Wednesday, February 28, 2007

all fingers and thumbs

further to the post below - the coming of the apocalypse, i like to keep it light - a baby has been born with twelve fingers and eleven toes and a frog in china has been found with eight legs.
the rise of the mutants, i'm all for it.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

colossal squid

bejesus! the wonder of it all- teenareena tell me you’re there. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6383665.stm
in other news as anyone noticed the eerie flux of variable-limbed animals being born recently ? i’m not a religious type by any means but – unless i read this in a neil gaiman book somewhere – wasn’t an impending apocalypse meant to begin with similar portents ? two headed lambs in dorset, a four legged duckling yesterday, a pig with two heads last month, today a giant squid in new zealand - "one expert said calamari rings made from it would be like tractor tyres"…..cower in fear brief mortals….

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

story two# the emperor of white noise

Above, a dark sky studded with stars, below, the mire of puddles. Beyond late and getting later, it was now early and the shadows curdled in muted light. They called him the Emperor of White Noise, the King of Sound. He took me to his room and showed me sonorous notes in vast, sonic booms. Seventy thousand records, and not one of them contained music.
I'd asked if they were all sound effect records and he'd replied, oh yes. Shivering through Artic Tundra 4 and crouching beneath the velvet swoop of A Plane Leaving the Tarmac he'd looked at me, eyes glittering behind the oversized lenses he wore. Asked me if I wanted to hear something really powerful. Something he'd made himself.
Before I could answer he'd pulled down a freight of equipment and smiled a raw grin. As I'd lent back on his filthy bedcovers he told me not to worry.
At first, there was nothing, and then a mooching slump through the speakers, dense sweet musk, barely noise at all. Smelting of sound, I raised my head and told him.
Vanilla ice cream. He nodded.
The next one. Slight and luminous, full of shrykull shards, scrooching and mimble, I almost put my hands to my head. He was nodding as if he understand, but the sound was furflous, a neon blue ten watt bulb strobing and straking.
It's the moon. Yes, he'd replied, a full quarter.
I'd asked him how and he'd replied that he knew sound.
We took the equipment to the garden where the moon turned our shadows to bone. The later the hour, the clearer the resonance and so we poured the night in through the filters. It oozed in black shleems and crooked murms, revealing the shape of the hours.

Friday, February 16, 2007

making hangovers my bitch

a quick sweep of the eyes and once over my shoulder, i’m hungover and it makes me nervous – i’ve dispensed with the usual - the shakes, the sweats, the bleary-eyed hang dog look and gone directly to the heart of it, to the fear. how this manifests itself is sweet, heavy doses of homesickness, enough to make me consider moving back to the badlands of cornwall, almost exactly ten years after i left. the place I struggled against and fought to leave for so many of my teenage years now seems almost painfully appealing. even a picture of trago mills makes me heave an unnecessarily melodramatic sigh, although that may just be the twilight zone of my hangover.
talking of twilight zones have you ever had the uncomfortable feeling that the mother evil is not a pair of eyes in a dark window (unless they’re jim davidson’s dead, cold eyes, but if he was peering in through my window i’d imagine i was in some sort of maudlin nightmare, and slap myself awake or at least senseless) but the headline which just caught my wizened old eyes on the news website – ‘wolf loose in cornwall’ – perhaps the headline with the biggest potential for a horror comedy i’ve ever seen. pint down the slaughtered lamb, anyone ?

*i’ve just read that the wolf has been recaptured (unharmed) by armed police – tranquiliser darts one, wolf nil*