I don’t particularly have anything to say about this incredible image, I just felt a need to share it. As a man of a certain age, this image which I saw on Facebook, then sourced to reddit, sparks a great deal of nostalgia in me. As a child in the ’90s, I had a SNES & can see many sprites from games I used to love such as Secret Of Mana & Final Fantasy VI.
Something a little different from me today. Some microfiction. I hope you like it & let me know if you’d like to see more of this kind of thing. Cheers.
The good cop bad cop dynamic was thought to be the surest route to a bloodless coup, but reality like battle plans, rarely survives contact with the enemy. The two cops who exited the cruiser and strolled nonchalantly to the stopped car were huge, imposing units. They couldn’t, however, have been any different to each other if they’d tried. One had the predatory grace of a great white shark. Glinting eyes and jagged dagger teeth. His aspect was like death, animals dispersed and fled where he walked. The other was like a calm, contemplative elephant. Slowly striding forward, chewing tobacco in a languid jaw motion. His aspect was life. Cheerful demeanour of a spring morning postman. If he wasn’t chewing tobacco, he’d almost certainly be whistling. The shark grinned like the reaper’s skull, the elephant smiled warmly.
As they approached the stopped car, it took off suddenly in a screech of burning rubber. Cool as a cucumber, the elephant unholstered his sidearm, aimed it and released the safety in one fluid movement. He squeezed the trigger gently and a bullet tore through the air before penetrating the rubber of the escaping vehicle’s rear right-hand tire. The car fishtailed wildly across the road before smashing with force into a lamppost, crumpling the front of the car inwards like a crushed beer can.
-Fucking hell Brian! said the shark, I’m supposed to be the bad cop.
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Another literary taxidermy I have worked on for the past several weeks. This time the first and last lines come from a novel rather than a song, William Gibson’s cyberpunk defining Neuromancer.
Taxidermy #2: Cyberpunk Hauntology
The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel, Greyscale mashup of crusty pixels, Launching the careers of a million YouTube video essayists, Flickering lines in horizontal drift Across convex surfaces of CRT screens. With sunglasses affixed, like Mollys eyes, I slide a cassette tape into my portable cyber deck And flip Back and forth Through advertising pop-ups For dating apps & how to manage your crypto portfolio. Flip. The other side is games on tape, Pixelated faces in two colours Or two shades of the same colour. He told me Molly was his soulmate, In this semiotic swirl of neon billboards, Fake tanned robots & whitened teeth, She was the only thing that brought him joy, He said, The only thing he thought of as pure, good Correct. She tattooed a Molotov cocktail on her left cheek, Just below the eye, the legend read: “A toast to the rich.” It’s all over social media: Guillotines outside Bezos’ mansion, Pitchfork & torch mob chasing down Musk, Gates crucified, Rihanna spreadeagled. Molly licks her lips & cuddles up closer To Kurt Cobain & Eugene Kelly. Flip. He had proper insomnia for the first time in months, Propelled by podcasts & hope for denied futures, Spectres haunting Europe in the sickly light Of late-stage capitalism. He thought I was a robot, for some reason. Maybe it was my telescopic, go-go-gadget arms Or my electrified hull. Have you never seen a guy with tank tracks before? Flip. She said she’d take me anywhere, Pasted in gum Arabic, Monochromed by xerox & stapled in a bedsit. TS Eliot wanders in & asks me if it’s his. Mayakovsky commodified As social realism is used to self me junk food. Here, in the desert of the real The mirages take on the aspect Of heroic scenes of miners at the coalface, Writ in mosaic On the marbled plinth Of a six hundred foot Lenin statue, Loyally guarding the industrial dock lands From the predatory approaches Of Union busters & Pinkerton patrols. Flip. He found her next At a union meeting, waving a red flag, Armed & dangerous, bullets for bailiffs, 1312 carved into the stock of her rifle. She smiled at him warmly & offered him coffee. It was like a support group, Name badged workers sitting in a circle On plastic chairs. “My name’s Colin & I’m a communist.” “My name’s Andy & I’m an anarchist.” We escorted the Nazbols out, at gunpoint. All through the meeting She made regular eye contact with him. It reminded him of bus journeys From petroleum-choked city centres To endless fields of humming pylons, Brutalist substations & grazing cattle. Terraces & tower blocks giving way To reservoirs & army bases. Liminal transition: Burial into Boards Of Canada. The urban rain nestles up against Bucolic pastoral mellotrons. Flip. It was here, amongst the effigies, That they were finally separated. Burning haystacks hummed Like an overcharged oscillator, Birds singing like circuit bent toys, Folkloric mythology depicted in pixels. My avatar is a pagan deity, My alt anon account is a denizen of the underworld. I see him running, mind scrambled Like a CRT between two magnets, Flickering lines of snow whisper prophecies Foretold In ancient hard drives. I never saw which way Molly fled, Or if she survived, But he woke up screaming In a soft walled room. The medication soon soothed him. Empty bliss of depersonalisation. He never saw Molly again.
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So, this is basically a note I found on my phone, dated 20/04/2020, where I’d saved a bunch of memes, Tweets etc. alongside some records of conversations I actually had (with names changed to protect the [sort of] innocent). I think I intended to write something about the Pandemic, which I never started, & these notes were related to that. Obviously that date is the date of the last thing added, & some of the conversations recorded here definitely happened before the laughably light, & late, lockdown which came into effect in the UK on 23/03/2021.
Nothing I present here represents my own thoughts or feelings.
The title comes from the excellent song by Ugly Casanova, which I will include at the bottom of this post.
I don’t know if this is of interest to anyone, but I think that it offers a fascinating insight into the levels of horror, confusion & paranoia which I personally experienced, both in cyberspace & the meatspace. These notes represent a world in the grip of uncertainty, a far cry from the blasè acceptance of the pandemic & it’s deadly mismanagement of today, 18 months on.
You don’t expect this sort of thing in a country which voted overwhelmingly for dogmatic free market fundamentalists
[Gaslighting the population into confusion over the seriousness of this virus 🦠 a shambles with a serious agenda? ]
[the world became intoxicated with fame and glamour and lost the yardstick of true value. how can the guy who kicks a ball around a field be more valuable than the person who looks after your children? or the star of a movie franchise be worth more than the nurse who risks contagion to wash you and feed you when you are seriously ill and vulnerable? the person who performs the back breaking job of pulling the food from the ground that magically appears in your shopping trolley may be an itinerant EU worker but try living without him.. Time we all reassess what is important, and why???]
Roy: Dave, if I don’t come back from dinner it’s because some bastard has bought all the Irn Bru and I’ve topped myself.
Roy: the state of the world now is that if McDonald’s closed some people wouldn’t eat at all.
Me: that’s Darwinism in action.
Roy: yeah I agree, let them starve.
My aunties kids would starve cos that’s all she feeds them.
[Wife going into work at the bank people still not distancing, as I quote it’s my money and I’ll stand we’re I want.
They have not been given any ppe when money us unbelievable for carrying… and possibly bringing it home to there families]
[Ugh, I keep seeing parents of high school kids saying how “the government stole their babies year over some old people who’ll die anyway” and that they’ll put on a dance privately just to spite everyone.]
Roy: there’s this new virus in China
Comes from bats
It’s so contagious that the doctors who were treating the sick guys even caught it through their hazmat suits
We’re all gonna get it anyway
Roy sweeping the lanes. Complaining about the large amounts of dust he’s inhaling.
me: hey silver lining, it’ll probably kill the coronavirus if you’ve got it
Roy: well, Turns out marijuana kills it. I’m probably immune.
Me to Bob: I wonder what Roy’s source is, that marijuana kills corona virus.
Bob: don’t know but I bet it’s website has got a cannabis leaf in its logo
Above is based on a meme which shows a mock up live, breaking news broadcast. Made to appear like a BBC news broadcast.
Alex: this is ridiculous
Society is breaking down
I think it’s man made. My theory is that the economy is gonna collapse and that China will bail us out. They’ll buy us.
J: it’s crazy. They’re closing things and banning things. I’ve got tickets to Disney land in three weeks.
Me: I’d get in touch with your travel insurance if I was you
J: well we got it on credit card so we can get money back. It’s just daft though innit. There’s no need to close things. It’s probably not even real.
Me: I think it’s actually a lot more serious than you think
J: yeah I guess. I’m just so confused. You don’t know what to believe do you. How do you know what’s real anyway? Is this real? I don’t know.
*
J: what happens if we have to close down?
Generic Management Figure: name me one company that’s closed down
Jake: what?
Generic Management Figure: name me one. No company has had to close and none will.
Me: but it’s a possibility isn’t it.
Generic Management Figure: yeah but it’s not very likely
Somewhere between Bladerunner and Soylent Green
(Jason Manford, comedian: Sat watching the news with the kids when they announced “shoppers will only be able to buy 3 of any item”
My 7 yr old son “hang on, what about grapes?”
My hysterical daughters are now acting out the scenario of a shopkeeper giving 3 grapes to each shopper.
(Yes we’re going mad!))
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I recently became aware of the concept of Literary Taxidermy. The general idea is that you take the opening & closing lines of a poem, story or book & write an entirely new poem, story etc. between them. Instead of following this formula precisely, I have written this poem using a lyrical couplet from one of my favourite songs, Zürich Is Stained by Pavement (see below). The opening couplet here is about self-doubt & the fear that you’re not as strong as you need to be. I took this theme & ran with it. I hope you like it.
“I can’t sing it strong enough.” Well I might be able to, No promises, But I’ll give it a go. Maybe I’ll be able to find new reserves Of deepest, strongest strength to tap Way down deep where I wouldn’t expect. Maybe I’ll absorb that strength from others, By osmosis while holding hands Or shaking hands Or hugs Or fist bumps. Maybe I’ll fall within the range Of an area-of-effect buff From one of my stronger, More confident companions. Maybe the strength I seek Will be found in spirituality, Although I must admit, That is incredibly unlikely; A long shot, to say the least. Maybe I’ll find the strength I need In the unshakeable belief In my fellow man, Solidarity in community & rejection of competition. Solidarity not selfishness, Sacrifice in the face of solipsism. Maybe the strength required Can be found In the wisdom of the dead, Dusty library words, Observances and inventions, Artistic enlightenment That gradually evolves Into feelings of encouragement & spasms of renaissance. The worst-case-scenario, of course, Is that there is no fresh, Untapped well of superhuman strength, External or internal, Waiting for me when I need it the most. No secret inner quality, No unrealised ambitions Or dormant skills. Maybe there is nothing but weakness, Doubt and disillusionment. Maybe, just maybe, “That kind of strength I just don’t have.”
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Today marks the 24th anniversary of the passing of William S Burroughs. The hugely influential Postmodernist and key figure in the Beat Generation is loved and revered to this day, as much for his raw & paranoid prose as for his gruff, antiauthoritarian personality. His crowning achievement in literature is surely his nightmarish sequence of vignettes, Naked Lunch. The novel, which famously had to fight several bannings and an obscenity trial, was a nonlinear torrent of vile images and scenes, many taken from Burroughs own personal experiences as a hard drugs user.
As well as his feverish depictions of drug manias and psychoses, Burroughs is well known for his use of the fabled cutup technique which involved cutting up newspapers, magazine articles etc. and rearranging them to form new, bizarre prose. Burroughs believed that he was tapping into something here & potentially seeing glimpses of the future. This method, & Burroughs more generally, were a huge influence on many cultural icons going forward, most notably David Bowie. Lyrics to several of Bowies tunes were written using the Burroughs-esque cutup technique. A particularly great example of this is his Time of the Assassins, a cutup of a full issue of Time Magazine, in response to their review of Naked Lunch.
I myself became enamoured with the cutup technique and created several pieces of poetry using the style.See the Slow News City Poetry Index for links (Cut up or shut up #1-8). You can find a useful online cutup generator here, if you fancy having a go yourself.
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As I’m sure some of you will have noticed, the regularity of Scruffy Theory has dropped off in recent months as I have found other commitments intruding on my time. Between October & June I was completing the third module of my part-time BA in English Language and Literature, & so that took up an awful lot of my spare time. Sporadic blogposts did appear in those months though, most memorably, perhaps, The Mark E Smith Guide To Writing Guide, of which I am quite proud, and the tail end of the Chaotic Neutral series of my Song of the Day posts. Today I received my results for said module & am pleased to announce that I achieved a Distinction, so the hard work and blog neglect was potentially worth it. The next module begins in October.
In addition to this I have just taken on a freelancing job as a transcriptionist, as well as my manual day job. This takes up a lot of my time.
As a way of dealing with the time constraints faced, I am planning on broadening the scope of this blog to encompass some of my other interests. This broadening of horizons, I hope, will allow me to produce, perhaps fewer, but better, bigger pieces. I may, in the future, write posts about my experiences as a transcriptionist (while careful not to violate the non-disclosure agreement I was required to sign), my new found love of eScooters, & even some poetry & fiction that I am currently writing. I’d love to hear what regular visitors would think about these broadening horizons. Would you be happy to see fiction and poetry here? Or should I keep things like that in my other blog, Slow News City, despite it being a basic account and non-monetised? I simply cannot afford to upgrade a second account to Premium at this time.
Broadening horizons aside, one new series of posts I have been thinking about is one which explores the songs from the genres I love, & love writing about, which could be considered part of the genre’s canon. I’m planning to begin with Indie music, as that has been the main focus of this blog for most of it’s existence, but I am also looking at songs for Hip-Hop and Electronica series too.
Anyway, I’ve rattled on long enough for this post, & like I said I’d love to hear from you in the near future with any suggestions or ideas regarding the future of this blog & perhaps even ways of efficiently managing my time too.
Watch this space.
Tom
P.S. I’d like to take this opportunity to shout out to three of my friends who have sadly passed away this year.
Firstly, the excellent poet & storyteller, Adrian Spendlow (whose great blog can still be found here). A warm, loving human being who my partner & I greatly enjoyed spending time with. I will always remember how he loved to order the Pint of Prawns meal from one of our favourite food pubs, The Masons Arms. Sadly, I didn’t see him in his final year as he’d moved to America around a year before he passed away.
Second, there is my colleague from my day job, Julian Debenham. He was talkative & loved being the centre of attention. He was generous to a fault. You couldn’t enter a pub with him without him buying your drinks. Someone once gifted him My bloody Valentine’s three studio albums on vinyl & he didn’t like them. Knowing that I was a fan, he passed them straight on to me without a second thought. A lover of music, particularly folk & Nick Cave, he is missed greatly at my workplace.
Thirdly, there is Derek Rawnsley. I didn’t know Derek as well as the other two but I liked him a lot, nonetheless. He was married to a friend of mine & his loss is keenly felt. He was an Owl enthusiast & his wife gifted my partner & I one of his Owl statues to remember him by.
Rest in peace all.
Stay safe everyone.
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Thanks to Redditor u/XtalHedphelym for uploading this excellent image.
I initially found this fantastic image on a Facebook group dedicated to the excellent Spookypasta known as The Backrooms. For me, this image doesn’t really get at the core characteristics of The Backrooms but it’s still a wonderful example of Radiohead’s satirical take on Capitalist Realism. The original post on Facebook incorrectly gave the date as 1997, potentially due to the font used for the bands name, though careful examination of the image after finding this better version of it on Reddit, confirmed the date to be 2000-2001. Hope you like it.
Here’s (probably) Radiohead’s most Backrooms energy track:
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Day 30. I’ve become kind of caught up in the excitement & humour of the Twitter account-cum-Political Party, the Northern Independence Party (or NIP) & the prospect of it achieving a small amount of success in the form of some councillors & maybe an MP or two. They’re already standing former Labour MP Thelma Walker in the upcoming Hartlepool by election, a seat which Labour has held since 1945 & which Sir Keir “Keith” Starmer (aka – The Abstainer) is likely to lose to the most corrupt & murderous UK government in living memory. Sadly, the electoral commission is saying that NIP failed to register on time (as a legit political party, that is). They are however pressing on with their campaign, only standing their candidates as independents for the time being.
On another of the fledgling party’s social media posts, they asked their followers what song should become a free North’s anthem. I could think of no finer a song to fill this position than this rowdy & romantic New Wave classic by Mancunian Post Punk heroes, The Fall. I hope you’ll agree.
Hit the North Hit the North (Hit the North) my Cat says eeeee-ack Hit the North Hit the North Hit the North
Ninety-five percent of hayseeds (Hit the North) are corn-pones, guaranteed Hit the North Computers and fashion hotels Cops can’t catch criminals But what the heck, they’re not too bad, they talk to God Religious
Hit the North Hit the North Hit the North
Manacled to the city Manacled to the city (hit the North)
All estate, all es, all estate agents alive Yell down nights in hysterical breath Those Northern Lights, so pretty Those big big big wide streets Those useless MPs Savages
Hit the North Hit the North Hit the North (Manacled to the system) Hit the North
From the back third eye psyche The reflected mirror of delirium Eastender and Victoria’s lager The induced call, mysterious Comes forth
Hit the North Hit the North Hit the North Hit the North
Hit the North Hit the North Hit the North Hit the North
Hit the North Hit the North Hit the North Hit the North
Looking for some great music? Check the Song of the Day (Chaotic Neutral) Spotify playlist.
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What follows is a short spoken segment which Mark E Smith, reluctant Working Class Autodidact & erratic frontman of The Fall, recorded for Greenwich Sound Radio in 1983. Smith was already becoming respected for the poetic & eccentric content of his band’s lyrics (see The N.W.R.A below), which he whittled down from huge blocks of prose written with a similar methodology to Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose technique.
Here we hear Smith not only giving an insight into his writing process (about 50/50 chance of being serious) but also some poetry. Please enjoy the audio & the transcript I have provided below. The section which describes the process was taken from here, while the poetry & prose which follows was transcribed by myself.
Hello I’m Mark E. Smith and this is The Mark E. Smith ‘Guide To Writing’ Guide.
Day-by-day breakdown
Day One: Hang around house all day writing bits of useless information on bits of paper.
Day Two: Decide lack of inspiration due to too much isolation and non-fraternisation. Go to pub. Have drinks.
Day Three: Get up and go to pub. Hold on in there a style is on its way. Through sheer boredom and drunkenness, talk to people in pub.
Day Four: By now, people in the pub should be continually getting on your nerves. Write things about them on backs of beer mats.
Day Five: Go to pub. This is where true penmanship stamina comes into its own as by now, guilt, drunkenness, the people in the pub and the fact you’re one of them should combine to enable you to write out of sheer vexation. To write out of sheer vexation.
Day Six: If possible stay home. And write. If not go to pub.
Using this method, this is a poem I wrote called London.
(Mock American Accent) I’d just got over to London, get me a pint of your fine old British ale.
London.
Decadent backbone of former empire.
Spittle chinned Southerner looking forward to next holiday.
Digitale Croydon, fourteen pound per hour.
An immigration backlash type situation here
And there’s an Indian clerk in the backroom with a literature degree,
His boss is a roofed architect over-bathed, intense.
Project Victoriana Punish,
His clothes are flapping United Nations:
Japanese pants, odd boots, Euro shirts.
Is no shirt, his mind is Parisian
Fifties situationist
and ‘neath his designs you have no choice,
Stay where you are.
He is looking down on you from his tech drawing board.
Take the chicken run, run to the bog
You can do it
Do not
Warning! rumours of grey cancer builders greatly exaggerated
Manchester.
Dear TV Times,
Your majesties, I have concocted, through the noble invention and the blarney craft of the humble Northener, a system where by constant annoyance by the telephone can be erased. This entails explosive charges, left to me by a dead sailor from Bury, being wired up under every windowsill, close proximity to my ears. When phones ring and are inconvenient to the ears I just press table lamp-like what next to my bed and they blow up. I got the idea from a book.
Yours sincerely,
Mr Reg Varney.
Please note: all herbs is available from P.O. Box 935 GTV Manchester. Once you get a bit of pain I was splitting myself, them hilly-billies.
When it happened we walked through all the estates, from Manchester right to, er, Newcastle. In Darlington, helped a large man on his own chase off some kids who were chucking bricks and stuff through his flat window. She had a way with people like that. Thanked us and we moved on.
‘Junior Choice’ played one morning. The song was ‘English Scheme.’ Mine. They’d changed it with a grand piano and turned it into a love song. How they did it I don’t know. DJs had worsened since the rising. Elaborating on nothing in praise of the track with words they could hardly pronounce, in telephone voices.
I was mad, and laughed at the same time. The West German government had brought over large yellow trains on Teeside docks. In Edinburgh. I stayed on my own for a few days, wandering about in the, er, pissing rain, before the Queen Mother hit town.
I’m Joe Totale The yet unborn son The North will rise again The North will rise again Not in 10, 000 years Too many people cower to criminals And government crap The estates stick up like stacks The North will rise again X4 Look where you are Look where you are The future death of my father
Shift! Tony was a business friend Of RT XVII And was an opportunist man Come, come hear my story How he set out to corrupt and destroy This future Rising
The business friend came round today With teeth clenched, he grabbed my neck I threw him to the ground His blue shirt stained red The north will rise again. He said you are mistaken, friend I kicked him out of the home
Too many people cower to criminals And that government pap When all it takes is hard slap
But out the window burned the roads There were men with bees on sticks The fall had made them sick A man with butterflies on his face His brother threw acid in his face His tatoos were screwed The streets of Soho did reverberate With drunken Highland men Revenge for Culloden dead The North had rose again But it would turn out wrong The North will rise again
So R. Totale dwells underground Away from sickly grind With ostrich head-dress Face a mess, covered in feathers Orange-red with blue-black lines That draped down to his chest Body are a tentacle mess And light blue plant-heads TV showed Sam Chippendale No conception of what he’d made The Arndale had been razed Shop staff knocked off their ladders Security guards hung from moving escalators
And now that is said Tony seized the control He built his base in Edinburgh Had on his hotel wall A hooded friar on a tractor He took a bluey and he called Totale Who said, “the North has rose again” But it will turn out wrong
When I was in cabaret I vowed to defend All of the English clergy Though they have done wrong And the fall has begun This has got out of hand I will go for foreign aid But he Tony, laughed down the phone Said “Totale go back to bed” The North has rose today And you can stuff your aid! And you can stuff your aid!
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Scruffy Theory 