Monday 28 January 2013

DJANGO UNCHAINED

"I could be the actress you be Tarantino"- XXXO- M.I.A,

"Yes love, love your attitude, because the nigger play pussy that's the nigger that's getting screwed"- Gimme the Loot- The Notorious B.I.G 

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Ugh. Just woke up, and it's like something out of a bad teen movie, beer cans, empty cartons of chicken, no messages, that same old feeling that my life is falling away into middle age and I can't remember what it's like having sex sober. It stopped snowing yesterday, and Magic FM is happily informing me that parts of England are going to be flooded by all the melted slush. Last night I drunkenly watched Aldo Lado's "Night Train Murders", a fairly inventive spin on Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left", which was based on a Bergman film, "Jungfrukallan", which means that sixty or seventy percent of all banned video nasties took their influence from the artiest director Europe ever produced. I don't have toilet paper or tobacco, and on Thursday I had an email from my careworker which read:

Gentle reminder that your injection is due today!

I emailed him a link to my new music video on YouTube and told him to go fuck himself, which was hardly mature, but well. On Friday I went to see "Django Unchained" again, this time in the ghetto Odeon in Bromley, which doesn't have 3D capacity and charges four fifty a ticket. The screens are kind of tatty, the seats are threadbare and they have CCTV cameras in all of the theatres in case a fight kicks off. Me and Raf saw it on opening night in the middle class Beckenham Odeon, which saw a few walkouts and a general uncomfortable atmosphere from an audience that didn't know how to take the word "nigger" repeated almost every other word. American maverick director Spike Lee has publicly refused to watch it, saying it is offensive to his ancestors, which obviously smacks of jealousy. After I tweeted him that his slave movie "Bamboozled" was a toecurlingly bad film and that his intellect spoils most of his movies, he locked his Twitter account, which adds him to the list of celebrities who are blocking me, which includes EL James and Stephen Fry.
A group of black girls were sitting right behind us second time round, and if you know anything about black girls, you know that they are guaranteed to provide a running commentary of whatever movie they are watching, which, in the case of "Django Unchained", meant that by the end they had forgotten that anybody else was in the cinema.

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"Sharp scratch," Holly says. The needle tears a hole, that old familiar sting. I'm in the process of getting punked on Pynchon Ward, my two weekly date with a depot injection of Olanzapine straight into my left buttock. It's getting to the point where I don't even mind it anymore. 
"I can't believe it's been two weeks," Holly sighs, and then: "Oop, it's bleeding quite a lot, let me get a plaster."
I wince, hoping that it hasn't hit an artery.
"Have you seen Django yet?" I ask, pulling up my jeans.
"I heard it was quite violent," Holly says, disposing of the needle.
I limp out of the medical room, scanning for an easy hit. I see an awkward looking man in his late thirties, smile at him and say:
"Can I buy a cigarette off you?"
"Oh," he says nervously, seeing the fake evil look in my eyes, "oh, oh, you can have one."
He leafs me out a Benson Silver, and I get a flash of what his life has been like to end up here. Shy at school, not much of an academic, some low rent jobs, a steadily increasing drink problem, a slightly too close relationship with his mother.
"Cheers mate," I smile, limping down the corridor to the smoking cage. Some random black zombie (the usual type of mentally ill homeless from the area that collects on the ward on a weekly basis), is following me in. Because I've been jacked up in this cage before (the worst was from a young pikey with an electronic tag who got six shots to my head before I managed to take him out) I gauge this zombie as pretty harmless but smoke in the corner just to be on the safe side. Another guy comes in, a clean shaven white guy with tracksuit bottoms on and the unpleasant scent of Lynx, sex addiction and schizophrenia.
"What's that then?" he asks, pointing at my HMV bag.
"A book," I say. I've brought in the new Misha Glenny crime epic, "Dark Markets: How Hackers Became the New Mafia", since I met an Anonymous hacker (who I will never name) in the Secure Unit last year.
"You read books, then?" he asks, confused and lecherous.  
"Sometimes," I smile, putting in my earphones. 
"My mum likes books," is the last thing I hear him say before I switch off. I'm listening to Redman's "Muddy Waters", definitely one of the best albums to get high to. I'm hoping they won't piss test me, since I smoked all night before I made my new YouTube video, which has had 82 views in four days which I guess is okay, but it's hardly Rihanna or Justin Bieber, the deities of YouTube. When the weird dude leaves the cage I text my producer to say that Lloyd Kaufman, head of Troma and creator of The Toxic Avenger thought the video was great. I have been tweeting him for a while. Nobody makes movies quite like him. Anybody who smokes weed loves that guy. I wander back to make a decaffeinated, lukewarm coffee, scoping the place for new faces. I recognize most of them. I probably know by sight all of the mentally ill people in the area, and the cogent ones recognize me. Usually if I see a homeless guy I know I'll buy them a couple of cans of Super T. They're all alcoholic or drug addicts, or both. Poor bastards. There but for the grace of God. A young black girl with a few gold teeth is staring at me. I take out my earphones.
"Hello," I smile.
"Are you staff?" she asks.
"Nope," I say.
"What's that?" she says, pointing at my bag.
"A book."
"You can get books in HMV now?"
"Mostly the hip, drug culture classics, or music biographies, or serial killer histories," I explain, stopping when I realize she doesn't understand.
"How long have you been in?" she asks.
"I've just come for an injection," I reply.
"Oh. Are you a heroin addict?"
"No."
"Oh."
I sit down and read my book for three hours. I have to wait this length to ensure the medication doesn't kill me. It's an urban legend that you can die from a depot injection. This time round I'm okay. It's been a calm day on the ward. I eat dinner there, and leave, wandering back to my flat in the freezing sleet. On the bus I watch the streets of the suburbs pass by, remembering nights out, people I used to know, things I used to do. It hits me as a dull epiphany as I watch the rivulets of rain snake down the window. I don't really have any ties left in England. My parents don't even live here. Pynchon Ward is the only home I have.


A.W.M 28/01/2013


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