Electric tennis racquet

Zero, by the Smashing Pumpkins, played on an electric tennis racquet (!).

Oh, when I start a band…

Excerpt from a letter to a friend

Henry Miller

“I’ve also been feeling rather unhinged lately. It’s a combination of dissatisfaction/inertia/struggling within the spaces of work, home, personal life, artistic life… and on and on.

Interestingly, Henry Miller has been wonderful to read. He’s helped to both unhinge me further, and clarify my ideas and ambitions, etc. I have finished Sexus and am now reading Plexus, the second book in the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. He wrote a great piece in Plexus which struck me profoundly in terms of my own writing. He’s better than I’ll ever be. But he confessed to being hopeless at narrative, yet able to plot and balance and counter-balance characters, thoughts, and events and philosophies. To map out a novel according to ideas. And that’s absolutely the pleasure of reading him. He has no real narrative (other than things more or less jerking forwards in time, with the odd glimpse from the future, and the odd nostalgic exploration of times past). It’s a sprawling mass of ideas – that’s where his writing plays out, at a meta level. Not in the real physical world, but where life really takes place – inside our heads, where memories and thoughts and opinions collide. He maps these out so that a book never has a great narrative trajectory (not in any overly conclusive sense), but in which the linkages between concepts matters most.

Clearly, he excites me. And he’s the closest to what I’d like to write like that I’ve ever read; of all the authors I’ve admired. I’m total shit at narrative too. But I love ideas. I love the conceptual links between things, moreso than the actual, physical links of and-then-and-then-and-then…

Anyway. This is why I’ve been delayed in replying. I’ve been a mess. But a happy (?) mess. And a nervous mess. And a wonderfully distracted mess.”

Research?

If you are told something by a group of people who all agree with each other, can find books on the subject in a library, and the internet also backs up their claims, then what they’ve said is basically irrefutable and totally, like, the entire cosmic truth, and you should buy into it without any further consideration.

Oh, wait… NO.

Superman… the musical

I need say no more…

New-found old gold

A friend recently introduced me to a band called The Blue Nile. I’m glad he did. Their first album A Walk Across the Rooftops is genius, and contains the brilliant title track as well as Tinseltown in the Rain – one of their (apparently) more well known numbers.

Sure, it sounds a little dated – they are, to an extent, a product of their time. But their ability to craft songs also sees them move and resonate beyond their time. Nothing in the music is superfluous – everything has its place, and the lyrics find true potency in their delivery.  They often turn on one or two key images, and the trick which singer Paul Buchanan has mastered is to add new and interesting inflections in voice and meaning with each return. Same goes with the instrumentation. A beautiful example is Broken Loves – one of the most amazingly structured and performed songs I’ve heard in a while. Its sound is deceptively simple.

It’s Ed.U.Ca.Tion.Al

Crazy old quantum physics! Always going about things a little differently to the rest of us.

Here’s a nice cartoon explaining one of the madcap ways of electrons.

Not only is it fascinating material, but whose interest isn’t piqued by a title like ‘Double Slit Experiment’?

That’s right… DOUBLE SLIT EXPERIMENT.

While I keep giggling like a schoolboy, you watch this:

Popularity is a mystery

Oh, and despite my recent neglect of this blog, it’s somehow never been more popular, according to my daily stats.

This fact is as inexplicable to me as the above photograph, which provokes untold emotions in me.*

*They’re probably not emotions, really, so much as ill-defined attempts at feelings, abstracted through the vague unreality of the great Reality Filter. It’s hard to feel much of anything when encountered through such a foggy lens as the Internet. Except, that is, a general and ever-pervasive sense of disgust.

The warm embrace of excuses

I know I’ve been neglecting this blog of late. That’s because I don’t really care about it. Yup, that’s right. I care about other things more. What other things? Well, for a start – while by no means everything and every reason – perhaps this well known, widely-spread diagram will aid your understanding…

I can usually swallow the whole thing

The best of Piranha 3D (and overall… it was pretty shit, and not in a good shit way) was the following scene, reproduced precisely here:

Piranha 1: Is something caught in your throat?
Piranha 2: Cough cough cough.
Piranha 1: Here, have a glass of water won’t you?
Piranha 2: COUGHS UP A DROOPY PENIS HE JUST ATE.
Piranha 1: Feel better?

… Left me VERY keen to see the 70s original. Join me, please, in seeing it. We’ll make a day of it, plus other CLASSIC corn-ball horrors.

KoL heart World Vision

Yeap, looks like Kings of Leon are getting in behind World Vision, judging from their new advertisement/music video.

The song’s bloody catchy though.