J G Ballard Goes to Greater Feast

Clink on link to see excellent obituary from Will Self on the great man.

RESTAURANT REVIEW No 1- KARIMS'S MANCHESTER

Do you ever find yourself in a city, alone and at a loose end with a couple of hours to kill? I sometimes do and it was on just such an occasion in July 08, I made a spontaneous visit to this humoungus Indian restaurant in the middle of Deansgate in Manchester City Centre. Karim's is vast and dome-like with hanging chandeliers and huge marble pillars and marble tables. Entire countries stocks of marble must have been plundered to furnish Karim's.  Wars fought etc...

I was initially attracted by a chap in traditional Indian dress standing at the doorway, what particular tradition I know not, and the food made me none the wiser.  Traditional 'fusion' dress perhaps?

Upon entering the otherworld I chose a little marble table where, as solitary diner I felt much as a sailor might upon the vastness of the ocean.

A mile away on the other side of what might be laughingly referred to as the dining area were twenty four small copper domes containing pilau rice, bhuna curry, byriani, aloo, tandoori, and some egg fried rice, et al, all of which the tight lipped waiter described as self service 'asian fusion'.  I was not particularly hungry but several hours later when I had loaded my plate and navigated by GPS through marble mountains back to my table I was suffering from exhaustion and starvation.  I'm never attracted by this 'eat as much as you like' bollocks.

On a serious note this restaurant is really quite mad.  It is without doubt the largest eatery I have ever been in and to be the only diner added to the unreality.  But a restaurant is much, much more than grandiose surroundings and this place just didn't feel right.  My non-alcoholic beer offered little comfort too.  The staff leered at me from far away and occasionally people would poke their head out of the kitchen door as if pointing out 'the customer' with evident surprise and no little curiosity.

After a while I could feel a panic attack coming on and realised I would need to make an escape. A sense of impending doom curdled in my guts as I ate the uninspired lukewarm gruel and even as I chewed I wondered at the multiplicity of bacteria that might reside in the long heated chicken bhuna even now, I was thinking, taking up residence in my naive and unsuspecting gut.

I ordered the bill and informed the waiter I had not ordered the mutton dressed as lamb.  He stayed true to form and glowered silently.

As I passed the doorman in traditional dress he smiled and said 'you enjoy?'

'No'I said, 'not really.  'It's all fur coats and no knickers in there.'

Not recommended at all.  3.5 out of 10.  Bring your own knickers!

AFTERTHOUGHTS:   No intestinal problems though mildly burning ring-piece next morning.  Nothing like my own curries when I suffered from a burning bell-end after the first piss of the morning and a fiery arse throughout the day but I am liberal with my chillies and these somatic joys are what asian food has taught me.  I remember with nostalgic yearning those banana and chilli fried butties Nazir used to make when we were students and just back from the pub.  Now they were real bottom burners but that's another story.  I hate to diss a restaurant because it is somebody's living but this place really is bollocks.

The Meaning of 'Rosebud'

You remember how in that great scene from 'Citizen Kane' the glass snow jar thing (what are those things called?) slips from Kane's lifeless hand to role on the floor and he breathes the one word 'Rosebud' and dies? Well reading the incomparable Simon Callow's first volume biography of Orson Welles- 'The Road to Xanadu' it turns out that Randolph Hearst, the monstrous newspaperman on whom Kane is based, referred to his mistress Marion Davies's pudenda as 'rosebud.' Now dear reader, tell me Heart of Balance blog doesn't pluck facts from the trembling lyre strings of history for your amusement!

What?

What's a pudenda? Ye gods you do not want to know.

But Rosebud? The name in fact comes from the co-writer Herman Mankiewicz who in his youth had a bike named pudenda, I mean rosebud. What kind of kid calls his bike rosebud?

Is it the greatest film ever made? Well there ain't such a thing. At that level of supernal artistic achievement it's how the work touches the very soul of the viewer. And we are all touched differently. That's the miracle of the Shakespearean Sonnets-how they universalise emotional life.

It may well be the finest American film ever made, though David Thompson recently said it might be the most overrated  American film ever made-it's probably both those things.  But it also just might be one of the most insightful studies of the corrupting nature of power. That's not so bad considering it was Welles's first film.  And it changed film-making forever.

Oh and the meaning of 'rosebud'?  Well it was the name of Kane's full-suspension mountain bike!  Wasn't it?

These are desperate times for the Art of Balance Consultancy!

So why write a blog when nobody apparently actually reads it? Well just occasionally you just gotta get down and boogy man! And screw the world sometimes! Sometimes you have to just believe in what you're doing though nobody else pays attention. Sometimes all you have is your faith in yourself. I believe in this world. I believe it's just possible it may have a future. And more egoistically I believe in my dreams and in my hopes for my under-pants and for a burgeoning under-pants literature.

Won't you please believe in me..
Just for today?

Please join the 'Believe In Me' Donation Fund to promote and support your very own heroes ability to publish his great works and CD's that humanity seemingly wish to ignore but that they so desperately need. As one schizophrenic vegetarian professor of myarseology recently commented in an completely unknown journal "tony digs so deep sometimes it frightens me but hey, he's offal nice too." (She was a fellow Scot but I enjoyed her kidneys in a garlic and red wine and mango jus.)

Send money /cash/ cheques/ gold bars to tony@they'llbelieveanything .com

Thanks you for leestening to this very peersonal massage. (Send money nows!) Or what you can afford : Toe clippings/ Hair clippings/ Distilled Sweat/ Actual Blood/ Fear-type Feelings/ Original Jokes/ Transformational and Alchemical recipes/ Any bloody thing that can be sold on. (Preferably through amazon)!
OK! I'm here to stay is the message.  Enough already and Bone-hard Bonne Nuit!

SUNDAY POEM ABOUT THE MALE ORGASM (For a change!)

UTTERING THE WORDS OF LIFE


Last night when I
licked the wet walls
of your mouth’s cave,
nibbled the sweet
shells of your ears,
palpated the soft creamy
down of you
and slipped inside you
between your peaches…

I became a secret cannon.
A huge tube of steel!
Cunning symbols wrought thereon.

My swelling balls
the spherical wheels.

And I discharged from
the mountaintop to
the great all-encompassing
lake beneath.

Became the cannonball
then a pinball
rushing through tubes,
mazes and passageways.

Then with a great spurt
of red fire gushed
fireworkingly through your head
with a shout
and you breathed

‘I’m coming! I’m coming!’

Me, I hurtled through air
still rising!
Till, reaching the zenith
of my whirling arc;
I plunged,
fell with grace,
disappeared over
the crested ridge
and landed with a thud
in a field of disinterested cows.

The ball I was became flattened
on the sweet earth,
its grey skin merged
into hands, eyes, legs.

On the faint breeze
wafting from the next valley
I heard your voice,
laden with urgency,
uttering the words of life:

‘I’M COMING! I’M COMING!’