Sometimes people are so astonishingly stupid it just takes you breath away. Todays daily record has on its front cover a story which claims that the EU is destroying the scottish fishing industry (and the traditional fish supper) by banning white fish fishing in the North Sea. It is breathless in its condemnation of this as though the evil EU is simply trying to destory peoples lives. However if you look into the story in any depth it becomes apparent that the reason that the ban is going to be put in place is because years of over fishing and fiddling quotas has driven white fish in the North Sea to the brink of extinction. The only chance to prevent their extinction is to stop fishing altogether. What I fail to understand is how you can argue about this. What the fishermen seem to want is to fish until there are no more fish. How is this better - its not going to take long at current rates. They still won't have jobs and there will be no fish.
I've been listening to Bauhaus - In Flat Field and Mask today - excellent retro stuff. Goth done with a great sense of fun rather than this po faced velvet and roses stuff some later bands have turned it into.
I must urge you to check out themanwhofellasleep a fantastic collection of well - I guess web art would be the closest word but that makes it sounds pretentious which it most certainly is not. Give it a try. Brilliant!
There are some changes coming to this site soon as well - a new poetry section and a brand new poetry collection. I am just finishing off one or two poems for it (and still writing the odd thing which sneaks in despite my best intentions) and I have got to do the artwork for it. There is also a new software section coming. I have a few bits and pieces that should have their own page and documentation. Keep an eye out!
Mostly just an update to go with my poem. This poem has been floating about in my head for a week as a couple of images - the prayer flags under the bright blue sky and the stone on the ice. Last night the story came to me and then the poem:
Like a Stone on the Ice (HTML)
Watching the Versace documentary earlier this week and also listening to Ulrika Johnsson on Radio 4 it occurred to me - why on earth are we so fascinated by celebrity. We take the most insecure vacuous people our society has to offer and elevate them to this "star" status. The question is though - are we worshiping them or is it like watching monkeys in the zoo?
I've been rereading the Phillip Pullman His Dark Materials Trilogy. This really is an excellent set of books. Much better than Harry Potter which although they are damm good stories are very traditional. The Dark Materials books are very inventive and have a much darker edge to them. Well recomended. Also I have been reading the book Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About that goes with the website (and it turns out very famous newspaper column :-) but I don't do newspapers anymore). Not a good book for reading late at night in a quiet house - last night I had to keep hiding under the bed covers to have a good laugh out loud. Very funny though.
I've gotten into the really bad habit of only posting journal entries if I've also got something else to post - music, poem, picture or whatever. So in an attempt to break that habit here is an unaccompanied entry.
For one reason or another I've been thinking this week about politics. It started from a passing comment to my Mum that I had become more right wing than when I was younger. Then the other morning Tony Benn (who I admire greatly - although I don't always agree with him) was on the radio. On top of this I discovered this The Political Compass. You can see my results Here (check the analysis page on the political compass site for comparison). I guess that this means that either I am wrong about drifting to the right in my personal politics OR I was very left wing indeed when I was younger. I guess the real things I have learned as I have gotten older is that Ideology of any kind is a bad thing - it leads to inflexibility of thought and deed and blinkers people into taking paths that they don't necessarily agree with. The other thing is that I think that the free market is and essential part of the way we build our society and in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. The way in which we structure our society should be a mirror of not only our personal desires and wants but also of the values that we hold to be important - that is to help the needy, ill, unemployed, those that do not contribute financially to our society. Very simply put we are rich enough as a society to have both nice houses and help out other people.
This morning I woke up to hear a small plane flying over very early (5 O'clock) and most unlike me I actually worried for a moment that it was terrorists - Grangemouth is very close and a small plane packed with explosives could do a lot of damage to a very large area. Last time I remember waking in the night to worries like those was as a small boy when I dreamed that I woke up and there was a nuclear wasteland outside my bedroom window (complete with comic book mushroom clouds - too much 2000AD :-)) a dream I still vividly remember to this day. The thing that did worry me though was that terrorism on this scale is very hard to fight - catching the perpetrators doesn't do you any good - it's a bit like arresting the postman who delivers a letter bomb. In fact if I where a terrorist organisation I would get the people who delivered the bomb (or whatever) to give themselves up to the authorities straight away just to make the point of how helpless they are. Also if the terrorists really started going for it the western world would be in a lot of trouble indeed. All a bit worrying really - given as well that they have fundamentally opposing goals to ours. I mean would you like to live under the Taliban - that is the kind of society that Al Queda would like to see.
This weeks music selections are: Tori Amos - Strange Little Girls. I find this album really disturbing - especially the version of the Eminem song "'97 Bonnie and Clyde". Excellent though - well worth a listen. Been listening to loads of John Zorn as well this week. Very, very talented man.
This website is well worth a read - it essentially a list of things the author of the website and his girlfriend argue about but its very well written (very hitch hikers) and there is a real sense of two people who love each other in their own odd reality. It had me laughing out loud.
Life does tend to be a balancing act – you get one thing right and another thing that you thought was perfectly fine suddenly goes wrong. These are the times in my life I find the hardest and I have been doing a lot of brooding. I guess I am looking to re-establish my focus. To this end I have been looking at a lot of things in my life. My music has slipped badly and I haven’t been making much progress in it – to this end I am learning CSound properly and trying to write some proper composed stuff as opposed to the random collections of sound and texture I normally produce. I have also been looking at my writing and trying to do much the same thing.
I am very good (in both writing and music) at establishing a mood and painting pictures what I need to work on is the narrative – we will see where it all ends up. No doubt I will be posting things here when they are complete.
I have been trying to catch up on some reading – Dead Air by Iain Banks is excellent – classic Banks and very counterparty. It starts with September 11th last year and is very modern in its themes and references. I’ve also been reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman which has a lot of resonances with the worlds I try to conjure up in my poetry. I heard This on the radio – you probably have to hear it read out loud, but its hilariously bad.
Music wise I have been listening to lots of good things - The Return of the Fenn O’Berg is a wonderful album – witty, inventive and a damn good listen. Christian Fennez and Jim O’Rourke are two of the most inventive members of the laptop brigade around at the moment I think. Original Pirate Material by The Streets is also wicked and well worth picking up – very funny. Its good to hear this kind of music being done in a very British way. Solaris by Mirror is also an excellent release – much in the vein of the Sylvian/Czukay collaborations. Very hard to get hold of though – I only have an mp3 copy at the moment.
A bad day for the surrealists ( HTML )
A short poem inspired by a comment in an email from a friend about having to go out and buy a wetsuit and some Kitchen cupboards.
