the long moths of boredom

Straw Poll

2006-04-14T10:38:00.000-07:00

Is this a very funny joke or a real-life version of that "I'm not gay but if i was I'd be really, really dedicated to it" story that was in the Onion a year or so back?

Mothers Against Noise

You decide.

The Importance of Being Earnest

2006-03-31T14:09:00.000-08:00

Hi. It's Friday night and I'm taking advantage of a rare empty house...to read my last chapter out loud and start fiddling around with ideas for an introduction. I'm 24 years old...but strangely content.

This will probably only reach the people who I know from back home (which might be a somewhat presumptuous way of beginning a paragraph, as I don't know if any of them read this), but this reminded me of our long-lost acquaintance Paul Bennett. From the Nicky Wire-esque heading to the inclusion of Homage to Catalonia- we can presume it's on his sixth-form reading list, presumably Of Mice and Men didn't make the cut- this is the bookshelf of the kid who has It All Figured Out. I remember the angsty youth reading out Nietzsche's aphorisms from Beyond Good and Evil to an indifferent, or at best baffled, study centre in the days of Friday nights at the Castle Taverns and Ginger Brown gigs.

I will write a proper apology one day to attone myself for using this page as a pedestal from which to unfairly savage other literary blogging, but it will have to wait. For now, I'd like to imagine the discussion the kid has with his father at Sunday lunch:

Dad: You'll change one of these days son, everybody does. Don't worry, you have plenty of time to grow conservative. It's good for the young to experiment.

Son: DON'T FUCKING PATRONIZE ME!!!! (Storms off upstairs to listen to Pete Docherty's "band").

The End

J

Hmmm

2006-03-08T09:08:00.000-08:00

From Amazon:

Customers who bought books by Paul Celan also bought books by these authors:

John Felstiner
Brian Massumi
Hilary Spurling
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Terry Pratchett

Who knows?

happy 70th post, moths of boredom

2006-02-27T10:07:00.000-08:00

Over Christmas, my mum (who has just joined one of those online video rental things that lorc has been raving about) asked me what films I'd like to see. I thought for a minute, and said "Polanski's Macbeth", which I remembered loving when I was a GCSE student. Typically, the film didn't turn up for two weeks, which was- you've guessed it- the day I had to go back to Norwich. So my chance to engage with a fragment of my educational past was delayed. Now, however (fingers crossed) I've ordered the same movie for a fiver from Amazon. Within five days I will be able to see:

- a very young Keith Chegwin riding a horse
- Francesca Annis pretending to be mad and walking around naked
- the bit my teacher kept on freeze-framing where the guy gets an arrow stuck in his head
- the bit where MacDuff chops off MacBeth's head
- the cynical ending where Donalbain goes to the witches
- the weird merkins that the witches wear

What I actually mean is that I think I'll see these things, because I'm not altogether sure that any of them were actually in the film.

Jx

2006-02-15T08:59:00.000-08:00

I don't have enough mates in the (ahem, splutter) "Blogosphere" to inflict this on (or do I?) but here are my responses to Lorcan's questionaire:

Seven things I must do before I die

1: Find a hat that doesn't constrict my cannonball head (or make me look like a Mekon).

2: Tune a guitar by ear.

3: Come up with a completely outlandish romantic gesture, ie. bigger than skywriting.

4: Go to a week-long party with whoever turns out to be our generation's equivalent of Oliver Reed and Keith Moon. Dine out/ bore grandchildren with tale for rest of my life.

5: Start liking flying.

6: Be on Newsnight Review at least twice. The first time I'm going to be Emin-drunk, the second time I'll be sober as a judge and deal with the other panellists' wry remarks really casually. A superannuated Clive James will be so impressed with my performance that he'll buy me dinner afterwards. Over steak and claret, Clive will hand me a treasure map featuring incredibly complicated instructions, telling me that "it's a job for a younger man". The following adventure will become the subject of an award-winning travelogue, which will subsequently be adapted into a film starring someone who's a child actor at the moment but will have grown up by then.

7: Do all the outdoors stuff I've been shirking for the last couple of years, including the Appalachian Trail.

Seven things I cannot do:
1. Drive a car.

2. Act reasonably 100% of the time.

3. Click my fingers/ whistle (these count as one.)

4. Get rid of my "eye-bags".

5. Stay in at night without worrying about people having a good time without me.

6. Dance the Gay Gordons.

7. Stop being sarcastic

.
Seven things that attract me to a city:
1. Cool metro.

2. Well-named trainstations (Good: London, Paris, New York. Bad: Glasgow- too pedestrian.)

3. Cheap and delicious food.

4. Bars full of rumbunctious, friendly, outlandish people without airs and graces. London does not score highly on this account, whereas Newcastle does.

5. Sense of community and everyday life visible in city centre (cf the markets and charity shops in central Budapest).

6. Relative obscurity- Trieste, San Sebastian, Norwich

7. General joie-de-vivre- Barcelona, San Sebastian.

Obviously, you don't find all of these in the same place.

Seven things I say:
1. Who's making tea?
2. Fuck, who's ringing?
3. Can I pay on card?
4. Maybe...I'll have to see...
5. What's for dinner?
6. Wasn't like that in the war.
7. fucking hell

Seven books I like:
1. Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
2. 1992 Non-League Football Year Book by Tony Kempster
3. Collected Stories of M.R. James
4. Concluding by Henry Green
5. The Erasers by Alain Robbe-Grillet
6. Germinal by Emile Zola
7. This Sporting Life by David Storey

Not necessarily my seven favourites though.

Seven movies that I’ve loved:
1. Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom)
2. The Rock (Michael Bay)
3. The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy)
4. Don't Look Now (Nicholas Roeg)
5. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick)
6. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese)
7. Ivan the Terrible Pt.1 (Sergei Eisenstein)

Top of my head, again.

Jx

wake me up when we cross the county line

2006-01-02T13:16:00.000-08:00

Back in the Vale, weather always on the cusp of ice or post-rain that you never see fall, frosting and unfrosting. Dales to the West, up towards the watershed and the river brim full, Moors to the East. Lumps on all horizons. In the Vale are silos rising from flat fields and farms, some of which are all-but abandoned and occupied by a breed of person much like the "squatters" you find in H.P. Lovecraft. Dusty rooms full of unpriced antiques, windows that look out onto yards strewn with hay. Arterial roads and railways and villages with quiet pubs that have Sky TV on in the corner, out of town garden centres frequented by couples who listen to Jim Reeves in the car on the way home.

borders...

2005-09-05T07:10:00.000-07:00

One thing I've noticed about the response to the devastation of New Orleans (see Dumb Riffs) is how the boundaries between the so-called "United" states have been emphasised in the media. Reporting has made the movement of peoples between Lousiana and Texas (for example) a pseudo-international issue. This must mean one of two things, or both:

1- That our collective consciousness isn't prepared to allow for the possibility of such a thing happening in the "developed" United States so we're carving off sections of it to create areas (or countries of excess). It doesn't compute with our realist fiction of America.

2- That the White House is twisting the media arm in order to elicit the above response.

J

heat

2005-08-31T04:07:00.000-07:00

It's pushing thirty in Norwich today. Whenever it does this, I find myself in the not overly air conditioned library, forgetting the greater part of my vocabulary and ability to think in an organised manner.

Last night I read Chris Paling's book A Town by the Sea. I really, really wanted to like it so as to make a big noise about the Booker shortlist omitting difficult fiction (James Meek's The People's Act of Love was, annoyingly, a huge disappointment). But I'm not really sure about it as yet. In many respects it does what I've been wanting British fiction to do for a long time, which is jack in the contemporary referent in favour of a more stubborn, abstract chronotope*. It has the same approach to motive and subjectivity as the early nouveau roman and an enterprising approach to mythomania that implies a hostility towards the cod psychology that characterizes most so-called literary novels at the moment. There is, unfortunately, too much of a dependence of Sebaldesque melancholia 'n' memory themes that writers still seem to be employing half-heartedly. There are passages of beautiful writing but it often descends into whimsy of the sort that results in would-be novelists suffering schoolyears of torment. I don't know, it's better than most contemporary stuff I've read lately.

We'll see on that one.

jx

* I recognise that in writing novels that date fast, contemporary writers are critiquing a culture of disposability. This disclaimer doesn't accomodate the fact that it's incredibly frustrating to read the likes of Nick Hornby/ Martin Amis/ Ian McEwan clumsily attempting to deal with a millieu that they seem to be separated from by the very virtue of their critique.

Academic Writing is...

2005-08-15T04:53:00.000-07:00

...like pissing with the toilet seat down first thing in the morning and trying to get it all in the pan.

Marooned in the library, musing on the barely-existent parallels between my attempts to finish a rough statement of intent by five o' clock and England's quest to bowl out Australia by close of play. I'm not a cricket fan, really, despite having been brought up in Freddie Trueman country. But I'm a sucker for displacement activity. Hey, writing about my fondness for DAs has become one in itself- I'm at two removes from the SOI now. Shit. It's always like that time I wrote my English coursework in sixth form: all day on the beer, started at two in the morning. But I pulled it off.

When the SOI is finished, I'll post it so someone can tell me it's already been done.

More displacement now, because it's been a while since a Moths reading list:

In Italy...

Alexander Trocchi- Cain's Book. This was alright, I guess, but I wish I'd read it when I was sixteen or something.

Henry Green- Concluding. Read this again and still don't know what the fuck I'm going to write about it.

Collette- Claudine at School. Not just for titillatory purposes- the above is also about a girl's school and it seemed worth comparing and contrasting.

Celine- London Bridge. Celine is great but if I wanted to read all of this I'd have needed more time. Unbelievably dense, atmospheric, often vomit inducing. Effluvia features heavily.

Am currently reading The People's Gift of Love by James Meek, in a stable-doorish attempt to rectify my ignorance of everything written in the last ten years (except Ian McEwan novels). I haven't decided about it yet: the themes are very appealing (cannibalism, gulags, Russian castration cults, the Trans-Siberian Railway and so on) but it's got a fairly Led Zeppelin-esque approach to metaphor and a cast who are, frankly, hamming. Am waiting to read The Town By the Sea by Chris Paling, which I've finally got my hands on but can't open until I've finished the Meek because I'm trying not to be a dick and finish some books occasionally.

Anyway, the non-show must go on.

jx

Fucking Hipsters (Pt 120,000)

2005-08-12T05:55:00.000-07:00

I just found this photo of myself with a weird halo that looks like it's made of barbed wire. Please visit the Teknikov website and leave cryptic messages for Chad on the board.

We're playing our first gig in London on the tenth of September for a Guided Missile club night. Grizzled Norwich veterans KaitO will also be playing, as headliners. Advance warning: I will probably be real grumpy after the show, so apologies to anyone who has the misfortune to speak to me.

jx

Miss me too? Probably not...

2005-08-12T05:05:00.000-07:00

The startling return to form of Moths associate jiminyminerry homunculus (sorry Lorc, I could never spell it) has shamed me into popping my head over the parapet again and proclaiming "never again shall I be so fucking lazy". Atcherly, I haven't been keeping up to date because I had forgotten my UEA password after my unfortunate affliction by Diary Loss*. I feel like a newcomer at UEA- I've only been here around four times in the last two months. Computer Mouth* is afflicting me already.

Anyway, shortly after I wrote the angry piece about what the media have inevitably called 7/7 I decided, for a variety of reasons, that I must flee the country. I wanted to go to Genoa but the famed incompetent who works on the desk at the Norwich National Express office could only figure out how to get me to Milan. That man has been the bane of my life (he said, melodramatically) on a number of occasions. Anyway, it meant that I had to go to Milan. Usual Moths form would require a misjudged attempt at in-depth analysis of Italian culture but I wouldn't presume to be able to treat the matter with more accuracy than Tim Parks' A Season With Verona.

I stopped for a couple of days in Milan, gawping at the Heidi Klum/Flavio Briatore-alikes on the Via Montenapoleone. I made pilgrimages to supermarkets, pizzerias, grim arterial roads (as Parks will attest, Italians don't "do" suburbs too well) and the Giuseppe Meazza stadium at San Siro. Though I feel a political obligation to "prefer" Inter to FatSilvio's AC they have a history of signing incomprehensibly useless players (Paul Ince for one, not that I'm bitter) and, in the Herrera period, introduced Catenaccio. When staring up at the ground, I completely forgot that Inter even played there. Come to think of it, I didn't see a single Inter fan the whole time I was in Milan.

Perhaps I could digress here and use Inter Milan as an example of a psychological phenomenon I observed a couple of years ago. If anybody knows what I'm talking about, please don't hesitate to contribute their own experiences of its occurence. It goes something like this: you're comfortably aware with the existence of something for years, just letting it plod along its own course (the fact that its generally something inanimate or abstract doesn't really matter). Then you stop and think about it, and it becomes the strangest thing in the world, and you don't know why. Nothing is inherently strange about it apart from its being there. Examples:

Inter Milan
Northampton (the town)
That bit in the middle of France
Dundee

Answers on the bottom, please.

Anyway, after Milan I went to Lago di Garda's Northernmost point, Riva, and wandered around looking at people who were rich to the verge of inanity. Many Germans and Austrians. I took a trip to Italy's largest modern art museum which is, charmingly, located in a hard-to-access townlet up in the Alps (Rovereto). I climbed a mountain before Sunday lunch. The place made me feel very melancholy, as if I was WG Sebald or something. Peruvian pan pipe music started to bring tears to my eyes, and I missed Jenny, and I was hungry for most of the time.

I went all the way to Trieste after that, which is on the Balkan rather than the Italian peninsula, almost in Slovenia. I tried to pass off my visit as a literary-cum-spy movie homage but I think I just wanted to see how far I could go before falling off. The South appealed, but a seventeen hour train journey to Reggio in forty degree temperatures put me off. Border towns live up to their reputations as uncanny places, which is all I can put into words for now. In Trieste I met Ilija who was a Croatian-German-Italian, camping out indefinitely while looking for a job so he could bring his wife down. We got drunk and ate salami on one of the long moles jutting out into the harbour. He had strange business to get up to in Serbia, which confused me massively and I still haven't completely understood.

The journey back to England was enormous and I felt like crap all the way until the Starits of Dover, when a chicken curry and Mars Bar straightened me out. I picked Jenny up in Norwich and we headed up to Oban in Argyll (that's in Scotland, non-UK and Southern readers) to rendez-vous with my dad and his girlfriend. We spent a week eating fish, looking at fish and talking about fish, and got drunk a few times in a pub that reminded Mary of the Admiral Benbow in Treasure Island. On the way back to Norwich, we stopped off at my mum's place for a few days and I finally got to make a tit of myself in front of Jenny at a football match and show her around Newcastle.

On the final day I received news that my application for AHRB funding had, against all reasonable odds, been accepted. This was exceptionally good news and I can now, at last, dedicate myself to doing important things like reading the first three pages of library books and writing on Moths. Expect increased service...

Jxxxxxxxxxx

* a condition supposedly eradicated by post-Thatcher medicine
* a disease you can read all about in some old posting I'm not diligent enough to link to

Confused?

2005-07-08T02:58:00.000-07:00

I fucking well am.

Everyone knew it was going to happen eventually. The police, government, security services and so on made it incredibly clear that London or another major city would be subjected to a terrorist attack of proportions that anyone below the age of sixty (at least) would be unfamiliar with. We'd watched it happen in several other "major" European capitals: Madrid, Moscow, Istanbul. As the newsreaders say, it was never a question of "whether".

Developing any kind of sophisticated reaction to events that we have, up to this point, been insulated from by the prophylactic effects of the media is obviously going to be the goal for the British chattering classes. Some have a head start- it's not hard to imagine the headlines for yesterday's events being prepared shortly after the bombs at Atocha. The language that people have used to approach the situation in its immediate aftermath has been appropriated wholesale from the politicians and inhabitants of New York. An outsider might almost pick up on a palpable sense of relieved pressure: a reservoir of trauma has been dammed up behind the non-happening of the event which was always expected.

But a response that deals in linguistics or trauma theory is too emotionally distant given the proximity of the situation. There is a tendency to rush out the professors (left and right, Chomsky and Fukuyama) and initiate debate before the fires stop burning. Now is the time to consider an appropriate emotional response to the attacks.

There appears to be something approaching a consensus (on the internet at least) that what happened was somehow our "fault". "We've" been sucking up to the USA, "We've" been dropping bombs on Iraqi children. The answer to this is, of course, no "we" haven't. I would venture to say that even the individual hands pulling the triggers aren't responsible. In a value system in which everyone is expected to be in a beatific state of "just doing my job" and is subjected to the prevalent moral climates engendered by brand individuality that encourages only the simulacra of debate ("vote for employee of the week! we've put the internet in your restroom!") one's powers of ethical arbitration are wasted somewhat.

It seems that we compensate for this political catatonia (and I wouldn't call it apathy. It's not as if everybody sat down together sometime in 1989 and implemented a mutually agreeable and indefinite period of H&M tailored, Starbucks-scented nonalignment) through guilt- guilty pleasures or guilty feelings. How often do you hear someone say to you "I know it's shit, but I like it..."? In this case, it seems that people are too self-conscious about the ramifications of anger to reach for that particular emotional crutch and henceforth take the burden upon themselves.

I have felt angry. I feel guilty when I observe the actions of our government (and that of the United States) in some of its international affairs. However, I refuse to subscribe to the Guiltianista viewpoint that this country is incapable of contributing positively to the international community. I'm old enough to remember Bosnia and Kosovo, two embroilments that were ethical imperatives despite our dithering and slightly half-assed way of getting involved. I'm also not completely sure that deposing the Taliban was the worst thing we could have done at the time. Once again, the execution of our "regime change" was far more dubious than its guiding imperative.

My main concern is that people don't begin to feel en masse that they brought these events upon themselves. Middle class guilt (international version) is as painful to watch as fish dying. I think that some forum for catharsis (anger and sorrow) has to be tolerated and not condescended as a kneejerk response. Cold intellectualism is an arrogant denial of the self and others.

New Feature

2005-06-09T08:49:00.000-07:00

More mothsy venom to spice up a dull summer's day. The new feature follows on from a conversation that Jen and I had last night. It's called....

LINKS TO BLOGS BY LIFEHATING AMERICAN PSEUDS...

http://geography3.blogspot.com/

Check her not taking W.H. Auden's hint...

jx

And then it was summer

2005-06-02T10:12:00.000-07:00

Jesus, I'm getting pretty slack with this. I've been drinking five cups of sugary tea a day since I was about six/knee high to Tony and, with the added problem of heavy confectionery consumption, have the attention span of...let's talk about something else. Perhaps a pros and cons list. Cons first, 1-2-1-2 until all the good things and bad things are paired off in what we used to call a crocodile.

CON: I've just sent my first chapter to my supervisor. There's a huge reliance on Lacan's later ideas in the third section. I've never read the later Lacan. FRAUD. Now I must attempt to locate the correct section in Ecrits- and understand it- in a single week. I might have to check out the ever-reliable "...For Dummies" section in Ottakars.

PRO: I really enjoyed writing the rest of the chapter. Getting up at seven, heading up to campus, grabbing a coffee and reading idly for a couple of hours before going home and getting down to it. My head's been bursting with books.

CON: The bills are mounting up. Loads.

PRO: I've just begun moving my stuff into my new house (1,000,000,000,000 times better than No. 4 Ally Road). There's two sitting rooms.

CON: I've got a hangover (a bit).

PRO: I've allowed myself a couple of "idiot" days because I've been working my arse off. I spent lunch drinking Kronenbourg in the Playhouse garden then went home and listened to Source Tags and Codes by ...Trail of Dead. Album of the week.

CON: I can't go and see ...Trail of Dead (and hang out with Conrad) in Cambridge for the very un-rocking reason that I have a work do that day and I promised to go along.

PRO: But that would be a little bit like running away to join the circus, wouldn't it?

CON: Darlington didn't get in the play-offs, Man Utd won fuck all, Norwich got relegated, Celtic let the league go to Mordor on the last day of the season, Liverpool won the Champions League.

PRO: Hartlepool got dicked in their play-off final.

And maybe a reading and listening list...

LISTENING...

And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead- "Source Tags and Codes"
Sleater-Kinney- "Dig me Out"/"S-K"
Neu- "Neu 1"
Black Sabbath- "Paranoid"
Antipop Consortium- "Arrhythmia"

READING...

Henry Green, "Blindness"
Alan Burns- "Europe After the Rain"
Ann Quin- "Berg"
Franz Kafka- "The Castle"
Joseph Conrad- "The Shadow Line"
Stevie Smith- "Over the Border"
HD- "Collected Poems"
Jacques Derrida- "Spectres of Marx"

and other stuff.

PLACES I WANT TO GO BUT CAN'T RIGHT NOW...

The Orkney Islands
Paris
Trieste
Barcelona
Cornwall
bed
the pub

Girl, come back soon....xxxxxxxxxx

Jx

Music survey

2005-05-23T01:15:00.000-07:00

Karl sent me this. It's a bit like "Home Entertainment" in the Guardian's Friday supplement but you're only allowed to talk about music. I understand that you're supposed to then forward the survey to five mates (like a friendship cake: does anyone else recall this troubling phenomenon?) but hardly any of my friends have these blog things. Maybe Chris does, I don't know. And Jenny does. But that's only two. Anyway...

Total volume of music on my computer: between 1.5 and 2 GB

The last CD I bought: I'm not absolutely sure. The last CD I actually unwrapped was "Burnt Mind" by Wolf Eyes. They do this noise terror thing but I can only listen to that sort of stuff when I'm in a mischievous frame of mind. In between ordering that from Amazon and it turning up I got the last Black Dice album, the first Le Tigre album and "An Electric Storm" by The White Noise, a British experimental group from the sixties who made records out stuff they found in the BBC sound effects department. People who like Broadcast, Add N to X and Stereolab will be on familiar ground. Actually, I suspect that Broadcast are actually a concept group doing a kind of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" thing with this record.

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me: Like Karl, I can't really pin this down so I'm going to do five songs that remind me of the summer I left home.

1: "Suicide" by Spacemen 3. On the live version Sonic Boom shouts "this is for Alan Vega and Martin Rev" and there's a huge echo on his voice so it goes "Rev..rev...rev....rev.....rev......rev" as this Vox organ drone starts to well up around him. I listened to Playing with Fire a lot that summer, and got stoned. Just like seventeen year-olds are meant to do.

2: "Xmas Steps" by Mogwai. Both versions, and me on Ron used to have a heart attack every time that door noise happened in the EP cut. Listened to this all the time building up to seeing them at T in the Park, where they were fucking amazing and ended up with about nine people on stage. I lost the ability to speak for quarter of an hour. Sad bastard.

3: "A Man Called Sun" by (The) Verve. I don't know why but I feel like they're a "guilty pleasure" nowadays. Back then nothing seemed untoward about shoeless hippies fragging out a la Jim Morrison and trying to sell me ludicrous anthropocentric concepts such as this. It always came out at parties.

4: "Sister Ray" by the Velvet Underground. I couldn't get enough droney rock at the time, and it made me feel well cool. I think this is shortly before I had a period of believing that you didn't need any other records as long as you had Psychocandy by the Jesus & Mary Chain. Fortunately, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club came along to make the whole thing look very tired and I discovered keyboards, drum machines and chord changes.

5=: "Living in the Ice Age" by Joy Division. On which Stephen Morris sounds like a drum machine. Although Curtis was undoubtedly singing about something bleak and impenetrable (Gogol or Gulags, generally) I could never get the image of mammoths moving around in time to this out of my head.

5=: "Only Shallow" by My Bloody Valentine. I reckon this is on lots of lists like this. Like, everyone thinks "man, that'll be the sucker punch. MBV are criminally overlooked". Then you realise that they kind of aren't and have been misappropriated by loads of shite groups who bandy their name around to justify any load of incoherent crap (see Death in Vegas, Scorpio Rising). Anyway, I was only seventeen and had never heard anything like it. Sounded great drunk.

Other records from this period..."Two Step" by Low, "Breadcrumb Trail" by Slint (another obvious choice), "Under the Western Approach Road" by Pilotcan, "When we Reach the Hill" by Black Heart Procession, that whole Super Discount compilation by Etienne de Crecy, "Sweet and Low" by Fugazi, "Outdoor Miner" by Wire, "Stereodee" by Mogwai.

Ah, nothing like a good old reminisce on a Monday morning to fuck up the rest of your day.

Jx

may

2005-05-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

Teknikov played a busy Marquee last week, and I forgot how to make beautiful harmonic tunings on the guitar. Some people seemed pleased though, reasonably edifying. I have to admit that I was quite disappointed (to the point of getting into an utterly foul mood) with the result. More work needed.

Back up in Yorkshire for a couple of days but have made the decision not to venture into big bad Richmond due to time restrictions. Apparently, my mother and stepfather are contemplating a move back to this Alpinesque retreat after a few years in the no-man's-land of the Vale of york and Mowbray. If they do, I can use holidays to reacquaint myself with my teenage leisure pursuits, which include:

- visiting the tractor beam bookshop. There's a few second hand bookshops in town- it's no Hay-on-Wye but you can always pick bargains up. My most frequented outlet was the little place near the castle, which I would always visit on an inexplicable impulse. On arriving, the Mackem owner (who appeared to know very little about books, but was a master in salescraft) would position himself between you and the door and not move until you had an armful. Despite having been forced into buying nearly everything I've bought in there, Mackem-guy's sales have formed the nucleus of my bookshelf..."Germinal", "Brighton Rock", TS Eliot, Levi-Strauss all first came my way in Richmond Books.
- The Coffee Bean. Dirty cafe where we could smoke fags as teens. Our (football team-mate) Glen bought it and used it as a gallery for his neo-expressionist interpretations of the fields near Billy Banks Woods. Then he sold it and went back into painting and decorating, allowing for the acquisition of the joint by some mean old harridans who charge me £1.50 for a cuppa.
- The daytime drink. Nine pint afternoon sessions were the scourge of my life (seriously) from 16-19. These experiences lead me to believe that cinemas and well-stocked municipal libraries are essentials for all settlements.
- Lame fugues. Walking out of the house prepared for nothing but a trip to the offy over the road and returning six hours later having traversed ten miles of rough country. Not quite Albert Dadas but still quite unusual.
- Being able to walk home from the pub, leaving enough energy for a late-night lame fugue.
- smoking tabs on Castle Walk and appreciating the scenery/thinking of Norwich.

Back in town tomorrow for supervisor meetings/ finding out if I have a teaching job or not. Yikes.

Jx

Reading List

2005-04-28T12:20:00.000-07:00

Well, here's a list of the books that I've managed to grind through over twenty pages of in the last few weeks...

Rex Warner- The Aerodrome. A soupcon of Kafka, a snifter of Isherwood, a distinct hint of Orwell...
Louis MacNeice- Collected Poems. Cheer up, big man. At least you don't have Auden's jowells.
Artur Machen- The Terror. I shat myself. Sorry if this is ugly, but it's true. You probably wouldn't.
Helene Cixous- Angst. I haven't read very much of this, but at least it lowers the testosterone count.
Iain Sinclair- Landor's Tower. I believe this is what the reviewers call "crackling prose". Haywire.
Sigmund Freud- various. Please help.

some other stuff I can't think of right now. Some Derrida? Ah, Of Hospitality. It made my head hurt. Any good stuff about ruins would be appreciated, too.

Records, many of which appear to have been borrowed from Nathan Barley...

British Sea Power, Broadcast, The White Noise, Black Dice, Antipop Consortium, The Birthday Party, Le Tigre, Pink Floyd, Fugazi, Royal Trux/RTX, Ultramagnetic MCs, Wolf Eyes, DNA, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Gram Parsons, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Violet Violet, PiL and a bunch of other stuff.

Okay, time for more barwork

jx

Thursday

2005-04-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

About as succint an evocation of today as I can manage. I didn't manage to write up the rest of London and now it's been confined to the superglued papershredder that passes for my memory. Anything I write now will not necessarily conform to the same temporal sequence as that of the recent visit to Capital City. We did go to an exhibition of Lee Miller's life-loving, titillatory, invigorating portraits at the NPG. I did buy some records in Rough Trade. We followed the Whitney Sinclair up to Hoxton Square, down through Shoreditch to Spitalfields and then across the Square Mile to Saint Paul's. As usual, we staggered around Soho with aching limbs, pressing our noses up against the windows of Patisseries baking cakes for the Groucho Club and French bakeries.

I've been writing my chapter on Loving over the last few weeks, reading up on ruins and neutrality and various explications of the uncanny. About 4,000 words so far, with another 2,500 to come over the weekend if all goes according to plan. Saturday I'm heading up to Lincoln (with some trepidation) to watch Darlington and meet up with my brother and Ron. I'd link to some of his journalism- somehow, he's scribed a little for When Saturday Comes and Four Four Two- but those who know him understand that making any kind of effort is so anathemic to him that he'd probably be offended.

A couple of nights ago I performed with "quiet big band" Roberte (no website as yet) in the music centre at UEA. It was fucking intense, especially letting a single tone decay for about four minutes at the end. Normally I find myself trying not to laugh or yawn in these circumstances but on this occasion all I could do was stare into the unlit crowd. Applause broke tension. We were supporting the avant-garde (is this still an acceptable term?) violinist Tony Conrad (probably has a website) who plays big drones and microtonal "rrrreeeeeesss" on modified instruments. The night before we went for dinner with him. I'm sure i'm not the only person in the world who'd find sitting in Pizza Express on St. Benedict's Street talking about, and I quote, "the most popular weapons in Glasgow" with a sixty-something former associate of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sonic Youth and Gastr del Sol a little bit strange. He was very sarcastic, playing up to my immature stereotype of New Yorkers. Good laugh, though.

guten tag

jx

(Lazily titled) London #1

2005-04-18T04:51:00.000-07:00

So, despite the fact that (thanks to the Brains-type figures who press all the wrong buttons in out IT department) I lost a few words, I concluded that I was close enough to 3,000 words to take the weekend off. It was time for a London visit.

Unfortunately, we decided to prepare for our trip by caning wine (white, rose), beer and chinese food, resulting in no sleep until three in the morning. The alarm went at half six. It was a miracle when we staggered onto the train just before eight a clock, bleary eyed and (in my case) stinking of booze. I think it gets caught in my teeth. They'd mucked up the seat reservations so when I got to the place I was meant to be sitting there was a posse of middle aged City fans on a field day to Crystal Palace. We sat down behind them as they cracked open the Stellas.

Somewhere after Romford the coffee kicked in and I began singing "London Loves" by Blur.

At Liverpool Street we tried to begin walking up to Trafalgar Square, but then deemed it too much of a dautning task and retreated to the underground. We emerged fifteen minutes later at Charing Cross and spent a while trying to find the National Portrait Gallery, before realising that it was quite a large and not entirely discreet building stuck just behind the National Gallery...

SkyNet

2005-04-15T10:55:00.000-07:00

How to ruin yr day:

1- write lucid, incisive prose. In fact, the best you've written all year.
2- find out the computer you're working on is fucked.
3- lose it all.

Kids- always save your work.

Everyone in the computer centre is now under the impression that my permanent mode of being involves thumping screens, kicking chairs and swearing (what's that? It does?)

FUCK

Jx

An "Aweful" Purchase

2005-04-15T05:37:00.000-07:00

Aweful, November 26, 2003

Reviewer:
Kyle Stewart (Georgia) - See all my reviews

This series is horrible beyond all conception. Tolkien overbloats EVERYTHING to the point where it's absolutely ridiculous, and I loose tract of the plot amidst unimportant details. Quite frankly my only thought is I DON'T CARE WHO EVERYONE'S FATHER IS, IF YOU WANT ME TO KNOW THEN WRITE A PREQUEL, JUST TELL THE STORY IT IDIOTIC BRIT! I don't know how someone who wrote something as good as "The Hobbit" could produce this junk. I think what happened was he had a bunch of notes left over, and wanted to cash in by writing a sequel, so he threw all the details he had onto a shallow plot, but sense it was to complicated to be called "dumbed-down" like most money-making sequels noone could attack it. And it was so complicated people have been trying to convince others for decades that they're intellegent because they can understand this book, but since noone understands it, noone can test them to see if they really do or not. Anyway, if you want a complicated plot you can understand, read "Dune" by Frank Herbert.

Question:
- Does Kyle know there are already TWO prequels to Lord of the Rings?

The rest of the argument is far too elliptical to follow.

Kyle: you are the Moths of Boredom reviewer of the week. Should anyone wish to reward his achievement, I've accidentally pasted in his e-mail address at the top. All prizes should be appropriately cerebral, as Kyle is a very "intellegent" young man. Not some "Idiotic Brit", right?

Jx

Finally, a satisfied customer!!

2005-04-14T04:29:00.000-07:00

Today's Amazon review is a little more positive... witness this rousing reception for George W. Bush on God and Country by, well, George W. Bush.

a book for the ages
June 23, 2004 Reviewer: A reader

This was the best book I have ever read. It will stand the test of time and truly be on everyones shelf before this century is over. Bush will always be the man we loved and trusted. Thankfully, this book will rewrite our society to a better tomorrow.

Books can write?

Jx

Today's unhappy customer...

2005-04-13T05:23:00.000-07:00

Today's reviewer is Matt Gordon of Wiltshire. Can you guess what he's returning to Waterstones?

Dull, dull, dull dull dull., February 25, 2005

Reviewer: mattgordon from Nr Bath, WILTS United Kingdom

Not only does this book fail spectacularly to live up to the hype it recieves, but whilst doing so somehow manages to condone human sacrifice, rape, murder, torture and genocide.

Beware of exposing children or the infirm to these questionable morality examples.

Some chapters also are so far fetched as to be unbelievable. Examples of the whole world being covered by water (where did it all go?), to the feeding of 5thousand with fish in breadcrumbs (not even a decent recipe included) and the laughable zombification of the main hero are neither explained in any depth nor reassesed or apologised for when later chapters blatently cotradict them.

Add in a few spurious claims such as a 6000yr old earth and an infinitely large assimilating bad guy (kind of like the Borg off Star Trek) and this book manages to fail despite its obvious potential.

If you want a decent cult novel with morality metaphors and a philosphical and deep main herpo i would strongly reccomend The Dice Man.

Edgy and provocative? Or sixth form philosophy? I just can't decide...

Jx

more disappointed customers

2005-04-12T02:54:00.000-07:00

Next up...Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler...

The Wind Beneath Multiculuralism's Wings, March 9, 2005

Reviewer: the_dalry_lama from Dalry, Near Beith

It surprises me that a lot of liberals and left wingers don't seem to like this book much, because the only reason most of us put up with the distortions of fact, biology, history, and society that these left wingers promote is because of this book. Yes, that's right, Hitler, despite himself, was the greatest friend the Jews, Blacks, liberals, feminists, socialists, and communists ever had.
Around about the 1930s, Jews were widely distrusted in the West, Blacks were treated like big brawny children, while the commies were penned into a truncated remains of the old czarist empire. Along comes Hitler and 30 years later, all Hell had broken loose.

Hitler, by his cruelty and incompetence, basically dragged down the perfectly respectable idea that White European civilization should dominate the World. It was no coincidence that following his disastrous impact on the World, the Jews had the sympathy to found Israel and dominate the media in the USA and other countries; the Communists rapidly expanded across Eastern Europe and Asia, and infiltrated Western academia; the Blacks won their independence, which they squandered as quickly as a welfare, or got their Civil Rights, which just made it much harder to explain their continued failure; and the absurdity of liberal multiculturalism, which puts the stone age on par with the rocket age and endlessly attacks White European civilization was enshrined as a new World religion.

All this is thanks to Adolf. Although he was a man of obvious political genius and had some good ideas, I think his inhuman extremism, lack of a sense of proportion, and poor strategic sense, damned us to the present, PC, multicultural Hell. For this reason, despite its historical interest, I can only give this unlucky book one star.

"liberal multiculturalism, which puts the stone age on a par with the rocket age"?? Eh!? This racist propaganda writes itself!!

jx

Mothsy Bonus

2005-04-12T02:47:00.000-07:00

It's also worth checking out this list of inspirational albums, particularly the comments about Britney...

jx

new feature

2005-04-12T02:41:00.000-07:00

This week, The Long Moths of Boredom will be republishing Amazon reviews written by disappointed customers. Today: The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Lots of Words, Doesn't Say Much, June 7, 2004

Reviewer: benji_j from London, England

After reading the positive reviews for this book, I thought "what the hell", and bought it. I thought the same thing when I read it, but in a different way.

This book is one of the hardest I have ever read, partly because its written in a very formal and slightly archaic style, but mainly because I find it very hard to see what Bachelard's point is, most of the time.

After finishing another seemingly endless paragraph, eventually working out what the grammar and words mean, you are often left not understanding what he is getting at.After half a chapter I finally realised that he has no point.

It's hard to explain, but I would say that this book tells you nothing even remotely relevant to anything you will ever experience.

Overall, a pretentious waste of paper. I think I might chop mine up and make poems out of the words.

Thanks, Benji

jx

Temples 'r' US!!!!

2005-04-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

Hello. I am 23. Should I really be leafing through books about landscape gardens in Ireland in order to write highflown academese about buildings and the uncanny? The answer's in the question, is it not?

Anyway, apart from that I've just got back from a weekend spent forgetting to switch the telly on to witness important cultural events (RIP JPII/ HRH+CPB 4 EVA!!!/ NCFC 2- MUFC 0). If my grandchildren should happen to ask me where I was the day the "people's pope" (sic) was put to rest (truly, euphemism is the poetry of our times) I'll be able to tell them the following things:

1- I was cursing the search system in the Millenium Library for making me waste my time
2- I was watching a pissed-up tramp rucking in the market place(in a two way display of abject ignorance, some lads called him a "dirty fenian wanker" in response to his chorus of "The Billy Boys")
3- I was hungover
4- I ate chilli beans on toast, a cambozola and ham baguette, meatballs in tomato sauce with linguine
5- I went to see Mika Bomb, Hyper Kinako, Violet Violet and others down the arts centre.

On Royal Wedding day I went to Somerfields and worked. Work allowed me to escape the humiliation of being a United supporter in a Yellow pub, except for when the guy introducing the bands (it was a get-together for all the rockabilly/skiffle bands that did the East Anglian circuit in the 50s and 60s) insisted on yelling the score out between acts.

Great events have, once more, passed me by.

Jx

America

2005-04-05T02:50:00.000-07:00

Last night, I watched gun-toting darkside hippies Love play far too quietly in an overlarge venue, went home and watched the beginning of a Steve Martin film then went to bed and watched Wisconsin Death Trip. WDT is a documentary with a narrative constructed in black & white reconstructions of stories from the newspaper of the Wisconsin township Black River Falls. The stories take place across the year 1897 and the film is split into four parts, corresponding to the seasons. In between each sequence of reconstructions, we're shown the town as it is now (in colour). Several characters recur across the reconstructions, one being a cocaine sniffing schoolteacher who has a "mania for breaking windows" (hysteric diseases are a preoccupation in the film).

Anyway, I've figured out that you could more or less extrapolate everything you need to know about America by putting Arthur Lee, Steve Martin and the window-smasher together in a room.

Jx

Recent dilletantism includes...

2005-04-04T07:49:00.000-07:00

Colin Wilson - The Occult (hippy esoteria bits notwithstanding)
FR Leavis - New Bearings in English Poetry
Andre Breton- Collected Writings
Louis Chevalier - The Assassination of Paris
David Gascoyne - Collected Poems
Georges Perec - Species of Spaces
Ian Sinclair (ed) - Conductors of Chaos
Ian Hacking - Mad Travelers - Reflections on Transient Mental Illnesses

As you might recognise from the implication of the header, I very rarely get to read much more than half of anything, more's the pity. Oh, and I've not been doing too well on varying the testosterone levels this week.

Listening to...

Black Flag - The First Four Years
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Fever to Tell
Sonic Youth - Murray Street
Plaid - Spokes
My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
Verve - A Storm in Heaven(!)
The Beatles - Rubber Soul, Revolver
Stereolab - Transient Random Noise Bursts and Announcements
Boards of Canada - Geogaddi

Lists give me an excuse to keep on sitting here...

Jx

Free Arthur Lee

2005-04-04T04:28:00.000-07:00

I'm off to see Love tonight. I have to work for a couple of hours while the support band play, but it'll be worth it. The original guitarist, who used to hold up mobile candy vendors in California at gunpoint, is playing with them.

Saturday was one of those days which rolls from place to place, solar powered. We walked up to Mousehold Heath the back way, Magdalen Street via the charity bookshops (see below) and Sprowston Road. Once across the tiver you enter Norwich Ultra Aquam (Over the Water) which is, according to some internet literature, an autonomous commune within the boundaries of the city at large. It always struck me that the East and North of Norwich belonged in its own world, but I'd ascribed the feeling to staying in the media-class/student ghetto for too long and coming to consider anywhere else otherworldly. Anyway, Sprowston Road looks like the North, terraced houses elevated above street level with small patches of grass on the little plateaus by the porch. A couple of adolescents were leaning on the wall, half-naked, loud and outdated hip-hop blaring from the front door where a bulldog was chained up. They were chatting up some girl. The pubs up that way are all interesting looking (in the sense that they're a bit rare)- The Cat & Fiddle, The Artichoke, The Wherry, The Prince of Denmark and that one that's above the road at a confluence of back streets. Norwich's renovation continues apace but it's largely confined to the southwest of the city, a small strip along the riverbank around Duke Street and the far peripheries. The fringes of the heath, outer Magdalena, are intact examples of old Norwich (as opposed to the spectacle of Chad dressing up as John Sell Cotman at the Castle Museum).

We turned up Gilman Road, past a small church, to get onto the Heath. A path led through a small patch of wood before opening out onto a wide meadow which was once the site of a lime-kiln. Apparently the topography of the Heath was affected over the course of the last few centuries by unsupervised mining. Beyond this field the woods rolled and tumbled into little dells- anyone who read Alan Garner's great book for kids when they were at school would recognise the scenery. We stopped and rolled around in leaves for a while, taking photographs. We then cut out into the open ground higher up and walked around the pond, which I'm sure looks suitably melancholy in the right weather but is completely out of place in spring sunshine. We went back into the woods, trying to head in the direction of the football noises which represented our destination, the bandstand, and Zak's Diner. What is it about a certain species of British youth and the American fifties. Took some photos of the bandstand and then abandoned ourselves to gastronomic simalacra (admittedly of the most delicious sort) for a hour or so. Less good chips than Cappy A's but nicer burger.

Sorry, inner food monologue at work (see also Homer Simpson, Desperate Dan). I'm hungry. The woman in Lite Bites (in the futurist utopia also known as the Earlham Road Complex) wouldn't let me get a ham and cheese sandwich for less than £1.40 so I had to make do with ham, and I'm not letting myself eat it till I've finished the AHRB form.

Anyway, after the Heath we went for a drink in the Adam and Eve. This joint likes making claims like "!!England's Oldest Pub!!" but had contented itself on this occasion with "Possibly Norwich's Oldest Pub", a claim contradicted by the nearby Maid's Head Hotel. The A+E sold me Old Peculier which resulted in a need to fall asleep and/or wet myself all the way home, a journey involving lengthy detours around the co-op and Choices Video.

yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah...

Jx

Famous Relatives

2005-04-01T04:09:00.000-08:00

Having got bored of Googling my own name, I decided to ask Wikipedia what Kennedys i was aware of. It troubled me that my name would forever be associated with a cabbal of philandering American statesmen, a fictional doctor and a "punk" violinist who found himself inexplicably popular in the 1980s. I was directed towards this fella, who, in addition to fighting an against-the-odds human rights campaign in the Deep South, was a sort-of-buddy of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Having said that, I haven't read the stuff properly yet. It might be an April Fool.

Oh, and today's diary entry...interesting stuff happening on the Teknikov front after Wednesday night's gig (which was fucking good fun, I have to admit, though my throat knacked afterwards). Shall speak more of which as and when I know more. Last night we went to a Smiths tribute night at the Arts Centre (well, spending every night in there is better than spending every night in the Union, which is what I was forced to do a few weeks back) which was exactly as expected: geography teachers remembering the lost girl with the Cure t-shirt who used to sit around picking daisies etcetera etcetera. For more description, cut and paste from the following list of rubbish 80s indie cliches:

- Jozef K
- Gregory's Girl
- C86
- Derek Jarman
- Liz Frazer
- "shimmering"
- duffel coat
- Oscar Wilde
- rain
- Milan Kundera
- Youth tribes

Afterwards, we went for a long walk in the mist down Old Palace Road and back up through the Nelson Quadrant, where, in a strangely filmic episode, they were just stacking the tables up and locking the doors at the Fat Cat. A man was leaning against a lamp-post, looking crook. I thought he was going to open his jacket and offer me nylon stockings for Jenny.

Today I have been reading about the influence of Dada on English Modernism. Interesting.

Jx

Very Old Man

2005-04-01T03:48:00.000-08:00

In the graveyard of the church I went to photograph on Monday there's the grave of a Very Old Man. This is his story...

Moths hereby instigates a Very Old Man competition, which of course also means Very Old Woman (although women should perhaps have a separate category, as most worldwide longevity records are held by ladies). The town with the most Very Old Man wins.

I'm trying to avoid doing my AHRB forms. Does it show?

Jx

Across the Fields

2005-03-28T09:16:00.000-08:00

Still on the Macbeth tip, I took the Espio out into the countryside just now to try and grab photographs of an "open place". If you walk about a mile from my mum's place, you come to a small church and graveyard, where a man who lived to something in the vicinity of 130 is buried with a huge memorial. It's a tranquil place but also very eerie, situated as it is on the edge of a little hamlet with its back to what appears to be neverending countryside. The Vale of York can't be much more than thirty miles from Richmond (at the edge of the dales) to the foothills of the Yorkshire moors but feels like a huge void. It seems like the kind of place that's been put there to cross, either on the conduit North-South routes connecting London and Scotland that run through it (the East Coast Main Line and the A1 both run within five or six miles of the house) or on the East-West routes between the two national parks. The VoY becomes a gap inbetween any number of other co-ordinates we could select: estuaries (Humber and Tees), sports clubs (no football teams of any note between Darlington and York), stabilising points for dialect. Valespeak is only made distinct by the fact that it's speakers sound like the crows that inhabit the area, but it's actually just a combination of all the harshest elements of Leeds, Teeside and Mackem.

Anyway, I take some pictures at the church and then start to lose my nerve, having as I do a head full of MR James (currently). I cross a bridge over a muddy stream, flowing into a flooded field with a few rotten trees. To the left of the little lane is an air force comms post for navigating the Tornados into RAFs Leeming and Dishforth. Whenever I take a photograph of it I remember the Greek planespotting scandal. Carry on up the road and there's a suitably sinister lone farmhouse, reminiscent of many a cheap horror film (ha, ha, ha...Jeepers Creepers). I picture the farm as run down, not doing business, a couple of dirty dogs chained up in the Yard. Chances are that a businessman-commuter type actually lives there, or a doctor. Further up the road, I notice that there's a woman (country type wearing a bodywarmer) also walking on it which for some reason causes me to decide to return to Scorton. I've proved my point about the open places, anyway.

Jx

argh! ahrb!

2005-03-28T04:19:00.000-08:00

The thing I enjoy writing the least, but seem to spend the most time on, is the proposal. Currently, it's the AHRB proposal, the "give me £10,000 so I might actually have time to study" bout of arse-kissery, that's giving me a headache.

How do I put this into the AHRB's brand of Newspeak? Reconfigure the below to Academese and I'll buy you a pint:

So, there was this guy called Henry Green. He wrote his first novel very young and then crammed a whole career into (give or take) twenty-five years. At times (especially during the war) he was very prolific, but on other occasions it took him ten years to produce anything. In the 1950s, he gave up, apparently convinced that he couldn't do anything else with the genre.

Anyway, there's an acute concern with place in Green's work. You first notice it because of the amount of times people walk through doors, are in the wrong place, get caught, shut doors and so on. Initially, the boundaries are the main indicators of space rather than what a demarcation contains. Then you start to pick up on something which I can't call much more than a "nuance", or a "strangeness". I happened to read Bachelard (who is, apparently, too en vogue to mention in an AHRB application) alongside Elizabeth Bowen, causing me to think about the effect of the perception of place and on the way we respond to the spaces literature (or art, or even music) offers us. Green is frequently surreal in his presentation of space (in much the same way as Robbe-Grillet was later, often employing a process of super-banalization or chosisme so maybe I really mean absurdist but who knows) but his general artistic non-alignment makes this a risky claim to be making. I've read shitloads and started writing a chapter but, given that I'm talking about ineffability, you haven't got a peg to hang all of that money onto. Go on, please, I'm desperate.

As I said, translations win prizes.

All I really wanted to do today was sit around at home and read idly. I intended to do a couple of chapters of Ackroyd's book on William Blake and maybe some other stuff, but now have a head too full of the AHRB. Back to Norwich tomorrow, a million and one things to be getting on with, and a gig winging it's way towards us.

Later,

Jx

Not always so grumpy

2005-03-27T13:36:00.000-08:00

Hey, the adolescent nit-picking below isn't my conventional mode of being (I hope). Here's one or two treats to make up for it. (Adopts Jools Holland's start-of-the-show-look-the-bravery-are-playing-voice)

We have an interview with Ian Sinclair, in which the doyen of the going-for-a-walk scene talks of his desire to "bury" psychogeography (and differentiates, helpfully, between surrealist and situationist attitudes towards the derive).

Over here, mildly pleasing photographs of candy cigarette packets from "abroad": that's one for the kitsch folk.

Now, for all the footy pervs, a load of non-league porn. There's a reason behind my research into this, honestly, I'm not just a spod. One suspects that the owner of this site may have Chad-esque tendencies, though...

And, combining elements of the above, some quasi-situationist writing about football.

Next time, I'm going to put the link to the CIA World Factbook 2005 up. What a day that'll be.

Jx

real people

2005-03-27T12:11:00.000-08:00

So, today I've been mostly sitting around my mum and stepdad's house watching it rain outside and trying to figure out how most people spend their time. I'm aware that this could become a reasonably self-pitying splurge (to which the response should be "most people work, you pig-fucking student") and is at best an example of writerly neurosis.

So it starts last night. I met my friends Will and Lottie in a dive in Richmond in time for the second half of the England-Northern Ireland match, late because I'd already been wasting my life watching Darlington put in an utterly inept performance at the damp WMS. It soon emerges that we shall be out for the duration, and by the time Sinj meets us around half seven I'm pretty steaming.

Standing at the bar with Andy Lamming, waiting for him to get the drinks in, some skinhead kid turns to me and mutters something incomprehensible. I respond in kind and then realise that he's planned it all, he wants a scrap and he's picked me. I'd been full of foreboding at Middleham the day before and I think it was only last week that I said to someone or other that no-one's given me any gyp for ages, years and years. "You tekkin' the fuckin' piss?" he says, a couple of times. "No mate," I respond, "I wasn't". With no answer, he turns away, distracted by one of his mates. Lamming and Sim decide that we're staying in the pub anyway and I agree- what's to be gained by being forced our of a pub. Like all stupid young men, I don't like to lose face.

So why am I so fucking bothered (if the answer's not at the end of the passage immediately above)? I didn't get a kicking. I just felt fucking stupid, like I'd let myself down by being vaguely intimidated. And as usual, I spent the rest of the evening getting drunker and drunker and imagining stacking his face in with an ashtray or kicking him down the steps at the top of Frenchgate. Then I hooked up with my brother and we went on up to his mate's house in the Garden Village to drink even more. I woke up under a shelf, disorientated and nauseaous.

Sorry about the venting above. I think that when I come home a general malaise develops borne of my inability to get anywhere, knowing that only five or six miles away there's a few thousand square miles of England's greatest countryside to walk over, climb in, photograph or desecrate, but the buses never show and twenty-four year olds can't be begging lifts all the time. That feeling of unreality sets in, a space-and-time claustrophobia when you develop the impression that you won't get everything done in your life you want to, so you won't bother trying.

Ask yourself, how much time have you wasted in your life? I'm always fucking on at people not to waste what they've got and to grab everything that comes, but I've frittered the hours away watching shite TV, staying sober, doing nowt. Some people- film directors, politicians- just can't have let time slip like that. You know what I mean.

I've just chanced upon some early Auden which resonated for a moment and, breaking my usual rules of blog-composition, I'll quote (from "Thomas Epilogises", , 1926)

Lights!
The train shies, throws its rider. There's an end
Of our pathetic search for difference.
We are embraced by lichenous desires,
Change Wanderlust to Weltschmerz in the Under-
Ground.
The poodle has returned to her old vomit,
We to our cottages like crouched Ophelias

To repeat myself, know what I mean? Believe it or not, the Teknikov song "Lloyds of London" is about much the same sense of early-twenties inertia. The Teutonophilia evident in the lines above cheered me up a little, as I've been contemplating Germany again today. Real people go places, I think.

So once more, that old call-to-arms that marks the beginning of summer: Do everything properly, love every minute, try something new, one hundred percent. One day, I might try and take my own advice.

Jx

At Home

2005-03-25T14:26:00.000-08:00

Up in Yorkshire at the moment, reminding myself what contours are and behaving like a child. Went to help my mum out today, taking photographs of an open day at the stables she does a little marketing work for. My sister's digital camera ran out of battery after all of thirty minutes, rendering me impotent as an assistant as I'd promised myself I'd use the point-and-click to take some Yorkshiregraphs.

I walked out to the hill over the little town with the stables and took about fifteen pictures, trying to cram as much of the suitably moody-looking sky into them as I could. I sat on a bench and thought about Macbeth, and how I'd quite like to use Macbeth as a title for everything I ever do. It sums a lot up.

Note to Taz: I've varied the testosterone level, as required. I've read a book on Lee Miller, the surrealist photographer (woman) this week and am around halfway through The Last September by "posh Irish bird" (copyright K. Whitney) Elizabeth Bowen. Also reading the collected poems of David Gascoyne and Mad Travelers: Reflections of Transient Mental Illnesses by Ian Hacking, which I thoroughly recommend. It even manages to be funny.

So home, home, home. It's a state of mind. It's got me listening to Cream, Black Sabbath and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I'm eating my fingers. I've spent today surrounded by extras from Emmerdale, tweedy old fellas with tobacco-stained moustaches and blonde ladies with big thighs. There was a pro-hunting protest, young Tories milling around looking like they were just waiting for a Guardian reader to show up for them to beat to death with bugles, then feed to their dogs. I sneaked by. Some hefty old boys in that mob, and I was marking myself out anyway by wearing a vee-neck with nothing underneath....a queer lefty poser. I avoided meeting student-hilarity celeb Richard Whiteley, thankfully, and walked around with my sister putting the world to rights.

I am knackered

Jx

funny because it's true

2005-03-21T03:35:00.000-08:00

From the Mogwai Q+A:

Q:
if the world was to suddenly be visited by aliens, what music do u think would be best for them to hear first?
A:
The Bravery. It would then become apparent to the aliens just how shite this planet is. They would then kill all the humans and leave the animals to get on with things down here. Barry

Couldn't have put it better myself.

Jx

where we're at

2005-03-18T04:36:00.000-08:00

Flowers in the verges and students spring-breaking on the concrete, plastic cups spilling in the Roald Dahl-for-young-adults lager waterfall that the architects of the UEA "piazza" so thoughtfully provided us. Easter has always been a time that I run off home for a week or so, abuse Sinj's lift priviledges and get dewey-eyed about small animals running around fields of the dales. So I've leapt at the chance to do a good deed by going to take photographs of horses this time next week (do camera flashes make horses bolt?)

I also tend to associate this time of year with the South West Coastal Path trip, which has passed into lore amongst those concerned. It was a watershed (well, there was a lot of water involved), involving as it did my unintentionally hilarious Jesus impression where I walked along the sand, shoeless, for a few miles having a rapid sequence of epiphanies which ran something like...

"I'm never going to get drunk again...I'll be nice to everyone from now on...keep on smiling, positive mental attitude...never going to get drunk again...be nice to girls..."

I was so pleased with my resolutions that I went to a pub all decked out in Union Jacks and drank five or six pints of ale. I'd like to finish it one day- we dropped out with four hundred miles to go, under the walls of King Arthur. Fuck, it rained that fortnight, all varieties- we kept getting stuck in estuary mud and slipping down hills. It was blazing sunlight for the first three days, causing dehydration and sunburn (and midday drinking) but it was snowing by the end of the trip.

Anyway, all of this is part of an experiment into nostalgia. All reading suggestions welcomed as ever.

STEREO:

Tortoise- Standards
Scott Walker- Sings Jacques Brel

BOOKSHELF

Carl Sandburg- Chicago Poems
CIA World Factbook 2000
Peter Ackroyd- Albion

Jx

reading list

2005-03-16T05:44:00.000-08:00

I'm waiting for the reading lists at SCHEMES but I'd better share today's find....

Sandburg

Nostalgia, of course, is much like masturbation (cheers, Twainy) but I'm not sure where the line is between it and melancholia. Sandburg is completely American, in a kind of Bruce Springsteen way (he gets the joke).

What else have I been reading? Henri Lefebvre, Viteslaw Nezval, Louis MacNeice, Henry Green, a little WB Yeats, Tzvetan Todorov and a book by Lethaby on architecture and mysticism that made perfect sense after a whole bottle of £2.99 Corbieres.

Got to decide what I'm applying to teach next year. English Surrealism looks a canny choice but I'd have to A) shoehorn Green in and B) read everything else on the reading list. And Vic's taking it...

best to go,
Jx

A Good Thing

2005-03-10T12:18:00.000-08:00

I think the fact that I've written so few entries recently means that I've been spending less time on campus, which means (strangely enough) that I've been doing more work.

I've just written a poem for SCHEMES, which should be up there soon. I think that poetry is one of those things that you can't really self-publish- you're better off being masochistic and putting yourself at the mercy of someone else. Cf all those people who print "academic" essays on the internet, much like that one I slantily cited in my MA dissertation.

What was the line I thought of on the bus? You'll never write anything better than the stuff that comes into your head on the bus when you've been disarmed of pen. Well, I won't share it with you now having provided a beating-stick like the previous sentence.

What else do I think is interesting at the moment? I've been reading, in no particular order of preference...

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (when is an arm not an arm?)
An introduction to Heidegger (I have an arm! Big deal!)
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (don't listen when people say you shouldn't think your mother's hot)
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (encyclopaedically wacky)
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces (for light relief and because it was cheap)
Poems of Viteslaw Nezval (beautiful, taking a moment to be serious)

It is time to go to work now.

jx

a lesson learnt

2005-02-24T04:51:00.000-08:00

Someone's beaten me to the line and written about the pubs down Nelson Street which goes to show that thinking about writing something and actually writing it are two completely different things. Conclusion: I've missed the point of blogging and established some erroneous hierachy by which a blog is too inferior a form on which to write about a meaty subject. I haven't remembered the link to the piece but I'll put it up when I find it again.

Saw Sideways on my once-a-year trip to the cinema last night, which was a pretty beautiful film, if flawed in places. It reminded me of two things: a less histrionic American Beauty, and my boozy, skint camping jaunt round Umbria with Luke a few years ago. We went there after a trip to the curry house down POW Road that has replaced one of the Nazma's (classic, vintage-style Indian restaurant, not one of those nouveau gaffs with lighting and fusion menus). Though I enjoyed my food, I've woken up on a downer because I left my very old leather driving gloves in there that I acquired for a scarcely believable fifty pence at the charity for Romanian orphans (FARA). We wound the night up by spending a tenner we found in the snow outside the Alibi...in the Alibi. The "entertainment" was pretty special last night- a pissed-up guy playing the hits on an acoustic guitar. Now, I realise that this is fairly standard but most venues take time to find a guy who a) knows the right chords for the right songs and b) can sing a little. Now this guy wasn't a bad singer in the usual sense of having a grating voice or hitting one or two bum notes- he just couldn't sing at all. The highlight was an aborted version of REM 's Man on the Moon, which I can't do justice to in writing.

Had to work early again this morning. Why don't people take time to socialize their brattish kids before turfing them out into the big wide world? When people I know order a coffee, they look you in the eye, smile, mind their Ps and Qs and probably crack a joke. The students who I serve on a day to day basis act as though they don't have time to be polite, conversational or vaguely normal and attempt to give the impression that they're on their way to perform some task of earth-shattering importance. Even though I know for a fact that they spend all day every fucking day sitting in the hive bemoaning their "skintness" and how "hard" their work is. Solutions: get a job to support your coffee and croissant fuelled student lifestyle and actually pay the occasional visit to the library. I'd best get my arse in gear because i really want to be in the position of marking the work they hand in...comments will include "less time in the Hive, please", "this work shows all the hallmarks of caffeine dependency" and some other half-assed attempts at being deadpan and withering. Ah well. If they could only learn some manners (by which I mean the down-to-earth type also known as "common courtesy" rather than some la-di-da "the fish knife goes on the left" bollocks).

Well, it's Underground day. Hope I'm not supposed to be djing because I can't stand the sight of "Contort Yourself" and "Optimo" failing to fill a dancefloor anymore.

jx

computer-mouth

2005-02-21T08:45:00.000-08:00

It's always good to see someone holding forth on PhD guilt, and interesting to see an alternate manifestation of the unwelcome phenomenon. Now, I'm only just embarking on the no-doubt hellish journey (such dizzying highs! such flattening lows!) but I've developed my own set of symptoms. Whenever I sit down at the computer and fool about on the internet (like I am doing now) I get a terrible feeling in my mouth, not unlike when you go to sleep for a very short amount of time on public transport. I feel as if I have the breath of a hound and slime dripping down the back of my throat, which is sore. My shoulders ache. Two things cure computer-mouth: a daring assault on Mt. Work, or a cowardly traipse up Pub Hill.

I'd better tell you about schemes. The beautiful, talented and very singular Jennifer Hodgson is launching a web publishing venture and all contributions are welcome (even, I'm led to believe, writing about sport). Keep checking out SCHEMES for information and the first few offerings. I'm trying to knock up a complete fabulation of a trip round the boozers of the "Nelson Quadrant", all but one of which I'm far too wet to enter unaccompanied, which I hope will become a tale of Hamilton (Patrick, not Ronald)-esque woe.

I've also updated the Teknikov website, but there's still far too many pop-ups on it.

jx

The Girls in Front of Me

2005-02-21T03:14:00.000-08:00

I drank three cans of Guinness by myself last night and decided that, if they stopped having meetings to decide their direction and filming them and removed the slow bits with James hetfield singing, Metallica would not be too bad an idea. I did this because I'd promised myself some time to relax before having a day of hard work. So I get up early, get up to UEA in time to get all the shifts that I need, and hit the library by 9.30. Even allowing for my daily browse, I'm doing productive things by ten. And so it goes until the girls who are now sitting in front of me show up. They are talking, in a loud and exciteable manner, about:

surfing
what subjects studied at GCSE
where they've been travelling
what modules to take next year

There's something about the subject matter that, combined with the unique frequency that their voices produce together and the unrelentingness of it, that makes me feel as though the Melvins are doing a slow, instrumental set in the computer room. I can't quite explain, but I know that I'm not going to be finished by twelve and, being a pig-ignorant ignorant pig of a sexist I only ever tell blokes to shut the fuck up.

One of them has symmetrical piercings from brow to bottom lip, as if a metal butterfly flew into her face and got stuck.

Ah, they just caught the death stare thing and I bollocked them. Now I'm blushing. All this occurred in real time. I can work again now.

jx

the mental life of the old skools

2005-02-10T06:20:00.000-08:00

Fall titles again elude me so I'm going to give up this silly game. For now. I've had the kind of week when it doesn't seem appropriate to listen to music made by other people- I've been too busy making my own. The gig at the Marquee on Tuesday was an experience- I can't remember ever playing so well, or being so engrossed in a performance. People danced. When you're performing you feed off the energy of the audience. Come down the front, be close, get in my face.

As ever, I woke up the next day feeling a bit blank. There's been several high points this week (my Monday supervision was very encouraging indeed, and Lyndsey seems the person to bully me into becoming a good writer. Even more importantly, she's letting me do what I want with the project, so there's an element of fun that was absent before). High points emphasise all empty time. The day after a gig, or similar event, is often pretty grey.

I strolled, half according to plan, half following the path of least resistance. I studied the alignemnt of pubs in a small area just North of Dereham Road. There were a disproportionate number. I felt as though the right thing to do would be to pop into the Fat Cat and sup a half, but couldn't be bothered. Before this, I saw an old school, with separate doors for girls and boys. It reminded me of the two halves of the brain. Some good Victorian institutional architecture down Waterworks Road. The area across the metaphorical tracks is an absolute goldmine, an extension to my adventures in the Golden Triangle. I'm not sure what to do with all of the information I collect on these journeys.

jx

container drivers

2005-02-07T02:16:00.000-08:00

Ah, there's no reason-ah behind this title-uh, except...and the shambolic excuses for diagrams that the science teacher had offered us-ah were now being used as a-ah textbook example-uh of what NOT to do in an emergency-ah...I couldn't think of the title of The Fall song about slating your critics. Though they are many in number.

We got a bad review on the BBC website which disappointed me, especially because the criticisms made were simultaneously true and ignorant- we did come across as "lacklustre" that night, but (I know this is a classic excuse) the sound was shit and it was our first gig with the new line-up. We were thrown to the lions a bit and it'll be a long time before we get on an art centre bill again. Still, something tells me that the reviewer was out of his depth at such a small gig (and the line about "entertainment in the bar" seems to suggest that he enjoys a tipple, I add mischievously) and is probably more familiar writing up shows at the UEA. I know, I know, I know that I'm sounding bitter here but I'm from the Paul Weller school as far as this kind of thing is concerned- we were lucky, but the criticism of the Pistolas was particularly personal and not at all conducive to encouraging the development of new music in Norwich.

A quick browse of the rest of BBC Norfolk's music mini-site indicated that they tend to favour bands who (in theory) have mass-marketability (Cord and the like). This makes commercial sense but the lack of success of these groups just points to the fact that they're not even very good at what they do. Every town in Britain is choked with Stereophonics/Coldplay/Oasis influenced bands who think they're going to make it because the local news gives them good write-ups. On the strength of the "local buzz" generated by out of touch regional media (whose music writers tend to be non-specialist thirty somethings whose interest in music doesn't go particularly far beyond the occasional purchase of significant releases ie, new Manics albums or the Scissor Sisters) these bands get picked up on by London promoters and alleged "industry" people who think that they're going to do great things. They then play a gig in London where the local buzz is immediately exposed by the scrutiny of people who actually know their shit, fuck off back to Norwich or Darlington or whatever and give up six months later. These bands also contribute fuck-all to the local scene because everybody in the area actually knows that they're just peddling the same brand of so-so rock.

Yes, this is the most immature, gauche and boring thing I've posted (well, at least since last week) but it really does my fucking head in.

Still looking forward to the gigs, though, and a bit of Brighton Rocks later in the week.

jx

Life Just Bounces...

2005-02-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

Several encouraging things happened as I walked up to UEA today (as part of a new and probably soon-to-be-discontinued get fit 'n' save cash drive). Firstly, the dinner lady outside the school at the top of Avenues Road said hello and smiled at me. Then, a guy wearing a T-shirt walked past. As I looked away from the guy in the T-shirt I saw several small flowers sprouting in the verges (aaah). Most implausibly, at the Avenues/Bluebell Road junction a greenfly landed on my lip.

I think I should add here that, aged about seven, I tried to start a greenfly farm. Not understanding the principles of farming or of insects, I only had one greenfly. It died, because I put it in a tub with an airtight lid on.

Reading last night, discovered a cracking ""A-Z of the City" (edited by Steve Pile and someone else) plus John Reader's new book on urban life. We also talked some rubbish at the relationship between New Journalese and entropy, and my TLS came this morning. I feel almost like a "doctoral candidate" today, which means that I'll probably end up out on the lash tonight.

jx

Not writing "Elastic Man"

2005-02-02T07:37:00.000-08:00

I think the problem today is that my mind is somewhere else. I've spent all afternoon:

- thinking about next week's gigs
- thinking about flyers
- mentally working on my Basque (the place, not the lingerie) story
- reading Guy Debord essays in the Nothingness library
- wanting to be locked in my room with all the right leads to do some recording
- looking on Amazon and trying to decide whether groups with names like "Sunburned Hand of the Man" would be any good, and whether or not I'll like the new Boredoms record any more than the last one
- calling up books in the library that have only the most tenuous links to the novels of Henry Green
- not being able to form sentences
- thinking about going on up to Orkney to drink Highland Park with Luke and reminisce

What a waster.

jx

the north will rise again

2005-02-02T04:59:00.000-08:00

I should really know better than to feel so smug about the result of a football match, but United's victory over Arsenal last night gave me an involuntary warm glow which hasn't yet departed.

I did start writing a piece justifying this feeling but it was so full of North v. South cliches that I had to delete it. It wasn't as funny as this, anyway.

I just don't seem to have the words today...

jx

can't think of an appropriate Fall song

2005-01-27T07:10:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-26T09:09:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-26T08:22:00.000-08:00

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"...

2005-01-26T06:26:00.000-08:00

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"

2005-01-25T05:15:00.000-08:00

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!

2005-01-20T02:43:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-20T02:32:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-20T02:02:00.000-08:00

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!

2005-01-20T01:49:00.000-08:00

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...

2005-01-18T06:52:00.000-08:00

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

smallcore...

2005-01-18T06:44:00.000-08:00

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...

2005-01-18T05:21:00.000-08:00

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"

2005-01-18T04:58:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-18T04:43:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-17T02:14:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-17T02:13:00.000-08:00

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...

2005-01-10T09:10:00.000-08:00

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

Fan Fiction

The "poetics" of "space"...

2005-01-10T06:40:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-07T06:30:00.000-08:00

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...

2005-01-07T05:49:00.000-08:00
...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"

2005-01-07T05:10:00.000-08:00
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

being in a band, the wrong way

2004-12-06T08:40:00.000-08:00
Teknikov, (not even) Norwich's premier "new-wave rockers" have a gig of more than moderate importance approaching. It's on the 17th of December in the main room at Norwich Arts centre, as part of local promoters/cabbalistic clique Wombatwombat's Christmas do. Aside from my concerns about whether this get-together will take on the character of an office party and end up with Chad replicating his arse on the NAC photocopier, I'm worried about how the immanence of this performance has reawoken my least favourite Teknikov tendency. See, we do nothing for ages, then get together when we've got a gig on the horizon, rush-write a couple of new songs and have one or two practices. I'm utterly convinced that this is the wrong way. In my head, when you're in a band you're supposed to congregate round one of the band member's houses, drink until your head's about to fall off, listen to a load of records and occasionally keep hold of the instruments for long enough to scratch out the bare bones of what will hopefully become another valediction of your group's individualistic, instinctive wondefulness. That's always sounded like a lot of fun to me. But no, it's the workhouse ethic, staying-sober-and-doing-the-gig-properly, not really thinking about it, producing for the sake of fulfilling quota-ed requirements, booking the taxis to get us to the rehearsal room on time. All this and more rubbish. Everyone should fall in love with it a little more.

I live in a house

2004-11-29T05:58:00.000-08:00
I suppose the majority of you do. Mine is in an area of Norwich knonw locally as "The Golden Triangle". "Golden", I assure you, refers to the commodity that the local landlords reap from their leaking, cold, shoebox properties. If I went round my landlords house, I reckon that the bathroom taps, the doorhandles and the telephone would be made out of gold. The cutlery would be gold. The windowlock would be gold. The hair of his children, flaxen gold. In the golden triangle, there is an interesting ratio at work. For every nine houses with malfunctioning ovens/gas fires/fire alarms there's one house full of gold and other treasure beyond my most lucid imaginings. In that house lives the owner of nine houses of type A. often, this person combines their career as a slum landlord with work as a university lecturer or column writing for a liberal newspaper. They have many cats, which live off the uncollected garbage in the yards of type A houses. Because they are too lazy to look after their animals (and they are often too busy counting their ill-gotten gains), most of the cats have adopted one of the down-at-heel properties as a second home. The outcome of this system is that anybody who rents a room in one of the quasi-slum dwellings in the Golden Triangle gets a free pet.

I live in what is known as the box room. It's at the back of the house, with a conveninent low roof outside providing easy access for any one of the numerous burglars who do their dirty business in our area. The room is not very large. This is a problem because (being a PhD student and that) I have hundreds of books, which are now all curling up with the damp. I have to study, write music, sleep, eat, make love, make merry, administrate etc from this room, which is tiny.

It's a lovely house though, if you postmodernize geography and think of it as a constantly active space rather than an immutable entity. The five of us (and our girlfriends, who spend enough time in the house to have a right to bitch about its general unpleasantness) have developed a Dunkirk mentality to deal with it. If we play our music loud enough a synaesthetic effect occurs and we can smell the noise rather than the damp or the bin. We also live next door to an off-license/newsagents. If you're sitting in the living room, it's a shorter journey to the magazine rack than the toilet.

Now I must go and write about Henry Green.

how this came about

2004-11-29T05:48:00.000-08:00
There are several explanations and all of them are true. Firstly, I was jealous of all the other people who made the vagaries of their day-to-day life sound exciting through their ability to confabulate a little bit. Secondly, I've recently embarked on a PhD thesis on the (still unfairly neglected) 30s/40s/50s novelist/enterpreneur/professional charmer Henry Green. So have about 5,000 other global literati but, as I've perhaps indicated above, I find originality a challenge. Oh, I was meant to be explaining something through the medium of lists...back to the thread...that's it...I thought a weblog (that's a clunking word. Say it to yourself.) would help me put fingers to keyboard on a daily basis. Thirdly, it's a nigh-on peerless displacement activity. And I think, in my heart of hearts, that's my "motivation".