from London, couriers memories with the scent
of newsprint, stirs whatever part of the brain
deals with the origami of real broadsheets, calls up
memories like a drunken hand
texting exes, family and friends, carries stories
of dire phantoms, familiar as dreams:
dispatches from a dormant front,
stories that float in the air
and dissipate like smoke.
cheap rosé wine, sweet sunshine, wail of a fire engine, fan on maximum, soft grain of faux-leather chair, 23rd of June, waiting for the atom bomb, sitting here
I think I’ve figured out the way hype really works.
Traditoinal theory is obvious: band is hyped, people buy, people convince themselves they like since the alternative is to admit they were duped. People say “we like”, hype perpetuates. That’s the traditional theory, but I don’t buy it. That might have worked in the wide-eyed old days, but since peole got savvy to the theory, it doesn’t work like that any more. It works like this:
Band is hyped. Some people buy (see above), but most people don’t buy. Most people ignore the hype and self-congratulate. Hype is never true. Hypebole is by definition OTT. People know what hype is, these days. So they wait, until just past the cusp of the hype, until the media turns its palsied eye to some new morsel. Then, as the hype wanes, people buy (or download). People know the band will suck, since the greater the hype, the greater the suction of the hypee. But they can deny themselves no longer, so they buy (or download). Then the genius, the true effectiveness of modern hyperbole, is revealed: the greater the hype, the more a mediocre band exceeds one’s expectations. Judging by the hype, I thought Bloc Party would really, really, really, really suck. Instead, they just really suck. In fact, I think this could be a grower which ends up just sucking. Until such time as it gets a second listen, I’ll give it this: it’s better than Kasabian. But then so is the sound of?a?lion eating your legs.
Bloc Party tracks elapsed while writing this post: 3 1/4.
a night in, sitting watching the sun dissolve in a welter of turquoise and copper behind the mountains, the lime suspended in my drink like an emerald on a diamond ring, rock music playing, and an open poetry book on the floor.
Increasingly (I write, listening this midnight
to the softly-soft hush of your fast-asleepness
from the next room) we two are becoming three.
Talking amongst ourselves, one of us will get up
and do something unexpected - crack a joke,
belch, do a funny dance - and increasingly
the culprit isn’t you or me. Or something we say -
a stutter or a fuss or a curse - will come
not from you or me. I link two points with a line
and then put a third point elsewhere, and pull
the line into a fat parabola, and listen to you snore,
you and our friend there, two and three -
what used to be you and me - we two
like two strangers on the back seat of a bus,
shuffling over, politely making room.
Bellowing of ambulances in the street opposite;
go down in dressing gown and saucer eyed see,
in the grey-lit morning,
through the fog lumbering off the mountains,
and the problematic lack of contacts,
dead boy and car,
and then the costume of soap and foam,
roll-on deodorant, work, clean kerb and home.
I knew this man - he had some kind of fatal affliction. Each day, a tiny particle, a small drop of his soul, leaked or escaped into the air, out beyond the insipid, the grey sky and into dead space. The paranormal specialists could find no way to plug the tiny perforations which dripped his spirit behind him as he went on down the highway.
It was attributed to hashish and opium addiction, excessive womanizing, lashings of money and flattery, and a charmed, but not charming life. Who can describe the agony of this gradual soul-depletion? Too cowardly to take his own life, he roamed the cafes and cabarets, searching out other wretches who shared his hideous malady, and they spent their days in sophistry and idle banter, as their essence oozed, and the void moved ever closer.
The man - charlatan bastard, poor piteous doomed puppet - immersed himself in these vices, but this only exacerbated his demise more rapidly. Eventually he could derive pleasure from nothing; the most lurid pornography, or the most holy scriptures, failed to arouse him from his stupor, his boredom. Great cities, or the endless beautiful plains stretched out before his jaded gaze and disappeared into the nothingness of his feeling.
- Steve Kilbey, Fall in Love
See Guardian Online’s Barry Spinnaker quiz  Ten out of ten for yours truly. Campeone!
When I was a little ‘un, one of the most exciting things on TV was the “how do they make it?” documentary. A camera would float around a vast, stereotypical manufacturing plant, following the process of mass-production from raw material to finished good. The production was resolutely low-budget, as all early ’80s TV seems now, but in its demonstration of the efficacy of the Process, it was glorious. To my formative mind, all things in life took on the relentlessness of the assembly line - school, play and relationships were all linear and bound by the rules of cause and effect. I grew to have not so much a belief in, but more a deep affinity with the consumer society - even as my father grew increasingly at odds with the same.
One of these documentaries concerned the manufacture of peanut butter. It was wonderful to see the myriad peanuts trickling, tumbling, rattling, being shelled, cleansed, roasted, crushed, agglomerated with stabilisers, emulsifiers, preservatives, mixed in colossal vats, and finally jarred and labelled.