So Bizarre...

From an elderly article entitled "Every Word You Say":

The Police member who underwent the greatest shock was probably Stewart Copeland. As the band prepared to finish writing the album in February, there were continual, gruesome TV reports of the bombing of Beirut. Stewart Copeland had spent much of his youth there, due to his father's CIA - connected overseas job. "My home town was being bombed. I found out my nanny, who'd raised me, was killed by American supplied bullets. I couldn't write about anything except war and hate. I wanted to kill," he said. Though some of that hurt has filtered through to Synchronicity, much of it was sidetracked into a filmscore he's been writing, for Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish. And there was another film project, directed and shot by Copeland in collaboration with brother Miles. He spent two weeks following a tour by Anti-Nowhere League, Defects, Chron Gen and Chelsea, filming a dozen gigs on one hand-held camera. "I want to invent the 'C' film," was the explanation. Before the 30-minute "So What" goes on general release, he hopes to send it on a tour of British punk gigs with the soundtrack played at full PA volume. "We want to get the audience to react as if it was a band playing. We tried it at The Marquee but didn't get the response we wanted." That was mostly because of not knowing how to best cut the film for effect. He's now re-edited the feature."

It says Stewart Copeland was filming the tour. Now Floyd told me he'd met Stewart Copeland; fairly typically, he described him in less than flowery language. Floyd didn't have much time for the middle classes, full stop. But he never told me the guy was filming them on stage...

I wonder if he knew?

The Killing Fields

Russ surprised me tonight.

Russ is the only Maori I know. I can't properly pronounce the tribe he's from, much less spell it, but he's incredibly bolshy (and considers this normal), and he's also a nice guy when he bothers to listen. Most times he just makes decisions before listening, which isn't so cool. I'd also guess that his given name isn't 'Russ'. I'd guess that's what he calls himself here.

He's due to fly back out home to New Zealand in the next few days. I hadn't seen him for a while, so didn't pick up on this fact until tonight - although he says he'll be back for more work in the luxury of South East England in the fairly near future. He'll be missed, and not only by me; he's somehow managed to wangle his way into the hearts and minds of several locals. I wish I knew how he did that :-z

He drank a toast to me tonight: 'You walk your own way and don't take shit from no man, and I like talking to you because you remind me of my tribe. We're the same.'

Bless. It must be some kind of tradition out there, to come up with a toast for every person in the block when you leave.

Meanwhile Rose, the beautiful, engaging, funny and sharp blonde behind the bar, has hit marital quagmire after mere months of wedded bliss. She has bruises on her arms and her chin is held high. 'I've told him to leave, and he's leaving'. I hope so, he was never right for her and her five children. But I remember Rose on their wedding day, skitting across from the bar in her wedding gown to pick up cigarettes from the off-license I worked in at the time, beautiful as ever and so very happy. She looks like a female version of Derick Rethans, whom few people would (I suspect) regard as beautiful - but she definitely has the same nose, chin, eyes. I don't know how the alchemy occurs, but it does. In Rose, the slanted eyes and comically long, thin nose and mouth turn out as 'delicate' and 'pixie'. Perhaps the mischief in her makes that difference, I don't know. It disturbs hell out of me to see the marks of her being beaten. The jealous marks of a man who just discovered that his wife's children will always come first. You'd think he'd figure that idea and learn to live with it before he married her...

They seemed so happy.

And maybe that 'seeming' is why Russ gave me the toast he did. I don't allow 'seeming' in my life, I prefer the truth.

17 syllables

My mate Nigel's going through one of those 'sad and lonely' phases we all go through from time to time. For the last few weeks, when I've stayed over, we've crashed out to the strains of Have you ever fallen in love (with someone you shouldn't have fallen in love with)? - thanks so much Pete Shelley.

Eventually something snapped, the inevitable happened, and he slept with the wrong woman. It was partly my fault; she seemed like a gift at first sight, and I kinda propelled her his way, but then neither of us knew she was the wrong woman. We should both have listened to her better; she wanted something permanent, which is the last thing on his mind at present, sad and lonely or not. As things are, we're both guilty as sin and hoping she wasn't unduly upset at his instinctively blunt reaction to her too-early mention of the R word. I have to say I'd have reacted in exactly the same way he did; relationships aren't something you have, like a house, they're something that happen, like the weather, and there's something odd about asking someone else whether you can have one. But I guess that's why we're friends...

Nigel is a little nervous and twitchy since that night, particularly when it grows dark, expecting retribution to strike him down in increasingly obscure and macabre ways. So I'm publishing the slightly non-traditional haiku we wrote tonight to mark the occasion, and to remind him of the aftermath next time there's a next time. It's named Bunny Boiler, after that scene in Fatal Attraction:

shotgun window head exploding
spattered wall my brain
death (probably)

(NB I should make it very clear at this point that the lady in question is a pleasant person who is entirely unlikely to do any such thing :)