"Dating sites were already home to some of the most sustained and intense mendacity in history. In chat rooms, people liked to impart a sense of their own talent and importance, which rarely corresponded to the mundane reality of their lives. The Web fostered this because people were unable to check up on their virtual partners' behavioral traits. Everyone was discovering that on the Web they could lie without fear of exposure or opprobrium."
p.280 Dark Market: How Hackers Became the New Mafia, Misha Glenny
People who make music together cannot be enemies, at least not while the music lasts- Paul Hindemith
---------
"We should get a camera," I tell Raf as he hands me a cigarette, "and we should go up to the gates and start asking random people if they work for MI5."
"This is MI5 you idiot," he grins. "And anyway, I've got a camera on my phone."
"Fine," I say. "I'll ask the questions, you film."
We are standing outside MI5 headquarters after a long walk down the Thames from Charing Cross, killing time before a gig I've been invited to by a band I discovered on Soundcloud called The Bedroom Hour. MI5 is even more impressive than it looks from a distance, a giant post-modern fortress opposite Vauxhall Cross, the gay capital of London. Cameras are everywhere, and tough looking rugby boys with serious eyes, dressed in expensive tailored suits enter and exit along with scruffy long haired computer types. A sign on the entrance reads: ANY BIKES LEFT ATTACHED TO THESE GATES WILL BE REMOVED WITHOUT WARNING.
"I don't think that would be a good idea," Raf says.
"There's probably about five hundred different ways to break somebody even before you use violence," I muse.
"Possibly more," he replies as I light my cigarette. "There's probably thousands."
The windows are mirrored two way glass, and inside this mysterious building one can only really guess at what goes on.
"Theatricality and deception, Mr Wayne," I say, putting on a Bane voice. Raf grins. We leave, but not before we pass some sinister looking army types, eyeing us with practiced menace. Hopefully I haven't managed to inadvertently piss off Military Intelligence. But, judging from the new Bond movie "Skyfall", nowadays everybody hides in plain sight, and since I'm not a drug dealer, pimp, hacker, international terrorist or cat burglar, it's highly likely that they are simply too busy to care about the tourists. That's not to say they wouldn't be able to read what I'm currently typing, as I'm typing it, however...
-------
"Are they any good?" Raf asks. We're sitting in a TGI Fridays in Leicester Square, sharing a thin chicken pizza and some barbecue ribs.
"They're not bad," I say. "I listened to them online for a couple of hours."
"Where are they playing?"
"The Venue, Great Portland Street."
"Big gig, then?"
"Seems that way, they've even got a management team."
"Cool."
"Their manager wants me to write their biography."
Raf chews the meat off a rib. "Cool. But that means you'll have to really get to know them. You'll have to spend a lot of time...I mean, what if you don't get on?"
"Then I don't do it," I reply, sipping my Corona. The Russian (?) waitress comes to our table.
"Everything is okay?"
"Fine," I say, and when she leaves: "They make most of their money from tips."
"And you're giving them the book, I gather."
I have a copy of my 2009 debut "Smoking Is Cool" with me. (A book that has been read by a handful of very notable people, and pretty much nobody else.)
"I'm a shameless self-promoter," I say, waving over the waitress for another beer.
------------
I'm drunk(ish) by the time I get to Great Portland Street after a couple of interlinking tubes. The Venue is a little less dramatic than I was hoping, and there's no big crowd. In fact, there's no one here, just a gate across a stairwell that leads into the (admittedly shabby looking) club. It's dark and cold and I'm running out of cash after London prices have sapped me almost dry. It's going to be about five quid for a beer I'm guessing, it's how the functions make their money from the bands that regularly play here. I wait around for ten minutes or so, until a bouncer turns up, looks at me and says:
"Give me one cigarette."
"What time does this start?" I ask as I hand it over.
"Come back later. Eight," he says, looking at his watch.
"Uh huh," I say, and walk away, marginally pissed off. I find myself in a Cafe Nero ordering the cheapest filter coffee they have, which helps kill forty minutes. When I get back to the Venue it's open, so I head down the stairs hearing some hip indie music thumping from the speakers. I pay the entry fee, get my hand stamped. It's dark and mostly empty. I hunt out the bar, buy a can of Carlsberg for four quid, and then see a group of well dressed kids in their early twenties playing chess on their Apple Mac. I wander over.
"Are you The Darlingtons?" I ask. The Darlingtons are the headliners, I recognize them from their promo photo outside, and I remember I'm already following them on Twitter.
"Yes?"
"I'm uh, following you on Twitter," I say.
"Oh," one of them says. There is a moment of silence, and I work out a new segue.
"The Bedroom Hour wants me to write their biography. I'm...a writer."
"Wow," one of them says. "I'm Chris."
I introduce myself around to the foursome, possibly hyping myself up a little too much after I say that Bret Easton Ellis has read both of my novels, and that I'm basically an industry insider. (Not the case).
"Wow," Chris says, and then: "Who's Bret Easton Ellis?"
I explain who he is. And that I've met him. Which results in a few minutes of back and forth compliments, and the plugging of my two almost universally unread books.
"Who's winning?" I ask, to sidestep any more questions about how hip and connected I am.
"We've been playing for an hour. It's deadlocked," Chris says. Putting on my new found music journalist face, I decide to ask some questions. Turns out the line-up of The Darlingtons is:
Chris- Drums
Dan- Guitar
Biz- Bass
Kiwi- Vocals/guitar.
They started playing together five years ago when they were sixteen in Taunton. They've known each other since early childhood, and their big influences include The National and Editors, two bands I have vaguely heard of, but am not young or cool enough to follow. No matter, I'm now feeling like the little kid in "Almost Famous", swanning with the bands and occasionally asking strikingly important questions. In fact I'm pretty much tapped out, since I've been drinking since whenever and all I can really ascertain is that these kids look a lot like One Direction which, in fact, can only be a good thing in commercial terms.
"You look a lot like One Direction," I say. "But, in a good way."
"Oh," Kiwi says. "Umm."
"That's a good thing," I add, feeling a little stupid. To make myself feel less like a spy posing as a genuine music journalist and more like I work for NME, I say: "So, have you got YouTube videos? Also, what's the most rock and roll thing you've done?"
Chris seems to be the most vocal of the bunch.
"Ten thousand views on 'It Hangs'," he says.
"Not bad," I say.
"We've had about six thousand each on the other two, as well," Biz says, possibly giving me more status than I deserve. I deserve no status, I'm basically winging this.
"And uh, what's the most rock and roll thing you've done?"
"In Italy," Chris says, and then I interject:
"Italy, wow, that's impressive, right?"
"In Italy," Chris continues, "We played a gig after being awake for 48 hours."
"Were you coked up?" I ask. They all laugh, thinking I'm joking.
"Nah, but we were pretty drunk," Kiwi says.
"You'll get on the coke when you play Glastonbury, then," I laugh, knowing that if I was playing Glastonbury I would definitely be coked up, although that's not particularly likely to happen.
"What are your songs about," I say, wishing I had a cool little pad to write this down, "who is your target market?"
Chris certainly appears to be the leader. "Small town angst, suburban drift, the idea of breaking free. We all lived in the same little town, it was...I dunno, we all wanted to break out when we started playing together... we all just wanted something...more."
"And your target audience?" I ask.
"People that want to escape," Chris says.
I'm actually quite touched by that, and I'm praying that they don't suck. "Well you're out now, right? I mean, touring Italy, that's cool, huh? What's the biggest audience you've played to?"
"Bestival," Kiwi says, "eight hundred people, give or take."
"Yeah," Chris smiles, "but it's not like they were there to watch us play."
"Still, though," I say.
"I guess," Chris says. I show him the copy of "Smoking Is Cool" I signed for The Bedroom Hour, and with the torch on his iPhone he starts to randomly read a few pages in the dark of the club.
"What's it about?" Kiwi asks.
"Mental institutions," I say.
"Oh," he replies.
"My second one is about school shootings, it's free, I'll tweet it to you."
"Cool," Kiwi says, possibly a little unsettled at the taboo content of my books.
"Do you swear in your songs?" I ask. Chris looks up, hands me back the novel.
"I don't think swearing in music is useful or interesting," he sighs, "I mean, Nirvana never swore, neither did The Beatles."
"True," I say. Out of the darkness a large, casually dressed lady swans over to the couches where we reside. She starts chatting to Biz, and it turns out this is my contact, Diane Sherwood, the woman who wants me to write the inside scoop on The Bedroom Hour.
"I'm Andrew Moody," I say, offering my hand.
"Oh," Diane coos, "we don't shake hands here!" and hugs me a little too informally and for a little too long than is normal for complete strangers to greet each other. I hand her the book (which has quite a few pages of sexualized torture in it, not to mention the most arrogant character in possibly all of world literature) and she holds it close to her chest. "I'll treasure it forever," she sighs.
"So," I say, trying to steer the conversation into business. "You wanted me to write the book about the band?"
I think she's a little drunk. "Oh, yeah. Yeah. The keyboard player just had kidney stones removed. Today! And the singer's wife is due to have a baby at any point! It would make a really insane story...and..madness, just crazy..." she trails off. It has become apparent now that this is a case of Twitter addiction, and this woman doesn't really have a clue about the machinations of writing, and especially the machinations of writing a book about an unsigned rock band.
"Cool," I say, nonplussed. I decide to "go for a cigarette" and time it so I can miss the first band, of whom I have little interest in. The bouncer is looking bored as I step outside. I give Raf a call and light my second to last Benson Silver.
"Bro," he says. "What's up?"
------------
Yesterday was Valentine's Day. I went early to Pynchon Ward to get my two weekly depot injection of Olanzapine. I arrived at eight thirty, in time for breakfast, the nurse didn't recognize me through the door and I had to wait until they'd searched my pockets and shoes for contraband. This place is harder to get into than Fabric, I thought, trying to be chipper about the fact that I had a date with a needle and not with a mysterious teenage blonde who loved the romance of struggling writers. I went to the office to tell them I was here. A little confused, they told me Holly (responsible for the jab) wouldn't be in for another hour and I'd have to wait. The smell, cheap bleach and medical rubber brought back memories, all bad. I wandered down to the smoking cage. Inside, a battered looking man in his thirties with a bandage around his right hand stained with dry, browning blood was trying and failing to roll a cigarette. I offered him a Benson out of pity, and lit it for him.
"So why are you in?" he asked.
"I get an injection every two weeks," I said. "And then I leave."
"Oh."
His story is common, after a ten minute manic explanation I ascertained that he spent some time in prison then had a nervous breakdown trying to reintegrate into society after the post-traumatic stress of doing hard time led him to self harm and start fights with people just to lose.
"My dad just doesn't fucking get it," he said, "fucking cunt."
Back on the ward I sat down and read an article about the German philosophers who supported Hitler's rise to power in the history magazine I bought from Sainsbury's. The mental patients were rising, groggily, and the standard day's chaos was about to begin.
After waiting twenty minutes (and being accosted by an old woman who demanded to know who I was, and if I was working for the doctors as a spy) Holly arrived.
"I'm uh, here for my injection," I said.
"Oh," she giggled, "well let me at least get my coat off!"
"I wasn't pressuring you," I said, a little nervously.
"Ooh, I know, babe," she smiled. Ten minutes later and I was undoing my belt in the medical room.
"Welcome to my parlour!" Holly actually said. "Which side, you choose, honey," she giggled, setting up the needle.
"Left, I guess," feeling like I was unwittingly married to a butch dominatrix. I braced myself as the needle entered my buttock, that aching sting that momentarily jarred a nerve.
"Happy Valentine's Day, Andrew," Holly sighed, post-coitally.
The three hours I then waited on Pynchon Ward included a random visit from a sniffer dog searching the rooms for drugs, and a South African murderer played catch with it after calling me a homosexual, and then asked if my depot injection was "Heaven" before his mother turned up. The psychiatrist asked me to fill in a questionnaire rating his standard, and after he attempted to force the vote with some last-minute sucking up, I gave him full marks on everything and left, musing on the LSD trip that was always there, never leaving, never changing, never dying, never making any sense at all.
--------------
The Bedroom Hour have taken the stage. They open with "Shadow Boxer", its long, dreamy intro segues into a euphoric peak and after a mesmerizing few minutes, the almost purely sensual vocals emerge. I'm standing next to Chris, and he's nodding his approval. There's only about thirty people in the club, but Stuart Drummond, the vocalist, is so lost in his performance, a beautiful, desperate longing, a melancholy, romantic sexual act, that the sonic vibes are immense. I nip to the bar, and the barman agrees when I say: "Fucking sexy band, man," and wish I had money for something harder than a can of lager. "Tyrannosaur" is book ended by some banter with the audience, the keyboard player DID just have kidney stones removed, which receives a cheer. That's pretty hardcore. The next track, "Nocturnal", which I remember from their Soundcloud, has the same urgent, tripped out tempo with a soaringly catchy chorus. After "Midnight Game" and "No Key" I'm totally sold on the performance, which leads to the triumphant "Heart Will Haunt" which has such an emotional, epic thrust, that Drummond is now somewhere else with the music, possibly sending his psychic energies to his pregnant wife. This music is designed for the sex act. The classy "X Marks the Spot" and almost transcendental "Slow Motion Cinema" to close inspire me to head to the stage and shake the guy's hand.
"Fucking good effort," I say drunkenly, and I mean it. He's exhausted but buoyant, slightly dazed from the emotion he's just let out. Whatever this guy means with his tunes, he really means it.
I debrief with The Darlingtons outside.
"Doves meets Elbow," I say, "with a little Joy Division." I actually know these bands, and that's the extent of my musical comparisons, I am not a music journalist, so the subtle influences from bands I've never heard of are lost. Still, I'm having fun.
"Have you seen Control?" I ask the lads.
"God it's horrible isn't it," Chris says, laughing. "But great at the same time."
"Ian Curtis has to be the most influential musician of the eighties," I say, trying to sound knowledgeable.
"Maybe, maybe," Biz says. "We love Joy Division. It's that small town thing."
The bouncer asks me for another cigarette, which I think is hardly professional, but whatever.
"So guys," I ask, after Stuart Drummond pops up and very graciously thanks me for my support, which makes me feel ultra-hip and savvy, "what's your battle plan? You can't make a living out of journeyman gigs like this."
"It's like boxing," another drunk guy says, wearing a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt and smoking a roll-up, "you do these to get experience before-"
"-the title shot, yeah," Chris says. "We know."
--------
And then they transform. The shy, polite and well groomed foursome that look as sweet as pop bad boys One Direction (face it, they're cool as fuck) , put on their game faces and start. What strikes me immediately is just how talented they are as musicians. The sound: upbeat yet complex guitar riffs, tight and ambitious drum patterns, charmingly scruffy vocals and soaringly catchy choruses is really quite impressive and their togetherness and comradarie is infectious. The defiant and classy "Bats" (N.B They shot a really interesting video to this that I didn't quite understand) does actually speak to a Facebook generation that is a little bit lost in the morass of post-digital culture. Kiwi is a shy front man, preferring not to take the focus away from the band, which possibly needs to change in the future. The little girls have come to worship, but the older women will want to eat them. "Ship at Sea" and "Don't Give Me Hope" do promote the maturity of their sound, and the extremely interesting "Everything" is a small masterpiece of complex guitar patterns mixed with the pitch perfect simplicity of the chorus. They end with "Watch Yourself", and what comes across most is the technical abilities of the lads, and their consummate professionalism. Again I head to the stage to congratulate a job well done, and they're sweaty and energized and happy and defiant. I make my exit then, ready to write my first gonzo piece on the underground music scene. At Charing Cross I'm bemoaning the smoking ban and shudder a little as I see two drunken girls dressed like nurses, obviously heading out to destroy a few male egos and get a few more vodka tonics bought for them with the promise of kinky sex. Speaking of which, The Bedroom Hour (aptly named) would provide a nice soundtrack to the action.
A.W.M 21/02/2013
Twitter- @thedarlingtons, @thebedroomhour
Thursday, 21 February 2013
Monday, 4 February 2013
MANIC DEPRESSION
Don't say I never warned you from the start- Marilyn Manson
Self pity won't save you- Bloc Party
------------------------
"Somebody doesn't like me," I say.
"White or black?" my therapist says.
"What... do you mean?"
"Milk? No milk?"
"Oh. White. One sugar. This is new."
"What?"
"You didn't usually offer me coffee."
My therapist smiles. If I wasn't so paranoid right now, I'd be fantasizing about her stripping for me, breaking out the love cuffs. The therapist sex fantasy is one of extremities, either sub or dom, but nothing in between. Otherwise, what's the point?
She hands me a lukewarm plastic cup.
"Thanks," I sigh.
"I haven't seen you in a while. How was Spain?"
"Somebody doesn't like me," I say, sipping my coffee.
"Oh. Your mum and dad?"
"Nope."
My therapist looks mildly concerned, and, like most of her patients, I sometimes live for those maternal glances.
"Who then?"
I swallow another mouthful.
"That's what I've been trying to work out."
-----------------------
It was shortly after my suicide attempt that I first attempted to cover a Nine Inch Nails song that had already been made world famous by Johnny Cash, possibly the finest cover version of all time. It was only a matter of weeks from the time I washed down a packet of Clonazepam with a bottle of Jack Daniels. I woke up after three days with the hangover from hell and muscle cramps throughout most of my body.
"Try Hurt," Phil said. He was my care-worker. I'd known Phil for about two years. My self-perception was never the same as my public-perception. It's only recently that I can see why people walked away from me. I never realized how my self-destructive tendencies had alienated so very many people. And I always thought I was more talented than I am. Phil has a nervous tic whereby he will crack the stupidest, dumbest jokes and then pop a drum roll with his fingers. At first I thought it was something he did to make people more comfortable around him, a trust thing. The fact is, he can't help himself. It's common among failed performers. The kind of shit Keith Harris does when Orville is still in the suitcase. Phil came to London from Belfast about twenty years ago, got work as a Mental Health Nurse as a way to make quick cash and meet girls. He set up a music outreach clinic in 2005, a place where psychiatric patients could meet and play together, a safe haven for those who never felt safe. It's funny that I always thought it was my final shot, that I could still make it as a singer in the brutal world of popular music. But that's manic depression for you. Only very recently, and even with an album now recorded, I can see just how insane I once was.
-----------------------
"A dislike?"
"Yep," I say.
"I'm not good with this kind of thing. What does it mean?"
"It means that somebody has seen my video and thinks that I'm a fool."
"Hmm. How many likes have you got?"
"Five."
And...one dislike?"
"Yes."
"Soooo..." my therapist says. "Technically that's... five sixths of the vote."
"Yeah, I guess."
"Then what's the problem?"
----------------------------
The idea of "seizing the culture" was always important to me. When I was holed up in my proverbial cell in supported accommodation, living on eighty pounds a week, drifting into heroin addiction, my perception of success was both delusional and everything to me. I spent twelve hour stints at my (internet-free) laptop, writing furiously the novel that I knew would make my name. Every Tuesday I would make the trek to Antenna Studios in Crystal Palace and sing for three hours with people who could barely hold a note, composing songs and struggling to vocally train myself to almost pure discordancy. It wasn't a matter of success or fail. It was just that I was single and didn't have any friends, money or purpose. I quite simply had nothing better to do with myself. Phil and I would practice Hurt obsessively, my one big number. It was a song that meant everything to me. I connected with it. I was in all sorts of pain.
-----------------------
"One dislike? I'm interested as to...why is that a problem?"
I adjust my glasses. It's been a wet, cold Monday, and, like always, I'm mobbed up in the height of hoody chic. I don't really have the money to spend on clothes, and, judging from my musical output, it's going to be staying that way for a while.
"Have you released anything on YouTube?" I ask.
"Not to my knowledge," she smiles.
"Well, when you do, you'll know what it feels like."
"I don't actually have any plans to, Andrew."
"You're sure?"
"Pretty sure. But let's stick with this. What did it make you feel?"
"Like an idiot. I put... I put a lot into that one. Have you seen it yet?"
She giggles, shakes her head.
----------------------------------
In August of 2011, mere weeks after the UK Riots, I was arrested in Rodel Sound Studios midway through recording "Middle Class White Boy", a song I had written in ten minutes when I was seventeen. My care worker Tony Tang (whose claim to fame was a small role in Guy Ritchie's "Revolver") had contacted a psychiatrist after I had been refusing my medication for three weeks, a psychiatrist I wound up shoving into a wall after he told me he wasn't frightened of me. Twenty minutes later three huge policemen forced their way into the studio. The biggest one grabbed me firmly by the wrist.
"Andrew Moody, I'm arresting you for Common Assault."
"Are you...I don't...I don't believe this."
"You have to come with us to the station, I'm afraid!"
"But I didn't do anything."
"Come on Andrew, you don't have a choice."
"Can I have a cigarette first?"
The other two PCs had nailed off all the exits.
"Okay," he said, smiling warmly at me.
I lit a cigarette, and before I was taken, I turned to my producer. "What do you think?" I said sadly.
"I'm speechless," he replied.
---------------------------
"So you included text with this one? A story?" my therapist says, for some reason grinning broadly.
"Yeah," I sigh. "Kinda tells the tale of how I felt when I was arrested and strip searched."
"Hmm. How did you feel?"
"Horrified," I reply. "I was coked up. My uh... my..."
"Your...what?"
"I was coked up. Cocaine has a tendency to...shrink things."
"So your YouTube video is about how it feels to..." I can see she's about to start giggling again.
"I'm proportional," I reply, still feeling slightly used.
"Taught you a lesson though," she says, smiling, on the verge of laughter.
"Definitely. The next time I get arrested I'm going in sober."
"Is there going to be a next time, Andrew?"
"I didn't know there was going to be a first time."
She looks at her watch. "Hmm, time's up, I'm afraid. Shall we book for next week?"
I sigh. "If you like."
---------------------------
"Seizing the culture" was always important to me, and I know now that it was never about seizing the world, but turning it back to a time when I had a position within it, a time when I was a useful person, when I had some measure of control. But if you read any criminologist of note all you find is that you can't turn back the clock and you can't recapture the scene. That one dislike made me realize that even if you have survived suicide, drug addiction, false arrest and psychiatric imprisonment, some people are still going to think you're a fool.
A.W.M 05/02/2013
Self pity won't save you- Bloc Party
------------------------
"Somebody doesn't like me," I say.
"White or black?" my therapist says.
"What... do you mean?"
"Milk? No milk?"
"Oh. White. One sugar. This is new."
"What?"
"You didn't usually offer me coffee."
My therapist smiles. If I wasn't so paranoid right now, I'd be fantasizing about her stripping for me, breaking out the love cuffs. The therapist sex fantasy is one of extremities, either sub or dom, but nothing in between. Otherwise, what's the point?
She hands me a lukewarm plastic cup.
"Thanks," I sigh.
"I haven't seen you in a while. How was Spain?"
"Somebody doesn't like me," I say, sipping my coffee.
"Oh. Your mum and dad?"
"Nope."
My therapist looks mildly concerned, and, like most of her patients, I sometimes live for those maternal glances.
"Who then?"
I swallow another mouthful.
"That's what I've been trying to work out."
-----------------------
It was shortly after my suicide attempt that I first attempted to cover a Nine Inch Nails song that had already been made world famous by Johnny Cash, possibly the finest cover version of all time. It was only a matter of weeks from the time I washed down a packet of Clonazepam with a bottle of Jack Daniels. I woke up after three days with the hangover from hell and muscle cramps throughout most of my body.
"Try Hurt," Phil said. He was my care-worker. I'd known Phil for about two years. My self-perception was never the same as my public-perception. It's only recently that I can see why people walked away from me. I never realized how my self-destructive tendencies had alienated so very many people. And I always thought I was more talented than I am. Phil has a nervous tic whereby he will crack the stupidest, dumbest jokes and then pop a drum roll with his fingers. At first I thought it was something he did to make people more comfortable around him, a trust thing. The fact is, he can't help himself. It's common among failed performers. The kind of shit Keith Harris does when Orville is still in the suitcase. Phil came to London from Belfast about twenty years ago, got work as a Mental Health Nurse as a way to make quick cash and meet girls. He set up a music outreach clinic in 2005, a place where psychiatric patients could meet and play together, a safe haven for those who never felt safe. It's funny that I always thought it was my final shot, that I could still make it as a singer in the brutal world of popular music. But that's manic depression for you. Only very recently, and even with an album now recorded, I can see just how insane I once was.
-----------------------
"A dislike?"
"Yep," I say.
"I'm not good with this kind of thing. What does it mean?"
"It means that somebody has seen my video and thinks that I'm a fool."
"Hmm. How many likes have you got?"
"Five."
And...one dislike?"
"Yes."
"Soooo..." my therapist says. "Technically that's... five sixths of the vote."
"Yeah, I guess."
"Then what's the problem?"
----------------------------
The idea of "seizing the culture" was always important to me. When I was holed up in my proverbial cell in supported accommodation, living on eighty pounds a week, drifting into heroin addiction, my perception of success was both delusional and everything to me. I spent twelve hour stints at my (internet-free) laptop, writing furiously the novel that I knew would make my name. Every Tuesday I would make the trek to Antenna Studios in Crystal Palace and sing for three hours with people who could barely hold a note, composing songs and struggling to vocally train myself to almost pure discordancy. It wasn't a matter of success or fail. It was just that I was single and didn't have any friends, money or purpose. I quite simply had nothing better to do with myself. Phil and I would practice Hurt obsessively, my one big number. It was a song that meant everything to me. I connected with it. I was in all sorts of pain.
-----------------------
"One dislike? I'm interested as to...why is that a problem?"
I adjust my glasses. It's been a wet, cold Monday, and, like always, I'm mobbed up in the height of hoody chic. I don't really have the money to spend on clothes, and, judging from my musical output, it's going to be staying that way for a while.
"Have you released anything on YouTube?" I ask.
"Not to my knowledge," she smiles.
"Well, when you do, you'll know what it feels like."
"I don't actually have any plans to, Andrew."
"You're sure?"
"Pretty sure. But let's stick with this. What did it make you feel?"
"Like an idiot. I put... I put a lot into that one. Have you seen it yet?"
She giggles, shakes her head.
----------------------------------
In August of 2011, mere weeks after the UK Riots, I was arrested in Rodel Sound Studios midway through recording "Middle Class White Boy", a song I had written in ten minutes when I was seventeen. My care worker Tony Tang (whose claim to fame was a small role in Guy Ritchie's "Revolver") had contacted a psychiatrist after I had been refusing my medication for three weeks, a psychiatrist I wound up shoving into a wall after he told me he wasn't frightened of me. Twenty minutes later three huge policemen forced their way into the studio. The biggest one grabbed me firmly by the wrist.
"Andrew Moody, I'm arresting you for Common Assault."
"Are you...I don't...I don't believe this."
"You have to come with us to the station, I'm afraid!"
"But I didn't do anything."
"Come on Andrew, you don't have a choice."
"Can I have a cigarette first?"
The other two PCs had nailed off all the exits.
"Okay," he said, smiling warmly at me.
I lit a cigarette, and before I was taken, I turned to my producer. "What do you think?" I said sadly.
"I'm speechless," he replied.
---------------------------
"So you included text with this one? A story?" my therapist says, for some reason grinning broadly.
"Yeah," I sigh. "Kinda tells the tale of how I felt when I was arrested and strip searched."
"Hmm. How did you feel?"
"Horrified," I reply. "I was coked up. My uh... my..."
"Your...what?"
"I was coked up. Cocaine has a tendency to...shrink things."
"So your YouTube video is about how it feels to..." I can see she's about to start giggling again.
"I'm proportional," I reply, still feeling slightly used.
"Taught you a lesson though," she says, smiling, on the verge of laughter.
"Definitely. The next time I get arrested I'm going in sober."
"Is there going to be a next time, Andrew?"
"I didn't know there was going to be a first time."
She looks at her watch. "Hmm, time's up, I'm afraid. Shall we book for next week?"
I sigh. "If you like."
---------------------------
"Seizing the culture" was always important to me, and I know now that it was never about seizing the world, but turning it back to a time when I had a position within it, a time when I was a useful person, when I had some measure of control. But if you read any criminologist of note all you find is that you can't turn back the clock and you can't recapture the scene. That one dislike made me realize that even if you have survived suicide, drug addiction, false arrest and psychiatric imprisonment, some people are still going to think you're a fool.
A.W.M 05/02/2013
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
------------------------
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.
----------
"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
"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
------------------------
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.
----------
"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
Thursday, 10 January 2013
THAT GIRL AND A CHRISTMAS VACATION
"And if there's a wish, pay your visit to Mr. Dickens. For he, like many another literary man, is bound to adore you, fatherless child."- Norman Mailer, Marilyn
"You should marry a librarian," she said, lost in some impulse, her eyes half closed, the computer screen some window to a library somewhere, me, older, wiser, quieter, reading some strange book as my wife carefully annotates a newer stock of antiquated stories. I spooned some sugar into my coffee (decaffeinated) and said:
"Nah, I'm gonna marry Rihanna."
She reacted quickly, shaken back to the secure unit where she, guard and protector of the criminally insane, needed to quickly bring me back to reality. The other female staff, tough, black women with a penchant for the needle and the school of hard knocks, looked horrified.
"That's insane," she said, finally looking frightened.
Some moment in the past (by now I had completely lost track of time, my diary would date days past, strange, coded entries, and I would realize that I could not remember writing them) I had overheard the nurses talking about Fifty Shades of Grey with the same reverence as the King James Bible.
"I'm joking," I sighed, and then: "Can I get a light?" The rules of the secure unit were that clients were allowed to use the staff lighters once every half an hour, and, after midnight, on the hour. She looked up at the clock. It was twenty six minutes past nine.
"Five minutes, Andrew," she said, looking hurt.
"Why a librarian?" I asked.
"Oh," she said, lost in that same impulse. "The way you are with all these books..."
A million hours ago (or two weeks, or whenever) I had slid all of my books out of the two inch gap in my window, making a composite artwork and protest of controversial books in the gap between the window and the iron webbing that trapped the unit like some giant metal spider. The Cliff Notes for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest lay proudly in front, announcing to the passing police and security staff that there was at least one client in the secure unit who had a bit of imagination left. As a punishment my window was locked (despite it being August) and my pillow was replaced with a hard blanket. But it was that girl's impulse to dream of my future with some mystery librarian that I am thinking of now, sipping a Sailor Jack's and Coke in a small bar in Furengirola on New Year's Eve 2012. Mick Jagger sings "Keys To Your Heart" on a TV showing a Stones stadium gig somewhere in Japan. My brother (who had a tooth extraction this year, and as a result has quit smoking) is saying: "It's called regressing to the mean," explaining to me a concept in some high class book on the nature of thought he's stoically been reading the past three weeks in Spain.
"See, a pilot may pull off, like a great move, a double spin, and execute it perfectly."
"Uh huh," I say, sipping my rum, staring around in the dim neon light of for women under forty, finding nothing. The bar is like a bad impression of a bar, a bar doing an impression of a hip NY rock pub. It has everything but the Wurlitzer.
"But it's a one off. Afterwards, his maneuvers became a bit shaky again. He's regressed to the mean. On average, he will always return to the same standard. And another pilot may make an error in flight, but, in the same way, his level will always rise again, his mean is higher. He regresses upwards."
My brother (who I can't help but always see as the helpless baby who looked so cute when he cried) has a degree in Neuroscience and is in his final year at medical school. He does not have my permission to become a psychiatrist.
"Interesting. Can you apply that to the notion of humanistic progress?"
My brother now has a habit of unhooking the false tooth in his mouth and clicking it up and down, almost unconsciously. Earlier today he told me he had dreams now where all of his teeth would fall out, usually in the presence of beautiful girls.
"Explain," he says, sipping his drink.
"The idea of human progress. Eventually the standard, the average ability of everybody on the planet regresses to the mean. All things may be possible in the universe, but not for humans. Our mean is too genetically low."
He considers this, smiles sadly. I'm drunk.
"What's the time?"
"Five minutes," I say. 2012 has been the year of personal apocalypse. I lost myself in grief after the Dark Knight Rises Massacre. I have sold copies of my school shooting books, Smoking Is Cool and Fear of a Tabloid Planet in the US, and thought I had given James Holmes the idea, which led me to self harm and offer myself as a karmic sacrifice as I tried to incite the nurses on an acute psychiatric ward to kill me. They did force me to eat a cup of Benzodiazepine tablets (a drug family more addictive than heroin) and then shipped me off to a secure unit. I spent a month there during the Olympics. Two weeks after my eventual discharge an ex-girlfriend of mine hung herself in a psychiatric ward. Then floods, fires, hurricanes, and a final dreadful massacre of children in an American nursery school, in which the babies were each shot twice with an automatic rifle designed for military combat, wielded by a baby faced psychopath who first shot his mother who had bought him the gun.
"Happy new year, dude," I smile, feeling tears well in my eyes. We're now sitting outside, and I'm smoking a cigarette, remembering her words: "You're a really good kisser," spoken softly, shyly, like a little girl who has always had a schoolyard crush on her English teacher. I think about asking my brother to take me to a brothel. I need the feel of a woman to take away this guilt and sadness, even if the intimacy is only commercial.
"Love you dude," he says.
-------------------------------
She is sitting across from me on the plane. The takeoff was shaky, and I had gripped my arms in panic, knowing that I had used all the Benzos to help me sleep in Spain. Now we are cruising at altitude, and I am drinking the last of my Euros in miniature bottles of Jack Daniels and cans of lukewarm Pepsi. She is strikingly beautiful, but her eyes betray the evil of her experience. She has taken on many men, and she is young yet, her stamina can take it. Her eyes are pale blue, her skin a china white, lips red like a Greek prostitute who has bled her finger and applied the blood to her mouth. The plane is shaking now, and I am clutching my drink with terror as she opens her mouth. Her teeth are rotten and sharp, one by one they fall from the diseased gums, she will show me this, and then smile a closed lipped smile, opening, closing, opening, closing, and then she says: "Please fasten your seatbelt as we prepare for our descent into London Gatwick..."
I wake with a start. Sitting across from me is a fat, unlovely looking girl, clutching a teddy bear and sobbing. My whisky has leaked onto my trousers like a child's accident and through the earphones in my depressurized eardrums, Marilyn Manson's cover of Carly Simon's poem to Warren Beatty is taunting me with the words: "You walked into the party, like you were walking into a yacht..."
It is 2013 and I am back in London. As soon as the plane lands safely, the girl has packed her teddy bear and is sitting with a soft smile on her face. She has beaten death once more.
"You're so vain... you probably think this song is about you... don't you... don't you..."
A.W.M 10/01/2013
"You should marry a librarian," she said, lost in some impulse, her eyes half closed, the computer screen some window to a library somewhere, me, older, wiser, quieter, reading some strange book as my wife carefully annotates a newer stock of antiquated stories. I spooned some sugar into my coffee (decaffeinated) and said:
"Nah, I'm gonna marry Rihanna."
She reacted quickly, shaken back to the secure unit where she, guard and protector of the criminally insane, needed to quickly bring me back to reality. The other female staff, tough, black women with a penchant for the needle and the school of hard knocks, looked horrified.
"That's insane," she said, finally looking frightened.
Some moment in the past (by now I had completely lost track of time, my diary would date days past, strange, coded entries, and I would realize that I could not remember writing them) I had overheard the nurses talking about Fifty Shades of Grey with the same reverence as the King James Bible.
"I'm joking," I sighed, and then: "Can I get a light?" The rules of the secure unit were that clients were allowed to use the staff lighters once every half an hour, and, after midnight, on the hour. She looked up at the clock. It was twenty six minutes past nine.
"Five minutes, Andrew," she said, looking hurt.
"Why a librarian?" I asked.
"Oh," she said, lost in that same impulse. "The way you are with all these books..."
A million hours ago (or two weeks, or whenever) I had slid all of my books out of the two inch gap in my window, making a composite artwork and protest of controversial books in the gap between the window and the iron webbing that trapped the unit like some giant metal spider. The Cliff Notes for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest lay proudly in front, announcing to the passing police and security staff that there was at least one client in the secure unit who had a bit of imagination left. As a punishment my window was locked (despite it being August) and my pillow was replaced with a hard blanket. But it was that girl's impulse to dream of my future with some mystery librarian that I am thinking of now, sipping a Sailor Jack's and Coke in a small bar in Furengirola on New Year's Eve 2012. Mick Jagger sings "Keys To Your Heart" on a TV showing a Stones stadium gig somewhere in Japan. My brother (who had a tooth extraction this year, and as a result has quit smoking) is saying: "It's called regressing to the mean," explaining to me a concept in some high class book on the nature of thought he's stoically been reading the past three weeks in Spain.
"See, a pilot may pull off, like a great move, a double spin, and execute it perfectly."
"Uh huh," I say, sipping my rum, staring around in the dim neon light of for women under forty, finding nothing. The bar is like a bad impression of a bar, a bar doing an impression of a hip NY rock pub. It has everything but the Wurlitzer.
"But it's a one off. Afterwards, his maneuvers became a bit shaky again. He's regressed to the mean. On average, he will always return to the same standard. And another pilot may make an error in flight, but, in the same way, his level will always rise again, his mean is higher. He regresses upwards."
My brother (who I can't help but always see as the helpless baby who looked so cute when he cried) has a degree in Neuroscience and is in his final year at medical school. He does not have my permission to become a psychiatrist.
"Interesting. Can you apply that to the notion of humanistic progress?"
My brother now has a habit of unhooking the false tooth in his mouth and clicking it up and down, almost unconsciously. Earlier today he told me he had dreams now where all of his teeth would fall out, usually in the presence of beautiful girls.
"Explain," he says, sipping his drink.
"The idea of human progress. Eventually the standard, the average ability of everybody on the planet regresses to the mean. All things may be possible in the universe, but not for humans. Our mean is too genetically low."
He considers this, smiles sadly. I'm drunk.
"What's the time?"
"Five minutes," I say. 2012 has been the year of personal apocalypse. I lost myself in grief after the Dark Knight Rises Massacre. I have sold copies of my school shooting books, Smoking Is Cool and Fear of a Tabloid Planet in the US, and thought I had given James Holmes the idea, which led me to self harm and offer myself as a karmic sacrifice as I tried to incite the nurses on an acute psychiatric ward to kill me. They did force me to eat a cup of Benzodiazepine tablets (a drug family more addictive than heroin) and then shipped me off to a secure unit. I spent a month there during the Olympics. Two weeks after my eventual discharge an ex-girlfriend of mine hung herself in a psychiatric ward. Then floods, fires, hurricanes, and a final dreadful massacre of children in an American nursery school, in which the babies were each shot twice with an automatic rifle designed for military combat, wielded by a baby faced psychopath who first shot his mother who had bought him the gun.
"Happy new year, dude," I smile, feeling tears well in my eyes. We're now sitting outside, and I'm smoking a cigarette, remembering her words: "You're a really good kisser," spoken softly, shyly, like a little girl who has always had a schoolyard crush on her English teacher. I think about asking my brother to take me to a brothel. I need the feel of a woman to take away this guilt and sadness, even if the intimacy is only commercial.
"Love you dude," he says.
-------------------------------
She is sitting across from me on the plane. The takeoff was shaky, and I had gripped my arms in panic, knowing that I had used all the Benzos to help me sleep in Spain. Now we are cruising at altitude, and I am drinking the last of my Euros in miniature bottles of Jack Daniels and cans of lukewarm Pepsi. She is strikingly beautiful, but her eyes betray the evil of her experience. She has taken on many men, and she is young yet, her stamina can take it. Her eyes are pale blue, her skin a china white, lips red like a Greek prostitute who has bled her finger and applied the blood to her mouth. The plane is shaking now, and I am clutching my drink with terror as she opens her mouth. Her teeth are rotten and sharp, one by one they fall from the diseased gums, she will show me this, and then smile a closed lipped smile, opening, closing, opening, closing, and then she says: "Please fasten your seatbelt as we prepare for our descent into London Gatwick..."
I wake with a start. Sitting across from me is a fat, unlovely looking girl, clutching a teddy bear and sobbing. My whisky has leaked onto my trousers like a child's accident and through the earphones in my depressurized eardrums, Marilyn Manson's cover of Carly Simon's poem to Warren Beatty is taunting me with the words: "You walked into the party, like you were walking into a yacht..."
It is 2013 and I am back in London. As soon as the plane lands safely, the girl has packed her teddy bear and is sitting with a soft smile on her face. She has beaten death once more.
"You're so vain... you probably think this song is about you... don't you... don't you..."
A.W.M 10/01/2013
Saturday, 8 December 2012
THE SADNESS OF CHRISTOPHER MALONEY
In an age of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary
act- George Orwell
Gravity’s my enemy-
M.I.A
Eminem began life as a nickname. Scrawny, weak, underfed Marshall Mathers III was bullied and abused as a child. Possibly not to the extent he extolled in his wrathful, self-loathing, vicious and messianic music, but psychologically he began as M n M, a little, round, chocolate sweetie.
The game has changed. In fact, it’s not that the game has changed, it’s
that a new level of transparency has burst free into the everyday language of
the post-digital age. Opinions are commodity, your followers are your bank
balance and a RT is worth ten points. A favourite means that you have tweeted
something of (at that instance) serious value to your audience. However, there
is no way of knowing whether or not they are using that favourite (yes, I know
it’s spelt favorite but I’m English) to use your information as commodity
either against you or to create a matrice of tweets to promote some other
scheme. Get it? Good.
I missed therapy today. Overslept by five hours. Last night I was so
doped up on Promethazine (an over the counter Valium derivative) that I was
tripping out nicely and enjoying my mild hallucinations of the fairy lights on
my wall twinkling and undulating like silkworms. I tweeted, I wrote some notes,
I watched YouTube and put on my very own concert of videos on my feed. Adele’s Skyfall should, by rights, win the Oscar
for Best Song. Her critical and street credit could not be higher, and whilst I
don’t particular listen to 21 often (it’s
a little bland) I do respect that she is a great pop musician and I like her.
And that’s enough. Skyfall is her
masterpiece, and I don’t think she’ll ever write a better song about the
devastating break-up that influences her art. All pain is subjective.
I’m not sure too many people are following this blog (and for those who
have purchased this as a book, it began in October 2012 as a way of making
sense of an ex-girlfriend’s suicide, and was continued until I found an ending)
and frankly, that doesn’t matter too much. I will tweet this link once, and
only once, and whilst nobody ever reacts to my writing directly, I hope that if
you are reading this you are not too put off by the navel gazing. I’m currently
high on Promethazine, so I think this is totally awesome and trippy.
On Saturday I went for a walk in the woods with Raf and tried to explain
Bisociation to him. I like walking in the woods. It gives inspiration for the
huge haunted house novel I am outlining.
“Okay,” I said. “Bisociation is the interlinking of two previously
incompatible frames of reference. Like uh,” I avoided a puddle, handed my
tobacco to him so he could roll me a cigarette, “insects and military
intelligence.”
“English, bruv.”
“That is English.”
He grinned. “Please continue.”
“Okay,” I said, pulling up my hood, “What do you call a paranoid wasp?”
“What?”
“KGB.”
Raf smiled, “Hey, that’s pretty good!”
“And that,” I said, taking the cigarette and lighting it, “feeling of
mild euphoria, of epiphany, of revelation, that feeling is Bisociation.”
Raf considered this. “Sometimes you chat so much shit, but that was
pretty good.”
“Both my parents were teachers,” I smile, exhaling.
I booked another ticket for The
Shining: US Extended Edition at the BFI since I auto-suggestively passed
out the last time. All the hip, fashionable “scene” makers were laughing the
whole way through which was too much for my fragile constitution to take. This
time round I had to wait two hours and borrow a smart phone off a couple of
bouncy gay fashionati (the type who think simulating oral sex on each other in
public is just too hip and spend their time writing letters to Europe and
hanging in the coolest bars in Soho) so I could call the fifty year old manic
depressive I was randomly going with. He had had a serious coke habit for
years, and consoled his failures to become a cross between Jack Nicholson and Stanley Kubrick by reading Aleister
Crowley’s poetry and transcribing old mix tapes onto CD. He turned up eventually,
wearing a leather jacket with the word REAL painted onto it, some scarves and a
cowboy hat. We went outside and picked fag butts off the floor, and I
accidentally hit up a joint somebody had tossed. The screening was in NFT1 as
opposed to NFT3. NFT3 is better. It’s the one they use for the premieres since
the front row is far enough back from the screen to see it clearly. We had
front row seats in NFT1, but nicked the seats from two intellectualti before
the lights went down, making it impossible for them to kick us out. I didn’t
auto-suggestively pass out this time. I had watched a documentary about Kubrick
which showed footage of him playing chess against Shelley Duvall and
anticipating her first eight moves. I actually like the Extended Edition more.
It will be a cold day in hell before it comes onto BluRay, so I’ll keep seeing
it every time it reappears after its decade absences. It’s a treat, and I’ve
been dreaming about it every night since, including last night. Marilyn Manson
once said that he believed dreams were “time travel”. I like that idea.
A.W.M 05/12/2012
LOST IN THE EMPIRE
It is when Nana and Joan of Arc exist in the same
flesh, or Boris Karloff and Bing Crosby, that the abysses of insanity are under
the fog at every turn…
…Anyone else, man or woman, who contained such
opposite personalities within his body would be ferociously mad. It is her
transcendence of these opposites into a movie star that is her triumph (even as
the work she does will eventually be our pleasure), but how transcendent must
be her need for a man ready to offer devotion and services to both the angel and the computer.
-Marilyn,
Norman Mailer
I really like Matthew Modine. Kubrick saw his brilliance and tenderness and his performance as Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket is the most human in any of the master’s masterpieces. After I threw up the morning Magic FM told me that there had been a shooting in a cinema in Colorado showing The Dark Knight Rises (in which Modine co-stars), I tweeted him to tell him of my horror and grief. He tweeted back a photo of a victory sign and the words:
It’s all good Andrew #TweetPeace
My Dad was a member of a video club in the early 90’s for a while. It
was half-hearted, but we had a few good ones. Hamburger Hill, Mississippi
Burning, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket. They tended toward
big budget intellectual exercises, and he instilled in me a love for Hollywood
in a time of industry grunge chic. I started watching the Oscars the year Pulp Fiction was released, even though I
was surprised that Jim Carrey wasn’t nominated for The Mask. I genuinely was. I bet fifty pee to a mate of mine, back
when fifty pee was a lot of dough. It was inexplicable. How could Jim Carrey
not get nominated? It was amazing, his performance. Secretly it turned me on.
I unfollowed 1500 people on the 5th of December, and then
slept for 24 hours. I have lost 200 followers because of my actions, people who
were only following me so that I would follow them, the reason I followed them
in the first place.
The vast majority of them were indie, self-pubbed writers. Believe me,
there is nobody duller on Twitter than an indie, self-pubbed writer.
I was back on the ward today for my injection. I didn’t bother bringing
my sunglasses this time, since I understand now that the nurse gets off on the
invasion and I didn’t want her thinking that I respected her. One of the care
workers had helped me tidy the flat before I went, even going so far as to
throw out both my tobacco and my Royal Mail card that I needed in order to pick
up the wheelie suitcase my mum had ordered for me. Huh. Straight after the
horse faced skank had jabbed me up (I forget her name) I bumped into Dr Ghosh
as I awkwardly sauntered to the smoking pod.
“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked.
“You’re looking well, Andrew!”
“Had 402 views of my YouTube video. Me, one take, singing Rockin’ In The Free World.”
“Oh yes,” he smiled, “that’s an easy one to play, isn’t it. Who was it
again, who wrote it?”
“Neil Young.”
“Yes, thirty years ago, right? Yes, it’s just three chords.”
“Difficult to sing, though,” I replied, grinning.
“I’m sure it is! Great to see you looking so well.”
“You too,” I replied, and put my earphones in, feeling used and
worthless in a totally punk rock way.
A friend of the girl who hung herself was smoking a cigarette just
outside the pod, and therefore inside the ward, next to a woman with
Alzheimer’s who has a habit of self-inflicted head injuries. Inside the pod was
a South African murderer that I met in the Secure Unit. He was wearing the
hospital pyjamas, trembling from the medication, his head bowed, moaning about
his mother. I lit up and put on Rape Me
by Nirvana, ignoring his babbling and working out linguistic motifs I could
study for this book. If you ever do get sectioned, then my only word of advice
that actually matters? Don’t talk to the
ones in pyjamas…
There seem to be quite a few conspiracy theories revolving around
YouTube about James Holmes and The Dark
Knight Rises massacre. I tried watching one of them, but they were all so
poorly made. The editing was like something out of an Alan Smithee movie and
whilst I know for a fact the filmmakers felt their efforts to be transcendentally
profound and hip, their utilization of sombre voice over intercut with Hans
Zimmer’s score and sinister photos of Barack Obama made me understand the ache
inherent in their lack of cinematic talent. As for the movie itself? I bought
it today for £15.99 in a BP Garage just by Blue Leaves House, after a dull
three hours on Pynchon Ward. I had the dubious honour of getting the Word
Conundrum, an anagram puzzle they leave on a white board daily. The answer?
CELEBRATE. I thought the movie was pretty good. Wally Pfister’s cinematography
was exquisite, a deep cornucopia of blues and browns. The editing was stately
and mannered, the direction epic and tender by turns. The script had a few
unintentionally gigglesome moments, especially when Morgan Freeman had to
explain the hugely complex plot to the audience, which he does better than any
actor in cinema history. All in all it was a reverent, rich, wonderful failure,
that was as self-adoring as the worst of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and nearly as homoerotic. According to a
recent tweet by Bret Easton Ellis (who was at an Official Academy Screening) it
won’t win. Too self-indulgent and now too scarred with abnormality and horror
for the film to win much of anything. The movie set out to be the most profound
and important movie of 2012. It is, but for all the wrong reasons…
A.W.M 07/12/2012
Saturday, 1 December 2012
MICHAEL CROSSAN AND WHAT'S WRONG WITH BEING PRETENTIOUS?
The ride's over, did you enjoy yourself?- Leech, Incubus
If you can imagine that I have a following outside of Twitter, and presuppose that even though all you have done is click on a siren wailing link that invites you to a blog that has so far seen suicide, psychiatric medical injections, crack, dominatrixes, police stop and searches, rapists, murderers and numerous references to former enfant terrible Bret Easton Ellis, imagine now that I very likely have more enemies than friends. (And I apologize for that sentence by the way, it went on for far too long to be rhythmically acceptable.)
In 2010 a friend of mine told a friend of mine that Bret Easton Ellis was doing a book signing promoting Imperial Bedrooms in London. That friend told me. I had spent the past three years inside a room in a house for psychiatric patients (including a huge, boss eyed, illiterate violent criminal who had been conceived through the forced incest at gunpoint of a brother and sister) living on eighty pounds a week. I was not allowed to drink alcohol, and there were daily spot checks to search my room for contraband. This didn't stop me seguing into a brief spell of heroin addiction with another inmate, but it did result in the police being called (and searching my room for contraband) if I had a friend over past 11pm. Owing to these circumstances, the lack of money, the horrible living conditions, the company of monsters and the nightly supervised medication, eventually I was just left to my isolation. In the four years I spent there, my dad never visited once, and if I traveled to their mansion in Chislehurst I was shouted out if I dared to mention writing. "I don't know any other twenty seven year olds who only talk about their books," my mother would hiss, as if that had won the argument.
Meeting Bret Easton Ellis was suddenly a ray of light in my squalid purgatory. Speaking of which, my window faced out on a wall. I lived four years in that cell. The window didn't open any wider than three inches. My walls were covered in song lyrics and abstract matrices of plots and dialogue for the novel I had been battling with since I was 17 about a school shooting in Orpington in 2001. I had amassed thousands of pages on my computer, and had only written and subsequently self-published my 2009 debut Smoking Is Cool because I had become so obsessive about the other one, I needed perspective. But when Smoking Is Cool suddenly became a literal paperback with an ISBN number and a barcode, I thought I had found a way out of the NHS psychiatric system. I sent review copies to ten magazines (all I could afford), gleefully expecting film rights and thousands upon thousands of pounds for my efforts. Three magazines responded. The New Statesman wished me the best of luck with it. The Literary Review (who are now blocking me on Twitter) wrote that it clearly had a lot going for it. Empire sent it back with a post-it note. And then the NHS forced me to withdraw it from publication. I had used real names of patients, locations and doctors. They wrote me a strange letter which stated that since they controlled my finances, they needed to look out for my best interests by banning the book, since they didn't want me to suffer when they sued me.
Bret Easton Ellis is the most well connected writer in Hollywood. After I met him (I was first in line after waiting five hours, but let two groupies go first after my wild monologue to two bankers in the queue started to piss them off) I went off with my signed copy of Lunar Park to a nearby coffee shop to observe my prize. I had him sign it on the front because I didn't want him to see what I had written on the inside cover, which I will now transcribe:
Dear Dad, as you can tell from its battered, much read appearance, this is my personal copy. The best American novel of the 21st century so far. But don't take my word for it... Lots of love, Merry Xmas, Andrew xxx
I was going to write something about a hotshot middle aged writer who is inexplicably blocking me on Twitter despite having had no contact with me, but he's too busy lost in his schizophrenia and I don't want to upset him. Michael something. I dunno. I'm sure he'll win a Booker Prize one of these days, LOL!
If you can imagine that I have a following outside of Twitter, and presuppose that even though all you have done is click on a siren wailing link that invites you to a blog that has so far seen suicide, psychiatric medical injections, crack, dominatrixes, police stop and searches, rapists, murderers and numerous references to former enfant terrible Bret Easton Ellis, imagine now that I very likely have more enemies than friends. (And I apologize for that sentence by the way, it went on for far too long to be rhythmically acceptable.)
In 2010 a friend of mine told a friend of mine that Bret Easton Ellis was doing a book signing promoting Imperial Bedrooms in London. That friend told me. I had spent the past three years inside a room in a house for psychiatric patients (including a huge, boss eyed, illiterate violent criminal who had been conceived through the forced incest at gunpoint of a brother and sister) living on eighty pounds a week. I was not allowed to drink alcohol, and there were daily spot checks to search my room for contraband. This didn't stop me seguing into a brief spell of heroin addiction with another inmate, but it did result in the police being called (and searching my room for contraband) if I had a friend over past 11pm. Owing to these circumstances, the lack of money, the horrible living conditions, the company of monsters and the nightly supervised medication, eventually I was just left to my isolation. In the four years I spent there, my dad never visited once, and if I traveled to their mansion in Chislehurst I was shouted out if I dared to mention writing. "I don't know any other twenty seven year olds who only talk about their books," my mother would hiss, as if that had won the argument.
Meeting Bret Easton Ellis was suddenly a ray of light in my squalid purgatory. Speaking of which, my window faced out on a wall. I lived four years in that cell. The window didn't open any wider than three inches. My walls were covered in song lyrics and abstract matrices of plots and dialogue for the novel I had been battling with since I was 17 about a school shooting in Orpington in 2001. I had amassed thousands of pages on my computer, and had only written and subsequently self-published my 2009 debut Smoking Is Cool because I had become so obsessive about the other one, I needed perspective. But when Smoking Is Cool suddenly became a literal paperback with an ISBN number and a barcode, I thought I had found a way out of the NHS psychiatric system. I sent review copies to ten magazines (all I could afford), gleefully expecting film rights and thousands upon thousands of pounds for my efforts. Three magazines responded. The New Statesman wished me the best of luck with it. The Literary Review (who are now blocking me on Twitter) wrote that it clearly had a lot going for it. Empire sent it back with a post-it note. And then the NHS forced me to withdraw it from publication. I had used real names of patients, locations and doctors. They wrote me a strange letter which stated that since they controlled my finances, they needed to look out for my best interests by banning the book, since they didn't want me to suffer when they sued me.
Bret Easton Ellis is the most well connected writer in Hollywood. After I met him (I was first in line after waiting five hours, but let two groupies go first after my wild monologue to two bankers in the queue started to piss them off) I went off with my signed copy of Lunar Park to a nearby coffee shop to observe my prize. I had him sign it on the front because I didn't want him to see what I had written on the inside cover, which I will now transcribe:
Dear Dad, as you can tell from its battered, much read appearance, this is my personal copy. The best American novel of the 21st century so far. But don't take my word for it... Lots of love, Merry Xmas, Andrew xxx
I was going to write something about a hotshot middle aged writer who is inexplicably blocking me on Twitter despite having had no contact with me, but he's too busy lost in his schizophrenia and I don't want to upset him. Michael something. I dunno. I'm sure he'll win a Booker Prize one of these days, LOL!
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