:: bizarre :: The dark nights are upon us. But I am persistantly interrupted in my work by the elusive Dr Landolph, occasional resident of the apartment below. The man insists on banging at my door in the middle of a particularly phat bassline. "Christ on a cannonball, what is it now Landolph?" I fling the blighter aside, "Come to bemoan another forty eight hour shift no doubt. You will choose these dead end careers."

Landolph will be rubbing his bleary junior medic eyes and what seems to rise and fall from his lips is less like any known form of coherent protestation, more an extended gasp of pain. And it continues - as he returns, with an unslightly slump, to his own floor La-Bas.

"You'll find no sympathy here Landolph!" I cry after him. "Dissident popslingers are the real heroes." Alas, our ever-merry banter disguises my own equally real fear that a delirius Landolph, numbed as a common drunk, could tomorrow deliver a spinal where an intravenous was needed, instantaneously rendering some twitching unfortunate a costly zombie.

Further scorn from Mona at the Workers, where I slip out to for cheap sustenance - "Alright Urban Legend." Alas, not any reference to a reputation as a moral gadfly I may have garnered about the neighbourhood but it seems that my winter parka, a contemporary techno take on the classic, has me resemble the murderous protagoniste of her favourite 'slasher movie'. "My slashing days are over, Mona. Tea!"

I sit but am accosted by a gurning vagrant. With an inverted, somehow deceased, look he implores for me to buy his - what sound like - 'buthzniks' ("Biscuits? Business? Speak the Queen's English dog or begone!") I beat him back with my cane and lyricise into a jotter before returning to mount the creaking boards and shock corridors of this pitiful establishment - feeling like the midpoint between Steppenwolf the relevatory book and the rock hoodlums.

But I am distracted and compelled to consult the Weboscope - called so for, it is said, the scope of all humanity may be traced within this curious modern apparatus. A bedlam of views, news, beauty, vanity and insanity. Even - it would seem - friends reunited ..

PHILIP LARKIN

flap! The bleached-in awning of a November sky, nothing till a rook flapped though it and settled back against the upper reaches of a leafless tree. It drew me there and we watched one another for some time. Boring birds. Which was Larkin, no? I ask myself. Boring birds, I think he mentioned. Simon, to my left, saying little, shook and used his inhaler. He held back the vapours before relaxing and emitting a clear plume of breath across the air. It was McCarron doing the talking, mostly to himself but occasionally bending half-sentences at my right ear. The three of us were on the bench. Contingency.

Saturday morning, for God's sake. We shouldn't be there really. But if our crumbling provincial Grammar pulled this off we'd be into the finals for the first time in living memory. So we were there. Contingency.

"What's wrong with these lads?" Multifarious clip clop of studs, an unknown games teacher doubling as referee strides past with Benson, our captain. Benson doesn't look at us and breaks off to warm up, "Asthma. Art. Catholic." Benson once told McCarron, after banging his face into some shower walls, that if he "didn't like it he could fuck off down south."

"The lads can throw their weight about so work out who's up first when we need you."

McCarron had stopped talking and was coughing - a terrible smokers cough for a seventeen year old. I peer away under a ludicrous haircut, yearning to be elsewhere, anywhere. I map the pitch, the horizontals of the posts, bisecting from the goal to the twenty two metre line and the embankments planted with absolute regularity. The gates, where the rugby bus waits. The gates emblazoned with an ornate and immutable Belfast Royal Academy ensignia. BRA ("..tee hee..") Royal. Academy.

The rest of the team clops past. Deep Heat, shin guards and gumshields. BRA follow and I note how the foreign faces of each opposition team always seems to follow a similar pattern. An obvious bully or two, a joker, pint-sinkers, wiry ones, slippery midgets and a head-twister, a fucknut. Future accountants, lawyers all, momentarily stripped of their specs and pumping up for kick-off..

.. which happens and within the first five minutes someone from our team is injured. I stand to replace them but Benson gestures for McCarron.

As the ref blind-eyes all manners of trip, over-tackle, stampage and splatterwerk I reach into McCarron's bag and fish out this month's Bizarre magazine. McCarron, it would seem, is increasingly attracted to huh huh weeerd stuff.

SADOMASOCHISM

RAAARRRRRRRRRRR. Andrew WK's friekin livid. Geezer's fuming. Tortured. "When I was five my parents had me take piano lessons. I got into Bon Jovi and Europe." Ironically Andrew seems to be someone who takes not giving a fuck way too seriously. Europe understood the pain of scales and chopsticks. They helped. Now get back on the cover of the Bluffer's Guide To Wild and shaddup. If he wasn't famous he'd be "throwing himself into the emptiness - the black hole of nothing that embodies every molecular drop of matter into a constantly expanding and collapsing explosion." Bloodletting up on the corporate cross is lightening his head. He's so 4 real, we can't compete. Alright already you ain't no fucking .. nostril snake.

Nostril snakes, lizards of the lake and beasts from the bowels of the earth. Here's one, a harrowing article on Dennis Neilson, a "killer driven mad by his own surname" which, prior to disposal, was Nappey. The preferred moniker was spotted on a passing ice-cream van. A breath of relief we're not wincing through the annals of the murderous work of the Strawberry Mivvi. What a way to go.

A handy shopping guide to fetish gear and hoods. Most on my own Holloway Road, and in Brighton. Baby Jesus Butt Plugs. Marvellous.

Art was the new rock'n'roll for a time and Matthew Collings has a forth book out, partly lamenting the end of Brit Art, which has "tailored itself so that the public could read it." True but at which point does this happen? When the queues were around the block at Apocalypse? Sensation? After the first good review? After the first show? Approaching galleries? Existing outside the artists mind at all?

Victorian studies of sexual perversion. Richard Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis.

When not making exhaustive studies of sexuality, it seems, Havelock Ellis happily bust every bulb going on the wackometer, opposing penetration and masturbation, except in the name of science - when he would perform the act across a microscope to examine the results. 'Worringly' close to his sister, when he wasn't forcing his lesbian wife to urinate in front of him - a trick his mother taught him - he was happiest corresponding with the transvestites and melon-fuckers who provided his source material.

Kraft-Ebbing was the first man to merge Sadism and Masochism into one complex, where it stayed, worming its way - via Freud - into pop psychology. J'accuse sadomasochism. Sex should work from the hips up, not the brain down, and the S/M scene is Dungeons And Dragons for geeks who believe a smatter of sex can smokescreen their geekery. If you want to explore power, headbutt drunks like normal people. Armwrestle or something. Away from the pageantry of the Torture Garden and sheen of Skin Two, and back in the politics of real lives and real bedrooms, the notion that sadists and masochists are a cosy little double act is an optimistic one. While a masochist might have the time of their lives in the hands of a sadist, no sadist wants to spend their time pleasuring a masochist. Defeats the object, dunnit? So one has to see a point at which true sadism seeks the non-consential act for it's jollies. Not a good thing. Despite being seen as the more evil of the two, sadism depends on another's reaction for it's satisfaction which is, at least, some kind of interaction. Masochism, however, being locked in and centred on the masochists own pain would surely be best served by not giving the masochist the pleasure of pain at all. Letting them really suffer. Hmm

(NOTHING)

.zzz.. feeling guilty. .. the court were shown examples of his lurid off-colour website.. The best ones are, your honour. Hammertime. Guilty. rap rap rap

Heavens! .. fallen asleep at the Weboscope. I stand before my amplification as it powers with an ancient whisper, the ghost of rock - a love I left upon the altar, and mistreated in that most cruel fashion, with neglect. Back now to claim thee, the battle has entered it's dark age, where the clay must be pounded, wrenched open, thrust into to produce an animate indestructible Golem. Unexpected truth requires a curious mix of high discipline and low abandon. So, for the third time, I drop on one knee like a crusader, a Templar. I cross myself - "For poetry, the existential and big sister God." I strike up a Fender Precision. "Now I give thee life! LIFE!! Scream Landolph SCREAM! .. a riff of sparks scatters across the floor .. SCREEEEAM Landolph

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