He is on a bus

- He is on a bus. All the other seats are occupied.
He is riding on a bus somewhere. It is a long journey.
He sleeps. S. is beside him. He can hear her breathing, feel her heartbeat.
The bus runs on through the night. He is in the aisle seat, with S. on his right. It is dark.
The nearby seats are occupied by blonde, young teens.
At one point the seat beside him is empty and he lies back snoozing on both seats.
During the night he hears about a plane that has been shot down.

- Images: The long aisle of the bus in the dark.
The floor of the bus. The blonde young kids chattering.
The ghost of the crashed plane, like a cinder, through the floor of the plane.

Going Along The Road

Going along the road... off to "college"...

I reach at the junction a confluence of lights. Neon glow, etc.
Rain-wet.

An evening class. At say five o'clock I depart into the dusk.
I have with me my bag. I have also brought my duvet with me, an amorphous mass slung on top of the bag.

Off to the western sector of the town, near a backstreet chipshop, before the suburbs peter out into motorways, unlit, near brownbrick streets.

At the "bus stop". How am I to get this cumbersome duvet on the bus. Then again I can't leave it here on the sidewalk.
Banal and self-conscious.

I walk back along Whaleboat Road. Nearing the garage... A busy road, constant streams of traffic.

I see walking before me along the pavement a girl.

Metropolis 9 (conclusion)

Thought to say the truth I begin to disremember the details of that movie, the Neverending-Metropolis movie. It was a long time ago now, or at least it seems so. Like pallid scenes from an unfashionable movie seen five years ago. Was there ever a city where wishes came true, or is that just my conceit, an awkward spin I put on it? Was there a director, and, more importantly, was he anything like I remember him? And, the Neverending Movie? Surely it's an absurdity to even conceive of such a thing, a grand folly. Impossible to make a film about every event that ever happened!  Yet how wonderful if it were true. That scene with the heavy metal band trashing the hotel room, now did that occur, or was it remembered from some other movie or constructed from alternate scenes by my errant mind. My mind which is always dragged back to the wish-city, the Metropolis...
I got so puzzled about it all that I went back to the local cinema. A dirty-grey facade on a little-frequent street, scene of a million dispersed dreams. The usherette seemed unenthusiastic about my excited queries, but showed me wearily up some plush-scarlet steps to a glossy-white door.
Inside was a comfortable brightly-lit office space. Perhaps some sort of show-room for the public. A set of plexi-glass windows up at one end. Rounded corners, soft carpet, unobtrusive decoration, friendly to the eye. Dominant colour is an aqua-blue suggestive of a neutral, compliant efficiency. From out of nowhere looms the salesman. Neat little moustache, telephone voice, kindly-efficient eyes, extremely polite but not in the least indulgent. The merest formality of toadying and "customer is always right" concealing an enormous blank wall of indifference. Wearing a white tuxedo so shiny-pristine it's an offence to the eyes.
"Can I help you sir?". I start to mumble about do you remember old movies from five or more years ago. "Yes sir, I quite understand. Please say no more." He leads me gently but firmly to one side of the room where there is a low magazine rack covered in glossy leaflets. I try to get out an objection, but am interrupted by: "Yes sir, yes sir, quite so sir. If I could just draw your attention to our brochures?" "But..." "Thanks so much. I think you'll find you will be satisfied with our selection".
He takes a selection of these glossy brochures and fans them out skilfully on the big desk. A myriad of colours. Candy for the eye. The guy has obviously got his spiel all worked out and is allowing nothing to spoil it. Like a valet whose job is to stand around in a bathroom seeking tips. Using his automaton-like obsequiousness to express contempt. Interrupting with his large, insincere mouth: "Thankyou sir. Quite so, sir. There's really no need to explain. I feel sure our selection will be of interest to you Sir". Like a malfunctioning robot.
These glossy brochures of his are labelled Forthcoming Attractions. Not what I'm after at all. He is quite intent on selling me some new variant on my warped desire. Like flipping the channel. A New Season of Programming. It seems that my Metropolis or Wish-city was only one of these old fantasies lost among these glossy leaflets, the Upcoming Attractions drowning it out with the fanfare of their newness, with their blaring cheapness.
I guess I entered the wrong room... I'm being sold the holiday-life insurance-virtual wish machine-videogame package when what I wanted was the straight-hit-to-the-vein nostalgia trip, clear and even... though I hesitate to use the word... "authentic".

Metropolis 8

The latest scene to be shot takes place in a large cinder block industrial-grey hotel. Camera-spectator stands unobtrusive in corner. This could be the old-style luxury hotel or mansion if it weren't so grimly stripped of ornament, so processed and bold. Look out the windows and you'll see a receding avenue of identical buildings, like a great main street or city thoroughfare carefully denuded of any individuality, monolithic shapes like banks and department stores, though not cluttered with bright eye-catching signs and displays, but blank-walled and vacant-eyed, uniform, like a row of tombs. Rectangle being the obvious form, and essential to the grid pattern, all constructed from the same dull grey-brown brick, cheap and dense. Oh blessed uniformity. Allows one to concentrate.
Up in the penthouse suite of this hotel are staying the personnel and entourage of a heavy metal band. They are currently partying. It's an interesting process.
They're also going through the formal tradition of a room-wreck, done with celebratory gusto and a sense ot showmanship. What outlandish boys. They bill themselves as the return of Hair Rock, that much-missed genre. Transatlantic accents, "decadence", androgyny, copious amounts of coke. We need more spandex strides and poodle perms in pop music. Shouts of "Rawk n Rawl!", the stoner aesthetic. Mixed with make-up and hellfire, thunder n lightning, flirtations with soft-focus Satanism. They are spraying fire extinguishers, their boots trampling the bedcovers, kicking in doors, sweating to live out the bad boy role. Arcane kiss-curls, curlicues of make-up, sharptongue grimaces.
The lead singer, Izzy, stradles the plush carpet, his lurex pants glistening, and with a fluid yet wildly uncontrolled motion flings his white swallowtail guitar through the window. The band's shouts and leers become louder and more stylised, more violent, as if grasping for something tangible in the rooms they occupy in restless, unstable huddles. Bottle of vodka and nosecandy in the bathtub. Someone already fucking in the hall. From the floor below all you'd hear would be boots trampling broken glass and fixtures being ripped from walls. A big Fender bass takes a long arcing dive from one of the low topfloor windows, followed by assorted debris.

Asteroidea

Like the Asteroidea that circle in the sea,
So the heavenly wanderers that our bourn oversee,
So are the beasts and birds, and so are we.
The starts that glide their course by night
Make fated paths within our sight,
So do the asteroids on deep
Plot careful courses while we sleep,
Turn on turn, insensibly,
Like the turning of the wheel,
That great wheel of the galaxy
That by each movement, will reveal
The spiral and the five-armed star
Marking out a destiny;
Whether in depths of sky or sea,
Or bound by land like mortals are,
Whether peace or frightful war,
Whether death or ecstasy.
That man, four-limbed, one-headed, is
Like the bright comet of the astral fish,
Shown by five points of errant fire;
And tugged by currents and lazy drifts,
Knows not the end of any wish,
Nor yet the author of desire.

Metropolis 7

Now if only could see the script for this Movie. The dialogue is incredible, completely authentic, for the director (or so he claims) has the power of the Cosmic Recorder of all speech and thought. His claim seems genuine. The actor is given his lines to remember on a daily basis, at least that's the theory.
But this is no clear-cut memorable movie talk, carefully revised and faux-authentic, this is real speech, based on an original improvisatory and never-to-be-repeated performance. The actors have to get used to acting real talk as if they were lines from a movie, real speech with all its umms and ahs interruptions trailings-off and vagaries.
"What was I gonna say? Can you oh never mind..."
"Huh?... Whut?"
"Nuthin'".
I watched and listened once to a group of five kids speaking. If this scene had been represented in a film they would all have more or less taken turns to speak, and delivered their lines more or less clearly, all to the coherence of the plot. In fact, in real life, all of the kids spoke at exactly the same time, continually interrupting one another, all the time competing to chime in the loudest or wittiest, spilling out half-lines and half-words and sounds that were not words and never meant to be words, but merely sounds of assent or doubt, amusement or derision- All of it banal, meaningless, blabbing out stock phrases from TV, incomprehensible private jokes and words. Now it certainly would take an especially skilled kind of actor to recreate this (extremely common) kind of speech, which is really completely fluid, flexible, and insubstantial.

He lent us his spectacles and we looked at Europe

 He lent us his spectacles and we looked at Europe, and we were saddened and shocked and 

                         angered all at once. But some small, hard part of us, some interior iron, was glad. And 

                         eventually we were able to persuade our heart, to wake it to the gladness of the great work

                         to come, the great uncompleted work, the fostering and waking and tending of the seeds of the 

                         previous great works, the great works of Athens, the great works of Florence, the great works

                         of Paris.  And we were able to perceive in that flourishing and in that work of destruction

                         after all a wild joy, and a stern one, a double-helix twined upon itself, composed of contradictory

                         impulses, spinning like a top, full of dynamism and orgasmic potential. 

His gaze is the gaze of the bourgeois divested of illusion. Thus it is both noble and frightening, like the gaze of a fallen Zeus, divested of his splendour and somehow cynical. It is the gaze of Moses who has after all seen that there is nothing upon the mountain-top, and that the stones he holds in his hand are mere dross matter, come to tell us all, that he is after all still a prophet, and that there is after all still a Promised Land. 

We have given authoritarianism a chance, a million chances. We have tried the pyramid power structure, for thousands of years. It's given us pyramids of skulls, rivers of blood, obscenities of piled-up cash, rubble of broken lives. It's time for God's sake to dismantle it, somehow, by all means and any, to dismantle it, even if we have to become angels, even if it's impossible, even if it's the last thing we do. 

It's time to laugh at it and mock it, to fight it tooth and nail, to take up arms against it, to banish it, to undermine it, to fanatically attack its weakest points. It is ridiculous, therefore laugh. The more it demands to be taken seriously, laugh at it the more. The more it surrounds itself with mysticism and shadow, shine a bright light on it the more. To its pomposity and seriousness and ritual, laugh like you would at a clown, for it is clownish. Exalt small brave acts of disobedience and cynicism, exalt small honesties, exalt what is heartfelt, exalt what is whole-hearted. 

It is the Zigurrat of Ur, the pyramid of phraoah, the ridiculous and ungainly, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the monuments of Moloch, the tombs of the City of London, the military barracks, the sacred leader principle, the holy pyramid, the priest in his inner sanctum, the lofty priest caste, the banker caste, the proud stockbroker caste in his inner sanctum office, the celebrity-god, emblem and unwitting symbol of the hierarchy, symbolic sacrifice-victim of the priesthood. It is the missile, the phallus, the indestructible granite tomb, the needle of Cleopatra, the prick of profit, the cold hardness of cash, the glorious bank vault.  

It transumted, and became a friendly face, a falsely smiling face, and expressed itself with borrowed Venusian luxury, and false frontages of glossy pastel colours and perfect teeth. It transmuted, and clothed itself with mixtures of subcultures and glamour. It transmuted again, and became a jester with a mask of rebellion. It traded in these images as in all else, it traded in souls, it traded in hopes, its wares were like so many glittering and deceiving jewels in an endless fair, a fair that never let you sleep or left you in peace, a fair that was insistent and multifarious, and that colonised all your space, and lied to you, and maniuplated you in a sweet voice, and endlessly transmuted like a demon-nymph that could not be held. 

"I will this" it said "and I will traffic in everything, and all things shall be laid out upon my stall, and I will be the merchant-god, and turn all men to the shades of Mercury, with deceit, with conjuring, and with commerce. I will be the mask of mammon, the false face of the zigurrat-pyramid, the mountain of skulls. Behind me will be open sores and wounds, ugly corruption, sickening violence, which I will surreptiously traffic in as spectacle. Behind me the vacuous tomb-memorials, the marble pillars, the sparse bank vaults. Behind me every desire and impulse cheapened and parasited, every ugliness made concrete and sprawling and vast. I am advertisement, I am a perpetually grinning mask".