Fragments 3

This one is really really old, and appears to be pretty much complete, but again, I think I never posted it up because I intended to make it into some sort of deep and profound work of art rather than the emotional scribblings of someone who had only had about an hours sleep.

Title: Nice Meeting You

"The other night I was sitting in a sofa filled, windowless room in a hostel somewhere near London Bridge, with Kristen asleep on my lap listening to the conversations of those around me in a drowsy sort of daze. I was struck by a phrase, heard many times before, that had an interesting resonance with me and my current circumstances. A group of backpackers who, presumably, had met earlier that day and were going their separate ways in the morning were making their goodbyes and getting ready for bed. One of the men turned to another, with whom he had been arguing over who George Bush was more like; Hitler or Satan (pretty routine European youth hostel chatter), and shook his hand saying, "it was nice meeting you"

It took me a little by surprise to hear these words in that situation. They seemed so formal, like something that a parent says to a daughter's boyfriend that they disapprove of. Not something said between a pair of global travellers at 4am in some foreign city. I started, in my fatigued state, to think about why they used that phrase; concentrating on it with a ferocity only found in me at times when I'm both bored and trying very hard not to think about something else - a state that allows me to do things like examine, in worrying detail, the state statutes of South Carolina as regards semi-automatic weapons control (resolving a pointless and long running argument) the day before an important exam.

It was the use of the past tense that interested me. 'It was' acknowledgement that the brief encounter had already ended, that the experience has passed with a certain finality. It was what? 'it was nice,' ‘nice’ - quite possibly the most bland adjective in the English language, meaning good but with no colouration or emphasis, just a positive, stating that the experience was not unpleasant. Finally ‘Meeting’ – a word which conjures up connotations of the beginning of something, not an actual relationship but the possible start of one, an acknowledgement of the ephemeral nature of this meeting – a momentary snapshot of the consciousness of another, never to be seen again.

Hearing people use this phrase so casually, to be completely calm about never seeing someone again, made me realise how badly equipped I am for the life I’m now living. I’ve lived in one fairly small part of south east London for my entire life, I move between groups of friends but I’m still living only about 30mins walk from friends I’ve not spoken to in decades. In the last year, however, I’ve made a lot of friends who are from other continents, people that I’ve not just met but formed a connection with, and now, with the end of the year, I have to get my head around the idea that I’m not going to see them again. It’s not just that I’d stop talking to them, but that there is no other means of knowing about them. If, for example, I stopped talking to one of my friends from London I’d still hear about them, I’ll still have the possibility of reconciliation, but with my friends made in the last year if I lose contact with them personally I lose them completely and totally. It’d be like they never were."

-17^th June 2005

-Ben

Fragments 2

One that I think I had aspirations of making into something much longer and more elaborate, entitled Martial Arts Movies:

"I was watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon today; a film I saw at the cinema when it came out, loved it, then promptly forgot it. It's a subtitled film, which isn't something I usually have any problem with, but in the case of this film reading the subtitles gets annoying because the film is so damn pretty. The fact that the subtitles make a substantial amount of this amazing spectacle only half seen means that when there is no dialogue you jump at the chance to just sit and watch the pretty pictures.

In the case of Crouching Tiger this meant that I was paying a good deal of attention to the fight scenes, which, on the whole, didn't contain any dialogue worth subtitling (breathless grunts being much the same in every langauge). The thing I noticed is something that is most pronounced in films like this one but is true of most, if not all, films of the fighty variety ever since Bruce Lee first started doing his own enormously popular brand of homicidal gurning. I was watching the fight scenes and thinking about how far distanced from any kind of real fighting, it's all flowing movements and graceful poise, like erm, like... dance.

Obviously it can't be expected to look like a real fight, they are ugly: people grab clothes, swing clumsily at each other and most of the time it's all for show anyway, nobody actually gets that badly hurt beyond a few bruises and a bit of blood. Screen martial arts has, however, gone from merely very pretty fighting to a kind of abstract representation of violence, a kind of dance that men can watch comfortably because it maintains a veneer of machismo through its association with fighting."

-14th April 2006

And a little one that demonstrates what happens when I get really bored, titled Oscilloscopes are Puurty:

"I'm sitting around listening to music and staring at the oscilloscope built into windows media player, if I was stoned I could lose whole days to this thing. As I'm only on mild painkillers at the moment, however, I am able to pull myself away from it for a moment. Oooh, it dances to the music, jigglejiggle. I've found myself listening to music I've not listened to in ages purely because it looks good, Rage Against the Machine especially - a band that I've not really been much into since my first teenage forays into music and politics - looks damn fine through the oscilloscope and I've also remembered that they are really quite good in a shouty, led zepplin-plagiarising sort of way."

-13th May 2006

-Ben

Fragments

I was procrastinating today and I found a load of bits of unfinished blog entries that I'd saved as drafts on here and then promptly forgotten about. I figured I'd put them up here as some of them are quite interesting, well, perhaps not. Either way, here they are - i'm not bothering to put them up in any sort of order.

Discarded Fragment of CV - removed because it read like it was directed at someone in particular, an angry reply to something someone had said to me, which it wasn't. I was just thinking out loud.

"To the people reading this who know me, and are wondering how much of the me they know is real and how much is a character, I can't tell you. To be honest I don't know myself, I think I've absorbed too many old stories and affectations to be able to say that there is a 'real' me, other from the one I present to my friends and family. People like to psychoanalyse those around them to some extent, "what does he really think though?", looking for some kind of deeper meaning in a person, like looking for a meaning in a poem; a reason to like or dislike or love or whatever you feel like doing. I'm not going to say that I always say exactly what I think and represent myself as I am in my head, but some of what you see in me is a product of who you are. I'm not the same person to everyone, and that difference is probably as much how others see me as how I present myself.

Beyond a few fictonal or missapropriated experiences, the odd unpleasant shame glossed over, this is the only me there is; looking for any other one will just be a reflection of what you think I should be and probably examining why you'd like me to be like that would be a more constructive way of spending your time."

-27th June 2005

-Ben

1980 - 1990

I’m not very good at understanding or articulating my reservations and dislikes about something or someone - generally my negative opinions are only ever spurred into words by hearing them put into words by someone else; a circumstance which consequentially makes me wonder whether or not I actually have any negative opinions of my own at all. This makes me generally a pretty rubbish scholar of English literature and is the main reason why I don’t see myself bothering to take my studies past BA level – it’s hard to do literary criticism when you have trouble saying anything more coherent that ‘I don’t like it’. I do, however, dislike things, I dislike lots of things, and people, lots of people – I’m just really not very good at putting my misgivings into words even inside my own head.

I mention this because I’m about to try and explain the reasons for one of my biggest dislikes, even though I’m not even entirely sure if I have any. Bear with me, this might take a while…

I believe that the Eighties - I mean the decade from January 1^st 1980 to December 31^st 1989 - was a fundamentally bad idea. It was a decade of bad politics, bad art, bad music and just generally crappy aesthetics. It’s not the first of the bad eras of history, not by a long shot – I don’t think many would mourn the loss of the dark ages, nor would anyone with any taste be particularly bothered by the removal of much of the 18^th century – but it is the one I am most familiar with. I am aware that as someone born smack bang in the middle of the decade this seems like a strange belief to have, I consider my origins in the 1980s in much the same way that catholics think of man's inherent sin - it's something that I must work to overcome through good deeds and a life of good music and good design.

I first tried to write this blog entry a few months ago when I found myself sitting around at home instead of going to see a film called Mirrormask with some of my flatmates, which for all I know might be a very good film. The reason I decided not to go up to the campus cinema was because one of my flatmates tried to describe it to me as ‘fantasy, like labyrinth or the neverending story’ which are probably two of my least favourite films of all time ever. There is something about 80’s fantasy films that makes me feel physically sick. I think it’s partly their terrible special effects, corny scripts and icky monsters but mostly it’s because they, in their seemingly unending stories and freakish detachment from reality, remind me really strongly of the kind of horrible, inescapable nightmares I have when I’ve got a fever of 101 and am in the process of throwing up everything I’ve ever eaten in my life. As I’ve got older I’ve found that my distaste for 80’s films isn’t just restricted to that particular genre – I have a special hate reserved for that type of action movie that got really big in the 80’s which took an almost sociopathic delight in presenting gratuitous, remorseless violence – films like the ‘death wish’ movies, Robocop, Rambo that have a level of violence unseen in popular culture since the revenge tragedy went out of fashion.

It’s not necessarily the excessive cruelty and violence that particularly bothers me – many years of films and computer games has dulled the shock value of even the quite graphic pretend violence – it’s the way in which the violence often comes from characters whose actions the audience is supposed to support. The prevailing cultural attitude in the eighties seemed to disdain human compassion and empathy as weakness - the idea of society was seen as stinky liberalism and the action movie stars didn’t have mercy and were lauded for it. This culture bred off itself, creating the impression of a world in which human life was no longer particularly valued then using this lack of basic humanity as evidence that merciless force was the only way to combat the perceived decay of society that these attitudes had formed. It all reminds me of the writings of fascists like Ezra Pound in the wake of the First World War – in a civilisation destroyed by violence they looked to a ideology which promised them only violence as their hope of release from a ‘botched civilisation’.

The subject of fascism brings me neatly into my next big area of dislike – 1980s music. In the late seventies the punk movement started to associate itself with Nazi iconography; swastikas, iron crosses, leather, etc, this wasn't done to show identification with fascism, but because in British society there are few things more shocking and socially unacceptable than a swastika. Some time around the turn of the decade, however, the original intention was forgotten, bands like the charmingly named Joy Division (named for the groups of Jewish women in concentration camps who were used for the sexual pleasure of Nazi soldiers) donned slicked down hair and leather and the desire to shock was replaced with a sort of perverse admiration.

When talking about the music of any decade I find that talking about the stuff that was really popular isn’t the best way to gauge the general quality of the time – we don’t judge the 70s on the Bay City Rollers, nor do we judge the 60s on Cliff Richard – and so similarly I won’t judge the 80s on the dross that topped the charts most of the time. The 80s seemed to be the decade when every single genre of music drifted helplessly into self parody – I mean just look at the most popular ‘alternative’ band of the time – Metallica – who seem to be a band who took ‘This is Spinal Tap’ as a creative springboard and then went downhill from there.

I think my opinion of the eighties began with my disgust as a child (with a liking of cars, planes, mud, shiny things etc) with the design of 1980’s cars. The style of the time was for hard angles and straight lines; decades of aerodynamic research and beautiful designs were washed away in a horrible wave of cars that seemed to take the flat-pack wardrobe as their main source of inspiration, it’s like a rule was introduced that rulers had to be used all the time when designing cars, that someone hid the machines for bending metal. My sneaking suspicion that the 80’s was a decade where taste was not allowed has been confirmed, and then some, in recent years by my discovery of the horrific aberrations that constituted electric guitar design back then, seriously, I challenge you to take one look at a Fender HM ‘Strat’ and not weep with horror.

I understand that the strict chronological definition of ‘the eighties’ as an era doesn’t necessarily correspond exactly with the inception or lifespan of the things that I’m associating with it: I know people were making cars that looked like wardrobes in the late seventies, they were writing songs with godawful drum machines and nasty synths in the seventies, that people still wore stupid clothes and big hair well into the early nineties but the fact is that the eighties was when these things became iconic cultural touchstones. To any one still in any doubt, I close by stating that the eighties was the decade when a car like a Delorean DMC-12 could be considered desirable by people who weren’t blind and that music like the Pet shop boys could be popular.

I’ll probably revise this when I think of more coherent arguments.

-Ben

Eugh

The side of ireland that they don't like to put in the tourist adverts.

Irish girl forced to carry anencephalic baby to term

I'm not going to bother writing anything more. I've got work to do, and I'm sure that analysis of this can be put better by others.

-Ben

Cargo Cultism

This is just a short little post, partly because I really should be doing some worthwhile work but mostly because I can't be bothered to think through a more elaborate treatment of this idea right now.

I was aimlessly wandering the internet the other day when I was supposed to be working and I came across this beastie


This is a fender Rory Gallagher Tribute model. Now anyone who has read this blog before or got me drunk will know that I don't like pre-distressed guitars, clothes, people, etc - But this one is special - I refer you to the manufacturer's writeup:

"The Rory Gallagher Tribute Stratocaster guitar is an exact replica of that revered instrument, right down to the extremely worn 3-Color Sunburst alder body, maple neck and rosewood fingerboard. We’ve even included five Sperzel tuners and one Gotoh tuner, and we’ve replaced the 12th-fret dot marker with white plastic instead of the original clay. It also features three custom-wound ’60s single-coil pickups, aged chrome hardware, 21 jumbo frets and a bone nut. Our homage to a true and truly missed master."

This level of imitation is frankly bizarre, I couldn't get my head around it at all until I remembered something I'd read a few years ago about odd pseudo religions in the south pacific called cargo cults. These were collections of rituals and practices designed to imitate the trappings of western culture without any knowledge of the reasoning or purpose behind it. People would build airfields, with crude imitation control towers and radio equiment carved from wood, in the hope of summoning aeroplanes with their precious cargo. I see the same thing in this guitar, it's like a bunch of people completely ignorant of music heard this amazing musician once and are labouring under the impression that by accurately (if superficially) recreating the objects associated with him and his music they will somehow be able to reproduce it.

It's at times like this that I wish I could figure out a way of writing down an exasperated sigh.

-Ben

Hungover Musings

I am rather hungover, which, considering the fact that it's about half past four in the afternoon, gives you an idea of just how crappy I felt earlier. Last night I went out to have a quiet drink with my flatmate and listen to a friend play, met a couple of people at the pub and 'quiet drink' rapidly turned into a serious bender. It was fun, one of those nights out driven by some strange sort of momentum which makes perfect sense at the time but looks very different by the light of day.

Right now though, sitting here feeling dizzy and nauseous, wondering if I'm going to be sick again, I'm squarely in the 'alcohol is wrong' camp. I feel ashamed of myself, not because of some shocking indiscretion - I was reasonably coherent last night - but because I'm too old for this, or at least I feel that way. I ended up spending last night getting wasted with a couple of people whose names I can't even remember today, going on an monster debauch just because it seemed like a good idea at the time, because jeebus knows I’ve got little to celebrate right now. I’ve got my finals in a week, two exams, two days apart, and then I’m finished with university; I’ll make the transition from student to unemployed young man with a degree in English literature and not much else. I’m nearly a member of the workforce and I go out on benders like some first year film student. Oy…

I’m now sitting here trying to decide whether I should post this up or not - it doesn’t exactly show me in the most positive light, it makes me look like a drunk, a morose and self pitying drunk with no direction or discretion. But, considering the fact that I’ve managed to offend and upset the only person who has the patience to read this thing, it probably makes little difference if I post it up or not. Man, I really shouldn’t write stuff when I’m probably still considerably over the drink-drive limit, but I’ve written this now so I may as well post it up. I can always obliterate all evidence of this blog’s existence when I start looking for work…

-Ben

Earthquake

Today Kent was struck with an earthquake, 4.3 on the richter scale, it damaged houses, caused gas leaks, spread terror throughout the land.

...

I slept through the whole thing, first I heard was my flatmates talking about it.

-Ben "sleeps like the dead" Hollingum

bad literature

Over the course of the last few years I have read a lot of books, unsurprisingly, considering i do an english degree. A lot of what I read is, as you'd hope, really very good; it makes you think, laugh, cry, and fart. There is, however, a significant amount of the stuff I've had to read that is rubbish. I mean really unreadable shite.

This unreadable shite heap can be divided up into two distinct types:

The first category is stuff that I didn't like, but I'm not willing to discount the possiblity that it has some literary merit that I'm completely missing for some reason or other. In this category I put the stuff too complicated and pretentious for me to be able to understand (James Joyce's Ulysses, Ezra Pound's Cantos) and the stuff that might have some great merit but, due to its soporific dullness, I've never actually managed to finish (Most Victorian Novels, Anything by Wordsworth). This is by far the biggest of the two categories, probably making up about 90% of the stuff that I didn't like at university.

Ther other, much smaller category, is stuff that is just plain bad. This category is one which, considering that most of the time I'm studying works from the literary cannon, you wouldn't expect to exist at all. There are, nonetheless, periods of literature when writers were so focused on a particular mode of literary expression (19th century england's obsession with the novel, for example) that scholars of other kinds of literature are forced to really scrape the barrel looking for decent examples of their craft. Anyone who has had to read what passed for theatrical drama in the mid victorian era, or post romantic poetry will understand my pain.

The thing that has sparked this train of thought was reading the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I don't know whether they included the poetry in the anthology out of a sense of completeness, or because, having included her husband, they felt they had to include her too (like asking a friend with a boring girlfriend to a party) but either way, her poetry is really terrible.

if you don't belive me read this

I think that she should be put up there with such immortals as William Topaz McGonagall

-Ben

hair

I have a lot of hair at the moment. I’ve always had extremely thick hair, ever since hair started to grow on my extraordinarily lumpy head as a small child, but right now I have a lot of hair – it reaches about halfway down my shoulder blades. I’ve not bothered to get my hair cut in about 18 months and it grows pretty fast.

I’ve enjoyed having long hair; it prevents me from getting sunburn on the back of my neck in the summer and keeps my head warm in the winter. Although I won’t deny that it can be very, very annoying - when it’s been blown across your face by the wind, when it’s dirty but you can’t be bothered to wash it but have to because otherwise you’ll look like a goth. I have, however, been willing to put up with these annoyances as the perks outweigh them: you get to pretend to be Jesus all the time, to flick your hair around, and generally look like one of the Allman Brothers.

About a week ago, however, I was shaving (not shaving off the beard, but shaving around my beard), just staring aimlessly into the mirror and grinding off the Amish style neckbeard which my body wants to grow so badly, and I was gripped by an urge to cut my hair off with the beard trimmer. I actually went as far as flicking the thing open and standing there for about two minutes just holding it next to my head and fighting an unexpected internal battle.

I really don’t know why but since that morning I’ve been thinking about little else. My hair is annoying me - it’s too long now and makes me look stupid, it curls around my face in a really bizarre way and, when it is combed or dirty, invariably makes me look like I listen to slayer and do computer science.

There was a point around Christmas when I really liked the way my hair looked, it was all cool and funky, wavy and shiny. But now it’s just a floppy irritant. I have been thinking about getting it trimmed, styled, or something like that, but I don’t want to, I want it gone. I dislike guys with well kept hair, and I know that if I cross the boundary that stands between someone has long hair because he’s not cut it in years and someone who has neatly styled girly hair I’ll be one of them. It’s not particularly rational and looking at this it really doesn’t show me in a very good light. I think I should point out that what happened in the bathroom wasn’t the voices telling me to do things but a moment of epiphany – I looked stupid and have looked stupid for some time.

It did take a year to grow this fro though, and I’m very wary about cutting it off. Perhaps this urge will pass. I'll try some different hair products, see if my opinion changes.

-Ben

The World is Clearly Insane

This is something that I've always suspected but recently the evidence has just been heaping up.

Look at this -


I'm not sure if you can see this on the screendump I took but I had to make sure that this wasn't lost the moment the things gets bought.

It is a bass that has been 'Relic-ed' That is fender make a Precision Bass then guys with acid and beltsanders come along and scrape off paint, corrode hardware, and generally make the thing look like it has been used lovingly for the last 40 years. It is the weapon of choice for the musician who wants to look like a road warrior without actually you know, having to give up his job as an accountant.

These things piss me off no end anyway, but this one is special.

If you look carefully you will see that this is in the 'Scratch and Dent' category - That's right, an instrument designed to look all manky and beat up has been reduced in price because it got scratched in transit.

I really hope this is just some kind of late april fools joke and not an omen of the coming apocalypse.

-Ben

Part the Third (a bit late)

I wrote the first two parts of this account in the first few weeks of my third year, a couple of weeks after the events described. The reason why it stopped there wasn’t because I didn’t want to write anymore, but because I was busy. It’s really not that much of exaggeration to say that I’ve been busy pretty solidly since then, the third year was hard, my marks have stayed roughly consistent but the amount of work required to get those marks seems to increase with each essay, the last two nearly killed me.

But hey, it’s over now, I handed in my last two essays of ‘ever’ on Monday and have been drunk pretty solidly for the last few days. I’m now sitting around on a nice day listening to loud music and nursing a hangover; my friends who were staying here have all gone and I’ve got nothing particularly pressing to be doing so here is the rest.

Well. That’s the plan anyway, I don’t know how much I’ll be able to write, or whether I can remember it clearly enough to write about it.

My first day in America was largely spent staring blankly into space and trying not to fall asleep. I was very happy to be there but I wasn’t entirely sure of myself, not 100% convinced that it was all actually real. We went to Kristen’s sister’s flat in Harlem – which, to my surprise, actually looks exactly like it does in films and TV shows - although there weren’t any crime scenes, which is generally the only reason why American film makers ever shoot things in Harlem. I remember that the flat was very cool, full of strange artwork done by the people she lived with and oddly hewn furniture.

I think I probably seriously offended Rachel by not appearing to be particularly interested in going sightseeing in New York, and generally not being hugely sociable or entertaining. In my defence I think I should point out that I was tired, confused and (due to sitting down rather awkwardly on a chair that was much, much harder than it looked) reeling from what felt like a really hard kick in the balls.

[Note for women: Being kicked in the balls in just about the most unpleasant feeling ever, it combines extremely sharp physical pain with often pretty serious nausea, aching and the fear that you’ll be left infertile and walking like a cowboy for the rest of your days. So please, don’t kick guys in the balls unless they absolutely unequivocally deserve it]

Where was I? ah, yes, being dull and uninteresting in New York. That night me and Kristen ate some tasty floppy pizza, planned the escape from New York with Rachel and slept in the spare room on a surprisingly comfy airbed. I slept like a log, probably woke up half the building snoring but I’d been awake for about 40 hours by that point, so I figure that I deserved it. The next morning we went out for a brunchy-lunchy type thingy in a diner downtown which gave me my first proper idea of what my meals were going to be like on this journey…

In a word, Big. Very big. I ordered a ham omelette which was billed as one of their healthy options and was presented with a mountain of food on a plate the size of a hubcap. I really should have guessed it would be like that from the fact that the diner proudly displayed a notice telling the customers that they had a defibrillator behind the counter…

I recall stuffing as much of my behemoth of a breakfast into my mouth as I could manage with half my mind paying attention to the conversation and the other half looking at the poster on the back wall, of which all I could see was the header: CHOKING VICTIM - and wondering why they were promoting a skacore band in a downtown diner.

Needless to say I still wasn’t 100% there.

We said goodbye to Kristen’s sister and set off some time in the early afternoon; unfortunately after about 20 minutes of travel the camera keeled over and went to sleep. I’m not sure if it’s because of that or just because the first day’s travel wasn’t hugely eventful but my memories of that day are fairly hazy.

I remember driving over bridges and under overpasses going out of the city, marvelling at how people in New York appear to have developed a quite complicated means of communication using only car horns, Trying to navigate using the sketchy directions from Kristen’s sister and a map that I hadn’t yet got the hang of (American maps are strange) and fumbling for toll money.

I remember going across the Tappan Zee Bridge in the sunshine and thinking it was really amazingly beautiful, going along that long causeway section down close to the water level with the main ironwork bridge silhouetted against the reflections of the water and the blue sky.

I remember stopping somewhere in New Jersey to look at the map and get petrol, it was all green and sunny, there was a jeep parked next to our car. It felt like England, but hotter.

I remember, unfortunately, the first night trying to get a room in Washington – how the one way systems in Roslyn and the edge of town funnel you inexorably into the centre of town regardless of your intentions. How, bizarrely, due to the bad map I did a lot of the navigating from my memory of Washington’s street layout drilled into me by playing Midtown Madness 3 too much whilst very bored. By some kind of divine intervention (which must have been conferred by some kind of clerical error) we managed to get a room in really swanky hotel on the edge of town that didn’t mind knocking about $250 off the normal nightly price for a tired, stressed and generally bedraggled looking young couple. If I was ever to meet that woman again I think I’d probably give her a big hug and buy her a few drinks. Americans are, on the whole, very good at customer service, friendly and pleasant. I think I only got one scary look in our whole journey which was in a Seven Eleven somewhere in North Carolina (I think) where I went to buy something and, standing there with my long hair, beard and strange accent, got looked at like I was some sort of talking moose or alien or something. You could probably argue that one of the big problems with America today is that all the nice people in Washington DC work in the service sector.

But yes. We went to our decadently massive hotel room, with its kitchen and big TV; its monster bed and sofas, showered, sat around talking for a few hours and then fell asleep. Thus ends the first day proper of my travels in America. Wow, considering how long ago it was now the fact that I can remember any of it is quite impressive, testament partly to how very cool it was and how crushingly little of note I’ve done in the last year otherwise.

I’m going to stop writing now because this is making me all sad and wistful. I’ll probably write some more soon, but right now I’ve got a nice bass with new strings and a new jacklead which is angrily demanding that it be played.

-Ben

electric demons

I've lived in a house with four other computer-owning, internet-surfing, morally bankrupt bitorrent types for close to two years now. We don't have a TV and so the internet is our primary source of news and entertainment (after the pub) we've grown rather dependent on it. A situation which unfortunately places us rather at the mercy of powers beyond our control.

The first of these is our ISP, Tiscali, whose only real contact with us is the occasional threatening letter we recieve for commiting the dreadful social faux-pas of actually taking advantage of their "unlimited downloads" tariff. Due to the Heath-Robinson, held-together-with-twine nature of broadband technology our line has always been unpredictable and considerably slower than it supposedly should be. Recently, however, it has been getting a whole world worse: it drops down to about 10kbs during peak times, rendering it completely unusable, and has a charming habit of completely cutting out for hours on end.

Complaining to Tiscali probably wouldn't make the situation a great deal better. As I understand it, the hardware and lines are generally the responsibility of BT and so Tiscali, in their capacity as profiteers who buy the bandwidth in big lumps and then flog it off at a markup, can't really do a great deal about our concerns about hardware (especially when our high usuage probably means that we aren't a profitable enterprise for them). We'll try anyway, but they'll probably just send us a form email about how it's not their problem, we can go swivel, etc.

The other thing our internet connection is at the mercy of is our very own electric maniac, our network router.

As far as I know computers are incapable of doing anything random; they cannot be creative or spiteful or obtuse of their own accord - HAL is still a fair way off. This knowledge makes the behaviour of our Routers (we've had more than one go crazy) even more inexplicable, because if they aren't motivated by a spiteful desire to confound us with random actions then they must have some supercomputer-level programs which allow them to accurately emulate this.

There's nothing like having a router which stubbornly refuses to accept the truth of its own existence, or the existence of a DSL line, or the existence of the computers around it. If it was just the wireless then it would make a little sense, but no, it's the wired connections as well, we've had routers which will actively deny any knowledge of the computer which is being used to adjust its settings.

The best bits are those occasions where, after giving up on the thing as dead in the wee small hours of the morning, you leave it doing the computer equivalent of wearing its pants on its head and shouting "I am Napoleon", only to wake up the next morning find it purring away happily as if nothing had happened.

I'm generally quite a calm man, it takes a great deal to make me angry - I've only been angry enough to bite the heads off puppies about twice in the last two years - but both of those occasions were caused by wireless routers. I think the antics of our old Belkin router in particular have probably done more to advance the moment of my inevitable fatbastard coronary than even the greasiest of pies.

-Ben

You can't spell Beard without Bear

In the last few weeks I’ve been writing essays, reading unpleasant amounts of excessively complex prose and generally concentrating on the things I’m supposed to. As a result of not being able to do anything other than work I’ve had lots of interesting ideas for things to write on here, things that would blow the mind of anyone who happens to read it, probably…

Due to the amazing memory wiping effects of free time, however, I’ve got nothing to say now – whatever great ideas I’ve had have dissolved into nothing, probably because they were nothing to begin with. As most of my writing is - I worry sometimes that someone might find this Blog and think me some sort of raving egotist, who thinks that these mindless ramblings might be interesting to someone. I only started writing this because my grammar and punctuation were so bad that my university papers usually came back covered in red ink. I figured that I needed to practice writing, and decided that the Blog format would force me to give more thought to my writing than I would if it was private - on account of a fear of looking stupid in public. I don’t actually expect anyone to read it, I don’t tell people I write it, and I don’t feel the need to tell anyone who does know of its existence when it’s updated. As far as I’m concerned people can read it if they want to but I’d not encourage them.

…

Anyway.

I was doing some futurethink today, spurred by a discussion with my housemates about what on earth are going to try and do with ourselves when this year ends, and I think I’ve figured out what it is that I’m really afraid of in life.

Obviously I’m afraid on the normal things, of being fat, poor and lonely (Er, actually now I think about it I’m kind of all three already – I mean that I’m afraid of being more so), but in my mind these worries are part of something deeper than such material concerns. They can be summed up with one sentence:

I’m afraid of being someone’s weird uncle.

You know, every family has one, there’s the rich one, the nice one… and the weird one. The one that lives with your grandparents sometimes when whatever relationship or business venture he’s in collapses. The one that gives you strange gifts at Christmas. The one that has never quite grown up.

My brother is a successful sensible person, my little sister is intelligent and reasonably sane (although that’s before Crown Woods – I think even I was sane before I went there) so that means that the odds on me, as a slightly eccentric man with sufficient facial hair to scare small children, being the weird uncle look rather discouraging.

Luckily my little sister is only 11 (which is waay too young, even at crown woods) and my brother and his other half are career types, so hopefully I’ll have plenty of time to sort myself out before I find myself face to face with a small child shouting

“aaaah don’t leave me with uncle Ben, he’s weird and he smells funny!”

-Ben

Obituary

OLP “benbass” MM2

Entered service 4^th January 2003, Retired 28^th February 2007

In the New Year of 2003 my brother and I got on the train up to central London, I had no beard, a fairly serious weight problem and a wallet filled with birthday money, borrowed money* and stuff I’d saved up. My intention was to visit Denmark Street - hallowed home of guitars, basses and all manner of general all-round coolth – and buy my first bass. This wasn’t my first trip, not by a long way, not even my first with the intention of actually buying something; I’d been playing my dad’s old bass for around 6 months but had decided that I wanted an instrument of my own, one that I could better play my favourite kind of music on.

I dread to think what I sounded like back then, not very good certainly, definitely pretty ignorant of the guitar arts – I essentially walked in, pointed at the black and white Musicman copy and said “I want that one,” with that odd combination of unpleasant arrogance and insecurity that marked my interactions with everyone back then**. Nowadays I’d try anything that looked interesting, examine each instrument like a judge at Crufts, haggle and quibble over prices and generally be one of those annoying nerds that you get in guitar shops, intimidating everyone else. But anyway, I got it home, and spent a long time playing it. Over the next few months it made me progress much faster, its considerably lower action and higher string tension improving my technique no end. My dad was distrusting of the single pickup arrangement, and its general lack of serious low-end thump, but I was happy.

Over the next two years strange modifications were made, pickups were added and changed, preamps installed and repairs attempted. It became a two pickup instrument, with a jazz pickup at the neck and a Bartolini active preamp. It sounded much better, even if the extra cavities made it look a bit worse. This is, however, where it becomes difficult for me to assess how many of its problems were a result of its cheap manufacture and how many were because of my attempts to improve it. I’m pretty sure, for example, that an attempt to sort out some proud frets in 2005 did more damage than it repaired, damage that I only managed to rectify a few months ago (and even then, not without consequences). I have no idea how good an instrument it was when it was new, because at the time I didn’t really know much about that kind of thing, it was easier to play than my dad’s bass, but that isn’t saying much. I think that it was flawed; the dodgy fret job was an attempt to fix a quite serious problem that was already there. I’ve been tweaking it and fiddling with it constantly since then and finally got it, I think, about as good an instrument as it could be about a month ago after an extensive amount of fretdressing, neckshimming and trussrodding.***

All this time it did me good service: it was played everyday for rarely less than an hour or two, often accompanied me to auditions gigs and rehearsals with no problems and generally acquitted itself admirably. It was there when first played with a band, there for the strange period when I played bass in a band that rehearsed in someone’s attic, I was playing with my band at my school leavers’ ceremony, and, finally, it has been there whilst I’ve been traipsing from fruitless rehearsal to fruitless rehearsal whilst at UKC.

On the 28^th of March, I went into county music in Canterbury (not normally one of my favourite shops) and saw a newly set up second-hand Yamaha BB604 priced at £200. I played it, I liked it a lot; depressingly, considering I’d spent so much money on the benbass over the years, this thing surpassed it in just about every regard. I pondered and examined, chatted with the clerk and generally did all the things that I normally do. It passed all the tests, it was bought. It was good.

Thus ends the career of the benbass, it will now be retired, hopefully lent to someone who will play it as it’s really quite a good bass, certainly shitpiles better than most instruments people learn to play on. In the meantime, due to space restrictions it sits in its case in the corner of my room.

-Ben

*Which I’m not sure if I’ve paid back…

**now I’m just unpleasantly arrogant.

*** I’ve been reading too much Joyce, sorry

Tired Rantings

I have a problem with phoney democracy.

Now I know that sounds like the introduction to a rant by some barely literate middle class anarchist but bear with me, it's really not where I'm going with this.

At least as regards anarchism, I make no promises about my literacy.

The Annual General Meeting of the University of Kent Union was the other day, they were voting on a referendum on how the union should be run and on a proposed ban on the sale of coca cola on campus. I've been at university for nearly three years now and I have to admit that I've never bothered voting in a single one of their elections - don't get me wrong, I'm not apathetic about voting, I do all my local and general election voting like a responsible citizen and keep well informed on the issues and ideas of the debates - student democracy, however, is something that I've always been a little more cynical about

In 1997 it was the general election year, the year of the big labour landslide victory, lefties and moderates everywhere were soiling themselves with anticipation of the great new labour government who, according to all the predictions, were going to wipe the floor with the crumbling remains of the conservative party. I was eleven years old and doing my last term of primary school. I didn't really understand much of what was going on in the wide world, although I was vaguely aware of something - mostly just that my parents were cautiously excited about something and most political billboard ads are really dumb. My primary school, however, decided that they were going to hold a little mock election to see if they could enthuse the kids about the whole process. Now there wasn't going to be any powers for this School Prime Minister (not that I remember anyway - this whole thing had completely vanished from my memory until I was reminded of it by my mum about 8 years later) but nonetheless all the kids participating approached it with great sincerity, the bullies attempting to build a kind of cult of personality around themselves, the popular kids (insofar as that can be said of 11 year olds) wrote sincere and well thought out manifestos, and they all carefully rehearsed the speeches they were to give to the whole school before it was put to the vote.

Amongst all of this I was the kid who decided to form the 'Smarty Party!' When my turn came to present I danced on stage to Jollity Farm by the Bonzo Dog doo dah Band wearing a lurid tie dye shirt and silly wig, I made ridiculous promises involving a school cafeteria that served chocolate and cake (this was before Jamie Oliver) free computer games on the NHS and cool trainers as part of the uniform, I then cried 'join the smarty party' in my finest stupid voice, threw (empty) packets of smarties into the audience and left the stage, once again, dancing like a child possessed.

I won the election. By quite a long way.

My second brush with student elections came when I was in secondary school, a few years later. I was nominated as the class representative to some kind of bafflingly pointless student parliament. I had no say in this, I was chosen by my teacher in lieu of a vote because I was considered (on account of my comparative good behaviour and high test scores) to be one of the more sensible kids in the class. Nobody really cared in the slightest about this and, seeing as I was quite a long way from popular, my appeals for questions rarely got any response.

I sat through a couple of these meetings, reported the few sincere concerns and issues raised by my classmates and listened as they were ignored, poo-pooed and was generally humoured in a patronising sort of way. After a few weeks me and the other representative from my class took to sitting around talking in some obscure corner of the playing field until it was time to come back, then returning and delivering a completely fictional report of the agenda of the parliament. I don't know whether it was because my teacher didn't care or because she didn't notice, but I was never questioned on this, nor did the lack of active response on the issues raised by the class surprise anyone in the slightest. We still did go occasionally, when someone raised an issue that wasn't in some way related to toilet roll or football pitches, but the reports actually seemed less convincing when we were reporting the truth.

There was a change of headteacher after a few months of this and the whole idea went out with the old one.

During my time at sixth form there was no real problems with this sort of thing, if you had a problem you went and spoke to the people in charge. They’d probably ignore you but at least it was honest. You learned the real ways of power, like how to recruit members of staff to lobby on your behalf if you wanted anything taken seriously.

I won’t deny that, at least compared to the examples given so far, there is an increase in the influence of student democracy once you get to university level. The Student Union, however, is still not much more than a voluntary advisory body. A group who, most of the time, act as an irritating intermediary between the ordinary student and those who actually have any executive power.

The driving force behind university politics is ambition; the majority of students who take these positions are doing it because they think it’ll look good on their CVs' when they come to get work. This is an excellent motivating force at union election time - the candidates are motivated to hand out sweets, harass people relentlessly and make promises that they know that they have neither the power nor the influence to possibly carry out. Once the positions have been won and the new faces installed, however, the motivation evaporates. It makes little difference to the position holder whether or not he does a good job – he has the position and that’s what matters on his or her CV. Those who do actually care (there are probably some) are forced to either spend their entire time banging their heads against a metaphorical brick wall or directing their energies towards pointless posturing like, for example, attempting to ban coca cola on campus.

Democracy is something that educational bodies have always had a hard time with; on the one hand they want to teach their students that they should be politically active, aware and participate in the running of their area and country - on the other hand, they are still institutions whose authority over their students is absolute and accountable to powers other than those it governs. The result of this conflict is a kind of patronising pseudo-democracy, a nod to the general idea of self governance but with none of the actual powers: like the European Parliament only more so.

-Ben

futurethink

Today I finally got round to going to see the careers advisor at my university, which meant trudging through the snow* to the strange building round the side of Keynes College. The careers advisory service at UKC is located in a building designed as the house for the master of Keynes College and it's not the prettiest of buildings - unique, I'm sure, but not pretty. It looks like the architect, who'd been denied the opportunity to do anything fancy whilst populating campus with concrete squares, decided to add all the quirky architectural features he'd wanted to put on Keynes College on this one small building. The result is a odd, pointy building with a very high Apsi** and a fairily serious damp problem.

I wont bore you with the details of what was discussed, suffice to say it was useful: it would seem that my employment prospects aren't as grim as I tend to decide they are. There is one cause for annoyance, however, which was not dispelled by the talk. That is the very annoying way which I'm told employers, as a whole, assess the merits of someone's time at university. You are a desirable applicant if you spent your time at uni working for societies, writing for the uni paper, working for the uni radio station, doing summer internships and just generally working towards some specific career goal from the age of 18 onwards. They also see merit in those who manage to graduate with first class honours, presumably because it shows them as dedicated and intelligent. If you don't fall into either of those categories, however, then you are apparently a worthless burden on the state who may as well just send his CV to McDonalds.

I am currently precariously balanced on the first class honours side of the fence, however, my average mark is barely more than the minimum for a 1st, so it would only take one bad essay to throw me into the 2:1 category. This is worrying when I consider the fact that A: I'm working pretty much to the edge of my ability at the moment, if I screw up an essay I can't just cancel it out by writing another worth 80% or something, and B: I have concluded, from my experience of university, that the marking of work is, to a large extent, arbitrary - So when I say I only need one bad essay to screw this all up I mean that I only need one essay that my seminar leader takes a dislike to.

Needless to say I think that I'm going to have to spend the rest of this term either in the library or whispering sweet nothings to the faculty.

how wonderful

-Ben

*ok, so there wasn't really enough snow to 'trudge' through per se, but I was in a stompy sort of mood.

**Architecture per square inch

Odd Coincidence

In the nearly three years I've been studying english at uni I've written many lengthy and dull essays; I think the total stands at nearly 30 individual pieces and probably enough paper to choke an elephant.

Amongst this heap there have been four essays - two in the first year, one in the second year and one - so far - in the third - which, as a result of various blunders* and personal issues**, got written in 24 hours rather than a more sensible amount of time: like, for example, a week.

Only one of them was actually entirely constructed in one day, all of the others were just high speed condensing of the notes and research I'd done a few weeks earlier before I was distracted by something (usually another essay - they hunt in pairs)

The strange thing is that these essays, despite being marked by different people, on different subjects and written in different states of mind, have all received the exact same mark.

It seems that when I write an essay in 24 hours it is automatically given 68% (a high 2:1) and left at that.

considering I often get lower marks than that for essays that I labour over for weeks it's a bit strange, especially when you consider the fact that these essays, whilst they do have a sort of nervous eloquence that comes from being very stressed and tired, are generally shite.

not that I'm complaining.

-Ben

**Like forgetting which week it is, how many essays you've been set, what your network password is, etc.

*ie, drinking too much.

A good day

today I woke up at 9am - not because I was hungover, not because I was being beeped at by an alarm but because I was sufficiently rested. This was a good start. Also, my new glasses look good. Which is another good thing

I had a seminar which was like pulling teeth - basically about 90 minutes of me talking about Ezra Pound with the occassional long loaded silence in which I desperately tried to get someone else to say something. Hopefully next week won't be another monologue, they make me self conscious and I have a sore throat. This wasn't such a good thing, but I managed to make myself sound reasonably clever (I think), so the fact that no one else spoke isn't going to make me look bad.

I had an essay to pick up and a book to buy from the school of english - which was, of course, closed for lunch (a state in which it seems to spend most of the day) So I wandered off to the computer room where I checked my email and found this on the net, which is one of the coolest things ever.

With essays picked up (70% - another good thing) and books bought, I went home.

I spent the next hour or so laboriously deciphering the comments my seminar leader had written on my essay and the cover sheet. I didn't get very far (in a shock event Prof. Scofield has taken the award for most indecipherable handwriting from the previous holder - Prof. Carabine) but what I managed to understand seemed mostly positive (a good thing). Better, however, was the fact that whilst I was doing this a plumber sent by the landlord was fixing the leak in the pipe leading from the boiler which had made a sizeable patch of distinctly swampy carpet outside my flatmate's bedroom over the last day or so.

I managed to plow through around half of the book that I bought today (a good thing).

We bought a new tv - phillips 28" screen, £50 from ebay - which is also neato.

Generally it has been a good day, in between these events I've mostly been chatting with my flatmates, playing the guitars and listening to music.

a little list

The Good:

William Carlos Williams
Django Reinhardt
Slim Gaillard
Joseph Bazalgette

The Bad:

Ezra Pound
Elvis
John Kellogg

The Ugly:

-Ben

guitars

I often recount the story of how, during the easter holiday of 2002, I set a new fastest time in 1080 snowboarding*, a time that beat all previous records, a time good enough to send into a magazine if I was so inclined - a time, in short, which required a great deal of practice and perseverance to achieve. This was at a stage when I was at a fairly low ebb mentally, generally feeling all fat and emo, and this achievement made me feel good, 'what!' I claim I said to myself, 'could I do if I applied this perseverance and concentration to something worthwhile, like playing an instrument!' The very next day, as the story goes, I took my dad's bass out of its case and started to learn to play a couple of really simple songs.

This is, insofar as I can be sure about anything with my rather easily altered memory, an accurate retelling of the events and thoughts of this time.

What I refrain from mentioning, however, is that this was not my first flirtation with music. Around 6 weeks previous to the day when I started playing the bass I reached a similar epiphany and resolved to learn to play the guitar. I picked up one of the many guitars that were lying around in my house and started to play.

After a day or two of atonal musical ineptitude I gave up.

Like so many others I concluded that my hands were too big, or too fat, or too clumsy, and stopped playing at that stage; deciding that I just wasn't cut out for that sort of thing, destined instead for a career as a mediocre tambourine player. Many months later, when I realised that I was really quite good at playing the bass - perhaps even talented to some degree - the attempt at playing the guitar got shoved into the embarassing episodes folder of my mind**.

The main reason for this was that a lot of guitarists look down on bass players, they see them as simple people, people who can't manage all six strings, and I was already worried that my lack of experience would prevent anyone from taking me seriously. Afriad of admitting to having tried to play the guitar and given up, I started telling other people and, in time, myself, that I'd never tried to play the guitar, feigning disinterest in the hope that people wouldn't assume I was just a rubbish guitarist who'd moved to something simpler.

That isn't to say that I was, though. Not exactly anyway. The opening stages of learning to play the bass are much easier than learning to play the guitar - whilst there are the bruised fingers, blisters and bad rhythm to put up with, there isn't the horror of dischords, or the pain of trying to mangle your fingers into the various chord positions - This meant that I wasn't discouraged that time. To an extent my feigned disinterest was real, I have no desire whatsoever to play the electric guitar, they bore me, but my growing interest in jazz and folk has made me interested in playing the guitar, what with the absence of funky bass solos in folk music.

Anyway, to get to the point, due to various circumstances I have recently come into possession of what is, after a couple of serious modifications, quite a nice acoustic guitar. I've started playing it and I'm hoping that I'm not going to suck as badly as I thought I would the first time I tried.

If I do, then I'll probably delete this post and go back to feigning disinterest. If I don't then I think I'll learn to play to a reasonable degree then move on to something else, the banjo or the mandolin perhaps.

Sorry if this post isn't hugely coherent, I can't use my copy of word because I changed my CD drive and it has become convinced that it's being stolen or something and won't let me use it. Also I'm listening to brand nubian and dancing around like a nerdy cracker who knows no-one is watchingm, which tends to distract me.

-Ben

*A game, in case you hadn't guessed.

**it's very big, and bulging.