Packing , continued

Well, that's my books done. It didn't look like I had quite this much when they were sitting on my shelves, nor did I expect them to be this heavy. Although I have just noticed that the shelves appear to be quite seriously bowed from the weight.

leaving canterbury

I was doing the washing up last night and generally cleaning house, so I'm feeling a little hungover today (don't ask) and it has once again occurred to me that I've got to actually start packing and get ready to leave here.

It's a bit of a strange situation as, because the rent is year round on this house, I've never actually bothered to completely pack and clear out in the two years I've lived here - in the summer I generally grab my computer, some books and my clothes and leave everything else here. It raises the interesting quesion of just how much stuff I have, and how much stuff I've forgotten I have. I mean, seriously, at the end of the first year I found a huge pile of nice clothes that I'd not worn in a year because I dropped them on the floor of the wardrobe and then dropped a bag on the in the first week. Under my bed I found my timetable from the first term, that I thought I'd lost at the time, and some underwear that not only wasn't mine but belonged to a girlfriend I'd broken up with some 8 months previously. In the light of this I really wonder what on earth I'm going to find in my room this time, probably nothing that interesting because my life hasn't been that eventful but still, wierd shit. At least I hope so, otherwise this is going to get really really boring.

I figure I've probably got about a car's boot worth of books at least, my amp takes up about half the back of a car, plus the three guitars, and the computer - the stereo, my cds etc, will probably take up a fair amount of room. then there's all the stuff that I don't even think of as things I can pack - the kitchen pots and pans, the bed linen, all the stuff that has been discarded and forgottten but nonetheless must move. It's like when we moved house when I was 12, I ended up with three boxes in my bedroom marked 'ben's misc' which were full of such useless crap that it took me about three years before I went through them and threw it all out.

man, this kinda sucks. But still, I feel like my life needs to start over in some way or other, and it's not possible to start over in a town you'll only be in for a few weeks, with people you'll never see again, so the last few weeks have been more frustrating than enjoyable a lot of the time.

anyway. I'm going to start putting things into plastic boxes labelled 'colouring materials 1', 'large bricks 3' and suchlike (anyone who has at least one teacher parent moves house with these)

-Ben

Artsfest

Saturday was the day of artsfest which is an excuse to go onto campus and drink beer in the sunshine thinly disguised as a music event. As part of the pretence that we weren't all there to ogle the girls in their summer dresses I was playing in one of the bands. It was a lot of fun, I was playing in a band that I had been in for about 3 days previously and probably am not in anymore, which added an interesting element of difficulty to what would otherwise have been pretty routine stuff musically. The band I was in were pretty good, as far as I could figure from my perspective - I can't really comment on the singer due to the fact that, where I was standing at least, he was totally inaudible over the sound of two big guitar amps, my bass amp and a drumkit - my friends told me that not being able to hear him wasn't a hugely bad thing, however.

I was reminded of just how much fun playing with bands is, when I contemplate the prospect of playing in front of audiences I worry that I'm not good enough, I think about how I'm not that good a musician and don't have the immaculately polished skills of a lot of people. When I'm up on stage, however, I couldn't give a crap - I lost my place completely in the opening song but just grinned and laughed and rejoined on the next bar. I stop being self conscious once I'm in front of an audience, I dance like a prat, talk bollocks and generally showboat.

I also learned that my bass amp, despite the fact that it is big and heavy, is woefully underpowered for any kind of gig situation - I was completely and utterly drowned out from the moment that the second guitarist came in and struggling before that. I need a more powerful amp head at least, possibly some new speakers, if I'm going to be playing any more gigs. oh well, I've been meaning to get a better amp than the one I have since before I even bought it.

I spent the rest of the day doing what I always do at artsfest, that is, drinking too much and getting sunburned. I didn't feel drunk but, looking back, perhaps I should have stopped after eight cans of lager, whether I was swaying or not. i felt fine the next day though. huzzah.

erm, since then I've done a whole lot of bugger all. I should probably start packing soon and get ready to shuffle off this campus soil and get myself a soul destroying office job. yay. I like to end on a high note.

-Ben

Whitstable (again)

Today I found myself sitting at my computer in the light of lovely noon sunshine, having been awake for all of about 10 minutes. I decided that I should do something with myself today, something that would actually take advantage of the pretty weather and the lovely part of the world I'll soon be taken away from. So I grabbed Matt and Tom and we shambled off to whitstable.

I would have brought my camera and taken many photos but I figured that Tom would, and that the photos he took would be way better than anything I could ever take - I mean seriously, he can make me look halfway attractive, the boy's got a gift - but unfortunately his camera battery died halfway there and so there are no photos of our journey. Believe me though, it was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky, beautifully warm and the air was full of strange and wonderful butterflies. As I write I'm generally feeling very well disposed towards everyone and everything as a result of the day's loveliness - although I'll concede that this is probably partly due to the alcohol I consumed at woody's after the walk back and partly due to the fact that I'm listening to Bela Fleck and revelling, just for a moment, in the idea that I might be able to play as well as Vic Wooten one day.

But anyway, I'm really not sure where I'm going with this - ah yes, I went to whitstable today, dozed on the beach listened to the sound of the waves scrunching up the gravel beach -- later Me, Matt and Tom adjourned to Woody's to drink cheap booze and to discuss how parkwood was cooler back when me and my friends lived there.

Although I'm sure everyone thinks that, even the boring buggers who live there now.

heh, I'm knackered and sleepy.

-Ben

The Fretless

I’ve gone ahead and finished the modifications to my fretless bass, and I have to say that, with the exception of a few minor cosmetic blemishes on the fretboard and a burn on the back of my finger which will probably leave quite a sizable scar, it has been a complete success. Here are the remaining stages of the process.

I last wrote when I had just finished shielding the cavities of the body with aluminium foil. I hadn’t got round to wiring the different sections to ground yet and I’ll admit that I had doubts as to whether or not the foil would be sufficient to shield the cavities from the sheer amount of electrical noise that my room seems to funnel into my instruments.

I managed to eventually find a shop in Canterbury that sold sandpaper (you just have to keep walking down Wincheap high street until you are practically in Ashford – it’s on the left and looks like a proper old fashioned hardware store) and finished sanding the finish off the body of the bass, leaving it a nice matt black rather than a cheap looking shiny thing.

The next day I got some wire and stripped all the shielding off it, cut it to the right length, and ran it through the wiring channels to the pickup cavities. I made sure that I had enough to stretch this wire along the length of the bottom of each cavity, maximising the chances of it making a decent connection to the entirety of the shielding foil around the pickups, and taped it down with electrical tape (I tried soldering it to the foil in one or two places but as far as I can tell it isn’t possible to make a secure connection to foil with solder, so I made doubly sure with tape – it appears to have worked.)

After this I turned my soldering iron to the other electronics, I ‘m not going to go into a huge amount of detail on the methodology of this part, but I feel I should point out that this – the double volume pot I was using – is very, very small. Like tinysmall. I started to wire up all the pots etc. with as much of the connecting and grounding wires as I could without actually putting them inside the control cavity, and once I’d done that I started to wire up the pickups and grounding wires to the pots and jack. After I’d loosely bolted in the volume and tone pots the hot output wire connecting the volume pot with the tone pot broke – evidently I made a slip when cutting off the shielding that didn’t show itself until I tried to bend it into the cavity. This meant that I had to unsolder and remove the aforementioned incredibly small and intricate double volume pot from the cavity and start that whole process again. I was, however, determined to be professional and so after merely uttering a simple ‘oh bollocks’ I gritted my teeth and set about that task.

I’m guessing that my concentration was impaired by my frustration because when doing a particularly intricate bit of desoldering my hand slipped and I burned the back of my middle finger on my right hand so badly that I screamed like a crazy man and spent a good few minutes holding my hand under the cold tap and loudly swearing at the world in general in the most colourful and unpleasant terms I could think of. As I write, about a week after I did it, I’m looking at the icky patch of scorched skin at the bottom of the hole in my finger where the burned and blistered surface has come off – kids, don’t solder angry; always curse the universe fully whenever you encounter a frustrating setback.

One big problem that I’d been putting off for as long as possible was the fact that I don’t really know what the bridge pickup on my fretless is – I bought the bass from a pawn shop in Plymouth in 2006 and my research on the internet have told me that A. the bass was manufactured sometime between 1985 and 1994 (personal speculation based on various insubstantial details causes me to think that it was probably made in the late 1980s) and B. that the bridge pickup - along with the two on/off switches for the two pickups – was added in by someone else at some stage in the bass’s history. Further investigation poking around with it has told me that the pickup is unusual and probably quite expensive – the adjustable polepieces and split coil humbucking design suggesting that it is most likely a DiMarzio ‘Model J’. Being unable to find any wiring diagrams for a DiMarzio pickup of indeterminate age, however, I had to deduce the significance of the four different coloured wires myself. Through devilish cunning I managed to get it down to a 50/50 split - either the white was hot and the black was ground, or it was the inverse. I decided to go with the most logical option – the first – and wired it all up. The work on the neck not yet being finished I was unable to test the wiring properly (by playing the thing) – only to plug it in and poke the pickups with a knife to confirm that they were all connected up and making some sort of sound. As far as I could tell, it worked – which was a bit of a shock.

After I’d finished the neck refinishing, which took two days because it kept raining and forcing me inside, I reassembled my bass and set it up. Once the strings were on and the bass plugged in I discovered that the pickups were wired out of phase – I wasn’t even remotely surprised, there was a 50/50 chance of this happening and it would be difficult to remedy if it was wrong, therefore, according to Murphy’s law there was only one way things were ever going to go down, I knew this when wiring it up, but I also knew that if I changed my mind and rewired it before I could test it then that would turn out to be the wrong way.

Rewiring the pickup turned out to not be as traumatising a process as I had envisaged and the whole thing was up and running within about 10 minutes of the problem being discovered. When plugged in and with the amp turned up the shielding is so good that I actually have to press the bass's front against the side of my poweramp before the thing makes any noise at all.

I now have a very tasty fretless to match my very tasty fretted, the pickups have a growly bite to them that I've never heard on a passive instrument that cost less than £400 and the newly finished neck is beautifully silkysmooth. On top of that it looks badass with its new matt finish, I tihnk you'll agree. Huzzah.

Now I just have to learn to play it properly.

Fretless Neck Refinishing

I play the electric bass, I'm not really a proper musician – I can’t read music, I never had a lesson in anything and I could write the sum total of my musical theory knowledge on the back of a matchbox… in lipstick – I am comfortable with this, however, so, unlike many fretless bass players, I feel no need to try and make it sound like an upright bass. I use rotosound roundwound strings and position my right hand near the bridge. The problem with this set up is that it wears grooves in an unfinished rosewood fretboard faster than you can say ‘Jaco Pastorius’ and this was starting to cause me some problems. I found a guide on the internets which suggested varnishing the fretboard with superglue and figured I’d give it a shot because it wouldn’t cost much to try and if it went wrong I could always just sand it off.

I make no claims about this being a particularly good method, like all things I do it's kinda half arsed and involves as little expertise and equipment as you can possibly manage - I figured I'd put it up here though, because I'm sure there are others, like myself, who aren't hugely interested in doing a professional quality job, just one that looks ok and works. It's bare bones stuff, so if I say to do something or not to do something it isn't because I think it sounds like the right thing - it's probably because I've done the opposite at some stage and didn't like the result.

Materials Needed

- 1 Pot of superglue (I found that about 20g was sufficient, although more might be a good idea) I used only the finest Wilkinson’s £1.50 a pot stuff.

- 1 large packet of disposable gloves (you don’t want to become permanently attached to your bass, and will probably need to change gloves often)

- lots of sandpaper, from about 250-300 grit to the stuff that is essentially rough toilet paper

- a washing-up scouring sponge

Methodology

You’ll need to do this outside. Remove the nut (try very hard not to damage it) they are normally only lightly glued in – if at all – so it shouldn’t be too hard, just ping it off with a screwdriver or something. Mask off the body of the bass (if the neck is still attached to the bass, I just unbolted the neck because I needed to anyway) to prevent scuffing the finish, that is, if you actually care. And mask off the back of the neck – this is more important, the back of the neck is a surface you are constantly touching and sliding your thumb up and down – if it has imperfections they will get annoying fast.

Sand down the fretboard, preferably with some sort of sanding block to keep things level and smooth out imperfections but if you have very flat hands, or just can’t be arsed to find a suitable blocky type thing, then just use your hands. After it is sanded smooth and clear of any serious imperfections, scrub the bejeasus out of it with a wet scouring sponge a couple of times, drying it in between with a cloth – this is to get all the dust off it before you apply the first coat.

Put on the gloves, then get some sandpaper that you’ve already used and splurge a 50p sized blob of superglue onto the back of it. Spread this evenly over the surface of the fretboard, splurging on more if needed. Now leave to dry – you’ll be doing that a lot so I suggest listening to something to keep you entertained, I found that the radio series of the Mighty Boosh and The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy work especially well for this purpose.

When it is dry add another coat, then wait for that coat to dry. If you don’t think that it looks sufficiently well covered then add a third coat, but that one isn’t essential. If no third coat is desired then wait a long time, longer than seems sensible, to make sure that the glue is completely dry (don’t touch it to check, it’ll leave marks) and sand it down with light sandpaper. The reason for the extra long wait is that if you start sanding it down when not all of the glue is completely dry then the white sanding residue will stick to the still wet parts and you will end up with misty looking discoloured sections of finish. After you’ve sanded it fairly smooth get out the sponge and scrub it down before you add another set of coats.

Repeat this process a few more times, enough to give you, say, at least six layers of glue in total. Then lightly sand it smooth with fine sandpaper and polish it with the scrubbing side of the sponge and some cloth.

Reattach the neck to the body of the bass (if you took it off) and begin the process of setting it up. You might need to raise the height of the nut slightly if it was really close to the surface of the fretboard before; I did this by cutting a small piece of cardboard and placing it underneath the nut to raise it slightly. There are some that would argue that this technique would decrease the sustain of the instrument and, if you actually buy into that crap, then feel free to just buy a new nut made of fossilised angel shit or whatever they are saying gives you the best sound at the moment, and cut it to the right height.

Tune up and check the neck for buzzy spots, if you find one then get the light sandpaper and the sanding block and do some more levelling on the fretboard under the affected string. Once it's all playing smoothly get your groove on and play until your fingers hurt.

-Ben

Cutty Sark

What? Nooo!

well that sucks, apparently only about half the ship was there because it's been dismantled for repairs and it not completely unrepairable but still, it is far from good, the cutty sark is too much of a landmark to lose. I remember going on it with my grandparents when I was a kid, I still remember the figureheads in the hold and the way that the whole place smelled like my great grandfather's sea chest.

And apparently it was started on purpose, which, I'm sad to say, being from that area myself, surprises me about as much as a dog pissing on a tree; but still, it does wear away a little bit more of my frayed respect for humanity as a whole.

Mind you, it's now been featured on the national news, its lack of funding has been showcased to the world media in the context of a 'terrible tragedy' - this could well mean that they get much more money than they had to renovate it before, probably enough to more than offset the damage done by the fire, if they play their cards right.

I hope so anyway. I like the Cutty Sark, and it'd be nice to see it all shiny and new, rather than slowly corroding like it has been for the duration of my living memory.

-Ben

Guitar Shielding

I wrote this for my own benefit (hence the rather patronising tone - I don't have a very high opinion of my own intelligence) but I figured I may as well put it up on here, seeing as it might be of interest to someone somewhere, if only as corroboration of the effectiveness of this method as written up by others in more detail than me.

Things Needed:

1 Tube of Contact cement

A large pack of disposable gloves (they get sticky and you have to change them periodically)

Shielding Foil or Kitchen foil (the thick stuff for preference)

1 Roll painters tape (masking tape will do)

1 Sharp knife

1 Pointy Biro

Methodology

If you are shielding pickup cavities which aren’t covered by a pickguard then use the masking tape to cover the surface of the instrument around the edges of the cavities. If you are shielding a control cavity covered by a metal plate on the front of an instrument (like a stingray or a telecaster) then mask the body around the control plate before you take it off. This is important as it prevents you getting glue and foil stuck anywhere visible.

Unscrew and desolder everything (and I mean everything, even the bridge - leave the neck on if you want though, and the strap buttons - they don’t really have anything to do with this) - you’ll need all the cavities clear of wires and objects that will get in the way – if you aren’t replacing the wiring as well then try, as far as is possible, to keep the pots, jack, and capacitors wired together when you take them out of the body (it’ll save time later) only desolder the bridge ground and pickup wires.

Once everything is out of the cavities lightly sand and then clean them as well as you can, try and make the surfaces as smooth and clean as possible.

Cut strips of foil to whatever width seems appropriate for the cavities you are dealing with, make sure that you have a good number of them ready before you start messing around with the glue otherwise you’ll have to cut them whilst all sticky.

You’ll want to do this next part either outside or somewhere fairly well ventilated - it won’t kill you to do it inside, but it will make you feel kinda woozy by the end of the job.

Put on the gloves (you really can’t do this job without them, I tried - it went horribly wrong and the skin on my fingers went all manky) and wrap your glue spreading finger inside something like a plastic bag or some paper and start spreading the glue evenly over the inside of the cavities, try and avoid getting any in screw holes.

Use the same technique to cover one side of a few of the foil strips. Pause for a minute or two to allow the glue to get its sticky on (the longer you wait, the stickier it gets – better for neatly plonking it on, but if you do it earlier you can slide the foil around to get it into the right place) then, without the bits of bag (or old gloves, or paper, or whatever you chose to use) on your fingers, start sticking in the foil, trying to get as little glue on your fingertips as possible. Ignore screw holes, wiring channels, holes for potentiometers etc - you can poke those holes through with a pen or something later on (if you can find them, try and remember roughly where they were - you can feel for them though if you forget).

This part is very boring and time consuming – just get comfy and sit around sticking the strips into the cavities until the whole cavity is covered with as few gaps as you can possibly manage. Change your gloves whenever the gloves become stickier than the surfaces you are trying to stick the foil to. Listen to some music by all means, but don’t watch TV, you need to be looking intently at what you are doing the whole time. You’ll want to take breaks from this every now and then, as your eyes will get tired focusing intently on the work and your brain will get confused by the fumes.

If you are putting foil into a control cavity with a plastic backing plate then try and get the foil to overlap the edges of the cavity into the bevelled (or countersunk, or chamfered, I have no idea what to call it – I’m not a carpenter) part under where the cover would be, complete the shielding of this cavity by covering the inside of the cover plate with foil so that it touches the parts on the bevelled section.

Once you have finished lining the cavities give yourself a manly handshake in appreciation of a job well done and go off for a while to get some fresh air and make the glue induced hallucinations go away. If you have been shielding cavities not covered by a pickguard or by a metal control plate then come back after about half an hour (after the glue has set fairly well) and cut around the inside edge of the masked part with a very sharp knife (very sharp!) and peel off the tape, taking the excess foil (and, as long as you've cut the edges properly, only the excess foil)

Now part one is done - I would write how to do the next part (wiring all the different sections of shielding foil to ground) but I’ve not actually done that bit yet.

-Ben

More Lists

In my last post I talked about lists and how they generally reflect a mixture of what people like and what they want people to think they like, this post is more along similar lines. Whilst thinking about the way that people look to someone's favourite things as an indication of what sort of a person they are it occurred to me that if I quickly wrote down the first five things that came into my head in various categories I'd probably end up with an interesting insight into what sort of a person I am. I only managed to write to before I started thinking ahead of myself and trying to chose ones that made me look all sexy and intelligent, but these two lists are both as unaffected as I can manage.

I think it'd probably be reading too much into it to say that they are in order of preference, but it might be the case, I'm not sure.

Favourite Poems

1. The Young Housewife - William Carlos Williams
2. The Snow Man - Wallace Stevens
3. Under Milk Wood - Dylan Thomas (I'm not sure if this really counts as a poem)
4. The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock - T S Eliot
5. Ode to a Nightingale - John Keats


Favourite Short Stories

1. Babylon Revisited - F Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Disc - Jorge Luis Borges
3. Sonny's Blues - James Baldwin
4. The Dead - James Joyce
5. The Other - Jorge Luis Borges

The reason for the slightly unorthodox categories is probably something to do with the fact that I've been reading huge amounts of modernist poetry and short stories this term.

With the poetry it's all pretty strange stuff, number 5 is the meditations of a man contemplating and coming to terms with the inevitability of his imminent death, number 4 is a man contemplating the seeming inevitability of his decline into mediocrity, number 2 is a weird metaphyiscal pondering which I probably only like that much because I'm impressed that I can understand it, and 1 and 3 are wonderfully tactile poems that I love for no reason I can articulate very well. As to what they say about me, well, they tell you that I don't like old poems, Keats' being the only one not written in the 20th Century, I'm sure that signifies something about me, although I have no idea what.

With the short stories it's a bit different; I read a lot of short stories, much more than I read poetry - I read short stories of my own volition all the time. Most of these stories are examples, fairly arbitrarily chosen, of the work of my favourite writers. I wouldn't say that I'm a huge fan of F Scott Fitzgerald's stuff on the whole, but that story is so incredibly well observed and composed that it deserves that spot. The two Borges stories are probably, combined, about 5 pages long and are little gems of mini narrative. 'Sonny's Blues' - along with 'Previous Condition' and 'This morning, this evening, so soon' - is probably my favourite story discovered over the course of my studies this year. And 'The Dead', well, it's Joyce before he dissapeared up his own arse, and few can beat that. The fact that I put two Borges stories on there probably means that I'm anxious to show that I do read texts that aren't required reading for one of my courses.

On the whole I think it makes me look kinda pretentious, which is hardly surprising, because I am, especially when it comes to books.

-Ben

lists

We for some reason live in a society bounded and defined by lists and tables, sets of statistics which show the prevalence of, or popularity of, this, that, or the other. It's always interesting, I find, to see the results of large scale polls of people's opinions on the value of works of art, people or things - because whilst one person generally will not give a true ranking of their favourite things*, if you take an average opinion of a large group of people you generally end up with a result which is either an accurate repesentation of people's opinions or a fascinating hint as to the shared aspirations and affectations of the polled group.

The thing that started me on this train of thought was some of the new features on facebook - specifically the group statistics. These are a selection of top ten lists based on the books, bands, films, TV Shows and interests which appear most frequently in people's favourite things lists and they are quite interesting to read. I'll reproduce the lists for the university of Kent group here:

Top Music

1. Muse
2. The Killers
3. Snow Patrol
4. Oasis
5. Razorlight
6. The Kooks
7. Coldplay
8. Foo Fighters
9. Radiohead
10. U2

People are generally rather more confident about what they like and dislike when it comes to music than they are with other things - This list doesn't really tell you anything other than show you dazzlingly broad spectrum of student musical tastes, covering the full range of middle class white folk music, from 'hipper than thou' to 'super-ultra-bland'.

Top Movies

1. Pulp Fiction
2. Fight Club
3. Gladiator
4. Shawshank Redemption
5. Snatch
6. Goodfellas
7. Anchorman
8. Dirty Dancing
9. Lord Of The Rings
10. Donnie Darko

does anyone understand donnie darko, really? And why are university students so obsessed with very violent films like 1,2,3,5, and 6? is it because they don't often hurt people in real life so they like to do it vicariously whilst pretending to be a gangster?

Top TV

1. Scrubs
2. Family Guy
3. Friends
4. Lost
5. Desperate Housewives
6. Simpsons
7. Prison Break
8. Hollyoaks
9. Futurama
10. 24

It's kinda depressing that all but one of the shows on here is a high budget american studio effort, and the one english production is a godawful soap opera.

Top Interests

1. Music
2. Reading
3. Travelling
4. Football
5. Drinking
6. Shopping
7. Dancing
8. Art
9. Sleeping
10. Films

I'm pretty sure that no. 7 means 'getting twatted at the venue and twitching about the dancefloor until I'm carried home' and no. 3 means 'I went on a gap year... did I mention that I went on a gap year? I went on a gap year you know.'

Top Books

1. 1984
2. Harry Potter
3. Lord Of The Rings
4. The Da Vinci Code
5. To Kill A Mockingbird*
6. Birdsong*
7. Pride And Prejudice
8. Memoirs Of A Geisha
9. Catcher In The Rye*
10. Lord Of The Flies*

I've only read seven of these, no.s 4, 7 and 8 being the exceptions (and I've never finished 3 - it's too boring.) I think 1984 is probably top because it's well known and shows that you think about like, political things, and stuff. The starred ones are common set texts at either A level or GCSE.

I'd be curious to see what the results are for other groups, other demographics etc, to see how different segments of life, even different universities differ. And what they say about the group in question in relation to other groups.

I was also going to mention the lists I quickly wrote down when I was supposed to be revising, but that seems like too much of a tangent now. I'll write about that at some other point.

-Ben

* Yes, the footnotes are back - this one was too big to leave in the body text and I couldn't be bothered to rearrange the sentence structure to incorporate it properly, because I'm lazy like that, anyway, the footnote - They will, to some degree, give a selection of their favourite things, but it is one tailored to impress or create an impression on the person they are being asked by - it may not be a conscious thing, but people do it nonetheless. Now that you've read this you'll probably completely lose track of the meaning of the sentence you were reading. sorry.

Richard Littlejohn

Americans will not know who this guy is but suffice to say that he is essentially a british equivalent of Rush limbaugh - a reactionary bigoted wazzock who is for some reason given a column in a national newspaper. Anyway, I'm not going to bother ranting about him here, I just thought I'd link this page

These reviews are, it has to be stated - entirely ironic and made me laugh until I nearly peed. I especially like this one:

"Some have labelled Littlejohn a crass, reactionary, vicious-minded little bigot. In this, his magnum opus, he takes these feeble accusations by the throat and shakes them around like a yorkshire terrier with a small dog toy. Probably a dog toy in the shape of a golliwog.

In his quest to uproot the insidious weed of political correctness, he strides across the rhetorical spectrum from delicately constructed hysterical ranting, all the way through to elegant and waspish carping on and on about nothing of any significance. He leaps with the ease of a ballerina from one lazy disingenuity to another, flouncing his little tutu with the carefree flirtation of a batty boy in a badly broken metaphor.

If Kylie Minogue's perfect posterior could be rendered in prose, then this book would be that prose. Only when she turned around, she'd probably have a penis like that girl in The Crying Game. You know? Ewwww. Eh?"

-Ben

I'm drunk. heh. I've also finished my exams. that's probably more worthy of mention - I'll write about it tomorrow.

The Insert Key

I was browsing my normal morning's crop of blogs and webcomics today, and came across a link to this -

How to Disable the Insert Key in Word

It's always encouraging to find that other people have the same problems and annoyances as yourself, and I must admit that this solution, whilst more complicated than the one I came up with, certainly has slightly more elegance.

Here's my alternative method for disabling the insert keys, it involves prying out the offending keys with a flathead screwdriver:



Like I said, not very elegant. Mind you, seeing as nothing about my life is elegant I think my method suits me just fine. As you see I also removed the # key because I kept hitting it when I meant to press shift (the first modification I made), the left windows key and the right click key are gone because if you hit them by accident when running a full screen application it pulls you out into the desktop, and I not only removed but subsequently destroyed the caps-lock because THERE@S NOTHING WORSE THAN ACCIDENTALLY WRITING A SENTENCE IN FULL CAPS.

-Ben

...and if you are wondering how I managed to do the # symbol without actually having the key anymore - I just poke the switch inside with a screwdriver (it's the first time I've had any reason to ever press that key on purpose)

... and yes, this would all be uneccessary if I had A: the ability to touch type properly and B: smaller, less sausage-like fingers

Exams

Well I've finished my first exam, I think it went reasonably well, although I'm not certain of that. Some of the questions were hilariously pretentious but I managed to find and answer the neccessary two - ones that I rejected included these Gems:

"Instead of 'Imagism', would it make sense to speak of 'imagisms'?"

and the marvelous

"How Can the notions of 'difference' and 'deferral' bound up in the derridean Differance help us to grasp modernist modes of textuality?"

Which is a good example of why I don't want to carry on with my studies beyond BA level - I don't have a fucking clue what that means, not the foggiest notion, and I'm not an underachiever or a slacker, despite whatever impression I give on here.

I managed to write more than I usually write in exams, still less than most, but more than my normal; the downside of this being that, having just written about 10 pages of closely spaced handwritten text in three hours, my right hand is really hurting. I have a pulled muscle in my thumb (I didn't even know you could injure that muscle), a bruised thumbnail and a blister on my index finger. ouch, I think I'm probably going to be playing with a pick for a few days.

Unsurprisingly, the exam paper was just as badly put together as the rest of the course and about 90% of the people I spoke to afterwards replied that they had done the exact same pair of questions as me, as they were the only two that corresponded to the stated aims and objectives of the course as taught be the seminar leaders, rather than the chapters of the pretentious wazzock of a module convenor's book.

-Ben

Sounds

Myspace, whilst it has a stupid name and carries connotations of scary emo horrors, is a good way of finding good (and frequently very bad) music. Stuff I've been poking around with recently be these

Lucy Kitt
-I've seen her live a few times and she is very good, or perhaps it's just that she plays in the original material vacuum that is canterbury. Listening to this stuff it would appear to be the former.

Charles Stuart
-Discovered whilst on a 'listen to other people's music' bender a week or two ago. Strange sort of Lo-fi soul electronica, good though.

Future of the Left
-Welsh supergroup made from some very good bands, they are shouty, loud and generally rock. Even more so live.

Ambervision
-Mandatory plug for my friends' band, I've not seen them live in a shamefully long time. getting better with each song I hear. Jangly indie pop goodness.

I'm not sure why I'm posting these links here, it's not like my endorsement is going to give them any new fans, but meh, I'm bored and if I stop writing this then I've got to get back to work.

shit.

-Ben

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