Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man

"Hi, I'm Timothy Treadwell and this is the Grinch
Oh Boy, is he grumpy!"

The above is spoken by a blonde man-boy distilled from that mysterious cartoon heartland of borderline America. Behind him on some bright green astro-turf looking tundra a threadbare brown bear roots around disconsolately in this unpromising landscape. There is nothing here of any consequence - for bears, for people or, I suspect, for film-makers.

No black binbags containing sanitary towels to drive the bear into an olfactory frenzy - not a discarded take-away or even a crisp packet in sight. Its wet, its cold, the brief summer has passed and with it the salmon, the elk, the roots and berries from which the bear derives its impetus to sleep fitfully through the winter. The only thing left is Treadwell, Timothy Treadwell.

The conclusion's kind of obvious, and so it was that within a few hours or minutes of that dreary shot 'The Grinch' had fully lived up to the requirements of etiquette expected in the world of Dr Seuss and torn both Timothy (who would not listen to his nurse) and Timothy's partner to pieces.

The bear's name, of course, wasn't really The Grinch, just as Timothy Treadwell wasn't the man's real name. It was an alias adopted to make him more alliteratively interesting - you be the judge.

Where do they come from this long lineage of peculiarly american fools? What triggers them and what decides them in their choice of career? For example,whether to play a ukelele surrounded by flowers while singing the worst dross of the jazz age in a preposterous trilling falsetto like Tiny Tim in the sixties - or befriend and murder young men and bury their dismembered bodies in a cellar in Texas? Shoot John Lennon or make an album with Frank Zappa (a double album at that - wild man fischer)? or go off into the wilderness of Alaska for 13 summers in a row 'saving the bears' from their imaginary oppressors without brief or invitation - like Timothy Treadwell...

(This guy looks physically and sounds emotionally like the product of some unthinkable dalliance between john denver, boris johnson and post sinatra/woody allen mia farrow).

The only relief comes when Herzog declares the universe as driven by "murder, chaos and blind chance" - a fierce antidote to "Timothy's sentimentalised" delusions.

(I can't even say Treadwell anthropomorphises his subjects as i'd lay myself open to accusations of humanising mine).

While Herzog is clearly irritated by his subject, trying desperately to find mythology in a hundred hours footage of unremitting stupidity, he is also compelled to continue the vain quixotic search for primal innocence he began in the Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Beneath the scar tissue of cynicism beats the heart of a romantic who cannot avoid the realisation that once more he must settle for the artifice of film - like Lene Riefenstahl and her Masai.

Unlike Werner Herzog I have only impatience and revulsion for the follies of Timothy Treadwell. I agree with the helicopter pilot who said 'he got what was coming to him'. I'm unable to find compassion for him and am immediately disposed to pathologise and dismiss him as a borderline personality replete with all the familiar destructive traits of narcissism i.e. a tenuous grasp on the reality of others and an abiding sense of self-pity, selfishness and a total lack of empathy.

I felt sorry for the girl, the hardly seen assistant/girlfriend who was 'frightened of the bears, feared disaster, and wanted to go home' I wonder what her story was - what brought her to deliver herself into the hands of this self-absorbed, dangerously, permanently childlike fool?

In the words of T.S Eliot -'Those who have crossed with direct eyes to death's other kingdom remember us - if at all - not as lost violent souls but only as the hollow men, the stuffed men,
alas our voices are very small'

Oh yeah, and the bear shot down like maximillian in a righteous fusillade - mild regret for him.

PS. The more discerning readers may have noticed that the illustration is not a bear but is in fact a wooden tiger eating an equally wooden British officer. (Tipu's Tiger - as seen at the V and A, London). I make no apologies.

So Tired

Even as the hot weather eases and a cool moist breeze begins to blow i can't shake off the narcoleptic state i've fallen into. I stagger through each day just barely awake maintaining consciousness only by a titanic effort of will.

Every day going back home on the interminably delayed piccadilly line from earls court to finsbury park (my nearest station arsenal is closed for engineering works till august the 7th) i've slept - or more accurately - passed out.

Whether through breathing the depleted viscous atmosphere ( to call it air would be an offence under the trades descriptions act) already filtered through the lungs of thousands of fellow travellers - or whether through the exhaustion of work, the psychic aftermath of working all day with addicts in a variety of therapeutic (for them) group settings (and other counsellors with their unending 'issues' and deluded notions of 'care') - or whether, more likely, any of the above combined with temperatures in excess of 40 degrees (more below ground)i don't know.

But i do know that i've spent most of this saturday nodding out on the couch. With the exception of a soporific browse through the books in the charity shop and a couple of hours at an NA meeting i've done nothing. Hence this - so at least i can fall into bed with the satisfaction of having noted my condition. I'm optimistically clutching The Three Theban plays by Sophocles though i suspect i'll read a paragraph and it'll be sunday. Still, 3 meetings in last 3 days and no time spent lost in the bewildering and ultimately dissatisfying labyrinth of pornography that is the internet means i'm doing alright. Maybe i'm withdrawing - or waking up once more.

9 Ullet Road Liverpool 17

Lived here round about 1975 to 1976. I was 24. I lived in the garret. Kevin and Gill in the top corner , Chas and Libby below and Paul Brown "Brownie" on the ground. I was working at the Customs and Excise till busted for dope and diconal - traces in a syringe.

A synopsis of that wonderful terrible eternal summer of '76 would be Ananda Marga initiation, the thrill of opening a stolen DDA from Lark Lane chemist, o'd'ing on a £2 bag of stevie jones chinese heroin (and we used to complain about the size), o'd'ing on cocainer chrystals made soluble with dilute hydrochloric acid - i thought my head was going to explode from the pressure, Gill o'd'ing on diconal in a locked flat and me climbing down from the roof through the skylight to rescue her (dike stashed by a chimney stack till the ambulance had gone - then me and kevin, remorse over "shes gonna be alright" scrambling for the works.

Oh yeah, and practising western magic on the flat roof - chalk drawn circle triangle and wand surrounded by stars invoking the 4 quarters describing great pentacles in the air with my sword. Out of the body experiences, glimpses of other worlds but unable to articulate that wild creativity that electric connection with all - sad and lonely through it. active addiction only defence against the rawness of it.

I feel it now but stronger , I am finally able to stand and be seen. I love. I am loved. I feel.I am unafraid,I am connected, I am no longer alone, I never was, I am still, thank you god.

3 Ivanhoe Road Liverpool 17

I lived here from the ages of 6 to 11 (1957 to 1962) Upstairs the Eves and the Taylors, downstairs in the basement my great aunt Violet and husband "Coxie" (so called 'cause he was a coxswain on the boats). We lived on the ground floor.

Those bricked up windows behind me the cellars where I descended awash with apprehension whistling 'Davey Crockett' to fetch coal. sometimes we had none left or I couldn't scrape it up with the crappy bent ragged-edged rusty shovel we had off the uneven sweating black bumpy floor - i can smell the damp coal dust and the mildew as I write this - so I'd steal into the well-lit smooth-floored cellars of my neighbours and help myself to a bucket of theirs - higher grade better burn smoother shape ....Ours predictably low-grade pre-cambrian tarpit spitting hissing massive dripping, veined with non-combustible shale and decorated with a bas relief of a ceolocanth - a mystery that, how they did it,how they spelt it.

Stark terror sometimes felt in this house. Place palpable with it - not just the cellars with their uneven stone stairs but in the room behind my left shoulder unexplained bangs, breathing, rustlings, various visions and a glimpsed figure of a man passing through the locked room witnessed by my father and mother.

Two sisters, former residents, who died in the blitz, seen in an old-fashioned bed in a strangely refurnished room by my 12 year old cousin Philip shortly after he suffered terrible burns when his nightdress caught alight from the coal fire.

It was made of some now illegal fabric spun out of napalm and semtex - the bastards who invented it, manufactured it, and inflicted it on an unsuspecting public; and the ministry bastards who oversaw and approved all and made sure my cousin got not penny one in compensation but struggled through life scarred physically and emotionally - they got off scot-free, their consciences untroubled by their own staggering incompetence.

Us then defenceless - without voice, without redress - poor, afraid, decent and deferential. But not any more. I'd tear their non-existent bollocks off if clocks were back. No wonder the house has the look of Borley Rectory. As soon as i think about it the ghosts come out.

A true parisian evokes both style and dignity

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and on the Comfort of the Resurrection

This is the crematorium at pere lachaise cemetery at full blast. I want my ashes scattered above ground, on grass - in the sunlight. The saddest sight in the whole cemetery steeped in monuments to massacres and injustices, deathcamps and heroic resistance - the saddest sights by far were the modern concrete cellars below the crematorium with their uniform glass-fronted storage lockers each containing its urn of ashes and bedecked with photos and flowers all discerned in shadowland low white light and all under a pall of grey dust.Like a halted process - stopped sterile and unarguably "the past". A terribly sad place.

no-one remembers the Armenians

paris 19th July - 55 today

Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie - Groovin' High behind me - a pause and now somewhat incongruously the Eagles - Hotel California. But tonight is one of those cracked brown sepia evenings that seem to grow hotter as the light leaves. my bare back already viscous slippy against the once cool crisp 1/2 hour ago pristine white cotton sheets. memories of old-time methadone withdrawal. Now elvis costello - almost blue. So, the photos - me and sue somewhere on the leftbank just out of the blast furnace of the street rue moufflage or some such near the roman amphitheatre. there, awash with moules mariniere and pate d fois gras (almost too intense, too rich for my spartanised islington palate - as it hit my liver i knew how the ducks felt). later the river, each concrete bay a natural theatre of dreams - the first a dignified round of grey haired elegant couples slowly waltzing, the next a flickering host in a portentous tango from the voluptuous heavy-lidded blonde to the bright-eyed nocturnals smiling hunger. And finally, the wild blur of limbs like a single entity that hovered in a circle of angolans singing and drumming. Work tomorrow but fever in the blood.

Tom at Colonus

really the camel estuary

This the correct photo from a few weeks ago - rather than the triumphalist image of me above trevose head

camel estuary padstow cornwall

waiting for adam's tv people to interview us for Bad Lads army - what are we letting ourselves in for? Adam's my 25 year old son. he did two weeks which is two weeks more than i'd have done without walking off so hats off to him. suddenly the americans and the israelis are benevolently disposed towards a cessation of hostilities in lebanon. overnight a 360 degree change of attitude. no matter how i examine the historical and current evidence i cannot find political or militiary evidence to support their actions. any, heres a photo of cornwall offered as a less vexing subject for contemplation than long running arab/israeli farce.