Friday, September 12, 2003
TWANBOC linked, at last. I am a lazy shithead.
9/12/2003 11:24:00 pm
I love Orbital. I wish I could articulate it.
If pushed, I will admit to being inspired by (in terms of writers) Hunter S Thompsn and AA Milne. But really, the reason I write about music is The Stone Roses, Orbital, and maybe, at a push, Jeff Buckley and The Verve.
9/12/2003 11:11:00 pm
Speaking purely from a second-hand perspective, depression is an evil, evil thing. I'm lucky that I'm blessed with a thick skin and an easy-going demeanour (I know that seems unlikely, but it's true).
9/12/2003 10:55:00 pm
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
She comes in colours
(black & blue); whiff of belly.
Lifted up to grass.
9/10/2003 11:24:00 am
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Last minute. The floodlights are off on the far pitch and the people who were playing or training or whatever over there are walking past. Some of them are on our third of the Astroturf now, walking back towards the gate behind the goal my team are attacking. The fat lady is singing. It’s 6-all. I’m on the left wing and Jim delivers the ball to me. Martin Henson is between me and the goal. It is very much the last minute. Martin is a big man and not young, incredibly skilful and with years of experience; but he’s not a defender. A touch with the left foot, I’m not sure where it’s going but I know where I want it to go; between his legs. It goes there, Martin is unbalanced and stumbles, teetering in the right direction to allow me to nip round and touch the ball back on to my right foot. But it bobbles, someone else is there, it knocks off them and back towards me, too high, and my step is out of synch with the ball, it hits my left thigh and moves forward slightly, knee height and 18, 24 inches away… Left foot, gentle but with a sense of ultimate purpose, the ball nearer the ground now, beneath and through and round at the same time, not clipped or hit but struck and struck perfectly at that, across the defender and the keeper and inexorably into the top far-corner! “Oh yes!”
People walking behind the goal and one of them stops and says “fucking good goal mate”, never seen him before, never see him again, for that split-second he’s my favourite person. Oh wow. What’s that feeling? Complete loss of conscious thought, complete surrender to instinct. It wasn’t me that struck that ball, it was my foot… If that makes sense. I’ve had a shit day and now it’s all alright. More than alright. I scored three goals and we won 7-6. Last-minute winner. Is that shallow? I don’t think so. It’s almost better than any song, that feeling as- no, not as but just before the ball hits the back of the net, the entire, endless and yet still non-existent moment from connection of foot and ball to the arrival of the ball in its proper place (the top corner!), the instant just before the ball pushes the net backwards and outwards… That’s the best feeling, when inevitability kicks in and no one can stop it, the second before climax.
Forza.
9/09/2003 11:51:00 pm
I've just acquired a copy of Britney and on the inside back cover our eponymous heroine looks astonishingly like Dusty. Complete double-take the first time I swung the jewel-case open.
9/09/2003 11:07:00 pm
Richard Long is also a genius. Here is his website.
9/09/2003 11:43:00 am
Andy Goldsworthy is a genius. Here is his website .
9/09/2003 11:41:00 am
On a plus point, Lisa and Ian are another two new recruits at Stylus who look to be filling holes that have needed attention for a while. Less of this fucking hand-wringing and more simple joy and pleasure and passion about music. Lisa's the only female music writer at Stylus and she's out on a limb at the moment (blog-scrapes being a baptism-of-fire), but I have a sneaking suspicion, a hunch maybe, that given a bit of time to get used to the scenery she'll be punching way above her weight. Plus having people who are both this good and reliable to boot means that I don't have to worry about churning out reviews so much.
9/09/2003 11:26:00 am
And it's not getting better, with criticism and fading hopes for elevenses.
9/09/2003 11:19:00 am
Laughing Stock and grey skies for breakfast...
9/09/2003 09:53:00 am
Monday, September 08, 2003
I got a parking ticket. I got a parking ticket for parking in Dawlish Warren carpark for an hour on Sunday morning whilst Billy, Eva and I went for a walk around the spit and ate blackberries straight off the brambles. In September. On a Sunday. When it was raining. And there were no other cars in the carpark. Well, only a hundred maybe, in a carpark that takes probably 800 cars. And we were parked at the far end by tyhe nature reserve, well away from the machines. I always used to park there on Sundays.
Fucking parking nazis. £20 for a morning's relaxation.
9/08/2003 11:30:00 pm
I'm not afraid of post-punk - I've been listening to Wire all weekend...
I can see Mark's point a bit better now he's framed it (he's not saying the knackered vocals of Lumidee are the only good thing about "Never Leave You" [and yes it would be horrendous if Beyoncé sang it - doubly so if she did her faux-sexualised Bond-girl dance routine all over the video like she does on "Baby Boy" {this time with no shoes! for double-sexiness!}]), but even so I'm still concerned about the inevitability with which post-punk is trotted out as a genesis point, influence, staging post. It's like 1996 all over again only instead of The Beatles and The Small Faces it's Wire or PiL or whoever who are being mythologised. People who can't sing have been making wonderful pop music since pop music began. People who can't sing have been singing since singing began. I guess in a sense then I am afraid of post-punk, afraid of it becoming a new musical monarchy, a new standard, a new heirarchy, even if I'm not afraid of the actual music. I don't like anybody who insists it was ever better in the past becasuet hat invalidates both now and the future, and although that's not what people are doing they are setting up others to do so if they are creating a moment when everything seems to have to be framed in the context of its relationship to something else (one specific thing).
9/08/2003 12:18:00 am
Nothing is ever finished, merely no longer worked on…
What am I…
The romantic or the realist… The romantic without realism (cynicism) is just a dreamer, carrying notions in his heart without any intention of ever setting them free, knowing that he wants them close because they’re fragile and special. He needs the dispassion and resignation, the bloody-mindedness or the realist in order to bring those dreams about, to act on them, to let them go and offer them the space that would give them life. Some of them will die, but some of them will fly. And none of them will go anywhere if you keep them to your chest. Perhaps. Likewise the realist needs dreams to add colour and sound, to reveal pathways…
This is storytelling, what I do. Each time I write here I am telling the story of me, the story of how I felt about a record, an idea, a person, a strange event. A dream or an imagining. The structure and placement of the words has no more import other than to keep you (me) reading, smiling, furrowing the brow. Nothing really beautiful exists in complete abstraction; it all needs to come back somehow to stories, the stories we tell each other with words, with songs, sounds, images, colours, cloths, tastes, scents, kisses… Science has pushed us to deny the Grand Story and instead see our lives as series of anecdotes, tales and comments, and this is fine. This is better. Because once the scale of the story is reduced it becomes controllable, in part, by the person at the centre of it. Stories are how we understand, how we progress, how we enjoy. A beat can be a story, a wave can be a story. A dasein is a story. Stories move through and over and between one another and they never end, they simply stop being told, or become another story, or are forgotten for a while.
The opposite of the story is the spectacle, the image without narrative, the object without history. The spectacle can be beautiful but it cannot be profound. It can only have the appearance of profundity. This is because the spectacle does not move, it is a stasis, and a stasis is a lie and a figment. All real things have movement, all real things change and decay; it’s by changing and decaying that they help us learn. By touching something and eroding it we take from it and learn from it, and continue its own story as well as our own. The spectacle cannot be touched because it has no substance. Substance is movement; even if only internal, and the spectacle has no movement because it has no animation and no story. Anything without a story is still and dead and forgotten.
The writer is interested in the creation of spectacle, of the freezing of imagined perfection, capturing something and holding it forever. Denying it movement. Removing its story. The pleasure for the writer comes in the placement of the words themselves, in the arrangement of the spectacle, the manipulation of their poses to assume aesthetic loveliness. The storyteller is interested in the telling, not the placement. Telling must necessarily involve communication, parlance, discourse; all of which are antithetical to the spectacle because they encourage movement and decay and change and would therefore corrode and alter the aesthetic of the spectacle.
The romantic holds his notions to his chest as the writer arranges words into beautiful shapes and stills them of movement. The realist casts away notions to allow them to become stories.
I want to be a storyteller, not a writer.
9/08/2003 12:00:00 am
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