THANK FUCK FOR OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH

'What about that thing we were going to do?'

Higgs and I having just finished our marathon viewing of the Our Friends in the North DVD (all 10hrs 23mins of it), I would just like to say how fucking glad I am this wonderful social-realist document exists.

Our Friends in the North is an epic in the true sense of the word, in that it records and reflects back the recent history of an entire society. How rare is it today to come across a narrative that attempts to embody the story of a tribe in all its panoramic scope? OFITN parallels Middlemarch in so many respects, and it deserves to occupy a place on every British DVD rack in the same way that you might once have expected to find Middlemarch on every bookshelf in the country.

My personal favourite moment is when the southern policeman up north for the miners’ strike adopts a faux Geordie accent to piss off Anthony. What comes out is pretty poor, but not detectably different from any of the supposedly authentic ‘Geordies’ – Eccleston, Craig et al – heard in previous scenes, and a noticeable improvement on Nicky’s mother, who seems to have arrived in Newcastle via the Indian sub-continent (as well as somewhere Hebridean? Or perhaps Galway? There’s a definite Gaelic lilt there).

ON THE KLAXONS' RECEIPT OF THE MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE

'[Amy Winehouse] is fantastic, but her record is a retro record, and we have made the most forward thinking record since I don't know how long' - One of the Klaxons

Right. Much as I agree with the verdict on the Winehouse record, I feel this notion of the Klaxons as a 'forward-thinking' band deserves closer attention.

The Klaxons, as far as I can tell, are purveyors of competent melodic guitar rock, distinguishable from the surrounding mire of 99th generation Indie! bands because of an admirable (and long overdue) willingness to incorporate certain elements of the last 20 years of electronic dance music in their work.

Hence we are treated to copious amounts of repetition, falsetto vocals, the occasional synth and synth-aping bassline and guitar part, sporadic 4-kick drum-to-the-floor passages etc etc. There is also the propensity to cover classic rave tracks - 'The Bouncer', 'Not Over Yet' - and the attempts to invest live performances with some of the accoutrements of the rave scene: strobes, glowsticks, fluorescent clothing et al. For all of these things, and for providing a much-needed modernist jolt to a British alternative music scene currently wallowing in a second decade of endemic conservatism and rampant retroism, the Klaxons deserve our approbation.

However, the idea that this is some kind of radical new futurism, that the Klaxons have made 'the most forward thinking record since I don't know how long' [sic], needs some qualification. Like their antecedents the Stone Roses, the Klaxons are fundamentally a guitar band with a side-interest in dance music, with a sound much more closely related to classic psychedelic rock than to the rave records they tentatively borrow from, the most salient difference between the two bands being that the Klaxons are yet to produce anything as wildly futuristic and era-defining as 'Fools' Gold'.

Moreover, you hope that one day the Klaxons might banish the acid-solipsism that underlies their essentially romantic, nostalgic dream-pop, and that precludes their being able to recapture the one indispensible foundational element of old rave - its alchemical admixture of progressivism and communalism. 'Pop should be escapist', say the Klaxons, but modernisms and futurisms have always been at their most fantastic in realising that, to produce the genuinely innovative, you must also have a desire to share your ideas and innovations with others, over and above a drug-addled desire to escape into them.

This kind of navel-gazing will not do.

A SHORT POEM BASED ON A TRUE STORY:

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'SUMMER IN GERMANY'

Girls on a two-level bunk:
To the sound of each other’s quiet cries,
they learn how to make love.

In the daytime they clean graves.

BILL CLINTON HAD IT RIGHT, IN MANY RESPECTS

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‘There is no them. There is only us’ – Bill Clinton

THE THINGS YOU FIND ON THE NET ...

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'Then he would say, “My name is Jonathan Higgs. I was born in North Carolina. My father was a doctor and my mother was a Grannie-woman. I have never been whipped”'.

COMMUNICATION FROM BOBO

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"almoooooooooost but not quite, thank the holy mother fuck herself, just jumped outta me winda after glynis sed 'look at the moon' couldnt walk for a few days, but i divint need me crutches any more. beat every motherfucker up the great wal today with a fucking limp. basecamp here i come get in like"

No diggity: Rob Jameson is a literary genius.

JOHN CAGE'S 'SOUVENIR' PLAYED OVER THE TOP OF MC RSI'S 'GAMER'S ParaDICE' = AURAL SEX

A FEW THOUGHTS ON 'I WISH I WAS A PUNK ROCKER' BY MS. SANDI THOM

Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair
In ’77 and ’69 revolution was in the air …

The first thing to address is Ms Thom’s somewhat confused, confusing elision of two entirely distinct musical epochs. Most glaringly, punk rock, as many people are aware, was at least in part a violent reaction against the hippy movement, apparently the target of Ms Thom’s mention of flowers worn in the hair and ‘’69’.

True, recent revisionist theories have been propounded arguing for a reassessment of this notion, pointing to such sites of inter-movement agreement such as the shared interest in leftist politics, an underground press, an emphasis on individual expression and anti-authoritarianism etc. On this reading, punk was not a repudiation of the sixties generation, but a restatement/repackaging of the earlier era’s core values in bondage clothing, in much the same way some latter day commentators have argued that the Renaissance, Romanticism and Modernism were merely successive artistic convulsions in the gradual unfolding of a far more wide-reaching cultural shift towards ‘modernity’. You might say, therefore, that Ms Thom is attempting to give lyrical expression to such ideas, embodying the notion of a common ground between the punk and hippy movements by constructing sophisticated, almost surrealistic imagery, conflating two caricatured archetypes (a punk wearing flowers in his hair – fancy!), in the process demonstrating a remarkable awareness of certain currents in contemporary cultural thought.

However, whether or not this was Ms Thom’s intention, this assertion is unlikely to be supported by the remainder of the song’s lyrics, which continually reiterate a facile and erroneous running-together of the late sixties, the late seventies, and pretty much every other recent historical era, as part of the wider attempt to posit a mystified, vaguely-defined idyll that will support Ms Thom’s clumsily constructed myth of decline (I would also like to point out at this stage that Thom also rehearses the common (typically American, it must be said) misconception that 1969 was the annus mirabilis of the sixties counterculture. The 'summer of love', as many people know, ocurred in 1967, while 1968 has been dubbed (with possibly a hint of irony) the ‘year of revolutions’. Quite why 1969, the year of Altamont and Let It Bleed, commonly held to have been a ‘come-down year’ after the explosive events of ‘67 and ’68, is so widely celebrated is something of a mystery, although perhaps an inflated sense of the Woodstock Festival’s importance has something to do with it).

When music really mattered and when radio was king ...

Again, quite why radio should be judged an intrinsically purer technological medium than, say, music television or the internet (presumably the focus of Ms Thom's ire in this line), is not clear.

When accountants didn't have control ...

Do accountants run the world? Did they not in '69/'77?

And computers were still scary and we didn't know everything ...

So being frightened of computers is a good thing? And being knowledgable isn't?

And footballers still had long hair and dirt across their face

For a start, it should be faces. This is possibly the most baffling line of the whole piece.

THE TEN BEST OASIS TUNES ARE ...

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(in no particular order, although the first two are about right)

1. Live Forever
2. Champagne Supernova
3. Acquiesce
4. Supersonic
5. Cigarettes and Alcohol
6. Listen Up
7. Fade Away
8. Slide Away
9. Half the World Away
10. Cast No Shadow

What a lot of 'away's. Perhaps the secret to a good song title is to incorporate as many 'ay' sounds as possible.

SOME INITIATORY QUOTATIONS

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'Every epoch not only dreams the next, but while dreaming impels it towards wakefulness' -Walter Benjamin.

'The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state and attempt to point out the direction of the future – without arriving there completely' - Jackson Pollock.

‘The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed’ - William Ford Gibson