sweet effay

COLLAPSE

2006-10-17T13:03:00.001+01:00

Just wanted to add my voice to those trumpeting the advent of COLLAPSE. My copy arrived today with incredible swiftness and, well, that's the rest of the day gone really. In fact, it's probably the rest of the week gone. Not only is the thing nearly three hundred pages long, but it's packed with material that is simultaneously fascinating and so complicated (in a really good way) that it will have you rushing off to check stuff right left and centre.

It looks very nice too and is small enough to put in your pocket so that you can read it on the bus as you head off to the library to take out their books on number theory.

It's available here, and well worth the money.

Degeneration

2006-10-05T20:30:00.000+01:00

I’ve just spent an enjoyable couple of weeks wading through Max Nordau’s Degeneration; an attack on the art and culture of the nineteenth century fin de siècle. The vast quantity of bile with which Nordau sprays his targets is absolutely wonderful. Here he is on realism in Ibsen:

The small features pinned by Ibsen to his two-legged theses, to give them, at least, as much resemblance to humanity as is possessed by a scarecrow, are borrowed from the society of a hideous hole on the Norwegian coast, composed of drunkards and silly louts, of idiots and crazed hysterical geese, who in their whole life have never formed a clearer thought than: ‘How can I get hold of a bottle of brandy?’ or ‘How can I make myself interesting to men?’ (p. 405).

As for Nietzsche:

First of all it is essential to become habituated to Nietzsche’s style. This is, I admit, unnecessary for the alienist. To him this sort of style is well known and familiar. He frequently reads writings (it is true, as a rule, unprinted) of a similar order of thought and diction, and he reads them, not for his pleasure, but that he may prescribe the confinement of the author in an asylum (p. 417).

To prove his points, Nordau provides the reader with enormous numbers of quotations which he then reads with such stunning literal mindedness that they become absurd. This is not to say that some of them are not absurd in the first place, but anybody who interprets the famous gateway scene in Zarathustra’s ‘The Vision and the Riddle’ as the ‘self-evident fact’ that ‘the fleeting instant of the present is the point of contact of the past and the future’ (p. 418) is clearly not paying attention.

The interesting thing about the book is how contemporary much of it sounds. Why? Because the same arguments are still being trotted out today. It’s true that many of Nordau’s targets are no longer taken to task for their inability to hold arguments or talk about the ‘real world’, but if you take names such as 'Symbolism' and 'Nietzsche', and substitute others such as 'Deconstruction' and 'Baudrillard', the book would read very similarly to various tedious and uninformed attacks upon continental philosophy which litter the shelves of the philosophy sections of Waterstones up and down the country. The only real differences are that Nordau is so delightfully rude about his targets and he actually has a thesis as to why all these people are writing such rubbish.

The clue is actually in the above quote about Nietsche: Nordau thinks that all these artists and thinkers are literally insane: Basically, the strain of living in an age of information overload (he cites daily newspapers as an example) has driven the nerves of large portions of the population of Europe to exhaustion. This results in the clinical condition which forms the title of the book. Your run of the mill degenerates simply become criminals, but the artistic ones channel their malaise into painting and literature (partly, apparently, because they haven’t got the bottle to go out and do real crimes). They then gain followers who form schools (apparently a sure sign of degeneration as real artists are strong enough to work alone) and the sickness spreads.

Nordau’s long clinical accounts of degeneration are delightful. My favourite characters are the graphomaniacs who (take heed ye bloggers!) are unable to stop publishing any old nonsense, often repeating themselves as they go and, most heinously of all, using different coloured inks in the process. Unhappily though he is on rather a sticky wicket as he is a devout follower of Lombroso (the book is littered with desriptions of jawlines and foreheads) and consequently his scientific credentials are not much better than those of some of his targets.

Nordau ends the book with a prognosis for the twentieth century: He sees things getting much worse but then, good Darwinian that he is, the degenerates will die out; possibly to be replaced by a hardier breed of steel nerved men able to absorb vast quantities of information:

The end of the twentieth century, therefore, will probably see a generation to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen square yards of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone (p. 541).

Art will then be left to women and children as men become more scientific and so no longer require such frivolities in order to live well ordered and beneficial lives.

Poor Max. He must be spinning in his grave, but at least we have the likes of Sokal and Bricmont to carry on the fight.

Bob Woodward's Book on the Iraq War

2006-10-01T09:24:00.000+01:00

It portrays Bush as determined to stick it out even if his only supporters are whittled down to his wife and the White House dog. 'I will not withdraw, even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me,' Woodward quotes Bush as having told top Republicans at a White House meeting.

How stupid is George Bush? What makes him think that he currently has, let alone can count on, Barney's support?

I am a prize winning photographer!

2006-09-26T19:55:00.000+01:00

Here you see the winning entry from the open class at the local horticultural show. So what did I win for this masterpiece? The princely sum of thirty-five pence. We don't half live the high life out here in the Flatlands.

Yet more proof...

2006-09-19T20:36:00.000+01:00

...that the Daily Mail and it's readers constitute an unholy alliance of nostalgia for an age that never was, reactionary knee-jerking, and plain stupidity.

Royal Mail has begun selling postage over the Internet and with uncanny precision, the DM and its fetid followers have pounced upon the central outrage of this pernicious act. Is it the fact that such a move will deprive Post Offices of yet more income, thereby constituting one more step in Royal Mail's ongoing campaign, aided and abetted by government complicity, to reduce the size of the network by taking so much business away that smaller Post Offices are forced to close, thereby simultaneously allowing Royal Mail to claim that it's not their fault and obviating the need to dish out redundancy payments? Ermm, no actually: it's the fact that the new downloadable labels will not have the Queen's head on them.

Click the link. Check out the outrage in the readers' comments, then wonder at the stupidity of a such a large bunch of imbeciles getting worked up over this terrible change, all of whom have apparently failed to notice that the Queen's head has been absent from vast quantities of their mail for decades due to the use of franking machines and printed Post Office labels.

Public Service Announcement

2006-09-14T16:17:00.000+01:00

Every week I buy a TV guide, and every week I hurl it across the room complaining bitterly about the fact that there’s nothing worth watching. Next week however is a different story: two decent, nay essential, programmes!
Sunday, ITV 23:10 – The South Bank Show on J.G. Ballard
Friday, BBC2 23:35 – The Fall: The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith.
So I can finally give the DVD player a couple of nights off.

What are we doing in the Little House? Playing Lego Star Wars II: very probably the best video game ever made.

Equal Opportunities

2006-09-08T20:11:00.000+01:00

Remember how the introduction of university top-up fees was not going to put off students from poorer backgrounds and would certainly not end up discriminating in favour of the well off? Of course you didn't believe it and neither did I, but here's something that I never imagined even at my most cynical:
Degree discount for up-front cash.

Reanimation

2006-09-06T20:29:00.000+01:00

Okay, the evenings are drawing in as the long hot summer heads towards to a close, the Secret Blog has been consigned to the abyss, so it’s time to come crawling back here again. Expect more of the same insightful commentary at least until December when Thomas Pynchon’s latest thousand page opus hits the shelves. Oddly enough, I was just planning to re-read Gravity’s Rainbow, but now I can put that off until I have ploughed through this monster.

Flatlands living goes on as before, although the Little House has had it’s roof fixed, meaning that we are now cosy but skint. Not so skint, however that I haven’t just zoomed over to Threshold House to pick up the new versions of The Remote Viewer and Black Antlers. If you’re lucky, there will be more on them when I have heard them. If you’re unlucky, I’ll see if I can attract some more illiterate hate mail by slagging off Quizmania again.

You'll not get away this time, Mr Blair

2006-08-05T10:30:00.000+01:00

IT directs our attention to the formation of a new political party by families of deceased military personnel. Musing on the hauntological aspects of their chosen name, she seems to have forgotten that 'Spectre' is an acronym for Special Executor for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. The government crumbles and the forces of darkness show their hand...

Middle East Crisis

2006-07-20T22:05:00.000+01:00

What could be scarier than the events in the Middle East?

The fact that these people are serious. Do yourself a favour and check out some of the other threads; see how the other half live.

Some time ago, I said I'd lost sympathy with Nietzsche, but it's all come flooding back now.

Chrono-Tortoise

2006-06-20T21:51:00.000+01:00

Undercover Surrealism

2006-06-17T01:44:00.000+01:00

The Hayward is running an exhibition on Georges Bataille and Documents. I like Bataille. Well, actually I like Deleuze, but I obsess about Bataille. Ever since I first came across him, his writing has been hovering around my consciousness. I was planning to write my PhD on him, but decided against it because it might taint my appreciation of his work; that was one of the smartest moves I ever made. Thinkers you work on for extended periods of time tend to leave a nasty taste in the mouth; Bataille still leaves a knot in my stomach and an ache in my testicles.

The things I like about Bataille are those parts of his work which bring out the worst in me (or, as one of my tutors once put it, ‘the adolescent Bataille’). I appreciate The Accursed Share and enjoy his writing on Lascaux, but the stuff that really does it for me is the porn, and the short early writings on some form of anti-Platonic, sun and deviant readings of various form of art. When he writes in ‘The Lugubrious Game’

That the paintings of Picasso are hideous, that those of Dali are frighteningly ugly

yet still claims this as some form of approbation, I know exactly what he means. Horror can and should play a major part in the visual arts.

So, as he becomes fashionable in history of art circles; notably after Rosalind Krauss’s taking up, and bastardisation, of ‘Informe’, the Hayward runs a major exhibition on Bataille and Documents and it is something I can’t possibly miss, so I finally emerge from the Little House to blunder round a London gallery.

Worth going? It’s Bataille! You would have to be a fool to stay away. Documents was a bizarrely eclectic magazine which, if it had any claim to be Surreal (and I don’t think it did) achieved that by its juxtaposition of unrelated items. I saw the exhibition with IT, who made the rather apt comment that “Documents was very much like a fanzine or a blog”. Of course, the difference was that Bataille was scabbing the money for the project from Georges Wildenstein who was apparently somewhat disappointed that the finished article failed to resemble an academic ethnographic journal masquerading as art,

The great thing about the exhibition, if you are heavily into Bataille, is that it juxtaposes a large quantity of objects which are discussed in Documents, and with which you are already familiar from the articles in question, but may not have seen the original accompanying illustrations (they are not in the Oeuvres Complètes, and only some are available in various English reproductions, the best of which is probably The Encyclopaedia Acephalica from Atlas), let alone the things themselves. A good example is ‘The Language of Flowers’, where the Hayward displays Karl Blossfeldt’s fabulously sexualised close ups of various parts of plants which both predate and outdo Robert Mapplethorpe’s floral studies.

Documents relationship with film is particularly well served with a small cinema showing short extracts from various films ranging from ethnographic studies to The Broadway Melody of 1929 via Luis Bunuel. If one is to believe The Guardian (not that I ever do) some of the exhibits no longer contain the shock value they may once have had, but the casual racism of some of the cinema pieces is simply stunning. There is not really sufficient information in the exhibition itself to work out why some of these pieces had any importance for the people behind Documents.

Is it an exhibition about Surrealism? Not really. In the same way that Picasso (who deservedly features heavily) was subsumed under the Surrealist umbrella, the scene around Documents has been heavily touted as a sort of ‘Black Surrealism’, but the fact is that the people who were congregating around Bataille were disaffected to such an extent that they had moved far beyond the cosy borders of Surrealism. Whilst Dali would pull back from Bataille and unsuccessfully attempt to cosy up to Breton’s version of Surrealism as a working through of the unconscious in some sort of cathartic teleological push towards communism, artists such as Masson (whose exhibited work is quite prosaic, but whose fabulous illustrations for The Story of the Eye are in the catalogue) and Belmer (who only features in the catalogue) travelling down a road of pure horror and violence indicated by Bataille which completely obliterated the more utopian dreams of Breton. Perhaps at this distance it is difficult to appreciate the shocking nature of much of the material on display, but if you can read it through the work of Bataille, Masson, et al., you begin to see why Breton was so appalled with them and why some fairly innocuous objects can take on such a threatening nature if viewed in a certain light.

Hotting Up

2006-05-12T11:40:00.000+01:00

Summer has come to the Little House with soaring temperatures and lots of outdoor pursuits. Living in a semi-rural environment, we get to sit and watch all sorts of wildlife frolicking in our garden and the Neighbouring woods and fields. Unhappily, though we also get to live in close proximity to all sorts of vermin. I don’t mind the mice in the roof (well, apart from the dead one that landed on my head when I opened the loft hatch), but I could do without the squirrels and wasps the size of zeppelins. I could also do without the ants.

Ants are fine and dandy in the great outdoors but when the bastards are heading for your larder, it’s another thing altogether. Currently, we have them trying to outflank us via a pincer movement involving one lot coming in the back door and another via the conservatory. Almost exactly between these two points of entry lies the kitchen, and I know that if a single member of either of these troops makes it that far, we’re well and truly buggered as all their mates will merrily follow along the pheromone trail and start making off with the Rice Krispies. So far, we’ve managed to hold them off, but I think that I’m going have to resort to chemical warfare in order to get a moments peace around here. The ants a bad enough in themselves, but the Little effay’s constant cries of “Daddy come quickly, I saw an ant!” are starting to get me down; not least because she usually sees fit to do this when I’m in the shower or carrying some heavy object or other.

Still, it’s not all doom and gloom. The stereo is getting its usual pounding and top of the playlist is the recently released Acid Mothers Gong Live in Nagoya which is members of Gong and Acid Mothers Temple from a Japanese gig on the 2003 tour. Good? It’s outstanding. Absolute mayhem, with Daevid Allen apparently singing through that thing the Butthole Surfers used to use to make the vocals sound like they are at the wrong speed. What’s really great about it though is that when you listen to it, you sort of half-recognise the theme behind a barrage of screaming guitars and synths then, about five minutes in, suddenly realize that they’re actually playing the most brutal and twisted version of ‘Flying Teapot’ you’re ever likely to hear. No home should be without a copy.

Bloggers at home pictured in handmade masks

2006-04-30T20:01:00.000+01:00

Kek's inspired challenge, following Loki's original post, had me racing for the dressing-up box. Here I am in one of the Little effay's Halloween specials.

The lunchtime moral dilemma

2006-04-30T15:54:00.000+01:00

I went down the pub at lunchtime to join in the witty and sophisticated discussions of my fellow Flatlanders. The main topic of conversation was 'would you sleep with John Prescott for two-hundred and fifty grand?' The general consensus ended up as 'yes, but not if I had to let everybody know about it in order to get my hands on the cash'.

Labour Meltdown?

2006-04-27T14:21:00.000+01:00

You've got to laugh haven't you? Well, if you didn't you'd be sobbing in despair. Of course the conspiracy theorists are already arguing over this one: Was the Home Secretary's apology given out in order to bury the cash for peerages story? Was the Prescott affair something that had been kept on the back burner in order to bring out in an emergency to bury something even more embarassing such as a monumental Home Office faux pas? Can Patricia Hewitt really be such a prat?

Personally I think the whole thing goes deeper than that. It strikes me that we are witnessing a carefully managed campaign by disaffected elements within New Labour (no, of course I don't mean Socialists!) in order to make the results of the local elections spectacularly bad. Think of all the other clues: A toothless campaign against the Tories; 'Don't vote for the BNP because they have a real chance of winning'. I'm sure y'all can multiply the examples.

The only thing I can't work out is whether this is a campaign by the Brown-Noses to force Blair out, or a scorched earth campaign by Blairites to fuck the Brown-Noses over.

Definitive proof that New Labour have completely lost the plot

2006-04-21T11:52:00.000+01:00

Check this out. What is the matter with these people? How better to get people to vote for your opponents than by turning their leader into an instantly memorable and lovable animated character? I passed our village hall this morning to see a large crowd camping outside it hardly able to wait until the Fourth of May to register their support for Dave. I would have joined them, but I prefer my lizards a bit more Burroughsy (W.S. or E.R.).

Not that I care who does better. People talk about Blair's legacy: In the Little House it consists of transforming Labour from a party that was always treated with suspicion, but seen as preferable to the Tories under any circumstances, to one regarded with equal hatred (not more: we have long memories in The Flatlands). Well done Tony!

Picture Time

2006-04-10T19:24:00.000+01:00

Deauville, 1928 and these two fine fellows are obviously done up for a special occasion. Perhaps it's somebody's birthday party, or maybe they are just off for a big adventure in their parents' garden.

But wait. Just look at the one on the right with the thoughtful expression. There's a face which seems to be saying "Oh hurry up and get on with it! I want to get back to that interesting book by Monsieur Bergson, as I don't think I've quite got this business about the virtual off pat yet."

My thanks go to Infinite Thought for sending me a volume I would never have guessed would ever see the light of day: Deleuze, un album, a collection of photographs of our Gilles throughout his life. Bizarre or what? Coming next to a bookshop near you: Michel Foucault: The S&M Collection.

Stalling on the Information Superhighway.

2006-03-29T11:02:00.000+01:00

Bloody Internet connection. I can hadly read Blogs most of the time, let alone post to my own. The effay Tactical Nuclear Unit is off on manoeuvres next week but when we get back, I'm biting the bullet and getting broadband. Whether it will make any difference, who can tell? My brother has been regaling me with tales of woe about his own attempts to set up broadband. Naturally, I put it down to his general technical incompetence, but it turns out that after a week, BT have admitted that the only way it will ever work is if they dig up the line. I reminded him that he has a second line in the house which was installed when he was electronically tagged and which is now redundant (well, at least for the moment), but apparently he is not allowed to use that one.

In the absence of twinkling modem icons, I have been sitting in pubs reading the latest posthumous Deleuze publication. I must admit that my hopes weren't high, but it really is rather good even if quite a bit of it has seen the light of day in English before. Hardly a work of great philosophical significance, but lots of snappy soundbites:

Discussion is just an exercise in narcissism where eveyone takes turns in showing off.

Sounds like a description of some of most the enjoyable evenings I've ever had, but you've got to admit that he has a point. There are also comments on Gulf War 1 and veils in French schools which could have been made yesterday rather than ten years ago. So much for progress.

Speaking of things which were made yesterday, I finally bought the Complete Fall Peel Sessions on Monday. It's one of those things that I knew I would get eventually but have been saving for when I needed something to cheer me up because, say, I had to spend long hours listening to the incessant whine of a modem failing to connect. It seems to be doing the trick.

Quizmania

2006-03-18T21:00:00.000Z

I fell asleep in front of a video the other night and, when I woke up, was confronted with the most appalling piece of television I have ever encountered. I had heard about Quizmania, ITV’s phone-in quiz show which runs throughout most of the night, but nothing could really prepare me for the reality: It is like (and now here’s something I never thought I would say) Family Fortunes with all the good bits taken out.

Back in the Eighties, when people were getting excited about channel hopping and fast edits on MTV, Alvin Toffler coined the term ‘blip culture’ to describe, amongst other things, a relationship of viewer to televisual spectacle where everything is presented in tiny pieces of information, constantly shifting from one subject to the other. Quizmania is the absolute antithesis of blip culture. Even more than Big Brother, it is based upon ennui. This is because, unlike Big Brother which commands the viewer’s attention by holding out the possibility that something might happen (those bored people could start arguing; perhaps one of those sleeping bodies will wake up and masturbate), Quizmania is deliberately constructed so that it appears that even less is happening than is actually taking place: The presenter lets the whole thing grind to a halt as if he is waiting for somebody to phone in, when the phones are actually constantly backed up. In this way, the crushing boredom, coupled with the presenter’s ‘hints’ as to the answers to the questions, entices the viewer to ring in because it appears as though s/he will get straight through and any form of action will break the ennui in which s/he is forced to feel complicit.

However the whole thing is, of course, one big con aimed at getting the 60p call charge out of as many people as possible. This becomes apparent when one realises that Quizmania is the only programme on ITV with no adverts, and that many of the people who do get through to the programme have no idea what has been happening for considerable periods of time beforehand (they keep repeating wrong answers). I must confess that I suspected this was how it was operating but my faith in human nature is such that I could not bring myself to believe that it was quite this cynical without further proof. Consequently, I rang in during a particularly extended lull in order to see what would happen. Naturally I got a recorded message telling me that all the phones lines were backed up and that I had paid 60p for the privilege of discovering this.

Is it popular? I don’t really know. A more interesting question is can it maintain whatever popularity it has? I think the answer has to be yes, because players (they don’t really care about viewers) will assume that, as time goes on, it will become easier to get through as the more casual amongst their number give up. My guess is that if the number of phone calls goes down radically (although I doubt that it will), they will reduce the number of lines, thereby cutting costs and still keeping the players hooked on the same length of line. There are more unpleasant programmes on UK television, but this has to be the most cynical piece manipulation of viewers yet; I await the next nadir with bated breath.

So long, big fellah

2006-03-16T14:27:00.000Z

Tumbleweed blows across the remnants of another empty part of town. Is there any truth in the rumour that Mrs Bloke found out about the Psychster and Jodie Marsh, causing him to shut up shop and go into hiding in a part of the Net that is forever Essex?

Hoorah, we're back!!

2006-03-13T14:23:00.000Z

The Cinestatic empire has been switching servers and we haven't been able to post anything for the duration. Still seems okay now. Thanks Mike!

Here's something I wrote earlier:

The West Country Massive over at An Idiot’s Guide have been pontificating about their favourite punk singles. Naturally, this triggers off the Sad Old Punk™ inside me and I just have to add my two cents.

First off, anything post 1977 can be discounted straight away (well, apart from the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag, obviously). Why? Because Simon Reynolds and his posse will immediately jump up and down crying “Oh, that’s so post-punk!” Consequently, whilst I have some sympathy for Cloudboy’s choice of ‘Honk Kong Garden’, it’s going to have to be ruled out because nobody wants to get into a dreary argument down the pub about which genre’s which. I will just add though that it seems to me that the whole argument re The Banshees and The Slits (to name just two) being post-punk simply hinges on the fact that it took them a while to get any records out.

So what are we left with? We can discount the Pistols, Clash, Damned, Ramones, Adverts, etc. straight away because, good though they are, even ‘Anarchy’ wasn’t that shocking. They might have been in the vanguard of punk, but the music just wasn’t punk enough. ‘Peaches’ by The Stranglers? Well, it had rude words in (although not the version they recorded for Capital Radio) and an interesting bass line, but not really.

Now at this point, you’re probably thinking “Oh God, the twat’s going to come out with some obscure bunch of second-raters like Eater or Chelsea, but no dear readers. The best punk single ever is ‘Oh Bondage Up Yours!’ by X-Ray Spex.

Why? Well it might not sound that bizarre now, but it certainly was at the time. The first time I heard I heard it was when Leper Jack played it to a bunch of us and it was greeted with stunned silence. Until that point, we thought that the Pistols had an extreme vocalist, but Poly Styrene was something else all together, and Laura Logic’s squawking sax provided a perfect counterpoint to it. Furthermore, it has an even better spoken intro than the Damned’s ‘New Rose’. Most of my friends who heard it couldn’t actually cope with it. Sure, The Pistols, etc. rocked, but that woman sounded just terrible and the lyrics! Furthermore, we mustn’t forget the b-side, ‘I am a Cliché’ which is not quite as good (nothing else X-Ray Spex ever did was), but is still very fine indeed.

If punk was supposed to make people shake their heads in horror, ‘Oh Bondage’made even punks shake their heads in horror. There can be no finer recommendation.

And the runners up? The Buzzcock’s ‘Spiral Scratch’ ep and ‘Love Comes in Spurts’ by Richard Hell and the Voidoids.

Derrida for the MTV Generation

2006-03-08T13:59:00.000Z

"Well, it has a piece called 'Plato's Pharmacy' in it, so if we put pictures of drugs over the front, all the kids are bound to buy it!"

Stealth shark spies

2006-03-05T18:20:00.000Z

Check this out. Evey time I feel the world is too prosaic, I read about what military scientists are up to. Of course, these things always spill out into commercial use eventually. Coming soon: specially imported children with neural implants, ready to service your every desire at the touch of a radio control...

7 x 7

2006-03-04T21:59:00.000Z

I’ve been tagged by Glueboot for another meme. As it (almost) shares its name with the B-side to ‘Silver Machine’, I suppose I’d better do it.

Seven things to do before I die
Watch the Little effay grow up and leave home
Finish the bloody kitchen
Get broadband
Sort this teleology business out once and for all
DMT
Grow old disgracefully
Become the old bloke in the village pub with his own seat, who sits there every day and gets drinks bought by all the regulars.

Seven things I cannot do
Run
Read German
Read books at the same rate that I buy them
Hold a grudge
Hang out the washing without using the pegs in a specific colour-coded order
Have any respect for arguments which make reference to ‘political correctness’ and/or ‘do-gooders’.
Just say no

Seven things that attract me to somebody
An outfit that makes them look like a cross between a vampire and a prison guard
Intelligence
An interesting record collection
A large appetite for intoxicants
A propensity for staying up for ridiculous lengths of time arguing violently about philosophical minutiae
The ability to put up with me on a daily basis
Gross moral turpitude

Seven things I say
Well, I’m having another
What’s for dinner?
Do you really think your mother will be any more pleased about this than I am?
For some obscure reason…
The fact of the matter is…
Hmm, interesting. But then I’d want to say…
No it is not you lying fucker! (shouted at politicians on the television)

Seven books that I’ve loved
Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism & Schizophrenia
Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte
Wyndham Lewis (ed.) Blast 1 & 2
Michael Moorcock, The Cornelius Quartet
K.W. Jeter, Noir
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Seven movies that I’ve loved
Repo Man
Hardware
Wild at Heart
Once Upon a Time in the West
Videodrome
Street Trash
Rumble Fish

Seven people to tag
I’ll let you volunteer yourselves