Archive

Journal

 

Screw faced, 

Not loose screws.

Judge us in haste,

It’s The Daily Mail weapon dog blues.

 

Just ‘cause I wear trainer,

Don’t mean I fit in a box.

Don’t presume we retard,

When we fucking ox hard.

 

We want fields of green,

London is killing me.

Theses streets are so costly see,

Plenty impossibility. 

 

My pit bull’s called Dysnomia: Dissie for short.

We got Greek Gods on speed dial, fuck you up for sport.

 

 

Ellis Tull

10.9.07

 

 

It was a whole bunch of fun having Ellis as a brother for a long stretch. Mischief and banter were tools of the sibling trade and we made the most of opportunity in a brutal looking high-rise. In the kitchen we stood thirty stories deep.

Nose-to-nose with the British Telecom Tower when we washed and dried dishes in the scour proof stainless steel of our teenage years. Living so high up meant that Ellis was fascinated by the effects of gravity: we used to hold plates up, and watch it interact with our reflections in the bubbles. We’d place bets on who’d reach the bottom first, and being older he always won. He was safe, someone to look up too at one point. The real problems started when Charlie the mentalist moved in next-door. The hot water was endless then.

Mum said Ellis hadn’t been right since that school trip turned him doolally. Mum said it freaked him out coming face to face with pigs cows and horses. Other animals recognised him, that’s what she used to say at dinnertime. Ellis said that it was the horizon that flipped him. He said it was unspoilt concrete free 360-degree. I didn’t know what he meant.

Ellis got the shitty end of the stick a lot. He got it worst ‘cause of his dad. His dad was long time trouble. Long time inside, doing bird for plenty. The only time he heard his dad’s voice was when Mum read him the prison letters. The only time I ever saw a photo of his dad was in Auntie Andrea’s knickers draw.

We spent a long time at Auntie Andrea’s when Mum worked at big Sainsbury’s. Auntie Andrea had long legs that used to get dads in trouble all the time. Dad would check those legs like he was the lift inspector. At her feet we had four cousins, but Ellis and I were the eldest, captain privileges every single time we played football in the park. Ellis would scare the crap out of them. And me.

 

It was unreal witnessing him switch. The first school that kicked him out was inclusive – it was a new record for Brent and a family first, that’s what my Dad said. It was one of the teachers at the centre that suspected he was bi-polar before anyone else. She was able to get with him like no one else could – taught him about the Greek gods of war - cheered him right up let me tell you. The medical test results answered a lot of questions, and cusses, and taken into consideration crimes. Mum had washed her hands of him that many times she had raisins for fingers. She’s still got all those poems he wrote her after he went bad though.

 

Ellis had been darked by birds since before he was old enough to get game. It was his bad, perpetually. It just got worse when he started with crazy Charlie. His condition had made for a difficult bedfellow and the one-night stands of carnival and summer time were over before they began. Jealousy and mood swings became the ammunition for relationship warfare, and no one stuck around long enough for peacetime. Mum hated this about him above anything else.

To be fair, Charlie seemed different at first. I never knew she’d take my best friend away. She wasn’t like those other jezebels. She had the kind of loving he needed constantly. He had always longed for stability. She was the worst thing he’d been addicted to: raised on broken biscuits and obliterated crockery, Charlie knew the difference between bastard and fractured. She needed homecoming lips of her own. They fell in an instant. 

When the clocks went forward loving eyes met deranged gazes. They spent days smoking and getting vexed. They spent hours lost in possibilities. Legs and arms and hearts and hair tangled. Matted, platted and battered. The law of friction would bind them permanently. Sexual tensions on a nightly parole, and violent lunges were mistaken for the spectre of true love. Their view of together was built on conflict and reunification.

They deteriorated quick. As the drugs became habitual, so did the drug sex. It sounded like she was killing him in there. Next door would bang on the wall and she’d just turn the music up. I’ll tell you this for nothing: she had a very hot body. Everything was in the right place that’s for dam sure. With the door locked, they’d get up to untold all sorts, all hours of the day and night.

The police knew Ellis and Charlie by name and by sight – they’d been waging the same routine together for so long it’d worn a new gully in the street from our flats to the world famous Portobello market. Saturday was official rich-pickings day. Italian tourists in expensive garments and a quick snatch and dash before the clock stuck one: Dealer O’clock. Those vipers never surfaced in the AM - unlike the meth heads that traded outside Browns dispensing chemist from 8 till 8.

The Saturday Ellis and Charlie got it they had it coming, but goombah Vincenzo never knew what hit him. With that accent he was asking for it. As if my brother and his loco looked like they were in the habit of showing people around the Notting Hill filming locations! Apparently his wife thought she was gonna actually meet Hugh Grant.

More like Divine fucking Brown where he ended-up. Ellis led him of down a side street to meet a generation of urban decay and his clenched fist. Well-versed knuckles dusted the bridge of Vincenzo’s nose underneath the Westway. To Ellis he was a chief on his turf and a prime candidate for a Rolex removal. Time is money he always said: his fucking drug money.

The local radical police force had been on point, and surveillance made it more of a calculated foxhunt than a game of cat and mouse. Ellis ran like fucking Forrest. Pigs were flying in choppers overhead, way above the terminal Italian on the pavement below. Thirty-one stories deep and on the edge of something and absolutely nothing. My big brother was threatening to turn jumper from the tower block that we grew up in.

The feds edged closer on the expanse of flat roof. They didn’t know that Ellis was the non-negotiable kind. He became more volatile by the inch. Crazy Charlie came out of nowhere broke through, and whispered her name in his ear. He lit the pipe and drew her funk in deep around his lungs.

 

One way or another it was inevitable.

Gravity just sped shit up.

 

 

 

Difficult

Not easy -

but the same. I fucked up

Again.

 

Tragic

not always.

But Violent

most.

 

I want it to be different.

But Easy, not the same.

Not shift shoulder to shoulder,

And play in dad’s game.

 

Fuck it I fucked up: I’m gonna have a son.

I can’t take it no more. I’m sorry Mum.

 

Ellis Tull

19.11.09

 

 

 

 

Two New Short Stories

 

The Heathen was a disaster capitalist, a slum landlord that arrived with nothing and took what he could when he wanted. He built an Empire the iniquitous way. The Heathen owned vast swathes of property in West London during the fifties and sixties and beyond. This elephantine portfolio comprised of six entire streets, including mansion blocks in disrepair, decayed Victorian villas and numerous commercial properties. When viewed aerially, the residential properties’ geographical locations formed a perfect triangle. This area became known as The Heathen’s Delta.

 

The glimmering skyline of London is a lighthouse for ambition. It has both fruit machine neon’s and obsidian darkness. The city is widely regarded as an intensely lonely place yet many are drawn in to follow their dreams over a path of metropolitan rooftops. The Heathen provided a nightmare trajectory for his victims, for their families his crimes never grew old. The dark arts he practised left indelible stains on memories and postcodes. Over the decades his myth became impossible to separate from his reality. A few credit him with housing the children of the Windrush generation when no one else would, whilst many blame him for fostering the endemic racism and hatred of the day. This became known as The Heathen’s Paradox.

 

We know for a fact that during his teenage years, his first taste of wealth came at the expense of England’s majestic birds of prey. The Heathen thieved rare eggs from nests and sold them on the black market. At nineteen he became the scourge of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, eradicating the last of the Red Kites from southern England & Wales. The publicity surrounding his arrest gave him a taste of the celebrity bad boy image and the notoriety he craved.

In court, he refused to finger his buyers or disclose the whereabouts of his loot. He received the maximum sentence from a Judge he would later blackmail. His stay at Her Majesty’s pleasure bore poisonous fruit. Large men with primal motives gathered in his cell each night, from where he transfixed them with tales of the empire he would build on the outside. He promised them money, distributed contraband, and received the fortification of a five strong militia. Their penchant for violence proved invaluable when he walked from the prison gates and became a landlord, and then a pimp. There’s no rest for the wicked, and less for the good.

 

The Heathen knew little about the property and lettings business and his entry to it came completely by chance. Ironically, he excelled at it by operating in an honest manner. The market was riddled with fraudsters setting up lettings agencies set up just to take deposits. They vanished whilst too many chased too few flats in the metropolis. Word of his reliability spread. A working girl he frequented was the first to suggest he should become a front for their activities in Paddington, that he would find it easy to let properties without alerting the landowners to the true usage. Years later, this moment would be the identified as single reason why large parts of West London fell into dilapidation and squatting became rife.

 

Wary of another spell in the clink, the Heathen was reluctant at first. He despised registration documents and incriminating paper trails. But spurred on by money, he soon found a way of manipulating British company law, and over the long haul the tax requirements of a dozen countries. With the right advice, edicts on whoring proved just as easy to sidestep. In the eyes of the law, running more than one girl per property constituted a brothel.

To circumvent this The Heathen carved up grand properties into bedsits and ensured each was owned by a different phony company. The once proud stuccoed houses of Maida Hill & Vale, Paddington and Notting Hill Gate were filled with heavily perfumed courtesans. Ownership of these properties lead to Bahrain, the Cayman Islands and the council were powerless to enforce action. Not that the law helped, many of Paddington Police Station were his best customers. One brothel became affectionately known as The Officers Mess.

 

The Heathen is the only landlord with an entry into the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymological roots of the word Randy derive from the brothels he ran on Randolph Avenue. And prostitution was the pivotal part of his early career and the provision of young girls and boys to the landed gentry gave him access to power and license to extort. It wasn’t just money he kept in his pocket. Through peepholes his henchmen took photos. He used these compromising prints of parliamentarians and prominent businessmen as capital, and then ensured local councilors made baffling decisions in his favor. This blackmail established a long reign over the slums, and the tenants, he demeaned. History has shown that he led multiple duplicitous lives at once, and that through his wealth was able to buy women’s silence or virtue, one way or another. His poor wife, his poor, poor wife.

 

Her eyes had been the paragon of sultry looks, but only lachrymose solitude was dragged through her heavily lined lashes back then. In the day she played bridge or tennis with The Hampstead Set. In the evenings the housemaid served her potent sedatives on silver service at her pale pink rococo dressing table. She fingered these pills around the tray in the half-light, turning them over against the contours of the tray; unable to look in the eyes he had once promised the world to. She washed the pills down with Tanqueray and recounted the times she had begged him for a child. She often fell asleep to this refrain.

 

She always knew he had other women. She smelt them on his clothes. She preferred it that there was a cast of floozies at his disposal. Better that than just one other woman that had him completely, the way that she thought she once did. What was loyalty grew into point blank denial. Her lawfully wedded husband spent the weeknights gallivanting, playing the plantation owner, perverting the course of lives and perpetuating a tolerated injustice. The same group of his friends she would cook for on Sundays were always complicit in his midweek activities. Sickening in-jokes were shared across the King Edwards she roasted so lovingly.

 

The Heathen kept his mistresses and whores in his properties. The whores were kept in W9 and the mistresses in W11. The straight line between both areas completed one side of The Heathen’s Delta, and one edge of his complex personality. We now know he only ever had clear feelings for one woman. Trudie of Mayfair was the daughter of a notable ambassador and an iconoclast of wedlock. She was well practiced in the sexual arts of the orient. Trudie and The Heathen first became acquainted at The Clermont Club on Berkeley Square.

 

The Clermont was a perfect venue for a relationship such as theirs, a home for minds concerned exclusively with power and money and domination. An exclusive club where quiet and menacing men gambled fortunes until the early hours, men who had strangled other men and thought this an acceptable modus operandi. Arms dealers, directors of companies with misleading names, jingoist aristocrats and men who believed wholeheartedly in kicking people when they were down: The Clermont Club was their court.  

 

The Heathen showered Trudie with wads of his cum and his money whilst his wife lit the fire and hoped he’d arrive home. Within weeks The Heathen had set Trudie up in a mews house in Notting Hill and paid for the art on the walls and the convertible car outside. Together they entertained the high-society Organ Grinders of The Clermont with the girls she trained, and when they grew bored of the Orient, they went to the ghetto. Bedecked in handmade alligator skin loafers, The Heathen led the privileged to his cortège of Phantoms and cruised the streets of Paddington picking up blacks of both sexes from the fleshpots he ran. This clique grew fascinated with a specific type of racial tension. Trudie considered them sexual explorers, claimed that Dr. Livingstone’s spirit was reborn in hedonistic form. Carnal experiences were spoken of in hushed tones at opulent dinner parties. They became exotic porcelain ornaments on the well-to-do merry-go-round.

 

In return for safeguarding the supply of deviant acts to The Organ Grinders, The Heathen was afforded opportunities to cleanse his money and distance himself from the negativity surrounding the slums he farmed. He bought more property under duress, forced people to sell up with the use of violence and devil dogs. A phalanx of trusts where set up that ensured title deeds unfolded to smoke and mirrors. Every lead that led to him turned cold. Stone fucking cold. The advisors he employed ensured he was able to sidestep the criminal cases and repossessions that good society demanded he be tried for: a reminder that one can always buy injustice.

 

This sexual exploration became The Heathen’s own Waterloo when Trudie became intoxicated with black culture. He wrought out vengeance on the West Indian men that lodged in his properties, daubed racist slogans on the walls and broke up loving relationships just to make himself feel better. The Apostle suffered worst. The Heathen demeaned him frequently in the two dimensional sunlight of summer in the city. Trudie toyed with man dem lust for her, trapped it in a dub echo chamber. She tried to keep the violence of The Heathen’s henchmen to a minimum. The Heathen lied to her about his actions and the trouble he caused to men trying to eek out a new life in a new country. Each of the lovers she took were hunted and forced to disappear from view completely: or fucking else.

 

The Heathen ground Trudie down in the middle of a dank winter and she returned to his side with a list of expensive terms and conditions for doing so, one of which was completely unforeseen and disbelieved by many that knew the couple. Such was his need to control her or to be controlled himself: The Heathen agreed to all without exception.

 

With his business life purged of the ventures that could bring him to his knees, he settled into the shadows of the West End’s cinemas and hotel bars. He knew he was dying. As the heist film Dog Day Afternoon premiered in the cinema next door, The Heathen repented in St. Patrick’s Church, a place of worship built on the site of a mansion-sized bordello owned by Casanova’s mistress.

 

It seemed multiple property deeds would remain The Heathen’s only legacy when The Kingpin Sheikh Al-Thani approached him at The Dorchester with a business proposition. With the proceeds of black gold, Sheikh Al-Thani was in England to open a bank on behalf of his county. The Sheikh wanted to purchase The Heathen’s only Mayfair property in which to house it, a property that was not his to sell. The Levantine pelf arrived in his offshore bank account 72 hours before his death from a heart attack on May 21^st, 1976. This was his final windfall and it vanished along with the rest of his money.

 

The circumstances surrounding his death have become steeped in conspiracy and suspicion. Many said he faked his own death and found refuge in Egypt. There are of stories his abduction by Saudi death squads and Black Panthers.  The establishment pounced as soon as was legally possible, yet found no profits, only defaulted bank loans and unpaid debts. Mountains of financial paperwork led to narrow cul-de-sacs of sweet fuck all. Trudie and his henchmen went to ground in the days after his death.

 

The pathologist that examined his body at St. Mary’s in Paddington said the cadaver had a distinctive tattoo on the inside of the left bicep: text written using the Greek alphabet and a series of sixteen numbers, the final seven of which had been gouged out just prior to or immediately after his death.

 

One rumor emerged and continued to echo in the London underworld in the months after his death. It is said that Trudie was carrying his child when he died, and that her pregnancy was a condition of her returning to him the previous year. Some said she bore The Heathen a son. This whisper reached his wife, who had been left penniless by his debts and broken by his lies. She took her own life months later and is buried alone in Highgate Cemetery.

 

Stories of the Son of the Heathen wouldn’t die. Many wondered what the bastard child of the prototype neo-capitalist and a devious jezebel would turn out to be.

 

It was The Apostle that recognized him first.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homeboy Sandman

 

 

 

Frank Sinatra died some time ago, apparently.

 

The Topical Soundclash

 

Course Fishing

Morning. I did a fun thing. I went back to school for three days, sat in a class. It wasn't just making wise-cracks and affixing chewing gum under tables, I actually learnt a little something-somthing about writing a novel, met some fine people. There will be a 5000 word short story coming soon, but two shorter odds and sods are below, a poem about snack food and an exercise in one word titles. 

Biscuits

The crumbs were moist.

They dropped.

My god I am so fucking fat,

They’ll have to bring a hoist.

 

To carry me with consummate easy,

This opulence makes me shudder.

Waltzing around their high court.

My god I love the Viennese. 

 

<ends>

Desire.

The moment I saw them I felt incomplete. They came from another planet and were worn by men that could jump buildings and men that could deliver lines with a consequential rasp. They spoke of status and of wealth. The screamed cool at everyone that you wanted to notice. Groups of cats would rubberneck at breakneck speed to catch a glimpse of the pair of them.

 

Until they came along the only couplings I’d been remotely interested in were breasts. Nikki had tits, Faye had boobs and Sarah had a cracking set of knockers. But it was that spoilt cunt that had the Nike Air Jordan 1’s. Someone big and hard jacked him soon enough, it’s hard to look cool in towelling socks on a main road, crying.

 

Brrrr!

Gucci Mane in the Membrane.

Are you unable to test you ambition to divine shitness this January? Looking for a way to put you streets behind everyone else, forever? No doubt about it: you should definitely get a face tattoo. You’ve heard lots about them but don’t see them too often where you live, go change that. You really can have effect on the local housing market with the right design.

 

We recommend an own-brand logo or a phallus. Having trouble attracting members of opposite sex, you will do now. Nothing makes you look more like a rapist than some ink on your grill. The fact that your neighbour is selling the flat below needn’t stop you being really free shit. Sleeping in the communal area with the clay figurines you call a family is much cooler with a face tattoo.

 

It’s interviews where face tattoos really come into their own. They make sure your seen immediately and keep your name in their heads. Feel safe in the knowledge that your face will be torturing them way past the meeting and especially after the inevitable rejection letter.

 

 

 

Hope.

Fuck hope. Hope is the suicide bridge that pushes you in the chest not the back, the voice that talks you down from the roof of the office, and the hand that removes the bullets from the gun. You have no hope. It is inconceivable that your boss hasn’t read your response to the Weekly Objectives e-mail, a correspondence that you erroneously hit ‘reply to all’ on just over an hour ago.

 

Añcker is a perfectly normal surname in rural Germany. Using someone’s family name for jokes is popular around the globe and a jocular gateway to affectionate nicknames. It will, however, be extremely difficult to cite this tradition or pretend that ‘wAncker’ was a typo when preceded with the shotgun vitriol of ‘my boss is such an insipid clammy handed autocratic little ……’.

 

Your transport to work may have been delayed, diverted or suspended (late night I presume) and you may feel entitled to those ‘hard-done-by’ emotions from the hairdryer treatment you received when turning up late for the Monday morning sales meeting. All of that is immaterial now. Take a moment to congratulate yourself my apprentice: you’re getting much better at being shitter.

 

What is of interest to Insipid He of Clammy Hands is that you went home sick on your first day back from holiday. Than and the fact that you’ve been ‘hanging out the back’ of Sarah, his 22 year old executive assistant for months now. It has not gone unnoticed that you’re spending way too much time hanging around what he terms each others ‘work stations’, flirting and taking the piss. Give yourself a high-five badman: your devil-may-care attitude to work has infected her productivity and monkeyed with his business travel arrangements. Excessive boozing on a school night and cajoling an impressionable member of the fairer sex into your own abyss is exactly the sort of behaviour applauded at Shit Towers.

When intending to send the aforementioned e-mail to Sarah, referring to the long-standing, jolly and affluent female client as ‘The Cash Cow’ seemed a really funny gag. As did re-typing his words in a German accent and describing, in strip-light detail, the sado-masochistic sex you imagine the client and boss to have in her wipe-clean Panic Room. No one is laughing now: you’re alone on the other side of the line you just crossed. Mr. Añcker never had conclusive proof that it was you that changed his ringtone to Winston Churchill’s ‘Fight Them on the Beaches’ speech, but thanks to Microsoft Outlook, he’s got printable evidence. Accept no responsibility for this internally: blame Bill Gates.

 

Receiving a high-priority e-mail from the Head of HR with the words ‘Unacceptable Racist Behaviour’ in the subject box is enough to sharpen anyone’s attention. Yet you didn’t bother opening it and went for wank in the disabled toilet. Coming back to a work-station and finding your personal effects in a solitary box would usually trigger an anxiety attack mid-recession, not you, you’re wondering if those placards at traffic lights are true. Perhaps you could earn ‘300 pounds a day’ working from home.

 

You are a shithead.  

Embrace it.

 

an open letter to Battersea Dogs and Cats Home

Hello Kind Folk of Battersea Dogs and Cats Home.

 

You may remember me by my nom de plume ‘Dolphin’. Like my favourite recording artist: Prince, I have now changed my name after a difficult period in my life: I am now called Nellie, there are other sobriquets too, but I would rather start this missive retrospectively. I’m writing to inform you of my gratitude to the kennel hands and re-homers, and offer brief reportage as to the state of my affairs since we parted in October. I have such fond memories of my time with you and since I left, my life has become a fantastic adventure. I have leant to type. 

 

Just because I’m deaf, it does not mean I’m stupid: Je suis assez un intelligent (I have also learnt French). L'est magnifique! Most humans are unaware that sign languages translate without regional differences. Treats are, of course, universal and my new folks bribe me with Smackeroo’s when they train me: it’s the most rewarding symbiotic relationship. I love attention and I get it. More specifically, I like my belly rubbed, and chasing a fluorescent Frisbee. This new gaff is well stocked in these orthodox beliefs. Woof-Woof. Woof-Woof-Woof-Woof!

 

On account of my hearing, they wouldn’t let me off the lead for the first month. So I broke off the lead once and then showed them what’s-what, I showed them that I would always follow. I got my Park Freedom 400 Meters Badge very soon after that. Then I met Mr. F. Risbee: I will follow that bright yellow Olympian all day, any day. And then I run back to the old man and refuse to drop it at his feet, run around for a while longer. It is mine after all. Woof.

 

I’ve only shat on the carpet thrice, they called it ‘gifting’ and cleaned it up pronto.

 

Yours truly,

 

Nellie the Deaf Staffy

London

W9

 

Tales of K9 in W9.

 

We recently welcomed a mildly trained feral beasty into the bosom of our family. Meet Nelly: the Staffy / Bull Terrier Collabo. Preconceptions are worthless now: my dogs not badder than your dog, she just loves cuddles on the sofa.

 

She is two years of age, or so the dogs home tell us and as deaf as the post she was found tied to. Now we've got her we feel like we've been without her for ages. Battersea Dogs Home made us all very welcome: we met behind bars, but my better half baked a file in a Bonio and she escaped to victory soon enough, on Sunday October 24th to be exact. She had been abandoned on August bank Holiday weekend, soon after she had had her first littler, kicked out now she’d given birth to the pups they could sell.

 

Out on the road, when picking up her poo, I hold my breath for such an extended amount of time, I’m considering become a Pearl Diver in the New Year.

 

Things we’re learning:

 

Patience.

Sign language.

Wholesale Bribery with Smackeroo’s.

That we can't say no to the below eyes.

 

The Father of My Children

This film totally kippered me. It's very, very good.

 

The Colours of Money

Exceptional work from The Aspirins for My Children. I wholeheartedly recommend a few Jeff Mills.

 

I've Put the Heating On: Goodbye to Summer

    

The Lake District is dope and the sun was long. Ale is best served in an English country garden. The shaddows are behind us. The first days of the winter campaign are underway and the thermals are readying themselves.

Bollocks. 

 

 

Pubic Service

 

 

Right on Time.

 

With Northern Rock.

 

Minty.

 

The Graduate

I was on my way to English lit. when Miss Luck appeared to beckon me in the direction of the main sports hall. She held the previous class on the account of the absence of our usual P.E teacher. She neither waited for me to catch up, nor caught my eye to offer conformation that I should be following. My teenage mind wanted, hungered, fantasized about getting inside.

 

When seen from the eyes of a 15 year-old boy, the exceptional body of a 24 year-old woman is a playground: I wanted a go on her tits. Black leggings advertised assets, I could just make-out the line of her knickers in the half-light of the stairwell. She is lithe, provocatively so. The fabric was under the most satisfying of duress, expanding, differing textures detonating curves. At the bottom of the stairs, she held the door open and spoke for the first time.

 

‘It’s this way Austin’

I do not get a chance to reply.

 

We were no longer going in the direction of the sports hall, but to a corridor that ran parallel. She opened the door to the storage room and I walked through, she followed me through and locked the door, bringing her fingers to her lips and shhing. Then walking towards me. Filth all I can think is filthy.

 

‘I saw the way you were looking at me today Austin’

‘I liked it’

 

Holy fuck.

Mrs. Robinson shaped explosions are happening everywhere.

Miss Luck stops close to me, grabs my hand and places it on the busty exterior of her tracksuit. I can feel her watching me as she unzips her tracksuit top. I move my hand inside too nervous to break eye contact. She kisses me slowly and full of purpose, pulls me closer. I have still not said a word, my mouth is dry, my heart races. We are flushed and hard, nipples hard, dick hard, she starts to pull the leotard off both shoulders and that’s when the dream stops. 

 

Wait for it.

This is a new sound from Columbia, which is just off the coast of Kilburn. This track features the most inventive dog barking sample since Cat Stevens 'Was Dog a Dougnut?' (below). In the right mood i could just about manage a hand in the air moment (i said right mood and just about). 

 

 

This came through the door without any sense of irony.

 

 

New Shit

 

Some new stuff for the book.

Drawing is often better than typing.

Cycling is often better than walking.

Wanking is plain and simple.

Don't quote me on that.

 

 

 

It's the Real Thing.

Bogota Airport anti-drug tzar Col. Jose Piedrahita made an interesting find (see below) on a routine check at the airport on Friday. A lovely work of gak folk art in a the shape of the World Cup trophey bound for Madrid. I'm unsure if this was for the palyers upon returning from the World Cup should they win or to drown thier sorrows if they don't. Either way, full marks for the idea, half marks for the execution.

Good luck tomorrow to the Spanish. Venga.

 

Tit Calligraffiti

http://www.nielsshoemeulman.com/

 

B B Q X H A P P Y

 

Rude Britannia and RCA Show

Bono and Sting gutted and David Shrigley's old cat at Tate Britan.

The RCA show had a couplacorkers: Jean Jullien and a charming illustration fun squad called AHA staffed by Nazareno Crea and Molly Kyh. 

check Jean out here http://www.jeanjullien.com/

 

 

Cool Like Dat

Digable Planets 'Rebirth of Slick'

1993: Nuff said.

 

My Dog's Deader

 

 

 

 

(w)OOF.

 

FLY-BY LAY-BY

His name is Carl and he has a burger van and he called it Carlsburger. I like it a lot.

It's on the A11, Norwich style and pattern.

Give me six etc.

 

Sausage Soundclash

There's a new vendor in town and he's reppin' out of Chelsea, home of Tory Boy esq. and All American Frat Boy City Boy Jnr. The locals round here remain unaware that one can actually put arms inside the sleeves of ones jumpers as well as tie them around your shoulders. Like whoa.

Enough of all that, I'm not here to discuss knitwear, just the pork and the pastry. It's rare combo the swine and the pint and that's what makes it so darn especial. Hat's off to The Anglesea Arms for one of the finest homemade Sausage Rolls in Laaandon town. Check 'em at 15 Selwood Terrace, SW7 3QG.

 

 

Writing Adventure Vol. 2

Morning.

The second part of the writing adventure (see below post) cum rave was another question. This question was 'Is there such a thing as a perfect mind and what would it think?', my answer in the form of a poem is below.

Stay Gold.

The Perfect Mind and the Imperfect Body.

The perfect mind has no need for the Cello.

Its processes utterly functional,

Overarched in yellow.

Its needs always minimal,

One plus two,

The information it assimilates,

Bound together with Pritt Stick.

 

 

Thinking in a straight line,

Needs must and they do.

Why waste your time on the many,

Think of few, few, few.

 

 

From 850 BC,

To last orders with Moe,

What can’t be gleaned on a bar stool,

Nobody should know.

There is talk of an odyssey,

There is action with beer.

Drink a couple more now.

All becomes clear.

 

 

Fried and doughy,

Sugary and sweet,

He can’t see past belly,

Unrecognized are his feet.

To some they're called Churros,

To others heart attack,

If you took one from Homer,

He fucking wants it back.

 

Love Gravity

Guess what?

The London Literature Festival is coming to town on 1-18th July, at the Southbank Centre to be specific. As part of the festival Spread the word and Coney Agency are running what's termed a 'Writing Adventure'. I have no clear idea what this is but it sounds a bit like a M25 Rave: you meet in secret destinations, obtain clues on what to write and then meet at another location to further the plot. In order to obtain a place on the course, applicants had to provide a 500 word answer to the question 'Is Gravity Responsible for People Falling in Love?’ my answer is below.

 

 

LOVe GRaVITY

It was a whole lotta fun having a younger brother for a long stretch. Mischief and banter were tools of the sibling trade and we made the most of opportunity and modest upbringing in a freaky-deaky looking London high-rise. In the kitchen we stood nose to nose with the Telecom tower as we washed and dried dishes in the scour proof stainless steel of our teenage years. The real problems started when Charlie the psycho enchantress moved in next-door. The hot water was endless then.

 

James had been darked by le birds since before he was old enough to know better. It was his bad, perpetually. His bi-polar condition made for a difficult bedfellow and the one-night stands of carnival and summer time were over before they began. Jealousy and mood swings became the ammunition for relationship warfare and no one stuck around long enough for peacetime. He longed for it and Charlie seemed different at first. Raised on broken biscuits and obliterated crockery, she knew the difference between bastard and fractured and needed homecoming arms of her own. They fell in an instant. His affection was always an anvil perched on an insecure edge.

 

Loving eyes met deranged gazes. They spent days smoking chronic getting vexed. They spent hours lost in possibilities. Legs and arms and hearts and hair tangled. The laws of friction would bind them permanently. Sexual tensions on nightly patrols, primeval urges mistaken for the spectre of true love, their view of completion was built on conflict and reunification. They deteriorated. The drugs and the sex got harder became habitual. The police knew them by name and by sight. Saturday was market day, rich-pickings all round. Italian tourists in expensive garments are a quick snatch and dash before the clock stuck one: Crack Dealer O’clock on road. 

 

The day they got they had it coming. Goombah Vincenzo never knew what hit him. A brotherhood of knuckles ruptured the bridge of his nose under the Westway. To James he was a chief on his turf and a prime candidate for a Rolex removal. Time is money he thought, my fucking drug money. The local radical police force had been on point and surveillance made it more of a calculated foxhunt than a game of cat and mouse. Charlie got left in the dust but she knew where he’d go and hid from blue flashing eyes. My baby brother threatening to turn jumper atop the tower block we grew up in. Twenty-four stories high and on the edge of something and absolutely nothing. Pig helicopters circling overhead, a terminal Italian on the pavement. The pigs edged closer on the flat expanse of roof, James more volatile by the inch. Charlie broke through and screamed his name. His plummet was silent. The real noise came when he landed, euthanizing her in the car park.

 

One way or another they were always falling.

>Gravity just sped shit up.

 

 

Asking the Same Question

 

Rock Chicks (sorry)

 

Kids in America

 

Ride, Rise, Roar

David Byrne is my favourite polymath.

If he wasn’t so magnanimous with his own prodigious talents, you could argue that they were undemocratically placed, as they are, wrapped around and in between one human being called David. This is a documentary about his last tour, which I was lucky enough to attend on three occasions; like the other fella with white hair, he doesn’t come around everyday, best make hay, hey?

The tour featured dancers, more Swan Lake than Go-Go, at points they darted across the stage on office chairs. Shhhhhsometimes I do this when everyone has gone home. I recommed it as a tonic.

You can view the tralier here http://www.rideriseroar.com/

 

Ol' Dirty Winehouse

There are many things I find endearing and alluring about our cousins from across the English Channel. A sense of style, the accent, Mai 68, the wine, the food (i could go on): yet all of these talents are superseded by their nations inbuilt & glorious nonchalance (itself a word of French origin).  It is in this spirit that I’d like to talk about Wine.  This is a case of plonk shipped to a load of plonkers. 

That’s one and a half million cases and a pair of American plonkers.  

Ernest & Julio Gallo is the largest family owned winery in America, started by a pair of enterprising young brothers (white grape) soon after the repeal of Prohibition (just wrong) in 1933. They are not squeaky clean but they sure know a profit when they see one. It would, however, seem that they couldn’t smell a con if it was right under their noses.  The favourite movie of middle class alcoholics  ‘Sideways’ had ensure that the Pino Noir grape would be a good bet for a ‘tipping point’ triumph.  As the films metaphoric usage suggests: it’s very rare, it’s not easy and there’s never a surplus, only the deserving will end up sniffing the Championship bouquet. Only the duped will fall for a fake.

 

Entre Monsieur Claude Courset, filthy rich, head of Ducasse Wine and recent recipient of a six month suspended jail sentence and a 45,000 Euro fine. It was his idea to repackage eighteen million bottles of wine label them as Pino Noir and export it to E&J Gallo for resale at a huge profit. It wasn’t the American consumer that noticed first, nor E&J Gallo: it was the French inspectors amazed at just how much of the troublesome grape had grown and made it to market. It hadn’t.

One of the accused told the local news ‘At those prices, we would of put Yoplait on the label if they had asked us’.

C’est Bon.

 

J Dilla Doc. Pts. 1&2

 

Not for Prophet

Jacques Audiard new movie ‘A Prophet’ is dope.

There’s nothing like adversity to put hairs on your chest and, for lead character Malik, getting locked up is the just beginning in a long line of challenges and opportunities. Part of the Arabic underclass he is forced into a dead end situation by a Mafia Don: his options for survival are wretched and cutthroat.

There’s killers, there’s players, there’s dealer and him.

Yet this is situation he thrives in, gradually turning it to his advantage as the film unravels, displaying a streetwise guile that makes Machiavelli’s politics look like child’s play. Scarface should watch out: there’s a new knife in town and he's smiling.

 

 

FIT

 

Guantanamo Decorators

 

Tails of Two Cities

 

 

It’s an unfortunate time of year for our four-legged friends. Old adages ring true as dogs homes experience a sudden influx as January plummets from Decembers asshole. One story caught my eye a couple of weeks back. It highlighted social differences between metropolitan cities on both sides of the Atlantic, differences that are linked by our dear friend Rover. In a very perverse and nonsensicle way, it makes me glad I'm British.

 

Over in sunny California, the Chihuahua is having a rough time of it. The skinny little dog made popular by another skinny little dog, Paris Hilton, is the areas most unwanted pooch. In the bay area alone, around 300 are handed in unwanted each month, this is, like totally topped by LA, with a staggering 400 Chihuahuas forming an orderly cue in a distinctly doggy style death row. As with most fashions, these dogs soon fell foul of new trends: smaller handbags offered no space for pint-sized pooches.

 

Closer to home, it’s The Staff that saturates the kennels of England. These dogs stand for an all-together different type of glamour yet feed on a similar need for status. A walk around the Battersea Dogs Home website will tell you all you need to know about the epidemic rise of Staffs and Pit-bull crossbreeds in the UK. Scrolling through the web pages of unwanted dogs is heartbreaking stuff, puppy love turned into doggy divorce very quickly and these mutts didn’t have a lot to say in the matter, never mind a lawyer.

Both breeds represent female and male trends in ownership linked by a common need for status in their respective societies. In these instances the dog is an accessory for fashion or fear and not four-legged kinship.

 

Oof.

 

 

 

Good Ol' Jan

 

This One's 4U Mr. D. Cameron

 

Quote of the Day

‘I do admit to having a chronic inferiority complex but I’m willing to wager mine is better than anyone else’s’

Arthur Koestler

 

Outsider Art

I went to the Museum of Everything at the weekend and had a very good time indeed.

The aptly titled exhibition No. 1 is full on feast of folk art from around this place we call Earth. The works on show come from a variety of artists, take a variety of forms with the commonality being all practitioners exist outside of the commercial art market and mainstream society. This is Art intrinsically free from a need to conform and this is where its beauty glows with an unpatrolled vibrancy. It ranges from the fairytale to the religious and the macabre to the life affirming.

The gallery itself is a disused dairy in Primrose Hill and I'm hard pushed to think of a more charming place to visit to inspire creativity. You can find more details by clicking here: http://www.museumofeverything.com

 

Orson Welles Pissed

 

 

Insider Art

“OK. Hands up. Look, I know I embezzled a shit load of cash, assaulted more than a few people, did murdered, did the bunk, went on the lamb leaving a trail of destruction (that we don’t need to go into) before getting a 5 stretch but in this godforsaken gaol, BUT I really, and I mean REALLY, need that Winsor & Newton Artisan Oil in Cerulean Blue Hue before I stab this slag with a handmade paperclip shank; my solo show at Haunch of Venison opens next week. You cunt”

I recently brought some prison art and viewing it throws up some difficult questions and I reckon that’s one of its strongest points. Looking at a challenging painting completed behind bars, by an inmate serving time for a crime (for which you remain unaware of its severity) offers many of the same emotions as looking at a piece by the Chapman Brothers; you often question the state of the artist first before examining what they’re trying to say. By its very existence, prison art fits the shock doctrine so famously manipulated by some of the most successful YBA’s.

 

Our increasing fascination with the inappropriate & macabre stems from a number of places, at one end of the spectrum, the wholesale abolition of the concept of Hell in the 1960s (the invention of the Pill and its resulting choices for Roman Catholic women saw to this) afforded a new light on an old subject and at the other, throwaway nihilistic popular culture. Or just maybe ‘skulls just look rad!’ who knows?

 

The emotional interior landscape of prisoners is not addressed by back to work schemes and first and foremost, these programmes offer individual, and moreover, peaceful expression and an all important sense of identity in an often hostile name and number environment. Participating prisoners talk in overwhelming positives, from something good to discuss with their families to good ole fashioned hope.

The Koestler Trust was set up in 1962 to help prisoners find a voice and its first public show was held in Foyles Bookshop on the Charring Cross Road, the winner received a cash prize paid for by its founder, writer and thinker, Arthur Koestler.

 Arthur Koestler was no stranger to controversy himself. He had been imprisoned a number of times, firstly at the behest of El Bastardo Franco and secondly by the French for subversive activities at the start of WWII (from which the UK secured his release only to lock him up as an illegal immigrant when he arrived in the UK, doh).

He tirelessly campaigned for an end to capital punishment. Riddled with both Parkinson’s and Leukaemia took his own life in a suicide pact with his healthy wife in 1983. His is an interesting story, no-diggidy, no-doubt.

 

An exhibition on Prison Art is on at the Royal Festival Hall until December 3^rd.

 More reading:

http://www.koestlertrust.org.uk/homeAK.html

 

Fish Tank the Musical

 

 

The T-Cell Chronicles

During the process of this thing called grief, I have been forwarded similar points of interest by some caring people. Few have invoked the reaction in me that Hanah Mackeys blog has. Her man and father to her children, Paul Stevenson, was diagnosed T-cell Lymphoma, a rare and aggressive form of cancer. Hannah decided to keep a record of it, on line and in full view and in total honesty. It’s the very opposite of a lugubrious state of mind and so unswervingly brave it'll put hairs on your chest.

Paul took pinky to keys for the last post and this serves as not only a reminder of him but also an offering of hope to people in similar situations. In cases such as this, technology can be such an enabler of human spirit and as an intrinsic luddite, for once I salute its bandwith desires.

You can view it here http://t-cellchronicles.blogspot.com/

Hannah is the Don, Capice?

 

Things That Keep Me Amused

#2 Biggie Space

 

If the first verse of a record opens with the line 'If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe' you know you're in for a fun time.

If you then find out Stephen Hawkins does a guest rap, you may well get a boner or a wide-on, indeed. If both of these facts turn out to be true and you subsequently find out that Jack White is releasing it on a limited edition 7inch single; you'll be as happily confused as I am.

God bless America and Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawkins.

 

Labour Intensive

 

BIG FISH / BILLY OCEAN

 

The waters off Kenya’s gold coast are undergoing a flourishing transformation.

The seas are stuffed to the gills and the indigenous fishing industry is making hay. Regular £200 catches in an area where the average earning is a meagre £5 makes local people very happy. Shooting fish in a barrel is not what the fishermen said but what I thought of writing here.

The Chinese and Japanese super-trawlers are scared of the Somalian Pirates that command the high seas around that neck of the woods. They have altered their routings accordingly.

This offers indisputable proof that it’s environmentally friendly to become a Pirate.

Pieces of Eight Mo’ Feckers, Pieces of Eight.

 

Ed Ruscha

I have been a fan of Mr. Ruscha since my friend Richard Hogg mentioned I should check him out a few years back. The current retrospective on London’s South Bank is the first time I’ve seen a solo show of his work and it's pretty darn special.

Part draftsman, part social commentator, all American boy; it’s this mix of attributes that make him one of the great post war Artists. His growth as an artist often mirrored the growth of the fledgling ‘mad-men’ USA advertising industry. For me, his reclassification of these graphic images holds a different resonance in our current financial predicament. Exposure to the wholesale-retail of The American Dream ™ and its corresponding use of language and billboards must have been a very new phenomenon, its effect on social behaviour unknown or ill considered. His training as draftsman for Walt Disney could hardly have been more perfect for the subversion to come.

 

His work is playful and inspiring and when viewed together, gobsmacking.

 

On at the Hayward now until Jan 10.

 

Shock and Awe Patchwork Inc

 

'I COULD TELL YOU BUT YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE DESTROYED BY ME' is not a self-help book.

 

It is a book on the Uber-Handycrafts of the USA Army and its iconography. These decorative military uniform badges offer a valuable insight into the CIA's finest needle work and 'black opps'. As you would imagine, these missions are cloaked in a secrecy and not friends with Area 51 on facebook, but we do know they command a $27 billion dollar budget, each and every callender year. 27 Billion and good ole Dick Nixon's not even in office.

Big budget weapons, Massive Cigars, Clandestine Operations and Brilliant Strap-lines. It's just like the X-Factor!

 

Hell, Yes!

Is it a Gallery?

Is it a stack of speakers?

Nope; it's a dope factory.

I caught the excellent Emory Douglas retrospective; he was the creative force behind The Black Panthers. Strong imagery conveying powerful messages, square in the face of a repressive regime. Good job, well done.

 

The New Museum, Manhattans lower east side on Bowery. Cracking gift shop too.

 

Things that keep me amused:

Number 1: P.I.N. Face

 

P.I.N Face is a new affliction and one that only strikes shop assistants and cashiers and, rather alarmingly, it seems to have varying degrees of potency solely dependent on the value of the current transaction. P.I.N face is the moment that the shop assistant demonstratively ‘looks away’ whilst you enter you P.I.N code.

 

From experience, a small transaction in a local shop does not require the same amount ‘I will never steel from your account brother’ neck gesturing as a organic deli does. JD sports induces a ‘what’evs mate’ motion. My worse / best P.I.N face is that of the boutique clothes shop 'I’m actually an actor (or model slash actress) and I’ve served people considerably richer than you, regularly’ assistant. I have developed a strategy for maximum pleasure in these consumerist times, as they pass you the handheld terminal, mentally insult her (quite personally) and watch in delight as the aforementioned snobbish look is buggered beyond belief.

 

Idi Amin: C*nt, funny C*nt

 

I do not want to encourage tyrannical behaviour of any sort. If you’re sitting reading this thinking of becoming, you know, a dictator, don’t bother: nothing good will come of it.  Ladies and Gentlemen, Idi Amin who was described by one of the white British ruling classes as ‘a splendid type and a good rugger player but virtually bone from the neck up and needs things explained in words of one letter’.

 

One word runs concurrent throughout our nations descriptions of past dictators and that word is Bastard. Often prefixed with Evil, Cruel or Heinous but rarely has Cheeky fit the bill. Short on empathy but long on brutality, Idi had an individual and equally incendiary way of dealing with the pomposities of the British Empire and it’s this ‘fuck you’ attitude to colonialism that’s worth retelling. Upon hearing of Lord Snowdon’s divorce from Princess Anne in 1975, Cheeky Idi* sent a telegram announcing that his ‘experience will be a lesson to all of us men to be careful not to marry ladies in higher positions’. During the quagmire that was British life of the 1970’s Cheeky Idi organised an appeal to help the 3 day week sovereignty through the crisis, he personally donated 10,000 Uganda shillings and organised one whole lorry load of vegetables and wheat which he ordered Prime Minister Ted Heath to collect by aircraft before it went bad. He called the Queen ‘dear Liz’ and held the British upper class in high contempt. NB: Scotsmen personally trained him.

 

 *Cheeky Idi murdered 300,000 innocent people

Notation from Francis Wheen’s fantastic new book ‘Strange Days Indeed’

 

SUM

 

Neuroscientist in mind altering book non-shocker.

Science has taught us many things about life, many things about our beginning and many things about our demise. It hasn’t, however, shed any light on what happens when we pop-off this mortal coil. This perfectly formed book by writer and David Eagleman offers 40 insights as to what may or may not happen.

Written with such a humanistic approach to science fiction Kurt Vonnegut is very probably dancing the fandango in his grave as I type. The clarity of vision and wit contained within its 110 pages stopped me, stone cold, in my tracks on several occasions. By way of example, in one chapter ‘Metamorphosis’ he supposes that there are 3 deaths, one where the body ceases to function, the second when your body is consigned to the grave, the third and time when we truly die, is that moment your name is spoken for the last time. The irony of this place is that many people never meet their loved ones again as they we’re the only ones remembering their name.

Think about that.

Freaky Deaky

 

Fish Tank

 

 

Don't watch that: watch this.

Fish Tank is the story of Essex girl Mia and her tres potent teenage rage. Mia head-butts a butters member of an s-tate Girls Aloud in the opening scene and it get’s rougher and tougher from there on in. The dialogue is brutal and the soundtrack is on the money: there’s even a close up of the excellent Soul Jazz compilation ‘An England Story’ so the hard of hearing know it’s a banger.

It's one of the best films I've seen for an age. It's Kes for southerners.

Yes, it's that good. 

 

I'm Not Making This Up

Let’s hear it for Das Racists!

 If, like me, you’ve been bored shitless with racism, sorry, hip-hops recent offerings, you’ll be encouraged by the arrival of Das Racist. It’s sounds inventive and the lyrics are both intelligent and stoopid, daft and punky and the production doesn’t give a flying feck for tradition. The ensemble is partly staffed by Victor from Crooklyn’s premier ironic party vendors ‘Boy Crisis’ and I was fortunate to make his acquaintance on one of their visits London in spring of last year. I took them on a walk though one of the Queens very own parks and was absolutely amused as Victor and band mate Tall (no shit, the smallest member of the group) tried in vain to fuck catch a Swan on the Serpentine.

Beastiality means nothing to Das Racists; it’s just a walk in the park.

www.myspace.com/dasracist

 

---

 

 

A Fever Called Swine.

 

Sex and drugs and sausage rolls is all my brain and body needs.

Often overlooked for an overrated pork pie, the Disputed Champion of the Savouries isn’t to be fucked with lightly and I’m currently pushing for some sort of Sausage Roll kite mark to avoid your disappointment. It’s sad to say but in undertaking the commitment to produce the prefect Sausage Roll all but the brave fall in its shadow.

How hard can it be? I hear you ask.

Let me talk to you about the troubles.  

It’s warfare out there. A lot of people don’t agree with the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘tasty’ and there’s more than a few conscientious objectors. Fucking Vegetarians. They are not freedom fighters. They’re just uninformed. Although clearly clever: the merger with the Health Brigade was a master-stroke and has all but destroyed the Pork Rebel Alliance (PRA or The Real PRA). For many dark years this level of outright devotion and commitment to cause has been some underground business. I’m talking to you now from a secret room in the attic of the attic in the Anne Frank museum. Oh the meaty irony.

This battle and its resulting blockades have forced a stranglehold and pushed the majority of guerrillas’ underground. Dissenters wander arid cityscapes in search of a vendor to call the Supreme Being: a human so divine that serving religions sullied mammal on a daily basis actually perks-up their supremacy, one banger at a time.  In my lifetime, the black market has never had such piety.

Many ‘manufactures’ (for craftsmen they are not) in today’s market take the refrigerated and regurgitated route. Others pay no attention to form, both skimp on the sausage. Or worse still: get absurd with the pastry. Clue is in the title dickwads: Sausage Roll.  Greggs isn’t the only villain on the high st. and Tamiflu is rendered impotent by the severity of this swine crime.

GREGGS FOR THE GOOD OF HUMANITY: GIVE IT UP!

Sure, we had a few dwrunken Saturday afternoons together but I knew you were a bit of a chief back then. I was just using you. Now you’re just making a fool out of both of us. Times have changed mate. Fix up or forget about it.

Rest assured that this is no class-war; I’m pleased to tell you that the bouji-butcher also makes mistakes. More often that not, showing out with sausage so rich suckers salivate.  This upper middle class affectation does not float my yacht, yah.

I believe that sausage rolls represent a stolen moment and therefore should not be viewed as breakfast, lunch or dinner. It would serve many well to remember that the king of snacks will not be confined by convention. To this end the champions’ sausage roll should be snack sized, by my measurements this is 90 x 70mm, with pastry crusty and approximately 2mm thick. This form doesn’t fill you up, leaves you satisfied able to eat lunch ('what sausage roll Miss?') and most importantly, leaves room for another if you really feed the need.  I'm writing this in Barca and my stomach is suddenly well-homesick for West London.

My sausage roll Nirvana is, rather handily, on my route to work and postal coordinates W11 2JA. Denying myself the pleasure of a daily dose has become one of the unexpected joys of my adult life. It also makes Friday mornings a monumental celebratory experience. Mr. Christians on Blenheim Crescent just off London’s Portobello Road is a place built by food lovers for food lovers. And tourists. Less deli and more de-lightful these fuckers know how to get down with the swine, the slightest seasoning and the pastry.

At this juncture I had planned to produce a top ten and map of where to find them but that’s just a ludicrous waste of both of our time. As my girlfriend recently noted ‘It’s just a sausage roll Austin’. Suffice to say places that deserve your tummy love include many of the nations on-site farm stores (Grasmere Farm in Market Deeping, I salute you), if you’re very hungry the Ginger Pig in Borough market, Waitrose’s bouji version excursion and of course Mr. Christians.

But be warned if there’s only one left, I will fight you for it.

TONY SAPRANNO

If any of you have a vendor contender, let me know where and I’ll post the info once I’ve verified its authenticity.

 

Dan the Don

It’s not every day that an album this grand comes along but that day was 10^th February 2009.  It has not left my car, home stereo or cortical hemispheres ever since.  

This is an album in its truest sense: a collection of songs that hang together like heartfelt and connected emotions on life’s sinuous road, eternally embodying more than the sum of their singular elements. As a songwriter he asks questions and demands answers, never over complicating with metaphor he sets new standards in straight talking and manages to sound effortlessly comfortable, tender, aggressive, lost and assertive over the course of two verses and one chorus. Over the course of 14 songs: you’ve walked a lifetime in heartaches cowboy boots.

Murder ballads for the broken man, a Heist record for the G’s, delicate midnight lullabies for those lovely ladies out there and stone cold classics for all and sundry. In this town called Auerbach subterranean blues guitars skank their way over drum patterns rock-steady and sure-fire. Dan’s a white man for the sole reason of the skin he’s in as this music is raw and tender like Andre Williams fighting Screamin’ Jay Hawkins in a downtown sushi restaurant. Rest assured: he is one of the songwriters of our generation.

The album already had me firmly by the balls and then I saw the live show. Fuck me. Dan Auerbach and the Fast Five play like a bunch of desperado gangsters and look like, erm, a bunch of desperado gangsters. If the Reservoir Dogs movie had house band, they’d no doubt be it. The Furious Five are in fact ‘Hacienda’: a family band from San Antonio, Texas whom I was lucky enough to see them perform at SXSW in Texas in 2004. Rene Villanuva looks like John Leguizamo (Tybalt Capulet) and plays bass like a vexed wasp, all action and meaning, his weapon strapped short just in case he’s got to plant a quick right hook. The rhythm section bangs, hard.

It’s only fair to end on Dan, he clearly means it when he’s up there and it clearly means everything to him, there wasn’t a guy that wasn’t impressed and engaged or a lady in that audience that wouldn’t of capitulated in his gaze that night.

 

Like I said: Dan the Monster Don.

 

http://www.myspace.com/danauerbachmusic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXrj6Ch5n5E&feature=related