Winterday

Black and white time, but in my imagination, the sky is red at dawn and sunset.  Red and mist sky.  Bitter burning cold against the skin.

See, you get out of Christmas and into that strange limbo time that tastes of leftovers. Wrapping paper tumbleweeds blowing up the streets and work colleagues trying not to make eye contact with each other, after the one day a year that they lived totally in the moment.  

It makes me impatient.  I'm waiting for something.

I mean, literally, at the time of writing, I am waiting for something (an eagerly anticipated visitor) but I'm always filled with that feeling at this time.  Something about running taps into it.  The wind.  Grey  cliffs and some silence inside.  Crow sounds and the laughter of ice.  

The sky takes on a certain frozen light quality.  There, a broken jet trail falling apart like pine needles.  That sense again.  Expecting.  Senses sharp.  Almost primal, ancient starvation warnings kicking in.  I want to hug stones.  I can believe in turning a corner and seeing the utterly inexplicable crouching in the moorland heather, amber eyes or maybe green, focusing sharp and utterly impossible.  

Our expectations of these days at the start of winter build a context of the liminal, that transformation is possible.  One of the thin spaces in which anything could be possible.  

Hold that feeling, that idea.  It doesn't go anywhere, we just get distracted.  The Noise obscures the Signal, but it's always there, a number station broadcasting freedom data.  The secret that we miss sometimes; every day, every place can be a liminal place.  Every second, just by pausing and looking beyond the immediacy of the day-to day narrative that has been built around us, something more is possible.  

In the cold days of winter, I can see this with greatest clarity.  Every moment is a railway platform and every movement is taking me somewhere astonishing.

Video playlist

The Glitterball - Children's Film Foundation seasonal adventures in a rusty and battered New Town with spherical aliens and a lot of pylons.  I blame this movie for a lot of my aesthetic sense.

At the Earth's Core - I've got a thing for people in animal skins, OK?  And giant steampunk drilling machines.  And evil pterodactyl people.  It was always on in the afternoons at this time of year.

Audio playlist

Belbury Poly: The Owl's Map or Belbury Tales - electro spooky constructs from the collective unconsciousness of a distorted 70s England, haunted by strange voices in the ether and weird glimpses of ancient rituals on the teak framed analogue TV in the corner of the pub.

David Bowie: Low - I don't think I need to explain this.

Spookhouses

...something of a Halloween meditation, somewhere between trash culture and the patterns of relationships.  Alright with that?

Scary times are here again.  That frost on the wind that reminds us of our poor shivering ancestors hoping that the sun would come back again this year and that the wolves might stay away just one more night.  The shadows around us get deeper; we think of the voices that aren't voices.  The thoughts calling on the wind, sweet as a Halloween treat.  The days of the dead, one might say.

Fear: five years old and watching Laurel and Hardy Murder Case.  Crackly 1930s, cheap, not one of their best.  Something in the over-exposed shadows and the old dark house mystery of it strikes more fear than I thought possible.  Their clowning doesn't seem funny.  It seems to be the result of hysteria, babbling with slapstick in the face of the unspeakable. I spend the rest of the night with my fingers jammed into my ears, terrified in case I heard the sound of footsteps in an empty house.

  It's on YouTube.  It's rubbish.

...and then I found this picture and ah, it all makes sense now.

What are we scared of the most?  Being alone?  I wrote earlier this year about my fear of being forgotten, my attempt to embrace that.  I failed in that venture, happy to admit.  I don't want to be forgotten, not while I'm alive, not by my loved ones.  I won't abdicate my place in your thoughts.  Nor do I wish to be the sole focus.  In that, I found a bit more love for myself.

Fear: Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1970s version).  Tiny creatures infest an old house.  They call out to the mother of the little nuclear family moving in there.  Whisper to her.  Such tiny horrors, gremlin beasts running around the dark corners.  What do they want?  

Simple.  They want to change her.  And they succeed.  The polyester mom, in her A-line maxi  becomes something quite different, that we never see.  We have to be content with just hearing her altered voice from the shadows.  She changes.  She becomes something new and awful.  And not safe.  Not at all. 

I'm so scared of it, nine years old and so scared of it.  And so envious.

I mean, I COULD read a subtext in here if I wanted to.

I run away quite a lot.  It takes huge effort of will not to and I have learned to be brave.  Growing up, always watching my back, I learned survival patterns.  As an adult, I'm only just realising that I still watch my back, all the time.  A partner asked me how I have fun and I couldn't answer, because I knew that I find it hard to let go and enjoy; I'm always watching for the wolves.  Always wondering when they'll strike.  The sound of breaking glass at 330AM, the sudden commotion in the cinema.  The man in the bar who keeps staring and I don't think it's because he likes my nail varnish.

Fear: a nightmare.  The first one I can remember.  I'm in a wonderful happy place.  The Muppets are there; I love that show.  This is wonderful.  Suddenly, they all grow silent, sombre.  A door opens; it leads out into a huge dark field, night, cold air.  A carnival or funfair.  At the entrance, a booth, the open section surrounded by lightbulbs like a backstage makeup mirror.  A man, his face slicked with greasepaint, wearing a black and white striped suit and bow tie, grins from within.  THIS IS THE CARNIVAL!  he screams.  I am terrified.  I can't move.  I must wake up.
       Oh no, he says.  You can't wake up.  There's loads of ways I can stop that.

Fear had become such a part of me that I didn't notice it anymore.  Like the sound of trains so regular that they become part of the day, so you don't even recognise true silence when you hear it.  I simply assumed that everyone else felt the same dread at every movement, every new face.

I decided that this Would Not Do.

My diagnosis of ASC helped.  I knew that my senses were working at a ridiculously high level, but my brain still operated on standard human threat response and the two were clashing.  I learned to manage it, slowly and painfully.  I still am.  Likewise, standing up and telling people I don't know just exactly who I am and how I identify, that helped too.  No-one killed me.  That tired teenage voice, reminding me about getting beaten up for wearing purple, could finally get some sleep.

I made mistakes.  I was scared. Scared of asking questions and having conversations that were so important, hurting people by my confused silence.  Scared of change.  Scared of loss.  There is so much rebuilding to be done, repairing the damage that the terror did to my world.

I listen to my own internal ghost stories.  Let them scare me.  Understand them.  Hold my ghosts close.

Fear: The Mummy.  Universal Studios, Boris Karloff.  Said to be an arch and creepy film.  I plead to be allowed to stay up, to watch it.  Finally, I'm allowed, sitting on my bed with a tiny black and white portable.  I have to twist the analogue aerial in the right direction to get a picture on it.  Swirling and buzzing, an image built of tiny monochrome swarms.  

Karloff.  That face.  Those eyes.  

I'm not scared.  

I want to be him.  The Mummy is not terrifying.  He is driven by love.  He is noble.  He walks in the dark and seeks out his heart's desire.  I am enraptured.  No fear at all.  Not the rapacious, aristocratic Dracula or the mindless Wolfman or the victimised Frankenstein ('s monster).  This is the absence of fear.  This is the moment of light mind, of being entranced.  Body relaxes.  Some prototype mindfulness born from ancient celluloid, creaky transmission towers at midnight and the belief in magic.

I wrap the sheets around me close and whisper ancient Hollywood spells to myself.  

And I'm not scared at all.  

Happy Halloween.

Rain

The summer has different lights. There's the bright optimism sunshine of June and July, deepening into the fiery skies of August.  And as August moves on, the world pales, becomes something else, hinting at what happens next.

And sometimes, you get a rainy night in August.

Clouds form.  Low level, smooth white sky.  The holidays are over, perhaps.  But not back to school yet, not back to work.  Streets emptied and soft rain falls.  Still daylight, but darker, quieter.  Lonelier, maybe?  Rain.  Cement and concrete shines into grey green.  That smell, just there, on the breeze.  The dry sunburned earth of a million back gardens gives up its secrets to the clouds.

Days of summer lost.  The early days of the holiday, that enthusiasm, becomes feverish now.  Something is getting born.  Some new world.  Yet so many faces running inside.  Don't get caught in the rain.  Catch your death.  Keep dry.  Umbrella.  Safe.  Hood up, coat buttoned.

I miss people.  I have so many, many people. The ones I love, the ones I found.  My partners, and not a one of them within less than an hour's drive.  The clouds make the world seem huge on nights like this.  If I'm not careful, it becomes a vice, a grip of cold Sunday night feeling - time for your bath, early to bed, get up early for work, sandwiches made, must be asleep by eleven, iron your shirt, what didn't you do on Friday - don't go out, it's raining, you'll get soaked - 

But that thing.  The big mystery.  Every dull looking life has diamonds hidden in it.  Remember that. Sit around with a roast and bad TV, yeah, it's going to hurt, unless a roast and bad TV is your idea of heaven. I don't have the right to judge anyone, but I still run in fear from that life, because I made myself into something new and pretty that has nothing to do with Sunday night feeling.  Nothing to do with running inside from the rain in the summer time, in case you get wet.

I can't tell you how it feels.  I can't begin to explain.  The rain that falls in the summertime, changing the nature of things.  I took my life and I sculpted it until I looked in the mirror and gasped at what I'd done.  When I could look myself in the face and know that I was happy.

When I met my gaze...and there was an awful lot of eyeshadow involved.  I was standing in the rain.

I'm in a fix here, people.  I'm not going to live in a world of ironed shirts* anymore.  I don't know how to do this, but there has to be a way.

I know what I am.  What am I?
Ambiguous.


Dee X



*Please note, I have never, ever ironed a shirt, not for about twenty years I think.  It's a statement for effect.  The effect is up to you.  "Mild exasperation" is often a good one.

Why We Don't Always

There are simple fears and larger ones.  Insecurity driving so many of them, but what does it come to?  We are scared, scared of loss, scared of being replaced.

If, as I am, you've got a few things going on out of the hetero/neuro-normative (bi, trans, polyamorous/RA, autistic, is there anything else? It'll come to me; oh yeah, teacher, that counts right?), then you get a few of the fears going on.  If your partner meets someone new, you get the Fear.  Just a bit.  No matter how many jealousy techniques you have going on, no matter how much you face your Abyss, your Chapel Perilous, you're still going to get the stabby feeling every so often.

And the form of it is so endlessly changeable.  We all have a universe of them to wake up to; are they better than me?  Younger?  Hotter?  Look better in heels?  (Not the last one, I look better in heels than all of you).  Or perhaps not as crazy?  Less inclined to slur words after 1030 at night?  Able to take things not completely literally and not to recite production details for The Prisoner during after dinner chat?

Perhaps it's not new relationship fear.  Perhaps it's the fear at the end of the street, the sense that when you leave your house, you don't come home again.  The fear of getting lost in yourself.  Once, saddened and drunk, I sat down on a street corner at 3AM and considered how easy it would be just to stay there forever.   I was a long way from home, literally and figuratively.

What is it?  I can't speak for you, but what is the nature of my fear?  I interrogate it.  I talk to it, coax it out, provoke it with images.  It's my fear, mine and mine alone...but maybe it might speak to some of you as well.  And as I talked to fright, I understood a few tiny aspects of part of my Shadow (one of my partners is SO into Jung).

That shadow is the shadow of Forgetting.

I am scared of being Forgotten.

Being forgotten...my gods, all our culture is devoted to telling us that this is the worst possible outcome for a human life!  Abramic religions make reference to being forgotten by various Old Testament style manifestations.  The rise of printed media fills us with dread - what if we aren't written down?  The postal service!  We are forgotten!  No letters today.  Empty mail slot on Valentine's day, Christmas, Birthday.  They never wrote back after the interview. We lost your test results.  There has been an error, please re-submit your details.  What was your name again?

Dickens, telling us not to forget the poor, reminding us that the economically lost are forgotten too.  Remember the dead of Verdun and a hundred thousand other places, but live in terror of the shadow of the Unknown Soldier, symbol of the worst thing; we lost your son in the mud.  Never seen again.

The force of ages.  The weight of years.  Our history is designed to get lost in, and we now fill it with fame and notoriety.  To be Remembered, and this won't be a simplistic rant on the transitory nature of celebrity, with all those classist overtones.  Because why do half of us write and paint, if not to be Remembered, to cling to some form of existence as imagined/implied author?

Oh, there are many people who act in the sheer joy of creation - I'm lucky enough to know so many, but what about me?  Does the fact that I operate behind a pseudonym absolve me of a desire to be Remembered?  I'm guessing that my deep fears suggest not, not at all.

To be Forgotten.  To not matter to those you love the most.  Nonsense, I know rationally.  But I'm human, mainly.  My mind generates odd little lizard thoughts.  Tells me that those I adore are human too...I will drift from their attention, a little further each time...

But here's the thing.

We say Being Forgotten is terrible.
We're wrong.

Memory is our ego.  Memory is our desire to hang on.  Can you name every pupil in your English class when you were 13?  Can you name every cloud you ever looked at?  The shapes of them?  Our lives are generated by processes of physics and biology, which can be understood mathematically, as can a cloud; we see no purpose in memorising each facet of the sky.  Let them move on.

Not that I want to forget.  I want to recall every last possible second of my loves.  I want to remember everything, till my mind cascades.  But I can't, anymore than the world recalls the name of the bricklayer who built the wall of this room 112 years ago.

My loves will not forget me, though they will get distracted every now and again.  They are very, very attractive people.  They are likely to get frequently distracted.  This makes me happy.  I can be forgotten for an afternoon.  Old friends will think on me less and it won't change me where I am right now.

When we choose to be forgotten, perhaps only for a weekend or an hour, it's one of the most powerful things we can accomplish.  The strongest moment of being ourselves.

We choose to be ourselves, the limit of our own senses, with nothing to support us, no illusions of immortality.  We Are.

I can't always manage this; I'm not always that strong.  But I understand a little better...even though I just wrote all this knowing very few people will ever read it, perhaps not even any of those it was intended for, that it will get lost.  I write this because it makes me feel better to write it.

That said, I still intend to raise statues in my name, so maybe don't take any of this too seriously?

Summerlands

That moment.

Remember?

The bell going.  On the last day.

That last day in school.  Time stretching out and no longer sure of what would happen, one lesson to the next.  The whole place is holding its breath, willing the moments along.  A sense of letting go finally, nine month's worth of clenched fist released. Perhaps it almost felt comfortable for you?  For the first time, perhaps, maybe?

And the bell goes.  And suddenly everyone's moving.  But in that moment, something shifts and changes -

And then the corridors are empty, the classrooms silent again and it's all over, all gone.  All the fears and troubles that seemed so huge and devouring, if you're lucky, they've gone, left behind and forgotten.  Old monsters and witches are just papier mache and left in the cupboard.  Paper teeth after all.  If you're lucky.

That sense of scattering, inexplicable because it's really just the same as any other Friday.  But still the feeling that everyone, no matter how old they are, is leaving in a different direction.  In my mind, it looks like a cheap TV crossfade, a double exposure making people vanish into the air like perfect ghosts.  Then there's only the rolling fields under the sunlight, empty and the silence of a school when everyone's gone, not coming back, this year is over.

And we all became summer ghosts, closer to our own idea of ourselves than anyone else's, just for a little while longer.  Six or seven weeks of misrule over our own hearts.





Some authors capture this moment beautifully.  For example:

The Summer Birds - Penelope Farmer
A literal summer of liminal transformation, dreamlike and impossible.  Not saying much more, but you'll be lucky to find a copy these days.

It - Stephen King
Despite what everyone thinks, it's not really about killer clowns.  It's about those perfect/monstrous summers when you learned who you could be...and then forgot all about it when school came around again.

Shadowland - Peter Straub
Not sure why this doesn't get more attention.  Cheap horror pulp cover, I guess.  A twice told memory of a long lost surreal summer in magical hell, told by an unreliable trickster narrator, about how he came to be a wandering unreliable trickster narrator.  "If you go through life with an unchipped heart, you won't get far."

I'm sure that there are classic literary examples.  But I'm all cheap dime store magic and second hand horror stories and I think it's how I'm happiest.

Nightmare in Ecstasy

Shapes emerge from the grey celluloid fog; home movies spliced with flying saucers and the living dead.  Desire reaching out across decades - this is my world, why can't they see it?

Caveat: slight return.  I've talked about this before, but somehow I feel like I need to do so again.  

If you like top ten lists of WORST FILMS EVA then not only do you need to stop reading, but I'm going to fight you.  And I fight nasty and I aim to put my opponents in the morgue.  Not that they're dead.  It's just freaky to wake up in a morgue, when the last thing you remember is having a fight with a camp sociopath on the internet.

There was a lot of this horrid "worst evee" shite back in the 1980s and 90s; it's experienced a revival on YouTube over the last five years, promulgated by pasty faced criticboys who never made a thing in their lives, apart from a dime of someone else's money toadying to rancid studio product.  Well, I'm years past the point when this was at all relevant, but tonight (it's always night when you read this, right?)  I'm going to talk to you about Edward D Wood Jr.  

Half of you have gone "uh?", half of you have gone "Jesus, twenty years too late", half of you have gone "that film with Johnny Depp" and half of you are wondering what joke I'm going to make about maths skills.  Keep hanging, finks.  I'm not going there.  Just walk away and I won't hurt ya.

Well tough to all 200% of you.  I can't get Ed out of my head.  I first saw his most notorious effort Plan 9 From Outer Space when I was about ten.  Quick version; everyone says it's the worst film ever made.  It isn't.  The end.

The saucers always come back in our dreams.  Silver and perfect, out of reach.  Anything we see inside will always be a let down. How could anything live up to that?  What film maker could put the unknowable on screen?  -  "Then one day, they destroyed a town" - the battle of LA, urban legend of WW2 anti aircraft units fighting alien ships late at night - one solitary photo, a bright shape caught in a searchlight beam, like a starlet at Grauman's Chinese Theatre - 

Plan 9 is goth as fuck.  Regardless of what the storyline is, the actual theme is all about playing in graveyards with no money, hanging with your friends in horrible times and being so far on the outside of mainstream that you've forgotten how to get up without a couple of inches of corpse makeup.  Zombies, UFOs, ghosts, vampires, film noir and TV psychics all meld together into a dreamlike void, made on a quarter of  shoestring in the rubble and demolition sites of fringe LA someplace.  

It comes at you, swinging like a champ.  Everyone overdoes everything.  The chief of police is a pro wrestler and Maila Nurmi (*sigh*) is an alien deathbride creature with claws like a wildcat.  The army tries to blow shit up and fails.  The aliens tell 50s America that its values and beliefs are a load of fucking arse and the audience sides with them against the sharp suited b-o-r-i-n-g heroes.

There is nothing here - NOTHING - that isn't repeated in alleged genre classics.  I've got a lot of time for Invaders From Mars, the movie that links childhood nightmares with the science apocalypse, but on a thousandth of its budget, it would have looked just like one of Ed's pieces.  Stock footage and bad alien costumes; the only advantage is that the Supreme Intelligence in that movie doesn't carry a clipboard and go through the evil scheme step by step, like its opposite number in Plan 9 does.

Hollywood shadows - the memory of the Black Dahlia, the all night horror specials on foggy, miniature TV screens - the dying stars.  There were once 13 letters in the Hollywood sign, but they took them down after Peg Enwistle jumped to her death.  So they tell me.  Who knows?  Print the legend.

All Ed's movies have something in common; an aura, a sense of that nightmare reality LA. Unlike most other films of the period, you can sense the horror and despair of Hollywood right there onscreen.  No-one ever jumped on a bus to become a big star after watching one of these; you can smell the disappointment too strongly.  Look at poor Bela Lugosi, ditched by the studios and living out his last days in poverty, supported by his few remaining friends.  Or Maila Nurmi, half skeletal with anorexia, blacklisted and unemployable.  This isn't the world of the popular kids.  This is our place. 

Horror host in the torn dress. My mute vampire queen.  I wanted to be like you-

Note: this is c.1955.  Allow that to sink in for a moment

Which brings me to my next point I guess; how much of Ed's unenviable reputation is the result of arrant transphobia?  He was only truly happy as a woman and this in 1950s LA.  How the fuck did he even survive out there under those conditions?  Thirty years later, smug men in sharp 80s suits were mocking this.  Hipster comedy, supposedly making a break from the past but still laughing when men dress like women.  Ha ha!  Oh, my aching sense of moral outrage.  Look at the some of the alleged classics from the last thirty years, as the supposedly hip and left wing stuff like The Young Ones uses trans status as a mark of shame.  Move on a decade and look at crap like Friends telling Joey that he shouldn't wear lingerie.  I wonder if we've come anywhere at all, our society so desperate to find shame and something to bear our teeth at, like primate packs expelling the weak.  At least we have Rupaul in the mainstream nowadays.  

Ed, looking fantastic as usual

In the dark places of celluloid, in the queer shadows and the scarred, outsider building sites, Ed's movies aren't like anything else you've seen.  He died penniless, having lost everything that ever mattered to him, his scripts, movies, even his pet dogs.  I read his story as a kid, thought he must have been ancient by the end.  He was eleven years older than I currently am, an alcoholic who wrote trans porn for rent money, too forgotten to even register as laughing stock.  Another Hollywood burnout, old flashbulbs dropped in the gutter after the premiere. 

And I don't think I've achieved a thousandth of what he did.   

So, I said I'd write about it.  But -

There'll be billion words written about him today, tomorrow, forever.

This isn't a tribute or in honour of his creativity, his artistry or his presence.  It's about the rest of us.  It's a single, solipsistic piece of writing, triggered by the death of someone I never met.

 - It's in the half heard guitar riffs on the radio, when you don't know what music is yet

Music made sense, when I was small.  Music made sense, and it was boring.  Sense and the explicable is just nothing.  All love songs with obvious meaning, even to a five year old.  And then - well, you know the rest.  When it doesn't make sense, when you crave understanding of something so mysterious and frightening and so very, very powerful and wonderful, when you see that face staring out at you from a ragged poster, the jagged flash, the eyes -

 - More drifting lyrics, half heard singles.  Finding this scene like solving a puzzle.  Up alone in my room on rainy days, with the library books about science fiction films that I could never get to see.  That face, Thomas Jerome Newton, lacking normal eyes no matter which disguise he had on.

 - There have always been visitors -

Eight years old and there's a clown walking on a beach and it is the most frightening and addictive thing I've ever seen.  The words stick to my memory, almost uniquely.

 - My mother said - 

Mystery and makeup.  Two years on, I'm dressed as Dracula and something associates in my mind somehow -

Oh and then.  A long, harsh time.  Growing up autistic but not knowing, assuming I was just insane.  Like walking on knives.  "Broken glass" I nearly wrote just then, didn't even spot that one.  Conformity and gender and sex roles enforced with brutality and ignorance and the determination that there must be no ambiguity.  The Great Terror in South Yorkshire.

 - Oh no love, you're not alone - 

Two years later, nine and a half stone, walking down the street in three inch cuban heels and a purple silk blouse.  Kids threw bricks at me.  Who gives a fuck?  Singing he played it left hand with a girl/friend at midnight.  Eyeliner and lipstick days, no matter what those 1990s documentaries tell you.

Years and years and years.  Twice.  Two times, synchronous events, both times driving, once in the morning, once late at night.  Both times, Life on Mars, like a soundtrack.  In an interview, he said it was a love song and he was very, very right.  Twice over for me, in fact.  Watching the dawn come up over the motorways (I'd love to call it the autobahn, but even I'm not that pretentious, even tonight) and listening to the entire back catalogue.  Driving a long way back home through unlit lanes for five hours, with just the one album looping over and over again.  Smiling at the madness and beauty of life when you just let go and be whatever you need to be.

Changing the makeup, a new role to play.  It's what I've always done.

It feels like that music has been on a loop in my head forever and I don't mind at all.