Tonight I cycled along the seafront. It was late and the air felt still, the sea was dense. There was a pressure in my head which made me speed up on the concrete and my mind feel like it was richocetting off the balustrade.
That's alcohol for you. Inhibitions left to the wind. Thought processes unsteady and darting, like a hundred shoals of tiny fish; full with fleeting feeling, reason empty.
I sped along, unaware of how fast or slow I was going, but at the same time, sure of myself. It was then that I saw them, emerging, ghostly from the recessed darkness of the beach; a man and a woman dressed entirely in white, their robes billowing out like they were two brides. As I sped along, a police car cruised further up the seafront to where more men and more women were dressed in white, emerging from the dark sea. It was a strange sight, stranger still for I remembered then that I'd seen them here before.
In the pub tonight, we spoke, as we always seem to do, of religion and spirituality, each of us, it felt, desperately trying to gather some truth in for ourselves, each of us missing some part of ourselves that we were trying to find, yet telling others that we had already found it.
I shirked at my own feelings on meditation and Buddha and God and finding inner peace. Almost ten years on, I have to ask the question, have I found it? Have I got those answers which seem so integral to positing oneself to others as a 'spiritual' person? No, the questions just get harder. The more I learn, the more and more I get out of my depth and then am forced to swim.
The inner peace I sought in the past, well, now it seems fanciful. Because peace to me used to mean the end of all this tiring, endless shit. But it doesn't. The endless tiring shit goes on and on, for as long as I go on and on, for as long as the world turns in its sleep.
So the question has become one of, do I want reality, or do I want comfort? I ask myself over and over this question, and I still can only answer: both. I want reality and I want truth, but I want that truth to be palatable, not painful. In the words of that great band, Of Montreal, I want my film to be beautiful, not realistic.
But nine times out of ten, reality whoops my ass, so to speak. I was told for years that the only way to happiness is to 'be here, now'. And I can talk like a jaded old thing, but the truth is, they are right; but the question remains, well, how much do I really want to?
I felt blessed by seeing those strangers in their white robes; glad they weren't in their houses tonight watching TV. Glad for the fact that they seemed so strange and unearthly in this all too often one-dimensional world, where spirit is absent too much of the time. And I'm glad I am cycling, using my legs, using my lungs. I want to cycle more, so that my legs ache and I am caught for breath, so that I am finally worn out with effort. Perhaps that is what they talk of when folk talk of peace; it is when you are finally done with trying, and the wind catches in your throat as you breathe it in.
Showing posts with label bicycles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bicycles. Show all posts
Friday, August 31, 2007
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Wednesday
I cycled into town today, mist billowing towards me. I have had a complicated relationship with my bicycle, Jeopardy. It has been fraught, to say the least. I am feeling now, however, that we are finally beginning to understand each other, rather than simply tolerating each other, or at worst, forming what can only be described as a dysfunctional bond, based on mutual dislike and mistrust. I have to admit, I haven't been very caring towards her.
These foggy days, I love them even more than those ones which are pumped with sunshine and crisp blue skies. Today, the sea looked like snow. The West Pier was even more spectral than usual, rising up out of the frosty waves like a black demon. On days like this, it is possible for me to believe that I could be living in any age, the world stilled into a black and white photograph, all modernity vanished.
On days like this, it makes me cry to think about leaving Brighton.
These foggy days, I love them even more than those ones which are pumped with sunshine and crisp blue skies. Today, the sea looked like snow. The West Pier was even more spectral than usual, rising up out of the frosty waves like a black demon. On days like this, it is possible for me to believe that I could be living in any age, the world stilled into a black and white photograph, all modernity vanished.
On days like this, it makes me cry to think about leaving Brighton.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Three things making me happy this morning (and a secret one).
High on Tetley tea and a gradual recovery from some strange and unnameable lurgy, I am feeling very pleasant this morning, the kind of pleasant that, in fact, surpasses the meaning of pleasant, since pleasant usually denotes a somewhat tepid experience without that deeper bite of life.
I am thinking of the things that make me happy.
I am having amusing fantasies. I am thinking about some of the bands and songwriters I never get tired of listening to. Then I am imagining a large bustling kitchen, with blue and white chequered tiles above the cooker and bowls of Frosties on the table. Tea is swilling in the pot, toast is popping up golden from the toaster. It's ten o' clock and I am a child sitting amidst my strange new family.
They are a vocal bunch, bubbling with eccentricity and odd hairdoes and voices which make me skip and dance across the linoed floor. If I were to imagine what their names were, I'd say Joanna is my sister, with her dangerously uneven fringe and her pleated dress. Then there is my dad, Micah P, with his craggy cheeks and unkempt mop of thick black hair, streaked with white. Then there is my mum, Kate with her flowing wavy black locks, her wild eyes and her rather hideous beige jogging bottoms. Then there would be old Kurt W, my Uncle, in his red and white shirt, his sloppy paint spattered dungarees and his slow big hands. And of course, there is my wayward brother, Peter, who only turns up at the house occasionally, when he has run out of underwear and fags. He adjusts his trilby on the front doorstep, running his hands through the tufts of his hair, tucking his dirty shirt in.
I wake up blearily in the morning to Joanna and her long red hair, her elegant fingers, who is throwing tiny wooden dolls out of my bedroom window, shouting 'Danger !Danger! Danger!' at the postman below. The postman shrugs and struggles to drop off the heavy parcels of cigarettes through the letterbox for my father to smoke, so he can age his lungs into further disrepair, scouring his vocal chords until they sound like the low grind of old farm machinery.
It makes me happy to imagine what breakfast time would be like in this family, and the words and sounds that might be spoken. I think the women of the house at times might try my nerves, Joanna with her dreamy babbling and endless improvisational harp-playing when I'm only asking if I can borrow her hairbrush or for her to pass me the tomato sauce; my mother staring upwards as raindrops gather on the edge of gutters, singing high-pitched verses about bursting clouds and a place called wuthering heights and washing machines, oblivious to the fact that she has left the all our clothes out on the line.
It would be at times like these that I'd slip onto my Uncle's lap and curl up like a dog, listening to him humming darkly as he chews on tobacco and strokes my head with his large forefinger and thumb. Or else I would join my father outside in the shed, where he would be whittling away at pieces of wood, shaping them into cats and elephants and one that looks like the Eiffel Tower. He would give them me when they were done, and I would line them up on my window ledge.
Late into the night, I would sit there, playing with them, staring up into the night sky. The faint strains of Joanna's jumpy high pitched squeaks from the next room would echo around my head, words about meadow larks and sparrows jumping about my ears and brain. As I peered up at the stars outside, I'd whisper softly along with her to my own melody. My own voice would be soft as honey, oozing quietly through my teeth, as her notes and words skittered upwards, a cacopany of syllables and cadences and brilliance filling the night air.
I like this fantasy. I like to imagine different families of different figures. Some would be happier than others. Some would be a recipe for disaster. How would it be to grow up with Einstein, St Francis Of Assisi and Charles Bukowski all under one roof? Roald Dahl could be my gardener. I could grow up in a dark and brooding family with Sylvia Plath as my older sister, wandering out to the garden at night, disappearing into the bathroom for worrying lengths of time. She would steal my favourite clothes and never return my eye shadow. Morrissey would be my older brother, slouching in the corner of the sitting room in one of his moods, specs on, fringe stuck high into the air. He would sit there with a condescending look in his eye, a huge pile of books at his side, reprimanding me for making too much noise. Then he would make my eyes grow big with wonder as he quoted me lines from Oscar Wilde or A Taste Of Honey. Or what would a line of uncles who were composers be like? Debussy, Shostakovich and Bach all under one roof for Christmas?
This morning I am also thinking about all the words that make me happy. There are so many of them. However, for some time now, I have seen a pattern emerging, wherein most of my favourite words seem to begin with un. This includes: undone, unborn, unlit, unsmiling, untie, undress, unnerve, unloved, unseen.
Oh to live in a world where everything moves like these words. Where all is undone, unseen and unsmiling. I go all silent and hushed inside when I read these words, quiet like a church when the service is over and all the people have left for home.
I also think that the word unkind has one of the most wonderful sounds in the English language; it is impossible for me to say it without it having the ring of ineffable kindness about it. Isn't that wonderful, for unkind to be such a kind word? The sensitivity and gentleness of it is beautiful.
The third thing that is making me happy this morning is The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. I was introduced to this book when I was in New York last year, and I first became acquainted with it in a mood of sleepiness, as it was read aloud to me on several occasions as I drifted in and out of somnambulistic states of dreaming. My apprehension of this novel was therefore done through the haze of half closed eyes and ears, and upon reading it properly for the first time recently, I realised that perhaps it was more than just tiredness that kept my perception of this book hazy and dream-like. This book is like a haze of a dream, or perhaps an acid trip taken at a young age. It is a act of bizarre genius, which makes me indefatigably, irreverently, happy. It also makes me see my bicycle, Jeopardy, in an entirely new way.
These seem to me to be two perfect passages of writing:
Maccruiskeen put his baton away into the hole in the wall where the Sergeant's had been and turned to me, giving me generously the wrinkled cigarette which I had come to regard as the herald of unthinkable conversation...
And
I sat there for half an hour, bereft of light and feebly wondering for the first time about making my escape. I must have come back sufficiently from death to enter a healthy tiredness again for I did not hear the policeman coming out of his bedroom again and crossing the kitchen with his unbeholdable and brain-destroying bicycle. I must have slept there fitfully in my chair, my own private darkness reigning restfully behind the darkness of the handkerchief.
I am thinking of the things that make me happy.
I am having amusing fantasies. I am thinking about some of the bands and songwriters I never get tired of listening to. Then I am imagining a large bustling kitchen, with blue and white chequered tiles above the cooker and bowls of Frosties on the table. Tea is swilling in the pot, toast is popping up golden from the toaster. It's ten o' clock and I am a child sitting amidst my strange new family.
They are a vocal bunch, bubbling with eccentricity and odd hairdoes and voices which make me skip and dance across the linoed floor. If I were to imagine what their names were, I'd say Joanna is my sister, with her dangerously uneven fringe and her pleated dress. Then there is my dad, Micah P, with his craggy cheeks and unkempt mop of thick black hair, streaked with white. Then there is my mum, Kate with her flowing wavy black locks, her wild eyes and her rather hideous beige jogging bottoms. Then there would be old Kurt W, my Uncle, in his red and white shirt, his sloppy paint spattered dungarees and his slow big hands. And of course, there is my wayward brother, Peter, who only turns up at the house occasionally, when he has run out of underwear and fags. He adjusts his trilby on the front doorstep, running his hands through the tufts of his hair, tucking his dirty shirt in.
I wake up blearily in the morning to Joanna and her long red hair, her elegant fingers, who is throwing tiny wooden dolls out of my bedroom window, shouting 'Danger !Danger! Danger!' at the postman below. The postman shrugs and struggles to drop off the heavy parcels of cigarettes through the letterbox for my father to smoke, so he can age his lungs into further disrepair, scouring his vocal chords until they sound like the low grind of old farm machinery.
It makes me happy to imagine what breakfast time would be like in this family, and the words and sounds that might be spoken. I think the women of the house at times might try my nerves, Joanna with her dreamy babbling and endless improvisational harp-playing when I'm only asking if I can borrow her hairbrush or for her to pass me the tomato sauce; my mother staring upwards as raindrops gather on the edge of gutters, singing high-pitched verses about bursting clouds and a place called wuthering heights and washing machines, oblivious to the fact that she has left the all our clothes out on the line.
It would be at times like these that I'd slip onto my Uncle's lap and curl up like a dog, listening to him humming darkly as he chews on tobacco and strokes my head with his large forefinger and thumb. Or else I would join my father outside in the shed, where he would be whittling away at pieces of wood, shaping them into cats and elephants and one that looks like the Eiffel Tower. He would give them me when they were done, and I would line them up on my window ledge.
Late into the night, I would sit there, playing with them, staring up into the night sky. The faint strains of Joanna's jumpy high pitched squeaks from the next room would echo around my head, words about meadow larks and sparrows jumping about my ears and brain. As I peered up at the stars outside, I'd whisper softly along with her to my own melody. My own voice would be soft as honey, oozing quietly through my teeth, as her notes and words skittered upwards, a cacopany of syllables and cadences and brilliance filling the night air.
I like this fantasy. I like to imagine different families of different figures. Some would be happier than others. Some would be a recipe for disaster. How would it be to grow up with Einstein, St Francis Of Assisi and Charles Bukowski all under one roof? Roald Dahl could be my gardener. I could grow up in a dark and brooding family with Sylvia Plath as my older sister, wandering out to the garden at night, disappearing into the bathroom for worrying lengths of time. She would steal my favourite clothes and never return my eye shadow. Morrissey would be my older brother, slouching in the corner of the sitting room in one of his moods, specs on, fringe stuck high into the air. He would sit there with a condescending look in his eye, a huge pile of books at his side, reprimanding me for making too much noise. Then he would make my eyes grow big with wonder as he quoted me lines from Oscar Wilde or A Taste Of Honey. Or what would a line of uncles who were composers be like? Debussy, Shostakovich and Bach all under one roof for Christmas?
This morning I am also thinking about all the words that make me happy. There are so many of them. However, for some time now, I have seen a pattern emerging, wherein most of my favourite words seem to begin with un. This includes: undone, unborn, unlit, unsmiling, untie, undress, unnerve, unloved, unseen.
Oh to live in a world where everything moves like these words. Where all is undone, unseen and unsmiling. I go all silent and hushed inside when I read these words, quiet like a church when the service is over and all the people have left for home.
I also think that the word unkind has one of the most wonderful sounds in the English language; it is impossible for me to say it without it having the ring of ineffable kindness about it. Isn't that wonderful, for unkind to be such a kind word? The sensitivity and gentleness of it is beautiful.
The third thing that is making me happy this morning is The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. I was introduced to this book when I was in New York last year, and I first became acquainted with it in a mood of sleepiness, as it was read aloud to me on several occasions as I drifted in and out of somnambulistic states of dreaming. My apprehension of this novel was therefore done through the haze of half closed eyes and ears, and upon reading it properly for the first time recently, I realised that perhaps it was more than just tiredness that kept my perception of this book hazy and dream-like. This book is like a haze of a dream, or perhaps an acid trip taken at a young age. It is a act of bizarre genius, which makes me indefatigably, irreverently, happy. It also makes me see my bicycle, Jeopardy, in an entirely new way.
These seem to me to be two perfect passages of writing:
Maccruiskeen put his baton away into the hole in the wall where the Sergeant's had been and turned to me, giving me generously the wrinkled cigarette which I had come to regard as the herald of unthinkable conversation...
And
I sat there for half an hour, bereft of light and feebly wondering for the first time about making my escape. I must have come back sufficiently from death to enter a healthy tiredness again for I did not hear the policeman coming out of his bedroom again and crossing the kitchen with his unbeholdable and brain-destroying bicycle. I must have slept there fitfully in my chair, my own private darkness reigning restfully behind the darkness of the handkerchief.
Wonderful. Apparently, O'Brien (not even his real name), who was a shy man and a raving alcoholic, was so embarrassed when they refused to publish his novel in 1940, that to save face, he told friends that the entire novel's manuscript had blown, page by page, out of the boot of his car whilst he was driving around Ireland.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Nowhere To Run To Baby, Nowhere To Hide
I am spending way too much time alone. I realised this again today as I made some soup and realised that I had been having an animated and somewhat tetchy conversation with it for the past five minutes. Something is wrong when your lunch starts to take on a personality of its own, and an irritating one at that.
One good thing, however, about descending into the vaults of loner-y weirdoness is that you can discover places you wouldn't usually be on the look out for if you were with someone else, actually enjoying yourself, or having a life. So I'm cycling up the main road towards Shoreham today on 'Jeopardy', my aptly named death trap of a bike, hoping not to be squashed by a lorry or hurled headlong into the road by the surprise opening of a car door (I've not quite regained confidence in my bike or in my cycling skills since I quite unstylishly fell off her on Hove Lawns last December and had to be prised out from underneath her by a gaggle of purple haired old ladies and one jogger).
Then, out of nowhere I spot an American style diner by the side of the road. Apart from the fact that it's pretty rare to see a diner in England at all, it is even more unusual that I would find myself actually choosing to cycle in the direction of Shoreham per se, nevermind doing so in a gale force wind storm, since, for a slightly morose feeling person, it isn't the most conventionally uplifting of locations. I mean, the power station does have an incredible dark kind of beauty to it, but it's hardly the most life affirming of sights for someone who is a bit down.
I've vague recollections of my friend telling me about a diner around this area, but I've never been able to find it. But by chance, there it is, all neon strip lighting and big windows. I decide to cycle past it on my way home and stop for a coffee and write. After all, that's surely what diners are for: coffee and writing in your notebook as the waitress refills your cup.
I love diners. In fact, if I were to cite my reasons for wanting to live in America (an urge that comes over me from time to time), the presence of diners is one of them. As I entered 'Woodies', I forgave myself for my lack of ability to be scathingly critical of the fake American post-moderniness of it all. 'Must everything become a replica of the American dream, a dream which is, and has never been real?' Ah well, more to the point, how fat will the pancakes be? I'm quite up for sitting here and looking out over the corrugated steel rooves and pretending I'm not in stinky England.
It's a clean, smart looking place. But, sadly, the most important thing about a diner is missing - booths. Booths, to me, are like restaurant versions of the hidden room behind the painting in a stately home. They are inherently romanticised in my brain. They bring to my mind that one off reunion between two, now elderly gay lovers who haven't seen each other in over forty years, who, silently, as they wait for the bill, touch each other's hands, and smile a sad smile before both looking away. Or the overweight divorcee who's just had to move into rented accomodation, who rattles his change nervously in his hand and sweats loneliness. Or the female serial killer who's just notched up another policeman on the roadside, and who checks her lipstick in the silver napkin holder, and is not even bothered if she makes it to the border. Or there's the three gangsters in crumpled suits who are discussing their fat wives and praising the shape of the waitress's legs through her uniform, belching into their Root Beer, whilst outside a dying gagged man is locked in the trunk of their car. Or the nineteen year old boy with a notebook and a grey duffel coat who turns up every day and orders tea, who, in two years will have finished writing one of the greatest novels of the last fifty years, and which will never get published. These and other numerous somewhat cliched images in my head are why I love diners.
But I am appeased by the fact that, as I am shown to a table by the window by a pretty waitress with electric blue eyeshadow and white pumps, they are playing 'Stoned Love' by Diana Ross on the jukebox. In fact, they continue to play great music for my entire time there. I order a coffee and realise I've forgotten my little notebook, so instead I begin to write on the napkins. They bring my coffee and it's good, and they don't mind me writing on their napkins, and, as the sky darkens outside, I'm feeling a peculiar kind of contentment, the joy of being warm, hearing good music and feeling anonymous.
'Time For Action' by Secret Affair comes on the jukebox. Wow! This has to be the most evocative song of my childhood, and the happiest (perhaps matched only by 'Reward' by Julian Cope and 'Mirror In The Bathroom' by The Beat). How does a song do that? One minute I'm in a strange diner on a miserable January afternoon, scribbling on a napkin. The next, I'm seven years old again, and happy, balancing on the rotten strip of wood that went all the way around the flower bed that the tree in our back yard grew in, up past the convent wall, next to the plastic shed roof with the rusty motor boat under it. I make sure I don't swallow my gum as I tip and sway, as I sing and pull at the ivy that is climbing the tree, crossing my fingers it isn't poisonous and about to bring me out in a scary rash. I thought I was it then, the baby sister who would sit on the knees of my older sister's male friends whilst they painted their faces like Alice Cooper and drank beer. 'Time For Action' reminds me of running down our stairs and standing in the hallway in sunlight whilst my sister talks on the phone. It reminds me of going into our lounge, with its green velvety walls, its leather sofas and its French doors, and slowly opening the dark wooden doors of the dresser under the window where inside sits the record player like some holy relic. And I put that record on, listen to it crackle and jump as I dance, pretending I'm a Mod boy, in cool clothes, in a cool gang, walking through the streets of some unknown Northern town.
They are playing 'Nowhere To Run'. I'm really happy. I wonder to myself if the pancakes are really like the ones in America, not just, as it usually is, some lame British version. Why is British food and service so rubbish? I remember when I was driving from New York to Boston last year with Chall Gray and stopping off late at night at a diner for pancakes and coffee. That diner was fucking fantastic, the counter gleamed, the booths were pink and everything was mirrored, and there was even an entire open refrigerator full of fresh food on ice which you could pick out for yourself. It was something else.
But here, I like it here. I like the fact that it is a chrome paean to Americanness and that it lies on one of the busiest and most grim and unAmerican main roads out of Brighton. I like the waitress, I like her pumps, I like the view, I like not knowing anyone. It's that right balance of cheerful, clean and a bit weird, and I know the power station is looming up behind me as I sip my drink to give me that David Lynch feel. I shall return to haunt this place again soon, rattling up Kingsway on my trusty 'Jeopardy', and next time, with a notebook stuffed in my pocket.
One good thing, however, about descending into the vaults of loner-y weirdoness is that you can discover places you wouldn't usually be on the look out for if you were with someone else, actually enjoying yourself, or having a life. So I'm cycling up the main road towards Shoreham today on 'Jeopardy', my aptly named death trap of a bike, hoping not to be squashed by a lorry or hurled headlong into the road by the surprise opening of a car door (I've not quite regained confidence in my bike or in my cycling skills since I quite unstylishly fell off her on Hove Lawns last December and had to be prised out from underneath her by a gaggle of purple haired old ladies and one jogger).
Then, out of nowhere I spot an American style diner by the side of the road. Apart from the fact that it's pretty rare to see a diner in England at all, it is even more unusual that I would find myself actually choosing to cycle in the direction of Shoreham per se, nevermind doing so in a gale force wind storm, since, for a slightly morose feeling person, it isn't the most conventionally uplifting of locations. I mean, the power station does have an incredible dark kind of beauty to it, but it's hardly the most life affirming of sights for someone who is a bit down.
I've vague recollections of my friend telling me about a diner around this area, but I've never been able to find it. But by chance, there it is, all neon strip lighting and big windows. I decide to cycle past it on my way home and stop for a coffee and write. After all, that's surely what diners are for: coffee and writing in your notebook as the waitress refills your cup.
I love diners. In fact, if I were to cite my reasons for wanting to live in America (an urge that comes over me from time to time), the presence of diners is one of them. As I entered 'Woodies', I forgave myself for my lack of ability to be scathingly critical of the fake American post-moderniness of it all. 'Must everything become a replica of the American dream, a dream which is, and has never been real?' Ah well, more to the point, how fat will the pancakes be? I'm quite up for sitting here and looking out over the corrugated steel rooves and pretending I'm not in stinky England.
It's a clean, smart looking place. But, sadly, the most important thing about a diner is missing - booths. Booths, to me, are like restaurant versions of the hidden room behind the painting in a stately home. They are inherently romanticised in my brain. They bring to my mind that one off reunion between two, now elderly gay lovers who haven't seen each other in over forty years, who, silently, as they wait for the bill, touch each other's hands, and smile a sad smile before both looking away. Or the overweight divorcee who's just had to move into rented accomodation, who rattles his change nervously in his hand and sweats loneliness. Or the female serial killer who's just notched up another policeman on the roadside, and who checks her lipstick in the silver napkin holder, and is not even bothered if she makes it to the border. Or there's the three gangsters in crumpled suits who are discussing their fat wives and praising the shape of the waitress's legs through her uniform, belching into their Root Beer, whilst outside a dying gagged man is locked in the trunk of their car. Or the nineteen year old boy with a notebook and a grey duffel coat who turns up every day and orders tea, who, in two years will have finished writing one of the greatest novels of the last fifty years, and which will never get published. These and other numerous somewhat cliched images in my head are why I love diners.
But I am appeased by the fact that, as I am shown to a table by the window by a pretty waitress with electric blue eyeshadow and white pumps, they are playing 'Stoned Love' by Diana Ross on the jukebox. In fact, they continue to play great music for my entire time there. I order a coffee and realise I've forgotten my little notebook, so instead I begin to write on the napkins. They bring my coffee and it's good, and they don't mind me writing on their napkins, and, as the sky darkens outside, I'm feeling a peculiar kind of contentment, the joy of being warm, hearing good music and feeling anonymous.
'Time For Action' by Secret Affair comes on the jukebox. Wow! This has to be the most evocative song of my childhood, and the happiest (perhaps matched only by 'Reward' by Julian Cope and 'Mirror In The Bathroom' by The Beat). How does a song do that? One minute I'm in a strange diner on a miserable January afternoon, scribbling on a napkin. The next, I'm seven years old again, and happy, balancing on the rotten strip of wood that went all the way around the flower bed that the tree in our back yard grew in, up past the convent wall, next to the plastic shed roof with the rusty motor boat under it. I make sure I don't swallow my gum as I tip and sway, as I sing and pull at the ivy that is climbing the tree, crossing my fingers it isn't poisonous and about to bring me out in a scary rash. I thought I was it then, the baby sister who would sit on the knees of my older sister's male friends whilst they painted their faces like Alice Cooper and drank beer. 'Time For Action' reminds me of running down our stairs and standing in the hallway in sunlight whilst my sister talks on the phone. It reminds me of going into our lounge, with its green velvety walls, its leather sofas and its French doors, and slowly opening the dark wooden doors of the dresser under the window where inside sits the record player like some holy relic. And I put that record on, listen to it crackle and jump as I dance, pretending I'm a Mod boy, in cool clothes, in a cool gang, walking through the streets of some unknown Northern town.
They are playing 'Nowhere To Run'. I'm really happy. I wonder to myself if the pancakes are really like the ones in America, not just, as it usually is, some lame British version. Why is British food and service so rubbish? I remember when I was driving from New York to Boston last year with Chall Gray and stopping off late at night at a diner for pancakes and coffee. That diner was fucking fantastic, the counter gleamed, the booths were pink and everything was mirrored, and there was even an entire open refrigerator full of fresh food on ice which you could pick out for yourself. It was something else.
But here, I like it here. I like the fact that it is a chrome paean to Americanness and that it lies on one of the busiest and most grim and unAmerican main roads out of Brighton. I like the waitress, I like her pumps, I like the view, I like not knowing anyone. It's that right balance of cheerful, clean and a bit weird, and I know the power station is looming up behind me as I sip my drink to give me that David Lynch feel. I shall return to haunt this place again soon, rattling up Kingsway on my trusty 'Jeopardy', and next time, with a notebook stuffed in my pocket.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Catch-Up
I spent yesterday afternoon in bed with a hot water bottle and my toy dog, nursing a sore and menstrual belly. I took this time to slip in and out of the waking world to the sound of Joanna Newsom's new album Ys, her follow up to The Milk Eyed Mender .
To me, Joanna Newsom's songs transcend time and space, slipping between this world and all those others which spin together in this incredible and mysterious universe we call ours. And her voice is amazing, somehow sounding both direct and a thousand places at the same time, ageing and ageless. At some points she sounds no more than five years old, at others, she is a mature woman with lines creeping upon her face. Sometimes I can hear her at eighty five, others, she is a voice beyond all time, rattling down the centuries. She weaves her melodies through the cracks of existence and takes us with her down deep into the grass with the insects and the dew, humming across the sea bed to the tops of shipwrecks, spinning dark energy from her fingers, hanging from the corners of stars as she shouts entire verses about meteors and wheelbarrows and I am flabbergasted, left with huge tears in my eyes.
I love it when song can do this to me, when I am a balloon filling with vowels and consonants, crescendos and cadences. When it takes me to those worlds I always longed to go to, or that have become some distant memory, buried deep in the back wall of my being, or even that I never knew existed. When I listen to albums such as Ys, I know it can hold me, in anything, in the same way that a mountain or a wide green open field can, and that reminds me of the immense power that potentially lies in music and in words.
I felt similarly when I watched David Attenborough's Planet Earth last Sunday night on television. This is an extraordinary series, I never fail to be dazzled by the cinematography of this programme, as it tracks the natural world in all it's beauty and complexities. On Sunday, it was about jungles, from the tops of the tallest trees to a man who sat 300 hours alone in a hide in order to catch just a few shots of three birds of paradise performing their mating dances. From colugos, strange squirrel-like creatures that glide through the air from tree to tree by flaps of skin which attach, bat-like, from their bodies to their furry arms, to raiding chimpanzees, capturing and killing a rival member of a tribe, passing its bodily parts and head around to be eaten. It travels from the most impressive, beatific sights in nature to the most horrific, from the vastest to the tiniest all over the world. At one point it filmed a clearing in a jungle over the period of one year, but speeding the film up to show it all in a few minutes. It was clear from watching how these plant forms were growing and moving, how intelligent all forms of life are, as they travel and expand to the tune of their own logic and sense of instinctual survival. Seeds and pods burst to bud, to stalk and to vine, find their way across fallen trunks, scaling trees, climbing towards life and light. The plant kingdom is an entire universe in itself, governed by its own laws and logic.
For much of existence in the world, we humans are utterly insignificant save for the harm or good we inflict on them or their habitat. The animals go about life their way, the insects are indifferent to our desires or our dreams, plants and fish travel through their universes as we travel through ours. The toad belches and sings his way through the night, and it is his night, just as the child clutches his blanket and stares wide eyed and white faced at the shadows thrown by the cupboard door, and his world and the frog's world are as real as any I can muster. A flower knows how to court the bees and feed from the forest. The spider always knows the best way for a spider to be.
I wish I had a great mind for science and logic, I would love to study biology and geology, physics and maths. But my brain is as slow as a tortoise up Mount Everest at such things, stubbornly refusing facts and figures into its depths, preferring always the poetry and images that they conjure, the skew-wiff angle, the endless unravelling, the bits that escape definition, the non-rational, intuitive. Give me Derrida, I'll lap him up with a big spoon. Give me quantum physics and I'm there for five hundred years scratching my head to understand just three words, (despite the fact that I don't see a world of difference between quantum physics and deconstruction in the first place). So I'll refrain from saying something deep and meaningful in a factual way about the universe here now, despite feeling like this post needs it right now. Maybe I can leave that to the beloved Bob, who is currently residing in a tiny caravan alone in a wood somewhere in Sussex, probably eating RicePots and working out another law of the universe as I speak, and who blows my mind about such matters on a regular basis.
Well, it's been such a while since I last posted, so I might have known this would end up a long ramble. And I haven't even recounted all that has happened since I've been away. Suffice to say, I've been favouring music over writing for the last few weeks, hence my absence here, and it's been a productive time in that respect. I've recorded five of my songs for a demo with the help of the lovely Tom, who, aswell as being a dear friend, is also a wonderful songwriter and a talented musician. I've also been teaming up with others to collaborate and jam and things feel exciting for me musically at the moment.
Other things I've been up to recently: poetry submissions, being skint, sobbing daily at The Jeremy Kyle Show (move over Pete Doherty, he's my new hero), my acting debut as a grieving pale faced, black dressed sister who turns into a chiwauwa in Tony's new short and very weird (and good) film, previewed at the Duke of York's on Saturday. Eating lots of Turkish Delight and discovering the Choccywoccydoodah cafe (we're talking a piece of cake the size of your head, a cafe equivalent of an opium den), realising at 33 and a size 14, I'm never going to make it as a Supermodel, not cleaning my flat, loving, mourning, feeling romantic, occasionally reading and falling off my bicycle.
That should do for now.
To me, Joanna Newsom's songs transcend time and space, slipping between this world and all those others which spin together in this incredible and mysterious universe we call ours. And her voice is amazing, somehow sounding both direct and a thousand places at the same time, ageing and ageless. At some points she sounds no more than five years old, at others, she is a mature woman with lines creeping upon her face. Sometimes I can hear her at eighty five, others, she is a voice beyond all time, rattling down the centuries. She weaves her melodies through the cracks of existence and takes us with her down deep into the grass with the insects and the dew, humming across the sea bed to the tops of shipwrecks, spinning dark energy from her fingers, hanging from the corners of stars as she shouts entire verses about meteors and wheelbarrows and I am flabbergasted, left with huge tears in my eyes.
I love it when song can do this to me, when I am a balloon filling with vowels and consonants, crescendos and cadences. When it takes me to those worlds I always longed to go to, or that have become some distant memory, buried deep in the back wall of my being, or even that I never knew existed. When I listen to albums such as Ys, I know it can hold me, in anything, in the same way that a mountain or a wide green open field can, and that reminds me of the immense power that potentially lies in music and in words.
I felt similarly when I watched David Attenborough's Planet Earth last Sunday night on television. This is an extraordinary series, I never fail to be dazzled by the cinematography of this programme, as it tracks the natural world in all it's beauty and complexities. On Sunday, it was about jungles, from the tops of the tallest trees to a man who sat 300 hours alone in a hide in order to catch just a few shots of three birds of paradise performing their mating dances. From colugos, strange squirrel-like creatures that glide through the air from tree to tree by flaps of skin which attach, bat-like, from their bodies to their furry arms, to raiding chimpanzees, capturing and killing a rival member of a tribe, passing its bodily parts and head around to be eaten. It travels from the most impressive, beatific sights in nature to the most horrific, from the vastest to the tiniest all over the world. At one point it filmed a clearing in a jungle over the period of one year, but speeding the film up to show it all in a few minutes. It was clear from watching how these plant forms were growing and moving, how intelligent all forms of life are, as they travel and expand to the tune of their own logic and sense of instinctual survival. Seeds and pods burst to bud, to stalk and to vine, find their way across fallen trunks, scaling trees, climbing towards life and light. The plant kingdom is an entire universe in itself, governed by its own laws and logic.
For much of existence in the world, we humans are utterly insignificant save for the harm or good we inflict on them or their habitat. The animals go about life their way, the insects are indifferent to our desires or our dreams, plants and fish travel through their universes as we travel through ours. The toad belches and sings his way through the night, and it is his night, just as the child clutches his blanket and stares wide eyed and white faced at the shadows thrown by the cupboard door, and his world and the frog's world are as real as any I can muster. A flower knows how to court the bees and feed from the forest. The spider always knows the best way for a spider to be.
I wish I had a great mind for science and logic, I would love to study biology and geology, physics and maths. But my brain is as slow as a tortoise up Mount Everest at such things, stubbornly refusing facts and figures into its depths, preferring always the poetry and images that they conjure, the skew-wiff angle, the endless unravelling, the bits that escape definition, the non-rational, intuitive. Give me Derrida, I'll lap him up with a big spoon. Give me quantum physics and I'm there for five hundred years scratching my head to understand just three words, (despite the fact that I don't see a world of difference between quantum physics and deconstruction in the first place). So I'll refrain from saying something deep and meaningful in a factual way about the universe here now, despite feeling like this post needs it right now. Maybe I can leave that to the beloved Bob, who is currently residing in a tiny caravan alone in a wood somewhere in Sussex, probably eating RicePots and working out another law of the universe as I speak, and who blows my mind about such matters on a regular basis.
Well, it's been such a while since I last posted, so I might have known this would end up a long ramble. And I haven't even recounted all that has happened since I've been away. Suffice to say, I've been favouring music over writing for the last few weeks, hence my absence here, and it's been a productive time in that respect. I've recorded five of my songs for a demo with the help of the lovely Tom, who, aswell as being a dear friend, is also a wonderful songwriter and a talented musician. I've also been teaming up with others to collaborate and jam and things feel exciting for me musically at the moment.
Other things I've been up to recently: poetry submissions, being skint, sobbing daily at The Jeremy Kyle Show (move over Pete Doherty, he's my new hero), my acting debut as a grieving pale faced, black dressed sister who turns into a chiwauwa in Tony's new short and very weird (and good) film, previewed at the Duke of York's on Saturday. Eating lots of Turkish Delight and discovering the Choccywoccydoodah cafe (we're talking a piece of cake the size of your head, a cafe equivalent of an opium den), realising at 33 and a size 14, I'm never going to make it as a Supermodel, not cleaning my flat, loving, mourning, feeling romantic, occasionally reading and falling off my bicycle.
That should do for now.
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