can't think of an appropriate Fall song

I notice that the Dublin society of literary arts have been busy writing and contemplating the novel. I started a new story last night but I haven't finished it yet. It can go in the pile of lyrics, poems and rants on my desk which will one day meld into a glorious polyphony (or get dumped in the bin).

Have been at work all day so have nothing of great interest to relate. Work is: filling fridges, selling sandwiches, counting sandwiches, serving drinks, clearing tables, fetching things and fixing things.

However, I did catch my boss looking at porn on the interweb, causing him to use the most middle-aged, middle class excuse ever: "how did this get here?" One of the pictures looked like Pamela Anderson rimming Jenna Jameson, but it may well have been lookalikes.

Planned much of the my ringroad adventure last night. Read about it soon on The Norwich Adventure (it was the only name I could think of).

jx

new teknikov stuff

I'm only writing this because I need to think about it and it's easier to think about something in front of you (in my opinion). Perhaps also because I'd like to share my concerns about the most "pretentious band in Norwich", because they are funny (inasmuch as they make me look like a bit of a tothead).

Sequentially thinking...

1- albums. I think that bands, even school bands, should think about music duallistically: live and recording. I love playing live, really enjoy the whole build-up with all the bands borrowing shit off each other and having a beer, the gig itself (even when we've played shit I never really want to come off stage), the aftermath when you can get drunk and hear what people have to say about you. However, I'm also convinced that bands should always think in terms of making fantastic recordings that will somehow be inflicted upon the public.

2-I was always enthused by the way that Godspeed (they're the most notable example, anyway) didn't bother hanging around to be signed, didn't worry about saving their best material for when they were signed and just put out a very limited edition tape only release. Some people would say that this encourages elitism, but I reckon it makes everything far more democratic. Why wait.

3-I was chatting to Nick from Roberte, another band I play in, and he was talking about putting our record together. It struck me that I've really been thinking more about what a Teknikov record would sound like rather than playing endless arselick gigs and sending demos off to record companies.

4-I wrote an article that I haven't put online or published (and don't intend to) about the concept album, arguing that it isn't actually such a bad idea. Musically or lyrically, albums should have some kind of thread running through them. One of the things that gets on my wick the most about bands is when they big themselves up for eclecticism, then it turns out that what they actually mean is that they do all kinds of different songs, but all are utterly pedestrian. Like: "hey, this one sounds a bit funky! Let's call it Funk Song! And this one is really keyboardy- let's say Do the Duran" or whatever. I've been listening to the new LCD album which does eclecticism better than most, as the fluctuating reference points are in many ways the "concept" of the record and for the most part the sound is pretty integrated (not so sure about the Beatles tribute in the middle though). On the other hand, that Rapture album was just too full of different ideas to make sense- starts off with a kind of deep-house track, then an emo sounding one, then a slow one. The songs ended up sounding better in their own right.

5-But I've written a reasonable amount of new stuff. Some of it is pop, with more normal song structures and choruses, some of it is more unsettling. The stuff I'm working on in my bedroom at the moment with the Casio harks back to stuff I'd fourtrack when I was seventeen- drones and thumps and obtuse lyrics.

6-But! Isn't this as done to death as Wire-y stopstart music at the moment? Just found out that the guy from the Liars came up with the idea for their terrifying second album by accidentally typing something in on Google. Then made a concept album. And as for noise? 10 zillion bands are doing it properly at the moment.

7-I just don't know. When we do it live, the discordant noisy stuff has always sounded better than the attempts at making danceable guitar music.

8-Where is the compromise?

Answers please. And nothing from Chad saying "You think about it too much".

jx

the power lines over there

When I first came down here, last century, I always sat on the side of the library facing the teaching wall, the one that overlooks the roof of the lecture building. It wasn't until the following May (during a horrendous bout of food poisoning brought on by a series of badly-managed lake barbecues) that I noticed that my study was much more productive if I sat on the other side of the library. It has south-facing windows which allow you to look down to the old golf course where the dog walkers are and the lake and marsh beyond.

You can also see the pylons. I know that they're a very controversial issue and you wouldn't want to live underneath one (but people nowadays are more worried about mobile phone masts) but they've got a similar aesthetic appeal to railway lines you see when you're driving in an unfamiliar part of the country. You don't know where they're going to immediately, but you do know that they go everywhere in the end, into the grid, onto the rest of the world. The lines just stretch on into the distance, the pylons march over the marsh like something from War of the Worlds.

They act as an interruption to the reknowned "undulating" landscape of Norfolk which, conversely, emphasises the ongoing flatness. I may talk about the pylons when I give the M.R. James paper in May. Who knows.

jx

How I Wrote "Elastic Man"...

I think that you could post once daily for about 1500 consecutive days, heading each entry with an appropriate song title by the Fall. Todays headline refers to a youthful Mark E's rant about the debilitating effects of writer's block when the expectations are high..."The Observer Magazine just about summed it up: eg, self-satisfied and smug!" (That's a misquote, incidentally).

Today I'm trying to finish an initial piece of work, which has seemed interminable for rather a long time now. Even though it's only going to clock in at around 5500 words. Things I now have to consider before the upgrade panel get me by the scruff of the neck and scrunch my balls up...

- Bachelard, the dialectics of inside and outside
- lots of stuff about the second world war
- photography of Bill Brandt
- Kant and early writing about space/Bakhtin and the chronotope/different geometries
- Roger Caillois on why wars are like parties
- a precision definition of late modernism
- the influence of cinema on Henry Green
- the history of misrule festivities in England
- ontologies of fiction, Lewis Carroll through Alain Robbe-Grillet

At the same time, I have to:

- prepare a paper on M.R. James and the nature of fear in open spaces
- get to work on the Teknikov recording
- record my own stuff, do a solo gig (to prove a point, more than anything)
- work at the bar
- read more, booze less
- find my four-track (PROTEST!!)

In other news, before I get onto the dedication:

The Casiotone is one of the most wonderful instruments I've ever played. You can knock together all kinds of tinny beats and arpeggios on it, as well using the digital synth. The synth has amazing top-end squeals and low-end Throbbing Gristle/Suicide grinding noises- middle keys sound pretty fucking Bearsuit, but I don't need those. I might write all of the new Teknikov stuff on that and only use the guitar incidentally..."Larousse" and "Lloyds" are a bit New Wave of New Wave of New Wave (as the NME have forgotten to call the current trends in singalong guitar pop that sounds a bit like Menswear).

Anyway:

Beb, I hope Cod City is going to treat you alright for the next couple of days. I miss you already and don't have anyone to waste time drinking coffee in the afternoon with. Who will accompany me to the Cold Front single launch tonight (I have a better idea: stay in and lick the underside of the toilet seat)? Who'll knock over my record pile and get hid at the Underground tomorrow night? Where is the duck?

Love you

jx

the legend of "the most depressing day of the year"

The radio had been warning us for weeks in advance that it was best to stay in bed on the 24th and not wake up until the morning after. A combination of monday blues and avian flu would catch us in a sly pincer, before the cavalry of incelement weather would mow us down in our tracks. I couldn't stay in bed all day. Instead, I got up and smeared a succession of mackerel fillets across soggy toast, downed grapefruit juice from the carton, necked ginseng and echinacea. I even contemplated eating the oranges I bought on the Saturday market.

I ended up at jenny's house, in bed again. Her room was colder than outside, where the puddles had frozen and it was snowing slightly. Eventually, I performed some kind of protean crawl from under the sheets and set about assembling a costume that involved as many hoods and zips as i could find. On the bus up to UEA I took photographs of the clouds lurking over the pavilion in Eaton Park and the whipped surface of the empty boating lake. There's days at UEA when you can imagine you're anywhere you want to be: today the campus was a scientific research institute in the French Alps, or maybe the Vosges. The buildings were designed to be observed through crisp air, illuminated in short bursts by wintry sun.

I sat in the library, taking pictures of the teaching wall out of the windows, reading "Nothing" (Henry Green). Fantastic, just what we need...a novel about middle age. Light comedy? Not on the 24th of January, Picador. Follow that up with "The Restless Age", a collection of John Guttman's photos of the Depression. It's sort of relevant (gets me thinking about how we conceptualise space in the novel, the relationship between this action, cinema and photography. Green was a cinephile. Who hated being photographed.)

Then, eat some something advertised as "chicken and ginger chicken" in the diner, that tastes more like lake-scum. Some woman gets charged eight pounds fifty for her meal. If you cooked at home, think of what a princely meal that could have bought you.

Go to work. I haven't mentioned my work on here yet. It's an open mike night. Chad and I have a "dispute", only the first of the year, the Coseys turn up and play an Ink Spots song and Jen's mate Max plays something undescribable about Paris in the 1890s.

I get a staff cab home, knowing that there's only 30 minutes left to ride out. Two mini Mars Bars and a fiddle with the (amazing) Casiotone synth later, and I've ridden the day out. Listen to "Second Edition" as I'm going to sleep, which may explain why I wake up sweating at 4.30 and writhe away the rest of the night...

jx

My Neurotic Teenage Years Give Me The RIGHT To Impose My Opinions About Music On Others!

This week's offerings:

This is fantastic. One Richard Cheetham seems to be under the impression that Norwich's hardest-working band are a drug-addled ensemble of Hoxton cool-arbiters with expensive haircuts. Lest we forget, he comes from the city that unleashed the unremitting hell of Twisted Nerve (Votel. You. Owe. Me. Money.) on the world.

At the risk of trying to sound even trendier than Richard Cheetham thinks Le Tetsuo are, I've been wanting to share Wolf Eyes with the world since getting hold of their LP collaboration with the similarly disgusting Black Dice. They should do one with Mike Oldfield.

On the subject of excellent wank-noise-wank, I'm intrigued as to whether NME will declare open-season on Britpopesque guitar bands when the new Mogwai album comes out. They'll hail the "new dawn of post-rock" and scribble a load of shit about Godspeed You Black Emperor! are going to blow all the fucking corporate cocksucking sellouts like Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party out of the water, before getting carried away and calling Hirameka Hi-Fi the most influential band on the planet. Actually, it may even occur around the time of the Slint reformation gigs...

Was listening to Moving Units before I came out this morning. Yank haircut hipsters make me laugh.

That Eagles of Death Metal record was blaring out of the Protest offices last night, it sounded pretty good. Also got a good listen to that psychedelic blues record out on Soul Jazz courtesy of Tom, but treated myself with Suicide. Couldn't face "Frankie Teardrop" though.

That's quite enough for now.

Jx

Fiction- Remix

Karl's already done the makeover on "Big Vern...", adding handclaps, cowbell, 808 and cheeky samples culled from "In the Graveyard the Monument Moved in the Morning", Anthony Burgess, Martin Amis and "The Rockafeller Skank". Word is we're going head to head in late spring with our Thomas Gravesen themed travelogue, provisionally titled "The Real Thomas Gravesen Beats The Real Dave Gorman till he's a Drained Husk of a Man".

area man not good at films

Jenny and I were lying in bed, trying to decide whether or not we liked films. We'd just finished watching Spike Jonze's Adaptation, which we both thought was classic, but it raised the pertinent question of why most movies are an utter crock, given that all you need to make a really fucking good one is some imagination as regards writing and photography (plus the logistical elements: actors, a bit of money and so on).

I'm always winding the Dirty Protest by refusing to co-operate when it comes to choosing a film to watch. It must be pretty annoying. The thing is, though, my attention span just wasn't designed for watching movies- music comes in short doses, reading is self-administered and can be broken up as much or as little as is neccessary. Movies, though: do you often do that thing where you pause a film halfway through one night and watch the rest in the morning? I don't think it works. Films work in moods, through the repetition of colour schemes and types of camera angles, through timbre and metonymy; they demand the immersion of the viewer. Even something as bludgeoningly metafictional as "Adaptation" necessitates a surrender to a particular set of aesthetic influences for its duration. If you pause a film halfway through and restart it later, the narrative climax that occurs in the second half won't work properly, as you've removed yourself from the climate that the opening stages of the movie have conditioned you for and replaced them with other influences.

Well, that's what I think.

Anyway, I've noticed that I've only really got a lot of time for "classic", canonical movies- ones with vigorously unique aesthetics. That's why I'll always have a soft spot for Eisenstein, 70s Hollywood, cowboy films. You can watch any of them on the utterly superficial level that i demand (same with Godard and French movies in general). I'm a sucker for photography- the films that really do my head in are the ones with massively high-res cameras showing loads of explosions and robots (actually, I love "Alien" and "Terminator", but that's different) that cost a bunch to build.

(Disclaimer: yes, I enjoy it when Charlie Kaufman does Borges too, but it's the exception that proves the rule)

So, all hail the new shallowness

Jx

Fiction!

I've pulled my finger out to write another ten minute short story, narration courtesy of the my favourite Viz pseudo-criminal.

FICTION!

For those of you who don't know, the Earlham Road Project was inaugurated a couple of years back by Karl Whitney and his non-corporeal (but don't tell him I said that) accomplice Kenny Stetson. It's dedicated to spreading "Fiction, Collaboration and Disgust".

Karl (or Kenny?) is going to rewrite "Big Vern..." soon, presumably making them the DFA to my Rapture.

jx

you had to be there, but...

...this is the funniest band in the world.

smallcore...

I wish I'd thought of this, only I'd have used a Yorkshire Rose.

Still, is the best way to reclaim the streets not to just keep on walking, and pretend it's somewhere else.

Strategy for doing this on Norwich's Earlham Road (big wide arterial, large houses, very long): Get stoned at home, resist temptation to stay in and eat snacks. Leave house, head towards the footbridge that leads to town. It has to be night, so the lamps are on. Blink really fast all the way to the footbridge.

I had another (well several) good experiences on the other side of the footbridge, but my favourite was when a few of us were walking "up the city" (as they say in these parts) one Saturday and life got a bit Italian neo-realist: there were loads of police cars, dogs, there was a wedding on the corner with confetti spilling through the air and the bride throwing her bouquet, and men who looked like mafia. That was good.

And there was the time when we were jumping up and down on the footbridge at half three in the morning because we realised it wobbled if you did.

jx

oxford is their, er, ouagadogou...

I think this is a rant I've been meaning to have for some time, and I hope Chad covers his eyes when he sees it, because he's still defending the "legendary" Oxford "scene" despite them having totally shafted us up the arse last year (in my opinion):

snooty twats

Oxford, why do I despise you so? Ostensibly, you're a pretty city with nice buildings and lots to do, given your smallness. You even have road names that tell you what direction you're going in, like Norwich ("Cowley Road", "Abingdon Road").

Do I hate you because, when I visited the university on an open day (seven years ago), I got thrown out of the Firkin for being underage, not impressing the girl I was with (who, surprise, I was trying to impress)?
Do I hate you because your football club has often been associated with people I find distasteful (Robert Maxwell, Mark Lawrenson, Dean Saunders)?
Or is it because you kicked all of the normal people out of the city many many years ago and made them live in far-out satellite estates, so that there would be more room for Fulbright scholars and dandies?

Well, all of these things are bad. However, the real reason I find you so incredibly hard to cope with is my encounters with your FUCKING INBRED musical community. Let me tell a few stories of my ongoing exasperation with you.

No 1: "Truck" 2003:
Through Chad's connections, we get a gig. Now, this is back when we weren't very good, in the old Spacemen 3/Velvets days when we made a big droney racket and Chad still played that echoey claret Epiphone. Quite a lot of Norwich were going down, so it promised to be a decent day out. Anyway, both Teknikov and Magoo got stuck in the Chillout tent, which was full of trustafarian youths smoking weed on some smelly sofas at the back, banging on about how they wanted to hear some "roots". Me and Dave Cox (someone else who had the good sense to take his music away from the dreaming spires) were absolutely tanked and Dave ran around with a megaphone announcing that Andy Bell was going to play with us. The sound was shit. The next two days were full of posh farmer's kids walking around in Carhartt like they actually knew how to play music, scratching each other's backs and looking like pigs, all the while going on in intolerable RP accents about how cool they all were.

No 2: Radiohead- forever:
Oxford's made its admittedly lower-case name off the back of this band, who started out making prog-grunge (which was actually about as exciting as Bush) and then went on to make albums that sounded like the Alan Parsons Project. Thom Yorke labours on under the misapprehension that he is in someway more politically astute and erudite than the rest of the population (of the world). I'd send him for re-education in Siberia, where they might also carry out some biochemical experiments to put some symmetry in his face.

No 3: Last Christmas at the cellar:
We went to Truck's Christmas party but had to pay to get in, so they could continue funding their excrescent record label. The other Kaito played (that'd be Cato), and they were completely anonymous. For purposes of comparison, we'd been to see good Kaito in the Zodiac the night before, where some of the Oxford scene-dudes had actually given us the time of day because we were backstage. Because we were backstage, they intimated that we might get to play Truck that year, on a better stage. There's a piece somewhere on that Oxfordbands blog about how to get a gig out of that crew, and how to handle how fucking cool they all are. I would suggest that the best way to get a gig with them is to be the most well-known band from somewhere else and bullshit, telling them you'll sort them out a gig in your own town (Fonda 500, Kaito etc). Then when Rock of Travolta or someone give you a bell, put on a French accent and mutter something about "needing to get ze bread out of ze oven". Anyway, I digress- the night ended up with a lot of neurotic-looking people standing on the stage, holding hands and playing Christmas carols on recorders.

No 4: Electronica (last few years):
The predilection for the sort of electronica preferred in oxford is, I think, mostly confined to people who do the music for history documentaries or are signed to Twisted Nerve recordings. Truck are like a mini-Twisted Nerve, with less money but the same taste in exactly the kind of music that should make any same person want to carry out a chainsaw "masacree" (you know, prefers Misty's Big Adventure to Sonic Youth, the Soft Machine to Can, corduroy flares to handmade Italian shirts). We saw this guy Nervous Testpilot play at Truck- I was pissed, so enjoyed it at the time, but later on I got round to thinking "you know, you can't actually listen to Kid606, so why would I want to waste my time listening to people who sound like him". And they're all there, across the country, provincial Nathan Barleys nodding their heads to the latest obscure glitchcore releases and not even bothering to worry about why they never have sex. I'm not precisely sure if Aphex Twin is a genius or a Charlatan, but listen to any Warp recors sampler and you'll hear 25% good stuff and 75% which is the aural equivalent of reading the Bible in Polish. I bought a Dat Politics album having enjoyed their gig (drunk again, just got together with a wonderful woman) and it was SHIT.

Anyway, I know I've completely failed to carry out a decent assassination of Oxford, but I don't have time to say all of the things that are so wrong about that blog. Funhating, snobbish, rude, arrogant pricks. And I'll say that even if we're at Truck this year.

Jx

"View Next blog"

If you click on the button in the top right hand corner (I've just noticed) you get shuffled along to the weird world of "other people" (are they real? Where are they? Are you Speevs?) One along is a woman who is clearly about as computer-literate as I am: her kids have just gone back to school and she's enjoying the peace and quiet. After that though, you get to this:

sounds like a porno site, but less fun, and with moving graphics

I don't know, when I was fourteen I was still pretending I was going to be a professional footballer and learning to drink...

jx

sun

Yes, I know I was bitching about the drizzle yesterday but today I'm sitting in the all-new UEA library computer rooms and the sun is getting in my eyes. I haev just received the guidelines for my upgrade panel, which means I have about 4 months to cream off a chapter, a proper research schedule and prepare myself for a Viva. I can't even remember the last time I went for an interview- I didn't have to do one for university and every job I've ever had has seen me asked such searching questions as "are you going to have your fingers in the till" and "so, you're in a band then?" It means that I have to justify my research and actually explain it to a panel, which should be fun. Still, at least it means I have a reason to take everything seriously for a couple of months.

Chad dropped the rehearsal tapes through the door last night (but didn't come in! I was sitting in the front room watching "Last Rites" on ITV!) and I had a listen before going to bed. I think it's just the way the recording turned out, but I'm sure I heard an echo of Campag Velocet in them. Distressing. Read "Brideshead Revisited" and "Abroad" (Paul Fussell's history of British literary travelling between the wars) in bed last night for too many hours, which at least meant that the shower was free when I got up...

Anyway.

Jx

So, since I last moaned about my academic predicaments I have:

- had one of my bi-monthly episodes of pretending to be a DJ
- rehearsed, enjoyably, with Teknikov
- slept, eaten chicken, been to a charity jumble sale
- been to work
- done fuck-all writing

anyway, I was just trying to find the link to the photo on the official Brighton Rocks websites and Google also provided me with the addresses of a bunch of blogs of people who seem to have hooked up with people at it. I feel like Cupid, or something, or maybe just a DJ whose tune selections are so off the mark that people have to find something else to do than dance.

The new Teknikov stuff is sounding good, in as much as I could envisage myself doing my dying robot dance to it. Songs called "Fucking Ugly Buldings" and "Lloyds of London", I suppose they're a bit Talking Heads-y, a bit Wire-y, but now they're starting to sound Teknikov-y, and it's about time. We get our posters done by guerilla gig-posterers The Dirty Protest (no, they don't do flyers for wanky pop-Situationist twatabouts featuring pretend skagheads The Others) who are wonderful. And live with me.

Anyway, we're doing two gigs at the Marquee in the space of three days (8th and 10th of February). As far as I'm concerned, while most bands in Norwich aspire to play the Arts Centre, I aspire to play in the Marquee. It's a rocker pub (like the Edward VIIth, scene of one of our favourite ever gigs) and it takes ages to find the door into the back room, where the bands play. If a band has already started when you go in, it's too dark to see the person who you're supposed to be paying, so you walk straight past them. You lean on the ramp and put your pint on top of the concrete garage, which is actually inside the building, which feels like a garage...it's very Russian-dolls. The bogs are very worst-toilet-in-scotland and the barstaff are surly. The stage is tiny and there's a picnic table just in front of it, then another little hut which everyone sits on top of.

On the 8th we're playing with The Cosy Cat Club Band, who are sort of jangly-blah "melodic" (mmm, my favourite, but they're our mates) and The Bells The Bells, featuring our drummer Matt on guitar and vocals. They're pleasant and, a la Mercury Rev. On the 10th we're playing with I Don't Know, who are 1 part Faust, 1 part Greatful Dead, 1 part Lightning Bolt. We might do a special set for that one.

Anyway, I'm going to go and do some work . Goodbye.

jx

norfolk rain, uniquely unpleasant

As far as I know, it's the only rain in the world that makes you feel like you've been walking in the Sahara well still wetting your turn-ups.

As the saying goes...

...this is "dark as hell". But pretty funny as well.

Fan Fiction

The "poetics" of "space"...

I've just been reading Karl Whitney's thing which is kind of the original as far as I'm concerned. Though he comes across as self-effacing and humourist (see the shoes story) his writing is actually incredibly intimidating. It's the reference to big piles of books that got me feeling like someone had just walked over my grave. Why do some people find reading and the absorption of information so easy?

Anyway, this is an appeal for help. As the postings below might suggest my current areas of interest lie in the theorisation and creation of "space" in late British modernism: Henry Green, Patrick Hamilton, Elizabeth Bowen, Christopher Isherwood and others. My point of departure is, I suppose, the way that space is used as a metaphor or an analogue to enable us to visualize an idea, but I'm also thinking in terms of the relationship between space and time (what I'm going to inaccurately term "chronotopicity"), the demarcation and hierachization of space and (something that paticularly interests me) the notion of the genius loci. I've used DH Lawrence to illustrate the last item on the list and am moving towards a belief that there is a certain form of chronotope that pertains to "deep time" and the memory of place. Surviving consciousnesses is a bit of a theme here, one from which I could proceed to talk about melancholy or ghosts or some other Ackroydist arcana.

What to read though? My work on demarcation and delimitation suggests Said amongst other things, but I've been pointed towards Gaston Bachelard's hugely inviting but fuck-off difficult The Poetics of Space. Now I'm absolutely adamant that I'm not going to write a hipster thesis on (avert eyes now if you don't want to read me getting all angry-obsessive) "psychogeography" or "flaneur theory". There's enough "Towards a Poststructuralist Geography of the Epistemology of the Ontological Epistemologies of LA Woman" out there. I embarked on this project by thinking about misrule and liminality (arguably a chronotope in itself), using these concepts to project an idea of constant suspension in Henry Green's novels.

To cut to the chase, if anyone is reading this and knows of anything at all that might help me (writing on anything at all mentioned above) please e-mail me. I know enough people out there are itching to talk about this kind of stuff.

Jx

One More Thing

As the first post indicates, this is relatively new for me. I have a habit of sneering at stuff for ages until I decide it might be a laugh and maybe even ingratiate me in a world where I can rob even more ideas off other people.

Time for a speculation on boredom:

There are too many people in the world. The likelihood of you being at all different from at least, ooh, fifteen other people is utterly fucking minimal. It's always people with indie-guitar/ situationist/ French lit interests who are the most unoriginal: I often think that everything I like is part of a performative identity. I mean, I do utterly fucking adore the music of Joy Division- I get hairs standing up to the intro of "Shadowplay", I hear an inevitable car-wreck life in the "touching from a distance" bit of "Transmission". But all the same, didn't I just come to like them because I thought I should?



So I'd like to cross-index some of the interests of other people who like some of the shit I'm into:

CATS: I guess they're alright. Nowhere near as funny as dogs and I get the impression a lot of people who claim to like them because they're "independent" are just sublimating their own neediness. NEXT!

SOCIALISM: In one sense, yes. That would be the high-taxing, redistributional, levelling out of society bit. But, like Orwell, I'm not much into the accoutrements the movement has acquired in the last bunch of years...food fascism, police hating (working-class people doing a necessary job being blamed by stuck-up pseuds for "repression": just following orders. I know that the police force is riddled with "problems", but all this "fuck the pigs" business is just immature), world-music loving. I'll have socialism on my terms, ta.

JAZZ: About two or three albums. I think I'd rather listen to classical music than most of it though. I guess my opinions will change someday, but I can't see myself calling my kids "Mingus".

COCAINE: Great fun for five seconds. Not if you're being rubbernecked in Columbia though. I find Yanks most blase about this one, especially the ones who claim elsewhere to be socialists.

SEX: Yes, I do, but I can't help but feel that a lot of people who go on about it all the time are the most neurotic about shagging (see "CATS")

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY: I've liked going to places, looking at maps, adventuring and "reclaiming space" since I was, er, born. Does this mean that the six year old building a treehouse is Raoul Vaneigem? Possibly a movement for kids who got brutalized at school to organize treasurehunts and picnics (see Mortmere). Not that I don't love some of it, I just feel the need to clarify my difficulty with the elitist implications of the lexicon of nu-situationism.

DECONSTRUCTION: (This mostly applies to our American friends) Do you really know whay you're talking about? Will displaying a penchant for Jackie Derrida help you lay that chick with the cats, jazz and cocaine who used to go out with that guy from the coffee shop? Deconstruction gives so many good things a bad name...Barthes, Derrida, feminism. Trust me, American undergraduate: I may not know as much jargon, but I'll have you under the table on this one.

anyway, managed to ejaculate (well, it kind of felt that way) some of my gripes by now. If anyone wants to join my cross-indexing project and fuck up some of my most dearly held obsessions, I'm fair game.

Jx

Like Everyone Else...

...I'll put links to "experiental" artists on my blog, arrogantly and somewhat patronisingly assuming that my journeys to the shops are more important than anyone else's trips to town because I can theorise about them. However, this is really nice and contains a handy lifestyle accessory, if you're Debord-inclined:

www.leewalton.com

How do you spell "Scarborough"

I went there on New Year's Eve, and when I was trying to get an impression of it down in my notebook I remembered an incident in junior school where I had to write an account of what I'd done at the weekend. I'd been to the football, where it was pissing it down, and it was the first time I'd ever stood at the game. Just behind the old dugouts at Darlington, next to the tunnel, when the tunnel smelt of boots and linament. They were playing "Scarboro (sic)" (sic) as I referred to them in my school report. Anyway, when the teacher gave it back to me it was covered in red pen. He liked my evocation of the brilliant match-winning free kick, but wasn't too enamoured with my ability to spell the name of the opposing team. Anyway, I'm still not sure, so it can still be the shorthand version.

We had been going to go to Leeds to do what the young do, but we couldn't (Yuill having reached crisis point with housing). We contemplated an early return to Norwich but the Waterfront wasn't tempting and neither was a trustafari squat party. J phoned around the guest houses of Scarboro (Whitby having been off-limits, fuck Doctor Beeching), eventually getting a room in the last place she tried. Or one of them, the true self-mythologiser always gets the last berth on the slowboat.

Scarboro (Skartheborg) turned out to have a lot more appeal than it did last time I was there, on my way home from the amazing model village in Brid about 11 years back. On leaving the train station, it seems to be the average post-millenial British town- HMV/Starbucks/Thomas Cook/ Wetherspoons. Predictably enough we were on the hunt for an imaginary place made of Graham Greene, Enid Blyton and Morrissey (getting carried away reading Peter Ackroyd on the train. Isn't it boring now everyone's into the same stuff). We found it, though: South Bay, joke shops selling Dracula teeth to make up for the pair we couldn't get to Whitby to buy, coin waterfalls that never pay out (like a petrified river I once saw, in the DH Lawrence part of Italy), the Futurist theatre. One has to speculate on what FT Marinetti would have made of the Chuckle Brothers in "Pirates of the River Rother"- he might have appreciated their impotence in the face of technology (I'm recalling the episode when the lawnmower escaped from them, destroying the flowerbeds for Rotherham in Bloom). Lawks, the old fascist.

Best fish and chips I can remember eating for a long time (and I eat f+c a lot). There's a little terrace on the way to the toilet at this place from which Scarboro looks a lot like the occasional views of Torquay you get out of the window on Fawlty Towers. Slippage between the seaside towns...I keep on finding myself near the ghost train in Whitby (which is actually near Whitley Bay) or on slipping on seaweed on the shingle beach that is Ayr and Brighton. If we're ranking, though, Scarboro has retained a strained sense of gentility (disrupted, it must be said, by the proliferation of Red Hand of Ulster symbols) and it's also got a cut-off otherworldliness emphasised by the relic bridges over the apparently dry valley dividing South Bay. Up on the esplanade (or off it) we found our room, in lodgings run by a middle-aged couple who were markedly less valium-dependent than the woman we met in Cromer. The night involved a trip to a pub full of crims and molls, then the concoction and imbibement of weedschlager, which is 9 parts Famous Grouse to 1 part green, and induces mild euphoria followed by sleep.

Awaking without hangovers had a fry-up and laughed at the man banging on the doors of other guests to wake them up. He was pissed off because someone wanted their breakfast in bed. We walked down the cliff path through the greenery, after getting morbid at the benches ("Enjoy the View: I did" being a personal favourite) at the lookout point. The spa was at the bottom (a working funicular would have made our trips 100 per cent) and awakened a feeling similar to the big villas in San Sebastian with palm trees at the front- all F Scott, lost generation. Got chips and J went in the autosketch machine, but couldn't keep a straight face. Purportedly, it was the ghost of Rembrandt doing her picture but I suspect the use of a tape recorder and PhotoShop.

Anyway, we eventually left. If I think of more about Scarboro, uninsightful as it will inevitably be, I'll start at a new place.

Jx