Just finished reading Oscar Wilde’s `The Portrait of Dorian Gray’ and like any other great piece of literature it’s going to take me a while to digest the bulk of the ideas contained within– but I’ll give a few initial impressions anyway.

For a start, I think Wilde succeeds superlatively well in giving sophisticated voice to the aesthetic and moral sentiments underpinning a certain `aristocratic’ worldview, at least in the guise under which it held sway over much of late Victorian English nobility.

This was a worldview held together by a clear notion of the limits of the role of the nobility in instilling moral purpose: namely by the idea that although the gentry had an important duty to maintain a facade of conventional moral propriety as an example to the rest of society, it needn’t go beyond the surface appearance of such. For in this view morality was nothing more than a means of imposing order and stability on a savage and chaotic mass and therefore need not detain those whose role it was to oversee this rabble.

So that while the `proper’ conventions should be (must be) adhered to on all the `appropriate’ occasions, the preservation of an outward appearance of rectitude was in itself sufficient to maintain overall moral order and to fulfil the exemplary role assumed by the upper classes. Indeed, the whole elaborate, ritualistic, system of etiquette, in which these conventions were embodied, served to distinguish class and good breeding and had grand aesthetic value in itself (much like the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church with which Wilde along with so many other late 19th century decadents were enamoured).

In place of any simplistic, bourgeois, sense of obligation to commonly understood notions of ethics or moral obligation was a commitment to the perfectibility of experience through the arts and through bodily pleasure. Correspondingly debauchery and excess was to be tolerated, and even implicitly encouraged, as a sign of worldliness and refinement – as long as it were done discreetly so that there was never any open lapse in proceedings such as would breech decorum and cause scandal.

To inhabit this dual world of masks and shifting roles where the real thrill lay in committing outrages by night and cosily resuming one’s lofty public office by day meant taking part in a very cynical game. But this is the world so utterly embraced by Dorian Gray, the young aristocrat who thanks to the mysterious workings of some occult mechanism (perhaps something as simple as Noel Edmond’s cosmic ordering) takes on the ability to inhabit a further dual role: both as a beguiling object of desire, an idol and muse, and as a predatory libertine, hungry for pleasure and experience and resolutely callous to the consequences. For Dorian Gray discovers that he has become immune from the ravages of sin and time, and can pursue his depravities free from any outward physical blemish — indefinitely.

The only catch is that while his own beauty remains undiminished, the ruinous effects of his lifestyle start to work themselves on to the lifelike portrait of Gray caught at the peak of his youthful grace – the very portrait which incites him into make his fervent prayer that the effects of the passage of time on his dazzling looks might be stayed.

But this seems no catch at all. Once he has hidden the portrait away beyond the reach of prying eyes, fate itself seems to take a hand in protecting Gray from the terrible consequences of his actions: at one point his youthful visage itself stays the hand of his would be murderer, a young sailor hell bent on avenging Gray’s mistreatment of his sister – for the man who wronged his sister all those years would not be this young.

The wonder of the book, in my opinion, lies in the irresistible brilliance of Lord Henry’s epigrams, dispensed as effortlessly as from the lips of some wizened Eastern sage. And with their utter contempt for the artless, sincere and ugly, set in opposition to the pursuit of beauty and pleasure for their own sake free from any self-imposed ethical inhibitions and society’s dreary pieties, Wilde perfectly distils the essence of the aristocratic ethic mentioned above. Lord Henry’s teasing paradoxes are – along with an unnamed book which Lord Henry gives him to read – enough to seduce Dorian from his initial youthful earnestness on to the path of amorality and physical excess.

Gray takes greedy advantage of the license offered both by his agelessness and by his prominent social standing, and rather understandably his arrogance begins to snowball quite quickly. He thinks he can get away with anything – and he does, leaving behind him a trail of broken lives, and at least one corpse. He pays no mind to the necessity for discretion and reputation so that his name becomes blacker and blacker — he’s still invited to some of the best parties though. Finally, it is his arrogance, which has now attained to gargantuan proportions, that leads him onto his final act of destruction, the one that proves fatal. So that the book seems to be saying that Gray is not up to the demands conferred upon him by his kind of immortality, that perhaps no mere human being is – and that in the end our ideals should always be unobtainable.

I’ll always love the Cribs because of that one line: “A year’s a long time/you’re doing nothing with your life”. I’m not sure what that means in the context of the song. But since the rest of the song is a withering put down of the vast rump of their peers, insincere, generic indie band fodder and loser scensters, it’s safe to assume it wasn’t quite meant as the self-directed lament for lost time I originally took it as; seems to be more of an attack on insincerity and vapidity. But I like isolating that one line when I listen to the song, there’s just something about the way that Ryan Jarman spits it out with a mixture disgust and pity.

You always cherish songs or lyrics that seem to speak directly to you, and that for one reason or another attach themselves to some emotionally raw period of time– even if you’ve picked up on something that isn’t really there. I really wasted a lot of time when I was younger, spent more than a year, indeed more than two years, when I really was “doing nothing with my life”, bound up in myself and shut off from everything at a time when I should have been at the peak of my strength, both mentally and physically, when I should have been going out with my friends and being young and care free. Everything went to waste, all of it. That whole period of time was a sad stasis for me during which I effectively accomplished nothing, a big messy blot on my chronology which I find especially galling now that I’m almost up to my third decade and am just beginning to appreciate what a precious commodity youth is.

The first time I saw Ryan Jarman on TV on Never Mind the Buzzcocks (and this was before I’d heard a single note of theirs) I thought he was a total poseur, one of those hipster wankers that the Cribs are always harping on about in their songs. My immediate reaction was to assume his whiney, effete Northern accent was a put on. In fact his whole awkward, foppish manner, the bored adolescent slouch, the slurred `couldn’t care less’ delivery, came across as just so much posturing. So, I reasoned, there’s probably not much more to their music either. Just another group I can dismiss without doing them the courtesy of actually listening to their frantic, gormless attempts at ripping off the Libertines or whoever.

How wrong I was. All it took was one viewing of their `naked lady prancing around mischeviously as the band plays on impervious’ video for `Men’s Needs’, during which I noticed that, you know while the girl is clearly the main attraction here the music’s pretty damn good too, in fact it’s really good.

And that wasn’t a fluke. Mirror Kissers, the next video of theirs I came across, a kind of ADHD indie take on A-ha’s Take on Me, had no nudity whatsoever. But the song was brilliant, even listening to it now there’s a wonder in it for me; it still gives me the same gut level twist I always get when I hear something that makes me realise why I fell in love with this kind of music in the first place, that makes it thrilling again. It’s not just that the Cribs had taken a sound that by this point has been done almost to death, and made it sound so fresh and invigorating, it was the electric potential they had that you could hear and that you could see as they performed in the video, the promise of so much more to come.

Their album `Mens Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever’ I played over and over again, something I rarely do anymore. I find it hard to just listen to albums as albums anymore, and can usually only stand to play a few songs from most records at any one time so little patience do I now have for the studied superficiality of so much that’s out there today. But `Mens Needs…’ drew me in, their songs were fiery and honest, and I never felt short changed just playing the whole thing through. I wish I’d gone to see them when they had toured this album though, they played a few gigs @ Rock City back when I lived within walking distance of it.

I haven’t yet bought their newest one the one with Johnny Marr on it. I haven’t even downloaded it like I would have done till recently just to hear if it was worth buying a physical copy. I did what has rapidly started to become a habit for me and streamed it off Spotify. I love Spotify just because it lets you to listen to music without having to make the comittment of money or disc/physical space, without having to subject yourself to the tyranny of the radio playlist to hear something; it makes music even more disposable than it was before. Oh yeah and on top of that it’s really fucking convenient too. Plus yeah with downloading much as I tried to avoid or ignore it there was always that residual guilt over the fact that you were short changing the people who made the music.

Anyway back to the new one, the hooks aren’t as immediate as before, the pace and tempo have been slowed down, I think it needs a few more listens.

I have an awful confession to make: I think I may be falling out of love with music. It’s been quite a gradual process over the last few years, becoming more obvious since I moved to Nottingham in 2007. But try as I might I can no longer deny it. Maybe it’s just that I’m older now and I’ve grown out of my prior infatuation with music or I’m getting jaded about everything.

The worst thing now is to compare my current mood of spent passion with a few years ago when I had a desperate almost pathological dependency on certain records. Records which I absolutely relied upon to lift me out of my despondency or gloom, out of myself when being myself wasn’t too much fun. All the time I was infatuated with a song I would treat it like it held some kind of essential truth about whatever was going on with me at the time, to which I had to keep referring back incessantly; I was always conscious of just how music was a mood altering substance for me.

I had phases when I latched onto different records or bands or musicians, leeching off as much emotional sustenance as I could from them and then dropping them. My nervous reliance would eventually wear itself out dropping from its initial intensity, through different stages till it reached a kind of bored indifference – most of the music I was obsessed with about 10 years ago I can take or leave now. There is a roll call of names: the Beatles, the Black Dog, the Aphex Twin, Suede, the Pixies, John Fahey, Neko Case, Coil, Current 93, the Smiths, Van Dyke Parks, Love, Built to Spill, the Go Betweens, Josef K, Shack, Elliott Smith, the Wildhearts, Richard Thompson, the Afghan Whigs Galaxie 500…It was an unhealthy lecherous relationship that I had with music. But I would always discover some new artist or album to rekindle the previous excitement once I had grown weary of a current favourite or even a whole genre of music. There would always be a replacement, even the Replacements.

Right from the off, from when I started seriously getting into music, it was never a communal thing for me. Listening to music was almost exclusively a solitary pleasure, like onanism it was something I got most out of alone and secluded in my room. The few times I ventured out from my sanctuary to a live gig I felt awkward and uncomfortable. I would go alone, because I had no friends, and just stand self-conscious near the front feeling my bladder filling up, and unwilling to pass all the way through the crowd to go to the toilet.

As a kid I followed the NME (this was in the mid 90s just before it became completely unreadable) and kept an eye out for whichever bands were being hyped up as the brightest and best. A little later I started to consciously make more of an effort to seek out music I thought might impress my peers; but I soon enough discovered they didn’t care what obscure unlistenable rubbish I pestered them with, and that my musical tastes did nothing to endear me to them (precious little did actually – I was too far gone into my personal weirdness at that point).

See, I’d been labouring under the belief that the music you listened to spoke profoundly for who you were, just as much a matter of identity as the clothes you wore or the company you kept — and for a lot of folk, music became the entry into a whole new cultural, tribal affiliation. So since it was such an important constituent of your public persona, maybe even the key to a whole lifestyle, you had to really work at your taste in music, cultivate it and filter out all the shite that stood out from the rest, so that it was all seamless and fitted in neatly with the rest of your posturing.

But that didn’t work out for me – I couldn’t use my musical acumen to compensate for my many asocial defects – so I abandoned most of my prior extra-musical criteria when it came to choosing what I listened to. Instead I decided that I would just follow my gut and seek out whatever gave me the most pleasure. So that the realisation that I impressed nobody became a liberating one and I resolved to spurn the shallow dictates of musical trends and fashions. Actually this turned out to be problematic for me. As the music became a more and more intimate thing for me, more of an indulgence, it increasingly served to reinforce my already strong inclinations towards introversion and solitude.

Overall it seemed to work out alright, I could listen to Coldplay, Limp Bizkit, Orson and other fun insincere throwaway shite all day – though there was plenty of piles of steaming insincere shit that I stayed away from because it was no fun at all – and I didn’t need to pretend that I was doing it ironically since I’d given up evangelising about my music tastes: so if no one cared about the cool stuff I listened to why the fuck should I be self conscious about my “guilty pleasures”. No one cared about my music tastes full stop so fuck ‘em all.

Of course I couldn’t totally escape the influence of trend makers and hype merchants when it came to seeking out music to listen to, but I thought I was doing alright. Actually turns out I wasn’t too far off prevailing trends: the clamour to reappraise each and every musician who’d made anything halfway listenable any time during the last 50 years without regard to the intervening layers of critical orthodoxy coincided, perhaps not coincidently with my own such attempts.

But at the same time — and I’d kind of realised this before but hadn’t properly taken it to heart — a lot of what makes rock music so compelling is bound to its essential newness, to the ephemeral, disposability of it all. That’s the nature of the beast. It’s the statement that’s being made in the here and now, which will always be tied to some particular here and now as it spins away into a hazy past, that gives or that gave ferocious life to so much of popular music. As joyous and wonderful as it is to listen to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ it can’t ever capture the thrill of hearing it when it first came out, and that impact of knowing how much of an almighty sneer Dylan was cocking at his audience’s expectations; similarly you can’t distil the wonder of the Velvets first LP into a pure aural experience separate from its seedy black and white New York milieu.

This music is *about* a certain time and place, it derived from a joy and recklessness of feeling that came from tramping down prior generations’ staid conventions and obsolete thought patterns, in a word it is disrespectful. Rock would be nothing, a heartless and soulless shell, without the sneering postures and attitudes of rebellion, the guttural promises of dissolution spat out in the face of an uptight establishment. I mean, it just isn’t Mozart or Mahler — whatever its pretentions it can never have the same depth and it will never evoke the same breadth and range of emotions that “classical” music does, so it doesn’t have that going for it. But then modern popular music rarely ever really attains or even attempts to attain to the timelessness of folk music: precisely because at its core it is antagonistic towards its antecedents. The more it moves away from that spirit of nihilism the more tedious and artificial it becomes. The more it becomes a part of the same establishment it once strove to scorn and provoke — and ultimately the less it means anything. It *should* be music for outsiders by outsiders.

Because in the end, the clothes and the haircuts these fuckers wear, their music videos, the legions of girls/boys they like to fuck and the drugs they gorge themselves on — all the debaucheries and the subsequent mock penitence or the getting religion — each aspect of the now clichéd rock mythos is an essential part of the whole performance, each is integral to understanding the art, to understanding why this music is so compelling and so awesome. This is why Bowie was such a genius; he understood all of this and then consciously, artfully, encompassed it in his art. But in the midst of all the pandemonium and the trips to rehab and the coke and the groupies you can’t neglect the music for too long – unless of course you’re a genius and have already delivered some scant bare proof of your genius to the world, but despite the widespread empty bandying around of the term in praise geniuses are seldom to be found in nature.

And that’s why Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse are such cunts, they got one little taste of the adulation and the worship and the attendant lifestyle, all the shit that came from heading up the zeitgeist, and ended up just dive bombing into their own personal horror movies—and FORGOT ABOUT MAKING ANY KILLER TUNES. You can only indulge these idiots for so long, sooner or later we get tired of the cheap voyeuristic vomit laden thrills they keep offering up and then they need to start coming up with the musical goods.

OK maybe it’s a lot more nuanced than what I’ve just spouted in the last few paragraphs, there’s jazz, soul, R&B, various hybrids of different musics that aren’t necessarily focused on iconoclasm, but I still think that in the end the spirit of defiance should be and once was the engine of popular music post the second world war—and yes that rebelliousness was manipulated from the start but there was still some substance to it. So anyway I guess my mission to extract as much joy as I could from the annals of recorded popular music, to listen to records on their own merits divorced from the immediate circumstances of their creation or inspiration, missed the point by a pretty large margin and I was doomed to failure from the start.

And then the more music I bought, downloaded, streamed, the more I gorged myself on just on the process of just gathering stuff that I could listen to later, the more I just got bored of the actual music. A lot of stuff I listened to and if it didn’t have that immediate visceral impact the first time, I would just discard it and never bother listening to it again. Of course there were records that absolutely shone through amongst all the tiresomeness and that gave me much succour. But these were few and far between, and I was demanding more and more from those I did manage to find. And then there is no contemporary music that I could really get excited over, lose myself in again – I keep hoping there will be and I’ll get reeled back into being a proper fan. Of course I love bands like the Cribs, the Fleet Foxes, and the Twilight Sad and I’ve really started trying to keep up with new music again. But I can never escape the feeling with these newer groups that they’re all retreading old ground that’s already been retread at least once before already. Take the two CDs from my collection that I’m currently most enamoured with: Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, and the Inner City compilation “Good Life: The Best of Inner City”. This music was created around 20 years old, it is part of the sound track of 1989, and yet it could have been released last week because sonically it hasn’t dated at all. And yet in 1988 or 1989 pretty much everything released 20 years prior with a few exceptions sounded *old* and of its time to those ears.

In fact what have been the main musical innovations of the 00’s apart from everything getting more shite?

Essentially the big revolution that has taken place has had nothing to do with how music actually sounds or which new genres have sprang into being and everything to do with how music is formatted and distributed, and the CD fighting a pathetic last stand for the physical formats against MP3s and downloading – and consequently everything to do with how easy it is for folk to take a hold of music (thieve it) and share it amongst themselves and thereby elude the grasp of the bloated and complacent music industry. And this has changed how we listen to recorded music, but more especially how we value it, first of all financially and then spiritually.

It’s a bland truism that for most things (aside from perhaps crack cocaine) the easier they are to come by the less you value them. For music certainly scarcity lent whole albums and bands and even genres (e.g., Krautrock) a whole other aura of seductiveness, being elusive and mysterious upped their cache no end amongst those with even the barest aspirations to being trendy. But then I can also relate too many occasions when I bought an album or a compilation for the sole purpose of hearing just one song as against the fact that I’d read in the NME or something that rest of the record wasn’t up to much; and my shelves are now cluttered with this kind of stuff. Nowadays I don’t bother listening and making my own mind up on the whole album. I can avoid opening myself up to chance, I just find that one song I want to hear on pirate bay or spotify and play the fuck out of it. There was sheer joy to be had picking through racks and stacks of dusty CDs in charity shops or scouring badly lit indie record shops (I never got into vinyl so I was never cool enough to rifle through boxes of LPs or singles) in anticipation of finding something rare by a band or a musician you saw namedropped a few times in some old interview, that might potentially open up a whole new genre of music for you, or finding a song you’d caught the tail end of on the radio and which was never played again, the thrill of the find often eclipsed the actual pleasure to be got from listening to the music itself. Usually you found fuck all, but you were sustained by the memories of glorious past finds. Now compare that with the scenario where the name of a song pops up in your head and a few minutes later you’re streaming it on spotify, like I just did just now with the song Encyclopedi-ite by Sammy.

And talking of abundance now music from every corner of the world, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australia, has become readily accessible and most probably has some kind of market outside of its previously limited geographical confines. Also too the archives are continually being turned out in the quest for more reissue fodder, and we’re all hungry to discover neglected masterpieces, to what had been dismissed before when it felt like there was a surplus of good music around – and all this on top of a music scene which, although it may not be thriving, is still producing enough intriguing music that you shouldn’t really dismiss it out of hand. In the end this all leads to a surfeit of choice, which can be kind of wearying – for me at least.

And of course, the other thing that has really fucked music up has been the total triumph of corporate cynicism, the co-option of everything, giving us the apparent paradox that the more money flows into an art form via corporate sponsorship the less everything is worth artistically. Obviously the men in suits have always had a major hand in things. It would be foolish to suggest there was ever a time when they weren’t standing somewhere off to the side pulling the strings and gleefully manipulating what was supposedly a spontaneous expression of youthful spirit and clamour sacrificing art to the profit motive. Equally it’s impossible to deny that the marriage of business and creativity was ultimately responsible for some of the most wondrous, life affirming, superlative music ever recorded.

But the fact is that, whereas before there was some kind of struggle going on between the dictates of the bottom line in opposition to the imperatives of art, that battle is now truly over and was decided quite some time back squarely in favour of mammon. There were times when the corporations hadn’t totally consolidated their grip on music when musicians had money thrown at them and were still allowed a lot of leeway, with the understanding that sooner or later the record labels would recoup their money – without marketing everything to fuck and without the demand for instant monetary gratification. The Beatles, Bowie, the Stones all were products of this kind of latitude. Turns out that all that time the corporations were busy working away, figuring out the optimal ways to manipulate youth culture to suit their own nefarious ends.

For example corporate sponsorship today is in effect a parasite leeching off of the credibility and the spirit of a youth culture, that once seemed to stand for more than the latest make of mobile phone, or clothes line or alcoholic beverage but which no longer can claim to. A subculture that once flowered precisely because it offered up an alternative to mainstream purgatory is now fatally compromised.

there are some records that are food to me,
when im spiritually hungry they feed me,
copper blue by sugar is one,
entymology by josef k,
twilight sad
gregory isaacs
good life – the best of inner city,
so pure + pristine, slick + futuristic,
rocket from the crypt
calenture – the triffids,
basket of light- pentangle
tim by the replacements.
sixteen lovers lane – go betweens
kicked it in the sun built to spill
daydream nation sonic youth
erasure
neko case fox confessor
i can put some records on and
well they just
alter my mood instantly
just like drugs
but eventually i suck all the emotional sustenance out of them
there are some records that meant so much to me
and I can’t even listen to them anymore
i gorged myself
i was reckless
spanners by the black dog
doolittle by the pixies
treinanko nainy diabate
the yellow princess by john fahey
waterpistol by shack
imperium current 93
horse rotorvator coil
phuq wildhearts
music can’t be just some casual thing
it speaks to hurts that are inexpressible
it speaks to a lack, an incompleteness
u get to pour urself into the spaces it offers

I remember when I first started coming to the chat room. It’s definitely been over 10 or 11 years now. At that time I didn’t have a computer at home and the concept of the internet was still essentially a novelty. It wasn’t inevitable that it would become as all pervasive as it has, that it would have such a dramatic impact on the way we shop, listen to music, what we watch, or how we take in the news – on pretty much everything. Those were innocent days.

I was in my first year of uni and hadn’t really got the hang of making friends (still haven’t), so I spent a lot of my time on campus hunched over a PC terminal “surfing” the web in the quaint terminology of yesteryear. I stumbled onto disinfo.com by accident, following a link from the black dog website (the black dog were an influential techno collective whose music I was obsessed with for a few years).

I liked the content on disinfo; it was my kind of thing, since by then I was really taken by the idea that “official”, “consensual” reality was more than a bit of a sham. I’d started reading stuff by Chomsky and a few other countercultural figures at that stage and the articles written by Richard Metzger, Alex Burns and others discussing them and their ideas piqued my interest; I also started commenting on the forums pretty quickly. It took me a bit longer to click on the chat button I’d noticed at the corner of the page. But I eventually did (BTW from now on I use ‘disinfo’ mainly to refer to the chatroom and not the main site).

I remember the first nick I used: ‘David’. It was a friend’s name. I was a bit hesitant about calling myself anything too crazy, like my own name , because I really didn’t know what to expect. But what I found that first time got me hooked and kept me hooked till the room’s untimely demise 6 or 7 years later.

I had, or so I thought at the time, stumbled into an online underworld frequented by an exotic array of misfits who seemed to be constantly in the midst of tempestuous ordeals with drugs, sex, and magick – and who were at the same time pouring all this sordid stuff into this little black chat applet box for my delectation. This shit they were talking about was way beyond my narrow and mundane life experience.

The allure of the chatroom at that point was obvious for a wee eejit like me who’d lived a sheltered life up till then. These were artists, creative people — musicians, writers, poets, philosophers, scientists, scholars, designers — with a profound scorn for the banal and the commonplace; fired up by the possibilities unleashed by iconoclastic visionaries Robert Anton Wilson and Terrence McKenna they aimed for the poets’ systematic derangement of the senses.

Inevitably, given the concentration of artistic types, these were also deeply emotionally unstable people with often severe mental health issues; we had at least two cases of diagnosed schizophrenia and one of advanced multi personality disorder. But fuck it, we tried to accommodate serious personality issues whenever we could; we were none of us under the misapprehension that we were normal or that we fitted in — although neither was the abnormality contrived or just an act. It flowed naturally, unfettered by the niceties or conventions of other online spaces or indeed of real life. (But it was also true that near the end of the room’s existence the mentally ill people had begun nudging out the interesting people more and more.)

On a good day/night all this of this would come together in a terrific surge of chaos and pandemonium. The result was a hot cauldron of incoherent profanity and semi-coherent profundity; garbled, conspiracy laden drug talk, alcoholism, and psychosis, mixed in with esoteric symbolism, sadistic bullying, and of course copious amounts of cybersex — and to top it all off the inevitable descent into pure noise: flaming and flooding. It was a thrilling and frustrating introduction to the potential of the chatroom as a theatre, as an inspired arena of performance.

When things were quieter I had the opportunity to take part in slightly more lucid discussions on philosophy and literature, names would arise, authors I just had to read, musicians I just had to hear, films I had to watch. To a large extent the course of my intellectual life for the next 10 years would be determined in this forum, informed largely by the shame I felt at not having read Jung, Marshall McLuhan, R D Laing, James Joyce, Timothy Leary, the I ching, PD Ouspensky, Aleister Crowley, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Wittgenstein, etc, et fucking cetera.

You will have noticed that I’ve been using “we” when referring to the disinfo chatters. It was a tough slog and it took a wee while but I eventually became accepted as part of the group, eventually settling upon the moniker “Fletch”. To start with I was a bit antagonistic toward the regulars. This was partly due to inevitable teenage “issues”, but it wasn’t just my spotty insolence at play here; the regulars around at that early stage weren’t the most friendly to “newbies”. The mute button function and private rooms were for sure routinely abused to exclude all but the familiar names, and this exclusivity caught my ire, but it also drew me in.

Perversely I remember this as being the most exciting and edifying period in the chatroom’s history, according to my acquaintance with it of course, and it would set the standard of discussion and interaction by which I measured the room’s subsequent decline; they were halcyon days. And it soon became obvious that the reticence in accepting newcomers was a (misguided) attempt at preserving the beautiful dynamic that these people had built up amongst themselves –they weren’t just being crabby bastards for the sake of it. There was a feeling that you had to *earn* your way into the circle, to prove you weren’t some slavering dunderhead neophyte.

That semi-stranglehold weakened after a number of the older regulars started to leave and there came a concomitant influx of newer people. With the make up of the room having shifted, the atmosphere became much more tolerant and I was able to insert myself as a regular without too much hassle. Then when I had my home connection, I got into the habit of staying up into all hours of the night chatting on disinfo, sometimes in a frenzy of typing, but mostly wide-eyed, my retinas frazzled from sitting in front of my screen in expectation that something interesting would happen.

At its best the room gave me a sense of group belonging which I had rarely found elsewhere. Maybe I should’ve switched off the PC more often and gone off to look for people around me who shared my interests, at university, in my locality. But at that time I was too bound up in and constricted by my shyness and self consciousness; chatting on disinfo was the path of least resistance when it came to any form of meaningful human contact. And at least on disinfo I was bound to find fellow travellers, right?

The decline of disinfo was gradual. Like I said by the time I really became a regular the room was suffering from the departure of some of the older regulars. But it was still pretty active and there were great conversations still to be had thanks to the interesting folk attendant. These were the familiar nicks upon whose entrance I would light up in anticipation: mouse, horus, alfie, fuzz, 23, sappho, alt, mamen, spirare cogita, zany, erica; a motley bunch of characters amongst whom you could count a wizened and sagacious Dutch astrologer; a prickly, dogmatic feminist academic; a hilariously eccentric Spanish housewife; a pompous, pedantic goateed savant who was also a graphic designer; and a precocious young writer who was going to devise a new quantum information theory and who cited Georges Bataille as his literary antecedent.

Again after a time, these regulars began to drift away, their appearances becoming less frequent. The room became more and more barren as fewer new people took their places and decided to accept the creative challenge of filling that drab empty black and grey box with exciting words and ideas; and so the momentum of the room lurched to a heavy crawl. It also seemed that the idea of chatting online in a real time forum in which you were apt to meet a variety of new people and to be challenged by a whole host of new and uncomfortable thoughts, ideas and personalities – as opposed to the less arbitrary pastime of messaging people you knew or kind of knew – had become passé. Web 2.0 was shinier and had more spaces for you to type in your credit card details but it had lost a great deal of its soul (although I believe people were bellyaching about something similar ten years ago when I’d started coming online)

I stopped coming to the chatroom for a year, 2003-04. On my return the room had undergone a profound transformation. So many of the people I known before had offskied, and these were regulars who had been there since the beginning. The character of the chat was markedly different from anything I had known before — now much, much diminished. Weirdly, it was around this time that I started getting to know the three disinfo chatters who I would end up being closest to — and who I would come to consider real friends as opposed to just people who gave good conversation: Lynne, Claire, and Rev Spook. But for the rest around at that time they were, almost to a man or woman, obnoxious dimwits.

The room had then hit one of its fallow periods, and perhaps, yes, it did happen to be a particularly bleak one; but it was never in so much misery that it had to be put out of it – it was still viable. However, the next time the site was given one of its periodic overhauls they left out the chat function as surplus to requirements, leaving so many of us homeless. Indeed, the good people at disinfo.com seemed to have been scarcely aware of the disparate and (broadly speaking) loyal community that had made the chatroom its focal point over the course of almost a decade — and when they were made aware they didn’t particularly care.
But we weren’t gonna have this.

Spook organised an online petition. We got 59 signatures, which was something at least. And to be fair they listened…and came back and tried to fob us off with this shitty little insult of a dedicated meebo room, which we soon gave up to the bots and the 5 year olds which comprise meebo’s core audience.

Quite a few of us had migrated over to the irc chatroom affiliated with deoxy.com. Maybe it was the next best thing to having our old room back; certainly some of my favourite people were regulars there or at least occasionally made an appearance. But…no. The monotony of the chat at deoxy made me despair: whereas we’d had our fair share of drooling drugged up loons at disinfo, talk about drugs didn’t absolutely saturate the conversation like it does at deoxy, to the exclusion of anything else. Start a conversation on philosophy, art, or heaven forbid, politics on deoxy– and if it isn’t a prelude to some kind of description of getting stoned or of how you’re preparing to get stoned, or a real time account of being stoned then it’s just utter futility to expect anything approaching enthusiasm: merely earthly concerns hold little interest for these folk.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s a nice place to visit sometimes, an amusing aviary crowded with exotic breeds their glittering rainbow plumage always on full display; but it’s not somewhere I can personally tolerate for long.

So what now? I had given up on the whole thing, finally consigning it to the past. But it seems Rev Spook had other ideas and that there may well be life in the community yet over at revspook.com: there’s talk of a decent dedicated chatroom, and lots of other cool stuff. Maybe we can revive some of the old spirit again. We won’t have what we had then but perhaps we can have something better.

A few years back I, like so many others since its posthumous publication over 60 years ago, fell under the spell of Peter Demian Ouspensky’s ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, the author’s meticulous, yet captivating account of his years of training under the mystical tutelage of the enigmatic, slightly sinister Mr G — Ouspensky’s way of referring to the Greco-Armenian magus G I Gurdjieff. Having found a copy in my local library and been suitably intrigued, I had to take it out, quickly devouring the whole book in a few short bursts of concentrated reading. I was completely thrilled by it. It was like nothing I’d read before, offering up tantalising glimpses into a mysterious self-contained teaching which promised a direct route into higher realms of consciousness, ultimately enabling those fearless enough to take it an escape from the mundane world of mechanical suffering to which, it claimed, we were chained by our normal perceptions.

These were grand claims, and any charlatan could have made them, and yet Ouspensky who gave up everything, his career, his reputation, and ultimately his mental well being, to follow Gurdjieff didn’t easily fit the mould of gullible aspirant. He was a sceptical, and extremely intelligent man, one who had been unfazed by the exotic outer trappings of the mystic East. He had visited India looking for a route to the miraculous, and yet came away disappointed, finding little that was concrete beyond vague promises and hints of the esoteric and transcendental –or at least little that someone who so closely identified himself with Western science and philosophy could easily latch onto. But Gurdjieff offered something that Ouspensky found irresistible so much so that he overcame the many misgivings that he had about him, his personality, and his methods of teaching. Misgivings that never went away and which would ultimately lead many years later to the final schism between the two.

Gary Lachman’s ‘In Search of PD Ouspensky’ is a biography of Ouspensky, a figure who had up till now had pretty much always been relegated to the status of supporting player, struggling to move out under the grand shadow cast by Gurdjieff’s lead man, something Lachman sets out to rectify. According to Lachman, Ouspensky deserves to be seen as an important thinker and occult theorist in his own right — and he makes his case well: it is abundantly clear that Ouspensky did not deserve to fall prey to the indignity of having his reputation reduced to that of a mere vessel for Mr G’s teachings.

Well before his fateful meeting with Gurdjieff, Ouspensky had made his name as a renowned writer who had commanded audiences of thousands at his lectures, and his Tertium Organum, an extremely important treatise on the ‘fourth dimension’, was a major influence on the Russian and European avant gardes of the early 20th century. Indeed it was Ouspensky’s reputation as a successful and respected expositor of the occult which likely convinced Gurdjieff to make the furtive moves he seems to to have made toward netting this valuable and illustrious potential pupil. It was a strategy which ended up paying dividends; indeed Lachman argues that without Ouspensky’s help Gurdjieff would scarcely have been able to spread his teachings beyond the small informal bands of followers he had gathered around him prior to meeting Mr O.

Lachman does a commendable job of shedding light on Ouspensky’s early life and rehabilitating his standing as a writer by arguing for the value of his pre-Gurdjieff work, work which Ouspensky himself later denounced. He then moves his focus on to Ouspensky’s time with Gurdjieff — although obviously he couldn’t hope to convey the sense of excitement and discovery as effectively or with as much lucidity as Ouspensky’s own account — and their final schism. The fact was that the more Ouspensky studied and practised Gurdjieff’s system, the stronger became his conviction that he had finally stumbled onto the way into the miraculous he had been after for so many years. So why the split?

Indeed after the split and after having established himself as a teacher of Gurdjieff’s system, Ouspensky lived out his later years a broken man, lonely and beset by doubt and uncertainy — the poetic “radiance” of his younger years replaced by a stiff taciturn outer shell which he seldom allowed to soften — so that Lachman has to ask, would it have been better if Ouspensky had never met Gurdjieff?

Ultimately this leads back to the question, never far from the surface whenever one encounters Gurdjieff, namely, was there more to all this than an extremely charismatic conman plying his trade on some influential and highly credulous people using advanced techniques of psychological manipulation? And I suspect there was and is more to it and that a rigid, unyielding skepticism in this case is akin to a willful blindness. But, nevertheless, between the two reassuring extremes of the positivist’s easy dismissal and the devotee’s wholesale suspension of critical judgment there is a vast territory with very few signposts.

Lachman attempts to shed light on what must be by its very nature for the most part forever occluded and beyond rational clarification, namely Ouspensky’s relation with Gurdjieff and his system. There was something there, some kind of power that compelled Ouspensky, and others, sophisticated folk whose naivety is similarly hard to presume or take for granted, to give up everything to commit themselves to this Master. As he progressed through the system, Ouspensky was absolutely convinced that he was beginning to achieve genuine results: that Gurdjieff’s claims were starting to become manifest.

But then like most people who read Miraculous I was deeply puzzled when it came to Ouspensky’s account of his break with Gurdjieff (but not with Gurdjieff’s teachings). For me ‘Miraculous’ was ‘about’ Gurdjieff’s system, Ouspensky own role was simply as an excellent expositor who had been successful in his account (as Gurdjieff himself later testified) precisely because he was able to refrain from bringing too much of himself into it.

As it was Gurdjieff put the Guru-disciple/teacher-student relationship at the core of his teachings, giving it a singular pre-eminence as the sole means through which one was able to obliterate the mechanical self. You cannot ‘awaken’ by yourself, he taught, because it is impossible to get anywhere by dint of individual willpower alone. So that in order to achieve any kind of result, it was necessary to completely, unquestioningly surrender your faith and your free will to another: to lay yourself prostrate at the feet of one whose authority derived from his or her achievements on the path. This entails an absolute obedience, a severe form of spiritual slavery, that runs counter to all our humanist cultural inclinations, as it also did in Ouspensky’s time. For you must never question the validity or wisdom of the Guru’s command, no matter how absurd or counterintuitive, since all such doubts and hesitations invariably arise from a benighted level of understanding. Gurdjieff in particular taught that the normal, unenlightened, man’s intuitions are almost always incorrect.

Gurdjieff openly boasted of using his students as guinea pigs, and was happy to let it be known that they were merely a means for him to achieve his own hidden ends, treating them with a corresponding disdain. Of course if you came even some way towards accepting his claims to spiritual authority then you could not judge him or his behaviour using conventional criteria– even if it was impossible to escape the feeling that he was abusing his power. But Gurdjieff had a zenlike disregard for convention and consistency, making an absolute virtue of contradiction and abrogating prior claims to an extent pathological by the standards of normal behaviour. This left the way open for more enterprising and strong willed students to take the initiative and circumvent the necessity for total submission to Gurdjieff’s stated commands.

According to Lachman, it was Ouspensky’s inflexible adherence to Gurdjieff’s teachings, even after their break, that ultimately proved his downfall. He had taken on Gurdjieff’s criticisms of his volubility, and his extrovert tendencies as a barrier to the work completely to heart — which led to the dour aloofness and unapproachability for which he became notorious in later years. And Ouspensky stuck to the system literally up to his final days, unwilling to admit that somewhere along the way his approach to it had become ‘mechanical’ – which was precisely what the system was supposed to overcome.

Later on Ouspensky who’d been convinced by Gurdjieff’s claims that his system had its origins in some secret mystical school, became more and more preoccupied with the idea that he might be able establish contact with them. He thought that his former intermediary Gurdjieff had gone awry somewhere along the way and it was precisely because had lost Mr G connection to this source. Consequently Ouspensky made several bids to publicise his own school in order to attract the secret brotherhood’s attention. Alas all his efforts were to no avail which just added to the mounting sense of failure and decline of his later years. As is the Russian way, he turned to drink to ease his misery and loneliness, and his body quickly deteriorated under the weight of this regime.

It is hard to feel anything but sorrow and pity for this broken man who’d tasted so much intellectual glory and success during his younger days in the heady intellectual atmosphere of fin de siècle St Petersberg — a time and place that had been swept forever away by an epic tide of savagery — and having banked everything on the pursuit of enlightenment under the guidance of one man was unable to admit to himself that he’d been wrong — almost up till the very end. At the time of his demise, the contradictory accounts of which Lachman can do little to disentangle, he seems to have accepted that the system had failed him.

Lachman describes the strange parallel between one of Ouspensky’s later life and one of his earlier works, a novel in which the central protagonist, Ivan, is given the chance to relive past moments in his life over again, and most crucially to alter the course of his life to . But Ivan finds himself incapable of avoiding the same mistakes he made first time around, he is destined to mechanically repeat history. Ironically Ouspensky must have have been constantly asking himself exactly where he had gone wrong, unable or unwilling to pinpoint where he made his own mistakes.

Here’s a draft of a much longer piece I’m planning to write on my childhood — an idea that came about due to the incident I describe in what follows.

Every once in a while the urge seizes me to search online for friends I once had in a different place and a different time. Usually I just type their names into google and hope for the best — but this haphazard approach generally gets me nowhere.

The name alone is really not sufficient; even if it’s seemingly an odd name it’s never odd enough to clear away the resulting mass of ambiguity. Well, anyway during one of these periodic searches, which on this occasion I opted to conduct via facebook, I typed in the name of someone I’d known in primary school in Port Glasgow, and had last seen and heard from around 16-17 years ago.

This might not seem too long ago if you’re in your fifties or sixties, but it means a lot to someone in their twenties.

This time I got back the usual long list of contenders, but the photo second from the top was unmistakably the one I wanted. I recognised him straightaway even though close to two decades separated this worn out lived-in face in front of me from the cherubic schoolboy countenance indelibly imprinted on my memory.

I waited a couple of days before summoning up enough courage to send a message. But when I did he responded instantly and with amazement that it was me, and there followed on facebook chat that evening one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever had.

You know I always feel a sense of wonder when I think back on my primary school years, at how adult I was then and how much I thought I understood about the grown up world. And it wasn’t just me: I seem to recall the same untimely maturity in my childhood peers exemplified most of all by the surreal and ironic humour we all shared and revelled in. Or maybe it’s not that I was so precociously mature then, but that I still feel a lot like that wee boy I was then, enough to retrospectively add on to the image I have of him the few adult traits I’ve accumulated since then.

And maybe that’s why this person I was chatting to — who I will now refer to as S — didn’t come across as a stranger, as a completely different person to the one I had known as a child, even though so much had passed between us, all the tribulations of adolescence and early adulthood: the teenage anxieties, awkwardnesses and disappointments that are decisive in fashioning an adult human being.

What I’m trying to say that there was a heartening familiarity between us that I had not expected. I’d been genuinely afraid before I’d contacted him that his attitude toward me would be one of indifference and perhaps even hostility.Actually to properly appreciate what this online reunion meant to me, you probably need to understand how formative I consider those years I spent at primary school, to who I am now — how they’ve been a steady fixture in my dreams ever since I left that school in Port Glasgow.

I was born in and as a child lived mostly in Glasgow. But since my dad ran a small clothes shop (the `boutique’) in Port Glasgow, on its narrow high-street, and because he wanted to keep an eye on me and my sister, we had to commute there with him every weekday morning to attend nursery and primary school. Port Glasgow, since you’re unlikely to ever have heard of it, is a small town located close to the fringes of Glasgow on one side and is not far from the mouth of the Clyde on the other. It was superlatively well placed to take advantage of the momentous spurt in industrialisation and trade which characterised Victorian era Britain, allowing the town formerly known as Newark to bill itself as Port to the second city of the Empire — no idle boast during the Empire’s heyday.

But when that era of prosperity faded, and the shipbuilding industry which had given a living to most of Port Glasgow, speeded onto its terminal decline, the town really started to hit the skids. It’s the same old cliched sob story: as the work began to dry up so Port Glasgow fell prey to the blights of urban decay and poverty, and with those twin afflictions came the usual social maladies.

In particular Port Glasgow seemed to take to heroin particularly avidly.

During the time when I went to school there in the Eighties and early Nineties it was already well on the way to becoming the derelict junkie’s haven it is now — though it wasn’t so bad then that I as a kid wasn’t able to ignore it. Nowadays Port Glasgow as part of the small Inverclyde district along with Greenock and Gourock has now been officially classed as Scotland’s heroin capital — and trust me beating Glasgow in this particular league table is something of a feat. According to my former classmate things really began to go downhill when the IBM factory just outside the town closed making hundreds of people redundant. The effect of that and of a spate of other closures in the area was completely devastating, sucking just so much vitality out of a town which could spare next to none.

But back to me…

As a child I had really resented the fact that I had been torn away from my Glaswegian neighbourhood where I had played with kids who were, like me, second-generation Pakistani immigrants, who all looked like me, had embarrassing provincial parents like I did who they spoke Urdu to, in fact with whom I shared everything culturally — only to be transplanted to a small racially monotonous town on the banks of the Clyde to attend a school where I was the only nonwhite child. Indeed, where I had to endure taunts because of my colour and where my utter cultural difference would always serve to mark me out and create a sense of division between me and the other kids, something I never managed to bridge properly.

This feeling of apartness, between me and the children was always there — and didn’t I feel it then and don’t I still feel it now? (Don’t get me wrong I also have very fond memories of my primary school years. In some ways those were, comparatively speaking, the happiest days of my life — things began to get even worse after that )

My mother has always felt bitter at my father’s decision to school me and my sister away from our community in Glasgow; she thinks, as I do, that my experiences of that time are at the root of my introverted disposition, my shyness and my dire want of social skills. She has always suspected that in this all-white community, the hostility of the parents towards my father, the Pakistani shopkeeper, who had the effrontery to open a shop right there in the midst of them when so many were struggling to find jobs, was inevitably being passed onto their children. But my mother can also be very paranoid so I don’t know how true that is.

Funnily enough I only recently realised that most of the kids I went to school with then had distinctly Irish names and were therefore also of recently arrived immigrant stock, the effect of the Victorian boom.

I spent a good part of the 1980s having this same routine of commuting back and forth between Glasgow and Port Glasgow. Then everything changed. In 1991 my father died of cancer and although my mother heroically tried to keep the shop going for a few months, single-handedly I will add, it just wasn’t viable and she eventually gave it up. So me and my sister had to go to school back in Glasgow.

This displacement happened during the middle of my seventh and final year at primary school, and the sense I had then of unfinished business because I couldn’t be there for graduation and because after 7 years I wasn’t able to join them all in their new lives at high school was overpowering and stayed with me for years. I had felt then that I was finally getting somewhere, that I had begun to sense a much greater acceptance from my peers during my last year in Port Glasgow just before I had to leave. It was as if all I had been working on all these years, this war of attrition in which I had just started to make some headway, went into stasis and I desperately needed resolution. I didn’t get it, and I never really got over that lack of closure. So inevitably what I perceived as the landscape of my defeat was always popping up in my dreams nagging at me. My school was perched on a cliff overlooking the clyde and I remember that on sunny days when we played in the playground it would glint brightly like a jewel and sparkle over a rich cobalt blue — and almost two decades on from that this wonderful vista remains a fixture of my sleeping hours.

And that deep childhood yearning for the imagined triumph which could have been mine still haunts me to this day, although as the years pass it sinks further and further into the back of my mind, overlaid by fresher, rawer neuroses and insecurities. And that’s pretty much where it stayed for most of my conversation with S — in fact it was only after we’d stopped chatting and I was able to properly reflect on the deeper implications of what had taken place that it all began to really register.

Inevitably, we were both of us deeply curious to hear about what the other had been doing during the intervening gap of 17 years; although I was also extremely eager to learn the fate of my other primary school classmates. S assured me that he had lived an extremely eventful life.

So eventful, in fact, and so full of drink (he described his vocation at one point of his life as “piss head”), drugs, and general debauchery that he came across as — and in his recent photos had the look of — a jaded middle aged hedonist, who’d only been finally compelled to give up his lifestyle of over indulgence by the looming certainty that he was nearing the point of no return.

He had packed a good three decades worth of excess into those 17 years and, having gone as far as he could along that line, was now content to sit back with an endless supply of tales to tell and to look after his new born son; whereas I, who had barely been led astray at all, was ashamed to tell him how little I had experienced in the way of revelry and excess — or had achieved in worldly matters in compensation for my timid abstinence.

It also turned out that quite a few of the other kids I had known had got heavily into drugs, and S told me about this one guy who had been in the year above and had had a reputation as a playground bully, and who had died of an overdose years later– though I couldn’t put a face to the name.

I couldn’t believe all of what he’d been telling me about the descent of Port Glasgow into deprivation, it didn’t really scan. I mean, how could you reconcile this sordid adult world with my innocuous childhood memories?

Even if drugs had been somewhat of a problem in Port Glasgow during the 80s, our primary school was still a safe haven, nor do I recall hearing much about them second hand in or outside of the playground — and these things would have inevitably filtered down to us if drugs had had the impact they had from the 90s onwards. It was precisely because they hadn’t intruded onto my childhood world that had made it such a shock to hear about their subsequent ubiquity. And these kids I knew, they all seemed level headed, sensible (as I mentioned earlier they seemed so grown up to me then as young children) and intelligent — a lot of them were brighter than me — so I never thought that any of them would end up anything but successful young adults.

I enjoyed being imaginative and creative at primary school, priding myself on being the best at drawing and art and feeling immense pleasure at being able to use my imagination to write stories. But mathematics was my Achilles heel. I had stalled at the 3 times table and try as I might I just couldn’t learn it nor did I make much headway with the 4, 6, 7 and 8 times tables. In general I had no time for mental arithmetic — there was something too cold and abstract about mathematics for me, and this also carried over to music which was a jumble of notes with no associations to real, concrete life. My deficiency with numbers meant that I was stuck in the second bottom maths group just above the kids with learning difficulties. Also, rather embarrassingly I was probably the last person in my class to learn to read the time from a clockface.

Academically speaking I was never in the top rung, and my current attachment to academia is more a means of avoiding the real world than any kind of attempt on my part to honourany innate intellectual gifts I possess. I did my time trying to find employment in the real world and I realise now that academia is a much more forgiving environment. It had never occurred to me that out of everyone in my class I would end up being the scholarly one or that our paths would so diverge.. Neither had I expected that any of them would still be living in Port Glasgow as quite a few are: a town that promises next to nothing to any young person with even a modicum of ambition nestling in his/her breast.

This conversation — which had unleashed a steady rush of multicoloured highly charged childhood memories and emotions through my consciousness and at a pace that left me quite disoriented — went on for around an hour and a half. It ended when S had to attend to his baby son.

And I haven’t seen S online again to pick up our conversation, which is a shame because I really would like to know what happened to James Gillies.

The great Prince Paddy makes his voice heard on disinfo.com regarding their legendary chatroom(RIP) *wipes tear from eye*:

http://www.disinfo.com/content/story.php?title=To-All-Lonesome-Lost-Disinfo-Chat-Refugees—-1