The Internet Void versus The Infinity of Fools

With apologies to passive-aggressive Facebook posters (you know who you are).

The Internet Void versus The Infinity of Fools

“He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.”

                                                Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

There was a time when I believed that the internet would set us free as a species. That so much virtual space would open up the borders to infinity and we would never have to deal with anyone we didn’t like ever again. Yet you only have to take a cursory glance at the comments section under any YouTube clip or newspaper article to realise that people seek out conflict on the virtual plain more now than ever before.

I think that ‘internet troll’ is far too polite a term for people who attack others online. Troglodyte is more apt. Trolls merely live under the bridges of the information superhighway, but troglodytes live in darkened caves beneath its surface, blind to all but their own non-thoughts and nonsense, only poking their heads out into the daylight to vomit up some piece of bile onto Twitter or an article on climate change.

Most of the kind of nonsense that happens on the internet these days is borne out of personal cowardice and fear. The internet offers anonymity, as well as an uncensored, unfiltered funnel down which to pour our own self-hatred. Hatred is really just another name for fear, redirected and amplified away from self.

In my experience, people judge others by their own standards and most manifestations and excuses for prejudice can ultimately be traced back to negative self-image. Men who are homophobic are either afraid of confronting doubts about their own sexuality or else they are scared that gay men will treat them in the kind of inappropriate ways in which they act towards women. People who hate a particular religion or race because they think they are sneaky or dishonest are themselves not to be trusted. People who accuse other people of smelling bad are usually the ones with the questionable personal hygiene habits. We each reflect in others what we find lacking in ourselves, in the same way that we seek out friends and partners who have the strengths and skills that we wish that we possessed.

I began this article by quoting my favourite aphorism in the whole of philosophy. The internet has become the void, the abyss. It is so big and so unwieldy, with so much that is horrific and vile just a few short keystrokes away, that it fills us with a kind of primal terror. Like staring into the night sky or snorkelling above the falling away of a continental shelf, the fear of the unknown terrifies us and sends us paddling back to shallower waters. Rather than stretch our horizons, we stick to familiar territory. The internet is an infinite expanse, yet most people obsessively circle around the same dozen websites time and time again.

Most of our fears about content in cyber space are really just reflections of the fears inside our own heads. Yet rather than immerse and marvel in the intensity of our own imaginations, we cower away from them and blame anyone but ourselves for the images, thoughts and ideas that run through our heads. We can, for instance, worry that our children are exposed to pornography online like never before. Yet children, certainly boys, have always been able to get hold of porn. It may be extreme, but by virtue of the fact of it being freely available, it becomes ultimately worthless. It’s very rare that I watch pornography, given how mind numbingly boring it is, mainly designed as far as I can see for men dishonest about their own sexual preferences to watch other men get sucked off while still kidding on that they’re 100% straight (just be honest and free yourself). Yet the most graphic pornography I’ve ever been exposed to was German and seen when I was eleven at scout camp, from the personal collection of the dad of the kid passing it around the tent. His dad was Akela, the head of the Scout Group. It’s easy to fall into the trap that the internet is making the world a worse place for children to grow up in, but the truth of the matter is that things are at worst just as bad as they always were. Yet by blaming new media it becomes so much easier to abnegate ourselves of the responsibility of honestly educating our children. Pornography isn’t the problem. The problem is the attitude of society towards women that makes their mistreatment a viable voyeuristic activity.

What the internet is doing is making us more claustrophobic. In captive chimp colonies when numbers become too high or not enough personal space is allowed, individual members will eventually turn on one other. We are becoming an infinite number of monkeys shoehorned into a finite cage. There was a time when any person could hold a particular view about the origins of the universe, even if that view was enforced by church and state, and they could remain blissfully unaware that anyone could hold a contrary view. These days, you can express an opinion online on anything from evolution to England’s starting eleven and be told you’re not only wrong but also a cunt by ten thousand random idiots in a micro second. Is it any wonder if we become claustrophobic? Is it any wonder if personal responsibility starts to dissolve when an inner monologue and self-checking is lost to the hive mind?

Look at any newspaper website comments section and you can see that the majority of comments are posted by people who don’t even read that paper or subscribe to its values. Guardianistas attack Mailites, Sun ‘readers’ (<even I’m doing it) post on The Daily Mirror. Rather than exploring the untouched plains of the internet, we seek out people we hate, like we’d rather be with someone we hate, just so we don’t have to face life alone. We have to have someone to push against, be in dynamic opposition against. Not much point being a racist if you don’t seek out Muslims to shout ‘Paki’ at. Not much point hating women and blaming them for your own inadequacies if you don’t make cowardly rape threats from behind the safety of a plastic screen. How brave of you. Well done you (sarcasm emoticon).

The internet makes idiots of us all and somehow reduces us to the belief that anything that we have to say is of equal value and deserves to be shared with the whole of humanity. Again, check the comments on YouTube or any article touting the 10 Greatest Albums/Films/Garden Hoes of All Time to witness an abject lesson in banality. “I don’t agree with your choice. I think The Godfather should be no 1 and The Godfather 2 no.” or “Typical left wing, bleeding heart liberal press.” quickly descending into comments about 9/11 being an inside job or Americans ranting at British people about how we’d all be speaking German if not for them, like they were personally at fucking Normandy on D-Day. We need to be saved from ourselves. Who cares what you think? If you’ve got something to say, start a blog to ring fence your opinions and save us from your non-thoughts. Or take a course in journalism so at least you’ll have an editor to reign in your exuberant hatefulness.

Mind you, the internet renders even traditional forms of journalism meaningless. Most newspapers these days are more full of editorials and personal opinion pieces than anything like actual news and much of it is as badly thought out and written as your average Facebook post (‘I am a beautiful flower and if you don’t appreciate that then the problem is with you not me, even though I’m the one posting this passively aggressively, clearly demonstrating in the process that I’m the one that needs to work on my self-image. How many likes for my maudlin post? I’m so alone.’).

Yet here’s the nub of the matter, folks. I still believe that the internet will eventually set us free. Or a version of it. We are only at the beginning of our journey into cyber space and this is a period of adjustment that we need to go through. After all, Dunbar’s Number is the number of relationships that the average person can comfortably maintain at any one time. Dunbar’s number has a value of 150. Just 150 friendships that we can maintain, which shows that despite living in towns and cities and supporting national sports teams, we are still essentially villagers who haven’t yet evolved to live like city dwellers. Like Dunbar’s Number, we haven’t evolved beyond basic expressions of intolerance and hatred. We can talk about national pride, but our brains aren’t sophisticated enough to think like members of multi-racial, multi-opinionated societies, comprising millions of individuals. We want everyone to think in the same way that we do in order to validate our belief systems.

I blame monotheism. The idea of one god was originally imposed upon western society in order to set in the public’s mind the idea of their being one ruling family, chosen by god to rule in perpetuity. Monotheism has infected us with a kind of monomania, where everyone must worship one god and be of one sexuality, one nationality and one personality.

What the internet has done is to confront us with how erroneous this mind-set is. In my personal fantasies, I believe that what we are going through at the moment is the first step towards the annihilation of nation states and the establishment of new countries dedicated to more useful criteria for patriotism, like knitting or Game of Thrones or Star Trek or Justin Bieber or Joyce or Dylan or Nina Simone or Creole cooking or football or golf or cricket or redheads etc. etc. Which must terrify the ruling elite, if they ever envisage such a situation. Western capitalism and hierarchical systems in general have always ruled by the principle of divide and conquer. Get us to hate the least powerful, immigrant workers, the unemployed, the disabled, etc., in order to focus our rage away from the real enemies of society (i.e., them). Yet if we were to once again form mini-societies based upon common ground then capitalism would eventually give way to collectivism. No mega-rich is the wealth is passed around between is us.

Eventually we will probably all retreat into a virtual environment anyway, where everyone’s tastes can be catered for, whether that’s enrolling in your very own version of Hogwarts or abusing virtual children. Unhealthy behaviour on both counts, but it will be our children who will have to discuss what’s acceptable behaviour when they get there. Eventually cyber space will cure even death and then, essentially, we will all remain children forever anyway. As we start to take our first steps into the tide pool, it seems that we are already learning how to remain childish.

(this article is open for comments, but I won't read them. It might be more productive to cut out the middle man and just smear shit on the wall).

Get it done.

6S

Another one of those pieces of writing that I intended to write ten years ago, got stuck, then today wrote the entire thing in under an hour. I quite like how it turned out.

6S

“Am I supposed to look out for him?”

                                              East of Eden, John Steinbeck

Full moon in broad daylight.

Fractal branching trees against a winter sky.

Orion rising and blood red sunsets.

Goya’s Third of May 1808 and Guernica seen in the flesh.

The aroma of second hand bookshops.

A pungent funk rising from freshly bought skunk.

Thunder storms and match struck sulfur.

The appetising scent of ‘she’.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The four winds cascading through woodland bowers. 

Nina Simone and Kind of Blue.

That perfect pause in the Stones’ Paint it Black.

Silence.

Salt and pepper ribs and chips.

Tandoori chicken and saag aloo.

A taste of freedom, cognac and pickled onion crisps.

The taste of success. Irn Bru.

Cat nestled in my lap whilst gently page turning.

Popping bubble wrap from out of a newly delivered gift.

The cool side of a freshly turned pillow.

The heat from a newly won love. 

Anticipation, expectation and fear.

Caleb’s moment of Biblical betrayal in East of Eden.

Arriving back from a long walk with problem solving solutions.

Roller coasters and laughing so hard you don’t care if you die.

A newly minted piece of finished writing.

Yes, yes, yes, this feels so good.

Get it done.

Blue Metal Jazz

Today we're thinking about the blues, metal and jazz. Mainly jazz though.

Blue Metal Jazz

These days whenever anyone asks me for my favourite genre of music I give this reply: Blues, because it is grandfather to my second and third favourites genres of music, heavy metal and jazz. Indeed, there can hardly be a style of music (outside of classical and opera) that has not been influenced by blues in the last century. I once saw on TV a Danish neo-Nazi heavy metal group singing white supremacist lyrics over 12 bar blues. Sometimes incredulity can only give way to hysterical laughter.

As previously written about in an article on Bruce Dickinson’s ‘The Chemical Wedding’, heavy metal was the first music scene I got into. If I’d been born a decade earlier, I’d have undoubtedly been a punk, but I was a teenager in the late 80s and it was heavy metal at this time that was in the ascendancy. In many ways, I’m glad. Punk is fine and sometimes, as with the first few Clash albums or that one vitriolic offering from the Sex Pistols, even brilliant. Punk though was very much of its time, visceral and immediate, it made no apologies and it acknowledged few debts to its roots. It also had, ultimately, a limited range.

The reasons that I grew to love metal are the same reasons that I have grown to love jazz. On the musical spectrum, both occupy an enormous range of styles. They also blur the boundaries between neighbouring genres. Are AC/DC a rock band or a heavy metal band? Is Nina Simone a blues singer or a jazz singer? The answer in each case is both.

With both metal and jazz there is a bewildering breadth of styles, from blues rock to hard rock to glam rock (thankfully a dying breed), speed metal to black metal to progressive and power metal . There’s modal jazz, cool jazz, free jazz, and jazz-fusion; bebop, hard bop and fast bop. They can even encroach upon each other’s style, as in The Bad Plus’s kick ass jazz version of Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’. Or listen to any Iron Maiden album featuring Nico McBrain on drums, especially ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son’, to hear a jazz trained drummer at the top of his game.  Most of the best metal drummers list jazz legends like Chick Webb and Buddy Rich as major influences, in the same way that Tony Iommi credits gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt  as being instrumental to his playing style (see ‘Planet Caravan’ on ‘Paranoid’).

Of course, as similar as they may be in some respects, the two styles of music are vastly different in a great many more. Consequentially, I tend to listen to each under very different circumstances. Metal is my getting stuff done music. When I sit down at my desk to write of a morning (ok, afternoon), I usually need something rhythmic and plodding to shift me into writing mode, the bass drum propelling me forward, banishing any lethargy from my soul.

Jazz though is for reading. To settle down to the sofa with a volume of Alice Walker, Asimov or Melville, one needs a good jazz album. Most of the musicians I love are favourites because of their lyrical ability, but it’s difficult to listen to them when reading, because instead of concentrating on the words on the page, I’m lip synching to the words in the air. Jazz though wraps itself around the words, compliments them, soundtracks and illuminates them. Rock music kick-starts my day, jazz draws it to a close.

I came to jazz the way most people have come to jazz over the last fifty years, via Miles Davis and ‘Kind of Blue’. If you’re used to more regular or mainstream forms of music then listening to jazz is like learning to speak a new language. ‘Kind of Blue’ serves as Rosetta Stone to this arcane tongue. It’s also a fine indicator of how far your comprehension has progressed. There was a time when I hated jazz and even thirty seconds of any jazz album was enough to make me feel physically sick. First listening to ‘Kind of Blue’ was like hearing Beefheart’s ‘Trout Mask Replica’ for the first time. Or struggling through that first, tortuous reading of ‘Finnegans Wake’. It was jarring, strange and didn’t always make a whole lot of sense.

These days I speak jazz fluently and ‘Kind of Blue’ sounds to me as mainstream as anything else I listen to. To be honest, I prefer ‘Sketches of Spain’, but that’s solely because of Miles’s heavenly interpretation of Rodrigo’s ‘Concerto de Aranjuez’, one of my favourite pieces of classical music. That said, ‘Kind of Blue’ is in many ways the perfect jazz album, the musical equivalent of ‘Frankenstein’ or Rimbaud’s ‘Ma Boheme Fantaisie’ in the original. It’s musica universalis, the music of the spheres in which ancient philosophers and eighteenth century astronomers and composers believed. Miles Davis is to jazz what J. S. Bach is to the classical tradition.

As mentioned earlier, Nina Simone blurs the lines between blues and jazz, as well as pop and rock, from covers of Leonard Cohen, the Beatles and half a dozen Dylan tracks, to her own compositions, like ‘Mississippi Goddam’, written in response to myriad racist murders committed in the 1960s (she called it a show tune for a show that hadn’t been written), to the instrumentals that showed off her sheer virtuosity on the piano. The latter, in particular, are showcased on her 1958 debut album, ‘Little Girl Blue’. To hear songs like ‘Central Park Blues’, ‘Good Bait’, the opening to ‘Mood Indigo’ is to experience serenity. These are complimented by the fragile tenderness of her voice in ‘He Needs Me’, ‘I Loves You Porgy’ and the title track, ‘Little Girl Blue’.

‘Little Girl Blue’ also contains perhaps Nine Simone’s most famous track, ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’, made famous when used in an advert in the 1980s, selling a product the name of which I care neither to name or even indeed recall.

Nina got screwed out of the royalties for her first few albums and was understandably belligerent in refusing to play any of their tracks live, making sure audiences comprehended her exact reasons. The albums still exist however and the world is a better place for their existence. She could be tough, demanding, insisting people refer to her as Dr Simone after she was awarded an honorary doctorate, but I guess she had to be. There isn’t an African-American musician in the last century who hasn’t experienced the kind of abuse that should fill any rational human being with revulsion. Slaves made America, north and south, what it is today and virtually every musical style to come out of the States in the last hundred years, good, bad and indifferent, is infused with the blues. A lot of the time I think the kinds of racism that is pointed towards the African American population is born out of jealousy and pure resentment.

I once knew a couple, she of Afro-Caribbean, he of eastern European Jewish decent. In Britain, few people looked at them twice, yet I was told that in the States, even in Manhattan, people on the street would regularly drop out of reality in seeing them together. My response upon hearing this was, what, has no one in New York ever heard of George Gershwin? The music of Gershwin embodies the artistic evolution that results in cultural cross fertilisation. ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is often mislabelled a classical track, but it is as much jazz music as anything. For many, ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is the theme song of New York, the soundtrack to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, one of the cultural crucibles of the world, an area of outstanding ethnic mixing. But then Gershwin’s all-black opera, ‘Porgy and Bess’, a work forged in the Manhattan melting pot by the son of east European Jewish immigrants was a flop at the time of its original production in the 30s, derided and sneered at by the usual subjects. It’s heartening to know that ‘Summertime’ from ‘Porgy and Bess’, with lyrics by DuBose Heyward, became, briefly, for a time, the most recorded song in history a couple of years ago, with everyone from Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Tom Waits and Louis Armstrong recording versions of the song. Nina Simone recorded her own version. Miles Davis too.

Jazz blurs not only into blues, but into classical music. Aside from Gershwin, some of the greatest American composers of the 20^th century came out of jazz. One has only to think of Count Basie and Duke Ellington, the two greatest composers, pianists and band leaders to come out of the era of swing and big band. “One more time.” Many of the most recorded jazz standards in recording history are Duke Ellington compositions, ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’, ‘ In A Sentimental Mood’ and ‘Mood Indigo’. “One more, once.” The high pitched horns of the Count Basie Orchestra almost define the sound of the 1940s. It somehow doesn’t sound right hearing them without the occasional doodlebug exploding outside.

Nina Simone I would characterise as my favourite female singer. Yet for all time jazz composer and performer, I can only pick one man and that is Charles Mingus. Much as I love ‘Little Girl Blue’ ‘Kind of Blue’, ‘Sketches of Spain’, I adore ‘Mingus Ah Um’ above all others. If the ‘Count Basie Orchestra’ are the sound of the 40s, ‘Mingus Ah Um’ defines the 1950s, even if it wasn’t recorded until the decade’s final year (I can be forgiven, as I wasn’t born at the time). Released in the same year as ‘Kind of Blue’ and the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s peerless ‘Time Out’, ‘Mingus Ah Um’ somehow encapsulates that time more than its contemporaries. ‘Kind of Blue’ is timeless and ‘Time Out’ mixed up with so many styles of world music as to almost escape the gravitational pull of jazz altogether.

‘Mingus Ah Um’, with its defining track, ‘Fables of Faubus’, written in mockery of Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas who deployed the National Guard in order to prevent two African-American students from attending high school in Little Rock, stands out as an album of its time. It’s an album of outstanding tracks, ‘Better Git it in Your Soul’, ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, ‘Jelly Roll’ and ‘Self-Portrait in Three Colours’.

Like Ellington, Basie and Gershwin, Mingus is a genius composer. His meisterwerk, ‘Epitaph’, is so complicated that it was only successfully performed for the first time more than a decade after his death. Any fan of Radiohead will know Mingus’s work, if only by proxy, with both ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘We suck Young Blood’ both heavily influenced by the Mingus track, ‘Freedom’ (from the album, ‘Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus’, a title that inspired at least one ‘Jazz Club’ sketch on 90s programme, ‘The Fast Show’).

Indeed, it’s indicative of how far my comprehension of jazz music has come that there are so many jazz artists that I listen to these days that I have not yet even mentioned, including Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn, Lee Morgan and Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Cassandra Wilson and The Bad Plus.

I still listen to heavy metal, but much of it being the music of my youth and, strangely for a genre firmly rooted in the mid-twentieth century, the list of jazz artists I listen to is marginally more contemporary than that of the metal. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, what’s contemporary is what’s new to you in that instant. I read 102 books last year and only one of them was published within the year (Philip Hoare’s, ‘The Sea Inside’), so who needs contemporary? The past is another country. They may do things differently there, but it also means there’s a lot to discover for yourself, as if it had never been discovered before.

Get it done.

Her Ribbons and Her Bows

I don’t necessarily agree with every word that follows, but I wanted to write a parody of the kind of obsessive fandom that leads people to read far too much into things. Dylan attracts more obsessives than most other artists. You see them up front at gigs, little notebooks in their hands like train spotters, obsessively writing down any deviation to Dylan’s recorded lyrics. I’m not quite that bad, but I do have more books on Dylan than anyone apart from James Joyce and Shakespeare.

Dylan is God, only in that he moves in a mysterious way. And like any religion, the following is more wishful thinking than revealed truth.

Her Ribbons and Her Bows

“Many stories are told of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s journey to the Frogstar. Ten percent of them are ninety-five percent true, fourteen percent of them are sixty-five percent true, thirty-five percent of them are only five percent true, and all the rest of them are… told by Zaphod Beeblebrox.”

                    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Will: [takes a drag, holds, exhales]: Just Like a Woman, you see, is Dylan waving [waves] bye-bye to his existence on tour. It’s 1966 and he’s at crisis point, strung out on speed, too little sleep and too many tour dates. He’s got a new wife at home and a mercenary manager on his back trying to coin him for every last cent. If you take a look at the footage from that era, he’s thin as a rake (it’s why they get Cate Blanchet to play that version of him in the Todd Haynes film), and he’s giving it all, “I shouldn’t be singing” and “I’m gonna get me a new Bob Dylan and use him, see how long that Bob Dylan lasts.” Dylan wants out. The novelty of people booing him when he first goes electric the year before has become a drag by the time he reaches England. He, he, he’s looking for an out and it comes two months after his return to the States, July 29 1966, when he comes off his motorcycle (deliberate, some say), exaggerates his injuries and retreats into eight years of obscurity at Woodstock. Just Like a Woman foreshadows it all. The crash happens in July and the song comes out in the States in August.  

It’s not a misogynist song. Not a misogynist song. Some people to take it to mean, typical woman, but it’s not that. For a start, if you listen to the lyrics, it’s saying that she likes to act all grown up, but she’s fragile like a child. It’s not a chick at all though. It’s him. It’s Dylan. It’s this lifestyle, the touring, the interminable, inane question from the press, the ire of the folk fucks and their cries of “”Fake” and “Judas.” From the outside, it all seems so glamorous, but it takes a lot of foundation to paper over the cracks. “Lately I see her ribbons and her bows have fallen from her curls.” Dylan seems never to have really enjoyed it: “It was raining from the first and I was dying of thirst, so I came in here.” Todd Haynes knows all this, that’s the other reason he gets Cate Blanchet to play Dylan in ’66. Jude Quinn man, Dylan then as he sees himself, trying to hold it all together, slowly coming apart at the seams. That film confuses me. It’s Cate Blanchet, right, who’s fit, but she’s Dylan, who’s, who’s God. Is it ok to fancy God? Is it blasphemous? Can bet there’s a whole website for people who fantasise about boning deities. Holy Fuck. Ha!

 

Just Like a Woman, though, it’s a Dear John letter to his fans. It’s Dylan telling us we need a break. “Ain’t it clear that I just can’t fit. Yes, I believe it’s time for us to quit.” It’s not misogynistic and it’s not bitter. It’s a pretty tender song, nothing like the bile of Like a Rolling Stone or the two fingered fuck you to the folkies in Positively 4^th Street. It’s not forever, he’s saying, but people are going to have to make changes before he comes back. “When we meet again, introduced as friends, please don’t let on that you knew me well. I was hungry and it was your world.” Perhaps he’s right. Going back on tour in ’74 wrecks his first marriage to Sarah Lownds. Though that break up leads to Blood on the Tracks, the greatest break-up album ever recorded, so, y’know, every silver cloud.

Anyway, what’s your kid up to these days? Haven’t seen him in ages... 

Get it done.

See Also (click link)

Best Things Ever #3 Highway 61 Revisited

Coffee Shop Blues

Selections from the journal of Danny Roberts

Welcome to my favourite observation post in all the northern hemisphere. The second floor of a certain coffee shop, St. Antoniesbreestraat, Amsterdam. The walls are painted a medium shade of blue. Ganesha, the god of new age cliché reclines, serenely, in the corner. The stairwell leading from the street bisects the room. One side contains the bar and pot counter, the other is the chill out/lounge area. Both halves are glass fronted and partly enclosed by Plexiglas like the crystal turrets of a high street castle.

A large brown, L shaped sofa dominates the lounge area. The coffee table in front is littered with the various accoutrements that every good pot smoker requires: Ashtrays, lighters, tobacco and papers, a full size hookah and of course the gear itself. Skirting the Plexiglas there is a semi-circular, Formica table which sweeps out past the windows as far as the jukebox in the corner. Nina Simone’s ‘Mood Indigo’ is playing. And there I am next to it, staring out the window and into space.

I love to just sit here and do nothing. Not only can the finest green and black be bought from a few feet away, but the view is splendid. Everywhere you turn everything is perfectly framed. The open window before me to the pavement below. The archway across the street.  The stoners staring blankly through the glass from the other side of the room. An arcade runs underneath us, through which people pass, gaining a precious few seconds respite from the ubiquitous Amsterdam rain. And it seems that I myself am framed for the delectation of the shoppers passing beneath.

I could sit here for hours (I probably have). Allow the world to orbit in an ellipse with me at one foci and the spliff smouldering in the ashtray at the other. And as it rushes past my eye-line I’ll let my attention roam and relax on individuals and try to discern as much as possible before they exit stage left, stage right. The girl on the bicycle in the sky blue jumper. The acid casualty tramp who jogs past holding his cupped hands to his face as if carrying some precious cargo. The guy in the white shirt, business suit and a Rasta hat. He staggers through my field of view, arms in the air and shouts in the poshest way imaginable, “Hey, where are all the white women at.”  He’s paler than me.

And as below, so all around. The two women who look out of place outside of Hampshire who eat space-cake and swap icing tips and wait for something to happen. An entire family occupy the sofa behind me. Seriously, father and son, nanna and granddaughter. Fuck knows what that’s all about. Maybe one of Bill’s rants got through. You see son, the thumb is opposable, that’s why we can use tools and  live indoors. Cool dad. And sat next to me, an American. He looks like Hemmingway, but as he speaks (“Hey look honey, the walls have babies in bubbles in space.”), he sounds more like Al from Home Improvement.

All these people have stories to tell. Most are just passing through. Since the rupture (I refuse to call it the 'event', it sounds so fucking stupid), there are a few places like Amsterdam, Venice, Timbuktu, San Francisco, Singapore and a handful of others where the local space, time and reality shattered during the rupture and later stabilised. Throughout the city there now exist places where you can walk from one version to another.

If you want to go back to the 1870s, get the 51 tram from Amsterdam Central and stay on until Westwijk (although you may find yourself doing the last couple of miles by horse and trap). The Venice Bridge of Sighs can be accessed via Admiralgracht. Hendrix is busking in the market around the corner from here. Oberon and Titania and all the other fairies have taken up residence in the Vondelpark and may receive you. The shopkeeper from Mr Benn has a place near the station and people stumble into his poorly animated premises all the time. He's either malevolent or means well, I've yet to decide which.

If you want to see zombies take the ferry at the back of the station and head up to the campsite in the woods up there. The army pretty much have the place in lockdown but there are breaks in the fence and enough guides prepared to take you zombie spotting. Hunting them costs a little more.

Many come through the city on their way to try and join Star Fleet. Fuck knows who discovered this route but I am reliably informed that you have to head down to Max Euweplein, where the Hard Rock Cafe is located. You approach from the main road, up to the precinct and out through the arcade, passing the giant chess board on the left.

Then you get a train to Schiphol Airport, fly out to San Francisco, take a guided tour of Alcatraz and once there use the men's room on the second level, first stall. Once in the stall, hop two over to come out in the third one along. You emerge into a vision of what people in the 1980s imagined the future might look night. At most any other time in my life I would have jumped into a Star Trek universe without giving it a second thought. But damm it if Andy hasn't made a sailor out of me. I guess it was inevitable. If my parents hadn't met serving in the Royal Navy, I wouldn't be here at all.

Andy is the reason I'm in Amsterdam. I've sailed all over looking for a clue to his whereabouts. Been at sea so long that the feel of solid ground beneath my feet still seems unnatural. For a while I gave up looking altogether and spent years sailing around and around the globe, coming near land only rarely. It was useless, Andy deliberately makes people forget him, so how was I supposed to pick up the clues to find him?

Mostly I read and marvelled at how even the most magical plots now seemed tame compared to what I had been through in recent times. Yet the new world was created out of these flights of fancy and I resolved that if I didn't have Andy around to help me then I needed to know as much about what possibilities were out there. Books seemed like a good start.

Besides, if you've spent as long as I have staring at the pages of Finnegans Wake, trying to make any sense out of great swathes of its 'narrative' and its dense arcane syntax, then any other text in the English language is a piece of piss by comparison. The Wake powers the most powerful engine on my ship and with a bit of trial and error I've found a couple of hundred secret routes through the bounds of reality and beyond.

Eventually though even a man as misanthropic as me craves the company of others and it occurred to me, rather than running around looking for Andy it would be better to drop anchor in one place and wait for him to come to me? Amsterdam seemed the obvious location for a number of reasons. Not least of which that if I'm going to be sat around waiting for the man, I'd like a smoke while I do so. I also heard of a couple of people that were able to remember Andy that pass through these parts from time to time. Haven't heard a peek out of any of them in months.

And yet a hyper-dimensional crossroads like this is a gift for a writer. This spot isn't just perfect for its visual treats but for the things you hear. I come here every day to hear people talk of triumphs and disasters, narrow escapes and nightmare endings, new worlds and fresh realities, rekindled passions and lost loves and childhood dreams realised and discarded in the blink of an eye. All these tales deserve a chronicler and as I've not been doing much else of late, I've taken the task upon myself to the point where finding Andy seems a secondary mission at this stage. You will excuse me if I have occasionally used some artist licence, but I have that Joycean strain in me and I do so hate to do things the same way twice...

I’m thinking about my first trip here. It was my first time in a coffee shop. First time abroad. Me and a mate popped in for a couple of hours. But the sofa devoured us and we ended up staying six. I forget what we were smoking, but for a moment there time seemed to speed up and slow down and stop.

The whole thing freaked me out to begin with. Sat in a public place, smoking gange and no one gives a fuck. In fact it’s actively encouraged. The first spliff always takes me by surprise and this was no exception. You have to treat it like a roller-coaster. If you tense up, you’ll hate it. But if you lie back and let out a healthy laugh from the pit of your stomach, you enjoy every second of it.

That’s what I did. Went with the flow. Turned on my scanner and took in everything in around me. The Dutch guy selling the dope. He had the look of Brian May mixed with Stretch Armstrong. The girl serving drinks. Dreads half way down her back, nose ring. The epitome of Dutch beauty (And as I’m watching her, she turns and winks at me - but it’s just that time’s broken free of its mooring again and she’s only blinking).

Then there was the clientele. The Filipino boy, with his dad (‘Look father, this is what passes for opium in Europe.’). The local popping in to pick his stash up for the weekend, complete with dog on lead. Can spot British tourists a mile off. The German fallen asleep in the corner. And a couple of twenty-something lads who seem to my pot-addled brain to be a kind of Jeeves and Wooster pairing. ‘Sir, I have purchased half an ounce of the finest Nepalese White.’  ‘Excellent Jeeves, now let us depart with all due ambulatory rapidity before we are observed frequenting this working class establishment.’ (Only in Dutch).

However, the star of the show almost defies description. He works here. He’s dressed in skater jeans and sneakers. Boomerang t-shirt and rainbow suspenders dangling from his sides. He’s white, American I think, with a mushroom afro and goatee. There’s a half finished joint permanently balanced between his lips that I haven't seen him light once. I’m not quite sure what his job is, but it must qualify for laziest occupation on Earth. Having watched him for the most of the evening, I narrowed down his main responsibilities to the following:

1. Emptying ashtrays
2. Shouting, ‘No cameras near the counter.’
3. Lighting four candles at about half seven.
4. Greeting people at the top of the stairs, shaking their hand, nodding his cocked head and saying,   ‘Awright man.’ in his best Jamaican accent.

And you just know to look at him that he came to Amsterdam for a week and he’s been here ever since. He's an absolute star!  I picture him fifteen years in the future when cannabis is legal and not merely decriminalised and space-cake is served to visiting dignitaries as a Dutch delicacy. He’ll be dressed in a tux and cumberbund, the same joint pursed between his lips. He’ll greet visiting ambassadors, shake their hand, nod and say, ‘Awright man’, in twenty five different languages.

In the middle age of Awright Man  he'll be perpetually slumped in the corner of some coffee shop. Muttering to himself about  how Amsterdam’s became too touristy and the best place to toke skunk is now some cabin at the northernmost tip of Norway, 'cause it’s permanently dark there for three months of the year. Then they'll throw him out and he'll trudge home to slump in front of the TV, one hand down his pants, spliff in his mouth, snoring and muttering ‘Awright man’ with every exhale.

I was so high that night, I lost the power of speech for most of the evening. Claire had a conversation with a Parisian about speaking French. Something about how you don’t have to speak French, just believe you can and you will. People talk such bollocks when they’re stoned. Probably true these days. Most things are possible with enough time and space.

We left at midnight. When we arrived back to the street level I turned around and said, ‘Brilliant night.’ and we went off home to our hostel.  You never forget your first love...

My God, that spliff’s massive. Oh, hang on. Hang on. No, it’s just closer.

Of course, eventually I’ll tire of sitting still and drift out into the parabolic streets to wander lost, defeated once more by Dutch street design until I either stumble into another coffee shop or walk off the map or onto another map. Or more likely, I’ll walk in a straight line for forty minutes, turn left and be back where I started. Which will be here.

This place is like a lighthouse to me. Whenever or wherever I get lost in the city, I can always find my back here even if I get lost trying to find anywhere else. Like the second-hand American bookshop with a portal to a fantasy adventure world in the back room. Found it once by accident, meant to go back, can't find the bloody place now.

Then there was the time I was watching the snooker in a coffee shop, left my bag in there and by the time I realised I'd forgotten it, I'd walked in a complete circle and was standing outside the same place. My bag was still tucked under the chair.

But enough of such nonsense. Especially when there are real tales to tell. Like this one...

http://eponymistuk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-evil-that-men-do.html