THE ANTI-GRAVITY MAN/LONDON, MY LONDON.
In the rundown lobby, I sit on a couch upholstered in drab gray wrinkled fabric and wait as patiently as I can. I know that I’ve swum oceans, that I have come 10,000 miles on this far-fetched, far-flung pilgrimage – at which point a man in a navy blue duffle coat and sneakers walks purposefully into the lobby.
This is Eugene P. He’s come to explain the situation to me, and to the publishers. The word is our work is beyond the scope of these types. It’s nothing but local gossip though, we assume. Servants, postmen and the like; and the occasional long haired gent from London. There is nothing you can put your finger on though. But Eugene is the self styled superconductor of bad intent, a florid and exuberant household god, yellow pages advertised. Usually, although not today, he affects theatrical cape and walking cane, and is a levitator par excellence. He’s the anti-gravity man and therefore has trouble appearing before the skeptics at immigration in civilian garb. Consequently we’re in another waiting room, a soviet style Holiday Inn conference room…Maybe he can put in a word for Dionysia as well, adding scientific ballast to her claims of torsion field disturbance in surplus-charged tourist destinations. The gray drabness of the couch finds an echo in the coarsely rutted complexion of my elephant mask. Meanwhile, an overhead projector scrolls text of Dionysia’s latest book – a tourist guide to London written circa the last celebrity crash, the numinous funeral of James Shitkicker esq. – at pedestrian speed and we all fix our attention on the characters, aided by soft piped jazz…
London My London/Dionysia Triantafillou: A Numinous Account of Pre-Birthed London.
You’ll want to know this. Why it is you get prickly. Get hot and frustrated, suffer underground languor, heavy sky torpor, grey sky ennui, sheer underground terror, and why no-one listens to you. People don’t even see you in London. Tunnel vision is the perspective of choice for the citizenry. London skies, grey and overbearing, are not conducive to thought. It’s murky, muggy, even when the sun shines. Winds don’t blow, excepting of course the electrical winds, minor disturbances in the torsion fields. The obscure unseen pressure fields, electricity, sap the energy of the most resolute…
—The projector stops, the electricity having failed. It’s my experience too. We agree on everything. Virtually everything. Virtual unanimity. It’s as if we are all as one…and the projector hums once again into life—
…even natural athletes are reduced to sucking in oxygen in desperation. Fat men gulp and stumble. There’s muggy electricity everywhere, blowing wild into the wind vortices, the streets aflutter with thoughtlessly discarded refuse, the winds sucking vital energy away from the crepuscular hordes. Many first time tourists are literally disgusted every time they step outside. The citizens of the city move to and fro like reclaimed dodgems, bump into each other, the crackle and hiss of electricity horribly tangible. There’s no air here, just bleeding streets, tumescent tourist piles and scabby residential hutches accumulating lifelessness, fetid dormitory streets evincing a cultish village ambience. Dross appears to accumulate in extrinsic as well as intrinsic appurtenances, established behaviour patterns. Litter is everywhere. London is, in fact, for the life affirming, a lifeless cesspit kept afloat only by energy input from twittish media apologists, a kind of continual civic ECT, itself a cause of torsion field disturbances. (Dionysia, as you can see, doesn’t exactly mince her words) We know these apologists are just lifting their skirts to the city’s occult energy (money) gods. To the pyramid atop Canary Wharf…that’s where the energy is produced, where it’s at. Now triple pronged, the plan is almost complete. Tourists are generally guided away from these baleful erections, their phallic audacity considered by the authorities as just too sacred for extended perusal. It’s the pinnacle of money worship, Satan brow beating the whole city, flashing his gleaming smile every 5 seconds. His acolytes doing deals that keep them in energy credit. The over stated tourist destinations meanwhile are crawling, notwithstanding the uncomfortable fact of the degree of difficulty in approach, the methods of transportation thereto being distinctly understated. Running on empty. Railway termini spewing out cashcow whores. Transport to the money centers is ironically, trouble free. Civic chaos is what it is.
(She has a way with words eh? A kind of fiery civic outrage fuels her contempt, something I’ve always worshipped in her…Anyway, my money’s on the whole thing going tits up. The provinces would hold the key without me. Lucky I’m back eh? Lucky for me and for some. London My London. Back in the driving seat, a mythic rejuvenessence, elephant tracks staled through under use. My work’s cut out for me but with God’s help…Meanwhile Eugene, who has been eyeing us quizzically, has started murmuring his own catechism of intent, his voice co-mingling with that of the voice synthesizer giving tongue on Dionysia’s behalf)
…Normally there are two spheres and a spark jumps between them. Now imagine the spheres are flat surfaces, superconductors, one of them a coil or O-ring. Under specific conditions, applying resonating fields and composite superconducting coatings, we can organize the energy discharge in such a way that it goes through the center of the electrode, accompanied by gravitation phenomena – reflecting gravitational waves that spread through the walls and hit objects on the floors below, knocking them over…the second generation of flying machines will reflect gravity waves and will be small, light, and fast, like UFOs. I have achieved impulse reflection; now the task is to make it work continuously…
He sounds completely sober, serious, matter-of-fact. Between the two of them, their voices achieving an elliptical rhythmic tension, a new liturgy is hammered out flat. But it occurs to me that the need is because we’ve all got our own problems. This again is Dionysia’s angle. God bless her. I see what she means when she says that the sky shelters its own, heaving lugubrious static charges over the cityscape. Languid strolling in the dank underbelly is right out. Not an option, except for the darkly obsessed. Anyway back to Dionysia…
Pedestrians, enraged by car fumes and other irritants, walking static charges, are just boiling with rage. Shop fronts jostle with over excited punters bearing cell-phones as heraldic insignia, txting obtuse messages to each other. Doormen flex their insecure status in your face. Restaurants are full of pipe cleaner types, or power- lunchers loading up at the trough, unpleasantly coiffed city slickers and their frog-like girlfriends/boyfriends. Celebrity chefs do time here on TV, fat tongued boys pretending to a gaucherie that’s more than enough to put you off your dinner, anxious lest their credibility is shot to shit by a too overt display of contrived anger, nervous lest their real clients get a whiff of their bombastic need for cheap celebrity. No one wants to be associated with some loser who just wants to be noticed…some pre-gnostic simian with bad teeth and a thick tongue…
All delegates generally agree over the iced water and hors d’oeuvres, as we dance a subtle conga of deference to the man who holds our destiny in his gravity free hands, that noticing, seeing, is more than ever the primary contemporary currency. Seeing is the default mode, the consensual lingua franca. We’re all lookers, more than listeners. Eyeballs take it all in. Eyes everywhere, actually just too many eyes taking you in. Eyes that notice you in peripheral vision, glances are shot surreptitiously. Obsessed eyes in a line, offering baleful challenge, misplaced eyeballing. Synapses shudder and spit in sympathetic overload. The eyes track like smart weapons with the didactic import of laser beams. No one, least of all schools, teaches the meaning of looking. People gawp unreflectively and idly. Looking is now an almost completely vapid activity, disguising clandestine intent. People fail to acknowledge the meaning of under-contextualized scrutiny. Eugene’s point, readily agreed on by the rest of us, is that people literally cannot see in front of their noses. He therefore posits levitation as survival technique. Snowblind, they see, but they fail to see. And there’s a configuration more suited to modern journalism, to the sappy look-at-me-ma me-me-me effusions of the journo. The projector rolls on…
Everyone wants both to notice, the all seeing London Eye a metaphor literally dumped from heaven in the heart of the Capitol, and to be noticed. You can’t get a slice, even a small piece, of pure privacy for love. It’s Rip off city, ripping off your time as well as your money, London’s a stand up act from hell. Every gormless dolt is a comedian, eyes gleaming, eyebrows arched. Everyone’s funny. Everyone’s a comedian. It’s grueling and it’s wearisome. The glimmer in the eye of the standup skewers any attempt at laughter. There is no comedy, as all our best comedians instinctively know. Just the hacks and attention seekers remain, tugging at your nerve ends, begging your indulgence. Non-Personality passes un-remarked as prime currency. No one cares that London’s comedians and cabbies are no longer funny, least of all the city authorities. They actively encourage a weary fatalism in the tourist body, a long-suffering acceptance. Laughter is pyrrhic for the authorities. Therefore funny is something of a faux pas in this city. Unfunny comedians with their sponsored personalities may be enough to pull in the out of towners and the truffle hog cultural tourists, but even the sly, smug commentators who know they’re above it all see that they’re all in the game together. It’s a seamless feat of blind sighted robbery.
Suddenly Nobby Wyse the cabbie (and sometime fruiterer) our courier, is up on his club feet. He’s overwrought. The effects of the flight are still with him. He needs more water. And sandwiches. My need to love, on the other hand, outruns the otherwise overwhelming urge to mime muscular strength for the docs. And my shaman (Abrahams) tells me he’s only trying to further his own career, to make me his cause celebre…I am the main atomic threat in his arsenal of delusionals. This is what I need to hide from Eugene P. I need him on board and so I’m happy to act out for him. My need for levitation techniques and good character references is primary. Once he’s on board it’s a matter of irrelevance that my delusions (as he terms them) show Ahab in a good light. My very presence on the streets, appearing in reflection in shop windows, is an affront to his so-called professional integrity. So, he asserts, I need locking up, restraining. An assertion that of course I endorse. Anything for the career of a friend and fellow witch doctor, a shamanic colleague. My double bluff as usual disconcerts the old fraud.
And so I show him, and therefore myself, in a very good light. I have first to be seen about town, with a girl on each arm, so that he can show the world how he copes with the likes of me. I show off with abandon at paparazzi events, celebrity parties, falling with charm and distinction into gutters as the night wears on. I am obliged for the sake of his camera to literally fall out of nightclubs, legless, punching and kicking out at photographers and insulting passers-by, so that he can seem to pick up the pieces. A recklessly laughable pantomime, but it gets me out and about. And in the papers. It’s all character ballast. My character as a reckless devil-may-care, but also as a dangerous delusional, is by degrees thus established in the public mind. I appear in the gossip pages as proof that he knows what he’s doing. I have obligatory gay escorts as well, so my appeal is literally all encompassing. If I weren’t some sort of auto-shaman I’d need an agent, just to protect my own interests. Just to reap the rewards for him. To guard against abuse, as you’d ensure the safety of children. But I am my own agent. I do all my own bookings, and I pay myself 10% of everything I earn. I make smug appearances with Ahab on TV, browbeating unruly hacks who dare question our impeccable and above board professional relationship. I have sex on a more or less consistent basis. People pay me just to look at them. I touch them where it hurts.
I now warm to my theme. I hope to convince Eugene of my bona fides. I’m angling for credibility…now, sex. No one has sex at 40. Even 20’s pushing it. At one stage, he observes, the gay Mr. Massive reportedly considered having a baby with the lesbian actress Jackie Chunder. He remarked that the advantage of being in a mutually incompatible relationship, sexually speaking, with procreation in mind is that at two removes, the sexual partner actually becomes the object of desire. Gay man + gay woman is the perfect sexual combination in anyone’s book. Or at any rate I affected to see things his way…we are still, as a species, obsessed with sex in any form. People only need to think about it. To reiterate obsolete, forgotten obsessions. But it is, for most people, all over now. Thinking, in many cases, has to be enough, because even though sex doesn’t discriminate, perfidious consciousness does. The terror of rejection coupled with the terror of body penetration. Rubs both ways. But Sex is for everyone. The tabs, the heavies, the glossies, the rags are all filled with SEX. It’s fucking everywhere! Sex as gardening, and as kitchen culture. Mediterranean culture grafted on, so the industry can lie through its teeth that London is SEXY. The very airwaves hum with words of protestant obloquy. We may be obsessed by it, but that doesn’t mean we can do anything about it. The obsession itself renders the action virtually obsolete. The obsession can only be tended, orchid like in the fetid heat of desire, if you don’t get enough of it. Obsession gets us off, hence the sex-porn industry. Actually doing it ruins the mood. But nonetheless, sex is in the buildings, objectum-sexuality. The Oxford Circus building fuckers were in this reading of events responding to an objective need. And then, from the overhead…when did you last re-examine your life? Never? Why not? It doesn’t come knocking.
Ignoring the interruption I develop my themes. My life is pre-ordained narrative. When fame beckoned, or when real people became the norm as providers of vicarious obsession on TV. Do I really care about 10 people shacked up in a media safe house? 70 grand is nothing, but to be gawped at by outsiders for 10 weeks…is it worth it? I’d say so. I’d say it’s worth it for us. Further, I’d go further. So nothing happens? That’s the point. People’s real insecurities/weaknesses/dysfunctions revealed minutely, by degrees. It’s a slow death, but better than actually executing people, as other cultures do in other contexts. Anyone who can argue against the spectacle of random image generation revealing inner vacuity FOR THE BENEFIT OF MILLIONS just doesn’t have any sense of fun. I must see these people through. It’s me they’ll look to in post-celeb desperation. Just to be looked at, pored over, it’s enough. Not for us though eh? We have other, higher standards. I’ve shacked up with Dionysia, with destiny. We’ve our own moral imperatives haven’t we? No relativistic weasel words or concepts cloud our outlook. We know knowledge is useless, unless gleaned from TV. We know expertise is over rated. We’re aware that destiny is there for the taking. We still have obsession. Still, I walked down streets clogged with sex rubbish. And people images. Random images, generated from the central image banks, images of profane sex-rubbish. I fall silent, breathing heavily, a spent force…
Back to Dionysia…Destiny for London would appear to exist in the interstices between the serious and the not so serious. The broadband spectrum of modern life in which everyone has an angle, all humourous bases have been covered and every Tom Dick and Harry is a comedian. Visitors to the city should be acutely aware that all pathetic exhibitionists have been green lighted, offered carte blanche to advertise their personal cravings for attention in all media, all the time. We’ve reached actual meltdown here. Laughing’s no longer the point. Rumour is the point. Cliquey internet discussion groups are smug and self congratulatory in getting the joke, not realizing they ARE the joke. Needless to say, London is heaving with internet geeks. More and more internet cafes are receiving unconditional planning permission.
Yes yes…I know it was always going to go that way. There are precedents; the ennobled talentless making pushiness an end in itself…and these crimes were perpetrated, or conceived at any rate, well over 40 years ago. But still, you might think, might you not, that we should have all got a bit wiser, a bit more clued up, instead of merely cleverer, in the meantime? Did we view it as a warning, a nuclear alarm? No, we didn’t think it mattered that much. Everyone sitting here…in this room before me now…even now you probably harbour a certain sneaking, grudging admiration for the chutzpah of the talentless, a certain suspicious contempt for the really talented, those rare individuals who you’d never in a million years be able to emulate. Inane pushiness, allied to a will of steel, is what gets you further now; it’s the motor of our essential contempt for quality. We are, as you know, all potential stars now. Come on in, the water’s lovely. We are constantly bathed in paradoxical cathode ray light. My sphere of influence is massive. I am a political heavyweight. I am a TV chef. I know the correct temperature both at which to boil eggs and to fry public figures. My earpiece still crackles and hums with immoderate laughter as yet another public servant is tickled up for ridicule. I look on scornfully, down my nose, as public figures appear ridiculous in attempting to appear serious…but Wyse is now falling asleep, and rather than interrupt my flow and wake him, I decide to press on with the rest of my testimony…
My putative sphere of influence is something that’s potentially more or less boundless. I’ve given birth, in gravitational extremis, to at least 2 million new clued up citizens. All media savvy. We all star…all the time. I am not renowned for my modesty, so I’ll say it. I did it. My technical surveillance was all that was needed. I operated my own camcorder. I directed my own movies. They’re all in the movie. I took the star system, and made it accessible, relevant to the denizens of the Thames Valley, the inhabitants of the Hertfordshire corridor, the fauna of the Essex badlands. All those clubbers, commuters, were stars of their own movies. I directed them. They owe their fame to me. We’re always in convoy now. Out on the shingle, awaiting the moment of re-entry. But the logistics of movie making are enough to make your eyes water. You cannot insure a movie these days unless it’s underwritten with new mafia money. Money laundered through Paris and Rome and all points east. It’s East of Hollywood. Private jets sear the skies, snake through the ether carrying Spielbergs and Geffens to impossibly mundane locations. Servants and lackeys live expansively. Dine out on anecdotes about the habits of celebrities.
The serious/not serious paradox, by which the joke needs contextualising, needs to be allowed room to breathe on different levels, has been allowed to become entrenched. Words that tend to drift in and out of focus are suddenly funny. Far from becoming wiser, better able to contextualise, we have drifted. We’re in the backdraft. Creativity, in London, is at an all time low. Sloppy crud…less wise, more stupid, we’re less able to make non-relative value judgments, more inclined to assume that any old rubbish is acceptable. We have become bed wetters. Our snaky fantasies find expression in incontinent dreams. We are, at best, collusive in the process of attempting to evade the moral consequences of our actions. We are obsessed by sex, ignoring the uncomfortable truth that sex is unlikely to be the very first of our worries. And ignoring the fact that obsession is merely a cancerous form of disgust. My pride is hurt. These cokeheads and bitches are less wise, less inclined to wisdom. It’s not what we want is it? We need more not less hopeless personalities clamouring for attention. Don’t we? Now of all times? And despite the advantages of growing up wise, or wise capable, we give these bastards houseroom. What’s going on? Destiny is in our hands. I didn’t create this system for another man, the fertile conditions of celebrity for these ends. It was meant to be a leveling up, not a leveling down. Warholian schtick times 10. All beautiful people star in their own movies, or not at all.
Elephant images are now ad-mixing with the text on screen: But instead, it embraces the speeded up world of longer working hours, elongated spasms of debauched stupidity, alternating with head wrangling sessions at the terminal wank bank, the spam filled bandwidth streams. All pretty much redundant conceits. Only wankers, it seems, fetid fantasists in the City precincts, need to get that much money that badly that they’ll buy into these damp dreams. No necessity to work now that survival is assured. Why bother working, when the fruits of that labour are so unworthy of possession. But “work” they do, for share options, packages including dismal self-disgust. City boys in loafers are revealed as the worthless descendents/progeny of space/time filled hippies of 30 years ago, children of debased and unworkable fantasists, hedonistic access/excess merchants. One off the wrist meat jockeys. Girls in offices are now just wanking machines. No office orifice that can’t be filled with cheap dayglo condom. Five-knuckle shuffle, into the cavernous machinery of the cyber sphere, digitized crypto porn. Spaniel men slither around the streets, and are fawned over in excessively flattering magazine portrayals as worthy of aspiration. Big over emphasized opinion pieces suggesting, in the very act of analysis of what was wrong, what was right about it all. The tourist trade cannot, I venture, stand up under much more of this pressure. Tourists look down their noses, already look to points further east. London can’t grow, there’s no room. London is, in psychological terms, stuck at a stage of development that we must identify with the adolescent.
And I think, how right she is. My beautiful wife, claws out, eyes blazing. The machine is now spitting, humming, emitting autoerotic sparks, controlling the room. Righteous anger. She’s a better writer than she’s given credit for eh? She can really dish it out. She has nailed it. The city avidly consumes profane myths when I’ve already provided better, realer myths. Pre-crash myths that invoke a falsely historicized crypto-biography that doesn’t pay heed to reality. Profane myths that don’t even mention elephants, or gravity disturbance. So the streets just fill up with dead mythic matter, accumulated ennui and depreciated electricity. Real myths involve Gods, and conflicts between Good and Evil. Good coffee/bad coffee, the cappuccino culture express, young professionals, IT ingénues who can’t tell you what they really do for a living. Where they fit in the great pan-glottal-stop of globalised yob culture, with Englishness at its epicentre. They don’t know. They just read up on their destinies in magazines. Burnished heritage yobs, St. George the Angevin on dragon slaying benders of corporate excess. English yobs are central, the boiling core of fractured alienation, hedonism. They are now on the march. Round the orbital fuelled by E-type jaggedness, over the hills and far away. To some crazy field…back then…specious template…ravers with club blindness and hearts full of spacey altruism. The blissed out togetherness…a soothing lie. When I can supply lies that are real fun. Re-entry lies. Smoothed down, accessorized, playful gender games, no gender, and no gender specificity, attractive to those who no longer have any idea how to be men, or indeed women. Just a playful mass of spaced out keyboard tappers, moving money and rumour from A to B and back again. Headspace now uniquely, in the context of history, empty. Literary gents just squabble, up and at ‘em, city boys ruck in east end pubs. Grotesque wannabe thespians, wielders of power close to the 7th circle, polished…still…ex-schoolboys, nervous of your millions, jealous of your influence…
I pause for breath. This is all leading back to the 70s. I see in Eugene a man who appreciates the importance of dressing up, of cutting a dash, of showing off. Everything leads, like roads to Rome, back to the 70s. The first and last explosion, the last redoubt of my previous re-entry, the apotheosis of my frivolous intent. Unbeknown to their dads and in some cases granddads, the grand-dada Glam experience had been the apotheosis of this sort of blissful playfulness 25 years earlier. If only the old goats, multi-coloured satyrs of comic excess and over statement, had realized it at the time. The kiddies’ dressing up box, envisaged by my cohorts, gave birth to and green lighted the insane and fetishistic infantilism of grown men in make-up, wizard capes and platform boots, men who truly made that dazzling epoch the brightest and the richest and the most immaculately realized of times. Before oil prices dropped the bottom out of the world’s self-satisfaction, and even allowing the 60s hangover, the 70s were the best of times. The city’s energy fields at that time weren’t silted up with rogue electricity, it was too expensive. Just too expensive. Not enough to go around. And the glitter and tinfoil/spandex acted as great conductive material. We made our own entertainment there, in the darkness of the 3-day week. We dressed up out of boxes and then stood on boxes. We strapped on extravagantly designed guitars like sci-fi accoutrements and we rocked. Those lucky enough to have grown up in the 70s were forever reminding themselves, the first warless generation…no fighters…strikers and football players, would-be boozers and non-contracted out council refuse men, that they were the pioneers, the first anti-radical snakes out of the basket, the primary and pre-eminent tricksters in pre-ironic schtick. The first makers of anti-history. Growing up in the 70s meant never having to grow up at all. Free of electricity. The main players in the fall out from mawkish idealism and misplaced eco-optimism, they knew things were shit, and rejoiced. Anti-radical!
I turn to my wife…
Dionysia, you need to know this. You need to know this. You already know this. I had it good. Anti-radical. That’s why I am good. That’s why you love me. Everyone loved an aspect of me. You are the best advert for this country, for me. I am a living template, a tourist magnet. I initiate the uninitiated; I inaugurate marches around the orbital and all divinely consecrated elephant trails. Everyone was in on it. I put this show on for you. And you understand. A fabulous anarchy, 6 years before…public inclusivity …punk…hyper realized, publicized anarchy. The revolution in taste was, as you know, over by ’72, the taste for serious consideration of life’s many and manifold ills out of date. All the earnest pipe suckers and rock critic academics were hatched in the 60s, cultural imperialists, “I claim this cultural movement for the highbrow”…actions without consequences, the misuse of the word ‘liberal’, the misuse of words generally with impunity…these chic revolutionaries, documenters of history’s slipstream where “secret” histories are played out…history which is parodied to distraction by men in glitter capes and spandex. Former plumbers, postmen, furniture polishers, firemen, removal men, Hendrix look-alikes, groovy fuckers, pimps, agents, moustachioed civil servants, embryonic androgynes, all took a look at their groovy elder brothers, laughed up their sleeves and decided that the appurtenances of frivolity were more appropriate as an enduring metaphor for newly mythic life. And then, as life itself. Incantational frivolity, as men in tights looked around for the exit door. The door to the reckless age of mutual consent. Suddenly everyone’s equally grown up. Kids are sagely regarded and regard their elders sagely. Kids more wised up than the parents, in the same non-consequential vortex. Parents, fellow travelers, sentimental for an orthodoxy they were, luckily for them, never subjected to. They never had to take the consequences of their rhetoric. I look around, surveying the post frivolous generations, and those younger than me seem somehow the same age as me. Older even. Immeasurably older. I cannot see the young at heart any more. The young are prematurely old, but without the wisdom that age brings. Fertile ground, feckless to a high degree. They just don’t have the balls that we did. We died in vain for them. In the trenches of attritional camp warfare. We fought for the right to be frivolous. They merely are frivolous. (Wyse stifles a yawn, blinks, looks meaningfully at the screen…of course, I see what he means. I now espouse the essential inconsequentiality at the very heart of mythic life). I am a corporate dragon slayer for cheap thrills. No more, no less. My kids think I’m a groovy bastard. Which I am.
Eugene, I now live alone, because no one will put up with me. Except Dionysia. And the magic’s gone out of it now. When she was Frank’s it was kind of exciting but…what am I saying? Dionysia is everything to me. Everything. All frivolous avenues have been closed. My children, all 2 million of them, need the cheque, but not the company of the account holder. It’s been ages since that moment occurred. The moment when you realize you’ve already thought something, an intangible, the thing just beyond your mental field of vision, that need not be thought of again. The desperate near recall of what it was that showed you the answer. It’s gone. It ain’t coming back. My children, all two million of them, I pretend to relate to. They know me, but only as a shell of a figure in their peripheral vision. Doc Abrahams knew. He knew something I didn’t. I wear the mask both out of deference to him and as emblem of my reborn, re-mythologised status. (I’m hoping here that Eugene doesn’t look to closely, below the surface, below the elephant mask).
Anyway, back to the 70s. Again. That moment of recall. Party time for the young at heart. Never before had the mechanics of fun been so overtly demonstrated. Mirror hats and outré guitar shapes kept company with primary colour face paint; candy riffs and bubble stomp conspired to keep the nation’s pre-birthers in a spin. Dance floors that had been initially weakened in wartime became compromised to a dangerous degree during Slade concerts. Guitarists strummed in overt parody of the act of onanism, without for a moment doubting the unironic content of mechanical repetition. Wankers, guitarists, straightforward tautology. Real/hyper-real. Platform boots, foolish haircuts, eye shadow. We dressed up like dogs’ dinners, slapping on the rouge and grease paint. Meta-levels of artlessness were paradoxically attained. No need for spurious sexual context, or unambiguous commentary. Animated looning, postulating a metaphysics of braggadocio. They were all yesterday’s parties. My children and those still to come will never now dance like they danced. Of course it couldn’t last. The paper thin culture, translucent and brittle, illuminated by excess, couldn’t stand that much frivolity without going into a tailspin of over concerned, over actualized context, message, and social context. Contextualised to death by academics, meaning was imposed from without by the newly educated, the undergraduates of pop theory. Red bricks literally spewed out pop theses, while Oxbridge still supplied bespectacled junior moguls, and the glum suburban satellites of major cities acted as cultural midwives to a new breed of hipster journos, manqué class warriors, fat birds from Bristol, Cuban-healed tossers, bedroom onanists and writers of letters to the rock press. And also to the new rock stars themselves. No longer ex-postmen, these sweaty, pallid creatures were devotees of Oscar, would be Huysmanses, decadents in training, languid effete aesthetes, trainee geniuses in polo necks, be-quiffed and shimmering with self regard, speccy geniuses, somehow different from their peers. No girlfriends or boyfriends for the new pop aristocracy, taking pop music out of the disco and into the bedroom. Single beds, sweaty socks, dreams of pop stardom, at once dragging the meaning out of dreams…
They see I’m flagging. Billy, Nobby, Sapper, they look at their watches, yawn, stretch with comic exaggeration. They melt into the functional seating. I’m priapic, striding back and forth, like a tiger. They need to know this, these tie-dyed morons, that life eventually, without the mythmakers, becomes too heavy to escape from. Escape velocity becomes impossible. Them up there beyond the orbital, up in Bletchley, way way beyond the orbital, those mythical code breakers, encryption experts literally won the war. Single-handed. Or mob handed. Credit where it’s due. Now, the multifarious tribes of neo-hippies and bankers grow large on the proceeds of 55 years of peace in their time. Land usage was not the issue. Huge lapses in perspective were the issue. Raves were for wankers right?
10,000,000 words expended, Eugene is struggling to remain conscious, and they’re running into each other and away with the meaning. I haven’t prepared my presentation in anything like as professional a manner as has Dionysia. She’s the pro’s pro. An A-list personage. My dreamlover. Still no meaning…Abrahams back yet? Gone away, holidaying on the continent. 3 holidays a year. At least. In this fractured age, nothing will mean that much ever again. Holidays from meaning. He doesn’t trust me. I’m just a showcase. In my mask. The tank’s almost empty. We’re inter-political. I’ve had my fill of it. For now. I’ve become truly concerned that the young at heart will never ever have to face their own mortality. They’ll all live forever in cyberspace. But anyway, this is linear time. I’m talking about the other sort. Time’s out for the young. There are no more boundaries, no border controls. Across the universe there are currents to be ridden, fantasies I wish to indulge, parties at which I intend to get drunk. The young at heart know they’ve got it made. They’re in love with the future, because the future is theirs. They live for the future, the green light. Nothing’s a problem for future generations because they have it all on tape. Ambitions are taken as read; the world is my oyster, my personal biosphere, my zone of control. I’ve taken out cultural leases in all major control centres; faked birth certificates, passports. The capitals of the world are under one metaphorical roof. It’s now, with Eugene’s help and with God’s blessing, my city. MY London. I take it, all of it. The energy fields, silted up with unused electricity, are key. If I haven’t yet made my meaning clear to the unseen energy vampires who we’ve been assured are behind and beyond the projector wall (which is still playing tunes and spontaneously re-mixing Dionysia’s epochal words concerning London’s problems) I take electricity away from the earth, where it can do harm. London is dead. And all points east and west. Deader than dead. All cities need re-invention. Re-mythologising. A latter-day reverse Columbus, re-tracing his steps through history, must sail down the Fleet in a tea chest…re-discover the source. A new John (or Simon) Dee must scry alternative futures. I’m opening the gates. The electricity is being channeled at last. We only have one chance at this. The inhabitants must of course all die, figuratively, to be re-born. Die or leave in giant arks. Sail away down the Thames, out into the channel and away. Or on planes bound for Eldorado. Air stewardesses will have their work cut out, what with air rage all the rage, for the Exodus must be mythical and epic. Great tribal movements, populations on the move on devotional repetitive forced marches, in train around the ex-bus lanes.
Now, with Eugene P’s (forged) endorsement and character reference in the bag, I have to re-discover the unexceptional in time. My mission, to re-energise. I must discover the good if not the exceptional in me. My forebears were not aware of it, they never are. Parents know jack shit. That’s the point of them. Not to know things, to be unaware. I’ve gone around the world, racking up the air miles. I have interests all over, businesses to attend to. On brogued feet, quietly dressed, thin pencil moustache and slicked down hair, I enter the departure lounge, checked in and boozed up. I see my own sort as eminently avoidable. I don’t wish to be involved in any sort of competition. I have my own TV crew with me, recording every telling detail of my progress. My thoughts and ruminations exhaled in considered and urbane tones, barely whispered, are minutely calibrated in the passengers’ minds as unscripted observations, and of course grist to the microphone’s mill. These utterances, which become by degrees more portentous and exclamatory, though at the same time deeply human and affecting, are the key to my ability to bring the plane down in mid-flight. Confidences are gained and then broken. Trust is misplaced. Close-ups aren’t required to expose the real me. I’m naked. In flight I’m stripped bare, a numinous presence, ready to be reborn. I slough off the old skin over Asia. Crashing to earth, drunk as a bastard, I must achieve humility and an acceptance of the mistakes I’ve made. I must become my own therapist in double quick time. Like hell. Left to my own devices, checking my portfolios, my investments, I see that I have never made a mistake in all my life. I am beyond error. I am electricity proof. I am a household god, God of Inconsequential Fecklessness and I fuck my own brother’s missus. My dead brother’s missus. How bad is that! Time for a word from Frank probably….
