A Very Dense Text

Another

...while I'm here... 

Some strange opposite of being marooned on a rock in the digital ocean

I've been stranded with no internet access at home for fucking ages. 

1 hour a day in Hackney Central library is hardly even enough time to notice that the young muslim guy sitting next to me has been casually browsing hardcore porn the whole time.

I don't own a scanner. Every time I scan something in in the library, something strange happens to the file and all that's there on my memory stick when I get home is an infuriating conflagration of chinese characters and an image that despite being there and having an icon all of its own, apparently has a file size of 0kb.  For some reason I have taken it upon myself to repeat this pointless exercise 3 times.

On the up side, spending lots of time in public libraries is good for me. I like the people. They smell like life and they all walk differently. Their clothes seem to utter idiosyncratic rhymes about their living rooms and the moods of their pets. I feel privileged to be one of this bony, stinky, oozy rude gang whenever the sensation strikes that I am, in fact, a key member.

I don't have any images to post. This entry is more a page in my diary that I am choosing to share with you, whoever you are. So, for the sake of consistency, here's a new fact about me;

I work (volunteer) in an Oxfam bookshop now in Crouch End. Its nice. I get free books from the recycling pile. If I had a scanner of my own I'd give serious consideration to scanning in the cover of a volume I brought home today from 1984 called,

Pre-Menstrual Syndrome 

- DIET AGAINST IT - 

your complete self help plan

by Dr Robert C.D Wilson

Underneath this bold red and green text there is a printed photograph of a blonde woman, under ungainly studio lights, very slightly cross-eyed, positioned in front of a heavy brown curtain, smiling, stupidly, like a sea cow and holding a basket of raw broccoli up to her face.

P.S Issue 2 almost ready!

Youtube

Words can only fail to express how much I adore youtube for bringing clips like these into my life when I have no money to buy records and lack the courage to watch T.V;

... and just as a little side dish, how's this for a youtube comment!?

direfranchement (3 weeks ago)  

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Hartman has my heart forever. No other man sang these standards with as much unpretentious ardor and grace. He renovates a ballad, delivering with an unmatched masculine tenderness, wrapping his marvelous voice around the lyrics and releasing them with an intimacy of intense heat that never scorches but only soothes. This performance exemplifies his mastery of the idiom and the time-defying integrity of his art.

 

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Issue Toooo

Themes will definitely include, amongst other things; Penises, Demonic Visitation, The Future, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Incest, Penises, Boys on Trains and more... Penises. Start rubbing yourself into a frenzy now, because this is going to be good.

Also, for those lucky plucky few who check this blog, I will be uploading scans of the entire first issue very soon indeed. It would have already been done if not for this weird thing called Christmas and one particularly annoying technical anomaly.

Thanks for making it this far.

Great Men

I've been aware of Ivor Cutler for a long time now and have always entertained a marvelous idea in my head of who he is and what it means to listen to his songs. His work has crept up on me slowly, like a thought.

I imagine -as is probably the case with many people- that the first time the residue of Mr Cutler's existence entered my life would have been through our dearly departed Mr John Peel's late night show on BBC Radio 1, an organization which in my opinion has never quite been the same since he passed away suddenly in October 2004. Huddled under the blankets with the volume turned down as a young teen, Ivor Cutler's voice would certainly have been one of the multitude of alien sounds settling comfortably into the little nooks and chasms of my developing mind, right next to hardcore german techno and The Fall.

For whatever reason (mostly thanks to Javena Wilkinson and J.Black), Mr Cutler's work has seemed more pertinent to me this week than it has ever done before and so by this rationale I'm now going to post my favorite one of his videos available on youtube. Ivor Cutler sadly passed away just two short years after John Peel, in 2006. 

All that remains for me to say is that this is, without question, utterly brilliant.

Old, but young.

Digging through dusty old boxes of Merlin Premier League sticker albums, ancient Beano annuals, toy cars that change colour when you run them under hot water, plastic Transformers, countless pieces of Queens Park Rangers memorabilia, moth eaten cuddly toys and exercise books from primary school, I came across this entry in my 'General Note Book' from 1996

I don't think my writing style has changed much, and my handwriting certainly hasn't. I think what really caught my attention was the phrase "...God pushed his son over and he fell arms flailing through the clouds to earth (a big ball of earth and grass and trees)..."

"...and he fell arms flailing...", "...earth and grass and trees...".

I still aspire to write sentences like that. I was ten when I wrote that one and I'm not sure if I've ever done any better.  

My memory is not the most reliable of instruments at the best of times, but if I push it I think I can remember making that story up. The task must have been to invent your own creation myth and although mine is hardly an original concept, I don't know, I just like it.

If anyone knows better, as in, knows which probably Eastern mythology I have directly paraphrased along side the obvious Christian influence then I'd really like to know.

In other news AWKWARD issue 2 is coming along swimmingly. I'm leaving this little passage from my childhood out so take that as a sign of the quality being left in. Ha. 

The Ice Caps Are Melting Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho

This clip was brought to my attention recently by AWKWARD contributor and friend J. Black. I don't really know what to say about it. I guess J. might because she's cleverer than I am, but unluckily for you, this is what you're reading. 

I've tried several times to format this post in a way that makes me feel that I understand what I am doing, or why I am putting this here. Needless to say that I have not yet succeeded. 

I don't know if the ice caps really are melting. I'm told that they are and that this is due in no small part to the actions of us feckless little overachievers over the past 200 years, with our boats, planes, cars and computers. I don't know if the human race is really doomed to witness this spectacular apocalypse which it seems zealots of all persuasions are gagging for at the moment. 

Somewhere inside myself I think I believe it, but still... call me a fool... the fact remains; I just don't know.

What I can say for certain is that in my eyes Tiny Tim was a great artist. He was also a sad artist, a lonely man and a tragic figure. He lived his life in a way which seemed eerily beyond his control and for this fact alone I guess I'm grateful. Not one of us really knows what's going on, but the least we can do is sing a song because we think its a great song.

I suppose this post in all its insignificance is nothing more and nothing less than a tribute to Tiny Tim, in all his twisted glory. 

I think he may be my Michael Jackson.

Mystery

Who sent me that fucking Dinosaur postcard all those months ago? 

My house