74" in a cold riot

Nothing solid
is made out of wood
any more,
The heart of it
is sandwiched pulp,
Shavings, glue,

Pressed cardboard,

The planed edges
Curling like veneers
over long teeth,
horns...

Peeling. Yellow. Clipped.

For all that,
it seemed quite flawless,
Hunkered down,
On all Fours
in the 2nd hand shop.

A good price.

A steal.

"Just how do you intend
to get it home ?"
the woman asked,
my £10 note
Crisply disappearing.

I stared at the casters.

"We'll wheel it there,"
I said.
"Up around the corner."

"You can't do that.
The wheels will break."

Pencilled eyebrows 
Darting, lightly drawn,
Scribbled

"On the pavement."

"Well..." I said.
A little unconvinced.

We upended it onto the
Trolley, finally.

My wife waved as she
Lit out ahead
with the baby stroller.

Boxing clever.

I was scarcely out the
door when it listed,
Crashed,
Wounded itself at
my feet.

"Watch out !"
the woman winced.
Two steps right
behind me.

I wrestled it upright,
Made it over the kerb,
before it slid off again.

Hal Roach's music box.
in and out a clinch.

I caught up with my 
wife, my son, 
Snatched it off the
trolley and onto the 
Stretcher.
 
"It's no use," I grimaced.
"All advice is lethal."
 
We returned the trolley.
Trundled it home
Without further incident.
Up two flights of stairs 

To convalesce by the sofa,
 
Cracked. Scarred. 
Mean black toes intact,
but bruised. Jack Johnson

On coiled uppers.

Penultimately, quite

                           A'right.




▼ MILES DAVIS: RIGHT OFF from "A Tribute to Jack Johnson" LP 
(Columbia) 1971 (US)

revolution .000

The revolution is not so much on pause, as riven by incertitude.

The click track - you may have observed - has fallen foul of synchronization: Stalling; Steiner, and Bradley. As unreliable as Ukrainian trains. Between Kiev and October.

Burrowing under creaking autonomous sod. Moles. Metro gnomes. Travelling in fits and starts; co-opted SMPTE time.

1/4; 1/8; 1/16.

Incremental decrepitude.

A tree leaning into the broken tooth of a circular saw, filmed for posterity in crackling stop motion.

June 1883. The Chautauquan.

"Sound is the sensation excited in the ear when the air or other medium is set in motion."

Naked science.

An old African proverb tackles the nature of suddenly uprooted trees with telling prescience:

"Do not look where you fell, but where you slipped."

By extension, keep one foot in front of the other. And don't forget to tie your shoelaces. When not dancing barefoot; or broadcasting 'Radio Ethiopia' before a lolling wave.

Lumberjacking; sawdust traumas; pissing in the river in a force nine gale.

Of course. Mixing metaphors is similarly as perilous, mixing metaphors while mixing one's drinks - injecting intravenously - an ill-advised taboo.

It was not Bill Burroughs who remarked "If we can hit that bullseye then the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards..." but Zapp Brannigan.

Zip gun boogie. Billy West. East. North and South.

"Checkmate". I digress.

The revolution is not so much on pause, as low on ammunition.

One month blurs into another as camel charges in Cairo's Tahir Square give way to rocket salvos over Bin Jawwad; the waters recede in Fukushima to expose fuel rods in meltdown.

Cesium-137. Iodine-121.

Tsunamis. Turbulence in Syria.

A changing of the guard on the road to Damascus.

Four horsemen on overtime. Double time. A plague of Sundays.

Somewhere between one month and the next, the bleachers fell into disrepair. The fiddles went quiet.

The ferryman sailed by, empty-handed. Lantern-jawed. Granite sprung.

The emails gathering one on top of the other like so many dessicated leaves.

Well. I have lost the will to rake the ashes. I began one post and could not see an end to it. The music is of saws and knives. Scraping knotted bone.

Paul of Tarsus can keep his fine opinions to himself.

hypnotizesomeoneforbeginners

My wife seized the wheel
of the skillet,
I took the stool and nursed
a glass of wine.

" You like risotto ?"
she asked.

"I don't mind paella,"
I said.

"It's the same thing, without
the seafood," she went on.

I took a sip.

"Well. I don't care for
anything with peas throught it."

"That's right," she said,
"you like plain rice."

"I like that red and white shit
Better," I allowed,
Admiring the mushrooms as they
Snuffled around the pan.

Noses. Brown leather buttons.

"Yes." she smirked. "And saffron.
Nothing but the best."

I sat a while. Considered this.

Rolled the grape,
Round and round.

"Well. I hope to get a taste again.
Before I kick the bucket."

The mushrooms sizzled.
The baby hiccuped.





It did not seem to go down well.

said the ticktockman

>  who are the brain police ? <

"When I was a little kid, and I was going to East High in Cleveland - my dad had died in '49, and my mom and I were living there - I cut school one morning and I went to, I think it was Halle Brothers, down in the public terminal, the Cleveland Terminal Tower. And John Steinbeck was on tour, and he was speaking... and I couldn't get through the crowd... 
it was deep... 

Because there stood John Steinbeck, who was an ex-prizefighter - I mean, he looked like a fire plug! He was a tough guy. He worked like I had worked! I had ridden on boxcars, worked on demolition teams, and driving truck, and crops, and all that shit. But I was a little skinny squirt of a thing."

A failing Harlan Ellison muses on the nature of epiphany - sometime during the 1950s, underneath the observation deck of the watchtower - in a 90 minute interview from his California home, September 2010.

As I remarked, in a reply to a comment in an earlier post:

The smoke has always been as much out as in the bottle. Too much volatility. The cork won't settle.

"The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones..."

- Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience" (1849) as reprinted in the preface to "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman", 'Galaxy' magazine, winner of the Nebula Award, Best Short Story, 1965.

"...the end will take care of itself."

- Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman", 1965.


This reading, reissued on The Harlan Ellison Recording Collection, in 1981, is long out of print. Paired with a reading of "Shatterday", written in 1975, both sides to the original Alternative World Recordings imprint - AWR 6922 - can be sourced on Digital Meltd0wn.

▼ HARLAN ELLISON: REPENT, HARLEQUIN! SAID THE TICKTOCKMAN from "Harlan! Harlan Ellison Reads Harlan Ellison" LP (Alternative World Recordings) 1976 (US)

MORE HARLAN ELLISON ON ISLETS OF LANGERHANS

the mouse barks, the caravan passes

Or. Tracking the ongoing ballad of a part time rating agency assistant.



"Köpek ürür, kervan yürür." In Turkish.

"ha kla-vim novchim, v'ha-shayarah o-veret." In Hebrew.

"Wot ? Wot ? Wot ?" Nathan NØ.



Have mouse, will travel.

"But what has been entrusted to one's care one does not laugh at; to do so would be a breach of duty; the utmost spite that the most spiteful amongst us can vent on Josephine is when they sometimes say: 'When we see Josephine it is no laughing matter."

- Kafka, "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk", published 1924.



Let me begin by explaining, yet again, my protracted absence from the bleachers. This time around, it has less to do with those recently accumulated factors in stress - a birth; moving home; a death in the family - than a spurious addiction. My voluntary exposure to WOT in the course of the past two weeks has brought me out in rash. A belt of welts. From collar to cuff.

The Web of Trust did not impose itself. I actively sought it out.

A hive activity governed by Bayesian inference; or rejection of hypothesis based on the posterior probability.

Confused ? Well. I am too.

The Web of Trust is nothing remotely approaching a secret order. On the contrary, WOT currently has two million registered users as of January, 2011, and an online participating community estimated in the region of 17, 000, 000.

That adds up to a lot of contributing fingers.

A tad more than those swords employed by the Knights Templar.

"Browsing the Web with the Web of Trust extension gives a completely different sense of security. Instead of browsing alone, you have millions of people helping point out what sites are trustworthy, are safe for your children, and respect your privacy. No matter how you use the Web, Web of Trust is an essential tool to browse safely in today's sometimes uncertain environment."

Indeed.

That is the central premise.

The reality underpinning the notion of trust is a good deal more impenetrable. Perception is just that, if one goes no farther than blind faith in those coloured ratings returned in one's browser. Or the default splash warning.

From WOT Wiki:

"Users are rewarded activity points for rating websites and writing comments. All users have an activity score, which is visible on the add-on's rating window and the profile page for registered users."

For every rookie there is a platinum plated wannabe. The popular misconception is that level 'ranking' somehow equates with rating reliability. This is not the case.

"The rating reliability is a computed estimate based upon demonstrated talent and ability, aka: merit."

Deduce from this that a rater with a higher reliability carries more weight in his or her ratings, that the resulting evaluation is that much harder for any casual rater to overturn. WOT is not so much democratic, as a firm proponent of meritocracy. This is valid, when one considers that an especially active participant might not necessarily be driven by egalitarian motives; but, on the contrary, might be galvanised by personal agenda.

Or grudge.

In fact, it has been the case - in my short spell as active participant on WOT forums - that I have witnessed factions fighting up and down the flanks when opinion has been polarized. And rational debate disintegrates into something far more partisan.

A rain of neckties all along the lonesome trail.

This was never more so than in one particular instance where the submitting party to a graphic design site was publicly dissected on the grounds of the domain proprietor's alleged association with Scientology. This, in spite of there being no trace of evidence that said site espoused values demonstrably sympathetic to L. Ron Hubbard's 'spiritual' auditing.

"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party ?"

No flying saucers. But enough light sabre rattling to implicate Tony Manero in a rhumba with Darth Maul.

In these trying circumstances, the forums run red and green in turn where the high ground is pursued.

Unsecured. Fought to a bloody stalemate.

And yet. Through it all runs a thread of prevailing sanity, even though rating reliability remains undisclosed. Guessed at. Whispered.

"...reliability estimates aren't public to make gaming the system more difficult and to encourage everyone to rate honestly. Also, even though the estimates are automated and perfectly objective, I'm sure some users would take them personally and publishing them would create all kinds of unwanted friction in the community. I don't think anyone wants that."
- Sami 18 January, 2010

Often, the process employed to arrive at an equitable rating is painstaking. And quite transparent to anybody following a submitted topic. It involves more than just a rudimentary grasp of any single technical process: virus checking; the routine examination of PTR records to resolve IP addresses into hostnames; the exposure of malicious redirects.

The whole nine yards.

A closer inspection of any one unravelling thread more often as not reveals something approaching forensic science. All of this conducted by volunteers.

In the space of two short weeks, and some 200 posts - typically 'comments' in blogging parlance - I have observed quite severe threats exposed and rated accordingly. Activities ranging from blatant Phising scams to deeply unethical corporate practices. And this is one area where WOT collectively excels.

The reasons for my initially coming into contact with the WOT community are fairly pedestrian and well enough documented in a previous post. The impact of a negative rating cannot be underestimated. Equally, not nearly enough consideration is given to the various motivations which govern a rating. The community, in common with any community, is populated by disparate individuals harbouring equally disparate ideals.

Not everyone can be trusted.

Still. One of the fundamentals I have taken from this is how readily privacy is overlooked. Less, protected.

Many bloggers originating on blogspot.com, or a wordpress equivalent, do so because the platform eliminates the necessity to understand CSS and HTML; to design - or commission the design of - a website from the ground up.

As a result, many bloggers appropriate code from third party sources with no acute sense of how that code impacts on privacy. I am no less typical in this regard.

The most innoccuous byproduct of this behaviour is the inadvertent setting of cookies.

Given that many bloggers employ some form of traffic monitoring as a means of assessing their site's popularity - Google Analytics, Statcounter, etc - setting cookies is a prerequisite. The information gathered includes IP addresses, browser details, timestamps and referring pages. This is the primary function of traffic analysis.

Since the majority of bloggers operate non commercial sites, and are therefore not legally obliged to carry a Privacy Policy, the temptation is to absolve oneself of all responsibility to inform as to how that information is handled.

Consider this.

In 2010, Quantcast settled out of court to the tune of $2.4 Million after UC Berkeley published findings disclosing that it knowingly employed 'zombie' cookies in to gather Personally Identifiable Information in a"pattern of covert online surveillance".

Quantcast advertises itself thusly:

"... a new breed of measurement service helping buyers and sellers quantify the characteristics of digital audiences against which they can activate addressable advertising solutions."

A commercially optimised form of traffic analysis, in other words.

Wikipedia asserts that:

"...the Quantcast code causes the user's browser to access Quantcast's servers, at which time they can log the user's IP address and information Quantcast places in cookies that are stored in the user's browser. The cookies significantly aid in making inferences. Quantcast also provides affinities revealing other popular sites that the average viewer browses. This is possible by tracking "referrer" information that is normally included as part of every HTTP request made by the user's browser."

The terminology - 'zombie' cookies - is deliberately pitched for maximum effect. The reality is that flash cookies - Local Shared Objects, as utilized through all versions of Adobe Flash Player - share the characteristic to surreptitiously 'respawn' after user deletion. In short, the facility to be deployed as Spyware.

I have come across several blog sites which utilize Quantcast to monitor traffic. Feedjit, likewise, employs an LSO.

To date, MTV, ESPN, MySpace, Hulu, ABC, NBC and Scribd have all appeared before a federal court in the US on Quantcast related charges. Ustream, SodaHead, Warner Bros. have faced similar charges, in utilizing a Clearspring Technologies widget to clandestinely monitor children's online activities.

And. Lest we forget, let's hear it too for good old uncle Walt.

It's heartening to know one's kids are in safe hands.

Postscript:

My brief time as a participating member on these forums should in no way be regarded as an attempt to infiltrate, or deliver the skinny. We are not riding with Angels here - not even the Finnish Chapter - and while I have witnessed prescriptions for Snake Oil change hands along the trail, I am nobody's Doctor. 

Besides. I don't have the stamina to stay upright in the saddle for the long haul. 

My loitering on the forums, I suspect, has been more tolerated than embraced. That is the way of it with these clubs. The one percenters. If one wants to don the patch, one has to put in the miles. Prepare to get a little bloodied. I have met some interesting characters along the way, a handful of especially righteous members. I started out kicking against the pricks. I end it now without grudge. 

A little respect is overdue. Retrospectively. I have intentionally picked out those last few words in bold; for those with tired eyes.

bounce and rhyme

"Bounce and Rhyme,"
the handbill reads,
"FREE for
Babies under Three!"


So we bring ours.


We arrive at the library
ten minutes late,
The Reading Room
filled with noise,
Cleared of books,
Smoke,
An ocean of mothers
cross legged
on turquoise carpet,
Gurgling parcels
Dangled in velour lap.


Thank god, I am not
the only man in here.


There is one. Two.
I am possibly the oldest.
But freshly shaved.


We double park
the buggy under a
Frieze
of grazing elephants,
and waste no time
in squatting down,


"Wind! the Bobbin in..."


a guerilla battalion of
Mothers
well versed, armed
to the teeth,
with loaded gesture.


"Pull, Pull, Clap, Clap."


The rhymes are more
or less
Uncharted territory,
Forgotten,
I might have been
Schooled
in another country, a
Dialect modelled on
Quite the wrong note.


Our son leers up off my
knee with hobbled
optimism as we busk it,
grumbling,
Mincing over intricate
patterns,
Drawn in the air,
an orchestrated handclap
or two
to startle
an eye gone over to sleep.


What's that ?
he might be thinking,
You stitched
me up,
What happened to those
scratches
of Sesame Street we've
been busy rehearsing ?
The Count.
The modal jazz.


It's not my fault, kid,
I covertly sign,
We have to work with
what we've got,
a clouded palette,
Don't hold it against
me,
there's still a chance
we may
make it through.


"Wind! the Bobbin up..."


His mouth turned down.


And looks straight through
me, teary, crestfallen,
Lets go loudly in
his new corduroy suit.

ensenada drive, woodland hills, 1969

The piano may not have been drinking, but I have; to a civilized degree. Purloined from the original German, here; the root and trace of it seeded from a sugarmegs microdot of a torrent sown, originally, in 2006. With supporting observations from John French.

A roll of the dime. As invited within the offices of the good doctor, Faust.

A sequence of eight annoted short pieces, recorded somewhere between the onset of winter, 1968 and the spring of 1969, none of it features on the official "Grow Fins" compilation of outakes from those Trout Mask Replica Sessions. I learned of the captain's passing, first, in a report from Casa Nada, sometime in Sacramento.

01-Untitled Piano Song (1:33)
02-Untitled Piano Instrumental #1 (1:53)
03-A Lot Of Money For You, A Lot Of Money For Me-Untitled Piano Instrumental #2 (1:19)
04-Short Whistling (0:10)
05-Untitled Piano Instrumental #3 (2:04)
06-Why Can't We Be Free? (0:50)
07-Untitled Piano Instrumental #4 (0:58)
08-Untitled Piano Instrumental #5 (0:31)


▼ DON VAN VLIET: THE BEEFHEART PIANO TAPE (OR, THE TROUTWOOD NOT TELL ME WHERE THE SUSHI'S HID / SUNDAY EVENING) Original Reel > PC Wav > FLAC > MP3 (Bootleg) 1968/9 (US)

a dose of vitamin e [reduced]

Gustave Doré, 1886. 


In a good mood, then, I leave my wife dawdling over the pram in the more sanitary side of town and duck into the supermarket.

Our sage bag of tricks has piled on one and a half lbs in the course of one spare week. Something less by metric alchemy.

I do not find what I am looking for. 

"DOYOUDOSUSHI?" I enquire. Karaoke out a Can. Barry Sheen, after a stroke.

We kick-start the pram and travel in caravan to the park at the top of the road. By the time we get there I could eat a horse. As it is, we prowl around in search of a dry bench and fall upon the sushi. Devouring every shard.

It is all right. 

I do not care for George Osbourne. I do not like him at all. An 18th century engraving of a man divested of powdered wig and rouge. Ankle breeches. Buckled shoe.

Give his coalition seven more months, and there will be a poor house back on every corner. Jacobins swinging in Tyburn.

We take a meandering route back home past vast Georgian houses hugging avenue and circus, a puzzle of lanes. This part of this city I am largely unfamiliar with. An adjunct to its commercial heart. Among the nursing homes and divided lets, an odour of squandered wealth persists, blackmail, sculduddery; under quarried flagstone and vans deploying fibre to the curb; out of rockery and reclaimed wind. 

When Gilmour's charge did dandle, Parliament Street did blush;
Should Lutyens' stone be littled, with swords brought forth be hushed.

We open the door on mail forwarded from our old place.

A solicitor's letter on behalf of the utility company demanding £154 on top of all we fed in to its niggardly prepayment meter in the course of this year past.

This, despite a credit carried over in that last quarter of some £56. Plus a £20 late payment surcharge; £30 court fees; £50 solicitors costs. Oh, and £1.14 statutory interest.

Just one more reason we are forever in debt. 


▼ THE FALL: I AM DAMO SUZUKI from "This Nation's Saving Grace" LP (Beggars Banquet) 1985 (UK)

triage

Christmas Trees
have taken over our
Pavements,
Creeping out under
cover of
Darkness,
Flood Warnings,
Dragged out out of 
bed to sober 
Up,
unwanted guests.


By morning they have
Succumbed to frostbite.
Shedding
needles like so many
Fingers. Toes.


Walking back
from the brink of
Shrivelling,
we step behind a
Dislocated limb,
allow a woman to
move past us,
Uninterrupted.


Thanks, she yawns,
Her breath a
Fog. Steaming like
Warm breakfasts.
Tea. Toast.


We nod and pretend
to examine the tree,
Stooping
like Undertakers on
The Job,
Measuring a corpse
left out in the rain.

1010011010:~$sudo su

There was a time when all was word,
from font of crackling spindle
Searing Moses ear,
to Albert James Freed on the AM dial.

Before that too, the coiled copper wire
of the fallen, whispering for Adam.
Serpents. Rose seeds.
Unplumbed wormholes in the garden.

The nature of the word is virus.
Binary. Hyperlinked. Self-replicating.
It will not rest, in cave nor cache,
what began as babble is storm, torrent.

philip kindred got it nailed, the sepsis.
Dancing round hospital in wheelchair.
Denounced as hack, hacked in turn,
Warding off infection with icthys palm.

What began with an apple
Scrolled on the Mainframe, vavvavvav,
Scripted on the backs of eyelids,
Blessed, archived, embedded in host.

The voracious appetite to overwrite, 1.1

all out to fink, inc.

..."La Fleur De Barbe" is not among those eight recordings of Dubuffet's reissued by İlhan Mimaroğlu on "Musical Experiences" (Finnadar SR 9002). Certainly, it hails from those original pieces recorded by Dubuffet - in collaboration with Danish painter and ally, Asger Jorn - between December, 1960 and March, 1961; twenty issued on six 10" LPs, with perhaps eleven additional pieces on a farther four 10" vinyls, each in a limited pressing of 50 copies individually numbered and signed by the artist. 

"The first tape produced in these circumstances is rather unusual as it is a poem, La fleur de barbe, which is declaimed, chanted and vaguely sung by several voices mixed together (which are all in fact mine) with occasional instrumental accompaniment."

OUT OF PRINT SOURCE: THUNDERPERFECTMIND

▼ JEAN DUBUFFET: LA FLEUR DE BARBE from "Experiences Musicales" 6 x 10" LP (Unknown Label) 1961 (France / Italy)

all out of ink, inc.

"Bowery Bum (May 1964) is the piece that occasioned my association with Dubuffet and opened the way to my discovery of his own extraordinary music (of which I eventually made a first commercial edition on Finnadar SR 9002). The visual impetus of the Dubuffet drawing, one of his Bowery Bums, suggested the form, the content, and even the sound source - the sound of a sole rubber band used as a counterpart to the India ink of the drawing. The outer formal character of the piece corresponds to that of the drawing - a seemingly random maze of lines through which appears a human figure, pathetic and droll."

- İlhan Mimaroğlu, sleevenotes:
"Face The Windmills, Turn Left" (Finnadar SR 9012).


The trail which led - for me - ultimately to İlhan Mimaroğlu begins with a stark one colour caricature of Mingus by Greg Condon. "Changes One" and "Two" - recorded in NYC in December, 1974, with Don Pullen on piano; George Adams on tenor sax; Jack Walruth on the horn - are variously celebrated as a high, or derided as elevator music climbing only so far as a wedding planner schmoozing in the honeymoon suite of an uptown hotel. The last position is thoroughly strange when one considers that much of the content from these two sessions was informed by the Attica Prison Riots of 1971, mitigated only marginally by allowing that both albums were produced by Turkish electronic avant-gardist, İlhan Mimaroğlu.

For some, the blame lies not with the featured composition or performance, but the veneer and polish of the final Atlantic release. In short, those essential qualities Mimaroğlu brings to bear in consenting to channel the muscular Mingus at the top of his game.

Born in Istanbul in 1926 and educated at Lycée of Galatasaray, Mimaroğlu "studied in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Center under Vladimir Ussachevsky" after his move to the US in the 60s. In 1971 he collaborated with Freddie Hubbard on the critically acclaimed "Sing Me a Song of Songmy: a Fantasy for Electromagnetic Tape". For his part, Mimaroğlu was rewarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. One assumes Mingus was himself impressed; there is no record that the decision to draft Mimaroğlu into service on "One" and "Two" was anything bar consensual.

Beginning in earnest in 1964 - with "Bowery Bum" (after an ink drawing by Jean Dubuffet, executed 12 years earlier) - Mimaroğlu's experimental compositions are simultaneously linear; collaged; perplexing. Founding the Finnadar label in 1973 as a conduit for both acoustic arrangements and his continuing experiments in stereo and quadraphonic sound, Atlantic bought over distribution of his back catalogue in 1981.

"Musique Noires", released in 1983, compiles - so far as I can gather - earlier "tape parts realized in the studios of Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center" overdubbed with traditional instrumentation and voice. In the following instance, with cello by Charles McCracken.

There. I just thought I'd hurl out a curved ball.



▼ İLHAN MIMAROĞLU: BOWERY BUM from "Face The Windmills, Turn Left" LP (Finnadar) 1976 (US)
▼ İLHAN MIMAROĞLU: STILL LIFE 1980 from "Musique Noires" LP (Finnadar) 1983 (US)

AVANT GARDE PROJECT 30

behind the nib of sleep

This post has been amended, pending investigation into possible po-facedness.

Sleep. No, not the recumbent John Giorno from Warhol's 321 minute anti-film - premiering to nine people in total in a Manhattan loft on January 17th, 1964, two of whom fled within its first hour - but the absence of it. The dessication of self as bodily fluids coagulate. And major organs fail.

Tim Sullivan got me started thinking on it in an afterthought to his piece on horses; horseshit; bridles and bits. A trail of "secret creepo rays beaming out from Disneyland". This is not an attempt to distil his original meditation. More precisely, it was not so much sleep deprivation which was mentioned, as insight. Looming up through a tangible fog on wings which beat and dazzle. I sat down to brood over it, got up to pour a cup of instant coffee, and realized one cigarette was not about to get me through the night. My wife offered to set out for the shop, but I could not allow it.

Of the two of us, she has had less sleep by far. Her breasts are tender, her nipples chafed from our child's feeding, the whites of her eyes veined like cracked porcelain. Besides, it was I who made it first to the end of the pack.

I put on my shoes and walked up the street to the shop on the corner with my older son. Really, the shoes are no use at all in this weather. The snow melted some time between Christmas and the approach of a new year, but it has been raining constantly - a freezing drizzle - and the pavements are carpeted with municipal grit. A poor man's salt of the earth. And the road we must cross rises quite steeply, steeply enough that I have seen rivers washing over it. And the green light over the shop's canopy dispelling any kind of welcome as we near it. As dismal, maybe, as the bar in Venice Beach. Its proprietor seemingly despising all who purchase tobacco products or alcohol.

Glasgow is littered with this type of convenience store. Jaundiced shopkeepers irrately dispensing forbidden fruits to the infidel. And his children. In the event that we all succumb to a sudden rash of cancer, there is an alcohol dependency unit situated conveniently nearby; just to keep the cash register chirping.

So. I bought the cigarettes, my son paid for a bottle of chocolate milk, and we trudged back home to pick up where we left off.

Back to sleep, then. Or the rationing out of it through these lean times.

It is not a taxable commodity, I don't believe. Not yet. The rising tide of the clinically depressed may yet tip the scales in favour of a referendum on it, even chronic alcoholics habitually embrace it. Junkies, of course, are perpetually on the nod. And when the urge to hit at the keys is on the wane, I even put my monitor to bed.

It is an untapped market of huge potential. Only the FTSE never sleeps, now the tiger is awake.

Well. There is no Bill's Bar to bring one's woes to.

Even the best of them will chew you up and spit you out just as soon as the eyelids flutter; the fingers grope for pennies to shield the retina from the cold soaking glare. I cannot pretend to have amassed an ounce of advice worth a button. Not that anyone is asking. There is no respite. That's the truth of it. The soft tissues brittle over like crystallized syrup; the arteries harden and the blood becomes like ice. A redundant muscle with too much heavy traffic wheezing in and out.

The biggest sleep we've all been chasing.

Leaning in to it like skittles, squandering the passing of days as we suck it in and shit it out. Contorted monkies, finally, racing to the finish.

I forgot to mention.

An advertisment dropped through my letterbox today. Four figures in washed out black, the ink laid on sparingly as a mafioso's kiss, and not - as you have every right to second guess - the four horsemen of the apocalypse. "SINGING RESERVOIR DOGS WANTED" - looking just like the Walker Brothers, what are the odds ?

"FOR 1950s DOO WOP GROUP. WILL BE EXPECTED TO BUSK IN TOWN, SO AS TO LEARN TO ENTERTAIN FROM THE GROUND UP." No specific reference to burial, or promise of resurrection, but the allusion to it nonetheless. "YOU WILL RECEIVE AN EQUAL SHARE OF THE MONEY AND I WILL PAY EACH OF YOU £10 ON TOP OF THAT."

I could be tempted.


image by Pablo, 1933.

A nod, too, to Nathan Nothin's procurement of jam and "Jerusalem" as the veneer of democracy starts to fade, and to jonderneathica for supplying an invitation to the quietus.

▼ SLEEP: EVIL GYPSY / SOLOMON'S THEME from "Sleep's Holy Mountain" CD (Earache) 1992 (US)

fingers in the pies

Antonio Prohías, 1961.



"A Ha to Doctor Johnson
Said Scipio Africanus
Lift up my Roman Petticoat
and kiss my *@!$! Anus"

- William Blake, Complete.



The following (quoted) piece first appeared the day preceding Hogmanay; under a different badge. I promptly reset it to draft, given my alarmism seemed a tad overblown.

In hindsight, I'm not so sure.

There exists a spate of reports out there documenting persons being locked out of their Google or Facebook accounts. Contact lists violated; emails circulating in the wild. The repercussions, when one pauses to reflect on it, are potentially grave enough to raise a code red. After months of plunging into the surf without a seatbelt, internet security is very much back on my agenda.

Legitimate concerns after the careless activation of a Java Applet.

Not content, then, on promoting catalepsy with my waxing lyrical on parenthood, I reinstate it now as a means of further cudgeling the casual wanderer onto the Bleachers. Or to merely propogate unwarranted dread.



"A curious thing happened on the way to the forum, today, to paraphrase Zero Mostel as Pseudolus.

Or Frankie Howerd. Chose your poison.

I was sitting in front of my portal to the world with the sound turned way down low and my browser open. My fly zippered. Out of sheer laziness, I left the tab logged into my Google account. Staring absentmindedly at the baby in my lap; daydreaming myself into a coma.

Well. An hour or two might have idled by. I did not notice whether the monitor drifted off to sleep. The grey afternoon licking at the window petered into twilight; the lamps up and down the close across the street stuttered awake like drunken fireflies. I could have leaned out to start a cigarette. I could have leaned out to start an argument, but nobody was listening.

I am still getting used to the change of water. A different sort of fishbowl entirely. If I ever move again it will be to a croft parked on the edge of a sheer cliff - a broken lighthouse - with nothing but glowering skies between me and the sea.

So. Mildly irrated at this slipping into genteel dotage without so much as a properly diagnosed seizure, I sidled my son into the crook of one arm and lunged at the keyboard for a timely interruption. I punched the volume up as far as it would go. And that's when I heard it. That's when I became aware of some kind of terrible intrusion.

At first I was tempted to dismiss it as a bad rip.

A sloppy stab at binary encoding.

I quit the file and the sound persisted. Keystrokes. F@ckin' keystrokes. Jamming away like a trio of ambidextrous Ukranian crooks. Or the Yellow Magic Orchestra.

Dear lord.

Now, I am not so quick as to dismiss myself as wholly cretinous when it comes to desktop security. I have a modest grasp of the internet; those pitfalls to avoid. I laid my son in his crib and opened up my system preferences, navigated to sharing. Firewall on ? Check. No exceptions ? Check. Internet sharing off ? Check. Back to security. A cursory search to make sure passwords are enabled, then on to accounts.

The devious hacking of remote keys upped a gear and appeared to be reaching its crescendo.

I logged out of everything I could - force quit what I couldn't - restarted and ran a standard Symantec test for vulnerable ports; everything clean and stealthy. The keystroke noise, of course, had disippated. I logged into my router's firewall and closed down anything which did not seem essential. I did this, and I did that. Oh, yeah. So what.

Last, but by no means least, I logged back in to my Google account, changed the password, deleted an obsolete default email address, and made sure port forwarding was not enabled. Everything appeared to be as it should, bar the one lamentable oversight, which lay with the integrity of the original password itself, perhaps. A glaring error. Possibly.

Like Mr. Kurtz, at the atrophied epicentre of his heart of darkness, I have gotten lazy. Prone to infection and possession.

Like Marlon Brando in his precarious temple, I have gotten fat and routinely neglectful; complacent in the face of complexities. But not an inch too paranoid.

Apocalypse now ? Last tango in Partick, motherf@ckers."



postscript:

I habitually monitor downloads with Clam Xav; a freeware program. I monitor, too, inbound and outbound connections via the indispensable Little Snitch. As an added precaution, I installed Sophos Home Edition and scanned the entire volume for evidence of Trojans or Worms; in particular any DNS Changer which might have embedded itself somewhere in the directory. Nada. I also ran a subsequent fully authorised scan through a separate program to check for any Malware Sophos might have missed; specifically Keystroke Loggers. Nothing. Theories ? Spurious observations or informed conjecture ? Hit me with it. I'm all ears. Let me begin the new year with cigarette burns peppering the hood on my sweatshirt; a glass tumbler to bottle up the smoke.

the wrestler

Of all those odd jumbles of vowels
my son brings with him to the world -
the gurgles; yelps; indian war whoops -
broken consonants, riddles, squawks,
the strangest by far is that piercing
screech; a squeal of brakes on a
dodge scraping the corner, hubcap
flapping, all this accompanied by tiny
fists flung out over each shoulder,
as he comes to in his crib, half drunk
on milk, one expression after another,
mouth yawning; lips smacking in
a perfect 'o'; forehead furrowed with
all that effort required just to break
wind, squeeze out a fart: a pistol shot.

It is an undecipherable conundrum.

The letting go of past lives, the
slipping of an old soul into a new shoe.
The lacing and interlacing of self,
eyelash and fingernail, an epic struggle.

There was a free thinker named Boehme,
much admired by the engraver, Blake.

"Man must be at war with himself,"
he wrote, "fighting must be the watch
word, not with tongue and sword,
but with mind and spirit, and not to
give over."

Peaceful soldier. Wrestling with tigers.



image from the comic book,
"Fiasco Bombasco", by Ive Sorocuk.

know your conjurer

To those of you who looked no farther than the sacrificial goat, you left the feast empty bellied; to those of you who asked no more from pablo's danseurs than a festive showing, you missed a merry treat.

Squatters on the Bleachers - and there are a few - will be aware by now of my fixation on the astral unravellings of one Daevid Allen; the dark archipelago where hippie collided with punk in those eruptions from Planet Gong. The liaison was fittingly brief. It culminated with a startled Dingbat Alien fleeing passing searchlights - luminous burning spearings - to seek refuge in the bush; it ended with Mark Perry's ATV hijacking a free bus in the Here and Now.

In much the same anarchic spirit, Dave Sez of Know Your Conjurer - aided and abetted by pinkpressthreat - wassailed the house to alert me to a Megapost on some very hard to unearth gems from the band first formed in Ladbroke Grove in 1974. Never once in print jams and unreconstituted vinyl rips. Soundboard Recordings. What began as one man's labour of love seems to have escalated into something more deeply collaborative.

From who ? Where ?

Know Your Conjurer. From Pablo to Bosch. * * e d o * *.

This unforseen doffing of the - conical - cap took far longer to orchestrate than anticipated. A two fingered jab at the keys, and my dashing off to shake a knitted monkey over the crib. Lest I forget, I would like to say a brief hello to baby Cal, too, who entered the world to share his birthday with Stacia of Hawkwind just three short evenings ago. Glad tidings.

Three weeks on the heels of my own impossibly small son; Milo, the Sagittarian. Registered, at last, today.

Know your conjurer.

no reasön

Recorded in Escape Studios, Kent, 1977; produced by Speedy "Thunderclap" Keen(e).

Written by Ian Kilminster.

▼ MOTÖRHEAD: MOTÖRHEAD from "Motörhead" LP (Chiswick) 1977 (UK)

pablo dillinger, on registering a birth

A knife. A fork.

And the forceps not so small,
nothing remotely tidy,
or encircling in pentameter.

Two feet and a long syllable;
drawn out, redly yawning.

The cerci of an earwig.

This is not what immediately
occurred to me, or even after
the fact. The blood still
drying on my hams. The wailing.

And the young doctor's face:
contorted with the exertion
required to change a tire.
A 4x4. Something heavy hurtling.

I did not think to thank her until
much later, back in the corridor
between soda machine and bins.
Fearing the worst and hindsight.

A knife. A fork.

Not to spell apple, but application.
Raw, dispassionate intervening force.

I do not remember if I did - thank
her - at this late stage. Not formally.

A smile. A nod. That is properly
the size of it; wan, if not quite
hostile. The fleeting discomfit of a
husband discharged. Discarding
gown and overshoes in sanitary
fashion. Dishevelled. Irritable.

And yet. I threw my arms around
the midwife while they weighed
my son, thankfully she did not
think to escape. Imagine the
effrontery. The potential for sheer
awkwardness; "you crazy fool !"
my wife chiding, from the stirrups.

A knife. A fork.

And the forceps not so small,
but my son a rosy bundle,
scalded and petulant; mewling.



illustration from Picasso's "pichet tête"
(1953); partial glaze on white ceramic.

three minutes to three, december 6th

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The encroaching murmur of sleigh bells.

The due date came and went as the ice fastened and snow drifted. On our trip to the bus stop for what was officially our last antenatal appointment, all that was missing was the donkey. Magi. Three wise men overtaking us by taxi.

The wait was crippling. Or seemed so, as Scorpio fell under the centaur's arrow. And the great goat Pan up to his midriff in dirty slush; spotting by his elbow.

Whittled by uncertainty, all semblance of resolution gone in a puff of smoke, I found myself slyly coveting a random assortment of 70cl bottles on supermarket shelves. Impervious to cajoling, not one absconded in my basket. Fairweather friends. Down to the grain.

The scales stalled at tipping point. Worse, the scales sat empty.

A pregnant pause. A timing of contractions.

Well. Something had to give. The bump was having none of it, the hospital did not want to know.

"Keep an eye on those contractions, you'll know soon enough," the midwife on the line pronounced. She might easily have been an imposter. A mental patient stopping by the desk to pick up the phone.

A falsetto brute with pharmaceutically doctored balls.

Another Saturday came and went. Blanched under two feet of snow. And the madman downstairs, stamping his feet at one AM; belting out "The Sash my Father Wore". I wanted to burst him good, the unenlightened orange balloon.

I took to eavesdropping on Holy Warbles. I was too unnerved by then to even leave a comment. The Holly and the Ivy.

Pascal Comelade is a Frenchman by birth. A Catalonian by calling.

On Sunday afternoon, I was dipping into his Haikus. I pulled out "Put a Straw Under Baby" and cranked up the volume on the PC's wheezing internal speakers. So far as I was able. This apple is so elderly, it ought to have fermented into cider. Acid green and volatile. I have wanted to euthanize my disagreeable neighbour under King Tubby's dubby boom for some weeks now, but our living room echoes like the chilly wooden benches of a Siberian train station, and I have not had the heart to hard wire the woofers out of their box. The patience.

We are in limbo.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," my wife cried out. "My waters have broken! Get me up before I ruin the couch."

On arrival at the hospital she was five centimetres dilated. By 8PM, she was fully dilated and the midwives were convinced she would breathe our baby out by suppertime. Debbie and Lauren. I warmed to them almost immediately.

In my limited experience, midwives are a grounded lot. Where consultants - even nurses - routinely grate or inflame, midwives are the exception. Of course, we had time enough to establish a rapport.

It was not an entirely easy birth, though. Let me attest to that.

By 12:30 AM, as December 5th slipped into the 6th, it became alarmingly clear that my wife was not going to breathe our baby out without some kind of clinical intervention. I am ashamed to confess that after eight hours of attending her labour, I was beginning to tire. My wife kept pushing, and I kept pushing my wife.

Faintly tetchy. Craving the nicotine.

I wanted some of that diamorphine to myself.

By 1:30 AM, the decision was made to move her into theatre. I made my way down through the warren of deserted corridors for a cigarette and a lungful of freezing air while she was prepped, then put on the mandatory ridiculous hat, overshoes and gown. The old hospital is an eerie place at the best of times. The Glasgow Royal Infirmary. The Maternity Unit is a recent addition, but late on Sunday night through Monday morning, most of its wings are locked off and only the most persistant of housebreakers can negotiate admission.

Orderlies and porters are nowhere to be seen, if they retain earthly form at all.

I have visited aged relatives on their deathbeds in there; deep in the bowels of the old building. I have had wounds treated in its accident and emergency unit. Like many people, I have an aversion to hospitals in general. I care for this one even less.

It was a forceps delivery when it came right down to it.

Our son was heaved into an alien world full of halogen lights, scrubs and strange voices at three minutes to three on Monday, the sixth of December. As cleanly as I could muster, I cut the umbilical cord and placed him on his mother's chest.

Skin to skin.

He is a brave little thing, his cheeks a little marred from the steel of the instrument which was used to pry him from his mother's womb. I am told this will certainly fade. With time.

His eyes were quick to seize on mine when I spoke to him and cradled him in my arms. The tiniest bit unfocused at first, awake and mildly curious.

He has yet to grow into a name, my youngest son. Waiting on the whisper.



▼ PASCAL COMELADE: PUT A STRAW UNDER BABY from "Haïkus de Piano" LP & CD (Les Disques du Soleil et de L'Acier / Eva Records) 1992 (France)

neville brand ate all the flies | the five gates to hell

"I'm a Buddhist. In case of an emergency call a Lama.”
- Col. Vincent Kane


The fly had been following the end of my brush for close to two days, flitting from room to room like a ball of lint on rotor blades.

I do not care for flies. Houseflies; blowflies; bluebottles. Calliphoridae. Like something decaying off the coast.

Where I might nudge a spider gently on its way - to scuttle under the bed, or abseil behind a door - I have little patience for the fly. The karmic goodwill runs thin. The stingiest dribble of undercoat.

So. After experimenting overnight with a dose of Quick Dry Satin - the ninth configuration of synthetic finishes - I observed enough shredding around the jambs to prompt me to opt instead for an oil-based eggshell. The drying time is a killer, 18 to 24 hours over an offending battleship grey, and all of it an unsightly stippled gloss.

The antichrist of painting and decorating.

I was on the second coat, having walked on down the hall, to where the ghost of a toy tugboat floated face down in the bathtub, when the insect which had been tailing me hovered up and alighted right of frame. I did not miss a beat. Anchored in the greasy slick, the brush caught up with it easily. Swept straight over it. Airbrushed out with a bubblegum pop; a napalm kiss on celulloid.

And what became of Neville Brand ? Lee Marvin’s thuggier twin.

I would not mention the incident with the fly if it did not bother me. Just a little.

Slow witted and lazily sculpted, Brand bristled with the neanderthal menace of the faintly retarded or simply psychotic. A slack jawed insouciance melting into bulging eye and pit bull leer on the turn of a sixpence. Or the onset of a stroke.

Neville Brand wore sharp suits and Brylcreemed hair. His face hewn blunt. Liver lipped. Itching to be cut by a cornerman with trembling hands between the 6th and 7th round.

In truth, I planted both feet heavy in the schoolyard bully’s shoes when I flattened that fly. Smeared on the door with the cigarette fastened between my teeth. I was irritable. Tired. Bitten by self-pity.

In bad need of a slave.

But wait. Killer Kane. Boyd, not Arthur. And several times removed from Stacy’s Colonel.

Neville Brand was no simple bad boy bum. Weighing in for a preliminary bout in Griswold, Iowa, and cremated in Sacramento, his nine times decorated army grunt was D.O.A. from the first. Painted into a corner, I contest, as the result of Dutch and Celtic ancestry. The white heat of Illinois steel.

Typecast by villainous hacks - the revolving door of misplaced mediocrity - the former shoe salesman turned Warner Bros. stooge traded bleeding out by the Weser River for an afterlife of two bit parts.

Sometimes shiny as a quarter in the gutter. Often overlooked.

“I’m a loser! I’m a loser!” he cried, but the truth was far from that.

Scant regard is given the 30,000 books reportedly amassed between petulant acts of cruelty; teased out of acting classes paid for through the G.I. Bill. The raging thirst to distance himself from understudy. Shadow.

“Let me out! Let me out!” he sang.

And all the while the whiskey and remorse. The inability to rearrange at sub molecular level: to set the atoms dancing; to walk - as Captain Fairbanks yearned to - between and through the impenetrable. Walls and floors.

Buttresses.

I have no idea if Neville Brand ever flirted with Buddhism. Perhaps. I suspect not. Myself, I have only used the term emphatically when laid up in a hospital bed. Just to see the charge nurse stiffen.

The closer I peer into cracks and examine those hairline fissures tumbling off into chasms, the weaker my resolve becomes. An endless cycle of filling and painting. Sanding. Immersing bristle and forearm in litre upon litre of turpentine substitute.

It was emphysema which did for him in the end. And the library all up in flames.

Still. The fly is my concern alone. All this chatter of Neville Brand and Hollywood is just so much passing the buck.

Well. It could be worse. Don't ever get me started on the time I aimed a .22 at a crow on the lamb and missed.