Angel Dust

Curtis

Lemme tell you about the night Fiddy got shot. Shit. Fuckin' night that was. What I remember bout it, that is. It's hazy. Hazy as the smoke from a blunt. A serious blunt. A badman’s blunt. I'll tell you what I can recall. There're some gaps. Wouldn't be a night if there weren't, would it. Course, the memory kinda blanks a bit after we linked up with DMX. Y'all know that if life isn't like a dream after linking with D, y’know, hard to remember, you know he's in that place he sometimes goes, that place where it is only him and the devil, and you know he's hurting like hell, aching in his blood... No such night. He was on form. Big time. Flowing like cosmos, get me? He'd just written a new song. It was about this time he got blazed with these greasy hood rats in England. Naturally, he has some reservations about the U.K. He can't with take anywhere that has estates rather than hoods all that seriously. He finds it funny that there's such a thing as a rapper from Yorkshire. Pussyhole's main influence was Dylan Thomas he said, creasing the fuck up. Still, some things impressed him. Shit, he said, it might be where Prince Charles and Camilla live and all, but those wastemen in the London made Brooklyn crackheads look like Sidney Potier. Then he shook his head. Then he said it again, shit. The song was called For The Boys Hitting The Pipe I Still Got Love For You. He'd read it graffiti’d on a door near a public library in Hackney and it moved him. He dropped us a few licks. Y'all know how emotional he is. Who else could write, say you want to fight me, fight these tears. Seriously. He was ballin' his eyes out as he was spittin'. It was tight. Gave a brother hope. But that was post 9/11. America wasn't ready for that shit. No time for redemption. America was raw as diaper rash, and just as cranky as the baby. Y'all remember how Bush announced the period of grieving was over. Y'all remember how long after that was? Two weeks. Shit. If y'all catch me no longer mourning all I've lost, it'll be me I hopes is dead. If you see me stoppin' droppin' liquor for my fallen boys, my bitches, my homies, my loved ones from back in the day, my dogs back from the block, y'all know, my friends, Warren Beatbox, Sally Alleyway, Welfare Wendy, Gentile Joel, Black Sinatra, Rabid Ruby, White Barry White, Will Spliff, Billy Suicidal, Fanny Howe, Tranny Davis Jnr., Evil Jesus, Elizabeth Rotten, Johnny Cotten, The King of The Juice, Tennessee Tennyson, and Sister Sisyphus, then my black ass seriously ain't worth the fine skin that the good Lord graced it with. Cos' the thing is, as y'all know deep down, when you love a dog, a dog loves back. Alive or not. So if any of y'all see me dry eyed over all my boys that I left behind when I hung my rag up in the kitchen, boys back from the motherland, boys havin' it harder than y'all can imagine, then you'd be right in thinking that all I be is rank meat making a shameful parody of mortality. I'd hold my hands up and admit to that and take a bullet for it. But, no, that ain't me. My grief breathes inside of me. Trust me on that. Damn son. I’m shaking. Enough of that shit, else I'll be the one starts ballin' my eyes out. Let me get back... DMX wrapped up his bit and Fiddy silently nodded in his direction. That from him is like winning the Nobel or some shit. On that he bounced. He bounced higher than Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. Seen that shit? I prefer the books. Momma read them to me when I was little. She used to say, you can have all the money in the world and move a million miles away from it, but you'll never escape the ghetto of the mind if you don't read, Winston. That's how I got my moniker. I was reading at recess and some kid pulls me up on it, so I told him, badman's read. Course, I backed it up by giving him a little lick. Had to. No one fucks with BadMan Winston, Claire Verona said, and it just kinda stuck. She was sort of queen of the school. I wonder what she’s on these days. You should have seen brother, you really should have. I could have married that girl, I really could have. Course, I'd moved on from Winnie the Pooh by the time I hit High School. Still, tho, I get do get sad when I see the cartoons. That's the problem with Disney. It turns everything into a product. Thing is tho, you can't put a price tag on what's real, what's felt. That's why I despair at some of this modern hip hop. The money hip hop that Fiddy, saddens me to say, was a key figure. The rap trap. It's taken the Disney blueprint. Sell, sell, sell. Still, hip hop survive that shit. As Public Enemy will tell you, too black, too strong. It'll break the chains. Y'all know what I mean, a chain of gold is still a chain. My favourite character in Winnie The Pooh is Piglet. You know I got little time for pink skinned Motherfuckas, but Piglet's aight. Most of those cracker bastards though, they just don't relate. It's because deep down they jealous as hell. Seriously. You know what those silly fools really feel towards a brother. Envy. One of the seven sins. They envy us our persecution. The sufferance. The dignity of the flesh. More shit you just can't buy. They're jealous cause the only motherfuckas that fucked them up is themselves. They can't justify their bullshit, so they go beyond. Beyond bullshit. That's why the cops broke so many black bodies last year. Broke them like bread... I despair at times. Fuck the police. Seriously. Fuck this land. I mean it. How do you go from having a brother behind the desk in the oval office to having a klansman? That's why it's the Whitehouse. Damn, show me a brother who can't relate heavy to Eeyore and I'll show you a fella frontin' harder than uncle Tom's nephew. Selling you  more shit than Pharell Williams skipping down the street singing about being happy. Shit so dumb it should be sang in a clown costume by someone with a whited up face. Y'all know what I'm saying. I'm a get too furious if I keep on... DMX bounced and we hit da club. It's probably no big secret that fiddy was pushin' at the time. Naturally a motherfucka piles up a lot of enemies in that game. Well, Fiddy had more enemies than Christ had disciples. Like Christ, I saw Fiddy rise from the dead tho. It was that night. Fiddy got shot that night. Fiddy got shot hard. Shot not once, shot not twice, but shot nine motherfuckin' times. Follow? Here's the thing though, Fiddy didn't give two shits. Fiddy didn't give a solitary shit. Just danced it off. Motherfucka was too high to die. Motherfucka was already in heaven. We'd been doing Angel Dust since the a.m.

The Struggle

The Fall

Broadcast unannounced last Halloween on BBC2 before Live At The Apollo, The Fall was shown with neither introduction nor credits. The measure it took to catch as large amount of the casual viewer as possible, scheduled immediately before a crowd pleasing comedy show, running at around the length of a political broadcast, one wonders if the filmmakers didn’t want the piece to have a moral impact. Almost like a cartoon b-movie during the war years. A warning against something. Satisfyingly, it also works as a little trick or treat in keeping with the hi-jinks of the evening it was shown.

  Anyone who has seen Under the Skin will be aware of the kind of work Jonathon Glazer and Mica Levi can create, so it is just as well it came out of nowhere, out of context, eschewing anticipation and obverting preconceptions, for it’s a great little shock, a poetic piece that gives the audience the jitters by disturbing them into engagement rather than scaring them to the point where they have to close their eyes.

  You can watch by clicking the image below.  

In analysis,

The film starts with the shaking of a tree. The next shot is of a gang surrounding the man who has fallen to the floor from his refuge point amongst the leaves. Everyone wears masks. The aesthetic is a blend of the oriental Noh play tradition mixed with occidental symbols of Melpomene and Thalia (the expressions of tragedy and comedy that have become the symbol for drama in the West). A trial of sorts takes place. Glazer’s visual reference points seem to be a combination of Goya’s The Third of May 1808 and the photographs the soldiers took of themselves torturing the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Thus the notion that the man on trial being an individual who has wronged the society and is facing justice becomes an unlikely conclusion, and it seems much more probable that he is someone trying to evade the oppression of a corrupted authority. Levi uses traditional instruments on her soundtracks while utilising modern sound technology. This takes the film out of any time period past or future. This accentuates the suggestion made that authority has been power’s insidious tool throughout the ages. A timeless tyranny. It is a warning not to see the atrocities of the past as done and dusted. Oppression mutates, it doesn't end, the set design just changes over the ages. The trial concludes with a hanging. The gibbet opens from under the condemned man’s feet and he plummets. However, he doesn’t stop plummeting. The rope around his neck is not connected to a branch. The rope keeps falling after him. The hangmen look down from the top of hole, as people peer down a well, to see the man descend out of sight. Satisfied, they skip away. However, a long way down the man has caught himself by wedging his legs against the walls of the hole. He takes the noose from his neck and the rope falls and falls and falls and we can’t help but think that there is no bottom, the fall is endless. Slowly the man looks down, and then he eventually looks up. Does he cease the struggle and let go and fall, or does he hold on and start the long arduous, quite possibly impossible, climb back up to the top, and out, of the pit and go quite probably back into the hands of his persecutors?

  Glazer has said that he likes the idea of a short film being like trying to compose an articulate sentence. I think The Fall is something like the following two.

   In conclusion, the film forces the viewer to consider the protagonist’s options for themselves, does one either commit one’s self to the difficult climb onward into inevitable uncertainty and little possibility, or resign one’s self to the fall into endless inconclusion? The film advocates that we be brave regardless of the sparsity of hope.

i. the moon is not only beautiful, it is so far away

  I'm thinking about how life changes after something seismic happens. Something that takes us outside of our way of living. Outside of how we thought it was. I’m wondering if it’s a bit like coming back from the moon. I wonder if we don’t come back with a different point of view. Coming back to Earth from the moon is written about very well here lazenby's moon.

  It’s funny to think that already within the space of a fortnight we have a delineating sentiment. Already we’re starting to talk about before the virus in the same way people used to talk about before the war. And now we have a life during the wartime delineation. During the lockdown. And there shall be a hereafter where it will be after the lockdown even if not after the virus. The lockdown is an unimaginable difference to some. An existence outside of hyperreality. It’s been described as surreal, but really is it anymore so than the way were living? Something I’ll be interested in seeing is the immediate fallout of after the lockdown.
  I’ve a funny idea. Not amusing. Just funny. There’s a book that Kurt Vonnegut wrote when he was an old man who’d earned his wrinkles in both thought and biography. It’s called Timequake. I looked up the term timequake in the OED and it lacks a definition. I’ll try..

Timequake.  noun

A timequake is a fracture in the space time continuum where all existence is put in a timewarp where they have to relive the last ten years of lives their as an observer, as in the great timequake of 2003 and when everyone was transported back to 1993 and had to relive the same thwarted flirtations, the same bad hairstyles, the same culinary mistakes, the same corny jokes, and the same deaths of those they held dear over the last ten years again. Hardly a barrel of laughs.

  After the timequake ends, at the precise second where people can continue their lives rather than relive them, everybody just freezes. A kind of apathy petrifies humanity in the same way Ice9 froze the ocean in Vonnegut’s earlier novel Cat’s Cradle and brings an end to man’s existence. A question of free will has inadvertently, inevitably so, has been planted in the everyone’s heads. They are depressed at what they’ve been through. We have to grapple with the idea of determinism. There's a stark ennui revolving around the painful acceptance that the lives we’re living are not necessarily the ones we’d choose. This is true for all (see The Prince and the Pauper for example), but it is most noticeable in the realm of the quotidian, i.e. teachers complaining about marking, nurses complaining about being overworked, waitresses complaining about sleazeballs, prostitutes complaining about cops, cops complaining about being called pigs, students complaining about homework etc &c. Vonnegut illustrates this in the scene where the novel’s hero, Kilgore Trout, the only person not affected by this apathy, and thus not frozen to the spot, looks at the motionless city and tries to wake up the citizens. He runs around and around, wake up, you’ve got free will! he shouts declaringly at the human statues. He spends a long time doing this with no results. Finally he runs into the foyer of a hotel and shouts at the single figure in it wake up, you’ve got free will! Slowly the person in the distance starts to move. They gradually pick up motion. Back and forth they start to move. Free will says the stranger. Why, free will’s a crock of shit says the black janitor as he gets back to mopping the floor. After this Trout amends his message. To revive the people he begins to say You were sick, but now you’re well, and there’s work to do. 
  Of course, the implication isn’t that the sickness wasn’t necessarily the timequake. 
  I can’t fully remember what follows. However, I do remember that it contains a very tender scene afterwards. Kilgore Trout’s swansong. Before he dies there is a ceremony organised to send Vonnegut’s much loved character off. Naturally Kurt is there himself. It would be rude if he weren’t. There’s a lot of love going round. Trout himself is at his most charming. At one point he puts out the idea that Stonehenge was built in a time when the Earth’s gravitational pull was much less and that the ancients could throw around these giant rocks like pillows. I suppose that’s what happens afterwards is that people reconnect. Or, simply, they connect. They've good reason to. they've good reason to do it meaningfully. They develop a human feeling. One which may have been not have been all that there beforehand. Or one that had been lost. 

part of an ongoing series..

GNAWING

Marx and the Mouse

Karl Marx used to write at night. It’s well known. There’s a reason why so many authors write in the nocturnal hours. It’s because there aren’t enough hours in the day. However, if you close the door, as they say, the night could last forever. He’d sit there at his desk, quill in hand, page in front of him, cigar in the ashtray, bottle of port within reach, and do battle with his foe, that succubus feeding off the degradation and misery of man, the ghoul of capitalism, for hours on end upon end. Sometimes there would be a plate of food next to him lovingly prepared by Jenny depending on he behaved that week and the household finances. Often there wouldn’t be.
  O! Prometheus am I, he would cry, this work, this albatross, these buzzards, this never ending peck at my gut, how I am afflicted with it. All his life his the ultramundane shadow of his father’s death to liver cancer shaded Marx’s life. All for what! He’d resume, For trying to enlighten the enslaved! For suggesting there was something other than the dark! For telling Sisyphus to toss aside his accursed boulder! He would despair. I must be the loneliest genius in the world, he would lament. And all geniuses are lonely. He imagined himself Lear, the fool offering him a nuncle to go in place of the crown of his intellect. Tears would fill his eyes. Yes, the loneliest genius in the world. 
  But then, one night; HARK! A sound. Something other than the noise of the scratching of a nib on paper pervaded the desolate chamber. Who could this be, he thought, and, before realising the words forming on his mouth, called out, Papa? Instantly he realised his error and blushed. What a blush. The blush of a great man. If men could die from blushing surely he should have perished. However, more pressing thoughts entered his mind. Perhaps it was an old adversary, some bourgeois intellectual, an agent of mediocrity, whom he’d publicly humiliated, come to taint the work. He sat guarded. No, he thought. The creature, either daemon or mortal, did not sound malevolent. Quite the contrary. It sounded scared. Carefully he traced the sound to its source. Oh look. There it was. A little mouse had found its way into his study. Company. His loneliness lifted. Now how to coax his new comrade- nay, his new friend- to his side. Ah! he exclaimed, once again Lear, this time locked up in jail, abandoned, but now not alone, and he quoted the play aloud, a little melted cheese should do’t. And he put down his plate of scraps beside his chair. The mouse; all eyes, ears, trepidation and fur; approached and nibbled. However, he scurried away before they had chance to get properly acquainted.
  Marx, feigning an air of whimsy, told Engels about this the next day.
  Why Marx, chuckled Engels, it’s not cheese that mice love, it’s chocolate.
  Quite the little decadents, scowled Marx. Yes, quite the little decadents!
  As he made this proclamation Marx wondered where he could pick up a bar of dairy milk on the way home. But how shall I ever be able to attain it, he wondered. Why! By hook or by crook! However else? 

Pentagrams In Snow- Monday 11th

Dear Friends,

Next Monday is the first Pentagrams In The Snow of they year. To mark the occasion there will be a set from Bohman Brothers amidst our cast or regulars and others.

As usual, it is at The Lamb on Holloway Road, from 7.30p.m.

Hopefully see a few of you there.

With warmth,

Sam

December Pentagrams: the light will bend

I hear a tear in the radio static
and see it and melt electric 
into the fibers of your blue, blue dress

starlight peppering the water
in the kitchen sink



------

Friends,
It's the second Monday of the month and with it come Pentagrams In Snow, where we shall tread the boards softly perchance to dream a little dream and maybe drink a little drink or two..

Monday, 9th of December
7.30 onward
The Lamb on Holloway Rd

Pentagrams 14: a dance to the end of the shore

Friends,

Pentagrams 14. I'll be reading Poppy & The Rain. I don't know exactly the others will be reading.There might be a couple more portraits from The Sorrow & The Pity Made Flesh (/this is what you get when you mess with love). Come down.


Monday,  8th of October
7.30 p.m. 
The Lamb on Holloway Road