A Review Of Something Old And Something New For You
(Not Gérard Depardieu)



A battle between the narrative and the poetic - the pre-meditated and the heuristic - the Subtleties of light jazz oratorio-style musical and scratchy, sample driven post-post-post Trip Hop. With Tell Me On A Sunday we have a collaboration between Don Black and LLW of the double crown - a story which starts without explanation and rides up and down the various highways of a woman's journey across America - a woman foregoing the low-life darkness of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriaty for the crystal-lined malls of air-conditioned, muzaked high life with various "creative types". Sounds horrible doesn't it? I bet you'll cry somewhere along the line. Somewhere in the years between this record coming out and now, the technology has swallowed the feeling that good old vinyl used to paste over everything - or at the very least allowed to shine through. And despite TMOAS only being available on MP3 (or CD if you have fifty quid to spare on eBay), the emotion really does come through, managing to avoid the mauling that mp3 hands out as the penalty for fitting 3000 CD's on something that you might throw away by accident.

This story has no absolute start - it drops our heroine in New York, already in anguish at some proto-yuppy having done the dirty on her. What is obviously clear is that whatever traumas happen to this woman, her girlfriends are bitches, nasty gossiping harpies with drink problems and accounts with the plastic surgeon. You wonder why she stays in the country when it is so obvious that the solution to all her problems lies back home with mum and possibly with Neville Braithwaite as well. Still -- nothing ventured - a relationship with a high roller - however much it is pre-destined to last about as long as a mayfly - is still an adventure compared to a life of boredom and the pub on Sunday back in Muswell Hill. And a flight home would end the beauty and crime that is this record.

We drop in to this world-as-a-stage - it is much like the strange set-based drama of One From The Heart - without any idea of why our nameless narrator has decided to leave Neville and camp out on fifth avenue with Joe. But immediately we find out that Joe is a git - a businessman at large - I cannot help feeling that the relationship might have been saved by judicious use of the higher-numbers on the hotel TV service - and that there are plenty of unfulfilled women itching to reveal how much of a git he actually is. So Joe goes the way of all Joes and we learn a little too much about the pseudo-intellectual that is Sheldon Bloom and of course the one thing about pseudo-intellectualism is that it rubs off. Not sure why but this part of the story is the most likable for me precisely because of the LA Story atmosphere. The outsider's analysis of the empty life of film people is both a beautiful and emotional song - a passionate reaction to the ever-sunny days and lives of the empty-heads of Sunset Boulevard. And as added beauty and comedy we have Elaine Stritch as Mr Stigwood's secretary - almost but not quite as iconic as Martin Amis' appearance in one of his own novels - or have I got the wrong Mr Stigwood? And of course this relationship fails - we need no reason - it is destiny.

And who next? We are not sure. And we do not need to know. About now we lose track of the men - it all becomes a blur of happy mania, shocked and violent discovery of infidelity, and the lament to herself as our demi-ingenue rants and raves about how it is all her fault. She just picks herself up and carries on - all the time writing to her mum in the happy mode of Sylvia Plath writing home. It ends in a blur of all three modes - like there is no real beginning there is no ending either. This commentator can only hope that the final misery is brought on by jet lag as she waits in some East Coast airport for her connection home. Did you cry?

And now we have Third by Portishead - a ten-years-after album that before relase hung on the cusp of the graph of catastrophe theory - it could be nothing other than a pointless re-hash of the past glories of Trip Hop or a triumphant parade down the lesser-travelled byways of alternative music. Portishead are one of the few bands to handle both life in the main-stream and the byways of such organs as Wire - indeed as has been mentioned in many-a-derisory review, they were the soundtrack to many a wibbling-classes dinner party - but let's not let that colour our opinion. Not having been to many such dinner parties, the associations of albums one and two are not brought down to tedious cliches.

There is no story here - I admit freely that the words of this record have not yet had time to seep in - and unlike TMOAS they have no chance to because they are incidental to the greater good of the music. The album opens with a sample of radio which immediately reminds me of Mr Kadali by Sing Sing, but any comparison stops there - we have a throbbing lo-fi intro which drops suddenly to the water-treading that allows Beth to moan over the top of the track. It is obvious that this is no Dummy and you will probably agree that this is a good thing. This track finishes as if the needle had been lifted off the vinyl. And now we pulse into seemingly random hits of deep and distant drums again waiting for Beth to sing.

There is no overall theme - though the voice is a constant - instantly obvious as Portishead and yet completely different from anything that goes before. Depressives should avoid - or maybe it would actually be therapy - isn't that the purpose of all music? The middle tracks (rip especially) sound dangerously, though not unhappily, like Goldfrapp to the extent that I was beginning to wonder whether Alison and Beth had ever been seen together. There are stand-out tracks - some with medals for the voice and some that win on looping strangeness that seeps in while you aren't looking.

It is obvious that there is no comparison between the two above records. Or is it? Like every human programmed to look for faces everywhere, we love it when we see connections that are not obvious and there are many here. Infinitesimal droplets of emotion sharing both musical and emotional scales are all around, artificial they may be simply because these two records are important - maybe constants in the ever-changing list of favourites that I am compelled to construct by my daughter. I realise that Third needs more listens to pick out the real nuggets but sometimes many listens leave you with simply an overwritten palimpsest of crayoned impressions. Both are great records and need no stars to reinforce how great they actually are.

Flags Of All Nations - Especially Mexico

Does not compute but will give you a vague impression.

All my world-exploding thoughts came back to me yesterday and of course in reality would have trouble getting the lid off a jar of pasta sauce. One of them was about the slight (and as far as I was aware unheralded) change to the BBC News set and branding. My thought was about how the impression of an increase in detail might look good for such a set but does it actually detract from the contents of the news that is being presented. The first news programmes I watched started with a mono-tone jingle and a set of wavy lines which vanished with the music leaving the newsreader in front of a plain background maybe with a still photo illustrating the story in progress when the technology allowed. The contents were the thing - not the wonderful sci-fi environment that the presenters had to play in - Peter Snow was the only person allowed to play with graphics in those days. Now I can't help being distracted by the wonderfully-proportioned and tastefully-blurred backgrounds that look like something out of a catalogue of Constructivist art. Is El Lissitzky working in the BBC art department now? (rather apt as I am listening to Kraftwerk). It would all be wonderful on The Culture Show I suppose. Let's have Huw Edwards in a louche pose at the bar talking to Mark Kermode while Lauren Laverne "does serious" and tells it straight in the newsroom. Oh dear! That sounds like the mad colonel who tried to persuade Sue Lawley to demonstrate a condom on a banana.

I've just discovered that Mark Kermode is married to a Professor of film studies - Linda Ruth Williams. I bet it''s difficult to sit through a whole DVD in their house on a Saturday night.

Notes/Rants for this morning

Interests in common - talk about anything - Zellig. printing neatly gives a good impression - my Fs are not like Fs. The Bloomin(g) Heather kills me again and again - but it makes me feel like they have all gone out there for a last-gasp frolic in the face of the end of the world. Self-awareness - is this a sign of depression. It's catastrophe theory - not chaos - sudden tipping over into the tingling and the tears.

There Is At Least One Sheep, One Side Of Which ...

The Kitchen Dalek is getting agitated. It appears to have lost its ability to fly - or perhaps it is an early Stair-Phobic model. It wheels around the table but comes to the edge and rocks back and forth as if contemplating leaping to its end on the floor.

Several times last night, while I sat rapt (or maybe vegetating) in front of the telly, I thought of really big things that certainly needed writing down. If only I could be bothered to traipse all the way upstairs to get the notebook. Look at me - saving the world - if only I could remember how it went. I did manage to write something down this morning though I am not sure it really counts as anything that important. I was daydreaming about living happily without having to worry about loads of interactions with society. I don't mean being anti-social in a sit-at-home sort-of-a-way but just not having to worry about the ups and downs of day-to-day living. The trouble with this daydream is that the only way it can come about is by being sectioned and locked away in some horrible psychiatric hospital which is not something I would want to experience. I would also suspect that the criteria used to decide who gets so incarcerated are different from the days when you could be locked up for simply having loose morals - and quite rightly so - that they are different I mean - not being locked up for looseness. Maybe it is an irony that now society is so complicated that mental illness in the form of stress and depression is so much more common, that the chances of getting put somewhere to get away from these triggers are so much lower.

Of course what really should happen is that society should be made less pressurising. Kids should grow up in blissful ignorance of things like league tables and income tax (though not maybe rice pudding) and yet these days they end up getting the shakes at simple maths tests. At primary school I only ever got homework in the form of a project to be completed during the summer holidays. Now my daughter gets an hour a week, often on something the class has been tested on blind beforehand. I suspect that the red-tops image of the partying teenager may be a myth. Kids have been going through school pushed and pushed into doing dry tasks to achieve Government targets using a curriculum that seems to have less variety than a book of log tables and they end up gibbering adults, determined to work hard and get on for the sake of getting on.

All this "trying not to look at what I was trying to remember" has made me recall what I was thinking about that I should have written down. It was nothing at all really - just a simple restatement of the realisation that Extremism on both left and right is the joining up of the two ends of a big political circle. I suppose the only difference between Fascism and Communism is that one allows its torture to be outsourced while the other sets up a cooperative to do it. Having said this, the largest Communist country has realised that it needs to control its free-market - or it doesn't ... or ... err ... not sure what it believes in now - just keeping itself in power I suppose. So we have a free vote in the west and in this country most people can't be bothered to use it - do you know where your voting cards are? - while there are people being killed in other countries for the right to vote.

I've just had a further thought about China. I do seem to remember that they do have some limited democracy at the local level - whether any decision that falls outside of state edicts would be allowed to stand is another matter. Isn't China just too big to have any chance of full democracy working? Then again it works after a fashion in India. I'm not sure what the turnout is but I bet they appreciate the right more than we do. All of this is of course a wasted distillation of the disparate fragments I have managed to read regarding the various democracies and other political systems. Actually, it's a pointless exercise in filling up, a thought I also had about yesterday's entry but I suppose it helps to unravel my own thoughts.

There does seem to be a big gap between what I am able to express and what I actually think. I have felt superior to many people commenting on various news stories because it seems that they are unaware of how big the world actually is. People seem to think that one example of something they agree with or wish to propagate in society is enough to prove that it is right. I repeat a favourite phrase of the minute - The plural of anecdote is not data. However, I have also seen this phrase used by people as an introduction to something that they then go on to rant about as if data was indeed the plural of anecdote. Like saying - "I don't mean to be rude ... " or "with respect". This may all be part of the idea of "Enlightened Ignorance". Don't get dragged into the arguments because they are often only conducted by the extreme supporters of either side. I recently read about a debate on the death penalty where the participants were simply allocated to either camp - pro or anti, and it made me growl that is was thought that any reasoned argument could come out of this. Indeed the narrator's own argument consisted of simple statements of facts about death penalties in various historical and geographical contexts followed by a blurry non-sequitor that seemed to suggest that his heart was not in the argument he had been forced to defend. Indeed there was no indication whether he actually was pro or anti.

All this leaves me in my own blurry state, but isn't that the way of all but the most confident of people? I tried to be like de Bono for a while and to state that I was right and everybody else was wrong - but that is impossible and makes one out to be a total jerk.

This hat is really snug - not too tight mind - just right. An ideal hat - a superior hat - a hat one could grow old with.

A real Mencken manque

Nowhere did today say it was going to be like this. But no day announces itself with any level of accuracy. Indeed there is no proof that a day will begin at all. I suppose that the split second of the start and that of the corresponding end will always occur even if the machinery of the solar system -the mechanism that determines what a day actually is - simply vanishes in a bizarre accident involving some undiscovered (and remaining undiscovered) sub-atomic particle (perhaps the charmed schmo or a top dork).

Actually nothing happened out of the ordinary today - I wasn't thinking that it would and of course there is still a good portion of today remaining in which something strange might happen. Somewhere in the world someone dreamed of something - probably quite ordinary - and then it happened in real life but that was only strange within its context - when compared with the billions and trillions of events around the world, there must be billions and trillions of these incidents. In fact there must be billions and trillions of these incidents that never manage to bubble to the surface and gain entry into any one's consciousness. They probably keep bubbling up like matter-anti-matter particle pairs, annihilating each other most of the time, occasionally one making its way into someones head and becoming real. My neighbour at this desk is probably related to me within six generations and yet neither of us have any definite knowledge of the fact. Shall we see what happens in the rest of the day? It must be pretty big to get past my boredom threshold. See you in tomorrow (which is an Adverb by the way).

You And Whose Universe?

I love the way that numbers are always correct. My real-life experience of numbers only really includes calculations involving plus/minus/times/and division but I would imagine that all the way up to eight-dimensional integral calculus, there is never any stage where the results of numbers are wrong. The complexity may obscure the fact that something is correct but deep down both sides of the equals sign always agree. I find myself involuntarily calculating with dates of birth to work out when someone left school or joined the army or any other milestone and the additions always work - it would be a huge issue if they didn't - we would have found something wrong with numbers and as numbers are not dependent on pesky, real-world things, they are ... frictionless... shall we say - no outside influences muck around with them and skew them above or below the line. There is no mathematical equivalent of friction that means that the accounts of a company are plus-or-minus any degree of error (actually in the world of mega-super-rich-credit-corp then there probably is but there shouldn't be). Which makes it all the more annoying that there is no formula for prime numbers. But minds immeasurably superior to mine have been on that one for years.

It would be most upsetting to find a fault-line in mathematics where a simple addition failed. I was going to say that I was sure that proof that this could not happen had already been found but then again there is the self-referencing of using a number system to prove itself. What happens if deep in the recursive nature numbers, such a fault-line occurs and technically invalidates all maths? Of course it will not matter for even if this occurs we have to look at the real world. Relativity already disproves the simple nature of movement but only for high relative speeds - all our normal movements only need simple stuff to work things out to a needlessly accurate degree - what if addition is proved to be wrong but only for high numbers? I know that addition works for any numbers you can think of but that is not proof.

You may think that this is from a random note - you are probably right.

Verdunct Cromulence In The Mutified Serizone.

Daughter and I did drawings of submarines yesterday though she decided that hers should be disguised as a fish like the enemy subs in Stingray. My drawing comes from my childhood obsession with Jaques Cousteau's yellow, underwater saucer which I would draw and build out of Lego. Now of course I have enough software to build a proper virtual model which would be an interesting project I suppose. I did try and build a saucer out of the Lego we got recently but there do not seem to be enough structural elements in the set we now have. There are no long pieces to act as scaffolding for the skin so while I used to be able to pick up my old subs, this one just falls apart. And of course we used to have hinges and stuff which meant you could build hatches and other moving bits and pieces. I suppose I could try it in the virtual Lego. Watch this space for an import into Bryce.

Sadly, a colleague and I sat in the "encounter area" the other day working out Captain Jack's timeline. We had to leave a few gaps which daughter dutifully filled in from her Doctor Who-obsessed memory and this without watching Torchwood at all. However, compared to some fan sites out there we still have huge gaps and various jumps missed out. Probably bot a good idea to go then - sorry go there. Douglas Adams' concept of the changing grammar of time travel is spot on though we already have a grammar that handles location in space and time is just a dimension anyway. There are languages that have more or less tenses than English so maybe there are languages with more or less ways of defining location in space.

Language (and English especially) is very much like a badly-designed computer program where various requirements have been incorporated as the needs of the speakers change. Some of English (the spelling) is like redundant lines of code which do nothing while some of it creates a very inelegant way of handling a situation which could be done in a much neater way. Having said that, what we do speak, after a while becomes elegant simply because we repeat and become familiar with it. There are very few words which I find do not roll off the tongue - Oban is one of them - I just don't seem to be able to remember where the stress is supposed to go - but most speech just flows like joined up writing. Of course, any attempt to "re-write" the language is doomed. Language is always in flux and new words get made up fit the needs of changing times but so many people balk at the sudden introduction of these new words. I know there are ways of writing and speaking that really annoy me but they are usually of the form of phrases being used without any real understanding of what they actually mean, simply because they either sound good or make everyone think that the speaker/writer is clever. Still biggest culprit in this is probably yours truly.

Humble contrafibularities to all.

There Is Something On Your Back

Is Mary Poppins going to be a recurring theme in Season 4 of Doctor Who? First episode had The Anti-Julie Andrews of Matron Cofelia of the Five-Straighten, Classabindi Nursery Fleet, Intergalactic Class - and now we had the straightly-played comedy of the catching of the statues in The Fires Of Pompeii, exactly like the cook and other "domestics" (as IMDB calls them). I have been Dick Van-Dyke - goodnight all.

In Your Area - Chanticleer

Like A Flamingo On Ritalin

Is an unopened Amazon package the most interesting thing in the world? I picked one up this morning and while I know what is in it and that it has no interest to me - well maybe a little - still it burns in my peripheral vision like a tempting treat. I am sure that this is a common cultural phenomenon, far more exhilarating than the odd bag of swag from Saturday mornings when I was fifty-quid bloke. And I seem to think that the smaller an Amazon package is, the more interest to me it has. The Christmas Amazon package always comes in a large cardboard box - about the right size for baked bean tins - and it never seems quite as exciting as the small packages but of course they are for us and not others.

My wife was most unimpressed with my guffaw at the Spherical Chicken joke on The Big Bang Theory last night. The issue is not with her not getting the joke - just that it is not that funny. She also keeps pointing out everything that she sees in the programme which leads her to believe that Sheldon and I were separated at birth. Unfortunately I have to keep my mouth shut now because I had started saying Sheldon's lines before he did. Occam's Razor anybody? There! I thought I'd get it in today's entry.

Today's notebook entry :-

"Truth In Science does not promote the real truth or any truth at all. I am right and they are wrong. Evolution can ALWAYS explain everything and do it in simple, elegant way which does not involve outside influences."

The phrase "homunculus in reverse" has just entered my head. In The Curious Adventure Of The Dog In The Night-time, the narrator does a brilliant job of describing how the homunculus you imagine in your head cannot be the answer to consciousness because that homunculus would need it's own homunculus and then we get into God Over Djinn as the answer to all recursions like this. Having a creator requires a creator of a creator and so on. I suppose you could argue that the complexity of the development of life is just as complex as having all those creators - however you are just comparing very-very-very complex (Evolution) with infinitely complex (creators) and of course infinity is infinity times bigger than any finite number. (Are you keeping up Douglas?) Of course at this point someone will go and spoil it all by mentioning faith and the argument becomes two different things which are impossible to compare, like kumquats and Neutron Stars.

Imaginary Professions And No Wonder Boys

Hello to Wedge McFudge!

Bookless confusion again but something has been recommended to me and is available and the wonderful treasure house that is our library. So not the film of the book which I have not read but the book of the film that I have seen.

The text on this screen seems to be varying in size as if seen through imperfectly-flat, medieval glass. Which reminds me that for the first time I have contemplated recording one of the BBC idents, specifically the one for the Medieval Season on BBC4 which, while being contemporary (in the sense of being in the last 100 years) conveys the idea of medievalness in a mind-blowing moving collage. See it here. It starts on Monday with Stephen Fry And The Gutenberg Press which can only be good.

Of course I wouldn't want to live there. Too much of not enough stuff I think. No analgesics - which I suspect might be extremely important over the next few weeks.

Certainly no pictures at eleven to go with that story. Feel my pain. Dave! Don't do that Dave. I can feel my mind going. Well I thought it was my mind.

All my day is now a virtual whirl of contacts via various channels. When I started work (all those years ago doncha know , ahem, ahem) contact was almost always by phone and face-to-face contact only with the occasional trip out for good behaviour. Chiming with my personal view that my mental age is somewhere in my mid-twenties rather than mid-forties, I fell that my productivity is far higher now that it was then. Solutions to technical problems are available instantly thanks to Mr Google, whereas in the dark ages of the late eighties, if it wasn't in the manual (or quite a lot of the time in the manual but written with the grammarian abilities of a two-year-old hamster) it just didn't get done. I can remember getting my first email address and even testing an X400 address regarding some information to an outside company. I can recall the acceleration of the use if communication though for the most part the arrival of the Internet in the office has been a sly, gradual creep rather than a load of gee-whizz jumps. Any dispute can be settled - if you trust the answering source of course - though I have come to the conclusion that loads of supposedly factual books repeat rumour, speculation and urban myths without any real fear of being found out. In which case, the world is fluid in the extreme. The only thing I can be sure of is the existence of my own body and even then I perceive my own shape as something quite different from what it is physically. I have been here before haven't I and strangely I seem to recall that I got a sense of deja-vu when I mentioned the homunculus before. Which is a signal to stop isn't it?

Anastomosis For The Masses

I seem to be lost in someone else's idea of simplicity which to me looks like so many deferents and epicycles - I am looking for some comments from Mr P. Tolemy but as usual he has forgotten to put any in. Why did so many people persist in adding complexity on complexity just to make their system fit the observed model (and of course the view of the Church that only the Earth could be at the centre of everything)? All this just when Friar Occam had provided them with an instruction against doing just that. It is all very well for me to be so self-righteous when I have committed many sins of over-complication in my professional life. It is good to have the complication in the early stages while making sure that the hours of discussion lead to a simple and elegant solution.

This morning's drive was under a very oppressive bit of Nimbostratus which coughed up the odd bit of soggy snow between the rain. I have realised that what I really like about the rain is the nice grey cloud that it comes from; it's a bit like hiding under the blankets and forgetting about the rest of the world. Or maybe the white noise masks all the noise that clogs up the brain of the average westerner these days. Human beings are of course trying their best to jam up civilization by making it more complex with a view to ironing out not only all the negative things that happen (which we address with Health and Safety etc) but to fit everyone into easily-manageable categories. Mental illness is just a rebellion against this. We have our TV and our empty social rituals to try and make us accept all this. I'm not saying that there is any concerted effort to do this - I don't think that any controlling organisation is clever enough to do this, being snarled up Brazil-like by their own internal procedures which are just as ludicrous as the structures they impose on the rest of us; it just falls out that way. I would like to say turn off the telly and go and read a good book but that way you are still subject to someone else's views and pernicious instructions in following their way of thinking. Even going off and trying to do something creative on your own account is fraught with having been influenced by something you have already seen. All is full of cliche and things already done - everything has been done at least once already. Nothing you or I can do will ever be entirely original. Any omnipotent being will quickly get bored with the noise of our repetitions. The good thing for us is that we can experience something new every day because there is so much to see and do. The world is full of good and interesting things. Of course it is also full of bad and dull things - and bad and interesting things - and good and dull things.

Currently my head feels full of syrup. Or maybe it is treacle.

Cooking A Frog And Other Chestnuts

Like an eighties Ford Escort, this entry is likely to have spoilers.

I seem to remember that Cheffery with Amphibians is some sort of management parable to justify changes in processes - though so wonderful is the analogy that I cannot remember whether it supports sudden or gradual change which means that without supporting text, the whole thing is meaningless and may as well be ignored.

Have you noticed how only the naffest of characters in TV now have musical ring-tones? Even on the "kids'-show-for-adults" that is Torchwood, all the mobiles simply ring like good old-fashioned phones. Beth's phone had the same ring-tone as mine which causes no end of confusion in our house. Luckily no-one decided to ring us at 18:20 on Saturday when the Sofa was pulled out - though luckily not needed - and we all sat down rapt for new Doctor Who. Our neighbour across the street had just got Hi-Def and was pleased that the box had arrived in time - only to discover that Doctor Who is still filmed in good-old wrinkle-concealing, lo-def Tellyboxviewervision. There was of course the consolation of the highly-textured, son-of-a-sod hands on Gardeners' World the night before. Now that I am unable to read Private Eye in low light I am not actually sure that high-def would actually give me any increase in enjoyment. I may be wrong but surely after a while, the fill-in-the-gaps extrapolation of the brain lets you concentrate on the story rather than how you could take Billie Piper's fingerprints from the screen (nice to see her back so early on by the way).

Actually finished The Outsider by Camus in about 90 minutes all together. I thought I should read it after hearing it mentioned in some Radio 4 poll as the most life-changing book for men. I suppose that must be way up the list partly because it is so short, though it obviously has much meaning for life in general because of mind-focusing qualities of being sentenced to death by guillotine in a public place. The real meaning is do-se-doing around my head at the moment with equal odds on it falling out of one ear as a meaningless piece of brain-dumping that gains most of its kudos from being written by an Algerian-born, footballer-turned-philosopher, or establishing itself as a life-affirming instruction manual for how to be happy. Still, the bits on the beach with the hot sun are nice. Then again I did once think that the best book I'd ever read was Bridge Across Forever by Richard Bach and now all I can remember about that is the bit about how the Lemon Meringue Pie was good if you didn't like it too lemony. Oh and the bit about the Wookie.

Life-Affirming books? Hmmmn. Or is it Life-Changing? From a purely physical point of view you could have Ulysses because of both the many false starts that most people seem to have trying to read it and the simple amount of time it takes up to make a serious attempt at it. Or maybe it could be just because it makes you realise that everything is just going to happen in the way it is going to happen - no matter what philosophy/exercise programme/diet/meditation de-jour you follow, life bowls googlies and you have to deal with them as they arrive. I think that chimes an iota with The Outsider, about which I am of course quietly smug.

Maybe life is just like cooking frogs - pointless, slimy and fraught with Health and Safety issues.

Canine Exhalations

See all the faces hiding in that picture? Silently and silently they see the revolution in our head - the sounds of small rebellions, kicking out against the dot and dash and stop of good and systematic writing, against the rhythm of the prose and stream of filth that betrays origins. here are all the clichés that we get away with just because they sound right and switched to try out new things, break up sentences into staccato bursts of nothing, just code in wireless, code in air.

We, the independent, feeling it deep like code blue crush, the external beat, external breathing for us in this shuffling group of those engaged and paid to save us. Scents of long ago, of bread and sweet things in the old crushed leaves of parents' dances in the village hall. Deep bursts again of well and echo, nothing more than drum and voice.

Poetry in solo drum, a voice of failure, outsiders down the years of tragedy that mark a family.

The world ended yesterday - at least I think it was yesterday. The receipt said yesterday but that is no matter now we have to live with the consequences. Not sure what you can see of this over there and to be honest I'm not sure what I can see of it myself. But something happened anyway. The sun was so high and rained down from the sky, turning the sea to nothing more than a sheet of stars and something blue and intelligent. I know it is all just senses but everything seems to be different today - like someone was whispering in my ear - ordering me to do something I don't really want to. I am trying to wrote it down as it happens and though everything seems so slow around here at the moment, writing it down just makes it all speed up. maybe it's because I'm racing ahead of the thoughts, trying to define the next sentence, trying to work out whether this punctuation mark is better than that one. I have just realised that it is the punctuation trying to hurt me. There are armies of neglected apostrophes, baying for revenge. And somewhere in the dizzying depths of the Special Forces, the long-lost mystery that is the mark of irony; the mark that dares not speak its name for it does not have one.

Marked up and spell-checked in the face of the arresting officer, we are paraded before some initial judge of grammar who looks like he has just fallen in love with that literary ingénue over there - she makes eyes and just about knows who does what in the world of poetry. "She hates Daddy" mantraed over the background of grafted stories all wth proper plots and atmosphere above anything the accused could manage. We can only do this once says the judge and he admits he sees nothing wrong with what the prosecution have just handed him, a manuscript of scruffy pages, crumbed and stained from days in cafes slightly cooler than our houses, wheezing aircon lifts the pages gently and still the sun rains down and pours in off the sea to burn the dusty concrete and seep into the ears and eyes like thoughts projected. Maybe we are the madmen with the radios in our heads. Over the bay they have some fort, some military complex where they check your badges at the gate and wave you through to libraries and guarded terminals. And they all have perfect skin from drinking all that water, avoiding sun - Parisians all of them - wasted in the tropics and all with faces like defining a plain in Euclid. Myths all of them. My accusers go higher for authority and have found nothing but indifference. Seeking no point and no penalty they let me go, back to derelicts and subsistence.

Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

Listening to Matty Groves by Fairport Convention.

Gas and police cars - is all society breaking down? There will be bread riots next - 'ere - this medium toastie is all flat - whatcha goin' to do about it?

Lovely song Matty Groves - and one to wind up the Folk Police should it be updated - loved the version which was played by some of Fairport at the Cambridge Folk Festival which name-checked Ikea.

"Dashing" Dan Cruickshank is off on his travels again tonight with a sprawling (Copyright all Newspapers) documentary allowing him plenty of opportunities to say "Gosh" This is Adventures in Architecture (tonight 21:00). Not sure whether he will be visiting the shiny new metropolis that is Liverpool Capital of Culture. I have to be careful with any criticism of this wonderful event because of the way I ranted against the softies who came out with all the standard anti-scouse epithets when it was awarded. I am afraid that the city still looks like a building site and even the finished buildings have just filled up the gaps in the skyline which made Liverpool waterfront one of the best in the world. The Banksy (eyes right everyone) stands for more culture than all the new skyscrapers which incidentally must have been cheaper than expected because someone discovered a load of battleship grey paint in a yard behind the Town Hall. The planners seem to have created a giant model of some sci-fi vision of a huge warship to link all the Waterside buildings. It is not a good look. Is it too much to ask that they do at least try and have a look at the older buildings or would all that decoration get in the way of the Chief-Executive's salaries?

Sorry - rant over - back into "stand-by" mode. Like how do you write something that directly suggests the music you are listening to? Any guesses as to what this is? An electronic footstep - maybe a shufflling dance of some sort - analogue - not changing with the rest of the chords, leaving a weird edginess to the whole thing. On top of everything, an achromatic high bell-like sound that shoots up and down the octaves and towards the end when everything drops away stays bubbling away with a fuzzy, low bass sound. The bell sound has turned into a mixture of metallic and string sounds. Over the top we get the odd whip-like notes that range throughout the flange settings. The whole thing seems to be built out of chords which rise for ever like an infinite canon, where clever changes mean that it seems to come back to the start when in actual fact it has just got a little bit higher. Finally there is a low version of the whip sound and a very quiet buzzy drone in one ear. Actually it hasn't finished yet but I have to so that's it. Not enough really is it.