Feeling Somewhat Bleak Around the Edges

I am not well today. Tomorrow I am guaranteed to feel even worse as I am due at the hospital to have unspeakable things done to my poor body by a Scottish lady doctor. These two facts are not exactly helping me feel funk free. I am fighting hard against it, but for the last coupe of days several things have left me feeling somewhat bleak around the edges.

Amid all the angst at my own uselessness, I got an email from a friend, part of which read: ‘Nobody could erase my memory of you being there for me on the end of the phone every day when I split up with my ex, or hell – you giving me the hand-up in my career that led to what I now do for a living. That’s family, and that is what our line is all about.’

I found this deeply touching. There is no doubt it does the soul good to be occasionally reminded you have helped those you care about. The email also served as a bit of a kick up the arse. I cannot afford the luxury of feeling sorry for myself – there too many people I love and I want to do the best by.

A Fuzzball Riot

According to Charlie Brooker this week: 'Musicals are not to be trusted. They're not right.' Having just seeing Avenue Q, I feel he may be right. You should never trust anything that makes you laugh out loud at manifest evilness of bears.

The Bad Idea Bears (who could between them confirm all of Mr. Grasso's suspicions of ursine evil, especially when they end up converting to Scientology) were among the many moments when Avenue Q had me shaking with laughter. The idea of an adult musical inspired by and following the conventions by Sesame Street was always going to be either a glorious fist of furry fun or a slow-motion car crash. It ended up being a fuzzball riot and I loved it.

Anything that relies on the instant recognition of childhood for its hook has to have something more powerful in the tank to last beyond 10 minutes. If the only humour in Avenue Q was knowing that Rod and Nicky are versions of Bert and Ernie, Trekkie Monster is related to Cookie Monster and its human characters are a satire on the rainbow casting of children’s TV, the show would fall flat. Even rather fabulous songs on the universality of racism, heartbreak and sex in the characteristically bouncy style of Sesame Street would not be enough to keep you interested for more than two hours.

What makes Avenue Q not just funny, not just brilliantly staged and performed, but worth watching is that it observes some of the widespread angst of my generation without being poncey. Without any sense of effort, it casually managed to be as deep as your average Enda Walsh play. However, it did this without any annoying hint of pretension and the added bonus of brilliant puppets.

My definition of a brilliant puppet is one that, through the performance of the pupeteer, you forget is rods, felt and stuffing and begin to interact with imaginatively in the same way you do any theatrical character brought to life. Kermit the frog would be a good example of this. When Jim Henson got the little green blighter right, he could do a lot more than teach children how to count.

The Avenue Q puppets stopped being furr and strangely coloured noses within the first couple of scenes. When the emotionally crushed Kate Monster sings: ‘There is a fine, fine line/ Between love and a waste of time’ it works because she is expressing a human experience. She is no longer the bastard child of Zippy from Rainbow and Zoe from Sesame Street; she is simply someone who made a huge emotional investment in the wrong person.

While I laughed lines such as: ‘Schadenfreude? What's that, some kinda Nazi word?’ and lyrics like: ‘Everyone's a little bit racist sometimes/Doesn't mean we go around committing hate crimes’ two of my biggest chuckles of the night did not come from the libretto. The announcement that Naoko Mori (geek readers will know her as Toshiko Sato from Torchwood) could not continue playing her part in the second half due to her ‘disposition’ dripped such distilled sarcasm you could not help but squirm in discomfort. Even funnier was when a member of the audience sitting close to us announced a little bit too loudly as a banner proclaiming ‘Monsteresorri School’ was unfurled: ‘I know it’s a real word, but I don’t get it.’

Not wanting to confirm Mr. Brooker’s thesis on musicals, but the next one I intend to see is Wicked. It is a show notorious for its satire on spin and the loss of free speech that just happens to feature a green-skinned guerrilla and flying monkeys. Like Avenue Q, it is definitely one not to be trusted.

Turnip-headed Twats

Lawyers are often the bane of writers. Generally speaking they are a pox upon the truth telling process and an anathema to communication. In particular, the current lawyers I am grappling with are turnip-headed twats whose dedication to over caution, not knowing the facts and failure to engage with fair comment is doing harmful things to my blood pressure.

I miss working for a ballsy, news organization that actually starts from the perspective of what can be said instead of what will not upset those being written about. The recurrent legal grief I get every time I try to tell truth in print is seriously making me consider taking a Masters in Media Law. I now certainly understand Heinlein’s Year They Hanged the Lawyers.

Come the ELF revolution, the lawyers will not be hanged or even put against a wall and shot, but most of them will be looking for a new profession. Possibly farming turnips.

Slovenian Meejah Hor

I have agreed to do some more publicity for the Freemasons On Trial documentary, but only because it is publicity for Slovenia. The countries that emerged from the Yugoslav Wars of Dissolution have a special place in my personal history. I get a certain kick out of being translated into Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak, Montenegrin, Macedonian and Albanian, (that list alone should tell you an awful lot about the Dissolution Wars).

This means that when I get an interview request for ‘the most read Slovenian print medium’ and it ends ‘I send you best regards from Slovenia’ I feel like being incredibly helpful. I am not sure whether I can be classed as a Slovenian Meejah hor as there is no money or other discernible benefit to myself involved in giving an interview*. Still, I am sure it will give my Slovenian acquaintances something to chuckle about.

*Dosjeji Zarot is still in print in Slovenia, but neither Kid Dork nor I are getting any royalties.

The Demise of English Dreaming, English Rain

There is a possibility that this blog may have to disappear from the world of global public access within the next few months. If this happens, there will be an alternative. It is most likely to take the form of an occasional email newsletter containing details of any mainstream books I write, my new limited edition psychogeography/shadow history audios and some blog-like writing on apparently random aspects of the world as seen through a one-eyed ‘word slut’. As it would be subscription only, it might be more freewheeling. Imagine something like Popbitch without the pop.

If in the event of the demise of English Dreaming, English Rain you would like to receive such a newsletter, please send you email details to inside.knowledge@gmail.com.

WSD

For me, WSD usually means the gloriously archetypal Suede b-side WSD. I am aware it can also stand for word sense disambiguation (largely because I was once paid in cakes at Queen’s University to take part in experiments to develop algorithms to get round it). However, for the last couple of days WSD has translated into West Sussex Downs.

Bizarrely during my stay, the WSD seemed to act like a zone of increased potential. It became natural to be one minute herding sheep on the Truleigh Hill with an 87-year-old shepherd called Don before the next moment was taken up with talking to a Canadian girl who was riding across the downs atop a blue-eyed Shire horse. Meeting a professional magician called Raven atop the Devil’s Dyke quickly seemed as commonplace as spotting a clump of emo on Southend High Street. It felt at times as if I had slipped into a fiction edited by Boris Vian.

In these circumstances, the mind can smooth down the unusual. The flint and razor wire walls of HM Lewes Prison quickly became accepted as a natural a part of my temporary environment as the sudden chalk drops. The secret military spots, leftover microwave towers of Backbone and visible outcrops of Home Office Scientific Development Branch that may feature in Off The Map seemed no more extraordinary than the eating at a table whilst a Buff Orpington pecked around your feet. Chanctonbury Ring no stranger than certain alleys off Villiers Street.

For all the dramatic splendor, for all the constantly performing landscape, I am glad to be back in London tonight. I loved the relentless prototypical bursts of Englishness – cream teas served out the back of village post offices; hillside lanes, arched in green, twisting to reveal thatched cottages; moss-eroded statues of pan in formalized gardens – but I am WSDed out.

I could now happily go several months without seeing ducks copulating or lambs bouncing. I have exhausted any desire to navigate through fields covered with livestock excrement arranged in distribution patterns Viet Cong landmine layers would be proud of. I have also had enough of bloody rhododendrons, but that is an entirely different story.

Moments of Grace and Light

Since February, the majority of my days have had a life during wartime feel. The guerrilla attrition of stress has been cutting deep into the elements of my life still recovering from old injuries. I have felt old, broken and emotionally exhausted. The shuck has been prowling and I have been worried about going tharn.

Now, if you are one those readers who agree the anonymous commentator who wrote ‘Please go back to slashing your wrists in public – you being happy is boring’ this might be a good time to stop reading. I could easily give you enough vivid details of my angst to turn English Dreaming, English Rain into the Fugazi Times. However, today I would rather record moments of grace and light.

One of my favourite, less psychogeographically heavy walks in London is along the canal from my home to Camden Lock. Sauntering passed colourful houseboat homes with ripe names; passed mosque skylines and temples of old money; passed hyenas ripping flesh in Regent’s Park; under the undeclared works of art that pose as Victorian bridges; through clammy tunnels to bursts of green that speak of a vegetal force ready to recover the city as soon as mankind vacates it. On a good day, even the tattered professional drinkers hugging their cans of beer and watching the water from wooden benches can make me smile at the richness of illusion.

This afternoon, in sunlight and the best smiling company, I walked to Camden Lock. A half-hearted browse through the over-priced junk of the old horse hospital, a laugh at the ‘Bono is a Twat’/‘Make Coldplay History’ T-shirts and the obligatory stall lunch were all managed before it was time to catch the last waterbus back. All of this was a wonderful diversion. Even just focussing all my attention on watching the deft strokes used to create our crêpes gave me relief from dwelling on everything currently preventing me from getting more than four hours sleep a night.

If I had to pick a favourite memory above all others from 2006, it might just be taking the waterbus from Camden Lock with Surreal Girl towards the end of last summer. Even above memories of travelling around the Highlands and Islands, concerts in Hyde Park or eating ice creams at midnight when returning from parties held in the shadow of MI5, that particular boat ride still shines. The trip back today was just as glorious.

The whole ‘There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats’ may seem overly English, but the reality is that taking a boat along the canal it is incredibly relaxing. Once you aboard, you have to submit to its pace. You enter a bubble of reality that runs on its own timescale. There is nothing you can do but give in to the actual rhythm of the water for an hour.

The gifts of a riverborne perspective – uncommon angles, the enclosing darkness of the Maida Vale Tunnel, invading the privacy of the stretches of moneyed riverside, being within touching distance to Browning Island – wash over you. The river becomes a reflecting road. Following it in this way cleanses and refreshes the spirit.

It has been a beautiful day.