Dancing with a Panda

I know this is probably boring to read, but I had another fantastic weekend. The seeds of a throughouly good time actually started a few weeks back when Surreal Girl kindly bought me a ticket for Sundae In The Park. For those of you who are Sundae virgins – as I was until Saturday – this is a shameless corporate event involving music and limitless free ice cream. Yes, you read that right, limitless free ice cream.

Sundae In The Park also had everything you would expect from a somewhat middle class music festival. Lots of families. A restrained fun fair. More food stands selling organic, freshly baked eco-friendly pizza than ones selling burgers. A dedicated bar selling Pims. Stalls promoting good ideas such as reforestation, wind power and commercial bottled water to fund aid schemes jostling for attention with bad ideas courtesy of the eco-fascism of Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund. With its pantomime cows, coconut shy, toe wrestling and cute and not so cute farm animals – waiting to pounce somewhere on Clapham Common on Saturday was the lurking evil of llamas – at times Sundae felt more like an oversized English country fete than a chance to see Echo & The Bunnymen.

Although I am probably making it sound terribly poncey, there were enough Dead Kennedy and Black Flag t-shirts milling around for me to not feel out of place. In fact, the sheer number of old punks in evidence made me wonder they shared a genetic disposition to the prospect of gratis Ben and Jerry’s.

It was an unreservedly grand day out. The sun shone. We ate a picnic, drank a huge pitcher of Pims and enjoyed far too much free Fairtrade Vanilla and Phish Food. I swayed to the musical orgasm that is Killing Moon, felt my eyes moisten to a Badly Drawn Boy song* and ended up dancing with a Panda. I cannot remember the last time a £5 entry ticket brought such delights.

As for Sunday, it was mainly deliciously lazy. Papers were bought and read in bed around a regime of tea and light dozing that went on till mid-afternoon. Then a trip down to Seymour Place – a swimming baths used by my mother more than fifty years ago – via the colour and vibrancy of the Arab quarter. On the streets of our walk, the clink of coffee cups, gunfire quick conversations shouted into mobile phones and intoxicating aroma of apple tobacco in hookahs battled with car fumes and the doppelganger shift of passing stereos.

Surreal Girl is many things. Two of those things are a former champion swimmer and lifeguard. This explains why after more than three decades of partially avoiding my fear of drowning by trying not to go near anything resembling a swimming pool, I found myself being chlorinated and freezing my testicles in W1. Due to her extreme patience in the face of my terror I actually managed 10 metres with a pool boy (not as much fun or as perverted as it sounds) and found myself not wanting to get out of the water. This is no small achievement for her.

Of course, most of the joys of the weekend are not easily captured by words. Right now I have no easy sentence to trap in amber that rare sensation of blissful emotional contentment as its waves washed over me. No quick phrase to express the delights of simple domesticity. Nothing I can type that will ever get to the heart of why a decent red and a courgette risotto can be so damn life affirming. Maybe if I was a better writer I might get closer. However, right now all I can muster is that I am slow motion smiling at the marvel of a weekend as good as this.

* I know, I do not like Badly Drawn Boy either, but it was a Tank Park Salute style moment where one his unreleased songs captured a sense of lost childhood, the utter pain of broken promises and the need to carry on despite the fragility of life.

Bela Lugosi Is Dead according to Papa Ghede

The soundtrack to today has been Nouvelle Vague’s new album. Whilst Bande À Part is not as damn sexy or weird as their last offering – which had the deeply odd bossa nova covers of Too Drunk Too Fuck and Guns of Brixton – it is still trippy loungecore to love.

Adding to the bizarreness this time round is a definite vodou theme. Bela Lugosi Is Dead according to Papa Ghede is unbelievable. Any irony in Pete Murphy growling: ‘Undead undead undead’ in the original is more than tripled by Phoebe Toimer’s rendition. However, it also becomes deeply powerful by being set against the sex and death Haitian rhythm used to call upon the vodou lord of the graveyard.

A couple of tracks on Bande À Part have led me to being overcome by a flood of melancholia, especially Nouvelle Vague’s interpretation of Waves. Inspiring such a mood seems apposite for an album that has the most gothic packaging of all time. Trust me, the special edition CD case is like a black hole – it steals sunlight whilst seeming to shimmer like a 1980s video effect. It is also an incredibly funny album. If Billy Idol’s Dancing with Myself envisaged as a 1930s tap-dancing spectacular does not make you smile, you have obviously had even worst nightmares than me during the last 24 hours.

Time Travelling Porridge Spheres

It is difficult to know what to write today. Stripped to its bare white bones I could just type: I am back.

Whilst at the Doctor Strange cryptic level, ‘I am back’ would do at a pinch as both literal truth and higher planes metaphor, it does seem insufficient after having been away for 10 nights.

Feeding a random sample of my Scottish sojourn journal entries into an online Burroughs cut-up generator to yield a stream-of-consciousness impression of the holiday yields:

Flying into remembered wounds. Bursting into harsh blue. Waterfalls with breakfast. Fourth Reich invasion of the December cold mountain turrets. Inverlair not yet sucked by cash vampires of orbiting Disney castles. The fence sung with shadow history. Echelon spires disperse the fake culture of momentary tat. Enclosures of eager pine trees and Jedburghian Texans. The ears of Mr. and Mrs. Southwell. Smiling at future kisses. Ambitious hills permitting vegetable cravings. The peasant smoke lodge of junkie-style public schoolboys. Clan ghost music battles vicious sonic booms. Tourist forgotten standing stones. The industry of time travelling porridge spheres.

Whilst the above passages reads like nonsense and the last sentence demonstrates why cut-ups can be of limited practical value to a writer, I was planning proper entries, wordscapes and pictures relating to my trip.

However, I am now not sure if they will go up. Travel is often transforming and intensely personal, making it potentially boring to read about. It is just conceivable a few people might enjoy hearing about the Harry Potter viaduct, how to punch a fulmar, Eradour Distillery or my Tomb of Eagles dream, but at the moment I am not convinced the world needs a piece of ‘what I did on my holidays’ writing from me.

Highlands and Islands

Forgive the lack of service. I am away in the Highlands and Islands for a while. When I am back, I hope to post some private journal entries from my Scottish sojourn and there may even be photographs.

Suffocating Kryptonian Order

A comment was left on my comment on Stephen’s comment on the State Socialist Utopia entry of this blog that deserves a response. (Bloody hell, the previous sentence sounds as incestuous as most European royal lineages). ‘Agent Drake’ (it is nice to have readers who know the classics) asked why I ‘hate Superman?’

The Phantom Zone is part of it. Superman is the son of a man who condemns his political opponents to an endlessly cruel punishment. Like Stephen, that prospect scared the crap out of me as child. I realised what it meant – an eternity as a shadow in a dimension of ghosts.

It was not just the black ensemble and the fact Terrence Stamp was playing him that made me have a limited degree of empathy for General Zod. Jor-El and his ilk have always struck me as fascists with an advanced code of ethics and the sort of tosspots I would want to rebel against. I also might feel like beating the crap out of the son of the man who had condemned me to the Phantom Zone and wore the ‘S’ symbol of suffocating Kryptonian order on his chest.

My views on Big Blue Cheese are also down to the fact that the extent of his powers and moral certainty makes Superman more than a little boring in most comic book versions of the character. Whether Bryan Singer has done anything to make him interesting and likeable is something I will reserve judgement on till I have seen his latest opus.

Now that question is out of the way, look out for an entry trying to tackle the cut the crap question from ‘C…e’ about the direction I am now ‘travelling in’ made all the way back on the Cult Author Piñata.

Eating Monkey Brains

I lost a legal battle today. The book no longer contains a reference to Ernest Shinwell, son of famous Labour politician ‘Manny’ Shinwell. This is not because my claims about his involvement with the Kray twins are particularly new or outrageous, but because my publisher has already lost a lawsuit against Ernest. It is a question of backbone.

Having to airbrush Ernest out of the picture means tales of what the Krays got up to in Nigeria are now absent. I’ve managed to slip in a subtle reference*, but there is no full-on description of Ronnie eating monkey brains or of Ernest Shinwell’s role in the Kray’s dreams of a Nigerian empire.


* ‘The Krays name even became to known to established Labour peer
'Manny' Shinwell during the period in the gangsters career when they
were trying to involve several politicians in their failed attempt to
create a property, tourist and retail business in Nigeria.’

Meat Cleavers of the Wo Shing Wo

I had my publicity photographs taken today. I look suitably ugly, surly and ridiculous. With the eye patch, flowing locks and the traditional black ensemble I could even be mistaken for a cliché or writer of comic books (the two states of being often seem to entwine). Various bridges, steps, trees and graffiti covered walls were called into service as backgrounds and Nicola, the photographer, did a great job given the fact it is impossible to take a good photograph of me.

With the contractual obligation to provide photographs fulfilled, I was free to spend the rest of the day changing my appearance. For reasons of security – not least of which is the need to avoid the threatened meat cleavers of the Wo Shing Wo – I cannot divulge details of my transformation. All I can tell you is that Surreal Girl was the stylist and I am still having difficulty recognising myself in the mirror. Trust me, this is a good thing, even if I am still in shock at the prospect of wearing shorts for the first time since the age of 10.

At some levels, it has been a gentle day without any big events. Sunshine, easy laughter and smiles drifted into a delightful night of Red Planet pizza, wine, football and the company of friends. However, sometimes even a gentle day can contain hidden, monumental shifts in your being and personal history. That has been my experience today. Beyond the surface, beyond the ability of any camera lens to capture, things have happened and I am grinning right down to the core of my being.

From enjoying a Cuban-style brunch of fried banana, spicy tomato sauce and rice to cursing Sven-Göran Eriksson in a strange Kurdish café, every moment has seemed to give me a wonderful memory to bank. Post my vision of the mayfly whilst in hospital, I try to take nothing for granted. This means if nothing else, I know just fortunate to be enjoying elements of my life at present - despite the threatened meat cleavers of the Wo Shing Wo.

State Socialist Utopia

Tonight I braved the central London heat to discover Cuba in Kensington or at least the Che Guevara: Revolutionary & Icon opening at the V&A. I was pleasantly surprised for my £5. The exhibition managed to be much more than just another excuse to roll out Guevara, providing both an absorbing biography of Alberto ‘Korda’ Diaz’s famous image and a satisfying meditation on iconography.

Arranged around a series of ideas – amongst them revolutionary, saint, pop and emblem – was a strong, if far from exhaustive selection, of ways the most reproduced image in photography has been utilised. From advertising to agitprop, it did not try to reconcile the contradictions between commercialised guerrilla chic and genuine symbol of liberation, but instead revelled in exploring them. Even the usual banal context information you get in galleries was relatively informative and pretension free. They kept it simple, but provocative, revolving around a series of themed quotations (my favourite being Ariel Dorfman’s ‘Deep inside that T-shirt where we have tried to trap him, the eyes of Guevara are still burning with impatience.’)

To add to the opening’s atmosphere, there was also the prospect of Cuban hip-hop, barbecued titbits and mojitos. The recreation of a Fidel event was a little too authentic for me. An alleged state socialist utopia was evoked by every patch of green in the V&A garden being covered by people and queues for food and drink the size not seen in this country since the Winter of Discontent. Given this, the only red star Surreal Girl and I ended up eating under tonight was that of the Wagamama logo.