He Did Twelve Encores, Six Of Which Were “Suzanne”

I’ve long been quite a fan of Leonard Cohen. A lot of people complain that his music is depressing and makes them want to commit suicide, but I actually find a lot of the music funny, albeit in a very eyebrow-waggling, droll kind of way.

For example, if I was at your parents’ house, and they’d gone away for the weekend and we were rifling through the vinyl in between swigging cans of medium-sweet cider and smoking joints with far too much tobacco in and I saw a bit of Leo; perhaps Songs of Love and Hate, I might consider putting it on the turntable.

I might have also considered Nashville Skyline, The White Album, Arrival or many others. If your parents were particularly cool, I might well have attempted a spinning of Back in DHSS.  (Fuckin’ hell, it’s Fred Titmus!)

But I digress: a few year ago I was idley listening to radio 4 and managed to accidentally listening to the enterity of Arthur Smith Sings Leonard Cohen, in which the South London comedian combines his normal absurdist humour with occasionally breaking into song. Leonard Cohen’s songs specifically.

At one point (and I’m paraphrasing a bit here because I can’t remember exactly what he said) he describes his favourite joke when he was eight years old. It’s this one.

I don’t swear, I don’t smoke and I don’t drink.

(pause)

Oh sod it, I’ve left my fags in the pub.

He then adds that just the other days he left his fags in the pub, said “Oh sod it, I’ve left my fags in the pub” and then realised he’d turned into his favourite joke from when he was eight.

Now I remember this joke clearly from my younger days, but I wouldn’t have said it was my favourite joke. The funniest thing that ever happened to me when I was eight was a story I was told by a classmate.

He described in detail how he was having a wee, which already caused me to smirk a bit.

He then described how, somehow he managed to knock a toilet roll into the toilet, currently full of his piss. This caused me to laugh out loud for the first time.

He obviously found it funny at the time because he’d started laughing and his dad had come up to see what all the commotion was about. I was having difficulty breathing by this point.

His dad walked into the toilet and through a series of events I can’t quite recall the details of, managed to drop the apple he was eating into the toilet.

By this point I was in hysterics. You know when you manage after quite a lot of effort to control yourself and then someone reminds you of what you were laughing at and you lose it again?

That’s what was happening to me at this point. I couldn’t stop.

I didn’t die laughing, like certain people, and I eventually recovered.

And yet not so long ago, when a sudden gust of wind blew the toilet roll into the toilet, I started giggling madly, recalling the original incident.

Put it this way, I’m never going to eat a apple in the toilet.

Notes From A Training Workshop, part 2

Clearly, I do not have the knack of drawing bridges:

And this is the actual thing:

(photo of Chelsea Bridge from here)

Notes From A Training Workshop

At some point soon today, I’m sure that doodling will commence. What you doodle supposedly says a lot about your personality and outlook on life.

Pictures of an axe entering someone’s head with brain and blood flying everywhere is probably not a good sign, although I’d argue that a picture of that happening is much better than actually enacting such a scene in real life.

Flowers on the other hand are probably better, especially as there is ample opportunity for adding to them. A head spurting blood on the other hand, well there’s only so much elaboration you can do.

I like to doodle geometric shapes or rows of dots coloured in with the pen. Certain pens are better for doing this and if you’re not careful you end up with a smudge of ink all the way up your hand, most annoying.

What I should have done is bought some of my own paper. Colouring in the letters on the hand-outs and squeezing your artistic creations into the margins just doesn’t cut the mustard.

The buses are going past at fairly regular intervals, sometimes they shake the tree directly outside. I’m watching the tree closly, trying to ascertain what the wind is like out there. The weather is very “close” at the moment, with the worse of both worlds being warm and uncomfortable, with a tendency to starting raining very hard, often in the middle of the night when I have the window open and scare me, making me sit bold upright in bed, realising it’s the middle of the night and it’s still a few hours before I’m due to get up and head for work.

Lorries shake things considerably more, namely the light fitting, a little bit. But it doesn’t more dramatic to say “shake considerably more” as I’m sure I’ll agree.

The temperature in the room is less than what I’m used to, but in a good way. Sitting in a certain place gets a nice breeze of air conditioned air on the back of my neck. Most pleasant.

I can see people walking past fairly often, although the frosting effect on the window means only people of a certain height and then only certain bits of them: oooh shoes and some hair, oh a shoulder, an arm raised aloft; that kind of thing.

I can’t help thinking, I wonder what would happen if some crazed killer smashed the window and brutally murdered everyone present, before turning the gun on himself, as you do.

But that didn’t happen, obviously. Or I wouldn’t be writing this now.

In 1984 I Was Hospitalised For Approaching Perfection

That’s not strictly true, it was actually for drinking an entire bottle of cough medicine. And it might have been 1983, anyway. Still, it’s unusual the the first line of a song, especially one quite so droll and sardonic, speaks to me directly, especially when I’m not in a fraught emotional state from drinking too much gin.

The song in question Random Rules by the Silver Jews.

For those of you who like something a bit odder, I discovered the films of Terayama Shuji on Ubuweb earlier on.

God knows what’s going on but it was interesting to watch.

Fantastic stuff.

Text Messaging Is Destroying The Pub Quiz As We Know It

The BBC reports that a lingustics expert has spoken up in favour of texting.

Professor David Crystal argues that such condensed messages enhance and enrich language skills.

He called it an “urban myth” that school work was riddled with text speech, and said in fact students knew when to use it in the right context.

Regrettably, his book is called Txtng: the Gr8 Db8, but I won’t hold that against him. And then, I read the following, also on a text messaging theme from Rosie’s blog.

You start every text message with “ha ha” and finish most with a smiley face.

Justifiable grounds for complaint, I can’t help thinking. And this got me in a bit of reminiscing about text messaging in total.

I bought a mobile phone for the sole reason that I hated speaking to people on communal phones, which is all you get when you’re a student. A mobile telephone enabled me to sit in my room and talk to people, without feeling all self-conscious.

So it wasn’t straight away that I attempted this new fangled SMS-ing. I never tried all the vowel-less malarky, but I didn’t quite get the hang of the punctuation straight away, using a stupid number of dashes in the process, thus resembling Emily Dickinson.

When it comes, the Landscape listens — Shadows — hold their breath — When it goes, ’tis like the Distance On the look of Death —

I did eventually get the hang of it and estimate I have used more semi-colons in text messages than anyone who isn’t insane. A cheery note from a friend on my course one Easter morning prompted this reply:

Put it this way, every page of Boyce and DiPrima’s Differential Equations is stained with my tears.

which remains my favourite text message to this day. Although of course, you had to me there. Or care about differential equations. Which I don’t imagine you do. I’m also pleased with managing to use the word “motherfucking” (as an expletive) in a pash-note.

Which reminds me, lower or upper case ‘x’s for kisses? And how many?

Sorry, boring things like this interest me.

People Who Say “If You’re Not Part Of The Solution, You’re Part Of The Problem” Are Themselves Part Of The Problem

Being as I am, a white European male in a G8 country with a sedentary job, life is reasonably easy for me. I can safely make the assumption that the vast majority of people I’ll meet are solidly tied into my cultural hegemony and it’s not like I own enough things for voodoo economics to be an attractive proposition to me. Which means, to all intents and purposes, this is me.

Of course I’m aware that there are others who don’t have it easy as me, and short of reincarnation or a new, slightly disturbing idea for a reality TV show, I’ll never feel their pain, excepting in the usual liberal guilt kind of way.

(While I’m thinking of minority groups, there is some controversy as to whether woman count as a “minority group” the male and female populations of the world being roughly equal in size. However they do get paid less, so they count.

In her famous essay “A Room of One’s Own” Virginia Woolf states you need “five hundred pounds a year” to write. Given this was written in 1929 and according to this very useful site, in today’s money that is £21,792.46 which means that I am within my means to be a writer.)

But I digress.

Instead of a disturbing reality TV show, let’s make this a meme.

If you weren’t who you were but were, for example a different face, a different gender, a different sexuality, a different religion, who would you like to be?

I hate to mention a jazzman for the second time in as many days, but if I were African-American I wouldn’t mind being Eric Dolphy.

The beard! The shades! What’s not too love?

How about you?

Cardigans I Have Known And Loved

As everyone knows cardigans (or cardigan sweaters as they are sometimes termed) were invented in 1992 in Jönköping, Sweden by this man, James Brudenell who was holidaying there.

James was also responsible for inventing the Balaclava, which later, due to a misunderstanding, inspired legendary psychedelic folkers, Pearls Before Swine.

He then appointed five local people to spread the word around the world, initially only in Japan, but thanks to a plucky young grocer from the West Midlands, suddenly cardigans were available everywhere.

James’ marketing techniques for cardigans in this country were limited to the progenitors of the so-called C86 movement, which also resulted in sales of lunchboxes quadrupling.

An early experimenter with cardigans was Anthony Braxton, although he was frowned upon by the jazz establishment for not wearing nice suits and trying to ape the tweed-jacket-and-leather-patches look of the European avant-garde.

Note that is a small saxophone. Anthony Braxton is not a giant. But it took the effort of one Kurt Cobain to popularise cardigans again.

Cobain chose his lime cardigan in a direct tribute to an obscure band of Scots known for their chapped lips: the Vaselines. Jesus didn’t want them for a sunbeam you know, Christ being more into loinclothes, which were more comfortable than cardigans, and more washable too.

I For One Welcome Our New Robot Conductor Overlords

The Guardian reports on the ongoing quest to invent a robot conductor.

Having done conducting once, when I was younger, I came to the conclusion that conductors are pointless during the performance, although they may be useful during rehearsals.

Still, when you go and see a performance, you want to see someone doing something interesting. Just sawing away at a violin doesn’t count. You need flailing limbs at the very least. That’s where the conductor comes in.

What I want to know is when they are going to have the first robot pop band; Kraftwerk don’t count.

This Weekend I Was Mostly Doing The Following Things

I visited my parents in the south west this weekend, and somehow I managed to do the following things:-

• Drank four different porters.
• Ate a curry cooked by my brother.
• Saw Alfie Allen’s willy.
• Helped my parents buy a camper van. By standing there drinking vending machine coffee and eating crisps.
• Sat next to one person who stared into space and one who read the Rough Guide to Spain on my train journey – both who did Bath-Paddington.
• Felt hot. A lot.
• Installed the Japanese language set on their computer.
• Gave my nieces free rein of my coloured pencils, one of which, I was thrilled to discover, endorsed Howletts.
• The cheese, oh God, the cheese!
• I didn’t even manage to sit there for the whole afternoon on Saturday reading the paper.

If I have to do anything this weekend, I’ll be very annoyed.

It’s All Greek To Me

When I was young, a mere мальчики, I became very fascinated with Russian and decided I wanted to learn it. The fact that I wasn’t a человек with an aptitude for languages didn’t matter: there was a book about how to learn Russian in my house, and it had a cool picture on the front (maybe it was a матрёшка) and they were the second most significant country in the world – I already knew English.

I think part of my fascination was the Cyrillic script. This looked like the letters I was used to, only different. Some were the same but had different sounds, some looked like the were mirror images or upside-down and some looked completely different. It was completely безумный, truth be told. Other languages had more exotic looking letters, but I couldn’t fathom those out at all.

Although I never learned Russian properly, even now I don’t know a single слово, I did at one point know all the pronouciations of the letters, which meant I could write people’s names, for example, in Russian.

Many years later, a similar experience happened to me in respect of the Greek alphabet. Learning all kinds of odd mathematical uses for the Greek letters I rediscovered my fascination: once again some were the same but sounded different, some looked different and some didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before.

There was one difference though, the letters were always referred to by their names: theta, nu, sigma, delta, pi etc. I didn’t know how you pronouced the letters at all.

So I went to the library, found a Greek dictionary and wrote them all out, pausing briefly to consider whether to bother with the obsolete letters as well. You know, just for a laugh. But I didn’t.

I went further than I did with the Russian and for a time, riddled with paranoia, I wrote in my notebook in Greek letters so if anyone found it, they’d need a Greek dictionary and a lot of time to work out what I’d said. And hopefully they’d think it was in actual Greek, rather than a reverse Greeklish and my secrets would be safe.