Don't get excited about this. These re only being posted so I have access to them online in case they need editing. I say 'in case' they're obviously going to need editing because they're rubbish, and first drafts. But anyway....
The assumption in the group had been, in the six months they’d been away, Cardiff Centre should have been finished by now. Rows of people carriers lined up accordingly on the rooftop, you’d be able to make out the tiny see-through boxes tottering up and down the edge of the structure, and the sinewy alleys would be pumping little families, clustered and huddled together around the complex. But they’d seen enough as they flew together in land that it was no longer a surprise when the group began their descent over the city, and the centre was still a tangle of snapped girders, abandoned digging equipment and breezy, angular grey crumbling rocks. From a metal gauze, a putrid-smelling gas was billowing into the night.
The mystery, if any, was that none of the people responsible for this hulking eyesore had stuck around. Maybe it had something to do with all the fires they’d seen, he thought, as they passed directly overhead the geometric blot. He craned up and over the tip of his right wing he could see the Spike Tower was also on fire, and the left hand corner of the giant indoor field was also lit up, like a paper flare waving towards the sea. There had been dozens of similar fires all along the choppy water, all along the lost coastlines. It was as if Wales had ignited every major landmark to warn others to stay at sea, to keep off the jagged, dangerous rocks that seemed to be the entire island, now. They’d stopped for dinner on an archipelago, just off the coast of Pembrokeshire. Even out there, The House of the Gods at Caldey Island was aflame, the spirals of smoke dissolving into the evening sky much, much thicker than a typical chimney stack. As they swooped in at the bay and progressed home, it was obvious this was happening inland as well.
As they descended towards the lake, the sky had become thick with arid and coarse smoke. This didn’t carry the scent of any natural bush or grass fire, not that there was enough of either left around the edges of the lake and encompassing homeland to cause such intense, acidic plumes. It smelt like rain. The group ducked between the dust clouds and made their landing in the shallow water at the edge of the lake. The water was oily black, with icy reflections of orange, red, mud and gold splashed everywhere as their bodies flapped down into the gunk. Not a place to settle, even for a minute. His mate had already swum and started fussing on a verge by the time he’d even taken in his surroundings – she was always so bloody resourceful! –he watched her as she awkwardly smudged the bitter water from her feathers. He joined her on the bank and did the same.
He scuffed and wondered aloud where everyone was. Sky was dark, people should be in their nests, feeding and mating. Usually when one nest was ablaze, a noisy red people carrier would soon appear and power a hearty stream of water to quench the flames then people would go back in, to feed and mate. Today the whole Roath acre was burning; from across the lake it was evidently not one fire here spreading, but the result of several different fires joining in together. If one catches fire, the red car would be there straight away. So why, when everything’s burning, is there nobody around at all?
The sound of commotion behind him caused him to crane his neck and look towards the noise. A man he recognised, but could not place where, was leading a group – males and females together – through the metal hedge to a hexagon of grass near the water. He was clearly a leader, he was talking fast, loud, and nobody else was talking over him. He mopped his brow with a white cloth, and kept tugging at the hair on his face, then looking at his hands when he gestured. The group were all nodding as one, silhouetted, but none looked very happy. People usually looked happy when they nodded. It was probably because not many people had come to their meeting. He sneezed a glob of black water from his beak and looked down into the water. Silly goose. He watched as the rest of his flock descended into the black water like a meteor shower, splashing dusty water onto the bank.
He realised he recognised the male from hundreds of bits of paper he found while snuffling through discarded things, on wooden, wiry poles, on the side of nests. The male was definitely in charge. Maybe he’d do something about these fires. After all, if they were going to stick around for the season, it’d be nice amidst this wreckage to have shrubbery and clean water to wash, hide in, and drink from together. Together in this gathering storm.
Dystopian novels and short stories often take unusual yet distinct approaches to narrative in order to provide their sense of place and character. For example, in J.G. Ballard’s novella ‘Concrete Island’, the story takes place in just one location, and with just one character, which heightens the sense of alienation and isolation, reflected by Ballards stark descriptions of the locations. In order to create this sense of alienation, I decided to use an animal narrator, to provide a non-human view of a human-dominated society. I opted for a goose above other animals because they are undomesticated by humans, have the luxury of flight, and in the context of the story, can be isolated from human life for six months, and then return to find things very different indeed.
To create character, I decided to use the same approach to anthropomorphises as Richad Adams in Watership Down; the characters can interact, comprehend and narrate with accurate lexis, but have no concept of man-made nouns and uses vocabulary suited to their own surroundings; hence a house becomes a nest, cars become, a sports stadium becomes an ‘indoor field’. I wanted to make specific locations universally named, to frame the action in a recognisable place.
I decided to make the physical attributes of the apocalyptic scenario keeps indistinct and unspecified. Although the text infers the fires are man-made, fire is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and so one which the characters can identify with perhaps more than the humans. Human survival is one of the key components of dystopian or apocalyptic fiction, usually against a totalitarian system. Although the world creates in ‘Together’ is part of a larger scenario, I wanted to suggest a regimented human society, by the protagonists repetition that they only use their ‘nests’ for ‘feeding and mating’ and nothing else. Towards the end of the piece I wanted the human gathering to be a positive conclusion, although the goose has yet to conclude the reason for the grouping, there is an evident leader, whom we can assume is a prominent figure in their society.
In JG Ballards work, in particular High Rise and Concrete Island, the landscape is often a principal enemy, with the power to trap, isolate and disorientate the characters. He achieve this through description and allegory, and I used the initial flight of the birds to achieve this. Contextually, the centre of Cardiff, South Wales, has recently been designed, and has been rebuilt over a number of years. By the point of the birds return, the large retail outlet (“Cardiff Centre”) should have re-opened. The birds’ reception to this is that of negativity (“a hulking eyesore”) but I wanted to use Ballardian phrases such as “a tangle of snapped girders” and “angular grey rocks” to create a distant, cold vision of a modern, human creation (designed to improve life). The idea of things created for good ultimately harming the society that created it is a consistent dystopian theme, which is why I chose the ultimate source of the apocalypse as this building. I chose locations in Wales rather than more obvious settings to provide a more localised, familiar look at apocalypse, rather than the often clichéd destruction of major cities and landmarks, in order to create a more identifiable story.
In order to create a sense of menace, I wanted to create a sense of menace and that the situation was beyond of control. The fires are of no direct threat to the goose, in fact he continues relatively as normal, pausing to study the situation (and not fully appreciate the severity for the humans) and use relaxed, colloquial rhetoric (“silly goose”) but I used phrases such as “intense, acidic plumes” to emphasise the severity of the smoke, and “the whole Roath acre was burning” using a sizeable measurement normally reserved for rural contexts. I also used the simile “like a meteor shower” as a more direct use of imagery.
I wanted to use the recurring use of ‘Together’ as the title and recurring throughout the piece, partly inspired by the phrase ‘birds of a feather, flock together’ and also the sense that a united group have a better instinct to survive than an individual. It is taken that animal instincts like geese to flock together, is given, but as the thoughts of the protagonist at the end suggests, only the humans cans put out the fire and make their future secure, and this can only be achieved together.
Monday 26 October 2009
Thursday 30 April 2009
No One Had It Better
Cardiff Central’s new library opened at the end of last month, so it’s been open for about six weeks now. Upon the ribbon being sluiced and the revolving door being manually spun for the first time, this building instantly became the best thing in Cardiff, no questions asked, even less answered. Winchester’s library reopened a couple of years ago; a massively inferior complex built in a hexagonal geometric anomaly that looks like a Micro Machines replica of the Library Of Congress annexed to a smoothie bar, but having revisited the Winchester ‘Discovery Centre’ (no libraries allowed, under Hampshire County Council rulings) I made a few base-level conclusions.
My new book shop or library test is the Richard Ford test. Richard Ford is an amazing author, his most well known work being the Frank Bascombe Trilogy; The Sportswriter (probably the single greatest novel I’ve ever suffered the ecstasy of reading), Independence Day (the much lauded sequel) and The Lay of the Land (The finale), all of which I would recommend to anyone without even merest hesitation. The Richard Ford test is to see whether the literary institution in question has any Richard Ford books in it, especially the ones which aren’t the Bascombe novels The Winchester ‘Discovery‘ Centre, despite being several stories smaller than Cardiff’s magnum opus, and generally giving the impression that antique pig farmer swap meets and crusty folk nights are as important, if not more so, to a libarary as the books themselves, it has a shitload of Ford. Including, I was excited momentarily to see, a copy of Wilderness, which is pretty much impossible to find anywhere except the obvious. It almost made me want to join in the discovery, but I wasn’t carrying twenty five proofs of address, my passport or a portable retina scan. Cardiff Central Library had zero Richard Ford books in it. None! Zero! Zip! Zilch! Fucking nothing-a-doodle-doo. Failure.
That’s about the only fault that springs to mind though, the rest of it is a ridiculous geometrical nightmare, that looks like it was designed by a box of schoolchildren in a wet playtime, but it so overbearing and exciting, you can’t help but run around inside getting overexcited by things you’ve seen a million times before. There are pointless ostentatious chairs which you can’t sit on wearing a dress (not that I was), hundreds of special chairs with arm rests on, which I didn’t think would work at all, until I sat down in one by a window on the top floor, overlooking the sex shop on Mill Lane and the Wyndham Arcade, and realised that they are anatomical perfection for the lazy reader. You’re physically forced to sit hunched over a book and consume that fucker.
There are entire floors or half-floors dedicated to things I don’t understand, and machines that look like CAT Scanners and bent backed old duffers plonking about using light emitting desktop computers and sprawling out maps and other technical documents one step away from being tapestries. They also have these audiobooks which are basically miniature mp3 players with the book loaded onto them, so all you have to do is slot in headphones and it’s party time with Peter Carey. I loaned His Illegal Self and then spent the rest of the gloomy April afternoon before going to James’s birthday drinks, meandering around Bute Park in figures of 8 listening to a woman attempt a variety of bad accents and age-affected vocal lilts as she tried to convey an Italian American, a teenage teller, an elderly grandmother and small boy all having one conversation. It was like watching someone trying to juggle a ball, a knife, a tortoise and a flaming globdule of filthy wax, on a unicycle. Also, and this wasn’t any credit to the library, apart from maybe being rewarded for existing, but in the reading area where they chuck all the daily papers for people to read (alas, not on giant sticks), but there was a Muslim reading a copy of The Satanic Verses. I saw him later outside Boots and he was still reading it. I’m not sure why this was such a good thing, but it was.
There’s an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer is explaining to, I think Jerry and George about how good he is at karate, because he’s significantly better at kicking the ass of the other people in his class. The joke comes from the fact he’s joined a beginners karate class with a bunch of 8 and 9 year olds who are obviously going to have their ass kicked by a lanky hipster doofus. A couple of days ago I went and saw a terrible British comedy called Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel, starring erm, The Irish Guy from The IT Crowd, Shirley Ghostman, and some odious wanker who can’t act, but was in Shameless. Inexplicably, this film also has Anna Faris in it, who can pretty much top the US box office off her own merit, so what she’s doing in this low budget and more or less unwatchable British Sci Fi “lads down the boozer” comedy is beyond me. But she’s Anna Faris, and is therefore completely awesome by default, and this is where the Seinfeld comparison comes in, because she’s so much better than everything else about the film, it’s like watching a 34 year old powerhouse. doing karate with a feeble 9 year old. I was tempted to write her a letter, but that’s a bit 2006.
My new book shop or library test is the Richard Ford test. Richard Ford is an amazing author, his most well known work being the Frank Bascombe Trilogy; The Sportswriter (probably the single greatest novel I’ve ever suffered the ecstasy of reading), Independence Day (the much lauded sequel) and The Lay of the Land (The finale), all of which I would recommend to anyone without even merest hesitation. The Richard Ford test is to see whether the literary institution in question has any Richard Ford books in it, especially the ones which aren’t the Bascombe novels The Winchester ‘Discovery‘ Centre, despite being several stories smaller than Cardiff’s magnum opus, and generally giving the impression that antique pig farmer swap meets and crusty folk nights are as important, if not more so, to a libarary as the books themselves, it has a shitload of Ford. Including, I was excited momentarily to see, a copy of Wilderness, which is pretty much impossible to find anywhere except the obvious. It almost made me want to join in the discovery, but I wasn’t carrying twenty five proofs of address, my passport or a portable retina scan. Cardiff Central Library had zero Richard Ford books in it. None! Zero! Zip! Zilch! Fucking nothing-a-doodle-doo. Failure.
That’s about the only fault that springs to mind though, the rest of it is a ridiculous geometrical nightmare, that looks like it was designed by a box of schoolchildren in a wet playtime, but it so overbearing and exciting, you can’t help but run around inside getting overexcited by things you’ve seen a million times before. There are pointless ostentatious chairs which you can’t sit on wearing a dress (not that I was), hundreds of special chairs with arm rests on, which I didn’t think would work at all, until I sat down in one by a window on the top floor, overlooking the sex shop on Mill Lane and the Wyndham Arcade, and realised that they are anatomical perfection for the lazy reader. You’re physically forced to sit hunched over a book and consume that fucker.
There are entire floors or half-floors dedicated to things I don’t understand, and machines that look like CAT Scanners and bent backed old duffers plonking about using light emitting desktop computers and sprawling out maps and other technical documents one step away from being tapestries. They also have these audiobooks which are basically miniature mp3 players with the book loaded onto them, so all you have to do is slot in headphones and it’s party time with Peter Carey. I loaned His Illegal Self and then spent the rest of the gloomy April afternoon before going to James’s birthday drinks, meandering around Bute Park in figures of 8 listening to a woman attempt a variety of bad accents and age-affected vocal lilts as she tried to convey an Italian American, a teenage teller, an elderly grandmother and small boy all having one conversation. It was like watching someone trying to juggle a ball, a knife, a tortoise and a flaming globdule of filthy wax, on a unicycle. Also, and this wasn’t any credit to the library, apart from maybe being rewarded for existing, but in the reading area where they chuck all the daily papers for people to read (alas, not on giant sticks), but there was a Muslim reading a copy of The Satanic Verses. I saw him later outside Boots and he was still reading it. I’m not sure why this was such a good thing, but it was.
There’s an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer is explaining to, I think Jerry and George about how good he is at karate, because he’s significantly better at kicking the ass of the other people in his class. The joke comes from the fact he’s joined a beginners karate class with a bunch of 8 and 9 year olds who are obviously going to have their ass kicked by a lanky hipster doofus. A couple of days ago I went and saw a terrible British comedy called Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel, starring erm, The Irish Guy from The IT Crowd, Shirley Ghostman, and some odious wanker who can’t act, but was in Shameless. Inexplicably, this film also has Anna Faris in it, who can pretty much top the US box office off her own merit, so what she’s doing in this low budget and more or less unwatchable British Sci Fi “lads down the boozer” comedy is beyond me. But she’s Anna Faris, and is therefore completely awesome by default, and this is where the Seinfeld comparison comes in, because she’s so much better than everything else about the film, it’s like watching a 34 year old powerhouse. doing karate with a feeble 9 year old. I was tempted to write her a letter, but that’s a bit 2006.
Tuesday 14 April 2009
Shout
I don’t remember making any promises.
I’ve become increasingly obsessed with pathetic forms of self-regulating anger management, I hadn’t even vaguely thought about the phrase ‘anger management’, until the other day until reading on an internet website about US domestic box office figures, where until last week, the pisspoor comedy and career low for Jack Nicholson of the same time, had the highest opening weekend in April of all time. Clearly April is a barren wasteland in American cinemas. It was beaten, amusingly, by Fast and Furious, a film so angry and spiky and masculine, it almost literally reeks of gasoline, like when BOB is lurking in Twin Peaks.
I digress. Actual anger management, is something I’ve thought about even less than I’ve thought about the Adam Sandler vehicle. Until November last year, it was well documented that well, that there has only been one documented incident of me getting angry, the infamous “shut the fuck up and show some fucking respect” slice of ridiculousness from All Tomorrows Parties which will probably be on my gravestone, it being so out of character and aimed at probably two of the least deserving people I’ve ever met. Last November, a similarly undeserving soul (Pav) was fearing for his life after I threatened to kill him at a house party for the heinous crime of turning off the radio and putting some proper music back on. I don’t know why I’d put the radio on, but boy was I unhappy it had been turned off. I say he was fearing for his life, but I don’t believe for one second I was being taken seriously. I don’t know how I’d even go about thinking about killing somebody else, there just isn’t enough murderous thought real estate spare in the sprawling avenues normally occupied by thoughts of elaborate suicide. Add to these previously isolated cases an incident at work where a preposterous self-imporant no-name author, (the type who uses a pen name so her books would be shelved next to or near several superior scribes in the shitty post-Bridget Jones chick lit vomit section of your local bookstore) whose uppity and deluded opinions of herself (high) and myself (low) caused me to slam open a door and smash a foot long dent into the plasterboard wall of the basement corridor.
A couple of weeks ago, I flew too close to the sun whilst out drinking and thought (incorrectly) that because the rose wine being sold at £4.99 in the Prince of Wales was pretty cheap, and didn’t really taste that much of alcohol, that meant it wasn’t. By the time I’d gone out the side door of the pub for a cigarette, pissed over the wheels of a car parked around the back of WH Smith, swaggered back into the pub and failed entirely to hold my own in conversation with Jo or Lisa without resorting to making up words or just letting out random sounds. It’s like I was learning to talk at the age of 26. Anyway, I lost my phone somewhere between getting out of the taxi, and getting into my house, and this enraged me to the point of going barking mad, and after attempting a wide variety of massively idiotic attempts to find it, including ringing the number on my house phone, and then returning to the street outside and crawling on my hands and knees, looking underneath cars and in hedgerows to see or hear either a little neon square, or whatever terrible present ringtone I had on my last phone during it’s final days, the only solution was to fling open the bathroom door in a dramatic and pompous way, and knock it off it’s hinges. There have been a couple of other minor incidents recently, but they’re more boring than anything, so I’ll put them to one side.
So, to the management. Not that any of these anecdotes have caused anything other than minor hysteria at the time, and a general lack of conviction from anyone else that I’m being anything other than a compete fool, but I have been doing some minor things to combat the increasing waves of anger hovering in the air around me. The first is regular baths. Admittedly, this sounds like I’ve been more than content to let the filth settle neatly in a fine layer on my skin for random and irregular periods of time, but reset assured, this is not the case. A bath, watching an episode of Seinfeld or Arrested Development, or listening to Stars of the Lid or The Blue Nile on a portable DVD player. Heaven. I even did the done thing amongst flake-eating losers and invested in bottles of allegedly anger-destroying (my inference) radox bubble bath. Partial credit!
In January, I quit drinking. On April 12th, I quit again. In January I swapped Red Bull for Pro Plus. On April 12th I did the same. I can’t comment entirely on the pros and cons of this, but it’s cheaper at least. I’ve also quit smoking again, declared myself asexual, and I’m going to press on with learning how to complete cryptic crosswords, and I’m reading more books. For a pair of fleeting moments in the past few months, I half thought about falling in love again, but luckily my common sense was restored, and it proved the possibility of positivity was anomalous, rather than me thinking I’d been consistently reading the love interests intentions wrong for so long.
Right now I'm sat at the living room table with lemon and ginger tea, which smells like I should have a cold, and today in Poundland ("keeping our price promises since 1992!") I bought two slide packets of Lemon Sherbert tealights. The scent was a lie, although I've just looked at the packet again and it draws no reference to them actually smelling like lemon sherbert, but then I can't think why they'd have chosen this name otherwise. I'm not putting one in my mouth, it smells like burnt tealight.
Some of my rage has been lifted lately because I’m on the cusp of giving up on music. That’s an exaggeration actually. I’m not going to give up on it, I mean today alone I downloaded the new Black Dice album (incredible) and the new Bill Callahan album (less incredible) as well as The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby and the Range (still amazing after all these years, although it’s not the same without Grant Coleman reading the Radio Solent football results at the end). But no longer will I ever see a band t shirt, a vocal appreciation for a band, or a habit forming indicating a person or groups musical taste alliance. I was never a ‘rock is so much better than crappy pop music’ twats at school, and although I’ve very much learned my lesson with thinking that someone liking, for example, Bill Callahan or Black Dice, automatically makes them on my wavelength, and how this is painfully untrue, there will still part of me which thought music, above film, books and anything else was ultimately the route to anyone else’s personality. I’ve been to see two bands this year; Wavves and Wintersleep. I pretty much hated everyone else there at both gigs. Anyone can like anything these days, and the money people save on not buying any records anymore means they have more money to spent on going to see the bands, and therefore you get more people, and therefore more shitbags at every gig you go to. Wavves was rubbish anyway, we all got what we deserved.
I’ve become increasingly obsessed with pathetic forms of self-regulating anger management, I hadn’t even vaguely thought about the phrase ‘anger management’, until the other day until reading on an internet website about US domestic box office figures, where until last week, the pisspoor comedy and career low for Jack Nicholson of the same time, had the highest opening weekend in April of all time. Clearly April is a barren wasteland in American cinemas. It was beaten, amusingly, by Fast and Furious, a film so angry and spiky and masculine, it almost literally reeks of gasoline, like when BOB is lurking in Twin Peaks.
I digress. Actual anger management, is something I’ve thought about even less than I’ve thought about the Adam Sandler vehicle. Until November last year, it was well documented that well, that there has only been one documented incident of me getting angry, the infamous “shut the fuck up and show some fucking respect” slice of ridiculousness from All Tomorrows Parties which will probably be on my gravestone, it being so out of character and aimed at probably two of the least deserving people I’ve ever met. Last November, a similarly undeserving soul (Pav) was fearing for his life after I threatened to kill him at a house party for the heinous crime of turning off the radio and putting some proper music back on. I don’t know why I’d put the radio on, but boy was I unhappy it had been turned off. I say he was fearing for his life, but I don’t believe for one second I was being taken seriously. I don’t know how I’d even go about thinking about killing somebody else, there just isn’t enough murderous thought real estate spare in the sprawling avenues normally occupied by thoughts of elaborate suicide. Add to these previously isolated cases an incident at work where a preposterous self-imporant no-name author, (the type who uses a pen name so her books would be shelved next to or near several superior scribes in the shitty post-Bridget Jones chick lit vomit section of your local bookstore) whose uppity and deluded opinions of herself (high) and myself (low) caused me to slam open a door and smash a foot long dent into the plasterboard wall of the basement corridor.
A couple of weeks ago, I flew too close to the sun whilst out drinking and thought (incorrectly) that because the rose wine being sold at £4.99 in the Prince of Wales was pretty cheap, and didn’t really taste that much of alcohol, that meant it wasn’t. By the time I’d gone out the side door of the pub for a cigarette, pissed over the wheels of a car parked around the back of WH Smith, swaggered back into the pub and failed entirely to hold my own in conversation with Jo or Lisa without resorting to making up words or just letting out random sounds. It’s like I was learning to talk at the age of 26. Anyway, I lost my phone somewhere between getting out of the taxi, and getting into my house, and this enraged me to the point of going barking mad, and after attempting a wide variety of massively idiotic attempts to find it, including ringing the number on my house phone, and then returning to the street outside and crawling on my hands and knees, looking underneath cars and in hedgerows to see or hear either a little neon square, or whatever terrible present ringtone I had on my last phone during it’s final days, the only solution was to fling open the bathroom door in a dramatic and pompous way, and knock it off it’s hinges. There have been a couple of other minor incidents recently, but they’re more boring than anything, so I’ll put them to one side.
So, to the management. Not that any of these anecdotes have caused anything other than minor hysteria at the time, and a general lack of conviction from anyone else that I’m being anything other than a compete fool, but I have been doing some minor things to combat the increasing waves of anger hovering in the air around me. The first is regular baths. Admittedly, this sounds like I’ve been more than content to let the filth settle neatly in a fine layer on my skin for random and irregular periods of time, but reset assured, this is not the case. A bath, watching an episode of Seinfeld or Arrested Development, or listening to Stars of the Lid or The Blue Nile on a portable DVD player. Heaven. I even did the done thing amongst flake-eating losers and invested in bottles of allegedly anger-destroying (my inference) radox bubble bath. Partial credit!
In January, I quit drinking. On April 12th, I quit again. In January I swapped Red Bull for Pro Plus. On April 12th I did the same. I can’t comment entirely on the pros and cons of this, but it’s cheaper at least. I’ve also quit smoking again, declared myself asexual, and I’m going to press on with learning how to complete cryptic crosswords, and I’m reading more books. For a pair of fleeting moments in the past few months, I half thought about falling in love again, but luckily my common sense was restored, and it proved the possibility of positivity was anomalous, rather than me thinking I’d been consistently reading the love interests intentions wrong for so long.
Right now I'm sat at the living room table with lemon and ginger tea, which smells like I should have a cold, and today in Poundland ("keeping our price promises since 1992!") I bought two slide packets of Lemon Sherbert tealights. The scent was a lie, although I've just looked at the packet again and it draws no reference to them actually smelling like lemon sherbert, but then I can't think why they'd have chosen this name otherwise. I'm not putting one in my mouth, it smells like burnt tealight.
Some of my rage has been lifted lately because I’m on the cusp of giving up on music. That’s an exaggeration actually. I’m not going to give up on it, I mean today alone I downloaded the new Black Dice album (incredible) and the new Bill Callahan album (less incredible) as well as The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby and the Range (still amazing after all these years, although it’s not the same without Grant Coleman reading the Radio Solent football results at the end). But no longer will I ever see a band t shirt, a vocal appreciation for a band, or a habit forming indicating a person or groups musical taste alliance. I was never a ‘rock is so much better than crappy pop music’ twats at school, and although I’ve very much learned my lesson with thinking that someone liking, for example, Bill Callahan or Black Dice, automatically makes them on my wavelength, and how this is painfully untrue, there will still part of me which thought music, above film, books and anything else was ultimately the route to anyone else’s personality. I’ve been to see two bands this year; Wavves and Wintersleep. I pretty much hated everyone else there at both gigs. Anyone can like anything these days, and the money people save on not buying any records anymore means they have more money to spent on going to see the bands, and therefore you get more people, and therefore more shitbags at every gig you go to. Wavves was rubbish anyway, we all got what we deserved.
"and I will lay my head, lay my head low"
Tuesday 13 January 2009
The Sugar is Sweeter
Simple pleasures are my favourite pleasures. Complicated pleasures frankly just aren't worth the effort, but simple pleasures are amazing because they're so easily achieved, and although the seratonin imbalance is only a tiny bit levelled with a brief instance of joy, it sure beats the fizzy drinks can build up that complicated pleasures endure during their creation that by the time the big taste question is answered, it blows up in your face.
No. Like cartoonish American policemen, a coffee and doughnut is all it takes these days. I don't think I'd actively gone and bought a doughnut in about five years. Maybe not even before the time when Rachel and I used to buy them before watching VHS tapes of Twin Peaks from the library. I think that was in late 2002. Each VHS had three episodes on it apart from the ones which had the hour-long Season 2 bookends which only had two episodes. I used to watch it first on my own in bed facing the window eating skittles or chicken soup, then on Saturday or Sunday afternoon Rachel would come over and we'd watch them again, and I'd feel slightly cleverer because I'd already seen them but it meant I could be distacted picking the hundreds and thousands off the doughnuts one at a time during the bits where Nadine Hurley thinks she's a teenager again. The doughnut I bought was from Subway, which again, I don't think I've been to in about a year. Subway always enthralls me because nobody questions it. For example, everyone knows that a Greggs a day will kill you, and thingammy with the moustache told us all that eating nothing but McDonald's will also kill you, and even Adam and Eve told us that too much fruit will bring untold trouble. But Subway, they could literally be serving sliced children cutlets and fluffy hamster guts and I've never even thought about it. Same with Millies Cookies - "look, it wasn't around when I was 13 when everyone talked about people finding nemetode worms and gall bladders in their burgers, so I will unquestionningly consume it's wares". The doughnut was delicious mind, and was round, and had bits of chocolate on it when fell into the bag during transit, so I got to tip them onto the plate and then try and fasten them back onto the doughnut.
When I was younger, the jam doughnut was the king of the doughnuts. Mainly because you got jam in it, and in a more than slightly pathetic manner, I used to argue that they were better because you got less doughnut with a ring doughnut. I'm glad I grew out of that. People who think that are also the sort of people who celebrate their birthdays at midnight on the day before. One of my ex girlfriends birthdays was on New Year's Day, and she refused to even acknowledge it until the next day, despite the fact there was essentially a party happening right there and then. It's one of the reasons I fell in love with her. But back to the doughnuts, obviously garish ring doughnuts with icing and fingertraps for hungry wasps made out of sugar and drizzle and lemon and insanity, the Homer Simpson doughnut, the pumped-up party ring, these and these alone, are the only doughnuts anyone should consider. Clearly these should be digested with black coffee the colour of oil, and nobody else in the room. Then, and only then can the simplest of pleasures be truly immersed.
No. Like cartoonish American policemen, a coffee and doughnut is all it takes these days. I don't think I'd actively gone and bought a doughnut in about five years. Maybe not even before the time when Rachel and I used to buy them before watching VHS tapes of Twin Peaks from the library. I think that was in late 2002. Each VHS had three episodes on it apart from the ones which had the hour-long Season 2 bookends which only had two episodes. I used to watch it first on my own in bed facing the window eating skittles or chicken soup, then on Saturday or Sunday afternoon Rachel would come over and we'd watch them again, and I'd feel slightly cleverer because I'd already seen them but it meant I could be distacted picking the hundreds and thousands off the doughnuts one at a time during the bits where Nadine Hurley thinks she's a teenager again. The doughnut I bought was from Subway, which again, I don't think I've been to in about a year. Subway always enthralls me because nobody questions it. For example, everyone knows that a Greggs a day will kill you, and thingammy with the moustache told us all that eating nothing but McDonald's will also kill you, and even Adam and Eve told us that too much fruit will bring untold trouble. But Subway, they could literally be serving sliced children cutlets and fluffy hamster guts and I've never even thought about it. Same with Millies Cookies - "look, it wasn't around when I was 13 when everyone talked about people finding nemetode worms and gall bladders in their burgers, so I will unquestionningly consume it's wares". The doughnut was delicious mind, and was round, and had bits of chocolate on it when fell into the bag during transit, so I got to tip them onto the plate and then try and fasten them back onto the doughnut.
When I was younger, the jam doughnut was the king of the doughnuts. Mainly because you got jam in it, and in a more than slightly pathetic manner, I used to argue that they were better because you got less doughnut with a ring doughnut. I'm glad I grew out of that. People who think that are also the sort of people who celebrate their birthdays at midnight on the day before. One of my ex girlfriends birthdays was on New Year's Day, and she refused to even acknowledge it until the next day, despite the fact there was essentially a party happening right there and then. It's one of the reasons I fell in love with her. But back to the doughnuts, obviously garish ring doughnuts with icing and fingertraps for hungry wasps made out of sugar and drizzle and lemon and insanity, the Homer Simpson doughnut, the pumped-up party ring, these and these alone, are the only doughnuts anyone should consider. Clearly these should be digested with black coffee the colour of oil, and nobody else in the room. Then, and only then can the simplest of pleasures be truly immersed.
Sunday 11 January 2009
The Ecstasy of Gold
2009 thus far has been brought to you by the letters R, M and the number 37.
Also the following
This time was different because I was on my own, was going to stay on my own, wasn't going to share wine with any homeless people, and was intending to be home before bedtime. I think because of the connections to Bristol with former love life greatest hits, birthday adventures and crazed mentalists (or any combination of the above) I've always been apprehensive about the place. The last time I went anywhere near Bristol was driving through the city centre with my parents in the rain and taking photographs through the drandrop mottled car window of people waiting at the zebra crossings and bridges. I enjoyed going in the station at Temple Meads because they have those three-in-one hand washersoaperdriers which are a novelty when you're about three years old but once you're old enough to realise dry, soapy hands are a nightmare for turning the pages of a book on a crowded train. But I didn't feel like getting out of the car.
The river was frozen over in places, which was a rare pleasure because you don't often get to see rivers frozen over, partly because the freezing temperature of putrid bile is a lot lower than pure water, but there were crazing paving cracks and dark grey veins of ice all around the edges of the dockside. These were all very pretty and cold, but the real highlight was looking around the grey hulking mess around the site of "@ Bistol" a 21 century hokum museum that nobody outside of Bristol understands and/or cares about. Outside this endeavour is a courtard flanked on several sides by crap grey fountains, a big crap round metal ball that makes your reflection look like a National Geographic outtake, and some miserable little chain restaurants. This was all covered in dirty brown ice, slobbered liberally over the fountain edges and floor, and if I'd been trying to impress someone, or was waiting outside the school gates rather than on a walk through Bristol at 10am, I'd have make spinny circles and vampire bat slides across the drain covers. I really wanted to, but these are the sacrifices of solitude. I did take some photographs of some stuff I saw on the floor, like painted question marks and bourbon biscuits and green and brown slime.
Since my epiphany somewhere about two months ago that buying second hands books regardless of the likelihood of reading them at any conceivable point in the near future, second hand book shops and charity shops have been heaven to me. I think also since the realising that unlike with music, rooting out the 'classics' and the 'cult classics' is actually a very good thing, rather than a waste of effort. For example, many great novels were published in the 60s, 70s and 80s by brilliant American authors, some regarded as cult best sellers. The comparable bands would be like, The Doors. No thanks. For this reason, the second hand boat I'm sailing is good, because I'm almost guaranteed to find exactly, or near as damn it, what I'm looking for. On this occasion, I was trying to find Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, for no reason other than that it's apparently absolutely impossible to read; the literary equivalent of those jigsaw puzzles with nothing but a giant close up image of a plate of baked beans, tomato bubbles and everything. I also quite like the covers of the Thomas Pynchon reissues, which of course, is the most important thing. I didn't find Gravity's Rainbow in the Oxfam on Park Street, but I did find one of Pynchon's other books. The man at the counter who looked like a bookworm, and I could tell this because he was wearing a fleece from Millets, started talking about Gravity's Rainbow and I realised the exact conversation I had played out in full in my head like a screenplay for a fantastically boring film about myself, was taking place. It seems that you can strive for individuality and a semblance of ubiquity, but when it comes to second hand books and nerds, we're all on a level playing field. I ended up buying nine books in Bristol, I won't bore you with the details, but finding an orange-spined edition of The Kingdom By The Sea was a little exciting. Oh, I said I wouldn't bore you.
I went to some old haunts; The giant Fopp down in Broadmead has now become a giant CEX, a cross between a shoplifters paradise hookey street metropolis and a seedy above-street-level boxing club. There were three copies of 'Hats' by The Blue Nile shelved in the H section. I checked the P and A sections for The Blue Nile albums I didn't have. I also walked underneath that big building by the roundabout, the one that cars can drive under, and nobody knows what the building is actually for. I walked past that building with the graffiti skull on it. I went to the depressing blue funk that is the new shopping centre, Cabot Circus, which is up there with the worst places I've ever been. You can see the almighty air of disappointment surrounding Cabot Circus from space, you know. The only part of it I liked was the wall opposite the outside of the mens toilets. I also went to The Commericial Rooms, which is a classy Wetherspoons near the centre of town. I realised I never wanted to work in a bar, especially not this one, when the poor girl was subjected to three simultanous idiot customers complaining about their drinks. I sympathised so much that when I found out the only soft drink available with my meal deal was J-2-0, I didn't grimace until I saw she wasn't looking. And I drank the J-2-0, of course. In the spirit of exorcising demons, I sat on exactly the same table I sat on the last time I went there. I didn't even realise this until I left, despite the fact the table was right next to the kitchen, and is the table that the kitchen staff usually sit at to eat their complimentary food. They probably spat on my lamb burger before they skewered it.
I finished The Girl Who Played With Fire in the cinema in Cardiff. One of the plus points of turning up 90 minutes early for a film you've told people you're only going to see "because there's nothing else to do" is that you can pretend it's a mistake and have an hour and a half to yourself to read, and the bar in the Cineworld in Cardiff is perfect for it. The downside is then running into someone you know at the cinema and explaining you've turned up 90 minutes early to see Role Models, and look like the ultimate loser.
Which of course, I am.
Also the following
....and!
I went to Bristol this week. Bristol and I really don't get on. But forgive and forget. Or forgive more than anything, because I'll never forget the times I've spent in Bristol. Like the time I got lost because the falafel was too hot and I ended up at the wrong train station and had to get a train to Temple Meads in order to get back home. Like the time I had to hide all my deoderants in the bushes outside the Academy. Everyone's done that. Like the time I missed the last train (the last train missed me) and spent the night on the streets a la Chelmsford with no company except the best of Warren Zevon and the best of Uncle Tupelo on opposing sides of a C90. That was the night I found out where the Thekla was, and I found out where the mechanical cows lived. There were also times where I walked in the fountain and was sick on the station platform, times where I've been late for being a dinner lady because I wasn't sure what side of Bristol I was on. More recently there was the time I stayed on when I was planning to go home, and we got rained on more than I've ever been rained on.
This time was different because I was on my own, was going to stay on my own, wasn't going to share wine with any homeless people, and was intending to be home before bedtime. I think because of the connections to Bristol with former love life greatest hits, birthday adventures and crazed mentalists (or any combination of the above) I've always been apprehensive about the place. The last time I went anywhere near Bristol was driving through the city centre with my parents in the rain and taking photographs through the drandrop mottled car window of people waiting at the zebra crossings and bridges. I enjoyed going in the station at Temple Meads because they have those three-in-one hand washersoaperdriers which are a novelty when you're about three years old but once you're old enough to realise dry, soapy hands are a nightmare for turning the pages of a book on a crowded train. But I didn't feel like getting out of the car.
The river was frozen over in places, which was a rare pleasure because you don't often get to see rivers frozen over, partly because the freezing temperature of putrid bile is a lot lower than pure water, but there were crazing paving cracks and dark grey veins of ice all around the edges of the dockside. These were all very pretty and cold, but the real highlight was looking around the grey hulking mess around the site of "@ Bistol" a 21 century hokum museum that nobody outside of Bristol understands and/or cares about. Outside this endeavour is a courtard flanked on several sides by crap grey fountains, a big crap round metal ball that makes your reflection look like a National Geographic outtake, and some miserable little chain restaurants. This was all covered in dirty brown ice, slobbered liberally over the fountain edges and floor, and if I'd been trying to impress someone, or was waiting outside the school gates rather than on a walk through Bristol at 10am, I'd have make spinny circles and vampire bat slides across the drain covers. I really wanted to, but these are the sacrifices of solitude. I did take some photographs of some stuff I saw on the floor, like painted question marks and bourbon biscuits and green and brown slime.
Since my epiphany somewhere about two months ago that buying second hands books regardless of the likelihood of reading them at any conceivable point in the near future, second hand book shops and charity shops have been heaven to me. I think also since the realising that unlike with music, rooting out the 'classics' and the 'cult classics' is actually a very good thing, rather than a waste of effort. For example, many great novels were published in the 60s, 70s and 80s by brilliant American authors, some regarded as cult best sellers. The comparable bands would be like, The Doors. No thanks. For this reason, the second hand boat I'm sailing is good, because I'm almost guaranteed to find exactly, or near as damn it, what I'm looking for. On this occasion, I was trying to find Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, for no reason other than that it's apparently absolutely impossible to read; the literary equivalent of those jigsaw puzzles with nothing but a giant close up image of a plate of baked beans, tomato bubbles and everything. I also quite like the covers of the Thomas Pynchon reissues, which of course, is the most important thing. I didn't find Gravity's Rainbow in the Oxfam on Park Street, but I did find one of Pynchon's other books. The man at the counter who looked like a bookworm, and I could tell this because he was wearing a fleece from Millets, started talking about Gravity's Rainbow and I realised the exact conversation I had played out in full in my head like a screenplay for a fantastically boring film about myself, was taking place. It seems that you can strive for individuality and a semblance of ubiquity, but when it comes to second hand books and nerds, we're all on a level playing field. I ended up buying nine books in Bristol, I won't bore you with the details, but finding an orange-spined edition of The Kingdom By The Sea was a little exciting. Oh, I said I wouldn't bore you.
I went to some old haunts; The giant Fopp down in Broadmead has now become a giant CEX, a cross between a shoplifters paradise hookey street metropolis and a seedy above-street-level boxing club. There were three copies of 'Hats' by The Blue Nile shelved in the H section. I checked the P and A sections for The Blue Nile albums I didn't have. I also walked underneath that big building by the roundabout, the one that cars can drive under, and nobody knows what the building is actually for. I walked past that building with the graffiti skull on it. I went to the depressing blue funk that is the new shopping centre, Cabot Circus, which is up there with the worst places I've ever been. You can see the almighty air of disappointment surrounding Cabot Circus from space, you know. The only part of it I liked was the wall opposite the outside of the mens toilets. I also went to The Commericial Rooms, which is a classy Wetherspoons near the centre of town. I realised I never wanted to work in a bar, especially not this one, when the poor girl was subjected to three simultanous idiot customers complaining about their drinks. I sympathised so much that when I found out the only soft drink available with my meal deal was J-2-0, I didn't grimace until I saw she wasn't looking. And I drank the J-2-0, of course. In the spirit of exorcising demons, I sat on exactly the same table I sat on the last time I went there. I didn't even realise this until I left, despite the fact the table was right next to the kitchen, and is the table that the kitchen staff usually sit at to eat their complimentary food. They probably spat on my lamb burger before they skewered it.
I finished The Girl Who Played With Fire in the cinema in Cardiff. One of the plus points of turning up 90 minutes early for a film you've told people you're only going to see "because there's nothing else to do" is that you can pretend it's a mistake and have an hour and a half to yourself to read, and the bar in the Cineworld in Cardiff is perfect for it. The downside is then running into someone you know at the cinema and explaining you've turned up 90 minutes early to see Role Models, and look like the ultimate loser.
Which of course, I am.
Tuesday 6 January 2009
Turn the Radio Off (2008 Part 2 / 2009 Part 1)
Here's a list of my top 100 songs of 2008. As with every year, this is not based on what record I think is technically better, or is a 'better piece of music' or carries more credibility. It is more of a list of what songs meant most to me, has the most memories attached, which made my feel like my heart was full of popping candy, or my tongue was covered with sulphuric acid. I'm not making any allusions (delusions) of grandeur with this list, in fact, I don't recommend listening to the songs you don't already know, because you probably won't like it. I don't believe many people would like Mysterious Skin by Orphans and Vandals, but I do. I like it a lot. It's not an easy sell, but it's a perfect soundtrack to what's been an imperfect year.
100 Death Cab For Cutie – No Sunlight
099 Sightings – Cloven Hoof
098 The Battlefield Band – Blackhall Rocks
097 Wolf Parade – California Dreaming
096 Slow Club – Because We’re Dead
095 Canadians – The North Side of Summer
094 Constantines – Hard Feelings
093 Yeasayer - 2080
092 Bon Iver – For Emma
091 Glen Branca – Lesson no. 1
090 Crooked Fingers – Sunday Morning Coming Down
089 Galaxie 500 – Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste
088 Orphans and Vandals - Christopher
087 Art of Fighting – Heart Translation
086 Tom Petty – Don’t Come Around Here No More (Tiedye Dub)
085 John Denver – Fly Away
084 The Wrens – She Sends Kisses
083 The Imagined Village Band – The Hard Times of Old England Retold
082 Mobius Band – Friends Like These
081 Lloyd Cole and the Commotions – Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?
080 John Vanderslice – Up Above The Sea
079 Johnny Foreigner – Yes! You Talk Too Fast
078 Eugene McGuinness – Bird on a Wire
077 Graham Nash – I Used to be a King
076 The Mountain Goats – San Bernadino
075 The Mae Shi – The Lamb and the Lion
074 Wild Beasts – Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants
073 Dodos - Fools
072 Mogwai – Dracula Family
071 Constantines – Trans Canada
070 Glasvegas – Lonesome Swan
069 Frightened Rabbit – Heads Roll Off
068 Fuck Buttons – Colours Move
067 Elliot – Carry On
066 The Gaslight Anthem – Casanova, Baby!
065 Wilderness – High Nero
064 White Hinterland – The Destruction of the Art Deco House
063 The Young Knives – Turn Tail
062 Alphabeat - Fascination
061 Get Well Soon – If This Hat is Missing, I Have Gone Hunting
060 Andrew Bird – The Trees Were Mistaken
059 Empire of the Sun – Walking on a Dream
058 Shearwater - Rooks
057 Paul Simon – Darling Lorraine
056 These New Puritans - Elvis
055 Sun Kil Moon – Tonight The Sky
054 Scott Walker – The Seventh Seal
053 Juno – The Sea Looked Like Lead
052 Marnie Stern - Transformer
051 Fleet Foxes - Your Transformer
050 Mark Kozelek – Up To My Neck in You
049 M83 – Graveyard Girl
048 A Mountain of One – Ride
047 The Hold Steady – Constructive Summer
046 The Magnetic Fields – California Girls
045 Sun Kil Moon – Gentle Moon
044 The Secret Stars – Shoe In
043 Usher – Love in this Club / Moving Mountains
042 Deer Tick – Ashamed
041 John Vanderslice – Promising Actress
040 The Tallest Man on Earth – I Won’t Be Found
039 Titus Andronicus – No Future (Part 2)
038 Panic at the Disco – That Green Gentleman (Things Have Changed)
037 Parts and Labor – Satellite
036 Studio – Escape From Chinatown
035 Frightened Rabbit – My Backwards Walk
034 Wintersleep – Dead Letter and the Infinite Yes
033 Sun Kil Moon – Lost Verses
032 Marnie Stern – Prime
031 Malcolm Mclaren – Madame Butterfly
030 Fuck Buttons – Sweet Love For Planet Earth (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
029 Passion Pit – Sleepyhead
028 Prefab Sprout – When Love Breaks Down
027 Wild Beasts – The Devils Crayon
026 The Gaslight Anthem – Miles Davis and The Cool
025 The Durutti Column – Otis
024 Tom Smith – Bonny
023 Frightened Rabbit – Keep Yourself Warm
022 Cat Stevens – Lilywhite
021 Bon Iver – re:stacks
020 Set Your Goals – Echoes
019 Wilderness – Silver Gene
018 Parts and Labor – Prefix Free
017 Of Great and Mortal Men – Ulysses S Grant: Helicopters Over Oakland
016 The Infadels – Make Mistakes
015 Cut Copy – Hearts On Fire
014 Ida – Maybelle
013 Fuck Buttons – Bright Tomorrow
012 Hercules and Love Affair – Time Will
011 Red House Painters – Shadows
010 Laakso – My Gods
009 Wintersleep – Miasmal Smoke and the Yellow Bellied Freaks
008 Mark Kozelek – Cruiser (Little Drummer Boy Version)
007 Kleerup feat. Marit Bergman - 3am
006 Cat Stevens – Don’t Be Shy
005 Studio – Turn The Radio Off
004 Of Great and Mortal Men – Richard M. Nixon: Two Under Par Off the Coast of Africa
003 Frightened Rabbit – Good Arms vs Bad Arms
002 Titus Andronicus – Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ
099 Sightings – Cloven Hoof
098 The Battlefield Band – Blackhall Rocks
097 Wolf Parade – California Dreaming
096 Slow Club – Because We’re Dead
095 Canadians – The North Side of Summer
094 Constantines – Hard Feelings
093 Yeasayer - 2080
092 Bon Iver – For Emma
091 Glen Branca – Lesson no. 1
090 Crooked Fingers – Sunday Morning Coming Down
089 Galaxie 500 – Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste
088 Orphans and Vandals - Christopher
087 Art of Fighting – Heart Translation
086 Tom Petty – Don’t Come Around Here No More (Tiedye Dub)
085 John Denver – Fly Away
084 The Wrens – She Sends Kisses
083 The Imagined Village Band – The Hard Times of Old England Retold
082 Mobius Band – Friends Like These
081 Lloyd Cole and the Commotions – Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?
080 John Vanderslice – Up Above The Sea
079 Johnny Foreigner – Yes! You Talk Too Fast
078 Eugene McGuinness – Bird on a Wire
077 Graham Nash – I Used to be a King
076 The Mountain Goats – San Bernadino
075 The Mae Shi – The Lamb and the Lion
074 Wild Beasts – Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants
073 Dodos - Fools
072 Mogwai – Dracula Family
071 Constantines – Trans Canada
070 Glasvegas – Lonesome Swan
069 Frightened Rabbit – Heads Roll Off
068 Fuck Buttons – Colours Move
067 Elliot – Carry On
066 The Gaslight Anthem – Casanova, Baby!
065 Wilderness – High Nero
064 White Hinterland – The Destruction of the Art Deco House
063 The Young Knives – Turn Tail
062 Alphabeat - Fascination
061 Get Well Soon – If This Hat is Missing, I Have Gone Hunting
060 Andrew Bird – The Trees Were Mistaken
059 Empire of the Sun – Walking on a Dream
058 Shearwater - Rooks
057 Paul Simon – Darling Lorraine
056 These New Puritans - Elvis
055 Sun Kil Moon – Tonight The Sky
054 Scott Walker – The Seventh Seal
053 Juno – The Sea Looked Like Lead
052 Marnie Stern - Transformer
051 Fleet Foxes - Your Transformer
050 Mark Kozelek – Up To My Neck in You
049 M83 – Graveyard Girl
048 A Mountain of One – Ride
047 The Hold Steady – Constructive Summer
046 The Magnetic Fields – California Girls
045 Sun Kil Moon – Gentle Moon
044 The Secret Stars – Shoe In
043 Usher – Love in this Club / Moving Mountains
042 Deer Tick – Ashamed
041 John Vanderslice – Promising Actress
040 The Tallest Man on Earth – I Won’t Be Found
039 Titus Andronicus – No Future (Part 2)
038 Panic at the Disco – That Green Gentleman (Things Have Changed)
037 Parts and Labor – Satellite
036 Studio – Escape From Chinatown
035 Frightened Rabbit – My Backwards Walk
034 Wintersleep – Dead Letter and the Infinite Yes
033 Sun Kil Moon – Lost Verses
032 Marnie Stern – Prime
031 Malcolm Mclaren – Madame Butterfly
030 Fuck Buttons – Sweet Love For Planet Earth (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
029 Passion Pit – Sleepyhead
028 Prefab Sprout – When Love Breaks Down
027 Wild Beasts – The Devils Crayon
026 The Gaslight Anthem – Miles Davis and The Cool
025 The Durutti Column – Otis
024 Tom Smith – Bonny
023 Frightened Rabbit – Keep Yourself Warm
022 Cat Stevens – Lilywhite
021 Bon Iver – re:stacks
020 Set Your Goals – Echoes
019 Wilderness – Silver Gene
018 Parts and Labor – Prefix Free
017 Of Great and Mortal Men – Ulysses S Grant: Helicopters Over Oakland
016 The Infadels – Make Mistakes
015 Cut Copy – Hearts On Fire
014 Ida – Maybelle
013 Fuck Buttons – Bright Tomorrow
012 Hercules and Love Affair – Time Will
011 Red House Painters – Shadows
010 Laakso – My Gods
009 Wintersleep – Miasmal Smoke and the Yellow Bellied Freaks
008 Mark Kozelek – Cruiser (Little Drummer Boy Version)
007 Kleerup feat. Marit Bergman - 3am
006 Cat Stevens – Don’t Be Shy
005 Studio – Turn The Radio Off
004 Of Great and Mortal Men – Richard M. Nixon: Two Under Par Off the Coast of Africa
003 Frightened Rabbit – Good Arms vs Bad Arms
002 Titus Andronicus – Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ
001 Orphans and Vandals – Mysterious Skin#
So where do we go from here? Here's a quickly doodled biro box around the key events of 2009 so far.
* I'm pretty sure I've already seen the best film of the year. Frost / Nixon, starring Michael Sheen and Frank Langella. This isn't just because I'm obsessed with Richard Nixon and have been for about 18 months, but it really is brilliant. Langella's Nixon, despite looking and sounding very little like Tricky Dick, is one of the best acting performances I've ever seen. Michael Sheen, who seems to be getting away with murder impersonating yet another member of the British establishment, is a riot as Frost, and has all the excellent inflections in the journalist's voice. The fact that the supporting cast includes Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon and Oliver Platt all being completely awesome makes it even better. I went to an advance screening with Sian and Nick from work, and there was a satellite link-up afterwards with a Q+A in London, hosted by some fuckwit who was 2 parts Marcus Brigstocke, to 2 parts total bell end, and with Peter Morgan (anonymous looking screenwriter) and Sheen (much more 'britpop' behind the scenes). The link failed for a good 20 minutes, but the rest of the questionning was cool.
* I have too many books to read. As I look up, and I note all the books I got for Christmas, the ones I've picked up from work or charity shops in Winchester since, the books I bought before Christmas and the one I'm currently reading (The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larsson) which I'm waiting until Thursday to buy, it amounts to a backlog of about 30 books. So, if anyone has read the following and can reccomend over some of the others, then stand up and let your voice be known.
Martin Amis- London Fields
Martin Amis - Times Arrow
Paul Auster - True Tales of American Life (Edited by P. Auster)
Eric Berne - Games People Play
Drusilla Beylus - The English Marriage
Robert Dallek - Nixon and Kissenger
Richard Feynman - Surely, You're Joking, Mr Feynman
Luke Haines - Bad Vibes
Henning Mankell - The Pyramid
Colin Thubron - Journey into Cyprus
PG Wodehouse - Psmith, Journalist
PG Wodehouse - Ukridge
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein - The Final Days
I think I'm going to be reading these until Christmas.
Im also 6 days into an attempt to go without alcohol, cigarettes, fizzy drinks and talking about the weather. So far, the hardest of these has been the latter. It's been so cold these past few days. By 'talking about the weather', I don't mean discussing temperature, like I have just done above. What I'm trying to cut out is the act of walking into a house or room after being in the cold/rain/sun/snow/tornado and going "ooh, bloody hell it's cold" or "Jesus! it's freezing" or "fuck me it's cold" or "I don't think I've ever been so cold" etc etc etc. The others I'm doing OK with, but then, these feel like the longest 6 days of my life.
Across the bridge of many ways / run with the fox...
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