Wicked

Yesterday I noticed that someone has written ‘wicked teacher, luv ?? xxx’ on my desk. In the same hand and pen above it ‘smile’ and then ‘xxx’ with a heart dotting the i on smile. I don’t know when that appeared. It must have been the end of last academic year, before the summer break… Anyway, it cheered me up after a day getting things in place for today when the kids started back in earnest.

And actually today was fine. The kids were fine, and I enjoyed it a lot more than the previous two days when staff pissed me off in general. School would actually be pretty good if it weren’t for all the staff… Or at least some of the staff. Most of the staff. Jenny and I decided yesterday that the problem was/is that so many of them are so twee and precious… so many of them are simply soulless. Which for teachers is a pretty sad way to be.

Whatever.

I ought to point out, to set the context of the above, that the surface of my desk at school is festooned with messages from ex-students. As a rule, they don’t get to write on it until they are leaving at the end of Year 11, which weeds out the ones who are, you know, not really all that pleasant… It tends to be girls too. Maybe boys just can’t write. Or maybe I just get on better with girls. My favourites are the lengthy poems and ‘stories’ written several years ago now by Hannah, Heather, Aimee and Kate. Those are starting to fade… it’s kind of saddening really. Also the ‘A* teacher’ from Rusty, and the so faint you can barely see it ‘love, Clare xx’ in pink, on the front. That would have been one of the first I guess. From around six years ago now… scary. Thinking about it makes me want to eat my head, as Sethe so aptly put it. Sigh.

Oh, and yes, Sethe, ‘Wicked’ in the UK does mean ‘wicked cool’ but of course we are all too cool to actually say ‘wicked cool’ so we just say ‘wicked’. And I think the anonymous message means wicked as in wicked cool, rather than just plain nasty, twisted and evil, but it’s probably a fifty-fifty decision…

Right, I’m off to pack for the weekend in Brighton now. And listen to Charles Manson. Now he really WAS wicked.



posted by duke harringay at 8:58 PM

the Electro-Pop-Hula-Goth saviours

How fabulous is the Future Bible Heroes’ ‘I’m A Vampire’? Pretty fucking damn fabulous, is what. How can you resist lines like ‘I survived for 700 years and I still look seventeen’, ‘I am the bitch goddess from beyond your grave’, or ‘damn, I am what? I am what I am. I am impossibly glam and I am happy as a clam cause I’m a vampire.’? Well?? Impossible. Especially when hitched up to an electro backing track that is everything you ever wanted from the likes of… take your pick of ‘80s/’90s/whenevers electro Pop Genius and then add a bit extra for good measure. Now double it. Future Bible Heroes are the Electro-Pop-Hula-Goth saviours. Open your hearts and let the blood flow.

posted by duke harringay at 8:57 PM

I am Superman, and I can do anything...

Today was the day I finally got to hear the original version of ‘Superman’, the song made famous by REM back at the tail end of the ‘80s. Well, I say ‘famous’ but really it wasn’t that famous at all. Not in the UK at least, because REM still weren’t THAT big when that album came out. Which album was it again? I can’t remember for the life of me. Rummages about in mind… too lazy to get out of my chair and rummage for the actual record… Document? Whatever. The sleeve notes to the Clique album say that REM played the track live on MTV back in ’88, and that Gary Zekely, who wrote the song in the first place, joined them on stage for the performance. I’d really like to see that sometime, Zekely being one of my favourites of that whole ‘60s West Coast songwriter scene of course, what with his work with Jan and Dean, the Yellow Balloon and the Clique (you know the Clique – you know you do… ‘sugar on Sunday’. THAT was the Clique, although that particular hit was a Tommy James number). And thanks to those sleeve notes I now I have to investigate The Fun and Games, another Zekely production… isn’t sonic archaeology fun? (and expensive…)


posted by duke harringay at 8:57 PM

double yay!

I am very , very happy this evening as I just heard that Richard Buckner is coming to the UK in January to play some shows! Richard Buckner! Do you know how many times I have wished I could get to see him play? Too many times to mention. So roll on January… Plus a new Buckner album due soon too… double yay!


posted by duke harringay at 8:56 PM

Boredom, boredom, boredomboredom.

Back to school today. Yawn.

Back to the same old sameold. Back to crushing banality. Of course not helped by the fact that there weren’t actually any kids back today, just staff, which meant hours of interminable babble in which nothing interesting and certainly nothing new was said. Maybe I’ve just been doing it too long; maybe I just need a new environment, some new challenges. Whatever. We had the same talk of strategies for dealing with student behaviour – strategies that the same people will still fail to use with any modicum of success; the same talk of starting afresh with rewards schemes that never worked in the past; the same old ‘inspirational’ words and passages displayed on dull OHTs, delivered by voices that sound as inspirational as the sodden jeans hanging on next door’s washing line.

At least I got to start my new wall display. I put up a Ladybug Transistor poster, and a couple of Tintin postcards that C brought back from Belgium in the summer. Also pinned up a Free Loan Investements poster for their Have You Ever Been To Mexico EP – sketchy record, neat poster. I also took in a couple of Careless Talk issues, to photocopy photos of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Dirtbombs for the wall (not wanting to cut up the lovely pages, you understand), but I didn’t get a chance to get to the resources room, so that will have to wait until tomorrow. It’ll probably be the highlight of the day.

On a more upbeat note, I did finally manage to get through on the phone to the Telewest people and arranged to have someone come around and install a broadband cable net connection. Yay! Broadband at last. I’ve been hassling our cable provider for a couple of years for this, and they’ve finally now put it all into practice. So, come 14th September I’ll have an always-on connection! Double yay! How this will alter my on-line and indeed life experience remains to be seen. No doubt I’ll tell you all about it. Aren’t you lucky?


posted by duke harringay at 5:37 PM

I must be watching too much TV. I’m getting pissed off with the adverts. I particularly hate those Ford Fiesta ads, the ones that say ‘get out more’. You know the ones. And of those, in particular the one with the guy listening to some music on his headphones, lounging on the sofa… the subtext of which is that he’s one sad fucker for enjoying himself by himself, whilst all these other wonderful people are out enjoying themselves by driving around in their fucking car, talking to each other on their goddam mobiles. And what’s the boot full of CDs about? What, they’ve just robbed a Virgin? Or they’ve got all these CDs, but hey! they’re so wild and wacky they just don’t have time to listen to them all!! ? Is that it? I don’t get it. Why would you waste your money like that? I guess I’m missing something, but I’d far rather be the guy on the sofa, getting excited about the music, and fuck all the empty-headed figures without shadows and their auto-obsessions.

Those ads for mobile phones, or specifically sms services piss me off too. The ones telling you to get all your flirting over with before you go home by, uh, using sms. What, is ‘text’ suppose to sound like ‘sex’? I dunno. And the ads don’t really seem to make much sense; if you’ve been out with someone for the night, or even if you met them whilst you were out and you’re off back to your flat for a bit of the other, why would you flirt by using sms on your phone? Why not do it by using, you know, the spoken word? Maybe the ads are aimed at deaf mutes. Maybe in the days before sms flirting was impossible for deaf mutes. And maybe I have too much time on my hands.

Maybe it really is time the holidays ended after all.


posted by duke harringay at 8:31 PM

I have a new friend. I shall call him Norman, because he looks a bit like Norman Wisdom. He has that kind of hunched over walk that Wisdom affected so well, although I suspect my Norman walks that way because of too much cycling in his younger years.

My Norman, you see, was a professional cyclist, back at the tail end of the 1960s and the start of the ‘70s. He was never a lead rider though. He admitted he actually wasn’t even really a domestique, just a kind of dogsbody, but hell, that means he was a million times better than I’ll ever be, so hats off to him. I met Norman at the front door last week when he was looking for folks to sponsor his 100 mile rides for FORCE. Apparently he does about five of these 100 milers each summer, between May and September, going up and down the Exe valley as far as Dulverton, then doglegging to Willand, and with a little trip to Dawlish tagged on the end to make up the 100. And even if that makes it like the flattest route you’d find around here, it’s still a fair ride. So again, it’s hats off to Norman.

He used to ride for Mercian BP with Poulidor as the team leader. According to Norman, Poulidor was ‘thick as a brick’. I wanted to say ‘but aren’t all pro cyclists a bit challenged in the brains department?’ but that would have been rude. Wouldn’t it? Yes it would. So instead we talked about the Alps, comparing notes on the Col De Joux Plane, which he said he rode several times, and which I rode, ah, once. He told me too of the Ventoux, which he said was ‘a bastard. An absolute bastard.’ I believed him. He said he rode it several times too, in Paris-Nice (‘race to the sun? race to the snow, more like!’) and the Dauphine, and every time it was ‘a bastard!’

Norman reckons he once beat Eddy Merckx too. On a climb in the Tour of Spain, he reckons he dropped Merckx and Joop Zoetemelk, which is no mean feat. But then Merckx came back on the descent because he was ‘a bastard’ at descending. Of course. I was a bit sceptical of the story, but the way his face lit up when to spun the yarn made me just smile and let it run. I hope it’s true.

Norman went off with a fiver and a little asterisk by my name and address on his list. He asked if it would be okay to drop by one weekend for a chat, and I said that would be good. He seemed so happy to have someone interested in the stories of his cycling exploits, and god knows it’ll be nice to talk to a real person about riding instead of boring you all with it on my blog.


posted by duke harringay at 8:30 PM