A Jade Terrace

“The more fraudulently materialist amongst you will have realised something about the present. But I’m going to let the rest of you work out what it is for yourselves. Perhaps a field trip followed by an intense period of data collection and accompanying analysis, will help clear up any remaining mysteries for you. There might even be a statistic in there somewhere! It’d be nice wouldn’t it? To purge the unsavory penumbra that still lurks out there, in people’s heads- in the collective ‘consciousness’. To wean the great fat petis-bourgeois off their attachment to ‘well you never know…’ and ‘just wait and see…’ and ‘it’s just one of those things…’ and in a miraculous slight-of hand replace them with the wonders of knowledge, prediction and classification. Wouldn’t it be nice? Finally to prise off these platitudes that cling to the outer reaches of the social mind like limpet shells- cladding it in a hard coating of mystification:

_________________________________________________________

Dance like no one is listening. Live like you’ve never been heart. Sing like no one is listening. FEAR LESS HOPE MORE HATE LESS LOVE MORE (and good things will be yours). ‘Do not go where the path may lead go instead where there is no path and leave a trail’. DON’T WAIT FOR THE PERFECT MOMENT. TAKE THE MOMENT. AND MAKE IT PERFECT. ‘Remember that you are loved for the way you are, don’t try to be different’ DON’T GO THROUGH LIFE, GROW THROUGH LIFE. ‘When you look back on life you’ll regret the things you didn’t do more than the one’s that you did’#YOYOLOYOLOYOLOYOLOYOLOYOLOYOLOYOLO.  LIV E   W E L L________L A U G H  O F T E N________ L O V E  A L W A Y S________________________________________________

…………………………………………………………………………………………..….And so they multiply and multiply and quadruple the multiples, waging a recursive war against the ability of people to think reasonably and diachronically and reflect and achieve a critical distance and remove themselves from the picture and become interested in anything other than their own gradual decay. Don’t you agree? These new Marxian inversions aren’t idioms really, more like injunctions, a fresh set of indomitable demands which overdub the stern, Q.E, tenor of the Old set with a New whining, ankle-pulling, sycophantic voice of unreason. ‘Oh trust me you’ll regret that you regretted so many things when you’re old and decrepit, a walking anachronism who will have literally hours in-between episodes of the Archer’s in which all you have left to do is recollect and regret and forget and regret your own timidity and frivolity and lack of meaningful commitment to anything other than your tan’ Sentiment and desire spared down lovingly to their bare neccesities. They get the best of me. Those bare necessities. The language is being steadily dismantled. Its getting structurally gutted from the inside and daubed with  a recoat on the front façade, like the architectural footnotes in the City of London. Left standing, not on their terms but on ‘ours’- the old guard jostling incongruously between curtain walls and Nero’s. Pulled out, hollowed, and then slotted back into the high street with their spines facing outwards- lost in the forgotten content of the sprawling bookshelf. But, I mean, you knew all that yourselves…’

A bird flies into a mirror

           

       The unhappy child sits drawing frenetically in his pew. It is a long mahogany pew sculpted at both ends and stiff backed, plundered once in the annals of family history from some nameless chapel. The felt-tip in his sweaty clutch races up and down the surface of the page, and from the cryptic marks he makes alien lifeforms begin to become discernible. His drawings hold together for him in a finely wrought sequence of logical relations, so it is clearer than anything else who exactly are the Baddies and who the Goodies and who the Nondescript, and what that patch there denotes. But whenever he proudly exhibits these micro-worlds to Ms. Ravenscroft during Wet-Play, it becomes apparent from her pitying, indented, smile that she is hopelessly lost- caught adrift in a world without maps. The newly emerging creatures on the page have talons wrested from their convex limbs to clasp their touch-sensitive ray guns, and one spindly, blubbery creature is immersed in a radiation field, suggested by an aggressive march of intersecting ink dashes. To suggest a group of Nondescripts watching the activity in suspense, he begins to grid together on the page 20 quick ovals in overlapping proximity. Clouds are given the most perfunctory treatment of all though, just two spaghetti bundles of scribble in the uppermost regions of the drawing. Splayed across the bureau in front of him, like the wreckage of an incident, are the child’s tools- a litany of multicoloured pens he will not bother to unlid for he prefers the Royal Blue in his hand to every other. It is the most faithful of all the felt-tips, and the least prone to suddenly drying out or cracking under his brutish exertion.

     From out behind the French doors, across the veranda and out on the lawn he hears the laughter of the fat man and his mother at the antics of his younger brother. Then the fat man can be heard chasing his brother in thunderous footsteps around the veranda, whilst his mother wonders aloud where the unhappy child has disappeared off too. Seagulls, distant traffic, the conspiratorial ‘shh’ of an opened bottle top, ants scuttling into the picnic basket and the crinkle of tin foil.  Panting after his exertion, the fatman drops onto the creaking sun lounger on the lawn with his younger brother clasped in his arms, fighting and squealing in pleasure. Ice  glass, muffled conversation, and yet more infuriated seagulls. The unhappy child winces like a stubbed toe at all this confirmation of his own self-imposed exile. ‘But if they could only come in here’, he thinks. The study where he draws is full of dusty sunlight, and a sharp glare of white shoots off a glass on the table where he has imprisoned a spider. It continues to skirt the periphery of it’s prison in a pathetic fashion, unable to accept its sentence of captivity. The unhappy child begins to wriggle in discomfort on the pew, but his legs dangle short of the laminate flooring. The room is stiflingly hot and childhood is unendurably long and in two vicious motions he scores the page in a cross with the Royal Blue dagger.

Be The First To See What You See As You See It.

When you read historical fiction you should extinguish the street-lamps, dull the sound of traffic and consider the conditions that border every sentence on the page- you should try to fathom the grooves of the habitual life within which even the most sordid human expression struggles. The trapped nerve that that is dead creativity vacillates here on the page, making a tendentious offering from the past. But how confident can we be that we have understood that offering correctly? The ephemera of everyday communication encloses a sprawling mass of allusions- every advertisement or editorial or sardonic put-down, contains nods towards certain (assumed) items in the inventory of our collective consciousness. How far can an interpreter go in cataloguing (for instance) the endless conversational idioms of a certain historical epoch before they admit defeat? How accurate or exhaustive can any reconstruction be? Even those who are willing to accept that the past is a subject to peruse and inquire into rather than a clearly identifiable TRUTH awaiting discovery, seem unprepared to tackle the morass of contradictions implied in the idea of a ‘First-Hand-account’. The very action of reportage (however professedly ‘impartial’) is one of distortion, as any experienced anecdotalist will attest to. The peculiar set of inflexions, pauses,grimaces and mimicries with which an anecdote is brought to life is perhaps untranslatable into prose. People are ‘moved to speak’ (in the Quaker tradition) from an ineffable desire- and yet the transcript of their contribution can not be accompanied by a parallel record of the speakers intension. The po-faced insistence on a ‘close reading’ therefore shadows an impossible expectation, namely: that there is a point at which further critique is unnecessary- that the subject, and its heady suffusion of sensations, facts and testimonies, can be for all succeeding generations ‘wrung dry’. Such a work of entire historical anamnesis is a patent absurdity - for it is worth considering that the closer and closer we move to the page the more illegible the print becomes.

The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman

Most historical novels result in a Teleportation Accident, in which the author tries to transport their hero from the immediate present tense in which they were devised to another clearly defined set of over-determining circumstances (usually a war or revolution) against which to test their worth and define their character- yet more often than not this journey results in what Perry Anderson refers to as a ‘tragic collision between historically distinct times and their characteristic social forms. The first chapter of Ned Beuman’s new novel hilariously maps this ‘tragic collision’ by having its protagonist (a hapless, oversexed, Weimar-expressionist set-designer called Egon Loeser) suspend his colleague in the harness of his ‘Teleportation Machine’, whilst trying to stage a play about a 17^th century set designer.

Loeser is an indifferent bystander to the ever-increasing tumult of his surroundings, looking in the other direction as the tide of fascism crests upon him, and much dramatic irony is had at the expense of his myopia. His stubborn resistance to engage in anything remotely political and desperate, trans-continental pursuit of just one shag from the beautiful Adele Hitler (!) are what makes Loeser both the best joke and the greatest tragedy of the text. He also nurtures an obsession with an obscure Venetian set designer, whose magical inventions evoke the mysteries of Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige. During his time spent hung-over in the liberated bohemian hinterland of a Berlin approaching the Third Reich, Loeser marvellously subverts the idea that (in Lukács phrase) History ‘has a direct effect upon the life of every individual’. Despite his upheaval to the United States later on in the book (when his embittered tone started to echo that of Nabokov’s begrudging émigré Pnin) Loeser remains adamant it will not affect him as he continues in his blind, unreciprocated desire for Adele. All of which means he is hardly the most endearing character to spend 357 pages in the company of, however Beauman seems readily aware of this- compensating for his protagonists shortcomings through a feast of riotously inventive subplots and mysteries that converge haphazardly around the disinterested man in the novels centre.

Appropriately for a plot that recurrently turns back to the theatre, there is enough fourth wall disassembling in The Teleportation Accident to please those who (like myself) want to see more formal innovation amongst British writers. In one of the novels best examples of Foster Wallace style self-psychoanalysis, Rackenham (a Dandy-ish doppelganger for Christopher Isherwood) says, “I’ve never seen the point of historical drama. Or historical fiction for that matter. I once thought about writing a novel of that kind, but then I began to wonder what possible patience could the public have for a young man arrogant enough to believe he has anything new to say about an epoch with which his only acquaintance is flipping listlessly through history books on train journeys’. Fact and fiction are interwoven with the delicacy and fluency of a surgeon stitching a wound. Like all the best adherents to the format, historical celebrities such as Brecht, Sartre and Grosz appear only metonymically, in the manner of the Hamlet from ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’. The Po-Mo styling’s’ also include peppering the otherwise richly authentic tone of the narrative with anachronisms, such as when Leoser arrives at an otherwise ubiquitous Berlin ‘warehouse’ party to find everyone taking Ketamine! In the novels coda, ‘Zeit-geisterbahnhöfe’ (a pun on the ‘ghost stations’ that were left abandoned underground, by the fissure of the Berlin wall) Beuman appropriates a device familiar to gamers (who can shape their narratives outcome according to their in-game choices) or Wayne’s World fans but largely unfamiliar to readers: that of the multiple ending. The use of these metafictional tropes can be alienating when the plot seems undeserving of them, however sit perfectly comfortably amid the genre-trespassing modus operandi of Beauman’s writing.

It sprawls from Germany in the early 30’s, via a Pre-war Los Angeles and a Paris full of name-dropping poseurs- with brief sojourns in a dystopian lagoon and Cold War Berlin- and yet Beauman manages to keep his ambitious narrative thematically watertight and rein in any stylistic excesses- resulting in a novel that effortlessly mixes comedy with philosophy with Noir with science fiction in a kind of heartfelt Bricolage. I sincerely hope this bawdy, dense meditation on history and identity graduates from the Booker Longlist to the Shortlist- and that the judges decide reward ambition and innovation rather than mediocrity and stagnation (ahem ).

the “here take this”

It’s a gallant pose really, an offering made on one knee. But at the same time its a proposition not left worrying about a reply, one given without even an expectation of response. Nothing calculated or insincere- it’s strikes me that I’ve found it at last, the fabled ‘good deed’. The real deal! A bona fide article of unsolicited Rightness- and less than a foot away! I look on patiently, voyeuristically, soaking up all the warmth and meaning you can get from close contact with the Good. Upon close inspection it seems uglier… But then again what did I …I’m not sure I even thought…but there’s a perfect geometrical composition to their relationship and its clear that any realignment- even the slightest intervention- would misalign it, would send the whole scene careering off into murky depths of depravity. So I keep the requisite distance, unwilling (or unprepared) to infringe too closely upon something so magnificent. Feeling the fragility of moments such as these leads you to try and sustain them, to tighten the thin veil that separates them from reality. Above the sky bears in low and brooding, with great battleship clouds assembling in its every quarter. The afternoon acquires a pervasive unease, a sense of immanent danger. The rain is dampening my hair but I’m transfixed. Gutters are spewing, window’s are rattled, the lines and lines of washing hung out in the estates are wrenched and wrought in bedraggled postures, the interiors of office blocks, schools and libraries oscillate in great moans as they’re coiled by the repeated gusts of wind, on buses the work-weary nap and press their foreheads to the windows and all around us peoples cheeks flap backwards, with their hats pressed hard to their skulls, their umbrella’s jousting ahead of them and their faces of stoic resistance: fighting the elements to return to their homes….but these two are hermeneutically sealed- entirely detached from the environment. They project out onto the world an impression of complete co-dependency- just an unashamed need for each other so enshrined that if one had the daring to turn away the other would collapse. Which isn’t to say they love or even like each other (it’s way beyond that). Their need shows the faintly resentful nature of every true kind of dependence. Which is the mutual dissatisfaction that comes from knowing you are trapped in the confines of the ‘for better or worse’, left in the poorer end of the spectrum. Each looks at the other in affectionate derision. A man, his dog and their shared bucket of fried chicken. Slowly- agonizingly slowly for the salivating fat Rottweiler at his knees, the skinny bearded man scavenges around in the festering KFC bucket, filled with its glistening crustaceans. Then he finally takes a piece out, first tears off some meat from the carcass for himself before offering the remains down to the dog (who never declines). After every fresh slab is devoured and its bone gnawed away with precision skill, both man and dog begin cleaning their fingers and paws before moving on to the next piece. The gentle lapping of tongues overlaps with their occasional moans of pleasure and the coarse scrape of incisor against cartilage.  There’s never any delay in offering the chicken nor any satisfaction seemingly gained from doing so- just mans dutiful deferment to the beast perched at his feet. The pair allows a few minutes after the ritual has been completed for what appears just a silent meditation on their surroundings. There they remain for a while in the hollow, sad world that always follows the best meals. Canine and man stay a while to patiently digest, allowing their eyes to get glossed over in pools of reflective bliss. Above the rain ricochets in pin drops against the glass, and the clouds draw further and further in. Then a sudden yank on the black rope lead, and a metallic jangle of dog tags signals their time to leave the bus stop, so that I’m left alone with the wind and the bones. 

One Too Many Mornings

At 6am on Tuesday the 15th of January Paul French, the colossus whose body was that night a vessel brimming to capacity with six pints, three double whiskies and the countless leftovers of neighbouring surfaces, staggered unevenly across the cobblestones of the sleeping street- before departing for the gutter with the agonizing wait of a felled Redwood and a final yelp of ‘OI! OI? Cheryl! Sweetheart, did I show ewe THIS move? Oh my,whh on oh FUUCK” Paul’s six foot frame was next found prostrate in the gutter screaming and laughing - waking up five Mrs. and six Mr.’s in the adjoining houses on Pratt Street with his yells. Some of these felt grateful to have been hooked and yanked from their sweating fever dreams, from the senseless raging of their unconscious maladies.  Some awoke glued to damp pillowcases; others in crusted pajamas with tides of mysterious ennui ringing through them like tuning forks. They lay silent and flat in their crummy rooms vibrating at different frequencies. They poured glasses of water. They forgot where they put them. Everyone groaned. Their fingers idly took reconnaissance missions around their genitals; their cats demurred to their cooing from the moonlit windowsill. Some searched for an entrance back into their abandoned dreams, tried to refashion the spectres that all too quickly where vanishing from their mind. Their alarm clocks spread vicious neon rumours. Regaining consciousness they shuffled through the Faberge eggs of reality to the daily set of neurosis, tasks and arrangements that lay in the centre. After the disturbance had died down on the street far below the same routine of comprehension was taking place up and down Pratt Street in the effrontery of a moonlight all too suddenly there and too brilliantly gleaming off the furniture. Day was rapidly advancing and there was nothing to be done for it. The mutterings to their still snoozing, and snoring, partners of “did you hear that?” were wasted. The heaving of various weights across beds, startlingly, infuriatingly alert in the morning iridescence. Attuning their minds between bursts of grainy static and the aftermath of obscenities from the street below, to the chaos of their digestive gurgling-the sound of a distant siren whistling along the bypass to its denouement.

There’s something Neanderthal about our morning selves with their bare feet padding along the dark corridor to yank the bathroom light cord. Warming themselves over coffees and haphazardly sending landfills of cereal into their bowls. Leaning dopily into mirrors to inspect their inevitable decay. Men grating layer after layer of their skin off in the great cats eye, allowing the blade to stealthily cleave through the foam. Finding as ever that the morning inspection doesn’t soften the blows. Each one of their insecurities remains as recognizable as the night before. Faces bare every sign of over familiarity to their interlocutors. If anything their impression is worsened by the wan drapery of sagging cheeks, the catatonia of the zombie stare and the deep trenches that are dug below it.  Neading their skin into its preferred contortions, sending tidal splashes of cold water against their cheeks and dislodging those strange barnacles that form in the corner of their eyes- the people before noon prepare themselves for IT, whatever it may be…

Pocket Money

Sorting through the detritus of his pocket was something Peter took great pleasure from. The juxtapositions it threw up were a haphazard sketch of his identity (some grim autopsy of modern life). Picking through this mound of rubble seemed a way of slighting the elusive ‘self’, of blocking out in charcoal its negative space until it illuminated the page. He wanted to know who he was, and this provided tantalizing hints. At most a week would be allowed for this shit, these articles of irrelevance to familiarise in his pocket and then with a great swoop he would distribute the whole mess on the kitchen table. Receipts for forgotten purchases, 13 pence, business cards from a psychic, the torn pieces of an A5 flyer for… ‘Nagasaki” an East London club night represented by a nightmare collage of domesticity against a background of solarised mushroom clouds, a myriad of foreign beer caps and the crusty green grains of a miserly eighth comprised this weeks selection. What did it all mean? The exercise was one inspired by the crime novels he’d read, in which the devilish P.I. would deduce a suspects location from an obscure newspaper scrap left in his hotel room, vanishing upon its discovery to leave the subordinates in the room once more in thrall to his sagacity. The idea of carrying this bank of information, this analogue database, in his jacket pockets at all times seemed to satisfy one of many possible characterisations within his rich fantasy life; that of the arch-thief. 

The Sea Monkey’s

This is what Jeremiah, an aspirant Italian intern who leant against the rooms doorframe gripping several cappuccino’s, said to the esteemed fashion impresario Michelle Feranne as the latter sucked his vanilla smoothie through a cellulite straw, lecherously stroking his Mac book in an office on the fifteenth floor of the Modelling Agency that bore his name. On the union-jack patterned divan behind him an angular, stern, emaciated Scandinavian girl with immaculately straight bangs of blonde hair and perfect posture was sat skulking and shivering slightly in only her translucent pants. She had been ordered to wait upon Michelle’s recognition and forbidden until then from dressing. His free hand moved intermittently to her goose bumped thigh in a force of habit; as he listened to Jeremiah tell him what he paid to hear.

‘Man, you look deadbeat Mick. Tell me, what keeps you going? Knowing as you do that success, I mean true artful recognition, for you, in your line of work, is only accessible through blink and you’ll miss it stabs of clairvoyance? Waiting months, as you do, drinking these potions’

He gestured to a set of ominous looking bottles with cryptic labels,

 ‘Brewed by these slab-faced doctors and homeopaths, munching on your tablets like a horse- trying to induce this sight into the Big Trend of next Spring to, in a spontaneous flash, be able to pre-empt the rapids of socio-cultural-political-economo-literal-extra-celestial currency. Why put yourself out like that? You work too hard man, putting in these 15 hour weeks, sustaining repetitive strain injury in your forefinger as you click through endless portfolio’s of naked, well lit, bright young things… and for what recognition? Huh? The bastard’s think they know beauty but there is only one direction they are looking, am I right?

Despite not really understanding, at that Michelle raised a manicured hand to his temple in weary agreement, and repeated ‘eeizright’ with his eyes closed. Mournfully he rocked his oily head backwards and forwards as though trying to alleviate some great pressure from his mind and then, removing his hand from the scandinavian’s goosepimpled thigh (which the red marks he left behind suggested had been being treated like a stress ball), leant forward and guzzled his smoothie.

‘…You do so much for this young hungry, fertile industry but, and you must know this, you don’t belong here….’

A final, expressive Slurp of Vanilla was discernable from Michelle.

‘…Indeed you’re maladjusted to this hollow, shallow environment, everywhere trying to dive deeper, get insight, casting a critical eye on the already hypercritical. It as though you have the serene majesty of a lion yet have been imprisoned in the pig’s enclosure, forced to rut with only the filthy, artless slabs of meat for company, conversational detritus to the left and right, everywhere surrounded by their discarded opportunities, their vapid waste! Look around you!…”

 Michelle obeyed, lowering his sunglasses just a fraction to look past Jeremiah to the dozens of rows of interns masturbating, filing their nails, tweeting and tensing their stomachs at their workstations. They all had untouched boxes of salad next to them. A few had crushed their Diet Coke’s into a dystopian mesh of twisted logo.  Their habitat was flatpacked, airy and chrome- an open plan office with exposed brickwork and superfluously filled bookcases acting as partitions. Towards the back of the room he could see the days models leafing through comic books on the many chaises longes. One of them was very possibly bragging about having run into Gilbert or George in the East End earlier, whilst the other smiled indulgently at the Beano. As he looked out Michelle felt vindicated in having recently ordered the office space to be restructured, having done away with the old ‘hierarchy’ of the office seatingarrangement to position his staff in descending order of beauty and youth from his perspective outwards. As he looked out now, the vista receded through leopard print spandex leggings (sans underwear) and translucent black lace blouses in an outward sprawl of nubile, sprightly jouissance, mediocrity and then decay- with the taut and eager for promotion held in absolute centre-stage high definition and the old and saggy sat so far back in the long room as to be little more than imperceptible blurs. It wasn’t of much concern; to him at least, that this meant longer journeys for the old crones who for some reason felt themselves vital to the whole operation of the agency. Michelle got enormous pleasure from studying the Intern’s behaviour in this controlled environment. In the altered, faint way of all childhood reminiscences it reminded him of watching his Sea Monkey’s be spawned and flourish from that mysterious powder, and the feeling of omniscience this spectacle seemed to bring about in him. How they fascinated him so! From that first spark the creation of basic life forms, on your own kitchen tabletop, oh the delight! The mystery of those colourful sachets overrode any background disappointment he might have held towards the eventual sperm-y inhabitants they produced. This early encounter with an alchemical white powder was to prove… prophetic in later life, but luckily he wasn’t there yet. Watching the interns engage in their rituals, studying them undertake these hesitant character-less interactions as they openly bartered their bodies in his marketplace of desire, was one of his chief distractions these days. He considered this piece of social engineering, this restoration of the natural order, as he understood it, to be one of many masterstrokes in a blossoming career. An archetype of his species, a foreign envoy sent forward from amongst the most youthful, Jeremiah, continued his speech uncertainly, measuring Michelle’s face throughout for any cues.

‘Remember don’t do, as they actually want, do, as they might want if they got around to properly considering it. Don’t forget Micky that your job is the manufacture of needs, you’re here to decide what the wallet-warmers want. So why waste your time trying to figure it out, with all these focus groups, these charts and predictions? The shitmunchers will gladly oblige, whatever. You can put down your crystal ball and allow yourself some stability. Why not make the conditions in which your waldorf can detoxify at a normal pace beneath that radiator torso? You know, Terry told me this in confidence but its no wonder you’ve been finding it hard to—-’

Michelle raised a hand- although he still felt curiously low, the sight of the intern’s and Jeremiah’s soliloquy had reenergised something in him.

“You are so young… it is not your fault, but you ‘ave misunderstood Jeremiah! That OH the not knowing, the mystery… well zhat’ he paused and closed his eyes.

 “is the ‘hole magic of it!”

And with a dramatic swivel of the great leather throne he turned his back on the lingering intern.

“For this edition,we are looking for four line poems on the relevance of geographical perspectives on the history of ideas”

Once i’d got to grips with the theme i had an attempt. 

And titled it,

A FOUR LINE POEM ON THE RELEVANCE OF GEOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, BY GEORGE MACBETH, AGED 19 & 2/4’s

The four-line poem is one throughout which

Our chattering, pearly eyed, bard is assured

Whilst his credited words scrape the white into bars,

That he writes and flourishes and thinks inimitably. 

The New Shirt.

I

I inherited a tshirt by way of my sister a few days ago “I bought it on the assumption that Josh would like it but as he didn’t I thought I’d give to you, aren’t I kind?” I heard her crackle through the hidden ventricle in the phone where the sound comes out, with the crunching of tires and brakes in the background.  From this introduction I wasn’t prepared for what took place. For the widening in my parameters of taste, in what is, and isn’t, acceptable to wear on your torso. For the adoration and gratitude I now have for this chance encounter. For the undeniable fact is that this commodity (and it pains me to slur the shirts creative majesty in such a way) has hollowed out a place in my heart, without me knowing why. What is it that makes me view its impending wash with such fear and envy of the time that the washing machine will rob me of its company? Why it is that whilst wearing it around the streets today I felt it enhancing the lives of every drone It passed, felt it reconnecting them with their senses of humour?

My desire for the object flickers around it metonymically, so that its beauty glimmers in corners- in things entirely separate from it, in the margins of its transatlantic emigration, in the varied forms it could have transformed into in the last half century, in the whole fragmentary chain of relationships that dangles behind it like a thread. Tracing its evolution seems a Sisyphean effort to bring the object down to earth, to evacuate its mystery.

Whilst for me the shirt stands symbolically above and beyond its appearance, I feel I should at least give you an indication of what it looks like. Starting with the word “FLORIDA” which is stitched in an intricate lattice of colour on the front of it. Around the multicoloured letters of the curly typeface we find a whole menagerie of characters and symbols assembled. Underwater reeds sway at the serif’s of the letter’s F, R and A whilst on roof of the ‘F’ can be found a woman reclining in a strapless red bikini with one hand idly tracing the black onyx of her hair. Upon the neighbouring roofs of the R and A we observe a bald man in pink trunks wind skiing, although the activity can only be inferred from its blunt rendering here, and on the distant final letter another bald man in black trunks wind sails towards a precipice. Enjoyment of the tableau is in no way lessened by the craftsman’s obvious neglect of which way the wind was meant to be blowing. Plunging from the crest of the ‘D’ a dolphin pivots to the depths below whilst elsewhere an unspecified tropical fish pokes its head out of the ‘O’s giant porthole. So both the surface and underwater depths are shown as interwoven into the harmonious fabric (literally) of Florida’s way of life, each making space for the other in a union of aquatic paradise.

As the punch line to this gloriously delusional depiction of the American dream, like a sub-heading, the word “Destin_” is stitched in gold beneath. As though the utopia of stress-free WaterSports envisioned above was the goal of a community hollowed by Vice and crime, their true innocent ‘Destiny’, but that the t-shirts creator underwent a damascene conversion about including the statement and so chose to pass it off as the town DESTIN on the North-West peninsula of Florida instead. Or perhaps the machinist suffered a fatal coronary at the sewing machine in the sweatshop whilst swivelling the shirt into position for the “y”- leaving the final ‘n’ to send its flick tilting hopefully upwards into acres of blank space. Like an imperfect coda suggesting so much more.

I find it hard to see the shirts creation, in the form it reached me, as anything other than a collaborative effort, as some great act of osmosis obtaining between designers, Brain-stormers and exhausted lackeys. Oh and did I mention it’s tie-dyed? Yet for all the sandal-wearing, ponytailed flyer distribution that this suggests it is tie-dyed in a cranberry pigment so garish, so brashly, violently there that a head-on confrontation seems to overwhelm your sight and send you staggering back like a Jedi from a force field. In all its swaggering domination of your visual field the shirt serves both as a baffling testament to the nation it was once presumably bought, worn and made in as it is a redneck dare, a provocation that bristles and snarls at the viewer to ‘just fuckin’ try’ and avert their eyes. The closer you peer into its warning light arabesque the headier the reaction. Smoky patterns lace across a surface through which the screaming red flares of ambulance sirens are sent, the phenomenology of a roadside accident…on a piece of travel memorabilia…which suggest histories… and hidden traumas you’d rather not explore but cannot help trying to envisage…………………………

II

….I can imagine its second owner, Jake Wright or something utterly benign,first encountering my shirt whilst stoned in the blazing Sunday afternoon of a ‘yard sale’ and purchasing it unknowingly within a greater Ganesh of sleeves, bundled clothes and ‘pants’. Then at home, whilst sorting through his horde, can see him emptying out the contents of his arms to find the t-shirt curled within the various basketball vests and watching it fall to rest on the bed in front of him like a baby on a doorstep. Like Moses in the reeds. He’d have felt upon that first glimpse the same interior rearrangement of desire that I did. He would have felt the unmistakable lurch of something else making way to allow this new object room in his life. First he would have tried it on. Their requisite courtship then proceeded gradually from stolen glimpses in hallway mirrors to family mealtimes spent in neurotic paranoia to the carefully chosen social debutante from which point onwards he felt absolutely at ease with the t-shirt. They where together throughout his senior year, as he allowed it to become a ‘staple’, ‘one of his quirks’- a beacon by which he was identifiable. It would become a canvas for hardened stains of semen, dried scabs of pizza and the burns of his joint’s ash. It could even be found illuminating the miniature window of his yearbook photo.

 Its third owner I see as Jake’s embittered ex-girlfriend Casey. Some time after she had walked in to see him pressing Lacey Fuckfeatures against the fridge, with his hand buried in her jeans, on that fateful night at TJ’s end-of-term party, after the tears, after the four pounds she shed and after she completed the fifth re-run of When Harry Met Sally and, at the bequest of her mother, had thrown away the makeshift Voodoo doll of Jake- Casey got around to considering the Florida shirt that was hanging in the back of her wardrobe. The problem was that despite having once competed with it for Jake’s affections she couldn’t send it to the funeral pyre of photo’s, cheap valentines cards, Ska mix tapes and various stuffed farmyard animals he had gifted her over the years.  Because she too had been taken in by this item’s peculiar charm- its smiling evocation of a gentler, less aggressive time than the one she inhabited. An era when, presumably, holidaying retiree’s acquired an item and a tan from every new destination they visited not out of irony, but from a desire to preserve in capital what they felt unable to in their memories. When hippies were still culturally interesting and marijuana was subversive. When you could count the tv channels available on two hands yet spent too much time prowling the gardens of the neighbourhood with your slingshot, or talking to your imaginary friend to bother. It came from a time when the Lacey Fuckfeatures’ of this world would have had enough self-respect to resist the slimy drunken gropes of the Todd’s and enough clothes on not to have enlisted them. “And besides oversize t-shirts where back in fashion!” Casey sung gaily. So instead of throwing it out, she resolved to keep it, but cleanse it.

Which is how we pan the camera to her stooped in the attic over a bucket of red dye, wringing out the shirts every association with her ex. Then see its brilliant red trailing out from under her jacket as she runs across the piazza eternally late for her seminars throughout her first year of college. A few owners down the line, once her feckless roommate Stacey had borrowed it but left it behind drenched after a foam party in a bar to be acquired from the lost property by the zealous barman Mike who, after graduating, thought it stood out within his new wardrobe of suits and fleeces and so bestowed it upon his newly health-conscious father Ted for jogging in; we reach the recent past and find the ugly intrusion of capital into this as yet organic story with the dawning phenomenon of ‘vintage’. We find Ted’s granddaughter Daisy hungrily scavenging through his mothballed wardrobe for stock, salivating as she picked out items to sell at her store; viewing in each Hawaiian shirt and stonewashed pair of Levi’s a tongue –in-cheek humour, this wry judgement on post-modernity, which would elevate the clothes, and more importantly their owners, to a hip knowingness they had never before known. With this new passport the Florida shirt flitted nomadically through ever-cooler thrift stores in ever-grittier edges of cities, its increase in price roughly proportional to the declining level of emotional investment the callous owner’s gave it. From its origins in an accidental purchase it soared through price tags of $12 to $14 to $20 yet never again felt the warmth of a Jake or a Casey. The majority of its time in these years was spent crumpled and unwashed in a studio corner, cleaning guitar strings and praying for salvation. Finally, via art school openings, onstage drummers too numerous to mention, fanzine release parties and a budget airline, fate threw it across my sisters path. And so I marvel at this bloodline stitched in its fabric and find my place at the bottom of its family tree.

I wanted to get to grips here with why we’re compelled towards the item we are, and are repelled from the others or something equally pretentious, in a vain hope that a wider point would present itself- but I don’t think I did and I don’t think It has. I’m no closer to understanding the attachments I’ve formed with the inanimate, at the expense of the animate, or even answering how long these bonds will remain before they fall out of my favour. Or answering what it says about me that I could find, or would look for, warmth in something as essentially vapid and spiritually hollow as a t-shirt. All I can say is that after this pointless exercise in justifying a type of ‘bespoke’ commodity glorification to myself, it’d feel too rich to once more offer the shirt as bait to the ruthless, glistening jaws of capitalism and so here its story should finis-