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.
Learning Experience
Grade school is naturally a very confusing time for kids as they grow older, mature, discover the people they have the potential to become and are subjected to a plethora of outside influences, some good, some bad.
In my final term I already knew that I'd be heading off to Paris for my secondary education and I'll admit that my focus didn't just falter it positively stumbled and did large A.D.D tumbles off the beaten track. Not only had I discovered girls, but I'd discovered swearing and similes. The term 'foul-mouthed little brat' doesn't even cover it.
Lucy and Jane had discovered smoking and were already developing a pack a day habit. They still hadn't worked out how to hold the cigarettes properly and they would come back in after break with red eyes, burning from the smoke. Donald was experimenting with masturbation and would draw attention to the slightest erection by wrapping it in elastic bands through the grey coarse material of his school uniform trousers.
Tariq and Sharleene had realised they shared a mutual appreciation for French kissing and Sharleene was already unbeknownst to Tariq planning their impending wedding. Tariq, unbeknownst to Sharleene was using his experience on Lisa, despite the nicotine after-taste.
Me on the other hand, I'd keep the lesser geeks enthralled by recounting the latest violent movie I'd seen with my cousins on pirated videotape. Sometimes I'd embellish or make improvements, but they were guaranteed a constant freeflowing stream of obscenities and gory details. I think that was the beginning of my desire to be a storyteller in some shape or form.
During one of the last afternoons of the term I was engrossed in describing how well some action film had shown one man's stand against an army and how he'd mown down every motherfucking last one of those Commie rat-bastards when Richard asked if Mrs Collins would appreciate hearing that sort of language. I didn't hesitate and told him that the skanky old bitch could get down on her knees like a two-bit whore and blow me for all I cared, I'd talk any motherfucking way I goddamned well wanted to.
Maybe it was because all eyes were on a point slightly above and behind my head that I realised who was right behind me, sure enough it was Mrs Collins. Greying hair, with a tufty goat's beard on her double-chin, dressed in the most frumpy clothing you can imagine a school teacher to wear, peering down in astonishment at the torrent of obscenity that had just poured out of the mouth of one of her 11 year old pupils. The look on her face was worth every minute of detention.
Going Down
I seem to have something of a love/hate relationship with the English. Let me explain this out before you e-mail me any abuse. No wait, e-mail me the abuse anyway, I need some new insults since Angry White Girl's cuntspanner ran out of invective and arsebandits just gets me weird looks.
Anyway, as I was saying; love/hate. One of the amazing things about my living situation is that I hardly ever come into contact with English people, despite living and working in the middle of London. The politest Englishman I know is some sort of Hugh Grant Lite (in a good way) and he's my yardstick for measuring whether someone is English enough or not. I love the English, they're so polite. And yet I hate them for almost the exact same reason.
Case in point, I was standing against the back wall of an elevator. There were five of us in the elevator and the gentleman at the front, standing with his back against the doors was smiling congenially to everyone as we descended. When the doors opened he stepped aside, still inside the elevator and allowed the women out, despite blocking half the exit. He gestured with his hand and tipped his head as each woman got off. I stood waiting, watching this whole bizarre ritual and smirking slightly.
"Are you not getting off?" he asked me. And I realised he'd been waiting for me to walk past him, through the opening he was partly blocking instead of just getting the hell out of Dodge himself first.
"After you" I replied.
"I insist" he retorted.
"I couldn't possibly" I parried with.
"It would be terribly impolite of me..." he began but I had to cut him off.
"Get out of this goddamn elevator right this second you snotty twit. You're going first if I have to kick your legs out from under you and push you out."
Sometimes you just have to be overtly rude to remain the politest person in the elevator. And this is the measure of a true Englishman, since he gave me a nod, mumbled a "right you are then" and trotted off out of the building. If he'd been from any other country I'd have expected a faceful.
Lemniscate
I first encountered the Theory of Infinite Parallel Universes in the bathroom fixtures department of a John Lewis store in London. What I mean when I say that is not that I shook its hands, asked how Mrs Theory of Infinite Parallel Universes was doing and if the kids Musings of Infinite Parallel Universes and Unfounded Conclusions of Infinite Parallel Universes were enjoying school. I mean this was the first time that the theory entered my head as a plausible explanation for divergent pre-destined paths.
Why do I say pre-destined? Because if you accept the theory then everything has to happen because everything has the potential to happen, just not in the current reality you find yourself consciously living through.
I decided to put the whole thing to a physical test, what better way to prove a theory? Two highly polished full-length mirrors were positioned facing one another, six feet apart. I then ensured that the mirrors were not perpendicular, but slightly off by a few scant degrees to aid in my experimentation. I stood with a clipboard and pen between the two mirrors and started my observations.
Arbitrarily assigning myself as Dº (or origin) I started my observations of D¹ directly in front of me and of D³, directly behind him. I mean me. Well no, if we're going to be anal about it: him. Where was D²? Why he was directly behind me in the other mirror.
I must have spent maybe two hours in this most narcissistic of scientific pursuits taking notes, attempting a variety of simple physics experiments. Waving at myself caused the slightest hint of a delay between the various parallel incarnations, and I swear that D¹¹ was giving me the finger. Not only that but I could have sworn I caught D³² looking back over his shoulder at me with an evil glint in his eye.
As each divergence was an evolution of the divergence before it the changes affected each subsequent incarnation. This became most noticeable when I used a pair of binoculars to determine that D¹³³ had a patch over one eye and a nasty burn scar down the side of his face that D¹³¹ didn't display but that the back of D¹³²'s head clearly showed.
All very concerning, I'm sure you'll agree. I don’t think the Theory of Infinite Parallel Universes and I will be shopping together again in the near future. Or in any future.
Double-Tap
One. Two.
The sound of brass casings tinkling against concrete as I pivot and crouch down into a secondary firing position, shielded by the armor-plated door of the comfortable Mercedes. Ten feet in front of me an identical executive-class Merc crackles and smokes from the effects of the opening salvo, removed from the equation, wiped out in a flash; perfect ambush tactics.
Something grazed against my elbow lightly but I refused to let it break my concentration. AC/DC's Back in Black was blasting from somewhere near by, underscoring the scene perfectly.
Three. Four.
I count my shots, only firing at genuine targets as they appear from behind the dirt-encrusted van they've used to block the street ahead. They're firing in wild bursts from Irish-made AKs, not taking the time to aim properly. My partners would be having a much harder time keeping them at bay if they used proper squad tactics to advance under fire at us. As it is we've got them pinned but I don't fancy my chances against a fully automatic rifle when I empty my second last clip.
Five, six. Seven and eight.
The clip released and falling free as my left hand brings the other magazine up and into the space. Sliding home with a resounding click I rack the slide back to chamber the first round and duck out of cover in an attempt to flank the
Another touch at my elbow and this time my concentration is broken out of reverie. The couple on the bench beside me have taken a deeper turn into their tongue-hockey and keep bumping my elbow as I try and read Colm Trancy's latest thriller. I'm stuck wondering what the polite way of telling them to stop it is as he angles into her and they slouch down further into the bench.
She's making noises I haven't heard in a while. Either he's got a very good tongue or she's making a lot of money out of this exchange. His hands are everywhere and nowhere and he's just noticed that I've stopped reading my book. There's a shared look with his eyes saying don't you wish you were me and my eyes saying would you both just get a room please? before he speaks.
"You wanna join in or something buddy?"
All my pithy replies and witty retorts abandoned me, I felt the uncontrollable flush of embarrassment as my face turned red and I skulked off somewhere else to continue reading my book. About a chapter later I realised I should have come back with;
"I probably couldn't afford her, mate."
Battleships
The tip of the oar sliced down through the surface of the still water like a knife through smoke. The slightest tremor caused concentric ripples to chase across the surface, momentarily perverting the clear view of the bottom on the pond. Some ten meters away from me Simone was doing the same.
One stroke, two, then the oar was lifted out vertically and inserted once more on the other side of my vessel. Two quick strokes and I was heading in an interception arc towards my enemy's vessel, ready to attack.
From a bank of the pond Aricella covered her mouth and tittered. Only a thin gingham checked cloth seperated her from the grassy slope beneath and her toes splashed away at the cool water's edge. She was enraptured by the sight of two young men sitting in half barrels trying to sink one another whilst staying afloat in a freshwater pond.
Occasionally Aricella's little yappy dog Toto would charge headlong down the bank of the pond, drenching himself before realising that he was incapable of swimming and fighting ashore again; a minor annoyance that I was dilligently ignoring as I focused on my water-borne prey. Another three quick strokes with the paddle and I was within reach of Simone's half-barrel with him facing the wrong way.
I reached out with the oar and nudged the side of the barrel causing my own to tip away in the opposite direction from lack of purchase. The net result was that we both received an equal amount of pond water splashing down into our respective barrels. The cold wet water sloshed around my feet, tickling my toes. Simone meanwhile pivoted within his barrel and used his oar to splash water my way like a giant wooden spoon.
"En garde!" I cried out, with a shaky attempt to stand up in my barrel in valiant ignorance of the Principles of Archimedes. Oar held aloft, I struck a pose worthy of Errol Flynn and was rewarded with an outburst of laughter and gentle clapping from Aricella and the incessant yapping of a soggy Toto. Simone paddled the two brief strokes to confront me once more before balancing himself to an upright position.
It was all over in a flash. Simone struck the oar from my hand and leant his center of gravity forward only to push himself back to a neutral position against my own barrel. The water poured into my barrel and it sank like a stone, the rushing waters causing a noticable undertow that tried to suck me down with the barrel. I swam to safety fully aware that I was the victor, although I might have lost the naval battle, as I was now entitled to enjoy the ministrations and attentions of Aricella.
Frosty Crunchies
Waking up in someone else's bed will always be strange to me. Waking up is still one of those awkward processes where your brain reboots with just the basic operating system and builds up from there. Breathing, check. Limbs, check. Eyes, blurry but functioning. Bladder, that's a big ten four daddy-o. Only then do you start to work out more important factors such as location, company and how the fuck did I get in this bed?!
Alcohol is like the cerebral sludge you have to dredge through to get your answers. The more you've had the slower the process, but it doesn't erase memory, simply impinges it. Bar, check. Club, check. Dancefloor... oh good God, says your brain to your limbs, you didn't really try dancing did you? You know you come across like an epileptic squid on an electrified sheet of metal when you try to dance. And yet. You're not alone.
For years I argued with a female friend that dancing was foreplay. I take Billy Connolly's stance that dancing is from the ancient caveman tradition of: "hey look at me, I'm important, I just killed a mammoth. I'm gonna drag you home tonight and we're going to explore this concept of evolution. Repeatedly." Dancing is horizontal foreplay, and I'm not just saying that because the art of foreplay for the male gender can be written off as undressing. Against all known laws of relativity and sensibility, the dancing squid appears to have scored.
Female, check. Long hair, check. Naked... hehehehehe. Naked. Naked? Check again. Naked, check. Still naked, check. Breathing, check. Gotta have priorities. So I've established pretty much that I'm still me and that I've pulled out of my skin by this point. And that she's definitely all female. And still asleep. And very, very naked. Still. But now you're trapped in unfamiliar territory and your actions over the next few minutes will determine the course of everything to follow.
Male primale instincts can be boiled down to three categories; food, threat or mate. When a man encounters something he has four courses of action; eat it, kill it, hump it or run away from it. Sometimes the urge to run away overpowers the urge to kill and the urge to mate. In spycraft there are four ways to persuade someone to betray their country, known as MICE; Money, Ideology, Coercion & Ego. Men make crap spies because we're too busy thinking about sex, dinner and giving the other guy hell.
An opportunity has presented itself. Do I pretend to fall back asleep and see how she reacts when she wakes up? Do I wake her up with a kiss and risk her ire? Do I slip out of bed and leave the house, leaving my number on the pillow in the tackiest of methods available to mankind? Do I go and get some food and find something to kill? Food, yes. Threat, no.
I stumbled through the livingroom, still half asleep, barely noticing the flatmate asleep on the couch until I almost sat on her. She looked about fourteen. I decided to try the kitchen instead and hit the jackpot with a bowl, a spoon, a packet of Frosty Crunchies and some ice-cold milk. Who says I can't hunter-gatherer with the best of them? This? This is to keep me warm through those lean winters. Shut up. Frosty Crunchies... best cereal kids can nag their parents to buy. Sugar content higher than the cieling you'd have to scrape the kids from. Wonder if these belong to my lucky girl or her flatmate. Excellent way to refuse to grow up.
I had just inserted a spoonful of chilled bovine lactation-splashed sweet, sweet frosted crunchy flakes when a kid walked into the kitchen in pyjamas trailing a floppy teddy bear. The kind of kid you associate with hidden psychokinetic powers in a horror movie, yes we're talking that cute. Not that I find kids cute at all.
"Is mummy awake?" the little moppet said adoringly.
Is mommy the one on the couch?
"No, dummy, that's the babysitter, mummy's the one who brought you home for a pity shag last night."
I guess that answered who the Frosty Crunchies belonged to at least.
Password
"You know what the most annoying thing about having a very clever password is?" she asked me as she installed new drivers onto my machine. "Its that you can never share the joke with anyone without compromising the safety and cleverness of the password."
"Is 'cleverness' actually a word?" I had to ask, just to wrong foot her. There are few things in the world of a geek more intimidating than a beautiful female geek.
She paused and chewed on the cap of a pen as I watched. Either she was blissfully innocent of being a tease or she knew what sort of effect that was likely to provoke.
"Your passwords for instance..."
At this my eyes went wide. Of course as a Sysadmin she had access to everyone's passwords and God access to every machine, but why, in a company of over 200 employees, would she have singled mine out specifically?
"...they're all from computer games, aren't they?"
I nodded and dwelled in my geeky gamerness for a few beats before realising that she must have played the same games to know that. All my passwords were the names of evil computers from games; Xerxes, Shodan, Cabal, with a few numbers tacked onto the end.
"People's passwords reveal very interesting things about them." she looked around complicitly before moving in close. I imagined she'd smell of fresh plastic-wrapped computer components for some weird reason and was surprised by the clean, human smell she exuded.
"Take Eleanor for example," we both looked round to see the company's most successful account manager toiling away on the phone and flipping between pages on the company Intranet. "All her passwords are things like 'fuckme', 'spankme', "useme" and yet to look at her she appears so normal."
"What're yours then?" Only fair, since she knew all of mine.
"Password1"
We'd gone beyond the irony of people who couldn't think up original passwords and out the other side where the innocuous choices of the early nineties were back as the post-modern choices of a decade of more computer-literate techno-geeks and freaks.
Flirting With Cowgirls
He pushed the split shells of pistachios across the rough bar top through pools of spilled beer and around soggy coasters like tiny tortoises at the whim of an angry god. A jukebox somewhere through the throng of people was playing an old Johnny Cash compilation. Good ol' Johnny, he thought to himself as he peeked down through the slender neck of the bottle of weak domestic beer they'd given him. It barely deserved to be called beer; he'd pissed stronger stuff than this and was already on his sixth of the evening.
None of this was as he'd expected it to be when he'd quit his city job. Working a ranch had sounded like a blissful escape from his daily troubles, his responsibilities effectively dropped to zero, but so did his opinion of the Wild West. Nobody drawled, he hadn't seen anyone mosey into or out of town, he wasn't permitted to carry a six-gun. Nobody roped steers or yah!'d at their horses when they charged off into the dusty sunset. The sunsets were, if anything, less impressive without the smokescreen of city smog against the desolate landscape of Texas. At least the boots looked good.
He kicked one boot against the bar and tugged the leg of his jeans up slightly to see his left foot. The half-smoked cigarette fell from his lips and he ground it out. Somewhere in the back of his head Ennio Morricone struck up a tune, drowning out the jukebox. Morricone, the Italian who had underscored every 20th century dream of the Wild West. As the drum tempo in his mind increased and a lone whistler started a tune, the swing doors parted and in she walked.
He'd remember this moment again and again for the rest of his life; the first time they'd make love; as he woke up at first light by the roadside in New Mexico; as his hands closed around her neck and he snapped it neatly in two; as he sat alone in the truck in Monument Valley; as two cops dragged him out onto cold and wet tarmac; in the lonely dry cell and then finally again one last time as he was strapped down to a table in Arizona.
She'd remember this moment for the rest of her life too; as she saw him relax his face as he fell asleep that first night, revealing the true person behind the facade; each time she'd visit him at the ranch and watch him work; when she missed her first period ever and immediately went to find her sister and then finally once more, looking into his eyes as his hands closed around her neck.
But for tonight he was The Man With No Name, he was The Duke, he was the cowboy he'd always wanted to be and his gal had just walked in for the first time. He sobered up immediately and his heels clicked out a rhythm as he strode across the bar to ask her to dance, arriving just moments before the man who would have given her a long, albeit quiet and dull life. She looked from the safe option to the dishevelled, rugged cowboy who'd strode over from the bar, hand outstretched in an invitation to dance.
His calloused hand clasped around hers', smooth as silk. He was so used to working with thick leather gloves on at the ranch now that the human contact electrified his senses and he couldn't have let go if he'd tried. With a surprised laugh she stepped towards his embrace and they started to dance to a tune only they could hear, oblivious to the other dancers and patrons. A solitary trumpet blared out a resounding triumphant solo and their fate together was sealed.
Burger
There are two men in this world who can make the perfect burger as far as I'm concerned. Neither of them will impart their secret burger mix recipe unto me and I'm perhaps running out of time to come up with my own. I imagine taking two weeks off and retiring to a beachfront hut with walls covered in spices and visiting a meatmarket for the ground beef before standing out on a wood deck as the world revolves around me and the waves crash into the sand beneath me as I try to discover my own secret burger mix recipe.
One man calls me son, paradoxically, since he's not the one related to me in any way. He cooks the burgers, mixed to his own special recipe, in a giant barbeque oven that towers over him in the local market. Smoke belches out the top and he opens hatches in this metal-plated contraption and inserts steaks and various other cuts of meat for the other patrons but I always get a cheese burger.
The other never called me son, but I only recently started to call him dad. He's my step-father and for the longest time I never felt that he'd earned the right to be called dad. When I compare everything he's done for me in life and the influence and inspiration that he's been on my own dreams and ambitions he deserves the title far more than my own flesh and blood father does. It raises questions about whether being the provider of the sperm that created life gives you any rights or expectations over the life you created.
It was father's day not too long ago here in the UK and my step-father's birthday was within a week of it. I made sure to give him a call and let him know how things were going. I haven't seen him since November when he and my mother decided to seperate after seventeen years so I made a point of inviting him over to stay this month.
One of the hardest things for me to do was to tell my blood father I loved him, despite the atrocious job he did of being man enough to face his responsabilities as a father. He's been an influence in absentia though as my actions and reactions are jaded with the threat of becoming just like him, something I consciously do my best to avoid. My step-father on the other hand is the paragon of a father figure and someone I can look up to as a role model.
My step-father used to make the most incredible burgers. There would be onions and herbs on the chopping board, the blender would be full of minced meat and like a master anarchist cooking up a batch of explosives he would create these meaty discs with the cohesion of persistent osmosis and the tang of spices. He's have crisp lettuce and juicy tomato on standby and white floury baps ready to bundle the whole thing together with the slimey cement of ketchup. The end result would tower over the slender golden fries and you'd need to disjoint your jaw like an anaconda to get a full bite of the burger.
If I think hard enough about it there were maybe a dozen occasions where my step-father made burgers, usually on nights my mother was working late or out at a function, and perhaps for that very reason I associate making burgers with the duties of a father.
There's nothing 21st century about someone rainsing another man's son, especially in this day and age where divorce is just another part of married life. I guess it also doesn't help that for the longest time I chose to believe that my blood father was Johnny Cash. At least its a safe bet that Johnny knew how to make a kick-ass burger.
Solitaire
You wake up and you realise you're alone. Your first waking thought is several steps ahead of your normal thought process. You panic and sit up quickly, checking the chair, checking the en suite, looking around for a sign that she's walked out in the middle of the night. Did you fall asleep blissfully unaware that behind her eyes she'd been making plans to leave you? You've been awake for four seconds now and already your frame of reference has vanished.
In any geometric space you need three vectors and an origin. You have your forwards and your backwards, your left and your right, your up and your down, and you have your grounding point, the place from where everything is reset to zero and everything makes sense. I've been with her so long now that my sun rises with her alarm going off and my senses fall asleep the sight of her, her scent, her presence. Now all of that is slowly coming to an end.
Imagine if you will that in 1890 Gustave Eiffel hadn't agreed to allow the Parisian Tower to remain standing beyond the Universal Exposition and the tower had to be dismantled, slowly and carefully. Its a massive undertaking, dwarfing the construction simply with the logistical difficulties of how the hell do you take something like that apart? You can't possibly blow it up, the mesh is mutually supporting, every girder bears the weight of everything above it. The whole thing is embedded into massive concrete foundations that have to be taken apart last.
One solution is to take plenty of explosives, strap them to every part of the construction and blast it to kingdom come. Collateral damage to the Trocadero fountains, the surrounding Ecole Militaire and Musées would be catastrophic, but the tower would be down. Similarly, the tower could just be left standing until it falls down itself. Maybe Jean Michel-Jarre would think of a way of combining explosives and music and laser light-shows into a stunning spectacle of composition and deconstruction.
None of this means anything, its just a way for me to put thoughts down in a form I can understand. You'll have to forgive me, I woke up alone this morning and very little made sense.
A Farewell to Marks
Originally appeared on Uborka as part of a guest-post week in conjunction with LondonMark.
His darkened locks Time hath to silver turn'd;
O Time too swift, O guest week for'er ceased unkind,
Our endeavor together and talent hath ever spurn'd,
But spurn'd in vain; for thine audience and mine,
Popularity, acclaim, adulation, all manner inbetween;
Duty, faith, love, for content barely comprehended or seen.
His writing quill now shall make a pick for teeth;
And, lovers' sentiments must go unspoken,
A man-of-words, my praise unto him I bequeath,
And feed on my talent, thine inkwell is broken:
But though from uborka to home he depart,
Embers of fire still smolder within his heart.
And when he saddest sits in blogspot page,
Be it story of love, comedie, tragedie or a song,
'Blest be the man, whose skills mature with age,
Curst be those envious souls that think him wrong.'
Angels above, praise unto him and hark,
I leave for paintballing, and remains only LondonMark.
Lucky Wander Boy
Originally appeared on Uborka as part of a guest-post week in conjunction with LondonMark.
Computer Gamers fall into two distinct categories. Each category is populated by a host of sub categories but there is a clear defining split at the highest level between console gamers and PC gamers. Console gamers buy mass-produced technology platforms wildly behind the performance of current PC components at a reduced cost and then buy games on cartridges or CD/DVDs at £40 a pop. When they're finished with the game, they're stuck with it.
PC gamers buy wildly expensive rigs, customise the internal configuration and then buy the same £40 games. The game's look, sound and performance depends on how expensive your PC is. Once the game is finished you can, almost without exception, find new content to plug in to the game to get more than your money's worth out of it. Therein lies the biggest difference between console gamers and PC gamers. One is a casual gamer, the other is a nerd.
Nerds like to be armchair generals. I'm an armchair general myself, and one of the first games to ever awaken this geeky need to order tiny soldiers around doing my bidding and destroying all opposition was WestWood Studios' Camden & Conquer which was later to spawn sequels such as Camden & Conquer: Londonian Sun and Camden & Conquer: Mark Alert.
The real genius behind these games that was very quickly done to death by every other copycat studio immediately afterwards was to put you in an isometric view of your theatre of war (in the C&C series this is invariably North London) and to make managing and protecting your resources a key to victory. How many times did a game turn bad when you lost control of the local shops and your nihilistic disillusioned LondonMark troops mutinied from a lack of coffee, cigarettes and decent red wine?
Vehicles also played a large part in your success, and being able to transport all your troops from one side of the map to the other was done either by Tube train, double-decker bus, illegal minicab or the latter games included a "Crazy Mike's Taxi Service" which could backfire with spectacular results. The opponent could and invariably would introduce fetching young ladies to distract your troops on these services and only by using the Chrono-Steph super weapon would you be able to regain control of them.
Perhaps though, nostalgia glosses over the errors and difficulties with the control system. The game would never boot up before 12 o'clock and was completely unplayable after a few glasses of wine. E-mails to the tech support staff were usually met with a recorded message asking you to preferrably send a text message and network play would always see you playing one of the Notting Hill maps when all you wanted to do was trash Chalk Farm.
Maybe the console people are right, maybe I shouldn't have throw away my youth being a 20th century Sun-Tsu and instead opted for the mindless bright colors and platform jumping fun of Super Markio World 64.
Song For Eulot
Originally appeared on Uborka as part of a guest-post week in conjunction with LondonMark.
Overheard coming from a cubicle at the Electric Ballroom last weekend:
Confidence is a prerequisite for the habitual reader of what is known as... (Marklife!)
Plot disclosure can be mute if you bumble along the route through what is known as... (Marklife!)
You've got writer's envy, always intimidated by my first class posts - but you love every bit of it. (Marklife!)
Who's that weirdo commenting? You should cut down on your Net-life, mate, get some fresh air! (Marklife!)
CHORUS:
All the comments
So many comments
And they all go "Londonmark,
take us through what is, your Marklife"
Know what I mean?
I get up when I want, except on weekends, when I stay comatose until mid-afternoon. (Marklife!)
I put my trousers on, have a cup of coffee, and I think about going to work. (Marklife!)
I talk to kittens, I sometimes talk to sparrows too. It gives me easy content when I've run out of inspiration. (Marklife!)
And then I'm happy for the rest of the day, safe in the knowledge there will always be a post for people to comment on.
CHORUS
Marklife - Marklife!
Marklife - Marklife!
It's got nothing to do with your desktop publishing system, you know.
Marklife - Marklife!
And it's not about you Livejournalists who go round and round and round...
Marklife - Marklife!
Liber Paginarum Fulvarum
Originally appeared on Uborka as part of a guest-post week in conjunction with LondonMark.
In an effort to get out of the house on a bright and sunny Sunday afternoon I decided that I'd head up to Highgate village and scour the old bookshops for anything interesting. My shelves already boast a first edition of Laura Chase's The Blind Assassin, a signed copy of Jack Ryan's biography of Fleet Admiral William Halsey; Fighting Sailor and a rather beaten, but still readable copy of On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess by Milo Temesvar.
This day however I was to repay my efforts tenfold through a simple misunderstanding about which wines go with which seasonal birds, an altercation between a map of Bulgaria and a preposterous wedding hat that had been secured too tightly to a rather fetching-looking young woman's head and a handful of used pre-war 5,000 French franc notes. None of which is important of course, what is important is that I found myself in the possession of a leather-bound galley-copy of The Importance of Being Marcus by Oscar Wilde, and not a bad one at that.
I scurried off to the bus stop and sat huddled over the beautiful book, breathing in its age and undog-earing the pages as I found them. There were pencil scribbles in the margins and my suspicions that the galleys had been bound together years later and turned into a book were confirmed when I prised part of the leather off to find a hand-written thanks from Sir Robert Gadling; the publisher.
The Importance of Being Marcus was Oscar's first draft of what was to become the more well-known play. Major differences include the setting of the first act being changed to Half-Moon St. from Camden Parkway originally, and the characters are less reliant on good fortuned plot contrivancies to get through the convolutions of deceit and misidentity that Oscar subjects them to. Although this did seem to lumber the plot heavily and as such can be forgiven, as ultimately we just wanted Algy and Jack to kiss Cecily and Gwen.
I'm glad the overtly sexual double-entendres about going into the gardens to trim the hedges and eat muffins were removed as they really left me feeling like Oscar was just trying to inject some naughty pre-Benny Hill spirit into the play that wasn't required. And the bodice-ripping pre-marital four-in-a-bed romp in the third act was guaranteed to leave the audience and actors questioning their motivation for watching and participating respectively.
The publisher's margin notes included one request that Jack seemed overly obsessed with apologising all the time and saying such terribly genteel things as "gosh" and "rather" a lot and that Oscar should give the man some spine as he came across as a bit of an upper-class twit and maybe just a little bit of a whoopsie but when I got home I slipped the book between Dickens' Peter Flowerbuck and Marlowe's The Merrie Comedie of the Redemption of Doctor Faustus and thought nothing more of it.
Spank!
"Harder!" she yelled from just left of my knees as she wriggled in my lap. "Hit me harder!"
I raised my hand up once again, the black robes draped from my arm sweaping out like the wing of some giant bat man and I knocked the mortar board from my head. It fell to the floor in front of her handcuffed hands and she twisted her head round to look up at me. My bashful look was all it took to tell her something was wrong.
"Listen, I'm just not comfortable with hitting women. There's something innately wrong about it."
She gave me a crimson pout and batted her dark eyelashes at me; "But I've been such a naughty girl and I deserve a spanking."
Her pleated navy skirt was hitched up around her waist and the long white socks pulled up to her knees led to a slightly red pair of buttocks. The rouge impression of a hand, my hand, could be seen on each cheek.
"I just don't feel right spanking you like this."
Her head bobbed back up and her pigtails bounced like antenna.
"Oo! You want to use a cane?!"
A selection of crops, canes and floggers had been deposited at my feet before she had stretched herself feline-like across my lap. She rolled slightly and landed on her knees, sitting down on her black patent Mary-Janes before breathing huskily.
"I didn't do my homework. I wrote rude things in the girl's toilets. I disobeyed my parents. I... I..." there was a note of desperation in her eyes as she could see that I still wasn't getting into this roleplay.
"I squeezed the toothpaste in the middle!"
My eyes went wide.
"I told my mother she could come stay with us next weekend!"
My lips curled back in a snarl of primal rage.
"I rearranged the DVD collection out of alphabetical order!"
That did it.
Bottoms Up
Originally appeared on Uborka as part of a guest-post week in conjunction with LondonMark.
A couple of years ago now I was working in an advertising agency in Chelsea, well, it was really in Battersea, but we claimed it was waterfront Chelsea property because that was more likely to impress clients. We had a diverse portfolio of clients and I would occasionally have to put down pen and pencil on a lingerie campaign to pick up marker pen and whiteboard for a children's nicotine patches brainstorm session.
You may have heard of or even participated in a focus group. We'd take a product that we were being asked to advertise, present it to a cross-section of the public to gauge what the target audience was likely to be and then pour all our efforts into selling that product to that part of the population. That's why Ribena doesn't advertise to teenagers and Tampax doesn't advertise to men. Simple common sense really.
It was towards the end of my time at the agency that I was tasked with selling an independent TV show. A production company in the UK had acquired default rights to a show that had worked extremely well in the US during the 80's and wanted our help working out demographic research and coming up with some posters and teaser campaigns. We readily accepted, and took delivery of the pilot showreel the next day for an internal focus group.
The screen showed static, then black. Then a test card, followed by sepia images of ornate Camden drinking establishments. A cheery tune melodiously stroked the images, firing up deep nostalgic feelings about enjoying a pint with your friends. The unknown actor's names faded in and out and the credits finished on a shot of a bespectacled gentleman with a goattee holding up a sign that said "Newcastle United Wins!" at which point I worried that we were about to watch a science fiction show, despite the disclaimer that it was based on a genuine venue.
Over the next half hour we were introduced to a variety of far-fetched and ludicrously fictitious characters in an update of what I came to realise was something of a classic formula. There was the rollicking Scots barman and his ditzy blonde colleague, trading banter with a plethora of stereotypical characters who never seemed to leave the bar including a leery lad-ette who would quaff pints and talk football with her weedy writer brother.
And yet, I stood there in my executive power suit, with my ponytail and perfectly manicured nails, toying with the sleek sliver of mobile phone and company car keys in my pocket and felt like such a fraud. These people had real chemistry, they weren't impressed by the size of each other's expense accounts or which supermodel they'd be taking home that night.
They'd found a place where they could take a break from all their worries and their troubles were all the same. I vowed there and then that I'd renounce my flash lifestyle and do my best to track down that little establishment in Camden. More than anything I wanted to cease my superficial and shallow existence. I wanted to become scruffy, I wanted to be able to wear jeans and sleep in my clothes in a doorway, stinking of cigarettes and alcohol. More than anything I wanted to find a place where everyone could know my name.
And I owe it all to Cheers: The Next Generation.
Lets Put On A Play
Originally appeared on Uborka as part of a guest-post week in conjunction with LondonMark.
I'm not really the kind of guy who goes to theatreland, despite there being a direct bus route connecting me to the breathing heart and soul of a fantastical array of productions. Sure I've been to see the obligatory Cats and Chicago, and some of the more fun ones like The Lion King and The Pirates of Penzance ("...for he is an Englishman!") but I don't know, I think my dislike of theatre stems from the sheer disappointment that was seeing a first run production of Les Londonmarks.
Les Londonmarks is set in a Frenchified Camden underworld. The protagonist, Marcus LeLondonien, is sentenced to prison for 19 years for stealing content from another person's website. After his release, LeLondonien plans once again to steal content, this time from a lesserknown Blogspotter, but realises the futility in the face of the Googlebot which sees all and knows all. However, he forfeits his parole by being caught with some of Camden's more exotic produce (which he was simply holding for a friend), and for this crime LeLondonien is hounded by the police inspector Acyrbert. Marcus eventually reforms and becomes under the name of M. Madeleine a successful businessman, benefactor and mayor of Camden. To save an innocent man, Lelondonien gives himself up and is imprisoned in Holloway. He escapes and adopts Stephette, a child of mysterious and unknown origin from a distant land. Stephette grows up and falls in love with Marcus, who is wounded during a revolutionary fight against the tyranical fascist police forces of Acyrbert. LeLondonien escape by means of a flight through the sewers of Camden. Stephette and LeLondonien marry and he reveals his past, with Acyrbert finally accepting that LeLondonien is a man of originality and integrity by the end of the play.
Okay, sounds pretty good, huh? What could you possibly not like about it? Dashing heroes, contemporary issues and an evil despotic villain. Fantastic stagecraft, scenery and lighting, so what was my big problem? The singing, the endless bloody singing! Every other character breaks out into bloody song every other scene. You can't get one line of exposition out of someone before they're wailing to the audience about the End of the Day or Empty Chairs at Empty Tables. They even start singing bloody songs about what they Hear Other People Sing!
That male lead had an awful singing voice, he should have stuck to writing screenplays.
Screen Legends
Originally appeared on Uborka as part of a guest-post week in conjunction with LondonMark.
I feel honored that Mark and I have been allowed final guest privileges before the new iteration of Uborka goes live. I've seen a sneak peek of it and wow is it amazing. No, I'm lying, in fact I haven't seen it, I don't know who Pete and Karen are. Who are you? What are you doing here? Does your mother know you do that in front of your computer monitor?
Surely picking Mark as my co-host is like putting Paul Newman and Robert Redford together in Butch Dyke and The Sundance Film Festival, Newman and Steve McQueen together in The Towering Bruschetta, or even Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Michael Mann's Sheep. And speaking of classic movies I'll tell you a little something about Mark you maybe didn't know.
When Mark was over in San Francisco last year he made a movie, a pretty low budget one, and a remake at that. Imagine the reaction though, on the first day of shooting, when he makes some unauthorized rewrites to the scene of the day. As Phil and Paul Hartnoll toyed around nearby, rewriting Lalo Schifrin's original score and Mos Def practiced his scary-face/lion-face in a mirror, Mark was furiously beavering away at a word processor to spice up the script and make it a little more contemporary.
The director called action and Mark played the scene out just as it had gone in the original, patiently eating his hotdog until the bank alarm goes off behind him. He hits his cues and fires the ridiculously oversized prop gun they've given him before striding across the street, through the mist of a burst fire hydrant, ignoring the cries of pain from the other crooks and focuses on Mos Def before uttering his revised lines:
"I know what you're thinking. Did he write sixteen paragraphs or only fifteen? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a LondonMark post, containing the most long-winded, high-concept lexicon in the world, and would melt your brain clean out, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I need punctuation lessons? Well, do I, punk?"
Of course, if you ask any of his exes, they'll tell you there's a very different reason he's known as Dirty Marky. And you can expect the movie tie-in boxer shorts Dirty Marky Marks to be available at a market stall near you very soon. The movie went straight to DVD, or at least that's what the producer told us.
Embrace
"I'm cold" she shivers and rubs her hands up and down her bare arms. Its been a warm day in the office, despite the numerous fans that dot the landscape amidst the warren of cubicles and sub-offices. But now we're standing outside the local bar, drinking Pimms with our colleagues and she's cold.
I offer my sweater; I have it crumpled up in my backpack. I'm so paranoid about losing my backpack I never take my hands off it. I look like I'm constantly on the verge of disappearing. All it would take is a polite excuse, a few handshakes and I could flee the scene of socializing. I don't know why I offer the sweater, I'm not particularly fond of her, I just work with her, but for whatever reason I do.
Looks are exchanged as she pulls on my clothing, I frown in reply and seconds later her head emerges from a sweater she could wrap around herself twice. She's like a parachutist whose canopy has spread around her. A brief thank-you and a hint of a blush flushes her cheeks, she takes a sip of cold fruity Pimms and listens in for a cue in the conversation she can jump in on.
Later as the proceedings are starting their second wind and we've all played musical conversation partners for a myriad of topics with a multitude of people we find ourselves in a tight circle again, my mind has trouble seeing someone else wearing my clothes, like a part of my identity is being parodied and paraded in front of me.
She raises her arms to pull it up over her head and the sweater catches on her top, showing an athletic stomach and tanned skin. The alcohol had dulled my senses, but a flutter in my chest reminds me I'm human after all. She hands back the sweater and I realize I'm being an utter moron. There's nothing going on, it’s all in my mind.
Its not until much later, as I'm walking to the bus stop, feeling a slight chill, that I pull the sweater on and find myself suddenly transported into what her embrace must feel like. Warm, soft and comforting, smelling slightly of some unknown perfume. I savor it all, knowing that it can't possibly last. Sure enough, by the time I'm home again the smell and memory have already dissipated to nothingness
For You
He picked up his phone and put it down again immediately. The feeling was too delicious to spoil yet. He would listen to some music instead, yes, that's what he would do. He looked through the pile of CDs sitting beside the player and dug one out that he hadn't heard in a while.
Within seconds the first track had him reaching for the phone again. He'd unconsciously picked something that only exacerbated his mood and upon realising that he'd started to dial her number he stopped again, cancelled the call, put the phone down and hit the eject button.
Picking up his book where he had left off he tried to focus on the words but the images they painted in his mind didn't match anything that had come before. The actors on the stage were no longer the same people, their actions didn't make sense, their inaction frustrated him and he started the page over again but still they wouldn't move, locked in place like mental statues. Eventually he tossed the book to the floor in disgust.
Snatching up the TV remote he began a frantic search through the channels in an attempt to find something entertaining to take his mind off his thoughts of her as they ran like quicksilver through his body. He could feel the magic bubbling under his skin, trying to ooze out of his pores, turning every inch of his body into a capacitor; charging up with fervent emotions.
His eyes had glazed over and his finger was on auto-pilot, racing the static of channels he didn't subscribe to. Cursing, he reached for his phone, unable to torture himself like this any longer. And then...
Blank.
His mind was empty. Her number was gone. Digits danced behind his eyes, country codes and area precursors tickled the lower portions of his brain like velvet gloves in a darkroom. He concentrated, his brow furrowing until his vision went red, but he couldn't even remember what the first digit was. He looked skywards, imploring silently to the heavens above, hoping for divine inspiration.
And finally he put the phone down for the last time and closed his eyes.
Homopholio
My aromatherapist cracked another knuckle and pinched into the nerve cluster at the back of my neck. I felt the tinglings of dendrites and ganglions protesting that they really did object to this sort of treatment at the hands of a woman and that they would bally well be writing a letter of complaint to their central nervous system if this abuse continued much longer.
Slatherings of peppermint and lemongrass extracts wafted my sinuses into submission and I was subjected to the occasional interspersal of polite chat along the lines of:
"Nice tattoo, is it recent?"
Ug
"Wow, did it hurt?"
Ug
"Where did you get it done?"
Ug
Eventually we came to the end of the session. "You've got too much worked up tension, you should find an outlet. Also, drink lots of water today, your system will be flooded with the toxins I just kneaded out of your muscles." So I figured the best thing to do with a body full of extraction of vitriol was go and spew it at Londonmark's recent book signing at Waterstones. If you were wondering why he went silent for a week that's why, he had a mini promotional tour going on and was too terribly English to mention it.
Standing beside a pile of copies of From Camden With Love all with his author's photo on the cover (the one Pix took of him near Camden Lock, in black and white) I was horrified to see that quite a few people had turned up, and that some of them looked important.
"I hear he's actually gay" I whispered to a pair of Vogue stylists who were tittering and stroking the slick dustjacket of the cover with their lips as they covered their mouths from Mark's view and fluttered their eyelashes at him from afar.
"Its actually just a rehash of John Richardson's History of Camden with a plot stolen from Tolstoy. He's changed the names of course." I grumbled to a small assembly of newspaper book critics who immediately began scribbling notes.
"He's the only person I know who reads his penis enlargment spam." I gossiped to a few of the other London A-list bloggers who had been let in on the whole proceeding as they nursed the thin fragile flutes of champagne they were emptying at a pace that would have made George Best hiccup and slur his disapproval.
Having expended my venom for the evening though I found myself somewhat drained and went to the signing table to apologise and make an exit. Poor innocent Mark nodded and smiled, delighted that a journalist had already compared his book to Anna Karenina, albeit somewhat confused by the allusion. He seemed concerned that a number of men were asking that he sign the book to 'Big Richard' but I patted him on the shoulder and said "Nevermind, at least nobody believes you're a big flaming woopsie."
Upstanding
Its taken me years to reach this point. This older man has been an obsession with me since the age of thirteen. Its not even as if I like him that much, I mean when we started out it was all very fresh and exciting and like opening a window into a new world. He knew exactly what to say to keep me engrossed in his work and sometimes I would revisit the same familiar pieces again and again to rekindle that initial thrill.
And then I think Tom Clancy and I just grew apart. It wasn't him so much as all the ghost authors and licenses that were multiplying out of his work. Jack Ryan and John Clark/Kelly had become the characters I enjoyed reading about more than any others. Although I dabbled with the Terry Pratchett universe for a while I outgrew the style very quickly, able to predict where his plot was going early on and anticipate what should have been enjoyable twists.
Clancy always had the techno-fetish to keep me interested. Talking about tanks and guns and thrust vector flight control systems does weird things to me. Silent and deadly special forces characters tasked with rescuing hostages send my imagination to dizzying heights and aspirations and somehow Clancy, although somewhat steadfast and plodding in his style, never seemed to lose the ability to set that off.
And now... now, he's finished his Jack Ryan mythology, and there are three books I've yet to read, but only one that I intend to. Having somehow sidestepped the reality of politics all the way up to the Presidency there seems nowhere else for his avatar to go. I almost don't want it to end, but the flipside is that I can't wait to finish the affair.