HMV + Roadside Stall + Django’s

Lots of things are bobbing around in the stew.

Yo La Tengo tickets have been bought, and groupie glee is building within me. Next major gig quest: Depeche Mode in October.

On the way back from the Stargreen outlet on Argyll Street, HMV just had too many racks of CDs with Various Percentages Off! to resist, so I zipped in and got Nick’s birthday present (Bent: Programmed To Love – I’d originally planned on Kruder & Dorfmeister’s The K & D Sessions but the idiot went and bought that for himself despite my strict instructions to check with me before buying any CDs), as well as This Films Crap Lets Slash The Seats (David Holmes, £5.99).

On the walk home, I passed a roadside CD stall on Goodge Street, and due to my physical inability to walk past potential music bargains, I had to stop there as well, and was astounded – A Grand Love Story (Kid Loco), Code 4109 (DJ Krush), Field Studies (Quasi), Fear Of Fours (Lamb) and Breath From Another (Esthero), all at £5 or less. I didn’t have enough (or any) cash with me at the time, but I’m going back today, and there will be spending.

Last stop on the way back was the computer room, where I checked my email, and found that Django had been kind. Doolittle (Pixies, $7.99) and The Fidelity Wars (Hefner, $8.99) are on their way to me from that wondrous land of affordable music that is the US. Although this sounds like a day of little restraint, I’d like to say that So…How’s Your Girl? (Handsome Boy Modeling School) was available for $9.99 but I controlled myself.

In other news, friend, future colleague and travel freak Yan Bin has come up with a detailed itinerary for what looks like a smashingly exhausting 18-day odyssey through Greece and Turkey, to be attempted in September. I just hope I don’t run into residential difficulties for the next academic year, so I can enjoy this trip as much as it deserves to be enjoyed without having to deal with the looming spectre of homelessness.

Stress Surrounds In The Muddy Peaceful Centre Of This Town

I spent the night singing along to five albums worth of Pavement instead of studying, which is quite absurd, given that I don’t know the majority of their lyrics.

The other day I said I’d be content if Stephen Malkmus would just perform three Pavement songs when I go to see his gig next week.

I lied.

After spending last night listening to the five Pavement albums I own, in chronological order (with a break for West Wing between Wowee Zowee and Brighten The Corners), I have come to the conclusion that I also want Here, Silence Kit, Range Life, Fillmore Jive (hell, all of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, which I’ve just decided trumps Slanted And Enchanted on my desert island disc list), Rattled By The Rush, Brinx Job, Half A Canyon, Stereo, Transport Is Arranged…oh, I just want Pavement never to have broken up…

And when I did study, this is what I had to snuggle up to. Try this excerpt from EU Law (Craig & De Burca), which is a very, very thick book:

“The semi-communautairisation of the third pillar and the simultaneous infiltration of the Community Treaty by third-pillar features emphasise the increasing complexity and mixity of the European Union constitutional order, and an inevitable move away from the clarity and simplicity of the Community legal order of the past.”

These writers regret a move away from “clarity and simplicity”? Could’ve fooled me.

Matthew Sweet Tangents

Does Matthew Sweet deliberately think to himself, “Okay, you’ve got a couple of rather unhappy dark songs, so make sure you give them the catchiest, happiest melodies you’ve got”?

Sick Of Myself (which, of course, is the ideal song to begin an album called 100% Fun with) is exuberant and rollicking from the get-go. It’s a song for convertibles, and the wind in your hair, and turning the volume up on the car stereo, and even as you sing “But I’m sick of myself, when I look at you” you can’t help but bob your head. There’s that playful, percussive guitar which starts it off, and there are those multiple false endings, and the entire song does actually sound like lots of fun, as long as you don’t listen to the words. I could go on and on about it, but I did a little digging and found someone else who loves it as much as I do and wrote about it better.

The dark songs on Altered Beast are, at least, in a minor key, but I still find myself swaying and smiling and singing along with gusto because they’re just so thoroughly pleasant.

Devil With The Green Eyes starts off like a lightweight 80’s big-haired rock ballad, with the sort of keening guitar feedback you expect from November Rain or a song by the Scorpions. But then the drums and harmonied vocals kick in, and you think the intro was meant to throw you off. But then he’s singing “The devil with the green eyes said you were never meant to be mine/’cause I came up from a dark world and every love I’ve ever known is dead/if you come close enough to see I am inhuman, I will tell you why you’re feeling so uncertain/Every word I say has a way of turning evil in you”.

And then of course there’s Someone To Pull The Trigger, where he sings “Well I’m waiting and willing/The clarity is chilling/But I’m not turning back/And neither can you/I need someone to pull the trigger…so if you’re what I think you’ll be/if you’re who I think I see – shoot”, and the quietly jangly country-laced guitars sing along.

This intrigues me because it makes me wonder about the songwriting process. I guess different people have different ways of doing it, but I always thought that whichever came first (melody or lyrics), the writer then tries to make the other components of the song suit what he’s already got. So both the lyrics and the music of Good Vibrations convey exactly that. And everything in You Oughtta Know echoes “And when I scratch my nails down someone else’s back I hope you feel it”. And She Don’t Use Jelly is as silly and lovely and weird as you’d expect it to be.

But then for each example I think of there, counter-examples jump out at me. Mack The Knife. Most stuff by eels.

Oh well, yet another train of thought skipping merrily off the rails and dangling its bare feet in a countryside pond while munching on buffet car sandwiches and throwing crisps to frustrated ducks…

Ggggah

I don’t check my email for one day, and I miss arrival alerts for used copies of Endtroducing and Doolittle, and of course they got snapped up by someone else by the time I got to them today. I think the word is GGGGAH. Said with ggggumption.

Pitchfork reckons the new Wagon Christ album is 0.1 point better than the previous one (which was reasonably scrumptious), which means it’s going on my wishlist.

Randomly: Switch the first letters of words around in a goofy referential fashion a la Smog’s Dongs Of Sevotion and Pastor Of Muppets, and you have a strangely giggling Michelle.

Maybeeee Someone’s Gonna Save Meeeee

Tickets bought to see Stephen Malkmus at ULU on April 12, hooray, hooray!!! But now there’s a dilemma – I assume he’ll sing lots of songs from his solo album, so do I go buy it so that I don’t end up listening in ignorance? I originally intended to wait till it was available second hand at Django, or buy it cheap in Singapore when I go home for the summer. And is it an affront to him as a solo artist to hope he sings some Pavement songs as well? I’m not asking for much, just AT&T, Shady Lane and In The Mouth A Desert. Please?

Now that’s done, I have to go toddle down to various roadside ticketing agents and see what I can scrounge up for Yo La Tengo (April 10). And hey, contrary to my previously voiced fears, I’m not going to have to slink in alone and grit my teeth in envy eavesdropping on everyone else talking to their friends about how much they love Slanted And Enchanted, or I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One, because Marten, sole indie-lovin’ friend in London, decided that the gigs were just too good to pass up.

Yay. :) Going to these two gigs will go far towards lessening my genuine pain of missing Bon Jovi when they play here in June!

And hordes of indie readers leave in disgust.

Online Vs Offline

Two days on, and things are looking (very) slightly better. Some sort of start has been made on Milosevic, although everything else I was depressed about on Friday is pretty much still going on.

An addendum to one thing I wrote on Friday, about anti-abortionists: I am anti-abortion, except in cases where the mother’s life is in danger, or both the mother’s and child’s lives are in danger, where I believe it becomes a moral grey area where any decision either way is incredibly difficult. I believe abortion is the taking of an innocent life, and in my ideal world, it would be illegal. Then again, in my ideal world, there wouldn’t be rapists, and contraception wouldn’t fail, and people who didn’t want to get pregnant would act responsibly in their sex lives. But there isn’t much that’s more hypocritical than anti-abortionists murdering, and it disgusts me that in their moral universe and mine, some points overlap.

This is actually a subject I can go on and on for hours about, but it’s something I generally prefer to deal with through real-time conversation rather than in a blog, because misunderstandings are so much easier to deal with face to face. I’d also state that almost everything I said above is, at best, a simplistic summary of my thoughts on the subject, and I don’t think any valid opinions can be formed in response to my views (either for or against) until you’ve actually talked to me.

It just struck me that many of the things I think about a great deal are hardly represented in this site. I think a great deal about politics, and religion, and morality – basically, all the stuff that people disagree most violently and irrationally about – but I seldom write about any of that here. I think it’s because in real life, I spend a great deal of time in the company of debaters and at debating competitions, where all the above subjects are, surprise surprise, violently and irrationally disagreed about. And as I said earlier, I actually prefer talking about things like that face to face with people, rather than chucking inflammatory words into the ether where they can be easily misunderstood and people can think of me as a bad, bad person.

Which does trouble me. I’m perfectly happy with people having less than positive opinions about me (because sometimes, no one agrees more with them than me), but I like having the chance to defend myself if they’ve got me wrong, which they frequently do, either through a fault of theirs, or mine, or both. And although people frequently get me wrong in conversations as well, at least I’ve got more of a chance if they communicate their displeasure there and then, and we can try sorting it all out.

So that was yet another simple comment turned into a personality rant. They tend to slip out from time to time.

Low

It might be having to study for exams, or it might be hormonal, or it might be the changing of the seasons, but whatever it is, I feel incredibly low today, and not in a cool indie-rock Mormon couple way.

(Note to self: Evaluate at some point whether references like the one I made above are attempts at over-cleverness which reflect some deep subconscious pop-psychology-stoked insecurity of mine, or whether they’re perfectly acceptable expressions of the connections my mind makes, and this is the one place I can express them given that if I said things like that in normal life, people would look at me with polite incomprehension. As I said, note to self.)

Reading the news with any sort of emotional involvement at all is a recipe for depression. Bush says fuck you to Kyoto. Anti-abortionists just keep on killing abortionists. Timothy McVeigh calls the children who died in Oklahoma “collateral damage”. Trouble goes on in the usual trouble spots, and then some. I feel a sort of impotent fury at the world, and the conglomeration of human (un)reason that goes into making these things happen.

You know what else terrifies me? The fact that all this is going on, and chances are that I can keep on living my charmed easy life, flying between comfort zones London and Singapore, and none of it is likely to really affect me that much in my lifetime, unless weapons of mass destruction get involved.

It disturbs me how easy it would be to stop caring. To shut myself in with my books and my music (geez, this all sounds very I Am A Rock) and shake my head in resignation when I read about 10 month old babies killed by snipers, and then go play Dope Wars the next minute.

And then the other question is: what the hell is your caring worth, Michelle, if you don’t do anything about anything except sit around all day reading the news? I’m sure suffering people are grateful that you care even though you spend far more money on buying CDs than in donations to charities that might help them. I’m sure they speak fondly of you to aid workers, because you spent five seconds thinking “poor, poor suffering people” before you turned the page and read about the Oscars.

It’s a Moebius strip of frustration and malaise and “Michelle, everything may be crap but so are you” and I really just wish we were all better people, and I also wish that didn’t sound as stupid and trite as it did, but I did mean it.

(Note: Dope Wars deliberately not linked to. May you all be spared from its enslavement.)

Contradictions

Somewhere in the giant cosmic calendar, today is marked “Michelle, London: Contradictions, contradictions. Haha! Hahaha!”

Staying awake the entire night trying to make up for a lazy day. Making it downstairs for breakfast, and guzzling coffee, only to go back upstairs and fall asleep for five hours till three.

Magical fantastic hair, which would be reason for a little frivolous gleeful smile if I was going to Cargo tonight to see Ninja Tune maestros in action. But I’m not, because of the tube strike. I hope the strikers know that because of them, the tiny proportion of the world that would have been at Cargo have missed out on my hair.

Happily putting up my new Sandman poster (O gods of Blu-Tack, I beseech thy benevolent stickiness). Getting annoyingly outbid at the last moment for a Sonic Youth poster at ebay.

Cave paintings in the sky around half past four. I saw an icthyosaurus, struggling out of the tentacled grasp of a giant squid, and its beak broke the surface of the clouds in a flurry of blues and lilacs. An hour later, all is dull greyness and spittle, and I write this in a mood of restless discontent, hoping that the next contradiction for today will be something bad turned good, which would be refreshing.

Then again, I fully acknowledge that lots of my days involve no early risings or breakfast, evil hair, things at ebay that I can’t even afford to bid on or don’t get shipped to the UK, and disgusting weather, with none of the little joys that peeped into today, so I suppose I should quit kvetching.

Some Days

You know how some days you wake up at two and start swearing wildly because you meant to wake up at eight and be all responsible instead of sleeping half the day away, and then you mean to go grocery shopping, but instead you squander even more hours away in the computer room, and you return home seething with disgust, and then you find a CD-shaped parcel in your pigeon-hole wrapped with paper saying “This is not a CD” repeated all over it in various sizes and ink densities, and there’s a poster-shaped parcel waiting for you in reception, and when you get up to your room and open them, they’re belated birthday presents from your best friend, and one is the lovely soundtrack to Hilary And Jackie, and the other is a beautiful rare Sandman poster you’ve spent years longing, longing, longing to own?

Usually, me neither, which is why yesterday was so great. Thanks, Russ. :)

Raven Lunatic

Last night, while we were watching an X-Files episode involving ravens (Chimera), Michael walked into the TV room halfway through the show.

Shortly after Michael came in, when the camera focused on a mirror (which basically meant a raven was going to appear and caw, followed by some dreadful blurred monster thing), I went “Aaaark! Aaaark!”, which was supposed to be a raven imitation.

Mary (to Michael): Oh, that’s something related to the show. She hasn’t just gone completely mad.

Michael: Thank God. I was about to start baaaaing just so she’d feel someone understood her.

I love my hallmates.