Unpopular


Thursday, August 23, 2001
I picked up a new pair of spectacles today. The optician, whilst shining his light into the recesses of my pins told me that they were ‘beautiful, and clear’ and ‘a lovely pair of eyes.’ No-one has ever said such things of my eyes before and I wondered if it was some kind of corny pick-up line. If it was, it was unfortunate that he was in his mid fifties and sported a beard, which isn’t really my type.

My e-friend HM tells me she’s been on the receiving end of pick-up lines a lot, but I have to say I am pretty sure I haven’t. Not that I can remember at least. Maybe I have and just didn’t realise it, being either too naïve or insecure. Or something. HM says that the lamest pick up line she experienced was when she was sitting next to a guy in a computer class and when she complained of how she could never type with her fingers on the right keys (whilst learning how to touch-type), he said "me too!" and then said "we have so much in common. We should talk about them sometime together." Which I agree seems pretty lame. Of course if I had been that guy I would have just mumbled ‘hmmm’ and kicked myself inside for not being able to hold conversations.

And apologies to HM for ripping part of her email out pretty much verbatim…

C and I watched American Beauty last week. It was a very dull movie. I can’t think of much else to add, except, well, it was one of those movies that seemed to be really, really patronising. All that crap about the bag floating around in the wind; the pretty explicit statement that ‘oh, you normal people would never understand that, would you?’ or at the very least that they would never see such a thing as being beautiful. Which is crap. Because even if it were true, that’s such a horribly smug thing to say, or think. That whole cultural snobbishness thing going on. I hate all that. People say I’m like that, but that’s probably because I don’t communicate very well. I like things that I like, and I don’t like things that I don’t like, and hey… is there some element of intentional, forced obscurity to that? I don’t know. I like to think not, but know that hasn’t always been the case so may not be now.

I also hated the way American Beauty handled all that sexuality stuff. You know, Kevin Spacey getting his just desserts for giving into mediated pressure and obsessing over a teenage girl. The fact that coming to terms with homosexuality will drive you to destruction. It was pretty horrible. Plus, I couldn’t decide if that gross character who was making out like she was so sexually active was for real or not. That whole thing about it all being an act, how when Kevin Spacey seduces her she’s like ‘it’s my first time’ and all coyly virginal. Well which was the act? And does anyone care?

And actually there seems to me to be no clearer signifier of contemporary society’s hypocrisy than the treatment of young people as mediated objects of desire. On the one hand advertisers and movie/tv show producers, record companies and artists gleefully promote imagery of young people (both male and female) in ever more sexually provocative roles, and then on the other damn anyone who dares to fall for that manipulation in any manner that isn’t cerebral. It’s like a cultural studies test: can you accept that the meaning of image is not necessarily a ‘real’ meaning? Can you detach the inferred sexual references from fashion and attitude and treat it solely as a concept? And that if not, why not? It’s kind of sad really.

When I was at the South West film archives the other day we stumbled on a local news vox pop where old timers were being asked about 1946 (did you know that in 1946 the average number of pairs of underpants owned by a man was two?) and there was a fine segment where two traffic wardens tell us how women in 1946 were much sexier than they are today (this was, I think, 1996) because in 1946 they covered themselves up much more. I think they had a point.

Which makes me sound like a dull old fogey. So be it.

Walking to town yesterday in my pink shirt, khaki shorts and clean Simple sneakers (short haircut of course) I felt like a weirdo. Now I’m not the sharpest dresser, not by a long shot, but just recently I’ve been feeling like a positive Face next to all the shabby down-dressed Numbers around me. It’s one of those shifts of style I suppose, back to a predilection for ugly band t-shirts, chains hanging from scaggy jeans, long lank hair and soiled trainers. The Rawk thing. Why does everyone have to look so unclean? Beats me.

Girl walking down the street with ‘useless slut’ on her t-shirt, un-clear as to whether it was store bought or bedroom made, the strange point being that the former seemed most likely where once it would have been obviously the latter. And you can blame those pesky Manic Street Preachers if you like. But ‘useless slut’. Useless at being a slut? Or a slut with low self-esteem (some would argue of course that low-self esteem is essentially the definition of ‘slut’, but hey…)? And why am I thinking about it even?

Speaking of movies, have you heard Deloris’ ‘c u @ the cinema’? Deloris are a band of Australians who at times make sounds like Pavement and at others a sort of cinematic post-rock noise that sounds fantastic. Their album The Pointless Gift is full of fine moments with fine titles (‘colleague, what we have lost is enormous’, ‘fond of liners’, ‘telekinesis fight’) and should be snapped up wherever you are. It’s also on the wonderfully named ‘Quietly Suburban’ record label, and does anyone remember The Suburbia Suite by the Sound Barrier, which was like an album of Style Council instrumentals from 1985? They had great titles too: ‘After the Gymkhana’, ‘Kodacolour Days, Toffee-Apple Nights’, ‘Half-Term Excursion’. Fabulous stuff.

Speaking of movies, part two: have you heard the Le Tigre song ‘what’s your take on Cassavetes’? Excellent stuff. Not that I have much of an opinion of Cassavetes mind, although I admit that with this song and the continued praising of his work by M then I am tempted to make the effort and discover more. Besides which, M has always made fine recommendations, not least recently John Fante.

Now for some strange reason, I always had Fante down as some dry, dull voice. I had no reason for this at all, it was completely irrational, but there it was. So I avoided Fante for no other reason, except perhaps for the fact that Jack made reference to him in their song ‘Cinematic’ of a few years ago which I always found a little forced, a little too ‘alt-culture by numbers’ for its own good. Played again now of course it sounds better than that; just a fine carousing tune that celebrates some things worth celebrating, and really, if it’s all shallow and obvious, then so am I and why do I care at all?

But John Fante. I read the first five chapters of his Ask The Dust whilst sipping double espressos in the Boston Tea Party coffee shop this morning. And COULD that man write? Well yes he could. In spades. It’s the kind of wildly infectious, beautiful mad poetry of life that both reflects that life like a mirror and yet simultaneously lifts it, wailing magnificently, out of the gutter and into the heavens. And because we all need obsessions to punctuate our lives, I’m glad I held out on Fante for so long because I can see an end of summer into autumn obsession coming on and it looks like it’s going to be one hell of a ride.




Tuesday, August 21, 2001
pub smells 2

There’s something romantically doomed and despicable about sitting at a bar, drinking whisky and beer, just letting the world slip past in a warm blur. There’s something even worse about seeing words appear on a screen, the typed recollections and meanderings that swoon hand in hand to radio transmissions; words that appear, words that are dragged from nowhere, accompanied by sips of Holland’s slowly brewed classic; words that slip and slide inside like skeletons with the wish you were somewhere else, sometime else. Someone else. Anyone else.

I’d not noticed the pub smell on my clothes for years but smelt it again this week. It was the same as the Bruce smell and it made me sadder than sad, and gladder than glad. It was like a hallucination, a falling backwards and inwards to a place more vulnerable and profound. A place that exists between the fifth and sixth pint; the place that takes too long in getting too and which passes by too fast.

Accompanied by games of pool as well… Games where the tensions of the Bruce revisited in a haze thanks to the persistent presence of hovering violence and hatred, floating out there in the ether, tethered to tattooed fists, un-tucked checked shirts, feather-cut platinum blondes, too-tight jeans and g-strings. Games where focuses shifted and wary thoughts drifted, inwards and outwards to the lights of cars sweeping past beyond the criss-cross windows and away, away to the trees and the blinking stars, and those angels under the waves that crashed on rocks.

The black hung over the pocket and the cue ball disappeared down the hole. My heart did somersaults and then tripped over untied laces. Ghosts hung around in my head and sang sad songs. I told them to split.

Augie March have a song called ‘Angels Of The Bowling Green’ which is a surreal submarine trip, and I play it every day. It sounds like whispered nothings in your ear sung by seahorses.

‘what do I miss? Her cruelty, her unfaithfulness. Her fun, her love, her kiss.’

What do I miss? I miss those fragile, cracking, ephemeral kisses of doubts. I miss those fraught, opened up sores of empty bleeding drunks; those eternal nights of losing sleep and falling to the moon. I miss standing above the motorway and staring out to sea, blinking in time to the lighthouse. I miss the simplicity of knowing it’s never going to happen; the honesty of knowing that the darkness of the wardrobe embraces will never come again. I miss drawing on walls that aren’t my walls. I miss the obliteration of riding pick-a-back down double yellow lines, with too many hairs in my mouth.

I miss polar bears.

I miss scarves.

I miss the smell of pubs on my clothes.

I miss the Angels of the Bowling Green.



Monday, August 20, 2001
pub smells 1

Scott used to work in the kitchens of the Bruce Inn. He worked there during the summer of 1983 when we were both seventeen and I would walk up the dusty lane from my house to the pub to meet him after his shift finished around two in the afternoon. We spent the afternoons playing pool and drinking sweet cider. The pool table at the Bruce was in a tiny room that filled with smoke, and the walls were so close to the table on the long sides that you had to use special small cues. In one corner of the room stood a jukebox and a Donkey Kong video machine. In another was a dartboard. There were two small round tables and maybe six little stools but mostly people stood, smoking their cigarettes and drinking their beer. There was only one door to the outside in that summer and two thin windows that opened only a crack. It was always hot.

Scott was a good pool player. He had learnt from his dad I guess, who would sit and watch the snooker on the telly at home, and also on occasion drop by the pub for a quick game. Originally from Larkhall, Scott told me his dad used to play in the rough bars of Lanarkshire, quietly dispatching the flashy young players who fancied themselves as sharks with a smile, a handshake of iron and a polite ‘good game’. Scott inherited the same quiet intense game, and if he occasionally injected a bit of flamboyance, well that was only the impetuosity of youth after all.

The Bruce Inn was a strange pub, and although I came to call it my regular haunt, my clothes becoming ingrained with that peculiar pub smell that mixes beer and fried food with cigarette smoke, I never felt like a regular. Maybe it was my inbuilt paranoia. Maybe it was the fact that the bar was largely the haunt of characters from the other side of the invisible but violently real wall which existed between the sprawling private housing estate on which I lived, and the council housing scheme, and of course this being 1983, Class War was very much still in vogue. So despite the fact that I was on the dole, and met several of the same characters in the signing-on line, I was treated with mistrust, tolerated only because I was with Scott and his dad.

Of course, my insistence on playing Jesus and Mary Chain b-sides on the jukebox, chalking up poems and drawing odd characters on the blackboard didn’t help.

The blackboard was the most important piece of furniture in the pool room. Hardly anyone ever used it to score dart games, instead marking up their initials for a turn on the pool table because naturally, the Bruce ran a ‘winner stays on’ policy.

There were some strange characters that played in the Bruce in those days, and most of them would have slit your throat in the blink of an eye for no reason other than to watch the blood flow. There were many tattoos.

Wee Jackie was an odd character, decorated in Glasgow Rangers tattoos and in the habit of playing sneaky shots that placed his pool balls strategically over the pockets rather than potting them immediately. It was usually a hard slog of a game against Jackie. He swore like a trooper, although that was hardly unusual of course because every other word you would hear in the pool room of the Bruce would be ‘fuck’ or some variation thereon. Jackie was a bad winner and a worse loser. When he won his little round face would smirk smugly whilst his stubby body strutted around the table. When he lost, that same face would turn to thunder and he would storm from the room, muttering many ‘fucks’ under his breath. It was hilarious but of course no-one ever laughed or even smiled, and after five minutes he would return and place his initials ‘JJ’ on the board for a rematch.

There was big Billy Bowie, who had been in my class at school and who had visually aged considerably in the year since we had left, me to flunk out of university, and him to deliver the mail. Billy had gone bald quickly. His eyes were heavy and his face sagging already at eighteen. It was a strange sight. But he still had a smile and a calmness that you couldn’t help liking, and his accurate, methodical game of pool was formidable.

Less methodical and accurate was the game of Hammy. Hammy also delivered the mail, and always looked nervous, taking quick gulps from his beer and darting his head around like a startled rabbit whenever anyone spoke. His game was flashy, full of deep screws and spins that looked fantastic when they worked, but more often left him out of position and led to more games lost than victories.

Then there was the strange young bloke who worked in the kitchen with Scott whose name, if I ever even knew it, I certainly can’t recall now. He had a solid game of pool, and I suppose more than anyone else I modelled my own game on his. He used more of a snooker player’s stance; chin on the cue, back bent parallel to the floor, a long fluid stroke in stark contrast to the upright stances and stabbing cue jabs of Wee Jackie or Hammy. It worked well. There were few hard strikes, only the occasional, smoothly executed ‘double’, and always a careful consideration of where the cue ball was going next. He was also an expert at Donkey Kong, which of course was the best arcade game ever.

Scott and I would play Donkey Kong between visits to the pool table, which meant that with my regular defeats on the baize I at least became quite adept at leaping barrels and rescuing maidens. Slowly, though, my own pool game developed and by the time autumn started to ease into winter, and our afternoon sessions became night after work and art school visits, I could at last count on occasionally staying on the table for more than one perfunctory game. Not that I was ever a great player: my lack of competitive spirit made sure of that, but on a good night when the beer hit the right spot and focused everything just so, well I could take on the world, or at least the contents of the Bruce Inn pool room. And win.

Later of course Scott moved away to join the RAF and we only occasionally played pool in the Bruce after that, when he was back on leave, and of course it was never the same because it never is. Wee Jackie stopped coming in and the word was that he and Hammy and Billy had joined the team from a pub in town and played there all the time. They closed up the outside door, took away Donkey Kong, and replaced it with a puggy machine. Naturally too they took the Jesus and Mary Chain off the jukebox. They even replaced the green baize with blue, and eventually too my clothes lost their pub smell.

Even later again Scott died in a car crash in Germany and my friend Jon and I went to the Bruce after the funeral and played a last game of pool together, but the ghosts were too visible and we played badly and got too drunk.

I never went back again.