The headland

You never wanted
to be the type
to be immobilised.

Now they ask you
why you always
seem to let
yourself wash away.

I think, like me,
you find it hard
to hear the sea
keep knocking
so you let it in.
You know that, while it's great,
to say
"I will be strong"
you know you're only there
to be engulfed
so why
not play along?

You know that you're supposed to hate
that sensation of letting yourself rot
but
there's something so sexy
about being stripped
to the bone.
Something so thrilling 
about self-destruction
as you tumble down
bit by bit.

I think the world was never made
with us in mind
so, still, we sit.
And gorge ourselves on vertigo
and tumble down
bit by bit.

Harvey Fucking Slade

The Interloper

Gary had awoken with an insatiable thirst for the velvety serenity of a cup of milky tea. Often one awakes with an unaccomplishable set of desiderata in mind, but sitting hulking and inanimate upon the kitchen work surface was a box containing seventy-thousand bags of Tesco’s Own Brand tea, acquired for a price so fractional that, as Gary fumblingly jammed coppers into the self-service checkout, he looked like a triumphant victor collecting his prize from the world’s least challenging slot machine; albeit an image that would be greatly enhanced were the teabags sculpted into the shape of a gargantuan stuffed bear.

                He drifted out of bed and towards the kitchen with tea on his mind, wearing his house as if it were a comfortable old shoe. At the stairway, he turned instinctively; bleary-eyed without his contact lenses, he could hardly see – and certainly had no reason to think about – the route he was taking and the place he was at. He navigated like a speedy vehicle on auto-pilot, mechanically avoiding the creaking steps not out of a conscious concern for the sanctity of the quiet, but because something in him told him the sound was irritating, and because when you’re waiting on a steaming cup, it’s unsettlingly easy to take for granted that you’ve got somewhere to drink it.

                The caffeinated monstrosity reared up through the kitchen door, its cardboard lid hanging open from the previous night, which dissolved into a heavy session on the tea. The kettle sat by the jumble of plates and, lo and behold, there was water left in it. As they do in the business world, Gary conducted a “time and motion study” and concluded that time would be saved were he to not bother refilling. He hit the switch and the kettle – which he had left plugged in; more evidence, he considered, that he was almost predestined to have this cup of tea – flashed orange and began to boil. Gary opened the fridge and–

Fuck! It had all lined up perfectly – the water in the kettle, the plug in the wall, the teabags in their Goliathan receptacle – until now. Gary’s heart skipped a thousand beats as it dawned upon him that he had no milk. He would have to walk for at least five minutes were he to shop at Eastern Bloc, its shop front lovingly adjourned by a promise to provide its customers with the best “Eastern Europe Foods” and, although two grammatical errors in three words is an impressive feat, he regretted the necessity of leaving the semi-detached world he’d built for himself.

***

Milk in plastic bag in hand, Gary sidled up the familiar street. He felt angst-ridden, uneasy; so libidinously was he clucking a mug that he began to sweat, the perspiratory drip clamming up his face and causing him to grimace alarmingly at somebody presumably in the employ of the Auto Repair Garage.  He swung the bag accliviously by its handles and clutched onto the milk, stroking the bottle through the bag’s flimsy skin. Approaching his front door from the opposite side of the pavement, Gary relaxed and let it hang, walking towards it in such an insistent straight line that it was as if he wished he would simply pass through his door like a translucent spectre. Unfortunately, as he emerged upon his side of the pavement, his gaze was broken. His eyes darting upwards diagonally, it became evident to him that there was somebody upstairs and, what’s more, they were having a damn good time.

I mean, Christ, the window was open. See, sound had a spooky way of travelling through Gary’s abode – toasting some toast or brewing a brew, one could seek to improve the overall experience with music, but would hear it better from the stairway. These architectural quirks lead him to make a point of closing his windows in order to really listen to music in the bedroom that faced the street, lest the neighbours be provided with a constant, and some might say unpalatable, DJ set. The current occupant(s), it seemed, had no such qualms about serenading the neighbourhood with the gangsta rap stylings of A$AP Ferg’s Trap Lord.

As Ferg helpfully contemplated whether a semi-automatic or a TEC-9 might best kill an unfortunate “motherfucker”, Gary felt a surge of emotion in which fury was tempered by confusion. He jiggled the keys around in his pocket, but he was extremely reticent about venturing into an unknown that had, about twenty minutes prior to these events, been his stomping ground. Call the police! you will say, but you must understand that that was not a possibility. Gary had left certain sensitive items around the house, and he could by no means justify handing the law enforcement a conclusive piece of self-incriminating evidence; a smoking bong, so to speak. He knocked on the door.

Before he saw anybody, a whale-moan could be heard coming from the stairway, or perhaps the kitchen;

“Yooooooooo…”

Gary stood as a guest outside his own front door. The man who answered was no doppelganger – no sick Dostoyevskian double, come to steal his life, his home, his image – nor was it a cop and, for the latter at least, he was grateful. The intruder – all Heffner smoking jacket and full-moon spectacles – lackadaisically stroked the subtly ginger follicular appendages that had engorged his face, their colour the only distraction from their burgeoning Hasidic dimensionsHasH.

“You here for the meeting?” he asked. The accent he spoke with had travelled one way or another between England and the US, seemingly settling smack bang in the middle on some rock west of Ireland.

“What meeting?”

“Well, I hope it’ll be a meeting of the minds, baby.”

Gary spluttered and stared. The intruder tipped his chin upwards and titled his head. His eyes narrowed as he examined this new specimen. Gary thought he saw something behind them too; a crazily efficient clockwork mechanism spun inside that beardy head, and right now it was analysing him, sussing out just what his whole raison d'etre was in this kerfuffle. The usurper stopped stroking his beard for a second, and this broke his concentration; he abandoned the eye contact and immediately returned to the beard for another round of fidgeting.

“Are you…like…squatters?” Gary asked.

“Nah, we don’t need to squat. We got seats!”

“…and wh-”

“Let me break it down for you. Come in, come in…”

He welcomed Gary into his own home.

“I’m with an organisation called Junkies for Jesus.”

Dumbfounded, Gary could only hazard “is that… some kind of recovery group?”

“Oh no, I have absolutely no interest in kicking the smack. I have a lot of resolve in my belief that there are no two things more compatible than the Zen of heroin addiction and the theological guidelines of evangelical Christianity.” Gary was in a daze, but the current occupant guided him into his kitchen. Where was the tea? “You want anything to drink? Anything to smoke? I can hook you up with a radical bowl…”

“Tea?”

“We don’t have that. I’d give you a hit of my heroin but, ahhh…then I wouldn’t have as much heroin. SALLY! SALLY! SALLY!” he rose to his feet and began screaming at the ceiling, lobbing projectiles against it – although nothing more likely to crack their skulls in their subsequent descent than a box of Coco Pops. “SALLY! HEY, SALLY! YO!” Upon that last “yo” he seemed to have a change of heart, stopping dead in his tracks and reaching into his pocket for something. He pulled out a beat-up iPhone and began to text with a dead-eyed look of total focus and concentration, and then he jerked back to life;

“Ok, Sally’s not going to bring the bong down. Not to worry-” he began to thumb a crumpled Zig-Zag rolling paper, winking at Gary “Bun big zoots, keep smilin’. Whaddya wanna know? I got a whole life to talk about, and a whole life to talk about it in. I can tell my origin story – growing up in the Deep South lonely, ostracised, not knowing the love of Jesus. The only Jew in the whole of Savannah – how about that?! Even my family, they were gentiles! I still don’t know how that worked, but I can tell you I poured my despair, my woe, into the world of drugs. Taking drugs. Selling drugs. Manufacturing drugs.  Drugs were the best goddamn thing Judaism ever did for me. Met Sally at a crackhouse in Minneapolis. Passed out by a river and wound up gettin’ baptised…”

Gary was in no mood for this invasive raconteur. He snapped, grabbing a pint of water off the kitchen table and lobbing the contents in his face.

“How’s that for a baptism, you mad prick? What the fuck are you doing in my house?!”

The proselyte did nothing but smirk. He finished up the joint he was rolling, lit it as he puffed upon it, and sedately looked Gary dead in the eye;

“This is my place now.”

“Tell me…” Gary seethed with clenched fists “…what you did to the tea?”

“I drink coffee.”

“It was a bargain!”

“I know it was. I like to shop at Tesco too. I’m aware of their reasonable prices.”

“And if you were to get milk?” Gary was incensed, but the truth was all coming out. First this hustler had taken his house, now the extraneous parts of his everyday environment?

“There’s a place round the block that sells some real good Eastern Europe Foods.”

Gary began to throw things around the room, recklessly decimating dishware until the settler peacefully restrained him, holding his flailing arms.

“Why don’t you stay for this joint? It’s hella fat. You haven’t even met Sally yet.”

But Gary had hung his head in despair and was walking towards the door.

“I haven’t kicked you out! Stay for a while.”

Gary stopped by the door and turned to face his adversary.

“Can’t.”

“Why not? I got some weed, I got some hip-hop, I got coffee, hell, I’ll even crack into my Henry the Horse if it’ll wipe that frown off your face.”

“The place,” said Gary with a great sense of resignation, “doesn’t feel the same as it did.”

“Places erode – even the stuff humans built. If the bricks don’t crumble, the spirit will. Time changes everything.”

“Yeah,” sighed Gary, and he let himself out.

Time, indeed, had changed everything.

Swan Shenanigans (Swananigans)

The canal and I have got history. When I first moved to the city, so distracted was I by it actually being such a thing, that I dwelled little upon the reality that, for me, Leicester was little more than a surrogate London. Whereas the Thames predates its milieu, the waterway that cuts through the motor city infrastructure of Leicester was crafted not by your Gods, but by man. If the city – a forest of concrete erections that, if you excuse the self-indulgent punnery, inspire Freudian envy in men of a certain age – is humankind’s greatest achievement, then the canal is surely a fractional one, an accomplishment within an accomplishment; a containment of perhaps the most immovable of the classical elements within a manmade paradigm. These counterfeit rivers do for that profulence of H2O what reservoirs do for lakes, and what McDonalds meals do for the good, natural name of beef.

The last irresistible crack aside, I place little weight in bucolia. Don’t misread that; I’m certainly an environmentalist, but urbania can be as beautiful a landscape as a blank-slate field, and what particularly interests me is the ramifications of environment on the human psyche. What applies to nature too applies to humanity; contraception, abortion, euthanasia, and then incarceration, militarism, murder are manners of regulating our sentience just as we do the water. The course your life, and mine, takes will be determined ultimately by where we stand in the hierarchy of capitalism, although to use the word “regulation” bears a bitter irony in this context. These thoughts become increasingly fractured; I try to grasp the fragile strings of ideas I devised forty years ago, to articulate them as I would have then, to compliment them with subsequent cognizance, subsequent wisdom; yet they slip from my grips, lubricated by distraction and eroded by time. Of course, it was wondering this grey-stone shore that I first devised the theory of Prognostic Sentience Measurement, but I must regain my personal equilibrium before I brief the uninitiated, for I am in the throes of a great malaise, and it is the fault of the swans.

I have always had a complicated relationship with the swans of the Leicester. Is it not unthinkable to be incapable of abstract thought? To me, it would once have been, but I have since fulfilled the role of a guest speaker at my nephew’s secondary school, and I can attest; it’s extremely thinkable. But, to my knowledge, swans have never had education budgets slashed by the apparently employability-centric scimitar of Michael Gove – their innate capabilities are only for the most basic of instincts; to reproduce, to feed, and survive. So, in this unthinking utopia, do they only know happiness? Or is that extreme contrasted by another – an inherent proclivity to shit the proverbial pants? Do swans know only happiness…and fear?  Primal instinct has a delirious joy; we would all like to fuck like a swan – not fuck a swan – but the reckless abandon they are presumably imbued with as they frolic in the canal is antithetically answered by, when danger rears its ugly head, by a justified fear of death.

To a human, what is more terrifying than death, other than life? How could a swan even know of death? I imagine they are more familiar with a loose sense of imminent danger, but who’s to say their conception of mortality isn’t more concrete? Does the swan know what’s unknowable? Is it possible to know the unknowable only when faced with the great unknown, the seeming unknowable perversely the last thing you’ll ever know? Those four decades ago, suffering from a rampant cold, I needed to blow my nose.

I have passed the swans, and now I can tell you about the Theory of Prognostic Sentience Measurement. It is what I have been building to; in an ascension of words that mirrors the way my own trajectory has sloped downward in the years since the heyday of the theory. Images of subjacent collisions colour my brain; dashed on concrete or dropping to a waterbed with a voluminous gloop. I have always found this tract of the canal to be extremely vertiginous, on account of a the first night I ever went drinking with the group who would prove my closest friends for the next few years, and one of these friends stumbled precariously along the very edge of the Grand Union Canal. Assuming he was, like a swan, aware of his imminent plight, I neglected to question him on the issue. Of course, he fell into the canal. Hesitantly, three of us dragged him out, and after a week of debating as to whether he had succumbed to a ravaging case of pneumonia, he reemerged. It took him, however, a year to replace the pair of glasses that he had, you could say, bequeathed to the swans.

5% of pneumonia victims die. A similar figure, perhaps, for other bacteria that might be in the water system. The Theory of Prognostic Sentience Measurement may sound like a mouthful to you, but I am a writer, and not a mathematician or a scientist or a sociologist – and I am certainly qualified at none of these things – and I am getting to be an old man, and the percentages are harder for me than they once were, when I was a young man, when I had just left school, and the basic mathematical principles were relatively fresh in my mind, not rusted, not buried, not submerged among the detritus of forty further years of severely impractical thinking. Prognostic was my get-out clause, my admission that by its very nature the theory was predicated on guesswork, prognostication; soothsaying for the modern day. And, of course, contemporary soothsaying is best conveyed by percentages. That is what it was; a percentile division of the things that might – just might – kill you.

“Yes, I’m a charlatan! But in the 1970s, ours was a permissive society.” I said to the man on the bike. He looked at me like I were a leper, and sped towards his own private sunset on his skeletal steel steed.

At times I get nostalgic and Google death percentages. Sometimes they relate to that formative incident - 3.2% of deaths in the last year have been caused by alcohol, so I can factor that into my friend’s chances, at the time, of surviving it. Drowning, I have no idea, but a night when one falls into a canal is perhaps a night on which one is particularly susceptible to it. And then one has to look at the percentage, if there is one, of actually getting pneumonia or some other ailment. I take a look up at the flight of stairs leading to the motorised haven of Leicester’s high streets. The bank of the conduit is redolent of the highly pedestrianized air possessed by grand European cities; Amsterdam, Brussels, Venice - they too with a penchant for canals. If I walk steadily, the percentage for drowning will be low. But if I affect a hobble – and at this point I do just this, stutteringly stepping ever-closer towards the edge like a crab on ketamine. But before I take the tumble, an epiphany spreads its light upon the breadth of my person. One day – perhaps as soon as 30 years’ time – the big fire will come (not Biblical rapture, dummy; global warming) and the earth, the universe will no longer be inhabitable. Humanity will certainly be extinct.  But who drove it to this state? Which force in the world, which dominant species is especially gifted with an aptitude for killing and maiming, and creating great beasts of arms and technology, finance and private property that they can be subordinate to, which too can choke life from just about anything that’s got it?

I race up the stairway. “Out of my way!” I say, pushing a hardened bruiser in a manner that ought to add a few fucking per cent to my own Prognostic Sentience Measurement.

“You fucking what, you fucking muggleshitcunt?” he bellows in a manner that, whilst deep, sonorous and extremely authoritative, is not exactly Churchillian; more like Winstonian, as in Ray Winstone. “Where the fuck you going?”

“Come and get me, Ray!” I squeal with delight.

“I’ll fucking kill your slag shit cunt family!” His meaty slabs of leg pulverise the steps as he pursues me.

But if he can find my slag shit cunt family, good luck to him, for the real point of his ire is gone. The traffic halts, lining up into an informal motorcade, as I leap jauntily into the centre of the road and, screaming “ONE HUNDRED PER CENT!” quite literally launch myself upon the muscular bonnet of one of those superfluous military-style trucks beloved of the quintessential suburban bourgeois family. Something’s odd here, I ponder, as my blood spools around my crooked ground-level profile. I try to communicate my query to my inadvertent killer, but they are breathily protesting that “I didn’t have time to brake!” and other banalities. But I’ve seen the jeep, and suspicions are high. It belongs to the old friends of my parents. Maybe they’ve come to take me back – eternity in Surrey must be my destiny, farmed off by these C-of-E berry-growers in their bomb-squad ride. What else, I ask you, could they be doing in Leicester?

Head-land

You never wanted
to be the type
to be immobilised.

Now they ask you
why you always
seem to let
yourself wash away.

I think, like me,
you find it hard
to hear the sea
keep knocking
so you let it in.
You know that, while it's great,
to say
"I will be strong"
you know you're only there
to be engulfed
so why
not play along?

You know that you're supposed to hate
that sensation of letting yourself rot
but
there's something so sexy
about being stripped
to the bone.
Something so thrilling
about self-destruction
as you tumble down
bit by bit.

I think the world was never made
with us in mind
so, still, we sit.
And gorge ourselves on vertigo
and tumble down
bit by bit.

empty

empty

Running

I knew from the start you were running.
You’ve got those runner’s eyes
that say “I’m here
now, but in my mind
I’m far away.”

Too far away to face
that paperwork that you know
was due in yesterday, but
you didn’t get round to.
"Gravity," you think.
"Anything that ties me down
isn’t worth staying still for.”

You told me “it’s a shame
the world is round, because
everything always catches up.”
I knew that running was
your nature not by choice
but because you’d not yet learned
to float away.

I knew, as I’m a runner too.
I was stretching at the table 
just in case you reached out
and tried to grab a hold.
I wondered where you were
as we snacked on our hors d’oeuvres:

Probably back at home
watching TV and forgetting
that awful date you just went on.

It’s hard to feel free
when everything catches up
eventually. I hope that
you’re still running.
Accountable to nothing
but the wind in your face
as you sweat off each droplet
of responsibility.

I think that we’re perfect for each other:
let’s stay away forever.
I’ll run one way
and you the other
that way
we’ll never catch up.

Insufficiently shambolic.

Sequel to the Prequel
by Babyshambles
(Parlophone, 2013)

I don’t like British indie rock. I resent the cacophony of the leaden guitar playing, the pick vituperatively assaulting the strings as if the indie’ers haven’t worked out that amplifiers are actually rather useful for, well, amplifying one’s playing. More so than the sans funk unconscious imitation of chicken-scratch rhythm guitar, I loathe consummately prosaic Brit-Rock hacks like Alex Turner who believe you should write only about what you know, as opposed to what you feel . Pete Doherty, however, is an exception; iconoclastic enough as a performer, a writer and – of late – a Parisian bohemian expatriate to still hold a certain superiority over the multitude of groups spawned in The Libertines’ wake who are, at best, as “this’ll do” adequately uninspiring as Beady Eye. Sequel to the Prequel is his first album in four years and its perfunctory sensibility suggests that, although Doherty is certainly a functioning addict, the joys implied by Babyshambles’ rollicking music might even be actualised were their centric singer-songwriter slightly more than just functioning.

At this stage, what can be said about Doherty’s heroin addiction that doesn't lend succour to the tabloid press’ relentless and sadistic campaign to make everyone forget that he’s, at least in essence, a musician? I would love to – as with his fantastic 2009 solo album Grace/Wastelands – be able to use Sequel to the Prequel as a riposte to these facile voyeurs, but it feels as superficial a manifestation of the familiar Doherty persona as a late-period Rolling Stones record. “Rollicking” was an adjective I used in the previous paragraph to describe the joie de vivre-imbued Babyshambles sound, and what music is more rollicking than freshly electric Bob Dylan, circa 1965? Doherty seems to agree with me, as he plagiarises passages of I Want You and Maggie’s Farm in a couple of the record’s uniformly derivative melodies.

Doherty has made a trade of haphazardness, but whilst Babyshambles’ début Down in Albion was charmingly strung-out – its evident seams lending it an enjoyable quality of spontaneity – the relatively polished production of Sequel to the Prequel bears the feel of an effort to dress the artist’s latest set of ramblings up as “proper” songs, this newly-found sartorial elegance a futile and distracting embellishment. Again and again Doherty, who seems better suited to a solo career as a sort of scattershot troubadour, resorts to the same old bag of melodic tricks; a pinch of Waterloo Sunset here, an almost wholesale borrowing of the chorus from Where Angels Play by the Stone Roses there; “there” being on the LP’s true nadir, Maybelline, a tedious amalgam of the usual thrashed riffs and ubiquitous major-to-minor chord changes. Picture Me in a Hospital does not deviate much from these over-prevalent re-treads of his earlier music, but heart-on-sleeve lyrics and, atypically, a violin (substituting for the jangly guitars one expects to propel its riff) serve to elevate it beyond said functionality.

This is because, like any formula, the Doherty songwriting blueprint occasionally works, with the eponymous track a touching Music Hall bit of frivolity that is all Doherty. Dr No is altogether less archetypal, a slice of dark reggae concerning the purchase of some drugs that suggests that – in a shocking turn of events – perhaps Alex Turner is right, I'm wrong, and it is better to write about what you know. Whilst these highlights are certainly vital and thrilling – and the record does get better as it progresses – Sequel to the Prequel is the most disappointing record its focal point has made to date. It’s not embarrassingly smacked-out, nor is it pathetically polished and mainstream-adulating, but the middle-ground on which it firmly places itself renders it an uninspiring addition to the canon of an artist who knows better, and is – surely – capable of being the purveyor of honest and incandescent rock music he’s always promised to be, and has, on occasion, shown himself to be. 

I'm not sure what to call this yet, probably 'I Kept My Last Name'

I kept my last name
And told you that
I think
There are some parts of a person
That should be kept,
And not be thrown away.

Your family didn't understand
That I refused
To simply be bent and worn
Like the ring on this 'ring finger'
Of my left hand.

But the truth is I'm already worn
By so many people I no longer know
Like a hoody left behind after a one-night-stand.

As hard as I've tried
To keep myself contained
In each escape
I've spilled over
And given parts of me away.
And I resent
That someone somewhere
Has my virginity screwed up
In a pile of dirty washing on his floor.
And someone somewhere
Has my favourite place by the river
Pushed back amongst the rubbish in his chest of drawers.
And someone somewhere
Wears my favourite song so smugly
Every time
I see his fucking face
Contort that fucking grin that says
"I know you"
In a way
I can't displace.

So when you asked to take my name
I told you no
As it would only be
Another part of me I can't reclaim.

I've learned to hold on tight
To who I am
Because so much of her
Is in places I can't reach
Or doors I can no longer open.

Broken Record

You were the sixties smash
That swept me off my feet.
I was so young and
Oh how we were young! You were
The anthem of my march
Out of my teenage years.

If I were down
You’d cheer me up.
If I were lost
You’d show me home.
If I were stronger
Then I would have learned
To do this on my own.

Instead you just assured me it
"Will be alright" for thirty years.
And I am glad that you were there
But with each grey hair that appears
I think that I’ve played you too long;
Your sound has gone, you just remind me
Of a time that won’t come back.

And when you stand and beg me
"It will be alright" I only hear
The scratchings of a broken record
Back from yesteryear.

Kanye heads into the ditch.

Yeezus
by Kanye West
(Def Jam, 2013)

In the liner notes for his 1977 career retrospective Decade, Neil Young wrote of Heart of Gold, his biggest hit single, that “this song put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there."

The three albums that followed – 1973’s Time Fades Away, 1974’s On the Beach, and 1975’s Tonight’s the Night –  were tough going indeed; rough-hewn ruminations on death and dissatisfaction that possessed few of the wistful qualities of the brilliant yet somewhat saccharine Harvest. They would also prove to be the greatest work of an artist dedicated to the encapsulation of raw emotion. Today, Young is revered, but his departure from the foreground of country rock lost him many fans; he was certainly a better songwriter than Harvest guests James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, and if he was to stick with the commercial country sound, not only would it have made great financial sense, but it would have been to the scene’s ultimate credit.

Kanye West’s triumphant victory-lap of the last three years has included three albums, starting with 2010’s grandiose masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, before seeing him touring the world to rapturous responses alongside Jay-Z in support of their collaboration Watch The Throne, and winding down slightly with his label-showcase Cruel Summer. The latter is somewhat of an outlier due to West’s reduced presence on many of the tracks, but thematically it sits well alongside its predecessors as a celebration of excess, and the singles – Mercy, Clique, New God Flow – speak for themselves. It is difficult to classify these projects within any preconceived umbrella-terms for the genre; are they conscious hip-hop? They’re certainly intelligent enough, and have their flirtations with experimentation. Yet they unashamedly pander to the mainstream; filled with famous voices, slamming beats, and inane, zeitgeist-y platitudes that jump out amidst the general lyrical brilliance. I think My Beautiful Dark Fantasy is a truly great album; a fantastically conflicted look at what it means to be a rich black man in America, and Watch The Throne exceeds expectations as its celebratory contraposition. But if Kanye West spent the last few years building an amazingly lucrative musical empire, then  Yeezus is the sound of him rebelling against himself in a blood-soaked artistic coup.

Another quote that the anti-commercial din of Yeezus brings sharply to mind comes early in the pages of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain – “Great heroic Achilles who...isolates himself, positions himself defiantly outside the very society whose glorious protector he is and whose need of him is enormous.” My question is – does Kanye West need mainstream culture, and vice versa?

Judging by the dearth of listenable music amidst the masses of pop singles professing to be hip-hop, I would suggest that Kanye is an extremely positive figure to be sat atop the genre’s Olympus – which, by the way, is a simile he – never one to resist glorifying himself – has embraced in the past. Judging by the quality of Yeezus, I am not sure Kanye needs to cater to the tastes of anybody but his own. Which, indeed, is how an artist should work. On his incandescent verse at the centre of I Am A God, he declares his intentions; “Soon as they like you, make ‘em unlike you/’cause kissing people’s ass is so unlike you.” Any artist with integrity should, he says, pay scant regard to criticism, and keep moving on creatively as the muse dictates. In the same verse, ‘Ye pours scorn on his erstwhile fashion choices of “pink-ass polos with a fucking backpack” – the venom of the expletive is remarkable, and an avid listener of his music knows exactly what he’s getting at; in 2010’s Gorgeous, he said “as long as I’m in polos, smiling, they think they got me” – he is throwing off the fashionista shackles that bonded him to white America.

In the middle of opener On Sight, with its nasty buzz-saw synths, the thrillingly rudimentary beat drops out, and the listener is briefly regaled with a pitch-shifted gospel sample. “Look,” it implores, “this is the Kanye West you used to like.” He could make retro-fitted rap albums like Late Registration and The College Dropout again. But he’s not going to rap over this sample. No sooner has it arrived, it is unceremoniously ripped from the mix, similar sounds resurfacing again only on the great album closer Bound 2. It is interesting (to me) to compare Yeezus sonically to a contemporaneous album by a partnership whose deft production touches are all over On Sight, Black Skinhead, I Am A God and Send It Up; Random Access Memories by Daft Punk. There is a great disparity between Yeezus’ head-fucking production and the lush, organic sounds of Random Access Memories.  If anything, this proves that Daft Punk share his passion for musical exploration, and they fit right into Kanye’s “muthafucking clique” alongside such luminaries as Mike Deen and Hudson Mohawke, whose names may not be so familiar to you, but whose beats will certainly have reverberated through your eardrums at some point.

Blood on the Leaves is a track so potentially divisive that its key detractors and its most avid defenders are more than likely the same person. Anybody who has followed the Yeezus saga will be aware that it has drawn criticism from some for its juxtaposition of Nina Simone’s Strange Fruit, a track that still simmers with political potency, with the rapper-singer’s autotuned lamentations of relationship woes. It is an audacious and possibly insensitive move and at first, I admit, a contrast that made me somewhat uncomfortable. Its ugly synthesized horns, however, drive home a greater truth about this music; that Kanye West has no interest in masking the ugliness of some of his thoughts and desires. Furthermore, it is indicative of a kind of black empowerment rarely seen in mainstream culture; West can take an iconic sample inextricably linked to his race’s social history and make it as personal as any whiney white music. Why should an artist be bound by history? It is wholly in keeping with Yeezus’, and in general with West’s, desire to disregard the past.

Similarly, on one of the album’s more crudely scatological lyrics, Kanye states of an unnamed woman, that he will “put (his) fist in her like a civil rights sign.” Sex is everything on Yeezus; not merely as an enduring provider of pleasure and fascination that informs some part of almost every verse on here, but as a means of revenge. The sharp, hilarious social critique of New Slaves (which, in time, I will address) is eventually brought around to the image of West cruising the Hamptons, having sex with the wives of the white oligarchs who have so wronged his people. This is just one instance of many. Ultimately, the sexual insensitivity of the lyrics makes me remember what I liked so much about the Kanye West of Gorgeous, railing against media sexism like a flip-side of On Sight; compare “she told the director she try’na get into school/he said take them glasses off and get in the pool” to “black Timbs all on your couch again/black dick all in your spouse again.” Both songs positively radiate fury, but the difference is that this time around the anger feels misplaced, which is a conceit at the heart of Yeezus’ schizophrenic outrage. The album – and not just the music therein, but also the no-singles-no-videos-no-artwork-no-press(except for the New York Times)-no-tour(just yet) marketing campaign – is so nakedly antagonistic, it is as if West is defying the listener to like it.

The lyrics’ virtue lies not necessarily in what is being said, but in how it sounds. Consequently, I think that Lou Reed’s dictum that “if you like sound” one should “listen to what he’s giving you” one of the more pertinent statements concerning Yeezus. For all the talk of Kanye’s status as a musical visionary, it would be criminal to overlook that he is a brilliant MC, whose multisyllabic phrasing is seldom less than perfect regardless of lyrical meaning; whilst he does not often speak-rap, Andre 3000-style, there is a consummate musicality to his vocal delivery. In fact, ‘Ye’s delivery is remarkably contained a lot of the time. I hear the behemoth beats, such as Black Skinhead’s raucous glitter stomp, and want to scream what lyrics I’ve memorised. Yet, for all his egomania, he resists imbuing his recorded performances with superfluous force.

Rick Rubin, one of the many producers who worked seemingly tirelessly in order to realise Kanye’s vision, has stated in the press that there was a rush to complete Yeezus  in time for release date, with many of its star’s verses incomplete or completely absent on the eve of their deadline. Consequently, lines that seem to reflect inconsequentiality may actually be displays of spontaneity, which don’t necessarily make a record more refined, but certainly make it more honest; much, in fact, like the one-take aesthetic Neil Young has preferred to employ throughout his career. One feels, however, that some preparation was put into the creation of New Slaves.

To reapply an adjective I used to describe On Sight (and that is, in fact, appropriate for several of the songs on the album), New Slaves is driven by a beat that is so rudimentary, there is no drum track either synthesized or live. At times, the lyrics are penetrative, such as “meanwhile the DEA teamed up with the CCA/They’re try’na lock niggas up – they’re try’na make New Slaves/See that’s that privately-owned prison, get your piece today!” – a very erudite and very funny attack on the US’ barbaric prison-industrial system; a by-effect of the War on Drugs, arguably the single biggest project dedicated to subjugating and criminalising the poor (particularly, incidentally, of black America) since the feudal system. At other times, his bars, if well-intentioned in context, are questionable; “you see, it’s leaders and it’s followers/but I’d rather be a dick than a swallower.”The song as a whole is a terrific indictment of the racist attitudes West sees everywhere, be it the prison system or the world of fashion that he perceives as having mistreated him,  giving birth to the hilariously pointed crack “doing clothes you would’ve thought I had help/but they wasn’t satisfied unless I picked the cotton myself.”

The choice of word, “help”, is very interesting. It suggests that West thought he could win in white, capitalist America on his own terms, perhaps becoming  the oligarch he so despises, a little like his sometime colleague and noted entrepreneur Jay-Z. But once he was almost there, he came to a realisation that a) he will never gain the same respect in high society as his oppressors, simply due to centuries of skewed opportunity and b) that he truly fucking hated these people. His final line is the rhetorical question, “now what the fuck you goin’ say now?” It’s a challenge to his peers in hip-hop as much as it is to the establishment he’s decrying, or the gaping-mouthed listener. Is anybody going to top this album in 2013? In New Slaves, Kanye “see(s) the blood on the leaves,” and this time it is 100% serious with few, comparatively trivial, personal connotations. The track’s beautiful epilogue is a crescendo of histrionic guitars, like the overblown  musical aesthetic of 1980s hard rock being flipped on its ear, with Kanye’s autotuned singing contrasting gorgeously with Frank Ocean’s crystalline vocalisations. Ocean’s presence implies that the “swallower” credo  was firmly tongue-in-cheek, and reminds us that West was one of the first figures in mainstream hip-hop to endorse LGBTQ rights. There is an suggestion that whilst he is incredibly mature as an artist, he still has some way to go as a person. Which is the case for many of us.

Speaking of which, to make an oversight of West’s self-applied apotheosis I Am a God (aside from its masterful centric verse, which I have already mentioned) would be to ignore the delusions-of-grandeur-that-maybe-aren’t-really-delusions that lie at the heart of the Kanye West oeuvre. Initially I read the title as I Am God, in the singular, and was rather disappointed that he chose to not-quite elevate himself over every single other being in the universe. It supposes the interesting conceit that West is a pantheist of sorts, worshipping both the Judeo-Christian God and that messianic figure of white-collar splendour; himself. Often the album’s lyrics are comically awful, and not in the sense that they are badly written, but rather morally repugnant. A promotional video directed by West was a short, near-verbatim parody in which the rapper/director/polymath inserts his own name into American Psycho’s famous Huey Lewis & the News scene. American Psycho concerns a hideously amoral, psychopathic Yuppie whose emotional vacuum is masked by the superficialities of the Reaganite ‘80s, and American God would have been a worthy alternate title for Yeezus. It intrigues me that he associates Godlike stature with wealth, rattling off lines concerning such trappings of corpulence as Porches, ménage-a-trois and, now infamously, croissants. Much like the quantified anguish of Guilt Trip, it drips with dread, descending into guttural screams.

His appearance on Saturday Night Live, on which he premiered New Slaves and Black Skinhead, introduced by a rather unenthused-seeming Ben Affleck, was incredibly exciting to watch, with his on-stage demeanour respectively statuesque and hyperactive, as would befit the divergent styles of both tracks. Nevertheless, it did not prove as prescient to the finished album as it might have seemed, promising something altogether more political, and rather more rooted in EDM than the criss-crossing beats of Yeezus. Yet again, he confounded expectations. I am exhausted from writing about the record; fragments of information that I wished to include somewhere herein keep belated occurring to me. The RZA, who has worked with ‘Ye before on songs including Dark Fantasy and White Dress, and considers him to be upholding the spirit of the Wu-Tang Clan despite their very different approaches to the rap genre, contributes to the production of I’m In It, likely the most radio-friendly track on here (and one of the most sex-crazed, as the title would suggest), which ends with a magnificent drum/vocal breakdown in which West explains that he’s “got the kids and the wife life/but can’t wake up from the nightlife.” Perhaps this is an indication that this is a belated primal roar from Kanye the artist, before Kanye the man settles down to fatherhood, although I doubt he will ever do so in his music. Furthermore, Mike Deen’s cascading guitars on Hold My Liquor are a wonder to behold. And, at 10 tracks, it brings to mind Illmatic in its brevity, if nothing else.

I saw Neil Young (backed by his wonderfully creaky band Crazy Horse) on the day Yeezus came out. He is 67, and attendees were still complaining that he spent too much time exploring the tonal possibilities afforded by his electric guitar, and not enough time playing “the classics.” I don’t imagine that 67-year-old Kanye West will be too dissimilar.

Film Review: The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann, 2013)

What up...old sport?

Really quite good. Well, it's certainly the best Baz Luhrmann film.

For those for whom Luhrmann's previous films were somewhat...loud, the Great Gatsby will initially seem not dissimilar to works like Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet (Anybody else refer to this as Romeo Plus Juliet? No? Just me, then.*) in its resolute gaudiness, the director pouring champagne on any traditional definition of good taste, and drowning out the cries of the detractors with the juxtapositional din of the soundtrack Jay-Z "executive produced." Sometimes the music stops and, behind incessant chatter, one can hear the director flicking through banknotes, or set and costume design specifications.

[*I'm surprised he didn't think to add some quirky punctuation to this one, ie. The Great Gatsby? or The Gr8! Gatsby]

Much has been made of the film's post-modern treatment of the "Roaring Twenties," and it truly is ludicrous; amidst the Bacchanalian excess of the party sequences, the guests seem to pour alcohol over people and things as much as they actually drink it. So much for prohibition. At one point, the protagonists drive their CGI car past a vehicle full of African-Americans who are...wait for it...splashing alcohol around and listening to Jay-Z. Yeah, I think Luhrmann could do well to take a closer look at the social history of the United States.

What's remarkable is that, at around the halfway point, the film becomes good. And, I mean, really good. Its greatest scene, a tumultuous hotel-room summit featuring all of the primary ensemble, is light on "Luhrmannisms" and heavy on character and dialogue. When he allows himself a brief technical flourish, towards the scene's climax, it is particularly deserved, and especially effective.

Once the film gets into its groove, you realise that, for example, instances of the gimmicky culture-clash soundtrack (can I just set the record straight and say that I actually really like Jay-Z, and consider 'The Blueprint' to be one of the 21st century's finest albums) are, in fact, few and far between. It's like Luhrmann spends the opening portion of the film luring his fan-base into thinking they're in their comfort zone of "ooh! look! bright colours! shiny things! fast cars! lovely dresses!" and then decides to actually do The Great Gatsby.

The turning point was, for me, the scene wherein Nick, at Gatsby's request, invites Daisy Buchanan for tea. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to explain The Great Gatsby's plot to anybody; it's a book that absolutely everybody needs to read. I tried to adapt the aforementioned scene into screenplay form for my A-Level English coursework, writing it in the style of a Woody Allen comedy. The "comedy" pretence proved to be just that, upon my realisation that Fitzgerald's masterful prose was infinitely funnier than anything I could hope to write. There is little of the novel's bitter, satirical humour in the picture, but this scene balances it perfectly (and, a rare occurrence in this adaptation, relatively faithfully) with heart-wrenching drama. DiCaprio continues his winning streak with a wonderfully charismatic and vulnerable performance that adds immeasurably to the whole "show." Carrie Mulligan manages to nail Daisy's shallow charm, but it is far from her best work; disappointingly so, as she is generally excellent in everything, and was a primary reason for looking forward to this adaptation. Toby Maguire, whilst never the most arresting screen presence, carries the film; it would fall apart with work less solid than his.

Yet, despite its cast of the talented and the beautiful, The Great Gatsby is a flawed film. Perhaps - ironically when one considers its contemporary and historical context - the financiers just gave Luhrmann too much money? Whilst it was certainly a decadent time for America's privileged classes, and Gatsby's lower-class aspiration remains at its heart, the critical near-consensus that it is simply an overbearing aesthetic for a novel of such nuance and subtlety is hard to disagree with.

Oh, and I saw it in 2D. Baz Luhrmann can make a reasonably enjoyable film, but that doesn't mean I'm going to pay him extra money so I can put a pair of glasses over my glasses. I'm not a total asshole.

Treading Water

Treading Water

Treading water through time
With my wellingtons pushing back
Anything that clings on. I step
With a certain scepticism; like
I can feel the chain of cause and effect
Harrowing down on my feet.

I should have been the finest vessel
Sailing the seas of your mantelpiece.

Instead I'm the sails facing windward,
Crucified to the heckling audience
Of the future. I want to drop anchor
And ground myself against the storm of circumstance
But we sail on regardless.

I should have taken a deeper breath
And paddled back to shore.

I should have wrung these memories

And walked on as before

I should have been a stronger man;

It doesn't matter anymore.

The Despicable Mr. Rice

The Despicable Mr. Rice

A short story by Jack Frayne-Reid

 “Do you understand how business works? Let me explain something to you; the press has spoken, the ‘nobodies,’ as you say, have spoken – and they don’t want you. So we don’t either. How could we gain capital with an ailing enterprise under our wing? No sooner were we to buy you out, would a piece appear in the Financial Times detailing your own precarious recent history, and with you sitting there on the Board of Directors, they start to question my integrity. A chain of events then ensues, as you will have seen many times before, in which our shares invariably plummet. That is why we no longer feel comfortable in purchasing seventy per-cent of the company.”

Colin Rice wiped his brow as if he were brushing  aside his fringe. He let his pen slip from his mouth and drop upon the table with a conspicuous tap as he envisioned bringing each fist down upon the elderly chairman’s head, one after another, the left hook catching his fall as he collapsed from the pugilistic force of the first hit. He picked up the ballpoint again, an image now forming in his head in which that of Anthony Z. Fox was forcefully penetrated by the stationary item, rigidly held in Rice’s own outstretched, propulsive palm. This all happened in an instant; it felt imperative to kill, or at least seriously wound Fox. Yet, he knew that the impulse that seemed so paramount in that moment was one he would never act upon. He could already see the headlines.

***

The contents of a wastepaper basket were joined, at the hour of four in the afternoon, by a ballpoint pen that now served merely as a reminder to Rice of the emotions that bubbled within him yet, somehow, were not him. To the decorated Colin Rice, a ballpoint pen was something to be used in the course of navigating lucrative successions of Machiavellian business deals; selling, accumulating, finding the time to donate a portion of his wealth to a worthy cause. In truth, he primarily used the ballpoint for signing an array of cheques, which had always been a talent. It was certainly not emblematic of the lumbering mutilation of a corporate rival.

***

It grew dark and Rice found himself alone at the hotel bar, lamenting the company expenditure that it had taken to dispatch him to the mountainside headquarters of ZoxCorp, and how there would be so little of it in future. His ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card had not arrived; an irony, he thought, as in his youth he had frequently dominated the Rice family Monopoly board. (His tactic had entailed purchasing the less expensive properties – the murky browns, the light blues – and, within minimal rounds, reaping the benefits of the cheap hotels their modesty afforded.)

“Say, what beer you got there?” purred a husk of a voice; like a scratchy delta blues record, still half-whispering toward the crossroads.

“Lügenheißer.” Rice was distracted by a Wall Street Journal piece on private sector urban renewal, which he read via Blackberry internet. “...I guess it’s German.”

“Heidegger; he was German.”

“Uh-huh?”

“His deal was, I think,  the present has a meaning only insofar as it opens to a possible future. Lügenheißer,” He enunciated, nodding at the barmaid. “Thankyouthankyou...It might’a been some other guy. But that was what he said; consequence is man’s great concern.”

His existence having been defined by the limitations of prosaic thought, Rice sensed that the time was right for a pleasantry; he introduced himself, hand outstretched.

“I’m Anderson.” He had a tight grip.

“Oh yeah?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Whadda you do, Anderson?”

“I...” Anderson paused, finally looking up from his drink and into Rice’s eyes, breathing heavily, forming his words carefully as a sickening grin flickered across his lips. “I’m into insider trading.”

“Well, I know how it feels to have so many relying upon you.” Huffed Rice. Curious of the deep Midwestern brogue, he asked; “Are you on Wall Street?”

“Summinlikethat.” Grinned Anderson. Rice waited, but his acquaintance did not elaborate.

“Sorry, I’ll leave you t-“

“You ever shoot a bear?”

***

Although, as a long-time party donor, he had been known to shoot fox, “No, I have not.” said Rice.

“When a bear dies at your hands, it’s like you’ve conquered nature.”

“Right–“

 Look at the majesty of the bear. If you’re goin’ bear-shootin’, best bring your highest-calibre clip, because you gotta pump a-plenty so’s these...hirsute motherfuckers go down.”

“I don’t have a gun.”

“You might wanna think about changin’ that, too. Get a bear good, you wanna get it in the shoulder, ‘wise it can lower its own heart-rate; no blood, not as much anyway, you got no haemorrhage. And what the fuck you got if you got no haemorrhage? No, no, no. Shoot a bear in the shoulder, the bullet goes deep, and it just drops. A life ended, a huge, imposing physical force, shut down by the free will of mankind. That’s my shit. Consequence, consequence; The bear doesn’t know consequence. All he’s known is a string of moments, and to kill him is to take away an essence that has never sought a goal beyond food, has never been adulterated in any way by the concerns of aspiration.”

Rice, finishing his Lügenheißer, asked; “Why do you want to conquer nature?”

“Why do you wanna conquer nature?” he tapped him on the chest. “Asshole. Every man wants to conquer nature. It’s not like we asked to be born, don’tchathink?”

“I-“

“Right from the fuckin’ day we’re ripped,  screaming,  from the abyss!”

“...the abyss...?”

“ First, we do not exist, and then we do, all of a sudden, and there’s a lotta complications that come with that, lotta baggage. If we want, we can choose not to exist again. It’s a fight, right? Isn’t that what you’re gettin’ at with all this Randian shit?”

“I thought you were into insider trading?”

“I’m into a lotta things.”

Rice found Anderson, with his gravelly demeanour and curiously blackened fingertips, a mildly disconcerting presence. He felt fit to squirm as he was regaled with tales of blood-soaked hunting expeditions and existentialist philosophy. Anderson’s manner did not alter as he would drink, of which there was plenty, and it was a drunkard’s sincerity that led Rice confide in him of the myriad catastrophes that had preceded the failed buyout; the offshore investment, the misplaced finances, the hasty avoidance of responsibility. Although Anderson, loath to see somebody plagued by as superfluous an emotion as guilt, attempted to reassure him that he was not truly responsible unless others perceived him to be so, Rice was beside himself, wondering how he could reconcile his misdeeds with any form of morality.

“Kill a bear.” He said. “When you plug it, Colin, imagine consequence...imagine the future doesn’t matter. Look it in the eyes and walk away.”

***

By a pineland creek, Colin Rice set his sights upon a Brown bear. It had been easy enough to obtain a firearm, and he was anxious to discover – not the full, but surely a substantial – extent of his capabilities as a man. Rice aligned the scope of his hunting rifle with the shoulder of the creature, lumbering nearby on the other side of the water.  A wisp of recollection passed by; “...responsible only to yourself, if you can live with that.” He shuddered, and this seemed to pull the trigger for him. The bear’s mournful eyes met his as the round hit its shoulder, and he felt blinded by the spectacle of his crime – no, his victory against nature. The bear bucked and howled like a ship coming to port, its blood seeping through thick bristles of fur. Rice threw up into the bush by his side and fired another shot.

***

The call came through on a biscuit-aided rest-stop, Rice seated idly upon a boulder .

“There is interest,” whispered his secretary “in the ownership equity,” and Rice regretted not entertaining the idea that there may have been Blackberry signal further down the mountain.

Having established that; yes, it was seventy per-cent and; no, it was not yet common knowledge in the offices, he was poised to hang up in order to maintain a brisk pace, his breathing pattern unhindered by the irregularities of speech, when the thought hit him that behind money, there must too be an identity. The investor, he was told, was the noted tycoon Roland L. Anderson, of whom the LSE Encyclopaedia of Economics writes; “with his public appearances in the last four decades limited to the funerals of friends, Anderson is a veritable Howard Hughes.”

***

It was not inconceivable that Anderson wished to purchase the business; more so that an industrialist of his stature would perform their own headhunting work. Nor was it inconceivable that, with well-timed flights, he would be in the UK by now. Would Rice be able to fly with the gun, he wondered? He found it rather fetching, and there would certainly be no time to return it to its owner – why couldn’t he own a firearm, like the Americans do? Anderson probably had lots of guns. Rice pictured his arsenal – stacked like the company warehouses; weapon upon weapon, from the pistol to the shotgun, sunlight seeping through a crack in the shuttered blinds  to reflect off a polished Kalashnikov. Perhaps he had grenades, also. So many thoughts turned over in his mind that Rice did not sleep on the plane, and he flew into Gatwick watching the dawn with the flickering eyes of insomnia’s madness.

Waiting in the lobby was not his usual chauffer. Politely beckoning Rice into a Buick 1948 hearse that was at once handsome and morbidly anachronistic, a gaunt-faced man of an uncertain demographic slipped him a letter. It bore a blood-red wax seal, on which an ‘A’ was circled by spindly vines;

‘Next,’ it read ‘-the rats.”

***

It is arguable that, in the bear, Colin Rice had killed a creature of true nobility, and that rats have no such qualities. They were almost not worth his time. Nevertheless, he understood that this was a necessity, were he to see through the process that Anderson had set into motion. Consequently, he directed the driver to the Soho apartment of Bill Brion, who had joined the organisation as an intern and steadily risen in the hierarchy until he could no longer work alongside certain members of the executive body. Rice admired Brion’s work ethic, but thought that this supposed integrity – how much of it a visage, he did not know – was what kept him firmly in the realm of the nobodies.

“Wait here,” he told the driver. “I won’t be twenty minutes.”

Seventeen minutes hence, he was once more inside the Buick. He held a suspicion that, were it not for Brion - who opened his door with as much of a frown as he could muster through his baby-face -  his company would not have been described by the IMF (of all people!) as ‘rife with practises that reflect the failings of the British financial sector.’ The charming Mr Rice had expressed conciliatory sentiments, and a desire to talk over the very nature of their culture, but all the while he eyed the fire-poker that peaked out from Brion’s coal basket.  Cloaked in the hiss of the kettle, Rice stepped into the kitchen with soft footsteps, raising the blunt iron at the informant’s innocuously turned skull.

The line between company and man was dissolving in front of him, just as Anderson – grin simmering upon his haggard face – appeared to be materialising in his eye-line. Just as there was a free market, there was a free will. In Brion’s absence, the money-shaped hole could be plugged by Anderson’s, no longer leaking salacious drops of information, and nobody would lose face, nobody would go to prison, nobody would face consequence - least of all the immaculate Colin Rice. Champagne glasses clinked to the flow of bloodshed, and he felt no feelings of inner complication. It was not psychopathy, but lifestyle preservation. Consequence had been rendered insignificant by Anderson’s 70% stake in his existence – his actions had become something bigger than just himself. After all – corporations are people too.

Idealism is Not a Dirty Word

I was having a discussion with my friends the other day about the mechanics of socialism, and they were of the opinion that while it's fantastic in theory - the truth is a market economy is a far more realistic option, as it 'works', unlike socialism which has failed.

I have discussed the hollow illusion of capitalism 'working' previously so shall not delve into that, nor the semantics and application of 'socialism' in modern political history. Instead I shall be focusing on the idea that leaning towards a political theory of idealism is in some way a bad thing; a faint brush of good intention but ultimately futile and not showing a real understanding of how the world works. I will be focusing on this because this was the overarching sentiment behind the discussion I had, and indeed the same sentiment that comes up every time I discuss radical left ideals in a modern society.

Idealism is not, and should not, be a dirty word. Martin Luther King said he had a 'dream' for a reason; he was envisioning something which was not within the scope of the reality of things, but was a progressive lurch forward towards a better world. If you do not dream then you have nothing to reach for and nothing to achieve but the preservation of the current state of affairs and until we reach a perfect world then idealism will continue to be the engine for progression.

I often feel quite angry to be tarnished as an idealist as if it's some sort of negative characteristic, or as if I'm still a child because of it. 'When I grow up and start to pay taxes I'll understand these things a bit better'. If that's what growing up is then send me off with Peter Pan and let me fight Captain Hook CEO for eternity. I once had a discussion with someone about the legalisation of gay marriage in Australia, and how they thought it probably wouldn't happen because they're a realist and in their opinion it just wouldn't make political sense. Sure it should happen, but what's right and wrong plays little factor in the true mechanics of society.

Maybe that holds some truth, but the reason that this line of thinking holds any substance is because the spread of the attitude itself stops us from aiming for any sort of achievement to begin with. There is a cancerous spread of realists in the world and they are holding the world back from thinking it's actually worth aspiring towards anything at all; as if bending over to receive the rigid dick of party politics is acceptable because our arsehole is so loose after years of traditionalist buggery that, actually, it feels quite enjoyable now. The old public school boy way of thinking holds true because those public school boys have grown up and are now donning their old headmasters' caps in Westminster.

No. We need to get off all fours and pretending we're still living in an animal kingdom state of affairs and accept that dreaming of not getting fucked is a good thing. The best of things. Politics is a system of constant progression but realism drags it back, and the reason that realism is so rife in society - or has any existence at all - is because people think it's an acceptable line of thinking to be resigned to the negative consequences of the political game, or that the few failed attempts at creating a stable system based on equality means we should stop trying. This, of course, links back to my previous discussions on the hollow sense of capitalism 'working' and this is because capitalism is the holy grail for the prematurely middle-aged realist. The holy grail, fittingly, has holes in and is made of wood but - hey, at least we've got a grail so let's not go out and look for a better one. Capitalism has the necessity of a distinct underclass to keep it running yet somehow it's been drummed into us that this is reconcilable with a system of politics that 'works'.

Idealism, whilst unstable and uncertain, is what has lifted man off of all fours and led him through the animal kingdom to a society where universal suffrage has started and slavery has declined. 'Radical' thinking has led us each step of the way because it's 'radical' to take a step from the trodden path and try a better one. The reason that women and black men are even allowed into Westminster is because people dared to have an ideal different from their present state of affairs, and the mechanics that drove it. Idealism has kept mankind moving forward for centuries and should apply just as much to politics as it does to science. You don't find any medical scientists saying 'well, I think that's enough diseases cured for now', and even though, after years of research and masses of funding we have no cure for cancer the response is to try even harder, not give up. For some reason people can't reconcile this way of thinking with politics, but they should.

Our society is flooded with various cancers: the middle class white man still rules, women are paid less, minorities are still racially abused at football matches and some people grow up poor with the odds firmly against them doing anything else other than dying poor as well. The irony behind my thinking is, of course, that some might say I'm not applying the same aspirational attitude for the working class as I do for myself, but I am merely saying that it requires aspiration on both sides - something the Conservatives in particular miss entirely. Yes, people growing up in poor families can, do, and should aspire to lift themselves out of poverty but the truth of the matter is that they're far less likely to achieve the same things someone growing up in a richer family is, and if we're going to ask them to aspire then we have to aspire too and change the framework of society into something that isn't so intrinsically unequal. Otherwise we're continuing to live in a society of invisible slavery; driven by cause and effect rather than the whip and chain.

Everyone should aspire. The cancers in our society will never be solved with a realist attitude, and if you're a realist then you're encouraging people around you to be a realist too - as if it's some legitimate way of thinking. It's not; it's backwards and in every sense it's anti-political philosophy. Political philosophies have ideals behind them for a reason, and harbouring those ideals at heart always is not a bad thing, even in the light of roadblocks. Politics is a world of ladders that various minorities are still climbing but the greater climb towards an overall better society requires reaching from all sides; something realists will never do. Realism is standing on the same step of the ladder where idealists forever aim upwards. Sure, you might miss the next step and sometimes you might fall entirely, but that's an awful lot better than staying where you are and enjoying the bittersweet view of a cancered, imperfect society and treating it as a utopia rather than the incomplete construction site it is. Keep climbing, keep building and never sway from the fact that this needs to be done. Hold it to heart and don't let it flutter away.

By Harvey Slade

My Stationary Lover

You didn't clean the dishes up.
I work all day, when I come home
I do not want to find
This fucking mess
When all I want is
Less stress, and peace of mind.

I can't think in this clutter.
How can you lie there on the sofa?
Shawl across your legs and crumbs across your chest,
Hand still gently holding the remote across your breast
Changing channels of your dreams
And making sure you catch
The end of my reaction.

Very funny. You look cold;
I'll sweep you up and lift you somewhere warm,
And think in spite of all these flaws,
And all this havoc that you cause
And all the crumbs and all the mess
That I am yours,
My stationary lover.

'Looking For Harvey Rose' - the short story.

For my creative writing course, I was tasked with producing a genre piece in under 350 words. This caused complications for me, as I think to limit an writer to what is "necessary" to their piece is anti-intellectual and anti-artistic. However, it proved to be an assignment that provided me with insights into self-editing. The genres offered were romance, crime and western; three of my favourite genres. However, as I practically breathe gangster films (or that might just be the marijuana vapour convincing me I'm a G) I chose crime. Because I'm taking advantage of the course for my own means, I chose to use the character from a script I'm writing, the titular Harvey Rose. (No relation to ASSP's own Harvey Slade, obviously, because one does not convey family ties through the first name, apart from in North Korea. And we all know shit's a bit funky up in there.) Anyway, here it is. It's still not quite under 350 words.

“Our boys found a .44 Magnum at your place. What kind of a hippy are you, anyway?”

“Hey, man, I’m a hippy. I just had to pack a gat sometimes to get where I am today.”

“Yeah,” cracked Lieutenant O’Donnell, “...a fuckin’ prison cell.”

It had started, as so often seemed to happen to Harvey Rose, when his door was kicked in. This time it was the cops. Harvey’s dictum was that familiarity breeds not contempt but comfort. He sat stolidly as they fired easy questions at him, thinking, there’s nothing so daunting about the tank if you’ve been in there before; once, twice, a dozen-odd times since the pop revolution.

“Then there’s this heavy, got his ass mown down ‘side some party in Topanga two years back. Seemed like your garden-variety worthless piece of criminal shit, but he worked for none other than Vitale Danza, so perhaps he wasn’t without talent.”

“Just checked the file, Joe” the cops were doing their routine, “and Timothy “Rattlesnake” Conway had a preternatural gift for cocaine trafficking.”

“Don’t know no Rattlesnake,” Harvey grunted.

“Ain’t that just some shit, ‘cause, hypothetically, we knew who shot him, we could stick his ass in stir.”

“See where we’re goin’ with this?”

“As it happens, we’ve been looking for a hook into the Danza organisation for some time. Now, if he ain’t fuckin’ killed you yet, that implies to me that he ain’t fuckin’ gonna...”

“It’s funny...it’s almost like,” Harvey laughed in too high a pitch, “you want me to flip?”

You could hear it from the booth; even the coldest narcs, guys who hadn’t cracked a smile since Kent State, broke out in laughter. The lieutenant wiped his brow and spluttered, “We laugh now, but that is the idea, yes.”

“Hell, fellas, you got the wrong guy. Check your garden, I probably landscaped it. I’m straight.”

The lieutenant had been pacing, but at this he sat opposite Harvey.

“Only been 18 months. And it was gradual. Six months prior, you murdered Rattlesnake Conway. Why? I could give a fuck. He was a louse. It took you half a year to make good with Danza before you could get outta the game.  How hard’s it gotta be to make a comeback?”

John Ford: A True Western Villain

Quentin Tarantino's wonderful new epic, 'Django Unchained' has been extraordinarily successful since its domestic release on Christmas Day 2012. This should be no surprise; it's directed by Tarantino, arguably the world's most popular straight-up auteur, and stars big box-office draws Jamie Foxx, Samuel L. Jackson and Leonardo DiCaprio. Yet, 'Django...' is atypical in today's mainstream cinematic landscape in several ways. Its comedy and movie-violence is juxtaposed with a brave depiction of the horrors of slavery; where the viewer delights in Tarantino's trademark violence as ignorant slavers are whipped and shot by the man once bred to fear them, when two black men are forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of their master, the film becomes almost impossibly brutal. It's shockingly rare to have Afrocentric blockbusters, beyond Tyler Perry's cross-dressing Christian propaganda, least of all ones that are so candid about one of the darkest chapters of American history. It's a nearly three-hour film, and an ambitious and unconventional work, with the writer/director continuing to use decades of pop-culture as the palate that colours his stories. 'Django Unchained' is an anomaly as a hit film in 2012/13, because it fits fairly perfectly into the time-honoured Western tradition.

"Time to murder some underwritten characters because of their race!"

I hadn't seen any John Ford until recently, when I saw 'The Searchers' in my Film Studies class. Although he is supposed to be the King of the Western, my only prior knowledge of his work had been a Quentin Tarantino interview I read around the time of 'Django's', where he was asked about his favourite Western directors. He cited Sergios Leone and Corbucci as key influences, and explained that he hated John Ford, principally because the celebrated director had a substantial (but uncredited) role in D.W. Griffiths' 'Birth of a Nation' as a Ku Klux Klan member. There is no need for me to explain how much hate and violence that "classic" (read; worthy of some Nuremberg-style litigation) film created. I've had people argue to me that Ford was a product of the era, and his environment, but I think that's bullshit. If you're intelligent and compassionate enough, you know the KKK are evil, regardless of whether or not 'The Clansman' was a big-selling book at the time. Charlie Chaplin didn't spend 1915 lending his talents to racist films that promoted the murder of black people. Years later, he was practically kicked out of the US for being too left-wing. People's ideologies are their ideologies.

"I never liked John Wayne films. Sexist and boring. xxx." - a text from my mother.

So, I saw 'The Searchers' and thought, though the film was artistically beautiful, the script was a crock of shit. It starts off with caricatured, "scary" Indians, devoid of emotion and personality, committing a basically inexplicable act of atrocity, which serves to justify John Wayne gleefully shooting them down for the next two hours. Then there's a scene that can only be described as some STUPID-ASS SHIT, wherein Wayne finds some white girls in a Native American camp, and it's implied that the entire tribe has taken it in turns raping them. They just sort of stand there gurgling. It's extraordinarily moronic. The least sexist thing about the film is that one of the female characters can read better than her male counterpoint.

Prior to my viewing of the film, I asked my lecturer why he didn't consider 'The Good, The Bad & The Ugly' one of the quintessential classics of the Western genre, and he implied that it was too trashy and violent. I think that's an extremely elitist view to take considering its level of influence on modern cinema, and I maintain that Leone's 'Dollars Trilogy' are markedly superior films, particularly in their resolute lack of Ford's ugly, patriarchal form of good ol' boy White Supremacy. Wayne's character is definitely a racist, but I've heard people argue that the film isn't. You can blame it on its time, but 'Casablanca' didn't have a dumb script, and that came out 14 years beforehand. Whilst screenwriting was not a talent Ford possessed, his choice in screenplays reflects his personal tastes and views. Judging from what I know of his work; they were abhorrent.