Archive for May, 2002

Excerpts: Writing Home (Alan Bennett)

Writing Home is one of John’s favourite books, and I’m glad he made me read it despite my complete unfamiliarity with Alan Bennett’s work. In some ways it’s an experience akin to reading the very best (I use that word loosely, and won’t bother to clarify it) blog/online diary combinations, except that you can curl up in bed with this, and it is consistently charming. Thought I’d put a few favourite entries up here before I return the book to John (with many thanks!):

1982
5 April, Yorkshire. I walk round the village at half past ten, the shadows from the barns sharp and clear under Larkin’s “strong, unhindered moon”. “This must wait”, is my foolish thought, “until I have written something that permits me to enjoy it.”

1983
20 December, New York. I am reading a book on Kafka. It is a library book, and someone has marked a passage in the margin with a long, wavering line. I pay the passage special attention without finding it particularly rewarding. As I turn the page the line moves. It is a long, dark hair.

1984
25 September. Gore Vidal is being interviewed on Start the Week along with Richard (Watership Down) Adams. Adams is asked what he thought of Vidal’s new novel about Lincoln. “I thought it was meretricious.” “Really?” says Gore. “Well, meretricious and a happy new year.” That’s the way to do it.

7 December. To a party at the Department of the History of Medicine at Univeristy College. I talk to Alan Tyson, who’s like a figure out of the eighteenth century: a genial, snuff-taking, snuff-coloured, easy-going aristocrat - Fox, perhaps, or one of the Bourbons. He is a fellow of All Souls, and when Mrs Thatcher came to the college for a scientific symposium Tyson was deputed to take her round the Common Room. This is hung with portraits and photographs of dead fellows, including some of the economist G.D.H. Cole. Tyson planned to take Mrs Thatcher up to it saying, “And this, Prime Minister, is a former fellow, G.D.H. Dole.” Whereupon, with luck, Mrs Thatcher would have had to say, “Cole, not Dole.” In the event he did take her round but lost his nerve.

1986
4 March. Read Winnie the Pooh to an audience of children at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn. Many have never been in a theatre before. I battle against the crying of babies and the shouts of toddlers and end up screaming and shouting myself hoarse. It is Winnie the Pooh as read by Dr Goebbels.

  May 31, 02 | Uncategorized | Closed

David Grubbs (The Spitz, London)

Music Industry Trends Not Yet Overexposed (A McSweeney’s list). I swear some of these already exist on the AMG.

Elsewhere in music, we went to see David Grubbs at the Spitz on Tuesday. I’d never heard any of his solo stuff before - what drew me to the gig was more the six degrees process of connection i.e. David Grubbs was in Gastr Del Sol with Jim O’Rourke who now works with Sonic Youth, who is Michelle’s favourite band. So I already knew it wasn’t going to be one of those gigs where I could stick my head up my arse for a bit and, based on my own personal knowledge of the artist, revel smugly in the indieness coursing through my veins. This is probably why I spent a large part of the “song” where sounds of a baby crying/cat wailing (not sure which it was), opera, orchestra and random blips were repeatedly and what felt like randomly pastiched together inwardly giggling at my cliched wondering of whether he was just getting his sound samples ready for the song, or whether the song had already started, or whether everything had gone horribly wrong technically and he was desperately trying to regain control. (Aside: Man, that was a convoluted sentence.)

I enjoyed the gig, though. He looked and acted like his name, which is not to say he was engorged and slimy and writhed around on the floor under a big log, but rather that he seemed overwhelmingly ordinary when he wasn’t being a brilliant guitarist, the sort of person who’d mooch unassumingly into a gig and sit stolidly two thirds of the distance away from the stage with his Bud, watch quietly and leave.

We sat at a bad angle from the stage, and I think poor Alec spent most of the gig watching a pillar playing the guitar. Every now and then the tea light at our table would wink out from a draft and we’d have to relight it. I didn’t actually observe everyone else around us that much, except for a guy with some serious beard action and an aging hipster whose reactions to the music tended to be obvious but didn’t seem put-on. For some reason, even though I was perfectly happy being in a room with lots of other people, none of whom were irritating me (this can be rare), even though I was definitely absorbed in what was a fairly remarkable performance, there was a corner of my mind where the edges of the room seemed to blur where Alec ended, where the hand that wasn’t touching him didn’t register as a part of me and the hand that did, did.

  May 29, 02 | Music Geekery | Closed
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Attack Of The Clones

Attack Of The Clones on Sunday was everything you expect from a Star Wars movie - cool effects, terrible dialogue, corny jokes, shameless use of devices (retain Jar Jar so he can (a) be given away with Happy Meals and (b) propose emergency powers for the Chancellor in the absence of Queen Amidala; get Amidala’s back slashed by animal in gladiatoral arena so that later her top may magically but legitimately become ripped and midriff-baring).

Low points:

  • Hayden Christenson AKA Darth Sipid.
  • The sound of the devil laughing gleefully over Natalie Portman’s soul.

High points:

  • Yoda, who was my imaginary friend for most of my childhood. I somehow formed an attachment to him in Return Of The Jedi (the second film I ever saw in a cinema. I think the first was ET.) and probably embarrassed my family by crying my eyes out when he died. He’d already been swordfighting his way through most of my imaginary worlds for years before Attack Of The Clones, but it was still nice to see it happen on the screen, even if I do think my imagination was better at realistic computer animation than Industrial Light And Magic seem to have been with him in this movie.
  • C3PO: I’m programmed for etiquette, not destruction!
  May 27, 02 | Film | Closed

Bart Davenport/Homescience/Amazing Pilots/Ladybug Transistor (The Arts Cafe, London)

On Saturday people on the boating lake in Regent’s Park may have been pleasantly reminded of the age of imperialism by the sight of a small yellow girl rowing a tall poncily reclining white guy round the lake, although Alec had admittedly rowed me round the lake for the previous 45 minutes, and the Irish arguably have as much cause for resentment about imperialism as us yellow people do.

At night I’d decided to indulge my delusions of indieness by going to a gig at the Arts Cafe. We had a good time, but I ended up enjoying the performance of Bart Davenport (who wasn’t even advertised) most, and Ladybug Transistor (the only band I’d actually heard of) least. In between those two were Homescience (not the most cohesive or animated performers around, but their songs were mildly Pavementy so I liked them well enough) and The Amazing Pilots (who were, in contrast, incredibly cohesive, really got into their performance, and had much better rapport with the crowd, but whose songs were for the most part less interesting except for one called I Thought About It And I’ve Still Not Changed My Mind, which lived up to its rather great title).

Alec bought Bart Davenport’s CD on the strength of what he managed with just the quality of his voice, his songs, his guitar and the occasional kazoo, but it turned out to be disappointingly glossier - a bit too sunkissed and xylophoney - than what we’d been expecting from the performance. Still pleasant enough though, and well worth looking up if you like Summer Hymns or Yuji Oniki, who produced some of the CD.

There was nothing I specifically disliked about Ladybug Transistor, but there seemed to be a sameness to all aspects of their performance and their songs that didn’t capture me at all. In response to the last sentence of this review at Pitchfork, I guess I do just prefer the less sophisticated and trippier ways of channelling 60s sound that the Elephant 6 bands come up with (which reminds me, must go listen to my Olivia Tremor Control CDs for maximum summerness).

  May 27, 02 | Londoner Forever and Music Geekery | Closed
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Spread Eagle Surprise

Friday was meant to be practical day. It was meant to involve writing heartfelt treatises about why a Masters in Law, and particularly subjects like International And Comparative Commercial Arbitration, would give me mojo. Instead I found myself staring up at the Cutty Sark and chasing an elusive meridian line across Greenwich Park with Luke. As you do.

Later, with a dead phone battery, I was in Shoreditch trying to find a public phone to call Russ about meeting up in Herbal. Walking down the street, a pub door opened and a man came out. Right, I thought, pubs are good for public phones, and so I strode in. In hindsight the fact that all the windows were frosted should perhaps have warned me that The Spread Eagle was a pub where the line between public and private was somewhat blurred. Specifically, the line between women’s privates and the male public. Hindsight is always 20/20, so they say, and here I did indeed sight several ‘hinds’ with disturbing and unlooked-for clarity before beating a hasty retreat to a pub where everyone was fully clothed.

Herbal was enjoyable enough, except that the diversity of the music in the Ninja Tune room meant that we didn’t always feel like dancing to what was being played. Also, getting a split lip from an accidental hit on the dancefloor (miscellaneous wanker dancing way too vigorously for reggae) wasn’t too much fun. While spitting a lot of blood into the sink, I remembered primary school health education tests where you had to memorize the functions of the different teeth. Mrs Ang was right about incisors, although at the time I think the point she was trying to make was that it was naughty to bite people.

  May 27, 02 | Londoner Forever | Closed

Goddess Of Small Things

The details of my life seem that much more shallow sometimes when I try to write them down here, but for me buying a lot of CDs, endorphin-level-wise, is right up there with beautiful sunsets, belly laughs, MSG, and a warm man. Well, maybe not quite as good as a warm man, but anyway, it feels damn good.

So on Thursday I bought:

  • Since I Left You (Avalanches, £8.99, Virgin)
  • Spoonface (Ben Christophers, £8.99, Virgin)
  • Good Morning Spider (Sparklehorse, £8.99, Reckless)
  • Fog (Fog, £6.99, Reckless)
  • Black Whole Styles (Big Dada compilation, £7.99, Reckless)
  • cLOUDDEAD (cLOUDDEAD, £5.99, Selectadisc)

Yeah.

Dinner with Alec and his dad was inevitably stressful and toothachesome from holding back my usual stream of inappropriate comments and smiling a lot, but it was well worth it for the valuable ammunition of embarrassing Alec stories gained.

Back in my room, I snuggled up in bed with cherry juice and Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (Meera Syal), which I found very much more tragic than ‘omedy, as opposed to the You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! type review excerpts it had on the back cover and elsewhere on the Web. When I closed the book the light outside was long beyond Prussian blue and well on its way to eggshell.

  May 27, 02 | Londoner Forever | Closed
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Happy Ending

I’ve only just come to the stage of post-examness where writing for the blog begins to feel like a growing necessity rather than the enforced sidetrack from Getting A Life that it would have been in the past few days.

There is nothing wild or bacchanalian to report. Company Law went much better than I’d expected, and I left quickly after exchanging a few perfunctory words with the few people I actually talk to in the course, nothing of substance; there was no feeling of Here Ends Undergraduateness (assuming I pass), no lump in the throat.

It’s an illustration of my general lack of connection with the social aspects of the law faculty, I guess, even if I will miss the lady in the cafe who worried aloud that the owner of the purply coat left behind (mine) would be cold and since then always reminds me to take it with me when I leave, the lovely Irish security guard who always tried to calm me down every time I was desperately apologizing that my debating tournaments were keeping him there overtime (we always got him some whisky to make up for it), and strangely, the roadworker on a long-term job on the road to the faculty, who chats me up every time I walk past and tells me I’m pretty even when I look bloody awful.

I grabbed a Time Out, a Marks & Spencers lunch, and made a long list of things to do, both practical and frivolous. I went shopping - the makeshift stall on Goodge Street again proved itself an unlikely treasure trove when I found Adventures In Foam (Cujo, 2 CDs, £10), reeled back in disbelief, and snapped it up hungrily. Oxford Street yielded two skirts and a garish top.

Last year the night the exams ended was celebrated in typical style - dinner, pub, club till dawn. This year I had dinner with just Russ (in Carluccio’s, which I loved. Can’t wait to try the one in St Christopher’s Place). It felt right, celebrating the end of my undergraduate life at UCL with a friendship which I count among my most important achievements at university. I didn’t feel the need for anything more glamorous.

  May 27, 02 | Londoner Forever | Closed
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Insensitive

The exam venue was a large room which is usually a stomping ground for rampaging medical students (in their UCL Union building on Huntley Street. Thursday nights here are epitomized by mass karaoke and wild table dancing.) I think it was a bit insensitive to leave the Time Crisis machine in there when converting the room to an exam hall.

  May 21, 02 | Londoner Forever | Closed
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Hall Chronicles: Theology Students

Being around theology students makes life that little bit more surreal. Two conversational snippets with my hallmate Stefan:

Me: You look troubled.
Stefan: Yes, I am trying to write an essay. The Trinity, it is annoying me.

*

Me: So how’s the studying for ancient Greek going?
Stefan: Oh, I decided to focus on human salvation instead today. I thought it was more important.

  May 16, 02 | Londoner Forever | Closed
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Star Wars Cockney Rhyming Slang

On Wednesday morning Xfm was giving out Attack Of The Clones tickets (still can’t say that without making it into ATTACK!!!! of the clones) for the best Star Wars Cockney rhyming-slang listeners could come up with. One guy’s contribution was “Imperial Fleet”, to be used in the context of “let’s go into the bedroom and I’ll show you my Imperial Fleet”. Another guy called up later, suggesting “Trade Federation”, which is “something you can do with your Imperial Fleet”.

  May 16, 02 | Easily Amused | Closed
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