Thursday, February 24, 2005
Soccer
On Tuesday I was bullied into playing football despite the hideous cold I’m currently getting over (last three days = gravely voice and occasional exorcism of flecks of phlegm via husky cough [ladies my voice is sexy] – worst part = last Thursday when it started with that awful sore throat which you just know presages a week or more of feeling like shit) because my brother had insisted we still play despite the fact that most of our team are Arsenal and Liverpool fans, and hence would be staying in out of the cold to watch their Champions League endeavours. Not so for me – older brother whinges and bitches at me until I feel guilty and relent to running around in sub-zero temperatures on leg-deadening Astroturf. Bastard.
Only seven of us turned up, and on the next pitch there were 5 youngsters (mid-to-late teens) being put through their paces by their coach / trainer / manager. They looked fit. They had bibs. They did a proper warm-up. We’ve seen them train every week for the last year and sometimes they run around cones and all sorts of other scary shit like that. “Our team” on Tuesday comprised two 17 year olds who are just stepping up to Sunday morning football, my decrepit 34 year old brother with bad ankles, Nigel (mid 30s), Rick (mid 30s) and John (25) the goalkeeper who thinks he’s a striker. And me – 25, lazy, a stone overweight, and riddled with malaria almost to the point of respiratory failure.
So we challenged these super-duper kids to a game.
Oh foolhardy souls. A game against STRANGERS, and YOUNG STRANGERS at that.
Younger, fitter, technically more skilful, better drilled – we stuffed them 6-2. I scored three or four, nutmegged one of them in wonderfully cheeky fashion, and missed a handful of chances too, including a spectacular angled volley reminiscent of that infamous Van Basten goal (only mine went slightly over) and a couple of lovely curled chips which hit the post or landed on the roof of the net. The fact that I kept trying to race past people only to stop halfway and hack up my lungs notwithstanding, I played pretty well, certainly much better than last week, but me scoring a few goals wasn’t the reason we won against the kids. It was down to experience and composure, teamwork. We knew our strengths and weaknesses better than they did, knew how to keep the ball, didn’t throw people forward leaving holes at the back, created chances without faffing around, and took most of those chances too.
I’m meant to be playing again tonight with the university guys. In the snow. At the highest point in Exeter. I may be some time.
NJS
2/24/2005 09:55:00 am
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Eating cheese-on-toast at 10pm
Some kind of fucked-up, left-hand-drive Aston Martin Vanquish or something, automatic too, took me a while to figure out how to deal with it, how to get it to accelerate really fast, two of them, one with a pointy front. I think I preferred the non-pointy one, but drove the pointy one more. Not sure why. A tiny orb of plutonium or something in some kind of weird fucking psychic ring that stopped it leaking evil radiation. A big, one-armed, hairless mutant dude who was kind of squidgy and horrible but nice in his personality, and who had some weird telepathic ability or something and could tell me what was going on, what to do with the package, where to go, etcetera. I had a gun, too.
Last night I had a fucked-up special agent dream, in case you didn’t guess.
One other regular weird guy on the train is the chap with the big black briefcase on his lap, who looks like Mr Bronson from Grange Hill, moustache, glasses, whisky nose. He sits, arms on briefcase, head forward, blotting out the fucking terrifying existential disgust of his train-based commute every morning with music. He’s been through three pairs of headphones in the last two and a half years, steadily moving upwards into external noise-reduction territory, cutting out the outside world. At first he had some Sony W.Ear ones, then he moved on to the Sennheiser PX range. I have the 100s, which are open-backed and wonderful. The 200s are closed-back, and good, but I find them slightly disorienting. Above them in the range are a pair I can’t remember the number of, but which cost considerably more and which have some noise-reduction thing going on, blotting out external sound by creating frequencies which nullify those not from the music. Fuck knows how that works. They’re designed for use on airplanes, primarily. He had them for a while. Now he has some Bose things which are closed-back, have a little red LED on them, and fit completely over his ears. He’s had them for longer than either of the other two, so I assume he’s finally happy with them. Most of the time his eyes are closed and his head down, but he doesn’t look asleep. He looks… disgusted. He looks like he can’t stand being near all these horrible, talking, sweating, breathing, commuting people, reading their copies of The Sun and drinking their soda pop and finding solace in their bibles.
I’d love to know what he listens to.
I bet it isn’t the new Doves album.
Doves confound me. By rights they should be my favourite band. Expansive, intricate, melancholic psychedelic rock informed heavily by the structure and production of dance music. I used to have The Cedar EP on 10” vinyl, bought the day it came out. My friend Magnus hadn’t heard of them. I took it round his house. He could tell you what a record was by looking at the grooves. “This looks like a dance record? They’re a rock band?” “They used to be… Sub Sub.” “Ah.” It was ace, we both loved it. On the b-side was a tune called “Rise” which had harmonica and twilight forest noises. On their next single they had a track called “Break Me Gently (Incidental)” which I once played via a nice pair of headphones to a girl coming up on ecstasy and she said it was better than orgasm. There were these bubbling noises in it which drifted upwards. Actually I think she said it made her orgasm. But she table-danced in her holidays, had her clitoris pierced and claimed she could orgasm by walking upstairs in hotpants. Her boyfriend lived with me. He’s a good guy, if… indecisive. Just ask James! Oli and I taught him to cook. Now he runs a restaurant. Possibly.
Some Cities is another “good” Doves album. It’s less prog than the last one, which is good, because the over-reliance on production really began to grate on me with Last Broadcast. The songs are shorter, there’s more guitar. It sounds brilliant, because they’re great producers, but Jimi still can’t sing. His weak lungs, his inability to sustain his breath (and therefore hold a note) mean that every song he sings is structured the same melodically, each line falling away as his breath fails and falters and vanishes. But at least he’s not the other guy, who seems to exist only as a device to attempt sabotage on Doves’ songs by having some kind of grating, squeaky asthma attack over the top of them – when he takes lead vocals for one song and seems to deliberately sing it off-key, out-of-tune and in any annoying voice, you have to wonder how stoned they were in the studio when they thought it was a good idea. Their heritage as Sub Sub, which was initially what marked them out as special and gave them a creative and atmospheric edge over other bands emerging at the same time (Witness, Coldplay), possibly, but now their… lack of songwriting ability? No. Lack of a way with a melody, or a hook, or a chorus (I’m not bothered about a whole song, not really) is starting to severely hamper my enjoyment of them. They still seem to compose music in terms of structure and layering like they were making dance tracks intended for ingestion in a club, I’m not sure how, just in some intangible way, but… I’m not one for subscribing to Noel Gallagher’s belief that any “great” “song” can be played solo on acoustic guitar and still sound great (in fact I think that’s ludicrous piffle), but, you know, I’d like some hooks.
Oh well.
Work sort of kind of in a way gave me a rise / promotion yesterday, starting April 1st.
Oli – what is it you’re trying to recapture?
NJS
2/23/2005 10:16:00 am
Monday, February 21, 2005
RIP
Oh yeah - this guy I know of, had a monkey in his pocket once, I think it was drunk, I think it had been sick in his pocket, he was drunk as well, we were in San Diego I think, that summer was kinda blurred but we were definitely there - anyway, this guy was a writer, or something, looked like a bum to me but what the hell, sometimes you can't tell, you know? I've seen professors who look like bums, who cough up bits of their lungs, who smoke Silk Cuts not because they're low tar but because it's kinda like giving up, for them, when they don't wanna give up, not really. But yeah, this guy had a load of drugs in his trunk. Years ago this girl I liked gave me a book with some of his letters in and said it was cos I reminded her of him - he was the only writer I've ever been compared to and not felt, you know, offended, like someone was demeaning me and what I do (Nick Hornby? I mean, for fuck's sake, come on, he's been dead for years). But yeah, this guy with the slightly-tinted glasses and the rifle and the trunk full of drugs. I think he wrote for a paper. I never liked Lester Bangs because he wrote about his music, not mine. But the guy with the monkey in his pocket and the trunk of drugs and the rifle, kinda reclusive, I hear he blew his own fucking head off with a shotgun because he just couldn't take the world anymore, couldn't take anymore of Bush and Republicans and fucking idiots running after money.
I hear you, man. I hear you. I'd blow my own head off if I thought it would change anything.
NJS
2/21/2005 08:00:00 pm
We all love the party.
karim says:
sick
Sick Mouthy says:
golrim
karim says:
i fucking love bloc party so much
karim says:
my god
karim says:
i'm obsessed
Sick Mouthy says:
you need patrick wolf in your life
karim says:
i can't believe J didn't enthuse about them more
Sick Mouthy says:
have you got all the b-sides?
karim says:
months ago
karim says:
i've got little thoughts
Sick Mouthy says:
ALL OF THEM
karim says:
no
karim says:
give them to me
Sick Mouthy says:
email me yr address
karim says:
*.****@**********.com
Sick Mouthy says:
i'll burn you a cd of my itunes playlist
Sick Mouthy says:
POSTAL ADDRESS
karim says:
i've listened to nothing else for about 6 weeks
karim says:
and it's grown on me like the cancer
Sick Mouthy says:
haha
Sick Mouthy says:
aids cancer
karim says:
like you said
karim says:
i actually can't remember the last time i loved a record like this
Sick Mouthy says:
aye
Sick Mouthy says:
it is greb
karim says:
my current favourite bit is the last 30 seconds of positive tension
Sick Mouthy says:
grebt
Sick Mouthy says:
yeah
Sick Mouthy says:
it struck me the other day what it is that they do
Sick Mouthy says:
they're postrock
Sick Mouthy says:
like mogwai or something
karim says:
yeah
karim says:
they are very mogwai
Sick Mouthy says:
but with all the boring bits replaced
karim says:
in places
Sick Mouthy says:
by great hooks
karim says:
aye
karim says:
aye
Sick Mouthy says:
and played double fast
Sick Mouthy says:
hence the "no songs" accusations by the psty embrace fans
karim says:
they remind me of so many things
Sick Mouthy says:
did you see my review?
karim says:
all of them good
karim says:
yeah
karim says:
you're right
karim says:
i reckon i had an epiphany with the album about 2 weeks ago
Sick Mouthy says:
aye
karim says:
and then i suddenly hated myself for not going to see them when they played manchester THREE TIMES last autumn
karim says:
so i am going in april
Sick Mouthy says:
aye
karim says:
i will break mcnamara's legs for a ticket
Sick Mouthy says:
they're not comign any closer than portsmouth
Sick Mouthy says:
which is gutting
karim says:
i fucking love it so much
karim says:
i feel emancipated
Sick Mouthy says:
haha
karim says:
i forgot what it was like to hear something new and go HOLY SHIT THIS IS GREAT
NJS
2/21/2005 06:44:00 pm
Sitting on a cornflake
There’s a British character actor, portly, miserable-looking, late 30s, early 40s, who played the devil (possibly) in Russell T Davies’ The Second Coming, the vaguely controversial, sub-His Dark Materials religious drama broadcast on ITV early in 2003. He’s also in early Doors, among others things. He’s called Mark Benton, and a guy on my train looks just like him, only slightly balding too, which just adds to the air of defeated existential misery that he carries with himself. I have a vague impression of him sometimes listening to a walkman, but I think I’m mistaken. Certainly he is sometimes reading a book, but is more often asleep.
I sat next to him today. He was reading a book. It was The Bible. When he’d finished with it (he didn’t appear to read much) he produced a small purple zip bag, not much larger than the book itself, and placed the book in it. It looked to have been designed especially for the book. I wasn’t surprised.
I feel sorry for that guy.
The man on the cliff was playing scrabble with an old lady, in the shelter on the cliff, at 3pm. He doesn’t look like the type of man you might imagine would live in a shelter on top of a cliff. He’s always clean-shaven. Where does he shave?
NJS
2/21/2005 05:10:00 pm
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Slight Return
I knew I was having a shit game when I nutmegged two defenders in a row, turned into space, and put my foot through the ball as hard as I fucking could (which is pretty hard) only to see it sail six inches over the bar. I had a few decent touches, made a lot of runs, had a couple of shots which hit the wrong side of the post, made a few decent passes, but nothing come off, nothing worked. I must’ve made about half a dozen nutmegs during the game, two or three of them passes straight through defenders’ legs, but I didn’t manage to score, I don’t think I got an assist, and I ended the hour and a half feeling useless and stupid. Last week I’d been knocking goals in for fun. This week, nothing. Why?
I walked a different way down the cliff this morning as I left home slightly earlier. I walked along the path which takes you along the outside of the cliff top rather than down the worn trail which goes straight through the middle. This meant I passed by both concrete shelters rather than just one. In the shelter I normally don’t pass by, there was a man wrapped up warm in a thick coat, hood pulled tight over his face, laying down asleep on the bench, head rested on a duffle bag. The man on the cliff is back, although I strongly suspect he never went away – quite possibly he just moved to the other shelter at some point. And he is most certainly living there.
NJS
2/16/2005 09:54:00 am
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