unpopular

With Love and Squalor

I first met Chris when we were fourteen. Even when I look back on it now, it seems so strange that we ever became friends. Maybe that strangeness was the reason itself.

She had come cycling down our lane on an old boneshaker one early August afternoon. School had finished a week before and I had nothing to do and nowhere to go so as usual was just sitting in the front garden watching the world slip away from me. The sun was at its peak, and although the shadows from the trees in the orchard were short, I knew that they were already lengthening. I hated that midsummer was in the middle of the school term, that by the time we had our freedom everything was already creeping steadily towards the fall. Apples ripened on the branches, slowly blushing whilst the plums dropped and decayed into the grass. Endings always seemed much closer than beginnings then.

No one ever came past our house. There was nowhere to go, after all. The lane just petered out a hundred yards past the red tin barn and although you could jump over the fence and walk across two fields to the river, no one ever did.

That afternoon she was wearing a pair of faded cut off jeans and a loose red t-shirt, stained with what looked like white paint around the bottom. Her shoes were beaten up blue Converse.

“What’s at the end of the lane?” she demanded, nodding past the trees and the hedgerows. No introductions, just a demand. I eventually got used to that from Chris, but that first time I just thought she was a rude tourist, lost in the lanes. I just looked dumb and shrugged my bony shoulders. “Nothing much” I finally replied. “Just a couple of fields and then the river.”
“Can you swim in it?”
“I guess so. Maybe. I never tried. All the kids go up to the next village. There’s a weir downstream there and they jump off the bridge into where it’s deepest. If you want to swim you should go there.” I’d seen them there every year I could remember, so I knew it was true. I had never done it myself though because I always hated taking off my shirt and I looked so stupid in swimming trunks.
“I saw that earlier. I rode over the bridge.” She yawned and looked at the sky stretching cloudless and pristine above us. “They were all shrieking and ducking each other.”
I wondered what she was going to say next and already wanted her to say what I’d always thought.
“I hate all that stuff. It’s so immature.”
I smiled inside and laughed aloud. “Yeah. Stupid kids stuff.”
Her smile was broad and shone through her eyes which I later knew to be a deep brown like the Devon soil when the fields are freshly ploughed and mark the end of winter. “But we should go swimming in the river at the end of your lane. It will be ours and ours alone.”
We didn’t even know each other’s names then and already she was claiming rivers for us. But that was Chris. Always wanting to try something new and understand everything about where she was and what she found around herself. Full of mysteries too, but I didn’t discover that until much later.

So it was Chris who made me see my world for what it was, or for what it could be. Then again, perhaps she would say the same about me.

The next day she cycled up to the gate like it was her who had always lived there and not me. She propped her bike against the hedgerow and flopped down on the grass. Her hair glistened like a fresh morning and a hairslide with a tiny pink piglet for decoration held it off her face.

“What you reading?” she asked, pointing at the book I had just abandoned on the grass. I picked up a battered copy of ‘Franny and Zoey’ and waved it pointlessly in the air.
“Oh cool” she said and grabbed it from my hand. “I love Salinger. I read this when I was eleven. Of course you know he was stationed near here, don’t you?”
I just looked dumb. I have always been good at that. It’s like how I always look pissed off. Everyone always tells me to cheer up, that it might never happen. Like they’d know. Because it always does, or it already has. Later Chris told me that people said it to her all the time too. She thought it was just a teenage thing, and I used to think the same. Sometimes I look back and wonder if it would still have happened to Chris if she made it past sixteen, but it’s a moot point so I never dwell on it, like she didn’t dwell on my blankness that afternoon. Instead she just went right on with her monologue.
“My god, how can you not know that? That story, ‘For Esmé with Love and Squalor’, it’s set in a Devon town. Well, that’s Tiverton. Daddy says so, anyway. He says that Salinger was probably stationed in the old manor house out there before D-Day, when he was in the Intelligence Service. Is it true it rains hardest in the centre of town? When it rains again I want to go and find out.” We looked at the sky doubtfully.
“No-one in their right mind wants to go to Tiverton. You’d get kidnapped and sold into the white slave trade if you went there alone.” I was only partly joking. “And anyway, how would your Dad know about that story? I thought you just moved here from Kent?”
Chris just shrugged. “Oh, he teaches American Literature at the University. Well, he will in October when the term starts. He’s writing some book about Hemingway at the moment. We only just moved and he’s already off to Key West for more research. He says it’s quieter there in the middle of summer because it’s too hot for the tourists.”
“Yeah, I imagine” I said, although of course I couldn’t.
“Have you read Hemingway? You really should. You’d love him.”
I didn’t know how she could tell that then, but in the end she was right about that like she was right about everything. “We did ‘The Old Man And The Sea’ in school last year” I offered.
“Hmmm, okay. But ‘The Sun Also Rises’ is best. We went to Pamplona last year for the bulls running. I’m vegetarian so I thought it was all really horrible what they were doing to those poor animals, but the book is just divine. You can forgive a lot when Art is divine, don’t you think?”
I just looked around helplessly and nodded. No-one said 'divine' except the posh second home idiots from London, and we really didn’t get much talk about Art or Spain in Stoke Canon. Unless it was Mrs Jones’ watercolour classes at the church hall, or the lads in the pub talking about their holidays to the Costa Brava. I’d heard them, Sunday lunchtimes when Dad took us out for roast as a special treat. They stood by the bar for hours, smoking cigarettes and drinking endless pints of beer. They would guffaw and roar like belching lions.

Chris talked so fast and was full of so many things I had never heard of. Neither of us knew it then of course, but in the two years we would have together we would teach each other so much.

Believe it if you need it, or leave it if you dare

I watched two of my favourite music soundtracked scenes on TV and film the last two nights. Tonight it was The Royal Tenenbaums, and the scene with Nico’s ‘These Days’. It’s the ache of longing in the scene that I love so much. The pause, and then the drawn out slow motion shot of Margot coming off the Green Line bus and approaching Richie is heartbreaking, and the Nico song never sounded so perfect.

And then last night it was the last episode in Freaks and Geeks, and the scene where Lindsay listens to The Grateful Dead’s ‘Box Of Rain’ in her bedroom. I swear to god, every time I watch that scene I want to cry my eyes out. It’s so damn perfect. For me, it captures the purity of the Pop experience: the personal discovery of a sound that can take you to places you almost did not dare to hope existed. It’s all about the sheer euphoria of discovery, of finding something that speaks to you and to you alone, yet simultaneously binds you to something bigger. A sound that says ‘you are not alone’. Oh, and the closing scene of the show, to the sound of ‘Ripple’ is very nearly as fine.

Somehow too it is the fact it’s The Grateful Dead that makes it even more perfect. For someone like me that was a revelation. Before that point I had not fully realised that American Beauty was indeed such a great album. Sure, it is flawed, but I swear, there has seldom been such a memorable opening to an album as ‘Box Of Rain’. I remember, I had not heard it for some time and it came on my iPod one morning a few months ago as I walked through the new Princesshay Development in Exeter. It sounded magnificent, and I felt a smile creep over my lips for the first time in what felt like forever. And I never thought I’d say this in the context of The Grateful Dead, but that’s the magic of Pop. And I believe in it.

Roseanna

Chris came for a chat earlier today. I love it when she appears, even though I still cannot get my head around the fact that I am nineteen again and talking to a ghost. Somewhere inside, however, I know that it does not matter. Somewhere inside I know that nothing matters, for I too am not who I should be and nothing I know is real except for the memories of a recent past I cannot clearly recall, and a future that is already fading.

I was flicking through my old bookshelves, surprising myself at the titles I had forgotten I had read. In amongst the spines, a well-thumbed copy of ‘Roseanna’ sat next to a battered ‘Godard on Godard’; both, as I remember, picked up for pennies at a library sale. I pulled out ‘Roseanna’, and suddenly there she was, sitting on the stool behind my desk just like it was twenty years ago. Or three years ago, whichever you prefer. People have these notions about ghosts, that they are grey and wraithlike. Chris is not like that. She’s bright and solid, like a new bike. I told her I stole that line from a song I might never get to hear again except in my mind and she said it sounded beautiful and that I should never worry about stealing, for everyone does it all the time. The secret, as she always used to say, is to make the thefts seem natural and to believe that what you steal is truly your own. I kept trying all my life, but it is so much harder than you might think. It’s the same difficulty of being an artist, and I could tell you all about that one day for sure.

Every time Chris appears again I look at her with new opened eyes. I suppose this is only natural, for I have not seen her in anything but a few ever fading photographs for twenty years. So now I want to tell her that she looks more radiantly beautiful than ever, but I am sure that to do so would feel like a betrayal; both to the memory of her reality and to my heart’s heavy love for Karin. But Karin will not even exist for another year, and Chris has been dead for three.

And what am I?

Chris never tells me straight. I asked her last week, and she just shrugged and said, “how do you feel?” I said I didn’t know, but that surely she had seen all the twenty years stretching out ahead of us just as I had lived through it, and she just smiled and asked if I had not seen ‘Back To The Future’? I told her it hadn’t even been made yet, and she said “exactly.”

The thing is, we don’t ever know the whole story. All stories change; they mutate and reconfigure themselves depending on the contexts they find themselves placed within. Take ‘Roseanna’. Chris and I talked yesterday about how we first discovered those Martin Beck stories. We were both fourteen and desperate for something different. Being fourteen is like that for some people. I think it is the age when you make important decisions about who you want to be. It had always seemed to us then that most people just wanted to be anonymous, or at least to be uniform within the structures they found themselves. We didn’t talk about it in those terms then of course. We just called everyone else The Fucking Sheep and revelled in our oddity. And oh, yes, people thought we were odd.

I said to Chris “do you remember that morning in school? You wore your black skirt and sweater, those little ballet pumps and your hair tied back. You looked like Anna Karina.”
“And you wore your father’s suit and that black homburg you found in the charity shop. You looked like Sami Frey.”
“I wished…”
“Oh, but you did! We thought we were the Bande à part” she smiled back, and then as the smile faded added “it was the week before I died.”
I had to blink back the tears then and wondered what it must be like to be eternally sixteen.

Chris broke the silence, “and then there were the Martin Beck stories. You found ‘Roseanna’ in the penny pile of the library sale and left it on my doorstep.”
“You’d been reading Chandler and we’d been watching those old Noir movies on Saturday nights in your parent’s bedroom when we were meant to be babysitting your little sister. I thought you’d appreciate it more than me.”
“Milk and alcohol. Always a good bet for getting the brats to sleep.”
“No-one liked that whole crime thing then.”
“Well, not fourteen year olds at least.”
We looked into each other’s eyes, searching for something that neither of us could give even if we could hope to find it.
“We thought we were so cool reading those books.”
“I thought it was so sweet that you were both called Martin, and I started calling you Beck.”
I was silent for a moment, and then said quietly, “I had forgotten that.” And I had. The sudden memory hit me in the back of the head like a brick. “Did you really think it was sweet?”
The “yes” drifted in front of me like a dream. I blinked it away, but knew it would always come back.

“But we were not cool” I eventually told her. “Not really. Not even remotely.”

The truth was that we had just been fourteen years old and desperate to look different. The truth was simply that no-one else in our immediate surroundings knew what the hell we were talking about. Trapped within our obvious confines we did not realise that the secret discoveries of fourteen year olds are simply the tired old memories of the previous generations. What seems precious, hidden and unique is, in another world, the banal, mainstream and obvious.

“Karin and I talked about those Martin Beck stories the other week, you know. I told her I had read them when I was fourteen, and she laughed at me when I told her I was reading them again. She told me that in Sweden everyone knew Martin Beck. In Sweden there are a million crappy movies with Martin Beck in them; they show them all the time on TV and everyone groans when they come on.”
Chris nodded, a beatific smile draped on her lips. She twisted on the stool, her left hand clutching her bared right shoulder, stretching her neck taught. It was brown and sleek and for a moment she looked like Karin had done the last time I saw her, twisting away from me as I asked to kiss her.
Chris looked out the window and murmured, as if to no-one, “But what does that prove?”
I looked at the old paperback that lay open on the desk. There was a line with a red biro-ed asterisk beside it: “The repetition was almost frightening” it said, and in the margin Chris had written, in her spidery handwriting, “Martin, baby, this is the key to all your problems…”
I had forgotten how she wrote and thought like an adult even as a teenager. It had always made me jealous as hell.

And as the silence between us stretched into infinity I thought about what she had written, and let her question play around in my mind. What did it all prove?

“I don’t really know.” I said at last.

And I truly didn’t. I truly didn’t know anything at all.

Julie, meet me by the coffee machine...

Martin had always struggled with Murakami; something about the whole magical element that he found difficult to connect with. True, he had enjoyed ‘South Of The Border, West Of The Sun’ when he had read it two years ago, but the thought of reading anything more by someone who so openly paid homage to The Beatles was more than he could really cope with. Still, Julie had insisted that ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’ would appeal, and she was usually right about those kinds of things. He remembered the conversation about it, just ten days before. They sat outside a café, which had a yellowing Herman’s Hermits album cover in the window, and a Go-Go’s one over the counter. They both drank strong black coffee, no sugar. She had smoked too many cigarettes, and they had looked at each other through glasses neither of them really needed to wear. His were darkly tinted despite the clouds but with prescription lenses so he could see, and hers clear glass, her vision twenty-twenty. “I feel like I am looking through windows” she said, “and sometimes it feels so strange, and I trip on the street when I am walking.” She tugged nervously on her shirt as she spoke, pulling the collar closed as though worried Martin was looking at her breasts. But all he had thought of was how the tiny white polka dots looked like spots of snow on a red carpet.

They had talked about books and records that afternoon. Martin liked how she talked fast and passionately about the things she loved and how, when she spoke English, she sounded vaguely Scottish. It made him oddly homesick, even though he had not lived there for twenty years and had hated every moment when he had. He wondered if he still sounded as passionate about the things that he loved. He doubted it. But then he doubted so much these days that it could hardly matter. Julie blew smoke over her shoulder and looked at the upturned ceramic plant pot that acted as an ashtray. She smiled and told him that ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’ was a beautiful book.

And she had been right.

It was reading Murakami, and particularly Sputnik Sweetheart and Norwegian Wood at the start of the holidays that got me thinking about writing again. There are lines in both books about reasons for writing, and they connected with me so strongly. For effectively it was all about that idea of writing to make a sense of oneself in the world. It’s an idea that I also talked about so long ago, and I had forgotten about it somehow.

So it was good to be reminded about that. And I did start writing again, and it was fun. Being fascinated by the whole process of creation though, I am always thinking about the publication stage, and I think we all of us who make things need that stage to feel fulfilled. This is where the Internet is so great of course, for everyone can publish and be damned. You can argue that’s a blessing in disguise of course, but hey, the search for the single gem whose unique sparkle you personally love the most in the tumult of Aladdin’s Cave is at least as important as the finding. Right?

Anyway, I started publishing some bits of writing on another blog, but then I figured what the hell… why not just keep everything here. I mean, I have no idea why different people read this. Some maybe want to read about Pop music. Some maybe want to just know what I’m doing from day to day (hi Mom!). Some maybe just like it that some days there’s someone grouchier and grumpier than them. Hell, maybe some people even like the writing. It’s a strange world, after all.

So I’m gonna start posting some of those pieces here. I’m thinking of it like an electronic sketchbook for words. They probably only make sense in my own head, but what the heck…

Ego

Ego is a strange thing… So there I was uploading a cover scan image of Young and Foolish to the Amazon site, and I had a look at the Marketplace copies that are for sale. There are only two there, both in the USA. One is going for nearly £24, and the other for £72. How insane is that?! Amazon itself says you can buy one for £6.56, but it says that “usually dispatched within 4-6 weeks” schtick, which inevitably means “uh, actually we have no idea if we can source a copy, but if you’re willing to wait forever we can always try. We’ll most likely just keep telling you that delivery is delayed and then eventually give up, but hey, it’s tough being an online billion dollar corporation…”  I also hope no-one buys copies at those crazy prices, because you can bet that neither I nor the publisher will ever see a penny of the profit. Incidentally, Rupert, didn’t you say that the US distributor still had copies?

And uh, do you want to do a sequel? 'Old and still bloody stupid' is my working title. Duh.

Parklife

I was watching Cléo de 5 à 7 again the other night, and those gorgeous scenes in Montsouris Park got me thinking about parks in cities versus ‘real’ countryside. Now I love to ride my bicycle through the countryside, that’s a given. But then I thought about that in comparison to those folks who love to go trailing over the moors or adventuring through the wilderness, and I figured that I guess I prefer the idea of cycling on roads for the same reason that I prefer walking in city parks to traipsing around real countryside. And that is, I think, to do with the idea of humans imposing some kind of order on nature.

I guess when I think about it I really do like order, or at the very least designed chaos. It’s like, when I was out riding the other day and I rode over the hills to the reservoirs above the Teign Valley. I love it there. I love those reservoirs. The views are gorgeous, and it’s such a beautiful setting, but the fact is that it is a beauty created by structure. It’s the imposition of engineering that creates the landscape to a great degree. And that’s what makes it beautiful for me. Same with those magnificent pylons that snake through the Culm valley just outside our village, talking the power to/from Exeter. It’s like, ‘blam! We’re putting these things here, and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it, Mrs Nature.’ I mean, I know in the huge big picture that Nature Will Win Out. But frankly, sod the big picture. The moment is all that counts.

irony

Yes, yes, I am fully aware of the irony of wittering on about how I miss the old-fashioned (or fashioned-old as Bilgewater might have said) letters of yore in a blog.

the art of letterwriting

Some of you may recall me rambling on at various points in the past about a little booklet I once bought at a Glasgow School of Art Degree Show. It was by Angela McKay and it was called ‘The Art of Letterwriting (Is Not Dead)’. And it was ace. In fact, it remains one of those little artefacts that I could not bear to be without, and occasionally I dig it out of my Box Of Treasures and have a smile to myself. I really love how it's ‘letterwriting’ as all one word, and I find it kind of bittersweet to see the way Angela wrote ‘…. YET’ in the bottom corner of the front cover, because it seems so prescient, and in these times of instant communication I do find myself yearning for the days when we would send letters scribbled on the backs of old photocopies, tracing paper scraps, thin ruled pages of A4 or leafs torn from sketchbooks. And how we would cram all kinds of ephemera into the envelopes: train and bus tickets, movie ticket stubs from the GFT, tourist leaflets from our end of the world towns, expired coupons promising 10p off yoghurt, badges for bands no-one else in your town had ever heard of let alone loved, mix-tapes with hand made covers and a million daydreams. Of course maybe it’s just my age now. Maybe those ‘younger generations’ that John Sebastian once sang about are still exchanging such things. Who knows. And really, who cares? Because it’s not exactly Important is it? I’ve probably just been on holiday too long and need to start thinking about more serious issues, like VLE’s, Strategic Plans and Residuals. Or something.

But Angela McKay… yes… you see THIS was the reason for this blog post: Angela McKay will be the artist in residence at Preston Manor in September. Confusingly, that’s nowhere near Preston at all, but rather in Brighton on the sunny south coast. A short trip on the train from Victoria in case you London types fancy a day trip to the seaside (and why wouldn’t you?). Visitors to the Manor can meet Angela, see samples of her work and ask her questions on:

Thursday 13th September, 11am – 1pm
Sunday 23rd Sept, 2 – 4pm

The flyer says that’s ‘free with admission to the Manor’. Sounds like it would be a lovely part of a wonderful day out. And maybe afterwards you can write someone a nice letter about it.

results day

GCSE Results day again. After last year’s 100% A-C pass rate in my classes I was aware that the only way was down, so I was kind of prepared for a dip. I was still gutted to discover the one ‘D’ sitting in the results list though; even more so when it transpired the student in question had missed the ‘C’ grade boundary by a single mark. Argh! So my class results are only 97% this year. I expect I will get a grilling about that slip up…

The whole school results are on the up though, which is good. 46% is a good 5% increase on last year, which has to be a positive. So we didn’t reach our 50% target, but at least we are on the right track.

It’s always strange being in school outside of term time. It feels all wrong, like being in a ghost town. And actually, I can’t say I’m particularly in tune with the idea of returning to school on September 3rd. I cannot get my head into that mode at all. Well, I suppose there is still time enough to come around. I’m already trying to fill my diary with interesting events so I have some nice things to look forward to. There’s a possibility of doing a presentation at BETT in January, which would be great, and I have an invite to attend a Film Education event at BAFTA on the evening of September 6th, which would be really cool. Unfortunately I can’t get back to Devon the same night, and it wouldn’t really do to be missing my first lessons with the new AS year 10 group on the Friday, so it looks unlikely I’ll be attending.  Still, there’s always The Lodger show on the 28th to look forward to.