snapshots

FLASCHENPOST

2011-01-20T04:55:00.000-08:00

“the essays gathered here collectively examine the ways in which a poem can travel across continents & years between poets and readers of different ages and (…) how these readers (sometimes themselves also poets) can understand and speak back.”

Karen Leeder, Flaschenpost, a special edition of German Life and Letters, 2007

If you could climb a ladder with no end

would you find yourself here? In the upper stacks

of the Periodicals Room? Turning, a woman

with whispered hair wrinkles her forehead

as she shelves books back-to-back, the way a mother might

frame photographs: careful to see she doesn’t

crease the corners; checking

that the inks don’t fade.

This collection is her

pride & joy. This room: her message in a bottle

encoded in these alphabetized walls, then sealed and stowed

away in stacks, her life measured in reams

holding the voices of the past. Preserved to last.

How long before she too

has a dusty spine and threadbare seams,

a coffin-cover that keeps pristine

her own story, now far too faint to read?

Ages have passed since she has seen

anything like the girl with crumpled chestnut hair, skin brighter

than the yellow tint of time, who wanders in here

to half-disrupt antiquity, flick through dust-speckled silence

with intriguing eyes looking for German Life & Letters

(now confined)

Instead she finds

washed up on this cold coast

a poem in herself;

a living, breathing Flaschenpost.

Berlin bombed with poetry

2010-09-02T14:52:00.000-07:00

We have bombing, and love-bombing, but poetry-bombing? Now there's a new concept. Berlin's been the victim of an alphabetic assault this month, with millions of poems by German and Chilean artists raining down on the city... It's a CND wet dream. What better place to be poetically pulverized than Berlin, that cultural capital with its poetic edginess and (in)tense history...?

here's the story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/31/berlin-bombed-with-poetry
http://lyrikline.wordpress.com/

memory and the Pergamon

2010-08-05T05:58:00.000-07:00

How does memory function? Christa Wolf writes about electrical impulses and neurones, but also describes memory as though it were a kind of awesome organism, a thing with a mind of its own. Memory's often described as a palimpsest, with new memories inscribed over old ones and the beautiful script of a life all entwined, inbetween blossoming and fading, to become the crumpled loops and lumps of a life well written.

I think memory's more fickle than that; the most recently written moments can sometimes be the most quickly forgotten. It's not all totally chronological, as a palimpsest is, with the oldest script fading fastest. Ancient, instinctive, primeval memories - of fear, love, of mother and father - are the oldest ones, yet they are also the ones that stick the strongest. The most easily legible memory in our brains can sometimes be the one that was written long ago.

Perhaps here, in the Pergamon museum in Berlin - a place brimming with relics of the past, with memory made literal - I can find a better metaphor for memory, a blueprint of how and why we remember what we do.

Everyone is moving to Berlin

2010-08-05T05:51:00.000-07:00

It’s all going down in East Berlin.She swept her long hair over her shoulder and swayed the table decisively. He looked at her and took a little sip of his cool beer. He'll never be able to fit me in, she thought, between that faded old sofa and the cranky fridge with half-drunk bottles of Weisswein and the hung-up washing and steaming cups of dark tea on the sideboard of the shop. Never, if not tonight. She thought he'd liked her that day on the U-Bahn. She couldn’t work out what was a memory and what she’d invented. Was he itching to take her bottom lip between his teeth, as she was, and gently bite?

He paid for her drink and winced. “Sorry, my contacts, hang on a sec.” He was so polite, it was exhausting. It was a little cold. She wanted him to warm her up, to put his electrifying fingers on her shoulders and squeeze.

“Got a light?”

“Sure.” He flicked a flame between their lips, briefly. Crumpled lung chrysalis. Was it just breath, or was there something else forming between them, as sweet and flickering as smoke?

(This post was inspired by Lail Arad's song, Everyone is moving to Berlin and first appeared on The Doodle Caboodle)

Blackberry Sonnet

2010-08-05T05:48:00.000-07:00

I love this man, now and for forever. His pupils were split berries, black on
white irises. Her hair was spilt libation on his forehead. She tipped
her liquid lips to his, and drank to the world he'd turned his back on.
She turned and said a silent thanks to the world that had stripped her
of him, that had held his neck crooked across the cliff
and wondered
what the sea tasted like
------------from that great height

-------------------------what bones sound like
--------------------------------------when the whole world sucks them stiff.
She turned, kiss still on mouth, and cursed the world that never really let them be.
As silence rose, she caught sight of his snagged arms, poured earth
over his forehead and turned and fled, weeping
--------------------------------------------------------to the silent sea.

This sonnet was inspired byLaura Marling's song, Blackberry Stone
and was first published on The Doodle Caboodle

Dental Trauma

2010-08-05T05:46:00.000-07:00

I
I have bit
my tongue for too long
on this one.

I know that conscience
and the cold bite hard,
and rhyme is a twisting

tongue, is a sound leaf
caught between
two lines of teeth,

but this was torture.

II
Your cigarette
was a lovebite at the night's
cold neck

a brush of teeth along her black
back, a perfect kiss
in the cold air. So when

your lips brushed mine
I could not help but wonder
how,

between the rush
of teenage lust and tooth
and tongue, salivasap,

your lip
managed to trap
itself between my metal brace

and gum, biting
itself into submission
bleeding, suffering, then numb

as kisses became kickboxing
attempts
to escape, save face,

to free your tongue
like a bird of song
from its newfound cage:

my bruising, glinting brace.

This poem first appeared here: The Doodle Caboodle

The Doodle Caboodle

2010-08-05T05:38:00.000-07:00

OK, so this is a bit of a shameless plug; my apologies. I'm writing for an art blog called "The Doodle Caboodle". It's run by a friend of mine (Alex Moore; her website is the Threepenny Orchestra). One day she rang me up and said that she was starting a blog with a group of her friends from art school, and would I like to contribute? The blog is a space to collect work by all kinds of people, centred around a theme that changed monthly.

Yes please. So I am now writing for the blog. I'll post my pieces here too. In the meanwhile, do visit The Doodle Caboodle if you have time, as it's supercool and the artists illustrating on it are very talented indeed.

On the Move II

2010-07-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

Is a house like a Greek chorus? Doesn't your home seem to speak to you sometimes? Reminding you of the past, singing your future fate, warning you to turn back at every photo, every crack, every faded patch. Recording your progress. And do we move houses so often because we are afraid of stagnating, of having our last house determine our fate by holding onto us? When we move house, do we redesign our future too? Or in buying a new house, are we just purchasing a new illusion for ourselves: namely, the renewed illusion of freedom?

On the Move

2010-07-14T06:52:00.000-07:00

After a year of moving around, from London to Paris to Berlin and back, I've been thinking about the way that surroundings affect people. I am convinced, now, that habitats influence a person's state of mind, that they affect and reflect the shape of the human soul. A home's aesthetic is a person's aesthetic: the glow from the very walls infuses into a person and emits memories at them. I'm not quite saying that Naturalism runs riot. Instead, I'm arguing that a sticky surface - a kind of memory bank - is enacted by each wall.

Lacking a home, I have used the internet as a wall: a sticky surface, a memory bank, a permanent place in my itinerant lifes, which will welcome me whenever I need to return, whenever I feel sad or nostalgic or homesick.

I've been itinerant the whole year, and when you move around a lot, the fung shui of foreign flats and rooms has a different effect. Surroundings affect the traveller profoundly, since they are very different to home. Travellers don't get so attached to the places they stay in, because they know they're moving, but these places sometimes affect travellers more than inhabitants, who have gotten used to their hometown's aesthetic and are no longer affected by it.

Bleibenblurb II

2010-05-31T03:04:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I watched a Dr Who episode where the Doctor and his assistant are living in 2 worlds, both of which feel very real. They have to choose which one is real and which is the dream. If they die in the dream, they wake up in the real world, but if they die in the real world then they just "die, stupid."
Basically, their lives are at stake.

This episode got me thinking about the nature of travelling and the life narrative. Normally, when tourists travel to another country, they stitch their journey-chapter into their narrative; when they return, there will be others who remember the holiday and what was seen and done. Thus the holiday, though in another place, is easily recogniseable as part of the tourist's narrative.

Yet when I travel, to Berlin, to Paris, I do not travel with others from home, who will remember. When I return to London, there are none there who know my life in those other cities, no collective memory of that time, and so it feels as though I am switching lives, walking between worlds. There will be hardly any evidence, save perhaps the inches of dust rolling up in my room, to show that I have been anywhere else at all. I have built up new lives in these other places; made new friends; told new jokes and anecdotes; stocked new kitchen cupboards; formed new favourites; frequented new cafes, bakeries, clubs, cinemas, bookshops.

When Proust wrote of selves proliferating, he was referring to one individual whose various selves were divided by time and age: an older Marcel was able to write down younger Marcel's impressions. Yet for modern travellers, who can reach half way around the world in a number of hours, the multiplicity of selves results from a dislocation, not in time, but in space.
So my sejourn here in Europe is not just a continuation of the narrative; it is a fragment. It is a different life in a different world. I have barely aged between being in Paris and Berlin, yet these are two existences in which I, the "I", is a very different being, in which my worlds are galaxies apart. Even the plane journey felt like a Tardis trip. Viewed through the telescope of time, in hindsight, these two worlds will once again be fragments; anomalies; dreams. They feel so real now but will seem light years away when I go back* - sleepsung, sandy-eyed, awaking from that familiarly elusive Proustian dream - when I return to the milky, familiar cosmos of life in London.

* back in space but forwards in time.

Bleibenblurb

2010-05-30T06:20:00.000-07:00

Berlin: a narrative?
In general, Western thought has tended to be either linear or cyclical. Life and history are viewed as cyclical, as people are born, live, die. Individual existences, in contrast, tend to be perceived as linear. When people think of their lives, they remember them as narratives with cause and effect, not as discrete days or random events.

And so, to be suddenly uprooted, teleported from London to Berlin, leaves me longing to stitch up my lives again, into one whole. The Easyjet flight really did feel like a Tardis trip. Ditching my baggage at the checkout, I closed my eyes and woke up with a jolt at Schoenefeld airport, confused and disoriented, baggage reappearing by my side some minutes later. Who am I? Where am I? In another life, in another world...

It is so difficult to assess where I'm at, here in this sparkly Berlin bubble. I'm preoccupied with the floating sensation that this latest journey has lent my life. This Berlin bubble, from which I can only dimly see back out into my London life, is deceptive indeed. Where does it begin and end?

It's hard to take stock of 'my life' from here. For this is hardly a smooth continuation of the narrative. Displaced from home, from family and friends, language and location, I am left with some strange perception of myself as a hologram, flickering from world to world, never quite permanent enough to take shape. Not fully fledged. I can be whoever I want to be, I can reform and reshape, and yet there's something tying the boundaries of my self to my soul, some digging edge of time warning me not to change too much, for soon I'll have to go home, and who knows how I'll do when I'm there?

Building a life in this city takes time, and forging friendly terms with the city very much involves starting from scratch. Perhaps that's why my life here feels like an escape - it's discrete, it doesn't build on my London existence, which I am more than a little reluctant to return to.

The Russian Churches in Paris: Rue Daru, and Saint Serge

2010-05-09T08:03:00.000-07:00

The Orthodox church in Rue Daru shone. I had stepped into most severe shimmering dreams of thick dark Russian eyebrows furrowed, set in golden clouds of incense and hundreds of people clambering, candles that each man woman and child clutched, that caught strands of curly hair of the person in front, smouldered. It was a miracle that no-one had a flaming wig of straw for hair.

The Saint Serge Russian Orthodox church is different to rich Rue Daru- wooden, cheaper and brighter. What they couldn't afford in gold, they discovered in colours. Bright, classical, Eastern, Byzantine, I don't know. I felt like Raphael stumbling upon the antiquaries shop in La Peau de Chagrin (Balzac). Hidden among the coloured paints and fake gold there was eternal life - if only I could find it among the dusty trinkets.

The Saint Serge church is very much like a mad old Russian woman's living room. Golden crudely painted icons, wooden boxes piled into corners, an altar area that looks like an open wardrobe with a granfather clock - chaotic, fascinating, touching. The smell of stale wood, of perfume, of incense, of age, of signs of life and care too. There was a bookshelf, fresh flowers, a splodgy Easter cake in front of the altar.

The Russian people never forgot where their old loyalties lay during Communism, and when the Soviet bloc fell, the people went straight back to the church services. It's a mindset - even Communism, which was supposed to be based around human community, required the Russian people to pay (lip) service, to pledge loyalty. They have moved from one kind of service to another, and then back again. Will they ever be free from false gods?

the future of language

2010-04-02T06:11:00.000-07:00

Language is an animal. It prowls, it lurks around the corners of the mouth, around streetcorners, it stalks softly through reams of sounds, before pouncing - swiftfooted - on pages of prey.

So if language is a species, then its grammatical structure and lexicon - its DNA, if you like - are passed down from generation to generation, mutating each time. This Darwinian metaphor for language is pervasive; already the press are talking about languages 'dying out' as if they were endangered species. Some languages have already become 'extinct'. If we can bring the bison or the orchid back from the brink, can we save our languages from extinction too?

I suppose keeping zoo animals in captivity is the equivalent of preserving 'dead'languages in a locked-away library. Semioticians have talked of a linguistic 'ecosystem' in which languages, like organisms, are interdependent. Tongues interact as animals and plants do; they feed off each other; they mimic others' strengths and pounce on their flaws; they give birth to new generations of communication like textspeak or slam poetry. When the lingosystem's balance is upset by invasions, religions or technology, languages (like organisms) can become endangered and indeed extinct.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the technological revolution of late. English is the global language, particularly because it was the Internet's mother tongue. Arabic and Chinese are becoming increasingl popular in the West because they open the gateway to business in the East.

Meanwhile, dying out languages like Welsh have been put on the endangered species list. Just as we encourage endangered species to adapt to new environments, so Welsh speakers have adapted their silvertongue with a new tool: Internet vocabulary and a plethora of webpages. It's not a Welsh of mythic beauty, it's a mutated Welsh of a modern age - to survive, it will have to adapt.

'Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.' Derek Walcott, the Fist

homeland and hiraeth

2010-04-02T04:07:00.001-07:00

Language is a funny fabric. Words are shapeshifters, changing to fit the speaker's intentions. Yet a word can also be incredibly specific, pinning down a precise concept that's difficult to translate. 'Home' is one of these words. Do nomadic languages have a 'home'? And if so, does it describe the nomads' temporary housing, or does it denote something far more important, one of the few stable factors in nomadic existence: the home that one has among family?

Explaining my longing for home is difficult in Paris. My home doesn't exist in France, or indeed in French. 'Home' is translated as 'Chez soi', or 'ma maison', but neither of these explain the specific feeling of love, and warmth, and comfortableness that I feel. 'Homesickness' is inadequately translated as 'nostalgie' or 'le mal du pays'. Faced with this inadequacy of wording, is it any wonder I feel so tongue-tied in Paris?

The other day, I stopped a well-to-do woman on the street to ask for directions. 'Je ne parle pas aux étrangers,' she snarled. 'Did she mean she didn't talk to strangers, or to foreigners? Was she being racist, or just careful?

'Etranger' has two translations in English: a stranger, and a foreigner. In English, a foreigner can be someone you know well, but in France you would still call them an ' 'étranger'. Even after living in Paris for years and years and years, you will always be an 'étranger' - a foreigner, and thus a stranger to this strange city.

Enlisting Paris

2010-03-27T07:22:00.000-07:00

Stuff I miss when I'm in Paris:

-British milk
- real Greek yoghurt
-scones, crumpets, carrot cake, chocolate cake
-pubs
-my bicycle
-big green spaces
-the Times, in full, in print. Ditto the Observer & Poetry London.
-the Royal Institute of Art, the Tate, the Phoenix, the South Bank
- the tube
- people wearing colourful clothes
-smoke-free zones
-cheap Haagen Dazs
- my HBS hoodie
-home

Stuff I'll miss about Paris:

-croissants & pain au chocolat
-the Saturday market at Nation
-very clean swimming pools
- the Velib
- Louvre, Musee Rodin, l'Orangerie
- Guys with big statement specs, stubble and skinny jeans.
- Parisian fashion in general
- the Soup bar on Rue de Charonne
- poker
- chocolat chaud viennois
- cheap wine

latex heads and lather, part II

2010-03-26T05:49:00.000-07:00

Having moved to the 15th arrondissement, I was in need of a new local pool. During the last six months here in Froggieland I've tried out many of the famous ponds in Paris - including the pool in Les Halles surrounded by tropical plants, and the Josephine Baker pool with a glass roof, situated on a floating island on the Seine.

My experience of swimming with the frogs has been mixed. At Piscine Josephine Baker, a snotty, spotty receptionist accused me of being foreign - shock, horror - and wrongly trying to claim a discount available to under-25s who live in Paris. I pointed out that I live in Paris and am under 25, regardless of my accent. Nonetheless, she refused to accept my various identity cards, and insisted that I'd need to bring my apartment contract to get the discount. Something was very fishy about Josephine Baker - and I'm not just talking about the Seine.

My experiences at local pond Aspirant Dunant were better- although their lilipad lockers once proved disastrous when a friend couldn't get hers open and had to flip-flop to the main reception in her bikini and ask the male staff to help. They were delighted to naturally...

Now, I have found piscine paradise - finally, a pond with excellent showers, very very clean floors and a 50m pool! (This is twice the length of most pools in Paris). Its size means it's rarely crowded. In Piscine Blomet, Liliputian lockers are a thing of the past - rather than having to cram all my possessions into a frog-sized box, I can lock the entire cubicle I have been using and take the key! The showers are very good by Paris standards, lukewarm but very powerful, and the hairdryers are fantastic. Piscine Blomet is definitely my new pond - and I'm one very happy froggy indeed!

travels and tinned tomatoes

2010-03-11T16:36:00.001-08:00

Sometimes speech is superior to novels in its ability to adapt, update and be instantly relevant. Novels are like tinned tomatoes but speech is the real thing – freshly plucked, red and ripe and juicy, smelling of today. Novels can be stored; reliable and predictable, they have a meatier flavor and melt and mature in your mouth. Novels are stocky, food-for-thought. But speech tastes of summer.

My parents are both moving on - to new people, new houses, new ideas. Which leads me to thinking. They’ve both evolved from their decades-long friendship – from their dialogue (of which I was the transcript, the novel, the endpoint). Which leaves me – where? Am I finally irrelevant?

No – I’m like the tinned tomatoes – I go back to visit both of them, I remind them of that summer decades ago when the air carried the heady scent of tomatoes and their youth glowed scarlet in the Grecian air. I’ve seen the photos of them – him with tousled strawy hair and a beard, lean and tanned – her, gypsy like with long curls and dangling earrings, skinny and beautiful, sea-skimmed.

Cassandra, by Christa Wolf, had just been published when they were living together, in 1986, as flatmates in Cardiff. Now, with mum’s copy in hand, sitting in my dad’s house in Cardiff, so near where I was born, pondering a holiday to Greece, is it any wonder that I’m drawn back to the story of my origin? The story that both my mother and father have now relinquished, the story that’s two decades old – the story that’s fast fading into gold-tinted illusionary myth. Then (it seems) anything was possible. Then they could have been together or not together. Now, they are who they are; they have become themselves, irrevocably.

Who am I to try and recreate the past? The story is old, and mythic, and very valuable. I am its author now.

Cassandra, by Christa Wolf

2010-02-28T06:22:00.000-08:00

“Freedom!” shout the Yanks. “Equality!” bellow the Commies. “Life! ” yell the people, but their voices are drowned out.

Christa Wolf wrote about prophetess Cassandra and her role in the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. She saw parallels between herself and Cassandra, between East Germany and Troy - both states insist on absolute loyalty, both keep fighting on when there is nothing left to fight with, both are eventually defeated by a stronger state. In the Greek –Trojan war, the ideological cause of war (Helen, epitomizing beauty and love) is little more than a noble myth to disguise the power struggle over territory and trade routes: namely, the Hellespont. The war between the USSR and the USA was the same - argues Wolf - although portrayed as an ideological struggle, the Cold War was actually about economic control and territory. The Cold War, like the Greek-Trojan war, brought both states to the brink of self destruction with the arms race; the people of both empires lived in perpetual fear of attack.

~~~~~~~~~~

…a few hours after reading Cassandra we start talking about Nicaragua, and the fact that mum was a foreign reporter there in the 80s. She told me she travelled with a Nicaraguan translator. A year after she left he ended up dead. My dad produces a book of photos from the country, taken in the '70s. I flick through the book of photos, trying to get a handle on the political situation of Nicaragua of the last thirty years. Reluctantly I move from the timeline at the back to the beginning – for how can I judge the people in the photos or understand their plight if I do not know the dates and facts of their story?

Fool. Has the Cassandra allegory taught you nothing? Troy could be a state now; the disputes for territory and ideology continue. The earth is the earth is the earth. I look at the photos: the women intently studying pistols; the guerillas with their dirt-studded jeans; one lighting a cigarette below the ubiquitous Coca Cola posters (that hint at the American involvement); the lower half of a body; a skeleton jumped and livewired out of the earth – the remnants of a man, his love, his legs.

The red blood tinge, always somewhere in the frame. I don’t need to know the dates to get the story: humans, suffering, pride, fighting, desperation, intense poverty of materials and intense creativity of spirit – a people to despair of and a people to admire – a people that we first world Westerners rarely have to face and never really understand. We don't get it, because we have not in seventy years been forced to face ourselves, bloody and skeletal in the mirror, with almost nothing left as future or past, and ask ourselves if we will fight.

Blood, feuding, fighting, revenge, death. Revolution, civil war, guerilla fighting, collapsing government, exile. As a Westerner, I find that this is the language of the newspapers. I never have to read it in the mirror.

An article about Christa Wolf from the New York Sun
Another article about Christa Wolf from the Goethe-Institut

courrier international

2010-02-18T10:18:00.000-08:00

After a bad day at work , I walk to a newspaper stand and ask for the Courrier International. The newspaper-seller grins. He has dark weathered skin and his wrinkles glow golden.
"Etes-vous Parisienne?"
I smile back uneasily. I am always defensive when people inquire about my origins.
"Non. Pourquoi?"
"Bahhhh..." The newspaper-seller lifts a copy of the latest Courrier International to the light.
Les Parisiens: quelques raisons de les détester.The front cover is crowded with grumpy Parisians, like the ones I encounter on the metro every morning: the ones who never stand up to give little old ladies their seats, the ones who listen to oversized music on oversized headphones, the ones who stare unsmilingly back, who mutter "pardon" before barging past you like you're a pillar...I'm not saying all Parisians are like this all the time. It's simply commuter culture here. The morning metro's a hostile, humid rainforest peopled with commuters clutching canopies of newspapers, trying to protect themselves from others' prickly stares.

I grin back at the newspaper-seller. The characters on the cover are definitely from the metropolis, there's no doubt about it. These are Parisiens all right; and the magazine's got their ca-fait-chier attitude down to a T.

Then I realise that the newspaper guy might actually *be* a Parisian. I stifle my grin, just in case, and hand over 3 euros.
"Ne vous inquietez pas, je cache la manchette," I reassure him, folding my magazine in half so the front page is hidden. He nods, solemnly - and then grins back. Perhaps he's not a Parisian after all...

adbusting

2009-12-23T05:58:00.000-08:00

In Britain and indeed Europe, we are consumers. We do what the capitalist system expects and needs us to do - we buy things. Nowhere is this clearer than in the snaking queues at department stores this Christmas.

Trapped in this conformity of action, we turn to images and objects - we are now defined by the objects we own, rather than the deeds we do. We buy objects not for what they are, but for what they seem to be - even the most simple of objects projects a complex brand identity, a kind of appealing hologram; turn it to the light and see it for what it really is. Adverts are the way that companies project an object's identity, exaggerating the product's powers and personifying it, giving the product human characteristics: family-orientated, environmentally concerned, caring, macho, attractive. Every object now has a human face: its brand.

Advertisers are personifying objects here, this is metaphor on a vast scale, only the metaphors are deceptive rather than descriptive. In literature, a metaphor will shed light on the true nature of the object. In design, the ad acts as the product's false face - a mythic mask which seeks to conceal the ordinary, unethical origins of the product, giving it a heroic backstory and alter ego.

Instead of being given real information about the product - where it was made , by whom, under what working conditions - we consumers are given a brand, a name, a 'face' via advertisements - thus we choose the object on the basis of its projected persona, and overlook its inherent value as a product. Through these objects' personae, we seek to define ourselves too: just as we choose friends to reflect well on us, so we choose our brands on the basis of what they say about us.

Yet the only thing they say about 'us', the human race, is that we are easily fooled. An advert is not purely the face of an object; collectively adverts form the cultural surface of our society. They change the way we look, think and talk. They distract us from the reality of the product and the world, and they falsely reassure us. Nescafe, endorsed by G. Clooney, is trusted by consumers who like the actor. Distracted by his catchphrase 'what else?', which suggests that there is little 'else' beyond the realm of this advert and his reassuring smile, consumers forget to ask questions about Nescafe's business dealings with third world coffee growers. We are distracted from the political reality.

Interestingly, people have taken to advertising themselves on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, consciously shaping alter egos and mythic masks, projecting a new flawless version of their identity out to other people. The internet is perfect for this, as its mixture of image, text and sound enables full-scale advertising and content does not have to link to reality in any way: images and sounds can be created on the computer, virtually, without any need to resemble external reality.

Thus with the internet we move towards a virtual world with little need for stable, fixed reference points in reality. We have search engines that can 'read' the internet and programs that can 'draw'. Though the internet was created and interpreted by people in reality, its importance as a cultural phenomenon lies in its capacity to detach from the real world.

Of course, artists and graphic designers have always looked beyond reality during the creative process. I'm not calling for a return to purely realistic art. The world of the imagination and of visual arts is a wonderful place. But it's dangerous that this world is no longer free- that it is being exploited by companies to deceive and brainwash - rather than stimulate and liberate consumers.

(This post was inspired by a lecture at Middlesex University and none of it is particularly original, just a synthesis of ideas I've heard about advertising, hyper-reality and the internet).

idiotidioms

2009-11-29T15:34:00.000-08:00

"Ca fait chier!" is probably the most (m)uttered phrase in Paris. 'Chier' being the verb 'to crap', it comes as no surprise that the idiom is so popular in Paris, probably the most crapped-upon city in Europe. Pigeons and dogs express their appreciation for the city perversely, by defecating all over its beautiful cream-coloured skyline.The phrase itself: "ca fait chier" or "ca me fait chier" means "that pisses me off" or "That bores me". It expresses an irritation or boredom that seems to be frequently experienced by people here. I quite liked the expression as a little defiant nod to the bodily basis for human civilisation, the boring mundane things people have to do, like eat and sleep and go to the toilet, before they can be civilised, cognizant beings.

I liked the expression, that is, until a little old woman and her mutt decided to make a toilet-stop on my street. Her well-groomed terrier turded the terrain right outside my flat. I went batshit. Gesticulating wildly at the dog and his gutter-gift, I walked after the woman and asked her to woman to remove her dog's faeces from my front door.The parisienne looked at the steaming pile of poo and shrugged. "Ca fait chier, huh?" she said, and walked on.

Well, quite.

life drawing

2009-11-21T15:54:00.000-08:00

She thought she saw herself once though, in the shimmering torso of the naked man. They had come for drawing classes and were met with Adam, the nude. The door was pulled open by a man with a moustache and a mischevious regard. He tugged them into his world of sin (what would her mother have said?) and there, before the bright lights and crimson curtains was a naked man lying on a canape. He was very intently still whilst twenty women art students focused on him, trained their eyes on his shadows.
She didn't know where to look, so she fixed her eyes on his torso and drew in a frenzy. She tried to untangle the scene but from any angle it was licentious. Life drawing. This was what she'd signed up to: sketching this naked man all flesh, displaced from Eden, ballerinaed against the blank bright screen. These women were all pursuing knowledge. They drew the blocks of shade and light over and over again, exploring the demarcations of sin/virtue with their hazy 2B pencils. Thought in the act.
His cures intersected ruler straight lines. She found she could not bring herself to draw the dangling fact, so left it blank. A neat square space between the dip of the hips and his two legs.

latex heads and lather

2009-11-15T14:59:00.000-08:00

Latex heads and lather sounds like it could be some kinky ritual in the shower, but actually - sorry to disappoint you - I'm talking about my local pool. Having swum on my return to the UK and enjoyed it, I promised myself I would take a dip with the Frogs. French swimming pools couldn't be that weird, could they?

My trip to the local pond proved more complicated than I'd imagined. Feeling exposed and foreign, I tried to tiptoe into the changing rooms, only to be stopped at the border and ordered to take off my shoes - wearing them beyond this point gets you a 5 euro fine. Entering the pond included dodging lilipad-swarms of AquaFitness classes and sporting a skin-coloured swimming cap, which stretched ears back beyond recognition.

Swimming with the frogs became swimming among the Frodos; our shiny bald heads and stretched ears certainly placed us in the land of sci-fi. The feeling that I had landed in some fantasy novel was confirmed by the wacky orange walls resembling Martian craters (let's face it, swimming pools are not the best place for the 1970s colour scheme that seems ubiquitous in parts of Paris). The turquoise and purple lockers were computerised and whizzed shut, nearly slamming my fingers in. Annoyingly, they did not respond to normal things like keys and thumping. Instead, I needed an 8 digit pincode to recover my possessions.

In the swimming pool, the Aquafitness class had luminous faces like distant stars. Pregnant women doing backstroke kicked the water viciously as their faces curled into sweaty masks of pain. One woman passing me had a bump like an island that she seemed to be trying to swim away from. Listen ladies, I wanted to say, save it for the delivery room... An enormous man in a tiny speedo wailed to himself as he swam. When a young and overeager kid dived into the water and missed, crying loudly on the side, I decided it was time to leave.

Swimming with the frogs was interesting, but I think I'll wait till the pond's empty before I try again.

do sculptures get crushes?

2009-11-15T11:39:00.000-08:00

Leaves fall on them. So does faeces, rain, dust, sometimes snow. Love, never. Scuptures in Paris certainly don't get crushed by the heat of the moment, but they must get crushes - with so many beautiful people walking around, how could they ´not? Human hearts crafted these sculptures, remember - something of love still fizzles along the stone outlines.

Paris is alive. To be in a city of busy traffic, buzzing telephones and racing pulses, among scattered couples - to be among all this, and yet stone, motionless, eternal, must be torture.

Sculptures that see this vivid living daily - of course they desire it! Of course they chase it, the way men in bars chase women in red skirts and smiles - how could you not covet the life that flows through people here? Imagine being a sculpture here - perched among trees that blossom, leaves that fall, fertility consummated and confirmed before your very eyes, yearly anew, whilst you - fruitless, barren, old - are strapped in stone for ever.

I like to think that every now and then, one of these statues slips out of her stone chrysalis, winks at a beautiful young man with Monoprix bag, and smiles a little sadly when he saunters past, oblivious.

2009-09-18T16:57:00.000-07:00

I buy a ticket and take the train. “I am a rock, I am an island,” is singing somewhere at the back of my head. If I’d never loved I never would have cried. Simon & Garfunkel: the inseparable duo who separated, the proof of human division, of communication break down. I am a rock, I convince myself, and a rock feels no pain, so it is better to be a rock, after all. I travel abroad and I am anonymous, independent. I travel abroad and the closest thing to home is the little purple passport in my back pocket.

A few weeks on, the same story: I buy a ticket, take the train – from Cardiff, this time. There are scatterings of Welsh-speaking softness on the platform, people here and there with a lilt of homeland about them. I listen in, briefly, but choose a different carriage to the silver-tongued Celts. I have no need of home, of attachment, of hiraeth, I tell myself. And an island never cries.

I get off the train, haul my blue suitcase over the bridge. The suitcase has a faded brown leather tag on it, with my grandparents’ name and address handwritten on it. Return to sender: the suitcase and I are going home.

Lemon sole, chicken soup, crème catalan. I produce tokens from my rucksack: a yellow eggcup and a flowery china mug for tea. There are really beautiful buckets of roses on the landing.

After the operation she has lost a stone and a half. Her smile and her eyes are the same crinkly marmalade though.

We eat together. They normally divide the labour up, and Emi does the potatoes and the bread and butter. Now though, after the op, Emi has had to take on all the food-furnishing. The family are sending Waitrose food hampers up so that they have plenty of ready meals and fresh fruit and veg, to make mealtimes easier. Of the food hamper items, the lemon sole and crème catalan rule supreme. It's great that she's eating now. Each mouthful disappears like a stealthy cat around a corner, but the mouthfuls are thin as petals and her appetite is wilting. We start the crossword, but she wants to go back to bed. Emi and I chaperone her up the stairs and it is the most important thing I have done all month, all year maybe. We are supposed to stand behind her in case she falls but it is not our bodies which protect her from falling.

I come back down the stairs slowly , trying not to let feelings form like thin skin atop boiled milk. I am not a rock, nor an island. Simon and Garfunkel were wrong, totally wrong. When I get to the bottom of the stairs, thinking about the food hamper, the cards, roses, visits, presents, my grandfather looks up from the crossword. “to support another, six letters. What d’you think that is?”

It’s family, I want to say. It’s love, Emi. It’s you.

sainsberries and bustivals

2009-09-01T02:30:00.000-07:00

The sweet-sweating physicality of it, the way the words run their way around your head without stopping for breath, the way their imprint leaves its inky footprint on your thought-tracks like print from a newspaper, the trace of which will just not leave your fingers.
~~
She would not leave my mind. The bus was heaving with shopping, earphones rollicking as the back of the bus bumps and grinds with modernity. I see streetwise kids spitting music like it’s white fire or fruitstones - the heavy beat of R&B on their phones is a pallid imitation of the real thing: women kids men rapping on the street at Carnival, colours swaying and rubbing, exploding. She got on the bus quickly, heaved her Guantanamo orange Sainsbury’s bags on top of mine on the luggage rack and sat down.

“I’m so sorry, would you like me to move my bags?”

She smiles, her nose gem sparkles at me in the electric light. She has a soft voice that reminds me of sundried apricots, and her skin is the warm brown of light muscovado sugar caramelized. “Nah, darlin’, don’t worry, it’s fine. I just wanna keep my guitar next to me.”

Curious, I sneak a peek at her Sainsbury’s bag. Gluten-free Fairtrade chocolate stars and organic muesli. Her handbag is made of gold-sprayed Coke can ringpulls. I always thought that recycling ringpulls, one of the brash symbols of consumerism, would result in tackiness. Not so: her handbag looks pretty damn fine. She has fashion-friendly sandals and full makeup on, but when she picks up her designer phone it’s to tell someone that she’s been, “In India. Yeah. What’ve I been doin’? You know me, darlin’, pretty much huggin’ trees the whole time. Yeah. Just been to the Southbank actually. Hmm? I was busking. Yeah, thought I might catch some inspiration.”

She is a paradoxical mix of urban and nature-loving, of eco-friendly and consumerist. Here she is, looking like the hottest woman around for miles, on the latest mobile phone with her non-reusable Sainsbury’s bags, yet she is also a tree-hugging busker with a tendency for ethical eating. I love her, because her environmentalism is a positive part of her life, intertwined with having fun and making clothes and music. I love her, because her love of life radiates through her. Her urban and eco, her fashion and ethics, are not conflicting spheres ( I realize): here is someone who loves life, and who also wants to protect it. Who seeks harmony in every sense of the word.

A mother gets on, hauling a baby in one arm and a pushchair in the other. The young woman and I shift our stuff quickly, so she can get on.

Behind me, a South African woman chuckles: “Ladies,” she giggles, “would you ever see men carrying such baggage? Never! Never! We always do the shopping, we always pick up the clothes from the launderette! We always carry the load! Men never carry anything!”

The young sugarbrown woman winks at me. “I don’t do nobody’s laundry, babe!” she exclaims, and we all giggle. I feel sorry for the man hunched up behind us, reading the Telegraph. He is pretty defenceless against our sexism. He is carrying nothing.

London Underground II

2009-08-25T11:47:00.000-07:00

She glanced at the man who got on at Goodge Street. City type shoes and handsome face cast into a bored over-boiled sort of mask, mouth turned down, humbug-sucking. He looked heart-stopped, or else had pulled out the stops from his heart & drizzled it dry, draining it away for the six-figure sum he earned at work, the funds he ‘managed’. Yep. He was definitely one of those cityslick sinners who sunk whole companies with their sneaky share trading. She already had the measure of him. He'd snatched the pearl from the purse of his own oyster heart, and sold it for stocks and shares a long time ago.

Of course, within a few seconds he had pulled out the Times. His predictability sickened her, sank in the pit of her stomach. Businessmen will always look like this, and the world will go round and they thrive on money and society showers them with status, though their morals rise and fall with the share price.

Those bigshot Merchant Wankers, Rachel thought, viciously twisting her tongue around a cherry stem. She had taken to knotting cherry stalks in her mouth, as a distraction from her perennial chewing gum habit. A stem snapped in her mouth. She dropped it into her hot cupped palm and stashed it in her pocket. She kept the successfully knotted stalks in her left pocket, and the disappointments in her right. She liked the the unevenly blunt jangle of the pockets against her thighs; she liked the idea that beneath the boring denim exterior she carried unpredictable hand-delves of colour.

The doors slid open like a sleek dress, revealing London's shimmering skin. Rachel hurried down the platform, suffused with desire for the shining world around her. She marched along the dirty yellow line at the edge of the platform, using it to navigate past flumes of saris, badly fitting pink shirts , a man’s skinny bottom wiggling unconvincingly in cream denim, women bedecked with gold jewellery and jangling hipsways.

Rachel kept moving – yet the sudden sneaking suspicion of a voice, of a complication, made her turn back. The train doors slammed shut and a swift surprise in the form of an almost- broken nose hit her, hard.

“Oh, shit, I'm so – so – “ Her brown eyes flashed and swelled indignantly, golden flashes of fury like sparks bursting from the brown earth.The bespoke suited man soothed his shoulder where she had collided with it. He smiled and held out a stroke of luck in the palm of his hands.

“You left this on the train, I thought you might want it.” The knotted cherry stem glimmered on his fingers.

43 bus journey

2009-07-25T08:09:00.000-07:00

Naath Laaandaan. Get the '43 winding around Tavistock Terrace, Alexandra Road - the automated lady voice seduces me with the sound of memory itself, smoothing the bus short and stopping before a tube station - a park with exercise bikes - a church fete dubbed 'feel good festival' - a shrubless scrubland ironically bearing the words 'Islington was in finals for Britain in Bloom'. The sign shines in earnest, seemingly unaware of its own self-ridicule, and I realise that this concrete cornucopia is the place that I call home.

jellyfish

2009-07-25T08:02:00.000-07:00

A stinging spike like a burn in the back of the neck, no, in the back, like an icecream cone of steel in the stick of the spine.

It happened in the sea by the rockcombed beach. We were swimming with the moss tangled around our feet, stars of seaweed blossomed at the bottom of the sea or sky as we swam in circles around the grotesque, inflatable green crocodile. We'd bought it from a dusty shop nearby, selling tat & packed with French families.

I felt the sting in the small of the spine. It bit and the pain held on, like a furious lover's parting shot. I turned my hand to my back in an admonishing slap and found soft mollusc wobble...I screamed; the jellyfish inflated to a suffocating balloon, formed a suction around the patch of skin and pulled...

I shrieked and shoved. The jellyfish lump parted like that jumped-up lover leaving, through the briny ocean of memories. Gone. I swam back to what I knew with a lump in the small of my back, wounded by the whispers of the deep.

hiraeth

2009-07-25T07:53:00.000-07:00

I sit here in the small of the back of London, crouched, tense in the hollow at the base of its Underground spine, only stopping through. In just twenty hours, I have seen the vivid, thorny green of my home: the wild garden, the grapes, the cream and the raspberries. Here I lived, living, live? Impossible to translate into present the beauty of the past: walking through Alisa's room is like walking through a ruin: it seems like relics, and it's difficult not to drift back in time. I come back home - home- home - and brim with love and sadness in the dark sweet night. Mum is writing a piece about lodgers, about the last great lodger - Alisa - like the great Roman ruler at the end of an empire. Soon she'll sell this place, and then we'll have to leave it behind, our great home, our great lives here. The photographer comes and we stand on the stairs, in her room, in the garden, and swap smiles that are so real . And so, in one big burst of love we reduce the moments of the past, the years, our house in Green Eggs And Ham to a few flat photographs. Yet we all live on; I joke that mum's stolen my novel, reduced my debut drama to some piece in the Home pages, but I'm secretly not afraid - there will be far more tales to tell along the way - in which Alis, Mum and Shaz will doubtless make quite a few appearances...

Bath

2009-07-25T07:48:00.000-07:00

The green grey landscape, turquoise baths with golden Roman columns and silver rusty springs filling pools with antiquated coindrops of water, fountain money... outside the rain strikes like slim silver, threads silver steam so it's rising from the blue green pool like Time: eternally escaping...leaving only tiny water droplets, the residue of memory, in our palms.

frockshock

2009-06-09T05:03:00.000-07:00

Nothing fits my fretting state, so I trip
into a chintzy charity shop and quickly strip
off my own tear-stained stock, only to slip
my fingers into silk rosed topshop frock and quip
to myself that it’s far too baggy for my newfound
state,that even if I bought it I would hate
the bump of fabric at the front,
the little rosy tucks,
the cotton crib at the pit
of the stomach, a reminder of the blip
that forces me to peel the dress from skin and slip
it on the hanger, return it to the plummy woman
at the till, lower my pregnant glance and quickstep out of
the shop of hand-me-downs, eyes bursting at the seams:
from this gold-daisied dress I glimpsed or guessed
the shape of things that might have been.

The Red Academic

2009-06-01T15:41:00.000-07:00

Property is theft anyway - at least, that's what I tell myself when stealing from my flatmates' shelves in the fridge...

"If property is theft then intellectual property is just stealing from the communal body of knowledge. My only hope is if ideas cannot be owned by anyone, if ideas exist purely as selfless facets of human wisdom rather than claimed & copyrighted snippets of someone's thoughts. Losing copyright over intellectual property would mean that no-one would strive for originality, to say something new, because they could not derive personal glory or fame for it - if good, it would be shamelessly repackaged and plagiarised. That way originality would no longer be the pinnacle of human achievement. This would leave people free to learn for learning's sake, not for fame, and search for what is 'right' or what seems truthful, rather than what is original. Too often people say something purely because it's new, exciting, unusual - with little regard for the truth of their statement.Surely pointless to distract readers from the pursuit of human truths, in search of novelty?"

2009-05-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

The lips of two hands, curved and flashing flesh:
the white drug in the dip, fingers that reach
to sip hallucinogenic hazards like hot milk -
For both are white and tenable
in the tipped hot cup of hot-cupped palms
poured out like life-source, sipped, kept
warm on the lips of kids in schools
and drug addicts alike. What is it about white
light that so kindles love?

This stuff's not firelight, yet pills and milk
both bring the mind
to another plane. How strange
that the liquid love donned out in broad daylight
by schools and mums trains tots
to seek as teens the soft warm love
of the drug, the E, the pills cupped like a breast
in the hot held hand at the back of the club,
the stream of milky white, the next best
step.

St Davids

2009-04-21T05:42:00.001-07:00

If like some nutter combing coast, I searched
for Stuff we'd left behind along the shore
and gathered it all up into a poem
for some other nutter to find once more

The poem might look like this: four teabags
and tin foil nicked from shelves, a pack
of CDs wedged with salty towels, one Crazy,
a heap of shells, some wood, a ruddy rack

of words that try too hard to re-
create creation, attempting to retain
moments like butterflies, whose beauty lies
in fleetingness: the transience of passing rain;

your brown eyes; iris-sparks bursting from the soil;
your hand in mine: moments that words would only spoil.

the bath cycle II

2009-04-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

He sinks skyward, and by the sudden cold all over he knows he’s reached the clouds. He ran this bath to escape the hot brown earth, the dusty summer sun, the heat, and when he lowers himself into the bath it feels like he’s risen above this world, weightless in the water, soothed and refreshed by this cold climate, this thick new cloud-element for him to exist in. The sky, the sky: blue sometimes, gray others, polluted always. Shuddering he thinks of the sun: a blazing foghorn torch in this cityscape, just strong enough to push through the crowd of fuggy fumes, determined to drench the ground in its life-force. Climate change feels like it’s coming on fast. The paranoia’s struck, and every time he pounds the pavement he feels like pollution’s parading toxic in his lungs. Cars, fumes, flames: he fears them all, not only because of their macho machinistic power, their capability to crush human bodies into nothingness, but because of their environmental impact. He fears not the here and now, but the future, and if WallE has taught him anything, it is that eco-disaster is not so far away. He seldom goes out these days, and when he does he drops his hands in his pockets and tries to breathe in as little as possible. The bath seemed his only escape, the pure cold hope of the water rising around him, cleansing him of the fumes and the flames that he so feared.

www.adaisythroughconcrete.blogspot.com

the bath cycle I

2009-04-11T17:09:00.000-07:00

Skin submerged, heavier than milk. The womb of water’s supplied by two metal taps at the top, dispensing liquid that’s clearer than memory even. The poet, immersed in words all day, finally sinks herself into the liquid substance, reveling in the sheer physicality of it. Not words, but water – though she can’t escape language, even lying here in this languid state. Alliteration at its worst, a rift of rhymes drifts over her with the song-steam from the bath. Kids in the street drinking wine on the sidewalk, saving the plans that we make till it’s night time… it’s cliché but effective, a lyric that tugs along a kite of memories, swaying in the wind like she swayed in that club, the wine-mouths on the pavement, her friends leaving her on the desert streets…too much, too much. She blinks it back, and her eyelids are like the thin skin atop boiled milk, barely a defence against the rising steam of the bath, essence of the past. Her body swirls, she hesitates as she pulls herself pulsating from the womb of memories, the water womb, emerges triumphant from the sour sticky liquid that is Radox bubble bath and soothes herself back into her clothes, to her conscious self. Behind her, the water absorbs the imprint of her body and her dream-state is left to darken and brew in the bath like a warning. A sitting storm.

Detective III

2009-03-27T19:41:00.000-07:00

Her grin used to stretch as wide
as the lake in Port meadow, used to override
the rules and flood the banks of her cheeks
with warmth. But now it was tired,

a punctured tyre of a smile, a half curl,
a quick muscle tap, like the flick of the finger
on a cigarette dropping ash, draining the dust
of the past.

Her filofax was full of ex
boyfriends' numbers, flagged up
like busstops and as on a tea-stained map
you could run the route of her life with your nail,
trace the heartbreak signs around London
to that boyfriend on Hampstead Heath - with the Mini
and the massive bank account - who was hers last year,
whose money woudn't stretch
as far as a family or kids. And so she left,

to wrinkle and stain her teeth with sour coffee
that kept her eyes awake
but couldn't resuscitate
the faint beat of her heart.
A year on yet
her pulse would pump again in a culprit's clutch,
a big-time thief who would rob her memory bank
of sadness, stand her back on her own two feet and leave
his tender fingerprints on forehead,
bring her hot tea in the mornings
and sweeten her smile to the tulips
that she blossomed now as far as her sparkling
eyes, seraphin-style.

The Detective: II

2009-03-24T17:04:00.000-07:00

He'd searched
for clues too many times
not to spot the signs.

The shimmering fishscale smile in her eyes
swooped to the surface of the iris-pond,
swirling like light on lilipads
was as clear a clue to him as any footprint

her new dress might as well have been a shred
of clothing caught on a rusty nail or hung
on the body; for her body, though unbloodied,
was the scene of the crime.

He didn't need hard evidence
to read the story right - the sight
of her soft back in bed
her shoulders turned to him
left him startled, suspicious, bereft-

enough clues to look back. So that when she left
with that other man he was already there,turning it
over in his mind, their bodies in the sack,the
broken love, the knife stuck
in the back.

Respect?

2009-03-24T16:19:00.000-07:00

Our society is not a just place. We live in a hierarchy whose flexibility is superficial – a hierarchy which crushes the brightest of kids and elevates the laziest, sometimes – a hierarchy which makes numerous mistakes. We elevate some people and lower others: even a perfect meritocracy has to have a scale, yet if we think we can rank people according to any set yardstick then we are blind to the human condition. For the value of people is in their diversity; any yardstick we measure people by will shove some good, decent, hopeful people to the bottom of the pile, and put some greedy, dishonest, indifferent people at the top. Hierarchy is inaccurate; what’s more, it’s the ultimate tool of prejudice against individuals, since your place in the hierarchy is often decided by your parents’ place. Moving up or down is like swimming against the tide: nigh on impossible.

Yet even that statement does not express my meaning: it suggests that the hierarchy is inefficient, inaccurate, that the hierarchy sometimes keeps ‘the wrong people’ in the slums. It’s not that the hierarchy’s flawed process is immoral: the hierarchy itself is immoral. There are no ‘wrong people’ and ‘right people’; nobody should be in the slums, nobody should feel like they’re at the bottom of the pile, should have to feel worthless or disrespected, even if they are really stupid or lazy. Everybody should be treated like a human being. Everybody deserves respect, because everybody has feelings and hopes and dreams and emotions; nobody else has a right to crush these.
Yet my ‘respect’ is not the same as the system’s ‘respect’. When somebody like Tony Blair talks about ‘Respect’, what they mean is: you should have respect for us. You rabble, you ‘scum’ (as Sarkozy so despicably put it) should have respect for us politicians. What they mean is: you should have respect for the system that put us at the top and you at the bottom. What they’re saying is: you should believe in a system that thinks you’re worth next to nothing, that pays you next to nothing, that will deliver you next to nothing in terms of ambition or education – and you should respect and uphold this system. Essentially, the ‘Respect’ agenda equates to politicians asking poor people to agree with and partake in a system that places them at the very bottom – to agree that they should be at the bottom, to be complicit in their own poverty.

The problem with the political ‘Respect’ agenda is, that it doesn’t work both ways: the police aren’t seen to have respect for muslim and black people or protesters when they deliberately target them on the streets; the politicians don’t have respect for young, poor people as a voting demographic. Their policies appeal to middle class morality, not people in poverty. They say, if you don’t adhere to the rules, we will limit your freedom further. They don’t say, why are you acting like this? What are the problems in your life? How can we solve them? Fair enough, in a smooth-running society with limited funds and limited interest. Yet by enabling police to stop anyone they deem suspicious, and by imposing ASBOs and thereby criminalizing young people who have committed no criminal offence, politicians are intervening in people’s lives, are taking an interest, are spending funds – but in a negative way, in a way that treats people as worthless, in a way that denies them a backstory and therefore deals with them more like a number than a human being. Human beings have backstories, problems: numbers don’t. Thus politicians toting the Respect agenda – from Margaret Thatcher in the 80s to Blair in the new millennium - have effectively created a society in which young people, poor, black and asian communities are treated as potential offenders, as alien threats, as ‘them’ against the ‘us’ of society, often arrested without sufficient evidence. That’s not what I call respect.

Entre les murs: The Class: a film by Laurent Cantet, adapted from the novel. Really interesting on social class and the clash between (school) institutions and young people, and the extent to which their destinies are predetermined by their class, and by the way society treats them, dismisses them, writes them off.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy158dWdbpw

masks of mascara

2009-01-04T14:34:00.000-08:00

Women who use makeup are literally self effacing, scrubbing off their real identity only to paint on a new appearance using mascara, black slightly smudged eyeliner, concealer, foundation, blusher, lipstick and blonde hair dye. Women at work literally constrict and limit themselves, deforming and reshaping their real bodies in cinched clothing, high heels and tight skirts.

So what? you say. The make-up's empowering. It's a way for women to assert their feminine identity at work, express themselves regardless of society's and men's desires, and paint themselves purple.

If only.The fact is, women change their appearance to be clones of the same blonde, busty woman with pink cheeks and thick black eyelashes. The way that all women strive for this particular Barbie look indicates the existence of a prototype of feminine beauty, heralded by the ironically misogynistic women's mags. A so-called 'enhancement' of women's appearance is a way for them to feel powerful at work, and a way for them to bridge the gender gap, some say. Yet the disparity between expectations of women's and men's appearance in a professional context indicates an aesthetic gap that still points to the pay gap - 12.8% - between men and women in full-time work. Women use make-up to make them feel confident and strong, rather than relying on inner confidence and strength, and in doing so they perpetuate the idea that a woman still needs to appeal to a male sexual appetite in order to succeed in the workplace.

Maybe makeup enables a woman to feel confident and strong at work- or maybe women's use of makeup is a denial of their identity, their make-up. Maybe the slap is a signal that, even at work, women are still just eye candy.

The Red Academic

2009-01-04T14:05:00.000-08:00

Property is theft anyway - at least, that's what I tell myself when stealing from my flatmates' shelves in the fridge...

"If property is theft then intellectual property is just stealing from the communal body of knowledge. My only hope is if ideas cannot be owned by anyone, if ideas exist purely as selfless facets of human wisdom rather than claimed & copyrighted snippets of someone's thoughts. Losing copyright over intellectual property would mean that no-one would strive for originality, to say something new, because they could not derive personal glory or fame for it - if good, it would be shamelessly repackaged and plagiarised. That way originality would no longer be the pinnacle of human achievement. This would leave people free to learn for learning's sake, not for fame, and search for what is 'right' or what seems truthful, rather than what is original. Too often people say something purely because it's new, exciting, unusual - with little regard for the truth of their statement.
Surely pointless to distract readers from the pursuit of human truths, in search of novelty?"

haircut

2008-11-21T09:25:00.000-08:00

Dreadlock holiday; when she returned home it was time for a haircut. She tipped her head back. Carefully she took the razorblunt implement, held it to the light and purified it in the mug’s luminous essence: alcohol. The meths reminded her of the hazy drugfug, the fumes and the flames of her earlier days. She used to watch them carefully, those flames atop the fiery shots that she downed in bars, one by one, like swallowing sparklers that fizzled out in her mouth: a daring, if not dangerous, trick.

Now Sian watched the scissors sizzle, flicker open and shut like flames across her hair. Scissors spread-eagled like a pair of legs, vibrating, quivering with the cut and squeal of each lock lost, her ebony tresses falling like trellises, the scissors snapping shut like curtains, closing on the final scene, the signal to the audience that the deed is done. Her hair is cut.

~~~

There is no audience to signal to, except herself. The strands of straight black hair lie like jailbars on the table, prison bars that she has broken free from: made a break for short spiky simplicity. The bars clunk as they hit the table and her eyes freeze across them like icicles – they will not melt for a few minutes, not until she hears the soft unwinding of keys from a coat pocket, the failure of the door’s silence as it is forced to open, the sound of another. Then she will look up.

“What the fuck is this about?” The words whistled around Sian and imprinted their vicious anger on her consciousness, not quite deflected by her hair’s short spikes – not yet . The spikes weren’t armour yet, they let goosebumps pinch on her neck like fat bubbling on a frying pan. She didn’t want to be one of the pretty girls whose eyelashes mimic their hair – long, black, wavy – whose mouths were lily fountains to drink from. Not any more. Yet at least the long hair had been a protection, a curtain to a four poster bed were she could curl up to her soul and introspect, stare straight at the kernel of her thoughts and forget about the rest of the world. This short hair left her free – and vulnerable.

“This is my fucking notebook! You can’t just cut your fucking hair all over my notebook!” Yet the strands formed words, swinging around the straight lines of the notebookblack strands swung around the straight lines of the notebook like words, communicating in a new language. Freshly cut hair, thought Sian: finally something scribbled in a notebook that could be described as original.

2008-09-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

"Harpsichord music sounds like skeletons copulating on an old tin roof.."

harsh... Pic = copyright Alex Moore, illustrator extraordinaire. (www.threepennyorchestra.blogspot.com)

The night of Kir = White wine and a town called Cassis

2008-09-11T10:02:00.000-07:00

We take a train to Cassis and search for a hostel for three hours, having walked sweaty from the station. We ask a boy about our youth hostel; he leads us to the town square and confidently points out a block of light atop a dark and depressing concrete building.
"C'est la." He disappears down a narrow medieval alley, and we climb the rusting iron railings that form a skeleton staircase in the darkness and walk towards the bright light at the top. There's golden music coming from the doorway, it feels like we're hallucinating heaven...

Then we peer in and it's not a hostel at all; there are a load of old people sitting on school chairs in a circle, singing in harmony. Oh fuck. This is intensely strange... an old lady comes out to tell us that we have reached the Cultural Centre of Cassis. So this is not our youth hostel. We quaff cheap wine until the situation doesn't seem so bad. Everywhere is full, apart from a hotel offering one room for three people at 96 euros... three people take it, the rest of us agree to sleep on the beach.

At the beach we watch the gendarmerie (armed police) patrol the sand, bored and curious about the three guys and a girl perched on the steps, chattering in English and playing cards. Our night is peculiarly peopled: some pretty French women donate us a bottle of wine they don't want, a curious old guy asks us if we are cold while his wife urges him away, muttering "don't talk to those tramps," and the strange boy with a light strapped to his head slopes along the coast for hours in the dark, combing the beach for some long forgotten relic.

4AM: We migrate to the town square. Neils is asleep astride a low wall, Henry is insomniac and wide-eyed, Ipod tucked into his ears. Tom is asleep on the bench, curled up under a couple of towels. It never gets dark exactly, the streetlamps sweat out silver light all night as we sit and make small talk and slip into sleep for one brief hour...
Then morning comes and we have done it: we have slept rough. We slowly evolve from vagrants into civilised tourists, transformed by coffee and pain au chocolat, ready to face the day.

Soundbites from the boat

2008-08-25T07:08:00.000-07:00

We have become aggressive hunter-gatherers, snarling at anything that hinders our chance of survival - waiters, mosquitos, pedestrians - and developping the deadly instincts of a Dalek when it comes to stray insects on the boat. "If it flies, it dies," Shaz says grimly, swatting another one away. We all laugh.

Bleak Valleys humour and hysterical laughter are becoming familiar landmarks on the rolling soundscape of the canal, along with a buzzing fan and a stuttering pipe pumping out water. Every time the pipe starts pumping, my father asks, "does that mean the boat is sinking? Should we book into a hotel?" He sounds hopeful.

The boat's new catchphrase has been announced as:

"If you dump, you pump."

This refers to the toilets that only flush if you pump them vigorously. Hysterical laughter again. That's a good sign, isn't it? Maybe one day soon we'll be sitting around a roaring fire telling tales of our inexpert manoeuvrings of this boat. Like Odysseus and his crew. That's right. Maybe this counts as bonding.

"Mum, it's not like being on a car, you have to -"
"Oh just shut up!"
"Now, now..."
" Mum, your sailing's worse than your driving."
"You've been itching to say that, haven't you?"

Well, sort of bonding anyway. Oh family holidays! This one's been peculiarly pleasant, even though we are bitten and sandy and sweaty and unwashed. Waking up to the canal and the green glowing leaves, vivid living limbs of trees that shimmer and rustle with life, crisp against the clear blue sky. Leaves agitating, whispering, telling us to get a move on and enjoy the bright blue day. The solid metal sheen of the bike is winking at me in the sunlight, raring to go...

Oh fuck. Trying to moor up on the bank, we have managed to dent both the side of the boat and a tree. We are not like Odysseus and his crew. Nowhere near. We are more like the green seascum that latched onto the bottom of the boat, lazy and unskilled, hoping for a free ride...!

Mum: "I don't believe in washing up liquid. We're not getting any. We don't need it, all those chemicals."
Me, muttered: "Oh dear god."

Between a loch and a hard place

2008-08-25T07:02:00.000-07:00

The soft drip-drop could mean mosquitos or an empty water tank. This noise wakes me, alerts me to the possibility of danger. Am lying on a hard lump of a bed, that feels like frozen custard - same colour too. Lurid pink curtains let in artificially-flavoured strawberry light. I open my eyes again and I'm lying in a tiny cabin on a boat. I'm not sure where I am. I'm not sure who else is on board. I'm not even sure if the boat is moving. Oh fuck - I think it is...

the morning after (the Cambridge ball)

2008-08-25T06:59:00.000-07:00

A bike, cut clean
across their bickering conversation.
Blinds drawn, banishing the dawn.
Cocktails that clink, grotesquely.
This world does not fit
right- this world is reality

threatening the shape
of both their dreams, imposing its exterior
hideousness. Turning women in ball gowns
into girls about town, smudged make-up
and smeared smiles painted insincere
-less smile than sneer- with jam-and-butter
breakfast-traces strewn across their unripe faces...

this is not the world of visions
nor of hopes - the perfection of a rose,
the sky, their hearts, simply could not cope.

the traveller

2008-08-25T06:54:00.000-07:00

Foot
loose
and fancyfree

I slipped my sandals under
the seat opposite me,
tipped my toes
onto the ledge so that my legs were a bridge

between the train's cool cushion
and myself, later bridging the gap
between the train and platform,
transporting me

from door to distant land
like a sultan who disrobes,
weary from battle and the weight
of royal matters, settles atop a silky seat -

so do my feet, released from sweaty sandals
glitter with sun-brown battle scars.

Like a traveller
who's been granted royal protection I bow low,
and smile and tell them it's not far...

concert at Exeter college chapel, Oxford

2008-08-14T04:12:00.000-07:00

We sat down and were showered with gold. There's no other way of putting it: gold liquid drops of candlelight welled from the wax as though the candles had been moved to tears by the music. Then there was the honey-gold that spilled onto the singers' skin, reflected from the chalice-coloured archways of the church, where the saints shimmered like crumpled stars, hung above a portal into another world - one of music and unsayable longing.
Music and art often reach feelings that are deeper than words... The way that classical music could stir people has been lost to the class snobbery and academic bias of decades, centuries even. Now ordinary people avoid classical music and academics/ pseudo-intellectuals relish it - they can speak intelligently about a piece of music, and think that this is akin to understanding it, ergo enjoying it. This is false logic; one can enjoy something immensely, feel moved by it, without understanding it at all... kissing, for instance, is one such example. Music is another.
Sometimes speaking critically and academically about a piece of music enables you to find a deeper meaning in it. Sometimes it simply distracts you from the power and beauty of the thing itself.

The singer in this chapel was singing 'an die Einsamkeit' - 'on solitude'. Kind of ironic, I thought, that three people had joined together to perform a piece of music about being alone... Then I looked around at the golden light and the fragile blue of the chapel windows, like egg shell vibrating as the living, incredible thing hatched within, cracking our human shells with this beautiful sound...
Alright, I thought, well done, you've said something suitably clever. Full marks, you faux intellectual. Now shut up and concentrate on the music...

Charivari Agreable, the Oxford Baroque ensemble

the wine merchant

2008-08-11T14:39:00.000-07:00

Nicolas was her local wine merchant; she visited his shop on Fridays, and when she left she always ready to step into the weekend in style, wine in tow. The shop was narrow and teeming with bottles; they crouched by the counter like clumps of wild flowers and crept up the walls like ivy, taking ownership of the shop, transforming it into an intoxicating lair. This place was a cavern of brewed mischief, where bottles of wine as sweet as ambrosia and as dark as dragon’s blood piled high against the walls. Stepping into this haven and doing business with Nicolas was the way that she rescued herself, every Friday, from the drudgery of the working week.

Is it any wonder, then, that in the bar she fell back on Nicolas, and on alcohol, to drown her sorrows once again? It was the habit of years: she had always relied on Nicolas, received alcohol, delivered from his hands. And so, once again she accepted a drink from him, and relied on him and leant on his arm and...

...and so the affair began, in that first heady sip of wine. Nicolas had a long nose and very narrow nostrils which he used to discern the flavours of a new vintage. His eyes flashed green when he was impassioned, like blades of grass caught in sunlight. He always had a hint of stubble.

But the thing that caught her most about him was the scar. A deep red mark etched on his collarbone betrayed his adolescent apprenticeship as a wine merchant, when he dropped a bottle of wine costing thousands and a glass shard caught his torso. She often traced that scar in the dark with her fingers when he was sleeping. Years later she could draw it with her eyes closed, recreate that beautiful mark of clumsy adolescence.

cigarettes and cinders

2008-08-11T14:34:00.000-07:00

We were in a dim-lit club crammed full of twenty-year-olds and cocktails and the slightest scent of sweat. The dancers were too close for comfort, but the loud distorted noise of the bar made it a good place to spill secrets.
Nathalie crossed one leg over the other so that both legs reflected the spangling light of the bar. Her hair was astonishing; it fell across her shoulders and wrapped itself around her frame like amber silk, a robe in itself.
She tipped a tussle of tobacco onto a flattened out cigarette paper, rolled it and rerolled it with concentration, as though it were a piece of origami that she wanted to get exactly right. Soon the cigarette smoke fluttered from her mouth: smoke like a fleet of faded butterflies, emerging from their crumpled lung chrysalis. The smoke dispersed but the tobacco odour lingered and clung to our clothes, the fumes of a dark perfume.

The bite reimagined

2008-08-11T14:28:00.000-07:00

« Enfin, ne pouvant bientôt plus former de sons, il mordit Pauline au sein. » ("finally, almost unable to form sounds any more, he bit Pauline's breast.") Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin

They fought about condoms, icecream, family, friends, what constitutes good music and when exactly they were going to get married, but their love for each other always stopped them from stepping over the line, crossing the threshold into single life again. Until something extraordinary happened.

He bit her breast. There was a horrific sinking sharp crackling bite, as though her breast were a prawn cracker snapped by some indifferent obese restaurant goer, his forehead thick with sweaty pleasure. His predator’s teeth were buried deep in her soft flesh, his gourmet cannibalism unleashed.

She flinched and screamed; only then did he let go. She recoiled from the viciousness of it, the pain. She couldn't understand the alien destructive impulse that had caused him to snake-like sink cold diamond-cut teeth into her human flesh.
Later, in disbelief, standing by the bathroom mirror in my own flat, she inspected the two pink, ugly rims of teethmarks - one where he had drawn blood - and the bottle-blue bruise. Even though the wound wasn’t infected, it hurt. That night sucked life out of her like snake venom.
That’s why she left. Running through the night in a tear-stained dress, she wept for a love that had kept her safe for so long and finally failed her now.

Bayonne Festival

2008-08-09T08:43:00.000-07:00

At the Bayonne everybody wears red and white, drinks, sings and dances around the vibrant streets.People wear scarves and tug the scarves of other people they find attractive. Robin and I ask for a mojito; we get given a suspicious bottle that looks like it has been fished out of the sea; gravel and seaweed are still stuck to its sides. It reeks of alcohol.
I am wearing a spangly red dress , the colour of shimmering children's arts and crafts paper, too ridiculously fluorescent to actually be worn. It is beautifully cut, but still somehow looks childish - Shaz tells me that it looks like I made it in a Design Tec lesson with a sewing machine. Simple it may be, but it is crimson - both the colour of the festival and the colour of desire - and it is fun, and I feel very nineteen walking down the streets of Bayonne in a spangly red dress, hips swaying to the music, smiling like a maniac - very young and very free and euphoric - full of possibility...

The Bishop's Palace, France

2008-08-09T08:29:00.000-07:00

We entered under the stern gaze of two stone statues. They stood to attention on the side of a square lawn like security guards. Later, I came to see the statues as oversized bishops standing by the side of a chessboard lawn. The lawn was the board on which our family rivalries and manoeuvres were played out, where meetings and departures were frequent and significant. Each word was tense, on edge; every move altered the balance of power between siblings, lovers, children. We were the pawns. I didn't realise it then, but my family were playing dangerously close to checkmate.

The house was antiquated, majestic - an appropriate place for a grand reunion of faded fortunes and dreams. Grand turquoise sofas sighed when you sank into them. Heavy curtains of burnished gold glowed with sunlight, wooden floors ached with moths and bats and cobwebs. Rot and deterioration crept into every corner.

The bookshelves were packed with neglected beauties, a veritable Aladdin's cave of books. Their thick leather bindings sported gold leaf that glimmered. These books were ghosts of an old nobility, meticulously ordered and beautifully bound - but never read. The paintings were of little boys and pretty young women whose eyes followed you through the corridors. They glimmered in the dark and watched.

a baby bat

2008-08-09T08:27:00.000-07:00

A tiny bat fallen on wooden floorboards, a tangle of sharp black bones and velvety skin that lurks like an inky daddy long legs. Rachel picks up the bat with a piece of cardboard. She pokes its limbs with paper edges until it acquiesces. Scooped up onto the cardboard like a bowl of icecream, its wings are little black creamy drips dangling from the edge. Creeping towards Rachel, the bat becomes a furry little baby, wiggling its black wings on her arm, climbing up her arm like an infant, looking for milk.

the setting sun

2008-08-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

an impossible scoop of dream flavour icecream melting seraphic light into the sky like whipped cream. The colours: pink and golden like the flamingos and burnished gold of an impossible archipegalo. Crimson and violet beat their fleeting wings across the sky. Each colour leaves an inky imprint on the heavens, the kiss of a wine-stained mouth on blue cheeks.

(influence: Sheelagh Neuling- if you tell him)

sketch in Cambridge

2008-08-09T08:23:00.001-07:00

A woman in a bright red umbrella. A man glancing into the cafe window disapprovingly. A skinny guy, students touching, taking footsteps that dust the pavement but, like icing sugar, can be rustled away with one breath of wind. The trellises of King's College with patterns that run like fancy footwork along the top of the wall, dancing shapes across the stone. The rush of a bike, circular speeding streamline wheels that cut clean across the roadscape. Roses, mine, at home. Darkness and the thin crack of light, banished by blinds. a woman with glasses and a headband and sunshine yellow shoes. The looming sky. Flashes, flashes.

the morning after the night before

2008-08-09T08:16:00.000-07:00

Eight students on the table in front of me. They have been at a Cambridge may ball, made it to the survivors' photo at 6am and are now having breakfast with smudged makeup and ballgowns crumpled from the all night vigil.
One, a girl- or is she a woman? - is wearing something between a ballgown and a gold-sequined mermaid outfit from a fancy dress box. She is playing at fashion, aiming for a cross between nobility and Amy Winehouse.
Her eye makeup is exquisite; golden pearls of shimmer punctuate her eyelids. Shadows sweep across her lids alluringly. Her earrings dangle regally; they are grown up earrings that one might wear to the opera, and are a counterpoint to the crass conversation:
"Callum said I chose my earrings to match the way his bollocks dangle."
Hysterical laughter fills the air like champagne bubbles. She moves slightly, smugly, but her bosom does not move. It is tucked tightly into a sequined bustier, pressed into two breast-clusters, two glittering galaxies. Her tinted black nails betray her adolescence, scratched to imperfection.

The students leave and their table is an anti-feast of crumbs and water jugs and elegantly crumpled napkins. Their table is a work of art- left abandoned, a creation in itself, betraying little about its creators. Funny how the remains of a meal are fairly indiscriminate - this table could have been occupied by a large family, businessmen or ladies who lunch. The remains of the last supper, or Queen Cleopatra's feast: and all that's left is this wooden table, these crumbs.
Only writing can repeople the table, tell a little of its back-story.

the Rhine, Germany

2008-08-09T08:13:00.001-07:00

Today we swam in the Rhine.The river looked murky but when we got in it was so clear, the water very pure. Our bodies were illuminated peach gold shimmers under the water, mermaids' bodies.

gypsy girl, dancefloor

2008-08-09T08:03:00.000-07:00

A gypsy girl, thin in a very beautiful way, came to the table. Her cheekbones glistened with sweat, her skin was luminous. She held a bottle in the hand, a roll-up in the other. Her nose was pierced, one sparkling diamond hovering there uncertainly to signal her rebellion, but without upsetting the exquisite balance of her nostrils. This girl was one of those unique beings who have something about them, a quality that makes you want to watch them and never look away, hold them and never let them go.
She wore plain jeans and a black top which revealed glowing skin, two shoulder blades pulling like wings. Her hair was pinned up at the back of her head with a pencil, as though she were an artist, the strands curling around like swirls of paint. Her eyes shone; she was wholly concentrated on her lover, the dance.

She danced nearer and nearer to him and he danced too, and they were in time to the music the drumbeats the rhythm the lyrics, they moved and they shook and they shimmied closer and closer together, they danced they were dancing closer together and their hip bones were touching closer together
and then
he takes her suddenly, catching her head like a falling star in his hands and pouring burning light into her lips with his an animal kiss, a surprise kiss, playing passion - his trump card - laying his desire on the table.

She tilts her head and kisses back, mouths moving and hands searching,
the music over,
the seduction complete.

Origano festival, Austria

2008-08-08T13:05:00.000-07:00

The 'origano' festival took place in Dornbirn's main square. Arabic melodies mingled with African drumbeats intertwining into the lilting Eastern European instruments. Europeans, however, are shy about dancing, insecure about the way others will perceive them.
This makes the dance in European cultures seriously tame, and somewhat dull. Dance as an art form, not just as an embarrassed half-shimmy in a crowded club, needs to be resurrected.

Anyway, this festival felt like a lemon slice of London, a concentrated crowd of fun lovers of all ages moving to the music, hair spangling in the jumping lights - enjoying living, no, loving living. Guys with dreadlocks and rollups clapped and stomped and smiled, while the music tumbled around them like whirling dervishes descending. I moved too, unsure of myself but feeling swayed by the music, not quite confident enough to really let go...

Hakkasan, London

2008-08-08T12:52:00.000-07:00

The chatter of conversation travels up dark mahogany trellises, latticeworks through which light interweaves in Chinese patterns. A woman stands feet apart, stony-faced, freeze-framed and heavily made up. Behind her is what looks like a panel, which she occasionally beats back with her palm like a gong, to reveal a passageway to the bathrooms.

The tables are dark like the latticework, divided by darkness. The diners see and are recognised by waves of light that come from unobtrusive ceiling spotlights above each table, creating a pool of intimacy, enclosing each group's table with dark space, so that they feel they are the only diners being waited on. Diners are encircled in dishes of light as waiters place dishes of food between them.

Alan and I have a marvellous time here. This restaurant is popular and time is tightly kept, each diner only allowed a limited slot in this enchanted space of dark wood and stylish lighting. Mysterious glimmers of smiles and snippets of conversation flit like fireflies across the lake of marble floor. After being served small dishes of food as potent as potions and as bewitching, we are asked to move to the bar. Here the last of our white wine tingles in our glasses as we talk of literature, Proust, cubism, whether Braques beats Picasso, the purpose of words...

I step into the cab, utterly bewitched, and gabble words into my mobile phone as though under a spell. Entranced.

Guardian review, Hakkasan's

Nuremberg, Germany

2008-08-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

This place is beautiful only if you can call concrete jungles beautiful. Expensive shops, complicated fretwork, buildings rise like sculptures from concrete plinths. Humans walk around like living miniatures. The tall buildings shade most of the ground from the sun, dip it in semi-darkness - a perfect light for preserving expensive artworks.

But we are not miniatures or models or sculptures, we are people. We are breathing, living beings - and there is something beautiful about life that this city with its grey squares and fancy pavement patterns iscrushing, withholding, failing to acknowledge. Art that is truly beautiful, or arresting, often contains a glimmer of life, of emotion or muscle or colour or something, some vivacity, which Nuremberg totally lacks.

raspberries

2008-08-04T08:25:00.000-07:00

I went out with little girl Janet, each of us clutching a bowl and sandal-shod, and scrambled over to the two families and stood and ducked and clambered to pick raspberries. The last time I saw raspberries, they were three suggestive red blossoms atop an alcoholic cocktail – a seductive fruit, the fruit of lust – sweet but sharp. The raspberries’ rich purple-red was the hue of the roses I was given – so raspberries also recall love, romance. Funny now, how children – quite literally the fruits of love – harvest these other fruits of love. The symbolism comes full circle.

fishing for answers

2008-08-04T08:19:00.000-07:00

Fishing is cowardice and a thick streak of blood. The shoal of trout were creating a whirlpool of swirling tails and gills just under the surface of the water. We dropped sweetcorn on hooks into the water and waited till the stupider trout took hold. Once caught they flipped about frantically, expending the last of their life-energy in one last desperate fling because they had nothing left to lose – just like the poker player, desperate and despairing, chucks in his chips in a final plea to fate. Like there’s no tomorrow. Then, once caught, the fish endured three blunt whacks on the head until they grew limp and the blood streamed.
Is this fair? Humans were responsible for all of this, this ending of a life in exchange for a pleasant meal which we didn’t need. The pain of a dying trout must be electrifying – a pain that, if it were inflicted on humans, I would consider torturous and totally unacceptable. It is socially unacceptable to kill a human, but fine to kill an animal. Is the double standard justified? Surely pain is pain, the ending of a life is still the end of a life, be it animal or human?

Humans, ironically, are not so humane. Today I watched a mother let her daughter torment anbother little girl until she cried. The mother could easily have stepped in and resolved the situation, but she didn't. Was she blinded by love, or by selfish loyalty? Is loyalty genuinely a force for good? Isn’t loyalty just the flip side of tribal instincts, fear of the other and self-preservation? If compassion enables you to reach out to a human whom you have nothing in common with, doesn’t loyalty do the opposite, and encourage you to stick with humans whom you have a connection to? Perhaps loyalty is the antithesis of compassion, a closing-ranks instinct rather than a reaching-out one.

great quote

2008-08-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

“There’s something
in the definition of happiness that requires that it arise freely; you can
provide the right environment for it, but can’t force the matter.” Oliver
Burkeman.

Salsa bar, London

2008-08-04T08:14:00.000-07:00

Shapes move to a music that sways through the men and women, bouncing the men’s arms and the women’s breasts, flinging feet in an untraceable pattern of steps which, like the trail of kisses across a woman’s body, is led by the men.

This is salsa, only the music is pounding from speakers in a bar in London and the dancers are posers with cowboy hats and bootylicious bodices. This dance is theatre and music combined; the couples entwined enact a courting ritual, a seduction, which the music moves them into, sizzling and swirling around them until the dancer’s identities are sacrificed unto the music, until the dancers are the music ...they move closer into each other’s arms, press up against slick sexy sweaty torsos. Their bodies become curvaceous shimmering shadows in the strange strobe lighting. The music climbs higher; the dancers sway and shimmy more and more...

Men ask us to dance, by way of a possessive hand around our waists and a powerful tug that sends our hearts thudding and our salsa steps landing in a flurry of footprints across the dance floor. Later, sitting in a booth drinking tap water, we get given two raspberry vodka concoctions with three ripe raspberries strung on a cocktail stick across the glass – a strangely rich symbol of desire.

2008-08-04T05:54:00.001-07:00

His hair was flame coloured and devilish; his face was calm, composed. The goatee burned about his mouth uncertainly, like a smouldering ember that had jumped from the fiery ginger of his tight-kept hair onto the cold calm stone of his expression. All this gave him a look of peculiar intensity that drew her eyes to him again and again, irresistibly. She stared at him even when he noticed and smiled bravely at him – flirtatiously, passers-by might have said, in the way that young women do, sending subliminal signals of desire and attraction in the flicker of a smile, without really meaning to, without being aware that this smile was a flirty smile, this look a knowing look, these eyes come-to-bed eyes and so on. They only realise their earlier power, their earlier coquettish mannerisms when they are mature women, when flirting is much harder and the flicker of a smile will oft go unnoticed. 

He did not smile back. Instead he looked at her with that intensity and she looked away. She got out a book from her bag – Orlando, suitably intellectual – and pretended to read it. On the bus she sat deliberately, provocatively in front of him. She was too nervous to say anything, so she continued reading and ignoring what she thought was the burning gaze of his eyes on the back of her neck.

“That looks complicated,” he said, and she turned eagerly.

portrait on the tube

2008-08-04T05:53:00.002-07:00

Her eyes were silver and slow-moving, orbiting around their sockets, observing all corners of the room. Her cheekbones held rings of fatigue under her eyes, tiredness pooled there in circles like moonlight. These dark lunar rings betrayed her late nights; the moonlight that had kept her company through the wee hours had left traces around her eyes.

They were rimmed with turquoise eye-makeup, meant to disguise the shadows. Her lips were sugary with the fake mint of chewing gum. She was a creature of the rainforest, this luminous woman with her inner strength and tribal loyalty. In the inhuman jungle of the London underground she did not bat an eyelid.

German Poetry lecture, may 08

2008-08-04T05:53:00.001-07:00

Sifting through siderooms and pub club insanity pours into the precincts of my academic self, sharpens my intellectual instincts, as I release ideas into the tidal wave of meaningless drumbeats pouring from the soundbox, drowning out my thought box rocking my not-yet-washed student socks. This is the life, they say.

the couple at Waterloo station

2008-08-04T05:50:00.001-07:00

He took her hand and they strode onto the escalators, so confident and sure - so in love, so hopelessly in love. On the escalators they held hands and their burning fingers intertwined like interlacing stories, hands crumpled together like the discarded pages of lost books.

He swooped a printed kiss onto her open face, like a word of tenderness scribbled on the page of a notebook. Here. Now. They were writing their own histories, unfolding them in the damp grey morning at Waterloo station, London. There had been lovers before them, and there would be lovers after them, and in some ways they were no different. They were simply another couple on the platform stage, acting out their roles.

And yet: there would be no two people who kissed like this ever again, who looked like this ever again, who felt the same rush of love and pain. On the surface, they were the same as any young couple have ever been; yet they were also two lovers unlike any others, experiencing emotions so new, the world had no words to describe them. For all the critics and their cynicism, for all the linguists and their poems, the English language cannot adequately express love. It cannot reflect feelings in the way that lovers' faces do – in the way that his face did in that moment to hers, in the way that it shone.

don't blink on the tube

2008-08-04T05:42:00.000-07:00

“Before buses, railroads and streetcars became fully established during the nineteenth century, people were never put in the position of having to stare at one another for minutes or even hours on end without exchanging a word.” Georg Simmel.

So I got on the London underground, took a train which sank into the darkness of the tunnel. It was decked with businessmen, prawn faces poking from their crusted suits, swaying as the train swayed. Sitting were women of various sizes and ages, all variations on the same theme: cropped City shorts, blond highlights and tiny handbags. Sitting in rows opposite each other they looked like a baking tray of tarts plumped in the oven.

It suddenly struck me that this was it.
This was the epitome of civilisation: humans jostling in the jaws of this monstrous train, decomposing slowly, trapped in their own technology. Desperate to leave and yet resigned to this dystopia.

No-one moved or smiled. All we acknowledged was the slow grey crank of the escalator, moving us slowly towards the light; all we knew was the hopeless grind of the train. Don't smile, don't catch someone's eye, look away, be ashamed to exist. Remember we live in a bubble of personal space. Burst it and you break the silent code of this cruel city.

on paris

2008-08-04T05:41:00.000-07:00

We chatted. We laughed. We bridged a temporal gap - le temps qui coule sous le pont Mirabeau - through talk and laughter, to reconnect in the present. We talked of love, life and literature, of history, hopes and heartache. We saw Picasso, ate dried apricots and sundried tomato-stained bread and bought expensive shampoo and skipped on dinner to make up for it. We made collages on the floor and she smoked on the balcony. we fell asleep and woke up to the Eiffel tower, to days filled with possibility but lacking direction. we left the flat at 1pm and stayed awake and out till 6am, used coffee and bars and theatres and Paris streets and staged our last day on these platforms…

http://www.purplestainedmouth.blogspot.com

currency

2008-08-04T05:27:00.000-07:00

Currency

Words are valued for their age and beauty, for their permanence and their origin. Words can be given as gifts, are free, can be used by all, and evoke all the wonder of the world. The most valued words are the oldest, most evocative and historically resonant ones – for example, chalice is much more evocative than glass, treasure instead of capital, love instead of crush, court instead of flirt. These older words have been used in more contexts by more writers across more centuries; they thereby become richer, acquire more resonance than new words which are exciting, because they are new, but still rather flat.
Capitalism uses money as a currency: paper notes that evoke nothing more meaningful than numbers, that are not freely available to everyone. Capitalism is a system within which the things that are valued are those that are desired by the greatest number of people and available in the smallest amounts (greatest demand, smallest supply). Things which are of value in the capitalist system are often material, having clear physical worth.

Artefacts are interesting, because they hold value in both the capitalist system and the cultural system. The capitalist system deems them valuable because they are rare, in small supply. They also have clear physical worth and are attractive; therefore lots of people want to collect them.
However, artefacts are also valued by poets and authors, in their world of words, for their permanence, and their historical richness. They are aesthetically pleasing and from the past and yet strangely timeless, in that they are accessible to any future generation. They reveal truths about humanity.

origami rose

2008-06-24T12:43:00.000-07:00

A keepsake: the white, folded paper
petals that curl into a rose
your fingers curl around it
as you pass it to me,
this creased imperfect
origami
symbol of
our love.

green graveyard

2008-06-02T17:50:00.000-07:00

Pere Lachaise cemetery, eternal home to some of the greatest people that France has ever seen. Even the trees seem dead – their bases ground into the gravel, the cement thick to crush the fumes of the deceased, to keep them firmly buried underground. A river of faded & gnarled leaves, like souls of the dead in the river Styx, floats permanently between the tourist-pounded pavement and the silent graves, between life and death.
Cemetaries are a nightmare for unwilling symbolists. The dead are around us here, stillness, faded leaves are amassing on the sides of pavements like graves or souls. Yet – the trees here, green. Living people parade the pavements, their speech forms pyramids risen from the dusty silence. The green leaves are a reminder that life goes on and on and on and on, that new lives are exploding on the world scene in maternity wards and bathroom floors everywhere.
We like to keep birth and death separate from ordinary life, containing each earth- shattering crunch in hospitals or cemeteries. And yet in this cemetery, the leaves are stirring green & vivid above the graves – perhaps there is life here after all.

"they gave birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more" Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

This cemetery is a tribute to some of the great thinkers and movers and creators of our time. Yet it is also a silent tribute to those whose lives will not be remembered as moving through the world stage. Their lives had meaning for those surrounding them, loved ones, and as part of the patchwork of history.
No life is without meaning.
This tourist attraction seems inappropriate somehow. The pleasant aesthetic of blue sky, green trees and shapely graves is jarring in contrast with the reality of death, the slow disintegration of the old, the sudden lightning stop of the young, earthshattering bottomless breaking night.
Some would argue that the beautiful graves and carefully engraved names are a tribute to former lives – not deaths - after all. But I I would suggest that these beautiful gravestones are a pleasant sheen over real death and an inadequate tribute to life. I don’t want to be blasé and relaxed around these graves, strolling gently to the next famous name. I want to confront life and death, stare them straight in the mouth & try to comprehend the mystery inside.

turning textbooks into butterflies...

2008-05-31T16:22:00.000-07:00

(Photos thanks to Hector Durham; box folded by Sara Adams)

Today I caught a butterfly with my bare hands. Searching for it among scraps of paper, I came across a veritable jungle of origami: lions, roses, dragons, elephants and scorpions tumbled out of Sara Adams’ cardboard box, to crouch on the grass of Wadham gardens. It is the act of creation, of playing God with mini paper creatures, which makes origami so attractive.

Folding paper is a natural instinct in people; think of children making paper boats and hats and students rolling cigarettes and sweet papers.
It proves difficult for me, however: ‘Do people swear when they’re doing origami?’ I ask, frustrated. It’s not looking pretty. Soon my paper has become a heap of quivering shapes. It does not, by any stretch of the imagination, look like a butterfly. I think I’ll stick to writing; folding paper is too much like hard work.

http://www.cherwell.org/cherwell/content/view/7449/118/

Heidelberg

2008-05-31T15:21:00.000-07:00

This is a weird town, the buildings are stumpy and painted with candyfloss colours. In the night we hear bangings, yelling and creaking.Yet it is beautiful: thick green sheen on the river, towering green mountainside, pretty coloured houses and minaret- spires on the churches. The castle is very German, with big sculpted lions and unicorns and a giant barrel for storing wine. Our apartment is painted yellow. Sometimes it feels like we've walked into the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, but I think that’s just paranoia.