Another bullshit night in suck city

One of my favourite reads over the last 5 years has been Nick Flynn's "Another bullshit night in suck city".
Its a personal memoir of Flynn's relationship with his alcoholic, itinerant and very absent and errant father.

Flynn worked in a hostel for the homeless for a number of years in Boston, USA and the book is about his meeting his father at work one day (his dad was a customer), and his subsequent reflections and recollections of his upbringing as he tries to unravel how this situation came to pass.
Flynn writes beautifully and you can feel the ache and yearning in his heart for a father who always manages to remain a puzzle, always belligerent and at odds with the world.

The book rang a bell for me in a very empathic and emotional way.
My father suffered from depression and various other psychological problems from as early as I can remember. My mother divorced him when I was eight and my sister was seven - this was in '74.

He was an alcoholic for a number of years both during and after the marriage and my mother did a good job in depicting him as some kind of satanic figure who would bring nothing but pain into our lives if we had any contact with him.

He used to try and see us and phone occasionally after the breakup, but my mother would just go ballistic and threaten to dump us on the street if we even dared to utter the word 'dad'...we had to call him by his christian name only - as if he was an impersonal acquaintance or friend of the family.

I never remember my father being cruel or even disciplining us, he was always affectionate when he wasn't strangely distracted, lost in his own world or out drinking with his father. The distractedness and lostness I later understood to be classic signs of depression.

We lost contact altogether for about 10 years and then he turned up on my mum's doorstep one day when I was about 18. Stinking of booze, croaky voice, unshaven, disheveled and speaking my name. He'd known the address for years, but apparently had never got the bottle up to get on a train and make the twenty mile journey to our home.

My mum let him in out of shock I think, more than out of any sense of compassion.
I remember feeling quite numb - knowing it was 'dad' but somehow feeling disconnected and embarrassed. He didn't make much sense, he was rambling about being sorry for the past, staying in hostels, being punched in the face by some Rasta etc, etc.

My mum made him a cuppa and a sandwich and we just made weird small talk, him asking me about my job, how old I was, 'are you courting?' and so on. We talked about my sister (who was out) and various other family members.
Anyway he asked the time after about an hour and said he's better go and catch his train.

There was an awkward goodbye and then he disappeared. My mum just moaned about it being typical, stinking of drink, turning up on the doorstep and all that, I left her whingeing and I remember going in my bedroom feeling shattered and somehow unreal.

It was like meeting my own personal Lazarus.
I suddenly remembered that the local village railway 'station' could be overlooked from my bedroom window, and I thought no, he's not catching the train back from there is he? I assumed somehow that he'd got a bus from the station in town, but when I thought about it, the place he came from was on the direct line through the village.

I gently and very nervously peered through the window...and sure enough there he was!
A tiny, scruffy, strange little figure, all alone, pacing around, looking up and down the tracks, stepping in and out of the shelter muttering to himself.
A thought flashed into my mind, what if he's gonna top himself!
I was transfixed and anxious, but somehow fascinated - like an impartial observer who's watching a good movie.

So I watched and watched, this part of me, my blood and kin, enacting his eccentric performance. After about twenty minutes, I heard the rumble of the train and felt my heart leap. The train slid into view, obscuring him and the platform. I looked in the windows to see if I could spot him, but I was just greeted by the bored looks of afternoon commuters.
The train shooshed slowly away and the platform and tracks were bare,no blood, mangled bodies and screaming travellers.
Did he really exist? Did he actually come to my home? Who or what was that experience?

I felt an overwhelming sadness and disembodiment, I felt like I had suddenly died and become a ghost myself. I totally understood at that moment what loneliness and rejection must feel like for so many people in this big dark world.

I'll write the second part of this story soon.
It is the reason why I have embraced the philosophy of the outsider and the artist, it is these experiences I had with my father I now realise that make me who I am. His brief ghostly apparitions and eccentric mutterings were the truest and most powerful influence on my development and identification with the underdog.

Thanks Nick Flynn for helping me identify the most important and interesting part of myself.

Death in the countryside (or on an island).

As I get older I find it easier to come to terms with death by imagining the dissolution of my own consciousness and that of others as a merging with the universe on both the macro and micro level.

If you think of all the millennia in which you and I never existed in thought or physicality, and then through a chance coupling we are brought into being by a confluence of probabilities at the quantum and macro level, and then we are allowed a brief window on existence, which is 'the blink of an eye in cosmic time' as Schopenhaur said, but as quarks and stardust we have existed as part of everything, always and will forever more.

The anxiety over death is always at the personal level. What will happen to MY personality, MY experiences, they will be gone forever won't they? I like Bryan Maghee's view of this: everyone who has ever lived and their individual lives, will always exist in time, they can never be destroyed. You have to think about this one a bit, every experience we have had or will have, will always have a physical existence in time, so in a sense our lives are eternal and we are immortalized in time.

I find the bureaucratic industrialized death of urban society frightening, with its medicalization and hiding of death. My experience with my mother’s cancer revealed to me the true horror of dealing with a terminal illness in western society: not just to have to witness the suffering of someone you love, but to watch that person treated like a piece of meat, a number, a statistic, an object to be processed and passed through the system like a dumb animal.

I've had a few epiphanies on personal death when I've been quite isolated in the countryside on a summers day, or even up a mountain in Byronesque weather: 'I could die here' I thought, and It would be perfectly okay. Just go to sleep and decay back into nature and the wind and sun and rain.

As soon as I perceive the hum of the city again, I can feel my urban death anxiety return, and this is no romantic reaper of nature and human harvests, but the white noise of abstract nothingness and non-being in any form. (Don Dellilo's novel White noise is worth a read on this.)
But then again, maybe population and others remind us more of our fragile identities, whereas with nature I feel a knowing and a taking care of this thing called me, a benevolence. I belong here.

I find nature comforting and I find quantum uncertainties, superstrings and parallel universes comforting and fascinating. The fact that my life and experiences, loves and woe's will always exist like a book in the library of time is the best memorial we can have before we dissolve back to what is our natural state - properly part of everything.
We never know death anyway really, only ever life.

And anyway, we are never truly alive or dead, but exist in a superpositional state of quantum probabilities, I think. I hope. I know.

Teacher leave those kids alone

All those wanky teachers at school, uuuurgh!
I know you hear and read about people being inspired by teachers in their school years - but I never was. I was dis-inspired, disenchanted, discombobulated, dispirited and injected with a venom that I'm still attempting to suck out of my psyche 30 years later.
I hated school.

It was the purest symbol imaginable of the ideology and time management of the human mind. It was preparation, indoctrination, psychological and physical bullying: "This is it boy, get used to it, you're gonna be fucked about for the rest of your life, true freedom is only for losers, wasters, the stupid and the mad!"

Knuckle down and you may, just may, graduate to an adult gulag, be psychologically tortured every month as you try to meet your mortgage and credit card repayments, panic about losing your 'job' or becoming ill, worry that your kids are not wearing the right trainers, the car needs insuring, your wife is seeing another man, you paid too much for your broadband, can you afford a holiday this year?

All the anxieties of being a grown up, all the things that school prepared you for: taking shit because that's what you bought into, and now you have to pay the piper - in spades!

You can opt out, not play the game, 'do your own thang'. But there starts the ridicule. The negative labels start spitting through the air like bullets, your body and soul become riddled with the stigmata of being different.

You're a criminal now, suspect, odd, weird, mentally unstable, insecure,incompetent and possible dangerous to boot!

Well, fuck 'em, the teachers, the bosses, the guru's, the priests and the politicians. Fuck all those who think they know whats good for you, what you really need to be happy.
I know what I need:one single person to love and truly understand me and accept me for myself. That's all anybody needs really.

Oh and maybe a guitar and some decent grub.

Guitar heroes.

Always been a Fender man myself.
There's something so pure about the guitar, both electric and acoustic, its not just an instrument, its a symbol, a weapon. Woody Guthrie had "This guitar kills fascists" daubed on his old acoustic, and I remember Joe Strummer saying how he enjoyed the pain as his fingertips were gouged by the steel of the strings as they pressed into the fingerboard. The guitar is so organic, mythological and beautiful.

Its a gun, a phallus, a woman, a sword, and often its your only true and faithful friend. Exaggerating? Maybe,but think about it.

Its been the timeless platonic object of cool for half a century now. Its one of the few 'consumer products' that does not become obsolete with age, but instead, it matures both in looks and sound and increases in price and desirability.
Guitar worship has its genre's of course.

Strat's are associated with the psychedelic head fuck of Hendrix, long soaring solo's, warm textured twangs and bends, Telecasters belong to that bright Buddy Holly rock 'n roll sound: bottleneck slides, cute trebley licks - the country wing and wang.

Gibson SG's and Les Pauls are heavy rock, the fat thick sound of Jimmy Page on Whole Lotta love and Kashmir, Gary Moore's Parisian walkways, Steve Jones' chainsaw jangle on Pretty Vacant and the bluesy roar of God save the Queen.

Slash let the side down though with his overdone and overproduced pomp rock ramblings - imagine him with a telecaster, the great apeth.

Fender Jaguars, Jazzmasters and the the other retro shapes are the coolest though for me personally.
Tom Verlaine playing Marquee moon, the Grunge of Kurt Cobain and the pure lyrical chord hooks of early Elvis Costello - these are poor songwriter in their garret objects and catalysts of adolescent angst ridden creativity.

The guitar is an 'instrument' in so many ways, both physically, psychically, mythologically and sexually.

I always keep a Strat miniature in my pocket to ward off the malignant spirits of keyboard players. I'm still receiving therapy from bumping into Rick wakeman in 1978.

The ideological oppression of Action Man

I wonder how many men and women (of a certain age) like me owned Barbie dolls and Action men as kids? Barbie was released as the first wave of rock ‘n roll was about to splash into the 60’s, G.I. Joe appeared in ’64 and Action Man exploded onto the scene at the birth of psychedelia in ’66.

As the counter-culture began to permeate the adult psyche and our parents were ‘digging’ Elvis and the Beatles, a generation of soft and malleable minds were being inculcated and politicized into believing that Velcro headed skinheads and ‘plastic blonds’ with perfect figures – plus their wealth of outfits/accessories/gadgets – were the narrative blueprint for a successful and fulfilling ‘grown-up’ future. A future of consumerism and disposability.

Action Man and Barbie were the scalar or fractal representation – nay holographic projection - of imagined and future embodied selves.
Action Man’s machismo and plethora of weapons and tools, becomes the ‘responsible’ hard-working/warrior family man in a war of attrition with his debts, devastating the landscape with his DIY aesthetic and circular saw.

Barbie and Sindy’s Platonic ideal of womanhood becomes the ethereal standard of beauty, and the engine of insecurity and anxiety for the modern femme – “Have I got enough outfits? If my Bum looks big will Ken still love me?”

Incidentally, I used to burn my sisters Sindy with my dad’s lighter, which is a kind of primitive cosmetic surgery. Wow, the paternal hegemonic significance of that!
Look at all the Hollywood stars of the last 10 years, the action heroes especially have an uncanny similarity to Action Man; they’ve got no character, they’re too pretty and they haven’t got any balls.

The Bohemian sensibility represents a melting of the archetypal/artificial plasticity of action figure gender roles, a great nay to the ideology of prescribed uniforms, accessories and weapons/tools/gadgets.
We must ‘break the mold’ (fnaar), and not be afraid of being a bit lumpy and peculiar like vegetables and other organic forms which transgress the homogenous, cold hard plasticity of modern consumer existence.

The Illuminati plot in the 60’s to counter the Counter-culture and inculcate traditional gender roles and the normalcy of mass consumerism/militarianism into a generation of confused and fragile young minds, by the insidious means of realistic gender specific action dolls has been largely successful.

The Bohemian has always stood between Action man and Barbie, a third sex, unashamedly organic and with the proud physical and psychic scars of a life lived outside the toy box.

I managed to find a new door of perception from the the plastic puppet schemata, by imagining Rolling stone Bryan Jones faking his death in the swimming pool - by the clever use of a doppelganger - and then being reembodied and skinned into blond, bearded perma-culture Action man. Did anybody else escape their 'square' destiny like this?
Maybe girls melted Barbie into Mama Cass?

If God was one of us

I was listening to that old song by Joan Osborne the other day ‘If God was one of us’.
So of course my mind collapsed and digressed into a multiverse of fractal peninsula’s, lost in a ocean of metaphor and self generating tsunami’s of fecund transcendental signifiers, which in turn transmogrified into subliminal Huxleyan-like mescaline induced Daliesque deserts populated by the hermaphroditic, polymorphous Jungian guardians of the gateway to Plato’s realm of true and timeless ideas.

Unfortunately, my Homeric psychic odyssey was shattered at this point, and thus was I ejected back into the empirical realm once more by a sudden glinting recollection of a 6-pack of pickled onion Monster Munch on top of the bread bin.
Such are the basest phenomenological desires visited upon this most sensitive and beautiful of minds.

But to digress on a digression, If God was one of us (a physical person) what would his/her state of mind be? Maybe a heavy guilt complex? Paranoia? In therapy? Would they be an anti-capitalist? Or maybe they’d be a corporate industrialist like Damon in The Omen, but actually Christ instead of the eer…anti-Christ – and thereby destroying capitalism from the top down?

What name would they have? Norman, Tarquin, Ethel, Chardonnay? Remember they must have a bit of gravitas, an aura if they are to save mankind. Nothing too ‘New Agey’ though – too Californian, most people would just switch off these days.
And what about miracles? In an age of CGI and 911 they would have to do something really weird to fuck peoples consciousness’ up!

Then again, maybe they’d want to ‘blend in’, feel a bit ‘sheepish’ and crave anonymity and the quiet life.
Would God sign on?
Maybe God would be content to do a bit of blogging, have a roll-up and watch re-runs of the Simpsons.

What would happen when a Jehovah’s Witness knocked on the door?
Would God think Quantum mechanics was a bit nosey?
In physical form, I believe the great one would be fascinated by the mundane minutiae of human existence – reading the ingredients on the back of shampoo bottles, eating prawn cocktail crisps and having a wank.

Would the Church collapse if God was discovered sporting ice wash denim and a mullet?
I know 'IT' is into being humble but what about looking a twat? God may forgive all our sins but could we forgive that? And forgive those that wear mullet’s against us.
Would the mullet become a ‘crown of thorns’? The ice wash denim the ‘great burden’, the cross we all have to bear?

So ends the theological seminary for this week.

Julian Cope: 'Head-on/Repossessed

This is two autobiographical books in one. The first book is the story of Cope's middleclass upbringing in Tamworth in Staffordshire, his student life in and around Liverpool, his 'discovery' of Punk, and the formation, success and breakup of his first band The Teardrop Explodes.

Cope gives a refreshing exploration of the birth of Punk from a northern perspective, specifically from the viewpoint of the Liverpool underground scene in the mid to late 70's.

Unlike a large number of the London born and bred Punk musicians and writers I have consumed over the years, Cope is so self-effacing, honest and funny about every single area of his life, that you feel this is what Punk was and is supposed to be all about.

He talks about his first sexual fumblings,the breakup of his first marriage and his meeting with true sweetheart and second wife Dorian with almost juvenile naivety and enthusiasm. His petty jealousies of Ian McCulloch's Bunnymen - his big rival on the Liverpool scene at the time - the sudden descent into drug taking after being almost Cromwellian in his distaste for them previously, and the American tour antics are mesmerizing to read about - and hilariously funny.

He is a natural writer, the first book reads like the perfect Punk novel, which in a sense it is. No 'true' lifestory can survive in readable form with out a bit of narrative structuring and poetic license.

Cope is an iconoclast: eccentric, literary, original, quirky and also, oddly considering his background - of the street. He comes across as the classic Alien dumped on earth for a while, a bit lonely but quite enjoying all these bizarre new experiences.

I'm looking forward to reading the second volume.
Best bits:
The turd in the shower episode, the first LSD trip, where it took him an hour to walk 25 yards whilst simultaneously waving and grinning to his friend, and his picaresque descriptions of band members, family and friends.
Genius.

Bukowski and Me

I've been a Bukowski fan ever since I read Post Office around 10 years ago.

Buk reminds me of a hybrid of my 2 grandfathers, ruffled, knowing, wise and often mysterious – like a dishevelled Buddha forgiving everything but forgetting nothing.

His poetry and novels are virtually all auto-biographical and chronicle the ups and downs of his blue collar, low paid jobs, bar fly existence. And his relationships with women - don't forget the women.

He was almost anti-social and a one man anarchist movement, but he had a heart of gold underneath the macho/brawling/drunkard exterior - just read about his reflections on his childhood in Ham on Rye or the poem Bluebird.

He's often lumped in with the Beat's, but he was always an iconoclast, one of the uneducated underclass forced to write to keep sane. He said all he needed was a room a bottle of wine and a typewriter to survive.

If you've ever known the alienation and soul destruction of performing a shitty job, being directionless and skint, broken hearted and lost and surrounded by hyena's (just an average day for me), then Bukowski will have a few beautiful words of consolation. He's got all the T-shirts…the empty cans, the spent typewriter ribbons, the suicide notes, the authentic wounded soul.

R.I.P. C.B.

Marvel and Me

From about seven years old until I entered my teens I was an avid Marvel comic book fan.

I had Spiderman, The Titan's, Dr Strangelove and Planet of the Apes. I used to collect them from the newsagents near my Grans house. This was a big event, as my Gran lived ten miles from my family home in another city.

That little newsagent became a magical center of my universe. I went from the wild rural countryside to the big dark city, a touch of real psychogeography going on here.

My mum only stopped in their to get fags originally, and I got her to order the comics from that shop as the area represented a little paradise away from the boredom of my school and humdrum locale. She thought it was funny.

The hero's of these comics were often existential loners, usually wounded souls, often orphaned and left to fend for themselves in an uncomprehending world.

I realised years later, this was where I got my love of reading and graphic art from.

I also believe my childhood Marvel obsession with heroic outsiders is one of the reason's why I did a degree in psychology, and my fascination with the existentialists and beat writers.

William Burroughs especially, is a very graphic, 'comic book' style writer, whenever I read him I have vivid dreams and see bright colours.

I always had a pile of little Commando comic books too, but it was the dark gothic Americana of Marvel that always fired my imagination.

Over the years, looking back, I realize now, how my passion for these books coincided with the gradual breakup and divorce of my parents and the disruption and stress of leaving the family home.

I was identifying with the heroes in the books as I felt a bit lost and ignored and worried about the future.

This was also the catalyst I think for my life long existential addiction. My heroes were misunderstood, lost and confused, but that was okay, it was cool and deep and heroic. Art can save your life sometimes when shit happens.

I'd just like to say thank you to Stan Lee.

Artists and Transgression

I have been reading the old Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun’s novel ‘Hunger’ recently – a bit Notes from the Underground but a lot bleaker. He has been called the father of Modern Literature and was even awarded the Nobel prize for his work.

But there’s always been a cloud surrounding the mention of his name in ‘PC’ circles and what may be called ‘polite society’.

During the Second world war he supported the German occupation of his homeland was extremely chummy with Josef Goebbels and wrote a glowing obituary on Adolf Hitler. In Norway his novels were burnt in the streets.

I do like his books, they often have lone wanderers entering small communities and chronicling the lives and loves of their citizens with real and strange psychological depth. He was a favourite of Charles Bukowski and the other Beats.

Francis Stuart is another writer who’s work, especially Black List Section H, has become an essential read for outsiders and Idlers for 4 decades.

Convicted of Gun running for the IRA when he was a teenager and imprisoned, during the late thirties he was part of an organisation that organised academic exchanges between Ireland and the Third Reich, and took a lecture post at Berlin University a couple of years after Jews had been banned from university teaching.

During the War years Stuart worked for Editorial Ireland, reading radio broadcasts which contained German propaganda. He freely admitted at the time and some time after, his admiration for Hitler.

Although later on he defended himself somewhat, buy claiming he never supported the Nazis, but was fascinated by the spectacle and sinister iconography of Nazism.
He was eventually imprisoned by the Allies at the end of the war, but it took decades for his reputation to recover.

Celine’s Novel ‘Journey to the End of Night’ is another counter-cultural bible for many, and he was another huge influence on the Beats.

But his publication of anti-Semitic pamphlets for the Vichy government during the Second World war, are not something you would associate with a writer who always extolled the freedom of the individual and loathed governmental/social control.

During the war, he also publicly wished for a Germanic-French Alliance against what he called the conspiracy between British Intelligence and the international Jewry. He fled to Denmark for a few years and was sentenced to a year in prison in Absentia but was pardoned later on.

Funny, but Celine was Declared a National Disgrace’ by the French Government during his exile. Now his name only conjures up images of existential freedom and hard won victories against the cold banality of traditional conservative values.

The German Philosopher Martin Heidegger, author of the Existentialist classic Being and Time, a huge influence on Jean Paul Sartre and every other serious post war thinker was an unrepentant member of the Nazi Party.

He even wiped a dedication to his biggest influence Edmund Husserl in early editions of his book upon the insistence of his publishers as Husserl was a Jew.

Karl Popper encouraged the world to ignore Heidegger’s name and works ever after.

During the same period, a certain Austrian Psychoanalyst named Carl Jung was known to have been extremely chummy with psychotherapists in Germany who openly supported the Nazis.

Until the outbreak of the Second world war, Jung had edited German language journal ‘Zen Trablett Fur Psychotherapie’ which often contained outright attacks on ‘Jewish mental states’ and exalted Aryan racial purity. In the publication, Jung did nothing to censor articles advocating the extermination of mental patients.

His collective unconscious/racial memory idea was obviously taken up by German thinkers and propagandists who wanted to imagine a biologically and psychologically pure and discreet ‘Volk’ - and of course providing a supposed scientific validation for the termination of certain racial ‘undesirable’s’.

Jung’s Austrian, Christian, Goyim credentials represented the acceptable face of Psychoanalysis which had been known as ‘The Jewish Science’ for decades.

He was also no fan of Modern Art, calling Picasso and other modern’s ‘Degenerates’ in the true spirit of Nazism.

All these thinkers are responsible for constructing modern consciousness, and especially the existentialist idea of personal autonomy and individual freedom of expression that first exploded in the 50’s and 60’s. The Beats took the main existential idea of ‘authenticity’ and making up your own rules after the death of God to question traditional roles of manhood and sexuality.

Jung’s ideas on extroversion/introversion, archetypes, the collective unconscious, Individuation and investigations into the Occult and Eastern thought, permeate all areas of art and culture today. They have become part of our everyday language.

I remember years ago at university when I began talking to a young psychology lecturer about Jung, he frowned and said: “He’s a Nazi”. The hint was that the conversation was over. The crime of Jung destroyed any consideration of his work.

Can a writer or philosophers works ever be truly separated from their personal morality? Can we forgive them their ‘crimes’ if their work may contain even a few gems of solace and guidance for the betterment of humankind?

Culturally, we seem to have mostly forgiven these writers, and read them and quote them all the time and hold them up as iconic explorers of human freedom.
Do you need to have serious moral flaws and ambiguities to be a serious groundbreaking artist? Yin and Yang.

Are the greatest artists always ‘fascists’ in relation to the world at large?
By reading their works and promoting their ideas, are we consciously/unconsciously colluding with their worst crimes by default?
I have thought of these questions often.

I believe it is possible to be detached, and maintain a certain objectivity towards artists and writers. They are the appointed transgressors, the dark parts of ourselves, morality explorers voicing what we know is there and often wish to utter ourselves, but fearing social stigma, we stay silent or condemn what we loathe in ourselves.