Sinister: slow graffiti

[Rachel Playforth]

reading (and thinking) about belle and sebastian playing live suddenly
reminded me of a puzzling incident from my childhood.  back in the days
before we got those shiny flat tables with metal legs, my school was
equipped with proper slanty desks with inkwells and pencil grooves.  and
a decade's worth of graffiti.  in my day the trend was towards
decorating your desk with tippex flowers, but there were plenty of
traditional scrawls and gouges in the soft wood.  one prominent message
on my desk read: 'THE WHO Live at the Hammersmith Odeon'.  i thought i
knew who had written it - a girl called amber in the year above with a
taste for black eyeliner and retro rock music.  but i was baffled by the
actual meaning - i couldn't work out why anyone would state that a rock
band lived at the hammersmith odeon.  it was obviously some kind of
symbolic assertion that i was too uncool to understand.  almost
involuntarily, i began to imagine the band living in a cinema, sleeping
on the seats, setting up their drums in front of the screen, making cups
of tea in the huge echoey space.  i thought of it as a protest, an
occupation, or perhaps they had nowhere else to live, having spent all
their money on loose cars and fast women.  it wasn't until about a year
later that i noticed the correct syntax of the graffiti, that 'live' was
an adjective, NOT a verb. 

this pretty much sums up what a gauche little idiot i was back then and,
perhaps, how my imagination made up for it.

this morning i wanted to cast lots of crush votes.  just because it's
raining, and it would make people feel good, and i don't like to think
of them writing wonderful posts into a void.  but i didn't.  i would
feel oddly unfaithful (though i don't seem to feel any compunction about
flirting rampantly in #sinister, for some reason.)  i'll just spread
general 'amae' instead (while knowing full well that my definition of
that word wasn't quite accurate, but what the hell, it's a foreign word
and we can abuse it to our own ends if we like, pretentious melodramatic
teens and post-teens that we are.)  

as i sit behind my slightly claustrophobic desk, on my slightly
uncomfortable chair, bored out of my skull already at 9.45am, i am
comforted to think of will porter in another library far far away,
having unending non-specific sex in his lime green pants.

i went to see a play on wednesday featuring a manic-depressive librarian
and her love affair with the dewey decimal system.  i was hooked
straight away.  during the course of the play she explained to a chaotic
wannabe comedian that the dewey system was beautiful in its
inclusiveness, that there was no conceivable subject that didn't find a
home within its walls.  and that it helped you to see connections
everywhere.

luv archel xxx 

******************
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