RANDOM ECHOES - 27/9/05

Allen Ginsberg crying when he relates the moment he first heard Bob Dylan - the track: 'Hard Rain'. Ginsberg mentions how he felt the beat/protest/bohemian/self-expression 'baton' had been passed on to a new generation. His voice cracked, the full lips (half paralysed by a stroke) quivered and he started to cry.

Some memories brought to light in run up to moving from Brixton (not in chronological order):
- sparrowhawk and magpie fight over carrion in my back yard, a monumental battle full of shrieks, stand-offs, flurries - these two beasts would face up to each other, frozen in attitudes of defiance and then crash together - the magpie eventually had to retire from the sheer sleek power of its opponent but I still remember them both as goliaths;
- watching a middle aged woman carrying a wooden chair along Coldharbour Lane, shuffling and talking to herself, big baggy maroon cardigan, greying locks; it's not far off 2am on a Saturday morning. She places the chair in my porch, sits on it, takes out her little crack pipe and smokes a rock. She nods for a moment or two, mumbles something then picks her chair up and leaves talking louder than before, occassionally shouting;
- having my face beaten to a pulp for sport by eight teenagers one April evening as I was walking home, the kung-fu mock challenge of their leader, the tearing away of my glasses, the pummelling with knees and boots of my face, eyes ballooning and weeping, the thud as each hit impacted on my skull;
- my neighbours landing a helicopter on my ceiling every Saturday, shaking the core of my home, dissing my attempts to improve my environment and shield it from additional noise pollution;
- Dario Fo wins the Nobel Prize for Literature 9th October 1997, same day I moved in - had a newspaper cutting on my noticeboard ever since, faded and brown now but still the smiling face of that genius is there to this day;
- a lapis talisman given in memoriam that I find one morning broken into three pieces on the floor of my bathroom when a) I hadn't left it there, and b) it represented something that was meant to be unbroken - I suspect a third soul was at work;
- Brixton as a sound collage that never stops: the nights full of shouting, an assault of millenarian oaths and curses, of madness and insanity; at other times calypso being sung on a guitar outside my window at 3am; drug and alcohol addicts swearing at each other or at anything they perceive as a target for their misplaced anger and fear, even inanimate objects; bass boom cars shaking the windows and rattling doors; random screams; a blackbird singing through the summer nights; evangelists chanting and sermonising through PA systems on street corners. Heaven and hell;
- sleeping on my sofa for a year whilst putting myself back together (even thoguh I had a perfectly good bed to sleep in, I just couldn't bring myself to get in it).

An elevator in a large office complex, let's say a skyscraper, that develops a 'mind' of its own and deposits people at floors different to the one they have pressed the button for - penthouses inundated with unwanted visitors and guests; VIPs delivered to the basement to find themselves lost among heating pipes, maze-like alleys and conduits; exasperated execs breaking down and crying in the wrong foyer.

Another day (the tenth?) of waiting for replacement debit card - apparently one branch of my bank has lost the original replacement card somewhere in their internal mail when sending it to another branch. No one apologises to me. They are attempting to erode something.

Music machines (MP3s for example) result in much love.