For the foreseeable future, I'm going to be over here. Hope it works out.

Thank you, and goodnight

(I drew that. It's supposed to be a heart-shaped Tetris block.)

May all your trespasses be forgiven, and all your pastures green. See ya.
 

Goodbye, John.

It'd take ever such a long time to explain that John Martyn was one of the most important musicians and songwriters in my life, that he showed me that so many things I felt guiltily drawn towards was not only 'alright' or 'acceptable' but could actually be everything I imagined they'd be--so playing guitars through tape-delays, playing fingerstyle, singing softly, swinging rather than strutting, writing songs that don't necessarily have choruses--and what's more, that there was such a brass-balled courage in being the person you were rather than what you thought someone else wanted you to be. To be empathic, to care, to hurt and love and, yes, to risk looking like a fucking idiot for the privilege of doing so.

It'd take such an awful long time to tell the story about how I played "May You Never" on my brother's guitar in the sitting-room of my grandmother's house the day after she was killed, and kept on playing it until my Dad had fallen asleep.

Some of us live like princes
Some of us live like queens
Most of us live just like me
And we don't know what it means
To take our place in one world
To make our peace in one world
To make our way in one world
To have our say in one world

It'd even take a long time to explain how I drove home from work one night during the most torrential rainstorm I have ever seen in this or any other country, the skies lit up purple, the drains frothing and fountaining as they overflowed, the pavement submerged along with the road, and how I had to ford two feet of flood water a mile out from home that left me parking up outside the house with the entire engine steaming, and how I was listening to "Outside In" from Live At Leeds the whole way home, and how I'll remember that until the day I die.

It'd take a long time to explain that I saw this, immediately below, when I was eleven years old, and that it pretty much changed my life.







John's music has gotten me through some tough shit. I have no doubt it'll continue to do so. If this is your first acquaintance, I'd like you to be friends.
 

Edge of the horizon

I suspect this blog may be nearing the end of its useful life. I'm not dead or even resting. There's no cause for alarm.

For the last six years - seven years? - I've been trying to convince myself that I have been rehabilitated from the miserable things that happened to me.

This isn't helping.

I don't want to talk about it. Sorry.

Whatever. The future resonates with possibility. Fuck it. Onward.
 

These are the gayest band names

 
In descending order of gayness:

1. U2
2. Deep Blue Something
3. HiM
4. Archers of Loaf
5. My Dying Bride
6. Taking Back Sunday
7. Neutral Milk Hotel
8. Dragonforce

All of these are inferior to the two straightest-named bands ever: Huey Lewis & The News, and Morris Day & The Time.
 

Classic albums I haven't heard.

Kimono My House by Sparks ∗
Curtis by Curtis Mayfield
Scott 3 by Scott Walker
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill_ ∗∗
Symbolic by Death
Blue by Joni Mitchell
Maxinquaye by Tricky ∗∗∗
Roots by Sepultura
Kim Wilde
Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys ∗∗∗∗
Meat Puppets II
Actually by the Pet Shop Boys ∗∗∗∗∗
Pink Flag by Wire
Funeral by The Arcade Fire ∗∗∗∗∗∗
Midnite Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest
Bummed by the Happy Mondays
All Saints & _Saints & Sinners by All Saints ∗∗∗∗∗∗∗
Reign In Blood by Slayer
FLM by Mel & Kim.

∗ I have no idea why I hold off on this: I finally drank the Sparks Kool-Aid earlier this year with #1 Song In Heaven, and this one has "This Town...", which I've loved since I was about eight years old.

∗∗ No excuse, really, for not having brought this into my home: everything I've ever heard about the premise of the record makes me salivate.

∗∗∗ Nor this. Surely this is a full-blooded, reptilian parent to those Burial albums, saying what they cannot, going where they dare not? I mean, what the fuck is wrong with me?

∗∗∗∗ Whereas this is so much of a quote classic unquote that the prospect of it actually listening to it fills me with a kind of dread. 'Perfect pop' or whatever this is supposed to be bores me rigid: I'd rather listen to pop that's been knocked out in an afternoon. I want to like things because I like them, not because someone says I should.

∗∗∗∗∗ There's a point where the squeaky-voiced me certainly went off the Pet Shop Boys, after liking them throughout my childhood. It might have been when they started getting more housey (I seem to remember "Go West" as a tipping point), but from a speculative eye all the songs on this record are mint, and I should hear them at once. And then go and listen to the rest (the implications of #1 Song In Heaven at work again.)

∗∗∗∗∗∗ Just about everyone I know has repeatedly assured me how profound, great, meaningful, etc, this record / band is, and that's arguably the thing that now puts me off. Moral: I'm a miserable bastard.

∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ When I eventually realise that this group's slight body of work constitute some of my favourite songs by anyone anywhere, with the sort of dynamic, utterly self-possessed singing and productions that aren't afraid to leave       great           big     spaces     for the listener to crawl inside, and when I eventually realise that this group pretty much invented Röyksopp et al about five years ahead of schedule and did it better, well, then I suppose I'll just have to finally buy both of these records.

encounter

 
i was unprepared, i must admit, was for the last twenty minutes or so of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind to have me on the verge of tears.

it's that one impossibly optimistic tone row that they hopefully beam back to the flying saucers; the conversation that follows between their synthesizer and the mothership. even the tracking close-up on the synth operator (who, in fact, is Philip Dodds, chief engineer at ARP Instruments, Inc., who built the synthesizer used for all the alien conversations).

and here i am, quietly resurrecting a client database that ran out of space over the weekend while i sit here watching this with my parents, trying not to cry into my t-shirt.