Monday, January 24, 2005
Cat
So we finally had our pet cat put down yesterday. She was 21.
NJS
1/24/2005 10:16:00 am
Thursday, January 20, 2005
NNNNOOOOOOOOooooooo......
Not fucking that! You bastards!!!
NJS
1/20/2005 11:35:00 pm
Back of the net / Aberdeen
I was going to say that Wayne Rooney couldn’t score in an old peoples’ home, but on the stroke of 87 minutes he proved me wrong, the wee bastard. Exeter did themselves great credit up until that moment – ten minutes of shellshock at the off notwithstanding. I watched the game in the pub in Teignmouth and the atmosphere was electric; they stopped the schedule for Exeter Odeon last night and showed the football there instead. They don’t like it up ‘em.
The library seems double quiet today. This is an unexciting job at the best of times, but for three days a week over the last two years it has been more than bearable due to the presence in the office of someone who would gladly shoot me with elastic bands, bring me back chorizo from his visits to Spain, discuss metaphysics / art / existentialism over beer, listen to Orbital / Eno / Aphex Twin / Disco Inferno, laugh his arse off at Jam, swear unnecessarily, watch Japanese samurai films, be regaled with affections and offerings of food by an African dramatist of debatable sexuality, keep tardy hours and, generally, make going to work seem like a pleasure rather than a chore. It’s not that I dislike the other people I work with; far from it. But… to all intents and purposes, over the last two years, Billy has been my best mate, someone I see every day, talk with, laugh with, discuss interesting things with, drink with and get along with very well indeed on almost every level. He’s introduced me to countless people, places and ideas that I would never have come across.
The real Dr Bill, I know you’ll be reading this. You’ve been an inspiration, frankly, and I’ve loved working with you. Keep safe, mate.
NJS
1/20/2005 10:46:00 am
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Comments
Specifically those at Stylus and even more specifically this one;
Posted 01/18/2005 - 06:30:24 AM by BeeOKay:
"Let's hope this fares better than the Singles list, right?" Especially when you have a writer openly say I have listened to more B.S. pop than the Super Furry Animals. SFA are the best band in the world today, hands down, IMO.
from the bottom of the Top 50 Albums of the 00s article.
Fucking hell I hate people. I'm trying to wean myself off responding to the comments on Stylus, because the vocal readership appear to be 2/5s retarded. Remarks like that make me fear for the future of our species.
NJS
1/18/2005 11:41:00 am
Monday, January 17, 2005
Defeat
I can't deal with people who seem scared of life. Is that bad? Life isn't there to be scared of.
NJS
1/17/2005 01:58:00 pm
Overheard
"I can't do poetry; I can't read things into it."
NJS
1/17/2005 01:48:00 pm
The God Man
The God Man intrigues me more than almost any other passenger, I think. Certainly more than big-nose kid, whose nose is so desperate to get away from his head that it appears to be mere seconds away from jumping off his face. I’m sure, in a few years, when his countenance has found the measure of his head and adjusted accordingly, when he’s worn it in a touch more, it won’t look like it doesn’t belong there as much as it does now. But anyway. The God Man.
The God Man has a slight bounce to his walk, but it’s not a buoyancy born of arrogance; his feet splay slightly outwards, and he wears exceedingly sensible shoes that are probably waterproof and an exceedingly sensible green anorak thing that’s not a kagoule or a Berghaus walking jacket or something Liam Gallagher would wear, but the kind of thing your dad might have worn at some point in 1987 when he’d completely given up all hope of ever being anything but a parent again. The God Man wears a shirt and tie to work, and has a wife, who you might describe as comely, if that means “roundish, with chubby fingers”. They have a child. She sometimes picks him up from the train station in a knackered old Fiesta. The God Man wears glasses and has short, curly, fair hair which would be messy if it was long enough. This morning he seemed to fall asleep on the train while reading. He often reads. Sometimes he talks to the blonde girl of dubious morality who may have gone to public school and who is going out with someone I was at school with (@l3x R@msd3n, fyi – I saw them on NYE*), which is an odd combination, because he is The God Man.
A while ago he was reading Paul; A Man of Grit and Grace. I couldn’t properly catch the title of whatever he was reading today, but it was another book about Christianity in one way or another – not a Religious Book, or even a Book About Religion, but a book about people from religious books. A biography of a religious figure? I’ve never been impelled to read biographies anyway, because I’m not really interested in people’s lives in that way (biographies seem to be something that people get into reading when they’re older, as if you start reading about other people’s lives when you give up on your own), but reading a biography of a religious figure… even though, you know, Paul existed, it strikes me as being more like reading a biography of a fictional character than of a real person. But that’s not the most intriguing thing about The God Man – when he’s not reading books about religious figures, he reads magazines about making electronic music, about synthesizers and weird computer boxes and gizmos and flashing lights and nodules and modulators and wurlitzers and stuff. I find it odd to ally the religion with the electronic music. Because… The God Man… I get the impression that he draws a lot of strength from reading books like Paul; A Man of Grit and Grace. He looks like he draws strength from them. He looks like he doesn’t find it easy dealing with getting on the train in the morning, with walking along the platform, with whatever he does at his job. He looks… defeated. He looks like a librarian. He may bounce as he walks but his shoulders and stooped and he holds the straps of his satchel as if he couldn’t cope if he didn’t. Not dramatically so, like you see some people who look as if they can’t face life at all… but he looks… weary. I’m not explaining this very well. He almost looks as if he would resent living here and now, if he ever felt anything as strong as resentment; he looks as if all his feelings are mediated by… belief? I don’t know. That seems very patronising. But… what the hell. I do think that religious people are irrational. I do think faith is a coping mechanism. The God Man looks like he needs help coping. That he might also make baning drill n bass in a Aphex stylee intrigues me. How does he know the dubious blonde girl? Has he been religious all his life? Is Paul a role-model for him? Does he wish he was gritty? Does he like Mouse On Mars?
Also I saw an old friend in the pub on Saturday, very briefly. He works for the Environment Agency. Good man. He was with a woman who might have been a bit older than him (he being slightly younger than me), and she was the same “type” of woman (in a physical sense) as his mother. I don’t know if they were “together” together. Is that a sign of defeat, when you start finding yourself with women who resemble your mother?
*NYE being another story, you see. Did I already mention it? Last year, maybe. I hate New Year’s Eve. Emma does too but she won’t admit it; because we’re young she feels impelled to be out and about and doing something, having fun. So we went out. We lasted an hour before the whole hideous thing, the entire spectacle, was too much. Large men wearing only pants because they’re dressed as The Ultimate Warrior, women in blonde wigs who are so ugly they look like men in drag. Boys dressed as fairies. Queuing for half an hour to get a lukewarm drink. The awful compulsion to Be Seen To Be Having Fun. An hour, and we went to get a pizza and then returned home and drank wine and played Trivial Pursuit.
Today’s blog post is bought to you by the numbers 17, 1 and 5, and by the concept of defeat.
NJS
1/17/2005 11:56:00 am
Thursday, January 13, 2005
MORE FUCKING SONGS BY THAT BAND (look away if you hate Embrace) (or don't actually - read it and then listen to them again and see if you still hate them)
This Is Part Eight (8!) Of The Enormous Embrace Exercise
A song-by-song directory and exegesis of my in-and-out-of-love affair with The Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band On Acid
More B-sides, this time for the release of “Looking As You Are”, the third single from Out Of Nothing. The A-side has been slightly rejigged, but I’ve yet to hear it, so it can wait till another time (possible infinity, possibly forever, probably never) before I wax lyrical about it. I’ve not jibbered separately about different versions of songs before; why start now?
I Ache
Embrace’s evolution continues with “I Ache”, the most instantly noticeable of the new b-sides, an oddly dramatic piece of subdued acoustic spaceblues (figure that out – “oddly dramatic” and “subdued” at the same time) lashed through with caustic streams of silverblue guitar that makes you feel dizzy. Dark and narcotic, it sits alongside “Too Many Times” and “Flaming Red Hair” nicely, although it’s slower than both and much less digital than “FRH”. This gets on the 10-track b-sides CD, when I make the next one.
Soldier’s Hours
A fuzzblown grooving rocker with a raucous chorus, something akin to The Jesus & Mary Chain playing at Happy Mondays for a laugh. Messy in a very good way, energetic, audacious and layered with clashing cymbals and buzzing, fuzzing guitar. Weren’t the two rockers on the debut album meant to sound like this? Possibly. The title is cribbed from “Flaming Red Hair”, the arrangement from a version of “Milk & Honey”, a tune they’ve been trying to nail since the OON sessions and which has been through several incarnations. The version I might have heard a few times has a wonderful, anti-gravity, Spiritualized-esque intro, and a wonderful string arrangement to close which reminds of REM for some reason. It also has a slightly dodgy, tacked-on chorus pinched from a song called “Forever Young” which they played at the RAH years ago. It was very good, apart from the dodgy chorus. Anyway, “Soldier’s Hours” is a 3-minute fuzzrocker, and I like it. It would get on the long-form version of The Infamous Nick Southall-Approved Embrace B-Sides Compilation CD.
Madelaine
This is going to become a firm, firm favourite with fans. Scorched ballad, with perhaps the most honestly autobiographical lyrics Danny’s ever written, detailing his failing lovelife despite the level of fame and success he has achieved – witness “don’t let it go / I feel like everyone’s calling my name and I’m still alone / you ought to know / that I would change everything just to sing to you when you’re alone / and later I’ll wade in again / over my head / all my mind / I wanted to see what you meant / and I’m out of time / I’m useless and stupid / I suppose if I had you I’d let you go / there’s something inside me which stops me / I wish I could break its hold”. The titular girl (“I wanted to feel how I felt on that day I met Madelaine”) is incidental in identity; she’s a signifier for the idea of being in love with love rather than in love with a person. Our protagonist is infatuated with infatuation, and once the decline to steady company and easy passing time begins, once the butterflies and dizzy headaches begin to pass, he panics that it’s over and that he feels nothing. He’s said in the past that he worries he doesn’t feel things as strongly as other people do, doesn’t experience emotions in the same way others do. I used to think the same. Perhaps he’s an emotional adrenaline-junky, hooked on the fix of intense empathic sensation either positive or negative, the peaks and troughs, and unable to appreciate and live with the middling, semi-contented (medicated?) calm we mostly walk through in a daze, finding it claustrophobic. Perhaps that’s why he needs to be onstage, needs to be singing, needs to heighten his sense of awareness and be the centre of attention, repeatedly loading himself into a gun, placing himself in a position that many of us would fear intensely (but still love to be able to do). Sonically “Madelaine” starts quietly, piano and guitar, but it grows across four minutes, Richard adding layers of guitar until it becomes powerfully laden with noise, strafing and rising like Johnny Greenwood or Nick McCabe used to do, matching and then beating his brother for intensity. “Madelaine” is very, very good, and would get on the uber-discerning 10-track b-sides comp CD, never mind the long-form version.
The Final Say
Quite poppy to start, acoustic strum a la “Hooligan” or “Save Me” perhaps (actually sounds very familiar) but quieter. Some excellent, cheeky, really poptastic backing vocals over the verse, and a big dynamic lurch into the chorus that might have been described to me as being like “Caught In A Rush”. It is, I guess, but less jarring. A guitar bit, a chorus, more ace backing vocals; this is good, very competent, very nice tune. Apparently it was in the running to be on the album but was too “…cheeky?” according to a certain guitarist. I need to listen to it more – it’s the one that’s grabbed me least thus far.
NJS
1/13/2005 10:06:00 am
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Silence
The only thing I agree with Starsailor about is that "silence is easy". Three minutes of silence yesterday wasn't for people in South Asia whose homes, lives and families have been obliterated by nature; it was for the people in Britain and elsewhere in the Western world who stood still for the sake of feeling a little better about themselves. Silence helps NO ONE except the silent, and it only helps them feel less guilt about the fact that they are not dead. Remembering or thinking of the people who have died, 150,000 and counting (I dread the quarter of a million mark), does NOTHING for ANYBODY. Three minutes? Fuck off. Give three more pounds. Do something that's actually going to help people in Thailand and Malaysia and elsewhere rather than just making yourself feel better. I went for a walk at midday yesterday, meaning that I was silent for a few minutes, but I'm silent for many, many more minutes every day, and feel no need to be pious and demonstrative about it. Unless you know someone who has died in this tragedy then you are NOT grieving - you may be shocked, appalled, upset, but grief... well.
grief
n
1: intense sorrow caused by loss of a loved one (especially by death)
I refuse to believe that the people of this country are that afflicted by profound empathy that they are grieving for thousands of people they have never met. Not in the sense that I understand the word grief, anyway. Yet more Diana-isation, yet more commodification of anguish, yet another dick-measuring contest to see who is more upset, yet more public shows of pain instead of practical help. Get over yourselves. There's nothing wrong with a bit of British stiff-upper-lip, and it's infinitely preferable to this selfishly adolescent melancholy show-off contest.
PS. Kasabian sound like a very bad rip-off of Regular Fries, who themselves were not a great band. Kasabian's beats are generic cod-funky indie shite, their Beatles-indebted backwards fills are classicist-pleasing cynical wank, their tunes are shouty-shouty over-masculine bollocks. They're like Lo Fidelity Allstars with no talent, no fun, no sense of the ridiculous and a fear of the modern. They can FUCK OFF.
NJS
1/06/2005 09:55:00 am
Sunday, January 02, 2005
Bloc Party
All those things that people have said are actually true. They make my eyes feel too big for my head.
NJS
1/02/2005 11:12:00 pm
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