blog The evidence for broken window theory — the idea that the presence of litter and graffiti encourage people to commit more crime — continues to stack up. Human beings, it seems, respond badly to neglect. This ties in with my Unmade Bed Theory, whereby I become more virtuous the tidier my flat is. A discarded sock soon becomes a mountain of dirty laundry; a sink full of washing up turns into mental lethargy and physical slovenliness.
Tidying the flat, though, is only the beginning. For every coat put in a cupboard you seen a new universe of disorder open up before you. Shoes should be lined up, socks separated from pants, books in alphabetical order. And then there are all the notes you’ve jotted down and all the projects you have committed to completing, each one of these represents a level of disorder. Dylan said: I accept chaos, but I’m not sure if chaos accepts me. Me? I don’t accept chaos but chaos doesn’t care and hugs me to its bosom.
Most people assume that order is a slippery slope and that if you start arranging books and cds, you’ll end up counting lamposts as you walk down the street. However, it’s easy to avoid such obsessive behaviour: just ensure that your intentions are positive (achieve more focus) rather than negative (remove all that is aberrant).
29 Nov 2008
blog When I am designing a website I’ll do many iterations; keeping the old mockups for reference but looking to improve with every change. Sometimes, I’ll go back to an old file, splicing ideas together but always with a view to a more harmonious final form.
With writing, I tend to accumulate notes until they become a huge unwieldy mess on the a page. I find it difficult to cut an paste without it becoming a duckbill platypus of a piece: odd and ungainly.
Maybe I need to take more of a design approach to writing.
28 Nov 2008
blog I lived.
I slept, ate, drank, pissed, shat, loved, fucked, talked, argued, worked, listened, tasted, felt, dreamed, looked, saw, smelt, touched, played, cooked, fought, walked, ran, stumbled, slouched, ambled, danced, denied, kissed, lied, hurt, cried, smiled, hidden, thought, sat, lay, rushed, rested, got lost, been surprised, felt doubt, felt confident, felt guilty, drew, painted, licked, sucked, dribbled, planned, learned, bossed, obeyed . . . oh so many things.
25 Nov 2008
blog Last night we had the opportunity to go to two private views: Laura had an invite for Eva Rothschild at the Modern Institute and I had heard that there was going to be some kind of recession-busting sale at Recoat Gallery with a wide range of artists selling works for £40 or less.
I had never heard of Rothschild before, but assumed from her name that she is part of an illuminati/lizard conspiracy to suck out my brain. The fliers for the show were neatly bourgeois, with subtle shades of grey and achingly anonymous typography.
Recoat, on the other hand, I knew about from reading Momus’s blog. Apparently his latest collaborator, Joe Howe (the guy from wonky glitch hardcore act Gay Against You ), is a friend of the gallery and if you’ve seen the picture of Joe on his myspace then it isn’t that hard to guess what the art is going to be like.
To be honest, it wasn’t much of a decision. Despite my advancing years, I am not yet ready to throw my lot in with the comfortable bourgeoisie. Give me jejune rebellion any day!
Actually, the work was pretty good. Despite the fact that most of it looked like scraps from old notebooks, they were rather nice scraps. There was lots of colour, a few satirical jabs against consumerism (boo!), and plenty of pseudo-graffiti. Alas, there was nothing that I felt impelled to buy, but the scene felt vital and full of promise, and I am glad that such a place exists in Glasgow.
This is what it looked like:
15 Nov 2008
blog 
I saw this cat today in Glasgow’s China warehouse Town. Ostensibly a piggy bank, I can’t help thinking that it would be a waste to use it in such a way. For me it is a totem, an inscrutable, glittery piece of objet d’art, far more affecting than anything I saw at Recoat Gallery last night. It feels like he(?) is impotently trying to communicate something, something about being trapped in a strange ornament maybe.
15 Nov 2008
blog I am a shallow man, a hollow man, a man for whom going to the cinema is an opportunity to absorb, via osmosis, something that resembles a personality:
After watching a chick flick I am kooky and endearing; after an arthouse movie I am quizzical and languid and, after submitting to the frenetic largesse of the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster, I am a nimble, daring and dashing hero of my own head.
Unfortunately, in the Quantum of Solace, James Bond is so charmless that to emulate him would be to emulate a serial killer. Unlike Casino Royale, the events of which are referred to numerous times, Bond doesn’t get opportunity to be droll or dapper. Indeed, he is practically autistic the whole way through. “You’re very efficient,” says his female accomplice. “Thank you, I’ll take that as a compliment” says Daniel Craig’s Bond flatly.
I saw Quantum of Solace in Peckham, a place where you need all your physical self-possession just to avoid being stabbed. Actually, that’s not true, Peckham may be full of mentally ill people but it is generally quite charming. The Will Alsop library helps, even when you are being berated by a woman with a loud hailer.
My favourite part of the film was the bit set in La Paz, Bolivia, where men wear fedoras and women wear bowler hats. As you no doubt know, hats are essential to civility so it was interesting to see them worn in a spirit of conservatism rather than the spirit of dandy individualism that you have to affect when you wear a hat in Britain.
But despite that moment of sartorial interest, it was just endless fight scenes and thus quite boring.
13 Nov 2008
blog 
For those who couldn’t make it to OMG Glasgow on Sunday, here is a bootleg (thanks Rob!).
Right-click and save as to Download.
12 Nov 2008
blog One of my favourite pastimes is to imagine modern urban behaviour in a pre-historic community. The classic example is to take the ancient equivalent of the pub — a gathering around a fire with drug-taking rituals — and then try to imagine a teetotaller politely declining having hallucinogens blown up their nose. It is impossible. By doing so they would automatically default on their membership of the tribe.
To carry the analogy further, later on one of the tribal elders gets up to tell a story. You are admiring his imagery when it occurs to write a critical review. Alas! Writing hasn’t been invented yet, so instead you tell everyone in the village you thought the story was a bit toothless. A few days later. Word has got back to the tribal elder and he isn’t happy:
“Why would you say those negative things?! Don’t you understand that by doing so you are undermining your own place in the society?”
This was the situation that I found myself in at Discombobulate last night after having previously written an ambivalent review. I was reminded yet again that, despite the inevitable death of the universe and everything in it, actions still have consequences.
My trouble is that despite being a terrible writer, I am a half-decent web designer to the point of understanding how to get a respectable Google ranking. What this means is that anyone I write about becomes associated with this drivel and in such a small pond as the Glasgow literary-comedy scene — in which I seem to be the only person in the city who writes any reviews — I have become a kind of Kenneth Tynan figure. And, to paraphrase Paul Johnson on Tynan: “Neil Scott became a power in the Glasgow literary comedy scene, which regarded him with awe, fear and hatred. He seemed to know all world literature and studded his articles with such words as esurient, cateran, and eretheism.”
It’s true that I am esurient for truth and don’t much care for the comfortable literary cateran with their critical erethism, but I also don’t like upsetting people. So even though I don’t/can’t write to commission, Rob Wringham insists that if I enjoyed it this time (which I did) then I really ought to write about it in order to placate the discombobulatistas.
First up, Ian MacPherson, who organizes the night and reads Flann O’Brien-esque stories in a musical Irish brogue. Though I have little time for Flann O’Brien, I find MacPherson’s train of thought compelling and addictive. For at least an hour afterwards, you find yourself thinking about the world in a MacPherson-esque way, with word play and bizarre intent at every turn.
The tall, cheekboney poet whose name I can’t remember had a nice verse about the awfulness of the Metro and Graham Fulton’s spare lines about office life included some excellent observations about going to a communal toilet, but I am slightly allergic to modern poetry, so was happy when, in the second half of three, Alan Bissett sat down to read.
To return, briefly, to my early human settlement analogy, Bissett reads like the village shaman, warning the younglings away from danger with his tales. He is a consummate storyteller, with his words bleeding with Celtic authenticity and his deft character studies (the factory worker questioning Alan’s university choice of English was particularly well-drawn). The story was an autobiographical sketch, concerning his Father’s near-fatal accident at a chemical plant in Falkirk was both tender and shocking. The talent shown through incidental details, like the observation about how the grey Grangemouth skies are transformed into sci-fi landscapes at night, was palpable.
By comparison, Anneliese Mackintosh’s story of Hamish Dust — a conceptual artist who will creatively kill your children to charm you into bed — was glib, shallow and very very silly, yet all the more enjoyable for it. It was litcom punk, with memorable lines about removing the entrails of a daughter with an Argos blender and spiritual emptiness in a New York apartment. The bankrupt morals of Damien Hirst-style artists were exposed with her sharp satirical teeth. Even the done-to-death M&S seductive advert parodies worked.
Whether all this will be enough to get the tribal elders back on side, I don’t know and don’t particularly care (well, only enough to write 750 words on the subject). However, it is a very pleasurable evening: much more fun than sitting around the fire with your tribe. Now, where did I put those hallucinogens?
12 Nov 2008
blog We attempted to commemorate Armistice Day at work this morning with a two minute silence but the sense of contemplation was marred by the rude hum of the servers. I suspect that when the Singularity takes place the computers won’t be much interested in remembering those that have died. Perhaps they’ll establish monuments to data that was corrupted or hard drives that were hacked, but I doubt it.
One thing I have got in the habit of doing at this time of the year is to look at the list of survivng World War 1 veterans, which is surely one of the most tragic pages on the internet. Every year the page gets smaller and in ten years time it probably won’t exist at all. Thinking about the inevitability of death and how you might avoid it, I click on the Wikipedia pages of the supercentenarians, people who have lived beyond 110 years. They all tend to advise people to have a sense of humour, drink alcohol, enjoy lots of sex, and eat well. Or else, be a serious, teetotal, virgin. One or the other.
On Sunday, I read my ‘embarrassing’ teenage lyrics at OMG, Glasgow’s pre-eminent confessional comedy night. Having been to the previous two, I was pretty sure I knew what would work, but I was still amazed at the response. People laughed, people applauded; it was an incredibly gratifying experience and one that I can’t wait to have another go at. I was careful to not to ridicule my 15 year old self for two main reasons: one, because I feel sorry for him and two, because I am worried that he still exists inside me as a homunculus. He was/is a much more instinctive chap than me, but I think he would have been proud that his words provided some entertainment for people in these dark days.
11 Nov 2008
blog 
As someone who listened to Russell Brand’s Radio 2 show religiously (that is, every Sunday morning with the hymn book of the Guardian website open on the football pages), I was saddened that he felt forced to resign over Manuelgate. Fresh comedy is rare enough without removing one of the few men whose manic energy allows him to be funny on a weekly basis. Admittedly the infamous show with Jonathan Ross was one of the weakest ones he had done (it also included a horrible fawning interview with Gael Garcia Bernal that was far more offensive than the phone call to Andrew Sachs) but that is the price you pay for the pleasures of an unscripted performance.
As Brand says in today’s Observer interview, the phone call to Manuel wasn’t made with any malicious intent. The only thing that holds the show together is the interviews, so when they found that Sachs wasn’t home it was bound to lead to a sense of desperation and silliness. What was said about Sachs’s grandaughter was tasteless, true, but ours is a culture which celebrates the idea of living in the moment and it is the moment, that joyful, flowing, unselfconscious ideal of the moment that is the nub of the problem. That moment, well, occasionally it has consequences.
When the controversy became hysterical, I got worried: what have I said here that people could use as a stick to beat me? Probably quite a lot, as there will be with anyone who has ever thought that, essentially, nothing really matters. This is certainly the case with Brand who holds that the physical world is transitory illusion. I’m not sure if a 78 year old man’s feelings are included in the category of transitory illusion, but the Daily Mail certainly didn’t think so.
No doubt, the moral majority would have been happy to let him enjoy his nihilism if his only medium of expression were a little read blog. The difference is that Brand is a tall poppy — ripe for the chop — whose escapades include a callous disregard for others feelings. Ah, feelings again . . . thing is, if you hurt someone’s feelings but your intentions were good are you still guilty? These days we are obsessed with other people’s feelings, as though they were fleshly things that deserve top billing. Unfortunately, it is impossible to reason with other people’s feelings . . . so let’s not.
09 Nov 2008
