What I can’t afford to do — and I deeply hope you guys also won’t even attempt to do — is to live in a world of unlimited access (in- or outbound) that requires you to pretend anyone who happens to trip over your doormat should get precisely the same attention, respect, interest, and focus as Real People You Know. They come first. Scarcity. It’s a real thing.
Because that way lies utter madness and, frankly, it makes a charade of your actual life.
Interrupting your focus on your own work, family, and friends in order to harvest anonymous compliments or deflect anonymous dumbassery does a disservice to everyone involved and is, in my opinion, an utterly depressing and unscalable way to slouch through life.
hard as it might be to believe there was a time when i was quite innocent. now, here in my thirties, i’m feeling mighty jaded and a little deflated.
driving to la rochelle earlier this year we passed a phenomenon i’d forgotten about.
on the side of the road black silhouettes, some with a red lightning flash at the head, would occasionally puncture the verge of the slick, macadamed surfaces which cut swathes through the fields of the charante-maritime. after a few kilometres of pondering how they resembled discarded props from a fairground ghost train ride and just before they settled into my accepted background of inter city france it dawned on me that each one stood for a death on the autoroute; a real person now cut-out of the communities their macabre mannequins are left to guard. Read more »
Back in my halcyon post-art college days, some friends and I put these cool little gigs together. As well as an immense pool of local deejaying talent **cough cough** to draw on, there seemed to be this never ending supply of local bands and musicians who would turn up and play for free, or almost free.
Sometimes you forget how many talented people are out there, and how few get anywhere near the recognition they deserve. I say deserve, but I guess that kind of thinking is where the problems start, as soon as you try to commoditize a talent, put a monetary or acclaim-based worth on it, everything gets kinda distorted.Maybe that’s why those days were halcyon, no-one had any cash and everyone was just glad to have a chance to play for an audience.
Out of this crowd, a guy named Jacob Fletcher, stood out as someone who (if there was any kind of musically justice) could make a name for himself one day. Last time I saw him he gave me a couple of his tracks (one of which I’ve posted below) and it kind of hints at that deep-burnt nostalgia you feel for places that are a long way ago.
He’s playing at the social in a couple of weeks (the 15th)-I might see you there.
Visual FX aside, Transformers is by no means a good film, but anything so relentlessly (and in this case, clumsily) attuned to the mainstream is bound to have some interesting things to say about the culture it’s been engineered to appeal to.
In the hands of a more gifted director, the cut and paste characterization, the ham-fisted slapstick, the soul destroying summer blockbuster box ticking might have gone largely unnoticed, perhaps a sam raimi could have even made it enjoyable. Such is the paucity of michael bay’s vision that all these processes are writ large on the screen constantly reminding you of commercial and idealogical forces at work shaping and directing the narrative.
I say ideological because this is a film heavy with pernicious product placement not just by corporate america, but most jarringly by the US military. At one time (maybe even a few years ago) or, once again in the hands of a more talented director, this mindless propaganda would have been barely noticeable. As it is slo-mo helicopters land in desert bases where arab children wait to embrace the returning warriors, keffiyeh‘d men join the americans in the defence of their land from outside attackers, a brave and valiant fight against great odds.
All of which makes you wonder who’s agenda these plot devices are choosing to serve? What price to the film-maker for the access to so much hardware and, more importantly, what price to the audience ?
Scariest of all (or what should be scary to the people who write the checks-to the military script advisers or whatever they call themselves) is that in a movie about 40ft transforming robotic aliens it is the idea of a competent, powerful, respected American Military that is hardest to swallow.
sometimes, when i think about posting and i’ve not got a track i’m desperate for you all to hear i like to indulge myself and imagine i’ve got a column in a broadsheet - that i’m so witty and erudite that people tune in to see what’s been going on in my life this week and where that might take them. so i make a mental list of things which’ve happened in the week; anecdotes or experiences; moods or meals, and see what could spark a post. as you might have gathered from our posts of late its been a hectic, almost life-changing month for the latitudes and for it’s writers. and out of all of this what’s sparked in me the kernel of an idea tonight is getting some new perfume.
feel free, all you opportunist blog pillagers to tune out now if that offends your sensibilities. if you only came here for a french house re-edit or new-folk meandering take your booty and run by all means but i like to think that you’re along for the ride so i’ll keep trucking with this idea.
for years now i’ve worn the same scent. available in high end department stores across the globe, it’s one of those designer spin off ones in a beautiful bottle. it smells of roses and i discovered it it in new york (just off 72nd & broadway) bought my first bottle after a day of obsessively (rapturously) snuffling my wrist to catch a hint of the glamorous sweetness and after a couple of years i started getting comments about how other people couldn’t quite bring themselves to buy it because it was too familiar as my perfume.
and that felt good.
“i have” i thought proudly “a signature scent. and when my friends meet someone else wearing it they’ll think “she smells like juliet”.
its no news to any of us that smell is a peculiarly evocative sense. i have a friend who’s mother lost her sense of smell in a car accident. its more devastating than you might imagine. with it goes most of your taste palette. not to mention the ability to sense elements of danger (no early warning that you’ve left the gas on or knocked over a candle) potency of drinks, or recognise the smell of cut grass, cooked bacon or a baby’s skin.
and deeper than that, she must be denied that particular key that smell plays in memory. the whiff of cloves which instantly transports me to childhood christmas times eating leibekuchen, eucalyptus to a corsican mountainside in 1989, pipe smoke to my grandad’s soft liverpudlian brogue telling me stories in his lounge. that proustian evocation of the oddest of memories sparked by warm tar, school corridors, printing ink, new leather or baked apples. smells which remind you of home, or an idea of home.
and now i have a new scent. an engraved bottle of decadence, of itself an extravagant gift which i get to wear everyday. according to experts (or obsessives but often i’m hard pressed to tell the difference) it smells of roses, raspberries and finally sweet tobacco. to me it smells terribly grown-up, comfortable and exotic, memorable and familiar and glamorous, of flawless well-educated women of a certain era who wore bespoke lipstick and hand sewn underwear but mostly, mostly it will always smell of the day i got it. so whenever i unpack a packing case or box of books from here on in to fifty years from now and i catch a glimpse of it, i’ll be transported back to this summer.
here’s a track which takes me back to last spring, my nose pressed against the window of a eurostar carriage, pulling in to lille station still wearing that old perfume and feeling like this is was a song for a grown woman to hear and that i still had a lot of growing to do.
One day, perhaps living in the post-oil society predicted by prophets such as Matt Simmons or James Kunstler, we will look back at events like this weekend’s woeful LiveEarth concerts as a fitting epitaphs for a culture that was tragically incapable of engaging in the reality and responsibility of enacting actual change when the need for such measures was at it’s gravest.
It is hard to imagine a more feeble response to such dire threat; seeing the red hot chilli peppers perform, complete with Anthony Kiedis nonsensical nursery-rhyme lyrics, whilst random ‘animal kingdom visuals’ played on huge screens to billions of people I was reminded of something Eugene Peterson once wrote;
The entertainment industry in the West is second to none in providing cheap diversions and borrowed ecstasies. A temporary detachment from daily responsibilities, a vacation from demanding intimacies, is most useful-it can return us to our dailiness, our jobs and friends and families, energized and renewed….But in excess it defeats what it sets out to do for us: we are herded into the bleachers as spectators to the aliveness of life, reduced to the passivity of a couch potato, satiated into sloth.
Somewhere along the line we have lost our ability to engage with any kind of radical action and replaced it with the misplaced sense that it is enough to spectate.
And our artists are silent.
150 acts from all around the world not one with anything to say, not one able to provoke or inspire. Resorting instead to borrowing passion and radicalism from another era, diluted and scrubbed of all it’s edges by the passage of time.
If our best response to the ‘greatest threat mankind has ever known’ is Corinne Bailey Rae and John Legend covering ‘Mercy Mercy Me’, surely we deserve all that is coming.
i’ve got this horrendously addictive personality. once innocent activities, food stuffs or hobbies often rendered subject to my frequent compulsions, becoming a displacement activity for whatever it is i’m avoiding this week until i’ve done them to death and can’t face going back. until the next time. regular stuff, quotidien stuff, nothing too illegal and a long way from depravity. i’m talking checking websites every hour, smoking, drinking hot water with a slice of lime, baking cakes, searching for new music on the internet, eating sushi for every meal, watching the wire, even knitting.
currently, and this might be letting on more than any of you want to know, but currently its raw vegetables and humus- i have to eat them every day.
(image taken from hmsneptune.com)
I spent a day last week attending my great Uncle’s Martin’s funeral. At the wake I got chatting to his best mate ‘Tom’, they’d been friends for over seventy years; meeting in primary school age ten, growing up through adolescent adventures and then sent off to War in 1943.
Martin joined the Royal Marines, Tom the Navy.
What struck me most was the fun they’d had, the jokes and stories, some 50, 60 years old that had come to represent a snapshot of their lives together. When I think about the dangers they must have been exposed to and the horror they must have seen, that’s quite a thing.
And then these car bombs and attempted terror attacks, trying to make us fearful (all amplified out of all proportion by newspapers and tv shows )
It’s all nothing. It’s less than that, it’s attempted, botched laughable nothing.
They don’t deserve my fear.
They’re laughable men, cowardly and manipulated, robbed of all honour, following a ghastly and perverted code.
Men like my Uncle wouldn’t give have given them a second thought.
right now i’m tired. i’ve done a day in the office, a stint at the gym, managed some ad-hoc dinner and i got to get me this blog post done or y’all’ll have nothing to read when you get to your desks tomorrow.
but there’s something keeping me awake, something calling me from across the room. a place i’ve started to escape to in the evenings. at weekends. damn, even on holiday when i’m already supposed to have escaped.
that place is maryland. tighter than that, that place is baltimore. and deeper even; darker than that, the place i keep going back to? well currently its the city docks. a bit ago it was the west side projects. rumour has it (though i’m not one for spoilers) that i’ll be moving to the halls of government soon enough. Read more »
We’d all heard the rumours, but seeing henry’s departure confirmed late on friday night was certainly no way to start a weekend. Such was the depth of connection between him and the club, it was almost too much to take in. The thought of him not being there to work his magic …..
Thankfully I have arseblog to help me in times of footballing crisis and after the initial shock had subsided it’s clearly not as bad as it could be. It’s been a while since he could skip past players at will, after a injury-laden season on the sidelines chances are he may quite be the player he once was.(well here’s hoping anyway)
Putting partisan bitterness aside for a moment-there have been so many good times (that hatrick against Liverpool in 03/04 season), so many happy memories of his time at arsenal. It’s too soon to be watching henry’s best goal compilations on youtube (they make me want to cry) and I’ll be zoning out of any barca media coverage for a few months, but in the meantime thank you titi.
