blog A few years ago I became contentedly happy with my haircut. It was short, angular, and very vaguely contemporary. I decided that it was MY haircut, it would be my trademark haircut, the one that the world would know me by, like Morrissey’s quiff or Quentin Crisp’s frizzy meringue. I didn’t even have to pay for it, I just asked my girlfriend to give me a number four all over every three months and few trims inbetween. It was so liberating to think that I didn’t ever have to worry about my hair again. I could, instead, concentrate on matters of more import.
Then, without any warning, I became gripped by dissatisfaction. That which had once seemed a liberation was now a prison. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my haircut had become a curse. Only slowly did it dawn on me that the door to my cell was actually open and that all of the guards had gone home. I could grow my hair!
The ensuing growth has been fascinating to observe. It has made me realise that short hair is inherently mediocre and that, although long hair can look really bad, short hair can never reach its heights. The trouble is, where do I stop? I am getting married in August and the photos from that event will accompany me until I die: what if I look entirely awful?!
See also: Wikipedia on Long Hair
26 May 2008
blog 
The above is a poster produced quickly for Rob Wringham to promote his literary gig at the CCA in Glasgow. I enjoyed making it, but wonder whether I shouldn’t have taken more time to make it flow a little better.
There is something about how centered it sits and the amount of fleurons that makes me slightly uneasy. Jan Tschichold, in The New Typography, derides the use of symmetry as vulgar. Indeed, when he finally came to employ the technique at Penguin it was because he was only creating templates and symmetry is easier for the less-gifted to make the covers look pretty.
I’m not particularly interested in prettiness at the moment, instead embracing the palate-cleansing effects of ugliness. I have been reading this essay by Jeff Keedy and thinking about the daunting sense of freedom offered by opening yourself up to the more outré formulations of graphic language.
25 May 2008
blog A couple of weeks ago, Rob from Luxembourg announced that the band had decided to go their separate ways. They had finally thrown in the towel after seven years hard slog on the indie circuit. In a final gesture of resignation/celebration, the band posted the demos of their aborted second album onto last.fm, allowing their loyal fans one last chance to hear new Luxembourg songs.
I wasn’t expecting much of The Last Holiday Before the Divorce, despite its great title. One of the formative moments in my life was observing, at the age of 17, lots of old people (though they were probably only the age I am now) in the Princess Charlotte clinging, despite the burns, to the embers of their youth. I wanted — and still want — to embrace the new, rather than wistfully evoke the sentimentalised pleasures of my youth.
When I first saw Luxembourg in 2003 they were fantastic, they renewed my faith in music, which lacked the catchy songs with sublime lyrics. The lyrics remained great (if somewhat solipsistic) but the music became more discordant and confused. You always got the sense with Luxembourg that they were throwing everything into the mix, which some might argue was evidence of a deeper malaise: that of desperation. Now, no one denies that you have to put in some effort in, but at least pretend to be a little nonchalent! We like our bands to be cool, not to try so hard they become resentful.
As such, it was a surpise to find that The Last Holiday Before the Divorce is really quite good. It is mature, stripped of all excesses, and unbearably poignant. Art is No Defence, despite being the roughest song on the album, is one of the best — experimental and atmospheric. How I Love You is a sharp dose of weimar indie; Steady Pressure is a light, airy piano ballad with a sublime pathos-laden chorus; and Crowd Scene a throbbing, insistent pop song with an addictive melody.
The two ‘singles’ — that is, the only songs to be properly recorded — Kick Me and Not Quite Right — get better and better with each listen. It’s melancholic, at times like this, to wonder what might have been if only they had been contemporaneous with the Longpigs and Mansun rather than Franz Ferdinand and The Libertines. The late-period Britpop they purveyed would have been signed and embraced, not ignored and scorned. Wrong place, wrong time: what a waste.
24 May 2008
blog I woke up early this morning after a frenzied three hours of cleaning and tidying the night before. There is something about imposing order on chaos, purity on dirt, that grants the mind serenity. It stops wasting energy on low-level anxiety and displays its untrammelled, overflowing powers on whatever is the task at hand, which, in this case, was reading The Second Plane, Martin Amis’s collection of post-9/11 writings.
Martin Amis writes deliriously well. His sentences flow into paragraphs without ever getting caught on grammatical rocks or diverted by philosophical reeds. I can’t quote any of it because I’ve already took the book back to the library (although, of course, most of the essays can be found on the web), but it was a quick, sharp enjoyable read. Unfortunately, it also felt largely irrelevant.
Unlike Amis, I find it difficult to get as worked up about the Islam(ism)ic threat. One gets the sense that the news agenda has moved on. The immediate issue of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been overshadowed by the more daunting prospect of peak oil, climate change and rising food prices — none of which Amis mentions. The people involved, who Amis sees as having Clio* whispering in their ear, are pitiful bit part players in comparison.
The only time Amis’s imagination gets really fired is when he evokes the possibility of a worldwide Caliphate. Here, stoked by the writings of Islamists, he writes of a world of terror and boredom, of nine year old wives, humourlessness, and misogyny. It is a vision he should have taken further, London Fields was a good sci-fi novel, I don’t why he doesn’t write more. As it is, Amis’s mind is too occupied by low-level anxiety to really get a handle on what’s going on.
* Amis is obsessed with the idea of Clio, the muse of history, to the extent of naming his daughter after her.
24 May 2008
blog Could it have been different? Really? Could it? I imagine myself living another life completely. Not going to university, living by my wits, being in a band, following my dreams and the dreams of others as we skate through the clichés of modern rock and roll. Would it have been so bad.
I didn’t make my decisions, but I’m always glad to have made them. I know things that I couldn’t have learned any other way and not for anything would I lose these thoughts and feelings. It is a lack of understanding that would say otherwise. But counter-factual history is so tempting . . . I wish I could meet with some of my alternate reality mes. The ones that didn’t read Proust in bed, the ones that tried at school, the ones that played in a band longer, the ones that never designed a website, the ones that went fishing every weekend . . . none of these propositions sounds particularly appealing, but it is something to think about them.
Of course, you can be whoever you want to be now. You can espy patterns in your life that can lead to amazing realities. Or you can, like I do now, not think about them at all. Just live. Exist. There is something in being mindful, not thinking about the future, just focusing all of your resources on the task at hand. I am sure that being mindful is the reason that I am so energetic at the moment. Anxiety and worry, really drain people. Wow, imagine if it is true! I will have cracked the secret to being energetic all the time, wouldn’t that be something else!
I watched Soylent Green this evening, a not especially bleak dystopian vision of an overpopulated society that has polluted all its resources starring Charlton Heston. I like Heston, he’s such an oaf in the film, so vulgar and postmodern. It’s just a shame that they didn’t really evoke the misery of living in New York when it has a population of 40 million. I did like the ‘scoops’ — riot vans that literally scoop up protesters — but the rest was fairly tame.
I’m not quite sure what the purpose or aim of my current ‘research project’ is, but it will no doubt become clear at one point. I can only hope that it isn’t just preparation for the bleak future ahead.
22 May 2008
blog Laura asked me a question: “What should I read that would improre my writing. She gave me two less than promising options: a Lacan book and something called the Libertine Reader (nothing, thank Christ, to do with Pete Doherty). Rather than pass comment, I scanned my own shelves looking for something better.
Ballard? Too clinical. Home? Too wild. Schopenhauer? Too arch. Sinclair? Ah, Iain Sinclair’s Lights out for the Territory. Perfect. He is the perfect modern author of poetic prose: every sentence is soaked with allusions, his command of language is superb, visceral and unique. No one could fail to be inspired by lines like this:
“The notion was to cut a crude V into the sprawl of the city, to vandalise dormant energies by an act of ambulant signmaking.”
Sinclair is radical, uncompromising and wry. Alas, Laura chose the Libertine and I wrote this.
18 May 2008
blog Watched Idiocracy last night, a broad satire on the idea that dumbing down and the superior breeding rate of stupid people could bring about a society of morons.
Forget about the slightly eugenicist concept that stupid people’s children are inevitably stupid and the film is pretty good. It is appallingly bad in many places, but this badness is justified by the premise. You may not like Swift’s Yahoos but you can’t deny his satiric purpose in showing them to you.
All that is most vulgar about modern life is here:
- corporate takeover (gatorade is in the drinking fountains)
- obsession with sex
- constant schadenfreude on television
- diet of junk food
- celebrity politics
The great subtlety of the film is that it is unrelenting in its presentation of dumbness. No beauty or truth was allowed to survive in this world.
The moral, such as there was one, is that you should do things with your life rather than sit around doing nothing.
16 May 2008
blog I have written this thing every day for almost 50 days. The entries are getting shorter and my will to expand it and make it into something palpable wanes by the day. I lack that confidence you need in order to foist things onto the world. There’s a good line in Alex James’s autobiography about how difficult it is to be an artist because it is so much about belief and, if you the feeling that you’re not good enough takes root, you’re fucked.
I see this same thing in people I know. They lack confidence, not insight. Quite what they would produce if they had the confidence I’m not sure. I no longer have any idea why anyone would produce anything bar a few Beckettian lines about the exhaustion of everything in the world.
Just this minute stepped out of the office to get a glass of water and ended up rewriting my girlfriend’s exhibition catalogue. I have something to say about other’s writings that I would never say about my own. Practical concerns. I wish I had it in me to be a collaborator with someone.
So what could I write that would turn out really good? How about a novel about a man who spends his whole life wondering what he should do with his life. Write about what you know, that’s what they say don’t they. Hmmm.
15 May 2008
blog In an age of ubiquitous good taste, where Helvetica is lauded as the zenith of typography, the notion of embracing ugliness so its own sake has a beautifully twisted logic.
You, with your ‘striking’ photography and ‘stark’ lines, your Swiss typography and monochrome palette — who do you think you are? There is something rotten in the state of design and its this fake idea of beauty. If you want to have impact, embrace ugliness. Be gawky, be young and uncomfortable, be stupid.
Worse still are those tedious sheeple with their bloody Bembos and fancy ampersands, their detailed leading and kerning, all seeking elegant transparency. Some foolish designers believe that design is like a glass — a mere receptacle for the content. You have different receptacles for different content (beer, wine, whisky, tea, coffee). These are people who have never lived! Never even drank a pint of whisky!
Mix things up, shake things down, rock the party, smash the system. Human nature is just a flaccid excuse for a load of preconceptions. Reshape your desires as you see fit. See the world in a different way. Hear the sounds that no man has ever seen before. Recreate. Display. Play.
13 May 2008
blog Little Miss Sunshine was recommended to me by the most cynical man I have ever met. He said it wasn’t his kind of film but that he had, despite his grim black cynical heart, really enjoyed it. The features a dysfunctional family’s roadtrip from Alburqurque to Redondo Beach for their daughter’s garish beauty pageant and is, undoubtedly, one of the sharpest films I’ve seen in years.
All too often cinema is populated by ciphers and cliches. Writers rarely understand what it is that make people who they are, preferring to show what other people think other people are like. Little Miss Sunshine sees the world with incredible clairty, focus and joie de vivre. It sees the world like I do.
There’s the gay Proust scholar brother who has come to stay with the family after attempting suicide. There’s the pseudo self-help guru father who needs a lot of help if he is going to get his facile 9 steps book published. There’s the wiseacre grandad who enjoys heroin and porn. And there’s the silent Nietzschean adolescent played by Paul Dano (recently seen opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in There will be Blood) who has undertaken a vow of silence until he passes his pilot’s exam. All of these characters could have been drawn directly from my brain and to see them embodied on screen was distinctly uncanny.
12 May 2008
