In a Funny Way

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.

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.

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.

"and I will lay my head, lay my head low"

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.

The Ecstasy of Gold

2009 thus far has been brought to you by the letters R, M and the number 37.
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.

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

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...

Heads Roll Off (2008 Part 1)

I was going to write a detailed and poignant tale about my Christmas, from the moment I got out of the car in Winchester to be greeted by a pub full of weirdos and none of my friends. I was going to continue with how I went to a different pub after being the only person from my group of friends to do the Christmas Eve tradition 10 years running, and ended up going to The Black Boy where everyone is foppish, young, drunk and beautiful, and how I drank enough red wine to be sick over the edge of the bridge into the weir. Then I was going to humour you with stories of board games and presents and christmas cake, but none of this is very exciting. I'm just going to get this year over and done with. My festivities and calamities which came to a head on Christmas Eve were the culmination of this years driving forces; my hopeless inability to keep in contact with my friends, and my belief that getting drunk alone will somehow combat the pain, are best left in the past.



And whilst we're on the subject of the past, here's a list of my top 20 albums of 2008. Unlike my forthcoming list of my favourite songs of 2008, this list is for albums released this year. Otherwise it would be Little Drummer Boy by Mark Kozelek, easily the album I've listened to most this year.



20 Neil Diamond – Home Before Dark
19 Get Well Soon – Rest Your Weary Head, You Will Get Well Soon
18 Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours
17 The Tallest Man on Earth – Shallow Grave
16 The Magnetic Fields - Distortion
15 Glasvegas - Glasvegas
14 Constantines – Kensington Heights
13 Shearwater - Rook
12 Wild Beasts – Limbo, Panto
11 Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago
10 Kleerup - Kleerup
09 Parts and Labor - Receivers
08 Wilderness – (K)no(W)here
07 The Gaslight Anthem – The ’59 Sound
06 Fuck Buttons – Street Horrrsing
05 Titus Andronicus – The Airing of Grievances
04 Sun Kil Moon - April
03 Studio – Yearbook 2
02 Of Great and Mortal Men – 43 Songs for 43 Presidencies
01 Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight



All predictable stuff. With the exception of maybe 3) which is a collection of remixes and shouldn't really count, 2) which nobody has bothered to listen to despite it's brilliance (although the fact that it doesn't appear to have an 'artist' listed anywhere so I've decided myself to call the project 'Of Great And Mortal Men' might be the problem) and 10) which I think has only been released in Sweden, all of these have appeared on other peoples lists. I could bang on about all of these for pages and pages but I'll pass. Highlights of the year though have been Parts and Labor following up last years #1 with another flawless, if diluted album, an unbelievable return to form for Wilderness, an album at number one which is nothing but pitch-perfect angsty excellence, and Glasvegas, who I haven't just included to aggrivate, it turned out to be a pretty good album after all.



If you care (why do you care), you can see how these translate to the top 100 songs of the year, revealed in the new year.

Good News For People Who Love Bad News

Hello

No, not the Blur reunion. No, not Mark Ronson's list of his 99 favourite musical recording acts of all time. No, not the fact that I think my mouth is going to internally collapse like a bouncy castle at the end of a kids birthday party. No, the fact that for the first time since, what, late August? I'm going to ressurect this silly useless thing, because someone called Anonymous, who can't even spell the word anonymous, said to. That's it. Exciting.

So, coming soon: a review of the year, my top 100 songs of 2008 based on order of enjoyment, a possible aesthetical re-theme so this page looks less like pages from teletext. I might even put some more photographs up. But not today. No, not today.

bullets might give you black eyes

Wrapped Up in Books

I've had it with this whole dreaming thing. Last night I dreamed I fell in love with a girl with brown hair, an attic bedroom and a Penguin Classics bedspread. Then I woke up and was annoyed that I was awake. I'm aware that talking about your dreams is about as boring as it gets so I'll pass up this opportunity, but this isn't the first one of these. The more interpretations of perfection my dreams are going to screen for me on a nightly basis, the most annoyed I get when I wake up, and the less likely I'm going to compromise. The thing about all of these dreams are that they're too close to reality. Like, in most of these dreams at some point I have the exact discussion I'd probably have in my own kitchen with my housemate.

"No seriously, she had a Penguin Classics bedspread"
"That's ridiculous, that's the sort of thing that's too perfect"
"I know, that's what I said, I mean, that's the sort of thing you dream of when you're dreaming up perfect situations"

So basically, my life has got so consumingly dull that I've started to dream about dreams about dreams. It's not particularly fun either, it's not like a David Lynch movie when you can drink a cup of coffee and eat some shortbread and the most part dissected by Twin Peaks nerds on websites who wrote about Mulholland Drive for their dissertation. Not me, I wrote about Lost Highway, except it wasn't for a dissertation, it was an essay on Non-verbal communication and I got a good mark for it. But my point is, dreams within dreams within dreams don't make good dreams, and definitely don't make good dream anecdotes.

The two saddest things you can see, I think, on a normal walk somewhere are mountains of post on the doormats of closed shops and lost cat signs. One represents lost friends, the other represents lost dreams. There's a couple of shops around here that have changed owners several times over the year. One's a takeaway, which has had different names, different people behind the counter. One time, I forget the name, the owner had pulled out all the stops, had exciting posters and menus, and cooked all the food himself, and talked to you about the events of the day, almost miniature stand-up routines like local radio presenters do when they're going through the daily rags on their morning shows. He was great, but of course I only ever went there once, and now it's gone. Probably, as soon as the new takeaway opens, I'll go to that one once, and never again. I guess once-and-never-again people like me must make life hell for these people, it probably makes them think it's going to be that all the time, and then it's not, and these people never come back, so maybe there's something desperately wrong with their food. It's not my fault I moved house, or that the takeaway was in completely the wrong place, or that during that period of 2005, I wasn't really into the whole buying takeaways things because my disposable income only covered alcohol. But it still gives me twinges of sadness in my heart to see these vacant shops with piles and piles of post building up on the doorstep, post that was probably the first thing they picked up in the morning, or when they were doing their day-to-day routine, the postman would pop his head around the door and they'd have a brief chat. The saddest part is that not only is their business gone forever, but they can't even bring themselves to visit the shop and collect their mail. It's almost like people who can't face their lovers or relatives graves in the cemetery because it's too goddamn much.

Lost cat signs just make me very unhappy. I get significantly more emotionally affected by lost cat signs in plastic wallets stapled to telegraph poles than I do by hearing about the mass slaughter of human beings in any given country or town. This is because cats don't deserve to be lost. All humans in my opinion, have the potential to destroy and manipulate and create untold evil towards another, and the only thing that stops people is the lack of opportunity, and I just can't get excited about them anymore.

What is exciting though, is ten pin bowling on the Nintento Wii. Our house has managed to borrow one of these consoles whilst one of my housemates ladyfriends is kayaking in Iceland or hunting eskimo in Alaska or whatever to fuck people researching Bruce Parry's Tribe do when they're out of the country, so we've ended up with the Wii rather than her take it to a cattery or whatever. I'd safely assumed that like the Playstation 3 or the Xbox 360, I was going to take a back seat from this era of videogaming like I did with the last one. I'd only just got excited again by the idea of driving fire engines off bridges on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas again but now there's this ridiculous motion-sensitive ten pin bowling thing. It's almost impossibly easy, but takes most of the fun out of ten pin bowling, Namely:

1. Ten pin bowling costs too much, so you have to pretend to be a lot, lot more excited about the game than you would be if it was free
2. In a ten-bowls game, it usually takes until bowl 6 for you to settle on which ball is the 'right number' for you, even though there's not really much difference between them
3. Horrible shoes which have to be sprayed with industrial-strength odour stuff before they're given back. I once asked to have my own shoes sprayed with this.
4. In the olden days when only my mums hairdresser friend Sue had Sky, bowling alleys were the only place to watch MTV
5. You don't get the option to fuck about with the little portable metal 'slope' for people too useless to even hold a bowling ball, playing at home.

Why the Wii is better:
1. You can eat doritos from a saucepan whilst you play
2. The pain in neatly transferred from your finger socket joints to your wrist, which is much less panful when you have to pick things up the next day
3. I don't get fucking spares all the time. The last proper game of bowling I played, I got 9 on the first bowl, and then 1 on the other, for the entire game. I actually texted 8-2-ASK to see if I was the first and maybe only person to ever get this score. No reply.
4. You can talk on the house phone to your parents about how you had a dream about a girl with a Penguin Classics bedspread whilst simultaneously scoring two successive strikes, and this somehow makes you look better than if you weren't on the phone, even though you only really need one hand.
5. I've managed to make a cartoon Wii character thingy who looks just like me, or me if I'd been drawn by Brian Lee O' Malley. Basically me, if I was good looking, played sports, and was a slacker in Toronto.
6. You can walk three steps into your bedroom and listen to Dance Away by Roxy Music any time you like.
7. You don't have to share your own toilet with patrons of Lazer Quest.

Can you even get Penguin Classics bedspreads?

Anyway, this is a photograph I took of a petrol station in Cardiff on a Friday night. It's very Edward Hopper.

Burn

Hello
I should have done something exciting and edgy today. Like going to see "teen film of the decade" (uncredited source; this is what the advert said, but I suspiciously can't find the quote online anywhere) Wild Child, starring whatshername from Aquamarine, that walking haircut from Stormbreaker, and for some reason, Nick Frost. Starring Roberts as some sort of EVIL Malibu teenage socialite who gets banished to boarding school in mega-strict England (because obviously English people don't know how to have fun) only she causes havoc everywhere she goes, and starts all the parties, but ultimately we get a happy compromise of stiff upper lipped English snobs having a gay old time, and crazy US bitch gets a dose of normality, and learns how to do sums or something. I should have gone to see this, I really should. Instead, I did some historically dull activities, which I would say I won't bore you with, but then I don't know who you are, or why you're reading, so maybe this is fascinating for you.

I bought a new CD writer from PC World because I'm sick to the back teeth AND sick to death of burning cds in the weedy little tray that pokes in and out of my laptop like the worlds limpest Swiss Army knife. I'm not expert on these things, but this external CD writer is massive. It's like, bigger than a bible. It's almost the same size as a hardback cope of Ken Follett's A World Without End, and just about as heavy, too. Which makes me wonder what the little burner inside my laptop and located just underneath the Caps Lock and ASDFG keys thing it's doing. No wonder it broke. Although apparently not, as the album I send my dad in the post along with a copy of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo made managed to work OK. To be on the safe side, I walked up to PC World to buy a new one. I've never been in PC World before, but boy are they nothing like the adverts. Admittedly, I went to PC World in Cardiff, and like most things in South Wales, you're guaranteed to get more pathetic version of what might be brilliant elsewhere, but even taking this rule of thumb into account, PC World was a shocker. For the wealth of technology available in, store, I would have though they could have at the very least, created holographic staff with extensive artificial intelligence who actually knew where anything was, and without acne that looked like it was going to erupt any minute. Secondly, it's wonderful that they divided the store into "PC" and "Laptop" halves, but what I was looking for (an external drive for a laptop) wasn't on either, when it should surely have been with Laptop accessories, but it wasn't, it was with a bunch of other CD drives, all of which were labelled in such a high technical register the only words I understood were "CD and DVD", the rest might as well have been written in Klingon. I had to ask for help off one member of staff, who served a pleasant dose of bullshit that the drive I had in my hands was exactly what I was looking for, and then when I got to the "tech desk" where the lady informed me this drive I had was an internal drive for a PC, not a laptop, and that the one I really wanted was fifteen pounds more expensive (of course!). The tech desk was quite interesting, because there was a little room where people with big thick glasses were dismantling laptops. I couldn't help but think it was somewhere like this that Gary Glitter got rumbled. He'd have paid £114 to have his laptop fixed on site too.

I took time to have a look around Newport Road, since it's not every day you get to walk around in the pissing rain amongst an avenue of vile oblong concrete and stainless steel megastructures all ten times the size of the QE2 and infinitely less exotic or relaxing. They're all there: Comet, PC World, Pets at Home, Maplins, some stupid place whose logo was a big R in a circle, a big fuck off blue structure called WHAT! that used to have a high street version, at least three carpet showrooms, and all your other favourites. There's also a drive-thru KFC, a drive-thru McDonald's and a drive-thru Burger King. These as far as I can remember, are the only drive-thru's I've ever really seen close up. They're a massive disappointment, although I get the feeling that the Newport Road industrial estate, which is basically built either side of one long road which stretches beyond the horizon into a scribble of overpasses and junctions about two miles out of town, is modelled slightly on the entrance road to American towns, they've not quite nailed the true horror of these commercial landing strips quite enough. The McDonald's was having a refit when I went past, although they'd kept the drive-thru open, which I thought was rather sad, but not as sad as the thought that the only reason they did that was because they know people are too lazy to try and navigate six lanes of traffic to go to the Burger King on the other side of the road. There was also a Do It All, which became Focus in fuck-knows-when. There was a plaque just outside the entrance commemorating the store opening in 1982. The store was shut, the only sign of life or any kind of wood or plastic was a skateboard ramp that had been built in the car park. I thought for a moment about all the hopes and dreams that took place on that day in 1982, and how this massive structure was now standing stagnant like the Titanic, sunk in a wild sea of grey retail gloom on the outskirts of Cardiff. I carried on. By this time the rain couldn't be described as anything less than ridiculous. I was amused though, by the number of mobile burger vans that had set up in the car parks of the stores. WHAT!, Allied Carpets, The stupid shop with the big R in a circle; even the Quik Save car park had a burger van and Quik Save closed in early 2006. Running one of these burger and hot dog vans must be the worst job in the world. I guess it's like running a worn-out old dog of a pub in a backwater suburb, where you deal exclusively with regulars and nothing but regulars. Here it's builders and nothing but builders. What a job.

When I returned home, I did some rearranging, which including moving all of my DVDs out my bedroom and into the lounge. I cunningly disguised this as a "share and share alike" motif, where my housemates are now entitled to borrow any of my DVDs at will, but really it was an excuse to free up some space in my room. The space previously taken up by the DVD shelving is now taken up by three perfectly neat stacks of books. I still need to sort out space somehow for both these, and a rogue collection of CDs that I've amassed and have no sensible place for which I've then stacked on top of them. I'm praying I won't need to get to any of these books in the near future because I've stacked them like a cross between Jenga and Kerplunk and if they fall over, then there's nowhere for them to go but to fall all over me.. The CD burner works fine though. I made myself two mixes today, to listen to as I pottered around making and doing things. The idea of making a mix CD, putting it in my crappy CD player on the window sill, and playing it was an alien concept last week, but now it's back with me, like a familiar itch or an old friend I'd taken for granted. I wish I wish I had some other people to make mixes for. Requests please.

Up To My Neck in You

Today I'm commemorating it being exactly 365 days since I last fell out of love. The past year has been a mess of scattershot memories, utter tedium, hearts that hate, splendid isolation and fear and loathing in Mahwah, NJ. Pretty much all of it has been soundtracked by Mark Kozelek for want of anything more cheerful. Here are some highlights.

Mistress (Piano Version) (Red House Painters)
I need someone much more mysterious
June 2006, August 2007
Red House Painters I
And so it goes...

New Jersey (Red House Painters)
You're not as good as your mum but you're as good as dead
September
Red House Painters I
Moss Bross Staff Room

Have You Forgotten? (New Version) (Red House Painters)
When we were kids, we hated things our parents did
October
Vanilla Sky OST
I shouldn't have bothered.

Take Me Out (Red House Painters)
If only you could take me out, instead of back in to a relationship I don't understand
November
Red House Painters I
No Use For Old Friends, closing number.

Carry Me Ohio (Sun Kil Moon)
Sorry for never going by your door
November
Ghosts of the Great Highway
Early mornings, familiar roads.

Gentle Moon ( Sun Kil Moon)
But if love was like stone / then yours was mine through to my bones
December
Ghosts of the Great Highway
Juke box.

Glenn Tipton (Sun Kil Moon)
I buried my first victim when I was 19
December
Ghosts of the Great Highway
Stephanie

Up To My Neck In You (Mark Kozelek)
Up to my neck in misery for most of my life / I've been a fool...
January
What's Next to the Moon
Cineworld unlimited card, building sites and cranes

Bad Boy Boogie (Mark Kozelek)
On the day I was born, the rain came down
January
What's Next to the Moon
Manchester

Down Colorful Hill (Red House Painters)
Prayers prayers prayers for success
January
Down Colorful Hill
Manchester Zodiac

Lights of Magdala (Mark Kozelek and Hannah Marcus)
If heaven were a lady, don't you know you'd been the one
February
Don't Let the Bastards Get You Down: A Tribute to Kris Kristofferson
In a park by a lake, a camera

Shadows (Red House Painters)
You ain't saying nothing, that I don't already know

February
Ocean Beach
Everywhere everywhere everywhere everywhere

Cruiser (Mark Kozelek)
Slipping letters under my door / candy wrappers round my floor
February
Little Drummer Boy
Shopping for oranges

Follow You, Follow Me (Red House Painters)
Just one single tear in each passing year
March
Shanti Project
Genesis!

Tonight The Sky (Sun Kil Moon)
She fell into his sweet strong kiss / she made her perfect gardens in this?
March
April
Hello excited stranger, I'm yet to receive my copy of April in the mail.

Michigan / Fly Away (Red House Painters)
I don't need a purpose to plan within / I just need to feel your pulse again
Live Track, The Blind Pig, Ann Arbor 2001)
March
All of her dreams have gone soft and cloudy, all of her dreams have gone dry.

Lost Verses (Sun Kil Moon)
I came up from the ocean / evaporates sea salt water / a mist above the skyling / I haunt the streets of San Francisco
April
April
Dinnertime and the train home.

Katy Song (Red House Painters)
I know tomorrow you will be somewhere in London / Living with someone
June
Red House Painters I
As covered on youtube.

Void (Red House Painters)
And I know that I have picked the most perfect sunflower yet
July
Old Ramon
For windows.

Lost Coastlines

I'd as good as written off Okkervil River after last years damp squib, The Stage Names, and their live show I saw at Cardiff Barfly, where they honked out an hour and fifteen minutes of tuneless dirge, and tried to polish off a dreadful performance by doing a crowd singalong of Westfall, both made for dreadful 2007 for one of the bands on the cusp of being one of my all-time favourites. Likewise, Jens Lekman, whom I didn't get to see live, but managed to squeeze out an atypically and depressingly awful album last year which went pretty much against every reason I liked the guy in the first place. But these things can't be helped. I'm long past the naivety of expecting my favourite bands to consistently deliver. But although I'll probably never forgive Okkervil River for being total shit last December, I'm reconsidering The Stage Names. Well actually, I'm not, it's still not very good, but next month, they're releasing The Stand-Ins, which is either an accompanying album, or an appendix to the former album. Either way it explores similar themes and ideas that were brought up in The Stage Names, and the artwork even sits underneath the previous albums to make a complete picture. It's like Guns and Roses waiting a year inbetween the two Use Your Illusions instead of releasing them on the same day. Except The Stand Ins is more of a mini album, with three pointless instrumentals making up the full XI. And you know what, every single one of those eight tracks shits on the best bits of The Stage Names, massively. In Lost Coastlines, and the ridiculously titled Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed On The Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1978, they have twoof the best songs in their entire canon. In a way, I like the fact that what are clearly the best songs from this recording session all ended up on this album, rather than poorly diffused across the two volumes like a pungent odour. But despite this, they've been entirely overshadowed by Shearwater anyway, so I'm not why I'm really concerned with readdressing the situation.

I spent a few hours today in Pontypridd, for no real reason other than that I had to leave the house, and it didn't look like too shoddy a day. It did rain eventually, but it was such a not-as-bad-as-it-has-been day, that when I got home, I went onto the street and cleaned the outside of my window with windolene, and then opened the window and blasted blue collar indie rock into Rhymney Street. But Ponypridd was alright. I decided to go exploring more than I had done before. Previous visits with Anna involved looking at the down and very little else. The first time I went I only looked at the University of Glamorgan campus which was built on the side of a mountain and basically made me study twenty times for my A levels so I didn't have to go to university there. The person giving us a campus tour genuinely told us that he'd "only been to town (Pontypridd High Street) once, and (didn't) have any plans to go back there any time soon). He was a third year. The only times I'd been to Pontypridd in more recent years were on Sundays with Lisa when there were no buses out to Llantrisant, so we had to get the 132 at ten past seven in the morning, and then sit around at Pontypridd bus station for forty minutes either playing cards, or pop punk top trumps, or seeing who could skid further on the rain-soaked drain cover just inside the railway station. Then we'd get picked up by Abby and drink coffee in her garden, before being driven to work. It used to take nearly 3 1/2 hours to get to work. I don't miss that at all. Nor do I miss having a reason to go to Pontypridd, because it's not a particularly amazing place, and it hasn't really changed much since the very first time I went there. There's still a hill that I wouldn't ever dream of climbing because I know what's at the top (a boring university with an eerie Jim James thing going on where nobody ever leaves the campus) and a pokey little high street. Today was of little exception because the first shop I went into was a charity shop, and I had to pretend to look at books for an absolute age, because a drunk man who had no qualms with drinking Carling at just past midday in a charity shop, rifled through all the videos no less than three times. I didn'y dare ask him to move, but I had to wait because there were CDs I really wanted to buy. The rest of the town can fuck off, the only major difference was that the big stupid pointless joke shop wasn't there any more. It always amused me how such a big joke shop could ever thrive in a town where the only thing anyone does for fun is choke pigeons on the bandstand, and you can't package any of that in a Smiffy bag and hang it up next to the saucy nurse costumes. Alas, it's all gone now, it was replaced by some nondescript shit that had only filled half the building.

What I did like, though, was the side of Pontypridd I didn't even know existed, the park. The park was very pleasant, and walking around under the criss-cross shades of the avenues of trees and looking at the waterlogged crazy golf and the suspiciously clean looking swimming pool (which had done that thing a lot of open air swimming places do, which is to paint the bottom of the pool an obscene shade of turquoise which is so blinding it affects your retina to not even see dead twigs and Quaver packets when they're probably right there. The bandstand was closed to the public, because there was some sort of filming going on. I couldn't figure out what, and I did spend longer than I should have done milling around with my hands in my pockets waiting for something to happen. I watched a man who looked like Mackenzie Crook sweep some water off a path with a broom, but there were no cameras trained on him, so unless he's doing menial handywork because nobody went and saw Three and Out, I don't think the water sweeper was in the film. I wasn't really expectinh Russell Crowe or Viggo Mortenson to jump out and start pounding their chests on Pontypridd bandstand, not least when the surrounding area had been set up to look like a crappy little summer fete with coconut shys and hooplas. It was all very Sylvanian Families. I went home after that.

Post Script. I think from the comment below I didn't really express my point very well: The Stand-Ins is a GREAT album, and everything that I felt that the Stage Names lacked; imagination, a fantastic concept, memorable hooks and melodies, and a sense of the epic.

Game Shows Touch Our Lives

"Ladies and gentlemen, in the audience tonight, Academy Award winning actor, Ralph Feinnes"

Earlier on today I watched Quiz Show, the really rather excellent period piece with Ralph Feinnes and John Turturro. I'm surprised I haven't got round to watching it before, since it was almost to the last second, a perfect hybrid of All The Presidents Men and Network, two of my favourite films. The quiz show in the program though, was pretty shoddy. It was called 21, and was a familiar format, but not one I'd ever come across before, simply because I think quite a few American format quiz shows didn't really cross the Atlantic, and plus it was very very simplistic, with rolling "applause" signs, a hilarious parody of corporate advertising, and a really ordinary systematic set of questioning. It did, though, continue the general theme of last week which I spent in the staff room at work idly reminiscing about the quiz shows of my youth. People seemed surprised at my ridiculously retentive knowledge of some of these, possibly with the suggestion that somehow I wasted my youth. This I can't deny, but at the same time, I have memories all through the childhood and teens of doing the things most people remember; going to parties, shoplifting, sitting around in the park, going to friends houses to watch 15 certificate movies like Demolition Man, and so on. In fact, I remember doing all those things more times than I recall ever wanting to. I also spent a lot of time in large DIY stores like B+Q, Texas, and Do It All. An awful lot of time. So much time, that I don't intend to go to any of them ever again, and it's just as well I can't drive, because these big breezeblock, drafty cubes of DIY misery are far from anywhere I'm intending to go for the rest of my life, and because they're all in out-of-town Sim City industry hell-holes, I can probably use the excuse that I can't. I'll buy my paint from elsewhere. Probably an art shop. I hope I never have to paint anything, really.
But back to quiz shows. David has suggested that I could feasibly write to some people and ask if they need a rough guide / essential guide / pocket guide to quiz shows. I'm actually considering this, but since I can't remember the name of who he said, or whether he was being serious, I probably won't bother. But it's an idea, and if his friend can get a book about Dario Argento, whom nobody really cares about apart from a nanopercentage of horror movie film geeks, buck toothed weirdo women, and Quentin Tarantino. Anyway, I could talk in great length about any game show, right down to some contestants names and scores, but I don't have time, and anyway, I'm not getting paid for this, and I could get paid for that, so that can wait. Here though, is what you would probably find in the back page, the quick-read guide to British game shows.

All Clued Up - bizarre word-guessing game similar to Wheel of Fortune, presented by (I think) Michael Aspel, and it involved a giant keyboard
Bob's Your Uncle - I can't remember much about this, apart from that I think the prize involved winning shit for your wedding, and involved jumping in a swimming pool
Bullseye - Oft-parodied working man's social club darts-themed quiz.
Catchword - BBC2 Who-can-come-up-with-the-longest-word program to rival countdown, which was invariable won by anyone who could spell floccinaucinihilpilidication.
Celebrity Squares - Trashy British version of Hollywood Squares with people like Leslie Joseph and Roger De Courcey and Nookie Bear.
Chainletters - Fun word-puzzle game in which you had to change letters of words to make new ones: CAKE - RAKE - RARE - MARE - MARK etc
Crosswits - Classy semi-intellectual crossword-themed quiz game with Tom O Connor.
Fifteen to One - One of the best: Set design straight born from Foucault, William G Stewart as torture master, with offensive buzzer sounds and flippant rudeness.
Full Wing - Rubbish golf-themed Saturday night drivel with Jimmy Tarbuck
The Krypton Factor - Intelligence and ability-based quasi-intellectual challenge show with Gordon Burns suggesting that anyone who completed an army assault course is somehow like Superman
Lucky Numbers - Unwatchable Bingo-themed shit with Shane Ritchie sponsored by The Sun
Play Your Cards Right - Craptacular
Raise The Roof - Crap short-lived megaquiz in which contestants could win a house in Florida. Hosted by Bob Holness, these seemed to involve more video footage of the house than of anything resembling a quiz.
Take Your Pick. Classic 'open the box' show given cheesy tabloid makeover with Des O Connor.
Turnabout - Daytime quiz which involved answering word puzzles and making computer generated spheres change colour, a bit like a more elaborate naughts and crosses.
Through the Keyhole - Another oft-parodied celebrity show with David Frost and Lloyd Grossman trying to see who could look more out of place on such a show
University Challenge - Rendered fairly useless after the Young Ones parody, this intellectually alienating quiz has hit a new stride with Jeremy Paxman's new insolent approach.
You Bet! - Either with Forsythe or Matthew Kelly from what I remember. This was THE show for rewarding utterly useless talents, like memorising the cast of the Bill by their ears, or the country of origin of stamps from what they taste like.

There are of course, hundreds of others, but in researching, the above, I've discovered this website:http://www.ukgameshows.com, which pretty much renders my continuation useless, and the utterly ridiculous person who runs this website would evidently make a better candidate to write the aforementioned book than me. Unless there's a market for someone who can drop in anecdotes about suffering severe migraines eating a cheeseburger and watching The Main Event, a bizarre and rubbish living-room based family show hosted by Chris Tarrant. Maybe I'll just skip straight to doing in-depth essays trying to explain the concepts of most 21st Century quiz shows and ignore the classics. With the exception of The Weakest Link, Deal or No Deal, and inexplicably, Eggheads, most 21st Century shows have bombed. People just don't like seeing other people win money these days, and I guess advertisers can't drum up the cash because nobody at home is watching. It's sad, because two of the best game shows I've ever seen were short lived ones from the last five years or so: Traitor, and Didn't They Do Well? Traitor was a weird cross between an amateur dramatics improv show, an episode of Big Brother where the contestants all went insane and were convinced there's a total bullshitter in the midst, and an alcoholics anonymous meeting where someone suddenly notices they can smell gin. It was televised slanging matches, all neatly compered by Tony "Daily Sport" Livesly. It was compelling and lasted about a week. Didn't They Do Well? as the title suggests, was hosted by Bruce Forsythe, and was a great concept, because the only concept was that it didn't have one, and was a Frankenstein's monster of a quiz where instead of asking questions, Bruce played clips on a big screen from other game shows, ranging from easy shit like Family Fortunes or some kids stuff, through to the big money questions from University Challenge and Mastermind. It was a great concept, and it was what brought Bruce back to the BBC, his natural environment away from the News of the World scratchcards, illuminated dolly girls and rabid pisshead audience members acting like they were in Jumpin' Jacks rather than a respectable TV studio.

The only new-new show I've seen recently since I don't watch much TV was called Battle of the Brains. Hosted by some clown I'd never even noticed and whom talked too much, I couldn't gather much from the concept apart from that it was basically Eggheads, only without the eggheads themselves. Which meant neutrals can't be bothered to root for either team, whereas you always hope the eggheads lose, or that the show has been cancelled because one of them died. BBC2 have also had the scheduling idiocy to put it on directly before Eggheads as well, meaning you're basically watching the same program twice in a row. Here's hoping the mentalists in Holland or Scandinavia who devise all these concepts have their thinking hats on, and are happy to let us steal their ideas.

Back and Forth

There's a lorry outside my house that's picking up a skip or loading the recycling bags or something similar, and it's taking a long time doing what it's supposed to be doing. The noise that it makes when it either picks up or drops whatever it is that it's either picking up or dropping, is exactly the same noise as our letterbox makes when a parcel, letter or pizza delivery pamphlet makes when they drop onto the front door mat. Because I've got my bedroom window open in a failed attempt to welcome the summer into my bedroom and to usher out the wine and fag smoke from last nights 'Dorm Party' (me and Chris Rock's 'Never Scared' up all night) into the street, then the distance the sound traveling is identical to the distance from the front door, through my bedroom door. Normally I don't care, because I don't receive much post, except parcels of review copies of crap like the new Offspring album or the just-above-average She and Him album, sent to me by Playlouder, and occasionally I get to open the Liberal Democrat propaganda addressed to 'Occupier' or if I'm feeling particularly majesterial, to whom it may concern.
But at the moment I'm actually waiting for a new hard drive to come through the door. Since I only know what size the drive is in terms of how many crappy mp3 files and Microsoft notepad files I can't motivate myself to delete I can shove on there, and not how physically large it is. This is the first thing I've bought off the internet that hasn't been a standard size. A CD, like The Dismemberment Plan one I'm expecting to arrive any day now, is always CD sized, a DVD is DVD sized, a Sun Kil Moon t shirt, although far too big, is still just about the size of a t shit. The problem with buying things like hard drives or similar off Amazon is that although probably somewhere down in the small print, probably in a box of text you have to click and drag for the white text to show up, they give you the weights and measures. Like most people, I figure that because I've already committed myself to cretinous laziness by not getting on the bus and going to PC world, I might as well continue the trend and not look at anything except the price. This hard drive could be the size of half a house brick, which I'm expecting, or it could be the size of a kettle, or a toaster, or a badge maker. I have no idea, they didn't print a picture on the search page of a human hand holding the drive, so I'm lost. At least in the Argos catalogue, if you're buying a set of swings or a paddling pool, you get a picture of the first child of summer pranking about on, in, or under it. If you're buying a board game, you often get some close ups of a ritalin-ruined toddler with a gormless expression that tells you JUST how fun the board game is. I miss those pictures. They should put them on packets of twiglets, to remind you how much fun twiglets are. I guess the internet doesn't have the resources to have pictures of people standing in front of, or holding every object in the world, so more fool me if the drive won't fit through the letterbox and is so heavy I can't even put it on my load-bearing desk.
I went to the cinema yesterday and saw something funny. No, not The X Files: I Want to Believe, that shit wasn't funny at all. I did see a group of teenagers running their mouths off on the escalator telling anyone who cared to listen that "Cineworld ain't got no respect" and "You don't wanna come to this cinema, it's shit" and "fuck this place, don't go to Cineworld, they don't let you have fun", which alerted my curiosity. One of the problems with always listening to headphones when I'm out and about, is that when base-level incidents of mild amusement involving conflict with other people arise, it's really hard to get involved with eavesdropping without looking obvious. As the groups of teenagers were descending the moving staircase and being apprehended by a heavy duty guard by the revolving doors, I had a quick scan up the line of people waiting at the box office. Everyone, without exception, was trying to subtly eavesdrop on the incident in the corner of the room. Everyone. Not even, the inarticulate degenerate couple who go the cinema because they have nothing to say to each other, and then spend twenty minutes deciding what to see (10 minutes gawping at the pretty pictures outside, ten minutes trying to remember what pretty picture corresponded to what title, inside). Not even the quartet of acne-crusted teens in Lost t shirts going to see Batman for the fifth time. Especially not them, I think they were excited to be seeing a real live scuffle that didn't either involve them, or someone who can fire laser beams from their elbows or turn themselves invisible. The scuffle was minimal, but I was far away enough to get away with taking my headphones off, pretending that it was because I was nearing the box office, rather than just wanted to hear a bunch of scally teens getting mouthy in a cinema foyer. I think the general gist of the scenario was that the group were either shouting, or talking, or generally being awful in one of the screens, and had been forcibly removed by a member of security. I think their defence was that they were having fun. Since when was "it's fun" ever been a defence against anything? . I'm sure Harold Shipman found giving old ladies lethal injections fun as well. The only excuse poorer than "it's fun" is "I was bored". I didn't get to hear the extent of their cries because they were ushered out of the cinema before any more of their suggestions to other people not to come in could fall on any more deaf ears. The queue of eavesdroppers averted their attention back to thumbing through their Unlimited newsletter or drooling "so what are we seeing again" to each other, simultaneously, because they're got a psychic connection because they're so in love. I think as soon as they realised the scuffle wasn't going to be resolved with gouging and bloodshed, they had to resign themselves that the film was going to have to be their primary anecdote tonight,

On the subject of eavesdropping though, it did remind me of an incident I saw on Saturday Evening. I was at The Big Weekend, which is an annual horror show where everything shit about life in South Wales all conglomerated into a seething, sweating mass, drinks and lot and makes life hell for everyone else. It's a breeding ground for seediness and dirtiness and every unpleasantry under the sun. Three-legged rabid spongefuckers with backwards fingers and green teeth who live underneath rocks of sea slime in the caves of the Welsh Valleys. even they make their only trip to civilised society for the Big Weekend. I took a detour through the fairground which they crowbar into the roads surrounding the museum like vomit through a sluice gate, because fairground rides make good photographs, especially when it's dark, and patrons are drunk and queasy. The camera battery ran out almost instantly, leaving me stranded in the fairground with no reason to be there. I did see a fight though, and the strategy for listening in on this required more acting skills than in the cinema. If anyone of the people involved in this drunken near-brawl saw my obvious attempt to slow down and take off my headphones so I can really, truly enjoy the sight of someone with a fake diamond earring getting a good lamping on a Saturday Night. My solution was simple. I decided quickly and for no reason, that I really wanted to take a photograph of exactly what was next to where this scuffle was taking place. Obviously knowing my camera was out of battery ,I took it out of my bag and tried to take a photo, giving me a reason to stop, and I could then see what was going on out of the corner of my eye. Then, because the camera wouldn't turn on, I had to take the headphones off to listen to it, and look intently at why it wasn't working. I found myself doing this impulsively. Why do people take their headphones off to do things that don't require silence to do. It's like when my dad used to turn the car stereo down because he thought he could smell gas. It worked, I had a good listen, saw that it wasn't going to end in bloodshed, it was just some petty shit, obviously about a girl, and carried on home before I got killed.