or this............

that sort of thing

http://http://www.xfm.co.uk/Article.asp?id=31671 the departure - who do the early 80's disturbingly well, far better than just about all their peers. you can hear bits of the gang of four, early bunnymen, and comsat angels in it. i would have loved this in 1981! i still think they are outstanding, but perhaps more for their ventriloquism. when i first heard "be my enemy" on the radio, i thought it was a track by the chameleons that i'd somehow missed.

last night did get me thinking, there's a lot of this sort of thing about, people have suddenly even heard of the gang of four again, but i just wonder why now? i think that it is great music, it sounds cold, and dark, romantically angsty. but why now? it will always sound to me like winter nights walking around in ashford middlesex. streetlights, boredom, that sort of thing. the night sky over the airport, vast, with a pink-orange tinge, and the great west road, white coming towards you, red going away. and just standing still and watching it. 

those fuckers in the flat upstairs. 8.00 a.m. they start jumping around (they have a dog that jumps around), cleaning it sounds like, and doing some sort of DIY that involves banging and scraping something. but worst of all, they have a new stereo, with extra powerful bass on it. they use this to listen to some godawful pirate radio station playing dance music. it's one of those where the music is interrupted by the dj reading out texts and saying things like "big shout going out to the newham crew." "big up your massive"(no thanks, my massive is large enough). i had a hangover, but couldn't sleep through that. fuckers!

they are quiet now, so i've tried to take revenge with einsturzende neubaten - but to be honest, my speakers are pathetic. royal trux too, but it just doesn't match the upstairs bastards onslaught.

i've got an (unpaid) job, or the possibility of one, as a music writer for a magazine, so they sent me off to see this band they want interviewed last night. it was at the barfly in camden, a venue i am rather fond of. this is where i got the hangover from. there was lots of hair, what i would describe as careful hair. gleaming sprayed and preened helmets of it on every head. this surprised me. the barfly is a sweaty, sticky sort of venue, you expect long lank and greasy there (like my own) rather than that. but the music wasn't bad. the band that i am meant to interview (when the editor sorts it out), cherubs -or the cherubs i'm not sure- did a sort of strokes thing, but definitely with a harder edge. it was a pretty rapid, urgent sort of sound, and a metallic voice. the rythym gituar was doing some interesting things, but was pretty low in the mix. this sat slightly uneasily with an early '80s gituar harmonics and bass driven thing that they seemed to slip into. that part was interesting, but sort of didn't sound like it knew where it was going. remarkably, they lacked presence on the stage, being pretty static, even though it was obvious that they had been at it for a while. their hair wasn't as nice as the other band, but their singer did look a bit like ian curtis, and seemed to have a similar (but far lesser) intensity about him.

i have to think up some intelligent questions to ask, and i'm having trouble at the moment. i've never done an interview before! there's the obvious - where/when did you form?

how long ago?

influences?

ambitions?

but there's got to be better ones than that. i thought how do you feel about cheerful music? wasn't bad. what is your position on hair? would be another. i must stress that i mean these questions seriously.

if anyone can think of further questions, please let me know.

as it turned out, there are two bands of that name. the other cherubs, who i was looking forward to seeing, are older blokes from texas; one of whom used to be in the butthole surfers, which is a very good thing. and they are meant to be very noisy. but this wasn't them.

the other band on was the ludes (i have another question: to put "the" in the name or not? what does it mean?). these take the same period for their inspiration, but different bands. dave thought the jam, which i agree was probably the closest. i thought bits of the clash. they were very tight, and pretty exciting, even moving about a bit. they had good hair too(if you like that sort of thing).broadly speaking, they were better looking. i think (regretfully) that these things do matter.   

i just went out for my nightly trip to the off licence. it was lovely, there's a very fine rain coming down, almost like mist, that only becomes visible as discrete drops underneath the streetlights. under there it becomes an orange beaded veil. there was virtually no one about, and it was so quiet. a small knot of life was gathered in the glow around the shopfront, in a slick of yellow from the illuminated sign that reflected off the wet pavement, as they always are in london, a smeared bright yellow with red lettering. these are the colours most easily discernable under the bleaching effect of the sodium light.

as i said, it was unusually quiet. my flat is on the corner of the block, just a little above street level. the corner just outside my bedroom window is where couples break up. about three a night on friday and saturday, maybe only one the rest of the week. you hear them staggering back from pubs on bethnal green road, or from the tube, on their way home. and my corner  is where they pause to unload their stored animus onto each other. it's something in the character of the corner; from this corner one can go east or further north, it's possible to storm off at a 45degree angle, towards hackney or bow. there's no separating drunken couples, because of the rain.

i believe that there are certain locations that demand certain behaviours, the quality of light, or proportions of the architecture, quantity of traffic. well, this is obvious. the albert memorial will make people (not just tourists) stand and stare. numerous roads will make people resemble nervous fowl trying to cross them. these are not the sort of examples i mean, though. i live on the breaking-up corner; or maybe more like the faultline corner, where that pattern of streets echoes and exposes the flaws and previously unspoken anger between drunk couples. there is the loitering fence, where i spent an hour or so the other night, just down from the townhall, watching the traffic and the people. i wasn't the only one there. there are obviously the walls that demand to be written on. there are the drunk steps. there is a place for rearranging heavy shopping bags. i believe that there are also places for murder, and other crimes. i know there are economic factors for these too, or mainly, but there are places that just invite it. the roundabout between upper and lower clapton road would be one. it is a deprived(ish) area, sure; but there are worse, it is a centre for the crack trade, though chimes bar has now closed, and the fountain pub has had a (hilarious) facelift. but there is also something obscene about the scale of that enormous roundabout-'70's concrete- in comparison to the victorian and edwardian housing that it interrupts; and the underpasses that noone has ever used in my memory, that were blocked with rubbish and supermarket trolleys, and are now blocked with plywood and corrugated iron..it is a giant well of sky, vertiginous. the lighting is not enough the bleach out the night, and the horizontality dwarves the pedestrian and even the buses. 

there is a passage in jorge luis borges' "a new refutation of time" where he describes (beautifully, at least in the translation) coming across a corner which he feels is unchanged from when he knew it as a child, in fact from the last century. he says

"The easy thought I am somewhere in the 1800s ceased to be a few careless words and became profoundly real. I felt dead, I felt I was an abstract perciever of the world.......No, I did not believe that I had traversed the presumed waters of Time; rather I suspected that I possesed the reticent or absent meaning of the inconceivable word eternity..........

"....that pure representation of homogeneous - calm night, limpid wall, rural scent of honeysuckle, elemental clay - is not merely identical to the scene on that corner so many years ago; it is, without similarities or repetitions, the same. If we can intuit that sameness, time is a delusion; the impartiality and inseparability of time's apparent yesterday and another of time's apparent today are enough to make it disintegrate." jorge luis borges A New Refutation Of Time (trans. Suzanne Jill Levine)

he goes on to say that if times (such as he describes in that passage) are identical, so must those who experience them. everyone who arrived at that corner and thought "i am in the 1800s" is the same person, for the duration of that perception.

london, probably any city; is like this. a dense mosaic of memory. perhaps everyone who has stopped to smoke a cigarette at the top of the steps into the tube prior to getting their train is the same, as they idly look at the people at the bus stop over the road. maybe there are pockets and constellations of dense time, and, walking into them we share the identity of all others who preceded us there, and those who have followed.

in the context of my corner, this seems to make sense. these couples are all the same. just as couples' arguments are all the same. they resurface, over and over again. they are a pattern that can't be solved, it's not it's function to be solved. it just demands to be repeated.

there, a portrait of me, with two of my most favourite props (or crutches): cigarette and tea mug.

they just showed "touching the void" on telly. never seen it before, it's a docu-drama about two mountain climbers; one breaks his leg, halfway up a mountain, and the other is forced to cut the rope that is their mutual lifeline, and abandon him for the sake of self preservation. the other one crawls with his shattered kneecap, out of the crevasse where he was left (not deliberately), then across a glacier, and finally across rocks; ending up rolling in shit in the latrine of the base camp.

i usually don't like the docu-drama genre. there's enough pointless "reconstructions", historical and otherwise, on the telly. i tend to think that talking heads, with minimal visual examples or illustrations suffices. i've seen enough programmes (on bbc2 usually) where someone obviously thought that talking about the plague or whatever wasn't interesting enough, without people dressed in period costume, and coughing. this is insulting to the imagination of the viewers, or is a way of doing something glamorous for tv, rather than a radio piece; which it could easily works as well as. but in this case, the settings, especially the crevasse, are incredible; as is the cinematography. well, mountains are photogenic. and it actually makes the whole thing more vivid. this is due as well to the fact that there is the voice over provided by the protagonists all the way through, rather than bogus scripted reconstructions.

the thing that struck me, anyway, was that the bloke who broke his kneecap, and did the crawling, was a taciturn rugby player type,  (and it seemed to me) extraordinarily unimaginative. it was his matter-of-factness that kept him alive. he was at least partially saved by his watch; i thought that it was incredible he thought to look at it at all. "right, i've got a shattered knee, i'm in shock and dehydrated, 120 feet down a crevasse in an andean glacier, and my partner's cut the rope and left me for dead- what time is it?" , so after his initial agonising crawl out of the crevasse, he sets himself targets like a good middle manager. he gave himself 20 minutes to drag himself to the next snowdrift, 25 to the one after. he says that he  was devastated to the point of tears if he didn't make his targets. but it kept him alive. he kept his mind off the big picture, just kept on fulfilling his quota of painful mileage.

then, towards the end, nearly at base camp, though he doesn't know this, delurious, and accepting his imminent death but continuing to crawl because it seems like a more respectable way to go, he is plagued by a song in his head. we've all had it- a song, and usually not one you like, that won't leave the consciousness, and plays as if on some eternal nagging loop on an internal radio. in his case it was "brown girl in the ring" by boney m. he says in the film that he didn't particularly like boney m, unsurprisingly, and thought words to the effect of "fuck me, i'm going to die to boney m". that may have also saved him, certainly motivated him. you don't want to go like that. and then,  it's the smell of shit, from the basecamp's latrine, that drags him out of his delurium and enables him to call out for help. it's the smell of shit that calls him back to life.

anyway, i don't know what to make of it, except to say that it's well worth seeing. it's not in any conventional way heroic, there aren't any noble sentiments in it. i'm not sure, even though it's a triumph-against-adversity sort of story, that it's uplifting. but it's worth seeing.

hmm.....interesting -http://www.iht.com/articles/96307.html about leo strauss, spiritual father of the neo-cons

the following is an excerpt from this article-http://evatt.labor.net.au/publications/papers/112.html 

"Strauss is not as obscure or as esoteric as his admirers pretend. There are certain incontestable themes in his work. The most fundamental theme is the distinction between the ancients and the moderns - a distinction that informs all his work. According to Strauss, ancient philosophers (such as Plato) were wise and wily, but modern philosophers (such as Locke and other liberals) were foolish and vulgar. The wise ancients thought that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty; and giving them these sublime treasures was like throwing pearls before swine. Accordingly, they believed that society needs an elite of philosophers or intellectuals to manufacture "noble lies" for the consumption of the masses..."

lies such as religion, or very threatening stockpiles of WMD. remember rummy's shrug, and his explanation that the WMDs were simply a convenient excuse for the iraq adventure?

and more.........

"......In his book On Tyranny, Strauss referred to the right of the superior to rule as "the tyrannical teaching" of the ancients which must be kept secret.. ...Strauss tells us that the tyrannical teaching must be kept secret for two reasons - to spare the people's feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals......... But why should anyone object to the idea that in theory the good and wise should rule? The real answer lies in the nature of the rule of the wise as understood by Strauss.

It meant tyranny in the literal sense, which is to say, rule in the absence of law, or rule by those who were above the law. Of course, Strauss believed that the wise would not abuse their power. On the contrary, they would give the people just what was commensurate with their needs and capacities. But what exactly is that? Certainly, giving them freedom, happiness, and prosperity is not the point...... The goal of the wise is to ennoble the vulgar. But what could possibly ennoble the vulgar? Only weeping, worshipping, and sacrificing could ennoble the masses. Religion and war - perpetual war - would lift the masses.... Instead of personal happiness, they would live their lives in perpetual sacrifice to God and the nation."

"Irving Kristol, a devoted follower of Strauss and father of neoconservatism, was delighted with the popularity of the film Rambo. He thought it was an indication that the people still love war; and that means that it will not be too difficult to lure them away from the animalistic pleasures that liberal society offers. There is a strong asceticism at the heart of the atheistic philosophy of Leo Strauss that explains why those with religious inclinations are attracted to it."

"The neoconservative goal is reactionary in the classic sense of the term. It is nothing short of turning the clock back on the liberal revolution. And it will use democracy to accomplish its task. After all, Strauss had no objections to democracy as long as a wise elite, inspired by the profound truths of the ancients, was able to shape, invent, or create the will of the people. In his interpretation of Plato's myth of the cave, Strauss maintained that the philosophers who return to the cave should not bring in truth; instead, the philosophers should seek to manipulate the images in the cave, so that the people will remain in the stupor to which they are supremely fit."

from  "Saving America: Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives"  By Shadia B. Drury

it's not really clear to me whether, according to my favourite conspiracy theory of the moment, the neo-cons are using the dominionists, or vice versa; or whether they have made common cause....except the neo-cons might want to use war as a "noble lie", rather than wanting to hasten armageddon.

WHAAAAAAAT?

it wouldn't be any of my busiiness, if the actions of this fucker and his amoral imperialist friends weren't making me and everyone else on the planet less safe- but they are, so i feel entitled to say what the fuck happened? how did the chimp get back in? it even looks as if he might even have got a majority of the popular vote this time - though i know that there are some more ballots yet to be counted.

he's really going to be wearing the imperial purple now, and that crown he ordered was obviously not premature. the holy american empire. according to the pundits that i saw on the telly, they seem to think the result is largely due to "the war on terror". people are apparently not keen on changing their president in the middle of a war, even if it's a war that the president manufactured. he sold fear. that's what his mate blair is trying to do over here. i hope that it doesn't work over here. i think kerry was right, terrorism is largely a "nuisance"; we've had it over here, in this city, for a long time. i remember numerous ira bombs, in stations, canary wharf, even harrods. and the ira trying to kill the entire tory cabinet in brighton -that was a good one. recently we had two (was it three?) right-wing bombs, one in a gay bar, the other on brick lane. i don't seem to remember any of these events changing election results. it has never made me afraid in that way. i know that blair and blunkett want to inspire us all with fear, it makes their lives easier. scared people accept things like i.d. cards, internment, stripping people of their citizenship. 

update: whether true or not, i don't know, but channel4 news were just saying the bush victory occured by virtue of his campaigning on "moral issues" (a phrase which seems to me to imply that only one stance is moral, like they are a test or something, with a right or wrong answer- actually, that is what i believe as well in a way). so according to that, the chimp won due to his god bothering, and his ludicrous opposition to gay marriage. the argument that it harms marriage as an institution if same sex couples are allowed to do it has no bearing on reality. people of opposite genders will get married (and divorced) just the same whether gays are doing it or not. i can't see why they wouldn't. apparently there are tax and other benefits to marriage (same as in this country), so the reason must be that those benefits are to be retained purely for heterosexual couples; as a reward, i assume, for being heterosexual. in my opinion that is discriminatory, silly also. the bible, or some bits of it, doesn't approve of gays. it doesn't approve of shellfish either, but you dont get christian fundamentalists declaring a fatwah on mussels.

then there's abortion; which is, i agree, a far more serious issue. but i still can't see that the state has any right to enforce someone to have a child,  the obverse of saying a phoetus has rights is saying  that a mother has none. no one has an abortion just for a laugh, or because they are bored........i do favour the rights of those already born over those who are only a potential at that stage . also, an administration that is so gung-ho about the death penalty and war scarcely has any right to preach about the right to life.

in short, voting over these spurious "moral issues" is to me as brain dead as voting over the spurious "war on terror". like i said, if it didn't affect me and the rest of the world, it'd be none of my business. but it does.

i've spent some time over the last few days looking around the right wing american blog scene. to tell you the truth, wading thigh deep through swamps of tabloidese.  it's not that these people are stupid, or at any rate, they can write. and certainly some have a sense of humour (which is more than i display all of the time). i can't understand the villification of liberals though. it's like some sort of group think.

sure, there are variations, certainly; behind the universal endorsement of kicking islamist arse (that is, killing), and uncritical appreciation of the state of israel and their policies in the occupied territories. there are the christian types, who are concerned with aforementioned "moral" issues, and possibly instituting a theocracy, who like the idea of small government/no taxes (as long as it smites the ungodly) ; there are libertarians, who love the idea of small government/no taxation (until aforementioned theocracy starts smiting the ungodly); secular right wingers, who just love the idea of an empire, buying into the same U.S. exceptionalism or providence as the christian taliban, but without god in the picture; and lastly - this may be the biggest constituency- people who are just scared of the evil machinations of the non-existent al qaeda, whilst supporting policies that are most likely to conjure that phantom into murderous life.  

it looks like bush has managed the trick of wartime leaders, and totalitarian ones: to equate his continued power with the well being of his party, the state, and the whole country. i have no doubt blair would like to turn this trick as well; he's certainly tried the messianic certitude, but he's not seen as a wartime leader, like winston-fucking(sell out chunks of europe to stalin if he lets us deal with  own own pesky domestic communists)-churchill .

anyway, the thing i hate most about this, apart from the anti-intellectual yahooism, and the machismo, is the sense of specialness, or chosen-ness of america. it's a denial of the historical process, it's a denial of the relations of production that drive history.

so, in short;  they can all stick their empire and their god ( might be blairs god too) up their arse.

you've probably all seen this by now (it's a bit late, innit?)http://liegirls.com/

a new imperium.........it's got that dynastic thing going for it already......there was me thinking that america was a republic (as the uk should be)

"Even now, the White House is being redecorated for President Bush's second term -- or at least one room, the Lincoln Bedroom, is. The famous long bed will remain; so will the original Emancipation Proclamation in its glass case. But dominating the room, above the bed, will be a large carved crown from which will flow, ceiling to floor, royal purple satin drapes. The crown has been sent to be gilded with gold in anticipation of Bush's triumphant return from his campaign." (full article at)  http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2004/10/14/bush_gilded_crown/index_np.html

check this out: http://www.theocracywatch.org/

http://www.theocracywatch.org/rr_economics.htm that link is especially interesting, bearing in mind the bush tax cuts, and his funding of "faith based initiatives" for social provision (whilst allowing secular projects to starve for lack of funds). as an economic policy goes, it's chilling.

it also reminds me a lot of our very own thatcher, who i recall came out of her gin sodden silence some years ago to pronounce that young single mothers (and their children?)should be put into the care of religious institutions. i think blair has had a taste of this - state money for religious schools; though i suppose that at least he hasn't just limited that to christian schools. still, i think that we should disestablish the church in this country. any religious organisation of any kind can fend for themselves. the french (and i would have said the americans, but maybe not now.....) have it right; a strictly secular state.

and this: http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2004/10/27/scherer-christian/

lt. gen boykin, recently promoted to a high position in the "war against terror" (he may have been the man who sent torturers from camp x-ray to abu graibh) told a prayer meeting the following about bush:

"Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. He's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this." full story here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/10/17/wboyk17.xml so the very contentious nature of bush's election is a sign of divine providence. i found something somewhere about "dominionist" history, that encourages reading history backwards to discern the workings of divine providence. whatever the outcome of anything according to this scheme will be an expression of god's will. of course this includes invading iraq or pulling out of emissions treaties. it is the sort of history that in the C19, had the white englishman as the pinnacle and culmination of human history; god ordained, of course. 

"Gen Boykin told NBC that he would be curtailing his speeches to religious groups. "I don't want to come across as a Right-wing radical," he said." irony?