Brave New What?

Disgusting Songs For Lovers: 14/02/12

2012-02-14T18:37:00.003Z

One I made earlier, full of cringe-inducing, goose-pimpling, gross-out moments for the most squishy-abject Valentine's Day Ever. Enjoy.

Side A
1. We Love It - Tiny Tim
2. Cup of Dreams - Thinking Fellers Union Local 282
3. Blues - Oso El Roto
4. Grounds for Divorce - Elbow
5. Cut The Mullet - Wesley Willis
6. My Dick - Mickey Avalon
7. No Wedding Cake - Fol Chen
8. Hawai - Gablé
9. Shit Rap - Anonymous
10. I Am Nastay - Kevin Blechdom
11. Gallery Piece - Of Montreal
12. Let's Have Sex - King Missile
13. When I'm Sixty-Four - The Metropolitan Police Male Voice Choir

Side B
1. Cuppycake - Strawberry Shortcake
2. Chicken Pussy - Bongwater
3. Sweaters - Laurie Anderson
4. Quill Blues - Big Boy Cleveland
5. Monkeys - Fartface
6. My Girl's Pussy - Harry Roy & His Orchestra
7. Hot - Charles Bukowski
8. Lovesickness - Tomboyfriend
9. Nobody Does It Better - Radiohead
10. Whatever You Like - Melissa Brandt
11. Sleep All Summer - St Vincent & The National
12. Blood Red Sentimental Blues - Cotton Jones
13. TV Show - Martha Wainwright

All love,
Jesse Darling xxx

Social Media Marketing Strategy: A Masterclass In 3 Easy Lessons

2012-01-24T22:20:00.012Z

Lesson One:
IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING,
SO LONG AS IT'S WORKING.

Lesson Two:
GIVE YOUR CUSTOMERS WHAT THEY WANT,
EVEN IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY'RE ASKING FOR.

Lesson Three:
HATERS GONNA HATE.
NEVER STOP BELIEVING.

[SIGN UP HERE TO GET YOUR CONTENT FRESH FROM THE SOURCE!!!]

A Subjective History of 2011 in 23 Pictures

2012-01-05T22:10:00.022Z

Looking hard at the world is an act of insubordination in the face of capitalist [sur]realism.
Please scroll down for a [con- sub- and para-] textual catalogue of affect, obsolescence and precarity. And against all odds, this.

Opening Soon
Newington, Edinburgh

Home Entertainment
Clapton, London

Fix My iPhone
Clerkenwell, London

Untitled (Vodaphone)
Finchley, London

They Playin Playstation Games (o2)
Seven Sisters, London

I'm Lovin' It 1
Seven Sisters, London

I'm Lovin' It 2
London Bridge Station, London

Jesus Loves You
Piccadilly, London

Fall In Love Not In Line (Be The Change)
St Paul's, London

Was The Rider Using Ear Phones?
Aldgate, London

I Can't Help Myself
Stamford Hill, London

I Must Not Use Facebook at Work
Chalk Farm, London

Follow Fashion, Spend Money
Tottenham, London

Mystery Prize £1.00
Hackney, London

Reduced to Clear
Hackney, London

R U Homeless?
Greenpoint, New York

Home/Back to Your Journey
35000 ft above the Atlantic Ocean

Find Your Way
Red Hook, New York

I've Done It, I've Undone It
(Sue Tompkins at) Frieze Art Fair, London

I Have Done My Duty
Hackney, London

He's Got To Go
Holborn, London

Haunt The Government
Shoreditch, London

Change
Princes St, Edinburgh

Jesse Darling, 2012

Accidental Revolutionary: A[nother] Retrospective

2011-12-15T19:18:00.002Z

All this reading about unproductive labour, queer temporality & the politics of affect is making me feel wicked good about having spent my youth just doing drugs & serially falling in love.

Take a Picture, It Lasts Longer: Kitchen Sketchbook 1

2011-12-02T12:10:00.008Z

I was like why would anyone make a painting, like, ever? Like what's the fucking point, it's 2011. But lately I've come to see the value of materiality in objects and images: a bold assertion of corporeality, an antecedent instinct which appears as a primal scream in the face of virtualization. Not that there's anything wrong with virtualization; it's simply the state of things (as Baudrillard would say, with a big libidinal shrug), neither good nor bad. But mark-making - and corporeal assertion - suddenly looks like an act of radicality in the late-capitalist liquid modern: bodies on the street; sharpies on cardboard. This feels instinctual, like a reclamation: LOOK at us, LOOK! The peasants are revolting - messy, meshy, immediate. The aesthetic tropes of the new revolution are borrowed equally from folk and outsider artforms and the propaganda materials of Glasnost and Perestroika. It's a singularly handmade, unvectored kind of aesthetic. And what am I doing about it? The last time I saw my own handwriting was when I signed my tax declaration. For the rest I'm typing slender little aphorisms into an iPhone, toc toc. Neatly parsed into 140 characters. Tick, tick. A whole life spent online. Tick, toc. I never used to be so afraid of the instinctual-libidinal song that flowed from my crayons and magic markers: what the hell happened? Is it a feminist issue? Either way I figured I should get some practice in mark-making in order to overthrow the counter-revolutionary horror of imperfect speech. Fuck the spell-checker and fuck helvetica. And fuck the sleek graphical interface of the new world order.

So I installed a whiteboard in my kitchen and bought some markers. It's not revolutionary but it's a start. Free your mind, etc, and the rest.

"Every grand theory & noble sentiment ought to be ﬁrst tested in the kitchen - and then in bed, of course."
- Charles Simic

[London, December 2011]

Cities I Haved Loved 1

2011-09-07T18:04:00.007+01:00

I ♡ NYC! said I, said I. Why, I ♡ you too, honey, said the city, gay & good-moody; the lights were all on & the night air warm, & the beer like bread & butter.
When the rain began I walked lorn in my ragged, drunk & blatant oh not pretty.
But I ♡U, NYC! I called out to the scud & the flot on the clotted rank Hudson; & bitter & breezy, wind-in-the-facedown, a city wrapped in thick layers of fog hissed through gritted windows:
Yeah, honey. You & all the rest of em.
& slammed itself shut like the end of the night, when a trick's a trick & a john.

Thirty-One

2011-06-28T10:59:00.008+01:00

This may be the last birthday post I ever write.

My generation grew up affluent and rather indolent. I've never seen myself as either one of those things, but that doesn't mean I'm not. At 17 I fell into the "deep subculture" of underground Amsterdam, several strata below the straight world, and didn't pay any rent or taxes until I was 26. It took me some long years of self-directed social rehabilitation to break the surface topside, and even today I struggle occasionally with the protocol. I'm not proud of it and I'm not ashamed.

I thought everyone had lived a wild subcultural youth until I got to London, where I learned that some people actually go to university at 18 and study something they're interested in. Some people are lucky or driven and turn this interest into a career. By the age of 31 those people have turned that career into a sustainable, even comfortable living. Good for them, I say.

Suffering and misery are found everywhere, as are happiness, joy and gratitude. It isn't possible to make the "wrong" choices, but it's possible to make choices that you will later fight to justify, to yourself and others. It isn't possible to make the "right" choices, but it's possible to make choices that help lubricate your path through the social world and the slippery negotiation of capital, which a person is slowly supposed to accrue, Sisyphus-style, as s/he goes through life. We are born free, but the most accomplished of us will end up laden with assets: mules of our own making and proud of it, paid-up citizens in the thingly world. Nothing to be proud of, really; but nothing to be ashamed of. What else do we have, after all?

At 31, I've got time to accrue some assets and responsibilities of my own: buy a house, bear a child, who knows? [And if I did, what then?] It doesn't look that way from where I'm standing now, but if I've learned anything it's that where-I'm-standing-now is subject to any number of factors including one's age, sex, race, geographical location, physical and mental health, gender identity, financial situation, marital status, the food in one's belly (or lack of it), length and quality of last night's sleep, time of year, time of day, favourite colour, most-played song, etc.

What else do we have?
All we have is where-we're-standing-now.

I say this will be my last birthday post, because at thirty-one I feel like putting away a few childish things and blogging in a personal capacity is one of them. But I also believe - passionately and inarticulately - that one only ever writes* in a personal capacity, contingent on where one is standing at any given time. The great poets, philosophers and songwriters all exhibit some of the madness associated with youth; a madness in which we assume our own relevance, rightness and particularity in the face of the glaring indifference of the wide world and everything in it; in the face of inevitable demise; in the face of the fact that our passions are subject (and certain) to change.

Affluent and indolent, my generation are able to remain teenagers until their late forties if not forever. But I've been rehabilitating myself for years, and in the end it worked. I got rid of the sickness of hedonism and the madness of youth. I inherited that old Protestant work ethic that harangued my own parents out of their hippie dreams, and I b̶e̶c̶a̶m̶e̶ tried to be a "grown-up."

I don't know if I'm any good at it. But I try.

A kid I know has a birthday shortly before mine. He turned 20. I told him it gets better, but it doesn't: it's a relief when the terror and self-consciousness of youth start to recede, but other niggles, phantoms and shades of grey come creeping in to replace them.
If nothing really matters in the end, it can't be possible - in fact, it's ontologically impossible - to make a "wrong" choice. But the madness of ageing is that one can forget this, ensconced in the bondage of a life like a person of true faith, forgetting that what one calls one's "life" is utterly contingent, subject (like everything else) to where-you're-standing-now.

Any life's as good as another.
At 31, I'm not proud. But I'm not ashamed. And what else could there be, but that?

JD, London, 2011

* builds/thinks/makes/cooks/sees

Valentine

2011-02-13T17:21:00.008Z

I've always loved Valentine's day. I don't know why.

Maybe because it's really a commemoration; a study in guilt and loss and lack, a meditation on lovelessness. Or perhaps, like other self-defined tuff nuts who parade themselves around the place, I'm just a secret romantic who'd do anything for love.
The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between; the tension between desire and disappointment fills me with grandiose longing and melancholy glee. I hate the Hallmark fiction of crypto-capitalist romance (o damp styrofoam, o pink nylon pantyhose) but I'm all for the grand design of the human heart and the redemptive power of love on a microcosmic and/or metaphysical scale.

For many years now I've made a point of celebrating Valentine's day in a public capacity. It feels like the only right thing to do, like working the soup kitchen for the homeless at Christmas. When I was nineteen, my lover and I stole a pair of Salvation Army jackets and wore them down to the main square, where we handed out chocolates and pamphlets saying LOVE EXISTS in five languages. I'm sure glad it was never documented, but I'm happy to remember it all the same. The following year I made 200 numbered prints and raced around town on my bike putting them in all the free postcard racks, with an accompanying sticker that read: THIS IS JUST TO SAY THAT SOMEONE LOVES YOU: NO STRINGS ATTACHED.

This is the only surviving print in the series.

The year after that, I went around town with a red aerosol and sprayed this stencil on every wall I could find:

Some years later I decided I would celebrate the pain and the glory of Valentine's day by getting tattooed. The tattooist chased me out of his shop and told me to come back in a few days when I was sober. I followed his advice. He made me some sketches, based on my stipulations; these are dated February 19th.

I never did get that tattoo.
Somebody else did, though.
This shoulder belongs to my friend Jeremy; Valentine's Day, 2006.

Some years later, in another city, I was living in a big house with five other people. After a long hard winter, we got together and agreed that - whatever else was going on in our [love] lives - we really loved one another and all of our friends. So we threw a party: a St. Valentine's speakeasy in our front room.

[I'm the one in the striped t-shirt. I'm wearing that T-shirt now.]

In the summer of that year I got very sick and lost the ability to speak for a few months. It was a strange experience and a lonely one. During that time I sent a message to all my ex-lovers, asking them to call my telephone and leave a message. Any time of the day or night, I said; anything you'd like to say - I promise I won't pick up the phone.
Many of them did.
I wasn't sure why I'd asked for the messages, and then I didn't know what to do with them - until one Valentine's day, putting together a mixtape in a state of mild existential heartbreak, I put them all together and made a song.

This year, I had a few beers after a long day and went out on my bike with my paint-markers and aerosol - and a fresh lamb's heart. I'd planned to nail it to a wall and write "AIN'T NOTHING PRETTY ABOUT A TRUE HEART." But exhaustion and rain and street art don't mix, and the sirens went off when I brought the hammer out. I don't think it would have looked that great anyway, and it might have freaked people out, which was only a small part of what I wanted to do. But sometimes you have to try out an idea to know that it's a bad one. In this respect - and many others - ideas are [like] love affairs, and vice versa.

Fortunately, though, I've lined up another Valentine's day present. It's one of my favourite love stories, moreso for being an unlikely one. It's a film that seems to be about death, but is really all about life at its most curious, visceral - and temporary. Perhaps that's why I like Valentine's day so much: I've searched high and wide, through books and in bottles and all over bodies, and as far as I can see, love - the bio-deterministic chemical cocktail that causes so much trouble and tenderness - is all there really is. Love for another person, for several people, for all people; love for an idea, for an ideal, for an animal, for life itself [etcaetera]. I'm going to stop now, lest I become too sentimental - a side effect of too little sleep. Friends, lovers, strangers, I give you:
Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971).

Here it is.

Be my Valentine; be your own Valentine; be anybody's Valentine; be everybody's Valentine.
Until next year,
much love.

xxx JD

Who Says You Can't Run From Yourself?

2011-01-13T23:31:00.007Z

Who says you can't run from yourself?
It's always worked for me.

But how, you say; I've always only ever been who I am.
But who are you, really? Who is anyone?

Nobody's really anybody.

How to run from yourself in 7 easy steps:

1. Leave town.
2. Leave the country.
3. Change your name.
4. Change your hair.
5. Fall in love. Fall out of love.
6. Get drunk. Stay drunk.
7. Keep going. And don't look back.

And repeat. And repeat. And repeat.
At least, until you're ready to meet the person you've become.
But by then, it'll probably be about time to start running again.

On [Protest] Signs & the Signified

2010-12-09T21:28:00.031Z

This post was published in the awesome and revolutionary Fight Back! A Reader On the Winter of Protest [which is full of good stuff, PLUS I designed the cover. Go get yours asap].

The work of art is an act of resistance, at best, in that the act of resistance posits a vision of how things could be otherwise. This is the real function of art: to celebrate what we know to be human, and to keep asking questions beyond that. I am an artist, and artists deal in signs: I originally published these photographs as a response to the various discourses about who was really behind the protests. Was it violent anarchists, bourgeois intellectuals, kids from the banlieues who listen to Dubstep? Or people just like you? Or all of the above?

Well, I was there too. I was angry about the cuts, as we all should be, because they affect us all, students or not; they reinstate the outdated feudal protocol of class privilege at jurisdictorial level and stand in opposition to what we have come to understand as our basic human rights as residents and citizens of this country. In universal terms education is both a right and a privilege, but access to education was one of the last great things about Britain, and absolutely worth fighting for.

And yet this anger is transformed into something like pride at the moment you find yourself marching to the beat of a hundred disparate voices and sound systems united - not by a complex ideology, but by an immediate and intuitive sense of rightness.
In the spirit of non-violent resistance, and in the spirit of this feeling - something like pride, a little celebratory and a little inflammatory - I began collecting signs; for signs are signifiers, and signifiers are incantations that invoke change. The artist Patrick Brill (aka Bob and Roberta Smith, whose work includes signs and placards hand-painted with whimsical, subversive slogans), in a recent piece for the Guardian, wrote that "the arts are a universal language, reminding us that the factors that unite us are huge, wonderful and exciting, and that what divides us is small and mean."

Whatever you may have read, these protests were huge, wonderful and exciting, and these signs are works of art in the proper sense - a handwritten cardboard many-headed manifesticon in urgent creative response to a power that would see all good things vectored and laminated and priced-up accordingly. The signs speak of the wit, charm and diversity of the protesters, which is the reason I am proud to stand among them. Who was behind the protests? A picture is sometimes worth a thousand column inches: let the signs speak for themselves.

To paraphrase an old anarchist rallying cry: the brain is an organ twice the size of your fist.
Keep thinking; keep feeling; keep fighting.

JD., London, December 2010

The Point is to Live: an Incidental Photo-Essay

2010-10-05T17:28:00.002+01:00

All photographs were shot in 2010 using an iPhone. The title and all text is taken from An Absurd Reasoning, by Albert Camus.

I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know - and with that alone.

It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm — this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

[For A.]

Thirty [Major Retrospective]

2010-06-28T17:36:00.000+01:00

Last year I became pretty suspicious of words; how incantory they can be, how they can sneak up on you; and I'm getting too old for the naked public confessional, after all.
So this year I've decided to do what I said nobody ought ever to do, and publish my diary - that is to say, my notebooks. That's right; one page for each year of my twenties, written at some point during that year. And when I say I've come a long way - as have we all, as must we all - you can take this retrospective as concrete proof, and join me in looking forward: because - God Willing, and insh'Allah - I've still got hella far to go.

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

... And breathe; and thirty.

Love to all, and take good care of everything,
JD xxx

Notes on Bricolage: an Elegy for Haiti

2010-01-15T10:35:00.011Z

The following is adapted from the final chapter of my dissertation, a full version of which is available on request.

“The ‘bricoleur’ is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand’, that is to say with a set of tools and materials that is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.”
- Claude Levi-Strauss, p. 17, “The Science of the Concrete” in The Savage Mind, 1962

In December I took part in an international art event in Haiti’s Port-au-Prince: the Ghetto Biennale. Haiti is the wasteland of the world, desperately poor and held together - quite literally - by faith and community and a couple of well-placed nails; there is very little else with which to build. Port-au-Prince is built of corrugated iron and concrete-rot, thrown together haphazardly; pure bricolage, built for a purpose.

I went to Haiti with the idea of building a church from the waste. More specifically, I went to Haiti to see bricolage and magical thinking in its native habitat.

But there is no waste in the wasteland.

Of course there is plenty of waste in Haiti: the stuff and things that America no longer needs or wants. There is garbage and there is decay; poison trash piled up high on every corner, stacked soft and wet on the banks of the viaduct, towering above the city in the shantytowns with no infrastructure to dispose of it all. Port-au-Prince smells like human faeces and rotten flesh, and in those rotting stacks, the remains of chickens, dog legs, a baby dead in the afterbirth, one eye gazing out at the sky. But the Kréyol word for this kind of waste (human and animal remains, hollowed-out grapefruit shells, random components from obsolete technologies; shit, plastic bottles, and sachets that once held water) - fatras - must be distinguished from waste, by which we mean unwanted surplus.

There is nothing wasted and nothing spare. Bits of trash too fragmentary to warrant a moment’s thought in an affluent Anglo-American reality are engaged to perform discrete functions, or used as part of greater constructions: houses, businesses, contraptions to keep the sun out, or in substitution for a tool; in downtown Port-au-Prince, for example, there’s no such thing as a department store. With the exception of school uniforms, all clothing is imported in aid packages from the USA and resold on wire hangers in the street; this is known as pepe, and sold by weight. The young men of Port-au-Prince, fully cognizant of sartorial subcultures, languish on street corners dressed just like young men in Atlanta, New York, and Miami: but this too is bricolage, since the young men of Port-au-Prince assemble their outfits, in perfect pastiche, from the cast-offs of young men in Atlanta, New York and Miami. Vodou churches are hung with bright balloons, incongruously advertising the Christmas sale of a small franchise in rural Massachusetts, or commemorating the 50th birthday of somebody called Val.

During the final stages of my dissertation, in which I intended to write extensively about my experiences in Haiti, there was a terrible earthquake in Port-au-Prince. Everything I saw, everyone I knew, everywhere we’d been: suddenly gone.

News of deaths confirmed started filtering through that abstract timespace, one by one. I kept writing through the pain, which - like all suffering - is both universal and indescribable, and so of no special relevance to this story, except that I couldn’t bear to exemplarize a culture in such suffering and so rewrote a few sections of the text. However, the relevance of Haiti as a microcosm for the wasteland of our world is more pertinent now than ever.

I am not equipped to provide a history of Haiti, nor to give an extensive commentary of what is happening there now, but I will say this.

In my writing and my work I have attempted to make a case for bricolage as ideal praxis for the artist/human being living in the super-saturated wasteland of consumer culture. I believe that my case is a strong one, since by all counts - economically, environmentally and socially - it’s time to stop consuming and start (re) creating with what we have, employing a little bit of much-needed magical thinking to help the process along.

But this is an ideology. And although passionately felt and probably correct in intention, ideology is always a luxury.

No such luxury existed in Haiti.

In sculptural terms, the bricolaged object is composed of several disparate elements not designed to fit together. There is no fusion, no melding or welding, no tessellation; the elements exist in perfect frail symbiosis. The sculptor-bricoleur solves the problems faced by every earthbound object - the problems posed by gravity (let us think of it as the “dust-to-dust” principle) and entropy (or: the “this-too-shall-pass” principle) - using the objects at his disposal, and the special sculptural qualities provided by these.

Such structures are built for a specific purpose.

Such structures are not built to last forever.

In the event, of course, they did not. “A native thinker makes the penetrating comment that ‘All sacred things must have their place.’” (Fletcher, quoted in Levi-Strauss: p.10: 1966) “It could even be said that being in their place is what makes them sacred, for if they were taken out of their place, even in thought, the entire order of the universe would be destroyed.”

No amount of aesthetic ideology can bricolage a wasted city back together. The wasteland is what we inherit.

This is not a conclusion, but an elegy.

Keepin' Touch

2009-11-25T13:02:00.003Z

"We'd said we'd keep in touch. But touch is not something you can keep; as soon as it's gone, it's gone. We should have said we'd keep in words, because they are all we can string between us - words on a telephone line, words appearing on a screen." - David Levithan

I should probably write more often, shouldn't I?
But I forget how to. Or why to. And for whom?
For you? For who?
And how should I presume?

It's not like nothing's been happening, after all. There's always something happening. It's just that it ain't always everybody's business; or else it is, of course it is, must be, all information like Linux, Open Source, open-sores; let the business of it all begin. But it can take time to find the right words, or the right reasons to tell the story. Let the story sit for a while; let it become what it needs to. Takes time. Worth waiting.

I think I'd go so far nowadays as to say that it's worth waiting for anything worth having. Who knew? I sure as hell didn't. I don't want to imply that I've got any time to wait, or anything - time is something else - like touch - that you can't keep and mustn't try to. Time is like molten glass; transparent and slippery, almost invisible, it moves quickly and with a certain viscosity before setting into shape. When set, it's a mirror; it's a stain.

Like I've said before, you can't rush these things.

But in the meantime, hello.

Twenty-Nine

2009-06-28T17:56:00.002+01:00

This was and will be the year that I figured out that some things don't need to be said.

Why I Hate Madonna

2008-10-02T16:29:00.004+01:00

This was written for the current issue of Plan B Magazine (I've said it before, but I'll say it again: the only UK music rag worth reading, so go out and get it).

You love her or you hate her – and that’s always a good thing, even if both sides tend to focus on all the wrong reasons. Madonna-bashing forums assert that at fifty she should stand down and do the dignified thing as behooves a woman of her years. A vague moral stance somewhere between Christian outrage and misogynist hypocrisy provides an agenda in which her übersexualized image, public "displays" of bisexuality, and outspoken position on issues such as abortion and homosexuality are vehemently and ineloquently criticized, although in my view these all are points in Madonna’s favour – as an artist, as a woman, as a perfect postmodern myth.
Meanwhile, on the pro-Madonna front, she is lauded for her business sense, her unerring nose for an edgy [and exploitable] subculture, that career-spanning string of hits. Because Madonna is an icon of camp and retro - and because her position has ceased to be of any serious relevance - the willfully superficial hipster-fashionistas can afford to embrace her. Madonna has moved into the area of iconry that is beyond reproach, like those two other towers of blond ambition, Andy Warhol and Marilyn Monroe. She is the Colonel Sanders of Pop: churning out tasteless nuggets wrapped in chemically-enhanced flava from some music factory whose workers are exploited. The content of her oeuvre has fallen into irrelevance, just like the ingredients of the KFC spice blend: it's full of shit and ultimately damaging, but it sells like hot chicken.
We can all agree that Madonna’s a predator, honing in on the hot stuff and making bucks off the back of others’ innovations. We know that her talents, if any, do not lie in songwriting or musicianship or any aspect of artistry integral to her career. We say she’s cynical and controlling, although it’s none of our business. But watching early videos of Madonna – in the tell-all feature Truth or Dare, for example, or that In Bed With Madonna clip with Wayne and Garth – one can’t help but warm to her: she’s this spiky little smarty-pants with huge charisma and a fuck-off attitude. She’s almost punk. You’ve gotta love her.

So what happened? How did she get so humourless and bloodless and lame?

My case against Madonna rests on the fact that she has sold out everything she ever stood for. Perhaps she never stood for much, but – like Warhol and Monroe, whose personhood thrust forth a transparent dialectic of inauthenticity and vulnerability that almost resembled a comment on the mass-media machine they sought to serve - her statement was in her very existence. Maybe Madonna never wanted to be an artist, except in the sense that Andy Warhol meant it when he said, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” And maybe she never wanted to be a role model for other savvy, tough, single-minded girls from the wilds of Buttfuck and Nowheresville; but I can’t forgive her for that when her agenda was so closely aligned with that of the humanist-feminist movement ("Let's forget about the mythical Jesus and look for encouragement, solace, and inspiration from real women ... Two thousand years of patriarchal rule under the shadow of the cross ought to be enough to turn women toward the feminist 'salvation' of this world" - Annie Laurie Gaylor, "Feminist Salvation," The Humanist, p. 37, July/August 1988).

At the very least, though, she has always been consistently transparent in her solipsism. “I am my own experiment,” she said, “I am my own work of art.” As an artist, though, Madonna has never had anything to say: ever the controversial figure, but never controversial enough for me. Despite constantly reinterpreting the feminine myth (a prevalent theme among female performance artists, from Nina Hagen to Cindy Sherman), and overtly challenging sexual morals, Madonna never dared to step over the line. She always had to be sexy and beautiful; she always had to be the princess, reaffirming gender roles and hierarchical structures anew with every reinvention. Madonna appropriated authorship and ownership of the strong-and-sexual blonde archetype as though Jean Harlow and Mae West and Greta Garbo had never existed, and determinedly cast herself as the star of every [meta]narrative. For those for whom this role was not appropriate or available, the message was clear: sexual power belongs to the skinny, rich, Aryan-featured elite – although Madonna herself was none of these things from birth.

Like KFC or Coca Cola, the Madonna machine is vast, ubiquitous and mechanically sophisticated. Her taskforce has included such luminaries as Bjork, William Orbit and Pharrell Williams, and without a little help from her friends, who knows, Madonna might have faded into washed-up obsolescence years ago.
Not that this is the just dessert of all veteran female troopers of the touring circuit. Look at Patti Smith: greying, uncompromising, hugely dignified. Joan Jett, born like Madonna in 1958, retains the credibility of being the original riot-grrrl icon whilst remaining firmly in the public eye; femmy third-wavers sport T-shirts proclaiming “WWJJD (What Would Joan Jett Do?)” and Gibson has honoured her chops with a signature guitar.

Would it have been possible for a genuinely transgressive artist to achieve such widespread power and influence? Maybe not, but with all the resources of the [corrupted] industry (an extensive army of stylists, producers, songwriters, radio pluggers, PR staff, plastic surgeons and yoga teachers paid good money to work their asses off on her behalf), couldn’t she have done something a little more interesting? The trend-setting wild girl with her church-baiting, tough-girl persona has calcified into a po-faced Kabbalist (a church, after all, is still a church) fashion victim, whose statements in the last years have all been about the sancticity of marriage and the rightful place of women. She is still a symbolic figure, but one that stands for everything that’s wrong with big capitalism and the dying, bloated music industry. Impossibly grandiose, cancerous and corpulent, Pop has eaten itself. In publicly and totally losing her mind, Madonna’s natural successor, Britney Spears epitomises the end of an era, and Madonna [the artist, the woman, the postmodern myth], skinnier and more drawn with each passing year, seems to be eating herself, too. The inevitable tragedy of having bought and sold and propagated one’s own myth so completely is that one is forever doomed to be equal to it in person. At fifty, this can’t be easy or fun. But really, it serves her right.

I Was A Teenage Porn Star

2008-09-09T14:46:00.016+01:00

Here is the original Dutch-language version of the same text (more or less). All original text and translation by Jesse Darling, 2008.

You asked for it:
(deep breath). Here goes.

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”

Thesis 1, The Society of The Spectacle, Guy Debord 1967.

I Was A Teenage Porn Star, just eighteen, spreadeagled and splayed like a flayed bunny-rabbit on a round bed on the toppermost floor of a falling-down house in the cheap end of Amsterdam’s red light district. On every side the wall-eyed wide-angle of a six-cam gaze; and me, staring out at two long screens in which I myself appeared, fucked in every last pink hole. And by a man I hardly knew, too. Although he was my man, or at least, he’d said so; and I - so help me God - was his woman. Not that I was a woman, yet. But I was learning. I was learning fast.

There was a certain technique to it. There were tricks and devices. Coffee creamer for the oral cum-shot; spray-on hair conditioner for the facial and the titty. And all kinds of ways to fake anal, because only the fags were expected to do real anal, and I was just eighteen, and it hurt.

We had fake names that we’d bawl out whenever the moans and sighs would get samey and strange in our mouths. Oh yeah, I'd sing, do it to me, do it to me! Loud as I could, kind of sweetly, just like that; wide-eyed, wide-mouthed on the sticky screen. And I looked to see if I was doing it right. Doing it hard. Doing it like I liked it. And the punters, you know, they loved it.
I was - and am - a professional performer. There’s nothing a performer won’t do to lay down a good show. And they loved the show, my face, that look in my eyes. Perhaps they imagined arousal, or the first-night nerves of a hot, wet virgin; but there was nothing at all in my eyes but boredom, bathos and bewilderment. The whole episode was one big oh-God-let-it-be-over, and I was too young to know that it doesn't have to be like that.

I was good at my job. Not at first, but I learned fast. Like other precocious eighteen year-olds, I assumed I’d seen and done it all. I hadn't, of course; and it was a shame, if not a tragedy, that much of what I was doing in public was for the first time. Worst of all, I was watching myself throughout: watching to see if I was doing it right, doing it hard, doing it like I loved it. I never asked myself if it felt good. I wasn't paid enough; there wasn't time. It was repetitive and banal and mildly horrifying. Tragedy, really, is too damn good a word.

Why did I do it? I needed money, and fast, and got in with the wrong people. I was a runaway and would-be adventurer, with no real sense of self or self-preservation: I was curious. The mechanized sex industry is a parasite, a dragnet, the man your mother warned you about, trawling the bottom-feeding circuits for the children orphaned by circumstance or by design. I wore a cheap g-string and an old black bra of my mother’s. “At least it’s not waitressing,” I said to myself, reflected in the mirrored walls of the changing room where we waited it out between shifts, “and anyway, even if it’s horrible I’ll learn all about sex and I’ll get really good at it and then people will say I’m really good in bed, like in Cosmo.”

I was eighteen. I thought I could survive anything. But it would be years before I could make love without looking over my lover’s shoulder at that imaginary screen in the top left-hand corner of the room. Am I doing it hard? Am I doing it like I love it? Yeah, yeah, do it to me, I sang out, bored and numb: and my body knew just what to do while I’d glide softly out of myself towards that top left-hand corner, far above my lover who lay vague and distant, far-off, elsewhere. And it was working, god help us both, and so I didn't stop (don't stop! Don't stop! Don't stop! Am I doing it right? It sure looked like it). The show, after all, must go on, and so it went on, and on and on, all night.

I didn't learn all about sex, like in Cosmo. I learned the advanced-level execution of the same old confidence tricks that women (both in- and outside the sex industry) teach themselves for use in sex and elsewhere. I didn’t learn how to give a better blowjob, but I learned how to look while doing it, eyes half-closed, all sidelong and sexy: passive and big-eyed, forever on the brink of orgasm simply and solely because someone, anyone, is watching.
The dolls of the sex industry exist to serve. They are there to convince you -- johnny, voyeur, masturbator, consumer -- that they enjoy what they do; that they are doing it for you. The big-budget commericial porn flicks are full of pneumatic, surgically restructured sex-machines - she heavily made-up, sun-bed brown, flat-bellied and bald-cunted, with silicon tits stuck on the bare ribs; he, shaved and musclecut with straight white teeth and a big hard cock. Ken and Barbie, fucking by the swimming pool: the business of sexual artifice exemplified.

When I watch porn now I imagine that I recognize something in the eyes: that boredom, the numbness, a peculiar presence-yet-absence that spells cocaine. The popularity of cocaine in the sex industry is no accident: it’s an emotional anesthetic that makes you feel like a well-oiled machine. My colleagues and I used cocaine locally as well as internally; a dab of coke on your cock and you’ll be hard all night. You won’t feel a damn thing; but that, of course, is the whole point.

Don't get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with sex, or with images of sex - even [images of] dirty sex, violent sex, inappropriate sex, or consensually abusive sex. The problem lies with the consumer culture that has absorbed our desires, repackaged them in plastic and sold them right back to us at a premium, as though they were the real thing.

Commercial pornography is like McDonalds: a monstrous capitalist spectre that consumes resources and money, and monopolises our psycho-cultural aesthetic with merciless ubiquity. Exquisitely cynical, commercial pornography has sold us a popularized pleasure myth which is based in a set of fundamental fabrications, and which detracts from everything that is good and real in the living world. The "McDonaldization" of our longings has led to the emergence of pornography as a symbolic commodity which would replace “real sex” – ugly, beautiful, vile, banal, spiritual, dubious, delicious, and gloriously various -- with a plasticized imitation. “If we were to acknowledge that sexuality is personal and unique, it would become unwieldy. Making sexiness into something simple, quantifiable, makes it easier to explain and to market. If you remove the human factor from sex and make it about stuff – big fake boobs, bleached blonde hair, long nails, poles, thongs – then you can sell it. Suddenly, sex requires shopping; you need plastic surgery, peroxide, a manicure, a mall.” (Ariel Levy, “Female Chauvinist Pigs”.)

When commodities, in this case pornographic images, are taken over by the cancer-bloom of mass capital, the question is no longer one of supply and demand. The supply – churned out relentlessly for a market that was created by the producer – forces the demand. Such an induced demand means that without a decent alternative, millions of men and women all over the world will keep buying and watching and consuming, as though the phony representations of symbolic sex could fill all their holes. But money can’t buy you love: a pornography built on artifice has as little to do with adult sexuality as a Happy Meal with hand-prepared home cooking. Ex-porn actress Sarah-Catherine, in an interview with media studies professor Dr Chyng Sun, is quoted as saying, “The images that we re-enact over and over again have absolutely nothing to do with our personal sexuality. I would say that what's shown not revolutionary, it’s not different; it’s the same-old, same-old; it’s women in uncomfortable positions pretending they feel good. And what's revolutionary about that? What's liberating about that?”

The culture of Queer, whose very name is a semiotic reclamation, has always been about transgressing the performance of gender, which is obligatory in mainstream culture for both men and women. Queer is also about the reclamation and subversion of the gendered body, but shares its roots in the symbolic and aesthetic cultures of camp, of butch, and of drag, all of which provide visual fodder for a reinvented sexual iconography. The most interesting and subversive examples of post-pornography have come out of Queer culture, such as Phineas Slipped (Keri Oakie, 2003), a school-boy romp which would be thoroughly hackneyed except for the fact that the boys are played by trans-men, butch dykes, and women in drag as well as bio-guys (biologically male, used to differentiate transgendered men from non-transgendered men). During the sex scenes – big cocks all round – it’s impossible to tell what’s flesh and what’s silicon. “Dyke art porn magazine” Slit, of Sydney, Australia, publishes self-directed centrefold spreads in which the subjects are active agents, self-styled in their own subversive visual fairytales, borrowing from the canon of symbolic archetypology: from heterosexist caricatures and homosexual iconry to zombies, cowboys, sailors, pigs at the spit or lambs to the slaughter; donkeys, monkeys, mermaids, radioactive princesses on roller-skates. A spate of websites, led by the excellent NoFauxxx, publish homemade porn - “artistic, political and all-inclusive, featuring models of all genders and sizes” - ,made by (and for) a community of “ladies, queers and artists all over the world.” NoFauxxx models do not conform to heteronormative standards of the body beautiful, and the site is not limited either to hetero- or homosexual sex. Queer, in this case, is no longer [solely] about sexual orientation: it is about creating a new visual discourse in which gender roles are seen for what they are: a series of performances which offer the possibility of transformation and transgression. Camp and butch can be seen as theatrical, or otherwise performative reinterpretations of the proscribed gender roles; now these, too, are deconstructed. The fuck-bots of commercial porn grimly and joylessly play out their amplified and mechanical gender-role representations, but in the wonderland of new Queer semiotics, the performance of gender is played for laughs: burlesque, grotesque, and larger-than-life.

When the machine of the music industry became a monster, the counterculture - unwilling to be reduced to a marketing demographic - came up with Punk Rock, whose DIY ethos saw a new revolution in the creation and distribution of music and [con] textual content. In the same spirit of DIY, Queer culture has started a new pornographic revolution: porn with an anti-porn aesthetic, created and distributed within a peer group with little or no marketing budget and no mass production values. Without the incentives (and values) of Big Capital, all participation is voluntary. With no script and no standard, participants are required to create their own scenarios. The exploitative aspects of pornography are gone, replaced by a brave new erotic aesthetic.

We live in a spectacle society, but the spectacle has been exploited to the point of saturation. Everything that was directly lived has faded into a representation; and despite this, there remain – within ourselves and our experience – those mammalian and mysterious aspects that defy commoditization, that cannot be replaced by an image or a representation. Despite everything, I believe that sex is one of these. I believe in its redemptive and life-affirming power. I believe in sex as a deeply human phenomenon which is both sacred and profane, transgressive and instinctual. I believe in the essential rightness of desire, and also in the desire to see images of naked people fucking: the problem lies in the colonization of these by Big Capital and the solution can be found in DIY culture. Let us grow and prepare our own food, distribute our own fanzines and records and weblogs and mp3s, and film and photograph our own plural sexualities.

In seeking to reclaim The Gaze, we turn it back towards ourselves; for within a spectacle society it seems as though we must become that spectacle, to move through it and into it, in order to move beyond it. The female body is so deeply contextualized, so colonialized by hundreds’ of years worth of spectacle-mongering, that it has become the natural foil and canvas for female performers: we struggle to reclaim our naked bodies as our own intellectual property as though reclaiming our own land. It is, and remains, a performance – and a spectacle – but at the same time, we are searching for a way out of the performance, for a way to finally feel something, for real, and off the record. And until we have freed ourselves from the necessity for performance, we'll keep on fighting through the night, doing it hard, but doing it for ourselves: dressing up, strapping on, tying down, playing out, until those images belong to us, and us alone; until our bodies are our own again. Don’t consume; create and participate, and keep the camera running as you go.

Have fun, kids. And stay safe.

Love,

JD x

Twenty-Eight

2008-06-28T09:03:00.001+01:00

Hey, listen, I know I haven't been around much lately. I know I've said a lot of things -- made a lot of promises -- and I haven't always come through. I know I've been bad-tempered and difficult at times; and I've lied about what I really wanted out of life, as we all do, and I've spent my time and money on the wrong things and I've been drunk and emotional and talking too much about Jesus and destiny and what the hell I'm going to do with myself after all these wild and wobbly years in which I've never once seen fit to do the right thing. And I'm sorry. But sorry is a waste of time and space, and time and space are commodities I seem to have less and less of, and so I'll just call for forgiveness, and for aliveness, despite it all.

On the morning of my birthday I woke up alive and alone in a foreign city: afforded one more day on the wild wide plural yonderin' earth to drink stove-top espresso and sweet-talk myself into thinking that it's all right and it's all good: although scattered through time-zones and all across the breadth of the shrinking globe, the loved and loving still left after all this gypsying and bad manners are pinging through the social smog of networking sites to wish me a good one from Sydney, Seattle, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Beijing. How did we all come so far? How did we get so close? The wireless heart picks up the signal, just in time; we transmit our soft data through the noughts and ones and wires, and the pixels pop and plunk and squeak into our lap[top]s; any number of little boxes and inboxes to open, any number of little gif[t]s to accept.

And meanwhile, somewhere in Lower Austria, the work-in-progress that is Jesse Darling (big-mouth, pant-seat pilot, rent-a-muse, piece of meat, imperfect lover, failed wife and self-mythologising autobiographer) turned twenty-eight in the glaring grassy margins of meatspace: flagrantly in the face of some -- but not all -- of the odds. In the face of the wide sky and the dying day. On a hilltop above a quarry in a sculpture garden on the concrete banks of a little amphitheatre above which the magically-inclined nerds of the Metalab were remote-controlling their robotic flying candelabras into the evening blue. It was a grand night of getting stoned and enjoying the Schadenfreude of those little robots nose-diving into the dust, something like watching animals pace their nine-yard circles in a zoo, but humane, because machines have no feelings (of course; and although there's a poetic joy in imagining some kind of ghost in the machine, there's a far greater joy -- or sense of abandon -- in knowing that "no animals were harmed during the making of this film"). I was thinking about robot zoos, robot ballets, robot choreographies, making little dancing haloes with laser pens; I was flying in the sky, no remote control. It was good to be there. Good to know I still can; old enough to be young again, and about time too.

I used to have dreams in which I could fly. Flying was a discrete skill to be learned and mastered, like riding a bike (directly concerned with release and momentum and the zen-fine balance of both). It took years of dreaming to really be any good, but in the end I was soaring above the highest of the high trees in the perpetual end-of-summer light, thinking all the time, shit, I'm really far up now. And never fall. And then I stopped dreaming of flight. That was the year that I turned twenty-five, and got married, and I tried -- I really tried -- to go straight, and as we all know, that didn't work out either. At least, so far. So far: so good.

June 28th, 2008; Vienna. The sky was raspberry blue on that morning, and I ate raspberries and raw mint out of a plastic tub with my fingers. Those raspberries, you know, they were given to me fresh and damp from the tender wet garden of an eminent Austrian media journalist whose name it probably wouldn't do to mention. He took me out for oysters and Pinot Grigio and told me about his wife, their children, their lovers, his garden, the house in Greece, the radio surveillance techniques of the military; and there was a sadness in his mouth and eyes -- a profound resignation, to be accurate -- which is the saddest thing of all. And I got to thinking about the choices we make in life, and how it's possible to make the wrong ones, whatever that means. All that white wine and salt water in our big brash mouths, talking the old out-for-dinner jive like the consummate pros we both are, he and I, and all the time the sadness salty on the tongue and the tide just behind the eyes. It was a sadness I understood -- could taste -- sage and tobacco and moonshine and blood and brass. I shrugged it on to my shoulders, as though putting on a man's jacket on a cold day, offered in the spirit of chivalry and good old-fashioned romance. Romance! As though any of us would honestly dream of doing that thing, any more. Now I know better - don't I? - I know what it's really all about; and thank God. Now when we look into each other's eyes, we know how we kid ourselves, and sometimes we go there regardless, just because we can, and because - quite frankly - we should. But despite all that, even now, there are those love stories which last the duration of a train journey or a single shared cigarette, a dinner date, a lifetime of half-platonic blue-balls adoration, a song performed live in which one of you is on the stage and the other - penetrated, open-mouthed - dying of love and forever unseen. My mother, still kickin' at fifty-eight, has powered through the bloody aftermath of a thirty-year marriage and a subsequent string of unfortunate relationships before finding - winding up with - happiness and fulfilment: all of which goes to show that the bruised heart hurtles onwards despite it all. It's a divine momentum, the concentric spinning of the mortal coil. Once I got depressed because I couldn't see how there could be any meaning to any of it, and then my Dad, drunk, quoted me Camus: "The only question we should be asking is why we're not killing ourselves." And we're not; despite it all. Touch wood. So far, so far, so far: so good.

And so what's left at twenty-eight, when love is just a bundle of chemically-determined hormonal signals and I don't know where I'm going or what any of it means?

Why, you are, of course.
And - more to the point - I am. It's beautiful.

Here's to it, chaps. I'm raising my glass to it all, to you, to me, just as I did at my virtual birthday party last year: to the ongoing chaotic principle, to the questions that keep me alive. To that old itch that won't scratch. To the wireless node of the heart, crazed with neurological sparks and condemned to flames and flight and the fate of all those things that don't exist. Who gives a flying fuck? We're alive. Perhaps not in a week from now, but now.

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

- Prayer, Galway Kinnell.

I Was A Teenage Drag Bunny

2008-02-11T17:51:00.004Z

This piece was written for the fabulous Frances May Morgan, editor of the fabulous Plan B Magazine, for which I have occasionally been known to write. It's the only British music rag worth reading so go look it up.

I was a weird kid, bookish and ornery, scared shitless of the body-popping gym girls with their push-up bras and the nodding stoner boys with their bongs and cocks and sex jokes. I wasn’t like the other kids; they let me know it every single day, and their world (their music, their drugs, their bike-shed fumblings all fucked up on fruit booze) was thus inaccessible, and as such, undesirable. Anyway, I was proud and brittle and I didn’t want any of their dirty business. It wasn’t that I objected to getting one’s rocks off and one’s buzz on, per se: take, for example, the tea dances of the prohibition era, when everyone was smoking reefer – which was yet to be made illegal – and drinking coffee, which had just hit the scene as the new drug of choice. Dark and decadent, coffee was the new hardcore – and a caffeine high, as some of you will know, is just right with a blast of THC to blunt the edges. It’s a good level, great for dancing, conversation, even sex; I fancy you can even hear the drugs in the music, squeaky and tweaky with sharp corners and a soft middle. But dropping E’s and doddering spoddy and graceless in heels at the zoo-smelling club until the inevitable meltdown, a wet-walled dry-hump and a puddle of spaz? It just wasn’t my idea of fun. There were more wholesome alternatives: passing out akimboed on snakebite beneath the see-saw, for example, while some acned 6th former drunkenly and peremptorily went about disposing of one’s virginity. But all filled me with fear and loathing. The horror, the horror of it!

It was the awful lack of ceremony that I hated: I was longing and dreaming and pining along with the very best of ‘em but I had my own ways of doing it. I’d lie back on my bed and listen to my Walkman, as we all did, only I didn’t listen to Take That, Nirvana or The Chilis. I was riding high on electric currents of old rock n’roll, prohibition-era tea-jazz, and the dulcet tones of Buddy Holly, who was hot, with that little tremor in his voice like he was about to cum. They sang, of course, about love and marriage, but that’s not what they really meant: nobody fucked before marriage in those days, or at least, not officially. No, instead they danced: gaberdine hard-ons pressed up against the scratchy taffeta, with layers and layers of net and nylon and social expectations – a fortress of elastification, a cat’s cradle, as kinky, to my mind, as Japanese rope bondage -- to keep those hard-ons far from the rustling unshaven damp between plump and juicy thighs. And that, I reckoned, was how sex should be: pure animal anticipation dressed up in the cheap suit of propriety, and straining at the seams like a well-filled fly or a girdle under duress. As Buddy Holly slavered and simpered through a succession of blue-balled ballads and phoney proposals toward the illicit zipped-up fuck under the endless boardwalk, I lay alone on my bunk bed and felt like I’d been born in the wrong time.

And then I met Graeme.

Graeme was like me: a social misfit who wore the wrong clothes and listened to the wrong music. We both dug on the old stuff, the scratchier the better; delighted in vinyl hiss and the creaky syncopations of long-dead brass bands, dreamed of waltzing the Blue Danube while surreptitiously removing one another’s formal attire. I was Bunny, a dashing playboy rake with rabbit ears and a swirling moustache, and he was Felicity, swooning society belle who allowed herself – on occasion – to be utterly ravished by her gentleman beau. I don’t know how I ended up playing the man and he the woman. It was organic, orgasmic, pre-drag and proto-queer. Who gives a flying teenage fuck; it worked for us. As gauche teens in civvies we were quite unable to get it on; we didn’t know where to start, and the whole thing was just embarrassing and weird, not to mention thoroughly colonialised by the scary popular kids with whom we felt we had nothing in common. But as the music swept us up into the boudoir-ballroom in our minds, we became Bunny and Felicity, madly in love and wildly excited, groping at one another’s syncopated hearts through layers of dressing-up box and gender confusion and identity crisis and teenage angst: hooks, eyes, mother-of-pearl buttons; suspenders and dickie-bows and fake moustaches, with the visceral, coital squishing of the trumpet and the tuba in the background all the time and the soft moaning of the French Horn, whose very name, even now, sends shivers down my spine. Gasping of violins! The low murmur of the double bass! And the walking rhythm of the old ivories, like the titillation of fingers on skin. We ate sherbet and drank sweet coffee until we were all static analog and itchy groin, tripping out to the ancient radio standards that played and played and played while we lay on my bunk breathing hard and pretending to be other people. There’s no drug like sex and no drug like music, after all, and kids will have their way in the end.

Time passed and we found ourselves growing up, uncomfortably and inevitably. We moved slowly from the thirties into the forties and then the fifties and we started doing it like ordinary teenagers, disinterested and confused and horny and heartbroken. By the time we put Bunny and Felicity to rest, we were both listening to a lot of sixties pop with some bop on the side. I learned to drink my coffee black and even started boozing a bit, just to show my new friends and the boys at work that I was willing; Graeme locked himself away in his room all summer with a stack of his father’s old seventies prog records. We sent each other angry mix-tapes and envelopes full of sherbet and bile. It was over.

It has been said that the conceptual teenager was invented in the early fifties. The post-war baby boom had produced a new affluent generation, with money to spend on records and time to spend on style, heartbreak, and the maintenance of a new youth culture. Like Graeme and I, those kids were middle-class, white, bored and desperately hungry for something that feels like living. And then there was that hot jazz, so-named for what it’ll do to ya, for when it all started to get a bit hackneyed and obvious. The word jazz is derived, they say, from jism, and when you hear that old-time stuff, with the tongue of the saxophone moving in and out and the big bass throbbing and the vocal blue and sweet, you’d believe it. Like rock n’roll, like love, like everything, jazz has been colonialized by white capital, reined into the safe toothless margins of drive-time radio and elevator music for department stores and airports and all the places people go to spend money, stand still, and calcify. But the rebel heart keeps on pumping to the squeaky beat, the hustle and the rustle of hi-hats, and I’m back there again, curled and crinolined, not sure whether I’m leading this waltz or following, neither boy nor girl nor rabbit nor wholly of this time and place, just a fast-breathing thing with a heartbeat and a sugar rush and a funny feeling down there which is all I ever knew of love. It’s hard to imagine, now, but once upon a time this was wild, sexy, dangerous shit, born of poverty and heartache and racial mingling and the Great Depression and the svengali cynicism of the original pop moguls who plucked that music from the streets from whence it came and thrust it into record sleeves.

Buddy Holly, nota bene, who was only 22 when he died, was a notorious freak and occasional bisexual, or at least according to Little Richard. To Buddy, Bunny and Felicity: RIP, and may there be some dirty dancing in that portion of heaven reserved for teenage kicks, dead youth movements and sexual deviants. And may I be delivered unto that place every time I bust out the old vinyl and lie back on my bunk, dancing cheek-to-cheek-to-arse-to-elbow with my teenage self and all the playboys and girls I could have danced with, or become. Amen; ah, man; a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop, a-wop-bam-boom!

Requiem for a Bone

2007-12-08T10:15:00.002Z

I knew a man once, few years back. He was a sailor and a drinker and he could've been a contender, or at least, he sure as hell thought so, and with a couple of beers in him he'd need no provocation to get up there and bawl it into the microphone. Fact is, Bone only had a few lyrics, but they were infinitely interchangeable, and he put them to good effect. The nights would get late, and everybody was drunk, and the boys would be strumming away wasted at the same chord like a wanker worrying at a soft cock. Whoever was playing the drums that night would be bashing blindly at the snare. It may have sounded like shit, but there wasn't a one of us on those nights who'd still give a flying fuck at that juncture, with the hour so late and life so short and all. I'd do my diva thing, sucking on the mike like it loved me back, and then it would be old Bone's turn to bust it out: "I could've been a contender!" All gravel and spit and wasted dreams and halitosis, was Bone, and there he'd go again; we all knew it well, and on occasion someone would sing along with him, although everyone knew that this was The Bone Show, and that the song, at that moment, belonged to him. "I could've been a contender!"

The lyric ended there, and so nobody ever found out what had stopped old Bone from being a contender, or what he might otherwise have become had he not drowned in the Ij on the 18th of September 2007, fished out in his underpants four days later all cold and blue and silent; but in all probability, you know, not much. He was one of the professional losers one finds on every corner and in every bar in a drunken wet sin-city like Amsterdam where people go to lose themselves instead of find themselves, and where the losing can go on forever, or at least until the party's over. But the party never stops if you've got it in you to carry on; until it's over for good, that is. Until they come and drag you out of the river, pull you three weeks dead from your apartment with a needle stuck in your arm; until you're lying retching on a respirator breathing in the sorrows of a lifetime of sins. Bone would've gone sooner or later, you know, the way he carried on, and at his age, too; to say it was better this way makes no sense, but at least he quit while he was ahead. Arguably.

Mark Laurence Scott, known as Bone, was born one day ahead of Saint Valentine's in 1963. I never knew his full name or how old he was until the obituary came through; forty-odd years of hard livin' had made him look older than his years, and I'd always guessed him to be somewhere in his mid-to-late fifties. Bone was of the old school, and riddled with superstitions and tales; he told me once that the reason he'd never learned to swim was because it was bad luck for a sailor, a jinx on the voyage. The worst case scenario which would necessitate swimming for one's life must of course never happen, and must therefore never be pre-empted or even thought of, for fear that the prophecy would fulfil itself. After all, a sailor who's witnessed the gnashing waves of a hungry sea at close range knows better than to pray for a drawn-out death. One frothy gulp of a moment, and you're gone.

Bone lived on a boat, as he always had throughout his life; it's likely that he was drunk when he got up to piss and lost his footing. He was usually drunk, after all, and like I say, he couldn't swim. It all figures.

Bone was a regular at the Sunday evening sessions at the squatted Pakhuis Afrika, a behemoth of a warehouse all ship-blackened concrete and great wooden shutters and the boom, boom, boom of stone ghosts and old storm-water dripping in the dark. Afrika (RIP) was home to many and heart to more, a concrete honeycomb of makeshift bedrooms, living rooms and artists' working spaces partitioned by chipboard and canvas and old curtains gaffer-taped to the ceiling. I could write pages and pages about the wild years of Afrika, about psycho Peter who hung out in the dark stairwell talking to girls about demons and angels, about the dizzy red-wine waltz I had with Daan in the wet black dark of a great concrete hall. The walls echoed our steps like a samba, noisy in the stone silence, and the moon threw a tongue of sudden light into the pool of rain on the floor, and I could almost hear the violins. There was the time I was in love with Tessel and waited for three hours on the roof for my heart to break, smoking her cigarettes and throwing small things into the water far below, before deciding that I should probably go home, one of these days, and sleep. But these things, as with all things that make life worth living, are ephemeral as well as temporal, and also -- significantly and definitively -- gone forever.

That's how we lived, always: we made the most of the reclaimed spaces and the long hours and the music that sprung out of the air as though fully-formed and blazed for a moment in perfect synergy before disappearing into the night, leaving just the faintest trace of melody on the tongue. We made the most of each other, too, but the nights were cold and the beer was cheap and there wasn't much else to do. We were shit-poor and busted and fucked up, and it was this that made it all possible, and what made it worthwhile.

Oh, don't get me wrong: it was a choice to live like that, spending time as though it were free -- reclaimed, like our homes and our bikes and our endless cyclical love affairs, from whence these things are rationed out to the decent and the perfunctory and the straight-laced -- and with our grand houses all held together with gaffer tape and the grace of God, we were richer than the rich. It's not big or clever or revolutionary to drop out of the bottom of society -- usually it's part default and part defense, with a streak of lazy social consciousness attached by a safety-pin -- but Jesus Christ, it's fun. We were unimpeded by mortgages and taxes and all the little costs of renting or owning a place in decent society; proudly dispossessed of any kind of a future or past, touched by the great God of Why-Not and protected by Saint Christopher as though his own. Like I always said: people go to India to find themselves, but people go to Amsterdam to lose themselves. And it ain't always such a bad thing to lose yourself, in music or love or the jangling parade of life; to not know what the hell you're doing, to place your lips to it and sing, with such a sound that seems to come either from above or below or anywhere but your own empty belly. My esoteric friends are all pretty sure that being dead feels like that, and although we'll never know, I hope for old Bone -- a lost soul by profession -- that it does.

Every Sunday a janky and disparate crew of musicians and liggers and drunks would gather to make magic and music. It was our church, our choir, our Sunday service, and we attended devoutly. We'd roll up for a few beers beforehand, or else we'd drink a few coffees at home and smoke a joint before heading over for eleven-thirty. It would go on pretty much all night; sometimes until four, other times until six. Those of us with jobs made sure to work the shift-shuffle and get Mondays off. We weren't nine to fivers, any of us, and there was always a good turn-out. The Afrika was directly on the other side of a bridge which led to a road which led to a music studio and our music would fly out of the great holes in the concrete and fill the foggy night, a call to prayer for the boys in buttoned-up coats with their guitar cases or trombones who would drop by for a beer on their way home and end up staying until dawn. Bone and I used to share the mike sometimes, and it sounded like sand being poured through honey. We gathered applause like confetti. He'd get drunk and kiss my hand, and then he'd do it again, and again until I'd snatch my hand away and pat him on his snarly old head, going that's enough, now, Bone, that's enough for tonight. And it was never enough, never enough for anybody, and there was always another kiss, another song, another beer where that one came from, and the night was long, and life is short and all, and there wasn't much else to do.

What can I say about those sessions, that place, that time, this man who is dead? This is the price you pay for living for the moment: the moment is gone and lost as soon as it falls, and you're left with empty hands and a hangover and a skein of melodies you can't quite remember.
I'm still singing a couple of the songs I jammed out into the mike on those nights, but even with a full string section and a bad-ass guitar it'll never be the same again. God, who doesn't exist, lives exclusively in the moment, and the moment, like God, doesn't exist after the fact. But to have your mouth full of God, man, and your head full of drums!

Godspeed, Mark Laurence Scott. I wish you sea legs and cold beer and long nights of music, and if you're ever hanging round these parts, man, then this song's for you.

The jam sessions were hosted by the endlessly generous, talented and life-affirming Zibabu. Thanks, boys, for everything.

Time, Ladies and Gentlemen.

2007-10-18T06:01:00.002+01:00

Time shows up, starts getting over-familiar. It's six in the morning; I've been awake since four, but I don't know why. I was dreaming a Japanese horror film about a girl who is haunted by the ghost of her bike, and I woke up smiling incongruously in the face of a feeling that there was something under the bed, although I've slept on a loft bunk since I was six years old. There were a few dark years back there in which it was all dirty mattresses and pallets, and I'd wake up in the cold hours of the night all frozen up with terror. Maybe it was because I was sleeping on a dead bed, and maybe because of all the weed and speed and whiskey, but probably it was because of the monsters hiding in the cracks. At least you can see 'em from a loft bed, and that's all a person can hope for, with monsters.

Time has started coming round more often and taking liberties, putting his hand above my knee. Listen, I say. Could you not do that, please.

Hey, girl, he goes, like it's his God-given right: we're just getting to know each other a little better. Don't fight it.

Do I know you? I said, at first. But then I remembered where I knew him from, like one of those lost acquaintances whose faces swim out of the murk of forgotten parties when you see them again in their civvies, months later, for a polite hello and goodbye. Anyway, he seems to know me, and we all know how you always have to say hello to people who think they know you. And then of course he starts coming over to my house and hanging out for hours at a time.

He's there when I'm cooking, and you know how I sometimes get in that mood and hate it when people stand around sticking spoons in my soup and chomping on carrots and wittering on while I'm working; sometimes it's fine, and then everybody's welcome to come and grind my pepper and beat my eggs and shove my polenta in and out of the oven. And like I say, Time takes liberties that others don't, or can't; and secretly, you know, I do like a liberty when it's taken stealthily with a bit of finesse, or even roughly from behind, on occasion. So I let it pass; and that's how it works, with Time. I let him pass. Not without a bit of struggle or petulance; after all, a girl can't be seen to give it just up like that.

Everyone's telling me I'm not as young as I used to be, and while that's undoubtedly, objectively, inarguably true, I never really thought about what it means. Until now. Time is trying to get into my underwear, you know, and I suppose he'll take it from there and continue until he's in my face, my eyes, my ankles and wrists, the corners of my mouth and the curve of my waist. And it's not even personal; he does this with all the girls, and the boys, too, although they pretend not to notice, as with hard-ons in the showers.

And now he's back again, probably sitting under my bed and filing his nails and yawning and refusing to make me coffee. Sometimes I wonder how long he's been here.

If the monster under my bed was just Time all along, doing his thing and sniffing around and checking me out in his mild and lecherous way, I think I can live with it, after all. True, he terrified me as a kid, and even more so when I was half way between being a kid and a grown-up and a monster under somebody else's bed, but now it's all good: we're just getting to know each other. Guess this kind of thing takes a while; why rush? He's got all the time in the world, and I don't even seem to have a choice. And if nobody else will love me when I'm old and ugly - and who knows, it could be sooner than I think - at least my old loving monster Time will stick around. He's not much for monogamy but I reckon he's a keeper. I might even learn to love him back; but like I say, why rush?

Goodnight, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

Nobodummy

2007-10-05T15:08:00.004+01:00

I almost never take the tube because it fills me with fear and loathing; a shuttle-ride all the way to cold hell in a capsule, braying through the holes of London all stuffed full of scuttling suits spritzed and slicked and gung-ho for the rat-race, with the cream of upwardly-mobile human misery dutifully gurning alongside.

The other day, however, I took the Hammersmith and City line to Paddington, and sat there glazedly taking in the ads, which were all about handheld DS consoles for adults; with such a console, according to the ad, you might "train your brain" or "kick back," depending on your identified demographic. Look, here you have your doddery-looking-but-sprightly gentleman of the Old School, losing his teeth but keeping a tight hold on his stocks and shares, and the mounting pillar of properties upon which he perches. He's holding his DS in a pair of shaky hands and guffawing delightedly at a digital game of Cluedo: the new wonders of technology. And look; the hunky young black professional, up-and-coming in the dog-eat-dog world of business and technology - yet groovy enough to take five with a virtual game of poker, or perhaps a round of Grand Theft Auto to keep it real. And then you have Type Bridget Jones: Thirtyish, cute in a drippy sort of way, and probably really hot in a pair of support tights and an LBD, all drunk and desperate for a husband and child and an erect cock bashing against her cervix twice a week and Whatever [else] Women Want. But today she's going to work as she does every weekday, made up all nice, hair teased in soft waves: the eternal ingenue. Like I say: cute, right? But childless, dogless, and trapped in a passionless marriage of convenience with a lacklustre career. Not much time to have fun. So here she is with her handheld console, and she's laughing delightedly at the screen like a little girl at the digital machinations of her virtual life. And what a life:

"Whichever way you get to to work and home again, on average you will spend three years
of your life commuting! That's three years wasted!

But with Nintendogs, you can spend your commuting downtime rearing, training, and competing with virtual puppies. You can name your pup, feed it, pet it and train it. It'll even
answer to the name you give it. Teach your pup tricks and commands using the voice recognition system. It's just like having a real dog! Forget the crossword, your commute will never be the same again."

Christ. That we've come to this.

What do you think of when you think of "dog?"
For me, at least, "dog" brings up a particularly kinetic set of associations. Dogs vibrate, salivate, defecate, make their presence felt. Dogs are all there, inarguably physical and sentient: striding lopsided or low-to-the-ground, spindly-legged or hairy-legged, bandy, randy, rolling out the lipstick; lop-eared, pop-eared, pop-eyed, cockeyed, tongues lolling and eyes rolling; trembling, lumbering, clambering and meandering, and sniffing and breathing and grinning and baring; dog sweat, dog shit, dog spit, eyes swimming: hot and damp and stinky and very much alive. I sing the canine electric!

[And no, I'm not a "dog person." I'm a human being. Sometimes I feel like the last one on earth, a ghost in the machine, cycling at two in the morning through the deserted City of London with the rain trickling like tears down the glassy faces of the emerald city. How sad to be a building not lived in! Coming alive only in the daylight hours - never to know the smells of cooking and sex and shit and shampoo - and left for dead at night when the office ants all scuttle back to their flat-packs. My bike describes a wide arc through the sad imperial stones and the toothy brushed steel, and I can sing at the top of my lungs because there's not a soul to listen, except the poor fancy office blocks who crane and arch to hear a song through the beeping of burglar alarms and the murmur of airco. And somewhere, a dog barks.]

Cycling in London is a daily threat to life and limb and all the more enjoyable for that; of the hundreds who perform the daily 40-minute death-ride to work, sweaty and grimacing and gulping down great gusts of fetid air farting out the back of buses, I doubt there's even one who would regard their commute as wasted time. Me, it's when I do my best thinking. When you're on your bike you're alive in the living world, part of the flesh fabric of it -- a liquid space of celebration and risk -- you're breathing out loud.

Sometimes I take the bus, which is superior to the tube in that you can see where you're going and where you've come from as you travel, which makes for a marginally less disembodied experience. Buses tend to get crowded, and the protocol is more relaxed. Perhaps it's the cultural context of the bus - a shared temporal space of community - or perhaps it's just better than being holed up in a hissing steel box in some subterranean bowel growling with menace and ancient machinery.

Hakim Bey, aka The Goofy Sufi, wrote among other things a little book called Immediatism which I read cover-to-cover on the 149 bus during the rush hour traffic around Old Street.* In Immediatism, Bey talks about Nobodaddy: the faceless face of Big Brother and große Kapital, the Godhead of the Machine, crunching down on numbers and bones and cities.
It is the voice of Nobodaddy who whispers through the whirring of the stock exchange and the howling of the tube as it hurtles down the tunnel to King's Cross. Nobodaddy is selling you software and vitamin pills. The sticky thud of the suicide commuter is a little prayer to Nobodaddy, and the choir of pissed-off urbanites all checking their watches and cursing their phone providers mutter a discreet vespers at His mass. Nobodaddy is Facebook and Twitter and Google. Nobodaddy is watching you.

Every God depends on the cooperation of His flock, though, and there's never been a more willing subject than Nobodummy, the necessary counterpart.
Nobodummy is you, darling, and me too: everyman, sucker, believer; kneeling at the altar with palms spread and mouth open like a baby bird, praying for our cut, our slice, our little handout, rewards for diligence, for good behaviour, for doing what we're told.

Without Nobodummy, Nobodaddy would be powerless, an electronic whine in the void. But we work and we work and we work for our money, and with our money we pay our fares to work and back; and we buy and we buy and we buy stuff and things, and the stuff and the things are tithes to the church of Nobodaddy, and rendered worthless when we die. And slowly - but surely - we begin to lose our only non-saleable commodities, with which we are born, and which are all we have: our lives. Our time. Our bodies.

What do you think of when you think of "real?"
"It's just like a real dog." It's just like a real life.

Me, I think of the human body; the active engagement of the senses. "I'm not feeling it," "It just feels right." I think of laughing, crying, bleeding. Throwing up. Having sex. Cooking for friends. Poor old Walt Whitman (shit, man; you've got to get a grip, man), with his sandals and hard-on, striding through the leaves of grass and singing the body electric: "Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching... Undulating into the willing and yielding day,/ Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh'd day." What would he make of panty-liners, mouthwash, antiperspirants, air-freshener, sucralose, ketamine?

In the credit-crash future when we've virtualized and deodorized ourselves into oblivion we'll have only a flickering screen for solace when we look to Nobodaddy for deliverance. We'll be left in the unfamiliar filth of our own bodies, crawling in the muck, unable to feed ourselves. We'll find ourselves in the broken streets with wild packs of dogs and with their effortless embodiment of the long-lost sensual world, they will become our prophets and our priests, teeth still sharp even after centuries of domestication (which is more than you can say for the human race, after all). The master in thrall to the slave, desperate and unmuscled in the rags of fashion and the ruins of industry. O Dog Almighty! Kneel to the hound and pray he'll deign to stick his sweet wet tongue where the sun don't shine; and bless you, bless you with his love. Nay: pray you'll be able to feel something when he does.
Amen.

No, it's nothing, nothing, nothing like having a "real" dog.

*"In effect," wrote Bey, "chaos is life. All mess, all riot of color, all protoplasmic urgency, all movement -- is chaos." In this sense at least, the 149 bus through Dalston is life itself. Reading on public transport can be seen as a way to preserve one's individual space in the melée, but also as a form of encapsulation not unlike the use of a hand-held console: ironic, really, but hey, you do what you can. In another passage about replacing democratic epistemology with dada epistemology, Bey summarized by saying, "Either you're on the bus or you're not on the bus."

** Originally coined in 1793 by visionary motherfucker William Blake, the original poem "To Nobodaddy" goes like this :

Why art thou silent & invisible
Father of jealousy
Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds
From every searching Eye

Why darkness & obscurity
In all thy words & laws
That none dare eat the fruit but from
The wily serpents jaws
Or is it because Secresy
gains females loud applause

Ladies and gentleman, William Blake. Seventeen ninety fucking three. Nuff said.

How To Save Your Life, or How to Keep Your Bike: An Amsterdam Story

2007-07-14T17:59:00.002+01:00

See, it was one of those wild-youth times in which I didn't even have my own toothbrush. It wasn't that I didn't clean my teeth -- because I did -- but I used a different toothbrush every night, you know? It was one of those times. In general, everything was going every which way but loose. It was messy. I couldn't do anything ordinary like keep a job or arrive anywhere on time, or fill in banking forms or file my taxes or feed myself decently. I didn't mind it much -- because I didn't know better and because life was so rich and dramatic and full of drunken promise -- but there was one central issue making matters even more difficult and complicated: my bike kept getting nicked.

In retrospect, my bike getting nicked was only one of the assorted symptoms of a general malaise born of chaos and youth and not looking after oneself. This all took place in Amsterdam, where it's pretty much mandatory to be in possession of a bike. And because cycling is such a deeply-ensconced cultural concept and way of life -- and not just for kids, paupers, punks or health bunnies, but for everybody, young and old alike -- there was a lot of folklore and superstition* around bikes and how to treat them. At the time I had a lover called Jan. Jan and I, incompatible in many ways, were nonetheless both highly gifted with the unfortunate talent of being effortlessly able to waste inordinate amounts of time. We had a regular practise consisting of a brisk constitutional bike-ride to the store for booze and sandwich fixings, followed by a restorative promenade along the canal to take the air through a cloud of hash-smoke. Finally we'd repair to the park and lie in the grass drinking beer until the day was good and over. Our bikes accompanied us wherever we went; we knew each other's bikes as well as we knew one another's bodies.*** Jan used to tell me that a bike is like a horse: if you treat him good he won't bolt. If you just put a little time and care and energy into your bike, Jan said, it'll stick around a while. And he should know, since he's has been riding the same rotten old bike ever since we met, which was seven years ago. On one occasion he mislaid that bike and rode another for a while -- but that was during a phase in which he took a lot of speed and slept in the back of someone's bus on a grungy mattress with no top sheet and drank too much and played in a garage punk band called Cunt 87**. You know? It figures.

I was a notoriously bad master and always mistreated my steed. Old Jan would wince at my special trick, in which I'd spring from the saddle whilst in full tilt and let my poor unmanned bike careen forth in a wild zigzag -- like the proverbial headless chicken -- before it keeled over hard with a resounding crash, spokes whirring. I used to call my bike a piece of shit, right to its face; I called it bloody useless; I called it ugly. I kicked it when it protested. I was rough with its chain and I never once oiled the poor thing. If my bike got a flat, I'd park it at the Sleutelbrug (which, ironically, means "the key bridge"), where junkies come to sell their stolen bikes, and get it nicked on purpose rather than fix it. I'm not proud of it now. I've learned my lesson; I won't harm another bike as long as I live. But back then there was a lot I hadn't learned, and anyway, I had at least one lover with a sturdy bike rack. It was as good a way as any to get around town; sidesaddle and fancy-free, rolling a cigarette as we went, and sometimes slinging both arms around my darling's middle, and maybe giving a nipple tweak or a belly pinch for good measure. But a girl needs her own bicycle, rather more than a fish ever could, especially when there's no man around to ride her ass around town.

Every two or three months I'd lose another bike, either through ill-treatment or misfortune or neglect. Jan protested that I ought just to dirty my twitchy fingers and build my own bike in a painstaking and dedicated labour of love, with attention to detail and care for the parts, but I was far too janky and lazy for that: I couldn't even make up my bed, or indeed my mind, so how in the hell was I going to make up a bike? No, I knew where I had to go, and what I had to do.

You can try your luck on the Sleutelbrug any time of the night or day, but every weekday at about five o'clock it's rush hour; the students start streaming out of their lectures at the adjacent University, some on bikes, others on foot, and the junkies -- sometimes as many as five or six -- congregate shiftily to peddle their ill-gotten wares. It's all very hush-hush and black market, but everyone knows that if you're hangin' at the Sleutelbrug, you're only there for one thing. When the cops drive through, everybody scatters or pretends to be deep in conversation about anything other than stolen bikes. The humble bicycle is a proud institution in the Netherlands, and the trafficking of bicycles is not to be taken lightly; you can incur quite serious penalties by even riding a stolen bike, so business on the Sleutelbrug has to be conducted with caution. I was an old hand and a familiar face at the Sleutelbrug, and I could cut a harder deal than the hardest junkie on the block. Seven euros, I reckoned, was the correct price for a stolen bike.

Now, a junkie will tell you that smack goes for a tenner a gram, and oftentimes they'll try to cut a deal with the unusual paint job or the perfectly straight back wheel or the half-decent back brake. But I didn't buy that stuff. Something procured for free, see, will always generate a 100% profit at point of sale. Fair enough; business is business. But a fancy bike is just as freely and easily gotten as a shit-heap bike, and the condition of a stolen bike is therefore immaterial. The street price of heroin? Also immaterial. The service itself, I figured - being a fairly simple, if slightly risky operation involving a flex or a hacksaw -- was worth no more, and no less, than seven euros. I stood there arguing with junkies until the police showed up, whereupon we'd retreat, still arguing, to a side-alley. I expounded my theories of saleable goods and semi-skilled labour. I'd be willing, I said, to throw in a bit of tobacco, but fifteen euros? You're fuckin' joking.

Junkies aren't particularly renowned for their attention span or their powers of discourse, and so usually they'd get sick of me in the end and hand over the bike for seven euros and a pinch of baccy. I had it down to a fine art. And then I'd ride away, promising myself this time I'd buy a decent lock. But a good lock -- saleable goods and all that -- will set you back at least fifteen euros, and you know, I didn't have fifteen euros. I might have had fifteen euros if I wasn't spending all my rather petty cash on beer and weed, but hey! A girl's just gotta have fun, or at least that's what I thought at the time, having mastered the fine arts of procrastination, rationalization, and nothing-better-to-do-ism (niets-beters-te-doen-isme).

Being possessed of neither a decent lock nor a decent life, two months usually saw me back where I'd begun, arguing with junkies and avoiding the cops on the Sleutelbrug. At some point I started to get sick of gazing into rheumy eyes and haggling over tobacco shake, but true to form I managed to get my bike nicked again, and this time I took it personally. The bike in question had been an old workhorse I called Auntie, whom I treated badly but was secretly growing fond of. I went to the bridge, vowing that this time would be the last. I'd get me a fine, upstanding, duck-bellied granny bike with working brakes and I'd call her Auntie the Second and I'd buy me a lock and I'd keep her for my children and grandchildren to ride, and I'd get to work on time and I'd stop drinking and I'd stop seducing everyone at random just to see if I could and I'd get it together and I'd clean up and then I'd go out and save the world. Fuck yeah.

I arrived at the bridge on one of those hot Amsterdam afternoons. The sluggish green canal smelled brackish and rank, like rotten fish and dead seawater, and everyone was drinking beer on the café terraces, slit-eyed in the sun like a bunch of lizards in shirt-sleeves and halter-necks. There was a fat, greasy-looking junkie there with a pitted face and bad jail tattoos. "Fiets te koop," he sang dolefully, leaning drunkenly on the rusted pink handlebars of a My-Little-Pony-lookin' bike meant for a little girl no older than eight or nine. "I can take the stabilisers off for you," he said, "Only fifteen euro."
I argued with him for a while, just for fun and practise, and then he gave up and asked if I wanted to take the sorry thing out for a test drive. Test drive my arse, I said, I was looking for a duck-bellied granny bike, not some poor little kid's hand-me-down. "Take it anyway," he shrugged, "Only seven euros, to you."

I rattled away on the poor little bike, stabilisers clattering, knees to my chin. I glanced over my shoulder. He wasn't even looking, the sorry bastard, and it was a hot day, and I couldn't be bothered; this'd do me for a while, I thought, and maybe Jan will raise the saddle for me, or something. At that moment, I hit a new low. I was stealing a stolen child's bike from a junkie.

By Dam Square, both wheels were flat and the only brake had stopped working. I fumed and started peddling back to raise hell about having been sold a faulty product, but it quickly dawned on me that a thief knows a thief when he sees one. The damn junkie had seen right through me from the start. He'd probably spotted the cops coming and didn't want them up in his weave, and knowing damn well that the bike was a dud, he'd let me ride the hot product right on out of the scene. Anyway, demanding a refund at the Sleutelbrug? Get serious.

I rode up glumly on the fucked-up little pink bike, just as the cops were disappearing from view. I pawned the thing off on a hippie-looking junkie in dungarees and waited around some, now and again putting in an order with a passing junkie for an upstanding duck-bellied granny bike, preferably in a shade of red. They told me they'd see what they could do and disappeared down the slimy side streets of De Wallen. The police had driven by a few times and I'd either scarpered or made a great production of ostentatiously lighting a cigarette, feigning an expression of studied ennui and concentration that was meant to look studenty. A blue-eyed junkie with long grey hair and jagged razor-edge cheekbones came up and spoke to me a few times, apologising for the slowness of traffic. "It's the police, see, and the sun," he said, "Everyone's lyin' low."
"Been waiting around here all bloody day and seen nothing." I told him. It had gone five.
"That's a bummer," the junkie agreed, and disappeared.

An hour went by and one of the junkies I'd been asking earlier approached me with a fancy racer bike, but I wasn't into it. The hippie-looking junk in dungarees showed up again, as well, empty-handed. He said he felt bad for me. I said I felt bad for him.
He said, nah, I got a score from your little pink bike, so I'm all right.
Least one of us has scored something, I said.
"Look," he said. "I don't like to see you waiting around like this. I'm going to see what I can find."
I said I'd give it another twenty minutes and then I was definitely going home. The afternoon was muggy and dank. I'd been there too long: the lizards on the terraces and the sweating pigs in their blue bellhop pants and boots were starting to look at me funny, I was sure of it. I wanted to go and get stoned. Twenty minutes, he said. And went.

I went and sat at the junkie's bench at the canal and waited. About ten minutes went by. The cops drove past again, but I wasn't doing anything, I said to myself: I was only sitting. They gave me a dirty look and kept going. I wondered what the hell I was doing there.
Another five minutes. Suddenly somebody was behind me, rustling and muttering. I turned around to see the grey-haired junkie standing there with an enormous bunch of huge yellow roses.
"For you," he said. "I couldn't find you a bike, but I got you these instead."
I took them from him. They were indecently blousy roses, crushed at the corners, fixing to die, smelling crazy sweet. A rose that's decomposing, kids, is the sweetest smell of all. "Where'd you find 'em?"
"The fancy hotel was chucking 'em out." He came and sat next to me. The dungaree-junk showed up at that moment, too.
"Beautiful roses," he goes. "D'you get 'em at the hotel?" The grey-haired junkie assented and he nodded sagely. "They do have some lovely flowers, that hotel." He looked at me apologetically. "Too much filth on the street tonight for bikes, I'm afraid. It's the sun, you know?"
He sat down too, and we all three gazed at the water.
The long-haired junkie asked if I liked his roses. I said yeah, man, I love 'em. I did.
"You got any money?" he inquired good-naturedly, cocking his head at me like a canny bird.
"Nah."
"Tobacco?"
"Yeah."
We all rolled up cigarettes, and sat there smoking awhile, chatting companionably about the scandalous inflation of street drugs and about bikes and about the rotten police. And then I gathered up my roses and walked home with my arms full, thorns sticking in my arms, petals falling all around on the concrete like confetti. If I'd had a bike, I thought to myself, I wouldn't have been able to take these roses with me. I went back and arranged them in beer bottles in my room. I gave some of them away, I think, but I don't remember to whom.

Some time afterward, I inherited the beloved bike of a good friend who was leaving town, as Amsterdammers of all nationalities are wont to . Auntie the Second, although duck-bellied and old-fashioned, was far less of a grande dame than my imagined dream bike, and was as cantankerous as a mule: a mad dog at times and at other times a bronco. I admired her aplomb, and came to respect her for her spite and her spunk. Auntie the Second was not afraid of me. Auntie the Second took no shit. When Auntie the Second -- by then just Auntie -- got her first flat, I carried out my first repair. I oiled her chain. Slowly, Auntie and I became firm friends. I learned my lesson, and I've used it ever since.

I write this now from Amsterdam, where I'm hanging out for a few days of nonanymity**** before heading back into the wilds of London town. At the moment I'm riding a duck-bellied granny bike with a dodgy brake and a silly-looking basket on the front fender, courtesy of a friend. She herself rides a nifty little mountain bike, but she has the granny for posterity and for guests, and she calls it "her stupid bike."
"I don't think you're stupid," I coo to its handlebars as we ride around the old wet city, which smells of rotten eggs and seagull piss, and is awash in rain and beer as per usual. "I think you're very nice. You're lovely, you're my sweetie, my liefje, lieve lieve fietsje van mij." Cycling at night through a silent Amsterdam with the tram lines murmuring night thoughts and only the early-rising birds to call my bluff, I swear I mean every word of it.

I've been here two and a half days. I forgot my toothbrush in London, and it was only this afternoon, I'm ashamed to say, that I went out to the supermarket for a new one. It's not that I haven't been cleaning my teeth, though. Because I have.

AFTERWORD

Auntie and I were inseparable from 2002 until 2005, when I left Amsterdam for good. I gave her to a trusted housemate and rode her around on my sojourns from England or America or wherever the hell I've been in the last few years. Auntie was stolen outside a party in 2006.

* Typical Dutch joke: Fietsen is gezond. Eet meer fiets. Translated: Bik[ing] is good for you. Eat more bike. It's untranslatable, since the verb "to cycle" is spelled like the plural. There's also a saying that goes something like: it's better to go on about your bike than to bike over your cock. This also translates badly, as there's no English equivalent for lullen (to talk or to "witter on", colloquial) from lul (cock, also used pejoratively). Another good 'un: Op een ouwe fiets moet je leren. Means literally, "You've got to learn on an old bike." It's a sexual reference, of course, pertaining to initiation by a more seasoned partner. There's also "Ga fietsen!" (imperative), which translates best as "on yer bike," but is a little more emphatic in the Dutch, something like: "Get fucked." Basically, whatever; I'm trying to illustrate how many bike-references there are in popular language compared to what we've got in English. Out of my head, I'd say that Freddie Mercury gave us at least two, and I can't think of more. English-language bike-phraseology is warmly welcomed in these parts, however, so if you know something I don't, kids, do bring it on.

** Kut '87.

*** Many's the faithless lover, in Amsterdam, whose affairs are exposed when the wronged partner espies their darling's fiets locked up outside an unfamiliar house.

**** Like anonymity but the other way around.

Twenty-Seven

2007-06-29T01:32:00.004+01:00

It’s my birthday. I’m thankful for it. Just to have survived this far, with all limbs attached and a complete set of internal organs, is enough to make me grin on a day like today, oppressively grey with bursts of triumphant sun.

I cycled from Brixton to Shoreditch in the splitting sunlight and scudding clouds, monoxide fumes farting out of the grimy arses of hard-working buses into my hard-working morning face, candying up my larynx, sticking to my lips. In the absence of either breakfast cereal or birthday cake, I bought a piece of overpriced confectionery and picnicked alone in the gardens of the Geffrye Museum on Kingsland road, which is one of those places that nobody ever seems to go except the people who do, for whom it’s just about everything there is to live for. All these old people sitting on benches, and me among them, staring up at the sudden blue through the high branches, wondering whether it’s God whom I ought to thank, or my mother, or myself, or the trees, or the laws of quantum physics, or the sweet imaginary angel who watches over my skanky ass and keeps me going my strange way through the strange process of living. And yet God doesn’t exist, surely, or at least not in some sentient, omniscient, dude-in-the-sky capacity; and there is no angel, but the constant tang of death, who tastes like metal, who could show up at any time, and who – I’m sure – is standing there biting his lip and shaking his head, letting me off a little while longer – watching me sing and run and screw my life up, watching me putting it all back together and pretending I’m all grown up – because I charm him, with my jank and joie de vivre. Death will be as sad as a barman at last orders when he comes for me: he’ll be terribly sorry, he’ll be soft-spoken like a policeman, he’ll do what he has to do.

But I’m not dead yet, kids. Hell, no. I’m twenty-seven, and you’ve just arrived at the party – which is just as well, because it wouldn’t be any kind of a party without you.

It’s a virtual party because those are the best kind – we’re all here but not at the same time, and not in person, so there’ll be no fussing about what to wear, no washing of hair or clothes (which, of course, is just how I like it). There’ll be no panic about last buses or designated drivers when it’s time to go. No gifts, no pleasantries, no introductions to make. It’s my birthday party, and it can go on indefinitely, or not at all, at your place or mine or someone else’s, whatever. It’s all good, and it’s all up to you – what you’ll do this evening, or tomorrow at lunch, or for the rest of your life, or until the next birthday party which will take place in June 2008 provided that I live that long (twenty-seven being a fairly auspicious time to die, as Jimi, Janis, Jim and Kurt have all aptly demonstrated). Or, you know, whatever.

You're about to attend the great virtual feast of twenty-seven at which dead rock stars (see above) mingle with lovers and ex-lovers - real and imaginary, of either and all gender - along with great wingéd beasts of the unconscious and random gathered blogophiles at the killer punch bowl in my mind in the sky. Assembled guests will witness this moment at which I start bashing my spoon against a glass. Just a little something I prepared by way of an acceptance speech (thank you, O Creator, for giving me these twenty-seven years to waste and fritter according to my wont, and thanks for considering me worthy of another one, insh’allah and all that, and to all of you who are here today to share in this momentous occasion and read my bullshit as though it's true).

With the eve of my twenty-seventh birthday dawning, and with so very much love in my heart, I thought to bequeath a little of my earthly wisdom to the starving children who walk around the place with hairstyles and fashions and several belts too many. Yet another herd of swine to my pearls, no doubt; but that doesn’t matter when one is almost twenty-seven and filled with the magnanimity of old age. No, it doesn’t matter at all; the pleasure of giving far outweighs the pleasure of receiving, and nowhere is this so true as with a great big fat piece of advice. But so what, bitches? It’s my birthday. Without further ado, then - in celebration of past and future mistakes and the long wide winding road to hell - I would like to present my subjective and definitive list of things to do before you turn twenty-seven (in no particular order), and a few things that you really don’t necessarily have to do – perhaps at all, perhaps ever.

1. Question God, or if you’re as Godless and hell and useless with it, then don’t stop there – question your mother, your professors, the very nature of your identity, and keep going until you’re plumb worn out.

2. Forgive your parents. You’re all right, aren’t you? Then they can’t have done such a bad job. More to the point, though: you are alive, and without them you wouldn’t be. Life is a gift bestowed not [only] by God but by the magical chromosomic dance of procreation. Be grateful.

3. Forgive yourself. For everything you are, and are not. See above. Period. This process will be an ongoing one throughout your life, but by the grand old age of 27, you ought to have made some headway.

4. Learn how to say No. It’s the most important word you’ll ever use. Not in order to protect your virtue or your sobriety, but just because you haven’t got time to do anything that, for whatever reason, you don’t want to do. Say No to hen nights with colleagues, to the dreaded Sunday Lunch with your partner’s parents, to the second date with somebody you know you’ll never want to fuck when sober. Say No this very evening. Or say Yes. But make sure you mean it.

5. Learn how to say Yes. There are moments in life when can definitely implies should. And you’ll know when they come, because it’ll feel so damn good.

6. Have sex. Whoa, now, whoa! Back down there, Tiger, I don’t just mean any old sex. See, kids, perhaps you’re too young to understand (hey, don’t grind your teeth at me), but you betta know: sex, in and of itself, is a poor and silly game of squeaky plumbing and crazy golf; the ace in the hole often doesn't cut the mustard, dig me? No, kids: sex is like poetry. Wot, you say: because it’s “a deal of joy and pain and wonder” (Kahlil Gibran)? Nuh-uh. it’s because it’s far better to have no poetry than bad poetry – which is so very, very bad – and in the same vein, it's better to have no sex than bad sex. Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread; foreplay isn’t about the desultory ten minutes of nipple-twisting and dry-humping, but about the exquisite side-stepping, the dance, the intrigue. Once in a blue moon one comes across the kind of chemistry that raises the hackles and bites at the heart, forces subjectivity, trickles like blood, smacks of chaos and sweetness and the great booming who-gives-a-damn of the whole swirling gloriously indifferent universe; on those rare occasions, it’s more than okay to go with it even if you don’t know why, even if you don’t exchange a word, even if it’s over in fifteen minutes flat. The memory of those fifteen minutes will feature in the great book of your life as a glittering thread of memory “laid out in pages there with as much love and care as the lock of hair of a lost first love” (Dylan Thomas) and it will have been worth every scrap and hickey.
Not so, however, with the majority of random sex: drunken sex, curiosity sex, sympathy sex, rebound sex, and all of those other ill-advised fucks and fumbles that’ll make you wish you’d been a born-again virgin. A friend of mine got married at the age of 25. Her life had been full and illustrious up until then, except that in all of her years she’d never once taken a bite of that cherry – or the apple, whichever way you prefer to see it. There wasn’t any dark reason for it. It just didn’t happen; she’s not the kind of girl to throw herself into self-destructive situations, meaning that she chose, sensibly, to avoid sex during adolescence, after which I suppose it becomes more and more difficult to broach the matter. I couldn’t resist asking how she’d found the big S-E-X after a lifetime of honourable celibacy.
“Well,” she said, a little shyly, “I mean, I had to tell him because, y’know, he thought there was something wrong. So we waited, y’know, we worked up to it, and when we finally did it, well, y'know, it was good.”
“So how long,” I asked her, “did you, like, wait?”
She smiled. “Oh, y’know. Nine months or something.”
Nine months of foreplay, people! At the age of twenty-five, by which time a person is somewhat better equipped – psychologically – to give and receive pleasure. Nine months, and you can bet your buttons (do ‘em up, now, kids) it was good. Don’t get smashed on lurid fruit liquor in the park and accidentally lose your virginity to the local Romeo with his peachfuzz chin and his genital warts. Do as my friend did and make sure you’re really enjoying yourself before you take the plunge into that flesh- coloured soup of viscous fluids and potential heartbreaks. Amen.

7. Learn another language, and speak it. It’s good for your sense of empathy. It’s also a difficult thing to do, and you should always seek out difficult things to do. No good going through life thinkin’ you’re King Shit; a person’s got to fall on her face a few times in order to grow. And you will (see also: 8, 13).

8. Leave home. By that, I mean your parents’ house, but also, preferably, your hometown, or better still, your home country. Leave and don’t come back for a while. Get out of your comfort zone. Fetishise another culture, only to realize that every culture carries its own big share of bullshit. Take a lover from another cultural background and experience, first-hand, the fact that some things are universal.

9. Learn to cook. It will equip you for health, looks and longevity about five thousand times better than any vitamin supplement, self-help book or bikini diet ever could. Our life’s work, if you ask me (and you didn’t, but bear with me here) is to learn firstly how to survive, and then, once you’ve nailed that, to learn how to live. The preparation of food deals with both objectives at once, and as such is a deservedly sacred art universal to humankind. To be able to cook for yourself will save you from schmuckism at the filthy hands of capitalist food chains and the biliously indifferent catering industry (take it from me, the customer always pays for the sin of being served, at the hands of those who can’t afford to buy the product that they sell). To be able to cook for others is a gift that keeps on giving. Like dancing, singing and sex, cooking is something that everyone can do when given the correct impetus and a sense of entitlement and curiosity. And if you didn’t know you could, well, now’s the time to start finding out. Anyone wants to ask me to dinner, I’m there.

10. Develop a connoisseurship. Of something, anything. Get into the finer points. Become an expert. Whether your area of expertise pertains to beer mats, extinct species of bird, non-latex sex toys, the Grateful Dead, psycholinguistics, old-style mopeds, vegan baking or internet search engines, it’s good to have your little thing. With this little thing you’ll be able to impress curious freaks at parties, find solace and focus in times of confusion, and perhaps even get a job, one day. Geek is the new black, so work that shit.

11. Learn to stomach one or more of the following, as and when the occasion calls for it: cigarettes, espresso, oysters. Why? Beginning with the former, cigarettes are a social tool, a charming prop, and an expression of status and/or culture and/or subculture. They rot your lungs and reduce your life-expectancy and are absolutely not worth becoming dependent on, but it can be a fine – and useful – thing to be able to offer or accept a cigarette when your life, or your tenuous inclusion in obligatory camaraderie, depends on it.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that fags are sophisticated. They’re not, really. They’re just sort of tuff. Espresso, by contrast, carries a certain sophistication lacking from the mochaccinos and three-sugar lattes of this world. It’s good to be able to handle one’s coffee served black when in the presence of vegans, Turks, diplomats and neo-beatniks, as well as caffeine aesthetes of all stripes and denominations. Espresso means business. And quite apart from all of that, kids, it’s a fantastic drug, much better than most of the others. Take it from me: the horse's mouth (so to speak).
Oysters, now: that’s something else entirely. Good old Jonathan Swift was quoted as saying, “He was a bold man that first ate an oyster” and he was a man whose word is good. You, too, must be bold, to embark on your first oyster adventure. Yes, they taste like cum, smell like pussy, go down like seawater – but the little shiver that runs through you afterward is testament to how truly wonderful they are, and incomparable. They are the food of God, dripping mucus of life itself, heaven in a half-shell – and a veritable orgy of amino acids, to top it all. Of the three pleasures listed above, the oyster is the one I urge you not to miss. Just one oyster, kid, before you die – and you’ll be a man, my son.

12. Take some fuckin’ responsibility. Look after yourself. Feed yourself (see 9). Clean the bathroom, do the washing up, dump your boyfriend, quit your job. If and when you find yourself pissing everybody off, it’s time for a reality check. Yes, they may all be bastards, but they’re also right about you. Take it on the chin. Listen to advice. Learn by your mistakes. Sort your life out. Get off the sauce, cut down on the chemicals, do some exercise. Look after your body. Your body’s all you’ve got of God, not that He exists; but you do. Oh, yes! God can’t help you go straight, and your friends and parents are sick of your bullshit: it’s down to you, kiddo. You can do it. Hey – if I can do it,* then anyone can.

13. Lose a fight, a dream, a friend – you get the picture – and survive it. Dare to have your heart broken. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger; it grows you up. Live a little, love a little, die a little, and start again. Repeat. And repeat again. Ad mortem. Ya dig?

14. Get fuckin' serious.

15. Lighten the fuck up.

Having said all that, of course, a person must be allowed to make their own mistakes. Personally I don't give a damn what you do; I just wanted you to know how much I love you.
Me, I'm going back to the party. The guests are getting ready to dance; maybe I'll find someone to waltz with. Twenty-seven! Thanks for coming; raise your glasses. Until next year, then: good night.

*Honey, I'm a work in progress.