Friday, September 19, 2003
The thing is, only people who live / have lived in London care about London.
9/19/2003 11:28:00 am
Jeffrey Smart.
9/19/2003 10:01:00 am
Thursday, September 18, 2003
Normal service will resume when my head's back together.
9/18/2003 09:34:00 pm
My name is all over the fucking internet.
9/18/2003 11:13:00 am
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Name analysis, prompted by Ian. Two different results for my first name though, depending on whether you use the truncated version or not...
"Your name of Nick has given you an idealistic nature with a desire to help others. Your initiative often causes you to be the first to act when you see a need. Since you are impressionable and receptive, you feel the misfortunes of others very keenly. However, this name makes it awkward for you to express your deeper thoughts and feelings with finesse and diplomacy to the extent that your candid, sometimes blunt, manner of speaking creates misunderstandings with others. Being somewhat self-centred, you learn through your own experiences, as you rarely take advice from others. Yet, you are sensitive and very easily hurt and offended. You long for praise and appreciation for your efforts, but others find it difficult to understand you. You dislike monotony and system and enjoy being creative in an inventive way whether it be in interior decorating, music, art, crafts, or other endeavours that require versatility and skill. You are imaginative and visionary, somewhat of a perfectionist, yet the results of your efforts often fall short of your high expectations. A leadership position appeals to you because you would enjoy directing others rather than being directed. Your feelings are strong and you tend to react intensely to situations."
"Your first name of Nicholas has given you a clever, deep mind and the talent to excel in highly inspirational lines of endeavour as a dramatist, musician, writer, or artist. You can be lifted by beauty in all forms and you are at the most creative when inspired. Your expressive, affectionate nature responds very quickly through your feelings, but you must guard against being possessive and jealous. You feel and sense much that you do not fully understand and cannot express. Your delight in mystery could draw you into occult studies or religions. Unfortunately, uncontrolled thoughts make it difficult for you to retain emotional stability, and prevent you from finding proper peace and relaxation. You tend to centre your interest too much on whatever means the most to you, and then you become over-possessive and suffer through disillusionment and fear of losses."
Both of which are kind of accurate in some ways (much like horoscope character definitions - "reliable sex with a Virgo" it says for me [Taurus]) but are pretty much horseshit on the whole. Interestingly, if you tell the kabalarians your name is "Asshat" they say this;
"Your name of Asshat makes you quick-minded, versatile, and very expressive. You are adaptable and creative in responding to new situations. This name has given you an interest in people and a desire for new experiences. You have the ability to create a favourable first impression, and so you could do well in the fields of sales promotion or entertainment. The use of this name creates a lack of stability in your affairs as it inclines you to procrastinate. It spoils patience and weakens your stand in matters of principle. You are inclined to do whatever is expedient in order to avoid facing issues. You could suffer bitter experiences through attracting wrong types of association and can be drawn into circumstances involving you in unwise situations."
"Fucktard" is sadly not a part of their database (but "Asshat" is?! wtf?!).
What's in a name? Lots and lots, probably. But not this, I suspect.
9/17/2003 11:02:00 am
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Hmmm... Fact is, I'm quite a hard bastard and an ass-kicker when I need to be. I don't have a problem with the city, I just prefer clean air. I can dance and I can focus my eyes on a distant point.
9/16/2003 10:59:00 pm
One of my best friends is in Japan. James, I love you to bits. Even from thousands of miles away you make me laugh.
9/16/2003 04:27:00 pm
Radio Five Live had some interesting guff about delinquent children on yesterday (or maybe Sunday) morning, teachers living in fear of violence, having nervous breakdowns, suffering from depression, increased truancy, drug-taking, verbal and physical assualts by kids, kids with ADHD, kids on Ritalin, decreasing literacy etcetera etcetera. I'm not a teacher but my mum is, and several of my friends are becoming teachers ("why don't you, Nick?" - because I don't like kids), so I have possibly a slightly better idea of what goes on in schools than your average 20-something who isn't a teacher and doesn't have kids (plus the school my mum works at is one for special needs kids, so I hear first-hand from her the extremes of pupils' behavioural problems which are echoed in, but worse than, mainstream education).
Anyway, I'm particularly intrigued by the question of how, given all these facts about literacy and misbehavior and truancy and the like, GCSE and A Level results are still improving year-on-year. In the 45-minutes or so of the program I head, and in the various other discussions on the topic of bad behavior in schools over the last couple of years that I've heard on Five Live, the disparity between these two phenomena hasn't been addressed. I absolutely refuse to believe I'm the only person intrigued by this, so why isn't much more made of it?
9/16/2003 02:11:00 pm
In related news, Careless Talk Costs Lives is folding with issue 1 (it started with 12 and workd it's way backwards from there). While it's not good that another music magazine is failing I can't say I'm surprised because a; they didn't print anything I sent them (they picked Olav's review of Elbow's latest album over mine - Olav I luv yer but yer a git), b; the paper was far too nice and expensive, c; it's far too precious, and d; once again the furthest it appeared to get away from London was Brighton, which, as everybody not from London or Brighton knows, is just Camden with a coastline. Allegedly.
Where is the music magazine that I can read? Maybe, given NME's imminent (already happened if you live in London, as ever) relaunch as a smaller, glossier magazine (complete with contents page!), I ought to write to Conor McNicholas and try and convince him to hire me. I read NME every week from when I was 15 till I was 22, when the all-pervasive stench of narrow-minded, juvenile badness finally convinced me I was wasting my time. Wednesday's at university would be spent alone in the student union bar with a couple of pints of Guinness, a sandwich, and copies of NME and The Guardian (so sue me - I'm an ex-working class 20-something with pretentions of intelligence and liberalism, what am I meant to read?).
New Musical Express. New. Music. Not just old music played by young people with bad jackets. Please. There's nothing else.
9/16/2003 02:02:00 pm
Bang! have the most awful layout, both online and in print (slightly less bad in print, but only slightly). As if the general layout, typesetting and art direction wasn't scraggly and confusing enough Bang! started a new graphics feature as part of their reviews section a couple of months ago, whereby they would plot the "goodness topography" (my name for it, not theirs) of an album by giving each track a rank on a bar-chart (remember those from school?).
This has problems on several levels. For a start it looks crap, secondly it's passing off subjective opinion as mathematical fact, thirdly it takes up valuable space that could be filled more productively with words, and fourth-
Fourth...
Fourth...
Hmmm... How to get this across? Is it negligent to review a high-profile album when you've only heard, say, 13 of 18 tracks on that album? Possibly. If you then attempted to plot the "goodness topography" of the album though, and both ommitted some tracks because you hadn't heard them and also got the tracks you had heard in the wrong order, then I think that ups the negligence charge from possibly to probably. Well that's what Bang! did when they reviewed The Neptunes Present... Clones.
But that's not it. Because in the same issue Bang! also reviewed Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which they also plotted the "goodness topography" of. Except with Speakerboxx... they'd only heard ten songs. Ten songs out of 39. 39. One less than 40. i.e. They had heard 25% of it. Speakerboxxx... is a 140-minute monster and they offered their opinion after being exposed to something like 35-minutes of it. If that isn't professional negligence then I don't know what is.
9/16/2003 01:46:00 pm
Monday, September 15, 2003
Today's soundtrack;
Can Ege Bamyasi
Brian Eno Another Green World
The Rapture Echoes
Outkast Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
9/15/2003 04:23:00 pm
It's difficult to
understand red when you have
only ever seen
blue, even if people
have described red to you, and
you have imagined.
9/15/2003 11:20:00 am
ear·gasm (îr'gaz-em)
n.
The peak of musical excitement, characterized by strong feelings of pleasure and by a series of involuntary contractions of the muscles of the mouth, chest and genitals, usually accompanied by the ejaculation or utterance of verbal exclamations of pleasure by the listener. Also called climax.
v.
To have an eargasm.
9/15/2003 10:34:00 am
Sunday, September 14, 2003
I have Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.
9/14/2003 11:12:00 pm
Sam writes perhaps the most simply honest and affecting thing about 9/11 that I've read since Ian McEwan's piece during the aftermath about the messages people trapped in the WTC left on their loved one's answerphones. How is a 14-year-old (as Sam would have been back then) supposed to deal with distant death if the rest of us don't know how?
At 1pm (there or thereabouts) on Tuesday September the eleventh I was just stepping out of my car; before I turned the engine off someone on Radio Five Live (Simon Mayo?) announced that a plane had hit the WTC. I assumed it must be a microlite or something, stepped out of the car, and went about my business. An hour and a half later I got back in the car and turned the radio back on and the world had collapsed. I rushed home and sat glued to satellite television for the next few hours, trying to make sense of it, gather facts, understand, before going and playing football as I always do on a Tuesday evening. What else was I meant to do?
My business in that hour and a half was death. A schoolfriend of mine had died of cancer. 23, talented, engaged to be married. Dead. Saskia Carter. She'd been at RADA. She was a singer, dancer, actress, poet... You know when obituraries of people who die young say they were "full of life"? I always think that's bullshit. Saskia was. Someone actually did say of her once to me "if you want something doing, ask a busy person - Saskia's the busiest person. She can do anything." And it was true. The hour and a half had been spent discussing her memorial service with the person who'd said that about her; our old drama teacher. In a very real sense, death was all around that day.
A couple of weeks later I went to Saskia's memorial service, felt very strange, left early and then drank myself into a melancholic stupor in the space of barely an hour while watching a shit band made up of more ex-schoolfriends embarass themselves in a pub. 9/11. I still don't understand what it means.
9/14/2003 09:31:00 pm
|
|
