@uspic¡ous Fish¿! Delirious With Weird   Sunday, August 31, 2003   You have no idea how much I want one of these. If you love me and have a spare £6k I'd be ever so grateful. 8/31/2003 08:13:00 pm 0 comments   I have a new computer, hence updates and activity may be quiet for a few days while I set it up, but then, once I'm downloading like a crazy-legged churchman and fully sorted with everything, I imagine I'll be updating like buggery. 8/31/2003 04:41:00 pm 0 comments Thursday, August 28, 2003   This is shit. Too long, too fond of itself, too precious and wordy. I covered the same release in 100 words on Stylus a couple of weeks ago for The Rubber Room, and, even if I say so myself, did a much better job. I'd link it up so you can see for yourself, but Stylus is only semi-functional this week as we gear up for Monday's relaunch. 8/28/2003 11:41:00 am 0 comments Wednesday, August 27, 2003   The Mars Vaulted… 10.51pm, Wednesday August the 27th 2003. Mars is the closest to Earth that it’s been for 60,000 years, and with a good telescope you can see as much detail on it’s surface as you can normally see on the Moon with the naked eye (how come all the other planets’ moons get given proper good names like ‘Ganymede’, and ours is just called ‘Moon’?). Since Friday when I read the article in The Independent’s Mars Special I’ve been excited about seeing this swollen orange rock. But when I actually saw it tonight… It’s just an orange dot, brighter than the other stars. Pretty cool. Likewise The Mars Volta; since I read Sam’s excitable surge of sensation captured on paper (by anyone else it would just be a ‘review’) I’ve been looking forward to hearing it, expecting it to be insanity and excess captured on CD. In actual fact it’s just… Pretty cool. I saw At The Drive In’s last ever UK gig at the tail-end of 2000, in a sweaty Camden basement, and it’s safe to say they were fucking monstrous. The Mars Volta push things out that little bit further, and it’s impressive, cinemascope stuff, invigorating and inextricable, but… OH! The thrill of “Enfilade” from Relationship Of Command, bound to the tracks, explosions of noise, incoming, incoming, that floating, almost dub section, replete with melodica hovering just above the railway line, the stupid heaviosity of “Arcarsenal”, the fractured dynamics of “Pattern Against User”… You can only hear it first once, I guess. When you turn around and see how faint and shimmering all those other stars are though, and turn back to Mars… It really is fucking bright and clear. Rock on, Mars. 8/27/2003 11:14:00 pm 0 comments   Solaris Steven Soderburgh and George Clooney’s remake of Andrei Tarkovski’s legendary Solaris dispenses with almost the entire first half of the original film, cutting the running time in the process from 3+ hours to just less than two and removing whole layers of personality development from the lead character, psychologist Chris Kelvin (played in the new version by Clooney). The dizzying car journey through a starkly de-colorized urban Russia of the future is lost. Kelvin’s contextualising interaction with his father and son is lost. The beautiful opening shot of soft green reeds gently rippled underwater is lost. Friends of mine have suggested that the spirit of the film is lost too, that the original’s slow, ruminative beauty and austere philosophy is diluted, ignored even, by Soderburgh’s stylish treatment and Clooney’s star power. I’m not so sure though. The updated Solaris moves fast; barely ten minutes in and Kelvin is already on his way to the space station orbiting the strange planet of iridescent seas and luminescent mists. Tarkovski’s version took an hour to get this far. While I may defend the right of an artist to use slowness, stillness and length in a piece, understanding and appreciating the cathartic powers of near-hypnotic repetition and stasis as well as the alluring intricacies of vastness and the unashamedly widescreen imagination, from 20-minute jams by Miles Davis or Can to three hour cinematic masterpieces like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia or Amadeus by Milos Forman, I also love brevity. Directness. Focus. Some things need three hours to unfurl, others barely quarter that time (Spielberg’s recent AI would have made a wonderful 30-minute short, but became an endurance test after 60-minutes; by the two-and-a-half-hour mark I was cursing him). Most things would benefit from the sympathetic touch of a good editor (Auspicious Fish included!). As such the new Solaris is now a manageable length (the DVD of the original is split between two discs, meaning you have to change them halfway through, and although it was always intended as a two-part affair this is still incredibly frustrating in the digital age), much less daunting and wearisome. Tarkovski can’t compete for simple visual sumptuousness either; he may frame every shot like a beautiful still-life but budgetary and technological limitations meant that the planet Solaris itself, supposedly shrouded in swirling, spectrum-ranging mists, was nothing but an indistinct grey blur 30 years ago. Today it is a shimmering, translucent aura of red and blue, rendered digitally with beautiful, mesmeric precision. The space station in Clooney’s homage also looks like an actual space station (or at least like a mimetic Hollywood vision of one) rather than a hastily-evacuated Soviet boiler room (one thing capitalism does best is special effects!). But these considerations are neither here nor there if the essence of the film is lost. Is it? Solaris is a treatise on the nature of personality, on the question of what makes us human. The planet Solaris creates facsimiles of people from the memories of those sentient beings in its orbit, that is those upon the space station circling and studying the planet. Hence Chris Kelvin is confronted with the all-too-physically-solid spectre of his dead wife Reya, and his (dead, by the time Kelvin arrives) friend Galbarian is visited by his infant son (daughter in the original). The crew of the space station understandably react negatively to the arrival of these doppelgangers; are they ‘real’? Are they human? Are they dangerous? How is one meant to feel about and towards them? What value is the simulacra, even if it is so perfect as to be indistinguishable; how can you love something, someone, when you irrefutably know they are not ‘real’? (It is unconfirmed in both versions of the film whether or not all the doppelgangers are of dead people; whether the book both films are based on states this concretely I do not know.) The question for Kelvin is does he love this new ‘copy’ of Reya or does he love her memory? Is this new Reya a ‘copy’ anyway? Her personality and memories are created from reflections of Kelvin’s own memory of his wife, hence the new Reya is an incomplete person, a Golem with the looks, voice, gestures and demeanour approximate of the ‘real’ Reya (exact of Kelvin’s memory of her), but sans the dasein. A notion I have long been intrigued by is that we are as other people perceive us to be, that our objective, definable personalities are relative to how we are perceived by those around us, that our intentions and feelings matter not until they are understood. Indeed, our misapprehended and falsely inferred thoughts, feelings and intentions are much more important in terms of our identity. What use is the ‘real you’ if no one but yourself ever encounters it? The ‘real you’ is the you that people deal with everyday. Clooney’s Kelvin is a blank slate. We are given little or no family information or background for him, and the film only portrays him in unusual, stressful conditions and in flashback, thus only giving us a picture of Kelvin under extreme duress and in the past, and leaving him as a two-dimensional vessel for the projection of our associations and memories. We think of other things we know about Clooney, of his private life, of ER, of Oh Brother Where Art Thou, of Out Of Sight and of Ocean’s Eleven. We think of the original actor who played Kelvin in Tarkovski’s version. Likewise the film itself is a blank slate emotionally. Too many questions are raised and too many images unexplained for it to be fully emotionally engaging, and likewise it is too emotionally confused for it to be a reasoned academic philosophy. But this is the point. The planet Solaris creates blank vessels for the projection of desires and loves, confusions and memories, and by giving our subconscious free-reign over the design of these resultant simulacrum stretches the limits of our consciousness and our conscience. Confronted by our impossible and unreasoned memories given physical reality, we short-circuit mentally and emotionally; when Kelvin is first met by the projected Reya of his memories he is so confused, disgusted and tortured that he lures her into an airlock and blasts her into space. When the subsequent Reya discovers this act of betrayal she breaks down. Much like Mary Shelley’s monster of Frankenstein’s creation, or Pinocchio, or Buzz Lightyear, the simulacra Reya wishes to be real, to be human, to be more than just spectacle and projected, redirected fantasy, memory and misremembrance. Clooney’s hollow Kelvin becomes like the heroes of Jorge Luis Borges' meta-fiction at this point, aware of his fictionality; Reya is constructed from his memories but he in turn is but a character, and a poorly drawn, unrounded character at that, hence she is an echo of an echo. His fictional nature is accentuated, doubling the falseness of the simulacra Reya in turn. The boundaries of reality and fiction, of story and history, of empathy and antipathy, become blurred to the point where they don’t exist. At the end of the film it is made explicit that they're works of fiction when Reya states "we don't need to think about it anymore", the inferrence being that once they assume control of their own fictional context they can be happy by guiding their own narrative. If Kelvin can project positive thoughts onto Reya, consciously assume control of how he perceives her (indeed, of who he perceives), then he can control his own responses to her by influencing her character, who in turn can influence him until the issue of who is real and who created who is dispensed with as they become symbiotic. Tarkovski’s original Solaris may have more completely involved the audience by painting a fuller picture of Chris Kelvin, by drawing the viewers in through sheer length of involvement with the film, but for my money Soderburgh and Clooney’s version tells the story and emphasises the philosophy better. The glossiness of the digital effects and CGI of their version add to the sense of unreal which is the essence of the film; the appearance of reality is so sharp and luminous that we know it must be false, the space station so perfect and detailed and Hollywood in its facades that we know that too is not real, is hyperreal. We’ve all seen what the inside of an actual space shuttle looks like and this is not it, but we know instantly that it symbolises the space station at one further remove; a signifier that only signifies another signifier in turn. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein concealed the its heart and meaning in multiple-layers of remove, telling the story at a further distance with each further onion-skin of narrative until the essence of it is told in something like the 7th person, the characters becoming so false and one-sided that all which can exist is the story and the meaning without distractions. The new Solaris asks us what defines us, how people perceive us, asks us to think about what composes and creates ourselves, and demands to know if we love actual real people, or merely the impressions of people that we choose to avail ourselves of. Is it a better film than Tarkovski’s? I couldn’t say; but I certainly don’t think it’s any worse. And I shall definitely be watching Tarkovski's version again over the weekend. 8/27/2003 09:25:00 pm 0 comments Monday, August 25, 2003   Black Stones fist-sized to twice that size, taken from the river bed about half a mile out of town softened by the flow of water but still quite a harsh and unnatural colour i've got about a dozen but i'm gonna need at least three times that many 8/25/2003 10:50:00 am 0 comments Sunday, August 24, 2003   The death of the author, the birth of meaning, intention, acceleration, expression and why bears shit in the woods… “If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” If the tree isn’t falling on me, I don’t give a shit. As for the bears man, they don’t leave the forest for bowel movements, do they? They just don’t shit in their own beds. I don’t mean a single word of it. Some of you are pinning significance to these lines, finding profundity in the colons and the html coding and the occasional bursts of profanity, feeling passion and belief and a definite sense of purpose, and the simple fact is that I’m sitting here, for the most part, with a bottle of Nastro Azzurro or whatever next to me, and I’m just writing, like it’s a job or a chore or a reflex action. This isn’t poetry, this isn’t my deepest darkest thoughts and fears. I don’t have deepest darkest thoughts and fears. I’m not the fire-spitting, intense young man given to bouts of solipsistic existential angst that you might think I am. In real life I’m the most laid-back man in the world. I don’t feel half the sensations I describe; I just know the tricks, the metaphysical hyperlinks that tap directly into the mimetic associations of love, hate, fear, pain, joy, loss of control; I learnt the buttons years ago that I can press to make someone go ‘ah’ or ‘oh’ and make them feel as if I know exactly how they feel. I’m not a tortured soul released to the anarchy of pure expression of sensation. I don’t believe that we’re all linked by some kind of universal thread of energy and super-consciousness. As nice as that sounds. I don’t even believe in the existence of a human soul. Sorry. Sam gives the impression that music is a totally visceral and occupying force for him at every moment he’s involved with it, dancing in his bedroom, feeling the thrill of arousal playing a show, however small, moonwalking across the kitchen floor to the fridge humming Outkast couplets with desperate, joyous intention, and this is probably largely true. Cozen I imagine beneath oily Scottish skies, dissolved into the mist and rain and The Associates, a seldom tear and a complex rumination noted on the back of a train ticket with a chewed-up pencil. But this is true, if it is true, probably only once in a while. I get the idea that Marcello might sit down with a record and a glass of wine and a furrowed brow, focused like a heron on point for shimmering silver fish beneath the surface of the sound, synapses stretched to the point of receptiveness, ready to pounce on the ontology and capture the meaning of any given piece and cage it in words more beautiful than its previous freedom. But I suspect the reality is far from this. Likewise I’m not raging and sweating and firing off missives loaded with bellyache and sputum. “Anyone who writes about music the way you do must invest a lot of emotional time and weight in it, whereas for me it’s a distraction at most.” So said Leon the other night in a brief AIM. And what was my reaction? I invest probably a hell of a lot less than you think. “So you’re a fake then?” No. I’m wracked with spiritual catharsis and projected into transcendental arias of azure sublimation much less often than I give the impression of being. And that’s fine with me. Anybody who actually lived the amount of passion and intensity that I project would find themselves quickly going mad. I know because I’ve seen it happen to friends who lost sense of (or were never told about) the difference between art and artist (artisan, for me, I fear), craft and craftsman, people who thought they had to live it like they love it and who ended up on medication, in counselling, or worse. This is something I do because I know how, because I don’t know how to do anything else, because Yes, at times I love it. Not because I think it’s the most important thing in the world, but because sometimes I think it’s the best thing in the world. A question posed in a philosophy lecture in my second year of university; which of these actions is an act of self-expression; painting a picture, painting a living room wall, or tying a shoelace? Being at a substandard university (although this particular philosophy lecturer, John Gingell, was most definitely not substandard) most of the class except me immediately exclaimed “painting a picture”. To which I say bollocks. It’s still you painting the wall or tying the shoelace, you who chooses the colour, the roller, the way your laces move from eyelet to eyelet, the knot you tie. Emma is beautiful. Everything that you do expresses yourself. Certainly some moments and actions are more obviously invested with time and thought and feeling, but why obliterate the significance of the little things? My choice of watch, socks, glasses, lager and crispy fried duck with honey sauce is just as revealing of my personality as the fact that I’m currently listening to Kelis (and before that Stankonia). So yes, it is about the passion and the moment and the loss of control or self or whatever, but it’s also about what you’re humming along with when you’re doing the washing up. It’s about banging the steering wheel in time to Lumidee as much as it is lighting candles and lying on the floor to Mogwai. About walking down the cliff with Mouse On Mars distracting me from fretting and cursing about the tourists as it is drowning myself in a solitary bottle of shiraz and a Shack album during lonely weekends at university. It’s about sitting with a copy of Encounters and making notes and then sitting at a PC and working them into some kind of workable, concise and vaguely expressive whole that doesn’t embarrass me. It’s about the now but not just the now; it’s about all the nows past and all the nows yet to come, even if the one right at this instant is pretty dull and shallow and superficial. It’s about giving the impression of the amazing nows that might be potential for you, for me, even if I’m not feeling them right at the moment. And generally I’m not, because it’s impossible. So it’s not just puking up the passion when it’s there; it’s remembering how it feels and getting that across as if the remembered is the current. Plus, sometimes, it’s about thinking about something until you feel you’ve got a better grasp of it and can ascertain a further grain of truth that the passion (current or past) missed noticing because it was too busy dancing or fucking or crying or staring in absent bliss at the vapour trails of France-bound Boeings. I spent this afternoon dancing solo to Justin and N*E*R*D and Kelis, window thrown open, jiving and popping and twisting until I was a sweaty, happy mess. Fucking damn right. Just so you know. Taking Sides Beyonce vs. Justin I used to fancy Beyonce something rotten, something about the thighs and the stridence and the… oooh… you know. But Marcello’s comment about her “dead, shark eyes” seems startlingly on the money now. There’s something about the video to “Crazy In Love” (which is to r’n’b what “Move Your Feet” is to house, surely?- structurally they’re almost identical, built around a chorus and a hook and a horn riff and precious little else) that I find disconcerting to say the least. Even during the ‘uh-oh’ moments, ass-shaking in the street, Beyonce looks incredibly fucking focussed and professional and serious. This is pop music for heaven’s sake woman, and damn fine pop music at that; you’re meant to enjoy it. But no, there’s a shark-like certainty of purpose, ruthlessness and conviction in her eyes that puts me off. Anyone that serious and determined is surely insecure about something along the line somewhere. Justin (fucking Justin!- a distillation of all I love about Stevie and Jacko and The Neptunes’ delicious southern-fried boom-click) on the other hand, in the video for “Senorita”, is cool, in control, and enjoying himself to an impossible degree. Plus, at the moment he sets up the call-and-response finale, when he first sings the female part and pushes his voice suddenly into serious territory and finds it almost breaking with yearning on the words “really leaving witchoo” (emphasis on those final two delicious syllables) I stop jiving and bend over double in complete emotional torment. Verily, the man-boy is a genius and I am a swooning fanboy. Girls want to fuck him, boys want to be him; I’m not fussed either way. 8/24/2003 11:19:00 pm 0 comments   is currently £3.99 in WHSmith, which might just be the sale of the fucking century. I suggest you transport yourself down to your local inferior bookseller-cum-newsagent post haste and purchase at least one copy. 8/24/2003 09:20:00 pm 0 comments Saturday, August 23, 2003   Towards a neo-dynamic formalisation of the (self-)one / other paradigm of Metroid Fusion. What does Metroid Fusion teach us? Warfare reaches past tense and the present is left seething for the future, trepidatiously establishing a survival, eking out a continuation of its own norms and self-antiquities. Moral relativism becomes transient to the nth degree as symbiosis is heralded as the path to this survival; what is the one when the one, no longer guided by a known and trusted quantity or school of ones, is a divided one, is taken apart into one and also one, the original one subdivided again and left alone, as one and also less than one (as the one is now two), to find a new and other one with which to symbiote and therefore regain its former one-ness. There are two points to consider here before progression (transgression – utility of the self one and also of the other one). Baudrillard’s “screen” is now subverted, subsumed, reduced to less than a screen, thinness and controllability, the screen within hands, closable and sealable and pocketed, becoming like money, small change, a material for bargaining and a temporary, fleeting, chosen and revisited identity, no longer the one as unit with the screen but the one as flow between the screen and the one itself; the one becomes movement, fluidity, and transference of energy. The one-ness of our (self-)one and the screen and the movement that the one becomes between the two (self-one and screen) educates, enlightens, shows the (self-)one the necessity of symbiosis between the one and the one that is other which is the point, culmination, goal and “scene-master” of Metroid Fusion. Mulvey’s gaze at this transjunction (between [self-]one and one that is other, between screen and [self-]one, between screen and one that is other, between Metroid and X, between Samus and X, between Samus and Metroid) is recoiled and drawn within the (self-)one as the (self-)one becomes rather than gazes; the gaze is resurrected as the (self-)one (as Samus) is within death, and the impermanence of death (Samus lives!- ‘save’) makes frugal and wasteful the gaze. Thus the gaze is defeated and the sexualisation of the (self-)one and the one that is other is negated, and the symbiosis is revealed as an asexual reproduction, a manifestation of pre-self history, Lacan’s conjoined family narrative. Intertextuality arises with the hub and nexus of the subverted, foldable, closable screen (Gameboy Advance SP) and the permanence screen, the screen-driving box, the utility (Gamecube), adding further desexualisation within the process of transgression and once more adding a further liberating remove to the gaze. I have yet to complete Metroid Fusiobn, although I have all the upgrades and so on. I am simply not good enough at computer games to kill the (self-)other-evil, the replicated desire, the impermanence machine, Samus-X. This article has been brought to you by Nick’s Internal Po-Mo Bullshit Generator. 8/23/2003 04:50:00 pm 0 comments   Promos of the new Luke Vibert and Plaid albums arrived this morning, and the Vibert album has a run of tracks (6 through 10) that is fucking perfect in the way that Reynolds said the first four (or was it six) tracks of the last Daft Punk was. If I was a fool I'd say that Vibert's done to dance music what The White Stripes have done to rock music, stripped it back to a point somewhere in the past where there was less to it, aesthetically, metaphysically, not quite started from scratch but rather reduced focus to a tiny, intense dot. But Vibert's new record is more complicated than that. In a good way. "I Love Acid" and "Acidisco" are the most tightly wound, switch-your-ass dance tunes I've heard in a long time, dripping with delicious acid squelch and with eyes firmly planted on the dancefloor, and yet still in control and with a degree of subtlty that makes them listenable as well as danceable, taking a step to the side of what Medicine8 did so well on :ironstylings. Vibert's new one is maybe not as consistent as the Medicine8 record, but the peaks are way higher. "Lions may mate 150 times in three days," announced David Attenborough mere seconds ago. Keep up, keep writing, try not to worry, keep listening, keep doing stuff, lose focus, regain focus, feel a pang of guilt, feel a touch ashamed. My first email address was he_bangs_the_drums@yahoo.com - what does that say about me? About you? It says we all do it, and it doesn't matter. It says you're getting better. And don't worry about the girls. Worry about the boys and the girls. But don't worry about anything. Download "I Love Acid" and dance. 8/23/2003 11:35:00 am 0 comments Friday, August 22, 2003   Two things happened at lunchtime. One, I realised I worked on a university campus again when I couldn't get hold of a copy of The Guardian after midday (fucking hippy lefty pseudo-socialist fucking intellectual gits depriving me of my weekly smirk at Petr1d1s' abberations in the name of music-writing!), so had to settle for The Independant instead. And b; as I was reading said broadsheet (Mars! on Friday! will be closer to Earth than it's been for 60,000 years! wow!) on a secluded patch of grass behind the chemistry building the sun finally burnt through the heavy veil of clouds and hit my t-shirted back, and it was hot. Really hot. Then the clouds pulled back in again and it was merely warm-to-temperate. 8/22/2003 02:21:00 pm 0 comments   I don't mean write about music; I just mean write. 8/22/2003 10:21:00 am 0 comments   The Neptunes. Vigilant readers will notice that part of this review is recycled from the !!! piece I put up here a week or two ago... Well, who else is worth ripping-off apart from myself? 8/22/2003 10:04:00 am 0 comments Thursday, August 21, 2003   Oh, and Sam - use your blog like a gym. That is that you should write in it lots and lots and lots, anything you can think of, to tone those creative muscles. The more you write the better you'll get. 8/21/2003 11:17:00 pm 0 comments   This evening's listening... The Boo Radleys - Giant Steps Oddly, Martin Carr emailed me on Tuesday to ask if I'd like to contribute to a ten-year-anniversary site for Giant Steps, after he'd been surfing the web for stuff about the album and come across my review on Stylus. He wanted it by tomorrow, so I said I wouldn't have time, and then quickly dashed off an email to my friend Mary, who used to run the Boos' fanclub back in the day. Anyway, this morning Martin rang Mary to ask her if she'd contribute, and also mentioning that he'd had an email from somebody who knew her (ie; me), so Mary then rang me this evening and voilá, made me feel guilty until I found the time to bash out 300-or so words for him. Small world, eh? DM & Jemini - Ghetto Pop Life Dom Passantino is a fantastic addition to the Stylus staff, not only because he's young, British, gobby, and writes like a m*th*rf*ck*r, but because he's turned me onto this, which is fantastic. The Nextmen - Get Over It Dom also turned me on to this, which is also fantastic. Plus "get over it", or, more accurately, "get over yourself" is the best piece of advice I've ever received, and this whole album seems to be about expressing that same truism. Relax. It's OK. The way to be happy is to be happy. The way to stop being miserable is to stop being miserable. There's some dancehall-type rhythms going on in a couple of tracks featuring Cutty Ranks, and, although I'm still white, rural, and lower-middle-class, I really enjoyed them. Given that I loved the dancehall stuff on last year's Sofa Surfers album too (not to mention the wicked Super Cat track on The Neptunes Introduce... Clones [my review for Stylus goes up tomorrow]), I think it's time to say go on someone, recommend me some dancehall / ragga... I might get into it yet. Though I imagine this stuff I'm enjoying so far is incredibly diluted and pussy-whipped white-boy compared to, fuck knows, Sizzla or Sean Paul or whoever. I put my hands up and admit to knowing nothing about this stuff except that my old flatmate Chico loved it. But he also loved smoking dope till his eyes hurt and playing Worms all day on the PlayStation. Bell X1 - Music In Mouth Purely business. Two listens this evening, a bit of net-based research (thank you, All Music Guide, for telling me who the fuck they are) and some note-taking, and then 30 minutes at the bedroom PC writing up a review to hit Stylus tomorrow. Load of crap. The album, that is, not the review. The review is, of course, magnificent. Maybe. 8/21/2003 11:13:00 pm 0 comments   Mooning It struck me on Tuesday night that, despite editing for radio, you can still hear Eminem clearly use the phrase in "Lose Yourself". 8/21/2003 11:25:00 am 0 comments Wednesday, August 20, 2003   There is nothing to see here. 8/20/2003 03:35:00 pm 0 comments   Pete's not keen on The Neptunes album either! I get the idea that this is just his bloodyminded refusal to agree with his sister and her boyfriend (that's me, folks) about hiphop / music in general, all part of being 17. Meanwhile I'm mightily pissed off with the copy-protection device on The Neptunes Introduce... Clones because it's stopping me being able to play it properly on this - . Meanwhile "Fix Up Look Sharp" has managed to worm it's way into my head at last. Only to get blown the fuck out again by Lumidee's "Never Leave You (Uh Oooh)", which is possibly the best single of the year so far, up alongside !!!'s "Me & Giuliani..." and anything by Justin. I imagine Pete hates Lumidee's sublime, sweltering handclaps and perpetual, hook-ridden vocal chirrups as well, but Stephen (11, crap at sport, likes 50Cent) loves it. As well he should. In related news, I've added a link to Fractionals; I have no idea who he is but everytime I Google my own name his blog comes up as having quoted me, so he deserves a link. I also a have new email address - auspiciousfish@yahoo.co.uk - which should help propell the Auspicious Fish brand further towards world domination, or something. Rar. 8/20/2003 10:06:00 am 0 comments Monday, August 18, 2003   Today I'm being an artist... So said I to a couple of kids yesterday morning when I was liberating some black stones from the brook in Dawlish as they were cycling past and asked what I was doing. What am I doing? I also have a load of driftwood procurred from Dawlish Warren, and, in a week or so, Emma & I intend to travel up to Dartmoor for the day and "do our Richard Long thing". Why? Because I want to. Emma's constant declaration of "but I'm not an artist" is met by my rebuttal - "you are as soon as you do some art; ergo, do some art!" So to that end we shall spend Tuesday week "doing some art", with Dartmoor as the canvas and some black stones and driftwood as the paints and brushes. Anyway, what's Mr Benn got to do with any of this? The simple fact that right now I'm being a blog writer, tomorrow night I'll be a footballer, on Wednesday I'll be an audio/visual library assistant, on Thursday I'll be a beachcomber, at the weekend I'll be a music writer, on Tuesday week I'll be an artist... Mr Benn, of course, would enter the costume shop each day and magically the shopkeeper would appear to allow Mr Benn to try on a new costume, and with each new costume came a new life and a new set of experiences. I guess Sam in Quantum Leap experienced a similar thing, except that his guy-rope back to reality had been cut so he could never go back. Mr Benn, being a children's programme, had the safety of always returning to the shop and then work and then home. In my own way, I'm trying to be Mr Benn, avoiding simple, permanent definitions of myself by embracing passing fancies and availing myself of vague opportunities, trying on a new hat each day as I fancy it. Thus if I have an idea of something I'd like to do I shall try and facilitate doing it. Being an artist is one hat! The idea of using natural found objects to alter an environment and make it somehow more magical appeals to me massively and is something I've had buzzing around my brain for a while now. The tipping point was The Simpsons the other day when Homer became an artist, and Lisa mentioned that German chap who wraps entire buildings in fabric and places opened umbrellas alongside the freeway. And so, on Tuesday, that's what we shall do, using driftwood and black stones and Dartmoor. I intend to leave the found-object pieces in place, and as such will provide instructions on here explaining how to find them, should anybody wish to (assuming the don't get moved / destroyed / disassembled). Emma and I are both keen photographers too, so you can also expect some pictures of how things turn out. I like this; my imagination is firing all over the place. Yesterday I saw some twisting metal garden plant-stands of the type you might use to help runner beans grow, and it struck me that their fluid, chrome surfaces would look incredible juxtaposed with a forest surround, so I might well head down to B&Q to see if I can pick some up and try the idea out for size. I'm also thinking about doing things with flags, and contemplating buying a easel and some canvas... Tomorrow, of course, I might decide I want to be a spaceman again. Speaking of which; does anybody know where I can buy a spacesuit? 8/18/2003 10:18:00 am 0 comments   Elbow... 8/18/2003 10:15:00 am 0 comments Saturday, August 16, 2003   America is waiting… For the lights to come back on? The other night, in the midst of the blackout, people in NYC were reported to be directing the traffic with the aid of sparklers… I love this world… Some portentous, Godspeed / Explosions In The Sky style spoken words of the “blackening skies… industrial pain… critical capitalist mass…” type, some diva-esque backing vocals, possibly wordless, a beat, some strings, some squelch, a simultaneously beautiful and ominous video of strange, bleached-orange, future-animated bugs, crawlies, creepies, insects… Very good, stalled my finger on the ‘+’ button of the Sky remote for the remainder of the track (what else held me?- “Senorita”, Robbie Williams [if only to decipher the narrative of the starless video], Muse [their new album is not released until September 22nd over here, yet NME have reviewed it already- why?]; judiciously skipping past Marilyn Manson, “Frontin’” by Pharrell [sorry Emma, but it’s pedestrian and doesn’t do justice to Curtis] and that cunt from that band who did the Spiderman song, earnestly emoting through his fucking chin-beard). So what was this weird thing with the bugs and the beats and the layers that sounded so familiar that I was sure I owned it? “Eye For An Eye” by UNKLE. Psyence Fiction struck me as over-eager to be classic, striving to cover modern-hipster classic territory that spans a dozen2 albums in a dozen1 tracks, pudding over-egged and far too many cooks messing up the broth. To be Beasties, Prodigy, MBV, Mazzy Star, post-rock, trip-hop, soundscape, psyche-rock and everything else that Lavelle deemed so desperately to be cool all in the space of 50-odd minutes was much too much to ask, “New Grass” sample or not, Richard Ashcroft’s withered husk ruining the best track, DJ Shadow reined-in to someone else’s vision- pause I’m listening to My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and fuck me if this isn’t great2… Thanks to Cozen / David / Mr Howie Jr for the new tags! unpause -and it ended up being rubbish. I since traded my copy to Emma in exchange for Pre-Emptive Strike, an altogether more satisfying proposition. But this, this “Eye For An Eye”, it sounds good. The year has already reaped many musical rewards and looks set to continue to do so. Monday sees new records by The Neptunes and Elbow (why has every review of this record that I’ve seen so far appreciated it’s value but misunderstood it’s meaning?- I guess I’ll have to wait til Monday when my own take on it goes up on Stylus), and in the not-to-distant future there are records by Outkast, The Rapture, Luke Vibert and Bark Psychosis to look forward to, plus recent things I haven’t yet got hold of such as Dizzee and Cat Power, and doubtless countless other minor-masterpieces that i don’t even know exist yet. The more music I listen to the more music excites me (read that statement with emphasis on both scope and intensity and the more there is to get excited about in the future. I’ve just put on the CDR burnt with the four tracks thus far leaked from Codename: DustSucker, Bark Psychosis’ upcoming second album (nine years in the making!- well, 18 months in the making and 7 and a half years in the procrastination and deviation). Please Graham, some word on this soon. There must be record labels excited at the prospect of working with this music. I think part of the reason i enjoy the new Mogwai record is because they seem to be moving ever-more-explicitly close to Bark Psychosis in their sound, adding nuances and layers where before there was only bludgeoning dynamic, however awesome that was. “400 Winters” from DustSucker tails off into a beautiful, minimal coda played out on dwindling piano that slowly slips beyond the horizon, “Miss Abuse” has sparse, disquieting, rumbled bass and an exquisite acid line, while “Burning The City” emerging from the midst of a growing, percussive chaotic stamp into a strange and elegiac pop song which dreams of flying and escape, elliptical acoustic guitars, Graham’s subdued, half-whispered, faltering voice so comforting, and Lee Harris’ drums unmistakable and beautiful… “Did you ever hear the one? / yeah did you ever hear the one? / about that bird-girl / who went to sea / she took of from the rooftops / and landed next to me / said she’d seen it all…” I can’t wait for the rest to come… Carnival always falls on A Level results day and the two in tandem bring much ruin. Six years ago we began drinking at 11am, paused at 4pm, continued at 6pm, and by 8pm Anthony was unconscious beneath a pub sofa and I was supine, double-whisky & coke in hand, on the grass bank of the stream, lights and noise and people skipping through my fucked-up head and winding my alcoholic nausea into a tight ball that contained my sense and balance until I found myself at midnight, half way up a cliff, puking for all I was worth, only barely aware that 14 hours earlier I’d been awarded a couple of As and a fail and that this meant nothing to me whatsoever, not pride, not elation, not relief, not disappointment and shame for fucking-up Politics, nothing except the clear knowledge that now we can go and get pissed… and not stop. I didn’t stop for four years. Over the last six years Dawlish carnival has expanded almost exponentially. What had once been constituted by a Beautiful Baby competition, a display by some Majorettes and a half-arsed procession that was to Notting Hill what Starsailor are to Tim Buckley, now contains air displays, fairground rides, steel bands, closed-off streets, park & ride systems, raft races, pram races and 7 days of sheer, hellish miasma… The climax is Thursday evening, the middle of August, the height of summer, and a day of displays by the Red Arrows, by parachute display teams, by adrenaline-crazed ‘wing-walkers’ strapped to the top of dairy-endorsing biplanes… The population of Dawlish is approximately 12,000, which swells to probably double that for the six weeks of school holidays in the summer. On Thursday there were an estimated 120,000 people in Dawlish for the afternoon’s events… The sea just offshore teemed with boats both private and commercial, bay trips that normally cost £3.50 inflated to £10 a head for the duration of the displays and the boats crowded like Delhi buses, everyone with a sea-worthy vessel within ten miles ensconcing themselves beneath the vast field of sky that makes up the canvas for the planes, helicopters and parachutists… Many years ago, the first time the red Arrows performed at Dawlish carnival, a handful of us got incredibly stoned that lunchtime and then climbed Red Rock, a sandstone promontory at the root of Dawlish Warren, so that we could lay on our backs, stare upwards and be terrifyingly baffled by the manoeuvres of the smoke-trailing jets. Two years ago I went to the carnival procession intending to get properly drunk with four friends, re-united after completing university, our first proper session to just get pissed and laugh at each other and remember that how much we enjoy each other’s company in nearly three years. One no-show, one couldn’t stop, one got diverted by newer friends and I spent the evening showing in off in front of a girl who, two years later on, I’m still showing off in front of… This year… I missed most of it. At work in the library during the air displays, arrived home on the train just before 5pm to find 300 people on each side of the platform, all of them eager to get back to their hotels / tents / caravans / homes / tables booked for summer evening meals, and fought my way through the crowds, still dispersing, still enormous, up the cliff, and home. I spent the early evening writing (a review of the new Shack album, which you’ll find on Stylus later this week) and finally walked down into town at about 9pm, like a salmon fighting upstream as people flocked back up the hill in the opposite direction to mine. Emma was working until 10pm, so for 50 minutes or so I wandered around, saw the fairground rides still on the lawn, the grass turned to dust by 240,000 feet, lights and noise, an 8-piece steel band on the bandstand, amped up to a PA that blasted back at them from behind the audience to swell their numbers to 16 and approach quadraphonic sound, walked up Queen Street past the chip shop that, for one day only, hadn’t opening hours as such but rather kept frying until the potatoes and pies and fillets of cod had all gone, around the corner to the Lansdowne Hotel, the maddest pub in Dawlish (which is, believe it or not, a town full of mad pubs), the landlord a cycling nut and music aficionado named Ray, rickety scaffolding erected at the pub’s front and sticking out into the road by nearly half-a-dozen yards, at the top of which, some 20-feet up, was perched a band, Dawlish’s oldest band, old men with electric guitars and feathers in their hats drinking real ales from pewter tankards that they carry with them from pub to pub, playing “Smoke On The Water” and “Stand By Me” and a verse of “Hit Me Baby One More Time” for kicks, traffic halted and hesitant because of the crowds of people occupying the street below, glasses in hands, voices raised, cheering and singing and dancing outside the best Chinese takeaway in Dawlish (best because it is closest to a pub!- for a crafty pint whilst waiting for the family’s chow mein to fry), like The Beatles playing “Get Back” on the roof only mentalist and infinitely better and more important to the people below, because this is real and present and fucking good fun too… and what’s more it happens every year! I met Emma and her brother and her workmates at 10pm and we went for a couple of noisy, crowded, standing-in-the-road pints, recurrently stepping from the path of traffic, and then we went back to her friend’s house for pizza… Next year I’m taking the week off for it. Make everything more colourful… Make pop music strange and intriguing and amusing and fascinating. Take the formula and stretch and strain it into unusual shapes so that we know something is going to happen but-OH! we don’t know what. To this end I’ve been listening to Brian Eno, Mouse On Mars, Boredoms, Endless Summer by Fennesz, Outkast… Jazz, football, pop music, Maradona using his hands, Cantona puffing his chest out, Bowie wearing a pair of tights, Ian Brown making a mockery of miming, Bjork on the back of a truck, holding your arms out and your hands with palms upwards and staring into the rain as it drops from above and smiling, Remarkable… We may spend most of our time being bored but we don’t have to allow that boredom to be miserable, we can make it colourful and light and shimmering… If the lights go out, direct the traffic with sparklers… Not only does it make sense but it’s beautiful… Maybe the heat has finally got to my brain. 8/16/2003 09:11:00 pm 0 comments Thursday, August 14, 2003   Dead Meat. 8/14/2003 03:00:00 pm 0 comments   I met Emma at Dawlish carnival two years ago. Wow. That long. 8/14/2003 01:46:00 pm 0 comments   Dawlish carnival is a mad affair, with planes and beer and grockels. 8/14/2003 01:46:00 pm 0 comments Wednesday, August 13, 2003   I see Pitchfork's We Are The World column has reached dizzy new heights (blinded by the lights!) of pop coverage, as today's feautured songs include Fountains Of Wayne and El-P. Way to go for introducing the nasty little indiekids to pop music, Ryan! 8/13/2003 11:12:00 am 0 comments Tuesday, August 12, 2003   Me and Dr Mark on the train coming home from the university, across the aisle from us is a kid of about 20 with his younger brother and sister, and he's being a cunt to his little brother. Where's the line between harmless, albeit malevolent fun, and actual abuse? Dr Mark is a parent, and a very, very wise and good man. Both of us are hideously uncomfortable. Without going into detail, the 20-year-old is saying and doing stuff to his little brother, who's maybe 9, that is going to get burried deep down in his subconscious and, by the time he's 20, probably turn him into the same thoughtless, bullying wanker that is the brother he doubtlessly so despises now. We grow, we develop, we learn via imitation. What chance have you got if all you've got to imitate is shit? So anyway... The conversation between Mark and me turned to our own families and parents and backgrounds, relativism, class, expectations. We're both working class, comprehensive-school kids, and we both work in one of the most affluent universities in the country where almost all of the students (and a lot of the staff) come from serious silver-spoon stock, and we both feel hideously uncomfortable with this too a lot of the time. Talk turns to how uncomfortable Mark feels when labelled as "an intellectual" by his wife or family when, compared to others within his department, he doesn't feel like one. I mention how uncomfortable I feel when my parents look at me as if I'm an alien because I'd rather spend the evening listening to music than watching television, about how they think I'm highbrow, about the massive discomfort I felt when, whilst joking with my dad about the Simpsons episode when Homer starts panicking that he knows nothing about Bart's interests, my dad says he thinks one of my hobbies is "listening to weird noise". In the midst of this noisy, swelteringly hot train, talking about discomfort and expectation and the bonds of having great big working-class chips on our shoulders, I try and distill my philosophy regarding art, life, class, relativism, highbrow, lowbrow, etcetera, into one simpe, pure thing. "All I want to do," I say to Mark over the hum of the engine and the audible convection of heat from railroad metal, "is expand my mind to the point that I can perceive enough things to properly understand what's going to help me live my life better, and be happy." Mark nods. "And I'm not going to do that by buying fucking ornaments." "Now that's the soundbite that sums it all up," says Mark, "'ornaments'." Ornaments. What's the fucking point. 8/12/2003 11:16:00 pm 0 comments   As there isn't a spell-checker on Blogger, and my mind is both muddled and addled, I often keep a window up with Microsoft Word (yeah, so shoot me, anti-capitalists) open so I can quickly check spellings of anything I'm not 100% sure of (so I don't look like too much of a fool). Due to what I've just been writing I currently have the phrase "spontanaeity palette" in the Word file, which I thought was rather nice. 8/12/2003 02:30:00 pm 0 comments   Very impressed by my first listen to Mogwai's Happy Songs For Happy People last night. Far from having lost the intensity and ferocity of their earlier outings I think, if anything, they've gained a level of subtlty and control over the nuances of calm that's added dimensions to their sound. They couldn't go on producing "Like Herod" or "Xmas Steps" forever. Plus now they're using organs! Which means Nick loves them. 8/12/2003 09:50:00 am 0 comments Monday, August 11, 2003   One of the best albums I've heard in ages. Actually, no. I've heard loads of great albums lately, and several of them have been by Mouse On Mars. But this one is still fucking great 8/11/2003 04:59:00 pm 0 comments   Just to clarify... Freaky Trigger is aeons away from Tom Cox or Nick Hornby in almost every way, it's mere coincidence that the two paragraphs were juxtaposed that way blame the heat!); FT is a font of interesting, amusing and thought-provoking writing and ideas, whereas the other two are miserable, frightened, passionless old men who ought to be put down. I also think it's largely a good thing that FT has diversified into covering other areas of content, however, even though I think it's good that they've diversified, I also think it's kind of sad because diversification of this kind seems to me to be symptomatic of a developing maturity that goes hand-in-hand with a slow eking away of youthful passion and idealism. Or... It's kind of sad that Tom thinks Pop Music isn't the only thing worth writing about anymore... But it's also good. Because it's realistic. And correct. But... I hope you get what I mean. Or... Isn't it sad when you realise that other things are as important as the one thing you once thought was the most important thing in the world? The Record Review Freaky Trigger is far from impenetrable, and for that I am thankful. Some other things ARE impenetrable, although some are more worth trying to penetrate than others. Is the record review dead? No. I don't think so. As long as there are records, there should be record reviews. Yes, your mates may be a better source of suggestions of what you might like, but... The writers of reviews need to understand that the thing is more important than the review or the writer. I think. I need to think more. Rest assured I'm not stopping reviewing things, Todd, nor am I accusing you of killing it! Fabricated and forced redirections won't take. If it's going to change it'll do it naturally. I like the fact that the sleeve of Happy Songs For Happy People is proper silver. 8/11/2003 02:20:00 pm 0 comments   There is now a seemingly random list of stuff right at the bottom of the blog template. Fear not; I have not gone mad, it's so that these particular things are encoded into the HTML and therefore searchable via Google. Hence I've written the word 'sex' quite a few times, because it's still, I imagine, the most searched word on the 'net. From time to time I will add new words! 8/11/2003 10:35:00 am 0 comments Sunday, August 10, 2003   Hot sweat… Dunno who I’m writing for. Dunno who I’m listening for. In Borders (not Oxford Street, the perpendicular one) on Friday during my trip to London and I picked up Paul Morley’s new book, the one he got paid to write a 3-page advert for in The Guardian last week, and I read page 120, because Tim Hopkins told me on Thursday night in the pub that that’s the page on which he mentions Freaky Trigger and The Church of Me and various other webzines and blogs and such. And claims that they were created in his image. Biblical? Morley as father, Carlin as son, Ewing as Holy Spirit? Morley wrote that he felt prideful of this, of the fact that he had been the inspiration for the writings of others. Maybe so… The internet’s development may be hyperaccelerated but it’s still a very young medium of expression. We’re still mining the potential. Hell, we’re still mining the potential of music and people have been banging pieces of wood together and singing for aeons. Sinker tells me that Morley was never an anti-prog writer. Just as well. Subtly bowing to the past, saving esteem for people who epitomised better times since gone. The record review is a dead medium, says David Howie. Mark Sinker. Tom Ewing. Todd Burns. Only if you think the writing is more important than the music. The record review has a function- help us live our lives, aid us by cutting at least some of the chaff from the wheat in the ever-expanding forest of popular culture, popular music, tell us what might make our lives better, what might… Oh, you know. Am I inspired to write by the writing of others? I couldn’t give a toss who Paul Morley is. Or Ian Penman. I wish he had a blog. I can’t wait til I can read some everyday. My eyes don’t work properly. The record review is only dead because you think it is. Long live the review. It’s the reviewers who are dead. This reminds me of how I used to think of philosophy when i was studying it. How I still do think of it. I have no interest in names and dates and schools; just the ideas themselves, and how they can help us live our lives better, stretch ourselves that bit further towards happiness. I used to know the names of each member of all my favourite bands. I used to believe there was an unwritten rule of natural law which stated that four scruffy white guys with guitars was the best possible vessel for creating music. I used to think that people didn’t so much make music as find it. None of this is the case anymore. The names of the people who made the music are almost incidental to me now. It’s growing hot. Sunday afternoon in Devon in August and it’s at least as hot now as it was on Friday lunchtime eating a sandwich in Soho Square, maybe hotter, even in the shade, even with the window thrown as wide open as it will go. I’m desperate to let people know that I have nothing to say. I was going to buy a melodica but the cheapest I saw was £35. Having already spent £110 on CDs (Mouse On Mars, Augustus Pablo, Bowery Electric, Charles Mingus and others) this was too much. I want to listen to it, not create it. At the moment. Maybe one day. Freaky Trigger has been re-launched. The blogs have taken over- there are now five and the scope if no longer pop music (though New York London Paris Munich still exists) it is more. Art, food, film, television? I think those are the bases. Tim H is co-editor, writing about contemporary art. He said in the pub that he didn’t care for “sublimation of the self”, how can you capture it in words, what’s the point in trying to experience someone else’s abstracted absence? The triumph of blogs is that they can be updated anytime by anyone, teams of blog writers, and maybe the exchange and interaction can achieve something akin to the level of an educated pub debate. Yes. Yes. I see this. And yet… what I do is so solipsistic, it’s all about sublimation, loss of self, all that shit. I do forget who I am and what I’m doing. My skin is glistening with warmth. I can’t help but see Freaky Trigger’s re-launch, however interesting and worthy the content will be in the future, however much I may enjoy it (not that, like anything else, I read it as often as people may expect- I simply don’t have the time or patience), I can’t help but see it as a defeated slide into adulthood and maturity and balance and sense and… Because isn’t it as much about fun and bile and silly, irrational impulses and insanity and selfishness and greed and illogical feelings as it is about care and attention and balance? It’s a young man’s stride, maybe. Tom Cox, how did you get where you are? How are you not dead yet? Why are you so disgustingly void of charm or wit or awareness or passion? 14-tear-olds listen to loud music and I don’t understand it… You’re 27 for heaven’s sake man, stop simpering like a retired, crippled old man, cursing the passage of time and the loss of use and faculty. You’ve still got youth! That’s what I resent. These fuckers won’t die, won’t pass on the banner, won’t step aside. Careers are here to be worried about. Tony Parsons may be a fool and full of shit and his books may be dull and lacking in wonder and magic (if you’re going to write a whole book please make it fantastical and wonderful and unreal!- because otherwise what’s the point?) but at least he recognises his own lack of touch and steps aside from this sphere. Plus he’s 15 years older than you, Cox. Hornby, kill yourself. You don’t care anymore so why try and express your opinions to those that do? You really shouldn’t be scared. But you are. We’re equipped. Trust us. This is Sam and DeRogatis all over? Only DeRogatis knows who Sam is. He’s gunning for you, Jim. Great thinkers have shit sex-lives. 2001 was a great year for music. Shame I missed it until now. Check your facts. I haven’t got time. I’m guilty of it myself. Mouse On Mars put such a smile on my face, a beat and some sounds and here and there some clumsy horns or strings (on Idiology at least), like charmingly profound robots. Bollocks to Kraftwerk. Nothing to know, no cutting edge to care about, just the simple pleasure of sound. Yesterday Emma and I went on the boat-trip around Dawlish bay (not that it’s a bay, as such), which, despite having lived here for 24 years, I’ve never done before. Seen from the sea, the red sandstone cliffs of Dawlish, which I’ve become so used to seeing from land that I seldom notice they exist, even when I walk down them every day, became as spectacular and magnificent as anything you care to remember from a holiday program you saw as a child; stark, dusty and carved in strange, alien shapes by the wind and sea, crested with shags, the oddest of seabirds. I want to buy a small boat; how much is a small boat? A wooden dinghy with an outboard motor. I want to be able to swing around beneath those cliffs every day and look up at them from the water. 1. Never list anything. 2. Sweat pushes through pores, amalgamates with skin, refuses to evaporate or drip away, stains your chair. 3. Struggle to find context to use word ‘diachronic’. 4. See the movement of leaves on trees and curse the lack of real breeze. 5. Paperclip, broken friendship bracelet, crumpled paper tissue. 6. Hunter S Thompson, Spiderman, leavening bread. 7. Cellar door. 8. The first time you come together. 9. Unmanipulated digital photography as the nearest thing we have to the death of time; realisation of the eternal and universal presence and import of the ‘process’ 10. King Tubby Meets rockers Uptown. 37.5 degrees centigrade in London just now. As hot here, I imagine. Nothing is fixed, nothing is immutable. No permanency. I like this. 8/10/2003 03:03:00 pm 0 comments Saturday, August 09, 2003   I have been in London for the last two days drinking ale and buying records. I may tell you about it at some stage. I am also slowly becoming convinced that Mouse On Mars are the greatest band in the world. 8/09/2003 05:49:00 pm 0 comments Wednesday, August 06, 2003   Draught... My five-week goal draught ended last night with a simple tap-in from close range. Hardly spectacular or even notable (considering this is a 'friendly' kickabout rather than a league of any kind), but it is good for my footballing confidence. I thought I'd lost it there for a while since I knackered my hand. On the flipside I am however limping as my right hip has seized up. Hipsterism... I hate hipsters. I mean really fucking hate them. The only consolation is that they hate themselves more than I hate them. This whole kerfuffle with the new PFM column has cemented the reasons for my hate, the small-mindedness, the blinkered dismissal of other, the canonisation of the artist over the art itself, the obsession with ranks and lists and etiquette, the unwavering belief that they have somehow stumbled across "the truth", the path, the finishing line, the universal order, when there is no such thing. It twists my stomach and makes my temples clench. The snarling how can you like that, it's shit?, the condescension, the barely concealed disdain. Where does this come from? A projection of deep-seated self-loathing? Possibly. A desperate grasping at some kind of concrete fulcrum upon which to found the basis of one's identity in post-religious, post-social/cultural-stability times? You are not your record collection. And even if you were it would make you a small minded, precious little shit. But you're that already. It's the fascistic denial of the potential for other people to find joy in anything you yourself cannot (will not?) see as having the possibility of joy within it that disturbs me most. 'Friends' of mine telling me "you can't listen to techno, it's shit" when I was 16, "you can't like dance music, it's shit", "you can't have fun, it's shit..." Well fuck you. I am not about definitions and rules and linear routes. I want to be able to experience and understand everything that I see as worthwhile, whatever it is, wherever it comes from. This adhesion to some kind of indie meta-narrative and prizing of authenticity, belief in the romantic idea of artist as genius, obsession with cliques and movements and 'scenes'. Argh. Apologies for the complete lack of form and coherence here. This really is just bile-spilling time. There is no meta-narrative. There is no guidebook, there are no rules. How stupid is it to want one anyway? To have someone else make your decisions for you? Plugging in to the indie heirarchy isn't about discovering universal truth, a system for making essential qualitative judgements; it's about letting someone else make your decisions for you, about giving up your own existential control. Which is inauthentic. Hence, for what it's worth, Justin Timberlake is more authentic than, fuck, The Black Keys, say, or the fucking Field Mice, because hell, Justin's producers might have a lot of influence over his music, he might swoop across the audience at gigs on a guide-wire, but he knows what the fuck he is doing. Whereas these other little fuckers are pissing in the wind, running uphill towards nowhere, hands on their crotches, ideas holding their trousers up, fool fool fool fool fool. Ah, shit. You can't achieve authenticity by proxy simply by thinking you know what someone else is doing. Bitch you. I am these people's demographic anyway, more to the point. 24, spend a LOT of money on music (send me free stuff, people), tastes that are predominantly left-of-mainstream. But I hate it. So much. Fucking fake, illusiory, no integrity, no joy, no generosity, shit shit shit shit. Chris Ott reviews !!! and what he should have done (what he did) was write out his fucking CV and then bitch "see? i am ALLOWED to say i like this grudgingly!" Wipe your arse with your credentials and authenticy and realness and realise that you have no humanity. Why don't I ever just sit down and take a few hours to sort this shit out in ym head first, make some notes, formalise it, make me sound like less of a fucking angry young man? I'm off to watch the ducks and listen to Mouse On Mars. 8/06/2003 11:59:00 am 0 comments Tuesday, August 05, 2003   Hmmm... integrity? 8/05/2003 12:00:00 pm 0 comments   Just to let you know, if you didn't already, that Marcello is absolutely on fucking fire over at The Church of Me this week with his qualitative value rundown of the UK Top 40 Albums... Praise be. 8/05/2003 11:47:00 am 0 comments   !!! !!! GSL 2002 Ah! I can feel the seams coming apart at last. Some people will tell you how all the great songs were written long ago and how things don’t work now the way they used to. How it was so much better back then. There’s no craft now. It’s just not as good. And I say to them; fuck off. Are you not dead yet? Hope you die soon. Maybe, just maybe, the last fifty, sixty years, all those songs, all that technological development, rock n roll, psychedelia, punk, acid house; maybe that was all practice? Rehearsal? Maybe now we’ve learnt the ropes of popular music we can start to get down to the really fucking good stuff. !!! are the best band in New York right now. And they’re not even from New York. Get your head round that. As I understand it they’re something to do with Out Hud, a splinter, more focused maybe, pursuing some different vision. If this is tangential then cosine me, or sine me, or whatever. Just find me the gradient. Oh; here it is. Yes. It was here all along. What’s going on? Bass and drums and guitars, some organs, some horns, some electronic shit in there, dance music made for people to actually dance to. You know the climax? When the acid surges through and the percussion’s gone and you’re waiting and waiting and it builds and builds and then comes in, shocks your heart back into time, and then tumbles away just as fast? You know rock n roll bands forgot how to do that? It’s back. “Hammerhead” pulls itself apart through this great big mountain of percussion that scrambles shit up, and maybe it’s a bit like Vision Creation Newsun by Boredoms, but it isn’t that, which is enough. “KooKooKa Fuk-U” gets eaten in layers of noise and it’d be looking at its shoes if it wasn’t fucking dancing, OK? At one point “Intensify” just gives up and people start shouting, the human voice as the most exciting thing another human being can hear, damn right, but imagine how much more exciting it would sound with a beat. Go! Clap! The best beat! “Storm the Legion” opens up in a storm of trumpets and LSD before short-term memory loss makes itself known and friends start walking out of doors in the ceiling with absent looms on their faces, eyes focused on things that aren’t there. “LSD taught me a lot about me / or would I have figured it out naturally? / it’s 2 late 2 tell / cuz I’m walking to hell / with all the other acid casualties.” Of course they’re right. Everybody starts out thinking they’re opening up new realities. Few realise they’ve lost the one they had to start with when it trickles away though. Too many friends… Too right. Ah. That shit I was saying up top, about the past, about pop music’s historiography all being practice, rehearsal. !!! need all of pop music behind them. They are the product, the culmination of what’s happened before. It’s not just rock n roll, or punk, or funk, or dance; it’s all of it. This is a psychedelic experience as much as anything else. Headphones! Stereo bass! You mad fuckers! Like you haven’t turned me around enough already!? This is far from perfect. What’s perfect? But this is bleeding with energy and integrity and ideas. OK; idea. Singular. But what a fucking great idea. One tune is called “There’s No Fucking Rules, Dude” and it’s right. There are no rules. There never were. What’s coming next? “Me And Giuliani Down By The School Yard (A True Story)” is the next instalment. This is already old hat. It only just found it’s way over here. What’s next? What’s next? What’s next? Now. 8/05/2003 10:04:00 am 0 comments   He's a fat man... I feel so much better... Enjoy Bowling For Columbine. So Carly Simon is auctioning off the right to know who "You're So Vain" is about, but if you buy the right to know you don't get the right to tell anybody else, so you must carry the secret with you to the grave. I'd like to raise two points about this; 1; I thought everybody knew it was about Warren Beatty anyway? and 2; Who gives one? I mean, really? Drive that taxi. Drive that taxi to your daughter's wedding. I bet you think this post is about you, don't you, don't you, don't you? I reviewed the !!! album last night for Stylus (the eponymous one, not the new one) because it's only been out on this side of the pond for a few months. It didn't take long; an opening of the valve and a swift outpouring of tangential consciousness which lasted probably only half an hour and resulted in 600-odd words which I was very pleased with. Said review is now posted here, up above this. I always get my shit backwards. Oh well. Anyway... It just struck me this morning on the train that in the !!! review I mention each of the "eleven-year cycle" revolutions, the musical/cultural fulcrum's which are popularly accepted (in some circles) as being massively important moments of zeitgesit serendipity which irrevocably alter the playing field from then on in. Roughly speaking these are; 1955: Rock n Roll 1966: Psychedelia 1977: Punk 1988: Acid House Nothing unusual about that. It's common music-journalist practice to bring up these 'events'/'fulcrums'/'movements' every so often and bemoan the fact that we haven't had one for ages, that we were due one in 1999, man, and it didn't happen, it's all over, we're fucked, we've stalled, everything's been done already... Which is bullshit, first and foremost because it's not over yet and if you think it is you can fuck off and die. But mainly because those four movements and their associated years of impact and the whole meme of the "eleven-year cycle" are all completely arbitrary, just as all history is arbitrary (history existing only as recollection, collective OR individual, and never as actual past events because past events are past therefore how can they exist?- they cannot). But that's not the concerning thing, that I should fall prey to perpetuating a meme about moments of historical significance; we all do it. The thing that concerns me is the fact that these movements seem to bear some claim towards being all-encompassing, that these four movements are the only ones of true significance and development, that all other movements/genres/moments/events in popular musical history are merely incidental at best. And what really concerns me about this (clearly false) meme is that these four moments of significance are all white, with the possible exception of Rock n Roll (if only we [and by 'we' I don't actually mean we as in us; I mean them as in everybody else of course] were to fully accept the influence of Chuck Berry as being greater than Elvis Presley then we'd be getting somewhere with understanding it). I make the briefest mention of funk in the penultimate paragraph, but nowhere do I mention hiphop or soul or reggae or gospel or or or or all of which are probably as important to the development of !!!'s sound as psychedelia or acid house (what's with the capitalisation of genre names?- I shall remain inconsistent) if not more so. I've recognised this insidious little twist within the meme, and probably lots of other people have as well. Which is good. But it's still unsettling how it can slip into a review or article that isn't specifcally anything to do with it otherwise. The casual and unnoticed dismissal of whole tracts of popular culture, not because they're worthless or irrelevent, but because... well, why? In related news, Pitchfork have resurrected their We Are The World column, with devastatingly nobular (or even crapulent) results. "Pop, r'n'b, hiphop..." blah blahblah blahblah... Scott Plagenhoef started writing for them for this? In which Ryan says "this hiphop/pop/dancehall/garage tune is good! it's good because it's like indie music! hooray me!" Scott wants to try and fix what he perceives as being wrong with the site? You'd have to destroy it and start again from scratch, I'm afraid, Scott. I don't really hate gays/blacks/jews/opticians/traffic wardens anymore; in fact they're alright, some of them. the ones that are like me, anyway... It's the same thing, kids. And what's more the readers fucking hate it. You think I'd want anything to do with such nasty, small-minded little culture-fascists? Not a chance. Just heard "Love Shack" by The B-52s playing in the campus shop. Already the day is bright and clear and hot as you can imagine (tarmac melts, office workers loosen ties, Nick wears shorts in the library), but it has been intensified by that song. Forza. 8/05/2003 09:53:00 am 0 comments Monday, August 04, 2003   Coming soon (just for Sam)... November 1995 Nick get's involved in a huge fight which involves drugs, police, and excessive violence. Be there or be square! We all fuck-up from time to time. 8/04/2003 05:08:00 pm 0 comments   James Oldham strikes again in NME's longform review of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's second album, Take Them On, On Your Own; "The songs themselves (particularly the swagger of 'We're All In Love' and the breathtaking 'In Like The Rose') are cleverly arranged and accessible throughout." The Sunday Express beckons, James; you'd be a fool to resist. I think this may even trump Bang!'s feeble attempts to rank the 'goodness topography' of any given album in their new reviews. 8/04/2003 04:34:00 pm 0 comments Saturday, August 02, 2003   Asthma… Unable to breathe… Can't hardly breathe... *gasp* You don’t have to rush back in to things in order to prove something to yourself; you don’t have to define yourself by who you’re with or what you want. Definitions (and lists therefore) mean permanency and the world is not permanent. People are not fixed values and set qualities. People are processes. The world is a process. That includes you. This is also why lists are rockist; even mutable, transformable, changeable lists; their very existence at any point in time demonstrates a move for permanency. (One day I may define ‘rockist’. Ha!) Shoot down sacred cows? Are they unassailable now? After smashing the previous sacred cows themselves and claiming nothing is unassailable? That from now on everything has changed? No; they become a new order themselves. Maybe. Eric Cantona did it best. Stopped. At his peak. Imagine if Bowie had done! Who is it now who’s a crotchety old man, always harping on about the perfect aesthetic of rock music, decrying everything that came afterwards? Meltzer? Is he the one who believes nothing can get any better than The Rolling Stones and Hendrix and The Who? Who doesn’t bother anymore? He’s wrong, of course. But also right. Because what place does he have now to continue striving? To try and carry on forever? Bangs’ taste died with Bangs as did his writing but not alas his name and legend and mythology. You die. You stop. Or you try and carry on forever. Very few who try the latter maintain quality. Not that quality matters. Metal Box and London Calling came out in the year I was born. Don’t have heroes, and certainly don’t have these fuck-ups as heroes. Don’t make the reporter more important than the reported. Cult. Of. Celebrity. We all need… I am broken – fix me. No. I am bored – entertain me. I am absent – distract me. One thing I forgot to mention in the part about Paul Morley below, is that as much as he may curse the death of the 7” vinyl disc there is a whole generation after him who loves CDs. The silver, the perfect images pressed onto the surface, the very fact that the disc itself can be painted with an image to represent the music, to accentuate it. The intangible rainbow of colours that rise and evaporate in sunlight, streaming across the real surface of the disc, the part where the music lies, ripples of colour, all colours, in infinitesimal patterns and shifts. The socialist uniformity (utopia?) of the jewel box, so utterly throwaway and shelvable. Indestructible? I don’t think so. You can destroy them; it’s a joy to, because it takes effort, to physically snap a CD, to scar it’s surface; you have to mean it. Black plastic? No thank you. That’s your first kiss. I can’t remember it. The real magic is in putting the psychedelic silver disc into a black box and having this perfect sound emerge, time after time… Maybe. It’s not your magic. But you’re not writing for me. I’m not writing for you. 8/02/2003 10:26:00 am 0 comments   It's quite simple, isn't it? This isn't one of mine. I'm quite prideful of my images, but this might be better than most of mine. Wait till Todd hosts some images for me. Wait till you see the sunburst. I am not urban. 8/02/2003 12:59:00 am 1 comments   Oh for fuck's sake. Who cares about the fucking process of writing? Just fucking write. When did the writers become more important than the subject? Than the readers? You selfish twats. ARGH. I'm getting dragged into this. I say again; all I want to do is tell people what I love and why and then maybe they can understand and we can all love everything together... 8/02/2003 12:59:00 am 0 comments   Hmmm... K-Punk. I don't know who you are. Punkonscious. It doesn't have to be ugly though, does it? Ugly and unfriendly? Only city-dwellers have time for the ugliness-as-anti-professional. Maybe. I don't know. I want people to be able to read it. 8/02/2003 12:19:00 am 0 comments Friday, August 01, 2003   Trace a political kiss from your lover’s lips… Did I ever tell you that Jaws is my favourite film? Is Marcello looking to wind-up The Church of Me? Recent posts have erred more and more towards the explicit in terms of revealing the function of the blog (less The Church of Me than The Church of… well, those of us who read it know who, Marcello, and I’m almost crying as I’m writing this and I don’t even know you so fuck knows how you must feel every day); the possibility of a book is mentioned more and more often (it must happen, mustn’t it?). Your “history-book-thing”. I hope it’s helped. I hope it will continue to do so. Purely for selfish reasons, you understand? I have no idea who Jim DeRogatis is and I’ve never read Lester Bangs but thank you, Sam. One thing though; Reynolds has been around for a fair while… A bad stomach through Wednesday night as a result of a dodgy kebab (when will I stop filling my body with shit?) and all I could do at 4am was listen to The Colour Of Spring on headphones. My trail through the hinterland of 80s pop music continues apace with Tears For Fears; this week I went out and bought their first three albums after one too many encounters with “Mad World” for comfort over the last few months. How much have I enjoyed Songs From The Big Chair? A lot. I’m enjoying it now- “Shout” is a great tune. How much braver is this than, say, a legion of so-called alternative bands operating these days? Organs, synths, sax, guitar, lyrics about something (how old do I sound? < / fogey >). The new SFA is a nice enough pop album but there’s an intensity about this that Phantom Power is missing to its detriment. Maybe it’s an 80s thing, Depeche Mode, U2, earnestness, white flags, primal scream therapy… Didn’t Mansun want to sound like Tears For Fears? A shame they were such complete fools. Sitting at the train station, Thursday lunchtime, and the child next to me, maybe 6 or 7, stank of chips and TCP. Further down the platform two sisters, at a guess 18 and 15/16, stood together, cut from the same clay, neither stunning but the younger one that touch more alive, a shade slimmer, more confident, a touch luckier with the family genes than her older sister… How must that feel for the elder sibling? Soul destroying? Does she even notice? For the first time in a long time (as long as I can remember) I have fingernails. I’m not sure how this came about. What do I do with them? Quick, hurry, someone get a splinter so I can tweeze it out with my digital cartilage (is that what it is?- isn’t it the stuff your hair’s made of?). I so want to pick them to feel the satisfaction of pulling them from their roots, it’s so much better than slowly tearing off a scab… Interesting article in G2 today about the Fight Club-like phenomenon of New York’s “inexplicable mobs”. I, of course, being 24, male, mildly media-savvy and open to suggestion, want to start one of these in Shaldon or Cockwood or Pinhoe. Overseen magazine article headline; My cheap Spanish boobjob disfigured me for life… Word doesn’t like ‘boobjob’ but it suggests ‘blowjob’ quite willingly as an alternative- does this say something about Bill Gates? A scribble in my notebook (Moleskine, naturally) reads “think about going jumping…” As this is undated I must trust memory, never wise for me, and if memory serves it’s a reference to sitting on the breakwater that juts from Boatcove into the approximation of a bay that is Dawlish seafront, listening to the walkman (Manitoba or Bark Psychosis, I imagine- is it ever anything else these days?- I must make some more minidiscs) whilst some teenagers next to me (I was there first) debated whether or not to go jumping from the end of the breakwater. “Is it safe? It’s a long way down. Is it cold?” Do it, it’s ace, imagine that feeling between jumping and immersion, imagine that blood rush as you hit the water, the adrenaline… They jumped, but only after I’d made my way to the middle of the cliff, where I watched them like the voyeur I am. I haven’t jumped off the breakwater in years. Don’t go in the sea off Teignmouth. Work is underway to repair a broken sewage pipe. 2003 and we’re still pumping shit into the sea off our beaches. When the wind blows off the sea in winter, when the waves get chopped up and whipped across the seawall and beneath the viaduct, that orange foam which floats across the crazy-golf and discolours your alloy wheels, that’s not natural. Don’t go in the sea off the North Devon coast either; a fifteen-year-old Marine Biology student has spotted a Great White Shark. No doubt in Tring an eight-year-old flutist has seen Elvis… No, that’s cynical. Experts say that from her detailed description of the fish’s movements and size it could well be a Great White. It makes my laughing dismissal of the River Lizard which I tell Emma haunts the Exe seem a little foolish. Meanwhile more people decide to search for the Loch Ness Monster. Makes the carp in the ponds at the university seem slightly sinister. Get poisoned in the sea off the south coast of Devon. Get eaten in the sea off the north. As I keep telling myself; when you live in Dawlish everyday is a holiday. I’ve never been on ‘holiday’. As a child we couldn’t afford it and by the time I could have earned enough money to take myself away on holiday my modes of escapism had become long established. At various stages since I was, what?- four?- these have swung from my imaginary friend Robin to drawing to reading to playing football to taking drugs to getting drunk, all the while (all the while?- bit strong… from time to time) music there as the valve behind the valves? Escaping too, not from. Paul Morley in The Guardian Review (mental note from my good side; be careful Nick, you have no idea who the fuck this guy is but he’s probably quite important – mental note from my bad side; fuck it) bemoaning (is he though?- really?) the death of the single. The single is the 7”. The single is not multi-format. Though Morley himself admits that he helped introduce multi-formatting when he worked as Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s promotional director, his attitude towards this act of murdering something he loves seeming to be oh well, it’s dying anyway, and isn’t it fun seeing the shiny new things we can kill it with? There’s magic in those black wax dinner plates and their little grooves, magic in being able to see the stylus move inexorably to the middle of the record and it’s never-ending groove; getting lost in that groove and then being snapped out when it’s time to turn it over / put a new one on. Keeps the concentration up. Do CDs encourage us to make music an addition to our lives because we can just press ‘repeat’ and keep the spinning and spitting out music for ever? So we can do something else other than listen? So the 80s killed the 7” and with it the singles chart and TOTP; what else are they going to be blamed for? I was born in 1979, so you can shut up right now. The first single Morley bought was T Rex. At a guess he still has it somewhere, and even if the original has long been lost or broken or worn out, I imagine he’ll have found a replacement. He talks of being ‘defined’ by singles, by 7”s, by individual songs. Maybe each new 45 helped him grow as a person. Being ‘defined’. The first 7” I bought was “Bad” by Michael Jackson. After a week I used it as a frisbee because I was bored of it. It broke. Ch-ch-changes… The constant struggle for me has been to avoid definition, to keep myself out of those boxes. Maybe because the boxes I wanted access to were denied me, so therefore no boxes are good enough. Maybe because deep down I always suspected that there wasn’t anything to define. The idea that a record (or a succession of records) could define me, however much I love it (yes you, Spirit of Eden; yes you, The Stone Roses; yes you, Orbital ‘Brown’; yes you Paul’s Boutique [notice how I pick albums rather than singles?- rockist through and through!]). I’m Nick Southall and that’s as much as you’re getting. Googling one’s own name; the triumph of postmodernism?- the triumph of the drive to self-celebrity?- a desperate clutch at binary, abstracted snatches of fame in order to bolster an insecure mind? I also work for Nickelodeon, for a political organisation in Woolongong, South Africa, as a professional footballer, and, most weirdly, for Exeter City Council (not a relative!). But mostly, according to Google I am me. Which is reassuring. Morley’s praise of singles may be a devoutly poppist gesture (the Pope condemns dirty gays, says they shall not be allowed to marry, says it is against the “natural moral order”- oh come on John) but his tangible glee at the arrival of the iPod and the endless lists of untouchable, ether-dwelling songs, downloaded and paid for individually (if at all!- punk fucking rock!) reveals him as a definite rockist*. Why? Lists. Lists. Lists. Definition, permanency, codification, clarity, order, rules, balance, truth. Oh Paul. Didn’t you realise? His new book is about a journey (presumably metaphysical/fictional [“I don’t write fiction- I invent fact”]) with Kylie Minogue (she’s not hip anymore, Paul- “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” passed when The Flaming Lips covered it live, we all love “I Luv U” now, didn’t you know?) through history from “the pre-modern through the modern into the postmodern and beyond”. The truth is revealed in one sentence, with almost pornographic explicitness; “There will be no objects to hold or fetishise, people will simply collect lists.” There may be no “compulsive alphabetising”, but you can bet there’ll be even more compulsive pseudo-meritocratic ranking and rating. True chaos is anathema to pop music, and the rockist (and the poppist) cannot deal with it, so they list (verb; to list, lister, listing, listed).. People won’t even need to listen to songs anymore, they can just look at the lists. All is well. Oh, I mean it’s a really interesting article and everything, much better than Petridis’ awful Kraftwerk piece last week, but all this bemoaning the transmutation of the single from culturally resonant gem into marketing man’s commercial tool is negated by those four words that start the penultimate paragraph; “In my new book…” And to then go on and praise lists as well… I still can’t bring myself to massacre Tom Cox after his awful thing in The Sunday Times last weekend. “In my new book…” Playlist during the writing of this post; Tears For Fears, Wire, Tricky. *Not, of course, that the terms ‘rockist’ and ‘poppist’ mean fucking anything. Just so you know. 8/01/2003 11:45:00 pm 0 comments   ¿L¡nks¡ Stylus Grooves Measure ILX SFJ James in Italy James in Japan Freaky Trigger Marcello Happy and Lost Oli Office Dom Passantino Assistant Colin Cooper Geeta Dave Queen Jess Harvell Gareth Silver Dollar Woebotnik Septum Flux Not Today, Thank You Gutterbreakz De Young Nate Patrin Matos Andy K Haiku War Against Silence I Feel Love Rob K-Punk Nto Vlao Laputa Woebot Tim Finney Ben Robin Carmody TMFTML AK13 B Boy Blues Cha Cha Cha Clem Ian Mathers Meta Critic Blissblog Luka Freelance Mentalists Some Disco DJ Martian Pink Moose Leon Nayfakh Crumbling Loaf Enthusiastic But Mediocre iSpod Auspiciousfish news feed Nickipedia AusPishFish Arch¡ves << current Nothing Here Is True Nick Southall is Contributing Editor at Stylus Magazine and occasionally writes for various other places on and offline. You can contact him by emailing auspiciousfishNO@SPAMgmail.com All material © Nick Southall, 2003/2004/2005