Oh, and it looks like Sethe has been listening to Dearly. I’m guessing too that she still has a Stephen Malkmus fixation. It’s really not healthy. She reckons that she really is in love with him and thinks she could spend all day kissing him and not get bored. Imagine that. The impulses of the young, oh how I envy them…

I’m off to listen to Minny Pops.

posted by duke harringay at 4:02 PM

Christ, I haven’t written anything here for ages. Actually I haven’t written anything for ages, period. Why is this? A range of factors are involved I guess, not least being a head too full of school things (something I am still suffering from in this second day of the half term holiday) which naturally precludes pretty much anything else. I know I should chill out and forget about it for a while, but I am impatient and want to be putting loads of ideas into practise NOW, and not have to wait until September. Oh well.

I had planned to write some things at the weekend too, but my head was not only filled with school things, but it was also jammed with snot. Another cold. I’m losing track. It feels like a monthly cycle now… grrr. When will Summer, or at the very least Spring, rear its glorious head and bestow its feathery blessings on us all? Speaking of blessings, I did a year 10 RE cover the other week and one of the questions they had to answer was to say what ‘blessings’ meant. Jo said it was when you bless someone, which seemed fair enough. I started to tease out a fuller definition but then remembered I was only doing a cover lesson and I’d hate for a non-specialist to start telling someone how to draw if they were covering my art lesson so I shut up and beat a hasty retreat.

I’ve been beating hasty retreats to the attic the past two days too because there’s a man banging around in the bedroom plastering all the walls and ceiling. It’s all kind of dusty and icky as a result, which is never nice, but I’m buggered if I was going to do it. In my book DIY stands for, uh, something really negative that I cant be arsed working out now. Maybe Deeply Irritate Yourself, although that’s far too polite.

We bought two pale aqua rugs today for placing on the bare boards that another Man Who Does will be coming to sand and seal on Friday. Thankfully I will be in London on Friday, so will miss the fun as he looks at the floor and draws in a breath and shakes his head, as such Men Who Do do.

And speaking of Aqua, I’ve been spending the past two days looking at Apples. Not the fruit, but the computers. Considering if we really OUGHT to go out and buy a suite of pretty iMacs and iBooks and a couple of G4s for our new media suite instead of (it now transpires only slightly) cheaper faceless PCs… I must admit I’m now starting to drool at the prospect. I even bought a MacUser magazine today to check out the score with what’s going on in Mac world. And as I type this I can just sense Rupert’s glee and his ‘I told you so’ grin. Of course I’ll have to get the Head to get me a Powerbook or iBook as a test machine so I can get to grips with it, but ho hum.

But yes, Friday I get to pretend I’m someone really important at our school. I’m off to an induction session for Heads and Deputy Heads of newly appointed Specialist Schools. The real Head can’t go cos she’s in New York on holiday, and the Head of Art cant go cos she’ll be on Dartmoor so it’s down to me and one of the deputies to fly the flag, as it were. I’m sure I’ll be out of my depth with people who do Important Things like run schools and manage budgets and blah blah blah, and me, just a bog-standard teacher. Oh well. I expect lunch will be nice.

It’s of course also a good excuse to go to London and see some culture and friends. Meeting Robin for the first time in an age will be good, and I’ll be able to congratulate and thank him in person for his wonderful new article which makes me jealous and wish I had a brain in the right gear which would allow me to write something approaching that level of interest or quality. That level of ‘badness’ if you will. Instead of writing about bloody music all the time (here he goes again) and saying, gee, I dunno, something about the new Manta Ray album (which has just finished spinning as I type) like how it’s like Pixies covering Appliance, or vice versa, and how in places it really lands magnificent body blows, like stepping into the ring with Arthur Cravan. Which it is, and does, and I don’t mean to belittle the Manta Ray album, it’s just… oh sod it, I don’t know. If I was so hung up on writing something ‘real’ and ‘proper’ I wouldn’t be wasting time on this bleedin’ thing, would I? NO I wouldn’t. And in fact, since I’m on about it, the Manta Ray album (Estratexa on Acuarela) in fact is pretty wonderful and you should all check it out.

But real writing… wouldn’t it be nice?

I was remembering Everett’s wedding last night, and the minister kind of paraphrasing what I said once about how Everett writes to make sense of himself, and in the process maybe he makes some sense of the reader’s world too, and in fact of course when I wrote that I was also talking about why I write about music (and why I write this, why I write anything apart from school reports and other such dull stuff). It’s all to make sense of the everything of life, and sometimes too to make a nonsense of that life. What else is there?

And then Kevin says he used to write about music because he just wanted to tell everyone about great records and essentially wanted to say ‘listen to this!’ I don’t doubt this is true but also don’t doubt that somewhere in there was a little something about defining ideals and communicating feelings and creating a sense of identity. And maybe, again, I’m painting my own impulses on others’ work.

The plasterer needs a cup of tea, and so do I.

posted by duke harringay at 3:58 PM