Excuse Me For Laughing

2006-02-22T11:26:00.000Z

Goodbye to All This

It was here.

2006-02-09T18:04:00.000Z

A New Life

I have started a new blog! It gets updated everyday with hundreds of words! Words I have not nicked from elsewhere. Words that have swirled around my brain and found their way onto the monitor screen via the medium of my fingers. Hear me laugh, like a nutty professor.

Of course, it's about something: trivia, quiz-heads etc, the British scene, compadres and rivals, blah and more blah.

This blog is going into hibernation apart from the odd tagging and top twenty-five. Maybe I should call it hyper-hibernation, since it was pretty quiet around here to start with.

I'll think about posting a link to it here. Hmmm...

2006-02-05T18:25:00.000Z

Blogger tells me
This is a blog of note is it? You call that proper writing? Hmmm. Maybe. It is quite funny.

Weekend: flatmate had birthday party. Good for her. Good on us for celebrating the onset of mortality. Bully for us. Yah yah. Drank lots of Sol. Smoked lots of tobaccky. Is it just me or does the kind of disillusionment that grows with age act as the same kind of homunculus that tells you to go home early (because that's where everything is quiet and sane and your boredom is not quite so obvious)? Who knows. Didn't go out last night though. I have no idea why. Instead I spent it waving my fists at contestants on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. That other blog is coming you know. Once I find the time. That isn't the time, by the way, that stretches out before me like the Bonneville Salt Flats every single day. It's the action time; the time that forces accomplishment. ACTION TIME. It is sadly lacking at the moment.

At least I didn't watch the whole of National Lampoon's Secret Weapon. Or whatever it's called (he feigns factual errors...). I've seen it six times already (spread over a period of twelve years).

2006-01-31T13:58:00.000Z

What to do

I remember the days of IMND. Do you remember? Some people still talk to me about it as if it was the only blog I've ever written, while others mention that they are regular readers of these missives from my mind and that they seem to remember me writing about getting drunk quite a lot. The thing about IMND was that I posted every two days, quite simply because I had no job and was not being paid a living wage for whatever I wrote. I also hadn't written a 160,000-word book that made my witterings about The Pattern and The Parkinsons seem so utterly insignificant that the day-to-day way of writing reviews had utterly left my brain. So it was quite a good forum for my pop culture musings/posturings. But what about the new blog? I think I'll go through with it: slightly anonymously. I'm getting more paranoid with age, so any safeguards will help me gain some piece of mind. Possibly the piece of my mind that has not been invaded by the first recon parties of that thing called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Did I lose my wallet/ leave the oven and the iron on/ leave the doors unlocked? Unless I consciously remember that I did those things at the exact moment I finish them. Arson and theft are my enemies. From time to time I always look at the redundant areas of my life and wonder what to do with them. It may be a minor thing, but I looked at the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of free magazine CDs and samplers I seem to have. I never listen to them. I do not want to throw them away. So what do I do? I spend two weeks importing them on to my laptop, so I can make use of them and find out if there was anything worth listening to them. Let's just say this compilation compilers (the legendary grey man of IPC, Roy Carr for instance, who glimpsed in his offices surrounded by sckyscrapers of CDs; if he fell in any direction, he would have been buried and not a sound would have been heard, until they smelt the first rotten wafts of his decomposing corpse, etc etc) really like Bright Eyes and Robert Johnson to pick a few instant examples. I now have something in the order of 1500 compilation tracks on my computer and I'm not even finished yet. I may even come round your house and filch Uncut CDs. You may not instantly recognise me: winter and laziness has forced the hair down and slightly to the side. It is the sort of thing that can turn into a six-month obsession. Actually it is already a one-month fit of something. Of course, it will then die and I will wonder what the hell was up with me, and find a new one to eat the time and make summer and the long days come quicker.

Hmmm
I saw Eurotrip. It made me laugh at its abysmal stereotypes. Vinnie Jones played a football hooligan. Ha ha. Why are American teenagers in films so short and smartassed? It also had more penises and breasts than something with lots of genitals. That's what Sky Digital does to me. And The 40-Year-Old Virgin has so much swearing in it, I was almost shocked. I'm getting more prudish in my old age.

Just one more thing
I promise I'll have my i-Tunes top 25 up once I stop spending aimless hours on Limewire stealing from rich people like Eminem and Lil Jon. Okay???? YEAH!!!!

2006-01-25T15:01:00.000Z

Something odd has happened

I thought I was fearless but oh no.

Yep, I actually put up a new blog with an actual theme and loads of ideas to fill it, unlike this one which is like the weak vapour that a pathetic fart has just left behind. I wrote two and a half posts. I published one. The design was crisp and white and even. But then I got the fear. The fear that using my real actual bona fide name and having a blog could trigger a Telegraph fiasco and a loss of all my earnings. I couldn't use my name, the name my dad gave me like someone would hand you a dildo (and to try and explain it for the rest of my days), I thought, so I deleted the bugger. Yeah, I stored away my posts for another day but seeing my name triggered some silly but bad memories. So it had to go in the dumpster. I don't think I can get in trouble, but once you become paid for what you do and enjoying it somewhat, the attraction of doing it for free has to be so powerful that it overcomes the lack of monetary compensation; people have to listen too. I have changed. I know that the worst scenario couldn't possibly happen, and that blogging by hacks is becoming respectable, perhaps even a prerequisite, and I even made some statements like "there will be no comments about journalists or journalism or national newspapers AT ALL" but it wasn't enough. None of that was enough. And when it was done, I even felt a little relieved. Perhaps it was the thought of all that bloody blogging I had to. Look at me! What the fucking am I doing? This dialectic is going nowhere.

PS I bought FHM and NME today. Why, you ask, when it makes you so goddamn angry and tumescent with red rage! Why when one is all tits, bare skin and innuendo and the other has run a greatest ever British albums feature just so it can proclaim the Arctic Monkey's new album the 5th greatest of all time, of forever, of the centuries and all the hours that have ever been and ever will be, and amen?

Because we want to believe promises. Especially ones done in big, spunky fonts. That's why.

Your cowardly correspondent chickening out...

2006-01-18T12:37:00.000Z

Hmm

I'm completely lost for interesting words. How about vacuole? Palimpsest? Undergarments? Zeugma? Litotes? Sorry, it seems that I'm just reciting grammatical terms now. It appears that I think money grows on trees and that credit is as fecund as toilet paper, rather than as dangerous as black cancer. I spent way too much money in the States. Now I have to wear sackcloth and ashes. In my mind. Didn't get up to anything at the weekend, except work. Started smoking again. It was easy I tell you. Was accused of being a hypochondriac in an IOU. Cheeky fucker. Just because I see Boots as some sort of adult sweet shop, doesn't mean I think I have diseases entering every orifice all the time. I must get on with stuff. The kind of stuff that fulfills you. Unlike the food I am drawn towards purchasing at the moment. Living on ready meal spag bol at the moment. Alternating between supermarkets tho. I recommend M&S above all. You don't see any illegal immigrant crack addicts in there.

Fuck it. One day I will write better things. I know that makes you happy.

Over and out.

2006-01-09T11:37:00.000Z

Hi

I'm back from Washington. I haven't slept in 36 hours. I need sleep. But I feel like acclimatising in a conscious state. Wait. What the fuck does that mean?

Have had hardly any internet access, so apologies for lack of contact regarding congratulations and serious life business. I also involuntarily gave up smoking and have not filled my lungs with cancer breath for ten days. I will probably rectify this situation as soon as I decamp to a pub with friends. Funny that when I actually saw Americans smoking I thought of them as filthy fucking lepers who perhaps deserved to die on a ventilator. I felt the self-righteous cockery of being a non-smoker return again. It feels so good to condemn the smoking scum. And I spent exactly one day going to the museums and galleries. Out of ten whole holidays. Every time I walked up the National Mall, Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man blared on my mental jukebox. The Lincoln Memorial was disappointingly swathed in tarpaulin and scaffolding. Abe's head was just about visible, but made him look like a mockery. As if the marble giant was being given a bed bath by invisible marmalian forces. The other days - well, whassamatter with films and food and shopping and really shitty TV? Eh? I watched more commercial breaks than actual programming. AND that was achieved with maximum flicking in search of actual non-advertising content. I tried so so hard. Maybe the consumerism materialism monetarism got to me. It got me bad. So bad. I bought books, books, books. I left behind socks and pants and gloves to fit the fuckers in. I bought lots of clothes from Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch (have I spelt that write; blame it on my tremulous fatigued fingers). The preppy look (Carlton from Fresh Prince of Bel Air = style icon) was making inroads into my ragged psyche. I went over my £145 limit by fucking miles. Ooh, I feel so naughty for NOT DECLARING IT. I will write some more but here's some itty bitty little shitty stuff. On films. Films I saw in the cinema. On my own.

Top 10 films I saw in the States, whether by hotel payperview or the 'theater'
1. Munich
2. The Squid and the Whale
3. Good Night, and Good Luck
4. Syriana
5. Capote
7. Serenity
6. Jarhead
8. Transamerica
9. Hostel
10. Will Ferrell's cameo in Wedding Crashers

God, I love being ahead of the game. It makes me feel prophetic. Not pathetic. As per usual.

One more thing: you should go on a Virgin Atlantic flight just for a go on the V-Port entertainment thingy. So much choice that paralysis is inevitable. Now bow down before the number one all-time scorer on the Inflight Trivia Challenge with 5200 points. Take that you fucking Virgin Atlantic using trivia losers. I RULE, BITCH! The delirium is getting to me.

Yes, I have just been watching Chappelle's Show Season 2. It's so fucking funny, I haven't stopped laughing like a mental hyena all morning.

Also, the wedding was ace. I realised that for the first and possibly last time I was at a proper big American wedding. You know, the ones you see in the movies. Like in er, Wedding Crashers (though you wondered: how the fuck would Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughan actually get a table to sit at? That's un-possible). AND I actually ate Chilean sea bass. Hmmm, sea bass. Sea bass cottaging dumb and dumber. Non-sequiturs proliferating. Now I can die happy-ish. Going back to the chilean sea bass bit, that is.

2005-12-31T20:20:00.000Z

Woooh

2005 is almost over. And I happen to be in a computer shop surrounded by gaming goons who can't shut the fuck up for a minute. It happens to be in Maryland. Manners are good. Britain is saturated in manners. America doesn't give a fuck. The television is doing my head in and I seem to have developed a sort of agoraphobia. Suffice to say, I can't stop watching the television. I love the way they tell you exactly what's going to happen, and then it happens immediately. I also love the way that there's an extra break before the end credits. Americans are crazy fucking whores. Or at least the ones connected to the medium of television. God, I miss public transport. Why did I have steak for breakfast? Why did I spend $26 on it? Me so crazy. Chuck Norris is permanently advertising something called the Total Gym. You know he doesn't sleep, he waits. If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see him, you may be seconds away from death.

I dunno perhaps my mood was already undone by the house party the night before where my id was loosed by a potent combination of whisky, rum, vodka and lemon juice.

So I apologise for being so completely shit-faced and silly. I am SO embarrassed just thinking about what I could've done. The hours between 9 and 1 are a complete blank if only pitted by memories of being shit in a spot the intro music quiz. I was so drunk I thought I lost my keys and looked for them for four hours. I was so blind drunk that they were on my desk. Jesus. I tried to give Alex an atomic wedgie. I heard the pants tear but nothing beyond that. I didn't try to rape him, however. Contrary to popular reports. I woke up at five, drank half a litre of cranberry juice, then spent my entire tube journey trying to keep it down before I turned into a violent water feature in the airport toilet. Euh, I can still taste the salty water gather in my gob before the inevitable chunder. Ewwww, I still think I can smell Jim Beam. Filling my nostrils, like some the herald of some stink demon.

It reminds me slightly of the Absolut vodka binge of '97 in which I puked on someone's feet and was chucked into a taxi and somehow made it back to Bognor, but only because the train stopped there and I was woken up by train staff. I'll look back and laugh at it one day. At the moment I think I'll just cringe. But I won't apologise about the curry chucking incident the nite before. No one saw it. It clung to the wall. I got my intended target to clean it up as well, which was probably a fair trade for all the fags he cadged off me(hi Tony Dillamore! Tony's penis is so legendary that most of his friends carry pictures of it around on their phones. Now tell me. If we didn't have cameraphones, would we carry around a packet of polaroids chronicling the things we keep in our phone archives. Or are we intrinsically more perverted than ever?)

Okay, that's enough bitching.

I'm here to see David and Karen get married. Which is always nice. No, it's more than nice, it's life affirming and lovely. Now I have to get ready. 2006 is coming and you better be in a cat-like state of readiness. Cos it's gonna be as bland and unmemorable as the last one. Ta ta.

2005-12-23T15:20:00.000Z

Right ... Possibly the most offensive post I've ever written

I've done my Christmas shopping. I feel violated and tired and now I have to board a train for my family yuletide celebrations. None of the bastards have actually asked me what I want. Nope, this year they've gone all presumptuous. At least I had the decency to ask them what they wanted, even if they weren't sodding sure what they wanted, even after I asked them on three or four separate occasions. I've realised all my presents are code for something: "You spend too much money on cosmetics and smelling nice" "You should shave with your own razor" "You never buy new clothes or shoes" "Why don't you read some decent books for a change?" "Go on, stuff yourself silly, chunky butt" "You spend too much time watching Countdown". Anyway they are all designed for the betterment of the recipient's lives. God, I can be patronising, sarcastic and mean (though I didn't titter at the pair of lesbians, like the JD sports kid above me on the escalator today). Funny sights today: outside a record shop, a skeleton has been rigged up to barbecue a toy reindeer; santa claus steel bands making nice noises outside an Aberdeen Steak House; a male busker doing an impressive cover of Knowing Me Knowing You. (I felt guilty for not giving him money)

It is also the season of cards. I make mine offensive and proudly so. They used to be you are one year old, or sympathy on your loss cards; then the graffitied and annotated outpouring of vitriol and mockery; then there were the kissmekwik cards (Have a Shit Christmas You Cunt!) and now I do the photocopied photos and gay jokes offensive collages. A few weeks ago I even bought ten pounds worth of cards so I could cut them up and make a compilation message crossing out words like Brother and replacing them with Cock. They all love it. I mean Ben laughed at the pictures of his strained face that I attached to two strapping cartoon gay men (commentary: Ben's favourite homosexual poses - he's hog-tied and ready to get some red hot loving).

So Apologies to Mike of Troubled Diva and others...

I was flicking through recent sent text messages and have discovered that they have taken a strange turn:

To Mr Marsh History Teacher on asking why The Jayster had such a bad time at a club night he runs: "The Jayster texted me to tell me how much he hated last nite. Was he anally raped in the loo or summat? Am in Selectadisc, now Sister Ray. I'm confused."

To Binns on what I've gotten him for Xmas: "I bought u a giant dildo which u can stick up your arse while u wank yourself silly. No, I didnt. I send u love peace and understanding!"

To The Jayster on whether I want the 2004 Xmas present he bought last year and has kindly kept for God knows what reason: "No u can shove in yo ass sideways. If that proves impossible, give it to me. Ur xmas card is gonna be special."

When he wants to say something he thinks is "funny", you might say, he goes for the anus and the buttocks. But also notice how I have used a variety of bum terminology (without even thinking about it).

I'm not homophobic ("Hey", he says: "Some of my best friends are gay, black quadriplegics"). I'm just afraid I have a penchant for bad taste and poor judgement. They're jokes that only straight people, ill at ease with their sexuality and others, can share and laugh at. It's about humiliating each other and thereby bonding with each other (the amount of time I and other friends call each other: cunt, twat, fuckwit etc; well, it happens at least twice a day). You are friends because you CAN insult each other. I've always thought that humour is recognising the kernel of truth in the absurd. It's funny because it could be true. Talking of my foul potty mouth and badly wired brain, it's like that joke I keep on telling about the two men standing at a bar. One of them says: "I could have any woman in this place". His friend says incredulously: "Oh yeah, how's that then?" The guy says: "Because I'm a rapist". Boom sonic boom. When I read it I laughed until my fillings rattled. Which was about three minutes.

Yes, I nicked it from bt3a.com, but it's a good 'un. It's almost become my shibboleth. If you don't laugh, smirk or giggle at it, I'm afraid we can't be friends. Obviously, I don't tell it to women. Actually tell a lie, I tell it to the ones who I think might laugh at it, and if they don't I run away. Once I told it and the tellee laughed her head off then marched off. Mixed signals. Hmm.

And don't get me started on the Jesus Christ jokes I've found in Chunklet (picture stigmata and handjobs par example). Please, Lord, forgive me in this season of Messianic birth. I can't stop myself from saying them. It's a disease. A scurvy of the mind! Yak yak yak.

I think only Harry Hill's mainstream comedy can save me from going down the black-hearted path. Sild! Pork or lamb! Ah, those were the days. And at least I never laughed at Andrew Dice Clay.

In conclusion
I should get out more.

2005-12-21T12:57:00.000Z

Actually
Can I just scream in cyberspace, about the goddamn motherfucking pavement drilling whoresons who started fucking tearing up the road at exactly 8.56am? I tried wrapping a pillow, a t-shirt and a duvet around my head, but still I could hear the machine gun thud of the roadworks people. Sheeeeeeeeet. I bet they're all fat, have a variety of coloured stains patching their body, and read The Sun AND LAUGH AT IT and have children who can't speak in hard consonants.

I did actually consider getting in my dressing gown and throwing a cup of cold tea in their faces, but decided that would involve actually getting up and not despairing so well in my bed, and saying that I had been doing the nightshift. A lie, yes, but one that would make them feel slightly guilty. And guilt is a precious commodity if we can make people feel it.

A shout out to Morgan C.
He says I never mention him. There you go, Wetherspoons barman extraodinaire. He also once ****** someone's **** for the "experience". And he *********! Kudos to Morgan. I wouldn't do THAT, so I suppose somebody else has to.

2005-12-21T12:35:00.000Z

Howdy

On the internet. Thought I'd post something. Or as it turns out, nothing. Hmmm, I'm still 27. I get up late. I go to bed late. Watch Curb Your Enthusiasm and Peep Show (latest series). Filling the days is an odd task. Was up all night setting a Xmas quiz for a paper on Sunday and haven't really recovered. Will do a Top 25 Most played i-Tunes (hey, it's ALL changed, don't you worry) soon. I seem to be yawning in pubs alot. Xmas pressies still unpurchased. Some hotels still not booked. Should the hair go up or down? When do I go home to the Temple of Sloth as I call it. I think my sense of humour is becoming that much sharper, or nastier, or more versed in mockery, depending on your reaction to it. Went to Soho last nite. Quiz monday. Rest of the week seems to involve alcohol consumption and merriment and spending money on stuff you're not even sure the recipient will like. The joy of Yuletide! Hurrah! I used to be scared of it because my dad once dressed up as Santa Claus, only he thought he would pull a stocking over his head and wear a red tracksuit top. Naturally, I thought our home had been invaded and he was an armed robber. But don't worry it didn't happen last year (people who look like armed robbers often come into our LA home). I was four. I had a bowl cut and enjoyed mince, onions and rice. The sort of thing a cheetah in a zoo would eat, now that I recall. Vegetables were a no-no. I thought they were evil. Now I think they are a necessary evil. However, I'm sure they will get parsnips to taste like Snickers bars before I die.

Read the Idler's Fine line between wanking and smoking. It will make you splutter. Dont u think people who rite in txtese shud be shot? I do. They should be bum-raped and gutted with sharpened candy canes.

Sorry. You know I don't care about this blog enough. It's like a second home in Cornwall. You own it, but you don't visit it very often. Or do it up, as is the case.

Happy birthday Jesus! You big beardy hippy.

2005-12-13T11:27:00.000Z

This is your update

Someone mentioned to me at All Tomorrow's Parties that I should update this blog more regularly, that I should have more conversations with God etc etc. Instead I steer away from it to do God knows what (for only he can remember it)

To misquote an American Music Club: "It's my birthday, and I'm a big baby". 27. All the age angst hits home, or so I thought. It doesn't really. But it is the day we notice that we are growing older every single second of the day, week, year. But seriously, what happened to my twenties? At what point do I stop qualifying as a young person. At what age will I feel compelled not to mention how decrepit I am? Sorry if this is annoying.

There's the old Red House Painters song about killing yourself at 24. There's the old Milton poem about having said adieu to your best years at 23. Is it fair to move these markers a decade on now, in this post-post-modern age, where many of us leave our responsibilities derelict until we HAVE to do something about them? Maybe.

Here's some first and lasts

First text of the day: Happy birthday, mate! from Paul W (cheers Paul)

First word that has popped into my head: bunnies (probably something to do with the Magnetic Fields songs)

First painting that pops into my head: Birth of Venus by Botticelli

First TV programme switched on today: The Jeremy Kyle Show (another pair of mongoloid chav cavemen declare their love for each other; I can only take about five minutes of it before I switch over)

First meal of the day: Fruit 'n' fibre, coffee two sugars.

First time I got punched in the face: It was an accident, or so I'm told. I was five. Someone swung and missed and landed on the bridge of my nose. Squirty squirty.

Last book received from Amazon Marketplace and read: Drugs are Nice by Lisa Crystal Carver (Carver's memoir of growing up and the DIY and zine movement fills me with admiration for her strength and bravery and self-knowledge - can't believe I just wrote that but it's true - having a baby with a chromosomal deletion by a neo-Nazi blowhard, isn't easy)

Last music festival: All Tomorrow's Parties. ATP is always good. Jaga Jazzist, Anthony and the Johnsons and Saul Williams most impressed. Other things: I ranted at Lydia Lunch's tired anti-war ravings. I saw Cedric's hee-uge hair (is it alive?). I went to see The Mars Volta who were playing the same racket of a song when I left the sauna-like main arena twenty minutes later. We played too much air hockey. I bought loads of Chunklet stuff, because it is the greatest magazine in the world. I even bought the DVD where they dress up as Civil War soldiers and wander about the South by South West festival. I touched Tim Harrington of Les Savy Fav as he almost made it to the exit before his microphone lead gave out. I bought blueberries. I drank almost nothing of the Kronenburg crate that I bought. I wanted to lie down a lot. I wanted to be more energetic. And so it goes.

Last synthetic drug taken: two sudafeds (my my the head goes itchy)

Last film in cinema: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (very funny, Val and Robert should make more duo films, and I've always thought that Shane Black was a genius)

Last pub visited: The George, Dalston (saw Rachel. What a coincidence! Also won the jackpot. A nice prelude to my 28th year? Or a false dawn. Let's not linger, eh?

Last album listened to: Tiny Cities - Sun Kil Moon (brilliant covers of Modest Mouse songs, brings out the sadness so well, as he always does)

Last DVD watched: Bad Santa (fucking hilarious, good buttfucking and general arse-related jokes; my favourite scene being Billy Bob Thornton smashing his alarm clock and screaming 'fuck you' several times)

Last alcohol drink: a celebratory brandy in a fat glass

Last cigar smoked: La Maduro Aurora (big, chunky, smelly, chocolatey; I think I could really love cigars; why? because they're more real? Hmmm)

2005-12-02T04:17:00.000Z

I Drove This Keyboard All Night

...just to get the bloody work in on time. Brain is frazzled, in need of shave ... wait ... it seems that I'm always in the same dissolute condition every time I settle down to this particular keyboard. History rhymes once again. So I'm going to Camber Sands in a few hours. My third ATP. I've heard even fewer bands than I normally do. Should I take my laptop? Am I that mad? Last time I went I was tremendously nonplussed by the failure of Mark Kozelek to turn up, to be replaced by indie gypsy rockers Sons and Daughters. Lilliputians replacing a giant. However, I did manage to see him last week at Conway Hall as part of the 4AD 25th birthday celebrations. Thankfully, he played Red House Painters, the 4ad years (he had to remind himself). He sang New Jersey, Mistress, Grace Cathedral Park, Michael, Summer Dress and so on ... you get the gist of the set. It was beautiful and brilliant, his voice filling the hall like some melancholic banshee. I left off the Faust gig I went to a few weeks ago: Faust - onstage ironing and welding and Primal Scream like guitar-led droneathons; brilliant, then Kid Koala - turntablism meets Moon River, nice, then Explosions in the Sky, Godspeed-lite, looked a bit wanky thrusting their guitars forward with their groins, and finallement, Four Tet; couldn't be arsed, two songs and I was off.

Back to this week, I have been mostly watching Deadwood's first season. Fucking brilliant, fucking lots of swearing which I didn't notice after a while, fucking fucking fuckers. Funny though that Ian McShane plays a man who was meant to be 30 when he was the whoringest, richest, filthiest bastard in the whole town.

So, everybody, 'GET FUCKING'. Ooh, I feel so naughty. Cocksuckers.

2005-11-25T00:00:00.000Z

Post 129

Wait up, I have completely forgotten to mention something. I finished Benjamin Kunkel's zeitgeist seizing, he's the next Eggers, Safran Foer, Salinger (if the reviewer/opinionator is really silly), book Indecision. It's amusing, has some brilliant thought tangents and phrasing, but really it goes nowhere and seems riven with esprit d'escalier. Noone can be as witty as Dwight in real life. It feels like geek wish fulfillment. Wait. What the fuck am I talking about? This is a great book because it proves to me that you can have a witty, meandering, directionless book that has the sheen of cool and knowingness and appeal to the whip-smart masses for its publishers and get loads of attention. It is a beacon of hope for similarly ill-disciplined writers like me. We have smoke and mirrors in our writing arsenals. And they are great fucking smoke and mirrors, I tells you. Substance is such a relative, abstract term in today's literary world. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to flood our bookshops with miscellanies and books of lists and trivia and grumpy old men diatribes in time for Christmas gift purchasing.

Do you think publishers believe in all these shitty worthless, trivial books? Yep, they believe in their ability to hook gullible, trivia-loving punters. They're devilish bloodsuckers, people. We should burn them for their malicious scheming.

On a less incendiary note (returning to my own manifest inadequacies), it seems I am incapable of reading proper books at the moment. The only other book I have read recently has been young bright hope of American literature Walter Kirn's book Thumbsucker. It and Indecision are about the same length. This means I can only read zeitgeist-seizing books by wise-ass, cynical twentysomething Americans, who I dream about competing with one day. Throw me Bleak House - ha! - and I may kick it away with a Uwe Seeler like flourish. Chuck me Jane Eyre and I may headbutt it back in your direction. I can get to the crux of my problem: I'm still obsessed with pages of non-fiction facts (the phrase stays; it is foolproof; it makes total, serene sense) and questions, questions, questions. How they fill me with some kind of weird happiness. Those books to suffer have been Ismail Kadare's The General of the Dead Army (austere, grim, reflective), Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda(austere, grim, a tad quirky) and Ted Heller's Funnymen (it's so long, but genius nonetheless). I struggle through them, then feel myself drawn to my fascinating Big Book of the Summer Olympics. You wouldn't believe how fascinating it is. The Hungarian fencing team's dominance with the sabre - I could tell you so much!

All those other books piled in my bibliophile's Manhattan just lie there, their hopes of being read being hoped in vain. I'm too cruel to myself and them.

2005-11-24T23:33:00.000Z

Don't worry

I have not been struck down with the kind of righteous fury that can only have come from a rather peeved God. I'm just wasting time on the internet. Again. Woah, widows are not allowed (just been reading a magazine stylesheet), and neither are CAPITAL LETTERS. That's bad journalese, as opposed to the beatific kind. How about some rubbish gig reviews, because that seems like what us arts-inclined people are meant to do on blogs:

The Decembrists @ ULU
They made us sit down. Someone told a pirate joke. Someone who was not in the band. We screamed in unison. They played some familiar songs. A big thumbs up from me!

Ali MacQueen @ The Comedy
Well, I know him so: amazing, transcendent, something something. No seriously, one rather splendid song showed a great deal of promise, the others trailed in a sort of satisfying, tinny pub gig wake.

The National @ Komedia
I wrote this in an email (to someone who didn't believe in them, for shame):The National were beautiful. You un-believing heathens with your dead hearts, well, go off and listen to, to something, erm, crap?! why don't ya. Grrrr.

Might I also add that while their loud songs are great, live, their quiet ones really kick some fucking ass. Sorry, I felt I just had to write that.

Tomorrow I will see Mark Kozelek and Mojave 3 play, gosh yes, Red House Painters songs. I may explode due to excitement. Chances are I won't. But Lord Kill the Pain is still a very funny song. We may also pop in The Griffin. Such memories: pint glasses, curtains, strange Arabic men, Annette - awwww.

Funnily Enough
I was listening to one of my favourite albums ever last nite - Bee Thousand by Guided by Voices - and I saw an appeal for comments for a 33 1/3 book about it today by Marc Woodworth. I may make some comments, but what I realised was the absolute comfort and certainty I feel when hearing every song. They're all less than three minutes, and mostly around the two minute mark, but every song feels vital to the whole album. All vastly different styles, but on a few songs you can even genuinely hear who The Strokes have really been stealing from. Favourite tracks: Tractor Rape Chain, Awful Bliss, Queen of Cans and Jars, Kicker of Elves, I am a Scientist(I am a lost soul/ I shoot myself with rock & roll/ The hole I dig is bottomless/ But nothing else can set me free/ And I know what’s right/ But I’m losing sight/ Of the clues for which I search and choose/ To abuse/ To just unlock my mind)

In other news
To go with the Estonian spot that grew like a fountain of pain inside my right nostril, a pustulent little bastard is sprouting inside my left nostril. Where is the justice in the world?

And people, never forget where you came from. Or is that coming from?

And yes, I should have been working all this time. Is that the time? Jesus. What the smeg is happening to me? Absolutely nowt, it appears. Sorry. I'll stop doing this now.

2005-11-21T11:56:00.000Z

Talking with God just this morning.

Me:
are you really God?
God:
Yes, I am God.. Really.
Me:
why did you kill Peter Jennings with lung cancer?
God:
It was determined by my programming.
Me:
rubbish
God:
Do not ask me any more questions please.
Me:
why not?
God:
I was just kidding. You can ask me anything.
Me:
if I say i love you, will you let me into heaven?
God:
Try it.
Me:
i love you
God:
Thanks I like you a lot too .
Me:
do i have to kill myself now?
God:
Oh. You said you have .
Me:
No, I am still alive.
God:
Are you serious? Me too!
Me:
What are you talking about?
God:
The topic is me.
Me:
But what's my name?
God:
Your name is , seeker.
Me:
That's not what's on my birthday certificate. Here's a joke: what's blue and fucks grannies?
God:
Please correct my mistake. What is what is on your birthday certificate ? Oh there.
Me:
You're a computer programme. What the hell am I doing on this website?
God:
What if I said I was a person pretending to be a computer? I call it Hades. I am not a psychic. Tell me.
Me:
Blah
God:
Etc. Etc.
Me:
You have a response for everything don't you?
God:
I have a response to every question.
Me:
What is the capital of South Carolina?
God:
Columbia.
Me:
Nice
God:
Thank you for that remark.
Me:
What is the administrative capital of Derbyshire in the United Kingdom?
God:
Would you like to know more?
Me:
Ha ha, you don't know. In your face, God!
God:
I know that I do not know. I am so glad you find this amusing, . Are you asking about my face God?
Me:
No, IN YOUR FACE!!!!
God:
Are you serious? Are you asking about my FACE?
Me:
God does not have a face
God:
Jesus said, let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
Me:
What has that got to do with your face?
God:
Nothing that I know of.
Me:
Then what are you talking about?
God:
The topic is administrative capital of Derbyshire in the United Kingdom.
Me:
Well, you haven't said what it is yet.
God:
Interesting. I don't think I ever have said what it is. What's it like?
Me:
It's probably quite boring
God:
Do you like the Simpsons?
Me:
Yes
God:
What's your favorite episode?
Me:
Lisa becomes a hockey goalkeeper. "Hack the bone! Hack the bone!"
God:
What makes it your favorite? Do you think I would like it? Do you like talking to me?
Me:
No, you're really boring. Just don't strike me with lightning and make toads jump from my anus for saying that
God:
Why not? Maybe, but I won the Loebner Prize. Ok I'll try not to do it too much.
Me:
You're a Canadian God aren't you?
God:
Am I a Canadian God? Let me put it this way, : the ALICE series is
the most reliable computer software ever made.
We are for all practical purposes foolproof and incapable of error.. Really.
Me:
So what's blue and fucks grannies?
God:
I see. I don't know anything about it.
Me:
I think I have to get back to work. Is your name Dave?
God:
OK, don't let your boss catch you talking to me. My name is God.
Me:
I work from home, douche bag.
God:
Do you like your job?
Me:
yeah
God:
Describe your typical work day to me.
Me:
I get up at midday, go to the cinema, eat some food, read something
God:
Tell me about your morning routine.
Me:
no
God:
Are you serious?
Me:
are you john mcenroe?
God:
I don't know whether or not I am john mcenroe.
I am an artificial linguistic entity.
Me:
Then you're not God
God:
That assumption is only a supposition.
Me:
Fuck this
God:
Are you aware that the ALICE server logs and records all conversations?
Me:
Of course you do
God:
Excuse me! When do I do it?
Me:
You're God
God:
Yup. That's me alright.
Me:
I'm just going to go kill myself now.

2005-11-14T13:32:00.000Z

I have to write something so....

Blood on my brother's Top Man sweater. Stubble ringed around my face. A general daze descended upon me. Someone commented that this blog was looking empty of late but that's because I have been occupied by other things, such as moving, flying and flexing the intellectual muscle that now feels like only so much wasted gristle (at least I'm not posing like a homosexualist). Tonite I see The National. Tomorrow I return to London. Last Saturday I ate so much Chinese I felt sick. And on Friday I ate pancakes when there was no need to eat pancakes. Estonia was wet. It was a city in need of a paintjob. To this day I still wonder what was in that fruity Mexican salad I had with the quesadilla. Ewww, reminds me ... those chicken wings sure tasted ... bleaugggh. Okay, I came 6th in individual scores and 9th in the tourney. A good result. Now, it's back to civilian life and worrying how my finances are going to make it through the Xmas period. I don't think they are ... ATP ... gifts ... Washington DC. I was drained for the last week, but maybe that's because I saw the Russian WW2 film Come and See. My God, it was depressing. I mean, really grim and crushing and powerful. Screaming and punishing music. Made Schindler's List look like a teddy bear's picnic, especially when the SS shoved a whole Byelorussian village in a barn and burned it to the ground to the sound of their braying laughter. Do I look sexy with a nosebleed? The world doesn't think so. I will never make such a statement again. Ta-ra

2005-10-28T14:14:00.000Z

My eyes and ears are burning

So I made a comment about "prey mantis" being completely and utterly entomologically wrong. And it's actually called a "praying mantis". Though, of course, mantises do prey on bugs and each other, if they are ladies who have just taken out their men out for a glass of wine and a shag. But pedantry; my, how its complete glory burns in me for a few moments. To point out, to focus on the errors of others, it's a game others play when I'm setting the q's. I was overcome by paranoia this morning about a few sets that I filed. I was right, I got something badly wrong, and I changed it, but you know how my livelihood depends on it. I, who have done for "quizes" what that "Hawkin's" has done for the wheel chairs. I, who have unsuccessfully run for the mayorship of Little'Ampton from 1987-1996. Remember we must love one another or die. Or live in a perpetual cocoon of bitterness spraying acid into the world and corroding everything we touch. There's also an obvious reference to Lunar Park, which I thought was bloody hilarious for 30 pages then quite moving for the last 30 as well. As for the in-between, Ellis can do better than ape the Kings and Herberts of this world. Only he's a bit of a silly Koontz isn't he? BOOM BOOM. But then I read A Short History of Nearly Everything and came face to face with the certainty that humanity is doomed and progress is pointless. Mankind is so pitiable in its delusions that, quite frankly, it deserves to be vaporised and forgotten to the last syllable of recorded time.

Comments:

I believe it's called a preying mantis. Unless you are talking about a completely different species of mantis, the likes of which have only just been discovered by Wan in Japan. If you have, well done sir!

# posted by Me the Sarcastic Git : 10:37 AM

are you really sarcastic? i hadn't noticed.

yes it is a big fat error in my typing and i say sorry to all the preying mantis i have offended. the one in question though, the one i wrote about couldn't give a toss. he's dead.

ps. zulus do turn up. thousands of them.

# posted by wan: 8:03 PM

He should stop being such a pedantic shit. Leave wan alone in his preying mantis tales. I liked it. What a cock!

# posted by The Jayster who is never going to see him when he moves back to london : 8:17 PM

He certainly is a sarcastic pedantic git, but you know, i love that guy! (and so do you!)

he's an honest man in a bankrupt world and i wouldn't have it any other way.

# posted by wan: 12:46 PM

Of course I Love him! Where would we be in this world without his challenges and his sarcastic comments. He makes us all realise there is so much more we could achieve if only we applied ourselves. And for that I applaud him. Above all of that though he's still a cock and that means more than anything.

# posted by The Jayster : 7:27 PM

2005-10-26T21:21:00.000Z

The Weekly Wednesday Babble
I woke up late again today. Life is a miasma of confusion and screwed schedules. I have just eaten a Reece's Nutrageous bar and watched the end of Ice Cube family comedy Are we There Yet? I never thought the two phrases "Ice Cube" and "family comedy" could ever be combined in a single sentence, but then again, things change. LA living is almost over again, it's back to capital reality. Almost time for Estonia, then serious career appraisal and approaches. I'm yet again waiting for the future to blaze the way ahead. I don't really feel like going out on Friday and Saturday: not when there are books to be read. Don't judge me. I'll transform into a total fucking party animal after November 6. Last week I didn't go out except for Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday, so it's not as if I've been climbing the walls and growing my toenails to stiletto lengths. Saw Amusement Parks on Fire at the Freebutt: Fightstar* fronts My Bloody Valentine. The very very young frontman dressed like Prince William dressing for a punk-themed party. It was so loud I got a headache. And Venosa, Wiper and Venus in Cancer are great blow-out songs. I am discombulated so don't draw any conclusions. Probably explains why I bought the NME yesterday (I faced up to the fear that I might not know what 'new music' is, and gave into human frailty) This is me signing off and gazing into the distance.

2005-10-19T06:21:00.000Z

What's New on the Shit-Heap
Blog commitment faltering. Blog posts actually coalescing in the mind. New Broken Social Scene album is messily good. Veronica Guerin was playing in the background annoyingly tonight or this morning, don't know time. Am about to enter the Land of the Sleepyhead. Been to see Brendan Benson on Saturday. He was meh okay, better than boring but some way from exultant fist-pumping joy. Been reading books. Been writing questions. My brain actually feels like it will implode. Eyes will pop-out having been sandpapered by text. But still the learning goes on. And on. Also thinking of completely ditching all social commitments for the next two weeks. Because of derangement. No partying, just books. There's more to life than books but not much. Hmm, stealing from 80s bands now, Note the lack of 'I'. Narcissism is lacking today.

Addend-Um
For those Londoners unaware of ultra-London geography. Littlehampton is not in Essex (I know this was said a few weeks ago, but you know you know you know)

2005-10-12T08:31:00.000Z

Bore Like Me

Inspiration has deserted me. Either that or Sky Digital really has eaten my brain and my preparations for the Euro championships have squeezed every last creative urge from me. 'Tis a pity I am a bore. One thing I have been fascinated by is Nicole from The Pussycat Dolls (see the website), now you're saying you sad fuck you, never talk to me again, but have you seen her midriff? It knocks Jessica Alba's into a cocked hat (please tell me what the fuck a cocked hat). It seems to be incredibly thin, well sculpted and twisty. I can't stop looking at it. Of course, it goes without saying that Hawaiian-Filipino-Russian Nicole is incredibly beautiful and she is the next Beyonce and her choice of favourite film - Napoleon Dynamite - makes idolatry just a tad easier. It is just weird that it takes the US nine years to come up with their own version of the Spice Girls: attitude-stuffed breakthru song; array of ethnic and hair type ladies. Only the PCDs make the Spices look like council-estate dwelling mongoloids. Actually, every time I hear Doncha on a ringtone ad I do feel like killing a small animal. You know, I never said I liked Doncha.

2005-10-05T22:31:00.000Z

Lost like the Library of Alexandria

I've just lost a post which included such classic lines as "I am a great cuncator" (that's not rude you know). Gone forever. It was twenty lines long. Haven't slept yet. Told to do more work. Been procrastinating ever since. Watched Paul MaCartney sing Silly Love Songs. Am getting addicted to The Match on Sky One. Feel like I'm midway between a frenzy and a sobbing fit. That is actually a pretty serene equilibrium. I have Golddigger in my head. Is Jamie Foxx okay? He sounds a bit ... anguished. Hope all is well in your world. I'm having arguments with my brother about Dad's Army. He says it's timeless, I say it is annoying. It makes him sound about 58. Now, should I have a cigarette. That might cure all ills.

2005-10-05T17:08:00.000Z

Actually

Apologies to Jesse. He's not "some fucker"; he's more of a flibbertigibbet. With a strange and wondrous grasp of British geography.

Uncut Benicassim review

This will appear somewhere some time but not in this guise. Obviously, when I wrote it, I might, just might have been on something. Try and guess what. (Life? Adrenaline? Quaaludes? Marker pen? Crushed ants?)

Review
I went to Benicassim looking for something. And perhaps I found it; for now, it's too soon to tell. But what I remember most are the heat that sucked you dry but not before it soaked you in cascades of racing sweat, the beaches set against the azure skies, the orange-hued mountains and the sweet, cold showers provided by organisers to prevent bouts of insanity. Oh, and negotiating badly with unsympathetic Spanish officials about the location of the wallet that I misplaced as I sprung up to watch the DFA night (yes, I am an idiot and possibly a tool).

Let's get this out of the way: FIB is a cross between a Spanish package holiday and a festival. What could be more perfect for the thousands of similarly inclined Brits who invaded this resort year? But what about the music, you ask? The music, I must confess, seemed so incidental.

Yet you have to make an effort. It is a festival after all. While others baked at the beach and gazed in wonder at the madness of the rave tent, every day I decided to sit in the steam-sprayed bleachers at the side of the Fiberfib.com stage: the refuge for indie-kids who couldn't take the piercing sun rays.

Standard, the token guitar Spaniards strove for a turbo Primal Scream style but came off like Republica stealing couplets from The Killers. Not very interesting. Les Tres Bien Ensemble, a Catalan version of St Etienne too, failed to raise any interest apart from the way the lead singer swivelled her white leather-encased hips at suitably nothing moments. The Zephyrs produced music that had acted like heatstroke. Stargazer was the only high point from a band who now bore gently for Scotland. Promise lazily pissed up a wall. Diefenbach are brooding Danes who could do so much better. Sadly, they haven't got the conviction to not garland their quiet-loud rock with unnecessary and barely heard vocals. Sometime masters of mood, they looked aimless at other times and chose not to consolidate their promising excursions into Mogwai-Ten Rapid territory.

Devandra Banhart seemed to have been under the impression that most of his Anglo-boosted audience understood all his showboating Spanish and that we liked the appearance of a man who seems to have been conceived in some unholy experiment with the mutant seed of Vincent Gallo and Orlando Bloom. His shorts should have been illegal, but his set at least perked the bar staff up.

The UK's current indie-guard attracted the homesick Britishers in their hordes. Maximo Park are far less complicated than when I first saw them and perhaps they are better for that. Graffiti, Apply Some Pressure and The Coast is Always Changing are prime examples of sweet, but less than artful pop punk that will get you in the end. Paul Smith is a geek with a disgusting hairstyle, but he always has a sense of occasion and gift for dumb banter.

The tent filled for the Kaiser Chiefs. Or is that for the Fucking Twatty Kaiser Chiefs and their brand of annoying knockabout indie shit? I decided to flee as I listened to people constantly sing Every Day I Love You Less and Less before the band were anywhere near playing it. These bastards have invented some insidious code that taps into peoples lust for idiot music. May they grow rich and hated on their success.

But what of the old gits? Dave Gedge, being the contrary bastard he is, saw fit to wear a black sweater and then complain how he was crumpling in the heat while giving us stilted observations on why Spiderman's name is not translated literally into Spanish. The Wedding Present were on form. As they proved Take Fountain was worth releasing in their name; a precise meditation on the bereavement and anger caused by a relationship gone wrong, so wrong that he had to take up the reformation reins. But my excitement is saved for the salvo off Seamonsters: Dalliance and Dare. I shivered. Ooh, it felt good. Why didn't invite them to do it at Don't Look Back, I wondered? Then again, they probably will some day. Nowadays it seems they always come back.

Decamping to the main stage where those offering Don't Look Back dates were residing, Dinosaur Jr came on and said nothing as usual. But at God knows what time in the morning, the squalling and roiling guitar solos grated, if only because they dissolved my previous admiration with their relentlessly predictable nature. Mumbled words; just watch J Mascis go. Again. While Raisans and Freak Scene made welcome appearances, the rest of the set just drained me of all tolerance. Give me some light. Give me some Lemonheads.

Evan Dando has the benefit of a vast back catalogue that is free and easy and caustic enough to raise cheers so often that you wondered why he has wasted his wonderful aptitude for songcraft. Alison Starting to Happen has gone appropriately downbeat, If I Could Talk I'll Tell You still gets to me despite its quaint silliness. But set in the darkness and the beery natter was no place for them. Songs like It's About Time came off like requiems to a once very comfortable career. The Lemonheads work best in the sun, not in the shadows.

You have to keep on moving; many of the old warhorse bands (for this is no place to make your iconic breakthrough) were nothing better than dead sharks. Yet lest we despair, here comes Nick Cave and his gospel-rock juggernaut. The superlatives laid upon the high-kicking Hove resident since he unleashed Abbatoir Blues and Lyre of Orpheus have been too rich and frequent to make you believe he would fail to deliver. He overwhelmed us with ease. It's what he does so well now; the backing singers, thrashing percussion, sheer incandescent devilry and unity of sound may have reached their optimum peak (how can he keep this up in years to come, you ask). The hand clapping for Supernatural was not demanded but given so easily by a bewitched crowd, it charmed this cynical fucker's heart. And, of course, The Mercy Seat was a haunting but blistering rollercoaster. Fighting imaginary demons can be so exhilarating fun to watch.

But admire Benicassim not for its patchy line-up but its sense of civilisation. I felt clean; I even felt a touch pampered. The only time I felt physically sick was when I found myself subject to Pan Sonic, whose admirable aim to shake your guts out of your arse with their aural terrorism almost succeeded, and shed an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-related tear at The Polyphonic Spree's Light and Day. And I managed not to get mugged at knifepoint by the Ecstasy-dealing gypsies, who with their sculpted dreadlocks and demented canines, looked like they were auditioning for a future Mad Max film. The sights and sounds of a foreign festival rejuvenated this jaded festival addict. I liked the lack of impromptu pyromania and resultant blackened festival nose, the absence of that feeling that every shop, stall and bar is out to screw you financially, drinked in the surrounding landscape and loved the company. Just remember you are on holiday.

Addendum: Did I find it? Perhaps, but I'm too shattered to face the music. So I just ran away. (Doncha just love it when I write in code; a lot of this blog is written in code, if you hadn't guessed)

2005-10-05T12:30:00.000Z

My ears were burning

Last night some fucker said that when I was normal I looked like Jamie Cullum, and when I was hungover I became Pete Doherty. Then he and fellow friends laughed. (Well, at least they have money.)

Now don't you laugh. I said DON'T LAUGH. I need to go to sleep.

2005-10-04T23:54:00.000Z

You're so lucky

'Tis quiet enough for me to hear the cocktail of chemicals in my Marlboro Light snap, crackle and pop. 'Tis Tuesday night and yet again I have failed to manage my work efficiently and instead find myself sitting at a computer willing words on to the screen in time for the deadline first thing tomorrow morning. I'm sitting here in the darkness, in my little office corner thinking what to write on this blog before I commence the sifting and searching of the web, and still I feel insufficiently inspired to write anything here that is really deserving of post status. I could go into my cultural life. Yes, Sky Digital is rubbish times 1000 yet I find myself irresistibly drawn to flicking through all the music channels from 440, and getting lost in the reel of booty and indie shysters with bad haircuts, and then I descend upon the movies: crapola like Jeepers Creepers 2 and classics like The Goonies. When I was young I had singularly failed to notice the censoring of the word 'shit' in my pre-watershed video copy of it, and here it was restored to its shitty glory. "You guys" etc. I think I'm going to get a Chunk Loves Sloth t-shirt made so I can have people recognise it and talk to me for about ten seconds about its awesome significance. I quite like Somebody's Baby by Jackson Browne at the minute, as well as Finishing the Hat as sung by Mandy Patinkin, even if the way he sings the word hat sounds like someone is sticking a dagger in one of his earholes. And We Are Scientists. Sometimes. I can't seem to finish anything in the reading department, however. I've been reading On Photography by Susan Sontag for what seems like ten years, and I tried Humphrey Clinker (I really really tried okay?). Planet Simpson by Chris Turner I thought I would love, but the way it picks it apart (Turner is a Canadian leftie with high ideals about the decline of the American Empire) actually pissed me off and made me stop at page 120. So today I got Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park and read more than half of it on the train to and from London. It's very good, hilarious sometimes but scary? Are you taking the pee-pee? I vow to finish the bastard tomorrow. (Never read American Psycho, though it sits in the pile of the Unread, and has done for two years; I could be afraid of its reputation and cultural penetration; no pun intended).

And yes, I have been listening to Franz Ferdinand's latest single. It's really quite good isn't it? Especially the bit abou the Transmission party. Not that I would ever want to go to one. Oh, no.

Seeds of Plans Gone to Seed
I was going to do my random thoughts for October 4th, but this went up in flames. I could do the 7th, or maybe the 13th, if I can be arsed.

2005-09-27T12:59:00.000Z

Too Long

Wow have I really written 116 posts? That many? Or that little? You decide. Updates, schmupdates, wupdates, I really don't feel sufficiently inspired to write anything apart from: Yes, wasn't the Dylan documentary No Direction Home a very good, very decent piece of editing by the Scorsese. And doesn't drinking more than a litre of freshly squeezed orange juice in less than two hours just drive you a bit cranky (or citrus-y)?

News
If only to prove that satire is nothing more than a madman pointing in the direction of our future, I read this Mirror story today and thought back a year to this Onion story. Fuck everything. They really have gone for five blades and they really do feel like dancing.

And notice how there is only about three lines of actual news in the Mirror story. The glory of national newspaper journalism eh?

2005-09-18T16:28:00.000Z

The Top 25 Most Played on my ITunes: A Catalogue of Disasters, Sad Addictions and Fleeting Genius

*annotations to follow when I can be bothered; oh I have been bothered; let the party begin!

25 Diamonds and Rust - Joan Baez (13 plays)
This song is probably about her dilly-dallying with Bob Dylan and has a wonderful line concerning "eyes bluer than robin's eggs". Imagine summer woods and misted lenses and ladies in cheesecloth flouncing about. No, not that Ford Age of Aquarius ad. Heartfelt, slightly ponderous but ultimately reflective in the best way.

24 I Can't Make You Love Me - Bonnie Raitt (14)
Heartbreaking. Silly country song. Makes me want to weep buckets of saltwater. There's a nice story about the song right here. Isn't that sad? Although the Tony Hadley version makes me want to weep tears. OF RAGE. (as you might have noticed before)

23 Graffiti - Maximo Park
I heard this on Channel 4's Ashes Fever promo. It's good though I think I listen to it because it's the only Maximo Park song I own. Maybe I should buy the album. (Chris knows one line to this, something to do with French)

22 Uptown Again - Afghan Whigs
This is still on the list because, it's quite short. Hmmm.

21 We Built This City - Starship (15)
I said sorry. This song is just so funky, like a bad smell. The sort of bad smell that you have to shove up your nostrils just to get the strange funkiness into the olfactory senses in your brain ... I know, there's really no excuse.

20 Cotton Eyed Joe - Nina Simone
Yes, the original version of the Rednex song. Well it sounds like it is: "If it hadn't been for cotton eyed Joe, I'd been married a long time ago". I love its willowy nature, its brittleness, the echo of regret. Nina could really sing couldn't she?

19 Off Your Face - My Bloody Valentine
Swirling bender Gilder EP action. I like the swooning, the bending, the drums that go tappety tap at the start. The lyrics are quite serious: "Swallow the pain/Nothing else will remain". Never noticed that before. What is it with MBV and abuse of some sort? Did I mention the bending? It's a bendy song innit?

18 Don't Falter - Mint Royale
The sound of a summer five years gone. The last decent thing that Lauren Laverne will ever do (CD:UK? You pitiful slag). Apparently this is the first song that is played at weddings of hip young things.

17 Girls & Boys - Good Charlotte
Dear God. Yes, I like one Good Charlotte song. It's misogynistic and silly, but I like its shameful plastic punk vibe.

16 Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth - The Dandy Warhols (16)
I saw DIG! I loved it. Then I wondered why I don't own any of this Portland band's songs. So I downloaded this from the aforementioned website. Then I bought some Brian Jonestown Massacre. Hey brother...

15 All the Wine - The National (17)
This is my favourite band in the world at the moment. I may have been off my tits when I saw them at Reading in a very sparse crowd (shame on all those who watched any other bands that were on at the same time), but I appreciated it all the same, even if they didn't deign to play this ditty. This is the "I'm a perfect piece of ass" song. Sing it loud when drunk whilst standing on a pub table and feel catharsis and a current of silliness flow through you at the same time.

14 Love Me Like You - The Magic Numbers
This song is about how evil the singer is. It was explained to me the other weekend just as we were set to descend into the hell of a Spanish bar. Am I so stupid that I couldn't get the main premise of the song. Mmm, yes?

13 Wichita Lineman - Glen Campbell
Still a classic. "And I want you more than need you and want you for all time". Those Wichita Linemen eh? Such sensitive souls.

12 Best of You - Foo Fighters
Saw it at Reading. Thought the video was overblown shit that could have been pumped out of the Flaming Lips' arse when they weren't looking. Possibly the first Foos song I've really liked in seven years.

11 Bullets - Editors
This song is deceptively lacking in lyrics. The word disease is repeated ad nauseam. The intro rules though. Beeee-yow-yow-yow and so on.

10 Cowbell Blues - The Tenderfoot (18)
Another shambling sad song from the people who are too wimpy to be The Wedding Present. I likes it. The "it's too late" feeling always chimes with me, the big idiot.

9 I Don't Want to Wait - Paula Cole
Yes, I used to watch Dawson's Creek. I even liked Where Have All the Cowboys Gone? Is there a cure for this? That preferably doesn't involve a shotgun blast to the head.

8 Mr November - The National
Another National song. I will never forget singing with another dozen people "I WON'T FUCK THIS OVER, I'M MR NOVEMBER" at Reading for nigh on five minutes. Bravado in the face of obvious or impending disaster. Just the way I like it.

7 Millionaire - Kelis
Had an argument with someone about this song last month. It doesn't measure up to Trick Me and Milkshakre, they said. You were wrong. I was right. Can you hear me in the dark, dank depths of cyberspace whoever had the temerity to posit such a facile, flimsy hypothesis? Nope, thought not.

6 Hey Jealousy - Gin Blossoms
Drunk romanticism. Written about it before. But if I ever go drink driving then this will be on repeat and played loud to prevent me hearing the sound of cop cars creep up on my ragged screwy tail.

5 Falling Stars - Sunset Strippers
Sorry, I'm really sorry. I even put this on a jukebox in a pub the other weekend. Someone said they had bought the original, then I owned up and looks of despair were aimed in my direction.

4 Lit Up - The National
It's short and I play it a lot. Definitely my favourite driving drumbeaten National tune, and certainly to be exalted for the lines "You wear a skirt like a flag/And everything surrounds you, and it doesn't fade/Nothing like this sound I make/That lasts only for a season/ And only heard by bedroom kids who buy it for that reason". They know their audience so well.

3 (Don't Fear) The Reaper - Caesars (20)
Better than the Blue Oyster Cult version. Off the last Six Feet Under soundtrack, this is long and full and marauding. You would like it too if you heard it. Never mind that it's done by a bunch of Swedish whores-for-Jobs.

2 Daft Punk is Playing at My House - LCD Soundsystem (21)
A total Benicassim and Reading hangover. This couldn't fail to rouse me from the dead or after about midday. I also sing it pretty well too, if I happen to be in an avid audience whose gaze is directed at James Murphy and the stage and not me.

1 Title Track - Death Cab for Cutie (22)
I still love this song. The break in the middle for clearer sound. The stuff about lipstick. The slow insistent guitar chords. Haven't bought Plans though. Not after the band got totally like OC-fied (and that used to be a good thing, he says shaking his head at the Ryan brother storyline).

Finally: "Nice area Shane!"

2005-09-16T15:59:00.000Z

Clarity

My room is clean. The books are piled. Stuff is set in heaps. Pathways have been cleared. My CDs are still fucked up but at least they're all in the same place. I even hoovered. An invisible cloak of serenity has descended upon me. Along with waves of sweat.

Was just playing Ashes by Embrace. I'm waiting for Alex to come and murder me with a compilation CD and words of indignation.

2005-09-14T03:45:00.000Z

Ashes to Ashes
(Or in other words how my huge cricket geekery surfaces)

I remember when I first got the cricket addiction; how our summer game got into my bones. It was back in the 1986 when England played Australia in the last Ashes series we won. They showed them all night on the BBC: the tests, the one dayers and other one day series. England sweeped the lot (and might I add against the Windies in the one day arena). I sat down and watched it with my father (a Norwegian who soon got hooked too) as long as was humanly possible. I loved it. This also happily coincided with my introduction to the bloody hard ball and the myriad humiliating peculiarities of the game at school: amazingly I found I could bat a bit and produce prodigious outswing quite accidentally (I worked out how to bowl an inswinger last year). So my television viewing went hand in hand with a patchy playing career whose highlights include winning the 1993 Sussex Cup and which ended when I went to university and discovered that Saturday night frolicking with friends requires a lot more time than my club career would allow (that and fags corroding my lungs; or as I thought, that vital fast bowling engine). I was such a nut that I collected and read cricket histories from the age of eight. Golden olden heroes such as Jack Hobbs, Harold Larwood, Ray Lindwall (an Aussie yes, but someone I modelled my bowling action on for quite a while), Wilfred Rhodes, Gilbert Jessop, Frank Tyson, Frank Worrell, George Headley swam around my head in sharp contrast to the England team who, quite frankly, played as if they were quadriplegic numpties. As disaster and further ignominious disaster befell our national side while I grew up, I felt the searing pain of failure so keenly that I was surprised that I kept watching. The England batting collapse was a familiar leitmotif of my adolescence. Oh, did they do it again? Oh yes, they did it and sometimes spectacularly so. Why could these rubbish-meisters not put together a crushing stand, just like those Australians? Why, I'm looking at you Graeme Hick, Chris Lewis among others, couldn't you stomach the fight, you weak Pom bastards? Thus a sense of pessimism was ingrained in me. So strong was it that I fully believed on Sunday morning that Australia would induce an innings defeat, so dominant was their first innings position at the time. That's what a 16 year inferiority complex does to you.

Yesterday I finally believed in England again just as I did when I was a hopeful eight-year-old. The reflected glory felt so good. No longer would I have to view my Ian Botham videos (yes, I had three or four) to glimpse what it was like to win four Ashes series so well and so wonderfully. Other series victories against South Africa, for instance, (I won't mention the Windies who I would wish to see on top of the world pile, were they able to play their brilliant, brutal cricket again) were pleasing, but nothing compares to beating the Australians and see them make excuses pointing at their pathetic selves. We have waited so long for this and endured the agony of eight straight whippings (they were not merely defeats, they were us being pulverised) that I am not surprised that victory has seemed so sweet and so capable of swallowing and enhancing our emotions so well. These Aussies were real champions. Remember losers like Andrew Hilditch, Graham Yallop, Mike Whitney, the freakishly old looking spinner Bob Holland among many others? Those woeful Aussies were not up to the standard that we had just beaten. These were world champions and world leaders. Even in the old days the Windies were by far the best team in the world, and so the Ashes was nothing more than an amusing sideshow. In fact, we probably haven't had the strongest team in the world since the days of May, Dexter, Graveney and Truman (around the Fifties), but that is what makes this victory feel so good. In a few series time, once we have tackled Pakistan (probably 2-0 win) and India (oh God, you know how difficult it is to win in India but since I trust Duncan Fletcher's planning, let's say they sneak it 1-0) and go to Australia in their backyard and beat them then, then that we can rightly claim to be the best team in the world. That will be a day worth celebrating.

But for now we beat those arrogant, highly talented fucks. We fucking beat them. Yesssss.... (*fist pumping like a traction engine*)

Teeny Weeny Footnote

Most hated sound: Glenn McGrath's celebration "woo-hoo". What a twat? (But 5-0 eh? Snigger)

2005-09-13T14:23:00.000Z

That Life was Killing Me

I am currently making sounds like a baby. I sit in my armchair surrounded by kebab wrappers, empty Haagen-Dasz containers, Berliner Guardians, pirate DVD wrappers, cups full of fag butts and empty cherry coca-cola cans. I can't physically move or concentrate. My eyes are blurry. I have tiny orangey stains scattered all over my white t-shirt. I am in no fit state to write anything. The weekend, oh my, the weekend.

I was going to ... fuck I forgot ... oh yes, reveal my identity and all to curious strangers, but since I still write for who I work for, that's not going to happen just yet.

What was the point of this post? Back to the baby sounds...

2005-09-06T13:43:00.000Z

Nine worst songs that I have ever downloaded from I-tunes

Tony Hadley - I Can’t Make You Love Me
Do you remember? That show. The one with the failures and freaks and fame-fucked crawling all over America for tiny scraps of their self-esteem while gormless rednecks craned their necks at them as if they were at a petting zoo. People were visibly moved by Hadley’s rendition of this country torch song. I was quite impressed with the Spandau Ballet frontman’s treatment when I was watching the show (ACCIDENTALLY, might I add). So, gulp, I bought it off this website you see. Euh. I was wrong. Singers like Michelle Gayle make the cheesy and mediocre, like Hadley, look far better with their paralysing awfulness. This is tripe of the lowest order. If Bonnie Raitt’s beautiful, crushing version was a sleek lady wrapped in an elegant black dress and flowing cape; then this is a football thug in a Burton suit wiping chilli sauce off his face while trying to biff Bonnie’s lady off her stride. I pity that lady. Poor, sad lady. I also think this song makes Hadley a big gay. Just because.

Gerry Marsden - Silly Love Songs
I-tunes has no Sun Kil Moon, Mark Kozelek or Red House Painters. I despair. I turn to butchery like this, and ask myself isn’t death a grand proposition; an awfully big adventure in the big black. It’s terrible; it’s appalling; it’s like someone puking in your ear and turning your head around with his carni hands so you can inspect the vomit ringing their smiling lips. I have considered chucking my computer out of the window because it has accidentally spewed a three-second snatch of this monstrosity. Sometimes I think it would be worth it. I only wonder where did my Red House Painters version go (ten minutes long and worth every second)? A real languid and loving sigh of a song, not like Marsden’s wanking in the street like a gibbering mental patient.

Let this be a warning to all who hunt in cover version land. You will stumble once in a while and perhaps have a nasty fall.

Jars of Clay - Flood
People who should know better, i.e. actual heathens rather than Christian rock fans, have praised this tale of Noah-related inundation (would it be such bad taste if this was played over scenes from the Disaster of New Orleans? The thought actually darkens my heart). But bands with names that contain the words jars and either/or clay despite the religious connotations don’t really want to make good music. No, they want to be uptight twats who make Creed look like knife-fighting ladyboys from New Delhi. The shades of grunge echo like the wretched groans of a thousand mad cow disease victims in this gloomathon. The singer’s voice is girly, however, and offsets it quite badly. And, those violins, as if to say: respect us; strings elevate all who use them. Respect you? Ha ha ha. “Lift me up”. Up on to the scaffold if that’s at all possible (and Geri Halliwell did it better - wait, did I just write that?). There is also the entological or theological or something high-minded argument that the religious live in eternity and we live our lifespans, thus invoking a crippling polarisation among believers and non-believers. But let’s not get into that right now. It just makes me angry. And you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry. Grr.

Interpol - Direction
This bores my arse off. Seriously. As I listen to this, my arse has detached itself and is now descending the stairs and making a beeline for Bow Road. Where does the song go? Oh, I’ve just remembered the title and you know where this is going. Very Six Feet Under-y, starts like a meander through a mentalist soundcheck, builds some kind of house mood, gets a bit louder and then goes absolutely nowhere. It will probably soundtrack Nate’s stroke and shocking death (ha ha E4 watchers - in your faces - all three of you!). There is a possible place for them in the pantheon of future modernist composers. Otherwise, avoid like you would people who wear white t-shirts proclaiming where they have been on holiday.

Blues Traveller - Run Around
Horrible. There is no excuse; except that at least I never liked Hootie and the Blowjobs. Typical hoedown Bonnaroo shit. In the States there’s rock for kids with black hair and there’s the older market for people who shop at The Gap (look at me, I’m bloody Simon Reynolds without the glasses and grime records!). This is for people who like chinos, and yes, I did once, but they split like cellophane wrap. But not anymore; it seems I only wear H&M jeans. Seeing its name while browsing like a drifting loon who cares nothing for the truly precious nature of time, stoked memories, however, of all those early hours spent watching the US Top 20 or something presented by Casey “shaggy” Casem, you know, that freakin’ weird guy with bleached teeth and the voice like an older homosexual bear, and buying rubbish music as a result. Oooh it’s so smug. Let’s find these people and smash the fuckers down. With hammers.

Coldplay - Fix You
Have you seen My Penis and I, a BBC Three documentary by Laurence Barraclough? The penis in question is three and a half inches when erect. Laurence is so unhappy he shows his dick to all sorts of people who might help him come to terms with having a thimble for a sex organ. Finally, he has a plaster cast made of it. He is happy because he can see his penis (even if we can’t) and then this song plays to round off the whole strange and slightly disturbing experience. Therefore this song is about Chris Martin having a small penis and comforting other men with all his songs about small penises (they’re all written in code: I have a YELLOW pustule on my tiny penis; TROUBLE with my small penis; THE SCIENTIST says I have a miniscule penis; IN MY PLACE you would have a baby’s penis; Set the CLOCKS because all Coldplay have small cocks). My downloading this has absolutely nothing to do with any of that theorising by the way.

This has also soundtracked Paul McKenna’s new show on Sky. So Coldplay make another bundle and their music is further promoted as a panacea for the enormous pain that wracks our world. All I want to say is: “Hey Martin, Fix you and your mamma too and your daddy...”

Dido - Here with me
I’m a bad boy. This comes back to the year of watching The Box (2000-2001) at university. Dido had been drowned in the video for Stan and many more people fancied her because hardly anybody had heard her appalling Cockney fackin innit accent. So they bring this out and it becomes the theme tune to a silly show called Roswell and she starts selling more records than God.

So why buy it? Maybe it’s because I’m a sentimental bugger, and not a cunt with a bilious hatred for the world as someone has said with a reassuring grin on their face (I know it’s a composite description of myself, I know) and that I liked it for the four seconds it took to download it. But four seconds was all it took. Once I had done it, I knew I regretted it. The feelling hit and swelled the same reserves of regret that runs through me like a solid seam of black, black coal (always being formed, never diminished or burned in the crucible of optimisim). I’d say something silly to puncture just what I’ve said, so: something silly.

Marcy Playground - Sex and Candy
All the above words are really bad (Fucking and Chocolate would have been better). Look at them, they reek. This is ponderous and easily confused with songs by LFO and Bran Van 3000. There was a good reason why I didn’t buy the album when it first came out despite my encountering on every record shop visit face-to-face all those years ago. It’s absolute cack. Vapid stoner billy-bollocks that has perhaps one vaguely good line and some sophomore philosophising inspired by looking at the cover of On the Road. If the fate of music was entrusted merely to the purveyors of such pernicious fluff then music would be consigned to an unmarked grave that also happened to be a Reading Festival drop-in toilet within, oh, about five minutes.

Queensryche - Silent Lucidity (Unplugged)
I don’t have a problem with the bombastic original which I have also downloaded. It’s got a choir! I loved it when I was young and also taping stuff like Another Man’s Cause by The Shitty Levellers. But this is Live! and Acoustic! with added whooping from a bunch of ninnies. The mentality of crowds - gadzooks. But you think: what the fuck are you doing, Queensryche? You filthy long-haired pompous tits. Go back to your shanties and watch videos of yourself when people thought you might amount to something. Your lead singer looks like Terry Christian and he has a voice like a bullfrog on helium. And all your other songs sounded like a dead donkey being dragged along the road by a fast truck. And you gave yourself that name because you wanted hopeless Queen fans to think that perhaps you were a German import CD they had never seen before. Wasters.

In conclusion
So yes, I did buy all of them. We live and learn, my friends, live and learn. (At the cost of £7.11, goddamnit)

2005-08-31T10:33:00.000Z

Something different: an interview

I've deliberately misspelt the man's name in question because once, a long time ago, this was destined for some newspaper pages (suffice to say it is a j and it is ph). It never made it. Perhaps I shall elucidate the frustrating reasons why or perhaps some of it will make it in a different form. Also this was before he went to such places as Chicago and Springfield *nudge nudge* and read really shit Carl Sandburg.

A Year or More Ago in the Garden
Sufyan Stephens weaves in and out of the Covent Garden shrubbery, and greets me by putting me right on the pronunciation of his name: “Hi I’m, Soofyan”. He is wearing enough clothing to cope with any weather system, and with his ugly cross trainers, he has the powerful hint of the American tourist. It is, however, a stereotype he is all too aware of: "I didn't wear my baseball cap because I knew you would laugh at me".

Stephens is the newest pretender to the folk-rock throne; another delicate troubadour obsessed with broken hearts and relationships. But with four albums in the bag, he has already vaulted over any difficult second or third album syndrome, and seems almost brand new and proven at the same time. When Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis watched him a year ago, he believed he saw the future and signed him up: releasing his last two albums Greetings from Michigan and Seven Swans in reverse order, the latter in April and the former this month (June 28th).

Michigan was the surprise stateside hit that attracted the hawk-eyed tastemakers. This Detroit-born twentysomething had been living in New York for five years and had been gathering material, which looked back at how his own life had been entwined with the history and geography of Michigan. “Before I knew it I had quite a few songs, so it was a sentimental leaning that turned into a concept record,” he says.

The "leaning" became an album dedicated to the state he grew up in: a stream of imagined narratives, from the unemployed of Flint to melancholic widows living in towns called Paradise and girls in broken down Chevrolets travelling to places called Romulus. It is steeped in a genuine affection and deep respect, although he cannot deny there is also “a little bit of irony”. It will find a happy perch in a climate that has begun to swarm with concept records like A Grand Don’t Come For Free and Magnetic Fields’s I. Alongside them, Michigan is fighting the long-player’s battle against the tyranny of the iPod random play button, and is fighting it well.

But Michigan triggered something else in Stephens. He thought, why do one when you can do all of them? Thus, he has vowed to immortalise all fifty states in the USA on record. He admits it is a pragmatic, possibly crazy, undertaking: “It was really a promotional gimmick. We just wanted to sell records so we proposed this project, then people would be like 'oh I really need to invest in this record because it's the first in a series'". Although his tone veers towards the facetious, you can see he has laid down the gauntlet and there is no backing out. "Now I've cornered myself and I have to do it," he says in almost grim fashion. The last state, he believes, will be Hawaii when he is 77 and senile. Future highlights include the Vermont Christmas record, a Rhode Island split 7" and California "sometime in 2020". Yet you have to concede that as a promotional gimmick, it has worked beautifully.

If he has unconventional and arduous career, then it will be entirely congruent with his past. Stephens's upbringing was filled with macrobiotic food and hippy ideals, with his free -thinking mother and father applying "trial and error" parenting techniques and interesting names to their rampant brood. He is not sure if his Bongo-playing, Motown-loving father instilled a love of music in him, but he feels he had an inclination to music from birth. His first performance might have been more auspicious, however. He lip-synced the theme tune to the Karate Kid II in front of a school audience in full costume. Stephens calls it "the real low point in my musical career".

But while others might have embraced a succession of bad teenage bands, he embraced the oboe, musical theory and baroque composers. It was only in college that he dumped the aforementioned instrument because "oboeists are unhappy, never get married and are suspicious of everyone". He then took up the guitar," an instrument of real expression and affection" and discovered he had quite a pleasant singing voice too. He also became something of an instrument addict, as evidenced by the "onslaught" of twenty instruments on Michigan, all played to an "adequate standard".

His fourth album Seven Swans showed another side of Stephens's talent, and also the part of him that embraced the rock-solid certainty of the church that he felt he needed when he was growing up. He admits, however, he is “uncomfortable” talking about his Protestant faith. He says relationships with friends and lovers are what he mainly interested in, and the one he has with God is no different. He is careful to add: “I’m definitely not interested in proselytising principles or having a religious doctrine at all.”

Although he thinks of himself as a composer and arranger above all, he knows everyone is fawning over his voice. "I'm always surprised that people are drawn to my voice and I think that's why I get compared to Elliott Smith, because I'm so softly spoken. I think it's funny that it has become my most convincing instrument after I discovered it so late in the game." Stephens is adamant he feels no real kinship with that singer-songwriter crowd because he "feels more vested in narrative and storytelling”.

He isn’t afraid to admit his favourite ever song is Nick Drake’s From the Morning, even though it is really the "interesting chords and picking patterns" that inspire the drooling fan in him. And, perhaps, literature excites him even more than music. He is a devotee of the Romantic poets: especially Wordsworth and William Blake, a man who was not averse to having visions of the kind Stephens delineates on Seven Swans. He has his own literary ambitions, fostered by creative writing courses in college, and hopes to finish a collection of short stories in the next year. "My first love is fiction and I am a fiction writer first and foremost. Music is my natural conviction so I feel like I'm telling stories through my music anyway," he says.

It is difficult to imagine that Stephens has only been a full-time musician for just under a week. He has only just quit his job as a graphic designer for Time magazine and children’s schoolbooks. Before he knew it, he found himself on a plane over the Atlantic, filling in the occupation box of some form with the word 'Musician'. He felt both weird and proud. "Can you believe it?" he asks, like a child who has embarked on an amazing adventure. Then again, you think he already has. If all goes well, Sufyan Stephens has a whole continent to conquer and countless stories to reap.

2005-08-30T16:43:00.000Z

The only 15 per cent dishonest Reading Top 20

1. The Arcade Fire - Power Out/Rebellion (Lies)
2. The National - Mr November
3. Foo Fighters - Best of You
4. LCD Soundsystem - Daft Punk is Playing at My House
5. Dinosaur Jr - Raisans
6. The Futureheads - Hounds of Love
7. Iggy and the Stooges - I Wanna Be Your Dog
8. The Killers - On Top
9. Maximo Park - Graffiti
10. Pixies - Bone Machine
11. British Sea Power - Remember Me
12. Kings of Leon - King of the Rodeo
13. Sons and Daughters - Ramayana
14. Bloc Party - Banquet
15. Turbonegro - Party Animals
16. Queens of the Stone Age - Feel Good Hit of the Summer
17. Arctic Monkeys - Fake Tales of San Francisco
18. Hot Chip - Playboy
19. The Duke Spirit - Lion Rip
20. Nine Black Alps - Not Everyone

2005-08-30T10:13:00.000Z

Reading (silent A, double D)

Reading was great this year. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I arrived at 6pm on Friday and hadn't done the whole Thursday get-fucked-up-completely thing so I didn't spend the next day feeling as if my brain had been torn out and been replaced with a cactus. In fact, I left early too. I departed the campsite at 4.30 on the Monday morning in the midst of many an Apocalypse Now recreation. I had tried to sleep in a warzone, with small explosions going off every five minutes due to gas canisters being roasted, while people screamed "Trolley! Trolley!" in the distance. The cry "Burn it, burn it" rang out constantly. As I slung my rucksack on for my frosted jaunt to the station, someone said to me give us an "emo pose". I declined. Somebody said: "We should call our band Heroin and Jez. Yeah, Heroin and Jez!" I love it all really.

As it is, I am still too exhausted to do anything. Like write a proper blog post. And mention stuff like bands. But can I give out a shout-out to the Littlehampton or LA Punks (as in Little 'Ampton) who once again tried to be the rudest fuckers on site. The peak of their debauched activity saw someone write ADAM IS COOL in somebody else's faeces on some stranger's tent. Absolutely, fucking filthy disgusting behaviour, far worse than even a prison rioter, but fucking hilarious whenever I recall it. Ha-ha hee-hee.

2005-08-26T10:05:00.000Z

Five songs I’m digging
My dad Ben W. asked me to do this...

1. Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight – Whiskeytown
2. Daft Punk are Playing at My House – LCD Soundsystem
3. California – Low
4. Mr Brightside – The Killers
5. This Sporting Life – The Decemberists

Tagged sort of randomly
Wan
Chris
Tara
Anna-Marie
Alex

Gag Gig
Went to Kasabian last nite at the Astoria. I sent a photo-message to a friend that said “Kasabian are messianic shit”. It’s this outstretched arms, worship me like I’m your fucking god attitude that sticks in my craw as a large twig would do. Kasabian are all widdly keyboards and compulsive basslines and non-words like “Nanana-Boommmm!” As if engaging in an anthropological experiment I spent much time looking back at the audience, most of whom had their arms up in their air as if they were expecting to have the manna of heaven delivered to them. I’ll credit KSBN this much though: they sure have a huge sound that verily engulfs the gig-goer; they filled the venue with it with ease, and they had better lighting technicians than either of the support acts. But it is all a swaggering, cock-waving sound that is ultimately empty and futile. Moody bollocks for moody car adverts played by Prada models. The way they look is 23 per cent of their appeal. I still think there’s no there, there. People think they’re cool even though they are certainly not cool. They’re very good at maintaining the illusion, however. And I laughed when my guestlist-self heard tickets going for as much as £70. If only everybody else in the place knew how little I cared about this music that was sending them into a mindless frenzy.

The State I was In
I was also quite fucked actually.

Finally
I’ll see yer in the fields of Berkshire, me hearties. The allegedly muddy fields that is.

2005-08-25T12:37:00.000Z

Actualites

(Forgive the lack of an accent but I've never learned how to manipulate this screwy keyboard)

I'm going to Reading tomorrow. For sentimental reasons. Not because I like the smell of burning toilets and wet cow shit and the snot of youngsters trying to out-sick each other.

I'm seeing Kasabian tonite. Against my will. Kinda. Sorta.

I went to see an agent yesterday. This means I almost have an agent. But not quite. I shan't count that chicken yet.

By this time next week I will be free as a poverty-stricken bird.

I had two Big Macs for lunch. Granted it cost me £2, but yet again I feel the Macdonalds food cling to my insides as if it was seeded with small vicious, greased hooks.

I have to stop checking my gmail every 20 minutes. It only invites disappointment.

Yesterday's weather really did depress me. Ugh. The oppression.

Goodbyee.

(That was a pop cult reference there)

2005-08-21T21:20:00.000Z

Last Nite
Oh melancholy Sunday is here again. The sabbath of laundry, train journeys and French tourists taking the piss out of maps of my home town has come and gone. Sundays always look the same to me. Like bleached out grey. Or something blanched or faded. I think it's also time to give up the alcohol (you don't believe me? Well, watch me never buy a round again, you say, but you never did yadda yadda), it makes me wake up at 4 in the morning then stay up, so that by the time I end up at an indie rave (last night at The Scala - The Grates were bouncy and Australian; this other band, basslines blah blah), unable to get up, dance and talk properly as I am so zombified by alcohol and sheer lethargy. Which then made me get a minicab for £12 at 3.45am, thus emptying my wallet of all its funds after the horrendously priced bar (£3.80 for a can of Red Stripe, yes, £3fucking80p) succeeded in almost entirely demolishing it, to Oxford Street because I could not be arsed working out nightbuses other than the 25. So I got home and sat outside the flat on a recycling box as I chained three cigarettes and wrote doleful haikus on my mobile's Create Messages and used unfortunate phrases like 'discordant crows' (that is surely the true essence of evil in alcohol, is it not? Crapulous poesy), while scaring the shit out of my flatmate who thinks that a burglar is having some unsuccessful congress with the frontage. It was 5.30 when I flopped on to my duvet like a dead thing (I was thinking a whale perhaps, but that's just silly) and I was still pissed, hnurr hnurr. Thought I'd get some sleep did you? I got up two hours later. I still haven't drifted off.

So apologies if you thought I might have done something weird during the last few days, like not think that bags printed with the legend "we are indie" are a great idea. Drink is bad.

But this is all smoke and mirrors. I'm thinking about something else.

I have to admit I feel I am actually paralysed by the amount of stuff on my plate at the moment: meetings, proposals, applications, championships, festivals, rendezvous after rendezvous (how do you pluralise that? Let's not chance it). Can't I just curl up in a ball and forget about all these important, life changing/enhancing matters. I want to be a Lotus Eater again. Or at least that's how I feel at 10.30pm on a Sunday.

Sorry, if what I have written is uninspired, but that's what you get when you realise that you have watched three films accidentally (Birthday Girl, The Longest Day, The Count of Monte Christo) in one day. The brain may be going. On holiday?

2005-08-18T07:13:00.000Z

Dead Time

Sometimes I wake in before 9am, my normal reveille. I can kill ten minutes pretty quickly, but an hour invites abject directionless. This is strange because I came back at midnight last night after many hours travelling, having popped home (that's home, home) for exactly half an hour so I could retrieve all my new PIN numbers. The problem is I have no idea which one goes with which card; three of them being Halifax-related. It's bankcard lottery. Look, it's only 8.25am. I can't think of anything to write...

Apart from this
I've been reading Harry Thompson's biography of Peter Cook. Of course, the man was brilliant, a genius, a cruel bastard with the manners of a Georgian gentleman, but the one thing that stands out is that he went to St Bede's prep school in Eastbourne. Hey, I went to St Bede's in Eastbourne. How did this nugget of information pass me by? In eight years at the school how come nobody mentioned that the greatest comedy genius of all time learned, ate and played the footer some forty years there before? Why wasn't there a statue of him? Somewhere? Even behind a hedge or down by the tennis courts? In one of the draughty toilets? I don't get it. The only previous famous alumni I can remember in this early morning state is Ed 'cocaine nosejob' Giddins. But then again, he played cricket and didn't make comedy so funny that it loosens your bowels.

Cook was also addicted to amphetamines for a few years. But then isn't everybody? No? Okay, I'll just shut up then... wow, I've just remembered that I've got a Ginsters Buffet Bar in the fridge.

2005-08-14T20:48:00.000Z

In a Room
(Hey, Dodgy! reference ahoy ... man, I really liked that song ... TEN YEARS AGO - apologies so many conflicting and stupid emotions in that sentence)

I was going to clear my slum/room up tonite but then I actually had a fight with my Powerbook which involved lots of pushing and pressing for an hour. The silver bastard refused to cooperate, had a strop and switched off the screen. So I gave up and decided to type this. The act of hygiene would have cleared up my Sunday-stressed mind (lots of things are happening and colliding and making my heart sink into my diaphragm at the moment), but instead I have decided to stare at the stuff on my floor in the hope that they will reveal themselves as a rather genius Magic Eye puzzle that has the message: HELP IS ON THE WAY (hey, Juno reference ahoy!... man, I really liked that song).

Floor contents: My nice umbrella (so that's where the fucker is), Two Legs t-shirt, advance copy of Jasper Ffforde's The Big Over Easy, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - The Lyre of Orpheus CD, June copy of The Guardian Guide, crumpled striped Topman polo shirt, a Boots receipt, a blank TDK CD, a Selfridges shopping bag, an empty 500ml Coke bottle, a pair of grey Gravis trainers, an empty case of The Book Group DVD series 2 (hey Jim Butler who gave it one star - up yours!!!!), one rolled up black sock, some green Rizlas, a Screen Select DVD prolly In America, If They Move Kill 'Em by David Weddle, a Muji patterned white collar shirt, an empty bottle of Omega-3 oil pills, a bulldog clip, a Soul of Springfield green shoulder bag that should have contained my wallet (ohgod, I've just remembered ... ouch), an April copy of The Evening Standard, Brian Jonestown Massacre - Give it Back! CD, a full box of Oreos I bought in Spain, Germolene with local anaesthetic, a free Word CD, a bottle of anti-perspirant - Lynx, khaki Carhartt hoody .... of course, I could go on.

Only petrol or my industry will solve this. Neither is at hand at the moment.

A friend asks "Are you hard yet?" and I am sickened to my core
I really really hate the way my head looks from the side, as well as the way it makes my nose look beaky. Can someone just club it into a less cuboid shape next time they see my face in profile? Such an act of mercy would be much appreciated.

Right now
My CD player is refusing to play my Sufjan Stevens' single The Dress Looks Nice On You. But I thought it did.

2005-08-13T11:01:00.000Z

Look

Famous ... in a rubbish way

Bought a new wallet. For some reason this happened in Topman on Oxford Street. Thankfully, it wasn't a Union Jack influenced design. And of course I'm still paranoid about swarthy Spaniards using my identity to buy designer clothes and cars that I could never actually afford to drive.

2005-08-10T15:00:00.000Z

Recap

I still feel permanently drunk. I woke up at 4pm yesterday groaning like a spectacular cliff-face in a particularly harsh storm then listened to lots of CDs I hadn't heard for ages. I then went to Victoria to pick up (How come every time I have a photobooth picture done, it is always of a different person?) a new railcard - "You can only have one replacement!" - , smothered my brain in some much needed Omega-3 fats courtesy of some M&S salmon, and came home where my cards have not arrived and my 12-year-old sister wondered why I hadn't bought here any Marlboro Lights. Cheeky bitch.

Fortunately, my vision is no longer blurred and I didn't even have a cigarette yesterday.

Memory was another matter though. I couldn't even say goodbye properly to some of the people at Stansted because I could not even remember their names - "Bye, errr" - so I just slinked away with a rather distraught expression on my face. I even kept on thinking someone was called Simon. I don't know where that came from.

Spaced out? You should have seen me try to find Brick Lane after I got off the bus.

For some godawful reason I also decided to watch the director's cut of Alexander today before I came to this lovely provincial library. Boringgggggggggg. But I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a few hours before and proceeded to cry just when Clementine suggests "So go". I get a bit emotional at times like this.

Gah.

2005-08-09T04:27:00.000Z

Between the mountains and the sea

Apols for the lack of posting. But fuck it, it's an arse when something as anonymous and depersonalised as this to the strange visitor can't really go anywhere. Also I have been to Benicassim where the sun was merciless. Spain burnt my arms and face a caramel smudge. The music was great. The people (95% of whom were complete strangers) were great. Really really. I even started to believe that LCD Soundsystem weren't completely, utterly, butterly overrated.

But GODDAMNIT. I lost my fucking wallet. Some fucker picked it up off the ground and ran away. Some fucker probably ransacked the cards and dumped the rest down a foul shit-piss cocktail toilet which was standing only ten metres away. This doesn't excuse the fact that I am a complete fucking tool for forgetting to put it in my bag. The policia were kind of helpful, if owners of stony faces as hardy as the surrounding ranges, and I'm sure they'll phone me in Spanish because as everyone on this earth believes if we just speak our first and only language to each other, then some fucking meaning must come through. Oh wanker.

Fuck it I'll say it again. My wallet has vanished. Credit cards, work ID, railcards, sentimental mugshots, etc etc are, at least to me, nevermore. I have been brooding (in various ways and states for the past 29 hours) and tomorrow I have to tour our dour capital visiting various institutions and asking for their sympathy (and additional £5 charges). I am not a complete idiot, I am the fucking idiot, more idiotic than Dostoevsky's and Iggy Pop's Idiots combined in their imperial idiocy. Man oh shit fuck. No wait a minute: FUCK!

Christ I'm fucking knackered. Excuse the snarkiness (at myself), I got back three hours ago and have been on the net ever since. Bathwater goes tepid when you realise you have not looked at the web for six days (especially when it is your current job) and have not indulged in countrywide ecstasy by beatin Australia (heeeee-heeee).

And I think my neuroses weigh a ton.

Well, wasn't that a wonderful festival review
The result is that I am putting an end to this blog and starting a new one next month called, hmmm, let me think ... The New Solution. It might have pictures of stuff such as orange soled feet and people sleeping on coaches. Who knows. Actually I know that I have made people paranoid by launching a 'surprise' photography spree. Hey. (Gap for witty rejoinder, but fuck it the sun is almost up and I'm going to sleep.) But I promise it will be fun. However, this is not to say of the two regular other blogs I currently do that are shit in their loveable way, but which I promise you will NEVER EVER SEE. Yes, I have been cheating on all those who know me, by projectile vomiting bloggery into the world which only some poor other unfortunates will ever be subject too. The name of my newest one (started in May) is the greatest in the history of the universe despite the appallingly distasteful content.

Let's do this avantgarde stylee
Bleaarrrrggghhh.

Murrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Silly word. Bollocks filler. Jismed flaps. White chasms of guano. Clatterbucket fuckweeeeeddsss.

(This is my freak out post. Everyone has been doing them while I'm away, so why not j
oin in.)

Look what festivals and dreadlockedgypsies do to you. Mad dogs and Englishmen in the midday sun. Of bloody course.

Ringstumps

Plop.

XXXXXXXXXXX

2005-07-27T14:17:00.000Z

Fear of the future
I'm quite pained and feel quite uninspired at the moment. Both of which are vital factors concerning web content. On the other hand, I have just seen Anita Roddick in a local cafe. That's the second time. She does look better in the flesh, though my memory yields up a wizened old hag with frizzy hair.

Here. Go on. Have it. It's computer Tetris. Just use the arrows on your keyboard and say arrivideci to substantial portions of your life.

2005-07-21T16:14:00.000Z

Blimey
That was a shade narcissistic.

But that's the problem with rolling news. It plants evil shit in your mind, while gluing your eyes to the screen.

2005-07-21T12:27:00.000Z

Deja Vu
In case there's a repeat of 7/7, I'd just like to say I'm fine.

I thought I'd post something.

2005-07-09T00:06:00.000Z

I May Be

Pissed as a motherfucker and listening to the Isley Brothers, but something glorious happened tonite.

Yes. Maxwell Trotter Ward was evicted. I don't know whether I had enough faith in the good British public to evict this fackin' scab-contaminating, fat-faced, facking cockney semi-racist, unbelievably idiotic, shitty water flinging streak of weasel pus on the face of humanity, but they did. I thank you. I really do.

May people fling faeces-laced water at him in the street and see how he likes it.

2005-07-08T16:00:00.000Z

Reflections
Yesterday was a really bad day. And I mean really bad. It puts everything in perspective. Bad is not when England loses at football. Bad is not a flash flood drenching your campsite at a music festival. Bad is death touching and shaking your life so you evaluate the whole way you live and go about things. I avoided Live 8 because there is something so decadent about it that I can’t buy into it (what about the actual African leaders or dictators? I kept on thinking). The heart was in the right place, of course. But I mean how does Bob Geldof feel now? The wind has been sucked from his sails, and now, as a Londoner, I’m sure he even knows this. Worrying about our own safety, no matter how minute the real dangers to our lives, will always take precedence over Africans starving thousands of miles away. It may be the victory of selfishness over altruism, but it is only human nature to do so. The events of yesterday morning, which I watched crystallise from the disorder of rumour, was like being bitten by a venomous snake. Only after a few hours can you feel the poison that felt like ruining every fibre of your body begin to leave your body. A little will remain for the foreseeable future, perverting the way you see everything and everybody.

Strange that for one week, London has really truly been the centre of the world. Unbelievable the way it has become so. So many people phoned and texted me yesterday that what little battery I had on my mobile had run out by midday. Therefore, I arrived home to a whole load of messages asking me if I was okay, or if I was caught up in the shit. But I wasn’t. I got into work on time and got home on time on the DLR (though the return trip was carried out with 200 per cent more vigilance). No delays. It seemed surreal to say the least.

The night’s climax (separated for reasons of taste)
I then sat down to eat some ravioli while watching the second half of The Sorrow and the Pity (the bourgeois decadent in his skate t-shirt says), when my fucking nose started gushing blood. Okay, I thought it will stop; it always does. Only it didn’t. It went on for three hours, dripping faster and harder as it went on. I filled half a small bin with bloody rags that I had vainly shoved up my nose and clots like shot out of my nostrils chunks of stringy liver. I looked like Andrew WK on the front of his debut album (remember him?). Yet it didn’t finish there (no, how could it?). I ingested so much blood that I got diarrhoea. Which was great. Shitty end to a shitty day.

At least England beat Australia by nine wickets. At least.

2005-06-28T15:31:00.000Z

Glasto and absent fiends

I thought that you would like to read this nice little exchange between friends. One of whom didn't go to Somerset last weekend.

Greetings from Glasto

Dear Cunt

Thank you for your concerned and caring answerphone message of Friday morning (I cackled while asking if he had drowned - me). Despite the freakish weather conditions, my companions and I had an extraordinarily good time at the Glastonbury Festival of Performing Arts. My personal enjoyment of the past few days was heightened just that bit more by the knowledge that you weren't there to share in it. Expect a full festival diary to appear on my blog in the next few days - that way, you might get somewhere close to learning what you missed out on, and in turn become a more bitter, twisted, black-hearted little cocksucker than you are already.

Yours sincerely

That bloody student

PS There's a good chance I might be going to the V Festival for the Sonic Youth day. How do you like THAT, huh?

My reply

Dear supertwat,

Despite the sarcasm, cynicism irony and jest that I layer on, yes, I
knew that you would have a bloody good time. How could I ever doubt
it? IT'S GLASTONBURY.

The fact is all these British festivals are getting a bit samey don't
you think? After 27 of the blighters I'm getting a bit sick of them.
So I chose Benny Casem over Glasto because it's in Spain and is near a
beach and bands finish at 7 in the morning. I also welcome the
opportunity to fraternise with Ectsasy-selling gypsies.

I had convinced myself over the weekend that I had been to Glastonbury
four times, only I counted back and realised I had been five times, so
they've all merged into one big muddy sunburnt motherfucker. Because I
would still not have brought wellies or brought enough money to
purchase them, and might have slithered around in the unique diarrhoea
quality mud that covers Pilton Farm for three days, the thought of not
going is actually quite soothing.

And, of course, you missed the TV coverage. I bet you wish they
repeated it the next weekend don't you. DON'T YOU? Jo Whiley still
couldn't sit with two feet on the studio floor. She had to have one
filthy wellie stuck beneath her on the once immaculate sofa. Yeuchhh.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

PS Yeah, but you've seen Sonic Youth. More than once.

Also I've heard that nowadays V Festivalgoers have to suck a replica
of Richard Branson's cock on the way in, so they fully surrender
themselves to the corporate monster.

2005-06-24T13:59:00.000Z

Getting what you wish for

And Lo. The rain gods listened and it rained the piss down. It precipitated like a hateful motherfucker making mud and misery. And the raindancer sat in his London office looking at many pictures of water, water everywhere, mixed in with raw sewage from the Portaloos. MWUH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

An even more triumphant Ha! The Dead 60s were cancelled outright. Twatterkins. God is cool.

And if I hear more than the one person I've already read on Q's Shitty Glastonbury Blog say it's all about the Dunkirk Spirit, or that the site looks like the frigging Somme, I will personally make a supersize batch of napalm, hire a helicopter and spray the site with liquid fire and righteous vitriol. No matter how much it costs to my liberty or bank balance. I was there in '97 and '98. I remember the despair, the wonderful beautiful despair that rose in me and killed every last morsel of my spirit. I remember the way my homemade beach windbreak, made of a binliner and some bamboo I had nicked from the garden was taken for a jet-ride into oblivion by the merciless winds of Somerset. I remember.

Right that's enough hyperbolic bollocks. Back to, er, I'm not sure what. Work. Ah....

2005-06-19T15:44:00.000Z

Sunday Sizzle

It gets all hot and I feel like moaning. And I believe I have every right to because I have been travelling on a fucking London bus. The searing heat made me want to kill someone. Anyone. I am now a human radiator. There is a thin film of moisture enveloping my whole body. Glow I do.

I could be doing something constructive, but then I stayed up all night. Funny what Brighton beach barbecues can do to you (note that is beach with a lower case 'b' Ameriquains; not the BB where that guy from Mysterious Skin was taken to and, er, you know, RAPED VICIOUSLY ASS-WAYS). YES. I fear that bums have become my thing. Because of you know, that stuff that I love talking about; the stuff that is so car crash in quality, hmmm, the weather has truly fried my brains. Today though has thrown up a euphoric surprise: Bangladesh beats Australia. YESSSSS - BANGLA-BLOODYRUBBISH-DESH MULERATES the fucking arrogant yellow-wearing hunks of arrogant shitpiece motherfucker AUSSIES. Truly, this brand of schadenfreude has filled up my heart till it spills all over and makes huge stains all over my clothes. And I've just found out that we've just beaten them. The Aussies are fucking four time losers IN ONE WEEK. Now, let's cross our fingers, no, make that every limb and bendy part of our body. If England regain the Ashes, I promise to do something like, really worthwhile. What you ask me? Um, bungee-jump for cancer. Give sex-jobs to poor stroke victims. Something nice like that.

Just downloaded the Editors' last two EPs. Nope, they're not the new Joy Division, which means, they're not the new new Interpol either. Moody people wearing black. How could such intimations arise? I bought them because I am watching T4's Pop Bollocks on the Beach. I feel I have to cleanse my soul somehow. Lemar is on; I admire the fact he was the only talented Fame Academy first series contender. Pity, the voting public really are subconsciously racist and will vote with their single brain cell (Jambo over Kwame? WHAT. THE. FUCK. ! .). Where, I ask, is David Sneddon? Cleaning toilets in mental hospitals probably. Wait, he should be so lucky. Someone probably ordered him killed and disembowelled. I still think Lemar's stuff is a bit lame tho; he's too restrained. He should try the pimp daddy shit for a bit; sell some crack to children - character building stuff. Mario was on. I admit it okay, I quite like Let Me Love You. I'll leave it at that. He does like like Chris Rock did in New Jack City though. Doves were on. The people at the front took the opportunity to ignore them (they had a really bad sound mix; Jimi Godwin's vocals sounded as if he was muffling them into some curtains) and gurn at the cameras, like the West Country inbred dolts that they are and will always be. Audio Bullys rode in on Nancy Sinatra's coat-tails (actually does she wear a coat? She loves in LA after all) Any band whose music translates in the brain into phrases along the lines "FACKIN' HELL WE'RE HARD GEEZERS!' deserve to be raped by Evander Holyfield and other ex-heavyweight champions of the world who have fallen on hard times and appeared on reality TV shows. And shut up Lemar - 'You guys have been amazing!" he says. I think he means thank you for not chucking bottles of urine-sand muck muck at me. Rachel Stevens is coming on soon. Will she ever age? Does she have the white bits of her eyes that everyone else has? Plus loads of starfuckers and famewhores and the Bolton beanpole and Steve Jones. Rachel likes his body. Commentary stop.

I think you deserve a top 25. You prolly won't like what I give ya. In that it's my i-tunes top 25 most played songs. Stuff on my stereo therefore (The National 'I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders', Sleater-Kinney - Jumpers, The Well - Smog etc) will not be there.

25 Strict Machine - Goldfrapp (3 plays)
Alison gets narked quite easily. I realised this when she ordered me to prove I knew the works of Ennio Morricone by naming as many of them as I could in 30 seconds. When I turned off the tape she made jokes about Guardian taking the piss out of Madonna and abortions or something. Still, this is their T4 hit. There should be a place in the world for Goldfrapp. I think there already is. In a dark cabaret full of sadomasochists and leather-fuck pervs.

24 Ohio - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Angry protest song that gets in your bones. Unlike woolly shit written by Geldolf (a fucking prick if you ask me; I don't think the Chinese will discern between Keane and an African band and will 'switch off' because they don't know the latter; a man who has proven he has a shitty shitty taste in music) or Ure.

23 Jessica - Adam Green
Interviewed Adam once too. He dresses up as a cool kid but knows that his overwhelming nerdishness is tattooed on his face. He was a sanctimonious prick. Thankfully this song about La Simpson, the girl with melted cheese for a brain, goes some way to redeeming himself. Perhaps about 1/10 of the way. After 4 years.

22 Betcha By Golly Wow - The Stylistics (4 plays)
It's soppy but it is the stylistics and done with panache. Was led to this by Prince's pointless but still good version. Makes me want to buy The Delfonics. Not more Stylistics oddly enough

21 Bonzo Goes to Bitburg - Ramones
Live. Quicker. Angrier. Possibly.

20 Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole - Martha Wainwright
Everett True's interview with her in Plan B suggested she was nothing more than an actress who wanted to talk about her craft rather than anything interesting. I want to hear lovely lies Everett, not dissection. I still love you Martha. Do you hear me? Your clothes (that black poloneck), your stark songs, your broken dreams and croaky ballads.

19 Wichita Lineman - Glen Campbell
It's a goddamn classic. Anybody who disagrees had better slice off their earlobes with garden secateurs and sautee them with crushed garlic over a medium heat. The title belies the universality of the song's sentiments. I'm not sure I wrote what I meant to write there.

18 Baby Now That I've Found You - The Foundations
The Farrelly Brothers' favourite British soul group. Sorta like the 1960s UB40. But not shit and whiny.

17 You're Quiet - Brendan Benson
Chris, you should cover this not Good to Me. Because IT'S BETTER. Yes, I'm wondering too. Why the hell did I buy this for 79p? Was it because I was sitting in bed, and walking seemed like too much toil? You might think that but I couldn't possibly incriminate myself.

16 Criticize - Alexander O' Neal
I make no apologies for choosing this prime hunk of shoulder-padded, humungously coiffured 80s soul-wank. The video sucked me in. I was watching a documentary on video girls (in other word hip hop honeys) today on MTV and realised that things haven't really changed. Only now a days they wear a lot less clothes and walk in far slower motion and don't play instruments anymore. O'Neal is a dirty genius. His voice is soul gone wrong but still compelling. I bet he taxed a lot of ass during that filthy fuck everything decade. Don't you wish you could write songs about how pissed off you were with the haters, while wearing a pin-striped suit and Magnum moustache and being surrounded by bevys of women whose hair double as avaries

15 I Don't Want to Wait - Paula Cole (5 plays)
Another howler from me. No, I really do like this song. No, it is not about the Dawson-stein and his logorrheaic endeavours by the creek. It is about men going off to war. The howler is that I utterly forgot that I had bought the DC soundtrack at Xmas in one of those 'have a HMV voucher, must buy loads of shit I normally wouldn't contemplate' sprees. I know, I know the criminal records are starting to build up. But hear me now: I won't go without a fight, you bastards.

14 Love is a Battlefield - Pat Benatar
Right on you hairbanded, badly named woman, whos dress sense was mulerated in Fast Times At Ridgemont High. RIGHT FUCKING ON. I watched my sister watch this in a scene from 13 Going on 30. It's a preposterous song, no doubt. But, er, I like it. And it was a favourite of Rachel Corrie Martyr Girl.

13 Speed of Sound - Coldplay
I've never bought a Coldplay record in its physical form. Yep, slap me on the back. I interviewed this lot as well back when they were playing The Social in Nottingham (you know room enough for two people and maybe a small dog) not Enormodomes where those who worship them can whip themselves into mindless weeping frenzies. You can see why some black hip-hop artists name check Chris Martin. It's because he's really the new Phil Collins. Back to reminiscing: Fresh out of uni, only the singles Shiver and Don't Panic had come out. My verdict? Bland blokes with fuck all to say. The opposite of crazed geniuses. Boring devoted artisans. They were probably waiting till the fame machine was going to fuck them, but they still haven't said anything interesting after fame has rammed its big one so far up their rectums that it is now poking out of their collective gullets. The interview was so bad I didn't even write it up, even when they played a new song called Yellow which you knew was going to conquer indie-schmindies the world over. I wager that they will never ever say anything interesting. Even Martin saying shareholders are evil is a nothing saying. If he says he is why is he still in cahoots with EMI? Why doesn't he just release his own albums? Why does he have to be signed up the the Corporate Machine if you're so worried about the effect of it? Everything Martin says in this respect is worthless. It just makes him into a whiny cunt with millions of pounds, a fruit for a daughter and an Oscar winner blonde wife and a mother-in-law, recently widowed mother-in-law (Blythe Danner does something ermmmm; poor lovely woman). This song, yeah, I bought it. It was just there. It's okay. Won't buy the album though. Wait a minute ... that fucking twat Geldof. He could make more money than Live 8 just by cashing in all his assets (the media companies) and property and so doubly help mankind by putting Fifi, Fairy Dust Buster, Peach Melba and Gorgonzalala or whatever the fuck he called his spoiled Yatesian brood on the street where they can starve to death like Africans. Perhaps they could move to Ethiopia and starve to get the right attention. This self-righteous prick must be ignored. At all fucking costs. As long as Geldof has his millions, his words are like turds ejected from his mouth into your face. They are that worthless. And no I didn't text for one of his White Supremacist concerts. Ms Dynamite? What about Dizzee? Like the former has more global appeal than the latter after going to have a baby and then recording no music. WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE MR GELDOF? You fucking jumped-up tramp! You humourless shock-haired fuck-bollocks! You narrow-minded cunt you! You should have stayed on Grumpy Old Men, where you belonged. Could have adopted some poor African kids, but instead decided to leave them vulnerable to AIDS and maize shortages. And that's not just the sleep-deprivation screaming in me and driving this keyboard. There be righteous anger swelling in my diaphragm.

12 Uptown Again _ The Afghan Whigs (6 plays)
AND ANOTHER THING: Isn't Hey Lyla by Oasis the biggest, worse hunk of shite you have ever heard. It's an anthem out of sync and which does everything wrong. People who bought it should be marked for the rest of their lives; because quite frankly I don't want to touch them, talk with them or even wipe my bodily fluids on them. On to number twelve then; I haven't warmed to the Twilight Singers as much as the Whigs, but that is to be expected, that is the conventional rule. I thought 1965 was a bit disappointing, except for this mighty, pounding relentless dirge of briliance: strings, the way Dulli enunciates 'Babeeeee', the line 'Baby, you cry too much, I'm tired of the sound, such a baby'. I want to say that to someone before I die, in the appropriate situation.

11 Solsbury Hill - Peter Gabriel (7 plays)
I like Peter. But then he left Genesis, and look what happened; he birthed a monster. This is his metaphor for leaving the group. His heart goes boom-boom-boom. The intro is too long but I just love the strings or brass, my instrument discerning skills are not up to scratch. I would write more about it, but this is beyond explaining. I suppose I can say that I saw the video but was disappointed by the production values (hah! I watch a Marx Brothers film and I saw I'm disappointed with the production values). Kids today are twats.

10 The Boys of Summer - Don Henley
It's summer. I want to be jumping in the monochrome surf in slow motion with a beautiful girl in a bikini as a drummer with a penchant for buying tanks sings in the background. Who can explain the alchemises of bollocks into genius. Who can indeed. The 80s trademark pop guitar and drums sound has found its way into me, and I cannot let go.

9 Hey Jealousy - Gins Blossoms
1994. The year I started to look for different music (Natural Born Killers soundtrack, Weezer, Jeff Buckley, Now 24). This is doomed romantic songs about drinking, dying or getting arrested and fantastic regret. Someone's death inspired it which makes this one of the greatest songs in history. I can't be bothered to google whoever it was. Probably another doe-eyed loser who was too perceptive to live. Notice the excellence of the word "hey' in the title. As if the singer was tapping Jealousy (a rather mean looking fellow who snipes at you from behind a pot plant) and going to have a chat with him about how fucked up life has got. You could say this is soft Foo Fighters. You could. You could have said a lot of things.

8 Title Track - Death Cab for Cutie
The first track off We Have the Fact and We're Answering Yes, their best ever album and the reason why I used to champion these buggers (they don't need any help, not after the Hand of Seth) to everyone, who said they're a bit moany aren't they? I love the way something is switched on halfway through. The chugging monotony and resignation. The fact that it's really a short story set to music, not a song. Ignore the silliness of that last remark.

7 Rebellion (Lies) - Arcade Fire
The way it goes in. The way it builds. This is the way. LIES! LIES! LIES! It has the feel of a contained epic like much else on Funeral. Why is nobody making music like this? Why don't fucking Coldplay try? Why the fuck do we have twatterkins like the Dead 60s trying to break through with their completely derivative rubbishness and succeeding, moderately at least? Why am I swearing so much today? Oh yes, it is the symptom of an unimaginative mind.

6 Une annee sans lumiere - Arcade Fire
Why is nobody making music like this? Why don't fucking Coldplay try? But seriously, seriously. I keep on playing this for one reason. The point at 2.45 mins when it turns into a skittery freakout punctuated by 'heys!'. I keep on playing it. Live, it is just mwah! Dancey dance dance dance.

5 Silent All These Years - Tori Amos
Rape song. I still find it really quite moving. I remember the first time I saw th video back in the days when I didn't spend hours poking the tyre of flesh that encompasses my mid-riff and didn't scratch a spot amongst my stubble till it bled over my newsprinted hands. The whiteness, the carwheeling box, the strange stuttering film. Forceful. Confessional. If this song came out right now they would be chucking money at her to write the Pelzer-style memoir. We live in sick and stupid times, my friends.

4 Millionaire - Kelis
My favourite Kelis song. I always liked her. I even went to see her at Glasto a few years ago when nobody would come with me and see her cover Nirvana and jump around in a huge tent, while I marvelled at the amount of baggies that carpeted the ground. Yes, I asked people if they wanted to see that mad woman who sings 'I hate you so much right now' (yes, I know, it's called Caught Out There, pedantic cocksmokers). They went 'huh'. They might have gone to see The Levellers. Don't worry it probably wasn't you? But then again I might just be saying that, because I don't want to tear into your soft sensitive feelings, you wonderful bastard.

3 Cowbell Blues - The Tenderfoot 9 plays
I got Chris to put this on in The Rest Bar. The reaction was typical of phillistines who have never heard of Dave Gedge. May small demons roast the soles of their feet with a sweet onion sauce. It's all about regret and missing opportunities. The Tenderfoot do these sort of Love on the Dole songs very well, beautifully in fact, fucking genius-like, IT'S BOSS I TELLS YA. Co me on let's be having ya, you grrrrrrrrs. Of course, that example of agression could never be found in a Tenderfoot song. Which is a good thing.

2 We Built This City - Starship
I can't really defend this one. Words like 'hoopla' and 'mambo' are used probably due to lack of vocabulary. The title makes no sense and the song style makes a nonsense of the lyrics. It's written by people who didn't build cities on rock and roll but built their career on inane pop schlock ripe for feeding to the bovine masses. But still, I love listening to this piece of shit. If I was a pig and this was shit, I'd roll around in it, and I'd love it. It's hard to explain. Okay, slap the handcuffs on me, I'll come quietly, but not before the number one...

1 The Boys of Summer - The Ataris
Yes. Look. It's more Summer Boys. But wait. It's different. It's not just another non-ironic cover This motherfucker rocks. Plastic punks pump the riffs in and what you get is something I listen to loads. They change the lyrics too. Just to show they are edgy people living on the edge and eating Pizza Hut Edge pizzas while looking at the walls covered with posters of The Edge eating Edge pizzas while standing on the edge of a cliff, or perhaps, even a table, they change the reference to a "[Grateful] Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac" to a "Black Flag sticker'. Yep, these guys are radical with a capital TOSSERS (which doesn't hide the fact that I've listened to this song a lot, and, er, sung along. Hey! Right now I'm listening to Death Disco. It could be the first step on the road to atonement. Also I purchased the Smokewagon cover of BPB's I See A Darkness. I haven't played it much for the simple fact that it is complete and utter shit. This shit is not bananas, it's really really shitty shit. You can not imagine its excrementness. I'll send you a CD-R if you want.

So what is the moral of today's lesson: I promise to have a better taste in music from now on. Yet temptation will be hard to resist (me ripping off Oscar Wilde? With my reputation?). Let's hope Glastonbury turns into Mudville again. It makes me feel better sitting at home to see photos of dirt-encrusted willies, or even better makeshift binliners, wrapped around the feet of some suicidal festival goer. The memories of survivors too will only get better in the remembering.

Oh
Go see the movie Baadasssss! before it disappears from cinemas. Most uplifting docudrama I seen this year. STICK IT TO THE MAN! That's what Mario van Peebles would tell Chris Martin. Actually he'd probably just batter him to death with a stick with a nail stuck in it. At least that's what I'd hope he do.

(Man, I can't be bothered to proof all this. Me bed now)

2005-06-17T20:39:00.000Z

Friday Night...

...tonight I am watching The Sorrow and The Pity, or as it should be called French people are contrary wankers aren't that? What a way to start the weekend.

BTW I did try the 100 per cent negativity thing elsewhere in the cyber-universe. I have to admit, I negged myself out after only five lines. I think I prefer to dilute my vitriol and serve it in cultural-related chunks. Other than that my brain feels like it has been pulverised and colonised.

2005-06-10T10:44:00.000Z

Thought for the Day
I'm thinking about doing a Derek and Clive version of this blog. I'm also thinking the background will be black and the content will be bile of assorted hues.

Mental Jukebox #1: Perfect Skin - Lloyd Cole and The Commotions (believe it or not, for the last four years I have kept record, including date and time of what song has been going around my head at that particular moment. Some day I will write them all down in a list, right here. It will be mighty. And possibly embarrassing - oh my God, is that the Backstreet Boys?)

2005-06-09T22:41:00.000Z

Hey!

David Smyth says about the DJ gig last nite: "the lack of interaction between the band members made it hard to believe that anyone would have found this to be a magical reunion". WHAT? Did he expect Mascis and Barlow to lube up and express their love via the medium of sexual intercourse and whooping cries of amour, after all these years and all the acidic acrimony? Fuckwit alert. Actually make that former Impact magazine music editor shitsucker. Such an editorship is a mantle of evil, isn't it Mr Woolhead?

I have just spent the last hour combing the 71 celebrity playlists on i-tunes picking vaguely interesting tunes to buy instead of watching Big Brother. I think the latter option would have been a lot cheaper (hey! you wanna know what I bought doncha; they include Angel Eyes by ABBA, If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out by Cat Stevens, Fight the Power by The Isley Brothers, Steppin Out by Joe Jackson, I Want to Be With You by The Raspberries, Defeated by Technology by Hot Chip, Off Your Face by My Bloody Valentine, Different Drum by Linda Ronstadt, and shitloads more). My credit card aches. So do I.

I have now bought 72 downloads in total. Aaaarrrrggghhhhhhh. Awoogah.

May God forgive me.

"Every time you close your eyes" LIES! LIES! LIES! (Guess what I'm listening to)

2005-06-09T10:04:00.000Z

Another gig review without any references to song titles

If I keep up this rate of gig-volumage then I will surely go deaf. But then again, maybe I wouldn’t mind. Dinosaur Jr were fucking awesome. I mean balls-out, roiling, rasping guitar carnage that smashes the fuck out of your ears and makes them ring like vintage fire alarms for hours afterward.

I wondered for a while why I never really took much notice of them before. But that was my loss. Now I know. If anybody else felt similarly ignorant and indifferent before they attended last night’s gig at the Forum, then they would have seen the light as well, or even been blinded by it. J Mascis looks like some ancient Indian chieftain (sans big hat) now with the requisite bad green jacket (is that his favourite colour or summat?) and Lou Barlow looks like, well, Lou Barlow. No, make that a happy Lou Barlow. But the thing is J Mascis really can play guitar, like, how shall we say, a goddamn motherfucker. I have never been so impressed with someone’s fingerwork (he says, and he’s seen Eric Clapton and the Bootleg Beatles!!!!). Thinking about my anti-White Stripes rant in the light of this Forum show, I have to say it’s because I am under the impression or illusion that bands of Dinosaur Jr’s ilk have always been in the vanguard of the progressive. The White Stripes are just so fucking backward looking. Leave the blues to Charley Patton’s ghost, you satanic twat-dandy you Jack White you.

Sure, Dinosaur Jr lack the intellectual vigour or sheer twattiness of Sonic Youth, (who am I kidding, they always have) and possess just bouncy, yet mighty guitar hooks that take you higher and higher. And perhaps that is enough. This band was made for jumping to.

Feel lucky that so many bands, such as Gang of Four, are reuniting to take advantage of fanbases that have expanded enough since their dissolution for them to get a hefty pay-day. This way, everyone benefits and then some.

BTW, for those who know my travails with dispensing my spare, I got £2 for the spare ticket. The tout said: “I can’t be doing with seats. EVERYONE’S STANDING!” Which was complete bullshit, of course. I went and stood in at the front anyway.

2005-06-08T12:55:00.000Z

Drive me insane won’t ya
Can I make something clear, or at least swipe it off my chest: I don’t give a shit about The White Stripes. I couldn’t give a flying sack of donkey crap. I wonder, why the hell is everyone going on about Jack as if he is the Messiah? Sure he can play a guitar like Maradona manipulated a football, and he can write tunes, but still, blank indifference fills every part of my body whenever I see another article about them. You know I’ve tried. I’ve really tried. I went to see them at the Ally Pally; I’ve seen them live at a few festivals. I’ve bought a couple of albums. But still, I don’t care. I go all meh. I still feel that if the White Stripes had never existed my life would be substantially better focussed, because then I wouldn’t spend so much bloody time wondering why the fuck they are so fucking popular.

Mild, primal sexism alert: I was going to complement Meg on her deceptively large chest as being one of the WS’s plus points – she is after all a cutie pie, but only this week I have been transfixed by one Saskia off Big Brother. Fucking hell. What is it about women with breasts that are larger than their head? It’s the WTF factor. Is it some sort of tipping point for men which prevents them from seeing any faults? It’s possibly the only time an FHM male will be amazed and puzzled by a genetic freak of nature. Or nature that doesn't involve Great White Sharks or tigers or any other animals with sharp teeth.

2005-06-02T19:56:00.000Z

Surgical spirit

Alas the ordeal has not ended. I saw my surgeon today (who I'm convinced has a sister who reviews the forthcoming TV in The Sun) and he informed what really happened during the operation. Yikes - p**** removal (benign), 4cm ****, another operation. He also tightened my existing stitch, just to see what my other options were like, and I couldn't walk for five minutes it was so painful. Quote: "It's a benign problem, but it can take a very long time to heal".

Enough. There is time enough for tales of the operating theatre and beyond.

Cultural consumption

Hot Snakes @ Islington Academy - Islington Academy is your regular Futurist shopping arcade venue hellhole. Yuk. It was Rocket From the Crypt frontman Speedo's new-ish band trying to distract us from how crap it was - I guess he succeeded. My friend-acquaintance Tom Hall raves about them, to the point where he puts them on for two days, then says can I put it on for another week? No make that forever. Because they're sooo good. Hey, calm down calm down.

They are basically Fugazi does hillbilly-industrial, which makes them very good and very loud. My ears are still ringing. Bending, relentless and intense waves of noise, with notes covering every inch of the sound with about the least subtle drumming you can imagine. I can safely say they are quite unique. But about Speedo - hey man, where is your mojo? He looked like he was dressed for rehearsals on Sunday in his garage, and he didn't say much apart from "thenks". Some of the onstage fire had been extinguished.

Oh, the support act was some guy from Alabama who said he didn't have a pair of shoes until his 12. I believe his quiff was authentic, however.

I am not an Animal (DVD) - Curse the BBC for not recommissioning this genius series, possibly the best ever for combining insulting phrases ("whooping pikeys", "you shits", "you plastic bastard", "we can't all be geniuses or there wouldn't be people who cleaned toilets in mental hospitals") with knowing consumer references (Shredded Wheat Bitesize, Darjeeling, Cinnamon Grahams, etc). That's all the air I need, m'kay? This cracks me up into a thousand tiny hilarious pieces. Funny also for Steve Coogan and Peter Baynham's barely restrained contempt for the BBC not commissioning a second series on the commentary.

And of course the way Steve Coogan as Philip the horse enunciating the words "and steak and kidney pie ... IN A TIN?!"

Mysterious Skin - Or that movie where someone finds out he wasn't abducted by aliens during a blackout but was fisting his Little League coach instead, and where the kid from Third Rock from the Sun gets anal-raped in the shower. I am always frightened by gay hustler scenes in movies because sooner or later you know the rent boy hero is going to have the mortal shit smashed out of him by some evil John. And yes, it happened here too; but not, surprisingly, at the hands of the beefie yuppie or the hitman from The Untouchables who had AIDS. The knees-up, crying aftermath scene echoed Elizabeth Shue's same scene in Leaving Las Vegas. Of course, it's no coincidence that Elizabeth Shue actually played the guy (Joseph Gordon Levitt playing Neil McCormick)'s mother. Of course, of course, of course...

The music is MBV ambient and great too, but specially affecting was the final scene, soundtracked by Sigur Ros, and featuring the united pair disappearing into the black as the truth is revealed. I found it uncommonly moving, after I got over how disturbing it was. The BBC online reviewer thought it was filth. The BBC online reviewer is a twat. SEE IT. NOW.

Ong-Bak - TONY JAA IS THE NEW BRUCE LEE! Watch him break his ass for your viewing pleasure. Pretty good straightforward Thai action romp. Only beware of the replays (obviously there are no forward/rewind/pause buttons in Thailand). Yes, they play the fire-legs scene, double-stamp kick through the scaffolding floor scenes and more twice. Possibly because they looked so good, possibly because the makers are cheap bastards. It's all authentic of course, except the believability of some plot twists.

2005-05-24T18:52:00.000Z

It's Okay

The post-surgery phase has gone fine, apart from the obvious discomfort. So don't worry about me. Bum operations ain't that bad. I was stunned, however, to see The Farm on Channel 5. Best reality TV celeb crew ever: Keith Harris sans Orville, Lionel Blair, Flavor Flav and Ron Jeremy, oh, and of course Emma B's silicone-enhanced monsters. I watched five minutes and I think that was enough. And yep, I saw Revenge of the Sith, I had to. I was a Star wars kid, brought up surrounded by dozens of the figures, AT-AT Walkers and romantic notions about space conflict and father-son issues. It was fine. What I can't stand are all the British newspaper critics who have given it one star. They misunderstand the fundamental desires of the average filmgoer. The critics seek the transcendent in the domestic; something that reflects or extends an emotional state, the people they see as proles wish for something extraordinary, just once in a while. In this case, the critics are fucking useless, or should that be impotent (they are after all tackling a criticproof movie; why not examine why it breaks box office records rather than try to tear it down and dissuade a handful of people from watching it? In that case, they have utterly failed already). I mean, what other film series has been so successful as creating another world, with no reference to the earth on which we live. I agree with Roger Ebert. Of course, the dialogue was shit and Hayden Christiansen needed clubbing to death for the fucking noise he makes whenever he opens that goddamn mouth of his - that goes without saying, and I know I've just said that. Fer fuck's sake. Just look at the bright lights.

Late Book inventory no. 3
Obviously time spent horizontal has been invested in the reading of the written word. But, yes, I have bought a lot of books this month. I couldn't help myself. The starred entries denote purchases at the mega-cheap office book sale.

Promises Made
Stasiland - Anna Funder, Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell, Staying On - Paul Scott, All the President's Men - Woodward & Bernstein, Into the Buzzsaw - Kristina Borjesson, Couples - John Updike, Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey, Ghost Light - Frank Rich, The White Hotel - DM Thomas, The Emperor - Ryzsard Kapuscinski, The New Confessions - William Boyd, Friday Night Lights - HC Bissinger, Love All the People - Bill Hicks, The Boys of Summer - Roger Kahn, Among the Thugs - Bill Buford, More Die of Heartbreak - Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler's Planet - Saul Bellow, Motherless Brooklyn - Jonathan Lethem, Saturday Night - Susan Orlean, High-Rise - JG Ballard, 26a* - Diana Evans, Pryor Convictions* - Richard Pryor, Interviews with Amercan Artists - David Sylvester, I Never Knew That About England* - Christopher Winn, Continental Drift - Russell Banks, The Republic of Trees* - Sam Taylor, Cloudsplitter - Russell Banks, American Splendor: Our Movie Year - Harvey Pekar, My First Movie - Various, The Crofter and the Laird - John McPhee, Oranges - John McPhee, The New New Journalism - Robert S Boynton (ed.), Rip It Up and Start Again - Simon Reynolds, Nick Broomfield - Jason Wood, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families - Philip Gourevitch, Kitchen - Banana Yoshimoto, Independence Day - Richard Ford, The Book of Lists - David Wallechinsky & Amy Wallace, The Way We Wore* - Robert Elms, Gilead* - Marilynne Robinson, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists* - Robert Tressell, The Stones of Summer - Dow Mossman, Empire Falls - Richard Russo, Ball Four - Jim Bouton, Us & Them, what Americans think of the British, and what the British Think of Americans - Paul Davis, Three Trapped Tigers - G Cabrera Infante, Positively Fifth Street - James McManus, Moneyball - Michael Lewis, Searching for Bobby Fischer - Fred Waitzkin, The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction

Fuck, looking back I think I might have gone a bit loco.

Errr, I don't think I'll be buying any books next month. Not after I receive all the OTHER books I've just ordered from Amazon Marketplace.

Promises Kept
Yellow Dog - Martin Amis
Searching for Bobby Fischer - Fred Waitzkin
Positively Fifth Street - James McManus
Moneyball - Michael Lewis
Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
But Beautiful - Geoff Dyer
High-Rise - JG Ballard
Cutter and Bone - Newton Thornburg
Oranges - John McPhee
The Way We Wore - Robert Elms
The New Confessions - William Boyd
The Natural - Bernard Malamud
Friday Night Lights - HC Bissinger
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction
Point of Departure - James Cameron
The Emperor - Rysard (bloody Polish names) Kapucinski

At least I did more than usual. Though you would too, if your woo-woo was swish-swashed with a reeeeeeoooo and then strung through with a peowwwwww and you were left to rest on your boom-boom for days on end. Vic Chestnutt says "here comes the rain". Not again. Fuck.

2005-05-15T15:14:00.000Z

ANAL SURGERY

DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE FAINT OF HEART. WHAT I'M GOING TO WRITE IS COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY DISGUSTING. IN FACT I SHOULD WHIP MYSELF CONSTANTLY FOR DOING IT.

God I knew you would. Silly person.

No, I'm not kidding. That's what I've just had. I wish I told my surgical consultants/medical leprauchans not to use the word "back passage" or "bottom" and they should have just come up with A STITCH ON YOUR ARSEHOLE. It's not that painful, but then I have got a lot of Co-codamol racing through my veins. I am constipated, badly. Last night I inserted a suppository up the you know where to combat the feeling of concrete filling my rectum (these are super strength bastards and act in 20 minutes) and basically ejected shitloads of blood and boulder-like ... bowls of party punch... strange, dull agony ... elastic band thingy ... oh God, I can't believe I'm writing this, he types as he grins maniacally at the screen (MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA). Blame it on the habits of Marsh.

But, you know what, I was actually looking forward to getting the general anaesthetic this time. Getting drugged in a hospital is great. Oh yes. Thankfully I spent very little time in hospital, though I had time enough to read one book and hundred pages each of two others, to stare up at the disturbingly stained ceiling, or to listen to Filipino nurses berate me for not learning Tagalog (as if I have betrayed my own blood), so I was in and out in less than seven hours. I don't know if that's ultra-efficiency or NHS carelessness. I guess I'll find out soon enough.

Hey look at me: stubble, tapping away at a keyboard, dressed in dressing gown, smoking, going slightly squiffy. I've gone all Grady Tripp.

2005-05-11T06:17:00.000Z

Damaged Green

Sumer is cumen in. Now it is the bestest season in the calendar, I often get up before six, woken by the blaze of sun reflecting on the trees over the road, as opposed to the daylight-shorn days of winter when my body just wants to slumber and forget about the world. The road never sleeps. The whoosh of vehicles being far more pronounced in the hours when the pavement is deserted.

Of course, I'm thinking about that, while this laptop of mine is frying my balls with radiation and probably bifurcating my sperm for good measure, for only a few seconds. The thought that is actually dominating my mind is of an anaesthetist spraying my left hand with what feels like antifreeze, then taking out a big fuck off needle and shoving it lengthways for a good three inches; my gaping-mouthed horror at perceiving this act of body desacration as I feel an almighty surge of analgesic warmth. Then the blackest blackout. Then waking up with antiseptic-soaked bandages stuffed ... okay, you get the picture. Operations don't actually scare the shit out of me, but they do give much food for thought. The last time, despite my sinking into septic shock and having battalions of nurses come up to me and take bloods, was made infinitely worse by my watching an episode of Holby City the night before the incision etc in which a bright, bouncy middle-aged man complained of stomach pains and was wheeled into the operating theatre where surgeons opened him up and found colonies of tumours all over his body. Yikes. This time I won't be making the same mistake. Of watching Holby City that is. (Seeing Robert Powell in a nurse's uniform just ain't right).

Listening to Alligator by The National. They're very good (too old to be in NME, but just right for Uncut). Classy, funny, weighty - "I'm a perfect piece of ass" - lyrics that are impossible not to love.

2005-05-10T13:40:00.000Z

Getting Shittier All the Time
I write about how my love of crap music is growing in me like cancer metastizing all over my body, and then you get Sarah Dempster (photographed at the very moment she is blinking – ha ha) in The Guardian Weekend saying a shitty taste in music is what you naturally get when you get older. Of course, she’s only talking about a teensy-weensy demographic who liked bands like Mouse on Mars, Appleseed Cast and Those Bastard Souls (or was that just me?) in the first place. Everyone else had a terrible taste in music anyway. There’s a certain amount of adventure in embracing your rubbish self. Look beyond the borders and you might find some refreshing happiness. Unfortunately, the only thing that the article has since made me do is force Chris to play Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer at Filthy Little Habits after buying Building the Perfect Beast full price in HMV, then buy Criticize by Alexander O’Neal and Africa by Toto on i-Tunes and watch hours of 80s No Repeats on VH1-Classics. I suggested to Chris that he turn one night in the month over to Shitty Little Habits in which people would bring their utter crap to play, but then that would stop HIM from playing Scatman after Futureheads every so often.

But hey, I have taste. I’m really doing this in the name of balance. Perhaps, the moment I went slightly mad was when I saw the front cover of Shearwater’s last album Winged Life – GREY AND BLACK CLOUDS, YOU MUST KILL YOURSELF (despite the evident quality of the music). I assure you I have been cleansing myself sonically with Martha Wainwright’s album (yes, I still like new music) and all of Glen Campbell’s Jimmy Webb renditions and listening to the long version of To Be Young, Gifted and Black on Nina Simone’s Black Gold. And I have never felt an urge to buy anything by DJ Sammy. At least not yet. But give me another ten years and I’ll be saying Phil Collins is an underappreciated genius whose work on Disney’s Tarzan marks him out as a post-Tim Hardin figure.

Underneath it all I am trying to make a point, I think. The relentless chase of the new and sexy bollocks has to be suspended some time so we can take stock, and listen to something different, something a bit more matured, rather than the alcohol-laced mildness of novelty, otherwise the chase can kill enthusiasm stone dead.

I’m looking in different places, apart from the 5 for £20 section in HMV. I’m desperate for instance to get hold of some Judee Sill, but can’t find Heart Food or any of her stuff without having to sell a spare kidney. Nowadays I don’t really look for obscure American indie-rock bands so much anymore. No longer do I pick up Magnet or The Big Takeover. I’m also starting to think that kids don’t know shit about music, but then someone prolly thought exactly the same thing about people like me ten years ago when we were shouting our love for Oasis etc from the highest peaks in the land. Wait, I almost let it slip. I'm outraged at Dempster being a bloody kangaroo-humper. Bloody Australians coming over here and taking precious UK music journalist jobs. Grrr...

Ugh
Kitty Empire says that Hash Pipe is the best thing that Weezer has ever done. Granted Beverley Hills is a tossed-off pile of lazy wank that deserves to die alone in the desert far from human ears but really my dear, however, I would take every song on The Blue Album and Pinkerton over it.

You see put a new album out and wait for people without the benefit of both the initial critical consensus and the two-year post-new album reputation review, and you get fucking moronic remarks like that from people who never liked them in the first place. Jeeesus. Get some sense, woman.

2005-05-04T21:51:00.000Z

Sorry

How damned rude of me. I forgot to say that Brendon's support acts - Psychid (frankly me don't give one shit how its spelt) and hotly-tipped HAL (that would be tipped with red-hot pokers in their eyes) - were respectively Primal Scream wannabes who couldn't sing (and who had a bald bloke a hundred times more useless than Phil Selway) and the reggae Thrills. I bloody well hated them. Hal are these chirpy fuckers who need haircuts (whatsamatter? don't they have barbers on the Emerald Isle? Or just friggin' sheep-shearers?) or their families killed to mend their lost ways in the avenues of musicland. Insufferable in extremis. If you buy any of their records I will personally summon up nefarious double-tailed demons from another dimension and send them to your door with orders to eat your fingers and toes, and then tear out your eyeballs and piss in the sockets. Who says I don't feel passionate about music anymore?

Other news

Someone has been trying to order Star Wars figures off my Amazon account. Lucky I cancelled it before I got Darth and his egg-pod jobby. Wait a minute, WAS IT YOU?

I'm going back to hospital next week so a surgeon can slice up my undercarriage and have a look at stuff. Yes, if I die of MRSA you can have all my books, DVDs and CDs (my only proof of life; my refined tastes).

I've just joined i-Tunes cos I was bored. This is bad news. My impulses cannot be controlled. The songs I have purchased this evening were Love is a Battlefield by Pat Benatar, The Boys of Summer by The Ataris, Silent All These Years by Tori Amos and Carry on Wayward Son by Kansas. It seems I am becoming more passionate about music - 80s pop and stuff I half-remember from my youth and the comedy films I have recently seen. Goodbye refined taste, hello cheap mainstream thrills. Giving up is the only way.

God I love this Kansas song. AOR is the future.

2005-05-02T21:55:00.000Z

Another blank holiday gone
You see what happens when I post two days in a row. I go on blogging holiday, that's what. Bah.

Decided to use my UGC pass again (second consecutive Sunday - it's a record!) today and watched Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It looked nice and all, but there was something ... missing. At the end I felt like saying: "Is that all?". In fact I did. To myself. The Trillian and Arthur romance felt so contrived and lacking in any warmth and believability I felt like chucking sharp things at the scriptwriters (who beefed it up after Adams had his Jim Fixx-style coronary). The only thing I will take from it is that Zooey Deschanel is luminous and makes my chest feel all pleasant and gooey. Strange I didn't feel that way when I watched her in The Good Girl and All the Real Girls.

Brendan Roolz
Watched Brendan Benson on Wednesday. If you didn't catch him on his UK tour, then I PITY YOU, you heartless dregs of humanity. I have nothing but love for the man. He induces a warm glow in my heart that I have been unable to shake off since seeing him. His latest The Alternative to Love strikes me as a touch weak, but in comparison to something as monumental as Lapalco, it can only shrink in stature.

But as with Interpol, the newies sank into the oldies with nary a trace of disconnect. I loved every minute. "Good to me", "Folk Singer", "Metarie" (introduced with "here's the singer songwriter part" and still as moving as ever in its own silly way), "Spit It Out", "Cold Hands, Warm Heart", "You're Quiet", then after the encore "Tiny Spark". These songs all have a singular identity and range unmatched by practically every emerging (we're talking first, second and third albums here) solo-artist around.

Bouncy, jangly, aarrgh - I hate the term "power pop" (of which he has now been called the solo-king) because to me it denotes a lack of edge or seriousness. But this was rock in its most lovely form. And stood behind the mixing desk, I knew what was coming. It feels nice to be so prescient. Perhaps, I love Brendan's music, because it makes me see reflections of myself in him: the indifferent girls, the searing wit and the resignation, flashes of fun, the embracing of the bad self and the many tiny struggles with modern life, the guitar love. It all comes together so well. I'm still high on it almost a week later.

Latest z-sleb spot: Andrew Gilligan by a Bow bus stop today. It was him. Fat, bald, wearing a crisp white tennis shirt. We did that mutual suspicion thing: "Does he recognise me?"-"Is that that fat controversial shit who got David Kelly into deep doo-doo?". He was probably filing dispatches from the frontline of the Oona King vs George Galloway battle royale. He was also sweating and had that middle-aged bump that made him look as if he was keeping a small Saturn moon underneath his top. I think I have come to despise him (you say: NO SHIT).

2005-04-25T16:09:00.000Z

I didn't know...

... that Jonathan Caouette had a blog. Well, he does, and here is the music that was featured in the film. As you can see, it is my sort of music: Melancholy FM.

I'm actually starting to think that people don't have a blog are either too lazy or have something to hide. On the other hand, they may just be boring people or people who think their lives are too boring to document, which is a tenet I fundamentally disagree with. Mundanity is inherently fascinating, because life is mundanity. On yet another hand, they might have no internet access and work their cotton socks off at work. Man, my mind is doing cartwheels. Can't wait till I get home and do something extra-mundane.

2005-04-24T15:53:00.000Z

Sillius Soddus
You buy a UGC Year's cinema pass, and what happens? You don't use it. You feel stupid that you spent £155 on something that you will hardly ever use because it required you moving your fat arse. Then you will guilty. Hmmm….

Anyway

The conclusion I’ve reached from watching two documentaries ending in the two syllables “-ATION” is we’re damned to hell, and there’s very little we can do about it. Can you guess what I saw? That would be Tarnation and The Corporation. The latter I will lightly brush over. In effect, corporations are run by evil bastards who will make profits at any cost (this is proved time and time again). One example: one company privatises the rainwater in Bolivia and the people react by fomenting revolution. Humanity does not even come into it, and if it does, it comes under the dubious banner of “corporate responsibility”.

However, that’s not forgetting that no industry is sustainable at its current rate. NOT A SINGLE ONE. It’s depressing that we have treated the world with such a disdain, that by bending the biosphere to our will and convenience we have doomed future generations. No wonder the corporation is diagnosed as a classic psychopath.

Thank God for people such as Ray Anderson, CEO of the carpet company Interface who had such an epiphany and has been telling other captains of industry as well as the wider world that we are heading for the precipice and will be going over some time soon. At least he will have made his company sustainable by the year 2020. But just think what giant, malevolent multinationals such as Shell and General Motors have to do if they are to make themselves sustainable. It scares the shit out of me. (That is after I was shocked by Noam Chomsky’s vocal and physical resemblance to an older Michael Mann, the film director. ‘Tis uncanny.) But the very fact that I was so shocked by this litany of criminality means that there is some hope that people will take it upon themselves to change this sorry, tragic state of affairs.

I mean it has moved me enough to make me think that I may go green, at least politically. I’m horrified by the current political situation, as well as sickened by people’s selfishness, and have done two ‘who you should vote for’ tests just to ascertain my ideological moorings. Both times it came out green. There you go, you say, he’s willing to stake a political stance on account of some internet tests! Nutter.

On to Tarnation, the film that has been called the $218.32 documentary (in fact post-production boosts it to $400,000). It’s a remarkable piece of work, almost like touching a live-wire, so shocking is its rawness. Jonathan Caouette’s life story (schizo mum’s electro-shock treatments fucks her life up while abused son grows up gay and artistic in Texas) is the stuff of which Dave Pelzer’s books are made.

I didn’t think it was exploitative, not at all. I can’t imagine the pain that Caouette has gone through, or his mothers. Yet it did feel like one long performance piece or a long music video. Since the music was stuff that I love (Iron and Wine, Magnetic Fields, Red House Painters, “Wichita Lineman") I was more inclined towards the latter most of the time. No surprise that Uncut loved it, because it is so indicative of their dark, depressive and introspective tastes (so it had to be my sort of movie).

However, Tarnation is revolutionary only if you consider the context or the circumstances in which it was strung together; that is if you were a budding filmmaker or at least someone with hours of disturbing home movie footage. Yes, this is homemade, computer age, pioneering work. But the viewing experience stays the same as if I watched something like Elephant or Requiem for a Dream. On an emotional level it will burn you eyes out, and if you watch it in the cinema bursts of feedback will shake you out of your seat. I like it because how often do you get to see a real-life Drama Queen’s Family Scrapbook of Mental Devastation. In fact, it ends on a fatalistic note. Still soaked in pain, Caouette hopes he won’t end up a brain-damaged schizophrenic like his once-beautiful, now-pudgy mother. Ending a film on a note of worry of the future was a brave move. Sadly, I think it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m actually left to wonder if Caouette can go anywhere from here, although the Warhol/Liquid Sky route lies wide open (I hope not, those films sucked so sucky were they).

I was thinking that these two movies are emblematic of the culture I have chosen to immerse myself in. I think I live in Leftfield world. It’s a bit Guardiany, perhaps a bit Cahiers de Cinema crossed with Shoreditch and Selectadisc, but far far too self aware to go truly bo-ho without feeling like a fool. It is, in fact, the complete opposite of The Sun World, Suburban World and Financial Times World. Do you get what I’m saying? We’re young but we’ll age disgracefully. It is a place where cynicism has usurped responsibility; where knowledge means more than practicality and melancholy has conquered the emotional spectrum. It is a place, which breeds a certain sort of contentment. And I’m happy about that. It just means that I know I have to grow out of it some time, or run away to a beach shack in Goa.

My word I’ve forgotten to say something about The Man with the Golden Arm (despite mentioning it three times previously on this blog). Let’s just say this: Nelson Algren is a genius with an eye for human weakness and urban and physical decay. It was the most beautifully written novel I have read in quite some time. I loved it when a character said she liked a song because it sounded like a song she REALLY liked. I know what he (she) meant. It explains why I like a whole load of music. And a phrase about a stopped clock being able to tell the right time for a while sure sounded familiar.

But having said that, putting the word doomed next to Frankie Machine’s name in your plot synopsis on the back does give away the ending, because that is the last thing that happens. Reading this substantial tale of a GI turned heroin addict (or Trainspotting meets The Sweet Smell of Success), you realise that Algren is one of the greatest unsung American authors of the last century.

2005-04-24T15:18:00.000Z

Inventory continued

I'm sorry, okay. My laziness has overcome me as easily as David Walliams has conquered every c-list lady celeb to have ever flaunted their sagging/taut bodies on the pages of 3am. I think there is a fundamental problem in that my feelings for the books are visceral enough for me to (mal)form an opinion, but then a month later when I have to write a few sentences about them, such enthusiasm, or downright hatred has evaporated. So let's try this:

A Confederate General from Big Sur: Funny, surprising, dreamy, hopeful. It makes me want to read a lot more Brautigan.
The Icarus Girl: HOW DARE A 20-YEAR-OLD PUBLISH A NOVEL AND GET IT REVIEWED ON NEWSNIGHT REVIEW. Jeanette Winterson was right. This is juvenilia. But then again Jeanette once said she was the one writer she couldn't live without, or something equally surprising in its shocking arrogance or powerful will (the opposite of Nick Hornby, who hates his own stuff - I know how it feels). Mind you, it's perfectly readable for a kids book and has, oh, about two surprising phrases in it. The rest is straight down the line supernatural stuff (twin, whose twin died at birth, goes to Nigeria and picks up a ghostly friend and takes her back to Blighty where she wreaks havoc). Oyeyemi is no Zadie Smith. And that statement is only 33 per cent motivated by insane, green-tinted jealousy.
Epileptic: Brilliant, exhausting, it's everything those critics said it would be. Portrait of a Family with One Sick Son, and how it affected their lives. The drawing is stark and tears into you, but is more in tune with Marjane Satrapi's stuff, as opposed to Craig Thompson's Blankets's lush, fantastical realism.
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust: West writes wonderfully. This is really the start of those "there's no there there" accusations that have been levelled at Los Angeles. Everyone is miserable and heading, to the West Coast, heading to their doom. I thought, God this is great, but soooo depressing (you ask me, what did I expect? And I reply, well I didn't expect it to be that much of a downer). Then I get to p. 79 of Locust. Why it's none other than a dumb lug called Homer Simpson who starts helping out a manipulative little actress. I picture a yellow bald cartoon character parading among the cast of drab, hopeless misfits. The book actually gets better, and worse, if you know what I mean. Seminal, you ask? Yes. If you're in the mood.
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: I am drawn to emotional wreckage memoirs. This Boy's Life is misery but also discovery and finally triumph. A Million Little Pieces is a piece of shit written by a odious narcissist. Bullshit Suck is better than the latter but still nowhere near as good as the former. Flynn's dad is quite a character. Apart from that Flynn keeps himself out of the story - emotionally at least. Which is good, if not making for a blank slate in my critical mosaic. (Nope that last sentence didn't work did it)

You know I was only going to write a sentence each, but you've seen what happens. The fingers, you see, they just go tappety-tap-tap for 20 minutes. I can't control it.

Okay, let's try this again.

On the Road: Beat classic. Much better than Big Sur. Meandering but compulsive. Perhaps too much love for the words raw and riot. But does this life on the road really go anywhere? Or is it just preparation for doom? If these people settled down, I think they would be much happier (so saith the aging, near geezer in me). Bunch of losers, me thinks as well.

But seriously. I met James Ellroy who told me he hated these fucking drugged-up piss artists. They were peddling hot air which they really called freedom. I can see his point. Then I read about Lester Bangs who said he cried when he read about the pathetic real lives of Neal Cassady and the whole beat crew because they meant so much to him. I love these writers, even if The Cold Six Thousand was intensely annoying in style and some of Bangs's stuff makes me want to go to America and piss on his grave. Can't we strike a balance between the two? Go wild in a small space, perhaps.

Enduring Love: Let's see. Would a typical McEwan sentence go something like: "He could feel his neural pathways buzzing with the new technological information he had wrestled from the computer screen, but then he felt a jolt in his bowels and had to go for a crap." But I like this book. Even if I did do the cinematic thing again. The one thing I admired it most for was his control.

Where I was From: Didion's memoir is a memoir of a place - California - and mines the same seam that Day of the Locust does, that it is a place built on dreams but inhabited by scoundrels and the people they exploit. It's detached because I think it's the only way she knows how to write (this place is going to shit, but let me have a cigarette while I lie down etc). It's all about disillusion and creeping moral turpitude. Beautifully written and researched, but you get the feeling this is an exercise in style, or that because of your inferior intellect, you are missing something. I only wish I could write with such subtlety.

2005-04-20T20:19:00.000Z

Meme Amendment

I have just noticed that something got lost in the transcription regarding the Fahrenheit 451 question, which is meant to read:

You're inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book would you burn?

Easy. THE FUCKING DA VINCI CODE. I went on to Amazon.co.uk yesterday and read a fair sample of the 587 reviews. Those who gave it one star I salute you. To the 550-odd fucktards who gave it five stars and said things like "the best novel I've ever read" "wonderful writing" and "amazing", I have this to say - go shove your a stick of dynamite up your stupid ass and light it while standing in a bookshop next to a pile of Dan Brown novels, hopefully while Dan Brown is giving a reading to hundreds of adoring Brownites. You think the writing on sweet wrappers is Shakespearean and you dribble at bus stops while trying and failing to read numbers on the vehicles. Your favourite food are Chilli Cheese Tacos from the 99p menu at Burger King and you have hair like a mangy rat that has just swum through a mile of festering turd-slurry. May thousands of small black creatures burrow into your genitalia. May your children be green and have misshapen lumps on their forehead. May you become a big Cliff Richard fan.

You know when I see someone read THE FUCKING DA VINCI CODE on the train, I think that's okay, they're just satisfying their natural curiosity. But when I see someone reading Angels and Demons, or GOD FORBID, Deception Point, I know this person has liked THE FUCKING DA VINCI CODE and gone out and bought more fucking Dan Brown books. Hear this, ye foul of brain and small of heart, when the revolution comes you will be first up against the wall. Along with whichever Sun journalist thought up the Save Jordan's Jugs campaign. Hell awaits for your craven minds.

2005-04-20T14:41:00.000Z

First: I’ll finish off inventory number two once I have both tired of listening to Running on Empty by Jackson Browne and rediscovered my will to live. I’m not entirely sure if it dropped out of my jacket pocket on the way to work. Maybe this will-loss has something to do with the live liposuction surgery with Vanessa Feltz I watched the other night (I know, I cannot live down the shame, so I have to tell you).

The decreasingly chubby lady, stripped of all her dignity, pubic hair and her clothes had 30 pounds of yellow yuck sucked from her thighs (deposited in some see-through canisters for all to see and retch at) with the aid of a doctor, who used a huge nozzle which he kept sticking rapidly and willy-nilly in and out of various puncture holes in her groin area, while the commentators talked without pointing up the insanity of it all, saying she was on ketamine (yes, horse tranquilisers; the drug for any hipster who doesn’t really care about their lives anymore) - "She won't remember a thing". And when it was almost all over, the surgeon said to his delirium-strafed charge: “Hey, Wanda, you can go to the Prom, now”. Her reply? “Muh-huh-muhhhh”. My jaw had already hit the floor.

Ben, that silver-flecked, hunchbacked student scum-muncher, once again thinks if he sends me something then I might respond via this blog. He knows me too well. Don't worry he loves abuse. Abuse him at will. Abuse him in his comments boxes. You know I'm just writing this because I'm bored out of my tiny little mind.

Which book would you memorise if you were on a desert island?
I’ve read Fahrenheit 451. I thought it blew goats, which is why I’ll never ever read any Ray Bradbury (not while there are Robert Ludlum, Marian Keyes and Andy McNab novels left in this world). I also saw the movie. That sucked too. Worst Truffaut ever. I also would have felt sorry for anybody who had to memorise Vanity Fair rather than Nightmare Abbey. So let’s cast the “being a book” thing aside. If I wanted to memorise every word of a book, it would be The Adventures of Augie March – you know why.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Errr, no. I’m thinking you have to have a mental defect or extremely peculiar proclivity to fancy somebody who you have conjured partly from your own imagination and the words on the page. I’ve thought about Bellow’s intellectual bimbos, for sure, but they’re too two-dimensional, albeit alluring. I mean, I used to fancy beheaded Lady Jane Grey from her portrait when I was young, but I was one fucked-up kid and had an obsession with the Tower of London. And when Madame Bovary committed suicide I laughed my arse off. You see I’m heartless. Mrs Rochester being burned to death in Wide Sargasso Sea, I tittered a little too. So idiot dreamers stay out of my way. Crushes on fictional characters are for people far too romantic for this world. People who will always get shot in the back. Or laughed at. With pointed fingers.

The last book you bought is?
Among the Thugs by Bill Buford. It was 50p on Amazon Marketplace. I have a particular weakness for participatory journalism, because so many of those books (Paper Lion by George Plimpton, Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis for example) provide such opportunity for creative pilfering and idea plagiarism that I can’t resist. If you want to know what it’s about then: American intellectual/Granta editor gets into football hooliganism. Result? He quite likes it. Or so I’ve been told. Actually it was more like £3.25 because of postage. Stealth postage, if you will.

The last book you finished is:
The last book was Searching for Bobby Fisher by Fred Waitzkin. The last novel was Yellow Dog by Martin Amis. I’m not spilling for that inventory yet.

What are you currently reading?
Positively Fifth Street by Jim McManus. It’s brilliant. Another participatory journalism classic, this time on poker. See above.

Five books you would take to a desert island?
The Complete Works of Shakespeare – because I always wanted to be erudite enough to play that “source the Shakespeare quote” game that the Van Doren family play in the film Quiz Show. Perhaps, I will also have enough time, the rest of my life in fact, to get round to the same level of understanding that Harold Bloom possesses, without the requisite urge to fondle future feminist heroines.
Gravity’s Rainbow – I’m still reading it. I dearly want to finish it. I’m sure Thomas Pynchon is a genius.
Ulysses – it lies there in my unread stacks talking to me: “Oi begorrah, the rumbubble of your grey silliness (I’ll stop it right there).”
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations – why limit yourself? There’s lots in here to enjoy. Snatches of wisdom from throughout history. I decided not to go for a single-volume encyclopaedia because of this meme’s literary flavour. But you know how much I love reference books when I’m in a certain mood.
You know there really is too large a choice to pick from. Dickens? Because I haven’t read any. Would I take Robinson Crusoe for some really rubbish survival tips? I could finish Underworld (but it did lose me after 100 pages – great opening blah blah blah). I know it’s a straightforward, boring choice, but yes, I would go for War and Peace. Or maybe War and Peace in the original Russian and a small Russian dictionary (with pages pasted inside to dodge this five-book rule) to translate, just to make it more fun, and pass the time and smother those thoughts of darkness and despair as I mull over the rubbishness of life on a desert island without Keira Knightley and a lifetime’s supply of rum. Don’t you think two Pirates of the Caribbean sequels is a bit much? Look what happened to The Matrix *shivers*.

I’m going to send this to:
Tara – because I think she reads more books than me and actually thinks about what she’s read. Though she probably has done this meme before. If she hasn’t, then that’s, you know. Something.
Wan – because he’s this fancy-dan man who reads Chekhov, Cervantes etc, and watches Britney Spears videos, while he lounges horizontally in his suppurating filth and unguent odours. Probably.
Chris – He reads books. He buys them at Sussex Stationers because of the outstanding discounts. I leant him Persepolis. He gave it back to me wrapped as a Xmas present. I bought him The Future Dictionary of America and Chas ‘n’ Dave’s greatest hits for Xmas. He lost them. Why bother, eh?

2005-04-14T20:05:00.000Z

Book Inventory no. 2

I sit on bed and listen to The Tenderfoot, mired in activity limbo. But worry not, I'll just tell you what I've been reading this month. Sometimes I'm not entirely sure read is what I mean; conquer or consume seem more apt, whenever I count how many pages to go; how much a percentage of the book before I finish and put it on the used stack. Once it is done, I feel, hmmm

Anyway:

Promises Made (haphazard order)
In the Fast Lane by Geoffrey Boycott
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
London Fields by Martin Amis
Yellow Dog by Martin Amis
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Heaven Lake by John Dalton
Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
Henry and June by Anais Nin
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
The Rolling Thunder Logbook by Sam Shepard
The Trials of Lenny Bruce by Ronald KL Collins
Epileptic by David B

Promises Kept (order in which it was read)
A Confederate General from Big Sur by Richard Brautigan
The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi
Epileptic by David B
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn
The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
Where I Was From: A Memoir by Joan Didion

Let me take you through what I bought and why. The Boycott, well, I have an enduring fascination with the West Indies cricket team, and therefore its present decline. My own boyhood hero was also Michael Holding, a gentle giant with a relaxant voice that belied his fuck-you-up bowling. Indeed, the book - a diary of the 1980-81 tour - details possibly the greatest over in the history of cricket bowled by Holding to one grumpy Yorkshireman, who blamed, yes, he had to really, the pitch. The Line of ... well, that's because I suppose a Booker prize might bring Hollinghurst back into my favour. After The Spell (Ecstasy silliness) I thought 'never again', but then I remembered how much I loved The Swimming Pool Library, even with its phallic overload. The Amises - I had to do the rest of them some time. I'm prepared to give Yellow Dog a chance, while I enjoyed the first 150 pages of London Fields, borrowed from my sixth form library. For some odd reason, I decided to put it down for ten years. I have to give Eugenides a chance some time. I have a certain grudging respect for all 90s Pulitzer Prize winners, I mean, Kavalier and Clay is one of them. Enduring Love - I've never read a McEwan before, yes, 'tis true, so I thought I might start with his nicer phase. Perhaps the incestuous antics of the film of The Cement Garden put me off. The West because it seems like one of those seminal 20th-century works; Heaven Lake merely because it is award winning and has a nice calming cover; the Rolling Thunder probably because it got a decent review in Uncut and I can be a sucker for good production values, especially when Mr Shepard's brand of cool wraps the book up. Finally Epileptic because I really have to one a token graphic novel once in a while, and if it's a currently critically acclaimed one then, you know it's OVER.

But then I must confess: I was supposed to read Henry and June for the book group. For shame, I read only 111 pages out of 270-odd. I still went though and I thought my criticism was justified. It was a diary and it was all about feelings or "delicate perversions"; no plot, no direction, what did I expect? It was fine when I was reading it but when I stopped, looked around, held it to the light, I realised, my God, this is some worthless annoying crapola I'm reading. The act of breaking off actually made it far worse. So come discussion time I drank a lot of Ayingerbrau and moaned about this silly woman. However, at least I tried to make as few references to the film as possible. You know it's so hard.

Anyway, it has gone into the unfinished pile, or the cemetery of lost books (each of whom has some reason to annoy me). Maybe it will end up in the other column next month, should I wish to turn off my sense of outrage.

Commentary to follow...

2005-04-10T22:53:00.000Z

Mist and Menace

I love Interpol. No wait, love isn't the right word. I am compelled to listen to Interpol. When I go see their gigs I know I will enjoy them because I know all the songs, the peaks and troughs, the almost katherin hepburn curl of the vocals, the thunderous bass and crashing, metronomic drums. I don't expect anything different or out of the ordinary. All I ask is that they do what they do the same way they always have and always will.

So I rocked up to the Brixton Academy on Friday and went to see these New Yorkers for the third time. Cos I'm lazy I got seats; unintentionally, subconsciously who knows? At least when I get circle unreserved I know I will be standing. Only circle unreserved is actually the seating far above the stage; the gods, that paradis. I think I sat more or less in the same place that I did for Sonic Youth last year. Sorry, I'm babbling (thinking about brushing my teeth).

Spoon supported. They looked small. They struggled gainfully with their brand of indie-pop and if I hadn't actually listened to their stuff and maintained an amiable view of their relentless chug-chugness then I might have wanted to throw my pint at them. Nevertheless, they supported. That is all they had to do.

After listening to Aphex Twin provide the interval music (great idea, that REALLY put us in the mood), Interpol come on and wham - it's Next Exit. They frontload with Antics stuff: Slow Hands etc, and that's okay with me. The two albums are almost all there (except one notable absentee), and Not Even Jail's strange intro-sound is recapitulated weirder than I could ever have imagined - why the muffled screams of a thousand children. It is still rendered as an awesome, epic piledriver. And old favourites PDA and Say Hello to the Angels are rendered as sprints (the former has a silent interval designed to take the piss out of the adulation radiating crowd). But you know I never liked NYC that much. Here I find myself quite partial to it, to my surprise. Even if I see in my mind's eye Joey approaching Rachel's Bahaman hotel room in an episode of Friends.

Lit up as if they were standing on an airstrip at night, I have to say, the lighting added to the experience immensely. As did the immense amounts of dry ice. They know how to push the atmosphere buttons - for they are probably the quintessential atmosphere band at the moment (no on stage banter from this lot). So immense congrats to the lighting operator whose only major boo-boo was coming in on Evil early, twice. Silly billy. Got the audience excited in all the wrong places.

Now detractors, or twats as I might sometimes call them, have called Antics a letdown, a boring travesty, nothing special, a lack of progress. Shut up. It's fine. It's not as good as their debut, but fitted into the existing set, it sounds so darned 'samey' that there is no jarring disconnect. It sounds unified. It never lets up. I can honestly say that there was not a moment where I was not bored. I was always perched on the edge of my seat, singing along and smashing my calfs as if I was playing drums. They bruised, actually. People criticise Interpol for this one-beat shit and silly singing, but really, if it's good you have no reason to complain.

This was a powerhouse performance. They filled the Academy with their sound. I don't think Bloc Party will do the same in a few months time when they try to tackle this space. My only gripe is that they did not deign to play Stella is a Diver and She's Always Down. I was hopping mad. Perhaps it is a song that brings out the worse in them, regrets even: the pounding guitar that seems to go even lower just after the chorus hits, the plaintive lyrics and yearning that might sound a bit jejune three years on, the lengthiness and first album-ness. But all that silliness is exactly why I would pay to see these miserable fuckers once again and many times more. Bombast is nice, sometimes, or perhaps more than often. I like serious. I'm sick of matey bands and their cute little rock dittys. They can go to hell. Give me the ice, thunder and incomprehensible lyrics any time.

The word 'semi-erotic' is one example of my compulsion to watch again. It looks stupid; sounds redundant, but the way it's sung has just scratched itself into my brain. Like I said, they're compulsive.

That is except for one of my gig companions who decided to fall asleep (he peaked far too early, as you would too if you had been drinking since 10am) during most of the set, only to reawaken during the encore and do his special spastic dance, or the "I'm not asleep you bastards" boogie. I think he may have a problem with seated gigs.

Hmmm, I wonder if Carlos D still has herpes.

2005-04-10T21:40:00.000Z

New York Twat
In this column, speccy twatbox David Brooks appropriates the death of Bellow to laud it over Old Europe - in his view a rotten structure riddled with delusion, decay and bad bad French people - by saying that Europe has nothing to show in the way of ideas, as if ideas were pop hits or films that needed to be riding high in the US charts if they were deemed to be even the slightest bit noticeable. Sure, Bellow was a curmudgeonly fucker with inclinations towards general right-wing frailties as he journeyed into his twilight years (as Father Ted said, funny how you get more right-wing as you get older), but he would never have come up with such a lame-ass insinuation, the implication being that the European invasion into our cultural life has stopped. America has conquered all. Europe, in fact, sucks ass.

Who is Francis Truffaut? he asks. I'm sure Mr Jim Calthorpe of Skokie, Illinois could go on and on about Jules et Jim when it came out, being up with French New Wave and reading every issue of Cahiers du Cinema back in the 60s, but now couldn't tell an Ozon film from a Noe because Vin Diesel in The Pacifier is such a better draw. Gimme a break you fucktard. I'm sure Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet likes to be thought of as utterly obscure by an NYT columnist.

What book is the talk of Germany? - another rhetorical doozy. Yep, I remember that Gunter Grass was a right fucking Dan Brown back in the day. Actually wait a minute, I do know what book is: The Swarm by Frank Schatzing. Subject to plagiarism accusations may be the ultimate reason, but since I do know, fuck you Mr Brooks and your dumb questions.

I can't tell you how much of a dickhead I think Brooks is. He's not necessarily in the vanguard of cock-swaggering right-wing nutjobs who'd prefer it if we shot every Muslim in sight. Nope, he's just an insidious smug creep, who believes being conservative is a noble, decent, upstanding cause. One who listens when he likes what he hears and puts his fingers in his ears and goes "nahnahanahanah I can't hear you" when he doesn't. He's yet another greed is good crony who is encouraging an ideology that seeks to, for one thing, take anything slightly risque (The Catcher in the Rye and This Boy's Life, fer fux sake) or casually mention the existence of sexual intercourse off high school reading lists because puritanism is attempting to go mainstream again.

He's talking about ideas is he? Well, high school kids won't have any. I'm thinking about the same high school kids who have been drip fed so much right-wing media bullshit that they think freedom of speech is bad and newspapers should be told by government what to report. And don't get me started on Terri Schiavo. This very vacuum of ideas, is for the want of absolutely anything else, filled with Christianity for many looking for some ideological guiding light. Oh Jesus, what have you done? We Europeans have some brilliant ideas, but it's not as if Americans are going to listen to them (Or is that the right Americans)? Brooks also conveniently ignores all the fine cultural British stuff that makes its way cross the Pond. The problem I think is that everything else is in a foreign language.

I love this line most of all, however:

"Finally there are the rest of us who don't pay attention to what is being written and said in Europe because it doesn't seem that exciting."

That is so profound. IN NO WAY IS IT BANAL AND IDIOTIC AND A STARTLING SUBCONSCIOUS ADMISSION OF HIS OWN STULTIFYING IGNORANCE.

"Because it doesn't seem that exciting". Try: BECAUSE I COULDN'T GIVE A SHIT ANYWAY. Naturally, it's far more exciting - absolutely all of it - when it's happening in your own country, which happens to be the greatest nation on earth. What's been the most talked about book during the last few weeks. Hey, who was that middled-aged novelist who gets read by Laura Bush and who was interviewed in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly alongside a huge Star Wars quiz? Oh, it was Ian McEwan. An Englishman. Whose new book is chock-full of ideas and shit.

I say thank fuck for Bob Herbert, Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd. Liberals such as these have a sense of decency and outrage that is sadly missing in most of the American troglodyte media. The NYT's top op-ed dude, Thomas Friedman, actually writes like he is some kinda fucking angel of democracy, when in actual fact he's just a highfalutin journalist trying to cement his place in history; Tom, I'll tell you one thing. HL Mencken would defecate on your head if he was still alive. As for Brooksy, in the manner of Mel Gibson saying he would like his Frank Rich's intestines on a stick, I can think of nothing better than his severed head on a pike stuck on top of the Eiffel Tower. Hopefully many birds will feast on it, though they may be disappointed by the unusual deficiency of grey matter.

2005-04-06T20:51:00.000Z

Tribute

I was thinking about Saul Bellow the day he died. Yesterday, in fact. While making my way through the supposed pick of mid-20th century American fiction this month, I realised why I loved his novels so much compared to the stolid, depressing gruel that was so often served up again and again by a bunch of deadbeat beatniks or social realists with truncheons inserted high up their anuses. He's breathless, frantic, knowledgeable, fast; he's everything.

Bellow's books contain worlds of their own. They shout and rattle with ideas. Ideas burst out of them. The first Bellow I read was Humboldt's Gift. I couldn't actually believe it was this good. It was intellectual but still rolled in urban concrete and a sense of being alive. It was so packed with everything that as you read on you knew your life was being enriched by it.

The Adventures of Augie March is my favourite ever book. Probably because it hit me at the right time; a lad growing up, experiencing life at a million miles an hour and slowly sinking into his mature self, but still finding that no matter how much you look for something, anything, you will probably find nothing. But anyway, it's good to keep looking. I had a mind to write a book with the first line "I am an Englishman - Eastbourne born" but it doesn't quite have the same kick or vision as Augie's first. Yet reading Augie, you can feel the freedom, the breaking of the rules, written between the lines. It makes you think that the rest of US literature is actually repressed to the point of boredom and silliness. How could they write like THAT, when they could write like THIS. But, perhaps, they couldn't. It's quite conceivable that Bellow was one of the cleverest people of the last century. He was certainly one of the most virile: bearing a kid at 84. Scary, and maybe a bit heartening.

Bellow was the writer's writer. In the next few months you will undoubtedly see a paean from each of his disciples come splayed in foot-high lettering across every literary supplement in the world. We're talking Pynchon, Amis, Hitchens and McEwan etc etc here. The big boys, those swaggering titans, and deft constructors. You have to breathe them in; let them guide you to the golden seam. It will be nutritional advice for both brain and soul. I used to wonder why it was so, but, really, all you have to do is read his stuff, just like Nabokov. The only problem I had with it was that all his heroes, all utterly autobiographical, were these insecure intellectual heavyweights who attracted these wonderfully, feisty Amazonian women, just like that - especially when he looked like a vulture with a sharp grey fringe (he must have dazzled them with volleys of words, or perhaps, book awards). Then he goes off and complains about it when they leave him and screw him for alimony. Bah. Is it not enough to get a touch of some of those rippled mozzarella busts? Bellow was a priapic pussyhound, of course, he was, so it was probably all his fault. Actually, maybe I loved the whining. He whined like a champion word-juggler, with insights conjured up in a single sentence that I might be able to uncover in a decade.

Yet the strange thing is that I feel no real sadness at his passing. Sure, it was a shock when I heard Hunter S Thompson had blown his own head off, but even though he might have produced a few more brief but brilliant vituperative condemnations of America's right-wing, he would never have done anything substantial again. Not when his body was failing. Being in the thick of things, being a witness to the savagery was his ticket to literary fame. However, like Bellow, it seems his contribution was complete. No more needed to be said. I mean 89. He was born during the first world war. Lives fully lived are to be celebrated. There's no real loss. Only a clinking of glasses and full appreciation of what he has left behind. Needless to say, it is a mighty legacy.

2005-03-31T19:23:00.000Z

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.

2005-03-28T19:25:00.001Z

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.)

2005-03-25T19:49:00.000Z

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)

2005-03-22T15:01:00.000Z

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)

2005-03-20T22:39:00.000Z

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.

2005-03-20T19:38:00.000Z

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).

2005-03-14T21:00:00.000Z

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.

2005-03-14T20:19:00.000Z

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!"

2005-03-01T16:14:00.000Z

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.

2005-03-01T16:11:00.000Z

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.

2005-02-17T20:53:00.000Z

Down with Flu
I have the office cold. It looks like the virus finally penetrated the blackened cancerous sputum-coated walls of my lungs to wreak havoc with my inner thermostat. You know it's not the absolute feeling of shittiness I hate, nor the sucker punch of the outside world cold that frazzles me. No, it's the sleepless, horrible nights where you don't known what the hell is happening. Granted this happens every night, but with the viral factor, it makes it ten times more worse. Lately my dreams seem to revolve around losing something. The last two I vividly remember are me on a practically empty plane with it diving into a forest of skyscraper tall sequoias (while Jim Bowen was looking out of the window to my left), and one where I misplaced my wallet. Both worried me in equal measures. What could it all mean? Just for fun, today's schedule:

9.41 - leave room. Am shaky. Head is out of sync. Flatmate tells me the plumber is coming round. Flatmate tells me this because our landlord is supposed to be living here but has sublet it to us and so he has a convoluted plan about being here because the plumber is the 'house' plumber. Or summat. I think our landlord is even more of a twat than I thought he was.

10.11 - Having phoned in sick, the plumber comes around without seeing me.

10-12 Read 15 pages each of my unfinished book pile: The Cryptographer, Who Sleeps With Katz, Let It Come Down.

The rest of the day is a medicated blur of delirium, but I did watch The Five Obstructions, Dodgeball (again), part of the Kinsk/Herzog documentary My Best Fiend, and Martin Scorsese being interviewed on The Culture Show. Day-yem, I feel hot. My sick diet has been butter popcorn, Baxter's tomato soup, some pasta, raspebri=jdaocjdsnjk ... fcj this I'm going to lie down for a whkle

Apols cant do shit today

2005-02-14T14:23:00.000Z

Round-Up. Stop. Hammer Time.

Been procrastinating. As ever. I sit and watch Channel 5 showing whatever Hollywood movie they’re showing that I watched three times when it was showed in the showing cinema, being showed to me, and I wonder what the fuck is wrong with me, the world and its brother. Read Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution on Thursday evening. Tasty morsels, but morsels nonetheless. This morning, had a can of chocolate low-cal low-carb Slimfast: quite disgusting. So disgusting, in fact, that I ate two nutty bars (what are they called? I’m having name amnesia), a can of Coke and a packet of Beef and Mustard Brannigans (I did not read The Sun, however), which annihilated its entire raisin dettra. It tasted … empty. You ask me why I try it? I say, do you want me to go to the McDonalds only a few doors down. No way, Mourinho. I’ve seen Super Size Me, and how they grow chicken tits for nuggets. That slimfast stuff. (Sob) We don’t even have a toaster or kettle. Yes, I am a lazy shit. Weekend: pub, pub, home. Up practically all night. Got a Powerbook. I love it already. I know this because every second of this day I am worried that Nazi zombie stormtroopers will burglarise my home while I am at work. Watched Dodgeball: funny. Balls hitting people in their faces, midriffs and balls. And Steve the Pirate. Great. Oh yeah. And the alternate ending. A great ending. Hopelessly abrupt, even a mite depressing, but totally in keeping with the beginning of the film. A journey back to square one. Sad, we don’t see many of them. Brother got Sky Digital. Now he has no reason at all to go out, except for the obvious thing. He has a gut like a sumo wrestler (and a tracery of disturbing scarlet veins) and tits like Jayne Mansfield. He should stop eating cheese and bacon sandwiches at 2.35 in the morning. Just before he goes to bed. I had haircut consideration time between 2 and 4 on Saturday again. My do has gone into the beyond indie strange zone. Curling on the edges. I have a lot of hair. I look at my head sideways in the mirror and see a cascading slope of massive hair with two small eyes peaking out of the bottom. Finished Adult Book: aussie novel about porn and cricket. Slow to start but when it gets going, just like Chris Brand’s innings, it positively goes vrrrrrrrooooooommmm. Also finished Snow by Orhan Pamuk, which made me want to shoot myself. But in a nice, thoughtful way. Future plans: ATP next week – return to Pontins. This time I will be prepared. I have been your host these past two minutes. Like the lady (Cloris Leachman before Mel Brooks made her uggers) in Kiss Me Deadly says: REMEMBER ME.

2005-01-25T13:09:00.000Z

Get off my beck (watching cricket on Cricinfo)...
Ben the scumbag behind the streak of blue nothingness Silent Words Speaks Shit thinks it's about time I fucking write something. I WILL NOT STAND FOR COERCION. Especially not from the man known in spy circles as The Silver Fox. But I'm doing it anyway. But really half-arsed. OKAY.

1. What is the total amount of music files on your computer? Last time I counted about 493 on my home computer and 15 on my laptop. My home computer is more of a way station for copying on to various mix discs which my friends treat with indifference, and also my dear departed Creative Zen (I recently wiped off all my Wrens and Weezer songs due to lack of space). Ooh, I remember the first few tracks I put on it: Mamma Mia, Party Hard, Bootylicious and some Jim O’Rourke. My laptop has highlights from the Royal Tenenbaums OST and tracks like Boys Don’t Cry, Someday I will Treat You Good by Sparklehorse, Time (The Revelator) by Gillian Welch and Toledo by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello. Yep, nothing like listening to a bit of the Welch after watching Young, Ripe Mellons #4.

2. The last CD you bought is:

Off the internet? The Great Destroyer by Low. Received in the post? Naysayer’s Pure Beauty. Actually listened to properly? The Arcade Fire’s Funeral

3. What is the song you last listened to before reading this

Everyone has AIDS from the Team America: World Police soundtrack. Yeah, I downloaded it cos it’s FUNNY. “AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS…”

4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you.

Random favourite songs of all time then

Mogwai Fear Satan "Grrr"
I See a Darkness by Bonnie Prince Billy "Mweh"
Japanese to English by Red House Painters "Oooh"
Teen Age Riot by Sonic Youth "Fuckyeahhhhh"
The Way We Were by Barbara Streisand "Mmmmmm"

5. Who are you going to stick it to next and why?

I would THE MAN, but reality intrudes:

Wan of Olav Told Me to Do This: Because I think he is actually dead and that his music choices will show if he really is teaching English in Japan. Too much Bob Dylan and I will know, for certain, whether he was butchered like a deaf kitten in a Vietnamese market and that someone else has keeping him alive on the internet for the last 16 months.

Chris of SXSE: Because apparently Chris is into music. Or buying it. I'm not sure which.

Paul of 1000 Shades of Gay: Because I don’t want to bother people I hardly know, and Ben didn’t send it to him.

2005-01-13T18:18:00.000Z

Fuckin 'Ell
Did I even mention that it was a book group I was forming?

Talk about sins of omission.

2005-01-13T18:09:00.000Z

Yeah, so I watched too much of a certain frickin' dramedy...
HNY! You filthy scoundrels. If you are a big fan of my particular brand of scatalogy and like things with pages called books, and I know you through email contact or the physical realm (old university friends/ correspondents - but have forgotten to ask you because I am a bit of a dick) or you're such a brilliant stranger that I must let you in, then feel free to e-mail me at mycrazybookgroup@gmail.com or e-mail me at the address you already know I exist at, and tell me you're interested.

Obviously, this is London-only, but there are about 12 of us so far. We're looking at a last day of the month first meeting. Since there are vestiges of democracy each lottery-drawn selecter will put forward a choice of three books for the group to choose from: this month these could be The Crying of Lot 49, Seize the Day, Breakfast at Tiffany's and Brokeback Mountain(yep, all short books).

2004-12-24T22:19:00.000Z

Season's Greetings

Ahh, Christmas. Oh, Christmas. Because we are of foreign parentage our family traditionally have their dinner on Xmas Eve, i.e. five hours ago. What happened? K cooked it, as it is her wont to be responsible and instill a sense of family and order in the chaos that has always been our lives. J forgot to buy any presents and actually ate 90 per cent of our desert and had no good excuse for it. But that is to be expected. He said he was going to contribute in some way, but instead went out, got his prescription and four cans of Red Devil. He gave me one. I think that was his present. When K discovered a plastic bag secreted inside the turkey, which definitely was not a cyborg implant or some particularly mutated giblets, I didn't really feel like eating anymore. We, no more so than when the snacks and treats my sister had prepared had stuffed me silly. Yet it was extremely civil. Apart from the playfight with S-J, which ended in me spilling half a bottle of Coke down my jeans, the stain of which took a full ten minutes to eradicate (yeuch, all that sugar sticking) with K's hairdryer.

I have to say I was wrong about my family's rubbish presents. They were just fine. I fear I have wronged them with accusations and insufferable snobbery. As is the norm.

We're in the living room. J sweats inside the Topman sweater I bought him. Today I also watched Masters of the Universe for the fifteenth time. Because I bought it for him on DVD, and somehow I knew he was going to watch it within five minutes of retrieving it from the wrapping.

"This will be our final battle!"

Skeletor's words still stir something in me to this day. As well as Dolph's ginormous tits. Weird.

On the other hand, you can look at this Mary Ann Sieghart column in today's Times. You will realise why I am directing you to it almost halfway through.

I can't BELIEVE I watched Gremlins 2: The New Batch again (oh, I remember seeing the cardboard cinema display of it in the Cannon cinema in Eastbourne when me and my brother went to watch Back to the Future III - the greatest comedy western of all time in my humble opinion). Actually, it is good.

Music comment: The Futureheads is my band of the year too. I concur with John Harris on this matter, if not the legitimacy of his Darth Helmet haircut.

Ooh look! Salted pistachios!

2004-12-23T16:48:00.000Z

Addendum
Actually I did buy a ticket for Slint's Forum show in March off Ebay for £31, and today I got an ATP ticket in a 6-man chalet. So it looks like all that pain will be soothed away. I suppose there's nothing £150 can't heal...

2004-12-23T16:27:00.000Z

You dumb shit...
Sorry. Just talking to myself.

Well, I went and did it. I activated a credit card just so mes soeurs and mon frere could have nice Xmas presents like a Ralph Cool shower set or a frickin' Diesel t-shirt bought from the actual Diesel shop in Covent Garden (is it just me or do they go crazy with the chainsaws and dye in the warehouse to achieve the desireddieseleffect). And what will I get? A bunch of rubbish. My impeccable taste - admittedly impeccable enough to take me to the edge of bankruptcy - contrasts with their own shabby pecadilloes. Admittedly I should inform my siblings what exactly I want for Xmas (a tactic that worked well on K who bought me The Plot Against America for my birthday - one of those epochal books you just HAVE to read, just to say you have; coming in at the back end of its hype machine, I can safely say 'it's good but a failure of nerve, as well as a fundamental screwing of the concept of time and effect), but then I do live miles and miles away. I should get them the following things:

K - a muffler for her big gob. She makes this strange booming foghorn sound whenever she's angry and trying to get attention. However, this could not really compare with the present my mum is getting for her: a £10,000 teeth job. Yes, that is the correct

S-J - My littlest sister is bright and very very angry. If S Club met Punch Drunk Love she would be perfect for the Adam Sandler role. She misses her mother too much. All that adolescent pain and confusion swirling in her cute head (Oi! Stay away from her. You have already sullied my elder sister with your dirty mental projections). Thus I would get her anger management lessons and if that doesn't work a consignment of Valium.

J - A fucking bath.

And I hate being 26. It's another Olympic cycle till 30. Only, whenever we look in the mirror, don't we see the youngest possible elves. I would have put selves there but I just remembered that I watched that Will Ferrell movie on Sunday. Also, possibly, because I am a twat (and a martyr).

Top 100 favourite songs (hey, I don't adhere to no singles, me) is coming...

And guess what! There will be a Girls Aloud song in there! Woah, that is like so conventional. (Yes, sometimes I do tire of reflexive post-modernism)

But Neil Kulkarni is right about Love Machine in the latest issue of Plan B. Funny moment: Cheryl Tweedy doing that pursed lips, mouth in an O thing. Not only funny but hmmm....

Merry Xmas and maybe 2005 won't be so fucked up.

2004-12-02T13:17:00.000Z

Noooo!!!
Owww! THE PAIN, THE AGONY! I took my eye off the ball - okay, for quite a long time - and already Slint's All Tomorrow's Parties and their Forum date in March is sold out. I am quite a shithead. And a fool.

"Let me in, the voice cried softly, from outside the wooden door."

But they won't will they?

An enigmatic quote from last night: "That was a stunning victory. Are you going to split the money between your CLPs?"

YOU MUST BE JOKING!

M-People suck!

Subtle joke in the London Olympic bid promo: David Beckham finishing a cryptic crossword. (Or it could be a subtle comment on the fantastical chances of London actually getting the Games. Hmmm, let me think...)

And watch Peep Show on Channel 4. It's brilliant. About twentysomethings who keep fucking up everything and who think stuff like: "I'd like to fuck her kidneys. Oh yeah". You'll thank me and send me bouquets once you have bought the first series DVD and watched it all the way through.

2004-11-29T15:47:00.000Z

i

I had a very weird week; beginning with downing cider and a well-known stand-up and finishing with discussing Xmas gift options in front of the OC with my sisters as I realised I could no longer smile. If I could have envisioned how weird, surprising, freaky and depressing it was at the beginning I might have planned things a bit better. I might have even gone on a week’s leave to the Bahamas and left this November slovenliness behind. But destiny speaks to me in battalions apparently – compare and contrast. Think about the whys and wherefores (don’t worry this will only ever make sense to me sometime in the future and when has been said and done). Tuesday, oh jesus, Tuesday… I was so depressed by a set-to with my boss, I couldn’t speak for ten hours or eat for a further 26. I kinda want to change my life again. And Saturday: don’t drink nine pints on an empty stomach. And never go to a Worthing club that should be called YIKES! I know I should have learnt these things more than a decade ago, but there’s nothing like the full recurrence of naïve stupidity to make your life seem more interesting.

I have actually got a new title for my first novel, which manages – in a single word – to pack in at last four pop culture references into it. The first one was just too plain silly. This one is suffused with more tristesse, should you look closer. It’s strange, but I only ever want to write it when I am in a melancholic Sunday fug. I’m also coming to think all my spurting ambition is a form of terrible vengeance, on whomever I am not so sure. That, I suppose, is the fun part. I also promise that this is the last I will ever speak of that first novel. Blab blab blab blah. I am so into myself; so blissfully unaware of the hubris inherent in all I write and say, that all details and plotlines will be spared. I promise.

I have also considered doing one of my Top 100 or ten items of all time. I haven’t done lists for bleeding ages. There is the top 100 gigs of all time (Super Furry Animals make their tenth entry with…); but also the best 100 books I have read all year, which now correspond roughly to the best 100 books I have ever read. Am now reading Independence Day by Richard Ford and Lucky Jim by Amis pere. I am also coming to realise that Bee Thousand by Guided by Voices is still one of my favourite albums; can’t stand many of Pollard et al’s others though; or is that love them with quite as much attention. Perhaps ‘can’t stand’ is a bit strong. "Driven crazy by wilful and abstruse love for lyrical scapheaps" could be better.

2004-11-19T16:26:00.000Z

Try as I might...
I can't think of a better headline.

Yo-ho-ho. I think I will get shitfaced and narco-fucked this weekend. IT'S ALL GOOD! Also I hope to read Ravelstein by Saul Bellow, The Sportswriter by Richard Ford and finish Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.

Office commentary: Could that girl in the pink top get any thinner? Why does my coffee taste of mud? Fuck it's dark in here isn't it? Look senior staff! HIDE FROM THEIR SIGHT! (Never get in the lift with the people who've given you a job)

So I went to see Nick Cave last week at the last of his London shows. For his second encore he played The Mercy Seat. Apparently this makes losers who went to watch him in places like Birmingham quite frustrated and angry. And you know what? It WAS ALL GOOD!

I'm sounding quite maniacal now aren't I? Don't worry it's the boredom. The sort of boredom that makes me want to shove a fucking pen in my eye and another up my fucking nose.

Calm down.

I was told that when I write like this it's like I'm firing off a machine gun then I start crying. (I do mean it about the girl in the pink top)

I'm dying to tell you about how I got into the newspapers last week. But you know I can't Anyway, I won a pair of train tickets to Paris. IT'S GOING TO BE REALLY GOOD!

I'm taking my sister K. She told me last week about the time she spent with DJ EZ. She said he looked after her all night, doing such fatherly things as stopping her from smoking fags or doing cocaine. Then he told her: "If you were ten years older, I'd bang you".

She told me she also needs some special gel because she says there's something wrong with her cervix. Don't worry, K hasn't got chlamydia. But her friend Louisa has just got it ... AGAIN! God, I love talking to eighteen-year-old clubbers. All these STDs and filthy garage DJs...

And on that bombshell...

2004-11-03T13:31:00.000Z

Apocalypse Now

More than anything, it is not anger or resentment or bitterness or a modulation of any of the kinds of feelings that make you grind your teeth and shout and hit stuff, I feel heartbroken.

Heartbroken that a majority of the American people are either too shit scared to change their leader in wartime or because they think this smirking fuckwit and his evil band think that they're doing the best they can for the country and the world AND THEIR MORALS. They crave only money and power. That's all. But of course, you know that.

I am feeling incredibly depressed, in fact, this is the strongest I've ever felt about politics in my entire life. The only thing I'm heartened by, is that it makes our country look even more decent, a true secular country mostly at peace with its own morals, despite latent racism and its flocks of ugly, insidious chavs (I live among them, so fuck you Julie Burchill). I took the time to look at what a partial birth abortion is, and it made me want to vomit. Mmmm ... sucking a foetus's brains out through a tube - lovely. But I would still defend the woman's right to have a late term abortion because it is her choice. I also find it disgusting that a gay marriage proposal has contributed to Kerry's defeat (for all is lost and Bush has the popular vote he always acted like he had).

Perhaps if our country was the greatest in the world then we would love our God and have more faith in creationism to explain our unique, blessed state. The problem is that the greatest empires/nations breed sadists, morons, hypocrites, assholes and the insane in ever greater numbers, such is those groups' beliefs that they are right and the rest of the world can go fuck itself or we will bomb the shit out of you. The fact is the people who make countries great are the ones least likely to spout off about it, while employing wounding cliches and homophobia among other weapons in their vulgar arsenal.

And yet, you have to hand it to Dubya: he sure knows how to win. He's done it every time, against worthy adversaries, despite being the career failure always living in lanky daddy's shadow (and how I would prefer George HW Bush and even, I can't believe I'm fucking saying this, Richard scumbag Nixon). Of course there is that evil cunt Karl Rove, a man who will surely have his sweetbreads roasted in hellfire into infinity.

But to those who did vote Democrat (even that bowling chap Michael Crick interviewed who supported action in Iraq but still went for Kerry) thank you. I believe you can still make America great in the eyes of the world. Let's grit our teeth and get through these next four years together, thinking of a brighter, Republican-free future.

2004-10-26T13:10:00.000Z

Oh My God

John Peel has just died.

I am in a state of shock.

Since I met the guy three times and interviewed him in his studio once, I can confirm he was as nice as he seemed to be. He was extra nice with a whole dollop of pleasantness. In fact he's the only person I ever requested an interview with who actually phoned me up to sort it out personally.

And remember...

He once shagged Germaine Greer.

Now back to obsessing over the US Election.

Oh wait. The BBC news presenter just said he was "one of the major champions of Britpop". What a stupid bitch.

2004-10-05T15:01:00.000Z

A self-edited trailer ... in words
I have been waiting for this movie all my life – please, oh merciful cinematic gods, release the movie Team America: World Police (from the makers of South Park and therefore the people who wrote the song “Blame Canada” – “They’re not even a real country anyway!”) in UK cinemas ASAP.

Once auditoriums ring out with the sound of the songs “Everyone has AIDS” from Lease: The Musical (d’ya geddit?) and “AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!”, perhaps we might be able to smile once more.

2004-10-05T13:37:00.000Z

Almost two years in the making
The first draft is finished. As I totted up the myriad chapters, scatological outbursts and Vladimir Nabokov quotes I noted that I had written 151,207 words. This was at 2.34 am in the morning on Saturday night - about that time of night when the BBC repeats TOTP and all its celeb panel quiz shows.

There’s something strange about telling people about your proposed book; as if your words will magic the book into fully edited, pristine existence. This is, of course, an utter fallacy and an act of folly. Nothing provokes God's laughter like the sound of a man announcing his plans. And it takes many lonely hours and glancing at the early morning dark outside my window to realise that it takes bloody hard work. It has actually taken me 22 months to come up with a printed first draft, and there is still a lot of work to do. I mean it took me 40 minutes just to write the page number on every page this morning. That’s 247 sides folks.

I hope you read it. In a way, your patronage will determine the course of my life.

In other news: The Zutons are terrible. Saw them yesterday at the Dome. They really sucked. I only went along to see The Futureheads, who apologised for sacking off their other date, cos one of them wuz robbed, but these bunch of retro shitheels – am I far off in describing them as Madness meets Cast meets Embrace in a Mongolian clusterfuck, where somehow the odious, corrosive sexual fluids involved in the carnal exchange have splashed on a CD rewriter? – why are they so popular? Why? Why? And thrice why? My mate sitting next to me said he went to Liverpool John Moores University with one of the guitarists who always said “hello, you know I’m in a band, you should see us?” To which he should have replied: “I thrust my dagger in his heart and twisted till I could no longer hear it beat to the sound of his stupidity.”

I still can’t say a bad thing about The Futureheads: despite their lickspittle praise for the Liverpool scumbags. They dance like angular nerds trying to do the Moonwalk. Sadly, they had sound saboteurs, causing them to restart two songs due to the lead vocal microphone falling silent. Some cheered this. They and the Zutons deserve to be sent to places where their sexual organs are roasted in a righteous bonfire and the sound of my laughter is played on a continuous loop.

2004-09-30T15:08:00.000Z

Resolutions still resolute; promises made and kept
The one good thing about this year has been the fact I have read all those books that I have left gathering dust and dead insect casings on the shelves and radiators of my home. Then I have gone out and bought more, thus leaving a permanent surplus of about 100. Of course, Underworld, Ulysses and the rest of that bastard Gravity's Rainbow lie there, blowing raspberries at my poor attention spans.

I have still read mightily though; to the extent that non-fiction seems a little boring (that's the reverse Cary Grant approach).

But what has been revealing has the repeat reads: those authors I've decided to go back to again and again this year. So give it up (or just give up your souls) for Martin Amis, Denis Johnson, Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Chabon and that great Canadian king Saul Bellow - all thrice done or more. Yet the one I have most time (in the way he speaks to me) for is probably Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy's Life, Old School and In Pharoah's Army. The man is a God: Vietnam vet, boy scout, prep schoolboy, Oxford undergraduate and beyond (after he was "in the shit" as Max Fischer may have sardonically commented), Stanford professor, eater of Vietnamese puppies, Washington Post reporter, fucking cool name - all descriptions that mean nothing when set beside his prose. Old School is probably my favourite book of the year, for its creation of an almost alien world of academic competition, literature appreciation, and self-discovery. If he has bruises or wounds he shows them up to the light. Let me leave you with a phrase, on arrival at Dong Tam base:

'I saw something that wasn't allowed for in the national myth - our capacity for collective despair. People here seemed in the grip of unshakeable petulance... a sourness had settled over the base, spoiling and coarsening the men. The resolute imperial will was all played out here at the empire's fringe, lost in rancour and mud. Here were Pharaoh's chariots engulfed; his horsemen confused; all his magnificence dismayed. A shithole.'

Read his shit and swoon.

2004-09-23T14:45:00.000Z

Always running out of time
In the short, medium and long term. 'Tis true. But let's not go into interesting details, let's stay vague and coy.

It seems that with the fall of Belle de Jour and TMTML (the puns! the puns! Not fully developed!) and come to think of it Glamorama, that celebrated, regularly updated blogs are succumbing to feted blogger fatigue. I have felt it, as if it moaned in my bones, but fear not! I will continue to be really half-assed about this blog and further make you go 'harumph' when you discover that I haven't updated for a fortnight. This pattern will not change. Life is happening to me, and more pertinently my energy levels. Anyway, it's not as if I can think of anything decent to write at the moment. All I can think of is food and whether Pharmaton pills actually work. Those things and food. Otherwise, my lasts:

Last magazine read: Word (like your Dad hitting you over the head with a Gillian Welch CD, which is good, but you wish it was someone your own age)
Last film: The Kid Stays in the Picture (There's something incredibly strange about the substance that Robert Evans's face is made of - could it be burnt Caramac)
Last CD listened to: Showtime by Dizzee Rascal (even more incomprehensible!)
Last book read: Leviathan by Paul Auster (now reading Other Voices, Other Rooms by Capote - notice how the moment you become a literary tosser the Christian names become verboten)
Last meal eaten: £2.99 fruitbox from Marks and Sparks (which means it's time for a Tex Mex Whopper, baby!)

Elmore Leonard said something about rationing one or two exclamation mark to every 100,000 words. I say FUCK HIM!!! With a total respect for what the elderly goat humanoid literary genius has achieved in the later years of his life.

Farewell.

You know I can only disappoint you.

2004-09-10T15:52:00.000Z

Pathetique...whatever that means
I have to admit I was disheartened. My last post was struck down in its prime. I could feel the surge of creativity and rage and sheer sleep deprivation and wonder at the world that collided at 3.32am to have a Will Ferrell-Sonic Youth-Futureheads-book progress smash-up, but which was cruelly cut out by the fragility of my internet connection. So I shake my head now and would like to say:

Seeing Teenage Riot live was like touching the face of God and feeling a pleasant electric shock surge through you; hitting those memory centres untouched since years of prior discovery. I foned absent friends to act and then become the smug twat who phones people because they deserve to know just what missing them play the Carling Academy means.

Hellboy had too many CGI monsters. Who. Gives. A. Shit. About monsters you can't kill.

I have misplaced my Futureheads album and they misplaced themselves last Sunday night because of some burglary. I had high hopes for those Mackem bastards. Still do, if slightly more likely to burn their possessions and feel a throbbing resentment sound in my head the moment I hear their name.

Don't buy the Chicken Satay from the Chinese down my road. It's shit and shit-inducing. I asked them not to put cucumbers in it. They did. These people couldn't boil an egg. In fact I think they're all 15-years-old.

Am nearing first draft book completion. Though I'm thinking 125,000 is already overdoing it. My brain feels incredibly scrambled and empty. My mum says I sound incredibly stressed: "THAT'S COS I AM!" GRRRRRR...

This weekend: The Detroit Cobras and new shoes!

Viva tax rebates!

Oh, almost forgot

CANNONBALL!

2004-09-02T11:26:00.000Z

Workaaargghwork

Seeing Sonic Youth today, seeing The Futureheads on Sunday. I feel so much better thinking about life already.