His head shaved down to the skin, body is taut with desire and rage, no room for any slack or vanity. He is hardened by days outside, skipping up rubble to smoke heroin off foil laying on slate with a brick wall pillow. He's beautiful in a filthy, dangerous way, emanating self-destruction like pheromones.
It made me ache to have him sneak a look at me that way, to stare at me with that needy lonely expression he probably gives his dealer. Such a turn-on.
Dirt
I turned up to meet you at a bus-stop somewhere near your house. I'd been at some stifling obligation in a wine bar and had contacted you as a means of escape. So I traveled to the other side of London drunk as hell on a grimy strip-lit bus and I waited so long for you to turn up that I had to run off and piss behind a tree before you even got there.
Of course when you appeared I wondered how I could have thought this was a good idea in my state. I bravely attempted something like coherent or intelligent conversation on the walk back to your flat. I'd brought some novelty with me as a gift that had been funny at the time but it looked so stupid in my hand whilst I was walking behind you that as soon as we arrived I hid it in a corner of your room.
Shrinking perceptibly at my attempts at conversation, we both wondered why I'd come. You were adamant that you wouldn't fuck me without some kind of verbal foreplay but I was tongue-tied with nerves and alcohol and just curled up on the floorside of your single bed, eyelids shaking with the force of keeping them closed as you undressed angrily and lay beside me.
During the night, loneliness or opportunism finally overshadowed your disgust and I felt your arm like a dead weight falling over my ribcage. You were impressively cold, nothing I did engaged you. When I touched your face you threw my hand back and then fucked me like you hated yourself.
In the white morning light I was appalled by my nakedness and left quickly whilst you were sleeping. My lips were stained with wine and there were crescents of black dirt under my nails; I was sure the streetcleaners and early commuters thought I was a hooker. But still, on the top deck alone riding back to my safe house my heart kept skipping with adrenaline. I remembered turning to face you in the middle of the night and feeling your angry cock pushing against me. Dirt is sexy.
Curled into the shape of a fist I search for my pulse
Broken, breathless, my heart stammers somewhere inside
Flutters in the cage of my ribs
The night shrieks wild, throws itself against frozen glass
Threatens to break in here, this room, this body, this cell.
I close my eyes and count.
Seconds etched in my veins, time written into my skin
My heart marches on like clockwork in chaos.
I'm still here, I haven't disappeared.
The night folds me into it's arms, holds me tight
My heartbeat counts me to sleep.
Broken, breathless, my heart stammers somewhere inside
Flutters in the cage of my ribs
The night shrieks wild, throws itself against frozen glass
Threatens to break in here, this room, this body, this cell.
I close my eyes and count.
Seconds etched in my veins, time written into my skin
My heart marches on like clockwork in chaos.
I'm still here, I haven't disappeared.
The night folds me into it's arms, holds me tight
My heartbeat counts me to sleep.
Substance
“--and then you're in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it's the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it's you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you, and the puke-, drool- and Substance-crusted T-shirt you've both worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest's center and centerless eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see you've been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land in. You see now that It's your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It's gotten you into is undeniable and you still can't stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can't stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
From Howl
'With mother finally fucked and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window and the last door closed at 4am and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture; a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination..'
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination..'
From Catcher in the Rye
"..Anyway, I kept walking up Fifth Avenue, without any tie on or anythng. Then, all of a sudden, something very spooky started happening.
Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddamned curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again.
Then I started doing something else. Every time I'd get to the end of a block, I'd make believe I was talking to my brother Allie. I'd say to him , 'Allie,
don't let me dissapear, Alllie, don't let me dissapear, Allie, don't let me disappear, Allie.."'
Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddamned curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again.
Then I started doing something else. Every time I'd get to the end of a block, I'd make believe I was talking to my brother Allie. I'd say to him , 'Allie,
don't let me dissapear, Alllie, don't let me dissapear, Allie, don't let me disappear, Allie.."'
smoke
the children make patterns out of desire
their voices rising like smoke through the trees,
their destinies held by angels above the fire
their voices rising like smoke through the trees,
their destinies held by angels above the fire
DEAD HOUSE
'Do you know what emotion memory is? Imagine a large number of houses and a large number of rooms in them, and in them a countless number of cupboards and chests with many drawers, boxes, large and small, including a very tiny one with a bead in. It's easy to find the large and small boxes. But where is the sharp eye that can find the bead that fell on the floor this morning, glinted for a moment and then was gone forever?..' - Konstantin Stanislavski
I've been obsessed with the German artist/architech Gregor Schneider for years but recently got really into him again after reading the novel 'There Is No Year' by Blake Butler which deals with the same domestic horror.. the psyche turned into rooms within rooms, false walls, insulated crawlspaces.
As a boy, Schneider would bury himself alive in the grounds of his family house and see how long he could remain so, breathing through a straw.
TOTES HAUS U R
'Behind the inconspicuous facade of a two-story building on Unterheydener Straße 12 in Rheydt, Gregor Schneider transformed his life into an artwork. The artist, born in 1969, dedicated fifteen years to converting and reconstructing his parental home. During this long process of maturing, a structure entitled Haus ur developed. By the time the public became aware of this transformation, however, only dull construction sounds emanated from the belly of the house. Schneider hammered, laid bricks, knocked. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
On the quiet, people puzzled what might be happening there. When by the mid-1990s reports leaked out increasingly, Schneider had been working for about a decade. There were small and large rooms, crawl spaces, rooms that almost imperceptibly revolved, halls narrowed to claustrophobic proportions, closed windows behind windows, and sliding walls. Schneider created a new world, his world. For visitors the labyrinthine cosmos was above all: uncanny.'
- Kulturkenner.de
DIE FAMILIE SCHNEIDER
'Gregor Schneider has called himself a painter, for want of anything better to say. Images, however, are singularly absent from the family setup in Whitechapel. Where are the framed photographs of loved ones, keepsakes, kids' pictures and scribbles? For there is a child here, somewhere or other. I heard a baby crying, inconsolable and far away, when I went down to the basement - unless it was just the wind howling in the flue. There is another room down there, with unopened packs of kitchen towels, biscuits, lollipops, stacked like gifts or as if for a game. I've seen the safety gate at the top of the stairs, the baby's changing mat in the bedroom. And the terrifying sexual graffiti, spied through the keyhole, in the attic of number 14.
Why is there a landscape turned to the wall against the living room wainscot? And nail holes, and nails without pictures in the hall corridor wall? It is as though pictures are prohibited here. But the house - renovated, refurbished, restored and distressed to an exact pitch of wear and use and unwholesomeness - is, it turns out, full of forbidden images. In fact, the entire house is an image, a duplicated, living image of itself and its occupants, whose stairs we tramp, whose thresholds we cross or recoil from, whose basements we crawl about in - not once, but twice.'
- Guardian.co.uk
I've been obsessed with the German artist/architech Gregor Schneider for years but recently got really into him again after reading the novel 'There Is No Year' by Blake Butler which deals with the same domestic horror.. the psyche turned into rooms within rooms, false walls, insulated crawlspaces.
As a boy, Schneider would bury himself alive in the grounds of his family house and see how long he could remain so, breathing through a straw.
TOTES HAUS U R
'Behind the inconspicuous facade of a two-story building on Unterheydener Straße 12 in Rheydt, Gregor Schneider transformed his life into an artwork. The artist, born in 1969, dedicated fifteen years to converting and reconstructing his parental home. During this long process of maturing, a structure entitled Haus ur developed. By the time the public became aware of this transformation, however, only dull construction sounds emanated from the belly of the house. Schneider hammered, laid bricks, knocked. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
On the quiet, people puzzled what might be happening there. When by the mid-1990s reports leaked out increasingly, Schneider had been working for about a decade. There were small and large rooms, crawl spaces, rooms that almost imperceptibly revolved, halls narrowed to claustrophobic proportions, closed windows behind windows, and sliding walls. Schneider created a new world, his world. For visitors the labyrinthine cosmos was above all: uncanny.'
- Kulturkenner.de
DIE FAMILIE SCHNEIDER
'Gregor Schneider has called himself a painter, for want of anything better to say. Images, however, are singularly absent from the family setup in Whitechapel. Where are the framed photographs of loved ones, keepsakes, kids' pictures and scribbles? For there is a child here, somewhere or other. I heard a baby crying, inconsolable and far away, when I went down to the basement - unless it was just the wind howling in the flue. There is another room down there, with unopened packs of kitchen towels, biscuits, lollipops, stacked like gifts or as if for a game. I've seen the safety gate at the top of the stairs, the baby's changing mat in the bedroom. And the terrifying sexual graffiti, spied through the keyhole, in the attic of number 14.
Why is there a landscape turned to the wall against the living room wainscot? And nail holes, and nails without pictures in the hall corridor wall? It is as though pictures are prohibited here. But the house - renovated, refurbished, restored and distressed to an exact pitch of wear and use and unwholesomeness - is, it turns out, full of forbidden images. In fact, the entire house is an image, a duplicated, living image of itself and its occupants, whose stairs we tramp, whose thresholds we cross or recoil from, whose basements we crawl about in - not once, but twice.'
- Guardian.co.uk
Blood Lines
Channel 4 screened a beautifully directed documentary by the photographer Leo Maguire called 'Gypsy Blood' the other night. It follows a tight-knit gypsy community with a strong family tradition of bare-knuckle boxing over a couple of years and was filmed down the road from where I was born and raised.
Incredible stuff, best shit I've seen on tv in years. Really beautiful, brutal, bloody. Highly recommended.
Link below, enjoy. Sxx
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/gypsy-blood/4od
Filth
Hello 2012.
How the fuck did we get here already? I remember scrawling THE END IS NIGH onto my wifebeater before heading out to celebrate 2010.. now the end is upon us according to Mayans and various maniacs and mystics. I'm not sure what I believe. Growing up in a Seventh Day Adventist Church which was obsessed with the Rapture and located next to 25Cromwell Street may have played a part in my pessimism. Or maybe I just really really want the world to end just so SOMETHING happens this decade. Either way.
New Years was a treat. I rented out a shitty cheap hotel next to a dual carriageway in Gloucester and spread a henry's worth of bags out on the white sheets for the boy to prepare whilst I sang and fell over in the shower pod with the door open. Thrills, Pills & Bellyaches blasting out of the surround sound speakers like a low budget early 90s music video. Fuck yeah! The windows overlooked a pile of rubble behind the hotel, dotted with cranes. I twisted a white towel around my hair and sat on the windowsill, shot one of 8 preprepared needles into my wet forearm where a web of veins have recently appeared. The God of Junk has been kind lately. The gear was the dark orange stuff our guy last had before Christmas. Before the benzo-laced bunk which made me lose my mind.
I was already half-drunk on home-made stout and the gear came on like a heavy dream. Blood on the bleached sheets and wet skin covered in multi-coloured streams from party-poppers. We fucked like teenagers to early TV Personalities and chainsmoked hash until I got paranoid the smoke alarm would go off and covered it with plastic bags and sellotape.
I can't remember the last time I had fun on gear. It isn't a fun drug. The last lot turned up in the post, forming the 'H' of 'HAPPY XMAS' on a customized greeting card sent from a partner in crime in London. That lot was shot up guiltily in my childhood bedroom whilst I backed up against the door in case my mother came in. My mother works in psychiatric care. I slunk downstairs and inteliigently debated the merits of electroshock therapy on persistant substance abusers whilst tugging down my shirtsleeves and trying desperately not to nod off.
I am full of dichotomies. There's no grey, just black and white in direct opposition. I keep waiting for the middle ground to make itself known but it never does. I'm trying to hold the flood of London chaos back so I can have space to think here, just one place where I can pretend to be a functional adult. NYE was a one-off. But these cracks and leaks are appearing all over and it's only a matter of time before the dam comes down and the London filth and junk come crashing over my life here. I have to go back to the Smoke, just so I can preserve one last place where I haven't yet burnt my bridges.
I'm sure there will be more soon, boredom is self-limiting.
S xx
How the fuck did we get here already? I remember scrawling THE END IS NIGH onto my wifebeater before heading out to celebrate 2010.. now the end is upon us according to Mayans and various maniacs and mystics. I'm not sure what I believe. Growing up in a Seventh Day Adventist Church which was obsessed with the Rapture and located next to 25Cromwell Street may have played a part in my pessimism. Or maybe I just really really want the world to end just so SOMETHING happens this decade. Either way.
New Years was a treat. I rented out a shitty cheap hotel next to a dual carriageway in Gloucester and spread a henry's worth of bags out on the white sheets for the boy to prepare whilst I sang and fell over in the shower pod with the door open. Thrills, Pills & Bellyaches blasting out of the surround sound speakers like a low budget early 90s music video. Fuck yeah! The windows overlooked a pile of rubble behind the hotel, dotted with cranes. I twisted a white towel around my hair and sat on the windowsill, shot one of 8 preprepared needles into my wet forearm where a web of veins have recently appeared. The God of Junk has been kind lately. The gear was the dark orange stuff our guy last had before Christmas. Before the benzo-laced bunk which made me lose my mind.
I was already half-drunk on home-made stout and the gear came on like a heavy dream. Blood on the bleached sheets and wet skin covered in multi-coloured streams from party-poppers. We fucked like teenagers to early TV Personalities and chainsmoked hash until I got paranoid the smoke alarm would go off and covered it with plastic bags and sellotape.
I can't remember the last time I had fun on gear. It isn't a fun drug. The last lot turned up in the post, forming the 'H' of 'HAPPY XMAS' on a customized greeting card sent from a partner in crime in London. That lot was shot up guiltily in my childhood bedroom whilst I backed up against the door in case my mother came in. My mother works in psychiatric care. I slunk downstairs and inteliigently debated the merits of electroshock therapy on persistant substance abusers whilst tugging down my shirtsleeves and trying desperately not to nod off.
I am full of dichotomies. There's no grey, just black and white in direct opposition. I keep waiting for the middle ground to make itself known but it never does. I'm trying to hold the flood of London chaos back so I can have space to think here, just one place where I can pretend to be a functional adult. NYE was a one-off. But these cracks and leaks are appearing all over and it's only a matter of time before the dam comes down and the London filth and junk come crashing over my life here. I have to go back to the Smoke, just so I can preserve one last place where I haven't yet burnt my bridges.
I'm sure there will be more soon, boredom is self-limiting.
S xx
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