Executive Decision

Meddlethwaite had tasted success. It mantled him with warmth and awe. The dammed thing worked!

Hurriedly he cast around for something to try in it. The ashtray! He pushed it into the transmitter and hit the go button. The computer tapes started hunting and the power indicators swung over as the ashtray disappeared in a burst of pale blue light to re-assemble instantaneously in the receiver receptacle at the other and of the room.

He was still staring at the ashtray when the woman came in. Small, dark-haired, she was not beautiful but possessed an indefinable presence that made her the envy of others.

"Evelyn", he said. "It works. Look, I've just transported the ashtray and that tea cup across the room." Meddlethwaite was excited. His face was flushed. "I wired in the fujitron chamber you brought this morning - and I couldn't resist it. I gave it a go - and look." He pointed dramatically to the receiver. "We'll be famous" he cried.

Evelyn smiled slowly, warmly. "I'm glad", she said.

"Is that all you can say", cried Meddlethwaite. "It's stupendous."

With a quick movement she brushed aside a strand of hair hanging over an eye. "Look" she said. "I have no time to waste. I want you to disconnect the transmitter portal from the transmitter itself and hook it up to that cable lying on the floor. Do it quickly", she said peremptorily, "and then come next door." The door swung closed behind her. Meddlethwaite was confused - and silent. The woman had been totally unaffected by success. She had worked like the devil and had finally come up with the answer to the problem. The machine worked - and she hadn't turned a hair.

Savagely he attacked the wiring and an hour later he had the new cable attached.

"Come here", she said as he entered the room next door. Meddlethwaite stopped in his tracks. She was adjusting a stainless steel cabinet and in an intuitive flash he recognised it for what it was - a transmitter - much bigger than the experimental model he had used next door.

Silently he approached the cabinet. "Get in", she commanded. "What the..." cried Meddlethwaite, far too late, as she pushed him suddenly into the cabinet - and the door clicked shut behind him.

Meddlethwaite was still screaming when the blue light enveloped him.

But he stopped when he felt his body slammed together and he looked out through the porthole at the grassy plain and the distant forest. He felt fine, except that he was frightened - more frightened than he had ever been. He fought to control his panic. The door would not open. And then he saw her.

It was Evelyn. She darted into his restricted field of vision. He blinked because she was clothed in a silver metallic overall. Her dark hair swung as she suddenly stopped, turned in her tracks and fired the thing she carried in her hand. The two horrible creatures chasing her, half man half ape, fell to the ground. Meddlethwaite heard nothing until she opened the door of the cabinet.

He stared at her wordless. "Come on out of there" she said carelessly. Meddlethwaite was overcome by a great sense of calmness. "Why should I?" he asked.

She stared back at him and started tugging at a zip on her coverall, "Because you've got work to do," she said, her eyes suddenly dancing. "The Galactic Executive have decided for a reason I really cannot discern that you, friend Adam, are the first of the Homo Saps."

PENNED BY BGP (Late 1950's or early 1960's)

One of my father's short stories, found among his papers after his untimely death in 1990. Click on the images below to see scans of the original typed pages:





Regards, MAlfaRK

SADF Insights : 1979 to 1981

In June 1981 I completed my two years of compulsory "National Service" in the South African Defense Force (SADF). I had been conscripted into the 7 SA Infantry Battalion and spent nine months in training (at Bourkes Luck and at Phalaborwa) and over a year in the South West African (Namibian) "operational area" commonly known as "The Border". For most of that time I was a "Grunt" - Rifleman 2, Section 2, Platoon 2, Alpha Company.

In April 2000 I found a piece of paper in the back of a drawer in my room at my mother's house in Pretoria. Nineteen years earlier, on a scrap of military stationery, I had scribbled down the insights I gained during my 24 months as an unwilling conscript in Apartheid's war machine. Interesting reading. What a waste:

• I have learned the meaning of love and respect, and how to hate.
• I have learned endurance and now know what I can take.
• I have learned the value of life and experienced the loss of death.
• I have been elated by true happiness and crushed by unyielding despair.
• I have learned to handle people and situations.
• I have seen the other side of life.
• I have learned to despise war and treasure peace.
• I have acquired some self discipline, but not army discipline.
• I now know that I must have freedom and am revolted by tyrannical oppression.
• I enjoy the tranquility of solitude and the excitement of a chosen group of friends.
• I have learned to never follow blindly and to reason carefully.
• I now know that nothing is impossible.
• I have discovered that true friendship is a scarce and valuable commodity.
• I despise the Racist Afrikaner for his contorted beliefs, his lack of culture, upbringing, etiquette and manners, his warped and twisted view of life and people, the way he resorts to violence when he knows he has not got a foot to stand on, for what he has done to me, my family and my freedom and finally for the way he is destroying this beautiful country. The Afrikaner's Apartheid-based nationalist political standpoint is deplorable.
  

With hindsight the fact that I was able to find any positive learning points at all is amazing to me. I suffered during those two years, but it appears that the glass was half full as opposed to being half empty. Yes. With my sweat, blood and tears.

MAlfaRK ©

Frank Black

I had always known Frank Black as the song writer and front man of the Pixies, the immediate forebearer of the alternative rock boom of the early 1990s. They folded in acrimonious circumstances in 1993.

Early in the new millennium I bought a Ferrari and drove from Prague to Germany to take ownership and to move it into short-term storage there. On my MP3 player I had a number of tracks that I had downloaded but not listened to. On the road, three tracks made an impression - Tenacious-D's "Tribute", Murder Dolls "Dead In Hollywood" and "Los Angeles" by Frank Black and the Catholics.



I drove back from Munich to Prague with Gerhard & Liana Schröder...and "Los Angeles" was playing as we went through a speed trap at high speed just inside the Czech border at Rosvadov. But that's another story! Since then I've delved deeper into Black's cryptic lyrics and unconventional subjects (eg. incest, collapsing dams, surrealism, Biblical violence, science fiction and surf culture) but have not had the opportunity to see him live. I was up to my ears in work when he toured passed through London on July 15, 2007, but here's his concert at the Paradiso in Amsterdam two weeks earlier on July 4.



"Los Angeles" is the third track from the end. Also take a listen to the brilliant "Robert Onion" right after that. I hope you enjoy.

Cheers, MAlfaRK

Outercourse

Come with me to places of pleasure,
Value for money, measure for measure.

Treasured virginity the first frontier,
Having a great time, wish you were here.

Fear disappears as emotion increases,
Smiles all around, the friction that pleases.

Jesus saves all the souls that he can,
Out of the frying fire, into the pan.

Fan the fire of wild emotion,
Lust and passion, undying devotion.

Motion rhythmic the passion heightens,
Saccharin sensations so sweet that it frightens.

Lightens the dawn the shape so sensual,
The taste and the feel, you know it so well.

Swell the emotions physically erect,
Remnant juices, a sign of respect.

Reflect on performance we all seem to tend,
Slipping through afterglow, oblivious the end.


Musing on freedom in the context of the permissive society, the religion of free love and the joy of one-night-stand orgasms. I clearly remember writing this piece on the fly (and late at night) on July 8, 1992...fueled by red wine. I was visiting with Ulrike Cowan and her sister Kati in the commune in which Ulrike was living at the time. The house in Hatfield, Pretoria, South Africa has subsequently been demolished and replaced by a shopping mall. Such is progress. I polished the piece a little on October 12, 1992 and have not touched it since then.

Cheers MAlfaRK ©

Bipolar Affirmation

Red water - yellow blood,
Reflections of warped mind - mud,
Shadows in my mind's eye,
Who and what and where am I?

Tripping over - falling slowly,
In this world I feel so lonely,
In this void that I call home,
Idiots usurp the throne.

Where'm I going - where've I been,
All the things I've done and seen,
Have left me feeling old and empty,
Still trying to find that land of plenty.

Marooned in a rudderless boat,
Blind madmen keep us afloat,
I know what's right but I'm not in control,
I'll surely die in this wet black hole.

Moving down this bottomless pit,
I think I'm alive but I feel shit,
My eyes are open but don't want to see,
The so-called friends that claim to love me.

Distant now, the end is near,
My friends are gone although they're here,
Through their eyes at last I see,
The colour of their gross insincerity.

Embryos for blackmail, access to gwat,
One by one into the trap,
I've gotta hold out, I must be strong,
Those pale reflections will see they're wrong.

Leave me, leave me, I'm going down.
At last I'll wear my thorn of crowns,
I am different - I am me,
Without a doubt the superior species.

Fuck you all!


A defiant piece flicking the bird at the world...and quite rightly too! ;-) The first verse I had in my head since "naaing beat" (i.e. standing guard) in the freezing winter of 1979 during my two years of conscription. The rest came to me in an amazing post-coital flash of elucidation at 03h00 on Sunday, June 14, 1992, exactly 24 months after my father's funeral. I wrote this in the half-light still lying in bed and with my girlfriend curled up behind me. One of my unforgettable memories of Pretoria, South Africa, reflecting the politics of the day, my disillusion with the world and my friends (who were all getting married) and my own paranoia and insecurity.

Cheers MAlfaRK ©

Echo & The Bunnymen - A Concert To Remember

On November 5, 2005 my wife and I were privileged to be in the audience at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in London and to be a part of one of the most memorable performances of my concert going career. Ian McCulloch, Will Sergeant and the latest incantation of Echo & The Bunnymen gave a stellar performance that is now available on both CD (Me, I'm All Smiles) and DVD (Dancing Horses). We viewed the whole performance from the raised area towards the back of the theatre (standing between the mixing desk to our left and the video camera shooting a panorama of the stage to our right) and had no one obstructing our view. It was a fabulous evening with a group that I have supported since buying Crocodiles on vinyl soon after it was released in 1980.

I was an unhappy conscript at the time, and just had enough time to record the album before being shipped into combat at Ruacana in the heart of the Namibian "Operational Area". It was one of the albums that got me through that morally heinous and soul destroying part of my life. Four years later I was a final year student and found myself travelling from Pretoria to Margate in KwaZulu-Natal. It was midnight, I was hitch-hiking and I was alone on the dark highway in the bush south of Durban. All I had was a backpack, a bottle of whisky, a Panasonic "Walkman" and a pocketful of Echo & The Bunnymen cassette tapes. It was an eventful trip, and Ocean Rain will always take me back to that dark stretch of road, the stars and the smell of the sub-tropical bush!

Three days after the London concert, the Bunnymen performed at the Paradiso Club in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It was the same set as the one they delivered in London and the bonus was that it was streamed live to the world. Unfortunately my bandwidth let me down all through that performance, but I was pleased to see that the whole performance is now available online. Block off an hour and 40 minutes, crank up the volume and enjoy this gem from November 8, 2005...

I was thinking about writing a full review of the November 5, 2005 concert, but found that Jamil Ahmad had beaten me to it! Please take a look at his site, but here's a complete transcript of his great gig report at musicOMH.com...

One of the intriguing advantages of the Empire's pristine acoustics is that it makes weak bands sound average, and average bands sound quite good. Take tonight's support bands. Johnny 4, who draw inspiration from the crummy '80s flick Short Circuit, are your typical student band: young, fresh faced and looking decidedly nervy.

By this point the Empire audience isn't even into three figures, and the band look like that decision to leave the pub circuit came a tad too soon. Mistakes are made, heads remain firmly fixed on instruments and size nines. It doesn't help that their sound is a mushy yodel of distilled Pearl Jam and Radiohead. To his credit singer Luke Albery tries to engage himself with a bit more verve in his string work and delivery, but this band and their sound just seem to have wrong written all over it, which tonight's over forties aren't buying either. Since most of them are old enough to be Johnny 4's parents, they receive the Chichester quartet politely.

L20 (you may have guessed) are loud, Scouse and proud of it. Barely older than Johnny 4 they hop on stage with a spring in their step. Singer Danny Marshall's ginormous lungs mean he can pretty much go toe to toe with The Music's Rob Harvey, only less shrieky.

Stylistically their sound is embedded with deep in folk and melody which tonight's headliners in no small part helped shape, along with Messrs Lennon and McCartney. Marshall has a tendency to exaggerate his vowels and ape the monkey boy routine (wonder how long he spent in front the mirror smoking cigarettes and downing bottled water.) L20 materialise into a monotonous cobble of northern bands. Surely, please god, the magic Merseyside cow has been milked of its last droplet?

Or has it? Strictly speaking there is some magic in old daisy, as Echo & The Bunnymen recently proved on their welcome return to form with Siberia. Tonight they slide onstage to the slow burning Disease, its haunting two minute serenade sounding remarkably epic and updated some 25 years on.

If many were here tonight in the hope that Ian McCulloch and co would play much old material, they picked the right night - thanks to the filming of the DVD. The likes of Pride and With A Hip were casually slipped in with much aplomb.

Noticeably, much of Siberia's airing fell effortlessly into place alongside the new material, and that's a testament to the band as a live force.

Ian McCulloch was on particularly fine form, goose stepping from almighty croons to waspy wails. Hidden under shades and a parka, chain smoking his way through the ninety minutes it took before he eventually broke a smile and spoke to the crowd, cracking a few jokes - which is where the subtitles button on your DVD remote will have to come into play.

And with Lips Like Sugar, The Killing Moon and Nothing Lasts Forever making up no less than three encores, it topped off a rare night of brilliance from one of Liverpool's true originals.

My profile at Last-FM bears testament to how well Echo & The Bunnymen has stood the test of time for me!

Cheers, MAlfaRK

Countries I Have Visited

Found a nifty website that generates the map below...

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

So that adds up to 64 counties. But the total comes to 75 if I add in the place I have visited that no longer exist, namely: Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Rhodesia, South West Africa, Tibet, Transkei, Venda, West Germany and the People's Republic of Hout Bay :-)

Cheers, MAlfaRK

The Vicar of Rome Meets The Big Satan

Last week Pope Benedict XVI met with George W. Bush at the Vatican. Dogmatic spiritual leader meets ignoramus war monger...what an interesting conversation they must have had! But the meeting got me thinking back to the death of Pope John Paul II and the nomination of his successor. On April 19, 2005 I was in New York attending a meeting in our offices on the 36th floor (overlooking Times Square) when white smoke streamed from a chimney over the Sistine Chapel and the announcement was mad that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger would be the 265th Pope. In our meeting room we put CNN on the video projector and watched this all unfolding over lunch.

Here are a couple of photos I took that afternoon...

As a pupil at Christian Brothers College, Mount Edmund in South Africa, one of my primary influences was my history teacher, Janice Farquharson. Over the past 30 years she has become a great friend and mentor, and during the course of Ratzinger's accession, she wrote this wonderful piece to commemorate the event:

So here goes, typed out again, my tribute to the Papcy.

VATICAN VERSE
- Inspired by the Election of Cardinal Ratzinger as Benedict XVI 19/4/05 -

Sing a song of incense
Voting for a Pope.
Will they OK Condoms?
What an effing hope!

Sing a song of Cardinals
All in red they grapple,
Busy picking a new Pope
In the Sistine Chapel.

Sing a song of Conclaves
Men of great moral fibre,
Finding yet another Pope
On the banks of Tiber.

Sing a song of Prelates
Catholic to a man;
Busy being celibate
In the Vatican.

ENVOI
Let us now praise famous Popes
Lords of all creation,
Stern opponents of safe sex
And of fornication.

So we'll sing a Papal Mass,
Start with a Te Deum,
Don't omit the Sanctus, lads:
Hoc est corpus meum.

© Janice Farquharson, SLC (Staunch Lapsed Catholic)
18/4 - 30/6/05.

The Cutty Sark

Some ignorant bastard has devastated the heart of Greenwich. On May 21 an arsonist torched the Cutty Sark, a fine three-masted square-rigged vessel built for long distance racing. This magnificent clipper was built in 1869 and at the time was one of the fastest ships in the world. She was dry-docked in 1954 and for more than half a century this ship has defined London's south east edges. But this relic from the golden age of sailing ships, when Britain had the world's greatest navy, is no more.

The loss is personal for me. I remember visiting the ship with my mother and late father in the summer of 1974. What a great adventure that was. My first trip abroad had taken us from Africa to Munich, Bodensee, Copenhagen, Roskilde, Manchester, London and Horley and my father (who had worked as a Fleet Street journalist in the late-50's) took pride in showing me the sights. One of them was the Cutty Sark. She was not just a reminder of the great age of sail, but also of Britain's history as an island nation whose success depended on maritime prowess. As a gifted raconteur, my father conveyed this to me in the most exciting and memorable way, spinning yarns about the last of the tea clippers and the lucrative race across the globe to bring the first tea of the year from China to London. My father is no longer with us, but the Cutty Sark was still there...until last week. And I feel the loss.

My young son unfortunately never had the privilege of meeting his grandfather, but last summer we did connect a few of the dots. I took him to Greenwich and showed him the Cutty Sark. OK, he was only a year old at the time (and I did not take his pram into the ship), but I wheeled him around this beautiful memorial to those killed in the two world wars and flashed back 32 years to that fine afternoon with my father...my tutor...my friend. I'm glad that I got pictures of my boy with the old clipper before she was cruelly defiled, but I have no doubt that she will rise like the phoenix from the ashes. Luckily more than 50% of the ship's timbers were undergoing off site restoration and if the iron hull of the vessel is not buckled, they should be able to rebuild her. But if they do, she will no longer be original fabric, and we will have lost some of the history itself. And some of my history too.

At the end of our month abroad in 1974 I also remember flying from Heathrow airport. At duty free my father bought two bottles of whisky with bright yellow labels. And the brand name? Cutty Sark! At the time I thought the label was cheap and tacky, but he seemed to enjoy the tipple when we got home!

In any event, I hope they catch the yellow bastard that wiped this genuine icon of London from the face of the tourist map, and I look forward to its rebirth.

Cheers, MAlfaRK

White Army Blues

Goodbye Gillian,
The army's come to take me,
So I'm leaving on a train.

We'll meet again,
Two years from now,
I won't be a long-haired lout,
I will be a man no doubt...
No doubt?

There goes the good life,
Farewell to the drinks and curls,
Farewell motorbikes and girls.
Bye-bye, so long...
How long?

MAlfaRK ©
Wednesday, July 4, 1979


I started writing this piece on the military troop-train from Pretoria, South Africa to the 7th SA Infantry Battalion at Bourke's Luck. Two years of conscription and carnage lay ahead. I remember finishing it while "naaing beat" (standing guard duty) in the early hours of the morning of that hellishly cold winter. The cloying aroma of military greatcoat still makes me sick. Gillian refers to Gillian Michael, my girlfriend at the time.

PW Botha & His Henchmen Excluded

"I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone"

These were the last words of Edith Cavell who was executed by firing squad for helping allied soldiers to escape from Brussels to neutral territory in Holland during World War I. I spotted them on a poster in the window of a bank on Fleet Street in London when I was out for lunch the other day. And they got me thinking...

"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"

I guess this is where the whole patriotism thing started for me - John F. Kennedy uttered these words on the day I was born. Noble sentiments to be sure (if a little treacly), but for a young lad like myself, but it was all downhill from there I'm afraid. I was born in Apartheid South Africa and grew up without a patriotic bone in my body. How could one possibly respect THAT flag, feel anything but revulsion for THAT national anthem and identify with any of THOSE national symbols?

"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it"

Or so said George Bernard Shaw. I think his theory operationalises, and I seem to support the alternative hypothesis. In my formative years I was deeply embarrassed by my country. In the sanctions era "my" flag was an embarrassment, "Die Stem van Suid Afrika" (a.k.a. "The Call of South Africa") belonged to supporters of the fascist regime, and national symbols like the springbok for me personified the racist totalitarian state in which I lived. Suffice it to say, it was an uncomfortable and sometimes scary place.

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross"

This quote is credited to Sinclair Lewis. I travel to the USA fairly regularly on business and during George Bush’s term of office, I think fascism has arrived. I am terrified by the flag-waving Christian Taliban, their theory of "intelligent design" (i.e. their attempt to get people to accept the Genesis creation myth as fact) and their apparent quest to eschew science and technology, and drag us all into a new Dark Age. But I’ve seen it all before – this is how it was in the Old South Africa. When good science clashed with Biblical fundamentalist beliefs, science lost every time. I know graduates of the National Christian Education brainwashing machine who still scoff at fossils saying "How do you know they’re not just normal stones created by chance?" These patriots were the same people who supported a government that censored (and frequently banned) music, films, books, magazines, the press, people and groups who saw the world differently to them. Scary times indeed…

"Patriotism ruins history"

Goethe hit the nail on the head! And I’m tired and it’s time for bed.

Later, MAlfaRK

First Post

Damn - now that title has set off a strange thought process. It's taken me back to the late-70's and a dark and desolate place where "The Last Post" * played through claxon horn loudspeakers as the command came down the line to switch off lights and turn in for the night. Taxis without wheels shuffled us across mirror-polished floors to steel-framed beds and cheap foam matresses covered in what we cacophemistically referred to as piss-skins. Cold. Frozen red fire buckets on cheaply welded frames. The secret sounds of Onan. Communal hell. Instant sleep and the expectation of a rabid and brutal awakening in a few short hours time. Once were soldiers.

But enough of that. Back then I scribbled things on pieces of scrap paper and notebooks and sent state-censored letters back home. I also kept diaries. Through my university years I started expressing myself in bad verse and when I backpacked the world I became a regular correspondent to friends and family. When I moved abroad I wrote tomes about my experiences and spent a fortune on postage. eMail changed all that. And then came my personal website and the chance to share my world with a larger audience. Pressure of work, business travel and a family of my own ultimately extinguished that fire, and I resorted to postcards to keep in touch with my significant others. Now I think the time is right for me to give blogging a go.

I have no agenda here other than to share observations and experiences and to go with the flow. "A collection of thoughts under construction" - that's probably what it's all about. So please bear with me as I figure this all out.

Later, MAlfaRK

* : MIDI Bugle by Neville Young