That's all folks ...

... for 2009 anyway. Damn, its been good ... most of it anyway, especially the summer. That was good and hot. Of course. Whatever. 

So holidays and festivities are upon us again. What you up to? I'm off to Scotland, which is surely the best place to be, unless you like sunshine and quality public transport. Well, never mind all of that. I plan on sitting down and drinking red wine whilst watching films and talking rubbish, non stop. If possible. Then next year ... well, thats where the white room stuff comes in I guess.

Before I forget; a thank you is in order for Emily who gave this blog an award the other day - thanks Emily :) The juice to this one is that I have to reveal 7 truths and nominate 7 blogs. I will do all that, but not today. Ahh. Nope, today I have many loose ends to ties up, this post being just one of them ...

Ok, so to anyone who has read this blog at any point since it started earlier this year, either once or lots, thank you very much. I know it doesn't always make much sense. If you have ever left a comment then a huge thanks too, even the ones that say stuff like, "I have no idea what you are on about." Maybe things will become clearer in the new year, but I doubt it :)

Be good y'all ....

Stop Cuts.

I currently have 16 cuts on my right hand,something which is doing nothing to improve my stability. On my left hand thereare just 3 cuts, but one of then is really sore. It’s slightly more than abland flesh wound, just enough to make me freeze momentarily if I happen totouch it against something rough. My feet are cut free for now.

But hands cuts are the worst anyway. Ican’t do a damn thing. Cold is burning. When I sleep I dream of razors and wirewool. Stop. Cuts. Stop. Cuts. Now.

Temporary obsession #46

I would like to have a room which is completely white, and with sunshine blasting through enormous windows. White sofa, curtains, furniture. Maybe not the floor of course.

This is just a phase I am going through, albeit a phase which is becoming a temporary obsession. I would love to know what it all means. It could be because I have had a part time job for a couple of months which involves working in an uncomfortable shit hole, but I am hoping that there is a deeper meaning than that. It could be an awakening to the reams of mental clutter which are currently slowing creativity; not slowing, tripping me up in every direction. I hope the meaning goes deeper than that also.

A brief rant about time travel ...

I realized this morning as I lay in bed that time travel will obviously never be possible, no matter how long we populate this planet. What an absolute bummer. Well, perhaps travelling forward in time may still be on the cards, but obviously not backwards. Travelling forwards in time can of course be achieved by sleeping heavily and without being aware that you were nodding off in the first place, usually after binging on alcohol and/or prescription, or unprescribed drugs. Travelling back in time? Someone would have shown up by now, right? Then again, perhaps the lunatic asylums of the world are full of people who travelled back in time and were never believed, apart from one guy, who saw that all his fellow time travellers were being sectioned and so returned to the future, shouting, "fuck time travel everyone, unless you are a qualified escapologist." None of this really matters though as I am now resigned to the fact that I am stuck here in 2009. Until January of course. It's all going to kick off then ... 

This post was brought to you by red wine and a laptop which is teetering on the edge of existence. 

Day 17, things arent going quite as well as we'd hoped ...

Nothing as dramatic as that title suggests is really happening in my life, things just keep going wrong right now and its starting to drive me to television. Just ... damn it, feet up, tv on, switch off brain, goodbye real world. I think it could be because I have now stopped drinking green clay every morning. It worked tremendously well, I must admit, but apparently three weeks is the max.

Right, ok, the bionic-eyed amongst you may have spotted that this is the second post in a row without a picture attached. There's a reason for that, of course ... both my PC and my laptop decided to fucking die on me at the same time, so not only can I not access any pix but I can't get to all the stuff I had been writing, and that is starting to seriously freak me out. It's in there ... I just cant get to it. And I have to leave in just over a week so the chances of me getting them fixed by then are less than zero (because I need to learn how describe what is wrong with them in French ... I may just find a shop and burst in, cradling my laptop and fall to the floor whilst emitting long, deep screams ...)

I am wondering if it is because I ditched twitter. Do you think there is some kind of internet karma that we just don't know about yet? I ditched the damn thing and felt so good about it (I found it totally useless, but clearly I am in a minority) ... two days later everything went tits up for me. Ok.

Right, so my blog idea is that next week I am going to re-post some old posts that got lost amongst all the chaff. Lets not get carried away though; hopefully it will only be a couple, maybe three or four and then it will be holiday time anyway ... it's a lame response to these troubled times, but seriously ... I am just going to be typing viscous rants otherwise, and who the hell wants to read that?

Amen.

Check out ...

So here is a massive thanks to the wonderful people over at BALLAD OF who have decided to make Beyond Wunderman their featured blog for a while ... how humbling. Thanks again guys, this has made my week :)

Go check it out as the rest of their site is full of incredible people and their work ...

You can view the post here. It's basically me rambling away about something I find difficult to explain!

Introducing Stepek - NYC Snapshots °3

I‘d been standing on the corner of Broadway and 101, waiting for a Polish girl I had met earlier that afternoon. Realizing she wasn’t going to show, I began looking up at an open window on the third floor behind me, a window from which music had been blaring from as I waited. Music and squeals of laughter – party.

Fuck it, I’m drunk enough to blend in seamlessly, I seem to remember thinking.

A group of five kids/teenagers who could, for all I know, have actually been The Strokes arrived, spoke into the intercom and headed inside. I slipped in behind them, laughed at their jokes and nodded in accordance when one of them asked me if I was going to Stepek’s party as well … Ha! Of course I am going to Stepek’s party!

... and the apartment was as full as the party was terrible. I spent all night bullshitting everyone about who I was and what I did for a living, telling them all the things I plan to do rather than what I really do. Not only did everyone buy this, but they seemed quite into it and I found myself engaged in all sorts of creative conversations.

It was long into the morning before I found myself talking to Stepek himself; he was treated like royalty, and kept at arms length by most of the drunks and stoners. To me, at that hour, his head and neck resembled a tightly tied, over filled balloon. His eyes seemed large and round yet flat also, like a photocopy of someone’s face plastered to the big balloon head. He swayed forwards and backwards, and sometimes as we stumbled through our conversation his nose poked uncomfortably against my face, a sharp triangular nose like a corner of cardboard.

At one point I began crying and then told Stepek that I was upset because I came from a country where the government forced me to sell vacuum cleaners to the rich in their own homes. I sell them with lies and manipulation, I said. This was after lying and manipulating my way through the whole evening.

Last thing I remember was watching Stepek snort some coke from the end of a brass key a beautiful Indian girl (who had been telling me about auto-manufacturing in Mumbai while I began to pass out) had given to him.

Anyway … here’s a picture of his cab the day we went to buy it.

A Room With a View - NYC Snapshots °2

"Come and look at the view."

"Can't I just look at you instead?"

"No! Come look at the view!"

"But I know what the view looks like."

"You know what I look like too!"

"Uh huh, that's right, and so between you or the view I already know that I prefer to lie here and look at you."

"But it's so bright this morning that I'd assume you can only see my silhouette from there anyway. Get over here."

"You fool. You should know that now I am going to start talking about your beautiful silhouette, and how I prefer it to the view from the window."

"Who are you calling a fool?. Don't make me come back over there and ... oh fuck it. Jonas, tell her to come over here. Push her off the bed."

"I'm pretending to be asleep. Leave me alone."

"Ah ha! You see? He wants to lie here and look at you too. I can see his eyelids moving."

"They're not moving. They're shut, shut tight. I'm trying to block the light out. Kaisha, pull the shutter and come back to bed."

"She wont come over J, she is being stubborn."

"I'm not being stubborn. I'm enjoying the sunrise, and you are both missing out."

"Well then, watch this! You see, now you are missing out!"

"Oh E, he's trying to sleep."

"No, he's pretending to sleep. And look at this. See? He's not asleep!"

"Hey, you keep saying that happens when I am asleep too though!"

"Mmm yeah. It's better when you are awake though. If you are asleep I wonder who you are dreaming about."

"I dream about both of you. You are more than enough for me!"

"And you two are more than enough for me too. Make space, I'm coming back in."

"Yes! I win! J, move over. Kaisha gets the middle today."

"I'm still pretending to be asleep, don't forget."

"Pretend to be awake then Mister. If I get the middle today I deserve full person-in-the-middle privileges."

"That's right J, she does."

"Ah, this is going to be so much more fun than some stoopid sunrise. I can tell."

"Ha, you see. I win again!"

Scoping on the subway - NYC Snapshots °1

After jumping on the subway up at 96th, I slumped into an empty seat and set my iscope to search out easy-listening music by pressing the trigger switch in my pocket. I decided that whatever it picked up first I would listen to, rather than spend the journey downtown switching from passenger to passenger, searching for the perfect music for my mood, frustrated by indecision. Very quickly four short beeps confirmed a lock and then the soft crackling mono sound of Billie Holiday singing 'A Fine Romance' filled my ears. I smiled, rested my head in my hand and looked casually up and down the carriage until I found a red pair of Converse tapping gently in time with the music I was hooked in to. They were directly opposite me. I relaxed, sat back with my left arm snaking along the seat backs beside me, avoiding looking directly at the girl with the tapping Converse. It was important to handle any situation like this with guile. You had to be careful because it was so easy to allow your foot to tap or your head to nod in time with someone else’s music, thus giving yourself away as a scoper and a thief, but, hell, iscopes aren’t illegal as such; they are just a public nuisance. People have strong reasons for choosing the music they listen to when they are alone, on the way home from work or perhaps off for a stomach tightening rendezvous with a potential lover and certainly don’t want someone else in there, stealing into their most private moments.

Uh huh.

Well, the song ended, and another began, and at that point my love of Billie’s voice quickly gave me away. Forgetting myself, I smiled and nodded at the girl, bobbing my head and even snapping my fingers in time with the first swinging bars of The Way You Look Tonight. I felt the air inside the train cool instantly as she suddenly focused her stare on me and then tugged her earphones out. I sat motionless and stared over her shoulder to the reflection in the window behind her, my hands frozen in my lap now. Then she pulled her player from her bag and with her eyes still wide and locked firmly onto me she turned the volume control slowly, increasing the decibels until eventually it became utterly unbearable for me to contain myself any longer. In one movement I slid off the chair and onto my knees, my mouth wide open in a silent scream as I tore my earphones from my ears, breathing rapidly and surely red of face. Everyone stared at me in disapproval as the girl looked above her head and stabbed her finger disgustedly at the red and black NO SCOPING sign. 

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For those of you in the mood to read more today, I am guest posting over at the always excellent, Mr Teacher Man right now ... for sure, a complete change of tone!!!!

Between last week and next week ...

Sandwiching itself neatly between the past and the future is this; a small and inconsequential post. I really like this post so far, it has a clean edge to it that I am finding especially refreshing and crunchy. Things like this just seem to happen sometimes.

So this last week has been mostly about guest bloggers, and as I said the other day a huge big thank you goes out to each of them. There's at least one link on each post to take you to their own blogs, all of which are worth frequent visits.

The week ahead is all about a collection of stories which take place in New York, as many of the tales in this blog already have. The upcoming posts are a little, well, I think "detached" would be a good word.

One last word, and again its about guest bloggers ... I've posted something over at Mr Teacher Man for Mr CJ Koster himself. It's longer than a regular post, but these things happen sometimes too.

Trippy reflections in household objects #39. "It's an iron."

Yeah. A quick photo post to round of an interesting week. So, here it is: Self Portrait in the bottom of an Iron. Didn't it just turn out so bizarrely? E cannot look at it; she says it looks as though I am riddled with bullet holes and shouts at me when I wave it in front of her asking what the big deal is. Personally I love it, even though to say that about a self portrait sounds a bit off.

Ok so the point of this post wasnt really to show the photo, it was to say a huge "thank you" to Phoenix, Akka B, and Mr CJ Koster for their tremendous, and, I'm sure you'll agree, contrasting guest posts. Seriously guys .... thank you :)

But the fun isn't over yet because there is another guest post on the way. Very soon. Apparently. Personally, I can't wait. I'm enjoying having people round here.

A Fine Mess Indeed (and a short story about cold feet)

Letting a stranger guest post for your BLOG is about as dumb as handing your mother a RED PEN and your high school journal. Sir Jonas apparently trusts me to make a fine mess of it, and I in turn trust that I won't linger long enough to finish all of the...ahem, yellow rum in his closet.

But before the closet, first a bath.

I'm really serious, this whole post - 100% of it, (maybe 80% or 50%) is being written from a hot undiluted bath. My note cards are watermarked and my face is full of mud. My feet were cold - that's why. I find it unbearable to write with cold feet. Cold feet and an empty stomach - totally unbearable. Now I'm sure Jonas is expecting me to write something clever or engaging or witty perhaps, but the fact of the matter is, I am none of those things. Nope. I'm not a story teller, an adjective or a verb.

I'm a poet,
and my name is akka b.

So...here it is.

The Artist Formerly Known as YELLOWMAN *
Mr. Wunderman,
Sir Jonas
or the Sky,

Yes, call him all those things,
as well as clouds that go by.

Clouds that go by,
but quick to respond

That's what his name means,
Mister-Wander-Beyond

* Yellow is Jonas' favored color at present, no one knows why, actually it is very probable that even he does not know why and it's also likely that in truth he despises the color, but for the sake of this post...let's just say he really likes it and leave it at that.