Overheard: East Village Coffee Shop, 2003

"Hey man, there's no law that
says you have to get your shit together!"

And the thing is, he's not wrong.

The Punk-Rock Robert Crumb

Such cracked,
hand-written, lo-fi, knockabout,
inky-fingered, fuzz-guitar raconteuring
must surely be a gift from the Gods?
The guy's middle name is "Lightning". No kidding.
Jeffrey. Lighting. Lewis.

www.myspace.com/jefflewisband

Search For The Myrmecophaga Tridactyla

In the days before the bombs,
the Banbury Boy and the Tiffins Girl found themselves
venturing into one of the city's much-loved Royal Parks.
Looking back now, it seems like such a long time ago.
They had originally intended to
see a film, but that hadn't quite worked out.
The Banbury Boy had blamed the listed details on the website.
At the time, they hadn't known each other for very long.
He was looking to impress.
It was early-summer. A Sunday afternoon.
One of the endearing oddities of the English language
(and there are certainly several) is the sheer abundance
of collective nouns in everyday common usage.
All of them meaning "group", but each one
glaringly specific to whatever particular thing
there happens to be a group of at the time.
A "herd" of elephants for example.
Or a "parcel" of penguins.
A "charm" of goldfinches is another,
And then, of course, there's a "sleuth" of bears,
a "shrewdness" of apes,
a "murder" of crows,
and (my personal favourite) a "smack" of jellyfish.
Covered with stiff, straw-like hair,
the giant ant-eater of South America is
roughly about the size of a German shepherd dog.
As the name suggests, they exist
on a diet of ants and termites -
sometimes up to 30,000 insects in a single day.
Granted, it's not the kind of creature you might expect
to see in a much-loved Royal Park
on a Sunday afternoon
in early-summer,
but that's why he'd brought her here.
That's what he'd promised her a look at.
Much to the Banbury Boy's disappointment,
there is an "absence" of giant ant-eaters to be seen.

Air Berlin 8526

The hour is ungodly.
The weather in the Liepzig area is adverse.
Before we can be cleared for take-off,
the ice and snow is cleared from the Boeing's wings
using high-powered jets of hot water.
The names Byrne, Jones, Edwards, Colman,
Taylor, Whelan, Pegg and Bent race through my mind.
For it was on a runway not so very far from here,
in not so dissimilar conditions,
almost 38-years-ago to the day,
that the Busby Babes made their date with fate.
It's the reason why both my father and my uncle
support Manchester United to this day.
Out of sympathy.
We accelerate into the raging maw
of the blizzard and are
engulfed.

Irena P. (Working Title)

My tinnitus is particularly bad today.
It's affecting my balance.
I blame it on the culmative effect of 2 gigs in 4 days,
i-pod headphones at 30,000-feet
and a complimentary hotel cotton-bud.
They're burning effigies of the Danish Prime-Minister on CNN.
I say effigy. it's actually little more
than an over-sized ragdoll in a generic grey suit.
The joke shops of Istanbul are clearly fresh out
of novelty Anders Fogh Rasmussen masks.
My driver is a 25-year-old rockabilly from Stuttgart.
He drops me at the MCA studio complex on Attenburge Strasse.
There, from 4 different angles on 2 different lenses,
Marianne Faithfull pretends to masturbate me
through a "gloryhole" cut into a pretend wall
in a pretend sex-club
in a pretend backstreet
in a pretend Soho.
The camera, throughout, stays on Marianne's side of the wall.
Mention of Mars bars is kept to the barest minimum.

'Irina Palm': Official Website