorientation of jet lag, the sway of endless miles, the jolting of sea meeting land, concrete meeting sky, city fighting landscape, I have returned to the familiar, the often seen, where my home dwells.
     It's official, I guess, and I see Brighton all about me, but I feel like a walker through space, a ghost in these parts, a girl without a home, a mind without a place to settle. I am rendered mute by the tenderest of experiences from my journeys, my usual personality feels like sludge in my fingers. And the place that feels furtherest away from me is here, and the lands I belong to I can no longer easily name.
     I turn thirty three tomorrow, and far from finding any settled place to rest my head, I find myself wandering, the page has turned and what is written is unexpected, exciting, unabashedly new and unformed.
     This is the time of my life. This is the turning of the tide. This is many days of reckoning, sweeping me up into their silent arms.
     I don't want to ever sleep again, but to remain awake until the last ships have passed over the horizon and I am with them, pulling the sails from their pits.