The Fractal Hall Journal

And then the Funvee gets blown up.

The economy may be collapsing, climate change accelerating, and Cthulhu may be turning up soon to eat everyone’s heads, but none of that matters because, with a big old load of cockrock, the Journal lurches back into existence. I’ll skip the deadly sin of blogging-about-blogging; needless to say, I haven’t been around for a bit, but now I am. Probably weekly from now on.

A couple of things of note:

Council leaders have compiled a banned list of the 200 worst uses of jargon, proving once again that people have too much time on their hands, despite the best efforts of Twitter, Facebook, and people who play with their toys on the internet. While there’s a lot of management bollocks on there, I’m not sure we should start banning various terms because people are too fick to know what words mean. Councils in Scotland are going to have a bastard of a time instructing lawyers if they can’t use “Advocate”, for a start.

Also, by implication the following unlisted phrases must be perfectly acceptable for everyday use in Local Government: “Willy-wobbling”. “Turdfaced fuckwit”. “Felch”.

2009 film previews: Only one thing could top not only a new Trek film, but also the Transformers sequel. And that’s THIS:

SO RIGHTEOUS.

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Of all the different kinds of guitar music I like, prog rock’s probably my least favourite. It’s a bit of a surprise that I’ve been listening to quite a bit of it over the past year, and that I’ve mentioned it a few times here.

There was a video not that long ago on YouTube of a school band doing a Yes track with Jon Anderson (I think) singing with them. I don’t have the link, and I don’t recall where I saw the video (either via Making Light or the Whatever), but it was a little piece of genius. As one commentator put it, the pomposity of prog meant it was never able to engage with the one thing it lacked; the enthusiasm of a group of teenagers thumping away at their instruments. That was probably why I ended up revisiting the world of unfeasably long album tracks.

That’s the thing that always comes up about prog. The overblown campness of it all. In the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war of rock, punk came out on top and that was the end of that. And I can’t help feeling a little sad at that, not least because punk has long outlived its usefulness, its iconography dug up, reanimated and repackaged as just about the least offensive musical opiate ever conceived.

Regardless of the merits or otherwise of the movement they came from, Pink Floyd are inarguably a legendary band. Wish You Were Here has been on the car for ages, and it’s one of the classics. There’s a reason it always turns up in those annual Bestest Ever charts.

It’s Have A Cigar I wanted to bring up. It starts off a straightforward rock track, with a funky bass line and Dave Gilmour doing a bluesier thing than on the rest of the album. It’s not obvious from the kind of thing Pink Floyd are remembered for, but Gilmour’s a hell of a blues player, even if it is the white boy 60s English blues thing of Keith Richards, Clapton and Peter Green (probably shouldn’t lump Green in there, actually, because if BB King says he’s the real thing then that’s good enough for me).

And then we hit 0:25 with a synthy SPOING and it all gets a bit odd.

I imagine that small bit is the musical equivalent of finding out Watchmen isn’t really a formulaic murder investigation. You’re pootering along as normal and suddenly WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT FUCKING SQUID THING. Maybe Watchmen would have been better without the psychic mollusc. Maybe the Floyd track would have been better without the psychadelic assault. But I don’t think so.

Have A Cigar sums up prog to me, and a lot of rock music in a way. The SPOING of the synths is going to turn a lot of people off as being, well, silly at best. And it is deeply, deeply silly. Even so, I can’t help think that when the band first put it together, they thought it was the most edgy, sophisticated thing they could have done. Rugged, fearless experimentation that can’t have the same effect on us after the 80s showed how commonplace electronica would become. That day in the studio, I bet they were as excited as fuck.

Maybe the only people who can really appreciate it are the kids like those teenagers covering Yes, who haven’t got to the point where they only way they can enjoy something like that is in an ironic fashion. Even the irony isn’t a problem, though. Even if the only way you can enjoy it is by rolling your eyes at your dad as he warbles along to something he loved when he was young, and accepting the silliness of those crazy old hippies, than it’s all good. It doesn’t matter what path you have to take before you like something, it only matters that you’re having fun.

Because you know who else lives in that SPOING? Jack Kirby. The guy was an extraordinary talent, an artistic visionary, and deeply silly all at the same time. Something like the original OMAC is, in most ways, fucking stupid, but exactly as fucking stupid as Pink Floyd. Just about everything you could use to defend the King you could use to defend prog, via childlike enthusiasm or ironic detachment, though I suspect the most effect argument is always a matter of craft. You’d have to be an idiot to argue that Kirby didn’t have an incredible technical talent, or that the guys who wrote Shine On You Crazy Diamond weren’t exceptional musicians.

Jack Kirby Lives In The SPOING. Tell me you don’t want that on a t-shirt.

Click here for the Delineation Archive.

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Hello, readers, and a happy new year to all. A proper one this time, rather than the perfunctory one from the other day.

Plenty of ups and downs over the past few months all over the place, which is a bit of an understatement. I certainly can’t remember a New Year starting so, you know, unpredictably. Where the Journal’s concerned, I think I’ve just about got ahead of the problems that kicked off in November. Unsurprisingly, blogging’s a habit like any other, and you get out of it after a few weeks of not doing it.

Part of the problem is trying to find somewhere to start. It’s not like plenty of things haven’t kicked off in the realms of the nerdish, from whatever the heck is going on in comics to the inauguration of perhaps the most important public figure on the planet: the 11th Doctor.

I’m really looking forward to Matt Smith on Who while dreading Tennant’s departure, and for whatever reason Smith’s arrival is causing a lot of- discomfort, I suppose is the word. Which is a good thing. The Doctor should never be a completely comfortable character, and Tennant’s made it very easy for the audience to be comfortable with him.

On a slightly related point, do you know the number one thing I fucking detest about the internet? When the very first thing any commentator feels the need to add onto any post, be it blog, twitter or fucking Facebook status, is a dismissive comment about the content.

For example:

Jimmy Fanboy is excited about matt smith as who!!!

John McFucknuts says: Eh, I don’t like him. Won’t be watching.

You know what I mean. A terse, pointless and uncorroborated one liner that adds nothing to the conversation. A little dig that says more about someone’s need to be noticed than to actually contribute. The Doctor thing was just the most obvious recent example.

I don’t mind disagreement. Not at all. By all means, should anyone disagree with me on anything, well, that’s why Comments are On. But at least try and make it look like a conversation. Facebook and its ilk are the worst perpetrators, because if you post a blog you’re asking for interaction. If you’re just telling the world what you’re happy about, it seems really mean that the first thing so many of your Fake Internet Friends want to do is kill your mood.

I know, I know. Mean? The internet? Heavens forefend.

I’m reminded of two parallel examples, one recent and one from a while ago that annoyed me so much it’s stayed with me. MightyGodKing notes that a drum and base track- Propane Nightmares by Pendulum- would be good to use in a trailer for a Flash movie. My first thought on listening to the track was to disagree. Not to jump into comments and let the world know that with a one sentence dismissal, mind, just to disagree. I don’t like drum and base, and I don’t really like the track.

But after listening to a while, I found myself agreeing with him. He’s right, it would do the job perfectly. And I found the song growing on me a bit. That kind of thing isn’t my cup of tea, but I can appreciate the merit of a piece of work that’s had some skill applied to it.

John Scalzi once posted a YouTube clip of Travis Barker overlaying drums onto the somewhat duff Soulja Boy track Crank That (incidentally, Trigg, if you’re reading this I meant to send you this link ages ago.) I like R’n'B even less than drum and base, and I’ve never been that big a fan of Blink-182, but even so the Barker video is brilliant. It’s a fantastic example of a different spin the application of specific talent can put on something.

Needless to say, the comments on the posts are a list of banal denials and disagreements. I don’t know how Scalzi does it, incidentally. It must be like having Statler and fucking Waldorf appended to everything you write.

I didn’t really want the first post back to be so negative, but it’s got on my nerves recently and I needed to get it off my chest. Expect tomorrow’s post to be a little bit brighter.

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Today’s sign of the impending apocalypse: Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy is due to be released next month.

A quick note on yesterday’s post: I’m not saying that “torture porn” in a Nightwing comic is either acceptable or unacceptable. To be honest, I have no interest in either the character or the title. But I’m still upset with DC about the Pa Kent thing. What can I say, my opinion on what constitutes a matter of importance where comics are concerned is a little skewed.

Kids’ toys: Can someone please tell me why the Transformers Classics line has so far released roughly a bajillion modern updates on Generation 1 characters, and yet appears to have no plans for an updated Wheeljack? Or why there’s no Wheeljack in Transformers: Animated? Or in the movie line? Sweet jumping Jesus, I need a new Wheeljack. I’ve only got 5 other versions of him.

You may all continue with your pointing and laughing.

Anime: As I think I’ve mentioned briefly before, I have fond memories of the Guyver animated series released in the 90s. I still find it odd that Japanese manga (a lot of it, anyway) is almost seen as a childish or girly thing to get, when back in the 80s and 90s (in Britain at least) it was seen as a wellspring of gore, horror and, ahem, “adult” situations. Anyway, there was a new updated Guyver series made a few years ago, and I can’t believe it’s taken until now for me to get round to watching it. I’ve seen the first couple of episodes that stick pretty closely to the first series, but I think it diverges pretty quickly after that as the creators get into the storylines that continued on after the previous run finished. I wish someone had the licence to release all the comics in English, because it’s really great stuff. Lots of action, lots of horror, and some of the greatest codenames ever given to giant mutated monsters.

I’m not sure whether it’s better than the original series yet, in that all the events are very compressed, to cover more ground in a shorter time. In the first series, you get more of a feel for the characters simply because you spend more time with them. On the other hand, the animation is way better this time around, and the second half of the first series was a fair bit ropier than the first half. Hopefully they did that a bit better this time round.

The first Guyver animation was actually made in the mid 80s, not long after the manga series had started, and had no connection to the series that followed later. I don’t have the link to hand, but if you check out “Guyver: Out Of Control” on YouTube, you’ll find it uploaded there. Very, very weird if you’ve never seen it before and you’re only familiar with the more recent series. Highlights include a main character with a strange doll-like face, and female Guyver with a seriously dodgy transformation scene.

SF: Given up on the second book of Kevin J. Anderson’s Saga of Seven Suns. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just average, and I’d rather read something great than slog my way though six more books of average. I’ve still got the Rebus series to finish, and Russel T’s tome, and I think I’m better off spending my time on them.

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I’ve never been the biggest fan of Krypto the Superdog. Always seemed a bit of a stupid concept, even when I was little, with the thought balloons and the powers and everything. I quite liked Ace the Bat-Hound though, so it wasn’t just an anti-Silver Age story thing.

I wasn’t keen on Krypto’s modern-age return, even though I think Jeph Loeb’s take was interesting (namely, that a dog with Superman’s powers would be an absolute disaster), but that’s mostly to do with the really shitty Return To Krypton storyline that was running at the time. And then I read Morrison’s All-Star issue with Krypto in it, and finally understood the concept.

I get that a lot with Morrison. Sometimes it takes a writer like him to make sense of otherwise crappy ideas. I mean, as Superman stories go I’m far more of a Golden Age fan than of the chubby Silver Ager, and I usually loathe the shoe horning of Sixties goofiness into more recent runs (like Return To Krypton, in fact), but All-Star really did make something brilliant out of something a bit crap.

It doesn’t take much, I find, to have my opinion changed on something. Usually, all the bits are there, it just takes a single key to unlock everything. Maybe not a key, maybe a lockpick. You know, like in Elder Scrolls, or Splinter Cell, when you’re in that mini-game that stands in for picking a door lock, where you kind of jiggle the right-hand stick until the tumblers slot into place, and you get that satisfying click-thunk that opens the door. It’s like that, but in real life.

When it comes to Krypto, all I needed was to see a young Superman playing catch with his dog, but on the moon. Just a boy and his pet, but on a huge, epic, Superman-type scale. Click goes the tumblers, and suddenly I understand the point of Krypto. Also, this Krypto cover is awesome, and I want it as a poster really badly.

It’s not just comics this happens with. More than once, there are songs I hear that I don’t quite understand until the lock gets picked. Like “Feathers”, a Coheed and Cambria single from the last album. At first, it seemed just like an alright kind of record, and I didn’t get why they chose it for a single release. Then I heard it live, and it was awesome, and it’s really one of the best tracks on an excellent album. Or maybe I’m just easily influenced. Or fickle, perhaps.

I’m not sure how I feel about how English literature is taught in schools, and I tend to think that it just didn’t quite suit me. I know a lot of people who really appreciate the things they learned in their Lit classes, and the tools it gave them to understand what they read. A conversation I had with a friend a while ago still sticks with me, because my mate was so glad she did To Kill A Mockingbird at GCSE as she wouldn’t have appreciated it otherwise. See, I couldn’t disagree more. It’s one of my favourite books, and analysing it in school would have killed it for me. Shit, there were books I used to like that I hated once we were done with them in the classroom.

The problem comes down to keys, or rather how we find the keys. English Lit just works for some people, but it didn’t for me. Take Shakespeare; now, there’s one writer who just cannot be appreciated from being pulled apart and scrutinised by a classroom full of bored thirteen year olds. Up until recently, as in last year, I still had no appreciation whatsoever of his work. Then a couple of things made the tumblers rattle over.

First of al, I read about a Canadian comedy drama called Slings & Arrows over on Siskoid’s blog (think it may have been this bit) that sounded interesting, despite being about The Bard. And it’s really good. Really well written, very funny. But more importantly, the main character (played by Paul Gross, who was Fraser in Due South) speaks so well about Hamlet, that I actually started to understand where the heck the play was coming from.

As an aside, this is how the real information revolution will work. Not from big changes and social phenomena, global trends that make everyone love particular brands, although that’s always going to happen, but from more people being able to connect with smaller things they would never have found otherwise. A short run Canadian comedy from a few years ago? I never, ever would have found out about that in any other way than in the haphazard mode things are distributed over the internet.

About the same time, I went to see an open-air Everyman production of Midsummer Night’s Dream at St Fagans, the Welsh folk museum. And it was hilarious, seriously funny, and I realised that Shakespeare’s work is almost completely reliant on the delivery of the actors. Reading it just doesn’t have the same effect. These things together picked the lock, and I understood the man’s writing far better than I ever had before. I watched the Ian McKellan Macbeth from the 70s, and was completely engrossed, even though the exact same thing had bored me to tears at school.

All that said, I doubt anything will make me want to read about Streaky the Super-Cat.

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Big excitement in Caerffili yesterday, and by excitement I mean human misery. First, there was an armed robbery in the centre of town, and then in an apparently separate incident someone torched an old factory right behind where I live. My initial thought was, obviously, terrorists.

I think we’re going to need a little context for the rest of today’s post.

Prior to Casino Royale, I hadn’t thought much of any Bond theme since GoldenEye, and Live and Let Die before that. Which leaves a lot of Bond themes that I don’t really like. Hell, a lot of Bond films that I don’t really like. But that’s ok.

Bond themes have a tendency either to be done in a style I don’t like (see Madonna, or Duran Duran) or to be derivative to the point of, er, pointlessness (like Moonraker). The reason I like GoldenEye, despite the fact that it’s almost a pastiche of “classic” themes is because at that period in the franchise’s history, what Bond needed was a touch of tradition, a return to the fun action-romp. It was what was required at the time, which made it good.

With Casino Royale, something completely new was needed instead, and we got that with both the film and its theme song. I fucking love the Chris Cornell theme, because after boring traditional themes and substandard dancey noodling, Bond needed to rock out with his cock out. Many, of course, hate You Know My Name. Which is a shame. But in this small corner of the globe, I feel like someone wrote a Bond song specifically for me.

Which brings us in a roundabout way to Jack White and Alicia Keys’ Another Way To Die, and I fucking love that too. I mean, a theme with a bluesier tone fits with the darker direction of the franchise, and it’s the one musical style that’s never really been used in a Bond film, to my recollection. It gets to have all the string-arrangement Bondey call-backs, and be something new at the same time. And the drums; fuck me, that is some great drum work. I am incredibly relieved Mark Ronson didn’t get his hands on it, because we really would’ve ended up with another insipid take-off of Bassey-era themes.

While I’m on the Bond subject, I also love the new film’s title. But I am already sick of people making comments to the effect that “it’s about quantum physics or something.” No it isn’t. It isn’t the producers’ (or Ian Fleming’s) fault you don’t know what words mean. It’s a completely appropriate title, considering the events of the previous film.

As I’ve just switched to Moan Mode, can I have a quick go at the latest Sherlock Holmes films that are apparently in production? We’ve got Guy Richie’s Action-Adventure version with Robert Downey, Jr and Jude Law, and the Judd Apatow spoof with Ali G and Will Ferrell.

Why on Earth hasn’t anyone wanted to make a faithful adaptation since Jeremy Brett snuffed it? The last BBC one had Holmes running a incident room and profiling villains. For fuck’s sake, that is not the point. Holmes isn’t Cracker, or a CSI officer, he’s not a swashbuckling hero and he’s been parodied so often, do we really need another comedic take? His whole appeal, his super-power, is deductive reasoning. I think so many of the modern takes try and put a layer of contemporary paint onto their adaptations simply because the writers just don’t have the talent to construct a clever mystery or the inclination to just use one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s. And don’t get me started on recent portrayals of Holmes’ drug use. That’s a whole big can of missing the point.

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Sweet Lord Cthulhu on a landspeeder, isn’t the American election over yet? I am so very, very sick of reading about that doddering old bastard and that loon he’s got running with him. Well, let’s face it, it’s that loon that most people seem to be writing about, and I’ve reached a saturation point where I no longer care. Am I not concerned with matters of global political significance? Of course I am. That’s why I just want them to hurry up and get on with whatever it is they need to get on with so we can all return our focus to impending economic catastrophe and building nuclear bunkers in our gardens. Because “Jabbing Russia With A Pokey Stick” had become a popular past-time of late and that has always turned out so well before.

I don’t know, it’s always easy to roll your eyes at how fucking bugnuts the world is, because you don’t have to look too far to find the crazy at any given point in history. But the whole creationism thing has really been eating at me recently. You kind of expect it of our fellows across the Atlantic (and I don’t mean to have a mean old jab or anything, but it does seem to come up a lot over there), but I get really itchy when it crops up in British newspapers as a thing. I mean, we all know it’s crazy? Don’t we? It’s just a stupid thing the media wants to make a drama of, right?

Then again, the politicians have recently started taking pot shots at women’s reproductive rights, and I thought that particular battle had been won a long time ago (ho, ho). It just doesn’t take much effort for matters to regress.

How depressing. Let’s have some links.

A three-year Southampton University study into the “out-of-body experience” phenomenon has kicked off. Because we are all cursed to never learn from the mistakes of Kiefer Sutherland in Flatliners.

Alien tat of the day: Almost five hundred quid’s worth of coffee table. If I could, I would buy all of the outrageously priced Alien and Predator junk I could get my hands on, and keep it all in one room tastefully decorated by Giger himself.

Irish novelist Eoin Colfer has been hired to write a sixth Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel. Now, this is an interesting story. Not surprising, because Douglas Adams’ books have always been incredibly popular, and who wants the gravy train to stop just because the author’s dead? I’m sure plenty of fanboys are screaming bloody murder.

But. I always felt the fifth Hitchhiker’s was awful, and a terrible way to end the series. And Adams always said he intended to do a sixth. I’m not what you’d call a dedicated fan of his, which makes it easier for me not to mind so much, I suppose. And I’ve never read any of Colfer’s work, but he really is phenomenally popular so he must have something going for him. I just really want a better ending than Mostly Harmless. Seriously, it was such a downer it really spoiled my enjoyment of the earlier books. So I’m certainly picking this one when it comes out.

And finally, a few bits of sad news from the music industry; the deaths of Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright and Motown’s Norman Whitfield. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been getting my prog on recently, and probably appreciating the Floyd more than I have in the past. And Whitfield, christ, just look at a list of songs he co-wrote. Those are some of the greatest records ever made. And he was right. War is good for absolutely nothing.

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Forgot to link to the PvP strip I referred to the other day. Here it is. I’m pretty sure Scott Kurtz isn’t desperate for the link boost.

Nothing outward strikes my fancy today, so let’s turn our bloggy gaze inwards.

As of writing, there are 244 posts published on the Journal, tantalising close to the quarter-millennium. Is millennium the correct usage? Quarter-century would be correct, but I suppose that’s a cricket thing, and batsmen don’t rack up a thousand runs in one match all that often. What’s interesting (for a given value of interesting) is that the sequential numbers automatically assigned to each post currently stand at 306, meaning at various points during the Journal’s existence I’ve started over 60 posts only to delete them unpublished.

I say it’s interesting because I didn’t think I did that very often- certainly not one in every six posts, which is almost one a week. Some are probably saving errors, but even so I thought there were very few posts that I type up before deciding against using them. I guess it happens more often than I realise.

Next stats are the category sections. “Comics” are unsurprisingly ahead of anything else, with 103 entries to date. “SF” is next, and again not a revelation, nor is “Film” at 77 posts. “TV” is a bit of a surprise in the fourth slot because I don’t watch that much on the Idiot Box (unless you count DVD sets), but I suppose that’s the X-Files effect. “Horror” has 35 posts, and I would have thought I’d have written more about that, followed by “Fractal Business”, which is a bit of a nothing category, really, a place to dump things that don’t go elsewhere, much like “Media” (with 20 posts) and “Misc.” (with 3).

The lower tier is filled with things I’m damn surprised I haven’t written more on. I thought I’d have had more to say about “Books”, “Music” and “Animation”, while a low number of posts on “Games” and “Manga” sounds about right. “Politics” is too dodgy a subject for me to want to get into on the Journal, because I can’t really see it being any fun.

The biggest surprise is “Crime” and “Fantasy” having the same number of posts, which doesn’t reflect my interests at all. Apart from a handful of authors, I’m really not that into the dragon stabbin’ side of things, while I read a lot of crime fiction. I guess grim, everyday criminal misery just isn’t that interesting to write about, in comparison to, I don’t know. Toys. Films about toys. That kind of thing. That said the awful grimness, horror and abuse in yoru average police procedural gets a damned good run for its money from Battlestar.
Is there a useful point to be made here? Probably not. Anyway, let’s nudge the “Music” category up by one.

I haven’t bought a music CD in almost two years. That seems absolutely crazy to me. I was in HMV the other day, and I actually couldn’t find a single thing I wanted to buy. It seems like there’s been a few singles here and there that I’ve kind fo liked, but nothing that’s captured my attention at all. Considering it used to be a matter of there being too much to choose from, this situation is mind-boggling. I hate to be an old fart about it, but everything just seems so mediocre. Indie music, British indie in particular, is just fucking wet.

I swear, if I hear one more pissing track that takes off Morrisey or Joy Division, or sticks a fucking disco spin on either of them, I am going to lose it. It’s funny, because I was watching the music channels again recently, and I saw a chunk of an Oasis video marathon. And you know, the more I think about it, the more obvious it is that I was a way bigger fan of them than Blur, and that a lot of the stuff from their first two albums was awesome. Except for Shakermaker, which is an awful track.

That is all.

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I’m nearing the end of a sizeable piece of work at the moment, and it’s been been a pigging annoyance for weeks. But I’m tantalisingly close to finishing. I don’t know about you lot, but there’s always number of ways that let me know when I’ve reached this point.

A) Suddenly, everything in the kitchen needs a wash.

B) The small hole in the shed must be patched up immediately.

C) My faithful old acoustic guitar gets cleaned, polished and the strings changed for the first time in about two years.

Things were complicated further last weekend by Virgin 1’s Klingon-themed Star Trek episode marathon and MTV Two’s “Vintage 300″, the first time in the history of music television where 90% of the tracks were actually really good. I lost a couple of hours to the latter, and I hate the music channels. Seriously, they had Free tracks, Bad Company tracks, and lots of other tracks that didn’t feature Paul Rodgers.

This is likely of interest to the very small subsection of humanity who like Star Trek and also 70s blues rock vocalists from Middlesbrough.

I bring this up as a way of saying things are likely to be a little light here at the Journal till after the weekend, but let me attempt to distract you from your inevitable disappointment, as always, with a picture of my cats:

You love it.

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[A couple more posts from the old blog, lightly edited again.]

September 22nd, 2005

All of Human Life is Here

Canton is a neighbourhood of Cardiff, and is a lot like every other small town that’s been absorbed by an expanding city. It’s centred around a main road lined with shops. It’s got a few laundrettes, grocers, butchers, pubs, chapels, a Tesco, the Cardiff Communication Worker’s Union, a police station, some hardware shops, about a million cafes and coffee houses. I had a coffee and a muffin in one of them. I considered joining the Communication Workers Union. I considered joining the Police. I considered buying a tool, and sort of regret that I didn’t.

You see, Canton also has a Kwik Fit. My car had ended up with freshly ground rear brake discs and had to be Seen To. The mechanic was helpful, friendly, and completely wrong in estimating that the service would only take an hour or so. I ended up on a day trip to a part of town that’s about ten minutes walk from my flat.

There’s a model/RPG shop called Dice & Disk on the main road that I never knew existed. For some reason, it sells a ton of comic book back issues from the early 90s. There’s a sex shop called Lovecraft that may or may not have inspired the title of the Super Furry Animals’ last album. It’s got a product in the window called Joy Jelly that sounds like those wobbly sweets in plastic packets moulded after cartoon characters; I particularly remember the Ghostbuster ones. I doubt anything in Lovecraft has ever appeared free on the cover of the Beano, although we’re in a whole new Century now so you never know. I know for a fact you can still get the jelly sweets in Woolworths, for Canton has one of them too. I went there and bought House of Flying Daggers for seven quid. Note it’s more expensive on their website. I’m supposed to be cutting down on impulse buying, but fuck it, it was a long day and it was seven quid. It could have been worse. I almost walked with a Batman Begins Utility Belt and 3 in 1 Power Gauntlet.

I whiled away the hours in the library, which is situated on Library Street, which a wonderful name. I want to live on a Library Street. A little further on is Chapter, the contemporary arts centre. There was a woman outside with a posh camera taking a picture of a drain cover, which is how you tell how arty it is. I stopped there for a cup of tea (which was 50p) and a fruit tart (which was not).

September 5th, 2006

If you can’t say it in three and a half minutes, it’s not worth saying

I think the above is a quote, but I don’t know who said it or, frankly, in what context. Hopefully, it wasn’t a Nazi.

Three and a half minutes is supposed to be the optimum length for a song. Not so short that it’s easily missed, nor so long that it gets boring. It’s the target length for most bitchin’ pop tunes aimed at The Kids, the gold standard for craploads of tracks from Motown to Slade to Christina Aguilera.

But in all honesty, I think 3 to 4 minutes should be the optimum length for any band’s tracks. It should be the bricks and mortar in whatever Wall of Sound you may be constructing. It’s a nice basic unit to use, because I think it forces you to selectively edit the work, to cut out the weaker bits, the same way a word-limit or poetry metre works on a writer.

Sometimes, it’s the limits we impose on ourselves that create the most interesting things, that force you to find interesting solutions. A film set entirely in one room, a tv series set on one single day; difficult, certainly, but isn’t making it difficult for yourself the point? After all, when faced with the possibility of writing absolutely anything at all you want, no limits whatsover, most people freeze and end up writing absolutely nothing. Maybe that’s why I’m not keen on modern, unstructured poetry (or modern, unstructured anything, whether on film or on canvas); I fail to see the craft, although that may be due to my own lack of insight or interest (and forgive me for using the farty old Daily Mail “modern” shorthand for anything new and rubbish. I’m currently drawing a blank on a better description.)

What it comes down to is this; I’m really aware that, if I’m busting out some super-fly, face-melting guitar work which is the very definition of freaking awesome, I never want it to end. And when you’re embedded in the heart of freakish awesomeness, it’s easy to assume that everyone’s enjoying it as much as you are.

They are not.

This goes for floor-stompin’ house choons and wildly improvisational jazz, too. Keep it concise, and you keep it interesting. If you positively have to break the barrier, ask yourself why you’re doing it. I can only think of a few extra-long odysseys off the top of my head that were worth doing, and a lot (if not all) of them stay interesting not because it’s the same three chords for eight minutes, but because they incorporate different movements. The big honking obvious one is Bohemian Rhapsody, perennial botherer of Greatest Rock Hits Charts; this one famously takes its cues from “classical” music, and incorporates several different movements.

The other track that springs to mind is Hey Jude. Now, there’s no seperate movement structure here, but this track is a very, very rare example of a song so good no-one ever wants it to end.

(As an aside, the above sentence is hyperbole. I know not everyone likes the Beatles but a huge amount of people do, and a huge amount of people like Hey Jude despite its length. Let’s just take it as read that a) everything here carries a “subjective” disclaimer, and b) lots and lots and lots of people like Bohemian Rhapsody and the Beatles.)

Example Number Three that occurs to me is Stairway to Heaven, which is kind of a mix of different movements and a track you don’t want to end. On a personal note, I also think In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 by Coheed and Cambria is an awesome long-song, but I concede that Emo-Prog Epics about interstellar war are not of universal interest.

The short version of the above is this; you are unlikely to write something like the above tracks at all, never mind on your first time out, and people are unlikely to thank you for trying.

In particular, the grouchy old band you’re supposed to be supporting.

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