Oh, internet woe.

My home internet has cruelly deserted me, leaving me with just my disintegrating Android for company and sanity. Just typing this out is utterly agonising.

But yes, I have an article in this month’s Middlebrow about the compelling horror that was Essex Jungle and a review of the new Atari Teenage Riot album on RHV that has sent none other than Alec Empire into a huge tizzy. Oh dear. Hope these are in some way enjoyable…

Been a bit lax with the ol’ writing of late. The ideas are there but alas, the time is not.. Hopefully soon a balance will be struck and my whining on the internet will be prolific once more…

Tube Rage

No longer do my adventures take place in the realms of Unemployment as I have happened upon a ‘real’ job. Hooray. But with this comes the unenviable treck to and from work at rush hour on the London Underground. This is something I”ve had very little experience in, managing to only ever have to arrive at places after ten and sitting in relative morning comfort, gladdened by a book and perhaps a discarded Metro. Lovely.

Now, however, an hour goes past in the gloom and tension of the morning commute, the stench of rage and rushed coffee seeping from every pore of my ‘companions.’ All are filled with gloom. Regardless of how enjoyable / passable / bearable your job is upon arrival, it is this that really sets up the day and gets you feeling agressive and entitled to your space at 8am whilst being jostled by carelessly placed suitcases, laptops and kindles while their owners glare at you sullenly for daring to take up a fraction of the alloted space. The scale of condensed animosity is staggering. It should be funny, the contempt of your fellow man towards you at such a cruel hour, but even the most noncomittal passenger gets sucked into the swirling anger of tube politics when thrown into the middle of it.

You resent the pregnant woman whose choice to have a child drags out your last scrap of kindness to let her sit down, you despise holiday makers with their large rucksacks swinging recklessly about and you seeth with barely repressed violence towards the expensively polished shoes of young city boys that step on your uncovered toes. If said boys glance down with looks of apology in their deadened faces, it takes your every scrap of restraint to not strike them firmly in the eyes. After a few days – yes, mere days – of this, every commuter is a target of your hatred. I am tempted to document this teeny human warzone with sly moblile phone pictures, maybe cobble them into entire panoramas taking in entire carriages but imagine my very soul will be beaten senseless by the narrowed eyes of my travel buddies.

 But I digress. The Tube is horrible. Everybody knows this. That is all.

Festival Features

I’ve written a couple of these for RHV. Will probably write more at some point…

http://www.redhotvelvet.co.uk/features/10-things-you-take-to-a-festival-that-you-never-use/ 

http://www.redhotvelvet.co.uk/features/rant-4-50-for-a-festival-beer/

Enjoy, or don’t.

Imperial Bedrooms

Bret Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms is a hallucinogenic sequel (though that term should be used loosely) to his debut, Less Than Zero. Rather than demonstrating the ennui and horror that pervaded Clay’s existence in his college years, looking in from the outside, here we find him at the very centre of a paranoid conspiracy simultaneously all about him and nothing to do with him. The ultimate unreliable narrator, Clay leads the reader down twisting paths of confused narrative and experience, attributing his literary debut as the work of ‘the writer’ – Ellis himself as a remembered presence. This then, is Clay being ‘real.’ But it is all the more bewildering for this.

Rather than being merely a follow-on from Less Than Zero, this novel is an entirely different beast indeed. The structure remains the same, and Blair, Rip, Julian and co all re-appear older, more jaded and dangerous than the bored teenagers they once were. The plot revolves around a hunger for fame at any cost, the characters all connected with the movie industry with Clay as a screenwriter, seemingly plotting his own downfall. It contains elements of a number of Ellis’ previous novels, and while this sounds like a tall order in such a short text, somehow it works. The violence and contempt of American Psycho appears consistently, and Lunar Park – esque ghosts haunt apartments and minds alike. ‘Normal’ relationships are twisted beyond all recognition, with Ellis’ trademark aloof style rendering them all the more cold and intriguing.

The idea of paranoia is rife throughout. The narrator’s judgement is under constant scrutiny by other characters and the reader. Motivations are rarely clear, his self-sabotaging actions reveal him to be more and more lonely and unhinged as the narrative progresses and unravels into what could be fantasy scenarios or grizzly revelations.

There are no superfluous scenes here, everything culminates in an icy creeping horror that leaves the reader confused and appreciative. It is a compact book, strange after the sprawl of Lunar Park. But the two have an awful lot in common. Both end on a surprisingly emotional tone. The last paragraph of this novel is absolutely devastating, more so because it is completely unexpected.

Imperial Bedrooms isn’t an easy work to read, or a particularly fun one either. But dread and suspense lingers – it is well worth the unpleasant ride.

Language

The world over, us Brits are maligned for our total lack of effort with languages. ‘Surely,’ we collectively seem to think, ‘we speak English! The world’s universal language. It is pointless to learn any other!’ and so forth.

On a recent trip to France / Belgium I didn’t try to use my tragically broken French once. When shopkeepers and hotel staff saw our bemused faces they immediately switched from their native tongue to English. Sure, we were graced with the odd eye-roll but for the most part, people were gracious and patient with us, no expectation whatsoever that we should compromise and attempt to communicate in a different language. We were able to bumble through with minimal effort on our part.

Cut to a week later and the television is bombarding us with the Royal Wedding. There is no escape, so you attempt to continue life as normal, pausing only to watch some big ol’ planes fly over your house and appreciate the free Bank Holiday. The coverage is full of excited royalists, a large number of whom from far sunnier climes than these. In addition to the rabid love of our Royal Family (takes all sorts, right?) they all had near-perfect English and great enthusiasm to show this off to the cameras.

It’d be stupid to claim that all Europeans can speak English at a fluent level, but judging by those that travel they at least put the effort in. It’s kinda sad the amount of  foreigners who endeavour to learn a new language when compared to our futile efforts at learning a bit of GCSE level French then giving up. Despite being an absolute hypocrite about this it is pretty shameful to not even try to exercise your meagre skills when given the opportunity. I’d like to think that following this pretty obvious eye-opener I’ll splash out on Rosetta Stone or at the very least, ask my multilingual relatives for help. But being a fundamentally lazy Londoner, with everything on my doorstep and everyone bending to my supposed linguistic superiority I most probably won’t. But I really should.