Marc Nash's Blog, page 54

10 Devilish Songs

They say the Devil has all the best tunes. Judge for yourself with these ten diabolic ditties. So many top tunes in fact that Cliff Richard's "Devil Woman" doesn't quite sneak in...

1) Robert Johnson - "Me And The Devil Blues"
From the original Grandaddy of all things devilish and selling your soul for the gift, comes this song from the crossroads where only the unholy got buried...



2) Pink Floyd - "Lucifer Sam"
A bit 60s psychedelic, but dem were the times. Animal familiar of the Devil rather than Old Nick himself, still that's hippies for you...



3) Laibach - "Sympathy For The Devil"
A Rolling Stones cover version, made suitably diabolic by the totalitarian posturing of this group from war-torn Yugoslavia. The Stones' song had a film dedicated to it made by Jean Luc Godard "One Plus One" when people really did think the Devil was about to inherit his realm with all the revolutionary upheaval of the late 1960s.



4) Daniel Johnston - "Don't Play Cards With Satan"
Daniel Johnston's mental disorders (schizophrenia and bi-polar) lend his art a heart-wrenching intensity (think of a musical version of Van Gough maybe). Just listen to his voice in this track and you have to credit that Daniel really, really believes in the Devil. Even the guitar strumming sounds possessed.



5) Funkadelic - "Miss Lucifer's Love"
Funky devils and why not? The devil in this case is almost certainly human and mortal, but when it's George Clinton you're talking about, that can be pretty other-worldly anyway! Groovy little devil.



6) Beck - "Devil's Haircut"
Beck doing what beck does best and with the usual impermeability of his lyrics. Just a good song really...



7) Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Up Jumped The Devil"
Seeped in Southern Gothic as Nick Cave is, Old (horned) Nick was going to make an appearance sooner or later in his music.



8) Big L - "Devil's Son"
Rappers are often portrayed as Fold Devils threatening the moral fibre of society. Here's a song that certainly had its fair share of trouble because of its extreme subject matter and kept getting pulled from release. Big L imagines that he is indeed Satan's offspring and goes on the rampage against Satan's enemies; er that would be Christians...



9) B52s - "Devil In My Car"
Just to lighten the mood a touch, the B52s bubble-gum rock camp it up when they discover that the devil has hitched a lift with them...



10) Butthole Surfers - "Sweatloaf"
The Devil always pops up in heavy metal music, but I'm not a metalhead really. But the Butthole Surfers always wanted to be Black Sabbath and this song is as funny as hell. Literally. Its starts quietly, so give it a chance. It was always great live, when lead vocalist Gibby Haynes ad libbed the intro with his insane mental jottings. Great fun.



11) Max Romeo - "Chase The Devil"
If Heavy Metal pays lugubrious homage to all things satanic, you'd imagine Reggae would play it for real as the enemy of their beliefs. And Max Romeo here does exactly that to fine effect.

Exege(ne)sis - Friday Flash

In the beginning was the word and the word was GodIn the beginning was the wor(l)d and the word/world was go(o)d
In the beginning was not the world, because God was supposed to have created it. Not in any procreative, progenerative way, since there was no conjoining of the sexes in reproduction, unless you buy into the male-female polarities of light/darkness, earth/sea, sky/ground.
The word or the world could not be good, since there was no other moral being yet extant to judge and pronounce upon it thus. If the Divinity is pronouncing his own work as good, it's a little unbecomingly arrogant of such a numinous Being to do so. Blowing his own trumpet as it were and we all know where trumpets and the number seven can lead don't we Jerichoans?
In similar vein there could not have been the word in the beginning, sine there was no one around to utter it (other than the Divinity uttering a 'shezam' or similar conjuration word). In certain Far Eastern theologies, there is a primordial sound, the moment of its first striking being the act of creation itself, from which all life and energies with their vibrations stem.
And God said, Let the earth bring the living soul after its kind; the beast and the thing moving itself and the wild animal of the earth after its kind; and it was so.
There is no capitalisation of 'earth' gainsaying the investing of gender in the manner of a Gaia and yet this is followed by an immediate polarity of the (higher) living soul and the (base) beast. 'After its kind' suggests the generations reproduced through sexual procreation and this is of course the (spare) bone of contention in The Garden Of Eden.
The word 'after' has been interpreted as 'according', that is within its delineated phylum, genus and species type. Genetic groupings are demarcated, yet allowing for theological prohibitions on 'pure' and 'unclean' animals that seem to cross several classificatory elements and forms the basis of the Jews' Kashrut dietary laws. They wouldn't eat animals that seemed to diverge from recognised groups in no matter how superficial a manner.
'The thing moving itself' undermines its own theological dialectic. One interpretation has this being worms and other legless creatures crawling along the ground (the snake of course was not thus shaped until God ripped its legs away in Eden). Modern science also suggests the primary existence of single cell creatures, clustering together into slightly larger aggregates. So something that superficially resembled an eye, though of course lacked for a developed retina and cortical and synaptic brain to function as oracular, clumped together with some cells that provided a degree of locomotion across the ground. Incrementally in time, the aggregation grew in sophistication and the eye was able to link up to specialist cells to facilitate it to 'see', the brain and central nervous system wired up the muscles so that the animal could walk and the rest is Natural History.
But what of language? That first word? In the beginning was the word and the word was Gravity. G-Force.
Of course the first enunciated word was nothing as complex and intricate as 'gravity'. Yet without gravity there would in all likelihood have been no first language, no opening gambit, no referential system at all. For as mankind evolved in among that confusing welter of sense experiences in his environment, there were a few things he noticed followed rigid patterns.
rain always fell down on their headsmountains always pointed upwardstheir spears and rocks would always eventually touch down on the groundas would their urine (men only)trees grew verticallywhile their shed leaves tumbled back down to earthbirds flew higher than men's headsscorpions crawled at men's feetavalanches and waterfalls crashed deafeningly descendentlyvolcanoes belched their fire and smoke ascendantly
Ergo a brace of things man could stake his tongue with. Upwas skywards and down was plunging towards their feet. From this they were able to extrapolate words such as here, there, right, left, near, far, under, over. Me and you as in a spatial configuration. Us an them. "My God good, your god no good". Heaven and the abyss. They didn't just admire mountains, now they scaled them through shared language enabling co-operation and teamwork and preparation of resources. Upwards ever upwards. Eventually they would tunnel and mine beneath the earth and quarry metals and powering fuels. And all thanks to gravity establishing a few regular ground rules.
In the beginning was the logos and the logos was G-d.
If the Greek word 'logos' means the unifying principle of the world, then it cannot truly be translated as 'Word'. For words partition, categorise and define. Words undermine the monistic, the belief in the one, for they introduce and encourage relativism.
In the beginning was the end of the world. And the world was begun (conceived) and ended (divided and dissevered) by the word.

Rear View Mirror - Friday Flash

The spike heel bit on the pavement, listing to the left which threatened to swipe the foot from under. But settled instead for merely splaying the boot in a wobble. From the distance behind, I couldn't tell if this was due to the spike heel itself having been worn down one of its halves, or the result of the natural sashay that drove the heel into the pavement at such an acute angle. The stutter lent the gait a teetering shimmy though.
The flap of an ankle buckle strap fluttered and reverberated like an ensign with each stride, since it hadn't been fully clamped down beneath its restraining bar. I wondered if it actually made any metallic tinkling sound, but again was not quite close enough to pick it out against the clamour of the noisy street. I increased my own lope in order to narrow the gap between us.
Travelling up the leg now. The nylon wrapping the calves rippled with each movement of the flesh they contained. Yet beneath their sheer sheathing, I could trace the tensing and relaxing wiggle of the calf sinew as the sole of the foot reclaimed contact with the ground. The knot of muscle moved like devoured pray being worked through the body of a snake.
The rep's sinuous give and flow with the elliptical orbit of the ball of muscle, was hamstrung further up the leg. That denier material covering the haunches, did not twitch or ruffle at all. Instead it remained ramrod stock-still, as if spray painted directly on to the skin. No matter the pivot of the hips causing the thighs to sway, the seams of the tights were immaculate vertical lines piloting the eye back down towards the tumult below the knee. Like the bars of a portcullis slamming shut on the bedlam beyond.
I espied the short mini-skirt rucking up with each lift of the leg into a forward step. Exposing the panty-line beneath the dark hue of the tights. An enticing ridge, that teasingly reburied itself beneath the swell of the skirt's fabric on the down-stroke.
Is this perhaps what my own flesh looked like while I'm in motion? Were I to be adorned in women's raiment that is. Or was my twin's mirror image revealed to me, not a reflective replication after all, but one deliberately distorted and carved by the alien clothing? My brother was yet to have the operation to change his body shape, yet nonetheless the legs would not be undergoing any surgical modification. Though how he held his pelvis, may have been subtly altered by the hormones be ingested.
Well may my sibling claim that he was a woman imprisoned within a man's body. Yet I rather feel that this was another instance of him trying to differentiate himself from me and to assert his own being by way of contrast.
But he did make a fine woman, so maybe something untoward had taken place within our shared womb. That the chemicals had wrought about an unintended transformation which my brother was seeking to put right now. Who knows, if we had been lying the other way round in respect of one another, I may have received the concentration of chemicals that bathed and cast him so.
I slowed my pace. There was little point in pursuing him now, in order to capture myself.

Before The Devil Knows You're Dead

I've just caught up on viewing Sidney Lumet's final film, "Before The Devil Knows You're Dead" with Philip Seymour Hoffman playing the son of Albert Finney. There was a really interesting exchange between the two characters which set me thinking.

Finney apologises to Hoffman for not being the father to him that Hoffman hoped he'd be. Hoffman replies by apologising for not being the son that he wanted to be to his father.

While we all have hopes and dreams for our children, do we have the right to demand them to grow to be any particular type of person? I don't think we do, beyond non-specific notions of them being happy, healthy and fulfilled. I don't think a child when grown up ever has to apologise for not turning out the way a parent might have hoped. This is not to say that if the child hurt the parent directly, such as stealing from them to fund a drug habit, the child needn't apologise for such an act. But I don't think they are obliged to apologise for the person they turn out to be. While a drug addict, (extreme example that it is) objectively would be likely deemed to have lived a disappointing life that almost certainly didn't fulfill their own potential, the accusation that they didn't live up to the parent's expectation ought not to be added to the charge sheet. The psychology of addiction would be most likely to point some of the blame back in the direction of the parent anyway, but that's a different set of arguments.

Why do humans want to become parents? It's a multi-faceted question, ranging along a spectrum from our blind biological drive, the intricate tangle of emotions relating to relationship and one's own notions of being a child, through cultural and sociological need according to the meaning of 'family' within different cultures, through to sheer carelessness as the child may arise out of a drunken fumbling. No child asks to be born, our consent is never raised before we even exist as a clump of cells, since quite clearly it cannot be sought. So whatever reason the parent has to sire children, they can have an image of what sort of child they might like, but they cannot, must not actively try and shape that child into the image the parent has in their mind. This is not to rule out the parent modelling morals and other social behaviours. A parent can model the ethics of what it is to be a member of society, but ought not to narrowly channel the child into being a lawyer because that's what the father does, or aspired to do but never got the chance himself. For a parent to live out their own fantasies through a child is anathema to my mind, since it denies the child its own identity and individuality.

When Finney apologises for not being the father his son hoped for, this is far more unforgivable to my way of thinking. Having made the decision to bring a child into the world, the responsibility is all that of the parent. To not devote the time, energy, attention and love to the child is a dereliction of duty. Of course we are all fallible and we may fail in certain realms, but an overarching failure as Finney's character owns up to is unforgivable. Finney's character confesses to being emotionally remote from his son and to me this is an example of just such an overarching failure. The emotional charge behind the decision to want a child, does not permit emotional remoteness once the child is born. Of course there can be many factors that lead to emotional remoteness, depression, failure to bond, an actual physical remoteness of an absent or effectively absent parent. But the parent should never feel compelled by their own behaviour to apologise to the child for not being the parent they hoped they would be.

A child is absolutely entitled to hope for a certain type of parent, which will inevitably be centred around love. However, the same is not true for the parent. The greatest love a parent can show their child is not to have preconceptions about who they should develop into, but to facilitate and support them in finding their own being.

7/7 Conspiracy?

I'm not a great one or conspiracies. That's in spite of my natural bent for cynicism, mistrust of government and someone who believes man is possible of any type of behaviour no matter how extreme. As a writer I've conjured up such scenarios in my stories.

Last night's BBC3 programme "7/7 The Conspiracy Road Trip" took four people who each doubted the veracity of the official explanation of the 7/7 Tube and bus bombings, on a journey meeting experts, witnesses and seeing some of the context with their own eyes in order to challenge their internet-fuelled beliefs. One queried the CCTV evidence. A second doubted that the bombers' personalities had been sufficiently probed to prove that they did what they did both knowingly and willingly. A third cited the UK government's benefits of staging such atrocities, enabling them to continue wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to promote British business interests in any carving up of economic resources to be had. The fourth doubted that the detonations were those bombs in the bombers' rucksacks, but rather had been planted under the train already. Military ordnance rather than homemade bombs.

Three of the four by the programme's end had their beliefs challenged to the point of being persuaded that the official version of events had some validity. In the course of an hour long programme,with the inevitable editing and foreshortening of their thought and emotional processes, such apparent Road To Damascus conversions inevitably came across as barely credible. It's curious what details they chose to fixate on initially to underpin their overall skepticism about the official version of events. Why say the mysterious lack of CCTV footage as against the apparent lack of psychological analysis of the bombers that distinguished two of the conspiracy theorists on the programme. Just as a side note, I actually think that there was an almost unlimited probing of the psychology of the bombers after the event.

But it almost doesn't matter what they believe or don't believe, same as it doesn't matter what I believe. Unless any of us go on to express our opposition or displeasure by detonating our own bombs. A TV programme may have changed three of its protagonist's minds, but I doubt that any viewer trying to fathom the jump cuts of logic on display could have had their minds changed. In the realm of politics, especially online where conspiracy theories thrive and pullulate, people rarely have their mind changed by reasoned argument. And that is the point, such extremism of thought and argument which flourish behind a cloak of online anonymity, demonstrate exactly how four homegrown youths might end up expressing themselves by becoming suicide bombers.

For what it's worth, here is my response to the views expressed in last night's programme. I have no evidence to back up anything I say, other than what I have read, heard and made judgements on. My views are as instinctive as those conspirators, who have little more, if any, evidence than I do. The government have provided evidence, but we have no way of knowing whether it's true or not. None of us are afforded the opportunity to scrutinise the original source evidence and draw our own conclusions.

I can credit that the UK government could stage such atrocities for its own political ends. But to my mind, such warped logic is little different from that which might motivate the four bombers to carry out such acts for their own purposes. Either party in such a scenario, wants to create terror and a climate of fear. We know governments can cover up their tracks, as witnessed by the recent Hillsborough cover up that they managed to keep going for 23 years. The French secret services in Algeria planted bombs against their own colonial civilians for military strategic purposes.

Equally I can believe the bombers could have arrived at their actions of their own free will, just as much as being patsies of arch political and military manipulators winding up the key in their back and setting them in motion for their lethal course of action. What al Quaeda did was put out a body of ideas, an inspirational/aspirational set of aims to its constituency and a method of organisation that any local operators could adapt to suit their own parochial conditions. Many of the 9/11 bombers were university educated, as was one of the 7/7 bombers. And yet in the Madrid train bombings, the perpetrators were drawn from the local criminal underclass.

The 7/7 bombers I believe, were entirely self-motivated and successful, because of the very arrogance and complacency of the British Establishment that didn't bother to penetrate such militant groups because it had so few Asian recruits in the ranks of the secret services. The fact that the programme's conspirator Davina, couldn't initially see how such men could end up at a point of turning themselves into human bombs, only mirrors that of the authorities who also had no real inkling of such a journey from alienated to mass murderer. And I promise you, that occurring the day after London was announced as successful in its bid to host the 2012 Olympics, it is highly unlikely that the Government would have undermined that goodwill and hopeful message and anticipated economic boon, by enacting a conspiratorial slaughter of its own citizens. But that's just my opinion.

The complexity of the issues, of the possible motives behind the journey of someone to become a suicide bomber, is not going to be served by such a programme as this one last night. I tackled it in the space of a novel. I didn't just represent my own theories, but the broad spectrum that allows for the views of the four conspirators, the official line, the cracks in between whereby the secret services overlook what's happening under their nose, the online forums and vicious exchanges to be had there, the processes of recruitment (grooming for non-sexual purposes), misdirection and misinformation, citizen journalists trying to get to the truth under their own auspices... I think the journey I take you on in the book, though not exactly a road trip, is somewhat more credible than last night's BBC programme.

If last night's programme annoyed, bemused or underwhelmed you, then you might want to turn to my book for a more serious and yes informed treatment of the processes that could lead to acts such as the 7/7 bombings.

http://amzn.to/qBs2N4

Marc Nash In Da House - Friday Flash

"Marc Nash in da house people!"Who?
marc nash is in his house, sat at his writing station. That place where more often than not, marc nash is to be located.
"Marc Nash, license to illeism."
marc nash isn't ill. marc nash is in the pink actually. And in the writing zone, on a real word tear-up.
"No, 'illeism'. I thought you were a master of words?"
marc nash credited you were using hip-hop speech. marc nash would suggest this points up the difference between the oral and the written word. Idiomashupsticks.
"So, why does Marc Nash constantly refer to himself in the third person?"
marc nash does no such thing.
"You don't say."
marc nash does say.
"Ipso facto ipseity"
marc nash proposes that just sounds like meaningless insufflation. It suggests a string of words, but scratch under the surface of noise and there is nothing there.
"Yes, better off leaving that sort of thing to the master. Tell me, referring to yourself in the third person is usually symptomatic of a deluded sense of self-importance is it not?"
Like any writer, marc nash's significance in the world is to be measured by the number of autographs and size of royalty payments. marc nash states here and now that these amount to none and pin money. Although clearly marc nash hopes that this will rise in number. But for the purposes of this intellectual exercise, therefore marc nash is not full of jumped-up self-importance. If only you could see marc nash's words written down, rather than vaporising through the microphone, you'd see that marc nash is always stated in lower case. marc nash has no presumptions above his station. marc nash's station remains that of the humble writing desk.
"Well that's another side of illeism, that it represents a sort of modesty, of not laying claim to yourself as an 'I' as somehow not meriting it."
marc nash would always start with the etymological root of any conception such as this. 'Modesty' is related to moderate, stemming from the Latin for both 'measure' and 'mode'. marc nash's writing is not 'measured' in any sense. Nor is it confined to mere modes of writing or genre.
"Oh but then surely Marc Nash must acknowledge the Structuralist argument that the writer is entirely a product of his own circumstances of upbringing, education and experiences and therefore has no free will in what he writes?"
marc nash rejects that conceit by the simple statement that marc nash has eschewed both his upbringing and inherited value system.
"Oh come on, what could be more tramlined than rejecting the values of your parents? Rebellion is utterly defined by what it is set up in opposition to. You have no say in what you create, maybe that's why you cannot lay claim to a first person identity with any surety? Or maybe it's a residual shame at what that first person represents and trying to distance yourself from it however vainly."
If marc nash may be permitted to take your argument to its logical conclusion, he finds only reductio ad absurdum there. Since you seem to be saying marc nash is merely some sort of automated word Turing machine, with a finite word store in memory laid down during his development, and a set of imbibed texts from other writers which he then proceeds to spin round like a washing machine word cycle to spew out 'new' texts of his own non devising?
"Well you are a self-confessed huge fan of music and isn't that what musicians do? Stand on the shoulders of their recent ancestors, armed only with a box full of records and reference and cut up and create afresh? But the idiom is finite."
marc nash offers that although words have rhythms, they are not closed mathematical systems. The possibilities for word combinations is endless.
"Is Marc Nash seriously having us believe that he refers to himself in the third person because it confers some sort of objectivity? That the subjective voice of Marc Nash thereby naturally feeds into a more universal truth?"
It is not for marc nash to say what is truth or not. It will be the verdict of the readers of marc nash texts.
"Which you've already conceded are few and far between. Perhaps this third person thing is more about trying to establish a brand? The need for self-promotion has hollowed you out away from your texts and into just the commodity of your name."
Who says marc nash is my real name?
"It's the names on the spines of your books."
marc nash books exist only on the ether in e-readers. They have no spines. The books of marc nash are fictional bodies.
"That sounds like dissociation to me. That Marc Nash is so cut off from reality and other people indeed, that he has wholly dissociated himself from the normal frames of reference, including how we address ourselves to others. You may be worryingly psychotic."
marc nash creates fictional beings on virtual paper. This does not make him schizoid, merely imaginatively creative. However, the fiction is enhanced because clearly these characters are representative of the mind of marc nash. marc nash is spilling the seed of himself into texts, but they are refracted versions of himself, therefore not quite fully-fledged first-person iterations. marc nash accordingly refers to them as 'he' or even 'she'. These characters are more important than the author marc nash, therefore the author marc nash cannot accrue more status than his characters. Ergo marc nash can only be third person like them, for to be first person would overwhelm and diminish them. Added to that is that marc nash (author) is not even marc nash's real name, but merely a nom de plume. In that sense, marc nash is truly a third person to whoever the first person "I" is that lies behind the persona conjuring up 'marc nash'.
"Well that makes two of us then, since I'm not a real radio DJ and this 'interview' is merely an idle daydream on your part as you both procrastinate and leap ahead to the ridiculous fancy that you will attain such status as to engender radio interviews."
marc nash has left his house and is on route for the pub.
"This next one is a dedication, De La Soul's, 'Me, Myself and I'."

The Unfathomable Nature Of Creativity

I hadn't gone there with the intention of emerging with a story of my own. I'd gone to support and hear a friend of mine's poetry. Poetry is like cinema for me, an artistic medium a milllion miles removed from the prose fiction I write, so I can actually enjoy it on its own merits, unlike reading a novel which I always have half a professional eye when reading.

I sat through the first couple of poets and then my friend came on and immediately sucked me into her words and delivery, transporting me away from my surroundings in the small venue. But then she uttered the word 'fuselage' and my creating brain kicked me back into the moment. 'Fuselage' is rather a fine word in that there is no ambiguity to it. It can only conjure up the notion of an aircraft. Unlike other words which have several shades of different meanings. And yet it's also a slightly unusual word that doesn't tend to crop up everyday. Its poetic qualities had been deliciously employed by my poet friend. To dsiasterous effect on me as it turned out.

Since the word had set off a cascade of associations and images in my head that took me out of her recital. The notion of aircraft resonated in my head with 9/11, a perhaps non-too surprising association. Yet in my mind, it had already become mutated to a toy airplane built out of Lego. Don't ask me how or why. It wasn't an image I'd been playing with prior to this. The human mind makes links and affinities so rapidly, there is simply no keeping up with, or grasping of it.

The word 'fuselage' resonated in my head as a plane without wings. Wings that had been stripped off. Somehow the alchemical processes of the mind mutated this into a Lego plane. Not one of those intricate Lego designs either. Merely an 8 block piece with another perpendicular 8 block serving as wings. It wasn't even clear to me if there was a tail on this most primitive of forms. No cockpit, pilot or wheels. But it manifested as an image of a Lego plane crashed into a Lego tower building.

There was my central image and immediately the lines started flowing to flesh it out. Again I had no notion of this theme, of Lego play, crashed airplanes or anything buzzing around my head in the lead up to this. I played some of the lines over in my head to reinforce them and make sure they 'set' in my memory like wet concrete. Then I sat through the last poet before the interval struggling to even listen to his words above the clamour of the sentences taking shape in my own head and proceeded to go off for some noodles and small talk with my poet friend.

I managed to not get distracted by the seething crucible of words and ideas for the duration of the meal, but once we'd parted and I was back on the London Underground, I proceeded to take out my Moleskine notebook and write the whole story straight through, or at least 90% of it anyway.

In the interim, my creative processing mind had moved the plot on to the notion of a little boy building a Lego tower and experimenting and learning about the fundamentals of construction as this was his first concerted effort to master the task and his tools. That conflated into him also being an architect, that god-like creative power young children have when they are at play and weilding their imaginations to transform their toys into whatever they make of them. The conception of raising a tower gave the peice its form and rhythm. This wasn't to be in paragraph form, but line strata upon strata, rising and accumulating. The notion of a tower and a pre-lingual child also allowed me to insert a little bit about Babel and language. Then that slotted into the destructiveness of little boys as he crashes and razes his own towering creation and provided me with the conclusion and the final line bringing it back to the Twin Towers as something he possibly saw on TV and was re-enacting here.

All of that sprung from god knows where on the back of a single word uttered in the midst of a poetry recital. If I hadn't have been paying rapt attention and somehow missed that word, would the story have ever emerged and existed? I have no idea, maybe something else might have prompted it, but I doubt it. I am none the wiser that even with the catalyst of the word, where all the things about a child buildinbg a toy tower and crashing a plane into it emerged from. It wasn't something I was ever consciously thinking about and yet it must have been there somewhere in my mind, even as a set of disparate thoughts that this one word 'fuselage' was able to knit together into a coherent image.

I remain completely baffled but unutterably thankful that this is how creativity often seems to work.
You can read the finished product below. It made its way into my first collection of flash fiction pieces as the final one of 52 flash stories that I wrote. And was possibly the quickest of them all to pen.



Basic Geometry


The boy is playing with his Lego bricks.
A grand architect working his dinky fingers
Thinner than the plastic parallelograms he manipulates
He mounts one atop another
Feeling, friction rubbing the bulbous tips
Searching for the hidden holes beneath till they snap home
In timeworn Euclidean geometry
Mortise and tenon, interlocking and binding
The colours are charmingly brightly random
Yellow crests red underscores blue fades into black
All perched on a thin flat base
Manufactured green to suggest the verdant
When where he lives is submersed in grey concrete.
He's building upwards now.
Modestly ascending for the heavens in small steps
Lips pursed, tongue just extruding with rapt concentration
The master builder with no picture in his head.
Virtually pre-lingual he knows words
But cannot yet assemble sentences into the air
He likes the word 'sky', unknowingly fumbling towards its suffix
As he scrapes the plastic bucket of seemingly limitless bricks
Across the floor towards closer reach
The intelligent designer just happened on some more axioms of geometry
The reach of his arm, the length of a cubit
The boxer's tale of the tape.
Resolute now, fabricating vertically brick upon brick
One block in width only
A coloured DNA map of his unformed, boundless mind
A Tower of Babel beyond the forfeit of language.
He has an innate discomfort of unaesthetic asymmetry
When an eight stud block gets bound against studs five and six of its overlooker
He cannot abide the overhang
His jaw set firm as he repairs the lip hanging over the void...
Elevating higher, yet higher towards the unfocused notion of heaven
He is amused that it sways
A basic fundamental about foundational and spreading the load
Yet the plastic edifice holds its stability
He stays his creative hand
Perhaps his pinched fingers ache from the sustained production
He pads backwards on his posterior
To view his erection with perspective
Is he proud? Is he awe-struck?
We cannot yet be certain of his fledgeling emotional range.
Now he grasps two longitudinal pieces, twelve spots both
He crosses one over the other and locks them in perpendicularly
His building soars, but now he can fly
He rams the plane into his tower
The high rise collapses beneath the assault
Just like the Jenga game his sister plays.
The plane breaks apart at its fulcrum
A lesson in physics, but one beyond his tender ken
He sifts among the rubble
Apparently delighted with something about the outcome
He sets about rebuilding the structure
Assimilating what he has learned about breadth
This time he deliberately courts overhang as he fashions gaps
For he has plumped for glassless windows
Holes he has recalled from watching the Jenga unfold
Though his are sightless, giving on only to the interior of his tower
But all in all, this construction is smoother, more practiced
The tower is hoisted up in double quick time
He recasts the plane
Declines to put a tail on it, maybe because he has never been on one
Pincered between his fingers, he flies it in the airspace above the column
He increases the imaginary throttle
And drives it hard into the heart of the tower.
The wing-piece is stripped off, but the fuselage stays lodged
In the finally calibrated inbuilt window
The tower wobbles, but stays standing
Yet the slow fuse of combustion has been lit within him
He skips out the room for some refreshment to slake his thirst.
What have we learned here today in the living room?
Some geometry, some physics, a love of destruction and aesthetic ambiguity
Thus is the groundplan of hell laid down in his mind

Urban Renewal Cubed - Friday Flash

A panoramic eyesore. A blot not just on, but which wholly constituted the landscape, blotting out all sunlight behind its monstrous compass. This housing estate a prototypical design for living back in its proud flesh heyday, garnering architectural prizes. Yet for those denizens forced to dwell there, it represented nothing but a suppurating sore of violence, degradation and stunted horizons.
Nonetheless, today it was coming down. Walls purged of graffiti, in order to have 'marked for demolition' daubed on them instead. Raised by geometrically theoretical architects without reference to the asymmetries of human life, now their grandiosely rash vision was being razed to the ground. The final Euclidean lines, being those as the dynamite blasted the buildings plumbline straight in an elegant curtsy.
However the residents weren't being returned their lives. Having inhabited this area their entire existence pre the pre-fabrication, as well as during it, now they were to be further-flung. More atomised than the levelled bricks and steel.
Over the settling mounds of rubble, the pallid sun emerged from its thirty years of eclipse. The wind no longer had the stilts to whistle through like a bowling alley and skittle any human pedestrians. Earmarked for reconstruction, the site would first have to be cleared of debris, the guilty town planners surveyed about their gross failings. But neither took place. The city fathers' coffers had run dry of money to redevelop anything, while the master builders had hightailed their way into academic tenure. Lecturing the next generation of urban blighters, while sat in oak-panelled Medieval collegial towers.
*
The city's antiquity had taken away visitors' breath for centuries. Approached from the hills, the vista opened up into the spangling splendour of its domes, spires and minarets. Yet the stucco had plastered over the cracks. Frozen enmities glazed behind the friezes. Grudges moulded over the centuries now hard set into the cornicing.
Some of the houses had still borne the stigmata of a painted red cross to indicate Gothic plague. Well now all the houses bled with the pestilence brought down on everyone's heads. Furious fusillades of neighbour against neighbour.
Since the mosaic of races had started to unravel. The hand-woven gaily coloured welcome mats, no longer adorned domicile entrances. Only piles of sandbags instead. Once harmonious pediments, pockmarked through the impedimenta of military ordnance, triangulated through their cross-haired sights up in the hills. The picaresque daubed facades now pebble-dashed by shrapnel. Bricks and mortar torn up by Realpolitik's mortars raining fire.
Brightly coloured houses were gouged by the scorched carbon trails of shells. Rendered further drab by blackout drapes, tarpaulin and camouflage netting between the husks of houses, likely secreting a gun emplacement. The miscegenated colours of the city's terracotta and slate, now uniformly turned sombre olive or grey. Telescopic theodolites surveying for urban clearing, by way of ethnic cleansing. The clot that never heals.
*
He sat on the window sill staring up at the wan disc of the sun. It had yet to burn through the clouds, so flattening it against their filmy shroud. The moment it did so, he risked the sun also burning through his retinas. He thought he might rather welcome that.
Resembling little more than a stage lighting gel, he tried hard to imagine the sun as a seething ball of nuclear fusion. Nothing but brute raw power, smashing of atoms and remaking matter into energy. He speculated on the sound all that elemental pounding would forge. His own fire roared as it burned its pipe-fed gas in a humble Newtonian and Charles' manner. Yet such rumbling was outmuscled by the hiss of the gas valve releasing it into the duct.
But then he recalled that there was no air out in space. That it therefore lacked for a medium for the sound to be carried. The light energy from the sun could pass unhindered, yet the energy converted into sound died on solar lips. Much like the voice of god.
The creeping advance of the light had woken the birds. Their aubade broke out across the trees. Flowering and nourished under the sun's tentacular reach. A programmed growth and an instinctual repertoire of song. An adaptive symbiosis between bird and tree. Light the conjuror summoning striking everything into life.
He sensed that the sun was growing stronger, its orange hue intensifying. He closed his eyes, but a corona was still imprinted on his retinas in an after-image. Like scar tissue. With his eyes still rammed shut, he rubbed the skin over his forearm. It was bumpy and welted from when he had sat here before and simply driven his arm out through the window glass, gashing it sufficiently to engulf the feelings swirling around inside his head. Trying to attain the zenith of touch, to promote it to the perigee of his constellated senses.
The blood transfusions he'd required to prop him alive. Somebody else's pith and plasma coursing through him, yet he felt nothing different from before. The delightful tug of the synthetic thread of  the stitches long gone now. Something not him intimately welded to his skin, until they dropped away. Then there was the plaster cast set in place to thwart his wanton unpicking, to let the ravaged tissue heal. A protection from himself. His so-called loved ones had adorned his false cast with their signatures. Peeled off and disposed of when the cast came off. But they'd had the last laugh when he came home from his hospital sojourn and found that his mother had organised for the broken glass to be replaced. Didn't they understand that he was engaged in trying to alter his very own fabric? Yet they persevered in the notion that the house and every other surface appearance was to be restored to familiarity. When all he wanted was to forge a new seam.
He'd garnered some satisfaction from the wound's raised fibrous gnarl. And still he picked at it remorselessly. Piquing the baby pink keloidal skin. He was desperate to override its code. His code, that DNA programme which recloned him time after time. He yearned to cast himself anew. Even if only this tiny portion of his arm. If successful, there would be other vitreous panes and glass shards to recontour his body. The gorgeous scar tissue that reverberated constantly under his sleeve. That fired his nerves and suggested that he was alive. With touch finally at the apex of the hierarchy of sensation. Eclipsing the light. The sound of nuclear fusion in his ears from across the void.

Call Me - Telephone Tunes

1) Blondie - "Hanging On The Telephone"
Blondie also had a song "Call Me" so she was definitely the queen of all things telephone.


2) The Jam - "Girl On The Phone"
This was the opening track of their semi-concept album "Setting Sons" and is in all truth a bit of a flimsy thing compared with some of the other relly strong sons on that album. But obviously pre-call centres, some poor telephonist had irritated the Modfather sufficiently to have a song penned to her by Angry of Woking...


3) The Fall - "Telephone Thing"
Mark E Smith was always ahead of the game musically and this collaboration with electronic dance samplers supreme Coldcut showed he was a prophet yet again. God knows what the thundering bass Fall fans made of it, but this is one of my top 10 Fall tracks.


4) Cop Shoot Cop - "Disconnected 666"
Industrial band Cop Shoot Cop sample that gets right inside your head and drives you mad. In order to soften you for the twin bass rumble that would inevitably follow in the next song.


5) The B52s - "6060-842"
This is not one of the better known B52s tracks, evidenced by there seeming only two videos of it on YouTube. The number is imaginary by the way...


6) MIA - "U.R.A.Q.T."
No idea what this song is about, but it does start off blethering about mobile phones... This one's more about texting though


7) Kraftwerk - "The Telephone Call"
You just knew there'd be a Kraftwerk tune in this right? It's in German so I have no idea what they're actually singing, but it's Kraftwerk so it works for me...


8) The Undertones - "You Got My Number"
Maybe not strictly about the telephone, since it's about not calling someone, but this song I think is criminally overlooked against the triumvirate of mighty Undertones singles, "Teenage Kicks", "Jimmy Jimmy" and "My Perfect Cousin". But this is great right? I said RIGHT?


9) Maceo - "Nextel Chirp"


10) Pete Shelley - "Telephone Operator"
I hated the 80s and all that synth music. This strangely enough sounds like Stan Ridgway's Wall of Voodoo, so it's okay


11) Steely Dan - "Rikki Don't Lose That Number"

Quantitative Easing - Friday Flash

The man was bigger than he had adjudged from TV and newspapers. Not that it made any difference really. He wasn't sufficiently anatomically apprised to be making adjustments in his thrust.
He would only get one stab at this. Whether it proved to be fatal or not was irrelevant, it would certainly prove cataclysmic. And injurious of course, it had to prove injurious to him. But this wasn't to be a frenzy and a flurry. Self-control had to be maintained in full. His act had to buy him an audience with the man. For he was too grandiose of office to attend to his constituents in his weekend surgeries, but had lackeys do it for him.
Besides he himself wasn't a constituent, not in this affluent neck of the woods. Once, when he still believed in Parliamentary Democracy, he'd written to an MP who was introducing a Private Member's Bill which was utterly oppressive to certain sections of society. The MP had curtly replied, telling him to take it up with his own local MP. He then wrote back again to say that since this was his own personal piece of legislation, he ought to shoulder the responsibility of answering all correspondence arising from it. The MP never did him the courtesy of a second reply.
That was the thing about our representatives, other than once every five years, they didn't really give the populace the time of day. And yet they proclaimed we were all in it together. This was errant nonsense of course. Even in times of a booming economy, there was a rump of the deprived and dispossessed. Left utterly cut off from any trickle down of wealth and which the government continued to neglect and positively shun even when blessed with resources to try and re-embosom them. But now of course, in time of total economic misery, those struggling and suffering become swelled in number. The rump is now formed of those insulated by their wealth and protected by alarm systems and steel gates.
Well, with a humble three inches of flashing steel, an implement we used to manufacture for ourselves only the factories and ore plants were sold off for scrap the last time this Party were the government, he was going to demonstrate that they could not hope to remain separate and aloof any more. That's why the knife was so apposite. Him holding the handle at one end, his target snagged at the blade's point. There was no dodging that indelible connection.
He leaped out at his target and thrust hard. The man's shock seemed to be still interlaced with looking down his nose at his assailant's breach of decorum. But then he started bursting out in sweat and his nose seemed to be dissolving, much indeed like a toffee. His shirt may have been blue, but his blood wasn't. The two men were ineluctably merged, the man's blood staining his own jeans. Right, the conjunction made, his captive audience skewered on the end of his tempered steel, time to cut to the point.
"As Chancellor of The Exchequer, what is it that you can do? Quantitative easing, but only to a limited degree, because we don't want to sink into the state of Weimar Germany and have to cart a wheelbarrow of banknotes around just to buy a loaf of bread. Then there's all those foreign junkets you take, parachuting in a Royal Prince, in the hope of landing some lucrative foreign contract. Nice work if you can get it. Don't see a lot of trickle down to the likes of me though. Maybe if I worked in an arms factory. And then third, since there's really not a lot you can do to foster growth, instead you look to make cutbacks and savings. The economics of austerity behoving the soothing mantra that we're all in it together. Only what services do you choose to cut? The NHS, but if you don't die on me, it won't be their services you'll be calling on will you? The police, god last summer's riots should have shown you what that leads to, feel secure now do you? There's blood on your manicured lawn here. Drains, Trains and water supplies, how can we a first world country that receives so much rainfall be suffering drought? Immigration officers made redundant so that any terrorist is almost free to wonder through overburdened passport control. And tax inspectors, so that corporations and your rich pals get off paying virtually nothing. Yet in their chronic mismanagement of the economy, still they award themselves unspeakable bonuses and pay rises, because they're private businesses and your government refuses to intervene in their affairs. Find the money from them. if they don't like it and hightail it for foreign climes, then they won't clog up the queues of people waiting to get back in the country then will they?"
The man was trying to speak, but his words were being serrated by his labouring breath, which the other noted was less than perfumed. When they did emerge as a croak, this was not the plummy, rarefied voice he was used to hearing pronounce from the Despatch Box in Parliament.
"War-ter... War-ter-nnn..."
Still no please or thank you the other thought to himself, but the tone was less than imperious and scarcely imperative.
"Do I look as though I'm the type of person who can afford to indulge in buying bottled water? I'm told that explorers can drink their own urine in extremis, but if I unzipped my trousers here and now, I think it would send out the wrong message entirely. I don't want to humiliate you, as much as equalise you. Quantitative equalising it might even be called. Besides, I don't have a silver spoon to ladle the water between your lips, while yours seems to have dropped out somewhere in the grass".
The man slumped forward into the arms of his adversary.
"See I here and now renounce my citizenship of the country you have been charged with the privilege of overseeing. I feel what few rights and benefits to membership of such a civilised society have been progressively stripped away by you and your ilk, so that there is simply nothing left worthy of subscribing to. No values and no value. Consider this severance as my notice to quit."
The man silently bubbled some blood on to the hand holding the knife. He took it for a seal of accord.
Yes, we are finally all in this together he thought to himself as he gently lowered him to the ground, the man's head resting in his lap. He was bleeding out like the country had too. He waited for the police to arrive, though with the drastic reductions to manpower, he expected a rather long wait.