The girls in the T Mobile poster are excited: they are obscure individuals lost in a crowd, but they are grinning because the camera is on them and they have been given a microphone. Grin it up, girls. Sing along with Pink. Pink is being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds; you’re being paid fuck all; T Mobile will recoup millions, from you and your mates.

Beyonce Knowles, meanwhile, advertises Trident Chewing Gum.

Figure 1: her feral alter ego, Sasha Fierce, is pictured having broken into a dark building, shitting on the floor.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The following preview has been approved for all audiences:

Perhaps the shot of Megan Fox draped over a motorbike with her arse up in the air is an image that people of all ages and ages can agree is beautiful. But… the movie seems designed to raise the bloodlust and horn of teenage boys, with a combination of Megan’s arse and giant, energy-guzzling robot berzerkers who deal out ultra-mechavoilence, then mutate into petrol-driven road vehicles. Wind the kids up into an erotic, martial lather and then deliver to them images of sports cars. Should we approve flows of imagery such as this for the fourteen-year-olds of today? Shouldn’t we be cutting images of cars and motorbikes together with images of unattractive women? Shouldn’t Megan Fox be draped over a compost bin?

Uffa Halal Pizzas, a member of www.just-eat.co.uk. Sullen people waiting for a bus. An argument at the reception desk of the Candy Health and Beauty Centre.

A signpost for the BRIT school.

“….The BRIT School is an outstanding provider of specialist education and training in the performing and visual arts and media. As one year 11 parent commented, ‘The school is unique – it provides opportunities not available elsewhere’……..” (OFSTED)

Recent alumni include Amy fucking Winehouse, for fuck’s sake. Which course modules did she take? Would it be alright if my child didn’t take those modules, or are they mandatory requirements of the course?

I remember reading a quote from someone like Mark Ronson, saying something to the effect that Amy broadcast her pain so that her listeners might be eased in theirs. Which is a little bit like comparing her to Jesus Christ: a bizarre, unspoken, unsigned but binding contract whereby Winehouse kills herself by hoovering up drugs, freeing us from our own chemical and emotional addictions. I can’t help thinking that, viewed from the Buddhist perspective, Amy isn’t a saviour but a victim of an unsustainable ego: habits of mind, flows of intention, affect, behaviour and consequence that drive her round and round in a tornado of high-entropy pain. Perhaps it’s difficult to live with knowing that her vocal style is an imitation of 60s Motown stylings, that she’s essentially a fraud; perhaps it’s difficult to live through constructing not only a private ego but a public myth, that society and media drive on, force her to live out. Her career is based on simulating something that she isn’t, in public. A tiny Croydon girl making money simulating the music of black 1960s America.

We pass some crumbling terrace blocks, derelict businesses.

Figure 2: Originality is no guarantee of success.

I start to climb up into the Hills of South London, the geological city wall: Grange Road. Past some cans of superstrength lager, upturned, impaled on the iron church fence. Past a park, drunks with pale, ultra-purified cider; a girl pushing a pram, a grandfather with his two grandsons who are fascinated by tree stumps; he’s happy to be ahead of them, he knows they’ll catch up, they’re basically good kids, they just need a nudge in the right direction once in a while.

I pass a kid who’s walking along with headphones in, rapping: I try to work out if he’s talking on a phone, rapping along to a song, or a fucking nutter. He’s saying, “I’m walking along on a broken foot in my fucking jeeeans.” I pass a graveyard (grave of a woman called Januaria) and he passes me, having cut through the church yard, and he does look like he’s limping a little: perhaps he’s rehearsing, writing lines. “Better daaaays,” he says, expansive arm movements, loping along past the big houses of Upper Norwood.

If we turned off the air conditioning, the temperature might go down.

Towards the big mast. Radio comes out of it. It’s not the radiation per se that we love, it’s patterns of modulation, modulations in the frequency and amplitude of the radiation. We like patterns of change. We like patterns of change.

Crossing the road in that empty moment just as the lights change against me but before the cars can accelerate – like the moment between the out-breath and the in-breath.

The Crystal Palace. A theme park so fucking amazing that Queen Victoria went. They had it in central London and it stunned everyone in the world, then they moved it to South London and it burnt down. Some kids set it on fire, probably. In South London we can burn glass.

Walking along Sydenham Hill past a shrine to Michael Maloney, who died on the road here. The memorial itself is just off the pavement, in the large garden of a large house; but the wire mesh fence has been deliberately pulled down to let relatives tend the shrine (with candles and flowers). I’d love to know how the relationship’s going between his relatives and the owners of the house they vandalise in the commemoration of their dad.

Figure 3: Michael Maloney

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