BREAK: I'M GOING AWAY. I'LL BE BACK ON MONDAY 2ND NOVEMBER. THERE MIGHT BE PICTURES.
October 2009
104 posts
GIG:
25/10/09 Stereo, 20-28 Renfield Lane, Glasgow.
It started with cakes. It finished with chips and cheese. My life is all about food and sandwiched between meals. There I go again; ‘sandwiched’. And in between; trains, tickets, vodka, beer, banter, smokes, laughs, heat, sweat, farts, drums, guitars, clapping, cheering, friends, fresh air and more vodka. Before all of that Sandy and me got a wee bit lost. We found the venue eventually. Even though we’d been both been there before.
It was busy. People, everywhere. They have the gigs downstairs in Stereo, and it’s great. Good and dark and uncomfortable and they have a bar there. Two words though: Air Conditioning. Two more: Lack of. That’s all I’m saying. OK, last two: Body Odour. Sort it out.
I didn’t like the support band. Mothlite were boring and bland and likened to both “Blur on goth pills” and “a giant vagina”. They had a piano but it didn’t help.
Isis were magic. They sound much better live then they do on their albums. They played new songs and old songs, were suitbaly epic and they didn’t disappoint. Are they a good looking band? I don’t know. I can never see anything at gigs. After spending most of my life thinking I was tall, it’s pretty obvious to me now that I’m not. Or other people are freaks. I’m starting to think it’s the latter.
“You step out of line, the press will be all over you. Like a pigeon on a chip.”
—
Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It.
Ten minutes into the third series and he’s already playing a blinder.
Love Letters Of Great Men:
Remember that book, in the Sex and the City Film, Love Letters of Great Men? Well it doesn’t exist. Which is pretty rubbish. I think it would be a good read. The thing about love letters written by great men is that they’re not cheesy. Not like the prescribed romance that we get forced down our throats today. They’re great: just like the men themselves. So the book doesn’t exist, but the letters do, and Google will help you track them down. I found some here.
February 27, 1913.
To ‘Stella’ Beatrice Campbell
I want my rapscallionly fellow vagabond.
I want my dark lady. I want my angel -
I want my tempter.
I want my Freia with her apples.
I want the lighter of my seven lamps of beauty, honour,
laughter, music, love, life and immortality … I want
my inspiration, my folly, my happiness,
my divinity, my madness, my selfishness,
my final sanity and sanctification,
my transfiguration, my purification,
my light across the sea,
my palm across the desert,
my garden of lovely flowers,
my million nameless joys,
my day’s wage,
my night’s dream,
my darling and
my star…
George Bernard Shaw
J.G. Ballard on Pornography and Sexuality
“Normally, traditional sexual activity involves a sort of warm bath where physical activity and a world of mental affections blur into each other, and give rise of course to a huge number of problems. (…) He sees pornography, which is emotionally neutral — pornography is sex with the emotions deleted — pornography is a useful technique for exploring what exactly is going on when two people copulate, when a penis enters a vagina, when a hand embraces a breast, when fingers explore clefts (which are obviously geometric structures which powerfully cue innate responses laid down in the central nervous system a hundred thousand years ago). Pornography is a way of dismantling all the excrescences that have grown around this sexual activity at its most basic, and finding the actual sort of operating elements.” -J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Weiss in 2006, commentary track on The Atrocity Exhibition (via Ballardian)
