Welcome to Acerbia; population: π
This is the archive of the many and fabulous adventures of . Like a hard-bitten son of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius taught to write by William S. Burroughs; continually reincarnated, debated over by intellectuals and literati at cocktail parties the author can't get invited to, the target of scorn and ire from women everywhere, frequently mistaken for a former member of the Warsaw pact, named after the Italian explorer Giuseppe Acerbi, slowly rewriting the Book of Cataclysm, this is postmodern fiction at its most playful and creative.
Teh Bug
If you don't read The Bug you really should. It combines the daily satire of one man's life driving his kids to school with the eternal damnation of a Kafkaesque curse... or something like that.
He hand draws the stuff too...
Bitterness
Seventy-six trombones led the big parade
With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand
They were followed by rows and rows
Of the finest virtuosos
The cream of every famous band
Creighton Alexander was lead trombonist for the big parade and he doesn't remember it with as much elation as some. I met with Creighton and we discussed his demophobia in Greenwich town hall which had to be cleared of all other people before he would come out from under the doily-covered table.
"It was horrible, I tell you. Forget the fact that I had my own five row battalion of trombonists keeping time with me, but immediately behind them were the coronet players in rows of eleven and I do mean right behind us. Those coronets were so close the guys in my back row couldn't hear themselves think.
Don't even get me started on the virtuosos. Prima donna musicians are the worst. Always convinced of their own superior playing skills. You know we had three grand pianos on a float? So what happens? There's this one lone bass oompahing up and down the square, clowning around like we're some sort of marching band instead of the be-all and end-all of big parades and he slips in the elephant dung. Elephants, I tell you.
One wrong note is all it takes to distract the trumpeters playing their improvs a full octave higher than the rest of us and that puts off the clarinet players. One of whom I seem to remember was particularly appealing in her little black dress. Well she gets the hump and marches off into the crowd and one of the canoneers goes running after her; leaving his post.
So there's this careening canon rolling down the hill, knocking euphonium players and bassoonists left and right and causing the thousand reed instrumentalists to all give off this one single note of terror as they watch this massive bronze canon thundering down towards them. Can you imagine what a thousand reed instruments sound like in a cacophony of terror? No, I bet you can't.
Anyway, you want to know why I don't like being around other people? That's why. You see how much you like being a band leader when you've been stampeded by a few thousand professional musicians, elephants, canons and copper bottom timpani horse platoons. But you know what the worst part of it all was? It wasn't the ground shaking in fear or the sheer uproarious pandemonium, it wasn't having my shin shattered by one particularly heavy elephant, no. It was the bastard at the end who struck the gong as if it had all been planned to happen that way, and he got all the applause."
Announcement
Pix and I have decided to separate.
It's an amicable arrangement and there is no shouting, screaming or throwing things involved.
We intend to remain friends, and hope that you all understand that we might not necessarily want to talk about it.
Thanks for your support and understanding.
You Talkin' To Me?
My friend Unmute mentioned this weeks ago in conversation and it immediately sparked my interest: Movieoke (good to finally have another source to link, he could have just been making it up)
Anyway... I gazed wistfully at my extensive DVD collection (those who have seen it know I speaketh the truth for yay doth it fill two of the larger Ikea DVD racks and still require additional space) and realised that there are many scenes worth playing out, but only one that I would want to try before a crowd...
Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken portion of True Romance, but then the question arises... Walken or Hopper? Walken or Hopper? Tough choice.
And if it were you? Which movie, which segment and why?
War of the Worlds 3
My grandfather would tell me stories of his role in the Third Martian war. As it turned out it had been a misnomer calling them martians when they invaded Earth at the turn of the twentieth century, they were no more native to Mars than we were after we counterattacked and took it from them. But once we'd located their home system in Proxima Centauri it somehow stuck. They weren't Proximans or Centaurians, they were Martians, and they were going to be squashed.
Giving them a cold didn't work on Mars, but the United Earth Authority had no qualms about cobalt-bombing a planet they had no intention of living on. Unfortunately that meant that once the dust had cleared and they realised that Mars was our next best option if we wanted to expand some sort of galactic empire the poor bastard colonists were stuck with living underground or scratching on the surface with a glow in the dark tail.
My grandfather ran one of the automated bomber production complexes in Kasei Vallis and was responsible for a crew of about 15 million automats. They'd churn out anything up to six craft each Martian month complete with organic components and armaments. The organics would be brewed up in the cloning vats; a cerebelum here for master control, a limboid for loading, reloading and basic maintenance of systems there.
One story he always liked to tell was the one where he had to check out why one of his bombers hadn't jumped to Faster Than Light after being launched. It had appeared to start the jump, elongating the vessel as normal, turning it into a metal arrow aimed straight at Proxima Centauri before returning to normal space and staying put. As the human responsible for production he had to take an automat repair crew on site and see what was wrong.
His pod docked with the ship and he loves to embellish the danger aspect that it might have jumped at any time but these ships were single use ships, everything was designed to work once perfectly and then never again. I can just imagine a whole asteroid belt around the Martian's homeworld filled with these derelict bombers, cerebelums slowly running out of oxygen and starving, shutting down the systems as they go.
Anyway, he docked and sent his crawlers inside to find out what had happened, and you know what he found? He tells the story with much more gravitas than I do, he goes on about dark tunnels through the depths of the ship and flickering lights because the audience usually doesn't realise that the ships had no need for lights; none of the organics aboard had eyes. The crawlers unlocked one of the access hatches and globules of organic soup came floating out in zero-G.
The FTL drive had initiated as it was supposed to with a mental command from the cerebelum, but the inertia bracing fields didn't activate and the organics were immediately puréed inside their chambers. He and the crawlers had to scrape up an entire ship's worth of organics and scrap the bomber for spares. He still has a jar of pink soup he keeps to scare kids with.
Dinner Special
Orli sits across from me, her long black curly hair spiralling down onto her tanned shoulders. My eyes flow across the contours of her face, over her cheek bones and nose, past her full and flushed lips and into the dip of her chin and naked neck. She is ferverently attacking a tuna steak with the fork in her right hand, cutting the steak with the fork edge before skewering a piece at a time. Looking up from her plate as she chews, she says "what?"
I smile politely and feel my eyes brighten in the dim dining-room under her intent gaze. She's looking straight at me with her large hazel eyes and her cheeks trembling ever so slightly as she chews. I glance over at the stump of her left arm, severed just above the elbow. Its such a glaringly obvious disability and yet in spite of it she's still the most attractive woman in the room.
"You want to ask about it?" she says.
"I didn't want to be impolite"
"Ask away" she taunts, cutting into the tuna once more and soaking up some of the creamy lime sauce it sits in, "I can't promise I'll tell the truth."
"How did you... what... well, how did it... you lose it?" I felt uncomfortable and flustered asking her as I knew that it couldn't possibly be an easy answer to give.
"I was a chronic nail-biter."
My outburst of uncontrolled nervous laughter drew a few stares from people who had been politely ignoring the two of us and our lack of fourth arm.
"Okay, seriously? It was during my last week with the I.D.F. We were patrolling what should have been one of the safer neighborhoods of Janîn and somebody fired an anti-tank missile into the midst of our patrol. I was closest to the point of impact and caught the blast. The shrapnel shredded my left arm because I put my hand out to protect myself. My rifle shielded my right arm."
As she said this her fork dug into the tuna steak and the folds of fish flesh crumbled apart.
"Our medical corpsman couldn't do anything but stave off the bleeding with a tourniquet and wait for an ambulance. By the time I was on the operating table it wasn't worth trying to save anything below the elbow so they amputated the shreds and broken bones and I was left with this."
She wiggled her left arm like a penguin trying to attract attention to itself with a wing and the waiter came over. He bowed in a practiced and exasperated manner, keeping his eyes on the stump that had beckoned him over.
"Yes ma'am, how can I be of service?"
"Could you possibly bag this food up for us and we'll take it with us, I think my date has lost his appetite," she gave him a smile to bring his focus onto her face and away from her arm.
"A bag ma'am?"
"Yes, you know, like a sock; only made of paper."
The waiter puzzled for a fraction of a second before realising that it was some strange foreign request and that she wasn't asking him to do anything impossible before picking the plates up and taking them through to the kitchens.
"Come on, lets go someplace private."
It was an abrupt ending to an otherwise fantastic meal and I was still too shocked by her response to formulate a better plan, so instead I helped her into her coat and watched her thumb through a money clip of twenties. She dropped enough to cover the meal and those of the three surrounding tables.
"Its only money."
The waiter came chasing after us with a white paper bag rolled up and sealed. The bag was warm in my hands as he handed it to me and it felt like being handed a mug of warm coffee.
"Thank you sir, ma'am, please do come again soon"
I could tell he'd spotted how much of a tip had been left.
?
Is this a trick question?
Exhibitionist II
For those of you who might be interested I have a picture of the Acerbia Bride hanging up in the Hype gallery. Does it look slightly grainy? Maybe you want to take a closer look at the actual picture.
Yep, proper digital art. Created in Flash, exported to jpeg and taken through an image-text filter to take up the resolution to massive poster print quality. The effect in person is pretty stunning.
In the background of the first picture you can see the inspiration behind this recent post.
The BUMFTAs
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, I'm Stephen Fry, bear with me for two minutes and we'll get Sir Ian McKellen on stage to make me look rugged and butch.
Our first award is for Best Film About a King Returning Somewhere. And the winner is... Lord of the Rings: Return of The King!
Our next award is for Best Film Including Orcs, Elves, Dwarves and Kings Returning. And the winner is... Lord of the Rings: Return of The King!
Next up is the award for Best Film With Very Short People on a Quest to Destroy an Evil Ring. And the winner is... Lord of the Rings: Return of The King!
Now here to present the viewer's choice award is Alicia Silverstone and her autocue. And the winner is... Lord of the Rings: Return of The King!
In the category of Best Film About Two Estranged Americans Finding Love in Tokyo And Pretty Much Outperforming the Socks Off Everyone Else in a Sumptuous GENUINE Location With Splendid Direction, Cinematography, Music, Lighting, and Basically Being The Best Thing Since American Beauty we've had a bit of a judge's veto and the winner is... Lord of the Rings: Return of The King!
Tough luck Sophia.
Love's Fool
Saturday morning, ten o'clock, 8 °C, scattered clouds. I head down to the mailroom and see that the neighbors have a delivery of a dozen red roses and a loveheart-shaped balloon with a bear on it proclaiming that it wuvs me. Or wuvs the intended recipient at least. I "bah" it and stomp past.
Saturday lunchtime, one o'clock, I go out to get some groceries and the roses are still there. I pause to make sure they're real by tearing off a petal and munching on it thoughtfully. I would have prefered plastic, they last longer. I tear off another one to make that rose symetrical again fully expecting the door to open as I do so and a rather stunned neighbor to pass from annoyance to elation at the thought that I've left her a dozen red roses on her doorstep before throwing herself on top of me and ravishing me in the hallway. Fantasy doesn't happen, I move on.
Saturday afternoon, three o'clock, I return and the flowers are still there. The bear is taunting me. I poke at him with a finger and consider going for the air pistol to put him out of his misery. Still nobody opens the door to gush enthusiastically all over me about being their secret admirer and bringing them flowers. Come to think of it, the good looking one lives across the hallway in a different apartment... I'm not sure I've ever seen this neighbor before, just the boyfriend, and he didn't look the type to send flowers.
Saturday evening, sunset at 5:13pm. Random hallway check reveals flowers still present and unwilted. Consider peeing on them and dousing them in raspberry coulis to make it look like a gang drive-by flowering or maybe just a funny Valentine. Think better of it and have the raspberry coulis on vanilla ice cream and no pee as I sit and watch the Casablanca remastered special edition. Sneer at Rick as he repeatedly gets his heart trampled by that bitch Ilsa.
Sunday morning, eleven o'clock, 7 °C, clear skies. I take the garbage to the chute and see that nobody has been home all night to collect the flowers. Either that or they are diligently avoiding taking them inside. Maybe its a tactic to make everyone else feel alone and unloved. Maybe they're all dead inside after a Friday the 13th massacre and the last survivor is choking slowly on their own blood as they try and drag themselves across a slippery parquet floor with all their fingers broken, croaking at their closed front door to anyone out in the hallway for help... I poke the balloon again for the hell of it.
Sunday evening, sunset at 5:15pm. Random hallway check reveals partially eaten crackers on the carpet, probably one of the sprogs from the ground floor running rampant through the hallways. I set up tripwires and Claymore antipersonel mines at sproglet-height. Anyone else will just have their kneecaps blown open. Oh yeah, flowers still there.
Monday morning, eight o'clock, 7 °C, partly cloudy. Flowers are gone. Dirty weekend must have finished early enough for them both to go back to work.
The Moroccan White House
Last monday the Casablanca Special Edition was released on a nice two-disc set. I sat down to watch it and was somewhat peeved to see that they hadn't included anything about the alternate ending. It being Valentine's weekend and me feeling rather unromantic about life in general I figured I could probably condense it down into a five minute movie if all the love-stuff was torn out and Rick was turned into a proper acerbic cynic...
Continue"The Moroccan White House"
Evil Genius Finishing School
Over the past week I've seen The Peacemaker twice and several episodes of NCIS which is actually pretty shit, but somehow watchable if there is no new CSI or West Wing to watch.
How many times has the Arab terrorist in a movie or TV episode revealed that he was educated at Harvard? How many times? Is it supposed to highlight the ultimate irony that America's education system can be used against America itself?
You know what the solution is of course...
...close down Harvard. Its nothing but a breeding ground for evil genius sociopaths.
Get Your Tongue Around This
It's February and almost Valentine's and everyone else can bitch and whine about being single or how commercialised the day is, but some of us are instead writing our annual Metamorphosism Valentine's Day Limmerick entries. Rules as usual are diverse and unlikely to ever produce one clear winner but my favorite one so far is Mig's own:
A stripper with the stage name of Alice,
Caught giardia intestinalis.
Protozoic infestion,
Sped up her digestion,
But callous Alice still lapdanced with malice
Just for the sheer enormity of disgust the mental image manages to provoke. The theme this year in case it wasn't too obvious is parasites, psychologists and LOTR characters. Last year's entry of:
There once was a man named Kant,
Who bought an online penis transplant,
The point to the song,
Something went wrong,
and his prostrate ballooned up like an eggplant.
...didn't win, but damn is it still funny... I can't believe its already into its third year.
Western Boy
The ad read:
Wanted, urban cowboy. Must be tall, lanky and able to ride a horse. Sharpshooting skills a plus. Requires ability to say certain catchphrases in a southern drawl such as "gee up there doggy" and "hey there little lady". You've got to be strong, you've got to be fast and you've got to be fresh from the fight. No time-wasters or wannabes please.
Bonnie Tyler lyrics aside I found myself intrigued and phoned the number at the bottom of the ad. Within seconds my accent and gruff voice had won her over and she asked me how quickly I could get to Surrey. She told me over the phone that she would pay £500 for half an hour's work. I considered it and although I'm sure Belle Du Jour makes more than that I decided I could always say no later if necessary.
Exhibitionist
Interesting news. The Acerbia Sniper Bride (image no longer part of the design) will be on display at the Hype Gallery in Brick Lane, London for the next week. The works are on a heavy rotation (literally, by the time you get back round to the start they've already changed out a dozen images) so I have no idea when it'll be up or for how long, but I'll try and get pictures.
The plus side is of course that I get a high-quality HP print of it on nice glossy poster paper when the exhibition ends next week and I may be able to sell prints of it. Woo, yay.
Free Porn!
I have a dilemma and I need your help. I know you're out there, you're using my bandwidth.
My manager went to a porn conference, he brought back porn. He brought back buckets of porn. Boxes and boxes of DVDs, magazines, toys, etc. All in german.
We need to get rid of this shit within the next 48 hours. Right now its just sitting here, gathering... well gathering some pretty weird looks, but eventually one of the members of the board is going to hear about this and we're all fired. None of us wants to say "oh give it here, I'll take it" because that would brand the individual as a deviant pervert.
So, my question is this, how does one dispose of porn without just throwing it in the trash? Is there a deserving cause we can donate it to? Should we be throwing this stuff alongside traintracks for young kids to find? Should we be giving it to homeless people? What?
Motto
There was a time I decided I wanted a motto. I felt I needed a motto. I had no family motto and it felt like I should have, these things are afterall quite important. So along with the big book of family crests, tartans and flowers I flipped through the pages of the Big Book of Family Mottos.
The first and easiest choice was to borrow my hero's motto:
Non Sufficit Orbis or The World is Not Enough
Bond's family motto supposedly, although according to the book On Her Majesty's Secret Service he simply adopts it from another lineage of Bonds to fool Blowfeld. Its been sort of canonised since Bond tells Elektra in the movie of the same name that its his old family motto but still, you can't beat the books. So I couldn't use this one. Maybe something a bit more special...
Who Dares Wins
Do they? That's great, what do they win? Steak knives? Cuddly toys? And who do they dare, do they dare each other? Does that mean that whomever triple dog dares no-comebacks wins even more? A tad too ambiguous I feel, and I might feel encouraged to blow up airplanes and jump out of them more often with greasepaint smeared over my face and a baklava. Maybe something slightly more classical...
Omnia mutantur, nihil interit or Everything changes but nothing is truly lost
My problem here is that Quiquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur nullifies it. I can either be profound and intellectual or silly and glib. Not sure I like my choices there. So what I've decided upon is something a bit spunkier...
Never apologise, never explain
Sorry, maybe I should be a bit clearer about that one, see its about having no regrets and never looking back or trying to clarify... oh bugger.
Afternoon Nap
I fell asleep in the warm embrace of a sunbeam, but when I awoke the world was dark.
Evil Epiphany
He leans forward in the chair and puts his head as close to his knees as he can. He's always wondered about this position, what exactly is it supposed to help do? Crush the nerves in his stomach? His breathing is labored and slow, rasping over his tongue as he pants and rocks back and forth slightly.
Someone has just pointed out that he's too old for them to consider dating and he's stunned to realise that he's stepped over an invisible line. All his friends are younger than him, every trend seems to be past its prime when he joins it, his car is considered a "classic" only by the other men he works with. And he suddenly feels very alone and very frightened.
Recursive
The drugs weren't working and I was referred to another therapist. I'd had the straight-laced Freudian type, the hollistic type and the latest one had been a nut for solving things with shock therapy. Jumping out of his office naked smeared in honey, that sort of thing. If anything it set me back a few months in the treatment. Now I had a new one again.
"I understand you've not had much luck with your previous therapists"
I'd say they didn't have much luck with me
"How long have you been seeing therapists?"
It seems like an eternity now
"Do you have a flippant answer for every question?"
No
She frowned slightly and her glasses slid down her nose. I was convinced there were no lenses in the frames and they were simply a distraction tactic. Any second now she would take them off, fold her hands in her lap and explain what revolutionary new therapy she had in mind for me. See enough therapists and you start to analyse human behavior like them. Leaning forward she took her glasses off, folded them up and placed them on the table before clasping her hands.
"Here's what I'd like us to do. We're going to take a walk through the cognitive pathways of your mind and we're going to assemble a small kit of tools for you to use to tackle your condition whenever it arises. Its a technique known as CBT."
What, cock and ball torture?
There was a moment of indecision on her face, as if she was selecting her reaction from a preset menu in her head before she gave an almost silent snort of derision and her lips curled up in a smile.
"I haven't heard that before. No, it stands for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Its a method for raising your awareness of the factors that contribute to cause your condition. So lets start shall we? Why don't you lie back on the couch and close your eyes?"
Sounds a bit like recursive algorithms to me.
Her couch was probably the fifth most comfortable one I had lain on during sessions. I wasn't madly keen on the upholstery but the padding was effective and molded to my back quickly. I lay back and thought of England.
"Now I want us to start by forming a sort of mental sanctuary. This will be where you can retreat to in times of distress. I need you to imagine a structure that will allow you to see your surroundings while offering protection"
How about a lighthouse?
"Too isolated, try again"
A phonebox?
"Too cramped, think of something more spacious"
A conservatory?
"That sounds nice. Now begin to populate your sanctuary with green fertile lush plants, maybe some orchids, some hibiscus, pleasing scents that will fill the air. Now imagine the couch in amongst the vegetation. You can lie on the couch and see out across your mindscape."
Right, gotcha.
"Good, now lets add a companion to the trek we'll take through your mind."
I didn't know whether to tell her about my spirit animal or not. Maybe she didn't realise she was overlapping on previous therapists' territory and that the resultant hybrid might well be more dangerous than before. I decided maybe it was time to leave the mangy koala runt behind and try something fresh.
"Think of an animal that you find comforting."
I imagined a penguin.
"And give him a name..."
I could think of several, but his appearance reminded me of Harvey Keitel in Reservoir Dogs so I decided to call him Mr White.
"Now you're going to take his hand..."
Flipper.
"...flipper, and we're going to leave the sanctuary for the moment and take a short walk down your cognitive pathways."
Somehow the pathway was yellow and there were midgets on either side chanting. Mr White looked more nervous than I did. I'd gotten used to the midgets years ago, I was almost convinced that my koala spirit animal was the one goading them on from the sidelines anyway. I told her about the midgets to see how she'd react.
"Ah"
I heard the papers on the clipboard being shuffled and with a rustle I heard her make an inquisitive "hrm" noise like a constipated puffin would upon being offered a laxative.
"Right... okay... right. Yes, we're going to give your spirit animal a tool. Something to help resolve the issues."
Twin Glock 17s. Colt M4 rifle. MP5 submachinegun. Bandolier of HE grenades.
"No guns."
Damn. How about a spanner?
"Spanner is good. Its less associated to violence than a hammer. Okay, let your guide carry the tool. And keep in mind at all times that he's carrying it."
I could imagine her discussing this later with the rest of her recently graduated class. The symbolism of never being alone, of having a sanctuary, and a guide who has the power to fix any problem encountered along the steady progression through my mind. It was all just so deliciously pointless. When I brought my mind back to focus I realised that the penguin, midgets and pathway had all disappeared. I said so.
"Don't panic, return to your sanctuary and we'll start again."
Floating through the ether I arrived back at my sanctuary and as soon as I opened the door I knew this wasn't going to work. Somebody had killed Mr White with the spanner in the conservatory.
Concerto
A felt-covered hammer strikes a string. A reverberation passes through the string and is followed by a second strike a fraction of a second later. The harmonics combine and are underscored by a combination of three hammers further down the row coalescing with the pitter-patter of impacts several octaves higher to draw the cacophony into a melody.
His fingertips are rounded, the nails clipped short and kept clean. His hands move up and down the spectrum of black and white keys drawing out a tune of his own composition. Nobody pays him the slightest attention, they're too busy with their martinis and mojitos, and a piano player is a de facto presence in a place like this, all but one in the crowd. She's been watching him for some time. She knows the music is original, she can see it in the attention he's lavishing on his performance.
Picking up her glass she slithers through the crowd and stops beside him to wait. She is supremely confident that he can't fail to notice her and sure enough a crack appears in his concentration and the music shifts noticeable to a simpler tune without missing a beat.
Suddenly he's looking around at her, his fingers working automatically, to him after decades of practice and sacrificed weekends and evenings this is the effortless performance he provides for a fee. This is what he avoided playing with the other kids for, like Schroeder in the Peanuts comic strips. This is what his mother wanted him to do with his life after the accident took away the feeling in her left hand. This is what he falls asleep trying to forget about for just one minute of peace.
"Hey there" she says, "Do you do requests?"
"What’s your pleasure?"
"I didn't recognise anything you were playing."
"I'm a composer as well, not many people pay attention to the music in the background in a place like this so I can get away with practicing my own pieces and the owner doesn't mind."
"Do you have a favourite piece of your own?"
"Oh yes, but I could never play it here" he looks down at the keys for the first time since he started playing other people's music in mild embarrassment.
"Why ever not?" she tilts her head quizzically to one side.
"Its not quite finished. Also its... well, its rather intense."
"Nobody is watching, you said so yourself, go ahead and play it. Please. For me."
And suddenly he finds himself with just the right measures of inspiration and confidence, encouragement and incentive to play properly. Not the endless practicing of scales, not the show tune stuff he's scraped by on for months at a time, nobody else's work but his own.
From a soft single-hand start the chords start slowly to build up before dropping down to an almost silent three bar pause. He adds his left hand, and the piece speeds up ever so slightly. His mind is locked on the notes only he can see before him, flowing out of the varnished wooden beast before him. There is a hypnotic quality to the tune and the woman is no longer the only enraptured listener.
A break of less than a second and suddenly he's hammering down on the keys in furious rhythms, his arms stretching out to reach the apex of another soaring crescendo before returning to the recurrent refrain he spent so long perfecting. There is a jarring discord for a scant second as a single droplet of sweat meandering down his temple distracts him but he picks the pace up once more and it passes into memory, unintentional, unknown.
He can scarcely believe his own fingers can keep up with the quicksilver flow of the his thoughts, even as he is playing he knows he'll have a hard time ever recreating the drive goading him on to the end. With a flourish and dramatic double-punch at the keys the music has taken over the room and his finale is performed in awed silence as a few people sip at their drinks, eyes affixed to the young man's back.
At last he reaches the final few notes, his body devoid of tension and he adds a slight delay as if playing with the listener, dangling the promise of an encore. Finished he leans back and looks upwards amazed at what he's just acheived. That's when he realises all conversation in the club has stopped and everyone is staring at him.
"That was very good" she says, "You'll have to send me a copy"
She drops her business card into the glass bowl resting beside the piano before parting the incredulous crowd, standing facing the piano still too stunned to applaud, and orders another drink.
"Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers
...Lest They Be Strangers in Disguise"
The words are painted on the whitewashed archway that spans between the bookcases lining the walls. They are the first thought in my head as my eyes open. I'm lying on the back bed on the first floor, in the children's books section. It took some dickering but George finally permitted C and I to stay. He wasn't too happy about a couple, I suspect he was worried we might make love in full view of his precious books.
Books cover the walls. Books tower over us and are crammed into every gap in the structure. In some cases I'm convinced that removing certain hardbacks would cause the building to sag in the middle. There are rooms where the books are stacked three deep on every shelf, you could never walk in and know where to start looking for something; every find is a precious jewel.
In return for two beds for the night I promised George I'd write something special for him, seal it in an envelope and leave it behind. We've to be up and out before customers start coming into the store, and as my bare feet pad softly on the cold stone floor to the kitchen that connects the back to the front of the building I smile at the though of people browsing the books as I slept beneath the shelves.
The kettle boils quickly, its barely big enough to fill one mug. I check the milk in the fridge and make a mental note to buy George some milk when we're out later, I also consider calling the CDC in Atlanta but figure the long-distance call isn't worth it. I take the mug through to her, black, without sweetner.
I put the mug down in the sunbeam that is already piercing through the window onto the desk and let the warm air carry the scented steam over to her as she lies on another single cot bed. Standing at the window I can see out over the Quai de Montebello and onto the Seine river. The shadow of Notre Dame cathedral is spread out over the parvis and only the pigeons and street vendors are up this early, the queues of tourists haven't started arriving yet, we have the Ile de la Cité all to ourselves it seems.
C yawns behind me and I turn to see her sitting up on the cot with her arms raised above her, pulling the shirt she borrowed from me last night up, revealing the laproscopy scars on her pelvic bone. She smiles as she spots the mug of steaming tea on the desk and joins me at the window. I hear her gasp imperceptably as the hot liquid burns the tip of her tongue but she says nothing.
Later when we're both dressed, and I'm wearing my shirt which smells of her again, we unlock the door to the store and help put out the displays of books for the day. George's daughter arrives and takes over the store and we leave Shakespeare & Co behind to collect the car from the cobbled sidestreet we left it parked in.
We've borrowed a friend's 357 Porsche Speedster for the weekend, its seen better days and been driven with more care, but she insisted on driving Paris in a convertible and as cherry blossoms twist on the wind and tumble past us, we pull out onto the quai St Michel on the way to Les Halles and I have to agree that it suits her just fine.
Proverbial
Dr. Avery Manfredjinsinjin was one of those scientists who was paid to do research nobody really wanted to do because there would be no meaningful application for the results. He'd never be the one to cure cancer or discover the next generation of superconductive metals but he was the man who discovered that a woman required a C cup or larger to attract attention when running for a bus.
Avery was involved in a pretty complex experiment when I met up with him for a beer on Friday. He'd spent the entire week in a disused aircraft hangar trying to establish at what point a cat amongst the pigeons will cause the desired panic effect.
"First y'see, first..." he slurred as he reached for his second beer of the evening, "we have to define the conditions of the test, right?"
He went on to describe the screening process his team had gone through to find the perfect definition of an average housecat. Fed twice a day, watered, lean, fit, comfortable outdoors as well as indoors, doesn't shred the drapes, with all its shots. They'd picked a nice tabby called Mr Snookums from some young girl who was more interested in the cash, probably wanted to buy herself a pony.
Avery started off somewhat ambitiously however when he decided to work in ever increasing cats per million by decreaing the number of pigeons over time. This of course meant that he first had to find one million pigeons. Trafalgar Square was no longer the scientist's haven for free animal testing fodder so three white vans were sent out across the city to capture tens of thousands of birds at a time and bring them back to the secret hangar.
With the birds in place and the test cat secreted away under a hatch in the floor Avery was ready to begin. With the push of a button the hatch swung open immediately reducing the million pigeons to just under a million with a wet feathery splat. The cat had little effect on the pigeons, only causing a localised portion of them to scatter. Panic was measured as negligable at one cats per million.
Handlers shooed just uner nine hundred thousand pigeons from the hangar and the second stage was ready to commence. Once again the hatch swung open and several pigeons were knocked aside and seriously concussed. That is until Mr Snookums mauled them in a feral rage. At ten cats per million panic was noticeable but still difficult to express in a suitable quantity.
With ninety thousand further pigeons shooed away and the messes of previous experiments scraped up and burned Avery was ready to try one hundred cats per million. The pigeons seemed edgier than before and Avery had begun to wonder if he should have used fresh sample flocks each time. The pigeons were shifty and had formed a circle around the hatch in the floor.
"And then see, then what happened..." he droned on, his inner ear sloshed with alcohol "is I hit that button..."
The trap swung open, and ten thousand angry pigeons descended on that poor cat.
Itsu de mo, Doko de mo, Super Acerbia Bros (Anytime, Anywhere)
The Nintendo Game & Watch series was a line of 60 handheld video games made by Nintendo and created by Gunpei Yokoi from 1980 to 1991. They featured a game that could be played on an LCD screen, in addition to a clock and alarm. Some of the titles available in Game & Watch format were Donkey Kong, Zelda, Mario Bros, Mickey Mouse, and Balloon Fight.
In 1996 an industrious young Japanese man by the name of Shige Matsuke acquired the license to a property he felt sure would revive the popularity of the Game & Watch series despite the emergence of new handheld portable consoles such as the Gameboy and Game Gear. For a meagre sum he secured the rights to an unknown website known only as Acerbia and set about tailoring the format to suit a pocket game.
By including such characters as Acerbic D and the Special Forces Squirrels of Doom and their ubiquitous black helicopter Shige was convinced that people would be captivated as they caught bombs dropped by Pixadevil and progressed through the various levels, with a confrontation with boss Sonic Bear every third level and a final confrontation on level 21 with super-boss Pussy-Eating Woman.
Unfortunately during playtesting Shige noticed that the majority of his test audience would fall from their seats upon reaching level 19, lurching in violent spasms as red foam poured forth from their mouths. Whereas some developers would have considered this a set-back, Shige instead knew that this was the holy grail of handheld gamers; the divine hypnotic seizure.
One evening he ransacked the test lab and destroyed all files relating to the game's research and development process before disappearing, to set himself up on the Japanese black market. Working out of of a single-room above a Pachinko gaming hall in Shinjuku he managed to make close to 100 fully working copies of the game using internals from cannibalised copies of Super Kitty Bukkake. Amazingly people paid six figure sums for them when word got out that Shige had found a way to guarantee a gamer rush that could leave players in a 2001-finale style hallucination-fuelled coma.
I unfortunately never got a copy, despite being the original creator of the characters and site in question, and last I heard only one working copy remains, locked safely in a vault at Penny Arcade headquarters where Gabe and Tycho have managed to avoid the temptation of playing it any further than level 13.