Aloha(tings) In Notting Hill

For some reason this picture has deeply unsettled me. I can't put my finger on it. I mean, it's obviously meant to be disturbing but there's something genuinely awful about it.



Maybe I glanced it once during one of my once mammoth record flipping searches in the depths of one of Notting Hill Gate's Record and Tape Exchanges - a glance that kills slowly, like a one-inch punch, worming through the system, undetected, waiting for someone to activate it by innocently posting the sleeve...

I don't even know why it reminds me of record flipping.

Or why it reminds me of Notting Hill (could this be the reason I don't like the film as well?). Could this be everyone else's reason too?

Maybe it's some kind of accidental post-hypnotic suggestion; the quick flicking of all those cut price records in those dimly lit basements acting like an accidental flip book, accidentally full of arcane commands... like the light flickering through lines of trees along the motorway, sending people crazy, sending drivers off into hallucinatory states, into dream sleep, messing with their alpha beats.... like Native Americans using their fingers to make dream machines out of the Sun...

...thinking about it, there was always an auditory element to the record flicking in the basement as well... the sounds of slapping record sleeves, making tiny micro-rhythms... the beginnings of Mille Plateux glitches? Slap slap slap... vaguely pornographic, easing the way into the unconscious... the nodding head symbolic of the nodding off into semi-consciousness - (Peter) Tripping into some vaguely altered state with no redeeming functionality....

anyone who's been in there, or an equivalent record store can recognise the symptoms, can see where dubstep came from...


...sometimes I used to flip two rows of LPs at a time, forcing one eye to watch each row (or rather forcing both eyes to separate, to obsessively monitor for bargains, to pan for Gold...)

(((((someone on here once tried to answer the question: what do you see if you pull out both eyes and face them towards each other...))))

... maybe something there caused that Henry Kaiser LP to slip into my barely conscious... maybe it combined with the seeping scum leeching out of the never-washed leather jackets of the people in there (Crass logos, black dyed hair that looked like it was melting), flicking alongside me as if they were humans too...

Or maybe I'm making too much of this because, on another level, this picture makes me feel weird too: