It Does Start to Blur After a While

Climbing back up to that 35,000 foot motorway above the clouds. The moon, seriously full on the trip out, has waned only slightly in the intervening days. On night flights they dim the cabin lights during takeoff and landing. For my money (or in this case, the company’s money), on nights like this they could keep the interior lights off for the entire journey. There are mountains up here, vaporous though they may be, which assume an entirely new vision of loveliness under a stark white moon. This panorama is obliterated completely by the pizza-parlour lighting from the inside of an Airbus.

My band of merry men and I have been spending quite a bit of time in Germany as of late. Outside the UK, Germany is our company’s largest European market. Lots of good consumers in Deutschland, despite their anachronistic policy of closing all shops on Sundays. If you find yourself famished in Hamburg on Sunday and your fridge contains two packets of mustard and a jar of expired mayonnaise, you’re pretty much fucked. You might find a few petrol stations open but those hotdogs have been twirling on their little circular runs since at least last Spring so the smart money would be on giving them a miss.

In past posts I have raged against stereotyping entire cultures based on individual behaviour or idiosyncrasies. The US is not filled to the brim with gun-toting, slack-jawed, rednecks named Bubba-Billy-Bob (a full 49% do not fall into that category) and although popular reality TV shows might lead viewers to believe otherwise, not all the English are Chaves. Likewise I am not going to pigeon-hole all of Germany based on my experiences with a handful of IT geeks- I’ll leave that up to you.

I’m one of those cowboy-type IT guys who pretty much makes it up as I go along. Sure, I’ve done a lot of project management stuff with wall-sized charts, graphs and Post-it notes but at the end of the day I’m the guy they pay to make it work- no matter what -and I better not think about getting on the plane back to London unless the Finance Director from whatever remote outpost I’ve been working in is so happy he shits rose pedals.

Working alongside my German colleagues has been, continues to be, an enlightening experience. They take nothing for granted, trust no procedure unless it has been demonstrated to them and consider anything less than complete success a dismal failure. They like plans and structure and are uncomfortable when things deviate from what’s on their worksheets.

Since I’ve been doing these rollouts for over two years I have become a bit, shall we say, complacent about the process. One site visit, a couple of days of prep work and one weekend to migrate usually does the trick. When things go wrong, and they always do, we’re there to make it all better. We get the place running and hand off to Core Services for on-going support. We don’t have the time to baby-sit because come Monday night, we’re off to our next job. My boys and I are fixers and like smoke-jumpers everywhere we take huge, chest-expanding pride in the job we do.

Looking at these two very divergent attitudes, one might think that there would arise a good deal of friction between the teams. In reality, we complement each other fairly well. They force us to be more precise and process driven and for our part we bring to the party an aptitude for adaptation and think-on-your-feet cleverness. It’s up to me to make sure everyone plays nice, catch the flack and push things along. It is almost, but not completely, like herding cats.

Fast forward.

It’s been months since I have been to Paris and I can’t say I have really missed it. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Paris as a place to holiday: the food is great, the shops are lovely and there are no end of little streets to explore. Unfortunately I have spent far too much time working in the suburbs of Paris in offices that have Neanderthal IT infrastructures and appallingly rude employees who smoke at their desks and throw their laptops if they don’t get their way. Experiences such as these knocked the stuffing out of the joy I once felt whenever I arrived at The City of Lights.

Added to my justifiable trepidation is the fact that I have just had the extremely unfortunate experience of catching the Eurostar from its new domicile at St. Pancras. On November 14th the Eurostar terminal at Waterloo was closed and moved to the refurbished St. Pancras station. The retrofit cost more than the GDP of Africa and provides a direct high-speed link to Paris. Trains from Waterloo travelled on the conventional, slower, tracks on the English side before speeding up once they got into France. It took the British 11 years to install their high-speed line while the French had their tracks ready nearly as soon as the last scoop of earth was removed from the Chunnel.

The upshot of all this upheaval has been to transform a dingy 19th station into a soulless 21st century station- and save 20 min on the journey time to Paris and Brussels. Ken Livingstone, the Lord Mayor of London, recently asked “why would anyone fly to Paris anymore?” Allow me to tell you: St. Pancras is a bloody nightmare. Let’s hope it’s still a work in progress because if this is a finished product Eurostar is doomed.

There is no doubt they increased the space available but whomever they got to allocate that space must be one for hard nights on the town. They created a huge ticket counter but reduced the number of automatic ticket machines. They spaced out security and passport control but since there seems to be less staff available it takes longer to get through. The lounge hasn’t been built yet so they put up a curtain around a bunch of garden chairs and shoved us all in there. Outside in cattle class they also have fewer seats with backs and have littered the area with a bunch of padded benches. They changed our gate assignment three times and the rush to the trains was only slightly less frantic than a rugby scrum. The signage is minimal and placed exactly where it is least visible. In short, in every conceivable way they have managed to transform the reasonably pleasant and hassle-free experience of boarding a train at Waterloo into a painful, dehumanizing and loathsome enterprise. Well done!

Even 1st class can’t save this trip. They didn’t put on enough food, the train is standing-room-only and as usual the loos have gone beyond filthy into a realm of wretchedness only approached by open sewers or Edgware Road kebab shops.

We’re coming up to Paris now and the world outside my window has descended into darkness. The transport strike is over now but several of the more disenfranchised suburbs are burning. For the French, this is the sort of equilibrium that allows them to simultaneously feel good and miserable and makes for good conversations over wine.

Four days later and I’m outbound from Paris. The train is much less crowded and they actually put on enough food for everyone. A pod of art dealers is sitting across from me; we’ve been chatting about their most recent acquisition- a small rectangular cast of St. Sebastian having his wounds attended by women. It’s a bit of an odd piece of a type generally created for nunneries. As an 18th century work it’s a bit past my normal area of expertise and taste but it does have a delicate charm. They sank into a heated debate about the volatility of the contemporary art market so I bowed out to try and put a ribbon around this entry.

Between now and the end of the year we have to finish up three more German sites, attend a staggering array of office parties and beg The Powers That Be for the money to keep my boys and I in nice hotels for a few months longer. We all know that sooner or later the golden tap of funding is going to be turned off and eventually we will have to return to more conventional jobs or unemployment. After two and a half years of this gig, the thought of riding a desk again makes the bile rise into my mouth.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. At the agency I used to work at they lost one of their only clients and offered voluntary redundancy to the entire staff. 43 took them up on it even though they only really needed 20 to fall on their swords. 43 out of 180 people decided that a payoff and the dole queue was preferable to sitting in a glass box staring at glowing monitors all day while their souls were slowly sucked from their bodies through their asses.

This gives me hope. No one who works in advertising, media, PR or any similar occupation should ever take their jobs seriously. Trust me on this, if the entire industry were to vanish tomorrow the only thing the huddled masses would notice, apart from a gigantic sucking sound, would be that they can now watch their favourite TV shows without being interrupted by people with perfect teeth making them feel inadequate about their choices in underarm deodorant.

We just cleared the channel tunnel. From this point it used to take about an hour to reach central London- they’ve cut that time in half, which is a nice trick even if we do have to go to the wretched St. Pancras. I’ll spare you a repeat of my tirade against Eurostar’s new London home and instead pass along a snippet of conversation I overheard at a dinner party: “St. Pancras might be pretty but I liked making the French arrive at Waterloo.” Some things never change.

My Home Town v. 1.0

I spent the majority of my life in the small seaside sanctuary of Santa Barbara California. My mum and I moved there from Long Beach (“inflamed boil on the buttocks of the world”) when I was three. She had just remarried, less out of love than to provide a decent life for me. She succeeded in that respect but paid an emotional toll that I only later came to appreciate.

We settled into a house on a couple of acres of land in a wooded enclave called Mission Canyon. Back in the day there were no fences dividing one property from another- trees and undergrowth stretched out in all directions, broken only occasionally by a road or driveway; there were even a couple of creeks which to me were as mysterious as the Amazon. For a boy and his dog it was an untamed and unclaimed frontier waiting to be explored.

And explore we did. Apart from the unwanted interruption of school, I spent nearly every daylight (and many night time) hour of my youth climbing trees, making forts, trekking up streams, swimming, building tree houses, shooting pellet guns, catching lizards, snakes, assorted bugs and in general loving the hell out of living in such an unbelievably cool place. The only problem, although it didn’t seem so at the time, was that I did it all alone.

Those canyons behind Santa Barbara do not lend themselves to neighbourhood block parties. There are no “blocks” or indeed sidewalks and the houses tend to be spread out at random and isolated from one another by the aforementioned trees and brush. It was 15 years before I met my first neighbour.

So there I am, an adopted, only child growing up in the woods with just my dog and parents for company. Socially school was a challenge. It wasn’t that I was shy, quite the opposite, I was an attention-starved extrovert who later mutated into the class clown who had a problem with authority. My particular handicap was that I didn’t understand group activities; I wanted to simply expand my solitary pursuits to include others. I would ask kids if they wanted to come back to my place and read.

I know this has “deranged psychopath” written all over it but for some reason, as tempting as it sometimes seemed, I never went down that path. I managed to acquire a reputation for being smart, cynical and academically lazy; that, coupled with good verbal and written skills, made me just interesting enough to my peers to keep me from becoming the type of dejected loaner you see the neighbours describing on the evening news, “Mark was always such a quiet boy…”

I stuck around Santa Barbara until I was 19- living with my pot-smoking girlfriend until she dumped me and went back to Mississippi to get knocked up. I spent the next year and a half in Long Beach, staying with my second set of parents, going to college, working as a photographer on the student paper, drinking a lot and fucking my philosophy professor’s daughter.

Somehow I managed to get accepted to Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, so back I went. Eight years, a wife, a divorce and countless weirdness later I fled to San Francisco where I was pretty content until I moved to London and entered a previously unknown circle of hell. OK, so that’s a bit of an oversimplification but I need to keep the narrative rolling along.

Today I find myself in Santa Barbara again. Not to live, no indeed, considering that the average home price in this place is now over a million bucks and that most of the jobs are in the service industry, I don’t think I’ll be making the move back anytime soon. No, I am here because my mother has cancer.

Two weeks ago she sent me an e-mail asking how I was, if my knee still hurt, what the weather was like in whatever city I was in and oh, by the way, I’m going in for Chemo tomorrow.

No phone call, no warning, nothing, just “I’m going in for Chemo.” I sat, open mouthed, staring at the screen until I realized that her “tomorrow” was my “today” and I had no idea which hospital she was in or how to get in touch with her- it was 2:00 in the morning her time anyway. By the time California woke up I was supposed to be on a plane for Spain.

In my hotel room later in the evening I managed to get in touch with my dad and he gave me the run down. Mum had a 2.5-pound tumour in her abdomen; it was isolated, lymphatic and treatable. She was on day one of a three-day course of Chemotherapy and she would be back home after that. She was looking at six more monthly sessions, with all the horrors that entails but at this point the Oncologist was cautiously optimistic. I was so completely unprepared for even semi-good news that I simply had no idea how to handle it; I just sat down and cried.

I spend my professional life addressing and mitigating Worst Case Scenario situations. My own personal mantra is “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” I never, under any circumstances, tempt “worst.” It can always get worse; it’s my job to make sure that when it does my team and I have the tools and skills to avoid a complete meltdown. I’m so blinded by this mentality that on those rare occasions when something doesn’t go supernova the wheels come off my bus. Good news, it would seem, disrupts my fragile mental state.

Much to my surprise, I didn’t catch the next flight to California; nor the flight after that. After being assured that mum’s condition didn’t warrant frantic action, I finished up the project in Spain, few to New York and then on to LA; arriving in Santa Barbara a few days after she was released from the hospital.

I’m still here. My mum is fragile but progressing, her tests are looking good and we just hired a care assistant to give her and my dad a hand with the cooking and cleaning. I’ve managed to escape for a few hours to sink into the shadows and soft chairs of a funky café by the beach. There is a giant paper mache sunflower on the ceiling, a cloth covered elephant in the corner and a weird mix of folk rock and inde world music on the stereo. Sitting directly to my left, in a velvet-upholstered throne complete with carved lion head armrests, is a woman who I would happily spend the rest of my life with. Best that she doesn’t know- I’ve had enough humiliating rejections for several lifetimes. She’s packing up her laptop now. Another small heartbreak in an ocean of missed opportunities.

I didn’t begin this to bemoan my romantic insecurities or go into agonizing detail about my mum’s current condition. I wanted to talk about being back in the place I first called home and how utterly disorientating it feels to be a visitor on my own turf.

Adding to my lost at sea feeling is the fact that I have not one single friend remaining in Santa Barbara. This could be partly my fault. I pretty much loathed everyone I went to school with and in my later life here my friends were probably best described as volleyball and beer buddies. Although my wife and I spent our entire married life in Santa Barbara, we were too busy fighting, fucking and moving house twice a year to establish any reliable support base.

I do remember hanging out with one couple: she was a therapist of some kind and he worked at the Post Office where, if memory serves, he used to pour honey into the sorting machines.

Returning this time under, as it were, duress, I decided to take the bold step of writing up a personal add and posting it on Craigslist under the heading Strictly Platonic. I wasn’t looking for a relationship or a quick fuck. I just wanted someone, preferably someone with a wicked sense of humour and breasts, to hang out with in the evenings.

The responses were underwhelming but as it turns out, that wasn’t a bad thing. I have ended up spending a lot more time in caretaker mode than I anticipated. I would have probably felt immensely guilty passing my evenings enjoying myself.

I’m reprinting the add here because I kind of like it and who knows, someone might know someone who knows someone who, in a couple of months, wouldn’t mind spending an evening or two sitting under a giant paper mache sunflower with a guy trying to find home.

Billy No Mates

I can’t help but thinking it’s a bit odd that after living in Santa Barbara for 26 years, when I make return visits the only friends I have in town are imaginary.

Sure, it would be easy to blame myself. I move around a lot and since my tracking bracelet was removed I can be pretty difficult to pin down. Still, you’d think that someone, a classmate, an ex-girlfriend, that guy named Jack I used to work with at a gas station who would stick radiator hoses down the front of his pants before he went out to fill up cars, would take the time to search through my Interpol files for my last known location and send me a birthday card. No such luck.

It’s exceptionally disorientating to be a tourist in what was, for so long, my hometown. I’ve become one of those annoying people who drive around, point at a new office building or bank and say things like, “Hey, that used to be Sparks skateboard park! Wow, that takes me back, I remember when JP and I would get tanked up on Dr. Pepper and ride our bikes all the way to IV, just to watch whatever dude was shredding the half-pipe. Of course we never had the money to get in so we’d try and sneak over the fence until one day…” and on and on until my passenger begins to moan and claw helplessly at the window until their fingernails bleed.

I traded in Santa Barbara for San Francisco and then, in a very hostile takeover, I swapped the perpetual fog of My City By The Bay for the omnipresent overcast and dull grey skies of London- where I remain. 5800 miles NE of the closest decent burrito and surrounded by people who think that a bunch of grown men kicking a ball around in a field is the pinnacle of all human endeavours. I’ve been seven years amongst the savages and it’s only constant denial and nightly uncontrollable weeping which keeps me from plunging into the Thames with stones in my pockets.

But I digress.

I swing through Santa Barbara a few times a year to see my Parental Units and wander aimlessly along East Beach hitting myself on the head with a plank and shouting, “why did I ever leave?!” Just before I lose consciousness a little voice from my past whispers, “because you never made more than $12 an hour, paid $1500 a month for a stucco broom closet under the freeway and were sinking into the lifestyle of a perpetually poverty stricken student.”

Now I find myself making another pilgrimage to my hometown and I will be damned if I’m not going to at least make an attempt to connect with someone, anyone (nearly), in Santa Barbara who can come reasonably close to catching my drift.

I feel it only fair to warn you that I’m not looking for a one, or even two, night stand, my soul-mate, a romantic trysts, marriage, children, or a house with a two-car garage and a white picket fence in suburbia. I live in LONDON for God’s sake! If I want to fish, I’ll do it in a local pond. I simply want someone to meet me at Sojourners so that we can have a latte and complain that they put too many sprouts on their sandwiches.

In the spirit of full disclosure I best you give you a bit of a run-down on who you might see over the rim of your coffee cup: I’m pretty much a run-of-the-mill 41 year-old near-sighted, tall, thin, balding, geek. I don't drink which makes me a pariah on both sides of the Atlantic and the things I do for fun revolve around paintings, photographs, bookstores and spouting witty cynical barbs when disguising politics over dinner.

My baggage contains a marriage (no kids), a divorce, my fair share of broken hearts, a massive amount of European travelling, left-wing rabble rousing for doomed causes, too much time spent in university, a long run of being a photojournalist and various weird, terrifying, utterly humorous, tedious and thrilling bits that make up a normal real life. (Please note that none of those bits contain piercings, tattoos, prison or strange associations with men in overcoats who answer to the name of "Guido.")

Since we’re attempting to manage expectations it would be good if you are within spitting distance of my age and have about as much blood under the bridge. You best be able to write since this will, for the most part, be a very long distance friendship. Holding your own in a rapidly changing conversational environment will be a necessity and knowing the difference between Monet and Manet (but finding Impressionism itself a pedestrian movement which served as little more than a transitional phase and whose seminal works are best suited for adorning sitting room walls) will keep you off my internal “do not call” list.

Right. That about covers it. I’m LA at the moment but I will be in SB between ---- and --- I have a good deal of family stuff to take care of (mum’s been in the hospital- thus the reason for this trip) but I figure I’ll have some evenings free to do whatever passes for fun in Santa Barbara these days.

I’ve attached a couple of photos so you will be able to recognize me across a crowded, restaurant, dance floor or Politics and Aesthetics in 20th Century Modernist Art lecture- you should probably do the same.

OK,
-Billy-

I Did This to Myself

Brussels. I shouldn’t be in Brussels, I should be in London. I’m in Brussels because a massive power failure rendered all international rail transport out of Amsterdam useless. I have been lied to in four different languages and squashed nose to armpit on a train that, it turns out, I didn’t need to get on.

The blame for my current mess rests fully on my slumping shoulders. I deliberately chose to take the train to Amsterdam instead of flying. Counting the time it takes to get to Heathrow, wait in The World’s Longest Queues, clear security, eat stale sandwiches in the BA Lounge, sit on the tarmac, fly, clear customs, play luggage roulette, train from the airport and taxi to the hotel, travelling by rail is normally only about 45 minutes longer and unimaginably more comfortable.

This time, not so much.

20 minutes out of Waterloo on the outbound leg the Eurostar ground to a halt because of signal failures. This put us just enough behind scheduled that I missed my connection in Brussels and had to take the all-stopping-all-the-time Inter City train to Amsterdam.

The return journey, as outlined above, was a comic adventure of cancellations and misinformation. Still, worse things happen at sea and all in all, if I have to be stuck somewhere, it might as well be the Sheraton Brussels Towers, one of my favourite hotels. Thank GOD for business travel services: one call and they got me a room with a view.

Ten years ago when I still had hair and massive credit card debt, missing a train in Europe meant sleeping in a hostel or more likely a railway platform. No connections, no cash and no clue add up to adventures that I’m more than happy are behind me.

Sometimes, like now, I take a step back and look at my life and am honestly puzzled: Is this what it means to be a grown up? Do other people have lives like this (relentless travel, fucking hard work, relentless travel)? Apart from the boys on my team, I don’t know anyone who lives like this. OK, that’s not exactly true, I have several friends who live on the road. But they are mostly burned out hippies who peddle home-made herbal remedies at psychic fairs or trade hash-brownies for gas.

I work with a guy, I’ll call him Rich because that’s his name, who did my kind of gig for six years. He worked for BP (British Petroleum) and installed computer systems on tanker ships in Asia. He had, it must be said, a blast. He built up about a million air-miles going between London and Singapore, travelled all over Asia, slept with beautiful women and generally had the kind of life most 25 year old males would sacrifice private pieces of their anatomy for.

At 33 he called it quits, flew back to London, married his childhood sweetheart, had a couple of kids and seems to be living happily ever after. I’ve been doing this for two years and am honestly terrified of the thought of going back to riding a desk let alone staying in a city for more than four days in a row. What happens to guys like me? What woman would want us? We’re not exactly the safest bet for a long term stable relationship.

When I was six and I made the decision I wanted to be a photojournalist, more specifically, a war correspondent, I figured I would live on airplanes, be a cynical loaner and eventually retreat to a cabin in Big Sur where I could edit my retrospective show for MOMA.

I’m now 41, live on airplanes, am not quite as cynical or as much of a loaner as I used to be; that cabin in Big Sur costs $2.4 million and a MOMA show of my greatest hits would leave a good deal of white space on the gallery walls.

I take a bit of solace in the fact that I haven’t strayed completely from my childhood ambitions but I am constantly haunted by a feeling that the further I go into the mainstream of the business world the more the six year-old in me becomes horribly disappointed. I rationalize that this is just a phase and because I still take the occasional photograph and write throw-away pulp entries for a blog no one reads that I can still call myself an artist.

Bullshit. I sold out the moment I hung up my cameras and started working behind a keyboard for cash. No amount of rationalizing will change that and for all my agonizing the truth is that I didn’t just skid uncontrollably into my current life, I made an eyes-wide-open decision to abandon my old one; now I have to deal with it.

Walking down a sunny street in Oslo this morning I tried to simply be content with where I was and what I was doing. I wanted to expunge my normal feeling that I should be someplace else whenever I’m not in California. I utterly and totally failed to do this. I in fact failed so badly that I had to sit for a few moments on a park bench and try to regroup. I found myself asking the big question: “will I ever be satisfied anywhere or with anyone?”

Probably not.

I wonder if there is a support group for people like me? Something tailored for folks whose entire life is one giant Attention Deficit Disorder.

“Hi, my name is Mark and since I was 17 I have never lived in any one place for longer than a year. I refuse to buy anything that will not fit in a single suitcase. I don’t want to make any attachment that I am not prepared to break within five minutes and I always carry my passport.”

I’m not sure what “normal” is, but I’m pretty damn sure that how I am is not it.

It is Cricket After All

Regular readers of this column, of which there are none, may have noticed a subtle shift in tone, a slight mellowing of my rancour towards England and the English. This attitudinal adjustment has not come about without a price and I feel that I have not so much learned to appreciate the subtle niceties of my adopted land but experienced a gradual decay of my resistance.

After seven years of close, in some cases intimate, observation of the common and not so common inhabitants of this island I really am in no better position to comment on what exactly encompasses the essence of Englishness than I was when I first stepped off the plane from San Francisco all those years ago. The problem arises, indeed is inherent within any attempt to snap-shot a culture, that there really is no way to define The English any more than you can pinpoint The French, The Germans, or the Norwegians. Generalizations about a people tend to be written by guide-book authors or foreigners with an axe to grind. When you grow up somewhere there is little need to define what it means to live there- you just do and that’s the end of it.

Let us not forget for a moment that any white-wash generalization of a people or a county is, by it’s very nature, stereotyping and while sometimes, in the hands of a gifted writer it can be humorous, it can also lead to the most grievous of racial diatribes.

I have lost count of how many evenings I have spent in restaurants all over Europe listing to half-drunk ravings about how America was created by Satan to perpetuate subjugation and destruction, only to be told, after the rant has finished, that “you’re OK, you’re not like that.” I’m not too bothered by this, it shows that there is a separation between the actions of a government and the feelings and desires of individuals. Just today, in an Amsterdam taxi, the driver reinforced this view:

“I love Americans.” He said, “I just hate your government.”

His sentiment is one I can wholeheartedly relate to. The danger lies when the overriding distrust of a country trumps the intellectual understanding that people who live in that country do not necessarily ascribe to the views of the ruling party which means that sometimes it is easier to simply hate all Americans (or French or Russians or Germans or…) than to consider the lives and views of individuals.

The fact that I travel constantly throughout Europe has given me an insight and appreciation not only of the cities that I visit but also of the country I return to. Looking out the small, scratched, Plexiglas window as we line up for our approach to Heathrow I see a patchwork quilt of hedgerows, green pastures and villages and this somehow makes me feel that everything is right in the world.

I fully appreciate why I think this: I’m returning to London after days or weeks away, I know that when we touch down I will be able to read the street signs and I still carry with me a touch of romanticism that all Americans feel toward Mother England. However, for me that warm fuzzy feeling started to evaporate after my first visit to London when I was 13 and encountered thuggish commuters, inedible food and wax paper toilet tissue.

Home is the familiar be it a cave, a cottage or a castle. The tiny refrigerators, washing machines and streets of London which once seemed so foreign now seem more “normal” than their gigantic counterparts in the US. Yet England will never, ever, be my home with a capital “H.” I work with a dozen ex-pats and none of them, myself included, would ever think the phrase, “being home for the holidays” meant staying in the UK.

Great Britain is a small island, about the size of the state of Oregon. It’s 60 million inhabitants jostle about for elbow room on land that has been walked over, ploughed, planted, paved, deforested, mined, fought over, bombed and generally abused for a few thousand years. In the US it is quite easy to wander into the wilderness and find oneself hours, if not days, from anything resembling human habitation whereas in Britain it’s difficult to find a spot without mobile phone coverage.

This small scale and isolation has shaped the character of the English and led to a xenophobia so chronic that, if certain papers with large type and small pages are to believed, the sole unifying belief of the inhabitants is a desire to keep everyone else out.

A favoured topic at pubs throughout the country is the necessity for the government to “do something about” the wave of immigrants flooding the shores of a nation which is bursting at the seams. I have been party to numerous discussion with normally liberal-minded people who will rabbit on about the dangers of letting in more of the teaming foreign masses without once seeing the irony of having the discussion with me.

I have taken one of their jobs, fucked their women, sent thousands of pounds to foreign banks, used their health services, insulted their citizens, government and way of life and never once has my right to live in the UK been questioned; not once have I been told “go back where you came from!” Why is that? The cynical among you might say it’s because I am a white male and you would be right.

My dearest friend in the UK, a lawyer who works in Leeds (the binge drinking capital of the UK- which is saying something), raised in Britain, with an accent so posh you could cut glass with it, happened to have the bad luck of being born in Pakistan and has thus endured a life of taunts, insults and threats from people who claim superiority to her because their parents got drunk and conceived them on a council estate in Hull.

The English of course do not have a monopoly on racism and some, including me, would argue that apart from a few notable headline gabbing riots, Britain tolerates and accepts immigrants from her former colonies (read: everyone) fairly well. Just don’t peak behind the curtain and ask what John Bull feels about all those Polish Plumbers.

I should point out that even though I am British, I am not now, nor will I ever be, English and if you think there isn’t a difference, ask a Scot. “English” is an exclusive club which I, because of birthplace and accent, will always be denied membership.

I didn’t begin this entry with the intent of digressing into the subject of race relations in the UK. My premise was simply that Englishness is indefinable and any attempt at doing so will yield a shed-load of general or exaggerated traits which apply to no one. To a reader of This England (an amusingly stuffy publication which prides itself on looking backward at, rather than forward to, a more civilized Britain) those things which most define an Englishman might be summed up as follows: a quiet reserve, perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds (aka: The Battle of Britain or Agincourt), a love of county Cricket, Sunday roasts, reverence for the Queen and gardening. While I do know one or two people who fit this description perfectly, observational evidence would seem to indicate that although these traits might at one time been an apt portrait of the idealized Englishman (Englishwomen shared nearly the same traits but substituted stern common sense for Cricket) they are far from the norm at present.

Now that I once again find myself 31,000 feet over the North Sea enjoying the crisply polite service offered by British Airways (that is not sarcasm by the way- I really do think their flight and cabin crews are tops) and wishing that children had both a volume control and an off switch; I’m trying to remember when the unfamiliar became the familiar. At what point did the strangeness of Europe, specifically Britain, give way to the sensation of familiarity which allows it to feel, if not exactly like home, then at least something that will do for a time.

The answer, for me at least, is that this change is still a work in progress and something I struggle very hard against. I don’t actually want London to be Home so any advances along these lines have been happening behind the scenes of my consciousness. Stupid brain trying to make me adapt, get back to thinking about sex every 6.2 seconds.

Amsterdam. Very, very nice bar attached to a swish hotel. I am definitely not a bar person but this place is pretty chill: no loud music, no one smoking (anything) and the seats are plush leather. Sorry, slight diversion, where was I?

The English are no different than anyone else: in their most sentimental or stressed moments, what they think of as the Utopia of Home is really an idealized conglomeration of gauzy fantasizes. What’s the harm of it? When reality is hordes of concrete car parks and city centres exploding with pups the size of Zeppelin hangers, who wouldn’t want to escape to thatched roof cottages and afternoon tea?

I make mock of London and the English, for all sorts of good reasons, however I have also spent the last five Christmases in one of those thatched roof cottages surrounded by my extended English family. They have taught me to love Cricket and country walks and days out on the river Dart. As difficult as it is for me to admit, no matter how progressive, how liberal, how anti-monarchy I think I am, years of exposure to a rural and genteel England makes me want to trade in my biker jacket and Ramones t-shirt for a tweed suit and a pair of Wellies.

Almost.

50/50

I am not a grouper or a joiner or a follower which takes me out of the target demographics of most of the social networking sites on the Net. I did, however get firmly addicted to The Show With Ze Frank and as an offshoot of that have become a sporadically active participant in the little pond known as The ORG (www.zefrank.org). It’s fun, friendly and gives us creative/crazy types a nice outlet for whatever we call our art.

As with any arts collective or commune everyone is equal but a few people are a little more equal than others (I have always wanted to use that line) and in the case of The ORG, above the maddening crowd of watchers and lurkers, a few truly inspired souls stand out. In this particular instance I am referring to Bliss and Leary who, out of curiosity, hopefulness or desperation, are embarking on an endeavor appropriately called 50 Dates in 50 States where they are, you guessed it, trying to hook-up with blokes in every state of the Union.

(Author’s note: It has come to my attention that the term “hooking up” is a synonym for “having sex with” a connotation which I, in my naive way, have not intended. I also remember when “Dick” was a perfectly nice man’s name so that pretty much dates me.)

In case you can’t do the math, they need to find 100 guys who can pass their rigorous screening process and escort them to whatever bar, restaurant, mountain overlook, drive-in movie, beach walk, country drive, paint-ball arena, sporting event, beer drinking contest, turtle wrestling rodeo, body art boutique, lobster fishing excursion, dance marathon, or bagpipe killing contest that passes for a first date in your zip code.

If you want further details or to throw your hat in the ring go here: http://www.50dates.tv/blog/ Reproduced here without permission are their essay questions:

Who do you want the date with and why how do you feel about math describe your perfect wednesday what type of girls do you typically date congratulations, all of your hard work has finally paid off, but...ummm...what have you been working on again how do you escape describe your first crush what's in your burrito did seven really eat nine tell me something that will make me smile who's invited to your tea party will our parents like you you have a roll of duct tape, paper bag, and shoe lace...go what is YOUR idea of a perfect date ?

Since I spend a lot of time in departure lounges I figured it would be better to spend my free moments answering their questions than eating stale peanuts and watching businessmen drink cheap booze. Thus:

I’m out of the running for this whole damn fool 50/50 date crusade because the only state I live in now is perpetual denial and besides, if you did decide you wanted to drive here to meet me I’d bet you’d have a hell of a hard time holding your breath for those last few miles. This of course doesn’t in the least dissuade me from writing a rambling response to your application questionnaire because it happens to be well after midnight, I’m tired, bored and in yet another of a succession of hotel rooms in a city where I’m pretty sure they flog people for speaking English.

Forgive me if I diverge from my planned remarks to share a small factoid about my youth: when I was five or six years old my grandmother used to give me about half and inch of PBR in a glass and we’d sit and watch roller derby together. She’d also take me to the track and place $2 bets for me. I’m sure these activities laid a solid foundation for my later years.

Like now for instance. I’m sitting in an airport lounge in Vienna watching the heavens open up and the delays on the departure board roll up like digits on a pinball machine. The liquor if free here and so are the little sandwiches; I’m surrounded by guys in ties with mobile phones stitched to their ears. I, on the other hand, am somewhat more comfortably attired in summer hiking boots and a linen shirt that has never known the love of a good iron. A man the size of Orson Wells in a fat suit just lashed out at the woman cleaning up the dishes saying, “This is appalling! You should see the Qantas lounge!” She laughed uncomfortably and scurried to an Employees Only door; he lumbered off to squeeze into an overstuffed chair.

You asked some very amusing, random, pointed and leading questions, most of which I feel duty bound to ignore completely because I’m they type who can’t do what he’s told, never looks at instructions, reads his own maps (but I will always ask for directions when lost) has a problem with authority and, when forced to work, wants to be in charge or left the hell alone. It should be noted that even though I am Not a Team Player in the corporate mind-control sense, I am the kind guy that parents love. I was raised well, brush up nicely, own a tux, say “please” and “thank you” at the appropriate times, can cook a turkey or a turkey shaped lentil loaf and know enough jokes to entertain the relatives at Thanksgiving dinner.

Be warned- if you do ever voyage to London there is no Mexican food worthy of the name. You know that pack of horrid frozen enchiladas cemented in ice to the back of your freezer? Eating them unthawed and covered in Drain-O would be nearly fifty times more appetizing than anything you would have served to you in London. Except at my place. I have a magic cupboard filled with items smuggled back in my luggage from The Mission District. Illicit dishes with spices and sauces unknown to this barren rock served once a fortnight with all the ambiance of a South-Central tamale parlour.

34,000 feet. Off to my right great mountains of foam reach up to the heavens. Sunset at this altitude has its own special colour and grandeur. Indescribable hues of blood orange and cotton candy pink fold around puffs of spun silk.

We have just been put into a holding pattering in the middle of a mass of storm clouds- thank you very much Heathrow Air Traffic Control. It’s getting harder to type because the plane is bouncing around like a ping-pong ball in a clothes dryer.

Days later now and since you have already left on your odyssey this is even more pointless now than when I started it. I should have finished this a week ago but along with my other more obvious failings I have an almost inhuman inability to write short, pithy, witty prose and must instead drone on and on. No one will ever put a quote of mine on a bumper sticker because I can write nothing of value in under 10 pages. If you hadn’t already noticed I have this nasty habit of being far too verbose for my own good. In grad school, hell, who am I kidding, in every school I ever attended I couldn’t possibly produce work in any mode other than Last Minute Panic. Other people get high to be creative, I stay up for days on end until my adrenaline reserves are all but depleted and then churn out steaming piles of disjointed gibberish. I can only guess that God Him/Her self personally intervened and translated my incoherent ramblings into something with literary merit before my instructors saw them because I always seemed to pull a 4.0. The Universe protects fools, drunks and art history students.

If you like duct tape, you should try gaffers tape! It has all the innate coolness and sturdy sensibility of duct tape but it also PEALS OFF. It’s like the post-it note of the tape world.

I’ve already had my perfect date thanks and I hope you two will experience yours. Mine involved a blue and white sweater, an aging pickup truck named “Ranger,” a side of a mountain overlooking the San Francisco bay and a woman who would later crush my heart with a nutcracker. Of course I didn’t know this at the time and even if I did, I wouldn’t have missed it. It’s beyond my power to convey the feeling of the moment so I’ll let Joan Baez say it for me:

Now I see you standing with brown leaves falling around and snow in your hair
Now you’re smiling out the window of that crummy hotel over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds, mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me, we both could have died then and there

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

Jesus, this entry has gone on long enough, you two are probably half-way to North Dakota by now. The irony of it all is that I spent 26 long years in Santa Barbara hoping to meet up with anyone half as interesting, maniacal, pants-wettingly funny, creative or bizarre as either of you and as soon as I leave (well OK, several years after I leave but still…) Bliss shows up packing enough attitude and industrial strength insanity to blanket all of East Beach. The fact that she has joined forces with the scourge of the Eastern Seaboard, Leary, on this marathon adventure ensures that each and every state will be slightly more amusing and demented than it was prior to their arrival.

I hear there are still a few places on their dance cards yet to be filled so guys, don’t miss this once in a lifetime opportunity to have a date with these two before they are truly famous. I’m afraid that this time I’ll have to watch and wonder from afar.

Short Sighted

One of the oddest things about me (there’s a hole with no bottom) is that despite the fact that for over 20 years I have played in a succession of hard rock, metal and punk bands, the music I actually listen to when I’m tucked up home on the sofa is a litany of 60s and 70s folk, bottom heavy with Dylan, Cat Stevens and any whiny women singer who ever stood alone on stage with a guitar. Naturally the dirt-bags I play with, festooned as they so often are with Megadeath t-shirts and biker boots, are ignorant of my embarrassing little secret. Just once I would like to play music that doesn’t cause permanent hearing loss. While I’m at it, I would also like to request a few gigs where the audience members are both sober enough to stand and without any visible head wounds.

I picked up a bass for the first time when I was 16 after deciding that six strings was at least two too many and that I would have a better chance with only four. I never took it seriously enough to get good at it but now, 24 years later, I have at least learned to play the notes: sometimes in the right order. I have learned one other thing as well: being able to play music is very different from being a musician. Get me on stage and I can dish out a pretty passable bass line to Won’t Get Fooled Again but when I go and listen to John Entwistle play it on Who’s Next I am faced with the sober reality that he had music emanating from his soul and I’m a ham-fisted hack.

While I’m on the subject of feeling like a hack- I have just spent the better part of the afternoon at a Lee Friedlander exhibition which, by dumb luck, I happened to stumble upon as I was wandering purposelessly around Barcelona.

For photographers of a certain bent, mentioning the name “Lee Friedlander” invokes a reverent silence and tugging on the forelocks. Friedlander, along with Walker Evens, Eugene Smith, Mary Ellen Mark and Henri Cartier Bresson pretty much set the standard by which all other photojournalists came to be judged.

Friedlander isn’t just good, he is scary good. In the 60s and 70s when he was at the top of his game he produced a waterfall of images any one of which, if it were mine, I would consider a crowning lifetime achievement. Walking around the Barcelona exhibit I was humbled, inspired and left with a feeling that I am simply too lazy to be a good photographer.

I know a guy, an instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute, who is a friend of Friedlander. The instructor told me that it is nearly impossible to walk down a street with Friedlander and attempt anything like a normal conversation: the guy doesn’t hold still for a moment- constantly darting around taking pictures of everything. To Friedlander everything is a good photograph and even now, well into his 70s, he has a work ethic that few can come close to.

As for me, I just shoot a lot and hope for the best.

Let’s talk about photography. Unlike IT where I simply bluffed my way into a job which no one, as of yet, has thrown me out of, I really was a photographer- in the bottom of some drawer somewhere there is a piece of paper from a very expensive school that proves it. I made my living as a cowboy street shooter for almost 15 years; working for newspapers, wire services, private clients, schools, I ran my own photo bureau, taught photography, ran a lab, sold cameras and did just about anything I could to keep my hand in the game while I slowly slid into abject poverty. But I’ve already told that story.

Before I go any further I feel it wise to point out that when it comes to photography I am an elitist snob. For me photography means black and white film and gelatin silver prints- although I will make allowances for Kodachrome 64 which is probably the finest color film of all time. In my opinion, when Kodak stopped producing their entire line of B&W paper they committed nothing less than a mortal sin.

They killed off my friends damn it- materials that I knew and trusted. I learned the Zone System using Kodak film and Kodak paper- the characteristic curves of Pan-X are burned into my skull. You simply can’t expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights using a digital camera- their range is not good enough- your highlights will blow out and your blacks will become impenetrable. The latitude isn’t there. Maybe someday it will be. Maybe someday a 30x40 digital print will match the tonality and pure artistic grace of Moonrise over Hernandez and maybe someday my butt will whistle show tunes.

Perhaps that’s what pisses me off the most about the entire digital revolution- the technology being replaced is superior in every aspect (except immediacy) to what’s replacing it. Of course it would be hypocritical of me not to point out that the throughout the short history of photography this same process has occurred on more than a few occasions: Daguerreotypes reproduced the world with a richness and detail that remains unsurpassed; yet they were swept aside by wet plates, dry plates and eventually roll film. However, each of those processes, unlike modern film, suffered from fatal flaws that made their demise inevitable. Daguerreotypes were too slow to capture motion, wet and dry plates required the photographer to be an amateur chemist and cart around a wagon load of material. Roll film, with its speed, tonal range, exposure latitude and versatility overcame all those obstacles and gave us a medium through which artists, journalists and Joe Public could express themselves with ease.

Almost without exception I have every single negative I have ever produced. They are stored in acid-free sleeves in dark boxes in San Francisco and London. 100 years from now, barring fire or flood, someone will still be able to make prints from those negatives- selenium tone them and they’ll last virtually forever. How many of your computers still have a floppy disk drive? How about a 100MB Zip disk? Do you think that CDs are archival? Think again. They have a useful life-span of a decade or so- I have a stack of CDs which are completely unreadable because of degradation of the media.

Maybe you think you’re clever and have backed up your digital images onto an external hard-drive: what’s the interface on that drive? USB? FireWire? In 10 years time will anyone even know what a USB plug looks like? One of the agencies I worked at has thousands of pieces of artwork imprisoned on Zip disks because it is nearly impossible to find working players or computers that will interface with them. Digital technology has a useable life-span of a Mayfly- we are storing the records of our world on the 21st century equivalent of nitrocellulose.

It’s not that I don’t think digital images don’t serve a purpose: they have revolutionized photojournalism and any other field where instant access to images is crucial. But they have reduced commercial photographers to little more than trained monkeys who push a button and let the art directors and graphic designers do the creative bits. Yes, that’s too harsh and an oversimplification but my mates who make their living shooting big expensive sports cars with big expensive cameras say that there is no longer a need for specialty trained photographers who can compose and light anything from a tube of toothpaste to a blimp.

I am one of those guys- or at least I used to be. My entire first year of photography school was spent just looking at light- how it reflects on shiny objects, dull objects, faces, white skin, brown skin, how it falls off with the square of the distance, how it’s blue in shadows but orange under tungsten bulbs and green under fluorescents, how it bends through lens elements and focus at different points on the film plane, why magic hour is so magic and how to calculate equivalent exposures in my head. I was taught that real photographers don’t need no stinking light meter and that bracketing exposures was for pussies.

Our cameras were off the fucking grid and they didn’t stop working if it rained, or snowed, or there was no plug to recharge them. Joe Rosenthal lugged a bloody 4x5 Speed Graphic up a mountain on Iwo Jima to take one of the finest photographs of all time. History doesn’t wait for your camera to recover from a humidly induced battery leak.

When I was six years old my father gave me a Kodak Instamatic and from that point on I was hooked. While the other kid’s heroes were football stars, mine were grubby middle aged men with drinking problems, bad teeth and half a dozen cameras slung around their necks. All I ever wanted was to be a photojournalist and the day I got my first press credentials I felt I had been knighted by the Queen.

Maybe that’s what it gets down to- a visceral love for the art and tools of the trade. I fully understand the limitations of the equipment and the media I use but the magic comes from working within and around those limits not in accepting them as obstacles. I guess I’ve become an anachronism- but at least I am a creative one.

Hemingway's Ghost

Right. It’s been a month now and I have covered a lot of air miles. If my memory serves me right (and it never does) I believe the last time I wrote anything at all here I was in Rome at some super swish hotel with no bathroom. Well I’m in Madrid now and the bathroom counter is lined with marble and the desk clerks look like supermodels.

But I don’t. Due to the fact that I just let a London barber buzz my head with a pair of gardening clippers I now resemble either an 18th century mental patient or a prison escapee. My colleagues, with all the tact I have come to expect from a race of sexually repressed gnomes gathered around me when I walked back to my desk and said in unison, “My, that’s a bit severe.”

I don’t care. In fact, I think I’ll stay with this look and cultivate it a bit further. On Tuesday when I went to rehearsal I dressed in my finest torn Levis a red hoddie and battered biker jacket: I had an entire row to myself on the tube.

Come to think of it, back in The Golden Years when I was starving in San Francisco I used to have similar experiences on the bus. I had hair then- lots of it –down to my ass in fact and I liked to wear it undone. In order to get to work and school (which were one in the same at that time) I would ride the 30 Stockton through Chinatown; no matter how crowded the bus was (and it is legendary for crowdedness) I would always, without fail, have an empty seat next to me. I have seen 150 year old grandmothers with club feet carrying an anvil who would pointedly refuse to so much as glance in the general direction of the vacant seat by my side. Pregnant women. Blind men. Guys with fresh stitches in their head and open sores, everyone would leave me alone. This may sound cool but it was, in fact, very embarrassing.

Just in case you are not lucky enough to live in San Francisco, let me tell you about the 30 Stockton bus. It’s the kind of bus that not only lets you get in contact with your fellow man but allows a city dweller to experience, up close and personal, the wonders of rural livestock. Let’s just say that there are certain elements of the Chinese community in San Francisco who like their food so fresh that it must be transported home from the shop in a cage and not a shopping bag.

Which, in a way, I can respect. We live in such a sanitized world where the act of killing our dinner is so far removed from the act of eating it that we forget that before it was stake, it was a cow. If you’re going to eat meat you should at least be prepared to look the animal you are about to slice up in the eye before you ice it. I’m as riddled with hypocrisy in this area as most of my fellow omnivores: don’t show me the chicken, just give me the nuggets.

I tried the veg thing for a couple of years and for the entire duration of the exercise all I wanted was a cheeseburger. I have a friend who is a vegan of the no leather shoes variety (she wears rubber Welly boots year round) who claims that the smell of cooking meat makes her gag. I never reached that stage of enlightenment; bacon in a frying pan was enough to send me into a salivating, food-lust filled frenzy. In the end I folded like a book slamming shut and gorged myself for a weekend on anything that could be moulded into a patty shape. Sure I made myself sick but not quite as sick as I thought I would be. In the end, which is to say from that point on, I took the compromise position of only eating chicken and fish and to make every attempt to keep the wanton exploitation of animals to a minimum. I won’t win any awards for ethics but I’d like to think that there are a few piglets in the world who are very happy I’ve sworn off BLTs.

As is quite usual, I have diverged completely from whatever originally inspired me to start writing this entry. Ah yes, I am in Spain and I therefore must write like Hemingway:

The men at the bar were old and thin with moustaches that sagged down wrinkled faces. Their hands, when they grasped their drinks, were lined as the furrows in the earth they tilled and baked to the same colour. When they laughed, as they did now, it was at stories grown familiar by their telling. The bartender, who was still young enough not to have heard all their lies before, laughed too. He liked the old men and did not pity them, as others might, their age or their poverty.

One man did not join in the conversations at the bar. He sat alone behind a small round table covered with stained grease cloth, his wine untouched, the last ember of his cigarette dying in an ashtray. He held in his hand an envelope, yellow with age, from which he carefully removed and unfolded a letter. The men at the bar lowered their voices.

“The same letter every night.” Said one of the men sadly.
“I wonder what it says?” asked the bartender.
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“I could not. I only pour his drinks. You men are his friends, he would not take offense if one of you were to ask him.”
“He has not been our friend for years; he barely even speaks to us now.”
“Perhaps you insulted him in some way?”
“No, that is not the reason, that letter is the reason.”

The man at the table folded the letter neatly along well-worn creases and slid it back into the envelope. He sat, for a while, staring at the door with the look of a man who had accepted a fact without understanding it. He rolled a cigarette, lit it and watched the smoke weave its way to the ceiling.

“Do you remember when he received it?” One of the old men asked.
“Fifteen years ago at least.”
“Maybe it is from his wife or his son?”
“They were both dead by then.”
“A mistress?”
“He hardly looks the type to have had one.”
“The years change a man. Look at me, I used to have great muscles.”
“And hair!”

They laughed at this and, spell broken, turned back to their drinks.
The evening grew late and the old men began to leave. They gathered their coats, paid their tabs and walked, somewhat unsteadily, toward their homes. At last only the bartender and the man at the table remained.

“I would like to close up now” the bartender said.
“Of course,” said the man, as if awaking from a dream. “How many?”
“Two glasses.”

The old man stood and went to the bar. He took a few coins from a leather change purse and set them on the counter.

“Is that enough?” he asked.
“Yes.”

The bartender slid the money into a small tin box.

“You spoke about my letter tonight?”
“We speak about it every night.”
“And what do you say?”
“We imagine it to be filled with intrigue and heartache.”
“Maybe at one time but now, now it is only faint words on yellow paper.”
“Perhaps you should tell them?”
“Perhaps I would if they asked.”
“They are your friends and feel the letter drove you away.”

The old man thought about this for a while.

“No,” he said at last, “I did that.”

He put on his black coat and grey felt hat, taking time to adjust it on his head. The two men shook hands. The old man took the letter out of his pocket and placed it on the bar. The bartender’s eyes grew wide and he moved a step backwards.

With a faint smile the old man said, “It is too late for me to make new friends so it would be best if I return to my old ones.” He turned away and walked to the door.

“What am I to do with it?” stammered the bartender.

The old man stopped. “Whatever you feel is right” he answered without looking back. He stood very still and listened. For a long time he heard nothing at all except for his own heart in his ears. The room was cold now and his breath hung in the air. A lifetime passed before he heard: a match was struck and flames caught paper. He turned his collar up and walked out into the night.

Don't Talk to me About Old

I’m not young, trendy or pretty enough to truly appreciate my current hotel room. It has no chairs; only a reclining bit of moulded plastic that looks not unlike the lid of an Etruscan sarcophagus. http://www.menyawolfe.com/wolf/sarc.jpg

There are no shelves or drawers or anything as boring or useful as that. No, I am instead blessed with silver disks poking out of the wall and recessed cubby-holes. The “closet” is a six-inch deep spring-loaded vertical mousetrap which snaps open when you press it and would not hold two shirts on hangers. I have placed in it one pair of recently sink-laundered underpants but the socks I washed at the same time have to drip on the floor outside because there simply wasn’t enough room for them.

The dominant feature of the room is undoubtedly the shower because, and you might have to pause for a moment to get a clear mental picture of this, it is in the middle of the floor.

I have stayed in some shit-hole dives before where the toilet, sink and shower all cohabited in the same phone booth size cubicle but I confess that having a shower as the centrepiece of the bedroom is a new one to me.

The sink is just to the left of the shower, again with no amenities like any place to set your toothbrush. The bed is attached to the platform that holds the shower and sink. Next to my head is a little box with an impressive array of buttons that control the blinds, the lights but not, unfortunately, the noise level from the club on the floor below.

Encircling the shower, my room and indeed the entire hotel is Rome. Once you strip aside the graffiti, the tourist choked sidewalks and the clip joints (€9 for a beer) it is difficult not to be impressed by Rome.

When I was an impoverished student living off my credit cards, I charged up a three-week Italian sojourn. Adhering to all the tired clichés, I arrived in Rome with a backpack, tan shorts and a Eurorail pass. It was summer, it was baking hot, I knew three words in Italian and I didn’t understand the money. Somehow I managed to find my way up the coast to Cinque Terra, Pisa, Florence and, regrettably, Milan where I was confronted with and baffled by, Mussolini’s enormous Central Train Station.

Anyone who says all roads lead to Rome has never travelled through Italy. If they had they would have realised that all roads, train tracks and footpaths lead to Milan. Not only do they lead there, they stop there and it is damn near impossible to find your way out.

Not liking Milan has become something of a hobby of mine. It is a very, very easy city to despise and for all the right reasons: it’s ugly, it’s dirty and the traffic is horrendous. These attributes separated it not at all from most other large cities and to be fair, Milan has two things worth seeing: the Domo (lots of spiky bits) and The Last Supper (lots of pealing-off bits). It also has gelato. Exceptionally good gelato as a matter of fact. It also has one of my favourite hotels: the Diana Majestic and some pretty decent restaurants.

Right, so apart from the hotel, the Da Vinci, the cathedral, gelato and restaurants, what has Milan ever done for me? Bah!

To be perfectly honest the only reason I went to Italy with my backpack in the first place was to try and hook up with a girl I had been wanting to sleep with for over a year. I managed, through cunning, bribery, threats and dumb luck to find myself alone with her for the last week of my visit which is a testament to both my determination and lust. For anyone who has actually bothered to read any of my earlier blog entries, it should come as no surprise that I utterly failed to get off with her or anyone else on my trip and returned to California sunburnt and heartbroken.

It is somewhat ironic then that about three years later I found myself in a shower with this same woman starting what would turn out to be a rather pleasant few months of fucking like weasels. But I digress.

The streets of Rome, are filled with rubble. Ancient footprints are everywhere. You can almost think that you’re seein’ double on a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs.
-Bod Dylan

My only glimpse of the Spanish Stairs on this trip to Rome was from the open rear window of a taxi and even then my view was obscured by a pack of motor-scooters.

You have to hand it to the Romans, they incorporate their antiquity into their modernity in such a way that it is sometimes difficult to differentiate where one style stops and the other begins. They put flats on top of markets built by Trajan, they drive cars on cobblestone roads that still have the grooves from oxcarts gouged into them; they get water from aqueducts built by men who have been dead for two-thousand years. In short, they recognise their past and build on it- literarily.

London, eating peanut butter toast, watching squirrels drink from the birdbath in the garden and avoiding going to the gym. According to my schedule I should be on a plane to Milan right now but the Gods of Available Occupancy intervened and threw a furniture convention there and every hotel, apartment and cardboard box is booked up.

Suddenly finding myself in the UK for a weekend has made me inexplicably happy and that bothers me. If I am beginning to appreciate London for something other than its close proximity to the rest of Europe I’m going to have to seriously re-evaluate my lifestyle choices. Truth be told, I’m very much in the middle of re-assessment mode at the moment; I have even dragged my cameras off the top shelf and tentatively, haltingly, run a few rolls through them.

Oh dear Lord, I can’t be serious. I can’t even be thinking about wanting to be a photographer again can I? I need to remember what it was like: the poverty, the horrible assignments, the insufferable press conferences at places like the County Jail, the Water Department or the Election Commission. Remember San Francisco? Remember working as a freelancer for three news outlets, shooting artwork, having a full-time job and still not being able to make the credit card payments? Remember going to open studios just so you could eat free cheese and crackers? Tell me, what exactly do you miss about that?

Just about everything.

Fuck. I am in trouble.

To Tired to See

This past weekend nearly killed me and even free booze in the First Class compartment on Eurostar can’t repair the damage.

We knew it was going to be hell when we parachuted in on Thursday but all the foreknowledge in the world couldn’t have prepared us for the reality that was Lowe Paris.

The details would bore all but the most hard-core, pimply faced, geeks out there so I’ll restrict my description to this: imagine that you had 72 hours to knock down and then rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge using only a pair of tweezers and half a pack of tape. Can’t grasp that? How about pounding a six-inch spike through a four-inch slab of concrete with your forehead- got the visual? Great. Now imagine something about a thousand times worse and the unequivocal certainty that if something, anything, goes wrong that you will be publicly flogged and set alight by 175 angry users.

I can’t remember the last time I slept at all. I don’t mean a couple of hours rest or a nice nap before dinner. No, I mean as little as five full minutes of unconsciousness. I am absolutely mad from exhaustion and my rational mind has packed up and moved to Palestine in the hopes of finding a more peaceful environment.

I don’t get paid enough to do what I do. There is not enough money in the world to make up for the hours, days, weeks, months, years, I have surrendered to this job. Maybe that is one good thing that has come out of this: cash is trash- money means nothing. I used to think that an extra twenty bucks a month would be all I needed to reach Nirvana. Please God, let me eat this week. Let me get one more client that pays in cash. Let me not blow a head-gasket or knock-up my girlfriend because I swear to God, God, if you don’t come through, you’ll have to answer to me and I am one pissed off, poor motherfucker.

Now I can’t spend what I earn and my expenses, which are huge, are paid promptly. Our Finance Department has been told, in no uncertain terms, that anything that lands on their desks with my name on it must be approved immediately or their blood will be on the tracks before nightfall.

Which is only fair. I am the one suffering slow soul death here on the road while they plod away like dumb animals shackled to a desk all day. We all have our demons and mine cost a lot to feed. If I turn in the occasional receipt for a quart of gin, a machete and three-dozen boxes of surplus Russian army pistols, who are they to question it? They can’t possibly know or understand what we are going through out here. We get the job done, beyond that, no one needs to know the ugly truths hidden behind the numbers. Just sign it Jack and transfer the funds. There is no accountability in this league and the truly extravagant only serves to mask the outrageously ludicrous.

We’re pulling into Waterloo now. My first day back in…in…fuck, I don’t even remember the last time I was back in London. I know they speak English there- or at least what passes for it. I’m counting on a warm bed and some company in it or, barring that, at least a morning without a maid barging in while I am naked and screaming at the TV.

Jesus, I miss my home.

Keyboard Interface Error

Ignoring blog updates is like skipping class, the more you miss, the harder it is to go back. Of course the same could be said for any endeavor that requires constant attention, I can’t remember the last time I updated my normal web page or, for that matter, watered plants.

It’s not that I have a short attention span, it’s just that I get bored so easily. To the uninitiated that might seem like the same thing but for the practitioner of the art of grazing through life, sampling and then moving on are skills to be lovingly honed.

Being an American by birth I feel an obligation to divert responsibility and deflect blame, thus I will transfer culpability for my lack of entries to the evil thieving bastard who nicked my laptop.

Three computers in four years have grown legs and walked out of my offices- past security guards, through electronically locked doors and off to e-Bay or some computer chop-shop.

It may come as some surprise to those not working in monolithic corporations that most of those expensive looking toys you see the guys in Business Class brandishing have, for all intents and purposes, no insurance on them what-so-ever. Allow me to explain.

Corporations, like most Americans stumping up for personal medical insurance, are only protecting against catastrophic loss: the Hong Kong office gets wiped out by locust or San Francisco falls into Republican hands, that sort of thing. The standard excess (“deductible” to my fellow Americans) is generally around £2500 per item which means that even the most expensive laptop is a write-off if it gets pinched from your bag on the train. Thus, when my top of the line MacBookPro wound up in the slimy hands of a professional scum-bag, my company bent over and took it.

When my notebook walked, so did my ability to update blog pages. Some of you might be saying, “Jesus saves and so should you.” But honestly, if you are saying that, fuck off. I am probably 10 to the 500th power more IT capable than you are and I not only know the benefits of backups I script chron jobs to run them. My computer was backed up, Jack, the problem was the poxy blogging software I was using (out of laziness, not ignorance) didn’t understand the validity of my backed up pages so I was reduced to re-creating the last few entries from scratch- I process I did with reluctance.

Which brings me to today. I’m on yet another Eurostar returning from yet another trip to Paris. We just pulled out of Ashford International. I have lived in the UK for a long time now and I have yet to have anyone tell me why a place like Ashford is deserving the tile of “International.” Having the Eurostar stop there for two minutes four times a day and then branding yourself an international port of call is about like saying you’ve had sex with porn-stars by jerking off to an x-rated movie.

A month ago, Christ, was it really that long? I was in Helsinki. It was a balmy -26 there but I was too foolish in love with all the snow to care. Naturally I spent most of my time inside an office but I did manage to get out and walk across a chunk of frozen ocean which was a first for me.

Helsinki is clean. All of Scandinavia is clean. I was in Finland for five days and the only piece of litter I saw was, believe it or not, an ice-cream cup that had fallen out of a rubbish bin. However, my host did tell me that come Spring all the trash that has been buried under the snow starts popping up like bluebells.

I like the Great White North of Europe quite a lot. The air is clean, the landscapes are beautiful, the people are polite and their social welfare systems are unparalleled in the world. The evil ex-girlfriend (one of many) who dragged me over to this side of the world is Norwegian. One would think that he bitterness and justifiable contempt with which I hold her might have rubbed of, to some degree, on her home country: this is not the case. I adore Norway and, if given the chance, could probably live happily ever after there.

Granted there might be a few stumbling blocks in my relocation plan. For a start, I don’t speak Norwegian. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that everyone there speaks perfect English. I’m not kidding. I have been to Norway about a dozen times and I have yet to meet anyone, from taxi drivers, to waitress in coffee shops to residents in old-age homes, who doesn’t speak English.

They take a very pragmatic approach to language in Norway (and Scandinavia in general) they figure that, with a population of only 4.5 million, no one is going to bother learning their language so they had best learn other people’s. They start with English and move on to German, Dutch and any others that might strike their fancy. The Evil One spoke five languages by the time she was 15. At 15, I was still struggling with the concept of gendered nouns in Spanish.

I did try to learn Norwegian. I took classes at the Norwegian Seaman’s Church in San Francisco (they have a little store where you can buy Norwegian candy- if you value your taste buds, avoid the salt liquorice) and my girlfriend and I would have Norwegian Only weekends but she quickly tired of it. For her it was like trying to speak to a mentally challenged infant and the novelty didn’t take long to wear off.

I should mention that I have absolutely no aptitude for learning foreign languages. I took and failed seven years of Spanish, two years of Italian, a year of Norwegian and one week of French. From the Spanish I remember how to say “shoe” from the Norwegian, “I would like a hot dog” my Italian can get me into trouble but not out of it and I can ask a Frenchman if he is having a good day as long as his name is Guy.

My job, at the moment at least, is to rollout new IT systems to offices throughout Europe. This means that I come in contact with not only the five major European languages but most of the minor ones as well. To my American readers it may come as something of a shock to realize that when a language changes, keyboards do as well. Sitting down at a French Internet café will present you with the problem of navigating an AZERTY keyboard. Go to Brussels from Paris and, even though the language is the same, their flavour of AZERTY is just different enough to mess with your head.

Because I can touch-type it makes the problem worse- since I don’t look at the keys, I invariably hit lots of wrong letters and end up locking out lots of accounts because I enter passwords incorrectly. Yes, after a while I adjust which just makes it all that much harder to switch back to a UK keyboard.

Oh yeah, have you ever tried building and installing a server in German? How about Italian, French or Finnish? Those little warning windows that pop up before you are about to delete the content of your hard drive? What if they are in Greek or Spanish? The only thing that makes my job possible is the fact that, out of either foresight or laziness, software manufacturers simply translate their menus into different languages while leaving the structures of those menus in place. Thus the buttons for setting up Outlook or Entourage clients to connect to an Exchange server are in the same place no matter what language the operating system is in. Of course the possibility for a catastrophic fuckup is still very real but we are, for the most part, able to dumb-luck our way through.

Damn, I was trying to get today off to recover both my sanity and my health but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. Time to take a shower, scrape my face, put on a clean shirt and go off to the Principal’s office.

How did this Happen?

Let’s start with the prerequisite semi-factual biographical statement which both illustrates my immersion in, yet distance from, the culture I am about to savagely trash.

I live in London. London is not my home. Home is 6000 miles west of here along the coast of California. For someone who grew up with surfing, skateboarding and sunburns, the ice-water beaches, leaden grey skies and endless rows of concrete parking structures of Mother England are, if not hell, a reasonable approximation.

In the summer of 2000 I abandoned friends, family, Mexican food, sandy beaches, warm summers, mild winters, decent bookstores, 24 hour anything, objective journalism, non-smoking offices, outdoor activities, tans, shorts, cheap petrol, rock radio stations, baseball and my cat in order to move with my girlfriend, to London. She had been accepted to graduate school at Oxford and I managed to wrangle a transfer within my company.

We arrived in the midst of what I was later to find out was an unprecedented heat wave; my California surfer-dude shorts and t-shirts seemed comfortably appropriate. We found a ridiculously over-priced flat overlooking the rail road tacks in what I was told was a pretty swish neighbourhood, bought a bunch of semi-disposable Scandinavian furniture, fucked a few times and talked about what color cat we wanted. Life was good. I was happy, in love and thinking, “This will work, this is good, I could really get to like it here.” What an idiot.

A month later my girlfriend dumped me; leaving me with a six-month lease on an apartment that I couldn’t afford and a dawning realization that not only did I not know a soul in the entire country but also that the only social activities available involved getting monstrously drunk and throwing up a lot. Fleeing was not an option. All my stuff was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, impossible to divert for at least a month and the terms of my work contract stipulated that I had to stick it out for a year or else pay the Company back for dragging my sorry ass to England.

I was fucked and I knew it. By November, when the freezing rain set in, I was wearing four layers of t-shirts under an old biker jacket because I was too poverty stricken to buy any proper clothes. I had no friends, no telephone, no TV or radio and ended up spending 16 hours a day at work just so I would have people to talk to. The only memory I have of my 35th birthday is sitting on my floor and crying.

My parents came to visit me for Thanksgiving that year. They smuggled a turkey over in their luggage because I was unsure whether we could buy one in the local store. My oven refused to light and we were forced to grill the wretched bird under the broiler: it came out looking like a lump of charcoal with legs.

Increasingly desperate and pathetic attempts to reunite with my ex-girlfriend failed predictably. I was replaced by someone younger, smarter and better-looking 24 hours after she set foot on campus. But hey, it’s been five years now and I’ve moved on. I’ve accepted her decision and I’m sure that if I saw her today lying on the ground engulfed by flames that I could find it in my heart to piss on her- if I didn’t have to cross the street first.

Those first few months pretty much set the stage for everything that has followed. So if anything I write sounds a bit jaded, you can at least see that my bitterness has a solid grounding in betrayal, isolation and despair.

Down to Business

Now that the formalities are out of the way, let’s get down to business: England is a sewer. Not all of it mind you, there are a couple of good bits here and there, mostly in Devon and Cornwall but with rare exception every city on this island is a monument to the over-exuberant use of concrete coupled with style-deaf architecture and overflowing rubbish bins.

For my American readers and others in the world who are geographically challenged, I must point out that England is not synonymous with Britain or the United Kingdom. England is a component part of the UK, like Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. Wales and Scotland (with the exception of Newport and Glasgow) tend to have scenic beauty by the truckload and are inhabited by proud folk who, much to their credit, hate England almost as much as the French do.

A word or two about the language I use here. First, I swear a lot in my normal conversation, to an extent that would cause embarrassment if I were ever called to dinner with the Queen. Since this is unlikely to happen in this or any other lifetime, I feel safe to continue my wicked ways. However, my use of colourful language does tend to find its way into my writing as well so if you are easily shocked by the gratuitous use of the word “fuck” I would advise you to look elsewhere for your Internet entertainment fix. Someone much smarter than me once said that an author should never write as if their mother was reading their book. Sorry mum. As if I haven’t already given you enough things to be ashamed about.

Secondly, because I have been trapped in England for so long, I have assimilated a good many of their more accessible phrases and colloquialisms. I now say (and write) “pissed” instead of “drunk,” “car-park” instead of “parking lot” and “mobile” instead of “cell-phone.” Dodgy, poorly and yonks have, regretfully, also entered my vocabulary. What I do not do, what NO American should EVER do, regardless of how long they live in England is start actually speaking with an English accent. It doesn’t sound cool, it doesn’t make you sound smarter, it makes you sound like a pretentious twat. Madonna and my ex-girlfriend should have headed this advise.

Lastly, I can’t spell. I use spell check. I use the UK English dictionary setting because, well, I live in the UK. Don’t think I’ve gone native just because “colour” comes out with an extra “u.” It looks weird to me too.

Why do they lie to us?

Early on most of us learn that TV and movies lie to us. Those who don’t usually remove themselves from the gene pool by imitating cartoon stunts involving falling anvils.

However, the subtle stereotyping perpetuated by anglophile Hollywood studios has left most of us with a rather too rosy picture of life on these isles. Indeed, it could safely be said that the heart-warming and heroic visions of English life that comes to us in movies like Good-bye Mr. Chips and Chariots of Fire are in reality fabrications of minds so far gone with a tweed fetish that they are not worth saving.

The grim truth is that a far more accurate depiction of British life can be found from repeated viewings of A Clockwork Orange and Get Carter. None the less, certain misinformed assumptions endure and I feel duty bound to address them here.

Before I really begin to sling mud I am compelled to point out that, far from simply being an ugly, ill-informed and culturally ignorant American, I am in fact an ugly, reasonably well informed and travelled, Englishman. Having obtained, through shear bloody-mindedness, the most coveted of all globe-trotting credentials: dual citizenship.

Since I joined the two-passport club by choice rather than birth I am particularly aware that the hand I am biting has been feeding me for the past several years. In the interest in fairness, and just in case there are officials from the Home Office reading this, I will endeavor to compile a list of things I actually LIKE about England; however, said list will be shorter and not as funny so I’ll lead with my strengths.

Myths Part One: Politeness

To a visiting American, or Swede or Italian or Canadian, the first thing that strikes them, when they trundle off the Heathrow Express towing vast suitcases filled with Pepto-Bismol (it never hurts to be prepared), is not the grandiose Victorian architecture of Paddington Station (which is now quite difficult to discern as it is hidden behind a century of accumulated soot and more recent scaffolding and plywood terraces) but the teeming mass of unfriendly, unhelpful and generally drunk Brits that shuffle about just past the ticket barriers. God help you if you stop to get your bearings or, even worse, look at a map because merely pausing while caught up in the flow of humanity will unleash upon you a torrent of shrieked curses from very properly attired business women, death threats from football-jersey clad skin-heads and looks of utter contempt from coffee sipping Bobbies.

Welcome to London folks, better get used to it.

Just where this misbegotten notion of English reserve and politeness originated is quite beyond my poor powers of comprehension. The English in general and Londoners in particular are a pissed off lot. Second only to synchronized queuing, the national pastime is drunken brawling in pub car parks. Shopkeepers are renown for their utter indifference to customers and asking directions from a passer-by on a street is seen as an invitation for verbal abuse.

Expressing any degree of politeness to a Londoner can be hazardous. As I was walking up the escalator on my way out of a tube station one evening, I happened to brush against a man who was standing quite far over to the left (Stand to the Right the signs say). I said, “Excuse me mate, sorry about that.” and received the cheery reply, “Fuck-you! I’ll fucking kill you outside!” Charming.

One very particular trait the English have perfected over the years is something that can perhaps best be described as “projective annoyance.” These are the subtle verbal and non-verbal clues a Brit will emanate when they feel wronged or put out in any way.

It’s the tiny grunt and wrinkle of the upper lip when you ask a woman to remove her handbag from the last empty seat on the bus so that you can sit down. Or the disparaging sigh produced by the person behind you in the grocery queue when you take two-seconds too long to readjust the contents of your bag in order to prevent the tomatoes from being liquefied by a five-pound box of laundry detergent.

A word to good intentioned yet ignorant foreigners: Never, ever, under any circumstances, no matter the situation, no matter the degree of urgency, tap a Brit on their shoulder to get their attention. You will be turned upon like a mother bear protecting her young. For your own physical and mental well being it is far better to allow a falling concrete block to actually strike the guy standing next to you in the movie line than to gently touch their shoulder and recommend that they move out of the way. Trust me on this.

I had a friend visiting from San Francisco who, while waiting in the queue at a Post Office in Leeds, tapped the woman ahead of her on the arm and said, “I think that window is open.” The woman spun around and shrieked at her, “DON’T EVER TOUCH ME AGAIN!” To which my friend took mild offence but calmly explained that she didn’t mean any harm, she was just pointing out that a teller was free. No dice. Within seconds the situation turned ugly and when the other customers joined in on the side of the local my friend was forced to flee.