Shivering Sands: Seven Years of Stories, Drinking and the World Read online

  5:"Ghosts IV32"-NIN

  My favourite piece from Ghosts I-IV. That prowling, pulsing rhythm has a real motorik feel to it, that slightly sleazy driving-atnight propulsiveness. It's the piece on Ghosts that I can slip into and go with.

  6: "Guest Informant"-The Fall

  Ancient, I know. I'm in the process of replacing all my crumbled old Fall tapes and unusable Fall vinyl with CDs. The "Brix years" of the Fall tend to be looked down on a bit, these days, and my own favourite Fall is still Hex Enduction Hour... but I rediscovered my love of this garagey bit of impenetrable twanging madness off Frenz Experiment. I spent a significant chunk of winter 1988 trying to work out what the hell Brix was yelling in the background all through the song. Turns out it was "Baghdad/ Space Cog/ Analyst."The new album's not bad, either, Mark E. Smith full on as The Last English Psychotronic Bluesman...

  7: "We're Gonna Rise"-The Breeders

  Weird thing. This came up on my mp3 player just as I was finishing the last page of Cormac McCarthy's The Road in the departure lounge in Oslo Gardermoen the other week. It's insidious like "Fortunately Gone," the opening song on their very first album, but in a different way. It creeps up slowly, winds its way into your head, and before you know it you're just kind of looking out the window wistfully.

  Everything Is Happening

  Written in June of 2008

  The things the internet have done to music continue to fascinate me. In times past, people recorded for radio-that is, they recorded in a way that would sound good on medium-wave broadcasting, because BBC Radio 1, the nation's way of discovering music, broadcast on 275 and 285 on the medium wave. FM was, for a long time, reserved for the Chart Show on Sundays, where Radio 1 took Radio 2 s FM slot for two hours. (Or was it an hour and a half?) This is one reason why there wasn't any bass in British pop music for years and years. It didn't broadcast all that well. Pop music was incredibly toppy for a long time; you only got real bass in clubs and at gigs. Today, it's the middle stretch that goes missing. Mp3 preserves the top and the bottom, but the centre loses nuance in the compression. And now I'm hearing people record for mp3. People are starting to complain about it-click around and you'll find "audiophiles" wishing for FLAC and Ogg that preserves more of the music. It's just another cycle. Sooner or later, we'll have another moment as in '87/'88 when people discovered bass again, and everything else sounded kind of insipid in comparison.

  Not that it'll happen in a big wave next time. The other interesting thing is the immediacy and fractioning of musical movements. In (say) 1988, you could feel it coming. (In actual fact, there were two things coming-in addition to acid, there was a reinvention of guitar music). Genesis P-Orridge has talked about this a little bit, the weird surge in the air that took him to Jack The Tab. In those days, big cultural shifts were a slow wave passing over the planet, moving at the speed of postage and club nights and the occasional phone call. And they came, at best, one or two at a time. And they caught up everybody.

  What's changed is the speed of communication and the speed at which new music can be experienced. So today we no longer wait for the breakers to hit every 11 years (roughly: rock, '55. Psychedelia, '66. Punk, '77. Acid, 1988). Instead, micro-movements pop up every month. Some new eddy in the hardcore continuum, MySpacey chavpop, The Fonal Sound, British "dark folk," the spooktronics crowd being drawn to the Miasmah label (and too many more to mention)... far more plentiful than "scenes" in the past, geographically scattered and inspiring the sort of mad group inspiration and evolution that you used to only find at the top of big New Sound cultural events.

  Everything is happening, all the time, very fast. I like that.

  §

  June 3RD, 2008

  Decades before people were hyping themselves in rap, Bo Diddley was doing nothing but singing songs about

  Bo Diddley (while ripping the piss out of "Hush Little Baby") and inventing the Bo Diddley beat (while actually trying to teach himself some old Gene Autry saw).

  The first time I remember hearing Bo Diddley was actually a clip played on some BBC TV music quiz show, probably in the early 80s. I said something like, "What the hell...?" and my dad said, "Ssh. Listen. Listen to his guitar." And THAT was it. Because it's the sound of your heart skipping a beat. boom-ba-boom-boom bam-boom. i don't think Bo Diddley met a second chord in his life, he made status quo look like Segovia for that. It's all about that beat. "I play the guitar as if I were playing drums," Diddley said. See, my dad had been a drummer, and that's what he picked up on. People thought he was weird because he had women in his band-musicians like Peggy Jones and the Duchess, who could crank out primal blues riffs that would've made John Lee Hooker stand to attention.

  Bo Diddley died today, aged 79.

  §

  Every Single Day

  Written in June of 2008

  Today we learned that our universe may well have "bubbled off" from a previous one. That, in fact, our universe may well be nothing but one of a chain of entire serial realities. Or, perhaps, universes cluster like frogspawn in the pondwater of some unimaginable hyperreal superfluid:

  "Their model suggests that new universes could be created spontaneously from apparently empty space. From inside the parent universe, the event would be surprisingly unspectacular... 'a universe could form inside this room and we'd never know.'"

  This apparently has a further implication: that the Big Bang (from our end-obviously an inaudible farting sound on the other end) of bubbling off from a previous universe meant that our universe emerged in ordered condition, rather than accidental chaos. This preserves the Second Law Of Thermodynamics, which says that systems progress from order to disorder, which explains why time runs in one direction. Serial universes explain the arrow of time.

  In my slightly whiskied state tonight, this also suggests to me that time never ends. There was time before the very beginnings of the universe, and there will be time after the end of our universe. All the time in the world. Also, check this out:

  "Detailed measurements made by the satellite have shown that the fluctuations in the microwave background are about 10% stronger on one side of the sky than those on the other. Sean Carroll conceded that this might just be a coincidence, but pointed out that a natural explanation for this discrepancy would be if it represented a structure inherited from our universe's parent."

  Let me repeat that bit. The universe may have an inherited structure. Like a RepRap machine, a self-replicating object. Turn this one around in your head tonight: what if a universe is a thing that builds more universes? Or a postbiological animal that reproduces more universes in n-dimensional space?

  We learn stuff like this every single day. Every single goddamned day a new idea just falls out of the sky.

  Who'd want to live anywhere else?

  §

  I REALLY, REALLY, HAVE TO STOP STANDING NAKED IN

  THE BACK GARDEN AT NIGHT. ONE DAY THE NEIGHBOURS'

  MOTION-SENSOR LIGHT WILL SNAP ON...

  §

  Rupture

  Written in June of 2008

  I had a sort of infernokrusher/BRUTE! moment in July of 2005. A searing rupture in the sf paradigm: the certain knowledge that in fact what sf needed was both an upgrade and a retrograde. A science fiction dominated by obsession with penis size, an adolescent terror of sex, sickening violence and massive, random, senseless explosions. Written with the sort of ugly, naive bluntness with which a disturbed teenager might craft the self-produced pornographic material that just barely prevents him from going off the rails and fucking all the neighbourhood pets to death. Imagine, then, a lobotomised fourteenyear-old Stephen Hawking who'd been sexually abused by nuns since the age of three, turning his hand to the great game of science fiction. I felt that, somehow, this would produce the perfect science fiction, the truest response to the early pulp-magazine sf.

  Luckily for everyone, I sobered up a day later because my family was coming home. The only products of that 24-hour fugue state were the following t
wo sketches. And thank god there weren't any more. Even my dear friend, the late Eva Lux, a sometime porn performer, looked askance at terms like "beef missile."

  But, sometimes, deep in the armpit of the night, these sketches call to me. I dream that perhaps I walked away from the purest fiction ever to have touched a screen. And then I dream that I'm being repeatedly punched in the face by everybody.

  Planet Earth's Control Room

  Jesus Christ's liver tasted of gin and semen. I gobbed it out on to the floor and looked around the control room. Somewhere out back, the Pope was still screaming. If I hadn't punched the teeth out of the piranha before I poured them up him, he might be dead by now. The only thing muffling his fucking noise was the mouthful of used condoms. The Virgin Mary came out of a side door with a shotgun. I bit off the end and spat it in her eye, laughing. "Virgin Mary my arse," I said. "Any wife of mine coming home with that story would have been left out for the lepers before midnight. You like the taste of dadpaste and no mistake. I've chewed open your son and washed his raw meat down with a bottle of shit wine. What do you think to that?" As the Virgin Mary went down on her booted knees and skilfully guided my purple-headed battering ram past her prehensile tonsils, I looked at the control panel. There was a depression in it with a red button at the bottom with the sign DO NOT PRESS. At the last moment, I ripped my beef missile free of her vocal cords with both hands and shoved it down into the control console.

  The world exploded. And THEN I ejaculated. The end. Fuck off.

  The Insulted Lover

  I grabbed a handful of my own semen out of Mother Teresa and flung it at the oncoming cops. They all got instantly pregnant and fell over. Even the men.

  "I've had better," said Mother Teresa, sparking a match off her nipple and lighting up a joint.

  It was then I knew I had to kill everyone in the city. With my penis.

  I flexed my flaming meathammer. The road cracked in half. The cops exploded. So did the buildings. Everybody died.

  Except me. Result. The end. Fuck off.

  Bugs

  Written in June of 2008

  The devices at Queen's University Belfast are described as "small hockey-puck-like antennas," but they sound like bugs to me.

  They channel wireless data signals across human skin using a physical effect called, I swear, The Creeping Wave. The Creeping Wave Effect would allow several electronic implants to communicate with each other across the surface of your skin-essentially, a bluetoothing of the human body. Or, if you like, bugging yourself-monitoring and updating your own devices over the air. I'm not sure if New Scientist's term "skin-tenna" will stick. Let's face it: it's going to be a creeping bug.

  At the same time, however, a team at Rutgers has its own creeping bug problem. They thawed out a bunch of soil-based bacteria, the youngest of which went into the deep-freeze in 1974, and tried some antibiotics on them. Antibiotic resistance is an increasing problem in the medical sector, and some elements of that resistance may be found in soil, hence the experiments. No-one was happy to see these vintage soil-bugs fend off a dose of Cipro that would literally have killed a sumo wrestler.

  The thing is, Cipro doesn't occur in nature. And all of the antibiotics used in the test were developed some considerable time after the soil bacteria samples were stuffed in the icebox. Bacteria that have not been exposed to an antibiotic should not have been able to evolve resistance to it, right? I mean, Cipro used to work just fine. And these bugs had never seen Cipro, because it came after they'd been frozen and because it was generated in a lab. Speculative explanations seem to begin with the suggestion that "natural variation or prior exposure to undiscovered Cipro-like molecules could explain the bacteria's retroactive resistance." But a different idea occurred to me.

  What if bacteria update over the air in a creeping wave across the surface of the earth?

  §

  The thing about travelling into the future is that it kills you one day at a time.

  §

  Inviting Death From Space

  Written in June of 2008

  Given the choice, how would you prefer to announce the presence of your species in local space? Imagine all the ways you could describe the emergence of a digital-age society on this planet. All the ways you could explain our species and our environment and biosphere, and explain that, no, we're not perfect, we're still fighting, we still haven't resolved our relationship with nature, there are still hungry people and sick people. But we're trying, and in some places we're winning, and although we can't reach you, we could really use a friend. All the ways in which you could hope to open up a conversation with the Other, wherever it may lie.

  Or you could just send them a Doritos ad.

  Because, yes, on the morning of June 12,2008, the EISCAT high powered space transmitter station on Svalbard used its array of radars to beam a Doritos ad at a solar system 42 light years from here.

  For six hours, the MPEG video file was repeatedly pulsed at system 47 UMa, in the Ursa Minor constellation, which was chosen because it seems to have a circumstellar habitable zone. 47 UMa does have two Jupiter-class planets outside the HZ, although one of them is so massive that it very probably does weird gravity things to the outside edge of the HZ. This means that, if there are Earth-like rocky planets inside the habitable zone that we just can't see yet, there's a fair chance they'll be small, lumpy, thirsty and ugly. Like a man in a Foster's commercial. Or, presumably, a Doritos one.

  EISCAT, which has had funding problems, has received an undisclosed but presumably substantial donation from Doritos in return for the broadcast, which will help them meet their actual aims of performing radar astronomy experiments. The director of EISCAT is quoted as saying: "Some years in the future, the money that comes from this kind of commercial service could be used to fund pure research."

  This would seem to open the door to polluting local space with the grottiest capitalistic artifacts conceivable in return for being able to do a bit of science. That's a pretty high cost-of a piece with the recurring nightmare in fiction of the Coca-Cola logo being permanently sprayed on the surface of the moon. Others will champion this as private enterprise giving science the boost it needs, which is usually where I'm told to wave my hands in glee that Richard Branson and his mates have created a zippy goshwow 21st Century space business on the same kind of suborbital lob Alan Shepherd managed in 1961 (and a fair distance short of the full orbital flight Yuri Gagarin made).

  Fuck that. I don't care. Attempting to announce our presence to any intelligence that can get in front of the signal by sending them something made by a company that sells crunchy shit in bags is not the way to the maturity of the species.

  According to the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence's Permanent Study Group, it's been argued that "a civilization which hopes to detect radio evidence of other civilizations in the cosmos is obligated to reveal its own presence. Others maintain that it is suicidal to shout in the jungle."There is, therefore, a San Marino Scale measuring risk in these matters. You can play with an online calculator, if you know a few specifics, to work out whether or not a signal broadcast into space will in fact bring down the alien hordes ov chewy doooom. And if it does, you know damn well that their first words will be "Sponsored by Doritos?"

  Amazingly (to me), it's not the first time we've fired signals at 47 UMa. Notional lifeforms in-system will also one day be privy to The 1st Theremin Concern For Aliens. They're due to get that in the summer of 2047. The funny thing about that, of course, is that the theremin was usually used to announce the presence of spooky space aliens in 1950s science fiction films...

  We're just asking for it, really.

  The Final Solution

  Written in June of 2008

  Did you know that only two species can be removed from the biosphere with no knock-on effects whatsoever? Wasps and dogs.

  Seriously. I have no reason to lie about this.* Delete either of those two from life on earth, and there's no effect on the fo
odchain, planetary ecology, nothing. They are surplus to requirements. The wasp exists to just bug people, and the dog is the planet's way of reminding us that pure, genetic Evil exists in the universe.

  Which makes me wonder why no-one thought of this before:

  A street-sweeping truck has sucked a dog up through its bristles on a New York street, leaving its horrified owner holding nothing but the lead."

  How did this act of stark, shining genius have to happen by accident? This is the ultimate Eureka moment for the human race. Send sweeper trucks through the streets every six hours to denude our roads of dogs. No more of their plotting on street corners, their shitting under human feet, their watching, their constant awful watching for signs of weakness. Oh, yes, a human's best friend. Until you show a sign of weakness. And then they eat you. Cats eat dead bodies because they get hungry, and, let's face it, they made it clear they couldn't give a shit about you from the start. Dogs lure you with that masquerade of unconditional affection. But they've been thinking about eating you the whole time.

  My friend Zo lost her dog Moo some weeks ago. What do you think happened to that little dog, now no-one's keeping their eye on it? That's right. That dog is now living on the fucking moon, collaborating with Nazis. Prove me wrong.

  Yeah, you can laugh. But I can hear you. It's that shaky, uncertain kind of laugh. Deep down, you know I'm right. You fear the Dog, but I Hate it, and that's why I can say these things out loud. The Dog is the natural enemy of the Human. We should all have street-sweeping trucks. Packs of us should be trundling up and down the streets every day, sucking the yappy bastards up for the good of our children and our children's children.