Interesting

I'm currently slaving over a hot essay and so I'm not going to be elaborating on my travels for a while, I'll just leave my one person readership in suspense for a while.

In the meantime I thought I'd share something I noticed whilst idly wikisurfing away from what I was supposed to be looking at - I think it was Aristotle’s poetics, but I'm not sure; and how on earth I got from there to here is beyond me.

I ended up looking at the page on the FSB (Russian security services) and then on the page about the KGB (soviet security services), both of which have been in the papers a fair amount recently due to their alleged involvement in the death of some ex-KGB/FSB agent who turned conspiracy theorist and fled to the UK complaining of persecution and threats to his life. Although, in a country where you can hire a hitman for a few quid and a sandwich, you don't have to do anything particularly unpleasant to be at risk of being shot at. It's getting a lot of attention over here because it's dramatic, gruesome, and has all the fun of a conspiracy theory whilst pandering to the (possibly not unjustified) suspicions many have of the Russian government.

Anyway, Here are the logos of the FSB and the KGB



Interesting iconography. The shield, symbolising protection, the sword symbolising strength, might and the ever present threat of nastiness and the emblem of the government for which these powers are being exercised. One notices that the only substantial changes that they made to the logo with the collapse of the soviet union was to change the emblem on it from the Hammer n' Sickle five pointed star jobby of the Soviet Union to the eagle thingy of the Russian Federation and to make an attempt to conceal the sword, with the threat of violence it entails, behind the shield.

I've not got any real point to make or axe to grind here, I don't know enough about Russian politics and there is way to much wild speculation going on around this anyway. I'm just saying that really they could have chosen their iconography in a way that is slightly less easily interpreted to mean 'democracy = we are more sneaky about doing away with those we don't like'. I'm sure I'm not the only who has noticed this, and I expect that there are already plenty of venomous editorials using this iconography to indicate that we should nuke them, invade them, cuss their momma etc..

anyway. I've got work to do.

-Ben

Part the Second

Well. The next part is here quicker than I expected, probably something to do with the fact that I’ve got a shiteload of work to do and no inclination/ability to do it. It’s a grey and cold day today in Canterbury and it’s nice to reminisce about the days when it was sunny, warm and I had someone to talk to.


I arrived at Heathrow airport at about 2am – my flight wasn’t until 8:30 but considering the scenes of chaos they’d been showing on the news for the preceeding few days I figured I’d rather be bored for a few hours than miss my flight. Thanks to this I was able to see the strange sight that is an airport with nobody in it, I’ve been in airports before for the usual reasons - to collect relatives, convert people to my cult and claim other people’s baggage. There is, however, something very weird about places designed to hold and allow for the movement of massive numbers of people, like airports; anyone who has walked around the north Greenwich peninsula* or stood in an empty football stadium will know what I mean – the places seem expectant, incomplete. The railing corrals and exit gates are meaningless without a full complement of bored and angry people standing in them, without them these places just look like strangely aseptic racehorse paddocks.

In the couple of hours that passed between my mother going home and the check in desks opening I amused myself by staring into space, humming songs, explaining to myself the wiring of the electronics in my fretted bass (it’s complicated) and watching the odd little refugee-camp style settlements people were setting up in the area of the check in desks. There was a Japanese family who were all asleep on the benches covered with those foil blankets they put on marathon runners, which looked very sci-fi, there was a bunch of American backpackers earnestly working their way through all the wine they had and telling stories about people driving on the left etc. There were various couples wandering around aimlessly including one middle aged couple who came over and asked me if they were at the American Airlines check-in area – “dis muhkan aerlynes?” (they were, it was written in big writing on just about every flat surface). I think that’s what they asked me, I was rather distracted by the appearance of the man: he was about 6’ with brown boots, grey slacks, a white shirt with that strange seam pattern that country singers wear and, get this, a black bootlace tie (with silver bull’s head on the top) and a big cowboy hat. I later learned, not hugely unexpectedly that they were bound for Fort Worth, TX. I hope that it was all an elaborate joke. Surely.

When the desks finally opened about 5 or 6am (I forget which) I was about 10th from the front. Not great, I hear you say, considering I’d got there at about 2am but I was fine with it as by the time I got my tickets and checked my bags the queue stretched through the three metal corral areas, snaked around the terminal and then disappeared out of the front door, I’m pretty sure that the people at the back are still waiting to this day, old and beardy.

Surprisingly, considering what the news had led me to suspect, there weren’t really any queues or problems at security – having never been in an airport before I can’t really comment on how it compared to normal running – I took off shoes, hoodie, belt, bag and was searched by a big Sikh bloke from security. It was all over nice and quickly and was much easier than I thought it’d be. Despite my long hair and beard I wasn’t poked with a cattle prod, or given any of the unpleasant internal examinations that my friends had been joking about since the 10th.

Airside lounges are boring tense places, like big trains stations but without the tramps and lingering smell of urine. I spent the whole time looking up at the boards every few seconds and worrying about things, there were some ‘cancelled’ notices on the board and some people shouting and raving at this. My flight was on time, which was a relief, and, after another rigorous search at the boarding area, I got to my seat somewhere in the arse end of the plane.

I was wondering, whilst waiting for takeoff, whether they intentionally design the plane so that the people with economy class tickets have to walk past all the upper class seats and envy all the smug rich people in their gigantic vibrating armchairs, four-poster beds, hot tubs etc before being stuffed into the hold. The takeoff was an interesting experience, I figured that I was probably going the fastest I’d ever moved in my life somewhere halfway along the runway and was enjoying the pinned-to-the-seat feeling of the G-force. The pilot was taking off into a pretty hefty headwind and so when we left the ground we did so with a lurch that made me feel like I was going to hurl (something I later found, to my relief, isn’t typical of takeoffs).

I’m not sure what more I can really say about the flight; between taking off and landing they aren’t the most interesting experiences. It was a cloudy day and I was a long way from the windows so I didn’t really have anything to look at. The fact that my little screen thingy was broken and that no electric devices were allowed in hand luggage meant that I had no idea what time it was, how long we’d been flying or anything like that. That, coupled with the fact that I was drifting in and out of sleep for the whole time caused me to have a very disorienting flight. About an hour from the end of the flight (I think) I was given a little green form to fill in, which asked me such useful questions as

Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist activities; or genocide; or between 1933 and 1945 were involved, in any way, in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?

You have no idea how hard it is to resist the urge to write “yes… I mean NO.. aw, damn, you got me.” But I was sensible and restrained all facetious and sarcastic impulses somewhere in the left thigh for the duration of the arrival process.

At immigration the passengers were divided into ‘US Citizens’ and ‘Foreigners’ The American line moved much faster and I felt a little imperial outrage - “I’m not Foreign. I’m British!” - at being stuck in the slow moving line. I was Processed though immigration quite quickly by an Arabic looking woman, which I found rather surprising considering the American paranoia about Arabs controlling ports. I was fingerprinted, which I found unnerving but I wasn’t in any mood to ask questions and so there is probably a study, in black and white, of my fingerprints somewhere in a federal database somewhere still. JFK airport was a strange contrast to Heathrow, it’s very small and tatty, the greying square ceiling panels and tire scuffed lino reminding me of my old school more than the airport I came from.

I collected my bags, still intact and in one piece and, after I’d gone through more searches in customs, wandered out into the arrivals lounge thingy having been awake for around 30 hours. I remember seeing Kristen’s sister first, before I’d even come through the door, sitting off to my right, then Kristen appearing in my view… and. Yeah. I’m not going to be able to write anything coherent about that…

Once that was all over with I was led around like a drugged up outpatient, with lots of attention being lavished on me, affectionate attention from Kirsten, and morbid curiosity, I think, from her sister. She took a couple of photos of me looking like a concussed tramp standing around in a grey car park gormlessly staring at a bottle of apple juice.

I think I’ll stop writing now, seeing as I’ve just written more on this in about two hours than I have in the last two weeks on my essay. I think it’d be better for everyone concerned if I didn’t write in quite so much detail for the rest of this saga.

-Ben


* Loads of stuff built to accommodate the massive numbers of people that never bothered to go to the millennium dome

Part the First

I suppose I should write about all this travelling I’ve been doing, not the half arsed account of the really quite mundane aspects of my summer, where all I really did was go to other parts of the UK and get drunk in them. The most interesting thing that happened this summer was a result of Kristen finishing her job in Long Island, NY and going off to start her new job on the other side of the country. Due to a shocking act of unprovoked generosity on the part of Kristen’s parents I was going to go with her on a road trip across the United States driving from New York to Berkeley, California, via South Carolina and her family home.

I suppose the best place to start this would be the 10th of august 2006. By this point I had got my head pretty much around the idea that I was actually going to America to see Kristen and, through much staring at maps, had almost got my head around the kind of distances we would be covering. Being from a small country I really had trouble with the idea of driving for an entire day and not reaching your destination – well actually that’s not true, but in the UK if you drove for a day your destination wouldn’t be anywhere interesting, it’d be just some small damp town in Scotland somewhere where the locals amuse themselves by drinking whiskey and shaving sheep. So, it is more accurate to say that I couldn’t get my head around the idea of driving for days and ending up somewhere where people have mains electricity and sewers. I tried to put the trip into some kind of perspective that I’d understand and so I worked out how far we were going to be travelling, roughly, and looked to see how far that would get me in Europe…

I found that it would in fact get me out of Europe altogether, and that it was pretty much like driving from here to Baghdad – although, despite the stories I’ve been told I was going to assume that the journey we were about to undertake was considerably safer than that one.

Anyway, back to the 10th of august. By this time I had sorted out what I needed to bring and got hold of an appropriate bag and suchlike logistical necessities, meaning that there wasn’t much else for me to do other than try and distract myself from the prospect of flying, which wasn’t one I relished. I’d never flown before so it was all a bit daunting. I wandered downstairs on the morning of the 10th (actually it was probably the afternoon – I’m not an early riser) and switched on the TV.

In case you don’t remember the story here it is

I spoke to some friends who had family going on holiday that weekend, camping out in the airport for days seemed be the norm and most of them lost a day or two from their holidays as a result of cancelled flights, which would have had devastatingly unsexy effects on my own trip.

Strangely, after the initial screaming heebie-jeebies, it wasn’t the fear of being exploded in midair by some shifty beardy geezer who I probably went to the same school as that particularly bothered me. This whole episode actually made me calmer than I was before about the prospect of flying. I don’t mean the sort of crazed calm one gets walking into exams, I mean that I was forced to either sit down and think rationally about the odds and probabilities of the whole thing or run away screaming and hide in my cupboard. I figured that getting in a plane was probably a few thousand times safer than getting a lift from Danny*.

So I did the sensible thing. I went out for a walk and watched the greasy brown sunset over London from the top of the hill – say what you like about pollution, it certainly does lead to some, erm, very unique sunsets – and later on decided to finally assuage my fears in the normal manner, which is going out, getting my wobbly boots on, and making really crass and tasteless jokes about it with my friends as if I’m not in the slightest bit bothered. I find that I can often convince myself that way.

---

So. There you go. Episode one. I’ll write up the rest of it later, well I’ve written most of it already, but It’ll probably require proofreading and rewriting like this one did and I need to get back to work.

-Ben

*No offence Danny, it’s just that you drive like Biggles.

Love and Honour

As a socially backward musical instrument obsessive I spend probably more time in guitar shops than any healthy person should. I’m one of those guys who is always sitting around playing whatever new stock the shop has and having nerdy discussions with the shop owner. I always stop if someone comes in who looks like they might be a legitimate customer, even if it does mean that I end up handing over whatever bass I’ve been messing around with to some 16 year old who then launches into a interpretation of some Metallica song that owes rather more to enthusiasm than ability.

In Canterbury (where I live) there are five guitar shops that I know of. I won’t bother mentioning one of them in any detail as it isn’t really guitar shop, more a secondhand shop that sells anything that electricity passes through, from mobile phones to valve amplifiers, and this just happens to include guitars.

Two of these shops are independently owned and run enterprises, the other two are franchises or chain stores of some sort. Now I’m not one to try and reinforce stereotypes but the two chain stores really can’t match the independent ones for quality of products and service despite their much larger size and more substantial stock. Part of the reason why they aren’t as good is because their stock, whilst large, is always limited to a small number of large brands that their parent company has distribution deals for but the main reason is that they generally sell guitars with neither love nor honour.

When I say that they sell guitars without honour I mean that they don’t really consider what the customer actually needs, instead trying to coerce them into buying whatever it is they get a good profit margin on or are having trouble shifting to more discerning customers. A good example of this being a co worker of my mother’s who went to a chain store in SE London near where she lives and was sold a overpriced, right handed, fender electro-acoustic guitar despite the fact that she told them that she was only looking for something to learn on (therefore no need for it to be amplifiable) and that she was left handed (which they told her was irrelevant). They had no honour and as a result of that, and their ridiculous prices*, they went bust about 6 months after they opened.

By love I mean caring about the instruments you sell and the people you sell them to. This isn’t just some tree hugging small business ideal, it makes sense, if I’m told I can’t play an instrument unless I’m seriously thinking about buying it then I won’t want to buy anything from that shop. This is a bigger consideration when you take into account the fact that whilst I have spent a whopping £50** on a new bass this year I estimate that I have spent more than twice that on various musical necessities – strings, straps, mic stands, jackleads etc. – and all of that goes to the independently run shops who go for a more holistic approach to musical instrument sale.

The love for the instruments also makes financial sense; if an instrument is badly set up and poorly maintained then nobody will want to buy it. Both of the chain stores in Canterbury have a wide selection of basses which are completely untouched from the factory: they still have super high action and appalling intonation which renders even the highest quality models unplayable. The people who work there just don’t seem to care, it isn’t their shop after all. On top of this most of the instruments don’t appear to have even been tested by the guys who work there***. I played the most expensive instrument in one of the stores today and, in addition to its nasty action and bad intonation, it was a factory lemon – the pickups were wired out of phase****, which is something they should have picked up when they took it out of the box.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that if you are in Canterbury and need something of a guitarlike persuasion then go to Socodi music. They rock.

-Ben

*their battered 1983 ibanez musician would only be worth the £700 price tag they put on it if it’d actually been played by jesus

** That isn’t a typo, it’s a Yamaha fretless bass that I got from a pawnbroker and lovingly nursed back to health

***yes, with the exception of Denmark Street guitar shops are always run by guys

**** put them both on equal volume and they cancel each other out, resulting in a nasty, scooped out and above all, really quiet sound.

Shoe Event Horizon

I’m still working in a vague sort of way on the write up of my summer travels but I got a bit disheartened when I wrote about 1500 words and hadn’t even got to the part where I landed in the US. I’ll manage to write it eventually but it might have to wait until I have other work to do that I wish to avoid.

Today I was thinking about how strange the commercial development of towns can be. How some places become saturated with a certain kinds of shops and yet lack completely in others. The best example I can think of at the moment is Woodbridge in Suffolk; a town with a wildly disproportionate number of secondhand bookshops and tearooms run by little old ladies. It is much easier to notice a surfeit of a certain shop in a town than it is to discern the absence of one - or at least it is until you want to go into one. Canterbury, being a sort of hub of commerce for central Kent and a popular shoppytourist destination for Johnny Foreigner, is a town pretty damn well stocked with shops. It is not one, however, without its own strange absences.

Today I was wandering around town in search of either a knife sharpening stone or some really light gauge metalworking files – not for sharpening knives, but for fret levelling on a bass I’m having problems with. Whist on this course I remembered something I observed in the first year but forgot; namely that there are no hardware stores in Canterbury. There is just about every other kind of shop you’d care to mention but nothing that sells anything like that.

The closest thing that there is to one that I know of is the B&Q on the outskirts of town. B&Q is a fine British institution which prides itself on their very open, non racist, non ageist non sexist employment policy – it is always staffed by a fine cross section of society united only by their orange aprons and abject stupidity. Last time I went to B&Q I had to explain what sandpaper* was to a gormless little skinhead.

I’ve actually had some insight into why this might be though; when I was about 17 I applied for a job there and was given an application form that took the form of a large multiple-choice questionnaire. It was filled with questions like this --

-1- A man fires a gun at a customer you are about to serve, what would you do?

(a) Jump in front of the customer and take the bullet for him

(b) Take cover and call the police

(c) Laugh, put the boot in, and then rummage through his pockets for change

Now I look at this set of answers and think: “now surely they don’t expect me to lie that much, I’ll put B as that is sensible and plausible”.

Needless to say I didn’t even get called up for an interview, someone I know though - who couldn’t count to 11 without taking his shoes off - applied at the same time, answered A style answers for everything and got the job with no problem. They have a recruitment system so stupid that anyone capable of thinking with any kind of subtlety is eliminated at the first round.

As a result of all this though, to get back to my original point, I am still having fretbuzz problems on the 3rd and 6th frets on the E and A strings which makes me cranky.

Anyway. I think I’m going to go to the pub now, as I’m already bored and it’s only 8:30

-Ben

*yes I know that it’s technically called glasspaper and I did try that one – I think it just confused him further

I know what I did this summer

It occurred to me the other day that I have this blog and that I’ve been neglecting it rather badly. It’s not that I’ve been desperately busy these last few months, although I have done slightly more than I normally do during the summer holidays (the same, however, could be said for most coma patients) it’s just that I pretty much forgot that this thing existed and when I did remember that it was here I’d usually get distracted or run out of things to say before I could finish writing an entry. Since the last time I looked on here I’ve done a fair amount of travelling, got a tan and grown my hair about another 6 inches, so I should probably update the picture and write about what I’ve been doing.

The summer started as every recent summer has; with me climbing bleary eyed out of bed after a week or two of post-exam recreational alcoholism, jamming as much of my stuff as will fit into the back of my parents’ car and travelling back to London. I spent a few weeks doing the usual half-arsed jobseeking, settling back into my old routine and finding, once again, that my old sixth form friends are still a lot of fun to be around. If events hadn’t intervened I probably would have ended up spending my time doing the exact same thing I do every year – putting on weight, drinking too much and failing to get a job.

Things didn’t go down like that this summer though, firstly my older brother ended up in hospital in Durham with a collapsed lung. The collapsed lung was caused the fact that Ed is so thin that he can do hula hoops with a cheerio and would need a belt to wear a pair of 80’s rockstar spandex, seriously, he weighs about as much as my left leg. As a result he did a bit of enthusiastic air-drumming his lung popped like an overinflated prophylactic (that may not have been exactly how it happened). I went up to Durham to see him in hospital and had the scary task of meeting Ed’s girlfriend’s parents. They were very nice people but I’m always nervous about meeting people when I require the use of two possessives to explain their relation to me, it generally doesn’t bode well and makes explaining who they are very messy. I stayed for a few days in their giant Tudor house with more bedrooms than they know what to do with and was present for a rather unpleasant infection scare at the hospital where it looked like Ed might be stuck in there for even longer than he had been already.

He got better though, and has a cool set of surgical scars as a souvenir. I’m no medical man but I think the procedure involved supergluing his lung to the inside of his chest and gaffa taping up the holes.

It came at a pretty bad time for him though what with him and his girlfriend due to be moving into their new house pretty soon after the operation. As a result of the surgery he was very weak and had been forbidden to even think about lifting heavy objects for a few decades afterwards (at least that’s what he claims they said) so I ended up making the trip back up there to help with the loading of all their worldly possessions (which is quite a lot) into the van and unloading all the stuff when they got to oxford where eddie’s job and Lucy’s course are located. It was quite an entertaining way to spend a few days, although, due the way things go, had to take place during the hottest period we had this summer, so I ended up carrying furniture around in 38 degree heat. Which isn’t a lot of fun.

My memory of the chronology of this summer is really bad, I remember the events but I’m not too sure about the order in which they happened. I could probably rummage through my email records and figure out when this stuff all happened but that’s more effort than I’m willing to put in and it’s not particularly relevant. It was around this time that I unexpectedly got invited to go on a road trip across the US and my summer got much more interesting. The prospect of travel meant that I gave up what miniscule effort I was putting into gaining employment and devoted myself to the serious business of having fun. There were lots of friends with family who had gone on holiday and lots of good barbeques and, strangely and wonderfully, I managed to spend almost no money in this entire period – for some reason it was perpetually someone else’s round.

After this the preparations for my epic journey started in earnest and that is something that I think I will document another time, partly because there is so much to say and tell and also because right now I’ve got stuff to eat and a leaving bash that I don’t hugely want attend to try and weasel my way out of.

I apologise for the poor quality of the grammar and prose. I’ve not done any writing in ages. I dread to think what my handwriting looks like.

-Ben

Plymouth and things

I have spent the last few days in plymouth having a great deal of fun and hanging with Eddie, Lucy and my family.

I will write something about that trip in more length when I can be arsed, right now I am much too tired to write anything coherent, as I'm sure you can tell.

One of the cool things about plymouth is its large number of Pawnbrokers, in one of which I picked up a new bass.

for £60, a Yamaha fretless bass for £60 - I have no idea of its age, perhaps 15-18 years old judging from its appearance - but it plays real nicely and has a good sound, and it's fretless.

mmm, it's jazz time.

it was so cheap because the electronics weren't working. that was, however, the work of about 30 minutes with spanners, screwdrivers and a soldering iron (actualy me - although in all fairness I did solder the wire in the wrong place at first) to fix.

I'm going to bed now, tomorrow I will continue the repairs and tweaks and perhaps write something about the trip rather than just rambling about some battered old bass I bought.

Drunken Ramble

I went to the pub tonight, I probably shouldn't have done as I've got more work to do than an English Lit. student should ever have to face, but I did anyway, as I was bored, tired and I've spent around 40 hours in the library this week. I went because Martin Jonathan was playing and he's always good for an evening of absurdly skilled guitar playing and damn fine songs. The drink was flowing (at a modest rate as I'm modestly bankrupt) and, in one of those 'inevitable rules of nature' doohickies, the trips to the toilet were frequent.

I'm not sure whether this is because I have a small bladder or that I just jump at any excuse to get my cock out (probably the former but who knows) but when I drink beer it seems to go through me at a great speed, taking all the liquid it can find on the way with it. This means that I spend probably more time in pub toilets than anyone who isn't either a coke addict or really easy.

For men, the toilet, whether it is in a pub, in a house or in a little wooden shack at the end of the garden, is a place of quiet contemplation. I was standing at the urinal (the one at the far end, closest to the wall - only a complete cad will choose the middle urinal if the others are not occupied) and looking at the exact same advert that has been on the wall there for about a year.

Which is strange in itself considering that those adverts must be subject to the closest 'eyes front, don't look at the other guy's penis or you'll catch the gay' scrutiny that any kind of advert is exposed to - you would have thought that this ad space would be fought over and changing hands constantly. It is not, however, and so after reading the government anti smoking advert for a few seconds (the one that tells you it will make you impotent - not really an issue to me as I've not got any in a good long while and don't smoke) my mind started to wander.

Whilst in this urine smelling reverie I started thinking about toilets, as you'd expect, given the situation. The toilet, I think, is one of the few areas of life in which the norm is biased towards women. Have you ever been in a house with a urinal? I think not... unless you have some very odd friends. The fact is that the toilet is something designed to work for women and work for men, just about, if you are trying.

I suppose it isn't exactly that its design is biased towards women it's more that it isn't biased towards men, which is either the ubiquitous norm or a loved memory depending on which websites you visit. I expect that it is this conspicuous difference to the other things in the world which are biased towards men (like porn, or any number of things I can't think of because I'm drunk) that makes the toilet such a domestic battleground. I mean, let’s look at this objectively here, how much harder is it for a woman to lower a seat than it is for a man to raise one? Considering fact that they are on average lower down and so have to do less bending, and their task involves less heavy lifting, I think if we go purely on caloric expenditure it would only be fair for 'up' to be the default position. However, it is this knowledge, conscious or otherwise of the toilet as a piece of feminist plumbing that makes these disputes so heated.

I mean seriously, women have no idea, the average penis (whatever that looks like) has about all the inherent accuracy of a rusty sawn-off shotgun in a hurricane, and a normal toilet is a long way down and very small compared to the safe surface area for a piss receptacle (about the size of a hedge or, whilst drunk, the Berlin Wall) even with the toilet seat up pissing into a toilet is a risky venture. By leaving the seat up man isn't causing a major inconvenience (unless the woman likes to sit on the toilet in the dark without checking the seat is down) it is that man is trying to make the toilet more man friendly, taking away a crucial area of dominance.

I'm not sure where I was supposed to be going with this, I'm drunk and I got distracted by shiny things, but basically what I think I was going to say at this point is that the toilet is difficult enough for man to navigate without the added difficulty of putting the seat up, which often wont stay up for very long and, mid stream, will come lunging down at your penis with rabbinical intent. For women going to the toilet is already easier, by leaving the seat up man isn't trying to take away women's rights, he's just trying to level the playing field a little.

-Ben

'Don't Play God'

It really gets on my nerves when people say that, look at this

morons, has it not occurred to them that perhaps keeping someone alive on a ventilator who would, if man had not intervened in the natural order of things, be dead, constitutes playing god?

It was the same thing with the Terri Schiavo case (I just googled that I found that I spelt it right first time, go me.) There were all these godbotherers saying that it wasn't up to man to intervene in god's plans but, if that was what they really believed then why didn't they insist that she be allowed to die when she had the massive cardiac arrest 10 years previously.

I have no problem with people not wanting their loved ones to die, that's fair enough but why do they have to use the same dumb cliche without actually thinking about what it means.

it's a nice day though, so i can't sustain a full length rant, I'm going to the garden.

Whitstable

Yes, that's right, I actually got off my arse today, and whilst my feet hurt as a result I'm happy that I did so.

I woke up at about 9am today, and sat around wandering what exactly I was going to do. I was up because I'd set my alarm to wake me, something I do every Thursday due to the fact that I have a lecture at ten. It has, however, never actually suceeded in waking me up before, 9am being one of those times I consider far more appropriate as a bedtime than a start to the day, so I wasn't entirely sure what to do.

I was in a daze, like a mormon who just been asked into a house, and so wandered up to campus. It was a lovely day when I set out, all suneshiney and warm* I decided that I really couldn't be arsed to go to the lecture after all and I was instead going to walk to Whitstable.

Whitstable, in case someone new has stumbled onto this site whilst looking for gorilla porn or something, is a pretty seaside town about 6-7 miles north of Canterbury (where I live). It can be reached either by getting a bus - boring, a car - impossible - I can't drive, or walking, which is nice as it takes you down a long footpath that runs through the woods and fields following the route of an old railway line. That is the route I take unless it's really dark, scary and raining.

Today, however, it was neither dark nor scary nor raining so I put on my sunglasses (which make the world look a lot more rich and colourful) and set out to go wandering. I passed through parkwood on the way there; the new houses are odd, they tower over the rest of parkwood like a castle or something, being a good three storeys higher than anything else on that side of campus. Can't say I'm a big fan of them, although the effect that they had on the number of people in Woody's is negligible; there are actually less people in there than there were even on a quiet night last year - I went up there on a Wednesday the other week and there were only about 20 people in the whole place, I was able to sit down on pound a pint night! Which is just wrong. I think the reason is that the new parkwood flats have the highest rent on campus so they are probably filled with posh buggers who aren't really suited to the Woody's vibe.

In my head I divide the walk to Whitstable into stages; they vary in length but are generally from one landmark to the next.

The first is the walk from my house to the edge of campus - last year this only took about 5 minutes and so didn't really count as a stage. This year, however, it is closer to about 45 minutes and so I count it as a kind of warmup stage - to check for holes in shoes, forgotten wallets etc, and see if the weather is good enough. I've had two trips fall down at this point; one because I realised I couldn't be arsed, the other because I got about half way to campus before I decided it was just too damn cold and manky for me to make the trip.

The rest are just the walk from one landmark to the next. From campus to the church on the hill near Blean, this is just down a valley and up a hill, which has a church at the top a mile from the nearest town and creepy as hell in the dark. From the church to the farm with the orchards and polytunnels, For some reason I always encounter lots of cyclists around this bit, despite the fact that they are no more likely to be there than anywhere else on the trip. Then from the farm to the edge of the woods,
taking you past the cowshed containing a herd that never ceases to be amazed by me until I go out of sight; although they are cows, probably once I'm gone they stare, amazed, at the puddle in the yard. Then the walk through the woods, which is all pretty much the same, and at this time of year, not very interesting - the world is asleep. Finally the last leg from the edge of whitstable to the beach, which is probably the longest stage of all, encompassing the road right at the edge of town with the crazy ULO** that looks like a spaceship, the long path to the station and the final weaving through the little streets full of little houses across the high street and onto the waterfront by the Prince Albert (snigger).

I sat around on the beach for a while, ate my lunch and watched three planes fly over in tight formation. They were small prop driven monoplanes and sounded like Second World War fighters (bloody loud), they looked like P51s, perhaps from Biggin Hill, but that seems unlikely, expect they were just stunt planes or something. I didn't stay on the beach that long because it was making me all sad and miserable and it started snowing to just add a bit of pathetic fallacy to events.

Yes. Snowing. You know I said about it being a beautiful sunny day? Well it still was, hardly a cloud in the sky and none above me. I've never had the experience of Snow on sunglasses before, and I doubt I will again. After trudging despondently around the town for a while I decided to walk home again.

I encountered a large number of cats; I think they tend to become ubiquitous when there are lots of old ladies about. There was a big old ginger cat was asleep on a sunny windowsill when I passed on the way there and whose position was no different on the way back except that it was facing the opposite direction. In another window there was a very regal looking Tabby that stared at me with a look of scorn that I usually only get from teachers. Then, when wandering around a churchyard, a shockingly cute little calico kitten started hunting me; clumsily prowling low behind me, then, when I looked round, sitting completely still with an air of badly feigned nonchalance.

I've never been in the churchyard there before, it's a strange place, with less of an air of crumbling antiquity that most of the ones round here have. There were a load of military gravestones around, about four from the home guard surprisingly, and it contained one hideously ugly mausoleum and one interesting one.

The hideously ugly one was impressive, probably cost more to build than my house and was pretty disgustingly ostentatious - which was why it made me smile to see the way that it was now in a dilapidated corner of the churchyard, covered in moss and mostly concealed by trees. I couldn't make out the words over the door at all; the only bit I could see was the first few letters which read "IANVA" in heavy Romanic script, which makes no sense at all.

The interesting one was a more conservative affair, just a wall about 1 metre high enclosing a square around 4 metres across with a little statue in the middle of some naked chick looking slightly miffed. Around the inside of the wall were a series of stone plaques. Only one however, actually had anything on it, just a the name of a man described as a husband and father who died fairly young. Presumably his wife remarried, perhaps to someone with slightly better taste in commemorative sculpture.

hmmm. I just googled 'Whitstable mausoleum' and it came up with a picture of the ugly one along with this information which is interesting. Google can tell you anything, no matter how amazingly obscure and pointless. I figured there was probably someone somewhere who likes these things.

On the way back I figured I'd try and cut off a big chunk of the walk. I live in Hales Place which is basically exactly where the old railway used to go - by taking the path, which diverges from the route of the railway at about a right angle a few miles from Canterbury, I was actually adding about a mile or two to my walk. Bearing this in mind I decided to carry straight on when I reached the pumping pond. At first this worked out fine, I was headed in the right direction and a man came past walking his dog from the way I was going. After walking for a couple of minutes, however, I came to a dead end with a big sign on a fence saying: "No Trespassing! This is private land. The railway line was bought from British Rail in 1952" I had to clamber through a hedge, walk about a mile across a waterlogged ploughed field, and climb over a field gate to get back to the Crab and Winkle way. What baffles me now is where the hell the guy with the dogs came from.

The walk back through campus and home was uneventful, I saw no-one I knew, except for ultramuntygirl who I hid from and that walk is so familiar to me now I don’t even notice it.

I wanted to include some pictures in with this, but I don’t have a working camera at the moment – the little digital camera forgets pictures after about 10 minutes and the lightmeter in my big Pentax needs new batteries. I don’t think anyone reads this anymore so I doubt it matters much about presentation. I appear to have written rather a lot here. Perhaps I’ve broken my mental blockage. I’ll have to see if I can get this energy to transfer to my essays.

Back to Work.

-Ben

*I don't exactly mean warm in the conventional sense of the word, it is February after all, but rather that the temperature was well suited to the amount of clothes I was wearing and the amount I was moving around, keeping me at a nice temperature. -- I know that these footnotes are annoying but that was too big a digression to fit into the main text and I felt I needed to clarify - I don't want people thinking that the UK is warm in February after all, I could get sued for false advertisement.

**Unidentified Lawn Ornament. Sorry, I just can't stop.

The Domino Effect

I was reading this article the other day

It’s one of those articles that basically confirms something that most people have always known, except with figures and in more scientific language. I think universities have whole faculties to do this kind of research; the 'newsworthy but not really surprising statistics' department.

People will like things that other people like, this is true. I mean that sentence literally; I don’t mean that people will pretend to like things that their friends like; I mean that people will genuinely like things, in which they wouldn’t otherwise be interested, because they are popular with a certain clique or compatible with a certain image. People do pretend to like music - I’ve done it plenty of times myself - in order to fit in. I’m not going to deny that, but there is another level of self deception, where pretending takes place at a much lower level, one that the conscious mind is largely unaware of.

There are two causes of this; the first is the aforementioned desire to belong to a certain clique, or just to give yourself some common ground with those around you. People are anxious to belong to something; it’s a core part of the way people think - we are social animals. In relation to culture this manifests in the formation of ‘scenes’; each with their own cultural touchstones, clothing styles and social norms. People get very attached to their ‘scene’, trying to find some kind of esoteric herd identity. One which allows them to slake their desire to fit in, without subscribing to the mainstream identity in which, accepted wisdom holds, individualism can’t survive. When a cultural product comes along that is perceived as a rallying point for a scene, people will flock to purchase this icon and confirm their allegiance by liking it. This is because most scenes are, under the façade of individualism and art, social groupings formed around the consuming of products; there is no defining code of conduct for a hipster, no set of beliefs; all that is required is that you buy some tight jeans, an Ironic T-Shirt and really like the killers.

A subset of this is the principle that you will try to like the music of the person whose pants you are trying to get into, for a while a few years ago I think I actually started to like the distillers.

The other cause for this faux enthusiasm is that of image. It is accepted that peoples’ self image is reflected in the things they like. Many, however, attempt to like things that they probably, deep down, don’t. This is an attempt to reverse the process – by liking certain books, bands or films people hope to persuade themselves that they are something they are not, something cooler. This is not to be confused with people lying about their likes and dislikes to project a specific image to others, I’m talking about actually doing it to yourself. Like the way that I drift from genre to genre like a deranged musical butterfly, I often wander if I’m just an indie kid in denial and that I don’t really like folk music, Jazz, hip-hop or Armenian trouser polka. I noticed a good example of this last night when I was browsing the thestudentbar.com (UKC online community) and I realised that pretty much all the American Literature students list On The Road by Jack Kerouac on their list of favourite books. I’ve read On The Road, it’s a good book, but it also ticks all the boxes for a certain sort of person: On The Road isn’t on the American Literature syllabus, meaning it saves the person the ignominy of admitting that they like the books they study: It’s a book that is internationally recognised as ‘cool’ and, unlike something more obscure it has the cachet of being a book that everyone has heard of but few have actually read. These factors make a good book into a great one in the eyes of many – I, for example, might have actually thought it was rubbish, I read it about a year ago and it could be the opinion that others hold of it that has elevated it in my mind. I don’t know.

I think that this is the cause that has the most effect on me; I’m not very sensitive to herd thinking. I do, however, belong to a kind of unspoken scene – the scene of the sceneless. To even speak of it is probably grounds for expulsion from the scene (that doesn’t exist) it is a scene of people who consciously try and avoid being in a scene. I listen to all kinds of music and pride myself on this fact. I’m constantly on the lookout for strange and unusual directions to expand my musical collection – over the summer it was folk music, for the last few months it’s been hip hop, now I’m heading in a Jazz direction - probably as much to uphold my self image as an eclectic kinda guy who doesn’t care what you think as it is because I like the music. Don’t get me wrong I do like this stuff but, I tend to exaggerate how much; for example, if someone said ‘Eliza Carthy?’ I’d say ‘hells yes’ despite the fact that I only like about three tracks from Anglicana and am not familiar with her other work. The thing that worries me is where this road takes me, before I know it I’ll be some middle class tosser waxing lyrical about the latest piece of fashionable world music at a dinner party.

And I don’t want that.

The thing is that I'm not sure if it's ever going to to be possible to distinguish music you like because of the music and music you like because of outside factors. You might take a disliking to a kind of music after getting a new group of friends but this might be as much due to the growing influence of the new friends as it is to do with the waning influence of the old ones. Ultimately, it really doesn't matter though, if you like it, go with it.

"ours is not to reason why/ ours is but to get down and shake serious booty" -- Alfred Lord Tennyson

I should probably get back to work.

-Ben

I can't remember

I actually thought of something interesting to write about here earlier today, but I can't, for the life of me, remember what that thing was. This is annoying but I'll just ramble and see what happens. If it's even half interesting I'll probably put it up as that way I don't feel like I've completely wasted time that I should have spent working on the latest batch of essays.

I've been getting rather good marks this year, which would be fine if they had happened my usual way - through a mixture of pretentiousness and luck - but this time I've actually got good marks by working hard. This is, of course, very foolish. If I give the impression that I'm the sort of person who works hard then people might expect me to work hard again: pressure that I really don't need at the moment. I wish I could just apologise, explain that it was out of character and not what they should expect from me. My normal style is badly proofread, incoherent and with a bibliography about three books long: but featuring occasional patches of verbose lucidity that redeem and bring it to at least the 50-60 range.

Last term I was fine with the high marks, then I had no expectations - I was happy just to be not failing. This time around I've got the possibility of a first hanging tantalizingly above my head and I've somehow managed to buy into my own bullshit and start to think that this is a possibility. This term, however, I'm up against, on the one hand, texts that are so boring they have a reading to sleep ratio of 3 pages per 30 minutes of nap and, on the other, a set of questions so complex and difficult that I'm 3 days of research and 20 pages of notes into one and still have no idea how I'm going to write the damn thing.

So I'm doing the only sensible thing, which is listening to music and writing a rambling whinge about it on here, avoiding the ominous word file sitting down there on my taskbar, mocking me with its emptiness. My logic might not be exactly watertight but it'll do for the moment, just until I can say that it's 'too late to carry on working' and go to bed.

I suppose I could have asked for some help from my seminar leader, but it seems more likely that I'm just not paying attention than I'm genuinely stuck. At least this way I write the essay the way that seems right to me and not according to the personal specialities of my seminar leader (I'm guessing with this one he'd tell me to relate it all to Conrad and then tell me a story about tar, Conrad, teeth, and finish it off with some trivia about Conrad)

...

Well that plan doesn't really seemed to have worked, I've run out of things to say (although it would probably be more accurate to say that I never had anything to say in the first place) and I'm not even close to that magical 2am barrier where I declare it to be too late for work.

oh well, back to the essay o' death.

-Ben

Bastardism

Sitting around inside my head I’ve noticed that a few things have changed over the last few years. I’ve gone from being a fat kid with spots to a fat bloke with a beard who, although no less ugly, no longer hides from mirrors. This process, however has a major side effect and that side effect appears to be that I’m becoming a nasty, arrogant bastard.*

This process began one day a few years ago when I took my dad’s old Gibson out of its mangled, sticker plastered case - ignoring the old sock and the label that quite clearly said ‘ainzorf!’** And, one bored spring afternoon, learned to play the bassline from a blink-182 song. I forget which one now; they all sound much the same. I had two friends who had been playing the bass for about a year each they were keen to help me on my way.

About a fortnight after I first played the thing, I sat down and spent an entire Sunday learning the chorus riff from Travelling Without Moving when I should have been doing my homework. I expect my timing and technique was awful and now I’d cringe to hear it, but at the time I felt like I’d climbed a mountain - partly because it made my fingers hurt. This was the first thing I’d done where there seemed to be a real relation between the effort I put in and the result I got. I started trying to play more and more complicated songs to see if I could, even making some very rudimentary forays into the world of slap bass. Within about a month I’d gone past the standard of my friends’ playing.

In a side note, the confidence this gave me made me actually able to control my nerves for long enough to get a girlfriend and from that route most of the positive aspects of my metamorphosis have sprung. That, however, isn’t what I’m concerned with here, and I think that any discussion of the details of how that transformation took place would be rather sentimental and involve a couple of rather obscene diagrams.

I’ve encountered few people who are better bass players than me since then, my dad and Nick of Mumrah being the only two I can think of at the moment, which is probably more testament to how little I leave the house than my actual ability. But in the absence of anyone better than me I’ve ended up building a great big ego around the fact that I can play Jerry was a Racecar Driver or something like that.

I’ve got better at other things in the last few years - I’ve got consistently high marks this term, and I excel in seminars and the like - probably due to the fact that I don’t notice when other people are trying to speak and I like the sound of my own voice. My arrogance, in other words, has spread into many other areas of my mind, I’m even starting to think that I’m reasonably good looking now, which is just weird.

All these other little conceits, however, are ultimately grounded in the fact that I can do something better than most other people, someone might get a better mark than me in an essay but I can think ‘bet they can’t even play Aeroplane’ and this salves my wounded ego.

Whilst I dislike the nasty person I’ve become I’d rather not let him go, You see, whilst I can keep my unpleasantness under control most of the time I have become aware that the faculty of this university is mostly made up of nasty, arrogant people, and they seem to respond well to those like them; giving me good marks and tolerating my laziness. I need the overconfident attitude to continue to do well here.

This all gives me a mortal fear of the people saying things like ‘my flatmate plays bass’ or something like that - I’ve built myself up from a depressed lonely teenager with the self esteem of a suicidal platypus to an academically successful and reasonably well adjusted, if overconfident person on the basis of my ability to play a four stringed fretted instrument better than anyone else. I live in mortal fear that one day someone will come along and burst my bubble, every new bass player I hear about makes me nervous, last week I heard that the boyfriend of someone in my seminar group was really good and I lost sleep. I probably won’t feel calm until I’ve satisfied myself that I’m better than him, whether that involves actually meeting the guy or just convincing myself that he's almost certainly rubbish.

So I apologise to all those people that I’ve shown off at, all those kids in guitar shops or people who’ve tried to impress me, I don’t mean to be a bastard, it just happens.

-Ben

* I can think of a few people who would dispute this, saying that I’ve always been a nasty, arrogant bastard and hte examples I can think of I can't say I blame them for it.

** in a south east London accent that word is the phonetic spelling of ‘hands off’. It’s a pretty weak joke but it was the seventies, and good ones were expensive.

Open Casket

I’ve been reading Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying today*. It’s not an easy book to read as in this book William Faulkner deployed all the literary techniques that are the bane of the lazy English student. I’m talking about stream of consciousness passages, weirdly named characters*2, a disjointed sense of time and multiple, often contradictory, narrative voices.

As I lay Dying, as you can probably tell from the title, is about someone dying, the matriarch of a clan of missisippissippi*3 hill farmers and the family’s attempts to transport her coffin to her home town many miles away for burial. That’s a pretty simplified summary, but I’m not writing an essay here. This got me thinking about how people deal with their dead, which isn’t that much of a jump considering my attention tends to drift away like a pair of loose swimming shorts on a beach holiday when I’m trying to do something constructive.

With the exception of elephants, no other creature I can think of seems remotely interested in their dead beyond a “let’s eat him before he starts to smell” sort of way, so why are people so interested in cadavers beyond their use in traumatising practical jokes? I suppose it’s a sort of decorous waste disposal, all this ashes to ashes stuff to disguise the more real, pragmatic reasons for sticking a decomposing body away from people and water supplies. Each culture goes for a different approach to this though, in the west it’s a matter of “stick the bugger in the ground once we’ve talked about him for a while” but other countries have different methods: from the uber cool Viking method “stick the bloke in his boat, set fire to it and push it out to sea” to the downright icky ancient Egyptian “do strange things to his innards and then put him in a pyramid, oh, and stick all his servants in there too” to the strange Tibetan method of “leave the guy on top of a mountain until the creatures of the air and land have eaten all the nasty bits”*4.

With Christian funerals, the thing that interests me is the fact that there is such a reliance on the body, making it the centre of all ceremonies, almost a religious idol of some kind. Just think of all the funerals you’ve been to (however many that may be, I hope it’s quite few) with the coffin placed centre stage at the front of the church all eyes on it. The people aren’t up in the pulpit talking about that body, they are talking about the person whom that body used to convey. Whether you believe in an omnipotent big daddy or not, the fact is that the body in the coffin has already gone from living person to cooling meat. Whatever it was that made them them, so to speak, whether that is an immortal soul or just the fact that their brain was plugged in, has departed.

Christian theology is always body bashing, talking about how the body is weak and inconsequential compared to the soul. Yet when it comes to the actual time when the separation of the soul and body takes place society seems extremely unwilling to acknowledge this. Instead it prefers to continue to deal with the two as if they are one, unable to shake the habit of a lifetime, despite all the embalming fluid and general lack of comment from the deceased that would suggest otherwise.

This is especially pronounced in America where it seems common practice to have some kind of wake or open casket staring session with the body on view for all to see. The purpose of this evades me completely, are you supposed to talk to it, or poke with sticks or try and revive it? Mankind is intrinsically afraid of death; the primary purpose of religion seems to me to be to make people less scared of death, usually by giving people the concept of the immortal soul to take comfort from. If you are shown the open casket you do not see an immortal soul, you see a dead person, the soul, even to the devout, does not show up and tell you everything is all right. The open casket thus serves to disturb both the religious, by distracting them from the contemplation of the eternal paradise, and the godless heathens like myself, by making us see the inert cadaver of someone close to us, intruding on our memories of them when they moved and made noises.

I think that the most sane funeral practice*5 I’ve encountered is that practiced by Muslims. According to Sharia law the stiff must be buried as quick as possible – for example recently the king of Kuwait was buried a couple of hours after he died – no fuss, no elaborate service, just put him in the ground facing Mecca. They do have memorial services for people to grieve and remember but in Islamic nations these ceremonies do not require the inexplicable attendance of a corpse and usually take place some time after the person is buried. This shows a sensible separation of the two functions of a funeral, commemorating the life of the deceased and getting them out of way of water supplies.

I don’t understand why the two should take place at that same time.

-Ben

*yes I know that seems like pointless intellectual namedropping but it has some relevance to what I’m saying

*2. Have you ever met a man called Jewel? Or Vardaman? Or a woman called Dewey? Eh?

*3. I never know when I’m supposed to stop that word, like when I try to write bananananana – I tend to get a little carried away.

*4. This piece of information is from Seven years in Tibet so I take it with a pinch of salt because I get the impression that as a narrator, Heinrich Harrer was full of shit. The other two are from Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories series, which I trust completely.

*5. I mean sane as opposed to fun, the Taiwanese ones with all the firecrackers and noise are good, but don’t make a great deal more sense

Buffer

I'm just writing this to act as a buffer between the previous post and the ones that might follow.

I've decided to restart this thingy

I don't think that I'm a better writer than I was when I decided to stop writing this but I'm less lazy, and it was the fact that I couldn't be arsed that was a bigger factor in the cessation of bloggage than the reasons I gave.

In the period between this post and the previous one, not a huge amount has happened, I'm still an english student, bored and lazy. Although I've found myself to be a more academically successful student than I was expecting myself to be in this second year. I'm still overwieght and drink too much although I'm working on those two, insofar as a man with no willpower can.

About all that's changed is that I'm now 20 years old, and therefore not a teenager anymore - although I'm yet to figure out what exactly this means - and I've got more hair and more beard.

let the aimless rambling commence!

-Ben

me not blog

Well, there you go, the title says pretty much all you need to know.

I can't really be arsed to keep this thing up anymore, not that I've really been doing much of that anyway.

I thought when I started this that I might be able to make some kind of interesting comment about my life and views; despite the fact that my life is only about as interesting as the lifestyle of a lazy english student can be and I'm so malleable that my views aren't stable for long enough for me to ever write them down.

I was wrong in that regard though; my attempts at profundity ended up sounding glib and facetious; my attempts to be funny fell flat and after a while this thing just degenerated into a glorified pinboard for me to put links and mundane information for people that I'd missed when they were online.

From now on I'm just going to restrict my humour to the usual array of cock jokes and tastless witticisms, and my attempts at saying something important or profound to drunken monologues and, perhaps, when I need to add a few hundred words to an essay.

Why am I even writing this here, I could say this to my readership - one person - when I talk to her, in one sentance. Meh, I suppose this is just another attempt at gravitas or something, it certainly isn't funny.

toodles

thingies

Look at this

It makes me think of the idea that there are things that just want to be made, and people have been trying to realise them with the technology they have available, like the helicopter.

It's strange how coincidences like this appear from time to time, although it's not as weird as a group of film makers in America inventing a name (Napoleon Dynamite) that, unkown to them, had been used as a pseudonym by elvis costello on a couple of really obscure tracks in the late 70's.

anyway, I'm off to canterbury tomorrow morning so I'll not be posting on this for a while, unless I can be bothered to go up to the library and fight off the freshers for a space in front of a computer.

-Ben

Pleasing

I was looking at a computer catalogue today (it fell out of a newspaper and I couldn't find anything else to read*) and I was marveling at how cheap computers are getting now, my dad explained the reasons for it but I can't remember what exactly they were, something about 'the hardware ceiling' and the arrival of cheap, imported cakes. However on the net I have found a much better looking alternative to the grey boxes.

I'll get one, one day, and it can go with the elaborately carved speaker cabinets I'll have for my bass amp** in my evil lair. Alas though, these are just idle dreams, I really need to get an evil internship or something if I'm ever going to make it as evil genius and I just don't have the time.

-Ben


*After I'd read the paper obviously, I don't just throw that away and keep the dropouts.

**Also elaborately carved. With a mini fridge in it.

erk

I think that soon there will only be one Uber corporation left in America

clicky

Marrows

I was reading this article today and thinking how I've had to learn so much American pop culture and language over the years in order to understand films and TV. I suppose it's because Americans have all the money,* but you never hear of things being changed for UK release because the American wording wouldn't make sense to us. I think here they assume that we'll just guess at what it means and leave it in. American publishers and film distributors seem to have a staggeringly low opinion of the American public; things like The Madness of King George III being renamed just 'Madness of King George' because they thought people would wonder why they hadn't heard of the first two episodes**. They seem perfectly willing to release a film like Memento or LA Confidential, confident that people will be able to keep up with their twisty turny narratives, but they don't trust the same people to be able to figure out that this is a squash preferring, bafflingly, to call it a melon.

It's especially baffling seeing as it's a very English film, and you can't grow melons here. But hey, we are a small nation film revenue wise, although if they were only interested in the big markets then they'd do well to shoot their films in Hindi as well and put in elaborate musical numbers.

-Ben

*When it comes to film making and distribution, I don't want to get into the broader argument again.

**There are much better examples than this but I can't be bothered to find any, sorry.

Summer

I think that with the fact that Eddie has gone back to Plymouth, my imminent return to UKC and the bloody awful weather, the summer can be said to be officially over now.

I've been wondering what exactly I've done this summer, how does it compare to other summers?

As for how it compares to other summers I really couldn't say, it's hard to give a Fun-rating.

it's not been a huge amount of fun for fairly obvious reasons, well, obvious to the only person who reads this and that's good enough for me to not bother to explain what I mean.

sorry, bit of a fatman emo moment.

I've been lurking with the same group of friends that I've been kicking around with since I was 16 and, on the whole, I'd be happy to spend another couple of years hanging around with them. They are still froody and even those that seem to have spent their time at uni exaggerating their existing foibles are still entertaining enough.

I didn't go to the reading festival this year, which is a shame, but I did see the queens of the stone age, which ruled (although I still owe pat big time for those tickets). Bizarrely I appear to have managed to pick up a few reading-isms this year despite not actually going, yay for getting drunk with festie veterans.

I've had no great personal revelation, no James Joyce style epiphany has struck me and made everything clearer. I doubt one ever will, I think that in reality people have to spend their time permanently slightly confused and unsure; never getting that great moment of clarity that they'd like, it certainly seems to be how things are going with me. No emotional music has played at any point, the soundtrack to this summer has mostly been leaning more towards the heavy side of things, and always upbeat, occasionally dangerously so.

I went to the cottage and that was ace, but it wasn't the 5 day depravity and badminton binge that it used to be. What it has become though was also fun, although not the same sort of fun as perhaps the newcomers had been led to expect.

I've put on quite a bit of weight, which is a bad thing, however I've managed to grow a beard that is visible to the naked eye, which is a good thing (at least I think so)... Perhaps the beard is contributing to the weight gain... I think I've got uglier but my self image has got prettier so I'm not afraid of mirrors anymore.

I've not really got any better on the bass, and the condition of my instrument is decreasing worryingly; I've done well to hold it together for so long. I think with the help of some people who know more than me I'll be able to keep the old gal going at least until next summer. But I can now play the guitar to a reasonable extent, well, I can play chords and have advanced song wise from the usual pop punk stuff.

The fact that Eddie barely seems to play geetar anymore is quite distressing though, I hope he's not going to give up on it all and become a square.

Seems pretty unlikely though.

I've not gone mad and beaten anyone up, although I did come fairly close to braining john at the cottage. But I do still swear at SUVs and off roaders in cities though, so I've not reached zen style inner peace yet. Just today in fact I was waiting outside Issie's school and marveling at the fact that the fat women (they always are)in huge off roaders always put 'child on board' signs in their back windows. Presumably afraid of their child getting injured when they run over one of those notoriously solid-and-dangerous-to-vehicles small children while driving around the narrow streets outside the school in their amoured personnel carriers.

meh. I digress, although I suppose you can't digress if you didn't actually have anything to say in the first place.

I think I've run out of things to say now. Well that's not exactly true, it's more a case of me getting bored with writing and needing to try and comfort issie who is all upset about the whole no-Eddie thingy. I'm not very good at comforting, I'll probably just provoke her into attacking me, that always cheers her up.

-Ben

I Have Returned

It's strange trying to describe a week of your life in a reasonably small number of words. The cottage was fun, it always is; but, as with every trip to the cottage, it's hard to put into words why or how. I've had a great time this last week, but pinning down specific incidents is hard, it's like whole week of 'you'd have to be there' I could tell stories but they'd lack the humour and the excitement that they had at the time.

Take, for example, the language of the cottage; generally at the cottage we devolop our own strange slang, it's generally various phrases used by the group that get taken up by everyone. They are funny to us and using them again becomes a kind of in-joke, reminding us of the time we spent getting drunk miles from anyone. This year's key phrases were:

"in the Face!" - based on Colin's belief that everything sounds more painful if followed by the phrase 'in the face!' (for example 'you have cancer... in the face!').

"sexy" this was used as an adjective to describe just about everything from food to women to a good game of frisbee.

"shut up... You're a twat, aaaah, you're shit" shouted in unison when someone said something that was a bit thick, or just if people were bored, getting drunk and shouting it at foxes was a good example.

There were others but I think that is sufficient to show you that in order to understand the cottage it helps if you are there. Obviously that isn't really possible for most people I know. This means that generally cottage anecdotes fall pretty flat.

I'm sure I'll tell stories but putting them here seems like recording it somehow, which is rather against the spirit of things, what happens at the cottage isn't really for the recording. I'm sure it wouldn't be half as fun if people thought that their actions would become public knowledge.

naked chef, hornet fighting, sausage surprise... They shall all stay within the group, only to be revealed in the occasional drunken anecdote.

Now I've got to try and fight off the post-cottage downer

-Ben

The Cottage

Well I'm nearly packed now, and I'm going to be off soon.

I'll be offline for a while so I'll talk to you in a week, unless I'm eaten by bears or killed by the psycho hose beast* but that seems fairly unlikely.

Go and be as sociable as The Man will allow you to be until october, I insist.

toodles.

-Ben

*See Wayne's World

Exams

In the UK about this time of year the press are grabbed by an exremely boring form of madness. The combination of parliament having been on recess for a few months and all the papers tiring of the usual celebrity holiday photos has unfortunate consequences. That's right, it's results time. A time when mad professors and pushy parents unveil their 9 year-old freaks who've already got an A in GCSE canoeing or whatever, when retired school inspectors with delusions of grandeur make statements about how "it's not as good as when I was in charge" and when politicians who think they have some understanding of education ooze out of the woodwork and start spouting their political agendas over the achievements of people younger and prettier than them.

The papers lap it up though, the steady stream of people dying which has sustained them up to this point appears to have dried up, so now they've got nothing else to do but glue their own interpretation onto the results, pressing whatever agenda they feel the need to press.

I'm sure I've ranted about this on more occasions than I can remember so I'm sorry if I'm being boring, but when some paper takes up the story that a 9 year old has passed GCSE IT* as conclusive proof that the exams are too easy I need to get ranty. Sorry to break the parents' bubble, but the child is weird and probably borderline autistic. What this shows is that with a great deal of effort a single exam can be passed, this doesn't mean that the system is easy, from when I was 15 to when I was 18 I took 52 (That took a while to figure out) proper hardcore exams and nearly went mad on a number of occasions. On their own they might be something an exceptional 9 year old can do, but they hunt in packs and most of us don't get the expensive tutoring and pushy parents (which is a blessing in my opinion).

I know that the system needs changing (roll on the Baccalaureate) but now isn't the time ot discuss it in public, for now just let the 16 year olds drink themselves unconscious and let the 9 year old wonder what use this GCSE is to him...

hmm.

I don't really know why I wrote all that.

It's not like it's something I've not said before, in fact I have a vague suspicion that I've written something almost exactly like this on this blog before.

Oh well, it passes the time and distracts me from doing the washing up even if I do sound like a whiny teenager.

-Ben

*Although considering I failed IT completely I can't really talk. but hey. I didn't fail, I got an X.

Getting Jaded

I've been thinking about the differences between people in the US and people in the UK. I don't mean the political differences, the broader social context or anything like that - that's been written about plenty by every person who thinks that meeting one or two foreigners makes them knowledgeable about the politics and social mores of every country in the world. I don't have the knowledge or the patience to write about that, instead I can just ramble incoherently about what I've observed myself.

The key thing I've noticed is the fact that 'extrovert' and 'arsehole' are not always synonymous in america. Sitting around with my friends from here, getting drunk and chatting away I've noticed that those who talk loudest are always those with the least to say*. With the americans (Again, not making grand generalizations here, although it may sound like that. I'm just writing about those I know - I'm sure there are millions of boring loudmouths in america) there were people who were loud but funny and interesting - I mean funny in a non abusive way and interesting in a non car-crash sense of the word. This principle is especially evident when talking about politics; the people who shout slogans and commit themselves loudly to one cause or another are generally those who fail to understand just how transitory and complicated it all is**. When politics comes up with the group as a whole, especially when drink has been taken, it's generally someone reciting the reactionary, bigoted bollocks they read in the sun and someone else shouting slogans they heard in Rage Against the Machine songs. While this is going on the people who actually read the news and have some concept of the boundaries between editorial & reportage (and read papers that know them as well) exchange embarrassed glances over their pints and occasionally try and correct the worst of the ill-informed ranting.

I think it's a culture of modesty; generally the people who have things to say don't want to make the people who don't feel stupid, while the people who don't want to prove to everyone that they do.

And the best way they can think of is to say it very loudly.

but that's enough ranting for one afternoon.

-Ben

*I harvested that from something I wrote last night talking to Sarah, I don't like to waste such rare moments of eloquence, even if it does sound like something a goth would write on his bag in biro.

**Mitch Clem puts this very well in relation to music, the blog is below the comic. (That isn't what it normally looks like)

Pastafarians

This made me smile.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster

Humour is definately the best way of making political points, it's a shame I can't do it really.

-Ben

If you need to do some serious godbotherer annoyance though I suggest this.

Or This.

Or This

Wow I'm just in hardcore heretic mode today aren't I...

The Gig

Oh man,

Best. Gig. Ever.

It's hard to write about the gig, I think I spent most of it in a kind of trance; mesmirised by the rockin' and it's hard to put that kind of thing into words.

We met up with pat and some of his friends from uni and headed to the nearest pub for some drinks and munchies. I wasn't drinking as I still have The Fear from the other night's activities but the food and many caffinated beverages were consumed.

After we'd eaten we started towards victoria underground station, warily though as one of the groups was a medium strength claustrophobic and the tube isn't fun if you are that way inclined. When we got to the ticket barriers though we all decided that the tube was not a sexy idea, the guards weren't letting anyone on the platform, we looked up at the CCTV monitor they have above the barriers and looked at our watches and realised: It was 6pm, on a weekday, on the victoria line. The platform was crammed moshpit-deep all the way to the edge with angry commuters. So we decided that the bus was a better option.

On the bus we passed stockwell tube station, with all the boards up around it with appeals for witnesses of the Jean Charles de Menezes thing, they were IPCC (independent Police complaints comission) boards which is reasonably encouraging, at least it's being investigated by someone other than the met, who seem pretty unrepentant. I felt momentarily scared when an elderly muslim man came on carrying a big briefcase and then spent about ten minutes mentally kicking myself for being an over suspicious thicky.

When we got to Brixton we relocated to a respectable looking pub and more drinks (and caffinated beverages) were consumed. I think I should explain that Brixton was where all the Caribbean immigrants settled in the early 50's so we were sitting around feeling very white and very young, in a pub with Skatalites and Price Buster posters on the walls, while lots of venerable looking, elderly Jamaicans argued with the occasional tramp that wondered in.

We went off to the gig and upon entrance were given a bag with SIGNED 7" VINYL inside. Steaming with glee we went into the arena. After a while of arsing around listening to the DJ (no support band) we started to get bored (that was when I was randomly texting people, including a really smarmy one to Bal about the signed vinyl; I couldn't resist).

Then they came on

They rocked.

I spent the whole time banging of head and jumping of around.

After it was over I realised a) I was completely soaked in sweat and b) I was practically deaf, everything sounded like it was coming through a thick wall. It's strange day when you get on the underground and think "mmm, fresh air". We got stuck on a train for ten minutes with one of the most talkative and boring men I've ever had the misfortune to meet. We missed the last train to Eltham and ended up going to Mottingham (about 40 minutes walk away) and stumbling back gasping for a drink and a record player.

Oh joy, to get home and discover that the 7" is a recording of "The Funmachine Took a Shit and Died" - the track that was supposed to be on Lullabies to Paralyse but the master tapes got lost. They rerecorded it especially to be handed out and this gig.

Collectors-Item-me-do, daddy-o

Oh man.

I ache, although I have had a shower and washed my hair.

-Ben

What Have I Done Today?

It's a question I find myself pondering every evening now, tallying up the achievements of the day. I'm not sure why I bother, it's not like I've written down some kind of list of what I should do everyday that I can check things against. Although perhaps I should, I probably need to get some kind of structure, but bugger that; it's too much structure for me. Getting up after I stop sleeping and going to bed before I start is about as organised as I can get.

Asking myself what I've managed to do today I scored reasonably well; although I don't have a list of things to do, I do nevertheless have a mental list of sorts. I left the house twice, I didn't spend any money on shiny things or magic beans, (important if you're on a budget) and I had a reasonably constructive writing session. I didn't save the world, write a number one record or have some great personal epiphany but I did shave and get my hair cut.

Worryingly I'm now a regular at my local hair slicy place. I suppose it's hardly surprising that he knows me after I've been getting my hair cut there for about 7 years but, considering I'm about as talkative as a tree stump, it's an achiement on his part. The good thing is that it means that I don't have to explain my hairstyle (I don't have one, want one or care) which is always an irritating experience.

Wow, my life is tedious. I can't think of anything to alleviate the boredom just yet. Although I'm going to see the Queens of the Stone age and Eddie is getting back on sunday which should improve the level of conversation from me talking to myself and giggling.

-Ben

Queens of the Stone Age

Me, Eddie and Pat are going to see QOTSA!

At the Brixton Academy on the 22nd of august.

Mr Ben is soiling himself with delight.

ooh.

I think I need to go and lie down.

I think this strip sums up the dangers of a good gig.

-Ben

University

Often, in my weaker (or perhaps stronger) moments - like when I'm eyeball-deep in dusty books about some mind-numbingly pointless area of literary study - I ponder why on earth I'm doing what I'm doing at university.

I mean, surely I could be doing something more useful or productive with myself?

Generally after a few seconds of confusion my brain neatly retaliates with

"No Ben, this is what you like doing, despite your occasional denials and, ultimately, it's the only thing you are really capable of doing."

Because, lets face it, I'm not really much of a do-er. My attempts at original writing have been, at best, pretty average and my middle class fear of insecurity will probably prevent me from ever making any kind of mark musically (That and my general lack of ability). However, rambling about the achievements of others in long incoherent essays is something I'm suited to perfectly - whether it's about literature at university or music on this blog (or at anyone who can't run away in time) - I generally enjoy myself in a reserved, quiet sort of way. Despite this I'm still occasionally bothered by a suspicion that I'm not really doing what I want to do, but taking the path of least resistance through life, not bothering to do anything else because it would require more effort than I can be arsed to muster.

Therefore it was interesting to learn tonight that some of the people around me are not going for the standard route; one of my friends has decided not to bother going to university, instead choosing to continue his career as a tennis coach, which is a more interesting and profitable way for him to spend his time than doing three years at uni for a qualification that wouldn't really do him much good anyway. Another one of my friends has decided to drop out of her course in Manchester because she doesn't like it. Not only that, but she's decided that she doesn't like the entire direction of her studies and qualifications from the age of 17 onwards and is going to take two years to start over.

I know that, even being completely honest with myself, I do genuinely enjoy what I do academically, depressing though that fact is, in its way. But I'd like to think that I've have the resolve to do what she's done if I felt I needed to. I doubt I would though. The best I can do is write a meandering piece of rubbish about her decision, that no one will read, and wish her good luck.

-Ben

It's late and I'm tired

I've been thinking about music a lot recently, as you can probably tell from the increasing incoherence and length of these entries. I say thinking, it's not really thinking more just listening. I suspect that trying to explain what you like or dislike about music is like trying to push a river up a hill. Like art it has many technical rules of composition and effect that provide order in the chaos. However to the uninitiated, like myself, music is still chaos. Just very beautiful chaos.

I don't have the eloquence to explain what is so good about one song or other without resorting to all sorts of bizarre descriptions that only make sense to me and my peculiar musical synaesthesia. I could tell you about how the guitar in 'The Sky is Falling' * feels all rough and tastes like peanuts or how the electric piano sound from 'Mary' ** looks dark purple. However this information wouldn't really tell you anything about the music I'm trying to describe or how it makes me feel. It would only make you question the wiring of my brain.

The inability to express why some music is good and some isn't is a cause of all sorts of horrors, from the aforementioned cool fights to arguments between friends over bands that one loves and the other thinks is crap. I can't explain why I don't like coldplay, it just feels smooth, sort of shiny but in a polished way. This isn't a very good reason to give to someone who idolises them and often results in slapping. I think much of the idea of musical identity is people giving themselves a justification, a reason to dislike huge swathes of music without having to ask themselves why. A man who only listens to metal, wears nothing but black and has hair down to his armpits doesn't have to sit there and wonder why he likes Justin Timberlake's new single, he just doesn't listen to it.

I think everyone blinkers their musical outlook to an extent. I, for example, am incapable of liking country music, commercial hip-hop, Free Jazz and the more extreme forms of Prog-Rock (I don't count deathmetal as music - in the same way that I don't count chainsaws as music). I don't know exactly why I don't like this music but by avoiding it altogether it makes my life a great deal simpler.

All this said though, what I know of technical musical theory could fit on the back of a fag packet and I couldn't point out melody in a police lineup. I listen to music that most people wouldn't consider to be particularly tuneful (I'm currently listening to McLusky Do Dallas) And I've got a history of hating music just because of genre. However I think there is always something there in the music I like, some energy, linguistic invention, even just a dirty sense of humour.

I suppose Cannibal Corpse fans would argue the same.

...

If they could string a sentence together that is.

I wonder if a bunch of socially inadequate spotty metalheads will start gibbering in my comments box.

I hope not.

-Ben

* Queens of the Stone Age. Songs For the Deaf Track 5. Interscope 2002

** Supergrass. Supergrass is 10 Track 12. Parlophone 2004

They Sing in Their Own Accents

Today I was writing something about regional accents in rock here, and how annoying the idea of it being cooler to sing in your own accent than in some other accent is. The problem that I hit is the same one I usually hit when I'm trying to write anything; whether it's an essay about the various possible interpretations of 'Ode to Nightingale' or a blog entry. I never actually bother to think through my argument before I start. I try and write on the fly, go with the stream of conciousness and write down ideas as they lead on from one another. The thing is, if you haven't explored the subject that you are about to begin rambling about very well, you can end up writing around and around until you defeat the argument you started with. This often causes the tragic realisation that the premise you began with was ultimately pretty unsound and badly thought through. I had that today writing about the whole regional accent thing. I started a little something like this:

I was listening to the Beatles today - as you do - and I was thinking about something that I remember George Galloway saying at Glastonbury this year, when he was asked what bands he was going to see. He replied something about going to see a band that were singing in their own accents rather than pretending to be american. He was talking about Maximo Park (I think) but it's a phrase that gets repeated over and over again by cultural commentators and music buffs. They see the regional accent like some badge of credibility; they talk about the uniformity of most singers, how all the bands on the radio sound the same. I don't understand what difference the accent sung in is supposed to make to the credibility of the music.

It's starts OK, in a bad sort of way. I'm rambling about music again but this time I've put it in some kind of context in relation to my own life. I've also made a statement, singing in a regional accent makes you no cooler than the next man. The problems struck, however, when I tried to explain why this was so.

Unless you've been singing since before you could talk and hadn't heard anyone else sing, your singing voice will be something that you've decided on; whether it's 'I want to sound like Robert Plant', 'I want to sound like I'm 50 and I've been smoking Malboro Extra-Chunky since I was five' or 'I want to sing in a northern accent'. I think the reason that singing in a regional accent is considered better than singing like Little Richard or whoever is the idea that it is original, that these people are doing something no one has ever done bef

It was at this stage that I realised that the point I was making was not, in fact a particularly good one. I should have instead pondered why this is such a big thing, why people from the UK assume that all Americans sing in the same accent just because they can't tell the difference between Wisconsin and Florida and how this is a bit of evidence that George Galloway's America bashing is a rather deeper hatred than mere political anger. Instead I was trying to say that singing in your own regional accent is no more original (and, by extension, cool) than copying the singing voice of someone else. This is a fairly thick thing to say really.

I realised that the germ of this idea, explaining the opening line about the Beatles, was from listening to Sargeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and thinking about how Paul McCartney used to sing in a regional accent and that it's nothing new.

That, I see now, meant that all I was doing was not some profound social statement about traces of nationalism and cultural identity in rock music but the standard music nerd game of 'Be into a much older band that you can claim did everything better and first'. A game which, as my friends will know, is one I play well, occasionally even on unarmed civilians; a technique banned for all purposes exept impressing 'the ladies' (this doesn't work - but it least it prevents more nerdspawn).

'Cool Fights' such as this become less common as you get older but are a major source of conflict among smug little indie teenagers at parties. What happens is someone says a band, someone names an older band who influenced them and basically it's whoever says the last band wins.

It is a game of great tactics. You can't usually involve youself in a game more than once (i.e you can't say a band, have it out-knowleged and then out-knowledge the other persons band - you'd look thick) but at the same time you don't want to use a trump card willy nilly as then everybody knows it and your mystique is broken. For example; if someone says 'Eric Clapton' then the trump card is obviously (although this can be contested ad infinitum) 'Blind Lemon' Jefferson. However the the next guy (yes, it is always guys), in accordance with the rules, will say someone like John Lee Hooker, B B King or, if being played amongst professional nerds, Leadbelly.

Bonus points are awarded if someone asks who they are talking about (especially if it's a pretty girl - although this only happens in the indie kid's fantasies) and the person can actually explain. Bonus points are also given to the guy who says the 'old Favourite' (one that in most games is the winner) for example in the Eric Clapton battle this one is, of course, Rob Johnson - Most players will only consider going for the trump card after the old favourite has been played, although only after assuming a sufficiently knowing and superior air.

Now this game, as anyone who has been stuck in a room with a pair of battling nerds will tell you, is a very tedious thing to put into writing (although I'm sure that plenty of people do) So I decided to stop.

And so I ended up here, rambling aimlessly about nothing in particular, having made no real point at all and wasted a lot of my time.

oh well. it's better than touching myself.

One day I might think of something interesting to say here, but I wouldn't get your hopes up.

-Ben