Hear Ye! I have seen the end of all things. Where they go - Ikea tat, tables laden with half-baked plans, and white goods once alive with the fruit of supermarket aisles, chow mein remainders, Cherry Garcia, houmous pots from Londis. They go to the LBI North London City Dump. "Don't drive Transits for a living, do you mate?" Upon completion of a fifteen-point-turn back to my original orientation, I unload the Bunker's knackered cooker, makeshift shelves, bedspace flotsam, garden junk - as was my original, socially conscious, contract.
Hear Ye! Then shalt come stadia-sized dozers to knock the lined-up mass of miscellaneous domestic waste up a Devil's ass-of-a-thing into skips as big as buildings. Short-let London stuff; what litany of smalltown smart alecs faced-out academic paperbacks on those bedsit shelves, studied upstairs movements on those studio futons or went nuts with other sharers over access to that bath? The City Dump - it smells like all the corpses ever happened still crash about in one enormous warm summer evening warehouse, supervised by a single crossword-pondering Seven Sisters lassie and a portacabin glance that asks "Are you sure you want to go in there?" And later, beaming as you leave - "I told you so."
"Hey kids, got any more spacey, cheap North London pits fit not for man nor beast that crawleth under boulder?" "Gold dust, DP," quoth the Housing Co-op, "Shogun Realty have pur-chased them all for renovation and Love Hotel-rent-rate-regeneration." As I turn to leave (spying squire Bobby Gillespie cycling in circles on his Primrose Hill boneshaker)..WAIT! There is one place.. we gotta warn you .. it is bad." "I'll take it!" I reach for papers to sign.
Boarded up, Berlin-era Birthday Party squat. Interesting. Five minutes in the place with Chris Downstairs. Chris Downstairs. Nobody should be judged by their appearance. And - to be fair - Chris Downstairs looked like a recovering smack enthusiast with fading homebrew hand tats (Mum, crosses, Black Flag) who commented on how potentially easy it would be to prize off the wood around the window, lift the latch and rip off or rape the occupant for a tied-up, screaming week. Nothing but break-ins here, mate. I'd be careful. It wasn't Chris but high risk (collapsing) -low life in general, which bought DPS equipment, has done gone lost it's appeal.
For a couple of weeks only, I'm keyholder (Assa 6EA High Security, copyable only by manufacturer with several signatories) to a des-res pad on Dartmouth Park Hill: dead-posh peninsula off 'Spaced' country. Living out of boxes, I circle things in Loot and scribble lyrics in the Lord Palmerston pub jemmied between Rufus Sewell and tousle-haired Jeff Buckley-types who chortle nothing much through mouthfuls of Toulouse Sausage. Page down Nokia-loads of txt and pass developments to Channel-Four-approaching Racks Of Lamb girlfriends (slashed capsleeve, peacock mullet.) Jez is off to Thailand for Wallpaper. There's a lot of talking up going on. Not far, just outside, bulldog-sporting car-scraper City Hobgoblins gather silently to reconnoitre through the fencing on Peabody Estates. Perhaps they think I'm one of these loping media lairds. Come ahead friends. Tufnell Park's a coop. And what are these chickens chasing when the door is eternally open? Security.
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Hugh M. Hefner is having a party. Celebrities, centrefolds and their kids. Brande digs the PMOY 2001 plates on her Porsche. A kiss from Gene Simmons and Nikki Sixx. Star Wars Mark Hamill looks on.
Playboy is American. Goddamit, Playboy is America. Freedom. Enough to go round and buck-toothed coop Europe is nothing more than a crazy medieval memory. Where just cos I have a Big slice of Key Lime don't explain why yours is teenie weenie. This pie is elastic, man. Inflatable. Undulating. Expanding. Monster slices all round. Big slices of house. Big slices of Porsche. Big slices of tits and ass. Occasionally Big writers take on Big issues. The President. Policy. Playboy is part of the postwar desire to burst out swinging - singing "America stoopid? We're just happy. If you Brits could only tell the difference."
Selling the Big Issue. Miss September's legs are parted - 'come here' - like open arms, but on a more, y'know, profound level using a, um, universal tongue. Cornflower tracing upwards on her inner thigh. Delicate, ripe. Seems she met Hef at a Playboy party in February. Moved into the mansion in May. One thing I've noticed about periods of sense-heightening unSecurity - like travel, they ain't half hornifying. I run around the Lord Palmerston like a man with a ripped off thong in his teeth. I can't think about anything else. People can tell. Not long ago, day-2-day domestic life - DPS work aside - was trundling along steady enough; Jarmuschesque but sexless as fuck. Perhaps this is why those in the most hopeless arse-end parts of the globe bang out child after child while the Security-assured West's population declines, why glamour is always elsewhere, feeling plugged-in a fiction and middling American Beauty a resonant film for our times. Security. Take it away and the strongest survival instincts bubble up like Rovers.
Jerri, she-devil star of Survivor: Australian Outback gets her yayas out. "I'm very earthy. I posed for Playboy to show my strength as a woman." Er..shake it baby. (Note: Get A. Dworkin parting the pink next ish - Ed) I honestly think it's best for men to butt right out of feminism, let gals get on with it. A political agenda's dead handy to have, if only to throw on for dignity when required. Should really get myself a trumped-up mission statement trumph card. DPS - unwashed mouthpiece of the unmortgaged, serves up tough love to the capital's doughnuts, washed back with a vintage draught of HTML GBH of the optical sockets.
Girls Of The Sopranos. Badda Bing. Does London need a New Jersey? Maybe not. How about, right, a rocking new Milton Keynes meets the Factory satellite of beatnik arts capital of the world-type-place. But affordable, 'kay, and with maddo rule-book-ripping nu meeeja warriors on every freshly-designed street corner rapping Black Panther Poetry Will Be Made By All-style. Love-offs left right and centre. Freeform beats and boffins banging about in Mondo 2000 retro-futurist avatar masks. Everyone do-lally on cool new drugs. In hyperspace. Class and prejudice and poverty and stuff strictly interdit. Let's go! We can build it.
Her blowjobs are teethy and rough. Please realise, my wife is an iceberg. "Talk dirty" is the Playboy shrink's inter-sheets prescription. Talk dirty. There's a certain Ulster accent forever doomed to make "My - it's a wondrous summer eve! And the August starscape would sparkle with additional brilliance should a lady as fine as yourself do me the honour of a promenade" reach the unaccustomed ear as "Moist-making sluts like you get swung to the floor by their stuck-up bra straps and rode till everyone's in tears." A burden to bear but hardly crippling. Possibly in an interview scenario.
Who To Do Before You're 30 (cont'd from page 54.) Tell me - I need to know before I roll up this issue and slip off <home> .. the "threesome", the "dancer", the "lesbian".. zzzzz. "The Bad Seed" huh? "Short, dyed hair. Tattoos. Bad attitude. The lowest lows - and the type of unbelievable highs that can cut though your roommate's headphones." Guess this must be US 'humor.' Have I 'done' any "Bad Seeds"? Eeeaagghhshh. Pictures of Blixa Bargeld in an over-the-shoulder Honcho pose. Enough already of frightmare-inspiring 'humorists' with unlikely names like Abbie Knopf-Bloomberg, Aaron-Jo Siragusa Jnr, Barbette Helgenberger and Marv Sedjfv*befgv^sav#f}hdwijc.
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Hear Ye! Kindly US stoners who make up this site's hits and probably haven't read this far anyway - considering London? Think twice if you're going to be a part of the fifteen to thirty thousand p.a. 'lifeblood'. You'll still have to hold down eight other positions, not including your nite job as Snooze Bootie for perspex-faced freaks with a fetish for slumbering nu wave rump. Forget buying. The good news is that ninety seven percent of your wages will enable you to live with your elbows bent about your head in a coop two foot by three with a wailing police siren in one ear and your neighbours Howie B in the other. With five other people. Should your Tamazepan wear off, you will pray screaming for an arm to come through the window and stab you into shitty oblivion. Hey, NYC in a pimp-strewn 16 mm Seventies. Easy, bro.
Is lifeblood about to squirt out all the wrong orifices of the Great Bear? Asking what you're even doing here, normally reserved for faders and hacks, is suddenly the new black. Four-in-a-bunk booksellers and ten-in-a-breadbin mocha-frothers feel the shock of the stretch to buy. Squeezed-hard rentboyz and girlz blame themselves for not stretching sooner for a hemmed-in hole on a smack farm. Few can actually afford to do anything in this hi-Security Honcho pose but freeze, buster and grit their teeth while freeholders, agents, landlords and the bank make them oink on the end of last-farthing-fishing piggy-bank-sucking vacuum pumps. Fear not, lifeblood kidz, rootlessness has it's pull-together plus-sides if your wits are keenly sharpened. It's the Seventies - would you rather be a bunch of long-haired fanzine-pressing anarcho-squat art mavericks or Margo and Jerry (see 'UK Gold') watching your micro-existenz fall apart like a failed Fanny Craddock lobster thermidor? Aged 26 and already scripting out the end credits to your own private windfall spunk. Take The Money And Run. The Hell Outta This Place - unbuckle Britain-eclipsing tums and hips at the pearly gates of Sid's Carlsberg Palace, Eldorado, Espagna. See? (Pardonnez moi - Phillipe's Spat-On Foie Gras And Backsurging Turkish Toilet Shack, Provence. Voila.)
"This turkey's about to burst!" "Oh no it isn't!" How many times need it be said that no-one can afford to be rebellious any more? But desire, need, for security is threatening to make the Zeroes the dullest stretch since, um, dunno. A generation whose ambition is a mortgage. Fucking Jesus, what have we done. There are other races to be run. Needless to say, it's high time Red Ken rouged up a touch and a self-build (raaarrrrgghh) or part-buy social housing plan got into gear. For me, oh yes, but for you and you and you and, hear ye this, some sort of unembittered future here ..sniff.. together .. blink blink ..