Tonight, I feel stupid. Not because I’ve done or said anything I regret - doing that usually just leaves me feeling guilty - but because I’ve been operating to close to my limits. I always feel stupid, in effect, after I try and do or say something really smart.

Tonight I was trying to write something about visual art, I walked past the tate modern and I remembered how strange it is that I, a generally fairly cultured bloke, can’t look at the stuff in there without giggling. I was trying to make some kind of intelligent point about authorship and interpretation, but my argument just writhed around, getting longer and longer, each sentence gaining more and more clauses and sub clauses, until it finally wound round, bit itself on the arse, and collapsed under its own weight. Like writing a fifty word sentence with 6 commas about how annoying it is when you write long sentences.

I’ve always been a little baffled by the reception that my writing used to get at university. Lecturers would use words like ‘lucid’ and ‘articulate’ to describe prose that looked, to me, like a pale, fumbling imitation of the fluid ideas that I could never quite put into words. That sentence, for example, doesn’t really cover it. It makes it sound like I’ve got amazing ideas in my head that I can’t put into words. That’s not it. Ideas are words. I’ve realised that, for me at least, there’s no abstract firmament from which I pluck the raw inspiration for what I write or say. I think in English, usually poorly punctuated, inarticulate English, and what comes out in writing and speech is really as refined as my ideas get, sad though that is. What I meant was that the writing always looked like a pale imitation of the words of others who thought in much clearer English than I.

Now I’m dethinking myself, in the hope of being able to get to sleep, by writing this dense little Blog post. A post which, if it is coherent in the slightest, is only coherent because it’s the same line I’ve been wheeling out over and over again in an attempt to make myself sound brainy, by pointing out how inarticulate I am in the most flowery language I can manage.

I’ll probably post the arty ramble when I’ve talked to my dad about it, and plundered his ideas to fill the gaps in my own thinking.

On a lighter, less emo note. Devon Sproule is rather good. Even if she does have a really weird name.

-Ben

Sorry about this

But I'm about to share something really disgusting with you, dear reader.

This evening I came home from work on a later train than usual, because I'd stayed behind at the office for a while to make up for a doctor's appointment in the morning*. I was in my normal commuting trance, listening to my music (Björk - which makes for a rather floaty and ethereal commute) and not really thinking anything. As always I was watching people; people talking, thinking, just generally being people and therefore fascinating. There was a man in his 50s-ish standing in front of me, standing facing away from me, but at an angle, so I could see his face. He was reading a newspaper and occasionally checking his watch. Brown coat. Shirt and tie. Briefcase. A generic London office gent.

He had one of those funny little ticks, you know, like how people play with their hair or fiddle with their keys when they're concentrating on something. What he was doing was sort of like that - with one hand he was holding his paper, you see, but with the other I noticed that he was, er, jiggling (boinging?) a big, gelatinous polyp thingy on his neck with his index finger. For a few seconds I just stared at it, transfixed. He'd flick it with his finger and it'd wibble about for a few moments, all floopy and quivering. Then he'd do it again.

BOINGwobblewibblewobble... BOINGwobblewibblewobble

He turned round and looked at me just after I noticed this, so I'm guessing that the choked gagging noise I made whilst trying not to be sick wasn't audible just to me.

Bleugh.

Very sorry for spoiling your day like that, but I had to tell it to someone, and none of you can be sick on me when I do.

you know what is cool though? An overspeeding wind turbine.

-Ben

*didn't have to, I just, er, did. odd that.

Earthquack

Last night, at 12:56, there was an earthquake in the Midlands that measured 5.2 on the Richter Scale. Unlike last time I was actually awake when this one struck. Although, I have to say that 'struck' is rather a strong word, I'm a pretty long way from the epicentre.

I was reading in bed ('Go Tell it on the Mountain' by James Baldwin, fact fans) when all the doors and windows started to rattle, one of my guitars fell over, and lots of stuff on the desk either rolled off it or fell over. It lasted about 10 seconds and was hardly a dazzling display of nature's awesome power, I've done more damage by farting, but it was certainly noticeable. The thing I find strange was that my reaction was simply to think 'hmm, that was odd.' and go back to my book. I didn't think it was an earthquake, I didn't have any idea what it might have been, but I felt no need to try and find out what it was.

-Ben

The Checklist

This article is very interesting, very long, but very interesting.

-Ben

Women in Computing

I noticed this when I was collecting material for a worthy tome on computer science, reading the biographies of computer scientists. It seems that in computing, like at Creative writing societies, the men are usually dull and introverted whilst the women are anything but. I submit to you, dear reader, three women who were pioneers in the field.

Firstly, Ada King, Countess of Lovelace

Widely regarded as 'the first programmer' Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage in his Creation of the Analytical Engine. She developed a program that, had it been built, would have calculated er, something mathematical*

Secondly, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

She was one of those people who, in military research offices, grappled with punchcards and valves, trying to harness the power of computers the size of houses with the processing capability of digital watch. she was also rather senior in the US navy. odd that.

and lastly, Hedy Lamarr

the co-inventor of the Spread Spectrum - a way of protecting radio signals from being intercepted or corrupted - used in anything wireless these days.

-Ben

*I'm interested in this sort of thing, but that doesn't mean I understand it in the slightest. I'm a humanities graduate with rather limited interests, sorry.

La Blogothèque

I meant to check this site out ages ago, when I saw all the performances they recorded with Beirut. I finally got round to it today and greatgreasyjesus! that's a big site o' sexy.

If in doubt, I refer you to their takeaway shows (concerts a emporter) These are cool acoustic performances (with character, not just dull rehashes of electric songs) from most of the good unusual music around at the moment. Artists like The Spinto Band, Tapes n' Tapes, The Divine Comedy, The Shins, Jose Gonzalez, Loney, Dear, and the Arcade Fire.

It's in french but it's easy enough to navigate, even with the torn shreds of my memory of the language.

-Ben

Futureshop

For the last few days at work I’ve been going through a lot of old books on contemporary technology – robotics, computing, communications, medicine, and so on. I won’t bore you with explaining why this is (I realise that this post is borderline ‘shop’ as it is) but I’ve been pondering the problems inherent to anyone or anything that tries to make predictions about the way in which technology will progress.

These problems all seem to boil down to not wanting to look thick in front of your future self; it’s one of those situations where you can actually hear futureyou laughing derisively. You don’t want to complete miss out the possible future developments, because you don’t want to look completely blinkered and trapped in the present/past. If you make a prediction that goes wrong, however, you end up looking like a pillock. I mean, who can forget the bloke from the US patent office who, in the late nineteenth century, declared that everything that could be invented had been invented – or when Bill Gates stated that he couldn’t see why a home computer would ever need more than 256k of RAM.

With the technology books the writers are afraid of making predictions that look stupid, but leaving out ideas (or technologies) that are known but unproven runs the risk of looking ignorant, which makes the book look out of date pretty much from the moment of publication. These fears manifest in a peculiar focus, not on technologies on the cusp of success, but on technologies so far advanced that they are hypothetical at best. These ideas don’t easily look out of date – odds are, they suppose, that talking about quantum computers, or Tokomak Fusion Reactors, as ideas that haven’t been realised yet, isn’t going to make your book look dated anytime in the next 30 years.

The problem is that these fantastical technological ideas either look dry & uninteresting on the page, or get eclipsed by more mundane developments in the near future. Virtual Reality, for example, is held up as the future of human-computer interactions in pretty much all of these books – despite the fact that, after 20 years of hype and predictions, all that VR has managed is to make a lot of people feel really nauseous*. Meanwhile Nintendo and Apple’s developments with touch panels and motion sensors have completely blindsided all of these books.

It seems to me that the best idea is just to go for a scattergun approach – mention everything that looks vaguely plausible (if that’s possible) and hope that people only remember the ones you got right.

-Ben

*Yes, I’m aware that I just sort of made a prediction about the future. I don’t care, futureme thinks I’m stupid anyway.

--

And finally, a little link (well, actually it’s a pretty big link). This is a well written and interesting article about how philosophy – and equally, all intellectual disciplines - should shun technical jargon and buzzwords in favour of expressing their ideas in everyday English. The idea is that if they do that then the intelligent layman will be able to read their stuff all the way to the end. Needless to say I got to about the fourth paragraph before I got an urge to listen to ‘the village green preservation society’ by the kinks, and lost my ability to take anything in.

A few links and pieces

First off, this cool short film:



Via Why, That's Delightful!

Second, I found this image when I was rummaging around in Wiki today (I'm researching a book on robotics, I was looking at Bomb disposal robots) It's a British soldier walking towards a suspected IRA bomb in northern ireland, back in the days before the robots.



It's not the highest quality, but a powerful piece of photojournalism.

The last point of order for tonight is This man.


Do I look like a killer to you? it's just that today, when I was out walking (in the sunny cold - so sunglasses and hat) I reached into my inside coat pocket to take out my MP3 player and a girl walking towards me flinched away with a momentary look of complete terror.

-Ben

I was going to try and take a better photo but then I realised that the overexposure is probably a pretty good emulation of the low winter sun.

Valentine's Day

Today the first inkling I had that it was valentines day was when I was coming home from work. I noticed that loads of the besuited gentlemen at London Bridge station were holding bunches of flowers - they were everywhere, sticking out of carrier bags, wrapped in brown paper, even the odd bunch peeping out of a backpack. Once I'd figured out why this was, I found it quite touching. It confirmed to me, that these people aren't dead inside, they are happily loafing around in their own heads, just like me, and carrying tokens of affection (real or affected) for someone (unlike me). Even Miss Orangeface Greencoat and her friend Pointynose Tallbird were carrying big bunches of dead plants.

I'm guessing that this must be the one day of the year that allows florists to pay the rent for the coming months.

-Ben

But all was not love today, the normally laughing and good natured sikhs were split into two pairs, walking apart from each other - the purpleturbanned pair were striking off ahead, leaving whiteturban and greybeard behind.

Sunshine

At my work I don't exactly have the sunniest of views. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that I don't have a view at all - just the back of the monitor of the person working opposite and some fluorescent tubes overhead. I'm not hugely bothered by this. I've found over the last few months, rather to my surprise, that when I'm at work I like to work - doing anything else makes me feel awkward and bored.

It does, however, seem to have some kind of effect on me. The sun shining into the train in the morning makes me smile, and I enjoy my walks during my lunchbreak, though the sights I see when outside the office are scarcely more edifying.

You can imagine, then, how good it felt to come out of work this evening and see that the sky was not dark and starry. The sun had set, yes, but the light was not gone from the sky. Which means that soon I'll be able to come home in daylight. Smiling in the sunshine.

-Ben

Andy McKee

bugger practicing, it takes too long, I'm going down to the crossroads



-Ben

Linkeo Mucho!

Now that I've got my blogging hat* on again there are many other things I'm thinking of. I think I'll try and space out the big rambling posts, more for your wellbeing than mine, but here are some links.

Wordlustitude
A fansmurfingtastic clusterspork of ephemeral and esoteric single use linguistic odditites.

Lucy Kitt
she's posted up some new songs which show that A. she's getting even better ('gone' is an especially awesome song), and B. that Atkin guitars are better than some good n' dirty nasal sex with beelzebub's hot daughters

Metronomy
They are bleepy, and kinda 80's sounding. But I can't get their songs out of my head. Which is proof that they're either really good, or I've gone badly wrong.

Four Hands Guitar
I've linked this video before, but I really must stress just how much joy it will bring into your life.

Kukuburi
Ramon Perez's Latest Artistic Venture, very pretty art. Especially the moustachioed blue flying otters.

-Ben

*I stole it from someone on the tube

We are a beautiful cosmos, you and I

As you all probably already know, I’ve finally left the happily snoozing ranks of unemployed graduates. I’ve hung up my headphones, taken all the guitars out of my bed, and started the morning walk to the station with everyone else. I’ve worked before, but this time it’s not as a temp, but as a proper salaried member of staff. I have a desk, a phone, passwords for the servers, and a work email address.

And I like it.

I’m not sure whether this means I’ve sold out, or that I have an interesting job, or just that after 6 months of dull unemployment, anything would seem good. I suspect it is a combination of the three.

The most surprising thing I’ve found is how very calming and meditative commuting is. I don’t find it stressful, even when I’m running late, or getting shoved about. Many people (including myself) have said that commuters move like automatons, just unthinking drones, but now that I’ve been doing it every morning I see things from the inside, which gives you great insight. I give no more thought to my commute than I did to my walk to school, but, importantly, this doesn’t mean that I’m not thinking. My feet know the way, my hands know when to take the card out and pass it through the machines, leaving me to sit back in my own head and think about whatever the hell I want.

It sounds weird, but I really like watching all the people on the tube - people in their thousands, all consumed in their own thoughts or chatting with all their friends. There is something about the completely, unavoidably public nature of the tube, which, combined with its anonymity, creates a peculiar sense of uninhibited privacy - people will gladly chat away as if they were in their own homes, because they know that no one knows, or will ever know, who they are. I don’t ever listen to what they say, I’m not really interested in that, my music provides my sound, but I like to watch faces and expressions, marvel at how people can look so incredibly different and yet all share the same recognisable expressions of anger, happiness, affection, etc.

So that’s how I spend my mornings, inescapably fascinated by the mute lives of complete strangers, collecting irrational dislikes or crushes on women who I will only see for a few busy minutes of my life.

-Ben

Also I think I have the coolest intimate strangers* ever – four big Sikh men who come out of the station together and walk down Grangehill Road at about 8:15 every morning. I have named them Purpleturban, Blueturban, Whiteturban and Greybeard. I wonder who they are…

*people you see everyday with clockmaker regularity, but never speak to

Rationality

It’s one of the big questions – can people ever be completely rational, or are we doomed to always knock on wood?*

Now most superstitions and habits can be chalked up to a simple, and understandable, desire to find a cause for events – you break a mirror and your wife leaves you, for example - you see cause and effect there because it’s easier than accepting that you’re a twat. This can also be seen when the cause and effect don’t quite seem to match – A mentally unstable nobody gets an urge -- a great man is shot dead – doesn’t fit right with people, the cause and effect seem disproportionate, so they flail around for something more fitting and substantial.

There is, however, an area of human oddness which I find less easy to explain: the widely held belief, often unconscious, that inanimate objects are in some way imbued with a kind of essence from their human user/owner.

There have been studies** in which a self-selecting group of people who considered themselves ‘very rational’ were offered something shiny and desirable (for the sake of argument it doesn’t matter what). When a volunteer was presented with something that they wanted, the assistant informed them that the shiny thing was previously owned by a notorious serial rapist/murderer. With a miniscule number of exceptions, they all turned it down. Even when the assistant explained that the shiny thing had been washed, sterilised, the volunteers weren’t interested. Even when they provided absolute assurance that it hadn’t been anywhere near any of the attacks, only a small minority of them actually accepted the stuff.

Now these are rational people, people who pride themselves on not trusting in the reality of things whose existence has not been empirically proven, and yet they refuse this thing that they want because of a previous owner, of which not a molecule remains – due to some kind of irrational fear.

For all my scorn, however, I knew when reading it that I would have done the same thing, and after a little thought this refusal doesn’t seem that irrational. Whilst the object is not physically tainted, it now has the status of a very unpleasant signifier. It becomes a trigger, of sorts, your brain would inevitably feel the need to remind you of its previous owner whenever you saw it, and then you’d recall the details of their actions – which would be unpleasant. So, for the sake of personal sanity the object is best avoided. Admittedly the reason doesn’t lie in the physical world, but it does make a sort of sense – it’s the same reason why people prize objects used at historical events it evokes memories and images. Coal is just coal, but coal from the titanic, well, people queue to see that.

Other things are less easily explained though. Like why the painting is more prized than the perfect reproduction or why many musicians get a kick out of using equipment with illustrious former owners. The latter example is probably one of the most strange; it seems to me to come down to people wanting to find some kind of physical remnant of a person’s intangible qualities.

Lastly there’s a little scenario I’ve been thinking about:

Say you have a paperweight, it’s pretty, it holds down the stuff on your desk when the window is open. It’s one of those things that you always take with you whenever you move offices, and you always get rather agitated when you can’t find it. Now say one day a policeman comes to your office and tells you that they want it for evidence, as they have reason to believe that someone used it to bludgeon someone to death.

You would be horrified. You would, most interestingly, be retroactively repulsed by the idea that you handled it, tossed it from hand to hand, and spent many bored hours watching the light bounce off it.

Why?

-Ben

*Apologies for the rhetorical questions, they just came out and now I can’t be bothered to write something less pretentious.

**sorry to get your hopes up with the asterisk and everything, but I’m afraid I can’t find the original abstract – this footnote is just a dirty little tease.

neato

Another computer games related post I'm afraid.

Ch-ch-check it.



looks like a fantastic way of getting around the fact that the view presented by 'first person perpective' games is actually more like the view you get from a narrow angle lens on a camera than the view a person sees. This system gives you the move more naturalistic range of vision, without the VR headsets that make everyone feel really sick.

-Ben

noises

I was watching a thing about a british music show, which reminded me of two things. One is how teeth gratingly annoying I find 1970's punks, which I'll probably explain at some point. The other was that the stranglers were really good.

JJ Burnel had fly skills.

-Ben

Strings

I found this in my Gmail account when I was clearing out my 'drafts' folder earlier. I corrected some spelling mistakes, and Gmail autosaved the changes, so I don't know exactly how old this is. I'm pretty sure that it dates from about a year ago, when my copy of Word went mad, leaving me with no word processing software - hence it being written in Gmail. I decided to post it up because it's reasonably amusing, and saves me writing something new. I've just put a set of new strings on my bass, but they are elixirs*, as opposed to cheap rotosounds.

I've bought new strings.

This is a much bigger deal than it would first seem; it's not that these are some kind of amazing, life changing strings in themselves - just a standard set of Rotosounds made about ten miles from here, the cheap kind with no silk winding because I'm a poor student and the silk comes off when you boil them - but the knock on effect that they've had has cheered me up. I turn to my bass when I'm bored, frustrated, have some free minutes, have a song in my head, want to show off, feel that my fingerprints are getting a little too visible, want to jam, or just when I need to keep my hands busy to stop them from dismantling things when I'm watching films. In short, I play my bass a lot.

Recently I've been faced with a serious lack of life giving wonga, well, I say recently, it's more like since the start of the summer. It would be more accurate to say very recently, I've been suffering from a more acute than normal lack of money. This lack of money means that all my non-essential essentials have been dropped, so I've had to say goodbye to my budding alcoholism, my massive crack habit, and I've not bought any new bass strings in about 4 months. The result of these cutbacks is that I'm dangerously sober, my dealer is having to pawn his bling and my bass sounds rubbish.

Of these it has to be the rubbish sounding bass that makes me most sad, I'm used to bouts of extreme sobriety - I even managed to stay on the wagon for the first 17 years of my life - and personally I think that Scary Jimmy's bling was a little ostentatious anyway. When I have a bass that sounds nasty than I start to think it's me, and in the absence of any money for new strings or people worse than me I'm left only with my collection of Vic Wooten, Les Claypool and Flea recordings and rapidly decreasing self esteem. I sit around listen to their amazing sound and immaculate technique and want to sell my bass, make my amp into furniture and actually start taking my schoolwork seriously.

Perish the thought.

When I start to actually think about paying attention in seminars and doing something more than the bare minimum of reading and preparation I realise that it is time for new strings, or I might slip down that soapy slope towards a decent job and something approaching respectability. Today I cleaned my bass, made some repairs to the fretwork, lowered the action a bit and stuck on the new set of roto 100-40's. It makes me happy.

I was noodling aimlessly just now, sitting at my desk, with my bass on my lap. It is dark outside but I'd not bothered to draw the curtains so I was looking at my own reflection in the window, watching my hands moving around the fretboard. I had one of those strange detached moments, where you see something without the blinkers that familiarity puts up, like when you notice that a girl you've been hanging around with for a while is really pretty, or when you see a pattern form out of something that was previously obscure.

I sat there looking at my hands and thinking, "how on earth did I learn to do this?" I'm completely useless when it comes to pretty much anything that requires dexterity or control, I can't sew, I'm bloody useless at soldering and my airfix models were always awful when I was a kid, and yet, I can make my fingers dance in these amazing patterns without even having to think about it.

-Ben

*they cost about the same as a big weekly shop, are coated in teflon, and make everything really wonderful. They're also made considerably more than 10 miles from here.

Inspiration

I was listening to ‘Mr Blue Sky’ by the Electric Light Orchestra today; they’re not a band I’m normally a fan of, but it’s such a catchy song. I’ve concluded that that song is one they wrote because, by some oversight, neither the Beatles nor Wings ever got round to writing it. I’m not saying that it might be derivative, it’s not a copy of a Beatles song, it’s just like a song that they missed out. If you see what I mean.

I remember reading an interview with Jimmy Page (I think) a few years back where he was asked, as he often is, whether there is any truth to the urban legend that he was the man who played the roaring, mad guitar solo in ‘you really got me’ by the Kinks. I can’t recall his response exactly but as I remember it he started by explaining that no, he hadn’t played that solo, but he really wished he had - that he envied the kinks because, as he put it, there was a whole group of bands at the time who knew that that song was out there somewhere, and wanted to be the ones who wrote it.

I know that it’s utterly irrational but I often find myself thinking along similar lines to Mr Page; that there are certain ideas, whether they are songs or concepts, that have some kind of existence independent of their creators – that want to be made. You just have to look at the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci to see an illustration of this - he drew pictures of helicopters, tanks, steam engines, etc., at a time when there wasn’t even a glimmer of most the technology that would make these ideas feasible.

With things like planes these recurring ideas not particularly interesting, people have always wanted to fly, but when you look at something like this it becomes really striking.

The central four devices are portable transistor radios made in the early 60’s. The outer four are first generation iPods. The radios were a flop, very few were made and little attention was ever paid to them. The thing is that everyone at apple swears that they’d never seen them before. It could be that the iPod just wanted to be, way before the hard-drive or the LCD display.

Terry Pratchett, British fantasy writer and generally funny man, has written a great deal on that idea. In his strange, pseudo-renaissance alternate world ‘Discworld’ technology and ideas that are familiar to us keep appearing, in garbled form in his world. The reason for this, he explains is that the inspiration for these ideas whizzes thought the firmament looking for a receptive head.

Or, I suppose, it’s actually just that shit happens and coincidences can be as implausible as they want to be.*

- Ben

*take, for example, the name 'napoleon dynamite' - when a bunch of young film makers invented a character with this name they had no idea that Elvis Costello made up the same name to use as a pseudonym on a couple of tracks he produced for other people in the 80's

Oooh

Shazam!

Now I know that this is hardly the most exciting news story you'll see this week, but look closely at the accompanying picture.

You spot it?

Yes that's right, it's taken long enough (judging from what 60's Sci-Fi told us, we're still at least 10 years behind schedule) but we, as a culture, appear to be finally moving into the future. And not the boring future - you know, the one that involves astonishing medical advances, mobile phones, the internet, etc. - but the proper retro-future where there are jetpacks for all, robot butlers in every home, and skin-tight lycra jumpsuits for everyone.

Huzzah

-Ben

Suicide Songs

I’ve been listening to a lot of music tonight, marvelling at the number of songwriters who write about suicide, and how, despite their bleak and depressing subject matter, these songs aren’t necessarily bleak and depressing in themselves.

‘Better off Dead’ by Bill Withers is a good example of this kind of song; it’s funky, catchy, and has lyrics about alcoholism and death – Like a Raymond Carver story put to music by Curtis Mayfield. It opens with the lines "she couldn’t stand me anymore/ so she just took the kids and went/ you see I’ve got a drinking problem/ all the money that we had, I spent," ends with the lines "she’s better off without me / and I’m better off dead…" followed by the crack of a gun going off, and isn’t much happier in between. Nonetheless it is a really good song - you find yourself singing along with the despairing, suicidal chorus with the same enthusiasm you’d give an old favourite.

I'm not sure if this is just me, but I find that that song reinforces my belief that it's not possible to take in melody and poetry at the same time. You can appreciate both, in the same song even, but not at the same time. How many times, for example, can you remember listening to a song and then, afterwards, thinking about the profundity or relevance of the lyrics. The first time I heard Eliza Carthy's version of 'Worcester City' I didn't register the slightest hint of what the story was about, just how good the song was.

‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ by The Police (I can’t remember whether it’s a Sting or Stewart Copeland song) is another example of an insanely catchy song about suicide, although it is different in its angle on the subject. This isn’t the monologue of a crushed alcoholic; it’s the angry posturing of a petulant kid, trying to make people pity him, caught up in the romantic idea of killing himself over love without ever really considering it.

To flex literary for a moment, the protagonist of ‘can’t stand losing you’ is like wossername* in Northanger Abbey – a personality created by the narrative format they imagine themselves in: in her case, the gothic novel. In this case: the self-pitying suicide song.

I suppose the thing that is interesting isn’t really the fact that catchy songs have been written about killing yourself, but the fact that so many songs get written about suicide all the time. I mean, I’ve got two examples here, but I expect that the Stereophonics alone have probably written about 6 more of the conventional dreary kind. Why this is baffles me a bit - I’m pretty sure that Kelly Jones can’t be writing from personal experience – I don’t doubt that living in Wales is bleak, but I don’t think it’s bleak enough for him to know a half dozen corpses by the time he wrote his second album. I suppose it’s just that Romeo and Juliet thing again, conjuring this image in people’s minds of suicide as something beautiful, rather than just the grotesque and painful end to the life of some poor bugger who’s been in and out of institutions their whole life.

Er, well, on that jolly note, I’m off to bed.

-Ben

*hey, it is 12:30 at night, don’t expect scholarly accuracy.

Science

For anyone who doesn't know, I'm currently working at a publishing firm, sorting and storing their massive archive of strange books. For the first few weeks I was there I was Mr Self-Control. I never caved to temptation and delved in the pile of books bound for the skip. My resolve was broken, however, when I found a children's science activity book (not one made by the firm I work for, I hasten to add) with the most amazing cover illustration.

(clicky on images for embiggening)



Good isn't it, quite the most astonishingly bad picture ever. I didn't open it for a week or two, because I was worried that perhaps what was inside would spoil the perfection of the cover, might explain what it meant and ruin it. But I was not to worry; when I eventually opened it up I found that the illustration in the cover was, if anything, actually one of the better examples from inside the book.

Look at this -



Or this -



By now I was convinced that I was dealing with a master artist, a latter day michaelangelo. But I still worried, perhaps the writing would be incisive, intelligent and educational - making it slightly less wonderfully absurd.

no need to worry on that front, most of the experiments described are bizarre to an almost surrealist extent.




So there you go, further evidence that Look Around You really isn't that far from how science is taught in the UK.

-Ben

Yes, it has occurred to me that these images are probably copyright of someone, but I figure that in order to hand me a copyright violation notice they'll have to admit that the art is theirs first.

and who would do that.

The blagosphere

The internet has many personalities - most commonly seen are the really obscene and seedy sex trafficker, the prejudiced moron, and the opinionated teenage boy. My personal favourite, however, is the strangely creative, subversive, counterculture type. Who, armed with a really bizarre sense of humour, goes about mocking all the sincere idiots and blowhards. It is the internet that glues captions to cats, that worships the flying spaghetti monster and names endangered whales 'Mr Splashy Pants'

Greenpeace have been tracking an endangered humpback whale for a while now, and recently decided to allow the masses of the internet to give it a name. The internet pondered, looked at the 'beautiful' names - and the usual hippy crap - and decided that the best name for a Humpback whale was 'Mr Splashy Pants', well, 73% of the internet did, anyway.

This all suits Greenpeace just fine. It may be a stupid name, but it has made them the talk of the interblag and motivated the righteous, sincere types to start a crusade to counter the massed facetiousness of the internet - thus generating them even more publicity in circles likely to give them more money.

I'm not going to link the poll, because I'd rather not be a direct part of the interblag meme fest, but the business end of the campaign is here - it's about trying to stop the japanese 'research' whaling fleets - who, by all accounts, don't do a great deal of research

-Ben

Face Plumbing

I have a really bad cold at the moment - one of those 'just short of making you throw up everywhere and declare it flu' sort of colds. I know that this isn't particularly interesting; in fact, I'd normally refrain from mentioning any illness I have to anyone, especially women - because generally the phrase 'man-flu' is said, and then the red mist descends - leaving me standing in the middle of a room full of poked eyes and tweaked nipples*

I thought I'd bring this matter up because, whilst I don't really have anything interesting to say, I do have something slightly disgusting to say - and that's nearly as good, right?

I've mentioned before how my body appears to be like a Škoda - It's perfectly sound when it comes to essential functions (I'm reasonably healthy, have no nasty diseases and don't get sick very often) however, when it comes to the less important things, it sort of falls down.

I have a brain that used to give me occasional seizures, knees and back that click and twinge all the time and, as I rediscovered today - some really shitty in-head plumbing.

I was blowing my nose, for about the 15th time today (I was just getting into london bridge station on my way to work). I blew hard, and snot came out, as I'd expected.

but it came out of my eye.

seriously.

my left eye, to be precise.

...

Which is quite possibly the most gross thing that's happened to me since I last drank Carling.

In other news, the Onion's informative world Map is very funny, and should be looked at. hard.

I'm off to oxford tomorrow, to hang with lucy and the edster. huzzah.

-Ben

*Yeah, I know, even when I'm in a berserker rage I still fight like a 10 year old girl

Nella Last

Mr Ben Reads - Nella Last's War

The edited real-life diaries of a 50 year old woman living in Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire during the Second World War. She wrote about being scared, being tired, getting old, getting bombed, and all the other many and various things that went through her head over the course of any day.

It was written for a scheme called the ‘mass observation project’ which was an attempt, started by some thinkers and anthropologists, to find out about how the war’s hardships affected the average citizen. Despite sounding scary to our post-Orwell ears, it was actually a pretty harmless and fascinating project - a social experiment in which people volunteered to have their daily reflections recorded. Obviously it wasn’t a very accurate cross section of the British public, the contributors were a self-selecting group with some reason to want to write for them – whether they saw it as a soapbox, a place to whinge, or a place to judge the actions of those they didn’t like – Nella Last wrote hers because she’d always fancied herself as a writer but had been sidetracked by circumstance, and life in general.

The book is interesting for two reasons, for one, it tells you all sorts of details about life during the war that mainstream historians don’t seem to bother mentioning. Like, for example, the fact that unmarried women were conscripted as well as men – for ‘essential’ work, auxiliary service and all the jobs left vacant by the soldiers. Or that unwanted pregnancies, with the unfathered children and backstreet abortions that came with them, were far more common than many would like people to believe.

The main reason why it’s so interesting, however, isn’t particularly the events she describes, but the feelings and opinions she voices in her more introspective or reflective moments. She is essentially a one-woman microcosm of all the changes in women’s perceptions of their role in society which, we are told, took place on a larger scale during the war. At the beginning of the war she writes little daily litanies, techniques and tricks, everyday domestic details - after a few years she writes in the same way, but occasionally vents her feelings like this:

I want to shout loudly to all mothers, and tell them how important they are, how much more they matter than all the preaching, talking men, who think only in terms of ‘organisation’. Look at the Hitler youth, and Mussolini’s poor moppets… …Let’s give them background, teach them simple rules of life, mentally and spiritually, love them a lot and then stand aside. Why, we would make a new world in two short generations and wipe out the bitter memories, make racial hatreds perish – and better than no man or men ever could

It’s been a good counterpoint to the endless military history books I’ve been sorting and sifting at work – countless tomes on tactics and strategy which have an odd dispassionate tone which I find slightly sickening. It wouldn’t bother me if it wasn’t for the fact that these books sell so well. I mean, commanders need to learn from examples and incidents, but I’m grateful that I don’t. Why the average middle class bloke wants to feel involved with the whole ugly business baffles me.

-Ben

Something

It's funny the way that working all day makes me tired. It's not tired in a physical way exactly; I generally go out running or do some kind of exercise in the evenings. It's more a kind of, erm, weariness really, an unwillingness to do small things like go and find a cable, or carry my guitar up from the living room where it has been for nearly a week. I can motivate myself to do big things, but I need to build up a certain amount of momentum to do anything, and small things don't seem worth it somehow.

One particular result of this is the fact that I've not updated my blog in a week. This is partly because I've been feeling generally a bit brain-dead and sleepy, but also because of the aforementioned inertness. I went on a walk in the countryside with various extended family this sunday and saw many very pretty things. some of which I managed to take photos of.

Unfortunately, the camera I took the pictures with is one that requires a special lead - which I haven't been able to summon the desire to find. After writing all this (which has just kinda come out in a big burst) I think I'll actually make the effort and find the cable.

Right after this song

yep. mmmhm.

Aha. I've actually done it now, I persevered even when I realised that, in order to get it, I was going to have to rummage in my mum's school bag, past the snarling and ravenous creatures that have evolved from old, forgotten sandwiches.

The walk started pretty normalwise, there was greenery, (although it was mostly gold, orange and brown) mud, and animals. Things started getting interesting when we noticed the Emus



Although now, looking at the Emu in sarah's photos I'm guessing that this is in fact, an ostrich. Which would fit in better with rest of the birds kept, which seem to identify the owner as someone with a taste for esoteric eggs - the little round birds in the background are quails. There were also pheasants, peacocks and various hues of chicken.

and then got followed across a field by a friendly shire horse.



The highlight of the day though was probably Scotney Castle.



Scotney castle is an old medieval fortified manor, which was a partial ruin by the the 19th century; when a new house was built further up the hill. The owners of the new house decided that, whilst a pretty ruin, it wasn't quite romantic or ruinous enough, and exercised a little artistic licence with the remaining structures to make something very pretty. if not hugely medieval.







So there you go, I triumphed over work-induced laziness, huzzah.

-Ben

The Tube (continued)

Another thing that I noticed whilst travelling by train is the astonishing collision detection that people in general, but commuters especially, have. At london bridge station there is a sort of concourse section underground where about six different pathways meet - people are walking across it, at speed, in every direction.

but they almost never hit each other, or even have to break their stride. I don't think it's conscious - it isn't for me anyway - they just know: weaving between the streams, anticipating the next move of the confused tourist, steering around the determined businessman - never having to stop or slow down.

It's quite beautiful in a strange sort of way, it'd be even more so if I could get a decent vantage point to observe from, and the time in which to do it.

-Ben

I was going to post something about the awesome play I saw tonight, in a church designed by Inigo Jones, but I'm really tired. I'll write about it tomorrow.

The Tube

Imagine, if you will, game of twister. One in which all the pads are rails on the ceiling.

A game of twister in which all the participants are strangers, and many of them don’t speak English. Where everyone involved is fully clothed – wearing big coats and scarves. Some of them are fat, some of them are sweaty, and a lot of them have bags - some very large bags. Picture this unlikely game of twister taking place underground in a very small enclosed space. That shakes and jerks around a lot.

...

The weird part is that I really don’t mind tube travel, it gets me where I’m going and it’s quicker and warmer than walking. I suppose it might be because I got so isolated at home that I appreciate any human contact, even if it is just being squished. It is a bit astonishing though - the way that people keep piling into tube trains until there isn’t any air between any part of your body and the bodies of the people around you – especially when you consider that at peak times the trains go through the station at the rate of about one every 2-3 minutes. Surely people aren’t afraid of being two minutes late?

It’s at times like that that I’m so very glad that I’m above average height for a bloke… I get the privilege of breathing air that isn’t filtered through someone else’s clothing.

Something else I’ve noticed is the way that commuters move in such rigid patterns. For example, the trains always stop in the exact same place and the hardened commuters just walk down the stairs and wait on the platform exactly where they know that the doors will be. I personally like taking a different route through London bridge underground station every day, I mean, you really should show your love for its multiple tunnelled craziness.

...

I’m pretty sure I saw Hugo Chavez on a train yesterday and another man who was stripping off and covering himself in lubricant in preparation for the next train.

I may have made the second one up… and I’m pretty sure Hugo Chavez doesn’t really take public transport… and even if he did then he’d be very lost if he was getting on the northern line at moorgate.

Everyone knows that it’s the District that goes to Venezuela… bloody tourists.

-Ben

Bad Folk

I have a fairly high tolerance for discomfort; my patience can stretch a very long way when circumstances require it to – I can sit around in an awkward situation for hours with barely a grimace, or I can endure a great deal of pain if there’s nothing I can do about it. If physical and social discomfort are mixed, however, my patience snaps like a glass twig. It manifests like a phobic reaction, I just freak out. I get a pervading, nightmarish feeling of being trapped, and have to immediately leave. In the past this has caused me to leave my friends behind at a party (arseholes + migrane) or flee an art gallery (crippling boredom + broken toe).

Tonight I fled from the local folk night due to a similar double whammy of unpleasantness. On the walk over there my knee made an unsettling clicking noise coupled with yelp-inducing pain, I suspect that this was caused by standing on tube trains today being jiggled around everywhichway – although I expect my running 2-3 miles everyday for a month is also a factor. After that I got stuck right at the front watching a band, (guest act, which meant I didn’t get to play) who were an amazing distillation of everything I can’t stand about folk music.

When I say “everything I can’t stand about folk music” I don’t mean that I don’t like folk music, no more than I dislike any musical scene. It’s just that there are clichés, tics and traits of every musical style which I find really grating. Little pet hates, you know, but whether it’s pinch harmonics in rock, misogyny in rap, or self-indulgence in jazz – in small numbers I can generally ignore them and still enjoy the music*. Every now and then, though, you get a band with enough of them to just push me over the edge. I can overlook one or two but a whole set, no. Acts like Metallica, 50 Cent, or ----** set my teeth on edge.

…Anyway, as I was saying these people were amazing in that regard:

Firstly there was their musical delivery: The group consisted of three singers; a woman (alto), a man (tenor) and another man (bass) with no accompaniment. They sang in close following harmony, all singing identical parts, just at different pitches - which, given the idiosyncratic ‘folk’ style of singing they all had (which isn’t a bad thing in itself), made for a very unpleasant sound. Worst of all was the voice of the bass, which I can only describe as like what would happen if you hooked up a talk box to a farting drainpipe.

Secondly there was their choice of songs, they chose teeth gratingly ‘jolly’ songs of the sort beloved by your hardened folkie. These songs are generally dirty, in a vaudevillian, sleazy sort of way and contain ‘rousing’ choruses or refrains, which the audience are expected to join in on, in a fit of tankard-waving enthusiasm. The refrains are often complete gibberish, seemingly inserted to illicit that compulsion some folk audiences have to sing along with anything that gets repeated frequently in a song.

Lastly there was the general haranguing of the audience, which is something that I find completely unforgivable in a band – if the crowd are bored by your set, telling them to be more enthusiastic is just going to make them pissed off at you. If you want an audience to really get into your music, then write better music.

-Ben


*Well, except for pinch harmonics, Don’t even get me started on pinch harmonics… ugh.

**Insert the name of any free-jazz musician you’d care to mention

Classical Sounds

I went to a performance of Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem tonight, it was being performed by a local community orchestra and the choir that my mum sings with. There were a few pieces of Mozart and suchlike, performed by the orchestra alone in the first half followed by the full on 'choir Vs Orchestra' showdown in the second (the choir won, fact fans).

Now I know that this is a little out of character but hey, I didn't pay for my ticket so I figured it was worth a listen. Apart from wanting to hear my mum and her choir sing, I was also curious to see if I found classical music any more interesting when performed live. The short answer is, I think, probably no. I liked it, and the choir were really impressive, but none of it really caught my attention - I had to concentrate on all the orchestral parts otherwise I just glazed over and stopped hearing it. I have no idea what it is about classical compositions, but I've just never been able to get into them. Judging from the average age of the audience I think that appreciation of that sort of thing comes later in life (or after it, seeing as some of the old folks there really weren't moving much). I wonder if it'll be like developing a taste for coffee, perhaps one day, when I'm balding a little, I'll suddenly get an urge to listen to Wagner.

Tomorrow I'm playing at a jazz night (giving the fretless bass an airing) so I should be able to get all these classical cooties out of my system.

-Ben

Pedantry

I found a strange subculture on the internet today - that of a small, besieged group of pedants, desperately railing against the massed armies of the illiterate internet/world in general. There is a blog out there for all manner of grammarian pet peeves, be it misuse of the word 'literally', Abuse of the humble apostrophe or strangely incorrectly applied "Quotation Marks!"

I've tried to explain my attitude to pedantry before (yes the hostility of the last paragraph is genuine - I was in a bad mood and generally sick of being corrected by everyone) with a reasonable degree of success so I won't bother repeating myself here.

On that note, I really should get round to tagging all of my old posts - I did sometimes write things worth reading, although I also wrote a lot of crap.

-Ben

Notes

(Click on the image to get a properly readable version. I apologise for the blurriness but I really can't be bothered to go through all the hassle of firing up the scanner)

I do enjoy finding things like this when I get up in the morning - little tokens of the chaos that accompanies my family preparing for work or school. It seems that today my little sister's voice has gone and Django (the cat) was being particularly vocal about not having been fed yet.

If you feel your note space isn't filled, then I recommend moseying on over to Passive-aggressive notes, it's funny, although I find it a little emotionally draining after a while - too much anger.

-Ben

Portal

Looks like a mighty neato game. All brainthinky and not deathtacular, which makes for a pleasant change. It's doing things with modern game physics that are actually innovative and original.

Halloween

I have a very uneasy relationship with halloween, I’m never quite sure what to make of it. Much as I dislike being put on the same side of the argument as moralising Christians, I really don’t much care for the whole trick or treat, dressing up thing.

My reasons are of course different from those of the bible waving fraternity. I dislike Halloween, not because it’s nasty and pagan but because it’s a travesty of all the cool aspects of nasty pagan festivals. Britain has no shortage of pre-christian celebrations and traditions and yet, on this most pagan of pagan days, we increasingly choose to follow not our own traditional practices and traditions but a sort of mangled, commercialised version of them. I’m not arguing that we should celebrate Samhain again, no, I'm not a wiccan ponce. ...and we do that on Guy Fawkes’ night anyway – lighting bonfires and scaring off the darkness with loud noises, you didn't think that was really about a gunpowder plot did you?

Modern Halloween, it seems to me, is not be a night of deference to the folk superstitions which the Christians find so offensive, but a night in which we mock those superstitions, ones which seem so childish in the glow of fluorescent bulbs. We stand there, in our brightly lit streets, dressed as plastic goblins, and then congratulate ourselves on not being afraid.

All Hallow’s Eve was traditionally a night when the faerie folk, banshees, goblins and other pre-Christian beasties prowled the earth; when the souls of the lost, restless spirits, were especially active. It was a night when you sat around the fire with your family telling stories, and left lit candles in the windows to help guide the lost spirits. A good example of how scary it was is a story like the legend of the Celtic Folk-Hero Nera. Nera was the only warrior brave enough to rise to the challenge of his king: to leave the hall on the eve of Samhain, to walk alone through the darkness to the Gallows on a nearby hill, and tie a white band around the ankle of one of the hanged men decaying there. Going out on Halloween was not something that children could do, nor even most grown men.

It was, in most parts of England (even more so in Scotland), quite specifically NOT a night when you went out. Because if you went out the faeries would get you, and there is nothing whimsical about the fairies in folk stories: they stole husbands and wives, murdered children, killed livestock. I’ve been thumbing through my big book of folklore* trying to find a story that I remember reading, but I’ve forgotten the title and this book is huge.

As I remember it, the story it was about a man who was sitting with his wife on all Hallow’s eve, keeping warm and out of trouble. For some reason she insisted on going out after dark and was taken by the queen of the fairies. Exactly one year later the man’s brothers came to sit with him through the night. Sure enough the fairy folk came back, they stood by his door and called to him, entreated him to come out and join his wife. He heard her voice, she pleaded with him too, and he forgot when he had been told about staying inside. His brothers, however, were mindful of the stories of the fairies, held him down and refused to let him go out. The next morning, at dawn, the noises stopped and the brothers went out to see what had happened outside. They found the door and the doorstep covered with blood, and his wife was never seen again.

A traditional Halloween should be spent sitting in a candlelit house, surrounded by impenetrable darkness and cold, terrified of what might be waiting outside. These days, the closest anyone gets to that is hiding from trick or treaters.

I'm going to go and read some M R James stories and scare myself up good...

-Ben

*Briggs, Katherine M. A Dictionary of British Folk Tales in the English Language. Routledge : London : 1991

Daylight Savings

Say what you like about London's pollution, it certainly makes for pretty sunsets.

I just watched the sun go down, it was gorgeous, and that made me happy. It is only 4:40pm, however, and that makes me unhappy. The clocks went back over the weekend (causing an all-night party I was at to get really confusing) and now I appear to be living in a land of perpetual night. I think they do it so that it is lighter earlier in the mornings, but this doesn’t really help me, I’m not generally awake early in the morning.

Other than stare at the sunset I've really not done much of note, I sent off another job application last night, and I've been ordering prospectuseseses from various institutions today - although I feel like I'm flailing wildly in the dark in that regard, I need to find some sort of big postgraduate guide to help me.

-Ben

Mr Ben Digs

Just the one band today, but they are very good.



The song is called 'Elephant Gun'

They are called Beirut and, as far as I can tell, they are basically the brainchild of a 19 year old from Santa Fe. Yes, young and talented. "Bastard!" I hear you shout? Well, that's as maybe, but he writes good songs.

-Ben

Sinister music

This is a little question for my readers (I'm not sure, but I think that you are at least three in number) - Do you know of any songs that could be called 'sinister' 'creepy' or 'scary'?

I don't mean scary like Boy Bands, or sinister like Gary Glitter - but you know - stuff that's actually creepy. I'm playing a folk night with my dad on Halloween and we were trying to think of some more appropriate songs. So far, we've got 'Paranoid' by Black Sabbath (in an Eastern European stylee - it works, really well), 'Watching the Detectives' by Elvis Costello (more because it's a good song than because it's particularly creepy, although it is pretty odd and unsettling), and either 'St James Infirmary Blues' or 'Death Letter' (old blues songs, included because they are really macabre).

Obviously there's no shortage of grim and scary folk songs, but we are looking to do some more modern stuff. Any suggestions?

-Ben

A clarification

I was out delivering letters for my mum’s school today – it passes the time – and I feel like I should clarify something about which there seems to be some confusion.

This is a Bear Trap:


This is a Letterbox:


All clear? good. That is all.

-Ben

Musics

At the moment Mr Ben Digs

The Elevaters
-Damn funky, sitting in largely unexploited territory somewhere between Stevie Wonder and N.E.R.D. I approve. (Via Kristen)

Headlines
-Pretty straight UK indie band, but done very well. (Via the radio, surprisingly - 6music is actually good enough for me to be able to listen to it all the time)

Emo

I wrote this last night, hence the references to being a bit drunk, but my internet was being crappy, so I couldn't post it until now.

Don’t worry, this post isn’t me being emo, nor is it another of my interminable ‘Ben attempts to analyse pop culture and fails’ posts. No. Instead I just thought I’d recount, in my drunken state, a story I was told today by one of my friends.

The friend in question has a job which requires him to work with children, and the other day he and a co-worker were teaching a 9 year old boy. When they were practising something particularly difficult the co-worker started to tease my friend and the boy in a good natured sort of way.

After a while the kid lost patience and retorted with the following:

Boy: Shut up! You… er… Goth!

The adults start giggling.

Boy:Actually no… you’re worse than a Goth, you’re an EMO!

At this point my friend and his co-worker start giggling harder.

Friend: What’s an emo then?

Boy: An emo is the worst. It’s a cross between a GOTH and a GAY

…

Such insight from one so young…

-Ben

Funny

As I was dangerously intellectual yesterday I thought I'd lower the tone a little for today. These are two things I've seen in the last few days that have made me laugh until I very nearly peed myself.

- Human Tetris
Anyone who can watch this and not giggle hysterically is dead inside.

- The 213 Things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the U.S. army
Bit of strange military humour, sort of like an army version of the Bart Simpson Blackboard gag - imply the stupid things done by mentioning only the prohibition to do them again.

-Ben

Killers and Strongwomen

This story on the beeb today led me off on a bit of a Wiki bender, because it occurred to me that whilst I knew the name Dr Crippen, I didn't actually know anything about him or what he did. His story isn't that interesting until the facts (if they are facts) in that news story are added. I mean, so he didn't kill his wife, but er, it's not like the new evidence makes him look shiny and innocent - what with the skilfully dismembered corpse buried under his floor. It just makes it more interesting, who was the dead body under the floor, if it wasn't his wife - I think the incompetent backstreet abortionist theory sounds plausible, if unpleasant.

I find these sort of figures interesting; not for what they did, killing people isn't that remarkable - anyone with a defective conscience, a half decent swing and a big stick can do that - but for the way that their crimes slip into popular culture after a few decades. Consider, for example, these names: Jack the Ripper, Sweeney Todd, Spring Heeled Jack - how many people would actually be certain which of these famous murderers was real, or at least closely based on a real person?* I was curious about the man's actual crimes because often you find that such shocking events and stories echo through the popular imagination, aspects of the case get regurgitated, intentionally or subconsciously, in narratives all the time and it's interesting to see how they reappear and evolve into something more fiction than fact.

In that regard I have a suspicion that all such stories have some grounding in fact. I don't mean that there really was a demon barber, but there might have been a really inept barber who gave someone with a tendency to exaggerate a clumsy shave, and so the story started. It makes me think of the romantic poets and their theories of the imagination (not something I like to be reminded of) specifically of Keats' theory, mirrored in the work of other good poets like Wallace Stevens, that art and, to an extent, perception, is created through the imaginative mind's interactions with prosaic reality - rather than conjured out of nothing.

Finally, as always with Wikipedia benders, I found myself getting more interested in tangentially related characters in the story, such as the friend of the late Mrs Belle Crippen** who informed the police that her friend had vanished - a Ms Kate Williams, known to the public as Vulcana. Who is a fascinating character, much more interesting than the weird quack who murdered his washed up showgirl wife. I insist that you go read about her instead.

-Ben


*In case you were unsure it's only the first one - Sweeney Todd and Spring Heeled Jack are urban Legends popularised in Penny Dreadfuls. Although there are those who argue that there is some grain of truth to the stories, nobody knows where that grain lies.

**Even if she wasn't 'late' at that point, I should think she is now.

Smoothed Out Shite

At the folk club tonight (which isn't really a folk club, it's more of a place where people who like to play instruments and sing gather and do both at each other) there was a man playing who comes there quite often and is, well, terrible. Terrible people at folk clubs aren't unusual, far from it. My personal favourites are the tone deaf old man who sings with, erm, charming enthusiasm and the middle aged woman who sings Bob Dylan and Joan Baez songs - seemingly with the conviction that if she delivers them with sufficient ferocity the chords will get into the right order on their own. But there's this one man who can't be so easily blocked out, or avoided by a swift trip to the bar.

He sings songs that he writes himself, about various predictable subjects - there's one about a break up, one cloyingly sentimental one about his grown up daughter, one generic lovey dovey song, and one about killing nuns... well, actually no, there aren't any about killing nuns, it'd be much more interesting if there was*. Anyway, as I was saying, this man is bad, but there's no specific thing that you can point out about his performances and say 'this man is shite'. His lyrics are clichéd and derivative but they aren't bad exactly - they are competently put together, more so than many songs out there. His guitar playing, whilst not face melting, is above the level of your average folkie - certainly better than Bob Dylan, and his voice is always pitch perfect. The thing is that when all added together these things seem to somehow subtract from each other, or at least, don't add up to something listenable.

He's terrible in the same way that a packet of sausages that only costs 20p are terrible - there's nothing stringy or oddly hard to incur disgust, it's all just ground up so smooth that there's nothing in particular you can object to. This man has perfected a style of songwriting that isn't good, it's just really finely honed, practised and polished crap. He's managed to take the normal cringe-inducing low points and occasional flashes of talent and merge them into one uniform whole. A whole which can only be described with the word 'meh'.

He is living proof that, with enough willpower, you can polish a turd.

-Ben

*And such subject matter really wouldn't be out of place at a folk club, folk songs are waaay more violent and sexual than people realise. I'm guessing it's because it's the music of everyday people, and as everyone knows, the average person is way more filthy minded and sweary than characters on TV

The heap

These are the guitars currently living in my room (or the spare room) at the moment.

From top to Bottom

Vintage* Acoustic Guitar - This one is mine, used to be my mum's but she traded up. Took me many hours of work with files, wrenches and sandpaper to get it playable, I recently restrung it and have started playing it again.

Encore Stratocaster Copy - Heavily Customised. I've covered the work on this beastie fairly extensively here, quite nice now.

Yamaha Pacifica - My little sister's. I don't actually know what it is doing up here to be honest. I think guitars just gravitate up here.

Hamer 'Slammer' Centaura - My most recent project, new electronics and a clean/set up. It's living here until Ed comes to pick it up.

Yamaha BB604 - My fretted Bass. Doesn't get played a huge amount at the moment, the strings are all manky and my bass amp isn't working very well.

Yamaha RBX200F - Probably made some time in the late 1980's, bought for £60 from a pawnbroker in Plymouth 2 years ago. Refitted the electronics, refinished the body, coated the fretboard.

Gibson EB-3 - Belongs to dad, lives under my bed in a case - I occasionally take it out and check that it's all in working order - probably worth more money than dad's car.

There's also a Hohner Pianet T that lives in my wardrobe, a Roland Guitar amp that sits at the end of my bed and a Giant Behringer Bass amp that sits on top of my chest of drawers.

All of which means that I don't have much room to sleep in.

-Ben

*as in the company, not the adjective - although it probably is about 10 years old.

Swearing

I was thinking about writing something on the subject of swearing and taboo language recently but then I found this.

Which puts it all far better than I can do myself.

-Ben

Zen and the Art of Guitar Maintenance

Metal is a strange genre. It appeals to a peculiar side of the male psyche that wants, more than anything, to be seen to understand things that other people don’t; to possess some insightful understanding that sees the merit in what others discard. It is, essentially, an exclusive club – a shared opinion that allows those who hold it to feel like an enlightened minority, that they appreciate something special that passes lesser mortals by. I dare say that there are some people who are in it because they really like the sound of guitars distorted so much that they sound like a motorbike with a kazoo stuck over the end of the exhaust pipe, but they are rare.

This is all stuff that I’ve said before, probably better and more coherently than I have here, but I was reminded of it today whilst setting up a guitar. The guitar in question, my brother’s, is fitted with a Floyd Rose Double-Locking Tremolo – it’s a bridge that looks like this:


Ugly isn’t it.

This giant chunk of chromed brass is a fairly recent invention: A refinement (of sorts) of your standard Stratocaster Tremolo, designed in the late seventies by a man named Floyd Rose. It has its advantages – it can bend the notes up or down 3-4 semitones without pulling all your strings out of tune when you return to normal pitch – which is useful, if you like that sort of thing. They do undoubtedly have their uses, not uses I particularly approve of, but uses nonetheless.

My beef, however, is with how teeth gratingly frustrating and impractical they are to work with: They take ages to get in tune, finger bending on one string brings the pitch of all the others down, you have to take the strings off to adjust the intonation, and, worst of all, if one string breaks the change in tension pulls of the other strings out of tune, and the locking nut & bridge makes changing said string impossible to do quickly – so if you break a string on stage you are totally fucked.

In this thing, however, lies further evidence that my theories about metal are not completely wrong. These machines are impractical, cumbersome and rarely used to an extent that counterbalances their many faults, even by their admirers. Yet they are, nonetheless, loved by heavy metal guitarists. They adopt very much the same attitude to them as I’d noticed in relation to their music; that these things are perfect in some way that mere mortals can’t understand. They dismiss all the faults as mere trifles designed to put off the casual user, leaving it for the purists who really appreciate it. I assume that this means that they take this approach to everything; I expect they find the turner prize interesting, and think Finnegan’s Wake is great.

I despair.

-Ben

Ed's Guitar

For the last few days I've been working on a guitar again, not mine for a change. My brother recently acquired a Les Paul and since then his old Hamer superstrat has been gathering dust. I was given the task of making it into a blistering funkmachine - something that the Gibson, for all its merits, quite definitely isn't - and generally bringing it up to an acceptable standard for a man with expensive tastes. Which, of course, meant only the finest parts; Switchcraft jacks, CGE pots, Sprague Capacitors, Oak Switches, and a pair of Seymour Duncan Phat Cats.

The part of this process that took longest was the waiting for the parts to arrive - Royal Mail were on strike and I can't just walk down to the road to my local Guitar Technician Supply shop. Once it arrived it all moved pretty fast though. I managed to do the whole thing without burning or cutting myself once, which is a new record - I'm getting better, at one point I couldn't do a refit without gaining some new permanent scars.

I've been sitting around playing it for the last few hours now, after troubleshooting the last of the little niggling problems that always appear, and I think it's rather awesome. I've not had to opportunity to have a go with the amp cranked up to 'Obnoxious Wanker' levels but from what I've heard so far it all seems to have worked. It is indeed a face melting funkmachine, but it also has a huge array of different sounds for its owner to play with, once you figure out what .

Before!


After it had been stripped down, the cavities extended, and the new holes drilled.



And this it what it looks like finished. I cleaned the Fretboard (despite Ed's protests) and gave it a polish to get all the masking tape marks off the body.



Oof. The modifications are much more complete and elaborate than those 'spot the difference' pictures would suggest, but they were almost entirely internal. It was quite interesting work - there weren't any frustrating setbacks that caused me to pull my hair out, or faults that I couldn't understand. Most interestingly, a circuit that I, an English Lit graduate, designed, Actually Worked!

In accordance with my witty naming scheme this guitar will be called the 'Stratobastard' until Ed gives it a better name.

-Ben

Oh, and if I ever meet Floyd Rose, me and him are going to have words. Honestly, who'd design a tremolo system where you have no individual string height adjustment and you have to take the strings off to adjust the intonation? eh? A madman, that's who.

Meme

I really should learn never to underestimate the number of brilliant madmen on the internet. They hide amongst the normal everyday madmen, who are busy gluing captions to your cats, and create something like Lolthulhu - which merges the simple humour of cat macros with the unspeakable horror of the Great Old Ones.

-Ben

This is also rather excellent

Odd

want a repainted green godess?

Have a craving for an armoured police car?

or can you simply not live without a combat engineer tractor?

Man, there are shops for everything on the internet, this seems a good shop for anyone who wants a distinctive car to stand out in the office car park.

-Ben

eew

Just now I was sitting around playing the guitar, strumming away happily, then all of a sudden I started to feel a little bit jazz. So I started playing fingerstyle, picking out strange and wonderful jazz chords that are all wonky and askew; the sort that have names like Bb7sus4aug19th. I came up with a chord progression I liked, I recorded it. I came up with a lead riff I liked, I recorded it.

- - -

I then realised that I had spent the last 20 minutes playing whilst holding a plectrum in my mouth.... A plectrum that I picked up off the floor of a tube station on my way back from oxford a few hours previously...

I suspect I may have only minutes to live.

I leave my guitars to any who will play them, my CDs to Izzy and my body to medical science.

-Ben