Untitled demo tape, 2003

The one (and only, to date) occasion I sent out demo tapes was after recording these three songs in the wake of a first-rate break-up in 2003. No one replied, which is fine. I can’t guarantee I remembered to provide any contact details. You’re welcome.

(OH, and the first track is all sine waves through nested delay lines and is almost guaranteed to give you a migraine if you’re at all susceptible to that sort of thing.)

alert to the light

L’Ange du Foyer

Max Ernst, “L’Ange du Foyer, ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme” (1937)

an instance of distance

This morning was the morning I realised I had lost my wallet. (It finally turned up, halfway to our friend’s house, when I pulled the passenger seat all the way forward.) He helped look for it by driving me up there, which I’m grateful for, but I could feel the suppressed anger as clearly as I could feel my own suppressed panic. I think it’s probably the case that I can expect sharp reminders of this episode regularly over the next couple of weeks.

It has been instructive, though, because I think I got to the root of something – while I was walking along outside the school, feeling punished and angry and dreadfully tired – that’s been bothering me since I got here. There are, I think, basically two of him.

(Here in fairness I should point out that if there are as few as two of me, I’m probably making good progress.)

Anyway, there’s the good one who’s encouraging and creative and who plays music like he just discovered it and who’s  thoughtful and open. I love this person a hell of a lot. And then there’s the one who’s guarded, who’s intensely and icily  hostile to anything – tax returns, lost wallets, staff meetings – that introduces uncertainty into his world, who can and does raise all shields at the first sign of heavy weather and abandons anyone outside to the ravages of the elements.

I will be clear: I hate this person more than any other person in the world. I live in fear of him. He causes me intense life-killing pain in perfect cognisance that he is doing so, and there is nowhere I can escape to when he hurts me.

Returning to my favourite subject, though, I am pretty certain that he could say something very similar about me, if it occurred to him to do so. In my case, the bad sport – from this perspective – is forever and inconsolably disgusted at [edited pronoun for clarity: my] failure to live up to a mutable set of unattainable standards. (I don’t believe I cause him, anyone, deliberate pain, but I am well aware that in this state I exude a sort of suffocating, annihilating unhappiness, which is terrible.)

Mastering my relationship with this bitter twin has been, continues to be, the great unfinished work of this part of my life, but making sense of the symptoms (the irritability, the swift plunge into despair, the way I cry in these horrible wracking sobs, the concussive waves of selfish resentment, the sharp stab of yearning for an imagined alternative, the terrifying dread that I might be an impostor in this relationship, most of the posts I removed from this blog about a month ago)  – where I can be confident that the bitter twin is a product of my troubled relationship with my father, which in some ways resembles my troubled relationship with him, while his dark half’s existence is a product of his relationship with his father, which in some was resembles his relationship with me (herald of uncertainty, generator of boring chaos, person who keeps stopping to hitch up his trousers because they don’t fit anymore, fuss magnet) – does allow me some private consolation, which is the only kind reliably available.

But I do not have no idea what is going on. It’s wonderful to be able to write that.

Weekend links

From the day-job dept: a method of using a Dropbox-synced folder as a remote backup location for your Git repositories. Works nicely for me.

Christine Miserandino’s spoon theory of life with a chronic illness.

Marcello Carlin on the strange and frightening world of Jim Reeves.

so-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs)

The late Josef Skvorecky on jazz in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. I have got to get that book.

Matt’s wonderfully bewildering blog.

I’ve been a regular reader of Tatsuya Ishida’s Sinfest strip for around, bloody hell, eleven years now, and in that time it’s become the standard by which I judge webcomics, in which a four-panel pen-and-ink strip supports explorations of modern paranoia, God’s indifference to the suffering of his creation, important consumer issues, and animal metaphysics. Some time ago, large full-colour (and frequently dialogue-free) strips began running on Sundays, expanding on the four-panel strips that run the rest of the week, and today’s is a particularly impressive example. A soul escaped from Hell has attracted the unwelcome attention of Death, who considers him, perhaps correctly, as unfinished business. The composition here blows my mind.

'Drumming', Steve Reich, as photographed by Martin Klimas

I read about Martin Klimas, whose recent speaker-destroying work is covered here.

Nick Lowe sings ‘Stoplight Roses’:

Leaving marks

I’ve begun tutoring a group of students in the introductory compsci classes here. I seem to be doing okay so far, if the comments made to the lecturers are anything to go by. I’m apparently “very patient” and “know what they’re going through”. I just don’t know what to make of this.

Fortunately I’m too busy, in any case: I’m writing a course to deliver in May, which will be about twenty hours of lecturing, eight three-hour practical sessions and an exam. Mustn’t forget to write an exam.

This last week, education institutions across the country have been participating in Israeli Apartheid Week, which advances the somehow contentious opinion that what Israel has been doing is shitty, vicious and ill-conceived. There’s a thing tomorrow that I’m participating in. Apparently the deputy something or other here has outed herself as an aggressive Zionist and has been suppressing the student body’s participation in this, so I’m going to be sure to try and tell her to fuck off as and when I see the opportunity.

Beyond that, I don’t know what to write. The programming and writing is going almost suspiciously well, I’m looking forward to visiting the UK in June, I’m very bothered by the direction the UK is heading in, I’m a bit fed up, I’m a bit excited, some things disappoint me, some things make me happy.

So, hello. Here’s a Fennesz song. It has a lovely tune in it.

Weekend links

“He knew that there is a lot more to be read in everyday life than in mere words…” – Oliver Farry on Georges Perec.

Chilly and refreshing but by no means cold, I’ve been enjoying Ben Taylor’s alluring Dream #6.

I’ve recently discovered artist Al Columbia. There is something authentically dream-like about his work that completely absorbs me. Here’s “I Was Killing When Killing Wasn’t Cool“. Don’t omit to examine the unique “Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days”, which you can actually hold in your hands like an adult.

From the “things I want to play with when I have the time” dept: the Mozilla Foundation’s introduction to HTML5.

This week I also discovered the late Hans Reichel, typographer and guitarist of apparently liquefactive talent:

(Tip of the hat to Destination: Out, who have licensed a stack of Reichel’s albums for download.)

When I do have a little time, I’m dipping in and out of J.P. Costello III’s The How & Tao of Old-Time Banjo. Not that I own a banjo.

A couple more songs:

Popul Vuh, “Morgengruss II” (from the Aguirre soundtrack)

I knew I was onto a good thing with my then-prospective Masters supervisor when he forwarded me a flyer for a Werner Herzog season at the local repertory cinema.

And, to commemorate the closure of the greatest pub in the known universe, here’s one-time house band The Two Petes, meting out the most glorious kicking to “MacArthur Park”.