UK Gay Community Falls In Love With Football

UK Gay Community Falls In Love With Football

So say the Guardian. People in ‘liking popular things’ shocker.

The London That Never Was - Part 1 in an irregular series

Perhaps I was a little harsh on the quality of some of London’s riverside architecture. Especially when you consider that once upon a time the good people of Battersea could have been given this

Metropolimbo

Metropolimbo

Perhaps the biggest disadvantage with growing up in a surburban satellite such as the towns within the Zone 5/6 boundary is that while you feel comfort in being able to experience both urban thrills and rural bliss quicker than most, you can unfortunately end up knowing not as much about either as may be desired. Metroland et al = limbo. The people there don’t tend to grow up yearning to escape to the big city, because the big city is only 45 minutes away on the Tube anyway. Likewise there’s no craving for the idealised simplicity of country life, because once you’re into Zone 5 the woodland/office block ratio really starts to tip towards the former’s favour. Growing up with cattle-filled farmland AND multiple Tube routes within equal reach I always felt re-assured by having these ‘options’ - nurturing - if not a key influence in - my blatant general dilletantism in life.

Only, now I live in Zone 3, with an urge to get even closer to the centre, and I find myself constantly struggling when it comes to knowing and recommending places to go and things to do. It’s a complacency perhaps not recognised by the abundance of people I know who live in Zone 3 but originally hail from other places in the UK, more often than not THE NORTH. Because of course when people move to London after college or whatever, they’re not going to take it for granted, they’re going to want to live reasonably close to some ‘action’ and seek out the places to go and the things to do in them. This could mean anything from just knowing a little place on a side street that does great tapas, to having been to all the big clubs at least once out of curiosity AND convenience. Anglophiles from overseas who’ve settled in the centre only in the last few years or visit London several times a year can also have this edge over a suburbanite like myself, who bitches about the place all too often thinking they know it so well.

So lately, because I have been living in an area that was previously alien to me (Harringay), and working in an area that previously felt so hostile or just plain indifferent (Old Street/Hoxton), having got to know them a bit more in that time, I realise more and more how little I did and still do know - and I almost envy the people who did feel the compulsion to escape their hometowns to come here, to experience London fully and freshly as an adult. Then again, the wide-eyed fascination I felt for the city as a child what with being able to encounter it relatively easily still counts for an awful lot. Perhaps people growing up in the outskirts of NY’s outer boroughs, or the edge of any large thiriving city feel or have felt these things too. All of which makes me personally feel that there is a little catching up to do, and what better time than now?

Elders Of The Universe

Elders Of The Universe: It gives me great pleasure to pronounce K-Punk bang on the money in this post about the fabulous language of Marvel:

“Part of the reason why I love Marvel so much is that it inculcated a feeling for language in me at a young age. While the children’s books I was required to read were Relevant to Kids - i.e. boringly slaved to the reality principle (about pets and shopping precincts) - and written in an appropriately sensible, ‘accessible’ prose, Marvel’s language had the euphorically jargonized intensity necessary to bring unlife to its super-consistent hyperfictional cosmos.”

I am currently waiting for a package from Amazon which will contain several collections of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World series, which does this kind of thing too - not surprisingly, since Kirby’s scripting style was a kind of Frankenstein version of Stan Lee’s. They have the same glee and love of the concept-rush but where Lee had a copywriter’s joy in the flow of words, Kirby’s writing is all total impact, with natural speech utterly attenuated and emphases in the strangest places. His habit of putting semi-random scare-quotes round words just adds to the weirdness*. Fandom has never really embraced Kirby-The-Writer**, his style is just too crude, too intense, too anti-realist, especially for current tastes which view superheroes spouting pseudo-Mamet dialogue as some kind of triumph.

*(Backup scans to come when I get the books)

**(Kirby the concept-hive is another matter!)

Virginia Woolf’s ‘Lost London Essay’

Virginia Woolf’s ‘Lost London Essay’: linked more out of duty to the readership than admiration.

Practical Criticism II

Practical Criticism II: There were two serious questions/points lurking behind yesterday’s (somewhat sarcastic) proposals.

1/ Assuming that the tiny-review model for published music criticism is likely to dominate for at least a while, how best can those 50 to 100 words be used?

2/ As Marcello points out in the comments box, contexts and uses for a piece of music are necessarily subjective. But it’s just this kind of subjectivity that I find so attractive in the blogosphere (and not just the music blogosphere). Details about where people have enjoyed certain music most, honesty about how they actually listen to music. The standard mode of even long-form writing about music seems to imagine a contextless listening experience - an idealised (and probably averaged over several concentrated listens) communion of writer and music. This may well be the best way of writing about music - but is it, and is anything gained by treating music as something to be used rather than contemplated?

GIRLS ALOUD - “Love Machine”

GIRLS ALOUD - “Love Machine”

SKIFFLE IS BACK!!

Yrs, Easily Pleased, Tooting.