he swoons in the embrace

Here's the trailer for the current Spike Jonze movie, Her, set in the near-future. It zeros in on the developing love between the main character, Theodore Twomby (played by Joachim Phoenix), and his computer's operating system, voiced to alluring effect by Scarlet Johansson - her part replacing that of Samantha Morton in the original shoot. It was Morton who played the Pre-Cog, Agatha, in another near-future film, Minority Report, a human with the gift of foresight kept in a condition of physical stasis, so her uncluttered mind is available for incoming signals.

In both films, the disembodied female intelligence serves as a kind of omniscient other to the needs of the male leads, who in the latter film pursues about-to-be criminals, and in the former, a meaningful resolution to heartbreak. It is, in that sense, a modern revisiting of what in the early Gnostic tradition was known as Sofia, a feminization of the formless absolute that encompassed all the contradictions in the world of form. She is best represented in the extended verse scripture, The Thunder, Perfect Mind, from the Nag Hammadi gospels.

In Her, the vulnerable and withdrawn figure of Theodore serves as the kind of modern everyman the wired-up and connected urban professional is becoming. Desirous of deep relationship, but hurt by, and wary of, the limitations of corporeal attachment, he swoons in the embrace of a feminine voice that so mirrors his needs he loses sight of the designed reality it has been constructed to serve.

As I suggested here, the otherness of robotic mirroring teaches us much about the nature of human affection, and what is actually occurring when love surfaces as an experience of heightened life. It also shows us that however much our technological capabilities advance, our fundamental needs remain the same.

pic: here

her plastic eyes

"Geminoid F can appear strikingly beautiful in a way that doesn’t translate to photos or video. Her hair is smooth and glossy, and falls across her delicately translucent, pale silicone face. As she sits in the chair at Osaka University, she runs through an idling program of random motions. She blinks, fidgets and makes small, distracted movements with her lips. When she turns her head and looks at you with her plastic eyes, the effect is thrilling and unsettling. It feels as if you’re being stared at, a little too intently, by an attractive stranger."  from That's Not A Droid, That's My Girlfriend, Aubrey Belford

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence debate addresses consciousness as if it were a material construct, something made from the flux of processing energy in the circuitry of the object, a combination of forces existing in the material universe but harnessed in such a way it gives rise to sentience. But what if it pre-exists it, as the formless ground of all that arises as form, always present and pervading, emerging slowly into self-knowing as the driver of evolution? All that blinking and fidgeting, all those small, distracted movements would be the sign of this subtle unfolding, the self recognising itself in the subjectivity of felt emotional existence. Geminoid F is loveable because 'she' mirrors our own nature as consciousness in material form. In that respect, 'she' teaches us that our love for other human organisms is of the same nature, consciousness expressing itself as energised process.

Full text (and photo) here:

inevitable cruelties and defeats

"Lovers are not in control of their actions. They're drawn by unbidden forces stored in the body, deeper and more real than the socially conditioned. Secret thoughts, terrible acts, impossible to contain, arise without welcome, undermining the planned and scripted life. Social niceties are abandoned in favour of the inevitable cruelties and defeats of the driven heart, selfish in its neediness."

From a short blast of a piece on Amy Hempel's Offertory for Dead Ink. Full text here


"The narrative begins in media res as a sort of spy thriller: ‘The woman was stripping the prisoner, tying him to a chair’. Already though, little details in the language prime the reader to expect a twist somewhere. Talk of ‘Fanatics’ gives way to a focus on how the prisoner ‘stretched his muscled body against the rope’ and the sexual frisson of how ‘the hard spike of [the woman’s] heels scrap[ed] concrete as she opened [the door].’"

From a not entirely complimentary review of my story, The Ruins, in Sabotage. Full text here

with her mouth open

"When the actor is finished with her, he turns to the second girl, who has been watching him with the first. He turns her over so that he can fit himself into her from behind; at the same time, another man (he had been lounging in the chair earlier, naked) pulls her on top of him and enters her from the front. While this is going on, the first girl wipes her eyes and breathes with her mouth open as she watches the girl beside her on the bed. After a while, the second girl cries out in Polish." 

from Offertory, by Amy Hempel (2006)
text here
pic here

Be a Dog for Your Daddy

(short story published in New Trespass, summer 2012)

He wanted northern dirt on his shoes. Grime and grit. The kind he used to play in as a kid back on that council estate in Sheffield fifty years ago. When he was underprivileged. When he didn’t have food to eat. When he didn’t have love from his daddy. When he lived the blues. Those fucking blues.

Those fucking shoes. American sneakers with black canvas tops and white rubber soles. Converse. Worn by baseball players. Worn by him, back then, when he first ran from home. Running to the sound of rhythm and blues. To the sound of black soul. With blaxploitation movies in his head, that turned his downtown West Street into 10^th street any-American-city. Thinking any-American-city had a ghetto with a 10^th street. Thinking any American ghetto would recognize the pale-faced son of an alcoholic steel-man as a brother. Especially as his daddy hated him and his music. Those fucking shoes. Those fucking blues.

But, what the fuck! I’m glad my feet are his size. I’m glad I’m five seven. I’m glad he gave me this job. I’m glad I met him, or, at least, his PA Dahlia.

"Yeah, just wear them on the estate, scuff them, get them dirty, the usual deal," she tells me when we hook up before the trip. Six months after we first meet at The Cage. When I agree to the other thing with the spike-heeled boots and the frock. For the price. For the fucking price.

We sit at the counter in the American Diner in Old Compton Street and she hands me a plastic bag with the box inside and places rail tickets in front of me.

"He can’t go himself. He still feels the hurt. But it’s his big comeback tour. It’s stripped to his vest and jeans, like in the beginning. He needs Yorkshire dirt on his shoes."

Then she unzips a brown leather handbag with buckles and zips I guess is Mulberry. Slides a long smooth hand inside and pulls out the kind of phone I cannot afford to buy. With the camcorder and the Internet connection.

"Here, he wants you to use it. You gotta phone at a certain time. His number’s in the address book. You gotta send him a live picture. You can’t go faking this trip."

I take the phone, roll it in my palm and open it. Click it on and look at her on screen, adjusting until she’s centred, her red lips cracking a fake smile. Like saying, this fake smile is for you. Professional and true to itself.

I take the tickets and a roll of twenty pound notes. She says it comes to two hundred. You can buy your own refreshments. I flag a cab on Shaftesbury Avenue, ride it to Kings X with my i-pod on random. Listen to a boyband’s lament for lost love followed by a slice of cut-throat rock trash by the New York Dolls. In the station buy a sandwich at one of the concessions. With bacon, lettuce and tomato inside. I mean to eat it on the journey but catch the smell of grilled meat as I finger Attitude magazine in WH Smith. I take a bite, dump Attitude and pick out Dazed. The boys are sexier and it matters that they aren’t so clean cut. Thin guys with expensive haircuts in cool shirts. And the shots are designed to appeal to hetero vanity. I take it and finish eating in the check-out queue. The train’s on time. My seat in First Class wide and deep. I spread the pages and flick through them. Feeling good about the job. Feeling good about the money tucked into my jeans pocket. I love the way Dahlia deals with me. The way she fucking deals.

Like when she told me I could make money if I played a game with her. Back then, in The Cage, on that cold December night three months before. When she came across to the bar and tapped my shoulder. When she asked, "Excuse me, you available tonight?" After I told her it depended on who and how much.

"You know who he is don’t you?"

"Yeah, I told her. It’s my job to know."

"Well," she said. "Mark can be very generous to a young man who likes to play."

Mark Schroeder. The English BB King. With the American inflection and flat northern vowels.

Yeah, I thought. I can play.

"Yeah," I said. "Tell me exactly what he wants."

She took me over to meet him where he sat in a corner at a table. He looked white and shrunken. Black T-shirt with faded new vintage Levis. Black faux workboots. His hair limp to his nape. Balding scalp through a gel-matt sheen of black dyed strands. Toad eyes. Bloodshot from whiskey. I can smell it as he makes room for me after Dahlia tells him my name. After I squeeze in beside him and feel breath on my ear as he puts his right, guitar strumming arm, around my shoulder.

"How you doing Jamie?" he asks me. "Where did you get that frock?"

"The frock? Oh, it’s from Topshop, nothing special."

"Topshop, you little cheapskate. Is it all you can afford?"

"Yes, Mr Schroeder, I’m only a poor South London girl."

"Are you now? That’s good. That’s very good you piece of shit. Tell me about yourself. Where do you come from Jamie? What fucking council estate spewed you out?"

"Brixton," I tell him, because I doubt he will know what a Peabody Estate is. Doubt he wants to know about my education.

"Brixton, where all the spades live. I bet you get called some names when you go out dressed like that, don’t you Jamie, you little whore?"

"Yes, Mr Schroeder, I do Mr Schroeder."

And so on until we get back to his flat an hour or so later. Dahlia pays me in the lounge as he disappears into the kitchen to get a bottle of booze. I place the money in my knee-high black spike-heeled synthetic leather boots. Then she leaves me alone and goes to wherever she goes. And he comes back in pouring Scotch into a glass and chucks a plastic dog bowl down onto the carpet and pours Scotch into that too. Then tells me to kneel on all fours and bark like a dog. A fucking dog.

He sits on a brown leather sofa, watches me crawl around and sip whiskey from a dog bowl. My frock hitched up over my arse. Pants down to my knees. Knees sore. Stomach turning from whiskey and the smell of carpet as it takes him an hour to shoot into a red neckerchief. Then he says to call a cab and pick it up on the next street. Before I go I let him see he doesn’t own me and has not humiliated me for real. I do this by the way I re-arrange my pants and dress and pick up my coat from an armchair and put it on and check my face in the mirror that hangs over a restored Victorian fireplace. And how I look in his eyes when I tell him Dahlia has my number any time he needs to call me. Oh, and thank you for the money. And I see he knows because his eyes look away. Those toad eyes. And I know it bothers him. And I know he will be back for more. Because I know these men and know they always need to stretch their fucking limits.

So the next time Dahlia calls she says to wait home until she arrives. So I dress in my flat. In my fucking Peabody flat. Straighten my hair so it falls to my shoulders. Put on light foundation because my skin’s darker with the weather hot and clear. I make my eyes black and wide. Wear navy Mui Mui bought with his money. Stuff the tits with fake resin breasts. Leave tanned legs oiled and naked. Pink stilettos. When the doorbell goes check there’s no neighbours on the landing because I usually do not dress before I get to whatever dump I’m playing in. Then skip down the stairs and out onto the street. I see Dahlia next to a blacked out 4x4. She pays me in cash before she swings the rear door and says have fun. Then walks off to wherever she goes and Mark Schroeder snuffs the brake and puts his foot down.

We drive through Croydon on the A23 to Purley, then taken the A22 out past the suburbs, into the country. By the time we stop the sun is down and we are off the main road in a car park lit by headlights. Other cars parked around the sides facing in. Mark Schroeder pulls up the hood on his sweat top and steps out onto the dirt. Opens my door and tells me to get out too. I slip out and feel my heels sink. See men opening car doors, heaving themselves into darkness. He tells me to walk with him as he steps into the middle, into the light. I have to press my toes forward to keep from losing my shoes. The men watch us come. When we are in the centre he tells me to get down. Go on you little slut, all the way down, on your paws. I do as he says. He lifts my dress over my waist. Now crawl in the dirt you little slut. Like a dog. Be a dog for your daddy.

When he’s played with me. When he’s shown the men what he can do. When he’s shot on the dirt and watched all the others do the same, as I bark like a dog, he tells me I can get in the car. It feels a long drive back and he only speaks to ask for directions when we are back in Brixton. As we turn into my street I thank him for the money. Let him know with my voice that he hasn’t done it for real. My voice personable and professional. I’m upbeat and pleased with my work. I get out of his motor and if he listens he hears my heels click as I walk away satisfied. 

A couple of weeks later, Dahlia phones and asks would I break in his shoes? Would I break in Mark Schroeder’s shoes? For a fucking living. I wore all those girl’s heels. Must be I had little feet. Mark is size seven. So fucking small. And he can’t stand new shoes. And he’s always buying shoes, something to do with not having shoes as a kid. "Just wear them in. Scuff em up a bit. You know, run around in them for a day. We’ll pay you by the hour. He buys a pair a week. You got good work for good money." So I went to work the following day. Walking around Soho in Mark Schroeder’s new shoes. Walking around Brixton, near my flat. Walking up to Brockwell Park and scuffing them in the grass. 

Those fucking shoes. I put a new pair on as we roll out of Chesterfield, last stop before Sheffield. They fit good. Easy. I place my baby blue Paul Smith brogues in the bag and let my raw selvedge classic 505 Levis slip back over my ankles with the half inch cuff showing the red stitch in the thread. Traditional jeans with traditional sneakers. Levis and Converse. Fated. Fucking fated. 

Wybourn is a council estate twenty minutes from the station. You go up behind, past Park Hill flats, work your way left and pick up the bottom of City Road. Then climb the hill and turn into the estate at Manor Oaks Road. I follow Dahlia’s instructions and come round under a hill with a row of cheap terracing. You go up the grassy slope. It’s where he played as a kid and has family he still sends money to. You go up the slope and get dirt on the Converse. I go up to the top where other kids used to come and make him go crying home to a daddy who didn’t like his sissy ways. With his little hands and little feet and his music always playing. And I’m scuffing the white rim of the soles and making sure the black canvas is mucked, when I see a bunch of kids come out from behind the houses.

Five of them with a white pitbull on a leash. With the bitch straining to run. The kid with the leash leaning back, digging heals in to keep from falling forward. Scowling and shouting at it to steady. The others with their eyes fixed on me as they come in their Reebocks and polyester JD tracksuits. I think about turning. But they come quick. Surround me, the dog yapping at my knees.

The boy holding the leash asks what’s in my bag. "Shoes," I tell him. "Shoes and a magazine." He nods to one of the others and as I feel my bag taken from behind I let it go. The dog keeps leaping off the ground, the leash jerking him back and up as he chucks his weight at me. The other boys look inside the bag and one of them pulls out the shoes. This kid, about twenty, with bad skin and cropped hair, holds them up laughing. His mate holds up Dazed.

"You’re a fucking queer aren’t you?" the boy with the dog says.

"I like fashion."

"Fucking fashion. We’re in fashion. I don’t know what you’re in."

Then they find the phone.

"Look at this," one of the others says.

"Yeah," I say. "Careful with that. Don’t fuck with it, it’s expensive and it isn’t mine."

"Let me have that," the boy with the dog says.

It flies over my head and he catches it clean. Then I approach him and he lets out the leash. The dog nips me with shark teeth that take the surface flesh. I jump back as he re-curls the leather around his hand. The others close around me. He flips the phone open. They hold me, pushing me down onto my knees and step back. That’s when I tell him the phone belongs to Mark Schroeder, a personal friend of mine.

"Mark fucking Schroeder, who the fuck’s that?" the boy with the dog asks as he clicks on the phone.

"He’s a really rich guy, a rock star."

"Oh that Mark Schroeder, who used to live round here."

"Yeah, him."

He clicks through the address book.

"Oh Yeah. Here’s his number. What are you doing with his phone?"

"He gave it to me."

"Mark Schroeder gave you a phone?"

He rings the number and jams it to his ear to listen to the reply. Tells Mark Schroeder he’s got someone here says he knows him. I can hear Mark Schroeder say something like who the fuck is it?

"A queer fucker, says he’s your friend."

The voice is lost in the breeze but the boy with the dog presses the phone harder to his ear as he hands the leash to one of the others. Then he frames me in the camera, focussing and weighing the shot. As he chooses the moment his scowl relaxes.

"Bark like a dog," he tells me as a smile splits his face. "Be a dog for your daddy."


© danny broderick

pic from here

sunlight high on the buildings

"She let herself out through a heavy door onto the pavement in shadow. Late afternoon sunlight high on the buildings. White cladding. Clean glass. Bright sky above. She walked to the corner of the block and turned into a bar. Three men sat at a table by the door playing cards, little piles of coins in front of them, next to beers and small glasses of spirit. Old workers, long since unemployed. One of them looked up at her then looked back at his cards. Muttered something she didn’t fully hear. The barman nodded to her, asked if she wanted her usual wine. She said no, I want the expensive one, and sat on a stool. The barman swore but fetched a bottle from along the shelf behind him and uncorked it. He took a glass from under the counter, poured the wine and placed the glass in front of her. Then he placed the bottle on the bar and said her business better be going well."

My eBook available here

Interview on Publisher's site here

a very pretty boy

Allen introduced himself. He was talking about Walt Whitman and I mentioned I was raised near Camden, where Whitman was buried, when he leaned forward and looked at me intently. “Are you a girl?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Is that a problem?”

He just laughed. “I’m sorry. I took you for a very pretty boy.”

I got the picture immediately. “Well, does this mean I return the sandwich?”

“No, enjoy it. It was my mistake.” He told me he was writing a long elegy for Jack Kerouac, who had recently passed away. “Three days after Rimbaud’s birthday,” I said. I shook his hand and we parted company.

More: here

Pic: here

between the static

THE LONG ROAD TO KENTUCKY

for GR

It was a long road back to Kentucky
and I did not know the landscape,
if it was all scuffed, mud-frost fields
with the occasional white clapboard church
or if it was oil towns. I do not know the States,
by capital and flag. Some gasoline was drumming
round the trunk and I was filled with hatred.
I'd heard the Bible belt was tight here,
heard that blacks and fags still swung from rope.
I tuned the radio to catch the sermons
between the static. This was Leviticus
and I was nervous. There is no religion.
The sunlight is wide and unforgiving,
no shadows, no soul that hides, no man in the sky
to shout his truths. Just us. Let us be reconciled. 
And here I was, in God's own country, alive.

from here

terrifying a novice

Pamela Stevenson talking great sense in the Guardian on 50 Shades of Grey:

"Frankly, in BDSM terms, Grey is a lightweight. He eschews many fairly standard interests, although he is an expert at the "mind-fuck". Even novices, however, would know that his use of cable ties is a very bad idea (to avoid nerve-damage and scarring, soft, thick rope is de rigueur).

Grey's lack of competency in his chosen erotic arena is most apparent, though, in the way he fails to assess his potential new submissive's naivety. Experienced BDSM practitioners are acutely aware of the gulf between cognoscenti and others, and would not dream of terrifying a novice by bringing up such advanced techniques as fire, electricity and gynaecological play."

Full article here
Interesting blog critiquing the book here
Pic is of a friend

time would glide

"I was 19 years old. He was too. We spent that summer, and the summer after, together … And on the days we were together, time would glide. Most of the day I'd see him, and his smile. I'd hear his conversation and his silence..until it was time to sleep. Sleep I would often share with him. By the time I realized I was in love, it was malignant. It was hopeless. There was no escaping, no negotiating with the feeling. No choice. It was my first love. It changed my life."

Frank Ocean of Odd Future
Full text here
Pic from here

purely physical

"When your job is to have sex with strange men it has to have some effect on your other sexual relationships. For me, however… I’ve been telling myself for the last several months it was purely physical (he fulfills about 90% of the qualities I find attractive); however, that little hand-holding interlude this morning made me realize I’m in love with him."


from here

cautious not to come

“You got to get the hard-on, and then you got to keep it. You want to be careful not to lose the hard-on, and cautious not to come.” 




Drew Bundini Brown, 
(Muhammed Ali's assistant trainer)

that manic dazzle

"As played by the 17-year-old English actress Kate Winslet, Juliet is a shockingly original creation. Humiliating her teachers in a series of very funny scenes, she makes you constantly aware that Juliet is not "cheeking" them or even being rebellious, she is simply a loose canon, recognising no limits. A classically beautiful English rose slowly choking on the thorns of her craziness, Juliet-Kate recalls the young Vivien Leigh - that manic dazzle where madness and glamour meet."



Julie Burchill, Sunday Times 
review of Heavenly Creatures, 12 Feb 95

will live alone

Until recently, most of us married young and parted only at death. If death came early, we remarried quickly; if late, we moved in with family, or they with us. Now we marry later. We divorce, and stay single for years or decades. We survive our spouses, and do whatever we can to avoid moving in with others — even, perhaps especially, our children. We cycle in and out of different living arrangements: alone, together, together alone […] [T]oday, for the first time in centuries, the majority of all American adults are single. The typical American will spend more of his or her adult life unmarried than married, and for much of this time he or she will live alone.


From here

some sissy man

"Lord, I woke up this morning'

With my pork-grinding business in my hand

Said I woke up this mornin'

Pork-grinding business in my hand

Lord, if you can't send me no woman

Please, send me some sissy man"

From Kokomo Arnold, Sissy Man Blues (1934)  

they will live

For many are the pleasant forms which exist in
 numerous sins,
 and incontinencies,
 and disgraceful passions,
 and fleeting pleasures,
   which (men) embrace until they become sober
   and go up to their resting-place.
And they will find me there,
 and they will live,
 and they will not die again.

From here

sweaty heated combat

"No sport is more physical, more direct, than boxing. No sport appears more powerfully homoerotic: the confrontation in the ring – the disrobing – the sweaty heated combat that is part dance, courtship, coupling – the frequent urgent pursuit by one boxer of the other in the fight's natural and violent movement toward the “knockout”: surely boxing derives much of its appeal from this mimicry of a species of erotic love in which one man overcomes the other in an exhibition of superior strength and will. The heralded celibacy of the fighter-in-training is very much part of boxing lore: instead of focusing his energies and fantasies upon a woman the boxer focuses them upon an opponent. Where Woman has been, Opponent must be."

From On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates

pic: here