A View From The Monatgue Pike (random thoughts while waiting for Ian).

Blackwell's Books and Rush Hair
Drip drip of people passing
Bus, bus and a glimpse into the bright back window.
The West-End is always a drunkeness.
A guy sits opposite fingering a menu, trying to decide which steak to order.
Academic books and hairdressing, is there a juxtaposition there?
Is there a kind of link to be made?
The guy has been joined by a friend, he says to him:
'What if it was doubles, he'd be fucked...
'...And that's what I was waiting for: cake, not gang am style.'
They laugh, I wonder at the complex meanings they espouse
And where I should choose to place my opinion.
Idiots ripe for a slicing of my acerbic wit
Or a tragic form of human being valid in their immanent perception
Of this ridiculous existential morass we endure?
I'm superior surely? No, that is a convenient hidey hole in a perpetual desert
We are the same in our lolling pop of existence.
There is no 'better' just different stratergies
And by the looks of it, theirs is working better than mine.
But we both use Mr Al Cohol for company so what does that say?
A group of old people just came in, a whole brigade
They are chuckling and giggling and that is
Perhaps the best advice I have seen today.

An Evening in Soho. Part 2.

This guy is still fully committed to selling us this...thing; sensing our proclivity for humour he went with it. ‘You know, it’s just like a real woman...except she won’t tell you to go and do the washing up afterwards.’ Now this was funny and I appreciated it, however IT was on a somewhat different tangent of interpretation; when we had first met many years before he had described himself as: ‘half Frank Spencer, half Norman Bates’ and I have never found a reason to disagree with this in the most wonderful way. IT suggested that he would quite like a woman to ask him to go and do the washing up afterwards - I think because of his long standing single status and not any kind of fairy liquid based fetish. Mr Greedy laughs as do I, but I feel the reality of IT’s words more than him. 

Our globular acquaintance, trying to push our laughter further into a place where our money fell into his hands, followed up with a gag about never keeping the thing in the boot of your car, ‘just in case’, and somewhere along the line he utters the word dismembered, which although fairly absurd and comical, doesn’t conjure up the image of sexual bliss. He was skirting on the apex, his humour was curdling before our eyes and we started to shuffle our feet and cross our arms, and in his ignorance he ploughed further into that rut. I politely suggested to him that in future he probably shouldn't use the word dismembered in his sales pitch.

At this point my memory has been mingled somewhat with the decay of fermented white noise within but the next thing that I remember is the portly gentleman discussing how his mother-in-law had dementia, he was obviously losing it, desperately searching for any reason to sell us this thing –I call this kind of strange conversational tick the IT effect; it was most definitely something IT said that swayed the discussion on this new and unprecedented route. Here is Mr Greedy’s story:

‘My mother-in-law has dementia, she got on ok on her own for many years, but now she’s in one of them homes. It’s funny ‘cause sometimes she doesn’t even know who her own daughter is’. He suddenly puffed up his chest, ‘she always remembers me though – always without fail. She always had a twinkle in her eye for me, I think it’s because I was a bit of a lad’. He was insinuating that his virility somehow had the ability to overcome serve degenerative mental disorders and who were we to argue. Noticing our moderate unease at his revelation, he added, ‘I never had sex with her though’.

I don’t want to seem unkind and remember I am a romantic, but this guy did look like he was literally moments away from the Guinness World Records team entering the building and congratulating him on having become the most unsightly man on the planet; so disclosure concerning any kind of reproductive activity, with family members or otherwise, seemed somewhat unsavoury. 

I mean he was really trying to sell us this thing and in fact there was a moment during the previous story that Ian and myself looked at each other with expressions that said – are we actually going to have to buy this thing? So maybe this guy did know what he was doing. But just the thought of finding that thing in the back of a wardrobe in years to come made sure we stood firm. He seemed to sense this too and moved on to what he thought was a more achievable goal the possibly more bizarre looking inflatable sex dolls. ‘I mean, [the dismembered sex doll] is definitely our top seller but a lot of people buy these too’. To please him we each took one from a peg to mull over the ridiculus bloated inflatable with that mouth they all have which looks so painful. I can’t remember who but IT or myself pointed out a particular doll based on a nubile young...lady called Mia Isabella. At an attempt at being subtle let’s just say she had very broad shoulders and something a little extra than the others – maybe now isn’t the time to become subtle – it was a chick with a dick, except the ‘dick’ was more like sad brown off cut form a bouncy castle. I wondered whether at Madame Tussauds they make sure every part of the body is anatomically correct; it’s just that you never get to see that part of the sculpture. Mr greedy made one final push to get through no-man’s-land:

‘No no it’s very popular – if you like that sort of thing, I mean, I’ve never used it, but we get good comments. There are always these’. He pointed to another row of products, it turned out they were vibrating cock rings, but his badinage had lost all its former lustre and we unconsciously contorted our bodies into the words: ‘thank you for your information vendor but will you please go away now’. Being ever perceptive to our silent wishes he did, we had machine gunned him down and he now lay in a bundle of mud and barbed wire in the abyss, which was one of the only fetishes not catered for I believe. We looked around, we laughed some more, then we left with sloppy grins and a good story to go and talk economics with some chums in The Whisky Room at the Athaneum Hotel, not really. We simply wandered out into the night contemplating those hero’s grappling with the sorrows of the Sex Doll.  

An Evening in Soho. Part 1.

I wish to start this tale by way of a disclaimer and an apology, I’m well aware that the setting and subject matter here may be slightly unorthodox to some of you, but let me assure you it is merely by habit that my friend and I happened to be in such an establishment and not due to any kind of deviant motivation. It is just something we do sometimes after our traditional drink in the Montatgu Pike on Charing Cross Road.

To further reassure you that we are in no way hackneyed loutish drunks or shifty droopy eyed perverts this was our choice of drink on that evening: my friend (let’s call him IT) was drinking Efes – A Turkish beer which, although being a huge dirty corporation with shares in Coca-Cola in Turkey, is definitely not the yobbo choice of beverage in the UK. I was drinking Old Rosie – a scrumpy cider from Hertfordshire of high alcohol content, uncarbonated and served at room temperature, cloudy and delicious, but again definitely not the choice of the yobbo. 

We visit these shops mainly for the reasons of irony and the hilarity they bring, as will hopefully be evidenced by the following. So anyway if you are of a prim disposition I apologise and you either want to proceed with caution or go about your day with a far more wholesome activity like drinking tea or playing scrabble.

Therefore, on this evening, IT and I finished our drinks at the Montagu Pike and, with our normal processes a tad eschew, but in an orderly fashion, headed towards our Soho Porn shop destination. Although I am not 100% sure on the names of the different establishments, I believe we settled on a different one from our usual – there is usually a lack of attention to detail by this time in the night. Porn shops in the West End are, more often than not, cleverly hidden beneath book shops, but for some reason this one wasn’t, we went in and did our usual thing of wandering around laughing hysterically at some of the ridiculous products and film titles they have on show*.

To further our entertainment on this evening, it just so happened that this shop had a much wider range of sex dolls than we had seen before, we stood in front of a rack of dolls of varied anatomy and form picking out particularly peculiar tenets of some of the products for our amusement. We were just guffawing at the obvious dissonance between the pictures on the front of the boxes and the globular effigies held within when the rather bulbous proprietor of the establishment inserted himself into our dialogue. He was a somewhat unwieldy individual; in fact he looked exactly like Mr Greedy from Roger Hargreaves fame, except with a head balanced rather clumsily on top of the lump at the apex of his torso (it didn’t really fulfil the criteria of being a neck). For some reason he had seen us and with some heroically misguided foresight placed us as customers ripe for a big sale#.

There was no preamble he was straight in there with his sales pitch. ‘Now guys if you want the best it’s got to be this one’, he pointed to one of the larger boxes situated on the floor, ‘I mean these are fine’, a cursory wave over a range of smaller boxes hung on hooks, ‘...but this is the one, it feels just like a real woman’. We found ourselves staring at this sex doll that consisted of a naked female torso with no arms, no legs and no head, just breasts and a...well you know. My reaction was to laugh with moderate hysteria, which is my usual response, whether out of nerves or joy, I’m never quite sure.

In my mind was the instant reality of the ridiculousness of attempting to copulate (if that’s the right word) with this thing, I mean I consider myself a vaguely tragic figure, but I think that drunkenly pushing out a melancholy white love tear into a limbless unspeakable muff simulation, then sliding off with a pathetic thump onto a carpet-less crumb covered plane of loneliness, would be a new level of tragedy I wouldn’t want to conceive could be possible. Secondly presumably you would have to clean the thing and that would be an absurd and laborious experience that no one would want to carry out. Well, I am a romantic and I think a head and some ability for cognition is necessary for romance.

TBC...

* I can’t remember any specific titles we found funny that day but here are some of my favourites:

In Diana Jones and the Temple of Poon
The Bare Bitch Project
Lawrence of a Labia
Big Trouble in Little Vagina
Pokeahotass
Fatal Erection

Edward Penishands
Now this is the purist form of entertainment in my opinion, linguistic heaven – I was never taught any of this during my MA in linguistics and Communication.

#There was a film playing on a small screen in the corner of the room which provides a somewhat absurd context to any situation; it’s quite hard to talk to anyone when over their shoulder you can see something huge pink and long disappearing into something else pink like a flesh explosion to the cacophony of grunts and whimpers, even in a porn shop.

Why I listen to Records. Pt. 2. A Tragedy

One afternoon about 3 months ago when I was tidying and generally reshuffling my room I saw this thing in the corner, I poked it a bit, plugged it in and then put on a record and everything suddenly became new and clear – ‘like a diamond bullet’ ,the full melancholic potential, the reaching thing I had been looking for – the fusion of everything that had been left behind – the Overman of objects, the yea-saying thing. *

What I realised was that my record player housed the very thing that technology (science) tries to eradicate and makes it part of its very experience; I’m not insinuating that my turntable is somehow special, but it was the basis of my realisation.

So thus the three main reasons I listen to records are:

1.       Atmosphere

2.       Randomness

3.       Tactility

The main soul and spirit of the record lies in the atmosphere it creates which comes from that sly extra component, the very excess of the sound, the hiss, the cackle, the imperfection. This is the otherness, the danger, the threat of terror in the dark that rotates the experience from a pleasure into a bliss. 

The two co-exist together in a beautiful harmony and this is what makes playing records tragic and affirmative. Like a Greek tragedy death and life combined in an inevitable beautiful downfall. The very faults and flaws are part and parcel of the experience itself. The transient nature of the record, and it’s deteriorating quality, makes every listen more meaningful, like being embraced by a lover who each time is slowly slipping away, eventually leaving you with nothing but a trace of a wondrous memory.

The hiss and the crackle creates atmosphere, an intangible spatial re-arrangement, something the flaccid whirr of the CD or the pause between tracks on an MP3 cannot do. The whole room is a potential between the melody and the slow breath of the Real beneath the music.

The randomness of the record player has two distinct situations. There is nothing more marvellous than when a random scratch or piece of erroneous material on the vinyl can create any number of new configurations of meaning.  This is something I heard the other day, when the needle got stuck on a scratch:

Da da da da ...the same...

                ...insane...

                ...pisshead...

                ...biscuit...

                ...kiss it...

                ...Michelle...

Now, I don’t know who Michelle is and if she would ever kiss the same insane pisshead biscuit, but this wonderful dissonance of parts is a potential forged from repetition of the same, an utter randomness territorialised, it reveals the world as the infinity that it is. It shakes you from that worn-out throne woven of straw and expectation and launches you in with the hoi polloi of new possibility, you become an amazing new flux of potential. Its small, but it is there.

Secondly, there is nothing more pleasing than going to a nearby charity shop and finding the most ridiculous, obscure record you can find and taking it home and actually listening to it; these aren’t songs you will find on the internet, with a 30 second sampler. Freed from that mass ocean of likers and commenters you are a pioneer rediscovering a deserted cabin in the middle of the frozen waste, the rescue party, turning corners on the immanent plane of chance.

A record is an object, a corporeal corrugated touchable thing, the music, the abstract indescribable, Dionysian intoxicating ungraspable, is in the folds of the vinyl that feel like undulations under fingers, music crystallised – you can feel it before it happens, it gives a sense, a tactile relationship to its fragility. CD’s are notoriously untouchable, a flat surface, and mp3s are purely ethereal, an illusion of a presence far divorced from our actual realm.

The record is touchable, it is an entertainment in its operation, when the record is played, you can see the mechanism working, and there is a visual dimension as well as the vibrating waveform agreeable to our paltry human senses. You can see the viscosity in our perception that creates the vibrations that disappear into parts unknown and up into quivering brain transcendence.

CD’s are hidden away, Mp3s are hidden away, lacking in a vital perception in the feast of musical experience. To see, to feel, to touch all are necessary, they are all experiences that tip the turntable into a slower more leisurely endeavour, a testament to idleness and the mulling over of strange, stupid and profound things; An antidote to speed.

I’m not saying that all other musical experiences are subordinated to the record player; I’m not privileging presence over absence (logcentrism). I’m just trying to describe my singular assemblage from all the facets of my experience, to show that a record player is for the connoisseur, a slower more loving, thoughtful and pleasurable occurrence. 

So that’s why I listen to records.

Pt 3...

* The irony wasn’t lost on me that only after the object had been discarded did it suddenly become a possibility, an immanent affect.