Files found in the depths of folders; better left there perhaps, or on the other hand... I'm too tired to write something new, and these seemed to connect to today, even though they were mostly written more than a year and a half ago. Fiction and not, there's no distinction. Our lives are all mediated anyway, so... so. I'm listening to the sounds of the Art of Fighting, in case you were wondering.

Feel like shit (temporal rip extract #1)

I saw C today and it was like a hammer hit me right between the eyes. Again. It was always thus and if things continue the way they seem to be continuing, will be again forever into the future. Whatever the hell the future and forever might be.

She was tying cotton around her tongue, which sounds like the most ridiculous thing in the world, and in fact it probably is but I don’t care in the slightest. It was magical. With C it was magical.

I never told anyone what the real name of my band was. I mean, I never told anyone that I had a band before, so I guess the name thing is irrelevant, and anyway calling it a band is ridiculous because it was only ever me and my tape recorder and George’s acoustic guitar and Elizabeth’s piano. I don’t know if I should count the sound of static and white noise recorded from around the house. Maybe I should. Maybe they were my partners in musical crime. I mean, maybe they are my partners in musical crime. I really don’t know.

I called myself Kimberley for a reason. That reason was a Patti Smith. What more reason do you need in your life? I just never expected this to happen. I mean, for fucks sake, who would?

So I came home and I put on Del Amitri, which I know might sound crazy and dumb and horrid but what the hell. It sounds horridly marvellous simply because I know what’s coming next, in five years time. I wish to fuck I could get my hands on the whole bunch of them right now though. I mean, I want to stop them making all those fuck-ups, all those dreadful rock and roll disasters. It’s not really for me to say though, is it? That’s what Chris would say. It’s none of my fucking business and try as I might I would never change a thing. It’s not the way it works is all he ever says, without ever saying the way it DOES work of course. I wonder. If I put a gun to their collective temples and spread the contents of their brains across the pavement, would they simply smile benevolently and rise again as though nothing had happened? Would the bullets even appear? Would they turn into a butterfly and arc away from view? Chris says you just can’t change the future and you can’t change the past. He says the only thing you can change is the present; the only difference you can make to the world is to make the difference to the moment you breathe in your world alone. That’s it. Breathe in. Breathe out. Did you make it special?

Whatever.



Young, Old, Pretentious and Stupid (temporal rip extract #2)

I was talking to Chris this afternoon. We were sitting out down by the end of the field when I should have been in Math. It was way too hot to sit in a Math room and anyway I have forgotten so much of what I once learned that it seems pointless trying to delude myself that I have a chance of passing my exam next month. I can’t believe I have to go through all this shit again.

It was the time thing I was wondering about. I told Chris what I thought about wanting to murder Del Amitri last night, about how I might be able to change the future. Chris just rolled over in the grass, looked right into the sun and sighed. We listened to the sound of my breathing for a minute before he finally spoke.

‘Do you remember those things you used to write about music?’ he said. ‘The things about how it was actually not very useful to consider Pop music as a linear thing?’

I nodded. I remember only too clearly. There was a time, or will be a time in some future, when I would write and talk endlessly about the nature of Pop; forever conceptualising notions of what was and what was not Pop, connected by dubiously informed ideas about Culture in general. The idea that I will spout is that Culture is not linear, that trying to understand Popular Culture as a traditionally linearly time based phenomenon is to miss the point. The point being, I seem to recall, that Culture is forever referencing itself and that as a result is actually best understood as a series of loops or ellipses that orbit around the individual, colliding and creating new orbits as we grow old. And everyone’s sets of ellipses are different, which is why two people will never totally agree on the importance of any set of references.

And I say I used to talk about it all the time, but really that isn’t true, because as you can imagine there aren’t that many people who will listen whilst you say things like that. And I say it isn’t true that I used to talk about it because I only ever wrote about it, and I only ever in fact wrote emails about it, boring a select group of people on a mailing list called Sinister, who were meant to discuss Belle & Sebastian but who were incessantly bored instead by me and my Pop theorising.

Naturally Chris didn’t give me any chance to say any of this under the sun at the end of the field. He just added quickly ‘well I always thought that was the biggest heap of crap. I never understood why you couldn’t have just listened to the fucking records.’ And although I have to agree with him, I’ll never tell him as much.

‘Well’, he said quickly, as though this was really annoying him; I mean the fact that he was going to have to talk around the whole time deal again. ‘Well’, he said, ‘time is just like that really.’

‘You mean I was right?’ I said smiling across the grass at his back.

‘Sort of’ is all Chris would say. And then he turned to face me with the faraway look he always has in his eyes when we discuss this. When I force him to say something on this subject I mean, because Chris will never volunteer anything. Not about time and not about how it feels to be dead. Usually I think that’s fair enough but there’s something about time I can’t leave alone, that I have to keep probing, searching for an answer where really I suspect there is none. Where really I suspect that it IS in fact like my useless Pop theorising, in that maybe everyone’s lives ARE all going around in ellipses and loops and we are all always crashing off on strange new orbits that cannot always be explained by the truths we construct in previous orbits. And all the time we spend theorising this is actually wasting the potential in the situation, in life, because this is only the mechanism of the situation, is only the hands of the clock ticking around, if you like, and that the really important thing is the moment that ticking defines, or rather that defines the ticking. It’s the moment of living that really matters; the touch of lips on your forehead; the sight of petrol on the surface of a puddle in the sunlight; the scent of hyacinths in the evening. The sound of the fucking records if you will.

I suggested that to Chris this afternoon, in a shortened form of course, and he sort of half nodded his head, which I took as being as close to an affirmation as I’m ever likely to get.


Cliché and emptiness (temporal rip extract #3)


I feel like running away from everything and everybody, just running and hiding away. Pulling myself into a ball and shutting the whole world out, being alone and tearing myself inside out with no-one else watching. My self-destruction is not a spectator sport.

Knowledge is not monetary. Learning is not a capital asset.

Cliché and emptiness. Repetition of life and the loop of existence; what a fucking fucking fucking dreadful joke.

Walking home from the station with Psychocandy playing distorted NOISE in my ears and tears joining the rain coursing down my cheeks, and what was I weeping for anyway? I never knew. I only knew that I was surrounded by shit and that the only escape was this NOISE and the words of evaporated melancholy I might read on the pages of books. That and the Velvet Underground. They changed my fucking life.

I am covered in red welts. The results of panics and desolate afternoons and evenings and too many late nights and train rides. And alcohol. Always the alcohol seeping through my body and tearing me from the insides out, and now the signs are visible and I want to tear myself open again. I scratch and rip. Nothing comes out because there’s nothing left. It’s all been done to death. I can’t find anything new to add, just find the same old words and see the same old pictures, smell the same scents and feel the same roughness. Skin falling off and covering the floor. I am in the gaps between the floorboards.

All my records are disordered, my schemes and systems decaying and breaking down. I fight the urge to reset them, want to allow myself the pleasure of irritation at irrelevances. I want to watch my life decay and fade. I don’t know where anything is, I just trip over things and let them happen. I’m only playing this record because it was there when I walked into the room. I’ll strip my computer and start again because it is going slowly; my computer is my surrogate life. I can’t be arsed doing an analogous thing with my life. What would be the point anyway?

Exactly.

I wrote a song in my head on the way home tonight, and it was called ‘Disappoint’. It was a great Pop moment, but of course it’s gone now because I cannot write songs and anyway, it would only have sat and rotted. Just like my life.

posted by duke harringay at 6:03 PM

a cheery wave from stranded youngsters

Back in 1998 I ran an intimate club event in Exeter called ‘Glitch’. I say intimate because it was held in the damp basement of a pub down by the railway station that would have held maybe twenty people at a push. Not that that posed a problem of course because no more than ten people ever turned up at once, but then that’s living in the sticks for you I guess. I suppose if we had called the club something more glamorous and had played banging drum’n’bass or House tunes we’d have been better off, but hey. And actually come to think of it we did play fantastic drum’n’bass tracks, so that was obviously not the problem either. Maybe people just didn’t like me.

My friends and I made the room as pleasant as possible though. We hung heavy red curtains around the corner of the room where I DJ-ed, sat behind my rickety stack of lo-fi equipment, perched precariously on a couple of planks of wood rested on empty beer barrels (I used to play a sample from the Wizard of Oz that said ‘ignore that man behind the curtain!’ with infuriating regularity – the sad thing is of course everyone did exactly that). We strung fairy lights all the way down the stairs, and around the tiny windows through which you could see people walk the street above and beyond to the railway line where the Virgin trains sped past on their way to The North. We taped up huge photocopy assemblages of print-outs from crashing laser-printers that looked like crazed Op-Art nightmares; Bridget Riley on mescaline or something. It was magnificent. And actually, the lo-fi sound system deserves comment in itself: there was a dodgy ancient Pioneer belt drive record deck whose innards you had to poke around with a screwdriver to change speed; an even dodgier plastic generic Taiwanese record player that probably cost a tenner back in 1988; an old NAD CD deck with no display working, and a sound that was always muddy, like someone had stuck a clump of dust over the laser; a portable JVC CD player that was probably the newest thing there, although it had a tendency to stick, sending juddering repeating noises through the speakers, which, incidentally, were ancient brown wooden unbranded jobs that passed from my dad to me back in 1980 but that nevertheless sounded marvellously tinny and metallic. There was also a portable radio, broadcasting talk radio or the news into the mix, which was handled fitfully by a crappy Tandy mixer. It was a true Punk Rock Club Aesthetic. And we wondered why no-one turned up.

I tell you all this because I used to play tracks from Mogwai’s Kicking A Dead Pig remixes album (Eye Q records, 1998) a lot in that room, and I used to love it to pieces. It seemed to fit perfectly with that Punk Rock Club Aesthetic, Mogwai always having sounded to me like majestic Punk Soul brethren into fucking sound up, sending it gyrating into the stratosphere on a wing and a prayer, and on Kicking A Dead Pig there were more mad bastards taking Mogwai’s sonic yawns and making them, if not stranger yet, at least pushing them in new directions. Perhaps down the mist encased valley to look at the ancient mill and to kiss under the sparkler dims of the pine trees; perhaps to the peaks of the distant hills, the bleating of sheep the only accompaniment to dreaming smiles; perhaps to the pub for a swift half of vodka.

I had favourites of course. I remember playing the Third Eye Foundations’ metal-dub ‘tet offensive’ take on ‘A Cheery Wave from Stranded Youngsters’ to myself and three other brave souls, joined by a half-tuned radio station floating on top telling of teenage pregnancies. If I remember rightly I followed it with Tortoise’s monumental ‘Gamera’ (punctuated, bizarrely enough with snatches from Simple Minds’ ‘Room’) which in turn sequed into Union Wireless’ ‘Saturn Ascension’ before ending back with Mogwai, and Alec Empire’s typically squalling drum’n’bass deconstruction of ‘Like Herod’ which was like a schizophrenic daydream wander through the set of Bladerunner, exploding android kisses echoing in your ears like haemorrhaging heartbeats.

Then of course there was the Surgeon mix of ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’; a terrific gaping black hole of a track that made for excellent texture, and it sounded especially good played below Gas, whose Zauberberg record on Mille Plateaux was itself an awesome example of a gentle gothic electronic sigh. And finally, there was my favourite Pop tune of the time in the somnambulist melodic whisper that was Kid Loco’s mix of ‘Tracy’; a simply gorgeous track that set sail for the distant horizon sunset and left you floating someplace up near the ceiling, counting the stars. Monumental.

Naturally of course the prospect of lugging boxes of equipment up and down two flights of stairs to a dank cellar to play messed-up sonic collages that no-one else came to listen to became less that appealing, but I made sure I played ‘A Cheery Wave’ as the last tune before I switched the power off and packed up the extension cables one last time. I still occasionally glue noises together on the ageing sculpture that is the Glitch sound system, but only ever to an audience of one, which is perhaps as it should be. And I still play Kicking A Dead Pig now and then. And it still sounds extraordinarily beautiful. And I’m still on the ceiling, counting the stars.


posted by duke harringay at 9:09 PM

I bought Nevermind the other day.

I was going to throw that line in somewhere in the middle of these ramblings and hope you didn’t notice, but I thought instead I’d get it out there in the open at the start.

I bought Nevermind the other day.

Okay? Let’s move on.

In the early 1990s I studiously avoided Nirvana. I don’t remember exactly why, but I suspect it revolved centrally around the idea of elitism and the need to feel aloof. I would almost certainly have argued against this being the case at the time, but then time has perhaps mellowed me, or has at least made me more aware that an embracing of the need for elitism is a major fuel for driving the Pop experience.

I’ve made a great deal in the past about hating Rock, but the funny thing is I actually love loads of Rock music. I always did. I used to say quite vociferously that I loved the Pixies, for example, but the thing was that the people I felt connected with otherwise hated the Pixies with a vengeance and in fact hated Rock with much more passion than I could muster either for or against.

It didn’t really matter though; my liking for Rock was a minor quibble in a set of much more vital shared feelings and thoughts, and besides, I always knew that the only thing I had in common with Rock fans was liking some Rock music, which isn’t really all that much at all, and in fact maybe what I’ve always meant about hating Rock Music is that I’ve always hated Rock Fans. Because Rock fans tend to have long hair. Rock fans tend to enjoy sweating. Rock fans tend to be kind of boring. Rock fans tend to like Rock Music.

Okay, look, here’s what I really hated about the whole American Rock scene of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s: I hated the fact that they referenced American Rock. I hated the fact that people were making comments about liking Aerosmith and Rush, and Led Zeppelin and yes I KNOW those bands aren’t all American but they ARE American Rock, oh how they ARE American Rock… And I grew up hating those bands, that music, with a devout and passionate hatred. Sure, it was a blind and uninformed hatred, but so what? If there is any other when you’re a kid of fourteen in love with a world based on very p-a-r-t-i-c-u-l-a-r references, then I don’t want to know about it. I mean, lets get right down to it here: I was a British Punk Rock kid from the sticks and that meant hating American Rock. Full stop, and pass me the petrol to pour on the flames of the burning Poison records.

And so revelling in the blissful myopia of those reasons I hated Nirvana.

I knew all about Olympia though, and about Beat Happening and K Records, and I loved all that stuff to death. I can still remember running home and playing that first Beat Happening album and just always returning the needle to the start and replaying, replaying, revelling in the brittle beauty, and in one of my sketchbooks from the time there is a scrappy ink sketch of Calvin and Jen copied from a photo that was probably hidden away in the NME or somewhere, I don’t really know. I liked the Pastels too, although that Glasgow scene always hated me and laughed at me even though they didn’t know who I was or could even give a shit, and that was funny because really I didn’t give a shit either about not being accepted into the cliques, and anyway, the best club is the club you run where you’re the only member, and it’s inside your head…

And.

Well, I was going somewhere with this at one point, honest. Maybe it was here: I never liked going out.

I loved the Beat Happening record because I could play it in my room and I could be whisked away, to where I dunno, but wherever it was it was special and no-one else was allowed. Whenever I did venture out to shows I watched people with friends, and people kissing and having conversations and I felt alone and aw fuck it, that sounds sad and fey and I don’t mean it like that, I mean… I mean I never felt connected. Pop for me has always been about isolation, and shows always seemed sweaty, and they always seemed boring, and there were always too many people.

So maybe too that’s why I hated Rock fans: camaraderie. I’m not much one for camaraderie.

Besides which, talking about Beat Happening and the Pastels and the Vaselines (which I wasn’t actually, but will now to say just that I always kinda dug those Vaselines singles because they were grimy and cheesy, and you know really I had a perverse Love/Hate relationship with all that Glasgow/Scottish scene of faux-sexadelic mock-cock-rocking deal with, aw, you know/remember/don’t remember/can go and research it if you really feel the need/I wouldn’t really bother though if I was you/ um, that Boy Hairdressers single and the attendant interview in Coca-Cola Cowboy fanzine with silly wee frothy talk of vibrators and pissing in sinks – BUT, em, The Vaselines records were stupidly Punk, which was enough for five minutes of course), I just couldn’t ever hear a connection with Nirvana, and I know that was never the point, but just… well…

I bought Nevermind the other day.

It’s a quite decent pop album, although I’m not sure if that’s how I’m meant to read it. I’m not sure if I am meant to read it out of the context of all that I know about Nirvana and Kurt and … and… And of course I know exactly how to read it: I ignore all the historical context and listen in the only context that counts - the personal one of Now, complete with all the baggage that ‘Then’ brings to the equation. And I hear a quite decent pop album, which makes a mockery of the fact that I had to soil my hands in the ‘Nu-Metal’ section of Virgin to find it. Is Nevermind a metal album? Is it hell. Not to my ears anyway. It’s occasionally The Pixies, and it’s occasionally Stiff Little Fingers, but it’s nearly always pop; it’s never ever metal; and it’s hardly ever American Rock.

Which means that once upon a time I suppose I was spectacularly wrong, even though I was quite clearly, and equally spectacularly, right.

And that’s all.


posted by duke harringay at 4:21 PM