Flicking through ‘Ghost World’ yesterday looking for a picture to scan and appropriate for a title page for the Year 7 comic strips currently decorating one of the walls in my classroom, I noticed anew one of the frames in the retro diner. It was the one where Al is wiping the flower petals off the table, where the background music is The Turtles ‘It Was A very Good Year’. See I only just spotted that. I guess the last time I read the book I hadn’t really listened to the Turtles, so didn’t spot the reference. And now it’s just another that makes me love the book more than ever. Like how the first time that Enid and Rebecca visit the diner the jukebox is playing ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’ and they’re saying how much they hate that song, and then later it’s the Association’s ‘Windy’, which prompts them to say that ‘this place is GOD’. Whatever.

I actually took the book into school with the intention of passing it onto the only year 10 kid to have seen the movie but after flicking through it again during morning break I decided it wasn’t a great idea maybe. Besides which I am very sensitive about how people treat books, mine in particular.

So, yes, here I am now, Saturday morning, mug of coffee (in Belle and Sebastian ‘Judy’ mug), start of the Easter holidays, and the Turtles on the stereo.


posted by duke harringay at 9:49 AM

Complete disaster. Most of my tutor group like Queen. That’s not the Queen, that’s Queen the dreary rock band; Queen the group who I probably hate more than any other group in the history of music. Even more than I hate the Beatles, I hate Queen.

Why do I hate Queen? And why do I hate them more now than I ever did? It’s easy: because they peddled the most dreadfully obvious, sanitised rock ever made; because they made Music For Car Adverts (as opposed to music used in car adverts – a subtle difference), the kind of music you expect Jeremy Clarkson to like (and if I hate anyone more than Queen, it’s possibly Jeremy Clarkson, or at least his public persona); because their insipid, over-familiar, formulaic, clichéd tripe has been the subject of pointless regurgitation, has been warmed over and served up to a whole new generation who seem too lacking in discretion to care that it’s just shit their parents like. And there’s another thing. If I was fifteen and my parents liked the same music I did, I’d be fucking mortified. I’d go and end it all right there and then. And Queen, more than almost anyone else, were always a group that old people liked. Which is being demeaning to old people, obviously. And actually, let me put that another way; Queen were always liked by old people who thought it really mattered that, you know, people in a band could actually play their instruments properly. Thought it mattered that rock bands were musicians. Whereas I was always of the opinion that was the last thing they ought to be.

Oh well.

Now I’m even more depressed. My Year 10 art group all like Queen too. They even say that they think it’s good that their parents like the same things they do. Argh! What is happening to the world!?

And why the fuck do I care?

posted by duke harringay at 3:27 PM

Bugger, just realised that some of the search results from the Google ‘search site’ service are no longer accurate since I tidied up all my directories and files and what have you. See I just discovered that Dreamweaver updates all necessary links in pages automatically when you move files in your site (the upside of having to move from Homesite to Dreamweaver – I finally found it!) which meant I could at last get everything pre-2001 into a more sensible order. Only now I realise that the Google database for those files is inaccurate and people are going to get 404 files. Grrr. I’ll have to alter the 404 page to say something about this.

Sorry for letting the blog descend again into what Rupert calls the ‘computer geek log’. Normal service will be resumed soon.

Speaking of geeks, that old-new-romantic just emailed again and said something along the lines of ‘it looks like I’m having a pub argument with a Jarvis nerd…’ Guess he never liked Pulp then. Oh well.

He’s not a very good typist either.


posted by duke harringay at 8:15 PM

It’s all Tim Footman’s fault. Him and his remembrance of his Exeter youth and his calling old New Romantic duffers like Rusty Egan and Steve Strange “production-line handbag-dancers”.

I suppose it’s only natural that Rusty would take offence at that line, but as ever it’s yours truly who takes the brunt of the abuse. I accept that though. I mean, I am the editor (ha ha!). And not that it was particularly intelligent or coherent abuse, but whatever. His main suggestion seemed to be that I put his name into Google, and that on such evidence he would rest his case. I did as suggested and got some results about selling old Visage records and a signed Rich Kids photo going for twenty quid (mostly on the back of Midge Ure I’d suspect, but hey ho). So yes, case rested indeed.

I tried a fairly nice email in response talking about how Tim’s piece seemed to me to be about the notion that the mythologising of a ‘scene’ was essentially a Punk/Pop thing and at the very essence of being a teenager. I suggested too that Tim (and I) chose a different mode/style of engagement with Pop culture precisely because we were of a different generation, and that each generation naturally ought to reject what the previous one has claimed as its signature. So, from a personal point of view, I was 13 and ugly and insecure and unfashionable when Egan and co were dressing up and doing their thang, and hey, guess what, it said nothing to me about my life. It never could, beyond some hazy dream that I knew was pointless and that I would hate anyway if it came true. So I / ‘we’ fashioned something different, naturally rejecting what we thought of as the narcissistic foolishness of what had gone before. Rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse.

In passing I also mentioned that when I was 13 I looked like a fledgling Jarvis Cocker decades before that even became vaguely ‘cool’, and that the reason I wasn’t at the Pistols 100 club show was because I was ten at the time and tucked up in bed, worrying about the bullies in the primary school playground. To which his response was ‘more shit from a Jarvis who went to primary school.’ Eloquent wit as ever, from Mr Egan, from which I can only assume he himself never went to primary school. He was obviously too fashionable for that. Education is for squares, after all, isn’t it?

Anyway, so that was all last night and this morning. I expect it will rumble on for a few days too. He’ll probably call his mates in and they’ll all complain about how Tangents hates the New Romantics, and who are we to talk about something we didn’t experience and blah blah fucking blah. I expect Steve Strange will get wind of James Nice’s great savaging of his biography and will sulk and pout about it. Maybe…

I guess the bottom line is that some of us just don’t give a shit about being famous, fashionable or popular. At least it means we don’t end up as desperate old has-beens chasing our shadows.

posted by duke harringay at 10:51 AM