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.

Warm Tone

I like science; it fascinates me, even though it doesn’t seem to like me back. My relationship with science is like that of the music connoisseur who can’t play a note on a musical instrument: I think it’s really cool, and I like to imagine that perhaps if I’d paid attention, or discovered my interest at an earlier stage, I might have been able to understand more of it. As it is though, I just read stuff written for the laity and try and understand it to the best of my feeble abilities. I know this sounds strange coming from an English Literature student, but there it is.

I make no claims to be some great empiricist (I’m a very trusting person and well aware of my inability to comprehend anything more complex than literary criticism*) but I do have a reasonable grasp of basic scientific principles gained from my father, brother and school and know when things don’t smell right. In recent months this incredulity has been fed and educated by the discovery of Ben Goldacre’s rather fantastic pseudoscience bashing blog/newspaper column.

When people think of Pseudoscience they generally think of the obvious practitioners – alternative medicine, cosmetics companies and various conspiracy theorists of various hues and flavours. But I think I have discovered a wonderful new area of wonky science to poke at…

As I’ve mentioned in other posts (ones that, like this one, are best avoided) I’m a musician, of sorts,** and I take my hobbies seriously. The ‘Guitar Stuff’ folder in my favourites, for example, is subdivided into numerous different flavours of geekiness*** and my face is known in guitar shops throughout the land. Reading reviews of instruments and websites/press releases from various manufacturers always makes me cringe; generally, with the exception of one or two small-shop luthiers everyone seems to feel the need to justify and explain various design decisions, and how this gives the instrument/amplifier/effects pedal/component part/cable/strap a ‘warm tone,’ with all kinds of scientific claims. I think this is especially prominent in the realm of electric instruments as there are just so many variables in what constitutes a players signature ‘sound’ including: First and foremost, the ability of the player then The materials of the instruments construction, the pickups, the hardware, the brand of strings, the effects, the amplifier, the speakers etc..

Now as I said, I’m not exactly hot shit when in comes to thinking about stuff that isn’t meaningless, but the following there is so much stuff associated with this industry that smells distinctly of bollocks. Most of it is just wild exaggeration; attributing a major, audible difference in the quality of sound to a design feature that might, at best, make a miniscule difference to the sonic properties of an instrument, detectable only with expensive scientific equipment and certainly beyond even the most discerning ear. The following two (there are many more examples, but it’s late and I’m tired) instances really get on my (ample) tits:

The belief that making the distance between the anchor points of the string (the tuning pegs and the tailpiece) longer will somehow raise the tension of the section of the string which is used to make the noise (between the nut and the bridge saddles). I would have thought that you could have a headstock the size of a cricket bat and the strings would be the same tension

The assertion that the kind of finish used, as in what sort of varnish, paint or wax the body is coated in, makes a difference to the sound. People speak disparagingly of polymer based paints – claiming that they don’t allow wood to ‘breathe’ or resonate properly and others speak knowingly of the ‘natural’ sound got from using no finish at all.

Both of these seem to be examples of rather more wild exaggeration than I normally tolerate in advertising or press-release bravado. I mean seriously, what the fuck? It’s paint for crying out loud! The main objection I have to all of this is the belief prevalent amongst many musicians that this bullshit encourages – namely that spending money on new gear will improve your sound more than just practising for a bit longer or, you know, actually having some talent. Buying an Eric Clapton signature Stratocaster will not make you Eric Clapton.

Basic rule of thumb – if it is science being used to sell something, then it is probably a load of horsecrap.

-Ben

*Although I’ll admit that the more complex narratological and linguistic stuff tends to make me go cross eyed a bit when trying to understand it.

** not a very good sort, but nevermind, I enjoy myself

****Guitar Makers, Amp Makers, Retailers, Parts/effects, and Reference.

Giggage

The Future of the Left are very good live.

They usually seem to be billed as ‘two of mclusky and one of jarcrew’ or words to that effect, but they really are an altogether different, and musically sexier beast than just the sum of their parts. They rocked. The songs I’ve heard on their website sounded even better live and the songs I haven’t heard before were brilliant. Live, tracks like ‘Wrigley Scott’ and ‘small bones small bodies’ sound incredible.

In fact the quality of the whole set matches that of the tracks on upcoming double A side of ‘The Lord Hates a Coward’ and ‘Fingers Become Thumbs’. Which all bodes very well for the album, whenever that gets recorded. All the material I’ve heard so far from them is a metric shiteload better than anything I’ve heard in a long while. Certainly better than most of the shoegazing indie noises that make up most of the music that ‘the kids’ are listening to these days.

----

Tch. We generic middle class indie kids are so predictable, Falco joked about how all the posh bastards who weren’t jumping around and getting into it would probably go home and write about the gig in their journal…

And here I am.

Oh well.

-Ben

Picture of the gig courtesy of ed.

Interesting

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

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

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

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



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

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

anyway. I've got work to do.

-Ben

Part the Second

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Ben


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

Part the First

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

-Ben

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

Love and Honour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Ben

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

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

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

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

Shoe Event Horizon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(b) Take cover and call the police

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

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

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

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

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

-Ben

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

I know what I did this summer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Ben