undercurrent

At the Bromley Overlook

The only way to return after such prodigious prevarication is straight in without fanfare...a missive from k-punk towers, then, where we've temporarily fled from cornwall aka 'The Drowned World'.

Gorgeous, endlessly ramified Magritte streetscape : architecture an exhaustive denumerable series of mock-tudor, pebbledash, garage/driveway combos. Anyone who didn't square off their hedge accurately would probably be reported to neighborhood watch. Everyone's either indoors or not there, peace reigns, even the alpha-species autos are kept neatly out of sight. None of the inner-london pretence of 'community' here, no pubs, clubs or shops. Everything is here for the curious to enjoy at leisure, pure AntiKapital: the Las Vegas principle (arriving in Vegas as a non-gambler, you get a whole city of entertainment free, totally subsidised by suckers for your enjoyment.) Touring this labor factory/civil service dorm that the workers spend their free time making beautiful. 'Been spending most of our lives living the accountant's paradise'. Trotting cats in the slanted sunlight raking the mock-LA-boulevards. Trees twisting space and houses that look like robot's heads. A yard at the edge of a wood, filled with rusted-out cars and shopping trolleys. A drive-through car showroom done in full-on chinese pagoda-style.

Animal Omen I : Opposite the service station Ruth flips an upturned matt-black beetle, as big as any I've ever seen; righted, the dusty scarab creeps forward with the malevolent wound-down-clockwork impotence of a refrigerated wasp.

We talk about (literally) everything and know, in all modesty, that we are right. The last time we met IRL we were hollowed-out shells, nearly finished-off by our enthusiastic dedication to the grindcore of Kapital. We know what we're talking about. But now we have the maniac confidence of Ecce-Homo-era Nietzsche, cosmological-level undoubt. Things happen when they're meant to, it's destiny, ILG cannot be defeated, all hail the contemplator !

Animal Omen II :

Conversation is savagely punctuated by a kamikaze pigeon slamming itself head-on into the window with a massive thud, leaving a distressed avian self-portrait in dirt and viscera-spurts on the glass. The bird unlucky enough to have been chosen as a messenger from the powers that Be staggers around on the grass below, retreating crookedly beneath a car. A warning: this assembly has outstripped the earthly joy allocated to its individual members, and is now in breach of the AOE decrees of transcendental miserablism.

A confusion of JG Ballard memes. At 2am it feels like the remains of a rainforest, the weather's still locked into archaeometereological patterns: the sweaty metrosexual cling of lud heat clogging every pore, permeating every fold in an attempt to evaporate all bodies within the M25 smogdome into a single renewable steampunk energy source. Then : the rain, monsoon style. I half-dream of floating crookedly down a stream in an upturned umbrella. Drips from the ceiling start beating an insistent but arhythmic tattoo onto the top panel of the microwave. Someone ought to turn that thing off.