Two dreams last night, completely different from one another. I think the halves of my brain flipped a coin to see who got the nightmare this time.
The first requires me to explain that in January 2010, after seeing Mission of Burma at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, I wrote about four hundred words on a story that never went anywhere, mostly describing a fictitious band called the Standard Deviants:
From the name, she had been expecting math rock or geek-chic indie gaucherie, spiky-haired boys in half-rimmed glasses and tennis shoes, not a four-part motley of post-punk midlife who could as easily have had students or children in the audience, jolting through songs about de Chirico's metaphysics and trysts on the Red Line. And you said it's a full moon when I said it's not foolproof. Moving nowhere, what we never fell to feel again, slingshot off melancholy into a shrapnel of drums and the singer's voice warped and burred on the low notes like guitar noise, her fingers in her lacquer-black Fender's strings. The bassist wore a denim workshirt whose sleeves turned back and forth from his wrists like a magician's patter as he bent to his instrument, stone-faced as a clown of the silver screen. Even between songs, the drummer was never still enough for Siân to make out the words scrawled in red and black capitals from torn T-shirt shoulder to wrist, spiraling into the soft bend of her sinewy arms. Racing in slow motion, strawberries and cream. Tea leaves, bicycle chains and dream of Christopher, Christopher and the machine.
It stopped there; it never picked up again and I'm not sure there's anything there to, except that I always liked the one fragment of Alan Turing love song. (At the time, I had no idea that anyone was writing them.) So did my unconscious, apparently. I dreamed last night that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks found me the music video on YouTube. It was done in black-and-white, with a 35mm look as if it had been assembled out of British New Wave: a dark-haired boy in a striped pullover wheeling his bicycle through industrial streets (rowhouses and hills, a river I didn't recognize through the dustbin backs of gardens), looking for someone or something while the band played a cavernous, brick-backed space full of dancing bodies, bright hair, tattoos. Dig silver, wash letters, there's no word for where you've been. Someone touch your shoulder, play a different scene. It should end with the boy entering the club, obviously, but I can't remember if it did. I feel slightly as though my brain has fanworked itself.
In the second dream, a plaintive but otherwise reasonable-sounding man with whom I'd been having a conversation online about black metal suddenly started complaining that it was fascist that he and his friends couldn't refer to ladies' night at their usual bar as "the Pigsty" anymore, and when I pointed out that wasn't actually fascist and I was pretty sure he still had a legal right to make pig noises at women who wanted to buy drinks, it was just kind of an asshole thing to do, I started getting internet-stalked. Threatening messages on Facebook, LJ, friends e-mailing me to say that Photoshopped images of me were being posted on Craigslist selling sex work, etc. He said gloatingly that he had my permission to do it, because I'd started the conversation with him. He wouldn't answer when I asked if he really believed that.
That dream was a lot less fun.
P.S. Hammer, please do not remake The Abominable Snowman (1957). I didn't think it was perfect, but if it hasn't got Peter Cushing, what's the point?
The first requires me to explain that in January 2010, after seeing Mission of Burma at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, I wrote about four hundred words on a story that never went anywhere, mostly describing a fictitious band called the Standard Deviants:
From the name, she had been expecting math rock or geek-chic indie gaucherie, spiky-haired boys in half-rimmed glasses and tennis shoes, not a four-part motley of post-punk midlife who could as easily have had students or children in the audience, jolting through songs about de Chirico's metaphysics and trysts on the Red Line. And you said it's a full moon when I said it's not foolproof. Moving nowhere, what we never fell to feel again, slingshot off melancholy into a shrapnel of drums and the singer's voice warped and burred on the low notes like guitar noise, her fingers in her lacquer-black Fender's strings. The bassist wore a denim workshirt whose sleeves turned back and forth from his wrists like a magician's patter as he bent to his instrument, stone-faced as a clown of the silver screen. Even between songs, the drummer was never still enough for Siân to make out the words scrawled in red and black capitals from torn T-shirt shoulder to wrist, spiraling into the soft bend of her sinewy arms. Racing in slow motion, strawberries and cream. Tea leaves, bicycle chains and dream of Christopher, Christopher and the machine.
It stopped there; it never picked up again and I'm not sure there's anything there to, except that I always liked the one fragment of Alan Turing love song. (At the time, I had no idea that anyone was writing them.) So did my unconscious, apparently. I dreamed last night that
rushthatspeaks found me the music video on YouTube. It was done in black-and-white, with a 35mm look as if it had been assembled out of British New Wave: a dark-haired boy in a striped pullover wheeling his bicycle through industrial streets (rowhouses and hills, a river I didn't recognize through the dustbin backs of gardens), looking for someone or something while the band played a cavernous, brick-backed space full of dancing bodies, bright hair, tattoos. Dig silver, wash letters, there's no word for where you've been. Someone touch your shoulder, play a different scene. It should end with the boy entering the club, obviously, but I can't remember if it did. I feel slightly as though my brain has fanworked itself. In the second dream, a plaintive but otherwise reasonable-sounding man with whom I'd been having a conversation online about black metal suddenly started complaining that it was fascist that he and his friends couldn't refer to ladies' night at their usual bar as "the Pigsty" anymore, and when I pointed out that wasn't actually fascist and I was pretty sure he still had a legal right to make pig noises at women who wanted to buy drinks, it was just kind of an asshole thing to do, I started getting internet-stalked. Threatening messages on Facebook, LJ, friends e-mailing me to say that Photoshopped images of me were being posted on Craigslist selling sex work, etc. He said gloatingly that he had my permission to do it, because I'd started the conversation with him. He wouldn't answer when I asked if he really believed that.
That dream was a lot less fun.
P.S. Hammer, please do not remake The Abominable Snowman (1957). I didn't think it was perfect, but if it hasn't got Peter Cushing, what's the point?
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