MY LIFE WOULD MAKE A LOUSY FILM BECAUSE... PT 2

I have never had someone end a phone conversation with me and, after they cleared the line, felt impelled to say, ‘Hello, Hello, are you still there?’

My mobile phone frequently cannot get a signal, runs out of credit and battery power.

When I get angry I quickly become incoherent, my vocabulary shrinks to an arsenal of a dozen mono and duo syllabic words, and spittle showers my immediate area. I would have failed the Glengarry Glenn Ross auditions.

I have never begun a romance by bumping into a woman, spilling the entire contents of her bag, bending down to help pick the debris up and had my eyes lock apologetically to hers. I met my wife, drunk, outside a pub.

I have never walked out on a restaurant dinner partner by slamming some bank notes on the table

I have never broken into a garden guarded by ferocious dogs.

If I am awoken at night by an unidentified noise I will always say, ‘bloody neighbours’ before falling back to sleep before the minute is up.

I have never sat in a pub, restaurant or hotel bar smoking, enigmatic and alone.

My bed has a quilt, not white sheets

I never awake by suddenly sitting bolt upright and gasping

I have never been caught outside with a woman in a sudden shower of rain and felt the desire to hoist my jacket over both our laughing heads. In cold weather I have never offered my jacket to a woman without reminding her she is daft for not bringing extra layers.

My life would make a lousy film because... Pt 1:

I have never lit a post-coital cigarette.

I have never ridden, as a patient or a concerned passenger, in an ambulance.

I have never awoken to answer a ringing bed-side telephone with the accusatory greeting, ‘Do you know what time it is?’

I have never come home, walked into my living room and fixed myself a drink.

I have never owned, worn or walked around my apartment in a white cotton vest.

I have never felt imperilled enough in a public eatery to excuse myself, walk briskly to the toilets and try to escape through the window.

I have never got into a taxi and said simply, ‘the airport and step on it’.

When I answer the phone I use polite English ‘He-llo’ by way of greeting. I do not use, ‘Yeah?’, ‘Y’ello?’ or ‘What is it?

I have never had someone slam the phone down on me.

I have never walked into a building and said, ‘Hello, is anybody there?’

I have never run through a hotel kitchen.

I have never driven at great speed through an alleyway.

I have never fled down a backstreet only to come up against a 10 foot unscalable metal mesh gate.

Currently trying to carve some time into competing work, academic and social schedules to progress on 'Trunk', 'Disappearers', 'Home' and 2 new mixtapes: 'Outlands' - a companion piece to the Night City mixtape (see - www,mixtapes.org.uk) and an opposites mixtape that alternates images of things that, twinned, could have a funny effect on the viewer or, better yet, an effect on the viewer that is funny. Example pairings so far include kissing and vomiting, screaming and being kicked in the nuts, sobbing and laughing hysterically.

this Month: Barry Lyndon's sly wit, Mojave 3's easy classicism, Stephen Colbert's GW Bush Roast Balls, Conrad's swampy verbiage, Hangover Square's Bleak and Blackly comic shocks, Shellac's mysterious yet infernal 'End of Radio' Posthumous Peel Session track, the continuing chime and roll of Sonic Youth's suppressed Rather Ripped LP, the inspiration of Seijin Suzuki promoting the mad energy of his new film aged 83, Cat Power breaking cover on BBC2, mixtapes idea, piles of unwatched DVDs, unread books, unheard mp3s, watched world cup matches

Flaming Lips at Hyde Park

Flaming Lips at Hyde Park
Originally uploaded by pauljunktv.

On 23rd June 2006, Flaming Lips shot a 100 balloons from the stage at Hyde Park. Suz, beating aside a dozen hyper children, captured one and managed to get it 50 miles south on public transport. It now lays, sorry and deflated, on a window sill, day dreaming of it's moment in the rock 'n' roll firmament

Currently trawling through mounds of Admin-heavy work. I received an email concerning the script for 'Trunk' that I have posted up on the junktv.org site. The script, that details the history of murder in Brighton, intentional ends after the notorious double trunk murders of 1933 so as not to run the risk of upsetting living relatives. So, I was extremely surprised to receive an email from a descendent of Celia Holloway - the victim of the original Trunk murder in 1831. I was kindly offered copies of contemporary news reports that may help in refining some details in the script. It was an interesting lesson for me: even 175 years after someone's death there are people who may be effected by things you write.

I spoke to a friend who has just moved to Switzerland yesterday. He said that it would take a while to get used to the order in which Swiss women checked men out, even though he had been forewarned by colleagues. The order is cock, shoes, watch. I noticed that he had a rather striking new pair of shoes.

This Sunday, I went to a Brighton Festival talk by Sean French and Nigel Jones about Patrick Hamilton. Lots of anecdotal interest about Hamilton's family, his relationship with his beleaguered older brother, Bruce, mad father, possessive mother, alcoholic genes, obsession with prostitutes, S & M themes throughout his work, his stint as an actress stalker, the modern equivalent of £700,000 he spent on alcohol during one of the (rationed) war years, his accident and subsequent disfigurement, his demotion from a widely respected and rock star-rich author in the early 1930s to an invisible man dying slowly of desperate alcoholism in the 1950s. Grew up in First Avenue, Hove, five minutes from my flat. Nigel Jones admitted that he had been bequeathed Patrick Hamilton's entire archive (one suitcase kept under a bed by his hated sister-in-law) but had flogged it as he was skint. Sean French made several interesting points but found himself, often, unable to finish a sentence, in a kind of twittering, woosterish display of speech impedimentary. Entertaining. Max asked a question about Hamilton's 'dankness' which led Nigel Jones to the thought that Hamilton is so fascinating because the world he wrote about - that of lodging houses, pubs, downmarket cafes, back streets and a lower class central London - has disappeared. Whilst it is not geographically or historically distant it remains tantalisingly out of reach. You can try to find the 'Midnight Bell' but the saloon lounge will have a pumping Mp3 jukebox, and Ella and Bob will be Ecuadorian transsexual language students with torso tight Audio Bullys T-shirts.

French mentioned something about the Admiral Duncan in the West End, now infamously a gay pub that was nail bombed by a homophobic psycho...but he didn't finish the sentence.