presently engaged

I'm afraid I can't come to the phone right now; I'm going through a shattering moment of complete clarity. Please leave a message, and I'll get back to you just as soon as my self has reformed.

cripples

"I made a two-minute film for a TV programme. It was all in one shot, no cuts. Everyone who saw it roared with laughter. There were people rolling on the cutting-room floor, holding their sides. Once they'd recovered, they'd say, 'No, no, it's very funny but we can't show that!'

more economic growth!

Our grass-roots agitation and protest movement to get the government to stop vacillating and put more resources into the economy is reaching its final phase. Turning sickness, security, transport, education, entertainment and farming into professionally-directed profit-motivated industry has been an excellent start, but there remain a few activities which are still under non-specialised, unqualified and therefore dangerously erratic individual control. We've outlined the following measures in order to ensure progress, efficiency and growth reach their natural zenith:

i am you

Your heart's a hundred and one thousand crimes,
Which my heart commits, one at a time.
Your heart's a poem which my heart explains,
Then writes on the walls of the underground trains.
I hear the song which your heart has sung,
My heart's an audience, of one.

crack para cat squad

This from 1973 edition of Conservation News: "Insecticides used in [isolated jungle villages in Borneo] to control malaria vectors also accumulated in cockroaches, most of which are resistant. Geckoes fed on these, became lethargic, and fell pray to cats. The cats died, rats multiplied, and with the rats came the threat of epidemic bubonic plague. The army had to parachute cats into the village."

I don't know about you, but that last sentence gets better every time I read it.

new room

I have been busy redecorating my flat.

the pink tip and the probe

Inside my chest is a vibe-detecting instrument, the naked pink tip. When I meet people this pink tip leans forward enquiringly, or it vibrates like a pleasantly electrocuted chicken, or it sways with melancholy happiness, or it shrinks away in horror, or it hardens resistingly preparing for battle, or it softens blendingly into yours. Although animal fear might put me on the back foot, or my interest in sex put me on the front, although I might not be paying attention, or I might be paying far too much attention; although, in short, I might be wrong; the pink tip never is.

atmospheres

"A strange individuality which is all their own is sensed in certain days. There are days brimming with the marvelous and the mystic, days having each its own individual and unique consciousness, its own emotions, its own thoughts. One may almost commune with these days. And they will tell you that they live a long, long time, perhaps eternally, and that they have known and seen many, many things."

paperwork

There are four reasons for an excess of bureaucratic paperwork. 

peligro

Since I moved to London I have been living with a grey-breasted hill partridge. His name is Peligro.

Peligro's unique talent is that he knows when things should stop. When I've listened to too much music, read too much, not done enough exercise, eaten enough, planned enough or got to the point of a drawing where another stroke would ruin it, he gently pecks my ankle and looks up at me.

A few days ago I was sitting quietly and started worrying about the future. Peligro came up to me and smashed me round the head with a cricket bat.

journey home

I was away for the weekend; and travelled back home by bus. The first bus I got on was a spindly art-deco vehicle of wrought-iron seats, emerald green and crimson-stained Miro windows, porcelain green tiles and mellow big band playing through vacuum-tube valve-amps. Five year olds served Darjeeling. The next bus, the 224, was a bus of tatami mats, kotatsus, paper screens depicting single-stroke zen mountains, curled up futons and, upstairs, a twelve-seater solar-powered onsen. I then got on the 124, a bus of ember orange and chiminey red, fake leather settees and fold-away pinewood pews; on a small stage at the back a bunny-eared couple sang finger-puppet love-songs. I got off at Kentish Town and rode home on dog-sled.

pomotron inc.

Pomotron are proud to present the new Artfix Generator 3. With the PomotronAG3, successful modern art is just a mouse-click away. Simply select your medium - painting, drawing, sculpture, experimental film, performance art, modern dance or installation - set the sliders...

the last time i saw my granddad alive

My granddad, who had taken great care of me and my mum, died in 1998 after a long battle with "something to do with his stomach." The last time I saw him, he was lying in a hospital bed, still dignified and massive, despite his undignified illness. He was surrounded by his children, all my aunties and uncles. They stood round his bedside, talking:

it's all my fault

It's not the fault of capitalism, the 'system', the 'human condition', God, the devil, the Americans, the Indo-Europeans, my genes, my wooden leg, 'bad luck', my parents, my lover, my job, or any of the circumstances of my life. Its not the fault of my teachers, the media, the neighbours, the internet, the bankers, the police, the corporations, the people or the politicians.

I did it. It's all my fault.

the fearless slave, #66: be your own referee

Last time, in our series of guides to help you free yourself from fear at work (the first step in freeing yourself of wage-slavery altogether), we explored options for buying a good quality degree. This week we'll look at how to be your own referee.

some things to see

Clouds moving very very slowly. Faces on the other-direction elevator. Milk plunging into tea gliding then slow-mo tendril bloom, swell and detune. Coats pulled from chair backs swirl in the air all fabric then suddenly become a body. Deaf people signing an amusing story to each other (busby berkely fingers and massively expressive faces). People looking at other people. The way cats move. The way donkeys look at geese. Dog scrambling to its feet upon lead rattle. Knuckles. Gliding gulls. Colours of the well-dressed. The never-seen-before never-to-be-repeated personality of now's light. Everybody's gait, and what it clearly says about how they enter into the unknown. All young children's eyes everywhere (you are allowed). Ant's nests as a blossoming blooming breathing whole. And all trees.

how to brainwash your students

The child is a threat to society: firstly the sensitive, mysterious and direct experience of the child, and secondly its free, ungovernable and creative initiative. In part one we looked at what parents can do to neutralise these threats. Here we shall give some advice to the teacher.

porn trance

"This is the odd, timeless zone that people go into when studying the boxes. Lone porn renters go into it immediately and resent being pulled out. Group renters never intend to go into the Porn Trance. They start out laughing together, pointing at the boxes and reading particularly ludicrous copy out loud. They are far too hip to really be interes... and one by one they get sucked in and the porn section is quiet again."

being attractive

The experience of accepting previously resisted heavy rain is choosing to pay attention to the odd mechanical alien flesh-working of a bore and the blobs of sound he emits, which is turning to acceptingly face an inward pain that I "don't want," which is massively improving the power of a painting or the effectiveness of a message by changing the tiniest detail, which is turning into the skid, which is a chinese finger-puzzle, which is leaning forward when you learn to ski, which is getting a cat to sit still on your lap.

how things feel

The stars are sad the city can't see them. The pencil trembles with anticipation as it is poised over the paper. Crumbles of mud tumble with giggles as they fall from bashed boots. The sun loves to shine on politicians. Lashes are fame for a snowflake. Lightbulbs unshaded are ashamed. Keys are tragic lovers. Curtains always part reluctantly. Unlit candles sullenly withstand. Beds are favourite uncles, pillows their patient friends. Forks writhe and sigh upon your lips. And all things, when ignored, pray to the space between them; for men do take the cups they lift for granted. So when you are held by distracted hands, follow their example, and then you'll too know, my love, that life loves you sometimes secretly.

vegetable laughter

Parsnips have an effete 'pursed' kind of intellectual giggle, but not affected and still charming. Carrots have a toothy sherbety snicker. Radishes have a wheezy muttley gaspy kind of laugh. Beetroots are excellent smirkers. Cauliflower has a high pitched west-kensington middle-management whinney. Aubergines have a sucking parping honk, like a beautiful woman with big feet, and bell peppers, as far as I know, laugh silently, their bodies trembling helplessly. Celery laughs like my auntie, with an infectious gawky naughtiness, new potatoes have a gurgly mirthful bubbly chuckle, like a fat Asian baby, and leeks have sweet bright ringing laughter that tinkles down my spine.

Smile like a pea, my darling.

the british empire; israel

An extremely brief history of the forming of the state of Israel.

the day i lost all my money and possessions

About ten years ago I left the isolated farmhouse I had been living in, in northern Spain, and drove to Valencia in the east. I packed everything I had into my car and set off in the early morning.

morality for lampposts

On an internet discussion forum I suggested to a young man that there was no point in voting. He asked me what I thought he should do, in that case, to 'make a difference' or 'change the world'. I replied:

london planes

The knobbly barley-grey branch-flung London Plane does not take sixty to seventy years to spread its thick-fingered full-crested knotted crown into the canyons of the sky, no, it explodes out of the ground like a geyser, shattering the frozen air, as soon as its seeds, which are more like grenades, hit the ground. Cycling around London, throwing these seeds from a shoulder bag, is my job.

Thanks for listening.

perhaps you you can escape now?

Perhaps you like your job? Or even love it?

life ain't like that no more

INT: NIGHT My granddad's flat (1992)

Granddad: I tell ya what Darren, I wish I'd never been born. I wouldn't've known nothing of the world then. Uncle Johnny said, "I'm glad I was born." Guhd, I'm not. Christ. Life's nothing but bloody worry is it?

to wit: to woo

I am now also laying much smaller eggs.

feeling blue

EXT DAY. Park bench. Man and woman.

Man: "I feel blue."
Woman: "Really? Which one?"
Man: "Hmm... somewhere between faded baby blanket blue, deserted-beach early-waking fire-building sunrise blue, leaf-alighting velvet-winged lorquin butterfly blue; the milky blue of a child's vein, the soft purply-pink hue of a blue midsummer moon in the Artic circle, the petticoat sigh of dinging spring bluebells as I run off my morning fry up in the woods and the lambent fox-belly-flecked filaments of your wide blue eyes."

strange deaths

My grandmother used to work for Borehamwood Fire Research Station, an institute set up to investigate the causes of fire. Her job was to give a code for all the fires (4B12E for chip-pan fires in London, 4B99A for electrical fires in Scotland, etc). She heard lots of stories about fires and firey deaths. I think the best one was this:

adverts

Human beings are to be habituated to a lifestyle in which pleasure and personal identity are not derived from nature or culture, which are free and belong to everyone, but from participating in the market, which generates profit for the few that own or manage it. To induce people to participate in the market the urge to buy has to be stimulated; through product dependence (making things that cause problems that are solved by other things), through product obsolescence (making things that are quickly used up, or that soon break), through perceived obsolescence (linking status with fashion and the most recently produced goods) and through iconic imagery that appeals to subterranean instincts, drives and fears. This is called advertising.

let's go home

"May I share something with you? A vision I had in my sleep last night - as distinguished from a dream which is mere sorting and cataloguing of the days events by the subconscious. This was a vision, fresh and clear as a mountain stream; the mind revealing itself to itself."

car boot sale

Bruce said: "But today I strode out mid-morning and spent a very enjoyable hour at passing passion: the car boot sale. My oh my there is very little need to buy things new if you've got a bit of time and patience, for you can find what you need in other people's rubbish.  A lot of unhealthy looking folk there but lots of good spirit and fabulous characters.  I listened in to some old geezers chatting over their range of very finely crafted weaponry: swords and daggers in mythical sheaths and holsters, pistols, loooong wooden rifles with ammo.  "Trouble with them is you have to wait til the smoke has cleared before you can see whether you hit the bloody target..." They were right into the mechanism of the reload and all.  I watched my own dispassionate though fearful and sizzley response at being so close to the weapons.

situation vacant

Wanted: good losers. We have several vacancies for carpenters and masons to work on buildings they won't see finished, golden-throated yawpers to design, paint and perform in their own peddle-powered buses, writers who can draw hands to help operate ancient mountaintop printing presses, fish-monger double-bass origami master left-back witch-doctors and spirit-guides with excellent noses to convert the secret voice of nature into snowflakes of meaning for fatly scattering on the eyelashes of the twinkly ready-for-anything and bright-eyed banjo-loving milk-maids for astronomy and skids. You are a king or a queen, of sorts, and a straight-talking, excellent-dancing, nuclear-hearted, utopian bricky, human trumpet or cowboy-fingered fire-lighter. You are either easily-hurt, massively bereaved, actually dying, vaguely meandering, six years old or less, an outcast, an outsider, a sad-eyed cheeny weeny, a warrior monk or a daffodil-girl.

We offer no prospects of advancement, no salary, no pension. Nothing.

the belly of the tree

I reach into the belly of the tree.
There is asleep within a tiny bird
Of amber gold. Her heart beats visibly,
But still it stays, and to my whispered word
Beats stiller still; her dream a happy end
Of endlessness; for when the bird awakes,
The chatters, peeps and cascade trills she sends
To speak in tone, and soft insinuates
The sound of nothing moving back in to
The room, the ear, the bellymind, of you.

hostel bodies

(May 2000)

Dear Uncle Tony,

I have been living, these past few months, in a cheap hotel in Buenos Aires.

the conversation tree

Conversation creates an instant tree, or slow lightning-strike, which hovers between the speakers, and sprouts, grows and matures as we talk, offering use, food, fun and beauty. The conversation tree has its own life, whispering requests to its gardeners and guardians, who, if they are quiet enough to hear, will take the interactional fractal exactly where it needs to grow, into a succession of ironies, connections, observations, memories, facts, gestures and games that connect together with uncanny aptness, as if the tree knows that the next comment exists, knows more than “I” do.

fantasy man

A while ago I was looking through the dating service of The Guardian (the countries "leading left-liberal news source") at all the identikit thirty-something graduate media-sales-art-therapists looking for a boyfriend, and decided to write a profile for them all. I called my profile "fantasy man":

rain, welcome

Rain dribbling down the window of a stationary bus, rain stretching finely sideways on the window of an extremely fast train, fine rain penetrating games' shirt during a cross country run, heavy straight down rain machine-gunning a skylight window while wrapped in the arms of a lover, the sweet green quiet rain of a Russian forest, raindrops plashing in puddles, the applause of rain on soaked clothes papping wet, rain straggling hair around a face happy to see you, rain beading on waxy leaves, winter rain shivering in 7pm rushhour headlights, a single plop of rain, neverending end of the world rain, which I do not resist. Rain, you are welcome here.

aptism

Apt |apt| (adjective) Appropriate, beautiful or useful in context. (verb) To listen to the context. To act or perceive appropriately or aptly.