Welcome to Britain
Dec. 28th, 2004 12:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusBritain starts 35,000 feet above Holland. The Berlin - London paddy wagon is crammed. Ryanair have me strapped into a seat and, yes, they're going to sell me snacks and duty free goods and yes, they're going to market to me. After all, the price I paid for the seat barely covers the airport tax. So in between the ads for perfume and that infuriating grammatical gaffe about how 'the use of mobile phones... cannot be used' comes an announcement that cut-price tickets for the Stansted Express are available from stewards, but that the Stansted Express has today been replaced by a coach service. I buy a ticket anyway. How the fuck else am I going to get to London? Welcome to Britain!
The marketing is slick and constant, nothing works, and it's twice the price it would be back home. And there's some sort of druggy, boozy menace hanging over the streets at night. Blame the binge drinking sprees! Have a happy smashed British Christmas!
We stop at a filling station on the Shoreditch High Street to buy some food. A homeless man is sitting at the entrance. 'Spare some change, please? Spare some change?' A black man gets out of a BMW and comes over to reform him. 'Look at yourself, mate, you've got to stop using the stuff. Go to a gym, man, do a workout, get out of this state you're in, it's a fucking shame on you, man!' He's a winner, the junkie's a loser. Go to a gym, start a business, buy a BMW, join the winners. It's dog eat dog.
Hisae and I are staying with friends who live off the Hackney Road. They're expecting us, but when we ring the bell there's no answer. Thank heaven for cell phones, which allow you to change your plans without telling anyone! We don't have one, but they do. So we find a phone box -- it really stinks in there, but at least the phone works -- and call our friends. Ah, they went to a pub across the road! We go in to meet them. It's ferociously loud, a kind of slick-brutal house club with bad 90s acid graphics, threatening bouncers and boom tsssk boom tsssk boom. People float around with a kind of wide-boy gait. Menace and hedonism. We take the key and tell our friends we'll see them back at the flat. Not my scene.
The lift has a sign in it that says 'Please do not use this lift as a toilet'. What do they take us for? Why not say 'You are a cunt, aren't you'? The assumption of guilt. But our hosts later tell us that the lift is used as a toilet. Often. Fuck. Welcome to Britain!
The flat is sordid; toilet paper, debris and detritus everywhere, a bunch of TVs, foul blue spotted carpet. Art students live here, but what's the aesthetic? Maybe some approximation of Corinne Day shitty junkie chic. We switch on TV. There's an awards ceremony; celebrities pay tribute to other celebrities. There's lots of Bono and lots of Robbie Williams. 'Listen to the radio, you will hear the songs you know.' Marketing, innit? Jools Holland drifts around, a bit more bloated than I remember him. There are video clips of people saying how perennially great U2 are. No dissenting opinions at all. A lot of applause.
Our friends return from the pub, extremely drunk, and sit with us, smoking heavily, demolishing a bottle of red wine. It's, like, 3am. I'm too polite to tell them I don't smoke, and they don't seem to notice. Well, it's their house. The conversation is about drugs. E can't believe I've never taken any. I say it's because drugs tend to make everyone act the same way. E illustrates my theory by alternating aggressive questioning with declarations that I'm his best mate in the entire world. Several times he shakes my hand. We're two Celts who gave substantial chunks of our life to London. Why? The girls sit on the folding bed and speak Japanese. They won't stay long now they've got their MAs. I'm tired, but this chat is something we have to do before we can sleep. I try not to cough or seem too self-righteously sober.
The next morning the taps in the bathroom don't seem to work, and neither does the flush in the toilet. Fuck! At least I'm able to shower. I don't think I could bear to be dirty in London. It already feels like a gigantic toilet. Crossed with an advertising agency. An advertising toilet? Why not? Clever marketing idea! Out on the street, I see a bus with an advert on the side that says 'More Glitz! The Brent Cross Centre, feed your addiction'. Feed your addiction? Fuck, you mean become like that junky we saw last night at the filling station? Have drugs and celebrity become metaphors for everything in Britain? Are they marketing heroin yet? Welcome! Fuck!
'Smile, you're on CCTV!' I guess it's to stop people pissing through the letterbox. They did that when I lived in Covent Garden. And not just piss. On Old Street there's blood on the pavement. I remember the sirens we kept hearing last night. I didn't feel safe walking around with my laptop in a bag. The atmosphere didn't feel benign at all, nothing like soft, safe neon nights in Tokyo. Minicab sharks, cars pulling up behind pedestrians. You're in there, protected, and I'm out here, not. I'm just going to have to hope you have a good heart. People in hip hop hooded tops looking hard in kebab shops. It all feels like one of those Streets videos where a bunch of tanked-up British guys end up with blood streaming down their faces. 'Mate, mate, I don't want any trouble, mate.'
Virgin cola, Virgin property, Virgin trains! Clever marketing! Entrepreneurial Britain! They don't work too well, though, these Virgin trains. 'Due to late arrival of the incoming train, the 2.20 Virgin train to Glasgow Central is delayed. Please wait in the concourse for platform information.' I browse at WHSmiths. Subscription gift packs to FHM and Maxim hang on hooks. They look a bit like lingerie. Marketing! Slick! The girls in bikinis don't interest me at all. I must be a homosexual, or a glitz dissident of some sort. The Times and the Independent have both gone tabloid, wow! There's a photo of Tony Blair in a year-end review. He looks all leonine and smug. For the first time, I really think of Blair as Big Brother (that's Big Brother from Orwell's '1984', not Big Brother from Big Brother, 2004. You know, the TV show where the TV watches people). Blair presides over all this. The marketing, the violence. British troops in Iraq, a bouncer hired to police someone else's pub. The gap between the rich and the poor getting bigger, and the sympathy getting smaller. Questions raised in the house about Blair's free family holidays in a chateau owned by tobacco baron Alain Dominique Perrin, CEO of Richemont, which owns cigarette brands Dunhill and Cartier and has a 21% stake in British American Tobacco. Blair, unlike the Scottish government, doesn't impose a full public smoking ban.
A billboard (I don't know what it's advertising) shows Britain floating mid-Atlantic, far from Europe. The slats rotate, display another image.
M&S food snacks for the train. Not much change from a tenner. Nicely presented though. Thai this, Mexican that. Global, slick, shrink-wrapped. There's nowhere to throw the plastic wrapping after you eat the stuff because presumably terrorists would use the bins for bombs. Somebody hates us. Hates our capitalist freedom. Wants to gas us in the underground. Because of Blair backing America. What else could he do? Be Schroeder?
Ah, at last, they've assigned a platform. Better late than never. On the train, the sound system feeds back painfully. An announcement comes on. 'Due to a problem with the microwave there will be no hot food on the journey.' Later, there's another about the doors. Apparently you have to press a button to open the doors when the train's at a station, then wait a while. While you're waiting, don't pull any levers at head-level, because those set off emergency alarms.
In the toilet I squoosh thick green liquid soap onto my hands, only to find there's no water. All these slick buttons and Star Trek sliding doors, and the water doesn't work. Fuck! I wipe off the soap with a dry towel. Yuk. You could complain, but then there'd be no end of it. You'd be like that girl on the bus last night. 'That's not the principle, the principle is I paid for a service and I'm getting something worse.' Placate the consumer, strap the passenger in. 'Customers are advised that, for your comfort and security, CCTV is operating throughout the train'. Wow! Even in the toilet? Did they pick up that there was no water?
Mobile phones. They allow you to change arrangements without telling anyone, and they allow you to tell everyone about your life. 'We're on the train... is mum there?' The mother is RP, Standard English, quite posh, but her kids speak with glottal stops. Tony Blair does that too, to show he's a bit populist. It's an important life skill. Practice those glottal stops! They cover up class distinctions that do, nevertheless, still exist. The widening gulf between have and have-not, drug addict and shopaholic. The new RP has glottal stops. Even Prince William and Prince Harry speak this way. To show they're like us. In spirit, anyway. You wouldn't want them to be spiritually different from us, would you, just because they're extremely wealthy? I mean, here in Britain we're already spiritually one with the wealthy. We just don't have their money.
'Cointreau-versial' billboard. A pretty girl sips Cointreau. It's a posh drink, innit? Some Hoxton Situationist has stuck on a sticker bubble which makes the posh rich girl say 'You - are - not - us'. Subversive, or obvious? The rich are not the poor. Less and less every day. But everyone wants to pretend they're a victor, not a victim. Everyone buys into the bling bling thing.
The kids in the next seat just said 'Bling bling!' The phrase is everywhere in Britain, an R&B-rap-pop fashion as widely adopted as the flash white sportsgear people wear on British streets, minus all the gold, silver and diamonds that stars like J-Lo and Britney accessorize it with. I open the Virgin Trains magazine. (Wow, marketing! Trains never used to have in flight consumer magazines! Then again, they once had basic services like running water and hot food.) There's an article about shopping in Birmingham. It begins 'Diamonds, platinum and all things bling lie ten minutes from the city centre in Birmingham's jewellery quarter...' Later in the journey, bored, I open the new tabloid Times and there it is in the financial section. 'Bling bling: fashion designer John Zhao shows off his crystal encrusted iPod'. Britain speaks fluent bling bling. Britain, from top to bottom, embraces the showy materialism, the 'I won, you lost' mindset of hip hop and R&B videos. Bling bling, I win!
Someone just farted. On the train. A Virgin customer. We're not citizens, we're customers. Virgin isn't the government. Well, not yet. 'Welcome to Britain!' hisses the foul smell as it snakes around, invisible to the CCTV cameras.
The marketing is slick and constant, nothing works, and it's twice the price it would be back home. And there's some sort of druggy, boozy menace hanging over the streets at night. Blame the binge drinking sprees! Have a happy smashed British Christmas!
We stop at a filling station on the Shoreditch High Street to buy some food. A homeless man is sitting at the entrance. 'Spare some change, please? Spare some change?' A black man gets out of a BMW and comes over to reform him. 'Look at yourself, mate, you've got to stop using the stuff. Go to a gym, man, do a workout, get out of this state you're in, it's a fucking shame on you, man!' He's a winner, the junkie's a loser. Go to a gym, start a business, buy a BMW, join the winners. It's dog eat dog.
Hisae and I are staying with friends who live off the Hackney Road. They're expecting us, but when we ring the bell there's no answer. Thank heaven for cell phones, which allow you to change your plans without telling anyone! We don't have one, but they do. So we find a phone box -- it really stinks in there, but at least the phone works -- and call our friends. Ah, they went to a pub across the road! We go in to meet them. It's ferociously loud, a kind of slick-brutal house club with bad 90s acid graphics, threatening bouncers and boom tsssk boom tsssk boom. People float around with a kind of wide-boy gait. Menace and hedonism. We take the key and tell our friends we'll see them back at the flat. Not my scene.
The lift has a sign in it that says 'Please do not use this lift as a toilet'. What do they take us for? Why not say 'You are a cunt, aren't you'? The assumption of guilt. But our hosts later tell us that the lift is used as a toilet. Often. Fuck. Welcome to Britain!
The flat is sordid; toilet paper, debris and detritus everywhere, a bunch of TVs, foul blue spotted carpet. Art students live here, but what's the aesthetic? Maybe some approximation of Corinne Day shitty junkie chic. We switch on TV. There's an awards ceremony; celebrities pay tribute to other celebrities. There's lots of Bono and lots of Robbie Williams. 'Listen to the radio, you will hear the songs you know.' Marketing, innit? Jools Holland drifts around, a bit more bloated than I remember him. There are video clips of people saying how perennially great U2 are. No dissenting opinions at all. A lot of applause.
Our friends return from the pub, extremely drunk, and sit with us, smoking heavily, demolishing a bottle of red wine. It's, like, 3am. I'm too polite to tell them I don't smoke, and they don't seem to notice. Well, it's their house. The conversation is about drugs. E can't believe I've never taken any. I say it's because drugs tend to make everyone act the same way. E illustrates my theory by alternating aggressive questioning with declarations that I'm his best mate in the entire world. Several times he shakes my hand. We're two Celts who gave substantial chunks of our life to London. Why? The girls sit on the folding bed and speak Japanese. They won't stay long now they've got their MAs. I'm tired, but this chat is something we have to do before we can sleep. I try not to cough or seem too self-righteously sober.
The next morning the taps in the bathroom don't seem to work, and neither does the flush in the toilet. Fuck! At least I'm able to shower. I don't think I could bear to be dirty in London. It already feels like a gigantic toilet. Crossed with an advertising agency. An advertising toilet? Why not? Clever marketing idea! Out on the street, I see a bus with an advert on the side that says 'More Glitz! The Brent Cross Centre, feed your addiction'. Feed your addiction? Fuck, you mean become like that junky we saw last night at the filling station? Have drugs and celebrity become metaphors for everything in Britain? Are they marketing heroin yet? Welcome! Fuck!
'Smile, you're on CCTV!' I guess it's to stop people pissing through the letterbox. They did that when I lived in Covent Garden. And not just piss. On Old Street there's blood on the pavement. I remember the sirens we kept hearing last night. I didn't feel safe walking around with my laptop in a bag. The atmosphere didn't feel benign at all, nothing like soft, safe neon nights in Tokyo. Minicab sharks, cars pulling up behind pedestrians. You're in there, protected, and I'm out here, not. I'm just going to have to hope you have a good heart. People in hip hop hooded tops looking hard in kebab shops. It all feels like one of those Streets videos where a bunch of tanked-up British guys end up with blood streaming down their faces. 'Mate, mate, I don't want any trouble, mate.'
Virgin cola, Virgin property, Virgin trains! Clever marketing! Entrepreneurial Britain! They don't work too well, though, these Virgin trains. 'Due to late arrival of the incoming train, the 2.20 Virgin train to Glasgow Central is delayed. Please wait in the concourse for platform information.' I browse at WHSmiths. Subscription gift packs to FHM and Maxim hang on hooks. They look a bit like lingerie. Marketing! Slick! The girls in bikinis don't interest me at all. I must be a homosexual, or a glitz dissident of some sort. The Times and the Independent have both gone tabloid, wow! There's a photo of Tony Blair in a year-end review. He looks all leonine and smug. For the first time, I really think of Blair as Big Brother (that's Big Brother from Orwell's '1984', not Big Brother from Big Brother, 2004. You know, the TV show where the TV watches people). Blair presides over all this. The marketing, the violence. British troops in Iraq, a bouncer hired to police someone else's pub. The gap between the rich and the poor getting bigger, and the sympathy getting smaller. Questions raised in the house about Blair's free family holidays in a chateau owned by tobacco baron Alain Dominique Perrin, CEO of Richemont, which owns cigarette brands Dunhill and Cartier and has a 21% stake in British American Tobacco. Blair, unlike the Scottish government, doesn't impose a full public smoking ban.
A billboard (I don't know what it's advertising) shows Britain floating mid-Atlantic, far from Europe. The slats rotate, display another image.
M&S food snacks for the train. Not much change from a tenner. Nicely presented though. Thai this, Mexican that. Global, slick, shrink-wrapped. There's nowhere to throw the plastic wrapping after you eat the stuff because presumably terrorists would use the bins for bombs. Somebody hates us. Hates our capitalist freedom. Wants to gas us in the underground. Because of Blair backing America. What else could he do? Be Schroeder?
Ah, at last, they've assigned a platform. Better late than never. On the train, the sound system feeds back painfully. An announcement comes on. 'Due to a problem with the microwave there will be no hot food on the journey.' Later, there's another about the doors. Apparently you have to press a button to open the doors when the train's at a station, then wait a while. While you're waiting, don't pull any levers at head-level, because those set off emergency alarms.
In the toilet I squoosh thick green liquid soap onto my hands, only to find there's no water. All these slick buttons and Star Trek sliding doors, and the water doesn't work. Fuck! I wipe off the soap with a dry towel. Yuk. You could complain, but then there'd be no end of it. You'd be like that girl on the bus last night. 'That's not the principle, the principle is I paid for a service and I'm getting something worse.' Placate the consumer, strap the passenger in. 'Customers are advised that, for your comfort and security, CCTV is operating throughout the train'. Wow! Even in the toilet? Did they pick up that there was no water?
Mobile phones. They allow you to change arrangements without telling anyone, and they allow you to tell everyone about your life. 'We're on the train... is mum there?' The mother is RP, Standard English, quite posh, but her kids speak with glottal stops. Tony Blair does that too, to show he's a bit populist. It's an important life skill. Practice those glottal stops! They cover up class distinctions that do, nevertheless, still exist. The widening gulf between have and have-not, drug addict and shopaholic. The new RP has glottal stops. Even Prince William and Prince Harry speak this way. To show they're like us. In spirit, anyway. You wouldn't want them to be spiritually different from us, would you, just because they're extremely wealthy? I mean, here in Britain we're already spiritually one with the wealthy. We just don't have their money.
'Cointreau-versial' billboard. A pretty girl sips Cointreau. It's a posh drink, innit? Some Hoxton Situationist has stuck on a sticker bubble which makes the posh rich girl say 'You - are - not - us'. Subversive, or obvious? The rich are not the poor. Less and less every day. But everyone wants to pretend they're a victor, not a victim. Everyone buys into the bling bling thing.
The kids in the next seat just said 'Bling bling!' The phrase is everywhere in Britain, an R&B-rap-pop fashion as widely adopted as the flash white sportsgear people wear on British streets, minus all the gold, silver and diamonds that stars like J-Lo and Britney accessorize it with. I open the Virgin Trains magazine. (Wow, marketing! Trains never used to have in flight consumer magazines! Then again, they once had basic services like running water and hot food.) There's an article about shopping in Birmingham. It begins 'Diamonds, platinum and all things bling lie ten minutes from the city centre in Birmingham's jewellery quarter...' Later in the journey, bored, I open the new tabloid Times and there it is in the financial section. 'Bling bling: fashion designer John Zhao shows off his crystal encrusted iPod'. Britain speaks fluent bling bling. Britain, from top to bottom, embraces the showy materialism, the 'I won, you lost' mindset of hip hop and R&B videos. Bling bling, I win!
Someone just farted. On the train. A Virgin customer. We're not citizens, we're customers. Virgin isn't the government. Well, not yet. 'Welcome to Britain!' hisses the foul smell as it snakes around, invisible to the CCTV cameras.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-28 06:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-28 06:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-28 07:14 pm (UTC)Oh, and I like the odd vogue myself, so the whole tobacco industry thing is lost on me.
bonnie scotland
Date: 2004-12-28 10:33 pm (UTC)in any case - edinburgh is great, albeit the ever permanent drizzle.
happy hogmanay wishes to you, r.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-28 06:56 pm (UTC)i wish we could save everyone the trouble...
Date: 2004-12-28 07:31 pm (UTC)I say DIY mass marketing will save us. If every billbord and commercial had to be home made by the executives who thought up these brilliant campaigns we would become a corporate sponsered outsider art renaissance. H&M signs painted on Cardboard resembling "will work for food" held by models in safety pinned ensembles. All awards shows would be public access with fold up chairs in someone's basement, no champagne and sushi. Just cheeseballs and fizz.
I hope you have a better time today.
Kim
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-28 10:21 pm (UTC)Dude, the non-drug-takers: we are the truly avant-garde.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-28 10:33 pm (UTC)still my heart belongs in the uk.
It is terrible
Date: 2004-12-29 12:55 am (UTC)alison
Date: 2004-12-29 09:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-29 10:52 am (UTC)captured exactly what is so obnoxious about london, i.e that the ubiqitous marketing and hypercapitalism fail utterly to mask the fact that the entire city is a crumbling, overpriced sewer
owen, c/o an office in peckham
murmur
Date: 2004-12-29 01:09 pm (UTC)work by dominic petitgand will be shown here in rotterdam as part of the international filmfestival.
erik
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-29 03:55 pm (UTC)no national meal, no national religion, posh people like italian opera: it's all part of the same disinterest that makes britain the best of a bad lot when it comes to multicultural society, along with our laziness, insularity, and victorian politeness. compare this to the strong sense of culture, and racial aesthetic, in countries like france, germany and japan. i wouldn't want to be a turk in germany. there would be no point applying for citizenship in japan as an outsider.
unfortunately it also means that any attempt to embrace alien thoughts is done slightly half-arsedly. of *course* we're not posh about cointreau. it seems like a nice idea, we give it a crack, but we just can't be bothered to see the aesthetic through.
when a spanish train is late and dirty, it's culturally appropriate, rustic dirt, and an amusingly disinterested spanish guy smoking while it goes nowhere. if an english train is dirty and late, they've thrown away the romantically shit old trains and replaced them with someone else's idea of things being new and exciting, which we can't work, and it's covered in chewing gum anyway.
you like your aesthetics and your cultures to be deliberate and proper to an extent that an englishman would find [coughs] slightly contrived. but i honestly quite like living in a place where everything is a bit shit, where i can get away with being a bit shit too. nobody will notice what i do here, whether it's good or bad, conservative or outrageous, so along with everyone else i feel free without even having to think about it. and it's a freedom which exists culturally just like it always did legally: not legislated for with some showy constitution, just there, in the places where nobody can be bothered to make or enforce any rules.
[land of hope and glory: exeunt]
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-29 03:59 pm (UTC)http://ilx.p3r.net/thread.php?msgid=5334604
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-29 07:58 pm (UTC)kim
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-29 08:44 pm (UTC)I remember visiting London for the first time - The is the city where you can see history, and where new kinds of music and art are born. Pour your feelings into a journal entry at that point and you'd paint a pretty rosy picture.
I have also paid London a visit while living in Japan. My feelings about London at that time were similar to those of Momus. I particularly remember wandering in to a place for lunch, subconsciously expecting a pleasant "Irasshaimase!", but being brought back to London reality with a sharp "Next!". And then being forced to make a quick choice between sandwiches slightly curled at the corners and tasteless quiche. The place serving food like that wouldn't have lasted a month in Tokyo.
- Lex
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-29 05:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-30 11:08 pm (UTC)I don't think Mr Momus minds farts too much - more it was the end of a cack day. The context of methane is so important.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-31 10:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-29 06:38 pm (UTC)Berlin has a low rent benefit plus 30+ years of pre-unification BRD (FRD) policy: Live in Berlin as an alternative to conscription. A real magnet, that, pulling in Bowie to this outpost, and you too, Momus. Berlin is still an outpost of the "old-West Germany" in the East, and will continue to exist as the center of the working out of the contradiction(s) that are Germany.
Let's hope this situation lasts in Berlin - no reason to think it won't, for a while at least.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-29 08:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-30 02:21 am (UTC)That said, is it not a little unfair to base a critique on London largely on an area immediately around the Hackney Road and the state of the nation's trains? Both aspects could hardly be said to be the city's strong points. It's a little like judging Paris on the subway stations where muggers and junkies hang out in the stairwells.
These may be the ramblings of a deluded ex-pat as I've found my time away from London has made the heart grow fonder, but I'm going to say it anyway. What I love about the city is that away from the corporate sponsorship and away from the mainstream crowds there are are many thriving underground scenes going on, and a lot of people operating entirely to their own agenda. It's true to say that due to the expense of living and operating in the capital these people may soon be 'pushed out', but the cultural variety of London at present is what I sorely miss. These things may not be apparent on the surface of the city and a lot of effort is sometimes needed to uncover them, but (with the exception of a few notable blips in history) wasn't that always the way? This trashed-up, mashed-up, corporately sponsored London doesn't describe any of my friends or any of the things I know and love. It just describes the very worst aspects of the place.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-01 01:10 am (UTC)But there are still a few paradoxes.. I've heard people from New York remark that it's amazing that London tube trains and buses have cushions on the seats and that they remain pretty much unslashed. And then I read about muggings and rapes on the Paris metro. I think there's no doubt that Britain is ugly, cheap and tawdry but is it really that violent? People seem reasonably well-mannered to me for the most part.
I have noticed some violent atmospheres around recently but is that perhaps not partly a byproduct of Christmas? I think the underclass, particularly, resent Christmas and their exclusion from it. I was mugged last Christmas by a thug whose repeated aggressive question as he blocked my path was 'where's my present?'. And yesterday I was waiting for a bus in Stoke Newington High Street (sometimes you get this sense, too late, that you are in the wrong place at the wrong time) and an elderly man came up to me and said that he only had £1 and he intended to walk to Tesco at Tottenham to spend it on beer. I felt sorry for him so I gave him £1 'for his bus fare' (I liked that he didn't ask outright for the money but hid it inside polite conversation). The next minute some thug with a completely different attitude appeared. He just exuded menace.. but the old man confronted him: 'don't talk to this man, he doesn't want to talk to you, leave him alone, he's my friend'. The thug replied, 'what do you mean, I haven't touched him yet' (!). I quickly jumped on a bus while they continued arguing. I noticed some bad vibes again today. I think things will settle down again in the New Year.
One other observation. I'm surprised, Momus, that, at your age, you wouldn't prefer to stay in a hotel. Not the Savoy, obviously, just somewhere relatively inexpensive - but quiet and clean. Would that just be too boring for you? I'm not having a dig. It's just there's no way I would want to travel around like that and possibly have a horrible time. I suppose I'm petit bourgeois in that way though.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-07 01:45 am (UTC)That filth and piss inspired me to do a project for art school in my 2nd year there: posters for a contest of freestyle pissing.
I mean, the toilets in pubs are so dirty you have to wonder sometimes...
http://www.in-duce.net/pro/freestyle_pissing
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-30 04:01 pm (UTC)Went out for a walk in the moonlight in the forest a few days later, and heard coyotes howling. The land was alive and I was scared. This seems like real winter to me. Textures of grasses, briars, branches, firelight, candlelight, smells of warm food and a hot water bottle in my bed. Staying close and not travelling, just like in the I Ching :)
By the way, as for your year-end thumbs up and down review, I've rarely commented on some of the very essays that make me think the most. Don't fall prey to the idea that controversy equals greatness. Just keep doing what you do; it's why I'm still reading all your drivel after 10 years :)