If Soliciting Is Wrong, I Don’t Wanna Be Right

A long time ago, I decided that when this site got an average of 50 hits a day, I’d try the comments thing. It’s been getting those numbers for a while now (thank you Google sex perverts), so I decided what the hell, I have only my sense of self-worth to lose.

Therefore please note the additional linky thing in the bottom left corner of each post, and do comment if the spirit moves you to. If those brackets keep telling me zero, I’ll get all insecure, and cry. And then I’ll start posting really offensive contentious stuff, like “You readers suck buffalo cock!” (hello again, Google sex perverts), or “Postmodernism is crap. Discuss,” and we really don’t want anything like that to happen, do we?

[Note: This was posted when I was still using Blogger, and hosted my comments on enetation. The original post, and the hilarious comments made in response to it, are unfortunately lost in the mists of time.]

Dear Morpheus

Dear Morpheus,

I’m getting rather tired of this. Every night I flop around restlessly in bed until about three. I wake up at seven, but because I know I haven’t had enough sleep, I try to go back to sleep till nine. I inevitably wake up at noon, feeling absolutely wasted.

That last stretch of sleep between nine and noon forms the bulk of my complaint. Somehow during that time I’m plunged into incredibly stressful dreams, and it’s really not much fun.

I no longer want to dream about Shu-pei (old, much-loved school friend) inexplicably chasing me mercilessly and murderously around a shopping centre until I am forced to fly to evade her. When I had fled through the aisles of a supermarket and finally got cornered by high shelves in the frozen food section, you will not believe the cruel cold hand of terror that gripped my heart when, as I hovered fearfully in the air above her growling below, she concentrated hard for a moment and started rising into the air too. She wasn’t as good at flying as me, and floated down again, but she was learning. I woke up soon after sweating and shaking.

I no longer want to dream about it apparently being the day before my WEDDING (look, I REALLY have no explanation for these fucking dreams, I do find this particular dream setting disturbingly weird too), which I have somehow forgotten to invite any of my friends to, and I am frantically trying to call them up and tell them because I don’t want to spend one of the most important days of my life without them, but no one by that name ever existed at all the numbers I try.

I no longer want the losing-all-my-teeth dream which I must have had more than five times before already, but somehow every time I dream it, even though I tell myself it has to be a dream just like before, I can feel the teeth wrenching themselves out of my mouth one by one and taste the blood, and this time, oh my God, this time it’s not a dream, I really have lost all my teeth, how will I go on with no teeth at the age of twenty-two (dentures don’t occur to me okay smart-arse, it’s a dream) and ow ow OW MY JAW IS BREAKING ITSELF and then I wake up.

I know they sound damn funny in hindsight. They’re probably funny to you too because you’re, like, immortal, and tend not to be plunged into existential insecurity. They’re not very funny to me at the time though. Please make them stop.

Yours hopefully,
Michelle

P.S. Have I ever told you you’re totally the sexiest fictional immortal two-dimensional entity ever?

[To anyone who clicked on the above link and has decided I’m crazy, you kind of have to read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics to get the whole picture (how apt)]

The Idler’s Crappest Towns List

The Idler magazine has embarked on efforts most noble in finding the crappest town in the British Isles, and the results are a romp. I’ve always found the self-deprecating nature of most English (and Welsh and Scottish and Irish of course; geez these national sensitivities are tiresome) humour immensely endearing (this is especially so after smiling politely at American exchange students who don’t understand irony) and the contributors to this feature have it in spades. Here are some randomly chosen gems, but rest assured that any town you click on will be hilariously torn down.

On Portsmouth – “When you are able for one moment to get the stench of deep fried reconstituted chicken guts from the far too numerous fast food eateries from your nostrils, and quite probably the taste of your own blood and smashed teeth from your mouth, you are greeted by the rancid odour of the thousands of gallons of effluent that is pumped mercilessly into the sea on a daily basis.”

On Bath – “In the summer it fills to the brim with loud American and European tourists who clog the narrow streets like the coagulated grease in a Scotsman’s arteries. In the winter the only escape is incest and the insistent call of the bong.”

On Stockport – “The overiding ‘look’ for Stockport’s locals is a shaven head with optional Fila cap / visor perched on top, a Reebok shell suit the legs of which are tucked into a pair of overpowering patterned socks and a pair of Rockport, Timberland or Kicker boots. Gold jewellry is popular, usually incorporating sovereigns and / or Marijuana leaf motifs. The male uniform is fairly similar.”

Cheerleader/Corrigan (Water Rats, London)

I’d never heard of any of the bands playing at the Water Rats on Thursday night, but decided that for £4 and a jaunt just around the corner, I’d take the risk and believe Time Out, where Cheerleader were described as “Buzzcocks and Pixies-styled noise” and Corrigan as “zinging post-punk and cinematic post-rock…variously recalls Magazine, Slint, Joy Division and Shellac.”

Cheerleader put on a show that deserved a much bigger audience than the 20 or so people watching it. Good songs that were catchy but not samey, occasional Frank Black-esque screaming from the guy, strong charismatic lead vocals, and both vocalists sounded great together; in general a solidly competent performance head and shoulders above some of the crap I have found myself watching in disbelief in the past (Mull Historical Society, this means you).

Corrigan was…intriguing. I’ve never seen a band that seemed so disconnected from its lead singer. The rest of the band looked the indie-rock part, shaved heads, spiked hair, cool faded T-shirts etc. As for the lead singer, I have difficulty describing what he was like without being probably rather offensive, but if you’ve ever watched Will And Grace, picture Jack in an rock band.

None of the band ever seemed to look at each other, and completely ignored the antics of the lead singer and his attempts to commune with them. I didn’t quite see the influences of Slint or Joy Division that Time Out saw, but must admit ignorance with regard to Magazine and Shellac, who are still on my long list of Canonical Bands I Should Probably Get Around To Listening To At Some Point For The Sake Of My Own Indie Cred. All the same, the band played cohesively if non-interactively, and I mostly liked what I heard. My problem was that I didn’t think the lead singer’s vocals (kind of like Billy Corgan but without the edge) went with the band’s type of sound, which, come to think of it, would have worked well with an Ian Curtis type of voice (so maybe Time Out was right to use “post-punk” after all).

So I think what I’m left with for this band is that I won’t personally be keen on them unless they change their lead singer, but they do deserve to go on to bigger things. (If you think about it, I’m sure a lot of people watching the Smashing Pumpkins starting out could have said exactly the same thing.)

Four quid well spent.

Discrete little chunks of Thursday,

Discrete little chunks of Thursday, that weren’t goo-worthy in themselves, seem to have joined forces in the night and put the goo whammy on me this morning:

A beautiful day.

The frivolous yet immensely happiness-boosting pleasure of wearing a new belt with an outfit it looks really good with.

Lunch with Alec (on study leave) at Ikkyu and half-pints afterwards at the Duck And Dive. Realising how rare this otherwise mundane pleasure was – being with him in sunlight, in the middle of the week.

Good progress on immensely boring essay (the concept of technical content in determining patentability of inventions) in the afternoon despite the stealthy beginning of a goo onslaught of distraction (which finally culminated today).

A breathtakingly efficient visit to the law library, photocopying journal articles and cases like a maniac, but organized!

Gig at the Water Rats pub on Gray’s Inn Road, which I have somehow managed not to find out about during four years in this area, a feat for which I deserve much indie derision. Great venue, and damn good performances (to be described in further detail later along with how I managed to fit most of my LEG into my mouth while talking to one of the bands). Slight attack of grouchiness before the gig due to hunger and annoyance at our joint indecisiveness, but that disappeared once I was in there with loud raucous music and a Snakebite in my hand. It’s easy to make me happy provided you can stand the things that do the job. Somehow, despite hating most of these things, Alec still manages.

Late dinner in cheap cheerful Chinese on my road.

Bed.

Breakfast.

And there you have it.

Parentheses Before Sleeping

I was lying in bed the other night waiting to fall asleep, and the Sigur Ros () album was playing softly as it often does at these times. The first three songs of the album always seem to me to convey a sense of deep, unutterable yearning (I can see the movie soundtrack producers lining up already). A gentle tension starts to build when track 3 introduces that repeating (but not repetitive) sequence of notes on the piano; they ascend and descend over and over again, and even though the notes are always the same you get the feel of wafting slowly upwards, maybe following a loosely spiralling path, and when the piano finally comes in several octaves higher with the same sequence of notes I find myself imagining fireworks underwater, clarity found, and quiet contentment.

[Posterity music-geekness note: Strange. I was writing this, and also remembering how, at the time, my anticipation of that pivotal moment was affecting my ability to enjoy the music as it happened. This also happens with Orbital’s In Sides album, when I’m waiting for The Box Part 1 to segue into The Box Part 2.]

Rastaporean

People who have independently, and without prompting, insisted that I am from the Caribbean, despite my strenuous arguments to the contrary:

  • The guy behind the enquiries desk at NatWest the day I walked in to sign up for a student account in 1999. He was from the West Indies, and assured me I was too.
  • A guy who came up to me after I had spoken in one of the UCL Debating Society’s weekly debates. He was cute, and I was mildly disappointed that he didn’t profess interest in more than my accent. “Hey, good speech. Where are you from, by the way? You sound like a Rasta.” Somewhere later on in the conversation, he asked if I smoked (I had a feeling he wasn’t referring to Marlboros), and left soon after I said I didn’t.
  • A guy in a hiking group in Cappadocia, Turkey. He spoke with Received Pronunciation and had coincidentally done his Masters at UCL. He narrowed it down to Trinidad.
  • My Jamaican landlady. She laughed uproariously at everything I said (this was before she recently informed me I was the most difficult tenant in the entire building. There is now little love lost between us, mostly because she is a confrontational, defensive – those two words seem like opposites, don’t they? Not with her – unreasonable cow with selective amnesia and deliberately adopted attention deficit disorder, in that she refuses to listen to you when you are trying to recount the detailed conversation you had with her in the past but which she now denies ever happened) and repeated it, highlighting my apparently unmistakable Caribbean lilt. She also went with Trinidad.
  • A guy behind the counter in Jessops, on Wednesday. No prizes for guessing where he was sure I had been born or at least lived a sizeable part of my life. He kept trying to guess where I was really from. I gave him the following clues: Not North or South America, not Europe, not Africa, not Antarctica, not Australia; the biggest continent (at which point he finally guessed Asia); not Malaysia, but a place very nearby; very small, very high-tech; starts with Ssssssssiiiiinnnnngggggg, at which point he finally managed Singapore. For some reason we briefly got into conversation about hip-hop clubs. He likes Subterania.

I am a small yellow girl. I lived in Singapore for the first 18 years of my life, and have been in London since. I have never been to the Caribbean, but apparently I’ll fit in if I do.

Meet Mr Ass

The culprit has been apprehended: none other than the boyfriend formerly known as Alec, now to be referred to here as Mr Ass for the near future.

The shameful facts emerged over dinner at Viet Hoa (the crispy pancakes fall miserably short of Song Que’s dizzy heights, but the rest of the food was fine).

Harsh retribution was swiftly dealt out by demanding that he buy me my favourite cocktail (it involves creme de menthe, Bailey’s, Kahlua and something else I can’t remember) at Bar Kick, after which I defeated him with relish at table football.

Last night I slept the sleep of the just.

It Must Be My Good Example

So now both of my flatmates have set up LiveJournals, one of them’s kinda nekkid on hers, and the other’s just posted her tits. (Mammogram? Sorry, bad joke.)

Meanwhile, on a completely unrelated note, I’m thinking this antiquated site really needs a redesign…