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writers:
lin
@le
mute
(a complete list)
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Non-Fiction
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2005-09-25 |
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so, there’s this woman, right. this woman is, to my mind, late twenties to mid forties – she may be of limited means, or she might be stinking rich.
buying makeup in a department store is a matter of sensibility rather than strictly pocket. you may want the reassurance of the high end label or just the ability to keep the makeup on for any length of time before coming up in an allergic reaction to it’s contents and clawing it off. so. she is dressed up to a certain extent, but nothing that will be damaged by contact with public transport dirt, and nothing too flash – stealth wealth, that’s the ticket, subtle power daywear. surviving the journey into town intact, she picks through the crowds and enters the sparkling portico of the voodoo vendor, harvey nics. designer labels, escalators, atria, modern, flawless dummies, clean, well maintained assistants. she heads for one of the cosmetics counters. miles of bottles, acres of mirrors, women in full slap wearing slightly medical outfits. beautifully, flatteringly lit, with every surface a glowing reflection of the last. effervescently faceted, warmly seductive, and cool and glossy all at once. slipping into the hypnotic state of shopping for one's own deferred perfection. dreamy, dreamy, dreamy... an assistant swims into focus. perhaps coming in for the sell - and bang. she is shot by her stalking ex boyfriend and then he turns the gun around towards himself, and, with a little difficulty, crooks his finger as far as it can go and squeezes the trigger again, tight.
this event passes for news in the papers, but of course i don't read them so i didn't see it. and, to be perfectly honest, in my opinion, it hardly constitutes news. it is a freak occasion, sure, but not really news as such. my psychiatrist tells me about it because we have a common interest in stalking, it is one of our conversational themes. i should say, this has nothing to do with my 'condition’. it is leisure conversation, not work. we also talk a lot about echo and the bunnymen, the human league, and the teardrop explodes, as well, because we are the same age, and of that era, and like to name drop a bit. we have quite a lot in common, except he is a psychiatrist and, unaccountably, a police surgeon.
this particular conversation segues neatly into an aspect of my imaginative life which he then gets very excited about. he is getting a theory going about me. he is a professional psychiatrist, which means he is supposed to monitor my drugs, but i don’t take any. and he is an amateur psychoanalyst. aren’t we all, these days?
of course, it is normal to me, because everything is normal to the person whose habit it is. what it is, is that this particularly modern, tarantinoesque death among the cosmetics brings up something from my own mental landscape he likes the cut of. this is that, although i am rarely late for anything, in fact i am quite obsessive about timekeeping, i often get held up in my preparations by a clothes crisis. of course, like a lot of people, i guess, when dressing, i choose my apparel in consideration of various factors; physical and psychological comfort, aesthetics, appropriateness for purpose, the weather, the likely weather, how the costume might be 'read’ versus how i want to be seen at the apex of my day, and at any other time, in different contexts, for reasons of social camouflage and mutability, and I like a little sexiness or a bit of a twist, unless i am going completely under cover.
but the thing he picks up on is that i also have 'could i die in this outfit?'. it is also one of the reasons i wash my hair every day - i would hate to die with greasy hair. i have a fear of discombobulation on death, as in life. clothes, like makeup, are a form of protection. but clothes, no matter how perfect, cannot marshal reality when it is really sliding away from you.
if this woman had any time to do so before she died, i imagine she could see beyond the staging of the retail environment, because no matter how seamless it is, and i bet harvey nics is pretty damn seamless, my feeling is that her new eye-view; the ground, would afford her a glimpse of something different. something dirty. perhaps something unfinished, something misplaced. an element of lack of arrangement in a back stage area of the shop, not for customer consumption will have been visible. or, in a moment of her own unspiralling, a thread coming loose from a button on her blood spattered blouse.
worm-eye, in that moment that is measured short but experienced long, has several thoughts before expiring. that unarticulated thought connected to the inability to move, and a feeling of discomfort in suddenly irritating clothes. a deafening but hushing rushing sound closes down distractions. she spots a price tag on the instep of a bystander's high heel. why would a person go to the trouble of selecting shoes, trying them on, taking some steps, looking in a mirror, thinking about who they might be in these shoes, or how they might complete or intstigate a certain impression, or fulfil a particular function not covered by the current shoe collection, and. not. peel. off. the. label? okay, trying on is done, the decision is made to buy them, the purchase is completed, they are carried home, packed and cosseted and then nothing? the process of fetishisation is abandoned before handling them at home? surely they are not even perfect until you peel the label off? who is this person? the price tag is a door, the only portal left in the hall of mirrors. through it she leaves the building.
then there’s the killer, finally united in death, forever, we think, with his imaginary girlfriend, the one who had a mind and a will of her own that he had to stop. he is hoiked from a last glimpse of the world of chewing gum, fluffballs, spiders and scuffed hems, up, up, and looking down, if the near-death tale tellers are to be believed, a new, vertiginous, view. looking straight down - it’s an unusual angle - life in plan. the two bodies like islands on a map, the sea of onlookers frozen mid ripple.
so. where do you want to go now? we can go anywhere, you and i. do you want to be back in the room with me and the psych? he is interesting, with his clip on tie, down the cop shop, fitting pieces together with cracker and rebus, or here, in his office, his head full of guitars and working on a theory about me with my quiet, reined in life, and reckless, apocalyptic imagination.
he anatomises my thinking in a timeline made of post-it notes perched along the edge of the table like little yellow birds. a bank of scruffy and half heartedly arranged books behind him. a seroxat mug with mould growing inside. pictures of his wife and child badly printed out from his pc propped with poor posture. barely tended plants lining the window ledges, black leather sofas never sat on but used as extra table space. traffic moves along outside with a sound like ripping cat hairs off a coat with sellotape.
move along, now, nothing to see here.
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Jamie : i copied and pasted this into my word processor. neatly formatted it. printed it. took it home. then read it. and i liked it. i liked it alot. not only are you a visual artist but you are also an accomplished wordsmith.
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matt : when i was a freshman in college, the guy i bought pot from (a friend of a friend of my brother) was heavily into collecting vinyl. he was one of the main dealers in The Student Ghetto, and he must have had four or five thousand lps. the first time i was at his apartment, he got me high and let me look through it all and play what i wanted.
he had a bookcase full of record guides. i looked through four or five, i guess. one of them, i can't remember which, rated albums from one to five stars. the reviewer's taste must have appealed to me, because i sat on his couch stoned for about an hour and a half and jotted down all the five-star entries.
and that's how i found out about another green world and volunteers and chirpin' and indeterminancy and trout mask replica and paradise and lunch and entertainment! and datapanik in the year zero and everything you know is wrong and i just can't stop it. love, the bothy band, ted hawkins, the move.
and crocodiles.
crocodiles always intrigued me because i could never figure out why it was given five stars. it didn't seem to be in the same class as the others. it didn't resonate like they did, didn't have the same... round quality, i guess is how i would describe it.
i bet i listen to it just as much as the others, though. i'm still trying to figure it out.
i bet marcus never sold a smudge of that vinyl. i bet he's still in that same apartment. he was ten years ago, anyway, last time i saw him. he was always kind of a homebody. the nesting type.
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elaine to matt
: maybe it was reviewed highly because echo and the bunnymen are 'important' rather than because it was such a great LP? or maybe it just scratched an itch at the time which is hard to pin down at a later date. i was inordinately fond of echo at the time and listened to them far more than other bands, except possibly the smiths, being a bit mono as i am. however, i really don't listen to them any more. but i still tend to listen to one thing at a time over and over and over and over.
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elaine to Jamie
: thank you jamie. i am glad it was worth all the fiddling and printing
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