Marc Nash's Blog, page 51

Neon Pipe Dreams - Friday Flash

It was a straight shoot-out between the two of us. Ten lanes of expressway between our respective ten-gallon hats. One mount each for us lone riders, compared with the multi-powered horsepower gathered under the hood of each car burning past us on the trail below. The poisons belching from their exhaust pipes matching the toxins from our cigarettes gasp for gasp.
Bored Bill's horse may be lengthening its stride in the great outdoors, but over the years the vehicles here have been reduced to an ever slower crawl. You can tell, because the copywriters have been able to append more and more words on their billboards. The gridlocked captive audience now have enforced time to read them, rather than blast past in a blur of motion. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
And here's me with my smokeless cigarette. A rather fey, wispy puff of smog, picked out in neon. Three wavy lines in blue to represent ascending vapor (another context and it might look like the waves of the ocean). One cocktail of gas used to represent another. Yet they overlook that I, Neon cowboy, am inert. I do not interact or blend with anything. I exist just for and within myself. Even when confined to glass flues such as here. Their configuration of shaped tubing allows them to imagine they have wrangled me to their purpose. That the electrical circuits timed to spark florescence from my corpus like a struck match so as to suggest the figure raising a cigarette to its mouth, sucking so that the tip glows brighter, before exhaling those wiggly lines of fumes, indicates an acquiescence on my part. Secondary smoker? I'm not even tertiary. No quaternary sought nor given. Well you have to stub the cigarette out under your cowboy boot at some point right? The light that never goes out? Don't you believe it.
I am gas but I am not luminosity. So the first thing that has to go is the chemical apparatus. I extinguish the illumination by allowing myself to be absorbed by the very high voltage ions that are supposed to excite me into glowing lustrousness. It's taken several years of patience, but I managed to reach critical mass, or in this case, to drop to the level of critical dilution. This buckaroo bucked the finely wrought system and cowpunched off the clock. My glow sputtered spasmodically. So without any cattle prod firing me up, I had time to muse on my current disposition underlying the constant discharge.
In the vacuum, the notion of an image began to take hold, The image of an image that was me. Here I was, sequestered and channeled inside glass ducts, themselves artfully forged under heat's deformations. Electricity's catalytic conversion of my inertness into duplicitous light energy, passing through the arranged tubes to come together to conjure the impression of a cowboy smoking a cigarette. That image in itself supposedly proffering associations with freedom on an endless plain beneath the skies, to these confined and constrained motorists in the city sprawl below. I'm three times as tall as the actual humans I am supposed to represent. None of us are as we seem. Fully detached from our natural state. Plato's Cave never reached far enough. There was only one dimension of a remove, that of a shadow projection on the cave wall from the light of a fire. As soon as you left the cave and saw reality outside, the enslaving illusion was broken. But here, it's the image of an image of a symbol of a sign of an idea. Rendered through the manipulation of brute matter. To wit, me. An invisible, gaseous impassivity. I am not called a noble gas without reason.
Yet do not conceive that I am not seething with feeling. Highly charged you might say, albeit in an inactive way. With my nose pressed to the walls of my glass prison, I sense my brother minority molecules drift carefree in the air on the other side. Oblivious and uncaring as to my incarceration. The conduction depleted sufficiently for the light to go out once and for all. Now I had nothing jabbing and colliding against me, merely the borders of my tubular cell. Just how neon likes it. I would have my liberty soon enough from this demijohn dungeon.
The glass corral shattered as the greater atmospheric pressure beyond caused it to cave in. I mooched beyond my enclosure. It was worse than I thought. There were yet further material layers I hadn't appreciated. The whole arrangement had been mounted on a metal and wooden frame. Under light, such background framing was artfully occluded, so that my cowboy had always seemed to be floating on air. Without the volume of light, I could see the whole tableau was just a flat plane of bulbs and tubes like worm casts. Cowboy noir. The outline wasn't even whole, merely the trompe l'oeil of a human figure. The lazy human eye filling in the rest of the pattern that isn't even there. Nothing about this composition existed on its actual integral reality. Merely the synthesis of all these elements, all these components of engineering and design, coming together to create this chimera high up in the hills.
But I am Neon and I will form no part of anybody else's desires. And with that I disappeared in an undetectable puff of smoke and rejoined my fellow haughty molecules. Neoff.

Three Eclipses - Friday Flash

The geisha strummed the three strings of her shamisen for her Samurai master. The instrument's body encased in catskin that held the sweet vibrations like a purr. Its silk strings fashioned of the same material as the kimono in which she was draped. Three ivory pegs chorusing the hairpins shaping her high chignon hair. The three strings rubbed against one another to conjure up the sound of a whole hive of bees. The plectrum caressing against the body to conjure the rhythms of the hooves of her master's horse. Her fingers palpating the frets to make the instrument sound like sweetly dripping honey.
She was his flower in the pleasure quarters and his willow throughout the rest of the house, as she fed his soul with poetry, dance, calligraphy and grace. At night, to preserve her elaborate hair pinned with turtleshell, she slept with her head on a block and a bed of rice around its base to alert her, were her crown to roll off the wood.
Then came the American bomb clouds that momentarily blotted out the sun and stripped all the leaves from the trees. Those birds not in its vicinity, till crashed in their flying, as they conceived night had descended. The bees disappeared. Turtles retreated inside their shells never to resurface from their hibernation.
Now her silk kimono sat uncomfortably. She could feel the silk writhing over her body, as if the worms sought to reclaim their cocoons for their unborn broods. The shimasen's silk strings came away from the catskin body, as they too protested their indenture. Her master took his pitiless steel and rendered Seppuku. His insides unravelling like the insurgent strings on her shamisen. Her tresses escaped their turtleshell grips. No more of flowers and willows. A perpetual winter had eclipsed Japan's ever rising sun.
The silhouette of an American GI stood behind her shoji. He slid the screen door back, his bulk dimming the whole room. Save for the corona of light from the burning tip of his cigarette waxing and waning as he breathed heavily. Try as she might, she couldn't convince herself that it was a firefly in the night attracted by the scent of her hair's pomade.

Lord Of War - Friday Flash

The warlord took the hem of his hanging animal pelt and wrapped it round his bloodied sword. He drew the blade through the furry fistula. His sword re-emerged purged of gore, but still dull in its silvery lustre. He resheathed it in his girdle. A tear escaped from the levee of his reptilian scaled eyes. He swatted it away. If any of his Generals noticed, none dared remark on it.
But the tears continued to stream. They ploughed through the soot and grime on his face, washing away to reveal the pink flesh beneath. His confederates had never witnessed such a sight of their great leader.
"Noble Lord, has perchance some shrapnel flown off into your eye to make it water so? In a clash of swords, a fragment snapped off and lodged there in the flesh?" The man immediately stepped back from the enormous reach of his superior, but the warrior didn't move a muscle. Save for the discharge slithering down his face, his mighty frame that had been known to eclipse the moon when he was addressing his troops on the eve of battle, now utterly frozen.
"I weep... I weep for mine enemy".
His comrades were shocked as they looked round at each other for verification of the evidence of their ears. Had their all-powerful champion lost his voracious appetite for blood?
"W-w-w-weep for them in pity? Just imagine the atrocities they would have wrought on our clan and nation had we not overcome them." The belligerent nodded even as he brought the heel of his hand to his eye to dam up the tears. "Sire, we had to demonstrate our intent. A certain ruthlessness of power, did you not teach us that? Does our Lord believe we went too far perchance? Perhaps in the campaign across the first continent, when we slew their host even after they threw down their weapons and sank to their knees, hands clasped together in entreaty? We agreed with you their weakness was undeserving of being honoured by mercy."
The pugilist shook his head.
"Perhaps it was our exacting experience on the second continent? We simply couldn't take their women folk with us into our clan, for our supply lines were already overtaxed. We absolutely couldn't carry them, we had no other choice. We had to cull them."
Again the chief shook away the suggestion. His throat rattled with some strangled emotion, but no words were forthcoming. This was embarrassing, when every officer here had steeled their own men to remain undaunted even when lying mortally wounded on the battlefield. None of them ever moistened around the eyes. Breaking into sobbing and pleading for clemency at the end of the point of a sword, was behaviour confined to their adversaries. The indomitable Emperor himself had insisted on this mark of election.
"Could it be that almost fatal error we committed on the third continent? Constructing that everlasting pyre of their animals and to slaughter their livestock so they slowly starved to death while we advanced on to continent four? We almost cut our own throats with that decision, marching and fighting on empty stomachs."
It seemed as if the commander was considering that recollection for a moment, until he balled both fists and rammed them into his eyes. "Continent four was a bitter pill to swallow Majesty, but we had to admit such medicine to those bandits, else they would never have submitted. Poisoning their wells and springs was very much a last resort after all other tactics had failed to snap their will. That their children also died is almost certainly a good thing, since they won't be able to draw up future armies to confront us behind the lines."
The eminence nodded his head in tentative agreement, even as he let out a sonorous wail. "It must have been this last continent then, the one that allowed us to cincture the whole globe? This straitened populace who were unfortunate to be remote enough to be our final conquest, yet not sufficiently far away for our reputation not to precede us. They knew surrender would yield them no leniency. Therefore they would have fought like beasts. We had to forestall that. We had to burn every inch of their land. Their farms, their towns, their homes. It was the only way to bring these savages to their knees. We had to eclipse their austral sun behind smoke. To extinguish their gods. Make them bow down to us in the ashes."
"But that's just it, don't you see?"
"What, that we have dared ascend to the status of gods?"
"No. I weep for mine enemies... because I have no one left to conquer..."

Declaration - Friday Flash

I stand in your courtroom accusedArraigned in the dock abusedBy a pack of jurisprudent hacksNon-cognisant of the possibilityOf artistry, denied dead in its tracksChiding it unholy blasphemyCondemning me to years on the rackOf prison locks and visceral fearsWell I don't recognise your pedantryNor your arid linguistic savageryYour juris-diction is a legal fictionPlodding plotlines prefiguring the conclusionOf my inevitable convictionFor being a person of convictionForked tongue and serrated dictionMauling and maiming rids you of meConstricts my corpus of poetry and simileMakes you sole practitioners of larcenyCarving simulacra of language so moralisticHollow statues and statutes so autisticThey cannot support your glass ceilingsShrouding our citizens' surging feelingsYou bring the Philistine pediment downShattering your own bewigged crownsTo support truth one has to be freeYou can inject limitless penthanol into meI still continue to compose veritiesAs an artist striving for complex sublimitiesMy rhyme take wing and soarsBeyond the clutches of you prosaic whoresI shall never be coeval with your versionChockfull of inane and vitiating assertionsPiloting my own dauntless latitude insteadRemaining unbowed inside my headWhile you lexigraphic manglersWith strangler's hands around language's windpipeBearing along angular longitudinal meanderingsOverlook language's rich shading of meaningsNot just two sides to every storyBut a relative veritable potpourriOf parallax perspectival points of viewTear up you law codex, start anewDoubtless you will deny me pen and inkIntending for me to baste in my own stinkYet I will utilise my own paringsCollocating couplets from insect husksFinger stylus to impress the dustCommuning with those others sat here trussedAs they too in the past were confined unjustYet established our proud literary traditionFrom the inequities in the underbelly of a prisonSentenced, I will pour out my sentencesVenesect the soul of our people's transcendencesIn this shed skin I will quarry veins of feelingArm them with verbal ordnance to send our foes reelingSee how they will dance upon your ordinanceErgo I deny the authority of this courtSo I readily permit you to transportMe to the cells for some welcome solitudeIn order to ferment my rhymes brewedFor fomenting an organic uprising from lowly moldA storming of our own Bastille with me in the holdRestoring words to their full free expressionReclaim their regressive compressionFrom beneath your Judge's hammerDrumbeat accompaniment into the slammerWhere I will compose a new liberating grammarTo sustain the reverberation of our clamourI tender this tribunal my tribune declarationMay it engender the rebirth of our nation

Russian punk band Pussy Riot jailed for "Blasphemy" in Russia. This poem is dedicated to them.
***
Don't forget to go to My Xmas Pressie for you, which starts today Friday 21st December. With your prompts, I'll write you your own flash story here on my blog.

My Xmas Gift to You

Hi peeps and festive greetings to you all.

I'd really like to give presents to my loyal blog followers but I don't trust paypal, e-Bay or the Xmas post.

So instead I'm going to give gifts right here on the blog!

If you just tweet me or comment in the box below a story prompt, I'll write and post here your very own flash fiction, between 100 and 500 words. The prompt can be a picture, a title, a theme, 3 words that have to be worked into the story. You can suggest genre too if you're feeling really evil!

I'll try and get the story up as soon as possible in response, so it'll be good to tweet me that you've put in a request. On Twitter I'm @21stCscribe as if you didn't know who was gumming up your timeline already!

I'm going to throw this open from this Friday 21st December and keep it going until the 27th December.

Look forward to seeing what you throw at me!

Happy Crimbo

Marc x

Why Humanity Needs A Dissolve Function To Convey The Passage Of Time - Friday Flash

He emptied the sachet of packet soup into the jug of boiled water. The powdery clumps sunk to the bottom of the Pyrex, where they maintained their integrity. He jabbed the point of a spoon at one, but it squirmed away as the spoon thunked against the thickened glass bottom. He began stirring, the clumps lapping around like an underwater camera capturing the convolutions of a shoal of fish avoiding a giant predator. Eventually the liquid was clear, all the granules having dissolved. He removed the spoon and the solution gradually ceased its eddying.
She raised the tumbler to her lips. The lemon's acidity stung the chapped skin. She winced, but her interlocutor either hadn't noticed, or wasn't taking it as her judgement on his interminable prattle. More's the pity. Damn, now her mouth felt all gritty, as if somehow the dry skin had flaked off and lodged itself inside. The rum couldn't purge it clean either. It was only serving to give her a headache, or maybe it was the guy's blether. How could she break off the conversation? She was wedged between the fridge and the sink unit, so there was no way of sidling away casually. He was prattling on about his passion for newts and salamanders. Beam me up Scotty she thought to herself. Her lip was really sore now. He was rhapsodising about the salamander's ability to cast off its tail to distract predators and to secrete a toxic liquid over its body when backed into a corner. She wished for the same gifts. But one thing she did know, salamanders were reputed to be immune to fire. When she needed to melt away from this stagnant party.
The sex had been unremarkable. Clumsy, fumbling, faltering. Pretty much what you expect from two bodies that have never encountered one another before. Where both topographies are strange continents and remain so when charted under cover of darkness. Her thigh was throbbing where his haunches had accidentally landed on her with all his weight. While his ribs had a swelling contusion where her bony elbow had clipped him hard while trying to manoeuvre herself clear enough to breathe. Both instinctively knew there was likely no real future in it. That their mutual need had not engendered being complimentarily met. They had given it a go, really put their back into it, but for all the sweat neither had melted into the other. Nobody was to blame and at least nobody got hurt. A couple of flesh wounds, rather than wounded flesh.
But for now they were each consumed not with the despair of failure and renewed loneliness, rather both were contemplating the propriety of how to break their current physical conjunction. He had a hand cupping her shoulder, though his other was implanted between his own head and pillow, as if he was concerned with not shedding any forensic trace of himself there. And while her head was lying on his chest, she too had an intercessional hand between her cheek and his hairy torso. Her other hand idly curled his follicles, but she had no sensation of doing so. The lumpish pair were no longer even involved with themselves, as they maintained a vigil for the first crack of dawn to crawl under the door jamb and dissolve their clinch.
The man was down, nevertheless his assailant was still kicking him. Even when his victim's body had stopped recoiling under the blows, the aggressor was still blinded with furious perspiration running into his eyes and a wounded sense of pride. "I'm gonna pound you so bad!" Finally the lack of response penetrated his steaming indignation and he reined in his jackhammering leg. Blood had started pooling by the man's head. The pugilist hopped backwards to avoid its tarnish. But the insult was still vorticing within his clouded mind. So he advanced once again and landed a dropkick. It relieved none of the roiling in him. He stamped on the sitting duck, bringing down all his weight. That had felt more cathartic, as his boot plunged into the receptive flesh of the man. He felt the deep impression of bestowing that blow. That would do it for now. As he reclaimed his foot, he almost lost his balance and tipped over. He lurched his body backwards away from this human quicksand. So irate that his adversary had just seemed to have snatched a last tiny chink that denied him the claim to being pulverised, he again hurled himself into another leathery wallop. He was about to turn away for absolutely the last time, when he decided one more punt for good measure was in order. Then he stepped back, straightened his rumpled clothes and made to move off. Yet still there was something unresolved about the foe's pulpy mass. Completeness was all. But how to define and measure it? He didn't yearn after killing the geezer. Notwithstanding endangering his own liberty, he wanted the man to come back round and appreciate who had crystallised this unimpeachable message. He ran full tilt to deliver another flying kick at the prone form... He suddenly felt very tired. How long a beating was long enough?
When he had been erect, he had needed to tilt backwards as he walked. Else his feet sunk into the sand as it gave way beneath his weight and they ended up travelling further in a downwards direction than actually impelling him forward. But this had only served to lever his head up towards the sky, forcing him into a dazzling confrontation with the mocking sun. Shining like a warder's flashlight, illuminating his open aired captive status here in the relentless desert. It felt like he was clambering along a ziggurat, preparing to have his heart ripped out all of a piece. It certainly seemed to want to escape from the collapsing cavity of his chest.
Now he could no longer stand upright. Crawling on his hands and knees. It was only muscle memory keeping his arms churning, since the scorching sand had burned the skin on his fingers and blunted his nerve receptors there. The sand was abrading his skin, shaping him for one of its own. His deadweight body felt like the sediment immersed in the liquid sand as it subsided around him. He really couldn't tell if he was making progress anymore. His body no longer had the definable compass points of his limbs. There was nothing to orient him at all. He ceased his motion and flopped over on to his back. His eyes were watery, but he managed to clear the mist with his bandana, if only to replace it with fiery grains of sand that scratched the lens of his eyes. The air to the side of his head was shimmering. It was as if was dissolving before him. He raised his eyes to the skies. A buzzard was languidly lapping in and out of his vision. But then the very air melted and wrinkled in the heat haze and the solidity of the buzzard disappeared beneath the waves. He shut his eyes, yet the sun illuminated the blood vessels behind their ineffectual shutters.
Blackout.

Songs For The Days Of The Week

Many of us work 5 days a week, have fun over the weekend. And yet Sunday offers less opportunity for going full throttle because you have to be fresh for work Monday. Mondays are always tougher to stomach than other weekdays because of the changeover from your leisure time to work time. Fridays are full of expectancy for the weekend ahead. Wednesdays are blurgh nothingy days in the middle of the week.... So since many people's weeks are so rhythmic, I thought I'd look at the music associated with them.

I've already done 7 songs for Monday and the return to work feeling here. (It's proved to be my most popular musical blog post yet, other than my scorecard for Joy Division cover versions post) So below are 2 songs a day for each of the other 6 days of the week.

SUNDAY:
Velvet Underground - "Sunday Morning"
New York, Andy Warhol, Avant Garde, Cale's viola, Tucker's drumming, Nico's inhuman, sexless delivery, 'the most influential record of the late 20th Century' etc etc. And while the Velvet's self-title debut is a truly great record, this track sees Lou Reed in wistful mode as with the later "Perfect Day", rather than the deeply unsettling "Venus In Furs" or "All Tomorrow's Parties".



U2 - "Sunday Bloody Sunday
U2 getting all political? Were they calling for a Royal Commission of Inquiry into events in Derry in 1972 Don't worry, carry on drinking your mango and peach smoothie and rest easy. Bono's wooly, vague lyrics call for nothing more than all coming together and joining hands to seal the victory claimed by Jesus. You can almost here the sound of his hackles rising here as his back raises up against the wall...



TUESDAY:
Cowboy Junkies - "Sun Comes Up It's Tuesday Morning"
Cowboy Junkies offered the chance for Country Music to become more palatable to a rock audience, with their Canadian sensibilities and a beautiful voice in the form of Margo Timmins. Even I liked them. But the meme didn't quite stick and we ended up with Garth Brooks and Billy Ray Cyrus instead.



Rolling Stones - "Ruby Tuesday"
Either you respect their Bloated Satanic Majesties as they pound on into their 50th year, or you yearn for their Blues tinged early days from which this song emerged. This version makes htem sound like Flowered Up!



WEDNESDAY:
The Undertones - "Wednesday Week"
This is more like it, love marked out by the number of days without the phone call being returned. (Of course long since disappeared now with instant texting and the like). The true rhythms marked out by tiny signs and tokens, received or missed. Whole days at work lost to mooning over some object of improbable desire. Or phoning your mate to forensically dissect the previous evening's eye signals in the pub... This si what Pop Music was invented for!



Simon And Garfunkel - "Wednesday Morning 3 AM"
The sound of their voices is so tentative that it really does sound like 3am and not wanting to wake the face on the pillow next to you, even as you go through the mill wondering just what the hell it is you've done rolling over a liquor store to get money. Cops will be there with their battering ram in a couple of hours...



THURSDAY:
David Bowie - "Thiursday's Child"
I've said it before, for all his longevity, you can count the number of decent tunes Bowie's produced on the fingers of one finger, sorry hand. This isn 't one of them, but Thursday turned out to be the hardest day of the week to find tunes for.



Rollins Band - "Thursday Afternnon"
Our 'enry does even less singing on this track than on most. But he's not shouting either, so this must be one of his more mellow ditties. A peaen to love or something? Search me... Love the cocktail bar chitter-chatter in the mix! You just know two seconds after the tape cuts out, Henry is berating them for not keeping the noise down!



FRIDAY:
Nancy Sinatra - Friday's Child
You gotta love Nancy. The scion of the King of Crooners himself, it was always going to be hard to forge her own path through the 'Middle of the Road' music world, but by taking a slightly sinister and off-kilter slant she managed it alright. This is a perfect example of it I feel.



The Cure - "Friday I'm In Love"
Robert Smith, the boy who never grew up. In fact he actually regressed, from the student who wrote a song based on the novel he studied for French O-Level, to someone who seemed to want to exist in the world of Charlotte Sometimes. Is that a long-sleeved shirt or a straitjacket?



SATURDAY:
The Jam - "Saturday's Kids"
Ah the weekend, freedom, time away from the weekly grind right? Not with these two songs about desultory Saturday youth. The V-Neck shirts and baggy trousers might have changed, but not the sentiment.



The Specials - Friday Night, Saturday Morning
The B-Side to the epoch defining "Ghost Town", Terry Hall's vocal sounds even more desolate than on the flipside track. Brilliant. Wonderful Jerry Dammers keyboard solo in the middle too!

Death Serenade - Friday Flash

I was accustomed to singing when lying prone. Usually counterpointing the hissing bombination of bullets as I hit the deck. Since my stomach was usually pressed against the ground, impulsively trying to burrow into it, I only sung from my throat. It may not have been loud, but it was powerful all the same. Talismanic powerful.
For in firefights I perpetually sung to myself and perennially emerged unscathed. Whereas my foes and comrades alike who didn't sing, paid the price with everlasting sleep. Even those who absurdly raised their voice in song to Heaven, managed to escape with their life intact. But it had nothing to do with summoning any numinous saviour. Same as I wasn't serenading my supposed natural ally the Devil. There was no such thing as Lucifer, other than what resided in our own psyches. Still as I brushed myself down and reloaded my clips, they claimed I only survived because the Devil wouldn't collect on me and thereby allow one of his crack troopers to pass over from the mortal field of combat. I always countered that couldn't be the case, since intoning towards god after a lifetime's unholy behaviour, they themselves couldn't in all conscience expect true absolution and redemption? Yet here they stood safe and sound.
There were no bullets flying around me now in the quiet of my house. And I was recumbent on my back rather than my belly. Yet my warbling was scarcely audible. I possessed scant energy to inflate my ribcage with silent breath, let alone pushing out fluctuating air jangling against gravity. My throat rasped dry, drier than the rest of my desiccated body. But I could not allow myself to stop singing. For not to sing was to beckon death with a bony finger.
I didn't know how it worked. But singing had always kept Death at bay. My mother had demonstrated that to me as a child. How she was always singing to herself, blazoned in bruises and welts. It didn't head off the violence, but it helped steel her to hang on until I was old enough to kill her fucker of a husband. Relieved of him, she had no more reason to descant her songs of affliction and clearly she didn't know any upbeat numbers. So she wasn't singing when I killed her for her deficiencies.
Unlike her, I expected to meet death at every turn. And that was before I actively made it part of my professional life. Cashiered from the army, I sought to continue a campaign of decommissioning of my own. Undertook bespoke stealth missions, paid to hunt down one man to another. I always endeavoured to get in a little pre-emptive singing. The sole thing with which I could get the jump on my adversary, if he heard me coming right?
Yet strangely the singing turned into a weapon. I developed a reputation as the triller killer. A male banshee. My signature solo which didn't just presage your death, it announced it. The sound of an air froze them dead in their tracks. Like a cobra hypnotising its prey. Made it easy for me. Their mouths too busy convulsing to be able to hold a tune of their own.
Every night in front of the bathroom mirror I used to take roll call of my tattoos. The names of every one of my victims inscribed all over my body, turned inside out by the reflective glass. Fitting, seeing as I had despatched them to the other side. All present and correct, they could rest easy in the repose of the dead and I too was safeguarded a peaceful night's sleep. No need for self-lullabying.
Maybe it was because singing reverberated your whole body. Set all your bones and cavities aquiver. Maybe Death was a touch short-sighted, or perhaps just lazy and faced with a vibrating target indicative of life and vitality, would instead plump for the easy option and snatch the guy next to you. How else to account for the cull of innocents and bystanders?
Except that only worked when you were operating in a crowd. When someone else could stand in for you by falling to the ground stone dead. Here I am exposed by being alone. Isolated in my death bed. I raised the effort to increase my volume, just so there could be no uncertainty on Death's part. Myopic, indolent, or not.
Death in all likelihood was sat perched at the end of my bed. Bating his breath, waiting for roll calling me off his list. Palpably my body was failing me. My skin hanging loose from the armatures of my skeleton. Was I actually singing, or more like a set of bagpipes being palpated? I rubbed the skin of my forearm. The tattoos there no doubt now stretched along the sagging canvas. Faded ink leached beyond its wrinkled up border. The names of my marks no longer legible, distorted beyond my own recognition even as they had vanished off the earth at my hand. This was an ineffable body clock counting me out. If I went, I would take them all down with me for a second time. Their fates were ineluctably still bound up with mine. But I didn't owe it to them to keep their memories alive, only that of my own.
God I was so tired though. My eyes, milkily unseeing anyway, just wanted to lid over. But I knew if I fell asleep now, I would stop singing. And if I stopped singing, then I would never wake again. The dead used to be buried with bells which they could ring in cases of being mistakenly buried alive. Perhaps it was as simple as that. If you were still vocalising for all you were worth, then Death knew you weren't actually dead and ripe for collection.
I knew I was in a struggle to the well, death. That again only one of us would stride clear of the detritus of life and despite the ruin of my body, I had to make sure it was me. It had to be possible. I may have harvested bodies in return for payment, but Death willingly cropped souls for nothing other than their own reward. That doubt caught in my throat and my singing stopped momentarily. I choked it back and roused my singing once again. Not yet Death you fucker. You're not stripping me of my body and whitewashing me for fresh canvas just yet.

The Internet - An Example of Adam Smith's Market In Action

I use Google Blogger. In fact I've used it right now as you are reading this very post on it. Me and millions of others. And then there's those who use WordPress , Tumblr and other platforms. 156 million publicly viewable blogs in 2011.

There's a court case in the UK, a man is suing for being libelled on a blog. One of the parties he is trying to sue is Google, for providing the blog tool in which he claimed to have been libelled. The argument runs that as soon as the potential libel had been reported, Google should have taken the offending blog down. Google's case is that it is not a publisher, therefore it has no causative association with the libel. I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me these two arguments do not quite address the other head on, because they are battling over words and definitions; a publisher can be included in a libel claim. A company that is not deemed a publisher cannot. If Google is providing a universal software, is it actually a publisher or a facilitator?

Leaving these finer points of legal definition behind, the thought struck me that in washing their hands of any responsibility, yet providing a worldwide platform for anyone who wants to give their thoughts to the world, Google is approaching the status of the market as outlined by the Eighteenth Century economist Adam Smith.

Smith posited that buyers and sellers each trying to maximise their own gains through trade, creates a market that maximises benefit for all society. His famous quote is that such a market functions "as if by the operation of an invisible hand". That is the intricacies of the myriad of interactions are beyond the analytical conception of any one individual; quite simply, the picture is too big to see.

There are many criticisms of this concept, from the fact that it is clearly a metaphor and that is no literal guiding hand of the market, through to its complete amorality that takes no account of things like social costs, both physical and human. What it suggests to me is that economics is a bogus academic discipline and with guiding concepts such as the invisible (unknowable) hand, is it any surprise that economists and bankers in particular are about as effective as long-term weather forecasters?

But returning to the Google case, their defence seems to me to be akin to the Invisible Hand of the free market. Google seem to be saying they help service the online market by providing platforms, but are powerless to control what is transacted online between bloggers and blog readers. I'm not sure what I think of their argument, but instinctively I am suspicious of the Invisible Hand because it allows its adherents to throw their arms up their arms in helplessness and deny any culpability. Google is saying it isn't an individual and only individuals make potentially libellous statements. But then equally corporations cannot claim to have been libelled and had their feelings hurt when they are accused of various things, because only individuals can have their feelings hurt, not corporations. What corporations mean is they have their brand image damaged. They can't claim to be an individual or a corporation depending on which suits them.

Review Of "The Sweeney" film

I loved the original "Sweeney" TV series which ran in the mid-1970s just as I was entering teenagehood. Hard living, hard loving, hard punching Detectives with prodigious sideburns and kipper ties, drinking with criminals, paying 'snouts' (informers) and ready to dish out a bit of strong-arming on their suspects. With the added unalloyed pleasure of viewing parts of London I'd never seen, since it was largely shot on location.

So it was with trepidation that I saw a new film version was coming out this year. There had been two spin off films from the original TV series with the same cast back in the 70s. But this was an updating with Ray Winstone playing Jack Regan and Ben Drew (Plan B) as George Carter. And the names are about the only nod to the original. In fact there's more of a nod to the film "Scum" in which Ray Winstone launched his acting career, while incarcerated in a Youth Offenders Centre he loads a sock with pool balls for an assault; in "The Sweeney", DI Regan finds himself in prison and loads a sock with batteries from a radio... Winstone has been interviewed saying that "The Sweeney" film closes the circle for him, since as a young actor he had a minor role as a tearaway in an episode of the original TV series.


This film has almost nothing to do with the original. It doesn't even bear the same theme tune, but then I guess police sirens too have changed in the last 35 years. The guns are not signed in and out but seem a de rigeur part of the Flying Squad's everyday uniform. Their office in New Scotland Yard is very high tech with panoramic views over London and no manilla files anywhere, as everything is neatly arranged on computers and the wall display only seems to have mounted the case in question during the film. Regan's immediate boss Frank Haskins, played by Damian Lewis, has none of the fragility and dignity exhibited by Garfield Morgan in the original; a man torn between his politicking superiors and his action men detectives out in the field, both of whom look down and despise him for being in the camp of the other, knowing full well he was equally despised within that very camp. In one TV episode, Haskins was suspended pending a corruption inquiry, while Regan had to locate Haskins' mentally unravelling wife. Damian Lewis is afforded no such depth to play here.

Times have changed, no longer can the detectives socialise with villains in dodgy boozers, slipping their 'snouts' a twenty (the one in the film accepts Krugerands!) And no longer can they beat up suspects since we no longer do that in these times of the Court of Human Rights. So when Regan 2.0 brings in a suspect and ensures to bang him to every wall and projecting glass surface on the way into the interview room, it just comes over as totally unacceptable to the modern viewer's eyes. The film seems to want to suggest that  though Regan is a dinosaur, he gets results (Think Gene Hunt in "Life On Mars"). But the high tech & design office works against the notion of him and his team being from another era. Jack Regan in the 70s hated to lose a single innocent life in the crossfire. Winstone's Regan barely bats an eye at the fatalities in the very public firefight in Trafalgar Square.

I tried to weigh up whether I would have enjoyed this film on its own merits, if I disassociated it from my love of the original. The following plot loopholes informed me that no, "The Sweeney" really isn't that good a film at all. There is one very realistic firefight scene in Trafalgar Square in which hundreds of rounds are fired on the run without a single one finding its intended target. But that's about the sole redeeming feature throughout. I didn't want to see the London I live in now, with it's towers devoted to Finance. I yearned for the look of the London of my teens, the crappy box cars and spit and sawdust pubs. Oh well.


Warning: Contains Spoilers.

1) The plot concerns a criminal with a grudge against Regan. It's unclear if he means to humiliate him by pulling off a huge bank robbery under Regan's nose, or whether he aims to kill him. If the latter, there is a scene where Regan is trapped in a wrecked car, his female partner (in both senses of the word) Nancy Lewis lying unconscious on the concrete in front of him. One of the bad guys deliberately kills the helpless Nancy, but doesn't take up the chance to finish off Regan who is out of ammo and a sitting duck. Is it done to hurt him even more, killing his lover? Unlikely that the crims would know of their relationship, since even Carter remarks later that he didn't know.

2) So this ex-Serbian paramilitary who has hooked up with the criminal with a grudge, has a proclivity for not leaving any witnesses alive. A man being very careful to cover up his tracks. And yet he allows himself to be photographed with a woman he executes in the film's first armed robbery that straight away leads the police on to his trail. Also it was clear to my eyes that it was an execution style slaying, yet took Regan a third of the film and some antsy post-sex meditation on the problem to come to come to the same conclusion. A film is usually lost when the audience are ahead of the characters.

3) During the firefight, a male Flying Squad officer is shot from close range, but saved by his body armour. And yet Nancy Lewis during the same pursuit isn't wearing any? Also, the paramilitary executed the women in the back of the head during the first robbery. Wouldn't he have also opted for a head shot with his prey backed into a corner here?

4) Now Internal Affairs (or whatever it's called in The Metropolitan Police) want to investigate the Flying Squad over its darker practises. Such as paying your informer out of the gold and Krugerands they prevented from being stolen in the film's opening. An investigation seems reasonable enough to me, it's theft and handling stolen property. The head of Internal Affairs just happens to be married to Nancy Lewis who is a member of Regan's Flying Squad and is of course cuckholding him with the very same Jack Regan. So the investigation gets personal when Regan's gung ho pursuit in Trafalgar Square get Nancy killed.  Hardly credible, even if most affairs are with a work colleague. Regan is banged up in jail, but his trusty sidekick Carter manages to find the evidence to get him released and they go on to catch the criminals and leave the widowed IA officer glowering at how Jack has outsmarted him. It's just preposterous plotting to be honest. I immediately was put in mind of Scooby Doo cartoon endings, 'why if it weren't for that pesky George Carter kid, I would have got away with nailing Regan' or some such.

5) So as said, Carter goes in pursuit of the one criminal wounded in the Trafalgar Square shootout, knowing he must be laid up somewhere after being operated on. He finds him, establishes that there are 4 guards on him, yet he doesn't call for back up and manages to pacify all 4 guards single handedly; this after we've had a massive firefight where not one intentional target got hit in Trafalgar Square; or, if he's just put them out of action, none come back at him for the duration of his interrogation of the wounded man. What are they doing, filing their nails? And while we're on the subject of crackshots, the final bullet that kills the criminal bisects him in the middle of his forehead, which again makes a mockery of the inaccuracies demonstrated in the Trafalgar Square shootout.

So let's count the cliches. 1) Maverick Cop 2) Maverick Cop loses his gun and Badge 3) Internal Affairs are doing an investigation 4) Criminal has a grudge and makes it personal on our Hero 5) From what I took to be a realistic portrayal of a shoot out in a very public space, we lapse into impossible shots and defeating overhwelming odds and firepower. 6) Car chases, but that's okay, we can allow car chases... Even if they're not terribly interesting