Jason Phereus,

2012-01-27T09:25:00.000-08:00

London losing its lustre?

2012-01-27T00:37:00.000-08:00

"Danny Boyle unveils his Underworld-soundtracked opening ceremony"

Fuck me, it's still 1996 in some people's heads, innit. The glory years!

2012-01-19T02:23:00.000-08:00

"Superunknown" by Soundgarden, an album I never listened to at the time, and the singles from which I actively disliked, is actually a really great record.

2012-01-19T01:37:00.000-08:00

Anyone who's ever had the misfortune of receiving an e-mail from me, or indeed reading this blog, will know that I am both a Lazy and Deeply Incompetent typist, but don't worry, I even handicap myself sometimes. Just found this in my work in progress;

Sanial Garigs chesy

any guesses?

2012-01-15T09:30:00.001-08:00

2012-01-15T08:27:00.001-08:00

2012-01-13T04:48:00.000-08:00

another bit here (actually the follow up to the first post, even if the chronology is a bit backward)

2012-01-13T01:01:00.000-08:00

As I said, I'm working on something longer (honest!) and will probably post some bits and bobs over at the decades' blogs, the first one's here. The Jensen/Beale reference at the start is to the film Network.

2012-01-11T23:48:00.000-08:00

I heartily recommend this by the way. I'm working on a similar project myself, hence the long silence.

Matt firmly declares that he has no intention whatsoever of doing the same for the 80s and 90s, and being the skilled interpreter of the secret desire/intention concealed within the negative assertion I am, I naturally look forward to reading them both in due course!

2012-01-11T23:28:00.000-08:00

Phil on Phine Phorm over at the Zone.

2012-01-06T01:51:00.000-08:00

I seem to have had my Hotmail account blocked and now would be a good time to switch to Gmail anyway so if you have sent me any message in the last 48 hours that you need to send me again I am now at c.neville1970@gmail.com

2011-12-27T20:18:00.000-08:00

I toyed with the idea of buggering off, I toyed with the idea of deleting the blog etc. but actually I'm simply going to transform it. I am not the same person I was when I started this about five years ago, and I'm certainly not the same as a writer, I don't think. I am writing (fiction) on and off and my style has become simpler and simpler, so looking back on earlier work is a bit painful.

I'm also, I have to say, optimistic about the future, and not just on a personal level.

A couple of months ago I rang an old friend to meet up for a drink and had to talk briefly to his wife, who doesn't really like me. Later he told me she'd said, "Carl sounds different, he didn't try to make a single joke."

She was right, Ahhh, free at last!

2011-12-22T04:06:00.000-08:00

2011-12-21T22:39:00.000-08:00

Anybody still carrying a torch for Techno Animal's mighty "Brotherhood of the bomb" would have been hard-pressed to deny the sheer sonic delight that was Death Grips. On one level it was contrived Math-rocky smart-arsed take on Blog-cultures obsessive re-churn of the obscure and the unlikely juxtaposition (dude!!! you sampled Magma!!) with a kind of horrible schoolboyish obsession with instability and dark thoughts. WOOOOOOO!!!! I am a PSYCHO!!!!!

Or, it was a colossal piece of Grand Guignol messthetics. I chose the latter approach, despite misgivings and had to admit to finding it thrilling. Plus it pissed on that Odd Future record. Which I also quite liked.

2011-12-21T21:59:00.001-08:00

Ho-Ho. Sign this.

Anus Metalicus

2011-12-20T21:59:00.000-08:00

Hipster Black Metal. Had to happen didn't it?

Though as far as I can make out Mount Eerie beat eveyone to that a couple of years ago. Quite like that Mount Eerie/Microphones stuff actually, should give it all another serious listen.

Y'know what though? I think I'm going to stop using the term Hipster. I think I over-applied it and that maybe it was unfair to begin with.

Let's use the no-less-odd coinage positive Black Metal.

First of all I absolutely love that Liturgy album. Yep, pretentious academic theorizing is exactly what Black Metal needs. Plus covers of My Bloody Valentine (bloody awful as it happens, but it's the thought that counts). Plus, a kind of rickety/dry/No-Wave sparse and spartan intensity, as much Glenn Branca as Burzum all added up to an intoxicating new direction for rock in general, above and beyond the impact on the Black Metal scene alone. So many people "came of age" in different scenes in 2011 that earlier moaning (my own) about lack of ideas/pastiche/hipsterism seem retrospectively misplaced.

Again, as with the Ferraro and Lopatin stuff below it felt like something new was happening: if there was some real or imagined confluence between Dubstep and Drone metal, it will be interesting to see if there is any overlap between positive BM and post-dubstep. I reckon that Rustie likes a bit of Black, innit.

So obviously the other major PBM bands had releases this year too, and I dug them both. I really like the pretentious/unpretentious thing going on with these bands that punctures all the solemnity of the scene. At some points that solemnity has seemed vital, now it feels a little bit unengaged. Ideas are always important of course but they're especially important right now and it's good to see these bands come along and inject a certain contrariness and debate into what could otherwise be a rather hermetic and inarticulate scene, ironically, given how generally smart Metal fans are.

So obviously Wolves In The Throne Room and Kralice got my vote (again).WITTR are often referred to as Eco-metal, presumably because of their reliance on images of a pastoral/sublime and I like the term, adding a potentially transformative, political edge, plus they're kind of down-home, rustic types. Regular Joes. Black Metal as the new Heartland Rock.

Death Metals' smartest man (he wouldn't like that description, I suspect) Hideous Gnostic, Caina had a new one out too. How's about that Caina, eh? and his heroic disregard for any presumed listeners/fanbase. He's a one off and as I've said before, locates Black Metal (and hardcore and post-rock etc) in a particular long train of Englishness, especially in his willful iconoclasm. An album that travelled far and wide...

...... taking things off in a whole different direction really, and partly falling in with Darkthrones' (only partially successful) return to Eighties' Hardcore.

Though these guys expressed that interface most successfully and produced, through a pretty fulsome combination of hardcore and Black Metal an absolute riff-monster. In terms of sheer cathartic rush not much this year came close. Plus they had a good line in essentially Arty post BM too.

Though my favourite of them all and maybe my favourite album of the year was this bit of Dadaist Black Metal from Finnish band Oranssi Pazuzu. Something of a conceptual joke given the band members' other activities, nonetheless it opened up all kinds of new sonic and structural possibilities for metal. Was it just Blackened Hawkwind? Maybe so, but it was still a rare and otherworldy blast of satanic space junk.

Here's the message: change or die. Change or remain undead/half-alive. Change is a kind of death anyway, die in order to be reborn. Be keen to find new loves and new hates.

2011-12-15T18:26:00.000-08:00

Tense, hoarse, sweaty, paranoid, frustrated, frustrating, belligerent, panicked, lost, pleading, apologetic, hopeful, 31 Knots were as turbulent and exhausting as ever on Trump Harm. It's hard to precisely explain how their music seems to happen to them rather than being something they themselves have created: less the bliss of the jam "losing yourself in the music" than it is a sudden panic-attack or a surge of semi-mystical and traumatic insight, though, again, there is none of the catharsis of thrash or hardcore. 31 Knots are pensive, watchful, dwelling on and within particular moments, mumbling through pockets of reprieve, subject to sudden surges of elation followed by regret and melancholy slumps; masturbation, political bile, sexual and social inadequacy, guilty insight, cryptic truths just beyond their grasp, "bitter ellipsis in search of a sentence".

Like Vampire Weekend if they'd ever had to pick through a skip for furniture.

2011-12-15T06:01:00.000-08:00

So yeah that Jamie Vex'd eh? Basically I don't think he's done anything I haven't really liked, and he kind of got out of the moody end of Dubstep almost the instant he released its definitive record, didn't he? That album of Vex'd offcuts last year was great, I saw him live a few years ago on an evening of Dubstep drabness around the time of the In System Travel stuff and he shone. Basically he seems like a younger (generations') version of Kevin Martin, restless, innovative, smart and largely incapable of making records I won't like.

Someone else LIOMRIWL is that Dan Lopatin. He's got better with each release it seems and Replica is basically pretty minblowing, isn't it? I'd be keen to know what else it sounds like, or how retro sounding it is (unlike the Wire album of the year a bit back Rifts) to me it sounded/felt pretty new. In fact this and the new Ferraro (who I haven't much cared for in the past) made me think, immediatley: this is the work of great artists.

Actually the titles alone on the Ferraro record were worth some kind of prize.

Yeah, I love those records. Fuck it, I'll say it: 2011 was a brilliant year for music. Actually it felt like a germinal year.

2011-12-14T22:54:00.000-08:00

I actually listened to quite a lot of music this year so I reckon I'll do an Albums of the Year thing. Basically everyone I've liked over the past few years released a record in 2011 so it was kind of a bumper crop for me at least. Tune of the year, from probably album of the year, though, was this bad boy.

2011-12-14T22:12:00.000-08:00

Can anyone out there do a post on 70s' Australian Cinema for And What Will...?

I reckon we also need something on Polish Cinema of the 70s too, he said, not looking at anyone in particular...

2011-12-13T21:32:00.000-08:00

Gobsmacked! Ralph takes things off in a whole new direction.

2011-12-11T21:38:00.001-08:00

Funny....I've just been having exactly this discussion with someone and contemplating something very similar myself. She is of course completely correct.

So long Nina! See you when I get there.

2011-12-01T00:43:00.001-08:00

Currently listening to Bangs and Works Vol 2. Amazing stuff, really, but keep flashing on this as UR-Choon behind loads of the tracks.

2011-11-24T07:00:00.000-08:00

For Phil!

2011-11-21T22:38:00.001-08:00

Excellent stuff on Folk Opposition from Ben!

2011-11-21T07:18:00.000-08:00

this sums it up, dunnit. I quite like FOTL you won't be at all surprised to learn.

Come on, Rick, I'm not a prize.
I'm not a cynic or one of those guys.
Come on, Rick, I'm not a rope,
Now pull your socks up.
Come on, Rick, I'm not a child,
I'm not special or one of a kind.
Come on Rick, I'm not a drunk,
I know my own worth,
I'm an adult!
I'm an adult!

A common purpose,
A common goal.

Come on, Rick, I'm not a prize.
I'm not a cynic or one of those guys.
Come on, Rick, I'm not a rope,
Now pull your socks up.
Come on, Rick, I'm not a child,
I'm not special or one of a kind.
Come on Rick, I'm not a drunk,
I know my own worth.
I'm an adult!
I'm an adult!

A common purpose
Gains value as a common goal.
Let's flail together
If we must flail at all.

Deep in the heart of the battle,
Caught in the switch of the flow,
Freedom from notes, she sells freedom from songs,
She sells freedom and arms Eritrea.

I could have made these excuses in my sleep,
As if anyone had doubted them at all,
But if we arm Eritrea then we won't have to pay her
And everyone can go home.

I've got to seek paranoia where I find,
As if anyone had doubted it at all,
But if we arm Eritrea then we won't have to pay her
And everyone can go home.
Yeah

2011-11-21T00:30:00.001-08:00

I don't know about anyone else but personally I don't really have any problem being told what to do by people I recognize as being more informed, strategically smarter and more competent than I am, or even by those equally so. Hierarchy is fine with me as long as I have intellectual and moral respect for the people above me: hey there's a lot of clever, committed people in the world and I have no problem being in the lowest rank as long the structure itself seems just and legitimate. I yearn neither to heroically stand on high nor dissolve myself in the mass. I'd like to be an engaged part of a rationally organized, coherent movement, if that means taking some peoples' decisions on faith, if that means being a foot soldier rather than a general, so what? The narcissism of hierarchy or the narcissism of non-hierarchy? Neither.

2011-11-13T18:43:00.001-08:00

Love K Punk!

2011-11-09T10:58:00.000-08:00

Happy Birthday Ping!

2011-11-07T02:25:00.000-08:00

Love Akala!

2011-10-30T00:45:00.000-07:00

New and rather excellent post over at the 80s blog from Ralph!

Need I say that if you want to write something for one of those blogs, you just have to tell us?

2011-10-25T09:33:00.000-07:00

Phwoar! That "Glass Swords" by Rustie is a bit of terrific, innit? He's been listening to Radiohead hasn't he (and who could blame him). Errrr....actually it sounds like chillwave to me....

2011-10-25T09:24:00.000-07:00

Phwoar! That "King of Limbs" by Radiohead is a bit of alright, innit. They've been listening Fly-Lo (and who can blame them.)

2011-10-22T20:29:00.000-07:00

Phil has started his own blog!

Now, I haven`t mentioned this to Phil but we`ve had a couple of uncanny confluences recently. Firstly I was looking at some Nice Strong Arm videos with a mind to posting them on the 80s blog when Phil, literally two days later, did exactly that. Fair enough, but then again Nice Strong Arm!? They`re not exactly The Beatles, izzit? Then I was also toying with a post on finding your "missing half" only for Phil to produce an excellent post on the same theme. Then last night I had a dream about him, in which he was moving house, only to wake up and find he`d set up a new blog.

All kinds of wizardy mind-meld going on!

2011-10-19T05:44:00.001-07:00

new post over at the 70s blog.

2011-10-18T09:01:00.000-07:00

It’s ok to be an optimist, full of non-specific can-do elan, gazing rapturously at misty vision of the better tomorrow our manifest destiny will finally deliver us into, ok to be a pessimist, a bit of a downer, perhaps, but a speaker of ugly and necessary truths and cautionary tales. Best of all to be a realist, third-way, middle path, nodding sagely and raising your eyebrows in amused contemplation of the excesses of the other two as they flank you on either side.

What you mustn’t be is any kind of idealist. What you mustn’t imagine is any kind of permanent, large scale transformation of social relations for the better or waste time dreaming of worlds as yet unmade and unimaginable: that particular adolescent yearning, fluttering away in your chest, should be stamped out a.s.a.p. Don’t embarrass yourself at your age, even if it’s still there, hide it away, lock it up and ignore it. Never publically acknowledge it. Get on with the loud, sour, self-harming business of living.

But for all that, we both know how strongly it is in you, don’t we?

The Hill 2

2011-10-13T10:01:00.000-07:00

Connery may be the star of the Hill and the character with whom the audience is supposed to empathise, but the film is comprehensively stolen from him by a trio of superb British character actors, Ian Bannen (who also steals the film from Connery again when they next meet in The Offence) Ian Hendry and Harry Andrews.

Andrews plays R.S.M Wilson the de facto ruler of the Glasshouse (the Commandant is a bloated upper-class sybarite who spends his time whoring and having the wool pulled over his eyes.) It’s one of the greatest performances ever committed to celluloid. Wilson represents the Empire, the pre Second World War world of hierarchy and discipline, the belief in Queen and Country and Duty, the man whose job it is to iron out deviations in the smooth daily running of the British war machine by running insubordinate or treasonous soldiers over The Hill. In a sense Wilson is The Hill, monolithic in his certainty and his unerring attachment to the rules, physically and mentally almost superhumanly robust. In a superb two-shot sequence after a suicidal drinking competition in the Officers’ mess we see Wilson and Stevens in separate showers. Wilson is scrubbing himself vigorously, whistling, brimming over with vim and gusto. Stevens stands wretched, head down and hung over, the water drumming on his back. Wilson, like the Hill can not be defeated or beaten down, he is of a different order, he has the right stuff, the mettle.

The attacks on Wilson, on the Empire, on the State, come from all sides, from within, through the ambitious Stevens, the liberal Harris, the weak and uncertain Medical Officer and without, through Roberts, the man who has lost faith in the pre-War world and has set out to destroy it and his cellmates, an array of those post-War figures who will begin to chip away at the old confidence and the sense of a natural order, the proles, the spivs, the queers, the uppity “darkies” who think they have the same rights as true-born Englishman. In these respects the Hill is really a film about the Sixties rather than a portrayal of the 1940s, a period in which the aristocratic old-order, The Establishment, was being eaten away by the democratic popular forces and meritocratic upsurges of a modern age it simply could not understand.

In one of The Hill's key sequences the prisoners begin a revolt over the death of their fellow inmate, Stevens, spilling out of their cells and standing chanting his name on the gangways, poised on edge of revolt, of a riot.

Lumet is often criticized (with much justice) for his over casual approach to mise-en-scene but here, as in the rest of The Hill, the camerawork and framings, the use of extreme low and high angles that alternately turn Wilson from a towering figure, a colossus around whose base the camera slowly rotates, to the implacable centre of the crowded, geometric intricacy of the deep focus crane shots keep his domination of the frame, and the Glasshouse itself intact (and align him even more fully with the hill, he is both the base and apex of an invisible hill, the hill of his absolute authority, standing there in the Glasshouse itself.)

Wilson goes about quelling the incipient riot with an exemplary combination of common-sense, humour, camaraderie, bribery, paternalism, quiet menace, enormous charm. At one point he threatens to round up the ring-leaders if the men won’t go back to their cells.

“Who are the ringleaders?” A voice calls down cockily, sure that Wilson doesn’t know and is merely bluffing.

The camera cuts in close and low on Wilson’s face as he somehow simultaneously barks and drawls his response, his head filling the screen.

“Every fifth man!”

…here is power in a flash, nakedly arbitrary, breaking up the fragile solidarity, exposing your fear that the mob cannot hide you, that you may be the one to suffer the full penalty, unfairly. You weren’t a ringleader yet you might be punished as such. Here is power, necessarily revealing itself, to disrupt and discompose before the reasonable discourse is brought in again to soothe and cajole.

“Every fifth man!”

A ripple runs through the crowd, the sound of something cohesive breaking up, of a focused energy dispersing, the shift from the collective to the particular. The wind goes out of the prisoner’s sails, the spirit, the spell, has been broken.

This is how they do it Carl, this is how they’ve always done it.

First it’s “every fifth man!” Then it’s extra rations for tea if you all go quietly back to your cells.

2011-10-13T08:40:00.000-07:00

Just a note on that occupy wall street thing. Now I am prepared to believe that playing Bob Marley songs on an acoustic guitar and dancing about doesn’t necessarily mean that you are just a carnivalesque hippy who believes “all you need is love”. In fact I’ve met loads of South Americans who will quite happily join in a bit of a folksy sing-a-long and have dreads and stuff and play the bongos who are also like intensely well read and very serious Leftists who have lived under the kinds of corrupt authoritarian governments and amid the kind of crime and poverty that most British Leftists have zero experience of, so I know that we Brits, especially we bookish, left-field Brits get all embarrassed and uncomfortable and sneering if we see people dancing to the wrong music and letting themselves go and stuff, and holding hands and hugging, but let’s not assume that our own general up-tightness is some form of greater intellectual or moral authority and that your capacity to access simple pleasures means you’re not also doing any complicated thinking, eh? Stiffness and introversion might not, after all, be the must useful qualities in those trying to build a broad-based collective.

2011-10-12T09:13:00.001-07:00

New post from me over at the 70s' blog

2011-10-03T18:52:00.000-07:00

Hell yeah! Greyhoos has been on fire over at those decade blogs recently!

learning to disappear

2011-10-03T04:14:00.000-07:00

Before I'd read Alex Niven's excellent upcoming Zero Book "Folk Opposition" I'd made a certain assumption about its theme/contents on the basis of the title. Then, when I got to grips with it I realised that the title was a subversive pun.

My initial assumption about the use of the word folk was that it was Churchlandian, that "folk" as it often does in much of the discourse in and around Zero books and blogs referred to a common-sense worldview constructed out of primitive concepts that have been overturned by research in cognitive science and theoretical shifts in philosophy that seek to further decenter the humanist/enlightenment presumption of agency, will and self-hood.

I expected, then, on the basis of the title that "folk opposition" ( like folk psychology, and a fairly recently-floated attempt at the term "folk politics") would be a deconstructive broadside against atavistic traditions of organisations, protest and identity. This assumption was made, despite my familiarity with Alex's writing, on the basis that it's hard to imagine the term folk, in the positive sense of a historically/locally grounded collective identity, being argued for from a radical perspective, yet this is what "Folk Opposition" insists upon, a notion of the folk which degenerates neither into a Volk nor is disdained as being merely "folk" in the eliminitivist sense.

I won't get substantially into the content of the book itself (you should just read it), but its manifesto-in-microcosm appears toward the end. "Deconstructive cynicism has had its day". I think in this Alex expresses an increasingly broad-based disenchantment with theoretical approaches that felt appropriate or energising during the Blair/Brown years but which not only seem to lack urgency under the Coalition, but actually feel counter-productive.

Intellectual Rock Stars and Philosophical Princes of Darkness out to wrest the mantle of More Theoretically-Anti-Humanist-Than-Thou are themselves rather a stale tradition, and the virtue of Alex's book is that rather than worrying after some transformative subjectivity which will bring about the post-Capitalist transition, it's significantly more interesting, and genuinely more Socialist, in it's basic humility. Where are interesting things happening? Where and what are the resurgent vestiges of communalism and mutualism and how are these to be supported and encouraged, to what extent should actually existent and emergent practices lead the way rather than a top-down theoretical models that ultimately produce little more than a flurry of intellectually gratifying debate. The book's call, effectively, is for intellectualism to be a handmaiden to grassroots' movements.

As a manifesto from the student demonstrations had it last year: "you are not going to be famous". The best you can hope for is that you might be of some use, that your role is not that of leader, but servant.

Or, as Pound might have had it, "Pull down thy vanity!"

2011-09-29T21:55:00.000-07:00

Some universities are investing more in support services, in recognition that if students leave their course, it can damage their prospects and lead to the university losing their fees.

(italics mine)

2011-09-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

tell me you are fucking kidding me!

(thanks to ZoneStyx)

The Hill 1

2011-09-29T01:16:00.000-07:00

"You'll stuff it up!"

The Hill has several areas of concern, one of which is the question of justice.

A weak and effeminate (closet gay) soldier dies as a result of his disciplining at the hands of newly arrived Staff Sargeant Williams and the men in the prison demand that someone be held to account. The only man who is prepared to put himself forward as a witness is the "broken" Sergeant Major Roberts, who has been arrested for refusing to lead his men to certain death and punching his commanding officer. Roberts is the disruptive, progressive figure in the Glasshouse, a correctional facility for soldiers, who draws other staff and soldiers into his conflict with his nemesis, Williams, who arrives in the camp the same day. He shares his cell with three other men after Steven's death, Monty a fat, illiterate Spiv, Mc Grath, a brawling Yorkshireman and Jacko a black soldier. On the Staff side the sympathetic figures are Harris a gay, liberal staff Sergeant and the bumbling and ineffective Medical Officer.

At the end of the film ( a conclusion often judged to be the film's dramatic weakness by critics) the flimsy possibility of justice that has been brought about, the coalition between the men prepared to testify and the staff prepared to protect them is undermined by the men themselves, by Jacko and McGrath attacking Staff Sergeant Harris. This is the conservative message of The Hill, that there is the possibility that the good, progressive Men of Rank can, in alliance, bring about change and see that justice prevails but this is doomed to fail, compromised by the bestiality of the proles and the inferior races whose lack of self control will only condemn them all to remain subjects of power. The tragedy of The Hill is that the subaltern classes don't know what is good for them, they have only directionless rage and immediate gratification, unlike the higher ranks who believe in and understand the reforming power of institutions.

2011-09-29T01:01:00.000-07:00

Why The Hill?

If you were to ask me what the greatest film of all time was I would probably stop to reflect for a moment wondering what the right answer was, y'know, the smart answer, the surprising answer, the answer you wanted me to give you and then I'd probably just think "fuck it!" and say The Hill.

I had a little go at The Hill here and I'm returning to it again partly as a consequence of reflecting on the recent shifts in the UK (in fact the three Connery-Lumet movies with which I am unhealthily obsessed, The Hill, The Anderson Tapes and The Offence all seem highly relevant at the moment) and the visibility of the deeply embedded and interlinked structures of power, privilege and authority that the rapidly receded tide of Old Skool neo-liberalism has laid bare. Just to clarify, what I mean is that while aggressively neo-liberal practices continue there is no comforting patina of progressive ideology anymore, this fantasy element, strong under both Thatcher and Blair has been whisked away: for the first time in a long time the sense of horror and dread is not, as it was during the Blair years, one of feeling smothered or suffocated, of feeling overwhelmed by ideology but rather a distressing lack of fantasy, the exposing of the thing itself, the machinery of Late Capitalism going nakedly about its business. In this sense the cumulative affect of this most recent stage is one of obscenity and insult whereas before it was weariness and fatigue, if before you were patronisingly smothered, now you are mockingly over-exposed.

This relates to The Hill in a number of ways and I may have to go at it from number of angles in order to get at what it says fully. Broadly, and veering off slightly I also feel that the critical strategies that were useful pre-2008 feel less urgent now, in that what needed to be "unmasked" during the previous decades is now quite plainly and unrepentantly present.

I say contemporary but really the hill is also primal, pyramidal, the method through which man dominates nature, disciplines the vast, impersonal expanse of the desert by imprinting the symbol of his Will upon it and also the means by which the "broken" soldiers are broken down further and then rebuilt. In a sense the return of and the return to the Hill is an extension of Pound's maxim that Literature is "news which stays news". The progressivist fantasies melt away, the ruling order is challenged and power asserts itself, hard-power, not the cultural soft-power of "repressive tolerance" or many of the other buzzwords of last decades' Leftist critique, along with the reality of social antagonisms presumed to have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

It's useful then to return to director whose primary focus was on power and the institution.

I'm going to write several short posts and the first one is about the end of the film so it definitely CONTAINS SPOILERS.

.

2011-09-28T08:23:00.000-07:00

Good, Socialist cover that, innit?

2011-09-27T21:39:00.000-07:00

sign this!

2011-08-18T14:31:00.001-07:00

2011-08-18T14:31:00.000-07:00

2011-08-14T02:19:00.000-07:00

I suddenly remembered this last night, out-of-the-blue and then had one of those, let's be frank, super-enjoyable youtube moments of rediscovery after not having heard it for 20 plus years.

It's even better than I remember. Once again,there are a lot of youtube links posted on blogs, innit? But if you don't click play you'll regret it for the rest of your cruelly foreshortened and benighted days.

2011-08-10T13:40:00.000-07:00

Wayne weighs in and tells me (among other people) off....

and after a bit of sober reflection, I think he's right!*

*the cunt!

2011-08-10T12:49:00.000-07:00

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but....

This has been a gift to police forces everywhere, hasn't it? Especially The Met.

A friend tells me that in Clapham Junction they really were just standing round, arms folded, watching....

2011-08-10T06:12:00.000-07:00

The riots have basically just been depressing all round, haven’t they? Impossible to condone or condemn you’re left in the position of feeling a certain amount of sympathetic revulsion for all involved: nihilistic, cynical, opportunistic and completely understandable, yet horribly destructive of other working peoples’ piece of mind and livelihoods, setting “communities” that should be uniting against each other and feeding into the government and the media’s “enemy within” rhetoric.

Dole Scum in flash trainers with smartphones greedily grabbing more vulgar Chav tack froma burning Footlocker and waving their housing benefit cheques in decent taxpayer’s faces are the new Muslims: and it looks like the re-armament is not just going to be a merely moral re-armament, the government’s disproportionate, hysterical response mirroring the hyperbole of the media and the attention grabbing Twitterers. Lewisham right now is like Fallujah on a bad night in 2008! (Cue twitpics of some bins in the road and a few moody teens skulking about.)

But what I’m nor buying is that it’s nothing to do with the cuts: unless you want to suggest that’s too reductive and it is in fact a response to the corruption and seeming impunity of the Met, the remorseless demonizing of the poor, the continued failure to regulate the banking sector, the recession we’re going to be mired in for a decade (although actually forever), soaring rents AND the cuts, plus the clear sense that Things Can Only Get Worse.

If the cuts and the financial crisis are unlikely to provoke disorder why have the police been predicting it for the past few years? Why did Nick Clegg predict it before the last election? Are you telling me that the Deputy Prime minister used to be so credulous a fool as to believe there was a link between diminished standards of living and widening inequality and the likelihood of people indulging in antisocial acts, but has now realised that actually it’s simply that moral standards have declined and parenting slipped in the past year? If it is a moral question, which is the way the Right will always want to frame it (as will left-liberals) the question must be, why does The Conservative Party have such a disastrous effect on peoples’ morality? Look at all that long, tranquil period under New Labour compared with the Eighties, or the last year.

What is it, Michael Gove, given that the economic argument is fatuous, liberal mollycoddling, in the Tories that brings out the very worst in people, that makes parents neglect children, incites the worst passions and voids them of all personal responsibility? What kind of contagion are you spreading, what is this evil that you let loose about the land despite all your strenuous proclamations to be the moral party?

2011-08-08T12:10:00.000-07:00

"My real sympathies are with all those people in the flats above me who are working class – and I don't mean that rudely – that have got nothing. They have only got the clothes they are in. The only thing I can say is that I'm pleased they all got out safely, because they could all have been killed."

(italics mine)

2011-08-05T16:51:00.000-07:00

another Mancunian Nugget.

unless they weren't from Manchester of course.

nice to see Ruthless Rap Assasins getting some props in the Guardian the other week.

2011-07-29T14:55:00.000-07:00

One swallow doesn't make a Summer/but one'll do for now/and as if i had a choice/ I didn't get where I am today/ by being too choosy/ I've got what it takes/ to take what you've got....

2011-07-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

one of the greatest lyrics of all time..

oh, let's get up to the Fells/ Show me what a Lancashire lass you used to be

King of the Slums - Bear with Me

2011-07-29T14:43:00.000-07:00

2011-07-29T14:30:00.000-07:00

a really great, unfairly neglected band IMnotveryHO

DUB SEX - 'Instead Of Flowers' - 1988

2011-07-29T14:28:00.000-07:00

Crispy Ambulance: The Presence

2011-07-29T14:23:00.000-07:00

2011-07-27T08:35:00.000-07:00

sign this.

and pass it on to be signed by others.

2011-07-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

Who writes this stuff and are they actually paid for it? an occasional series.

Looking through Time Out to find something to keep The Spleen entertained on his annual visit I discovered that WU LYF, who I rather like (cheers, Alex!) and are about the most Mancunian sounding band imaginable are apparently Tropicalia (a fairly broad “genre” in and of itself anyway) and Animal Collective influenced: well they’re certainly heavily Bromantic and maybe the rhythm section is a bit more exuberant than your average Indy landfill but they sound a lot more like Crispy Ambulance, or Dub Sex to me. Maybe I’ll go and play it to some of my Brazilian students telling them it’s Giberto Gil and see if they can spot the difference.

Is this just ‘cos of the vaguely tropical video for “spitting out blood”?

2011-07-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday Owen!

2011-07-17T05:06:00.000-07:00

The Hauntological Orchestra are the UK's foremost explorers of the art of audio hauntology - sparkier than a bri-nylon spacesuit, cooler than Jacques Derrida's old fridge-freezer. By turns painfully hip and mind-bogglingly kitsch, the Orchestra exists at the point where the funky but fashionable faux pas gives way to a vintage electronic vibe to die for. Your MC for this night of unbridled pleasure is Jonny Trunk, doyenne of retrofuturist chic, record label magnate, pop-cultural historian and presenter of Resonance104.4fm's acclaimed OST Show.

(italics mine)

Nice to see all that hard theoretical work done by Simon and Mark over the past few years, especially in Mark's attempts to provide music with some kind of forward orietation through reconnecting it with the modernist project, utterly travestied by whoever wrote this.

Who did write it btw? Because they should drop the term hauntology as a far as I can see before they completely devalue it. I mean I know it has underground cache and it's kind of new and makes you sound interesting and cutting-edge but crate-digging chillaxing hipster esoteria is not really my understanding of what Hauntology is all about.

In fact I'd be so bold as to say it's a thoroughgoing mis/nonunderstanding and as such does no-one any favours.

2011-07-17T04:06:00.000-07:00

Here's some of that Biwa action. That's a female vocalist, by the way, probably in her 70s at the point this was recorded. You kind of wonder why anyone would view Ground Zero as extreme after 26 minutes of this.

2011-07-17T03:59:00.000-07:00

I am getting into Tomokawa Kazuki.

My attitude to Japanese rock is pretty much perfectly summed up by Reynold’s chapter on it in Retromania and predictably it seems like the traditional music and the folk is way more interesting/exciting than the Boredoms or whoever (I was initiated into the Biwa through the Mimi Nashi Houichi section of the full length DVD release of Kobayashi’s awesome Kaidan, the Shamisen through tiny folk clubs in Okinawa.)

Actually the same seems to go for films and writers too, I can’t help but think that many of the artists who are feted in the West (I’m thinking here in film pretty much about Oshima who I have to say has made some dreadful films, Empire of Passion is a colossal turkey, innit, Realm of the Senses utterly tedious) are basically loved for being The Japanese Goddard, the Japanese Kafka, the Japanese X, when in fact most of what I’ve seen that’s really great in film (not a lot (in terms of quantity of films watched, I mean, admittedly I’m still picking my way through it) Ie Samurai Banners, Seppuku, Vengeance is mine or even the Death Note series, seem to be fairly straight forward, non-self-consciously auteurist projects.)

I’m just thinking out loud here and off the top of my head from a position of virtually total ignorance of the language, history and culture of the place so I won’t say anymore as I’m really still completely groping around in the dark re Japan (back off to Fukuoaka in September) and typically many things I had no interest in ie Manga turn out on closer inspection to be this incredibly rich and complex, multifaceted artform, with, for instance, a really strong social realist strand among other things. Actually there’s a point there about my assumptions, based on Manga’s reception, promotion, and its admirers in the West: it looked like tedious “exotic” wacky shit loved by smug or geeky “alternative” types that enjoyed a brief popularity on the back of Akira and that wave of New Tech optimism and cyberpunk Nipponophilia (remember the inconsequential and absolutely revered Tetsuo, by “the Japanese Cronenburg”?) that we had to put up with in the early 90s.

Actually I heard Tomokawa’s “Inakamono No Kara Genki” ( translated superbly as A Bumpkin’s Empty Bravado (I mean I don’t know if that’s a superb translation but it’s a great title)) and thought it was alright, but hadn’t paid full attention to him till recently only to discover that he’s done some really superb stuff and his singing style is distinctive to say the least, but without seeming contrived or simply out for empty effects. There’s a live version of a song “Pistol” from Miike Takashi’s Izo below, ( which, regrettably, I’ll now have to see, despite Takashi being among, to my mind, the dullest hack directors working on the planet today) which gives a pretty good idea of his technique. And a charmer from his earlier (1977) A Natural Voice.

Like I say, I’m groping and I’m happy to be schooled by enlightened commentators.

Kazuki Tomokawa - Dagazugu

2011-07-17T03:55:00.001-07:00

Kazuki Tomokawa : PISTOL

2011-07-17T03:52:00.000-07:00

2011-07-16T13:46:00.000-07:00

I have a colleague who teaches Business at the same private school/ college I work in who I would describe as loud, opinionated, right-wing on economic issues and aggressively philistine in the best neo-liberal tradition (intellectualism is pretentious wanking-off). We get on rather well as it happens, we’re similarly attention-seeking and argumentative, but coming from different directions.

Just before I went to Japan last March there was a strike due at Heathrow that fortunately didn’t impact on me but was going to interfere with my colleague’s holiday plans. In the staff room she complained long and loud about the situation and what bastards the unions were to her husband, a self-employed builder. She herself had had run-ins with inflexible, belligerent unions when working in retail back in the early nineties.

Now I would have described her as deeply unsympathetic to the trade union cause, in fact if I wanted to goad her I only had to start saying pro-Union stuff. A couple of weeks ago before the 30th of June demo I mentioned it to her, primarily to wind her up and have a boredom-relieving argument. She was surprisingly moderate on the whole thing. I thought you were anti-Union, I said. She denied this saying that she thought that there w as a role for unions but that the problem was that sometimes they went too far. This is a substantial softening of her position, though she characteristically acted as though she’d always felt this way.

Then yesterday there was a group of A-Level teachers having a moan about the pay and promotion bands, the qualifying criteria and the management's incompetence in addressing their concerns or following up on their promises.

Sounds like you lot want to unionise, I offered in my predictable leftist provocateur pose as I went past, expecting the usual litany of sighs, chuckles, condemnations and anti-Left quips, these are the patterned and predictable games we play, instead there was kind of shrugging silence. As though, y'know, actually, that wasn't such a bad idea

Slightly gobsmacked and keen to create scandal for sad psychological needs of my own I went further. Wildcat strike, Monday! I suggested. Better still wait till the first day of the new term.

Oh, then we’d really all get the sack, another teacher told me.

Now this is only my workplace, and this is only one person, but it is also a pivotal person in terms of the group dynamics, the person who stands up and talks, who argues, who pushes for stuff, who’s prepared to be unpopular: in this small circle an opinion former, a galvanizer, and the last person I would have expected to be moving even slightly leftward, ever. But these small shifts are signs of something, aren’t they? This woman here, that one there, things re-arranging, reality readjusting.

This is not the revolution, Carl, get a grip. It probably won't lead to anything. It’s just the loss of your workplace nemesis.

True enough. But still, trust me, that's not nothing.

2011-07-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah, Philip Jeck is playing in the boxy white church next to my infant/junior school on Barrow Island and well, it seems Dopplereffekt are playing at the Bluebird club.

picks up jaw off etc...

2011-07-13T14:40:00.000-07:00

Who is Curtis? I dunno, but he emailed to ask if he could post something, we said yes and the results are frankly excellent. Looking forward to a piece on the equally great Gremlins 2!

One thing about those blogs: we have no "editorial policy" or whatever, if you want to post you contact us, we add you, you post, we read.

So if you're out there, living in fear of anyone casting a jaded eye over your hard-wrought prose before flinging it back in your face with a haughty pshaw, that simply isn't how it works.

and you don't even have to become our "mate" and exchange hilarious-yet-trenchant Leftist email banter with us. After all, we don't do it with each other.

Can I also say again what an excellent blog Voorface is..

...and say, honestly, Wayne I've tried to add you to that links bar but Blogger say no....in fact go and hang your mouse over the top of the links bar and round the decades' blogs and you'll find two attenuated, invisible, phantom links to Pere Lebrun kind of lurking in the background like some kind of a sinister critique!

2011-07-05T13:47:00.000-07:00

Owen Jones I could kiss you.

2011-06-23T15:45:00.000-07:00

And I also like Michael Moore's films. Especially "Sicko".

2011-06-23T14:53:00.000-07:00

I watched "Machines" while I was in Japan and had the usual response, a combination of revelation, total agreement and bewilderment. Generally I thought it was great, timely, urgent, engaged.

And I think it would be a bold man indeed who said he had never learned anything from Curtis' body of work. I've found it be highly informative, provocative, enlightening.

I mean, isn't it? Are the couple of smug, witless cunts who knocked this up, in which, by dismissing Curtis as style over content they handily absolve themselves from having to engage in any substantial critique of Curtis' ideas themselves, likely to offer me more in the way of information, provocation and enlightenment than the subject of their parody?

I think we know what the answer to that is, dont we?

That's two "cunts" in consecutive blogposts. England'll do that to you!

2011-06-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

Saw this on the plane....thought it was absolutely great.

I also saw The King's Speech....which I thought was absolutely great too...

and Black Swan, which really, really wasn't.*

Is British film about to undergo a revival? Hope so....

*That Aronofsky! Five shit middlebrow art movies in a row...get another job you useless cunt!

2011-06-19T05:15:00.000-07:00

Back!

2011-05-30T23:58:00.000-07:00

First heard this on Sam's recent Acid Folk Comp. It's just lovely....

....but also tinged with meloncholy, as is the whole very good, if not quite so immediate album.

2011-05-29T09:40:00.000-07:00

Interesting post by Alex on the Wild Beasts. Quite like the new one, but still long for some of that wildness of yore (yore these days being approx 2 years)

The thing here is that it IS enlarging to listen to something recommended/advocated to you because it takes on a certain colouration from another persons life, in a way it stimulates a kind of empathetic echo, ahh! so this is what moves them, this is an exteriorization in a way of their inner world, this is a part of what their soul looks like (please note absence of scare quotes around soul). It forces a kind of imaginative investment in the listener, a listening through the other, in this sense when you listen you listen together. This is why I think there was such a sense of communion and communication around the music press. You read (and re-read) the same writers week after week, often hundreds of thousands of words of prose over a few years and you got to know them, you felt familiar, intimacy developed, you listened often out of respect, in a spirit of friendship, often you struggled to like things, to see what they had seen in it.

Meanwhile, Wayne takes an elliptically autobiographical swerve.

I say, more! Less elliptically.

2011-05-25T01:08:00.000-07:00

Right, Ladies and Gents, I’m going to be away for a while. I’ve got about another week in Okinawa, then I’m off to Miyako Island again, then Fukuoka for a few days, Seoul for two days, then to Osaka overnight before flying to London on the Saturday and starting work again on the Monday (jet lag!!!!!!!!!!!). Plus sorting out work for next year in Japan in the process.

The novel’s coming along too, you’ll be delighted to hear.

Mata atode!

2011-05-21T21:13:00.000-07:00

There you go, ed.

see, I told you it was obvious....

2011-05-20T21:51:00.000-07:00

Finished! Don't have much to say at this stage, other than that it was kind of good to read a really long novel (or in fairness five mid-length novels) again. Middle section's too repetitive though, innit? I mean I realise this is like a formal strategy on Bolano’s part, the sheer numbing, desensitizing pileup of corpses and how it eventually strips away even the reader's most prurient instincts, but for me he's made his point/achieved his effect around murder 700 and we could have done without the next 400 or so.

So...not blown away as I was when I read The Erl King and I do think that the open ended and “suggestively allusive” text that hints at some higher order of connection and interrelation between the disparate events is a bit of a clichéd, po-mo cop out.

Reader: What did all that mean?

Writer: Well, what do you THINK it meant?

Reader:*Blather*

Writer: Well if that’s what it means to you, perhaps that it IS what it means, ho ho….* author disappears in a flash of smoke-and-mirrors,*

Now I don’t want to suggest that this sophisticated and kind of “texturally correct” Barthesian/Derridian writing strategy of conferring ultimate authority on the reader allows for any old poorly thought out, random “weird” bullshit to be stitched loosely together and passed off as some intense commentary on the Late Capitalist condition/ Lacanian whatnot/ Eliminitive hooha, BUT if you’ve ever written a long narrative you’ll be aware of the way seventeen different directions/meanings are constantly fizzing away in your head at any point as you plow forward wondering how you’re going to tie this all up into a meaningful whole, and consequently when you watch, say “Donnie Darko”, your tendency is to think AHA! so you couldn’t find anything to hang all these multiple levels/cool “scenes” and ideas on, no overarching formal or thematic principle, and now you're going to try a bit of sleight of hand by going “ahh, yeah, but isn’t like an a-b-c narrative and like a “meaning” and like a “conclusion” just so old-fashioned, don’t we want like an open text that the reader can enter at any stage, that liberates them from linearity and into the play of multiple meanings and interpretations?” To which I say, maybe, but let’s not try to polish the turd of your shoddy, incomplete work with the increasingly threadbare rag of post-structuralism because it looks pretty old and overdone in itself that kind of approach, looks like a handy get-out-clause.*

Any other recommendations bookwise, by the way?**

*In all fairness you would have to say that Christopher Nolan is a great plotter, a great architect even if he's not thematically my cup of tea. This is probably due to the influence of Christopher Priest who I haven't read enough of, but who I suspect takes some of that looseness and independence of meaning you experience while writing and constantly uses it to switch the readers assumption back and forth.

** UPDATE, Yeah, I've just gone and bought Don Quixote....tried to read it a few times several years ago and and kept getting distracted by other stuff. It was never excatly the right time (same with The Possessed.) while I was in the bookshop, which has a really unusual range of stuff actually, I spotted a couple of novels by Steve Erickson, who I read pretty intensively in the 90s, and his newer stuff looks really intersting too, so depending on how long El Quijote takes me I reckon I'll get up to speed on his latest stuff.

errr.. anybody read any later Mailer, "Harlot's Ghost" and what have you? What about "Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson?

2011-05-20T20:57:00.000-07:00

Wayne’s memifying over at the 70s blog, spinning off the recent last song before you die/world ends thing and pointing to the amount of Soul/Soul-influenced stuff in there

.
Now no doubt there are some ultra-avantistas who will insist on listening to Bartok or Xasthur or whatever as some final confirmation of their impregnable rejection of sentiment/the ”human” but I’d be getting fairly “soulful” myself I have to say. What you would want, or at least what I’d want confirmed to me, a confirmation that’s required periodically in life itself not just at its final stages is the sense that somehow all this has been worth it, that despite the dullness, the boredom, the confusion, the alienation, the doubts there were moments of intensity and beauty, of understanding, sympathy and joy that redeemed the whole, the feeling that your deepest needs had been met, even if only briefly.

I’d have this song partly because while hell may be other people, so too is heaven and at base the question of how meaningful any two people can be for each other haunts life. Partly because the child is father to the man and it’s always slightly shocking and embarrassing to find how little you’ve changed, how superficially experience has altered you on the deeper levels (sure, you’ve wised up and know how to play the game better now, but there’s still that bitter, tiring distance between you and your performance) because life is unfathomable and painful and you need to be consoled and you need to have the possibility of a reprieve held out to you. Because perhaps the most admirable of all qualities are compassion and quiet fortitude.

What you’d want I guess at the final moment is something that expressed the fullness, the multidimensionality, something that caught up the specific time and place of your being in the world, something connected to region, roots, class, that talked of home and work, that spoke to your fear and hope, your dreams of flight, your faltering courage, your willingness to try, the importance of finding a peer group, of drawing close to what’s most vital to you. If you’ve never felt trapped in your life, by circumstance of birth, by character, by lack of opportunity, if you’ve never surveyed the seemingly insurmountable distance between yourself and the self you want to be, the place you want to occupy, socially, interpersonally and your current life-world, never really known dismay, failure, depleted spirits and battered ego, the fear that this is all you are ever going to get, then this song will mean nothing to you.

But to be honest I can’t think of a song that better captures that intermediate stage between
ecstasy and despair, triumph and defeat, resignation and assertion that most of us inhabit most of our lives. It wants to live but deeply understands the desire to die.

It’s a really obvious choice but it says everything to me, and not just about my life. Oh, plus, I’d have the video, one of the most beautiful ever made, playing on a fifty foot screen.

We could watch it together, if you like.

2011-05-20T04:23:00.001-07:00

I'm sorry but he's left me no choice.

2011-05-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

Superlative post from Wayne!

2011-05-18T23:04:00.000-07:00

Now Capleton’s More Fire is definitely a tricky proposition innit, what with having the absolutely thrilling (on like a sonic level, yeah) Old Testament hardcore homophobia of Pure Sodom, yet at the same time this stirring, numinous, ineffably lovely hymn to Jah.

Capleton you are “just lovely”. *Swoons*

2011-05-18T01:49:00.000-07:00

small overlap time:

I notice that the drum and bass comp that Wayne recommends in the comments and the Zombi album I was listening to at the same time are both called (more or less) "escape velocity".

just saying like....

2011-05-17T22:46:00.000-07:00

Ho ho...newborn Junglist I may be but I have to say that this....

is pretty awesome. I've long been a Zombi fan but they've excelled themselves here. Has this already picked up a load of mediocre reviews elsewhere? If so, they are simply wrong!

2011-05-17T00:02:00.000-07:00

Just lovely cont.....

In other news I seem to be getting into Jungle at last, a mere twenty years after it hit its creative peak (alright 14 years, whatever) S'funny but I hear it differently now because I've started to think of it in different terms.....or perhaps it's more that the terms it was always discussed in seem more meaningful to me now...

In other completely unrelated news I have a strong desire to go to Scotland. Now it could be because I am half Scottish on my mum's side and we went up there a lot when I was a kid, I have just watched NEDS (great, though not as good as his other two) and am mad keen to see We Need To Talk About Kevin (my two favourite film makers of the moment being Scottish) or the fact that I'm reading Andrew Crumey's essays and short stories online (he's Scottish) or the recent, very interesting political upsets, or the fact that compared to England, Scotland looks like deeply civilized and progressive place right now. Could also be the sheer glowering romance of the landscape, the undeniable charm, charisma and wit of the people.

If I have to live in the UK for any length of time over the next few years, it certainly won't be London if I can help it (but then again of course, A Job looms large) and I doubt it'll be down South at all. I used to swear I would never go back up North but now I have no idea why.

2011-05-13T22:09:00.000-07:00

I'm in a bit of a "just lovely" mood at the moment so i might post a few songs over the next few days...

This is just a winner on every level... there's a lot to be said for the captain in straight/romantic mode... in fact I kind of prefer him being "commercial" to his neon meat dreaming really...

kind of the perfect summer evening song, really...

2011-05-13T21:33:00.000-07:00

Excellent stuff from Wayne, Oliver and Culla over at the decades' blogs….

I’m a bit quiet at the moment as I’m, well, not exactly writing a novel but basically thinking about one a lot. I have the same experience every time I start something new, I tell myself this time I’ll keep it straightforward, commercial and after about two pages it all goes horribly wrong and you find yourself shackled to a rapidly mutating albatross for the next however-many-years.

A violently mutating albatross, perhaps.

2011-05-08T00:08:00.000-07:00

more "just lovely."

I first heard this on a Gary War mix last year. I know youtube links are ten-a-penny, but seriously, if you don't click play on that you really will regret it for the rest of your short and wretched life.

2011-05-07T22:31:00.000-07:00

My cup runneth over a bit today.*

Now while of course flattered and gratified by having Alex say exactly the kind of things I would want said about my writing the most important thing largely is that he has absolutely nothing to gain by saying it.

In this sense it’s pure generosity, and I have to say that in my experience of online life and interactions I think the internet is a superb facilitator of the generous impulse.

Certainly some people look on blogs or sites as steps in a career-ladder, a kind of generalized home based internship, but equally of course for many people the internet has allowed a reconfiguration of their social worlds, connecting up with people who they would otherwise never have met in order to share ideas. Fundamentally it has also allowed them to give.

As an example, I illegally download a huge amount of music and of course watch a vast number of films and videos on youtube, yet I myself, shamefully, have never uploaded anything. I know it’s all someone else’s hard work that they/we are stealing but still, there are people out there who take the time and effort to upload stuff, with no financial reward and a pretty minimal bit of ego gratification, yet hundreds of thousands of people do it. There isn’t even the arguable narcissism of Facebook or blogging to consider here, just a desire, a human-wide compulsion to give gifts to others, to all and sundry, to anonymously contribute, to use your spare time to do so. This impulse is a kind of generic desire to seek out and make happy or provide for some other who on one level is like yourself.

This, it seems to me is the utopian dimension to the internet in that much of what goes on here goes against rational self-interest, even on the basis of some kind of unconscious social contract: can the anonymous Canadian guy who has made literally hundred of brilliant films available on youtube really be doing so out of the self-interested idea that if he does this other people will upload stuff he wants to see and that therefore ultimately he will benefit: perhaps he is, but then you would have to question how rational his perceived rational self interest really is.

* It's kind of important to have other poeple in mind when writing and to write for them, innit? I have to confess that when I was writing Classless I pretty much thought to myself ahhh... I'm going to write something that will entertain Owen (who is himself a very generous soul).

2011-05-05T13:12:00.000-07:00

For Wayne!

2011-05-05T11:55:00.000-07:00

In My Craft or Sullen Art
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

2011-05-05T04:42:00.000-07:00

next chapter in the "just lovely" season....

lovely warm night here in Naha and I'm just about to go out and wander its streets getting pleasantly drunk, before murdering the above tune in the Karaoke up in Shintoshi.

2011-05-04T22:46:00.000-07:00

There was never a right time to leave her.

I wanted to, for years. There’s the absurdity of it, it took years even though it was obvious to both of us, almost from the start, that things weren’t going to work out.

Our relationship then rapidly became one huge delaying tactic, one crisis after another in which there was the implicit plea; not just yet, let me get through this first, this job interview, this course, this new position in work, this next trip.

She kept me busy, bound up in these crises with twenty texts a day and emails, demands, questions, requests, anything to stop my mind wandering off onto the basic fact of our unsuitability to each other.

I could never devote enough time or thought to her concerns, her crises. There was a central, gaping hole at the core of it all, the fact that I didn’t love her and that neither of us were ready to accept that. She demanded proofs of love, tokens of love, not material things but focus, attention, involvement, concern, but in the absence of the spontaneous and natural pleasure we should have taken in each other, the freely-given sense of fullness, we had only The Demand and The Void.

Nothing could fill that void, no amount of running about, no quantity of time given, it was a black hole into which we were both slowly and inexorably disappearing, sometimes it felt as though the whole house were imploding.

There were other factors mixed up in all this of course, all that family stuff for her, my own cowardice and doubt, our lack of self esteem, scepticism about love, past disappointments that weighed on us.

It’s hard to feel that your essence is not in some way celebrated, that what you are is of delight to no-one. Then, no matter where you are, you’re not at home, no matter how well you do you lack comfort and security. Whereas to be loved and to be in love is to have a home anywhere, to enjoy a basic freedom, to have trivial daily fears and concerns seem surmountable, secondary.

Some people have never been in love, I suppose and have told themselves that it doesn’t exist. I know quite a few, some of them get married thinking that a reliable husband who’ll bring in money for the kids they want is the best you can ask for, or that nights out with the lads, maybe a few one night stands, visits to prostitutes on Stag weekends, or at the very least porn will get them through it. That’s how life is. These people tend to be in their early thirties.

Some people fall in love once, it goes wrong, they never recover from that and then they drift into realism and a refusal to risk anything. Give me someone who has been as disappointed as I have. But two disappointments don’t always cancel each other out, won’t add up to satisfaction.

Equally of course I know lots of couples who have been together for years and are happy, and whose love for each other I don’t doubt. But you need love, without love your relationship is just one more thing you have to manage, one more negotiation between your fear and need, one more drain on your spirit, one more cost/benefit analysis. It will weigh on you, you'll begin to steel yourself for your partner’s return home from work, find you're hyper-alert to every nuance and tic of their mood, feel your heart sink when the phone goes and it’s them.

Call me naïve, tell me: give it time, come back in five years and tell me the same. But you can trust me, Ive already been there numerous times and that’s not the point, even if it all goes wrong, I’ll still stand before the Lord of song, with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah.

As my close friend Mr Cohen has so wisely and rightly put it.

Johnny the Fox meets Jimmy the Weed

2011-05-04T10:55:00.000-07:00

2011-05-04T10:47:00.000-07:00

it's a belter that album.

2011-05-04T09:07:00.000-07:00

She laughed in her sleep again just now

I love it when she does that

It makes me feel I’ve made her happy