A Real Cliff-hanger (TEXT)

 Posted by at 8:20 pm  Atelier  Comments Off
Aug 282012
 

Come to the window.

Why?

Please, sir. Quick!

What is it?

Look, look. It is her!

Who?

The OUTLAW!

How can you tell?

See, there are the banners with her name on it; Missy whatever she’s called.

Missy OUTLAW. But she is not alone.

No, there is the crowd.

It is unimaginable.

There must be thousands.

More than than.

Millions then.

Billions rather.

Oh dear, I am not feeling well. I need to sit down.

Are you all right?

No, I think it is my heart.

The Catastrophe Games

 Posted by at 8:18 pm  Atelier  Comments Off
Aug 282012
 

You don’t make it easy on yourself, do you? Trying Open-heart Surgery to get to the truth, trying to expose the sinews of veracity and the chambers of truthfulness, as if some kind of operation could provide you with the answers to all the questions you have been asking over the years, the big questions, like – If there is a God, what has been up to these last years and decades (just to keep to the last 100 years), and why do good thing happen to bad people, and the other way round.

Later post-operatively, “I love my life” you scrawl, the last thought brought to a shuddering, heat-stopping halt, flat line, sending the emergency team running for the defibrillator pads, and looking for the big needle to put straight into the heart, adrenalin, The truth drug to kick you back into life.

“Where’s my heart?” you ask and there is the sense of people searching round in a dark cellar or locker room down below, rummaging about, looking for something old and long discarded like a childhood dream, an old favourite.
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What has happened?

 Posted by at 12:42 pm  Atelier  Comments Off
Aug 272012
 

Who was it who came in last night? I definitely felt there was somebody skulking in the shadows, but I felt unable to move or to put it in slightly different words, I thought, I believed that I should not move, or that if I did attempt to move I would be enveloped in overwhelming pain. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that after an operation – open-heart surgery – lasting many hours or perhaps days, that I would not be able to move. I pretended to be asleep, trying to breathe as if I was asleep, trying to breathe as I thought that somebody who is really asleep would be breathing; slow and steady with an occasional snuffle thrown in.
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Yes please but no intellectual growth, thank you

 Posted by at 2:37 pm  Atelier  Comments Off
Aug 242012
 

When did the US Republican Party become a bunch of first-rate stand-up comedians? They are such sublime performers that they are able to appear as luckless, accident prone losers, likely as not to have recently been let out for a long weekend by a well meaning mental health facility. But we know these faultless performances have been honed to perfection over months and years of dedicated practice. But don’t worry, here in the good old UK, the land of golden medals, the land of ‘if they can do it so can everybody else’, you know who I mean: the so-called Conservative Party, because they know where to look for what to do next. It’s called getting rid of bureaucracy by changing labels and . . . well we like these brand new bureaucracies, their names redolent of profit and efficiency, the wages lower than the minimum it’s possible to live on.
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Be Marginal, Be a Hero – TEXT

 Posted by at 10:50 pm  Atelier  Comments Off
Aug 222012
 

She wants to come in.

OUTLAWS who cannot fulfil their obligations often do.

We have found her sniper rifle abandonned, and a note.

I am not interested. She has to answer for her own reality, unless…

What?

Is it a suicide note?

No, it isn’t.

Well, in that case I think we can leave Frederica to sweat it out.

She has however made a proposal.

As I said, bargains can be problematic.

This one is different. There is a tape with her note; a demo tape, along with some lyrics. It is a song.

Do you like it?

Actually I do, very much.

What is it called?

Embrace.

Quite marginal. Will it sell?

I hope so.

Esperanca.

Or the other meaning, ‘mayfly’

Being Even More Brazilian – ARCHIVE

 Posted by at 10:42 pm  Atelier  Comments Off
Aug 222012
 

For your ‘Protest Songs’ autobiography follow the headings Formation, Fame, Fall (imprisonment), Exile, Return, and finally Memoir.

FORMATION. Are you one of the ’64 Generation’? Or is your founding year 1968? Or maybe later? My formation year was ’73 (September 11 to be precise): Verdade Tropical [1.], Tropical Truth.

For Tropicalismo, the iconoclastic musical and countercultural force that flourished in Brazil at the height of the dictatorship in the 1960’s and 1970’s, 1964 was ground zero. This was the year of the US backed military coup, which became the blueprint for others that followed later, and the ideological testing ground for the new political bipolarity (authoritarian government in a constant state of emergency against the invidious forces of social democracy and all those others who “spend our money on other people”).
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Will you be requiring anaesthetic?

 Posted by at 11:03 am  Atelier  Comments Off
Aug 182012
 

Will you be requiring anaesthetic? He’s asking me whether I shall be requiring anaesthetic! Yes, I will definitely be requiring anaesthetic. Would I survive without anaesthetic? The shock. The pain.

A thought sidled into my brain: bargains can be problematic. And a further thought in the form of a question: was this the moment to bail out? Then there was a third internal event: a memory of the voice on the telephone implying (what was implied and what was made explicit – what were the actual words?) something about cancellation fees. The fourth internal event was a physiological reaction: a sudden deathly chill and at the same time beads of sweat burst out of every pore on every square centimetre of my skin.

I hadn’t told anybody about what I was doing: the alarming visit to my GP; my feverish internet research; my default antipathy to the socialised medicine of the NHS; the celebratory dinner after it was all done; my speech about the glories and the necessity of privatisation of the wasteful health services.

A hasty exit through the window was looking very attractive together with the consequent hasty exit from this life that somehow or other had suddenly become very problematic.

 

Olympic Surgery

 Posted by at 2:35 pm  Atelier  Comments Off
Aug 172012
 

Scrunched up, squeezed against the window, not much room to breathe, writing haphazardly in the miniscule notebook with a pencil that would soon be impossible to write with: one and a half inches of hopeless innuendo, mounds of oxymorons, overspiced, overseasoned and the coffee like dishwater. Not that we see dishwater much these days given that all of us (well, almost all of us) have invested in the labour saving delights of a dishwasher. All unpleasantness (like dishwater) is rendered invisible.

Pushed into a corner, trying to remember first times and first lines, trying to make a fresh start, trying to remember the headings, trying to remember the excitement of a week or ten days ago . . . what was it like to be caught in Olympic hysteria, amazed at our propensity for tears.
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