sweet effay

...where the dog has just had an operation to remove a seed from his front paw. Normally I wouldn't bore you with this, but he's wandering around with his right front leg wrapped in a green bandage just like me. It could be synchronicity, but I suspect that the veterinary nurse took one look at me and suggested they bandage him up in green for a laugh.

Well, I'm not about to let my bestest beer buddy outdo me on tales of medical woe now am I?

I didn't get to stay, just visited the clinic: X-ray; cast off arm; examination; new cast on arm (I went for green this time); bugger off for two weeks. So here I sit once more with a cast up to my right armpit and unable to even tie my own shoes.

The consultant said he was 'cautiously optimistic' because the plate in my arm was holding and he could see new bits of bone. Then he remembered that he'd put the new bits of bone there after chiselling them off my hip...

If I ever need to cheer myself up, I remind myself that I'm the healthiest adult in The Little House on the Flatlands. That does it every time.

Still, at least I've not got a bloody ear (get well soon IT, make him serve you hand and foot, and do what the doctors tell you), so I'll be able to listen to this in stereo when Amazon drop it through my door tomorrow or the day after. Look on the bright side: If I had two working hands, I might knock up a disc by disc review of the thing.

Not much comment needed on this really, but I think it should be disseminated as widely as possible. Prince Charles on uppity servants:

What is wrong with people now? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their technical capabilities?

This is to do with the learning culture in schools as a consequence of a child-centred system which admits no failure. People seem to think they can all be pop stars, high court judges, brilliant TV personalities or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having natural ability.

This is the result of social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically and socially engineered to contradict the lessons of history

Next time someone in the pub starts defending the monarchy to you, just bring this up and ask them if they really want to live in a world where their children are denigrated for their ambitions by somebody who has been the centre of attention throughout his life simply by virtue of the pair of thighs which he landed between when he entered the world. What more does Chas have to do to be a failure anyway?

I know this will probably blow my street cred apart, but I've started to read Jung. What's more, I'm enjoying it immensely. Obviously I should really keep my mouth shut about this, but then I wouldn't be able to share the following with all my rationalist buddies:

The fact the gods die from time to time is due to man’s sudden discovery that they do not mean anything, that they are made by human hands, useless idols of wood and stone. In reality, however, he has merely discovered that up till then he has never thought about his [archetypal] images at all. And when he starts thinking about them, he does so with the help of what he calls “reason” – which in point of fact is nothing more than the sum-total of all his prejudices and myopic views ('Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious').

That sure told them!

Not certain how seriously I take all this stuff yet. I'll let you know in few months time when I've hacked my way through a respectable amount.

http://www.thresholdhouse.com/index2.html

(photo by diego tran)

Gobsmacked by this one. I guess we all knew that something like this would happen eventually, but it still comes as a shock.

Coil have been a major part of the soundtrack to my life ever since 1986 when I first read a review of 'The Anal Staircase' in The Lamp of Thoth, the house magazine of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. The review made Coil sound like they produced the sort of music that Psychic TV promised but never managed to deliver (bizarrely, it was several years before I discovered that Balance had been in Psychic TV or, indeed, that Sleazy and Peter Christopherson were one and the same person); the sort of stuff I could imagine in my head; music of a genuinely and intensely magical quality. Coil delivered exactly what they promised: I managed to obtain Scatology, and was instantly hooked. Their music formed the backdrop to my final year in London during which time I undertook some very extreme experiments in sense derangement via the usual suspects and an intense engagement with Austin Osman Spare. In the end, I moved to the West Country for the sake of my health and personal life, but I can’t say I regret any of it.

I continued to be obsessed with Coil until the early Nineties when they moved into what I thought at the time was really bad dance music (I don’t care what Loki and just about everybody else says, Love’s Secret Domain is definitely their weakest album). At that point, I lost interest and just kept playing the albums I already owned.

I became interested again when I heard about the Equinox and Solstice EPs, but never actually heard them at the time as Coil material seemed to be impossible to get hold of. Later, on a trip to London, I bought Musick to Play in the Dark Volume 1 and was absolutely blown away. I swiftly made strenuous efforts to buy everything I didn’t own (at last, the Internet proves its usefulness!) and was amazed by the quality of some of the stuff I’d missed. I’d list my favourite albums, but it would encompass nearly all of them. LSD might be a bad Coil album, but that still means it’s better than a lot of other stuff.

Looming large over all this is the figure of Balance; even more so since they started playing live. Watching Balance on stage, the closest comparison one could think of were descriptions of Artaud’s performances. Balance never put on an act he allowed himself to become possessed, carrying the audience with him into his delirium. Happily for us though, we could divorce ourselves from it after the event, whereas Balance frequently existed at this level of intensity. I only saw Coil twice and both performances were very different, but they are the only act of whom I can say that their performances were as good as I hoped they would be. It goes without saying that my expectations were very high.

It would be wrong to describe Balance as my hero. Who would want to put themselves through the sort of things he did to himself? I gave it a go in London, but had to beat a hasty retreat. Still, I’m glad that he did. Music shouldn’t just be a pleasant diversion; it can be dark and magical; Coil are the most dark and magical of all.

Bye Jhonn
'Pay your respects to the vultures, for they are our future'

Unhalfbricking has resurfaced in a new guise, and he's writing about reading Michael Moorcock whilst listening to Hawkwind - Hoorah!

So Boris Johnson is out of favour. Not that I care one way or the other really, although I think it was a smart move on his part to force Howard to sack him rather than resign quietly.

What caught my eye was this twisted bit of reasoning:

The party leader's spokesman said the decision was made because he lied about the claims, not because of the allegations themselves.

The spokesman said: "It was nothing to do with personal morality but rather with his personal integrity and honesty."

Now I know that not everybody in the Conservative Party has studied moral philosophy, but I don't think you really need to have done so in order to grasp the fact that integrity and honesty are moral characteristics. Even if you want to draw a distinction between what people do and what they say they do, if Boris has been fibbing to Michael, the odds are that he hasn't been entirely straight with Mrs Johnson either. Do they really want to draw a moral distinction between lying to your leader and lying to your wife? I doubt that will endear them to the sort of people they are so desperate to attract.

Morality is always a sticky wicket for politicians; it is best avoided if you want to avoid looking either shifty or a prat. Consequently what they should have said was:

"Look, Boris is a constituency MP, editor of The Spectator, shadow arts minister, party vice-chairman, and spends more time on TV than Michael. Now we find out that he's also engaged in extra-marital exercises. We just felt we should relieve him of some of the burden, or he'll have a coronary before he reaches forty-five."

I've just discovered that the original live Talking Heads album, The Name of This Band is Talking Heads was finally released on CD in August. Why has nobody seen fit to mention this to me previously? I've owned the vinyl since it first came out, so do I really need it on CD as well? What's this? TWELVE NEW TRACKS, including an earlier version of 'Drugs' and a later version of 'Psycho Killer! Well, that's answered that one then.

Picture the scene: It’s 1979 at a typical teenage party in West Wickham. There are only two things to do at such events, either try and get off with members of the opposite sex, or get horribly wasted. As usual, I’ve taken the latter option; obviously not because I have a deepseated fear of, and inability to talk to, girls, but because I prefer to be absolutely certain that I will have an enjoyable evening. All the blokes I came with (not that I only came with blokes because I didn’t actually know any girls, you understand) have disappeared in the (I hope and pray) futile pursuit of the opposite sex and I’m left in a near-empty living room so pissed that the only thing that’s holding me up is the speed I took earlier in the evening, trying to find something decent to put on the stereo.

This wouldn’t be too difficult if it were not for the presence of a likeminded stranger who is equally as wasted as I am, but whereas I’m a sort of ‘prog rock meets punk rock, just don’t call me a hippie; yes I did see Hillage last week, wasn’t he amazing?’ kind of a guy, he’s a mod. Consequently, we are having trouble finding anything we can both agree on: I really want to listen to The Doors or The Clash, but he’s holding out for The Jam or the EP by the local band whose name escapes me, but whose icon he has painted on the back of his parka (tricky one this, from my point of view: They were really shit, but I couldn’t say anything too rude because half of them were in the house somewhere and I used to get my speed off the lead singer). We are getting more and more belligerent until we come across a copy of Dirk Wears White Sox by Adam and the Ants and both instantly agree that this is really what we need to hear. All arguments forgotten, we shove the rest of my speed up our noses, share the booze he’d thoughtfully stashed earlier, and discuss how outstanding this album is. “I’d love to go and see them,” he says “but the audience would tear me apart.” I nod sadly in agreement.

It’s incredible to think, given his later career trajectory, that Adam Ant once fronted a band with a reputation for being so extreme that one would think twice about going to their gigs. I’d seen loads of dodgy punk bands and been to several gigs full of skinheads throwing Nazi salutes at the stage, but Adam and the Ants were a step too far. Antfans were really scary: Go in there without the requisite leather and bumflap and you were taking your life in your hands. Of course this may not have been strictly true but, despite near universal agreement that ‘Never Trust a Man (with Egg on His Face)’ was one of the best tracks to have come out all year, I never met anybody who ever got up the bottle to test it out.

This all changed after McClaren nicked most of the Ants for Bow Wow Wow and Marco Pirroni arrived on the scene (someone once told me that the original Antfans started following Bauhaus, but I don’t know if it’s true). Kings of the Wild Frontier was okay, but the edge had gone, and the stuff after that is just plain awful. The best contrast is to watch Adam spastically twitching his way through the brilliant ‘Plastic Surgery’ in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, and then watch the video for ‘Prince Charming’. Oh dear, oh dear.

The thing that’s brought all this nostalgia on is that I’ve just picked up the remastered Dirk... and it still sounds as good as ever. It makes me regret not finding out what would have happened had I suggested to my new mod mate that we go along to the next gig. At least if it had turned nasty they’d probably have jumped him first and I could have legged it in the confusion.

...for the lull in the action over here. Not that I feel I have to atone for my lack of production: Despite the best efforts of various teachers, the Protestant Work Ethic completely passed me by (just ask anybody who's met me). However, there are several things I wanted to write, but tapping away with my left hand is so slow that I find myself unable to produce more than a few coherent sentences at a time without getting bored and running off to do something else. Two more weeks and the cast should come off, so hopefully things will improve.

I'm particularly sad that my projected post on the US elections and why Republican strategists are black magicians will not now see the light of day, but this fine piece over at Bristling Badger makes a similar point and is well worth checking out.

Still, good to see that the election will result in one new smart and lovable inhabitant in the White House. I am, of course, referring to Miss Beazley who will join the Bushes shortly before Christmas. I wonder if she will have her own website like Barney Bush? Let's hope so. I particularly enjoy Barney's answers to written questions on his site; I always think that if a joke is funny the first time, it's worth repeating ad nauseam.

Looking at Barney's photographs, I'm glad to see that they are finally letting his train grow, although it is still too short. The more observant amongst you will have noticed that Barney has his coat clipped rather than being handstripped as he should be. You would have thought the President of the United States would have been able to engage the services of a professional who could do the job properly. Then again, look at the people he has in his cabinet...