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A telling comparison: Laura has gone to New York for a week in order to speak at an exhibition about Seduction, whereas I am in Glasgow writing emails to local politicians. I think it is clear who has the better deal. For Valentine’s we had a game of scrabble whilst listening to Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, which is being repeated on Radio 7. My favourite, possibly because I identify with her, is the one with Patricia Routledge, about a busybody who is always writing letters.
My current email is about the continuing degradation of the local area by the skeleton-faced hedonists who congregate around the Salvation Army hostel. Now, I have nothing against teetotal Christian organisations who take in drug addicts when they are released from prison, but I do wish that their modus operandi included cleaning up after their charges. Every morning I see the cleaner washing down the pavement outside the hostel, but he never bothers with the pavement on the other side of Clyde Street. Nor is any effort made to clean the patch of land between the river and street, which is a mess of empty cider and wine bottles. Every evening I see the scrawny, skeleton-faced hedonists chatting gaily, half-cut, and anticipating the oblivion ahead.
In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde suggests that the real enemy of reform are the virtuous working classes, those who accept their sorry lot and work hard in degrading jobs. The working class who steal and debauch are heroically spurning the current inequitable system. Wilde proposes that all property be held in common, that no man should accumulate more materials and wealth than he actually needs, and that we should get criminals and machines to do menial work so that everyone else can dedicate themselves to creating and appreciating works of beauty. Every time I walk past the Salvation Army hostel I think about these ideas, I wonder whether the skeleton-faced underclass of Glasgow could be saved by political reform or would they just squander their new found riches on even more dispiriting pleasures?
18 Feb 2009
blog Listening to Merlin Mann’s series on how to improve your blog was most instructive. Mann, who blogs at 43Folders amongst other places, gave sensible advice, all of which I agreed with, but none of which I actually follow. Here’s a quick run through.
Focus on one topic
The idea is that by focusing on your obsession you will build up a dedicated readership, whereas if you just write about whatever you fancy, people lose interest because your venn diagrams cross so infrequently. It is true that most of the people who read me have one thing in common and that is that they know me in some way, but I like the idea of eclectic blogging, of never knowing what the blogger is going to say next.
Manage Expectations
Even if you do write about one thing, you have to be careful not to annoy people by posting too often or not often enough. People, the implication goes, cannot bear to read anything that is slightly different in form or tone. Surely that isn’t true.
Target your Audience
Mann suggests the neat trick of imagining ten ideal readers of your blog as a way of helping you to write better. You should choose one and stick a picture of them above your computer. My ideal reader is Nina Hamnett whose portrait (by Roger Fry) I used to love when I went to Courtauld Gallery. Unfortunately, she is dead and even when she was alive she was a drunkard. So much for the ideal reader.
Get Better
You should treat your writing like a craft, tweaking it, improving it, going back and correcting those annoying spelling mistakes. Don’t just do what I do and write something then click ‘Post’ or your blog will be full of self-indulgence, factual inaccuracy, and grammatical errors. Mann recommends letting things settle for a few days . . . Unfortunately, if I thought more than I do about my blog more than I already do I would probably never write and certainly never post. Oddly, the posts that seem to get the most comments are those that are written the quickest.
Writing a blog every day has been an excellent exercise, but I don’t particularly want to become a problogger or anything ghastly like that. I feel a bit like a carpenter who knocks out simple chairs but wants to make a nave for a church one day; that is, I’m still not sure if chair-making is the best preparation.
16 Feb 2009
blog On Thursday evening I went to a massage parlour for the first time. Here’s how it works. You arrive, are greeted with a friendly smile, and told to wait in a chair. At this point it feels a bit like going to a hairdresser, but then you are led down a corridor to a small room with one of those massage beds with the hole in it so you can breathe whilst laying down. The woman asks a few health questions and then asks you to undress and lie under the towel.
Everyone I talked to beforehand immediately associated massage parlours with prostitution, giving me a nudge, a wink, or a leering smile. No wonder my masseuse was so sheepish with me at first: her noble profession has been sullied in the popular imagination. All the necessary work she does, unknotting the shoulders of stressed web designers like me, is undermined.
To begin with I felt slightly claustrophobic, with my head sunk in a black hole with no lights on. The music — a combination of bird tweets and trippy meditation sounds conveyed by a cheap Alba stereo — didn’t help, but I gradually got into it by focusing on my breathing.
From the certificates on the wall and the prominent place on the high street, there was no way that ever be asked if I wanted “a bit extra”, but for the first time in my life I understood why men go through the indignity of prostitution. It felt uncanny to be rubbed and stroked in a therapeutic way, the intimacy (however professional) is soothing. I felt myself transported back to the evolutionary past, being groomed like a chimpanzee or a Bonobo.
In the past I thought that you should avoid massage parlours, not because there is anything wrong with them but because it might encourage you to live a stressed existence because you know that you can be untangled with a simple appointment. Prevention is better than cure, but cure is better than pain.
Thursday night I slept better than I had done in weeks and I would wholeheartedly recommend the experience.
15 Feb 2009
blog 
This entry is an excuse to post 105 flashing, individually drawn hearts as a cute, but subtle way of expressing my undying love for my wife; there is one heart for each of the months we have been together.
Valentine’s Day should, I think, be exclusively the preserve of people who need to be nudged into making the first move with somebody they fancy. It shouldn’t be a vulgar way of herding the masses into restaurants and cinemas, with flowers, teddies, and four-foot cards under their arms. But it is nice to be reminded of how lucky I am occasionally.
14 Feb 2009
blog 
You may have noticed that I have been a bit quiet on the self-improvement front. This is not because I have achieved enlightenment and am beyond such petty concerns, quite the opposite. For the past few days, I have been concertedly breaking all of my rules. I have been devouring the soap opera of football gossip, habitually checking my email account, drinking tumblers of whisky, not doing my stretches in the morning, staying up late, not flossing my teeth, not shaving, not going to the gym, and basically just indulging in irrational, swinish behaviour. Do I feel better? Do I feel worse? A bit of both, actually.
At first I felt guilty, ashamed of my recidivism, but then I realised I needed a holiday from virtue and a reminder of the costs and benefits. It reminded me to beware of anyone obsessed with virtue because they are generally equally obsessed with vice. I felt better knowing that I could do whatever I wanted, but also more tired and lethargic. My dreams were sweeter, but reality has far less clarity.
Last night I tried to read Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and was utterly unable — as unable to understand as Charlie is at the end of Flowers for Algernon. Instead I read Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism, but at the current rate who knows for how long I’ll have the necessary levels of attention?
The patron saint of resolutionists is H.G. Wells’ Doctor Moreau. Like the resolutionist, Moreau attempts to extirpate the animality from animals. In Moreau’s case this involves turning pumas, hogs, apes and leopards into passable humans. In the resolutionist’s case, it involves going against their instinct to drink and idle. The inevitable failure of both of these attempts should make us think again. Not to give up genetic engineering/resolutions, but of finding a way to work with nature not against it.
So after a few days holiday from virtue, I have been making quiet agreements with myself rather than attempting to impose unworkable rules or laws. It helps, in this cause, to observe those around you who are full of entropy. What you see are people incapable of focus, drifting, dissatisfied, suckered into youth culture, it is a terrible state to get into.
13 Feb 2009
blog 
What do people want from a review of the new Franz Ferdinand album?
They want to decide if it is worth buying or at least listening to; or, if they have already bought/listened to it, they want to know what it means; or if they already know what it means, they want to be pricked into thinking about it again.
So, is it worth buying?
Yes, but only if you like Franz Ferdinand.
Is it worth downloading illegally?
I am shocked that you would consider breaking the law, but yes it is worth a listen, even for the casual music fan.
Is it better than the last album?
Much better, the last album was a boisterous and vulgar. This one is just boisterous.
What is the best song?
The most immediately groovy is Send Him Away, one of the few songs that really shimmies and gets its message across without shouting.
What is the worst song?
I don’t much like the next song, Live Alone, which makes three minutes feel like ten.
What do you like about it
It is toe-tapping fun, full of analogue synths with their beautifully wonky sounds. Bite Hard — which was my favourite song of theirs at Latitude — is the best example of this.
What do you dislike?
Songs like What She Came For initially sounds funky and smart, but for me it was a bit stylized. The vocals veer between a frail whine and a hyperbolic snarl, neither of which are very engaging. The fact that the song then turns into Helter Skelter is just confusing. Songs like the 8 minute House number Lucid Dreams may have sounded good in the rehearsal room when high, but it is dull on record.
So what does it all mean?
Not very much. The lyrics are all about what goes on when you go clubbing, full of bland universals about ‘you’ and ‘me’, ‘kissing’, ‘feeling’. There is nothing specific or different in the way that Kapranos’s heroes like Mark E. Smith and Sparks wrote about. See, for instance, No You Girls which is full of abstract references girls and boys; there are no concrete images to give it any bite.
How about summing it all up
The problem with Tonight: Franz Ferdinand is that it is enslaved to the dirty electro sound. Dirty Electro evokes an idea of edgy cool, but it also means that the lyrics need to be shouted and tend to deal with scuzzy subjects. Personally, I prefer the dapper cleanliness of The Karelia to the mucky retro of late Franz Ferdinand.
12 Feb 2009
blog 
Home taping didn’t kill music, it is the death of home taping that has killed music. When you had to listen to the full song when making a compilation you really cared about the sequence and the quality of the song. When you listened to the radio with a finger poised on the record button, music had an intensity that has now been much diluted.
Momus talked recently about how the heavyhanded tactics of RIAA are good because they make music dangerous again. What bothers me about downloading is that it gives you such terrible karma: you can’t be a member of society without having empathy. We know that it is wrong to steal because we would hate it if someone stole something from us. Most law-breaking occurs because people lack empathy, they have become dissociated from the members of society they will affect by their actions. The more that music and software become corporatised, the easier it is to dissociate from the people affected.
The film industry recently attempted to evoke empathy by showing a few of the thousands of people who aren’t stars yet who rely on people paying to go to the cinema for their wages. Unfortunately, they did this before Quantum of Solace, a film that could have done with a lot less money thrown at the interminable action sequences and more on the threadbare script.
One solution would be to allow people to download files for free and then charge them if they listen to a song more than, say, ten times but it is difficult to see how this could be enforced and it might encourage people to listen to more music and make the attention they pay more diluted. In the past, when there was less music (and other distractions), an album was something that a listener invested a great deal of time into dissecting. Nowadays it is just something you use to stop yourself from thinking whilst commuting. It is a terrible fall.
11 Feb 2009
blog A nod pal is someone you see every day on your walk or cycle to work, someone who you pass at almost exactly the same place every morning.
The first time you see them, you don’t pay any attention.
The second time, you unconsciously think “oh look there’s that person from yesterday.”
The third time, you half-consciously assess whether you could be nod pals with such a person.
The fourth time, one of you might offer a weak smile.
The fifth time, the person who offered the smile will scan their face for recognition. If there is none, you know that they are not in the nodding fraternity. If they smile, you know that you’ve made a bond.
The sixth time, one of you nods and the other does the same. You are now nod pals and will now have some crumb of human connection to look forward to on the long journey to the office.
My current nod pal is an African chap, who followed the nod pal rules to the letter until day six when instead of nodding, he raised an arm aloft like a black power salute to which I — cycling perilously on the icy path — felt obliged to mirror. It was a satisfying exchange (especially as it crossed the cyclist/walker prejudicial divide).
Rob was saying on Friday that he wanted to seduce a woman over the course of several years using the nod pal procedure. This is conceivable, but there is a Platonic purity to the nod pal relationship that would tend to prevent such a travesty.
Before the African chap, I had a few nod pals (both cyclists) — there was the old woman who zoomed by whilst say “good morning” and a man in spectacles, shorts, and fluorescent tabard who had obstinately ignored me until I stopped to help him after he had had a fall. The next day he finally acknowledged my nod.
When I explained the nod pal to Tim, he raised the possibility that the whole phenomena was just inside my head and that the other cyclists were only humouring me. But that couldn’t be true, could it?
10 Feb 2009
blog As I mentioned in the 26 Things, I am not altogether comfortable in my own name. Scott I don’t mind, but Neil doesn’t quite fits with me. I try to embrace it, I acknowledge that I am probably stuck with it, but a part of me can never quite embody it.
Partly this is to do with association. I couldn’t identify with the other person at school who was called Neil (not Neil Spencer, not old Speggy!) and didn’t have any public figure who impressed me much. But maybe that has changed in the last twenty years. So I thought it might be interesting to have a look at Google’s top Neils to see what they say about the name.
1. Neil Gaiman
Comic book guy, blogger, and novelist, Gaiman manages to be both very popular and slightly obscure at the same time. Not quite sure how to pronounce his surname. Seems like a decent chap though.
2. Neil Armstrong
Known mainly as the first Neil in space and secondly as the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong is an heroic who has never embraced hero status. Maybe he is modest, maybe he is just terrified of being killed by the CIA for admitting that he never walked on the moon, who knows?
3. Neil Young
Neil Young has a dedicated fanbase who admire his ability to stay true to his principles and keep knocking out challenging records. His frail voice delivers a strong message that is only partly undermined by his simian demeanour.
4. Neil Turner
A quietly dedicated techy blogger who writes about software, macs and his life in a genial unassuming fashion. Also shows that google won’t penalise you for having odd domains like .me.uk.
5. Neil Patel
Another geek, Neil Patel creates webapps and blogs about entrepreunership and SEO.
6. Neil Diamond
Popular singer songwriter who apparently sings about a deep sense of isolation along with a yearning for connection.
7. Neil Crosby
Works for Yahoo and blogs about life and technology. Nice lifestreaming layout he has.
8. Neil Kramer
A blogger who, from my cursory examination, seems to be very into blogging for the sake of blogging. Rather like this then.
9. Neil Patrick Harris
Dougie Howser M.D. Loses marks for diluting the Neil brand with the middle name Patrick.
10. Neil Hamburger
Not his real name but a stage name that sums up his faux-club comedian persona. His actual comedic style is very funny anti-humour.
So, is there any identifying Neilistic feature? Not really. Maybe the only thing that unites us is the common enemy: anyone called Neal.
09 Feb 2009
blog What are we to do with tolerance? By tolerance, I mean the inevitable normalisation of all inputs — the process by which you ‘develop a tolerance’. Caffeine is the obvious example, being something that delights the mind and stimulates the ganglions but only until the body develops a tolerance. The only way to bring back that original sensation is to stop taking it for a period of time. Is the same thing true of all things that make you happy?
I remember visiting my Gran in Christchurch and remarking on the dramatic sea views from her flat. The air was so pure, the breezes so invigorating, and that view was sublime. It must be great to live here, I told her. “You soon tire of it,” she said. It was clear from this that human beings are irascible things, never satisfied with what they have.
For me, it means that each day the things that made me sublimely happy — the fresh juice in the morning, the vigorous physical workout, the daily mental workout — are now normalised, tolerated, put up with. Without self-denial it is easy to develop anhedonia. Pleasures must be earned, spread out, and not over-indulged if you are ever going to appreciate them without getting jaded. The idea of hell as the place where you get what you want forever, is easier to understand in this light.
Now, perhaps this is just my neo-puritan streak coming through, but I would be interested in how you decadents (who I know make up a significant portion of my single-figure readership) avoid anhedonia and jadedness. Do you indulge in more and more depraved acts in order to get your kicks? Or what?
08 Feb 2009