(co)incidentals

Miles at Eighty

2006-05-26T11:47:00.000+01:00

This week really is a week of eulogies. Not only does it mark the centenary of Ibsen's death, but Miles Davis was born eighty years ago on the 25th of May, only ten days after my own dear father. I discovered how close their birthdates were a few days ago and am still digesting it, charting significant years in their lives against each other. For instance 1974, the year I was born, was one year before Miles stopped playing music for five years and retreated into a dark world of sex and drug addiction, holding up in his apartment for months on end. This puts the sackscribbler to shame. And who's to say, were it not for my unexpected arrival on the scene, maybe my father would have jacked in his medical career and also gone for broke, developing an addiction to playing golf three times a day and travelling to the southern hemisphere during the dark winters to satisfy his needs.

Miles is one of my heroes and his artistic integrity and restlessness is a constant source of inspiration, pushing me to always try harder and open my imagination up just that little bit more. Without Miles contribution, the world would be a less interesting place and my ears would be paupers. In fact, I'm playing Kind Of Blue while writing this and am now on Flamenco Sketches, the closing track. Bill Evans is playing meandering notes across a slow blues and Miles has just come in to fill the space with fragile but resilient notes full of bittersweet regrets and terrible poignancies: a dark blues that would only get darker as the sixties progressed and America exploded.

Joan Didion, a writer whose austere staccato style is the closest literary equivalent to Miles' trumpet playing, opened a famous essay in 1967, one year before Miles began experimenting with electric instruments on Filles de Kilimanjaro, with the simple declarative sentence, 'The centre was not holding'. Over the next few years nobody did more to blow it apart than Miles Davis. Happy birthday Miles, no doubt playing a slow, sad solo somewhere in the heavens with your back to the Gods.

Henrik the Great

2006-05-23T11:23:00.000+01:00

There was an article on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning commemorating the centennial of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's death. Talking heads placed him as second only to Shakespeare in the Greatest Playwright Of All Time (TM) stakes and reminded the listener that his naturalism and concerns for the day to day lives of ordinary humans had played a great part in shaping modern drama. Also how his work means different things to different people depending upon where they are in the world. He is held in as high regard for his poetry as his drama in Scandinavia due to lyrical works such as Peer Gynt and Brand, in the People's Republic Of China women who subscribe to the burgeoning feminist movement are known as Norahs after the browbeaten wife who's had enough in A Doll's House, Hedda Gable remains the central role for ambitious actresses to interpret, James Joyce learnt Norwegian just so he could read his hero in the original language, and a wee boy in Scotland went on a pilgrimage to Oslo after being blown away by The Wild Duck at sixteen.

Henrik, I salute you, as fresh and essential and relevant as ever in a world no less bombastic or hypocritical or unjust than it was when you left it. Do you think you could just pop in a few more jokes next time?

Sing Your Life

2006-05-19T23:31:00.000+01:00

I've been revisiting the soundtrack to my mid-teens by seeing Morrissey, Billy Bragg and Roddy Frame live in quick succession (with Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile coming up a week today). I know all the words to all the songs of these artists and am happy to say they are as fresh and vibrant twenty odd years into their careers as when they started out. Entering his late-forties suits Morrissey very well, although the quiff looks a little fragile these days, Uncle Bill has certainly filled out around the middle (and made several references to food during his endlessly entertaining monologues) and Frame is as boyish as ever, but then he is a good few years younger then the other two. Still, even he has entered his forties now.

I think back to the times when I first saw these artists: Billy Bragg at the Hackney Empire for Hogmanay 90/91 when I was still at school, Roddy in '93 and Mozzer in '94 when I was at university. At school they were messiahs, telling it like it was, giving versions of romance and adult life that I wanted to experience, but were a million miles away from being stuck in a single sex Victorian prison in the Scottish Highlands. I've just put on Worker's Playtime, Bragg's album from 1988. It's still my favourite album of his, where he cut out the politics and wrote love songs full of detail and warmth and humour and substance. Worker's Playtime and Morrissey's Viva Hate introduced me to sounds and images that seemed very adult and sophisticated and that I could relate to much more than the American bands that I loved at the same time like Love, The Doors and The Velvet Underground. American bands were as exotic as summer holidays, but Mozzer and Uncle Bill described a world that was familiar and you longed to enter once you were grown up, so bleak and funny and vivid and real.

Now I'm older than these musicians were when they created those albums and I'm still a long way from that adult world of getting tattoos, driving cars, nasty break ups, Sunday pubs, marching against Tories and suburban dreams and dramas. Why? Because that world only lives in my imagination and has only ever lived in my imagination. But without it I wouldn't be quite the same person I am today.

Audiophile Heaven

2006-04-29T23:54:00.000+01:00

Over the past week I have not taken on any more freelance work in order to get properly stuck into my proposed second novel, which is slowly coalescing in my mind. I have one chapter finished and was hoping to have the second done by the end of this week, although I am horribly behind on my deadline because, well, because I've been listening to too much music on my extraordinary new headphones.

As a result of my sackscribbling habits I listen to music through iTunes on my computer, which consumes the majority of my available harddrive space (9698 tracks taking up 41.67 GB). After the revelation of listening through a pair of low grade Sennheisers, and spurred on by a headphones review in The Guardian, I decided to upgrade and buy myself the best I could manage within my budget. After a good deal of research online in various discussion forums and audio magazines I bought a pair of Grado SR325i headphones on eBay from the United States for £125 (they retail for more than double that in Britain).

Bloody hell! It's as though I had previously been listening to music in the corridor of the recording studio where it was being made and had just been invited to sit in with the boys as they worked. This compares with the best description I have read of their sound as compared to their nearest competitor, Sennheiser:

'Listening to a pair of Sennheisers sounds as if you are sitting in the audience hearing both the musicians and the room effects while the Grado’s gave the detail of the instruments as if you were sitting right on stage with them. The feeling I get from the 325’s is one of more reverberation! In other words, it sounds as if I am sitting on the stage with the musicians in a small empty hall. The music is resonating in those cavernous aluminum cylinders of the 325’s.'

Everything sounds three sixty now, everything breathes and you can make out what each musician is doing and where they are in the mix, especially the bass, where you get every note being played, although the high end is also a revelation, clear and bright and crisp. Everything is so detailed. You have a real sense of the musicians playing with each other and listening to each other very closely, what they are thinking, their timing and the slightest variations to the beat, etc. Effectively, my entire music collection is transformed. So if you excuse me while I just listen to one last album...

It's Bunuel's World, We Just Live In It

2006-04-25T10:19:00.000+01:00

This morning I watched Luis Bunuel's penultimate film, The Phantom Of Liberty. Effectively the film is a series of anecdotal sketches disrupting the usual conventions of bourgeois life so that the viewer might revise what 'normal' behaviour is. Not one of his best films, but distracting enough. It does, however, feature one of the most memorable scenes from any of his films. A small dinner party is held by a couple with a young daughter. There is the usual polite conversation about current affairs and a visit one of the guests has recently made to the opera, until a guest excuses himself from the table. He walks down the corridor and enters a small room, locks it, sits down, pours himself a glass of wine and... eats dinner.

You see, throughout the course of the dinner the guests have had their skirts hitched up and their trousers around their ankles and are sat on toilet seats around a dining table. I've always loved this scene. It's not exactly the most subtle, but it seems to me the apotheosis of what Bunuel was trying to achieve, restlessly questioning and subverting the conventions and proprieties of European life after a few millennia of war and suffering and cracked despotism. Now that we've a degree of freedom and self determination in our lives what do we do? Take pains to appear respectable and avoid ugly or distasteful conversation while trying to fuck our neighbour's wives behind their backs and indulge in various morbid obsessions. More often than not one hand cannot see what the other is doing because then the whole edifice would crumble. And the more respectable a public figure the greater the hypocrisy. Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.

A few years ago I listened to an interview on the radio with Jean Carriere, Bunuel's collaborator and screenwriter. Carriere said that in order to stoke their imaginations they would sit in isolation at the beginning of the working day and contemplate killing their fathers, sleeping with their mothers and betraying their countries. Then the creative juices would start to flow.

Cultural rituals and conventions fascinate me and are subjects I try to explore in fiction. I've lived in various places across the world and possibly the greatest pleasure is observing how different cultures go to the toilet, eat their food, make love and spend their free time. What is nature and what is nurture? How much of what we do and think is native to ourselves and how much is simply the unthinking response to our environment? How much are we in control? These questions fascinate me endlessly.

Slippery Characters

2006-04-20T01:01:00.000+01:00

This post is partly in response to my friend Andrew's recent post on his blog (http://www.rejectiondiaries.blogspot.com./), which featured a famous passage taken from Rilke's Letters To a Young Poet. Well, I also dabble in this fool's game of writing fiction in the hope of someday getting published and making a sufficient amount of money from it that I can continue to do it to the exclusion of all other concerns. Anyway, I recently got an email from a fellow poster on the Wong Kar Wai fansite I've included as a link asking for advice about writing and getting paid for it seeing as I'm 'a bit older and all'. This was my response:

'I do indeed get paid for writing and work as a freelance writer, not for my fiction though but for commercial work, writing copy for web sites. This suits me fine, but it does leave less time for creative writing. I have written a novel and several short stories, but haven't been paid a penny for any of it. Sent out my first novel to fifteen agents a few years ago and although one agency was interested nothing came of it. The fact is it is extremely hard to make money or even get published as a fiction writer, but one way to start is by submitting your stories to short story writing competitions. Competitions also give you the motivation to complete things to set deadlines.

Other than this my advice is to read as widely as you can and write as often as you can. You say you are an autodidact. Well, in the respect that I haven't done a writing course or have a degree in English literature, so am I. This doesn't concern me in the least because the only way of learning about writing is to practice it as frequently as you are able. Try to get into a routine and set some time aside in your day for writing. And if nothing comes of it don't lose hope but persist. Muriel Spark, the highly acclaimed British writer, died last week and in her obituaries it was noted that she had her first novel published at the age of thirty eight after winning a short story competition and that she was so penniless she was only able to do this with assistance from Graham Greene, who admired her winning story.

Maybe such a breakthrough will never happen for either of us, but the main thing is to keep going and never give up.'

This is what I wrote and it pretty much reflects how I feel. Writing is indeed a fool's game, but then so are many other things that humans get up to and we are very fortunate to live in a culture where writing doesn't get us thrown into gaol. Writing can often be a form of neurosis, but probably a minor one, an urge to get everything sewn up in words, give structure and beauty and meaning to an insensible world. Hell, all I know is that writing makes me happy, like drinking and gambling makes others happy. Writing is certainly a good deal cheaper than most other pursuits (free, in fact), but I suspect it is a good deal lonelier too and takes up considerably more time. One final thought. It seems to me you can't ever really trust writers. Slippery characters best left to their own devices. They leave too much of themselves on the page, you see.

Iraq Descends Into Civil War

2006-04-09T02:29:00.000+01:00

Goddamn it, doesn't it take the longest time for the simplest things to sink in, doesn't wisdom and self knowledge mark the soul slowly and steadily as streams become rivers and countries turn rotton. The time it takes to make a baby is the time it takes to make a cup of tea. I asked my brother before he died what he thought would happen next. Return to the stars, from whence we came. Words to that effect. So life regenerates. So we fuck the planet, so what. Planets are more numerous than grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. Common as muck. To see eternity in a grain of sand. Fat lot of good that does us when the rent's overdue and we've no means of paying. Too many of us, that's the problem. Darwin's sick joke. Don't think I'll be adding to our number, got my hands full looking after number one. Maybe the pursuit of happiness is our downfall, maybe Christopher Columbus was our downfall, maybe interpretations of history are our downfall.

There's nothing so remarkable we've achieved as a species to make us worthy of record in posterity. Pains and pleasures received and given. Vapid, wasted energies for good and ill. Physics and chemistry, like Alabam', don't give a damn, though maybe there's a mathematical deus ex machina. Just a great big herd of animals thinking we're better than our brothers consequence of the patina of civilization.

And here's the thing. I love it all, love it desperately, love it unto death. Love, love, love. Just wish Columbus never discovered America.

Karmacoma

2006-04-02T13:23:00.000+01:00

Two years ago today, the world almost ended. Or it almost ended for me at least. April the 2nd 2004 was the kind of alcohol fuelled freewheeling devil-may-care day I used to specialise in. Responsibility has never been one of my strong points, and getting drunk absolved me of the notion of even having to attempt it. Drunks don't have to consider the consequences of their actions. Drunks stop the hands of time passing and achieve a few hours of mindless spontaneity. If they play their cards right and drink intensively, if they really put their all into it, drunks hit the jackpot of achieving a complete blackout and wake up the next day with no idea of how they spent the previous evening. Blackouts are the holy grail for drunks, you see, because drunks can only manage very small doses of reality undiluted, otherwise they wouldn't drink. There are many reasons why drunks can't stomach 100% proof reality, or consciousness undistorted by intoxicants. It's often said Celts are genetically predisposed to drink, but I say that's balderdash, because I think it's more a state of mind, and such things are conditioned by culture and society. Well, I can't speak for anybody else here, but my alcoholism (let's call a spade a spade) arose out of two central failures: an inability to grow up and accept responsibility for my actions and a failure of the imagination. The first failure has already been documented, so let's move on to the second. By a failure of the imagination I mean an inability to empathise with different points of view and life experiences or take pleasure in the smallest and seemingly least significant details of life.

What the hell am I talking about? I said that two years ago today the world almost ended. This is because my spatial awareness and sense of balance was so affected by the alcohol I'd consumed that I fell backwards off a street level wall in central London and landed head first on concrete twenty feet below, fracturing my skull and incurring a severe head injury. An ambulance came and I was rushed to the intensive care department of the Royal London hospital in Whitechapel. I was in a coma that was artificially prolonged because there was a concern the pressure building up in my brain would kill me. It was touch and go for a few days, and then there was the question of how fully I'd recover. Two years on and I've finally made a full recovery and am back in the centre of life again. Things could have turned out very differently.

Naturally this experience has had a profound affect on me. The first thing I want to say is that it has brought nothing but good things, although of course I am deeply sorry for the pain and anxiety I have given my family and friends. It is certainly true that only a fool doesn't learn from their mistakes, and not many have made bigger mistakes than me and lived to tell the tale. So it would follow that I have comparatively more to learn, and this is probably also true. It took longer to learn some lessons than others. I'm ashamed to say that one near fatal accident wasn't enough to convince me that I couldn't drink again and it took an elbow dislocated as a result of a drunken fall followed by a two day spell in hospital to persuade me of that. I've been sober nine months now and don't miss alcohol one bit. Stopping drinking has been the best thing I've ever done and not having these constant disruptions to my consciousness has facilitated an almost zen like relationship with the world.

And what a wonderful world it is. You see, I certainly have the survivor's zest for life and am insufferably happy no matter what. Simply to enjoy life for what it is and contribute as best I can: this is what my accident has taught me.

Yadda Dada Yadda

2006-04-01T03:29:00.000+01:00

Here I am posting at half past three in the morning and beginning to feel one needs to be in good mental health and have a strong sense of identity to get through long nights of internet research. Maybe the trick is to be producing words, not consuming them. Or not to spend several hours listening to Cantopop and looking into the relationship between the internet and the contemporary art world: too many synthesised drum patterns, too many sites with multicoloured images flashing at you hyperactivity so you try clicking through them without getting anywhere. I mean, I've been in comas after serious accidents only to recover consciousness and not know who the hell I was, but give the patient an extended blast of Cantopop and a session looking through experimental, interactive artist's websites and he's only a phone call away from being taken into psychiatric care.

Allow me to elucidate. Tonight I've been researching an article about 'Art On The Internet' for a client and decided the time would best be spent with Faye Wong's greatest hits blasting through my headphones. The research didn't go terribly well and the article remains unwritten as I got sidetracked sifting through various artist's websites. I spent three years studying art at university over ten years ago and the whole justification for it being an academic subject seemed to rest on removing the artist's identity from the art that was produced. The artist really had very little to do with the piece of art, which had arisen out of a series of historical and social conditionals. This was not what an earnest, naive eighteen year old lost in the big city and somewhat hung up on the Norwegian malcontents, Edvard Munch and Henrik Ibsen, wanted to hear. As it happens, the news didn't go down terribly well with the wealthy, privately educated daughters of Albion who expected to be looking at pretty pictures for three years either. But Art History was feeling a little insecure at the time, and had to be treated with respect and all due seriousness.

All of which is a long way of saying a British liberal arts university education instructs young minds to be distrustful of concepts like genius, discussing art in anything other than the most objective terms, and to be especially wary of using words like love and beauty. Effectively we were told nothing was as it seemed in the visual world and images were out to trick and dupe us, to pull the wool over our eyes so they could have their evil way with us. Throughout the history of art, from Classical times through the Renaissance to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, art was propaganda for the ruling classes who commissioned it and consequently had final say over its content. This all changed dramatically over the last couple of hundred years and especially throughout the twentieth century, when ultimately anything could be art: from urinals and unmade beds to mass produced soup cans and dead animals. All for the sake of self expression and an investigation into contemporary ethics and whichever way the wind blew.

Fuck, I've lost the thread of what I was trying to say. Though the gist of it was that nothing on the internet was new and the naivete and flashing lights and promise of whacky worlds to explore made me think of how I felt at university (except without a Cantopop soundtrack). So whatever's going on visually on the web is very much in its infancy, around the toddler or terrible twos stage. It's all been done before, going back to Dada and similar movements. Right, this nonsense has taken me over an hour to write and Faye Wong is still going strong. Perhaps I've finally gone mad after all. You'll be the better judge of this than me, and the evidence is before you in the form of this post. Good night and thank you. I'm ready to get buckled up now, doc!

Orson and Me

2006-03-29T19:23:00.000+01:00

Orson Welles and me have one thing in common: we've both been involved in films shot in the Moroccan coastal town of Essouaria.

In 2001 I was an extra on a film about the Piednoire during The Algerian War of Independence and the town served as a stand in for 1950s Algiers. I lived in Marrakech at the time and drove down to Essouaria, two hours due west on a decent road, with a few friends who were also working as extras for the day. No footage was actually shot until well into the afternoon, because the morning was spent in wardrobe and then it was lunchtime, taken by the poolside of a local hotel. Then it was too hot, then there was a lengthy discussion about where to place the camera, then another delay over some error with the camera filter. There seem to be a lot of delays and waiting around on film sets. Finally we walked about the open area between the harbour and the medina walls for ten minutes with the cameras rolling, before adjourning to a street cafe on the central square until they were ready to use us again. Sitting in my vintage clothing and beret, I felt like some kind of pretentious Hemingway or Fitzgerald wannabe, one of the flotsum and jetsum of American expatriates washed up on the Cote D'Azure between the wars, no talent to speak of except for hamming it up like one of the locals. It was all rather fun.

Two scenes were shot in quick succession as the light was fading, one of us as civilian bystanders waving little French flags and shouting Vive la France (I shouted out Vive la Frogs) as the French army rumbled past, and one of us looking devastated and running after the army as they retreated. A fairly painless way to earn £50. I remember the film was called Simon, so I just looked it up on IMDB and got a French short film of the same name made in 2001, running time 36 minutes. It could very well be the same film, but I have no idea as nothing else is written about it. There is no user rating either. Simon is still awaiting the requisite five votes for that, but I suspect the film has had no dramatic effect on the directon of filmmaking in France.

In 1948 Welles arrived in Essouaria to shoot a film of Shakespeare's play, Othello. I mentioned the delays and waiting around involved in making films: it took Welles the next four years and a further eight locations across Europe to finish the film, which won the Palm D'Or at Cannes in 1952. After that it was little seen until a complete restoration was done in 1992. This afternoon I watched the result and have been thinking about it ever since, walking back and forth from the gym, running on the treadmill, eating supper, glancing at the Channel 4 news. I've come to the conclusion that it's very good. Not just that, but it's also very relevent to the current political climate.

Now I confess I don't know Shakespeare's original play well, but it seems to me Welles' version is all about the terrible dangers of growing too isolated in a position of power. Although there are crowds and armies throughout the film, the central drama is all but empty of people. Although the sets are effective and atmospheric, they ultimately work as a metaphor for how imaginatively barren the corridors of power can become. When you're due to go into battle any moment, when you're under constant threat, there's no time to empathise with or understand your enemies point of view.

So there's Othello and Desdemona, Iago and Cassio and... that's it. Othello the Moor, as an outsider in the Venetian court whose marriage to Desdemona is initially refused by her father, hasn't got any friends. Othello nae mates. And he's further isolated by being chosen by the Venetian court to lead their forces into battle against the Turks. His power and authority is unquestioned. He sits in his tower awaiting the arrival of the Turks to commence battle. Desdemona, his lovely andradiantt bride, is with him. And then there's Iago, who wishes nothing but ill on the Moor, sowing seeds of doubt in Othello's mind. Now, Othello's a black and white kind of guy, that's how he's got as far as he has in life. Othello doesn't do doubt, all he wants is proof, evidence of Iago's suggestion that Desdemona is being unfaithful to him with Cassius. Othello lives on his wits, trusts to instinct; once he's got his evidence, even though it's uncorroborated and ultimately turns out to be false, he strikes without delay. You see, in times of war you want a strong leader, a man of action who follows things through. Remind you of anyone, folks?

Partie de Campagne

2006-03-28T01:30:00.000+01:00

Watched Renoir's forty minute film Partie de Campagne tonight, based on a short story by Maupassant. The story involves a petit bourgeois group of Parisiennes spending Sunday at a beauty spot on the banks the Seine. The group includes a shop owner, his wife, their pretty daughter, Henriette, and a somewhat absurd young man engaged to be married to Henriette. After a picnic the mother and daughter go boating with two young local men. Henriette ends up in the arms of one of the men in a secluded spot by the banks of the river; her sense of propriety is finally defeated by her desire, although the brief moment of joy is soured by the knowledge of her fate and tears run down her cheeks. Several years later we return to the same spot and her young amour revisits the scene to discover Henriette with her idiotic fiancee, now her husband. Nature surrounds them and the river flows inexorably onwards, unwitting, blameless, guiltless.

The film is magnificent and very French in its ultimate resignation of the way society orders and contains desire. There is a strong feeling that the important things in life are youthful innocence and summer days of pretty girls on swings, unaware they are being watched by every man in the area. If this is not what life is about, then what is? Renoir's camera movement is fluid and naturalistic until the seduction, when it closes in on all of Henriette's desires and fears and the poignancy of her situation, as though class and society frames and encloses her even amongst the banks of a river on a summer's day.

I've recently been watching a fair number of Kurosawa's films, who I find portentous and humourless. There is more subtlety, light and life in a single scene of Partie de Campagne than in any of his dreary hours of fighting and plotting and planning, the sturm und drang of masculinity. And women are merely a backdrop, whereas they take centre stage in Renoir, their warmth and naturalness subtly undermining their menfolk's pomposities and affectations. Kurosawa adapted a number of Dostoevsky's stories, and it's like the difference between Dostoevsky, who I've always agreed with Nabokov is a second rater, and the lightness of touch and generosity of Tolstoy.

Frugality

2006-03-27T01:06:00.000+01:00

'Here, anyone who doesn't serve an apprenticeship to frugality is definitely wasting his time.'

Bouvier, writing about Western interpretations of Japan. I find myself agreeing. A very good observation.

Coffee Is The Way Forward

2006-03-27T00:08:00.000+01:00

I seem to have to remind myself of this on a daily basis, but coffee is really the only way to get through concentrated bouts of writing. Tonight was a classic example of this. I just spent the past three hours storming through an article on how businesses can generate business leads on the internet. One of those sessions where everything goes like a dream and the article pretty much writes itself. Alongside coffee, the engine was Graham Coxon's new album, Love Travels At Illegal Speeds, which I listened to three times straight through in a row on iTunes on my new Sennheiser headphones that I got from my sister-in-law, Nicola. They're such a good move because the sound is incredible. They must have belonged to my brother who died of cancer two years ago, so it's nice to get something from him that has already considerably improved the quality of my life. He was a musician too, so it's a nice legacy.

So what's the album like? Well, the reason I bought it was that I bought his previous album, Happiness In Magazines, a few months ago and was very impressed with it: it only took about ten listens to wear thin on me. First impressions, the new album is possibly more consistent, though stuck somewhere around 1979. The lyrics are even slighter and more meaningless than his old buddy Damon Albarn's, and Coxon is not much of a singer, but this only makes it easier to listen to while writing, which I am usually unable to do. I'd say it was a safe and solid effort of very catchy tunes full of lovely guitar phrases. Our Graham, in his late thirties, is a bit of an overgrown adolescent emotionally, but he sure plays a mean guitar. Now, I've moved on to Mali Music for some kind of contrast of how far his old songwriting partner has moved in the past five years.

Okay, I don't see any point in writing more and it's late and I can't be bothered to edit what I've written and check for spelling mistakes. This'll do for now at half past midnight. Nighty night, kids. Now I'm going to read some more of Nicolas Bouvier's Japanese Chronicles while the coffee is still buzzing through my brain.

Virgin Post

2006-03-25T20:59:00.000Z

Here I am at nine o'clock on a Saturday evening submitting random thoughts to an unconcerned and less interested world. Why am I doing this? Well, a friend has just started his own blog and suggested I start one too. I spend a good deal of time online anyway, both at work and play. I am a freelance copywriter and I write content for web sites. I also spend inordinate periods of time aimlessly uncovering useless information, (window) shopping on eBay and Amazon, emailing, Skypeing and posting on this particular Wong Kar-Wai thread. One can do almost anything through the internet, so I thought I'd add a blog to my bag of tricks, hoping it will encourage me to keep a diary of the things in life that move me, interest me or amuse me.

I can also record my impressions of the endless number of films I get through the post and watch on the very laptop (12" Apple Powerbook G4) which I use to work and access the internet on. All of this I do in bed, editing and filtering my relationship with the world like some hubristic crackpot African dictator. How can I live such a life? Well, between these solipsistic sedentary bouts I get out into the world and roam around, everywhere from Mali to Mongolia. Oh, and I also write a good deal of fiction, so I suspect I live more in the world of the imagination than any other, but then again, don't we all give ourselves narratives with which to live out our lives? Other activities include regular trips to the gym (so I don't get bed sores or become morbidly obese), the occasional gig and cooking for my elderly parents.

I've just noticed that half an hour has passed since I started this, which seems a reasonable period of time to spend recording my debut post, so I'll leave it at that. No dramatic cliffhanger so you tune in the same time, same place tomorrow, I'm afraid, but of course I know I'm only writing this for an audience of one.