Blah blah blah
Do you ever think that if you concentrated on one thing you could be a super-ace-bastard at it? I'm thinking so. I guess I spread myself too thinly. It's as if I have no time to do anything, or to do everything I want to. Everybody else appear to be doing fuck all and doing it in acres of time. They love it, the bastards.

Or I could just use my time more productively. This internet thing is a fucking menace. I can just spend hours surfing with no discernible end product. Killing time. Time is precious. Gah gah goo goo. Right now I am conducting a Sunset Strippers versus Cabin Crew (yes, the songs that sample Waiting for a Star to Fall by Boy Meets Girl off Three Men and a Baby) video battle royale. I'm inexpicably addicted to comparing the two, not to mention the songs. Yes, its sad to report that I have these sad temporary obsessions that waft through my life like an insane hurricane. And, you're thinking, yucky commercial cheesy house - how could you? Ye upholder of the divine indie ways. Hey. It happens to the best and worst of us. I could on the other hand finish reading The Man with the Golden Arm. Redraft my book. Do some study. Clean up my room. Write some much needed questions. Prepare for battle. Repair my bed.

Nope.

I'll just lie on my bed.

Like a complete twat.  ¶ 7:23 PM

  Films I Bought on DVD Ages Ago But Have Only Just Deigned to Watch

2. Les Quartre Cents Coups

Simplicity. I touched upon it earlier. Didn't I? This is New Wave Ground Zone. A Truffaut joint. Coming of age, rites of passage dramas have come from this to House Arrest which I was watching today. House Arrest is a silly childish confection which can be construed as a Hollywood hymn to the sanctity of marriage (lock your parents up - mind you, parents that love you with all their misguided hearts - and after long enough time spent with each other all those humiliations and petty cruelties you visited upon each other in the name of yourself will be forgiven), The 400 Blows, on the other hand, is about life.

Antoine Doinel's parents would hate him if they thought he actually existed as a meaningful human being. As it is, he's more like a pet. His stepdad is a bit of a buffoon; his mum is a harlot tied down to earth by a crappy family. So Antoine wanders the Parisian urban jungle; goes to the cinema, takes a few fairground rides, etc etc. In the classroom he shares in the general boisterous nature of teenage boys, but is singled out on account of bad timing more than anything else. His teacher hates him so has him marked out as a troublemaker and whatever Antoine does fulfills the prophecy.

It's not that Antoine is a tearaway or a veritable Nelson Muntz with antisocial designs on humanity. It's just that he does stupid things and gets caught, again and again. You'll know the feeling of bad luck that can dog you no matter what you do. So, after pilfering a typewriter, he ends up a juvenile delinquent running to a sea he has never seen. Splashing about it as the camera catches him in freeze frame, hopeful of a life in which he will find his freedom to roam and do as he wishes beyond the selfish, low horizons set by his adult peers.

Of course, it's autobiographical. He loves the cinema just as Truffaut does. You can see it will provide some kind of guiding light in his future. Even when he pays homage to Balzac and portions some of his heart out to the great coffee addict by writing an essay about his grandfather's death he is accused of plagiarism. Nothing is good enough when you are a naughty naughty boy. Some people are not meant for the formal strictures of the classroom. Only certain environments allow certain talents to bloom. Leaud as the kid does heartbreakingly earnest acting. He is no winsome moppet, and when he ends up crying in the dark of a police van, you feel for him, you really do.

None of the power is diminished, not even after almost fifty years. It feels fresh. It feels true. Truffaut could not have made anything else for his first feature. But back to the simplicity. You'll love it for that alone.

(And by the way he only gets three blows. I think the other 397 ended up on the cutting room floor.)

(Yes, I know this is sort of catch up on French New Wave, but I do have so many of them lying around unwatched.)  ¶ 7:25 PM

  A Meal to Remember ... For All Time

Sometimes eating KFC feels like you are committing a petty moral crime. No, in fact it always does. Especially when I'm belching the seemingly sulfurous and entirely synthetic chemicals that are invoked by the grotesque mash-up of chicken meat, gravy, coleslaw, chips and honey BBQ sauce resting in my gut for hours afterward. Looking around the London Victoria train station food court, you can see that everyone is simultaneously munching down trash and apologising to their future selves (and bodies). That is apart from the sad-eyed smack addict in the Burberry jacket, who just wants 20p, and is on a ten-minute circuit, examining each table's recently deserted detritus. Then again, maybe this hungry mass doesn't give a fuck. Or they have gone to Garfunkels or Cafe Rouge and prefer warm, indoor lighting. Or are just plain stooopid.

Last Thursday evening, I was surveying those passing through this mecca of food convenience, as I always do, when I saw him. Or is that Him? Yes, it had to be...

Jimmy Page

THAT'S JIMMY PAGE.

Yes, the guitarist from Page and Plant and some minor folk combo called Led Zeppelin. Not Jimmy Hill, not Jimmy Webb or the Whirlwind White or the owner of the Sun-Wa takeaway. It was Jimmy Page.

The same thing happens when you catch sight of a beautiful girl or a celebrity, only in the latter case you are even more likely to walk up to them and make a fool of yourself by shrieking the words "Are you..." like a blithering, star-fucked idiot. You keep on glancing across. You examine in ultra-fine detail. You analyse everything about them: face, clothes, dining choice. But I knew it was him. It was certainly not Mickey Dolenz. The master of riffs was wearing all black: scarf, full length coat, shoes, and wielding a space-age contoured suitcase. His hair was clipped neat for the Noughties; the respectable do for the reformed party animal. It was long enough and, perhaps, dyed jet black, but far shorter than even when the bouncing pubic locks he sported when he and Robert got Unplugged by MTV around 1995. And the eyes were as close together as I have seen in reality and my most wondrous dreams. I surmised that he was probably about to get the Gatwick Express.

And I was excited too. He's a different kind of celebrity. He's not the kind you expect to see on the streets of London, unlike any old classical actor (Simon Callow bumbling along a street by Leicester Square) or TV presenter fondling grapefruits in Safeway (Graham Norton) or soap star (Sanjay from Eastenders ambling down Shaftesbury Avenue). You get so "meh" about them. They're just so common. This sighting was special, because as an exalted rock star, you know he is supposed to be secreted in dark recording studios or laid up in a palatial mansion in Hertfordshire ready to shoot pheasant or take a cocaine delivery.

I was intrigued by his reaction to the court soundtrack. Jimmy was fidgetting rhythmically to The Doors' Light My Fire playing on the surrounding TV screens. He sure liked that. He ignored the adverts that asked if you knew some fucked-up drug addict and needed a narcotic-free rehab program to help retract them from their addled misery. Jimmy might have been smiling inside at the very mention of it. He didn't seem to think much of The Coral's Pass It On, and he left during the Crash Test Dummies' Mmm Mmm Mmm. His heart, I suppose, remains with the rock classics.

So you want to ask me (of course, you do, this silliness must continue), what did he eat? How did he eat? He was rocking forward all the time, slouched back, alone and facing away from the gangway, and past the balcony, viewing the diners on the opposite half of the place. The food was a three-piece meal with coleslaw and barbecue beans, carried to his table in a plastic bag rather than a tray. Jimmy opened wide, all the time. He wolfed it down like a clumsy carnivore. It was as if he was aiming to miss the chicken hunk and happened to catch part of it in his ominous lower jaw by accident. This was a consumption style borne of years on the road, eating with his mitts and snatching assorted fast filth from thousands of buffet tables around the globe. He sure got greased up. He was caveman-esque. Perhaps, I could also detect the evidence of some minor nerve damage or a mild stroke, in his constant, but, almost imperceptible, trembling. Who knows. My mind fantasised loud, smelly bullshit about the legacy of a life lived in the hard rock lifestyle.

Of course, I didn't say anything. I WAS thinking about obtaining an autograph. But that would have ruined the moment. If I had a cameraphone, well ... you know. Nobody else said anything. KFC demands all of your attention. And, I guess, this aged rawk god's visage is far beyond the sleb-spotting abilities of the food court hoi polloi.

When he jettisoned the remains of his ravaged meal in a bin, he kept on turning back and around, almost twisting in confusion, as if expecting some Led Zep fan was about to jump out of the chavvy crowds to pay him liege. It must happen all the time. But I just watched. I could do nothing else. I think he noticed. I mean, you would too; especially if millions of people have stared at you for the past thirty five or more years. So long Jimmy. I recognised you. This fellow KFC addict salutes your culinary choice. It was nice watching ya.

(Then again, you might say, maybe it wasn't. Maybe. But, if it wasn't, it was the sort of cosmic fantasy that feeds my very being. It makes me smile, gives me an instant grin. Okay. Silliness is over. Happy Easter. Remember Jesus died for you, but got resurrected anyway, because he was such a super-chap)  ¶ 7:49 PM

  WHAT A BLOODY DISGRACE...

they need shooting! Thinking that I might like to purchase a single day ticket for this year's Reading Festival, I thought, yeah, it will be a reasonable price £50 perhaps. But wait a minute - £60. £60!!!! That's in the fuck you money zone. That's how much it cost to go to the whole thing eight years ago. Fucking scumbag Mean Fiddler shit-fucks. THAT IS NOT WELL WEAPON. And far from totally Mexico.

(Look I had to work in some Barley-isms before his lexical inflections disappear into the ether of past fashion)  ¶ 3:01 PM

  Gigs

Yeah, before my brutal extraction I saw a couple of bands this week. First, Rilo Kiley. The Guardian sent Caroline Sullivan along to watch. Being of a female gender, I don't think she quite understands the powerful redhead appeal of Jenny Lewis, which is why she only gave it two stars, as opposed to giving it three on account of possessing a penis. However, I can understand why.

The UK doesn't really produce bands like Rilo Kiley. When the young 'uns in this fair country of ours form a band they do it in the fashion of any number of leather-jacketed Strokes clones or because they think Britpop is still alive and kicking the shit, instead of rotting in its grave while it is being consumed with all the fetid maggots that it deserves.

RK are too conservative for this seething mass of dumb Anglo-juvenilia. They are not the stuff of which teenage kicks are made, because you just know they were brought up in a pop culture detached from the fashions of the day, where the Doobie Brothers still rule the radio with an iron fist. Rilo Kiley are more a quietly subversive pleasant drive back from Taco Bell, as opposed to a fighting fit in a Shoreditch smack den.

But first: barnet alert. They have side partings. Side partings, at least the kind that are anathema to our youth, or have been since the days of New Wave. They could run for Congress on hair as short and neat as that. That's the first sign of difference. Then you realise they play indie pop rock with a few swear words slipped in and female-inclined "I hate you I love you" attitude. This music could never be nurtured in a British lab. As a result, they play to a small congregation in this country that realises, maybe life isn't thunder and lightning all the time, more a nice sunny day with a few dark clouds gathering on the horizon. An older congregation, perhaps. Because RK play predictable music with all the guitar breaks in the right places. The sort of stuff that Word magazine (for they sponsored the show) that goes apeshit for, merely because it saunters along, gets a bit loud, is a bit catchy; all in all pretty easy to take. Come to think of it, we have no pop rock in this country, nothing like Beachwood Sparks or The Wondermints, in spite of the PR behind Grand Drive. And I admit it. I like this stuff. Perhaps because I am taking on the mantle of an American indie conservative.

No one, however, would give a shit if they were fronted by a bloke. Jenny Lewis is the be-all and end-all of this band. Without her, this band of greasy no-marks would be dodging beer bottles in an LA bar. My companion for the evening reckoned he would prefer not to partake in carnal relations with the 28-year-old chanteuse because all she would do is look up at the ceiling, thus playing on his (numerous?) sexual inadequacies. Well, let's be honest, if I had at least a hundred lust-filled blokes (aided by her white doily and white tights ensemble) staring at me with their tongues pointed straight at my bosom, I would launch my eyes skyward as well.

The fatal mistake that Rilo Kiley make is that they - excuse this vile but somehow appropriate expression - blow their load by playing their two best crowdpleasers (or is that mepleasers?) Portions for Foxes and Love and War (11/11/46) third and fifth. The rest is weighed with drudgery, despite all the crowd's enthusiasm, which mainly emanated from one screeching Yankee visitor, whose cries of ecstacy, or perhaps, madness, needed a firing squard to cure them. It was likable, but ultimately slightly disappointing. The compensation was sharing in the Lewis stare-a-thon. She sure looked purdy underneath that spotlight. (The support was Marc Carroll - miserable Irish acoustic shit)

People are, of course, much more impressed with the Arcade Fire. It's all about joy in departing this mortal coil, innit? The kneejerk reaction is to blow them off, oh they're the end of year poll conquerors, oh, it can't be that good, let's still buy British! even if loads of moping Americans deem them to be the greatest thing since the last bunch of miserable slagheaps came sloping across the Atlantic. The parallel, as I see it, is The Shins. Not because they play the same sort of music, but because they rode the top of the US poll pile in the same way the year before and it was new year before Chutes Too Narrow was released in this country. I saw them last year, and it was all - hmmm, nice, thanks, I'll see you in Garden State. Next band, please.

Yet seeing Arcade Fire segue from Neighborhood 3 (Power Out) into Rebellion (Lies), I swore, just for a few moments, that this was the best new band I had seen since, well, Mogwai (sorry to keep dragging them in, but you must understand my frame of reference is becoming more miniature as the years pass). This was even after I thought the Power Out was played too low-key and twinkly for my own tastes.

Win Butler dominates the stage. The guy is big. He could impersonate an obelisk. In fact, from my vantage point I swear you could mistake him for Richard "Jaws" Kiel. He shudders and shakes so well, and even though his speaking voice exits his non-metallic mouth like Otis Lee Crenshaw, when he sings that weird, desperate wispy way, you get hypnotised.

The band were good, very good too. Spesh-ly Regine and her pretty red ribboned pigtails. They switched instruments - which were many ranging from accordion to cello to that small blowy thing with the keyboard and a soldier's drum - as easily as Dutch Total footballers used to swap positions (Rinus Michels was a genius, I salute you, who are in football heaven, possibly negotiating a peak at Garrincha's wah-wah in the Heavn XI showers - hey, it's getting late and I was drugged quite badly yesterday). They even have that mournful Godspeed You Black Emperor! string sound just right. Maybe, it's something they do best in Canada. The bitter cold, you see, it does something to you. Or it could be a sense of loss (relatives, freedom, the right to buy MakeTradeFair coffee beans in Montreal) which manifests itself in the sound coming from a cello. If you were looking for outlandish music comparisons, you could detect hints of Celtic music and Graceland in there, beyond the same-old guitar stylings. I knew this might happen (that huge, wailing wave of beautiful sound sounds good enough on the album), and it did come to fruition, even if I thought it was going to be lame. If you are looking for more fatuous comparisons, I was reminded of one of those New Orleans funeral marching bands. The processions where big-topped mommas lose their reason as they go to send off their dead (oh come on, ain't you see Live and Let Die?).

Neither were they afraid of dancing. A band that moves, sometimes wildy, sometimes gracefully, even when they were covered in godawful, venue-induced sweat, in that manner can only be fuelled by a deep, dark passion. And there was the percussion, not since Slipknot have I seen a band that relies so heavily on it. Arcade Fire do it best of all. They actually made me want to whack things. In time, that is. And not just the people who kept on trying to head to the front through the human walls that flowed solid from the stage. Sure, you could see the simplicity of their building the rhythm, building the sound technique, and then, suddenly, whoosh; the downhill, helter, skelter downhill ski-style release. But you still wanted to fidget in time, no matter how fast they went.

There was a buzz about the ULU. It felt electric. And you can always measure the buzz of a band by the guestlist. I saw none other than Jarvis Cocker and Brett Anderson, maybe looking for their own inspiration from a chamber orchestra who found themselves stuck in a indie rock land and tried to play their way out of there. I'm sure other ghosts of the indie past were here to feast on the future, but I was never that good at recognising them. Even when they were talking to my face. I just wished that Brett WOULD SHUT THE FUCK UP during the quiet bits. They deserved the thickest silence even when they were just murmurring incoherently. Had you taken your ears off the music, and you would have been certain to have missed something transcendent.

It just makes me think Arcade Fire could be one of those bands I can never tire of seeing (see also 'Gwai and Super Furries). It was that fucking brilliant. You should feel the force of the elegy too. Thus endeth the lesson.

Another monthly feature designed to breath life into this half-arsed blog.

Films I bought on DVD ages ago but have only just deigned to watch

#1 Weekend

Jean-Luc Godard. He should be my hero. Well, he would be if I wanted to make films rather than be entertained by them. I've seen Pierrot Le Fou (Top 30 films of all time), Breathless (fine, great etc) and Le Mepris (gimme a break with the whore parallels, please) among his 60s oeuvre. But it has only taken until this year for me to buy and own this particular Nouvelle Vague classic since the first time, almost nine years ago, that I first spied a highly complimentary review in the much-missed Neon magazine (did you know Heat magazine took that movie magazine's space in the Emap building? Like taking out all the bone marrow goodness and stuffing it with farmyard slurry). I was afraid, like all those other foreign films (see also Amarcord, La Strada, My Life as a Dog, Day for Night, The 400 Blows) I missed after my teenage rampage through world cinemal, that is was going to be some farcical chain of up-its-own arse scenes designed to piss off the viewer.

My fears were misplaced. It is a classic. But at the end, I got the feeling that Godard's coruscating, blistering, etc assault on capitalist values, ergo the extension of captialist values: fascism, flopped badly, even if its last ten minutes came nowhere near capsizing the rest of the genius-crewed ship. It should have ended the moment that the first victim was cannibalized in the terrorist forest hideaway. It had a wonderful matter-of-factness. Instead it just petered out with absurd machine gun fights and sylvanian-set wankery. I guess ideas don't have to have a resolution; they are in play for all time. It did, however, make me wonder if Jean-Luc, the contrary old bastard, would still glamourise jeans-wearing terrorists, especially if they were sporting keffiyehs and screaming jihad. Reminded again of the sledgehammer political subtext that practically spits on your shoes in this movie, I guess he would.

Right, gripe out of the way. Weekend basically tells the tale of an odious bourgeios couple making their way to the wife's father deathbed to obtain all of a rather large will. That is the entire plot,and what happens on the way it is what the film is all about, of course. Godard set out to make a road movie, without for large portions of the film, his anti-heroes driving in their car. They crash. They try to hitchhike. They meet people. They fight people. They kill people. Nobody is nice to each other, and every so often they happen across a car crash (France has apparently become a nation of auto-maniacs at class loggerheards with disregard for all motor-travelling life), whose victims they don't give a crap about. Humanity, it appears, is the first casualty of bourgeious values.

Even when the wife is raped by a passer-by, her husband, who is more concerned with getting transportation, doesn't give a shit. He just sits there and listens to the screaming and animal grunting litany. You see he's bourgeois, which in Godard's books makes him tantamount to a baby-bayoneting necrophiliac pillar of human excrement. On the human front, his wife deserves the filth she has married. She's a slutty uber-bitch from hell. You know this because when her car crashes and kills many people she screams: "Oh my God! My Hermes bag!" Suffice to say, the effect is hilarious. Funny too, when she asks a man for a lift only for him to ask her whether the Egyptians or the Israelis started the Six Day war. Being a racist, colonialist cow, (in Godard's eyes) she says the Egyptians. The driver replies "pathetic ignoramus" and promptly drives off. Hurrah for that supporter of the Palestinian cause!

This couple then scale hitherto untouched heights of utter nastiness when they stab to death their co-inheritor, who admittedly, is fat and annoying and looks like a blimp. This scene is about as far from subtlety as the Moon is from where I'm sitting. Blood gushes and spews over a newly skinned rabbit, as they say "I love you" to each other. The camera focuses on the icky leporine eye. Feel like puking yet?

Godard uses flare-gun filmmaking. I guess he gets bored very easily. This is basically one use-only stuff: the 360 degree tracking shot, his weirdest jump cuts yet, the immolation of a well-intentioned girl because she is just an imaginary character and this is a "rotten" film, and telepathic political polemic mind-reading(on naturally, the Algerian war and the Congo). And it ends with terrorists eating people because, "the horror of the bourgeosie (look, it's just one of those words I cannot spell, like diarrheao; fucking vowel jumble) can only be overcome by more horror". Thankfully, this doctrine has not been followed through in real life, otherwise longpig would have become a staple food group in most developed parts of the world.

But yikes, there is an actual pig killing in there. Yuk. First the sledgehammer swoop to the forehead, then the knife digging into the neck. The blood is so black it must be real. I felt queasy and I have seen two pigs being killed in reality, albeit with a machete. What a fucking disgrace, those of you more animal rights adoring people might say. It makes you think, however, that at least Godard means it. Maybe. Compared to the caribou choppy choppy time at the climax of Apocalypse Now, this sudden slaughter feels nastier and a thousands more times distressing.

I liked the political statements - yes "Christianity is a refusal of self knowledge, bitch!" - because current political cinema is sometimes too sophisticated and preachy for its own good. It's all too aenimic, too fashionable. There is a coherent political view here that is conveyed by megaphone, and what's more it's fun.

I urge you to watch Weekend. Watch it, because none of your friends will have and you just have to tell them about a certain mad as a bag of ferrets French film that likes fucking about with the medium and likes barking Marxist philisophy in your face while decrying the crumbling moral body of the Western world. The problem is that modern film has evolved a grammar that is staid and all too audience pleasing. Sometimes, we need de-education. Sometimes we need to grubby our hands in the basic nutrients of cinema and get in touch with our Iron Age-equivalent cinemagoer. Old films have ways of surprising precisely because the common garden viewer has left it so far behind. Still, I preferred Pierrot Le Fou. That's the one for Godard virgins. The sun, you see, it's always the sun, spraying its rays on a diamond sea. That and Anna Karina stabbing someone in the head with scissors. Lovely, so very lovely.  ¶ 10:39 PM

  Ouch
That really hurt. I have just had a wisdom tooth out. Sedation is recommended for those who would like to get dead drunk and get their teeth smashed in in a really civilised way. Otherwise, it is not recommended. (Thank God my dad stopped me from going to Tesco straight afterwards. I was certainly not in a sentient state and would have made a hilarious falling-themed scene).  ¶ 7:38 PM

  Notions II: The Boringness returns

So where was I? Oh yeah. Just watched UC. Some of the questions: stupidly hard. If you know what I mean. I like the team or programme (who knows? it all reeks of corruption) selection policy of having one cute female member, normally sitting on the second to the left, who says absolutely fuck-all, but you know, looks like someone you wish you met at university and was good enough to get on the UC team.

So let me just say: I'M FUCKING FREEZING. The boiler has gone to heater heaven, and now I wait for our useless, no-good landlord to come and fix it.

Hmmm, I've forgotten myself.


And The Great Escape stuff is fascinating. Believe me. Looky here. Go on. Did you know that the bit where Gordon Jackson inadvertently says: 'Thank you" to a Gestapo officer, actually happened in real life? YOU DIDN'T? Bloody hell. Actually in real life he was French. And he certainly didn't look like that guy from The Professionals.

THE NEW MONTHLY FEATURE

I am becoming obsessed with books. Film and music are fine and dandy, but books are like Napoleon brandy. To Dr. Johnson. Because I like stealing things from authors (doncha know my writing is littered with stuff Ive filched from some top-ho writer motherfuckers), I have decided to admit that Nick Hornby's columns for The Believer and his subsequent book The Polysyllabic Spree are just what I need to pep up this arid desert of dried-out ideas and recklessly loose inspiration. So I nicked the bastard's column format, in which he logs books bought and books read and talks about how generally useless he is at reading and how great, vibrant, wondrous and boring the world of books is. But cos I can't do columns split down the page, I have to do it vertical like.

Here it is, for the last month:

Promises Made
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky - Patrick Hamilton
Summerland - Malcolm Knox
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City - Nick Flynn
Good Times Bad Times - Harold Evans
A Confederate General from Big Sur - Richard Brautigan
The Story of the World Cup - Brian Glanville
The Polysyllabic Spree - Nick Hornby
Brokeback Mountain - Annie Proulx

Promises Kept
Don Quixote - Cervantes
Brokeback Mountain - Annie Proulx
The Cryptographer - Tobias Hill
Heartburn - Nora Ephron
The Polysyllabic Spree - Nick Hornby

The Unfinished Pile In My Room Reminding Me Of Failure (never to be mentioned again): Midnight's Children, Underworld, Gravity's Rainbow, Who Sleeps With Katz?, Invitation to a Beheading, Let It Come Down, Rabbit omnibus, Already Dead, The French Lieutenant's Woman, In a Free State, Points of Departure.

I have to say, I've been quite sensible with the book-buying this month. Well at least, since I went doolally at the office book sale; where you will buy complete shite just because it is one pound ("Yes, I will buy Andrew Collins's latest diary regurgitation nostalgia twattiness! Gimme that Chomsky I will never read unless I have stabbed my eyes out with sharpened paper clips! I will buy the Helen Oyeyemi hardback so I can chuckle at her jejune fuckedness!"). The books bought, how can I explain them? I read Gay Cowboys by Annie Proulx, oh that's Brokeback Mountain for the book group, and thought it spare, beautiful and ever-so slightly moving. Well worth, half an hour of your time. Or an hour, if you are being distracted by ER (hey, did you know Linda Cardellini the nurse, was in Boy Meets World, looking very young and unexploded). The Cryptographer by HIll, I was actually warned off, but it was just fine. It was set in 2021, but took the fortuitous route of having no Bladerunner futurism. The only real difference was the use of Soft Gold (some electronic shit) instead of money. It was in the end an unconsummated love story betwen a computer programmer and a tax inspector. Man, you're thinking, that's some rivetting shit innit? But it was just fine. I just can't feel my emotions rising to the occasion to suggest any passion-related adjectives. It was just so detached. And fine. Some brilliant lines so: alcohol singing in the blood etc etc.

Heartburn was purely curiosity value. I had heard of the film and seen Meryl Streep with her frightful dye job and read how the author Ephron wrote the book after her pussyhound husband Bob "Watergate" Woodward had fucked around while she was pregnant. And if you like a scorned Jewish woman screaming at you for a couple of hours, while she hands you exact recipes for key lime pie and mashed potato. then you will just lap it up. In a little less than a couple of hours.

Then I read The Polysyllabic Spree. Which planted a plagiaristic seed in me which has manifested itself in these semi-literate ramblings. Anyway, you should buy a copy, because not only is it for charity, but also because you may have convinced yourself that Nick Hornby is a dick of a writer, when in reality, he writes just what you like to read. Maybe because he's a dick and you're a dick, and we live in an unpleasant world full of phalluses, and dicks big and small. Okay I'll let that one go. Or those ones. Which is it? Who knows. Sorry about this. When your extremities are turning deathly blue, you have to type ANYTHING just to keep warm.

And then there's Don Quixote. I read it because Wan and Bloom read it (you see how word of mouth works). Oh, Don Quixote. On whom I wasted a full three-and-a-half weeks following his whimsy and insanity around god knows where in Spain. Did I think it a bonafidey classic? Of course. Did I enjoy it? Yes. Is it the greatest novel of all time? No. Don't get me wrong, this must have been like the Manhattan Project of literature. But age and length do not transcendence make. Granted, it has humanity rivetted in its bones and has much wisdom, but perhaps the translation (from a US penguin edition), with Sancho's use of the word 'blokes' irked me a slight bit. In the end I think I read it so I can say "I read motherfuckng Don Quixote. All 982 pages of it. Have you motherfuckers read it?" and someone will reply "Have you read any motherfucking Dickens or Austen, you motherfucker?" and I will say "Nope...motherfucker" and try to outrun my humiliation. Shouting GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKERS as I go.

But what of the other books I have bought? The Evans book is self-explanatory, if you know what I do do. Flynn is self-explanatory if you know, er, stuff. Summerland cos I thought Adult Book swelled rather nicely towards the end. And I'm reading Confederate General... right now. It's very good. Very funny. For instance, the invitation proffered by one young drunk loser to another, saying he should come so they can "piss off a cliff". Having read that sentence again, I should emphasise that it is about an actual geographical landmark and the act of urination. Surprising when I read that Brautigan blew his brains out with a .44 revolver aged 49. What is it with certain male authors and self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head? Can't they just control themselves?

I bought the Hamilton because of the NFT season and Hornby panting over him like a dog and Glanville's history because I often find myself in Waterstones during certain times of the year reading the entire entry on the 1958 World Cup. I thought it was time to take it home.

I bet I will read none of them. In full, that is. Because I'm a dick. And also because I crave novelty in novels. Novelty, as in I've just bought them and the urgency to read them is there and stirring me. Once this has passed (give it two months) that book may never be read.

Or perhaps I'm just an idiot.  ¶ 9:00 PM

  Notions

Monday is such a 'tomorrow' day. I phone this person tomorrow; I'll write it up tomorrow; I'll email that person tomorrow; goes the melodious loop inside my head. Because there are no pressing concerns, I just seem to sit at work and surf aimlessly all day. Having exhausted the list of websites I always visit (everything from James Wolcott to Bookslut), I then go on these fact jaunts that go in chains, for ever. So having seen the last half hour of The Great Escape (which shows up as not so 'great' but perhaps 'futile', considering the Gestapo uses most of the would-be Houdinis for heavy machine gun target practice) and the new Revenge of the Sith trailer, I get obsessed about these respective subjects for hours at a time. And where does it get me? The place of guilt. that's where. I would write more, but I said I would write against the clock and University Challenge is on. Must watch.

Things will get better. I promise.

"YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE!"  ¶ 8:19 PM

  Please forgive me oh indie gods...

I remember one shameful episode on Sunday night (or Monday 3am in the Queen Victoria). I saw one guy with a raggedy old Codeine t-shirt ("Do you like the band or the drug?! "Both") and asked him in one of those prissy, indie-wanker ways: "What do you prefer The Birch Tree or Frigid Stars?". After repeating it three times, he said the latter, but really, me the complete twat, IT'S CALLED THE WHITE BIRCH. I tossed and turned in bed (like a certain member of our party who was found wanking like an oiled piston engine over Maxim's Little Black Book without the turning part)over this grievous error.

So remember after about eight pints, your flimsy hold of indie knowledge will surely disintegrate and embarrass you. Someone is laughing at it right now. Of course, he's probably not. I'm just being a total idiot.  ¶ 4:14 PM

  My descent into incoherency continues...

“Look at all these PIGs”.
“What. They? Huh?”
“You know … Pretty Indie Girls.”
“I just want one of them to suck my knob”

Such was the level of conversation at the first ATP of the year. Hmmm, confusing. Anyways, ‘allo you beautiful shits. I’m as one Plan B boarder said “fucking fucked”. Slint were ace. (“I MISS YOU! … I MISS YOU! – ten seconds of pain that I’ve been waiting to hear for six years) As expected, Mogwai did their weird set. Because when a band such as they play bottom of the bill on Saturday, you just know they will put away the normal fireworks and do stuff like Helicon 2 and get Aidan Moffatt to sing R U Still Into It (he actually sang it as opposed to speak, or perhaps, slur it). Spoon were fine, Sons and Daughters were okay, but no decent replacement for Mark Kozelek, who “sadly” couldn’t play. The other bands, well, I was too fucking lazy wasn’t I? I did see some but words fail me, Love as Laughter, yeah… King Kong and monkey dancing, Red Nails Pavement fucking Electralane. Gently. Bad Wizard, bad head trip. Gah gah gah. Mum bleepy.

I also watched the Untitled Star Wars Mockumentary and had interesting arguments about burning Bloc Party CDs. We were very tired and emotional.

My other memories mainly consist of “It’s well cold” and jumping in the direction of the window whenever someone shouted: “Snow!” And chilli con carne ready meals from Londis. It was also the first time I ever brought a suitcase to a music festival. How the ages have withered that camper spirit.

God, you’re thinking: talk about disjointed. But that’s me at the moment – fragmented. Me vision is blurring, like the ever shifting notions of modern morality.

One more thing: I puked all Friday night into the tin dustbin. You know how after the drink and food has been expelled, then you get the gut bubbles and finally the luminous bile. That was me. I thought I vomited up blood, but turns out it was J, who had collapsed in the bathroom in an impersonation of a fountain of stomach lining and red vino. Hurrah for staying young and stupid! Hurrah for talking about vomit! At my age! Atmyageatmyageatmyage…

Scorsese man, I feel your pain. Yes, I even liked Kundun.  ¶ 4:11 PM