It’s been a while since the last compare and contrast blog. Still, continuing this occasional series is one I only noticed relatively recently, and I find it hard to imagine that The Wedding Present’s ‘Go-Go Dancer’…
…wasn’t influenced just a little bit by Sonic Youth’s ‘Teenage Riot’:
Sadly, neither sound as good as I remember them.
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Way, way back, I began work on a book with the working title of The A-Z of Internet Porn. The project fell by the wayside, but not before I had amassed a fair few entries (boom boom) and outlined a large (oo-er) percentage of the entries (fnarr) the projected book would cuntain. Maybe one day I will return to the project and finish it off (snicker), or perhaps I’ll attempt to flog the concept to a publisher for someone else to take in hand (huh huh), but in the meantime, while it’s languishing on my hard-drive (nyak nyak) alongside the completed novels Exiled in Domestic Life and Rusty Bullet Wounds and the never-ending work-in-progress that is my post-apocalyptic romance novel So Dark All Over Europe, I thought I might shove (arferoo!) a few extracts up here as and when the mood so takes me… Enjoy!
A is for….
ACCIDENTAL NUDITY
It’s a common situation: you’re out clubbing or on a night out with some gal pals and, forgetting you’re wearing something strappy, start dancing rather too wildly (well those 2 for 1 Bacardi Breezers are hard to decline) and suddenly – oops! – your tit pops out. You’re mortified, naturally, and put it away as quickly as possible in the hope that no-one’s noticed. Alas, no such luck: one of your mates had their camera of phone out and just happened to snap at the crucial moment.
The good news is that most mainstream social networking sites like Facebook remove pictures that are in any way ‘adult’ (clearly being off your face and spewing on the pavement is for kids) so should the pics that could ruin your reputation in a matter of hours make it up there (and the chances are that they will), so the chances of them being up for long and seen by the half of the world that didn’t see them in the first few hours won’t get to.
The bad news is that there are people on-line who go crazy for these kind of pictures. And of course, if you’re remotely famous, it’s even worse, because there are paps absolutely everywhere, with their lenses in your life, following you on holiday, to the shops, to the toilet…
Is it porn, though? It’s debatable, it has to be said. But we live in a celebrity-obsessed, sexualised culture in which one man’s poison is another man’s meat and one man’s yawn is another man’s porn…
See also CANDID SHOTS, CELEBRITY NUDES, DOWNBLOUSE, NIP-SLIP, NIPPLE POKIES, VOYEURISM.
And if you’re loving my work, there’s more of the same (only different) at Christophernosnibor.co.uk
I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of James Wells’ debut novel Hack when I received a preview over email from Clinicality boss Stuart Bateman, accompanied by a request to provide artwork for the cover. Parts of it made me laugh myself silly: others frustrated me beyond belief. Others still made me feel like I needed to take a shower. It’s the grubby, sordid story of a music journo, who on the one hand is such a scabby scum-sucking, double-crossing pondlife deserves everything he gets, yet on the other hand, as a part-time freelance music writer myself, couldn’t help but sympathise with some of his grievances – and he has many.
The first-person narrator, Rob, is a man who’s torn between his integrity and his libido. he’s not dumb, but he behaves it – and often has to act it just to get on with his job, but then one has to wonder how much of his shameful behaviour and how many of his diabolical opinions are the drink and drugs talking.
I should perhaps point out here and now that I don’t identify with the lifestyle aspects of the story, and while, in the event, the book incorporates subtly edited versions of reviews I myself have written, the book isn’t in any way based on me or my work. However, being the observant sort, I’ve spied more than enough sleazy music journos who think they’re the scene while at gigs that the tale Wells relates through Hack seems more than credible enough for me to buy it. And therein lies the book’s double-edged sword: it makes for uncomfortable reading, but is also compelling, a complete car-crash of a story. As a novel, it’s superficial and trashy, but also brilliantly observed, but I still couldn’t quite decide how to take it, so when Stuart asked me if I’d like to conduct an interview with the book’s author, I jumped at the chance, if only to find out just what kind of sleazy tosser this James Wells guy was – or if, perhaps, I should remember my own first principle of separating narrator from author…
The following exchange took place over the course of a couple of weeks of emailing.
CN: Hack is a pretty grubby book that paints a pretty messy and unpleasant picture of bands, reviewers, the music industry and the world as a whole. How much of it is drawn from experience?
JW: Well, some is, some isn’t. It’s a mish-mash of stuff I’ve observed first hand, stuff I’ve read and stuff I’ve imagined. It’s certainly not a realist work. It’s mostly supposed to be a bit of fun, with a fairly dark, twisted and dirty sense of humour pushing it along.
CN: It certainly is dirty. What’s the narrator’s obsession with ejaculating over breasts?
JW: It was just a bit of a gimmick, really. I was just messing with formula, really. It started when I was reading Bukowski – Women, it might have been, one of his really filthy works that’s really sordid – it just had a sort of cumulative effect, every few pages it’s the same scenario. He’s humped some broad and it’s ‘I rolled over, wiped myself down’, then he goes to the race track and gets wrecked. After while it all gets a but nauseating, but I actually liked it and found it funny in a sick way, and I was going for that. It was a long time since I actually read those book’s but they stuck with me, that matter-of-fact gutter eloquence and the way scenes just seem to play out again and again. Then there’s the whole process of pulp writing, the endless rehashing of scenes, plots and phrases, and I just recreated that in the context of a low-down, seedy music hack on an endless treadmill. Mostly, though, I wanted to keep the formula basic: sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
CN: To what extent is Hack autobiographical?
JW: Not very. At all, in fact.
CN: The book’s set in Leeds and presents itself as being based around the Leeds scene. Are any of the characters based on real people?
JW: Yes, quite a few, but I wouldn’t like to say which ones.
CN: Are the opinions expressed about music and bands your own? By which I mean, to what extent can we align the criticism and musical tastes of the protagonist with the author?
JW: Yes, I agree with many of the opinions expressed and like the bands the narrator Rob favours, and when he’s slagging a band, like Kasabian or whatever, I’m using him as a cipher through which to express my opinions. And so the distinction between fact and fiction, author and narrator continues to blur.
CN: With some of the running themes – in particular the CDs accumulating in Rob’s room – I got a sense of Chuck Palahniuk. In Fight Club and Choke, there are threads of the stories where the characters just endlessly collect, until the amassment of things – it’s rocks in Choke – takes over their lives. And then, of course, Palahniuk makes considerable use of heavy repetition. Was that intentional, or purely coincidental?
JW: It was entirely intentional. I’m a big fan of Palahniuk’s books and I thought that the way he addresses that idea of obsession with physical objects, that kind of obsessive gathering and accumulation was really appropriate to the music fan, and from the research I did it seems to be a common problem with reviewers.
CN: Well, it certainly is in my experience. So with regard to the music reviews in the book, you ended up using slightly altered pieces of mine after Stewart at Clinicality suggested there might be a few problems with the manuscript as it was. What happened?
JW: In my attempts to a) keep it ‘real’ and b) churn the book out quickly – I wanted it to be a piece of hack-work in itself, in the spirit of the narrative because I wanted it to be raw, immediate, unedited in feel, as though written to meet a deadline like so much journalism – I lobbed a bunch of reviews I found on-line and changed them a bit. But while editing the book, Stuart decided he didn’t want to take the risk of using ‘stolen’ reviews, even though the chance of getting stung for it was pretty negligible, and that’s when he suggested seeing how you felt about some of your reviews going in – with a few small alterations.
CN: As the ‘author’ of THE PLAGIARIST it would be hypocritical of me to refuse. Besides, I’m getting used to seeing chopped-up versions of my own reviews cropping up in all sorts of places on-line so I figured ‘what’s a few more’? I suppose this also tied in with the ‘spinning’ element of the story…
JW: That was exactly it. The part of the book where Rob can’t sustain his output so takes to lifting other people’s reviews and changing them slightly and then altering a few words here and there so one single review could end up yielding a dozen or so, I wanted to make it authentic. It’s a practice known as word-spinning. It’s insanely common, it’s how a lot of sites get just masses of content on-line so they appear up in the lists on search engines and I thought ‘this is proper hack work, 21st century style’ so I went for it and wanted to integrate it into the story. As it turned out, it was only semi-authentic, but still, I think the effect’s there.
CN: So aside from Palahniuk, Bukowski, and me, who and what influenced Hack?
JW: I’m not really all that keen on saying that I’ve been influenced by anyone because it sets up an expectation for the reader, and if they’re going to pick up my book because they’re expecting it to read like Bukowski or Palahniuk, then they’ll probably be extremely disappointed or annoyed. But I suppose I have taken bits and pieces from various other writers and sources, without really thinking about it, it’s impossible not to. Obviously, the music press was a big ‘influence’, and I know you do what you do reviewing wise and I generally like your approach, but there are some really awful reviewers out there, and forums too. Fans think they’re the best critics, and anyone who criticises ‘their’ band is in dangerous territory – and they seem to think that they’re the only people entitled to slag off ‘their’ band, too. it’s very strange that they’re so previous and so critical at the same time. The press blurb Stuart did also mentioned the John Niven book Kill Your Friends and I suppose that’s a fair comparison, but it wasn’t an influence. What else? Hard to say. I didn’t sit down and think ‘I’m going to write a book that incorporates elements of whoever and whoever’, so apart from the parts that were consciously based on Buk and Chuck, any other similarities in terms of style or plot to anything else is entirely coincidental.
CN: As with Kill Your Friends – which is a book I really enjoyed – there aren’t many – any likeable or ‘sympathetic’ characters. Why is that?
JW: I wanted the misanthropy of the narrator to feed through the narrative. Most of the characters don’t really have much depth to them so the reader doesn’t get to know them very well, but that’s not what they’re there for, they’re just there for the story, they’re functional. The main characters aren’t very deep either, but then I never wrote Hack as a literary novel with emotionally-engaging character development at its heart. In fact, it doesn’t have a heart, and that’s as intended, reflecting the nature of the business itself.
CN: That’s a very harsh view. There are lots of nice people who are in bands and put bands on who are in it for all the right reasons.
JW: That’s true, but they wouldn’t have made for such a fun book. Besides, the narrator Rob isn’t supposed to be completely unsympathetic. He’s not an out and out bastard, more a bit weak and a victim of circumstance.
CN: Aren’t we all?
JW: Absolutely, and that’s why I think Hack has a universality that extends beyond those with an interest in obscure music and music more broadly. Of course, some readers won’t get all of the references, some won’t get any of them, but it doesn’t change the underlying plot – thin as it is – which is all about systems of interaction between people, the way those interactions are based on mutual use and abuse, and told in a way that while perverse and dark, is also intended to be humorous.
Hack is out now on Clinicality Press, and yes, it is extremely funny (although I didn’t laugh quite hard enough to shit my pants). Buy it: the cover’s ace.
And if you’re loving my work, there’s more of the same (only different) at Christophernosnibor.co.uk
The Habit, the tiny bar venue in York that Mark Wynn plays often and has chosen for the launch of his new album attracts an odd melange of beatniks offbeats, hipsters, scenesters and hangers-on. With its artisan interiors and late-night opening, it has a distinctively cosmopolitan vibe, and I often find myself thinking of Henry Miller whenever I’m in there – and I like to go there every so often when I’m taking a night off, because I can sit or lean and blend into the background while someone or other – sometimes Mark, sometimes different people – play tunes, and I can enjoy a drink and watch and listen in on the ‘characters’, the cool kids and the wannabes, the has-beens, could have beens, never weres and never had a hope of beings. From a writing perspective, it’s a great place to go to simply observe.
It’s also, in many ways, representative of the way I see the music industry evolving – or devolving. As artists are rejecting the industry that rejected so many of them, they’re going cottage and taking things back to grass roots. The heart of music now doesn’t really lie in the big gigs and the major label multi-million selling albums. No, we’re entering a time when artists play day in day out to small audiences in intimate venues. They may eke a living and get paid a pocketful of change that they subsidise by flogging a few CDs on the night, and it’s a fucking hard slog, but existing at the opposite end of the spectrum from all the X-factor cal, it’s real-life, not reality TV. Without the cameras, the wardrobe, the production, the digitization and editing, playing up close and personal requires real talent and commitment.
Tonight, The Habit is more packed and buzzing than usual. In fact, it’s hard to get to the bar. The atmosphere’s a little different. It’s not full moon, but there’s definitely something in the air. Then comes a point two songs before the end of Mark Wynn’s set when the madness takes over. The drunken old fruit in the vulgar shirt who’s been busting moves all night knocks the mic stand – by no means for the first time. Mark pauses for a beat, moves the mic back so it’s positioned in front of his mouth and he launches into an improvised number ripping the piss out of the guy, who, it seems, is renowned for his tedious tales told in an inebriated state. Mark could be forgiven for being frustrated. His rant’s not overtly mean-spirited, though – it’s all in the delivery – and besides, it’s extremely funny, and I can’t help but be particularly amused when he riffs on how the old duffer resembles Henry Miller.
Y’see, Mark Wynn is a real one-off. There’s no doubting his musical skills, but in a world where there’s a singer/songwriter playing a mix of originals and covers, picking and strumming an acoustic guitar in every pub and on every street corner (especially in York), what makes Mark stand out is his apparent unwillingness to do just that. He’s a low-key and self-effacing kinda guy playing low-key, self-effacing kinda songs. His demeanour is slightly shuffling, shy and awkward seeming, and he has a tendency to play sets full of downbeat songs quietly. His between-song banter is characteristically mumbled, a little rambling, but it’s equalled by a deceptively sharp wit, and his unique brand of inverse showmanship is a welcome alternative to the big egos, the musos clamouring to be discovered.
Mark’s a genuine artist, relentlessly carting his battered guitar up and down the country on his endless ‘getting ignored in bars’ tour because that’s what he does. He’s a musician and he’s all about the music. He sings songs. Often sad or frustrated, but sometimes happy. and sometimes spinning yarns, a true troubadour, and the turnout for the launch of ‘Stories, Rags and Stomps’ (which he describes as ‘low-grade trash’) indicates that his work is appreciated.
After support slots from David Keegan and some other dude, and the rabble-rousing folksters Rat Catchers Mallets, who, er, roused plenty of rabble, Wynn’s set brings things down a notch. It’s no bad thing, however. He doesn’t actually play much material from the new album, as far as I can tell – although there are points where it’s so loud it’s difficult to tell what he’s playing – and instead plays a slew of unfamiliar material. It doesn’t matter. He plugs away, casually, affably, supping a pint and simply doing his thing. It’s what he does – and I hope he keeps on doing it.
The album’s pretty good, by the way, and costs less than a jacket potato or cheese toastie at The Habit.
Mark Wynn on Bandcamp: http://markwynn.bandcamp.com/
And if you’re loving my work, there’s more of the same (only different) at Christophernosnibor.co.uk
It’s oft said – not least of all by me – that it’s important to learn the rules before breaking them. Otherwise, it’s not subversion, but plain ignorance. On reading the sonnet sequence that occupies the first half of Leo Schulz’ Allegorical Beasts, it’s clearly apparent that the author knows his way around a sonnet.
That Schulz has actually produced a sonnet sequence is in itself extremely telling: in vogue briefly during the Elizabethan period, it’s hardly the verse form of choice for contemporary poets. Not that the forty-five poems that comprise ‘Sonnets of the Sea’ contain any half-arsed doggerel, sixth-form scribblings self-consciously imitating the Petrarchan or Shakespearean form: this is sonneteering 21st century style, which dispenses with the fussy rhyme scheme and the restrictive metrical dictates of old convention to produce a series of poems that pack some real punch. Schulz certainly doesn’t dress things up in draperies of poetic euphemism. Yet at the same time, ‘Sonnets of the Sea’ does follow the principles of thematic unity, and fills the lines with magnificent imagery, some contemporary, some timeless, and succeeds in doing so without being overtly self-conscious or revelling in the author’s own cleverness, a feat also achieved in the three-part ‘Imitation of Dante.’
If ‘The Devil Writes to a Woman Who Loves Him,’ the first of the three prose pieces, seems a little weak despite its twisted psychology and cunningly-devised scenario, it’s only because it’s overshadowed by the final story, ‘Love: A Confession’. The direct, first-person narrative drags the reader through the emotional wringer as the speaker (who I would hate to align with the author, although its raw intensity is so specific and detailed it makes it more than just a little tempting) picks over the scabs of a defunct relationship. Occasionally amusing, always observed and detailed with a stunning precision, the story is delivered with a vivid sense of tormented humanity, making t one of the most engaging short stories I’ve read in a while.
‘Allegorical Beasts’ is an intense and intelligently-written book that marks Schulz as a unique and remarkable literary voice.
Allegorical Beasts is out now on Königreich Böhmen and is available via Amazon.
And if you’re loving my work, there’s more of the same (only different) at Christophernosnibor.co.uk
For a moment, I felt the same incredulity and momentary slip of the sprockets of reality as when I turned on the news to discover that Princess Diana had died, and, some years later, Michael Jackson. Amy Winehouse, dead? Surely not? The way these three stories reached me was different for each: Di was a Sunday morning, I turned on the television to find nothing but blanket coverage on every station… I was at a gig when Jackson met his end, and someone in the audience had received a text and shouted out to the band between songs. From then on, we got updates from the stage via texts to audience members. It was through Facebook and Twitter than news of Amy Winehouse’s death circulated like wildfire, although I still turned to the television for confirmation… just in case. And sure enough, it was the breaking news on all of the channels.
Well, why wouldn’t it have been? Winehouse was a celebrity, famous and notorious in equal measure…actually, that’s not quite true. With only two albums to her credit (which collectively spawned just one top-ten UK single, her biggest hit being a cover on which she featured as guest vocalist) – and with many casual music fans unaware of her her debut, which achieved only moderate success – she might have been a reasonably successful singer, but it wasn’t until she careered off the rails and got fucked up that the media really got interested. Like Courtney Love – who is very much still alive – she only went stellar when things went wrong. The whole media circus didn’t only eclipse the short-lived musical career but also became self-perpetuating. There’s no more powerful blocker of creativity than intense scrutiny 24/7, a bunch of paps in your face every time you leave the house and endless speculation and commentary over a person’s varying degrees of wastedness. And if you have a propensity for drink and drugs, how are you going to escape it all? With more of the same, of course. And thus it becomes a vicious cycle.
Pete Doherty’s band may have been NME darlings, but being a pretty mediocre, shambling, jangling shit indie band, they were never going to become a household name (something also true of Hole, only they were a half-decent alternative rock band, at least until Courtney lost it after Kurt’s suicide and the mess and mud-slinging that ensued, which was at least partly media created). It was only the drug-related carnage and dalliance with Kate Moss that propelled him into the headlines. It’s hard to tell how much of it is driven by the media and how much it’s driven by a genuine thirst for scandal, but however you look at it, fucking up in public is the way to hit the stratosphere in terms of coverage. The media love it, of course: pick your target and shadow it, with the guarantee that there’ll be something outrageous to report most nights of the week and you’ve got an easy way of filling time or column inches. Are the public genuinely interested, are they really that thirsty for salacious gossip about the not-so private lives of celebrities? Maybe the they weren’t but tell them often enough and they’ll become convinced that they are interested.
The BBC had a reporter stationed at the cordon on the street where Winehouse lived. The reporter commented on the sixty-five or so fans who had gathered and remarked on her dedicated following. There’s no questioning the size of her fan-base: Back to Black has sold in excess of 10 million copies. But mainstream artists rarely have truly dedicated fans: were these dedicated fans the same ones who booed her off the stage not so long ago when she rocked up, wasted, stumbling over her feet and the lyrics and generally in no fit state to perform? Sixty-five people is hardly a crowd, and besides, how many of those loitering – when there’s nothing to see, so why not move along, now? – were actually fans? How many were police, and how many were media reporters and photographers? That’s a rhetorical question.
Most saliently, the number hanging around that street in Camden was significantly lower than the body count in Norway. Yet in the rush to give live, up-to-the-minute, as-it-happens coverage of another dead pop star, that story had plummeted off the radar. The hacking scandal was all but forgotten and I can only assume that the fact Greece – not to mention America, but that’s being kept strangely quite – is on the brink of financial ruin and there are wars raging across the globe are only of minimal significance in comparison. I’m reminded of Derrick Bird’s killing spree in Cumbria last year, which saw 12 people shot dead and 11 more injured before he turned the gun on himself. It was major news for a short while, until Raol Moat went on the rampage and the story was all but forgotten about. Despite a much lower body count, a siege was ready-made for live streaming news and much more likely to capture the nation’s imagination than something that was over before the cameras could be on the scene.
I’ll admit, I was never a fan of Winehouse’s work, and don’t think she was an ‘incredible talent’, and the monumental outpourings of grief on-line seem wholly disproportionate. In the same way that everyone loathed Jade Goody for being a fat racist ignoramus until she was diagnosed with cancer, when she was immediately presented with a halo and became a national treasure, it seems that dying young alters the mass perception to such an extent that all is forgotten. Seemingly, dying young it a tragedy no matter what, and makes one a better person, a hero, an instant deity. Thus, while I have no wish to disrespect the dead, I’m not going to suddenly change the opinion I held of her while she was living – a rough, skanky no-mark who got lucky.
But this isn’t about my opinions of Amy Winehouse or her music. I’m more concerned about taking an objective look at the media response – by which I also mean on-line media, interactive media. Sure, a lot of people did like her music, but did she and her work really touch the lives of so many, so profoundly, as to require the Twittersphere to become clogged and Facebook to become a no-go zone for those who want to read anything other than ‘RIP Amy Winehouse’ and what a tragedy it is that the world’s lost one of its greatest talents? Or is it simply an example of people being seen to do and say what’s expected of them, the herd mentality of not wanting to be left out? ‘Yes, me too, I never got any of her albums, but I really loved her music, so amazing, blah blah blah’.
It’s all a matter of perspective. It’s about time people started to think for themselves.
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I like reading, and would fairly describe myself as an avid reader. However, I often wish I had the time to read more. As we all know, time is one of the rarest commodities in today’s insanely hectic society, and while films and music offer instant gratification, the written word requires patience and mental engagement. It’s long struck me as odd, then, that the majority of bestsellers are whopping great 500+ page doorstops (that most of them are complete pap is, naturally, less surprising). Still, contra to the trend, and more in keeping with people’s busy lifestyles, the rise of flash fiction seems entirely appropriate, and short stories have been enjoying a welcome renaissance in recent years. And now, Propaganda Press have started doing a line in something truly innovative, the microbook.
Mike Meraz’s Black-Listed Thoughts is a compendium of pithy bon mots, one-liners, ponderences, reflections and scathing put-downs that’s perfect for dipping into, although just as easily devoured in a single short sitting. There are words of wisdom, words of encouragement, and words that are against wisdom and, well, pretty much anything else. By turns cynical and revelatory, Meraz is never less than sharp in his delivery. I found myself nodding in agreement, before turning the page and laughing heartily: Black-Listed Thoughts is a book for our schizophrenic modern age. A quick read though it is, this wallet-sized tome provides plenty to chew on and leaves a long aftertaste.
It might not be big, but it’s definitely clever enough.
Black-Listed Thoughts is out now on Propaganda Press.
And if you’re loving my work, there’s more of the same (only different) at Christophernosnibor.co.uk
So, the premise of the ‘hit’ ITV1 show Secret Dealers is – and please, correct me if I’m wrong – that householders apply to be on the show, and, if selected, three antiques dealers rock up (with a camera crew and host Kate Bliss, who previously appeared on Bargain Hunt and Flog It!). Then, while the householders are out (presumably they’re taken for a meal or something by some TV people and transported back when the word is given, rather than simply being booted out of their house and told to come back in a few hours), check out the contents of the house. Anything the dealers like the look of, they’ll pop a card next to, with the amount they’re offering for said item written inside. Each dealer is identified by the colour of their cards.
When the householders return, the host takes them round and shows them what’s been offered for each item. Where multiple offers have been made, the householder can sell to the highest bidder, or keep the item if they think it’s worth more. The dealer who buys the most wins, and the householder ‘wins’ the proceeds of the sales, and winds up with a house stripped of any items of value.
Fine. So it’s a glorified house clearance, daytime TV style, and everyone loves it because it’s got real people and everyone think they too might have some rare antique bric-a-brac lurking in the loft. I get that.
But where’s the secret? The title implies they’re undercover or otherwise anonymous, like the ‘secret’ millionaires and the ‘secret’ bosses. How are the dealers remotely secret when the householders know they’re coming – because they invited them – and it’s not only revealed how much was offered for each item, but who made the offer? The dealers know they’re dealers, and all of the dealers know what the other two are up to. The only secret is that the dealers don’t know how much the others have offered… which is essentially how sealed bidding works. It doesn’t make the dealers secret, though, does it? No, only the bids.
The threadbare premise for an hour-long show is one thing, but the completely misleading title is quite another. But then, I suppose A Bunch of So-Called Antiques Dealers Place First -Price Sealed Bids on Stuff to Fleece Idiot Members of the Public on TV in the Name of Cheap Entertainment doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Kate Alcock – sorry, Bliss – being secretive, yesterday.
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Tim had a point to prove and a gospel to spread. He had seen the light, he could feel the liberation surging through his veins. He was reborn! He scanned the slightly tatty leaflet on both sides, then pasted the images into a document. Within an hour, he had a hundred sheets of double-sided print stacked in the tray of his printer. He then proceeded to take the pile and fold each A4 sheet in half to produce four sides of A5. The quality was pretty good, and while obviously not an original, first-generation copy, and the background had been darkened slightly on account of the source document being an off-white shade, the text was perfectly legible. Over the next few weeks, he circulated them as widely a he possibly could, leaving them in public places – pubs, the library, on trains and busses, even tucking them into and between books in various book shops, with particular focus on the self-help sections, in the hope of replicating for others the circumstances in which he first discovered the life-changing publication.
Walking down the high street, a girl stopped him with an extended arm. a leaflet advertising a new eatery or somesuch held toward him in her hand.
‘I’ll take one of yours in exchange for one of mine,’ Tim said flamboyantly.
The girl looked perplexed and probably agreed out of bewilderment, at which point Tim took one of her flyers and shoved one of the ‘Liberate Yourself’ handouts, folded in half, that he had been carrying in his pocket into her small hand.
Happy and confident that he had made some gesture toward altering the life praxis of another lost individual caught on the wheels of contemporary culture, Tim headed home with a spring in his step.
Arriving home his mood altered dramatically. The place was empty and unkempt. The surfaces were dusty and dirty dishes were piled high in the sink. The shower’s plughole was clogged with hair, wet towels lay in a heap beside the shower and unwashed clothes littered the floors throughout the residence. An odour resembling hot dogs permeated the whole bedroom. It had been a month since Amy had left and she hadn’t come back, hadn’t called him or made any form of contact, she had simply cut him out. Slumping on the greasy settee, a discarded pizza box and a clanking pike of empty beer cans about his feet, Tim felt tired, physically and emotionally drained. He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. His skin felt rough and dry, his eyes sensitive and watery. He was exhausted, and this was reflected in his sallow appearance. No-one had called him in weeks. He couldn’t bring himself to check his emails or his Facebook profile. The last time had broken his rule and snuck himself a tentative sign-in the bottom had dropped out of his world when he saw there was nothing: no messages, no emails, no comments, not even a pathetic poke. Two months missing and the world hadn’t noticed his absence.
The realisation hit with a sickening thud and a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Tim had gained nothing, learned nothing. He had simply replaced one set of rules with another, bound himself with new ties. Having cut the shackles of technological totalitarianism, he had embraced another equally restrictive mode of living, only this time one with even less sense of connection and community than the dislocated confusion of culture he had existed in before. Instead of finding freedom, he has enslaved himself once more, and this time, without any of the support mechanisms that ostensibly held together the web of mainstream society, he was alone. Was he to blame, or was it the instructions he was following? Had he interpreted them correctly? The world wasn’t changing enough to accommodate his alternative lifestyle, wouldn’t allow him to reject it without it rejecting him in return. The fact he didn’t need it was immaterial: society needed him a whole lot less than he needed hit.
If you want to truly liberate yourself, stay in bed. Do not go to work. Do not phone in sick. Just do nothing, and enjoy. If no-one contacts you to query your whereabouts after a week, you may as well kill yourself.
Tim knew what he had to do. He knew who his friends were alright.
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Tim was spending a lot of time as he pleased, but was far from being a man of leisure. Things were shaping up on the allotment, but he was a long was off being self-sufficient. All too often, he found the temptation to do something else less boring instead too great, and would take himself off on long, meandering cycle rides or sit in the pub on his own with a book or a magazine, or even a newspaper. He’d never been a big reader before, but was starting to find it an enjoyable and stimulating pastime, although he preferred non-fiction books and still found the news as depressing as hell. Still, it only reinforced his belief that what he was doing was for the best. The world was sick and he wanted no part in it.
Amy saw things differently though. Tension had been mounting and the more Tim refused to join her on her social climbing excursions and uncomfortable engagements with people neither he nor she really liked, the more irritated she became.
It all came to ahead one Wednesday evening. Amy had been working late and Tim hadn’t been working at all. It had begun with Amy’s daily harangue about him getting another job, and he’d had to admit that money was beyond tight. His suggestion that they sell some of Amy’s DVDs and unwanted clothed had incensed her and she had given him a piece of her mind with a few home truths expressed in the most straightforward of terms.
‘You don’t get it, do you?’ he had said.
‘You’re right, I don’t. I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with you,’ he had snapped in reply. ‘You need your head checked. You’re not living in the real world!’
‘No,’ he’d replied in a measured tone, solid with confidence and conviction, ‘I’m part of the solution. Your way of living, following the herd, running on empty and perpetual stress, as though you’re actually gaining from it, is all wrong. Success – material success – is an illusion. No-one sees it because they’re scared.’
‘Don’t talk like that, you sound like you’re mad!’ Any had screamed.
Tim had shaken his head. ‘If only you knew’, he had sighed. ‘Look, you’re off to a party for Paul’s birthday tonight, right? Why are you going? You feel obliged,’ he had lectured. ‘You can’t say no because you can’t be seen to not be there. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, right? But what’s in it for you, really? You’ll make like you’re having a great time, but it’s all a complete lie. You think he’s boring and his girlfriend’s an idiot. Although to be honest, I think you’re jealous of her because she’s on a higher salary and likes everyone to know it.’
‘Look, I can’t be with you if you’re going to be such a prick,’ Amy had snarled. ‘I’ll be back for my stuff later.’ Then she turned tail and walked out, slamming the door behind her.
Tim’s face flushed, a combination of humiliation and anger. Fuck her. If Amy couldn’t get on board with what he was doing, and support him in making a better life for himself in an insane world based on facades and superficial exchanges devoid of contact or humanity in a culture of hyperinformation, he didn’t need her. It was her loss. One day she would realise he was in the right.
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