Notes on Bricolage: an Elegy for Haiti

The following is adapted from the final chapter of my dissertation, a full version of which can be found online here.


“The ‘bricoleur’ is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand’, that is to say with a set of tools and materials that is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.”
- Claude Levi-Strauss, p. 17, “The Science of the Concrete” in The Savage Mind, 1962




In December I took part in an international art event in Haiti’s Port-au-Prince: the Ghetto Biennale. Haiti is the wasteland of the world, desperately poor and held together - quite literally - by faith and community and a couple of well-placed nails; there is very little else with which to build. Port-au-Prince is built of corrugated iron and concrete-rot, thrown together haphazardly; pure bricolage, built for a purpose.

I went to Haiti with the idea of building a church from the waste. More specifically, I went to Haiti to see bricolage and magical thinking in its native habitat.

But there is no waste in the wasteland.

Of course there is plenty of waste in Haiti: the stuff and things that America no longer needs or wants. There is garbage and there is decay; poison trash piled up high on every corner, stacked soft and wet on the banks of the viaduct, towering above the city in the shantytowns with no infrastructure to dispose of it all. Port-au-Prince smells like human faeces and rotten flesh, and in those rotting stacks, the remains of chickens, dog legs, a baby dead in the afterbirth, one eye gazing out at the sky. But the Kréyol word for this kind of waste (human and animal remains, hollowed-out grapefruit shells, random components from obsolete technologies; shit, plastic bottles, and sachets that once held water) - fatras - must be distinguished from waste, by which we mean unwanted surplus.

There is nothing wasted and nothing spare. Bits of trash too fragmentary to warrant a moment’s thought in an affluent Anglo-American reality are engaged to perform discrete functions, or used as part of greater constructions: houses, businesses, contraptions to keep the sun out, or in substitution for a tool; in downtown Port-au-Prince, for example, there’s no such thing as a department store. With the exception of school uniforms, all clothing is imported in aid packages from the USA and resold on wire hangers in the street; this is known as pepe, and sold by weight. The young men of Port-au-Prince, fully cognizant of sartorial subcultures, languish on street corners dressed just like young men in Atlanta, New York, and Miami: but this too is bricolage, since the young men of Port-au-Prince assemble their outfits, in perfect pastiche, from the cast-offs of young men in Atlanta, New York and Miami. Vodou churches are hung with bright balloons, incongruously advertising the Christmas sale of a small franchise in rural Massachusetts, or commemorating the 50th birthday of somebody called Val.

During the final stages of my dissertation, in which I intended to write extensively about my experiences in Haiti, there was a terrible earthquake in Port-au-Prince. Everything I saw, everyone I knew, everywhere we’d been: suddenly gone.

News of deaths confirmed started filtering through that abstract timespace, one by one. I kept writing through the pain, which - like all suffering - is both universal and indescribable, and so of no special relevance to this story, except that I couldn’t bear to exemplarize a culture in such suffering and so rewrote a few sections of the text. However, the relevance of Haiti as a microcosm for the wasteland of our world is more pertinent now than ever.

I am not equipped to provide a history of Haiti, nor to give an extensive commentary of what is happening there now, but I will say this.

In my writing and my work I have attempted to make a case for bricolage as ideal praxis for the artist/human being living in the super-saturated wasteland of consumer culture. I believe that my case is a strong one, since by all counts - economically, environmentally and socially - it’s time to stop consuming and start (re) creating with what we have, employing a little bit of much-needed magical thinking to help the process along.

But this is an ideology. And although passionately felt and probably correct in intention, ideology is always a luxury.

No such luxury existed in Haiti.

In sculptural terms, the bricolaged object is composed of several disparate elements not designed to fit together. There is no fusion, no melding or welding, no tessellation; the elements exist in perfect frail symbiosis. The sculptor-bricoleur solves the problems faced by every earthbound object - the problems posed by gravity (let us think of it as the “dust-to-dust” principle) and entropy (or: the “this-too-shall-pass” principle) - using the objects at his disposal, and the special sculptural qualities provided by these.

Such structures are built for a specific purpose.

Such structures are not built to last forever.

In the event, of course, they did not. “A native thinker makes the penetrating comment that ‘All sacred things must have their place.’” (Fletcher, quoted in Levi-Strauss: p.10: 1966) “It could even be said that being in their place is what makes them sacred, for if they were taken out of their place, even in thought, the entire order of the universe would be destroyed.”

No amount of aesthetic ideology can bricolage a wasted city back together. The wasteland is what we inherit.

This is not a conclusion, but an elegy.

Keepin' Touch

"We'd said we'd keep in touch. But touch is not something you can keep; as soon as it's gone, it's gone. We should have said we'd keep in words, because they are all we can string between us - words on a telephone line, words appearing on a screen." - David Levithan


I should probably write more often, shouldn't I?
But I forget how to. Or why to. And for whom?
For you? For who?
And how should I presume?

It's not like nothing's been happening, after all. There's always something happening. It's just that it ain't always everybody's business; or else it is, of course it is, must be, all information like Linux, Open Source, open-sores; let the business of it all begin. But it can take time to find the right words, or the right reasons to tell the story. Let the story sit for a while; let it become what it needs to. Takes time. Worth waiting.

I think I'd go so far nowadays as to say that it's worth waiting for anything worth having. Who knew? I sure as hell didn't. I don't want to imply that I've got any time to wait, or anything - time is something else - like touch - that you can't keep and mustn't try to. Time is like molten glass; transparent and slippery, almost invisible, it moves quickly and with a certain viscosity before setting into shape. When set, it's a mirror; it's a stain.

Like I've said before, you can't rush these things.

But in the meantime, hello.

The Death of the Music Critic

Hey! Look! I wrote this for a series in Drowned in Sound curated by the legendary Everett True. Good, huh. In other news - in case you hadn't heard - the wonderful Plan B Magazine has quit while it was ahead of the hard times and the hustle sell-out: I'll be posting some of my stuff on here, just for posterity; just as soon as, uh... soon.

Twenty-Nine

This was and will be the year that I figured out that some things don't need to be said.

Why I Hate Madonna

This was written for the current issue of Plan B Magazine (I've said it before, but I'll say it again: the only UK music rag worth reading, so go out and get it).


You love her or you hate her – and that’s always a good thing, even if both sides tend to focus on all the wrong reasons. Madonna-bashing forums assert that at fifty she should stand down and do the dignified thing as behooves a woman of her years. A vague moral stance somewhere between Christian outrage and misogynist hypocrisy provides an agenda in which her übersexualized image, public "displays" of bisexuality, and outspoken position on issues such as abortion and homosexuality are vehemently and ineloquently criticized, although in my view these all are points in Madonna’s favour – as an artist, as a woman, as a perfect postmodern myth.
Meanwhile, on the pro-Madonna front, she is lauded for her business sense, her unerring nose for an edgy [and exploitable] subculture, that career-spanning string of hits. Because Madonna is an icon of camp and retro - and because her position has ceased to be of any serious relevance - the willfully superficial hipster-fashionistas can afford to embrace her. Madonna has moved into the area of iconry that is beyond reproach, like those two other towers of blond ambition, Andy Warhol and Marilyn Monroe. She is the Colonel Sanders of Pop: churning out tasteless nuggets wrapped in chemically-enhanced flava from some music factory whose workers are shamelessly exploited, cashing in on obsolete values, a branded God. The content of her work is irrelevant, just like the KFC blend - full of shit and ultimately damaging, but it sells like hot chicken.
We can all agree that Madonna’s a predator, honing in on hot shit and making big bucks off the back of others’ innovations. We know that her talents, if any, do not lie in songwriting or musicianship or any creative aspect integral to her career. We say she’s cold and cynical and controlling, although it’s none of our business. But watching early videos of Madonna – in the tell-all feature Truth or Dare, for example, or that In Bed With Madonna clip with Wayne and Garth – one can’t help but warm to her: she’s this vulnerable spiky little smarty-pants with huge charisma and a fuck-off attitude. She’s almost punk. You’ve gotta love her.

So what happened? How did she get so humourless and bloodless and lame? My case against Madonna rests on the fact that she has sold out everything she ever stood for. Arguably she stood for very little, but – like Warhol and Monroe – her very existence was her statement. Maybe Madonna never wanted to be an artist, except in the sense that Andy Warhol meant it when he said, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” And maybe she never wanted to be a role model for other savvy, tough, single-minded girls from the wilds of Buttfuck and Nowheresville; but I can’t forgive her for that, especially when her agenda was superficially so closely aligned with the humanist-feminist movement ("Let's forget about the mythical Jesus and look for encouragement, solace, and inspiration from real women ... Two thousand years of patriarchal rule under the shadow of the cross ought to be enough to turn women toward the feminist 'salvation' of this world" - Annie Laurie Gaylor, "Feminist Salvation," The Humanist, p. 37, July/August 1988).

At the very least, though, she has always been consistently transparent in her solipsism. “I am my own experiment,” she said, “I am my own work of art.” But as an artist, Madonna has never had anything to say: ever the controversial figure, but never controversial enough for me. Despite constantly reinterpreting the feminine myth (a prevalent theme among female performance artists, from Nina Hagen to Cindy Sherman), and overtly challenging sexual morals, Madonna never dared to step over the line. She always had to be sexy and beautiful; she always had to be the princess, reaffirming gender roles and hierarchical structures anew with every reinvention. Madonna appropriated authorship and ownership of the strong-and-sexual blonde archetype as though Jean Harlow and Mae West and Greta Garbo had never existed, and determinedly cast herself as the star of every [meta]narrative. For those for whom this role was not appropriate or available, the message was clear: sexual power belongs to the thin, rich, conventionally Aryan-featured elite – although Madonna herself was none of these things from birth.

What we’re being sold is a brand. Like KFC or Coca Cola, the machine behind Madonna has become vast, powerful, ubiquitous and mechanically sophisticated. Without this taskforce – whose ranks have included such luminaries as Bjork, William Orbit and Pharrell Williams – Madonna might have faded into obsolescence years ago: laughable, Cher-like, all washed up.
Not that this is the just dessert of all aging female troopers of the touring circuit. Look at Patti Smith: greying, uncompromising, hugely dignified. Joan Jett, born like Madonna in 1958, retains the credibility of punk icon status whilst remaining firmly in the public eye; femmy third-wavers sport T-shirts proclaiming “WWJJD (What Would Joan Jett Do?)” and Gibson even honoured her with a signature guitar.

Would it have been possible for a genuinely transgressive artist to achieve such widespread power and influence? Maybe not, but with all the resources of the [corrupted] industry (an extensive army of stylists, producers, songwriters, radio pluggers, PR staff, plastic surgeons and yoga teachers paid good money to work their asses off on her behalf), why couldn’t she have done anything more interesting? The trend-setting wild girl with her church-baiting, tough-girl persona has calcified into a po-faced Kabbalist (a church, after all, is still a church) fashion victim, whose statements in the last years have all been about the sancticity of marriage and the rightful place of women. She is still a symbolic figure, but one that stands for everything that’s wrong with big capitalism and the dying, bloated music industry. Impossibly grandiose, cancerous and corpulent, Pop has eaten itself. Madonna’s natural successor, Britney Spears – by virtue of publicly and completely losing control – epitomises the end of an era, and Madonna [the artist, the woman, the postmodern myth], skinnier and more drawn with each passing year, seems to be eating herself, too. The inevitable tragedy of having bought and sold and propagated one’s own myth so completely is that one is forever doomed to be equal to it in person. At fifty, this can’t be easy or fun. But really, it serves her right.

I Was A Teenage Porn Star

Here is the original Dutch-language version of the same text (more or less). All original text and translation by Jesse Darlin', 2008.







You asked for it:
(deep breath). Here goes.


“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”

Thesis 1, The Society of The Spectacle, Guy Debord 1967.



I Was A Teenage Porn Star, just eighteen and spreadeagled naked and splayed like a flayed bunny-rabbit on a round bed on the top floor of a crooked house in the red light district. On every side the wall-eyed wide-angle of a six-cam gaze, staring out two screens in which I myself appeared, fucked in every last pink hole. And by a man I hardly knew, too, although he was my man, or at least, he’d said so; and I, so help me God, was his woman. Not that I was a woman, yet. But I was learning. I was learning fast.

There was a certain technique to it. Coffee creamer for the oral cum-shot, spray-on hair conditioner for the facial and the titty, and all kinds of ways to fake anal, because only the fags were expected to do real anal, and I was just eighteen, and it hurt. We had fake names that we’d bawl out occasionally whenever the moans and sighs started to feel samey and strange in our mouths. “Oh yeah, do it to me, do it to me!” I'd sing out sweetly, wide-eyed on the sticky screen. Big blue eyes. The punters loved it.

I was - and am - a professional performer, after all, and there’s nothing a performer won’t do to lay down a show. Anyway, it worked: they loved my face, loved the look in my eyes - no doubt seeing unbearable arousal, or perhaps the heady first-night nerves of an adolescent. But there was nothing in my eyes at all boredom, bathos, bewilderment, and the great oh-God-let-it-be-over of gagging on coffee creamer and waiting for the moment of truth at which I could raise my eyes to heaven and let it seep sticky on to my chin. I was good at my job. Not at first, but I learned fast. I was just a kid, and relatively speaking I knew nothing about sex although like most kids of the same age I thought I’d seen it all; and this was a shame if not a tragedy, although there was nothing tragic about any of it, really, because tragedy is too damn good a word.

I hadn’t, of course, seen all of it - or even most of it, thank God - but it’s a shame that I saw so much of that room, those sticky screens, my own holes and my body doing things no kid should experience for the first time in public. I watched those screens obsessively. I watched myself being watched. I watched to see if I was doing it right, doing it hard, doing it like I loved it.

Why did I do it? I needed money, and fast, and got in with the wrong people, but like many other kids who end up in the sex industry, I was a runaway and an would-be adventurer, with no sense of decorum or manners or self-preservation. Teenagers should be left to their own silly devices, with their big talk and pretty faces and their beautiful young bodies, but the sex industry is a parasite, a dragnet, trawling the bottom-feeding circuits for the lost boys and girls missed by God and St Christopher and orphaned by circumstance or by design. The sex industry is the man your mother warned you about; the one who promises chocolate sprinkles if you’ll go with him to his house. I was broke and curious. I wore a cheap g-string and an old black balconette bra of my mother’s: I was young and chubby and nervous. “At least it’s not waitressing,” I said to myself, reflected in the mirrored walls of the changing room where we waited out the time between shifts, “and anyway, even if it’s horrible I’ll learn all about sex and I’ll get really good at it and then people will say I’m really good in bed, like in Cosmo.”

I didn't know then that pornography has nothing much to do with sex, and that it would be years before I could just make love as lovemaking should be, without looking over my lover’s shoulder at that imaginary screen in the top left-hand corner of the room. Am I doing it right? Am I doing it hard? Am I doing it like I love it? Yeah, yeah, do it to me, I sang out, lost and bored and numb: and my body knew just what to do while I’d glide softly out of myself towards that top left-hand corner, far above my lover who lay vague and distant, far-off, elsewhere. My lovers were predictably and heartbreakingly aroused by my automatisms and porn-star machinations, and so I didn't stop (don't stop! Don't stop! Don't stop!). Am I doing it right? It sure looked like it. The show, after all, must go on, and on and on all night.

All that I learned, in the end, were the fine arts of fakery and concealment: the advanced-level execution of the tricks women teach themselves for use in bed and elsewhere. I didn’t learn how to give a better blowjob, but I learned how to look while doing it, eyes half-closed all sidelong and sexy. I was a doll, passive and big-eyed, sighing in excited anticipation whenever a penis or a dildo or a bottle was waved before my nose, gasping in ecstasy whenever a finger was stuck in some hole or another, forever on the brink of orgasm simply and solely because someone, anyone, was watching. Ex-porn actress Sarah-Catherine, in an interview with media studies professor Dr Chyng Sun, is quoted as saying, “The images that we re-enact over and over again have absolutely nothing to do with our personal sexuality. I would say that what's shown not revolutionary, it’s not different; it’s the same-old, same-old; it’s women in uncomfortable positions pretending they feel good. And what's revolutionary about that? What's liberating about that?”

The blonde dolls of the sex industry exist to serve, to convince you -- johnny, voyeur, masturbator, consumer -- that they enjoy what they do; that they are doing it for you. The big-budget Cali-porno flicks are full of pneumatic, surgically-restructured sex-machines (she heavily made-up, sunbed-brown, flat-bellied and clean-shaven all the way down, with two silicon tits stuck down on the bare ribs; he similarly shaved and muscle-cut, with perfect teeth and an enormous cock). The deeply professional business of sexual artifice can be exemplified by these: Ken and Barbie lie fucking by the swimming pool.

When I watch porn now I imagine that I can recognise something in the eyes: the boredom, the numbness, a peculiar presence-yet-absence that spells cocaine. The popularity of cocaine in the sex industry is no accident: it’s an emotional anesthetic that makes you feel like a well-oiled machine. My colleagues and I used cocaine locally as well as internally; a dab of coke on your cock and you’ll be hard all night, although you won’t be able to feel anything. Which, of course, is the whole point.

That young men are raised with this kind of pornography as their sole sexual education, and that young women grow up to believe that “sexy” means only that sidelong look and a passive-receptive sexuality, is dangerous for those young men and women and for society as a whole. There’s nothing wrong with sex, or with images of sex; there is nothing wrong with [images of] dirty sex, violent sex, inappropriate sex, or consensually abusive sex for those who dig it. The problem lies in the consumer culture that has taken each and every one of our desires, repackaged them in cheap plastic, and sold them right back to us at a premium as though they were the real thing.

The problem with commercial pornography is the problem with McDonalds: it is a monstrous capitalist spectre that consumes resources and money, and monopolises our psycho-cultural aesthetic with merciless ubiquity. With the most exquisite cynicism, commercial pornography has sold us a popularized pleasure myth which is based in a set of fundamental fabrications, and which detracts from everything that is good and true and real in the living world. The "McDonaldization" of our longings has led to the emergence of pornography as a symbolic commodity which would replace “real sex” – ugly, beautiful, vile, banal, spiritual, dubious, delicious, and gloriously various -- with a plasticized imitation. “If we were to acknowledge that sexuality is personal and unique, it would become unwieldy. Making sexiness into something simple, quantifiable, makes it easier to explain and to market. If you remove the human factor from sex and make it about stuff – big fake boobs, bleached blonde hair, long nails, poles, thongs – then you can sell it. Suddenly, sex requires shopping; you need plastic surgery, peroxide, a manicure, a mall.” (Ariel Levy, “Female Chauvinist Pigs”.)

When commodities, in this case pornographic images, are taken over by the cancer-bloom of mass capital, the question is no longer one of supply and demand. The supply – churned out relentlessly for a market that was created by the producer – forces the demand. “Induced demand” is defined as "the phenomenon in which an increase in supply leads directly to accelerated consumption of a good or commodity" (Wikipedia). And without a decent alternative, millions of men and women all over the world will keep buying, and watching, and consuming -- as though the phony representations of symbolic sex could fill all their holes.

But money can’t buy you love, of course: just as there is negligible nourishment to be gleaned from a McDonalds Happy Meal. A pornography built on artifice has as little to do with adult sexuality as a Happy Meal with hand-prepared home-cooking.
The culture of Queer, whose very name is a semiotic reclamation much like the reclamation of "The N-Word" into black culture, has always been about transgressing the performance of gender, which is obligatory in mainstream culture for both men and women. Queer is also about the reclamation and subversion of the gendered body, but shares its roots in the symbolic and aesthetic cultures of camp, of butch, and of drag, all of which provide visual fodder for a reinvented sexual iconography. The most interesting and subversive examples of post-pornography have come out of Queer culture, such as Phineas Slipped (Keri Oakie, 2003), a school-boy romp which would be thoroughly hackneyed except for the fact that the boys are played by transmen, butch dykes, and women in drag as well as bio-guys (men who were born male -- a term used to differentiate transgendered men from non-transgendered men), and that during the fucking scenes – big cocks all round – it’s impossible to tell what’s flesh and what’s dildo. “Dyke art porn magazine” Slit magazine, published in Sydney, Australia, publishes self-directed, self-styled centrefold spreads in which the subjects are the active agents, self-cast in their own subversive visual fairytales, borrowing from archetypal symbology, heterosexist caricatures and homosexual iconry: zombies, cowboys, sailors, animals, pigs at the spit or lambs to the slaughter; donkeys, monkeys, mermaids, radioactive princesses on rollerskates. A spate of websites, led by the excellent NoFauxxx, publish homemade porn -- “artistic, political and all-inclusive, featuring models of all genders and sizes” -- made by (and for) a community of – “ladies, queers and artists all over the world.” The NoFauxxx models do not conform to heteronormative standards of the body beautiful, and the site is not limited either to hetero- or homosexual sex. Queer, in this case, is no longer [solely] about sexual orientation: it is about creating a new visual discourse for in which gender roles are seen for what they are: a series of performances which offer the possibility of transformation and transgression. Camp and butch can be seen as theatrical, or otherwise performative reinterpretations of the proscribed gender roles; now these, too, are deconstructed. The fuck-bots of commercial porn grimly and joylessly play out their amplified, mechanical gender-role representations, but in the wonderland of new Queer semiotics, the performance of gender is played for laughs: burlesque, grotesque, and larger-than-life.

When the machine of the music industry became a monster, churning out cynical nuggets of demographically-marketed pop packaged in artificial cool, the Kids – unwilling to be another Market, unwilling to be duped and smarmed and sold-to – came up with Punk Rock, whose DIY ethos saw a new revolution in the creation and distribution of music and [con]textual content. In the same spirit of DIY , Queer culture has started a new pornographic revolution: porn with an anti-porn aesthetic, created and distributed within a peer group with little or no marketing budget and no mass production values. Without the incentives (and values) of Big Capital, all participation is voluntary. With no script and no standard, participants are required to create their own scenarios. The exploitative aspects of pornography are gone, replaced by a brave new erotic aesthetic.

We live in a spectacle society, but the spectacle has been exploited to the point of saturation. Everything that was directly lived has faded into a representation; and despite this, there remain – within ourselves and within our experience – those mammalian and mysterious aspects that defy commoditization, that cannot be replaced by an image or a representation. Despite everything, I believe that sex is one of these. I believe in its redemptive and life-affirming power. I believe in sex as a deeply human phenomenon which is both sacred and profane, transgressive and instinctual. I believe in the essential rightness of desire, and also in the desire to see images of naked people fucking: to summarize, there is nothing wrong with the practices of voyeurism or exhibitionism. The problem lies in the colonization of these practices and desires by Big Capital, and the solution can be found in DIY culture: let us grow and prepare our own food, brew our own beer, distribute our own fanzines and records and weblogs and mp3s, and let us film and photograph our own plural sexualities.

Let us reclaim The Gaze, and turn it back towards ourselves; for within a spectacle society, it seems as though we must become that spectacle, to move through it and into it, in order to move beyond it. The female body is so deeply contextualized, so utterly colonialized by hundreds’ of years worth of spectacle-mongering, that it has become the natural foil and canvas for female performers: we are guerrilla fighters with stolen ammunition: our bodies are the bombs we will use to hijack the militant mainstream. We struggle to reclaim our naked bodies as our own intellectual property as though reclaiming our own land. It is, and remains, a performance – and a spectacle – but at the same time, we are searching for a way out of the performance, for a way to finally feel something, for real, and off the record. And until we have freed ourselves from the necessity for performance, we'll keep on fighting through the night, doing it hard, but doing it for ourselves: dressing up, strapping on, tying down, playing out, until those images belong to us, and us alone; until our bodies are our own again. Don’t consume; create and participate, and keep the camera running as you go.

Have fun, kids. And stay safe.



Love,

JD x

Londonnaire II/ This Is England

It's July 7th, by all rights the very swollen heart of Summer, and it's pissing down. This ain't no tropical storm, no; this is a freezing wet rain with an icy wind, lashing down on all the fat-bellied, bare-legged English girls with their modish gathered smocks in shades of lurid jersey in which every woman looks pregnant sans glow; it pisses down on every surf-attired urban wanker with his wraparound-aviator-hybrid shades and his chubby trainers and his skinny little English ankles. It rains, now, just as it rained down on the thousands of drugged, duped, spend-happy hedonists at Glastonbury Festival (the annual bank-breaking camp-out/flood party for ordinary British men, women and children -- 13-21 year-olds, then -- whose daily lives permit them no other recourse to public nudity). This year, like every other, it rained no doubt upon the Chelsea Flower Show, another staple of the British Summer calendar. Just as the pill-poppin', facebookin', thrill-seekin Yoof (extending well into their late thirties, by now) would brave just about any amount of mud and blatant fleecing at the hands of hot-dog vendors and drug-dealers to have their spark of real life, once a year, in a field, so it is for the Pimms-tipsy and ice-cream-guzzling Upper Crust who always rise, like scum, to The Occasion; in which a ribbon is cut, for example, or a prize awarded, or a whole lot of silly fuckin' hats worn and paraded around a lawn. The Chelsea Flower Show is one such occasion, and the casual visitor will be able to witness the wheeling-out of the living Old Guard, gin-blossomed, doddery and ready for the knackers', accompanied and propped vertical by their jowly and bloussoniéred dames whose facial waxing alone must cost more than a blue-collar Polack can expect to earn in two days' hard labour. Ah, merrie old England.

Sweden is a first-world country; Austria and Holland and Germany are first-world countries. Poland, America and Great Britain are second-world countries, meaning that although there's the civilized Western-world infrastructure in place, there's no money with which to run it; or else -- in our case -- the money has been so unevenly distributed that most of the country (the schools, the hospitals, the transport systems: even the buildings and the people who live in them) has descended, to a greater or lesser degree, into degradation and disrepair. Although the Brits love to feel culturally superior toward the immigrant hordes of dog-eyed Polish proles, there's more likeness than anyone wants to admit: England is Eastern-Europe-on-Sea, without the decency to dilapidate gracefully; the citizens and denizens of the latterly great nation of Britain are roaring all over this dirty little island in expensive cars, laying down huge carbon footprints in designer trainers, buying disposable objects from Ikea and Siemens and Tesco* as though there were no tomorrow and no credit crunch and no global warming, and as though there was anything at all to be proud of about being British, except perhaps Monty fuckin' Python.

Let the whole sorry lot be swallowed up by the rising tide, I say.

"This is finite," I mutter to myself through gritted teeth, over and over. The rain, the tube, the bus ride, the days spent in this kind of urban misery: "This is finite."

But life is finite, too.
What am I doing here?


Disclaimer: I'm not a xenophobe, or even an anglophobe (I can hear it now: "You don't like it, why don't you go back to yer own fuckin' country! Oh...wait."). I concede that there are probably many great things about Great Britain outside of Monty Python and the NHS; for example, a stout tradition of social rebellion, from Guy Fawkes to punk; the BBC; suffragettes; chips with salt and vinegar. But rain in July! Fuck that shit.

Twenty-Eight

Hey, listen, I know I haven't been around much lately. I know I've said a lot of things -- made a lot of promises -- and I haven't always come through. I know I've been bad-tempered and difficult at times; and I've lied about what I really wanted out of life, as we all do, and I've spent my time and money on the wrong things and I've been drunk and emotional and talking too much about Jesus and destiny and what the hell I'm going to do with myself after all these wild and wobbly years in which I've never once seen fit to do the right thing. And I'm sorry. But sorry is a waste of time and space, and time and space are commodities I seem to have less and less of, and so I'll just call for forgiveness, and for aliveness, despite it all.

On the morning of my birthday I woke up alive and alone in a foreign city: afforded one more day on the wild wide plural yonderin' earth to drink stove-top espresso and sweet-talk myself into thinking that it's all right and it's all good: although scattered through time-zones and all across the breadth of the shrinking globe, the loved and loving still left after all this gypsying and bad manners are pinging through the social smog of networking sites to wish me a good one from Sydney, Seattle, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Beijing. How did we all come so far? How did we get so close? The wireless heart picks up the signal, just in time; we transmit our soft data through the noughts and ones and wires, and the pixels pop and plunk and squeak into our lap[top]s; any number of little boxes and inboxes to open, any number of little gif[t]s to accept.

And meanwhile, somewhere in Lower Austria, the work-in-progress that is Jesse Darlin' (big-mouth, autodidact, improviser, rent-a-muse, human being, piece of meat, imperfect lover, failed wife and self-mythologising autobiographer) turned twenty-eight in the glaring grassy margins of meatspace: flagrantly in the face of some -- but not all -- of the odds. In the face of the wide sky and the dying day. On a hilltop above a quarry in a sculpture garden on the concrete banks of a little amphitheatre above which the magically-inclined nerds of the Metalab were remote-controlling their robotic flying candelabras into the evening blue. It was a grand night of getting stoned and enjoying the Schadenfreude of those little robots nose-diving into the dust, something like watching animals pace their nine-yard circles in a zoo, but humane, because machines have no feelings (of course; and although there's a poetic joy in imagining some kind of ghost in the machine, there's a far greater joy -- or sense of abandon -- in knowing that "no animals were harmed during the making of this film"). I was thinking about robot zoos, robot ballets, robot choreographies, making little dancing haloes with laser pens; I was flying in the sky, no remote control. It was good to be there. Good to know I still can; old enough to be young again, and about time too.

I used to have dreams in which I could fly. Flying was a discrete skill to be learned and mastered, like riding a bike (directly concerned with release and momentum and the zen-fine balance of both). It took years of dreaming to really be any good, but in the end I was soaring above the highest of the high trees in the perpetual end-of-summer light, thinking all the time, shit, I'm really far up now. And never fall. And then I stopped dreaming of flight. That was the year that I turned twenty-five, and got married, and I tried -- I really tried -- to go straight, and as we all know, that didn't work out either. At least, so far. So far: so good.

June 28th, 2008; Vienna. The sky was raspberry blue on that morning, and I ate raspberries and raw mint out of a plastic tub with my fingers. Those raspberries, you know, they were given to me fresh and damp from the tender wet garden of an eminent Austrian media journalist whose name it probably wouldn't do to mention. He took me out for oysters and Pinot Grigio and told me about his wife, their children, their lovers, his garden, the house in Greece, the radio surveillance techniques of the military; and there was a sadness in his mouth and eyes -- a profound resignation, to be accurate -- which is the saddest thing of all. And I got to thinking about the choices we make in life, and how it's possible to make the wrong ones, whatever that means. All that white wine and salt water in our big brash mouths, talking the old out-for-dinner jive like the consummate pros we both are, he and I, and all the time the sadness salty on the tongue and the tide just behind the eyes. It was a sadness I understood -- could taste -- sage and tobacco and moonshine and blood and brass. I shrugged it on to my shoulders, as though putting on a man's jacket on a cold day, offered in the spirit of chivalry and good old-fashioned romance. Romance! As though any of us would honestly dream of doing that thing, any more. Now I know better -- don't I? -- I know what it's really all about; and thank God. Now when we look into each other's eyes, we know how we kid ourselves, and sometimes we go there regardless, just because we can, and because -- quite frankly -- we should. But despite all that, even now, there are those love stories which last the duration of a train journey or a single shared cigarette, a dinner date, a lifetime of half-platonic blue-balls adoration, a song performed live in which one of you is on the stage and the other -- penetrated, open-mouthed -- dying of love, and forever unseen. My mother, fifty-eight years old and still kickin', has powered through the bloody aftermath of a thirty-year marriage and a subsequent string of unfortunate relationships, which goes to show that the bruised heart hurtles onwards despite it all. It's a divine momentum, the concentric spinning of the mortal coil. Once I got depressed because I couldn't see how there could be any meaning to any of it, and then my Dad, drunk, quoted me Camus: "The only question we should be asking is why we're not killing ourselves." And we're not; despite it all. Touch wood. So far, so far, so far: so good.

And so what's left at twenty-eight, when love is just a bundle of chemically-determined hormonal signals and I don't know where I'm going or what I'm doing or what any of it means?

Why, you are, of course.
And - more to the point - I am. It's beautiful.

Here's to it, chaps. I'm raising my glass to it all, to you, to me, just as I did at my virtual birthday party last year: to the ongoing chaotic principle, to the questions that keep me alive. To that old itch that won't scratch [my darling, my darlings]. To the wireless node of the heart, crazed with neurological sparks and condemned to flight and flame and the fate of all those things that don't exist. Who gives a flying fuck? We're alive, you [reader] and I. Perhaps not in a week from now, but now.

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

- Prayer, Galway Kinnell.

I Was A Teenage Drag Bunny

This piece was written for the fabulous Frances May Morgan, editor of the fabulous Plan B Magazine, for which I have occasionally been known to write. It's the only British music rag worth reading so go look it up.



I was a weird kid, bookish and ornery, scared shitless of the body-popping gym girls with their push-up bras and the nodding stoner boys with their bongs and cocks and sex jokes. I wasn’t like the other kids; they let me know it every single day, and their world (their music, their drugs, their bike-shed fumblings all fucked up on fruit booze) was thus inaccessible, and as such, undesirable. Anyway, I was proud and brittle and I didn’t want any of their dirty business. It wasn’t that I objected to getting one’s rocks off and one’s buzz on, per se: take, for example, the tea dances of the prohibition era, when everyone was smoking reefer – which was yet to be made illegal – and drinking coffee, which had just hit the scene as the new drug of choice. Dark and decadent, coffee was the new hardcore – and a caffeine high, as some of you will know, is just right with a blast of THC to blunt the edges. It’s a good level, great for dancing, conversation, even sex; I fancy you can even hear the drugs in the music, squeaky and tweaky with sharp corners and a soft middle. But dropping E’s and doddering spoddy and graceless in heels at the zoo-smelling club until the inevitable meltdown, a wet-walled dry-hump and a puddle of spaz? It just wasn’t my idea of fun. There were more wholesome alternatives: passing out akimboed on snakebite beneath the see-saw, for example, while some acned 6th former drunkenly and peremptorily went about disposing of one’s virginity. But all filled me with fear and loathing. The horror, the horror of it!

It was the awful lack of ceremony that I hated: I was longing and dreaming and pining along with the very best of ‘em but I had my own ways of doing it. I’d lie back on my bed and listen to my Walkman, as we all did, only I didn’t listen to Take That, Nirvana or The Chilis. I was riding high on electric currents of old rock n’roll, prohibition-era tea-jazz, and the dulcet tones of Buddy Holly, who was hot, with that little tremor in his voice like he was about to cum. They sang, of course, about love and marriage, but that’s not what they really meant: nobody fucked before marriage in those days, or at least, not officially. No, instead they danced: gaberdine hard-ons pressed up against the scratchy taffeta, with layers and layers of net and nylon and social expectations – a fortress of elastification, a cat’s cradle, as kinky, to my mind, as Japanese rope bondage -- to keep those hard-ons far from the rustling unshaven damp between plump and juicy thighs. And that, I reckoned, was how sex should be: pure animal anticipation dressed up in the cheap suit of propriety, and straining at the seams like a well-filled fly or a girdle under duress. As Buddy Holly slavered and simpered through a succession of blue-balled ballads and phoney proposals toward the illicit zipped-up fuck under the endless boardwalk, I lay alone on my bunk bed and felt like I’d been born in the wrong time.

And then I met Graeme.

Graeme was like me: a social misfit who wore the wrong clothes and listened to the wrong music. We both dug on the old stuff, the scratchier the better; delighted in vinyl hiss and the creaky syncopations of long-dead brass bands, dreamed of waltzing the Blue Danube while surreptitiously removing one another’s formal attire. I was Bunny, a dashing playboy rake with rabbit ears and a swirling moustache, and he was Felicity, swooning society belle who allowed herself – on occasion – to be utterly ravished by her gentleman beau. I don’t know how I ended up playing the man and he the woman. It was organic, orgasmic, pre-drag and proto-queer. Who gives a flying teenage fuck; it worked for us. As gauche teens in civvies we were quite unable to get it on; we didn’t know where to start, and the whole thing was just embarrassing and weird, not to mention thoroughly colonialised by the scary popular kids with whom we felt we had nothing in common. But as the music swept us up into the boudoir-ballroom in our minds, we became Bunny and Felicity, madly in love and wildly excited, groping at one another’s syncopated hearts through layers of dressing-up box and gender confusion and identity crisis and teenage angst: hooks, eyes, mother-of-pearl buttons; suspenders and dickie-bows and fake moustaches, with the visceral, coital squishing of the trumpet and the tuba in the background all the time and the soft moaning of the French Horn, whose very name, even now, sends shivers down my spine. Gasping of violins! The low murmur of the double bass! And the walking rhythm of the old ivories, like the titillation of fingers on skin. We ate sherbet and drank sweet coffee until we were all static analog and itchy groin, tripping out to the ancient radio standards that played and played and played while we lay on my bunk breathing hard and pretending to be other people. There’s no drug like sex and no drug like music, after all, and kids will have their way in the end.

Time passed and we found ourselves growing up, uncomfortably and inevitably. We moved slowly from the thirties into the forties and then the fifties and we started doing it like ordinary teenagers, disinterested and confused and horny and heartbroken. By the time we put Bunny and Felicity to rest, we were both listening to a lot of sixties pop with some bop on the side. I learned to drink my coffee black and even started boozing a bit, just to show my new friends and the boys at work that I was willing; Graeme locked himself away in his room all summer with a stack of his father’s old seventies prog records. We sent each other angry mix-tapes and envelopes full of sherbet and bile. It was over.

It has been said that the conceptual teenager was invented in the early fifties. The post-war baby boom had produced a new affluent generation, with money to spend on records and time to spend on style, heartbreak, and the maintenance of a new youth culture. Like Graeme and I, those kids were middle-class, white, bored and desperately hungry for something that feels like living. And then there was that hot jazz, so-named for what it’ll do to ya, for when it all started to get a bit hackneyed and obvious. The word jazz is derived, they say, from jism, and when you hear that old-time stuff, with the tongue of the saxophone moving in and out and the big bass throbbing and the vocal blue and sweet, you’d believe it. Like rock n’roll, like love, like everything, jazz has been colonialized by white capital, reined into the safe toothless margins of drive-time radio and elevator music for department stores and airports and all the places people go to spend money, stand still, and calcify. But the rebel heart keeps on pumping to the squeaky beat, the hustle and the rustle of hi-hats, and I’m back there again, curled and crinolined, not sure whether I’m leading this waltz or following, neither boy nor girl nor rabbit nor wholly of this time and place, just a fast-breathing thing with a heartbeat and a sugar rush and a funny feeling down there which is all I ever knew of love. It’s hard to imagine, now, but once upon a time this was wild, sexy, dangerous shit, born of poverty and heartache and racial mingling and the Great Depression and the svengali cynicism of the original pop moguls who plucked that music from the streets from whence it came and thrust it into record sleeves.

Buddy Holly, nota bene, who was only 22 when he died, was a notorious freak and occasional bisexual, or at least according to Little Richard. To Buddy, Bunny and Felicity: RIP, and may there be some dirty dancing in that portion of heaven reserved for teenage kicks, dead youth movements and sexual deviants. And may I be delivered unto that place every time I bust out the old vinyl and lie back on my bunk, dancing cheek-to-cheek-to-arse-to-elbow with my teenage self and all the playboys and girls I could have danced with, or become. Amen; ah, man; a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop, a-wop-bam-boom!