Li Tsai stood beside the groundship and studied the ruins of the ancient city. She’d learned in school that the inhabitants of that unhappy place called it Denver, in honor of some forgotten politician. Today those people were naught but dust and troubled memories, she thought, shifting her glance towards the new city standing alongside the bones of the old: Deng Xiaoping, city of the people.
September 24th, 2014 10.15am
He sits on the comfortable sofa and assesses his surroundings. He is in a spartan, minimally furnished room on the second floor of a nondescript Syrian apartment. There is a lamp-shade to his left, and a small coffee table in front of him, on which there is a bowl containing some dates. Somebody has tried to insert some signs of civilization, and he appreciates this. Outside, staccato gunfire is the false fire-cracker sporadically popping in the distance. The automatic bursts have an industrial sound quality, as if the trigger-happy fanatics shouting their devotions are contractors hired to destroy the city incrementally by hosing it with their bullets, and their RPG rounds.
“You want?” asks one of his swarthy captors unable to develop the question any further, because of limited English.
A laptop illuminates the otherwise darkened room. On the screen is a website that she is all too familiar with, the one that has been taunting her for months. A new photo has been uploaded within the past couple of hours. She pulls out a chair but chooses not to sit – the surfaces are damp and the whole apartment smells of bleach and lemon.
The website is seemingly old fashioned by design. Page backgrounds are dark with a watermark logo. Fonts are bright and dated. Items jerk around the page whenever a window is resized or moved. An animated under construction image rotates and hovers in view at all times.
The homepage shows fourteen captionless photographs. The image quality is poor and they appear to be scanned copies of original prints. Each image shows a minor celebrity in a state of undress, always draped across an object or a piece of furniture. The pictures are unflattering and raw. The first image shows a reality star splayed across a four poster bed. The next is an ex-soap star lying face down into a giant beanbag. A television presenter slumps backwards over a pile of cardboard boxes.
And so on.
Book versus film has always been an interesting debate. My thoughts are that the book always wins. You need to work at it, consider, understand and then evaluate. The same could be said about a film, but sometimes, something right in front of you isn’t considered fairly. If it was, Michael Jackson would only ever have had one nose.
I do like to watch a film after I have read the book, but that is mainly so I can moan. Although one film springs to mind that was very close to the book. It was ‘Sleepers’. The weird thing was I expected the film to pad the story out as it was a relatively short book. But the film was true to the written word which just made me realise how good the story was. Lorenzo Carcaterra got an awful lot of mileage out of such a small word count.
Films or books, books or films, I actually have a love of both. However TV is a different matter!
When I look back and remember a time when I did enjoy the whole concept of TV programmes, I can always recall being told to read a book by my elders. That was ironic as I did read. Every night before I lay in the dark trying to sleep, I read. But what is crazy now is that the folks who are the age of my parents, these folks who told us all to read a book, are addicted to the TV. Be it soap operas, (Jesus…A realistic soap opera would be about millions of families doing nothing more exciting than watching soap operas.) Jeremy Kyle type shows, (I blame Jerreee…Jerreee…Jerreee Springer) reality TV or whatever guff is on, they are addicted. A conversation with a soap fan is as coherent and entertaining as listening to a toddler use words for their genitalia and bodily evacuations.
We meet every morning in the coffee shop next door to the hotel. There’s Zia, with his three shots of espresso and who knows how many packets of sugar. Ali takes his coffee with plenty of cream. Aqmed orders one of those fancy drinks with an Italian name I wouldn’t dare try to pronounce. Every day something different. “What is it today?” Zia always asks Aqmed, as if there’s something a bit too girlish about Aqmed, a man who doesn’t drink his coffee black and strong. Then, of course, there is me. Omar. I am a tea man.
Leaning against the grimy brick Mel scuffed her feet on the flags. She flicked a fag end into a puddle of scummy rain water. Her fingers quivered and shook, fiddling and picking at the little gold clasp on her shoulder bag. She sniffed, wiped the back of her hand across her nose. She needed a fix but couldn’t have one yet, she needed to keep her wits about her. She hated being out on the street, well of course she did but it was Saturday and so there was no choice.
She sat in the chair waiting. Let it come, she thought. I am prepared for every eventuality, and when it comes I will not be surprised. Nonetheless, she was tense, apprehensive, alert, and when the doorbell rang her blood froze. Now, she would say. Here it comes. She tried to hide, inside the room, inside herself, but still she heard the sound of the doorbell like someone screaming in her ear. She tried to make herself smaller and smaller and sometimes even fled to the farthest corner of the room. The farther away she was the less she felt the threat. Sometimes she turned her face to the wall and began to count, ring by ring, and if the ringing did not stop began to mumble words of entreaty or supplication.
Melvin Mudlicker sipped his coffee slowly as he worked the numbers on a napkin at his fifth favorite diner.
Circumstances once a week brought him to this part of town and he had grown fond of one of the attractive young waitresses who always asked how he was doing, how his business was doing and if he wanted his coffee refilled or if he wanted his usual, a turkey burger deluxe with fries, hold the pickle and tomato.
They had developed a nice rapport, rhythm and flow together.
He was a tall sheepish gentleman in his late fifties. His eyes were gentle, his chin was weak, his shoulders were starting to stoop. His legs were thin and wobbly, his hair was thinning and gray. And he walked with the hesitant stride of a crane, his head bobbing forward with every step. Watching him amble along the street, one would never guess him to be an artist. A servant, perhaps, a beggar more likely, but not an artist: a soul unencumbered by earthly snares and committed to only the Muse. But an artist he was, and no mere artist at that. He was an artist in the most gallant of mediums: the daring realm of street performance.
Everyone of us has a favourite book and no-one else might agree and that is perfectly fine.
For pure perception on growing up, Stephen King’s ‘It’ was the only book I have read as an adult and it reminded me of being a child with a child’s logic. If memory serves me right, the book is around 1300 pages. All those words are a story around one simple idea:
‘For every adult who thinks up the legend of the vampire, there is a child who imagines the stake that can kill the vampire.’
literally stories 