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Wednesday, December 31, 2003
2003
Alright
Guy Bourdin and Art Deco at the V&A. Middlesex filter beds: a grass snake, woodpeckers, warblers, grey herons, kingfisher. My lovely family of coots on the River Lea - good luck! Abney Cemetary. Renata Adler. 1st english translations of With the Flow (Huysmans) and Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers (Pierre Guyotat). Turner and Whistler at Tate Britain. Healthy Gower swimming in July and August. New York in March (giant prawns, Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Station, Ghostbusters). Garbo in A Woman of No Importance at the NFT. Mario Bava, Dario Argento. Exiles. The hot weather. Sophie Dahl in the flesh. Attending a garden party hosted by an exiled Yemenese royal family. Darren Campbell and Carolina Kluft at the World Athletics. Ennio Morricone (reissue Mondo Morricone CDs), Goblin, Italodisco, Sandy Denny, Bix Beiderbecke, the London FM dial. More books: Modern Jihad - Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks Loretta Napoleoni (best this year), No End to War Walter Laqueur, Regime Change Christopher Hitchens, London Orbital Iain Sinclair (pbk), John F Kennedy - An Unfinished Life Robert Dallek. Vanessa Feltz (London Live 3-5). Berlusconi's big mouth. Roland Cartier shoes that glide! November 5th. Immolation of the Ba'ath regime. Milosevic in the dock. Learning to fence.
Awful
End of the affair. Mysterious weight loss. Dull and muddled translation of Deleuze on Francis Bacon, minus the plates. EU ban on Gower cockles. Berlusconi. Bombing of Al-jazeera. Iraq aftermath. Aceh. Liberia. Congo. North Korea. Chechnya. Kyoto. Water. Fires. No money, more problems.
Citta 03
Q: What did Saddam Hussein say when he came out of his hole?
A: "Did I beat David Blaine?"
1:34 PM
Sunday, December 28, 2003
Druqz
Heroin, opium and morphine production dominates the Afghan economy. It is controlled by Northern Alliance warlords, military commanders and drug cartels, with political connections that extend to the hierarchy of central government. Farmers extract opium from abundant poppy fields largely located in the East; it is processed into heroin at illegal production facilities. In July 2000 the Taliban outlawed the cultivation of poppy plants and closed down the laboratories used to produce heroin. That same year, they cashed in their last opium reserves for huge profit, flooding Europe and North America with vast quantities of unusually pure heroin (a disaster for San Francisco). With the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the Northern Alliance took control of the drug trade, along with criminal cartels ready to exploit the new war economy. Warlords and gangsters retained control of a booming industry, with a cut of the profits taken by provincial administrators, military commanders and terrorists. Farmers became reliant on the drug trade to maintain a decent standard of living (consequently, any attempt to return to a purely agrarian economy would be doomed to failure without overt (or covert) force).
Afghanistan is the world's largest producer of opium and exports 90% of Europe's heroin. According to The Economist, the huge revenues extracted from this trade will help military commanders buy influence in the forthcoming summer elections, as well as large caches of arms and equipment for Northern Alliance warlords. Afghanistan will become the world's premier narco-state.
Afghanistan's mature heroin industry has its roots in the murkiest of Cold War realpolitik escapades: the war between the Soviets and Islamisc jihadists (the Mujahedin) between 1979-89. The Carter administration saw the Soviets' reluctant entry into war in Afghanistan as a potential Cold War equaliser: an opportunity to create the USSR's own Vietnam. Covert support for the Mujahedin was irresistible: a way to divert, weaken and humble Soviet will and military power on the World stage. The Reagan administration inherited this plan and implemented it with a vengeance. It was a delicate operation: America would not directly arm the Mujahedin fighters so the Pakistani Secret Service (ISI) was engaged as a willing intermediary. The ISI was powerful; an Islamist force, virtually independent and easily able to influence the Pakistani government. Arms, ammunition and money were channeled from the CIA via the ISI across the Pakistan/Afghan border to the Mujahedin fighters. The CIA purchased hardware from countries friendly to the US, most of whom exploited the opportunity to offload obsolete weaponry. CIA funds flowed into accounts controlled by the ISI to meet the endless costs of purchasing and transporting equipment, building and maintaining storage facilities, paying the salaries of Islamist party commanders and Mujahedin fighters and releasing them from jail. The ISI ran up a bill of about $5 billion a year.
Furthermore, American money was siphoned by endless layers of bribery and corruption. The ISI would steel arms and skim funds, Pakistani border control demanded bribes for delivering weapons, and so on. By the time American aid reached the Mujahedin fighters a substantial amount of the initial cache had disappeared. Islamist fighters in Afghanistan found themselves hungry and short of arms despite massive US assistance. To match this deficit the CIA had to reach into the "the black budget": secret funds retained by the Pentagon for the finance of covert operations, for example the Contras in Nicaragua.
To fulfill mounting costs, adequately arm the anti-Soviet fighters and perpetuate the Soviet quagmire, the ISI and the CIA turned towards illicit trade, most prominently contraband and drugs. The localised drug industry was expanded by the ISI with the tacit agreement of the CIA. Most of the heroin extracted from this blooming trade ended up in North America: in effect, the CIA fed America's voracious drug appetite. Poppy planting was encouraged by taxes imposed on farmers by the advancing Mujahedin. Expansive poppy fields were planted in new regions. The ISI increased heroin production and smuggled the drugs through routes in Pakistan with the aid of the Pakistani army and the leading Muslim bank (the BCCI) who funded the operation. Narcotics took over the agrarian infrastructure as Afghanistan became the main source of heroin for Europe and America.
Now, with production back in the hands of the Northern Alliance, ISI and BCCI-sponsored smuggling routes through Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and the Balkans (the Islamist lines) have been largely abandoned. The Northern Alliance favor an alternative route through Central Asia into Russia. Tajikistan-based traffickers act as a conduit between the Northern Alliance and Russian border guards. The Tajikistan route generates huge profits for an enriched Russian Mafia, making inroads into the American market via links with Columbian and Mexican drug cartels, and increasing government corruption and gang violence.
In Afghanistan, allied forces turn a blind eye to poppy growth and heroin production; the problem is too complex, entangled and explosive. To challenge the unholy alliance of warlords, criminals, and military officials would constitute an undeclared act of war that would multiply problems within an already fractious and lethal war economy.
1:13 PM
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
This Christmas I attended Vespers, witnessed the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin and followed The Procession of Our Lady, which transformed the Brompton Oratory into a Spanish carnival. On Charing Cross Road we had a conversation about Marxist Priests in Latin America and Marxist mayors in Wales. It was Winter Solstice.
11:04 AM
Monday, December 22, 2003
This will be worth tuning into on the wracked tundra. Brrr. Bitter wind, ice sheets, gulags!
7:34 PM
Friday, December 19, 2003
Magic potion, puns, and village-based resistance
1:37 PM
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Hunger
Marylebone farmers' market, on Sunday, between 10am and 2pm, in a car park off Cramer street. Bright day: glassy sky, air nips flushed skin. Picking through boxes of dusty vegetables, sprout stalks, pumpkins and crusty loaves. There's a stall that sells pheasant, partridge, wood pigeon, wild rabbit and venison. Game shrink-wrapped, all odd hues: deep blood red and sunset yellow. Other stalls specialise in dairy products: untreated milk, quail and duck eggs, brandy butter, rich rice pudding in foil containers. There are racks of apples, and a wicker basket full of hares in plastic. And there are fishmongers: one sells cockles, brown shrimp, mussels, Blakeney Point oysters, live crabs and lobsters in the back of a van; another has a striped apron and sells skate, sea bass, mackeral, dover sole and cod fillet on ice. A man makes lovely pies (pheasant and mushroom, mixed game, duck and orange, rabbit) and sells Aylesbury ducks. A look in my eye reveals hunger and dull, mild poverty ("sorry, I'm just looking"). There are big Christmas trees for sale and a nostalgic scent in the air. The lavender stall, though, is a bit much.
In Harrods food hall I discovered that the dairy counter sells empty Ostrich eggs (£25 each). Two scottish women stood behind me, one said, "that's ridiculous! Empty Ostrich eggs!" and the other said, "well, I guess you wouldn't want an Ostrich to hatch in your house," and the other said, "no, I suppose not."
A tasty directory of produce (for my own reference).
6:57 PM
I expect you are trying to find the movie "Red Dawn" at the moment, it used to be on Channel Five all the time, written by John "Big Wednesday" Millius. Good film, Patrick Swayze leads a teenage American mudjaheddin to victory against the Soviets/Cubans in hometown USA. Are the American military a) fucking scary with a souped up Reaganite view of world politics? or b) labelling their missions according to the entertainingly ridiculous 80's videos they brought with them to Iraq? Have there been missions to capture/destroy high ranking members of the Ba'athist party called "Operation Three O' Clock High" and "Mission: Killer Klowns from Outer Space"?. I think the world needs to know.
Gavin Watkins
12:20 PM
Monday, December 15, 2003
On TV they show Saddam leaning back on a chair, smoking a big cigar - younger, handsome, power-glutted, "indefatigable" (George Galloway) - as a brutal purge of the Ba'ath hierarchy gets under way. The woman on the TV introduces this "chilling" footage and, at first, I don't know what she is talking about - then I realise that while Saddam is sitting there, generals and politicians are led from the room by Ba'ath security officers to be tried (briefly) and then slaughtered. Yes, well, I'm chilled: that's the (hard)line of power, power stripped to brute Stalinist essentials, "raw power" (Iggy Pop).
What happened on 18 July 1979 is recorded on video. Saddam personally ordered the filming of the proceedings of a meeting of the Regional Command Council and other top party officials of the Ba'ath, four hundred in all, in a conference hall which looked like a cinema that he had had built for international meetings. The film shows Saddam running the meeting by himself. He is on stage, sitting behind a large table with four microphones in front of him and a large cigar in his hand. Occupying the first row are his loyalists: Izzat Douri, his second-in-command in the Iraqi Ba'ath party and deputy secutary of the RCC; Taha Yassin Ramadan, his vice president; foreign minister Tariq Aziz; and others including his cousin, brother-in-law and Chief of Staff, General Adnan Khairallah.
Saddam stood up and walked slowly, as if with a heavy heart, to a lecturn with two microphones on it. He spoke to the gathered leadership in the manner of a relaxed lecturer addressing a group of supplicants. He not only announced the existence of a plot, but gestured with a wide sweep of his arm and told his followers that they would have a chance to determine the veracity of his statement. Mashhadi was summoned from behind the curtain and took Saddam's place at the lecturn while the latter went back and sat behind the table, still puffing on his huge cigar.
For two hours Mashhadi regaled the listeners with details of the conspiracy, dates, places of meetings and names of participants. It was obvious that his presentation was rehearsed. He referred to the so-called conspiraters as traitors, and as he mentioned each name plain-clothed security officers were filmed escorting the person mentioned out of the hall. When one of them tried to speak to the gathering, Saddam shouted , 'Itla, itla', or 'Get out, get out!'. Heads bowed, every single one walked out with his grim-looking escorts, never to be seen again. No one said anything while the camera panned across the faces of Douri, Aziz, and Khairallah.
What was happening, one of the most hideous recorded examples of the working of a dictatorship, finally became clear to the rest. Some of them stood up and started to cheer Saddam. He responded with a broad smile, twice thanked people who stood up to praise him and offer their fealty. Encouraged, others stood up to speak of Saddam leading them on a march to liberate Palestine, and the camera showed a happy Saddam content with what he was hearing.
Saddam reserved for himself the right to make the closing statement. Tearfully, he mentioned how the conspirators had tried to drive a wedge between him and Bakr (General Ahmend Hassan Al, his political mentor) and 'weaken the glorious Ba'ath Arab Socialist party'. When he repeated the names of the accused who had been close to him, he appeared to wipe tears from his eyes. The audience followed suit; Douri led the way and suddenly everyone had a handkerchief in his hand and was wiping away tears. Towards the end Saddam was in good spirits and laughed, and the whole audience laughed with him.
From Saddam Hussein - The Politics of Revenge by Said K. Aburish.
They pick him out of his hole, check his head for lice, shave off that scrappy Moses beard, then go out in front of the world - imagine a million eyes jammed into a tube as thick as wire -
"Let's go and break the news, boys..."
Schroeder and Chirac send their warm congratulations fast; Russia is too sour and choked to even fake pleasure. Probably all aware that their (former) moral opposition can be exposed as compromised (fatally) if Saddam decides to reveal a secret history of cosy deals and snug arrangements, or is drugged into it, or whatever.
Meanwhile, now: the illusion of scattered Ba'ath military operations - or Saddam's control over Iraqi resistance - disintegrates like Uday's palace in a welter of Tomahawk missiles. The bombs and shooting raids remain and the messy nexus of radical opposition - nationalist, religious, as well as Ba'ath loyalists and civilians amped on bloodshed, adventure, outlaw status - reveals a chaotic, lethal aspect. Or, until it breaks up like crude oil in stormy water. Once a loose alliance weakens, the tenacious Islamists remain - with their obscure fiscal channels, hard and software supplies, and resevoir of manpower.
We're on a scavenger hunt for terror.
George W. Bush
11:12 PM
Friday, December 12, 2003
Ivory Coast.
State television has shown pictures of four bodies, some wearing magic charms...The director of Ivorian Television, RTI, Jean-Paul Dahily said the assailants wore black clothes bearing the name "Nindja" - a reference to one of the militias which has sprung up since the 2002 uprising in support of President Laurent Gbagbo.
3:56 PM
Uruguay turns left.
On Dec 7, 60% of Uruguayans voted to reimpose the State monopoly on oil supplies, a demand for renationalisation counter to the global drift towards free-market neoliberalism, and more frustration for the IMF in Latin America.
3:24 PM
This is, I assume, not just "punishment" for the Iraq stance, but a response to Russia's increasingly obvious Soviet leanings: a new willingness to invoke Soviet heroes and the industrial achievments of the Communist era, the opening of a hydroelectric dam in the East (an old Soviet project abandoned in '89, but reactivated in the late 90s), the markedly undemocratic electoral win for United Russia that exposed Putin's determined grip on power, the incarceration of Mikhael Khodorkovsky (Russia's richest man, critic of and potential political rival to Putin) on charges of fraud, and a certain institutional resistance to private enterprise and free markets within the Kremlin etc.
One of the main reasons Russia opposed America's war was because of some precious trade agreements struck with Ba'ath Iraq. Russia is, ostensibly, an American ally in the War on Terror, but also, potentially, an enemy: Russia was one of the designated targets in the '01 Nuclear Posture Review presented by Rumsfeld, and that was simply because of the size of its nuclear arsenal.
1:13 PM
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
and related
12:43 PM
Saturday, December 06, 2003
Shining Path screwed.
3:32 PM
Mr Rumsfeld flew over the Iraqi capital in what the French news agency AFP described as a swarm of Black Hawk helicopters before landing at a military base.
Stylish!
1:41 PM
Friday, December 05, 2003
Swiss bank accounts!
12:39 PM
The tropical disease of US trade policy
Mr Bush, who is about to enter an election year, is risking a political backlash in steel-producing states but faced the prospect of worse among other states where voters could have been affected in a tit-for-tat trade war.
He was also facing pressure from American manufacturers which are heavy users of steel and had argued that the higher prices were hurting their businesses and costing jobs.
11:53 AM
Aceh Again
JAKARTA (AP)--Achenese rebels celebrated the 27th anniversary of their
independence struggle Thursday with the sporadic raising of flags and a rare
battlefield success, killing four soldiers and injuring two in clashes
across the
restive province.
The Indonesian military, which launched a fresh offensive against the Free
Aceh Movement in May, had warned that anyone celebrating the anniversary
would
be punished severely. They threatened to shoot anyone caught raising a rebel
flag and said offenders would be charged with treason.
The threats and increased military patrols in the oil- and gas-rich province
appeared to work, with witnesses seeing only a smattering of rebel flags -
black and red with a star - flying across the province on the northern tip of
Sumatra.
...
Thursday's killings marked one of the few days that the Indonesian army lost
more men than rebels and comes after months of military dominance on the
battlefield. Since the May offensive began, the military claims it has
killed more
than 1,000 rebels but lost only 47 soldiers and 16 police officers.
A rebel spokesman couldn't be reached for comment.
11:19 AM
Thursday, December 04, 2003
Good.
10:31 AM
Monday, September 22, 2003
Whitford, Sunday, 8am.
I slept in the car last night, in a field just down from the village of Llanmadoc on the western tip of North Gower, a short walk up from a hamlet called Cwm Ivy. The plan being to move before dawn, and there was nowhere else to stay, besides I had money for petrol and food and nothing else. I had some cooked chicken wings, some welsh cakes and a cartoon of orange juice containing no discernable trace of orange, just a sharp, vulgar tan, a taste somewhat like the sound of a singing wine glass. In the dying light, with the empty field and the cry of cattle like far-off dinosaurs, I picked up radio Pembroke and some elderly Kenneth Clarke type eulogising Europhilia. Ravens flocked above me, the death-winged brutes, a thuggish roost, clucking, squarking and grumbling. Farm collie barks richoceted through the encroaching dark, the car-light somewhat consumed, but the radio waves still clear. The Northern shore line was lit with the orange street and white house lights of Llanelli and Carmarthenshire, just across the estuary, visible above the hedgerows and scattered trees. The air was clear, cold and clean, smelt like charred wood, and the sky was dotted with bright stars. By now the night was as silent as death, but the radio buzzed, and I worried about the car battery for a second, then listened for the sea, and could just pick out the lapping shore line. The car, the stars, the sea, the moon, and I. Turn the light off, curl up, get under the rug. There's a moth in the car.
Awake before dawn, but then I was awake anyway. Walked down through Cwm Ivy as the night lifted into morning, through the trees and the dawn chorus, past the cottages, the odd window already lit. Down the path into the nature reserve and up into the conifer forest. There's a route you take because of the tides: a mistake at Whitford Point can kill you: the tide can advance faster than walking pace, and cut you off by a network of channels. Farmers let sheep graze on the beach and the estuary*, and there have been stories of them running to escape the incoming sea, leaping over the pill for their lives. Once, in the late seventies, a farmer was forced to leave a flock of sheep to drown. Every year somebody drowns on the Gower, and it's usually around here. I immediately took the wrong path - I mean the route didn't exactly specify which path, and the right path looked more like somebody's driveway - and for the next hour waded through sand dunes, going the wrong way, wondering what had happened to the path that's supposed to weave through conifers, and forever heading for another conifer forest on the horizon. Eventually I found the correct path and turned east away from the point, towards the estuary and the famous, inaccesible bird-watching hide. This is one of the richest wildlife spots in the country, but you need a telescope to see anything good, and all I have is a tiny pair of Olympus 8 x 20, so I couldn't see much. What kind of idiot goes to Whitford with opera glasses? There were no proper birdwatchers around, despite an assurance that they would be there in packs: maks, wellingtons and telescopes galore. But the view north across the sand and mudflats shimmered, and the bubbling cacophany of song betrayed a teeming population. The tide was low. From the tumult of sound all I could pick out was: crows, gulls, oystercatcher and curlew. The rest a piping mystery, but breathtaking, gorgeous, almost too elaborate, somewhat Rococo, like seashells. Day broke to flat cloud, a translucent rim of golden light crowning coal hills to the North like a halo.
I got bored, and walked back towards the point, across the sand banks, bedded with muscle and periwinkle shells, razors and whelks, cockles, limpits and scallops. I disturbed a colony of sandflies, thousands suddenly leaping to life around my feet as if a high voltage of electricity had pulsed through the sand. But then: Whitford lighthouse, the old cast iron lighthouse I first spotted driving past the shore marsh out of the concrete ribbon development of Penclawdd - home of cockle farmers, boy racers and broken homes - emerging on the horizon like a ghost from a childhood room, and a strange sensation, almost a blush of tears, and no idea why. And it's here! Well close! This lighthouse, unused, except by cormorants, rusting away into the sea, ringed by swirling currents and murderous tides. An image in my head for years, now some kind of existential pilgrimage, and a symbol of defiance and isolation (they're inseperable). Still with this dumb, broken heart, but laughing now: if J had been with me last night she'd have said "Oliver, you're an idiot, you're crazy, what are we doing in a field, in this cold car, in the middle of the night?", but this morning, here, all she would have said was, "oh! superb!". Right on the point the bow of a ship, the ship almost fully submerged in the sand, the bow poking out, wrecked, blue paint eroding to reveal old wood, still firm. Actually, when you look, it seems like...shipwrecks everywhere! Rotting hulks, scraps of rusting iron. But you must stay alert for another reason - and the terrifying yellow signs remain; 'DANGER OF DEATH'/skull and cross bones - look out for unexploded shells: Whitford was an artillery range during the wars.
It's 8am, a flock of small brown birds swoop down and land on the sand about 50 metres in front of me. I reach for the pocket-sized bincolars in the pocket of my jeans. These are the first birds I'll see properly all day, but the binoculars are stuck in my pocket and I cannot get them out, and then my hand is stuck as well, and I'm flailing about like a daft giraffe while the birds happily scavenge and peck along the sand. Then I fall over, and they all fly away, safe into the dunes, out of sight. I'm flat on my back on the hard, smooth sand, thinking: I'm really glad that this is the most unpopular beach on the Gower due to inaccesibility and danger.
Why am I even telling you this?
*This is a local delicacy, only available from local butchers: succulent lamb with a distinct flavour due entirely to sheep grazed on salty, sea-washed grass. It is, apparently, delicious, but only if cooked correctly.
11:53 PM
Friday, September 19, 2003
Aceh Eyes
7:52 PM
When everything fails, I shall go and work in the cockle industry.
Up before dawn with the gulls and the waders, fighting the elements in wellington boots, then home to cook the gathered cockles and off to the market to sell them. Welsh cakes for tea, then a hot bath and bed. With a beautiful wife, from Italy.
4:46 PM
Here, go here, what a treat! And how lovely, too.
Exiles
12:57 PM
Thursday, September 18, 2003
The Wayne Wonder of Worry.
9:30 AM
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Strange Attractor
Here's a response from a brain beamed in from West Coast sand, sea, hills and valleys, right into the centre of the capital, from one festering in its gloomy, greasy residential slums, following the lines of nineteenth century sewage pipes across canals, rivers, around football fields, alongside an ice rink, bus routes and marshes and emphatic/ecstatic about these routes and then...discovery and revelation always:
a little brick cottage, moth-eaten net curtains and tin pots and kettles lined along a crumbling, cobwebbed wall, surrounded by defunct warehouses beside a shadowy East End canal that morphs into a redeveloped wharf, moared yachts, bland box flats, and featureless luxury, while eels leap, stab and swarm beneath a baking blanket of algae.
For instance, that was another instance, re: the plane above Bloomsbury, below.
I didn't come here for a job, I came here just to be here, I was impelled, well, propelled, my provincial grit drove me to seek out a place, however small, a location and a life in this squall, because it bothered me not being here, and that wasn't dreams or hope or hype, it's just that every time I came here I felt energised, galvanised, and so this gravitational pull inside developed to the point where it began to spoil my surroundings, and when I got here that stopped, and I've never not loved being here. Because London has the romance, beauty and potential of every city, town, village, hamlet, field, hill and valley, magnified, intensified, and multiplied.
Even in this pitiable, broken, wasteful Nation State state, the Eastern Thames gutted and forlon, life sapped by open plan offices and studio flats, for example, it offers as much and more than any Great City coagulating and clinging to this measly, mapped, travel-worn globe, and that immediately negates any other UK city, because they aren't even on the same list. This extreme ditch with its murky water and glittering surface: if the misanthropy and euphoria of this experience doesn't shock, seduce and consume you, then I really don't understand you, and what would we have to agree on?
I came here for the music too and this hardcore continuum that's so big on the blogs, loved with unusual focus and conviction, well, wasn't that also shaped by the unique mystery of London, its myth-making and anonymity, the allure of name and place, recreating the Town and City outline and incline in terms of patchwork, texture, ambience, intensity, "zones of feeling"? The M25 Orbital a portal, secret passage, and runway? London made the music, it added to it: the pirates thrived on the tug and tension between the city's vast scale, the district-disconnected sprawl, and its insularity, its micro-climate, its contained culture. Which is precisely the energy, precisely the atmosphere, unrivalled anywhere (then as now). This insularity is as important, creative, positive as the ability to absorb, devour and expand.
If anyone has a clue as to the merit or origin of the following records please email durtal78@hotmail.com because I'd like to know what you think and what they are. I never hear them played out on old skool shows these days, and I think they're pretty good, but maybe you don't:
On Remand Timeless World/Black Steel (Part 2) Crack House Productions
Intense Paradox/The Quikening/Journey to the Unknown Rugged Vinyl
Intense The Genesis Project EP Rugged Vinyl
Beyond the Future (Peshay and Bay-B-Kane) Feel It/Mystery Ride (Flatline Mix) Paradise Records
Steve C and Monita The Razor's Edge/Full Cry Skeleton Records
11:49 PM
But the beauty of London can be precisely located, for instance:
a large white airliner jet skimming Bedford Square.
3:39 PM
Hurricane Isabel races towards the East Coast of America, looking to hit anywhere between North Carolina and New Jersey late Thursday or early Friday. With winds whipping up to 125mph and waves hitting 40ft +, Virginia has declared a state of emergency, hardware stores along the coast are stripped of essential items (batteries, torches, can openers, candles, plastic sheeting), people board up their houses and drag boats ashore, and the Navy wonder if they should move the Atlantic Fleet out of Isabel's raging path.
9:55 AM
According to the soldiers themselves, cross-dressing is a military mind game, a tactic that instills fear in their rivals. It also makes the soldiers feel more invincible. This belief is founded on a regional superstition which holds that soldiers can "confuse the enemy's bullets" by assuming two identities simultaneously.
Liberian militias' got it going on.
9:32 AM
Saturday, September 13, 2003
Seamounts
are isolated, fully-submerged volcanic mountains in the Atlantic and Pacific, ridges and canyons rising thousands of metres from the sea floor. Seamounts are largely unexplored: of the Pacific's 30,000, only 220 - 250 have been studied. 40% of all species studied on these colossal basalt peaks are new discoveries. They harbour creatures whose extinction had previously been dated back to the Mesozoic era, and coral communties that have evolved over thousands of years. Evolution has taken a divergent path on each seamount, there is no consistency or equivalence, they develop like different countries sharing, at most, 20% of their species. Seamount dwellers are sustained by nutrient rich currents deflected up the slopes, picking up speed as they near the summit. The summits support communities of suspension feeders: corals, sponges and seafans that filter organic matter from the passing currents. Sea-spiders and lobsters dwell in the coral, crags and rock outcrops of the slopes and whales and tuna fish feed around the mountains as they pass by on migratory routes. Creatures of the lower slopes, trenches and sea floor feed on the nutrient fallout that showers down from activity on the upper slopes.
Meanwhile, advanced fishing fleets abandon exhausted routes and depleted stocks, and mine the mounts for rare and exotic marine delicacies like orange roughy, alfonsino and deep-water red fish. Anything edible, or beautiful, a culinary paradise for the wealthy, the dedicated, the curious and the refined.
Data. Mechanics of the earth's crust. Spew and surge of vivid red lava steaming in the deep blue. The seismic ripples along continental shelves. Plates of lithosphere collide. Tectonic plate subducted. Seeping crust melts, forms magma. Gas forms from magma, builds up pressure and erupts. Volcanoes form islands. Sediments collect. Continents drift together. Ocean basin diminishes. Island accrection; the island arc is accreting to one side. Basin may close. A mountain range is formed out of deformed sedimentary and metamorphic rock.
And, the crumbling poles. Shafts, shelves and slabs of ice break off or drift away from the ice-edge, the brittle shelf, smashing into grey ocean or silently detaching. The ice-shelves recede like a suicide pact.
The Maldives will be submerged, the Alps bare and dripping.
No more food, time to leave.
11:32 PM
Ben Fogle with The Fear.
I've got The Fear, chaps.
Jacob's Escalator
11:35 AM
Friday, September 12, 2003
Actually, no it's not. $20, 000 is not the kind of cash I have to spend.
Unless somebody wants to donate the fare, I'll write you a brilliant book all about it, for free.
Look, all I want to do is get inside the Arctic Circle.
2:16 PM
Thursday, September 11, 2003
This is what I'm going to do.
10:39 PM
In 1994, Algerian terrorists planned to hijack an Air France airliner with the intention of detonating it over the Eiffel Tower. Having been warned of an imminent bust, the operation was moved forward from New Year's Eve to Christmas Eve. This sudden change meant that some members of the group could not participate, and things did not go according to plan. The airplane was hijacked by four members who killed three passengers before executing a forced landing at Marseilles airport. Here, French elite soldiers stormed the plane, killed the hijackers, and freed the passengers.
Secret connections linking Al-Qaeda, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, says Abu Zubaydah, one of bin Laden's 'brain trust' terror architects, now drugged off his face in American custody.
1:44 PM
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Children are very efficient killers
Children are the weakest victims, the easiest recruits, and often, the most effective killers. At a certain age the mind can just absorb, digest or obliterate. Trauma comes later, or it doesn't. That just depends on the type. The LRA, operational in some form or another since the late 80s, consists of child warriors and men who spat out their youth coming through the ranks: hardened, brutalised, utterely desensitised, or maybe dying to escape, or maybe dying by trying.
The LRA has its immediate origin in the civil war between Milton Obete's Acholi army (Obete was Ugandan president both pre- and post-Idi Amin) and Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army. Before Museveni's eventual military victory Obete was ousted by an Acholi army officer, Tito Okello, who then entered into the Nairobi peace accord with Museveni. This broke within weeks, and the NRA forced Okello's fighters to retreat North. In August 1987, the remains of Okello's army, who had fled to Southern Sudan, formed a rebel alliance with other opponents of the Museveni regime. One of these rebel units was called the Holy Spirit Mobile Force and led by an Acholi mystic and prophetess called Alice Lakwena. Lakwena told the Acholis that she was possessed by the Holy Spirit and would purge them of witches and sinners. She claimed that her fighters could repel bullets. She would annoint them with shea butter oil and the bullets would bounce off their skin. Fusing the roles of spiritual healer and military leader, Lakwena fermented a millenarian uprising. Aided by an enthused Acholi population, the Holy Spirit Mobile Force advanced to within 60 miles of Uganda's Southern capital, Kampali, where they finally met a large NRA force. Armed with rifles and stones, and smeared in shea butter oil, Lakwena's followers were massacred by the modern artillery of the government troops. Lakwena herself, like some macabre cross between Alice Coltrane and Rwanda's Hutu Power Madame Agathe, fled to Kenya.
After this defeat the Acholi rebel force largely disintegrated, but a small group remained in the bush under the command of Lakwena's 20-yr old relative, Joseph Kony. Kony claimed to be Lakwena's spiritual successor, and to share her religious powers. They had even been involved in special ceremonies together, he said. He would accomplish her mission to otherthrow the Southern-biased government, purify the Acholi people, and run Uganda according to the Ten Commandments. These aims would be achieved through violence; he called his fighters the Lord's Resistance Army.
Throughout the 90s, the LRA didn't pose a real threat to state power, but they were impossible to actually defeat. And in the North they perpetuated numberless atrocities and abducted thousands of children, absorbing them into their rank-and-file. A terrifying mix of The Pied Piper and Battle Royale, children were forced to kill their relatives and other children, either to punish those who had tried to escape, or just as a ritual, a rite-of-passage, or an excercise. They were raped and starved and trained as guerillas. They became slaves, guards, and soldiers. Girls as young as 11 would be taken as 'wives' or concubines. Later, when Sudan began to fund the LRA because of political hostilities with Uganda, they would be given as 'gifts' to arms dealers in Sudan. The LRA set up camps in Southern Sudan, and made guerilla raids into Northern Uganda, as well as wreaking havoc in their Sudanese locality.
To most of the fighters the actual ideology behind all this remained obscure, despite Kony's occasional sermons. The LRA were characterised as deranged Christian fundamentalists, but the reality was more complex, of course, and murkier. Kony was raised a Catholic but his litany of rituals was more eclectic, drawing on various Christian traditions, Acholi tribal religion and, more recently, elements of Islam (notably, during the period of support from Sudan's Islamic-dominated government). Kony personally benefited from the conflict to a staggering degree: he had about 20 wives, scores of cars, buildings in townships, trading centres in Acholi, and other forms of property. Ugandan officials considered him a villian, making profit from prolonged Ugandan/Sudanese hostilities, child abduction, massacres, and the economic and social disruption of the Acholi districts. This status quo ended last year, when Sudan promised to stop funding the LRA and, alongside Uganda, flush out their camps and detain their fighters. The renewed intensity of LRA invasions and abductions in Northern Uganda is simply a result of this crackdown.
12:17 AM
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
1260th Day
Midweek. Antichrist...has been resurrected from the dead.
9:25 PM
Monday, September 08, 2003
The vox and the fole
When one says that heterology scientifically considers the question of heterogeneity, one does not mean that heterology is, in the usual sense of such a formula, the science of the heterogenous. The heterogenous is even resolutely placed outside the reach of scientific knowledge, which by defintion is only applicable to homogenous elements. Above all, heterology is opposed to any homogenous reperesentation of the world, in other words, to any philosophical system. The goal of such repersentations is always the deprivation of our universe's sources of excitation and the development of a servile human species, fit only for the fabrication, rational consumption, and conservation of products.
Georges Bataille The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade
Cave systems. Insect tracks, tunnels, pathways, hollows and hovels. The broken cliffs afford shelter in their crevices, arches, ravines and cut-aways. Matted grass, fescue, lichen. Lizzards scuttle over beds of thyme and rock rose. "There are unconfirmed reports of swifts nesting in the cliffs." Jackdaws drive out choughs. Linnets and yellowhammers in windshorn shrub. Kingfishers make their way to the sea, ring ouzels from inland. Snow buntings on the cliffs in late October. The hunt of fox and vole. Natural slit in the cliff face walled off, held by smugglers. Tales. A tease. Relics of the Pleistocene era. Beneath here, unseen, that is, trapped, petrified. Cave bear, hyena, ox, bison, woolly rhinoceras, mammoth and reindeer. Also, animal bones, fragments of pottery, weapons. Hard winds full of ice and sleet, and a cold grave. Sea plantation and rock samphire seeking out sea-spray. Blind like bats, flowers stretching for the sun. Sharp bursts of thrift and squill. Rock plants of sub-aerial scree. Limestone cliffs rise, hit by Atlantic gales. Crowned by a navigational beacon, the plateau curves down from its summit. Life hums, sings and simmers on the exposed tidal channel. Brittle stars lose arms among the rolling pebbles. Starfish stranded on the high shore after storms. Hermit crabs scuttle among the wrack. Gulls pick their way through smashed sea shells and disembowelled shore crabs. "The sky near Burryholms was blackened with birds." A fierce and remarkable autumn. A mass of whirling starlings. A vast, ominous, teeming roost. The air bites. Air bites. Driftlines of seaweed. Cliff and dune weeds flourish in the turbulence of wind speed and wave action. Ice-crusts form in shallow waters. Carrion crows scour the shoreline. Submerged forest of unexploded bombshells. Cliff walk promenade of concrete shelters, cracked and warped. A wartime artillery observation post at the North point. Quicksands everywhere. A grey Atlantic seal, stranded at the cove. Exhausted auks blown inshore by winter gales. Catching prey, lassoo cells. Sea rush zone. "The milky latex of sea spurge." Clotted seaweed: red algae, oarweed, kelp. Fragments of razor, mussel and other seashells. She sells. Sea drift, artefacts. Ship trash, slip trash: lobster cages, rubber gloves, plastic bottles, knotted rope and tupperware. Lost and found: broken biros, cig filters, plastic straws, gull feathers. Crab corpse covered in sandflies. Scatter of delicate urchin exoskeletons. Clandestine mission creep of limpets. Hyrbid swarm of parasites and scavengers. The crackle, spit and splutter of rock pools, molecular warzones, tide receding. Refracted roar of RAF jets across the horizon. Monkfish thrown back overboard and washed ashore. Winter whistle of Oystercatchers spinning through the howl and hiss of wind and rain. Cormorants perched on the balcony and lantern balustrade of the last cast-iron lighthouse. Peregrine perched on a dead tree trunk. Piles of cockelshells. Stranded false killer whales. Sawbills and scoter tackle rip-tides and currents. Seals swirling through a strong swell. Pintail arrive from breeding grounds in the Baltic. Whole rafts on the wind in dance. Airborne raptor, dropping, arcing, cutting, ascending. Looking back amongst the debris on the high tide line.
Not surprisingly, there are a number of legends associated with the monument, the most popular being that the capstone was once a pebble flung away by King Arthur, who found it in his shoe while walking in Llanelli. The stone is also claimed to have been split by a blow from Excalibur, Arthur's sword (or according to a later variation, by St David to prove it was not sacred), and that on Midsummer Eve the stone goes down to the Burry stream, to drink.
Excerpt from Historic Gower
A school of dolphins playing off-shore mid-june. Ghost-grey basking shark looms like a phantom from prehistory. Blue lobsters and red crabs. Hoverflies, bluebottles, and wasps throughout summer months. Many butterflies, bees and weeds. Droneflies, wasps and greenbottles. The hum of wings. Small coppers and orange tips. Red admirals skimming the sea surface. Wandering groups of free range ponies. Bracken, bramble, gorse and rushes web across limestone, moor and meadow. Bared soil, delicate flower-trails, fragile blue flowers. Wheat and barley fields and corn crops. The trace of stream and ditch absorbed by rock during summer. Pasture reverted to scrubland, overrun by gorse, hawthorn and rose. Tussocks of moor-grass and rushes. Mossy mounds. Store cattle, wild horse and branded sheep. A stoat atop a telegraph pole. A mob of ravens. Velvety blankets of rare grass and smooth lids of algea. Cuckoo flower and silver weed. Freshwater swamps, ravenous bogs. Acres and volumes of sandhills sprinkled with birch spinneys and willow slacks. Oscillation of wind-combed dunes. Sand is always on the move. Rusted barbed wire and bonfire remains like sacrifical residue. Arid sandy slopes. Dry dune meadow. Misty skyline. A medieval sea wall colonised by thistles. A village lost inside dense woodland. A house that was a hotel. An abandoned quarry. The lost trail of ancient relics, the erasure of events and exchanges. Barrows, dolmens, menhirs and castles. A calamitous Norman stronghold on a cliff top. The castle that is haunted and cursed, and its story. Lost links and folds of time eclipsed by flora, wood and sand. Crumbling walls, leafy lanes, coils of road and hedgerow. Farmland that ends at a cliff face. Caravan sites, villages and hamlets. Bare paths and car parks. Land Rovers, Range Rovers, a bottlegreen Jaguar, a red Alfa Romeo. Summer pudding, strawberries and bucket, spade and net. White sails, anchored yachts, fishing trawlers, and a handsome ferry. A tidal island, a sweep of sand, a range of dunes. Expanse of mudflats and estuary, wooded cliffs on the North shore, eventually merging into coal fields and hills. Across a stile, down a muddy path, between gorse and nettle, dancing past adders and grass snakes. Very smooth pebbles, a brook full of ferns. Cut drainage channel and a sluice gate. A sheltered bridge quite high above a stream. A small church hidden in woodland by the side of a bleak bay. Light showers and dewfall. Transparent slats of sunlight through crowding cloud. The escape of dappled spots. These turn to shafts. These turn to bursts. Then sheets. Still until the incoming tide laps your toes, a gull perched on ragged rocks. Sun drips and collapses like a sodden pudding. There's a music of
Thrushes crack snail shells open on tarmac baths and discarded bottles. There's the art and order of erosion and accretion, for example, the succesion and balance of deconstructional and constructional waves, dragging and depositing material, i.e. pebbles and boulders, wearing down the angles, displacing and replacing, with no total loss or gain of material. But there is also the sea eating away at limestone shelves, and its random appetite and unpredictable attack. There is also the crenellations this creates, the refuge, nests and hideaways. Sedimentation and colonisation. This is the living space and the no-mans land between creation and waste. Of birth, death, folklore, legend, tragedy and shipwreck, holiday and labour, migration and passage.
1:37 PM
Sunday, September 07, 2003
I survived a two day train trip - where's my fucking prize
Watkins has endurance, I give him that. Here he is en route through the middle of China, a latter day gentleman abroad, of sorts:
I have just completed a monster train trip from Urumqi to Xian. A forty six hour endurance test on a hard seater in the midst of the chaotic rush back to school. Cramped up in a shit stained human zoo fighting for leg room and sleep space amongst peasants, granite faced Nazi attendents, stressed students and slack jawed gawkers. Dealing with gunge blocked sinks at every turn, petty officials that checked my ticket twenty times and the incontinence of young and old alike. Things went bad from the start with a hour delay at departure, a portent of things to come. Soon after we left my rucksuck, now bleached white from the sands of the Taklamakan, fell off the rack onto my bonce. That wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't glanced the arm of the girl opposite, and if said delicate flower diddn't have a yahoo military boyfriend. Still, the whole argument/Chinese pushing contest and intelligible interrogation by the guards/transport cops manged to kill an hour.
The rest of the journey was spent in pained frustration. There are two parts to the discomfort a forreigner will face on a Chinese train. The first is merely physical, despite the name the seat is soft but the back is at right angles to the bottom, making any kind of lasting sleep impossible and causing your vertabrea to decide to edge out of alignment. I managed to deal with that by buying a big book before departure and phase out of actual consciousness during the days, while sleeping under the table during the nights with a sharpened chopstick in case anyone's feet got too close. This former tactic will only work if you a): pretend to be completely ignorent in Chinese- as I did at the start of the trip; or b) you start acting like crazy person- which really wasn't that hard to fake after the second night. The second is the inevitable Let's stare/poke/talk Chinese at the laowai even though he's told them he does't under stand. Together these two factors create stress levels that are indeed both horrible and fascinating to endure. I shared my trip facing the Chinese Chuckle Brothers, whose eyes and manky smiles never seemed to leave me. Of course going for a smoke is itself almost an open invitation to an impromptu english corner with whoever's in the bridge between compartments- despite the fact that all the english they know is "hello" and I don't want to talk. I even had one eager student try to wake me up at Three o clock in the morning for a smoke and a chat (He asked later that morning why I stabbed him). In addition such respites in the standing area often left me trapped close to the mobile samovar as a mob of passengers fought for the last of the hot water brandishing their flasks and tea jam jars, or surrounded by parents holding their half naked sprog as they vented all manner of waste products from their bodies.
I should me more pissed off/wasted than I am. I'm probably just pleased I made it, I'm definately getting more patient in my old age, after all I only shouted "cunts" at the massed assembly round me three times during the whole odyssey.
Other than that I have been to Urumqi. The furthest city from the sea in the world and capital of Xinjiang Province. Definetly a Chinese city, though with a more tasteful use of neon than normal: all identikit buildings, sky scrapers with bad taste planning permission, wide tree laned boulevards, lion headed yappy type dogs and the constant whisper of "laowai" as I moved around. I'd like to say I did more but after a three day sleeper bus trip through the desert- another nightmare journey*- all I was up for was drinking and bowling with the Chinese military in our hotel. I was hanging around with an english guy and a bloke called Klaus, definately Germany's version of Mez, a force of nature that got us in all manner of scrapes but kept me laughing the entire time. However on the culture side I managed to see the mummies of the Silk Road, settlers of Indo-European or even Celtic origin. A fascinating collection of specimens and an excellent place to bring easily scared high school students, even if it was housed in what amounted to somebody's shed while the museum for them is built according to an almost geological schedule (Very typical of Xinjiang that).
* That said, it was pretty cool stopping off for a beer in the middle of the Taklamakan, seeing the silouhettes of the dunes in a neon lit hamlet of brothels , built soley for the Chinese Oil workers and their monster trucks.
8:47 PM
Friday, September 05, 2003
airborne raptor, dropping, arcing, cutting, ascending
you find me a better one than this
7:45 PM
869th Day
Two witnesses begin 1,260 day ministry, Revelation 11:3. They will be warning the Jews of the imminent Russian-Syrian invasion. Their ministry will be during both halves of the 70th Week because of Revelation 11:6, which shows God's judgment of water to blood, which occurs in last half; and Revelation 11:10, which shows world rejoicing at the death of two witnesses. If they ministered only in the last half, the world would be terrified and mourning at sight of returning Lord, not rejoicing. If they minister only first half, how can waters turn to blood, which is God's wrath? Witnesses preach against beast and harlot church and for the coming of Jesus in power and glory. Jesus comes in 1,651 days.
Days of religious, political deception (world peace) will be shortened or elect would be deceived. Days shortened by Russian confederacy invading the Middle East sometime between the 869th and 1,230th day, Ezekiel 38, Daniel 11. World War III erupts, probably nuclear and conventional. Takes peace from earth, Revelation 6:4.
1,230th Day
Russian-Syrian leader takes away sacrifices of Jews, Daniel 8:11, 11:31, 12:11. Within 30 days the first of seven trumpet judgments begin as God destroys Russian-Syrian armies, Ezekiel 38:22, Revelation 8:7. Days of war and sudden destruction shortened or all flesh perish, (nuclear war) Matthew 24:22. Jesus comes in 1,290 days, Daniel 12:11)
Babylon the Great is falling
Time is precious for anyone within a few miles of ground zero. Such individuals have no time to watch the mushroom cloud, gather personal items, calculate the distance from ground zero, or estimate the weapon's yield. As a general rule, if an individual can see a mushroom cloud, he is exposed to the initial radiation and heat. Thus every fraction of a second in the open increases radiation dose and the likelihood of serious thermal burns. The instant an individual realises that a nuclear expolosion has occurred, he should place as much solid material between his position and the rising fireball. The solid material can be a concrete or brick wall, deep ditch, building (preferably not constructed of glass), or anything that can act as a shield against radiation and heat.
Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Terrorism: Emergency Response and Public Protection
get in this maze, I love it, it's terrific...
12:39 PM
Thursday, September 04, 2003
Rising sea temperatures and altered climatic conditons slowly transform the wild fabric of this crumbling isle. Swallows and cuckoos arrive early and stay late. Red admiral, comma and peacock butteflies extend their ranges North. Little egrets breed. Olive and citrus trees are poised to replace oak and beech in Southern England. On the Norfolk coast a tourist reports a flamingo. Wallabies breed in Somerset, Kent, Bedford and the Lake District. The land is overrun with voles, the sea with jellyfish. Tropical fish replace cod and herring in warmer southern waters. Fishing fleets catch 3 metre sunfish in their nets off the South coast. Devonshire vineyards grow merlot and cabernet sauvignon grapes. Rhubarb is virtually extinct. Gardeners report bumper banana crops. Hammerhead sharks arrive off the coast and a 12ft great white was seen eating its way through a shoal of fish off North Devon.
A teenager suffered horrific burns after being doused in petrol and set on fire for knocking over a freshly made Pot Noodle, a court heard yesterday.
12:16 AM
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
I take none of it back, but I wish I hadn't said it, that's all. There's no point in erasing it: it's there now, for better or worse, probably worse, but perhaps better, if I'm lucky, if standards are really that low. I went crazy like Galvatron. I lost it. All burning ends in embers and extinction, so remain ice-cold, ice-cold...like Soundwave. Curse that upsurge, that swell. Curse the fresh air, the dewfall, the raindrops. Dumb soul...ice cold! No, because letting go like that just wastes words, drains the image and the view. You say too much: this is not a story after all. Well, you know, you can only face the sea alone. You'd stay silent for sure, right? Stare down the tide. Denuded. Stripped. Eroded. I literally wrote with fear in my eye: mistake. Wrote courage rather than keeping it. I went into the waves, 2ft shore break, not big, but a hard break on the steep sand. Struck head against centrifugal force, circular energy. Mild grey sea beneath an expanse of grey cloud: well, we swam anyway, and the colours came out for us. Curse this sickness, this sentiment, my pencil marks, my scrawl. At least this: I feel healthy at last. I lost it, you get it? There is this and there is that. There is bric and there is brac. There is hook, line and sinker. What entertainment. You dumb enigma. What an erosion, what an endpoint! My holiday...it was bracing.
people are seeing strange birds everywhere...
11:35 PM
Friday, August 15, 2003
I want the passion
which puts your feet on the ceiling
this fist
to smash forward
Osip Mandelstam
There is a bullet hole in a pane of glass: it's so neat that the glass has barely fractured. A small black hole rimmed by an outer ring of compact shattered glass, like a pupil surrounded by an iris, or a geological map of a volcano. It changes as you look at it; it could be many different things. The further away it gets from what it is, the more beautiful it looks. Washington DC, October, 2002: body slumps onto a car seat, back window splattered with brain, bone and blood > There is a woman with her back to you and she has a fine figure: tall, slim, and strong. She stands well, arms dropped to her sides, an iron pot clutched in her right hand, her head draped in a large silk scarf blown by a slight dry breeze. In front of her, her house, its front blown off, clothes and furniture crushed between smashed concrete and tile. The thing is, you can't see her face. But I like her posture: it suggests defiance. Jenin, May, 2002 > There is a man standing triumphant behind a flock of fine French flags. It's Le Pen, fists clenched, smile wide. France, April, 2002 > There is a man carrying a faint body out of an opera house. There is a soldier and a stunned crowd. Footage is grainy. Moscow, October, 2002 > There is a demonstration, a coffin, a bomb, a sign. I have the pictures, all I have is pictures. There is an intense pitch which becomes nothing but the inability to retreat. There are many random processes, more than there are coherent procedures. There is wasted time, there is a lot of wasted time. I waste time: my eyes scan the magazine rack and are greedy for the pictures and the words, greedy for the past and the future. I consume, I gorge, on fact and face and fate. I am dazzled, and hungry. Enough! I leave because I am brave, wade through a stale breeze, back onto the street. The world is full of things >
The weight of a small bird is sufficient to move the earth
Leonardo da Vinci
There is this sort of wry smile or this look of contempt or there is this determination and this quiet strengh or this fragile but fierce power. There are these strong, clear, beautiful eyes, full of tears. There is the measure and the mass of all pain inflicted and felt. There is disengagement and the need to disappear. There is a chain of events that begins with a simple misunderstanding and leads to conflict and disintegration. There is courage in blindness and weakness in hindsight. There is intuition and knowledge, the gift of one, the curse of the other. There is always something you couldn't say, or something you meant to say, or something you shouldn't have said. There are always things you do not expect from others: surprises, but disappointments too. There are standards, risks, elevations and deprivations. There is honesty, resistance, and a combination of the two that takes you forward. There is the impatience of sensation and expression, the violent impatience that breaks syntax and perception. There is ill-discipline and joy. There is the constant heat broken by the clear cold. There is conflict and resolution and the words that cross between. There are the lost points of a compass. There is the abandonment of navigation. There is the undiscovered island. There is the teeming archipelago. There is the lost tribe. There is desert sand free of footprints and tire tracks. There is the fog of battle. There are the fir trees of North Carolina: fog forest and trees. There is the ocean that devours, crushes the breath from your lungs, spits out bones and dreams. There is the ocean that captures the colours of climate, conquest and creation. There are the extremes of boredom and heartbreak. There is the extreme drama and delight of beauty: a face, a joke, a kiss, a good sky. There is a trip down the Nile, evening on a beach, an unexpected meeting. There is something untouched inside always. There is something to redeem if you dare.
Lost at sea. Yes it's a nice idea for a while, but fucking unnerving...Seeyou later. 12, 1 ish, your time.
This is the opposite of waste. But don't horde, don't hide. This is not the opposite of anything, this is the appetite for everything. This is the affirmation I promised all along. An oil tanker cut in two, a black tide, a gannet sinking in an oil-slick. Weather and waves break up oil. Silver seals dance all through springtime. Guillemots fly. The falcon ascends. If this is a time for fear then don't be afraid. This is: and rather than or. Strengh rather than power. This is how I would like to end and yet it is merely the point from which I will continue. The mass of bodies crossing a bridge during a city blackout provokes fear and apprehension when it should inspire elation, festivity, hope. This meltdown and this collapse suggests the possibility and probability of new connections and escape routes. The tender, temperate complexities of dream and reality. A boat to Stockholm, a hotel room in Hamburg, frying fish on Swansea sand, lost in Venetian backstreets. Don't lose these threads. Don't lose sight of this: the search for alliance, affinity, an imagination to curve with, compliment and extend your own. We're cowards about love: a disaster, or a spent currency, or too absolute. But we overload it: it's easy. When we speed, we cruise, city voyagers in a Hackney carriage, it doesn't demand extraction or capitulation. Eternal summer gilds us. When this ends, we are still alive, you and I. When we arrive this will end. We become part of the soil, the air, the rain, the sunlight. Or we drift, spread and bud like seeds. Right now, we're nowhere near, but we will get there. In the meantime, the world is full of things. Let's go exploring.
In one way or another, the animal is more a fleer than a fighter, but its flights are also conquests, creations.
Deleuze and Guattari
12:43 AM
Thursday, August 14, 2003
Missive from Chinese Turkistan
Mr. Watkins continues my global education, while I go green. Next year I leave the country.
> Its five past eight here, or five past six depending
>whether you use Beijing or Xinjiang time. Despite this Province
>being the size of Western Europe China refuses to budge on a uniform
>time zone, creating a myriad of transport problems for me, not to
>mention contributing to my general confusion.
> I'm in Kashgar, perhaps the furthest west city in China,
>a place where the silk road splits into its northern and southern
>routes east around the Taklamakan Desert. I've only been a few hours
>but its clear how different this place is from China. The city
>itself is typical in terms of its layout: Wide flat highways,
>avenues lined by white tile housing and clothes horse gated
>compunds, medium size block shaped towers of blue glass and steel,
>yet it seems to be in a completely different continent.
> While the streets resound to the constant refrain of
>horns the shop signs are written both in characters and the Arabic
>script of the Uyghur language. The Han Chinese population is sharply
>differentiated from the multicultural makeup of the majority of the
>populace, which also includes Kazaks and Kyrgz. I've walked down
>streets where brown skinned Asiatic Turkic men slowly pace down
>market streets, long wisps of white hair streaming from their chins.
>In narrow alleys pale skinned, round cap wearing figures sip their
>tea while kebabs cook on a raised trough on the street, watching the
>WWF on the television, a scene so reminiscent of Turkey I lost a
>sense of where I was. Blond haired boys play in the street, or work
>along side their fathers, hatchet in hand, building wooden toys.
>While Greek looking artisans, clad in dark clothes and flat cap
>hammer hot metal into teapots, tossing the waste shards in a molten
>pile a few steps outside the shaded wooden workshop. Its clear to
>see the remains of the trade route from Rome to Xian, the faces of
>numerous nomadic groups, the collected nations of the Chaghatai
>khanate in the faces of the people that stream around the city.
> Not that I've seen too much of the women's faces here.
>Islamic dress is almost mandatory down the crowded side streets and
>teeming bazaars. Women wear patterned skirts and long sleved tops,
>encrusted with sequins. While some bare their heads, most young wear
>a seethrough, light headscarf with rabbit ears of cloth tied at the
>back. Older counterparts are dressed with dark hoods that touch
>their shoulders and stretch down to their lower back. Some dumpy
>figures wear a hijab that makes a burka look like a plate glass
>window, a croched brown mesh cowl that does not even give freedom to
>the eyes.
> That said no one seems to the two women I am travelling
>with much hassle, perhaps because they were chaperoned by an
>englishman and myself. Also because the bare arms and legs of female
>Chinese girls is very apparent. People actually are very friendly
>here, with the traditions of hospitality and generosity that is
>similar to the middle east. As we tried to order in an Uyghur
>restuarant we had some problems for a while until one of the waiters
>said: "I'm sorry, I don't speak Chinese, but we can talk in
>English". I thought that was great, just like people in Wales
>Uyghurs will feign ignorence due to what they view as the colonial
>actions of the Chinese, whose settler population increases every
>year. However to us they seem to be very eager to makes friends,
>while trying to get me to buy a carpet.
4:53 PM
oh my Dubai
liquid city
Dubai is a coastal settlement, centred on a sheltered creek that feeds into the Persian Gulf. Its people initially lived by fishing, pearling and small-scale agriculture and this remained so until the late 1800s, when Dubai's then ruler granted concessions to traders, prompting many to switch custom from Iran and Sharjah. In 1903 the British shipping line used Dubai as a base, which brought it into contact with British India for the first time. The city grew as a trading outpost and continually improved facilities to entice and entertain traders. These are its fundamentals: trade and leisure. Dubai is a maritime city, a coastal emirate. It owes its existence to water, rivers, the seas and the oceans. It owes its success to sailing skill and technique, boat technology, navigation, and free trade (the circulation of goods and capital in fluid forms and networks). Dubai is self-conscious about its maritime origin and heritage: some of its most famous buildings share the same architecural motifs, mimicking vast sails or waves. Two impressive examples: the Burj Al Arab hotel (one of the tallest buildings in the world and the only 7-star hotel, it lies on an artificial island and bursts up into the sky in a great white swoosh of sail constructed with double-Teflon-coated glass fibre) and the National Bank of Dubai (this is more like a sculpture than a building: its convex glass front again resembles a vast, gleaming sail, this time rendered with a sheer and shimmering Futurist vigour). Another good example is the Dubai Creek Golf and Yacht Club clubhouse. One more crucial factor: in 1966 Dubai discovered oil, and this was the final catalyst in the city's ecomomic and social development. Added to the liquid routes and networks of commerce and trade was liquid gold. Dubai could now exploit and export its own wealth and remain the site and host for alien transactions. Dubai is a liquid city: its image is reflected in water, oil spills from its veins, trade converts solid assets into fluid capital. It is a purely post-industrial city, a late city with no basis in manufacture or heavy industry: oil extraction is its only concession to blue-collar labour. All else is transaction, speculation, and material luxury. Dubai's substance is contained on the software of a million laptops, the rest scatters on a sea breeze.
index to a future world
cultural hinge, taster, litmus test
quasar
Dubai is a city still under construction, a speculative and daring vision Sheikh Mohammed has begun to realise. Dubai is currently a projection of a future, exclusive Utopian city. Despite desperately low manual and menial wages, Dubai is inventing itself as the prototype city of wealth, luxury and surface detail. This is the city of work and play combined: an executive playground, a business quasar. It's not a decadent city, as such, it excells at ease and expense rather than debauchery. It's an Islamic city so laws are strict. Pornography and drugs are illegal and related crimes are heavily punished. Street vendors, car-washers and beggars are also outlawed, and the only vendors that do persist are DVD piraters. There is no cheap accommodation in Dubai, no youth hostels, no backpackers. There is no income or sales tax. Money circulates in Dubai like oxygen and blood. Life centres on little else. Massive construction projects begin constantly, artificial islands, beach resorts, luxury hotels, apartments and villas, all exclusive and expensive. Dubai is a future destination that has yet to arrive. Opulent houses and apartments on the Palm resorts have sold out before being built. Dubai lights the imagination of the world's richest: they want in on the Sheikh's vision of synthetic splendor. Dubai is a city that is styled: a city designed in its entirety, totally inorganic: a plastic Utopia. Traditional past-times and events are encouraged, such as falconry, camel racing and dhow sailing, but this is token and insignificant. The real culture is elsewhere: in the Gold Souk (a nest of streets dealing exclusively in gold) or the month-long Dubai Shopping Festival which attracts over 2.5 million visiters each year. The city spills out year by year: bands of new apartments, offices, restaurants, hotels, square metres of retail space, entertainment and lesuire facilities. Dubia deals in certain basics. Important to the appeal of Dubai in this future projection is the "greening" programme. Dubai being, essentially, a desert city, it holds little aesthetic appeal to its future visitors and settlers in this current state, so grass, palm trees and flowers are introduced and maintained by vast numbers of workers and a 24 hour watering programme. Dubai is the template for the perfect future city, no crime, low tax, and a cultural hierachy of finance and consumerism. The city stripped to its essentials.
future modes of existence perfected
style encased in style
luxury as law
I have a vision. I look to the future, 20, 30 years. I learnt that from my father, Sheikh Rashid. He is the true father of Modern Dubai. I follow his example. He would rise early and go alone to watch what was happening on each of his projects. I do the same. I watch. I read faces. I take decisions and I move fast. Full throttle.
Sheikh Mohammed
postscript: just discovered this: Dubai plans to build the world's first underwater hotel! Called Hydropolis, the hotel will resemble a giant submarine anchored in the Gulf, and accessed only by a tunnel via a waterside reception area.
12:19 AM
Wednesday, August 13, 2003
hot weapons
One Russian arrested two years ago in Italy had flown an Antonov 124 to Kiev and loaded it with 113 tonnes of rifles, rocket propelled grenades and ammunition for the Ivory Coast.
2:49 PM
Johnny Depp in action
KUALA LUMPUR, Aug. 12 (AP)--Pirates with automatic weapons opened fire on a
Taiwanese cargo ship near Indonesia's troubled Aceh province last week,
wounding the vessel's captain, a maritime official said Tuesday.
The attackers pursued the ship for an hour Saturday in Indonesian waters near
the northern tip of Sumatra island, said Noel Choong, head of the
International Maritime Bureau's Malaysian-based piracy watch center.
The pirates eventually disappeared without boarding the ship, which had been
carrying a large cargo of fish to Singapore, Choong said.
It was the eighth pirate attack in the area that has been reported to the
center since May.
Choong said authorities couldn't confirm whether the attackers might have
included rebels who have been fighting for an independent state in Aceh, an
oil-
and gas-rich province in northern Sumatra.
The ship's Taiwanese captain, Lo Ying-hsiung, was shot in the leg during the
attack.
No injuries occurred among the rest of the 31-member crew, that included
Taiwanese, Chinese, Philippine and Vietnamese citizens.
The 900-kilometer (550-mile) Malacca Strait, between peninsular Malaysia and
Sumatra, is one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.
The International Maritime Bureau has long listed the strait's entrance near
Aceh as a high-risk area where ships are commonly robbed or hijacked by
pirates armed with rifles and machetes.
12:47 PM
Tuesday, August 12, 2003
Tears of St. Lawrence: oh! beautiful
6:10 PM
Monday, August 11, 2003
That Sunday Times story about women undergoing foot surgery in order to wear "sexy power shoes" (re:"The brutal rule of fashion" below) is a sinister echo of the Grimm's Cinderella. Cinderella's wicked step-sisters ("beautiful and fair of face, but vile and black of heart") are prompted by their mother to literally disfigure themselves in a desperate attempt to fit Cinderella's shoe and defraud Prince Charming. This is from the, ah, "uncut" version:
Next morning, he went with it to the father, and said to him, no one shall be my wife but she whose foot this golden slipper fits. Then were the two sisters glad, for they had pretty feet. The eldest went with the shoe into her room and wanted to try it on, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said, "Cut the toe off, when you are queen you will have no more need to go on foot." The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the king's son. Then he took her on his his horse as his bride and rode away with her. They were obliged, however, to pass the grave, and there, on the hazel-tree, sat the two pigeons and cried,
"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
there's blood within the shoe,
the shoe it is too small for her,
the true bride waits for you."
Then he looked at her foot and saw how the blood was trickling from it. He turned his horse round and took the false bride home again, and said she was not the true one, and that the other sister was to put the shoe on. Then this one went into her chamber and got her toes safely into the shoe, but her heel was too large. So her mother gave her a knife and said, "Cut a bit off your heel, when you are queen you will have no more need to go on foot." The maiden cut a bit off her heel, forced her foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the king's son. He took her on his horse as his bride, and rode away with her, but when they passed by the hazel-tree, the two pigeons sat on it and cried,
"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
there's blood within the shoe,
the shoe it is too small for her,
the true bride waits for you."
He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking quite red. Then he turned his horse and took the false bride home again.
An allegoric shard, re: Sex and the City diktat: Rules of attraction reduce to self-abuse, deceit and, occasionally, despair and self-contempt. It becomes so that The Hollow hurts. The pleasure of being ruled by the shape and the cut of hardcore fashion criteria is physical pain. Wincing with delight and adoration, the body has to bend and crush and slice and re-arrange to the dictation of line, form, fabric, material. Suffer for style: punish, self-mutilate, impair and wear. This gorgeous fetish object seeped in blood, broken skin and splintered bone.
Shoes rule!
Shoes do rule: just ask the Salvador Dali caress. Shoes rule: Guy Bourdin will erase the girl, murder the girl to pore the shoes, covet the livid pink, red or black patent leather shoes. (And he hates them too: hates their domination, their symbolic power.) Enigmatic and arbitrary aesthetic codes: the secret language of the commodity fetishist. This world of erotic detail is
Hot black leather Louis Vuitton slingbacks, uPVC-white Miu Miu wedges, Gucci turqoiuse leather stillettos, large strap black Hogan sandles, Anya Hindmarch red and white stripe canvas flats, Laurence Dacade silver leather boots plus tassles, Free Lance metallic heels, Pied a Terre snakeskin flats, Marni leather sandles with chain detail, Jil Sander leather and mesh sandles with ankle tie, knee-high Gaultier lace-up boots...
Patrick Cox adverts, March 2003. Sophie Dahl photographed by David Lachapelle: sandal-strap and white leather heels focus a soft hi-gloss erotic glaze of flesh-tone metal lockers, wall tiles, towels and a tennis racket; Dahl lost in vague, vapid or virulent washes of desire that emanate from the feet up.
...Sergio Rossi mesh and patent leather sandals, Kurt Geiger B&W leather peep-toe shoes, Chanel Boutique crepe stillettos with wire accesories, Prada canvas art-nouveau pattern low heels, Jimmy Choo satin boots, Givenchy black leather knee-high boots with silver lock detail, sublime Sergio Rosssi satin and velvet sandals with crystals, Helmut Lang black suede boots with leather wedge heel, Casadei PVC thigh-lengh boots, virulent Charles Jourdin red patent-leather zip-up ankle boots...
shoes shoes fucking shoes ok oh just swoon
the altar: 133 Kensington High Street, W8.
My mind defiled, de-filed.
tossing bodies off boats...
1:05 PM
"I'm not GAM (Free Aceh Movement), I'm NKRI (Unitary Republic of Indonesia)
to the core," said Fatimah, 29, who is being detained in Lhokseumawe prison,
North Aceh.
11:50 AM
Sunday, August 10, 2003
a. Jaish Mohammed: a kind of wish-fulfillment actually fulfilled, just not quite at the right moment.
b. The brutal rule of fashion: The surgeon shortened Richards’s second toe by removing a piece of bone, straightened her little toe and cut off a bunion. Her operation took place in February so she could enjoy the summer in peek-a-boo sandals.
12:41 PM
Saturday, August 09, 2003
Orange moon. Stanstead flightpaths dot a deep August evening. Heavy air compresses sound, the street is like a vacuum. The street is, actually, gorgeous right now, in this heavy, heady twilight, all its rage implicit, sapped, beaten by the heat, bad boys stuck in doorways in vests. And full of slow-motion, sodden, sensual beauty: fit girls in a kind of element, drifting or driving through the sullen air, the soft air, the slow air. Like the opening scene in A Touch of Evil: deadly hot night, song drifting, skirting the glaze and glow of neon and lamplight, low roar of cars, high heels scraping the street. The song here is some kind of ragga karaoke event in the back room of a cafe, crowds milling on the pavement, sitting on railings sipping malt liquer and lager, smoking cigs and weed. The city contains itself, in this heat especially: creates its own extreme heat island, hotter than offical Met office predictions, its own coping strategies, its own routines, incubated in hot, thick air. This heat lives. It gestates new organisms, new lifeforms. New modes of behaviour. New codes. This heat seeps in. You sweat it out, and it sneaks back in through the pores. It gets into your bloodstream and your bones absorb the heat like concrete. Cells swell, veins suck and palpitate, skin purrs. Brainwaves buckle like railway tracks...! The air is like feverish sleep. Sink into city heat like the sea. I like this heat. It's exotic. It unwinds The UK. The old isle cracks. The sunny or cloudy or damp English summer dies not correspond: this heat is new. Pressure builds, is released, builds, is released: a layered pattern. A chaotic pattern of instinct and intention. You stop and then you move. The heat dictates your movements and your actions. The heat drives you and exhausts you. It creates an appetite for life and denies the satisfaction. It's a gift and a curse: mostly, a test. It says: how do you exist? And how do you exist now? Do you adapt, or do you die out? I eat: Ice Cream Mars, and other heavy-duty dairy or carbonated products, and think about the freedom of the sea and cliffs and sand. To wish away what's there: this oppressive, exciting heat. The heat you can only enjoy or cope with if you surrender to it, be absorbed, merge in. This is rare heat. It's special because it's not Kuwait heat, not California heat. This is heat that nobody prepares for, heat that is an event, heat that disrupts normal life instead of setting a context for it. This heat creates a holiday, even if you're stuck in work. Like the Foreign Office or the Treasury (can't remember which), forced to leave early because their air conditioning is faulty. This heat creates new conditions. A country becomes an unexpected place. Dogs aren't used to it so you have to feed them more water than normal. You're not used to it: perceptions shift into new zones. I love the heat: escape work, quaff a can of Lilt, sit on a step outside a brothel doorway in Soho, watch the beautiful, the idiotic and the mundane drift by, listen to beats bound and bounce out of an open window. Moments slowed and waded through. On a bus rattling through East End streets: shops, take aways, bars and clubs winding up for the sweaty, sexy evening. Heatwave life. Courted, coloured, contained and uncontained. The moon is orange, planes fly off to Europe, and the Pavillion packs out. Fireworks erupt in the night.
Smoke, cobwebs, street lights. I love this city. The movement and compression. The cohesion, the collisions, the cars, the clubs. Values and passions and possessions can never be a private affair: each choice demands capitulation, complicity. I just pluck things from the air. The smoke, it smears street lights: daubed across sombre mists, fading fires, it's only in the imagination, what you see after the fact. Lay yourself open and spiders crawl through cracks everywhere, with such unseen speed, such caution and determination. A mind preyed on, and caught. I fall into a trap. But the street lights are beautiful anyway.
11:45 PM
The crowd rose to their feet, mistakenly believing they had seen arguably the greatest performance ever. Photographers rushed across the infield to get a picture of the historic moment. Even Chambers briefly believed he had achieved the unthinkable
Poor Dwain.
4:37 PM
They call it a trap. But we should call it Bolton's first law of international power politics: keep the other guy guessing; wear him down. When he gives a little, demand a whole lot more. Then zap him anyway
This is my kind of perspective. Something will happen sooner than nothing. This is good, too: bit mad, probably all true. Latest here.
If I had known, I should have become a watchmaker (Albert Einstein).
4:27 PM
Friday, August 08, 2003
The mind would like to get out of here
onto the snow. It would like to run
with a pack of shaggy animals, all teeth.
Osip Mandelstam
Sprawling, sun-stunned. Wan skin, dilated eyes. Slowly burning, slowly bleaching, slowly tanning. I bask, like a big shark, tip at the surface, off-shore, calm. No, not calm. Sprawled, muscles supported by salt. Eyes lost in blue sky, slightly myopic, slightly eased. I burn in patches without even noticing. Nothing concrete or complete: all bits, flashes, surprises and shocks. Except now, as I wallow. Craner swimming with cormorants and gulls, fish and seaweed, leatherback turtles, moon and barrel jellyfish, dolphins and sharks. Circling me slowly, expanding orbits stretch out to sea and back onto shore. Float away from the crowds, the swell levels out, the riptide pulls me, drifts me nowhere, or into the line of oil tankers. The mind would like to get out of here, so I let go. There's just this cold flow of image and memory. The air is clear, or hazy, or frosty, or thick. A cliff that stands severe against pale sand. The calm sea roars in my ears, I submerge. Foam breaks up over sand. The sky is full of white birds. Details fall, and assemble. Motioned into a mosaic. No order to be made: empty spaces and blank bodies, they are given meaning, given direction, given detail, then it's different and...the sun or the rain...the clouds full of snow, clowds full of storms...petrels skim dark waves, rain rips across the horizon, cry of white seagulls, noise and little light. It's splendid. Stop to heat hands on the dying embers of fires lit and left among pebbles. Listen to the crackle of charred driftwood, loose kindling, like music <<< The sand gleams white and burns soft and hot between our hands. Together, uncles, aunts, cousins, mums and dads, watching Crab Island disappear, usually around tea-time. In wooden huts that curve along a concrete promenade, beneath car parks and tennis courts and dreamy, imperious houses, crisp mornings, curt evenings, we boiled water in a tin kettle, drank strong tea, scoffed buns with thick butter, didn't think about seeing beyond the horizon except on very clear days. Cracked concrete steps descend to sand, and glass: paradise of pampas grass, faded palms, spider plants. Stuck paper flags in mounds of sand, and found a Casio watch that didn't work. A concrete path along the bay that got so hot on hot days it scolded the tips of toes and heels. Doves, gulls and terns tore trash from the sand <<< starfish in rock pools, seashells and mineral deposits, features marked in limestone. Hidden coves found: clambering over wet rocks, slipping on seaweed, feet sinking into sand, sound sinking in dulcet tones, inside dank caves where water fell in frail cascades and sometimes we saw icicles. Arctic acres, inside - meanwhile... >>> Black sand cools at dusk. Channels set hard like peat. Streams cut through salt, shingle, seaweed, sand. Ropes and plastic bottles washed up from ships. Swansea dock spits out yachts and speedboats. A spell unwoven: degeneration. Tugs swarm, escort rough eyes into cold bondage. Dock arm extends, dark as tar, time-stained, expels and sucks in Balkan cargoes. Horizon hidden in the night except for light across the bay: amber, crimson, white. Pilot flames flare at exact intervals. Eventually retreat into cycles of daylight, sun and showers. Low tide at dawn leaves black sand beneath white sky <<< rattling scenes out on white walls, caught for prosperity: a manor house, rented near the sea, film marked: Pembroke, 1985. It rains, has been warm and murky since morning, windows stained black and green by shrubs and shade. Staring at summer storms all day, unblinking, absorbed. Light flickers on upstairs in a small bedroom, this story told: a kept woman, killed during a storm like now, who returns at these precise moments, the exquisite tragedy somehow laughable. "Let's draw dinosaurs. Give them names." Cut to: a walk across smooth, wet, dark pebbles, the sea a maelstrom, rough and green, romance of anglers lost at sea, and life in a lighthouse. ...always looking out for a pheasant on the grass in a beautiful garden. Tea on a table outside. "It was a lovely evening. The sun came out." <<< Marked out by the tides, the curve of the earth, one certainty: immersion, darkness, safety. The flood behind eyelids. Between the tides, exposed, shells crack under toes, shadows skim across rippled sand, our outlines yield, soften at the edges >>> You can get caught at the furthest point you can see from here. The causeway is exposed for about five and a quarter hours during low water. If the weather is calm it's a calculated risk. Shed in wind swept patches, dust-grey banks of rain cut across evening sun. The sea swallows rock pools and we get caught by the tide as the sky drops like ash. Stumbling over fescue and wild flower, stunned, a little stupid (as in, stupefied) we find an old war shelter, facing north. We gather anything that will burn and strike matches several times, and later sit in the flickering light of cigarette tips and the spit of flames blown by the breeze. Taut stars burst open between clouds. Foxes and rats hunt on slopes of weed. We watch clouds glide in at hard angles, and lose the moon. I am a black cat, did you just say that? >>> a place that teems with memory or destiny. A tawny owl haunts you across dunes, as you cut soles and toes on grass and glass, at the dead of dusk.
In a far away garden I swung
on a plain wooden swing - I recall
fir trees, mysterious and tall,
in my vague delerium.
10:22 PM
Tuesday, August 05, 2003
It's hoooot!
The tube system swelters. It's stricken by delays and all you can smell is sweat mixed with perfume, cologne, Faberge and Sure deodorant, make-up and hair gel perfection wilting before it's even 9am. People pack in at Liverpool Street to get off at Bank and Chancery Lane, they ram into carriages, people's backs and necks bend as the doors close, risking decapitation. Tubes move slow in the heat, constantly delayed between stations, stuck in the sooty, oppressive, rat-ridden blackness. This heat is an event. You could have just walked.
Meanwhile across the UK trains are delayed as railway lines buckle.
It's not that hot, not as hot as Kuwait or California. We don't understand oppressive heat. I die in this air conditioning. I'm actually cold right now. Not just cold: my brain feels chilled, I feel a dead wind running through my veins, my body feels hollow.
Most city riots occur when the temperature is between 27c - 32c. 32c is the upper limit, any higher than this and people are too hot to bother. The majority of urban riots occur in this bracket, from the LA to the 2001 Oldham riots.
London's murder rate peaks in the summer months. During the unusually hot summer of 1988, New York's murder rate jumped by 75%.
Well tomorrow I'm going to a beach in South Wales for 2 days, so goodbye you psychopaths.
10:39 AM
Angels die in pub fire
Hackney Gazette
9:48 AM
send me ghost stories
9:46 AM
Monday, August 04, 2003
AK Baby, Man Moving, Man Dropping
is the slogan on a yellow t-shirt currently being worn by a 12-year old Liberian rebel child, photographed for an i-D straight-up, 'Tribe War Issue', August 03.
First the drugs, then the bullets and then the battle. Jungle Fire battalion knew the routine and lounged on the abandoned market stalls, waiting for the marijuana and crack cocaine to kick in.
Rory Caroll, Guardian 04.08.03
In the war, everything was allowed. We were free.
Rebel fighter Jungle Lion quoted in Rolling Stone, August 03.
Politics, puppet regimes, neocolonialism...the US is inextricably tangled up in the fate of Liberia, but there's something else happening on the city streets directly tied to US precedents: the rituals, strategies and aesthetics of urban warfare. Liberian rebels don personas like LA gang members, indulge the same death-driven instincts and appetites, but live out post-social extremes.
Ammo straight from the executive mansion, lots of it.
Small Boy Militia members: General Death, Col. Bad Bad Thing, War Black, Bullet Bouncer ("Eating the heart protects you. You see, I'm stiill alive"), Lucifer, Dirty War.
(US dates to be announced.)
Kid loads his AK clip. Wild out: these boys love it. Trained in it, to it. They know nothing else. Each generation makes itself colder and more ruthless: desire to survive and surpass. Kill reflection, degrade instinct. Mass screwface, barren country.
7:18 PM
Saturday, August 02, 2003
In the Marais enchantment seeps up from the cobblestones, wraps around the wrought iron lampposts, suffuses the narrow alleys. You walk down a street, and a vendor conjures a bouquet of pink roses. Behind the stiff facade of a 17th-century building lies a garden drenched in the fragrance of lilacs. Then there is the Places des Vosges - with nine nearly identical mansions on each of the four sides, except for the grander King's and Queen's Pavilions, which anchor the southern and northern sides. In the soft morning light, the brick blushes faint pink. Linden trees pruned into a perfect geometry border a garden, which stands as the centrepiece of the square. Lovers lie on the grass entangled in each other's arms.
Atmospheric article about the posh boho Marais district in Paris by Cathy Newman in the August National Geographic, with gorgeous photographs by William Albert Allard. You can see some of these here. Particularly beautiful shot of the Rue de Rivoli drenched in a midsummer sunshower, rain steaming off hot concrete. Also: articles about Brazilian jungle tribes, the Atacama desert in Chile and coastal wildlife in Alaska, all with sumptuous pictures too. Nice mag.
4:45 PM
Thursday, July 31, 2003
If you're not prepared to act on the basis of murky intelligence, you're going to have to act after the fact, and after the fact now means after horrendous things have happened
Paul Wolfowitz
Don't borrow, don't spend, hold tight, keep still. Here's an idea: run away, hide, stay secret, stay silent. Don't get involved: don't burn anyone, don't get burned. The bank want your money back and The State wants your time and Everybody wants a piece of you. Or nobody does, and this is worse. Somebody wants you, but all you can do is hide. And they really want you. And you don't know what to do. All you wanted, really, absolutely, after all, was to be wanted. And to return it. Then it happens, and you can't. That's tragic. It's more tragic than Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth. It's as stupid, but more passive, pathetic, poisonous. Defiance = self-contempt. Pride = fear. No: this is only part of the story. Nobody can catch you. (Somebody catch me!) December. Antarctic base. Alone. The weather >>> I don't carry: Tesco Clubcard, Sainsbury's Reward Card, Boots Advantage Card, no Air Miles, no Nectar Card. I pledge alleigance to no one. But you can catch me on: EU passport, UK driving licence, HSBC cash card, LT Travelcard, RSPB membership, Foyles payslips, National Insurance, NHS medical card, Switch receipts, Freeserve traffic, Hotmail account, British Library Membership, CCTV, speed cameras. Now you know enough about me to pick me apart, smooth out my skin, open up my gut, pick out my brains, seperate my arteries, uncoil my appendix, tease out my nerves, string up my veins, pool my blood, admire my eyes, sculpt my bones. You know too much, and you're not even paying attention, you're not even asking. Pay attention! Ask! Stop watching me all the time: I leave traces all over the city, spectral aspects, transparent trails, wraith routes: make my way down these every day and forget to think, leave a mental shape, empty. It does not disperse: it's recorded. I detest that image. You got my bad side: look at that nose! Every image I arrange in this highly arranged imagination ruined by a scratchy, gaunt security monitor, watching at the wrong angle, watching at the wrong time. Thought I had control of things. Cower in the loo, that's control. How indecent. How undignified. Still the larks flying, singing, in the sky. The Great Kings of Israel. The Fertile Crescent. The Mountain. The Ocean. I laugh at a friend as he shouts, amusingly: I'm better than this, God damn you! Stephen, you are, you are >>> "I'm not paranoid, I'm violated" >>> Light breeze. Starlings fly past at dusk. A swell of shiny black bodies. Ripple and cluster of silhouettes. Light breeze. Cormorant flying overhead at end of day. Wind paths. Sea swells. Four lighthouses on a horizon, no residents. A swell picks up. Oil tankers anchored offshore. Evening encroaches. Tankers light up like small towns. In the wind and rain, like ghost towns. Lightships wink softly. Heavy seas, caused by the accumulation of strong frontal depressions. The sea's teeth. August. Return of the equinoctial tides. First fresh gales. Moor the yachts. Don wellington boots, navy Guernsey, yellow oilskin, woollen hat, handsome stuble. Wait for the fresh, ferocious dawn. Nova Scota, Iroise Sea, Cape Horn, Galacia, Bay of Biscay. Off the coast of Cornwall, morning: strong south westerly gale, grey-green waves roar in from the Atlantic. Smash rocks, curl up and over onto sandy beaches. Some people walk and watch, some people ride waves on gaudy boards, some people tackle the angry sea and kill fish. Tonight we shall eat beautiful fish by a log fire. Tomorrow there will be mist, thick white mist, and you'll hear foghorns. Foghorns make you feel alone and lost and they are comforting. It's strange. From the vantage point of the sea, we wade into winter, chaps, all pipes and pints and sea shanties and fresh air and danger! Ha ha! and foreign competition and overfishing and broken infrastructure and families below subsistance level They stopped manning lighthouses and I lost a million dreams. They used to sell fish in a big warehouse at Swansea docks. I was young and mum would take me to buy fresh plaice on a Saturday morning, and the fishermen would give us fishheads for the cat, and then we'd go home and have fried plaice for lunch. That was fun! Buying fish at the docks was exciting. They had all sorts of weird things for sale, and you could watch them unload the catch. They don't do this now, it all had to stop. ...we wade into winter, chaps, in our rusty boat on the waves surrounded by storm petrels and manx shearwater, auks and gulls, a speck of dust in a gale, emerald waves with frothy white peaks, they rear up like snow-capped mountains, and dwarf us and they could crush us. We catch fish in our big nets, plucked out from beneath the maelstrom, where it remains calm. Later asleep, sound asleep. With you darling. An owl across the reeds. Somewhere else. That calm we lost. Locked in memory >>> I am a Siberian tiger and I have lost my tigress and my heart bleeds >>> South of France consumed by vast flames. A gift donated by Corsican or Basque seperatists, nobody knows who. These fires are all deliberate. It is the apocalypse. Aircraft scoop up water from the Mediterranean and drop it onto the flames. It is desperate. Residents hose down their houses, and then flee for their lives. Their houses are destroyed. Roads jam. Resorts and campsights are deserted, then they are consumed. A thick black, brown, orange cloud engulfs the sparkling coast. White yachts shine bright against a horizon that resembles medieval hell. The sky turned orange, the smell was too much, ashes were falling into gardens and onto rooftops. Fire rips through dried-out wood. In the hills above St Tropez. Tourists flee in their swimsuits. Last night fires were moving closer to the 19th century £1.5 million home of David Beckham near Bargemon >>> Yet another dream in the feverish night. The walls collapse around London Zoo. The earth is spiralling towards the sun. Windows and wire and mesh melt. The bird cage dissolves. Lions, tigers, pumas, lynx, starved and crazy, dash through London streets, leap on pedestrians, steal meat from supermarkets, claim territory in London parks. Gorillas, apes and monkeys invade city offices, clamber onto famous monuments, swing beneath Thames bridges. Snakes and lizards terrorize the sewers, the tube, decimate the rodent population, it's a hard fight between them and the rats, mice don't stand a chance. Exotic spiders crawl into people's homes, someone finds a black widow in their wardrobe, someone else finds a tarantula in their bath, someone else finds a bird eating spider in their pantry, looking for birds, ridiculously. Giraffes meander through Soho, to the scent of bananas and latex. Rhinoceros rampage through Clerkenwell, hopelessly lost, terrifying, devastating. The sky is alive with rain forest birds, a violent rainbow picked off by white gulls. Lovely penguins crowd the south bank. I pack my bag and go on safari >>> A scientist falls in love with a biometric scan
Whereever you go you carry a message of hope - a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, 'To the captives "come out," and to those in darkness, "be free".'
George W. Bush
You didn't appear here because you happened to be the context for everything >>> Sau Paulo is a modern Cairo. Medieval Cairo updated, uploaded. Dense, dry chaos. Enigmatic sprawl. Spirtual devastation. Riddlers, story tellers, whores, street venders, thieves. Human squall. Silent murder. Superstition and apocalypse. Spells vs. deals. Bruises, cuts and scars. The flow of alcohol. Street parties. Unpassable streets. The stench and colour of human traffic. Moral eclipse. Love passed freely and tightly bound too. Class disintegrates. Or it just hides behind high walls and iron gates and festers in shanty towns. Divide so wide it disappears. Come out. Be free. Sau Paulo is a modern Cairo. Your soul could die there so easily. Watch it sliver onto the pavement and into the road. Stabbed by high heels. Crushed by wheels. You are healed by a witch doctor. An old Indian lady, a face with lines like battle wounds. A kind of pagan potion. Lose your Catholic roots in desperation. Healed, and then descend further. Meet a devil on the streets of Cairo and Sau Paulo. Kill a priest. Fornicate in the alleys. Drink the poison elixcir. Lost in a dream until you wake up which is never. Sunk in the Arabian Nightmare with a monkey and a prophet. And you're all dead >>> Spitfires flown by chaps over English fields buzzing with bees during a hot war during a hot English summer. Swifts and swallows dart between Spitfire and Nazi bombers. On TV, a black and white film >>> A hot English summer, a sign by Lea River says: On Sat 5th July 03 between 11am and 1pm an incident took place involving a child carrying a fishing net and a man pushing a bike. Did you see them? Or can you assist in any way? In strictest confidence phone: 0207 275 3437. Don't want to think about the gaps in that. I used to love this river. Coot feeding her tiny, ugly chicks (don't worry, you will be beautiful), sense me, swim away in fear. I mean no harm. Continue. Pick through the algae. I'm less dangerous than that damselfly. Sit and watch Canada geese hustle down river. Sit on a concrete river bank. Tower blocks, disused factories, pylons. Hollow, lonely squalor resonates. A rare tern swoops and stops in disgust. Strictly post-industrial now. Action happens in open plan offices. Skin is assaulted by strip lighting and air conditioning. Life is lost as soon as ink dries on the contract of employment. Thou shalt not refuse to work. I sit by a river as the air hums around me. Walk back. Missing: black and white cat. Last seen 16/07/03. 'Stanley' - very friendly 11-month old kitten should be wearing a black collar with blue name-tag. Reward offered. I hope they find their kitten >>> Off to the white of the Antarctic then, my last option. Everything white, so I can disappear into the whiteness. Then the icebergs turn out to glow a ghostly, beautiful blue. Between sky and midnight. Somewhere between there. Another dream? Or a desire? Disappear into a dot on the horizon. My atoms dissolve in a blizzard. Don't like it here. Go North. Fly like an Arctic tern. Do not stop.
Why is life so tragic; so like a strip of pavement over an abyss.
Virginia Woolf
Beneath the pavement - the beach!
Situationist slogan
12:24 AM
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