swit swoo

Failure vs Rejection

2012-02-06T12:24:00.000-08:00

I often feel like I've got a lot of potential I don't use. My designs in life are to be a writer, be a performer, be in a band. Doing those things are what I'm good at, what I love, what's important to me. Well, OK, I can't sing or play, but I think given these limitations I'm pretty good at being in a band. And I'm quite good at the other things when I set my mind to it.
Invariably when it comes to writing I will find something else to do, I suddenly get really into baking cakes or doing the washing up or drinking lots of cider or watching TV. But I am sometimes really really good at writing. Performing -whether it be reading stories or playing in a band- makes me feel completely alive and in the present moment. So given all this why aren't I doing it more?
In terms of writing and in terms of being in a band, I often find certain aspects of them totally terrifying. Using words is really important to me and I feel like if you're going to make something new then there's always going to be people who don't like it. I always feel like there's a conflict between wanting to expose yourself and your creations and wanting to be accepted.
My friend once told me about this writer who said that she felt the thing which blocked her i.e. made her feel a sudden urge to make coffee every time she sat down to write, was her fear of failure. I don't think I'm scared of failure, I think I'm scared of rejection, they are probably just as jarring and frustrating. Some psychologists would wager that it depends whether you are an introvert or an extrovert. Rejection is unfortunately a part of life, much like failure, and it's especially a part of life if you want to write or perform or play in bands. Sometimes people are not going to like you or what you do and if that governs your existence maybe you're gonna throw away everything that's great and different about yourself, lock it in chains and bury it.
Like many queers, many kids in general I guess, I grew up feeling like I had to suppress the parts of myself that were different or stuck out. It didn't work because I had a mullet and really bad fashion sense and my accent sounded relatively posh. At school I really tried to conform or become invisible but it was pretty hopeless. I don't think I make myself invisible these days, in fact I'm pretty much the opposite, but I do often go out of my way to try and get people to like me and sometimes I think I try too hard. Sometimes I think don't worry about it. Sometimes I feel fake always trying to ingratiate myself, but then my interest in others is real. I like people a lot and generally want to know their whole life stories unless they are boring or arseholes. Sometimes even then. Being close to people feels like the point of existence to me, that and doing creative stuff.

I once read this statistic that said something like 90% of comedians were bullied at school. I think a lot of people who want to perform are actually massively insecure. Is it cos we all spent years without any friends or without getting any approval from anyone? Maybe, but if that's the case then we shouldn't be scared of ridicule or rejection cos we're used to it and if ANYONE likes what we do then it's a bonus. Unfortunately it rarely seems to work like that.

And is rejection and criticism the same thing? No, not at all, but to the super sensitive (which is many of us), criticism can feel as painful as out and out rejection. But criticism is VITAL or nothing would ever develop. I would rather get criticized than have the world bite its tongue on me. I wish people were honest all the time, wore their fucking hearts on their sleeves, no, maybe that would be a nightmare, but wore their hearts on their sleeves more. Cos if no one says anything when they feel critical then you're just left imagining what's going through their heads in all the silence. I do that a lot but perhaps that's just the judgement in my own head.
Working out which criticism is valid and useful can sometimes be hard especially if you've been socialised to apologise for your existence as so many of us have. Then you end up becoming a puppet being pushed and pulled around by the wills of others which is doubly confusing as people invariably disagree.

I've been reading 'By Nightfall' by Michael Cunningham and a line that stuck in my head from that book was when one of the characters thinks, 'We worry about all the wrong things'. I think this is very true. I often imagine what I'm going to do or say will bring about the biggest clamour of rejection and apocalyptic judgement upon me from everyone. Rarely, well hardly ever, does this happen. Well, it's never happened actually, touch wood. Rejection usually comes for some unanticipated reason I'm completely unaware of which doesn't seem like a big deal. And it's rarely as bad as the fear. The most harsh and judgemental of trials for me go on in my head. And perhaps that's the worst rejection to live with. Who knows? But someone who wants to do stuff that sticks out and makes a mark whilst being liked by everyone will invariably end up beating themselves up constantly. Which is something I do a lot. If it was a physical thing I would be like what's-his-name in 'Fight Club' and be coming into work every morning with a black eye and a bloody nose. Maybe it gets easier as you get older. But does that mean you become a sociopathic arsehole? Perhaps there is a middle ground.

Wrestling the bear

2012-01-13T02:04:00.001-08:00

NB these are my own musings on my own experience being trans. I cannot speak for anyone else and many will feel totally different to me. Alright, on with the ritual humiliation and naval gazing...

I had a dream the other night where I was in a sex club for anyone masculine identified and there was speed dating. The thing with this speed dating was you had to have sex with the person you ended up with. In a circle. In front of everyone. I ended up with this bio bear (that's as in none-trans hairy gay dude, not a form of 'healthy' confectionery, which is what it sounds like) and we got naked and were preparing to have sex. I think we were gonna begin by wrestling or something, I had my cock at the ready nearby but hadn't put it on yet. Neither of us were mega hot for the other one but we were both game, just as we were about to begin he referred to me as a lesbian, obviously thinking it was funny that we were going to have sex. I was good-humored but a little irritated he wasn't more in-the-know. Some friends stood by and looked awkward whilst I explained to him that I was trans, even though I hadn't had any surgery and I didn't take hormones. He turned to me and said, 'that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life'. Course I got mega angry and did what any tough guy would do when he gets angry and sulked. He was confused about what was wrong but I didn't tell him. Did we fuck in the end? I couldn't possibly say. It didn't turn out to be a very sexy dream.

I often get asked by people if I'm going to take T. It's a fair question and one I ask other people a lot too. Some older trans guys tell me and some of my friends that we all end up on T in the end. I can't say for definite whether or not I will one day take T, but the way I feel right now is like I would never take it. I'm lucky in that I feel quite comfortable in my body. I don't really want people to see that I have tits when I'm fully clothed but all the same I can't be bothered to bind, I hate feeling my chest constricted worse than anything. On the other hand when I'm naked I don't feel like having tits needs to signify not being 'he'. I used to play in a band and my 'outfit' involved being topless and even with my tits I still just always felt like a boy when I was topless, even at the start of being in the band, when I still defined as 'she'. I don't think tits have to mean the body is female-gendered.
I say 'being 'he'' when I talk about myself rather than being male because I don't fully see myself as male. I guess that's where the no-desire-for-T comes in (and I am not saying that everyone who takes T identifies completely as male, but for me taking T would I think be another step towards maleness). I definitely don't identify as female or a woman but at the same time the way I feel right now is that I'll never be a man and I don't have any desire to be. Yet I feel pretty at home identifying as a boy. I grew up female and identified as female for most of my life. I think I have identified as trans/genderqueer for around four years so perhaps this would make me a four year old boy. Except not because that would be weird.

I'm still seen as female by a lot of the world especially when I speak. Sometimes I feel offended or pissed off when people refer to me as a lesbian, but I also question myself as to why I care. It's not what I am but I wonder if I should really feel offended by it. It's a mistake but it's not like I'm being mistaken for something bad. A lot of cis people outside the queer bubble don't have a frame of reference for trans aside from FTM or MTF transsexual. I find it hard to get very angry about this because the fact is many people just don't know genderqueers or whatever exist, no one has ever told them. I sometimes use 'transsexual' when talking to none-queer people just because it's simpler e.g. for cruising purposes. Who wants to debate fucking gender for seven hours? The point of cruising is it's efficient. Besides which, for the purposes of cruising, the difference in identifying as FTM or as a genderqueer trans boy is pretty negligible. I think it is anyway. A lot of people wouldn't see a difference and of course one can identify as an FTM genderqueer trans boy too and many do.

The other complication is whilst defining as 'he' I'm not really very into being masculine. Yet I go to the gym and try to get muscles. I even tried this Natural Transitioning lark for a while. A program whereby you work out pretty much everyday and take about a million supplements in order to gain a more masculine appearance without taking any T. The guy who pioneered it solely transitioned by doing this. I know it sounds unbelievable but the thing is, among the supplements he took and recommends taking were fat burner pills and lots of pretty powerful body building supplements so it's not like it was really totally au natural. My logic was I wanted to become more masculine in shape and appearance without fully transitioning. Hence I didn't bother with the supplements I found scary (like the fat burner pills, though a friend tried it and apparently it was like being on speed). In the end I didn't have the willpower, time or energy to go to the gym everyday, and I don't go that regularly these days.

I guess I am more attracted to 'female-bodied' people but I still like having sex with men on occasion and I really want gay boys to want to fuck me. Quite often they don't, and they think I'm a confused lesbian. Or they fancy me at first then they take an extra long look or get talking to me and they're all confused or embarrassed because they 'mistook' me for a guy. But really, I find it hard to be mad at someone for not being attracted to me if they're into big hairy guys with deep voices. However, if people had it ingrained in them from an early age that there was more than one way to be a guy then it might result in me getting some more action. I freaked out a gay boy recently because I reminded him so much of his first ever gay crush when he was 14 (the boy he was crushed out on was 14 too) and I enjoyed that. I find the wrongness of guys fancying me when they think I'm a 14 year old kind of hot. It's happened a few times.

My surname is female-gendered and I've thought about changing the letter at the end so it becomes male-gendered like my dad's or my brother's. But then I think why should I change it? A lot of second-generation-and-beyond-anglo-poles just default to the male name ending but my dad wanted his wife and daughter both get the female ending. That's possibly a bit annoying but I'm used to it now and I figure if women can have the male ending then guys can surely have the female ending. Also if I change my name then I feel like I'm aligning myself with the men in my family which I don't want to do, not that I align myself with the women in my family either, but I don't want to actively switch.

At the end of the day I'm lucky in that I don't care that much how much of the world perceives my gender. I've got my queer bubble of close friends all of whom understand and are respectful without much question, if acquaintances and family get it too then great, if not well, fuck it. I don't even fully understand what I am, so how can I expect straight people to? Or maybe I could if I needed them to, but I'm not sure I do.

POST SCRIPT

I've been thinking about this over the last couple of days, and, contrary to what I said before, sometimes I think I do feel like a 'man'. But I suppose not the same kind of man as someone who grew up as a bio male and not necessarily feeling much affinity with cis guys or wanting to be part of the world of cis non-queer dudes. And not the type of man who can let go of having a 'female body' or being shaped by my experiences of growing up female and still often being percieved as female (though when I was a girl I was often took to be a boy). Or maybe 'boy' has always suited me more cos I don't want to grow up. Especially these days when I feel stalked by grey hairs. But sometimes feeling like an adult creeps up on me when I least expect it to. And hence sometimes feeling like some warped version of a man.

Mea Culpa

2012-01-07T07:49:00.000-08:00

Having studied at Oxbridge and attended grammar school 'back in the day', my dad is very fond of Latin, famous dead white men and all that gross classical European art (is it renaissance or something? I don't know and I work in a bloody art gallery, silly me. You know, the ugly paintings of kings and queens and aristocrats?) My dad came from a working class background and was one of three kids of post war Polish migrants, and was the only one of his siblings to attend university, but as a teenager I just saw this very posh guy, completely out of touch with the modern world, correcting my grammar, going on about how x, y and z were 'from the Latin' and the only three books of any real importance were the Bible, ancient Greek and Roman stuff and something else in a similar vein. I can't remember what. Oh yeah, probably Shakespeare. This all just sounds like I'm ratting on my dad, he has his good points too, we're all flawed. I remember once overhearing him exasperatedly ranting to my mum in the kitchen, 'she can't even spell 'medieval''...'Why get it wrong when you can get it right?' was his motto whenever I shrugged my shoulders and grunted that some slight inaccuracy in my grammar didn't matter.
I'm sure there might well be something interesting about learning Latin to some people, but I had no interest when my dad tried to lecture me and everything just went in one ear and out the other. I had an interest in learning Polish and as a teenager my dad agreed to teach me. He would sit me down and start giving me long lectures about verb structures and make me repeat different conjugations of verbs. He hardly spoke a word of Polish the whole time. I mean, he was trying to help, but the way I learn was incompatible with the way he teaches...

Anyways, I'd heard the Latin expression Mea Culpa before. I know it used to be a common expression but I don't think while I've been alive, and certainly not in circles I moved in, or even my folks moved in. It means 'My Fault' and it is also the title of a prayer I used to have to recite each week at church, which Catholics will know...

I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters,
that I have sinned greatly in my thoughts and in my words,
in what I have done and in what I have failed to do,
through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.
Therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin,
all the Angels and Saints, and you my brothers and sisters,
to pray for me to the Lord our God

The bit that still sticks in my head is the 'in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do'. I still get it in my head these days sometimes, and whilst I can't solely blame Catholicism for making me neurotic I don't think it helped. It's this idea that thinking can be a sin! As if you can control your thoughts. It's like that X song that goes, 'I must not think bad thoughts, I must not think bad thoughts'.

I realized as a teenager that I was not immune to prejudice, that I'd think fucked up things about people sometimes. This worried me because thinking 'bad' thoughts was unacceptable, and I didn't realise it was something everyone did. I didn't give a shit about Christianity and I never had done, but I had my own moral code of right and wrong and if I broke that even in my head for a moment it would send me into disarray. I'd occasionally get a racist or transphobic thought in my head, even if it wasn't something I rationally believed, and I'd think 'oh my god the BNP must be slipping some sort of drug into my water supply', because I didn't realize that other people's psyche's worked like that too. I then worried very regularly that people would think I was thinking something bigoted, even if I wasn't, but of course I couldn't tell anyone I was worrying about people THINKING that I might be thinking something bad or that I might inadvertently do something bad because that would point to the true evil that lay within. Why else would I be worried about it? I thought that if you had a 'bad' thought then that must be that. That must be you. You were that fucked up, hateful, bigoted, racist, transphobic, etc, etc, person through and through. It took me years to admit I ever worried about this stuff. By this time I had spent ten years of thinking the insides of my head were totally unacceptable and there was something wrong with my brain.

The reality of the situation is that I am white and I live in a fucked up, white supremacist culture and therefore I have absorbed some of the shit that comes with that. That doesn't mean I am blameless or shouldn't question what goes on inside my head when it's fucked up. I think it's important to be aware of that stuff so you can question your assumptions, listen and accept when you are called out and think about your behaviour, how much space you're taking up, etc. But whilst I still do feel guilty at times, guilt can be a very unhelpful emotion (if it is an emotion, not just a signifier of something more sinister) and a terrible motivator for political action because it becomes all about appeasing the 'guilty' person's feelings rather than a genuine commitment to ending oppression. Becoming obsessively worried about being oppressive is essentially just being self-obsessed.

Back to Catholicism, a religion which is founded on the idea that you are essentially bad and must confess and make amends for your sins, hence all the guilt and penance and self-flagellation and the idea that even in your thoughts, God sees. I think this is one of the most damaging things you can say to anyone. If you accept you have 'bad' thoughts then they can pass and leave you and they don't need to signify what you're like at the core as a person. But if you can't and if you try to suppress the fact that you ever have 'bad' thoughts, you'll probably go crazy.

Don't be surprised if I'm ripping out my eyes and I bit my tongue and the taste of blood was so strong

2011-10-19T01:19:00.000-07:00

Last week I went to see Planningtorock at the Scala. I had only listened to her latest album 'W' the first time the night before. As soon as I heard 'The Breaks' and 'I Am Your Man' I realised the album was something that had been glaringly missing from my life thus far and started craving listening to it like I was in love. It's such a good feeling when a new album does that to you.

When Janine 'Planningtorock' Rostron came on at the Scala she looked like Jesus. Jesus crossed with that bloke out of Shameless. I mean if Jesus was a lass from Sheffield who you could imagine going down the boozer with and Shameless guy was a talented electro artist. Janine was all long straggly hair and white robes and Sheffieldian swagger. Before she came on there was a huge fanfare of operatic musical crescendos and bluey visuals and it sounded awesome and you knew something spectacular was about to happen.
The Planningtorock live band were amazing, not something you'd necessarily expect from an electro performance. The saxophone is really redeeming its place in pop music for me at the moment. I always associated it with 'Careless Whisper' or the unnecessary bit at the end of 'Born To Run' which ruins the whole song. Or a wanky show where they're introducing the band and they're all like, 'and Joe Blogs on sax!' while they're having a jam. Or like on 'Later With Jools Holland' where they all have to have some cringe-inducing 'boogie' at the beginning as he goes round introducing all the bands. I always thought the only none-jazz musicians who really knew how to use a saxophone for good were X-Ray Spex but recent events have proven me wrong (Raincoats, Electrelane) and the Saxophonist(s?) that planningtorock used were hella powerful. Also the percussionist beating an electro-synth-drum-pad made good and the whole thing sounded so damn fresh and alive and well, on fire. Combine that with visuals and Janine being a Sheffieldian Shameless Jesus and it absorbs you so completely.

P2R ended with 'Living It Out' which is all dancey and fun, but my favourite songs are those like 'The Breaks' which overpower you and envelope you in sound and emotion as she sings 'Don't be surprised if I'm ripping out my eyes/I'm on fire'. Anyone who can articulate desire and fucked-upness and falling apart -breaking too easily- in an electro song that makes you dance and press repeat over and over again deserves a medal for services to schmucks like me the world over.

On Monday night I went to see Jens Lekman. Now Jens is a man who uses full-on cheesey sax on one of his songs: Friday Night At the Drive-in Bingo. The first time you hear it along with his sentiments about moving to the country and leaving it all behind you might not like it. Even if he is being a bit jokey and exagerrating, probably. I don't think I liked that song at first. But pretty soon he worms his way into your heart and burrows down there and will never be extracted. He didn't play 'Friday Night At the Drive-in Bingo' on Monday but you'd be hard-pressed to come to the gig and not fall slightly in love with him.
Lekman is just as notable for his between song banter as for his songs, he kind of mixes them together. He tells stories in that baritoney accent of his, then further illustrates them with a singing voice that isn't so deep really but is kind of rough-smooth. His lyrics are brilliant and so direct, so lucid, nothing abstract in them. He uses his own name and often writes lyrics as though he's talking directly to someone or telling a story. Or having an argument with himself like on, er, 'An Argument With Myself' ('You fuck off!/No YOU fuck off...Why you hitting yourself? Why you hitting yourself?').

The highlights for me were several songs I'd never heard before such as 'Waiting for Kirsten Dunst'. He sang the song and told the above story pretty much verbatim but the youtube clip doesn't really do it justice. The whole stalking of Kirsten Dunst is something I would have done in his position and it doesn't even sound creepy, just kind of hilarious. The none-stalking sentiment of the song is beautiful as he triumphantly sings 'In Gothenberg we don't have VIP lines/In Gothenberg we don't make a fuss about who you are' and dreams of these egalitarian principles being applied to the rest of society, whilst sadly noting that the city is going in the opposite direction experiencing segregation, nationalism, gentrification and all that shit. Just like the UK in fact.
'The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love' is maybe not musically Jens' best song and maybe he's a bit overly gushing about Barack Obama, but it was one of my favourites because the power of the sentiment of perspective is pretty strong. It's enough to talk you down from making one of those unwise drunken phone calls.
Jens preambled 'Cowboy Boots' with his usual deadpan storytelling spiel: 'You know when you've had the same dream 730 nights in a row and you say 'OK, I get it now. Can I have another dream? And in my new dream can I have a pair of cowboy boots?'' And of course in Lekman style it's all about longing for someone you can't have and he requests the cowboy boots to walk 'the straightest and most narrow route anywhere but back to you'.

'Black Cab' gets the stripped down slow treatment. Morose hymn with those lines that so many will relate to: 'I killed the party again/I ruined it for my friends/Oh you're so silent Jens/Well maybe I am, maybe I am'.
'The Opposite of Hallelujah' is the last song before the encore and Jens dances around like an exciteable child throughout. But with more style obviously. Throwing confetti on everyone, he's kind of smooth but he looks so ecstatic that it feels acceptable. 'Opposite...' is mixed in with a quick snippet of Chairman of the Board's 'Give me just A Little More Time' and the song's influence on Lekman's music is clear. He ends with 'Postcards to Nina', the humorous classic about pretending to be the boyfriend of his lesbian friend Nina for the benefit of her devout Catholic father. But it's the final and slightly earnest line 'don't let anyone stand in your way' belted out that you take home with you with a warm glow in your heart.
I went to Jens Lekman on my own, left on my own, felt truly content. How could you not leave feeling happier after the reminder that the end of the world is 'bigger than our problems and our inability to solve them'?

Dole Scum

2011-09-08T05:31:00.000-07:00

It's coming up to month number four on the dole for me now. Don't get me wrong, I was pretty miserable when I was working. Life is indeed like that famous Smiths' song. I'm pretty anti-capitalist in a slightly hypocritical way and I think being on the dole forever is a totally valid life-style choice and the notion that to be a valuable member of society means you spend 40 hours a week working a job because life oughtta revolve around money is actually pretty ludicrous. However, after a while, being at home alone does start to get you down when all your friends are either working or doing phds or whatever. And being from a nice middle-class background I don't wanna go on about being skint too much as I know I will never end up homeless, but nonetheless it's not fun. Mind you, most of my friends with jobs are skint as well.

I've been on the dole several times before. The longest was when I lived in Brighton. I was on the dole there for about six months. I had all these lofty romantic ideas about how I was going to write loads and stare at the sea. Did I do that? Did I bollocks. I stayed in and neurotically checked my myspace (this was back in 2007) and facebook and emails and drank cider and felt directionless, pretty similar to now.
I feel like the way I interact with the world is to react to the things that happen around me or to me, so -despite going on about initiative on my application forms- initiating anything by myself is never much of a goer. I need constant external stimuli, I need to be pushed and moving all the time. I write much better under pressure. If I have all the time in the world I will invariably do nothing which is really what's happened lately. I am also an extrovert exhibitionist and I always need people around me to be interacting with. I feel like there's no point in doing anything if no one's going to see it, so the patient process of writing and editing something, well, I just can't handle all that alone time. Hence facebook habits. I always wonder what books would never have been written or what films would never have been made had facebook been around for the past 100 years. Because no one wants to feel alone and facebook promises you constant company but it's not really sufficient.
I have a friend, well, a facebook friend, and I'd like to think if we ever got to spend time together we'd be friends in real life, who has just finished his second novel, but he posts on facebook so many times a day. How does that work? How does he do it?

I don't want to rely on the insistence that unless you work or are in full time education your life is pointless, but I crave some kind of structure imposed upon me. I wish I was like those ballet dancers you see on documentaries (what? 'Black Swan' wasn't a documentary?!) who are so focused that nothing else matters. I mean I don't wanna be a ballet dancer but I want to be so focused it's unhealthy and I'm completely unbalanced, instead of the other way round. And I don't mean so focused on work and being a valuable capitalist money-earning subject, I mean on anything. And the less I leave the house the less focused on anything in particular I feel.

Yeah, so a little self-indulgent rant there. On the upside I just got on Spotify. I know, about three years after everyone else and I can only listen to it for twenty hours and there's loads of adverts. And the above Pet Shop Boys song is brill.

OH MY FUCKING GOD

2011-09-04T01:31:00.000-07:00

212 by Azealia Banks

I think I'm in love with this song. Or in lust maybe. I'd never heard of Azealia Banks until Wednesday when I went to see Pulp with my top pop fag oracle who presented me with a wondrous mix cd. 212 was track 05 and has been glued to my ears since then on repeat. I love the way the lyrics are so dirty and she's so fixated on oral sex and double meanings. And the way the song builds on so many different layers. It's all so spikey and taunting, the dirty matter of factness of 'guess that cunt gettin' eaten'. Half way through the rapping and beats temporarily dissolve into some sort of beauteous soulful vocal electro house break that sends shivers through your body before propelling you into another explosion where AB starts shouting, well, I'm not 100% sure what she's shouting, sounds like, 'bitch the end of the line is there!' Who cares? It's fucking great. And then on the second half her rapping goes from super bouncy to a kind of high school drawl as she begs important questions such as 'what's your dick like homie? what are you into?' I love the unashamed objectification of straight men and mockery of the pantomime that is masculinity which is something I still don't feel like you hear a lot of the time these days in music. There again my music knowledge is pretty limited and I know next to fuck all about hip hop but the name 'Lil Kim' is ringing in my head right now, not cos I want to make lazy musical comparisons, I actually don't really know much Lil Kim stuff, but as another artist who gloriously objectifies straight guys and raps about sexual pleasure. Funny I can't think of many indie pop bands who do the same, 'cept for maybe 'You Think You're A Man But You're Only A Boy' by The Vaselines. Or was that a Divine cover? But it's surely not just about the boys, there's the bit where she's rapping about a girl giving her head too. Ace. Did I mention how awesome the fuzzy beats are? And the way Banks' rapping kind of bounces when she's talking about 'a-sucking and a-licking' etc? Ah well you can listen to it yourself though I feel it's best listened to cumming loud in your ears via headphones or blasting out of some enormous sound system. Hell yeah!
Oh, I did a tiny bit of research about Azealia Banks this morning and it seems she is 17, still in school and unsigned. And she's well-fixated on oral sex in pretty much all her tunes. Except the Interpol cover. Check her out here and here.

YES WAY YES WAY

2011-08-17T01:11:00.000-07:00

For consistently good bands, good sound and atmosphere Yes Way totally beats Field Day hands down. Well, Sunday does, I missed the other days. Plus it was a twenty minute walk from my house.
So I groggily shuffled my hungover arse in the direction of the Bussey Building around two to find there was almost no one there but it soon started to fill up. SLUSHY GUTS played first. I am really liking their new incarnation as a four piece. Adds more beef to the still incredibly unbeefy lo-fi atmospheric sound. Clear lyrics tinged with sadness and fed-upness, perfect for those who like to be morose and frankly who doesn't? I mean, sometimes. Kind of like melancholy sea shanties, but with four it just sounds more pleasurable for the watcher. Next up BASTARD SWORD who kind of knocked me for six as they were so unexpected. They used a vocoder and auto-tune and played high energy keyboard/synth based electro pop. What could be better on a Sunday afternoon when yr expecting nothing but a twee fest? Got me shimmying about. ANGUISH SANDWICH are the band of Winston Echo who is well known to the UK indier than thou and I know I've seen him once or twice several years ago but can't for the life of me remember, anyways Anguish Sandwich were kind of chaotic rawkus shambolic indie punk. I liked them, they had the tunes. But I did leave half way through to go see what was going down in the Bussey Building Courtyard. People were discussing their Electrelane guestlist spots (grrr) or whether to start drinking beer (yes) and I was having anxiety about my desire for jerk chicken versus the response it might provoke from the high ratio of my friends who are vegan. The anxiety proved to be unfounded by the way as no one was bovvered.
I'll be honest I'm not sure I really paid much attention to any of the other bands until Maria and The Mirrors came on as I was having such a good time chatting to people in the courtyard. Again, another way Yes Way beat Field Day was that it was all small so you could easily find people. You still couldn't bring your own beer in though (despite our most ingenious efforts) so we ended up spending a lot of time sat in the street opposite and quaffing cans from the offy and meeting interesting people.
MARIA AND THE MIRRORS were my top pick despite sound problems, but I suppose I always had it in my head they were going to be. I saw them a few years ago at the Windmill in Brixton supporting some band or other and I was totally blown away. Things have changed since then, not least the fact that they have a more complicated sound set up, with the two female vocalists/drummers having about two mics each. They kind of remind me of a manic overactive octopus with a drummer furiously shouting and banging away on each side and some cute awkward faggy boy in the middle jerking his leg back and fourth and fretting over his laptop. Not that he is the focal point, it's the drummers you can't take your eyes off. MATM have the appearance of some kind of eighties new wave band but with much better clothes creating music that is kind of like the sound of things being smashed to bits in an electro double-drummer kind of way, that glimpses towards the Prodigy/Atari Teenage Riot/assorted industrial goth. The vocals often get lost in the sound or blend into the sound. Not sure if it's deliberate but it works somehow. And they just seem like such an anxious shy bunch of misfits which I think is what fuels their sound. It's the clamour of someone who feels fucked up smashing everything. Or maybe I'm projecting again. I just like it when things are a mess.

Dunno what happened next, more time in the courtyard and on the street outside...I think I watched another band. Who knows? I had fun anyway. It was a good day.

2011-08-08T01:08:00.000-07:00

‎"When you cut facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, discriminate, drive people into deeper poverty and shoot people dead whilst refusing to provide answers or justice, the people will rise up and express their anger and frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard." Martin Luther King

Field Gay

2011-08-07T01:06:00.000-07:00

This was my favourite song Electrelane played yesterday at Field Day. They were by far the best band in my humble opinion and having spoken to people after the event I think it's fairly unanimous. Their music changes the landscape of your head. Well, for a bit. I can't describe what they do because I love them too much and that scuppers my descriptive/critical faculties. Some things you just have to feel right? OK, I'm going to have to be extra mean about the bands I don't like to get away with being such an emo schmuck in the first paragraph.

Other highlights: FAUST were the first band I saw and a promising start. Having a bit of an arty jazz wank and it was great! But perhaps wank is the wrong word as that implies pretension at everyone else's expense and they were far from it. They reminded me a bit of bands like Notwist, though I understand Faust were there first. They ended with 'Krautrock' which they explained was the derisive word that English journos had given to their music, which then became a massively successful genre. I came late to their set and when I arrived they were taking a drill to a giant metal bin and then smashing it with a sledgehammer which looked so much fun I wanted a go.

FACTORY FLOOR were really great dancey electro fun. I would have liked it if they'd been a bit darker and more obnoxious as I understood they were, but I still enjoyed the noisey bleeps. Sadly we were squashed into the tiny Shacklewell Arms tent, so there was no room to dance properly. And by this time my legs were about to give way so these were the last band I saw.

CREEP were kind of in the middle. In a similar vein to Salem in some ways who I love and I enjoy it when they distort vocals/speed up/slow down. Plus it's all dark and atmospheric and stuff, but the atmosphere at Field Day probably wasn't right for them, I always feel a bit hyperactive at festival things and I found myself getting a little bored at times and my mind wandering. They chose some good records to sample but I'm wondering how much they actually did with them having sampled them...Perhaps better in a darkened room.

CLOUD CONTROL sounded real nice from where I was standing. Unfortunately where I was standing was three meters outside the tent cos it was impossible to get in.

OK, so now the cons (I am arranging everything into pros and cons these days. Grey areas are out):

JOHN CALE: I was mega disappointed! I only have the one album, 'Paris 1919'. But then he came on and as a friend pointed out he sounded like Guns n Roses. And he did! With wanky guitar solos and everything. It was a big pile of old man wank. I mean nothing wrong with being old, but y'know, in the vein of the Rolling Stones still bashing away when they should have packed it in years ago. Paris 1919 was sort of magisterial and beautiful and soaring. But not today. Oh who am I kidding? I'm only talking about the title track of 'Paris 1919'. As if I even listen to the rest of the album.

ARIEL PINK'S HAUNTED GRAFFITI: They looked like The Darkness and they sounded a bit like them too. That might just be my prejudice because of how they looked, but I'm a shallow guy.

ANNA CALVI I think I'm supposed to like Anna Calvi because everyone else does but she was sooo quiet. I mean they could've turned her up a bit, no? It's a residential area I suppose but maybe they could have planned things a little better...So again I didn't get the atmosphere and didn't find her exciting. I just had to resort to making wry observations like on some bits where she sounds like Shirley Bassey except not as good.

WARPAINT Much hyped but very dull. They just reminded me of a band of primary school teachers. There were so many hetero soppy declarations of love as well. I just can't cope with that sort of thing.

I am glad I went. Electrelane alone would have made it worth it, and getting to learn about new bands is always great. I'm so naive I thought Electrelane were headlining when I bought the tickets! I couldn't believe they were only on at four. 'Who are these Wild Beasts?' Nah, I'm kidding I had actually heard of Wild Beasts but there were loads of people I didn't know at all. It's pretty shocking how I've let my knowledge of schmindie music slip in the last couple of years. Or I'm up to date with some bands but only if they're big homos or friends of friends, which usually amounts to the same thing to be honest. I used to have an encyclopedic knowledge of music but being skint has meant I've not even been to a gig in yonks. Actually the last one was Pulp (who were AMAZING but also indicative of what era my musical brain is living in). Anyways, I'm determined to stay more up to date. So here's a song from 1973:

North South Divide

2011-08-01T00:12:00.000-07:00

I write this half asleep as I engaged in various excesses over the weekend -and some wholesomeness, but that still involved travelling- but now I must be up for my JSA interview. Oh joy. I think the Job Centre has got to be one of the most depressing places in the whole of London.

I've been back up north this weekend. It's weird because I can't say 'back home' as home (as in the place where I'm from/grew up) is Birmingham which I suppose only southerners count as north. A friend at uni was always eager to show off his sociological knowledge whenever I said I wasn't a northerner and remind me that Birmingham was 'socially and economically north', but anyway.

Leeds is an important place to me because I spent six years of my life there between the ages of 18 and 24, obviously things changed massively for me in those six years and Leeds will always have a fond place in my heart. Plus it's a really awesome city, as is Manchester where I used to visit regularly. I still remember many times knocking back cheeky vimtos (WKD Blue and Port) in Poptastic Manchester till 2am then scouring the streets with friends for still-open drinking establishments (including many an uber depressing casino) and then getting the 5am train back home to Leeds. These days I don't think I'd have the energy to do that as often as I used to. Though to be honest the night buses in London can be much more of an ordeal.

Also I spent a lot of time in Todmorden and Hebden Bridge (towns which famously pull in lots of hippies and lesbians, Sylvia Plath is buried in the latter). I have a friend who lives in Todmorden, she made me make peace with the countryside, which I used to associate with dull arse weekends with my parents, wondering why I didn't have any friends. Boo hoo. The further north you go the more exciting and wild the countryside becomes. South it's all too flat.

On my return north at the weekend I spent a lot of time thinking about the pros and cons of Leeds/Mancs/Todmorden in comparison to London...

PROS

NOTICEABLY MORE FRIENDLY/MORE RELAXED. I always forget this and then am pleasantly surprised when I arrive in Leeds and people actually talk to you and look at you and smile at you. You can instantly feel the shift in attitude. Because London is bigger and it takes years to get anywhere, other people become not people but obstacles in the way of a person's daily progress. If you go to some event or other in Leeds there is more chance people will talk to you than in the South, or that they're talking to you because they're genuinely interested in you. Which brings us on to...

LESS HIPSTERS/HIPSTER ATTITUDES. Now don't get me wrong, plenty of hipsters in Leeds/Manchester (maybe not Todmorden though!) but down south it's a whole new breed. When I was at uni I was shocked when around 2002 the Leeds alternative scene suddenly started getting 'cool'. NME deigned that Leeds was the coolest place for music in the UK, if you lived in Leeds you could rub two sticks together, call yourself a band and all these music journalists would wank over you. There were the Long Blondes, Kaiser Chiefs, Forward Russia, Hadouken, etc. Most of them weren't very good to be honest but they were very in. But the 'alternative hipster' thing all felt so sudden to me. Like I was at a gig at Joseph's Well in Leeds one night and suddenly I was surrounded by all these girls in 'high fashion' fluffy boots and all these boys with their hair straightened wearing £300 worth of 'vintage' clothing which looked kind of pseudo glam rock mixed with a metrosexual expensive Pulp look (of course Pulp looked better). My girlfriend of the time had told me about all these hipsters in Leeds but I hadn't believed her, now they were everywhere. The hipster Leeds thing was epitomized by a night called Pigs which ran at a venue I forget the name of near the Corn Exchange. Hi Fi maybe? To be honest it was often quite fun, much as my friends and I liked to slag it off.

In Manchester I witnessed the hipster thing when electro first started getting very popular (or was having a resurgence and rebranded as electro), again around the time I was at uni. Ladytron, Peaches, etc were all the rage, fair enough they were good. I once went to a faux warehouse party in Manchester with some friends that was total hipsterville. We made the mistake of taking loads of magic mushrooms pre party and when we got there everything became like a computer game or slow-mo/fast forward. What I noticed most was the Pencils: pale, anorexically skinny girls with those immaculate hipster black fringes. They looked just like pencils with tiny skinny little hands coming out of them like bits of string. The mushrooms sped up the Pencils' voices so they sounded like they were on fast forward, squeaky like chipmunks and their little hands, they were on fast forward too. One moment, going so fast like the propellors of an airoplane, then the next they'd be slow motion. That's when I learnt mushrooms and night clubs are an unhappy marriage.

I don't think hipsters are inherently bad, though they're easy to mock. To some people I am a hipster so I'd better not be too self-righteous, it's all relative after all. The problem I have really is the bad attitude that sometimes goes with being a hipster. Maybe that wasn't so apparent in Leeds but when I got to London, my god! ...

I used to come down to London a fair bit when I was living in Leeds to visit my mate Bob who I was also in a band with. We'd often go to Unskinny Bop before it became trendy (ha ha cos we're so cool), when it was still full of freaks and queer misfits. I thought the atmosphere was so nice and welcoming. I would also go to queer squat parties where I'd feel kind of socially awkward but it was generally welcoming-ish. So then I went to Soho, to Trash Palace, hardly the heart of the hipster world, but I was shocked by the unfriendliness and the cheekbones. I perhaps just went on an off day, but I couldn't believe all the glares. Then I got to Shoreditch and every one was a hipster and the cold disinterest that often went with this was so strange to behold. I remember when me and Bob first started playing gigs in London, people just didn't show much emotion/reaction to us. Maybe because there were a plethora of queer/shoreditch dickheads who couldn't really play their instruments and wore silly clothes or lack thereof, but I was still disturbed by the lack of any sort of reaction. Even a heckle. When we played in squats/things like nomocrime we generally got more of a warm response. Or heckled, but at least that's *something*.

I actually think in London you have to make yourself feel less than in other places cos everything's harder work and you just can't give the emotional energy to people that you can in smaller places.

MUSIC ASIA/BOOZE 4 U/DRIVING SCHOOL - in Harehills, Leeds! It's all one shop! I just love the fact that they thought it would be a good idea to combine a driving school and an off license. Maybe you have to see it.

WATERFALLS - Even if you live in Leeds or Manchester you can get the train to Hebden/Tod and jump in waterfalls in Summer, and in no more time than it takes to get from Peckham to Hampstead Heath. No waterfalls in London.

LS6 - a bit of a double edged sword this one. LS6 is the area of Leeds also known as Hyde Park. It's mega popular with students, so it's kind of got a reputation of (majority white, middle class) studentville. It's also full of musicians and supposedly has the densest population of musicians than any other area in the world apart from somewhere in Texas. Of course I have my doubts that the collector of this information actually went everywhere in the world and counted, but there are indeed a lot. Most are probably crap, some are good, a few are amazing. It's a good place to be if you want to be in a band anyway and frankly who doesn't?

LS6 is also home to a lot of working class Asian families. There is obviously the gentrification issue but to be honest I can't comment a lot on how Hyde Park has changed because when I got there in 2001 it was already mega studenty and had been for many years, which is not to say I wasn't contributing to the continuing gentrification cos I'm sure I was. One thing I did notice was that every year the rents went up which is mega shit. Apparently 90% of students at Leeds University come from families in the top pay bracket so there are obviously some big discrepencies with who can afford to pay the rising rates. Another thing that happened when I was in LS6 which was pretty heartbreaking was the local primary school got shut down, it was mostly refugee and migrant kids whose first language was not English. I remember one of the governers very publically stating that funding had been cut because the local authorities did not deem the kids who went there as important.

Fireworks night in Hyde Park was always terrifying. I guess maybe there was some resentment of students in the area, or there was just a very lax attitude to twelve year olds buying fireworks. As early as September there were a couple of streets where you'd have to be nimble and dodge the fireworks. I don't know if it's still like that now. I don't think anyone ever lost an eye. Touch wood.

Other great things about Hyde Park are the Brudenell Social Club where I saw many an amazing gig, The Hyde Park Picture House which is an amazing independent cinema. There was also the abundance of cheap samosas in practically every small shop. I had a bit of an addiction.

Overall I think Hyde Park is a Pro, even if some of the students are wankers. Don't leave your window open when you go out though, someone might be trying to climb through! I soon learnt.

CONS

LACK OF FRESH BLOOD - this was a big reason I left Leeds. Like it or lump it, London is like a big swirling vortex sucking in people from all over the country and the world, new arrivals every day. Leeds is not. What you do get is a new intake of students each year, who every year are younger and younger and younger than you. I'm afraid I rarely go for the young ones.

SMALL TOWN RACISM - I'm thinking here of towns like Todmorden and Hebden Bridge. Not saying there isn't a problem with racism in Leeds, Manchester or even London (see below) or that the working class populous of small northern towns are all racist hicks, but Todmorden and Hebden Bridge are very white places compared with much of the country and I've heard of people of colour being fobbed off with some bullshit in certain pubs about how they're not serving food or whatever, only to walk by half an hour later and find this is a lie. In Tod the other day, a friend pointed out a chip shop which was sometimes a popular haunt of fascists. Whilst there is a hippy, liberal, green, somewhat gay element to these towns, the BNP are also quite popular. It's also not automatically cool to be a homo everywhere in town, one new year's me and a friend got started on for snogging in a pub. Also some of the hebden lesbians are somewhat old skool in their views. Once I walked past the Hebden Bridge Wimmin's Christmas Fair to find a polite notice on the door stating it was for Women Born Women only. It's a fucking Christmas Fair!

FOOTBALL DAYS - this is perhaps more prevelant in Leeds and Manchester. I'm sure there's football violence in London too and I've just been shielded from it, but actually what gave me the idea to write this was walking past the pub in Leeds where I used to work at near the station and seeing a big line of police outside. That means it's a football day. Around the corner there's another pub with an enormous England flag outside similarly flanked by police. Most days working at the pub was fine (apart from me being naturally lazy and the pay being shit), I even started the trend of gays working there, so despite it being quite a hetero old man's pub, about 60% of the bar staff were homos at one point which was nice.

Match days were pretty horrible, I knew one Liverpudlian Socialist guy who was a regular, but on match days he didn't come in and occasionally you'd get pretty nasty right wing elements. If that was obvious I'd just walk off without serving them, but even with people who wouldn't have put themselves in the right wing camp there was so much grumbling about 'the immigrants', though nobody could agree on whether they'd 'taken our jobs' or 'taken our benefits'. This isn't just a northern attitude obviously. If you take a glance at the popular press you'll see 'Immigrant' is often used in the same kind of tone 'Pedophile' is used in.

I actually felt sorry for some of the guys who would come in and talk this shit cos they would tell me about dead end towns they'd come from where there were no job prospects. It's unfortunate that instead of wanting to fight against a fucked up system of global capitalist exploitation they blamed 'the immigrants' (poor non-white/non-western immigrants was really who they meant) who had also been severely fucked over by, often even moreso, by capitalism and imperialism. I would argue till I was blue in the face that 'the immigrants' were a scapegoat and most of the resources available in the UK came from fucking over the rest of the world but the pub guys had seen the figures in the Metro and I was just some privileged student hippy.

OK, that went off on a huge and depressing tangent and the attitudes witnessed at my old place of work are I'm sure just as evident in the south...so that's not really a comparison just a tangential rant.

Next week: Birmingham!

IF YOU WANNA READ SPOKEN WORD OR PERFORM LIVE (IN WHATEVER CONTEXT) BUT YOU ARE TOO NERVOUS OR DON'T THINK YOU'RE GOOD ENOUGH....

2011-06-29T02:01:00.000-07:00

believe me, you are probably better than at least 50% of the ones that do, and by virtue of the fact that you have even SOME level of self-reflective criticism/self doubt, you prove yourself to have a quality filter unavailable to many of the dicks that get up onstage. Just go to a performance/spoken word night anywhere and then you'll see. I went to Glam Slam last night and it was a decidedly mixed bag. I guess that's a good thing in a lot of ways cos you want to foster an atmosphere where everyone feels comfortable performing and no one feels intimidated by having to be a pro or whatever (plenty of terrible pros out there too).

Me and my friends were given the task of being judges and generally every time I held up a number I got booed for being too harsh. It was like being Simon Cowell or something and it was amazingly fun. To be honest I thought we were too generous in a lot of cases, if 10 is the best poem you ever heard then really few people should score above a 6. Oh well, maybe it is too harsh for what's meant to be a supportive environment I don't know. On principle I think competitive poetry might be a bit wrong but actually it's loads of fun to judge people and I should never be put in a position of significant power in real life. Fortunately that's not likely to happen.

One guy delivered a monotone rhyming couplet poem he had obviously written on the tube about a 'whore' but I thankfully didn't fully get the jist cos he mumbled so much. We gave him four which was quite generous.

I'm def going to enter next year even though I don't really do poetry but I figured I could do better than that. Some of the poems were good though. The winner was a drama teacher who did performance poetry, which obviously doesn't sound very promising, but then she did a poem about Clapham which was hilarious. It rhymed 'Clapham' with 'slap 'em' for obvious reasons.

And on Sunday night I saw Momus. A guy who also sometimes makes you go 'hmmm, this is possibly sexist/dubious' but mostly just 'this is WEIRD'. He's a very strange looking guy and he stumbles around the stage like a geriatric imitating monkeys and picking his nose. He's also a weird old perv and that comes across in his music and sometimes you like him for it and sometimes not. At times it gets tedious, but at other times he's great. I'm loving 'A Complete History of Sexual Jealousy Parts 17 - 24', you gotta love the new ordery dance beat. Once you get a certain way through the song if you're feeling all poly and earnest and responsible, you're like 'dude, take responsibility for your own shit', but I love it anyways, and then the best bit when he starts singing, 'if you really love me take lovers...love the others', etc. There's something actually quite poignant about it but then I'm an emo get. And you don't know what's ironic and you don't care.

My mate Heena first got me into Momus by putting this awesome song on a mixtape for me:

Another must-listen poly song in my humble opinion. I don't think that's the official video. Just the karaoke version. I don't think there is one. The ever talented and hot Amanda Palmer covers it too, kinda losing the subtlety of the original (especially with the screaming girls). It's still good.

Shakey England

2011-04-05T13:46:00.000-07:00

The first time I went to see PJ Harvey live, my pre-gig attitude was a bit like, 'yeah, so?' I'd loved To Bring You My Love and Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (the only two Polly albums I had) but she was just one of these habitual musicians who I didn't think about on a regular basis. Then I shuffled down to Leeds Met Union with my good friends Paul and Melanie and preceded to be blown away. It's a bit wank to say music makes you feel spiritual but I don't know how else to describe that feeling when music does something to you all through your body that language can't describe. When it makes your head fill with little chemicals like you're in love or lust or something. It was swelteringly hot that evening and as she played my grey anxious eyes suddenly all felt shifted and shiny and more alive.
Every so often Paul would go to the toilet or something and Melanie and I would make out. It was a special evening. I think the second time I saw PJ Harvey was at All Tomorrow's Parties. It was the one curated by Vincent 'The Cock' Gallo. I stood through the entire painful Gallo set (he was having a wank with his guitar for about three hours and feeling very proud of himself and superior) because there was a rumor Polly was going to come and do a duet with him. And did she? Did she bollocks. But her set was good.

I put those memories aside for a few more years and continued taking her presence for granted until I discovered the latest album, 'Let England Shake', which I cannot stop listening to. Sounds so beautiful and spooky and comforting. Some of it sounds far off and calm and some of it is beautiful folk pop and some of it is wonderfully strange and some of it is full of big drums approaching like marching soldiers. To the likes of me it's an incredibly accessible album, and I am a sucker for that, but it still sounds totally fresh and new.
It's a concept album about England. That sort of thing always makes me nervous from someone who's not outspokenly unpatriotic as far as I know. But whilst it's not an explicit critique of nationalism and colonialism, neither is it bigging up those things or bigging up 'being English', whatever that means.
The album certainly lays down graphically the horrors of war. Trusty wikipedia tells me PJ Harvey spent a lot of time researching the history of conflicts such as World War I, especially the Gallipoli Campaign and the testimonies of civilians and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The album is an examination of relationships to England told through various different voices. Many times Polly sings from the point of view of WWI soldiers who are sent off as canon-fodder. In 'The Colour of the Earth' John Parish takes on the main vocals, as a soldier singing about his dead friend: 'He's still up on that hill/20 years on that hill./nothing more than a pile of bones/but I think of him still'.
PJ Harvey's attitude to England is mostly ambivalence played out in beautifully melancholic, anxious music and lyrics: 'I live and die through England/It leaves sadness./It leaves a taste a bitter one' to 'Let me walk through the stinking alleys/to the music of drunken beatings,/past the Thames river, glistening like gold/hastily sold for nothing'. She paints quite the picture.
The final lines in the song 'England' go 'Undaunted, never failing love for you,/England/Is all that I cling to', which could make you vom taken out of context. What I take from it is it's a song about someone who clings to England with an empty, hopeless and misguided love though they know deep down patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. The preceding lines are all about how they search for something that they can get from England but they find only a 'withered vine,/a bitter one/reaching from the nations dirt/England,/I have searched for your springs/but people stagnate with time'. England is referred to like a person, so it's kind of like a song about a doomed relationship. Similarly vomit inducing is the title 'The Glorious Land', but the lyrics go like this: 'And what is the glorious fruit of our land?/Its fruit is deformed children/What is the glorious fruit of our land?/Its fruit is orphaned children.' Hello, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya.

PJ Harvey is particularly fascinated with the first world war and the futility of being sent off to die in the trenches, 'soldiers fell like lumps of meat,/blown and shot beyond belief/arms and legs were in the trees'. Again, she's a great conjurer of imagery and her lyrics have a kind of aesthetic beauty to them even when they're about something really horrible.

Now, the music...I have never been great with describing music, I guess because I'm not really a musician. I find the sounds PJ Harvey uses on this album rich and many-layered. Like a soft bed in the middle of a dark scary but extremely gorgeous forest. Someone described this album as sounding like 'world music' and I can kind of see that because it does borrow and mix together a lot of styles but never sounds disjointed. Her voice soars, though is for the most part deeper than on previous albums. Sometimes high and strange, sometimes ably accompanied by many other finely voiced people such as John Parish.

'Let England Shake' was actually a birthday present for my brother but I spent the night before his celebrations taking speed so it hasn't got to him yet. I will be very sad to relinquish it!

Once more with feeling...

2011-03-29T11:15:00.000-07:00

Oh yes, and a cursory glance at the Evening Standard (I know I shouldn't read that shit, but it's the horoscopes I just can't resist) the other day saw some stuffy declarations about how awful it was that some anarchists were planning to ruin 'the nation's special day of celebration' (can you guess what it is yet?) by protesting or organizing actions around the Royal Wedding.

I'm pretty disgusted that we're all supposed to be celebrating a couple of rich people getting married whilst the welfare state is being trashed. Why are we meant to revel in the privilege of a couple of rich white hetties from a posh family again? Yuck!

Oh well, at least we get a holiday.

Same goes for cops who were 'baffled' why someone would smash the olympic clock. Perhaps a few thoughts about what having that event does to the communities and parts of London where it is held. Rent goes up, squatters kicked out, excuse for more state control, police presence, racial profiling, upping of prices, and all that other shit. And like the Royal Wedding we are reminded of it every day and what a great honour it is.

No fecking thanks mate.

Whose streets?

2011-03-29T10:23:00.000-07:00

So I must talk about the March for the Alternative in London last Saturday and my irritation with the media coverage and the 'moral majority' reaction. Well, I guess it's more than irritation, it's anger.

The cuts are violence. The banks support a financial system designed to keep poor and working class people down. When you are backed into a corner who can blame you for throwing a few bricks? These were not 'random acts of violence' or 'hooliganism'. Smashing the windows of a hotel where you have to pay thousands a night to stay whilst Housing Benefit, Disability Benefit, JSA, public sector jobs, healthcare and education are all being cut for the poorest of us is a reasonable act as far as I'm concerned. Ditto the banks. So Lloyds got their window smashed? Good. They had it coming. It's not a random act of violence, it's very light retribution that will never rival the way in which banks target poor people and keep them dependent and the way the ConDems (or Labour or any fucking government for that matter) support these values of dependence on fucked up financial institutions which revolve around exploitation both at home and abroad. It's not a big deal when we think of the billions spent bailing out the banks and the ridiculous salaries their chief execs get. Fortnum and Mason's parent company dodge 10m in tax and they get some spray paint in their windows. Boo hoo. The cuts are the real violence, the inequality is the real violence and the worse and the more powerful it is, then the more oblivious the media are to it. Because we are told we have to suck it up and let all public space be dominated by buying things and the more things we can buy the better off we are. Well, it's bollocks, I don't want to live like that. I don't want to be told what to do or to be chastised for being disobedient and not protesting in a civilized way when all around me the opportunities for a person who wants to live without screwing other people over are being, um, kettled.
I don't want to sit down and behave and be reasonable. I was not consulted when the ConDems decided to scrap the EMA for half of the kids who are currently entitled to it, or decided to close half the libraries, or to sell off the NHS, or triple tuition fees, or allow people like Philip Green and his business empire to weasle out of paying a 25million tax bill, instead sucking up champagne luxury while the rest of us are being forced further and further out of the cities cos we can't make the rent and new policies are in place to try and get us working like drones every fucking day just to live whilst the rich white Etonian Tory boys pass judgement on our lives and what we can and can't afford. No one asked me whether I wanted the UK to attack Libya and the violence that will lead to is nothing compared to the violence of the demo. I know it's cheesey but it makes me think of the Manic Street Preachers circa 1991 when they sang 'Hospital closures kill more than car bombs ever will'. A bit of damage to property is not a big deal.

I support everyone's right to protest and show their dissent to the ConDem policies of inequality and exploitation, sucking corporate cock, protecting the interests of big businesses over those of the rest of us in whatever way they want. I think it's great 500,000 people turned up to march peacefully through the streets and for a while at least it did feel like we were taking over the streets. I think that is important. I think what UK Uncut were doing in Fortnum and Mason's was great, and similarly I have no problem with smashing the windows or disrupting in whatever way possible the banks and businesses who are protected at everyone else's expense. I don't support violence against individuals that is unprovoked, but I do think obstructing cops is fine if we really are to own these streets. My humble opinion in any case.

Here is an unusually smart article in the Guardian (Comment is Free so not editorial or owt, but who needs that?) saying something similar to what I'm saying I think but more eloquently.

Oh and I really like this letter from 'the anarchists', well, some anarchists, to UK Uncut who do lots of good direct action stuff also...no 'good' and 'bad' protesters! It is the government and big business who are fucked.

Janet Frame

2011-01-10T14:52:00.000-08:00

A writer must stand on the rock of her self and her judgment or be swept away by the tide or sink in the quaking earth: there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer’s own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death. - Janet Frame. Oh yeah.

Homosexual Death Drive

2010-12-12T12:08:00.000-08:00

Homosexual Death Drive are a band featuring the writer and activist Charlotte Cooper and Kay Hyatt. They use accordions, their voices, some twiddly nob thing, something else (maybe they had a uke or a banjo, I don't know, I had drank too much whiskey at that point). They both looked dead good in their outfits, Kay wore a dog themed waistcoat and velour green hotpants. Velour is my favorite fabric and I love the way the word just rolls off the tongue like an expensive Parisian delicacy. As the first song sounded Kay stomped on lots of tiny cardboard buildings which had been made for the show, like Godzilla. Many of their songs sounded like spoken word story shanties. The short set made for inspiring viewing. I expected them to be a strictly comedy band with the name and the lo fi-ness and the high budget set, but my favorite moment was their last song, which was about Charlotte's brother dying in a car crash at 24. The song was a bit of a secularist hymn and the sentiment was basically there's nothing after death, so don't waste your time while you're alive, live. If I wasn't all dosed up on paroxetine I might have cried.

I saw Homosexual Death Drive perform as part of the last ever Club Milk (amazing diy gig night, quite often veering to the queer direction).

Conveniently for me the final Club Milk was at the Ratstar squat in Camberwell, but a stone's throw from my house. I got there to be greeted by a very smiley promoter and a few friends I'd not seen in a while. The Ratstar was sparsely populated, but there were enough people to make it worthwhile. The first band I saw were called Skinny Girl Diet. Get this, they are all cousins, pretty young (I'm guessing around 16?) and they had only been together for two months. They were amazing! A dark bassy distorted guitar sound but fun enough to dance to as well. No post-ironic bullshit just passion. And their nervousness only made me like them more. And the bassist has a gold Angela Davis necklace. Now you can't fault that.

As if things could get better, there followed a drum and guitar jam by none other than Vice Cooler from Hawnay Troof and Rachel Aggs of Trash Kit, making them Hawnay Trash. Vice has totally butched up since the days when he used to dance around in his hot pants with Alison Wolf singing about sucking cocks and hitting it from behind on his conceptual gay album, what was it called again? It was good anyway. Still, he's very into reinvention this chap. Between being a big fag and today, he wore what must have been a mega sweaty red suit which made him look a bit like Austin Powers. That was the Brudenell in Leeds, years ago, then a couple of years ago at Barden's Boudoir he was spotted in Military uniform. Today he's got a semi mullet a medallion and is wearing an Ice Cube t-shirt and is constantly surrounded by women. OK, I'm being binary and unfair, I'll stop now. Anyway, he played drums and Rachel from Trash Kit played guitar. She is clearly not going to stop until she's the ultimate fucking champion of guitar playing for the entire world or something. A drum/guitar jam has the potential to go all jazz club and wanky, but it was thrilling watching those two thrash it out. Looked lots of fun too.

Other highlights were Methodist Centre, gay oi punk band, so much so much so much fun; Trash Kit, post punk amazingness; free pizza and Vice Cooler djing from his laptop, he started with Shots by Lil John and then we requested Ignition by R Kelly and he played that too. There followed Djing in a similar vein, although there weren't enough people dancing and the room had too many lights on for me to dance without feeling self conscious, so I kept retreating back to my bottle of whiskey in the corner. Hence I left around midnight and passed out.

Blowing my own trumpet

2010-11-29T15:07:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I write reviews for the Pink Paper, in exchange for free things and in the vague hope that one day someone might pay me to write about things. Maybe you want to read them. Maybe you don’t. I’m not forcing you, I’m just giving you the option.

HOLE – NOBODY’S DAUGHTER

PAVEMENT – LIVE @ BRIXTON ACADEMY

THE RAINCOATS + TRASHKIT – LIVE @ THE SCALA

XIU XIU – LIVE @ PLAN B, BRIXTON

YES WAY (UPSET THE RHYTHM THREE DAYER)

TRICKY – MIXED RACE

MY NOVEMBER IN GIGS...

2010-11-29T14:52:00.000-08:00

MIA

Only just gotten round to writing this about 3 or 4 weeks after the event. The show is now just kind of a blur of GRRRR. There are moments though that stick in my mind so clearly, like the blood splattered screen and the filthy bangin techno holler of ‘Born Free’, the smell of weed in my nostrils as the first note of ‘Bucky Done Gun’ sounded, and for some reason the line ‘some people think we’re stupid, but we’re not’ from XR2. This strikes a chord given some of the articles which imply MIA is…well, if not stupid, ‘confused’ or whatever (as discussed by Melissa in this ace article from Slow Songs For Fast Hearts). Actually that line sang slowly at the end of XR2 surrounded by electro fuzz felt like a moment really poignant to me, because it made me think of all the misrepresented and dismissed types of this world. But I’m just a fucking bleeding heart aren’t I? Really the night was just one big gay party (gay here meaning fabulous of course).
MIA is a proper macho femme, her style is a stunning mash to behold...Headscarf, blue strip of fierce cyber glam make-up, sparkling blue hot-pant outfit, all the stage awash with neon colours whilst singing about immigration, parties and liberation. ‘Armed and I’m equal, all power to the people’. Yeah!
Her two backing dancers had the moves and OTT goofy expressions on their faces, which sometimes turned faux-macho in a way which seemed to me to be taking the piss out of that notion. They looked like they’d walked off the set of a scally gay porn movie. In case you are confused, I think this is a good thing.
POWER POWER!

NICKY CLICK

I had the pleasure of hosting Nicky Click and her girlf Lady Jane Meredith, who does very awesome queer feminist screenprinting, when she came and played a show in London. She played at Bar Wotever and was decked out like a high femme bio drag queen, an explosion of glitter and perhaps some sort of candy in her pants. The set was beautifully chaotic, starting with Two Femme Girls and ending with a karaoke version of a song from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. There was a lot of booty shaking from the hot-panted Nicky and encouragement for the audience to do the same, sadly the crowd were somewhat tepid. I stood at the front, but I didn’t shake my booty as I have never been gifted with any moves…

WOOLF

What can you say about Woolf? They’re screaming post punk and they’ve come for your brains. The lead singer Collette always reminds me of that final scene in Ring (the original version, I do not watch American remakes) where the woman comes out of the TV. As I was watching Woolf at the scruffy but cosy punky local, The Bird’s Nest in Deptford Bridge, pint of cider in my hand and friends around me, I realised there was nowhere else in the whole world I’d rather be.

TEETH

Although they play in London a fair bit, I’ve not seen Teeth play in a couple of years, so I was glad to catch them before Babes buggered off to New York. They are electro punk joy with big hard beats. Their singer is fucking kick arse despite professing to feeling like shit. Babes is dancing over his laptop and quaffing a beer. The crowd are east london hipsters but some of them are really loving it.

THE KNOCKS

My friend pointed out they were a bit like a PA at a gay super club. As we’ve already discussed, the terms gay and super are positive in some contexts. They were pretty fun, they got the crowd dancing.

SLEIGH BELLS

They move like two balls on a pinball machine. They sound like screamo pogoing electro bhangra noise punk. Biff bang pow! One of those gigs where everyone falls on top of each other in excitement. They attract a lot of hipsters and they're super in, but don't hold it against them too much.

Story I Read at Ladyfest Herstorical Society and Postscript...

2010-11-24T09:24:00.000-08:00

LEN GOES WILD IN CAMBERWELL (2010)

My friend asked me if I wanted to read something at the Ladyfest Herstorical Society event and I said, ‘yes, of course’. I love hearing the sound of my own voice in an uninterrupted monologue that people have no choice but to listen to. It only occurred to me later that I didn’t have anything to read. So I churned this out quickly.
I had a mental breakdown in May, but whilst trying to recover, my life has been fairly dull. I’m a library assistant. I wear cardigans sometimes. Only ones on long-term involuntary loan from other people, but cardigans nonetheless. One day there will be queer library assistant porn where we’re all ripping off one another’s cardigans and sucking cock in the reference section and, y'know, bending over to fix the jam in the photocopier. At work I put the books in dewey decimal order and think these things through. But it’s not happening yet. Not where I work, in Swiss Cottage, anyway.
I guess the breakdown is an interesting story, but I’m just going to give you the brief edited slightly inaccurate version. I had been struggling inside my own head for many years. Since the age of twelve I would get obsessive, disturbing thoughts and hate myself for having them, keeping them secret from most people and worrying about the damage I could potentially do to others if I could have such thoughts. Keeping them a secret from most people for fifteen years was probably a bigger strain than the thoughts in themselves. On the days leading up to the breakdown in May my head filled with uncontrollable hateful, abusive and violent thoughts that I couldn’t stop. They were getting so bad I couldn’t concentrate on anything else, I couldn’t distract myself. The more I tried to distract myself, the more they came. It felt as though there was nothing else in my head. I was scared. I wanted the thoughts to stop but they felt like they were getting bigger and bigger and eating my brain. I thought I was losing my mind. It seemed like there was nothing left of my brain without the thoughts. They were me. I was essentially Hitler and I had just been suppressing it all these years but now my true nature was forcing its way through. I wondered how I could have these thoughts if there was anything good about me. I tried to stop them but the effort drove me crazier and crazier and crazier and the thoughts came with such velocity and I was so scared that I felt sick all the time. I couldn’t eat, everytime I tried I would throw up. I could barely sleep. I had always been chased by nightmares but then I stopped dreaming. I didn’t want to tell my friends about the thoughts because then they would know what a bad person I was and wouldn’t want anything to do with me.
On the night of May 24th I felt sure I was going to die because there was nothing left of my brain without the thoughts and I couldn’t live like that. And besides I couldn’t eat or sleep anyway. So I figured I had nothing to lose by telling my friends everything because I thought one way or another I would have to die if I didn’t get any help. By this stage my brain couldn’t deal with the thoughts anymore and as they could not be processed they were replaced by an overwhelming feeling of dread all over my body, a feeling like I had crossed over to the dead side and there was no way back. If it had been a movie I think everything would have gone black and white. I got to the stage where I felt like any attempts to help me would be like shocking a corpse with one of those things paramedics use to try and restart the heart when it’s already way too late. And besides, even if I did get through all this, I was still a person whose mind was full of evil thoughts so what was worth saving? My friends convinced me otherwise when I told them. I am the luckiest guy ever to have such friends. They took care of me during those terrifying couple of weeks and told me it would get better with enough conviction that I was able to believe them.
Six months on I no longer believe I’m evil. Well, I mean sometimes I think I’m always trying to hold back and be good and agreeable and please all the people all of the time, so much so that one day if I do lose my temper it might all explode at once and I might go on a killing spree a la Cumbria gunman who was shooting people around the same time as I went crazy. Sometimes I get those thoughts and I wonder how you can ever be sure you won’t lose it. If you’re so buttoned up, how do you know you’re not going to be completely out of control with hate and rage and violence when you lift the lid? But I try not to dwell on it. If I ever have the thoughts I would have once found troubling I don’t care, I just have them and they come and go. Growing up Catholic, I was always taught that you could sin in your thoughts, but I think that’s bollocks these days…I really believe it’s what you do and why you do it that matters. Thoughts are OK, whatever they are. No one can purify their mind.

But the funny side of things:

After my friend and I had trawled several doctors surgeries, which weren’t allowed to give me anything because I wasn’t registered, we ended up being sent to A and E. There I was seen by a psychiatric nurse who asked me why I had never sought to be put on medication before now.
I had actually been on anti-depressants before but I always stopped taking them quite quickly because by the time I was about twenty one I didn’t believe in the medical model of mental illness. I wanted to get better alone. I figured –and I still think there is some truth to this- that psychiatric medication merely covers the real problem without actually helping. That often psychiatric diagnoses are inventions of the medical establishment in order to hook us on psychiatric drugs so Glaxo Smith Kline et al can get rich. That often people with psychological problems need intense counselling and support rather than drugs but are denied these things because the government is more interested in putting money into banks and the armed forces and probably does business with the rich, unethical drugs companies, and therefore have little interest in putting enough money into providing access to such resources to the great many people who have been branded some kind of crazy who can’t afford to go private. And, what’s more, most mental illness is a result of one’s experiences of alienation therefore if we tore shit down and overthrew the white supremacist capitalist hetero patriarchy then there would be no need for medication. But maybe you need some while you wait. Did I mention that the medication totally fucks with my libido?
I was having counselling at a charity in Camden and my last trip to the counsellor before I ended up in A and E had not been particularly reassuring. I just wanted her to tell me I wasn’t going crazy, that there was some hope for me, but she didn’t give me much. I mean, how could she reassure me? It was getting worse. I worked so hard to get better and it was getting worse. I realised when I had the breakdown that I had to take some drugs for a while and so reluctantly accepted the fate I was being given. Though I did also believe deep down that once you got to the stage I was at you were already a gonner. You had no mind left to lose. There were the people who had been diagnosed mentally ill and were on psychiatric medication but actually they could cope fine if they really put their minds to it and got the right help or there were the complete true salivating crazies trapped in the prison of their own minds for whom there was no hope and once you crossed over to that side there was no going back. I had reached the point of no return. Medication would be like hooking a braindead person up to a life support machine.
My dad always said that when you had real problems you had to be tough, you couldn’t afford the luxury of being ‘mentally ill’. I had functioned perfectly fine up until now and I sounded so sane and lucid, a bit depressed sometimes, but not someone who had secretly been getting obsessive intrusive thoughts for fifteen years. I told him I didn’t think it was ever going to go away because it had been stalking me for so long, he said, well, just think of it like a permanent toothache. When you were pushed to your knees by bastards like Stalin or you had nothing to eat like in Communist Poland, then you don’t get depressed, you just grit your teeth and get through it. But weren’t you born in Guildford? I would ask him. Well, he just grit his teeth and got through it anyway because he was from that stiff upper lip breed. I guess he instilled in me all his prejudice against the ‘weak minded’ and it never struck me as anything to be bothered about.
I still think the pharmaceutical industry are evil and liars and that often mental illness is caused by problems of society rather than something inherent in a person’s chemical make-up and that many many more people would get better without being on drugs for a very long time if they were given the right help and support. But now I’m on begrudgingly one of those on medication. Did I mention before that the medication fucked with my libido?

The psychiatric nurse was super chirpy, she was clearly guzzling every drug in the crazy cabinet. She gave me a valium like she was treating a beloved nephew to a sweetie. ‘Go on, why don’t you have one right now?’ like she was giving me a yummy treat. It calmed me down a bit, so I suppose she was.
We talked for a while and then she looked at me, ‘I take it you’re a lesbian?’
If my brain had any hope of normal mental processing at that point I probably would have navel gazed a bit about the complexities of gender and sexuality, wondering how to describe myself and then said I was transgender, and saw myself as between male and female, maybe more on the boy side, but not as a man or a woman. And I liked being with guys sometimes. Actually who fucking cared? I’d nearly died, she could have said I was a monkey and I wouldn’t have been arsed. I should have just said I was bi, but I went with, ‘Uh…well, I’m queer’.
‘What do you mean?’ she said as if she was acting in a pantomime.
I hesitated. ‘Just put what you want’ I said.
‘No! I want to put what you want. I’ll put ‘gay’ if you’d rather’.
‘Yeah, that’s fine’.
‘I assume you’ve got a partner then?’ She said, I guess refering to my friend who’d taken me to the hospital.
‘Uh, no, that’s my friend’, I sighed, thinking about how many points my eligibility status had plummetted thanks to this little episode. I honestly wouldn’t want to go out with someone this crazy. If I had been more with it I would have thought how sad it was that she expected that unless someone had a partner no one would take them to hospital in a time of crisis.
She asked me about drugs, I told her I’d taken magic mushrooms this year and I occasionally took MDMA. ‘How did you find the magic mushrooms?’
‘Fun’, I said.
‘Oh, so they actually sounded quite beneficial!’ she said all upbeat, ‘I love magic mushrooms, but sometimes they can give you the horrors’.
I smiled.
She asked me where I saw myself in five years time. I said either dead, locked in a mental hopsital or a medical drugs zombie. ‘Well,’ she said, in a way that made me expect a wink, ‘I’m not going to lock you in a mental hospital’.

They couldn’t prescribe me any meds long term at the hospital and I was not yet registered with the doctor, they rang the GP and they said they’d give me my drugs in two days, meanwhile I had my valium to keep me going. I arrived to the locum doctor and she asked me if I’d ever taken SSRIs before. I said yes, quite a few and I’d stopped because they all had messed with my libido, but I knew I was going to have to put up with that shit for a while, so just hit me with citalopram or something that I’d had before so at least I’d know what I was getting. A little note came up on my screen saying ,‘did not take to citalopram’. Why were the doctors so prudish? Couldn’t they possibly mention sex? Surely they spent much of their days looking at willies and inside cunts. What was the problem? The locum ignored me and looked at the note. ‘Well, we’ll try you on Paroxetine then’ and she passed over a prescription.
‘Um, will it affect my sex drive?’
‘Ah, they don’t do that to everyone’, she said quickly as though it was unimportant. Fuck, maybe it wasn’t important at this stage.

So here I find myself six months into treatment unable to have even a decent wank. Everyone on the queer scene knows that the ‘best’ queers are the ones who have the most sex. Even though no one says it outright, it’s strongly implied. It’s bullshit of course, people should shag freely of course and fucking celebrate that, but if and when they want to, not because it’s what they feel they’re meant to be doing. Sometimes I feel like there’s a certain way you’re expected to behave. I clearly buy into it myself, I’ve spent half this piece talking about sex and there’s more to come. I mean I like having sex a lot of the time, love it sometimes, but then there are a few times when I have sex with people because I want them to approve of me and because I like the idea of myself as a person who has sex with everyone. Boundaries are for the prudish. I went to a queer festival over summer and stopped taking the meds in order to get it up.
When I last ran out of medication I lost my prescription and couldn’t get a new one for several days. On the fourth day I started having mega sexual dreams. I dreamt I was packing my boxes in preparation to move house, and people kept coming into my bedroom and having sex with me. I got really aroused whenever I saw abstract line drawings which in the dream were supposed to be the work of the impressionist artist Paul Klee who I once did a school project on when I was 16. Something about those abstract drawings got me really horny. First Whitney Houston came and had sex with me then Bobbie Brown. Bobbie Brown stayed in the room afterwards completely naked whilst I carried on sorting out my boxes. I was bent over reaching for something by a sofa when Whitney came back angrily shouting at Bobbie. ‘Who have you been having sex with?! You’re wife is going to be real angry!’
I stayed bent over so Whitney couldn’t see my face, but then she pulled me up by my T-shirt and sent me crashing out the door. Outside the door was limbo, it was all dark and black and the only thing visible to me at first were those Paul Klee but not really line drawings which got me so turned on. Then a group of cute looking men and women dressed in shirts and ties came into view. They kind of wore the shirts and ties in a bit of a Jarvis Cocker way rather than in a corporate style but apparently they were an IT team. I let the whole IT team fuck their way through me, then I woke up so horny I had to wank. This is great, I thought.
A week later I had picked up my prescription again and was back on the meds. I thought, this is stupid, I’m not having a breakdown anymore, why am I letting these doctors control me with their shitty pills and once again I stopped taking them. I thought about going to sex clubs and hooking up with loads of hotties and…and…I don’t know what else. Then it dawned on me I was being stupid and I should wait untill I felt really ready to come off. When would I feel ready? I wondered.
I wanted to find a neat way of wrapping this up, I want everything to be finished and resolved. That's how a narrative is meant to work isn't it? Fully recovered. I want it all over and done with and to move on. But what does recovery mean anyway? I do feel hopeful. I won't be on the medication forever even if my doctor says she'd be quite happy for me to take it forever. And things can always change in weird and completely unexpected ways and they have been ever since the breakdown. I told an ex lover what had happened to me a couple of weeks afterwards and she said things break for a reason, and I know that sounds a bit like a diss but it's true. The breakdown forced me to reach out to people and look at things from a new perspective which was massive in itself.
When I thought I'd come to the point of no return, I was desperately searching for some hope. I trawled the internet day in, day out, looking for stories of people who'd been mentally ill for years and years and had recovered or were doing lots better ultimately without the aid of drugs, and I found a few things, but not that much. Stupid wikipedia. I wanted to find the answer right then and there and have light shining down upon me lifting me out of the obsessional thinking or fear I would hurt someone. But I guess it doesn't happen overnight. But I'm really fucking stubborn and slightly arrogant and I don't accept things can't change and they have changed a lot and they will change a lot more. And I'm going to shut up now because this has gone on too long I'm starting to sound like that 'It Gets Better' guy!

Above is definitely a work in progress. I wrote it a few days before I had to read it. The event I read it at was The Ladyfest Herstorical Society which was an awesome event held at Lambeth Women’s Project. The event was d.i.y to the core and run by several wonderful people, all of whom I am very lucky to know. It featured zines, cakes, a d.i.y art exhibition, readings from Nazmia Jamal, Victoria Yeulet, yours truely and live sets by Smarty Pants, Truly Kaput, Lesbopig and Ray Rumors. And other stuff I probably missed. It makes me so happy and inspired to think that that event happened.
There was a moment where Naz was recollecting Ladyfest 2002 and it was so funny and warm even though it sounded quite dramatic at points…apparently Chicks On Speed (who demanded a hefty fee for playing) just stood there in the corner looking cynical and saying, ‘why didn’t you get sponsorship from Tampax?’ They never cease to amaze me.
So in the wake of all that, inspired by Naz’s piece from the Rock Camp book where she talked about finding community, one thing that struck me as missing from my piece, or perhaps only mentioned in passing, was how important all my friends were to me when I was losing it. How important they still are.

Apparently it’s mental health week this week. Weird. I don’t know what that means. I think the most terrifying thing for someone with mental illness, I mean I can only speak from my experiences, but I imagine this is the same across a lot of the board, must be to be alone, to feel isolated. Or to be surrounded by people who make you feel like shit I guess! I am so very lucky to have such good friends in my life, cos without them I don’t know where I’d be. Well, I do, I guess like I said in the piece, I’d be dead, permanently institutionalised or a medical drugs zombie. Sometimes I get scared I’m going to go beserk with rage and kill someone, I guess that’s an extension of the fear of being alone. I learnt that the people who love me can accept if I have obsessive thoughts whatever the content, but you probably can’t come back from being a murderer or whatever. But I think that fear is the result of not trusting myself rather than the likelihood that it’s going to happen.
Fortunately, however shitty and isolating it might be growing up with family and school kids who don’t really understand you or trust you or accept who you are, particularly if you’re queer/trans/gay/etc, then I am lucky to have now found a community of people who do trust and care about me.

The other thing I will say is that so many of the people I know have or do suffer from mental illness (1 in 4 the stats say, but I’m sure it’s higher in queers) and the best thing we can do is be there for one another.
It’s not possible to fulfill each other’s needs entirely. I’ve certainly let people down when they’ve been in trouble, and some people have let me down, but usually there is some help at hand. Even if you don’t feel like you have anyone to talk to there is always the wonderful world of the internet. I think by talking about shit, well, that’s how you get through it…

This is for all my wonderful friends, crazy or otherwise.

I got chills, they're multiplying

2010-11-17T07:25:00.000-08:00

Lucky bastard! I wish I had a furry coat and could curl up into a ball and hibernate. I wonder if the whole thing about pining after exes just evolved as a biological desire to use someone else's body for warmth.
Our house is fucking freezing. I sleep with all my clothes and my hoody on and I'm still cold. One of the first nights we stayed there I made the mistake of getting into pajamas and I was so cold that in my dreams I was really hot. I got into work the next day feeling like a delerious arctic traveller and then proceeded to freak out about several things like lack of money, inability to look after myself and that hollow feeling like something has been taken away from you and you want it back. I'm not sure what.
But it's kind of romantic isn't it? Sunday at three in the afternoon I staggered downstairs with a big ass hangover to find our boiler not working yet again and my housemate curled up on the sofa in the dark all her clothes and a duvet. I joined her under the duvet and we huddled together for warmth and watched 'Elf' and ate frozen veggie burgers. I just keep telling myself no matter how cold I get and how little sleep I have and how crazy I'm feeling that this isn't shit, it's romantic. Just like when you're trying to get over someone and you tell yourself, this is just a socialogical concept that I'm feeling now, an approach which might work if you were a fucking robot. Freezing away in Peckham and completely skint. This is the stuff middle class writers dream of the world over. I should be slathering at my own fate like an over-privileged wanker, but I'm actually seething with jealousy at the cute little mousey thing above.

Got MIA in my head, 'Lucky I like feeling shit, my stamina can take it'...except in my case I want to be like I was at 16, when I drank shot after shot of 50p vodka that was little better for you than ethanol, swanned into school about an hour late the next day and still felt fine, mentally and physically. Well, I mean I was insane and angsty actually, but a lot less tired. Then in the evening I'd do it all again and I never really felt the affects. I never cared about the cold, I loved the dark, I mean I still love it sometimes, but winter just sends me wanting to run off somewhere hot and chase the sun. Maybe it's better if you've got someone's body (or several people's bodies if you're very lucky!) next to you. Well, fuck it, I got my hoody and my hot water bottle, and whiskey (before me and my friends drank it all) what else do I need?

That blasted Sarah Kane...

2010-11-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

So, I just went to see Blasted by Sarah Kane at the Hammersmith Lyric. I kind of went on a whim. I've liked Sarah Kane's work since someone gave me her collection of plays -or I borrowed it and didn't give it back- about five years ago, but Blasted was never really a favourite.

I read the intro to the plays before reading them and was introduced to the furore over Blasted when it first showed in 1995, where it was repeatedly diss-cussed by tabloids and broadsheets for being sick, depraved, immoral and wrong. They all changed their tune after she died mind and now Blasted is revered as a classic of British theatre by all those peeps who savaged it initially.

Blasted begins in a hotel room, where Ian, the gun toting, chain smoking/drinking, soon to die from ill health journalist is, with his ex Kate. Ian is heavy on the expletives, extremely racist, homophobic and all yer other isms. He constantly taunts Kate for being dumb and mocks her stutter which comes on when she gets nervous or upset. Kate is much younger than Ian yet stands up to him, she is repulsed by him, but cares about him also.
Eventually Ian rapes Kate and the next morning they both wake up in the hotel room, Kate is disgusted and traumatised. Then the play kind of blows up, literally, when a soldier knocks at the door and the hotel room becomes a war zone. In this production they have some amazing set where they're still in the hotel room but it's just a ruin in the last scenes.
I guess retribution is enacted on Ian and then some, when he is completely at the mercy of the soldier, who in one scene rapes him and then eats his eyes whilst he is still alive. It's weird, when I watched it at the theatre I didn't wanna throw up, but now I'm proper gagging so I'll leave you to wiki for the REALLY sick bits of the plot.

As someone said in a very boring Q and A after, the play is an exploration of morality. People do incredibly fucked up and immoral things in the play, but that doesn't mean it's an immoral act to put the play on, as early critics opined.
And there's stuff in the play that explains -but never ever justifies- why one might act as they do. Like when the soldier (in this production he is Irish, and Ian is always referring to him as a foreigner, the association in my head is that the soldier is IRA, though I don't know if that was the intention) talks about the things that happened to his girlfriend and the things that he has seen, and then it turns out to be exactly what he himself ends up doing to others. When the soldier is talking about his girlfriend and he can't find the words to describe her, it's so incredibly moving and perhaps more so for the fact that he is a mass murderer and rapist. I know that sounds like a totally shakey thing to say, but you really have to see the play -but not if you're squeamish- and you'll get what I mean.
I guess what struck me as the great achievement of the play now I've seen it, is how it brings humanity to people who do terrible things. I didn't get that from reading it on paper, but when I saw it, it came across totally different. Ian comes across as sympathetic in the play, despite the fact he is massively racist and a rapist and a manipulative, controlling bastard. You never side with him, but it's pretty hard not to pity him. There's a moment where he's so lonely and in so much agony that he cuddles the corpse of the soldier who has just destroyed him for comfort.
Of all the characters, the one who comes across as the strongest person is Kate. She is the one who never exercises power over anyone else, and technically she could be seen as the one who's most powerless, locked in a hotel room, raped and then left to fend for herself in a war zone. But the roles of Kate and Ian are totally reversed at the end of the play when she finds him desperate to die and without his eyes.

I am thinking all these things on reflection, by the way. As the play got to the baby-eating scene I just thought 'this is horrible, when's it going to stop?' and 'no wonder she killed herself'. I think the being desperate for the end can be a sign of a good play when it's about the horrors of war. I have no idea what it's like to really experience these things and I really hope I never do, but this stuff does happen, and what's the point in pretending it's nicer than it really is?

I thought the play was a lot like a nightmare, especially once the hotel room became a war zone. I wonder if it had some dream inspiration. I started thinking at one point of Kate and Ian as parts of a person's subconscious. Especially at the end of the play where Ian is desperate to commit suicide and Kate is flatly stating reasons why it shouldn't be done. I think she says 'there's always hope' at one point, but by then it seems so unconvincing and you can't help but think, maybe this is why the playwright killed herself at 28, because she couldn't quite convince herself that there always is hope. Then there's Ian's repeated racist taunts, which Kate rebuffs and berates him for one by one. The battle between Ian and Kate could be a battle against one's own dark side.

There's also a lot of black humour in the play, coming at inappropriate moments. Not that I found it a laugh a minute. I think the play's pretty brave, and I just can't fathom why someone who could be that gutsy and deliberately provocative, laughing at stuffy critics, etc, could hate themselves so much they'd want to kill themselves. But after seeing the play it's kind of easier to understand that this wasn't coming from the perspective of someone with a lot of hope, even though, as with all Sarah Kane plays, everyone has their redeeming features.

All the actors were amazing too!

Sadly the Q and A was boring, not least cos the interviewer was pissed and incoherent and they didn't open it out to the audience. Plus it was with a load of playwrights, none of whom were anything to do with the play, I'd much rather a Q and A with the actors and director but I think that was last night.

I can't say I enjoyed watching Blasted, but it made a big impact on me!

Kay, why can't you ever be nice to me?

2010-11-01T17:04:00.000-07:00

Don't know why I'm thinking of lube so much. Perhaps because it has been several months since I last had sex. I'm not even bothered either.

Anyway, this evening I watched The Ghost, a thriller based on the novel by Robert Harris. It was pretty dull (there is a fine line between suspense and boredom) but whilst I was watching it I thought of a great new comic strip based on the adventures of Granny Lube. Granny Lube is of course what they refer to in the trade as KY Jelly. I mean the thick, old skool stuff that's all lumpy and probably doesn't reduce friction much compared to its slicker younger cousins. I'm not sure if the above picture would really do it justice...but anyway, I think she warrants personification. I can't draw, but I've started doing the strip anyway, because you're only young once right? And we all need someone who's been there since way before we were all born to guide us through our youthful trials and errors. I mean none of us have that, but imagine if we did! Oh yeah.

OTHER PERSONIFICATIONS I HAVE KNOWN:

POLLY - Polyamory, duh! she is ever present, making mischief wherever she goes. Never a dull moment. A lot of fun moments and sexiness and lurve and also a lot of drama and agonising pain.

MO - Mo says 'no'. Monogamy.

MRS TIPEX - I wasn't cool enough to sniff glue at school, not even Tipex, but I would laugh like I'd just inhaled some gross CFC infested 'body spray' in the changing rooms, whenever anyone asked to pass 'mrs' Tipex' because I would deliberately misinterpret and imagine the tipex as a little person. No wonder I was bullied.

Cluck cluck cluck

2010-10-16T06:23:00.000-07:00

'In the library...' sing Trashkit on 'Bad Books'. It is probably the only song ever written about Lewisham Libary's Lesbian and Gay section. I wasn't going anywhere towards a Trashkit article with that, it's just whenever I'm doing a library-related post it goes in my head. And here I am working hard whilst little children make as much noise as they can...

Took a cursory glance at the papers today and three things caught my eye:

1) 'Me and George Bush share the same sense of humour- he loves irony' (ha ha ha)

2) Barack Obama being called a 'Marxist Usurper' by the Tea Party. If only!

3) One Republican candidate refuted evolution and asked, 'if evolution is real then why aren't monkeys still evolving into humans?' I actually think this is quite a good question. But I still believe in evolution, don't worry folks.

Oh god, I've become like my parents, or one of those smug middle-class news shows where they look at the papers. I'm an anarchist goddamnit. Or some kind of socialist. I don't know. Let's not get too hung up on definitions.

Managing me today is a man who worries about everything consistently. He panicked because I was three minutes late. One of my co-workers dubbed him 'the mother hen' because he's always clucking over every last detail.

Last night I watched 'Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields' at the BFI as part of the London Film Festival. It wasn't massively illuminating about their personal lives and it didn't reveal much that the average Magnetic Fields obsessive doesn't already know. But it's always wonderful to see the band in action/live/making music/talking. I love to think of Stephin sitting in a gay bar for eight hours at a time with a cocktail in his hand writing songs. This is his typical lyrical process.
One thing I didn't know much about were the accusations of racism toward Stephin in the blogosphere, which were based on the fact that he didn't like hip hop and there weren't many black artists on his list of his 100 favourite records, and the fact that he liked the song 'Zippa-dee-doo-dah' from the racist Disney movie 'Song of the South'. He did not say he liked the film although he was falsely quoted as such. Interestingly no one who accused Stephin of being racist in the furor was a person of colour.
After the film there was a Q and A with the directors and Stephin, who was his usual chipper self. It's funny that the directors were friends of Stephin and were so bright and bubbly next to the king of morose.

When I left the BFI I was in quite a wistful mood, so walked out into the evening and across waterloo bridge over the thames, and saw london was all lit up and crowded and I thought how much I love this city. Even though it's too expensive to live in and too exhausting and at rush hour all you can see is tired dead eyes. But that's capitalism for you. I went past the gays in soho and ate over-priced but yummy falafel and then I went home and fell asleep.

Showbiz cattle

2010-10-01T06:45:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to see the Irrepressibles at KX Scala. I went with my friend who writes for a popular gay publication so I got in free, one of the great perks about having journo friends. We also got to meet the PR and a celebrity type and people offered to buy me a drink and everything (but alas I'm trying to be on the wagon right now...). I embarassed myself slightly by being too much of an eager beaver (showbiz people always make me nervous). We all got special purple wristbands which meant we could go in the VIP lounge. We did and it was so VIP it was empty. I thought I'd bump into some minor celebrity in there at least. It was through a staircase that smelled a bit like the chemical they use to clean toilets. Showbiz is glamarous!

I'd never actually heard of the Irrepressibles before the morning of the gig when my friend texted me, but he told me they put on quite a spectacle and they sounded a bit like Anthony and the Johnsons so that sounded good. When I got to the Scala I was struck by a couple of things, firstly, the queue. I'd never even heard of this band, clearly I had been living under a rock! The queue was enormous. Then upon getting in I noticed the stage looking very different to your regular scala night. It was all decked out like a christmas tree with lights and mirrors and there were various instruments including a double bass, a cello, something that looked like a giant xylophone and possibly a harp.
When the band came on I was stood behind two tall people so I could just make out the lead singer stood at the centre of the stage, looking like a stocky, dashing -but slightly shoreditch- young rogue and his cohorts around him, beautiful glittering topless boys, and glittering girls, all dressed in outfits that make them look like sparkly pansexual nymphs from a magical forest. For the first song it was dark anyway and I think they were all very close to the floor. The music did sound quite Anthony and the Johnson's-esque, but by the second song you could see the spectacle take off. I moved myself to a better vantage point and the music began to swirl and soar. And as it did so, all the musicians, who formed a V shape onstage (the lead singer being the base of the 'V' and the glitter boys being its front prongs stretching out into the audience) moved together in unison whilst playing, so you got the sense of one entity and like you were watching some kind of opera rather than a regular gig. The boy closest to me was a sexy topless fella with an oboe (you can imagine the connotations and he was clearly enjoying them!)
Hardly a word was spoken by the lead singer the whole time, save for when he was singing and when he did slightly smug theatrical kisses (a bit adam ant and the set design was probably as high budget as an adam ant video). It was completely captivating. Nice one.

Today I'm back in the library. Only four more hours to go before the next musical adventure...

Potential

2010-09-28T03:46:00.000-07:00

OK, so hoping not to die/go mad at 27. Sometimes I'm OK and sometimes there's a black cloud over my head that feels like a brain tumour or it feels like there's some snarling beast in me about to rip out and wreak havoc and hatred against those I love and those I don't. Shit. Everyone keeps telling me the essence of me is not evil, so I try to believe them, and I guess sometimes I do. There's a big conflict going on in my head. I guess that's what mental illness is.

Right now all is tranquil and boring in some north london Library. It's my first day at this one and I feel a bit like I'm working in a museum. Next door is Keats' house so I'm all touristic I guess. It's kind of a nice library, but sleepy and rich...

I read an awesome interview with Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist and critic of the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and the inhumane treatment of Palestinians. He completely changed his views from growing up hating Palestinians to seeing the injustices waged against them by the Israeli government and miltary and speaking up about what he saw in Gaza and the West Bank. Needless to say this has made him less than popular amongst many in his home country and yet he stated it was completely impossible for him as a human being to ever water down or deny the terrible events and mistreatment to which he bore witness. He said he wrote because he didn't want his fellow Israelis to be able to say they didn't know. I really admire anyone who has the guts to speak out even if it means they're going to be hated. I wish I was more like that.

I would do a link to the article, but I don't know how. It was in the Independent on Sunday 24th September. I will start doing links when I work it out...

Yikes

2010-09-20T19:06:00.000-07:00

Just woke myself up by trying to strangle my self. Yikes. I was having a horrible nightmare, one of my friends was a tortoise that had lost their shell and risked dying and her dad had just died, so I suggested using his old shell, she said that wouldn't work because if you used the shell of someone related to you you could contract all manner of genetic illnesses, so she had to begin a very slow slog to find a new one.
Meanwhile Beethoven was my little brother, I was walking the streets of somewhere which was in the middle east, going into bookshops and finding picture books illustrating the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It then emerged Beethoven had gone mad and I'd taken him to a mental hospital where they'd tried to restore his sanity by cutting off most of his hand. The idea was that the shock of having your hand cut off was meant to restore you to sanity. In actual fact he died from his injuries. I went home to tell my mum and dad. The dream kind of happened by jumping about in dates and places. First I was at home being very sad because my genius little brother had just died, the world was sad in fact. Next I was remembering how it had happened and I was back in the middle east, going to visit Beethoven, because I'd heard he'd gone crazy and I really wanted to find him and help him. He was found in a seedy as hell brothel where all the client guys wore handcuffs. He was wearing his handcuffs and on a bed with an eastern european girl with bleached blonde hair. In what I thought must be unusual for a client at a brothel, he was loving fingering her and going down on her and he was amazing at it, she kept saying, 'oh my god, oh my god, this is the best sex I've ever had! I know it sounds like I'd say that to all my clients but really this is amazing!'
As I entered the brothel (which no longer seemed to be in the middle east, but somewhere seedy in new york perhaps...) I saw a dog bowl and a drunk guy sat next to it. When he saw me he threw a bottle at me and told me to get lost but I managed to get in in time to see my little brother Beethoven pleasuring this sex worker. Both were having an amazing time it seems, enraptured with one another's bodies. But then morning came and Beethoven was on the bed alone and the brothel became a squat type place at the end of a party and various wasted idiots came in and started mocking Beethoven who was now visibly confused and depressed. I took him away with me and he offered little resistance. He was looking pretty sick and confused so I took him to a mental hospital, the location here becomes unclear, maybe we were in the UK or New York or Jerusalem or somewhere else. I put him into the mental hospital which looked dodgy and trashy as hell and watched as they started sawing half his hand off. I assumed they knew best and that this must be the only way to save him, but after they had done it I realised what a bad idea it was and took him to another hospital, the bit of flesh from half his hand hanging off. By this time it was too late and Beethoven died soon after. I returned home to my parents house and waited there for my mum and dad to get back. They did and they already knew. They were flustered and could not look at me. I looked in a copy of the Radio Times (something they always have in their house, and which I always look in when I go to their house, since there is little to do at my parents house except watch TV) and saw that their were lots of programs honouring Beethoven's life on TV. I pointed them out to my mum, who angrily said she couldn't see them. I felt like they blamed me for what happened to Beethoven. I then burst into tears and said 'it wasn't my fault, it wasn't my fault, it wasn't my fault' and my mum hugged me for a long time and comforted me and said, 'I know it wasn't' but my dad looked on in silence, he wasn't so sure. 'I didn't know they'd try and cut his hand off in that horrible place' I kept saying.
Lastly I was back trying to fix tortoises back together, they were completely dis-coloured so they'd turned white and brittle, like dried up crabs. I was trying to put them back together but I was worried I'd put the wrong ones together and they were related and they'd get some genetic disorder. Mind you, they didn't look so good either way. Then I started gagging horrifically and the gagging woke me up. I woke up and thought, why am I gagging? I must need to be sick or something, then I realised my hands were prized around my neck and I was trying to strangle myself in my sleep. Really fucking scary. I know I need to watch it. Having really horrendous nightmares is nothing new, but the self strangulation -well actually it's happened a few times before but this time was scariest cos I actually felt like it was doing something severe-. Maybe no more drink or drux for me for a while again.

I read an interview with Bob Hoskins in the Guardian. I have no desire to be Bob Hoskins and I am not a fan, the only thing I can really remember him doing is that bloody BT advert. But he said that if he wasn't an actor he'd be a serial killer because as an actor you get to act out all the violent and evil impulses you shouldn't have. This made me feel all the more encouraged to take an acting course, which I've been thinking about, but been concerned about the limits that might get placed because of the perception of my gender, etc.

Anyway, I remember watching an episode of Neighbours where they said it's impossible to strangle yourself. Hopefully that's true.

PS Forgive the dodgy cultural stereotyping in this dream - alas I can't control my subconscious!

Rip It Up and Start Again

2010-09-16T00:11:00.000-07:00

So, first new blog post in about six months. Six months ago when I last posted I was having a nervous breakdown and my post was a plea for help. I didn't really expect that to be the purpose of this blog. Anyways I deleted it, much like I end up deleting all my blogs in the end that aren't 'fictional' stories...I do want to write about going mad some day, especially because of experiencing what seems like an amazingly swift recovery from all that. But there are complications. But I'm not going to go into it again here for now.

I couldn't resist the urge to start writing a blog again because of a few things. I wrote some tongue in cheek reviews for the Pink Paper (I'm officially not a sell out cos I didn't get paid) and a lot of people really liked them, also some people thought they were shit, which is fair enough too, but it made me think, well I do have a talent and/or at least a compulsion to write about stuff constantly and I'm just squandering that and going brain dead because of fear. I find it much easier to sit in work all day and then come home and lie mind numbed in front of trash tv or facefuck than to actually write shit. But it's also driving me mad. I sit around thinking so many thoughts and being such a ridiculous show off, I've never thought it's worth experiencing anything unless you then express it to all and sundry. This coupled with the fact of being acutely self conscious, distrustful of my own brain, scared of criticism and scared of what other people think creates a bit of a conflict. But fuck it, I probably need to harden up.

The other thing that inspired me to start blogging again was reading Berlin Bromley by Bertie Marshall. Bertie (or 'Berlin' as he created himself back then) was a member of the Bromley Contingent (bunch of Sex Pistol fan type punk kids from the 70s, including Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Severin and Jordan who appeared in Derek Jarman's Jubilee and no doubt many others who were to be well known). It's so gripping I couldn't put it down, cliched as that is. Reading about all the punk parties and antics and drugs and punk frequented lesbian clubs right through to the not so young fag anymore actually visiting his namesake city for the first time in the noughties and finding himself destitute staggering around the city dirty and penniless, sleepless and linguistically challenged. I like punk and new wave but I never had much interest in the lives or histories of the people on that scene until my housemate waxed lyrical about it many many times and I began to realise how fascinating it was. I can't say my life is comparable to Berlin/Bertie and I don't aspire to be a Bromley Contingenter (I'm much too bleeding heart) but it did remind me of the value of telling stories from your life. I'd probably even be fascinated by the autobiography of a trainspotter, or at least a day in their life, knowing what makes them tick. So yeah, writing things down forever. Or until they become too cringy and you can't help but erase them.

I will continue to write short fiction on this when I actually do some again!

What I'm doing with this blog

2009-12-16T15:59:00.000-08:00

So I'm currently having a wee quandry...I enjoy blogging, it's one of the only things that keeps me sane through bloody work (when will capitalism be over? This is silly). Yet I find it completely impossible not to share very personal info in my blogs, otherwise I feel like I'm censoring myself. I mean it's still censored to some degree, what isn't? Yet...it doesn't quite feel safe for me to spill my little guts out for all and sundry. So I usually kill my blogs before the year is out thanks to fits of paranoia (actually all the old stuff I've written in this one still exists, it's just hidden, some of it may come back in a more fictitious context some day!) Possibly I will get me a livejournal and make it friends only!

Anyways, whilst not wanting everyone to see my guts, writing is one of the things I love doing most (besides jumping around on stage like a lunatic and any kind of performing stuff that I can actually do) so I really really really do want people to read my short stories. Strangely, no one's flocking to publish me, hence still keeping this blog! I am going to keep it mostly for my stories and make it a bit more public.

Any comments be they critical or supportive or both or neither are very welcome.

Thanks, Len

My Mouth, Your Ear

2009-11-26T10:44:00.000-08:00

MY MOUTH YOUR EAR – an afternoon of queer spoken word.

3pm – 8pm, Sunday 13th December

Lift n Hoist, 1 Queen’s Row, Camberwell, London

My Mouth Your Ear is a queer spoken word afternoon where performers and writers share stories, poetry, performances, raps, rants, zine articles, blogs, fact, fiction and generally anything you can use your mouth and a mic for.

suggested donation of £1- 3

Performances, mulled wine, cake.

Performing on 13th December:

JAY BERNARD. Currently 'editor' of Dissocia Zine, which combines dry wit, post-irony and non-existence. She is author of Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (2008), and was recently poet in residence on two allotments in Oxford and London, and at the Benenden School in Kent. Jay has performed at venues such as Buckingham Palace, LadyFest and Croydon library. She blogs at brrnrrd.wordpress.com.

CHARLOTTE COOPER. I've been making, publishing and performing things for donkeys years, but I've been getting into trouble for quite a bit longer. Some of this is explained at www.charlottecooper.net

SWITHUN COOPER. Swithun's poetry has appeared in magazines including Time Out, Magma, Chroma and Poetry London, and the anthology City State: New London Poetry. This year he won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors.

YALINI DREAM. Lankan Blood, Manchester Born, Texas bred and Brooklyn steeped, YaliniDream is a Queer Sri Lankan Tamil raised in outside lands. She conjures spirit through her unique blend of poetry, theater, song, and dance. Check out her work on www.myspace.com/yalinidream

FOX FISHER. Founder of SALUTE! Design and CubCulture screen-printing, Fox is a creative who also enjoys rapping and dancing and having many fingers in many pies.

LEN LUKOWSKA. Sometimes a writer, sometimes a performer. Generally an undisciplined faggy layabout who works in a library and needs more sleep.

HEENA PATEL (Manchester). Recovering ex-optimist. Dog-fancier. Hates wet feet. Avid Red Dwarf fan. 29, still not out.

Compere KAT REDSTONE. Kat has taken part in and devised performance since she was young, playing all manner of characters, creatures and genders!

CHARLOTTE RICHARDSON ANDREWS. London-raised writer/journalist. Queer, feminist and unashamedly opinionated. Deputy Editor at Wears The Trousers, a female-centric,
online/print music magazine.

NB we don’t have a running order yet, performances will be throughout the afternoon/eve.

If you are interested in performing or reading at My Mouth Your Ear please email us with a sample of writing, preferably something you would like to read at the event. We’d love to hear from you whether you have done a hundred gigs or have never shown your writing to anyone. We also invite you to bring pieces of writing by others which you have found particularly inspiring and would like to read out at the event, again in any format.

For more information email us at mymouthyourear@gmail.com

Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=201698148453&ref=mf