34. Decade's End

Director's cut version of a piece written for the final issue of The Boar of 2009, and hence the decade, listing our top ten records of the 00s. It is, as acknowledged, both incomplete and over-complete, for the obvious reasons. To get a little perspective: the main list, devised by Dave Toulson, had Manic Street Preachers' Journal For Plague Lovers as its number one. This list was the only one to include any albums by hip-hop artists, or indeed any non-white artists. Aside from Jess Colman's inclusion of Belle & Sebastian's Dear Catastrophe Waitress in a number one slot, this was the only one to include any work by female musicians. That gives you an idea what students listen to these days.

To get everything upfront: this list is redundant. Not enough dust has settled even since the beginning of the decade to make sense of ten years marked by perhaps the most fevered processes of cultural expansion and proliferation the world has yet seen. The increasingly obvious collapse of Britain's old pop media – radio, newspapers, magazines and the monoliths of the corporate pop industry – in the face of the internet has eroded the old models of how we listen, how we consume and love records. Even the CD format, except for small pockets of bloody-minded opposition, manifested as lavish packaging, seems to have its days numbered. There is now far too much music being released every year for anyone, fan or professional critic, to get a handle on it all. Looking at an entire decade, you can fucking forget it - I haven't even heard the most of the records that made most other critics' top 10s, the readymade elect. Lists, ranking and comprehension are for the Nick Hornbys of this world now. Consensus, in a universe of listeners atomised onto their own islands of taste, must be manufactured.

Perhaps the closest thing to a genuinely popular, zeitgeist-reflecting – and, not coincidentally, avant-garde – music was the astonishing renaissance of hip-hop and R&B that accompanied the end millennium: ruthlessly capitalist, relentlessly neophilic, rhizomatically spawning new and alien forms. There were Timbaland's productions, of which his collaborations with Missy Elliot on 'Get Yr Freak On' and the accompanying album Miss E... So Addictive, were the pinnacle; Outkast's psychedelic masterpiece Stankonia, the most feverishly inventive product of the Dirty South; the stoned high-low art absurdism of Madvillain's Madvillainy (Tristan Tzara in a hustler get-up); Cannibal Ox's book of revelations, The Cold Vein; the long-awaited Hell Hath No Fury, on which The Neptunes' production and Pusha T and Malice's oiled and vicious flows meshed like V8 innards; the genesis of grime in London, bent into extraordinary shapes by the artistic will of Dizzee Rascal on Boy In Da Corner; the purest flowering of Kanye West's pop talent in the form of Late Registration.

No surprise that indie simply couldn't compete with this overcharged germination, going, for the most part, into an ever-worsening slough of aesthetic conservatism and emotional infantilism. Where it chose to engage with these artificial intoxications, it produced the shimmering, Platonic dream-pop ideal of Panda Bear's Person Pitch, and Richard Youngs' suite of digital incantations The Naive Shaman – ecstatic accesses to the heart of nature, through the dreamworld of technology.

Shadowing this excitement, in a decade riven by disaster – 9/11, the Iraq War, the market crash – has been a sense of grief, dissolution and trauma, exemplified by Burial's Untrue – the rave burnt out into a world of shadows haunted by the memories of love, the spectral jungle of his first album hollowed-out to a translucent perfection. Coil's ...And The Ambulance Died In His Arms, recorded at their 2003 ATP performance, shortly before the death of frontman Jhonn Balance, was the aching, haunting, end to one of the most brilliant bodies of work of the 20^th century. Forbidding, but gripping this listener like barbed wire: the apocalyptic wasteland of Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven sprawled over the first half of the decade, while The Drift, Scott Walker's first album in more than 10 years, appeared as the most fully-formed, profound and insurmountable artefact of this decade.

What of all this will last? Try me again in 2020.

33. Evangelista

Originally published in the university newspaper, The Boar.

Evangelista – Prince of Truth (Constellation)

Carla Bozulich's muse is deadly: with every release since 2006's disturbing, fractured Evangelista, the record that gave its name to the project she's since piloted, it's assumed a more ferocious, more sulphurous presence. Last year's Hello Voyager intensified its electrified slow-burn into a penetratingly brilliant, fraught record – art-punk cowed with the quietness of exhausted desperation, in ragged structures fringed with noise, finally collapsing into the existential crisis of the long closing title track. Prince of Truth opens with just as stunning a tremor: minutes of crunching concréte noise congeals into an atmosphere electric with dread, Bozulich's desperate and distorted vocal burning in the air.

It comes as no surprise that former Godspeed You Black Emperor! guitarist Efrim Menuck was responsible for the record's production, at the band's Hotel2Tango studio in Montreal: each of these seven songs possesses the ambition, the sense of charged liminality, the ambivalent relationship with melody and structure, and the Gothic light and dark of that band's best work, without the 20-minutes passages of nothing-very-much. Funnelled into each is Bozulich's own 25-year background in art-punk projects like Geraldine Fibbers and Ethel Meatplow and the talents of a host of experimental-rock players, including Xiu Xiu drummer Ches Smith, the brilliantly responsive bass of Tara Barnes, and guitarist Nels Cline, last heard providing the kick to the last few Wilco albums.

That the band should be so utterly congruent with the thrust of Bozulich's singular and intense performances, on an album of such strange contrasts, is itself remarkable. They seem to work as one emotional entity, whether on 'I Lay There In Front of Me Covered In Ice' – a ballad that's also a Gothic story, where organ and piano barely disturb its frozen-pond stasis – or 'You Are A Jaguar', an emotional detonation-zone covered with sheets of cratered noise, a maelstrom of smashing drums, Bozulich's vocal jumping from fragile whispers to a strangled scream. The record's end balances its opening: 10-minute closer 'On The Captain's Side' slowly closes in on you in a drift of accordion and quietly lowering electronic noise like a black fog at sea. The demonic persona Bozulich has channelled throughout – the Baphomet-horned ouroboros of a woman that adorns the inner sleeve – cedes to a kind of peace: “with bitter tears, I float in mourning / I float in the sea alone”. Drift with her.

32. Flaming Lips

Published in The Boar, Warwick University's student newspaper, Vol. 33 Iss. 3.

The Flaming Lips - Embryonic (Warner Brothers)

As they should, they did it different. The Flaming Lips' latest is a turn away from the increasingly glossy symphonic-pop of their post-Soft Bulletin work, but neither is it a turn back to their previous identity as acid-punks. Their least conventional work since 1997's 4CD Zaireeka! – a sprawling, 70-minute panoply of (largely successful) experiments, an unashamedly ambitious prog splurge, even down to its Hipgnosis-goes-photomontage cover-art – but also, undoubtedly, a full-burn hit to the pleasure-centres. It is that now-rare, marvellous thing – a Flaming Lips album you actually remember after it finishes.

From the first spurts of tearing feedback and metallic synths that open 'Convinced of the Hex', immediately underpinned by a Bonham-via-Mantronix drum-pattern from Kliph Scurlock, you know this is something very different. The huge virtuosity that marked the rococo layer-cake productions of their last few albums is fed into making bewildering sprays of psychedelic fireworks, more achieved, if with perhaps less ragged verve, than their coarse and brilliant early work. Scattered throughout are irresistible thrash-out moments – instrumental freak-outs 'Aquarius Sabotage', 'Worm Mountain', like a burial mound of fuzz-boxes landing on top of you – but also strange, narcotic drifts – the suspended longing of 'Evil', 'I Can Be A Frog's whimsical jaunt, Karen O cackling unsettlingly in the background, 'Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast' like a gathering of Eno's Music For Airports choirs in the crackling aether. But in none of these explorations does their pop touch ever disappear: even the most mind-burning sonic pile-ups are arranged with the care of a gardener. Wayne Coyne's vocodered whisper on combination space-fable/love-song (the best kind) 'The Impulse' might as well be Jeff Lynne on 'Mr. Blue Sky'; the weirdness of his intergalactic evangelist turn on 'Sagittarius Silver Announcement' is only underscored by the conventionally ascending chorus, bathed in white light from the synths. And even this, as with so many of these songs, is refracted through a production haze quite unlike most rock albums – part-in-the-red studio-jam, part-interstellar-transmission, swimming in FX. When they finally hit spirally-ascending closer 'Watch The Planets', you've no choice but to take them at their word: it's cosmic.

The critics had it that The Soft Bulletin marked the moment the Lips passed into maturity. They may have, now, to think again. Coyne may croon “I wish I could go back/Go back in time”, but this will leave you with the tang of the future on yr tongue.

30. One Poem

Found Poem

(After R.F. Langley, Journals)

The eleventh tree is the ivy, then

on down through the guelder into the elder,

if Graves is at all to be trusted. Ivy

this morning, in sunlight, at Footherley,

umbels of pale green clubs. Slow wasps crawl there

with folded wings. One

__________________falls backwards and drops

onto a lower leaf. In the track, so

cold that dew is like seawater, and there

is the chilly smell of sweet

____________________rotting.

29. One Poem

Watching Nosferatu

It was the beginning, the purest map
of this cursed land, pock-marked in black-and-white,
scrying-field for a century severed

with gashes, drunk on blood. Schreck, starkly
carved as a hieroglyph, stone death's-head,
face of unnature, fingers teeming stalks.

I know well enough his blasted country:
gnarled passes, huddled villages, wind
whistling with a rattle of Schoenberg,

a land of phantoms, up to the castle
meeting the slate-grey sky alone. The eyes
of the Count, riven with hunger, drawing,

draining, ever-dark singularity.
The gesture - the sleeping flesh beneath him,
a dream-geometry of curves outlined

in linen, of curls framing kohl eyes, sweep,
pulse and yield of a neck, traced with the touch
of an exile. And, waiting to finish

the starved years, stone-hemmed days. Pooling crimson,
obsidian. The final acquisition.
I know
********that cold-sweating wish far too well.

28. Light of Glory

A 'spiritual autobiography' of Olivier Messiaen's oratorio La Transfiguration Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ, written as an assessed piece for my second creative-writing unit last year.

I didn’t know quite what to think, afterwards. It was as if another kind of knowledge – insubstantial, impossible to formulate – barged out what I felt I knew. It all came back, but that feeling, with all the strangeness of a photograph’s caught time, framed and hanging in a corner of my head, remained with me, however much suspicion with which I regarded that moment of emptiness. It was a summer evening much like any other; the curtains were drawn, the radio on, as if I’d returned to the habits of my adolescence, a look of earnest concentration on my face as I listened.

The next morning, as I was cycling the usual route to work, cresting the hill that descends towards the town centre, I was struck, as if lanced, by the sun moving out from behind the church clocktower. I remembered, then, how I should have formulated last night’s thoughts: that I knew, now, what revelation was.

***

On the other end of the broadcast were the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales, two further choirs, and seven soloists, at the leviathan carcass of the Albert Hall, playing Olivier Messiaen’s La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. Given the continued public distrust of funding for ‘experimental’ music, this was a vast mobilisation of forces: the BBC were seemingly prepared to shell out for the public service commitment of celebrating Messiaen’s centenary year. Performances and recordings of La Transfiguration are rare as snow leopards; I was left with only this first, astonished listening, onto which ideas and memories fixed themselves, barnacle-like.

It came, of course, with its own history. By the time it was first performed, at the Coliseu dos Recreios, Lisbon, on 7 June 1969, it had given its composer more trouble than any other work he had written, vastly delayed – taking four years to complete, instead of the initially-agreed nine months – constantly expanding – it was originally intended to run a mere forty-five minutes, consist of nine movements, as opposed to the final fourteen, and utilise smaller forces – and plagued by structural problems. At the premiere, the renowned Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, stricken with fever, had to be firmly coaxed from his hotel room to play his solo part, shivering in a cold sweat, to a crowd who had already been kept waiting. The struggles, it seems, were in proportion to the cumulative power of the final product.

The biblical narrative of the Transfiguration takes place at the peak of a mountain, the disciples looking on, catching their breath, as Jesus ascends into the air to converse with the apparitions of Moses and Elijah. Messiaen, a keen mountaineer, was partially drawn to the subject by the thought of “the awesomeness of the place of Transfiguration”. We can almost hear him, gasping, overwhelmed, on the summit.

***

La Transfiguration is a strange piece of work: though closest in form to oratorios such as Handel’s Messiah or Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, it is still not simply ‘Transfiguration: The Musical’. It is framed as a series of ‘meditations’ on the event, an extreme musical gloss on the Latin texts – selected from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, the Old Testament and Aquinas’ Summa Theologica – declaimed by the vast choir, illuminating and extending it into the aural dimension. The structure is cyclical: the opening Récit Évangélique – a cavern of sonorous percussion textures, punctuated by the ping of temple blocks – is followed by two movements from the Gospel narrative, another Récit, two Gospel episodes, and a chorale; this structure of seven movements, or ‘septenary’, is repeated. The number itself is emblematic of Messiaen’s programming of religious symbolism into every aspect of the work, rhyming with the seven Spirits of God seen in Revelation, the Seven Virtues, and the Seven Joys of Mary; three, associated with the Trinity, manifests in the triple blasts of the horns. This is an eternal return: just as the text weaves back and forth through the chronology of the Transfiguration, it re-presents variations on the same musical material. In Messiaen’s music time is strange, pliable: the Almighty never stoops to mere linearity. In Quator de la Fin de Temps, the whimsically flitting melodies seem to defy any progress; the vast chromatic blocks of his organ works are like immovable ziggurats. Every sound is no longer a mere pinprick in space-time; it resonates out into the metaphysical. Instead of seeking to explain, it actively amplifies the impenetrable mystery of His transformation, and the appearance of the Trinity – the three distinct beings in one.

Listening, I’m struck by the mounting power and strangeness of the music, as it cycles back, again and again, towards these moments, when the Divine made itself plain: its oscillations between serene plainchant, slowly arcing strings, and the woodwinds’ birdsong cacophonies, the brass’s apocalyptic blurts, the choir’s soaring shouts; its swaying movements between dissonance and collective tonal amalgamation. Then, in the calm of the mountain-peak, resonating with the foggy harmonics of tam-tam and cymbal, a voice, announced by alien chorales on the violins, trilling metallics, and an explosion from the timpani, issues from the cloud. “He is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him”.

There is nothing here without meaning: La Transfiguration is remarkable for the mirroring of its grand arc in the microcosmic details of its sound-world. Messiaen made frequent use of a signature technique: the seemingly random melodies emanating from the soloists are in fact lovingly-notated birdsongs; by now an expert ornithologist, he could pick favourite birds for each occasion. Thus, the ‘Song of the Eternal Church’ is accompanied by birds from Europe, Brazil, Africa and Canada, and the appearance of the Trinity is precipitated by the staccato rasp of the noble peregrine falcon. Now, I stop at intervals whilst walking to catch these details, part of our everyday sonic fabric – wagtails, blackbirds, finches, wrens. They summon with them the air, light and colours of the open field – in abundance in the countryside around his birthplace of Avignon – which Messiaen saw as one with the Light of God.

This is not figurative. Debussy’s influence made Messiaen a primarily chromatic composer. Whilst loving melody, he revelled in the timbre of strings and horns, thickening and layering harmonies, like paint squirted and trowelled onto canvas. In conversation with Claude Samuel, he spoke of the work in synaesthetic terms: “Gold and violet, red and violet purple, bluish-grey studded with gold and deep blue…” Its fabric can be better compared with visual art – Gauguin’s exotic visions, the unearthly radiance of Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, the light-flooded hallucinations of filmmaker Stan Brakhage – than most music. As the church organist, for sixty years, of the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, he thought of the blinding light of revelation in terms of the sonic white-out of its thundering pipes.

He was first drawn to the subject after hearing a sermon, at his summer home of Petichet in the French Alps, on the Transfiguration as the encapsulation of Christ as the True Light – the image of Jesus as “his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light”, joined in the wholeness of the divine Trinity suddenly invading our world; an illumination of the beyond. The enormous thirteenth-movement climax of La Transfiguration comes with three minor crescendos, announcing the members of the Trinity; with a sudden dip, the music seems to gather like a tidal force, rushing in to a blazing, sustained E-Major – the traditional chord of paradise – the entire ensemble lighting up like a nocturnal city. The final movement, ‘Chorale of the Light of Glory’, entirely defying musical common sense, is one last sighing love song to the Saviour – tender, joyful. As Christopher Dingle puts it, “We are beyond the restrictions of reason and are now in eternity.”

***

I was fifteen when I stopped believing in God. Becoming haltingly aware that the constant, stifling pain my peers spent their days inflicting on me was, in fact, a general condition, I resolved that no God could sanction such an existence. Reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline and listening to the scourging wrath of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible, I conceived formulations of God’s essential absence, a sucking void at the heart of life. When, during my last months at secondary school, I slashed my wrists so deeply I left a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, it seemed merely a confirmation.

Three years later, in a cold March classroom, halfway through my second year of Sixth Form, I was reading, under the table, an article about the singer Joanna Newsom. The writer, Frances Morgan, was being almost frighteningly candid about the almost supernatural effect of her work, its dreamlike resonances, vibrating towards – what? The metaphysical?

It was a thought, at first ridiculous, that wouldn’t leave me. Already listening to explicitly religious recordings – John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Beethoven, Buddhist ceremonial music, Qawwali – it was perhaps inevitable that La Transfiguration would leave a mark on me. Before this consideration, of course, were other reasons: its sprawling fecundity of ideas, almost unrivalled in 20^th century music, the eclecticism of one who loves too much of the world; its natural confidence; its total modernism, allied to the most plain and sincere of belief in the truth of a two-thousand year-old religion. Perhaps most of all, the fact that its at-times-overwhelming beauty is not in spite of its religious purpose, but directly because of it. Like the medieval and Renaissance piétas and crucifixions which so fascinated me, its strange transmutations – rendering the most arcane of theological events into the two dimensions of a picture, or the sound of a choir – seemed to radiate something all the more significant for being inexplicable. Whatever else becomes of it – whether the unknowable truths at the heart of La Transfiguration are, in fact, the ‘truth’, whatever that might mean – it will have done what Messiaen purposed: to touch and shake a life.

Surface Tension
On Derek Southall's Blackwater Recalled - Four Years After (1969) *

And, severance: a dreadful U,
carved from a block of night. Flicker
and swim of country bonfire light,
and past that moving on the face
of the waters. From underneath,

the bleeding. What does this ice-lid
scatter in the fields? Time becomes
the strata resisting footsteps,
the pulse of a camera shutter.
My homes echo with ripples, strokes;

crack with the black puncture of grief.


*This painting, which can be viewed at the Herbert Gallery in Southall's home-town of Coventry, was a reaction to the death of his brother in 1965, who drowned in a frozen lake at Blackwater in Hampshire, my family's home county.

26. Dissolution

Published in Plan B #45, May 2009. Thanks to Lauren Strain, for the editing, and David Tibet for the fact correction.

Current 93
Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain (Coptic Cat)

"Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience" - Frank Kermode, The Sense Of An Ending: Studies In The Theory Of Fiction

David Tibet, an autodidact prophet in the tradition of Gerrard Winstanley and John Lydon, has been preaching apocalypse for over 25 years. But no longer is he a voice crying in the wilderness: every day, the air now tingles with anxiety – global recession, energy crises, looming environmental disaster. Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain can be seen as a return to the matter of the first, recently reissued Current 93 recordings, whose ravaged soundscapes, a reaction to the Babylon of Thatcherite Britain, seem increasingly pertinent.

Aleph... is probably Tibet's most ambitious project since 1993's The Inmost Light trilogy: an eschatological rock-opera of sorts, acted out in Tibet's own bewildering, syncretic cosmology, the frequent incomprehensibility of which matters no more than it did for Blue Öyster Cult on Imaginos. Its theme - which, as far as I can tell, is that of the war of opposites: flesh and spirit, Rome and Jerusalem, Samael and Monad - isn't that important, except as a justification for Tibet to deliver some of the most overwrought, fire-and-brimstone performances in Current 93's history. Those who accuse him of being campy and OTT will find plenty of fuel here: when he draws the word 'murderer' out over James Blackshaw's Early Music flourishes on 'Poppyskins', or whispers that "my teeth are possessed by demons" - snarls of guitar like lightning in the backdrop - he seems possessed of both utter sincerity and an awareness of how ludicrous he sounds - a Gnostic Vincent Price, rolling his 'R's in his best Abiezer Coppe impression.

The (admittedly impressive) list of players gathered on this album is also unimportant. Except for Alex Neilson's supportive, malleable percussion - which occasionally resembles the eternal propulsion of OM's Chris Hakius - and Blackshaw's guitar filigrees, the ensemble is united in support of Tibet's benevolent demagoguery. In what is largely a continuation and refinement of the direction of 2006's Black Ships Ate The Sky, grinding rock sits alongside becalmed folk. Even the peaks of Tibet's sermonising aggression are balanced out by plateaus of slowly-building tension girded with strings and organ. '26 April 2007' is a narcotic glide shot through with coronae of fuzz; the voices - supplied by Pantaleimon's Andria Degens and Baby Dee, among others - drift like EVP. 'Not Because The Fox Barks' and 'As Real As Rainbows', are frighteningly intense: the former verges on metal, Tibet ventriloquising the final tribulation amid vast electric slabs - his incantations call to mind Ozzy narrating the end of Clash of the Titans. And, after the extinction of Antichrist comes the advent of paradise in the form of a stately guitar and piano. When 'As Real...' drops into a maelstrom of glitch, organ and piano - Sasha Grey multitracked over the top - it's as moving as anything on Sleep Has His House, still C93's peak.

"The deserts will be filled/With the comas of stars": words resonant with the promise of the millenarians who captivated England 360 years ago - that another world is possible, here and now.

"I live in increasing awareness that a Love will come suddenly who will finally tear our skies apart," Tibet wrote in the sleeve notes to Black Ships.... Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain is the most brilliant, preposterous warning yet of its imminent arrival; a vital reminder that the end, if we choose, will also be the triumph of love.

25. Caroline Weeks

Originally published in Plan B #44, April 2009.

A classical figure, misted as if the camera had caught something emanating from a pre-Raphaelite otherworld. Compare, perhaps, with a photograph of the bisexual American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay: the same classic-Hollywood poise, the same melancholy aura. She seems, though, to resist this framing as ethereal siren. She’s nothing if not real.

Caroline Weeks’ debut, Songs For Edna – its lyrics transposed from Millay’s exquisite, haunting poetry – has the feel of a record from a time-slip, an unplaceable artefact. The atmosphere of records by the likes of Karen Dalton, Linda Perhacs (Weeks is a fan of both), or Judee Sill, pervades: at once otherworldly and unerringly close, as if “the listener will… feel like I am singing in the same room as them”, cutting surgically to the heart of life. Her unaffected, direct vocal belies the strangeness of the act: over skeletal fingerpicking she reconstitutes the voice of a woman nearly 60 years dead – beautifully. “I was looking through a dusty old book of American poetry and I came across the sonnet ‘I Shall Go Back’, as I read out loud – the words danced off the page into song. Edna's poems struck a chord, deeply resonating with me on a very personal level”. It’s precisely that sense of uncanniness – the revenant past’s ability to shake us to the core – that Songs For Edna captures.

Weeks is very familiar with this sense of connection to the bygone. Her own musical background goes back some generations. “My great-grandad played in a brass-band where every musician was a member of the Weeks family… My grandma Gladys Weeks, who has sadly passed away now, had the most incredible voice, a very high-pitched warble. At a young age, sitting on my grandad's knee I would be mesmerised. I realised then that singing was something special.” Her childhood home was full of music: “my Dad would sing in choirs and listen to Leonard Cohen, my Mum sings around the house non-stop – mostly Carpenters and Joni Mitchell songs. I was always encouraged to sing, to sing from my heart, to sing for pleasure, in quite a spiritual way."

At the heart of folk-song is a dialectic between the experience of the singer, and the singer’s possession by the song. In this, poetry, with its penetrating focus on language, proves the perfect source. “There is a blank sound-canvas, I can colour the words, playing around with the rhythm, harmony and tone… the poems feel their way into music.” Millay is a marginal figure even within histories of American poetry, and the obscurity of source was part of the attraction: “The fact that she is fairly unknown makes her more attractive, or special in some way, like being let in on a secret.” This performative intimacy comes over in her live performances, which often includes “dance, choral pieces… tape recorders hidden under chairs and behind curtains.”

Solo recording is only one branch of the work she has been involved in around her hometown of Brighton, stretching from membership of the live incarnation of Bat For Lashes to “an all-female Bulgarian choir”. Her ex-membership of the experimental folk group Hamilton Yarns perhaps offers a background to her own aesthetic – a kind of futuristic archaism, appropriate to a landscape containing both the modernist incubator of Bexhill and the South Downs’ ancient beauty. “I feel that there are so many beautiful words in the world that have been lost and forgotten…there needs to be a renaissance, a revival of the past. I think we human beings need to slow down and appreciate what has come before us."

Begin here.

24. From 'Nocturnes'

From a currently dormant project, a sequence of prose-poems. I was considering including these in my end-of-year portfolio, then decided against it for reasons of space.

After John Burnside

I

These avenues are an absolutism. Statements in tarmac, red-brick, pebbledash, we do not want to hear. Webbed with traceries, absorbing the resonance of streetlight, the footsteps’ years. The mapping, above all, remains.

II

The marshes, a ghost-map on tarmac and concrete: fronds, tower-blocks. Congress of the semi-detacheds, sand-brick Barrett estates, mulched in brackish water. Curlews and bitternes ululating in public toilets, nesting in ground-floor offices, stalking between the flooded cubicles. The shopping precincts patrolled by fish, the charity shops flourishing with bulrushes and ferns, weevils devouring old hardcover Hazlitts. And, as evening draws on, the sputtering: sodium communing with marsh-light.

III

The beach sloping, stretching along the curve of God’s dragged finger, the churned-up mica in endless drift. Settling as a conglomeration of loose powder, congealing as the sea feels fit, repository of misbegotten stones, slashing razor-shells, the sea-life expelled. Charcoal petrified, a black, hard memento. And, in the evening, the half-lit swarming of Victorian needle-nuzzlers, parasols to the harsh moon.

23. Excavations

2nd draft of a story included in my end-of-year portfolio.

I have the photographs before me. They are spread out, like an ornate Japanese fan. Night came on some time ago, and I did not stand and switch on the light. But I can, for my sins, still see.

I do not know where or when I recovered them. They are already coated with dust again from sitting on my desk for weeks. Nonetheless, they do not show any age: the dress of the girl whose photo occupies the centre of my desk is as vividly scarlet, the flowers around its hem as white, as I imagine they were when first taken. She sits in a field, patches of daisies scattered behind, an acoustic guitar by her skirt, which sits placidly on a leg brought up to her body, thin as a switch. Her arms loop around her knee as if she were holding a dog. This is her only photo: there is nothing of her other than that smile, perturbing in its reserved curve, its flash of utterly white teeth, like the opening of a bean pod. I knew her, after then – we talked, sometimes, I’m sure. But the only extant information of her is that rictus. She is with others, whom I knew, also after these first days. In the other photos, they are gathered in twos or threes, the camera sometimes tilted at a crazy angle, the frame perhaps severing away half a face – for some, that is all I have. Some instinct other than that of survival draws them together, touching, clasping. No matter how long I look, it remains unknown. Skin, hands and hair blur into incomprehensible geometries. I pick up one, dust it off, scrutinise: a young man and his lady friend, slightly off-centre, almost compacted into one slithering shape. Their eyes are arrogant and supplicating: they know that the camera makes them, just as without them, there would be no photograph.

I stand, my body cracking out of inertia, and shuffle to the kitchen. Its unlit corners, crowded with black heaps, are a foreign territory. It is the places that come back, again and again: a palm tree, strung with fairy lights, people surrounding it in the background, the lit vectors of the city spilling away over the wall surrounding it. In one of the photographs, a young man plays rough-trade with it, his girl companion half-heartedly joining in. A slash of black hair frames her eyes, lit by the flash like a cat’s. I feel in these photographs, I am always just off-frame – in this one, sipping miserly at a Corona. But of course, I know I am not. If there is one fact they testify to, it is that. Everything else is supposition. Looking through the open kitchen window, down at the city, I know that this tableau of lights will have disappeared by morning. To have it set down in chemicals, unchanging – that is the thing. Everything else is tawdry imitation.

Standing over my desk, I glance down at them. When I try to remember, they come back, frozen and projected from that time, as if through a magic lantern. The geography of a face, certain senses of personality, affection. Where did they go, who were tied to these things? Where did I, to lose them? Of course, these are not my memories. I look at the arc of an arm, the tautening of skin around a cheekbone raised in smiling, the red cavern of a shout, and wonder where I was when all of this was happening. Dead? Dreaming? Some other world may have harboured me, but I do not remember it. The only, ignominious one left me is this, where the only voice is the October wind battering my window. They are the surface traces of everything that was never mine, like the coils of a sea-ammonite in chalk, the strata going down and down. When I try to remember these things – the heat of a hand around a shoulder, breath-explosion in another’s face, the ambience of beings – the only thing that comes is the heather blazing into colour on the scrubland, in the late sunlight, a fieldfare’s song whistling down from the distance.

There are two more photos of them in the fields. In one, three of them – two young men with scraggly hair, and another girl with the guitar – are sat around a fire of dead logs and ivy, more smoke than flame. In the other, the guitar-case lies by it, a copy of Shelley’s The West Wind and Other Poems sitting on its lid. Outside, I can feel already the evening’s coming frost preparing to seep in. They are saints, pasted into the gold frame of an icon. For them, it was the summer.

22. Why I Hate... Youth

Column, first printed in Plan B #36, August 2008.

“Flagging pursuit of happiness… Sneers at what he calls his youth and thanks to God that it’s over. [Pause] False ring there.”

--Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape.

In June 2007, the Observer Music Monthly dedicated an entire issue to “the bands and fans kickstarting a youth revolution” – an indication not merely of the OMM’s hubristic zeitgeist-tracking self-image, but of the music press’ singular reverence and hunger for ‘youth’. Since the mid-20^th century pop has been primarily consumed and performed by young people; the glamour of adolescence still forms a significant part of the music and PR industry’s language. Female singers are now accorded publicity and cred according to age – hence Duffy (24) being outclassed by Adele (5 months my senior) and Kate Nash – and are usually out of careers before 27. NME pronounces a new bunch of walking acne patches the Second Coming each week; Artrocker seems to exist to convince people that an unhealthy pallor, tiny legs and sixth-generation post-punk guitars do excitement make. Even the dadrock mags have token ‘hot new bands’ to get sweaty over – witness Mojo handing out 5 star reviews to whichever trad-folk wunderkinds appear.

Neither is Plan B entirely immune: its roots in post-C86 indie music-crit leave its unstinting and commendable neophilia open to moony-eyed sentiment about ‘innocent discovery’ and ‘childlike wonder’ – used, more than is healthy, to justify wilful underachievement and aesthetic conservatism. The insistence of some writers – especially those of a poptimistic bent – that youth’s music should not be subject to critical orthodoxy, only to the blind pleasure principle, is a means of draining ideas from music. As Adorno wrote, “Reflection that takes sides with naivety condemns itself: cunning and obscurantism remain what they always were”; it isn’t criticism, but a shutting-down of criticism, of discourse.

The fixation on youth – its supposed ‘excitement’, vigour, etc. – corresponds worryingly with the tendency of neo-liberal capitalism to deny the more unsavoury realities of human existence: suffering, aging, decay and death are elided from the spectacle. The ruling class obsesses over imitation philosopher’s stones (anti-aging products, alternative medicine), while tabloid readers worry over slippages in the celebrity façade of eternal youth. In music discourse, it maintains the claim that radicalism is reserved for the young, that musicians over a certain age are fit only for the nostalgia circuit, or PR-approved, Rick Rubin-assisted Creative Comebacks. This despite the fact that there are many musicians of middle-and-advancing-age soldiering on – Whitehouse, Richard Youngs, Matthew Bower, Scott Walker, Robert Wyatt, Portishead (average age 43) – and producing music far better than kids half, a third of their age. Some of the most compelling music writers around are in (or past) their forties: Mark Fisher, our own Everett True, Chris Bohn, Simon Reynolds. And look to the margins and the scale shifts: for example, 30 in jazz is young, and the number of musicians still keeping up the good work – Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, Charles Gayle, Evan Parker, Keith Tippett, etc. – past bus-pass eligibility is inspiring; in classical, if you’re below 50 you’re no-one. The continual emphasis on the cultural production and milieu of youth is a perfect example of late capitalism’s fixation on a newness that isn’t new; a state in which, as Frederic Jameson pointed out, “an unparalleled rate of change” is twinned with “an unparalleled standardisation of everything” – the idea that the young might come up with art to shame their elders is becoming more laughable precisely as it becomes a yet more central focus of marketing rhetoric.

Youth has its tortures, too, among the worst being its ephemerality: it disappears soon enough, and to deny the value of age is to state that the rest of life is not worth living. The extension of adolescence – the impulse at the heart of poptimism and indie/hipster culture – is also the admission that the future is not worth it – the basis of a nihilism unable even to make demands. Observe the young today – their blank eyes, zombie movements – and try telling me these creatures are our be-all-and-end-all, rather than a (literal) dead-end; they seem to have, a priori, as Greil Marcus put it, “bur[ied] their nascent personalities in received images”; to have, in their regression to the boredom, indifference and petulance of childhood, foreswore any “need to explain themselves and explain the world”, any wish to change it, or their futures. These things signify not, as the myth of cool would have you believe, a spirit of adventure, of seizing the prime of life, but a resigned fatalism. The artificial excitement, the sweat and hedonism of adolescence that the press clamour after – the correlative of the hyperspeed production of late capitalism, its bipolar cycles of boom and bust – is merely the obverse to the plague of depression, mental illness and substance abuse among teenagers. The kids aren’t alright – and we should realise it.

21. Pomes

Found Poem
After Roland Barthes

There are two musics (at least so I have
always thought): the music one listens to,
the music one plays. These two musics are
two totally different arts, each with its
own history, its own sociology,
its own aesthetics, its own erotics.

Found Poem
After David Toop and W.G. Sebald

In Austerlitz, Sebald writes
of hearing a radio programme
about Fred Astaire:
"Astaire's father, who according to this
surprising radio programme came
from Vienna, had worked as
a master brewer in Omaha, Nebraska,
where Astaire was born, and from
the veranda of the Astaire house you
could hear freight trains being shunted
back and forth
in the city's marshalling yard.
Astaire is reported to have said
later that this constant,
uninterrupted shunting sound,
and the ideas it suggested
of going on a long railway journey,
were his only
childhood memories."

20. Two Flash Fictions

These stories were submitted as an assessed part of the course.

I ♥ The 60s

I most enjoy the montages they begin with: Profumo, Martin Luther King, Lyndon Johnson, The Stones, the Technicolor hippies dancing circularly, Cilla Black. An entire decade condensed into perhaps thirty seconds, without any of the boring bits about geopolitical something or other. In fact, when the talking heads come on, I usually mute the set. UKTV History are the best regular source, repeating docs purloined from the BBC, both overviews and focuses on single subjects: Beatlemania, civil rights, the sexual revolution. I know the lines off by heart now, about the teenagers who “suddenly had money in their pockets”, about the “swaying of the old order”. Then, come the end, I’ll go to bed, and dream.

Once a week, walking back from the office, I stop by Borders, and ask the staff for any relevant new titles. If I’m feeling particularly risqué, I will, after tea, pull on my Biba jacket and floral mini-skirt, flare up my eyelashes, and go to the 60s Jive at the bingo hall down the Old Kent Road. Coming home, amid the vodka-struck barbarians of Peckham, hoots of “Wide Load!” sometimes cut the air. Once, wearing my Marianne Faithfull Girl On A Motorcycle catsuit, a lout in pimpled skin and tracksuit bottoms emerged from the shadows and propositioned me. “I like a girl with a bit of meat on ‘er”, he slurred. Given the relative rarity of such occurrences, I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or offended. Walking past the Goldsmiths University union I find myself spotting girls in the same leather jacket, ankle-boots, kohl eyes. They all have Anita Pallenberg’s hair, and a look of hungry ease I can’t manage. They stand on the pavement swirling their drinks, discussing boys, all twenty years younger than me.

On Saturdays, I take my Vespa (first-run F-reg) to Carnaby Street. These days it’s mostly fancy-soap shops for Guardian types, but a handful of boutiques remain, their frontages redressed in pastel tones. I kill the hours stretching towards evening by going through the same three racks. In the changing room, I was putting off my leaving without, as per usual, buying anything. I flicked around to see a man’s eye peeping in at a curtain-crack. There was something rather dashing about its iris, reminding me of David Hemmings. Creeping out later, I could see him better – he had Freewheelin’-era Dylan’s hair, and an expression stolen from Michael Pitt in The Dreamers.

We sat at an outside café table – something I never do, as it always rains – and I squinted at him through big Twiggy sunglasses, eating my éclair in what I hoped was a carefree way. When he came back to my place (“for a drink” – I felt like Elizabeth Ercy in The Sorcerers), his eyes immediately took in the room. I always felt the mess reflected a ditzy Holly Golightly quality onto me – the kind of girl too much in demand to clean, for whom life is one long game. He looked towards my cupboard, and a momentary shock ran through me that he might find my other DVDs. (Well, a girl in my position needs some assistance in that area of enjoyment.) I interrupted him with the question of what he’d like to drink.

Pause. A Coke?

I felt like I should offer him a tab or something, but had nothing to hand. Even asking that had been hard enough. I sipped my highball across from him on the sofa. I prayed the room might become a time-machine, sucking in the essence of that decade, dissolving the space between us. There would be no effort required: all would fall into place, the very air possessed of luminosity, white heat. So many years of devotion, crowding the place with its spirits, and I, I would be now the initiate. I put on a record. He nodded as The Doors’ ‘Five To One’ came on. A potential future, sealed in vinyl, slipped underneath the needle. He gestured to me to stand up, and held me in his arms. He said, with a laconic look, You know, you have eyes like Patty Hearst.

Pneumatic

People give me a strange look when I tell them I’m mostly silicon. Though I never give any indication of joking, they laugh. When I tell them it’s true, their eyes seem to sink back into their heads, their necks retreat, and they nod, Okay…. When they introduce themselves, people give their most salient fact before proceeding onto more constructive territory. I never get beyond my opening gambit, and hence my conversation now leaves something to be desired.

It was my third husband who encouraged me. One day, as I brought him his tea, he began looking me up and down. I could see him, as I bent to put the tray on the floral table-cloth, making a close and enthusiastic study of my cleavage. All through dinner, he would glance at my lips as I took a sip of water, as if appraising the value of a freshly-caught squid. In one of the many lulls, I asked him, When are we going to that new club? You said you’d take me two weeks ago, and we haven’t gone. You know, he replied, some men don’t like showing off their wives in public. Men prefer women to be, y’know… pneumatic. He shovelled up another forkful of peas and steak, and chewed noisily, as if to say he would speak no more. I was wearing my low-cut polka-dot dress. Looking down at my plate, I could see how it caught the outline of my breasts, a gentle curvature down to my ribcage. I tried to calculate what angle they currently sloped at, what the ideal angle would be, or where, on a scale of 1 to 10, my body was, and should be.

One afternoon, when I came home early from work, I found him fucking Sandra on the iffy-smelling sofa in the front room. Though the hairy back of his neck obscured her face, I recognised the grunts and yelps as belonging to the voice I heard over our fortnightly cocktails. Neither of them noticed me in the doorway, but I could see her breasts generously wobbling as if they were independent of her, the curve of her lips, and his decidedly less-than-clean arse straining with effort. She was, I decided, too good for him, though once the divorce proceedings were underway he no doubt still saw a lot of her.

I spent a few months staying home every evening. The house we had lived in together seemed to grow smaller each hour, the walls, their magnolia floral relief wallpaper colouring and peeling, narrowing until I was forced into my room, wanting the night to be done with. The first time, afterwards, I went to a club, I ended the night keeping a look-out for a taxi while my friend Louise satisfied her new companion in an alcove. The next day I booked my first appointment with the surgeon.

I had my secondary-school reunion a couple of weeks ago. I was stood by the punchbowl, speaking to Matt, who had a crush on me in Year 9, and was apparently now a biochemist. His eyes were hidden behind smeared bottle-thick glasses, patchy two-day stubble and acne scars making him instantly recognisable. As he fell silent for the nth time, I mentioned the implants. Breasts, arse, lips, calves, labia, appendix, several areas of sub-dermal fat. The majority of my paycheque went into a savings account, month after month. A different area each time, sometimes not knowing what I was going to get until I had the menu in front of me, cash to hand. A different surgeon each time, rotating around the city, explaining to them each time, Oh no, these are my own. As I spoke, my tits wobbled over the buffet table. Matt reached for another drink, gulped it down like a cat swallowing a fish. Do you mind if I…?, he said after a pause, and started feeling my arms, working his way up to my cheeks, down to my breasts, as if he were testing a steak. I could see from the way he rolled his eyes as he crouched towards my abdomen that he’d had a few more than I’d thought.

So, what are you doing tonight? Well now, that is a question.

19. David Toop Takes An Afternoon Nap

A 5-minute radio play written to a specific set of sound FX provided by Peter Blegvad. We were given the option of recording it, instead of performing - I did neither, simply because it was simply too rubbish, in comparison to the preceding works. In any case, there wasn't enough time to perform them all...

SOUNDS OF TYPING

DAVID: OK. [groans] God. Why do they send me this shit? Oh, come on, keep it up. Only five more disks to review, and then lunch. Booze. Cat-warmth. Bacon. Mmm. They could at least send me some interesting field recordings, though. Air-conditioning hum, forest clearings, something. Just because I wrote that bloody book, they assume I want to hear their contact-miked farts, or the noises their hard-drives make when they’re asleep. Give me Egyptian Lover any day. Ah, balls to this.

TYPING CEASES

DAVID: I know how the rest of it goes anyway. Let’s see what’s on the wireless.

RADIO STATIC WITH SPOOKY SOUND

DAVID: Hmm, nice. A bit of shape hiding in there somewhere. [Beat] Focusing in on the forms hiding amid amorphousness – picking out the pattern of dust particles in a nebula or whatever Burroughs said. Beats as the manifestation of man’s –

STATIC CUTS OUT

DAVID: – lust for categorisation, maybe… Yeah, that’ll make a chapter by –

CUTS BACK IN

DAVID: – itself, sure. Now, what have we got? Hm. It’s about, as I say – ooh – yes, finding whatever lies out there in here, maybe. And hence, the pleasure of an afternoon drifting the airwaves; the siren lure of signal. Which reminds me, the new Henry Cow boxset, must get. [Beat] Maybe I should head out to the off-licence later. Hmm, the cat needs litter; Albert could do with some air. Ooh, promising. Yes, in this case, it began with the numbers stations, hip-hop broadcasts, jungle pirate radio. The internet, for a while – Napster, streaming audio, Soulseek, the entire audio universe available – but interest soon…

END STATIC & SIGHS; PHONE RINGS

DAVID: Ah, for shit’s sake. Where did I – ? [grunts]

PHONE CEASES RINGING.

DAVID: Hello? [Less than happy] Oh, hi Tony. Yeah, I’m just wrapping up the copy now. Why don’t you email me about this shit? Alright, fine. Bye. [Sighs. Yawns.] Bloody toil. Let’s see what’s we have.

TAP DANCING

RADIO ANNOUNCER: The young Fred Astaire, born in Omaha, Nebraska, 1897, would listen alternately to vaudeville shows on the radio, and the freight trains in the marshalling yard south of their house, marvelling at the sound –

DAVID: [Sleepily] Hmm, interesting…. [Sounds of snoring]

HARP SIGNALLING ENTRANCE TO DREAM. DREAM DRONE

DAVID: Hmm? Oh, Derek, is that you? Was that Will playing? It’s so lovely to see you. And… Hugh? John? Paul?

JOHN STEVENS: Hiya David. God, you’ve let yourself go.

DAVID: What are you all doing here?

DEREK BAILEY: [dry Yorkshire accent] We’re setting up a dream sextet.

PAUL BURWELL: [Yorkshire accent] No limits on instruments. I’ve got the whole shebang – a gamelan orchestra. Bit of a bugger to play, mind.

DAVID: Well… that’s marvellous. Why don’t we get Evan or Eddie, and make it a septet?

SINISTER DRONE

HUGH DAVIES: [Welsh accent] I’m afraid they… can’t play with us. Too lively.

DAVID: You’re one to talk! I never knew anyone livelier than you guys. Well, there was that crack-gang I hung with in NY back in ’82. You remember those days?

DEREK BAILEY: Oh, we remember it all.

JOHN STEVENS: Not so lively these days, Dave. Ears gone, wits going with them. Nothing out there holding the interest, but what they keep behind the bar, and how much they’re planning to pay us. You spend a bloody lifetime trying to get out there, and where does it get you. We’re broken records, dontcha know?

DAVID: [Pause] But… you were all so good with it, we had such good times. [Beat] It… it meant something to me. [Pause] Fucking damnit, I wept for you, you fuckers! And this is what’s fucking left to me?!

JOHN STEVENS: David, would you calm down?! Or am I going to have to administer the Zen slap?

DRONE SLOWLY FADING

DAVID: [starts from sleep] Oh, God! What, where the –

SOUND OF BIRDSONG.

DAVID: [sighs with relief] Jesus… Right, back to work. Has this been on all the time? No, come on, the next disk. Although…

RADIO STATIC, SOON JOINED BY RHYTHMIC CLANGING.

DAVID: Hmm… Einstürzende Neubauten? I always told Blixa they’d make a good ambient listen, as long as he’s on low. See if we can’t get rid of this static…

STATIC CUTS IN AND OUT, WHILST CLANGING AND BIRDSONG CONTINUE

DAVID: Hmm. It was that question – what remains when we remove the input. One hand clapping. And beyond that?

BOINGING NOISE

DAVID: Hugh? [Pause] Hugh? [shouting] Hugh, speak to me! For God’s sake, say something!

BOINGING NOISE ENDS. TWO SECOND SILENCE. RINGTONE

DAVID: Oh, God, I can’t face it. A disk. Anything. Something by Brian.

PIANO

DAVID: Albert. Albert. Albert, my Albert.

CHILD CRYING

DAVID: Sshh, sshh. Come on, calm now. [Beat] We’re still here, aren’t we. Calm, calm.

FADE OUT.

18. Are You Tired of Being Alone?

A story, designed for performance, written for Peter Blegvad's seminar.

After Kenneth Goldsmith and Jarvis Cocker

I had gone into a bar one night, and met him at the counter. He asked me whether I would like a drink, and I replied, Why yes, I would, a Jim Beam double. He duly obliged.

And so I asked him, as you do, Where are you from? What’s your business in town?

And he replied, I make matches. He asked me whether I wanted another drink, and I did, and drank.

That’s an interesting line of work, I said. What kind of matches do you make.

Big ones, small ones, medium, and every intervening degree, he replied. I make fine matches, coarse matches, loving matches, violent matches, even, dare I say it, football matches, Australian rules or otherwise.

Oh, I said, that’s interesting. Are you paid well?

Very well indeed, he replied, and, lighting a cigarette, laid his hand on my leg. And he said, very precisely –

Are you tired of being alone?

And I supposed I was, I supposed we all were, everyone in that bar, or we wouldn’t have been there. I enviously eyed the one couple crowded in a corner, hands all over each other. The sensation of touch had entirely left me – I had no memory of any texture but the outside of cigarettes and dirty bar-glasses, slick with grease. All those others lined along the counter avoided each other’s gazes, looking far-off at some unattainable woman or other. His hand was still on me, groping its way towards my balls.

We went for a walk, and spoke about his profession. He said, The principles of love are incomprehensible to those who believe they have any connection with reality, rationality, ethics or otherwise. It is always and only a question of alchemy, of divination: one finds two suitable beings and bumps them into each other like particles. He said this in a full, operatic voice, somewhat like Billy Mackenzie. It is, in effect, an occult science, he said. One begins with a single movement, a gesture, an observation, a question –

Are you tired of being alone? –

And one carries on from there. These fucking dating shows, where they try and match people based on quantifiables – interests, similar heights, whether one will fuck anything that moves – are absolute Goddamn nonsense. Cilla Black had it almost right – randomise, cut out all knowledge. I get great pleasure from my work, not least because of the need to mop up the (*cough*) overspill. A perk, if you like.

When I met him again a week later, he told me he’d been busy. I kept running into couples fucking in doorways, on car bonnets at midnight, in the corridor outside my flat. The whole city was dripping with perspiration. His business-like appearance had dissolved, his hair splaying like an anemone of sparking wires, his neck reeking of sweat, face streaked with its trails, tie lapping around his neck like a loose dog’s-tongue. He pinned me against the wall – with his enthusiasm – next to a couple necking by a dustbin.

Are you tired of being alone? He whispered it this time, like air escaping from a tire. He isolated each word – Are. You. Tired. Of. Being. Alone?

And I could feel the warmth of his mouth on me, and could sense the sliding spit of the couple and shouted slipping out of me, And what if I am?

He exhorted me with his question, changing the intonation, as if maxing-out the permutations of a mathematical sum. Lighting a cigarette, he slid his hand down my leg. And his voice began to buck and waver and break, as he spoke about what he could do for this city, what energies there were to be released, of the pulses hiding in concrete and the rhythm of buildings and the secret congress of gases and the architecture that held us apart and the terrors of the raging horses in the tall silos smashing themselves in their fury to consumable pieces and –

that was when I left him, among the bodily fluids and the heat. And I was right, you know, and I know, and what would have become of me if I had done otherwise, and what might I have been.
And still I hear sometimes, walking the streets at night, echoing around corners, the question –

Are you tired of being alone?