but I couldn’t think of any. so I didn’t. I have one less emo under my foot. anyway, it’s going to snow tonight, and I can’t be arsed to walk down to the waterfront. it’ll be cold. and full of fringes and converse and aiden tshirts. you’re not old enough, surely. is this an early show? hahaha. that’s a funny thing. nice umbrella.
down to bloc party on sunday anyway. I just booked an air traffic ticket for the arts centre. it’s january. shave.
time for a break. ooh. better than I thought. I actually did collaborative teaming without punching anyone and began to understand something. we’re doing it all wrong. we need to do it different. and it starts with whatever we find out tomorrow about how we change everything to make it happen but I know for sure there’s one significant piece missing from where I’m sitting. I’ve got no idea who you are, what you want, how you want it and what I need to do to get it to you. ok, that’s four significant pieces. and there’s probably four more somewhere I’ve just forgotten about because I’ve drunk another bottle of Chantelle and Laurence’s rioja and watched Serenity and I’ve lost the will to remember stuff. I can totally see how altering our evaluation of customer requirements and aligning ourselves behind addressing those needs might move things along that ladder and into our unique zone of loyalty, but I’m not quite sure exactly what I’ll do about it when I get back to my desk on wednesday and have to design a widget for an email campaign that can’t reference external stylesheets or use javascript but I’ll probably think of something. perhaps I’ll just redirect the inbound chats to me and ask somebody directly: what’s your best imaginable supplier going to do to address your needs? go on. tell. me. I. need. to. know. I’ve thought of a couple of things myself, but really, I just made them up. blimey, that’s a big spreadsheet. Andy?
copywriters ban headlines in self-depreciation overload. social obscurity for the tagless. man discovers self, world proclaims genius, nothing happens. ban this link hell insists twitcher. dolt blasts banality, refuses license. basket welder delivers pig to a horse. I recognize you. purple Ford Fiesta.
savaged by the otter of me too you stand at the lip of backslap, peering into the slackness, and you’re plucked breathless back to the upstairs bathroom, watching drivel collapse under it’s own weight and slither down the drain of man-mental. close. and now you’re logged on, finish that presentation on end-to-end flows. idiot.
trolling under the cavities of entropy was our saturday afternoon pastime. 3 hours cradling nescafe in fingerless gloves and lumberjack shirts you are to me the antithesis of life and death and the magic of my own experiences that you can not possibly fathom. surrounded by each other we were passing though arrogance by not saying anything to anybody and our light was not so much hidden but willfully pointing inward if you can’t work me out you need to take a look at my shoes they came from london you know you see right anyway whatever. after that we’d go up to jarrolds and get our 2 for the price of one, enigmatic to fault under the rouched ceilings flicking scones across the table when ladies our mum’s age weren’t looking. we never got thrown out. still polite.
don’t look at me. I’m not what you think I am. in 25 years I’ll be installing photo printer drivers but I don’t know that yet. all I have is everything you’ll never have. I’m walking home alone through graffiti tunnel but is that now or then. the same floorboard creaks in the same place, but now it’s me not waking them up which it was but the other way around except I’d crashed the mini and thought I should probably tell them if they do the same I’ll probably do the same. I won’t be awake, but I’ll be alive which they won’t be. denied.
I misspelled an email alias today. is that how you spell misspelled? that looks wrong. I’ve got buckle boots. I’m playing bomb jack. never made it.
through the smoke of distributed publishing frameworks emerges an inline style. it wasn’t me guv. honest. well, ok, it was. you try sticking it in an edm and see how it flies. don’t get me started on portals. there’s one sheet. it’s over there. if you just made a copy of it and put it over there, then, well, I can’t help you, and by the way, I did mention this is an edm, so even if you put it over there is matters not a weasel’s chuff. and while we’re on the subject, I know that you are intimately connected to everything and are the lord god almighty of stuff but in this case it’s mine. hands off.
in my mind I project the issues off the axis and drop them, mindbomb-like, onto spurious experiences, and I’m imagining we protract ourselves by a single abstract definition only to find that I won’t work in Germany. or in an email. so at the moment where I realise there is no Island, I’m already climbing out to the desert to seek my clone, only to find that he’s altered the background class attributes and I’m now fabulous, instead of offset by 4. which is nice. except I have to kill him, etc.
get em out by Friday. I told the board we’d be able to transport humans through this before the end of January and I’ve just updated the mockup. things to note: I changed everything. imagine that. hang on. I’ve been sympathetically and tastefully modernised. my traditional interior has been transformed into a green monkey sanctuary which is approached by a spangle {color:orange}
there is life in that body, you’re just not using it. you can walk the length of this street and not trip over a sponge but behind you there is a contrail of wheelbarrows collecting pointlessness and dumping it in the allotment of middle age. really, I would, but you don’t know that. as for that one who precedes herself, there is surely a slabbering hoard of shed dwellers trotting shuffle-clad to peggy lee and assessing her age by how many times they think about it today, hopelessly treading the life mud of clack magnets through the polished hallways of sky sports, their tip tap tip tap on the brylcreemed keyboard of beelzebub sending clag missles to their watery island caravans.
today I shall forego a punishment in order to visit the post office. while I am there I will shuffle behind a see-through woman buying one second-class stamp and smile witheringly at somebody who treads on my foot reaching for the manilla envelopes. I’ll push my package through a grinder and they’ll tell they’re not packages but enormous letters which cost four times as much and I’ll nod and wither and shuffle back to the car while an asbo from mildenhall stumbles out of somerfield with a banana and twenty lights straight into the betting shop. not really. but anyway, it will be thirty minutes of my life that I might as well just have given to charity or something, which, if you work it out by the hour, is about ten quid, or what I’ll spend in the post office.
I bet you’re thinking the grand prix stuff was funny but this is just stupid.
look at that. blimey. you don’t expect me to really remember because its too late now and you would be lucky anyway. I just about pulled my finger from the wall socket when the birds started wailing at the window and I had to sweep them off with a broom. it was still dark but then it is now all the time and just look at that its a good job I’m not recycling. today everything is labelled happy twee and so I’m waking up slowly thankyou I probably shouldn’t have looked at that but as its at the end of list its sticking out like some broken appendage and I’m expecting some uncomfortable treatment because I did it before and they do it all the time so why couldn’t I etc. but you see its more complicated I know you do it all night but where is everybody else in the house? you see here we’re still extracting trumpets from wall cavities and posting factors on the wall of doubt until the whole thing collapses under its own weight and we prostrate ourselves at the altar of Trevor Eve.
I dig them up from the end of the 70s and wrap them in the daily mail before transforming into a 6-legged pantomime dromedary whereupon a malapropped oaf bangs his clavicle with a crucifix and it’s 3-2. after that you try and prise open the door with a boot scraper and an elfin twig basher rolls the boden catalogue into the road and we all drop to the floor like bruised monkeys at clacton where the high tide spills over the car park like black milk. is this something that has already been discussed? I had to mention it to eugene because he is the lord god of the known world and everything must be mangled through his immense brain portal immediately like so I’m just checking. you know. they do their own thing. we do ours. except we don’t go on and on and on and on and on and on and on about how wrong yours is and how right mine is and anyway I’ve looked at your own website and it’s rubbish right? we couldn’t do the other one because our internal organs were playing musical cavities and we’d lost the knob.
it was only 1976 when danno was hoiking his FS1E round the playing fields churning up sods and giving two fingers to the head he was an easter leaver you see so incumbent on hair-drying the flatlands he bespoke a jackson pollock on the geography block wall and punched a goalkeeper just before a jumper for goalpost got mangled in his spokes and the smell of burning acrylic wafted over earlham like a pall of doom. but twas the least of things when not the night before the barn fire of the vanities was out of control on the outskirts of sprowston and two-wheeled heliotropes barged through the melee wielding axle grinders and pumps for the sake of our skin whereupon we rolled uncontrollably under the tracks of a tank on super 8 while 17 bags of rubbish tried to get into tramps with jeans on
we were almost just sitting around and having a nice cup of tea in the dark as waily captain beefheart lookalike departed the stage to a single clap and relative to a norwich appreciation level that was a deafening roar considering there must have been at most 90 of us packed into the waterfront with maybe 10 square feet each to ourselves so when it all kicked off and we thronged, guardian reader-like, to the crush barriers at the front, I almost knocked someone’s deck chair over and woke them up.
we assembled as usual at the altar of Robyn Hitchcock looking our customary socially inadequate and middle-class dad selves and all did that little nod and hopelessly off time dance step which doesn’t involve much more than moving your head backwards and forwards and occasionally punching the air at waist height while ironically and whimsically smiling to yourself because you know all the words to the songs from Perspex Island. only this time is wasn’t just a guitar and morris slapping the bongos in falsetto, it was the latest roving incarnation of a rock royalty support band in the shape of the Venus 3, who, as Robyn points out, are 3/4 of R.E.M. and 3/5 of the Minus 5 or something as it is made up of Peter Buck, Bill Rieflin and Scott McCaughey who all feature on the Olé Tarantula album which made up about a quarter of the set which also included a selection box of previous solos and enough Soft Boys to keep the hardcore, which in this case means old, happy, and the usual rambling english intellectual twitness from one of the archetypal english eccentrics, who happens to have most of the others featured on the album or co-writing
as R.E.M. are having a year off, most of them are touring tiny clubs as the Venus 3 in front of about 100 people at a time and when do you get to stand 10 feet from Peter Buck as he changes electric 12-strings for fun and rips power chords and byrdsy twangdangles looking like he wishes he could do it like this all the time? well, actually, he looked like somebody had just told him his cat had been sucked into an irony vortex and the challenge for the evening was to see if he ever curled his lip. but he never does. even after the gig when he’s stood behind a formica table with a few robyn cds because they left the merchandise in brighton and is surrounded by about 15 of us telling him how great it was, he still looks like he’s been slapped by the invisible man. I mean, I know he’s having a ball really.
it’s not about R.E.M. though. long before things went all Green, R.E.M. and Robyn were already mutually respectual, as the Virtual Brighton magazine notes: Beginning as a strummer in Cambridge’s folk clubs, Hitchcock developed into a bandleader, heading up folk-pop iconoclasts the Soft Boys, one of alternative rock’s least sung but most influential bands. Yet by the time bands like R.E.M. and the Replacements quoted the Soft Boys as a major influence, Hitchcock had moved on to what would become his distinguished solo career. In other words, people were here to see Robyn Hitchcock. The support band were something of a novelty. a good one though. The BBC Oxford site sums up the whole things pretty nicely, but then again, Michael Stipe joined them on stage at the Zodiac and Thom Yorke was in the audience.
