in reykjavik (or california)

I’m the Simon Le Bon of the Pasadena chess scene?
No way. You're the Nick Rhodes. I'm Simon Lebon.

in scarborough

Five minutes before my play opens I overhear someone sitting at a table in front of me. A white-haired, large headed man, is eulogising The Chuckle Brothers to his female companion.

Forty minutes into the play I see a woman reach for tissues to dab away a tear. This surprises me.

After the lunchtime show, the cast and company sit outside at The Alma, in the sunshine, drinking through the afternoon. A worn down, middle-aged blond woman comes over. She shouts at the two outside tables. Saying that someone has stolen her rabbit and locked it in a car. Or stolen her children and locked them in a car. Or a rabbit has driven off with her children. Or her car. She is seething. We soak up her tirade. She tells us she hates posh. Who don’t give a fuck. She swears and swivels in the sunshine, voice trailing down the street.

The American lecturer sitting at the next door table, whose wife ran off with John Hurt, says that this is unusual for Scarborough. No-one believes him. With a diffident smile, a man called Karl, drinking halves of Guinness on his own, says he’s from Yorkshire; he doesn’t do friendly.

in aleppo

Returning from time away to your city, a sense of alienation returns. There is cricket on the radio, as there always will be; my tuna and sweetcorn pitta is as idiosyncratic as ever; last night I foisted my potato salad on an unknowing world. Things seem the same but they don’t feel the same.

It’s been a long time now since they did. I live with a sense of alienation from those things which for a while seemed a part of me. That alienation is currently clearly definable, and there seems little reason why it should change with any degree of imminence. The architecture of my world was stripped away and cannot be rebuilt in a rush.

Why did this happen? Why does someone make choices that lead to this? Perhaps they are wilfully destructive. Perhaps they are casual. Perhaps it is something else. It is almost a year now since last Summer. When this alienation acquired a forced shape; longer since it took an occult shape. But an event is not the creation of a state; it is the culmination of a process. The event is one of the many possible events that could occur; it is channelled and patterned by the days, months, years, maybe even generations that have lead up to it. The event itself does not cause the alienation; it is but the manifestation of that sense of self.

And then it too, the event, becomes looped into the process which was at work, and the fall-out and the management and the negotiation – the post – seems a mirror of that which lead to it – the pre.

In Othello, Iago stays silent at the end. He offers no defence of himself. He is the wrongdoer, his guilt seems transparent. So much so that it’s easy to forget that within this tragedy, he has killed no-one, whilst the hero has throttled Desdemona.

Society puts down markers and we are measured within those markers. Society, the weight of history, makes voices shrill, and casts events in stone. It belongs to the powerful, in every sense. It has as little regard for the truth as a python for its prey.

compañeros

Tunng might be the icing on the cake. They might be the layer of marzipan beneath the icing. There might be, probably are, more layers to this cake than you could ever imagine.

A little over a year ago I was driving the mule and not quite by chance I heard Vetiver for the first time. I’m a curmudgeon in many things and new music is no exception. A natural instinct towards scepticism means modern life is indeed probably rubbish, and modern music exceptionally so. All the same…I gave Vetiver a second go. And then a third. Sooner or later, Why’s A Building Get So Tall was right there on the brain, along with all those other quirky-haunting Vetiver moments.

All well and good. Later I overhead something at a BBQ, and my friend told me that was Sufjan Stevens. It didn’t sound all that painful either. Later still, he was at a BBQ of mine and heard the Vetiver and said that sounds like Davendra. And it was. The dolphin Wildman. Who’s an occasional part of Vetiver. Vetiver were playing with M Ward. M Ward – gets under your skin. He can make you cry, if you’re sitting with the kitchen door open sipping whisky at gone midnight on a Summer’s day when the carpet’s moving under you. So can Micah P Hinson, I soon discovered. The Innocence Mission also seemed to have mastered this trick.

So far, so American. North American. The only other time this kind of thing had happened to me was a dozen years ago, when I went to the South American continent and a whole world of music opened up like a serrated Hirst cow, belly, entrails, colour, all the stuff you just want to consume, and lo it is beautiful too. That made a kind of sense to me. Here was music from a continent that didn’t feature, occult, awaiting revelation. But this other stuff, this new stuff, where were its roots? How had it sprung up on me like a leaping hare? The only thing that made perfect sense was when Davendra sung a cover of Caetano, and the two worlds collided.

Then… other strange developments. Someone played me King Creosote, told me I should listen, he was another touched by genius. I resumed my sceptical disposition, because after all, this was British music, from a collective in Perth, how’s that going to tweak the strings? It’s bound to be too…parochial. The curmudgeon disposition failed again. The twisted lyrics found their target – I’ll Fly By The Seat of My Pants – words jogging along beside me as I rode the midnight bus from Stanstead, fleeing Bari for a homecoming of a blank white sofa and an unhinged employer . My friend tried to get KC for his film, but in the end found Barbarossa, and I sat on a beach in the sun and thought, if the worse comes to the worse, this man will sing it better than it could be said. And all the aeroplanes can’t take away... And all the cars and trains cannot take these things away…. muted whistling

Somewhere along the line a whole host of others knocked on the door and demanded attention: Anti Folk; Jeffrey Lewis; Adam Green, Filthy Pedro, Ray LaMontagne; Adem; Findlay Brown and more, and more. The roots stretch back to Bert Jansch; Benji Kirkpatrick; Bob Dylan; Caetano; Silvio Rodriguez; Eliot Smith and Patti Smith who pops up on a Suffolk stage to remind me; and more and more.

This is the cake, which over a year of flux, has been given to me to partake of, to sing along to. On Saturday night with my co-explorer, in Finchley, I heard half a dozen bands, all of them tainted with this same eminent, earthy, folky, musical, listenability, (to these ears). Rounding it off were Tunng. I’d heard a bit of Tunng. I wasn’t convinced. My scepticism was fighting its corner. Electronic riffs; hard to pin down the lyrics; too clever for its own good?

Tunng are the icing on the cake. For now, until the next time. Songs of murder and betrayal, songs of jackdaws and jays, adders crawling through English fields of Eden. Sung with a maverick glee by every part of the collective, all of them there to show off their tricks. A thunder box simmers. Rattles and whistles and maracas and stray voices shimmy or thud across the scape; landscape, soundscape, all at once.

It’s hard not to be jealous of musicians. They can do things wordsmiths can only achieve in their dreams. Maybe it’s why my inclination is to wrestle with them for proof. Not give in too easily. It has been a blessing in strange times that these songs have come to me, to keep me company; have said things to me and for me, better than I could say them myself.

bombardment

We zig zag round the warehouse ways of a Northern town, looking for a takeaway. We get to the Lebanese place just as the shutters are coming down. The man closing them says he shuts at ten and he doesn't do takeaway. He looks hot and careworn. He says things aren't good, of course they're not. He's got family in the North and the South and things are bad everywhere. He doesn't want to talk about it. He wants to close up. He points to two places where we can pick something up. In one of them we get a mixed veg and a lamb curry for three pounds fifty each.

peckham chess match (knowing your rook from your elbow)

in a spitalfields pub (acknowledgements Angus Fairhurst)

personality test: do you find this image

a] Cute
b] Scary
c] Offensive
d] Reassuring in a troubled world

of course they're only stories

…I find myself catching bits of these programs and they invariably wind me up. I react to them emotionally. Their narratives have a kind of inverted effect on me. Where they seek to lull the viewer into a slippery comfort zone, they have me grinding my teeth and cursing. Why ?

Prosaically: in all of these things, set in the US, some kind of evil or lunacy inevitably needs to be treated or overcome. Last night on ER there was a particularly chilling example. A man had stolen a tank and was advancing on the hospital. They discussed the tank weaponry and showed footage of a tank crushing cars. People in those cars became patients (inevitably Latinos – crying out in Spanish, the other language)… At the end of the show, the hospital will stand, the lunatic in the tank will be apprehended, the forces of democracy will prevail. Meanwhile …on Newsnight we see – More tanks, driven by americans, causing genuine havoc. And how will this narrative be resolved?

… these pieces of TV, which all have essentially similar narrative arcs… show a menace being unleashed within society, which the valiant defenders of society shall eventually overcome, whilst – and this is important – learning a vital lesson in the course of their duties. As though the negative effects of the anti-social contains within it a redemptive element in so far as through the understanding of the anti-social mechanism (individual/ act etc), society enriches itself again and coheres and can proceed with hope towards its next test/ episode.

…the processes of history we are living through mirror exactly this. The ‘bad guys’ in Fallujah (the terrorists) shall be overcome through the force of democracy, (state force is always the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, even if that is sometimes ‘medical’ force) and the State of the Union will be strengthened through this action. We shall move onto the next episode, unconcerned by the poor *latinos* (take your pick) crushed in the tank’s wake, who have laid down their lives in the name of a more sophisticated social consensus.

...the frightening thing is that millions of people who oppose in theory thiz US attitude towards history, perpetrated over the course of the past twenty five years or more, willingly soak up the cultural imperialism being beamed into their homes every night of the week. These narratives become part of our mindset... from Tokyo to Mumbai, from Iceland to Lesotho.

From Bangladesh, 290404

four ways to circumnavigate the absence of your own bed

Live in a fantasy world.

or

Never sleep.

or

Never stay in the same place for more than two nights in a row.

or

All of the above.

progeny

There are five people in the rehearsal room. The stage manager says little, takes notes. The director gives instructions, suggestions, notes. The actors do what only actors can. The writer hears words being spoken, explored, and sits on the outside, looking for a way back to the creature he brought to life, all those months ago. He contributes snippets, knowing that his presence is no longer essential. Soon he will be gone, leaving the rest to get on with it. The creature doesn't need him anymore. It will sink or swim by itself.

coming back

Three days in the North is enough to think that the whole of the South has put on a fedora and sneaked off down a back alley.

As it once did for three years.

bill

Today I walked into Mojo's and ordered a lemon chicken ciabatta, asking for a receipt. The Yorkshirewoman behind the bar wrote one out for me. I looked it over. At the bottom of the receipt she had written my initial and surname. I stared at it, then asked her how she knew my name. She didn't. It was hers.

assuming an attacking formation for the final

i hate this man

Who is standing outside the French House in a loose fitting tailored blue shirt hanging over sawn off knee length shorts with his mop of blond hair talking to someone who looks Mark Oaten but who isn’t, drinking a pint, who says, yeah they sent me to Sao Paulo and I’ve seen some places but that is seriously the biggest shithole in the world. I stare at him. I keep staring. I send gamma rays which cook his liver and his lungs so he’s overheating and loosening his imaginary tie which feels like it’s strangling him, and sweat swoons off him, suppurating his pint which he cannot help but drink because without liquid he knows he will die within seconds, but even so he is actually melting into Dean Street, his feet diminishing into knees, waist, groin, he’s now poking out of the pavement, can’t stop talking about shitholes, and Mark Oaten who isn’t Mark Oaten is shuffling in this puddle of acquaintanceship trying to find a way to disassociate himself from this creature which cannot stop tormenting the world with its leg-less opinions.

I look away. The man gradually re-congeals. I take my hatred and put it back in its box and go and watch a crowd of engaging French people shouting at the TV in the Golden Lion.

surveyor

A moorhen dipped beneath the canal’s surface,
Pat-a-cake feet spiralled through verdigris lace.

He wished his mind worked that way, like a clear
Glass to the depths, machinations on display.

It didn’t. His mind was more like the mountains he
Surveyed. The peaks were glistening adverts for the self;

But the valleys were occult, beyond the camera’s
Eye, nefarious or kindly, you could never tell.

Mapping them didn’t help. Marks denoted peaks, zones
Of demarcation, seemingly efficient, but,

In between those marks, white masked the evasive
Valley floor. Transparency a childish dream.

He knew these things. He wasn’t a surveyor for nowt.
The moorhen burst back through the line. It did so cleanly

As though the line
Does not exist.

hippy contemplation machine

confidence

Is one of those words that no one knows what it means.
In my head now confidence looks like the casino at Carrasco. Before development.
Confidence is also something you can discover (or not discover) in the eyes of a 16 year old.
Confidence once in a while masks unconfidence.
Confident people tend to be less self conscious about their actions than unconfident people.
When the lines are drawn, the deepest line will be marked between those who have inherited confidence, those who have learnt it, those who will always be acquiring it and those who will never know it.

the newbury mancunian

The mancunian is tough as old boots. She’s twenty six and sassier than the average octogenarian. You’re thinking it, she knows it.