Dear Spinny...

Dear Spinny,

How's you, chuck - alright? (No, that's not right at all..)

Yo, Spinster,

(..erm...uh-huh...)

Dearest Spinsterella,

(..*way* too formal...)

You see how easy it is to start writing a letter to someone you've never even met and with whom all your prior communication has been conducted within the hurly burly of the Blogger comment box scene? - well, it's not exactly a garden party, is it? No first names - well, no *real* first names, for the most part, not even a visual tic to latch onto in most cases (although, I suppose "Curly", or "Permo-features" or something equally juvenile might have passed muster for the Spinster, from what little was given away about her looks.) But then, like so much else in this cyber realm, even those details - the tight perm, the petiteness (blimey, even the Norn Irishness, for heaven's sake) - may even have been a part of the fiction, the fabrication, the fabulation that was Spinsterella.

It was very touching reading the comments on your last post - sadly, now all that is visible of your long-running and wonderfully entertaining blog. It's like a sort of smaller scale, low-key, understated blogworld re-enactment of the funeral of Rudi Valentino - there's much blubbing, despair and people are distraught and perhaps a little hysterical, but at the same time, everyone knows you and the form well enough to realise that trying to leap on top of the casket and get lowered into the sod with you is probably not what you'd have wanted - not the done thing. I make big claims for the power of things like blogging and Myspace and that to transform our lives in a more positive way than the mainstream media can, but I'm beginning to realise that it's the smaller, less grandstanding moments like your valedictory comments box that make my case for me most eloquently.

I'll try to stop this getting all Frank Capra very soon, Spinster - I know you wouldn't want an overblown valediction - but I have to say that I owe you an apology, so I may as well get that out of the way whilst the schmaltz is still in full flow. I commented quite flippantly somewhere nearer the time of your 'last post' - probably on Timster's bit - that you appeared to have 'snuffed it'. Not nice - I hold my hands up. If I'd actually made the effort to investigate further the choice of song you'd made to be your 'swansong' (a wonderful one, naturally!) I'm sure I would have been as lump-throated as all the other mourners back then; heck, I might even have been there, best fishnets on, trying to muscle past the line of cops trying to hold back the screaming hordes and fling myself down there in that hole to be with you in your final place of rest. But I didn't. Until yesterday. So here's a belated thank you - not just for using the song I wrote thanks to your inspiration, but for the beautiful character and world you created. The lump was late coming, but it finally made the throat. Better late than never - although, with all this funereal imagery, maybe I shouldn't use the word late so lightly anymore.

This is where I'll probably lose any of the brief respect I might conceivably have gleaned from any of your many female admirers who might be reading this (well - *google*...), but you see, I always thought there was a bit more calculation - no, maybe not calculation, that has unpleasant connotations that I don't intend - maybe *remove* is better? Yes remove is what you had, I think, in the way you approached the blogging thing. I'm not for one moment saying that there couldn't have been or wasn't a huge amount of truth in what you wrote - it was too well observed, too rich with those unblagable sorts of details not to be based in large part on the very real experiences of a wee lassie from Norn Iron. But I sensed from quite early on the most delicate of inverted commas around the whole thing - the idea that, at some level, the blog itself was actually of more import than the experiences being relayed through it. I can't back this up, it's just an intuition, but by way of support for that outrageous claim, all I have to offer is this thought: I feel that maybe if it had been just an "I did this and then I did that and then he came round and we did the other" type of narrative, you would probably still be doing it (....the blogging that is, not the other - although...).

I know that sounds an awfully up myself suggestion to make - that only artists can care enough about blogs to give them up when they feel they can't do them justice - as if every blogger doesn't have rival committments to their blog, even if they see themselves as pursuing no more than a hobby. But if you look at it through the various perversions that might be vaguely assembled to form "my point of view", then it does make sense and isn't such an uncharacteristically elitist position for me to take.

You see I think blogs *do* make artists of us, whether we like it or not. Just the selection of subject matter is an *artistic* one, isn't it? Indeed - whether to write anything at *all*. These are, at least, *creative* choices, I would say. Then there's the style; we all acquire our own voice, the way we write is an extension of us, isn't it? And isn't that, really all art is? An extension of *us*, by other means? And, perhaps most crucially, you have an *audience*. So, blogs and such like *do* empower us, I think; they allow us to choose how we will interact with the world. We can create our own space - invite people we like there, refuse entry to those we don't, say pretty much what we like, when we like, and be fairly sure that at least *someone*, somewhere on the globe will read what we have to say.

It just happens that, as with novelists, some bloggers are so good at their art that they allow us to forget that what we're reading is not simply an electronic diary that they've been good enough to share with us and the rest of the world, but an edited selection, the end result of choices and word quibbles and wragglings as to what and whether one should do, how far one can go...these sorts of thoughts (please do correct me if I'm wrong and you don't do any of this and I'll give your blog a very wide berth) go through the minds of everyone who blogs, don't they? It's just that not many of us are good enough to elicit the Valentino response when the efforts of conjuring up this seemingly effortless magic everyday begin to become too much for the liver of the life.

So I'm pleased in a way that I resisted the impulse of the other mourners to gnash and wail at your demise. Maybe I knew, deep down, as a fellow inhabiter of those arch inverted comments that it wasn't as if someone had actually *died*. No, this was a far more everyday sadness - like that feeling you get when you turn the page of a book you've loved reading, and realise that you've come to the end.

Thank you Spinster, and may life always be kind to you.



L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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Marcel Waves...

The joyous sense of a mind that has broken free of all restraints - a mind at play in a game of its own devising, whose resolution is infinitely delayed. The bride, who is queen of the game ... will never achieve her ardently desired orgasm. Her 'blossoming', Duchamp tells us, is merely the last state of this nude bride before the orgasm which may (might) bring about her fall. She is like Keats' maiden on the Grecian urn, forever in passage between desire and fulfillment, and it is precisely this state of erotic passage that Duchamp has chosen as the subject of his greatest work. Sexual fulfillment, with its overtones of disappointment, loss and 'fall' from grace was never an option. The bride, the bachelors, and by implication the onlooker as well are suspended in a state of permanent desire.

Calvin Tomkins on Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even.

He simply changed the terms by which painting had lived for centuries. In changing the rules, in re-inventing art as though it had never existed, he re-opened the possibility of working. The new rules were these: Art is conceptual - that is to say it has nothing to do with visual stimuli external to the artist's mind. It was to be as absolutely conceptual as much of the art of the past had been retinal.

Richard Hamilton on Marcel Duchamp, Art International, January 1964.

L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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BoyTron...

Marrissa slipped a sleek steel blue kimono on over her crimson bodice and ran to the door, a tiny tingle of excitement starting up in the hollow of her inner thigh. Maybe this was it, the package she'd been waiting for. Oh, what bliss to come, she thought and heard the cheesy, saccharine lilt of the refrain from the commercial running through her head...

BoyTron pumps away...
'Til the batteries run out...

The dwarf class Delivery Droid at the door held the tall box vertically in its stainlees steel claw. She hastily shoved a tip credit into its silver abdomen and grabbed the elongated box and hastily planted it inside the hall. Door closed, she dragged it along the hallway and into the bedroom that gave on to the vestibule, then tried to lift it. My, this is *heavy* - she thought, the tingle that had started in her inner thigh now working its way steadily up to her abdomen where she now felt a burning clench, a fearsome raunch that made her feel quite suddenly shocked at her own appetite. With an enormous heave, she launched the box on to the bed and began feverishly to wrestle with the thick bronze staples and wide strips of tape holding the box secure.

Eventually freeing the top of the box after some effort, she peeled aside two or three layers of tissue paper and there he was; the BoyTron; Luxury Series IIa, fully mobile mandibles (as standard), roto pelvis function, extra-regular size, black model. The peachy fuzzed surface caught the soft blue light from her bedside tan dispenser, soft hairs rippling around its abdomen. BoyTron's face looked back up at her, slightly sad, but with what appeared to be the beginnings of a playful smile about to spread across its coal-dark face. She fumbled with the instructions - why did they always put the English version halfway through?? - and quickly located the discretely secluded opening into which she would insert the lovingly cradled token in her palm and bring the Boytron to life...

BoyTron pumps away
'Til the batteries run out...

Gently, Marrissa clasped BoyTron's pretty-plump biceps and gently rolled him onto his side, pulling the box away and allowing it to fall will-nilly on the floor beside the bed. She lay him on his back once more, spread her knees and allowed the shimmering blue kimono to slide down her back and arms and fall like a shiny turquoise puddle about her on the sheets. Edging her way up Boytron, the token gripped between her long-nailed fingers, Marrissa felt with her little pinky for the delicate indenture of the slot. Hovering over him now, she touched the token to the top of the slot and with deliberately slow, sensuous sychronization slid the token and herself down, down, down...

BoyTron pumps away
'Til the batteries run out...

Pump, pump, pump...




L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob




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Alvin Starburst...

Starburst over London

I fell out of the sky

Lost among the humanoids

They never told me why...

Your Alvin vay sed. And so Alvin I become. Stood vare in me fishnets n bovver boots, a stoled zippy coat me only comfort from ver frightful cold feelings ov me extratrestial bod. 'Alvin', I mouved back at ver gang ov scruffs assembled about me, gorpin and gaspin at ver twin artbeats palpin away like billy O, me alien ness plainly visible beneaf me see-froo blars. So vis is Erf, I smiled ter me lonesome. Erf is a shit-ole, I funked, just like vey sed it would be - orrible grey stuff smered wiv white tubes wot pong like a sewer, paper rags streamin every here n vivver n evry wall wiv sumfing writted on it. Erf, you stink, I fort - might even ave whispered it under me bref. You stink of shit but you are ome, I fort.

Gubby, iz name woz Gubby, I fink, e was ver boldest of em, e reached out iz umanoid and n seemed a little took of aback ter find me skin not to much differenter van is own - smoover, paler, synfetically enhanced vo it were. Ardened against vizical pain to a degree iz pasty flesh could never not be, but still as vulnerable as any umanoid to ver chilly cold of ver wind. 'Eaty', e sed, 'Eaty'...Gubby kep on repeatin ver same silly word wot ad no meaning as far as me recepta banks and dayterstream rezorses was concerned -'Eating' bein the closest match to come up on me mindscroll. E finks I must be ungry, I spose, I reasoned, knowin vey'd most like gorped n gasped in orror n delight as me spasecraft ship plummetid like a cone into ver mud grey slimey slew of water into what I had crashed. 'Yes please, Mister Sir', I sed to him in me best Erf aksent as like I had been tort in all vose lessons to prepare me for me mishon. 'I is very ungry Sir, n food would be ver just delightful fing, if it pleezes, sir, fank you sir.." Gubby giv me a funny look, iz ed slightly ter one side and sed 'Nah' *Eaty*, not 'Eaty'. Yer know; 'Eaty - Fo nome'...

Erf can be confuzin sumtimes, carn't it?

L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob














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Apple iTunes Appeal...

Hi,

I'm Robert Swipe.




Like me, you probably watched the news last night and saw Michael Buerk's disturbing film about the current crisis at Apple iTunes. Who could be failed to be moved by the terrible images of suffering, disease and starvation that have beset the famine-ravaged corporation. Sad-eyed Apple iTunes executives, tears running down their fly-ridden faces - so much misery affecting so many - and seemingly no hope of a solution to their awful plight. Perhaps, like me, you just felt helpless, and maybe shed a tear and wished that the problem would just go away.



Sadly, it won't just go away- but there *is* hope. There *is* something you can do.



Just by clicking on the iTunes button below, you can give something - no matter how small - to help the poor, starving people of Apple iTunes





Because for every 79p or 99 cents you give, Apple iTunes will receive almost *half* that amount. So by buying 'Natalie Would', for instance, you might be providing a light confection such as a Mars bar or a packet of M & Ms for an impoverished Apple iTunes executive. Buy 'Spinsterella' and 'Deep Sea Diva', and the same executive could wash that down with a warm cup of latte or cappucino. Buy the whole album, and an Apple iTunes executive will be able to have a light but nutritious lunch...



So, you see - there *is* something you can do.



Thank you for your time.


xxx

Bob



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The Wheat is Growing Thin...

As seasoned readers will know, it has long been customary for me to take my lunch at my work's refectory.Well, that's what it would have been called in the good old days; before Glasnost and Political Correctness and Blair and Brown and Bush and all those other factors which have conspired to turn the British Isles into a blighted realm as likely to inspire pride as one of those horrid dried-up white dog turds you always used to see littering the pavement...in the good old days...

Anyway, this establishment is now called 'More' - for reasons which will soon become apparent. I go there - went there, I should say...I certainly won't be going back - every working day to partake of their really rather good selection of vegetarian soups. I'd accompany the compote (as poncy people would call the bowl of souped-up gruel they serve) with two thick slices of bread or two rolls, depending upon what was availaible, two small tublets of flora margerine and a fruit smoothie drink. It's the same price everyday - £3.80. I am, if nothing else, a creature of habit.

So, imagine my surprise to see, among the basket of sliced bread and rolls, that the normally unadulterated rolls (they do lovely fruited and nutty ones...) had been bisected - cut down the middle from the top down, not laterally sliced as you normally would to butter them - as if in an attempt to disguise them as ends of a cut loaf.

Of course, the Swipe sensors went into overload - this always happens whenever I fear that I may be asked to pay over the odds (or sometimes to pay at all) for a particular service (or pecadillo). So, by the time I reached the checkout I was braced for the total doled out like a disgusting plate of school spag bol by the boss-eyed, seven chinned troll who earns a crust taking the hard-borrowed grants out of the pocket of the impoverished student body and straining her vocabulary to its very limits in the conducting of such complex exchanges as these. "Four fifty please" she piped, the "pur-leease" sounding as if it were being tugged out of her. She sounded the way people who know and are unable or unwilling to disguise the fact that they're taking the piss do; her voice quavering with false politeness, the words barely able to conceal a guilty, glottal gulp. I handed over a fiver and told her that I could have bought the same amount of bread as two rolls yesterday for half the price. "I dun set prices", she grizzled, pawing a fifty pence piece into my palm, as if taking immeasurable pride from her own terminal ignorance - the gesture and her unchallengable air of smugness at her own stupidity concluding the transaction once and for all.

I headed off to get my cutlery, still shaking my head at this despicable capitalist wheeze, when I spotted one of the suited floorwalkers who flit hither and thither about the canteen to no apparent purpose (except, from what I can ascertain, to hold impromptu cabals with six or seven of their fellow somnabulants which seem designed purely to block consumers from the wares they wish to purchase). I put the same point to this - I'm presuming - managerial-level employee, reiterating the fact that, overnight, the cost of a roll had doubled. "He looked at me blankly before extending his jaw a little in the bemused manner of Valentine Dyall, Dreyfuss's assistant in the Pink Panther movies, and informing me (a little impatiently, I felt) of the following fluctuation in the international food market:

"Well, there have been quite significant increases in the price of wheat, didn't you know...."

So there you have it, dear, blessed Swipesters. Load up your gas-guzzlers with Mother's Pride - get the freezer stacked with Hovis. I can't begin to imagine what effect a *two-hunderd* *per* *cent* increase in the price of bread will have on the global economy, but at least now I know why the place is called fucking 'More'...


L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob




xxx
Bob

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Madcap in the Attic...

Put Bob in your i-Pod....






L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob



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