POLICE DO HIM IN DIFFERENT VOICES

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ANDREW AND STEVEN, THOSE AMUSING BROTHERS 

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MINDLESS EXPLORATION - the bedroom, Hermit (Chris McQueer, 2025)

This isn’t your bedroom but you might’ve stepped through it in the day. Carpets that squelch when they don’t crunch. Space Marines on the floor like an honour guard for a rotten chicken carcass. Damp clothes moulding up the wall. Mebbe it was a friend’s house. Mebbe it felt like this.

(Chaos tree, Ian Miller, 1980)

Depending on your age, the difference is that they wurnae in there with you. Y’know, weird cunts aff the internet. Excep mebbe they wur! Mind that lassie who ran away wi’ the boy she met on a forum then at the funfair? Aye, annaw. Was she sixteen or seventeen? Was he twenty five or thirty nine? Did they get married or did somebody end up getting minced? Point is, monsters shape themselves tae the times. 

The bedroom in this novel and the wee incel guys who live there have goat most of the attention so far, and right enough. There’s research there. But whit aboot the adults? The maw keepin’ everywhere that’s no the room spotless, no knowin’ how tae go beyond the threshold. Older wummin wae folded arms and greasy egg recipes squaring up tae cunts, totally fearless. Guys chasing fifty trying tae smuggle a party bag in the dancing. These aren't your family, but you know them, just like you know thae curtain twitchin’ cunts outside. Used tae need actual curtains fur that. Now there’s the Metaverse.

It’s a heavy lonely book, Hermit. Moments where you feel like a wee guy cracking off freezer ice intae supermarket coke wi’ yur pal, or like a younger wean wi’ a skint knee, cryin’ fur yer maw. Shame there’s still bastards out there trying tae turn that ache intae a weapon. 

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Magazine Dreams: A coda

Memories are mercurial. Nostalgia is a crutch and a weapon. The past self is whittled and reshaped to match the current incarnation.

All my formative experiences, unrecorded, undocumented. Barely a photo exists. I didn’t keep diaries. Aside from the shifting sands of my consciousness, it’s often physical objects that anchor me to points in time. Material connectors to the worm casts of my previous selves.

Magazines hold an incredible psychic weight to those who came of age in the late 20^TH Century. In information-scarce times, magazines were potent objects of sacred pop-cultural knowledge. Read from cover-to-cover, dissected, imbibed. Drained of their nutrients by hungry, inquisitive minds hellbent on ephemeral erudition.  

SELECT was my music magazine. I kept up with the inky zealous scrapping of the music weeklies religiously, but SELECT had a pop vibrancy and attitude that clicked with me. The writing was good, or at least good enough for a teenager in the hinterlands looking for rope ladders into a brighter future. This wasn’t joining a conversation; this was receiving sermons from the mount.

The April 1993 issue, which has passed into mild notoriety for a certain generation, was one of the first few I bought. Having previously mostly listened to third-hand tapes of rave-era DJ sets, this was my dawning comprehension of musical scenes and allegiances.

I paid no special heed to the jingoistic slant of that issue. But I do remember being fascinated by the bands that were identified as being part of this confected quasi-movement. Pulp, St Etienne, Denim, The Auteurs and Suede.

I had no idea of what was coming, in all its complicated, thrilling and regrettable shapes. A cultural domino rally that’s still happening. 

These pieces have been an exorcism, a positive excavation of a personal moment in time, to consider the moment before. 

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Ghost hunting in Lark Lane

Back in Toxteth. My grandparent’s pub isn’t there anymore. Razed after a later landlord got shot for the second time. There always were a smattering of crooks - the latest kit, trainers, Walkmans and that, but it was also vital community resource. In front of the replacement care home I eat Parma Violets from my son’s Halloween haul then walk up to the Police Station on Lark Lane.

Me dad was a policeman. He left security apparatus in me, fear activated, fear generating. I can feel it at the summer protests. Eyes on the fuzz as much as the fash. I am easy to control and the future needs us to be defiant. Lark Lane was where my parents dated. It’s just possible he worked in this station.

The organisers have activities, Victorian parlour continuity. I’m not averse to table tipping, it’s the demands ‘Make it hot, make it cold, speak to us, move something’ tripping over each other, no time given to comply. Hectoring.

No response so they get nasty. Winding the spirits up, trying to goad them into angry reaction.  And I don’t like the way they are talking about centuries dead sex workers in case anyone’s wondering what stage of woke I’m at.

I don’t understand what they think ghosts are. Souls who couldn’t pass on trapped in now? Incursions that allow access to lives 100 years ago? Whatever they believe in this is no way to communicate. One of the organisers is an ex-prison guard. I bail at the first fag break.

Walking back disappointed I realise I got what I wanted. I’m late diagnosed neurodivergent. That stream of contradictory instructions, the demands to act a certain way for no reason except to satisfy the demand. That’s the Police. This is useful knowledge for my ongoing exorcisms.

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The Frighteners - (Peter Jackson, 1996)

A psychic con man fights dread spectres from the past with the help of a recently widowed doctor and his ghost pals.

Peter Jackson’s ignored family friendly horror comedy that preceded his descent into debauched Hobbitery. The film was a commercial flop, the result of a rescheduled release where it opened against Independence Day and got its teeth resoundingly Welcomed to Earth out the back of its head. 

The Frighteners is readily Zemeckis influenced but there’s also fun traces of the good old splatter days lurking in the corners, if you know where to look. Beyond this the film endures as a satisfying story with engaging performances and computer FX that were restrained enough to not look fuck-ugly today.  

Michael J Fox is the lead giving an understated and solid performance, a necessary straight man balancing out the film's more heightened characters. Jake Busey is great as the exuberant maniac Johnny Bartlett, whose serial killer obsession drives him to a bloody rampage in the 1960s, back before podcasting was a viable alternative to therapy and homicide. 

But the real show stealer here is Jeffrey Combs and his underappreciated ability to attach charisma to otherwise morally depraved characters, a magnetism Jackson emphasises by filling the screen with his twitching phiz at every opportunity.

Combs plays the sweaty weirdo FBI agent Milton Dammers, a sort of no-fap Fox Mulder, intense, damaged and indoctrinated. Combs suggested the character's greasy fash haircut and black contacts, giving him hues of SS Sharks and dank basement teenagers. It’s a portrayal that prangs off all the hollering monsters sliming from behind craven keyboards into positions of power, an uncomfortable authenticity you don’t get with the films other born-bad monsters. Combs shows Dammers as risible and pathetic, he’s a fool to be laughed at for sure, but with the constant reminder that he’s too dangerous to elicit sympathy.

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VINCE STAPLES IS A POET OF PREGNANCY TERMINATIONS

Today I want to talk about poetic jiujitsu, what I call, what I am living, is - with respect to the dead Tory doyenne of postwar secular verse - the Reverse Larkin

Philip Larkin was a university librarian with a huge penchant for 50s African-American jazz as well as - really - the defining poet (writer?) of the latter half of Britain’s 20th century; more importantly, he provided the subtitle to Arkham Asylum; A Serious House on Serious Earth.

When I became a public librarian in one of Britain’s most deprived areas (culture’s not a dirty word, I try and say, displaying my gay samurai plays by Yukio Mishima to a largely hostile or, worse, disinterested audience) my English teacher neighbour gave me a shot of John Sutherland’s Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me https://www.weidenfeldandnicolson.co.uk/titles/john-sutherland-5/monica-jones-philip-larkin-and-me/9781474620215/

Even your reviews there give a picture of Larkin, or Horse-Lover as I am minded to call him in homage to the other literary great K Dick and Valis, that is extraordinarily bad, basically Reform stylee fash SHITE, well:

US DO OPPOSITE

Another Poetry War is kicking off, and very enjoyable it is too, timely that last week’s hero Ray Vaughn gets to be so again - this is more Image United or low-level than last year’s 15 years in the making Crisis on Infinite Earths - https://www.xxlmag.com/joey-badass-ray-vaughn-diss-songs/

RED/BLACK DENNIS/MENACE MINNIE/MINX

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The Big Switch aka Strip Poker (Pete Walker, 1968)

England’s most disreputable filmmaker had a gift for getting the keys to interesting locations. The Big Switch is a balsa wood scaffold for moving the camera between tight corners in various permissive interiors.

Soho’s dive bars and bachelor pads are squeezed under the street, over furnished with blank-eyed, lank-haired blondes disrobing before bored heavies. Mod cons and deep, high-backed armchairs are caught mid-reach by an American vision of ease and luxury that’s failing to unhook prewar dentures from the flesh of its hip. 

Dark stages set for strip teases while the dancefloors twist and gangsters move the girls into back rooms, cut to overlit studios where more bare bodies are pushed around by buttoned up ad men and art directors. The soft furnishings and nylon curtains hung on the wall are the only clothes Walker's women are permitted to wear, permanently exposed and pinned in place as no-one in particular orders them to drop their knickers again.

Then from Soho down to Brighton, stepping first into the apartments at Marine Gate, opened the day after Finnegans Wake was published. Its international modernist language is all too comprehensible, peeled walls, jutting open stairs, brick-effect brickwork and mini bars, sliding doors permanently half-open. The artist Percy Shakespeare, who painted the middle-classes at play throughout the 30s, was killed when Marine Gate was struck by an air raid in 1943.

The final shootout tracks into the doomed West Pier, where the arcade interiors and antique amusements are troubled again by being outside the land itself, and an offshore downpour gives the moment a bleak, sudden savagery: a woman in a raincoat shot, fallen and forgotten in the corner of the screen. The ghost train showdown squeezes combed-over bank managers with macs and berettas into carriages built for children, and the backstage machineries of leisure coalesce into view - abandoned by time, fire to come and water underfoot. 

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Anxiety of Influence

I keep thinking of the meaning and etymology of the word "influencer". It comes from the same root as "influenza", the Latin influentia, and it originally meant a fluid that supposedly came from the stars and affected people on Earth. It was how astrology was meant to work, and you can still see that in its current meanings -- it means the power to change things, especially without forcing the change, and even at a distance.

You know, magic.

When you're putting ideas out there in the culture, you're trying to change the world in some way, but every time we change the world, we change ourselves.

I do a moderately well-known podcast about music, and a couple of years ago I did episodes on two relatively obscure songs. A few months later I heard both those songs used in a TV episode, and had to wonder if it was because of me. I decided it was just a coincidence, then a year or so later I found out the show's creator is a listener. Not only that, he's since told me that in his next film he'll be putting in a song as a deliberate reference.

When you're thinking the TV is sending you a message personally, that's normally a sign of a real problem. When you get *confirmation* of it, it shakes your reality. You now live in a world where it's not vanity and the song *is* about you, at least sometimes.

Creating stuff on the Internet feels like shouting into the void. But sometimes you hear an echo, and sometimes the void talks back. And I think quite a few people are calling up things that I'm not sure they can put back down.

Maybe being an influencer is a very, very bad idea.