Further Epigrams

 

 

Just because they say it’s going to be the end of the world soon is no need to cancel your subscriptions to the very organs that tell you this.

 

A television licence is necessary if you wish to continue to be offended.

 

Someday we’ll learn to abandon bigotry and racism and replace them with the understanding that everybody is an asshole and the world would be better off without them.

 

If you wish to continue to feel pointlessly guilty you may as well do something really bad.

 

The people who actually read the news have no idea what they are saying. The people who write it have no idea what they are doing.

 

Football fans give offence with impunity but take umbrage like spoilt little girls. They are boy-princes in their protective palaces of bullshit machismo. Laura Marling could take them all in a fight.

 

Tom Waits is a charlatan but a very good mover.

 

History repeats…—More Untruths

January Epigrams

 

Late at night is never early in the morning. Tomorrow only occurs when you decide today is done.

 

The things that genuinely frighten you are the things you are completely unaware of.

 

Don’t think you’re clever if you half understand something complicated but if you can understand how complicated it is then you’re not as simple as you thought.

 

Dreams mean zip. Dreams are random letters thrown together to make meaningless words in a great novel of gobbledegook. When you come across some old friend wrapped in cling-film in a cinema it’s just, “jcbjhb hfgbh sab kjdah.”

 

Punk rock was invented by the government to prevent anything real from changing.

 

You can create the actual conditions of Coldplay writing “Yellow” by sticking a Dyson up a hand-dryer.

 

Homonyms are also pronounced differently.

 

You can terrify yourself if you stare into a mirror long enough.

 

Jimi Hendrix was a better singer than Rod Stewart. He may not, however, have…—More Untruths

Seattle and Portland 15th May 2008

 

I am moving along the highway between Seattle and Portland through the lush pastures of the Pacific northwest. Farmsteads nest cosily amongst the cows and tall pines and blossoming roadside shrubbery. No matter where you are on this continent you always know it’s North America. You’ve seen every region – mountainous, arable, rocky and desolate in countless Westerns, road movies and documentaries. Not an inch uncovered by celluloid, only the interior life lived in these locations remains mysterious to those of us from abroad and that’s as hard a nut to crack as any. Don’t be fooled, the North Americans are a complex people and those representations of their national character, be it Kennedy, Monroe or Jimmy Stewart are less archetype than empty caricature. Everyone here, it sometimes seems, is as much Melville’s Ishmael as Coppola’s Captain Willard, Hulk as Annie Hall or Houdini as Huckleberry Finn. With, God help…—More Tales

New York April 27th 2008

 

Manhattan

 

From the interstate New Jersey mostly appears to be an industrial scale service area for New York City – warehousing, processing plants, railroad yards and depots. We emerge from the Holland tunnel into the 21st century Disney-fied and strangely sedate Manhattan. No clamour anymore, no insane rush of adrenalin, no filth except the filthy rich. Successive mayors have expunged pretty much everything that made New York unique and now it’s safer and calmer and a great place for the wealthy to shop and school their kids. I miss the old version, the eighties bankrupt, crazy capital-of-the-known world version. I guess you’d find that buzz now in Rio or Shanghai. In the U.S. everything gets suburbanised eventually, even the vertical. But I’m an outsider scratching a square inch on the surface of a city containing four times the population of Switzerland and New York is still out there, in there, but…—More Tales

Atlantic City April 27th 2008

 

Atlantic City

 

People ask me what I’ve been doing the last ten years since I toured here. It’s a difficult question to answer without sounding like an alcoholic recluse. I’ve been watching television: Ten series of Big Brother, fifty DVD box-sets, God knows how many Matches of the Day. I watch every football show broadcast. I have watched every hour of Wimbledon, all day and every day since 1998. I watch obscure film noirs and 1940s Westerns. World Cups, European Championships, Champions Leagues, World Series, Olympic Games, Pop Idol, Later With Jools, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Question Time, Extras, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage. I have watched documentaries about murder cases, wars and famines. Quiz shows, panel games, sit-coms and period dramas. Property shows, How-To-Dress-Like-A-Cunt shows and the news, the news; flitting between continents, sport , weather and global desolation. And I have been nursing week-long hangovers. Grinding, edgy, deranged…—More Tales

Fairfax, Virginia 25th April 2008

 

To Fairfax, Virginia

 

I’m sad to see the back of San Francisco because I know we’re headed for the sticks. I bid farewell to civilization as the gimmick-laden Virgin America Airbus lifts out of the mist. Five hours later we touch down in DC and head for the rental car lot. En route I notice that the streets are aircraft themed. There is Auto-Pilot Drive, Landing Gear Avenue and Cockpit Place. No Heroes of 9/11 Plaza, as yet. Our hotel is situated in not so much a satellite town as a soulless congregation of intersections and strip-malls. We take some ghastly food, trapped in toxic polystyrene, from a chain restaurant back to our rooms. It is warm down here and the night seems thicker, the dense woods studded between the cement black against the sky.

I watch an old Michael Redgrave movie and eat my shrimp salad with a plastic spoon spirited…—More Tales

San Francisco 23rd April 2008

 

 

Day Off San Francisco

 

After an appearance at KFOG, the big “triple A” station here run by a loyal supporter, Dave Benson, I take a walk downtown to buy a new suitcase. There is a bewildering array in Macy’s and I do my neurotic mother act, pulling twenty different models from their tidy displays and roughing them up for signs of weakness. I eventually plump for something stupidly expensive that seems hardier than the malfunctioning cheap shit I brought with me. I notice it is made in Thailand. I step back into the daylight with my empty black tank to find myself surrounded by up-market designer outlets and multifarious street people,  the juxtaposition a living cliche of Reaganite social inequality. I hike up the ten blocks to the hotel checking out the different signs the homeless guys hold. One rhymes, “I sleep on the street, I eat from the trash, I…—More Tales

San Francisco 22nd April 2008

 

To San Francisco

 

We are quickly onto the freeway and into the small groupings of hills that break up the city, rashes of bright green shoots spreading amongst the brown scrub. In front of us is a filthy truck with the word suicide written above its rear driver-side wheel and an arrow pointing to where passing him might achieve this end. The Six Flags amusement park drifts by, a jumble of roller-coasters wrestling in a hollow. The desert weeds are blooming along the slopes and verges in wonderful yellows and florescent greens. Electricity pylons run along the ridges above us with their hands on their hips. The road curves smoothly round sandy outcrops and shrub lined arroyos. There is a faint echo of Scotland in the topography but it’s all so much wider. In America one can see the sense of CinemaScope; a peek through God’s letterbox.

Akiva introduces us to the…—More Tales

Los Angeles 21st April 2008

To Los Angeles

 

I am seated in a row with a young mother and baby on the aisle and a green Marine returning from leave beside me. They get talking and I earwig while pretending to read. He tells her Marines are the best of the best and never wear uniform when they travel on civilian transport. He shows her a picture of his sweetheart.  “She’s been kind of shy with me,” he tells her,  “But she’s opened up recently.”  I wonder if he understands the subtext or the inference she might make of this. He is both charmingly naive and frighteningly simple. She asks him if he’s been to, “You know, Iraq?”  He has not yet seen active duty.  “But I’m going to Afghanistan in July.”

“Will you be nervous?” she asks. “No,” he says, ” I’m excited.”

Her baby starts to cry and we hit a little turbulence and the teenage…—More Tales

Milwaukee 20th April 2008

To Milwaukee

 

We pull over at The Ironworks Restaurant truck-stop off of I-94 and sit around the counter on vinyl swivel-seats. Fake veneer abounds and there is the small miracle of ashtrays at every place setting beside the mahogany brown upturned coffee mugs waiting to be filled and refilled. You can still see the old phone points built into the counter where truckers would phone home before the age of the cell-phone. I used to use these all the time – it was such a luxury talking to someone in the Scottish morning from your midnight booth as you waited for your eggs over-easy, usually half-cut on weak American beer.

Our waitress, well past retirement age and quick as a whippet, gets our mugs upended and takes our orders. Later she tells us how her husband, who worked for the Denny’s chain of greasy-spoons, used to get “ticked off” with air travel.…—More Tales

Younger Bilge— —Older Bilge