:: l'homme who bent westminster ::13th March 2002. "Dearest Auntie. The rain. It poureth. And I am angered to read that the only people who are worried you might be going senile are 'white, middle-class southerners'. So slammeth top telly taste-czar Gavyn Davies in the papers dunnit. Everyone can spot the shod. Everyone is perfectly aware when something is being tickle-stick over Oscar Wilde with a laser-knife and some folks even enjoy a bit of the other. Run away from those focus-group head-benders Auntie, run!, and strive for old-fashioned quality and innovation. You sat me on your knee, educated and entertained me. When we rubbed brows, you with your dead clever one and me with ickle bickle dribbly oik mouth, the sparks were pure Swiftian magic. The monobrow, monolith demograph man is coming Auntie. Hide! Don't let him in! Love always. DPS"


:: new free sex chocolate ::04 March 2002. Today I was walking round Nan Goldin: Devil's Playground at the Whitechapel Art Gallery thinking - I'm not sure if I particularly enjoy Nan Goldin photographs but it feels like good art. Why? Her waterscapes were mesmerising but there is something about the very transcient images of sex with all it's bruises and bad makeup and stitches and sore parts that I didn't warm to. It's important to see alternative views of the sex act that don't hail from an idealist pornographer's eye but by leaving out all the romance that the couple feel is taking place Goldin had me confused as to what she actually held dear in her own chosen subject matter. Even the desire going on while two people screw seemed missing. She took all the politics and background away from sex and left it looking like an act only fit for second-rate hedonists. Which got me wondering if the photographs were about sex at all - the subjects all seemed to have chosen sex as their favourite way to commune with one another, but we wonder if they've made the right choice. Just as I started asking myself too many questions about Goldin herself, and started wondering if our old friend the juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane was a radical enough statement these days, I started thinking about the other visitors to the gallery and the people on Brick Lane. I somehow saw them in a slightly clearer light. Whether that was Goldin's beautifully scaled but abherrant funk-anthropologist methods or my own response to them I wasn't sure.

:: balistique ::24 February 2002. How to become a virgin. Move to America or take regular lessons in naivety -

"You know why you're all here?" the lecturer questioned the class. We looked at one another. "No." "Splendid!" He moved to leave. "Class dismissed. Oh - by the by - give me a thousand words next Monday. On.. My Lovely Cock." We stared at one another again. "Jim Goad's collection of pro-Bush haikus?" he sighed. "Oh!"

A tad confused, I made my way through the rain-soaked streets to the Apollo Theatre where journalistic powerhouse and professional antagoniste Christopher Hitchens was holding court. My intention - to bring up My Lovely Cock during the Q&A. I felt sure that Whitehouse-scanner Chip would be happy to explain, after pinballing 24 carat snippets from the pages of Emile Zola and Karl Marx through a gob-stopped audience. Imagine my disgust when the open floor climax was immediately hijacked by an almost incomprehensible Beatlemania of verbal funk, the normally erudite rabble seemingly determined on this occasion to yelp utter balls for a laugh. "How can you live in a country which condones THIS?" - an irate counter-contrarian behind me shook what looked to be a thirty page thesis in the air. Sharp as the Hitch might be, no amount of squinting to the seventeenth row could produce a winning answer from the stage.

In the lobby afterwards, I tried to join a mosh-pit of contrarians smoking under the No Smoking sign, swarmed about the celebrity pensman. "Are you aware of My Lovely Cock?" I grunted over someone's shoulder, louder every time. Desperate not to repeat the scene where Eminem (whose instincts toward women seem positively Betty Freidan-ian under the shadow of the sinister Goad) snubs Stan and Matthew for a hastily planted heiroglyph, I elbowed forward - only to watch the Hitch being bourne away by a whoop of grumpy monkeys. I made my final, desperate plunge. "Name?" he asked, pausing to dedicate a book. "Mr Hitchens. Hell. Chip. Are you aware.." But he had gone.

On the tube home I suckled aural comfort from bad babysitter Princess Superstar. Her sleevenotes to 'CEO' inspired one of the first shots I fired at the Transparent Zone, having dug the cut of Concetta's jib since her walking-Manhattan-naked-painted-gold phase stood out in the much-missed mag 'Ben Is Dead' - an organ which almost levitated off the shelves with creativity, thanks to the female touch of ed Darby. Compare and contrast Jim Goad's distasteful 'underground' 'output'.

"Dear God," I began in my notebook, "A mass walking of London naked might answer two problems. First up - voguish Nokia-jacking. Secondly - the insane and dangerous Public Private Partnership of the Underground. In my darkest hours I doubt the true independence of the Ernst and Young report. Give me clarity, God. Give me some vision - to big up Ken Livingstone's war against all things nuts - and give me the sheer style to destroy Satan-people like Jim Goad who can't treat women and men as all equally just the same. And help me fight policemen, who are all secretly anarchists."

And God said ..Balistique.


:: soulmate ferox ::9th February 2002. A break from fiction. I've been listening back to the third selection of DPS songs - Battle Royale - writing up sleevenotes and a running order, seeing to a sleeve proper. I'm pleased with it. It's taken longer than the first two through a mixture of technical hitches, personal goings-on and, well, a reluctance to come to a conclusion, song-wise. Whether they are freshly written or culled from some phantom back catalogue - every one of these songs is dear to my heart and deserved an airing. The engineering is homespun because, well, it is - but load for free or purchase as triptych in all it's glory. Bass players and remix-a-lots welcome, I fancy some live stage slaughter. A word about the contentious content of one or two of these songs - why have we grown to actively enjoy grittier films and books but never pop? Pop is usually seen as a celebration of it's subject matter, blues a lament. The twain might meet, and I try to ensure that even songs with darker themes stand on their own two allegorical feet.


:: malkmus et le cerelab ::25th January 2002. Been looking at the PSNI website. It's innocuous, blatantly so - all Bike Safe and Bobby Friendly. There's no reference to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, no Confidential Telephone numbers or suspicious package advice. It's almost as if a quango is going over every syllable to make sure the past thirty three years plus are officially History. Knowing Northern Ireland, I doubt that anyone will allow much to slip away but maybe they should. As every Japanese schoolchild will tell you, Japan has always been sinned against and never once considered even expleting aloud without prolonged, foreign provocation. Rewriting history is one the many things they seem to have made into an artform; the good lie being better than a less-than-honourable truth, and the eternal here-and-now an instrument to their proud success. If rebranding doesn't work in NI, why not try secular schools? I'm sure that education boss Martin McGuiness realises it's a way forward but the proposition has traditionally been more feared by the Catholic community, his voters, than the Protestant. One problem I have with Zen and meditation is the clearing of the mind, and that intellectual ponderings or discourse might not be the key to but actually stand in the way of happiness - but a problem I've never had with whiskey. Kim Beattie, enlighten me.