23rd
October 2001. Early Sunday
morning I received a call from a friend gripped by the worst pain she'd
ever felt; waves that shot from her stomach to her throat and caused her
to vomit any food, liquids and Nurofen she tried to ingest. By the time
I got there she had thrown up a quarter of a bucket of bile and was now
retching air. Her condition was serious and she was colourless and distraught
and crying. We raced round to a GP who gave her several variations of
anti-nausea injections in the thigh. All of these failed to take away
the pain which had, by now, heightened. My friend started screaming at
the doctor to give her something to knock her out completely and, when
this was not possible, she asked me to punch her unconscious. She believed
she was going to die.
What I found curious was what the doctor said at the height of my friend's hysteria. "You're Jewish aren't you?" she smiled, injecting more Lomotil, "Try to relax and think about God." I wasn't sure if this assumption was a result of our proximity to Golders Green at the time or my friend's aquiline features or both. As she was busy throwing up, I explained that she had no faith as such. The doctor was genuinely shocked. "Think about the people you love then," she continued. "God is just the people you love."
As we swayed through the leafy back lanes of Hampstead in a blue-lit and sirened ambulance bound for the Royal Free A and E I stroked my friends head and thought about blood. For example, if someone doesn't know who their biological parents are, will they ever be satisfactorily Jewish, confirmedly gentile? Diagnosis: profound gastro e which stabilised under Maxolon and saline rehydration. Not anthrax then.
16th
October 2001. The taste
of trivia. Here's a potato chip from Sweden called "Blair's Death Rain".
Decidedly piquant with an unnatural, dare I say it, chemical aftertaste
- it's a wildcard cousin sniggering around at the back of the uniquely Continental
European 'paprika' school. And named after a never-forgotten hot sauce,
I believe.
Apocalyptically-entitled bar snacks are a fine idea. There's a gap in the market for "Gaza Strip Bacon Bits", "We're All Fucked" nuts - even a maincourse "Four Horsemen" ploughmans. I've been working on an open sandwich which I think I'll call "Not A Single Star Will Be Left In The Night, Nor Will The Night Be Left, We Shall Die And With Us The Weight Of An Intolerable Universe" - halloumi, sunblush tomatoes, olives. Grilled. What d'ya think? Borges dontcha know..
New
readers arrive at the DPS website in fits and starts, but recently I've
been referred a stack from sources unknown. Kindly explain yourselves
- then keep consumer confidence alive and spirits vigorous by investing
in MP3 gold.
Act Three in the wings while I thrift for a new 'puter.
Still squiffy after Stereo Total
at Trash with fantastic pal Angela Penhaligon (far right), who sings on
a new DPS song. A fundamentalist Pentecostal Charismatic from Kansas,
forbidden to hear secular music until her late teens. Amazing voice. And
yes, Trash was littered with Dazed and Confused anorexia, preening and
mulletted - but brimful of decent music from yer new US clangy blues stuff
to odd Kylie remixes and classics from people like Dub Narcotic and original
bluesy clangers Jonathan Fire~Eater. Goodo.
Monks
and Fagin exit Mega City One. What
analysis can this website add to our experience of a devastated New York?
I'm so tempted to avoid the subject but to chit chat, distract or entertain
feels unreasonable. I want to sympathise to something more than a television
set. Been singing on the rooftops of N19, our own Canary Wharf blinking
away in the distance. A
few days after it happened I had a sense that the wide shifts in perspective
had softened our workaday anxieties into something communal and modest and
people just wanted to drink and dance and go for a game of badminton or
something. Blessings counted for as long as possible.
"I'm
an Israeli," says a girl in NYC on the tv. "Now America knows
the kind of people we've had to deal with."
The kind of people. In a crisis situation, the kind of person you are tends to come to the fore and we are all veterans of crisis situations. Most of them have been witnessed and felt vicariously but, still, we're contemplating mass horror a darn sight more often and up-close than most of our ancestors ever had to.
4th September 2001 Dear Diary. Decided to throw a house-warming party. For the first hour or so, I thought it was heading towards a total wash-out. Just myself and Chris Smith ex Culture Secretary, who couldn't touch anything pokier than a raisin and nutmeg Mullerice and kept talking about his wife's spine problems. Sheesh.
"Successful art is tedious on the internet," I tried to wake him up. "A new way of seeing is required." "The implications are perfectly crass," he choked, "Anyway, I hear you're putting a band together."
"The New Asylum Seekers," I mused. "A socially responsible collective. An Armenian, two Georgians and an Australian - from the rough part, apparently. Put the blighters to use is what I say. Russian mafia rustling up some mint. First video - get the chaps cruising up and down the Thames Valley casting tenners and supping Taittanger from the slip-ons of some well bred bootie festooned in diamond-encrusted Kruggerrands."
Thank you the doorbell went and who should file in but Chelsea Clinton, Simian, Anna Raeburn (smashing), Fritz Lang, Moldy Peaches, some Taoist children casting petals before Sir Peter and Jamie Palumbo, Erin O'Connor, Max Hardcore, K9, Daniel O'Donnell with Nancy Spungen, Crispin Glover (twice), Lady Victoria Hervey, Judge Death, Hear'Say, Karen Kilimnik, Antonin Artaud stroking a lizard in a diamond choker, King Of Woolworths with Thora Birch, Maxon Crumb and a Japanese ska duo called Dollar (weird) who performed Anti-Folk versions of US garage tunes. Anna guessed all of Max's (own) movie titles at charades, and Daniel pursuaded Chris to push out the boat (or yacht, as K9 chirped) to try one of Nancy's homespun blinis.