Saturday 8 December 2012

THE SADNESS OF CHRISTOPHER MALONEY


In an age of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act- George Orwell

Gravity’s my enemy- M.I.A

Eminem began life as a nickname. Scrawny, weak, underfed Marshall Mathers III was bullied and abused as a child. Possibly not to the extent he extolled in his wrathful, self-loathing, vicious and messianic music, but psychologically he began as M n M, a little, round, chocolate sweetie.

The game has changed. In fact, it’s not that the game has changed, it’s that a new level of transparency has burst free into the everyday language of the post-digital age. Opinions are commodity, your followers are your bank balance and a RT is worth ten points. A favourite means that you have tweeted something of (at that instance) serious value to your audience. However, there is no way of knowing whether or not they are using that favourite (yes, I know it’s spelt favorite but I’m English) to use your information as commodity either against you or to create a matrice of tweets to promote some other scheme. Get it? Good.

I missed therapy today. Overslept by five hours. Last night I was so doped up on Promethazine (an over the counter Valium derivative) that I was tripping out nicely and enjoying my mild hallucinations of the fairy lights on my wall twinkling and undulating like silkworms. I tweeted, I wrote some notes, I watched YouTube and put on my very own concert of videos on my feed. Adele’s Skyfall should, by rights, win the Oscar for Best Song. Her critical and street credit could not be higher, and whilst I don’t particular listen to 21 often (it’s a little bland) I do respect that she is a great pop musician and I like her. And that’s enough. Skyfall is her masterpiece, and I don’t think she’ll ever write a better song about the devastating break-up that influences her art. All pain is subjective.

I’m not sure too many people are following this blog (and for those who have purchased this as a book, it began in October 2012 as a way of making sense of an ex-girlfriend’s suicide, and was continued until I found an ending) and frankly, that doesn’t matter too much. I will tweet this link once, and only once, and whilst nobody ever reacts to my writing directly, I hope that if you are reading this you are not too put off by the navel gazing. I’m currently high on Promethazine, so I think this is totally awesome and trippy.

On Saturday I went for a walk in the woods with Raf and tried to explain Bisociation to him. I like walking in the woods. It gives inspiration for the huge haunted house novel I am outlining.
“Okay,” I said. “Bisociation is the interlinking of two previously incompatible frames of reference. Like uh,” I avoided a puddle, handed my tobacco to him so he could roll me a cigarette, “insects and military intelligence.”
“English, bruv.”
“That is English.”
He grinned. “Please continue.”
“Okay,” I said, pulling up my hood, “What do you call a paranoid wasp?”
“What?”
“KGB.”
Raf smiled, “Hey, that’s pretty good!”
“And that,” I said, taking the cigarette and lighting it, “feeling of mild euphoria, of epiphany, of revelation, that feeling is Bisociation.”
Raf considered this. “Sometimes you chat so much shit, but that was pretty good.”
“Both my parents were teachers,” I smile, exhaling.

I booked another ticket for The Shining: US Extended Edition at the BFI since I auto-suggestively passed out the last time. All the hip, fashionable “scene” makers were laughing the whole way through which was too much for my fragile constitution to take. This time round I had to wait two hours and borrow a smart phone off a couple of bouncy gay fashionati (the type who think simulating oral sex on each other in public is just too hip and spend their time writing letters to Europe and hanging in the coolest bars in Soho) so I could call the fifty year old manic depressive I was randomly going with. He had had a serious coke habit for years, and consoled his failures to become a cross between Jack Nicholson and Stanley Kubrick by reading Aleister Crowley’s poetry and transcribing old mix tapes onto CD. He turned up eventually, wearing a leather jacket with the word REAL painted onto it, some scarves and a cowboy hat. We went outside and picked fag butts off the floor, and I accidentally hit up a joint somebody had tossed. The screening was in NFT1 as opposed to NFT3. NFT3 is better. It’s the one they use for the premieres since the front row is far enough back from the screen to see it clearly. We had front row seats in NFT1, but nicked the seats from two intellectualti before the lights went down, making it impossible for them to kick us out. I didn’t auto-suggestively pass out this time. I had watched a documentary about Kubrick which showed footage of him playing chess against Shelley Duvall and anticipating her first eight moves. I actually like the Extended Edition more. It will be a cold day in hell before it comes onto BluRay, so I’ll keep seeing it every time it reappears after its decade absences. It’s a treat, and I’ve been dreaming about it every night since, including last night. Marilyn Manson once said that he believed dreams were “time travel”. I like that idea.

A.W.M 05/12/2012

LOST IN THE EMPIRE



It is when Nana and Joan of Arc exist in the same flesh, or Boris Karloff and Bing Crosby, that the abysses of insanity are under the fog at every turn…
…Anyone else, man or woman, who contained such opposite personalities within his body would be ferociously mad. It is her transcendence of these opposites into a movie star that is her triumph (even as the work she does will eventually be our pleasure), but how transcendent must be her need for a man ready to offer devotion and services to both the angel and the computer.
-Marilyn, Norman Mailer

I really like Matthew Modine. Kubrick saw his brilliance and tenderness and his performance as Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket is the most human in any of the master’s masterpieces. After I threw up the morning Magic FM told me that there had been a shooting in a cinema in Colorado showing The Dark Knight Rises (in which Modine co-stars), I tweeted him to tell him of my horror and grief. He tweeted back a photo of a victory sign and the words:

It’s all good Andrew #TweetPeace

My Dad was a member of a video club in the early 90’s for a while. It was half-hearted, but we had a few good ones. Hamburger Hill, Mississippi Burning, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket. They tended toward big budget intellectual exercises, and he instilled in me a love for Hollywood in a time of industry grunge chic. I started watching the Oscars the year Pulp Fiction was released, even though I was surprised that Jim Carrey wasn’t nominated for The Mask. I genuinely was. I bet fifty pee to a mate of mine, back when fifty pee was a lot of dough. It was inexplicable. How could Jim Carrey not get nominated? It was amazing, his performance. Secretly it turned me on.

I unfollowed 1500 people on the 5th of December, and then slept for 24 hours. I have lost 200 followers because of my actions, people who were only following me so that I would follow them, the reason I followed them in the first place.
The vast majority of them were indie, self-pubbed writers. Believe me, there is nobody duller on Twitter than an indie, self-pubbed writer.

I was back on the ward today for my injection. I didn’t bother bringing my sunglasses this time, since I understand now that the nurse gets off on the invasion and I didn’t want her thinking that I respected her. One of the care workers had helped me tidy the flat before I went, even going so far as to throw out both my tobacco and my Royal Mail card that I needed in order to pick up the wheelie suitcase my mum had ordered for me. Huh. Straight after the horse faced skank had jabbed me up (I forget her name) I bumped into Dr Ghosh as I awkwardly sauntered to the smoking pod.
“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked.
“You’re looking well, Andrew!”
“Had 402 views of my YouTube video. Me, one take, singing Rockin’ In The Free World.”
“Oh yes,” he smiled, “that’s an easy one to play, isn’t it. Who was it again, who wrote it?”
“Neil Young.”
“Yes, thirty years ago, right? Yes, it’s just three chords.”
“Difficult to sing, though,” I replied, grinning.
“I’m sure it is! Great to see you looking so well.”
“You too,” I replied, and put my earphones in, feeling used and worthless in a totally punk rock way.

A friend of the girl who hung herself was smoking a cigarette just outside the pod, and therefore inside the ward, next to a woman with Alzheimer’s who has a habit of self-inflicted head injuries. Inside the pod was a South African murderer that I met in the Secure Unit. He was wearing the hospital pyjamas, trembling from the medication, his head bowed, moaning about his mother. I lit up and put on Rape Me by Nirvana, ignoring his babbling and working out linguistic motifs I could study for this book. If you ever do get sectioned, then my only word of advice that actually matters? Don’t talk to the ones in pyjamas… 

There seem to be quite a few conspiracy theories revolving around YouTube about James Holmes and The Dark Knight Rises massacre. I tried watching one of them, but they were all so poorly made. The editing was like something out of an Alan Smithee movie and whilst I know for a fact the filmmakers felt their efforts to be transcendentally profound and hip, their utilization of sombre voice over intercut with Hans Zimmer’s score and sinister photos of Barack Obama made me understand the ache inherent in their lack of cinematic talent. As for the movie itself? I bought it today for £15.99 in a BP Garage just by Blue Leaves House, after a dull three hours on Pynchon Ward. I had the dubious honour of getting the Word Conundrum, an anagram puzzle they leave on a white board daily. The answer? CELEBRATE. I thought the movie was pretty good. Wally Pfister’s cinematography was exquisite, a deep cornucopia of blues and browns. The editing was stately and mannered, the direction epic and tender by turns. The script had a few unintentionally gigglesome moments, especially when Morgan Freeman had to explain the hugely complex plot to the audience, which he does better than any actor in cinema history. All in all it was a reverent, rich, wonderful failure, that was as self-adoring as the worst of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and nearly as homoerotic. According to a recent tweet by Bret Easton Ellis (who was at an Official Academy Screening) it won’t win. Too self-indulgent and now too scarred with abnormality and horror for the film to win much of anything. The movie set out to be the most profound and important movie of 2012. It is, but for all the wrong reasons…

A.W.M 07/12/2012 

Saturday 1 December 2012

MICHAEL CROSSAN AND WHAT'S WRONG WITH BEING PRETENTIOUS?

The ride's over, did you enjoy yourself?- Leech, Incubus

If you can imagine that I have a following outside of Twitter, and presuppose that even though all you have done is click on a siren wailing link that invites you to a blog that has so far seen suicide, psychiatric medical injections, crack, dominatrixes, police stop and searches, rapists, murderers and numerous references to former enfant terrible Bret Easton Ellis, imagine now that I very likely have more enemies than friends. (And I apologize for that sentence by the way, it went on for far too long to be rhythmically acceptable.) 

In 2010 a friend of mine told a friend of mine that Bret Easton Ellis was doing a book signing promoting Imperial Bedrooms in London. That friend told me. I had spent the past three years inside a room in a house for psychiatric patients (including a huge, boss eyed, illiterate violent criminal who had been conceived through the forced incest at gunpoint of a brother and sister) living on eighty pounds a week. I was not allowed to drink alcohol, and there were daily spot checks to search my room for contraband. This didn't stop me seguing into a brief spell of heroin addiction with another inmate, but it did result in the police being called (and searching my room for contraband) if I had a friend over past 11pm. Owing to these circumstances, the lack of money, the horrible living conditions, the company of monsters and the nightly supervised medication, eventually I was just left to my isolation. In the four years I spent there, my dad never visited once, and if I traveled to their mansion in Chislehurst I was shouted out if I dared to mention writing. "I don't know any other twenty seven year olds who only talk about their books," my mother would hiss, as if that had won the argument.
Meeting Bret Easton Ellis was suddenly a ray of light in my squalid purgatory. Speaking of which, my window faced out on a wall. I lived four years in that cell. The window didn't open any wider than three inches. My walls were covered in song lyrics and abstract matrices of plots and dialogue for the novel I had been battling with since I was 17 about a school shooting in Orpington in 2001. I had amassed thousands of pages on my computer, and had only written and subsequently self-published my 2009 debut Smoking Is Cool because I had become so obsessive about the other one, I needed perspective. But when Smoking Is Cool suddenly became a literal paperback with an ISBN number and a barcode, I thought I had found a way out of the NHS psychiatric system. I sent review copies to ten magazines (all I could afford), gleefully expecting film rights and thousands upon thousands of pounds for my efforts. Three magazines responded. The New Statesman wished me the best of luck with it. The Literary Review (who are now blocking me on Twitter) wrote that it clearly had a lot going for it. Empire sent it back with a post-it note. And then the NHS forced me to withdraw it from publication. I had used real names of patients, locations and doctors. They wrote me a strange letter which stated that since they controlled my finances, they needed to look out for my best interests by banning the book, since they didn't want me to suffer when they sued me.

Bret Easton Ellis is the most well connected writer in Hollywood. After I met him (I was first in line after waiting five hours, but let two groupies go first after my wild monologue to two bankers in the queue started to piss them off) I went off with my signed copy of Lunar Park to a nearby coffee shop to observe my prize. I had him sign it on the front because I didn't want him to see what I had written on the inside cover, which I will now transcribe:

Dear Dad, as you can tell from its battered, much read appearance, this is my personal copy. The best American novel of the 21st century so far. But don't take my word for it... Lots of love, Merry Xmas, Andrew xxx

I was going to write something about a hotshot middle aged writer who is inexplicably blocking me on Twitter despite having had no contact with me, but he's too busy lost in his schizophrenia and I don't want to upset him. Michael something. I dunno. I'm sure he'll win a Booker Prize one of these days, LOL!