Interrogation

You a believer in the unexplained Marlowe?

I've often had experiences I couldn't explain … or recall, for legal purposes.

So you fancy yourself a comedian?

If by that you mean behind my mile-wide smile I'm bleeding tears internally, well, yeah, my tap leaks? What of it?

So murder's okay with you?

I'll ask the next passing Samaritan when he walks on by with his cheek turned windward.

How about you thinking about doing the right thing?

I think about about it all the time and what good it does when expedience trumps the king.

Who's the king Marlowe?

I forget but once we idealised the judgement thing.

Idealised?

We - some of us - realised that certain self-confessed players don't like playing and preferred to rig the game.

Words of Advice to the Stars (Part 2)

On the Red-Carpet 

Women: overweight is really only acceptable if you represent a minority suffixed by [blank]-American and have some actual acting or singing talent or are a British actress over forty who's done Shakespeare or a Ken Loach, kitchen-sink melodrama set somewhere in the wife-beating North of England or anywhere in the narco-states of Scotland or Wales. Even if you can't see the camera: hand-on-hip, tilted in side-thinning-profile with leading foot forward at all times. Whore shoes – high-rise stilettos – and as much side-boob as possible (without revealing the tell-tale enhancement surgery scars). Only go frontal cleavage reveal if your chest doesn't look like the asymmetric ribbed caging of a tiny monkey cage which has had its bars bent on one side where if fell off a rickshaw and got run over by a school bus. Opening-fingered, tiny-flex baby-wave every time you see a camera flash.


Men: you should try to achieve the debonair look Donald Trump imagines he sees when looking in the mirror (though obviously not the tangerine dream, omnidirectional thinning-hair sculpted actuality). If you lean to the Obama-hugging left (which is most of you), just imagine Robert Redford examining old photos of himself instead.

Words of Advice to the Stars (Part 1)

Exercise 

Women: yoga, pilates or yogalates are acceptable workout sessions to be “caught” leaving – kick-boxing is fine if you're cultivating “edge”, but remember: toned is attractive; HD muscles are for men and seafood restaurants only. Always be seen exiting the gym/studio holding a next-generation mobile phone, a bottle of water and keys to an expensive sports car – ideal colour black or silver (seriously – no bicycles). With regards to the bottled water, it should not be full; nor should the brand label be facing towards the paparazzi, unless, of course, you have a sponsorship deal. Make sure it is just water and not one of those vitamin-juice-flavoured variety – it shows you are serious about hydration. Don't go cheap and, even without the label on prominent display, they'll know by the bottle shape. Layered two-tone Lycra is the optimal wear, avoid garish patterns and horizontal stripes and, for the love-of-god, no sweat patches and fix your make up before leaving: you want to look like you work out and not like you've been working out. Spray tan by all means, but after the “workout” - you don't want to look like a chocolate cake left out in the rain. Keep rib-thin, only risk the fat if you've got an exercise video deal or just had a baby – I mean LITERALLY just had a baby (make sure the caesarian stitching is covered and not seeping).

Men: pecs out, shorts hung low at the waist but go full Brazilian – the spider-legs look is perv-creepy and you really should aim for the "clinical" look that invokes the porn-star imaginings of both the ladies, male homosexualists and the and bi- and tri-curious. Underarm hair is acceptable but shouldn't look like a roosting nest for pterodactyls. Styled facial shadow is mandatory; though you don't want to look like you just didn't bother to shave, but you also don't want to look like you didn’t bother trimming. Go baggy, long-leg shorts, but not too baggy, leave a hint of the budge-smuggling-bulge; enhance if needs be but not with actual live avian prosthetics. Unlike the ladies, we want to see you in action: pumping, flexing, squatting … the whole nine yards. Feel free to sweat, but don't go car wash: sleek and slippery: not monsoon surfing (a light oiling with Vaseline or extra-virgin oil will achieve the desired effect). And men, leaving on a motorbike (sans head safety-gear) is acceptable; indeed, preferable to the car – again, no push-peddles, though it can work for lesbians or those women targeting that demographic because of their “perceived” tom boyishness (slightly masculine jaw-line). Always use tan beds and not the spray – it tends to smudge when Vaseline is applied over the top; leave the spray for face-only, slicked-hair and tux red-carpet events. And men, finally, stick to track and weight training, avoid yoga or pilates or yogalates unless you're filming a rom-com or musical or are Woodrow Tracy "Woody" Harrelson and are cultivating “outside the mainstream conventionality” (and have, on occasion in the “liberal press”, supported pot-smoking as a medicinal herb for glaucoma relief and private beach parties).

Junk Diet

The funny thing about progress is the paucity of its evidential basis – there seems to be things we can point to: technology for one; then other things, more nebulous, like social advancement, improvements in education, collective wisdom, etc., which are not. Are we smarter than the ancient Greeks? Are the more modern Greeks smarter than their fore-bearers? What brought this brooding on is the concern, while flipping through my selective collection of books, music and videos, of the danger we are losing – collectively speaking – in the miasma of the vast information depository of the Internet – the battle to discriminate against trivia. Trivia is a brief entertainment – and I love it as such – but is not the necessary diet of fruit, meat and vegetables. And progress is a concept that is often used to eclipse the question of what is good. They are not synonymous.

Lie to Me

I always had a problem with the subconscious – not my own so much (at least not for the purposes of this discussion); rather the notion: the notion that there lies within our minds a hidden – an entirely autonomous – subterranean mantel from which raw material erupts when it reaches a critical mass. I think my problem lies with the idea that the “subconscious” often forms an uneasy synonymity with the “unconscious” – uneasy for there is a certain asymmetry between the respective concepts: the “subconscious” functionally coexists alongside consciousness, while the “unconscious” suggest the higher functioning of consciousness has somehow slipped off-line. The oddity about both is that there is the residual suspicion that there is something – some thread – that connects both the “subconscious” and “unconscious” and with consciousness. When we say someone is “unconscious”, we don't necessary mean they are no longer sentient in the manner of, say, a rock, rather, that is kind of suspended availability; a lack off formal access; not necessarily that they are comatose, but they are not picking up on something; they are unaware. Similarly with “subconscious”, there is also the suggestion of a certain type of restricted access or, at least, an access that is triggered by more unconventional means. In other words, on closer inspection, the prefixes “sub” and “un” do not denote a total absence of consciousness, rather different states of its being. Take the notion of “self-deception” - there's an implication in some people's mind that there is a fully analogous process at work with when we deceive ourselves as with other people. When we deceive other people, we are hiding something from them, be that by means of slight-of-hand-distraction – hiding and / or lying – employing the various arts of deception. The problem with self-deception or, more precisely, comparing self-deception to the deception of a third party (or parties), is that, in that case of the self, one can at best avoid a truth one intends to deceive oneself about, for the hand of concealment isn't hidden from you – it is yours: the left hand cannot be separated from the doings of the right hand and vice versa, as every good politician knows; however, they also know that the truth can be hidden behind the ideologies of left and right.

As Above, So Below

The etymological derivation of the word “understand”, if memory holds true, derives – quite simply – from, “to stand under”; therefore, it would appear to be merely a contraction of sorts; however, the further question posed – or at least implied – by such an exposition, distils to the obvious: “under what?” Let me rewind for a moment and furnish the circumstance from which inspiration forged the grounds by which I now expound forth upon. Whilst I live close to the centre of a largish city, the street lighting is intermittent and stretches of unlit open spaces – mostly by virtue of historical inheritance in the form of Victorian planned parks or the abandoned topological relics of demolished once cathedral-like expanses of industrial premises – permit the observation of the circling celestial bodies wedged in the gravitational firmament of the void, especially during the winter months, when a crystal night bestows: the heavens, theologically speaking: the very same silent light show viewed across the civilised stage of space and time. To stand, one presumes, is to do so upon grounds of sufficient surety such that one may, at least momentarily, rest assured, but what inverse logic of perversity would have us root – again, at least metaphorically – our epistemic knowledge – the confidence to be found therein – in what lies in the distant stellar atrium above us and from which we ought draw down upon? Space in the abstract has or up nor down.

The Entropy Garden

What time I had entered the Garden I could not say. Time would come later, in a manner of speaking, but so would the allied matter of from whence-forth, since, an entrance usually implies an exit, as well as a timing. Such things, as I have already suggested, were not an early concern and I had not - until my partner had persuaded me also to listen to the sibilant wisdom of the sickle-eyed serpent and only then, as the event horizon of experience expanded and swallowed me whole - noticed, that for every tiny ordering I introduced into the chaos, I had somehow added to the overall increase in disorder. The Garden was, is and will be time. What let it be, let it go and remains without the hand of measure and, upon that, the snake was silent.

SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSH!

Framing the last

I could do with that long sleep right about now. Is it worth holding on to find out it's not worth holding on, for the sake of vindicating a long-held suspicion to spite the scepticism of my scepticism? Forced to visualise that hula-hoop of pain circulating around my torso threatening evacuation – soul ejaculation – from the body. Internal organs were punctured and flesh seared in the space of jumbled reason that pitched the physics of the muzzle flash, seemingly registering after the knock-down force of impact, as an after-image. Reminder. The importance of ordering events now? When I was in training they said: take pain as the body's run-it-up the flag-pole signal it was healing itself, a cauterising purge if you like; of course, that was just a self-propagandising prop – the self-administered sugared placebo – to avoid confronting the thought that pain is also a sign of serious, sometimes mortal, injury, but only the true believer sees it as the Elastoplast between the unknowable hope and actual medical attention. I had a neat little speech planned out, well semi – the key points; I like to leave room for improvisation – about how this was all a reversal of fortune; far from being the failure it appeared, his hand had been forced and framed with attempted murder or, failing that, actual murder; the success of my little enterprise wasn't dependent on that differentiation, etc. Hopefully, subsequent actions and reactions would speak louder than the words of explanation I was failing to ...