Beneath the pavement, the beach! Or a bit of plywood should do it.

In the late 70’s, just as I was approaching puberty, one of those inevitable and cyclic youth ‘crazes’ hit the UK.

But unlike, the Frisbee, the Hoola hoop, the Rubik’s Cube, the Yo-yo, and all those other dodgy baubles to keep the kids gormless and off the street… SKATEBOARDING put the brats firmly back on the pavements, and provided them with a mythology and iconography: a first sniff of the counterculture and the edginess of teen cool and sexuality.

There was another kind of glossy porn passed around on the school bus and the cloakrooms of my early puberty: American Skateboard magazines with full frontal centrefolds of longhaired, tanned ragamuffins, being spat into the cloudless azure skies over dry Californian swimming pools.

Wow, this was the life. It was my first introduction to alternative lifestyles outside of the school/work/family narrative trinity that me and my friends were being indoctrinated into way back when.
This was surfer culture for the landlocked, Bondi beach in your backyard!

It all felt a bit naughty and possibly dangerous to my young mind, but that of course made it infinitely cool as well.
I mean shit, teenagers are so grown up to an eleven year old kid, when a single year can dilate to a lifetime in its condensed developmental novelty.

The names of those place’s in the magazines too, so exotic and beautiful to an apprentice free spirit like yours truly: San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, New Mexico.
The sun was always shining, the beach was never too far away and everyone looked healthy and happy.
And there was something else too, a sensation of big, open, airy spaces, vast panoramas, alien worlds where total freedom reigned.

Compare this to the grey, heavily populated, rain swept industrial landscapes of the British Midlands, and I think you can imagine the magnetic pull of Skateboard culture and symbolism on my young and oh so impressionable mind.

The artwork, logo’s, slogans and urban graffiti that signposted and stamped this beautiful new world were awesome too: lots of Skulls and cross bones, Tarot card figures, reapers and snakes, stylised flames, the ace of spades and tumbling dice!
I had found my Mojo.

This was my first introduction into the semiotics of urban outlaw street style – the graphic semaphore of the rock ‘n roll language.

The esoteric grammar that I had to learn in order to communicate - with the correct balance of detachment and ‘cool’ - with my fellow surfers, involved phrases such as ‘Hang ten’, ‘axle grind’, ‘aerial’ and many others that are now lost in the mists of time.

The skateboard subculture of the UK in 70’s definitely had a Punk DIY vibe.
But whereas the Yanks had beautifully sculpted, Hockney-esque empty swimming pools and huge sections of industrial irrigation pipes awaiting ‘appropriation’ in the desert…we had to create our waves from sheets of plywood and half a dozen house bricks.

Not exactly California, not much of a tan, and the potential for disaster and encripplement (and embarrassment) were always lingering, like the proverbial broken pop bottle on Blackpool beach.
I mean skateboards were basically missiles with wheels, bad enough when someone was aboard, but the sudden torque and weight reduction that was created as the rider became violently detached, created a potentially lethal javelin of wood and plastic energy. (Oh those battered ankles!)

Me, and most of the kids I knew, had friction burned a hole in the knee and/or arse of their jeans at some early stage of their board training.

Everything was patched back then, or you had a jumper tied around your waist to hide the inevitable rent in the fabric of your back seam.
Don’t get me started on my collection of crimson scabs…

For the older kids, the soundtrack to this urban surfing culture was Rock music of course. But this came later for me, I was still listening to Blondie’s Heart of Glass and Racey – too young for full sexual/occult immersion.
Besides, I don’t think my balls had dropped yet and my testosterone count was hiding beneath a very small stone.

I do think that my skateboard and its sub-cultural trappings were for me, what psychologists would call a ‘Transitional object’.
Like a teddy bear may become a substitute for parental attachment – the plush dummy for the emotional tit – my skate-world inducted me into adolescence, self-reflection, sexuality and more ‘adult themes’.

A couple of years later on, it was natural for me to fall hopelessly into the long haired, be-denimed, vortex of Rock music and its cartoon symbolism and sexism. I’d done my apprenticeship after all.
My next transitional object was also made of wood, very mobile and surrounded by a lexicon of strange mutterings…it was also a little less physically dangerous.
The electric guitar.

As the Parisian revolutionaries had screamed in ’68: ‘Beneath the pavement, the beach!’ I still have fond memories of my urban beaches, my pavement surfing sessions, and not too serious ‘wipe-outs’.

See kids, I was a pioneer, a purist. I was to the history of British Skateboarding what Robert Johnson was to the Blues.
(Is that laughter at the back.)

The Ronnie Wood School of Aesthetics

I think I’ve finally done it. I’m at peace at last.
Don’t get me wrong, I still have the occasional hiccup and get all pretentious sometimes; spin off on an arty-farty head trip and explore the minutiae of my own colon – but hey, who doesn’t?

Yes, I’ll say it out loud, after 30 years of playing the guitar and making art (very off and on), I’ve come to the undeniable conclusion… that I belong to the Ronnie Wood School of aesthetics.

Of course I have moments of brilliance, where I get lucky and toss off a gem, but most of the time my creative ejaculations in the spheres of musicianship and painting, have been rather awkward, limited and often formulaic.

More talented, less sensitive souls might even say I’m a bit shit. I prefer the terms ‘fast and loose’, ‘passionate’, ‘free spirited’, and of course, my favourite, ‘organic’.

I’m not entirely sure what the latter phrase actually means to be honest, but along with all the other descriptions of my ‘abilities’, it serves to bifurcate the linearity of the hegemonic dominance of this thing called ‘talent’ within our culture.
(If in doubt, obfuscate.)

I like to open up the artistic ground for everyone - my watchwords are: ‘permeable’ and ‘accessible!’
I eschew the DIY/NIKE Punk aesthetic at every turn, don’t THINK about it, ‘just DO it! Get yourself a slogan and stick to it like glue.
Quite.

Christ, its not like I haven’t tried!
You’re reading someone who learned the 32 chords to Pinball Wizard (and forgot them again two weeks later), who studied the Clash songbook like a Vatican scholar deconstructing the Bible (and made ‘I fought the law’ sound like Simply Red).

I have tried to paint like Rembrandt, to capture the demonic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, but it all came out a bit A-level and tragic in its naivety (not cool ‘naive’, just sad naive.)

But the point is of course, I had a lot of fun exploring the more academic/technical frontiers of these two art forms.
I had to have some kind of grounding in the prescribed formulas for proficiency, so I could find my own path and ultimately reject the sterile conventions of that cheap painted strumpet called ‘genius’, and find success through my failure.

I now proudly embrace the shambolic, the spontaneous, the chaotic - the bum notes of my musical and painterly ‘happenings’.
I am an art brut and a guitar brut, and will never surrender to the spirit of Segovia (or Prog Rock.)

I have learned a lot from Ronnie: its okay not being that proficient or innovative in your guitar playing and artwork – it’s the ‘passion’ and ‘free-spiritedness’ that count at the end of the day…the organic.
Ron seems happy enough anyway.

Mind you he is in the Rolling Stones.

Get a Life

In the UK - I still find this hard to believe - a quarter of a million people are reported missing every year – and its on the increase. Around half are found within 72 hours, another 50,000 are found dead, but another 50,000 just disappear permanently. That's a good size football stadium of people every year.

We all know the story of the bloke who goes out for a packet of fags and never returns, the troubled kid who longs for the romance of the big city and leaves a despairing family in their absence.
But its still a hell of a lot of people who have either been murdered, committed suicide, died of natural causes - their bodies never having been found - and/or people violently breaking with their former identities to start a new life. If the figures are correct, then a considerable number of people must be successful at this personal revolution - at least in the short term. Or there is a terrifying amount of alien abduction and/or human culling going on!

It fascinates me how people can dispose of their families, their roots, their very names, and the intricate and vast web of connections that go with that, to become another person in what seems a very short and abrupt period of time.

It appears that now more than ever, lots of people have a compelling desire to lose all the paraphernalia of identity, to kill the themselves on one level and be reborn into a fresh new world of their own making – with all the uncertainty: physical, psychological and financial challenges that brings with it. Not to mention a fair amount of guilt in many cases no doubt.

It seems an incredibly selfish thing to do for the person who has caring friends and family – to put them through a perpetual living nightmare of unclosed suspense - but on another level it must be unimaginably liberating.
To start again, to be new born, to shed that old worn hide, tattooed with those endless labels constantly fixing you to people, time and place.

In the Independent article linked below, there are no shortage of theories as to why people disappear, most of them for very materialistic and psychological health reasons: bad relationships, financial worries, etc.
Leaving the old life in this way is akin to experimental suicide: you die in a way to yourself and loved ones, with the option of coming back if the afterlife is not to your liking – Lazarus as a control freak!

Meanwhile, you haunt those who knew you before, and are haunted by the memories of your former self.

Is there a spiritual dimension to many of these ‘vanishings’?
Like St Paul on the road to Damascus, in the violent abruptness of leaving and shedding of roots, there are the undeniable echoes of the religious conversion, reincarnation and intimidations of a very surreal immortality.

There is something incredibly brave wrapped up in all this too: the will to survive, mutate and possibly evolve, to see life as an adventure, with yourself as the main character.
Maybe its enough for most of us to blog and post ‘anonymously’ on the net, to adopt different identities for just a little while?
The digital escape valve.

Over the years though, like many people I’ve spoken too, I do find myself romanticizing about a more permanent holiday from all the documentation, people and places that make me…’ME’.

But then again, that ME is the me-for-others, the psycho-dynamic algorithm that fits in to the, family, the group, the system, the merry-go-round.
I can perfectly understand why many feel compelled to leap off the old predictable ride (the mechanical Waltzer meets the Dodgems – life), and find a new, more organic and spontaneous one of their own choosing.

Its just a question of how expensive it is for your sanity and your soul.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-missing-each-year-275000-britons-disappear-1801010.html

After the revolution

G20 Protests April 1 2009
Originally uploaded by noeldouglasflickr

I’ve always been nagged by this idea.
Just wondered if any other members of the disaffected have envisaged the UK during and after 'The Revolution' or some similar catastrophic breakdown of the infrastructure?

A lot of people (me included when I was young) appear to rub their hands in glee at the prospect of the collapse of the banking system and society supposedly being transformed virtually overnight.
I was more of an idealist then I guess. The passion of youth.

But I wondered about the psychological and physical effects of this on a population who have been embedded into aggressive capitalism for decades.
After being informed by a ‘comrade’ recently that ‘Anarchy’ comes in lots of different flavours (do they do blueberry?), and apparently has ‘no rules or morals’ I am curious as to the practicalities of a revolution and the romantic dream of The Revolution.
What’s wrong with staying an outsider?
Does long-term freedom lie with the individual, the group or mob rule?
Can you help me with the brass tacks I'm writing a sci-fi novel sort of.

If you imagine the UK, a population hardwired to technology and consumer culture for decades attempting to adopt anarchy, won’t they suffer from acute fear of hierarchical structures syndrome. They’ll have to be ever vigilant against the first intimations of anything that smacks of coercion or bullying if the purity of the anarchist ideal is to be implemented.

Surely a ‘self-sufficient’ anarchist commune must employ some kind of practical and moral infrastructure. Even in the most primitive society they start with the incest taboo and some kind of social contract. Anarchy isn’t about ‘no rules’.
How will food be distributed? Sanitation and clean drinking water? What kind of energy and technology will be allowed? Even the Luddites used spinning looms.

If you use wind and solar panels, who is going to manufacture and maintain these objects? Won’t there have to be skills training and how do you guard against the inevitable black market? How much technology, organization and policing do you allow before you start to mutate into a nation state? Maybe some kind of ‘amnesia drug’ will be required to induce a collective forgetting – hell is other people without broadband and disposable nappies.

There are so many presumptions about human nature in the revolutionary ideal.
The most arrogant idea is that large swathes of the population are living under a false consciousness and need to be educated.
We have the most literate, information drenched population in history, most people just like to moan, maybe they’d like to work less and spend more time with their kids, but they would be terrified if they were confronted with real freedom and the lack of modern conveniences…wouldn’t they?

We are all imbedded in so much ‘stuff’ that we take for granted.
If you think about it, there is a screaming irony in the idea of discussing back to nature ethics and the downfall of capitalism while using a system (computer and broadband) that is available to most people because of the industrial process of human exploitation. Some poor bastard in the third world flogging their guts out for a dollar a day so you can talk about’ worker exploitation’ because of your inexpensive IT technology. No one is innocent.

There have always been outsiders or’ Bohemian’s, people who go against the grain in every society in history. What’s wrong with that? Why not celebrate not ‘fitting in’ (your in good company) instead of attempting God like transformations of society?

The Milgram experiments and history itself has shown that most people are almost hardwired to hierarchical structures. They don’t like to think too much - they want and need their bread and circuses.

Zygmunt Bauman in ‘Modernity and the Holocaust’ showed how Milgram’s 7 out of 10 were complicit in that genocide, but he ends on a note of hope too: its that other 3 who spoke up and/or resisted that is the most important thing to hold on to. There is never a crowd on the leading edge as someone once said. Are the outsiders the most ‘evolved’ in any society at any point in time? Isn’t the great refusal (just saying fuck off!) the one thing that makes us most human, most un-herd like no matter how ‘wonderful’ and libertarian a society could be?

Do Anarchists believe in the reality of evil or biological mental illnesses? Psychopathology, sociopathology, depression? Or are these merely symptoms of the greater malaise of hegemonic oppressive Capitalism?
I recoil in Vincent Price-like horror at the thought of aggressive libertarians doing a ‘Bastille job’ on the prison’s and psychiatric hospitals.

Oh what joy to go dandelion picking with the Yorkshire ripper, or watch the psychotics torture the bunny rabbits when their medication runs out. Imagine the hilarious food fights we’ll have…like actually fighting for food with machete’s and garden forks.

Maybe its only art, poetry music and literature that benefits from the inevitable boom and bust of social and cultural revolutions? I think humans have an inbuilt need for drama and conflict and any utopia would get a little bit tedious after a generation or so for the inevitable outsiders – maybe quicker.
Perpetual insurrections or what Hakim Bey calls Temporary Autonomous Zones appear to offer sanctuaries for those who can’t or refuse to fit in. Poetic terrorism.

Isn’t it the artist/outsider as an alien observer and chronicler of his times who has the most fun, and leaves the best behind for the next generation of insurrectionists and cultural explorers to learn from?

Isn’t it more Idle and honest to say bollocks to the mob and save yourself and a few fellow travellers rather than get frustrated and stressed by trying to make everyone the same as you?
Why does everybody have to ‘join in’ to make humanity better behaved, when humanity has had innumerable chances to heal itself and has failed every single time? I think we are very much still animals under this (clichéd I know) veneer of civilization.

We try to deny this part of ourselves all the time. I guess I'm a bit of a Darwinian really and a Freudian. We repress, sublimate and project all those aspects of ourselves that remind us of our animal natures into culture. We need art and culture to remind us that we're supposed to be human rather than humanity being something that is born with us. Something we just are.
We have to practice being human all the time - its an adjective not just a noun.

I may appear 'cynical' but I can't deny history and the society around me, by pretending that all the shit that happens and has happened since man first walked upright is merely because of a system of governance or control - and by changing the rules a bit people won't hurt each other anymore.

I Have a lot of trouble with this idea believe me. I don't want to think its true, but just look around you. You can't blame the system for everything, its people each doing their little jobs that make the system.

Maybe I’m just disillusioned with age. I should have knuckled down more when I was younger and buried my head in the sand. Or gone to live in South America?
People have always said I’m too sensitive…

Diogenes meets the Minotaur on the Left bank

In this documentary George Whitman - the then owner and proprietor of the Shakespeare and Co bookshop - gives a very practical lesson in how anarchic co-operation, the love of literature and the bohemian lifestyle can become somewhat reconciled with the need to earn a living (relatively) outside ‘the system’.

There is a mythical aura surrounding Whitman, as is manifestly demonstrated by the old guy’s dealings with customers and staff alike.

Like the Minotaur lost in a labyrinth of book lined passages, alcoves and cubby-holes, he stumbles around ranting and mumbling at the young initiates, who have seemingly sacrificed their ego’s on his shabby alter in return for a place to sleep…and the opportunity of course to breathe-in a bit of the rarefied air (and dust) of this famous literary landmark.
Waterstones this ain’t!

The original ‘Shakespeare and co’ English language bookshop was run by Sylvia Beach from 1919 to ’41, and was frequented by all ‘the greats’ of modernism: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Pound, Joyce, Miller etc.

In 1951, Whitman himself opened a new English language bookstore on Paris’ Left bank, and when Beach died he renamed his ‘Le Mistral’ store ‘Shakespeare and Company’ in homage to the spirit of Beach’s former enterprise.

Since that time, thousands of writers (and would be writers) and assorted bohemian’s have wrote, slept, cleaned, cooked, ate, manned the till and digressed on the nature of existence within its cockroach infested walls.
It was a familiar social and intellectual watering hole for the Beat’s - especially Ginsberg and Corso during the late 50’s and 60’s.

When he’s not being a Minotaur, George has something of the Diogenesian cynic about him; a scruffy cur, barking at the idiocy of the world and its conventions - surviving on the dubiously edible scraps of his homemade concoctions (I’ll pass on the omelette thanks), his sublime eccentricity and the forbearance allowed to the elderly by the younger generation.

There’s a great anecdote told about George handing a rather posh young man (and potential guest/employee) one of his socks and asking him to clean up a bit of cat
Shit soiling the premises. He warned the poor guy to launder it properly afterwards because the sock was one of his favourites.
He believed this type of behaviour was ‘character building’ for the young initiate.

In the final scene of the film, George becomes Arthur Brown’s God of Hellfire incarnate by ‘trimming’ his wispy locks with a candle flame.
Again there is an echo of Greek myth: it calls to mind that famous etching by Picasso, ‘Minotauromachy’.

His daughter now runs the shop, and carries the bohemian/anarchist tradition on as her father and Sylvia Beach did before her.

Haven’t been myself yet, but I’ll have to make the pilgrimage at least once before I do not go gently into that goodnight.
I think the food is a little better now too.

Henry Miller: The Paris years by Brassai

I've been reading 'Henry Miller: The Paris years' by Brassai (again).
This book always lifts my heart. Its a beautiful account of Miller's adoption of Paris as his spiritual home after he arrived there for the second time in 1930.

His first trip had been with his wife and had been more of a tourist jaunt than an immersion in the street level bohemianism that Miller was later to explore in all its degradation, poverty and poetry.

When he arrived for the second time, nearing the age of 40, he was a different man - a psychic sponge drinking in everything Paris had to offer: literature, art, architecture, food, eccentric new friends, the cafe culture, endless explorations of the more colorful arrondissement's, and of course the women.

And all this while living on a pittance provided by various handouts from friends and relatives, or scams perpetrated with his close chum and 'cultural guide' Alfred Perlés (appearing under various guises in Miller's writing - Perlés was called 'Carl' in Tropic of Cancer).

But for all the hardships and precariousness of his existence at that time, as Miller himself famously wrote at the start of 'Tropic of Capricorn': "I have no money, no resources, no hopes...I am the happiest man alive."
Miller had to live like a vagrant to finally find his voice, to discover his literary soul.

As Blaise Cendrars said:
"Discovering Paris, breathing Paris, devouring Paris, he swallowed furiously, and ate it, then he wanted to vomit in it and piss against it, adore it and curse it until he felt he was part of the extraordinary people in the streets of this great city, until Paris had gotten under his skin and he knew from that day forward he could never live anywhere else."

Miller Himself wrote:
"There had to be a second time, a time when I was totally broke, desperate, and living like a vagrant in the streets to start to see and to live the real Paris. I was discovering it at the same time I was discovering myself."

Brassai is of course a brilliant commentator, a sublime chronicler of that scene in his legendary photographs, but also in his literary descriptions of bohemian Paris, both architecturally and socially.

Brassai's account of Miller's Paris is a Flaneur's guide and homage to the art of walking...and getting by with a little help from your friends.

This is beautiful:

The 'Crossroads' of the black magic imagination.

I suppose lots of people are familiar with the blues guitarist Robert Johnson’s tale of supposedly selling his soul to the Devil at the crossroads in return for some half decent voodoo riffs, but there are other tales of the crossroads that are equally as interesting and otherworldly - I have one of my own and a theory to go with it (of course).

As I said in another post, there used to be a railway line at the back of my mum’s house when I was a teenager. We moved there in ’78 from the silence of the Shropshire countryside to the sound of trains grating and clanking below the living room and my bedroom window.
It was supposed to be a temporary move. The lease having almost run out on the previous home, my mum had to find a place fairly quick and the new place was nearer to her parent’s side of the family, which explains the not ideal location.

From our upstairs flat the railway lines below were sandwiched between two grassy embankments. There were small communal gardens below each flat with a high concrete wall screening off the ugliness behind - mind you the flats themselves weren’t very pretty either.

If you forgot the railway was there and just maintained a level gaze out the rear facing windows, the scene wasn’t too bad: large back gardens, loads of greenery, red tiled roofs peeping through the foliage, trees receding into the distance, the poplars spiking up here and there like drunken old men wobbling in the breeze.
But that was the other side of tracks – literally.

I’ve always found railway cuttings sinister; they’re like dead zones, transit channels with their own very peculiar negative energy. Even motorways for example, don’t emanate that vibe for me - they still belong to the upper world, the land of the living. Motor vehicles have individuality and freedom of choice; they can swerve or stop relatively quickly.

There’s an ominous silence and tension that glistens like a cheese-wire on a railway line. The pregnant pause between the sudden roaring inevitable unstoppableness of that gleaming projectile as it fires down the barrel of its gun.
I guess that why this hidden firing range attracts the curious kids, the teenage daredevils, and of course the suicides.

It took me a long, long time to get used to the rattling freight trains that shunted below my bedroom window deep into the night; such a melancholy sound, so industrial, unforgiving and insensitive.
The bellowing of the horn would always give me a start too, like some Viking call to arms.

The flat resonated with bad mojo from the off. It always felt and looked temporary, shabby, haunted by unquiet spirits. Both me and my sister became somewhat agoraphobic, sleepless, tormented by odd psychedelic and precognitive dreams.

My mum was still lost in her post divorce anger fugue over my dad and his family. The trauma of moving again in such a short time affected us all of course, but this seemed to be a particularly bad move all round. We’d brought our own depressed, anxious psyche’s to feed the beast’s insatiable hunger for pure negativity – whoever and whatever ‘the beast’ was… and is.

There was a tiny platform and shelter across the tracks to the left as you looked through my bedroom window. A long steep strip of tarmac led to the road above, or should I say the crossroads – the convergence of four roads in this case.
Underneath the road was the railway tunnel: a sooty, black-bricked yawning mouth, through which an identical platform and shelter appeared on the opposite side of the line.
Okay we’ve got a mega crossroads thing going on here! Of course I didn’t understand this at the time, I just saw and heard the ugliness and inconvenience of it all.
Never mind, soon be out of here eh? Yeah right.

We’d been there around a year, and I remember it was about 1 o’clock in the morning when I heard the electrical hum, and scrunching of gravel. It was a school night so I’d been sleeping since about elevenish. My first thought was ‘track maintenance’, so I rolled over and tried to get back to sleep. But something kept tickling the back of my mind, something made me get up and look through the window.

To my right I could see very bright lights through the small embankment trees that screened off the railway line at that point. I realised the hum was probably a generator for the lights. Okay so far, I was right, its just British Rail polishing the ties or whatever it is they do.

I still felt compelled in some weird way to finally identify the source of my insomnia, so I moved to the lounge for a better view. I still couldn’t see anything and thought bollocks, this is ridiculous GO TO SLEEP!

As I turned away I heard heavy crunching footsteps on gravel heading in my direction towards the dark, deserted station platform.
I stood tensed and transfixed on the point where the tree screen ended - that little patch of dulled glinting rail, gravel and grass banking. I was like a little kid awaiting the actors to take the stage at the local pantomime.

I had a feeling I was likely to be disappointed, but some sixth sense kept me there; so odd looking back, but I guess the darker, voyeuristic side of my laddish nature suspected the opportunistic glimpse of a taboo.
What I saw was by far the eeriest site I have ever seen in my life.

Two men in dark suits were pushing a silvery steel coffin-like casket on a gurney along the trackside towards the platform ramp in front of me.
Oh My God! I was frozen. I suddenly felt guilty, ashamed of myself for looking, but I couldn’t move a muscle.
This was Twilight zone stuff, terrifying in its rawness, but it also had a Hammer horror movie quality about it too.
I felt like I had been privy to some secret tribal ritual, which in a sense I had.

I watched the two figures and their uncanny load trundle along the platform and up the narrow path to the crossroads above.
I had a fleeting thought of some poor wayfarer slinking over the crossroads after a night on the tiles and seeing two undertakers wheeling a casket out of that little entrance on to the pavement.
Pretty symbolic when I look back now.

I thought about waking my mum and sister, but why? It would only creep them out and add to the distress already bubbling away.
Anyway they found out the next night when it was on the local news, and they were a bit freaked it had been so close – I didn’t say I’d witnessed the sinister ‘ceremony’ of body retrieval.
According to the telly, some poor middle aged woman had travelled the 3 miles from another local village in her car, parked up around the corner, and decided to end her ‘long-term depression’ at this particular spot.

I’ve developed a deep interest in psychogeography over the last decade or so, and I do believe many places have a psychic resonance, a specific energy – good and bad – that can be tapped into when the self is sensitised, and open to the signs.
If you know how and where to look, the psychic accretions and mythologies of places and spaces can be read like the scribbled layers of a palimpsest, the graffiti of time leaving its runes to be deciphered by the initiated or chosen ones.

This ‘sensitivity’ though can be caused by depression, anxiety and frustration too. A person can be too open and permeable (vulnerable) to the darker forces that may cling to the brick, soil and stone of a place.
The ‘crossroads’ - according to the standard folklore accounts from around the world - was a place where criminals were buried and particularly suicides; those who’d committed sins outside holy and secular law. The diverging paths were thought to confuse the spirits of the dead: a punishment in the afterlife.
The ‘crossroads’ is mythologized in folklore as the place that is ‘neither here nor there’, ‘betwixt and between’ worlds, a nexus of paranormal phenomena, a rent in the fabric veiling other realities.
The phrase also has the literal meaning of course: ‘undecided’, a ‘terminus’, ‘watershed’ – an important stage in life.

A couple of years later there was another suicide on the line, this one had taken place over the other side of the tunnel; I know because I was sailing past on the bus to work one cold winter morning, and on my left I saw the huddled lump beneath a pale blue blanket and two coppers poking around with sticks. It was confirmed a few days later in the local rag.

I know that I can be accused of being melodramatic, my imagination working overtime when me and my family were going through a particularly difficult time over those years, but there was something strange and almost evil about that place, I can’t describe it in any other way, it seemed to suck the energy out of everyone.

My mum bless her, never did escape. She became something of a mad cat lady (literally) living on her own and getting more and more paranoid about the outside world.
She hated the place, but the outside world seemed even bigger and more frightening in the end.

One year before she herself died, she threw open the curtains of the living room window one Saturday morning…to be confronted with the recent aftermath of another railway suicide. I remember her telling me in a bit of a distracted daze, “And you know what, I saw this policeman pick something up, all white and lumpy…and I swear it was an ARM!”
I felt like I wanted to cry, I felt so sorry for her and angry at the suicide victim somehow - what a fucking sight to witness at her age.

I’m not sure of the ‘statistical clustering’ of these type of things around certain areas (I suppose 3 in 20 years or so isn’t that rare really, although there could have been more I didn’t know about) and to be honest I don’t want to know anymore, I’ve had my fill of this stuff, and all I can talk about is how that place made me feel from my own experience.

There was a palpable negative energy, and if I’d have never have lived through it I wouldn’t have believed it. That was just my family’s experience. Maybe it was just us that had tapped into something at that particular crossroads in our lives when we moved there.

I was only many years later that the combination of the railway cutting and the crossroads above came to my attention, and made me ponder on the more paranormal explanations of that horrible period and my mothers seemingly spiritual and physical imprisonment.
Maybe I’m just trying to find a suitable narrative to come to terms with the pain and loss myself though.
Still, a very curious and strange episode in my life.

Mr Lowndes secular hym for the unemployable

Found this little gem on my hard drive today and thought I'd share it.
It might be familiar to a few people already - it has gained something of a reputation as a sacred text across the years for those of the more bohemian persuasion...
Almost 30 years old now, but Mr Lowndes rant is as spot on today as when he first penned it all those years ago.

The following letter by S.L. Lowndes, described as unemployed, was published in the "Opinion" column of the Sunday Times (8/8/1982) with the title "Why Work?"

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I'll get the dirt over with first, before it's thrown at me. I am an idler. A parasite. Unpatriotic. OK? Now that I have no secrets, let us begin. I wasn't made redundant; I gave up work voluntarily. For me, and people like me, the Protestant work ethic never existed. The problem is that to counter this apparently simple choice not to work, we have against us the whole of industrialised western society, and probably the east as well.

"So-and-So is doing well for himself." That sentence will always ring ominously in my ears. I know then, without a doubt, that I am about to be subjected to a catalogue of some imbecile's achievements. It's usually parents, in this case my parents, who take a sadistic pleasure in gleefully reciting the exploits of Mrs Whatsername's progeny. They appear to be under the impression that the result will be to inspire me to reach the top in the business world. No chance, Ma.

It's a confusing situation to be in. On the one hand I do want some of the material wealth a steady job could bring. On the other hand I already have some treasure of my own. I have empty tennis courts, long walks, the library, afternoon kips, peace and freedom. I thought for a long time that I was alone with this attitude towards work, success etc. However, on talking to friends I have discovered what could be a whole new social movement. There is a swing towards the opinion that work is for donkeys and cowards. Only fools work voluntarily, all the rest are bribed or black- mailed. As a rough guide I would say that single people are bribed and married people blackmailed.

Let's look at someone who fits into this world in the way expected of him. Bob is an accounts assistant. For six years he has worked faithfully for his employer, and for what? The commuting is exhausting and he's always overdrawn at the bank. To live up to the image a young working man is required to present, he is forced to live beyond his means. So why does he do it? He's not a fool, he's only like all the others on that morning train; he's a coward. The consequences of being a non- worker terrify him.

I can only feel sorrow for all those young school-leavers scouring the boards down at the jobcentre. They think a job will be the answer to all their problems. Someone has been misinforming them. Such dreams they have! The money, the friends, the clothes, a car, a flat! I would point out to them the drudgery of clerical work, the agony of labouring, and the unending grind of repetition. Work is not the answer to any problems, not even financial ones.

This may be only sour grapes because I am unemployable. There isn't a job good enough for me. There isn't a job good enough for anyone. It never fails to astound me that in this world where so much is possible, and where there is so much to take your breath away, so many are pre- pared to settle for so little.

It makes my day when I walk down the street on a hot afternoon. There I am in shorts and tee-shirt, and there are the beasts of burden. The men all sweaty in their crumpled suits, and the girls ridiculous in the latest fashion. Go on, buy that new car, get a "nice" home. You're quite welcome, but it's not for me.

Chris Petit's 'Radio on'

I finally got around to watching Chris Petit’s ‘Radio On’ the other day.
It’s a very, very British road movie, which I find fascinating in its ability to combine a new wave soundtrack (Wreckless Eric, Bowie, Ian Dury, Kraftwerk etc) with a kind of post war 50’s austerity and cinematic noir.

I kept expecting Terence Stamp or Diana Dors to pop up in one of the monochrome set pieces (or maybe Norman Wisdom).
I caught the Petit name first of all in the novels of Iain Sinclair who I’ve been reading voraciously since around 2001.

After watching the movie I can see where Sinclair got his psychogeographical leitmotifs from: the bleak industrial landscapes, the obsessive pursuit, gloomy pubs, the cold alien noir of the city bustle, glimpsed graffiti and the overwhelming feeling of being unanchored and lost in all the fleeting signs and symbolism.

The film was shot in black and white, and released in ’79 - just before the evil empire of Thatcherism rolled over the country like dark cloud.

Petit himself said in an interview, the film is a kind of omen for what was to come.
I was reminded whilst watching it of Sinclair’s ‘Heart of darkness’ device, whereby the narrator takes on the Marlowe persona: a stranger in a strange land where the everyday landscape and customs of the indigenous people, become, for the seeker, detached and surreal.
The whole film is available on Youtube. Favourite clip:

The Existential burn of symbolic resurrection

Do you ever get the feeling you’re losing the plot?
As I get older, I feel normal society and my ability to fit in to it appears to retreat from me like the tide on a deserted beach.

I sometimes feel like one of those Anthony Gormley figures, silently rusting in the cold salt air, anchored forever to a certain spot, just watching the rhythm of nature sweep in and out…there, but not quite all ‘there’ if you know what I mean.

I believe the technical word for this is ‘petrification’ in the psychoanalytic jargon – a turning to stone, becoming an object, a mere thing. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit, its not THAT bad, not yet anyway. And besides, I have the psychological tools and experiences to adapt and roll with the transitional punches.
I had a similar experience to this many years ago, far more traumatic and abrupt, but ultimately beneficial and life enhancing.

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung, thought that middle age was an important stage in adult development, a time when hidden or repressed aspects of the self were often brought to consciousness for the first time; there’s a looking back, a re-evaluation of the past, an attempt to reinterpret events and integrate them into the psyche.
This is more popularly (hysterically) known as the mid-life crisis. I prefer the ‘mid-life transition’ much better.

I think I’ve been doing this sort of thing in my blogs: looking back and attempting to re-evaluate all that stuff, my heroic attempt to reach ‘transcendental wholeness’ as that old fart CJ would say (Not that annoying tit off ‘Eggheads’).
These transitions though, can of course be chaotic. We can be propelled down many bizarre and strange paths, left drifting in our fragile boats in the dark night voyage of the soul.

I’ve suffered with depression on and off since my teens, but in the late 80’s I had a particularly severe ‘episode’, which is the closest I have ever come to ‘madness’ in the classical sense.

Isolated, unemployed and very skint, I felt like I was constantly pushing through a thick grey membrane, constantly attacked by odd impulses, paranoia, suspicion. I hardly slept, the cloudless summer sky appeared dulled, in fact everything was blunted and muted. The only things that appeared to puncture this fugue were the little significances, synchronicity's, omens and symbols that seemed to briefly ignite and unite the befuddled areas of my mind – like brief windows of order/sense in the ocean of turbulence.

I realised later, that this ‘break down’ had been caused by not being true to myself for many years. I’d felt like I had to conform and perform for other people. I was stuck in a place I hated and nullified the frustration and lack of opportunity by getting drunk and hanging around with the very ‘wrongest’ of people.

I had been a psychic drifter, too lazy to face up to change and confronting myself.
So I believe my psyche took over the reins for while all those years ago, and said yoohoo! Here’s a few ideas, see what you can do with these, this is your last chance. Change or die.
What I found most remarkable or ‘mad’ about my madness was the fact that it often had a definite cold, hard, lunatic logic.

For example, my mind seemed to have an uncanny ability to latch onto statistical facts: 1 in 3 people are likely to die of cancer, your chances of being hit by a bus when crossing the road…the number of children that die in third world countries everyday etc.

I’d known all of this on some level before of course, but all of a sudden it penetrated my very soul, because I realised for the first time that I was just…a person, like everybody else. The narcissism and indestructibility of youth was crumbling away and I was forcibly being confronted with my own psychic and physical mortality.
I found that I had been saddled with an unbearable heaviness of being. I was crushed by the gravity of worldly enlightenment, scared to move, scared to sleep, scared to speak less big bad Reality slapped me for my insolence.

I began searching for answers in literature, poetry, I took up painting again and, I know this sounds strange and obvious, but I began to see behind the scene’s of everything. I couldn’t watch a movie or look at a painting or read a book without seeing the conceit, the fabrication, construction and artfulness behind the image.

But this experience didn’t make me cynical or sneering at all, it was more like I was being made aware or educated in the grammar of a new language. The absurdity of life had a childish logic and a surreal beauty. My psyche was forcing me to go back to school and learn my very personal survival skill.
My dark night of the soul had imbued me with a will to truth, and I found out I could cope with the truth, even enjoy it by articulating and assimilating it into my psyche through the medium of the arts.

I do wonder though, how different my life would have turned out if I’d taken medication or had some kind of therapy? No doubt I wouldn’t have suffered for as long and as harshly as I did, but would I have just carried on being the same old repressed me, until the next breakdown and the next pill/therapy course ad infinitum. Or suicide.

I know I was lucky, my previous interest in the arts and books laid a ground of symbols for my psyche to explore, before chaos totally swept me away into suicide or permanent insanity.
But how many never survive the catharsis? Never learn the new grammar? Never even get to the threshold? Because as long as the means are there they can drown its first intimations in drink and drugs.

How many are locked away and forcibly medicated by (understandably) concerned families and a medical establishment that has a nice pejorative label for any behaviour that is outside the very limited behavioural criteria of your average 1940’s Middleclass bourgeoisie.

Don’t get me wrong, no doubt many lives have been saved by medical interventions both forced and voluntary, not all cases of ‘mental distress’ can be allowed to ‘play themselves out’ in the hope of positive catharsis.

Sometimes people have to be protected from themselves and we from them.
I just wonder if our society was more organic, less fractured, alienated and competitive, and we weren’t reduced to worker machines that need to be kept running on a diet of legal and illegal drugs, the psychic transitions that need to occur throughout our life, may not have to entail the possible cataclysmic breakdowns, permanent insanity and suicide that pervades the current one.
Your soul shouldn’t have to shout and scream, it should just whisper like an old friend.

In more shamanistic familial cultures, these transitions are often welcomed, seen as important and essential death and rebirth initiation ordeals for the development of the psyche.
But then again, they don’t have to be up in the morning to go to the office, or worry about their mortgage being paid at the end of the month.
Not much room for existential resurrection is there in the kingdom of the great god Prozac.
Time to regenerate Doctor?

Achtung Grandad...and don't mention the war to my nan.

I was watching Hardy Kruger in ‘The one that got away’ yesterday afternoon. You know the movie, he plays a German POW on the run in a rain sodden and very bleak English countryside?
I can always feel my paternal grandfather with me when I’m sat watching these old movies. When I was a kid he’d give me the regular brief hushed messages out of the hearing of my grandmother, which usually went something like, “Good picture on tomorrow night eight o’clock”.
It was like a strange Illuminati code, concise, but containing a kaleidoscope of sensations and anticipations - the rendezvous for the secret Cabal of World War II junkies.

You see, what Gramps was really saying was: ‘There’s a good war film on tomorrow night and I’d like you to come over and watch it with me’. He lived very close, so I could eat my tea and sneak round to his little picture palace for a private screening.
Refreshments were always provided: Madeira cake, smokey bacon crisps and salted peanuts - washed down with industrial quantities of lemonade and cigarette smoke.
I always sat on the white fluffy rug in front of his chair like a faithful dog, the coffee table within easy reach as it buckled under the smorgasbord of snacks.
(Hey give me a break, I can't help it if I was the oldest grandchild, and besides, everybody needs a bit of pampering sometimes eh? Anyway it was only a couple of times a week...)

This man was probably the biggest influence on my childhood, he was like the dad that I didn’t have, the manly but sensitive figure that took an interest in my life; told me about history, to beware of the bogey men, spent long hours helping me construct Airfix kits of Spitfires, Mustangs and Messerschmitt Bf 109’s.

He of course belonged to a different generation (and so did I), today, his passionate encouragement of my interest in ‘Der Vaar’ would probably be termed ‘child abuse’ and/or an unhealthy preoccupation with Thanatos the death instinct. But the older I get, I do now wonder what subliminal synchronicities and resonance’s those experiences had on my still developing psyche - both good and ill.

Personally, at the time, I only felt Eros in my heart and mind for the spectacular visual and emotional drama that regularly assaulted my senses back in that somewhat dowdy and post-coital early ‘70’s period.
My grandfather provided, the colour, the camouflage, the heroes, the eggshell blue aeroplane kits and tall tales that grounded my somewhat diaphanous butterfly soul during my early years.

My dads generation seemed ineffectual and airy fairy in comparison, hung up on their own little neuroses, too busy working and worrying to collect and convey myths, legends and picaresque anecdotes to a wee lad.
Watching war films with my grandfather was akin to sitting around a Palaeolithic campfire with the village elder, being initiated into the social, historical, metaphysical and moral rites of the tribe.

Then of course, there were the sacred texts themselves!
Well, ’Purnells History of the Second World War’ to be precise. A beautiful weekly glossy that Gramps collected for a number of years, and which I spent countless hours leafing through; the strange adult world of babies in gas masks, the bombing of Dresden, a soldier squashed flat by a tank (like a cartoon), the ragged snowdrifts of the dead at Auschwitz, the scorched blistered children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I know, this sounds grotesque now, but as a young kid I was fascinated and intrigued by the ‘forbidden’ freak show. Wow, this was more grisly and far out than all those sad war comics my friends consumed, this was real grown-up stuff! I mean ‘Commando weekly’ - do me a favour.
But also, there was something else too, a feeling of oddity and peculiarity that my young mind couldn’t quite grasp then…or should I say develop.

Years later in my early 30’s, reading Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughter house 5’ and especially Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, I was finally able to understand and articulate that mysterious sensation of childhood.

Beneath the kitsch portrayals of heroism and gallantry as manifested in those war movies, the slick sanitized colour plates of Spitfires and German staff officer uniforms and the fairground freak show - there lay waiting, like a bizarre, brooding mythological animal, the total and utter dark surrealism of a world gone insane.
What I realised as a child on some unconscious instinctive level was that adult human beings (the grown-ups) are capable of behaving like this on a regular basis.

I guess my grandfather did show a certain irresponsibility in leaving me alone for hours with those images, and exposing me in such a massive way to the whole weird, sick carnival of World War II. Bless him.

Maybe that’s his greatest legacy though: he bequeathed me an unerring sense of the existential oddity and precariousness of existence, and the seemingly instinctual potential for cruelty us human beings have.
Maybe his clumsy way of saying, ‘be careful out there’ eh?
I mean shit, thank god we didn’t have Grand Theft Auto way back then – I would have been really fucked – lets have a bit of real life context here.
I prefer my John Wayne meets Sartre hypothesis anyway…or am I reading far too much in to this?

Funny but I do wonder why I fell into the warm embrace of the more cynical, Swiftian school of the arts from a very young age: Vonnegut, Bukowski, Burroughs, Beckett, Francis Bacon…err Black Sabbath? All the ‘B’ people so it seems.

By the way, my grandfather never fought in the war. Maybe he was exorcising something in himself – an irresistible voyeurism generated through a perceived guilt?
Okay I’ll stop now.

The Shamanic astral temple adventure

So, I put my all weather jacket on, chunky hiking boots, had my corned beef sarnies, note book, pen, camera and folding multi-tool packed in my little black rucksack, and like Huck Finn, lit out for the territory.
The multi-tool by the way is a nod to Ray Mears and Edmund Hilary – If I get stranded out here in ‘the wilderness’ (3 miles from the Co-op superstore) and have to slay an animal or cut off my own leg to survive…I’m prepared!
(Plus the penknife thing makes me feel all manly and primitive – like a more sophisticated Neanderthal…?)

There’s a particularly beautiful walk called the ‘Staffordshire way’ that runs through my village and snakes its way through the heavily wooded countryside and nearby villages that has been one of the little (and free) highlights of my life for a number of years.

As soon as I slip past the church on the hill and climb that first gnarled stile I feel a whoosh, like a collapse of all the tension in my body, indeed my physical self loses its edges and I can sense the dissolution of the egoic ‘ME’. Like ice being exposed to a huge instant flame I melt into the landscape, I become fluid again.
The countryside is looking after me, it knows me more than I know myself, it is benevolent and maternal. I am home again.

Once I have left my village behind, I feel like I can walk forever, this is me, this is who I am: the stuff I can carry and an open receptive mind, a generous mind that wants to give as well as receive.
Time itself seems to become amorphous and without context and delineation too. I feel that all times co-exist on my walk. I sense crowds of ghosts blowing in my ear, sitting in trees, sniggering behind hedgerows…I think I catch another face staring with me into a stagnant pool hidden away in a tiny copse of trees.
Trick of the light or a deeper reality?

Nature is so busy, always chattering, pottering about, preoccupied with its infinite tasks and passions - a trillion births, lives and deaths played out in the blink of this human eye. At times like this I reflect on Relativity, the speed of light, observer dependent time dilation and compaction, the microcosm and the macrocosm…what does it all mean, this democracy of scale?
Its poetry really, its just layers of metaphors to enable a brief foothold, all we ever get is glimpses of the infinite with science and nature.

But on this particular walk something even more profound and beautiful happened.
As I strolled through my bucolic idyll I noticed an odd structure through the trees. At first I thought it was a lump of windfall from the surrounding trees, but on closer inspection it appeared to be some kind of primitive hut! As can be seen from the pic, it was a tiny narrow space, tall enough to stand up in or sit down at a push, built onto an existing stunted tree with branches, twigs, turf and stones.

Wow! My cynical urban mind said, ‘its just kids messing about, looks cool though’, my cosmic esoteric consciousness screamed, ‘It’s a bloody cosmic portal for the teleportation of Shamen’s to parallel universes, what a jammy bastard I am!’
Believe me, in the imagination stakes I’m in the Premier league.

After breathlessly taking copious amounts of pictures, I steeled myself and entered the temple, I had to know what it felt like inside. I suspected some kind of Tardis experience, to be suddenly confronted by the inside of a spaceship, or like Mr Ben, another historical era maybe.

So there I was, stooped and motionless in that tiny space. I could feel the big round grey stones that had been packed into the floor pressing unevenly on the soles of my boots. I waited, I listened, I tried to turn on, tune in and drop out.
…NOTHING, just the static of the wind and the sound of my own breathing.

I suddenly realised what a complete psychedelic twat I must look to any passing rambler or snooping farmer. I swear I heard the laughter of children somewhere as I nervously slithered out of that ‘thing’…or maybe it was faeries giggling.

Later as I was sitting on my usual poetic perch at the culmination of my journey, I scribbled in my notebook: ‘Must remember to consult astrological charts and Pagan texts for most propitious alignments for astral travel’.
Of course it didn’t work today, Mercury was in retrograde and I wasn’t properly psychically charged, I’ll try again on Thursday after Neighbors.

Alas, on my return, the temple/space chariot had been dismembered; either by the wind or the hand of man, who knows, but I suspect the latter, as amongst the ruins lay a squashed Coke can and a Curly-Wurly wrapper…although, no, lets not go there eh.

Anyway, if it was kids who built it, I believe they were unconsciously enacting a hidden instruction planted in their DNA by an ancient Alien intelligence.

The Loneliness of the long distance sinner

I got really lonely and desperate leading up to and during the Christmas period.
I always do this every year. Like a great many people I loathe the fabricated joviality, the sensation of the world closing down, shutting up shop, the enforced introspection and hollow 'sense of occasion', the bad movies and general lack of neurotic human buzz.

Its okay living on your own when the outside world is seething and boiling with relationships, connections, the Sturm and Drang of preoccupied humanity, pulled hither and thither by all those personal little gravities and workaday concerns.
When the planet briefly stops spinning like this, I find without the anchor of close family or my girlfriend near, I float off into cold interstellar space or am flipped into strange orbits of obsession, tangents of whimsy and oddity. But this space can be creatively productive as well as lonely too.

I always used to go to my mums until she died 3 years ago, the last couple of Christmas' have been marked by 2 day trips to my sisters, or rather I should say, test's of psychological and physical endurance, a lesson in how to feel a gooseberry. I always feel a bit nervous in family get-together's, always feel sort of in the way. But then again, I am definitely something of a loner. I do need other people but I need my own space so desperately sometimes.

But I do enjoy going to my sisters and seeing the kids, she's really the only family I've got left.
Well, apart from my mum's brother and my very estranged (and strange) father, you'd have to be Derek Achora or Doris stokes to have any chance of contacting the rest... if you see what I mean.

Anyway, this year there was a bit of confusion about exactly what I was supposed to be doing over the Christmas period: Was I going to my sisters, visiting my girlfriend in Scotland, or just spending the time in some kind of creative, angst ridden fugue? Ultimately, events so conspired that the angst ridden fugue appeared to be the easiest and laziest means of keeping my sanity.

The other options involved a rather vulgar engagement with long distance public transport or being tortured by my nephew and niece in that stress filled family environment that only Christmas seems to produce.

I know I've always felt a bit of loose cannon, a black sheep of the family since I fist started refusing to go to school at the age of around 6 years old. I kind of embraced that chaos really, found solace and support in the lonely existential heroes of Marvel comics. These guys were displaced, alienated, misunderstood and wounded souls, social transients who never-the-less had compensatory powers - the power to stand outside society, but at the same time to influence and use that society in an almost metaphysical way, like omniscient gods who'd had their wings clipped.

I realised way back then that being a social and psychic flaneur was my destiny.
(Still not sure what my specific 'superpower' is by the way...maybe the ability to piss people off? Or play the intro to Pinball wizard quite well on an old Spanish guitar where the strings are about 3 inches above the fretboard?)

My family have been less amused of course by my often self-imposed existential superhero status. My 4 month holiday in the sun at Wellingborough young offenders resort at the age of eighteen - as you can imagine - did little to soften their attitude toward their wayward kin(that's a tale for later.)

I did manage to briefly shock and awe their anxious sensibilities in a more positive way in my late twenties by doing an A-level foundation course, obtaining a very good degree in psychology and embarking on a Phd. I have a tendency to do this by the way - do fuck all for years and then one morning...BANG!!!

You could audibly hear the collective gasp of astonishment and relief:'At last! He's found his metier, his vocation, back on the straight and narrow, settling down and fitting in - Phew!'
Their joy was short lived however.

I enjoyed my undergrad years, being initiated into the dark landscapes of Foucault,the rich kaleidoscope of semiotic's, the paradoxes and ultimate mystery of human consciousness.I found that the hallowed halls of critical psychology provided some kind of academic grounding, a legitimization and explanation of my alienation and inability to fit in. I felt strangely at home for the first time.
Having 2 great tutors at that uni helped too.
You can't beat a couple of world weary old Foucaultian hippies to make you smile at the absurdity of the world and question EVERYTHING.

Unfortunately, the uni where I began my post-grad appeared to be populated by a bunch of careerists and rude upper middle-class boors, and I started to feel ungrounded and repelled by the very 'institutional' (prison?) feel of the place.
I left after a year of self-funded disillusionment (my inability to get a bursary or studentship helped with my decision.)
I felt somehow betrayed and hurt in the process.

Family were okay about it on the surface, but I could detect a certain confusion and even an unspoken 'I told you so'.
Anyway, after many years of working various jobs - garden landscaper, signwriter - I found myself unemployed last winter and pondering my future.

I know I thought! I'll go back to uni and do a research Masters (only a 12 month sentence) at Edinburgh uni. I'll be with my girlfriend and back to study again. Get myself a career and start being a responsible citizen. The deadline for submissions was early Feb, so my flat became a hothouse of intellectual endeavor, I was a man possessed, or should I say 'repossessed'... and ultimately dispossessed.

I was writing a research proposal that was the equivalent of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason while living on an a diet of tuna and rice, Golden Virginia, Co-op 99 tea bags - plus copious amounts of verbal encouragement from my girlfriend via the digital phantasmagoria called 'MSN'.
I'd always been fascinated by the gang of dissident writers, pranksters and cyber-tricksters collectively known as the 'Luther Blissett Foundation', or more recently - 'Wu-Ming'.

I'd decided to do a an in-depth investigation into the Blissett phenomena: what a great example it demonstrated for the growth of fresh cyber-movements who could act as multi-media 'communities of resistance' against late capitalist imperialism - blah blah blah.

I'd contacted Edinburgh about the idea and they agreed it sounded good - in theory.
Now began the hard work of hammering out a consistent and logically sound theory. Anybody who knows me, realizes this can represent something of a stumbling block - I love theorizing and digressing on all sorts of intellectual esoterica, but hate the petty details...like making it intelligible to other people.

I had my Christmas project to keep me occupied again. What Joy! Previous lonely Chrimbo's had been spent writing novels that had been aborted by January, embarking on an angst filled series of abstract expressionist paintings, learning the basics of Classical guitar, and one year, actually writing a rock opera based on a post-apocalyptic Britain...this was as shit as it sounds.

I got in touch with one of my old favored undergrad tutors who was willing to give me a reference, and he gave me the e-mail address for the other guy, who'd now retired to a Mediterranean island to begin a permaculture existence, far from the groves of academe and the psychotic crowd.

Unable to give me a ref because he was no longer officially an academic, he gave me so much more that initially blew my mind and kicked me upon another trajectory.
We began a sporadic but regular correspondence about life, love, olive groves,hydrophonics and the mid-life crisis. saying that, I've been having mid-life crises since about the age of 12.

We both agreed that my attempted return to uni was something of a 'stop gap' for lack of other ideas, and there were many different lifestyles and landscapes to explore, including just being yourself at the end of the day and no matter where you are, attempting to be as psychologically and materially independent from group think as much as possible.

I realize now more than ever, four months on, that a return to uni wasn't the answer, it would have been a defeat, throwing the towel in, being lazy and unmotivated. Some people can live that life...I realized I'd got my t-shirt years ago and the years of suffering involved in getting the full wardrobe and pension were too high a price to pay.

I want to dance in the olive groves while I'm still relatively young, even if its sleeping on a pallet and busking for tourists.
Anyway, I withdrew my uni application and continue to meditate on the wider possibilities that Lady destiny and Father Time may have in store.

I made it through Christmas again anyway. I also renewed an old friendship, got an offer of a free holiday and learned a little more about permaculture, digital dissidence and myself into the bargain.
Glad I had a 'quiet Christmas' really.

The Spatial poetics of our soul

II was reading Kaya’s blog post about what ‘Home’ means to different people, and I remembered that I wrote this last year, which is the basic ‘theoretical tool’ I use to examine my own childhood, and of course it leads on from what I spoke about yesterday.
I love Gaston Bachelard’s book ‘The Poetics of Space’, I’ve read it at least 5 times over the last ten years.

Bachelard’s theory proposes that the first childhood home is the container and engine for the imagination for the rest of a person’s life.
Our first conceptions of space, movement, tactility, smell and taste are hardwired into our psyche's for evermore in our very first home.
Did we grow up in a flat? A bungalow (Like me)? A small terrace? An old Victorian shambles? A caravan? But more importantly for Bachelard, is how our pristine senses were first conditioned to all that material and spatial phenomena that constituted our initial conception of 'The world'.

The smell of a bookcase, the shape of the bathroom, did we share a bedroom? The sinister and intimidating parents wardrobe, the cubby-hole that we played hide and seek in, the rusty kitchen door, the texture, feel and smell of the sofa, the feel of the ripples in the glass in the front door panel.
Bachelard believed this original sensual and poetic home of our childhood is the substance and container of human personality for ever more..

When we were children, especially until the age of 5, all our daydream's and the possibilities of who we could be and of what we could imagine, occurred in the universe of our little shelter.

Roland Barthes used the same idea of this container of imagination by comparing our personalities to the fictional 'Nautilus': A fixed place of the imagination that travels through the larger world, surfacing and submerging, rejecting and encouraging - but essentially a container of the true self.

Bachelard theorized that our likes and dislikes, affirmations and rejections that we experience in adult life, are 'reverberations', musical notes that chime or jar with this poetic idea of home, that is in fact the deepest level of our personality.
The house is the soul.

Another fascinating thing Bachelard focused on was art and literature. He thought that our love of certain paintings and books for example, was not necessarily the pull of the narrative, or the aesthetic beauty of the scene, the girl at the window in Vermeer painting… but how this image resonates, reanimates and connects memory with imagination to our deepest sense of 'Home'

Bachelard exploration into the psychic home is comprehensive and vast, almost archaeological in its scope. He begins from the very primitive need for a shelter, the cave dwelling, the hut etc, to the sophisticated architectural spaces that we've all grown up in today.
Really worth a read by all the bohemian brothers and sisters.

Like Proust and his Madeleine, I sometimes find myself gripped by warm, comforting little epiphanies - a certain texture of stone, car wheels on gravel, a chance fold in the pattern of the curtains, the smell of an old rug, a painting of a chipped teapot, the precise tint of green on a tin of soup… like the green of my childhood kitchen.

And light itself, the eternal trickster is always tickling your soul .
The submerged child's memory of daydreaming in their bedroom on a Sunday afternoon, can suddenly be re-ignited by lying on a sofa in a different architectural space, and registering that same angle of light, that same spiralling dust mote in the warm sun.

A very Shopshire lad lost in a caravan park

I'm just gonna dip into this subject off an on in the blog over time, because I don't want to appear self indulgent, but is a kind of therapy for me that other readers may find interesting or amusing.

I noticed when I turned forty, almost like flicking a switch, the past really became not so much 'another country', as a vast continent inhabited by strange flora and fauna.
This sounds counter-intuitive on the one hand, the past should appear a bit stale, lived up, rinsed out, dulled and discarded - an old painting that is fixed forever.
But with middle-age I find my past is more like a huge old book, full of real prose, metaphor and symbolism - weird little synchronicity's and many angry and unquiet ghosts. Nothing is or was 'cast in stone', the past has become for me the most animated and movable of feast's. (Apologies if that last line sounds a bit cheesy.)

As I get older I have become a real scholar of this book, this is my project. The object of this ongoing exercise is to find out who I really am...or rather, how many persona I have been in the past, and is this me now, the final model?

I feel like I can't really know anything unless I can get a good interpretation, a decent grip on my past. I never felt the desire before, but then again, when you get past 40 the past starts to outweigh the future by sheer statistical volume like a melting iceberg - there's more underneath than on top. I guess I'm beginning to roll over!

I was born in a little wide place in the road, just outside Bridgenorth Shropshire. My paternal grandparents ran a little roadside cafe, caravan site, and Garage. It was my grandfathers mother who built the business up though, a strange, eccentric and rather formidable woman who died when I was about 6 years old.
The cafe and caravan park were situated on a natural plateau, a very lumpy rolling landscape of pink sandstone, thick scrub and woodland.

My grandparents house was built onto the side of the cafe (or rather the other way round), my uncle,aunt (my dad's sister) and cousin lived in a large pink pebble dashed house around 200 yards further along, and if you hopped over my cousin's garden you'd find yourself at a medium sized stone clad bungalow - the Tao of Dog family home. Everybody I knew worked in the various business's along with a few, very un-loyal, poorly paid staff.

The caravan site wound its way around the back of the large hill at the back of our houses, like a horseshoe shape, the front windows of a few vans could be seen glinting in the sun, like little beacons on the horizon.
Opposite, across the main road and the field was the Severn river and the hills behind it.

I know, I know, it sounds like a cross between a bucolic idyll, a 'Deliverance' style banjo strumming commune for the inbred and a bargain sun-seekers weekend getaway - it was actually all three in a way, but without the sexual incest, I think, I hope!

My father worked on a small free holding breeding pigs that daddy had set up for him on the land he owned near the bungalow, I think mostly to keep my dad out of trouble and use him as a slave - someone to own and whip when you're feeling a bit inadequate or drunk.

There was a lot of drinking. Actually, the quantity of drink seemed to be in direct proportion to the lack of money. It wasn't poverty by any means but there never seemed much cash flying around, everything was used up until it fell apart, make do and mend,no fancy holidays: we used to get a week in another tatty caravan park in North wales every year, a busman's holiday so to speak.

It was a strange childhood and better than a helluva lot of other kids I appreciate that, especially for the late 60's, early 70's.
That was the greater part of my childhood, surrounded by caravans with an ersatz holiday feel in a cold climate with no central heating, and the smell of ale and chips.
But this is my older self being more cynical and objective. Back then I was a total naive subjectivity, immersed in this odd world of fair weather transients, customers and 'tourists'.

The boy didn't really notice the smell of pigshit from the free holding, the reliance and addiction to drink that was the subtext of so many of the adults there, the dark depressions of my father and the 'still' unfathomable absences of my mother.

But there were so many things about that place that were magical also: The landscape and the freedom to roam ,fascinating and eccentric characters, and a feeling of being between worlds, being a watcher, waiting again for the summer season so the carnival can begin.

Future installments: The Flying saucer incident, 'OMO' the mythical killer pig,'my little Everest' and the seven trials of Action man!

Away with the faeries

I began reading Graham Hancock’s book ‘Supernatural’ again a couple of days ago – all 800 pages of it. Bought it last year, but couldn’t seem to get into it properly at the time, so much stuff to take in. The suspension of disbelief needed in the second half of the book is somewhat incredible, but when you just say ‘okay’, what if? A lot of his ideas kinda make sense in a Huxley meets Walt Disney way.

He proposes, like a lot of other people, that the revolution in symbolic consciousness that occurred some 50,000 years ago as manifested in the cave painting’s of Altamira, Lascaux and so on was because of the systematic use of psychoactive drugs, specifically mushrooms containing the psychoactive chemical Psilocybin. (I know, we’ve been here before!)

He claims that the images depicted on those cave walls, abstract signs, ‘therianthropes’ (animal-human hybrids), symbolic woundings, initiation narratives etc, have powerful similarities with the tropes of fairy lore from around the world and modern UFO abduction phenomena.

Hancock cites the DMT studies done by the psychiatrist Rick Strassman as a support for his theories. DMT is a naturally occurring substance with psychoactive properties found in most organic things including humans.
Strassman and Hancock propose that around 2 percent of the population have particular levels of the molecule that enable them too ‘spontaneously trance’. These people are in effect ‘born Shamans’ who under certain conditions are able to access other ‘free standing’ realities outside of normal human awareness.

Hancock sites ufologist Jaques Vallee’s work on this back in the 60’s, but his most interesting sources are Kirk’s ‘Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies’ (1691), and W.Y. Evans-Wentz’s ‘The fairy faith in Celtic countries’ (1910).

Both these books are full of first hand accounts of being abducted by fairies, gnomes, elves etc, the ‘Changeling’ phenomena whereby human babies are substituted for fairy babies, wet nursing of fairy children by human’s in the supernatural realm, inter-fairy/human hybrids, fairy ships and sky carriages and so on interminably.

If you suspend belief a little more and compare this phenomena with DMT trips and UFO abdication cases: being experimented on by small beings, conceiving and wet-nursing alien children, finding oneself in crystalline rooms in space ships, or alien landscapes, alien/human hybrids, a feeling of great wisdom being conveyed without language – there does seem to be some kind of correlation.

Swap the fairies and elves for little green or grey men, or cave therianthropes, the ‘sky ships’ for ufo’s etc – taking into account time and culture - and what have you got? A big pile of interesting analogies.
Note that both Hancock and Strassman believe that the experiences people have while ‘trancing’ on DMT and Psilocybin (and Ayahuasca), are very real free standing realities not just hallucinations.

Hancock does posit the idea that the fairy dance and the subsequent fairy ring phenomena may be evidence of quantum wormhole manifestations! Wicked.
I haven’t the time to write about the DNA Shamanic coding stuff later in the book. I’ll leave that for part 2 eh?
The book is one long cosmic head fuck! It does sound like the biggest load of bollocks imaginable on one level, but is vastly entertaining, even if just for the stuff on Palaeolithic cave art and Celtic folklore.

The Friday Night Rock Show

Old Rockers of a certain age may remember this well.
It was a radio one show, running from 10 till midnight from '78 to 93' hosted by the rather cheesy and incredibly earnest Tommy Vance.
I began listening in '79 when I came across it purely by accident one star crossed enchanted evening.
I was an avid fan for around 5 glorious years, but nothing can ever match those first couple of years of my initiation into the dark labyrinthine, occult pantheon of rock. (I know, I sound like Tommy.)

Locked away in my tiny bedroom, the curtains open, the night big and vast and full of symbolism and strange surreal connections, I hunkered down on the floor, back against the bed and gobbled up this brand new nocturnal carnival of soul food.

I was a 13 year old virgin who had tentatively dipped his willy in Slade, T-rex, Queen and Status Quo, but what I yearned for was total psychic and bodily immersion into something deeper, more symbolic, a new lexicon - something artistic that my adolescence could grab onto and use to articulate the swarm of new feelings and sensations that were, literally, keeping me awake at night.

The names of the bands awed me at first: Whitesnake, Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Rush, Judas Priest, Deep Purple...Black Sabbath!
These names were electric, they sounded mythological and timeless. The songs had wicked titles too: Heaven and Hell, Black Night, Tarot woman, the Necromancer, Spiral architect, Gypsy queen.

I'd just began around 6 months earlier getting into the habit of reading horror and sci-fi novels too: James Herbert, Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft...heady days.

Unlike chart music, TOTPs and all the other mainstream music sources, FRS seemed akin to a secret society, a trans global Illuminati psychic crash pad for the more spiritually inclined. I felt a feeling of anticipation, imminence, travel and adventure when in my little Friday evening rock box.

These bands and their music were so romantic and picaresque, so historically embedded somehow.
I used to set up the silver mike from my black Decca cassette deck next to the radio speaker, and slip in a C-90 BASF tape (remember them). The little red recording light would glow and I'd be crossing my fingers.

I would experiment with various recording positions, I was an apprentice sound engineer, A bedroom George Martin, attempting to discover the magical level point where perfect voice, guitar, bass, drums synchronization would be achieved - at least to my ears.

Fucking Tommy, not as bad as some, but he did tend to talk over the songs;finger hovering over the pause button...'Now'! Shit missed it, bastard, ruined. Sometimes I'd catch it just right and have an almost perfect recording without DJ contamination...and then find the tape had snapped and tangled in the mechanism, aaaaargh!

What hard work that old technology was, very physical and time consuming for our young audio engineer. Kids today eh,they haven't got a fucking clue.
No seriously they haven't and its their loss. I really learned to appreciate my music back then in the days before, MTV, MP3's and YouTube, and still do today because of those experiences.
Music was hard won, a rationed experience and a real event.
Then I got my Japanese Les Paul copy from my mum's catalogue and things got serious, and darkly funny too. That's another story though.

RIP Tommy and God bless Rack and Roooooowl!