| Wednesday, May 30, 2001 |
 | Eeeugh. I hate wanky little observational bits like that. Sorry.
To make amends, I shall thank Davo and show you why I currently have a lapful of semen. Snakeskin superhero outfits....the little teases....
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| Curious coincidences. An email from someone I used to know, and a back-page article in Time Out about foodstuffs which seemed a good idea at the time - Lileks, anyone? - which mentioned the glory that was Camp Coffee reminded me of a month spent drinking chicory-flavoured coffee granules, but I can't for the life of me remember why. Why did I not just buy non-chicory flavoured coffee and take it with me at all times?
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| Tuesday, May 29, 2001 |
| Lyrics which make you go hmmmmm, part of a continuing series which, if nobody else, Genug is still reading. I am coming to the disconcerting conclusion that all of these lyrics, no matter whom they come from, are about coercion, traduction, loss of control, surrender....well, apart from Luke and his motor boat. which is, if anything, worse.
Hey ho...
I don't want to live backwards,
I don't want to even look backwards
It's not my fault
It's not my fault you don't love me
It's not my fault you don't love me
When I'm drunk
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| I got the vertical clit piercing for my sixteenth birthday. With hindsight, it was somethig of a forerunner for the knees - movement was very difficult for sometime after without making squeaking noises.
Never let it be said that scary metalface George doesn't get the point. She's Pierced as Fuck, round and down on the UpsideClown
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| It seems that Graybo has had more dates in the last month or so than I have in the last decade. It must be the season.
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| I stepped off the platform into Brighton on Saturday afternoon with a degree of trepidation. Since the first rail link was built between Brighton and London was built in 1840, London has shat its malodorous poisons into the city by the sea. Trustafarians. People who drive SUVs. Corporate conferences. I was expecting a lynch mob, or at the very least a sternly-defended barricade.
Imagine my delight, then, to be greeted instead by Damon and George, arch-bitches of my heart's line. Along with Damon's friend Matthew, we drank, and then nipped over to Room 101 for vegetarian delights.
Well, theoretically.
Room 101 prides itself on "slow food". As in, the antithesis of fast food, lovingly prepared and delicately flavoured. On the other hand, there is slow food and there is taking the piss food. They were very nice about it, and knocked 10% off the bill, but what the fuck were they waiting for? The parsnips to grow? Delicious on arrival, however; just don't go there if you're hungry.
Anyway, up Trafalgar Street to meet Joe, Camel, Ben, Cass, Paul, Gillian and about a hundred Brightonian and Southamptonian extras at the Battle of Trafalgar, thence to the Tiger Bar.
Quick question - what the Hell is up with this Trafalgar bullshit? The fleet sailed from Portsmouth. What's the deal? Tell me.
Anyway, very good company, everyone else went on to a club, or as it turned out to wander the streets because Brighton was crammed with London weekender scum like myself. I crashed, and then hung around in metaphorical pipe and slippers chilling on Sunday. Which was pleasant, until the rush back to London to make it back to another drinks date at eight. Oy vey.
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| Friday, May 25, 2001 |
| I don't tend to read online comics, but Bobbins has really picked up in the last year or so. The dialogue is sharper, the characters more likable, if often no more believable, and the art maturing and evolving into a clean, memory-efficient style. Which is nice.
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| Paul has definite game:
I've been thinking about integrity. It's too easy for someone like me to assume a false integrity complex, based on what I do and what I use to do it; I'm a programmer, hence infinitely better and more useful than any gaggle of bullshitting salesmen and marketing wankers. What's more, I use the geek's favourite, Linux, which in itself is wrapped up with layers and layers of self-worth and superiority over other operating systems. The point is, it's too easy for me to lapse into assuming I have integrity, when perhaps I don't, because there's so many other things wrong with me.
Paul, I love you dearly, man, you're my brother, but let's not write off what you do as a source of your absence of integrity just yet. Complinet, and I quote, "is a leading supplier of premium information services for the financial services and technology sectors. The products are available to subscribers only, although free trials are available".
Keep it real.
Not exactly a leper colony, now, is it? Except possibly socially.
Everybody's dirty. And a working knowledge, even a detailed knowledge, of an open-source programming language is not going to change that.
Did I mention that I fucking hate puppies, as well?
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| Wednesday, May 23, 2001 |
| So, you're at the Blackheath Halls or similar, listening to the first song of the evening to be delivered live by Tindersticks. You're waiting to be seriously emotionally mutilated, and for you and your friends to start hugging each other, sharing the Kwan, drinking rhythmically and generally to wallow in the transcendent misery, when you notice, out of the corner of your eye, that...oh fucknylon.
Yes, it's somebody you used to date. Somebody who ended up breaking it off last year with the utterly classic line "I think if you were interested it would probably have helped". Standing about eight feet from you. Fucking hell. And is that blanking you're getting, or is it just the new hair and the glasses?
Of course, that's not the bad part. That's just slightly embarrassing. The bad part is that, progressive new creation that you are (except for the bit about Christ, obviously), you feel a definite sense of failure on that one. You probably owe an apology. Unfortunately, said apology is going to have to mention that one of your signal failings was not mentioning that, throughout the dating process, you were trying to acclimate to the existence of irremediable lymph cancer in someone close to you. Which meant you were kind of distracted. Which was bad. But then, when do you slip that into a conversation? And wouldn't it have been pretty fucking drama queeny? Shit's sake...
So you stand there, thinking about failure and the impossibility of successful comunication, rotating in a tightening circle, and the people around you are getting mellow and melancholic and emotionally expulsive, and you are shrinking further and further into your reptile brain, so by the end of a very good gig you are basically ready to kill for food. You miss the last train and take point on the walk north to Blackheath Hill, as your emotionally-expulsive companions connect on a deep and meaningful level and you catch flies with your tongue. Then, at last, the bright lights of not-quite New Cross, and everybody departs, each in their own cab. So you get back home hours later than you planned, to find that you could have got back hours earlier and it would have made no difference whatsoever.
Never had a night like that? Nah, me neither. Fancy a pint?
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| One of the interesting things about the whole KayCee debacle is that somebody fell in love with her. This is the equivalent of asking a Turing test computer for a date. The whole sorry fiasco has already had too much coverage, but I must direct you to perhaps the only worthwhile thing to emerge - the image of thousands of terminally ill elves.
Elves.
Elves.
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| You know how you have to poke food down a newt's gullet? That's the function of this post.
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| Monday, May 21, 2001 |
| The ever-perfect Rosa Luxembourg offers this addition to lyrics that make you oddly langurous and tumid:
He was a big freak.
I useta say lots of dirty things.
Well, as I find myself increasingly saying during conversations with the glamorous Spartist, crikey. Although she does lose points because the rest of the song is also absolutely filthy.
Which gives us, broadening the franchise once again, the key lines from songs which are in themselves of dubious morality. First up:
Well, exercise is good for you.
So come on, hup-two hup-two.
It's not a pretty sight but, hey, that's the rules.
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| Friday, May 18, 2001 |
| On amputated lines with peculiar effects, Luke is definitely leading the field:
I do remember being slightly titillated by a generic folkie at an acoustic
club in Sydney. She was singing a song about kids' toys which featured the
line "Gonna buy me a motorboat that goes 'putt-putt' over the ocean."
Something about the pronunciation of "putt-putt". Hmm.
Hmmm. Indeed. Especially as I keep misreading that as "motorbike that goes "putt-putt over the sea", which reminds me of "Motorbike to Heaven", which reminds me of Salad's first album, which reminds me of:
You put me in your place
So go on, the pleasure's mine
I gotta see your face
Which we can now allow in because the bar has been raised to hapless indie chancers of the 1990s.
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| Have you ever wanted to shove a glass rod right up Nick Jordan's cock? Well, sorry, girls, but someone got there first. I bet this doesn't appear on a Bloggo card in a hurry.
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| On a throwback - reasons to love Laptop - their/his/its last album contained a Kraftwerk-inspired cover version of Bily Joel's "Still Rock'n'Roll to Me", performed as if to a concert hall full of Japanese fans. Liquid football.
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| If he continues to rest on his laurels, while at the same time seeking the approbation of his peers above that of his elders, he will fall behind those less gifted but more dedicated; the effect of this situation on a mind like Jamie's is to sink it into even greater apathy.
Is Jamie hitting the mid-life crisis? Is it this Jamie? Is this, in fact, a school report? Have we actually got through an entire UpsideClown without anyone being scarred for life or anally penetrated? Or both. Bring this Reportage the Hell on.
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| Well, let's see...the last tour was with five people and then two and then just Jesse.
I guess the next tour, the laptop will go on tour by itself. I'll mail it to Norway, and all you'll have to do is turn it on.
So speaks one-over-x of Laptop, a band/bloke/laptop for whom I entertain feelings verging on the antisocial. The new single is out this week in the UK, for people who have always wondered what the bastard lovechild of Leonard Cohen, Bryan Ferry and Phil Oakey might resemble. "Back Together" is a lot poppier and warmer than a lot of his their/his/its first album, Opening Credits, but he's still a curmudgeonly old electro-fuck. So that's OK...
Does he think about you every day, just like I have
Ever since the girl I left your for,
Showed me where to find the door.
Well, quite. Check it out here.
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| Oh, Helotrix. My email is down, which means, among other things, that lines from female singer-songwriters which make you inexplicably horny must for the moment be laid to rest.
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| Thursday, May 17, 2001 |
| What, so you can invent scrabble, then just decide to piss around for the next half-century? Charming.
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| And, moving briefly away from the philosophy of games, a conversation about Small Town Boy led naturally on to one of the more pressing issues of our time: which snatches of songs by female singer-songwriters, taken out of context, make you inexplicably aroused?
So far agreed:
Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again. Which is also, not entirely shockingly, the refrain of many a tortured goth and self-mutilating teen.
Pale as a candle and your face is hot, and if I touch you I might get what you've got.
Any others? Tell me. And yes, Matt, you can have Jennifer Warnes. If it makes you happy.
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| And, although his use of "unique" with a qualifier is maddeningly irritating, this develops some of the themes, although is a little dated.
I find reading about computer games more interesting than playing them, which I suspect involves missing the point quite seriously. Maybe I was never given a chance to have Hard Fun at school.
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| Jesper Juuls's presentation to last year's Digital Arts and Culture Conference has some interesting things to say about the practical application of theory and narrative to game design.
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| Finally found the time and energy to look at the proof that girls are evil that so many bloggers seem to have been tickled by.
Can't believe nobody seems to have spotted the basic but utterly obvious flaw in the entire proposition.
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| Wednesday, May 16, 2001 |
| "Hey. Hey. Shhhh. It's OK. Look at me. Look at me."
Unselfconsciously batting his eyelids, he looks up from under his lashes. She smiles at him, warmly. Then her free hand comes up in a fist, and flattens into his face. The heavy silver ring on her index finger presses ruby upper lip into tooth until it splits like a snail. He tastes blood, and barely feels the next one go in under his ribs, but hears her.
"Bitch."
Bit late with this one, thanks to Blogger's brainfart, but I'm still the Small Town Boy up on the UpsideClown. Is this weird sex, or metroplectic initiation? Hugh decide.....
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| Saturday, May 12, 2001 |
| Drinks yesterday with Abigail, who is marvellous. Topics included Brendan Fraser as harrassed receptionist, laying the smackdown on Imhotep's candy ass, what the fuck QAD stands for (nobody knows), Christopher Walken having to show his children Blast from the Past over and over again, as it's the only film in which he isn't insane, psychotic, vampiric, murderous , Man with the Plan or talking about shoving things up his ass, sex (naturally), Eric Roberts as the Archangel Michael, whether summer makes you remember more and whether Italian men were cute.
Also picked up a copy of the Moldy Peaches' opus, which is somewhat glorious. How can one possibly not worship an album containing the lyric "Put your mother in a headlock, baby, and do it right!"?The important thing, however, is that our fishing friend at Brainsluice has been rumbled - they've been downloading porn with Davo...
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| Friday, May 11, 2001 |
| Fast forward to Thursday, and I'm simply havin' a wonderful Christmas time - in May.
For I was at a damn fine 75% of a gig with James, who needs to get a weblog so I can link to it. He could call it Three miles from milk, a hundred miles form Indie Rock. Which would (indie) rock.
Anyway, Bright Eyes are not a band I know very much about. They are all about twelve, they are all about three feet tall. They play confessional rock songs at bowel-watering levels of volume and intensity, the lead singer falls over a lot, and they rock like cock socks. Probably an acquired taste.
Bis, on the other hand, are a taste acquired by all right-thinking people. Throughout their transformation from sugar-rushing fake teenage vampire glitterballs to social-dancing Eurodisc-hos to misanthropic (but still loonsihly flailing) heralds of the electronicapocalypse, they have consistently been far better than they have any right to be. Love them.
The headliners, Arab Strap, were...abandoned halfway through. Loud, pissed, Glaswegian, obsessed with sex, hacking a crude poetry from bluntness...just not that interesting. If the between-song banter is more entertaining than the songs, you are in the wrong profession. Hey ho. Two out of three ain't bad, as our lady Shania would say.
And back to more good news - Curve are releasing a new album, albeit over the Interwebnet. As soon as I have mastered the arcana of e-commerce, I am there like a 'Nam veteran.
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| Monday was spent largely in Pimlico's glamorous Pimlico, celebrating the birthday of a college friend I hadn't seen for a while. It's odd - when I see people I haven't seen since Pat died, they tend to behave as if the whole thing went down last week. Which is not to say everything's all better, but the early moments when they're expecting me to burst into tears are...well, odd. Comforting in a very specific and peculiar way, maybe - at least if I'm going to, I can track down somebody I haven't seen for a while.
Topics of conversation included her new girlfriend, whether or not I was gay (there seems to be one of these, or a conversation about my penis, every time I enter a crowded social situation. Most peculiar), the perfect sapphic combination to put somebody off a game of Star Wars: Starfighter - Alyson Hannigan tied to a chair, with Winona Ryder and Kate Winslett in attendance, for the curious - the fact that we have five years left to cry in, and the might and majesty of the Dark Crystal. On DVD. Be still my cock.
Top night out, and to be repeated soon, hopefully.
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| Thursday, May 10, 2001 |
| So, getting into work on Tuesday morning (and yes, ths weblog is unspooling backwards), I find that some local artists (of which Hoxton's trendy Hoxton has many) have made casts of cloaks wrapped around human figures, which now kneel empty in the park. Oddly beautiful - as if Christo had taken to wrapping ghosts.
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| So, did everybody else in London see the mighty electrical storm last night? Just this once, I was asleep at a sensible hour. Bah....
Still probably for the best. Tuesday's non-ironic A-Team marathon nearly killed me. Have you ever tried to watch 2 hours of the A-Team in a non-ironic fashion? Not even Mr. T can resist the chance to take the piss. As Hannibal relieves Amy of fingernail glue, compact mirror and a lock of hair, T mutters, "You comin' out of the closet, Hannibal?" Then very nearly pisses himself laughing. Pure quality. Almost as pure as The A-Team versus Simon Le Bon
Then, as it was surprisingly late, back to Katy's to sleep over. Katy who had lost her keys. Katy whose flatmates were either asleep or rutting. Katy who can make an astonishing amount of noise when she has to.
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| Meanwhile, Victor's decided to be Board to Death on the Upsideclown:
DOMAIN OF HELL
Joint Consultative Committee
The first meeting of the Committee for 2001 was held on Thursday 10th May 2001 in the Old Branding Room, Antichrist's Lodgings.
Present: Satan, Mr A. Hitler, Mr V. Dracul, Diana, Princess of Wales
It only takes a minute, girl....
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| Votemon, on the BBC's Newsround site, is superb, although the way it provides easy access to profiles of the leaders and political parties does lead to some synaesthetic confusion. For example, why is Charles Kennedy's "single, no children" inherently less amusing than wee Willy Hague's "married, no children"?
(via Matt)
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| Wednesday, May 09, 2001 |
| Death to mawkish sentimentalism! Stupid people should not be allowed to express pain! The Onion once again not afraid to lay down the hard line, in a way that might be offensive to people who don't read it and as such are unlikely to get upset.
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| Tuesday, May 08, 2001 |
| One for Matt - psychogeography resources online, from Graybo. Although, as my dear friend and Brooklyn wiseguy would say, "Psychogeography? Nah, it's for Debords, man."
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| Geek predation When geeks find somebody even more socially retarded than they, the sudden delight at encountering something yet further down the food chain can result in terrible cruelty. (Sort of via Davo)
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| Points to Luke for being the only person I have ever met to know of Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes. This is, it turns out, simply due to my shortage of Antipodean companionship, as it transpires that in the land Down Under he is right up there. Or similar.
You and me, baby...we're gonna be like the birds.....and the goats...
Hmm....aurora sexualis uber alles.
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| Yours arse is two things. Firstly: It's the evil twin of the interrobang (the "?!" symbol that marks rhetorical questions). Up your arse is a placeholder almost as atomic as punctuation that converts the meaning of the answer just as the interrobang makes a question rhetorical.
Could you fit a hundred marbles up your arse? Would you even try? And wouldn't they be cold? Matt has all the answers to up-your-arse related dilemmas in today's raw, bleeding UpsideClown.
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| Friday, May 04, 2001 |
| And, having plumbed the depths of taste with Lair of the White Worm, what better knight's move than sex with....well, you'll find out?
Mum started again. "Peter. Janet. You are my children. For eleven years I have told you that your absent father is a feckless unsupportive bastard, who lives in Peru. This much is true. What I didn't tell you, for fear of your reactions and in case you rejected me, was that your father was....."
Find out just what has put its cock in George's "fictitious" mother on the Upsideclown.
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| Meg is an angel. The lyrics to "The Lampton Worm" bring back happy memories of my and my then-best-bud watching Lair of the White Worm and getting hysterically overexcited about everything in it, then staring deep into each other's eyes and intoning, somewhere between a snarl and a scream, "It milked a doooozen coooooooos".
Damn, I miss being a student sometimes. And at other times I don't.
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| Fuck's sake. This is just embarrassing. I know that our transatlantic brethren are occasionally mentioned in the same breath as "complete absence of self-awareness", but this tiresome screed in the interests of demonstrating just how able to take a measured, mature view you are is a comical act of cock-waving in and of itself.
It's really quite simple. Why is the "web design community" bitchy, vicious, childish, riven with accusation, incrimination, recrimination, et al? Because its alumni, in the main, are web designers. Thus, in the main, the solipsistic arrogance of art school is mingled with the crippling emotional retardation of the class geek. With little to occupy their inner lives, they settle on sophomoric backbiting and relentless self-aggrandisement as the closest achievable thing to an actually mature expression of emotion or contact between two human beings. Basically.
Or perhaps you disagree. Why not tell me. Or, even better, link to me. You elitist bastards.
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| Scientists and the self. Matt believes that acting on instinct is more truly him than analysis. Which is, I guess, fair enough, if you like it like that, but I'm not sure it takes entirely into account how being human works. Nevertheless, I get what he means, and to an extent applaud it. No more second-guessing, manipulating, organizing, seeing what happens if you're just 5 minutes late...some call it maturity. I incline rather towards not being able to be bothered anymore.
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| How often do you get a text mesage saying "BJ or drink?" And how often, having received it, do you realise that actually your friends aren't necessarily whacked-out fucksluts, but are simply curious as to whether you are able to stand Bridget Jones' Diary, or whether you should instead be placed in a bar and propped in a corner. Long night last night, thanks to a deadline and an inexplicable decision to sit down and watch television - Teachers, Adam and Joe and the first half of So Graham Norton before my synapses began to melt and I hit the books again. Worth it for Shannon Doherty telling il Nortino that she could toss him across the room with the power of her mind. Hostage, meet Fortune...
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| Well, I hope everybody is surviving the end of Capitalism. A lot of people said it couldn't be done, but a heroic gang of hippies proved them wrong.
Celebrating the establishment of a new system based in the contribution by all of what they could, and the support of what could be given, I went out for a curry with some friends, which we then "paid" for by teaching the waiting staff and cooks some simple Batiq techniques. Rob had popped in to the riots to scope them out in his lunch break, which is when you think about it a very subversive approach to subversion. Camel had been baton charged, but in a slightly non-commital fashion (apparently, the non-commital baton charge is a vital part of any self-respecting police action from the days of Empire onwards). Joe was cordoned off and subjected to brutal scenes of tedium and potentially ultra vires policing. I felt decidedly unrevolutionary, but..well, you know. Me and the Man were pretty tight at finishing school....
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| Tuesday, May 01, 2001 |
| Dutch blog disease continues. Now Mo Morgan is on sabbatical. And, just this once, there doesn't even seem to be a cryptic message in the source code.
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| From Tom:
"The picture-story fantasy cuts loose the hampering debris of art and artifice and touches the tender spots of universal human desires and aspirations. . . . Comics speak, without qualm of sophistication, to the innermost ears of the wishful self." -- William Moulton Marston
Or to put it another way, comic books appeal to those people who are cursed to have imagination and desires far far beyond the ability of the world to fulfill, and who are not prepared to give up this magic in exchange for a suit and a desk job.
Or, to put it another other way, comic books appeal to people who are cursed to have imagination and desires far beyond their ability to fulfil within the world.
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| From the Guardian's report:
Several hundred people blocked off Euston Road, outside the station, waving their bicycles, skateboards and scooters above their heads under a massive banner reading "overthrow capitalism and replace it with something nice".
Bless. I honestly don't know how I feel about these protests. I agree with an awful lot of the ideologies represented by the protesters. I am horrified by the inexorable drift towards the corporatization of government exemplified by the Bush presidency. But....the protestors dress so badly.
Oh, I hate being that shallow, too.
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Venusberg.org finds Blogger very attractive...
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elsewhere:
Interconnected
Plasticbag
Oh Skylab
Barcablog
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moreover:
Brainsluice
Mo Morgan
Mothninja
Tajmahal
Wherever y'are
Prandial Post
thereafter:
Toby Kay
McCargow
Blogadoon
LinkMachineGo
Methylsalicylate
Hammersley
Joeblog
Grayblog
the Collective
Nick Jordan
Kooky Mojo
Betty Woo
Moth
Mr. Thomas G
the author:
danATvenusberg.org
and finally...
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