Hogmanay Hill

Not quite Master of the Universe ...

but he won a game of Zertz.

Photos by Mary Ellen Mark

Kathryn Shattuck writes:

In 1968, around the time she was focusing her lens on war protesters and transvestites in New York, Mary Ellen Mark took a job as a still photographer on the set of “Alice’s Restaurant,” directed by Arthur Penn.

More than 100 films later Ms. Mark culled thousands of images, both impromptu and staged, for her latest book, “Seen behind the scene/Forty years of photographing on set/Mary Ellen Mark” (Phaidon). Some of the images will be on view at the Staley-Wise Gallery in SoHo starting Jan. 9.

Here she speaks about photos included in the book.

Way to go Paula, way to go ...

"There's a relief in the falling apart, isn't there? I used to walk up Madison Avenue, and girls really were buying $1,500 purses just because Madonna had one. The purse thing. It had gotten insane. But then, the world is insane. I can't begin to fathom other people. All I can do is keep my own bullshit meter intact. You have to make a concerted effort to keep yourself alive, to be able to feel pain, to stop yourself from getting distanced from things by technology. Some 250,000 protestors walked up Broadway to protest the war in Iraq, and the next day it wasn't in the papers. But will that stop me from marching next time? No, I will be counted."

The Guardian interviews the magnificent Debra Winger

Love lift us up where we belong ... irresistable
.

On reading of the death of Harold Pinter

How strange it seems,
this quiet denouement in the dead of night

brought into being here
(if not into complete awareness of itself)

above the silent tracks
of suburban Sydney's railway lines

running east to west
or vice versa

depending on the inexorable
moment's need to travel.

And so you pause - reflect,
reverberate with hope

you will not stoop to mimic, imitate
or, parrot-like, regurgitate

that other voice,
original,

which being neither sinful
in its own right

nor imbued with saintliness
speaks out (and still insistent) to demand

that each of us speaks too
so that we may be

still heard -
on this morning after.
.

Death of an adjective

There was a pause before we found out in Oz. Not quite Pinteresque but a pause nevertheless.

By the time I studied The Birthday Party at university in 1977 his plays had already been performed for twenty years. That's all of my life so far. They'll still be performed long after I've buggered off.

Michael Billington's obituary in The Guardian

Happy Christmas

Dear Santa

If we were to wake again one early morning,
still in darkness
with frosted window panes, thick snow
like a blanket of silence over
the garden of a child's half-memory
would we still discover that a kind old gentleman
dressed in red
and sporting a large white beard, white whiskers,
had left his sooty finger prints
on a strategically placed china tea cup
before half-finishing a McVittie's digestive biscuit,
perhaps too rushed,
perhaps confronted by one biscuit too many
on that, his busiest night
of the year now risen to its climax;
to be met by a lost boy's hopes, perhaps his expectations
of all he wished for:
a big red fire engine, that dazzling bicycle
(all emerald and gold) and, best of all,
the Airfix model kit of a Saturn VI rocket,
bearing not just Neil Armstrong and all the rest
of the Apollo space programme we grew up with
(their names forgotten mostly)
but also met by other hopes; our expectations
of everything that morning promised it would bring.
.

In case you forgot ...

Thanks Duncan at Mighty Media
.

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens

One of Spike's neighbours

Yesterday's Solstice ... in Ireland

Sent by Shazza from this source
.

Gifts from a friend

Walking with old men I'd never met

When I was still too young to know life's truths
they came to greet me as old friends might meet
somewhere on a quiet country road, near dusk
and after many years apart, roving separately
in search of life's adventures later to be shared,
not quite as tall tales to be told in fading light
as old friends strolled in search of somewhere
welcoming - but not entirely as the gospel either;

not when you've barely crossed the threshold,
barely made your own way into the world
down any road at all ahead of you, where life,
you could still see, stretched out enticingly.

And as we walked and talked, some truths
spoke more than others yet I walked untroubled,
listening less than carefully but certain that no words
that they could say to me that day could sway me
from my purpose or make me hesitate or think again
to wonder what the journey might be worth or cost.
.

Carol Ann Duffy's Mrs Scrooge

Scrooge doornail-dead, his widow, Mrs Scrooge, lived by herself
in London Town. It was that time of year, the clocks long back,
when shops were window-dressed with unsold tinsel, trinkets, toys,
trivial pursuits, with sequinned dresses and designer suits,
with chocolates, glacé fruits and marzipan, with Barbie,
Action Man, with bubblebath and aftershave and showergel;
the words Noel and Season's Greetings brightly mute
in neon lights. The city bells had only just chimed three,
but it was dusk already. It had not been light all day.
Mrs Scrooge sat googling at her desk,

Carol Ann Duffy's Mrs Scrooge in today's Guardian
......................

Some poets ought not to be read unless there’s an adult in the house with you

All it takes is a poet like Charles Wright,
an obviously well-read and erudite man with quite a lot to say,
and any one of his poems from A Short History of the Shadow -
let’s imagine for the sake of a literary argument
...................................................................we might have chosen

IF THIS IS WHERE GOD’S AT, WHY IS THAT FISH DEAD –
read on a close, some might say stuffy while others choose oppressive,
December night not long after a massive electrical storm
...................................................................has passed overhead
leaving sulphurous tones in the atmosphere to challenge some senses

while playing quietly in the background of an almost empty apartment
The Tallis Scholars 25th Anniversary (Disc 2) fills what might be a void
..................................................................with Media Vita for 6 voices
(which I’ve taken to listening to quite a lot, these still surprising days)
and there, I think, you have it - not to put too fine a point on it;

the makings of a contemplative moment or two of introspection,
...................................................................self-reflection perhaps –
although some observers, sitting on one’s shoulder let’s further imagine,
might offer up less generous interpretations of a man’s late night ruminations
by choosing words such as self-indulgent, self-pitying or even morbid.

...................................................................But that’s for those others
to say. Now - nothing seems certain, not even the words one chooses.
But the night’s quiet has finally arrived because at one thirty-three a.m. suburban
trains no longer rattle along the tracks below the veranda window, wide-open
to let in as much of the still night’s air as the darkness will permit.
.........

Necessary noise ... part 12

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
.

Original and best

Maybe me

More than this, I know not
how to say –

I seek a simpler way
to be the man I must become,

perhaps the man I have become
already, without seeing how

it happened, how it was or is
that I’ve become

this somehow different creature
this strange chameleon

- utterly transformed -
this unknown person,

this man I dare not recognise
and barely comprehend

although he must be me
must always have been in me

must always have so wanted to be free
to be at last what he and me - may be.

God bless The New Yorker

The New Yorker magazine

Happy 18th birthday Lucien

Parliament-Funkadelic ... it was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

.

Woof Woof

Picture (and cake) by Halimah

Mr Percival

Brilliant evening. Terrific voice, fantastic skill, quickest mind I've seen in operation since I don't know when. Compelling, engaging entertainer. Impossible to stand on the edges observing. You just have to join in.

His myspace site can't even begin to do justice to his skill.

Breakfast in Annandale

The last lavender of the Jacaranda season
litters the wet road outside the corner café
where a French waitress with short spiky hair,
Gucci glasses and an accent to die for
smiles as we enter - remembering our first visit
perhaps - but possibly because she sees love
joining us at the small, square table beneath
a great window through which the sun’s struggle
against the early morning clouds and drizzle
barely disturbs our deconstruction of the menu.

And if it seems that we may be wholly oblivious
to all that the world and this day have to offer -
forgive us – for we have wasted too much time
and risked the loss of everything we hope for
which makes this breakfast, here in Annandale,
not simply a question of which tea to take
and not just about a momentary pause to praise
the cappuccino; nor can it be wholly explained
by the way you lick my honey from your finger tips
or lift a button mushroom to your lips and smile.

But it’s in such small, connected acts of love
that we may once again discover what it was
and is and will forever be - the force that makes
you quiver when we kiss and me grow calm
so that the noise desists inside my puzzled head
just long enough to have no fear and feel no pain
and long enough to learn to trust the sense within
the moment that our pulses race towards the infinite,
where we may find - not just the pleasure of it all
but reach the heart of what it is that we complete.

Thank God your good friend owns a clapped out old Transit van ...

Some have mocked the Transcendental Transit Van but when Sharon and Ken needed to pick up their new kitchen table in Darlinghurst, who were they going to call? Ghostbusters?

I don't think so somehow.

rain falls on a cobbled lane

Standing quite alone near the doorway of a rented room above a quiet, cobbled lane adjacent to the canal in Bruges you watched the rain trickle down a cracked window pane behind which nothing moved except the wisp of smoke rising from a French cigarette held lightly between two fingers of your left hand, trembling almost imperceptibly. Your right hand rested on the glass, pressed against its cold glaze, unable - perhaps unwilling - to wave as you watched her go.

(Sat listening to Indian Summer by Arabesk and these words came. No idea what that's all about!)

We were younger then ...

Saw them live in The Appollo, Glasgow in 1973. It's been demolished but we might be still there calling out for more.

Drenched again

I looked up to the eye of yet another storm,
a force of nature bearing down upon the ground
I could not find my solid footing on today,

although I did not fall and neither did I stumble
in the dark of that redemptive tempest’s winds
which wrapped my bones in shredded nightmares

ripped by all the fears we weave into our hopes
out of the dreamer's yarn we cut as cloth to suit
the fashion of our age, temperament and disposition

as if such styling mattered or might make a difference
to indifferent storms that weather sends our way
regardless of our lack of readiness for wind and rain.

After midnight

The night grows still and quiet,
its oppressive midnight air
tempered by the softest breeze,
no more than hinted at; gently
caressing the perplexed brow
of a man who knows not how
to sleep, although the day’s dead
weight bears down on him,
to hold him between thoughts
of what he might have done
(but differently) and hopes
of what he might yet do, if time
permits and opportunity arises
like the sun, presaging dawn.
.

My story does not end this way ...

Thank you for your submission to Curtis Brown. I'm afraid we do not feel sufficiently confident that we could place this with a publisher to offer you representation with this agency. This a very subjective business and another agency or publisher may well disagree. We wish you all the best in finding a suitable home for your work.

Please excuse the impersonal nature of this note. Due to the high volume of material we receive we cannot write a personal response to everyone.

It just doesn't end that way. Stubborn of me, I know, as well as egotistical and maybe wholly delusional but it simply doesn't end like that.
_

Dreams, doctor?

I am hovering / floating in the air, high above a snow covered landscape looking down on winter scene that might be a Nordic country (not that I’ve been to any). Maybe it’s Alaska. There is a large forest of firs to the north east. To the north and west there is vast snow field with what might be a frozen river heading off to the horizon; hills to west.

There’s a snow covered raised area below me. It has the proportions of a postage stamp but it is huge, the size of a football field. There are spectator stands around three sides of the raised area. The snow is pristine, without a mark upon its unbroken surface which, for some reason, is significant. Something will happen on this virginal space, something unpleasant, like a sacrifice maybe or public executions. There is an air of foreboding about the scene. Don’t know why.

A group of skiers appears from the river valley. They are dressed in huge parka jackets with hoods and fur fringes. All are dressed in white jackets except one who is wearing a blue parka. The group ski onto the raised playing field. They ski backwards and forwards, round in circles, up and down, all over the formerly pristine surface. They are obviously intent on messing up the perfection of the untouched area. As they plough through the snow they churn it up revealing a sickly looking yellow substance below. It has the colour and consistency of custard but it could just as easily be puss spilling out of an infected wound.

As they totally destroy the surface shouts, wails, horrified angry cries break the silence. The skiers stop, look beyond the stands then at each other. They seem satisfied that they have achieved what they came to do. They speed away pursued by irate, evil blond haired people – the Midwich cuckoos, maybe, grown up into their mid-twenties.

The skiers head up the river which is frozen solid. Beneath the thin covering of snow there is jet black ice, as smooth as glass, thick and strong. They ski as fast as possible pursued by the Miwdwich adults who are demonically angry. The river opens up into a vast frozen lake. The skiers head for the shore. Upon reaching the frozen water’s edge each skier throws him or herself into the tufts of frozen bracken style grasses bordering the lake. They vanish into / underneath the land. Their pursuers are incensed.

I’ve become one of the skiers, maybe the guy in the blue parka. I leap into the bracken but I don’t vanish. I’m about to be discovered by the evil pursuers – I think they’re human flesh eaters by this time – when I’m grabbed from beneath the earth and pulled down to safety.

I find myself in what looks like an underground caravan or mobile home. It has formica topped tables and cheaply veneered walls. There is a double bed recessed into one part of the caravan. I take refuge there, naked beneath a huge pile of brightly coloured, patchwork blankets. I'm sharing the space with a young woman. We watch Dr Who on a portable black and white television while drinking hot chocolate and tea, eating cheese and tomato sandwiches. Go figure.

Australia

I'm almost speechless. This could be the worst film ever made, although I can't be certain about that. i have no doubt, however, that I detested every minute of it with greater intensity than it has ever been my misfortune to know before. Some films can be so bad one feels a perverse fondness for them. This deceitful, dishonest, racist crap is simply so bad all one can do is weep that so many obviously talented people so spectacularly fucked up to create such a horrible, deadly mess.

Quiet, soul

Is it in silence that I find out
who I am, just who it is

I think
I am;

this man before you now,
unknown to him,

himself - confused -
not as an affectation

nor an exercise
in self-effacing, false

humility (which hides
itself within an easy hubris)

but in this old frame: this simple
man with little noise to make?

Necessary noise ... part 11

the planets do, from time to time, align

Perfect Tuesday

Jo Shapcott's Muse

When I kiss you in all the folding places
of your body, you make that noise like a dog
dreaming, dreaming of the long run he makes
in answer to some jolt to his hormones,
running across landfills, running, running
by tips and shorelines from the scent of too much,
but still going with head up and snout
in the air because he loves it all
and has to get away. I have to kiss deeper
and more slowly - your neck, your inner arm,
the neat creases of your toes, the shadow
behind your knee, the white angles of your groin -
until you fall quiet because only then
can I get the damned words to come into my mouth.

Some days, a man needs a little help.
_

Gifts from a friend

It might end in tears. But think what may be if it does not.
_

Necessary noise ... part 10

Barbara wrote:

Last night I was walking home from the Traverse alone, having seen a splendid new play by Paul Higgins who is a wonderful Scottish actor. An ambulance passed, lights flashing but no siren and travelling rather slowly. I was transported back to your accident and heard you saying you thought all would be well because the siren wasn't playing. Felt in some ways like a long, long time ago and in other ways not so.

You've achieved so much to be proud of since then - and exceeded everyone's hopes and dreams for your health and in every other way.

Sitting here in Sydney on a sunny Saturday afternoon, Spike's violin and accordion music playing (Sophie Solomon) as she prepares her portfolio in another room, I had a quiet wee weep. Not quite sure why. Melancholic Scottish middle-aged man shit, I would say.

_

Incomparable

On the one hand there is every man on Mother Earth ... the "awfully large number of average looking men" as well as the above average; and

On the other hand there is the white peach souffle and a glass of Pommier Chablis Premier Cruz at Pier Restaurant, Rose Bay, Sydney.

No contest really.

(photograph showing a young woman on the verge of a comatose slumber after dinner with, perhaps, the most boring date of the 21st Century ... a man who can send polar bears to sleep with just one glance)
.

Tea for four at the Wentworth

Not this life

Where do twenty years go? And how
many boxes can contain life’s essentials
stored regretfully in an empty room?

Years stacked up against each other,
one on top of another, but not necessarily
in chronological order.

Nineteen eighty-eight sits awkwardly
with nineteen ninety-six
and two thousand and two is crumpled

in a heap in the corner, rubbing
shoulders with the elbows of four
or five more years, eventful years:

not one will ever come again.

Paintings and prints lean patiently,
almost with no interest in the outcome,
against the barest wall. A frying pan,

bought in France maybe and carted home,
rests adjacent to twelve or thirteen
albums of photographs that span the years

we never thought would end until
they ended, not as one might wish
they’d end but like an appalling soap opera,

a version of events going on elsewhere
in someone else’s life.

Soulmate?

According to Wiki -

Soulmate is a term sometimes used to designate someone with whom one has a feeling of deep and natural affinity, friendship, love, intimacy, sexuality, spirituality and/or compatibility. A related concept is that of the twin flame or twin soul – which is thought to be the ultimate soulmate, the one and only other half of one's soul, for which all souls are driven to find and join. However, not everyone who uses these terms intends them to carry such mystical connotations.

One theory of soulmates, presented by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium, is that humans originally consisted of four arms, four legs, and a single head made of two faces, but Zeus feared their power and split them all in half, condemning them to spend their lives searching for the other half to complete them.

Delayed gratification is not always worth the wait

You might think that after taking forty-five minutes to prise open a new jar of Vegemite one's taste buds would be in a state of near sexual frenzy at the anticipated delight. But no ... fundamentally, when all is said and done, a vegemite sandwich is basically some bread with a vitamen B paste spread over the surface.

Hawk's Nest breakfast and beyond

Drove the 25 kms north to Bombah Point. Found a ferry. Sadly it was not operating; I think because today's gale force winds made the water just a wee bit too choppy (even on such a short crossing). Of course, maybe it's simpler and there's no service on a Sunday but I don't think that's the explanation. It's just as well. Given the way my mind was operating this morning, if I could have crossed over to the north shore I might just kept going and not looked back.

It's not my photo by the way. That'll have to wait until I read my phone's manual to find out how to download pics. I'm sure there's a wire somewhere that I'll need.

Photograph by this guy

Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Brilliant writing. Utterly charming story. The witch queen woman is definitely not a pleasant person (that'll be Presbyterian under-statement, then). How could anyone do THAT to a unicorn?

Check out Neil Gaiman's web site

For hire: animal borer - wild and domestic. Satisfaction guaranteed

dreams, doctor?

I’m walking west across a peat bog in Scotland. Like all peat bogs, the water-saturated ground gives just a little beneath your feet. It’s like walking on a natural sponge made up of living material. Where the earth is most saturated it seems almost black in colour. Where it is drier there is the characteristic reddy-dark brown of peat. Short, hard grass and heather lie across the surface like a blanket of bristles or maybe like the stubble on the chin of Desperate Dan.

Then I find myself in a manicured public garden not unlike Hyde Park in Sydney. The whole area is elevated above the surrounding streets. I’m about five metres above the surrounding roads as I head north. At the edge of the park all the exits (bar one) are sealed with chicken wire. I can see the other side of the road, which looks like a Georgian Terrace in Edinburgh’s New Town.

To my left, beyond more chicken wire fencing, a ramp crosses the road. A woman with crutches and calipers is walking up the ramp slowly. She turns to look at me and smiling in friendly way she says, I hope you make it too. I follow the one open route, which leads me down a dozen or so steps, along an underpass then up many more steps that lead me into a room that might once have been Martin’s lounge room with a bay window recess in his enormous flat in Grosvenor Place, Edinburgh. Now, this room looks like the insane gift shop at the museum of Scottish tackiness. There’s tartan everywhere; tartan goods of every conceivable type – scarves, gloves, Tam O’Shanters (of course), fridge magnets, highland cattle, cute little sheep, toffee, fudge, God knows what. The way out is up an impossibly steep staircase with a dark, dark wooden handrail. Someone says, I hope you can make it.

Next I find myself in the street. For some reason I think I’m in Liverpool (England). I enter an old Victorian era department store. Once inside there are lots of individual shop fronts. They are warmly lit, inviting places. None of them seem to have doors. I can see happy customers and friendly shop assistants reflected in wall mirrors mounted in the window displays but I can’t see the people themselves and I can’t enter any of the shops.

Quantum of Solace

Vacuous even for a Bond movie. No matter how many things they blew up it was still as boring as bat shit. They managed to make the Palio of Siena appear tedious, which probably takes some doing.

Daniel Craig is very good but has very little to do, so he runs around quite a lot. Judi Dench stands still, exuding contempt for a quite dreadful script. It’s as if she’s really saying … don’t walk away from me James Bond! Don’t you know I am the magnificent Dame Judi Dench? I can’t even remember the Bond Girl. Gemma Arterton as Agent Fields (left) is probably the freshest part of the whole thing but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out her fate. Theme song is risible.

Gifts from a friend

Thunder (as forecast)

Let it roll in from the west
bearing the cleansing torrents
of rain unleashed upon us
without regard for who we are,
our small concerns, our big hopes,
the million little vanities
we throw high-up before us
into the charged atmosphere
to see if hurricanes may blow them
this way or that way but far from view,
far from who we think we are
when we confuse not only foolish men
who are, themselves, already
well-enough confused, but also draw
the wrong conclusions from the storm.

Necessary noise ... part 9

Sydney College of the Arts graduation show 2008

See more at Sydney College of the Arts

.

Okay is never the answer

Are there truths too terrible
to contemplate in the conscience mind?
Must they always come by stealth,
when you least expect the abyss
to open up in your front of you,
suddenly awake in the middle
of the night and at the very core
of your being? Or in the shower,
perhaps, on a summer’s morning
when the world outside is filled
with hope and life and light
and the world inside is bursting out
with hope renewed and fragile
anticipation of the idea ... 'maybe'?

_

south of Ulladulla

picture by Sharon Smith

The bosun's lament

turning the page

If you listen carefully
can you hear the new season’s
grass grow in the quiet morning
when not even the harbingers
of dawn’s chorus have risen
to give voice to the hope
a weary man might look for
in the half light of a new day?

And if you sit still long enough
to witness one full revolution
of your whole world filled,
not only by silences and space,
but with people, players, places
and circumstances, births, deaths,
marriages, soap operas, plays
and sonatas that might uplift
the perplexed spirit of a cliché
masquerading as a man
of wit and wisdom

could you see the point
of departure on the axis
as it spins beyond control?
And if not, how do you
deal with life’s certainties
we can neither touch nor taste
nor hear nor see nor feel?

Someone ought to write a manual.
Passionate intensity for dummies,
with a contents page, a proper index
and one or two cartoon characters.

If you’re lucky you’ll find it
in the remaindered section
of book shops everywhere
until you need it
more than you had ever feared.

Life

every now and then you catch yourself staring blankly at the screen in front of you, thinking nothing at all then thinking ... this cannot be happening. but it is.

thank fuck for the peace and quiet of the office on a Sunday.

Necessary noise ... part 8

Life’s a bit weird. I used to be someone who slept late and had to be dragged kicking and screaming out of bed. Yesterday, I got out of bed at fourish. This morning it was three twenty-seven when I looked at my phone clock then thought, “fuck it – no point in wasting time here.”

Yesterday morning was marvellous. I put my friend Spike’s Tallis Scholars CD on to play as dawn came up. There were no early morning trains, no traffic humming somewhere in the mid-distance, very few birds. There was just me and the emerging light and the voices singing Media Vita for 6 voices, its transcendent sound filling the flat, doing something to me that I don’t understand but, when you’re wise enough, you simply accept for what it is.

Today, the dawn is still an hour or more away. But the music is with me to help me start a day on which my entire world looks completely different. Without any warning.

One moment you allow yourself to believe that all one's hopes can indeed be realised. Next minute you know that’s not how the world really is. Up or down the music remains transcendent. Today it does something different to me that I understand no more than I did yesterday. I simply pray (although I am not a man who believes in the power of prayer) that I am and will be wise enough to accept it for what it is.

I looked for Media Vita for 6 voices on the web but couldn’t find it. Palestrina will have to suffice.

One man's essential truth

I love you without condition, without limit and forever. Nothing else matters.

Play's done

B J Wilson and the Voyage of the S S Heliotrope

A radio play in three Acts

Dedicated to Miss Amelia Starr

dreams, doctor?

It is early morning, still gloomy (in a Scottish autumnal way) before dawn. We might be looking at Queensferry Road in Edinburgh, just south of the suburb of Barnton (where I used to deliver milk every morning just before my accident). I’m with a friend, male, possibly from school days but I can’t see who it is or make out his face (or maybe it’s simply that I can’t recall who it was). We are floating in the air above the pavement at about the same height as the upper windows of the double decked buses that pass along the street. The buses are full of commuters making their way to work. My friend swims over to buses that pull up at the bus stop. He taps the windows upstairs trying to attract the attention of passengers but no one takes any notice. They are completely oblivious to us swimming in the air outside.

We swim away from the bus stop, heading west along Queensferry Road. Armies of commuters tramp along the pavement below us, heading in the opposite direction. We can swim effortlessly through the air. There is no resistance so one stroke (we’re doing the breast stroke) takes us very far. We lift up and down to various heights off the ground. A favourite trick is to swim just above the heads of pedestrians below us then ruffle their hair as if the wind was deliberately playing with their carefully combed appearances.

We reach the end of Queensferry Road at the Barnton roundabout but we’re no longer in Edinburgh. The roundabout has gone. The road curves uphill to the left. We’re blown off the road by a strong wind. We land in a rich green field with a series of undulating bumps and dips. Through the top of the bumps in the middle of the field there is a huge gouged path as if something has torn through the land with great speed and force. Whatever it was came from the sky because the gouges are shallower to the west, becoming progressively deeper the further east one looks. At the end of the gouged path there is a broken object dug deeply into the ground. I could be a meteor but it looks more like a giant baked potato that has burst open during baking.

We land to sit beside the extra-terrestrial baked potato. Sitting at its core there is a small, grey object about the same size and shape as a Cadbury’s cream egg. It has the texture of very fine sand paper but it is hard, dense. I struggle with a young boy, maybe seven or eight years old, to pull the egg shaped stone out of the baked potato. We both want it and fight over it. I win. The small object is almost impossibly heavy to hold. It seems to have characters on it written in a script I do not recognise and cannot read. The script is geometric in shape, minimalist in style. I wonder what it means then walk away carrying the object in my pocket.

To paraphrase Robert Duval's character in Apocalypse Now ...

I love the smell of faulty plumbing in the morning.

NOT!

Groove armada - superstylin

Sadly the youtube code has been disabled. Fun.

Wordle

cool stuff

http://www.wordle.net

Lettie Lariot: A bohemian artist with an air of mystery about her

A young woman emerges from the throng. This is Lettie Lariot, although that may not be her real name. There is much about this Bohemian looking beauty that is not known and often guessed at incorrectly. Were it not 1912 and, therefore, still 60 year’s until Hollywood would make Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, many observers would remark on the striking resemblance Lettie bears to Kathryn Ross. But this is 1912 and neither Paul Newman nor Robert Redford has been born yet so the comparison is never made. Everyone agrees, however; Lettie has a great natural beauty.

Lettie is dressed in a pair of trousers over which a split dress sits, sparkling with colours that seem to move and dance as she walks. Her overcoat is magnificent: now magenta, now purple, now red then blue and gold and green and yellow or was it ochre and magenta together. A wide brimmed hat sits on her long, flowing dark brown hair through which a streak of silver-grey strikes like lightening. Lettie carries stars in the pockets of her great coat and around her waist is tied the belt of Orion (not a fashion accessory but the true belt of Orion for in truth, it is said, Lettie may originate from somewhere beyond Ganymede.)

Necessary noise ... part 7

Never alone with four-week old tomatoes lost under the van's rear seat

Traitor

Ho hum. It tries very hard to be complex and thoughtful (while maintaining its wish to have large explosions every ten minutes). But it’s completely see through and predictable. You can see the joins a mile away. Don Cheadle is Don Cheadle, which means he’s never bad but it is inconceivable from the first scene in which he appears that he could be anything other than a morally conflicted and doubting good guy. Guy Pearce does his not unusual, thoroughly competent, American cop guy. Quite decent music early then it become Hollywood normal.

There were three of us in the cinema. A couple up the back who looked as if they were involved in an office affair and had gone somewhere cool, quiet and dark to neck. And me. Can a cinema survive on $24 income per session?

dreams, doctor?

I walk to the driver’s seat of my Tranist van, pulling the seat belt from the rear seat across the floor then around my shoulders and tie it to the door. I’m parked in a field that might be in The Trossachs in Scotland. There’s a light wood, bracken, wet grass. Dusk is beginning to fall. As someone had warned me I reverse carefully but the van hits a low deer fence (a goat could have leapt over it never mind a deer). I hit the foot brake but the van keeps sliding backwards of the edge of a ravine … yes, yes, Dougie, no one said it would be original … I sail backwards through the air, descending in rather clichéd slow motion. Me and the van move backwards through tree tops then into empty space and I see that it’s not an inland ravine but a sea cliff. I continue downwards.

We hit the sea bed with a bump. The van is sitting on its rear end in about a foot or so of water. Gentle waves roll in to the beach and I take in my surroundings. In front of me is the cliff I’ve just come off. It's covered in Caledonian forest trees. There is a massive structure attached to the cliff face, reaching almost to the top. It might be a giant Ferris wheel, it has that appearance and those dimensions, but it’s not for amusement. It could perhaps be a working wheel, except its not connected to any mill or water way. And its organic, made of wood and growing material, almost as if it’s part of the forest … watching too much Lord Of The Rings Dougie!

Over to the left there is a beach. Behind there are two blocks of 1960 apartment buildings like those my aunts, uncles and grandmother occupied in Castlemilk, Glasgow; except these are not modern day slums. They’re pleasant. It could even be a French sea side resort. There is a road separating the two blocks of apartments. It disappears towards the horizon.

There are quite a few people around. An old couple; children playing. Some folk out for a walk, some of them with dogs. I call frantically for assistance but no one seems too bothered. They look up and across at me. No one says anything but one or two smile, as if to suggest, ach it’s only Dougie horsing around as usual.

I rock backwards and forwards in my driver’s seat until the van rights itself. There’s some hissing and steam as the engine hits the water. I get out the van by the side door from which the hoist is usually deployed. I walk around the back of the van to inspect for damage. There doesn’t seem to be any. I return to the driver’s window, reach in through it to turn the ignition key and the van starts first time. I drive towards the beach but park just before it. Now I deploy the hoist. I’m standing on it, maybe sitting, when two police officers walk through the shallow water towards me. One says, good evening Dougie then they pass on out to sea. The other one simply smiles on seeing me, as if they’ve just been sharing a joke about me.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Fuck knows what that’s all about

Miriam Makeba

Necessary noise ... part 6

is this all it comes to in the end?

"I will be coming to the flat about 10. I can assume you wont be there then, can't i?"
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
you get what you deserve Douglas.

Can you, on a clear day, see forever?

Looking north. Candy floss clouds
suspended in a Michaelangelo blue sky.

John Martyn on the CD player
singing of Nick whatsit's solid air.

The green outside is dappled
with the lavender of jacaranda

here and there. Is that you
I can just see on the far horizon?

The chickens seem to be
distracting your attention

but I caught your wave
and saw you smiling.

Necessary noise ... part 5

Who knew?

There are so many things we’re never told by adults
when we’re young, inquisitive and oh so eager yet
to learn about the world and what it’s really like.

Instead, they offer facts and figures, dates, dynastic
lines and books of logarithmic tables, which help you
calculate some things that only Math guys understand.

The lucky ones, peut-etre, learn a little French and, maybe,
join the school exchange to visit some quaint towns
where no one understands a word you say but smile.

And when you’re seventeen, still spotty but so keen
to shave (although it looks a painful way to start each day)
they make you sit exams to test just what you know.

That’s very well and good, don’t get me wrong. I do not
mean to knock good education or insult the French
(nothing can persuade me of the need for cosines).

But does an adult warn you of the way a sunset falls
upon the heart, with blue and pink and gold; magenta
marbled clouds that fade to black against the sky?

Who warns of nights when trains roll down the track
like half-remembered words that thunder spoke
of how we dare not live without our dreams and hopes?

The answer is, of course, that not one adult speaks
a word of lessons still to learn when we have cast off
Maths, forgotten French and grown our first full beard.

never heard of them before ... said the old man

The Rest Of Your Life

Day one of the rest of your life
is not without its ups and downs
both of which you might expect.

The house begins to get tidier
(maybe that’s a consequence
of diversionary therapy
or displacement theory
operating on your psyche).

You clean up the messes that you can clean up,
which means the kitchen table is cleared
of a broken modem and unopened envelopes
mostly bills, of course,
and copies of The New Yorker
you never had the heart to read
because … well basically because
The New Yorker is way too optimistic
for a man who leaves his telephone bill
unpaid, his energy direct debit unopened
and his superannuation account
unexamined, although you could
attribute that reluctance to the collapse
of early-period 21^st Century Capitalism
at the fag end of the Bush years:

Yes we can! Yes we can!
It’s just that in some areas, we don’t.

You install software that’s been lying
close to your computer for quite a while
and you configure the programme
in ways you normally don’t bother
(reading the manual with attention to detail).

Some e.mails go unanswered.
Others, you put on a bright face,
learning how to use smileys on Skype,
which is a skill you never imagined
you’d acquire. And much to your surprise,
you learn about gravatars but don’t pick one.

Phone calls can be dodgy, if you take them.
You thinks it’s day one of the rest of your life.
Everyone else thinks it’s nothing more
than Saturday morning. So you have to put them right,
which can come as a bit of a shock (to them
because they’re in something like mild shock
but not wholly surprised;
while you’re aware you have to go over it again
and again and again.) But that’s life
on day one of the rest of your life.

Day two promises to be interesting
But we’ll get round to that tomorrow.

and today's word is ...

fuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckit

Ninety-one thousand, nine hundred and seventy-two

The number of words in my third draft of my unpublished novel, finished today. It's called Kaboom.