9.11. dexter, sinister

On the subject of 9/11, I have little to say, save that I notice an elderly man across the street has planted American flags in his window. One large flag taped to the centre pane, two smaller ones either side.

The wound is too raw, even ten years on, the ceiling torn away so toweringly iconic, that it is difficult to reconcile trauma on the ground with repercussions rolling out from its epicentre.

I watched old footage of Bush, Jr on our television this morning. Bumbling toward some public play at catharsis. All sense of emotion evaded him then, I seem to remember, the human scale of things. Wide-eyed like a nodding imbecile in the classroom, he merely looked to have soiled himself.

New York City's mayor made a better job of mobilizing a response. Bill Clinton, stepping out of retirement. Dogshit and disgrace.

I was listening to the Ramones when flight 11 nose dived into the North Tower of the World Trade Center - 'Road to Ruin', I am not fabricating events - and I could not engage a pause. I sat and smoked a cigarette. The telephone rang. The word 'apocalyptic' is frequently misused, but the unfolding of the impossible seemed to resonate with biblical import. Twenty-two floors up, myself, small potatoes granted, I sat on my little wooden stool and braced myself for further impact; an explosion of concrete and glass.

Chicken Little, stripped to the bone.

I worried for my young son's safety - just three-years-old at the time - and decided there was nothing to be done.

poem for a stand up guy, in beer

I could not listen
for the scraping retort.

The
Cackling;
Hooting;
the explosive Guffaw,

Ears burning,
pricked by stitching,

Even the word
'Nipple'
Arousing raw heights
of inanity,
Spittled lips puckered
Wetly
in rows, front and back,

The spotlight trained
on
tired, spotted flesh,
Sticking
at the armpits,
Small beer, short shrift,

Arrivists in cashmere
Sweaters,
Hanging on each word.

Finally,
it is not the metal taste
of fear
which saws and stings -

the spoon,
the knife, the fork -

It is the copper ringing,
the dread
of the seasoned familiar,
The strings,
The posies,
The lantern jaw of the
wooden marionette in the
Shadow of a beard,
The singing of the crowd,
The flaccid chatter,

The monkey,
the organ, the grind.

I tossed out the above poem, listening to it rattle through my skull, between a supermarket trip and charging electricity to my key. Milo had been shrieking since 7 AM. There was no respite from his teething. Whingeing. He headbutted me twice, I think. He may have unplugged a tooth.

The last of the loosely presentable.

I was thinking on 'Hostage', recorded live at Redondo Beach in April, 1980; Jon's Trotskyite cronies in Echo Park, 1972, too consumed with politicking to peer over their noses long enough to register discomfit.

From a grandiose brownstone, to a pier on Venice Beach.

I don't know if you are familiar with 'Hostage'. It is all but insufferable. Charles Bukowski, it is alleged, detested public performance. The routine humiliation.

There is no sense in stepping in a prize stallion's shoes, it is remarked, unless one is prepared to break from the stalls at a gallop. Of course. Charles Bukowski studied form.

The odds, the skinny, shortfalls in rent.

Despite all this, he could not stomach the notion of pandering to the crowd. There is more joy, perhaps, in trudging pavements in the snow. I have tried that too. I have written of it in private correspondence.

Coming home from the night shift with one's arms three inches longer. Fingers torn and bloody from mail sacks fresh off the 3 AM flight. Falling straight into bed knowing Christmas is in the bag.

Well. The postman brings good news. A Trust here in Glasgow has agreed to finance a good part of my tuition fees. I am relieved. Ecstatic. That they have backed my horse before it is dragged off to the knacker's yard, that I have composed my mouth in one last gasp.

Allen Ginsberg famously courted the crowd. It was a good gig, while it lasted.

Such as it is, I am of a mind to visit a home recorded reading from New Orleans, Louisiana - of all places - from 1970, forty years and many ailing dogs ago.

Of course. I have not arrived. Not quite yet, I am not so addled, though the Merlot is back on the menu. The beer tucked away in our fridge.

It is a nod, to the living at least. As much a public nicety as I am capable of.


▼ CHARLES BUKOWSKI: HAMMER AND LEASH from "King Of Poets" CD (Chinaski Records) 1997 (US / Germany)

jock's away, in a manner of speaking

Oscar Wilde • Brendan Behan • Sean O'Casey • George Bernard Shaw • Samuel Beckett • Eugene O'Neill • Edna O'Brien • Lawrence Stern • Sean Kavanaugh • Sean McCann • Benedict Keilly • Jimmy Hiney • Frank O'Connor • Catherine Rhine • Russell Hoban • Charles Bukowski • William S. Burroughs • Robert Stone...

Recorded by Ian Sommerville.

From a lecture given by WSB at
the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,
Naropa Institute, April 20, 1976,
and Brion Gysin's Permutational Tape fragment,
BBC Studios, London, 1960.

Sans Big Jimmy Paterson on trombone.

▼ WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: ORIGIN AND THEORY OF THE TAPE CUT-UPS from "Break Through in a Grey Room " CD (Sub Rosa) 1994 (US/UK)
▼ BRION GYSIN: RECALLING ALL ACTIVE AGENTS from "Break Through in a Grey Room " CD (Sub Rosa) 1994 (US/UK)

4 million buys you shit

photograph by robert altman.


"It was cheap; cheap; cheap-uh," squealed Jonathan Richman at the age of 41, moved by the vaguely unclean spirit of Bubba-Ho-Tep. Mo Diddley. Blue Mask era Lewis Reed as dessicated hip priest. "Nowadays I hear the rents are steep."

I fell back on the futon, feigning a head cold. My wife busied herself in preparation of a Sunday morning expedition to the swimming pool. With our young son. My stepchildren. If I wasn't unspeakably selfish, I might never find the space to scribble.

Such is the routine loneliness - surliness - of the long distance sniveller.

I sheltered behind a paper shield. Saturday's edition of what was once a broadsheet.

Like everything else, it has diminished in stature somewhat.

"Mumbai's slums are being gentrified," writes their foreign correspondent, "as middle-class Indians... sell their flats in distant suburbs and purchase illegal shanties in the city's central areas."

Actually. It was the headline which glued my eye.

"'SLUMDOG' SHACKS SOAR IN PRICE AS COMMUTERS SWAP SUBURBS FOR CITY"

In a week which saw UK mobsters, RBS slapped with a writ issued in the US - for their part in the subprime confidence trick which all but crippled global faith in free market religion - India races one step farther in paying through the nose for a silk purse fashioned entirely out of a pig's ear. Stealing the show in staging a masterclass in the art of turning the other cheek.

In a country where it pays better to dabble in out-sourced customer 'service' from a US or European financed call centre, than to take the Hippocratic Oath, India's new wealth is defined by hard currency.

It is not immediately apparent just who is making a killing.

On the face of it, it is those people living in the heart of Mumbai's slums who stand to make a profit. Typically, investing in a slum dwelling may net the aspiring buyer a loss in straight 'trade'. A modest shanty in Sewri, for example, may fetch as much as "four million rupees". £50,000. The stench of human waste running freely in the gutter seals the deal; vermin openly feeding on untreated filth.

But as rents soar as a direct result, it is those families who settled there generations previously who are being squeezed out. To establish new illegal settlements in ever more harrowing no-go zones.

No schools. No community. Scant opportunity to make ends meet.

The scandal evolving, then, has less to do with the modern parable of playing pass the parcel with toxic securities than the age-old saga of slum landlords ruthlessly embracing token regeneration.

Lest one forgets. In the 1980s, the darkly comedic double act of Regan and Thatcher popularized the free market economy to a staggeringly gullible and avaricious electorate. Privatizing one industry after the other; peddling them back to the public at large in shrink-wrapped token stocks and shares.

Mr. and Mrs. John Doe, not so much asleep as intoxicated at the wheel, were impervious to the consequences.

In such a climate, social housing was auctioned off with the rest of the family silver. Many individuals turned a tidy profit. Others inherited negative equity.

A lot of people spoke quite often of "collateral damage". Laughing all the way to the bank. A newly entrenched underclass - in Detroit, Glasgow, Manchester - took on the mantle of India's untouchables, and never shook it off.

House prices rocketed. Entire inner city areas, too, turned to shit.

Of course, there will always be a vocal element who stand to profit from shrouding the great illusion in still more smoke and mirrors. Mumbai, they will argue, is on the up. What's happening in Sewri, Dharavi, is indicative of India's commitment to eradicating poverty.

Really ? I think we've heard word to that effect numerous times before.

The Commonwealth Games village in Delhi dribbling sewage on the white hand stitched leather uppers of its athletes' Nike Airs, while government shoots for the moon. And an estimated £1 Billion in International Foreign Aid which still can not be accounted for. Not this side of Bollywood's space race.

Jonathan Richman tells it more entertainingly than I, sibling.

At some time in 1972 I guess he relocated to Venice Beach. In the company of David Robinson, Ernie Brooks and Jerry Harrison. The original Modern Lovers. 

On the heels of an east coast session for Warner Bros., recorded at Intermedia Studio in Boston, Massachussets, the group secured two demo sessions in LA; the first overseen by one John Cale. The Venice they encountered then might just have been invaded by surfers operating out of Dogtown, a seedier bay area on the south fin of Santa Monica.

In 1972, Jeff Ho, in partnership with Skip Engblom and Craig Stecyk, founded Zephyr Surfboard Productions in the decrepit heart of Dogtown. Stecyk, a local artist, invested Ho's board designs with a delinquent edge informed by graffiti tags seen all over the street; wholly at odds with those saccharine airbrushed sunbursts washed up on Muscle Beach. In Dennis Wilson's beard.

Dogtown's surfers were hard core. Digging in and occupying an abandoned amusement park on the Pacific Ocean Park Pier - the P-O-P - midway between Venice Beach proper and their home turf back in Dogtown. The P-O-P was a dangerous spot to surf, seemingly teeming with rotting timber pilings, an Iwo Jima fought for and defended with dogged enthusiasm, it is alleged.

In 1972, too, polyurethane skateboard wheels emerged, and Dogtown's Zephyr crew slipped the leash, taking to the streets and sidewalks like punk Angels on a staggered run.

Zigzagginng as ferociously as hoodlum circus collies on rollerblades.

In 1972, this would have been a part of The Modern Lovers' Venice Beach. A part of the scene they stumbled into. Between the shabby rooming house inhabited briefly, and that studio session produced by Cale.

Who could have anticipated it ? 

Slumdog. Dogtown. Roadrunner, Once, Twice, Three Times.

▼ JONATHAN RICHMAN: ROOMING HOUSE ON VENICE BEACH from "I, Jonathan" CD (Rounder) 1992 (US)

MUMBAI: PREVIOUSLY ON THE BLEACHERS