good stuff!

Excellent first post from Dan over at Faces, one from me(ish) at Up Close.

Ah that's interesting. 

A couple of years ago (4?5?6?) at a dubstep/wonky night at the Rhythm Factory in London's fashionable wherever (actually directly after seeing Maria and the Mirrors' like second ever gig, what a hipster bastard about town I used to be, eh?) Rustie did a kind of engaging set of goofy unquantised tomfoolery and eclectic drum and bass shenanigans that was kind of oh yeah, interesting y'know and a few of us had a dance around then the second it was finished the between sets DJ put on "I Luv You" and the previous forty minutes was instantly obliterated.

Awesome

If I were him I'd write a novel.

VIVA TRICKY!

OpenCoin chief executive, Chris Larsen, doesn’t see lots of virtual, borderless currencies competing. He thinks there might be one big winner. “I think of it like this: what did MySpace have to do to beat Friendster, and what did Facebook have to do to beat MySpace? Can anyone iterate on Facebook? There were hundreds of attempts at social networks, but only three big steps to get where we are.”

Monopoly money.

Punk Capitalism enters its next phase.

Oh good, so I can protect my wealth from inflation and keep it out of the reach of Government, not have to lose money changing currencies when I jet around the globe meaning I have more to spend on myself and I can buy craft beer, gig tickets and bar snacks just by using my smart phone!

Thank fuck for that. If you have got any friends who are/you yourself are on the dole, drowning in debt, facing a pension short fall or unable to pay the Winter fuel bills, just have a look at this. Don't worry, look, these people's self interest and groovy lifestyle consumption is going to make it all all right. Exactly when we don't know but the revolution is coming and besides they look well fed and  comfy enough so even if it takes years well..... Rome wasn't built in an etc. You know you can trust them, the future is safe in their hands, they are small business owners, stockbrokers and lawyers.

Hmmm.. wonder how many extra hours work I will have to do to get some bit coin now the price has shot up. Should have been one of the smart guys and  got in early. I could be a bitcoin millionaire now like Max Kieser. Still at least we have  created a new raft of bitcoin rich! They need somewhere to spend so the wealth is bound to trickle down! If I had some initiative  instead of  just sitting round festering in the politics of envy I would be setting up Bitcoin friendly services to cater to their needs.

A funky, subversive "punk" bitcoin e-bay maybe. Bitbay! With a cool logo and everything.

Of course what you don't understand about digital currencies Carl is that they are truly unregulated and implicitly anti monopolistic. Just like the internet, the great, earth changing, State subverting, new digital commons about to unfold before us was twenty years ago! But this time, it really is!

 

 

Awesome.

Spring, innit?

I wish this blog was updated a bit more often. Though it does look like they have already done their twice-yearly posts already, so the rest of 2013 could be a bit barren.

More Scottish Oil chat here.

Last line is particularly apt. I live in Japan at the moment, a country that has apparently been in decline for twenty years, nonetheless you would have to say Japan seems to have plenty of potential wriggle room, it could for instance solve its demographic problems by simply allowing mass immigration: highly unlikely, I grant you, but it could. Same goes for numerous other reforms that are politically/culturally contentious (opening to trade, restructuring companies etc) but possible and gains from "innovation" in fuel sources/raw materials etc.

But England? When the oil runs out and finance fucks off to Singapore, what have we got?

Gonjasufi, how do I love thee!

If any of the this blog's readers knows of the whereabouts of a copy of the documentary "Wasted Windfall" from back in the early 90s that would be great.

Certainly time it w as re-broadcast/made available.

Considerably ahead of "the return to Sabbath" and on an album with a song entitled "Blue Cheer". Had they been born in Seattle they would no doubt have  had their fifteen minutes, passed into legend and be ready to launch a minor but lucrative re-union tour as we speak.

Oh good, I can make it to this this year.

I have huge respect for the organisers even though I have never met them.

Actually Barrow-in-Furness has always been pretty adventurous musically. There were some really good gigs there during the late 80s, partly local promoters putting on Indy bands (would you believe the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Primal Scream, Shamen among may others all played the tiny Bluebird Club prior to getting big/becoming dance-oriented). Then in the later Eighties it was quite plugged into the "Noise" scene primarily via the truly awesome Mel-o-tones/ Walking Seed's connection with Kramer and Shimmy disc. It was also always hospitable to punk and crusty bands as well. And, due to being up North was a reasonably early adopter to House (everyone went on fairly regular pilgrimages to Eastern Block in Manchester, many to worship at the feet of Graham Massey, personally I used to sneak off to Affleck's and try and pluck up the courage to speak to Mark Hoyle.)

Actually I was reflecting the other day just how many now "legendary" post-rock/shoegaze bands I saw during the late eighties/up to mid nineties (basically all of them) and just how amazingly boring most of them were. 

I cant remember how  may times I saw Lush, Swervedriver, The Pale Saints, the Boo Radleys. Even once was one time too many.

Bark Psychosis playing to thirty people in the Duchess of York in 1994 (or somewhen) sounds amazing right? It was dull as dishwater. 

I have a feeling I even saw Disco Inferno. Or was it Ultramarine? Who cares? I sat at the back getting pissed as they droned unexcitingly on to seventeen fidgety hardcore Melody Maker muso-boffins (of which I was admittedly one).

Techno Animal doing "Ghosts" live to an audience of literally five people ?

Nah, actually. That was pretty great.

 

Of course Thatcher famously slammed down a copy of Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty" and declared "this is what we believe", significantly not using the first person singular. Thatcher is the Leader, Hayek the Master.

I wonder what book the Left* would slam down now, in an equivalent constitutive act.

*by which I mean of  course the redundant/ fascist/ totalitarian/ Leninst/ social-democratic etc Left.

There's a lot of battling over the meaning of the Seventies and the idea that Thatcher rescued a Britain that was in terminal decline. The book that's instrumental in setting up this dispute is of course Andy Beckett's "When The Lights Went Out", essential reading really. 

Of course I was just a kid in the Seventies and a teenager in the Eighties. My mum and dad aren't formally educated, dad left school at fourteen and became a plumber, mum at sixteen and did various bits of extra work before marriage and after my sister and I had reached the age where we didn't need to be looked after so much.

Now my parents were "aspirational" in a sense, they wanted their kids to go to University. This was a slightly ludicrous ambition for a working class family in the Seventies when it was  still the situation that many, many people could leave  school at sixteen with few or no qualifications and expect to make a living. Fewer people went into higher education than they do these days. On the other hand it was actually financially possible, as far as I recall my dad earned under he  national  average  wage all his working life and they were  certainly careful  with  money, no  car, no  foreign  holidays, they don't  drink or  smoke  (not very  working class of them eh?) so no  expenses there, no H.P. for furnishing and  white goods, not much keeping up with the Joneses. Instead they bought a house  with a garden on the outskirts of  town, saved  for their retirement and  educated their kids ( a bit of an uphill struggle in my case).

Now even by the time I got to University it  would have been virtually impossible  for someone who left school at fourteen no matter how thrifty and diligent to buy a house, retire comfortably and send their kids to tertiary education. This would be despite the bounty of North Sea oil, the wonders of myriad supply side reforms and the impending Great Moderation.

In other words I consider that I was in one sense extraordinarily lucky, that for a while a window opened and then got pretty much slammed shut. This opening was the result of several factors, some world-historical, some cultural and local but if as they say, the nation has been saved, the question is still saved from what, saved for whom?

 

 

Ah, I see.

That grandson looks like a promising lad, innit?


"He has previously worked for a Republican-aligned political group that aims to 'educate and empower the Hispanic community with conservative values'." (italics mine)

Timely stuff on The White Ribbon from everyone's favourite uncle, Ben.

Right! No more Thatcher funeral for me!

I hate the bogus universality of death, the suspension of moral judgement, the wiping away of the historical record, the ontological flattening.

"in the midst of life we are in death"*












*but some of us are more in death than others

Ideology at its purest.



Finally, my brethren be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. 13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. 14 Stand therefore, having gird your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, 15 and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; 16 above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. 17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God; 18 praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, being watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints--"

Could this be framed more as an Atlanticist, intergenerational crusade? Also imporatnt to have the young girl say it too right? Both to soften its extremity but also to relibidinize the message and reaffirm that this is an inclusive battle of the just against the wicked.

I am fairly sure that when I saw him doing this acoustic and solo a few years ago it was " I cried the day I walked you down the aisle."

Fantastically heart warming interview with Richard Thompson by novelist extraordinaire and Zero books head honcho Tariq Goddard, who kindly let me ask R.T. a question by proxy.

Interesting what he says about the 35 to 40 thing, definitely true in my own life, I have to say.

As an inventory of English types and lives Thompson's work is surely up there with the greats.







Sometimes I long for the solitary life
Parents long gone, no kids, no wife
Sister somewhere in Australia
Never did keep in touch
Sex no more than a how-do-ye-do
With a copy of Tit-Bits in the loo
Socially a bit of a failure
Nice not to have to try too much

A Solitary Life
A life of small horizons
Dull as the pewter sky over North West Eleven

A serious hobby in the garden shed
Model trains, or soldiers in lead
Join the suburban boffins of Britain
Experts on trivial things
And holidays in the Yorkshire Dales
Or cycling tours of the North of Wales
Unenvious of those flea-bitten
On continental flings

A Solitary Life
A life of small horizons
Dull as the pewter sky over North West Eleven

Excitement comes by subtle means
The satisfaction of routines
Small revenges at the office
Smug little victories
You work on your pallor, complexion like paste
Like the grey defeat on an inmates face
A life spent adding losses and profits
Resigning by degrees

A Solitary Life
A life of small horizons
Dull as the pewter sky over North West Eleven

And come to the end, sad and alone
A steady reliable tumour you’ve grown
From selfish years, while all your peers
Have stressfully jogged to health
In life you always were quite numb
And foggier now, you soon succumb
In drab St. Barts on the new by-pass
Death overcomes by stealth

A Solitary Life
A life of small horizons
Dull as the pewter sky over North West Eleven

Ah, I see "Footbal Hooliganism" has "returned".

I dealt with that quite a lot in Classless, as I recall. I still reckon I.D. is the best of the Hooligan films, even though, obvioulsy I am also an Alan Clarke fan. In fact a quite remarkable film.


I wish someone would sample this bit for a choon.

One of the best things to come out of the N.Y. Noise scene of the late 80s.

Powerful return from Wayne, continued brilliance from Phil and Paul a great Intro from Bobby (not his real name).

Good to see the North Sea Oil version of Thatcherite success doing the rounds.

An excellent piece.

Or maybe it's this.

You can keep your Mozzes and Costellos and whatever, the greatest commentary on Thatcherism is this.

and this.

Good lad!

Ahh, Thatcher's dead.

Shame, as that now virtually guarantees a Tory re-election victory in 2015 and the nation is about to enter into a frenzy of competitive grieving. This  time I suspect it is  going to get a lot more thuggish and ugly than it did with Diana. Then, non-participation wasn't deeply politicized (though I remember still almost getting into a fight in  a greengrocers in Ramsgate the morning of the funeral because I had chosen to work that morning). This time it will be. If you are thinking of  having any kind of celebration prepare to be targeted and criminalized.*

My deep condolences to all who will now have to suffer through this 24/7 full-spectrum sanctification campaign. Perhaps most wretched of all will be  watching Labour's attempts to out-eulogize the Tories and vie unsuccessfully to be true inheritors of her legacy. If Blair massively benefited from Diana's death, Cameron has been gifted an aura and a legitimacy now that will be  virtually unassailable, to attack him will be to attack Thatcher. It will be sacrilegious.

And all the  violence that is going to be done to the poor can be justified and will be redoubled by invoking the Blessed Margaret's name.

It is about to get even more fucking lunatic than it has been. I imagine  Louis Mensch is  already weeping in the street, rending her garments with her eyes rolled up to heaven, babbling. If you worried that they were unhinged before, their zealotry is about to hit unbelievable peaks.


Maybe I am wrong, I certainly hope so, but for once I am glad I am out of the country. If I weren't I would be laying low and waiting for the hysteria to blow over. Any chance that can have happened by the end of May?

Maybe you are braver than me, in which case, anyway, be safe.


* Of course I am being a bit South/London-centric in my thinking there. If you live anywhere else, fill your boots!

Pure hate

Unbelievable.

My ongoing dystopian novel gets caught up with at a frightening pace.

I have decided to come back to the UK permanently from mid May. I feel guilty living abroad, really.

Oh well. It was a nice extended honeymoon.

Excellent first post from Paul over at the 80s blog.

Anyone else fancies posting, just email.

 

To be honest I don’t  think I really understand  Federico Campagna’s “Happy Precarity” at all.

Here’s what I understand him to be saying. The  desire for fluid  living in the 70s, the escape from 9 to 5 drudgery into more autonomous forms of “self-employment” have shifted from a liberatory “line of flight” to a generalized state of “precarity”. We must not abandon the commitment to Fluidity and Precarity, i.e re-attach ourselves to discredited institutions such as Labour parties and Unions, the social democratic model of the State etc but instead reclaim the liberatory potential of precarity, the conditions for which are now really, actually present in a way they weren’t before because of (ta-da!) the Internet, or  more specifically the deep-net a kind of Utopian inner space (rather tellingly eroticized, exotisized and orientalised here in Campagna’s representative choices of the Silk Road and platforms for online sex work) putatively permanently beyond the reach of Capitalism. The  medium of exchange being that indisputably revolutionary and  unregulatable new currency, Bitcoin! ( I winced a bit while reading it, just a day after this.)

There are  couple of things I don’t get here, and maybe that’s because I am ignorant about Autonomia, though like any good comrogue I listen to Novara (and, like everyone else presumably, have developed an unseemly crush on James Butler) and did read half of Bifo’s “Precarious Rhapsody” last Summer (though it seemed to be all over the place and not really worth plowing through to the end of. Maybe I should return to it.) Then again. presumably this short essay is also supposed to serve as a persuasive introduction to its importance and relevance.

Basically though I can’t see any huge distinction between this happy precarity of  disintermediated autonomous exchange and alternate “competitive” currencies to the arguments of Randians/ Rothbardian Anarcho-capitalists. They also want a labour market in  which the government doesn’t have monopolistic control over the currency and in which onerous regulations are swept aside in favour of a purer market structure, one in which I and the Employer/Customer encounter each other face to face without the distorting effects of the State.  Campagna’s marketplace of happy precarity seems to be Adam Smith’s invisible hand sweetened with a dash of affectivity, “a union of  egoists” sounding not unlike Smiths butcher, brewer and baker but with added benevolence, because all egoists (here I understand this to mean those not constructed through “terroristic” metanarratives, religion, Marxism etc, “freethinkers” in other designations “bohemians” the “counterculture” etc) must, in recognizing the right to otherness as  constitutive  of their  own  subjectivity, automatically respect that right in others.

In a sense then the pursuit of self interest not only guarantees us the goods and services we demand/require but also the sociality that we yearn for, if only the State would get  out of the way. Thus from the state, that coldest of all cold monsters, we are also affectively destituted. The essay  in no way  question  the assumption  that a certain  kind of “egotistical calculation” is the  problem, the  problem here is (as for many on the anti-statist right) that the state distorts both the affective/social and economic markets from fulfilling their potential. Libertarians wouldn’t care much about the affective dimension, they are too ruggedly individualistic for that, but I’d struggle to see why what’s proposed here is much  different. From a true market exchange all good things will flow, here the true market is a really existing “immanent” Arcadia called the deep-web, a kind of “Autonomia of everyday life” that requires but some skilled midwifery in order to radically alter and de-alienate relations of all kinds among men. Friendship is, after all, just another form of utility maximisation.

The book is available here. It’s a quid!

As an aside, not to get too anti-Utopian and raise practical transitional questions rather than assuming that  immanent tendencies will somehow burgeon and sweep away the existing order in a happily bloodless circumventing of the state and the withering away of its repressive capacity because now we have mesh networking and e-currencies and social media, I am myself a precarious worker here in Japan, a freelance English teacher. And I would consider myself to be in a state of happy precarity for a couple of reasons, but primarily because I can pay my month’s rent and bills in the centre of Fukuoka (considered one of the 20 best cities to live in globally by Monocle magazine, so whatever your tastes, no slouch infrastructure and services-wise) on three hours work plus travelling stipend a week. If I also do a few hours on a Saturday afternoon I can eat for the month and have a bit of leisure (though given that my leisure is basically the internet it’s not a huge expense). That’s right, my rent is low and I am comparatively well paid per hour (and I enjoy my job, lucky me) but even a worker on minimum wage would be able to rent their own place here (Fukuoka), eat and crucially ( for the Japanese), have a mobile, they would also be able to find that work quite easily and quickly. That’s why, right now I am not in London, or Tokyo. My happy precarity is predicated on low rent and the potentially huge looming oversupply in the Japanese housing market outside Tokyo, on the long period of deflation post bubble plus relatively stable wages.Some pretty heavy macro-economic and demographic considerations in other words.

Now I would love to be able to transfer my happy precarity back home. What’s the plan for increasing housing supply/reducing housing costs drastically in the UK, as an affordable and secure, reasonably comfortable dwelling place seems to me the fundamental prerequisite for any kind of happiness, especially a happy precarity. Is the disintermediated deep-web going to get more affordable houses built or radically reduce rents? I have often rented  in London via that traditional form of disintermediation, the dusty precursor to the liberatory depths of deepnet, the Post Office window, me and the landlord one to one!

He still wanted “the going rate”.

Ah, Phil'll enjoy this the Woo-Tang Clan versus TED.

Awesome! We're off!

Interesting

I teach some of the guys who build the machines that are/will be used to mine rare earths from the seabed. 

In other news, Ping tells me that the road outside her dad's factory may be widened (and the factory have to be relocated) in order to allow direct access from Miyako Jima airport across the massive new bridge and onto the soon-to-be-upgraded runway on Irabu island. Direct access for the American military that is, of course.

 

So maybe that Asia Pivot is going to be a biggie after all. And Okinawa will continue to bear the brunt of it. Though I do also teach a guy who is an intermediary between the local government and the U.S. Air Force and the military presence in Kyushu is also increasing.

Yeah, become a TEFL teacher. Live in the pulsing heart of geopolitics!

Good news. Good things, eh, juries.

Mad to think that the student riots happened just as I was leaving for Japan for the first time. That's two years plus. The stress must have been horrendous.

Also weird to think that a large group of very smart people who would probably never otherwise have had any kind of run-in with or exposure to the Police now know them for what they are and point-blank fucking hate them.

Victory will be theirs.

Bat, Bean, Beam: Turn off your computers

Bat, Bean, Beam: Turn off your computers

great stuff as per.

 

The battle over the Nineties and the 00s continues in Clampdown, Rhian E Jones' prodigious, mordant take on the past twenty years cultural and political stagnation.

Clampdown consolidates, synthesizes and extends on several recent-ish books both Zero (Capitalist Realism, One-Dimensional Woman, Uncommon, Folk Opposition) and non-Zero (Chavs, The Last Party, among others) while at the same time offering an extension of their concerns, by building up its own canon of the subversive and politically hopeful and by explicitly focusing on the construction of female identity and the discourse around the abject figure of the female Chav as a kind of Uber or Unter Chav, the very quintessence of Chavdom.

What Clampdown admires is a messy, engaged, and enraged working class feminism that refuses to be disciplined by classed representations of femininity, a feminism that also refuses to be internally divided by those structures. Here actually I am struck by a moment in the film Made in Dagenham (briefly alluded to and worth a close analysis) in which the posh, frustrated middle class graduate goes round to the working class unionist's flat to tell her to keep fighting for the sake of all women. What Clampdown wants is a return to the notion, perfectly prominent up to the mid-nineties that working class women are the vanguard, culturally, politically. What's feared in the figure of the fat, baseball hatted, baggily track-suited, gobby female Chav on a big night out is the genderless and sexually liberated, non-neurotic and undisciplined female subject, object of horror, fascination and dismay and Clampdown flirts with, but doesn't quite fully engage with the radical possibilities therein. And in that sense it also opens up new vistas for speculation.

Too many brilliant insights and witty asides to mention really, but I will say that these lines represent an early highlight.

“In the slice of south Wales where I grew up, the most substantial attempts at economic regeneration seemed to be the daffodils planted along the M4 corridor to improve the view for commuters.”

Yes, yes and a thousand times yes. 

Hmmmm.....I think I will be over here for a while.

I am writing a novel.

I know I always say that but really this time I am, or rather the various tangents that I have been exploring in abortive novel attempts are starting to cohere. Irresistibly. Past a certain tipping point it has a momentum, a direction all its own that you are in thrall to.

Now, it seems impossible for me to write something without a desire to smash and destroy, lets say negate or nihilate everyone else who has ever written anything.

I look at the work of others and  all I can think is, " you pathetic worms, I shall crush you!"

My personal life is all sweetness and life compared to the last time I wrote anything, yet, and surely I can't be the only one who feels (though strangely I don't when it's non-fiction) an immediate and intense rivalry with all other writers the moment I start. Existentially threatened, like.

That will be the symptom of some kind of unresolved conflict at the level of the imaginary, innit?

Oh hang on, that is writing!

Excellent post by Agata over at FOPTMC.

Funny thing with Possession is, I have been aware of it's existence for many, many years, since I was a kid in fact and have never been able to bring myself to watch it. 

When I was ten, eleven years old I used to read couple of more adult film magazines, Starburst and Cinema and Possession had a big feature in the former at one point a kind of making of, plus a review. Primarily I was interested in the fact that Carlo Rambaldi did the special effects ( his next job, improbably, after Alien and Possession was designing E.T.) and the film itself sounded so disturbing (along with the look of the grainy black and white photos that accompanied the text) to my pre-pubescent boy-self that I have, ever since, spent time actively avoiding watching it. 

When it was out on video in my teens and I was voraciously consuming every bit of trash or cult cinema I could get my hands on, I never saw Possession, I missed it when it was on Channel 4, when it got shown at a film club at the Cinema when I lived in Leeds, I somehow didn't go that day, and last year when I discovered it was on You Tube I watched the first five minutes and then, finding that horrible enough (though nothing happens exactly) clicked away.

DON'T MAKE ME WATCH IT NOW!

ALL HAIL DIAGRAM AND MOLINE

Is this link now accessible to all? I can't tell for some reason.

I finished this a while ago but have been hanging around waiting for it to be  proofread, a long process when you're asking people favours of course, especially when the text itself is pretty long so I've just decided, fuck it, it can go online as it is and if it is, as usual, riddled with errors and repetitions and obviously fuzzy bits and bad formatting, well then there you go. Indulge me.

Also it's way too long so I can't imagine anyone will finish it anyway!

I am on Twitter, but have no followers, so any major league tweeters who want to link it on my behalf, much appreciated.

Update: Link now works\

Que se vayan todos!

Right, I have  just had a very pleasant afternoon there reading Dan Hancox's excellent book on Marinaleda. Part travelogue, part history lesson, part biography and a general rumination on the utopian possibilities of the present I am tempted to say it's a success on every level.

 

 The  centerpiece is a meeting with the pugnacious Mayor of Marinaleda, Sanchez Gordillo complemented by an extended series of reflections  on how the Marinaledas have  managed  to achieve their Communist utopia, how real it is, how scalable, how replicable elsewhere and the conflict at the heart of Spanish culture nicely captured in the title, between the traditions of struggle and  mutual aid and a sense of necessary penitence. It's fascinating, heartfelt and clear-eyed despite the author's obvious attachment to Andalusia present and past, brisk, lyrical, politically engaged.

 

What more could  you ask for?

 

Dan has kindly made the PDF available here.

 

And it's also available at Amazon here.

 

 

Oh for fuck's sake.

You'd think that Spike Lee hadn't already smashed all this  bullshit years ago in Bamboozled or something. Certainly one of the most  painfully acute films of the 90s.

That new Tarantino looks like some hipster racist bullshit too, dunnit?

Ho ho. I have  never  heard David Guetta's stuff. I  suspect I won't like it. Anyway I  have never seen him before either. Then I just clocked this image on a site which may or  may  not aggregate illegally uploaded films and thought, for a few seconds, until I could make out the name, ahh great, they've  made a movie  based around Eyeball Paul  from Kevin and  Perry Go Large and Rhys Ifans is reprising the role. That could be  fun!

Imagine my disappointment etc.

Not a drum, but I'd love to see him take a beating

Two years ago, when I was in Okinawa, so around Jan/Feb 2011 I started writing something set in a present-day Britain but more dystopian and in which there is a character who, being unemployed, basically receives credit on his Jobseeker Credit Card (which he  has to pay back when he is in work/exchange for community service hours) and which gives him access to a limited number of prescribed foodstuffs and essentials which he  can only purchase from the approved Jobseeker Credit Stores, Tesco. Of course it is arranged in such a way that he is  in increasing debt at the  end  of every month and so his Community Giveback hours increase exponentially. He worries  that the fact that he has bought a copy of  the Guardian rather than the approved newspapers might bring him unwanted attention next time he goes in for  an assessment etc.

 

Of course at that point this seemed like a kind  of nightmare exaggeration of tendencies in the  present that wouldn't actually come to pass.

 

That was, in retrospect, rather naive of me.

 

 

 

Motorhead.

Now generally everyone likes the Vic Maille produced stuff don't they. I certainly can't blame them. However and unlikely as it might seem the best album is really Orgasmatron. Yep, horrible title and worse still it is produced by Bill Laswell. Who did equally great Big Rock things on PiL's Album.

Phil "Philthy Animal" Tailor isn't even on it, but still, Laswell pays  a lot of attention to the drums, they more or less lead certain tracks and in a sense that bears fidelity to Motorhead's earlier relationship with Hawkwind as a kind of cosmic/tribal drumptrippers.

In fact, just to jump back to Overkill for the moment, I suggest to you that it is in fact the "I Feel Love" of  Biker Rock.


.

And let's be honest Orgasmatron is SUCH a disco-y title innit.

i could do that!

At the other end of the spectrum there is of course the sheer untutored awesomeness of

But Nevah Hum-Drumz

Some fine left-field tasteful and  discerning choices  going on there from all across the musical spectrum. I will be  ploughing that 70s mentalist rock furrow.

Corkscrew haired teenybop ponce or raving twin drum attack glam riff messiah? Clearly the latter.  Monster live assault from the unimpeachable T Rex.



Howz about that creaky becoming electric wooden funkiness in the supremely loose-jointed Mambo Sun for texture and minimalist swing?

Mo Drumz

Yeah,  it's more relatively obscure early Seventies rock from me.  This  is an  awesome tune that, again, seems  to be carried  forward  by the  drummer, rock  solid with the occasional little flurries that only serve to drive the song on. Plus some of those back-peddling, time-bending effects  that make the song branch and fold in on itself.
 

May Blitz. Nuff said.

Aha, I see the irritable Phil has got things off to a predictably rocktasic start with Nazz.

 

But, I think by this late stage in human history it has become clear that Sir Lord Baltimore are the greatest garage rock band of all time.

 

Not only that but they have the distinction of having a singing drummer ( not that many more of those around, are there, who else...The Husker Du bloke...errr.). And what a drummer. To suggest that he basically powers that whole first album along while the other two try to keep up would be unfair, but really, he's no slouch the lad!
 

Drumz!

A ten year anniversary of Blissblog is certainly an epochal momnet worthy of an end-of-year drum clash, innit?

 

Now, before anyone else inevitably gets in there I am going to launch my attack with this bad boy. Living in the  shadow of North Korea's recent successful satellite launch and  realising we may not have much  time left I am going for the Nuclear Option straightaway myself.

 

Fuck me, it's the Ventures! I don't even know that drummer's name! And I don't care!

Just had one of those musical moments. Go out to the shop to buy a bun (yes, that's right, a bun) come back and sit down to eat said bun with a cup of tea. YouTube has been playing around in the background, now on some  album which is clearly not the Raincoats' Odyshape anymore but sounds rather good. Another few tracks go past and our little bun/tea and chat session turns into us both listening to the music. Then it's... fuck me! What's this, it's brilliant? Who is this?

Turns out it's this.

Ho ho! One  of  my typos there has "re-enter the fray" as "dust himself off and re-enter the fairy".

Maybe I will "let it stand!"

I am getting quite close to the end of a longer piece of writing. Two things have just occured to me, while I was cleaning my teeth as it happens. Firstly I never want to repeat myself ( in terms of style, form, content) and secondly I tend to view the process of writing about something as an opportunity to learn about it. Writing for me is pretty much those things you are repeatedly told it shouldnt be, self-improvement and therapy.

I want to go where I haven't been before. I love his stuff but I cant imagine being Banville, for example, or Richard Ford and having to go on being Banvillian and Fordian year after year.

So essentially where I sense a lack in myself I write. Where It was I shall be and all that. I am always on personal terra semi-cognito.This leads to a fairly pervasive sense of insecurity and self doubt, my impulse once I have finished something has always been to think (as it still is now I realised as I chased down the vague dread that just got hold of me in the bathroom), ok, well, that was interesting, now I will throw it away. After all, other people are experts in these fields, this is their thing and I am an amateur. Now I supose everyone feels this way on some level, a sense of shame about proffering such meagre gifts the anxiety that exactly those experts will be looking on. No doubt the professional has learned to push it to one side.

Let me just put this back in the drawer, leave it in the file. Another experiment, another attempt and we will get there but not this one, not just yet. Next time, next time.

"I've got a present for you....the future, the future, the future....."

T.S.E.T.

timeless yet timely sentiments expressed therein.

Timeless sentiments expressed therein.

Here

and

Here

That last look on Tim Roth's face.

From Made in Britain, of course.

of course they are by contemporary standards, bloody articulate, well educated and polemical those lads in the video below, arent they? Are any of the bands influenced by them half as interesting as interviewees? or interesting at all?

Yeah that's right I basically spend all day lying on a Futon and watching stuff on Youtube.

bit of a find!

two quite sweet and revealing interviews with my teen hero Thirwell.

Recorded in 1987at the unemployed resource center in Liverpool.

(italics mine)

Shit.

I like Candlemass.

My penchant for befrocked and frilly theatrics seems to be increasing as I get older.

Still, there it is. Epicus Doomicus Metallicus is kind of the Jim Steinman of doom.

Great comment by Horace Throckmorten.

also pretty awesome.

I am teaching a couple of Chinese Phds (in engineering) at the moment, here in Japan.
About 25/26 years old, on an exchange trip, extremely nice.

What would you do  if you were rich, was the question. All of them said travel and not work. One said he would immediately give up his boring studies. I feigned shock.

I told them that in the west we have this thing we like to call "the Asian work ethic", the idea that Chinese, Korean and Japanese people have some greater commitment to....well, perhaps just even the notion of work itself than soft and decadent western workers. Don`t people work so much out of loyalty to the state, the company, the nation, the Confucian code, some idelogical zeal?

"It's because we have to."

They were insanely funky weren't they, Swans, before they got all bluesy and tedious.?Funky in a kind of rigid, abject way. It's odd, cause certainly A Screw which is all about the horrors of  shagging and disgust at the body etc with its barked commands and so forth, is actually a really quite sexy goodtime track.

Let's face it they were New York boys earlyHip-Hop and Disco are all over Swans supposedly rigorous pofaced confronational anti-rock. And  actually, sonically it  is still not as harsh or stark as  some fairly mainstream hip hop cuts of the day.

  

Swans are the new Coil, innit?

I also like Swans a lot. Well, the first couple of records anyway. And I  DO  have to say that as a  summation of  the precarity and hedonism of the 80s the title "Body to body/Job to job" is unbeatable.

be interesting to see how this (among other things) impacts on house prices.

Yeah, I like The Scroungers a lot.

I just met a guy who is a Cambridge graduate and who doesn't know I know he is one. I know  because other people I work for told me.

 

Prior to our meeting I was wondering how long it would take him to innocently mention this fact and to be honest  even I was surprised at how quickly he went for it, through an open-ended observation about the effect of  University on his accent within the first 2 minutes. Unsure I'd be able to control my irritation I rapidly turned the conversation elsewhere then buggered off.

 

Still, the all-time-greatest gratuitous reference to someone's Oxbridge background was at an unbearably tedious Guardian journalist party I went to several years ago.

 

It literally went like this.

 

Me: Hi.

 

Bloke: Hi. How do you know Paul? (the host)

 

Me: My wife works with John (his boyfriend)

 

Bloke: We were at Cambridge together.

 

 

Happy Birthday Ping!

Sore Throat used to represent some political/musically unimpeachable statement of intent to smalltown punks back in the day as I recall. Them and Doom and Amebix.

Link.

I'm in an Ugly mood these days. Not personally you understand, but increasingly the rawly abject, shitty, lumpen, stymied, degraded, atavistic and stagnant seem to be drawing me in as aesthetic categories. The Gothic is too expansive, I want something cramped, soiled, squalid, bilious, impotent.

 

Something that reminds me of home.

I saw a couple of films when I was back home too. I was fully prepared to hate Berberian Sound Studio (its play for hip left-field kudos as an amalgam of basically every cool theoretical, musical and cinematic trope of the last 5 or 6 years was way too obvious, plus it is essentially David Lynch's Wire-reading younger brother.) Nonetheless, it blew me away, despite all the Ghost Boxy trappings. Haven't seen Kaitlin Varga yet, but a few years ago Monster Bobby was bigging it up (and he no fool), so I am prepared to believe Strickland is a bit of a major talent.

 

 

 

I also finally caught up with another film Monster Bobby recommended way back, A film by Harmoney Korine. Normally I'd run a mile (and Mr Lonely, which I also saw, was excruciatingly twee). Trash Humpers however is as properly disturbing as you could want. A plotless, degraded bit of VHS found footage.

 

 

 

But nastiest and most brilliant of all was Kill List, highly likely to be overlooked as, unlike Strickland's effort, it doesn't make an overt play for the smart-set (as I was heading into the Cinema a hipster chick was squatting down next to the Berberian  poster and  posing while  her boyfriend  took a photo) and is pretty much an offshoot of the British Gangster movie. Certainly clunky in parts, nonetheless, it is a genuinely horrible film, a truly infernal vision of English life.

 

 

Actually, when I was back in the UK I spent quite a lot of time back in Barrow-in-Furness with  my Mum and Dad.

 

 Inevitably we watched Newsnight and Question Time on a daily/weekly basis. My Dad (79, retired plumber) has been shouting at the telly during these kind of programmes pretty much since TV existed.

Owen Jones came on.


"He's a good lad," my Dad said.


A bit later Paul Mason appeared.


"He's a good lad 'n' all."

I seem to have  been listening to those Third World War albums compulsively as well. And to be  honest I  think they're two of the greatest records ever made. Timeless sentiments expressed therein.

"I believed I was free/and a voice that must be let in/ I belived I was free/protest and they bust  your  head  in....."

Oh and while I am on the  subject my friend Chris introduced me to G.I.S.M when I was back in England during the Summer. I`m entirely meh on Japanese rock really, EXCEPT it turns out the crust\punk stuff which is actually much more psychedelic than the much-touted Acid Mothers etc. Certainly sounds like The Butthole Surfers stole a lot of moves from here, especially the guitar sound.

Twenty plus years on these four tracks still sound righteous.

Dead Prez - Hip Hop (High Quality)

Yeah. Gets better with every passing year this record, dunnit.

The Police......what a band!

Brilliant interview with Dan by Sam!

Wild Beasts - Lion's share

Hypothetical top ten....

Here's my most watched  films, at the very least. Most of these date  from my  late teens early twenties when the  sheer paucity of options meant that I revisited certain films again and again. And of  course, at that age, bad, middlebrow, narcissistic character identification was the key in some ways. As was the idea that things were "dark" or "literary".

Withnail and  I

Blue Velvet

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

The Exorcist 3

River's Edge

Night of the Hunter

Suspiria

Shock Corridor

Network

Eraserhead

That's basically the filler in the "Cult" section of your local second hand record/dvd shop, innit?

Wevie Stonder - Glidstep

Wevie Stonder - Winnet's Dub Plate

Pere Ubu - Heaven

Home!

I am really going to enjoy watching Facebook shed users and shareprice over the next few months. If it even lasts that long.

On the other hand, against all expectation from prior experience, this bloke has cheered me up.

He's from Coventry too. A Good Day for Cov polemicists.

Yeah, back in England next week and back up North, then down in London for the Summer. I dunno. It's fucking depressing, innit? On the  one hand I am glad I don't HAVE TO live there, and in fact can't full time for another eighteen months or so. On the other hand I am ashamed of myself for not being around. Maybe it all looks worse from here than it actually is, but I doubt it.

Presumably then, if you are on benefits and are murdered, in this political climate you have brought it on yourself.

Of course just beneath the restraint and the judiciously chosen words you can hear the quiver of delight, see the low level flickering in the eyes. What she wants to say, what she wants to do is revel in the deaths of the poor, and I wonder how long it will be before she's openly allowed to do so.

Good to see Kulkarni on the warpath here. Interesting that Alex picks up on the phrase "absolutely pleasant" as it reminded me of a hilarious phrase Kulkarni used in a review way back when and which has stuck in my mind ever since as a kind of quintessentially British take on hip-hop. "Moderately dope".

Some English Types: Maria And the Mirrors.


How do you live in dismal times? How do you live with poverty, how can you turn your alienation, your refusal. your anger and your passionate attachments into something? How can you create something beautiful out of what you can afford, the charity shops, the secondhand bins, the boxes of old videos, the boot fairs, the skips? 

What do you do with your youth?

You take drugs, you drink, you dream, you pull deeply inside yourself as you shuffle down dim streets in the rain, fill your cold room with books and quotes, pictures and clippings, posters, bits of art you may have knocked up yourself or that friends have given you, your battered old laptop constantly downloading sounds. You hunger for something rich in colour and sensation, for glamour, daring, flash, glitter, to lift yourself up above the narrow monotony of daily-life.

How to become equal to your dreams? Dreams of power, fame, sex, magical abandon, death, rapture, degradation, all the states your own isolation, your own cravings and unsatisfied hunger that the dull, sleepless nights on your bedroom floor have lead you to explore within yourself. How to reach those other worlds? Synthetic worlds in both senses, where everything condenses into a perfect image, where nothing natural or organic can be found but only a delirious fever-dream of plastic, rust, nylon,concrete, exposed wires, pistons, chrome, cables bleeding paint, plugs, sprockets, circuit boards. Mythological realms populated by fantastic, half-human creatures, machines of impossible sophistication, palaces, dungeons, temples, outlandish cities.

How to create and inhabit that richer world? How to irradiate the present, mutate it, repotentialize the fading power of the past? How to speak in a new language, share it with other initiates whose dreamworld overlaps with augments and thickens your own? How to build from the bottom up, from the detritus of a dead age, an iconography and an architecture that you can use to overlay the ugliness and squalor of the retail parks, the abandoned high streets, the degraded civic spaces, the damp flats, the rain-worn abandoned or half built projects?

Where can you go but through yourself, alone, and then out with the others you find there into a dimension still rich with possibilities beyond itself, horizonless ,where everything you have absorbed, that has shored you up is transmuted and refined, so that as you keep pushing forward  forging on, the echoes of what you have learned grow fainter, traces here and there, threads and filaments, dim reverberations until for an instant, together, the long hold the past has on you through the long, colonized future it has set you stumbling into, it seems, against all the odds, that victory is yours.

Greenwich Chip Shop Blog Mafia Full Spectrum Media Domination Project Continues.

Mainstream pundits, stop ripping off smarter and more committed people!

For Phil,



my sister introduced me to this tune recently, surely there is Non More Cowbell.

Cheers Matt!

Yeah.....Vertigo. I re-watched it recently.

Now, technically, it's great, innit? Beautiful shots and all that, San Francisco as a heavenly, monumentally vast and purgatorial non-place.

Except, re-watching some Powell and Pressburger ie A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus, both of which it directly rips off, either in shot for shot terms (as in Stewarts and Kerrs' responses to the Final Fall) or in terms of the suspended-between-two-worlds milky luminosity and hypersharp colour (AMOLAD) it was hard not to think, hang on, isn't Vertigo, especially in comparison to Black Narcissus just a load of one dimensional, misogynist old shit, really?

 I mean BN seems much the richer film on every level, even just dramatically. Vertigo is saggy and meandering, overlong, Black Narcissus is dense AND has a lot of forward momentum, manages to be genuinely scary and tense and at least has an interesting, multi-dimensional ensemble female cast whereas Vertigo is just about a couple of frustrated Puppet women who are thrown around by and slaves to James Stewart's tragically and heroically impossible male desire. Probably really meaningful if you're a hardcore Lacanian, but as my friend Chris likes to say, end of the day, maybe Lacan was just married to the wrong woman.

Plus, I remembered that back in the 80s Hitchcock was broadly regarded as a great director of thrillers but a reactionary old fuck. That shifted during the Nineties with the popularisation of certain academic discourses, which went, essentially, ahhhhh but isn't it his misogyny which actually makes him really interesting/ but doesn't his misogyny reveal to us an unbearable truth. Then again, times change and maybe its time we cleared away this (re)lauding of Hitchcock.

Give me Black Narcissus' complex historical/political/social/metaphysical/psychological depth plus its cinematic bravura and daring any day. Or for that matter (if we are talking Nuns) The Magdalene Sisters, which I watched again recently. If anyone has better managed a move through comedic delight into sustained horror the way Mullan manages it in the "you're not a man of God" sequence I'd be keen to know who it is.

AND while I am on the subject I noticed that in Cahiers Du Cinema's list of the 100 most beautiful films there isn't a single British film. Now whatever you might think of The Red Shoes or Tales Of Hoffman (just to stay with P and P for moment) I can't figure out any list of that length which wouldn't have them in there somewhere.

Is anything by Will Self worth reading? Novel-wise, I mean.

Excellent stuff from Alex!

yep, Cop Shoot Cop. Sampling my probably second favourite movie of all time The Exorcist 3.

If you haven't seen the Exorcist 3 because you're all like, but its the Exorcist Three!! You should  honestly just go and watch it.

but re this  choon i feel compelled to say

ahem


CHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON

spotting a theme yet?

Once  again, I say;

CHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON

CHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!

Then again, I am  also a bit  sceptical of the way, when a couple  of like-minded Leftists  get together and write something to stick online, suddenly they become a "collective" and their work is deemed an "intervention."

someone, or better still, several hundred people, should get on the phone to Mitch, and let him know how they feel. repeatedly.

This is honestly fucking nuts, innit?

Kudos though for this particular bit of revolting neoliberal newspeak.

"He has also chalked up some achievements: softening the Socialists’ 35-hour week, freeing universities, raising the retirement age."

(italics mine)

Ah, softening, freeing and raising. How edifying, compassionate and wholesome.

To nobody else's great surprise I turn out to be an idiot part 234.


Yeah.

That John Maus' album " We must become the pitiless censors of ourselves" is absolutely glorious.

Just re-watched this after about twenty plus years. It really is the most shockingly incompetent load of old crap.

And while I am still on the subject (of music). I  have to say that during the 90s I basically spent all my time listening to hip hop and one crew I was pretty obsessed with, who are probably up there with Gravediggers or (I kid you not) those first two L.L.Cool J albums in terms of  my most  listened-to-ever records is Tha Alkaholics.Yep. I know  that they are  not the  most progressive  end  of 90s hip-hop but they were just irresistibly witty, smart and funky, and despite being party-rap they didn't sound any less psychedelic or out-there than, I dunno, Company Flow or whoever.

Though round about the mid 90s hip-hop did seem really busy, lost of fabulous stuff going on in several different directions.

The first two albums are the best, aren't they, the point where E-Swift really sounded like the best producer in hip-hop, up there with Primo, but the later albums certainly have their fair share of awe-inspiring moments too.

and of course...

And actually while I am on the subject I really like that Roly Porter album from last year too. Couldn't be more  different to Kuedo and I guess a more  natural-seeming "progression" from Vex'd. I expected to be pretty indifferent, not being taken with the Non More Blackest Ever Black end of things but this has genuine eerie power and given his pedigree, feels less like a mining-the-crates-for-"new"-genre-move, plus his recent mix here is great and this old mix here too.

And his labelmates Emptyset are also, well, bracingly alien.

Re-reading Matt's 70's book and his bit on The Numbers Band, I suddenly remembered the below. A highly unlikely collision of song and guest singer. Give me the original any day, obviously, but still....

Shit, haven't seen Attack the Block, it had only just come out when I was leaving for Japan, I think, and downloading stuff via I Tunes is tricky here (no doubt someone more tech-savvy can suggest something). Point remains, if Bat recommends it, it must be good.  Bat is intellectually terrifying and, largely, the best of England.

Ha! That Bat! Now there's a man you don't meet everyday.

there's a certain type of loneliness, a restless, late night loneliness, when everyone else is sleeping, when it may or may not be raining outside, that comes stealing unexpectedly in, confronts you with the vast, incommunicable, ineffable misery of having a personal history.

 all that fear and hope and stifled dreaming, all that wrenching of yourself away from or towards other people, all the humiliations and the hurts you inflicted on yourself, on others, all the things that seemed to mean so much that fell away, all the fumblings after a self that you never became, how secretive you had to be about what you took joy in, what pained you.

the whole, cold kaleidoscope, all those interlinked moments, as an adult as a child, that only you have borne witness to, that no one else will ever know or see, painfuly bright and present again, the specific textures of a time, the light through certain windows, the meaning, just out of reach, of that look they gave you, or that clumsy attempt at expressing love, or the specific dimensions of a specific shame, its heat and pressure, all the horrible uniqueness of the ways your own life tasted, smelled and felt, the shabbiness of the masks you wore, your threadbare disguises, and theirs, come whirling in all their sad singularity into view.

what can alleviate that loneliness or console you? this being set adrift in the interstices of your own experience, of the depthless, endless shifting and reforming that you flit through like ghost.  

except that I’ve told you.