"I have come to understand that life is composed of a series of coincidences. How we react to these- how we exercise what some refer to as free will- is everything. The choices we make within the boundaries of the twists of fate determine who we are."-
JOHN PERKINS
"In the designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences."
POPE JOHN PAUL II
-----
On my way to Pynchon Ward all I will be able to think about is blowing up the hospital. I will have been off medication for a month, and thanks to the withdrawal symptoms from the mood stabilizer Olanzapine, I have only been able to sleep when drunk. The psychiatrist in the Secure Unit last year (I spent a month locked in with rapists, murderers and thieves) told me I had a photographic memory. He told me that people saw mood changes in me when their mood changed, that my mind moved so quickly that I could anticipate reactions in others before they had a chance to react. Within 24 hours I will have had a depot injection into my right buttock that will bleed out over my jeans (at this the nurse will giggle and say, "Oops!") two bottles of wine and half a gram of MDMA. When I will eventually wake up, the news media around the world will be speculating on the motivation for the bombs planted at the finish line of the Boston marathon. This will fall three days short of the anniversary of Waco, where 80 people were massacred by the FBI on 19th April, 1993.
Mum texts an hour before midnight with her adoring birthday message. My two quid mobile (the type favoured by drug dealers and the very poor) is now my sole means of communication with the outside world. Two days ago, whilst drunkenly streaming Barfly (Charles Bukowski's single foray into screenwriting) my screen burnt out.
"Fuck," I said. "Fuck. North Korea has just eaten my computer!"
In one hour I will be thirty. Mum has included thirty X's, which I bother to count. Now retired and living in Spain (it's midnight where she is), she was a German teacher for two decades and I've inherited her proto-rigidity. Spelling and grammatical errors make me uneasy. Tomorrow is Thursday, the 11th of April. Thirty years ago I was battling my way out of my mother's womb with my umbillical cord wrapped around my neck. Apparently I went blue.
Saving the solitary beer in my fridge for my 'official' birthday, I make a coffee and roll a cigarette. Then I sit down and listen to Soldier again, my first cross-atlantic collaboration with American rapper Rody Dailey, A.K.A Big P.R.E.M.E. We met on Twitter some months ago. I don't recall who followed who, or the circumstances of our meeting. Twitter has a strange and mysterious ability to render time (at best) irrelevant. By November of 2012 I had started making simple, one take videos of classic grunge anthems with my producer, Dan Cooper. Dan is a Brit School educated musician who set up his own recording studio in Penge, on the borders of London. Adele was a few years behind him at school. Between 2010 and 2012 I saved money from my benefits to pay for studio time, and completed my album the same day I recorded my interpretation of Neil Young's Rockin' In The Free World. Rody dug the videos, and after sampling his Soundcloud, I dug his 90s style, honest lyrics and great vocal talents. It went from there. He emailed us the ptf (Pro Tools File) of his uncompleted track Soldier, and I composed a hook (lyrically inspired by the framed poster of High Noon that I have in my living room- THE STORY OF A MAN WHO WAS TOO PROUD TO RUN). I'd been reading about the mathematics of music, how Beethoven created suspense by suggesting variations of the harmonic pattern. For example, in his String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, he plays incomplete versions of the chord and saves the complete note (giving the audience its aural catharsis) to the very end. There ends the comparison between me and Beethoven, all I did was save the vibratto high note until the fourth line of the hook and produce a compound vocal harmony (three separate notes sung and placed on top of one another, giving a choir effect) for a recurrant sample. Pretty simple stuff. I listen to Soldier on repeat until I'm thirty, then, sated, open my beer and put on Born Villain by Marilyn Manson, the standout album of 2012.
"You don't have to see," he roars, "to know that murderers are getting prettier every day..."
-------
It's 12.30 and I'm nursing a pint in the Hole in the Wall, a pub opposite Waterloo station, waiting to meet my sister for lunch. Opposite me, two city types are arguing fiercely over the pros and cons of Thatcherism. I zone out and put in my earphones. I've been listening to Masters of War by Bob Dylan on repeat for days. It's the next song I want to record. I'm obsessively studying it, working out tone, emphasis and inflection. On the wall above me is a framed front page of the Daily Mirror, celebrating the lunar moonwalk on July 20th 1969. The date seems oddly familar. I type it into a draft text message, saving it for later. My brother put 51 Bob Dylan albums on my iPod. I'm not sure, but I think that's all of them. My phone vibrates. It's a birthday text from Melanie, my sister, which informs me she'll be half an hour late. I send out a cautiously short reply, careful to conserve the credit that my phone swallows like a porn starlet lucky enough to work with James Deen.
Dan Cooper, my producer, is 27 today. Through some strange twist of providence, we share the same birthday. I call him, leave slightly slurred message pledging my eternal gratitude and unconditional love. Five minutes later he calls back.
"Happy birthday," I grin.
"Happy birthday, mate!"
"What are you going to say to Adele when you next see her?"
"Hmm. Got a cigarette, love?"
"Nice," I say. "Understated."
"By the way, your rapper emailed me. They loved the track."
I feel a huge sense of achievement. "Awesome," I say. "How's the site coming?"
"You'll be live tomorrow," Dan says.
"Amongst his many, many other talents, he also designs websites.
"You're the hardest working man in the business," I say.
"I try my best," he replies.
-----
It's 1.23PM and I'm sitting opposite my sister in Wacaca's overlooking the South Bank. Sipping from a cold Corona, and trying to eat my burrito with as much grace as possible, I'm explaining to my sister the rudimentaries of the occult.
"It's the careful documentation of energy," I say, swallowing, "how energy, both positive and negative is at the core of the human experience. Occultists believe there is a code interweaved into history, that with the right esoteric study will reveal the mysteries of the universe. Essentially," I conclude, "there is no such thing as a coincidence."
Melanie smiles. Next to us, a gay couple with a seat staring over the Thames share a kiss.
"What do you believe?" She asks.
"That there may very well be a way of piecing together the puzzles of the cosmos, but humans will never work it out. The moment we go to study something, we alter its habitat and change it."
"Oh. Oh dear, that's a shame. Do you believe in time?"
I grin, see that she's serious.
"Short answer yes, long answer...no."
"I think time is a construct developed to withstand the horrors of eternity," she says.
"So you're a post-modernist, then?" I ask.
"Wow, cool!" She says. "Am I?"
-------
It's half eight. I'm drunk.
"The minimum is nineteen pounds, if you're paying by card," the barman says. I'm with my younger brother Chris in Brazil, a bar opposite the Electric Ballroom in Camden, killing time before the Fratelli's gig. He bought me ticket as a surprise, even though neither of us really know who they are. Chris orders another two Corona's to hit the card limit. A Spanish Blues band is working through a very passable rendition of My Funny Valentine. We take our drinks to a table just as the lights start to dim.
"Romantic," my brother says.
"Definitely," I reply, sipping my drink. "Did I tell you my computer blew up? I'm writing by hand at the moment. It's exhausting."
"What happened?"
"It was either North Korea, a militant militia group, a sexually frustrated computer hacker, or my screen burnt out from overuse."
Chris smiles. "North Korea?"
"Don't joke, man," I say. "Next you'll be telling me J.F.K was shot my a lone nutter. What about the grassy knoll? What about the magic bullet?"
He sips his beer. "I start paediatrics next week."
"Wow," I say. Chris is in his final year of medical school. In little over a year (if he keeps his head down) we'll have another doctor in the family. My sister is a board certified clinical psychologist.
"Just remember though," I whisper. "if you become a psychiatrist I'll have to kill you."
"I finished that Jon Ronson book you gave me," he says.
"I tweeted Jon Ronson," I say. "We had a little banter."
"You already told me."
"So I'm telling you again!"
Jon Ronson is an investigative journalist who interviews people on the fringes of society and sanity, cult leaders, paranoid conspiracy theorists, shamed celebrities. he disguises his razor sharp intelligence with a nerdy, bumbling manner, that he deploys with practiced cunning to illicit information, providing his prey with just enough rope to hang themselves.
"How's the new book going?" Chris asks.
"I'm collecting coincidences," I reply.
"Uh huh, okay... why?"
"I'm an Occult writer. It's what we like to do." The blues singer holds a great note and I catch his eye, smile, give him a thumbs up. He smiles, nods, lost in the song.
"Coincidences. Tell me one."
"On July 20th 1969, man walked on the moon. Allegedly."
"Allegedly?"
"On July 20th 2012," I continue, "James Holmes walked into a screening of The Dark Knight Rises and opened fire into the audience. Oh yeah, and did you know Jimmy Savile was born on Halloween?"
"No way," Chris says.
"Yes way. He was born on 31st October, 1926. The same day escape artist Harry Houdini died in a hospital in Detroit."
"You're making that up," Chris grins.
"You've got an iPhone, man. Google it."
He does. "Coincidence," he says, slightly less confidently. "That's all it is." The band segues into a clever interpretation of Rolling In The Deep. I drain my glass.
Chris takes a long swig of his. We sit for a few moments in silence, then I say:
"Do you want a cigarette?"
A.W.M 17/04/2013
Wednesday, 17 April 2013
Thursday, 4 April 2013
ROOM 237
The most essential knowledge is certainly
that of the heart of man, to be learned by misfortune and travel: one must have
seen men of all nations to know them and one must have been their victim to
appreciate them; misfortune's hand, in exalting the character of him whom it
crushes puts him at the right distance to study men; he sees them there as the traveler sees the furious waves break against the rock on which the storm has
thrown him; but in whatever situation nature or chance has placed him let him
keep quiet when he is with other men; one doesn't learn by speaking but by
listening; which is why chatterers are usually fools-
MARQUIS
DE SADE- ESSAY ON THE NOVEL
---------
It's one week until my thirtieth birthday, and for the first time in years I have writer's block.
My new novel (for once I have a publisher's interest) is set in a world where David Icke's theories of Reptilian Overlords and Global Brainwashing is all true. Set during the London Olympics, covering all major news events (including the Savile affair) it climaxes with Sandy Hook, and Obama's new quest to disarm America.
I am getting to the point (ninety pages in) where I have to write about The Dark Knight Rises massacre. I can't seem to bring myself to do it. In my second novel, Fear of a Tabloid Planet, it took literally years for me to write about 9/11. Bret Easton Ellis added the murder sequences in American Psycho after he had written the entirety of the novel by hand. He procrastinated for as long as he could before facing up to what the novel demanded of him. Apparently he was laughing as he wrote those scenes, possibly the most violently misogynistic in the history of transgressive fiction. So I'm currently trawling internet blogs and conspiracy theorists on the web, researching what the paranoid fringes seem to think is a vast web of MK-ULTRA inspired False Flag operations. It's monumentally depressing. I have watched a few Alex Jones videos, the lunatic who went on Piers Morgan and had one of his trademark nervous breakdowns. I would feel sorry for Alex Jones if I wasn't so concerned that he owns a veritable cache of firearms. Lee Harvey Oswald had his nefarious connections to various different murky worlds, but it's a lot scarier to think that he did work alone. As DeLillo once wrote: "Conspiracy offers coherence". Alex Jones is clearly mentally ill. Some people will do anything not to cure their mental illnesses. He's too far gone to seek help now, especially with North Korea kicking off.
--------
It's snowing when I make it to Pynchon Ward, cold and tired and hungry. I head up the elevator, smiling grimly at the old woman in reception. I bump into the nurse who forced me to eat twelve Lorazepam from a cup with my hands held in stress positions by my side. I smile and she looks both guilty and cowed. The ward door opens and Oye, the nurse who once told me that I could never leave unless he let me, opens the door and I blank him. He says nothing, looks at his feet. A woman with half of her face covered in rusted brown bruises (skin cancer? A terrible accident? A vicious fall?) is wandering around incoherently. I walk down the corridor to the office.
"I'm here for my injection," I sigh. The nurse blinks.
"I'm sorry?"
"My injection," I repeat.
"I'm sorry, who are you?" She asks.
"Andrew Moody. Emm, double oh, dee, why."
"I don't know... why? What?"
This is always the worst part of coming to Pynchon Ward. The nurses are uniformly uneducated and this is not a difficult job to get.
"I have to have an injection every two weeks. Olanzapine," I say slowly.
"Oh. Take a seat."
I sigh, walk towards the smoking pod, bump into Vicki, the gnarled, witchy black Nurse who took great pleasure in telling me I was not legally allowed into America.
"You can't smoke. You're not a patient," she hisses. For years I was obsessed with the idea of writing the ultimate anti-psychiatry novel. I eventually self-published it as Smoking Is Cool, and managed to get a copy to Bret Easton Ellis at a book signing. I knew he was the most well connected writer in Hollywood. Two years have passed, and I have sold less than thirty copies. Holly sees me walking back from the smoking pod.
"Andrew!" she says. "I can be with you in ten minutes."
"Can I have a cigarette first?" I ask.
"Sure," she smiles. Vicki looks annoyed, sees I have a plastic bag with a copy of Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History and a can of Relentless.
"You can't bring energy drinks onto the ward," she says, plucking it from the bag with two fingers.
----------
I wrote to God the other day. God has over 500,000 followers. He even went to the premiere of Tarantino's Django Unchained. Those that conquer Twitter are the new rockstars of our atomized age. He tweeted that the world was run by facile fools (not quoted verbatim, He has since deleted it) and I replied:
You're much funnier when you don't preach, God
Within ten seconds I'd had five retweets. Then God removed his tweet (thereby deleting mine) and sent me a direct message.
You're much more tolerable when you don't talk.
--------------
Left or right?" Holly asks, holding the needle between her fingers.
"You choose," I sigh, undoing my belt.
"I'm thinking right," she says. "Sharp scratch!"
The needle enters my buttock, catching a nerve.
"Nearly done," she sighs. This is the depressing truth about psychiatry. It's not particularly glamorous.
"You can leave in three hours," Holly smiles. I limp out of the medical room and take a seat. After I've been reading about the history of Germany in 1919, and the origins of Nazism, somebody takes a seat next to me. It's a man in his forties, dressed smartly, his eyes calm and slightly dilated.
"I can save you," he whispers. "I can make you happy again..."
Another Jesus, I think. I've met so many here...
A.W.M 04/04/2013
Wednesday, 20 March 2013
GENERATION WUSS
"Even horsemeat can be delicious when one is in the right circumstance to appreciate it."- Auguste Escoffier
-----------
The pain starts somewhere between Bromley Common and Farnborough Village. I've had five anaesthetic shots into the soft palate of my left cheek, two fillings and an extraction. The dentist was a pretty, Eastern European, who took mercy on me after the drill entered into the root of a decayed tooth.
"Okay, enough suffering. I will recommend sedation. It's not nice."
I adjusted the sunglasses I had been given to protect my eyes from their examination lamp. "What happens now?"
"I will book you an appointment at King's College Hospital. They will finish what needs to be done. Okay? You will be sedated. It will be easier."
I couldn't feel the left side of my face. That morning, while browsing the music channels and becoming fascinated with a young R & B star called Dappy, a rat like hoody who sings mobile phone related pop songs and whose video consisted of him being endlessly photographed with sobbing teenage girls, I realized my music career was over. The poet writes the history of his own body, as Thoreau once wrote, and I was fast losing the deal breaker for pop acceptance: I am thirty in two weeks and I am running out of teeth. I had asked the dentist how much it would cost to do a James Arthur and do a clean sweep, fix the lot.
"Hmm, I would say, eight to ten thousand?"
This came as an expected but still saddening blow.
"I'll start saving," I sighed, and she smiled at me, I was putting a brave face onto an awkward visage. My care worker called me moments after I'd stumbled out of the rubber and disinfectant torture parlour into the dust and grime and melting fat of Penge high street, reminding me that my depot injection was due today. Huh. Since if I smoke or eat anything cold or hot I am liable to infect the gum from whence my tooth was wrenched, going to get punk'd on Pynchon Ward seemed like the only option I had. The days were usually spent chain smoking and drinking energy drinks whilst writing obsessive and meaningless tweets, and it's probably best for everybody that I don't own a gun.
But the pain has now started. A dull, pulsing pain as the nerves in my cheek slowly regain feeling. The rain slices down onto the windows of the 358, and I hear the bus driver being informed via his radio of a shoplifter's apparel and description, since he's in the Bromley area, about five ten, white, mid twenties, with black Nikes and a Stone Island bomber jacket and if he's seen he is to be apprehended on sight. The driver acknowledges the call and pulls up outside Blue Leaves House, the psychiatric hospital I have been intermittently locked in and out of for the past ten years. Before I get off I press the fresh compress into my jaw to quell the bleeding. I would kill for a cigarette, but know that a cigarette will infect the gum. I choose not to smoke, and stumble down with my iPod playing Rape Me by Nirvana on loop toward the entrance of the psychiatric ward.
-------------------
Emma Watson has now publicly refused to have anything to do with Fifty Shades of Grey: The Movie. Her refusal tweet went viral. Hermione will not be getting bondage fucked on screen. I think of this now as I undo my belt and Holly prepares the injection of Olanzapine.
"Left or right?" she says.
"Right," I say, thinking I've had two many injections into the left side of my body today that to get injected into the left side of my posterior would render me as helpless as a stroke victim.
"Sharp scratch," she giggles as in the needle goes, catching a nerve as usual sending a shooting pain up into my lower back.
"Okay, so it's eleven twenty now," Holly says. "You can leave at half two."
I limp out of the medical room and onto Pynchon Ward, compress still sticking out of my mouth like a deluged tampon. I unhook the book I am reading out of my jeans, Shoplifting From American Apparel by a new hotshot Brooklyn writer called Tao Lin. It's a short but unbearably boring book. I'm on page twenty or so, and so far what has happened is some guy has emailed some friends, eaten some brown rice, and experienced no strong emotion of any kind. Nothing is the central theme of the book. Nobody feels anything, or does anything, or means anything, or cares about anything. There are few adjectives and no discernible plot or story of any kind. It's a masterpiece of dullness. Tao Lin has 13,000 followers on Twitter. According to critics he's the most interesting prose stylist of his generation (which includes me, he's a few months younger). Usually I'll bring a Military History magazine or a thick, deliciously meaty novel. Today I'm stuck with the poet laureate of Generation Wuss. It's going to be a long three hours.
--------------
Lindsay Lohan turns to me, her nasal cavity is just a gaping hole from the cocaine and her eyes are dull and thick with insomnia.
"I'll blow you for a gram," she murmurs. Dappy is on stage singing to thousands of screaming girls, each of them more hysterical and emotionally troubled than the last. Lindsay is looking desperate.
"Fuckit, handjob, forty dollars," she says, smiling to reveal perfectly damaged, browning teeth. I check my wallet, and see I have fifty dollars and a gram, and I open my mouth to say sure, deal, but I realize that I have no teeth in my mouth. Lindsay takes one look.
"Actually forget it," she says, and stumbles into the crowd, too disillusioned to even ask for a toot of the charlie. Dappy is in his element, he's a pro and he has the audience right where he wants them. A metal staircase leads from above the stage, and as banal, simple dubstep beats announce the arrival of a Very Special Guest, I see Lindsay running back towards me. I smile (lips closed) and hold out the gear.
"No kissing, though buddy," she sighs, taking my hand, as Emma Watson descends from the staircase polishing the Best Actress Oscar she's just won for playing a nun in a holocaust epic that even the French critics admitted had a lot of heart.
"I'd like to thank all of my fans," she says, her words transcribing into 140 characters or less on a huge screen that some of the baying crowd are retweeting moment to moment, and Lindsay is pulling my arm hard, so hard that I wake up and the compress falls from my gaping jaw onto page 88 of the Tao Lin book. Blood has congealed around a certain passage:
"What are we going to do," said Sam.
"We can follow someone," said Audrey. They followed a small group of people in a band that Sam liked for about ten blocks.
I look around. Look down at my watch. It is two forty. I have been asleep for over three hours. Holly smiles, hands me a tissue to wipe the blood from my lips.
"You can go now," she says. I throw the Tao Lin book into the bin and leave the hospital and take the bus back to my flat. When I get back I take two Nurofen plus and smoke a cigarette. I have stopped bleeding.
A.W.M 20/03/2013
-----------
The pain starts somewhere between Bromley Common and Farnborough Village. I've had five anaesthetic shots into the soft palate of my left cheek, two fillings and an extraction. The dentist was a pretty, Eastern European, who took mercy on me after the drill entered into the root of a decayed tooth.
"Okay, enough suffering. I will recommend sedation. It's not nice."
I adjusted the sunglasses I had been given to protect my eyes from their examination lamp. "What happens now?"
"I will book you an appointment at King's College Hospital. They will finish what needs to be done. Okay? You will be sedated. It will be easier."
I couldn't feel the left side of my face. That morning, while browsing the music channels and becoming fascinated with a young R & B star called Dappy, a rat like hoody who sings mobile phone related pop songs and whose video consisted of him being endlessly photographed with sobbing teenage girls, I realized my music career was over. The poet writes the history of his own body, as Thoreau once wrote, and I was fast losing the deal breaker for pop acceptance: I am thirty in two weeks and I am running out of teeth. I had asked the dentist how much it would cost to do a James Arthur and do a clean sweep, fix the lot.
"Hmm, I would say, eight to ten thousand?"
This came as an expected but still saddening blow.
"I'll start saving," I sighed, and she smiled at me, I was putting a brave face onto an awkward visage. My care worker called me moments after I'd stumbled out of the rubber and disinfectant torture parlour into the dust and grime and melting fat of Penge high street, reminding me that my depot injection was due today. Huh. Since if I smoke or eat anything cold or hot I am liable to infect the gum from whence my tooth was wrenched, going to get punk'd on Pynchon Ward seemed like the only option I had. The days were usually spent chain smoking and drinking energy drinks whilst writing obsessive and meaningless tweets, and it's probably best for everybody that I don't own a gun.
But the pain has now started. A dull, pulsing pain as the nerves in my cheek slowly regain feeling. The rain slices down onto the windows of the 358, and I hear the bus driver being informed via his radio of a shoplifter's apparel and description, since he's in the Bromley area, about five ten, white, mid twenties, with black Nikes and a Stone Island bomber jacket and if he's seen he is to be apprehended on sight. The driver acknowledges the call and pulls up outside Blue Leaves House, the psychiatric hospital I have been intermittently locked in and out of for the past ten years. Before I get off I press the fresh compress into my jaw to quell the bleeding. I would kill for a cigarette, but know that a cigarette will infect the gum. I choose not to smoke, and stumble down with my iPod playing Rape Me by Nirvana on loop toward the entrance of the psychiatric ward.
-------------------
Emma Watson has now publicly refused to have anything to do with Fifty Shades of Grey: The Movie. Her refusal tweet went viral. Hermione will not be getting bondage fucked on screen. I think of this now as I undo my belt and Holly prepares the injection of Olanzapine.
"Left or right?" she says.
"Right," I say, thinking I've had two many injections into the left side of my body today that to get injected into the left side of my posterior would render me as helpless as a stroke victim.
"Sharp scratch," she giggles as in the needle goes, catching a nerve as usual sending a shooting pain up into my lower back.
"Okay, so it's eleven twenty now," Holly says. "You can leave at half two."
I limp out of the medical room and onto Pynchon Ward, compress still sticking out of my mouth like a deluged tampon. I unhook the book I am reading out of my jeans, Shoplifting From American Apparel by a new hotshot Brooklyn writer called Tao Lin. It's a short but unbearably boring book. I'm on page twenty or so, and so far what has happened is some guy has emailed some friends, eaten some brown rice, and experienced no strong emotion of any kind. Nothing is the central theme of the book. Nobody feels anything, or does anything, or means anything, or cares about anything. There are few adjectives and no discernible plot or story of any kind. It's a masterpiece of dullness. Tao Lin has 13,000 followers on Twitter. According to critics he's the most interesting prose stylist of his generation (which includes me, he's a few months younger). Usually I'll bring a Military History magazine or a thick, deliciously meaty novel. Today I'm stuck with the poet laureate of Generation Wuss. It's going to be a long three hours.
--------------
Lindsay Lohan turns to me, her nasal cavity is just a gaping hole from the cocaine and her eyes are dull and thick with insomnia.
"I'll blow you for a gram," she murmurs. Dappy is on stage singing to thousands of screaming girls, each of them more hysterical and emotionally troubled than the last. Lindsay is looking desperate.
"Fuckit, handjob, forty dollars," she says, smiling to reveal perfectly damaged, browning teeth. I check my wallet, and see I have fifty dollars and a gram, and I open my mouth to say sure, deal, but I realize that I have no teeth in my mouth. Lindsay takes one look.
"Actually forget it," she says, and stumbles into the crowd, too disillusioned to even ask for a toot of the charlie. Dappy is in his element, he's a pro and he has the audience right where he wants them. A metal staircase leads from above the stage, and as banal, simple dubstep beats announce the arrival of a Very Special Guest, I see Lindsay running back towards me. I smile (lips closed) and hold out the gear.
"No kissing, though buddy," she sighs, taking my hand, as Emma Watson descends from the staircase polishing the Best Actress Oscar she's just won for playing a nun in a holocaust epic that even the French critics admitted had a lot of heart.
"I'd like to thank all of my fans," she says, her words transcribing into 140 characters or less on a huge screen that some of the baying crowd are retweeting moment to moment, and Lindsay is pulling my arm hard, so hard that I wake up and the compress falls from my gaping jaw onto page 88 of the Tao Lin book. Blood has congealed around a certain passage:
"What are we going to do," said Sam.
"We can follow someone," said Audrey. They followed a small group of people in a band that Sam liked for about ten blocks.
I look around. Look down at my watch. It is two forty. I have been asleep for over three hours. Holly smiles, hands me a tissue to wipe the blood from my lips.
"You can go now," she says. I throw the Tao Lin book into the bin and leave the hospital and take the bus back to my flat. When I get back I take two Nurofen plus and smoke a cigarette. I have stopped bleeding.
A.W.M 20/03/2013
Thursday, 21 February 2013
EYES WIDE SHUT
"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
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
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
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