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There’s No Place Like Home: Memory and the Myth of the Countryside

“He felt the strain of this clinging affection for the old home as part of his life, part of himself. He couldn’t bear to think of himself living on any other spot than this, where he knew the sound of every gate…

In Our Own Image: The Man on Mars and the Ghost in the Machine

There is a little white light on the corner of your MacBook that rhythmically fades and glows. It undulates like a rising chest, or a slow, flowing, electronic heart beat. Your MacBook will only do this once you’ve put it…

Pop Music and the Beauty of the Beast

Is it ok that I (still) like ‘Blurred Lines’? Not the concept — the pseudo-controversial, over-played pop toon, released by Robin Thicke and his pals T. I. and Pharrell and upbraided almost univocally by the media for being misogynist, creepy and even a ‘rape…

Just Like Honey

‘Listen to the girl/ as she takes on half the world / moving up and so alive / in her honey-dripping beehive’

— The Jesus and Mary Chain

Un-puzzling ‘Her’ Surface: What’s Beneath the Drag Queen?

Before taking the terrifying plunge and transforming myself into a bonafide Drag Queen — the first external realization of my life-long alter ego ‘Glamrou’ — I confess that I had not yet self-reflexively questioned why I was so…

The Carbuncle Cup: What Makes an Ugly Building Ugly?

A friend once related to me their (possibly slightly drunken) conviction that even the ugliest building looked better than an ugly human being. For them, no concrete monstrosity could ever compare with one of actual flesh and blood…

The Infra-Avant-Garde

Keston Sutherland’s long poem Hot White Andy (2007) begins:

Lavrov and the Stock Wizard levitate over to

the blackened dogmatic catwalk and you eat them. Now swap

buy for eat, then fuck for buy, then ruminate for…

Technology, Freedom and the ‘Act Divorced from all Feeling’

A few weeks ago BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours discussed the question ‘Should pornography be discussed as part of sex education?’ The programme was responding to the Children’s Commissioner for England’s press release, which…

Carry on Carrying

In the run-up to last Christmas I went to loads of parties. Of course I did, I’m a man, I’m a man with a plan-ner, a planner full of engagements and functions and social events to attend. Yeahhhhh…..Well, no, not really. One thing which set the last Christmas ‘party season’ apart from the rest —…