I Hear…Goodnight (Low and Dirty Three) is consuming me with its gorgeosity. Hours I spend not listening to it are hours spent in a world without beauty, hope or grace. It plays unceasingly in my head, slowing the world around me to a languid gentle crawl of violins and harmony and candlelit desert porches. I shout at people on the streets, asking them if they hear goodnight too. They must. Everyone has to.
As second-last-ever Xen nights go, last night was rather anticlimactic, but I suppose there are worse ways to spend Halloween than watching Hexstatic mix Tubular Bells with drum’n’bass with accompanying visuals from The Exorcist, all perfectly synced with Linda Blair’s convulsions and bile-spewing.
Coming in costume garnered prizes – the incongruity of Alec getting rewarded for his pipe, Burberry tie, Derek Rose dressing gown and Brylcreamed hair with a DJ Vadim sampler amuses me still. (I am so stealing that sampler.) Despite my bias I must admit that he didn’t have the best costume there: Spinal Tap guy complete with big wig, luxuriant facial hair, tattoo of horned beast on chest, red lycra pants and huge sock shoved in crotch, I salute you.
The only thing that’s keeping me reading Life A User’s Manual (Georges Perec) are these effusive Amazon reviews, which promise that if I just stick it out a bit longer all will become clear and wonderful and no longer stupefyingly boring. I’ve been reminding myself of all this for 78 pages now, which is not unreasonably long for a book to get going (many others have wonderful beginnings and then meander into mediocrity), but I must say that much of what’s keeping me grimly soldiering on is the need to believe that I’m still an intellectual being in fields other than the law.
Another obstacle to my making headway with the book is the presence of White Fang on my bedside table. Somewhere in Spain, talking about childhood reading, we discovered that we both really loved White Fang but were less enthused with The Call Of The Wild, because White Fang was way cooler than Buck, who sometimes tended towards wussiness. But despite the fact that I knew I’d always had a definite preference, and I’d probably read both books over ten times each when I was younger, I couldn’t actually remember distinct plotlines for each one any more. These memory lapses tend to trouble me quite a lot, less because of the simple argh-it’s-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue aspect of trying and failing to remember, more because of that old worry I have about how much I’ve forgotten – that I haven’t just forgotten particular nuggets of knowledge, but that I’ve also forgotten I ever possessed the knowledge at all.
So I got the book out of the UCL library the other day, and it’s honestly been like a homecoming. What’s fascinating is that standard aspects of narrative like plot and the names of characters are still hazy. What swims back to me with startlingly familiar clarity are little, relatively insignificant things. At the beginning, the revelation of the lone man battling the pack of wolves with firebrands, of the wonderful intricacy of his being – the way his little finger, too close to the flame, automatically re-adjusts itself on the wood. I used to be able to see that little finger shrinking from the flame, the wolves skulking in the darkness out of the corner of my eye. When the puppy later named White Fang first ventures out of the den where he was born, tumbles into a nest of baby ptarmigans, picks one up in his mouth and naturally begins to eat it, I could always taste the salt of its blood, feel the splintering of delicate bones.
In conversation the other day Alec told me his idea for starting his own website. It would be called Your Blog Is Shite, and he would write rants about how completely pathetic the blogging community is, with featured links to illustrate his points. He assured me he’d get to mine as soon as he could.
Continuing in this romantic and sensitive tradition, we’re going cottaging (dumb sleazy joke intended) for our first anniversary. Our cosy getaway of love is called The Hole.
I’m not sufficiently steeped in Mogwai musicology to be able to tell yet whether Meanwhile Back In Communist Russia are highest-form flatterers or shameless copycats, but in the meantime I’m thoroughly enjoying the tracks I’ve downloaded, and at the very least it has to be said that the name totally kicks ass.
Scattered thoughts while trying and failing to understand international trade law, and listening to Nick Cave (No More Shall We Part):
Oh dear. This is one of those days where boredom breeds banality.
Drunk man on street outside our flat: All you part-y people ‘earin’ me I wan’ ya to say BOO!
Me, in bedroom/Tamara, in kitchen (simultaneously): BOO!
I like our flat. It’s friendly.
The frustrating thing is that while I was drifting through the world on autopilot (see previous post) I was actually doing lots of fun things, which I probably didn’t appreciate as fully as they deserved.
We had a dinner party of sorts on Friday – Tamara pulled off an impressive three-course feat a few weeks ago, and Alec wanted to return the favour. Avril, Chris, Kevin and me were just along for the ride, although I must mention that I tried to make myself useful in the kitchen by clearing rubbish, handing him things, and unsuccessfully breadcrumbing the bacon. (Note to self: must really make an effort to do the same at some point, although given current level of culinary skill, would be better off buying ready-meals from M&S and pretending to have cooked them.)
On Saturday we (me, Alec, Benny, assorted others) headed south to see DJ Shadow at the Brixton Academy. We missed the first two opening acts (Fingathing and Beanz from Antipop Consortium), which I was fairly disappointed about, because I had a feeling I’d have liked them more than Soulwax, who were good novelty fun but didn’t really get me dancing except for when they played Kool Thing (Sonic Youth) and It’s Hot In Here (Nelly, and I’m not ashamed). I’ve never really taken to The Prodigy’s Outer Space, and was even less fond of it last night when it prompted Wanker Lad behind me to convulsing, elbow-jabbing heights of ecstasy.
Shadow put on a good show, but as DJ gigs go I had more fun at Orbital, and still remember the Scratch Perverts being very much the shit when I saw them at Fabric Live a few years ago. To be fair, factors beyond his control were at work. When I hear a hip-hop beat I want to dance – by this logic, I would obviously have wanted to dance at many points during his performance. The problem is that he doesn’t really make the sort of hip-hop I like dancing to, he makes the sort of music I listen to on cold, late nights alone in my room, Organ Donor cascading down from the speakers and feeling like I’m the only one awake in the world to hear it. So I was torn, I guess. The atmosphere at the venue tempted me into dancing, but when I did I wasn’t really dancing the way I like to dance. I was also too short to be able to fully appreciate his visuals from where I was in the crowd, though what I saw of them when I craned my neck or tiptoed was good.
But as I said, none of that was his fault. He put in a solidly competent performance, included new spins on album tracks, and built a good rapport with the crowd, and I suppose that’s everything you want from a DJ gig. If I’d seen it before I left Singapore to come to the UK it would have absolutely blown my mind. After three years here, I recognize quality when I see it – and Shadow was most definitely quality – but I’ve also seen a lot of it, and I guess it’s hard to make me gibber these days, which I must say is worrying. Having said that, the next gig on the agenda is Fugazi (Nov 3), which will probably succeed in the gibbering sweepstakes, even if only because I am likely to spend most of it crushed to an inch of my life between sweaty, bald, tattooed hardcore punks.
Something has been wrong. Over the past few days I’ve been grouchy, boring, incapable of holding up my end of conversations, and have generally found any sort of interaction with most of the world extremely annoying. (My smart-arse friends will probably send reassuring emails telling me nothing was different, but give me the benefit of the doubt for now.)
It started with a rut on Thursday due to sudden panic about time passing and my brain remaining empty of Masters-related knowledge, and frustration with my lack of ability to get out of bed before noon. It then passed into a weird dreamy antisocialness, going through the day with minimal mental engagement with the world around me. Like I’d switched off cognition and gone on autopilot. I think the major point I want to make is that if you’re someone who’s interacted with me in the past few days, I’m sorry, I was somewhere else.
I think I’m back now, though.
The reading on cultural relativism I’ve been doing for my comparative human rights course has been boring me so far. This isn’t because it’s especially tough or dry, it’s because it’s just so earnest and civilized. Human rights are important. Social and political cultures are complex and diverse. It’s really, really difficult to figure out how best to protect everything and everyone, but we must keep trying. GROUP HUG!!!
In contrast, Voltaire once said he would rest in peace only when the last king was strangled in the entrails of the last priest. Philosophical discourse must have been so much more fun in those days.