— Wednesday, July 5th, 2006

Zef and I just watched Jarhead. It’s an American movie about marines before, during, and after operation Desert Storm.

Zef said it lacked substance. I said,

What do you mean?

He said, there was no clear anything.

I said, that’s the point.

And the other points?

The crushing inevitability of your partner’s infidelity.

That a man whose father doesn’t have a million pounds has fewer options than one whose does.

There were other points. But those stuck with me.

In Huxley’s Brave New World, the populace don’t even remember fidelity. “Everybody is everybody’s”. The thought of another man laying weird-fingernailed hands on the woman whose eyes gazed so wetly into yours fills you not with dread, with nausea and horror and loathing. Indeed, amongst the best adjusted citizens of this world t’ward which some say we are heading, the opposite is the case.

“Everybody is everybody’s”.

Nobody is anybodies.

But infidelity broke my granddad’s heart. My granddad fought in a war, and one night, keeping watch, he heard a rustling in the bushes. He unloaded his rifle into the night, and the noise ceased.

The next morning, one of the other soldiers found a dead donkey.

“Enfin, bon”, were you French, is what you’d say if you’d just talked about something that disturbs you, but since you can’t do anything about it

you can only accept it.

OK. I have read some words that were written by another for a musical project called The Gulag. You can hear some of it here.

Also, Oddkidd’s mixtape wot I mixed is available to download here (and if that link’s dead by tomorrow I’ll post another). I got back from my meeting (RECORD RELEASE DATE TO BE ANNOUNCED SHORTLY!) and she’d swung by and left me the most amazing cream and rusty-red Addidas tracksuit jacket, which is about the nicest thankyou thing I have had in a minute. Which is rap slang for ages, to those of you who don’t listen to rap music (which makes your presence here somewhat perverse, but still).

In other news, Morty eats talcum powder. i forgot to mention this after she came round last week and made a song with me and Dego. Morty eats talcum powder. She ate some in front of me. Cos she likes it. So I ate some. And I didn’t like it. It tastes how it smells. And the taste lingers.

Saying all that, I don’t like vegetables, so what do I know?

I’ll leave you, then with an exert from the Baghdad Burning blog. It is late now, and I must visit my other life, of which I recal even less than this one. Enfin, bon?

Bad Day…

It’s been a horrible day. We woke up to unbearable heat. Our area averages about 4 hours electricity daily and the rest is generator electricity, which means we can use our ceiling fans, but there’s no way we can use air conditioners.

We woke up to an ominous silence- an indicator that the generator isn’t working. E. went next door to check and got a confirmation. It might not work all day. The neighbor responsible for it was going to bring by the ‘generator doctor’ as soon as he was free.

The electricity came at 6 pm for only twenty minutes- as if to taunt us. The moment the lights flickered on, we were gathered in the kitchen and we could hear the neighborhood children began to hoot and holler with joy.

Before that, we heard the news about the dozens abducted from the Salhiya area in Baghdad. Salhiya is a busy area where many travel agencies have offices. It has been particularly busy since the war because people who want to leave to Jordan and Syria all make their reservations from one office or another in that area.

According to people working and living in the area, around 15 police cars pulled up to the area and uniformed men began pulling civilians off the streets and from cars, throwing bags over their heads and herding them into the cars. Anyone who tried to object was either beaten or pulled into a car. The total number of people taken away is estimated to be around 50.

This has been happening all over Iraq- mysterious men from the Ministry of Interior rounding up civilians and taking them away. It just hasn’t happened with this many people at once. The disturbing thing is that the Iraqi Ministry of Interior has denied that it had anything to do with this latest mass detention (which is the new trend with them- why get tangled up with human rights organizations about mass detentions, torture and assassinations- just deny it happened!). That isn’t a good sign- it means these people will probably be discovered dead in a matter of days. We pray they’ll be returned alive…

Another piece of particularly bad news came later during the day. Several students riding a bus to school were assassinated in Dora area. No one knows why- it isn’t clear. Were they Sunni? Were they Shia? Most likely they were a mix… Heading off for their end-of-year examination- having stayed up the night before to study in the heat. When they left their houses, they were probably only worried about whether they’d pass or fail- their parents sending them off with words of encouragement and prayer. Now they’ll never come home.

There’s an ethnic cleansing in progress and it’s impossible to deny. People are being killed according to their ID card. Extremists on both sides are making life impossible. Some of them work for ‘Zarqawi’, and the others work for the Iraqi Ministry of Interior. We hear about Shia being killed in the ‘Sunni triangle’ and corpses of Sunnis named ‘Omar’ (a Sunni name) arriving by the dozen at the Baghdad morgue. I never thought I’d actually miss the car bombs. At least a car bomb is indiscriminate. It doesn’t seek you out because you’re Sunni or Shia.

We still don’t have ministers in the key ministries- defense and interior. Iraq is falling apart and Maliki and his team are still bickering over who should get more power- who is more qualified to oppress Iraqis with the help of foreign occupiers? On top of all of this, rumor has it that the Iraqi parliament have a ‘vacation’ coming up during July and August. They’re so exhausted with the arguing, and struggling for power, they need to take a couple of months off to rest. They’ll leave their well-guarded homes behind for a couple of months, and spend some time abroad with their families (who can’t live in Iraq anymore- they’re too precious for that).

Where does one go to avoid the death and destruction? Are the Americans happy with this progress? Does Bush still insist we’re progressing?

Emily Dickinson wrote, “hope is a thing with feathers”. If what she wrote is true, then hope has flown far- very far- from Iraq…

— Tuesday, July 4th, 2006

See that? That’s a flyer. For a night. What it is, is I shall do a PA, which means rapping a few songs minus The Women, and DJing. i AM PRETTY CRAP AT djING, BUT i PLAY ACE RECORDS. Over the top of my DJing, some of my rap-ist friends will, um, rap. Yes son!

More on this subject later.

So, happy July, as a hot pink thing noted the other night. I have been on holiday, in Greenwich, which I am told is in London, but feels rather like a cross between the gay bit of the Lower east side of Manhattan and Ghent in Belgium. Ask me not why. I am rather taken with with the place – today the hot pink thing took me to its park (it had a bandstand in it! With a band in it! A Proper band like wot Sinatra had! Zing!) AND its Cutty Sark, which is the actual Cutty Sark built without the aid of power drills back in the 1800s, and yes, it is very big, and yes, I want one. Modern boats suck ass.

So, I got back to Stoke Newington, which was in itself eventful – I witnessed a bald red headed Englisher fresh back from the world cup befriending a German student, forsooth:

“Fackin expensive, tragedy really, fackin Rooney, but you lot were amazing ‘osts, fackin amazing, we’ve got our istory, but fack it, water under the bridge. We lost, but I ad a brilliant time thanks to you lot. You love your sausages! Fackin crazy fackers. Fackin sausages as big as my arm, and the bread as big as a baby’s! Yes, I lav you my friend. Fackin expensive though, fack!”

And so on. Anyway, I got back, and it seemed as though it were not a Sunday in sleepy Stokey at all, for the streets were awash with noisy jubilance! The nice Turkish man with the sad eyes in my corner shop (and yes, it is on a corner) informed me there had been a festival in Stoke Newington today, and the revelers had cleaned him out of beer and soft drinks. Fortunately, there were still plenty of 1.5 litre bottles of that 50p water I like so well. BOETH YN FAMA!

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome a new Whewell into the world. I believe her to be 13 hours and a few minutes old now. This is quite amazing to me, this birth business, even though it is as old as humanity itself, and I don’t care whether you think it was the chicken, or the egg that did it. All I know is there is wet pink sack of blood and bones and raw humanity somewhere in Brighton, and it could probably do just about anything at all.

Which is fucking NUTS, spa.

PS – MAE’N FOKKIN BOETH A RYDW I’N AR DRUGLESS COME DOWN.

PPS – It is so boeth in my flat that Zef and I just witnessed a little bit of of cotton floating about on top of all the air. It is currently an inch off the ceiling. BOETH!

— Monday, July 3rd, 2006