It's all in your mind

The New World

2006-10-17T13:19:00.000+01:00

I'm going to try out a new home, see how I like it. Feel free to visit Whose Mind is it Anyway?

2006-09-06T14:08:00.000+01:00

Vote for me please...

2006-06-10T01:19:00.000+01:00

World Cup Blog

2006-04-02T04:44:00.000+01:00

Work in progress, as ever

I felt the sadness in my sinuses first. A kind of swollen sensation, as if whatever emotion was beginning to build was making a last bid for escape through my nose, bypassing my mouth in case it caused me to make a sound. There was no welling up of tears, just pressure â€“ pressure that spent a moment or two as a solid distorting my face before seeming to become the heaviest of liquids, filling my feet, legs, then arms, until finally the sadness was all that was left.

Emily leaving seemed to have shattered that window in front of my eyes that had always previously allowed me to confront an unhappy image and recognise its dramatic or distressing content, but stopped me short of actual emotional response. I now watched a documentary about a child dying of AIDs and wept for half an hour after the program finished. My cat died and on the bus home from work I stared out of the window so no one would see the redness around my eyelids or the damp sheen over my pupils. These were early incidents.

For a while I ascribed them to a temporary imbalance â€“ her departure had upset a fine emotional register, which once restored would snuff out these embarrassing moments of quite naked empathy and restore to me the endlessly useful camouflage of seeming to care only up to a point. Weeks and months, eventually even years began to pass by. Emily was forgotten, forever smiling apologetically at Wellington airport and telling me that one day I wouldnâ€™t care about her anymore. Of course she was right, and she was replaced in time by people who by being every bit as loving as her, repeatedly performed a feat I once would have thought a miracle.

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2006-01-27T02:40:00.000+01:00

California, you're such a wonder

The week I just spent in San Francisco was really marked by two things I noticed, both odd and horrifying in their own way.

The first was the number of old people begging on the streets. And by old I don't mean 40 or 50, I mean people you'd more expect to see in managed accommodation being prepared for their final days - most looked 70 at least, and could barely be heard as they requested spare change, in vivid contrast to the brash and exceedingly vocal patter of the younger beggars. Even more surprising was that such a large number of them seemed to be women. This isn't the venue to discuss demographics or social policies, but a country which venerates the virtues of family and motherhood is a shocking place to find elderly bewhiskered women pleading for a dollar.

Secondly, while attending a talk to mark the launch of 'Surviving Justice', a collection of the stories of 13 wrongly convicted and subsequently exonerated American prisoners, a woman stood up, and in a moment of almost grotesque self-congratulation, chose to apologise to the present exoneree for being an American tax payer, and thus responsible for the tragedy that had overtaken 16 years of his life. Naturally the man accepted her apology with grace, but it was hard to swallow the sense of rising anger at such a selfish appropriation of one individual's woeful story to advertise your own glorious humanity and pity.

That said, I was still sorry to leave. Deep blue skies and warm breezes in January would probably make us all a lot happier.

2006-01-18T07:14:00.000+01:00

I had to write this down while it was still fresh in my mind... but could the sinister reason behind the pop industry advocacy of make poverty history, be purely to do with creating a consumer market for entertainment in Africa?

2006-01-12T19:54:00.000+01:00

So. Who else is loving angry bile at the moment? God I can't get enough of the stuff and this might be because I realized, calmly and quietly, that I would fucking love to go on Celebrity Big Brother with a chainsaw. Seriously though, we don't have permanent links to Mr Northern Uproar, or in fact to Mr Random Brand. People I admire greatly.

Last time I 'fixed' the links, our page didn't work for six months.

Get to it, Phil!

2006-01-09T13:55:00.000+01:00

Luton Who?

Mark pointed me in the direction of this wonderful piece on the unknown pleasures of circling Luton at 4am in the passenger seat of a probably decrepit car. As much as I recognised the idea of this kind of England, the England of concentric circles of disinterest and disintegration emanating from London along ring roads thick with cars, I know it's not the England I grew up in.

Southampton, uncompromisingly bland, without even the navy scuzz of Portsmouth to set it apart in the imagination, remarkable for what? Crumbling Roman City walls, gradually being left behind by the city itself as it crawls in the direction of the latest expansion of shops-under-one-roof. In two decades, three separate shopping centre developments, each larger than the last, each consuming the other, sucking out the marrow of convenience starved shoppers until only a few bored shoe-polished kids kick around the Bargate centre, and only customers seeking the grail of bargain-priced homewares stalk the halls of the Marlands centre. But these buildings refuse to crumble, they may gleam less brightly, their surfaces turning off-white like aging plastic, but they refuse to become brittle. Like polyethylene landfill, Southampton is a city that refuses to fall apart even under the strain of neglect and indifference.

The city tower blocks barely deserved the name, and the few concrete promenades stretching underneath them were probably as full of litter and crap as anywhere else you care to name, but they were few and far between, and zoned in such a way that I can't tell you if they were empty of hope or not because I never visited them. Southampton's suburbs were dark at night, and if boredom, hedonism or anger caused anyone to roam the streets flashing headlights I never heard about it. But I was also separated one step further from the city, living on the river, with only the mast-head of Fawley, steady red in the distance linking me with Southampton's modest bulk.

My memories of being driven around the city after dark are not soundtracked by Joy Division, but by the gentle routines of local radio. The 3am slot where the phone in features the same people night after night. The soft voiced host talking down his regular after dark callers from their ledges of sadness, lunacy or racism to a soundtrack of occasional bursts of 50s big band or 10CC if you're lucky. The branch-hung roads connecting Botley, Curdridge, Hedge End empty but for a white Ford Fiesta, rabbits and foxes fleeing from the frosty growl of a small engine.

I remember tuning in on the radio to find what sounded like a conversation in mid-flow. The two voices calling each other by name, warm with familiarity until the older one started denouncing a group of asylum seekers housed near his home, his voice rich with bitterness until the other man cut him off and suggested he'd feel silly about that in the morning and why don't they cool off to some Elvis. This is another England, caught between the stasis of rurality and the churn of the city, only here all that happens is the news agents change hands and people focus on the unerring ability of things to stay the same.

Towns like these are wrapped in plastic, vacuum packed. There's no decay, only renewal - the old stays old, and the new merely has some of its shine taken off. We were in a holding pattern all that time, though without knowing, circling the wrong place.

2005-12-20T11:55:00.000+01:00

Prompted by the palpable bile of a justifiably sneering K-Punk, I went and read Paul Morley's rim-job of an article about U2. I was not amused.

I find it hard to disguise my dislike of Bono, and even harder to disguise my dislike of U2 fans, who somehow manage to hear something unique and interesting in the nth iteration of that delaydelaydelay-soiledsoiledsoiled stadium pap - but there are more important matters to attend to than bitching about U2's tiny sonic-palette, or the gargantuan stage-ego of that slick-haired buffoon.

Bono's emergence over the last few years as the gurning public face of the compassionate celebrity movement to alleviate all of the world's ills (TM) has frequently caused outbreaks of total moral incomprehension from certain members of my family, with whom I have sympathy. I too have wondered how it is possible to preach charity and condemn the excessive consumption of the developed world while being a phenomenally wealthy and privileged star. Is Bono's self-righteousness so overwhelming that he doesn't see the contradiction between his ridiculous lifestyle and his message of generosity and equality? Can you legitimately complain about the commercial rape of the environment while making a living from huge world-spanning tours that require plane-loads of equipment, leaving a carbon footprint so big that the outraged are left with no option but to hope it is made sooty-flesh and stomps Bono into putrescence?

Rather than this phenomenon being the revival of charity, I am led to wonder instead if this is not the blossoming of a new and extraordinary greed. I do not see Bono inviting George Bush and other national leaders to tax the unholy fuck out of him and his troupe of weeping celebrities for hire (see Joss tear up at the sight of the bulging-eyed child!), instead, I see a man who would like to maintain his extravagant lifestyle, while enjoying the moral capital of his righteousness. What the celebrity appearance asks of us is that we respond to their donation of time, with a donation of money, but internal to this exchange is the assumption that Bono's time is worth more than that of ordinary people, and the only way this can be accommodated is through equating Bono the celebrity and Bono the man. To collude with celebrity fundraising is to be part of an obscene cult in which the person at the end of the phone with their credit card bears the entire weight of the enterprise - the weight of saving the world, and the weight of feeding the ever-swelling egos of the maniac figureheads. Bono and those who will inevitably follow in his wake must not be allowed to grow fat on this acclaim, free as it is from cost and responsibility.

A choice must be made: no one should be able to enjoy both excessive financial and moral capital - the two are not compatible. If Bono wants to be treated as a great moral leader, we should demand a sacrifice.

2005-12-14T18:12:00.000+01:00

Searching for answers on the internet is like playing 'Jeopardy'. You need to search for what you assume will be the form of the answer, rather than asking the question.

I.e don't type "How are Pringles made", type
"Pringles are made by"

There, easy.

2005-11-28T14:44:00.000+01:00

What kind of language is this?

It's probably time I weighed in with my thoughts on Aerial, though 'weigh' seems like an inappropriate word in the context of this incredibly fleet album. The source of this overwhelming sensation of lightness is not easily located; it pervades the entire record, from its elemental title, to the gusting harmonies that close 'King of the Mountain', to the swift twittering birds that bring the album to an end.

Bush's voice has obviously aged, without obtaining the richness that occasionally finds its way into vocals as the decades accumulate. This is not a weakness though on an album written quite deliberately from the perspective of an older woman - a family woman, concerned both with the everyday banalities of new children and laundry, but also a sinister understanding, evoked so painfully in Church of Me's review.

One of the album's most remarkable achievements is to balance joy and grief - the matching pair of 'Bertie' and 'A Coral Room' spring most obviously to mind - the former a Viol-led hymn to a loved child, the latter a piano led lament for a departed mother. The occasional harshness at the back of her throat serves only to remind us of the years that have passed since her debut, and of the various moments, tragic and happy, to which we have not been privy. The once smooth surface of her voice unexpectedly catches on a splinter or rough patch, and is all the more expressive for it.

'King of the Mountain' with it's title taken from folklore, demands double vision: seeing both the winter-swept halls of the Erl-King of northern legend, but also the fan-swept home/tomb of the other King, Elvis. The video of a spritely Kate Bush, leaning forward as if against the blowing wind, unravelling the loneliness and hubris of the various Kings - Presely, Kane, the Myth - she appears puckish in the midst of the minor-key, minor-orchestrated music, smiling with the knowledge that only something higher than a King can comment on the life and loss of royalty. It's certainly one of the most arresting and unusual singles I've heard for years, and retains that shocking lack of recognition still with each listen.

In contrast to the domestic modulation of the first disc, even after several listens I find 'A Sky of Honey' difficult to pick apart (something it seems from interviews, Bush was hoping to achieve). There's no separation of tone, just a gradual wash of colour and mood that's as slow and implacable as the movement of shadow on the ground. K-Punk's expression of the painterly composition of the second disc is spot on; the songs develop in increments both internally, and as part of the nine-part cycle. The moments between songs mingle and become inseparable, as pigments curl around each other in water to create fresh unseen hues, until finally, on 'Nocturn', with the steady bass and tinkling treble of guitars calling to mind the kind of summer storm that first mixes everything together, and then washes everything clean, we're asked to "look at the light". There's no colour, just light, a sudden end to the song; lightning hitting the ground with such force that sound is left flagging behind.

I don't think anyone could have expected Kate Bush to return with an album as revelatory as this, too many other talents have returned to the fold after much less extensive sabbaticals to dispiriting effect. Instead of losing her way and following blind alleys of 'relevance' or retreading past glories, the compounded experiences of those twelve years are vivid in the songs; unafraid and unstinting in facing down loss, unashamed in celebrating life new and matured. Few albums are as enveloping as this, or as nervelessly open.

Look at the light, all the time it's a changing
Look at the light, climbing up the aerial
Bright, white coming alive jumping off the aerial
All the time it's a changing, like now…
All the time it's a changing, like then again…
All the time it's a changing
And all the dreamers are waking.

2005-11-26T23:17:00.000+01:00

Who's Best?

A day or so after someone's death seems like a pretty bad time to start assessing their legacy, but the need for column inches beyond the statement of death makes it inevitable that already people have started compiling the subtle equations necessary to decide whether George Best was the greatest footballer of all time.

In the past I've tended to dismiss calls for Best's supremacy as being inspired by an Anglo-centric view of football that has blighted our development of talented players and hampered our performance in countless tournaments. The view that Best was an accident, an unrepeatable prodigy, has contributed both to his elevation as the greatest there has been, but also to the view held by all the home nations that skill is a luxury you can't count on (either in terms of the performances of your mercurial star, or in the likely makeup of any national squad). The perception of Best as an inexplicable talent, an unquantifiable variable, has gone on to haunt players such as Waddle and Le Tissier who while perhaps not as talented, still suffered under the maverick label.

By all accounts though, Best was a solid team player, and not a lazy liability. It is tempting to see the description of him as the founding hell-raiser of several generations of brilliant but difficult players as the conflation of his off-pitch excesses with his on-pitch style. However, I prefer to see it in terms of an essential British suspicion of flair. Now I happily confess that this is purely my own prejudice, built upon years of football commentary, journalism and match watching, so there are going to be people out there who interpret this completely differently, but while other nations seem to have reveled in the inexplicable origins of the skills of their most sublime players, we treat them as if there is an inverse relationship between talent and moral value. The protestant work ethic has no time for free roles.

Best's celebrity is now regarded with a certain prurient fascination, as if no one quite believes that an athlete can have debauched to that extent while still performing on the pitch. We now expect more commitment from our footballers (as do the shareholders contributing to their enormous wages) and yet the glamour of Best with his huge sideburns and even bigger appetite for ditzy models is undiminished. What has changed is the association of those vices with his style of play. Every virtuoso talent that has emerged since has been tainted with the image of pink-shirted George cascading champagne down a tower of glasses. It is now impossible to impress on the pitch with your unpredictability without someone asking the question off it whether that unpredictability is really just unreliability in disguise.

Therefore, it is easy to understand why Best occupies an uncontested seat at the top of the pantheon of players in the English league. He established the pattern that generations of players have followed or been forced into (even minor talents such as Jermaine Pennant seem unable to avoid the temptation of being the flashy winger). It's probably time to own up though. Of the three players most often mentioned as the greatest of all time, Maradona is the only one I've seen play several times. Best and Pele live only in often repeated clips of their finest moments, always attempting an audacious shot from half way that still fails to go in; body-swerving the keeper and still managing to keep balance after all this time. What always seems obvious to me though is that none of it looks very special anymore.

It's in the nature of sport to be nostalgic. Today's achievements are always measured against yesterday's failures or successes, and this is the same in assessing the performances of teams as well as players. This decade's Liverpool team is compared with last decade's, as both a collective entity, and position by position. Most of the time either for reasons of diminishing returns or romantic attachments, the comparison is unfavorable. This habit is played out on a national scale too. Who are the heroes of today, and how do they compare to the fallen and departed? But misty eyes often cause poor focus. Football worldwide has improved beyond measure, with each generation producing players more outrageously gifted than the last. Can anyone honestly tell me that they believe the Ronaldinho of today anything other than the utter superior of anyone who has gone before him?

The moist-eyed reverence English football has for the heroes of its past says a lot to me about the sport's idea of itself. We are more comfortable with the idea that legions of hard working players emerge from a conveyor belt on which occasionally there gleams an unexpected gem, than we are that those gems could be one day produced in the right environment. The failure of Simon Clifford, a man with a genuine philosophy for developing skill in young players, to establish a place at the table at a lowly club like Southampton (run by old-school dinosaurs like Redknapp and Bassett) speaks loudly and clearly about the attitude English football has to producing flair rather than resolve.

George Best may well have been the greatest player to play in the English league; there's no doubting his grace, vision and finishing. He may even warrant inclusion with the likes of Pele and Maradona in the nostalgic pantheon; but the failure of English football to produce a talent that we are comfortable comparing with his should be a warning to anyone who would like to see football played with skill and daring return to this country. Putting George to rest will not be easy.

2005-11-24T01:01:00.000+01:00

Easy, Tyger

I accidentally got into a very interesting conversation today about the qualities and etymology of the phrase 'easy, tiger' after expressing admiration at its concise encapsulation of a certain level of sordid flirtation.

I've done a little digging, and from internet sources can't discover any details about the etymology of the word. The period it seems most associated with in my mind is the sixties, the words tripping along with a raised eyebrow and a faked concern that rampant passions be reined in. That need not be the case though. The tiger ceased to be a creature of special fokloric weight for us long before the sixties, when its territory stopped being a place where you might aspire to go and live for the advancement of your career.

Do children today still have nightmares about tigers the way they once did? Is the scale of the beast still something that amazes the young, or have they moved on to others in the menagerie? I'd imagine that Spielberg has done more than anyone to oust the tiger as man's most feared enemy - the Jungle is a distant dream for most, but as the BBC recently reminded us, you're never further than around 70 miles from the sea in England. Sure the waters off the British coast are too cold to harbor a Great White, but you can never really know what's patrolling beneath the turbulent grey surface.

Perhaps it's the experience of seeing them immobile in palatial expanses of tended zoo enclosure that has robbed them of a bit of their mystery. On the few occasions I've seen a tiger, it's been a few stripes of fur glimpsed between fans of undergrowth; a huge paw resting on a log, the rest of the giant head and coiled body totally hidden. They've become pretty lazy. The stars of the show. What was once a creature so awe inspiring that Blake could only blame and congratulate God, is now a cause of mild disappointment for visitors to Marwell hoping to find out what a nightmare looks like. Or perhaps too many appearances bounding through river-spray in Athena posters have turned them noble and cuddly where once they were feared

What though, makes the tiger an appropriate subject for the innuendo? Is it a hangover from a time when anyone could have appreciated the droll futility of trying to calm a tiger? The conjuring of animal urges is obvious enough, but if they fuck as slowly as they do everything else, the tiger is hardly a candidate for pest of the animal kingdom, though the gentle purring undulation of the word is appealing, breaking as it does from that initial gasp of a consonant.

Then, the question of the comma.

Easy tiger...
Easy, tiger...

I favour the latter. It would be wrong to underestimate the effect of that elliptical 'easy'... not a demand for a pause, just difference. The punctuation gives the sentiment room, forces you to consider exactly what easiness must entail. Easy. Tiger.

Down, boy.

2005-11-20T18:37:00.000+01:00

Uh-uh-huh

What force drives modern celebrities to measure themselves against Elvis Presley? Robbie Williams is the latest victim of this curse, with a predictably slow-motion elegiac video portraying himself as Elvis-through-the-ages, with some lyrics I barely caught about Marlon Brando and 'advertising space'. The popular image of Presley as a tragic figure, epitomised by Peter Guralnick's lengthy biography endures still, with Williams in full sad-face mode, profound tattoos and all. However, the Presleyan short-cut to meaningful meditation on celebrity can't be the only reason for his imaged to be invoked so frequently.

There seem two possible reasons for the continuation of the cult. Williams makes an interesting case-study of the possibilities. Is he so in love with the trajectory of his own career that he sees himself ascending to iconic heights, or is he so insecure in his talent and status that he has to include a reverential commentary on his own limitations in the form of a worshipful paean to Presley, the ultimate manifestation of tender, troubled, talented masculinity? Hubris or fear, the choice is yours.

Morrissey makes another surprising acolyte. The performances accompanying the last album release were all given before a huge red "MORRISSEY" sign in the fashion of the '68 comeback special illuminated "ELVIS". The early Morrissey, inhabiting a different musical landscape than we see today, harked back to rockabilly and the now alien 50s in a way that was unexpected, at a time when historical reverence was being sacrificed on a now-tedious bonfire of modernity. However, now all we have is respect - there's nothing so note-worthy as calling on the name of a fallen icon, and in thanking them for all your talent, all your success, craftily swiping the remains of their rank and popularity to bolster your own. To kneel before Elvis now, what must we be saying about our own achievements? Even if Morrissey wanted to replace Elvis, he still had to welcome him onto the stage before he could mount his coup.

To descend to the more mundane for a moment, on a recent episode of The X Factor the defeated contestant was ejected after a bland knee-shake-athon performance of 'Johnny Be Good', with the unintentionally hilarious pay off of '... with the greatest respect, you're never going to be Elvis Presley'. Did it even need to be said?

No one is ever going to be Elvis Presley, not now. That so many continue to try is a genuine surprise, especially in a world of such rampant self-regard. Whoever said that the young had no respect?

2005-11-18T22:57:00.000+01:00

Man of Steel

Until now I haven't been all that excited by the forthcoming Superman Returns for a couple of reasons. The immigrant fantasy symbolism of Superman never seemed compelling compared to Batman or Spiderman, or even the uber-geeky X-Men, and with a string of non-Spiderman related block busting turds over recent years, the portents have not been good.

The teaser trailer that's just been released here gives me hope though. Sure, some of the effect comes from the old-testament prophetic voice-over from a beyond the grave Brando. And I'd forgotten how excited and nostalgic the John Williams' fanfare could make me feel with it's slowly accumulating layers, but there are a couple of genuinely beautiful images in here.

The first sees a slowly ascending Superman silhouetted against the sun, a visual used so often that you wouldn't imagine it could achieve anything more than cliche. However, the strange orange and grey nuclear sky, and the tiny rising shadow in the absolute distance behind a foreground of black cloud make this a wonderful shot.

Even better is the scene of Superman hanging still but for his cloak, high above the earth, eyes closed, seemingly listening to the whole planet, before rushing down towards a huge bright city through the clouds. I love how dark the planet looks, as if Metropolis is the only inhabited place on earth, and I love the warm electric blue haze on the edge of the atmosphere as the camera pulls back to reveal the curve of the globe.

It's early days, and many a crap film has been preceded by a great trailer, but this is probably the most exciting teaser I've seen in a long time.

2005-11-14T00:27:00.000+01:00

By common consent, the Amazon behaves a lot like a vast green hand, closing over civilisations too tired to machete their streets clear on a weekly basis, and hiding countless crashed planes, war criminals and lost sons of the Aristocracy. A recent New Yorker article about the search for the remains of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, the early 20th century explorer and theorist of the City of Z, also mentioned some of the many curious or arrogant safari-hatted types who had given their lives to the bugs, the river and the sneaky violent tribes. I'm not sure if an exhaustive account exists of every expedition that ever entered the Amazon and never came out, but if it doesn't, it certainly should.

There are so many ways to be lost in the rainforest: starve, drown, be murdered by suspicious tribesmen, poisoned, or have a Candiru block up your urethra. Almost every retelling of a brave wagon train of explorers entering the forest with clean clothes and the latest equipment ends with stories of campfire smoke that disappears after a few days, and a handful of ragged and torn men that emerge sometimes years later, forever defeated. The only way to take the trees on and win is with an axe, or chainsaw, or better, the tools of industrial deforestation. In a clean fight, the anarchic and the fecund have won time and time again.

The relentlessness with which the forest erases the failed and the fallen is quite startling. Within a handful of years an entire town could be indistinguishable from the bordering forest unless you knew it was there. When entire European countrys'-worth of rainforest can be removed without much of the world noticing, we have moved beyond the human scale of things, even beyond the national scale. However, I have never been to South America, and the mysteries of its cities, its beaches and its religions are just as impenetrable to me as the mystery of it's great forests. The distant green spaces of other continents are not the only places where people, histories and cities are lost.

I seem to get lost in London almost daily, even though I rarely deviate from an established route to work and back. That route has changed somewhat, so I'm now more familiar with the ugly 80s shopping centres and office building of Victoria than the chipboard shrouded Hawksmoor church in Holborn and the cute brutalism of CentrePoint. After seven months of exploring, the city still feels as alien as the rainforest, and as quick to consume and regenerate.

A Saturday afternoon in Wood Green, walking against the human tide and I can't see anyone dressed like me. Probably the fault of my imagination, but I can't imagine anyone sharing my sense of awe as I push my way through to Sainsbury's either. There are so many scowling kids, so many people shoving their way into Foot Locker, so many people struggling in-arm locks, ejected from Foot Locker 30 seconds later with bile on their tongues and promises of retribution once reinforcements are gathered. And so much litter. When the wind picks up great waves of it race along the pavement, gathering to circle dustbins, bus stops and lamp-posts until the gusts die down.

I don't recognise any of the shops. They all look like one-offs, selling mobile phone covers and fresh cuts of meat from the same storefront. Twice-distant along the street is the shopping centre, with it's sticky floors and its ethnic fast food chains. Inside is the cinema, which my girlfriend, with American squeamishness, claims has the nastiest toilets she has ever seen. Constantly moving from morning until long after night has fallen there are strangers refusing to make eye-contact - bodies colliding by accident and design, and the odd explosion.

I pick my way through from time to time.

So far I have made it home every time.

Between the Amazon and my local High Street, it's the sheer volume of life that threatens to pick you up and not let you go. So many vines to tangle your feet, so many unintended slights. I have yet to make up my mind whether I feel elated or merely scared of the city outside my front door - of its rhythms, its many ways to lose yourself, and its few paths to the forest's edge.

2005-08-19T14:32:00.000+01:00

For the moment the discrepancy between the formatting of the main and archive pages and the individual post pages will have to wait. There are more pressing matters to hand. To go with the minor cosmetic alterations to the blog, I feel the need for a major facelift of purpose. What is this blog for?

Like an old, charmingly ramshackle public house that has been purchased by a wicked sprawling Pubco, we need to rebrand. We need a theme.

So what am I going to write about? I've tried fiction, and no doubt I'll continue to put the stuff I'm not very proud of on here for your reading/ignoring pleasure, but there needs to be more than this.

It can't be music, as I never listen to anything new and I hate most of what's gone before. I think it would be churlish to step into a space already populated by people with a consuming love of listening to music and then writing about it, for the sole purpose of being sour and viperish about a song I accidentally heard on the radio. It's a similar story with Film and Television - I like both, but can you sustain a commentary on the FPS world when you watch less than a film a week, and probably only an hour of television per day?

Maybe books. But we're talking serious lead times on this. I get through one a week on the tube on the way to work, but if I'm going to get my audience back, I think the weekly serial might be too spartan a format for the on-demand world we're told me live in. The people need more.

So in summary, I have a few ideas that I'm keeping to myself, but I'd welcome suggestions. What would you like to read about day in day out?

2005-08-18T20:40:00.000+01:00

Rats... why are the comments not working!

2005-08-18T18:29:00.000+01:00

Replaced the old Haloscan comments with blogger's own. Let's see how it pans out.

2005-08-08T14:15:00.000+01:00

Fixed that formatting problem. Had to disable some 'float' option that I'd never seen before in the 'settings' menu. Now READ you dogs!

2005-07-13T23:45:00.000+01:00

Part Eight

He is dying, but of nothing preventable. He's just reached the end of his allotted time. His brother is here, though too busy attending to Jenks to even allow the possibility of noticing me. The skin on his face is slack and pale, except where a nurse has taped a nasal tube to his cheek; under the strip of adhesive the skin is pulled taut and a stretched yellow age blotch gives the impression of colour.

It is too gradual for anyone else to notice, but I am observing the slow clouding of his eyes, a gentle tide of white overpowering the last of the colour in his irises. I can also detect the minute increase in the gaps between his heartbeat, the ever more tortuous struggle of his blood around his body. I can feel him giving up.

It would be fitting to say Jenks was looking at me at the last, but he wasn't. Unaware that I'd held his hand since the day he was born, he let go, and the warmth of his fingers upon my palm was quickly usurped by the cold and a voice calling me away.

2005-07-13T00:00:00.000+01:00

Part Seven

There's a huge jolt. An electric crack, a lurch, and the amplified sound of paper tearing, that might be the unamplified sound of sheet metal being ripped. A grey-brown cloud blooms past the window, accelerated by the confined space of the tunnel. This is followed by people screaming, a sound not delayed by the relative speed of light, but by confusion. Yes, it had happened, and yes, it was ok to scream. The lights flicker and go out, and with the darkness comes sensation; the heat presses in, and the whimpers of a guy sitting three seats away corkscrew down into my ear.

2005-07-11T23:17:00.000+01:00

Part Six

Bullets buzz by Jenks' head, too close for him to be able to guess their trajectories. They just resemble a fast-moving grey swarm of midges like the ones familiar from football by the conifers in his parents' garden. I am of course standing nearby, blending in. Jenks' helmet is large, the lip overhanging his forehead by about an inch-and-a-half. It has brownish camouflage netting hooked over the top, and he looks silly, like a dirt-smeared mushroom crouching behind an armoured vehicle in the dust of a street a long way from England.

A small speaker positioned near his ear tells him to break from cover and make towards a building less than ten feet away. The voice is extremely clear - millions of pounds in investment have banished the phantom tinny voice breaking up over distance. The commmands are clear and precise. As Jenks moves, I move.

I position my body behind his, the curve of my back equal to the curve of his back. As he straightens, I straighten, and place my flattened palms either side of his head. Jenks cannot feel it, but as he scurries frantically from the cover of the truck to the shadow of the door, I guide him smoothly from side to side; his head tracing a complex trail across three planes while he moves. Bullets buzz by Jenks' head, and I see every one of them.

2005-07-11T00:03:00.000+01:00

Part Five

I don't really like Jenks that much. If I was in any position to, I'd tell him to work a little bit harder and cut his hair, which hangs in ridiculous creepers in front of his eyes. He's not the worst though, I can say that at least. I get reports of other jobs where the subject does little more than sleep all day; at least a drunken Jenks stumbling around near the traffic gives me something to do.

You might be wondering why I don't mention more of my colleagues, specifically the ones watching over the other members of Jenks' family. I see no reason to hide the truth; I am quite low ranking, and don't have permission to say much about their activities. I could be wrong, but I'd be surprised if they amounted to more than the examples you're reading about here, so don't feel I am selling you short. The specifics may be different, but there are only so many kinds of trouble people can get into.

2005-07-10T01:42:00.000+01:00

Part Four

This old guy on the street the other day, wearing a pretty nice fitting grey suit, stopped me and asked me if I felt safe in the world. It was an interesting enough question, and I was going to be late anyway, so I hung around for a few minutes and spoke to him. I refused the chunky little book he tried to press into my hand, and told him that I didn't think anyone was really safe in the world, and then said my goodbyes and moved on. He called after me that one day I'd have to ask for protection, but he didn't say it in a mean way - it was kind of like friendly advice, like he was smiling as he said it.

The door of their building was permanently locked, and you had to be buzzed through, which I thought was pretty fucking over the top considering they were just a regular recruitment agency. Nothing special going on here. A girl in one of those cutely tight-woven wool sweaters that looks really good on a curvy figure was sitting behind the reception desk, and she gave me an effortful smile as she called up a couple of floors to let them know I'd arrived. She pointed me over to a sitting area and mentioned something about coffee, but when I looked closer the machine needed coins, which struck me as kind of cheap. I thought she was finished with me, but out of nowhere, as my back was to her, she spoke up; 'Jenks, thats a funny name', and I gave her my best grin because I was still thinking about her sweater, and told her my mom was a little crazy and had given me her own mom's maiden name as my first name. 'Could've been worse' I joked, just as she cut me off and told me I could go up to the fourth floor.

2005-07-09T02:43:00.000+01:00

Part Three

Jenks was not the first, I'd had several over the years. Even if I am a complete success, old age or disease always require that it ends the same way, in failure. They all died as children though, either afraid or uncomprehending.

2005-07-09T02:37:00.000+01:00

Does anyone out there have a clue why the blog posts should suddenly have stopped wrapping around a floated menu bar?

2005-07-07T23:42:00.000+01:00

Part Two

Following Jenks around I'd eventually get to see many different places as he grew up and moved away from his family; first travelling wherever his boredom prompted him, then later following opportunity wherever he perceived it to lead. His first trips though were more mundane, made on the whim of his mother and father on sunny days when their family home seemed shrunk by the heat, and the cool expanse of the coast was too cheap an invitation to refuse.

Although the journey to Weymouth in reality only took about 40 minutes, to a small child like Jenks it seemed like hours. The walk from the station was a staggered procession involving breaks to purchase sun-cream from the chemist when Jenks' mother decided his skin was too fair and the factor of the lotion they already had was too low, followed by a long browse at a wooden walled hut hung with nets and spades, which concluded with the purchase of a bucket with a crab imprinted on the base. Then, stretched out beyond a stout stone wall was the sand, and on the sand, like a crowd of swaying birds stark on the rock of some wave-broken atlantic island, were hundreds and hundreds of people.

It's easy for a child to get lost at a beach. A simple three-hundred-and-sixty degree turn and Jenks no longer knew where he was, in which direction he'd come from, or where he ought to run to find safety. Droplet speckled boys ran along the billowing water, kicking spray high into the air as they sprinted by. Jenks spun around again, as if to see whether a repeat motion could set the world back in order from whatever disarray his movement had imposed upon it. Still, strangers all around him.

Now it was Jenks stumbling in the surf, taken with what seemed like a clever idea to run the length of the beach, his head turned to the side, scanning the sea of bodies for familiar faces, or the bright stripes of his mother's one-piece. I could see he was running the wrong way, but I was too distant; I'd stayed away from the water (my footprints would have shown) standing with my toes sunk into the pale gritty sand. I raced along lightly, skipping over roasting bodies searching for a way to catch his attention, to direct it back to the family he'd stared straight at and not noticed.

The sun was bright, and I could think of nothing else than to shout, to be heard for once. As I scrambled for the words, so long unused, Jenks slammed head first into a tall man wearing blue shorts, who picked him up from the damp sand and held him up to his face. I could hear perfectly. Jenks was lost. The man hoisted him onto his shoulder and together they began to scan the oblivious faces with shared intensity. I watched helpless as Jenks' arm shot up, spring-loaded with released tension, and the man strode easily in the direction he pointed. I remained where I was, still watching with my feet sinking deeper beneath the unhelpful sand.

2005-07-06T19:54:00.000+01:00

Something New

I'd looked out for Jenks from the moment he was born. From the moment he slivered out of his mother, caked in white goo and bawling at the sudden chill, it was my breath that warmed him and my shadow which shielded his just-opened eyes from the glare of the delivery room lights.

When he was a child, my voice carried far enough to warn him when he was on the verge of stepping from the path and into danger. Sometimes I felt like I was keeping him from harm by will alone, with no help from the others who were charged with his welfare. Still, he managed to reach adulthood without injury; his bones unknit, his skin unscarred and in his mind, complete ignorance of my existence.

His brother was a different matter. Occasionally he would claim he'd seen me (not that he knew who I was, far from it) and he would shiver and cry and cast his eyes wildly from side to side as if he were surrounded by lurking assailants. Eventually his eyes would tire and his lids would droop until he slept peacefully, forgetting everything he had seen for a year or too until it was his time to be observant again. Jenks remained subordinate throughout, and would never try and reassure his brother, even when he protested for hours that he'd seen me outside their bedroom window (he was not believed because it was the middle of the day, and Jenks' mother was outside cutting the lawn, pushing the mower right up to the wall of the house, certain that she'd seen no one, and he was being a baby, even though he was the oldest). I took no pleasure from upsetting the boy, and did everything I could to remain hidden. If I made mistakes, it was better for them to be lapses in anonymity, rather than allow Jenks to come to harm.

2005-07-04T15:22:00.000+01:00

1) How many books do you own?

We've got more than a thousand in our flat. It's a small flat and I can tell you that books are not as comfortable to sleep on as they look. More books elsewhere. Most of the books are C's, but I own one or possibly two, and have read some of those.

2) What was the last book you bought?

Gods and monsters, by Peter Biskind. Essays and articles about film. Actually, just realised that both the books Phil and I bought recently are top of the pile at Fopp. We're just slaves to fashion!

3) What was the last book you read?

Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut.

4)Five books that mean a lot to me.

THE BIBLE

LOL

no, seriously

Wuthering Heights
Glamorama (Brett Easton Ellis)
Slaughterhouse 5 (Kurt Vonnegut)
Digressions on some poems by Frank O'Hara (Joe LeSeur)
Lunch Poems (Frank O'Hara)

These were the first five that came into my head.

Ps. A prize will be given for the comment which takes most exception to my laughing at the bible.

2005-07-04T13:59:00.000+01:00

A new link at the top of our page for the first time in a while! Chiarina, aptly named The Lovely Chiarina by Tom. Two links for the price of one!

Am thinking about the book thing...

2005-06-15T09:24:00.000+01:00

So it's been a while, too long for me to get book tagged, so I'll just steal this off Scott.

1) How many books do you own?

I probably own just over a thousand books at the moment, primarily because I haven't knowingly disposed of one since I was about 14 years old. A brief stint as a student at Random House where payment was in books helped increase this figure and also provided some of the boxes that are shared between my flat and my parent's house.

2) What was the last book you bought?

The Bandini Quartet by John Fante. Essential reading for failed or failing novelists and people that hate L.A.

3) What was the last book you read?

Baudolino by Umberto Eco. I like Eco a lot, even though some people get annoyed with the academic feel of his novels. He almost, but not quite, fills the space left by Borges' refusal to write a novel.

4)Five books that mean a lot to me.

Lolita I've discussed this on here previously, so no need for any more. Essential.
The Duino Elegies by Rilke. Recommended to me by my brother, my copy is now severely dog-eared. I've also written about this in the past, badly, so I wont try again.
The Magus by John Fowles. Perhaps the book that inspired me to write a novel of my own, though perhaps not.
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. Really took hold of me when I first read it as a teenager. Thrilling prose, with a deep abiding fascination for the folklore that binds (some of) our imaginations.
Independence Day by Richard Ford. The supreme 'great american novel', which even if it didn't contain one of the most compassionate and subtle examinations of the american commercial (and sporting) psyche, would be included here simply because it has one of the finest last lines in modern literature.

5) Tag five people.

Well it would be nice if P & B from hereabouts would join in, so thats two. Then maybe Mark too. I've been away from this blog a while, so I'll leave the tagging there.

2005-04-20T14:19:00.000+01:00

Isn't the use of 'Head over Heels' during the school walkthrough in Donny Darko just perfect?

2005-03-18T15:42:00.000+01:00

A disappointingly mean-spirited discussion piece on The Last Temptation of Christ at the channel four website.

The writer seems unable to concede that the ten thousand complaints that were received after the first broadcast of the film were totally nonsensical, and so instead, what people were really complaining about was that the portrayal of Jesus was incomplete. This just doesn't wash, and smacks of apologia. One of contemporary Christianity's greatest problems is the inability of most of its adherents to allow themselves to contemplate the humanity of Jesus; yet how can God have been made incarnate as 'man' if that man was never prey to desire and temptation? Could the sacrifice of a man who never placed any value on his life really have been enough to secure salvation for the world, or rather, as Kazanzakis and Scorsese suggest, is it in the agonising moments between 'Father, why have you forsaken me' and 'It is accomplished' that the real enormity of Christ's sacrifice is to be found?

2005-02-14T01:11:00.000+01:00

If this week's New Scientist is to be believed, a recent study concluded that foxes would have made a better source animal for the domestic dog than wolves. Apparently they have a better innate ability to follow instructions and learn patterns of behaviour. With this in mind, isn't it time we had packs of foxes hunting dogs down in the English countryside?

2005-01-13T18:20:00.000+01:00

We all know that Prince Harry is a complete and utter smear of excrement on the national toilet bowl. The thing about this little scandal that angers me most though, is that there are clearly people being raised in this country who think it is both funny and acceptable to hold parties with the absolutely grotesque theme of 'Colonials and Natives'. Now I am as sneering about bleeding heart liberalism as the next lazy middle class person who is never directly affected by racism, prejudice or a historical tradition of poverty and subjugation, but doesn't that braying, privileged racism make you want to get out there and splash some of that watery in-bred blood on the streets?

2005-01-12T14:09:00.000+01:00

Any Americans out there care to explain to me why Randy Moss is getting scorched for pretending to moon the Green Bay fans on Sunday night? I mean, in the immortal words of Eric Cartman, what's the big fucking deal, bitch?

2004-11-30T18:25:00.000+01:00

More than most I'm aware that other people's dreams are incredibly boring; that being said, I'm going to tell you about one I had last night, just because I can't think of anything else to write about at the moment.

I was in a small appartment, living with some pregnant girl, though the baby wasn't mine, but that of a friend, now deceased. Various weird goings on, culminating in the tipping over of a blender full of milk caused the pregnant girl to run away, though in my dreams I am far more intrepid than I think I would be in reality, so I stayed on to investigate. My method of investigation was fairly unorthodox, and involved nailing the head of a toy doll - one of those big almost spherical ones that is rubbery but comes from a doll with a hard plastic body - to the wall. For some reason I was very nervous about talking to the doll's head, and could barely get my words out, but when I did it responded by nodding or shaking. In an effort to further communicate, I nailed the arms of the doll underneath the head on the wall, but it wouldn't answer to this, so I began to punch it repeatedly.

At this point, the doll became the head, arms and torso of an old woman, still stuck fast to the wall, who grabbed hold of me before pushing me back. We began to talk, and she explained that she only wanted to get rid of the girl because apparently, she was full of poo.

2004-11-17T02:20:00.000+01:00

I know, it's been a long time. Do we still have any readers? Will Pete and Brendan notice my return?

Well the subject that has drawn me back is the new Destiny's Child single, much discussed elsewhere no doubt, but it can probably stand a few more lines from me, just. It goes without saying that it's a thousand times more radio-friendly than anything Beyonce put out during her solo stint; three bites out of the surfboard of pop are better than one, especially if the teeth are steely and the eyes rolled back in the head. Those sharp orchestral stabs sound like 'In da Club' sped up and played backwards (though to be honest, the call to arms of 'Can you keep up' sounds like more fun than any competition with 50 Cent, which is likely to involve working out and comparing scars, you know, like Mel Gibson and Rene Russo do in Lethal Weapon 3). It also has a brilliant video.

Digressing a little. I've always been a sucker for those choreographed en masse dance routines - you know the ones - the zombies in 'Thriller', the school kids at the end of 'Baby one more time'. It goes back to West Side story I suppose, still the only musical I can stand. Ok, now everybody jump at the same time. Bliss.

I also love the economy of the track; as far as I can tell there's only about 50 seconds of song, repeated over and over, drummed into you by the relentless, slightly too fast percussion. It leaps instantly to the top of the heap of Destiny's Child songs.

2004-09-27T01:15:00.000+01:00

And he swore the fiercest beasts could all be put to sleep the same silly way

'Gram Parsons - Fallen Angel' BBC TWO, Friday 25th September

About four years ago I went into the local HMV and asked if I could listen to the Gram Parsons double album of 'GP' and 'Grievous Angel', mostly out of curiousity and the thought that really, with titles like that, these were songs I should like. I stood and flicked back and forth through the tracks for about 15 minutes, before surreptitiously hanging up the headphones and walking out, uninvolved. Clearly something happened in the intervening years, as when the record was given to me by a friend about six months ago it hit me hard. Eventually though, I had to give it back.

Today, I finally got round to buying myself a copy, after listening to ripped MP3s during the interim. About twelve hours later, in one of those serendipitous bits of scheduling, BBC2 decided to show one of their 'Originals' documenataries, smuggled out of the digital ghetto of BBC4 under Jack Davenport's overcoat. Mercifully, minimal time was given to the details of Parson's botched cremation in Joshua Tree National Park and the subsequent burial of what was left by his step-father and remaining family. Rather more time was given to his tragic family background; parental alcoholism and suicide, and rumours of foul-play in the death of his mother. This patina of darkness over the early years of his life is in fairly vivid contrast to his later reputation has a good-time guy, more interested in hanging out with Keith Richards than touring with the Byrds, or recording his own material. The two extremes are there even more explicitly in the songs; in the clear-eyed sadness of 'Brass Buttons' and the whiskey/gin/anything-soaked rush of 'Ooh Las Vegas'.

Rather what harp on endlessly about various songs, I'll limit myself to one. A notable part of the documentary was Keith Richards reminiscing on Parsons' ability to make every woman in a audience cry. Either Keith was being a little disingenuous in protecting the inheritance of masculinity, or I'm just not much of a man, but '$1000 Wedding' has made me cry more than once. Coming to it late, the cliches of vernacular American speech in this little country-tinged saga are probably more seductive than they would be if my country wings had been taken by someone with slightly less finesse than Gram in years past, but I particularly love the "mean ol' momma" lyric. The gentle piano introduction, and the eventual percussive swing of the main sections of the song are counterpoints to a narrative of almost unbearable melancholy - a succession of abandonment at the altar, drunken confession to concerned friends and the consoling words of a priest. Parsons and Emmylou Harris harmonize as beautifully as on any track on either album, but for me the most perfect moment in the song is in the final section, when Harris' drops out, and Gram Parsons' voice has a bruised, fibrous quality as he sings the line I've used as the title... Beautiful.

2004-09-17T17:18:00.000+01:00

hi!
Archigram - padre
i wanna go back to church

2004-09-14T22:00:00.000+01:00

The best decision I made today was to borrow 'The best of the Carpenters' from a middle-aged co-worker, rather than the reissued CD of albums by The Mice being touted elsewhere.

I don't believe in ghosts, but there's a slim possibility I saw one today.

2004-09-13T22:43:00.000+01:00

Don Paterson in this weekend's Saturday Telegraph (11/9) could be found attempting to revive the aphorism. I can't say it was a successful operation; either the lightening rod wasn't hoisted high enough, or the corpse-pickings of previous aphorists refused to be sewn together, with or without bolts through the neck.

The uncharitable part of me (and those who know me personally will be aware that this constitutes a high percentage of my total mass) tends to think that Paterson hasn't really got much of interest to say, and in order to keep in the literary pages has decided to embrace a 'forgotten' form; like the Coen's superfluously black-and-white 'The Man Who Wasn't There' and Southampton's recent attempts at the long-ball game. His coy little game of patsy with 'brevity' and 'truth' didn't fool me, oh no, not for a second.

Especially not once you've read a few of his minuscule musings.

I was terrified when I suddenly realised her entire conversation took place in inverted commas. She didn't dare mean a thing.

Seventy years. But your childhood was an infinity. What fools we were to sign up to time.

I read a definition of the word "solid": something which retains its shape; and find myself immediately terrified by the wilfulness of objects.

Obviously there is a lot to object to in that little sample (and I promise, I didn't just pick the worst ones). However, the thing I'd briefly like to bitch about is the vulgar over use of the idea of 'terror'. Terror is a good thing, I've long been a fan; I like the fact that it encompasses everything from bowel-evacuating fright, to the sublime uncanny. However, it also has a dark recent history, where it is just a foot-soldier in the pretentious quest to make the banal sound emphatic. Now the most terrible thing of all is to see something described as 'terrifying' as they so rarely make you want to fill a nappy or climb Mont Blanc. A shame.

2004-09-12T02:07:00.000+01:00

The Channel 4 Art Show was quite interesting. The Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth is familiar from my youth, and to see a passionate defense made when for as long as I can remember it has been reviled, was quite unique.

I thought the one unignorable flaw of the argument presented was that all of the wandering around these giant brutalist buildings took place when they were empty. In that context it was easy to see the drama of angular concrete avenues and cathedral-like buttresses. Space became monumental, a statement of principal; something it can't be when there are people rushing around with shopping bags, or looking for the sign for the toilets. Most of these buildings were made for banal purposes, efficient retail environments, cheap to produce and erected in record time. To me they now seem more impressive in their vast emptiness and drip-streaked degradation than they do in the imagined future of regeneration and re-use.

2004-09-12T01:42:00.000+01:00

When you're lying awake...

Love, unrequited, robs me of my rest:
Love, hopeless love, my ardent soul encumbers:
Love, nightmare-like, lies heavy on my chest,
And weaves itself into my midnight slumbers!

-Iolanthe, Gilbert and Sullivan

I finally saw 'Lost in Translation' tonight, which makes this a little late in the day/year, but I'm not begging anyone to bear with me, you can move along if you like. I remember reading a lot about this film, but can't remember what was said, which isn't a slight on those who've written about it before, just an indication of the state of my memory and my tardiness. I'm fairly sure though that an awful lot of the affection the film is held in has to do with an unacknowledged cult of personality that has developed around Scarlett Johansson. I don't want to burden this down with slavering riffs about how lovely she seems, but there's definitely something about her, about the way she looks - like she's just regained her composure after crying - that is totally separate from the character Sofia Coppola wrote, and is visible in practically every film I've seen her in. The film isn't hugely funny, aside from one or two set-piece scenes with Bill Murray, it isn't especially interesting to look at, and overall I didn't really believe any of it ; but I liked it in spite of all this.

There's something absurd and optimistic about 'Lost in Translation' - a faith in the ability of people to be matched perfectly, to never hit a wrong note, to always exceed each others expectations. It is both seductive and sly, and I think, accepts the fact that most viewers will be aware that they are being courted quite blatantly. But that doesn't really matter all that much. Charlotte is beautiful and lonely, and in quite clumsy contrast with the neon buzz of money and fucking in the strip-club city around her, she's looking for something meaningful to do with her life. She's a cipher for what most people who watch Sophia Coppola films want from another person. What most of them will drift through life hoping to find, glacing at pretty people on trains who are reading interesting sounding books, wondering if chance has dictated that it's them, and wondering if somehow this is it.

Also, maybe I'm just projecting.

There's a deliberate innocence about the film, the only sexual act alluded to is jarring and transgressive. Charlotte looks up like a happy child when she's carried to bed and tucked in - though just for a second - quickly choosing sleep over intimacy. She lies in the foetal position on Bill Murray's bed, countering the obvious starring role played by her quite clearly post-adolescent body. I'm not sure I believe it though. There was a part of me that felt elated at the idea of love, microwaved to perfection in sixty-seconds by the intense lights of the walls of animated billboards; of it being borne out of necessity and sushi and karaoke. But to remove sex from the scenario quite so coyly felt like cheating.

This is why the appearance of 'Sometimes' by My Bloody Valentine on the soundtrack resonated perfectly. 'Loveless' is probably the most inaccurately titled album of all time. No other music captures the adolescent ethereality of thinking you're in love as well as this. The cyclical geiger counter roar of distortion, the murmured vocal on the edge of comprehension, the relentless thump of bass and drums - all swarming, repeating, endless - like someone's name going round in your head, or the memory of the last time you saw their face imprinted like after-glare.

2004-09-06T19:12:00.000+01:00

Some thoughts on Girls Aloud's 'Love Machine' video...

1) The Irish one is evil incarnate. You can tell this just by looking at her eyes. When I try to imagine what she must be like, I am reminded that ants will use the bodies of their dead to overcome an obstacle.

2) Cheryl is the only one they trust to do 'cute'.

3) The red-head one knows she doesn't belong. You can see fear in her eyes, and sometimes it looks like hysteria.

4) The other two only exist to give balance to wide-angled shots.

2004-08-11T19:10:00.000+01:00

My nephew on the Ward Batman film of the 1960s (He's 7 years old)

"He couldn't take that long to defuse a bomb these days. In a modern Batman film he'd have been blown up ages ago."

2004-07-21T13:10:00.000+01:00

Thomas/Hughes

Oh I definitely plant my banner in the soil next to Dylan Thomas. I've never really enjoyed Hughes; that whole fixation with the barbarity of nature - far too 'blood and soil' for my liking. Not that Thomas isn't fairly bound to the earth as well.

But here's the thing; regardless of content, Hughes just doesn't sound as good as Thomas. Read virtually any Dylan Thomas poem aloud to yourself, and you'll begin to feel enmeshed in the syllables, trapped by them. The rhythm of his poetry is undeniable to anyone capable of being moved by the sound of words. In Wales, its not crows or foxes or even wolves you have to beware when you stumble sheepishly across the page; its the black and white man-trap - the unstoppable phrase.

(Many thanks to Kathryn for making me read 'In Country Sleep' a long time ago)

2004-07-20T18:36:00.000+01:00

Todd's 'I Saw the Light' a guilty pleasure??? A what??? Surely this can't be true, the track listing must be wrong... but if it IS true

Can I just take a moment to call out the compiler of this much-debated CD as a total and utter twat. I can't even begin to imagine why you'd feel guilt about liking one of the most ELEVATING and JOYOUS songs I can think of. No one I know really likes Todd Rundgren though. I have a few friends who respect him, who own a token CD (some even went the whole hog and bought a genuine release rather than the 'Go Ahead, Ignore me' best of, but they are like that anyway and shrink instinctively from the compilation), but certainly in this part of the world, my Toddophilia (teehee) is a plague of one.

Lets get one thing straight now. Music that makes you feel the electricity potent in your nervous system has nothing to do with guilt. You don't have to forgive yourself for grinning at the sentiment and delivery of 'We gotta get you a woman'; these are just tremendous songs, sung by a guy with a beautiful voice and a pretty fucking praise-worthy mastery of 3 minute pop. For God's sake, he was so good at writing these things, he gave it up and started doing more 'challenging' stuff instead (how I hate that word, but it seems the tossers who jeered and walked out of the RFH gig clearly felt it was a challenge beyond their capacity to answer). Anyway, I digress.

Todd's early records are just too damn happy. There's too much transcendence to be found there; too much to make you briefly feel more balanced in the world. You are not encouraged to feel like this any more. The tedious self-regard of the modern musician has nothing to do with joy, and everything to do with an utterly vapid seriousness (realise I am addressing the constituency of THIS specific compilation, all those itching to have a go), and so we arrive at our current malaise. Self-important boys with sharp collars and vintage Fenders, blithely under the mis-apprehension that I give a fuck about their position as inheritors, or champions of a past I hated anyway. Give me Todd. Give me the last two minutes of 'Just One Victory', which always make me feel like someone is brainwashing me into loving my fellow man. It is that serious...

'I want to... change the world'. He sings that. And he MEANS it. And occasionally, that's allowed.

2004-07-16T11:03:00.000+01:00

Aaah, I saw Todd Rundgren at the RFH last night. Although some of the beery 40+ natives who wanted a greatest hits show grumbled (and departed early) it was fantastic. What kind of moron goes to a TR show expecting him to trundle obligingly through his back catalogue? Sure it'd be lovely if it happened, but he's never done it before, so as my companion said, 'you just have to surrender'.

Surrender we did, to Todd's revelatory voice. Its never that noticeable on the records, fine to be sure, but just another instrument among the many. Live is another matter. He can sing. (He can dance too, capering happily from side to side like a orange-suited preacher).

When one guy sitting infront of me shouted 'play us something we fucking know', Todd replied 'no, we have new musical vistas to explore with you' Quite. But he still gave us a sing-along encore. The lounge version of 'Hello it's Me' was nice, but 'Just One Victory' was the clincher. It probably epitomises everything most people hate about 70s pop; its big, brash, complicated, hopefull and preachy. I never sing at concerts, because my voice is rubbish and I'm too self-conscious. This time I did. It was a wonderful moment, the whole audience on their feet singing along; somehow, some day.

2004-07-13T12:13:00.000+01:00

Some Girls

Let's think about this song by Rachel Stevens.
1. It's really good.
2. I've only heard it twice and I'm almost not sure I want to hear it again - the chorus has already expanded to fill my head like a gum balloon and I'm worried if it gets any bigger the whole thing will be spoilt.
3. (I was reminded of this feeling when I watched Morrissey performing 'There Is A Light That Will Never Go Out' at Glastonbury. The first time I heard that song I remember thinking, I don't want to listen to this very much, it will become less special. I remember comparing the song in my head to a silver spoon [wtf was I thinking, I don't know] that you keep in a drawer and only get out for special occasions. Anyway I think 'Some Girls' might be like this too.)
4. Having said that, this isn't something you can really control, and I already find myself hoping, every time a song on the radio ends, that the next song will be 'Some Girls,' even if the previous song was 'Some Girls.'
5. It makes you think what a rubbish criticism 'sugary' is for pop - I mean everyone loves sugar!! And this song makes me go all Bart'n'Milhous on that super-strength Slush Puppy syrup. My EYES are POPping out of my head.
6. Eye-popping is a good image for this song I think. It sounds like its eyes are rolled back in its head and its tongue is lolling out, which is a great look for pop.
7. For some reason it reminds me of 'Step Into My Office, Baby' off the last Belle & Sebastian album (geez, always with the indie comparisons!!), it has that same clod-hopping glam beat and there is something simultaneously cocky and gawky about both songs.
8. This goofiness is a big part of the charm of 'Some Girls,' this everyday smalltown highstreet attitude. Rachel's voice sounds so good - so English! I wish the video featured her working in a shop or an office (you know, a facility girl) but I'm sure it doesn't, it probably features her dancing around a black and neon room.
9. The high street. Girls in bedrooms. Girls hanging around outside the shopping centre on Saturday afternoon. Girls reading Smash Hits and watching Top Of The Pops. This is the tribe I think 'Some Girls' is thinking of in its sound and voice and attitude.
10. For some reason I feel it's a tribe that was more clearly defined in the past than it is now. Wouldn't this song sound a bit, well, naff, to girls like these? I am projecting.
11. The goofiness, the (I guess very artful) artlessness of the sound effects and the (I guess very affected) unaffected vocals are what made me stop short the first time I heard it - this sort of thing just doesn't get made these days, does it?
12. The melody seems to recall/predict some 80s kids TV theme (for a Saturday afternoon show, perhaps.) Richard X's vision of the future is nostalgic for a different vision of the future that never happened. Future nostalgia - this is a k-punk idea isn't it?
13. I've read a bit about this song on various blogs and in some places there's been some really unkind sniping about Rachel Stevens. Jesus she's just singing! Give her a break.
14. (Very incidentally, the fact that I think Rachel's voice is so good on this song makes me think about S Club 7. There's a huge gulf isn't there, between the cheery, rosy-cheeked, thumbs-up singles like 'Bring It All Back To You' and 'Reach' and the cool, sophisticated, grown-up (inverted commas ommitted for purposes of not sounding like a twat) singles like 'S Club Party' and 'Don't Stop Movin.' At the time I think I preferred the latter but in the light of 'Some Girls' I think I'll reassess that judgement.)
15. Right. Some Girls. So it's wide-eyed and lop-sided and goofy and naff and it's very Saturday afternoon pop. It's easily my favourite song of 2004.

2004-07-12T23:37:00.000+01:00

I wish I knew what I know now

I think the ending of Rushmore is supposed to be uplifting, as Max and the rest of the characters begin to dance in delicate slow-motion to the opening slightly off-key chords of 'Ooh la la' by the faces, but am I the only one who finds this whole scene inexpressibly sad? I had to watch an episode of Futurama when I finished watching it again the other night, just to cheer me up. But then again, my mother always said I was an emotional child.

2004-07-02T11:02:00.000+01:00

If...

Koons really does this he's Michelangelo would that make his famous metallic bunny sculpture his Pieta Rabbit?

2004-07-01T15:10:00.000+01:00

Now I know she is pretty much the apotheosis of canonicity, which doesn't generally play well in this parish, but Carole King's voice is just sublime, comforting and enveloping in the best possible way.

Eventually I might get around to writing more than a brief meaningless paragraph. I have something half written about 'Lolita' which I might finish once there's no football to distract me.

2004-06-30T11:11:00.000+01:00

'Waves' - Marjorie Fair

Not sure if this is a single, but it should be. Not exactly pushing the boundaries of the form, and it doesn't sound like its being played in the Tardis, but the chorus breaks like the first moment after an eclipse. So there.

Terrible name for a band though.

2004-06-26T01:19:00.000+01:00

I dare say a reasonably large number of bloggers are at Glastonbury, but honestly, at the weekend, if I don't get ten hours of sleep a night and a hot shower in the morning, I feel my humanity slipping away like a poorly anchored tent in the mud.

2004-06-24T13:01:00.000+01:00

Amusing coincidence of the day...

I had been listening to Tristan und Isolde for close to four hours without a single incident of note, when just as the final swell of the Liebestod broke, an incredibly beautiful girl walked past my desk at work. Neither of us died though, fortunately.

2004-06-16T19:14:00.000+01:00

The football has moved here

2004-06-14T23:21:00.000+01:00

I'm sorry we let you down Ryan...

FUCK, that was a great episode of 24...

2004-06-14T19:11:00.000+01:00

Most disappointing start to an international football tournament in recent memory? Five games and one decent goal. No decent matches.

2004-06-10T18:26:00.000+01:00

dance dance dance

last night i went mobile clubbing at victoria station. it was lots of fun! people turn up at an arranged time and dance, alone, to the music on their headphones. obviously you're not actually alone, and even though you don't really interact with the other dancers during the event (we danced for about 90 minutes last night), there is a tremendous sense of community. it was really an all-round positive experience: we all enjoyed it because we loved dancing, the people watching enjoyed it because it was amusing and silly and weird. it's either performance art or a political statement or a joke or just an excuse to dance, i dunno, but it has put me in a fantastic mood. the next event is at canary wharf on july 22nd.

2004-06-08T21:57:00.000+01:00

Following on from something Scott mentioned in the comments below, I started to wonder about the question of 'great' British players. Just how many are there? You can take it even further, how many 'great' players of any nationality have played in one of the British leagues? I can't think of many.

Controversial, but I'd say the best player ever to grace a pitch in British football is Mr. Dennis Bergkamp. You can keep your Charltons, your Laws, your huddled Worthingtons... I hope you kept the receipt for that Ardilles.

Seriously though, I think British football is massively over-rated, and one of the main reasons a light-weight like George Best is venerated so ludicrously by everyone from Michael Parkinson to your mum, is that we just don't have that many great players to offer. The cupboard is pretty bare. We're footballing minnows, grunts who value effort over technique and always have.

Also...

That ultimate England team program the other day. Hoddle criminally wasted? What about Le Tissier. The great travesty of English football in the 1990s was the succession of English managers who refused to accomodate his skills in the England team. We went for effort, energy getting round the pitch, players who put their stint in defending. And what the fuck did we win.

2004-06-08T13:25:00.000+01:00

Scott... George Best better than Platini? You're avin a larf right??? Platini had magic wands for legs, Best had cocktail stirrers.

2004-05-21T13:00:00.000+01:00

true innit

have you heard the Dizzee vs. Vitalic mashup 'I Luv Poney' that ILM's Siegbran did last year? you probably have. if not you can get it here. listened to it again last night and :-O

2004-05-12T19:10:00.000+01:00

Fantastic Four

Mainly for the attention of Mistah K-Punk, as I'm not sure if he has the stomach for Harry Knowles' crappy prose. Some new information on the Fantastic Four movie he mentioned a few weeks/months ago has come to light apparently...

Read here Mark, but be warned...

2004-05-10T18:01:00.000+01:00

Jamelia 'thank you'

This might be my favourite song of the year so far. I've always loved Jamelia. 'Money,' her single from a few years ago, was a classic. She's always given good interviews, and just come across as an all round lovely person really. Then she disappeared - to have a baby, I think? - and people assumed that was that. Another 1-hit brit r'n'b star.

And then!
She came back!
With an insanely catchy, sugary smash hit!
'Superstar' was so good, it didn’t seem overplayed even when it was, clearly, by definition, overplayed! What a nice story Jamelia's career was turning out to be. Couldn't happen to a nicer etc.

And then!
'Thank You' came out. I remember first hearing it on a Saturday morning when I was still in bed. I often get very emotional listening to the radio first thing in the morning, before I've woken up properly. Probably some Freudian leaving-the-womb trauma thing, er, haha. Anyway, I was ripe for a good cry, and 'Thank You' wrecked me. For these reasons
1) partly, I'm sure, because I was already pre-disposed to like Jamelia, and I just found the whole Jamelia-story at this point so heartwarming
2) the story of the song is of course very moving in its own right
3) but above all it's the conceit of the song. The general 'what doesn't kill me makes me stronger' attitude in breakup songs is of course as old as r'n'b itself, and this is the argument my housemate used to try and prove that 'Thank You' is a v.cliched, instead of a v.great, song. He's so wrong of course. This is why:
a) the lack of anger. This is some basic school bully pyshcology: the more you react, the more power you give them. Jamelia is angry, defiant, righteous actually, but she sings it like a love song. That's gotta hurt. Actually I've seen her perform this live and she does put a bit more lip-curling snarl into the delivery, but mostly she swoons and sighs her way through, until the killer blow, the whispered 'thank you' at the end (following the heartbreaking 'you could have had it all, babe..' lines) pierces like ice and is 100000x more effective than amplified rage or spite would have been.
b) In the lyrics Jamelia beats up on herself for letting this guy get away with treating her so badly - she was too young, too forgiving, too tender. What pushes this song from merely great to astonishing classic for me is that *these are the very qualities* she gives the song - she exacts her revenge by using the virtues that this person had made her think were weaknesses. 'Thank You' is impossibly tender, it sounds like a wide open bruised heart. The uncertain, faltering rhythm and Jamelia's disjointed vocal phrasing give the whole thing an air of ambiguity and nervousness that perfectly suits the soft-voiced defiance.
c) so this story is acted out in real time, as we're listening, and becomes a beautiful act of self-fulfilling narrative. We hear Jamelia describing her past self, even as it becomes apparent from the song that she is still the same person: it's just that, in the course of writing/performing the song, the qualities that were taken advantage of have become the instruments of a devastating emotional revenge.

Love it love it love it. It's such a quiet song, but it's so exhilarating and powerful, I'm amazed the world doesn't stop each time it comes on the radio.

2004-05-10T13:49:00.000+01:00

admin

our links bar is a state. it's out of date. we've let it stagnate. but it's not too late. new blogs are great. we may prevaricate, but we don't hate, and from this date, won't hesitate, to regularly update.
yours,
mindteam

2004-05-10T13:43:00.000+01:00

weakend

My favourite things, yesterday:
Kate bush - the big sky - BEST SONG EVER
Big pun - capital punishment - oooh HOTTNESS
Tom waits - rain dogs - haunted, erotic, dank, drunk

Yesterday I spent 4 hours on the train, going to southampton and back. It was beautiful. I was listening to a tape of songs about england and I was staring at england out the window. I saw a lot of interesting things. I wanted to make a list, heronbone-style, but I didn't have a notebook. Some of the things I remember, are:
1. a burnt-out, upside-down car in a field
2. 3 pheasants standing still in the middle of a small wood
3. a large white house on a river with a private jetty at the end of its garden
4. a row of tiny terraced houses with very long, thin gardens stretching all the way back to the railway. The gardens were full of tall trees, so the houses were in a deep green shade in the middle of the afternoon, and covered in pine cones. The gardens were all empty (it was quite cold)
5. a series of stations in north hampshire where the station name-signs were blank. I think two of the places were hook and fleet. They just had blank white signs with the SWT logo on. Spooky huh? Like we were at war.
6. a little reservoir in the middle of nowhere with red and white life-rings around its edge.
7. a pub called The Claremont which didn't appear to have any windows
8. a motorway. Lines of red dots moving away from me, and lines of white dots moving towards me.

Jesus I suck at this observational stuff. Best leave it to the professionals.

Can I just say: bigup somedisco, legend. I read scott every day, almost like a news ticker. Thinking about it he's actually probably my main news source. Crumbs!

2004-05-07T19:20:00.000+01:00

Two albums I didn't know much about at the time...

Pneumonia - Whiskeytown. I actually bought this for someone without listening to it first when it was released. What a fool I was. 'Don't wanna know why' is wonderful... breathe in, breathe out.

Poses - Rufus Wainwright. In the past two weeks I've acquired all of Wainwright's albums. All three are beautiful and moving, but this is my favorite, mainly because of Martha Wainwright's backing singing, which is astonishing, particularly on the title track. Baroque, playful, unfashionable and totally lovable.

2004-05-06T00:41:00.000+01:00

And as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted

Barcodes!

I like to think that the fact that we haven’t talked about them isn’t down to an oversight, or a mere consequence of us being too caught up in other wonders of the modern world such as teletext and the beta band.

No, we have neglected to write about them because we haven’t needed to. It just sits up there in the top left corner, to all intents and purposes minding its own business. But, drip by drip, it is seeping into your consciousness, travelling out to the far reaches of the internet and YOUR MIND.

Seriously though, we don’t need to make any claims for the barcode because it’s already an icon in its own right. Forget Beckham. Does he get blipped by barcode readers in every shop in the world? He wishes! Is he pasted somewhere on every product you’ve ever bought? Dream on, David!

So the barcode is the most recognisable symbol of consumerism, yet, unlike Beckham, it is rarely appreciated for anything other than its basic functional value. No, wait, I have interesting things to say too! Yes the barcode is beautiful, yes the barcode is brilliant at what it does, but most importantly it’s entirely anonymous. Barcodes signify numbers, which are cross referenced to give you product information and prices. So they’re all different, and yet they’re all just as famous as one another.

Just like you and me. Well, not me actually, I am famous. But like you! You express your individuality by buying different products (music, clothes, wallpaper) from those other people buy, but so far as the BIG BARCODE READER IN THE SKY is concerned, we’re all pretty much the same, only some of us have different sized black and white bars all over us.

All of which could be very interesting, when combined with the appropriate hallucinogens. But this has nothing to do with the real reason we used a barcode as our logo. Oh no. If you have a barcode reader at home (and really, who doesn’t?) you will already be aware of the extreme right wing message that our proud logo proclaims in alphanumeric fashion. Please have a go at deciphering it, and post your results in the comments section!

2004-05-05T17:07:00.000+01:00

THE SUNDAYS OMG!

yes, the sundays. you know, that band. i heard their first album for the first time in the dying embers of a lost weekend (actually lasting from wednesday - friday) in somerset a few years ago. i loved it instantly. and i finally got around to buying it recently, after months of idly intending to do so. i've also read quite a bit about it on ILM etc, lots of people seem to think it is the best indie pop album ever, including people who actually don't like much indie!

anyway i listened to it a couple of times and didn't really get into it, it sounded like, well, early 90s indie pretty much, i couldn't access whatever it was that had made it sound so special that first time (hint: DRUGS). i was aware that something was lacking in me because clearly i was capable of enjoying this record immensely. it just wasn't happening. anyway, last saturday i got stoned.

i don't do that much anymore! i get so paranoid and nervous. also smoking even one spliff makes the next day so much worse than if i'd got mildly pissed the night before. but i was at a party, came home, fairly blitzed, and went to bed listening to THE SUNDAYS. OMG OMG OMG.

admittedly i only got to about track 3 before passing out, but it doesn't matter, it was all over for me by about 1.30 into 'skin & bones.' no-one told me they were a psychedelic rock band! those guitars! seriously, on the chorus, when there are several things going on, a sort of bed of feedback under the whole song, and guitars sparking and chiming in about 5 different directions at once, i was seeing waterfalls of vivid colour, bright pink and green. this was a revelation not only because it was so beautiful, but because in my mind the sundays were a very dark blue, black and white band. the artwork, the smalltown english image, you know. i had no idea there were these cosmic fireworks involved too. and of course, i was stoned, and this kind of thing is much more liable to seem present in that state, and seem silly in the morning. but i've checked several times since in the cold light of day, and the fireworks and waterfalls are still there.

then the second song starts and the leap in mood and tone astonished me. the way the guitars suddenly flutter in out of nowhere (very 'william, it was really nothing;' more on the smiths later) and the pace being so brisk, and the melody having such momentum (you can feel the chorus ages before it comes), brought me hurtling down to earth with a pleasurable bump. i was closer to the real world now, the colours were closer to the blues and greys i expected. it was really just that sudden shift that startled me, and helped me start to love the album, because i was able to see between it a bit more, to feel its different skins of sound and atmosphere. when i'd been struggling with it, an unarticulated objection inside me had been that 'it all sounds exactly the same, it's so grey, so dull.' this was clearly, obviously not true, and i was happy to (re)discover it.

i've still only listened to it all the way through a handful of times. i will spend more time with it. i think 'i won' and 'a certain someone' are remarkable. the latter - that groove is so hard! for a schmindie band! it sounds like !!! 'me and giuliani..,' no honestly it does! i can't get my head round the thatcherite lyrics though - are they supposed to be ironic? and the last 2 tracks are great too.

i realised a couple of things about the band listening to them that night. first, they were fucking cool. i mean, they were not the smalltown losers pouting on the sidelines, there is no way they could have been with attitude like that, there is so much heart and sex and fire in the music, they knew their shit and they weren't apologetic in the slightest. i think i would have been intimidated by them. second, harriet wheeler must be the pinnacle of unattainable indie girl beauty. i don't know what she looks like. but she would have scared the shit out of me too. third, the sundays sound a bit like the smiths, but not as much as i thought they did. there are moments where the soundalike is clear. but even in johnny marr's most psyched-up moments i don't think he produced something so delicately, beguilingly trippy as 'skin & bones.' and there is a blissed-out, post-comedown awareness of dance in the music (i think) that i don't think the smiths every really accommodated.

these are just some initial thoughts on me and the sundays and our troubled history. i think we're through the worst of it, though, and should be OK in the long-run. phew!

2004-05-04T19:18:00.000+01:00

What you are about to read took place between 19.13 and 19.16 (probably)...

Ok, all the 24 bashing must stop. I don't even buy the claims I've been hearing recently that this series is inferior to the previous two. It has always been ridiculous, the way dramatic events seem to happen on the hour, every hour. I love the way the story is just made up as they go along, if complete lunacy is the price we have to pay for not being able to predict every fucking twist, then I say, lets have Jack getting bitten by an uncommonly big dog out in the Mexican wilds and engaging in some downtown LA lycanthropy before noon!

Feel free to disagree, but 24 is the most enthralling and addictive hour of television available in England at the moment.

2004-04-28T20:24:00.000+01:00

The revolution will not be on teletext

Apologies to those who’ve just tuned in, but Phil and Pete both posted after long absences so I felt compelled to dust off my brain and write something.

Me, I don’t tune in to anything anymore, as my television has automatic tuning (and possibly some primitive form of consciousness), and the radio in my car tunes itself as well. My cameras focus themselves, and come to think of it all the appliances in my house are in league with Satan, and that’s why I never write for the blog anymore. Ha.

But seriously, everything is hi tech and automatic. Yeah, okay, ‘tune your fuckin hearing aid in Grandad’ I hear you shout. But, I croak back, pointing my walking stick at the telly, ‘teletext is still as crap as it’s always been!’

Now I’m not talking about fancy digital TVs and all their clever red button malarkey. (My life is far too exciting and fulfilling for all those channels. I mean, the eight hours of snooker I watch every day is only on one channel, right?) No, I’m talking about the pages where you type in a number, (say 387 for the latest snooker scores) then wait for a few minutes until it takes you where you want. Then when you get there, you wait a few more minutes until it takes you to page 5 out of 18, and that page doesn’t load properly so the whole thing looks like a game of chuckie egg on the BBC micro. Aah, bliss.

Soon these days will be gone completely. You’ll have internet on your television, e-mail in the bath, palmtops on the electric scooter, etc. We’ll all be plugged into some mainframe which erases our brains and runs a simulated world program in which none of us are really in control, and by then teletext will be long gone, and who will remember it?

Call me a sad old git (yeah, just remember you’re the one reading a blog on the internet, so let’s not get into a debate about wasted lives) but I like teletext. As you can probably tell from the ‘design’ of this page, we’re into low-fi aesthetics that are retro and a bit rough around the edges. Check out Pete and Phil’s wardrobes for further evidence. And how many happy afternoons have you spent in front of the telly, with teletext on, waiting for the football scores to appear because you’re too cheap to pay for digital or cable, and too antisocial to get out more?

Our kids won’t understand this. We’ll be saying, ‘ah, but things were slower then, lad, back in them days you could… what… where am I?’ and they’ll be off in the garden, gallivanting on their electric skateboards like the ones on Back to the future (don’t go over the water!) and will anybody ever take a moment to reflect on the beauty of teletext?

2004-04-28T17:59:00.000+01:00

beta band, ica

what ho. glad to see phil holding the fort. i'm still here too though, honest! how's everyone been? good? lovely.

BETA BAND UPDATE! since i wrote to them down there (the letter was returned, unread ;( i've heard the album. i was prepared for disappointment, after reading this review by jess harvell, and also by the number of positive reviews the album was getting in the press. not in a perverse way you understand, just because most of the praise seemed to be coming from the direction of people who didn't rate Hot Shots II, which is silly, obviously.

so, yes, i've heard it, and i'm underwhelmed. something isn't there. it's a 'good' album, maybe the first 'good' album they've done. just a nice solid album. but it sounds earth-bound and humdrum where HSII was galactical and visionary. i saw them play last night at the ICA and it was a very good gig, theirs always are, and the new songs did sound more inspiring in that setting, but that whole air of whispered nocturnal revelation that HSII had in spades seems to have evaporated. the band have cheered up and fallen to earth. this album feels like the first time the band aren't marching off into the ether - it's the first time when, listening to it, i can imagine them standing there in a studio playing instruments. you can see the joins.

i remember steve mason saying a few months ago that the new album was going to sound like 'the mily way in a teacup,' which is a beautiful phrase, and a noble ambition, i think. thing is, they got that on Hot Shots! that's exactly what it sounded like! ah well. i'm going to see them a few more times in the next few months so i'll have more to say then perhaps.

and i apologise for apparently only being able to write about the beta band these days, it's a bit pathetic i appreciate that, but everything else seems to just turn my mind to mush, maaaaannnn...

2004-04-26T22:11:00.000+01:00

I started laughing uncontrollably at work today. I'd remembered something from my early childhood, something improbable.

When I was about six, I needed a new coat. Obviously I wasn't going to go out and make a choice myself, so off went my mum to pick something up from the supermarket. How little things have changed. Anyway, she returned from Asda in Totton with a blue and green coat (we called it a ski-jacket for some reason, even though my Dad was the only member of my extended family to ever have gone ski-ing, and that was decades ago, before marriage, when he traveled further as a seaman than the English channel). I recall being quite fond of it, and the first night I owned it I declared it so cold in the house that I could only be kept warm by wearing the coat indoors, though even then I realised this was pretty stupid and so in my embarrassment kept myself partially hidden from my older brothers between two armchairs, snugged together so the sausage-like armrests arched over me in a checked-brown canopy.

Aside from the panels of blue and green, which were mint-green and sky-blue for the tone conscious, the other significant motif on the coat was a yellow star on either sleeve. This didn't mean anything to me at the time. I got dropped off at the bus-stop as usual, my mum waiting in our maroon Renault until the orange-streaked school-bus had collected my sister and I, and the other children who waited with us who were friends then but are faceless now. I don't think anyone commented on my coat, certainly not like they had when some dull-bladed family friend cut my hair months earlier, and an older kid advised me to sue. Of course, I had no idea what that meant. I can't be bothered to invent the intervening snivel and joy of six-year-old life, as it may have been weeks between the coat purchase and the incident I recalled nearly two decades later, so on we go.

The boy was called Neil I think. When I try and picture him now I see a bowled chin, freckles, prominent teeth, and diluted-blue eyes arched with laughter. He's jumping up and down pointing at me, one or two years older. He is pointing at the yellow stars on my sleeves shouting 'Star of David, Star of David. You're a Jew, You're a Jew.' I've always self-consciously liked to think that I was quite smart as a child, but I didn't know what a Star of David was and I neither did I know what Jews were. Further elaboration was on the way. 'Round him up! Round him up!' And I was shoved a little, playfully though, without malice. It was just something he was shouting while playing a game. A few other kids joined in, though then as now, I am sure they had no idea what they were saying.

I sounds pretty horrible writing it down like that, but it didn't feel horrible at the time, and as you can probably assume by the fact that I giggled helplessly at my desk for a good minute or so, I don't find it shocking now. I have no idea where an eight year old learned about the marks of Jewish segregation, and I have no idea if he knew the full significance of the consequences of that branding. Neither do I know why it suddenly returned to the front of my mind with such clarity, but I'm quite glad it did. I promise every word, however absurd, is true.

2004-04-25T00:36:00.000+01:00

Things I can't quite believe I saw on television tonight...

1. Frank Skinner's sitcom 'Shane' (repeated from sometime earlier in the week).
2. The McDonalds advert which attempts to tell young women that its ok to eat there now. Thanks Ronald.

Both in their own way felt like personal insults.

2004-04-20T22:27:00.000+01:00

HMV selling David Mead's 'Mine and Yours' for 3.99. For some reason I knew it would be there, in the little wooden box that contains the CDs they don't expect anyone to want.

2004-04-06T18:34:00.000+01:00

Quite Happy

After more than two long years of searching, I finally have a copy of the 1984 edition of Funk and Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend hurtling over the Atlantic (hopefully inside a box, inside a plane)... god bless Abebooks, probably my favorite shop on the web.

2004-04-05T22:39:00.000+01:00

A very brief post, which seems quite inadequate as I have just read the piece on Brimstone and Treacle at K-Punk, needless to say, I enjoyed it.

Last week I acquired two series of Futurama on DVD, and after watching about ten episodes over the weekend and the sick day I took today, it strikes me that there's a real imbalance in the appreciation of Matt Groening's output. The famous 'more like the Waltons, less like the Simpsons' line by Bush senior is easy enough to skewer, mainly because trite bullshit comparisons like that are always wrong... but the point to me seems to be the extent to which Bush was wrong. The Simpsons and Futurama are funny and occasionally nastily satirical, but if satire alone was a good thing, Rory Bremner wouldn't just be a pompous cricket-loving tosser.

I can't be bothered to actually substantiate this with references from the recent media, but I'd say I've read on three separate occasions in the past month about the gradual shift in social units of support from the family, to an equally concrete circle of friends. No doubt there is a print-friendly psycho-jargon name for this group, which has nothing to do with Minnie Driver, but I don't know it, and don't really want to know it, just in case anyone does and is tempted to pollute the comments box with their verbal carrion. The reason I mention this little piece of sociological jiggery-pokery is to point out that while it might be true, its kind of irrelevant. A more important consideration than who you are behaving towards is surely that of how you are behaving towards them...

A far more serious treatment of an aspect of the point that I promise I'm eventually going to make has already been explored on various other pages, in their sober appreciation of comicbook art. So in keeping with that, I feel its my duty to be far more shallow and presumptuous (and provide fewer jpegs for the eye-weary).

Ok, here it is. The one sentence that I could probably have written just as profitably for any readers enduring this far without all the preceding fuckwittery. Matt Groening's shows, more than any other series on tv, make me feel optimistic. Optimism is a very serious business, it's incredibly hard to marshall. It's not kids' stuff. The Simpsons and Futurama regularly provide just about the most sane moral education in the modern media, while also managing to be funny and visually exciting. Lets just think about that for a few more seconds, as its actually probably slightly underplayed in that previous flabby sentence. A program that manages to be highly principled and actually probably does you some good... performs that non-specific miracle of 'making you a better person', but is also FUNNY... FUNNY.

I both hate and love big claims.

Matt Groening is a good man.

2004-03-26T12:56:00.000+01:00

fryday!

speaking of jamie cullum's version of 'frontin'', i can't hate, he may be awful (i haven't heard his own stuff, i'm sure it's crap), but i don't particularly mind it, it's actually quite sweet i think, his version works, it's an imagining of the song that has validity, i think it is as vivid in its own way as pharrell's was. this is a trend i wholly approve of: pop stars covering 'cool' songs. much better than 'cool' bands covering pop songs. cf:
will young doing 'hey ya!' - great
lemar doing 'i believe in a thing called love' - wonderful
someone else doing something else, i forget

all much beter than the dreadful:
vines doing 'ms.jackson' - so WRONG!
lostprophets doing oh fuck i forget, it was some huge huge r'n'b hit, they murdered it
snow patrol doing 'crazy in love' - i am not making this up, i haven't experienced this myself but i am told it exists. muppets!
(altho thinking about it, the elbow version of 'independent women part 1' wasn't bad, was it?)

well there you go, something to think about. isn't usher - 'yeah!' great? and britney 'toxic'? and jamelia 'thank you'? and beenie man 'dude'? and twista/kanye 'slow jamz'? and will young 'your game'? good couple of weeks for pop singles. (kylie 'red blooded woman,' awful though, just stop it.)

recently i bought the girls aloud album (a bit last year, i know.) on first few listens the songs don't sound as thrilling as they have done before. thinking about it i've almost always heard these songs on tv before, i don't think i've heard them on the radio or out and about much. anyway i got to thinking, maybe, these songs actually do sound better on television, i mean they are actually supposed to. it is a very compressed, tinny sound, very celophane or whatever. there have been saturday mornings when i've been watching cd:uk (one occasion when they performed 'no good advice' stands out in particular) when i have been very blown away by how exciting these songs were. listening to it on our very top-notch speakers, hmmm, not so much. i am happy about this, i approve of music that sounds best on tv, or on crappy radios, or on supermarket tannoys.

2004-03-18T18:09:00.000+01:00

in the unlikely event that anyone reading this hasn't already read this, here is another hearty recommendation. fantastically entertaining. we love over-elaborate extended metaphors and mr reynolds pulls it off effortlessly. lovely.

2004-03-17T13:56:00.000+01:00

everybody enjoys the colour and freshness of beautiful flowers in their home

2004-03-12T13:06:00.000+01:00

a fan letter to the beta band

i haven't written much about the beta band here. they are my favourite band ever. i don't think they are the best band ever.* just my favourite. they mean a lot to me. they came along at a time when it was important to me to have a favourite band. they have taught me a lot about how to listen to music and how to think about it. i have invested a lot of emotional energy in following them and supporting them, far more than i ever have in any other band. something tom ewing said about the pixies comes to mind - along the lines of "i will never love another band as much." i'm pretty sure that in the future there will be music that i enjoy even more than theirs, but i can't really imagine anyone ever really 'meaning' as much to me. the first 3 EPs ('los amigos...' especially), the self-titled album, and 'Hot Shots II' are all minor classics i think. i like the idea of 'minor classics,' i think it is more appealing to me than the idea of actual classics. this is probably indicative of a terrible, endemic, indie glorification of under-achievement. but fuck it. and also, there is something deliberate, i think, about the beta band's own version of under-achievement that is essential to their character, their aesthetic, their vision, whatever. i love the way they dramatise their relationship with their idols and the way they seem acutely sensitive to their position as something of a footnote to the story of so much of the music they love. let me explain this a bit:

the beta band are the least pompous - as in self-important - band i can think of. they put a lot of effort into demystifying and debunking their own mythology, such as it is (and this too is of course a process of self-mythologising, haha). how about some illustrations.
1) on their 1st tour, the video they projected to accompany 'dry the rain' was just a rolling succession of album covers. their favourites. just an endless loop of iconic images + myths. as if to say, this is where we come from, there's no illusion, we're not competing, we just want you to know that we know we exist in relation to all of this, we are a composite of it all.**
2) then there was the whole 1st album thing: announcing that it was the worst album ever made, singing "i fucked it up," and, y'know, it was pretty fucking terrible in places. it sounded like they'd given up halfway through each song. i guess it was fairly perverse but that lack of respect for career, audience, music even, was something i love, it's very human, just giving up like that.

so much of what they do, the half-finished ideas, the perpetual self-depreciation ("the music we make is not particularly good," indeed), the constant teetering balance in the lyrics and worldview between cosmic consciousness and provincial, ego-deflating piss-takes (statements of profound despair or love subverted by squeaky voices or bad puns) is geared into this endearing, very insecure, low self-confidence brand of under-achievement.

anyway, i could go on. even thinking about a band this way makes me feel very young, very invested in it, and it's a bit weird, because that's not a feeling you seem to get a lot as, y'know, time goes on. i'm aware that i haven't really talked about the music at all. but this is a fan letter. and i've heard the new single, you see, and i'm a little bit worried. it's alright. as promised there are more guitars and it sounds very angry.*** i met someone the other night who has heard the new album and he said this was the pattern. more guitars. my knee-jerk hostility to the notion of 'more guitars' is a bit embarrassing, entrenched indie guilt no doubt, i mean they're not objectively bad are they? and more specifically, there is no particular reason, is there, why more guitars on a beta band record should mean any kind of retreat, which is what my gut tells me this is. obviously i'll have to wait till i've heard it.

but the narrative i had constructed in my head for this band's trajectory (i told you, i've put a lot into liking this stuff) was mostly a move away from that, if that makes sense. the beta band were better (better words: more adventurous, imaginative, exciting, EXCITED, in love with possibility, with sound, with truth, with the modern world, with the myriad ways of seeing and expressing emotional experience) than those others, those people with guitars, or with only guitars at least. i remember some awful uk coffee-table 'downbeat' hip hop dude (from grand central maybe?) calling 'Hot Shots II' the "most credible indie record of the year," and thinking, fuck you, a) if 'credibility' is what's at stake then who the fuck do you think you etc etc and b) they're not indie!!!! at that point (2001) 'indie' really suggested to me a universe of signifiers and associations that the band who made the scottish dancehall of 'broke' and the cut-up church music in space of 'al sharp' and the whatever-the-hell 'life' is had nothing, or nothing meaningful, to do with. (and someone asking steve mason which bands he liked, and him saying, "fuck off, i don't listen to all those boring wankers with guitars, i listen to real music, hip hop and reggae" (or something along those lines))

so you can see my problem. i like aspects of the new song, i mean, it rocks, that's good, and it has a fun breakdown, and i am sure it will be fantastic to dance to at the gigs,**** and i can also see the attraction of a pared-down, thrashing, bile-spitting beta band. it's just that, at this point, when they are i guess the last band with whom i have this kind of deep adolescent attachment, if they disappoint me, well it'll be kinda hard to take. still. i take these things too seriously no doubt. right: that was quite cathartic and i enjoyed it. i'm off to italy for a few days. happy weekend.

*for instance last night i listened to everything i own by wire and joy division (it was quite a long evening). i don't think i'd say that the beta band are 'better' than either of those bands, for instance.
**even the name, to me, has always suggested half-references to the beatles and the beach boys, the 2 canonical giants of melodic pop music, the 'beta' band obv seeing themselves as 2nd rate in relation, and they know it, and are happy about it
***in the past one of the things i've loved about them has been the very quiet anger. the beta band are furious, passionate, committed, all of that, but it's a very cool-eyed, steady-handed kind of anger. a song like 'life' could soundtrack a velvet revolution, so steely and determined and righteous is its vitriol for the fucking mess that western politicians and technocrats are charging us all further, headlong into)
****one thing that isn't up for debate, is that the beta band are the greatest live band i've ever seen. i am fairly sure that wire and joy division were not more fun to watch or dance to. that's something at least.

2004-02-20T01:09:00.000+01:00

A world which produced Lili Taylor can't have so much wrong with it.

2004-02-18T17:41:00.000+01:00

dizzee + n*e*r*d

went to see n*e*r*d last night in hammersmith, and it wasn't very good. apart from the end, when they played 'rockstar' and 'lapdance,' and in the middle of 'lapdance' dizzee rascal turned up to do a guest verse, and he killed it, and then afterwards when pharrell was thanking the special guests (also justin timberlake and a black eyed pea), you couldn't really hear him say 'thankyou to dizzee rascal!' because of all the noise, and dizzee just kinda sloped off, just gave a quick wave over his shoulder and scarpered. i think for most people the most exciting thing was that justin turned up, and that was very exciting, but then i'd seen him at earl's court last month (it was spectacular!) so it was less of a big deal (oh yeah when they played 'senorita' before the sing-along bit justin asked all "the bitches" to join in. he said bitches! i was shocked!). anyway for me seeing dizzee was the highlight, just seeing him on the same stage, side by side with pharrell, well i thought it was cool and beautiful, i mean i love them both so it was a bit special.

that even mostly made up for how disappointing the whole night had been. i've loved the first n*e*r*d album since it came out and it's only been the last year or so that i've found out that that's not very cool! i blame ILM. anyway quite apart from how much i love the album, the last time i saw them play, was just pure joy and love. let's do a little comparison:

LAST TIME - FEB 14th 2003 (yes that's valentine's day!) - THE ASTORIA, SOHO

it was valentine's day. it was a friday. it was in soho. the venue is kinda cramped and the sound was loud and clear. it was the day before the huge anti-war march. they got everyone to do peace chants and did a little anti-US foreign policy speech. pharrell hadn't quite become a global megastar just yet. they played 'brain' first and seemed so shocked at the intense audience reaction (i've never seen so many people at a gig just losing it) that they upped their game and then it was just one big positive feedback loop of excitement and adrenaline. at the end pharrell looked like he wanted to jump into the crowd and hug everyone.

THIS TIME - FEB 17th (not valentine's day) - THE APOLLO, HAMMERSMITH

it wasn't valentine's day, and it was a tuesday. it was in hammersmith. the war happened anyway. they didn't get involved in any politics this time. pharell is a huge global megastar and everyone knew justin would be there because the brits were happening just down the road too. the sound was atrocious - quiet, muffled, murky. they came on and played 3 new songs. they got pissed off because no-one was dancing. we got pissed off because we couldn't hear anything (and because the new stuff sounded noodly and meandering, not brittle and thrilling like the first album). it got worse and worse till the end, when the guests turned up. at one point pharell was like, "c'mon, is this not the UK? is this not a n*e*r*d show in the UK? c'mon, let's do the things we used to do...'. !. it was hearbreaking. i wanted to give him a hug, they all looked a bit distraught. to go from that to this in 1 year, it is heartbreaking. anyway. guess i'll wait for the album, and if it does suck, just hope they bury it before they come back over here.

2004-02-13T01:26:00.000+01:00

For lovely pictures of a big abandoned train station, go here. It really shouldn't need a hard sell.

2004-02-12T22:53:00.000+01:00

Top of the ninth, all bases loaded and the peachiest looking pitch imaginable. And I didn't even swing.

2004-02-09T22:56:00.000+01:00

Third Stone from the Scum

Am I the only person in the world (aside from Paul Morley on Late Review) who thinks that Joss Stone is fucking awful? I can't detect any of this powerful emotion in her voice that every other critic and his dog seems to be howling about from the column-tops. All I get is economy-pack soul, the high-brow equivalent of pre-pubescent girls at a wedding doing the moves to the Macarena. I'm not for a minute suggesting that it doesn't have a right to exist, but a little proportion please... for once questions of whether she's a higher class of svengali-spun popstrel are irrelevant; the voice just isn't good enough to warrant all the attention.

2004-01-30T01:09:00.000+01:00

Denigration being so much easier and perhaps more interesting than commendation, I would like to pre-empt the probably inevitable backlash that greets any new series of a lauded program, and say that Six Feet Under is as good as it ever was.

Other matters... is Katie Melua a joke? The video (and lyrics) of the song used to advertise her album looks like it should be the end-piece of an episode of Smack the Pony...

2004-01-25T00:35:00.000+01:00

WIP pt.4

The policeman's deliberations were winding down. He crumpled the ticket, and between pinched fingers, offered it back to the bum. For a moment it looked like he was just going to calm the guy down and let him get on with his journey, but after standing pensively for a few moments, hands on hips, he beckoned for the crazy guy to follow him out of the terminal.

"What'll happen to him?" I asked Mike, as the cop led his charge away, craning his neck to speak into his radio as he sauntered past us. "Oh, station first, then maybe hospital. I dunno, never happened to me. The only time I had a real bad episode my mom took me into hospital by herself." He laughed happily, as if the memory of his hospitalising lapse into insanity was a good joke, or a comfort. "You know what she caught me trying to do? I had a needle and a biro, and I was making all these weird scratches on my arms and legs, and squeezing the ink onto them because I thought I'd see messages. They healed up pretty good though, so there's nothing to show." I nodded and smiled, after all it was a good thing that Mike hadn't scarred too badly.

The whole sequence with the policeman and the madman had lasted maybe ten minutes, and as the guy was being led away there was activity over by the gate marked 'Seattle' and the pop-crackle of a microphone being turned on. Quickly we all mobilized, with the veteran as our leader because he had bravely refused to yield the prime front-of-gate ground. A fat man in short sleeves and short trousers entered through the gate, and began by asking us all to have our tickets ready. Mike and I were near enough the front of the line to have our pick of seats, so I knew I couldn't escape him.

Our luggage was stowed under the bus, in separate compartments because we were going to different cities. I noticed this and remained quiet, Mike noticed this and said "So you're going to Seattle? GREAT PLACE! I know some good guys up there, I can hook you up with their numbers if you want someone to show you around." I was relieved when Mike didn't instantly reel off a list of numbers, but I didn't doubt that he was serious and that I'd get them at some point during the coming hours. I wondered what kind of friends a guy like Mike had - I thought about guessing, but disliked the idea of thinking of myself as an uncharitable sort of person, which I'd probably have to if I pondered for too long. I stepped up onto the bus, and as usual sized up the rest of the crowd, looking for empty seats, looking for anyone that might be trouble (I never found anyone).

Trouble though is a word that changes its meaning in proportion to a given situation. On a bus from DC to Chicago a woman claimed she was having a heart attack. She gained the attention and succour of at least two modern Samaritans, and once she'd 'recovered' enough for the driver to be convinced it was safe to continue, she proceeded to spend the next seven hours abusing her new carers' by reading them her poetry. I was only sitting a few rows behind her, and was pleased at my initial cowardly lack of boldness whenever I caught snatches of their ordeal. She had been in DC attending a poetry competition, and had novelty mugs with 'I Love POETRY' to hand out as rewards to the suitably complimentary listener, even though from what I heard, the rhythm of her verse was in a far ropier state than that of her heart.

Looking up and down the aisle, there were a few unshaven guys who must've closed their eyes the minute they sat down, either embracing or feigning sleep, and the rest of the coach was almost empty. I picked a seat a few rows down from the veteran who'd naturally been the first on, and waited for Mike's inevitable descent onto the seat next to me.

"Hey, mind if I sit with you?" he said, already shifting his buttocks to accomodate the generous dip in the seat. Of course I didn't. Who could object to Mike's company?

Somehow he'd managed to keep hold of burger wrapper, now empty but for the odd livid smear of mustard and ketchup. Only now remembering the litter in his hand, Mike balled it in his fist and let it fall between our feet. I stretched out a toe-cap and punted it under the seat in front of us while Mike was busy prodding at the straps that hung like little canvas creepers from his bag in the overheard compartment.

Slowly the rest of the bus filled up at a speed established by the fussy precision of the baggage handler below us. A few Mexicans filed past us, all wearing regulation uniform of check-shirt and cranially capacious baseball cap. They all sat near each other, as if they were familiar, but none spoke. A blonde woman in her thirties, clutching too many bags and a blanket, fell into the seat behind us in a barrage of muttering and self-satisfied laughter. This was Kimberley, who was not yet known to Mike and I. We would have to wait about another thirty minutes for that privilege. For a while we sat in silence, just watching the passing faces of our travelling companions, careful to avoid eye-contact.

2004-01-22T22:59:00.000+01:00

WIP pt.3

For the benefit of my two confirmed readers, here's the next episode...

Mike nodded discretely in the direction of the policeman, not risking being seen to notice him stalking through the TransBay hall. "You see man? Told you it was just gonna be a matter of time. Poor guy'll get arrested, just for being crazy. Being crazy's not a crime. Thats what I think anyway." He looked away from me and back to the man from SFPD, who had managed to get the guy to look up from the floor by coughing loudly three times. I thought Mike's brief discussion of insanity and crime was over, but I was badly mistaken. With disorientating speed, he dragged me to a highly personal plane, where I was nothing less than his confidante.

"I spent a lot of time in therapy as a kid. I had a stretch in hospital too. Ok now though." He smiled keenly, though without any suggestion that this was to reassure me. Mike was just pleased to be free of doctors and hospitals. As he sketched his experiences of psychiatry for me, Mike often paused in mid-sentence, as if he wanted to completely re-experience the event he was commenting on before he finished articulating his thoughts. He did this a few times as we watched the policeman lift the guy off the floor and begin to question him on an empty row of bench-seats a few rows down from us. I watched as scene after scene slipped through the little holes in Mike's brain, and waited patiently for him to hunt around for them, bring them back. The look of placid contemplation when he just stopped talking and went fishing around in his mind for something, dangling a needy hook beneath the thin ice layer of lesions and medication, became quickly recognisable.

While Mike was talking, the shiftless, motiveless lunatic derelict pulled from his plaid-shirt pocket a Greyhound bus ticket. There was no synchronous sharp-intake-of-breath from the room, but it was a sure bet everyone in there imagined that there should have been one. God, I hope he isn't travelling with US.

As the bum held out his ticket, the cop stood, legs an improbable distance apart, chanelling a tree so great that it needed two trunks. To this theatrical stance, he added a ludicrous, shameless flourish - he slowly removed with quick tugs his leather gloves, and then with near-pornographic relish, slid on a pair of latex ones he'd drawn from a pouch on his belt. He plucked the man's ticket from his hand like it was a radioactive shit, waving it around as if he wished it was behind several feet of lead glass. To be fair, the ticket was so grubby it had changed colour; gone was the uniform coroporate grey/blue, now it was a distinctly suspect mottled brown.

The policeman kept one plastic-clad hand on the bum's shoulder as he unrolled the ticket with the other. His eyes flicked relentlessly from ticket to man, man to ticket, unwilling to let a momentary lapse in vigilance usher in escalated craziness and violence. We couldn't hear any of what was being said, but the guy was certainly offering up some sort of defense, and in all honesty, looked quite saddened at the obvious insinuation that he was up to no good. As we watched, trying hard not to look like we were watching, Mike began to speculate about where the guy might be trying to get to. Mike thought his parents must be dead. "Sure thing," he said, "He's not trying to get home to mom and pop." I guessed that our resident loon was probably about forty under the accumulated layers of filth, sweat and fine, matted hair. "I dunno," I said, "his parents could be alive. He's not that old." Mike shook is head vigorously. "No guy with parents ever gets that bad. No one. It's part of the deal." I didn't argue the point further.

"My dad died a coupla years ago, but my mom still looks out for me," he went on to explain, once his longish hair had stopped swinging about. "It was my mom who told me about Portland. She read about it in an article, and she knew I was looking for a new place, so she cut it out and sent it to me, and now here I am, ready to start a new life in Portland and talking to a new friend all the way from England. She looks out for me for sure." Mike was proud, in a totally shameless way, which sort of threw me for a minute, and I forgot that I didn't trust him. "You know I've never met an English person before? I must've told you that right? I musta told you, so I bet I look like a real goof don't I?" His smile was enthusiastic rather than penitent, a plea for indulgence. He hadn't told me though.

2004-01-22T01:17:00.000+01:00

Work in progress pt.2

I don't know if I have any readers, but if I do, here is the next part.

Mike looked amused, like he saw this kind of thing every day. "I see this kind of thing every day" he said. "Every damn day." He shook his head and bit deeply on his greasy burger, forcing a little ketchup up between his braced fingers, which he licked at absent-mindedly while composing his next thought. "Its a fucking tragedy man. A fucking tragedy. We're all victims y'know? Insanity is all in the mind, its all about who they want to be mad and who they don't." I sort of agreed with him, but still didn't know what to say. In fact, I hadn't said anything yet, just nodded and offered the occasional understanding gaze. I felt it was time to break my silence, and said "Yeah, I know." Not my best work, but at least it was appropriate and congenial.

"Oh wow, you're not local are you?" said Mike. He grinned, as if fate had just hefted some great prize onto his lap. I felt strange that he didn't identify me as English. I thought my every word screamed it, to the point that what I was saying might even be obscured. Admittedly, most Californians so far had fingered me as an Australian.

Now down to the very stub of his burger, Mike began tearing at the wrapper, scattering little grimey confetti pieces on to the floor where he'd shredded two layers at the same time. He looked thoughtfully at me for a second or two, fingers poised to pinch off a piece of ketchup-sodden bun, and said "No, I can't place you man" before popping the bread into his mouth. He didn't look particularly disappointed with his failure to guess where I was from, and looked at me expectantly over the top of the burger and its corona of torn paper, which he had in the meantime raised to his lips.

"Ah, I'm from England" I said, "Been travelling around for a month or two, seeing what I can of the country."

"That's good, that's good" Mike enthused, "You liking what you've seen so far? Where've you gotten to? You gotta tell me all about it, what a guy from England thinks of our country." I felt sort of trapped, like I was being tied to the train-tracks of a conversation that was coming at me headlong and unavoidable. Then the bum lurched at a woman and she yelped, and the place came alive again through the membrane of our chatter. I had escaped, but I knew that at best it was a reprieve. Mike knew me now.

Through the door at the end of the hall walked a policeman, dressed in a summery uniform of short sleeved shirt and sunglasses. For some reason, the first thing I noticed about him were his gloves; shiny leather mittens which probably should have had metal studs protruding from the knuckles, but didn't. Hanging from his belt was a holstered gun and a set of cuffs, buttoned into a little plastic pouch. He walked slowly, confidently surveying the room as if we were all potential offenders, even though he had been called to deal with one filthy lunatic, and only one of the assembled was trying to pry up the floor tiles in the middle of the room.

2004-01-20T00:03:00.000+01:00

From this moment on

From 1957's 'A Swingin' Affair', this is probably my favorite Sinatra vocal performance. It helps that it's one of Cole Porter's finest songs, the gentle insistence of the rising scale imbuing the music with hope that is equal in measure to the enthusiasm of the lyrics. It would be a fine song without Sinatra's interpretation added to it, without Nelson Riddle's arrangement that moves so subtly from restraint to almost juvenile zest you're barely aware of your emergent smile. No, but if you add these two ingredients to the mix, something astounding happens.

A lot is said about Sinatra's voice as an instrument, as a woody, fibrous living thing. If you took at axe to Sinatra's throat there would be a ring for every year he'd lived, with nasty welts scarring those times that were particularly traumatic. Listen to the second treatment of the verses in this song... the second time he sings 'From this moment oooooon' and manages to hit a note so thick it completely encompasses you. Technically its superb, you can't see the join, even when he goes somewhere you're not expecting. But the fucking tone... its transcendent.

The kind of song that makes you want to shove the world out of your way, one atom at a time.

2004-01-18T02:09:00.000+01:00

Work in progress

I am sure there is lots of interesting stuff going on around me in the cultural ferment, but I haven't spotted it, so to fill up space, here's something I have been writing during my lunch and tea breaks.

Mike hands me back my pad. He's drawn a big sun, blazing with triangles, and sporting quite a nasty looking grin, like he knows he's about to supernova and is enjoying the thought of consuming the solar-system. Mike is commemorating our meeting, giving me a small token so I'll remember the twelve hours we spent together on the bus from San Francisco to Seattle. He doesn't know I'd rather be sitting next to Kimberly in the seat behind. If he was a smart guy he might realise this, but Mike is not a smart guy. Mike is probably what some people call an 'acid-casualty', and he has just finished meticulously writing the words 'The Grateful Dead' between the little wedges of sunshine that fringe the main sunny disc. He explained earlier that he had spent the five years before Jerry Garcia died following 'the guys' around on tour; selling t-shirts. Mike isn't a career-minded person, and is leaving San Francisco because he has run out of money and heard that rent is cheap in Portland. Mike's poverty meant I'd have the last four hours of the journey to myself.

I took an instant dislike to Mike, that had nothing to do with Kimberly, who I hadn't even met at that time. My instant loathing of Mike grew like mould on the rancid smelling burger he was eating when he slumped into an empty seat next to me at the Transbay Terminal bus station. He wasn't paying much attention to his food, and he was oblivious to the little weeping torrent of mustard that was oozing from between the pink meat patties. A particularly large dollop of sauce landed near enough to my foot that I had to keep reminding myself that it was there, and this pissed me off so I scowled at him, and naturally he smiled back. I probably didn't deserve that kind of treatment.

There was still a pretty long wait before our bus boarded. I'd learned to my cost in a Chicago bus depot filled with single mothers and home-bound ex-felons, that observing the official schedules was a mistake. Everyone has a ticket, and everyone thinks they deserve to get on. The only way to be sure is to get their first, beat the other guy to the hydraulic door.

Mike wasn't insane yet. We hadn't spoken, so at that moment he was just an annoying man with greasy American hair and a pungently nasty burger. Transbay had another more obvious crazy. Mike was the kind of person my dad would have described as being 'shot away' in a curious appropriation of slang that didn't suit him, but was totally in character. A guy in dreadlocks and a dirty brown shirt was spooking the waiting travellers by muttering and smelling. I didn't have a convenient phrase to contain his psychosis, he was just scary.

If you'd been looking down into the main waiting room, you'd have seen its occupants performing a slow orbital dance as we eagerly avoided contact with the filthy madman. On most scales objects act in roughly the same way: if you bunch them together and then fire a rogue particle at them, they explode apart and scatter. This is true if you are looking at Boron atoms, or scared travellers hoping that they don't catch the eye of the angry looking bum stalking their waiting room.

Every so often he'd bowl himself at a few more of us, sending some flying off to the toilets, and a few others off to linger by the burly blue-shirted ticket man at the Greyhound kiosk. Naturally, this being the pioneering west, there were a few who refused to give quarter. A veteran wearing his gold-stitched navy baseball cap sat resolutely on his canvas backpack; not exactly glowering, but certainly broadcasting to the room that he had decided to stand his ground. All enemies are alike to those who have seen active service.

Mike turned to me and said, "He's crazy you know. It's sad that he's out. Probably get arrested soon." I nodded along as this was the first time Mike had spoken, and I wasn't to know that it heralded an almost endless flood of conversation that would last across State lines and midnight queues for bacon and swiss sandwiches at a cafe in the middle of nowhere run by the bus driver's younger and fatter sister. We both looked over to where the guy was systematically jabbing the coin return button of the sturdy yellow and blue payphones. So far no change had come out, and this was when he started banging at the blue dot-matrix screens with the square end of the reciever. I looked around to spy on the room's reaction, and like me, I guess they were all a bit more tense now that the nervous quick movements had coalesced into some proper violence and rage. Through the swing doors at the far end of the room I noticed the kiosk clerk looking on and frowning. He picked up a walkie-talkie, its little curled leash straining up from the desk as he pulled it to his mouth.

2004-01-16T15:27:00.000+01:00

reasonable people

warp have made their back catalogue available for download at Bleep

2004-01-12T01:08:00.000+01:00

Watching Texas Teenage Virgins tonight, I was struck by two grotesque absurdities. Firstly the sheer shitty hubris of thinking that if an omnipotent God did exist, he would spend your wedding night with his legions of cherubim and seraphim cheering you on as you finally got round to sticking your cock in your new wife.

Then, even more infuriating, is the fact that a vital duty of care is being neglected in order to give the impression that a new moral order has been established, with the dusty bowl of texas as the Garden of Eden. While educators and religious figures congratulate themselves on the sale of cheap non-precious metal pledge-rings, the children of Lubbock Texas get each other pregnant, infect each other with STDs and fuck each other up the arse, safe in the knowledge that anything is better than putting the penile key in the vaginal door to hell.

2004-01-08T22:35:00.000+01:00

Hear ye, hear ye

Today's episode of the Simpsons, on BBC2 was incredibly moving. Yes, it was, so stop sniggering at the back.

(For those unfortunate enough to be reading this somewhen other than 'today', it was the episode concerning the death of Maude Flanders, and Ned's crisis of faith.)

2004-01-08T12:33:00.000+01:00

NUMBER FIVE - MARY J. BLIGE 'REAL LOVE'

standing alone on pentonville road, waiting for a bus, late night. there are some weirdos round king's cross you know. it wasn't raining at the time but when i picture it now, it is. sunshine in my earphones, a blazing round red sun in the night sky /// waiting for the 277 on that avenue that runs through victoria park. down to mile end. on to the 25, into the city. this time it really was raining, bucketing down. packed damp buses, steam rising off people. nowhere near summer in the bronx. /// i was listening to lots of songs on both these occasions but somehow it feels like i was listening to 'real love' the whole time. crystal clear pianos ringing in my ears - something childlike about the enthusiasm but ineffably cool - stately - at the same time - rich and satisfying and light and ethereal all at the same time. just thinking about it makes me happy

2004-01-07T19:53:00.000+01:00

ruralna gorila

this is my favourite end-of-year list so far - that's what 2003 sounded like you know!

2004-01-07T16:08:00.000+01:00

stand back - death approaching

on the tube at the moment there's an advert for the new tabloid-sized version of The Times, the tagline is 'it's not big but it is clever.' but then underneath the logo, there's another little line, that says 'born to commute.' er what? 'born to commute.' can you imagine. you see what they're doing: the 'born to xxx' formulation is a popular one, it turns up all over the place. let's think. 'born to do it.' 'born to run.' 'born to win.' 'born to lose.' 'born to die.' 'born to be wild.' each one of those is an effective little motivating motto, they're so peppy (yes! i am born to win!), except the negative ones, and they're just little jokes subverting the peppiness of the concept of being born to do anything. but 'born to commute.' are they insane? who wants to identify with that? i guess they mean that it, the paper, the small version, is born to commute, it's so small you can open it on the tube without losing your balance. but it suggests something competely different - that it's us who are born to commute. damn right. it's actually quite a beautiful phrase, i think it's quite poetic in the way it describes the lifestyle of its target audience. maybe it's because of the competely inappropriate use of the up-and-at-'em 'born to...' with the 100% mundane word 'commute,' which can only suggest weariness, routine, resignation, defeat. millions of people sitting in trains, buses, tubes, cars, every morning, thinking, what am i doing, how did i get here, when did i choose this, wait, wait, not yet, it's all going too fast, whatever happened to..., help me, i'm so, so tired. born to commute. born to commute. born to commute.