Dave Allen RIP

A great comedian whose enduring gags were those pointing up unnoticed absurdities in ordinary life. My personal favourite, which I remember watching as a very small boy, was one about a sign he had seen saying "Are you Illiterate? If you have trouble reading and writing, contact this address!" Others are here

In memorium, I'll offer my own. On the back of a credit card I saw a small notice saying "If your card is lost or stolen phone 0898xxxxxxxx". Handy, I suppose, if you've just stolen one.

Raison d'être

Within this life I find
that I'm craven
I could have been wine
but instead of that I'm
a raison

All of the time
I find I need a haven
I should have been wine
but I'm
a raison

The good doctor

"In America, childhood is a disease. Spontaneity is a symptom."
Oliver Sacks

Thinking is a Mindfield

Cheap Self-Help Phrase of the Week

"Your Wish Is Your Command"

Drugs damage the capacity for reason

The drugs debate takes another of its ponderous turns with the reaction to the new Met Police chief’s ludicrous attack on middle-class drugs users. Ekow Eshun makes a few valid points, but misses (or denies) the truly glaring inconsistency in the argument that the moral middle-classes should forgo cocaine because of its connection to global terrorism and crime. If ever an argument begged the point this is the one – is it the affluent user who creates the crime with their demand or is it the ass of a law which puts the control into the hands of gangsters.

Eshun makes an interesting point about Pete Doherty, the shambolic pop star, whose pictures – looking decidedly worse for wear - graced the tabloids throughout the week and who spent the weekend in prison after allegedly assaulting a photographer and stealing his money. Doherty, Eshun says, is feted by the broadsheets whilst being condemned by the tabloids. He thinks it's because Doherty is from a middle-class family, but it strikes me that drug-crushing rock stars were always working-class in the old days and were feted just the same. Well, not quite the same, since Doherty was – extraordinarily - interviewed by Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark, but it's just a matter of degree. It’s easy to say that if Doherty was in a Burberry suit he’d be ignored but history disagrees. Talent will out, generally, given the chance. (This is not to express an opinion on Doherty's talent which I have yet to actually witness, despite occasionally trying to listen to the Libertines.)

In fact the point about the tabloids points up something else, which is the way that the working-class often have stricter morals than the middle-class (which the tabloids reflect with their lurid and condemnatory coverage). They need them, because they can end up so much worse than the poor rich kids. So the problem with middle-class drug users becomes that because they have the leisure, money and space in which to indulge their drug use they encourage society as a whole to accept drug use, the results of which are far worse once they become endemic on poor council estates amongst people with none of these luxuries.

But this is really an argument long overtaken by events. It seems to be a constant one step forward two steps back. A study comes out showing that heroin, removed from its criminal snare and simply prescribed to addicts is actually basically manageable and causes little strain on the addict’s body, certainly far less than alcohol. I remember reading a report of a Swiss study which showed this in the seventies. The reaction to this sensible study is entirely predictable – a cacophony of condemnation for suggesting that people can take heroin safely. The fact that it appears they can is lost. Again it comes down to the same old point. The drug laws create more problems than they solve.


Looking through newspaper reports this morning you see the same words coming up over and over again. “Feted”, “shambles”, “worse for wear”. Luckily I’ve managed to avoid using them myself.

Rather brilliant headline here ’I chased Pete Doherty with a claw hammer’ in the Telegraph of all places.

Tree tops

Space cadets. We sat at the corner of the park, waiting for the sun to go down far enough to make it too cold to sit there any more. The wind picked up and the light trailed across the grass in long, stalactite-like rays. The sun glistened at the top of the trees, like a diver waiting to plunge off a high board. The grass rustled in the wind, spelling out the wind’s impetus, as though two invisible people were having a wrestling match. We was high.

It was inevitable, nowadays, but in a car crash you’d prefer an airbag and so, living in a society of car crashes, I’d come to prefer a cushion or two. It blew up in my face, and smothered me, just as I was getting worried. Sometimes I worried that I couldn’t breathe, but that went away.

My friend, who was restless by nature, had gone off and was considering the higher branches of a tree. Mentally, of course, all things are possible. And as the mind and the body are one, that means that physically all things are possible. It is just a matter of bending physics to will, I suppose. Not necessarily to will, of course, but perhaps more to intention. These subtle differences meant nothing to me, but they provided us with a great deal of idle chat.

I looked up in time to see my friend skirting those same upper branches with the agility of a small monkey. “Its still warm up here,” he told me, as a blast of wind stung my face.

I turned around and looked at the tree, which seemed to be still growing out of the ground as I stared, a gigantic thing of constant motion, which I suppose it actually is. The trunk seemed to be straining to get away from the roots, just as the roots seemed to be snaking out of the ground. The intention of a tree is plain – to go upwards – but does it have a will?

Climbing a tree is as natural – perhaps more natural – than walking, but it requires a certain lack of attention, a forgetfulness, which is the forgetfulness of down. Your body carries you upwards quite happily, but your mind will remain on the ground if you let it, and constantly interfere. Only when you have to return to the ground do you appreciate what it was going on about.

We sat up in the branches, smoking weed and staring into the sun. Suddenly a wave of dissatisfaction came over me. “This is all very twee,” it said, “we want more about the car crashes.” I turned to look at my friend who had nestled between the branches like he was on a sofa, but his eyes were shut. I realised I was both in the tree and on the ground at the same time. If I made a wrong move, it occurred to me, something very wrong could happen. I could either fall out of the tree or, possibly, fall back into it.

The branches seemed to constrict me now, full of intention. I realised that my arms and legs were not in their usual place, that is somewhere to the left and right of me, but instead appeared to be all around me, in front, behind, above, in places in which you’d never think they’d get to. I stretched my leg out and began felt a long hard stab in my back which ran up my spine and past my head. Air rushed past my ears, whistling a favourite tune. Branches bounced off me, as though a whole gang of schoolkids were attacking me. I grabbed one as it went past and held on tight to it, hoping to use it as protection. It spoke to me.

It said, “Hold tight.” The other branches stopped hitting me and I dangled in the air listening to the movement of the tree. I thought I’d open my eyes at this point. When I did I realised that I was above my friend in the tree, and not below him, as I had thought I would be. This gave me a powerful shock as I realised the tree had actually been attacking me, instead of the whole thing being a cosy hallucination as I tumbled downwards.

Later on we repaired to my house and sat around staring at the ceiling.

I took acid with Groucho Marx

here

Requiem For A Dream

Stunningly shot and crafted film, portraying the shocking decline of three junkies and one pill-popping mum. Consummate film-making slightly let down in the event by a rather melodramatic and un-nuanced ending which casts all four protagonists into separate lonely hells. There is something somehow very American, (and slightly childish) about the ending, which seems to have set upon being an unhappy-ever-after. Certainly there is no trace of irony. Haunting visuals and music linger long, long afterwards.

Gherkin

The favourite building du jour the Swiss Re Gherkin needs a little merchandising. My mind cannot help, unfortunately, turning in the direction of sex. So I propose the Gherkin dildo. And the Gherkin condom, coloured in the manner of the building and also possibly tasting of gherkin. It's Gherkin Great! it could say. Then you could have a little calender with aphorisms on it such as "Drink is the ruin of the Gherkin classes" or something.

No one is taken

Iraq

(through the bottom of a glass darkly)

Life - a test to see if you will kill yourself before it kills you

Primo, National Theatre

The set is stark. A plain, cold set with a doorway at the back which frames another smaller doorway behind which is a light. The bare, square, grey look is like that of a prison but has an unworldly, unnerving effect. There is a sense of the cleanliness of German architecture, the lines of Bauhaus and the austerity of Zen. On stage there is a sole plain wooden chair, which somehow implies a Buddhist flower blossom. It is a very beautiful set, and sets the tone precisely.

The lights darken and suddenly come up and Sher is there, framed in the doorway. He quickly takes to the stage and, dressed in a plain suit with glasses and speaking in a unaffected tone, he effectively embodies the scientific, the matter-of-factness of Primo Levi. Yet, there is a certain staginess. Although Sher is Levi telling the story, somehow he remains Sher. The character doesn’t quite absorb him. This is because they have kept a certain distance from the audience. He tells the story but there is little sense that he is telling us personally, in the way of a storyteller. In some way, he doesn’t engage the audience. He remains stiff and calm and the unrelenting nature of the monologue challenges you alone to make the engagement. You feel uncomfortable and don’t forget yourself in the performance, but it is impossible to resent it while he is telling you a story of genuine suffering.

(And what suffering. That, he gets across. When we hear about so much suffering in the world, does Levi’s story not represent the apex? Although others suffer as much, surely no-one has suffered more.)

Presumably the disconnected effect is entirely deliberate, but it is hard to tell. In any case watching Sher there is a sense of watching acting royalty. You settle purely to observe how he chooses to do it, rather than judging critically. Even if one might do it differently, it remains completely acceptable. In acting terms, Sher displays his mastery. Relating the entire story in the Levi’s unadorned manner, he allows himself only one moment of ‘ordinary’ acting, one glimmer of emotion as he tells the story of the man who prayed with thanks for avoiding the selection. The emotions are anger, disgust, sadness and Sher conveys them all with only a hint, barely a touch upon the wheel before immediately returning to the prevailing restraint. You feel he could have brought a hurricane with a switch in the tone of his voice.

Your Bed is Your Enemy

My grandmother once told me, while talking about depression, “your bed is your enemy.” It is true to say that nothing seems as bad as it does when you are lying in the dark on your own. Just the act of getting up seems to alleviate depression, although it may be that you just swap some for wanting to go back to bed. It strikes me that the best thing you can do with depression is to sublimate it, by doing something you don’t want to do. It appears that the brain only has so many receptors for pain and that these fire off more or less whatever is going on; therefore you may as well feel your existential agony related to something tangible instead of it simply torturing you unmitigated as you lie in bed. Perhaps its because you’ve so recently left the happy world of sleep, wherein you prove the truth of ignorant bliss; perhaps it’s the jarring transition. Perhaps its just me. Suddenly I feel terrible.

The Rant Begins

Never let it be said that I was hindered by the lack of technological accoutrements – I am able, if not to write as fast as I think, then at least to think as slowly as I write, which amounts to much the same thing. At least it allows me the luxury of being able to fill acres of electronic pixels with my ill-formed ramblings, a skill and pleasure which I little indulged in over the years, fearing that I would be some sort of pretentious weirdo, making up for his lack of social skills by sitting at home battering a typewriter to no good end.

Ah, now I am able, if only I could generate some thoughts with which to relay. I can easily act as conduit, but the lightning is lacklustre, merely scraping the grass instead of carving great craters out of the earth. If I sit here long enough translating electrical impulses into rapid finger movements, surely something will happen. Like the way radio interference is occasionally livened up by the odd alien transmission, similarly, the more words that I concoct from my internal conversation, the more likely I am to hit upon something worth all the jabbering. With this confidence in my mind, I shall attempt to say one thing per paragraph.

Luck is not something that I have close acquaintance with; my brain is apparently too slow to fully appreciate the opportunities that do come along, and luck is mainly, I would say, the ability to appreciate opportunities. That is how you make your own luck. Of course, you could say that you have to be lucky enough to appreciate those opportunities, which would also be true, if a little (here the word escapes me, but I know that its one my mother would use about me).

If I sit here in communion, utterly undisciplined muttering, scattering the blank page, with occasional bursts of poetry falling in accidentally, if I sit here long enough perhaps they will pay me. The thing about luck I have noticed is that its not enough for it to ignore you, it has to kind of shuffle alongside you, look you up and down, make you fully conversant of its locality and only then turn up its nose and scoot off as though to say “Ha! Made you look!” “Its not the despair,” John Cleese says in Clockwise, “it’s the hope.”

I did think, previously, that a good idea would be to extinguish all hope, in the hope (ha!) of finding some kind of peace and happiness, only it didn’t turn out that way. Perhaps I failed to utterly extinguish all hope. In fact, looking back, that is exactly what I failed to do, because I failed to extinguish the hope that I could be happy. This Hindu chap I was reading was criticising the Buddhists with their “extinguish desire” teachings, on the grounds that it was impossible and would only give you a complex. He, on the other hand, suggests that you extinguish all likes and dislikes, which seems to me to be equally as unlikely. Can you extinguish all likes and dislikes? Doesn’t one like being happy, and dislike being unhappy?

Oops, I seem to be slipping, as I used to in the past, into writing about philosophy, as though that was the only thing in the world that is important. How to live a good life, that is probably important. What else should we be thinking about?

Blair's heckler

Richard Ingrams pointed out, in yesterdays Observer, and Rory Bremner also noted on his show, talking about Blair’s heckler at the party conference, that as Blair wisecracked (not for the first time) that the protestor was lucky to live in a democracy where he could protest all he liked, that self-same protestor was being frog-marched out of the hall by goons. It's self-evidently ridiculous, and quite galling, for Blair to speak about the merits of our truncated democracy while smothering it with a huge fat arse. Of course Blair’s point is not that the man is allowed to interrupt his speech, but that at least he will not be murdered for his opinions, which is true, but it doesn’t say much about the level of politics in this country if we pat ourselves on the back for not being a tyranny. Is Saddam Hussein the benchmark now?

Luck

Not having any of it. Or in actual fact, having lots of it, but all of it bad. Firstly, my Ibizan trip was wrenched apart by a spine which made the unilateral decision to lead a battle against the forces of gravity. Instead of enjoying the relaxing atmosphere of hippies and sunshine I hobbled about like a broken weather vane flapping in a gale. Still, if the main purpose of the holiday was crushed under karma's stilleto, the secondary purpose, to drink sangria all day and eat inordinate amounts of seafood, was a runaway success. So it wasn’t in such a bad frame of mind that I inched my way back up my stairs at home. And the puddle of water which I spied in the middle of the floor didn’t instantly make me panic. In fact, in a leisurely manner did I decide to follow the still water back not from the bathroom where I had assumed some water had spilt the week before but towards the washing machine where I could see a lot more water had poured out, soaking the floor boards and (it later transpired) fusing the downstairs neighbour’s lights.

After I’d established that even this was not a terrible situation (at least not for me who didn’t have to cook with a torch) and that there was nothing much we could do except wait for it to dry out I turned on my TV and after a while it did what it had been threatening to do for some months, pop and transform the rich tapestry of modern culture into a momentary white glimmer and then a funereal black nothingness.

Bad luck is hanging over me like my own personal cloud. Luckily, however, with my worldview pitched exactly at this level, I am in my element. Pessimism is a much under-rated characteristic and rarely pays many dividends. Just occasionally, though, when the world does turn around and wipe its arse with you, you can sit back (lie down awkwardly in my case) and allow yourself a small grin for being proved right.

Anniversary

Cell Blog H

Jons in Jail

Groundblog Day

the story of a man who finds that everyday in the blog world is the same. Driven to cut his wrists, he dies. And gets buried. Hence the ground bit.