Sublurbia

It afflicts; the plasmic silence when the Spotify playlist has run, the thumbnail recommendations replacing song, and you can see with what face I am looking back at the laptop on the bed, here at the windowsill, thinking whereabouts on the soil I should buck my cigarette butt, having bloomed an arm through a hingeful of air, put out the flame on the house wall, a blow of ash, a reaction to flash photography, now calling that moon a bluff and that rascal star a buttress, now the light of the laptop failing to persuade wings out of the cold, no wings in so new a year:

yesterday a seagull tottered to a standstill, eyed food, decided not to drive on, interrogated old vomit.

There were two professors, or conversationalists, in the first chapter of the novel I am in. I always double check blurbs when I queue at Smiths; the publisher promised three professors. This story is about three people. Okay.

And yet the first block of writing, put above the debutant asterisk, is not so. The first words are an aloof conversation between two people only. Two professors.

I thought: One person must be late, or dead. Apparently it is a woman, and her absence is worth an excavation. I am reading the end of the novel on its first page. I am certain I am reading the book as though it were a manga, or a tempting fortune tale, counting down pages, sirening green bottles into accidental free fall. But all the pages are numbered, in tact, white, ready for a quick turn. Was this a father or brother's holiday-read from years ago? I start to speak at myself, speaking words out of the windowsill. Stop thinking about loose ends.


The Three Professors

'No, you read too far into what happens later.'
'Later? So are you saying it is her childhood? That something happened early on and might have been brushed under the carpet?'
'I am. She did not like the idea of a mother or a father. She essayed at length on supervision and sex. And in her eight hundred poems, mothers and fathers are never mentioned. The closest she comes is: I lived under an extraordinary roof.'


I forgot to say earlier, that there are other blocks of writing in the pages before; before the story begins moving forwards, and after the end has trespassed there.

These other blocks of writing were for 

Praise, Publishing Houses and For.

My For dedication is to Those Women Who Said: No: Condescending To My Mouth: Terrified Of My Ears.

I will leave the window dehiscent, bent out, to freshen my bedroom, and I have to go and soap my fingers, cut their nails, turn more pages.

Don't steal anything, please. I will be in the bathroom.

Kenny Dalglish? Whatever.

Hillsbrough is not going to have any impact on Liverpool climbing the Barclays Premier League table in 2011. It needs to be put this bluntly. It takes incredible patience or stupidity to watch and read about Dalglish and how he understands Liverpool, everyday. For instance, do the fans really believe that Rafa Benitez, who had never played or lived in England, understood Liverpool better than Roy Hodgson in his first four months at the club? I have become so sceptical that I'm sure if Liverpool do finish in the bottom half of the table, it will be Hodgson or the former owners who take the blame.

Imagine if Arsenal had demanded this ingredient: a sense of club history. For stylistic reasons alone, Wenger would never have come to England and pushed football forwards. Or, more importantly, consider Barcelona. In 1973, had a certain Dutchman decided Catalonia wasn't for him, we would not see Fabregas, Xavi, Iniesta or Messi in the same todaylight.

I would like to think Liverpool's genuine supporters (including many of my friends) are those who, despite being proud to sing on the Kop, recognise how boring and embarrassing the club's obsession with itself is. I love the flags, I love Xabi Alonso, I love Marcus Babbel. And I find it hard to watch documentaries about, and footage of, the tragedy without red eyes. But is there really any need for this reeking shit of media current? Am I really being harsh or am I even allowed to be harsh, in bringing up Hillsbrough? Or does the quality of the squad and its dumb tactical deployment over the past sixteen months have more to do with their league position than Lucas Leiva not being told what it means to wear the shirt?

When Spurs were in the relegation zone not so long ago, it was for footballing reasons. Pascal Chimbonda was standing at centre back while the porous pairing of Didier Zokora and Jermain Jenas couldn't distribute the ball in midfield. Our most talented players were either injured or off-form. Gareth Bale's career was being stultified since it was fashionable to describe him as a 'wing back' - dependable neither at left back nor left midfied. It is my opinion, and the opinion of many fans afraid to speak it, that stories about Walter Tull or John White, or even visits to terminally ill children in hospital, would not have addressed Zokora and Jenas's discipline or helped Gomes to settle. Nor would said emo strategy have eased the demands on Darren Bent, busily adapting to playing in a pair instead of as a lone striker. If our results had picked up after some kind of emotinal spa, this wouldn't mean anything anyway. The truth is always on the pitch, and the English Press, rather like Liverpool Football Club, has an unhealthy fascination with what happens away from it. Look no further than videos of David Beckham training at Spurs Lodge - a potential loan signing to inspire younger players, coming off the bench to improve Peter Crouch's statistics and Spurs' attacking set pieces. This almost-story should be worth a couple of hundred words in the Sport. Dalglish's, a little more.

There is no southern writer's bias going on here. I remember being surrounded by and joining in with Liverpool fans, jumping up and down, wearing a Carragher shirt and singing when they won the Champions League on the most powerful night in my football-life to date. (Admittedly, I probably went too far.) Liverpool are a club struggling to uphold a world famous legacy. They are carrying the burden of an inadequate stadium, an overrall dismal record this century with sponsors, and much disastrous business in the transfer market. What Kenny Dalglish has inherited, this time around, is a mid-table team. One that last season's most successful mid-table-team manager could do nothing to improve. Albeit in four months.

Ten

Unsleepily tired in these thousands of words,
I am not an essayist.

Would I were upbeat, hurtling from a promenade,
Waiting to leave behind me a ten-year-old's reckless footprints
In Dorset sand.
This opportunity, only and readily in dreams,
Is inspired by a strange-smelling photograph.
Any one of many relatives lifts the heaviness of the album,
Once a year
The lightness of the photograph,
In a hurry from the shelf,
And forwards what is really a poem into the hands of one who made me,
Who paid for the print.

Unsteadily, I don't remember this image.
But this is always going to happen.
I don't remember not being an image.

I'm not sure how much longer this can continue for.

If the world were globelessly flat,
Before Christ,
I would row out from an ocean-threatened city,
Pray to a mermaid,
And fall from the farthest explored salt water
Into a new nowhere.

When the tide retreats, I look and see a leather ball coming to a stop,
Spitting out gold crystals.

The Independent

After I take a shit, I think I might go out for a smoke in the light rain, so I flash my pass to security and next the revolving doors have my quieter brain clunking. A policeman, tilting a rifle, is checking for something under his car - kittens they used to tell my friend in Northern Ireland - when Peter Hitchens walks past and I remember how on my iPod, in my pocket, his name sometimes falls across the screen (if only a torch had a fragrance!) on the buses where I escape to that famous debate. And in this moment I want to take it up with him, everything, and try to defend his brother's title without whom my own words are even less firm. But I don't have the fortitude. I tell Samantha, who is on the phone and is interested in how my day is going, I have to go, I have to go, and I can't help myself. I do a shopworn performance for Mr Hitchens. 

Peter Hitchens: Hi

Intern: Hi, I just want to say I'm a big fan of your writing. (This is partially a lie.)

Peter Hitchens: Thank you, sorry I didn't catch your name?

*Intern says a name and tells Hitchens he is on a placement at The Independent.

Peter Hitchens: Well don't tell them you were talking to me then!

Intern: Well, Happy christmas and a Merry new year. And the best of luck to your brother also. (This I mean and, though I fucked up with Happy and Merry, I feel alarmingly tall just getting the words out.)

Peter Hitchens: Thank you, I appreciate that. Good luck. (This might be his turn at dishonesty: After all I'm standing there, damaging my lungs, speaking dull word after wrong word, and my name has already been forgotten.)

Peter Hitchens walks away in an important coat, and as he turns the corner of Derry Street and wrings into the invisibility of High Street Kensington, I recognise a smallness: About my hands, my ability. In spite of my excitement, a fictional writer writes me some nonfiction: You have been a third hand on a plain clock. Now fuck off and face the marble wall. 

The next afternoon, the editor of the Sport is outside, beside me, which should start a far more important dialogue. It is an opportunity as opposed to a surprise. But I always preferred surprises to opportunities.

He lights a manually rolled brown cigarette. He notices the same polieceman, and the arms that are impossible to bid farewell to. Terror is on everyone's agenda. It is a singular agenda. It wants to drown a plural intelligence. The editor of the Sport, running his fingers over his lips, then blowing over his ordinary, Arsenal mug of tea, says he will put my name in the paper. I forget about anything else for ten minutes.

Now it is January and on my last day I'm awfully hungover. I text Sean on whose squalid balcony, open to London city, I had stood in the spectacularly early morning reading the scorecard for the final Ashes Test through a window. Cricket is a childhood event, and for this reason it has to be taken very seriously.

I'm spying on Film & Music bods. I translate my stale reflection in the brilliant water cooler, into an idea. I will go home and whatever happens I have to blog about my experience at The Independent and what it means to me and how the future's mask is a fat, sweating, plastic face. What the future holds is in trouble. Then I sit back down, do a task, mull over a boringness.

Where you have to return to is the bookshelf. (As with a bathroom light, or the kitchen drawer in whose darkness the cutlery doesn't glint.) I have read many essays and works of fiction about narcissism.

How absolutely unremarkable this is - my little name, a talking centimetre, used to wrap fish and chips in. No, this is where the work is done: here. This entry is for the reader whose name is also a little unlarge; whom I don't have to love, but want to; who follows despite impatience. Thank you. Merry New Year.

Football Fanship and Persuasion

"But why do you follow that team?"

My brother, a Cottager of the Paul Peschisolido aeon, brought this to my attention when in 2006 Chris Coleman was inexplicably fired by Alfayed. Or Alfayed Jr.

What compels us to one team? What are the charms that forge a strange(ways) belonging and scratch reason and indifference upon every kick off?

Firstly, the cause of my brother's disillusionment: How a club is run from the top down. It is worth reminding oneself of the cheap tricks of family, extended family, school mates and school bullies. Legacy and Location (sadly, this is the normal order). Financial investment. Emotional investment. Patterns of play. Tradition. And the individual talent.

I have, before, overheard the brilliantly irrational fan jump to what (s)he thinks is a more important question: "Are you a proper supporter?" These probes, usually accusations, are certainly related, though I would say that ever since the Taylor report, the (off-the-ball) melodrama of Italia '90 and the subsequent influx of middle-class fans, the 'proper supporter' knockout blow has become the tired air punch of the fat and the guilty. Straight-faced righteousness is responsible for the soggiest kind of literature and pub-talk about the game. To borrow a favourite, silly catchprase from British politics: class war is dead. In a boast, the self-described 'proper supporter' - of any social background - will reveal more about its failing ego than the game.

Why do I follow, I mean really follow, Spurs? (OK so I go for free a lot, and I rarely do away games.) Why did I travel back and forth from Leeds, and now from Brighton, to join in this masochistic ritual? Why did I go as far as to customise the web-address of my blog - this meeting of personal and quietly public writing - after love of my club? Well, passion I guess. And passions ought to provoke serious and mocking responses in equal measure. Under the influence of Fever Pitch (1992) - a hideously overrated autobiography about fanship, probably still worth reading eighteen years on - I have listed a few reasons for, and advantages and disadvantages of, having spent nearly two decades enthralled by Tottenham Hotspur's special brand of (recently elevated) mediocrity. 

1) Seven Sisters is a hole. The stadium is not. On the twenty-seven minute walk from the Underground exit to Bill Nicholson (R.I.P.) Way, everything is rotten. But when the gravel, the entrances and the food stalls are left behind, walking out into the surround sound is always a new experience. The blue and white sloping sea of White Hart Lane, filling before kick off, is my macrocosmic Dionysia; a swathing delight at drama that would disrupt the breath of any person interested in culture.

2) "Football is about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish, about going out and beating the lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom." (Danny Blanchflower)

Tottenham Hotspur has a tradition. This argument doesn't work when Peter Crouch is bringing things down from the sky for bystanders, though I'm not going to complain if Rafael van der Vaart continues to score the same goal every other game. For the too-young-to-remember, have a rummage through your parents' VHS cupboard at the next available opportunity. Recorded somewhere between Top of the Pops 2 and vintage pornography, you might chance upon Hoddle's volleys, Villa's slalom and Gazza's belter against our filthiest rivals. And don't understimate Gary Mabbut's bravery, or Steffen Freund's aggression. Match of the Day is inconceivable without us.

3) We do lots for charity.

4) Harry Redknapp is the next England manager. He is a meticulous tactician. His every bone is humble. England deserves his services. (First and final sentences might not be sarcastic.)

5) If nothing else, we are worth a sympathy shag. Our captain left on a Bosman to said filthiest rivals. Ten years have past but even now - as I type out the fifth amendment in a room filled with cobwebs and a stopped grandfather clock - it hurts. I still want dark events to affect Sol Campbell's remaining lifetime. The experience was formative in so far as it hastened my moral education: don't expect loyalty or fidelity from anybody. If ever these virtues are disavowed by a friend or lover, deja vu assumes the gigantic form of a central defender lifting the Premiership title. The analogy all football fans know best - walking in on your best mate and your girlfriend, at it - is hard to refute. But until this happens, Campbell will remain the benchmark. I hate to harp on but there were many nightmares afterwards. And in the cinema, the incident would transfer a vengeance of blood lust. Sol Campbell never goes away. He just stands outside the railway stations I wait at, signing autographs and smiling in one of his Size XXL overcoats.


Readers who support other clubs will argue that you could edit place and person names, and publish the same blog post about any team. I agree in so far as the emotional life of football fans is consistent. But it is not at all protean. I know I am, I'm sure I am, I'm one club till I die. (An exception must be made for Wimbledon FC fans.) I was persuaded into this. It is impossible to be persuaded out.

By and large, idealism is safe and humorous within football. Especially on these shores. There are some idiots however, myself included, who sometimes refer to the game as a religion, approximating their status as a fan to a worshipper, or a sheep in a flock if you will. This is, of course, a ludicrous thing to suggest. And not just because managers actually answer our questions, passed on by priests Guy Havard and Garth Crooks, and offer reasons (sometimes even apologies) for the sickness they birth us into some afternoons. All this singing and proselytising is not done in the name of any Dear Leader. Even Sir Alex Ferguson, before a glass of sherry, will tell you Manchester United is bigger than any of its powerful representatives.

In the modern game there is a kind of stupid sacrifice and a desire for ignorance. Why do I bother? Next week I'm going to do something else. No, you won't. The Future of an Illusion has not conceded its worth. You will not change seats. You will wear the selfsame scarf and retro jersey to every match. Your happiness this weekend comes down to people you don't even know. What marries faith with football is the promise of eternity: an old ticket, torn seasons ago at the turnstiles, ketchup-stained and folded in a jar where I keep the most personal memorabilia. All is not lost. It really did happen:

Tottenham Hotspur 3, Sunderland 2 (December 2nd, 2005)

Scorers: Whitehead, Mido, Keane, Le Tallec and a late winner by Carrick.

Commitment

Close in on me, move away soon.
Another mouth from a movie.

No heart has beaten me freer
Than the written word.

The Sandwich Board

When and where to use when or where,
That old writer's hocus pocus.

On a sandwich board, the whole city.
Smokily the font is thick and the News accented.

Why this partially public outpour?
severe delays, part closure,
closed,
planned closure, severe delays

So there are literary features happening,
Un-umbrella'd pissed-ons perusing Newsagents,
Downbeat.

The sandwich board is in prostate protest.
If I watch its plastic black limbs and paper body,
The early summers come back and pester.
There the world is an outdoor one, barbeque prised.
A sandwich board beside a picnic bench,
Where my father could be in cricket whites, 
Nursing a Young's Bitter, and
When his children--
A trinity of newly discovered planets--
Buried themselves in chips and Choc Ice.

Here is a sandwich board outside London Victoria,
And on this sandwich board, the whole city.

It's a film prop, the purpose in a New Yorker.
It's a stool, a music stool:
Its lyric of Breaking News self-snared, flip-flapped,
It is in the musicality of wind.

Where a Silk Cut sausage-rolls itself out of flame
At a rain-puddle
A ringtone came, and

When you rang, wrung
The words from me as if the poem
Were a spiracle
For your breathing,
Where and when the blog, for no fault of trying,
Gave itself up, said I AM A FUTURELESS AQUARIUM,

The language became the news, darkly blue in salt water.

Let Me In (2010)

Above: Lina Leandersson & Kare Hedebrant in Let The Right One In, 2008. Below: Chloe Moretz & Kodi Smit-McPhee in Let Me In, 2010.









*

(Dir. Matt Reeves, 2010)

The first two blunders in Let Me In occur before the opening sequence has even finished:

1) Making changes to the narrative (of Let The Right One In) for the sake of nothing else but change.

2) Shouting at everyone that this is now about the United States of America - by pistol-starting with evangelists, with an epic orchestral score, and with a glaringly propped TV blaring out a patriotic speech made by a former President.

Let Me In is Matt Reeves's certain remake of the very special, uncertain Let The Right One In (2008). Both films borrowed their stories from Lindqvist's airportly novel about a girl-vampire's friendship with first her elderly helper, and later his replacement: a boy who is bullied at school and is struggling at the latch of puberty. The action has moved from Stockholm to New Mexico. Self-preservation is the challenge facing Eli (now Abby) and Oskar (now Owen), who must overcome the threats posed by their impulses and those of their enemies. What they don't have to deal with on screen is mortality, the Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart crisis. And not even prodigy actors Chloe Moretz (Kick-Ass) or Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road) can make this film fly. The faintly sketched community, the need for one genre only, and even the emptied significance of the snow, make for a missable, wet thug of a movie. All the androgyny and irony in Let The Right One In has been subject to bloodsucking. Reeves transports the impressive terror of his Cloverfield to a wholly foreign project, without a second thought.

There is no real pain, loneliness or consolation detectable in Moretz and Smit-McPhee's behaviour. Probably their talents are let down by a contender for most unnecessary adapted screenplay in history. If this were a TV movie, it would be worth flicking channels during each scene of dialogue. Never creepy, because it is never allowed to sit still and scare, Let Me In is another contradictory product of recession cinema; culture cannot afford the collapse of the movie industry, yet pointless remakes such as this one demand violent reviewing. The computer improvements on the climbing and killing skills of a vampire, and on the abruptness of fire, are cheap resorts to satisfy. From ten minutes in I wanted out, and for the world to go back to Thomas Alfredson's beautiful reimagination of a bland book.

The author Salman Rushdie has sought to debunk the mythical law that books are better than their screen adaptations. I wonder if he has read and seen Let The Right One In - a fragile conch of storytelling, an intimacy polished by a second pair of hands, but colonised and crushed in a third grip. This book to film to film-remake process is time consuming. Rarely is great art found crushed on either side by disappointment.

Answer

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. 

"To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless--of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here--that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse."

"That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?"

Robin Williams as John Keating, Dead Poets Society

The Social Network (2010)

* * * *

(Dir. David Fincher, 2010)

Some day Jesse Eisenberg will win an Oscar; precocious yet again, the twenty seven year-old deserves a nomination for his star turn in David Fincher's The Social Network. Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale, Adventureland) is Mark Zuckerberg, the overwrought and disputed creator of Facebook. From a meeting room where lawyers and Harvard rivals are resolving a crisis of plagiarism, the film's lense abreacts the hard work, genius and ugly social cortex that founded Facebook.

There is a problem right away since, at first thought, a movie about the making of any website promises little entertainment, comedy or tragedy. However the event (the creation) is invaluable to so many people whether they would like to admit it or not. Just type a few words into a search engine to collect the precipitated ironies - status-updates, pages, blogs, groups and their diary plans each determined to celebrate this film. In Zuckerberg, The Social Network makes an artist out of the computer-geek stereotype. The scene where Bill Gates delivers a speech to Harvard undergrads - Zuckerberg, part of the student crowd - is submerged in transcendence and greatness, avoiding the normal flaccid description of what constitutes inspiration. At his best, Eisenberg acts alert and exhausted moments as impressively as Ben Whishaw's John Keats (Bright Star, 2009) or Sam Riley's Ian Curtis (Control, 2007). Any breaking good news about Facebook has Zuckerberg rocking to sleep in the daylight, before the flutes of champagne reappear, the desktops restart and his brainstorming resumes.

If the argument is won by the end of the film, Zuckeberg hasn't moved a social muscle. Fincher flies the flag for his subject (and Zuckerberg has reciprocated, saying his portrayal by Eisenberg was "really cool"). When the idea takes off, he is advised but never herded by Sean Parker, the creator of the music piracy service, Napster, and a role comfortably acted by Justin Timberlake. Partisan for sure, but nonetheless objective. For objectivity is really an unerring search for truth.

The truth is that an overrated, failed romance between young people is what prompted Facebook, the social networking site which IDs and advertises our intimacy. This season there is a movie able to keep surprising its audience without borrowing the language of Halloween or of the Hollywood zeitgeist, against whom this is a small victory.