Met a guy at the Electric Banana who offered me a part in his
movie; maybe waiting tables, an extra in
a courtroom scene, a lonely
novelist. I asked what he wanted from me; I want answers, he said. I
want truth.
We are all middlebrow now, in thrall to he said she said, the touchable worlds of love, whether imagined or illicit, or sometimes even true. Someone should write this down; we may be touched by the significance of small things.
Welcome to the extravaganza; Hollywood in a Glasgow studio, a man with a thousand voices, none of them his own, and yet all of them. Parliamo
Tinseltown, parliamo the lingua
franca of joy.
A book is the best way to travel; a paperback is a seat in First Class, a gold card. Live a life you could never afford, where nothing is perfect but everything balances at the turn of a final page.
Wind lifts the tin roof on a forgotten cantina down by the border. A couple dance by the jukebox. A voice like aƱejo carries over the desert; please let her know that I’m well.
What if we could make our
buildings dance, screw them up like rejected
blueprints, fold their planes into curves and
corrugations? It might be possible to twist
dreams inside out, and turn these meditations into a
metropolis.
They put a band together for you - guitar, bass, drums, keys - tight, and sharp, all the right moves, like thunder, lightning, all new licks made entirely out of light by the Colonel of the groove.
There is a factory by the Thames where men are wrought from iron, a number branded into their back, a dream of Saturday beaten into a breastplate with an old hammer.
There is nothing as dramatic as an idea; who will speak it? Who will speak against it? Who will be changed by it? The idea sleeps in the pen of its writer, and only awakens when it is time to be spoken.
This season we’re all in catsuits, stitched from skins of dead punks and supermodels, bought from a boutique on a dead-end street. We know style moves on; till then we’ll wear our art on our sleeves.
You lived at ground zero, where the sound of a city drowned out every other song in the world, where a bassline could crumble suburbs to dust, and to survive meant you were made of stone.