Tsunami : Before And After. please please please look here. There are no words to describe it.

Waves have been calculated at, at their highest, being 56.15 feet tall.
- posted by Mark @ 10:58 pm 0 comments

 
happy new year. have a beautiful 2005.
- posted by Mark @ 10:49 pm 2 comments

 
Following Graham’s earlier example / post about record companies repackaging songs as if they were baked beans and leaving huge amounts of music fans might actually buy rotting in vaults in favour of Yet Another Compilation Of Well-known Songs With A Bad Cover , I thought I’d take you for a little morality tale, if you will.

In the 1990’s a band called Ned’s Atomic Dustbin sold 700,000 copies of their debut album “God Fodder”. Four years later, they were dropped by their record company, after the lowly chart position of 110 with their third album “Brain Blood Volume”. One can argue a million reasons why the album peaked at 110, but I dare say that a major factor is that the same album was released three months earlier in America, and all the high street stores were selling copies at £9.99 on import two months and three weeks before it came out in England. Therefore any chance of it actually selling any copies in Britain were : Nil. The hardcore fans had bought it ages ago, the casual voters didn’t even know it was out.

Sometime later, inspired by greed and no artistic principles whatsoever, the band’s former record company got some gofer at their offices to choose in some random order a bunch of their old songs, named it after an old single, chose a picture from a standard Image Catalogue (I used to love flicking through their glossy brochures, thousands of pages of high-res images lovingly recreated enmasse and provided free for potential customers), and shoved it out at £6.99. They even included one song twice.

Now, some former members of the band were a bit pissed off about this. Apropros of nothing, and, in fact, in direct competition with the first solo release by their singer (Groundswell’s “Corrode” EP), the label hastily ripped off their back catalogue for a fast pointless buck. Jonn even considered court actions to get the album withdrawn, or at the very least, a replacement made with full band co-operation (and consisting of all the singles, a couple of rare songs and other stuff fans might want) to be sorted out. However, having paid for all the promotion, videos, pressing costs, tour support, advances, managers costs, recording costs and so on and so forth out of their less-than-10% royalty stream, they found that they’d paid for everything, owned and controlled nothing, and owed something : they didn’t have the money to refute the shoddy ripoff release, and even if they did, it would be a long time thanks to the legal machinations that they’d receive anything like recompense, even artistically, from it.



The whole debacle was repeated in 2003, the only year in recent times that they didn’t play live, where another shoddy compilation, this time “Terminally Groovy” – was released without the band knowing about it – this time using a cheaply-photoshopped old magazine/press photo and another assortment of old songs. Hell, if the company wanted to make money, they had two full length video compilations that would’ve made a nice DVD, and a new Neds album, that they recorded in late 2001, that no label would touch with a bargepole. (In the end, the Neds released the album in late 2003, which accurately replicated the bands new lineup and their current live set). So new money for old product? Money for old rope? A CD costs the same to manufacture wether it contain old stuff or new stuff, and the promotion costs of a release by an ‘old’ band is next to nothing, being that the fans practically do the work for free.

“Street Teams” anyone?

Record companies are vandals pissing on the works of their “artists” and the artistic legacy. (Have a quick look at Motorhead’s discography-compilations if you like : the only reasonable unofficial Motorhead release is the album they made, didn’t release, and was then sold to a label by an ex-guitarist). The list is above is only the official albums. This is all the bootlegs.... that is,mostly unofficial compilations of previously released stuff to line the coffers of coked-up record company cunts.

Record companies don’t give a fuck about musicians : if they really cared about musicians, they might pay royalties to Jimi Hendrix’s bassist who sold his rights for £10k in the Seventies when he was absolutely broke. Broke, incidentally, as a result of record companies financial sodomy. Every news article listed above men tions that he died at just 57, and that he was battling for unpaid royalties. In an interview he joked "I should have been a plumber, at least plumbers get paid".

In the meantime, an enormous amount of stuff clogs up bandwidth : stuff that labels could sell at bargain basement prices and shift by the thousand : Pearl Jam and The Pixies have CD’s of every concert they play available for sale from their websites. (Incidentally, there isn’t going to be a live CD to accompany the upcoming Pixies live DVD, as they’ve already issued about 112 live albums this year so far). Pearl Jam only have 80 shows available.

This brings me onto record companies : rather than issuing stuff that nobody has (officially at least), they’d rather sell you something you already own, in a different box and a mastered slightly louder than it used to be. And this brings me onto Pink Floyd, who are undoubtedly big sellers. Even 2001’s “Echoes”, a shoddy compilation assembled by committee with only-one-previously-not-on-CD song, shifted 5 million with no live shows, no interviews, no DVD, and no promotion bar a couple of flyposters and a website.

Now, Pink Floyd are one of the big five in the bootlegging industry (at last count they have 775 bootleg albums released, or about sixty records for every one they made themselves), and if I could remember the web address, I’d point you to the place you can download a double CD (and a one hour TV Special) of them at KQED, in San Francisco, in 1970. All professionally mixed and ready. (Instead Click Here for a 1972 pre-release recording of them performing "Dark Side Of The Moon"..



Can anyone say 2CD/1DVD “Legacy Edition” deluxe box set? All you gotta do is slap up some new artwork (and there’s plenty of that hanging around in the Floyd offices) and Bingo! Christmas Reissue!

- or would you rather have a double CD of stuff you’ve already heard? –

So all you gotta do is run those tapes through a studio, remaster and spruce them up, run the video tape through a digital cleaner (and that’s easy to do) and bingo. Guaranteed sales. There’s also at least some seven or eight similar shows in the vaults that, despite being heavily bootlegged (and thus now available completely free - but only to geeks - on the wonders of the Internet) would still shift very respectable numbers, the kind of numbers that record companies would sell their souls for, if they had any.

Lets not even mention DVD’s that still languish in VHS Hell :And talking of Pink Floyd, I can think of at least six DVD’s worth of stuff that sits in vaults rotting when it could be shifting regularly off the shelves : three live shows and a documentary off the 1987-89 tour, as well as about fifty videos and TV performances, and a whole bunch of stuff filmed on the 1994 tour, some of which are on VHS, if at all. There’s also a gazillion U2 things that have been on TV and VHS that would do very good business should Island ever bother to sort it out.

It’s at this point that I tip my hat to Mute Records, Beggars Banquet, and Suede. Mute and BB are hard at work reissuing all their old videos on DVD, working with fans to get hold of rare and old footage, and packaging it all up in exhaustive releases : even the Inspiral Carpets got a CD/B-Sides/DVD Anthology package, and it cost about £11 for the lot. In the olden days you could buy CD’s and videotapes. Now you can get CD’s, DVD’s, DVD-AQ’s, SACD’s, VHs, PS2, X-Box, and the whole of the Internet. Is it any wonder the customer demands more? The Gravy Train is running out.

Suede and Depeche Mode have/had fans who worked in their offices. Megafans, who used to run fanzines or websites that were so good that the band hired them, and put them in charge of archiving the band’s releases, and in some respects overseeing reissues : on depechemode.com the megafan webmaster spends his time looking for old concert tapes in the band’s offices and archives, encoding them, and letting you watch them on the website (link currently wonky), and on suede.net, when the band was going, the guy who ran the fanclub was a fan, and made sure that the fans were well treated : even if the record company did nix plans for an archive series of rarities and a double DVD of the band playing-all-their-albums-in-order-and-bsides-over-five-nights-in-London . There’s no way that fans could feel ripped off really. (Even though the recent Depeche Mode 3CD remix package was a bit ‘money for old rope’).

The bottom line is that record companies have no understanding of what record buyers want. For every fan, there’s a megafan somewhere. Someone who will buy everything they stick out. Someone who knows what the band do, and how to treat the music they love with the respect it deserves. The sooner record companies bite the dust, and bands control their own work, the sooner artists can get on with being artists and not worry about being ripped off by unscrupulous, artless businessmen. To them, music is profit, and if they could make more profit selling beans, they probably would. Repackage old beans and put them in new boxes, and voila, profit. Or not. The new step would be simple : take an author’s work, take any letters you want, rearrange them, and voila, a new novel!

It’s that ruthless. Fuck the record companies : give the music to the musicians, or, as many artists do, they’ll fuck off and get day jobs. It pays more to work in an office than it does to be a musician playing to 2,000 people a night. And there’s something rotten in the world where artists starve.

So goodbye Gene, and (potentially) farewell Therapy, bands practically bankrupted by a heartless industry that doesn’t even pay it’s cashcows a decent per-hour-wage, whilst the companies are raking in 88% of the income, or even more if you want artistic control, where they’ll ask you to surrender even more paltry points. Sure most artists lose money and don’t sell many copies : but let’s face the facts, how can you sell 250,000 copies yet still be fired for being unsuccessful? There’s something rotten in the industry where 250,000 copies isn’t enough : get rid of the flab, and give the music to the people.

Though I must say it doesn’t bother me if they don’t treat back catalogues with any respect. There’s always FTP’s and MP3’s : I’ll get them for free and save myself the money thank you very much.

- posted by Mark @ 10:11 pm 1 comments

 
Why All Bush Voters are Stupid. You know what they say... Stupid People = Stupid President.
- posted by Mark @ 8:09 pm 0 comments

 
Hello gang. Plenty blogging tonight. However, I should also give you some links...

a blog full of links to MP3's
Another blog full of MP3's
Lots of rare Franz Ferdinand stuff

Oh, and if you want find MP3's on the web insert words like ""index of/mp3" -playlist -html -lyrics " into Google.

be careful, some porn sites are adding the phrases "mp3" into their pages so Googley brings them up in the search engines.

Oh, and please read this.


- posted by Mark @ 6:46 pm 0 comments

 
Happy New Year Everyone.



(this picture shamelessly stolen from The Urban Fox).

We're not going out and so will probably be blogging again shortly. Stay Beautiful, everyone.
- posted by Mark @ 4:26 pm 0 comments

 
And so onto another issue I’ve been thinking about.

“Digital Rights Management”.

DRM is the big buzzword that’s been running around, especially around anyone whose been using iTunes recently. In case you are not familiar, for iTunes, you buy the music as an “album” for about £7.99 (or 79p per song, which is ridiculous, as most albums have way over ten songs these days, and a 79p per four minute song works out at 20p per minute).

Now for that 79p iTunes files, what do you get? First of all, it’s in the proprietry AAC format : a format that only works on an iPod. (There are file convertors out there, and I have one, but it was a bugger to find, and no doubt iTunes will suppress all such freeware shortly). So whilst you can save it as an AAC file onto a CDR, you can’t use it to burn the music file onto a music CD, or much else.

It being an AAC file, it’s also assigned a ‘special’ activation key that ties up with your iTunes account and your iPod. Want to play it on your CD player? Want tp transfer it to a different iPod when your old one dies? No chance.

Imagine then, you buy a DVD. Not only does that DVD only play on your DVD player, but that you can’t even dump a copy of the content onto a video tape. (Anyone who has children and a DVD of a kids film will know how frustrating this is).

As far as I’m concerned, when you pay for something, it’s yours. You own it. You have the right.

Like any management bullshit, “Digital Rights Management” is no such thing. DRM is precisely the opposite : the restriction of rights to a narrow band of what can be described as – at best – restrictive use. This is why I am, until it is generally no longer possible, buying “hard” format CD’s and downloading non-restrictive MP3’s : there I own the song, and I can do what I want with it. If I want to put it onto a CDR compilation for a friend I can. If I change iPods, I’ve still got the music.

(and home taping isn’t killing music, it’s selling music : like Nick-O-Teen, a homemade compilation gives you a taste for free).

The big problem comes up in a couple of years, when iPods start to die, and people have to buy new ones. People will find huge amounts of their music will be unplayable. Expect an enormous backlash and also decoding/cracking programmes to runa round the net like wildfire. (At the moment, for example, the unreleased studio tracks from “The (IN)complete U2” iTunes box set are racing over the net : it can be done, and there’s no way in hell I’m paying £119 to get 10 unheard songs. I’ve downloaded them, and they’re not very good songs, full stop.)

A friend of mine has bought about a thousand songs over iTunes. What happens to those songs when he changes iPods is going to be a major issue for him. Unless of course, iTunes work out a way of assigning “user numbers” for individuals to iTunes instead of iPod/machine/PC specific ID codes. As far as I’m concerned, if you’ve bought the music, the music is yours. If friends of mine want to drop in and add any CD I own onto their iPod they can do : I know them well enough to know they bought the vinyl albums in the 80’s, the cassettes and the CD’s in the 90’s : did you buy “Murmur” on cassette in 1985? You bought the songs then. Have them now. They’ve still got the music. The iPod is a frame : That’s all it is. Another playback mechanism. Cassette, CD, 8-Track. I don’t care : if you bought the music then, you can copy it off me now. Because you paid for the music.

And music is what it’s all about.

- posted by Mark @ 1:19 pm 1 comments

 
Since it's New Years Eve, what are your plans?

Tonight we were tempted with going out, but the fact that it is New Years Eve has actually Detempted us. The streets will be full of enforced jollyness, people drinking to try to get laid, or to try and forget they're not getting laid, the streets full of men & women that I don't really like, after all, since when has intoxication been any good : the world is full of people who are on a mission to have a good time, and where that happens they'll inevitably be fights, puking, and hopefully a bit of romance. But since we are six months pregnant (cripes! six months!), and wallking ten minutes is difficult, we won't be going out. What's the point? Something that is hard enough in the first place (that is, going out), being compounded by the sheer number of people, multiplied by the likelihood of drunks./vomiting/fights means that we are staying in. Great shame, as Ellen's favourite band, The Concretes, are supporting Saint Etienne, who she also loves, eight miles away.

So 2004, in retrospective? It's just another year, really. A year ago I lived somewhere else, with someone else, and this year, I'm living with Ellen, in another place, with our baby on the way, and I've actually, never been happier. New Year Eve : I remember what I was doing for each of them, and whilst most of them I used to go out and get horrendously drunk to tolerate the company - (bad bands, wankers I thought were friends, priest, vicars, and so on and so forth) - now I'm goingt o stay in. Which is going to be brilliant.

Besides which, New Year's is like Christmas, the more you have the less bothered you are about them.

Cunt Of The Year? Pete Doherty of The Libertines. (Here's a discussion about him...). Now, I don't know him, I haven't met him, I haven't heard much of his music, though I did see The Libertines after he was thrown out - and they were pisspoor and woefully average in every respect. What do I know about him? He's been thrown out of one band for consistently being a smacked-out non-shower, and his other band, the aptly titled Babyshambles, have only played one show out of their last four. Of those three no-shows, he failed to arrive at the venue for two of them - including a 1,700 capacity headline show at the London Astoria, the type of venue most people would give their eyeteeth to play. (In fact, Matt Terry, singer of Dharma Drive, told me taht supporting a band at a venue that size was the best night of his life, whilst Pete Doherty can't be bothered to leave his smackedup stupor to even do the gig. That shows you which one of those two has more talent..)

Imagine you've got two huge-selling albums, your band are consistently on the covers of the weekly inkies that are devoured across the world as the arbiters of cool (even if the NME doesn't know it's arse from it's elbow there), your touted as an genius by thousands, - what do you do? DO you realise your ambition, make great records, and live the dream? Or do you sit in a squat, break into people's flats to get crack money, and sit in a drugged out junkie stupor trying to crowbar your constipated genius out of your useless brain like a fucked-up-hooker? What reason has Pete Doherty got to take drugs? Supressed child memories? That he's a rent boy? or is it that he's a stupid junkie loser who can't seperate myth from reality?

Myth = Drugs make you cool and creative
Reality = Drugs are for dickheads

Yep, Six months in prison for breaking into your lead-guitarists flat is so glamourous. Dickhead. I'm currently watching his Newsnight interview, where he tries to work out where his creativity comes from. Bollocks. Creativity comes from nowhere. It's either in you or it isn't. You can't force it. It's like taking drugs to unleash your inner footballer. (Though, to unleash your inner sportsman you probably have to sleep with hookers and crash cars).

It's bullshit. Seeing him I just get the feeling of a bewildered, fucked up useless idiot whose merely a shadow of what he used to be, and is too stupid/self-absorbed/selfish to try and save his thin slice of talent in favour of chasing some romantic notion of the fucked up junkie. There are millions of people who would give all they had to be in his position, being in a successful band with massive sales, a healthy live following... but anyone can be a junkie.

"Just another junkie loser" as the song goes.

Anyone who doesn't turn up to play in front of thousands of people, and consistently amkes a habit of it, is a fucking dickhead who deserves to go back to the day job. Watch the interview, and he comes across as a naive middle-class wanker whose completely up his own arse, self-absorbed in a world where he is a genius, believing the hype, and calling his former bandmate "His Highness" (or some other phrase). Let's play Fantasy Funerals 2005. Whose going to miss another talentless junkie?

(At least Kurt Cobain could write decent songs, fact fans).


- posted by Mark @ 9:36 am 0 comments

 
As earlier promised, here's the link to my third-and-a-halfth novel on my website. It's not very good, but its there if you want it.

I tidied up the side bars, added a few links, have a look, and enjoy. (And sorry for the spelling mistakes, by the way but I am lazy and can't be bothered to fix it).
- posted by Mark @ 9:02 pm 0 comments

 
Ok, well since you asked….

Chuck Palahniuk, writer of Fight Club,Survivor,Invisble Monsters, Choke, Lullaby,Diary and Stranger Than Fiction, has a theory, one which he borrowed from Bret Easton Ellis, that any writer worth reading doesn’t publish his first, or his second, or even his third novel : Bret Easton Ellis reckons that before any writer shows anyone his cretaive works he must write at least 250,000 words – and keep them firmly locked in a box labelled “My Dark Secrets”*

(* at least half of that sentence was a complete lie, by the way, guess which part).

Which is why I am particularly critical of J K Rowling. It seems as if she just sat at her computer and wrote a very long short story (with the same level of skimping-on-detail that any short story would have). Now, I know that these are children’s books, but that doesn’t mean you need to write at a particularly low level : a good children’s book (for the Potter target age range 9-14) could, in the hands of a good writer, translate to the world of adults without an adult reader feeling in any way above or beyond the words used, or, for that matter, feeling “I could do better”.

When I read vast portions of the early Harry Potter books, I knew I had done – and junked – better work. Admittedly, I was aiming for a slightly more mature, or, I prefer, more capable audience, but that isn’t really the point. A good writer would ensure that a children’s book would work for ages 9-14, or children of all ages 9-90. If you want an example of how a writer can communicate with all ages, look at Animal Farm.

When I was at University, I did a course on George Orwell. He was a contemporary writer – or as contemporrary as any on the course – and I didn’t like the idea of studying Dworkin’s punctuationally challenged, morally-skewed work. (Even consensual sex is rape according to her bile-tract called “Mercy”, which exhibits none on the reader).

Nonetheless, Orwell as a writer is excellent. Not easy, but always easily understood : unfortunately it made the particular course I was on absolute hell. There was little subtext to be gleaned from his work, he always made everything absolutely clear as day. I couldn’t do my usual thing of extrapolating ideas and imagery and turning it into 2:2 grade-winning waffle. Working on Orwell was like pulling teeth.

Anyway, after finishing University, with a head full of ideas, a pitiful dolecheque, and no Internet, therefore endless days of tedium, I locked myself in my teenage bedroom with a Amstrad 256 (in those days, Windows was in it’s infancy, it was, Just Another Operating System, one with a slight advantage over the rest, but still Nothing Fancy), and I wrote. About 160 pages later, I emerged in the blinking sunlight, wit my first novel.

It isn’t very good. So Not Very Good, I decided to print off a few copies, and then never really read it. I can’t even remember what it’s called. Oh yes, “Nowhere Else To Go”. How juvenile is that? Well, very. Though it manages to reasonably imitate/emulate the pre-millenial sense of confusion that we all lived through at that particular time, where we felt that life was changing and so on and so forth. I couldn’t really reproduce it, short of retyping every page, as the Amstrad OS is long dead, and only Dead Tree Editions exist. If I retyped it, like my other work, I would end up massively rewriting it so it would be almost good. Almost.

Incidentally, Chuck Palahniuk’s “Invisible Monsters” is actually his first ‘proper’ novel, but rewritten and massively reworked, so when it actually did get published, as his third novel, it was a noticeable step down in competency, though it did buy Chuck enough time to craft the wonderful “Choke” and yet still get away with a novel a year. A workrate that I would not envy. If I were a full time writer, I would probably publish a novel every 18-24 months, alongside frequent contributions to magazines to keep the coffers flowing.

So… back to “Nowhere Else To Go”. In effect it’s a plotless ramble of a twenty something who works in a comic shop, has a bit of meaningless sex, and one day decides to disappear… albeit, the disappearance only goes as far as him not going to work for the day, at which point I couldn’t think of an ending and left it at a cliffhanger. (Or a ledge hanger, being that there is no drama worthy of being defined a ‘cliff’ within it). I tend to think of it as being realistic, in so much as some portions of it are generally unexciting and lacking a definable plot. (In the same way that “Less Than Zero”, and the entire ouevre of Coupland, until “Miss Wyoming” is largely a plotless wonder).

“Nowhere Else To Go” was amongst my first 250,000 words. So was it’s followup, “Better Than Nothing”. At least this one had a plot, albeit a primitive one. I decided to really branch out with this one : during the day I was working as Officially “The Lowest Paid Journalist In England” – though I only discovered I actually held this lowly title this year when, on a business trip and reading a boredom-breaking copy of some entlemans magazine, a poll of the worst jobs in Britain revealed a person presumably working in the same place on the same wages. Anyway, “Better Than Nothing” was a multinarrative twenty something drama of three friends, all narrated without any precursor (so you never knew, one page to the next, who was writing), who lived in some nameless city, about their interactions, and their actions. There were a couple of other narrators, one being a depressed housewife who was verging on psychosis who had developed an unhealthy obsession with one of the male leads, and lived a fantasy life. If you must know, this was inspired by people who think they are married to popstars. Another narrator was a incompetent serial killer who occasionally abducted and murdered people : in this case a female friend of the main trio who had gone missing.

Anyway, there’s the usual tyrsts of love, lovelessness, twenty something should-mean-something-but-means-nothing sex, the type of sex that happens when you believe in the Big Big Love, but only find suburban disappointment. The sixth narrator is a dying woman, the mother of one of the characters, fading in and out of consciousness.

The day job was exhausting : I averaged 4,000 words a day of advertorial bullshit, internal politics by a series of incompetent idiots who believed that since they were the Husband-Wife Team that ran the office we were their slaves (as were paid an equally insulting amount), and often worked 60 hour weeks. Unable to quit, and with them renging on their promises to pay me an amount which I felt hesitant to take in the first place, I found myself another job as soon as I could, because the Dole doesn’t pay for six weeks if you leave willingly, irrespective of the circumstances. In effect I was being paid 67% of an amount I was hesitant to accept.

So, Steve and Lorraine Anstey, you are cretinuous cunts. No wonder an ex-employee poured concrete through your letterbox. I can’t say I was surprised.

After this, I worked at night, came home, stuck on a bad record – usually “The Second Coming”, which I loved dearly – it being the spring-summer of 1995, and typed my life away. Any fool can think of words that rhyme. I abandoned it at about the 70 per cent mark in mid 1995, thoroughly haunted by the plot of the Dying Mother.

My Mum was a two and a half heart attacks, and week to week, she looked frailer and weaker. It was too much to come home to see her dying by default over the course of years, and to travail upstairs and type it out as a fictional output.

In the summer of 97, I finished it at long last. It seemed pointless to come so far, and jump at the last hurdle. How good it was I’m still not convinced, but a quantam leap beyond the first work. There I could crawl. Now I could walk. I’d even introduced a plot. Stunning stuff, but it made for a satisfactory conclusion and an overall worthwhile work that was, frankly, not suitable for public consumption.

Finally, unpublished novel number three. It’s called “Secret World” and posits a sci-fi level plot. This one is all concept. God has retired to a village outside Coventry as a twenty-something, immortal, largely immoral playboy. There he lives a life of hedonism and disdain for the world, in a similar vein to say, a brainwashed character in The Matrix. I forget his name, but he’s played by the same guy whose in the under/over-rated Memento.

Finally he’s spurred into action by ecological disaster : mankind is due to wipe itself out by destroying a species that contains the cure for a mass plague. Mankind, having grown fat, and our enzymes lazy and unable to fight disease due to a reliance on prescription chemicals, is wiped out by a plague. The cure is on an island, and the place where the cure resides, in the genes of a small insect, is due to be demolished for holiday homes. This was largely inspired by a holiday with my parents I failed to enjoy, enforced twenty-something holidays with your parents, they book places with nightclubs, not realising that for me, a holiday involves late lie-ins, an absence of sublight when asleep, and being nowhere near nightclubs that were open til 4am. As a result I often came back off holiday more tired than when I departed.

I couldn’t work out an ending, so this one stalled at about 50 pages, when they flew off to the nameless foreign resort. It worked well as a short story, but nothing more.

Oh, and then novel Three-And-A-Half. It’s on my website. I’ll post a link.

And finally, my fourth novel. “Wake Up Dead Man”. I’m all written out for now, so maybe I’ll post about that later.






- posted by Mark @ 1:12 pm 3 comments

 
I dreamt about drowning. I dreamt that I was in an old building, an ancient stone theatre, the type with walls of off-white stone, of odd-shaped alcoves and of curves. I dreamt, somewhat oddly, that we were seated, crosslegged, like a school assembly, that there was a band playing who came on stage in horses.

Out of the corner of my eye, as it was daylight, I could see the thin blue line at the horizon, and it was taller that it used to be, topped by a thin white undulating bar. Tidal wave. It happened quicker than I could react. A wave demolished the wall behind the stage, flooded the room, and rose to me in three seconds. Like many others I climbed. Not all were so lucky. I reached the roof, and there I could survey the flood as it swept through the rest of the city, the alleyways and market stalls turning to a muddy brine, the people and detritus of wood and market goods swept away until it could no longer be seen.

The water, having eventually subsided then was sucked back into the sea, as all floods are, the sudden loss of pressure in the centre results a vaccum, and they suck. (Think of a bad James Cameron/Leonardo DiCaprio film, if you must). From my waterlogged, shellshocked vantage point of a roof sodden as people drowned below, air turning to water in their lungs, muscle turning to weight, people to statistics, I turned to see the corpses of ships exhumed from the ocean floor by the tsunami, the earthquake tidal wave, floating awkwardly for a brief second as they were deposited by the waves on the beach as the water could no longer carry them, they sat on a grave of silt and deckchairs. And then the ships were sucked back. I was sucked back too, the world became blue and wet and sound became merely an undifferentiated swirl of white noise.

Water filled my lungs, my nose, my eyes, my ears, I opened my eyes to see the ships floating again, the buildings torn apart around me, people ripped limb from limb and become merely natures puppets, and things went dark and light at the same time.

And I woke up.

- posted by Mark @ 10:56 am 0 comments

 
Inspired by this blog, we were overheard today. I was in a bookshop with Mark, and we were looking at the Harry Potter books. I explained to Mark that yes, I have read the books. The reason being simple : there was a time, at the height of Potter mania, when some of my prospective partners (some of whom later become actual partners), insisted that I read the books so that we too could have conversations about Potter.

"I had to read all the books, so I could get laid." I said to Mark.

"That was a hardship." said a woman as she left the bookshop and passed us.
Shit! Overheard.

A very astute comment - and unlike mostr comments I couldn't read what she really meant. Even if, by the 714th page of Harry Potter and The Incredibly Long Fifth Book In The Series, I couldn't decide if it was actually worth the effort. It was a hell of an effort.

Oh, and for the record, the first two books are shit : poorly written, and in need of judicious and massive editing. To me, they felt like the first two novels she had written : and the first two novels anyone writes are not worth reading, unless you're brilliant - and J K Rowling isn't brilliant.

I've written four novels by now. The first three aren't very good : the fourth is, with some careful editing, possibly worth reading. I'll tell you more about them if you like. (You know what the comments box is for).

Oh, and thanks for reading.
- posted by Mark @ 8:34 pm 3 comments

 
Hello hello.... Every U2 fan should read this. or, and Flight 93 was shot down..

So much for 'The Official Version'.

Oh, and if you like Suede, The Tears or Bernard Butler.... click here to download their first gig.
- posted by Mark @ 7:07 pm 0 comments

 
$35 million America? Is that all? After the biggest natural disaster of all time, which saw at LEAST 100,000 people dead - and that figure is only CONFIRMED dead in the hospitals. Streets, Alleys, everywhere is awash with bodies and rubble. Indonesia. Sri Lanka. Thailand. Malaysia. Burma. India. Maldives. Bangladesh. Seychelles. Kenya. Tanzania. Maldives. All levelled by tidal waves up to thirty feet high.

3 million people lack basic essentials. 1.5 million homeless. 2,000 tourists missing : we always mention how many Americans or Britons or Australians are missing. Which is just pissing in the wind. I don't care about 67 missing Brits. I care about 3,000,000 people. If you want to imagine that, think of ten times the number of people who can get into Knebworth. Or half of London. Tribes, languages, whole species have been made extinct. We do not control nature. We are here only through nature's unwitting leniancy. Homo Sapiens has survived only through chance.

Shame on you America. Should this have happened in say, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, you, Dubya would be bleating on national television begging for handouts. Don't bite the hand that feeds. You were lucky.

The BBC have some emails from people who were there : read these. pt 1, pt 2, pt 3 and yet another account and here's a link to some video of the tsunami. It's the biggest quake in history. We've been lucky most quakes happen on land, really... Each part is a seperate link.

Here's some other links...

21 Questions Bush will never answer.... , Bush may have had a stroke (and who would be surprised given his recent speeches?, Further proof that man is not only a virus, he writes Viruses, and here's some general paranoia and .something about global warming. In the meantime, Tibetan monks are fiercely debating their vision that aliens are due to land in 2012 to forestall the impending ecological disaster.

Like the existence of God, the jury is out until I see it with my own eyes.
- posted by Mark @ 6:34 pm 0 comments

 
The first day back at work. Well, not for me. I'm laid up with a cold, a runny nose, a blocked throat, a headache, mucus pouring into my mouth from somewhere and so I'm really really not up to commuting. Dial in, Turn on, and show up.

Last night, I uploaded all my songs onto the iPod. Despite saying 40gb on the tin, (and thus, me mercilessly shaving my collection to the 8019 songs I want the most, which sounds like a lot, because it is, and there you are), since I am working a PC, I actually have 37.13gb. Wish they'd mentioned that on the box, I wouldn't have spent so long uploading songs I don't have space for. In the meantime, it spends several hours transferring via a USB port, so I am netless. My taste however, is, as always, immaculate.

Apparently iPod's are this Christmas' really Big Gift. Like Buzz Lighteyar in 1995, and the Tickle Me Elmo in 1998. The period as an iPod widow are, for teh most part, over, thankfully. When everything works, my first test is always to put on New Order performing True Faith (1998 Peel Session version, geeks), as it has the full range of sounds I like to check. Live drums, squelchy synths, crunchy guitars, and that bass sound. (Incidentally, if you ever want to make a fortune, sell one of those basses to Peter Hook, he pays big money for them as they are his signature sound, and he has 6 of the 40 or so left in the world, alongside a set of hard-to-find, expensive-to-repair, obscure sound pedal thingy's).


A 14 year old heavily pregnant girl was murdered in Telford, and when I read this, it puts Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING into perspective. Sadly, the girl was last seen "wearing a pink tracksuit, white T-shirt and white Kappa trainers". Thus, I can't help but think either Vicky Pollard, or chav scum. Truly dreadful as murder is, our prejudices don't help. When I read that sentence I probably thought, hmm, slutty chavver, which is utterly wrong.

I suppose all of us are, at some point in our lives, slightly chavvy : even if it is only naivety that makes it so. A regular haunt of mine in Birmingham has this to say on it's website :

"We don't want the "chav" crowd ruining the nights at Snobs, just the happy, friendly good time people to come along have the best time they can... So if you're the type to wear football tops, caps, Rockport, Burberry, or Hackett you probably won't get in!"

It also has a sign on the window, which I may post a picture of up shortly. Look what I found..



Did I ever tell you Orange is my favourite colour?

Oh yes, I know about the Tsunami. I'm just unable to formulate a response.
- posted by Mark @ 8:52 am 0 comments

 
I did post yesterday, some largely incohrent rant about television. TToday friends will be visiting, I will be finalising the Great iPod Loadup, and vegetating. There is no music by James, Therapy?, Rollins Band, Mogwai The Clash, Iron Maiden, or The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy on my iPod, simply because there is not enough space. How can that be, you say? I have too many songs. Even with my current policy (1 copy of every song by every band, occasionally a remix or a live recording), I have breached the 40gb limit, and thus am now slowly shunting off crap b-sides, live songs, and the odd compilation.

Today's really bad idea : trying to herd a rabbit into his hutch during a hailstorm at 2am.
- posted by Mark @ 1:17 pm 2 comments

 
Here's a quick rant.

Modern Television is shit. Absolutely appalling dogshit. Feed us crap. Go ahead. Lowest common denominator, braindead rubbish designed to reel in viewers. Here we have "reality" television, where people are stuck together with irritating personalities, designed entirely to clash and row. There's no point, just to create disharmony. Watch as fat people are laughed at and starved! Watch as teenagers are made to sleep in tents in the middle of noweher as they are 'unruly'! Grimace as some hopeless starfucker warbles out of tune some piece of shit song thinking eh gets famous, whilst some pigbrained fuckhead (yes, Simon Cowell, you shit), smugly cacakles and looks down on the rest of the world... though we all know that if he ever 'sang'; it would sound like Shane McGowan gargling tar surrounded by tone-deaf seals.

The vast majority of what constitutes for 'entertainment' is bullshit. It doesn't entertain, it doesn't inform, it insults. It wastes time. Producers throw millions at rubbish bollocks like "Blade Vs Hellboy" whilst there's millions of great movies that go unmade, or unwatched. Culture is dumb. When you get to the end of your life, you look at what you've done, and if your greatest achievement is "Eric Goes To Camp", you're a cretinous, vaccuous cunt who's a waste of oxygen.

Hell. I didn't even mention the fucking crap Ford Focus advert taking the piss out of Fashion Designers. As if we didn't know Fashion Designers are empty brain-dead twats with no idea of anything that's actually important. Hell. Get me on "Pop Idol" as a judge. I'll make it worth your while.


- posted by Mark @ 11:39 pm 0 comments

 
As I am a hopeless plaigarist, (and that isn't the name of a Fall album, what is), and today has consisted of sleeping, napping, hiding under the duvet listening to Ellen's CD's, and bugger all else, I present to you, as roadtested by Di and Graham...

QUIZ#1:-

THREE NAMES YOU GO BY:
1. Mark
2. Er...
3. Er.....

THREE SCREEN NAMES YOU HAVE HAD:
1. mark-reed
2. thedomesticterrorist*
3. terrorist_faction*
*these last two are embarassing, and if I could Stalinify history, I would.

THREE THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. My good taste
2. My friends
3. My life

THREE THINGS YOU HATE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. My eyes
2. My bad memories
3. My ever-growing facial hair

THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE:
1. English (unknown, though possibly US - my dad was adopted)
2. I really really really don't care, it ain't where you're from, it's where you at

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU:
1. the future
2. anything with more than two eyes
3. people who don't think about other people

THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS:
1. food
2. sleep
3. the news

THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW:
1. Fluffy grey top that Elvis likes
2. trousers from Old Navy in Chicago
3. black socks. I never have any socks that aren't black. Colour matching is easy.

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE BANDS/ARTISTS (at the moment):
1. new order
2. leonard cohen
3. rem
(this list changes every five minutes)

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE SONGS AT PRESENT:
1. I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday - Morrissey
2. The Next Life - Suede
3. Regret - New Order

THREE NEW THINGS YOU WANT TO TRY IN THE NEXT 12 MONTHS:
1. Be a good dad
2. buy less stuff
3. find what is important in life

THREE THINGS YOU WANT IN A RELATIONSHIP (love is a given):
1. respect
2. honesty
3. fun

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE*
1. my life keeps getting better and better
2. reality television is exploitative cruelty
3. chavs are the pinnacle of human evolution

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS ABOUT THE OPPOSITE SEX (or same) THAT APPEAL TO YOU:
1. oh come on, i don't kiss and tell.

THREE THINGS YOU JUST CAN'T DO:
1. commuting
2. speak my mind the way I want to sometimes
3. respect bureauracy

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES:
1. writing. my ex-wife always used to take the piss and say "tap tap tap" because I typed so much. she was full of shit.
2. herding cats
3. hoovering

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW:
1. ice cream
2. get the cheque for £500,000
3. find out why my hair always looks rubbish

THREE CAREERS YOU'RE CONSIDERING:
1. if you do anything long enough it becomes a career

THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO ON VACATION:
1. heaven
2. more america
3. mainland europe

THREE KID'S NAMES
1. we've already chosen ours

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE:
1. be the best person I can
2. see our child grow up
3. conquer the world's problems.

I did not answer the last one "someone who accepts me as I truly am" for a reason. Love isn't about remaining stubbornly the same. Love is about change. It's about the compromise of one person as an island becoming part of two people who are working together. Which is why I hated the end of "High Fidelity", because at the end of it, He hasn't changed at all. He got dumped because he was emotionally constipated and loved his records, and then she came back, even though he was still the same stuckup emotionally blocked twat he always was, and she came back because she started going out with a crap Kung Fu Wanker, so he looked great by comparison. Maybe he wasn't so bad by comparison. But what was the point of the movie then? His character had no arc, and was all about having a girlfriend as a trophy, not as a person.

So there you go : I don't want someone to accept me as I truly am : after all, even Hitler wanted to be loved. And if one person was able to call him up an dsay "Hang on. wtf are you going on about" things could've been different. I want to be the best person I can. And being the best person you can makes the world a better place. Goodnight.
- posted by Mark @ 10:48 pm 0 comments

 
If it's Christmas, it means time for a Traditional Family Christmas. And that means the Traditional Christmas Family Argument.

My Dad is lecturing One Of His Sons about how You Know Where You Went Wrong * (yes, I know that is the name of a very old, obscure Pet Shop Boys song). Now, whenever my Dad says things like this, he immediately sounds like he's telling you off, even if he isn't, but it's just the way he got used to talking to people. You Know Son, You Should Be Ruler Of The World By Now. What You Need To Do Is... SHUT UP DAD.

People don't like having their noses rubbed in it. And whats to say that these things aren't the things that people haven't already said to themselves?

After this, which sees an ineffectual Dad trying to reach out to his kids but ending up with him lambasting them, we listen to him bore us for thirty minutes talking about parking tickets, whilst frantic text messages fly across networks... "Help! Save Us!" we plead. Wheels screech over a motorway to salvage us.

Back to my brothers, where we talk rubbish, debate the security at Robbie William's Knebworth show, all manner of popculture rubbish, and eventually drive over to Mark's Mum And Dad (Mark being a friend I have known since I was 11 : he lives about a mile from here), where we play with pets, eat sweets, and have a lovely christmas.

Overall, a brilliant day. So much better than Christmas 1997, my last Christmas at my Dad's in Birmingham, which I spent sorting out all my bills. Oh, and Spike is my favourite British cat : Maeve is American. She even purrs with an accent, I reckon.

We have concluded that Jaws 4 : The Revenge is better than Jaws 3-D, because Dennis Quaid and Sammy Gosset Jr are no match for the acting talent of Michael Caine and Mario Van Peebles, and Supergirl is better than Superman IV because of Peter O Toole. Taht does not however, make Santa Claus:The Movie, any good. You knows it..

Night Night.
- posted by Mark @ 2:53 am 0 comments

 
"I'm going to die before you" she said.

I can't think of anything worse. For either of us.

For a long time, I've never felt like this. Before, in all my other relationships, I thought, fearing the worst, that if my partner died, I'd stumble on, somehow. That life would go on, that I'd survive somehow.

After she told me that today, I knew, instinctively, that it is probably true. Her health isn't as good as mine, and I'm instinctively passionate to live. Seeing my mother die at 51, and seeing her fight against three heart attacks, seeing her there screaming i'm dying i'm dying : that stuff never leaves you.

So now I'm like, Fuck You Death. I'm living. And you know, I can't see beyond her now. Without her, my life has no plot. There's no vision beyond that. With my other partners, I always thought, yeah, life goes on. But I don't know if I can get over that. But I'm going to live to about 4,012 if I have any say in the matter. And it's not that she hasn't the lust for life I do : it's that she's not built the same way I am, physically, and she's probably not going to last as long. I need less sleep, I do more, I burn like a fire. You've got to burn to shine.

This is not so morbid as you might think. I just hadn't considered the possibility of a life without her in it. It would feel wrong. As if my life had been stolen from me. As if somehow the journey had been interrupted : she's meant to go the whole way with me. Til Death Us Do Part.

Yes. Things could've been different. But when we met, how we met, who I met... these things all fell into place. It was almost as if there was nothing we could do to stop ourselves. It was as if two previously docile chemicals met, and suddenly the whole was more than the sum of the parts. And now we are pregnant. It's as if there was too much love between us for merely two people.

Soul-mates. A word that is often often overused, but I can't really think of any other way to describe us. It's not that we are identical, we're not, but we're different in ways that are a perfect fit for each other. Our strengths and weaknesses complement each other. We have our differences, but the great thing about our differences is that I awlays feel as if we are discovering new things : not bad things, new things. She always astounds me and interests me and I never forget that : in the midst of this we seem to be made for each other. As if we were designed to fit around each other, like a jigsaw made of two strange pieces that when you put them together both create something beautiful.

Thanks to Di for posting something very similar, but no doubt inspired by something far less morbid than a conversation that includes the words "I'm going to die before you and you're going to have to bury me".

Life with her is a journey, beautiful and fascinating. Long may it last.
- posted by Mark @ 1:39 am 2 comments

 
Happy Christmas, Aethiests.




- posted by Mark @ 9:27 am 1 comments

 
Have some Christmas links...

Portsmouth Uni uncover the true meaning of being human...and A Cool Game that has probably been on every blog ever...

And finally The Department for Culture, Media and Sport wants to levy fees of up to £50,000 to cover the cost of health and safety inspections. So let's not much about : The Government would charge £1 per punter to the promoter to check if the mass public event takes place and is safe? Bullshit. They've got professionals for that type of thing. I used to know a guy whow orked for the Governements HSE : he'd pre-book and cherry pick whatever concerts and sporting events he liked, visit them, then turn up at curry houses for meals, check chip shops. It was easy. You don't need a team of crack professionals to do those checks. It would take, at most, five people, even at say Robbie Williams at Knebworth, to do the necessary checks (we're talking checking an event for risks, not public order here, a fairly standard checklist of stuff to be ticked off, especially as most of the concerts happen in the same old venues : Wembley Arena, Tadworth Dog & Duck, etc...), and that's being generous. It's a license - and pure exploitation of the promoters - to cream off profits, and it'll end up costing us, the public, even more money.

And what the hell do our taxes pay for anyway?

- posted by Mark @ 6:55 pm 1 comments

 
I'm sticking on old Cure CD's into my iPod. Looking back at these, I'm surprised by how much detail we paid to things in those days. "The Head On The Door" is 37 minutes. (Morrissey's "Kill Uncle" is just 33 minutes). There wer esingles, yes, occasionally. If you were lucky you could afford the 12" at £3.29, which had two extra songs and maybe a remix. Possibly a 4-track 10". With a live song on. That normally came out a week later to keep it in the charts. The only time you heard about these bands were when a newspaper had an interview, or if you were a megafan, the band sent you a photocopied pamphlet with an interview in. Ah. The joy of fanclub magazines. And fan-run fanzines. Remmeber them? Selling £1 pamphlets done at Dad's photocopy shop after the gig?

These days there's almost too much stuff. Every single has about six b-sides (two for each of the three CD's, or 2 CD's and DVD, however), every artists has a website (and no doubt plenty of fansites), all chock full of interviews, information, forums, weird MP3's. Fansites have radio sessions, bootlegs of live shows days after they happen, the whole thing. About the only band nobody knows anything about is Guns'N'Roses, and that's because their website has three pages, they don't do interviews, play live, or anything.

There's an overdose of information.

On The X-Files I can see the wheels of an old cassette tape moving to indicate something is being recorded. How quaint. Nothing dates faster than time. More later.

M
- posted by Mark @ 1:00 pm 0 comments

 
oh sweet, delicious irony.
- posted by Mark @ 2:31 am 1 comments

 
At long last, I updated my vanity website... have some links of some gig reviews.

Morrissey - London Earl's Court - 18 December 2004

The Tears - London Heaven - 16 December 2004

Neds Atomic Dustbin - London Garage - 15 December 2004

Manic Street Preachers - London Wembley Arena - 09 December 2004

Now, you should also look HERE where these reviews also sit, in a different, less homemade frame.

OK. Bedtime now. Night night.

- posted by Mark @ 1:55 am 0 comments

 
Whoo hoo! A whole day without blogging. Or, more correctly, so what? Other things happen in life, things outside of this small screen, this virtual world. Today I did my bills : i went through them, sorted them, totted them up. There are so many : each individually small, together a mountain. I have set up direct debits for all my bills : I don't even see the money, the vast majority of my money disappears before I even see it, at least 80% of it.

In the meantime, a small pile of discarded letters and envelopes sits on my living room floor. On screen, Neo fights several thousand Agent Smiths in Matrix Rehashed, though I can't for the life of me imagine why there's this fight scene. The more I watch movies the more it becomes apparent to me that some films are far too long, and often, too often, utterly illogical. For example, the infamous "Burly Man" sequence in Matrix Reloaded where there's a gazillion agents. Why is that scene even in the movie? What purpose does it serve? Is just another fight scene to give people a cheap thrill, and overall, it cheapens the movie. Some movies it's almost as if there's a clockwatch saying "every 27 minutes get fighting".

The purpose is to tell a story : for it to work it must be logical. To have extraneous unnecessary scenes that don't tell the story? That's what a "Directors Cut DVD" is for, no matter how flashy it is. So why then, is there the Burly Man sequence? Lowest Common Denominator then, I presume. I can think of no other reason that makes any sense.

Of course, the action scenes are fab, if you like CGI and semi A-Team style fight scenes. But it's lazily storytelling : the embarassing "rave" scene, for example. Handy that there's a FFWD button on the DVD player. Whilst watching the underrated Terminator 3 yesterday I also thought, in a wild moment, hang on, why's this happen? When T-X is walking towards Claire Stiles, whyl, when it has adopted the guise of her fiance, why then would it change to the female Terminatrix body, when all it had to do was walk right up to her, hug herm and kill her? What a crap Terminator. I'd be so much better. Same with the scene where The Governator fights with his conflicting programming after being re-programmed by the T-X. Thanks God for the skip button. It's crap, crap, crap. The reprogramming is a good idea : the rest is bullshit.

Oh, We're on the Matrix Revoltions coatcheck shootout : a pointless remix of the scene at the end of the first Matrix movie. For all it's pretensi0ojns to be intelelctual super sci-fi, these films would do a whole let better without the sprinklings of utterly superflous violence you can practically set your watch by.

Modern films. All suface, no feeling. All special effects, no thinking. This is the "2 Fast 2 Furious" generation. Generation X-tinct more like.

- posted by Mark @ 1:29 pm 0 comments

 
OK. Here we go again.

The shroud of democracry and so called freedom falls. Those who would surrender freedom for security deserve neither. And so, yet another of our cherished freedoms falls. Now they can stop and search you at any time (as my brother well knows), and, should you not be carrying an expensive, and unnecessary ID card, no doubt they will fine you. If you can't pay the fine, then no doubt you will be imprisoned.

I can't think of any easier and faster way to clean the streets in a Hitlerian fashion than to, say, I don't know, stop every homeless person and imprison them for not having an ID card?

Yeah, I'm being paranoid, but only a paranoid really knows whats going on. That old cliche.

In the meantime, in the face of mass protest, flying firmly, obscenely in the face of public opinion, mass protest, and articulate response, the Government once again spits on the will of the people, fervently believing that it knows better than we do, as it always does, because we the people, are dumb and stupid and need ruling. (We elected them, right? How dumb and stupid, could that be).

Tony Blair said this in 1997 : (or something very like it, I have it on my hard drive, but can’t find it right now).. “We have been givena mandate to represent the will of the people and we will not forget it. We know that those that have given us power by voting, can also take that vote away”.

And yet he ignores the will of the people. His job is to represent the people. If he does not, we will represent ourselves. 2,000,000 people in the biggest public protest of all time, protesting against an illegal war that was started on a lie. 1,400,000 people (no matter how wrong they may be), protested against the abolition of fox-hunting. He ignored them too. Not he, They. The Government.

The arrogance of The Government to think that they, and only they are right, and more than that, to fly firmly in the face of mass, enormous public opinion, shows clearly that They are failing. That they are not representing the will of the people.

Now tell me this : what will an ID card prove? What will it prove that a driving licence, a passport, a bank card, will not? We’re already swimming in cards and identification documents. An ID card is just another piece of useless crappy plastic we don’t need and we will be forced to pay through the fucking nose for. Not only that, I do not think that an ID card will help us catch one terrorist. How could a database that stores my entire personal details, my name, my address, my facial dimensions, my fingerprints, my iris scan, stop terrorism, people trafficking, drug smuggling, and bad weather? It can’t. It won’t. No matter how clever the Government think they are, the sheer number of smart people who do not work for the Government means that the system will always be circumvented, counterfeited, and useless. In fact, if anything, the ID card has just created a new boon for counterfeiters… identity forgers… criminals.

Well done, Her Majesty’s Government. You fucked yourself. You gave our freedoms away for nothing. FOR NOTHING. Just like the war. Your utter contempt for the human beings that you claim, laughably, to represent, is apparent. A Government that thinks that a reasonable question is something like : “Would you agree to ID Cards instead if being blown to bits by evil robot terrorists?”

The Urban Fox has an excellent post on it, as does Swiss Toni.

I used to work for the Home Office. I’m glad I don’t. I couldn’t tolerate working in a place where they blatantly didn’t give a shit about anyone and anything except lucrative government contracts, a distorted sense of idealism that has perverted every left-wing idea ever in favour of a right wing, oppressive bullshit state, and a nation lead by fervently rabid religious zealots who oddly enough, only mention that Jesus is their co-pilot AFTER they are elected. We’ve lost so much already : the right to telephone and internet use without being monitored (hello GCHQ! How is the weather in Cheltenham?), the right to a lawyer, a fair trial, a reason for being arrest, the right to trial, the right to freedom of movement and association, the right to walk down the street without being stopped, searched, and harrassed. (And don’t dare thinking of answering back, the Democracry Robots have no sense of humour). We’ve also now lost the right to walk down the street without identification. What next? Yellow stars? Arresting and fining the homeless who can’t get ID cards? Any other of Adolf’s ideas you like, Mr Blair?

“Paint me a flag and tell me I’m free”.

- posted by Mark @ 7:15 pm 3 comments

 
Ok. Christmas time is here. Cliff Richard is singing in the shops. The shops are overflowing : it's only when I see this many people out and about I realise that it isn't that it's busy, it's just that most of the time this world is Not Busy. There's too many people in the world for the human imagination to fully comprehend and that these people clogging up the high streets, they don't just meagically appear at Christmas. They're always here, and always there, and there's just too many people. Normally there's a war, or a pestilence, or a famine, or something that keeps the population at relatively stable levels, but with the advent of Extinction level weapons and medicine, people just aren't dying in the numbers they used to. There's too many people, and somehow nature will restore the balance. Somehow.

Oh well. That's a cheery Christmas thought for you. In the meantime, I am watching "Raising Hell", the allegedly final Iron Maiden concert from 1993, before Bruce jumped ship. Thanks to charity shop DVD's, these historic, but crap Region-1 DVD is currently sitting in my DVD player, and it's crap. I'd forgotten how ridiculous the sight of forty year old men in denim and sleeveless t-shirts (to a man), all with adolescent bum-length permed hair, and all wearing t-shirts for their own band, were. Ths music mix is appalling too : the default 5:1 has a barely audible Bruce Dickinson, unless you have a super-expensive home stereo setup. (I don't). Of course, you can laugh at it or with it : as long as you laugh.



Oh. Did I mention "master illusionist" Simon Drake? A truly blunt magician who looks like some guy you went to school with who manages to pretend to have women growing out of his crotch, cuts the hands off the bands guitarist and generally behaves like starstruck, cretinous pub bore who hijacked a TV show : it's unsubtle, brain-dead, lowest common denominator shlock-horror from Hamer House Of Crud. Oh, and then he uses that guitarists disembodied robot hands to play a guitar solo which was pre-taped. Normally this would languish in VHS hell, but seen as the only stuff Woolworths stocks on VHS anymore are kids movies (hard, it is, to get jam on a video tape), it's the US DVD I'm watching. Oh. Look. the guitarist who had his hands cut off by a corporate magician has reappeared as if nothing had happened. How crap.

And the guy in the charity shop said I'd lost my credibility by buying a Robbie Williams CD to stick on Ebay. Oh my.

Don't even get me started on ID Cards.
- posted by Mark @ 4:05 pm 0 comments

 
"We need to get some butter and some jam the next time we go to the shops".

Now, what does that mean? It means next time you go to the shop you should get some butter and some jam because we haven't got much left. Ok. That's what it means. It doesn't mean "I've just eaten all the butter and all the jam", does it?

Hell no. Because if you'd just eaten all the butter and the jam, that's what you'll say, isn't it?

Not if you're a woman you won't.

I hereby sacrifice two pieces of lovely toast to the Bin God, as sacrifices to my mouth are not accepted unless they carry Butter and Jam. I am SO demanding.

- posted by Mark @ 5:05 pm 0 comments

 
How now Brown Cow?

*

And I remember an advert we saw a month ago on the way to the Airport before we went to see Ellen's relatives. "In the eye of the storm, I am still Jennifer Lopez", it said. What was it? J-Lo self improvement classes? "How To Lose Husbands and Influence Scorn"? Who are these people, these cretinous, useless cunts who dare to order that, should they walk past us in the corridor of whichever TV show they are on, that we cannot even look at them? (As if we would bloody want to). Divas, I hate the lot of them : no better than us, most of them jumped up and prone to the God of auto-tune, unable to write a song, or mean anything. The most sincere sing a diva would write would be "give give give me more more more".

What the hell do you, J-Lo, know about the eye of the storm? At best, you are a mediocre actress with a stillborn pop career and delusions at grandeur. At worst you an insufferably egotistic, talentless waste of the earth's resources. Apparently the tagline refers to her immaculate poise in the face of media harassment. Really? The same person who demands that no-one even look at her when she walks down the corridor at Top Of The Pops.

This link has a fab quote..."It means no matter what happens, I am 'still' myself. I am 'Still' Jennifer Lopez. But it also means that the game's not over yet. I am 'still' growing and 'still' working to do the best I can".

No, dear, you're still just Jenny from the block. The Lord Of The Blings.

*And I have no guilt about stealing/linking bandwidth from a commercial site advertising he rnew festering odor. All publicity is good, yeah?

- posted by Mark @ 1:16 pm 0 comments

 
20 Facts about US Voting.

Yep. You can export Democracy after you have a working model... ok?
- posted by Mark @ 1:05 pm 0 comments

 
"Cutting a little girls throat is like cutting warm butter"...

.... I'm watching Commando, which I haven't seen in some fifteen years. When I last saw it, it was back in the days of 4:3 Pan'n'scan VHS tapes. I used to watch the film all the time : like any emotionally stunted bloke who spent days at an all-boys schools, movies were real-life. For me this was the life that you just didn't see.

The days I watch it and think : piece of shit. Cliched, brainless, macho, piece of useless shit. Watch! As Arnold Schwarzenegger and his anonymous daughter pet random deer and eat ice cream and practice kung-fu and go fishing in the opening credits. Be astounded! As anonymous just-electrocuted Bad Guy tells us "I Feel Good!" as he mildly punches a condum stuffed with walnuts called Matrix... Try to find the Varese Sarabande Soundtrack Album! As Duran Duran offshoot "The Power Station" contribute a song that should never have been written over the generic end-credits, freeze framed as The Governator, bloodied, bruised, but unbowed, carries his daughter into the sea like a Cyberdyne Systems Cowboy.

It's like a widescreen videogame. You command John Matrix, an anonymous retired crack CIA assasin brought out of retirement for one last job. At stake : your kidnapped daughter, in return for you killing the anonymous Leader of some South American Banana Republic Country, called, say Eurasia.

Level 1 : Defeat Kidnappers and assasins at your ranch house
Level 2 : Escape from your kidnapper, the plane, the airport and steal a car
Level 3 : Trail the kidnapper and catch him
Level 4 : Pretend to be the kidnapper, and rendezvous with contact
Level 5 : Kill Contact
Level 6 : Rob Gun Shop
Level 7 : Escape Police Custody
Level 8 : Steal A Plane
Level 9 : Attack Enemy Compound looking for your daughter
Level 10 : Free daughter, and have a final showdown with anonymous, no doubt English, nemesis

And whilst you're at it, kidnap a girl, explain nothing, and expect her to follow you like a docile little puppy dog : if you're a cop or a kidnapper, every woman is a hooker or a whore, and every security guard chats women up with the promise of letting them watch him kick ass. If you're lucky you can shag him. You get bonus points for, amongst other things, wiping out several hundred anonymous South American Stuntmen, planting a handful of explosives with a near-atomic destructive power, perform expert murderous moves in a balletic synchronoisation with a dodgy mid-80's synth-and-kettle-drum soundtrack, liberal use of the word "motherfucker" and - for bonus points - come out with Bondesque quips.

"Blow Off Some Steam." "Get The Point". "I Let Him Go." "Right? Wrong." "I don't need no gun, John." "Go On, twist the knife." "No Chance."

Hell, it's even worse than a Bruce Willis movie. It's like watching Miami Vice : The Movie, except worse, for the ending sees the newly-born Nuclear Family of Bloodied Daughter, Automaton Superman, and Kidnapped Surrogate Mother fly off in the sunset to a bad metal soundtrack courtesy of ex-Duran Duran members.

All The Bad Guys have moustaches. Bill Dukes, Dan Hedeya, and Alyssa Milano all appear. My God. I am so glad I don't live in 1986 anymore.

- posted by Mark @ 11:44 pm 1 comments

 
MORRISSEY - London Earls Court - 18 December 2004


“I shudder when I hear the word comeback”, says Morrissey on the cover of this months Word magazine.

But if anyone has comeback this year, it must be Morrissey. Despite what he sang in “The Loop”… I just want to say I haven’t been away, I’m still right here, where I always was… the very idea of Morrissey headlining Earl’s Court – twice as big as any venue he has headlined in his home country, even when he returned after a five year absence from playing live, would seem the place where sex-mad lovers must stop and draw the line.

This then, is Moz 2004. Back off the ropes and into the fray, reborn on the tour trail, packing them in across the world. A chance to see your very own idol, In Person, in an enormodome near you. And you don’t get much bigger than the 20,000 capacity Earls Court.

He’s outlived Elvis, he’s outsung Sinatra, and he is the traditional Torch singer, recast in a modern mould. Witty, erudite, not ashamed to work the crowd, or to expose his weaknesses – though how much of his work is a fictional retelling of his own self-image is unclear – Moz is everything Elvis should have been. There’s still the grand gestures, the traditional shirt-thrown-into-the-adoring-crowd ritual, the touching of hands with the masses : Moz offers us some form of contact, yet we only ever get a brush with his messanic healing hands. It’s some respects it’s all tease, and yet in others, it’s all pleasing.

Arriving in incredible style, dwarfed by the 20 foot neon lights that spell out his name, Moz opens with “How Soon is Now?” and Earl’s Court suddenly becomes The World’s Biggest Teenage Bedroom. We all become lost in ourselves as he, and his six-piece band (a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, a guitarist/bongo/recorder player, and Mike V Farrell on keys, backing vocals, bongos, guitars, and pretty much anything else he can get his hands on), proffer forth Live! In The Flesh! A twenty year old song from a band that hardly anybody here actually saw.

The Smiths material is dispatched passionately but inauthetically – “There Is A Light” is played far slower than on record, and frankly it grinds to a halt about two-thirds of the speed of the record, which makes it for both a rousing mid-set peak, and yet also one that makes us miss The Smiths far more than we should do, because they played this song better. The three-guitar attack of “Bigmouth Strikes Again”, and the lush, epic closer of “Last Night I Dreamt” leave us gasping : as if we needed reminding how good he could be – and often still is. If for nothing else, twenty thousand people all singing in unison “and if a double decker bus should kill the both of us, to die by your side, the pleasure, the privilege is mine” is the type of moment that really should topple Governments.

The rest of the set is one third hit singles, one third b-sides and other obscure tracks, and one third Smiths tracks : something for everyone. But this fails to satisfy many in the cavernous arena : Moz neglects most of his canon of 24 solo singles (with just two of said 24 in the set), in favour of three b-sides and covers of Patti Smith and The New York Dolls that rest awkwardly on unfamiliar ears. In many respects this sabotages his triumphant finale, but we love him because of his faults as much as despite of them.

A year ago, Morrissey was a legend in exile : he hadn’t released a record in seven years, had toured to an ever more selective audience (and ever-increasing prices), and was looking – to all intents and purposes- like a man who hadn’t realised that his time was up. And now… this. Tonight, he was greeted with open arms, returning to London for the penultimate stop on his eight-month revival on the back of the frankly half-mediocre, half-brilliant “You Are The Quarry”.

But for the spartan, 75 minute set – which works out at about 50p per minute per punter including booking fees - you can’t help but feel cheated. So do you smile when you think about Earls Court? as he once sang. It could go on forever. It could all end tomorrow. In whatever case, we are blessed and cursed.

I have forgiven Jesus…he sings. And tonight, even for the brevity of his set, we have forgiven our Intellectual Elvis for being away so long. The world is full of crashing bores, and it would a poorer place without him.

Labels: gig reviews

- posted by Mark @ 8:52 pm 0 comments

 


Happy Christmas, and thanks to the paranoics bible, http://www.rense.com, for the pic.
- posted by Mark @ 7:05 pm 0 comments

 
Black Hawk Down 2004 : also known as No True Glory: The Battle for Fallujah, which is apparently a non-fiction work.

My definition of non-fiction involves things which aren't made up. Harrison Ford should be ashamed. I thought he was better. Still, what the hell was Ewan McGregor doing in "Black Hawk Down" anyway? I somehow doubt someone in Iraq would see the film the same way that someone in Oklahoma would. You'd both see Savages and Heroes, but which one is which would be rather subjective : would it be the Iraqi's who kill the Soldiers who crashland with helicopters and napalm, or is it the Soldiers who bring forth napalm and helicopters to kill the barbaric Iraqis?.

I tell you one thing : if some foreigners landed in my high street with Helicopters and napalm, I'd tear the little fuckers to shreds myself. Call me a barbarian too, but if they turned up at Major Dad's I'm sure he too would rip them to shreds : after all, freedom is an opinion after all. I don't like the thought of people who live in completely different cultures telling Me what is Best For Me. What's Best For Them, that's what they'll tell me.

It's all opinion. I might very well get on my soapbox about The States. Where were America in 1939, and 1940? Selling stuff to Us and The Germans at the same time. After all, History is always written by the Victors. If America hadn't come and saved our useless Limey Asses in 1941 (two years late, better late than never), we'd all be speaking German and watching "God's Will : How The Glorious Patriotic Nazi's Rid The World Of Kike Yid Vermin".

No matter that Hitler decided not to invade in 1940. No matter that in 1941 his biggest tactical error was to invade Russia and the Egypt at the same time whilst simultaneously trying to keep France, Poland, Belgium, et.al., invaded. No matter that Hitler had given up invading the UK Mainland years ago.

That's damn right, we'd all be talking German if it weren't for America's altruistic war policy in 1941. No matter that they didn't begin helping other nations until say, 7 December 1941 when someone bombed Pearl Harbour in an act of militarily shrewd, but hardly-unexpected*, devastingly effective but utterly vile attack.

* some would say that Pearl Harbour was by no means a surprise, utterly avertable, and yet the military top brass chose to turn a blind eye to justify entering a way.

Anyway, probably the best way of working out how some of America feels is to compare Band Aid vs USA For Africa singles. We asked , "do they know it's christmas?" they said "we are the world".

At least Band Aid showed some intelligence when it came to naming the 'group'. USA For Africa is so.. prosiac.

Now, which lyric shows more concern?



- posted by Mark @ 6:28 pm 1 comments

 
Blunkett: I'm a working class victim of the rich, appartently. Really? I thought it was because he was a corrupt, unfit politicians crusading about moral values whilst sticking his wick in other people's wives, harassing pregnant women in court, fast-tracking Visa applications, being corrupt, giving away travel documents, and generally abusinga position of power like a Tomcat pissing on it's property. Here's a couple of blogs about it :clicky and clacky. Have fun.
- posted by Mark @ 1:20 pm 1 comments

 
Textbook disclaimer stickers. Fabulous. Click Now! Ask Questions Later!
- posted by Mark @ 12:37 pm 0 comments

 
Some people don't like my review of The Tears show. Most of them haven't actually heard the band yet : in fact about 2,500 people have (the sum total of their live audience, thus far). Some of the comments people have made I've been unable to formulate a response to, as they seem to be obtuse and unrelated to what I'm going on about.

Beside which, music is, and always as been subjective. If there some formula of say "guitar x 2 + flange + vocals x echo / weird lyrics + good drummer = ace pop" everyone would be doing it, and music would be a scientifically produced bland formula. Music is about whatever works for you, and whatever makes you feel good. If you can't find something in it that doesn't make it good or bad, merely opinion. And that's my opinion. I didn't like The Tears. I wanted to, I've liked everything they've done prior to this, but it didn't work for me. Oh well.

Elsewhere some people have jumped upon my writing style, which is normally what happens when people don't like what I'm saying, but don't know how to disprove me. It's like saying "the acting is bad" in a film, when they merely dislike the film. ( "Phantom Menace", anyone?). There's only so much you can do with the source material.

Talking of which, I wasn't the only one who didn't like the gig. I know of at least 3 or 4 other people, some of whom who came from Sweden and Holland, who thought it wasn't very good. No smoke without fire, eh?

It always reminds me of when I was working as a journalist in Bimingham. The advert said wages were a unenviable 10k, but as the job progressed, it turned out they started putting lots of strings onto that figure. In the end I was earning about 5k, tied up with various algebraic strings and performance targets and other subjective bullshit that was largely a reason to stop paying me even a basic wage : every director thinks that paying someone half the amount to live for a year, than they pay other peopel to live on for a year. That's cuntish.

When I tried to get paid the amount they said they would, I was accused of "extortion". People, man. Sometime they're just plain odd. Even me. As one guy I know said "I hate the thought I'm working my nuts off and barely getting by whilst the director is planning his next Porsche."
- posted by Mark @ 11:58 am 0 comments

 
SwissToni's Place: War, friend only to the undertaker reminded me of something : in recent times, only politicians who have never actually served in a war have started one. Churchill for example, if I remember correctly, came to power during the war. And Hitler did fight in WWI, but was clearly a nutter. Anyone whose been in a war would pretty much bend over backwards to stop one.

On another note, two quick short things, A New York Escorts Confessions is a damn good, but racy, blog.Probably not suitable for any of you who haven't had sex yet. (And if you haven't yet, chances are you probably will not that long from now, even if it does feel like an age).

And finally, thank you Windows. When I'm typing something, I love it when you change windows so I have lost what I just typed. Isn't technology smart enough to put a bit of code labelled "if user = typing > do not switch screens".... ?

Mx
- posted by Mark @ 12:23 pm 3 comments

 
THE TEARS – London Heaven 16 December 2004


Ten years go,we were here also. Brett Anderson, on the stage of the inapropriately named Heaven, with a new guitarist, and a clutch of new-born songs written with Bernard Butler, armed with a passion to take over the world.

And now, here we are again, the massive weight of expectation, as the most potent songwriting partnership of the past twenty years - barring Morrissey/Marr – returns for the first time in a decade in probably the most unlikely reunion in music.

Firstly, whomever chose Heaven as a suitable venue needs to have their head examined : the venue is anything but, being a cavernous, squashed box rammed to capacity where you either stand stock still for hours desperate for a drink and the toilet, or you peep through cramped sightlines to maybe catch of glimpse of someone on stage. Secondly, and perhaps partly inspired by the recent onstage murder of someone from Pantera, the venue is paranoid : bags are strip-searched and metal detectors rape your skin, and you feel like a terrorist trying to smuggle bomb out of Oklahoma airport.

But it’s all about the music at the end of the day : and what do you get? Firstly, The Subways, being akin to one of the multitude of faux-NY-garage bands that seem to be infecting the world like a rash. Though unlike certain others I could mention, and yes, The Killers, I’m looking in your uninspired direction, The Subways are good. It might not be your type of thing, but there’s no doubt that The Subways, like the Pistols, they mean it maaaaaaaan, and there’s more passion, more life, more guts and glory than in a thousand Strokes shows.

But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to see the debut London performance by a new band, even though they plainly aren’t new, in any way shape or form : what other ‘new’ band sells out it’s debut London show (and only it’s second show ever) to 1,000 people in fifteen minutes when it hasn’t released a record?

Expectation weighs heavy, but when you’re dealing with Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler, former Suede colleagues, as well as being behind a multitude of other stuff since their split, we’re not just talking Tweeldedum and Tweedledee. We’re talking the songwriting duo behind one of only four albums recorded in the Nineties to make The Guardians “Top 100 Albums Of All Time List”.

So what do you expect? If you expect nothing, that’s exactly what you get. What do I expect? Well, I expect something more than this : at best, a mixture of Andersons windswept, aspirant romanticism and Butler’s vast, sweeping epics that have characterised his solo albums : at worst the kind of lazy songwriting that characterised the odd Suede b-side and the type of midpaced, monotone minor-key stuff that dulled the senses about three-quarters of the way through the solo records. What do I get?

You get songs that bear no relation to anything you’ve heard before. The opener is a manifesto setting “Brave New Century”, but there’s little brave about it. Like too many of the songs tonight, it’s a fairly standard, mid-paced, unexceptional song. Like the vast majority of the rest of the set, it’s an OK song.

I want more than OK. I want nothing less than brilliance.

The problem is that there’s nothing here, not one song that grabs you by the throat with brilliance and genius. Not one song that makes you stand up and remember why you loved this band so much . There are moments, flashes of brilliance : <>“Refugees”, which shares a title (and possibly much more) with a song Suede played live once in 2000, is redeemed by a classic 4 bar solo that instantly evokes the spirit of glories past, but that’s about it. “Two Creatures” sounds like “You Do”, but squashed and flattened ; shorn of ambition and aspiration. There’s far too many unremarkable midpaced ballads that pass forgettably in the night.

Is this the new fruit of the most potent songwriting partnership of the nineties? Times change, people change, but should ambitions change? Should we blindly adore this simply because it’s Those Two? Or should we look beyond to judge it on what we heard?

Whilst it’s an undoubted joy to see Anderson and Butler on stage again and for hatchets to be buried, this new found sense of harmony has smoothed out the rough edges of their music : the constant sense of potential implosion that always hung over the early shows has disappeared, and with it, the sense of thrilling tension is also absent. It’s almost too happy : and we all know tortured artists are more interesting, right kids?

I came here not to damn, but to praise. Of the new songs, only three lift themselves beyond the quagmire of identikit Butler riffs and uninspiring melodies. “Ghosts Of You” is a beautiful shimmering thing that recalls the things that only the best pop music does : mean something. “Apollo 13”, thematically the typical starcrossed-lovers-until-death-and-then-a-bit-longer widescreen epic of the set is fabulous (think “Sleeping Pills”, but about a hundred times better), and finally “We Are The Lovers”, which is at long last a song that could, potentially, become an instant classic : the type of song that, like all good pop music, instantly tattooes itself on the inside of your brain. It’s also the only song that evokes the spirit of why we fell in love with Suede in the first place : the idscreen, ambitious romance of perverted pop. These three gems aside, most of the set flies by in an uninterrupted strata of flattened, reheated ideas.

Maybe the songs need time to grow, to become familiar. Maybe they need to be written or re-written. But on the evidence of tonight : The Tears are nothing special. Were it not for their prior history, nobody would cling this band to their chest as The Great New Hopes Of 2005. The Tears may be a new band, but they’re not doing anything new.

Now is not the time for The Tears.

Labels: gig reviews

- posted by Mark @ 8:50 pm 0 comments

 
"Christians are DONE sitting at the back of the bus. " And the meek shall inherit the Earth.

There is so much that is ignorant, arrogant, and ultimately utterly wrong about this post I don't even know where to start. Iraq, for a start, will never go Christian. That's like dreaming of a Buddhist America. Or a Muslim America, where Towelheads are on every corner with guns, and Yanks go and pray en masse in Mosques.

You can't ban abortion: you can only drive it underground. See this?



It's Bush's plan for the future abortions of the most civilised country in the world.



- posted by Mark @ 4:39 pm 1 comments

 
So Blunkett bites the dust. I know this is old news, but I haven't been around at home long enough to really comment. Suffice to say that if you set yourself up as a bastion of morality, you will inevitably take the fall. Blunkett used to be my boss, I met him once, he seemed very... fervent. Very sincere. Too sincere. Walk it like you talk it, or stay silent.

In the meantime, last night we saw The Tears. They were not that good : I'll write more about it later. Earlier was my work's Christmas Party : none of the drunken exploits posted below took place at my work's do. It was incredibly sedate. Around us though, a succession of works Christmas do's were also taking place. After one party left, another landed, the same chairs, a production line of jollity. (Is that a word?)

And out of my eyeline, a girl sits down who looks just like an ex of mine. The whole thing, the haircut, the eyes, even the way she bloody walked. I had to do a double take, check that it wasn't her. If it was of course, I'd probably not say anything, if it was the typical acrimonious split type deal. If it wasn't we'd probably do the whole "what the bloody hell are you doing here thing?". Luckily some of my ex's (generally, the nicer ones) I'm still friends with. But it was spooky, there was this girl, sat about eight feet away, who looked, to all intents and purposes, like someone I loved once, and it reminded me of a life I no longer live. It wasn't her, it couldn't be her, because she was so alike, and yet, so different, even if it were only little things that weren't the same.

She of course, was oblivious to this. What would possibly be the point of telling someone "That"?

The Ex-Girlfriend Clone Incident is about exactly the same thing... and I thought it was just me. But no doubt there is someone out there who looks just like me (who isn't my brother, actually), that sometimes, people who used to go out with me also see and do a doubletake about. Like,... that isn't. And you know what, it isn't. There's only about 59,999,179 people who aren't me in the UK, after all.

Talking of ex's... I went through my phone book on the train the opther day and took some numbers out. People get their mobiles stolen, they move to new places, they change jobs, their work email switches off, and then you realise you don't know them anymore. You can remember talking to her, the creases of her face, you can remember making love with them. But you have no way of contacting them anymore.

Delete number? YES / NO...

I'm sat here, with a cup of tea. Every time I drink tea I'm reminded of Donald Pleasance in "The Great Escape". Endlessly making the same cup of tea from the same teabag. Pleasance, incidentally, apparently was an English prisoner in a POW Camp during World War II. Life imitates art.


- posted by Mark @ 1:13 pm 0 comments