The Thousands

Caught a gallery opening over in Shoreditch tonight,  featuring works from folks such as Swoon, Banksy, Blek Le Rat, and plenty of others. Very nice.

Medium term readers of this blog will know that I was a "toy" tagger back in the mid 1970s in Washington Heights, and much later would trade nods with Keith Haring (whom I stand around watching while he did his chalk art in empty ad places in the NYC subways). Because of this, perhaps, a lot of this art feels a hell of a lot more approachable than much of the uninteresting and self-referential Big Establishment art.

Shoreditch, if you are unaware, is kind of London's defacto artsy zone, vaguely like Soho back in the late 70s and 80s: Lots of old factory buildings but with hidden gallery spaces and odd shops and design firms. That part of London is actually not easy to get to from the West End and London's great north, but it's worth checking out if you want to get a flavor for local interesting activity. Anyway, here's some photos...


Some Banksy prints...

An area of up-and-coming folks...

A piece by WK Interact...

And this was the ramp I walked in on. Unfortunately, I walked on that little upturned lip at the bottom and it caused the whole ramp to teeter-totter up and then slam down, sounding just like a gun shot. After turning to look at what had happened I then looked back at the assembled folks and they were all silent and staring right at me like I was nuts or something!
Ah well. Perhaps they're right.

Finch

Did I ever mention that I want it all in a novel these days? I not only want well-crafted characters, I want incredible ideas and a really nonlinear plot. Oh, and I want phenomenal prose, too.

I'm getting this in Jeff Vandermeer's Finch.

More than this, however, is the fact that only in his city of Ambergris can the noir-knob be set so damned high...not even Sin City can match a world in which fungal humanoids have taken over a city previously already quite chaotic but human-dominated. But in Ambergris, nothing is certain, not even physical structures or humanity as they all are succumbing to the Grey Cap's fungal technology. It's such a sense of uncertainty and living nightmare that it validates why I feel that some of the best writing occurs in genres that publishers and retailers like to slap with a tag of "sci-fi" or "fantasy". But this doesn't do books like this or Samuel R Delaney's any kind of real justice.

The prose is superb, and as the plot evolves even the every day features of life in Ambergris are unnerving as they are exposed, such as the "memory caps", which are memory mushrooms that sprout from the dead and that visually replay (for those that eat them), the experience of the deceased in the hours and minutes before they died.

It's a world so dark and detailed and unobvious and disturbing that you find yourself memerized and astonished.

Gotta fire a guy

Weird. I'm in a situation at work where I will need to fire a guy. More specifically, I actually want to fire this guy, and I don't feel bad about it at all.
Don't get me wrong, I completely comprehend what getting fired does to your life. First of all, it puts you in a fairly dangerous and desparate financial situation: You need to grab a new job fast, or face homelessness or, worse, moving back in with your parents (if they are alive). It also really screws up your social life and self-esteem: You try to avoid discussing "what you do" in conversations. Finally, you feel kinda loserish. Actually, since my brothers and many of my friends are musicians, the idea of being 'unemployed' is far less well defined, so I regularly hang out with folks who don't technically give a shit about being unemployed.
But for those of us who have 'gone legit', getting fired can be quite a blow.
In this guy's case I don't feel bad, however. First of all, I know I wouldn't be firing him simply because he didn't kiss enough ass or try to fit it. After all these years my ego has enough crap kicked out of it that I don't need to be the personal life boss to all my employees. (Since folks working for me find this liberating and others can't quite handle me talking to them as equals.) Second, I wouldn't be firing this guy because he wasn't quite good enough for my crack world class team of supergeniuses. No. Rather, in a team of relatively bright folks who try to kinda care about what they do, this guy just doesn't do ANYTHING. People have asked me what he does and I say I don't know.
Third of all, I would be OK with carrying some dead weight, but they won't let me hire anyone in addition and this guy's lack of functionality is really making life suck for everyone else.
Is the guy crazy? No, I don't think so. I think he just misrepresented himself and the kind of environment he's worked in before and I gotta get rid of him. The tough thing about this situation is that he could possibly take us all down with him if he doesn't do what he's supposed to, so fuck that. It's him or the rest of us and I choose him.
Heartless, aint it?

The House on the Lanes

That house was pretty unique, actually. A holdover from the "black country" days of coal mining and heavy industry. For its' time, it was considered one of the more posh houses in the neighborhood, fit for a foreman or higher-level manager as opposed to a worker.

Today, the house exists at the joining edge of two separate neighborhoods, each of which sits in two different counties, though this is really not directly relevant per se. But what is relevant is that the house does not sit on any street, but at the end of a series of alleyways and maze-like cut-throughs between these older workers cottages and muse houses. Actually, it sits at the end of two series of alleyways and maze-like cut-throughs, each alley leading to the house zigzagging through its respective neighborhood/county on either side of the house.

Because of this unique situation, the house eventually accumulated a steady traffic of people using it as a cut-through to get from one neighborhood to the other, as any other route required a drive of several miles.

This may sound improbable, and like the house had become some kind of public property, but this was not the case. Actually, it's easy to imagine the actual situation: Friends of the couple that lived in the house would sometimes drop by through one door for afternoon tea, and then when finished leave through the other door, to go grocerie shopping or visiting relatives in the other neighborhood.

The utility of the house as cut-through was well-known, of course, so that when it became known that actual friends of the couple were going to visit/cut through, they would sometimes accumulate friends and acquantances who would want to come along so as to partake of the convenience of cutting through.

These secondary friends and acquantences would of course eventually come by themselves and sometimes not even stay for tea: They merely would like to know if it was OK if they could pass through and, no bother, not importune them for tea or biscuits. As the secondary friends became regulars, they'd of course bring along tertiary friends until after a while there was a steady traffic of strangers passing through the kitchen and front parlour of the house.

The husband, actually the son of a lifelong miner, was the manager of a dairy distributor, got tired of this and decided one day to brick up the bottom level, so that from the front parlour it was only possible to get to the kitchen by traveling up the stairs to the first floor and then walking down the back stairs down to ground.

For a while they had some piece as it became quite clear what the motivation was. Some of the actual friends understood, but others in the area considered it rude and there were Chinese whispers around the neighborhood suggesting that the real cause was some sort of marital difficulties.

Eventually, however, the primary friends started moving up the stairs to get over to other side of the house and out the door to access the other neighborhood, and soon followed secondary friends and, eventually, strangers. It got so bad that they had to socialize appropriate times for the cross over. The husband felt like that boatman mentioned in the Greek myths that ferried people from life to the full-fledged afterlife, but he couldn't remember the name of that chap.

Eventually, however, he made the decision to brick up the second floor as well, and this caused some issues: The wife's job occurred in a county beyond one of the adjoining neighborhoods while the husband's job was local to the other adjoining neighborhood. As a result, it often made sense for them to sleep in separate halves of the house.

They did, however, develop a system for passing small objects to each other through the windows by placing the objects in small baskets at the end of poles. They had wall-knocks to signal or, if one of them was not within hearing distance of a knock, they'd phone and ring three times before hanging up to signal the need to "talk" through the knocks.

After months turned into years, they eventually forgot what each other looked like. You may think that's absurd, but how many married couples look at old photos of each other? They just assumed they did still know what each other looked like but in reality they had forgotten. That's why, at an antique show + auction one Spring afternoon, they bid against each other for the same item, a small inlaid snuff box from the 1880s.

Between the two of them, bidding soared into the high 3 digits for the snuff box, with other bidders rapidly falling away. As they bid each of them felt a certain animosity towards the other, for muscling in on a special item that only he or she had the proper eye to appreciate. As a result, bidding rose well beyond what the item was worth, and even well beyond what either of them would have otherwise paid for it, no matter how charming. More to the point, the bidding surpassed even what money they had in their account (which was a joint account after all) and even beyond the conservative credit line given to them by the bank. In other words, neither of them could afford it. And because this antique show was a small, local affair, there had been no credit checks so both of them had to forfeit the item. It was offered to the third-placed bidder for £125.

Bjork interviews Arvo Part

They seem to understand one another perfectly.

Junior College Shooting

At Patriot Junior College in Texarkana Arkansas, student Mel Turkington opened fire, killing 19 people. During the melee, police responded and in the process, Officer Henry Jones opened fire, killing 3 of his fellow officers and wounding four more.

Hearing the gunshots, Mel Turkington returned fire, killing an additional 2 officers and 4 more fellow students. One student, however, holed up in the Patriot Library, appears to have been armed, and she herself killed both gunman Mel Turkington, Officer Henry Jones, 1 additional officer and 5 more additional students.

At a nearby gas station, Sean Williams witnessed police cars responding to the campus shooting and, apparently in response, begain firing his semi-automatic weapon indiscriminantly at fellow employees, motorists, and patrons of the adjacent In-and-Out-Burger, killing 5 and wounding 4 more.

Although unconfirmed, the author of this blog post, upon hearing of the shootings, himself picked up a .44 caliber handgun and proceeded out to the street, where he shot (in succession) a street cleaner, a bus driver, a poodle, three little old ladies, a convenience store owner and a ticket booth worker. Certain older readers of this blog, upset that the blog has continually failed to live up to its original anno mirabils, returned fire, severely wounding the author.

Samuel R Delaney & Neveryon

You may or may not be aware of the fact that black gay New York writer Samuel R Delaney wrote the great American novel some years back...it's called Dhalgren and it is an astounding dark maze of a book.

More recently, however, I've been reading my way through his somewhat later Neveryon series, and it is hard to describe just how relevant a fantasy series the focuses primarily on gay characters (complete with the occasional gay sex scene) feels to my life. As a heterosexual male (which I experienced no wavering over despite the sex scenes), I find the issues suprisingly relevant: Neveryon is about, among many things, how language and culture can perpetuate slavery or any other institution, even on the part of the enslaved. In short, this is a fantasy series about semiotics (and Delaney even says just this).

And yet, reality continually creeps in, sometimes very explicitly. In The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, the story is intermixed with real scenes and interactions ostensibly from Delaney's life at the time of the writing, during the early part of the AIDS crisis in New York, before it was known to have a viral cause (and even before it was known to be contagious). The relationship between the Neveryon and New York portions of the story is not one-to-one however: One does not explain or metaphorise the other per se. In the Neveryon tale, there's a ceremony taking place that is in partial response to the plague while Gorgik the Liberator (who has fought slavery) is pulled into the actual halls of power from which he has been asked by the "Child Empress" to continue to pursue his goal. Numerous characters from the other books and stories of the series are pulled in and swirl around, as do real-life street people with whom the real Delaney has apparently had relationships (sometimes sexual). Meanwhile, the AIDS crsis is in full swing and I am reminded of the confusion we all experienced in those days as neighbors, teachers, friends and others shriveled away and then died in droves.

Indeed, I vividly remember visiting Mr URS in St Vincent's Hospital in the Villiage back in the day (he had contracted food poisoning from a below-ground Chinese takeout dump). I remember coming down some stairs and seeing a gay man in bed who was obviously stricken with AIDS. At that time, however, it was not understood that this was a certain death sentence, so I remember the almost sanguine look on his face as the nurse came in who would facilitate the appropriate treatment or antibiotic.

The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, however, takes place in about 1984, and includes "real time" reporting as the virus is identified and some actual facts about the disease are coming to be understood. It's scary and sad and yet, the fantasy portion seems to bring some sort of escape. No, there's no cure in the fantasy part for the plague either, but the ceremony does seem to bring some hope to the people of Kolhari. One wonders too if the fantasy ceremony (or the ultimate victory of Gorgik) can somehow bring healing or any other kind of help to the real characters living in the midst of AIDS, but it would appear not to be the case.

As I look back on that time, I find myself thinking that I was basically numb to all of the pain and suffering that was going on around us. I guess, as a heterosexual, I figured it had nothing to do with me. Was I simply that callous? Perhaps, but then again we didn't realize for a number of years just how deadly this thing was. In addition, I think I grew up being taught to be oblivious to my own pain, so feeling the pain of others was something that would take me a few years to learn still.