Also.
Utah Saints have spent most of the last nine months attempting to rework their one and only genuine hit crossover single. The one thing they have kept from the original is the vocals, Tammy Wynette’s vocals. As you may remember, Tammy lives next door not to Alice, but to Winnie – our heroine.
Utah Saints rereleased this single at the beginning of December on their own label, Pure Trance Kommunications. Over the past three weeks this record has been steadily gaining ground in people’s hearts and climbing the charts. The record is called ‘Justified & Ancient’.
Holloway Prison.
This is a prison in London. It is a prison for female offenders. It was closed in 2017, when all crime officially came to an end. It was reopened within days after the Fall of the Age of the Internet. Two of the first offenders to be banged up in it were Yoko Ono the Younger and Winifred Lucie Atwell Smith.
Yoko Ono the Younger was charged with and found guilty of murdering Paul Harrison, aka John Lennon the Younger. She was sentenced to life imprisonment – and these days, ‘life’ means life.
Winifred Lucie Atwell Smith was charged and found guilty of aiding and abetting in this same crime, as well as the additional crime of perverting the course of justice. Winifred Lucie Atwell Smith was sentenced to ten years, with no parole.
Winnie and Yoko have been sharing a cell in Holloway for almost all of the previous nine months.
Winnie and Yoko are more than best friends for life. They are soul sisters.
Winnie suspected she was pregnant, and she is. The nine months are up. Although her waters have not broken, it is only a matter of hours.
Winnie still has no real idea who the father is or, to be more precise, how the fuck she got pregnant in the first place. She has never had any proper full penetrational sex in her life. Not even dreamt about it. For Winnie, sex had always been about violently dominating the man of her desires. Never in any way the contrary. The less consensual the better.
The crow that lands daily on the sill of Winnie and Yoko’s cell window to take a look inside has a different take on the subject. As does the fox that prowls the perimeter walls of Holloway Prison most nights.
Mister Fox and Crow have a better understanding of the workings of the universe than the two criminals locked up for their own good and the safety of society.
Over the last nine months, being pregnant and being banged up for a crime she had nothing to do with have not been the prime concerns in Winnie’s mind.
No, there has been something far larger in her mind that holds nearly all her waking thoughts and most of her sleeping ones. If she had pressed the button when she knew she should have, would the course of history have been completely different? Would it have prevented the Fall of the Age of the Internet? And if it had, would the world be a better place? Or is her being banged up for a crime she did not commit, and everything else that has happened in the world in the past few months, exactly what was needed?
To bring it right back to being in the Brownies when she was seven years old – has she done a good deed? Or has she done a bad deed? That is the question – or two.
She lies on her bunk most nights staring out between the bars of her cell window. On the bunk below, she hears Yoko snore gently. And she sees the sliced grapefruit rise into the sky like a bad moon. But some nights it is not a half-grapefruit but an all-seeing eye.
Winnie knows she should not be in this cell looking out through the bars for her part in the murder of a young man she had never met. But she knows she should be behind these bars because of her wilful part in the … But then it becomes difficult and round and round her mind goes while the unborn Child in her belly grows and grows and is nearly ready to take its place upon the Earth.
Yoko Ono the Younger sleeps and snores soundly on her bunk every night, and will do so for the rest of her life-long term. Yoko knows she did the ultimate wrong thing in murdering her boyfriend, even if he had shagged her ex-best friend Cynthia Powell. She also knows her committing the murder was probably the greatest work of art she as an artist will ever complete.
She will also go down in art history as the only artist to win the Turner Prize* while being incarcerated for murder.
Right now, at 09:11, both Winnie and Yoko are having their breakfast, which is always gruel with raisins and a mug of hot sweet tea.
This day, unlike all of the others, will not be forgotten.
Meanwhile:
Chodak the novice Buddhist monk has tramped down out of the Himalayas, across India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Switzerland and France. He walked through the Channel Tunnel yesterday and arrived in England late last night.
He is now striding up the Old Kent Road, still in his saffron robe, his staff in his right hand and his copy of Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs clutched in his left hand. He is nearly there. What he is near to or why, Chodak still has no idea, but he has total confidence all will be revealed.
Crow flies across the Winter sky above him.
Meanwhile:
Jimmy and Bill are sitting at their table in Andrew’s café in Clerkenwell. On the table between them is the Brick. They are talking in hushed tones. If anyone were to eavesdrop on their conversation, they would learn they are discussing the possibilities of throwing Alan out of the band.
11:17 Monday 24 December 1984
Dear Diary,
I got my latest chapter to the book done in one sitting. But I am beginning to worry I am allowing a certain sloppiness of style to creep in as I am desperately trying to get it written before midnight tonight.
I have long allowed myself to start sentences with the words ‘and’, ‘but’ and ‘I’, but this is done to get my revenge on Miss Maxwell Stewart, my Primary Five teacher, who I hated with a vengeance. Miss Maxwell Stewart must be forty years in the grave by now, so she is certainly colder than this dish I am serving her.
But I do have problems with starting sentences with ‘so’ and ‘basically’. I have just flicked through what I have already written and found eleven cases where I have started sentences with the word ‘basically’. I have taken the opportunity to cross them all out bar one. I am keeping that one in, as a form of literary self-harm.
Language should be left to evolve in its own way, as art, and the marketplace should do so too. And we should learn to live with and celebrate the consequences. Thus bad grammar and spelling mistakes are part of the healthy evolution of language. This does not stop me wanting to halt the cheapening or undermining of the power of certain words favoured by those trying to sell us something, be it tickets, products or just their own opinions. Included but not limited to these words are the following: ‘genius’, ‘brilliant’ and ‘passionate’. I would like to suggest we have a rule where someone has to have been dead for forty years before they can be called a ‘genius’ or ‘brilliant’.
This forty-year rule would allow enough time for a consensus to be reached regarding the individual in question.
As for the word ‘passionate’, maybe the truth is that I have never felt ‘passionate’ about anything in my own life. As for what I have felt for the flesh of either sex, I doubt it has ever been more than lust. So why should the hoi polloi feel more than me?
Back to reality. Back to the here and now.
Matron has confiscated both my radio and headphones. Maybe that is a good thing. Maybe I can now concentrate on getting this book done and off to Dog Ledger. Midnight will not wait.
I have to admit I have been somewhat distracted in the past hour by a visitor. I so rarely get visitors.
It was a young man with rather searching eyes and very long hair. His name is Alan Moore. He too is a writer. He lives in Northampton, not far from the asylum where I am currently locked up. He is a big fan of my work, not just Fish Farm but Uganda. He called it seminal. Said it has been a big influence on the book he is currently working on, which is, as he put it, ‘sort of based on’ the i
dea of Guy Fawkes but set in a near-dystopian future – so I guess pretty much like what I have been working on. Except mine is utopian.
I showed Alan the chapter I have just written. He thought it marvellous, but suggested I have some obvious dictator figure that all the readers can enjoy hating. I told him I am not good at evil dictators. I go more for the sympathetic, if somewhat fucked-up, heroine. He said you can have that as well, and explained he has this girl called Evey Organ in his book – she is every teenage girl that has ever been …
I had to explain to him about my ideas of the Fall of the Age of the Internet and what it was like, and about its collapse and what the aftermath was like, but I don’t know if he got it. He has a lovely smile though.
He left me a copy of the chapter of his book that he had just finished this morning. It is called ‘Behind the Painted Smile’. The chapter, that is, not the book. He is not too sure what he is going to call the book yet. I told him I would read it later.
I did not tell him I was planning my escape from this place later today, or at the latest in the early hours of the morning.
The last thing he said to me as he was leaving the ward was, ‘Welcome to the Dark Ages.’ I thought it a most inspirational thing, and in his honour I will use it as the title of this latest chapter.
Only five more to go and then freedom.
Yours,
Roberta X
Postscript: they have just brought the elevenses trolley around. I always have a mug of the Camp Coffee.
While sipping it I recalled how that Bill Drummond and Will Sergeant from the Echo-something band who had played at the village hall on Jura had been talking about a comic they had been reading called Swamp Thing. If I remember rightly, they said it was written by somebody called Alan Moore. Maybe I should rewrite some of the previous book to include this Alan Moore as a character. Maybe make him the drummer in that band instead of Ginger Baker, whose name I had been using.
Since you took your love away
The pretending never ends
* The Hockney Prize had reverted back from being the Turner Prize after the Fall of the Age of the Internet and, it should be added, after it was discovered that David Hockney had been having an illicit affair with XXXXX. For legal reasons names cannot be named here.
3: WAR! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
11:07 Sunday 24 December 2023
Cell Block H
Holloway Prison
London
Winnie is lying on her top bunk, thinking.
Yoko is lying on her bottom bunk, thinking.
Winnie is not thinking about the fact she will be giving birth to a new life in the next twenty-four hours.
Yoko is not thinking about the man who she loved and who she killed.
Winnie is thinking about war.
Yoko is thinking about art.
‘Yoko, are you awake?’
‘Of course. Why?’
‘I have been thinking about war.’
‘And?’
‘There could be all sorts of wars going on in the world, and how would we know? Without us getting any sort of news how would we know? And it is not just ’cause we are banged up in here, no one in London or anywhere else in England would know if millions of people were being killed in Australia or Argentina or America or anywhere. At least when we had iJaz we could know what was going on everywhere. No one could start a war because we would all know about it and—’
‘But that didn’t used to stop wars before. When we were kids there were always wars going on all over the world and we would see it on the news every evening, but that didn’t make us stop them. It was the—’
‘Yes, but … right now there could be millions of people being killed in a war in the middle of Africa, and because we don’t know about it, it’s like it’s not happening. I mean, is it happening?’
‘You mean, like, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Or whatever that quote was the teachers used to like quoting at us.’
‘Exactly. But more than exactly. I remember once reading on Wikipedia in the old days about this war that had taken place right in the middle of the jungles of Africa back in the 1990s. And in this war over five and a half million people died. And we didn’t know about it, it was like it never happened.’
‘Well, you knew about it.’
‘Yes, but that was only years afterwards. That same war could be going on now in that same forest in Africa and millions of babies and old ladies and girls and boys and unborn babies are being killed, and because no one knows about it here, it is like it isn’t happening.’
‘Like that tree in the forest.’
‘Exactly.’
They fall silent.
A tree falls to the ground in the wilderness of the Yukon.
A young man falls to his death in the favela of a South American city.
No one hears a thing.
Crow flies across the sky above Holloway Prison.
Killer Queen hums a new tune to her/his transgender self.
John Lennon the Younger has a riff going through his head.
And Dead Squirrel has an opening line.
Mister Fox is still negotiating the rider for the FUUK that night.
Dead Perch is thinking very hard about something.
As yet it has not been announced where the FUUK is going to be.
Rumours are rife.
Tangerine NiteMare are so far ahead of any other band on the planet it is frightening.
‘Winnie, I have been thinking about what you were saying about war. I guess it is the same with art.’
‘What do you mean? People don’t get killed in art or because of art.’
‘No, not like that. But … you know how every day I scratch a “1” into the wall beside my bunk? And over four days I scratch four of these “1”s beside each other and then on the fifth day I scratch a diagonal line through it? And then I start again?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And that is what I will be doing for the rest of my life.’
‘You never know, you might get released one day.’
‘Yes, but there is no point in me dreaming about that. But anyway, this is what I do. In my head I have reinvented the week. Weeks used to have seven days in them, but now my weeks have only five days in them. It makes everything faster. It means I have more weeks in the year. More weeks in my life. And this wall beside my bed as far as I am concerned is the greatest piece of ongoing performance art ever. And no one ever sees it. Or knows about it. It is never going to be documented anywhere. Does that mean it does not exist? That it never existed? But for me it is better than anything John and I ever did.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you listening?’
‘Yeah, sort of. I was just thinking.’
And they fall silent again.
E. H. Gombrich is sitting in her library.
E. H. hated the internet and everything it stood for. As far as she is concerned, the internet destroyed art.
E. H. loves the fact the printing presses are once again clattering away, spitting out real physical books by the millions. People cannot get enough of them.
Or so she thinks. The truth is, ‘real physical books’ have not taken off again in the way some hoped.
E. H. has taken it upon herself to write a new edition of her great-grandfather’s seminal text The Story of Art. She keeps most of what he wrote but just removes the positive things her father wrote about the internet in his edition of the book. She can never get over how wrong her father was about most things in life and the world, and how right her great-grandfather had been. She then adds a final chapter about Yoko & John, and their groundbreaking work together. She is considering going as far as to say Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs is the greatest work of art in her lifetime at the very least. And how it is not just the book but the way it has then been delivered to 23 individuals around the world and how they have responded to it. It is those responses,
their ongoing nature, which maybe makes this the greatest work of art of the last one hundred years, if not since the Renaissance.
E. H. looks up from her desk and out of the window. The sky is empty except for a crow flying across, heading North.
‘You see, Winnie, I think everything I have done before is pointless compared to what I am doing on this wall, changing my days of the week. And the fact you are the only person in the world who knows about it.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, that’s what I think.’
Upsy Daisy is back in London selling copies of The Big Issue outside the Overground station on Kingsland Road. She is doing a brisk trade. Everyone loves reading The Big Issue these days.
Makka Pakka is standing in the queue at the Dalston Argos waiting to buy the board game Fifa24. This is to replace the one he smashed up in a rage last night when he was losing to one of the Pontipines. He has given up collecting stones.
And Igglepiggle is sailing his boat up the Lee Navigation past a warehouse that some artists used as a squat.
And Chodak is striding across London Bridge.
Down in the Borough hundreds of FUUK Kids are queuing up at the newly opened Woolworths record shop to buy the Utah Saints’ ‘Justified & Ancient’ single. But this is not for the radio-friendly mix on the A-side but for the Tangerine NiteMare remix on the B-side. Then, of course, there is the Tony ‘FUUK’ Thorpe extended remix on the 12".
A young lad is standing outside handing out flyers for a FUUK that is happening tonight.
2023: a trilogy (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu) Page 23
