28 December 2006


the science of the thing; but ye seem to me to be born blind, and believe in your way you do still care something for your daughter after coming in the afternoon, with porters bringing chairs and tables, found it was surely a strange neighbourhood and house for a young lady to be

20 December 2006

Insomnia Cure, Hong Kong

First, choose the type of zombie you'll be confronting. They can be classic, slow-movers as in the original Night of the Living Dead, or they can move fast, 28 Days Later-style. Are animals affected? Because you'll want to stay away from the wet markets and other places where locals buy live food. Think through the details of the infection. Are you immune only because you haven't been bitten? Or is this a more apocalyptic situation--is there a disease you alone are immune to, in addition to the zombies (a sort of double alien threat you'll eventually have to confront, a la Day of the Triffids)? What kills the zombies? Is it the traditional destroying of the brainstem, and if so, are organs able to live on independently of their bodies if this brain stem remains intact? Do the zombies retreat when it's light outside? Take some time to consider all these possibilities before deciding.

Next, start to plan your immediate escape route. You are in a massive modern hotel with non-opening windows. This is not good. Think through every escape route, every guest, worker, visiting prostitute that might now be wandering the hallways, either livng or zombified. Who will you save? Is it worth checking down the hallway that your mother-in-law has not yet been turned into a zombie? If you call her on the phone, will the ringing of the phone alert the zombies in the hallway to her living presence? The elevators are certainly not safe, but the emeregency stairwells are a deathtrap as well. What would it take to break the windows and crawl along the ledge to mother-in-law's room, and then to make it all the way down to the walkway along the bay? What sort(s) of weapon can be found in a hotel room? Is there any way of making it the eight storeys downstairs to one of the restaurants where more suitable tools could be found? Or is the risk of re-animated abolone, sharks' fins, gigantic lobsters, and night cleaners too great? Consider all of this many times over, and in different ways.

What are your prospects if you escape the hotel? Where will you go? Hong Kong is an isalnd; you are on Kowloon, on the mainland. It makes sense to get across the bay and eventually band together with other living people to clear the island of all zombies, using the surrounding water as a barrier. Of course, this will be a problem if they learn to walk underwater as in the remake of Dawn of the Dead.

As always, the only hope of long-term survival is knowing how to pilot a plane or helicoptor. But this thought doesn't help your insomnia. Instead, re-imagine your escape plan from the hotel to the island, and how you go about hiding from, and disposing of, zombies once there. Keep going. It'll be light out soon.

08 December 2006

Excerpts From Recent Text Messages

Those doorknobs are £62. Each.

Making my mark.

Well, Angus, you want Zoe, you gots to talk to me!

Landslide at Hay Heath, might not be going anywhere.

It's not like they're Jean Painleve.

Don't vomit on me!

We are Ready to Rock with Debbie.

Liverpool is weird.

The woman's father ran the paper mill in Crossett!

Butcher has good lookin mince.

CARRIE!

It's a dark day isn't it.

Go Carrie!

Oh wait, you can't get this text.

Is Strada too fancy?

02 December 2006

Alcoholic Gun Club

Spam of the Day

Why is the crowing of a rooster so regular, so persistent?
Although these swallows often nest as single pairs in cavities or nesting boxes, both adults and juveniles now gather on electrical wires by the dozens, socializing before they migrate. Driving the freeway or a narrow country road, you may glance up to a light pole where a large hawk sits in plain view. Ravens often travel in pairs, while crows are seen in larger groups.
Without flapping, it traces a leisurely, rising circle.
Herons nest in colonies, constructing their stick nests in adjoining trees or cramming several nests into one tree.
Quick and agile in rushing white water, they dive to the bottom of mountain streams for food, and use fast-flowing rivers for breeding.
This nondescript bird steps off a small boulder right into the torrent, and begins to peer under water.
Small forest birds, such as nuthatches and creepers may spend the night huddled together in tree cavities.
Putting out a feeder is easy.
Male Raggiana Birds of Paradise perform elaborate displays to attract females, sometimes even hanging upside-down with their wings pointing upward.
Just for a LARK, MARTIN and JAY decided to have a SWALLOW.
Their lives and ours depend on the daily transformation of sunlight, through photosynthesis, into energy.

22 November 2006

10 November 2006

This Weekend

Going to this, wish I were going to this, feeling inspired by this, unpacking boxes, writing about Chapter 5 of this.

Getting There

Befores and Afters

















01 November 2006

Today

Carpets ripped out and removed; wallpaper removed; upstairs floor sanded, stained and varnished; upstairs rooms painted, downstairs prepped; closet doors removed; kitchen door removed; kitchen cleaned, awaiting replacement; shed and patio cleared; floorboards awaiting placement on Friday; light fixtures ordered; rest of painting happening now; old flat packed; utilities switched over; closet floor varnished and walls painted and bathroom deepcleaned tomorrow; attic conversion starting Saturday; electrician and plumber coming next week; etc etc etc

Ectoplasmic Residue

A Few Days Ago

31 October 2006

2 Weeks Ago





Choosing them isn't.

17 October 2006

Please Stand By


Experiencing Technical Difficulties

01 October 2006


Piper decided to pull her weight (seeing as she's not contributed much to the purchase of our new house) and helped M. pack for his weekend in Berlin.

29 September 2006

Magic Music Days

Today as I walked past the our neighbourhood chemist where the young homeless drug addicts queue up in the mornings to get their methadone, I noticed one of them was wearing a very garish and familiar t-shirt. The shirt was bright purple and flourescent pink and yellow and green and stated "Disney Magic Music Days!". I once owned a couple of these t-shirts because I endured the magic music days of Disney World at least a couple of times in junior high and high school, after our school band, like many others througout America, spent humilating weekends washing cars and selling candy door to door to raise money to pay Disney to bus us the many many hours to Florida to march in some parade around the amusement park. My guess is that Euro Disney has started a similar programme for kids in Europe, and just look where the UK ones end up: outside the chemist waiting to layer what's left of last night's heroin with NHS meth.

Somethin' Strange in My Neighborhood















Coming across
this window cleaner's
mode of transport
--it even says
"Who you gonna call?"--
thrilled me
even more than
all the guys
dressed like
my boys
at Bestival.
Gotta get
that thesis
written...

28 September 2006

M. was in France for 24 hours to assess a show and he came home around 6am smelling of New Orleans! I haven't got to chat with him yet about what he ate or what else he got up to, but his clothes have that distinct and yet impossible-to-put-your-finger-on aroma of sweet and spice and pralines and red beans and rice and beignets and spices that go in a crawfish boil that you sometimes smell randomly around parts of New Orleans. The only other time I've smelled that in Europe was when we went to a Senegalese restaurant in Paris a couple of years ago that served the best boudin I'd had in years. In fact, it was the only boudin I'd had in years.

Ghosts in My New House

We are purchasing a house in Kemptown, meaning we’ll stick around the UK for another year or two at least. It was supposedly used to house workers at the mill that was in the area in the 19th century. We take possession next Wednesday.

I'm two Fall songs in one lately ("There's a Ghost in My House" and "My New House"). Three times this month I have dreamed that the house is haunted. The first dream was terrifying and short; I was being chased in the dark. In the second dream, the current elderly owner of the house was desperate to impart some information to me. She did so in the form of a book of newspaper clippings that described the death of a little girl (Rosemary?) and her mum, who then appeared to me as ghosts. There was something to do with facial mutilation maybe. When I woke up M. asked if I'd had a nightmare and I felt sad and insisted on calling it a “scary dream” because "nightmare" seemed insulting to the ghosts somehow. The third dream had to with ghosts haunting us overhead as streaks of light and sound and me having to shout at them that we meant no harm and wanted to live in peace with them and that they better stop.

In response, I've been re-reading Anelia Jaffe's Jungian An Archetypal Approach To Death Dreams and Ghosts. Though simplisitic Jung-talk about the collectivity of supernatural experiences, it nonetheless drew my attention the figure of the gray man that Anna Karenina sees in her dreams, and then again just as she throws herself under the train. Funny to see him described by Jaffe as a "spirit-maniken" with all the automatonic connotations that holds for me. What to make of ghosts in dreams anyway? When two such vectors of the uncanny meet, maybe it kinda becomes banal and overly obvious. A pair of flapping wings back to the time of the US Civil War, as Mark E sang. As expected.

18 September 2006

Bestival

Saturday, 5:45am

05 September 2006

Pearls of Genius

My brother has written a funny account of his acting job for a Chinese film about Peral S. Buck (who was played by his girlfriend). On set on Mt Lushan, he took this photo of some beautiful prose of Pearl's, which reveals why she was so lauded as writer:

Years Gone By and I'd Say We've Kicked Some Ass



Happy 3rd year, bbbbbbaby! Who knew this song was about extreme sports?

29 August 2006

What I Didn't Tell You That Night

On this day last year I returned home from trip to Thailand to discover that the hurricane we all thought hadn’t harmed New Orleans too badly had actually precipitated the biggest disaster in US history. I spent the end of 2005 in my favorite city, and wrote this in mid-January upon returning to the UK:

We'd driven down, and had dropped off the extra rental car at the Louis Armstrong airport, caught a cab, and, eyes peeled for any signs of damage, took off down the highway into the city. As we'd searched for the rental car drop-off we had seen a lot full of brand new white FEMA trailers all lined up in neat little rows, windows still wrapped in factory plastic. As we drove through the outskirts of the city we saw tattered billboards, chain hotels with broken glass in the windows, parking lots with a few dusty, seemingly abandoned cars. Nothing out of the ordinary for this place, the corrupt and dirty state where I've spent half of my life. It's part of the charm for some of us, the reason others always choose to forget us. From time to time we'd pass a suburban subdivision and catch sight of a patch of blue on a roof. But there was nothing to suggest the damage we'd seen on the news; we'd see this a couple of days later as we disaster-toured through St. Bernard and the 7th Ward, my dad snapping pix from the trunk of my parents' SUV that we'd all managed to squeeze into. It was late afternoon as we hit Treme. We had fleeting glimpses of the old housing projects, but not enough sight of them to see how these self-contained near-villages, formerly full of deep bass beats and people walking, driving, barbecuing, partying and napping on porches, had been abandoned.

We entered the Quarter on St. Ann because we were meeting our families at Place d'Armes, our 3rd or 4th and final accommodation option because our first choices in Treme and the Marigny had never re-opened or were occupied by contracters doing important rebuilding works for the city such as sorting out Saks 5th Avenue and the mall. I opened a window hoping to catch the old familiar smell. It was faint but still there. Spices, pralines, and from time to time urine and beer. Intoxicating. We did tourist-y things in the Quarter that first evening because your family had never visted the city before. Things were tame but jumping; the curfew had recently been extended. There were military vehicles along Bourbon and yankee animal rescue brigades and contracter-tourists strolling around with those ubiquitous flourescent grenade drinks that started appearing in the 1990s; the whole thing felt a bit like cinematic Casablanca, an insider place for outsiders to get away from the surrounding hell. We dropped in to a few mostly empty bars and listened to some live music. I watched the bandleader at one place sing "All of Me" ("go on take all of me, Katrina") unsmilingly, his eyes darting out to the sidewalk outside every couple of minutes to judge whether they'd get more than our table in that night. Down the street at the more populated Fritzell's, we asked the band to play "Waltzing Matilda" for you and your family. They told us later, as people would keep telling us over the coming days--sometimes accompanied by tears, sometimes by unexpected bear hugs--how happy they were that we had come back, that we were there with them, and that they themselves had gotten to come home, however many pieces there were to pick up or to try futiley to replace.

It had been four months since I had been living with the news stories, the pictures, the testaments on blogs. With the big and little daily news of Editor B, Jim Louis, The Book, Cliff, Clayton, Michael H., World Class New Orleans, Dangerblond, Poppy Z. B. and so many others, some of whom know each other in real life, some of whom met through blogging, others who maybe don't even know about each other but who are living the same thing in very different ways. I recorded--and continue to record--so much of it, sometimes with sadness, sometimes with hope, and sometimes taken beyond any disecernable feelings by the surreality of it all. Four months I'd spent compiling and mourning for something that I never had any real claim to to begin with. Moping around, obsessing about it all as if I'd been unwillingly separated from some dream boy I was teenager-y smitten with, you said, annoyedly, at one point. And then suddenly I was there in the middle of it, not quite believing it was all still standing, and yet not quite believing that it would ever be back to normal, to the way I remembered it as a little girl on fieldtrips or as an adult on--well, adult trips. Everywhere were little signs, even around the Quarter. The closed shops, the abbreviated menus, the absence of well-known characters and the lemon ice stands, the darkened aquarium, the midwestern college kids working in the tourist bars (like the Pat O'Brien's waiter who tried to fob me off--or was so green he didn't know--about Mr. Eddie, who we knew had perished in the flood). But mostly it was the people we saw everywhere who seemed to have been blown completely away and then had randomly blown back again, sometimes in pieces and sometimes not where they started from and not yet back to where they were meant to be. There was a sense of shell-shockedness about everyone we met. And yet everyone was happy to be home. As was I, in my own way.

That first night it was already getting hot; it would be one of the hottest New Year's Eves on record in a couple of days. We turned on the noisy ceilng fan to sleep in our room that smelled damp and musty from being shut off for four months; we were the first to sleep in it since late August. I went to the bathroom to get ready for bed, and then it all hit me at once. I couldn't stop crying. It all flooded out of me, all the compulsive collecting and containing and digesting I'd been doing as "research" for some film or book project was seeping out of the careful archives I'd created for it and was all around me, suffocatingly big, frustratingly at a stand-still, with no certain future and a washed-away past. And yet I was there, right in the middle of it all, and so much was still standing, and how could I be here just four months later when in September I'd thought it might have all washed away by the time I got back?

I couldn't tell you this properly that night because I was crying too hard, and you were annoyed, and maybe a little scared at this sudden outburst from me, and the way that a place and my past could haunt me so much in the present. So I came to bed and sobbed as silently as I could, thinking of all the people who will never get to come back, even to visit like we were. I thought of everything that surrounded us: the thousands of former pets who'd been left behind, driven frantic and wild by fear and hunger and who were at that moment running in packs all throughout the dark city; the tonnes and tonnes of collapsed and waterlogged wood, bricks and clay that had once stood strong and tall, and that had been built by someone's grandfather, who was proud to call the 9th Ward home at one time; the abandoned carcases of cars and boats and, we'd find out later, people; dolls, photographs, books, and the other scattered artefacts of people's lives, encased in mud in the sidewalks and front yards, waiting futilely for their owners to come back for them, or to at least give them a decent burial; the stifling darkness and quiet of the rest of the city, surrounding us on all sides.

The next morning we got up and had beignets and cafe au laits and were tourists again.

28 August 2006

Big in China

My brother and his girlfriend are playing American author Pearl S. Buck and her brother in a film by CCTV, China’s aptly named national television company.

They just finished shooting on Mt. Lushan near Jiujang this weekend.


The Happy Headlines Just Keep Rolling In

The UK's "one year later" reporting on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast has, as expected, got me a bit down. Of course I’m glad it’s actually in the news again. It’s disturbing to me when it’s not. No news is not good news. But I can’t help but wonder whether the stories that darken the papers today and tomorrow (and then inevitably disappear till Mardi Gras) engender much sympathy among those who already think New Orleanians who’ve elected to stay or who are still trying to return home are crazy and that the whole city should be left to Ernesto or whichever hurricane finally finishes it off.

NOLA’s doing a better job than I could of compiling the anniversary coverage appearing nationally and internationally.


But if you want to get a real picture of the daily struggles and triumphs happening in New Orleans, and a sense for why it’s the greatest city in the world, despite its old and new problems, you can’t do much better than starting with this list of New Orleans bloggers.

Many of these bloggers were involved in organising the Rising Tide Conference that took place over the weekend, a conference that aimed to "dispel myths, promote facts, share personal testimonies, highlight progress and regress, discuss recovery ideas, and promote sound policies at all levels." They "aim to be a 'real life' demonstration of internet activism as the nation prepares to mark the one year anniversary of a massive natural disaster followed by governmental failures on a similar scale."

27 August 2006

How Did You Know?



A Tekken competition
and dancing till dawn
to Public Enemy and The Fall
= my idea of perfect happiness.

Thanks for Friday night, guys!

23 August 2006

"Presenting our case to strangers in our neighbor to the north, America ... well, that will take some doing."

Apt quote from New Orleans author and blogger Poppy Z. Brite, who is probably one of quite a few writers and other New Orleans figures being asked to give their take on the state of things in the national press as the anniversary of Katrina nears. As a regular reader of her blog (but not her novels yet), I have faith she can pull it off. And if she can't, we make like "the Muslims" and create a Hezbollah-like organisation that looks after things in the absence of any real help from elected officials given the “state within a non-state” that New Orleans is, and always has been.

I both dread and look forward to the UK coverage of the anniversary. Around this time last year I was having to explain to my bemused--bemused!--middle-England neighbour that it wasn't just "stupidity" that caused people to not evacuate. I'm not sure if he had even registered that thousands of people (and animals) were still missing, trapped or dying as we spoke. I’m not even sure if I or even the evacuees registered it at that point.

I'm getting drunk just thinking about this! Being the media-slut I am when it comes to all things New Orleans, it's going to be a hard week.

Voodoo

I've been in Edinburgh the last few days with these freaks:

11 August 2006

Best New Orleans Recovery Plan I've Heard

"We have a silent majority here that really believes in violence and believes that America's against them. You remember the ramifications from New Orleans, that a lot of dissatisfied people here could ultimately join up with the Muslims or sympathize with them. It's a scary thing here as well as in the UK."

--Charles Payne on one of Fox "News"'s "business" programmes yesterday


Sympathy for the plight of Muslims, another opressed group of people in post 9-11 America?

An awareness of the government's apathy towards New Orleans and the popular hatred of and prejudice against its evacuees?

I'd say it's most definitely time for an organised revolution of dissatisfied residents and exiles of my favourite city, and I'll be the first to join up. I hope it leaves you quaking in your Prada boots Mr Payne.

10 August 2006

Welcome Home to Me



I was looking for the Psychadelic Furs to get me back in the mood of being back in the UK, but I found this instead. What a wanker.

07 August 2006

Houston, Again.

Castanets on my ipod: we could have taken any of these roads, but nobody knows about this one we chose, and who knows friend how far it goes.

I remember lying in bed in our hotel room in NYC a few months ago, feeling the immensity of the USA. Roads, waterways, tracks all snaking around our hotel and out of the city, across rivers and mountains and plains, like a living, pulsing vascular system. Lost highways through dark trees, modern ovepasses around skyscrapers and bypassing ancient downtowns below, suburban interstates strectching for miles and miles before giving way to plains, little capillaries reaching into the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic. We could have gotten into a car and taken any of these roads out of the city. We could have driven through mountains and fields and over river bridges, and we could have been in New Orleans or Little Rock the very next day, in the Texas dessert twilight or the LA airport to Oz in two. An overnight road down south leads straight to my parents, my childhood, my past. It was just one of many roads, right outside our hotel room.

It could start here, I remember thinking. We could get in a car and go down any of these roads. They're all connected. All okay. Everything pulsing like blood and in harmony. Everything connected.

Here at the airport in Houston it's raining and steam is rising off the runways in the dusk and the 100F air, and all the roads I see lead to the sky and then disappear. Even a phone call feels like a stretch like now. I can't make things fit together.

05 August 2006

04 August 2006

Road Kill Record

AR/LA Hwys. 82, 78, 157, 371; 21/07-03/08

Armadillos: 6
Bats: 1
Birds of Prey: 2
Bobcats: 1
Butterflies: 10+
Cats: 2
Deer: 7
Dogs: 3
Dragonflies: 20+
Fowl: 1
Frogs: 3
Migratory Birds: 1
Possums: 7
Rabbits: 4
Raccoons: 3
Snakes: 1
Squirrels: 2
Texas Grasshoppers: 1
Turtles: 1
Unidentifiable masses of fur: 10+
Waterbirds: 1

03 August 2006

01 August 2006

Lethally

Flanagans knowing blue eye took in everything. She just dropped out of the race as if she startedrunning backwards. His eagerness, burning in his eyes, sent pleasant little shiversthrough her. If it washer you were for marrying youd have nothing to worry about.

Hey MLJ

Phallic Long Distance Dedication. A moi de toi, xx.

26 July 2006

Mr Florence



I am visiting the US and have acquired a Pandora's Box of sorts. Here in the small southern town where I spent my high school years, there is an old cinema that's been around since the mid-1930s. It is called the Cameo Trio. At one time it was one of three cinemas in town, but as people here became more conservative and inward-looking along with the rest of America, the other two shut down. Today, people who want to see blockbusters usually drive to one of the huge multiplexes in one of the surrounding towns. The Cameo has never had a reputation for cleanliness nor for offering any kind of great, movie-going experience. Nonetheless, I and many others feel affectionate towards the place, in no small part due to Mr. W.P. Florence.

Mr Florence ran the Cameo from at least the late 1930s (I have in my possession documents that verify this) until just before his death a few years ago. He was a well-known "character" around town, always dressed in a scruffy gray suit and large black lather shoes, his hair greased back messily. His parents had money, he himself apparently had oil interests (as correspondence of his from senators Fulbright and McClellan suggests), and he attended the same liberal arts university that I did, before a brief stint in the military. Despite owning two residences in town, in his later years he was apparently living out of a backroom of the Cameo. My dad recalls once leaving some reading glasses behind in the cinema, and being led to this room to retrieve them; it was filled on all walls, ceiling to floor, with old newspapers, with only just enough room for a rickety old cot.

The state of this makeshift living space is indicative of the state of the cinema as a whole. It had amazing tile and mirror bathrooms, complete with a huge powder room for the ladies which connected to the "Crying Room" that was attached to the downstairs auditorium. However, everything was always a complete mess. The joke around town was that if you went to the Cameo you might just stay there, as it was impossible to pry your feet from the sticky floor. The viewing experience was less than ideal as well; movies might sometimes cut out in the middle and only if you were lucky would sound come from all speakers and be present during the whole movie.

Mr Florence was apparently well aware of the state of his theatre. My parents once observed another town "character," a strange and moneyed old lady we knew, tell him off about sticking to the floor as she tried to leave her seat. He promptly sent her a bouquet of flowers, and others concur that this was a common deed with him. He never changed the things people complained about, but he did charm everyone.

A few years ago Mr. Florence sold the Cameo to a family who own one of the large multiplexes in a neighbouring town. At the Christmas parade, they promoted the Cameo and their refurbishments on a float with a huge banner that read, "We cleaned up the Cameo!" Bizarrely, trailing behind them on foot was old Mr. Florence himself, holding up a sign that read, "And they did a good job!"

The day after I arrived here, we attended a huge "tag sale" of the estate of Mr. Florence and his late mother. Their two houses had been completely cleaned out, their contents put up for sale by an antiques auctioneer we know. She told us it took weeks to clean out the houses, and at least 5 days to clean everything up--in line with the Cameo itself, some items were so dust-covered you couldn't tell what they were, and the water they used to clean them with frequently became as dirty and thick as mud. I went along hoping to see some cinema memorabilia, and especially to see if there might even be some old film equipment going. From what I heard, there may have been, but it was thrown out due to the house clearers not knowing what it was. Two 16mm projectors were left when I got there, but someone had bought them, and I heard that a few items of what seemed to be antique cinema projectors were let go for $5 apiece before I arrived because no one knew what they were.

There were still a number of interesting items when I arrived, however. In addition to a $5 box load of correspondence with senators and now defunct film distributors such as RKO, vintage puzzles, and an antique rubber stamp set, I made a rash (given its weight and the fact that I don't live in this country) decision to buy Mr Florence's trunk pictured above. I've always wanted an old travel trunk. This was one of three at the sale, and this one cost next to nothing because, you see, it is locked, and no one seems to have the key. I'm sure it's empty, and I'm not sure I want ever to open it. I like that Mr. Florence's name is on its side, and I like owning a little piece of the ongoing death of cinema.

20 July 2006

RIP Green Boots


There is, of course, a yet-to-be-fleshed-out reason (see the colour tinting in Blithe Spirit, the ectoplasmic logoing of Ghostbusters, photographs of the number of Green (and Gray) Lady ghosts that permeate our fair British Isles, and Michael Taussig's colour project) that I chose a GREEN representation of Mark E Smith below, but in the process of posting that image I was sadly reminded that my favourie green suede boots suddenly ripped irreparably the other week.

19 July 2006

Wonderful and Frightening

I think few people realise that the title of this blog is inspired by The Fall, perhaps my favourite band of all time (the other half of my blog title--the title in the address--is inspired by one of my favourite texts on surrealism, by Hal Foster; I myself am neither a beauty nor compulsive). Listening to Mark E Smith ranting about computers this evening, I remembered I'd bookmarked this piece of writing that hints at the hauntological possibilities of the Fall; right up my alley, obviously. It happens to be written by one of the contributors to the recent Cultural Fictions conference I attended at Goldsmiths.

At the conference, and while I'm thinking about it (and I really should take notes when I think of these things), I especially enjoyed Mark Broughton's talk on dyschronia in relation to the excellent vintage sci-fi/ghost-fi, made-for-TV flick, The Stone Tape. However, I contend that ghosts are ALWAYS dyscrhonic, not just on the occasions when they're inaccessible through technology and "buried in time," as in The Stone Tape. It's not that technology is used to combat the mysticism surrounding ghosts; in my research on electronic voice phenomena (EVP) and the use of other digital methods of "scientific" ghost hunting, it's the technology that reinforces and redefines the uncanny nature of ghosts--and isn't dyschronia just one more example of the uncanny (being lost in, or TO, time goes beyond other forms of disorientation)? Ghosts are always dyschronic experiences, and even more so when they are stored as endlessly repetitive visual and sonic phenomena in out-of-time-and-space digital archives. Ghosts are irreversibly out of time--through technology they both symbolically and discursively keep repeating (and I don't buy exorcism film-myths and hate how Catholicism has ruined many an otherwise good horror film, but that's a topic for another post). This potential (or inevitable) link of ghosts and technology reinforces Mark B's suggestion (and my own hunch) that ghosts are the ultimate sci-fi figures; they are the ultimate uncanny, as my interminable thesis suggests.

18 July 2006

Lost and Found Cat

Look what spent the night last night!
Our neighbours found this strange little kitty wandering around in panic mode in the middle of the street, and came to us "cat people" for advice. We took it in for the evening (well, into the hallway, along with some food and water and a litter tray and bed) and this morning located its grateful owners who gave me a bottle of wine as thanks.

His name is JJ.

17 July 2006


It's officially tourist season in Brighton, and I can't even work out on the balcony because the square below has been taken over by European teenagers from various language schools who insist on taking pictures of me on their mobile phones. They are like a plague. The beach (above) has been overrun with the same, so I'll stay indoors and wait for everyone to leave in August.

13 July 2006

12 July 2006

Summer has returned, after a couple of cloudy sea-breezy days. I took my work and my bikinied self out onto the balcony this afternoon. At one point, a lovely tan women in a summery dress arrived in the square carrying a picnic blanket, some paper cups, and a tasty-looking cake on a crystal cake stand. How nice, I thought, she's setting up for a little afternoon garden party with friends. Maybe it's someone's birthday, and they'll be surprised by the cake. I watched as the woman spread out the blanket, and then herself, in the dappled shade and lush grass underneath a tree, and wondered when her friends would arrive. Then I realised what she was doing. A huge camera and little tripod had emerged from her bag. And so ensued 15 minutes of angling herself and the cake and cups around on the blanket, and lots of snapping and adjusting of lenses. And then as quick as she came she went: cake, cups, blanket and camera were briskly packed away and she strode past the usual group of drinkers, the older lady who feeds the pigeons and that guy who's always practicing juggling, back to some hot and stuffy office or maybe to her work-from-home studio and a computer full of emails from her advertising clients, one of whom is obviously a seller of cakes, or cake stands, or paper cups, or picnic blankets.

Singapore Fling

Ryan Chin (whoever you are), look what you've caused.

11 July 2006

Wankers


I had an erotic dream about Pete from Big Brother the other night. He was working or living at this salon that was doing some kind of charity breakfast that I was of course sceptical of. His messy bedroom had a couple of concrete steps that led up to it and he was such a good kisser. I watch too much telly lately.

09 July 2006

"Kenneth, What Is the Frequency?"



I'd forgotten the Donald Barthelme connections to the bizarre incident that happened to newsreader Dan Rather 1980s, when he was attacked by two mysterious men in white coats yelling, "Kenneth, what is the frequency?" You can read about it in this Harpers article.


This unsolved mystery of those men and their origin, identity and destination, and especially that line the repeated over and over, really thrilled and disturbed me. In the same way, I suppose, that "the rhythm" became a concept of mystery and dread for my little brother, owing to the fact that I told him that the Gloria Estefan song "The Rhythm is Gonna Get You" referred to some deadly nighttime presence that haunted little brothers who annoyed their sisters.

Frequency--electricity!--worries and fascinates me in a different way now, and shows up in my thesis alot, which reminds me that I really should post some of it here sometime to ensure even less people stop by this blog regularly.

07 July 2006

Donald Barthelme and Ghetto Reference Librarians

I'm a big fan of the late writer Donald Barthelme, some of whose (very) short stories you can access online thanks to the good work of a radical librarian called Jessamyn.

Speaking, however, of librarians, I clicked on a random blog link today of a woman who works in the reference section of a "ghetto library" in the Bay Area. Maybe I'm out of touch with public libraries, but do workers in the reference section provide a service whereby patrons can ask them random questions about soil, alcoholism, vacation destinations, and even the meanings of dreams and expect to get actual answers (rather than just instructions on how to obtain the answer using the library's resources)? No wonder the blog-writer seems like such a bitch. Her blog describes being trapped in a cubicle smothered by co-workers she hates as drunks and weirdos approach her with impossibly weird and random questions that she must provide answers to, while worrying about other issues such as the lethargy of housekeeping services when it comes to cleaning up after patrons' incontinent guide dogs.

I particularly like her entry about a woman who regularly calls up asking the reference librarians to interpret her dreams for her--which they obediently do, using a whole little section of dream interpretation books they've set up just for her. My whole point being that the blog entry has a Barthelme-esque tone to it, while the scenario itself is reminiscent of Bunuel's absurd film scenarios, or maybe Hans Richter's Dreams That Money Can Buy. I'm just saying I think there could be a surrealist film in there somewhere.

06 July 2006

Jerry Eleison


Went to see Jerry Springer the Opera the other night cause it's not selling well at the Dome so M had some free tix. I was excited to see some protesters outside holding placards urging us not to support the show (and according to this this, some of them may have even been fasting in anticipation! Wow, and all I did was change out of my flip flops into some sensible shoes in case the theatre was cold.). When we went in, the protesters handed us some brochures spelling out their quibbles, which were fair enough given these folks have probably not been burdened by so much of the annoying high theatre/performance art that I have, and are therefore unable to interpret the show as the slightly unsuccesful postmodern dig at opaquely grandiose and absurdist opera themes that I think it's, in part, meant to be. Which was what was kind of disappointing about it. When I was in high school, back when the Springer show was a late night treat focusing less on freaks and more on the freakish situations arising out of inequalities in class, race and gender exacerbated by a mass-media saturated US (and of course, by the show itself) I loved watching it as I love playing GTA: San Andreas now. It's a sort of self-critical anthropology served up on a plate. But there's no critique of media in Jerry Springer the Opera, no political messages. In that respect, it's simply pretty tame, West End humour. I liked the chorus line of many Jerrys at the end, though. Tap dancing chorus lines are great, so I don't know where these crazy Christians get off saying there's nothing uplifting here.

Oh, and the photo is not of a Jerry Springer the Opera protester, but rather of a man who was demonstrating with his family outside of a SuperWalMart in Arkansas. My dad had a new camera and decided to make them his first subjects and stopped and chatted. Nice folks, he said. I love how each state on his sign has a different sin attached to it. I think it's funny that Kansas's sin is "Effeminate." Hmmm.

30 June 2006

World Cup Fever Breaking

M and I have exhausted our collective barracking possibities for this World Cup, save our adpoted home of England. Ok, so the US exhausted its own possibilities for victory while Australia was heartbreakingly robbed. So gooooooo England.

Really, I'm trying to muster enthusiasm, but I've still got an image of the mass of little urinating willies of the red-shirted drunks who spilled out of the pubs and into the sqaure below our house after the England game a couple of weeks ago. Their fervent bleating of "World in Motion" (my fave World Cup song, actually) meant more urine landed on their trousers than on the shrubs, and also that the New Order kick I'd been on was effectively ended. But yeah, I'll be in front of the telly come 1600 tomorrow.

29 June 2006

Some things may stick with me forever. Not just the obviously memorable tragic-farcical things that hit us in the face last week (of which there were many, but the empty horse-drawn hearse and funeral procession that blocked our path outside the station for the London hospital being the most obvious, save the image on the screen we would see an hour or so later). It’s other things, irrelevant little scenes, colours, overheard bits of conversations, phrases printed on wall signs, that seem to have imprinted permanently on my mind. On the way out of the hospital: in the elevator, a man whose accent sounded Trinidadian and his two little boys, one sobbing into his dad’s shoulder. “He’s afraid of elevators,” the man smilingly explained to us. Somehow we managed to laugh and smile back. “It’s ok, we reach, we reach,” said the man to the little boy when the doors opened onto the main lobby. A few minutes later in the park next door: no idea what I said into the phone to my parents, but what sticks in my mind are the purple pansies and the pink and orange lilies and the little rose bushes, and the daytime drinkers’ cans of cider and lager glinting metallic blue and gold in the afternoon sun, and the brown squirrel that ran in slow motion towards me, stopping at my feet to beg for food. Then later, specific tastes: champagne in a waterbottle; a mojito without mint. The image from that Clive Barker book that made us laugh at our realisation of its perverse inappropriateness as a comforting mechanism for dealing with this. The next day back in Brighton: my bare tan legs and mauve toenails on the white hospital bedspread. Healthy-looking. Absinth-green odourless nail polish remover and one cotton ball to take away the mauve from my fingertips that would apparently interfere with the monitoring equipment if left in place. The “quick” crossword we started while we waited: eight-letter word for Freud’s term for the conscious mind; four-letter word for senile, 3rd letter is “R;” nine-letter word for “compelling,” also beginning with “C.” Did it call for a synonym or for some well-known example of something compelling, we wondered. Ken Loach’s Cannes winner: a recommendation from one of the anaesthesists upstairs who knows anthropologists study people and can be political and thinks it’s cool. His assistant is left-handed like me; we’re becoming more common in the OR apparently (too late to ask if as patients or workers). A green plastic thing being taken from my mouth as I woke from an instantly forgotten nightmare set in dark Kemptown alleyways. Downstairs again, and with the grogginess came clarity: the answer was of course “superego.” I always think better under the influence of something. We let the rest go; left the newspaper behind on the floor.

28 June 2006

A Beginning and an Ending



I have a habit of taking self-portraits at or near the begnnings and endings of things.








These are both happy photos, regardless of what's come in-between.


I hope you can tell.

05 June 2006

More Peel for Your Pleasure

That Radio 1 Peel site I linked below has links to other great Peel sites, including one containing the John Peel Sweet Eating Game and a page of priceless quotes from the man himself, containing the following gem:

"Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don't have any surface noise. I said, 'Listen, mate, *life* has surface noise.'"
I miss John Peel John Peel a great deal, once or twice a week of late. Guess I could use some distracting. Late Junction is ok, especially for drifting between sleep and whatever I'm reading, but those regular re-appearances of Tom Waits and new age-y soundtrack stuff from Peter Gabriel: it's hardly stuff you haven't heard before, or want to be hearing more than once.

A breezy warmish day here in Brighton, and outside yellow-pink blossoms and red and white England football flags are blowing about in the breeze, and flies are breezing in and out of the house, with Piper whirling around after them.

It's been just over 9 months since the hurricane hit the Gulf coast of the US, obliterating a lot of people and things and places from my childhood memories and my adulthood fantasies about the future, and now it's hurricane season again. Nine months is both a long and short time to live with something that's mostly in my in mind as memory and fantasy but, through my own persistent planning and "research" since then, feels as heartbreakingly real as if it were a living breathing dying daily presence.

28 May 2006

"Is it right to break the heart of one that adores you?"

So read D.B.C. Pierre at his talk on Friday evening, from a piece of fan mail from a besotted Bengali man. Or something like that.

23 May 2006

Er, and then there's this.

http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialcare/news/0,,1781360,00.html

Oh Shahbaz.

I like BB this year.

That footballer's wife wannabe girl is a real cutie and speaks like a cross between my friend Jemma and Michael "Phantom of the Opera" Crawford in Some Mother's Do 'Ave 'Em.

And what's not to like about well-endowed Tourette's sufferers such as Brighton's own Pete?

And last night after the whole house spurned the annoying Shahzan (the "Pakie Pouf"), he snuck into the kitchen while everyone slept and stole all the food, muttering typical villain threats for the cameras: "I'll make them fucking talk to me. Let's see how they think now. Oh, the satisfaction!" Straight panto.

22 May 2006

Speaking of Huevos


Rancheros deluxe.