students are revolting, aussies are leaking wicket, wikileaks

Thought for the day II

We have descended so far beneath reason that to speak it is to be regarded as extreme.

Thought for the day

The profligacy of the rich can only be redeemed through the crucifixion of the poor.

The Secret Garden

As if aware of death,
nature threw a shroud over things
best forgotten. Like the time,
sunk on Plymouth Gin,
you opened your lungs to the moon
and dashed a tumbler on the rockery.
Or when, with nerves splayed,
you flung some unloved vase
at next-door’s cat; missing,
they said, by a whisker.

Aware only of ourselves,
we arrived with shears and trowel,
creating order, sifting debris.
Discovering, beneath a veil of earth,
a red-brick path skirting the blossom tree,
divining amongst the knotweed –
taken root like some berserk worm –
a forgotten sense of purpose.

But, with each scrape and blow,
a different sort of discovery – a picture frame,
a chair leg, some inscrutable pottery.
Evidence of a life gone to seed?
What should we deduce from this random archaeology,
these unmade beds? A drink problem?
A rejected lover? A faith unravelled?
Or perhaps, as others said, you just lost the plot.

Portrait

Please, do not take my photograph.
It is not the wayward tooth,
or the botched parting in my hair,
or the fist-shaped hollow
that makes an empty coat of my chest.
It is not this tell-tale beard.
None of these things troubles me.
It’s that old saw we know is untrue, yet
cannot deny – in our crooked smiles
the lens finds truth; the camera does not lie.

buying time

Groping for change at the meter, I find,
with a frisson of fear, the right
amount – to the penny – amongst the fluff;
detect, in the clever clunk of coins, something
final. You, outside the surgeon’s room,
prone in a paper-thin gown; me wondering where I stashed
my ticket, thinking about buying time….

swimming

We walked down to the water’s edge
where you took off your dress
and threw me the blue towel,

‘Hold that’ you said.

The sea was black and warm and the sky was
grey and warm and both the sea and the sky were flat.

You dived in, breaking the water’s viscous skin.
I stood on the wet sand holding your towel,
watching you, striking out for something elemental.

observation

We used to dream of bigger things.
Remember the space-age look-out booth
we hoisted up that needle tower, to see
what starlings praised in flight?
The view up there was cycloramic
across the Downs, across the Channel
along the coast to Littlehampton.
The future, though, remained unsighted
Parcelled up and sold on trust; so
when it came it shook the world,
disturbed the stones beneath our feet
and brought us down to slighted earth.
Now the numbers seem so sad.
One-hundred and fifty metres high
Sixty tonnes of glass and steel – trapped
In our imagination. Like an interrupted dream.
Come then and mock the folly of plans.
Roll up and jeer at the screwball gall,
the brazen, pie-in-the-sky nerve of it all.
That panoramic pod. If that’s what helps.

I’ll take Dusty over Duffy, thanks

I  used to be tediously passionate about rock (pop, indie, hip-hop, folk, call-it-what-you-like) music. I could hold court for hours, boring everyone to death with what I now know were jumped-up opinions and rather blunt insights. I sneered at established artists who were ‘staid and middle of the road’  and championed the unsigned, the avant garde, and, in some cases, musically inept. Reader, I was embarrassing.

Now I am 32 I like to think I have some perspective.

It’s clear that since it all began in the 1950s rock music has produced a small pantheon of greats; artists who ‘mattered’ in a wider cultural or social context, artists who moved things forward or significantly raised the bar. They probably number fewer than 50 and we all know their names: Chuck Berry, Elvis, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Bob Marley, Lee Scratch Perry, Bert Jansch, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Sam Cooke,  Michael Jackson, The Clash, Bacharach and David, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Nirvana, Morrissey and Marr…

It is also clear – from where I am standing at least – that popular music as a progressive art form is over, kaput, and it probably has been since Kurt Cobain fired a bullet through his skull 16 years ago. But whenever I suggest this, I am greeted with gasps of  indignation from my peers, who ask me if I’ve ever even heard of  Fleet Foxes, Little Boots, or Noah and the Whale! Have they heard of Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Human League, and Donovan?

If Cobain’s death marked the ‘end of pop music’, then Britpop was the funeral cortege; the first major pop movement that was entirely backward-looking in nature. The whole shebang was Union Jack-draped nostalgia for the swinging 60s, with Damon Albarn playing Ray Davies to Noel Gallagher’s Lennon and McCartney. At no point did any of the artists involved sit down and say, ‘this is about us, this is our era, let’s do something amazing.’ Whereas the sixties folk revival was about taking the genre forward, using working class music to politicise the middle classes, Britpop was all about raiding your parents’ record collection. That’s not to say it was all bad ( Damon Albarn is a creative wunderkind by anyone’s mark), but it certainly wasn’t new. And that’s my point.

When you think of the defining moments in rock history – Elvis at Sun Studios, Jimmy at Woodstock, The Who at Leeds, The Sex Pistols on the River Thames – the  chart battle between Oasis and Blur begins to look pretty phony. Unfortunately Seattle, April 8, 1994, has a more authentic ring to it. Rock music is at its best when it is ruffling feathers and subverting the mainstream, when it has a genuine political (with a small p) edge, when people aren’t sure how to take it, when the music sounds new, fresh and vital. None of these qualities has applied to rock music for a very, very long time. How could they? Our parents have been there and done it themselves. There is no old guard to rally against, no relics of the Victorian era to scandalize. In many ways rock music – having served its purpose as the throbbing soundtrack to a cultural and sexual revolution –  has lost its…er, wood.

So in 2010 rock is just a  retro fancy-dress competition between lots of very nice, very polite, and very boring music school graduates who have absolutely nothing to say. They are all reinventing the wheel musically. No one’s to blame. There’s only so much you can do with six chords afterall. But, really, how anyone can reach their 30s and still be fascinated by the latest offering from the Ting Tings or  Bright Eyes is beyond me. I mean haven’t they heard it all before? Have they never ventured back into the annals of pop history? I often suspect they haven’t – which is why they salivate over lightweights like The Killers and sneer at the genius of Springsteen. It’s a shame, because the greats really were…

Turn left at Pickering

Anna Long Legs and I spent a white Christmas with her father, Steve, and his partner, Jayne , at their rambling house in Felixkirk, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hamlet, just outside Thirsk, on the edge of the North York Moors.

It was great to be back in big, gorgeous Yorrrr-kshire.

Its natural beauty still has the power to leave me slack-jawed, as does the narkiness of some of the natives. When I asked one waitress for extra condiments she made me feel like I had violated her terminally ill mother in the most disgusting fashion imaginable. Still it made a refreshing change from the effusively chummy bar staff you get in Brighton and Hove. Ask for a pint of London Pride down here and all of a sudden you’re swapping mobile numbers. It can be a bit much.

On the day after Boxing Day we headed to Whitby and Robin Hood’s Bay, to give Anna, who has a fixation with the sea, her first taste of a northern coastline. The first half of the journey was pleasant but unremarkable. The second half, when we left the Scarborough road at Pickering and cut north through the heart of the moors, took us through one of the most impressive landscapes in England.

The North York Moors is awesome and – under mordant, cloud-bruised skies – exudes a terrifying indifference. England’s third biggest national park is the closest thing we have in this country to real wilderness. And it’s hundreds of miles away – literally and metaphorically – from the polite, chalk-bitten folds of the South Downs which form the backdrop to my life on the Sussex Coast. I realise I’ve changed a bit, but…ee by ‘eck.