Vista

BSOD, Toronto, here.

Ah, the joys of modern technology. It's been about six months since I got myself a laptop and migrated over - in fact, I wouldn't say migrated, as such, would say was kidnapped at gunpoint and forced over to - Windows Vista.

Who would've ever thought that in the year 2008, I'd be able to type words on a keyboard and then see them

slowly

appear

o n e

b y

o n e

over half a minute or so? technology is wonderful.

Even more so when I spend quite literally minutes at a time seeing an hourglass over a greyed out screen whilst the machine tells me that the programme is 'not responding'. I'm not alone.

In effect, what Vista has done is taken a computer, and broken its legs with bloated code and unneccessary additions. Additions that some computing marketing spod somewhere no doubt thinks is cool but makes such pointless things as Ctrl+Tabbing through various screens, opening Windows, checking the volume controls, starting Word, watching Real Player, or even using Windows Explorer to search for files are reduced to wading through computing treacle. So much so I've switched all my visual codes and themes to a recreation of Windows Classic, as much as I can in Vista, anyway.

Even my Spectrum 48k was faster.
- posted by Mark @ 5:30 pm 1 comments

 
The Birthday Party


I'm really trying not to do the self-pity thing. Probably failing as well. It's hard, rattling around the house on my own, watching bad films and trying and failing not to spend any money.

Anyway, it's Xander's third birthday today. Happy Birthday Xander.
- posted by Mark @ 9:31 pm 1 comments

 
Full Of Life


I never really wanted life to turn out like this. I desperately wanted our son to grow up in a stable, loving family environment. I wanted him to live with Mummy And Daddy, and to think that this is both utterly normal and that we were happy together. Peacefully co-existing at worst, happy and confident together, taking on the world as One at best. I wanted him to enjoy that.

I didn’t have that growing up : I had two people who had grown apart. My father a perpetual adolescent, every Saturday watching sport and drinking, every Sunday morning fishing until lunch time. As I read about a Presidential Home, his absence was in itself a presence. There was a space where my father should have been and even when he was physically present, he was mentally absent : he was asleep in front of the television with it at deafening volume. After a few attempts to switch it off - to which he always told me “I was watching that” - even if it was the post-closedown assortment of grating static, I ended up just tiptoeing downstairs and slowly turning the volume down so he wouldn’t notice. He never did.

My mother worked her hardest to give us a good quality of life. Whilst we never had the best things, we never had the cool trainers, never had the shirt with the picture of the crocodile on or the Swooshed logo, she tried her best. Unfortunately what I could never forget, even if I wanted to, and boy, did I want to, was the realisation that my parents were welded and chained together and there were things about each other the other hated. Frequently were the rows and, on occasion, the throwing of plates and milk jugs, the screaming and the shouting.

Slowly, we came to the realisation, E and I, that fundamentally, our lifestyles and personalities were too different to peacefully co-exist. In an argument I can be very quick, very stubborn, very tenacious - a logical pitbull that does not know how or when to quit. I see my opponent in an argument as something to be decimated. To take apart their every statement and every belief, analyse it, isolate holes and iconsistencies, and exploit them mercilessly until they see the logical correctness of my argument. Fundamentally, I have what everyone else has in their personality : the belief that we are right. I believe that I have analysed the evidence at hand, reached logical conclusions, and anyone who disagrees with me is at best a nincompoop, at worst a deluded amoeba. I’m not nice to argue with, but I never threaten people, and never use violence. Probably the worst thing I ever say is when I call someone running away from an argument with me is that they are a coward. That’s a belief I still hold : if you pick a fight with me you better be sure you can stay the course. If you retreat at a certain point, that, for me, is the equivalent of tipping your king in chess : it’s a resignation and thus, a victory for me.

Some of you may know I’ve had a very difficult time with my former employer - so much so I felt very much forced to change jobs. The matter is still not resolved : I am still a dogged fighter with my jaws clamped around the issue seeking an answer. I will not stop until either my every possible avenue is exhausted, or until I seek satisfaction. Fundamentally what I seek from them is not major : a recognition that due process was not followed but that a procedure was misused with full knowledge of the actual impact it would have, an apology, a rectification of the process so it could not be misused in future. And money. I deserve to be bought off.

They shouldn’t be surprised. This type of commitment and dogged determination to achieve results was what they wanted when they hired me.

And now here we are. Since E moved out, I’m living in the wreckage of a life I used to have. My son slept every night for two years and four months in the room next to mine. Now, that room is silent. Whereas I used to see him the morning, rolling out of bed contentedly with a yawn and rubbing his eyes before we started a day watching television and rolling around and doing housework and hunting donuts at the garage, now I see nothing. I miss the notion of family that I used to have. It’s not that I do not have an OK home life, but it’s very different from what I wanted and what I hoped. I recognise that our seperation was very much the right thing to happen, and that we are happier in our separate states. But on the other hand, the realisation that a marriage has come to an end, that a relationship hasn’t succeeded, that the great dream that we hold of two drifters off to see a world that we’re not sure deserve us, that that dream failed, is hard. Everything I worked for over the past four and a half years was ultimately for nothing.

What have I got? I’ve got a millstone of a mortgage with 22 years left to run on it, I’ve got a four hour commute to and from a punishing job every day, I’ve got financial slavery and a fair dose of poverty coming right up, I’ve got the emotional repercussions of divorce that mean that if the house has increased in value since I bought it, I’ve probably got to find half of that money and pay it to someone at the one time I can least afford it. If you own property, and are planning on staying there, then it’s probably best to get divorced during a recession. That way you don’t have to find thousands of quid you haven’t got to pay out half of an imagined and irrelevant value.

I’ve got a beautiful son I love being with. Me and him were talking today at his third birthday. Talking about his friends, and the colours, and the cakes, piggys, owls, faces, ears. I bought him “Ratatouille” and a Lightning McQueen t-shirt which he loves. We had hugs and cuddles and giggles. As I went to leave, he pulled on his shoes and looked for his coat because he wanted to go with me, and he took my hand in his and said “We’re holding hands.”

“Daddy stay new house” he told me in his most serious and grown up voice.

Wherever I was going, he wanted to go. He loves being with me and it breaks his heart when I am away from him. My heart too. He’s one of my best friends and every time I see him he gets more interesting and more brilliant and more fun. It saddens me that there is so much of his life I don’t get to see because I can’t be there. I can’t be there because I have to work for a living and I can’t be there because his mother and I cannot co-habitate. It’s not what I wanted, not at all, but I have to accept that the only workable solution for any of us is if we separate and work on a life from there.

Being an adult is hard. Grow old, we must. If you can avoid growing up, it’s probably best if you can. Nobody ever said it would be easy, but this seems so much harder than it needs to be.

I sit in this house that used to be full of life, and I wonder sometimes about my life, because this certainly didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to.
- posted by Mark @ 10:56 pm 2 comments

 
Last Night


Moby’s 8th official LP, “Last Night”, is apparently a love letter to the long lost disco days of ancient New York - echoing and aping the halcyon years. In some respects, it’s a nostalgic recreation of an age that never honestly existed, except in the rose tinted glasses of hazy recollection and half-formed memory, a retrofitted perfect past. Oh, we can dance about it now - but at the time it was terrible.

Ultimately, “Last Night” is an artistic failure : an attempt to create dance music made by and for people who don’t dance anymore. I can’t realistically imagine any of these songs played in a nightclub. Like bands of a certain pedigree, this material has fundamentally lost its connection to the source material and the source activity and become, to a certain extent, an imitation of what it could be. The disco music contained in the first two thirds of the record is fundamentally unconvincing, asinine, dilute. Like the weaker parts of his previous LP’s - most obviously “Very” from 2005’s “Hotel” album - the whole of “Last Night” is characterless, lacking in personality, generic, and anonymous. Whilst, to a certain extent it’s recognisably Moby : his trademark chords and choral synth sounds dominate the record, and the vocal melodies sound very much as if he wrote them, the record falls desperately short. Being the first LP Moby has made comprising entirely of guest vocalists, the central character that made previous albums compelling - Moby’s vocal presence, limited in scope and convincing in versimilitude, is absent - replaced instead by a generic string of divas who communicate like stage actors, emoting and squealing and wailing, but with the emotional honesty of a bad TV actor. They could be singing the ingredients for baking powder for all the emotion this shallow record evokes within me. And, after several identikit (and nearly identically arranged and paced) disco frenzy numbers, the album starts to become an artistic desert : lacking in variation and distinguishing features. Endless miles of the same view start to bore.

It’s only by the final third of the album, where Moby breaks from the tedious mould and begins to populate the record with the slower paced, majestically arranged soundscapes that bear and reward repeated listening, that “Last Night” starts to exhibit anything other than a repetitive, almost hypnotic-through-boredom tedium. The final four or five songs are too little, and too late, to rescue “Last Night” from being an emotionally flat nothingness. Thankfully though, they do provide some worth to the record.

Overall, “Last Night” is sadly a crushing disappointment by any standards : an unsuccessful attempt to create a dance album, a set of boring and featureless songs swamped in generic and boring production, and lacking in any of the compelling factors that make albums worth repeated listening. It’s a great shame that “Last Night” is Moby’s worst official album yet : he can, and has, done so much better in the past.
- posted by Mark @ 10:34 pm 0 comments

 
Horse To Water
This divorce business is hard. And really, really hard. Really, pointlessly hard. I'm bending over backwards to try and solve this and someone else is absolutely refusing to move at all in the slightest. I'm trying so hard to solve it. It needs someone else to move, hell, for someone else to even do something as simple as answer the phone. That's all it takes. And that it seems, is too much for that person to even do. It's pointlessly hard.
- posted by Mark @ 9:09 pm 2 comments

 
Honesty


This boy doesn't know it, but he's in the middle of a war. I love him so much it hurts. And I know that there's a unneccessary gulf between his mother and I. I've tried so hard to be amicable. But there's only so many things I can accept or tolerate. There's certain things I cannot condone. I used a lot of words to explain my position to the person in question, and they are taking the 'Head In The Sand' approach : the one method I have been explicitly clear will not work. Part of being an adult is facing up to, and taking full, responsibility. That includes taking the heat and accepting the consequences of your actions. You can't just run away and pretend it didn't happen.

And that is what someone is trying to do right now. And neither morality nor legality are on their side.
- posted by Mark @ 10:38 pm 0 comments

 
With The Tongue Of My Oppressor


Finally, I've spent the past two weeks in a state of advanced illness. Unfortunately this has largely laid me low - very much against my will - with fits of coughing, sneezing, migraine headaches, sweating and shivering, goosepimples whilst wearing three layers of clothing, that kind of thing. Yesterday I was wracked with coughing fits so bad I practically became mute, and started to communicate by written notes to people. When I did cough, my bones jarred so violently I felt as if I had broken a bone. I have no idea what really caused it, though I suspect it was my bastard MMR jab a couple of weeks ago. It is only today that I do not feel as if I am in fact, dying slowly. I hate being ill, and it had severly compromised my ability to look after my son. I was looking forward to being with him so very much and I was unable to do so. I hated having to let him down.

But now? Well, last week I had the deep pleasure of going on a Diversity Training Course. I'm by nature very cynical about these exercises - at best, I see them as box-ticking nonsense, and this one seemed designed to shoehorn in almost every possible Big Issue in a way that ultimately almost demeans them. I feel... patronised and my intelligence insulted with the default assumption that I'm not clever enough to understand diversity.

At one point, there was conversation about how being The Only Gay In The Village was funny, which it isn't. It's cliched, stereotypical nonsense. It's no different than 50 cent talking about Gettin' Rich Or Die Tryin', or any other instance where the oppressed talk with the voice of the oppressor and fulfill their prophecy. No different from anyone else who believes the cliched, stereotypical bullshit about themselves and repeats it as a self-perpetuating myth : not all gay men are insenstitive buffons dressed in skin-tight leather, and its debasing to portray them as such, even in gross caricature. If a jew draws a picture of a man with a massive nose and a beard hiding a wodge of cash and laughing, and calls it "Der Juden" does that make it OK? Of course not.
- posted by Mark @ 9:36 pm 0 comments

 
In other news..
Dr Pepper promises a free can of its product to every American (except ex members of Guns N Roses if GNR release Chinese Democracy in 2008
- posted by Mark @ 9:13 pm 0 comments

 
The Strawmen That Broke The Camel's Back, explains the fundamental fact behind MP3's and the decline of the recording industry. "Not paying for a digital download is only like stealing a CD if you steal from a magical CD shop where each item replenishes itself on the shelf. And in such a shop, the value of the CD for sale might be seen to be almost nothing, since its perpetual supply would suggest a pricepoint at approaching zero.95% of what EMI does fails to make money. EMI losing on 19 out of every twenty bands it works with isn't a reason we need record labels - it's the reason why we don't."
- posted by Mark @ 9:08 pm 0 comments

 
REM - Royal Albert Hall - 24 March 2008


One thing you can count on REM doing, when they release an album, is to play a ridiculously small venue in London that you cannot get into. Despite having a road-ready band at the release of their last few albums, REM have chosen to premiere the record at such demand pleasing venues as the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios, a lottery-only show at Trafalgar Square, a 350 capacity Victorian Ballroom, a Church, and this time around, headlining a fundraiser for the ICA at the Albert Hall. Despite being a rather large 6,000 seater Victorian concert hall - and my tickets being approximately 100 feet in the air - behind me, there’s still people talking with awe at the exclusivity of the show. We’ll Never See Them Anywhere So Small Again, they mutter, whilst being 90 feet in the air.

I swear, sometimes, some people’s priorities are deeply broken. It’s akin to Paul McCartney’s ‘limited-edition’ Russian Rock LP : limited to half a million copies. Despite all this, the new look REM - shorn to five people, and dispensing with the multi-instrumentalist Ken Stringfellow (which limits the palette of their sound, and the choice of songs, considerably) - head up a bill that sees their set shrunk to a mere 80 minutes in length. Since most tickets are £55, REM’s 16 song set works out at about £3.43 per person (or a gross of around £21,000 per song) : not great value at all.



Being only the third official public performance of the band’s “Accelerate” shows, you could expect the band to be tentative or perhaps even nervous. Instead, REM present a headstrong, and human, performance. Backed up by the versatile, solid Bill Rieflin on drums - a worthy successor to the retired Bill Berry - the band offer a fiercely uncompromising set. For the first time in their career, the band neglect to play one single song from the IRS Years or even 1989‘s fabulous “Green”, with their history stretching only as far back as “Losing My Religion”. To an extent this is a pleasing attempt to eschew the old warhorses - I wish U2 had the balls to ditch “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Pride” from their sets - but also an act of perversity that overlooks their body of work.

With their 14th LP “Accelerate” not yet in the shops, the bands decision to then make more than half their set of unreleased stuff is both commendable and confusing. At this stage in their careers, for example, The Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney were, and are, providing history lessons, karaoke tribute bands to themselves of shrinking artistic relevancy, whilst here and now, REM are striking forth a bold new agenda. The new material, opening with a fan-pleasing double punch of “Living Well Is The Best Revenge” and “Accelerate”, seems designed to evoke the long lost joys of arpeggios and racing rhythms last seen on 1987’s “Document”, whilst also contemporary and modern. Unlike previous shows, the band also seem to enjoy premiering this stuff. The scissor-kicks from the 50 something Peter Buck make a welcome return, as he preens and poses and loses himself in the sheer joy of playing. Michael Stipe meanwhile, having self-confessedly not quite ‘got his tour legs’ yet, acts in an impersonation of a rock star, strikes a pose, and has yet to grow the stage persona that he develops over his other tours as a second skin or a hide. Here, he’s almost artistically naked - and none more so than during the encore when he monologues about the venue and even gets Peter Buck to utter a word or two on stage for the first time in his life.



Fan consensus on the show is fiercely contested : half of the pundits seem to opine that it was a privilege to see the band in such a small venue. The other half seem, quite rightly, fairly upset at the £55 ticket price, the relative brevity of their set (an hour shorter than most REM shows), and the perverse setlist. Aside from this, there’s no denying that the performance is tailored to the BBC Radio 2 audience listening at home around their wireless radios, with most of the new album and some weighty hits to keep most people pleased. Sonically, the band sound and look huge and ambitious : not quite the parody of a stadium act that they were on the “Monster” tour, and surprisingly, not one song from “Monster” (the nearest cousin to ‘Accelerate’) is played despite the spiritual kinship between records. Instead the five piece roar and pirouette and preen like a band that has fallen in love with feedback and guitars after ten years in a supposed artistic wilderness.



Unfortunately, thanks to an over-running indulgence from The Duke Spirit (who are, roughly the bastard tuneless offspring of the Jesus And Mary Chain and The Velvet Underground), REM don’t make it to the stage until late, and then, of all things, finish 8 minutes early. By my estimations, they shaved 12 minutes off their scheduled 90 minute set : and that’s not taking into account a 10 minute monologue which was charming but frustrating. Especially when the band returned for an encore, Michael Stipe claimed “Since we’re not on the radio, we can do what we like”, before playing a new album track and two of their biggest hit singles. And not one song born before 1991.

Nonetheless, when the band were on stage and performing, they were both compelling and dedicated : a tight and cohesive unit that uncoiled these new, fierce songs with the passion of teenagers and the lyrical strength that only experience can provide. Even “The Final Straw”, taken from the bands creative low-watermark of ‘Around The Sun’, is dispatched with a fluid passion and a determination that shows that even then, the band still had the passion and protest that makes their work both out of time and yet utterly of the moment. The main crux of the set is drawn to a close with a avalanche of new material, including the wonderful “Horse To Water” and the spirited “I’m Gonna DJ”. By the time the show reaches it’s end, some 79 minutes after it began, and 16 short songs later, one cannot help but feel a little cheated by the brevity of the set, the determinedly modern set stuffed with new material, and the almost staid atmosphere of the venue itself. That said, REM are no mere flash in the pan, and “Accelerate” no artistic misfire : the band are clearly passionate about their art and creating vital and strong material at this autumn period of their career for which even the most stubborn and fair-weather fan cannot help but applaud. Tonight was a new chapter in their new adventures in hi-fi, and REM deserve their accolades for never ceasing their quest to find new areas, explore new territories, and find new stories to tell. Long may it carry on.


- posted by Mark @ 11:10 pm 2 comments

 
Great Beyond

(Stock Photo)

It's been a fairly long day. I've reset my body clock by going to bed last night at 11.30 and getting up at 6.47am. I've seen four Planet Of The Apes films - Beneath The Escape of The Conquest Of The Battle For The Planet Of The Apes (the last film was clearly made on a miniscule budget), American Beauty, Miami Vice, Pan's Labyrinth, and right now, something on the History Channel. I've been writing - I had originally, grandoise plans to add a shocking 36,000 words over 18 hours. After careful consideration I have been unable to do that, primarily because I need to think more and write less. I have made some considerable progress mind you. Anyway, I wrote 3,000 words a day which isn't at all bad.

Time for a Wikipedia Row I suspect!
- posted by Mark @ 10:30 pm 0 comments

 
Be Excellent To Each Other
Clarke: But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all. It's this: "Don't do unto anybody else what you wouldn't like to be done to you." It seems to me that that's all there is to it.

When I see what's happening, I sometimes wonder if the human race deserves to survive. - link

Am busy writing - 2,000 words today. Not an amazing haul, but I'm working on it.
- posted by Mark @ 7:32 pm 0 comments

 
The Cure - London Wembley Arena - 20 March 2008


After 30 years, The Cure should, by rights, be washed up. An artistically redundant nostalgia act. Returning to the cavernous, and soulless Wembley Arena - possibly one of my least favourite venues in the universe - The Cure manage the rare trick of making this enormous void of a shed feel intimate, and this lineup - still ‘new’ by Cure standards at three years old, acquits itself as quite possibly the best lineup of the group thus far. Over three and a half hours and 41 songs, The Cure perform a show that should, by rights, be regarded as legendary : travelling every edge of their work from the nihilism of “Disintegration” to the flippantly clever pop of “Friday I’m In Love”

Previous Cure shows I have seen since the end of the 1996 tour - Roskilde in 2001, Manchester in 2004, The Albert Hall in 2006 - have all seen the band suffer from what departed guitarist Perry Bamonte called ‘a lack of confidence’ - and, stung by the commercial failure of “Wild Mood Swings”, the band reverted to type and produced a series of records that seemed almost a parody of The Cure, comprising all shade and no light, perversely ignoring the bands poppier material in favour of a relentless grind of epic, doom-laden miserable tracts. Finally, after spending a decade in denial of the richness of their back catalogue, The Cure appear to have come to terms with their past - and thus, perform a show that encompasses the whole of their work in a cohesive, brilliant whole.

Despite the absence of a keyboard on stage, it’s fair to say that The Cure have never sounded bigger. Guitarist Porl Thompson (an on/off member of the group since their 1976 inception) now revels in his role as the bands musical orchestra - effortlessly reproducing the lush keyboards of the group with a fluid and finely honed guitar tone, as well as the heavier sound of the groups more aggressive material with a bite and panache that the material had often lacked. Robert Smith, erstwhile and sole original member of The Cure throughout their various incarnations, meanwhile acquits himself with busy and expansive guitar work whilst the solid rhythms of Simon Gallup and relative new-comer Jason Cooper (with only 13 years in the group) produce a dynamic and effective rhythm section. Taking a cue from the very early shows when a three-man Cure fulfilled their sound with keyboard parts triggered with Robert Smiths foot pedals, the band follow this template to see occasional keyboard parts filling in the sound. In fact the only time the keyboard sounds are clearly missed are during “Play For Today” - a minor indulgence that sees the keyboard melody sung vocally by 13,000 people



Having seen four different lineups of the group seven times over the past sixteen years, tonights show - at an epic and comprehensive three and a quarter hours and 41 songs - is probably the finest Cure show I myself have seen. Despite the fact that they overlook a couple of their later albums (with nothing from “Wild Mood Swings” or “Bloodflowers” offered), this show is a comprehensive and thorough overview of their career.

During the course of the show, the band hit a level of emotional intensity and variety rarely seen in modern music : the only quibble I could have is in the order of songs played - the arena transforms from a massive party during the middle section of the main set which sees 10 singles played in a row to, in the blink of an eye, to a subdued and depressed cavern when the band move from the glorious Technicolor of “Push“, “Inbetween Days“, “Friday I‘m In Love“, “Just Like Heaven“ and “Primary” to the careful, sensitive monochrome of the mogadon “A Boy I Never Knew”: it’s a great song, but sitting on the back of a forty minute selection of the bands best known and loved singles to then premiering a downbeat sensitive acoustic lament thoroughly destroys the momentum achieved, and one the band struggle to regain until the encores as they obviously lose the goodwill of the audience during a subsequent procession of miserable and intense 7 minute album tracks : damn fine songs they are, but existing to an extent within a vaccum.

With 16 encores the band perform longer in their encores that most bands achieve in their own right - the first and third encore sets are devoted respectively to their second and first albums, whilst the second sees the resurrection of the rarely performed “LoveCats” and a string of hit singles from the 80’s. In the cavernous Wembley Arena, most of the venue is on its feet in an act of unconscious, telepathic communion : and perhaps surprisingly, the huge expanse of space that separates the standing and seating section is filled during the encores with a spontaneous dance floor of happy, celebrating souls who have trickled down from their assigned seats at the very back of the venue to no small annoyance of the venues ‘bouncers’. What this does prove is that The Cure, in whatever form they are - and this current lineup is possibly the most cohesive and strongest lineup the band has had since the 1985-92 glory days - can unify and communicate to all, cutting through the bullshit and the pretence, and creating a legacy of no small import. The Cure proved - if there was any doubt whatsoever in anyone’s mind - that legends are often such for a very good reason, and that the flame is far from spent.

Photos by OnThatDizzyEdge
- posted by Mark @ 1:55 pm 1 comments

 
Out Of Control


Well, its been a shit few days again, make no mistake.

I crawled into E's about 1.30am on Friday morning, after seeing The Cure at Wembley Arena. I originally had plans to stay with my gig buddy, having known that the show will be both stupendously long (195 minutes), and finish quite late (11.27pm). Nonetheless, plans had to be turned on their heads late in the day and so I had to arrange to arrive at E's, which wasn't in the plan at all. I ended up getting back at 1.30am. X woke me up at 6.50am by feeding me chocolate. He quietly sat next to me and the two of us hung out as I, somewhat exhaustedly, lay in bed trying to summon the energy to get up. I was feeling pretty rough, and with a headache and a temperature - presumably by sleeping on a couch with a razor-thin blanket for company.

As the day wore on, I helped E unpack her books and CD's and DVD's. Around 1.23, I went to the toilet, then went to rest my eyes on the bed upstairs. Five hours later, I finally awoke with a temperature, sweating and shivering under three jumpers. I was meant to be taking X back and looking after him this weekend, me and X were meant to be hunting Easter Eggs and for me to take him on a train. He loves going on trains with his Dad.

After a headache which hit about 8.30pm - which made me feel as if I have been punched repeatedly in the brain - it quickly became apparent that I wasn't going anywhere this weekend with him. In some respects I feel as if .. because I went straight to work on Monday after a weekend ill - that by 'slowing down' on Friday my body finally collapsed. I often feel that after a period of time where I feel I've been very busy my body will catch up with illness as soon as I start to relax, as if tension and business has kept illness at bay. Nonetheless, Friday was most spent asleep with a temperature and shivers and shake and sweats and a headache and generally feeling absofuckinglutely bloody terrible. I didn't want to be at E's : it's not my home and we did split up for a reason, after all, a reason that became apparent on Friday night when she asked me a question but didn't like the answer I gave.

This morning, I felt.... OK. My temperature has finally gone, but I couldn't, in all honesty, look after him - not for two days in a row. I was unable. So, for the second week in a row, I've had to bow out from looking after my son much as I would want to, to factors out of my control that are very frustrating and that I cannot in any way control. If I could control things, it would be very different. I took him to the shops and the park, which, in the freezing wind felt roughly like having to climb Everest whilst wearing flip-flops, before I had to fall into a haphazard way of going home. Eventually, I was home and trying to live quietly and recover. I have no idea if it worked. I feel as if I let him down again, which I really didn't want to do.


- posted by Mark @ 8:32 pm 1 comments

 
Accelerate


If someone wrote a computer programme designed to produce perfect facsimiles of REM’s mid-to-late 80’s output, it’s fair to say that whatever it produced would sound almost exactly like “Accelerate”. For all the talk of REM’s 14th album in twenty five years being a stunning return to form, it’s more honest to say that the album is not a grand return to form (one could argue that REM have never had a shite phase, and thus have no ‘form’ to return to), but another step in the bands evolution. After all, if this album were an extra half hour long, it would be the same length as “New Adventures In Hi Fi” or “Up”, and probably contain as many dead spots as those records inevitably do. After all, more is often less, and brevity is something that recent REM records have not enjoyed : most of them could have been improved by taking out a song or two.

After slowly travelling down a evolutionary path that saw them refine and replicate their past work to the point of near parody, REM found themselves in an uneviable position of preaching only to the converted : the last album “Around The Sun” was the sound of three millionaires sitting on expensive couches noodling away their talents in favour of heartfelt but tuneless dirge essays about war politics.

Thankfully “Accelerate” is much better than that : it opens with a roar reminiscent of the IRS years “These Days”, Stipe’s breathless, can’t-get-the-words-out-for-the-urgency vocals is backed up by the sound of the band playing together in a room : a world away from the previous, sterile record. If anything, “Accelerate” is the sound of reaction : the sound of troops pouring in, the sound of a spurned lover seeking revenge, the sound of a kick back against whatever it was. Living Well Is The Best Revenge, indeed.

Sonically, this lean beast (at a mere 34 minutes) is the bastard offspring of “Monster” and “New Adventures In Hi-Fi“, full of biting, cathartic guitars that exist seemingly to blast through the cobwebs of life, of soaring Mike Mills backing vocals, full of Stipe’s trademarked obtuse lyrics (though this time shoehorned through the breathless rasp of their best work, where the voice becomes another instrument instead of a liberal lecturer on a hunger strike - think an album made of pissed off glam rock versions of “Ignoreland“). In fact, by REM standards, this barrage of noise desperately needs breathing space. And a ballard of two may just do the trick.

Sadly, even the albums superior ballads - “Houston” and “Mr Richards” - are over in three minutes, and before they get half-way through have transformed from reminders of REM‘s unfairly maligned wildness years 1998-2006 into a morass of guitar pedals and assertive, vocal drumming from former Ministry / Revolting Cocks sticksman Bill Rieflin. “Houston” - the closest living relative to 1996’s epic, seven minute “Leave” would previously have unfurled to enormous proportions : here it is quietly suffocated after a couple of minutes, a song half-formed, snuffed out at birth : at the precise point any other band would add a solo, chorus, verse and chorus again, R.E.M. throw this baby out alongside the alt.folk bathwater.

In one respect, this is as fierce and direct as REM have ever been - less angular that 89‘s warrior “Green“, nor as shy as the agrophobic, role-playing stance of “Monster“ - but to the experienced listener, in some ways this surfeit of fast material exists almost as an exerecise. In the same way that a film with a lot of explosions sometimes uses the trick of spectacle and the loud bang to cover for the fact that at the heart of it there is nothing, I find it hard to believe that “Accelerate” will stand up to years of repeated listening the way the more considered and stately might.

“Supernatural Superserious” is allegedly their best single in years : to these ears it’s a competent and melodic rock song with a chorus that reminds me of Lisa Simpson’s poetry. It’s good, but affected in the way that most of “Monster” was - affecting a stance and playing a role. “Hollow Man” starts well, but is soon bludgeoned by breakneck bludgeon riffola, as if the band are on a mission to destroy all quiet moments on the record. One can imagine the band huddled around, improvising a gentle and beautiful melody before Peter Buck remembers they’re meant to rock and starts grafting on walls of MBV feedback. Wait!, the guitars say, we’re meant to be loud. BUZZBUZZBUZZ.

The title track itself sounds like “Circus Envy” with all the words and music played backwards. But then they play “Until The Day Is Done” which is as beautiful a piece of work as anything they’ve done in the past decade, and almost everything is forgiven.

This is not to sat that “Accelerate” is any bad thing. It certainly isn’t : fans clamouring for a return of REM to their long lost IRS years template, or their “Monster” era affectations will find plenty of worth in the new album. For me, whose seen REM evolve over the past twenty years from provincial town halls and student vinyl to a stadium filling ballade ring behemoth, “Accelerate” feels like a sidestep, a pose, a creative reinvention/revertion designed to reclaim imaginary lost ground that half obscures the bands true intentions. Fundamentally, there is a risk that REM have traded longevity and depth for the briefly satisfying thrill of feedback and the squall of a Marshall Amp. Ultimately, it’s too early to tell if “Accelerate” is an artistic folly or a broken-bone reset of a record that enables REM to reinvent, rethink, REM themselves again. Whatever it is, this brief star of an album is something that I feel is worthy of a high place in the bands body of work and may very well show itself over time to be a late-period masterpiece. Not just another REM album.
- posted by Mark @ 10:23 pm 2 comments

 
Wide To Recieve


After careful consideration, I've concluded that Cameron is a twat. Though Paul Weller appears to have jettisoned his musical muse some 16 years ago, he does have a point :

"I think they (The Conservatives) were absolute fucking scum - especially Thatcher, who I think should be shot as a traitor to the people. I still think that, and nothing will ever change my opinion. We're still feeling the effects of what they did to the country now, and probably always will: the whole breakdown of communities, trade unions, the working class - the dismantling of lots of things." (link)

In some respects, it's almost a justice, that a Tory MP - Ed Vaizley (who?) - responded to that quote with : "That hurt. The Jam were the band that defined my teenage years. I absolutely adored them."

Other than that? Life is turning to a sort of normality. My spare time of the past few weeks has been monopolised by rebuilding or recreating a hard drive profile. For the past two days running, someone has sat opposite me listening to music on their iPod that isn't complete fucking shit for a change. (I think they may be seeing The Cure this week, by the way). The new REM album is brilliant. And, I seem to have forgotten how to cook. I tried cooking something today for the first time in months, and I don't if I'm ill, or something, but it tasted bloody rubbish when I ate it. I will, and must, try harder next time. I have things to do tonight, so I suppose I better go and do them.

I trust you are all well. Ask me a question, any question, if you want, and I will see you soon. In the meantime, I didn't know this...

Anyway, for those of you with an evil bent... note that Evil Super Villians have a world domination flowchart. Have a peak into George Lucas mind...


- posted by Mark @ 7:45 pm 1 comments

 
Still Ill.


Not much news. Luckily I have my email addresses and my Ebay accounts back. I have the new REM album, and MP3's of their show at SXSW previewing the new record live. I am seeing them at the Albert Hall on Monday next week as well. You can download the SXSW radio broadcast of the new look, live n spunky, REM with extra guitars from here. Anyway, been busy, as I always have been, and I have plenty to do, so I better crack on with that : housework doesn't go away.
- posted by Mark @ 9:14 pm 0 comments

 
In The Future When All's Well


It has been a shit day. I still have the flu symptoms : chronic headaches when I even think about standing up, near incapacity when I think about moving, a throat that feels as if I have been gargling acid, and my back feels broken. I feel better - but that is still akin to feeling run over by a truck as opposed to being run over by a fleet of trucks.

After 3 weeks prodding and poking, I finally finished rebuilding my hard drives. Next thing I do when I get a chance is to sort out some replacement slave drives so I can back up once and be done with it once and for all.

In the meantime, it appears my Ebay account was hijacked. I got it back, but sadly it took 24 hours and a pain-in-the-bum conversation with a very nice person at Ebay. Since my Ebay account was linked to my PayPal account, my first step was go into PayPal and change all my passwords. Then to go to Ebay to change the password to something else. Unfortunately, at the same time - 6.36pm, fact fans - something seized, hijacked, or hacked my Hotmail account and also changed my password as part of what looks like a co-ordinated attack on my online identity. I can try to reset the account, but unfortunately my Secret Question is now in fucking Japanese, or Chinese, or something, and that is a little concerning. I am in furious and regular contact with Microshit's Support Desk, but they are about as much use as a glass hammer at the moment.

Nonetheless, the 500GB Hard Drive is finally finished and fully backed up. I lost some naked women. Not the end of any world. I still feel alternately sweating and boiling and freezing and goospimply. And I probably have to work tommorow. What a waste. The weekend was spent feeling shite.

All emails to mrmarkreed at hotmail dot com should be redirected to mrmarkreed1973 at hotmail dot co uk

thank you

m
- posted by Mark @ 10:58 pm 0 comments

 
The Apologist


This is meant to be a good weekend. It was the first weekend I was going to spend with X, and me and him were going to hang out. I was really looking forward to it. We were going to go to the seaside and hunt easter eggs and watch Star Wars.

It's been a very hard day for reasons I have not been able to control. If I could've had some influence over them, I think I would've. On Thursday, I had my second MMR jab. I felt fairly rough, but I thought I'd get over it. Then, on Friday night, I went to bed and woke up about 24 times throughout the night with a pounding headache, chronic backache and I felt.. crippled. I was up at 5.57. X was up at 6.05. By 9.49 I'd just about managed to put on my underwear. I had to ring E, and ask her to pick up X as I was incapable of looking after him. I was running sweats yet had goosepimples, despite wearing a tshirt and a jumper with the hood up and jeans. It appears I've got influenza. Then again, it could be a case of a fairly minor case of MMR. Doesn't feel minor.

Unfortunately, I feel as if I've let everyone down. X was waiting and relying on me to look after him, and I simply couldn't. I had plans and I was unable. I feel as if despite my best efforts I simply couldn't. It wasn't through a lack of wanting or trying. In the end, I slept maybe from 6.30 to 8.10, then maybe 11.10 to 11.40, then 2.30ish to around 5.00. I hate letting people down. So to everyone, I apologise. I tried my best, and the best wasn't quite good enough. What a waste of a weekend.
- posted by Mark @ 7:53 pm 3 comments

 
"okielaika / flurgle whoopsie / nothinkurdle / moannotatallillity”.


Is there anything precisely more middle class than Sigur Ros?

Yesterday I picked up Sigur Ros Aegetis Brynean CD. In Oxfam. In Brixton. How multicultural. How very ‘poverty tourist’. And whilst I enjoy Sigur Ros immensely, and find their music very helpful and useful, I can’t help but think that really, they are the invention of some crazy film-pitch. A Spinal Tap made real.

An Icelandic band of instrumentalists tour the world… headlining arenas… performing mostly instrumental quarter hour alternative prog-rock epics… sung in an imaginary language… and they’re huge?

I swear Rob Reiner is behind the camera. And I think, possibly the thing that is both brilliant and rubbish about Sigur Ros is that they are the ultimate escapist band. Even more than http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinal_Tap remove such established concepts as a chorus, or lyrics, or titles to create their own universe. A George Lucas style alternate reality where “Hoppipolla” is Number 1, forever.

If you watch BBC1 or 2, for any period of time, they inevitably play Sigur Ros eventually. Last nights documentary about Frinton-On-Sea lasted about twenty minutes before “Hoppipolla” turned up. I almost set my stopwatch.

Is there anything more middle class than writing songs about nothing? Old fashioned, working class artists try and aspire to create art about things, to impart the knowledge, drawn probably from some kind of intellectual thirst and a real, economic poverty. Sigur Ros are probably comfortable. I could translate their lyrics to read “Ok, mustn’t grumble.” Except in Hopelandic it would read “okielaika / flurgle whoopsie / nothinkurdle / moannotatallillity”.

Which probably speaks to middle class Britain more than any song by Billy Bragg does. Bring on the revolution. I’ll put myself up against the wall first. The world needs less bloggers than ever.



- posted by Mark @ 10:27 pm 2 comments

 
No Race But The Human Race


I pledge alleigance to The Queen.

Read that, will you?

I pledge allegiance to The Queen.

No. NEVER.

Under our laughable legal system, I - and all of the people in this country - exist at liberty solely at her discretion. Remember the phrase “At Her Majesty’s Pleasure”?

Make no mistake. The idea that I - or any other human being - exists to act solely as a subject of anyone else is repugnant. I’ve been brought up to believe that all human beings are born equal, and that we are all in control of our own destiny. Isn’t that the central tenement of Democracy? The precious, poisoned chalice that our leaders use as the club with which to batter into submission foreign countries and crush dictators? Democracy?

Face it, Democracy is just a word. A handy idea upon which they can hang a multitude of sins. After all, the crusade in Iraq is nothing more than installing an unwanted dictatorship on top of an unwanted dictatorship. Nonetheless, it is an act of utter hypocrisy - not to mention illogical stupidity - to install democracy into another country against its will, whilst at the same time, demanding that citizens of our small rock pledge Allegiance to the Queen.

In America, every day, millions of children are taught to stand and salute a song and a flag and to pledge allegiance to…. Whatever the fuck they declare allegiance to. But surely the point, the central tenement of democracy is that you can believe in whatever belief structure you want, whatever religion or creed it is. That said, apparently you still have to pledge allegiance to God.

Remember, legally, here in the UK, we have no rights. No constitution. We are nothing in the eyes of the law.

I feel really strongly about this. I don’t belong to the Queen. I’m not her subject. My taxes paid for her. Her and all her useless parasitic family. Personally, I wouldn’t have been heartbroken had the Silly Prince - known as the Bullet Magnet to his ‘comrades’ - had his inbred millionaire brains blown out by a Afghanistani.

The idea that, even now, that there is a ‘superior’ family that deserve to lord it over the rest of the unwashed scum and steal their money through taxes to live in palaces is such a ridiculous concept that it should have been made illegal hundreds of years ago. Still, mankind is a race that thought 150 years ago that women weren’t clever enough to vote, and only recently decriminalised homosexuality, that I guess nothing surprises me. Maybe in 150 years time, mankind will look at what we currently think is morally acceptable with horror. After all, the idea of a Royal Family is such a fundamental affront to any liberated and tolerant thinking that is practically Social Apartheid.

I will never pledge allegiance to anyone or anything except myself. I belong to no nation, no royal family, no army.


- posted by Mark @ 10:23 pm 3 comments

 
Carry On
I’ve been writing a will. It’s a difficult and strange thing to think of whats going to happen when I die. The ego has difficulty comprehending that the day after I die, almost everybody will get up, and carry on as normal. Nonetheless, what will happen? The world will carry on as it always has. It was here before e. It will be here after me.

But a few people will be in for one fuck of a shock when they get to read the will. Thieves never prosper, is all I will say.
- posted by Mark @ 10:19 pm 1 comments

 
Exhuming McCarthy


It's been a busy few days. I will explain all in a wee bit, but the primary factor has been that for the past week and a half, almost all my spare time has been spent restoring and rebuilding a 500GB Hard Drive (from which I can then run a slave copy at regular intervals), so that my Big Hard Disk Crash need never happen again. I estimate I am 90% done.

Have a quote that reflects my way of thinking about what ails the record industry, taken from Pg 213 of "The Undercover Economist" :

"The solution is not to ban new technology or to restrict trade. Neither is it to ignore those put out of work by technology. It is to allow progress to continue whilst helping support and retrain those who have been hurt as a result."
- posted by Mark @ 11:18 pm 1 comments

 
Third


Where have they been? One wonders. After an eleven year gap since the discreetly titled “Portishead” comes the equally minimal “Third” : a gap breached only a fabulous but superfluous live album, and the Beth Gibbons solo record.

And it’s as if Portishead have never been away. Their own, very personal brand of music - best described as ’Heartbroken Cowboy’, hangs on the kind of half-detuned slide guitar, the echoed, haunted vocal shorthand, and the relentless, broken rhythms that have always been a Portishead trademark. This time around, shorn of the coffee-table bullshit that poisoned ‘Dummy’, Portishead return as a peculiarly British slant that shows that they are often imitated, and only rarely equalled.

In those ten years much has happened. Oasis have become their own tribute act. George Lucas has put out three Star Wars films. The Internet happened. Everything changed. People just stopped listening to Portishead, and found their own new music to like. Aside it all, they simply disappeared. And in serious danger of becoming a mere footnote.

“Third” opens with “Silence”, driven by a barracking new-era Radiohead-style beat, it invokes the soundtrack to a film that never existed : a snapshot of 70’s Subway New York overhung with an air of unshakable foreboding. The minimal keyboard lines that permate the whole album are straight, sleek, unhurried and unfussed. Still, ten years is a long time and Portishead have had all the time in the world. And, then again, why fix what isn’t broken? Their previous template worked very well. As a result, these songs could’ve been recorded for any Portishead album : belonging to a long-distant time known as the Near Future, the album revolves around occasional, and underplayed moments of high drama - the rare drum roll that acts not as punctuation, but to elevate the tension, the perfectly timed guitar chord that seeks to, and succeeds in escalating tension beyond the merely uncomfortable. In the meantime, as on “Nylon Smile” Beth Gibbons turns a normally positive lyric such as “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you / I don’t know what I’d do without you” into a veiled, broken threat. It’s a haunting, minimal masterpiece of style and substance.

“Third” is a short forty minute journey. In the modern age of iTunes, it’s almost antiquated - holding this CD, listening to this voice for the first time again, which, in this age of bloated box sets and furious prolificitvity, makes this record a time capsule to the distant past of 1997 and also a familiar yet new friend. “Machine Gun” rattles like a semi-automatic weapon, and “Deep Water” sounds like an old blues song from a scratched wax disc in a museum : and make no mistake, it is an old-fashioned album. No mere collection of songs shoved together, nor any such thing as a half-formed thought, “Third” is a musical work of art, a successful artistic achievement, a worthy successor. It’s a brilliant record of no small ambition or vision that will stand the test of time.
- posted by Mark @ 9:42 pm 2 comments

 
Happy Now?


There’s an old song by Burt Bacharach - I almost typed Deacon Blue, for my sins, before common sense surfaced and realised that equating Deacon Blue with being the forerunning memory of anything other than the aural equivalent of drinking marmalade, all day, every day for the rest of your life, is a fate worse than death - in which Burt - or Ricky Ross, singer of Deacon Blue, declares He’ll Never Fall In Love Again.

Far be it from me to declare that Ricky Ross, singer of Deacon Blue, should regard himself as extremely bloody lucky that he would even be given the opportunity to fall in love - after all, and since I’m no Oil Painting (if I were, it would Picasso’s Guernica rendered in the visual style of a tribute band lead by Shane McGowan and heard briefly through a passing car), I know full well what singledom is like. I’m still in touch with my inner virgin, those hopeless years frantically masturbating the skin off my turgid and redundant penis as if I were trapped in an prison cell with only a dogeared copy of National Geographic’s Women With Plates In Their Lips Showing 2mm Of Breast 1973 special for company. Nonetheless, Ricky Ross, the singer from Deacon Blue, should count himself lucky his saccharine voice has enabled even to talk to a female of the species. It must be his singing voice : which to me sounds like what being forcefed sugar until you die must be like.

In the same breath, whilst my brain is hopelessly fighting against certain things, like, for example, remembering my endless stream of PIN numbers, my home phone number, the password for my Monster Account - apparently it’s poor form to use the same password of “Big Dogs Cock” for everything - my brain can conjour up, seemingly at will certain things that I absolutely cannot forget no matter how I desperately want to. For example, my brain can tell you that Ricky Ross is singer in Deacon Blue. That You Have Killed Me, by Morrissey, was, in fact, a bigger hit than any song by The Smiths. The cheat code for original version of Doom is IDDQD. That the shot in Return Of The Jedi has the biggest number of separate plates ever shot for a non CGI special effects show (159) - and that during the same shot there’s a continuity error of false perspective where a Tie Fighter doesn’t disappear from frame when the Millenium Falcon appears in front of it.



In the meantime, my brain is busy forgetting important stuff. Like, for example, what to do when attached by teenage kids, how to cross roads, what I’m meant to be doing at work. But ask me the catalogue number of New Order’s original Confusion 12” single (FAC93), and I’ll gladly tell you that not only did Peter Saville design the cover to feature one single overlaid piece of text, but also that the concept was later recycled for a tour T-shirt in 1998, and that Confusion has never seen official release as a 7” single, despite being reissued 4 times in a variety of around 15 remixes, in 1983, 1990, 1996, and 2002.

Happy Brain? Happy? When I die at the hands of an alligator attack because I didn’t know how to punch it in the eye to release its 300lb per square inch death grip, the last thought that goes through my head will not be anything important, but relatively simple… I wish I’d got to hear Chinese Democracy. And then it will all go black and I will be digested inside a crocodile’s lizard guts in redneck America. And that’ll teach me a lesson.
- posted by Mark @ 7:04 pm 1 comments

 
it's pretty shitty when you find out someone you've known for 14 years has decided to not be your friend anymore when they defriend you on Facebook and they don't even have the manners to give you an explanation. life's too short.
- posted by Mark @ 7:44 pm 1 comments

 
Who Would Jesus Mosh?


Even Galvatron, or Darth Vader must have an interest outside purely being Evil after all. If you were nothing but Evil - say, for example, more concentrated Evil than the Devil’s Nose - it would get utterly boring. Face it, being Evil is a sign of being a workaholic. When all you do is be Evil, there’s little space for anything else. Doesn’t Galvatron ever go jogging? Doesn’t Darth Vader ever plan his excursions around the universe on the basis of Disaster Area’s Tour Dates? Hitler, were he alive today, would have an iPod. And I’m sure it would have truly shite music on it.

Which makes it a little puzzling when I hear that David Cameron loves Morrissey. Now, I know for a fact that Morrissey once famously sang “Margaret On The Guillotine”, so quite how being a brown nosed, millionaire private school Tory Boy equates to being the Millionaire Lackey of Big Business hopelessly enthrall to the cruel dream of Thatcherism - an ethos where it was clear that all that really mattered was how much money you had, also known, a worldview known unofficially as “Fuck The Poor” could possibly in any way relate to Morrissey simply baffles me. How someone could listen to, and love music with lyrics such as “It takes guts to be gentle and kind”, and then wholeheartedly agree with Operation Bomb The Living Fuck Out Of The Brown People seems to me to be a prime example fo what psychotherapists call ‘Cognitive Dissonance’; the process of having two wildly opposing viewpoints simultaneously and simply ignoring the fact that by doing so, you’re a steaming great big liar living in a palace made of your own hypocrisy.

It’s like saying that everyone who listens to Simply Red is Evil. (We know this is true). But the devil has the best tunes. And The equasion cannot simply be reversed that everyone who listens to Morrissey is by definition, virtuous. Much as I would like to think that is the case, Cameron is the exception that proves the rule.

Not only that, but what is Galvatrons favourite movie? Who wrote Kim Jong Il’s favourite book? (Now, assuming that Kim Jong Il’s favourite book isn’t written by himself, presumably it might be, oh, I don’t know, Tom Cruises Guide To Ruling A Cult With An Iron Fist) What about say, Fidel Castro? Would he dig Beyonce? This is simply the issue at stake : no one seems to be bothered to find out about The Inner Monologue Of Evil. Hannibal Lecter is a ponce and a snob, who listens to classical recitals and kills the violinist who once hit a foul note - whilst failing to realise that maybe killing people is - perhaps -a larger transgression in the big scheme of things.

Who Would Jesus Mosh To? Being Evil must be boring, and a tedious monopoly of time. We all know Hitler was a failed painter, but what if, for example, Ted Bundy was a failed poet? What is Harold Shipman was merely expressing his frustrations at commuting? I’m seeing a trend here. In fact, given the number of times I’ve been delayed going to work because some Useless Fucking Cretin has decided to not only kill himself, but also to do so in front of MY train so I’m late for work, we should work on creating suicidal dating agencies.

Are you a killer? Need to kill someone? Are you suicidal? Want to die? Fulfill a killers perversions, and serve the community by not holding MY train up so I can get to work on time, by signing up to miserablemeetmurderer.com. Killer and killed browse each other, and choose dates, and then get on with the whole messy business of death behind close doors without jumping in front of my train.

Seriously. Everyone’s a winner this way. Now, you may think I’m being cynical or unnecessarily harsh, but I think that such a website will be providing a public service - A SoulMates for the terminally depressed. After all, I’m of the belief that anything between two consenting adults, however strange, isn’t necessarily immoral. If you believe in freedom for those weirdos that could only achieve a fraction of an orgasm by hammering nails into each others testicles, then surely, you also believe in the quality of life and death. Think of it as a Mutually Beneficial Euthanasia.

Oh, and I reckon Hitler would have Robbie Williams on his iPod. Think about it. You know it makes sense.
- posted by Mark @ 7:26 pm 1 comments

 
Administration


If I had to save one thing from a house, it would undoubtedly be my 500GB Hard drive. Though the hard drive doesn’t necessarily know it, it truly is, my life. Every piece of music I love, every photograph I have ever taken, and everything I have ever written sits on that hard drive. It’s only 500GB. Costs about £60 to £100, depends upon who you buy it from. I’m not particularly good at backing up - though I have several other drives around the house, and this perhaps, is my undoing.

My son also loves Futurama. Ama! Ama! He squeals and coos as he treats the house as his own, personal, playground, to crawl and climb in the pursuit of the elusive Futurama 15DVD Box Set that sits on a high shelf. For some reason, he identifies closely with this 12-rated, rather mature, animated series about life in the future. He likes it more than The Simpsons. My mother said The Simpsons was rubbish, because it was a cartoon. I almost pointed out that The Beatles were just a bunch of noise, but perhaps successfully, bit my tongue.

Whilst I was at work, X decided to play a new game called Indiana Jones Climbs The Mountain To Reach The DVD Box Set. It’s a game I’ve occasionally played myself. According to legend, myth, and minor bylines in The Onion, In his quest for this elusive, shiny animated prize, he somehow managed to cause great tragedy to befall me.

The Hard Drive - all my precious 120GB of smut, and the as precious 300GB of music, and the priceless pictures of my life over the past five years, came crashing down akin to Fonthill Abbey. It probably held itself with perfect grace and poise in air for a few silent seconds, motionless as Wile E Coyote, a paper bird at the apex of flight. And then, without just cause, the hard drive came crashing down with a dull clunk onto the floor.

From now on, I’m storing hard drives on the floor, or inside vaults backed up every damn day. According to my rough calculations, I lost around 650 naked women in that disk crash.

Alongside around 30,000 MP3’s and around 30,000 photographs.



Luckily, I have almost all the data backed up somewhere. I powered up my previous desktop, last used in anger on 8th October 2007, and recopied over all my MP3’s from the Hard Drive there. Luckily - I suppose - the rest of my MP3’s were also stored on my iPod. By use of some fairly cheeky ferreting in hidden system files and folders - I took all these 29,782 MP3’s back and reinstalled on the hard drive. I also recopied over all my smut, and all the photographs and my writing.

As I said, I’ve probably lost around 650 naked women. Not the end of my world. Its not as easy as just picking up and dumping MP3’s back into place, mind you. ITunes has this frustrating option, where by it stores artists by multiple categories. Not only do I have to take every MP3 from the ‘Individual Artist’ folder, I also have to recover from the ‘Compilations’ section., where the songs are sorted by album title, not by album artist. As you can imagine, this is probably a TV Season DVD Box Set’s worth of effort. Nonetheless, I endure. I have yet to complete it for a relatively simple reason.

Disk space. By copying the entire contents of my 120GB drive and my 250GB drive and my 160GB iPod, you can see that I am approximately 30GB over my 500GB capacity. Luckily, I have around 40GB of duplicates across my original system folders. You with me? Good. But I have to root out the 40GB duplicates, and recopy them over to their associated artist folders. What a pain in the Gulliver. Nonetheless, needs must. By my calculations, after I’ve gone through all this, I’ve lost around 650 pictures of naked women I found on the internets and the Googles.

There’s another drawback. On my iPod, as indeed, most iPods, files are sorted in a rather haphazard manner. It may look completely normal and well sorted when you click through iTunes, or the iPod click wheel, but it isn’t. Instead of what one would deem a common sense approach to file storage (that is, sorting files by the following structuture : F:My iPod/Music/Name of The Artist / Name Of The Album / Name Of The Song, the iPod is, in its uniquely Mac way, sorted rather differently. On the iPod all your MP3’s are renamed. No long is a song called “How Soon Is Now.MP3”, or “Welcome To The Jungle.MP3”. Each song is entitled something different. A typical example would be a four digit alphabetical string in each one of 49 different system files.

For example, your copy of “Angels” by Robbie Williams - and I know they come preloaded on every iPod, by Law, under the little known 1998 Guy Chambers Omnipresence Act of Parliament, Section 3.IV.14, is actually stored as a file that looks roughly like this :

Now strap yourselves in for the torrent of pointlessness,..

F:/MyiPod/Users/System files/Hidden/Music//F47/HYIK(2).mp3

Not only that, but you have to go into Tools>Options to even show the Hidden files. What I have spent time doing recently is extracting each of these renamed files to a ‘master folder’. The drawback is that in each folder there are probably 48 files that share the same, random 4 digit alphabetical string as in A.N.Other Folder. So in F03 there is HYIK.mp3. In F09 there is HYIK.mp3 - now know as HYIK(2).mp3. And in F17 there is a HYIK.mp3 that is now renamed HYIK(3).mp3.

With me? Good.

The stage I am now at is resorting these 29,872 files to folders inside the main music folder by Music / Artist Name / Album Name and then ensuring that the correctly tagged files (of which there are 8,000 on my old hard drive) are then filed in preference over the HYIK.mp3 files.

Fun. But at least it has taught me one thing. No, not, Back Up Your Hard Drive, but simply this : Never Work With Children Or Hard Drives*

*not strictly true.
- posted by Mark @ 7:00 pm 0 comments

 


A week ago it was Mother’s Day. In the Guardian Weekend, they invited people to write a letter to their mother, alive or dead, so here’s mine.

Dear Mum,

I know it’s been a long time since we met, and I know you didn’t want to go away. I forgive you, but really, even though we were all very hurt by your leaving, we knew it wasn’t your choice either. I would like to hear from you as to what life is like where you are now, now that you have the answers to the questions every philosopher, aethist, agnostic and artist want to ask : what is on the other side of death?

Things here have changed radically since I last saw you. The big news is that you are a grandmother three times over ; my brother has become a father twice (albeit I get the impression it was not necessarily planned either time) and so am I.

I’m a father as well. I have a son, X, who is three at the end of the month. He’s my friend and my mate and I think you would like him. I seem to have been quite unlucky in love. The girl I was with at the time you went away is now happily married with children and I am happy that she’s happy. There’s was another girl - the kind of person who thinks that she is always right because of who she is and not the quality of the decisions she makes. She was convinced I was cheating on her, and made the facts fit the conclusion instead of considering what was actually happening. It is impossible to learn from your mistakes when you don’t think you ever make any.... When she left it was the hardest year of my life. I would never wish that year on my worst enemy.

I was working as well, and they seemed determined to force me out by fair means or foul. I may always have been outspoken : primarily if someone’s full of shit I’m not afraid to call them out on it. But this has made my life very difficult because Power and Fairness are not always equal. In a year I went from living in the Midlands with a partner, to living in London single with a new job. What I had to do was simply to Get Through it.

Unfurtunately, I met someone. There are very few people who I wish I’d never met, but the first Mrs Reed was undoubtedly the biggest disgrace to the family name there has been. I’ve always felt quite attached to the name, and tried to imbibe our family name with the qualities of which I would be proud : honour, commitment, hard work, responsibility, and intelligence. Sadly, she seemed not to have any of these qualities. She seemed to see being married as a licence for her to stay at home and drink whilst I went out at work every day. She left, stole a lot of my possessions, came back into the house whilst I was at work and stole some more, and hacked my email so she could read it. None of this behaviour I saw as anything less than a besmirching of the family name. I never taught anyone to lie, or impersonate other people, or to steal. I don’t know where she got it from.

I then met the woman who would become my second wife. We have separated now, which is not what I wanted but what I have realised is probably the best thing to happen. We were in danger of losing our friendship and hating each other, which, considering we have a son together, was something I was keen to avoid. So it appears that me and marriage may have to ‘have a break’ from each other. But I still pull myself up, and believe in love.

The last thing I said to her the other day was “You’re the one whose hit me and stolen three and a half thousand pounds from me - so why are you the one whose shouting at me?”

Nonetheless, life hasn’t turned out the way I wanted it to. I don’t think I could have imagined that a year ago that I would’ve been forced out of a job I loved through unfair abuse of their powers through Constructive Dismissal, or that I would be fast on the way to be a divorcee for the second time. It’s been a shit twelve months. I have another job, and was unemployed for a total of eleven days, but it wasn’t the way I wanted things to turn out. Being a grown up is much harder than it needs to be.

I did my best with what I had and the circumstances I was in, and whilst I would like to have had things turn out rather differently, all I can say is that I tried my best.
- posted by Mark @ 6:49 pm 0 comments

 
Blue Monday Is 25 Years Old Today


The house I grew up in….. is a three bed roomed Victorian home in Central Birmingham. In many ways its no different from where I live now, albeit that where I live now is somewhat less central to a big city. I was always drawn away from the roar of the city to the tranquillity of the country. In an ideal world, we’d never be rushed, or tired. When I’m home, it feels as if the world no longer threatens me.

When I was a child I wanted to be… an astronaut. I’ve always wanted to be in a different world than the one I actually live in.

The moment that changed my life forever …. I think every day changes our lives forever, to an extent. Sometimes I look at my life and think that this, us, mankind, we haven’t evolved at all and we’re still doing the same stuff - working and eating and moving from one place to another - the same way that mankind was in 1805. The essential core experience of a life doesn’t change across the centuries.

My greatest inspiration …. Is my life and how I want to change it. Everything I do is geared towards either my continued survival or improving the quality of that survival.

If I could change one thing about myself …. I’d need less sleep and less food.

My favourite item of clothing…. I don’t think I have one. Hang on, a blue t shirt with a pear on it.

At night I dream of …. Of nonsensical things I forget in the morning. Parachuting out of tanks. Wrestling pandas. That kind of thing.

What I see when I look in the mirror …. Is myself, and that’s all I will ever be.

My style icon …. I don’t have one. Fashion is temporary. Style is forever.

I wish I’d never worn …. My first wedding ring.

My real-life villian …. Was Margaret Thatcher. Now, any religious fundamentalist in a position of power, be they President or not.

Its not fashionable but I like …. Bands that were on the cover of the NME between 1987 and 1993.

You wouldn’t know it but …. I secretly am obsessed with the tallest buildings in the world. I’ve been up quite a few of them. I have yet to see the Motherland’s Call.

You may not know but I’m not good at… driving. I learnt everything I need to know from Grand Theft Auto. And beside from that, I find a great terror comes with facing any other vehicle on the road. I have no idea what they are going to do, and that terrifies me into immobility.

I drive ….. Nothing.

If I have time to myself….. I quietly read about interesting and weird things on the Internet. Places like here, and here, and here.

My most valuable possession is …. Is probably my 500GB Hard Drive. The same one my son ruined last week. I’ve spent most of this week recovering the contents from my various other back up copies. Data is everything these days. I remember the days when I had a 1GB hard drive. How could I ever fill that, I wondered? Now, I’m considering buying a 1TB drive.

Movie heaven….. Is a year off work to catch up with every film I’ve ever wanted to see.

My greatest regret…. Is that it seems to have been very difficult for me to find my soul mate, and even more difficult to be with them. Other people find their soul mates, and it seems to come so easy and naturally to them. To me, love is a minefield and a battle. I have yet to find the peace.



The last album I bought / downloaded : Bought - Wayne Hussey’s solo album “Bare”, Downloaded - Prince “Nude Tour” (live in Hamburg 1990) bootleg.

My greatest regret …. March 2001 - July 2002.

A book that changed me …. The Job, William Burroughs

My favourite works of art … are printed on paper and vinyl, normally designed by Peter Saville, and performed by Hook / Sumner / Morris / Gilbert. Talking of which, Blue Monday is 25 years old today.

The person who really makes me laugh … is my son.

The shop I cant walk past …. Anywhere selling chocolate

The best invention ever …. Is electricity. Everything in modern life seems to be born of it.

In 10 years time I hope to be …. Happy

My life in seven words … dissatisfied, long, slavery, employment, fleeting, beautiful, meaningful.



Can you ever be too old to be a pop star? Yes. However, that doesn’t mean that you
can be too old to be a great artist. Pop Stardom is by its very nature, the fame that accompanies makinga fleeting and disposable, mass produced work of art that serves a functional purpose. Pop and art rarely interact, but when they do the results are rare and beautiful.

When is it always better to write about what you know? Well.. Most great novels have the word “Fiction” written in their classification on the rear, so obviously, no. Exploration of the unknown is the force that has made mankind climb mountains and reach the stars.

Does everyone have a novel in them? Yes. Some people’s novel are My Dull Dish Water Life, other peoples are Ulyssess. There is no such thing as a perfect novel, and there is no such thing as the perfect person.

How many unpublished novels are written every year? By me? Approximatyely one half to two thirds of one.

How long does it take to write a novel? At 2,000 words an hour, I could write one, with sufficient inspiration and without sleep, in a weekend.

What kind of book transfers well to the screen? Where the inner monologue can be expressed visually.

Whose vision does the audience get closest to seeing? Their own. Every person brings their own prejudices to a text, and it is their own lens of distortion that forms the final result in their eyes.

Should some topics be off limits? No.

Are photographs artworks? Undoubtedly.

Does the quality of the picture relate to the quality of the camera? Sometimes. You cannot polish a turd, so a poor picture by a good camera is still a poor picture.

Whats the difference between pornographic and erotic photos? An erotic photograph treats the participant with respect and arouses. A pornographics photos just treats the body as a canvas to be displayed akin to a geography map.

Do you have to ask peoples permission to take their pictures? Sometimes you can’t. Sometimes there is no choice but to shoot first and then ask later : you may lose the shot and the image and the composition.Also, some people, when they know they are being photographed, by their very nature they freeze and become self-conscious and aware.

Are photos realistic? In some respects they are reality. In others, they are artificial. A photograph is merely a frame upon a reality. It is no more or less real than any one persons perception of reality.

Are we now post modern? Everything’s post-modern by definition these days. Post-modernism is whatever we want it to be.

Does great art always have something to do with suffering? Absolutely not. By the same token, some suffering artists have produced nothing but self-pitying, mediocre drivel.

Can you make a great work of art accidentally? No. Any work of art is by, and has, a purpose. Albeit it may not have been the creators intention to make a great work of art,but o one tries tomake mediocre art. If one could identify the moments when one is making a great work, the, by definition, you could instantly recreate great art on command, which is obviously impossible. Artists do not necessarily know the very nature of what they create, for if they did, they would create different art.
- posted by Mark @ 10:54 pm 0 comments

 
THE MISSION - 'The Final Chapter' - London Shepards Bush Empire - 01 March 2008


And so it comes to a long overdue end.

22 years after they formed from the remnants of The Sisters Of Mercy, The Mission, who are now, in effect, the Wayne Hussey Experience, are finally summing up the substance of their work with these four final shows at a Victorian Theatre in East London.

For the uninitiated, this by the way, is their second split. In 1996, to underwhelming apathy (and a piss-poor album not even the band liked), The Mission as-was took their gang show round the world for a handful of shows before waving farewell at a football stadium in South Africa. The band reformed three years later, and did some fabulous shows. And some piss poor ones. The last time I saw them (at the Astoria six years ago), saw an artistically confused band in turmoil, trying to spotweld a journeyman session guitarist who desperately wanted to be in Nine Inch Nails to the rest of the group, before falling apart very publically when it transpired that nobody was getting paid for the work. Undeterred, Wayne Hussey took the remaining guitarist and hired two compliant guns to keep The Mission Gang Show on the road.



Within a matter of nine months the entire band - barring the singer - had changed. This, compounded with the two piss awful shows I saw earlier on that tour and a later, less-than-impressive one-man-and-his-iPod show by a solo Hussey, meant that I resolved to stay away from a series of ever poorer concerts. This was hardly helped by an artistic stagnation that saw the band revert to becoming The Mission UK’s Best Tribute Act In The World Featuring The Original Singer and a complete failure of the group to produce its own artistic identity. The final lineup produced just one live album (OK, to a point), and one forgettable studio record. With an ever changing open door of jobbing musicians and no original members, alongside a lineup that changed with frightening regularity, The Mission were fast disappearing into nothingness. It was an unworthy end to a band that changed lives and sealed marriages and were, for a short while between 1988 and 1991, one of the best live bands in the country whose shows were rightly legendary for their passion and intensity.

Now, 22 years ago, The Mission have become a habit and a job : something they do because they don’t know what else to do, trading on former glories from a lineup with which they only share a name, and an ever diminishing reputation. They almost became the sound of fingernails clinging to a cliff edge.

But these shows, The Final Chapter, are a valid, and bold reclamation of a previously sullied reputation. With these shows, they have boldly reclaimed their place and history. Maybe its because they are splitting up. Maybe its because they know that after this, there really might be no more. Ever. 22 years is a long time.



This is the band choosing to go. A funeral on their own terms. A final match from a prize fighter, determinded to show that, even with his last breath, he could still throw a punch as strong as any rival. This is the final triumphant victory. And to be blunt, it’s a glorious wake, a fervent celebration of everything they ever were. The tarnished memories of the previous few shows I saw have been banished. Instead, this new, hungry look band furiously, passionately unleash their last moments with a vigour and revelation - to luxuriate and enjoy this last kiss from their audience. It’s as if the band and the audience are lovers, and bowing out with one defiant gesture in the face of their sadly inevitable commercial and critical defeat.

Over the course of three hours, the band play their longest and most exhaustive show until there is almost nothing left to give anymore. From the opening “Amelia” at 8.15 to a sprawling, bittersweet “Wasteland” (the very song that opened their first show also closes their last), it’s a long journey. The first part of the set sees their landmark album “Carved In Sand” performed in full - alongside some of the respective b-sides and singles from the same era. It’s a precious but odd experience, to see The Mission perform these songs, though the two bands only share their name and their singer. Nonetheless, longstanding Mish guitarist Mark Gemini-Thwaite (who joined in 1993) plays with a passion and fluency as if he wrote these songs himself : they’ve been part of his life for fifteen years and were on his turntable for a decade before that. The capable, solid, and unexceptional rhythm section of Steve Spring and Richie Vernon meanwhile offer nothing but a dependable recreation of the past.



But the songs. Those songs. Despite the lack of the original players, these songs are just as strong as the original lineup. You wouldn’t know the difference. The band are joined for the final strait by the long-alienated, original guitarist Simon Hinkler (once in Pulp, to your surprise). After an hour of a fearlessly executed history lesson, they leave the stage to be joined a moment later by The Wonder Stuff’s Miles Hunt and Erica Nockalls to perform a couple of songs. And then it’s the final, last, farewell. Two hours of the band as they perform a determindedly perverse set that focuses clearly on beloved early album tracks such as “Islands In A Stream” and “Bridges Burning”. I could argue, and quite rightly, about the absence of hit single stalwarts such as “Beyond The Pale” and “Evangeline”, but at the end, it’s mere quibble. The band perform a tight, solid set of older material (including the overlooked “Afterglow” and “Forever More” from their ‘weird’ post-fame period) that serves to remind that there is and was a lot more of them than just flowers, big white shirts and mumbo-jumbo lyrics.

For most of us - barring the season ticket holders who have an aftershow party in the venue and enjoy a final 2 song encore from the band - the last Mission song of all time is also their signature number : “Tower Of Strength”. An unashamed homage to Led Zeppelin, the song mercilessly apes “Kashmir” and recasts it as a communal hymn, a spiritual prayer to healing power of song and of unity. A speechless Wayne Hussey gazes one final time at a crowded room in London as his band conjour up this magical music for the very last time. It’s a victory, for certain, of a sort : to be abdicating this position of one’s own accord, at one’s own terms. The final, glorious statement from a legend that knows that its powers are slowly slipping away, and deciding to provide one last triumph by which to be remembered. It may not be the best Mission concert of all time, but it certainly was the best of theirs I have seen. A fitting Final Chapter that reclaims the bands history from the scrapheap and places them back on the top of the mountain. A fitting end to 22 years of keeping the faith



Pictures reproduced by permission of Oliver Bourgel.
- posted by Mark @ 8:44 pm 1 comments