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Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Pop-Cult Mind-Wax - Break-Ups and Buskers and Summer

Duke De Mondo — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 07:43:48 EDT

"Fair morning" a man says, tiltin' the hat at a couple lassies stood front the bus-stop next the old cinema. Marquees boarded over, graffiti-bedizened hardwood sheets - Shelly + ?, Trevor Was Ere / Is A Knob, INLA etc etc. "Couldn't be bad t'that, sure?"Lassies smiling, gesturing in agreement. One chewing the beads of her necklace, twirling a toe on the spot. Round about, throbbing like a trapped-fly 'neath an eyelid; summer. A warm breeze shorn of puff loiters lazily about the flower-baskets hung here and there from the lampposts. Headed for the train-station, men in painter's overalls pat sweat-slick foreheads with damp hankies. "Fair mourning" fella says again."It is that" I answer, sat on a bench at the town hall, looking up from the notebook open on my knee. "About time, an' all.""Now… We're long due it, is right, God knows."Wandering on, he's stopped at the top of Church Street by a fella in a white t-shirt and faded jeans, palm outstretched, unshaven face all scab-marked and potted, blackened eyes red-rimmed and wired. "You wouldn't have a pound, mate? Lend us till Monday?"Watching this, drumming my fingers idly off of a knee, I'm thinking; Myself and Beautiful Ms Gillian - many's a quid we gave him, an' all, afore now. Fidgeting with one hand for change, other holding the honeycomb ice-cream busy dribbling and drabbling o'er the knuckles. Him laughing, tellin' me - "You keep your eye on her, now. She'd be the right handful, that lady, looks of her" and us laughing too, your mouth making mock-shocked O's, looking away in feigned offense. (Line at the bottom of the notebook page - "For the memories we planned to gather, beacons be raised. For those we were lucky enough to catch - a song or two, I think.")Thinking also of Newcastle night-time few months back, man by the phone-box calling "Fifty pence to make a call, mate?" and me shrugging apologetically. "I'm sorry, man, I have nothin'."He then raising the palms, "Oh fair enough, like, fair enough. But would you have a brick, maybe? So as I could smash your fuckin' face in?"Friend and musicological associate Mr Gardiner whispering to me; "Walk on by, for Jesus sakes. Keep the head down. S'always the same; abuse if you haven't got it, abuse if you have. Gave him 85p one evening, I did. 'Thanks' says he, then flings it back at me, skites me right up the back o' the thigh with a twenty-pence-piece. Miscalls me for all the arse-bandit bastards of the day. Shockin'."From the fella on Church Street no insults nor slurs, just a smile as he pockets the change. "Also" he asks then, "You wouldn't have a cigarette at all?"Shake of the head from your man there. "That's one thing I won't have about me nor ever will is a cigarette.""No bother." Calling after as the gentleman walks off. "Need to be stoppin' anyway. Sure they've banned it in the pubs, the gets! What next, I say to that? Ban us from pishin' the very pish out our kidneys? Will they be at that? I wouldn't put it past them! Rogues and whores, them boys! Nanny State! Political correctness gone mad, that's what our Stanley calls it!"Grinding and rumbling and crunching to my left. School-bus, screeching brakes and tissss of the doors. Two lads step out onto the street, emo fringes tickling the bridges of their noses, black growing out at the sides. "Is she riding?" one's asking the other, school-bag slung careless over a shoulder, shirt collar all skewed to that side. "No. Fuck the ride she'll give. A month, and not so much as a dry wank. Tell you, I'm this close to skidaddling and tryin' the luck with wee Forrest there. Wild woman for the cock, Joe says. Like a starvin' youngster scrabblin' for a Yorkie, by all accounts."Christ. Brushing the fag-ash off the trousers, closing the notebook, rising to my feet, fidgeting for the iPod headphones dangling out the neck of my t-shirt. Up Linenhall Street then with Cassadaga in the ear-holes, headed for the park, passing four, five boarded-over storefronts and a poster advertising a car boot sale at the Church Of God and women walking two abreast with matching wains a-gaggle in matching prams. Singing with surest conviction - Conor Oberst;"Everything, it must belong somewhere - I know that now, that's why I'm staying here…"And wound around his words, my own from three nights past; "I must belong somewhere, everything does… but it's not here." Crying and rubbing the nose with my sleeve, snotters blinding me and she crying also but saying "I understand…" and reaching to touch my arm. "It's okay…"Aw balls - Lad I propositioned one time back in High School steps out the bookies next the traffic lights. Spying him I duck into the post office, passing the red bin I was shoved into one merry mid-October eve when the taxi driver refused to take me home on account of the boke still wet on my trousers. "Just had these fuckin' seats cleaned!" he was shouting, they told me the next day. "Fuck the pukin' hoor like that I'm taking anywhere!"For a time I inspect the jiffy bags and the packs of airmail envelopes, lifting the odd one in the hand, turning it this way and that, coddin' on that I'm after something, giving himself out there time enough to have wandered far enough away."Good thing about this" a mate told me back one time when I was showin' him the picture of us at thon christening, you remember? "Good thing about this is that all the boyos you used to try an' get off wi' will know you were only messin'.""What? Surely to God they know by now!""Well… There's the odd rumor goin' about yet. Hit the shins off one myself not so long ago. 'He'd be fond of a gargle of the salty yoke' I was told by your one out the petrol station, for instance.""Jesus!"Shrugging. "Well, you did grope his arse to him thon time. Tried to lick his ear, an all.""It was ironic, dammit!"With a box of driving licence applications held afore her, friend of mine emerges from behind the glass partitions, greeting me with a smile and a "How's yourself?""Not bad" says I, testing a green biro on the back of my hand. "You?""Ach." She rolls her eyes, tuts. "That Tommy's bein' the right knob so he is. Up all night I was, over the head of him. Comes in drunk at two in the mornin' with a weeks worth of santerin' to do, wouldn't you know? Wakes me up out my sleep and me only half an hour down as it was. 'We've to talk!' says he, and nothing would do him but we were up and sat at the kitchen table thonner - two in the mornin' I say! - assessing the relationship thus far and where we planned to be taking it and by what manner or means we would get there. Notes he was making on the back of the TV Times. Minutes! Quarter by six he finally passed out, praise to Jesus, and me workin' at nine bells.""Lord above" says I. She shakes her head. "Shockin'. But here - what's this I heard about yourself and your wee girl? Is it right enough?"Nodding. "It is.""Aw that's wicked so it is. I'm sorry to hear it."Sighing, shrug of the shoulders. "Me too. But I couldn't… it's cause I'm goin' away. London.""But you're comin' back, surely?""I don't know" I say. "I don't know if I am. I doubt it, as it happens. And being uncertain, it'd be nothin' but the foulest, most selfish chicanery to let things go on any longer. To pretend to herself and myself that it's only a temporary upheaval when everything's telling me it's nothing of the sort."She makes a sympathetic "Dear me…" face, biting at the corner of her bottom lip, tilting the head some. "Well are youse still friends, at least?""Oh God aye" I say. "To lose a girlfriend's wretched enough - to lose a best friend at the same time… save us it'd be enough to wreck a man six times my size." "Well that's always somethin'." Making for to head off towards the offices at the far-end of the building, she says "You'll keep in touch with us, aye? Let us all know how you're doin'.""I will" I assure her, wandering back then to the doorway, earphones re-inserted.To the park with one hand hung awkwardly at my side on account of the iPod leaving no room for it in the trouser pocket. At my side also walks herself. Sensing her as I go like a phantom limb, instinctively reaching to touch of occasion, and then nothing.Speaks a voice from the back of my mind; "You'd be the wild one for playin' the martyr, wouldn't you just?"Lashing the flesh off the shoulder blades with cat-o-nine-tails fashioned out old letters and birthday cards and valentines notes. Sleeping with memories of sleeping next to her wound round the waist like Talbot's barbed-wire corsets.The wild martyr, right enough.Wandering towards me, lad I know from back at tech, blue bag full o' Steiger lager hung from one arm. "Trevor" says I, too loud probably. "You well?" "Alright, mate?"Questions scurrying back and forth o'er the pavings like frightened rats, never answered. Of women living in houses next rivers and bodies touched with minds Leonard Cohen craggily coos. "A cartoon is all he is, that Cohen" a fella recently informed me, "Like Morrissey. Cartoon melancholy. Means nothin', really." Cartoon melancholy. Forlorn Leghorn. Oh Jesus, that's awful. Near chokes me.Choking also in her bedroom after it all. Twin Peaks paused on the laptop screen afore us. Cigarette trembling atween my fingers, and now and then from the room next door, yelps and whoops from the Spanish fella wreaking the savage havoc 'tween the thighs of the wee French lass he was courting."I'm sorry…" saying, and was, and am.Dale Cooper frozen and eyeing me with the sore disgust. "Jais' but you're the right bastard.""I couldn't do anything else, dammit."Red room and a man stood in the middle singing "I Drove All Night" two beats out of time. 'Pon an analyst's couch a blonde-haired woman whispers "Sselb, reh sevol eh llits tub, wa.""Course he does" spits the vagrant 'hind the drapes. "Obvious, that."Passing the woman from the chip-shop sold me a fish supper one night I was drunk for the price of a half-dozen fireworks I had in my coat pocket, muting Cohen a moment to hear the busker on the street next the office supply shop. Nicotine-yellowed fingers skite back and forth 'long slightly-bowed guitar neck, chasing out the frets an aching lament. Foot tapping arhythmically on the stones, he turns and gazes doe-eyed to the heavens, mouthing with gin-wizened intonation; "Oh Kitty, my darling, rememberThat the doom will be mine if I stayT'is far better to part though it's hard toThan to rot in their prison away…"Parked off the motorway with hazard-lights on and radio off and windscreen wipers swishing lazily every half-dozen seconds, he turns to her and says "Aw, Kitty. So it will, but. The doom… All mine, it'll be…""Poor you" says she, turned away."You understand, though?" Tapping ash off the cigarette out the passenger window, shaking his head solemnly, words clinging to the coat-tails of the blue/grey fag-reek plume. "Mean, t'is far better to…""Better for who?""For... Mean, Mother Mercy, Kitty, to rot? To rot in their prison? Rot clean away?""Oh for Christ's sakes" says she, tutting. "Just get out."Calling after her as she drives off, waving his arms frantic in the rain - "It's not you, Kitty! It's me!"Song's end, busker looks up at me, sapphire eyes searing incandescent. "Request?" he asks."Aye" says I, tossing a quid to the guitar case afore him, a loose scatter of copper hugging the lower end. "D'know 'I Still Miss Someone'?" He nods, hacks back a clattering throatful of phlegm, tilts the jaw this way and that. "Could tell by the droop tween the legs."Laughing then. "Free of charge, that."Till he tunes the guitar I perch myself 'pon the windowsill to the right, scribbling of occasion in the notebook, thinking about helium we sucked to make the voices high, about the pair of us walkin' down past the Liffey one night winter past, about pre-dawn danders 'round churchyards with green-coat fellas sleeping on the steps out back, about kisses and her bringing me out panic attacks and…"Hurts" busker says, first few notes staggerin' unsteadily about the soundways like a fresh-rid gazelle. "Does" I say. "But would've hurt more, eventually, if we hadn't. Still. Scarcely eases it any."With arms all whipping couple wains come bounding o'er the dentist walls, flinging lollypop-ends at other, cursing and cheering and chortling as they gallop ever on, near colliding with a fella strolling upwards there towards us."Fair morning" I hear him saying to the bloke coming out the garage."Aye" says he. "To pish, though, the forecast says."With narrowed eyes and furrowed brow the busker here now sings.Thanks folks.

The Duke (Aaron McMullan to his parents and the clergy) is a Northern Irish writer, performer and insomniac currently residing in London. He is the creator of Mondo Irlando, wherein his scribblings and hollerings can be found. He is currently working towards the completion of his first novel, and his debut "punk / country / folk / whatever" album has recently been released by Ex Libris Records . You can also pop by His MySpace Page and maybe have a coffee and a biscuit.

Pop Cult Mind Wax - Out Of The Mouths Of Babes

Duke De Mondo — Wed, 2 May 2007 03:45:02 EDT

IBeing stricken with a curious sort of voodoo done gripped the better part of my arse a couple weeks back, I found myself sat in the doctor's waiting room of Monday past leafing idly through a copy of Bizarre magazine inexplicably (or bizarrely) left alongside the half-dozen copies of Tuberculosis Monthly and V.D Review.Sat there reading a very interesting article about folks who have filth with aquatic animals, I'm suddenly startled no end by a great gasp coming from my right."Lord above!" a voice says.Turning, I find a fella in his thirties sat gazing slack-yapped at the image on the page afore me. A youngster of about six months sits on his knee, bouncing and heaving with demented abandon."Is that an octopus she's at?" the fella mouths."It is boy," says I. "And bejeesus isn't she at the eels a couple pages after.""She is not!""She is. Damn the beast the sea can conjure that she won't find a hole for."Shaking the head with awe he says, "An octopus in the hoo-hah... I've seen it all now.""Couldn't be up to them nowadays," I tut."So what's the matter with you, then?" he asks me presently. "What are in wi' the doctor for?""Ach, it's a savage predicament," I tell him. "I'm having the wild bother with the arse. Shockin' altogether. You'd think I'd ate nothin' but leprosy all year, by damn, the concoctions that rogue's puttin' out of him." "A tight leash" he says sagely. "That's what you've to keep that article on."Just then, the youngster on his knee thrusts forward with a great flail of the arms."No!" says the fella, the father of the child as it happens. "Sit there and behave." Turning then to me, he says, "He's at the crawlin', don't you know? Oh but he's the terrible man for the floor. Damn the peace you'll get, if he takes a notion for rovin'."Much pushing and straining."Phillip! Behave there!"Smiling, I extend a finger the child's direction. "Hello," says I.The youngster looks up at me."Are you not for speakin'?"The answer arrives by way of a joyous yelp, "Cock!"I fire a glance at the father. "Ah...""Mother o' Merciful God" the father says, closing his eyes and grimacing."Did he just say cock?" I ask, stunned a touch."He did.""Cock!" the lad repeats, louder. "Cock!""Phillip!" The father's pupils dart left and right about the room."That's amazing," says I. "I never said the word cock till I was 21 years old, and even then it was only cause I tripped in the middle of a conversation about timepieces. Did you teach him that yourself?""By Mary's nuts I did not" the father assures me, stern faced. "It's a word neither me nor the wife would have on the lips, I assure you.""Ha" I chortle. "You and the wife wi' cock on the lips!"Despite the inherent hilarity of this quip, the fella's face remains free of the faintest ghost of the slightest smile."So is that all he can say?" I quickly ask. "Has he never said a 'dada' or 'mama' or 'Decameron'?""Damn the bit of it. It's cock and more cock, day and night. And save us, didn't he even address the minister with the very same? 'Is this young Phillip?' says he, and says the youngster, 'Cock'. A fine thing for to be greeting a man of the cloth, a mouth all 'cock'."Marveling some at the whole affair, I tilt my head back on the seat and say, "Wouldn't it make you wonder what our own first words were? The devil only knows what filth we maybe flung wi' the first waggle o' the tongue. It's not as if anyone would ever tell us. 'Oh, wee Jonathan, boys but I remember your first words clear as day. Fanny-fart, you said.'"Despite his obvious embarrassment, anguish and guilt, the father slaps the arm of the chair at this and gives a great hoot of laughter. "Ho, boys" he says. "Wouldn't you just wonder, right enough.""Or what other folks first words might've been" I continue, warming to the subject. "All the Big Men and the Big Women. Your David Hume's or your John The Baptist's or your Joan Of Arc's or who have you. Wouldn't it be great to find out, right enough?""Heth it would..."For a time we sit silently contemplating this, the still threatened only by the intermittent scurrilities tossed to the skies by thon dirty, foul-mouthed infant.IIHolland, 1632The young Benedict de Spinoza chortles and giggles at the antics of his father, himself busy racing about the sitting room of their fairly spacious townhouse, ducking and diving and bounding behind the furniture. A right amusing sight to see, if not so enjoyable for the man himself, jumping about the place as he is by way of dodging the missiles flung his direction by Hannah, his wife. "What were you doin' then, Horace, tell me" says she, a great wallop of a pan in her right hand, "If you weren't lappin' and lickin' away? Were you perchance lookin' for chinamen in thon fandang?" "She told me she had a sore pain in the area!" roars the set-upon patriarch, hiding behind a chest of drawers."'A sore pain' says he, I'll give you a sore pain!"With that, she flings the pan and races to the hearth for to retrieve the poker. "And what was she doin' in your study anyway?""She wanted help with her accounts! Sure you know what them young lasses are like, it's all gobbledygook t'them!""Accounts? Well it was a queer abacus in your service, a queer abacus an' all."Throughout the whole carry-on, young Benedict roars wi' infant giggledom. Horace, racing to the child for protection, he says, "Is this the thing for a youngster to be witnessing?""Don't you dare shield behind wee Benedict. You done him damage enough by fatherin' him. I tell you, he'll be a fine one if he grows up like his Da. By God the Rabbi best chop the lot o' thon off o' him while he's at it, if it's to corrupt him like it corrupted you!"Gazing up at his father, Benedict claps his podgy hands and says "Balls!"The two parents look at other, dumbfounded."Balls!" repeats the infant. "Balls balls balls."Hannah drops the poker and throws her hands to the air. "Save us all, there he's at the balls already. D'you see what you've done?"Horace covers the boy's mouth with his trembling hand. "He said none balls, he said bald. Didn't you, Benedict?""Balls n' balls balls.""Merciful Lord above!""Balls balls balls."Cesena, 1742 Francesco Guilliarti addresses her lover with a fair measure of hush in the voice, the child she's busy minding having finally fallen asleep there in the crib. "We can't, Alberto," she's saying. "The Count could be home any minute.""Oh for Holy Christ's sakes," tuts Alberto, fiddling with his belt, "We'll be lucky if we see him afore Wednesday. Him out on the lash wi' the wife up thonner in her sick bed and with all the curious colours of the Italian night coiled about his thighs? My arse he'll be back any minute.""Well I don't feel comfortable. Wee Barnaba's in the room.""He's asleep. The hell'll he know one way or the other."Francesco gazes pensively towards the sleeping child. "I had a dream about him, Alberto.""Oh aye?" The lust-crazed lad slides o'er to his lady's side, kissing at her neck, fidgeting with her hair. "I've been dreamin' only o' you."She shrugs him off with a heave of the left shoulder. "I said no, dammit. I'm tryin' t'tell you about my bastard dream!"Alberto sighs and falls back upon the mattress. "Well what?""I saw the child worshipped by all nations, and the papal seal about his forehead. This boy will be pope, Alberto, I just know it.""Pfft. Pope my arse."Just then, the child stirs from out its sleep, knocking a tiny hand off of the side of the crib. "Look," scolds Francesco, "Didn't I tell you? Now it'll be an all-night session."She wanders over to the crib and looks down upon the baby, its wide eyes staring back at her, its fingers poking in around the half-dozen teeth piercing the pink of his gums. "Are you waken?" says she. "Is that baby all woke up?"The child pulls gently at its bottom lip. "Arse," it says.Francesco pauses."Arse.""You!" she says, turning to Alberto. "Look what you've done! With that arse-talk o' yours, you've only learned him to say it.""Learned him to say what?""Arse! He's said it, just now."Alberto roars with laughter. "Ah fuck off, did he say 'arse' right enough? That's mad.""Mad is it? It'll be my guts o'er the ceilings if'n the Count hears tell of it!""Arse blarse" the youngster babbles.Alberto screeches with hilarity. "I'm glad it amuses you" says Francesco. "A fine pope he'll make, arse this and arse that."Kentucky, 1809 Nancy Lincoln gently rocks her infant son in her arms, sat by the hearthside in the family home. Outside, the winter wind rips and tears about the surrounding acres o' Sinking Spring Farm. The flames o' the fire flicker and waver with the weight of the draught down the chimney. On a couch o'er by the window, Thomas Lincoln gazes dotingly 'pon his wife and his son, sucking on the end of a tobacco pipe and with the tiny log cabin 'thin which the child was born visible on the twilit landscape other side o' the glass behind him.The child near asleep, he sighs and coughs and then, with a great sigh he utters the word "cunt." Thomas stares quizzically at his wife. "What was that there now?"Nancy shrugs. "I don't know. He just gurgled or somethin' I think.""By God it sounded for all the word like...""Cunt," the child says, snuggling against the mother's breast."He is sayin' it!" Thomas says, standing up. "By jove he's sayin... the C-word.""Och he's sayin' nothin' o' the like" scolds Nancy. "You're just thinkin' that's what he's sayin', wi' that dirty mind o' yours.""Gahn-guff cunt.""There, again!" With a finger pointed at the youngsters yap Thomas says "I'll be damned if he's not cussin'.""Sure what does a wain know about cussin'?""He knows plenty, sounds o' things!""Keep your voice down, he's near asleep. And anyway, where would he've picked that up from?""From your Da, I'd go so far as to guess. Thon ol' bugger's got a mouth on him like the crack o' a sailor's arse.""Your fanny" says Nancy. "He's sayin' no C-word and that's all's to it.""Cunt" coos wee Abraham, afore falling asleep.Gujarat, 1869 The grand diwan of Porbandar, Karamchand Ghandi, sweeps o'er the crystalline ballroom with a crowd of near three-dozen doting lads and lassies bounding about him for to gaze upon the child held there in his silk-adorned arms."By God" says Ghandi, "Look at this, young Mohandas, the whole o' India's hoppin' like a bollock in stew for to look upon your tiny wrinkled mug."Throwing himself at the feet of the diwan, a young monk beats his hands off of the floor and wails with incredible ecstasy. "Oh, what a blessing is this child, as beautiful and saintly a lad as e'er the land's done puked o'er the dusts!""He's that if he's anything" says a young heiress swanning about the periphery of the crowd. "And tell me this, Karamchand, is he yet fit for to recognise himself in the reflection 'pon the still of the river?""Oh" says Karamchand, "He'll recognise himself gazing back from even the most turbulent, most disarrayed of surfaces.""And is he sittin' upright of his own will?""He is, and he's as sturdy and as straight as the staff o' F�el�n held aloft by God's own paws." "And what of the talkin'?" says a politician from the West of the country. "Boys-o it gives me a right pinch to hear a wain babblin' and bletherin' on like they do.""Sad to say" says Karamchand, "Young Mohandas has yet to grace us with a sensible word. A garrumph o' nonsense, a great spiel o' shite, such is as much as you'll get from thon tongue."As if by way of demonstration, the youngster babbles thus; "Merde skide cazzate."Those gathered laugh heartily at this recital of the most curious gibberish."Oh he's a terrible man for the prattlin'.""Follar oootthah". "Listen to him there now! Mother of God, will he ever say a thing worth an ear, I wonder?" Clonakilty, 1890 Michael and Marianne Collins wander through the marketplace with the latter pushing Michael Junior afore her in a navy blue pram. Michael Senior, a man well into his dotage (although not so much that he hadn't the sense about him to wed a lass forty years younger), he splutters into a silk hanky and snorts back great clods o' throat-muck as the three o' them pass the stalls and the racks, the braying vendors and the bustling crowds.On a wall at the far end of the street, Marianne spies her great friend Joanne McCluskey, and waves and hollers her direction. Her husband wanders on oblivious, having lost a fair portion of his hearing. Joanne races to greet her sister in all but birth with a face all smiles and arms all akimbo. "Och Jesus oh isn't it an age since I saw you last?" says she to Marianne. "And look at this young article!" She bends o'er the pram, cooing and prodding at the toddler's ample cheeks. "Look at you!" says she, again. "Isn't he a right imp and a half?" says the mother."Oh, he's that. Tell me this, is he walkin' yet?""Well now, he'd be like his father there of a Thursday morning. He'd be able to stand for a second or two but it'd be a foolhardy fella would bet on one leg being fit to cross the other without the lot crashin' to the carpet."The women laugh at this, Michael Senior by now half-ways up the street, oblivious to the fact that his wife has paused in her travels. "And is he talkin'?" says Joanne. "I bet he's got a right wee tongue on him by now.""No" Marianne sniffs. "No he hasn't said a word.""Ach he must've said somethin' by now.""He's not," says the mother. "Now tell me, how's your own twins getting on?"Thusly runs the banter anytime anyone asks about young Michael's verbal abilities. The truth of the matter is that he's said at least eight words by now, but not one of them have been any word a lady might in good conscience attribute to the mouth of her child. "Fuck" went one. "Bum" went another. A third wasn't far removed from "Bastard." It'll be another nine months afore he'll say anything repeatable, and it'll be the word "Boat." By that time, most o' the folks in the tiny County Cork community will assume Marianne and Michael to have fathered a mute, and will be bound in a sore sympathy for the parents. Thanks folks.

Pop Cult Mind Wax - Old Age, Memory, Penile Mutiny

Duke De Mondo — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 23:23:43 EDT

Old Age, Memory, Penile MutinyorMy Willy Won't Rise And Johnny Cash Died, But We Still Got Songs Worth Singin', BoyWith the soft-shoe shuffle and the zimmerframe scuff 'gainst skirting and the sides o' cheeks being ruthlessly, toothlessly gnawed every which way round about, here it stands, the rest home near the motorway wherein a fella finds himself of a Saturday afternoon. Left and right, geriatric throat-linings ran ragged wi' the great barbed clusters o' rustic lung-juice all raging in the cracks o' the esophagus. Folks wander by with the chests awash with cacophonous industrial gargle, sighs that sound like "Solo Dancer" by Charles Mingus arranged for factory furnaces and slowed to a third o' the speed.Sad sounds for to serenade the 15:47, and somewheres in the gunk atween the telencephalic hemispheres, somewheres on the crest o' the thought-muck, Townes Van Zandt watches the whole affair from some empyrean front-porch with a guitar on his knee and his tongue all a-tremble with those words:And now I'm outta prison, I got me a friend at last, He don't drink or steal or cheat or lie, Well his names codeine, he's the nicest thing I've seen, Together we're gonna wait around to die, Aw, together we're gonna wait around t'die. And yet, oh but yet; Wandering these hallways all a-shingle with pills and paranoia and ashen-hued jaws all a-slackened, what I get to thinking about is how it reeks none o' death, this place, but of life, great effervescent pools o' lives all scorched wi' mishap and melancholy and love and loss and lamentation and veneration for memories tangled in the nonsensical whirr o' the aged mind-wax. What I get to thinking of is American Recordings V by Johnny Cash, recorded scarcely a hair's breadth shy o' J.R's last trembling step t'wards the azure glow o' the Almighty, recorded with such acceptance of his own inevitable passing and, more astounding still, with such tranquillity in spite o' how soon everyone knew said passing was set for to be announced via the wailing and the gnashing from the music papers and the broadsheets and the VH1 and the MTV, recorded with all o' this so thickly ensconced in the ones and zeros, says I, that a fella can surely taste the soil in the throat and feel the dew on the shoulders afore the first track has ever reached the first chorus. Yet no, again, see, not death in those soundways but life. "Like The 309", last song the man ever wrote, they say, starts with that sense-slappin' declaration: "It should be a while before I see Doctor Death."But, gloriously, thon chards o' aching sadness caught by the bollocks afore they get half a second's chance for to spray even the palest kinds o' Blues o'er the ear-holes. None time for to think about mourning, for the man has lived, and lived plenty, and thus, "Like The 309", it's a celebration o' life says "Aye, I'm set for being shafted somethin' rotten by The Death, but dig this, sonny, I lived plenty afore then."So it is wandering these rest home byways in pursuit o' the sitting room. "Mourn none" these faces round about would say, if'n they weren't numbed by diazepam and routine."We got hella lot life running thick 'neath the foothills of Nowadays, manys a grand tale to be told if'n someone ever saw fit to mine for the buggers."Epic arcs and sweeping narratives all pulsing 'hind those trembling eyes and perpetually stammering lips, aye, surely there are. On account of my dear grandmother herself being allocated one o' thon rooms for three weeks in sunny July, for this reason and none much other I find myself perched on a windowsill in the downstairs sitting room with an ol' fella to the left by the name of Gerry giggling to himself of an occasion and a chap to the right, fella used to be a Minister, he's staring at the ends o' his legs like a fella might squint in the direction o' a ten-foot willy just burst out the center o' the mantelpiece."The… blazes…" he says.What occurred a few minutes hitherto this scene is that the majority of the residents, my grandmother included, were taken off to the dining area for to enjoy a mouthful or nine o' fine Irish meat an' spuds an' gravy and what have you. The two aged lads sat next to me here and now, for reasons of complex digestion complications they get fed at times of the day incompatible with those allocated to the rest of the resting classes, although The Minister still enjoys a cheeky sweetie of an occasion. Right now, he's hunched o'er in the chair chewing a Werther's Original he's been chewing for much of an hour, an altogether fruitless session owing to how the wrapper's still fixed round the article in question.Now and then he'll take it out his mouth for to mumble something regarding "The red bed, now, where is it?" and then the head slumped down anew, studying the sway o' the carpet fabric this way and that 'neath those mysterious, unknowable feet somehow smushed wi' the ends o' his pegs.Myself and Gerry, we're watching the world trundle on outside the window, watching the sun shred the streets asunder with fierce lashes o' heat the likes of which, so the papers lined neatly 'side the TV assure us, this island has never once seen for as long as folks have bothered to make note o' such things.The sun, it runs those inquisitive fingers round the necks and legs and foreheads o' a quintet o' twentysomething lassies lain on a grass-verge far side o' the car park directly faces this room. The lassies in question, wearing none but a few wisps o' Clingfilm attire on the most sensitive of areas, they're passing round a bottle of cooking oil, dabbing tiny dollops here and there o'er their already well-tanned forms that the pleasant browns may birth a glorious corn-flake cocoon o' blistered red / black terror."Look at that" Gerry mumbles, gesturing to the sunbathers in an odd moment o' coherence. "Sure as fuck I'd be up to the eyes in thon if'n the knackers permitted. Last time the bugger so much as hiccuped I was in a coma for a fortnight."Following this somewhat disarming proclamation Gerry turns his attentions again to the joins atween the walls, the eyes all shades o' colors none but Gerry will ever taste. The Minister, he's mouthing something or other about Moses, the left hand trembling on the arm-rest, the right hand similarly a-quiver and held out afore him.And me, aye, I'm thinking of a conversation took place few nights ago twixt myself and my Beautiful Lady-Friend, the two o' us sat on the edge o' the bed, my head-holes afire wi' mourning for the delirious lust would've surely, for the first time in three years or more, been blessed by the beatific hum o' consummation, been carried t'wards fulfillment on wings o' holiest limb-locked abandon, if'n it hadn't been the victim of a sore barbaric penile mutiny."I'm sorry" I'm saying. "Mean, I dunno why. He was ragin' mental 'gainst the loins ten seconds afore we… y'know. Got all naked an' stuff."She takes hold my hand, aye, and she's saying it's ok, she's saying it's plenty alright. Nothing for to even consider worrying about, that's what it amounts to, the whole situation.Himself slumped sluggishly o'er the thigh there, dribblin' useless gunk round about like a drunkard lain pukin' his Thursday evening o'er a kerbstone. A fierce grotesque mockery o' the maniacal throb careered 'long the fucker ten minutes hitherto this pitiful, deplorable scene. A packet o' the jim-bob bindings lain on the floor beside us, ribbed to within an inch o' anything tolerable by mortal hoo-hah, and one o' the articles in particular lain listless and redundant o'er a paperback collection o' John Milton.Paradise Lost, indeed.She kisses my shoulder and rests her head against my neck, whisperin', aye, she's sayin', "This… bein' with you, t'is enough, I think."The Devil's Rejects paused on the telly, Michael Berryman's eyes caught halfways twixt a blink, and her own eyes, when she tilts her head back for to tell me things altogether too intimate for to reveal herein, her own eyes, I say, all alive with that beautiful autumnal G-minor radiance.She kisses me, and himself there, he gives a shuffle could be mistaken for the embryonic rustle o' some glorious towering thrust o' sturdiest steed. "Oh" says I, "What's this…""Is it…?"No, t'is far from it.A host o' possible explanations career back and forth cross the mind-wax.A side-effect o' the mooder-uppers prescribed on account of a fierce mind-funk couple whiles back, the rapscallions aiding the happy-glands whilst simultaneously wrecking no end o' havoc on the limbic system; some wretched atrophy o' the pituitary gland or the bindings o' the nut-knack-hammock; a hitherto dormant diabetic condition; a crippling fear o' being crap.In the final analysis, only the first and last o' these are at all credible, and the first makes no sense on account of manys a jolly wank having been teased out an upstanding filth-limb manys a time since first popping a pill of that sort.Discussing the matter with grand companion and fellow Blogcritic Sir Fleming a whiles later in the café beside the 24 hour library, he nods sagely, aye, and says all about how cruel it is, how the fear o' failing to please the other leads to the kindsa physiological turmoil fairly guarantees nothing shy o' that right there.Myself and mine Lady-Friend, we sat there till the dawn was set for spreading its legs and spitting the new morn out across the skyways. "I think I'm gonna have to go to sleep" she says. "I dare say I'll have a head like a double-fucked arse I don't get a couple hours kip afore 8a.m."I nodded.Round about the moment when she kissed me good night and whispered certain amorous asides into my ear, round about the point where she lay back 'gainst the pillow and closed her eyes that sleep might get to tingling the corners o' her dream-pipes, round about that time when I noticed again how beautiful she looked with the rumors o' morning-time lain o'er her there like a veil, round about that time, I say, Himself there, he decided probably he was fit for to help me out after all.Relating this development to Sir Fleming, he's squinting and raising the chin my direction."Well, true, she needed her sleep" I'm saying. "But two and a quarter minutes wasn't gon' make a terrible lot of a difference."Turned out even one and a quarter was pushing it. Mean, three and a bit years, for the love o' God.I'm looking at Gerry there, and at The Minister, and I'm listening to the sounds of hunger being staved off a whiles longer by the meals lain out o'er the dining room tables, I'm listening and looking and what I'm thinking is three and a half years or thereabouts, aye, but tell me now, how long since Gerry or The Minister or any o' these folks done found themselves in that magnificent mesh o' mucus and gametes and pantin' and pushin'?Neither Gerry nor The Minister wear a wedding ring, but neither do they wear shoes 87% of the time, yet I'm fairly sure they wore them plenty afore they came here.It's all the reasonable in the world to assume both are widowed, like Johnny Cash when he was laying down a rendition of Hank Williams' "On The Evening Train" by way of waving a gnarled hand at the carriage done swallowed his soulmate on that red-raw mid-May morn. How many folks have Gerry and The Minister helped onboard that self-same steamer, waving misty-lipped as it trundles on t'wards those celestial shores, how many folks leaned out those windows waving hankies and hollering about "We'll always have Paris" and if not Paris at least the bedsit 'side the cinema or the corner o' the kitchen where God himself was spied tottering around the thrusts o' a glorious grind?No doubt Gerry and The Minister've seen manys a hoo-hah or, who knows, maybe even a rogue willy in their time, manys a fine filth they've spun from the threads o' loves altogether far too intense for to be totally numbed by the chippin' and choppin' o' senility. Probably they remember very little most o' the time, except when the brains get all Goddard with the narrative and start flinging the C and D in the middle of the X Y Z unfolding here and now. There and then they raise the eyes t'wards the ceiling and they call on Margaret or Susan or Michael or Phil, they call and then a nurse says all about how "You ok there, pet?" and they'll pause afore nodding the head and sighing. They're ok. Few hours afore yon filth-limb debacle, myself and Beautiful Ms Gillian were watching The Notebook, being in the mood for a soppy ol' gangle might get the soul all a-quiverin' and the eyes all a-splurgin'. The Notebook, what it concerns is a fella attempting for to remind his wife of the love done dangled from every breath they tasted since first they met in the heady days of Period Dress and Classic Pop sometimes around the 1950's. She being in the fiercest throes o' Alzheimer's, y'unnerstann, she has none much of a clue that the tale being related to her by this lovely fella shares breakfast and dinner and mood-stabilizers with her every day, it's none but their own tale, an attempt on his part to reverse the irreversible, take the fire-extinguisher back out the crushed head-mess o' fate and see her eyes all flashin' with recognition again. The Notebook, it's a masterful piece o' work, and an altogether cripplin' number also. Fittingly enough, the flick we'd watched afore Nick Cassavetes' beautiful adaptation o' the book I watched a girl read on a train one day, afore that particular article got set for tuggin' at the eyeball spray-pipes, the flick we'd watched hitherto, y'unnerstann, it was a similarly themed affair also concerning the love lost to memory's fickle whimsy and the attempting for to undo the un-undoable.Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, aye, being my very favorite flick of 2004, being also the finest flick e'er framed about Kirsten Dunst gets stoned and half-naked with a fella looks like a Futurehead but is, in fact, the lad played Steve Flanders in Brian Yuzna's molar-molesting 1996 grue-fest The Dentist.Myself and Beautiful Ms Gillian, we'd let these four-odd hours of psychosomatic relationship drama rise and fall and flail and flutter in the airways round about the living room. We'd see Jim Carrey in the grip o' a sore insufferable agony racing hither and thither around the mind-wax that he might rescue some tiny portion or other of a beautiful, paradisiacal, pulsing love from being chomped rotten off of the head-screens by the fangs o' a vicious, hasty revenge."Would you get it done?" Beautiful Ms Gillian's asking me, after we'd considered whether or not Noah Calhoun woulda been better off putting the notebook down and going for to see what Lacuna Inc. can do about ridding the whole relationship off his brain-plains. Is it better to have thon memories gnawing his shoulders black every time he lays an eye or, god forbid, a hand on his wife, or to have the lot sucked out the eardrums that he might live in blissful ignorance for however long he has left?Course, those memories, they don't always gnaw, sometimes they kiss and caress and soothe and arouse and whisper in tongues o' sapphire devotion. And that's without considering how those memories, they're all reminds him he's lived at all. If the memories are robbed, where's the learning and the growing and the hurting and the loving and the, aye, the living.How much of the soul needs the memory to survive?Looking at Gerry and The Minister, then looking away, the metaphysical weight o' it all far too much to consider in this heat."I would not." I'm saying, in answer to the question about the head-wipe. 'Course, this was afore Himself there got set to embarrassing and shocking and fearing me for my very life. Who knows how I'd have answered, had I been privy to that kinda knowledge. But no.Without experience, y'unnerstann, we have nothing. We need the horrible as much as if not more than the beautiful, on account of the beautiful glistens ever more vibrant in light o' the terrors either side. And so, with dawn all swaying in the breezes, the beauty it bore witness to, all the more so, aye, since it was so near to being lost to the slump o' the dysfunctional jim-bob.And so Gerry and The Minister and the folks starting to make their way from the dining area to the bedrooms and conservatories and sitting rooms, they have that, they have lives tied round those wrists and ankles and earlobes, they have experience, and even if they don't remember it a lot of the time, the crooks in their foreheads and the crinkle o' their grins, they ensure the rest o' us remember it for them.Reading o'er the last couple paragraphs I got the finger hovering o'er Delete. But no. Let it lay there 'gainst the white, horribly cloyingly Hallmark as it may be, let it linger there a time, and let the words set for following yon procession learn plenty from the mishaps and foibles o' the consonants and vowels traipsed afore them.Thanks folks.

Pop Cult Mind Wax - New Love Grows On Trees

Duke De Mondo — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 19:27:14 EDT

A lower-case hush all threaded 'long the morning, the dawn all etched in cautious muted hues and the day softly sighing 'gainst the window. Round about, the subtlest blues bleed from the airways, the gentlest melodies rise from the ashes o' last night's conversation. For fear of stirring herself lain dreaming beside me, y'unnerstan, for fear of causing that sleep-spun veil to slip, for these reasons Tuesday morning holds its breath and waits and watches.Way back when, sometimes in the midst o' a half-dozen hours ago, sometimes afore I'd put my arm around her and she'd kissed me and fallen asleep, sometimes back then when Big Brother Live was all throbbing from someplace behind us, back then, with the two of us lain on a make-shift bed assembled by the living-room door, way back then I'd asked her, I'd said "Tell me now..."I'd said, "How the hell did this happen?"What she'd said was "Fuck knows." She kissed my neck. She said "I'm glad it did, though."Beautiful Ms Gillian, she's asleep beside me, she's holding my hand and I'm staring at the ceiling, staring at the ceiling and tasting those dreams, those symphonies swell back her psyche. Tasting her dreams and those poets, aye, that army of broken-hearted minstrels and troubadours reciting lines etched for to serenade the brown of her eyes or the tint of her hair or those conflicting shades of aching fragility and awe-inspiring fearlessness wound round her like autumn all threaded 'long the crest o' the tide.How the hell did this happen, says I, and to be sure, t'is a tale worth a mighty ol' ponder.Less than five nights hitherto this most perfect and blessed of mornings I was sat front the computer with Ornette Coleman reeling round the head-ways and a couple screeds I'd written one time burning in the waste-bin beside me, and all of this, I say, by way of coaxing the paragraph lodged in the back of the brain-webs from out my skull and onto yonder screen. That incendiary screeching, those fumes o' past musings, surely, says I, they'll chase the bastard out from thon danky ol' caverns.But no, not a hint of a rumor that maybe it might even consider disembarking some time or other.The general crux of the funk in the mind-wax, I knew, was the incessant wailing in the whites o' the eyes for to gaze for a time 'pon the lass all stringing the dreams o'er the sleep-times these past couple months. Beautiful Ms Gillian, with her melancholy sapphire verses and her eyes all whispers o' trembling divinity and her smile all simmering D minor.I gave up fishing for yonder bubble of prose, flung a wet blanket over those smouldering paragraphs all comprehensive analyses of this wank or that, aye, lay a hush o'er Coleman's ragged squailing, I did, and sat back for to smoke and to sip a fine brew in the company o' the cooing melancholy o' "New Love Grows On Trees", Pete Doherty, with the acoustic weeping inconsolable o'er his knee, he's asking some friend or other, he's saying;"Are you still talking to All of those dead film stars Like you used to?"Truth be told, I was talking to one not seven hours shy o' this moment right here all off-white sad-song hue. Edward D Wood Jnr, introducing himself as Daniel Davis, he met me in a red-light slop-pit stinkin' o' gin-sodden twilight commerce and crooning confessions o' deplorable roguery, met me here, I say, when I took it upon myself for to have a wee kip earlier in the day.I recognized him immediately, you'll be aware, wearing the Angora sweater as he was and with the blonde wig all dingle-dangling o'er his shoulders. "Mr. Wood", says I, "An honor to be in your company."Ed, he shook my hand and pulled up a pew, he all mullin' o'er the whiskey and me with a pint o' Red Bull to hand. "Isn't this just a kick in the back of the bollocks" says he.Turns out, Edward D. Wood Jr. had stumbled upon one of my screeds one time, number relating to his very own masterpiece Glen Or Glenda (or I Changed My Sex or He Or She or I Led 2 Lives depending on where a fella may be when he spies it, geographically speaking) and had found it to be reasonably diverting for a minute, or maybe it was awful, he can't really remember, truth be told, and had a bit of trouble with the "terribly idiosyncratic" wordplay. "Still", he says. "Imagine that. The two of us bumping into one another."T'is surely the last thing a fella expects, even when lost to the whims of the dream-fugg, to be bumping into a genius the likes of Edward D. Wood Jr., and him so sadly departed since December of 79. "What've you been up to, anyway, you fabulous old bastard?"What he'd been up to, it turned out, was a whole loada not very much. He and Bella Lugosi and Vincent Price, mind you, they'd got themselves a house-boat with the money done swole in the bank-books once that whole "Worst Director Of All Time" malarkey kicked off sometimes around the nineteen and eighties. "Terribly embarrassing" he says, "But still. Those two old rascals and I, dear God, we have a hell of a time all lipping and lapping cross the tides."Someone from a table across the way shouts "Pull the strings!"Edward, he gets a grin on the yap could surely have powered California for months, if'n we weren't wandering the sleepy-times, y'unnerstan, and therefore in no position for to offer much of anything by way of stemming the energy crisis all gnashing lumps out the coastlines. "So tell me", he says. "What are you at yourself? Are you writing?"I sigh, aye, and an "Oh, Dear Eddy, if'n only that were the case."I tell him I'm in the midst of an altogether terrible fuss regarding the state of the novel I'm prodding and pulling at. The fear, I tell him, it keeps me battering at those keys, but it keeps me also from being in any way capable of writing a damn word worth a frosted buffalo's ball-bag.I tell him I did get a short story published, however, in a literary magazine funded by the University Of Ulster, no less, a curious tale concerning masturbation and fleeting love and Bright Eyes, aye."But the truth of the case" I say, " Regardless of fear or anxiety or anything so adolescent, the truth of it all is that I'm in far too much of the lust with a lass worked on said publication for to concentrate on stringing much of anything together." What I tell him about is the maniacal raging in the blood-pump regarding Beautiful Ms Gillian. "Oh, her poems, Dear Eddy" I say, "Done scourged the soul asunder, you'll know. And those slipstreams o' obsession and lust and Fondness With Intent all career 'cross the brain-wax when she comes o'er for to share a smoke of an occasion, those feisty articles have swollen beyond any mortal man's capacity for swelling, I dare say I'll go mad in the teeth if'n I think of it all for any length of time. And yet how can a man think of a damn thing else?"Edward shrugs. "Fucked if I know."He lights a cigarette and gestures to a passing bar-man for a refill o' yonder elixir. "Well tell me this" he says. "Why aren't you telling this to her? Truth be told I don't have much to offer by way of advice, and I can only really understand every sixteenth word you say.""Ach, Mr. Wood, if'n only it were so simple."I've considered as much in fastidious depth, oh God aye Ed Wood, God aye, since back when first she entered my line o' look-see, matter o' fact. Way back when, when myself and Sir Fleming and Mr Ryan H were sat in the University buildings discussing The Stuff We Can't Talk About None Much Ever Again, lamenting those things what we oh so adore but can't dare for to mention no never no more, on account of them having been pillaged and appropriated and defiled and degraded by association with the dig-glands o' sundry intolerable student bastards. Bill Hicks, Star Wars, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, gargantuan pop cultural monoliths all, and each a rare cluster of holiest splendor, yet lost to the winds o' cruel circumstance. Sat there gabbling, I say, and a lass all a sudden appearing for to borrow a lighter off of Ryan H."Who the hell was that?" says I, when she leaves us for to go grab a coffee. "I dare say I've never seen such a glorious sight in all my time spent wandering these chambers o' direst pretension.""T'is Ms Gillian", says Ryan H.I give an "Oh" reeks of lust all boiling back the filth-switch. "She's ninety-nine colors o' lovely, that lass." Many's an hour in many's a day since then I've considered acquiring her phone number from friends whom I know to be in possession of such articles. But what, pray tell, would a fella say? Something insufferably stupid about wanking, no doubt, and anyroad, the hell would she be doing with the likes of me? What are the chances that such declarations would be met by anything but a lash o' the tongue carves the night sixty strands o' Go Fuck Yourself Sonny-Jim? None much likely.Edward D. Wood Jr., he scowls at this. "Oh fuck off back to MySpace with your Poor Me emo bullshit." I apologize and feel all sortsa ashamed regarding the length of my fringe all a sudden."The facts of the case, far as I can see, are that you either tell this woman of your affections and notions, or you don't, and spend the rest of forever writing songs nobody cares about concerning the sway of her hand this way or that." He takes his wig off a moment, gives it a good patting down. "Cigarette ash" he says, by way of explanation. Replacing the hair-piece he continues thus; "I could've let Bela Lugosi wander on by back in the day. I could've sat in the back room smoking and writing pretentious prose about I wish I hada asked him to be in my picture about I wear women's clothing. Or, maybe I could've held off in case maybe Bela was in possession of some tremendous telekinetic ability or other, and maybe I wouldn't have to do anything, see, because he'd know, certainly, from the time we spent discussing the in's and out's of his work, he'd know exactly what I wanted to say and would answer me accordingly, freeing me from any discomfort or potential embarrassment." He takes a puff on a fresh cigarette. "But the fact is if I hadn't asked, Bela would never have known, he'd have gone off to bounce back and forth o'er those narcotic highways stretching back his brains, we'd have lost contact and, well. Who would've pulled those strings?"Nobody, is who."You're right" I said, eventually. "I could be squandering my own Plan 9."I woke up in time for to get to doing whatever I was doing a few paragraphs back, hitherto the Edward D Wood Jnr dream.Pete's words still hanging in the soundways;"Aw, you, you're green You don't know what love means Oh shall I tell you? It tickles you pink, oh yes But it likes to hear you scream Fire and damnation, lamentations For the likes of you"I'm sorry Edward D. Wood Jr., I'm saying, but I just don't got the foolhardiness required for to nail yon colors to the mast for her to see. A click from the browser, and an email in the inbox. A message from Beautiful Ms Gillian. She'd been to my website, she's saying, and she liked it, and also, if maybe I fancy a yack about this or that or whatever, here's her phone number.I think I sat staring at yonder words for much of the next six or nine hours.Way back when, in the pitter-patter o' syllables and commas make up the first couple paragraphs, way back then, I'd asked Beautiful Ms Gillian about "How the hell did this happen?"How it happened was she sent that particular electronical communication. How it happened was we got to talking and flinging the txt back and forth and arranging for to share a fine caffeinated brew or nine in a bar beside the river the following Sunday. In that particular tavern, you'll be aware, before Beautiful Ms Gillian arrived, before we got to discussing Foreigner and The Last Unicorn and how she could borrow my jacket if I could borrow her jewelry, in the company o' fine friends, I say, I'm sat considering the enormity of the whole situation. Mr Ryan H, fella knows a thing or two about a gorgeous angular country melody and the in's and out's of crystalline wit, he's sat to my left fiddling with an item of time travel paraphernalia. Leaning over all conspiratorially, he asks me, he's sayin "So?" he says, "How's the mind-funk?"At the bar a few rounds back, y'unnerstan, a terrifying vision got to buggering the eyeballs rotten. What I caught a glimpse of was myself asking the bar-maid for a pint of something fit to set the brains afire with drunken hurrah. Something noxious and threatening and distilled to within an inch of the brewers ball-bag, something would undo three years o' sobriety in the time it took to raise a trembling glass to trembling yap. Visions of grand chat sparked by yon fumes all hissin midst the gut-sauce, visions of decadent trawls 'long side-streets awash with hot cum and crack-fried philosophy.It passed in the time it took to remember those banshees lined by the bed in the mornings, those phantoms clawing the TV screen at night.It passed in the time it took to remember how Beautiful Ms Gillian had seemed all the interested in the world with regards the status of my filth-o-meter rating (poor) and the chances that I might maybe be heterosexual? (Good, barring my well-documented hetero-Conorist leanings)Whispering on account of I don't wanna let myself hear what I'm saying, no good can come from hearing such things this far shy of certainty, aye, I'm saying to Ryan H, "I think maybe she digs me. In that way. Fuck knows how or why or what impenetrable mania must be frying that beautiful brown in the eyes, but whatever the reasons or why's or wherefores, I think maybe she possibly does."So aye, that bar-side funk, it done split like an arse on a sawmill.How we ended up on thon mattress lain out on Beautiful Ms Gillian's living room floor, how that came to pass involves a post-bar dander with some folks out round the promenade, aye, and me no closer to finding out if maybe Beautiful Ms Gillian's musings might bare even the faintest of resemblances to my own. Wandering these streets, I say, and a word or two from wonderful Maja, friend of ours has a wild ol' habit o' masking the searing all throbs in her heart with the kinda awe-inspiring outbursts fairly tremble with the weight of the "cunt" and "fuck" and "shit" and "cock" all skipping off of her tongue. What she says is "I think we should all go back to mine, sure as Christ, it's fuckin' freezing." Maja, she's been watching her words since I flung a couple lines her way in a previous Pop Cult Mind Wax. "The cunt takes notes!" she'd hollered, pointing at yours truly all "what?" about the eyeballs. "Fuck forbid my mother should ever see those rancid screeds o' yours."T'was in Maja's kitchen, herself and Beautiful Ms Gillian sat in the bedroom couple doors down, me and my good friend Festive Dave discussing the in's and out's of Zombie Cinema, the virtues o' Fulci and Romero and Hinzman, debating it all, says I, when the chat takes a detour towards matters relating to the lust and the longing and the lonesome fist-hump. "What the situation is", I tell him, "Is that I'm ninety-eight kindsa enamored with herself there, and rumors persist that I was thinking, this very eve in fact, of perhaps announcing such by way of a witty retort. But I dunno. I can't gauge what's going on, you'll be aware."Festive Dave, he mulls it over a moment, and then; "Well, I don't wanna be slabbering all piffle-paff and gab-flab, but what I can tell you is that I noticed a certain chemistry. I think you should make these things known."I made these things known.Sort of.Dave and Maja fell asleep in the throes of a savage drunken arse-melt, and so myself and Beautiful Ms Gillian, we went off to sit on the sofa and discuss the in's and out's of whatever and what have you. Sometimes, she'll ask about if I still have any thoughts of any sort for lovers all lost to the thinly-veiled references pop up time to time in the scribbles and hollerings, and I'm telling her no and I'm thinking, aye now, is this the time for to say?Next thing she'll be discussing the deplorable treatment she received at the hands of foul heartless gentlemen-friends of the long whiles ago, and I'm thrown off course on account of not knowing if she's saying this to tell me she's single or saying this to tell me she's in no fit state to be embarking on anything of the sort at this point in proceedings.For a moment we talk about who we'd do if'n maybe we found ourselves gay of an afternoon, and then, on account of it's 6am and afore anyone knows what's happened this'll be gone and I'll be no closer to holding her hand for a time, on account of all this, I say, I start stammering about "Um, see, aye, fucks sakes, well now...""What?" "Ach, balls. Maybe, y'know, I dunno. Questions and answers, curious articles the lot o' them.""Oh..." she says.What I'm thinking is fuck. That's no "oh..." like I want to be hearing.What I'd been attempting for to make known, you'll be aware, is that I was in the grip of a maddening notion relating to holding her hand or kissing her, maybe, and was all sortsa interested in her thoughts on the matter."I think I know what you're thinking" she says. This, you'll be aware, was the best thing she could possibly have said, since it meant I could now get to asking her what the facts of it all might be, and had nothing to worry about other than she maybe thinks I'm asking for her opinion on Syd Barrett. All I needed to do was say "aye" or "no" as needs be.Somewhere, Edward D. Wood Jr. was shaking his head to the tune of "You sneaky bastard."Beautiful Ms Gillian, she's none too keen on letting known her thoughts on my thoughts and what maybe they might've been way back when in the guts o' a sentence or two off a whiles. "I don't wanna go ahead and assume you're saying something you're not. Maybe you're asking my opinion on Syd Barrett?"I wasn't, but I did later, and she likes him, oh aye, and someday we'll learn how to play "Bikes" on a fake sheepskin rug. "I'm guessing you know the in's and out's of my thinking" says I.She did. So meticulous was her scanning o' my mind-wax, in fact, that she'd bypassed the "maybe we could press our faces together" entirely and headed straight for the bit about I wanna maybe be romantically involved with herself for an indeterminate period of at least ages. What happened was she'd been thinking similar thoughts. What happened was I had a girlfriend all a damn sudden.A fella bounded in the door at that precise second, fella by the name of Simon set for to leave for Germany in a fist-fulla days, the eyes all drink-fried abandon, the limbs flung this way and that. "I fucking rule!" says he. "I just had fuck with a beautiful woman whilst her flatmate slept on the armchair beside us!"He does rule, I point out. He's right about that.Beautiful Ms. Gillian, she kisses me and says maybe I could come round to her place later in the day, when the colors o' this most beautiful night been shaken out the corners o' the brains by way of a shower and a couple hours slumber.Thus we find ourselves the following morn all lain on the floor with the hands and the arms and the breath and the tongues all interlinked and exploring the byways and alleyways of one another's head-states and blood-pumps.She wakes up and smiles, reaches 'cross my chest for the cigarettes and the ashtray. "I have an altogether wondrous feeling regarding the summer ahead" she says.I return her smile, albeit by way of an exchange-rate does her out of a fair few chards o' gorgeousity, aye, and saying "Me too", and a kiss and a closing the eyes.An Asian lad, friend of one of her housemates, he opens the door and screams about "Oh dear Jesus! Sorry!" afore careering out the room in a cluster o' panic and embarrassment. A fine summer, aye, all twitching at the corners o' the day.Thanks folks.

Pop Cult Mind Wax -- Love, London, Shane MacGowan

Duke De Mondo — Tue, 23 May 2006 03:45:41 EDT

The trials and tribulations of a pretentious, self-obsessed, lust-stricken twentysomething, as glimpsed through the throb of pop culture.Somewheres on the other side of 5 a.m. I'm sat afore the monitor with the dawn all creeping cross the sleepers lain out expectant on the windowsill, with the eyes all twenty-seven shades o' knackered, with the brains screeching demented twixt my drum-holes, with Morrissey greeting Saturday Morn by way of a line or two about "London, giddy London." "Is it home of the free," he asks, "Or what?"The digit hovering, trembling 'bove the ol' left-click, the cursor skippin manic round the "Send." Catching a glimpse of a rogue reflection in the ashtray. "Look at you," I'm sayin', "What a deplorable bucket o' bastard you are."Still. Not at all unattractive in the right light and with the right level o' squint in the left-hand peeper.Two o' yon sleepers on the tongue and kicked on down the gullet by way of a cheeky mouthful o' caffeinated brew, Morrissey all a sudden out his mind with concern regarding a coastal town that they forgot to bomb and the wet sand clinging to his sandals, and the screen... The screen still dashed with the gravel o' mine mind-wax.What it says up there in half-mad digital shorthand, what it announces for the eyes all set to gaze, is that I love you. What I'm saying is I love you, and you should know this.When she wakes up, y'unnerstann, when she wanders towards the PC stack all gruntin' and coughin' from the corner of the room, when she gets to browsing through the email with the cigarette smoke all stringing purple symphonies roundabout, when she's sippin from the first coffee of the day and clicking through the play lists in pursuit o' a riff might shatter the traces o' dream-fugg still shimmering back the eyes, when she comes across this lust-crazed declaration all hidden away midst forty-nine lines of gabbled neurotic effrontery, what she'll smile and say is "He loves me."What she'll think and grin regarding is "So what the fuck else is new, hear me now?"Morrissey, he's busy accosting his lover for flicking through private journals in pursuit of a line or two red-raw with intimate lovelorn scribbling.Nowadays the fucker would just go snooping through the MySpace.I love you, it says. I add a bit.Now what it says is I love you and also, I'm set for to move to London.I got a burning in the belly reeks o' a craving for to be heard and read, I say. I point out that the longer I sit here in this back room with the fag in the maw and the fags in the brains, with the fringe getting blacker and the eyes getting redder, with the stacks o' Chapter One Paragraph One getting closer to the roof-slates with each tick o' the time-tock, the longer this goes on, I say, the closer the factory gets.Fore a fella knows what's happened he's stood in yonder production line checking pharmaceutical paraphernalia for anything out of the ordinary, yacking all about how he's gonna get a novel out one day, soon as my agent gets back to me. Soon as the publisher's ready. Soon as this leg gets fixed. Soon as the doctors let me go. Soon as I get this black from out my lung. What I say is don't get me wrong, not for a second. The factory, it's a place humming with strong and beautiful and soulful and special and dedicated human beings. But I'd be lying, I say, if I pretended yon grinding and sparking and thumping didn't scare the yellow out my pish.So aye. I'm going to London. I'm taking a couple bags fulla personality, a guitar tuned to Blue and a case filled wi' y-fronts on account of I wore boxers once in 1999 and my knackers ended up moored off Arran for a fortnight. Giddy London all Dickensian rascality and Arcadian splendor. A couple stealthy clicks and Morrissey sulks silent in the airways, the beautiful, furnace-tattered creak of Shane MacGowan's throat all thrust up 'gainst the grey o' yonder speakers."When I first came to London, I was only 16 With a fiver in my pocket and my ol' dancing bag And I went down to the Dilly to check out the scene But I soon ended up upon the Old Main Drag"This last lament for a childhood snatched by those side streets and alleys and stairways all blood-flecked and wanked-o'er. Bitter recollections of the "old men with the money" who'd "flash you a smile," aye, and a five-quid note "for a quick one at the wrist down on the Old Main Drag."What I tell her is how sometimes, when the dawn's all knotted 'gainst the glass and the lust-crazed lights o' Soho are clawin' at my guts, what I see is that Old Main Drag, what I see is a fella wi the mop all matted and blackened up wi' boot polish, what I see is days and nights and weeks and months spent bent o'er the bonnet of a stolen Corsa, working for to make that record, y'unnerstann, for to mint that disc, working for the price o' a melody in this cancer-limbed thoroughfare a world and nine removed from those pathways trodden by Morrissey's charming, razor-yapped dandies. I see Leicester Square and the shadows on the pavings, those pavings Shane's narrator likely sat upon for a time, flinging broken matchsticks to the rain, just afore he was "picked up by the coppers and kicked in the balls."By the end of the song he's sat huddled round a fag-end, maybe pulling a stinking blanket that bit tighter round his frame."Now I am lying here, I've had too much booze I been spat on and shat on and raped and abused I know that I am dying but wish I could beg For some money to take me from the Old Main Drag"Aye, if anyone knows about London, it's Shane. A mental map scrawled along the psyche, every byway and skyway and parkway rendered in glorious, intoxicating poetry. A fella can wander along those "Dark Streets Of London" with their memories of summers past, summers spent in psychiatric wards all "Drugged-up psychos with death in their eyes." He can catch sight of that "golden heart" pulsing twixt the city's "scarred-up thighs" in "London You're A Lady." A fella can curse "Dear dirty London in the driving rain" like the drunken rogue in "Sea Shanty." He can career along the "Dear old streets of Kings Cross" with yon scallywag hero of "Transmetropolitan," screech across Hammersmith in time to "scare the Camden palace poofs," "worry all the whores," and "storm the BBC" before the first hints o' twilight kiss the stone. "We'll drink the rat's piss, kick the shite And I'm not goin home tonight"(Wondering for a moment if a fella can easily acquire non-alcoholic extra-caffeine diet-Rat's Piss without too much of a hubbub?)Aye, I tell her. These gloriously wretched tableau's and episodes, I been catching glimpses of them e'er since that momentous afternoon when first I hit play on Rum, Sodomy & The Lash. But the other London Shane talks about, the London of "long-gone songs from day's gone by" carried along the swell o' the Thames, the London of "Rainy Night In Soho," I been pining for that, y'unnerstann. "Rainy Night In Soho," I remind her, is maybe the most beautiful song ever written, certainly the most beautiful ever written about Soho.Was goin to be the first song at the wedding I almost stumbled into, by the by. We used to dance drunkenly round the kitchen in time to the sway o' yon strings."I took shelter from a shower And I stepped into your arms On a rainy night in Soho The wind was whistling all its charms"London.What I tell her is that's where I'm headed, and I'm excited and terrified and tired and fryin. London, where's it's "Time For Heroes" and singsong revelry and grot-mawed entrepreneurs sayin aye, maybe so, maybe we could make that record.London. What I tell her is sometimes I get homesick and I'm still lain in my bed, what I tell her is sometimes I just get a craving to go wander round the disused quarry feeding chunks o' hedgerow to the horses, what I tell her is I dunno how well I'll do, being away and all that. It's well past 7, the sleepers long-since rendered useless, the day all set for shining, the branches o' trees all lazily weaving shadows o'er busted bottles and crushed tin-cans. I tell her that I been thinking.What I say is all about how the last time I was in her presence, midst the transcendent phantasmagoric swirl o' Dublin City, what I say is that she took hold a chunk o' my soul I been finding it awful difficult to function without. London, there it is, up ahead. Be it the London Conrad caught snaking through fog in those opening pages o' Heart Of Darkness, be it the London Strummer watched burn and rise anew, be it the County Hell, the home o' yon Landlord, the "Bitch's bastard's whore" done rid Shane o' his pennies back in the day, or be it all of those things and any amount less, whatever it is, it's there, it has a hand on my knee and it's telling me it likes my way with a G and the way I say "fuck" in conjunction with words not necessarily "fuck." What I say is I have a thirst for those lights all burning my breath. What I say is it's a thirst I acquired by way of masking that other craving, being the one connected solely to the blue all dancin' in her eyes.It's 7:45 I tell her, announcing the following: "All it would take for to lead me back from off of Hampstead Heath and, indeed, to have me packing those cases all the sooner, this evening even, would be a line or two from you along the lines of 'O.k, come on then.'"What I tell her is London is London, but it's not you, and therefore it can't ever occupy any more than maybe 16% of my heart and soul and mind and wrist. What I say is no pressure, but if you give the go-ahead, I will leave here, today, and book myself into a bus-shelter somewheres 'longside the fetid plunk o' the shuffling Liffey waters.I hit "Send" and spark up a smoke. Around 5 p.m. I woke up to the delightful hiss of a gentleman reading In Cold Blood from out the earphones wound round my neck. Before I opened the blinds I spent a moment soaking up this sensation in the chest, this hunch about how what was waiting other side of that windowpane was nothing less than the most beautiful day of the year thus far. Kinda day a man might sit in the back garden drinking Diet Coke, smoking Mayfair Kingsize and reading poetry written by women lost to delirious fancies regarding Saint Augustine. It was raining. But oh, what beautiful rain.I saw the inbox flashing, y'unnerstann, and "RE: At Great Risk, A Declaration" couple lines down, just after a spam affair offering 98% more willy and a fella from Wolverhampton promising a collection of Tolstoy works should I order a new vacuum. I saw it, and I shivered a tad. I'll open it later, I figured, after I shred a couple inches off the lawn.T'was whilst I was cutting the grass that I got to thinking about how London might not want to kill me. Maybe all I'd find would be a collection of scenes much like what I'm used to, just played out afore a different set o' bastards and poets and folks make me smile and chuckle and weep. Maybe there's no reason to be scared.And aye, maybe I'll never need worry. Maybe she's demanded, in CAPS LOCK swears all Courier New and size 99 that I better get down there immediately, come kiss her and hold her hand and sing her that song I wrote about how I was sorry I had a wank regarding a dirty joke she made one time.That she didn't say that, that she maybe said no, stay where you are, all very likely, and all very unpleasant, no thought to be thinking whilst a fellas trimming hedges with a blade size o' Russia. I stared at the email a long time before I opened it.Eventually, I did.I leave for London in September. Thanks folks.

Pop Cult Mind Wax - The Terrible Tale Of The Busted Cherry

Duke De Mondo — Mon, 15 May 2006 04:53:00 EDT

So I got to talkin' to this fella lives in sheltered accommodation in the guts o' County Londonderry, fella we'll call Jeff on account of the tale being all sortsa compromising. Jeff, you'll be aware, he used to be a plumber 'till he lost 40% of an arm as a result of a vein gone bad far side o' a year or two's jabbin'.He didn't blame the needle explicitly, y'unnerstann, but a fella can deduce as much from the black shimmers now and again in the corners o' his smile, kinda shimmer only a handful of unfortunate souls in particular circumstances ever need worry about shining. The arm, though, that's a tale for another time.I was three hours early for the train, and yet, with the rain bein a couple notches too wet and the lass in the chippie being a couple notches less enthusiastic than a fella might hope, the only option was to sit in the station reading some Flann O'Brien and wishing I'd something funnier to write than "wank", which, whilst certainly hilarious, is hardly on a par with the intricate collage o' puns and jests and droll retort found clinging to the pages of The Third Policeman. Flann O'Brien, or Brian O'Nolan as he was known to his mother, he was an Irish writer spent his days scribbling bollock-melting masterpieces and being ignored by all but a few individuals sat huddled round Dublin firesides discussing post-modernism. He died drunk and bitter and probably still had a thousand and six tales to tell about the hilarities of bicycles or footnotes, each syllable more intoxicating than the last. An amazing writer, and yet, prior to a couple months ago, I'd never heard tell of the marvelous old bastard. Irish writers, see, for whatever reason, never seem to have anything to say that I can be bothered listening to. It's only that I was born in Northern Ireland, and am therefore British, that I can even bring myself to proofread my own self-indulgent piffle. Nonetheless, Flann O'Brien, like Brendan Behan, Old Man Joyce, Oscar Wilde, James Clarence Magnan, Roddy Doyle and a handful of other cheeky rapscallions done crawled into my affections regardless of being all too fond of a "hilarious" tale involving Killarney, he can feel safe in the knowledge that I very much dig the fuck out his paragraphs, and am very sorry he had to be dead. So aye, was whilst reading a page or two of yonder waxings that Jeff presented himself. Jeff, it turned out, was headed my direction, and thought nothing of perching himself to my right for to dazzle the arse from out my hole with drunken gabble. Four years ago I'd have rejoiced at such an occurrence. Sweet Zeus, I'd have hollered, a drunkard with a tale to tell! What say we ditch this station and go find a brothel'll let us lie under the sofa drinkin' cider tastes like the lash on a seaman's shoulders till the early hours o' last Tuesday. Fella gets a few years of the ol' Sobriety round about the head-holes, turns out the senseless flailing o' a soused-up stranger's tongue is the kinda thing can lead only to a mind-funk size o' Texas and a yearning in the nuts for to be anywhere other than here, sat wi' this tosser thinks he's Peter Cook other end of a gullet-load o' gin.Jeff, he was all sortsa bladdered, every color o' drunkenness flick'rin' in his breath, but turned out he had many's a tale worth hearing, some of which were still fairly great even after the seventh or tenth telling.Many's a sorry narrative done trembled tween his teeth, many's a debauched episode and deplorable account. What traipsed longest 'round the brain-mess afterwards, however, was the tale of The Busted Cherry.Jeff, it transpired, was a man who was fond of the vagina, but more so if'n said vagina had a penis where the vagina should be. As biology would have it, weren't no place to find such a thing other than twixt the thighs o' a gentleman. So, in pursuit of the elusive organ, Jeff went snooping round the taverns o' Belfast City in the bygone days o' a while back. "It wasn't easy", he said, "You couldn't just ask folks, even then, even in the eighties, you couldn't just assume, not like now, with the Graham Norton and the Brokeback Hills and the cock-on-cock every which way."I asked if he could say willy instead of c**k. He ignored me."You had to be careful who you approached. But eventually I found this lad, saw him stumblin' out a taxi front the Ulster Hall one night, middle o' winter, aye, snow piled thick to the pink o' the prostate."Jeff and this fella, they'd got to talking, turned out both were similarly inclined towards the hairy chest and the sweat all bubblin' in the small of the back. "We'd meet up every weekend, go for a drink, have a fight with a New Romantic and fall asleep in a hedge. But we only ever kissed, y'see. I got the feelin' he'd been around a time or two an', well, I was a bit green about the groin."A woman walking towards the turnstiles drops her change, coppers rolling all directions. Jeff pauses for a moment, gathers his thoughts, scrambles round the back o' the throat for a hilarious quip to hang at the bottom of the frame, but no, a half-arsed "pfffft" from the side o' the sneer is all he can drag to the gums. "So aye", he continues, "I didn't wanna, y'know, do it wrong."Because high school teachers are all the happy in the world to draw arrows join willies to hoo-hah's and sperm to egg and husband to wife and back again, and yet nary a pie-chart to illustrate what exactly goes on back there for the fella bent across the bed wi' all Job's tribulations erupting north o' the spine. "I didn't want him to know, y'unnerstann, and if I didn't like it, I didn't want him to be the one to teach me, since he was a nice fucker, truth be told."He took a drink from out a coke-bottle filled with Bacardi."I wasn't in love or nothin, cause I don't think I ever have been 'cept for this time I saw a soldier looked like Jerry Lee Lewis scoopin' guts from out a dead man's boots. But I was fond of him, certainly."Jeff decided to try it out first, alone, before he made any rash decisions with regards his anus and this charming man done rose out the pulse of Belfast City Center. "An arse-wank, you might call it."I said I might. I probably won't."I was gonna use a bottle, y'see, but then all I could find was this big plastic fucker thick as God's thigh. So what I did was I bent a coat-hanger over and covered it with toilet paper, put a rubber on the top."Amazing, it is, the tales folks'll tell to strangers and priests. I got the feelin' Jeff had rolled this number out a time or sixty in the past. Probably the version I got (three times, in fact) bears no relation to the tale he told way back when, way back when he was high on speed and gabbling to some faceless reveler in some tavern reeked o' Love Supreme. Probably that version was still plenty far removed from whatever really occurred in that bedroom, with Non Stop Erotic Cabaret blippin an bleepin out the cassette player, with posters of Debbie Harry keeping watch o'er proceedings so as his parents would never assume him to be homosexual. Whatever the truth of events, probably it matters none. Probably Jeff was just getting something off of his conscience by way of an exaggerated narrative about coat-hangers and toilet paper. Whatever shred of The Actual was breathing in the corners o' the tale, probably it was enough for Jeff.Peculiar, the things folks feel guilty about."So I put it up there" he says. What I ask him is "What did it feel like?""Like I needed to take a crap. Very uncomfortable, and also, not especially fun."He stared at his feet for a minute, chewin' the bottom lip. "I figured it was something I was doin wrong, why it wasn't getting me all excited, so I tried a bit further."There's a story in Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk that involves a fella putting candle wax in a part of his body not at all designed for anything of the sort. I've slept with my legs crossed since reading it."A good ten or eleven minutes I tried, and nothin, not a hint of a shadow of a buzz anywhere."There's a girl couple seats removed, beautiful lass with the hair all black / blue highlights and the feet all bright red moon-boots. Is she listening, is what I get to thinking. "Then I felt this kinda, like a pin prick, not painful as such, just sharp for a second. Then three seconds. Then ten. Then I figured I'd take it out and go have a proper fumble. I tried to bring it back and damn near fainted, I can tell you that for the price o' fuck all."It turned out the toilet paper / contraceptive barrier had broken somewheres along the line. Just a notch, you understand, but enough for a reasonably sharp edge to emerge. "I'd bent it flat as hell, like, but still there was a wee kick to the bastard."The wee kick, kicked him for all it could in the middle o' his arse."I couldn't move it, if I did I would tear the bejeesus out my hole."The last thing a young man needs is his parents finding him passed out and bleeding from the back-end for reasons of shafting himself with a coat-hanger."A coat hanger!" I get to mouthin, eventually. "For the love o' Jandek, why not a banana or some rolled-up cardboard?""I wasn't thinkin" is what he says. "Mean, if I had been, I'd have left the hook outside. But I bent it all up in four, wrapped it up good, I thought."He pulled at it for a good three minutes, he says, he could feel his face turnin' black wi the pain. "Eventually, I knew it could get no worse, so I gritted my teeth, pushed it up a bit, dragged it to the left and slid it out."This was about the eighth story Jeff had told. The others didn't involve his arse in any capacity whatsoever, other than it being attached to him whilst he was giving up the brown and losing part of his arm or hanging out with a bloke used to be in The Ruts. By that point, I'd wager, he knew he had an audience all sympathetic to his antics. Still, some things you never expect to hear from a yap encountered but two hours hitherto. "So", I got to askin, "What happened with the fella?""Oh" he says, tutting, "Fuck him. Turns out he was an Everton supporter."Stories. Man can't walk from here to there 'thout passing a million of the bastards, and how many does he ever get to hear? Fairly few, is how many. Jeff skidaddled ten minutes before the train arrived, headed off for a pish, he said. He'd be right back. He was nowhere near it.Thanks folks.

Pop Cult Mind Wax - The Beauty Of Bjork, The Snarling Of Fate, Romantic Endeavors

Duke De Mondo — Mon, 8 May 2006 04:51:36 EDT

The trials and tribulations of a pretentious, self-obsessed, lust-stricken twentysomething, as glimpsed through the throb of pop culture.Fate has a way of biting a fella in the ballbag, kinda bite has a fella bent double o'er the bog all screeching red-eyed at the piss-hued reflection screeching back. What the fella spits is "Damn it, hear me now, look at these knackers all chomped asunder, sayin, with the teeth-marks humming neon out the flesh, and yet fuck my eyes wi' solder if'n yonder endorphins aren't smacking my brain-wax delirious!"What a fella finds is he meets Fate in alley-ways all broken glass flags a-flutterin' and lamp-posts bent with the heat, meets Fate and says aye, with the tweeds at the knees he says "Bite."What he maybe says is how he's been staring at the screen for nigh on forever and nary a syllable done danced 'cross the white. What he says is he's been lost in a mind-funk, waking up at five, treading the carpet black till he feels fit for a knuckle-fuck and a couple spins of Post. He's been sleepin' two hours a night, and the dreams, oh the dreams all tartan, the dreams all ethereal collages o' photographs and postcards, stitched round faces and names and voices and eyebrows, the dreams all pleading for to be snared within paragraphs six-foot long and humming with sordid adventure and melancholy flute. What he says is "I tried, and yet no."So bite, Fate, sharpen yonder gum-pegs on the granite thighs o' Zeus and sink those razors good and proper. For the love a God, sayin, for the sake o' the song.And lo, words form. I woke up this evening with a paragraph lodged in the gunk between my liver and my kidneys. For the first time in six weeks, y'unnerstann, I could feel words an' apostrophes an fuck-flecked retort sloshin' along the sides o' the guts, rumblin' long the tummy-mess, bladder feeling the holes in the A's and P's and R's like plasticine fingers on brail. What they spoke of, those words, were fluorescent searchlights dancing round a church-tower, aye, moonlight carving a glistening trench from the lights all scarrin' the horizon to the rocks all scarrin' the beach. A set of stone steps lead from the rain-lashed promenade to the blackness huggin the apartment blocks above. A headfulla Bjork; those crystalline melodies easin the itching twixt the ear-holes with a burning back o' the brains tastes for all the world like a cooing refrain coiled round a beat the color o' frost on a gypsy's tongue. "Fuck Bjork", Maja's sayin, and a fella all felled around the What The Fuck's. "People think we're all like that. Dippy pixie bastards. We're so not."Maja, she's also Icelandic, y'unnerstann, came to Northern Ireland for reasons of the study, and sat here now with myself and Sir Fleming in a terribly chic drink-hole by the sea. "Fuck Bjork" she says again, notebook on the seat beside her all throbbin' with kaleidoscopic verse an' opium prose.Maja, she gets off with that kinda banter on account of she's amazing and swears better than anyone I know, but still, I can stand not one more word against mine love, mine dearest Bjork, for whom God spat fire into mountains just so as she could sample the bubbling and hissing and spitting. Not a syllable more can I tolerate, and so conversation tossed in the direction o' a lass set to arrive in the shortly-times, lass I ended up gettin' hella very fond of in the course o' the last few days. "So tell me", Sir Fleming's sayin', "The blazes is goin' on there, anyroad?"What's goin' on, I tell him, is that me and yonder lassie, lass by the name of Carole, we done got to talkin' in the university buildings few eves past. I told her I was thinking of heading off for to live in the third verse of "Possibly Maybe", she said she was planning on setting up shop in the second act of A Streetcar Named Desire. I told her I was in a mind-funk and couldn't get a sentence to flow for love nor money, she said she'd been up all night writing a poem about Mother Ireland. I told her she should know I didn't drink, she told me I should know that she does. I'd seen her about, y'unnerstann, and we'd flung a banter at other before now, but never proper conversation.Those conversations, ever more intimate they got, and all the more frequent, 'till it was txt messages in the mornin' all about "Good mornin" and txt messages at night all about "Good night" and txt messages when I was listening to Debut all about "I'm listening to Debut". Soon enough, a mutual friend, he got to asking me, "Tell me now", said he, "What's the deal with you and Carole?"What the deal is, I explained, is that I think I dig her somethin' savage. She makes me laugh, I said, and also, the eyes, y'unnerstann, what beautiful melodies swim back those eyes? What sonnets all flare in the white? "Well, what I can tell you", he'd related, "Is that she digs you back. I think. I think I can tell you that."Gentleman stood by the bar lets a roar out his arse sounds like a twelve-tonne 'ruption midst a buffalo's bollocks. He'd fallen asleep five or six pints ago, shaken out the stupor by this gargle in his trousers. "I swear to God" Maja says, "If I don't get to a toilet my c*nt's gonna explode."She wanders off t'wards the ladies, Sir Fleming all inquisitive round about the chin; "So, what? Is there stuff goin' on?"I dunno, is what I say.Last night or the night before that, I can't say which night, I popped a sleeper on the tongue an wept for a time to "Hyper-Ballad". "I imagine what my body would sound like slamming against those rocks", Bjork was singin', "And would my eyes be closed or open?"Monochrome emotions and Technicolor sweeps all swarming and buzzing round the marrow o' the bones, every word let rise from the beautifully ragged binding of Bjork's gullet tasting like kerosene kisses set light in my gut. The swell o' that chorus, those ineffably intense raptures cascading back and forth between the speakers, they overcame a fella, you dig, this thunderin' narcotic in the head-holes, those processed gargles staggerin' long the melodies all twisted round one another's thighs.Somewheres in the midst of all this, I sent a txt message to Carole along the lines of; "I think maybe we should discuss stuff. That kinda stuff. Maybe. I might be thinking things. I dunno. My head's afire with Bjork."What came back was "We can discuss those things any time you feel we should."The sleeper kicked in fore I had a chance to reply. "And this", Sir Fleming says, gesturing round about, "This is where discussions are to be had?"Me all shrugging. I dunno. I'd hope so, but who can tell?Outside, the seaside township of Portstewart carries on about its business. Drunks roll cigarettes on storefront stoops and watch yon ocean swell and swirl ahead o' them. Nuns look out o'er the teenagers huddled together by the swings 'neath the convent walls, those teenagers with their bags fulla glue hung round their ears like feedbags. Men mingle awkwardly by the doors of the public shitters where it's a fiver for a quick one off the wrist and thirty of your finest notes if'n you fancy a rimmin. Mormon singers holler from the building used to be a nightclub, nightclub almost cost me my filth-cherry back in the day, if'n I hadn't been 17 and therefore fucked on vodka. Myself and a lass high on Bowie, we'd decided to leave the drinks for a moment, head out back the club and maybe lay a fumble cross the gravel. Me having trouble finding my way and she being in no state to guide me, we gave up tryin and headed back inside, just in time for to puke over a fruit machine and get in a fight with a fella out a pipe band. If a man's to discuss these matters anywhere, stands to reason it should be here.A lass stumbles out the toilets singing "Come Out Ye Black And Tans." Nobody hears her. Friend of ours, he's since joined us, face all awash with the glow from his lap-top. "Dear Jesus", he says, and we're all leaning over for to see.On the screen, a lady being filthed in the bum by a gargantuan remote-controlled dildo loaded on springs. I doubt I've ever seen the like."Got it on the web-net" fella says, "It was supposed to be V For Vendetta." S'been on his hard drive for three days now, hasn't slept a sleep worth two fucks since first it spat its muck cross his eyes."She keeps speeding it up", he's stammerin, "Damn thing can go no faster, you think, and no, there it goes, faster."He takes a mouthful out a jug o' White Russian, the woman in his 'puter hollerin' demented out the speakers."Just keeps goin' faster..."Carole arrives shortly thereafter. "Hi" she says.How I answer is Hi.She's wearing this beautiful black dress, you should know, the eyes all purple whispers, the hair all down o'er her shoulders. When she speaks, you should be aware, the words look like tears, except when they look like shadows, in which case they look like shadows. "You look beautiful" is what I woulda said, if'n I hadn't said something remarkably stupid about masturbation, some raggle-taggle bundle o' guff all rollin' out my face.She walks to the bar like the faintest o' breezes 'pon wind chimes, returns with a pint o' cider and black. In the jukebox to the left of my brains, someone tosses a coin towards "Big Time Sensuality";"I can sense it Something important is about to happen""Is it?" Carole asks me, and I say I dunno, I say I don't know much of anything anymore.She sits down beside me, and there's a moment right there, a second when it looks like she's gonna lean over, gonna lean over and what might happen is maybe a mouth-press of some sort, but no, The Cure come on the telly hung in the far-corner of the room, we listen to "Boys Don't Cry" and hope for a "Letter To Elise" that never materializes. Earlier in the day, y'unnerstann, I'd been talking to Ryan H, friend of mine knows a thing or two about dirty chat and blasphemy. "Why haven't you kissed her yet?" he'd asked. "There's been banter and intimate revelations and by the jissom o' Christ she's said she's up for it." I'd shrugged. I'd said who knows, but most likely it's got something to do with the ol' Right Time and such, aye. I'm holdin' out for a moment when "Army Of Me" is playin' and the sky's all slate-grey etchings, makes it all the more compelling, you'll be aware, when it comes to telling the tale. (Memories of the time I got kicked in the teeth and refused to bleed till such times as I could be sat in front a cathedral, on account of my journal was sorely lacking such a scene)"Well", he'd said, "You don't do it soon chances are you won't have no tale worth a fiddler's balls, she's headin' back to Belfast in the shortly times."Carole, she lights a cigarette, she says she's going home shortly. To Belfast. She says this and she pushes the packet o' smokes o'er to me, and I'm thinking aye, I'll have one a those, certainly, and also, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna kiss you. A scene unfolds in the reflections on someone's glass; I kiss her, and she says "Let's go a walk, maybe up round the convent, see if we can hear the sisters all singing in their sleep." I kiss her and the walls bend over and around us, we sit pulsing in the midst o' that concrete cocoon writing rhymes about the texture of the estates we live in, places where the passing trains sound like banshees, places where bus-shelters go to die. I dunno what happens next, someone lifted the glass. Maja's sayin "Kissing? It's just fucking stalling. I don't kiss."I'm thinking 'bout how aye, what I'll do, is kiss Carole.She looks at me and I hold the gaze for a moment, thread it through the fingers and roll it round the tongue, she looks at me and I lean across. She looks away.Sir Fleming, he notices this, but he says nothing, just flings a squint says "Was that? Did you?" and I fling one back, one tastes like "I tried."Who knows how it happened, who for a second could fathom it 'thout the aid of a fist fulla chicken guts and a pipe fulla Scottish moss, who could hazard a damn guess about the mechanics of it all, but fairly soon I noticed my arm was around Carole's shoulder. How the hell did it get there? She seems to know it's there. Did she put it there? A lass at the next table starts waxin' on and off about King Kong, her teeth red-raw wi' spite. "Fuckin Al-Qaeda propaganda if ever I laid eyes on it!", she garbles. "Foreigner comes to America, wrecks New York, and we're supposed to feel sorry for the rancid bastard at the end because oh, we slapped a couple natives in his homeland?"A silence. Someone asks Maja her opinion on trains. She tells him to go fuck himself.My arm still around Carole, the bar still hiving with drunkards and prophets and closet homosexuals terrified to admit they don't wanna give Kelly Brook a single one. I'm thinkin; the arm's there. S'been there for an hour. If ever a man had licence to kiss, chances are it bore striking resemblance to the sheen o' this moment here. And yet, oh and yet. An arm round a lassie, what does it mean, anyroad, in this day and age, with the broadband web-net and 24 hour news and erect willies on British telly? What if it means nothing, what if I go to kiss her and she says no? And here, no less, here in this ale-house all loaded wi' weeknight revelers drowning the clanging o' alarm bells set to bid them t'wards factory floors in the morning. Bad enough, rejection in the darkened corners o' chapels with no-one but the Blessed Mother to hear. Rejection midst a shower o' drunks, dare say it'd be enough to burn the pores from out the face. Sometimes she looks at me with the kinda look says "So when, then?"Other times she looks at me with the kinda look says "That was a fuckin awful joke, just now" and so I retreat a wee bit further back the brains.By the time the bar's stopped serving I get to thinking 'bout how I fucked it up. There was digging goin' on, fella way back when said so, "She most likely digs you back", he'd insinuated. And Carole, she'd said as much, albeit via the txt, way over there on the other side o' that connection, over there where how I am is however she thinks I was last time we met, and probably not how I am now, here, in this tavern all Gene Vincent swagger and Robert Johnson howl. Outside, on the street, after the bouncers've asked us to leave since come the fuck on, they have homes to go to and beds to throw up in, outside with the ocean tossing crystal spray to the breeze, outside with the church at the far end of the promenade all alive wi' the neon lights from the night-club 'cross the road, I ask Carole if'n she wants to go a dander someplace. I need to find a bank, I say. She says "Yeah, sure." What her eyes say is "I know what you're up to. And it's alright, I think."Beside the bank there's a set of stone steps lead way up off the promenade towards the estates and apartments on the hill. Steps look a bit like what yon priest threw himself down at the end of The Exorcist (were his eyes closed or open?), steps look a bit like the bass-line to "Human Behaviour". "I think we should go up there" I'm sayin. "Up those steps."And so we did.At the top of those steps, with the lights of Donegal all chiming in the distance to the left and a fella in a Hawaiian shirt puking into a bin-bag to the right, with the month of May tied to the flick'rin street-lights, with the caffeine kicking lumps from out my ear-holes, with all of this, I say, at the top of those steps I kissed her.Was beautiful. And yet, in the midst of it, a horrific realization. It can go no further, this affair. The problem is Carole lives 'midst the giddy swirl of Belfast City, being a fair ol' shit's fling from the house in which I fall asleep every morning. The problem is that I know from experience, y'unnerstann, these long distance things, they never work out. Friend told me one time; "These long distance things" he said, "They never work out." And more - "Fact, they lead to nothin' but a hideous mush all laced with jealousy and longing and an itching in the groin can't ever be fixed no-time shortly." Once upon a hangover, a fella woulda pretended all was right anyway, raced on down those barbed wire alleyways lead to a fumble and a fidget and a grand old tale to tell. Carole, what I realized was she was special in the way that means she's special, and not slow. What I noticed was that no, I couldn't be pretending things were set to occur if'n I knew they weren't, and I knew they weren't. Because why, because the mush discussed up yonder, because nothing but screaming and wailing and gnashing will come from leading things t'wards any sorta boat they can't ever board, on account of the holes in the sides and the fires galloping mental 'round the stern. "The boat" I said. "Fulla holes.""What, now?"I reached around the vocab for a word or two could aid me, a line or nine might explain the situation. What I got was; "The distance, this, these things, mush. This, this is all there can be..."For a terrifying second I thought I had said, "We can't filth", but I didn't, and better, she knew what I was talking about."Had this all occurred six or nine or fourteen months ago", I say, "When you're still down here all the time and, conveniently enough, so am I, then different, the whole thing, and beautiful, but I can't, I dunno how a fella might solve the whole distance thing, and I dunno if I'm the one for to solve it, even if it were lain out clear as day on a scatter graph looks like the intro to 'Venus As A Boy'."She smiled."For gods sakes" she said.She kissed me. I could taste Med�lla on her tongue. I woke up with another paragraph caught between my teeth.Thanks folks.