To Write Like Burroughs

I was drinking alone when the tipsy impudent couple across from me asked me what I was reading.

"The Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs" I said. "He was a repressed homosexual junkie who shot his wife dead by accident"

I thought the best way of explaining the work was like was to leave her to read the Hassan's Rumpus Room Chapter while I went for a cigarette. "You will never speak to me again now".

I smoked my cigarette and wondered how all the alien human anal sex while hanging, rubber dildoes up asses stuff would go down, jism spurting from the page into her bespectacled eyes, as I looked at another girl who was never going to talk to me.

She wasn't shocked, she thought it was all a bit forced. I diasagreed, I thought it was natural as hell, Ballard's Crash, now that is what I call forced and overwritten. I envy the flow of Burroughs words, little though my life will ever be like his.

I wish I could convey that kind of utter liquid, gooey force so effortlessly.

I Broke A Girl's Heart

I needed to try and refire my story writing in a hurry. I've been reading a lot about alien abductions lately. Wonder what goes through their minds?

The bunker

Don't bother with the Aliens Extended Edition. Really. Don't.

Do you know, it took me a long time to see it, until I finally got the Aliens DVD and see all this amazing new footage that my friend at University had been going on about back in 1994. "You should see the Sentry Guns!"

I wouldn't say my heart was pounding when I pressed the play button, but I was shall we say, "Interested."

Ridley Scott doesn't do Director's Cuts. All of his extended editions seem to be introduced with a little clip of his Ginger-Going-On-Greyness sat there in a chipperly avuncular fashion, saying that basically he doesn't do Director's Cuts cos his first cut was the best, but it's nice to see the deleted scenes.

. I can't remember what James Cameron said before this one, but I'm sure it wasn't "These scenes are a crock of shit, I can't believe I wasted the money filming them."

We kick off with a long and tedious "oh for fuck's sake cut to the chase" bit set in the colony on LV426, which is apparently entirely constructed with cheap plastic curtain rails and is populated by a myriad of crap actors of whom Captain Hollister from Red Dwarf is the best known. Cue redneck dad discovering alien ship and returning with a rubber chicken stuck to his face.

We are also treated to seeing Ripley sat on butcher's grass in the space hospital, being given a really really stupid photograph of her dead daughter - looking like Judith Hann off Tomorrow's World" - and doing some unconvincing crying. Or did this happen before? Fuck it I'm doing this from memory, and it doesn't matter anyway.

What else do we have. Oh yes, the much vaunted "Sentry Guns" scenes, along with the silly conversation about "Ant Hives". The Sentry Guns look ok, as models go, but they kill aliens rather too easily - in the manner of the Army of the Dead in The Return of the King - and the aliens they do kill are re-run footage hastily stitched in from what looks like the first marine raid on the cooling towers, but given a sort of fuzziness to make it look a bit different.

Yep, it looks different. And worse, like a Squid Head Star Wars figure being blown up with a firework while having yellow washing up liquid thrown on it. Shot in Super 8 and shown over and over again.

We finish with some "Don't be gone long" twattery, but the worst "Deleted" bit, by a mile, is the dire dire Hudson "rap". Forcing us over and over again to "Check it out" he masturbates over his weaponry like it's the night before Columbine round Dylan Klebold's house, reaching an orgasm with a decisive "Whap" before sticking his hand down his government issue camos for another round of frothy hand fun. "We got nukes, we got knives, we got sharp sticks" he ejaculates, before Apone  - and all of us - fearful of getting another faceful of sticky word come - tell him to "knock it off."

Er, I thought that's what he was doing already. Anyway, stick with the original cut. It does you no harm, and as Sly Stone would say, it might even do you some good.

Booba Lacka Lacka Lacka Booba Lacka Lacka!

In Two Thousand One and Three a Cenobite I Should Turn to Be

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20/06/2012

ndeed, I shall leave it a year. Watching the Olympics in a low key fashion might be rather difficult with nail and cheese wire impediments.

And then, in 2013, two thousand one and three, I shall seek out the Lament Configuration Puzzle Box and run inquisitive fingers over it's strange symbolic engravings, as the sky greys to black and sinisters coloured bolts of energy course along its structure.

And then, shall meddling open the box, and I will taken away from here, taken away from a world of drudgery and tedium, low paid humilation at the hand of low-bred in-breds, and taken to a world where “Pain and Pleasure are Combined”. My skin flayed, nails hacked out and my blood replaced by an agonising preserving re-animating fluid, full of parasites to perpetually stimulate the evil centre of my brain and eat away at the good.

And in a year, pvc clad and looking rather different of face and denture, I shall return and Lo! Shall all my life's irritants shall feel rusty chains rip through their plebeian flesh! But although, Cenobitically enhanced I may be, the more louche aspects of my ensavaged personality remain – and I shall drink Cuba Libras and Caparinhas with one hand, smoke Sobranie with the other into lungs pulled apart by rusty wire; all while kicking an enemy in the face with a spined boot, piercing cheek flesh again and again and again.

And then I shall listen to the Velvet Underground and crank out chirpy bon-mots such as “Your sole...my pleasure” and “The road of pain is a less travelled one, but as you can see the journey is worth it” to some dotty American 19 year old who repeatedly refuses to tell their arse from their elbow.

And I shall attract acolytes, and followers ignorant of the true extent of my powers, and so shall statues be made of me. Worship me if you will, but remember to always quake in fear.

My boots trample the still quivering dead. Is my life so far gone that this future seems preferable to anything else. I shall tell you later.

In two thousand one and three.

Soul-less Sci Fi

I hate CGI and shiny surfaces; films sculpted out a block of marbled perfection, road tested by preview audience robots.

This is not the sccience fiction creation I aspire to.

I like rubber and latex suits where you can see the zip up the back, I like models where you can see the dinky drilled holes and the hairdryer parts and cannibalised airfix model kits.

I like planets with stupid names and pinky orange matte painted skies; where the mad scientist holds court amidst the fearsome buzz of Tesla Coils and robots menace damsels with heads made of an anglepoise lamp. I like rubber rocks being thrown, I like the papery thwack of collapsing polystyrene sets.

I like spaceships that look like breasts or phalluses with a November 5th sparkler providing the propulsion; I like craft with pointless wings in the unforgiving vacuum of space that emit sounds that you shouldn't hear in the void.

I like creatures that are tentacled entities of frightening antipathy towards the human race; or the occasional interplanetary policeman telling us to stop fucking about with atomic weapons especially if they have massive foreheads and strange hair.

I like grit. I like dirt. I like being able to see the fucking join. I like mistakes, failure and fun. I like being entertained.

And in modern sci fi, I get dazzled. And more often than not, I get bored.

Hard On for Trailers

An obsession about trailers is the same as any other fetish really...

There is no difference between the fanboy sweating and getting hot at the latest Prometheus trailer and the man watching an amply sized woman crushing bananas down her cleavage. The kid looking for details upon Batman's new cape is the same as the man who peers intently at the speculumned delicates of his lady love as she rides a shiny set of medical stirrups.

I gave up on it. I got vaguely excited at the Prometheus trailers in a follow-the-herd sort of way, then after the first one wondered why I was bothering...if I want to see the film, I'll see the bloody film, not analyse frame frame by tedious frame some 60 second snippet of it product placing its way into your psyche.

I don't recall the Harry Potter books being read out on the radio, random page by random page, still less anyone getting excited about it. Watch the movies people, don't give in to the endless hype machine of squid-enema-medical-eyeball licking-furry playing trailer porn.

Its getting boring.