Albian Dreams: Journal Found in the American Wreckage

 The first time I realised that I was more intelligent than my father was when I looked into his eyes. 

This did not happen during his lifetime, of course. I was only two years old when my father took his own life, fearful to an equal degree of both the disease he believed he had contracted from his mentor, Mr Cohn - who would himself pass some weeks later - and the damage he believed the revelation of that disease would do to his reputation. If I looked into my father's eyes during one of those brief occasions when I saw him in those younger days, I have no memory of it - and at any rate, if I had been cognizant of any intellectual gap between us it would have been very much in the other direction. 

No, the moment when I looked into my father's eyes and realised, with certainty, that he was not my intellectual equal occurred only a few months ago. Two years ago, having broken ground on the TideFate California facility (following our proof-of-concept work at the Kirkoswald complex), knowing that the project on which I have laboured for so long was now nearing completion, and feeling that I could at last devote some of my time and talents to some less intensive project, I took up painting. My initial works in that field, completed as they were during a period when my mind had been preoccupied with some extremely complex concepts, were decidedly abstract, but once the initial fever had passed I began to explore the possibilities of figuration - and to work on improving my drawing from life, the better to do so. 

Even then, although I sketched many of my friends and acquaintances - my wife, my brother, my colleague E.M. - it was only three months or so ago that I set myself the task of creating a portrait of the man whose memory has guided every one of my life's actions - my late father. 

And so I busied myself scanning back through the library of footage of my father that I have acquired, trying to find a freeze-frame which truly captured his essence, his animating principle - his soul, if you want to use a mystical term. And it was in doing so that I realised that, whatever else I might discern behind his eyes - amusement, lust, a certain social cunning - the thing that stood out most was a sort of confused incomprehension. Again and again, when I paused the footage, I saw the eyes of a man trying, often in vain, to work out what was going on around him. A man whose mind, except on a few topics, most of them base - was mercilessly dull. 

I found it hard to capture it, this emptiness in that man's eyes. That vacancy. I have tried hard, over the years, to look for the intelligence in others. It has been necessary to do so. If I allow myself to become prey to my ego, I may start making mistakes, and, given my research, who knows what horrors might come from complacency? And it has been of practical use too. It allowed me to realise how E.M., once properly broken, might be put to practical use. Among many other things. And it allowed me to give TideFate a convincing cover. And so, when I draw people, I try to do so from a position of respect. And when I see the emptiness inside those eyes, my pencil tends to euphemise, to make the pupil just a little sharper, to tighten the slack in the jaw. But for all my generosity as an artist, I cannot deny it.

If I did not know this man to be my father, I would think him an idiot. 

 

This troubles me. It has always been one of my guiding assumptions, from the moment I began to plot the ways in which our world has diverged from those in which my father lived, that had he done so most of the work I have had to do would already have been accomplished. In that world, I have long felt certain, I would have been able to live the carefree life which my brother has allowed himself, instead of playing catch-up with the world I could have known. But what if I have been wrong? What if my father, in that other world, has truly been my brother's namesake, and squandered every opportunity afforded him? Will I cross realities, only to lock eyes with an uncomprehending oaf, a senile fool who nods emptily when I explain what my branch of our great family has achieved? 

I tell myself it does not matter. The California facility will be online in mere weeks. The stars move still, time runs, the hour must come and, one way or another, I will make that journey no other man has ever made before. I will look my long-dead father in his living eyes and bid him look upon my works. And together - in both our names, even if he is capable of little more than looking on and drooling - we will put right the wrongs of our two worlds. Alea iacta est. 

I am coming, father. You will see me soon. 

We Who Are About to Die, or Why Elon Musk Should Do It* - The Book

 A while ago on here, I mused about the laughable outdatedness of the vision of the future Elon Musk is trying to sell us. This week I read a novel that constitutes pretty much the definitive refutation of that vision, and it should be no surprise to anyone that said novel is even older than I am. However, where Musk's Noah's Ark in space fantasies have aged like early Grimes records, Joanna Russ' We Who Are About To... has only gotten more relevant to our dumb historical moment. 

I'm going to spoil the plot of Russ' novel here, such as it is, but this is not really a novel you read for the plot anyway. It starts with a ship's travel through hyperspace going badly wrong. Russ gives a very simple, matter of fact explanation of how and why this happens, before moving on to deal with its consequences: the ship's eight passengers, three men and five women, wind up stranded on an alien planet with supplies to last them eight months. So far, so Space Family Robinson. Where things start to diverge from that hoary old trope is the presence on board this ship of Russ' narrator, who is frankly having none of this we-can-repopulate-the-planet stuff, and says as much: 

    ' "All right, so you think you have the chance of a snowball in hell. Maybe you do. But  I  think that           some kinds of survival are damned idiotic. Do you want your children to live in the Old Stone               Age? Do you want them to forget how to read? Do you want to lose your teeth? Do you want your          great-grandchildren to die at thirty? That's obscene." '

The narrator, however, is outvoted by her fellow passengers, who insist that 'just colonizing a little early' is well within their powers. It's worth spending a little time on who exactly these passengers are: we have a rich couple, the Grahams, Valeria and Victor, and their brittle teenage daughter, Lori; a hulking, half-bright rich kid, Alan-Bobby; Nathalie, a woman on her way to army training; John, a bureaucrat of the sort who would rather not explain exactly which bureau he works for (and who spends a significant portion of the novel, until the narrator rumbles him, pretending to be an academic); Cassie, a nightclub dancer with dreams of becoming a mother (dreams which, in the future world Russ sketches lightly in the background, only become possible because of the crash - we'll return to this); and the narrator herself, a former Communist rabble-rouser and religious extremist. 

If you're thinking that none of these folks seem cut out to be pioneers, well, exactly. But crucially, with the exception of the narrator, they're all comfortable and confident enough to think otherwise. This is a work of science fiction to which Dunning-Kruger is much more relevant than Einstein-Rosen or Mitchelson-Morley. And so, despite the narrator's insistence that they're all already dead and might as well go about assuming that condition as quickly and painlessly as possible, they instead start setting up their shelter, digging latrine trenches and making playing cards to pass the time. By Day Four, Alan-Bobby discovers that he's big enough to beat up any other individual member of the group, but not all of them at once; and, four days later, in the proceeding the narrator refers to as 'the great womb robbery', the group start working through the practical implications of 'repopulating the planet'. Or, to put it more starkly, deciding which of the women is going to have to sleep with Victor (who, as the oldest, 'has offered to donate his genetic material first').

You can see why this book has me thinking about Rocket Boer, right? We have unbelievably rich bastards fucking up space travel. We have an impossible dream of planetary colonisation. And we have creepy pro-natalist misogyny and an obsession with 'genetic material'! It's like he's in the room. Except, of course, that Russ, and her narrator, are once again having none of it and - after acting as Victor's death doula (it turns out he really was on a clock as far as donating his genetic material went) - she steals the high-tech scouting module they all call a 'broomstick' and flees the settlement to live in a cave. Yeah, did I mention this was originally published in the UK by The Women's Press, by the way? 

Unfortunately, the would-be colonists follow her. Unfortunately for them, that is, as she has no intention of going back, skills honed from her years as a political agitator, a concealed gas gun, and a conviction that she would rather die than be forced into their nightmare version of reproductive futurism. And so she winds up killing most of the other passengers in a confrontation at her cave, then heading back to the shelter to kill off the rest. 

And yes, that includes Lori, because if you're going to reject reproductive futurism and its investment of meaning in the figure of The Child then you might as well go the whole hog. Besides, it has been established pretty conclusively in the rest of the book that Lori is an extremely hyperallergic child and is likely thereby to have the worst time on the planet of any of the would-be colonists. It's a mercy killing, really. 

Not that Lori's mother sees it that way. In what would be the final dramatic confrontation of the novel were it not for the long, remarkable coda which follows the protagonist as she slowly gets ready to die, Valeria Graham gets the drop on the narrator with a hidden revolver and forces her to listen to a self-justifying spiel which starts with you're not coming anywhere near my child and then rapidly expands, as she realises the gun in her hand is what Russ calls 'a compulsory Ear', to an assertion of her place in 'the top one-tenth of the top one percentile' and its superiority to 'grubby little people' like the narrator, as well as the moral superiority of her decision to buy a child as opposed to Cassie's dreams of extraplanetary motherhood:

   

     ' "That child cost as much money as a small New England state. Believe it. I don't quarrel with Cass,          but to have a baby and call yourself a mother - ! One doesn't say such things, of course. One                    doesn't quarrel. Not here. But having children...I am the real mother here. That's all I'm going to tell you about myself. I don't think you'd understand the rest." '

In the end, it's Val's desire to maintain her self-image as the perfect mother, by getting the narrator out of Lori's earshot, that creates the opening Russ' protagonist needs to kill her with her own revolver, then shoot her daughter in the head. Now that's dramatic irony. 

Val's idea of perfect motherhood, and her belief in the superiority of a child 'bought and paid for' finds a clear echo in a certain contemporary billionaire's own obvious disgust with the messy mechanics of sex, but while the narrator's explicit rejection of the kind of 'natural' motherhood Cassie dreams of (' "Those babies'll love me, not their daddies."') creates the conflict which results in her slaying the others, it's very clear the narrator also despises the Grahams' cosy little domestic set-up. Cassie and Val can argue the toss about which of them counts as 'the real mother here': it's a contest in which the narrator has no interest. 

Russ gives us, as our point of view character, a woman who defiantly rejects motherhood whether its acquired in the marketplace or forced on women in a state of (colonising) nature, under the guise of 'preserving genetic material'. I can think of no better protagonist for a time in which we find ourselves besieged by pro-natalist propaganda from the men who consider shackling space their manifest destiny - nor, indeed, can I think of a better book to write about this Mothers' Day. 

* You know what it is. We all know what it is. He should do it. 

Esther's Baby

Like a lot of trans people, I'm beginning to wonder why Brianna Ghey's mother seems to be so happy to appear in outlets like The Guardian and the BBC blaming her daughter's death on social media instead of, you know, the institutionalised transphobia of the places that seem so strangely keen to platform her. Especially when the policies she calls for seem almost certain to make it harder for other trans kids to find community online, and will indeed make it harder for abused kids of any gender to access what could be lifesaving support. 

So I thought to myself, why on Earth would she do that? And, well, you know where that tends to lead me:

Esther’s Baby

She learned, when she was very small,

that every mother wants a doll,

and not somebody who desires and dreams,

and seeks a place outside of others’ schemes.

Something to dress and show around,

a bump to bear with beaming pride

and, presently, a bouncing babe!

Not something for itself, no - a thing made,

pure product, matrix-minted issue,

wee feet to fit a dainty little shoe:

a brand new dolly, just for her;

a merit badge proclaiming care,

A sign that she was in the club,

A girl fulfilled. A woman. Mum.

And should her darling fail to settle,

should nights become a sleepless battle, 

even her complaints next day

would, to a fellow mum, convey

a maker’s pride in execution. 

Her lovely boy. Her job well done.

And if boy became something that child would chafe, 

a chain she’d worry, war against and break,

what was that but a cross to bear? 

Not for her child, of course. For her. 

All would admire her brave support,

as ally - what the A stands for. 

Except - 

If she would only wear the clothes

her mum picked out instead of those

drag-faggy rags she chose to sport;

if she would only try to walk 

less showily when they were out,

not storm and cry and scream and pout

at what was, really, just advice?

She used to be so very nice

when she was small. When she was young.

When she was what she called her son. 

And everybody makes mistakes! 

Why get so hung up on a name? 

It’s just a word. And so is her. 

So she said him sometimes. Couldn’t she be fair?

Would it kill her to stay in the room

for Harry Potter? It was just a film. 

No need for all this song and dance,

for talk of human rights and protest chants,

These things she picked up from her phone:

it wasn’t right, to undermine

A mother’s right to raise her child,

to keep her girl from running wild.

You listen to me, little lady,

you may think  you’re so amazing,

but carry on the way you’re going 

and pretty soon you’ll come to know

how girls who act like you end up…

And so she did. Well. There you go. 

How was a mum supposed to know?

You see what kids are like these days.

Their mobile phones and social games. 

She tried, you know. She really tried. 

You can’t say it’s her fault. Besides,

she still has so much work to do. 

It’s what her girl would want her to. 

She is an ally, after all,

you know - that’s what the A stands for. 

She owes it to the other mums

with troubled girls and wayward sons.

She’ll find a way to save their minds

from being warped by what’s online.

And she, so brave, will do it all

for her dear, her dead, her perfect little doll. 

Patio Salo

 

I asked myself the question: what does someone like Wes Streeting do for fun? And then a vision descended on me, as it had before when I learned the horrifying truth about Keir Starmer, and reader: I knew.

Patio Salò

It’s Couples’ Night, when Wes and Joe

dine on their heated patio

and after, in reclined repose,

role-play the parts of Fred and Rose.

Joe, in wing collar, big lapels,

makes Wesley’s heart and part both swell

- there’s risk he’ll prematurely mess

his replica of Rose’s dress

but Wes resists, he holds his nerve

while Joe reads extracts from Fred’s oeuvre.

Their lechers’ lectionary kicks off

with poor dismembered Lynda Gough

who was, when excavated, found

with her whole jaw securely bound

and bound around again with tape

like she was one of Wesley’s mates

who, pictured in the paper, claim

the woke have silenced them again.

It makes Wes laugh to see such stuff.

‘Fred knew how to shut bitches up!’

He chortles, and his Joe agrees,

dandling Wesley on his knee:

‘Use tape to keep her piehole closed:

She’ll breathe through the tubes in her nose

while we enjoy her where she’s hung. 

We know how to have our fun 

with kneecaps, spine and finger bones,’

he coos as Wesley wetly moans.

It seems, once more, they haven’t got

as far as Juanita Mott,

but there’ll be other couples’ nights:

it’s time to shower, wrap up tight

and take their foreplay to the street

where, slyly, they contrive to meet

some shivering urchin, ill at ease,

estranged, unhoused by policies

put through by some of Wesley’s chums

to save the cash we spend on guns. 

Joe always makes the first approach:

Wes must appear beyond reproach

and, even in his Rose disguise,

is likely to be recognised.

Besides, Joe has the common touch:

knows how to come on just enough

to keep the mark from catching on

to just what kind of action

both he and Wesley have in mind.

And, with their urchin thus beguiled,

they head back to their pied-à-terre.

And, as for what might happen there,

we cannot say: we must, of course,

be mindful of the libel laws.

But oh, what horrors we might know

if we dug up Wesley’s patio!

A simple event of my day

 

Impressions from the exhibition 'Chris Killip: The Last Ships' at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne 

Terraced houses in the snow

Graffiti: 'DON'T VOTE PREPARE FOR REVOLUTION CPB M-L' (photographed 1975, probably written 1974)

many motorcycles

men and boys looking at the camera

a tall wide shipyard ladder

Graffiti: 'HAGGIS IS MEAT'

the ferry stop from Get Carter

a shipyard lad in a boiler suit and built-up boots with heels 

Tyne Pride - the biggest ship ever built on this river, sold for less than it cost to build and broken up in India in 2005 

...and performing

 

A smoke break: for many, the only respite

The thoughts I outlined about different forms of performance yesterday were on my my mind as I watched The Last Showgirl. It really is as good as everyone is saying, but the thing that struck me the most about it is a kind of performance which is by no means restricted to professional entertainers. 

The titular protagonist of Gia Coppola's film, Shelly (Pamela Anderson) is struggling to come to terms with the fact that the Las Vegas revue she's been part of for thirty years is approaching the end of its run, and, in the process, having to reassess her place in the landscape of contemporary employment and gender politics. You realise, as the film goes on, that for Shelly the casino stage is more than just her workplace, it's her safe space, her refuge from a changing world she understands less and less as she gets older. In this respect Shelly reminded me a lot of Mickey Rourke's Randy 'The Ram' Robinson in The Wrestler, and like that character, another major strand of Shelly's story is her attempt to reconcile herself with her estranged daughter Hannah (played by Billie Lourd). 

Shelly has a habit of saying things about her show which sound like PR lines from a press release she long ago internalised, which are routinely shot down by the younger members of the cast: 

    Shelly: We were ambassadors for style and grace...The costumes. I mean it makes you feel like                         you're stepping out of the pages of Vogue magazine. I think that's why women like to come                     to the show. The glamour is undeniable.

    Mary-Anne: The glamour is undeniable. I think I could deny the glamour. 

The most brutal of these takedowns comes from Hannah, in a scene where she confronts Shelly for leaving her 'in the casino parking lot with a Gameboy while you did two shows a night': 

    Shelly: I mean if you can do what you love for thirty years, you know, and be passionate about your                  career...

    Hannah: What kind of career is this? You're in the goddam back of 80 topless dancers! This was                            worth missing bedtime for most of my childhood? Was it? 

You're in the goddam back. This line sums up the cognitive dissonance Shelly spends the film struggling with. It may be her on the show's poster but it's her from thirty years ago, when she was young. Shelly isn't the star of the show now - she's in the back, just another body on the stage, sewing up her own torn wing-cape so the cost of having it repaired can't be docked from her pay, even as she tells others (and herself) that her job gives her freedom, that she's doing what she loves, and that it's something she is 'passionate' about.

Ah yes, 'passion'. That word began showing up in advertisements for jobs around two decades ago regardless of - indeed, almost in inverse proportion to - the degree to which the job would seem to give workers something to be passionate about. One wonders how many people, by now, have had to pretend to be passionate about ready meals or tennis shoes or ISAs in order to convince a middle manager or a recruitment consultant who surely knows that they're lying that there's no lie they won't tell to get a job. Or, worse, no lie they'll eventually convince themselves to believe.

This popular motivational slogan started life as the title of a searing exposé of the Amway pyramid scheme. These days it's used unironically. It's meritocracy all over again.

I read today that due to a crisis in the broadcasting industry, senior TV producers are having to take jobs stacking shelves in supermarkets. I imagine these producers having to perform 'passion' for the supermarket experience to some retail manager in order to land those jobs. I imagine them sitting in the breakroom, looking at posters exhorting them to perform some version of positivity trademarked by their company's internal advertising department, no doubt with a cutesy acronym devised by somebody who can use the word 'learn' as a noun without feeling an urge to throw up.

They've seen the prices going up. They've seen more and more young men and women with sunken cheekbones trying to sneak food out past security. They've seen more and more goods get security tagged. Meat, when they started, then cheese. And then butter. 

The manager, who sat there during the interview and made notes on a piece of branded paper while they tried to demonstrate their passion for hooking people up with skimmed milk or tinned fish, won't hear a word of sympathy spoken for the shoplifters. 'It's organised,' he says. 'They're gangs. They sell it on. I saw a programme on the telly.' 

And the producer thinks about explaining that she knows exactly how programmes like that are put together, how press releases and video packages get laundered into a vague simulacrum of fact, but she decides against it because she has a mortgage, she has kids. She needs the shifts. So she just blankly says 'yeah' and makes herself smile once again as she wheels a trolley of white sliced bread to the shelves which face the in-store bakery. 

We may not have our tits out; we may not wear sequins and crowns: but, under neoliberalism, we are all the last showgirl. 

Performing and performing

 

A bit of self-promotion to start with: on Saturday March 15th I'm performing at Transtock, an all-trans music and poetry festival at The Globe pub in Newcastle. I'm really excited about this one, not just because it's my first proper gig since December but also because I'll get to see Gaydar, which I've been wanting to do for ages. Of course it also means I have to work out and rehearse a set list, which has got me thinking about performing. 

Well, that and the fact that, as I've mentioned before on here, I'm in the process of getting an official diagnosis of autism and ADHD. This has led to me thinking a lot about the ways in which I've found certain workplaces so difficult to cope with over the years. And what I've realised is that one of the reasons I found them so difficult was that, as well as getting stressed-out from all the normally anxiety-inducing aspects of those jobs, I was also in a state of perpetual nerves from the aspects of those jobs most of the people around me found relaxing. 

Because I can't manage small talk. I can't just chat with people. I can't 'banter' (and indeed, as you'll recall if you're a longtime reader of this blog, I frankly have some issues with the existence of banter itself as a concept). If something which interests me comes up, then I can talk to people about it but I know that, even then, I can come off as weird to a lot of people. It's hard for me to just stay at the surface level on things, to not see connections or go off on tangents. And if a conversation strays into the area of something I feel strongly about, it's hard for me to stay civil or just laugh shit off, because, like a lot of autistic people, I have an intense sensitivity to injustice. 

(And not to go off on a tangent here, but why is that pathological and not the fact that neurotypical people seem so much more relaxed about things being unjust? Why is being able to not give a shit about people considered the healthy behaviour? I mean do you ever stop to think about whether or not that might be why the planet is irreparably fucked up? Seriously, if the rule we followed brought us to this, of what use was the fucking rule?) 

...and the possibility of not being able to rein in an outburst like the above is why I find myself trying as hard as possible to stay on guard at all times in even the most minor social interaction. Smile politely. Don't be weird. Say the right words. Don't be weird. Oh they said something back. Don't be weird. What do normal people say at times like this? Don't be weird! Why are they looking at me like that don't be weird don't be weird. Wait are they looking as well oh God no don't be weird don't be weird don't be wait what did they just say? Don't react don't react don't, oh God don't don't be weird don't be weird don't be weird oh SHIT oh FUCK NOW THEY ALL THINK I'M FUCKING WEIRD. 

People always used to compliment me, at work, on what a professional sounding telephone greeting I had. And this always used to bother me because as far as I could tell I was just basically saying exactly the same thing as them. I was doing what we were supposed to do - create a sentence we could repeat in our voices with the correct rhythm and intonation a hundred times a day if necessary, and rehearse it until we could say it in our sleep, if necessary (guess what I say most of the time whenever I answer a phone in my dreams, regardless of the context?). 

It has taken years for me to realise that most of them had just noted that it said 'polite, friendly greeting' and some bullet points on the call script and would just work on that, instead of devising and refining their own personal antiphon. It's like the time I realised some people weren't lying when they say they had a happy childhood all over again. 

And I'm beginning to see now that the reason these people still had energy left over after work while I was completely drained was because they were actually able to relax by spending time in each others' company on breaks and over lunches, whereas I, from the moment I left the house until the moment I got home, was engaging in a work of supreme method acting to play the character of Normal Person. 

But hang on, AJ, why should that be a problem for you? I mean, you opened this entry by talking about a gig you have coming up. Why should you have trouble performing, when you're a performer? 

Well, indeed I am, but performing on stage and performing in everyday life are different things. For one thing, there's a clear demarcation between being on stage and off. Or rather there's a demarcation between the type of performing I do on stage and the kind I do when I'm hanging out with people afterwards because, yeah, I'm still worrying about Not Looking Weird when I'm at the bar or whatever. In fact, it sometimes feels as if being on stage is the only place where I get to be as weird as I want to be without having to make any excuses (and if you've seen me perform, you know it can get pretty weird). 

A stage is somewhere I have full control and total freedom. It's my time. I know exactly what I'm going to say, how I'm going to say it, what movements I'll make with my body, what topics will be addressed. If there is something I feel is unjust I am going to talk about it, and in words I have prepared and refined to have maximum impact. I do not have to worry about taking turns because the audience knows how long I am meant to be on stage for, and I needn't worry that I'm rambling because I have edited down everything I am going to say, even the bits between poems, and I have rehearsed with a stopwatch to make sure I bring things home on time. It is, quite simply, so much easier than LARPing as a Normal Fucking Person.