Smoothed Out Shite

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

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

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

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

-Ben

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

The heap

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

From top to Bottom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Ben

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

Swearing

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

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

-Ben

Zen and the Art of Guitar Maintenance

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

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


Ugly isn’t it.

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

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

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

I despair.

-Ben

Ed's Guitar

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

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

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

Before!


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



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



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

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

-Ben

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

Meme

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

-Ben

This is also rather excellent

Odd

want a repainted green godess?

Have a craving for an armoured police car?

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

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

-Ben

eew

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

- - -

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

I suspect I may have only minutes to live.

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

-Ben

pretty noises

What I posted earlier was in fact incorrect, this is the best thing ever.

-Ben

pretty noises

I like this

Antoine Dufour (guitar) and Tommy Gauthier (violin). It sounds like music from the future to me, proper futuremusic - none of this bleepysound, just new ideas, techniques and arrangements with traditional instruments.

This one is good also

As is Antoine Dufour's solo work.

Anyway. I need to go and think of something to do with myself today.

-Ben

In other news I've managed to stub my toe four times today (little toe on my left foot twice, and the first time was very hard) I think this must be some sort of karmic retribution for something.

Sunday

Unusually for me, something actually happened this weekend. Well, someone happened, but Sarah tends to be an event in herself, worthy of mention - like a visit from the pope. only more fun. and with less homophobia.

We went off for a rambling journey around London on Sunday, which was an uncharacteristically beautiful day. It started strangely: my London pride (not the ale) was somewhat dented by the fact that Sarah, who is from a land far, far away, seemed to know her way around the touristy parts of London much better than I do. We went to Trafalgar Square, which I've stood around in plenty of times*, but never really actually looked at in any detail - I've certainly never looked up at the column properly or taken photos of the lions. From there we went to St James' Park (which I've been in before, but only when drunk) which was a lovely place - it had pelicans, which at first glance I mistook for bizarre hallucinations of swans, an army of cyclists, and Buckingham Palace - which I've never actually seen before, and, to be honest, don't feel any the richer for having seen - it's pretty urgley.

After some tasty lunchings and lounging around in the park sunshine for a while we moved on to somewhere else, and the balance finally tipped so that I knew more about where we were going than the person from the other side of the Atlantic.

We went up to Camden where, to my shock, no-one offered us drugs (I'm not being snobby, it's just that I used to go up there a lot, and never walked more than about 200 metres without being offered something.) we shambled around looking at the emokids, goths and hipsters shaking their bony asses and spending this months allowance on various ironic, almost-witty or 'random' T-Shirts and sweating like pigs in their ankle length leather jackets. There was cool stuff left right and centre but seeing as neither of us had any money it was kinda like dry humping retailwise.

At that point the period of me being the one knowing where we were going ended again as we walked down regents canal from Camden Lock, which was lovely; all the weeping willows sinking into the water, the funny shimmering reflections on the walls and under the bridges and the little jetties at the end of people's gardens. I was walking along, possibly giving the impression that I knew where I was going, but in fact I was just following the prettyness. Luckily, the walk down the canal led down to Regent's park, where we sat around in the sunshine and observed (from a safe distance) some sort of traumatising mass aerobics event where middle-aged saggy women in pink t-shirts were enthusiastically shouted at by the gayest man in the history of aerobics instructors (and lets face it, it's a pretty gay history.)

From there we tubed it back to Greenwich, loafed about in the park & riverside, and drank tasty beer until it was bus home snoozetime.

It was a good day.

-Ben

*usually whilst waiting for the N21 at some ungodly hour of the night on the way back from somewhere fun

recruitment consultants

I've been trawling through pages and pages of job listings today - specifically looking for positions that require graduates, because I think I'll have better luck with those than with many other jobs - and I've noticed something rather unsettling.

There appear to be more advertised positions in the recruitment/human resources/head-hunting sector than all the other sectors put together.

Which I can only assume means that London is heading for some sort of 'shoe event horizon'*. A point will come when there are five recruitment agencies for every company that needs staff to do actual work and the economy will collapse in on itself in a horrific pileup of middlemen and consultants.

until then... hmm, they pay well.

-Ben

*see Adams, Douglas. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe Chapter 10 for a full illustration of this principle.

The Guitar is Finished

I'm going to leave the poor thing alone now, just play it until it grows old and confused and has to be retired, never more will it see me bearing down on it with a soldering iron in hand.

The action wasn't as low as I like (as low as I can possibly get it) and tweaking the truss rod, whilst improving the situation, hadn't got it perfect. I didn't want to admit defeat so I brought in some of my more invasive methods of treatment.

I used a knife sharpening stone to level out the frets, you can see from the different amounts of metal dust around each fret caused by scraping the flat stone over them that they weren't of equal height. Generally a sharpening stone is all that is needed - only really, really badly missaligned frets require the use of metalworking files.



This gets the frets level but leaves them scratched and rough, with a big flat part on the top of many of them, which can mess up the intonation a bit. So I masked up the fretboard thusly:



Then wrapped my thumb in light sandpaper and started to use the fleshysquishy bit of my thumb to re-profile the frets. I do this by rubbing my thumb along the length of the fret, smoothing the frets back to their normal shape - taking care to stop sanding before the height of the top of the fret drops below the height of the flat part put there by the sharpening stone.

After the neck was all unmasked and the fretboard oiled (to prevent the wood from getting all dried out by the masking tape) I put the guitar back together and put the new strings on. The action is crazylow now - like so



At the same time as doing the work on the neck I was elaborating on the designs on the guitar's body and headstock - I coated the designs on the body with a layer of clear varnish to prevent them getting worn off by playing. The body now looks like this:



and the headstock like this



Anyway. I'm going to wander off out for a walk now.

-Ben

oh, and I removed the profile information bit because I'd prefer it if this wasn't there for all prospective employers to see on google when you type in my name. I'm not going to stop writing, nor will it make any real difference to my listing on google, but at least this way it's not blindingly obvious.

Art

This is a piece entitled "Dissolution of Sound" from the series of works created as part of the Artist's work with the Unknowable Contexts Collective. Whilst characterised primarily by its conceptual naïveté, this work contains many of the hallmarks which earned its creator both acclaim and controversy in his later career - such as the bold use of anglo-patriachal textual motifs, which playfully explore the relationship between logic and contingency, and the use of subtly erotic abstraction. The paint is actually rancid Llama milk mixed, by the artist, with PVA glue - creating both an exciting artistic medium and a stinging critique of the failure of liberation theolgy in Argentina. The upward dripping paint evokes the upheaval in psychosexual politcal discourse which greeted the election of Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London in 2000.

The asking price is £7,500 - although with increasing interest in his work the value of the piece will undoubtedly increase with time. A good investment for any art collector with an interest in crochet.

-Ben

It's actually a piece of cardboard I used to dry my paint roller on whilst decorating the living room. I think I could still get a monkey for it though, if I find a suffiently gullible mark.

hmm

I was bored the other day, and I had a permanent marker, so my guitar looks a little odd. I think I really should leave the poor thing alone now, let it die with dignity rather than molesting it something rotten.

-Ben

Radioactive Unsexiness

I'm not sure about the rest of the world but in britain at the moment there is a huge inflation in quackery - an army of 'nutritionists', homeopaths, and other insubstantial witch doctory. It has to be said though, bad though the quacks are these days, they used to be much worse - I refer you to this bottle of delicious radithor! A life improving radioactive tonic sold in the late twenties and early thirties which contained about enough radium to kill you after a few bottles of the stuff. It was discontinued after a wealthy industrialist called Eben Byers drank enough to kill a small town, and well, sort of dissolved.

I also discovered that today is the 20th aniversary of the Goiânia Accident in which a large proportion of a city had to be decontaminated after some tramps rummaging around in an abandoned hospital found some pretty glowing metal and sold it to a local scrap dealer. Which led me off to the interesting category in Wikipedia of "List of Civilian Radiation Accidents" which contains many similar instances to the Goiânia Accident in other poor countries around the world in addition to a couple of soviet union ones which show such a bizarre recklessness they are almost funny. Like this incident for example

"December 2000 – Three woodcutters in the nation of Georgia spent the night beside several "warm" canisters they found deep in the woods and were subsequently hospitalized with severe radiation burns. The canisters were found to contain concentrated 90Sr. The disposal team consisted of 25 men who were restricted to 40 seconds' worth of exposure each while transferring the canisters to lead-lined drums. The canisters are believed to have been intended for use as generators for remote lighthouses and navigational beacons, part of a Soviet plan dating back to 1983."

who on earth thought that that was a good idea, and how on earth did they get them out there without killing themselves? I'm assuming it wasn't a very professional disposal operation.

Then of course there are the Radium Girls whose story just makes me angry.

-Ben

Footwear

Up until about a week ago I had been wearing the same shoes for about a year and a half; which may not be that long for some people but it's a long time for me - I'm heavy, I walk everywhere, and I've never owned more than three pairs of shoes at any one time. Generally, my shoes crumble and wear through after around 8 months. Not that the last pair of trainers I had were much more resiliant than their predeccessors, it was just that I had no money to replace them this time. By the time they were finally retired they had a powerful funk - the sole of the left shoe was worn through at the heel and the front, the sole of the right shoe was almost completely detached from the upper, and the insole had fallen out of the gaping hole in the back - leaving me standing on the sort of rubber waffle on the inside of the sole.

I managed to find a cool pair of shoes for fifteen quid, so the crumbling relics were retired. Someone, who shall remain nameless (I'll just refer to her as mother), was so scared that I'd keep wearing those shoes out in public that she threw away all of my old shoes, even the ones that weren't in that bad a state.

Which was fine. I never really had any occasion to wear them... until today.

I've been redecorating the living room, which means getting splattered with paint and standing on top of a ladder for long periods of time. I didn't want to get my new shoes all painty but standing on a ladder barefoot really hurts if you do it for more than a few moments.

So I devised a new form of footwear - one which combines the disposability of flip-flops with the ruggedness of gaffa tape.



They were safe to wear on a ladder but not hugely comfortable and greatgreasyjesus! they hurt when you take them off.

Bender Crapocaster

Well, I was wrong with both my guesses last night - "agathis or basswood" ... really, I should have remembered what I was dealing with - this aint no good value korean made fender copy: this is the people's republic's finest plywood beast of a guitar.

Which of course makes me love it all the more - i mean look at it, it is now a guitar with no illusions, it is the shittiest piece of crap you ever will see and now, thanks to me, it can be proud of it.

look at those lovely laminates

and I think it sounds quite nice as well.

-Ben

I've got blisters on me fingers

I think I'll borrow a power sander off a relative before I think about doing the rest of it - that or get some really coarse bastard sandpaper. I think it looks quite good though. No idea what wood it is - something cheap I guess, but I don't know what, probably agathis or basswood.

Unemployment

Cat, Strat, Kerouac and cable

-Ben

Instrument Ethics

The following is mostly written about guitars and basses, mandolins and banjos, but could be applied, to some extent, to every instrument… Except for the Bassoon - I don’t see the appeal of an instrument that looks like a shisha and sounds like a farting drainpipe.

---

The reason I repair guitars, even when I’m not getting paid or particularly interested in the work is because I believe that guitars are made for playing. Guitars that aren’t being played aren’t guitars, they are guitar shaped objects – things that adorn a wall or fill a case – they aren’t complete anymore. It’s like the distinction between a living, breathing person and a cooling cadaver – they are made of the same parts and are for all intents and purposes the same thing, but the latter lacks the spark that defines the former.

Many people have guitars that live in cupboards or attics because they’ve got nicer guitars or consider their guitars to be unplayable, I don’t approve. I know it is a heretical suggestion, and many a guitar nerd would dispute this, but I don’t believe there is such a thing as an unplayable guitar. I have yet to encounter a guitar that wasn’t, with a certain amount of work, playable. I’m not saying that people aren't justified in replacing the guitars with something better, nor am I saying that I can make any heap of shite Encore play like a Fender or a Gibson. I can, however, make them playable enough, playable enough that playing them isn’t a case of man versus machine, which is enough for someone to learn to play on it.

If a guitar is actually completely beyond repair or so profoundly shite that nothing can be done (it happens, generally only with acoustics, they are more difficult) then I strip down the guitar for any useful parts, screws, pickups, wire, pots, jacks and switches, hardware of all kinds. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t very high quality, the key thing is that if you stockpile parts you can repair guitars for no cost, you never have to ask yourself if it is worth your money to do it, and so even the lowliest of axes can be brought back to life and passed on.

Some people have vast collections of guitars, largely unplayed, they may have reasons, they might sometimes want a certain sound that can only be obtained from a certain guitar other than their primary one – but I think that when someone buys a guitar they should ask themselves the same question people ask themselves when they buy a dog – they may want one, they may think they look cool, but they need to consider whether or not they can give the guitar the attention and care it needs. I have no problem with people owning more than one guitar, as long as they aren't part of a collection of instruments owned for vanity and not neccessity. I have two basses, a fretted and a fretless, I play them about equally – I did have another fretted (which had been replaced by the new one) I knew that I wasn’t going to play it much anymore, so I passed it on to someone who would – I have two guitars, an acoustic and an electric, I don’t play my acoustic much so I let my little sister play it.

It is these principles that I cite when asked why my guitars and basses are so strangely modified and upgraded, why they are so covered in switches & knobs and filled with peculiar electronics. I modify my guitars because I don’t want to have a heap of unloved, unplayed guitars around just so that I have access to the sounds I want. With modern amp modelling preamps and a decent amount skill you can make pretty much any sound you want with a well tweaked guitar and that saves wood*, money and storage space

-Ben

*Don't get me started on 'environmentally aware' musicians playing something like 'live earth' holding an instrument made from mahogany or bubinga.

Quotation

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture"

--Elvis Costello, in an interview by Timothy White entitled "A Man out of Time Beats the Clock." Musician magazine No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52.

The citation is from here
It is otherwise attributed to just about every comedian, architect and musician that has ever stringed a sentence together.

I think it sums up what I have been trying to say for the last few years.

-Ben

Mr Ben Digs

At the moment.

Minus The Bear - Crazy funky, electronicky guitary weirdness-- and what's not to like about about a band who give songs names like "Pantsuit...Uggghh" or "Monkey!!! Knife!!! Fight!!!" or "Lemurs, Man. Lemurs"

The Hold Steady - No nonsense party rock, singer who writes amazing lyrics and sounds like van morrison, which is odd considering he is from minneapolis*

Basquiat Strings - er... a Jazzfreaky Penguin Cafe Orchestra? Tosca Tango Orchestra minus the tango? Hard to describe, damn good though

Loney, Dear - Swedish songwriter, catchy tunes, sings in a soft falsetto most of the time, pleasing sounds.

Go forth and listen, hypothetical readers!

-Ben

*I mean that it's odd that he sounds like van morrison not that he can write good lyrics

Reviews

Summer is a strange thing; I think it must be something to do with the fact that for the entirety of my life so far summer is associated with doing nothing, enjoying oneself, running around and getting drunk (that’s a fairly recent addition) but I find it very hard to motivate myself to do anything that I don’t particularly want to do during the summer. I am some sort of seasonal hedonist, during the autumn, winter and spring I am capable of self control, discretion and determination but in the summer I eat drink and am merry. This, I rather suspect, is the reason why I spent the whole summer finding the whole ‘getting a job’ thing distasteful in the extreme and why, now, as the summer is coming to an end I’m feeling a real need to get a job and sort myself out.

I could also be argued that this is because I’ve got a bigger belly than I had at the start of the summer, because my bass amp is broken and I don’t have the money to replace it, but I’m feeling like I’ve done enough relaxing now.

---

I’ve been reading reviews of albums on pitchfork media today. I find them fascinating because, if nothing else, they seem to be the established template that all the godawful music reviewers in campus newspapers across the globe try to copy. They always write some kind of introductory paragraph which serves a few different purposes, firstly it sets the tone for the review, secondly it establishes a voice for the reviewer* and thirdly it allows the reviewer to make himself sound all clever, imbuing the review with a sort of gravitas which it doesn’t really deserve. They aren’t all bad, some of the writers are quite good, the problem with the others is that they are all presumably mimicking the idiosyncratic style of a small group of writers, a style which they don’t have the ability to carry off.

A couple of times I’ve tried to write music reviews, little pieces about albums I’m listening to and like or dislike, but I can’t ever grasp the style that most reviewers, pretentious or otherwise, aim for. I am unable to get past my own opinions and tastes when assessing music; I find it impossible to give some sort of assessment of the quality of a piece of music because I don’t really have any universal criteria with which I can put it into words. I know that many of my reasons for disliking music are unreasonable and unusual but I have no other methods of assessment. When writing a review of a piece of music I invariably feel like a man trying to transcribe a piece of music in words, trying to express changes in specific pitch and duration without any objective standard to use – writing something like ‘it is now getting higher than the last bit, but not as high as the bit that came before that’ isn’t going to help anyone play the piece of music. By the same token I think that that saying that you find a piece of songwriting to be ‘somewhat derivative’ will not provide any useful cues to someone who wishes to discover its quality for themselves.

Despite all this, however, I think that there is such a thing as good music and bad music - different people like different things, but there is a dim and vague universal standard of quality which would probably manifest if you polled people over whether an album is bad or good. The best reviewers seem to be able to tap into this. It makes me wonder if perhaps the closest thing we have to objective perception in this society is a sort of strange composite of a multitude of subjective ones – I mean one person sees something then that doesn’t count for much, he could be nuts, wrong or stupid, if more than one person sees it then it is considered more likely to have been so. I suppose the logic is that two unconnected people are unlikely to be crazy in the same way and so what their perceptions agree on must be truth.

Hmm. I should shut up now. I have no idea what I’m writing; I’m an English graduate veering dangerously into musical and philosophical territory, which is somewhere I don’t understand in the slightest.

-Ben

*which is very important if you are a creative writing student with gonzo pretentions

Writing

I've been working on a covering letter for a job application today, which I'm sure will come as a shock to you, dear reader. Well it would if I had any readers. I was sitting around slaving over each sentence, writing and rewriting - trying to get the tone and style just right - trying to make myself seem like a better person than I actually am without deviating from the truth - and it occurred to me why my blog is generally crap.

It's not because I'm neccessarily a bad writer (although I dare say that might be a factor) it's just that writing isn't easy for me, good writing anyway. It tends to require much more torment and struggle than I like of an evening. I'm like a man who can shit gold bricks - it's a useful skill but the actual process is unpleasant enough to put you off the whole thing.

When it comes to my blog I just really can't bring myself to sit around agonising over every single sentence in the same way that I do when I'm writing under duress. I know that I should try harder, if nothing else because I think it'd probably make me feel good to know that I can write good work without being forced to do so, but I'm not really in the mood for it - it feels too much like work, which isn't something I ever intended this to be.

In addition to that I'm currently worried that prospective employers might be smart enough to google me and find this thing. Which would probably scupper any chance I have of getting a job when they see how much I whinge about nothing in particular.

-Ben

EDIT: Looking at this post after I've written it the other thing I notice is that i'm not generally a very verbose writer - a verbose talker, yes, but not a verbose writer. I spent my time at school expanding my vocabulary to the point where I could usually express myself fairly neatly and efficiently... and then spent most of my time at university desparately fluffing out my prose in attempt to meet the ever increasing miminum word requirements on my essays.

Incoherent Rantings

I've not written anything on here in a while, which makes me feel bad, although I'm really not sure if now is the best time to try and write something new. I'm still unemployed, but I'm making a point of being more constructive and active about this that I was before – you know, actually doing things with myself rather than just sitting around eating and wondering why I'm getting fat again. I'm now going to do something really stupid, which is try and write a piece making a point – this never works for me because I end up arguing round in circles and generally deciding, after giving it too much thought, that I'm too confused to make a stand for either side.

A few days ago (or perhaps weeks, I'm no good at placing things like this) a man, a father and husband, was beaten to death by a bunch of pissed up teenagers for confronting them about vandalizing his property. The public were shocked, I think, the papers said they were anyway – I wasn't shocked but I was sickened by it, a new low in the world of random street violence and a good reminder of why I avoid confrontations as much as I do, people get killed for no reason all the time and I have no desire to join them. When I die it's going to be doing something really stupid, don't get me wrong it'll still be a senseless death but at least it'll be funny in a sick sort of way when I'm crushed by a giant rubber elk or something.

As always with incidents such as this questions are asked, collective souls are searched and fingers are pointed in all directions. As always with these things, and with depressing inevitability, a bunch of really stupid suggestions and conclusions started getting thrown around pretty shortly after. Mostly by vultures seeking to use someone's death as a justification for pushing their own pre-existing agenda as a response.

The response that pissed me off this time wasn't the usual call for public hangings, floggings etc, that always arise from these incidents as society tries to convince itself that destroying some public examples will solve some broader problem of which they are symptoms.(no I'm not going to even speculate as to what the broader problem is, nor am I going to suggest that the people who did this ever deserve anything that anyone could conceivably want)

The public outburst that irritated me following all of this was a senior policeman, some big cheese, who called for the government to legislate to raise the drinking age to 21, to prevent attacks like this from being repeated – to stop the nation's curse of underage drinking.

This proposal seems to stem from either some sort of fundamental misunderstanding of the situation or some kind of staggering naivety about the circumstances by which underage drinkers come by booze. I should know about this, I've done my fair share of underage drinking myself, the vast majority of the time i didn't manage to get served by hoodwinking the staff; I got booze either by appearing to be mature enough that the seller figured I wouldn't cause trouble or by going to places where the retailer really didn't care one way or the other as long as I paid in cash. If the drinking age were raised it would make no difference to either of these situations – if they don't care then they don't care, and if suitability is based on the barman's discretion then that is a set of personal criteria based on experience, which exists independent to whatever the legal age might be.

What raising the drinking age to 21 will do will be to create a culture of underage, illegal drinking that is far more widespread and culturally accepted than what we have now. Students will spend their entire time at university drinking cheap cider in parks and houses – which will, in Canterbury at least, probably put half the pubs in town out of business and create much more friction between the student community and the local populace. And in amongst this mass of people secretively bingeing their faces off it'll be much harder for the police to locate the psychotic 14 year old pissed off his tits and spoiling for a fight with whatever moves first.

-Ben

Fritz Joubert Duquesne

Wiki Page

The man lived an interesting life - even if half of this stuff is wild self promoting fabrication, the other half is definitely enough to qualify him for the status of 'international man of mystery'

No respect

I went on a very long walk today, all over the place, I'll write about it properly at some point, probably tomorrow when I'm bored shitless. The thing that is currently springing up in my mind however, is a strangely frustrating encounter I had with someone as i was leaving Greenwich park today. As I was making my way towards an exit there was a small grouping of young people, I think it was a couple (or at least a girl and guy who were – consciously or subconsciously – giving the idea some thought) and two other guys. This sort of grouping is always bad; generally the two unattached blokes will be wheeling around and generally being twats, partly because they want to impress the girl but more (although they would never admit this, or even be particularly aware of it) because they are trying to get the attention of the distracted alpha male, like a bunch of five year olds whose mum is on the phone. I glanced at them when I was about 10 metres away but didn't consider them to be particularly worthy of notice. As I was walking past them however, one of them, the more strangely dressed of the two hangers on – who was shouting in a borderline incomprehensible patois I think is a mixture of south east London street and Turkish – started screaming insults at me and flung an empty drinks bottle at me whilst yelling all the insults he could think of, some directed at some feature of mine – fat, ginger hair, glasses, beard – and some just general cussing. He continued until I was some way off, gradually trailing off as he ran out of inspiration and motivation.

The thing that annoys me is how often this happens – just completely mindless attacks – he almost certainly wasn't looking for a fight like a proper nutter - he probably picked me precisely because he thought he could take me (he probably could – you have to get me very angry before I can be bothered to hurt anybody – if throwing stuff at me and cussing my momma had that effect I would have been expelled from secondary school in my first month) and because I don't look like much of a fighter. It happens a lot though, kids, usually in their teens, just randomly insult me, throw punches at me, heave stones at me. I have no idea why, it must just be something about my face. The worst incident I can remember is feeling a coke can bounce off the back of my head and hearing the unusual sound of a voice within arms reach – I spun round and came face to face with a boy who couldn't have been any older than 12, and I'm not going to hit a twelve year old, no matter how cocky the little fuck might be.

The most frustrating thing about it is that I'm used to these attacks and I've tried just about every way of reacting under the sun to them in the last decade or so. Reasoning doesn't work, neither do comebacks (witty or otherwise) - anything you say will be laughed at as if you'd just turned round and told them you'd peed yourself (plus my voice means that generally opening my mouth is an extremely bad idea). Violence doesn't work; there is always the suspicion of weapons backing up their otherwise unaccountable confidence and generally at any sign of a threat they scatter and hurl insults and projectiles from a safer distance. All in all the only method I've found that doesn't make things worse is just not reacting, if possible not reacting in the slightest – not even a twitch of a face muscle to reveal any awareness of the insults. This works, today the kid stopped pretty quickly, sounding a bit sheepish that his finely crafted insults had garnered no reaction whatsoever, but man is it frustrating, you end up spending the rest of your walk home pondering kicking some righteous arse, old testament stylee – meeting with the little shit and breaking some nose.

Which always leaves me feeling a bit worried by my own imagination.

-Ben

Family Slang

I was thinking the other day about the unique phrases and words which families develop, they are like the in-jokes that form between friends only more so; they are often passed around the extended family, handed down through generations. Most interestingly, because they are treated as normal by the older generation, the younger generations of a family often take a long time to even realise that they aren't common parlance. A cousin of mine, for example used one of these phrases amongst some friends and was embarrassed and surprised to find that none of them had ever heard them before. The words and phrases I've written out below are a just a few notable examples of the vocabulary that I'm pretty sure is unique to my family

Pelly Bags- A bag, usually a supermarket carrier bag, which is filled with clutter and jammed into a cupboard prior to a party – these bags are usually packed haphazardly and with little attention paid to the contents – many a valuble item has been Pelly bagged, forgotten, and declared lost, only to turn up in a cupboard years later. Named after a family friend who died some years ago, whose surname was Pelly, and who described the hours leading up to the beginning of a party as being spent “running around sobbing and stuffing rubbish into plastic bags”

The Headstaggers – A disease which affects small furry animals, such as gerbils, hamsters, Guinea pigs etc. It is characterised by odd stiffness of movement and is a sure potent of the imminent death of the aforementioned furry creature.

The Strunts – Similar to the headstaggers but more generally applicable. Similarly fatal but can, however, occur in milder forms A touch of the strunts.

Fitchy-Foo – To feel 'fitchy-foo' is to be bored and restless. Also occasionally chanted to indicate boredom in a social setting. From a long dead, and very strange, distant relative who used to wander around the house mumbling 'fitchy-foo, fitchyfitchy-foo' ad infinitum when he couldn't think of anything to do.

I might add further examples when I can think of them, but these serve to illustrate my point well enough. What I'm curious to know is whether or not other people's families form similar personalized vocabulary.

Guitars

I've been working on guitars a lot recently, not as a job, just as something to do, and occasionally for a little extra beer money. As you can see from the cheese grater and salad in the background, I hardly run a sleek professional sort of operation.

(Tony's blue Tanglewood mid-way though the fretdressing and cleaning process)

Today I rummaged around the house for some old classical guitar and mandolin tuners that had been left over from some repairs dad made to his instruments many years back , then cannibalized them for parts. I took a hacksaw to one set and liberated the worm gear and button for use in the completely knackered machinehead in Tony's guitar


(It's hardly an elegant solution but I'm not being paid enough to source a matching button, so he'll have to make do with a girly one for now.)

After that I did a little repair work for my own amusement - my mum found a tiny half size acoustic guitar with it's neck broken off, no strings and no machineheads. A little wood glue, some more parts liberated from the machineheads I found and whammy! I have a tiny guitar.

(it's only got four strings because the nut slots for the highest and lowest strings are buggered. The strings it has are tuned E-A-D-G, like a bass, and tuned to the same pitch as a guitar. Which gives the thing marvellously slack strings that can be bent and wobbled to my heart's content)

Here's a shot of it with a normal sized classical acoustic and a 3/4 size classical acoustic to give you an idea of scale.



I'll give it back to the school at the end of the summer holidays but for now I think it's going to be my special barbecue guitar.

-Ben

Psychology Study

(quoted from the website because it doesn't seem to be a stable enough url to link)

This study investigated the relationship of working memory to open and closed belief systems. Two hundred college students completed a working memory span test to measure verbal working memory, and Rokeach’s Dogmatism Scale (1956). Regression analysis was undertaken to determine the contribution of verbal working memory to dogmatism. A negative correlation was found between dogmatism scores and working memory scores (p = .002) confirming the hypothesis that those participants who display a larger working memory capacity would show lower levels of dogmatic beliefs than participants displaying a smaller working memory capacity. Error analysis was employed to determine the significance of inhibition processes; indicating that capacity limits in verbal working memory, and not processing deficits, were primarily responsible for poor working memory scores. Dogmatism was not found to be related to gender, age, ethnicity, religious affiliation, academic major, or level of education.

What little I can find out about the Rokeach Dogmatism Scale mentioned in the abstract this study doesn't necessarily consider 'dogmatic' purely in the sense of religion, although the only sample question given in this article seems to. I'd assume that the findings are equally applicable to the politically immovable and the religiously dogmatic. It must be considered, however, that I'm not even close to having the slightest understanding of the terms discussed so anything I say is a humanities graduate speculating aimlessly about science and should, therefore, be ignored.

-Ben

Wet-th

I'm been threatened with vicarious rocks, so I suppose I better write something here. Although I have no idea what I could write as little has happened to me of note recently. I read the last harry potter book the other day but I'm definitely not going to talk about that here, I decided after I read it that I was to going to try not to talk about it at all regardless of company, so spouting my views on the interblag is certainly not something I'm about to do.

Mostly what I've been doing in the last few weeks is sitting around in my house watching the rivers running down my street. You know that post a few weeks back where I talked about the biggest most extreme thunderstorm I'd ever seen? Yeah, well they've become pretty much normal now – it's been pissing it down so much that the Thames is rising to dangerous levels, the Thames! I didn't realise that the Thames was enough of a river to do that anymore.

The floods are arousing the usual army of commentators in the press: The lefties are split, half saying that the floods are the fault of global warming, the other half declaring that disasters in the third world are much worse and we should all go and feel bad about that instead. The northerners are whinging about how floods in the north don't get so much attention paid to them in the media. The right wing papers seem to divided also, torn between arguing that they used to have better floods in the old days, and that people these days are a bunch of sissies, and figuring out ingenious ways in which the weather can be blamed on the government. And the sun, is, of course, just trying to figure out ways of getting somehow flood-related pictures of half naked women.

Whilst sitting around inside watching the rain I've had to amuse myself somehow and it's mostly been through the medium of listening to heaps of CDs; bought, borrowed, and found. I have concluded that Seasick Steve is badass, Our Endless Numbered Days by Iron and Wine might be the best album I've heard in a few years and that the Spinto Band and Tapes n' Tapes are both up to 30% more awesome than there nearest comparable competitors.

I'll think of something intelligent to say at some point in the next few days, I hope.

-Ben

Mr Ben Has Graduated

I am now a university graduate, I wore the gown and shook hands with the vice chancellor and everything. I even wore a suit under the gown and not just a tshirt with a suit printed on it.



Note the extremely stiff and awkward stance of someone who is very uncomfortable in smart clothes. I did, however, only wear the suit for about 20 minutes longer than I absolutely had to - very soon after I was out of the ceremony i was back to looking like this



The evening went downhill from the point when Matt said 'Biddendens?' and I said 'hells yes!'

also - my last encounter with the campus bunnies.



Who didn't seem to remember me, they just ran away.

-ben

Shock and Awe

It's a strange feeling, that sudden realisation that you are, quite frankly, small time. To see someone do something that you thought you did well better than you had even realised it could be done, moving the ceiling of what you thought was possible. It's like being told you are an eight, an eight out of ten, you assume, only to discover that in fact the highest score is in fact 100.

I think the trick is to respond with 'I can be 100? awesome!' but it can be hard, especially when you are sitting around listening to the Flecktones or reading Joseph Heller.

-Ben

New Title

It's not great, but it's better than the old one - which I only chose because it was written in large friendly letters on my wall (a sign I'd made to help me through my exams) and my mind was blank.

The new one is actually a phrase used to angrily describe me in a seminar discussion by one of my lecturers - I've always been rather proud of it.

-Ben

Open Mic

This evening me and my dad went out scouting for new venues in which my dad can, and I quote, "assault the ears" of the general public - we went to an open mic night at a pub in a quiet corner of greenwich behind the edifice of greenwich town hall (Pointless Fact: it has a nuclear bunker underneath). It was interesting passing through greenwich now that the smoking ban in public places has gone through, there were lines of damp smokers huddled around the entrances of the many pubs we passed along the way, especially outside the Auctioneer, which was always an unpleasantly smoky pub.

In the pub we went into (I can't remember the name off my head, but it was quite nice) it was strange, but quite cool, to be able to stand around in a small, crowded pub and not be wreathed with smoke like the beginning of an amateur production of Macbeth. I'm not a particularly militant non smoker; unless it's really heavy generally pubsmoke doesn't bother me, yes, it makes my clothes smell bad, my hair smell bad (when there was enough of it to smell) and often leaves me talking like Barry White the next morning but I'd never really given it any thought. That's just how I work - I accept things as they are rather than getting huffy about what I'd prefer them to be. So the way I feel about the smoking ban is roughly the same as the way you feel when someone makes the tea that you so badly needed before you even realise that was what you were after.

but yeah, the open mic night was interesting, some quite good people, the overall quality wasn't great, but it wasn't that bad - some good singers doing good covers and some passable original stuff. The only downer was the odd bloke.

Allow me to explain, whenever you get a gathering such as this one there will always be the one odd bloke (it's always an odd bloke in my experience) - one guy with a complete tin ear and/or useless guitar playing who, due to the fact that he lacks important social skills, is completely unable to read the looks of dread which strike the faces of the regulars when he walks toward the stage as a hint that he should stop.

This guy set off alarm bells with me when he wandered in the way of the person performing at the time and produced a case with 'Ibanez JEM555' written on a handwritten label on the bottom. I have no huge objection to that guitar, other than the fact that it is a little tarty and out of place at an open mic night, what worried me was the label on the bottom - only two sorts of people have to write labels on their guitar cases; people with more guitars than they know what to do with; and weird obsessive types who have to arrange everything neatly. Niether of these possibilities bode well for a musician in my opinion. This guy launched into a rendition of erm, something, which was lacking in skill and soul and half drowned out by his horribly oversaturated effects.

It wasn't the bad playing that distressed me particularly, I've heard myself play way to many times to be bothered by that, it was the fact that he was so completely oblivious to his own inability - it didn't even seem to dampen his enthusiasm when the compere abruptly ended his song early. The problem for me is that when I encounter people like that and I can't get this thought out of my head:

'If I was like that, I'd never know... perhaps I am like that'

I don't think I am, but i know that I'm very bad at reading people and can be a bit obsessive when I'm interested in something, often to the point of driving people around me nuts. I wonder if perhaps I'm a nutter who has learned to do a passable impression of sanity through sheer effort.

Then I remember that I've never done anything by sheer effort in my entire life, and calm down.

-Ben

The Weather

I'm aware that talking about the weather is a terrible British conversational cliché, so I've been trying to avoid mentioning the weird apocalyptic storms we've been having lately out of a fear of looking even more boring than usual. But I've caved in, they are just too unusual - so unusual that in a country where the sensible take a raincoat and snowshoes out with them on a summer's day 'just in case' people are getting confused.

Firstly, it has been raining, really hard, like way more even than a normal British summer. The windscreen wipers have been on what is referred to in my family as 'holiday speed' pretty much everyday for a few weeks. Entire towns have submerged under the water, Sheffield, especially, seems to have done something really bad to incur the wrath of whatever deity was nearest - when we passed it both going to and coming from York this weekend it was blanketed by gigantic stormclouds and masked by a dirty bastard of a downpour.

As if that wasn't bad enough, this crappy weather, not content with just soaking northerners, has the tenacity to disturb us in London - a city where weather patterns have to check all weapons before entry and behave nicely. The road outside my house was a river the other day, it was washing away heaps of building materials from the innumerable extensions and garden projects that happen on this road in the summer. It must have been around a foot deep in places and formed big pools in hollows.

To cap this all off, we had a hailstorm. A big hailstorm. I'm not talking hailstones that sting your ears and scare cats, I'm talking hailstones the size of ping-pong balls that stripped the pointing off our walls, cracked the windscreen of our car and put some dents in the bodywork.

This clearly all wrong, extreme weather doesn't happen in London, it gets lost - forgets where it is going and just ends up dribbling on people. Poor innocent commuters were staring at each other on train platforms, their frightened eyes windows to panicked minds searching for long since atrophied vocabulary.

"eerm... very erm... moist?.. Crunchy?... weather we're having today? Eh? Clarence?"

-Ben

brain farts

I was just thinking I wonder if anyone would sponsor me if I spent an entire day telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth for charity. I mean think about it, it'd be interesting, sort of the mental equivalent of shaving your head - it makes you look very unattractive afterwards but people give you a sort of grudging respect. All questions, no matter how personal and unpleasant would have to be answered frankly and unambiguously. It'd be a test of willpower, resisting the urge to omit some grisly detail, character assassination for a good cause.

-Ben

York, etc

I have returned to London, having spent the weekend in York sampling the parties and hospitality of Sarah and her fellow grad students. Who'd have thought that postgraduate medievalists partied so damn hard. Me and Matt attended a Sci-Fi/Fantasy themed fancy dress party, me dressed as Jesus* and Matt dressed as Rimmer from Red Dwarf, as his desire to dress up stretched as far as sticking a letter H to his head (it stands for 'hologram', fact fans). The next day we had the hungover tour of the Town plus a very very tasty meal in a pub with more spirits behind the bar than I knew existed.

I have a very bad memory for parties, generally forgetting them even on the rare occasions when i attend them sober (this wasn't one of them) so I'm having a great deal of trouble writing anything coherent about it (I'm actually having a great deal of trouble writing anything coherent at all for some reason, I've rewritten this whole thing twice now). What I do remember mostly consists of beer pong, a guy dressed as a faun, a woman dressed in a incredibly well made Nanny Ogg costume, someone whose robot costume made them look like a baked potato, and a man with a water pistol loaded with tequila.

There were many other things but unfortunately the act of describing things requires a certain amount of in-head coherence in which I'm somewhat lacking, any attempt to write more could cause me sound like a modernist ponce. It's all strange shapes and garbled chunks of memory in my head.

As things currently stand, however, I'm feeling distinctly manky, I think I was ambushed by some dastardly northern germs that my southern pansy immune system was unable to withstand. On that note, I realized today, with the exception of some stress-related migraines, a minor inner ear infection and a couple of colds, I've not been ill in more than four years. Which is a bit strange, I'm worried that perhaps it's like that scene in the film where the guy turns to his pursuers and makes his best scary face and they all run away, only for him to discover that they were in fact running from the scary monster lurking behind him.

In other news Tapes n' Tapes are awesome, as is the Tyranny of Distance by Ted Leo.

-Ben

*erm, yeah, I'm a bad person

New Guitar

Tweaking and modifying mostly completed I think I can declare this guitar worthy of mention. Yes, I know it's an encore. Yes, I'm aware that the polepieces don't really match up with the strings properly and yes, I have noticed that it only has five strings. But it's still good, it has a nice sound and low action and...

This switch, which gives the guitar magical powers with the aid of some cunning rewiring and additional gubbins.

Also, did I mention it was free? ooh yes, no money down.

-Ben

Two Chunks of Nerdery

Today was a very nice day, all sunny and shiny. I was up early in the morning to help my little sister carry her amplifier and electric guitar to school for a rehearsal with her band and after that wandered off into the woods with my new copy of The Master and Margarita to read it in some nice shady spot under the trees.

The reason why I have a new copy of one of my favourite books isn't for the usual reason - I've not read it until it fell apart, no, it is instead because I was curious to read the other - more critically praised - translation of the original russian text. I've found this reading of the book to be much more enlightening about the political and social commentary of the book which is rather subtle and below my radar when I'm not in proper academic mode but I'm not sure whether this is because the language of the book makes these points clearer or because the footnotes flag up the examples of it and make you aware of the ways in which bulgakov presented politics.

Overall I have decided - shock horror - that I prefer the earlier, Michael Glenny translation. The language is more natural, more clear and well, english. You see, with the Peevar translation you are never able to forget that the book is a translation - there are too many strained attempts to accurately follow the phrasing of Bulgakov's language. There are numerous occasions where the language has obviously had to be oddly warped and battered to include some sort of thematic motif which the earlier translation - unable to fit it comfortably into english speech patterns - omitted.

I think that the high opinion of the later translation is based on a rather flawed understanding of what a translation should do - The standard reason given for preferring the Peevar translation is that people who can, and have, read the novel in both languages prefer the langauge of Peevar, finding it more representative of Bulgakov's original. I, however, think that this is precisely the reason why the Peevar translation is weaker - I'm sure that if you know the Russian phrases which Peevar is straining the phraseology to express in English then it seems fine, but if you are unfamiliar with the original language (and, let's face it, most of the readers of the book are - that's why they are reading the translation) then it just seems like clumsy dialogue. The Glenny translation seems to try and find phrases that are equivalent in usage and implication, rather than translating russian turns of phrase which don't really transfer well. This means that it often misses some subtle reference to something or other which makes it less suitable for critical study, but I think as a book to sit down and read, the Glenny is better.

Mind you, having not read it in the original language, any attempt at a scholarly argument along these lines would be rubbished by people who have, and who therefore win in the game of intellectual one-upmanship. There is also the fact that I've not read the glenny translation in a good few months - it might not be as good as I remember.

------

Having used my brain for the first time in a while I decided to finally get off my arse and do something constructive as well - so I sat down and wrote an intelligent and attractive CV....

Pfft.

only joking - I got my tools out and dismantled the electric guitar that Ed and Lucy gave me in exchange for my old bass.

This guitar was in the worst state I've ever attempted to resuscitate a guitar from. On first examination early indications weren't good - the neck was bowed back and there wasn't any visible sign of a truss rod adjuster, the action was very high and the tremolo was stuck in the foward position.

After finding the truss rod, and using this... interesting setup I managed to get the neck to bend foward until it was straight and level



All the containers are filled with water to push the ends of the neck down whilst the batteries hold the middle up. I left it like that for a few hours, until it learned its lesson and stopped sassing me.

and after some fairly drastic lowering of saddles and tightening of springs i got the thing to the point were it was actually really nice to play - and to my shock I found that it actually has a really nice sound - very erm. bitey and sharp, kinda dark red and crunchy...

So now I have a decent electric guitar and if ed and lucy sent me that guitar as some sort of bet I think I've won.

Huzzah.

In other news the wireless network stopped talking to my computer within about 10 hours of it starting and I can't seem to persuade it to resume diplomatic negotiations.

-Ben

Unpacking

I’ve spent a lot of time today trying to make my bedroom habitable as, due to the rates of rent round here, it looks like I’ll be living with my parents for a while, or at least until I get some sort of inspiration about what to do with my life. I have no idea when that might be, could be a few hours, could be a few years – I hope it’s soon because I’m getting bored already.

The reason why I’ve not really posted anything in a while is because I couldn’t get my computer –in an attic bedroom*- to recognise the existence of the house wireless network. I managed to solve this problem with my usual method – that is, treat the router like a huffy child and just leave the thing alone until it decides to arbitrarily change its mind. Which worked.

But anyway, back to the making bedroom habitable thing. The obstacle to my bedroom being habitable is the fact that it was my brother’s room. I’m not saying that he has a lingering, powerful stench or anything, just that he has a lot of stuff. Due to the fact that this room is much bigger than my old room he never had to do the purging for storage space that I did – there are boxes of stuff in his cupboards that I was astonished to find are still sealed with removal company tape from when we moved here from Plumstead 9 years ago.

As a result of this general lack of order in Ed’s room the process of moving my stuff in is rather slow – for every box of my stuff I unpack there is an equal amount of Ed’s stuff that needs to be sorted through and either packed or thrown away. Most of it is, as it has been left behind, fairly obviously rubbish – just the detritus of someone living in the same place for many a year - I am, however, not very well equipped to be the judge of what, if anything, is worth keeping amongst the heaps.

There are, for example, things that I keep that don’t appear to have any particular value, train tickets, for example, whose only reason for preservation is a date on them, a date which only I know the significance of. Without Ed to tell me otherwise me I’m spending a lot of my time imagining the significance of many of the items I chuck and feeling bad for throwing them away.

Mind you, Ed isn’t nearly as weird as I am, he probably doesn’t attach such significance to pointless inanimate objects. I should finish this unpacking tomorrow and then I’ll actually feel like I’ve settled in and can start doing more constructive things – like getting off my arse and getting a job.

-Ben

*ugh. That line has reminded me of a line from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley – damn, the one thing I would most like to forget about my uni experience would be Ezra Pound’s god-awful poetry.

London

Today my dad came down to canterbury, we picked up my amp from Bal's, then jammed all my worldly possessions into a battered looking rental van and chugged off home. It's the first time that I've ever actually packed all of my stuff in one place - other than my room - I've been accumulating this stuff for the last two years and I've never actually taken it all home before, I have quite a lot of stuff. I think I'm going to have to get my own place soon, just so that I can stuck all these boxes somewhere.

I'm going to have to draw out some plans of the floor space in my room, and just jiggle the stuff I need around on paper until I find some sort of tessalating pattern in which all my stuff fits inside my room without the need to clamber over heaps and use my bed as a guitar stand.

It's odd being back in london and it being niether a brief 'see as many friends and relatives as you can' stay nor the familiar summer routine of settling in and preparing for death by boredom. I'm currently in a sort of uni/not-uni wasteland between leaving uni town graduating - i'm home, but I don't feel like I'm 100% finished with uni yet.

Mind you, that's probably because I don't want to have to face up to the unsexiness of work which is the inevitable consequence of not-uni.

Oh well. At least the shock value that me getting a first holds should keep my family distracted from the issue of me being a directionless, jobless slacker for a while.

-Ben

My Degree

I'm waay too drunk to write anything sensible on here right now, too much beer pong, but I feel I should mention that I got my results today and I am now the proud possessor of a first class degree in english and american literature from the university of kent. Better still, I'm one of about 6 people in my whole department who got one, and one of 3 doing my course who got one. Which makes me very smug.

I rock.

That is all.

-Ben

Silly Musical Instruments 2

This one isn't nearly as strange as the Tromboon, and to be honest is probably quite boring, I just love the name of the instrument.

oboe d'amore

Seriously, the oboe of love? I'm pretty sure that there is no known incidence of an oboeist luring a member of the opposite sex with the seductive nasal whine of their instrument of choice. The Lasso D'amore, on the other hand, is a veritable sex-on-legs of an instrument.

For an idea of the beautiful sound of a Lasso D'amore, being played by a master, I refer you to the last 10-20 seconds or so of I'm the Urban Spaceman By the Bonzo Dog Band.

-Ben

Silly Musical instruments

The Tromboon

I want one (listen to the sound file, it is rather lovely)

losing things

I love it when you read through accounts of hauntings and poltergeists in which the afflicted party mentions 'things just disappearing' as evidence of nasty creatures from the scary beyond messing with their head. In the process of cleaning out everything in my room and generally stripping it down to the state it was in when I moved in I've already found a couple of things that I thought I'd lost long ago. Some of them are perfectly standard cases of misplaced objects - I found a young persons railcard at the bottom of a desk drawer that I could have sworn I left on a train to manchester in 2004, but there is nothing particularly interesting about that - I do things like that all the time.

The interesting one, well, interesting to me and seeing I'm the only one who reads this that's all that seems to matter, is the popshield for an old microphone of mine that I found among the books on my shelf. I dropped it when sitting on the end of my bed about 6 months ago and the grille and popshield flew off on landing. I remember that it was relatively soon after an inspection by our landlord and so my room was quite tidy. I bent over and picked up the popshield - which is a small, black, piece of foam - and, thinking of how easily misplaced it would be, put it on the shelf next to me, or so I thought, whilst I rummaged around and found the grille. When I turned back to the shelf, however, it was gone.

I looked everywhere in the one or two metre radius around the bookshelf that it could have possibly been put on or been blown to but found nothing - my mind boggled (which is painless, luckily); my eyes had been off it for about 10 seconds in which it had vanished.

If I was more into that sort of thing, or perhaps if I was in a place that could possibly support the idea of a haunting (you really can't have a haunted 1960's ex-council house built on former farmland) I would have put this down to some sort of invisible beastie snatching away my precious popshield and gone to church more, being the heathen that I am, however, I just assumed I was going more crazy and made a new popshield out of cut up old socks. Which probably didn't suceed in doing anything other than making me look more crazy.

Whilst packing all my books I found it, exactly where I thought I'd put it, sort of - It was lying, sure enough, on top of a book that was lying flat on the front of one of my shelves. The reason why I didn't find it was that the book in question was underneath a pile of other books. I figure what must have happened was that I put it on top of the book, then, when rummaging around for the grille, half unconsciously picked up a book that was on the floor and put it on the shelf on top of the popshield. Not remembering having done this, however, it appeared to me that the popshield vanished - I turned round to see a book lying there with no popshield on it - I didn't pay any attention what either book was so I didn't notice that it was different.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this exactly, probably just giving an example that the weirdness of human behaviour, whether malicious or stupid, probably accounts for the vast majority of ghost experiences and other such woo.

-Ben

oh yes, and if you were wondering how an object lost since 2004 could be in a drawer in a house that I've only lived in since 2005, which I know you aren't, but I'll answer anyway because I'm bored - it's because I basically tipped the contents of my desk drawers in my first year flat into boxes then, in an absence of the motivation to sort through the heaps, emptied them straight into the desk drawers of my new flat at the beginning of the second year - as a result I've been sorting through heaps of first year essays, handouts and lecture notes - some of which, like a sheaf of notes on Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist, aren't even mine.