'Open up...Make room for me...'

It's been an odd week, mainly spent in my new place of employment dealing with whiney, privileged arseholes who bitch about shocking stuff like having to do tests while in training and other such nonsense. There hasn't been any overt transphobia since I stomped all over one of the fuckers the other week, which is good, but damn, these people are hard work. In that spirit, allow me to point you in the direction of The Day The Immigrants Left, a fine piece of programming in which the BBC fulfilled its public service remit in stunning fashion by showing that, actually, the reason immigrants get jobs and 'indigenous' (dog-whistle racist code for 'white') Britons don't get them is because, frankly, most indigenous Brits are a bunch of goddam whiney bitches who need to be thrashed to within an inch of their lives with as many cluesticks as one can get one's hands on. I tells ya, if my employers had recruited me and a bunch of East European migrants for this job, we wouldn't still be in training: we'd be on the damn floor doing the damn job, instead of sitting around making feeble attempts at humour through the medium of fart noises. Or, in my case, being bored bloody rigid by people whose idea of humour extends no further than the fart noise. I hate whites.

One good thing about the job is that, due to my having to come up with work-arounds for the unreliability of buses during rush hour 'round these parts, I usually wind up arriving at work an hour earlier than I have to be there, during which time I've gotten into a ritual of grabbing an Americano from the canteen and sitting down to write. I produced a poem the other day which I feel is one of my best yet, particularly in terms of addressing my experience of adolescent anorexia and the underlying reasons for it. Said poem is called Criminally Fragile, and you can find it - and a bunch of other poems that have been posted on this blog at one time or another - at my Blankmedia profile. Do please have a look, and comment if you want to. Feedback helps.

And yes, the photos used as thumbnails for the poems are pictures I've taken. Some were shot near the area where I'm working at the minute, others elsewhere. I've became kind of addicted to taking quick, serendipitous shots of things since I got the Blackberry, and especially since I started doing those little poetry 'movies' for uploading here. I'm constantly looking now for little shots that could be well-used to accompany a particular line in a poem or the poem itself. At some point I suppose I should get around to uploading some of my shots to the Wikimedia Commons to pay back the number of times I've used their images to accompany my work. That'll be a nice weekend project sometime, I think. In the meantime, as a bonus for blog readers, here's one of the shots from where I am at the moment. I work on a business park and, what with us being in a recession and all, there are lots of empty units, which are fascinating in a JG Ballard/Iain Sinclair ruins-of-late-capitalism way. I got this shot taken from underneath a spiral staircase while creeping about by one of these vacant shells.

Bless my cotton socks I'm in the news...

I really must stop over-using that Teardrop Explodes quotation, but it's damn hard not to today. My plinth appearance has been reported in an actually rather wonderful piece in the local newspaper, the Sunderland Echo. I'm on page ten of the print edition - can't find any reference on the website, though, but I'm not too worried about that. They'll probably get it on there eventually, and if they don't at least the thing I feared happening - getting bumped to the website but not making it into print - didn't occur. It feels good seeing myself in the paper. Print gives things some kind of validation.

Despite my Sontag-esque musings yesterday, the accompanying photo came out rather well too, I think. I mean I've only glanced at it out of the corner of my eye, but it seems to make me look like a normal and respectable human being, so the photographer, Corrina, has done an extremely good job there.

News also arrives from the excellent Streetcake magazine, who have accepted a poem of mine for publication in their next issue. I was turned on to Streetcake - which sounds vaguely like a line you might hear in a Chris Morris spoof - by the blindingly fabulous Angela Readman, who suggested I send them some material when I was casting about for places to submit to as part of my clumsy, faltering attempts to get back on the poetry horse. And I'd be glad that she put me on to them even if they hadn't accepted my work, because theirs is a genuinely interesting publication, a poetry online mag that shows a commendable interest in using the fact that they publish to screen rather than page to take a more adventurous approach to the visual appearance of the work they publish. My poem, 'The Mechanics of the Scissorhold', will be published in issue 7, due soon, but there's a lot of interesting stuff to peruse at their site while you wait for it. Go read.

In other news, a Blackberry owner is now me. I finally took the decision to get me one of those new-fangled smartypants-phones after concluding that lugging a laptop down to London to receive peoples' tweets for my collaborative plinth poem would be just too much hassle - especially given that I have a Roland Microcube to lug down there too - and that, while I needed something small and portable which could quickly process tweets, my dislike of touchscreens precluded me buying an iPhone. Yes, I know, I'm a keyboard-loving dinosaur doomed to never fit in with the coolest kids when we all live in some Minority Report world where we write everything by grabbing floaty letters out of the air. So what? A Blackberry is tremendously ahead of the curve for me. Remember, I still genuinely feel aggreived at the demise of the 3 1/4" floppy (it was the noise; that satisfying thump-click as you slid the bad boy in and got ready for business. You don't get that action from one of yer weeny little USB sticks.).

And so, with the amp here and working, the comms taken care of, and the media informed, it's all just down on me now to rehearse this thing and try to make it the best that I can. Having completed my first full rehearsal I can say that initial impressions are good. Maybe it's just that Fish Manor has better acoustics for practicing in, but I really feel now that I'm finding my voice again, and looking forward to running my dirty little mouth off in public again for all you beautiful little monsters. More updates as and when...

Ready for my Close-up

In her preface to Robert Mapplethorpe's Certain People, Susan Sontag wrote:

'When I am photographed, this normally outgoing, fervent relation of consciousness to the world is jammed. I yield to another command station of consciousness, which "faces" me...Stowed away, berthed, brought to heel, my consciousness has abdicated its normal function...I don't feel threatened. But I do feel disarmed, my consciousness reduced to an embarrassed knot of self-consciousness striving for composure...I experience myself as behind my face, looking out through the windows of my eyes, like the prisoner in the iron mask in Dumas's novel.'

Yesterday, I had to have myself photographed for an article about my plinth appearance. And while I'm not sure it was exactly as nerve-wracking an experience for me as it was for Sontag, it was, I'll admit, a little embarrassing. I can be pretty good in a performance context, I like to think, but sitting down, looking at a camera and, well, posing...I found that a lot harder than I'd imagined. It's probably safe to say I have a new-found respect for models.