today : I show no interest

The other day I was watching breakfast TV. For some reason or other they were having a debate about whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. People were lined up on each side of the argument.

I switched over.

It reminded me that I just don't care about whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. It's one of those things that will forever remain controversial amongst people who like to obsess about these things. It's an industry for some scholars and busybodies. A new book or a film will come out and it will all be dragged up again.

Don't get me wrong. It doesn't mean that I don't care about Shakespeare the writer. The more I read the plays and poetry the more I am smitten with the beauty, scale and richness of it. People who dismiss Shakespeare - the plays - are idiots.

But whether a single man called 'Shakespeare' actually wrote them. Don't care.

Soon after, the show had a feature about Madonna's film about Wallis Simpson. Everyone is obsessed with Wallis Simpson and the abdication. But it is yet another thing that interests me not one jot. For a start I have no interest in the lives of the royals, and the abdication was also decades before I was born.

Which made me think about some of the other things I don't care a fig for, but seemingly take up much of other peoples' time and effort. Richard III - evil or not? I don't care. The identity of Jack The Ripper? Well, his name was Jack, so that one's cleared up enough for me and beyond that I just can't be bothered wasting the energy. Was Robin Hood a real person, and if he was, was it in Nottinghamshire or South Yorkshire? Don't care if he existed or not, don't care where he may or may not have lived and roamed if he did.

John Martyn? Nasty evil wife beater or beautiful troubador? Sinatra. How involved in the Mafia was he really? Wa Marilyn murdered by the Kennedy's?

The list of things other people are apparently interested in, nay, fascinated and obsessed by, but leaves me totally cold, is endless. It must just be me. Not got the interested in pointless speculation gene.

today : september # 3

today : September # 2

Whenever September rolls around, I am reminded that it is my least favourite month. In recent years, operations meant that I spent 2 of the last four Septembers in painful recovery, which is still fresh in my memory. But long before that Septembers were harbingers of misery.

When I was a teacher it, of course, meant going back to work. Some other teachers seemed to happy to be back in school. I imagine they maybe had broods of children and, as the adult at home for the previous six weeks, had spent the entire time trying to entertain their offspring. Maybe, for them, returning to work would herald at least some of the day being in their own control, some return to normal adulthood.

But for the childless me it spelt the end of freedom. The summer holidays were the time when I could cut loose from all routines and responsibilities. Sometimes I went on holiday for the whole time. Other years I would write solidly, or record and mix an album, or just do what I wanted for as long as I wanted. For example, I always like sitting down when the Olympics or whatever is on and consuming it all night and day knowing that other Olympics watchers were rationed to highlights brief moments.

But September was when the watch went back on my wrist and the collars and ties moved to the front of the wardrobe. Time to start being grown up.

Not that returning to school is totally without joy. There is something comforting in routine and work. I personally find something deeply satisfying in falling asleep in front of the TV on a Friday evening, overdosed on take-away additives and a glass of cold beer, but properly tired from hard work rather than sleepy from staying up the previous night playing GTA3. And teaching always throws up new challenges, new pupils and new colleagues - all generally positive. There's nothing like finding some gems amongst the new intake of pupils - either ones you know you can help get on and enjoy teaching or ones who are crazy and/or strange to the point of sheer entertainment. Same with new staff. Sometimes the churn of new colleagues can throw up interesting and positive dynamics. A new friend even.

But as the years went by looming Septembers started to outshine the potential positives of a new academic year. Eventually, for me, that first six-week half-term started the downward spiral towards the Xmas half-term, which is the nadir of any school year. The first couple of weeks in September are filled with energy and various kinds of newness. The next four filled with dread and pessimism at the knowledge that the clocks will go back and the six weeks from Bonfire night through to Christmas will be some kind of dark troop towards hell.

Let me explain. The minute the October half-term ends the entire nation is on a run-up to Christmas. Children are almost entirely distracted by the hyped promise of whatever gifts they are to receive. But everyone is also drained by the darkness of the winter mornings and evenings and those days where it never really gets properly light. Motivation is at its lowest. Tiredness makes everyone grouchy and hard to live with and there are more windy, rainy and cold days than not. It's not a massive change - but 1% less motivation and 1% less cooperative behaviour can tip the balance significantly.

Anyway, that's all in my past and not the real reason why I hate September. The real reason is that as soon as September comes around the so-called 'silly season' ends. I turn on the TV and find that I am bombarded with crap. Not only do the political correspondants all return from their hols but so do the politicians. After a blessed few weeks where we have had a nice break, everything returns to its appalling norm. That is: an endless parade of politicians, their fat awful corrupt lying smug holiday-tanned faces, spouting their endless specious bullshit. All their speeches and policy initiatives and hobby-horse ideology. All their psychotic egotistical preening and their arrogant self-serving miasma, poisoning the airwaves and the air with their pointless noise.

It reminds you that modern-day politics is not about running the country - after all, whilst they were away inflicting their odious selves on the people of California, Tuscany, Devon and the Dordoigne, the country more or less kept running. It is about egotistical shallow bastards promoting themselves and the hollow certainty of their own cretinous opinions and shoring up the wealth of themselves and their friends. It's no less tribal and objectionable than in Afghanistan or Libya.

today : September # 1

September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

today : some groovy tunes

Jazzsteppa - dubstep with jazz: genius



SBTRKT - Pharoahs. Superb electro groove. genius



Soul Creations Funky Jive pt1 (I actually prefer Pt 2 as it has more jazzy soloing but I couldn't find a youtube for it). Check out the wah wah funky guitar: genius.



I noticed this tune Atlas by Battles cropped up on an advert recently. When Battles hit a groove -like on this or Tij, they are genius.



Twilight 22 Electric Kingdom. Old School 1983 genius.




Fujiya and Miyagi should be more successful than they are. Their music is interesting and textured. This video for Ankle Injuries (could be my theme tune) is genius.

today : spineless swines, cemented minds

Michael Gove's free schools open in a few days. It'll be interesting to see whether they achieve any success.

I suspect we'll never know if they are better than other schools. No doubt they will be measured differently when it comes to results. I also suspect that the fact that they are an ideologically, rather than educationally, driven project that they won't be allowed to fail. So expect to see the exact amounts of direct funding being quite difficult to fathom, with various obfuscated forms of financial support that other schools won't receive.

The rub, of course, being that their freedom is supposed to replace a failing national curriculum. Mmmm, that's the NC that was a Tory invention in 1991, mainly as a response to bogus tabloid fears of left wing Local Education Authorities brainwashing our precious kids with their loony leftism and forced gayness. And now a new thing to replace old thing. The fears are little changed. Centralising control and exercising it through grateful proxies. Bypassing the swathes of immoral ill-disciplined (liberal lefty) teachers that populate normal inner-city schools. And still there's the suspicion that inner cities are run by Labour lefties who cannot be allowed to have access to our childrens' purely capitalist minds.

I bet that when it all comes out in the wash, in an age of cuts across the education system, the money per pupil spent in free schools will easily outweigh Gove's trumpeted pupil premium. And lets not forget that it was the Tories who relentlessly stripped cash out of the system over for twenty years, leaving schools, pupils and teachers gasping for breath.

today : I meet someone I don't know

I'd like to use the opportunity of me owning an internetweb weblog to announce categorically that I have never knowingly met or befriended a haemophiliac.

Don't get me wrong. In no way have I sought to avoid haemophiliacs. I have nothing against them and am sure that they are all very nice people. In fact I am further certain that many, if not all, of them are worthy of some measure of admiration for living with such a potentially difficult and problematic condition.

But still, as far as I know I have never met one.

I just thought I'd clear that up.

Because today I was in the process of donating some old stuff - a stereo system that worked but was obsolete due to the lack of a CD player, some fine quality but little-used hiking boots that were in hindsight, seeing as I literally cannot walk, an optimistic purchase, and some books - to a charity shop. I know the guy in the shop and it's my first choice whenever I have anything to donate.

(Without wishing to appear too worthy and preachy and that I do a lot of work for charidee without wishing to talk about it, if you are ever thinking of donating to a charity shop it's a good idea, so my contacts on the inside inform me, to only give half-decent stuff. It seems that lots of people use charity shops as a way of throwing stuff away, including lots of stuff that is genuine rubbish and sometimes disgusting, like soiled underwear, unwashed nappies and bloodstained bedclothes. This means that charity shops have to spend time to sort out the good stuff and pay extra to throw the bad stuff away. The rule is that if you yourself wouldn't think of buying something were it in a charity shop, then it's probably best being put in the bin or taken to the tip, especially if it appears to be covered in suspicious bodily fluids.)

So there I was, parked at the backdoor of the shop unloading my donations from the car. My friend was helping, given that my walking sticks mean I have 100% less available hands than your average normal person to carry bags etc. In fact, to say that I was unloading is only true in its broadest, continuous sense. What I specifically was doing was pointing at the various items in the boot of my car, which my friend then unloaded and took inside.

Nearby, outside a charity clothes shop (it is a salubrious area), there was a parked red van. A wheezing circular bloke wearing blue overalls was piling stuff into the back. Once he'd finished and theatrically slammed the doors he walked over to me. From about a foot away he pointed firmly at my chest.
"I know you. You're Darren's mate. Good to see you."
I can quite honestly say that I didn't know this guy. Never seen him before. In point of fact, I've never even known anyone who could be mistaken for him. Moreover, I don't know anyone called Darren. The last person I knew of that name was at middle school aged about twelve. When we moved on to new school we quickly lost touch. Not a surprise given that we were never really good friends: the only bond we really had was that I was the maverick right-sided midfielder in the school footie team and Darren was a pretty tall and fast centre forward who benefited immensely from a number of my crosses, through-balls, back-heels and other skillful and creative assists.

There aren't even many famous Darrens. D-list musical and panto actor/tabloid love-rat Darren Day, Darrin from Bewitched, footballers Darren Huckerby and scoop-faced serially-injured Darren Anderton and pretentious film director Darren Aranovsky are the only ones I can conjure up at the moment, and one of them is fictional and spelt differently.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't know a Darren."
"Yeah you do. Darren. Darr-en. Darren from Ellington Avenue!" He'd started to speak to me in that slightly shouty way people speak to foreigners who don't understand English, or the elderly whose ears and memories are assumed to be suspect.
"I'm sorry," I said, rapidly rifling through people I'd known who'd lived in the area of Ellington Avenue but never thought of for years just to see if I missed a Darren. I rapidly came up with a Neil, a Niall, an Andrew, a Chris, a Jonathon and a Dean, but no Darrens.
"Darren the haemophiliac!" he said, as if this piece of medical information would prove the key fact that made me unable to further deny my knowing Darren from Ellington Avenue.
"I don't know what to say," I said. "I am local and I grew up around here, so maybe you've seen me around. I even know Ellington Avenue because a girl in my class lived there..."
"What school did you go to?"
"Greenwood High."
"How old are you?"
"Forty-four."
"Oh," he looked momentarily crestfallen. "I'm thirty six." He was silent for a moment while we both absorbed the import of our ages: with the maximum crossover for people being in school at the same time being seven years, any notion that we went to school together was scuppered.

Apparently this was his last gambit for creating some historical connection between us.

"Well, gotta run," he announced. "This stuff won't take itself to the tip," he said and walked away back to his van.

today : same old sh*t

Knee + Jerk

National Service
Cut Benefits
More Discipline in Schools (bring back caning)
Cut more Benefits
Longer Prison sentences
Chain Gangs
Employ American advisors
Blame the previous government
Blame immigrants

(and btw cut taxes for the rich)

today : feel the pain...take the blame

Barring further incidents, there will be a torrent, a clamour, of blame, analyse and explain in the next week or so. None of the MPs, newspaper columnists, journalists, think-tank directors, commentators or bloggers will admit the truth. None of them will personally take the blame for what happened in August 2011. Overwhelmingly, opinion is that nobody understands. But that is the point. We/they will show that we/they understand so little that they hardly have a way to grasp it. They don't even understand how little they understand. But once again, they/we won't look in the mirror. If control was lost then there's nobody else who could have lost it. If there has been a moral shift, it didn't just happen without cause. If society is 'broken', as the politicians seem to insist, then it didn't just break on its own. The hard truth is that we/they broke it. They will bang on endlessly about others' lack of responsibility without once genuinely taking responsibility themselves. If the young lack role models and examples, then older generations are the ones who failed to be the example or the role model. If the young lack opportunity then we are the ones who failed to ensure it. Everyone expressed some measure of shock and surprise that the country exploded in riots, but nobody will really admit their part in a society that engenders such violence.

today : I predict a roti

today : 90 degrees in my shades

Today it was 88 degrees in my kitchen, which for England is pretty hot. Summer is erratic and often very short and it always amuses me that we complain when it gets really hot, just as we complain when it gets really cold, or when it is neither especially hot nor especially cold. We also complain when it rains, or not.

But I am out of step with other Brits. I love it hot. As hot as possible please. If I was (and sadly, I am not) the person who won £161 million on the lottery the other week (and there's none of this American lottery nonsense where you get it over 20 years. Here it's one of those oversized cheques in a single beautiful chunk) I would instantly move to somewhere like Santa Fe for the dry heat and/or New Orleans for the humid heat, holidaying in Calcutta, Rio and North Africa for a change.

Anyway I am not even going to pretend that I am not , in part, using the heat as a rather feeble excuse to post pictures of Claudia Cardinale modelling various items of 'summer' clothing.

today : tweet tweet

where do all the tweets and texts go? More and more tv and radio shows spend more and more of their time imploring viewers and listeners to tweet and txt. its a kneejerk part of any show now, despite the context. at the weekend i noticed, in between the uncomfortable and intrusive questions to survivors of the norway massacre (how did you feel thinking that you were going to die? by the way, what was it like to watch your friends be murdered in front of you?) the news folk begged us to send our thoughts by twitter and txt. what did they expect? later on, a couple of comments were read out. people felt sad for the people who died. one or two were angry at the guy who did it. surprise.

If someone did manage to send in a detailed and insightful comment it would never make it to air. ok, i get it on the radio. lauren laverne asks for people to request their favourite recent track. Fine. sometimes a pithy topic of discussion crops up and listener contributions add to the flavour of a show. but asking people to comment on an unfolding big news story with scant detail is just pointless and bizarre. what possible contribution could they make? and what happens to all the tweets and emails and txt that are sent and posted but never make it to air?

today : instant classic

According to what I read, John Grant almost gave up on music and on life after a crappy run of luck. But he didn't, and his album Queen of Denmark is terrific - not been off my Dansette for months. This song, in particular - especially in its long form, is an instant classic. As good as anything I've ever heard.

today : twaaannnggg!!! (reprise)

My Semi-Acoustic got a new set up and a set of flatwounds. Money I can't really afford. So sue me.

today's very interesting music is...

Fuguefat by The Octopus Project

today : I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.

One of the things, as a Labour supporter throughout the period of the last government, that I was always reluctant to do was to openly criticise them. This, on the the grounds that I knew what the alternative was, and Labour plus imperfection and mistakes always always trumps the Tories.

There were three main areas where I thought they fell down. Iraq, obviously. You can argue they had no choice but to follow Bush but in the end the whole thing was monumentally stupid. Then there was their puppy-dog overenthusiasm for things like databases (I always think the plural should be databii), surveillance cameras and all that stuff. Not only is it ideologically dodgy to go all Patriot Act on the asses of the innocent public, but these things always cost stupid amounts of money and rarely succeed. The NHS database, as an example, was a lovely Utopian idea but was ill-executed and ended up as a hideously costly failure that everybody but the people in charge could see coming a mile off.

But even in the heady days before Iraq, I was always critical of the way New Labour seemed to pander to the media. There was a desperation to control the news cycle which led to many hasty policy ideas and, ultimately a scatter-shot approach to policy that left too much important stuff undone or half-finished. It also seemed to be that lots of more radical and interesting policies were put into turnaround or watered down at the behest of the media. In some ways they can be let off the hook by dint of inexperience. New Labour were the first government to operate in the 24hr media world and also the first to live in the internet age. As the media world expanded so explosively, it looked like they were trying to corral it all. It ended up looking like someone trying to herd flies or someone trying to catch a thousand ping-pong balls and hold onto them. And after 20 years of relentless attacks on the left by the press, who could blame them if they convinced themselves that they needed to court the newspapers.

Recently, some people have been saying that this wasn't necessary, that the Sun never wot won anything on its own. But when you have 6 major newpapers against you and only one consistently for, then perhaps you have to try something to reduce the effect. In this climate the power of the press expanded to fill the gaps in competence and experience. The problem was that nobody said "Enough", the more the media tried to undermine, the more Labour tried to pander. More than once they back-pedalled. More than once they looked weak and foolish.

The 24hr news media still rely too much on the newspapers. Despite TV having 70% of the news market and the Beeb having 70% of that, even the BBC uncritically follows the front pages of some of the most agenda-driven and politically biased papers. It's not often that the Beeb creates the news agenda anymore. Occasionally they'll do a Panorama that enacts some small change, but even Rough Justice is long gone. Turn on News 24 and there is almost no investigative element to the journalism. They read out the same newswire reports, recycle the same stories as everyone else, and use the same small coterie of experts and commentators.

Knowing that nobody else is stepping up to take the lead puts power in the hands of the newspaper proprietors, whose ultimate job is to sell newsprint, and not really be custodians of balance and democracy.

A great example of this is a kind of non-political story: the MMR/Autism controversy. The newspapers went crazy over the story without ever checking the facts. They know that fear is an easy selling tool. It served their agenda of attacking the government and pressuring Tony Blair. on MMR they could attack at will because no government was going to change their vaccination policy in such circumstances. The Mail and The Express lazily live off health scares and/or miracle cures. But this time, even the broadsheets and TV jumped in, middle class journos caught up in the paranoia of not producing perfect offspring. The result : almost an entire generation of middle class kids unvaccinated and an pointless surge in measles. It's killed some of these very children, whose parents are, in the end, little different from those who swallowed the evangelism and fed their kids the Kool Aid at Jonestown.

The other thing that has happened is that the papers as a whole have enjoyed free reign to bully whosoever they please. Politicians are wary of criticising the papers because they know that the papers have files on them, or might stop at nothing to relentlessly smear them - smears which echo unchallenged across TV and radio channels. Therefore their only option has to cosy up. Keep your enemies closer.

On the surface it seems that recent events have cracked the press/police/politician nexus wide open for all to see. People are calling left and right for reform. But even if Murdoch's influence declines (after all he will retire/die eventually) let's remember to revisit the media/politics/police relationship in a few years time and see what reforms have been successfully enacted, and how things have changed. After all, three years later and the banks have paid themselves 14 billion quid of bonuses out of our pockets. Whilst surviving on our cash, they still believe they are so clever that they have abolished debt liability, still poise themselves to feed like vultures on the very economies their actions put in peril, and still celebrate their imagined profitability at the end of each day with bottles of vintage Bollinger. Root and branch reform was mooted, and then promised. To qoute George Carlin. We put a dollar in the change machine and nothing changed.

today : my latest hobby

Watching the floodgates open/the dam burst etc

today : twaaannnggg!!!

I bought one of these. So sue me.

today : The Laughing Policeman

I was thinking about this today. It's funny, sinister and quite bizarre.

today : Go Gordon

I always thought that it was a mistake for the spin-doctors to shackle Gordon Brown's streak of righteous anger. He is always ay his best when raining Presbyterian fire and brimstone on the head of injustice. One of the few politicians who I believe is driven by ideals rather than pure self-regard.

And finally, he looked the bullies in the eye and unloaded. Ironically, his critics are still in the mode where everything he does is worthy of ridicule i.e. the line pushed by Murdoch's press and then echoed by the rest of the kow-towing spineless news community, but he was spot on the target and delivered the kind of missive today that, had it come 18 months ago, might have won him the election.