All the signs of a girl alone

I will write about Jesus and other things too very soon, I've just been busy of late.

The happiest woman among all women

"Wittgenstein, he.... took the other bus, didn't he? Yes, he surely must have. It's a woman's way of looking at things-"The world is all that is the case." Patient, accepting of things. A man would never write that. A man would write 'The world is all that I perceive it to be.'"

-Mrs Lintott in the History Boys.

Despite the iffy political correctness of comparing gay men to women, I like this a lot, because it is of course exactly right, and made me think of that ghastly macho fuck, Nietzsche. Though of course it's more Berkeleyesque than anything to insist your perception is the truth, and he wasn't quite so masculine... Nevertheless, marvellous.

------------

On a similar vein, here's my favourite quatrain ever:

"To act coarsely enough
to pass for one of the boys,
At least appearing to love
hard liquor, horseplay and noise."

It's from 'Atlantis' by Auden.

--------

And to continue this theme a bit further...

Tobi Vail once said that Bikini Kill had failed because women in music were either not taken seriously or taken too seriously, or words to that effect. I always assumed she meant it about people like Tori Amos, who most people dislike either because they find her ridiculous or because they find her depressing. But I think it's even more relevant now.

A few years ago I considered mentioning this quote in a blog because it was at the time when Amy Winehouse and Duffy and their contempories were really the only women in the charts, and it was just repulsive. It was as if women could only be popstars if they had this after-dinner jazz bar style of singing. But now it's even worse, isn't it, with Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, and all this sassy, obtusely sexy shit. Lady Sovereign, she was what the modern female pop star should be like-funny and serious, aggressively talented and easy going. There's nothing wrong with music that's connected to sex and fun, but if you took the sex and, more importantly, the jokey wink-wink-isn't-this-really-a-bit-shit side of things out of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, there would be nothing left at all. Even Susan Boyle was all about sex appeal as far as the press were concerned, but in that case it was her lack of it.

It just seems an inevitable feature of modern pop music that women are defined by either their alledgedly self-imposed gravitas, or their fun, one-of-the-lads deficiency of it, instantly dumped into one of these two joyless trenches, with the no-mans land between belonging exclusively to the.... men.

Where is the little sparrow of our time?

The same is true in poetry. Plath was the Tori Amos of the poetry world; when a male writer has eccentricities (eg Larkin), it is part of the fun, when a woman does (as Plath absolutely did), it is the first thing that's mentioned when she's brought up, an irremovable part of her identity. Even Stevie Smith, who in my opinion is often hilarious (certainly more so than Betjeman) and struck the balance just right between comedy and sincerity, is most famous for 'Not Waving but Drowning', which is so miserable a lot of people think Plath actually wrote it. And Carol-Ann Duffy, who I like a lot, is seen as a miserable lesbian cliché even by some quite serious poetry students I know.

--------------


Anyway, back to Vail. Bikini Kill knew how to play music. What always attracted me to punk was its liberty, its piss-taking, and its feminine side. This is why I always liked the new york dolls and I never liked black flag. Punk is a music that is inherently hilarious. To try to make serious punk music is like trying to make serious happy hardcore. That's never been its purpose for me. It's just so, so stupid and ridiculous. And Bikini Kill knew this, and Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail have continued to know it after Bikini Kill. 'I wanna puke on yr stereo' by the frumpies has always been one of my favourite songs cos it's about as inane as anything can get, and anyone who takes le tigre seriously just isn't getting it.


Now, here's the way to do it.

Jonathan Meades describes the Guggenheim Bilbao as "the visual equivalent of easy listening for people who hate easy listening. Talking Heads in titanium."

Yikes!

---------------------

A proper genuine blog is coming soon I promise.

In hodden grey or scarlet goon,

There is only one brick building in all of Aberdeen, and it is a crumbled and useless shell, stared down into submission and ruin by its innumerable hard-nosed, stiff-lipped granite neighbours.


Jonathan Meades says something similar to this in this documentary and it's SO worth watching.

"Kanye's basically that knob who you only begrudgingly invite to the night-do part of your wedding. and even then he pisses against the bar."

-Grace Dent.

good youtube comment:

"This is like one of those times where your friends are like "YA! WE SHOULD TOTALLY DO THE TALENT SHOW!" but you don't actually want to do it but then you do it anyways and suck. =("

Mr Bizzle goes to Wetherby

The sun shines through the window of the office of the planners of Leeds festival.

"Gotta say guys, really looking forward to Bloc Party. I'm pretty confident that their set this year is gonna be totally seminal."

"But we need a hip-hop artist."

"Do we really?"

"I said 'need', not 'want'. Gallagher, praise be with him, really fucked us over with that Glastonbury Jay-Z stuff."

"He's right. Despite releasing that really great album 15 years ago, he really made the media acknowledge that mainstream rock festivals don't exhibit black culture with the same zeal with which we approach the rakes."

"Hey guys, wasn't the blur reunion great?"

"Look, let's just focus on this for a while."

"We can't have another guardian feature piece on how indie festivals are racist. It really messes up our image. I don't even know how they can call us racist. I mean, black people are great dancers. And I love that noisettes song."

"Ok, let's get lethal bizzle on again."

"But we've already got Reggie Love compering. That isn't enough?"

"But lethal bizzle hasn't released a new album this year, his set would be identical to last year's. And the year before that."

"I'm sick of your maverick insistence on novelty. Look down the bill, nearly all the main acts haven't released anything new for years. And if they did, it'd be similar to their first albums anyway."

"So we're agreed, lethal bizzle again. He's sort of rave-y, i think, at least in that he wears sunglasses onstage. The kids like it. It's not pure black stuff."

"The smart-price Kanye."

"Having bizzle on is our get out of the independent editorials free card. We'll put him fairly high up on-but not at the top of-the dance tent bill, so he's given prominence which his recent releases don't merit, and he'll be a good warm-up for royskopp or whoever's headlining the dance tent this year."

"Royskopp's set is gonna be mental, man."

"But, here's the thing. We're trying to appear not racist, right, and that's great. I'm fully for that. But, by having lethal bizzle on, a rapper who hasn't released an album for two years or a good album for four, aren't we basically admitting to only having a superficial grasp of black culture and music? Aren't we basically saying that the UK hip-hop scene is irrelevant to us, and that whatever happens within it, we're always just gonna select the same solitary rapper for our main stages, regardless of anything else, year after year? It's tokenism of the worst form-we're patronising our audience, and choosing a shit token at that. We're completely ignorant of rap music other than jay-z since last summer and dizzee's calvin harris song, and we're openly stating that in our choice of Lethal Bizzle. If we wanna not be racist-again, fully for that-shouldn't we see what's new and big in the rap scene and get a handful of them slots throughout the weekend?"

"...we could get Tinchy Stryder as well?"

writing devo's 'are we not men' as graffiti and waiting to see if someone fills in the other half is like a modern-day ichthys.

"sux kurt died anyway he made rock history fuckin ledg!!!!!!!!"

It's the last five seconds here that makes it genius.

my 8tracks playlists can now be embedded so here y'are if you missed them first time round:

"Is anyone from anywhere, has anyone ever noticed anything?"

-Simon Munnery opening joke.

"What if you ruled the world Michael. There will be no war, no hate, no rasism, no fighting and no suffering. There will only be LOVE LOVE LOVE!! You will always be in my heart Michael, forever and ever. I Love You!! R.I.P. The KING of Pop and God bless your soul."

Imagine seriously holding this opinion.

Best intro ever.



-----------------------

good youtube comment:

"Might have been something interesting in 1991, but this is just poor as fuck trash."

good youtube comment:

"Whoever you are you are the fucker.
Love,

Paul "

I knew you could

------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was gonna write on my next blog, which is this current blog (because at the time I had the thought I was in what is now the past), about a recent campaign by funny people to vandalise duncan norvelle's wikipedia page with fictitious catch phrases, after richard herring revealed that the page had a catch phrase section which simply contained one sentence, "chase me." There were dozens which have all now been removed by prudish pedants, but there were some great ones, like "The gods come screaming from the ether", but my favourite was easily "Is this the papal legacy you really want?"

-----------------------

Also recently amongst good people on twitter a daily mail poll was being circulated that asked, "Should gypsies be allowed to skip NHS queues?". So many people went and voted 'yes' (88%, the last time I checked) that the daily mail took it down.

---------------------
I don't know how or why, but I somehow find this song exceptionally good, when there is really nothing technically different about this to any other dubstep song. WHAT A MYSTERY MUSIC CAN BE HUH

-------------------

If I had the know-how, I'd make a st sanders style video with old beatles footage. It's amazing no one's done it yet-with all the girls screaming and crying in the audience, it'd work so well to switch the music for complete noise.


---------------
This song starts off so wrong but he swings it round in true majesty. That bit around 20 seconds where he's out of tune and gets a lyric wrong, then looks at the floor in shame, then flicks his head up and within seconds he's back on his feet. I think it sums up what I love about david byrne quite well. He's imperfect, but he'll work out a way to get around it and he'll make something amazing from nothing special.

"The better the singer is, the harder it is to believe what they are saying."

"Who's still working on his masterpiece?"




--------------------

"But imagine, among the mud and the mastodons
God sighing and yearning with tremendous creative yearning, in that dark green mess
oh, for some other beauty, some other beauty
that blossomed at last, red geranium, and mignonette. "

-----------------

Who is Virgilio Anderson?


---------------


xoxox

ain't nuttin but frontin

Yet another mix, probably my last for a long time. This one's on a theme of Mercutio, who as a character I think does a lot of what music should do to you; sweep away negative thoughts and make you feel ashamed to be miserable.


--------------------
gets good about half way through


--------------------

getting back into the fall recently, stumbled upon some classic lyrics, such as what may be my all time favourite lyric/piece of writing ever:

"The observer magazine just about sums him up; eg. self-satisfied, smug."

Amazin'.

Another brilliant lyric is in 'Second Dark Age', which contains loads of great lyrics ("cause groups can change the worrrrrrrrrld!"), but the best is when mark just screams 'A MEDIOCRE ANTI-JEW' at the start of a verse. I think it's particularly relevant (hate that phrase...) at the moment, what with all these "bnps" running about, messing up the precinct. people are making a massive fuss about the bnp and what everyone is forgetting is that nick griffin is just such an idiot, and a wholly mediocre person who can barely express his own views (which he himself has invented from fantasy) properly. Just let him pass, with all the others.

Interview with nick griffin about a month ago on the daily politics started with, "So Nick, to clear up, do you deny the holocaust?" Two weeks later...

There was a feminist's Austin Maxi parked outside, with anti-nuclear, anti-nicotine stickers on the side

Anyway, two weeks before...

----------------

Made another playlist, this one's on a theme of paradise. I think this one is considerably better than my first one, probably cos the subject matter is more concise. There's a lot of songs about water and beaches on it, which is odd as my idea of paradise really isn't a beach. It also contains Enya, who I always nominate as my 'guilty pleasure' band when those conversations come up, despite the fact that I'm not really that guilty because Enya are well good.

Anyway enjoy it, I'm trying to make a lot of summer playlists but not just called 'summer' cos I think 'summer music' playlists are laaaaaaaaame and belong in the sunday times culture section and nowhere else. So I'm trying to focus on certain aspects of summer and why it's good; eg places feeling like paradise, everyone being more attractive/liberal about who they fancy, and I think my next one will be about drinks.


---------------------

To add to what I said about half man half biscuit last time...."ok, lets pedestrianise the high street...."

Objects are simple.

"I can't explain this feeling,
Don't you know that salvation is freedom?"

-Al Green. Nice, very nice.

Everything was good the other night, walking home along the beach, listening to al green. The guitars in al green records, which almost certainly were done by several different session musicians, are the true wonder of it all. They sound so fluid and vacuous and, like everything in al green records, walk the thin rope over beauty and tragedy; whenever it gets too sad, the full beauty of it hits you, and when that gets too much, you realise just how heartbreaking it all is. Like a proper relationship should do.

---------------

I love it when there's a break in a song and someone says or does something really inane in the split-second of rest before the song kicks back into the life.

I went to see Half Man Half Biscuit the other week.


These two facts crashed into each other when, during a few seconds of silence in the middle of a HMHB song before a noisey solo, nigel blackwell said the best meaningless phrase ever:

"Alright, let's jet wash the wheelie bin...."

-----

"ITV and the media have used Susan Boyle, Now she is distressed. Perhaps the time has come for the Queen to use what power she has to command that Susan sings. such a move would be popular, not least among disabled people,their families and carers.
Angus Winfield, Brdgwater, Somerset, UK"

------------------


"The wind stuck,
fixed me up."

--------

I remember once reading an article about anthony kiedis which described him as 'banana voiced'. That's what I love to see in writing; a use of words that doesn't really make any sense but also is so, so clear and to the point.


--------------------
My friend Hannah has a blog now and it's probably going to be good, I imagine; I don't know very much about this business.

-------------------
I've made a playlist on 8tracks about fancying people, check it out if you will. It was sort of rushed and just a first effort to see how the site works (i think i'm gonna get quite into it) so it's not very good. There was loads of stuff i wanted to put on but couldn't eg. the reggae version of the four seasons' 'my eyes adored you' which bizarrely they DIDN'T have.

Also only listen to the first minute of 'you know my name', after which point it becomes incredibly terrible. One good minute, though.

Anyway, listen if you will, as always....

xox

Sunshine and sugar, a taste of believing, I knew you could.

Some beautiful and special person has uploaded a performance of the knee plays by David Byrne onto youtube in its entirety. It's the only completely outstanding thing he did in the late 80s, so watch it, and watch it.

Good youtube comment:

"It does have to be agreed though - Patrick Kielty is unbelievablely woeful. Not just at telly but probably at life n'all. "

---------------------------------

Good youtube comment:

"Even bands like what you say are shit,Tell me one good bloody band? "

Great little online comment on stewart lee's comedy vehicle:

"I thought the first episode was better than the second but also that the second was far superior to the first. Hopefully the third episode will fit in between the second and fourth episode.
This makes Horne and Corden look like the two guys from Gavin and Stacey doing a weekly sketch show."


------------

And another:

"I think that Corden and Horne is a much better example of what comedy should be and Chris Moyles is much more of a "people's" comedian than Stewart Lee will ever be.
I also hope that Stewart Lee refrains from poking fun at Fern Cotton, Cheryl Cole, the interchangeable presenters of T4, Kate Moss, Agyness Deyn, Madonna, or Michael McIntyre."

--------------

Worth noting that both of these and many more could have been written by stew himself. the article itself certainly was.

It's an unusual feeling, all this stewart lee getting well known stuff, with facebook telling me 8 of my friends are now fans and so on. I've never really had the experience of something i love with a small fanbase making the shift into the mainstream. It's really nice, I think.


--------------


it's always so sad when you see a dead pheasant on the motorway, much more sad than when you see a dead pheasant on a country road. it's a death that should never have occurred.

------------

saw a caravan the other day called 'the senator'

lyrics misheard by me which are better than actual lyrics part drei.

Actual lyrics: "I stand in liquid light- like everyone"
As misheard by me: "I stand in liquid ice-like everyone."

It's from this, which is good:

skipping my downfall, planning my ascension

tnjx is back and so so lovely



i love this song so much, and when the sun starts shining i'll love it a hundred times more still.

added a lot to the links section, check em out!

--------------------------

Pachelbel's canon in d is one of those perfect pieces of music. this version (<<<<<<) in particular is superb. It a living, breathing piece of music of music, slowing coming into bloom over the course of several minutes.

jay-z's december 4th is a seasick, swerving song. it's from the black album, jay-z's last album before his retirement, which is his most frantic and urgent album ever. 'my 1st song', which is the last song on the album, is unbelievably intense and fast, almost childlike in its insistent pleas. jay-z often starts albums with quiet introductions, and with december 4th was a beautiful one. a gentle, morose cartwheel through and out of his life to match biggie's classic album opener 'things done changed', it is superb. and look what someone's done:



it just works. amateur jay-z remixes are often of a high quality cos jay-z does so much to actively encourage remixers, and this is how it should work it. the little story in the video is quite sweet too. the whole song's a monument to effort.


--------------


a similar fruit of effort to tie in with the above is this:



i'm not being facetious or ironic at all, honestly. look at this boy! he's made something so intensely brilliant, sitting in his room. even though i dont like the music (though i sort of start to when i think of how much he cares), i always love watching this. he just takes it SO seriously when it's pretty ridiculous thing to do, and i really like it when that happens. taking the serious lightly is easy to do, but taking the ridiculous seriously? commendable.

Loz

thats ok

you always used to put so much effort into my presents....

so why not :p

12:11amJames

did i? or is that a sarcastic joke?

either way i cant remember

12:11am Loz

you gave me a tissue one year

and another you wrote an offensive joke on a scrap of paper

Just barely enough to believe in

Unintentionally amusing sentence about bertrand russell i read today:

"Without doubt, Russell was one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers."


-----------------------

Go here for ludicrous magical beautiful silliness.

------------------------

Lyrics-i've-misheard-which-are-better-than-actual-lyrics part the deux:

From alexis taylor's solo album:

Actual lyric: You're one collectors item
As misheard by me: We're one collective item.

------------

Episode 2 of series 2 of on the hour is probably the best half hour of comedy ever created. Pure and perfect without the overly surreal aspect of the day today that crept in later.

It's on youtube somewhere. But just this time I'm not gonna bother looking it up, to teach you all a big fucking lesson.

-----------

Let's finish this post with gimmie the loot, shall we? Ok lets.



BIG UP BIG UP IT'S A STICK UP STICK UP

ANYONE tell me that at 2:49 it doesn't take your breath away.


Biggie smalls' voice always makes me think of grand pianos. I know that sounds insane but somehow it makes perfect sense to me. His voice shares a lot of qualities with grand pianos and what they mean to me. It's a very soft, beautiful, classy sound, biggie's voice, perfectly formed and fine-tuned. Just like a shiny clavier.



One day soon I will write an article about why it's important and acceptable for white middle class teens to like hip hop, send it in to my student newspaper, have it rejected, and copy and paste it onto here.

THE SUN CAME IN LIKE A PACK OF ORANGE SPANIELS



wave pictures have given this blog a raison d'etre, i think. my blog is the LEAST current thing possible. i'm really quite a poor blogger to be honest. i have no connections or anything with other blogs and i write about songs that were released about three years ago, at the very least. but wave pictures have provided me with something in the here and now that i feel the need to campaign for. they really are wonderful, and give this blog a structure and point (but thank god not a 'theme', ack) which i think spreads into other aspects of it. they got the ball rolling, at long last.


----------

some people talk about how youtube has revived the diy spirit and i think that's not only complete shit but also the standard journalist's trick of claiming that one thing is a 'revival' of something that has always been around and never went away (also ridiculously used for pop, 'vintage', rave, antisocial behaviour, heavy metal etc) as a way to make an article seem more interesting than it ever could be. it's true that people do use youtube as a way to get their views out but they all seem to think it's the only way to do so. where once you might have someone making a fanzine or even doing a pirate radio show you now have boring voiced people giving reviews of new albums and films into a webcam. a lot of people now seem to think youtube is a way to do EVERYthing, even things which clearly work best in print. and that's a shame. but a few people use it as what it is; a tool to get videos seen that could be seen no where else. this is all youtube is and really all it should be. this idea is beautifully harnessed in this superb video of bonnie prince billy's i see a darkness that someone has made for their friend.



THIS is what the youtube DIY ethic should be, not people making poor gervais-inspired sketches and giving irate monologues. it's just so simplistically wonderful, isn't it. youtube is garish and horrible at the best of times and all we have here is relentlessly flowing water settling into an infinite, hellish red lake. i love thinking about a person making this and thinking that it's fine as it is (it is) and adding absolutely nothing to it. who else would be able to leave it naked and bare like this? certainly no 'vlogger' that's for sure. diy's all about minimal effort for maximum effect, and i've never seen a better demonstration of that than this.

-----------

incidentally i found out about the above song and bonnie prince billy through johnny cash's superb cover version of it which is on the equally superb but bizarrely under-rated album american III, which as an album is the sound of a lion dying.


------------------

ah spring.

every day a little brighter.

had an ok journey back to aberdeen, the tay was rippled silk with dundee a fire on the horizon. i bloody love that bridge.

----------

too tired to write tonight but this is better than anything i could ever write:

what does it sound like to be on top of the world?

just realised how well grime could accompany debating. maybe next week i'll take some mixtapes along...


anyway this is a sort of return to form. so many people hate wiley nowadays, you sometimes get the impression he hates himself. i like this though.

Misheard-lyrics-by-me-that-are-better-than-the-original part 1:

Original lyrics (happy day by talking heads):
I can't be critical
I can't won't stop

My misheard lyrics:

I can't be critical
My heart won't stop


Easily better.

Everything's brown today, even my gold

You know you know you know I went to see that 'vicky christina barcelona' tonight. Wow! what rubbish. I mean, really. It's just a mills and boon novel in every way; it has a narrator who tells us the already starkly obvious emotional outlook of every character and also the things that at the very same time we are actually seeing with our own eyes ('vicky went to the cathedral'), it has the standard mills and boon starting block of pasty white touristettes falling for a dark-eyed continental stubble-covered rogue, and it takes the clichéd tourist activities and puts them centrally into the lives of these characters. Urk, so bad.


-------------------

Fuck the knife are SO good arent they. One of those bands that you love when you first hear, then they become such a massive part of your life that you forget just how special they are, but occasionally, in the right moments, they astound you all over again. Like the Ramones. Or the beastie boys. But anyway, what voices! The woman from the knife sounds like someone's nan, and she may well be, and the man sounds like a melted whale.

I listened to silent shout on the way home tonight and those icy sounds fit perfectly, washing the glaring, stifling fake-tan of vicky christina off my mind. I listened to we share our mothers health several times, imagining vikings, and letting the windy voices blow me home through jagged granite streets.
--------------------

Continuing the theme of scandinavian beauty, el perro del mar.

------------------

It's hard to express how wonderful wave pictures are using one song as the impatience of you fuckers dictates i MUST do, but if i had to i guess i'd choose 'i love you like a madman'. Such beautiful lyrics, sort of like the mountain goats, but with the warbling confidence of a bad-tempered teenager.

---------------------

Mark Kermode and his stupid slab of cancerous gammon face.

---------------

My philosophy tutor has a slot on aberdeen student radio on tuesdays which i thought might be good but which turned out to be amazing. You can check it all out on his blog here.


--------------

Some stuff that's been washing round me a lot recently:

-Hot Chip-Laws of Salvation
-Hot Chip with Robert Wyatt and Geese (who are just hot chip anyway)-EP.
-Ital Tek-Cyclical
-Jay-Z remixed w/fela- Nigerian Gangster
-The instrumental version of nigerian gangster, which is just an afrobeat trip hop album, and isnt anywhere near as bad as that sounds.
-The Wave Pictures
-Vampire Weekend-I Stand Corrected
-Alexis Taylor solo-I Love my Home, Collector's Item
-X-The songs from their first album that the girl sung on.

-----------------

This is something quite special, apparently '90%' (probably not that exactly calculated) was made using stuff from the film alice in wonderland, of which this video is my only experience. Anyway, beautiful, breathlike stuff.



-----------------------------

Incidentally if anyone wants to know about the connections between wittgenstein's philosophy and alice in wonderland you have only to ask.

A taster of what you'll get if you do: When alice talks about how she can't recall what a candle flame looks like after it's been put out, that is PROPERLY wittgensteinian of her.

---------------

I'm now on twitter but will probably hardly ever update as I have four followers. But so did jesus when he started out.

-------------

Can people who have blogs please write on them please!

--------------

My friend gavin asks,

"Which music genre would you pick if you could never listen to another?
I like this. It's a less loaded, more modern (ie spoiled) Desert Island Discs construction.

You could of course assail the very idea of genre as a self-fulfilling restriction that truly innovative artists pay no heed to, and thus claim the gaps in the Map as yours.

But I know you've a proper answer nonetheless. (:"

I answer:

"60s r&b, eg martha reeves and the vandellas. At the end of the day, it is the most perfect of all musics. Functional and efficient in every sense-emotionally, rhytmically, aesthetically, it has it all. It's just pop music of course, but pop music crystallised to its central mesasge-love, not being alone, the beauty of desire. It expresses every emotion at once. It can be a social music-good for dancing-or music you listen to on your own when you're at your lowest ebb. Perfect, wonderous, infinite loveliness. Anyone who says they don't like it doesn't like truth.

Disco is a close second as it has all the features mentioned above, except it's not as yearning and melacholy as soul, which you need at night."


--------------

And that's as good a point as any to end on. I hope you enjoyed it, i feel like this blog is only just starting to get good now to be honest, and getting close to the giddy heights of joy and quality of my old myspace blog. I dont know why this is.


Stay so fresh and so clean x

I find this somehow reassuring:

"They're not dragons, they're people, and it's not a den, it's a room. It should be called People's Room."

doing a bit of irish literature around the start of the twentieth century recently. it was an odd time for irish theatre because the nationalist movement and the resentment towards the english features of irish culture meant a lot of playwrights started to romanticise and exagerate the primitive beauty of traditional irish rural life. the reason i mention all this is because this set of circumstances led to my new favourite stage direction ever:

"Tom goes to the corner and starts gnawing on a turnip"

"i think i'll call him saviour"

working

this is just too funny:

"Reasons Peaches Geldof would fit right into Bristol University:

- She has five middle names (really, she does).

- One of her sisters is called Fifi.

- When writing a column for the Daily Telegraph she tirelessly attempted to make even the most irrelevant subjects seem profound by using long words in inappropriate place....a job at the Epigram beckons!

- She is a DJ as part of a self-styled 'soundtrack collective' who call themselves "The New Testament Party Crew" (again, you couldn't make it up).

- The Lizard Lounge would probably welcome "The New Testament Party Crew" with open-arms.

- She studied Politics and History of Art for her AS-levels.

- Like most at Bristol, she would probably look down at UWE and view herself to be on a par with Oxbridge undergraduates.

- Like most at Bristol University, she would have no reason to look down at UWE or to view herself as being on a par with Oxbridge undergraduates.

- I'm sure she likes Pimms, and I’m sure she also likes pashmina.

- She has spent time in Morocco 'learning the culture'."

shell of light

one of the many things going to aberdeen has taught me is how small our country is. it takes 7 hours to get home to cheshire from aberdeen. this makes ANY journey within england seem tiny and inconsequential by comparison. the hour long journey to manchester now seems a quick sit down.

the journey from aberdeen to manchester or vice versa is an excellent train journey, particularly between aberdeen and carlisle, where it is almost continuously impressive. nose-to-the-window points for me are always the magnificent wallace monument, an amazing structure that always feels like a natural part of the landscape around it, and reminds me of a stretched version of kings college chapel tower in my silver city itself, or st giles in edinburgh.

this time, i was lucky enough to have a 40 minute stop in edinburgh so had time to zip up into the streets at stand around for a bit. edinburgh waverley is the only train station that gives me a sense of what travelling by rail was like in its new-fangled, fantastic heyday. it's the most spectacular experience to walk out of waverley. from the churning, cast iron victorian bowels of the city, up that gently sloping ramp straight onto waverley bridge and BAM you're in the center of things. everything is so perfectly positioned from that exact point in the city; the castle, the national gallery, scots monument, st giles, the bank of scotland. i believe that even hardened commuters, who often are miserable, must get some extent of a lift from it every time.

anyway then you're zipping through the countryside. the forth bridge, the distant mountains with a mess of snow on top, then curling through pine forests growing on grey scree slopes. the tay bridge by dundee, which is exhilarating, far better than the forth bridge because it's just so very long and unspectacular, so for minutes on end you're flying over water on an invisible bridge with no grand arches beside you, just 'the feeling of being in motion again', to bring in the mountain goats. "it's the most extraordinary thing in the world." and finally, the last 'leg' as my mum would say, parallel to the sea, sometimes feet away from it, for an hour or so straight up to aberdeen. endless, occasionally oil-rig dotted sea on one side, highland cattle and stone farm shacks on the other side. it's really not that arduous a journey.
-----------

wittgenstein's first lecture at cambridge was titled 'what is philosophy' and lasted four minutes. i love this fact, as i love all facts about wittgenstein. i think about wittgenstein a little more each day. there is so much beauty and so little art in what wittgenstein did. how can you fail to be inspired by the little snippets of wonder wittgenstein would capture in his writing:

"if i post this letter to new york, does it confirm my belief that the world exists?"

"here i stand; everything around me tells me so" (i'm paraphrasing a little here)

"we must climb the ladder then kick it away, having reached the higher ground"

------------------------------

^^^^^^^^^^^^these are by no means exact quotes by the way! just what i could remember off the top of my head.

---------------

dont get how the guardian get away with writing the same editorial on obama and the resurrection of liberal america EVERY DAY. for the past two months. that gary younge is the polly toynbee of obama, exact same thoughts, over and over and over again...

incidentally, a beautiful piece in G2 t'other day about how to re-energise your house, or summat. contained tips such as moving chairs around around, of course, cushions. a sign of tough (and cheap) times ahead, for sure. was particularly great in the guardian, where in the lifestyle section they recommend 25 quid bars of soap.


----------------

new years resolution is to achieve a better general understanding of science. exams are finished so lets get to work!

---------------

they show this advert in cinemas before the film in scotland and we all stand up and salute.

but seriously, it's awe-inspiring, isnt it. connery's bit is my favourite, just about, but they all had us cackling out of our seats for different reasons.

------------

everytime i hear H20's what we gonna do i'm staggered by how good the vocals are. it's one of those perfect vocal performances, expressing every emotion simultaneously. and yet, the singer is unknown, out there, in the masses. it was a massive single, but it should have been REALLY massive, it should have beaten heartbroken, because its easily better. it should have been a contender, it should have been something...

---------------

if anyone is wondering what the lone mainstream indie single that i enjoyed was this year, it was 'impatience' by we are scientists. so that's done for another year.

------------

heard this in a white canteen today and it filled with colour. i find speeded up vocals irresistable, i always have. they sound like what pop is, condensed into a single sound: vulnerable, beautiful, calling out to you.

--------------

and now, to bed, to read my book on space and dream of being an astronaut.

sat, sleep-deprived and pleasantly numb in that post-exam way in an unusually silent, empty flat, listening to fiona apple's across the universe, doing nothing at all.

kate winslet; always different, always the same

today will always be remembered as the day when the world found out that, instead of being the open-minded, modern, multicultural group we all thought they were, the royal family actually contains some bigoted, inconsiderate racists.

how will the country recover.

i want to start a new sub-genre called 'chunky house'.

you can almost hear it, just from the name, can't you?

always and forever

"Too long I roamed in the night.
I'm coming back to his side, to put it right."

"don't waste your time, fighting the light..."

the matches must not be stopped

i think i've copied this little bit of hilarity onto every blog i've had (i have had three blogs). it's from the wonderous, long-dormant blog the devil dances in an empty pocket. it's easily the most consistently great blog i've ever read. you can dip in anywhere at random and find something hilarious.

anyway:

"Changes I would make to the sort known as football:

A lion must be released onto the pitch for ten minutes in every match.

The pitch must be littered with dog turds. The first player to slip on a turd gets man of the match.

The matches must not be stopped.

Mike Tyson must play for one team.

Each and every player must wear a headset mic, and their collective voices broadcast to the venue.

Goalies must be forced to smoke.

One team must go skins.

Avril Lavigne must host all World Cup matches.

Linesmen must be dressed as WW2 pilots.

The captains must each carry a cane.

Sandals instead of boots for ten seconds out of every match.

Goldfinger by Ash must be broadcast at mind-warpingly high volume for the entire 90 minutes.

Managers must observe the match from an iced-cream van, whilst dishing out 99s to punters.

The fans must be terrorised by muggers."