I sometimes think I live only in the past and the future. In between I lie around in my room trying to keep warm and analyzing why the fuck I could be imagining head-sized tiger-striped tarantulas forcing their way out of men’s mouths.

But before this, my first post, heads straight into ‘my fascinating life in my bedroom’ blog territory here’s…






‘2005 ~ a Year in Books’ Part I

So I’ll keep adding to this list as the solstice and new years approach; I’ve read a few gems this year you see, tee hee...

Paul Auster ~ The Book of Illusions
Auster’s quite a dark, psychological writer; I quite liked this book. He’s deft, sometimes startling, brutal. An intellectual's family are killed in a plane crash; the only way he pulls himself out of his death-darkness is by researching and writing a book about the work of a silent comedy star who'd disappeared in mysterious circumstances decades before.

The story centres around a fascinating set of coincidences. It explores mental symbolism and how we act out our pain within the world, within our relationships, and the beautiful parallels that are created between our art and our lives in order that either have any meaning. It was suggested to me by a man, a friend who lives far away, so I bought it and read it in the spring.

I knew this man once, quite briefly. I came across him first in the street, flyering student nights outside the Manchester Arndale. He looked quite scruffy but I liked his clothes and vibe, but most of all his face. I was struck by it. He knew my friend and I stared at him while they chatted about Havok (my friend owned CDs with names like ‘It’s Not Intelligent And It’s Not From Detroit But It’s F*cking ‘Avin It!’). I came across him a few times after that, when I was out dancing. I'd see him with his dark-faced lady and his crew; and I felt like an outsider. But a few months later, at a big house party in victoria park, my sweet faced boy and I became friends…

…and from there unravelled our skein… a delicate weave of possibility, coincidence, pills and funk to begin with… to be reinforced with hilarity, desire, synchronicity ...inevitability. We had everything to say to one another. I felt him dancing across a thousand dancefloors, from big shiny techno nights across the north, to the grimy manchester pubs and dirty post-industrial wastelands (pre-urban splash) we loved…

I was also fucked… out of my face, often, and to excess. Sometimes you look back at your actions and your mindset and wonder who the hell you were. You feel sorry that you couldn’t have worked things out better, knowing full well why you couldn’t… And sometimes you can look over your memories and wonder whether they were real, had any authenticity at all, because it was all so messy.

But then again, it’s now six years later, and events and people from that time still dictate the parameters of my existence, and remain some of my best friends in the world.

So we had a cup of tea one lunch time. I finished with the sexy whiskey drinking bass player from whalley range, and waited hopefully for my man to do the same and be with me…

and waited…

…the millennium came and went; and I lost my mind. When I found it again, I packed in the drugs for a while, and gave up on him. I distrusted my instincts for a long while and hated him for that. It was the worst year on record; Y2K: KO, bottom out, black. Then Richie Hawtin, end of 2000, and the convergence in the afterparty darkness at the red house changed my world again...

I’d leave the tale there (would have left it long ago) but it was 2005 that he finally got back to me; hey it’s only six years later. I’ve met him maybe twice or three times in the last two years; I haven’t met him in daylight in perhaps four. And now he lives on the other side of the world [still out of reach, far enough away to say whatever]

Tomorrow he says he is going to call me. It will be the first time since 1999. I no longer remember his voice that clearly if truth be known, though give me a bit of mdma and his mannerisms become crystal. We’ve been emailing for a couple of years… we share friends and passions and our little synchronicities never ceased; the very fact of where he is and what he's doing alone is fucking inconcievable sometimes. Our connections are ridiculous and many. I always used to know when I’d run into him; later I’d dream about him and he’d mail me...

Towards the end of the Auster novel I think it is; the silent screen guy sees a black diamond or emerald lying glinting on a moonlit pavement. When he picks it up he finds it's a gob of phlegm. Appreciating the illusion in light of his own life, he names the isolated ranch he builds with his wife for the stone, and retreats into his peculiar genius ... perhaps as folk get older and create stories out of their lives, the need to distinguish between truth and illusion diminishes a little as they weave their own little mythologies out of the ether[/net]

So anyway, I’ll keep you posted…

[Any strict advice welcome]

By the way, they’re playing something intelligent from Detroit on http://www.cybernetic-broadcasting.net/ as I type if you fancy a listen.

Gutted that I-F isn't playing Sequence in December as reported actually.

next... Steppenwolf ~ Herman Hesse lol...