What I was going to ask, was that when I came in we had a chat about the history of this place.
“Yeah.”
And you knew it. You knew these things. You…
“Have a photographic memory. So you wouldn’t understand what that means unless you actually have one, because then we’ be talking about things we don’t know about and that would just deprive the listener of anything meaningful, or the dear gentile [sic] reader.”
And you were reeling those songs off to the person on the phone [an NME journalist], you just had it there. It was incredible to listen to you, how you knew these five songs [he listed rather obscure live performances of certain artists available only through online video media], their dates, venues and everything…
“We’re, like, fooling around. Not that it’s your business. I’m talking about all kinds of jazz, just ‘brp brp brp’, you know. I’m really interested. We watch Cash In The Attic and just have a hoot and I know everything about all the stuff they’re looking at.”
“And Bargain Hunt,” chirps in his wife.
“Basically of it. And when I go to museums I know all about it. I used to sit around and instead of playing video games and jacking off I used to read American Heritage and Encyclopaedia Britannica from cover to cover and dictionaries and everything, making acronyms of words and whatever, you know.”
And can you remember all of that now still?
“I have a photographic memory. You don’t know what that means.”
But can you still reference those 'photographs' now? Do they fade with time?
“I’ve been trying to destroy my brain with drugs but evidently I’m not Amy Winehouse and I’m just indestructible or something.”
That must be nice. No, I can't say nice, can I? What’s it like...
“It’s a torture. Like who wants to live forever in a world full of Tesco trainer ten year-olds running up and down the stairs with backpacks giving you dirty looks rolling out of a council flat farting out a bag of Walker’s crisps their last meal of 99p beans and toast thinking that they’re Superman? I mean, this sucks.”
Do you feel a renewed sense of life, though, since…
[Here he starts talking to a nearby couple and asks to borrow their power cord for his laptop. This lasts for a few minutes]
So in terms of technology, are you enjoying the advances that it’s allowed?
“Well I’ve been programming since I was nine years old and I’m forty years old, so 31 years ago I don’t know what you were doing.”
I wasn’t quite alive yet...
“Yeah, well, think about it. So anybody who thinks they can master the markets or do anything, they really don’t understand that once the people that created how the environments interact with each other, they cannot be uncreated just because you can apply some sort of charlatanism or, you know, opportunistic, or, you know, let me think of the right word for it [6 second pause] – hustle – on everybody else because they don’t have a clue how things work, you can’t undo the people that created the environment. You just can’t. And that’s why Microsoft systems continuously have bugs and Macs are all integrated now and they’ve got them now…ah, [to his wife, who's just brought down the computer] you’re so sweet. You know what this [a sticker on his Mac] says in Icelandic? 'Your bank doesn’t care about you.' Isn’t that great?”
[Anton gets the cable from the nearby couple. He plugs it in and thanks the couple profusely as the wife and I chat about where they’re going to next. He tells the couple he has 19 Macs stored under a table in his house and none of the work anymore]
So you don’t recycle these Macs that you’ve got, then?
“Uh, you can use them as hard drives, even when they crash out. You can chain them together, so mine are always really souped-up, whatever we’ve got, and I don’t know how you can recycle Macintoshes. We try our best. I try and put them in a woodchipper and feed them to pigeons but that just makes old people frown at me and I figure they’ve fought through World War II and various stock crashes and all the seventies bad TV…”
Click here to read part 3. |
