Hello chaps.
Today's playlist is a mixed bag of:
* Dustbowl folk.
* Early 60's surf and proto-garage.
* Appalachia blues, Virginian bluegrass, Chicago Jazz.
* Californian drinking songs.
* Sunburnt alt-country.
* Spoken word Beat.
* Deep southern gospel.
* Scratchy come-down punk.
So, here it is: http://open.spotify.com/user/trade_winds/playlist/7lLv67hCLBSyN1SFDybPla
Enjoy!
Love,
Nick.
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Friday, 9 July 2010
Blotting Paper
I used to have a bizarre recurrent dream where I was in a completely white landscape, a three-dimensional sheet of paper, empty except for a crudely drawn, child's idea of a house – a wooden cube, slatted in unblemished logs that never came from a living tree, yellow-lit, steamy windows, amiably puffing chimney like an old man's pipe, all under a brilliant white sky that was somehow bright without being distinct. There was no division in colour and perspective between the sky and the land. Clumped around the house in a geometrical spinney were four trees; arrow-straight brown trunks, with five cantilevered branches projecting from the crown, then a fuzz of scribbled green lines for the leaves.
The house stood at the bottom of a hill – there were gradients in this landscape, although because of the radiance of the sky, there were no shadows, so you couldn’t see an angle until you started walking up (or down) it. I used to be at the top of this steep hill, this ghost hill, and for some reason or other, I had to run down to the bottom, racing against (I have no idea why) the White Queen in the Narnia books. I always used to get off the mark with a comfortable lead, and my feet became winged and the air parted like a curtain as I sped downhill at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed, but she gained on me step by step as I began to slow, and instead of breaking the barrier and winning, she always drew level with me. Then, glancing left, she stretched and warped and fused, like burning photographs or smeared oil-paintings, and then I did too.
I used to be able to think I could feel my component cells, then atoms stretching like elastic to the invisible horizons – not painful, but excruciatingly uncomfortable and alien. The space between my molecules became an empty ocean, then a gulf filled with wheeling points of light, then a void so vast and incalcuble and touched with faint stars at distances so massive as to be functionally infinite that my mind, even within the dream, shut down entirely.
Well, around about this point, I assume my brain used to mentally hiccup, as happens when you encounter something that is just too big and strange (Thinking about what was there before God, and before that, and before thatargharghargh) and triped over the quantum door-step into confused awakening.
There’s probably some deep Freudian pulse to all this, but I don’t know what it is and I won’t linger on it.
The house stood at the bottom of a hill – there were gradients in this landscape, although because of the radiance of the sky, there were no shadows, so you couldn’t see an angle until you started walking up (or down) it. I used to be at the top of this steep hill, this ghost hill, and for some reason or other, I had to run down to the bottom, racing against (I have no idea why) the White Queen in the Narnia books. I always used to get off the mark with a comfortable lead, and my feet became winged and the air parted like a curtain as I sped downhill at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed, but she gained on me step by step as I began to slow, and instead of breaking the barrier and winning, she always drew level with me. Then, glancing left, she stretched and warped and fused, like burning photographs or smeared oil-paintings, and then I did too.
I used to be able to think I could feel my component cells, then atoms stretching like elastic to the invisible horizons – not painful, but excruciatingly uncomfortable and alien. The space between my molecules became an empty ocean, then a gulf filled with wheeling points of light, then a void so vast and incalcuble and touched with faint stars at distances so massive as to be functionally infinite that my mind, even within the dream, shut down entirely.
Well, around about this point, I assume my brain used to mentally hiccup, as happens when you encounter something that is just too big and strange (Thinking about what was there before God, and before that, and before thatargharghargh) and triped over the quantum door-step into confused awakening.
There’s probably some deep Freudian pulse to all this, but I don’t know what it is and I won’t linger on it.
"Later that day in gym class, she ate a mouthful of anthrax, go to sleep".
Here is the first of a string of stuff that I quite like to listen to. Today's humble offering is titled 'Wooze Patrol', and is a mixed bag of 1940's jazz, 1960's doo-wop, C86 indie-pop, Americana folk pre and post dustbowl, mid-60's psychedelia, and orchestral contemporary folk. Make of that what you will.
spotify:user:trade_winds:playlist:4XLtsVj3L3v4962VpUkfLn
Enjoy!
Nick x.
NB - This is a Spotify playlist, so you will need Spotify to play it. Fairly obviously.
spotify:user:trade_winds:playlist:4XLtsVj3L3v4962VpUkfLn
Enjoy!
Nick x.
NB - This is a Spotify playlist, so you will need Spotify to play it. Fairly obviously.
Saturday, 19 June 2010
Patterns
"I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors hare something monstrous about them." - Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Realms
Light lingers long by the door. A crack in the paintwork of the windowframe that I cannot see because it is too small threads a persistant eddy of cool air into my forearm, brushing a crease in the small blonde hairs on my medial muscles and running parellel down the wave-streak of my slightly twisted lateral muscle, as if the wind was surfing on my still skin down its length. There is the faintest of whistlings. The wind from a wasps wing stirs spirals of dust on my hornbeam chest of draws, and then the wasp is gone out of the door into the hall. Patterns in the white emulsion paint of my ceiling flit from fingerprints, to nazca lines, to the expanding concentric circles of a dropped pebble in the changing light, then stop. Flecks of sunlight diffuse off my gold hairs and shear off into the air, though I can't see them because of the fading sun.
I have watched a gull turn in a halo of sky for the last 1 + 1/2hrs. I don't understand why birds fly, anymore than I understand why the wind thrums my washing line or why my eyes are blue or why the sun didn't go out yesterday, or tomorrow, or a millenium ago. Oh, I understand the scientific, the academic, the realist theory why, but I don't understand the why why. Sometimes I can only find 'because'. I measure myself by what I don't really understand. I'm not very good with things I am supposed to understand. We step gingerly onto a line that is as wide as the most slender strand of hair, and broken and lonely winds push us from all angles without knowing why, but soon we forget about falling from all that staring at the sky. The land below becomes as intangible and intransient as a star, and about as distant. Soon, we don't remember falling at all, then we forget the memory of the memory of falling, and then nothing. Now, for the first time in all our lives, we are walking. And you cannot run until you've learnt to walk.
Walls.
There are four walls.
The unbreakable fourth, the inexorable third, the shifting second, the collapsing first, with the outer seal of the fourth hemmed in by the heavy third, and the siblilant second binding the folding first.
Between each wall is a rift of size.
The first and second walls contain emotion and colour and distance, which warp and elongate and snap from chemical to chemical and reaction to reaction. The reactivity of the first to second is sequential, numinous, lawful and chaotic in equal measure.
The third contains precepts of memory and foci of habit, half-formed phantasms, doldrumic and windless, which are subject to change as often and varied as cats paws in a trackless sea.
The fourth contains composure and resource, lodestones of self and selfhood, one fractured totality.
The distance between each layer is as thin as the wind through the slivered grass. Or as thick as the distance between the mirror and the reflection. The impact of one wall on another wall is so appalling as to be cataclysmic, yet so subtle as to be as discernable as the single reflection of a single sunbeam on a single grain of sand.
I Don’t Remember.
Influence begets influence, thought chases thought, step treads footprint, footprint crushes grass, grass presses mud, mud pushes stone. Stone cracks stone. Each thought, memory, and habit is spherical yet boundless – its circumference hypothetically measurable, its radius functionally infinite.
The space between each sphere is filled with archons of light.
The radiance is blindingly invisible. The colours are like the washes in a mandala. Seraphic synpases flit in torn bursts of pale flame. The wind that shakes the barley also propels the rain, murders the sky, sings the evening, twists the fabric, snaps the fingers, expands the pupil, waters cupidity, drowns courage, heals endurance and corrodes doubt. Memory falls like fog on a field. Shreds of vapour have more in common with remembrance than element. The bars of pink behind a shut eyelid, the diffusion of light through a glass of water, the sebum of smears on that glass. The slow fall of protective mucus like raining atoms on a woken eyeball. I don’t remember any more than I remember why I sleep, or why my heart beats. Or why my mouth swallows air. I don’t remember anymore.
"I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?" - W.G. Sebald, The Rings Of Saturn.
But There Are Other Skies.
I am followed by my own shadows and led by my own lights. On some days, I cast beams onto pavements and I am lit by the glare of silhouettes, although only when I shut my eyes. When I open my eyes again it is seven hours later.
Or eight.
I waltz from reflection to glaze to sheen before sleeping in matt colours. Everything in my dusks and dawns is in secondary colours. There are other colours there that I don’t have names for and I suppose never will.
I wake up in half-light and falter through currents of spontaneity and rivulets of impulse until the day ends and the sun goes down. Then I go to sleep when the light goes from black to black-black to grey-black to grey-blue-black to yellow-grey-blue to copper-azure to bronze-scarlet-sapphire. Then finally blue, blue stretching from golden horizon to golden horizon and from drowsing ground to waking zenith, until I am cupped in the palm of the sky and my breath flickers happily in my chest and the freshening wind rises with the morning.
Then I get up and do it again.
Strange Weather
I am blood-caught in the skies, as far in altitude in my head as my feet are chained to the earth. I lay on my back on cropped laser-green grass and feel my skin groove and spike with the blades and turn pink and mottled under the pressing ground. I watch clouds scud and trip over the sky until my vision spins.
I tilt my head back and watch the arc of the sky fall into the inverted earth until the blood pulses in my brain, and I watch as trees plant their leafy roots in the blue shimmering ground and their towering trunks reach the roof of the green sky. I have a tame Poplar that picks up the slightest breath and shivers silver leaves.
In a strong wind, it looks like it is on fire. Silver flames, edged with emerald.
Huge winds growl around the meadow and buffet the grass like an inland sea, tides of air.
And the barn owl rides the wind-spins like a storm petrel.
Realms
Light lingers long by the door. A crack in the paintwork of the windowframe that I cannot see because it is too small threads a persistant eddy of cool air into my forearm, brushing a crease in the small blonde hairs on my medial muscles and running parellel down the wave-streak of my slightly twisted lateral muscle, as if the wind was surfing on my still skin down its length. There is the faintest of whistlings. The wind from a wasps wing stirs spirals of dust on my hornbeam chest of draws, and then the wasp is gone out of the door into the hall. Patterns in the white emulsion paint of my ceiling flit from fingerprints, to nazca lines, to the expanding concentric circles of a dropped pebble in the changing light, then stop. Flecks of sunlight diffuse off my gold hairs and shear off into the air, though I can't see them because of the fading sun.
I have watched a gull turn in a halo of sky for the last 1 + 1/2hrs. I don't understand why birds fly, anymore than I understand why the wind thrums my washing line or why my eyes are blue or why the sun didn't go out yesterday, or tomorrow, or a millenium ago. Oh, I understand the scientific, the academic, the realist theory why, but I don't understand the why why. Sometimes I can only find 'because'. I measure myself by what I don't really understand. I'm not very good with things I am supposed to understand. We step gingerly onto a line that is as wide as the most slender strand of hair, and broken and lonely winds push us from all angles without knowing why, but soon we forget about falling from all that staring at the sky. The land below becomes as intangible and intransient as a star, and about as distant. Soon, we don't remember falling at all, then we forget the memory of the memory of falling, and then nothing. Now, for the first time in all our lives, we are walking. And you cannot run until you've learnt to walk.
Walls.
There are four walls.
The unbreakable fourth, the inexorable third, the shifting second, the collapsing first, with the outer seal of the fourth hemmed in by the heavy third, and the siblilant second binding the folding first.
Between each wall is a rift of size.
The first and second walls contain emotion and colour and distance, which warp and elongate and snap from chemical to chemical and reaction to reaction. The reactivity of the first to second is sequential, numinous, lawful and chaotic in equal measure.
The third contains precepts of memory and foci of habit, half-formed phantasms, doldrumic and windless, which are subject to change as often and varied as cats paws in a trackless sea.
The fourth contains composure and resource, lodestones of self and selfhood, one fractured totality.
The distance between each layer is as thin as the wind through the slivered grass. Or as thick as the distance between the mirror and the reflection. The impact of one wall on another wall is so appalling as to be cataclysmic, yet so subtle as to be as discernable as the single reflection of a single sunbeam on a single grain of sand.
I Don’t Remember.
Influence begets influence, thought chases thought, step treads footprint, footprint crushes grass, grass presses mud, mud pushes stone. Stone cracks stone. Each thought, memory, and habit is spherical yet boundless – its circumference hypothetically measurable, its radius functionally infinite.
The space between each sphere is filled with archons of light.
The radiance is blindingly invisible. The colours are like the washes in a mandala. Seraphic synpases flit in torn bursts of pale flame. The wind that shakes the barley also propels the rain, murders the sky, sings the evening, twists the fabric, snaps the fingers, expands the pupil, waters cupidity, drowns courage, heals endurance and corrodes doubt. Memory falls like fog on a field. Shreds of vapour have more in common with remembrance than element. The bars of pink behind a shut eyelid, the diffusion of light through a glass of water, the sebum of smears on that glass. The slow fall of protective mucus like raining atoms on a woken eyeball. I don’t remember any more than I remember why I sleep, or why my heart beats. Or why my mouth swallows air. I don’t remember anymore.
"I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?" - W.G. Sebald, The Rings Of Saturn.
But There Are Other Skies.
I am followed by my own shadows and led by my own lights. On some days, I cast beams onto pavements and I am lit by the glare of silhouettes, although only when I shut my eyes. When I open my eyes again it is seven hours later.
Or eight.
I waltz from reflection to glaze to sheen before sleeping in matt colours. Everything in my dusks and dawns is in secondary colours. There are other colours there that I don’t have names for and I suppose never will.
I wake up in half-light and falter through currents of spontaneity and rivulets of impulse until the day ends and the sun goes down. Then I go to sleep when the light goes from black to black-black to grey-black to grey-blue-black to yellow-grey-blue to copper-azure to bronze-scarlet-sapphire. Then finally blue, blue stretching from golden horizon to golden horizon and from drowsing ground to waking zenith, until I am cupped in the palm of the sky and my breath flickers happily in my chest and the freshening wind rises with the morning.
Then I get up and do it again.
Strange Weather
I am blood-caught in the skies, as far in altitude in my head as my feet are chained to the earth. I lay on my back on cropped laser-green grass and feel my skin groove and spike with the blades and turn pink and mottled under the pressing ground. I watch clouds scud and trip over the sky until my vision spins.
I tilt my head back and watch the arc of the sky fall into the inverted earth until the blood pulses in my brain, and I watch as trees plant their leafy roots in the blue shimmering ground and their towering trunks reach the roof of the green sky. I have a tame Poplar that picks up the slightest breath and shivers silver leaves.
In a strong wind, it looks like it is on fire. Silver flames, edged with emerald.
Huge winds growl around the meadow and buffet the grass like an inland sea, tides of air.
And the barn owl rides the wind-spins like a storm petrel.
Friday, 16 April 2010
The March Of The Toasters
On some days, I fear my toaster.
It sits in the corner of my kitchen, dowdy in shades of beige and silver, and emmanates a chilling smugness when I slot my bread warily into it's broiling depths. I'm not a technophobe, but more of an inadvertant luddite - on the whole, I approach technology with a certain clandestine joy, throwing the instruction manual gaily over my shoulder and bounding in to get happily covered in machine oil, choked with WD40, and peppered with splinters. Sometimes I finish using, making, or tinkering with something and find it hasn't impaled, burnt, or exploded at me. These are good days, and they are rare. For example, I once made a phone explode by looking at it. Sparks and everything. Often are the times when a friend will return from the bar, a parent from the garden, or a teacher from a quiet smoke, to find me cradling a smoking pile of twisted metal and making apologetic noises.
Truly, there is no hope for such as me. If the robots ever dominate this green globe of ours, then whatever band of desperate rebels remain will wheel me out into the ravaged landscape to combat hulks of metal and malice, where I will pull out my Phillips and Black & Decker and grin winningly as horribly beweaponed war-droids explode into despairing showers around me. I am, in my way, a sort of technological rapture, where the faithful (Simple things that I can't break - pestle & mortar, my aging ipod, and all Nokia phones) will live on, while the sinners (That bastard toaster, for one thing) will be plunged into the abyssal wheelie-bin.
I realize that most toasters are in the same league of dubious convenience as showers - devices where the merest nanometre to the left or the right means the difference between two degrees off ultimate zero and the surface temperatrue of the sun. I understand this, and realize I am not alone. However, I have proof that my toaster not only hates me but is actively trying to kill me.
I understand that the first setting on any toaster is not hot and the, say, fifth setting is burnt. Now then. Who designed that? Who sat down in their swively designers chair and basked in the halogen glow of their angle-poise lamp, thoughtfully sucking a biro, and thought, "Hmm, I sometimes fancy toast that is uncooked, and is therefore essentially bread, and yet in my mind, remains toast, despite the level of heat being equivalent to a Cornish breeze on a July evening. For this, I will devise Level One Toast. Equally, I sometimes like to eat bread that is so burnt it is essentially carbon, and yet I do not want to eat coal or indeed diamonds, as they are difficult to spread butter on, and in the case of diamonds, both harder to come by and considerably more expensive than Warburtons, so for this quandry, I will concoct Level Five Toast."
Presumambly this same designer thought that the idea of toast gently seared to a rich gold, with nary a hint of pallid nor burnt crumbs perverse and pointless, and left it out altogether.
I wouldn't mind, but Level Two And A Half doesn't give you that, as it logically should. It's this contradiction of logic that permeates all human society and exists solely to befuddle people like me. For example, 0 degrees is freezing and 100 degrees is boiling. That is fine, that is logical. But it doesn't stop me believing in my heart of hearts that 70 degrees should be a nice warm temperature.
Anyway, I don't want to get anal about toast. Who would? But to return to the toaster briefly. It is the most malicious item I have ever owned. It has, so far, mildly electrocuted me - possibly as a test to see exactly how much wattage would be needed to boil my internal organs, for maximum hilarity - burnt me more times than I care to remember, and (and this is the impressive bit) tripped me up. Yes, a toaster has indeed made me fall arse over tit twice. Once, when its lead had somehow managed to loop, like a sleeping boa, over the microwave, before falling to the ground and craftily snaring my foot like a triffid, and once again, when it pinged gloatingly at me when I shuffled downstairs once morning, causing me to slip up and deliver a beautiful header into the corner of the fridge. It is a nasty, vindictive bastard of a toaster. I am convinced that the real reason it hates me is because when it was bought I was eying up a sleek George Foreman grill, so now it has abandonment issues bordering on the psychotic, lapsing into murderous rage if I dare to use the grill.
This, really, is yet another example of mankinds mounting obsession with taking all the effort, hardship, and mental taxation out of life and replacing it with new, shiny, chrome-and-titanium effort, hardship, and mental taxation. My on-line banking is there so I can easily track, organize, and authorize my financial transactions at the click of a mouse, ensuring me fiscal security, a zen state of mind and a glowing complexion. However, it actually enables me to forget with depressing regularity a bewildering array of secret answers, user names, and passwords (Incidentally, the password selection process is indictive of the muted hatred technology has for us - only the other day I changed my hotmail password to have my laptop bark, "Too short! Too long! Must use at least one letter, number, and lower/uppercase!") and lock myself out, or, alternately, let myself in to find out just how poor I am (at the click of a mouse!) and thus sending me on a self-destructive path of financial fear all day that culminates in me resigning myself to my fate and buying wildly expensive because I've given up hope and might as well go out with a bang.
The only exceptions to this technological impasse are my ipod, which is old, scarred, slow, and chunky, like a veteran stray cat, my typewriter, which is one of the worst designed and viciously serrated pieces of equipment its ever been my (mis)fortune to have my fingers torn to ribbons by (Although it is very beautiful and I like the smell of india ink) and itunes, which is my pride and joy and keeps me sedated with Mogwai when I go through the rigamorole of on-line banking again.
It sits in the corner of my kitchen, dowdy in shades of beige and silver, and emmanates a chilling smugness when I slot my bread warily into it's broiling depths. I'm not a technophobe, but more of an inadvertant luddite - on the whole, I approach technology with a certain clandestine joy, throwing the instruction manual gaily over my shoulder and bounding in to get happily covered in machine oil, choked with WD40, and peppered with splinters. Sometimes I finish using, making, or tinkering with something and find it hasn't impaled, burnt, or exploded at me. These are good days, and they are rare. For example, I once made a phone explode by looking at it. Sparks and everything. Often are the times when a friend will return from the bar, a parent from the garden, or a teacher from a quiet smoke, to find me cradling a smoking pile of twisted metal and making apologetic noises.
Truly, there is no hope for such as me. If the robots ever dominate this green globe of ours, then whatever band of desperate rebels remain will wheel me out into the ravaged landscape to combat hulks of metal and malice, where I will pull out my Phillips and Black & Decker and grin winningly as horribly beweaponed war-droids explode into despairing showers around me. I am, in my way, a sort of technological rapture, where the faithful (Simple things that I can't break - pestle & mortar, my aging ipod, and all Nokia phones) will live on, while the sinners (That bastard toaster, for one thing) will be plunged into the abyssal wheelie-bin.
I realize that most toasters are in the same league of dubious convenience as showers - devices where the merest nanometre to the left or the right means the difference between two degrees off ultimate zero and the surface temperatrue of the sun. I understand this, and realize I am not alone. However, I have proof that my toaster not only hates me but is actively trying to kill me.
I understand that the first setting on any toaster is not hot and the, say, fifth setting is burnt. Now then. Who designed that? Who sat down in their swively designers chair and basked in the halogen glow of their angle-poise lamp, thoughtfully sucking a biro, and thought, "Hmm, I sometimes fancy toast that is uncooked, and is therefore essentially bread, and yet in my mind, remains toast, despite the level of heat being equivalent to a Cornish breeze on a July evening. For this, I will devise Level One Toast. Equally, I sometimes like to eat bread that is so burnt it is essentially carbon, and yet I do not want to eat coal or indeed diamonds, as they are difficult to spread butter on, and in the case of diamonds, both harder to come by and considerably more expensive than Warburtons, so for this quandry, I will concoct Level Five Toast."
Presumambly this same designer thought that the idea of toast gently seared to a rich gold, with nary a hint of pallid nor burnt crumbs perverse and pointless, and left it out altogether.
I wouldn't mind, but Level Two And A Half doesn't give you that, as it logically should. It's this contradiction of logic that permeates all human society and exists solely to befuddle people like me. For example, 0 degrees is freezing and 100 degrees is boiling. That is fine, that is logical. But it doesn't stop me believing in my heart of hearts that 70 degrees should be a nice warm temperature.
Anyway, I don't want to get anal about toast. Who would? But to return to the toaster briefly. It is the most malicious item I have ever owned. It has, so far, mildly electrocuted me - possibly as a test to see exactly how much wattage would be needed to boil my internal organs, for maximum hilarity - burnt me more times than I care to remember, and (and this is the impressive bit) tripped me up. Yes, a toaster has indeed made me fall arse over tit twice. Once, when its lead had somehow managed to loop, like a sleeping boa, over the microwave, before falling to the ground and craftily snaring my foot like a triffid, and once again, when it pinged gloatingly at me when I shuffled downstairs once morning, causing me to slip up and deliver a beautiful header into the corner of the fridge. It is a nasty, vindictive bastard of a toaster. I am convinced that the real reason it hates me is because when it was bought I was eying up a sleek George Foreman grill, so now it has abandonment issues bordering on the psychotic, lapsing into murderous rage if I dare to use the grill.
This, really, is yet another example of mankinds mounting obsession with taking all the effort, hardship, and mental taxation out of life and replacing it with new, shiny, chrome-and-titanium effort, hardship, and mental taxation. My on-line banking is there so I can easily track, organize, and authorize my financial transactions at the click of a mouse, ensuring me fiscal security, a zen state of mind and a glowing complexion. However, it actually enables me to forget with depressing regularity a bewildering array of secret answers, user names, and passwords (Incidentally, the password selection process is indictive of the muted hatred technology has for us - only the other day I changed my hotmail password to have my laptop bark, "Too short! Too long! Must use at least one letter, number, and lower/uppercase!") and lock myself out, or, alternately, let myself in to find out just how poor I am (at the click of a mouse!) and thus sending me on a self-destructive path of financial fear all day that culminates in me resigning myself to my fate and buying wildly expensive because I've given up hope and might as well go out with a bang.
The only exceptions to this technological impasse are my ipod, which is old, scarred, slow, and chunky, like a veteran stray cat, my typewriter, which is one of the worst designed and viciously serrated pieces of equipment its ever been my (mis)fortune to have my fingers torn to ribbons by (Although it is very beautiful and I like the smell of india ink) and itunes, which is my pride and joy and keeps me sedated with Mogwai when I go through the rigamorole of on-line banking again.
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Bear Grylls Über Alles!
There can be few greater pleasures in life - if we take life to mean when you don't have anything better to do and/or are putting something off - than lying on a sofa with friends and bitching relentlessly about what you're watching, while making no attempt to grasp the remote (which is four inches away) with your obviously bloated and arthritis-raddled fingers to change the channel.
I, for example, would quite like to twat Bear Grylls. You know, the overgrown boy scout? Brick jaw, close-set eyes (A sign of an unstable mind in Phrenology apparently, take note). He leapt off a helicopter into the ocean the other day to get to Namibia, into the freezing Atlantic waters just off the Skeleton Coast - "What I'm about to do is really dangerous; this is one of the most violent stretches of water... (Dramatic emphasis, hushed voice, drop an octave like Jeremy Clarkson)... in the world."
Really? Why do it then?
He was plodding - no, sorry, he never plods, he sprints unnecessarily - through the Bornean jungle a bit later. Busy, busy little man. He saw a placid green tree snake, squealed a boyish squeal of delight, launched into a lecture on its many fascinating habits, extolled its beauty, and lapsed into admiring silence. Then, he looked at it thoughtfully for a bit. Then he bit its head off. I don't know why. It seemed a bit strong really, just to show how hard he was.
A bit later on, he was above the snowline in Patagonia, shivering hypothermically in a dug-out shelter, with his hat on, and his ear-flaps up. Now, I'm not a hard bastard really - despite appearances to the contrary, obviously - and I've never been in the SAS, but it seems to me that you if you lose most of the heat in your body through your head, covering up your ears might be wise. Dappy doesn't cover his ears, and who'd listen to Dappy? Anyway, he was clearly a bit chilly, and he said, "This is dangerously cold. I could die up here quite easily", in the same harmonics that you or me might use to say, "I could be given a really nice present!". Truly, there is no understanding some people's conception of fun. Some people find pleasure in masochism. Some find it in really hard crosswords. Some people even derive enjoyment from jazz. Bear Grylls derives his from the possibility of contracting a flesh-eating virus in Sumatra.
It follows then that Bear Grylls is dangerous, and you should not let him near your children, lest he take them on a trip to your suburban playpark, liberally scatter landmines about the footie pitch, dig a bloody great trench, fill it with Solenopsis Invicta - the Red Fire Ant to you and me - and lob your nippers in. This is what Bear Grylls does to relax of an afternoon, incidentally. Goes swimming in ants.
Which brings me on to part two. I tread trembling and unsettled ground here - the televisual equivalent of the San Andreas Fault. Because I'd like to slag off the One Show. I have a lot of friends - the bulk, I suppose - who are students, and for some of them, Angry Adrian and Chirpy Christina are Godheads of a kind, second only to Schofield and Britton. There are other Illuminati - Ben Fogle, That Bastard from Bargain Hunt (The one who's not David Dickinson, who I harbour a paticular hatred for), the Top Gear crew on endless Dave re-runs, but The One Show has a vice-like grip, a full-nelson if you will, on evening TV.
And it's like having your brain massaged with big, pink, beautifully moisturised hands. Or a swift lobotomy. As I watched it, I could feel my jaw slackening, my tensile neck muscles relaxing as my lower pate sunk down to somewhere around chest level. A little bit of dribble came out. This is what I normally get when I watch, say, an Arnold Schwarznegger vehicle, not middle-Britain de jour TV.
I am using my valuble time - I could be eating a cake - to watch a bubbly Irish woman tolerate grumpy Adrian as he clandestinely gets to grips with the great and good. David Attenborough was on the other day, the great David Attenborough, and they asked him if he watched Britain's Got Talent. I'm sorry, what? He didn't, as it happens, but he did know about it. Simon Cowell already heads up the broken remains of the Weimar Republic and controls the world through a secret organization using the shattered stock market, political insinuation and Jedward (Come on, keep up), so it's only right that he's burrowed into the minds of learned types too, like the little cultural Tick he is.
There's nothing wrong with The One Show, as such. But it's a bit like my mobile phone, or on-line banking: theoretically, they exist to help, ease, and calm me, but actually, they all make me a little bit more tense and worried than I was before. My phone allows unsavoury types to plague me, reminds me to reply swiftly to friends, lest I spark offence and outrage, and bequeaths me with a bill that I can't pay at the end of each month. My on-line NatWest account allows me to quickly and effortlessly access and assess the extent of my abject poverty and plunge me further into worry. And The One Show, as a light, informative mode of entertainment, is there to remind me that my wit, guile, and funtional intelligence - my tools for tax evasion and exam blagging and all sorts - are slowly but surely being drained away by Adrian droning on about self-heating meals.
He really was, you know.
I, for example, would quite like to twat Bear Grylls. You know, the overgrown boy scout? Brick jaw, close-set eyes (A sign of an unstable mind in Phrenology apparently, take note). He leapt off a helicopter into the ocean the other day to get to Namibia, into the freezing Atlantic waters just off the Skeleton Coast - "What I'm about to do is really dangerous; this is one of the most violent stretches of water... (Dramatic emphasis, hushed voice, drop an octave like Jeremy Clarkson)... in the world."
Really? Why do it then?
He was plodding - no, sorry, he never plods, he sprints unnecessarily - through the Bornean jungle a bit later. Busy, busy little man. He saw a placid green tree snake, squealed a boyish squeal of delight, launched into a lecture on its many fascinating habits, extolled its beauty, and lapsed into admiring silence. Then, he looked at it thoughtfully for a bit. Then he bit its head off. I don't know why. It seemed a bit strong really, just to show how hard he was.
A bit later on, he was above the snowline in Patagonia, shivering hypothermically in a dug-out shelter, with his hat on, and his ear-flaps up. Now, I'm not a hard bastard really - despite appearances to the contrary, obviously - and I've never been in the SAS, but it seems to me that you if you lose most of the heat in your body through your head, covering up your ears might be wise. Dappy doesn't cover his ears, and who'd listen to Dappy? Anyway, he was clearly a bit chilly, and he said, "This is dangerously cold. I could die up here quite easily", in the same harmonics that you or me might use to say, "I could be given a really nice present!". Truly, there is no understanding some people's conception of fun. Some people find pleasure in masochism. Some find it in really hard crosswords. Some people even derive enjoyment from jazz. Bear Grylls derives his from the possibility of contracting a flesh-eating virus in Sumatra.
It follows then that Bear Grylls is dangerous, and you should not let him near your children, lest he take them on a trip to your suburban playpark, liberally scatter landmines about the footie pitch, dig a bloody great trench, fill it with Solenopsis Invicta - the Red Fire Ant to you and me - and lob your nippers in. This is what Bear Grylls does to relax of an afternoon, incidentally. Goes swimming in ants.
Which brings me on to part two. I tread trembling and unsettled ground here - the televisual equivalent of the San Andreas Fault. Because I'd like to slag off the One Show. I have a lot of friends - the bulk, I suppose - who are students, and for some of them, Angry Adrian and Chirpy Christina are Godheads of a kind, second only to Schofield and Britton. There are other Illuminati - Ben Fogle, That Bastard from Bargain Hunt (The one who's not David Dickinson, who I harbour a paticular hatred for), the Top Gear crew on endless Dave re-runs, but The One Show has a vice-like grip, a full-nelson if you will, on evening TV.
And it's like having your brain massaged with big, pink, beautifully moisturised hands. Or a swift lobotomy. As I watched it, I could feel my jaw slackening, my tensile neck muscles relaxing as my lower pate sunk down to somewhere around chest level. A little bit of dribble came out. This is what I normally get when I watch, say, an Arnold Schwarznegger vehicle, not middle-Britain de jour TV.
I am using my valuble time - I could be eating a cake - to watch a bubbly Irish woman tolerate grumpy Adrian as he clandestinely gets to grips with the great and good. David Attenborough was on the other day, the great David Attenborough, and they asked him if he watched Britain's Got Talent. I'm sorry, what? He didn't, as it happens, but he did know about it. Simon Cowell already heads up the broken remains of the Weimar Republic and controls the world through a secret organization using the shattered stock market, political insinuation and Jedward (Come on, keep up), so it's only right that he's burrowed into the minds of learned types too, like the little cultural Tick he is.
There's nothing wrong with The One Show, as such. But it's a bit like my mobile phone, or on-line banking: theoretically, they exist to help, ease, and calm me, but actually, they all make me a little bit more tense and worried than I was before. My phone allows unsavoury types to plague me, reminds me to reply swiftly to friends, lest I spark offence and outrage, and bequeaths me with a bill that I can't pay at the end of each month. My on-line NatWest account allows me to quickly and effortlessly access and assess the extent of my abject poverty and plunge me further into worry. And The One Show, as a light, informative mode of entertainment, is there to remind me that my wit, guile, and funtional intelligence - my tools for tax evasion and exam blagging and all sorts - are slowly but surely being drained away by Adrian droning on about self-heating meals.
He really was, you know.
The Gospel According To Pete
Even for November, this is taking the piss.
Half-time, so me and the fellas are out front, right outside, bang in the element, in a little courtyard. It is mashing it down. Smokers are hard done by in this country. Get to stand in our own segregated patio, like lepers, like fuckin’ pariahs.
I blame the Tories. There’s a bit of thing for having a dig at the old liberals at the mo, but I’d rather have a poncy liberal from Hampstead then some posh nonce from Chelsea, know what I mean? Cameron don’t know nuffin’ about living on an estate in the East End. Brown, worl, he’s got a dodgy eye. Bit porky. Fallible. Bare-knuckle boy, like me. Fair play to him, I say. Lesser of two evils, as the poet puts it. Hur hur.
Was a time personal liberty was just that – you could do what you fancied. But now, if I enjoy my quality tobacco product inside, turns out I’m killing that blonde bird who’s scowling at me. And she’s a good ten-feet away.
She looks like a whinger. Look at that horrible little dog she’s got. A rat. A nicely groomed rat, I’ll give her that, but still a rat.
Daft bint.
Blimey. I’d written off rising sea levels and all that global warming malarkey as one of them Green fings what I don’t worry about on account of the fact that it’s all a load of scare-mongering rubbish and I’ve got duties, I have, I’ve got kids, but the way it’s coming down right now, we’ll be up to up to our arseholes in ocean by tomorrow.
“What you reckon of Westham’s chances then, Pete? Relegation on the way?”
Worl. Judging by Zola’s performance so far, s’only a matter of time, really? ‘Course, I don’t voice that opinion. No. Don’t do to let the side down. So I say what the lads want to hear, which is, “Nah, mate. Zola’s a bit of a playboy, bit of a dancer, but he’s one of them Latino types (Big laugh), can’t help it. Good manger though. Give him time, boys. Give him time”.
They all nod their heads sagely at this. Much drawing of fag smoke and supping of pints. Pete’s got it bang on, as per usual.
‘Course, that’s how it works round my way. You stand by your mates. You stand by your woman, even if she moans the place down about you rolling in from the pub late slash pissed. You stand firm, even if she does demand more trips to Ikea to get cupboards and lampshades what cost me a fuckin’ fortune... and do I get any recognition for getting up at 5am to stand in the rain and wind chipping ice for Brixham beam-haulers to pack Icelandic Cod in, and me with my lumbago? Do I fuck.
I feel quite ‘urt sometimes, I really do.
And you stand by your team. What you feel isn’t what matters, sorta fing. You don’t let the side down.
Look at Gaz. Look at that hair-cut. Like a bog-brush. No, like a parrot. ‘Course, Gaz thinks he looks the bollocks, the very bollocks, but actually, he looks like my landlady’s moulting Cockatoo.
Cockatoo. I do make myself chuckle, sometimes. Hur.
Now Gaz is banging on about the need to send more troops to Iraq to deal with the Taliban. Gaz calls anyone brown “Arabs”: A-rabs, like that. And the Taliban are in fuckin’ Afghanistan, as any pillock knows. He’s saying how we need give them a taste of Bulldog Britain; a belting round the back of The Crown & Thistle etcetera. Gaz likes that sort of thing. Bit of an animal. Bit of an old-school thug, you might say. Likes a taste of splashed blood. I keep clear of him when he’s in one of them moods.
Len’s piped up. What’s he saying? He’s trying to calm Gaz down, isn’t he? Gaz gets a bit frothy now and then. Bit piss and vinegar. And then someone says something – anything – and he goes off on one and ends up in the caring arms of the old bill, and some kid’s got his arm broken in three places.
My nephew was killed in Iraq. Nice lad. Bit quiet. Spotty, face like the surface of the moon. Thought the uniform would get the birds, no doubt. Hur.
Bit of shrapnel through the temple. Whammo. Like that. And there he was, gone.
And now Gaz reckons we should make National Service compulsory, butcher the A-rabs, make footie the state religion – none of “this Allah shit.”
Sometimes he makes me so fucking despondent.
I thought of a nice little example about sticking with your team, too. Wifey, yeah? She tries on a pair of jeans, and her arse is all over the shop – like, two pumpkins in a sack, right? You wouldn’t say, “Yeah, your bum looks massive, love”. You just wouldn’t, am I right, or am I right? ‘Course I am. Anyway, that’s your team. Don’t matter if Zola’s a bit, y’know, continental. Don’t matter if my back seizes up some mornings, apparently. Don’t matter if Gaz has frankly got Rabies. Don’t matter.
You want to stick with Papa Pete, you do. I know what’s going on.
Hur.
Half-time, so me and the fellas are out front, right outside, bang in the element, in a little courtyard. It is mashing it down. Smokers are hard done by in this country. Get to stand in our own segregated patio, like lepers, like fuckin’ pariahs.
I blame the Tories. There’s a bit of thing for having a dig at the old liberals at the mo, but I’d rather have a poncy liberal from Hampstead then some posh nonce from Chelsea, know what I mean? Cameron don’t know nuffin’ about living on an estate in the East End. Brown, worl, he’s got a dodgy eye. Bit porky. Fallible. Bare-knuckle boy, like me. Fair play to him, I say. Lesser of two evils, as the poet puts it. Hur hur.
Was a time personal liberty was just that – you could do what you fancied. But now, if I enjoy my quality tobacco product inside, turns out I’m killing that blonde bird who’s scowling at me. And she’s a good ten-feet away.
She looks like a whinger. Look at that horrible little dog she’s got. A rat. A nicely groomed rat, I’ll give her that, but still a rat.
Daft bint.
Blimey. I’d written off rising sea levels and all that global warming malarkey as one of them Green fings what I don’t worry about on account of the fact that it’s all a load of scare-mongering rubbish and I’ve got duties, I have, I’ve got kids, but the way it’s coming down right now, we’ll be up to up to our arseholes in ocean by tomorrow.
“What you reckon of Westham’s chances then, Pete? Relegation on the way?”
Worl. Judging by Zola’s performance so far, s’only a matter of time, really? ‘Course, I don’t voice that opinion. No. Don’t do to let the side down. So I say what the lads want to hear, which is, “Nah, mate. Zola’s a bit of a playboy, bit of a dancer, but he’s one of them Latino types (Big laugh), can’t help it. Good manger though. Give him time, boys. Give him time”.
They all nod their heads sagely at this. Much drawing of fag smoke and supping of pints. Pete’s got it bang on, as per usual.
‘Course, that’s how it works round my way. You stand by your mates. You stand by your woman, even if she moans the place down about you rolling in from the pub late slash pissed. You stand firm, even if she does demand more trips to Ikea to get cupboards and lampshades what cost me a fuckin’ fortune... and do I get any recognition for getting up at 5am to stand in the rain and wind chipping ice for Brixham beam-haulers to pack Icelandic Cod in, and me with my lumbago? Do I fuck.
I feel quite ‘urt sometimes, I really do.
And you stand by your team. What you feel isn’t what matters, sorta fing. You don’t let the side down.
Look at Gaz. Look at that hair-cut. Like a bog-brush. No, like a parrot. ‘Course, Gaz thinks he looks the bollocks, the very bollocks, but actually, he looks like my landlady’s moulting Cockatoo.
Cockatoo. I do make myself chuckle, sometimes. Hur.
Now Gaz is banging on about the need to send more troops to Iraq to deal with the Taliban. Gaz calls anyone brown “Arabs”: A-rabs, like that. And the Taliban are in fuckin’ Afghanistan, as any pillock knows. He’s saying how we need give them a taste of Bulldog Britain; a belting round the back of The Crown & Thistle etcetera. Gaz likes that sort of thing. Bit of an animal. Bit of an old-school thug, you might say. Likes a taste of splashed blood. I keep clear of him when he’s in one of them moods.
Len’s piped up. What’s he saying? He’s trying to calm Gaz down, isn’t he? Gaz gets a bit frothy now and then. Bit piss and vinegar. And then someone says something – anything – and he goes off on one and ends up in the caring arms of the old bill, and some kid’s got his arm broken in three places.
My nephew was killed in Iraq. Nice lad. Bit quiet. Spotty, face like the surface of the moon. Thought the uniform would get the birds, no doubt. Hur.
Bit of shrapnel through the temple. Whammo. Like that. And there he was, gone.
And now Gaz reckons we should make National Service compulsory, butcher the A-rabs, make footie the state religion – none of “this Allah shit.”
Sometimes he makes me so fucking despondent.
I thought of a nice little example about sticking with your team, too. Wifey, yeah? She tries on a pair of jeans, and her arse is all over the shop – like, two pumpkins in a sack, right? You wouldn’t say, “Yeah, your bum looks massive, love”. You just wouldn’t, am I right, or am I right? ‘Course I am. Anyway, that’s your team. Don’t matter if Zola’s a bit, y’know, continental. Don’t matter if my back seizes up some mornings, apparently. Don’t matter if Gaz has frankly got Rabies. Don’t matter.
You want to stick with Papa Pete, you do. I know what’s going on.
Hur.
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