Firewater - Banghra Bros (instrumental)

also for his Bonsainess. that trombone player, eh?

U-MV152 - Cop Shoot Cop - Interference

For Bonsai Silverback.

The Farm - All Together Now

Oh Liverpool, so much to answer for.

COIL - TAINTED LOVE

It's like transformed into a metaphor for aids!!! and really SLOW with like FUNERAL BELLS!!! DEEP!

Michael Jackson - They Don't Care About Us

US!!! US!!!!! YGTBFKM!!!

4 Non Blondes - What's Up

i pray every single day for their ayexheycyahusheeon!!!!

Joan Osbourne - One of Us

didn't write it herself... but still that's no excuse is it?

Ladies and gents, look no further I've found the worst song ever written. Toe-curling doesn't come close, the simultaneous power to make the blood boil and the soul curdle, truly epic in its awfulness. Included here with on-screen lyrics just so you can appreciate the full majesty of its metaphors, the extraordinary precision of its diagnois of late Capitalist life. Make sure you've got someone much smaller/weaker than you around to beat up after you've seen it otherwise self-harm may ensue.

Don't say you weren't warned.

RWT - Communist Cookery

Basically, I’ve loved every record Tricky has put out, so there's never been a stunning-return-to-form/best-since-Maxinquaye discourse going on Impostume-Heights-wise.

I especially like Blowback, that one with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers on, yeah.

So unsurprisingly the new album is great stuff as well, and the single is a belter.

There’s nothing like sitting down to write a novel to really get the blog posts flowing. Annoyingly though, it doesn’t work the other way round.

Nothing quite lifts the spirits like a global recession, does it?

I’ve already been told off for gloom and scare mongering about house prices by mentioning, with a certain amount of undisguised glee, that the most dire predictions are of a fall of fifty percent and a long slow recovery that will only see them returned to their pre credit-crunch levels by 2017. Apparently I’m not supposed to mention this as it might upset people.

Red rag to a bull, I’m afraid.

Of course when the property market was booming and poor saps like me whose parents couldn’t rustle up a tidy deposit for them and who were stuck on a middling joint income facing a life of flatshares and exorbitant rents, well, certainly no-one ever had the bad taste to repeatedly go on about how lucky (or, well, really, basicaly, smart) they were to have got a flat in Up and Coming area X, and what a great investment it had turned out to be. It’s actually increased in value by six thousand percent in two days. A certain kind of faux-disingenuous gloating over their own excellent judgement and increased purchasing power now they could wilfully bump up their debts and offset it against their ever-expanding equity. Going on holiday again? That must be expensive. Oh, it doesn’t matter I’m seven thousand times richer than I was half an hour ago, my perspicaciously purchased bedsit in the much-sought-after Peckham Conservation Quadrangle has quintupled in value since the start of this conversation!

So if you think I’m not going to milk your impending penury for all I can you’ve got another thing coming. The parties over, innit!? Ten years of blindly binging on cheap credit, ears glued to any idiot that told you it can last forever, in debt up to your eyeballs cause you couldn’t resist all those trinkets, gimmicks and pseudo-experiences that late capitalist life was supposed to thrive on providing you with ad infinitum. The problem of economics has finally been solved, the dismal science gone dayglo! It’s all looking a bit grey and problematic these days though isn’t it? Poor you. Gas bill’s up forty percent you say? Seen the price of food in the shops? Filling up the Range Rover prohibitive? Inflation creeping back? Layoffs? Fibbed a bit on your mortgage application, desperate to join in the dizzy rush to success and social standing and finding it a bit of a stretch? Hang on, you didn’t see this coming? You who were always so keen to display the superlative wisdom of all your financial dealings? And now you want a bit of sympathy, a bit of pussyfooting around your monumental fuck ups? And maybe a bit of a help from the government, who should have kept their nose out and not tried to cool it when the market was booming and pricing lots of people out, but whose intervention is suddenly acceptable now Tarquin’s trust fund is looking a lot shakier, now that holiday home you were going to retire to in Spain has just plummeted in value? Strikes? Shortages? Petrol pumps running dry? The government stepping in to shore up industry with tax payer’s money! Why it’s just like the bad old days before the new economy was Magiked into being. Clearly what we need is thirty years of Friedmanite deregulation to put a stop once and for all to these immemorial evils and bring History to a close, that’ll be the solution, clearly there is no alternative. Ah hang on, we’ve just had that you say and this is the consequence? Same shit, new, Neo-Liberal flavour? Well at least we’ve had thirty years of wealth trickling down into the parched mouths of the poor, solving the problem of poverty once and for all, as only the markets can. Hang on, child poverty is more than twice the level it was in 1978? Not everyone has been sharing in that dream of a nice house with nice kids and a nice partner all eating nice food around the nice table and planning the next nice holiday with their nice friends? Shop till you drop? Live for today on the infinitely dilating never-never of the weightless economy?

Ahh well. Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s all just scaremongering and negativity. It’ll sort itself out, won’t it? It has to. It just HAS to. Just like recycling those copies of the Guardian and fretting over food miles in Waitrose will sort out resource shortage and help fight global warming. I know, I know, a recession affects everyone, not just the well–off. But then that’s what’s so heart warming about it, isn’t it? We’re all in the same leaky, captain-less sloop when there’s a downturn. The boom only benefits a few. No need to have too much nostalgia for that lost Blitz spirit, I’m sure we’ll all be kipping down on the Underground platforms together before too long.

Maybe it will sort itself out, but honestly I’m sure you wouldn’t be so mean as to not allow me a little wallowing in the nasty mire of my own resentment now this window of opportunity has opened up for me, would you? I’m sure it will be reassuringly slammed shut again soon. Indulge me. After all, we’re none of us bad people, really, are we, deep down.

I'm doing that periodic buggering-off-to-write-a-novel-that-I-later-decide-is-rubbish thing.

This time i'm going to try and get an agent. What a prospect! Posts here will be even scarcer for a while.

Meanwhile, listen to these guys, they're great. Chrome meets Ariel Pink meets Royal Trux circa Twin Infinitives. Of course they're not that good, but I insist upon my right to get overexcited.

Not so much to be loved, as to love.

In terms of Hamlet’s minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern may have been boosted on to centre stage by Stoppard, but it’s the almost invisible Horatio who is the moral and metaphysical centre of the play. Horatio’s simultaneous presence and absence is representative of his solidity, his groundedness, he need not call attention to himself. A part of Horatio’s invisibility resides in his pure outwardness, as opposed to Hamlet’s conspicuous inwardness, his “thinking too scrupulously on the event”. Despite claims to the contrary (ie Bloom) the real prodigy of consciousness, the exemplary figure, is Horatio, who stands in the same relation to Hamlet as Hamlet does to the other characters within the play. It’s Horatio who grounds the audience’s sympathy and credulity, standing as an intermediary figure between Hamlet’s inner world and the audience’s faith. The play’s integrity is guaranteed by Horatio. While we focus on Hamlet’s struggle we forget Horatio completely and yet the entire play is predicated on our belief in him. Linking us and also existing beyond us in an act of benign displacement, both the audience and Hamlet himself depend on Horatio.

The only major character to survive from the first to the last scene, Horatio’s “attitude” is not simply stoicism, it’s not that he is good at suffering uncomplainingly, anchored above all to his duty, but that having passed through an excess of suffering he has been annealed to the restless, unreconciled oscillations of Hamlet’s soul, a man who “having suffered all, suffers nothing”. This is not deadness, an inability to feel, think or act, the “beastliness” against which Hamlet rails: “What is a man/If his chief good and market of his time/ Be but to sleep and feed?/ A beast, no more”. Nor has it resulted in bitterness. Horatio is on the other side of a barrier that Hamlet, too gripped by the death drive, can not pass through. He may finally, Romantically, reconcile himself to death ( “the readiness is all”) but can not reconcile himself to life as Horatio has. Hamlet may seem to plumb greater depths than Horatio, may be more attuned to Steven’s “ ghostlier demarcation, keener sounds,” and indeed Horatio observes of the ghost, “This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him”, but understanding such a fact is essentially a part of Horatio’s encompassing of Hamlet and the audience. It’s Horatio’s own humility, his outwardness, his capacity to defer, his understanding of his own simultaneous centrality and contingency in the web of relations that make up the play’s world (and which make up the world) that makes him exemplary. It’s this understanding that provides the fulcrum on which the play turns on both a narrative (Horatio brings Hamlet to the ghost) and diegetic level (without Horatio as his guarantor Hamlet is simply a madman to the spectators’ eyes ).


Horatio’s reconciliation to life allows him to be an actor in all the ways that Hamlet’s reconciliation to death does not. What it does not allow him is the possibility of assuming a tragic role, but Horatio has already passed beyond these trivial satisfactions. Hamlet’s problem is not that he has been decentered, it’s that he hasn’t been decentered enough, he has been shunted to one side within himself but has yet to travel to and breach the limits of that self in the way that Horatio has. Horatio’s blandness, often appearing to be little more than a sounding board for Hamlet's observations nevertheless give way to the famous speech in praise of his classical virtues:

Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice,
And could of men distinguish her election,
Hath seal'd thee for herself, for thou hast been
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,
A man that fortune's buffets and rewards
Hast ta'en with equal thanks: and blest are those
Whose blood and judgement are so well commedled
That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee


Horatio watches over Hamlet, as he does the audience, and his constant reassurances and assents are designed as much to quiet the fighting around Hamlet’s heart, as they are to draw out further expressions and abreactions of that battle. When we consider Hamlet, rather than lionizing the Prince’s depth, his despair, the tragic grandeur of the cardinal insights of a mind too powerful to prevent its own destruction we should instead view it as Horatio views it, he is our proxy (and we his), as the inability of a self to surpass its limits, a self that hovers at the edge of destitution, the true undiscovered country at its feet and then, lacking the force to go on, slides back into suicide. If Horatio is empty in a sense that Hamlet is not, it is simply because he has surpassed lack through agency.


The joy I’ve named, shall not be tamed.

Milan Kundera created a famous if slightly trite distinction between two types of laughter in his novel The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting: the laughter of Angels and the laughter of Devils. The first is a kind of revelling in the sheer wonder of existence, an upsurge or irruption of delight; his example is two lovers racing giddily across a sunlit field. It’s laughter that comes perhaps from a moment of ontological alignment: everything is eclipsed by the fundamental exultation of being. It’s easy to relate this to children’s sheer thrill at their own mysterious embodiedness, the dizzying, seemingly endless supply of energy, the necessary expulsion of which is experienced as delight rather than a labour. Children, for all kinds of chemical and neurological reasons have a superabundance of such energy, adults only rarely experience this kind of joy, and when they do it’s a largely more muted affair, relegated often to an experience of “the sublime.”

Children are also comparatively unencumbered by the social, which is the domain of the laughter of devils, archly ironic it’s the moment at which human hubris and the pretensions of the social order are exposed and the truth of contingency brought into sharp relief, the example here is a hat blowing off a mourner’s head and onto a coffin at a funeral. This is a gleeful, mocking laughter, a laughter that in some ways stands as a repudiation to the incursion of the social into the laughter of angels. This laughter has two orientations, whereas the laughter of angels has, necessarily, just one (or none). It’s inevitably self-directed but a fundamental distinction in ethical quality rests on the acknowledgement of that fact. If the laughter includes the one who laughs as its object, it’s generous, no matter how harsh, recognizing a universal dimension to experience, if not it’s truly devilish, tyrannical, directed at the others, a delight in the mistaken belief in one’s own exemption.

I’m the only one left alive.

If there is a truly fitting figure for the Last Man, the apotheosis of history, the final and highest expression of the possibility of humankind, it’s Dante’s vision of Tiresias in hell. In a life which extended over several natural lifetimes, Tiresius, who has been both man and woman and granted the gift of foresight, is punished by having his head twisted round on his body 180 degrees, condemning him always to regard the past. Tiresius, who in Eliot’s use of him is a kind of meta-archetype in whom all possible human experience has aggregated (and who, in an echo of Horatio, has “foresuffered all”) has been punished by being denied any vision of the future.

All you have now is the past. Generations born looking backwards. And for the man who still perceives the flickering outline of a future, the horror of watching Tiresias stumble round his circuit scooping up souls, with no option but to wait until his vision has dimmed sufficiently for Tiresias to claim him.

Oh yeah I forgot the tagging bit!

Seven songs.

“Winter academy” Billy Mackenzie.

Current fave on an album, “ Beyond the Sun,” that I quidditched out of curiosity, expecting it to be rubbish, and haven’t stopped listening to since. Pretty trip-hoppy in places, which may have seemed cringe worthy bandwagonjumping at the time but by this stage doesn’t mean much. Also the third best title for a song ever: a faintly menacing, sparsely orchestrated torch strong.

"When I close my eyes/ I see you for what you were/ before the autumn came.” Even at his straightest and most soft-rock banal can you really ever get enough of him?

Jonathan Richman “ Because her beauty is raw and wild”

I’ve been going through a bit of a Richman fixation of late. I won’t elaborate here as I’m going to do a post on him soon, comparing him, possibly ludicrously, with the bloke below. Suffice to say that its beautiful, brimming, tremulous, quietly exulting acceptance of the beauty of the world is enough to bring the most embittered of men worshipfully to their knees.

Scott Walker “ Jesse”

This is the flipside of Jonathan’s eternal Summer Feeling: Walker’s endless, ash-grey night. The sound of Arnold’s “long, retreating roar” it is truly unnerving in a way that simpletons like Whitehouse and Merzbow will never understand. “The Drift” just grows and grows in stature, while the dolts are still dabbling with the “transgressive” qualities of like, S and M and harsh, post-human electronic noise, purveying pure kitsch as a consequence, Walker realised long ago that what’s truly unbearable is our own fragile, traumatic embodiedness, the increasing affective emptying-out of the world. "I'm the only one left alive." A work of art, with all the deeply equivocal, anhedonic sheer seriousness that implies.

The Constantines “New King”

A post-Polar meltdown bit of self-styled blue collar artrock from Canada’s eternal Nearly-men The Constantines.” It’s what The Constantines ought to be but still aren’t quite, the sense of some sublime, ideal form that they always just fall short of achieving that’s somehow, oddly, their appeal. They gesture at a perfectly realised expression of their own essence that somehow floats around each song’s periphery: a phantasmatic surplus, the dream realization of the song almost imperceptibly evanescing in the listener’s brain (at least, it does in mine). I also really love that version of "Islands in the stream," is that ok with you???????



Richard Thompson “Why must I plead with you darling (for what’s already mine)"

The wryest song ever written about infidelity? Costello’s “I want you,” for example, churns on for ten plus minutes of gutshot gurgling and whimpering, by the end of which you’re practically muttering under your breath, “ Jesus Christ, no wonder she fancied a bit of fun,” whereas Thompson takes it on the chin and decides, well, he might as well get a bit of gallows humour out of it. Good man.


Grails “ Stoned at the Taj again.”

A fabulously florid bit of Fourth-world, third-eye candy. Intoxicatingly cinematic, hypnagogic Neo Prog, all whirling crescendos and sinuous polyrhythms, pungent with pot and patchouli, lit by flickering braziers, cavernous, the air coarse with incense. Trippy, tie-dyed, dark and lustrous. Like Goblin had collaborated with Jon Hassell. Trust these hippies!

The Misfits “Hatebreeders”

Ludicrously joyful and exuberant “The Misfits” first couple of albums make misogyny, acts of random violence and thuggish self importance every teenage boys well-deserved birthright. Which, frankly, they are. Melodic punk is an almost Universal Evil with the noble exceptions of founding fathers The Ramones, The Buzzcocks, The Undertones (although I don’t own records by any of those bands, as it goes*) and, of course, The Misfits, who, like it or not, are easily the equal of any of the above. Actually, they’re better than any of them.

*I used to know someone who had ten or so “different” Ramones’ albums. Wasthafuggingpoint? It’s like owning two Rothkos or something…

“In this world...a man himself is nothing. And there ain't no world but this one.”

“You're wrong there, Top. I seen another world.”

Terrence Malick’s "The Thin Red Line"

Blue Collar’s determined refusal of the mythic is evident from the very start. A series of shots of an assembly line set to Beefheart’s “Hard working man,” the title sequence plays with and undercuts the conventions of heroic representation, freeze framing and then allowing the image to curdle, holding on it a little too long as the track clanks emptily in the background. A reflective pause, just long enough to deliberately sour the iconicity. The whole film takes place in that gap.


This is Blue Collar’s founding gesture, a pointed ambiguity, a refusal of the foreclosure of either sentiment or dogmatism. It’s neither a hymn to the authenticity of the working man, nor a paean to the historic majesty of the industrial process. Blue Collar wants you to understand that for all the power of solidarity and wit, all the pride and skill, all the tenacity, all the beauty that a sentimental eye of any disposition might find, there is a slow, empty pulse of panic behind it all that resolutely resists aestheticization. This integrity spills over into Schrader’s mid-Atlantic style, spare but without longeurs, the camerawork and framing discrete and unfussy without sliding over into cinema verite, all melodrama skilfully sidestepped. While Springsteen and Mellencamp on the radio might address your fears and sell you the Capraesque romance of the small man against the mighty Corporation, the dream of escape, the open highway, “Thunder road,” the only Promised Land that the working stiffs in Blue Collar are going to case is the local Union Office and its ungaurded safe. No-one is going anywhere here and there is only one real concern, money, and the desperate need for more of it.


“I take home two-ten a week man, goddamn. I gotta pay for the lights, gas, clothes, food... every fuckin' thing, man. I'm left with about thirty bucks after all the fuckin' bills are paid. Gimme a break, will ya mister?”


There is no heroic individualism, no swaggering, no idea that the blue collar tough guys “really live.” Pryor and Keitel have to lie to their wives to go out on a rare debauch and money worries run all the way through their attempts to get their rocks off, culminating in a despairing, early morning confessional on Smokey’s couch. And it’s precisely Smokey’s superspade toughness, how badass he is, how prepared to go against the system, that has him killed.

Blue Collar won’t let you escape the ugly reality of borderline poverty’s constant pressure, the bills that just won’t add up, the needs that can never be met. Its most telling symbol comes with Keitel’s daughter who has tried to make the braces that he can’t afford to buy her even though he’s working two jobs, out of wire. The constant pain of it, like a metal barb in your flesh.


In Blue Collar the factory itself is largely an irrelevance, it isn’t lingered over, there’s no sense of its being exotic or exciting, fetishized. It’s mundane, background. The director’s and the character’s eyes are aligned and this is one of the ways in which Blue Collar manages to maintain fidelity, in locating us directly within the men’s concerns rather than trying to appeal to any extra-diegetic or meta-critical level.

The only moments of overt directorial commentary are in the title sequence, the montage of machinery drowning out Smokey’s attempt to escape, a highly symbolic , impersonal murder in which it is the factory itself that is used as a weapon of destruction, and again when the film freeze-frames in the final shot, a deliberately composed socialist-realist tableaux, which might be entitled “The Workers Divided” and over which Smokey’s justifiably famous lines are reiterated:

“They pit the lifers against the new boy and the young against the old. The black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.”

“Blue Collar” has two highly sympathetic black leads, unusual enough for a Hollywood movie (the bad guys are exclusively white), but also two roles in which the blackness is largely incidental. Again we’re back in the characters' world. Bounded by their position as workers, there are no racial distinctions, none of the grueling attempts to address the “issue” of race that characterizes more recent Liberal Hollywood. “Blue Collar,” made in 1978, is colour-blind in a way that is inconceivable in contemporary cinema.

In the final scene of Keitel and Pryor hurling racial abuse at each other, the implication, along with the quote that overlays it “ they pit the young against old…” is that identity politics begins to appear once economic solidarity is undermined, that identity politics is at best a form of mis-recognition, at worst just one more potential weapon in the bosses' arsenal. Blue Collar’s guiding assumption runs counter to most Hollywood: under the thin veneer of self-interest lies a deep, primal reserve of solidarity and understanding which must be actively broken up and partitioned. You thought you were both just workers but actually you’re a nigger and he’s a honky. The essence of the three way relationship in Blue Collar is solidarity, and if that solidarity dissolves it is not due to an irruption of the inevitable human venality a la “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and a million others, or due to the countermanding claims of race and blood, it is concerted and imposed. The shock and tragedy of the final scene is the recognition that once the epithets start flying around, the bosses really have won.

The fatal flaw for almost all of Schrader’s characters is belief not that moral action is possible in an irredeemably corrupt world, but in the myth of the heroic individual, so remorselessly recycled throughout American culture. It’s a form of tragic moral naivete. The naivete is a failure to recognize the systemic nature of the problem, the necessity of others. Within the “Night Workers” series, the concluding, tentative redemption that Schrader lifted from Bresson’s “Pickpocket” sees the central character begin to realize his dependence on others, a move toward recognition of his social character rather than the traditional atonement-as-redemption of standard Hollywood fare. In Blue Collar that dependence is already there, the tragic naivete of the group in question resides not in their misunderstanding the nature of reality but in failing to understand its scale and power. In Blue Collar there simply aren’t enough of them.