Please welcome to the world … Jeremy Reed & Martin Bladh Darkleaks – The Ripper Genome (Infinity Land Press)

 

Darkleaks – The Ripper Genome
by Jeremy Reed & Martin Bladh
Foreword by Stephen Barber

Darkleaks – The Ripper Genome is a unique collaboration between Jeremy Reed and Martin Bladh that revisits the Jack the Ripper case from a brave new angle. Reed and Bladh are preoccupied less with who Jack the Ripper was than with who he became, his compulsions genetically scrambled into amalgams of hardwired obsession that re-manifest themselves in the figures of Ballard, Burroughs, Bacon, Peter Christopherson and Valerie Solanas, as though history were being driven on by the haywire velocity of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, backfiring for a few instants into the poetry of Baudelaire but always centrifuged into the contemporary moment. The figure of Jack the Ripper disintegrates into multiple entities of obsessional creativity and murderous fixations, across London’s wastelanded, scorchearthed streets, only navigable via the blood-spurted vectors emitted from that multiplied figure’s victims.

144 pages, 20x20cm, softbound
First edition limited to 100 copies.

STANDARD EDITION http://infinitylandpress.com/3809199-darkleaks-the-ripper-genome
LIMITED EDITION BOX SET http://infinity-land-press.format.com/3809241-darkleaks-limited-edition-box-set

 

 

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EXTRACTS

J.G. Ballard and
Robert Vaughan

Robert Vaughan as the alienated anti-hero of Ballard’s Crash; a petrol-head psycho addicted to metallized sexuality, and orgasmic bongo achieved through the erotic geometry of impacting bodies and dashboard  ergonomics, was simply Ballard 2. It was Ballard’s own sexual history sighted the analogy between his partner Claire’s nylon crotch and the triangular groove in the shatterproof smoked-out windscreen glass of a hammered BMW; the woman driver’s legs kicked backwards over her head from an explosive head-on collision. Pre-date Crash by a century, and the novel’s obsessive preoccupation with symphorophilia assumes an unnerving likeness to the injuries inflicted on Whitechapel whores whose submerged sexualities were mapped into ventricular alleys and industrial yards as a diagram of available pubis. Vaughan, or Ballard 2, is the voyeuristic stalker who vicariously shoots extreme genital injuries and facial lesions of crash victims by way of cataloguing their violated bodies. When the Ripper cut he zoomed in like the fictitious Vaughan with his nose mashed on the camera’s display, his orgasm synchronous with the diagrammatic wound inflicted.

Was it ever really 1888 except in sepia photos? Does the nineteenth-century exist outside of reinvented fiction, any more than the emergence of Robert Vaughan in 1973, as the delusional protagonist of Crash, driving a reconstructed Lincoln Continental as weaponised assassin along the network of Western Avenue interchanges and flyovers? Is there a link between the Ballard gene and Jack’s chromosome, as quantum psychopathologies?

Imagine it: a man always in a black fog-dampened greatcoat steps into the Whitechapel ziggurat. The fog’s so light-polluted he can’t even see his leather-gloved hand. When he makes contact with a tangible surface it’s a black warped aviator’s jacket worn by Vaughan as the serial choreographer of kamikaze crashes. Jack pre-emptively fingers 1973 in this way and the contact’s so alien it’s like touching gel coating the future.

Imagine it: the brief exchange of bodies like gay sex conducted through time-travel, or the first act of homosexuality committed in the cabin of a NASA rocket’s interplanetary mission.

Imagine it: Jack re-confronts an empty space like tomorrow and he’s thrown. Vaughan can’t go backwards in time, but the transitory contact alerts him like the metabolised milligrams of a drug to some molecular alteration, some blank that was a yesterday decommissioned by his memory, like you forget the taste of ice cream until reacquainted with green pistachio.

Imagine it: was it sex between two pockets of fog: no Jack, no Vaughan, just two foggy intelligences combining to create an orgasmic opal? Each heard the other walk away separated by a century in a nanosecond, like pulling a sticking plaster off time to find history never existed. Imagine it.

 

______________________

 

Have wanted to be your friend with mi letter
I feel certain amount of sympathy for you

the police about here are fine looking fellows
I had the pleasure of drinking with one this morning and asked him what he thought about my glorious work
I was Injoying my Little Self good

I must say you are clever in finding out things you are quite perfect
keep your spirits up dear Bos and be on your guard
all though this has been written with a beating heart and a shakey hand

Near the spot
I mean to leave it a little longer before I tell you where
I am waiting

Yours till death

 

 

been sharpen-ing my knife
you aint sharp enough for me here

I have done eleven murders so you aint found them out after al

Two gone down suers
the Dear old knife who committed these murders is down the thames

I will do the next one worse than the last
I do it when I get a chance not when I see police coming
I will do it one of those times when a copper looking and then I’ll do
the same to him

 

_________________________

Jewels
– after Baudelaire

Sinuously nude and knowing my fetish
she wears only paste jewellery in bed
her ruby anklets climbing up my back
or pendant spilling as she gives me head.

It’s all that dazzle delivers tempo,
cold lapidary sparkle prompting heat
excites by contrast – what I discover
are Egyptian tattoos under her feet.

She’s abandoned on a crumpled divan
fucked-out but seriously wanting more.
You know the rhythm – it’s like surf breaking
in continuity over the shore.

Her dark eyes go places in their corners,
fixated, drifty, they come back at me:
she shifts position, works up her black hair:
my condoms fuel the latex industry.

Her moka body oiled for me to fuck
I use it as a diagram, a curve
on which to project fantasies – I’m mean –
I screw so many others in her groove

her legs hitching around me like a vine.
If she’s aggressive, then I don’t let go
but maintain apparent serenity –
when she accelerates I do it slow.

Sometimes I see her as a boy-gamine,
narrow torso and round expansive hips,
the highly-sexed always contain this split –
angular cheeks and berry-popping lips.

The floor lamp throws a red cone on the wall
reflective light picks up on her pigment
like sorting garnets – it’s a fact in sex –
you always come outside of the event.

 

A Dead Body
– after Baudelaire

Remember, how on a blue summer’s day –
the shock kicked in like a sizzling taser
we chanced on something rotting in the street
there in a yard junction by the corner

this object with its legs up in the air
like a nyloned whore, corrupt end of time
apocalyptic thing – it wouldn’t rot
and seemed the victim of a psychopathic crime.

The sun demanded Ray-Bans; mine were green,
but this object resisted all meltdown
like nuclear waste: no one else around,
bad things happen on the bad side of town.

Beauty in ugliness: look down; look up
brutal blue sky spatialized on the black:
you couldn’t look at it – I mean the eyes
still registering a red filmed-over shock.

A black busy halo of spotting flies
formed a shape-shifting diagram over
noodles of larvae, composite decay,
and was their industry worth the bother?

The whole thing undulated like a wave,
as though in sexual rhythm, but was dead
and maybe hallucinating sunlight
I saw it change blue, yellow, green and red.

This microcosm, was it alien,
emitted radio waves, a frequency
we’d never heard on the spook side of weird,
the last transmissions of its legacy?

Its form kept changing without frontiers
like slow exposure or some fisted pink
explosion of manipulated paint
projected by Francis Bacon on a drink.

Psycho eyes glaring, jaw propped on a wall,
we saw a guard dog raving to attack
the mess it sighted: constrained by a chain
black muscle rippled across its broad back.

And you, honey, you’ll end up just the same
inside a mortuary – it hit me then
the vision of you decomposed – the thought
flooded my brain cells driving me insane.

I won’t forget it, dread your final end
a poem can’t transcend – it’s cleaner ash
a furnace temperature – not like this rot –
just go in one incinerated flash.

 

__________________________

 

I will cut
out There
Abdomen
I dare say you
Know what
That means

it is not for money but
blood blood blood
I crave for

Bloodworm

 

 

She I ll cut up well
I was going to dror mi nife along of er bloomin throte
I am going to her head off an her legs off
the ears & noses shall be cut off
I shall take her heart left kidney cassues and brains
I take good care of the uterus

I carry a black bag with somethink in that females don’t like
I carried away a part of her
(Conundrum Try & find what part)

I will send you the heart by parcels post
you can show the cold meat

 

______________________

The Old Main Drag

W.S.B. 1970s resident at 8 Dalmeny Court, Duke Street, St James’ Piccadilly, back of Fortnum & Mason. William Burroughs the silver suited, habituated junk spook faded out by daylight and accidentally eyeballing boys on the radial Circus. As a distractive inner discipline he colour-codes blues and greens eliminating all other frequencies. To him it’s like doing urban Mayan without psychedelics.

Was he or wasn’t he as an earlier invention Jack the R without guns? The sartorially precise, hat tilted down man in black, who infiltrated Whitechapel with a mission, and seemingly no traceable ID. Jack was to all accounts a black on black physically invisible assemblage who transmitted sexual impulses in the chilly foggy dark. It wasn’t a curvy gin-dazed hooker he wanted to fuck; it was the brown fog, the softest -mouthed fellatio imaginable in his crypto-erotic vocabulary.

Burroughs mostly understood the parallel processing of living in two different centuries. 1887-88 smelled ruinous, and go to the river you wouldn’t return for marauding gangs hanging out in windowless warehouses like a subspecies consigned to docklands turf wars. W.S.B. sniffs his way forward between centuries, exchanging his identity as Jack. There’s Chinese opium dens up Limehouse way, and rooms where you can smoke on floor mats and mattresses with stoned sailors.

Burroughs is so thin he’s known as invisible – he can beam himself through a wall and come out with his joint still burning. What if he met the real Miss Pamela Dakota down on the docks – subject of Lou Reed’s ‘Downtown Dirt’ (1975) come alive, red hair in a tousled bob to hunt him off the pier deeper into the Ripper precinct. Running from one century to another is like crunching 100 years into a helium-burn 10 minutes. There’s a dash of quantum in it like lime in gin or quantumnised photons called cobits than can only be O, I or an exact superposition of both.

W.S.B. knows intuitively he did something bad in the century he left behind, but he can’t identify it in his genes. If it was pathological homicide then the motive’s come out in different permutations in his writing, like his obsession with guns, and the wife he killed Joan, as a subliminal reality that carried through somehow. Can you be convicted of a crime committed in another century if you confess to it, like a junked plane back from a World War 2 mission suddenly coming out of pink cloud decks to land at Heathrow between two Boeings in from Rome and Berlin with a smell of damp plane fuel circulating in the air?

What do you do if Jack’s genetically coded into your memory and you can’t eliminate the belief you were him. You turn to fiction, maybe, cut-up, non-linear documentation on a narrative chopping board. Burroughs’ Word Hoard – Naked Lunch excerpted from a car park-sized stash of urban metaphors. At St James’ Bill dipped his cigarettes into the pint of cannabis tincture prescribed for him each week. They turned lime green. When he does succeed in picking up a boy, he says ‘call me Jack the Main Drag Ripper, I was around in 1888, and walked here to the action in ten minutes.’

 

_______________________

 

I am so pleased
I have got my knife Replenished so it will answer both for Ladies and Gents
If I cant get enough women to do I shall cut up men boys & girls Just to keep my hand in practise

I am going to take my Knife with me it is nice & sharp & it will kill 10 more mid-ages women & 8 children the oldest shall be 18
again I am going to commit 3 more 2 girls and a boy about 7 years old this time

I like ripping very much especialy women because they don’t make a lot of noise

I riped up a little boy
lots of red raddle spilt
pig sticking I call it

 

 

Just a few lines to tell you I shall begin my knife operation again
i goin to hoperate agin close to you ospitle

I have been having a nice rest but now my rest is over I am going to make a fresh start again

the last job was nice & clean
I have had no hand in it but I think it must be one of my apprentices who has been practising while I have been away

the time is nearly up for another job so look out
the knife is in good condishion and so am I
I am getting tired of my rest and I want to get to work again

I START ONE NIGHT NEXT WEEK
YOU WILL KNOW WHEN I DO

 

________________________

Jack on Jack

It’s me stalking me
a symbiotic wraparound
at zero visibility
magenta fog layering yellow
an iridescent iris
ambient temperature 2°C.
I’m on my back like man on man
apprehended by myself
like a capsule blister pack
compacted into squeeze
same front and back
two-tone green and white
the barcode my personality.
I’m running scared he’s running scared
each heartbeat inseparable
you couldn’t get a nano
in between me and my clone
in this Whitechapel killing lab
I’m programmed into
as serial intelligence
kill the other kill myself optimal
sexual ecstasy, a kick
unrepeatedly terminal,
so follow through this foggy atrium
searching for a delayed dawn

 

A London Fog

Brown off-white menthol green squashed yellow
a black
cadmium-orange smoky violet royal blue smudged red
a no-person
self-identified peripheral fog intelligence
spook country
alien hologram imposter a London
particular
a soluble frontier like an idea
looped by time
into variants where does a thought go
exciting impulse
if it’s not detained an ambient brain
whiter than grey
at the core of it some sort of mania
like you can’t reason
with water when you drown or correct a plane
in its nose-coned drop
a necrotic psychopathy revving
like a smoked-out truck
you can’t see except it senses you
with a single red headlight
a violent unstoppable scarlet LED
a laser that slices a neck
no registration, cloned, unidentifiably
collapsed back into fog
after its sensors kill, the engine dead
as something reverse engineered
day of forever in a rocket shed.

 

_________________________

 

I hope you can read what I have written,
If you can not see the letters let me know and and I will write them biger

THOSE OTHER LETTERS WERE NOT WRITTEN BY ME AT ALL

this is the first note you have from the real man
I can write two or three hands of writing
this is one far from detections
if anybody recognises the writing I shall kill the first female I see in this house or if there is no females I shall be down on the boss
Am trying my hand at disjointing and if can manage it will send you a finger
Excuse red ink The reason of my writing this in ink instead of human
blood is that I was not fool enough to keep any from last jobs in Whitechapel

I will write you again soon

 

 

___________________________

Francis Bacon’s Red Light

Soho’s like scrambled floating Lego when you’re drunk. Its compacted yards, alleys and courts do asymmetrical fits coming off Archer Street into Rupert and scoping north for sexual adventure. Before leaving the jade-painted Colony Rooms he’d kept seeing a distorted face in the bottom of his glass, and it wasn’t George Dyer’s morphed from suited bovver boy into hallucinated bits, but an image he thought somehow he could identify and brutalise in paint. The accusatory features shimmying in a residual film of champagne had started to recur with unnerving regularity, in the way George Dyer had shown in intuitive sightings months before they met, as rude boy masculine ideal he’d always pursued as rough trade in the Soho radius he exploited. Whoever he had sex with generally, was usually the fantasy built up of the one person who constantly eluded him. Tonight when he’d dipped his finger into the glass it had come out trailing a red fretline of blood: vermilion, scarlet, Persian red, he’d tried to label the exactone as specific to his colour obsession. His finger was still bleeding when he hung out briefly in D’Arblay Mews, waiting for his type to come out of the dark.

Out of curiosity he’d pocketed the glass to take back to his radically distressed studio at Reece Mews, and awkwardly fitted it into his grey flannel greatcoat pocket to repeat the experiment back home. He hung out in the drizzled yard for another twenty-minutes, luckless in his quest for opportune sex, before pulling a taxi back to his disordered Kensington Mews bunker.

When he got inside all the neural power juicing his dosed up artistic vision was familiarly there like jet exhaust burning out carbon. He could smell paint as raw energy, and it did something to him like chocolate as a feel-good endorphin hit. He was working ruthlessly on his George Dyer triptych, reinventing facial planes like the body panels of a car folded into disruptive angles on its back, after mounting the central reservation. What he really wanted was to invade George’s afterlife, if there was one, and establish a dialogue at any cost, a sort of telepathic exchange, and one that would bring George Dyer figuratively alive again in thickly layered Dulux pigment. Painting, for him was a means of fucking canvas to reinvent access to resistant ports – Dyer’s body when alive could only be reconfigured sexually, by stepping into it backwards. Now it could be dramatically reassembled to excite in the way mortuary photos had always brought him off by their compatibility with how he imagined altering the body’s sexual frontiers.

He gunned open a bottle of Perrier-Jouët and took the glass out of his pocket. It already had the resinous tang of a hangover filming a furred tongue. And he remembered acutely the lipstick-red carpet at the Hotel des Saint-Peres, close to the boulevard Saint-Germain, where Dyer had ended it all, pills all over the bed, that saturated carnation red that was somehow written into George’s suicide. He’d painted George with his eyes closed, initially in preparatory panels, in which George was seen opening the door of the hotel room where he was going to die, only the background was house paint lilac, unlike the triptych, as a rectangular black slab, in which the collapsed lovers sit either side of a distorted sexual geometry that is explicitly cannabilistic in its self-consuming intensity.

So many of his friends living precariously on the frontiers of alcohol, drugs and criminalised sexuality were dead, demanding he do self-portraiture for lack of conducive subject matter. Consistently making up had taught him an intuitive mapping of his own face, but he could never get it and be it, he could never imagine its reality without altering it through imagination.

He poured out a brimming glass of fizz, the bubbles spitting like a fry-up, and kicked his way into the trashed, chaotic studio. His work always put him on nervous alert, as though it was someone else’s that he’d like to reassemble, but that it was too exhaustively taboo to do so, and he was just left with it as a depressive postscript to what he did with such ferocious eloquence. His dialect was always photos that he could exploit to reconstruct faces at the terminal point of identity, before their features exploded out of recognition. How we imagined ultimate physical mutilation was always his starting point. He was so locked into a singular vision that the loop appeared without exit.

He drank the champagne off, and waited for the face to reappear at the bottom of the glass.

At first, nothing happened, and he started to think he’d imagined it all, and was going through another period of visually disturbing phenomena happening autonomously, the way he painted it. Then the face reappeared, slowly, formatively, a grey molecular oblong with stitched eyes that he didn’t want to open and identify. He closed his own eyes and blanked on the arrival’s features. He was sure it was George spooking him from a 4-D paranormal zone they couldn’t share, like fine grain on medium format film. He’d always feared that George’s suicide wasn’t the end of it, and this residual showing of blood and plasma was in some way connected to his death. He repeated the experiment and his finger bled again, only the random incision was deeper this time and would require a plaster. Like George, his obsession with personal appearance was pathologically obsessive, and he didn’t want blood spotting his cyan shirt or silver YSL jacket.

He was at his most lucid when drunk and dissolving barriers into a meta-reality, like a plane slicing through a cloud platform into bright blue air. For some reason he remembered George telling him in a drunken state in The Golden Lion, that he carried Jack’s gene, and that his family were related to the suspected Ripper. Of course he hadn’t believed it, but with George you were never quite sure, because he looked one way and thought the other, sort of bilaterally.

He stood there under a raw lemon light bulb in the sort of dead space his figures occupied in paintings, an industrial blank.

He couldn’t take the notion of George coming back at him on top of the guilt solidified into him like jam in a sealed jar. On impulse he threw the glass violently against the studio wall, like he’d done so often in viciously aggressive rows, and watched it explode on impact and bleed down the white wall like someone was seriously cut, and he’d never know who or what he’d bled so forcibly in a moment’s drunken rage at 2am in a studio mashed to detritus by the daily manual assault of his art.

 

____________________________

 

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LIMITED EDITION BOX SET

 

ALBUM PREVIEW
https://vimeo.com/210051898

Autopsy (Karolina Urbania music / Martin Bladh voice)
https://soundcloud.com/karolina-urbaniak-2/autopsy

What Shall We Do For The Rent? Walter Sickert (Karolina Urbania music /Jeremy Reed voice)
https://soundcloud.com/karolina-urbaniak-2/what-shall-we-do-for-the-rent-walter-sickert

 

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** This weekend the blog has the great pleasure of doing its bit part to focus attention on the birth of this new book co-created by the legendary British scribe Jeremy Reed and the similarly myth-accruing writer/ artist/ sound maker/ performer/ publisher Martin Bladh, just now published through the latter’s superb Infinity Land Press, already home to similarly luxurious-appearing tomes by Philip Best, Michael Salerno, me, and many others. Please enjoy your time in the book’s and post’s company, and thank you for the opportunity, Martin. ** Amphibiouspeter, Hi, welcome, really good to meet you! Thanks a bunch for your kind words about the GIF piece. Sure, I know that feeling you describe extremely well. Yeah, for one thing, the more you write/finish, the more you get used to the pace, and, more importantly, the pace changes and usually gets swifter the more you do because probably a significant part of that time was spent figuring out things that you have now partly figured out and which won’t be as confusing and time-taking now. But, yeah, the writing pace is a slow one. If it helps, making a movie is a hell of a long, too long, process as well. Anyway, big congrats on the getting the draft together. I hope I’ll get to read something by you at some point. Take care, and, obviously, please come back anytime. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Oh, they’re migrating, okay. That’s better news, although it’s a drag because that means all existing links to writings on Keyframe will be dead and useless now. Still, that’s better than death, for sure. ** Steevee, Hi. I kind of expected as much re: the regularity of the Burden doc. Still, excited to see it for the info and footage and background and so on anyway. Initially I chose yellow for a totally practical reason. I wanted to do a color-based, color-driven one, and yellow was the only color where there wasn’t a jarring difference in the look of that color in the GIFs that employed it. With almost every other color, blue, green, orange, and so on, there was way too much variation from GIF to GIF so the wouldn’t have worked the way I needed them to. When I chose yellow, that was when all the associations started becoming very interesting to work with. Thank you very much for asking. ** Damien Ark, Wow, that GIF work must looks nuts in red. I’m tempted to say, Lucky you. Thanks, Damien, and I hope you’re real good. ** Tosh Berman, Thanks very much, Tosh. That’s very heartening, thank you. Well, the first and last chapters of ‘Zac’s Freight Elevator’ are focused on white and black respectively, if they count as colors. There’s a pretty solid Emitt Rhodes ‘Best of’ collection: ‘Listen, Listen: The Best of Emitt Rhodes’ that covers both his solo stuff and the Merry Go Round stuff. ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick! How very, very nice to see you! Thank you kindly. That’s extremely interesting: what you say about children’s books and how the colors’ trajectory is the propulsion. That’s really fascinating. Yes, applying that idea/premise deliberately in cinema is such an inspired idea. Huh, I will definitely think a lot about that. Thank you very much again, Nick. I hope everything is extremely well with you and yours. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed it! Yeah, my allergy makes buying clothes no more interesting or fun than buying toothpaste or toilet paper. I think this weekend, apart from trying to get some work done that I won’t have much time for after Monday, I’ll take it easy-ish. Tonight is ‘Night of the Museums’ — which I think is a cross-Europe thing so maybe you have it there? — where a lot of museums stay open all night and do special events and stuff, so I’ll probably go around and see what’s going on. My day was pretty uneventful, just work and walking around and stuff. No highlights, I don’t think. I know of Kasabian, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard their music. Okay, I’ll rectify my ignorance. Cool, thank you for the tip! And your weekend? Anything planned that seems like it might be golden? ** S., Hey. Yellow’s pretty strong, right? Making that GIF work gave me a new appreciation for its sluttiness. There’s a walking haunted Paris tour that I keep meaning to take. Hysteria is as common as breathing these days, it’s fucking weird. ** Jeff Coleman, Hi, Jeff. Whoa, that’s total news that Wakefield is putting out those Duvert books. I had no idea. That’s utterly fantastic. I’ll pre-score them. Thanks a lot, man. I hope everything has a high degree of greatness in your world. ** Rewritedept, Hi, Chris. Thanks a lot, bud. Tricks are decent, can’t complain. You? Man, sorry about your grandfather. Close or not, that kind of thing is always a blow. Zac and I are locked into spending the entire summer working on the film, yeah, because it needs to be perfectly finished in September. It’s a ton of work, but I’m joyous about it in theory. Glad you popped in. I hope everything with the funeral is tolerable at the very least. ** Chris dankland, Hi, Chris! That’s a favorite Pollard song of mine. I swiped the title initially because I just love that title, but I ended up using the song as a kind of structuring, underlying guide for the piece in a certain way. Man, I’m so chuffed by and grateful for your amazing attention to the GIF work. That’s just incredibly rewarding to me. Thank you so, so much! And it’s awesome that you did that investigating to understand how the ending flip works. Man, you’re such a dream reader. The flip is partly coming from my use of the Pollard song as a groundwork. Maybe my very favorite thing about that song is that kind of senseless-seeming but so right flip at its end in the lyrics. What is it again … ‘How do the cows keep coming / just to run through the grinder / Please excuse me I’ve lost my girl / and I need to go find her.’ That lyric drives me crazy. Anyway, thank you once again, Chris! Have an extremely swell weekend! And, yes I just got the new Alex G album yesterday, It’s so, so good! I just love that guy’s stuff. ** H, Hi. Thank you very much. I often wonder how I would dress if I didn’t have the allergy. But then I remember how I used to dress before the allergy appeared in 1991, and isn’t so different, mostly just much, much less colorful. Here’s heavily hoping that heat diminishes as soon as now. ** Kyler, Hi, K. Thanks! Nice about all of those happy associations with yellow. I guess it’s a pretty upbeat color, at least if you don’t think about jaundice and things like that. I applaud your mysterious boldness, no surprise, and I hope it ends up paying off. Please say whatever else you can when you can. Great weekend to you! ** Bill, Hi, Bill. That’s interesting about the slower pace. I had that feeling and intention, but I wasn’t sure if would pan out. Thank you! Do catch the Lynn Hershmann show if you can and tell me about it if you do, please. I hope San Francisco proves to be a great envelope for your weekend! ** Right. With that, please turn your attention to the new and exciting book that you either see above these words right now or will if you scroll up just a little bit. See you on Monday.