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We are ornamental swords forged for the peace after the war
Every so often, I flick back through my Livejournal to see what I was doing on this day ago. So this weekend, I found that it was a year since I'd last been on a doomed expedition to find anything of artistic worth in the Hayward Gallery, before dawdling along the rest of the South Bank instead. This time, the things which actually gave me the shock to which modern art aspires were a robot wrapped in plastic in the BFI corridor, and seeing the huge doors on the side of the Turbine Hall open for the first time - though we did get some laughs from Joan Miro's muff obsession.
It's also a year since I saw the Indelicates launch the album of 2008, American Demo. And now they're back with some new stuff mixed in to the set - 'The Recession Song' has already been doing the rounds, ditto Simon's 'David Koresh Superstar' side-project (but what a perfect source for a song to spice up the Easter set). But the new song proper, 'Savages'...oh, it's lovely. More 'New Art For The People' or '...if Jeff Buckely had Lived' than 'We Hate The Kids', more beauty than bile (but with plenty of bitterness still because this is, after all, an Indelicates song).
Their Cargo show on Tuesday is a Club Attitude event, intended to encourage disabled people to attend gigs. Whether incapacity benefits would cover Cargo drinks prices is another question, but the photographer whizzing around in a pimped wheelchair is pretty swish, and the sign language guy...I'm used to sign language guys being expressionless berks in red sweaters who obscure a quarter of the screen when I'm trying to watch a late-night film, and who just make me think 'What's wrong with subtitles?' This man feels like part of the band from the start, getting into it, really conveying the spirit of the music as well as the words. He is an artist. Plus, he looks like Ming the Merciless crossed with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moleintheground, so watching him sign "but for the come in your hair" was always going to be classic.
No signer on Saturday, but there is Mr Solo, in a more conventional gig format than I usually see him, and as such, with an audience who seemed less appreciative. I think they must have been the peons there en masse for the other band, whose name happily escapes me.
Between my own sluggish attempts at getting up after the Bank Holiday excesses, and the dearth of Uxbridge trains, it was apparent to me yesterday that I was going to be late enough for the Tubewalk that I couldn't in all conscience ask everyone to wait for me - I decided instead to trust to synchronicity, and set off on my own walk in the rough direction of Rayner's Lane. Which didn't bring me to the expeditionary force, but did find me a wonderful little streamside park, and a house so tumbledown and overgrown that rather than thinking 'slatterns' it makes you think 'Sleeping Beauty in Pinner', and a very confused mouse lost on a main road.
Dear Gordon - I know you're a bit busy at the moment on account of your aides being a shower of arses who can't even run a smear campaign without tripping over themselves, but you should still be aware that there is, by definition, no such thing as a 'compulsory volunteer'. Such work is not 'voluntary', it is simply 'unpaid'. And mandatory unpaid work is called 'slavery'.
(ETA: This article has been tidied up since it was first posted, and now uses 'voluntary' considerably less than it did. But it still uses it, so the point still stands)
Another great move by the party of labour there - getting back to the old socialist roots with work camps, while simultaneously depressing the job market by providing a free alternative!
Though arguably the whole issue is academic, given it hinges on Brown winning the next election.
Margaret Drabble, in a piece about coping with depression, wisely recommends walking. But more interestingly, she also mentions "I've met only one writer who frankly admits that if it hadn't been for the drink, he'd have committed suicide long ago. Nobody would publish his book on alcohol as life-saver, because everyone is keen to toe the safer party line that it's really a depressant." I'd like to read that book, if anyone fancies running the neo-Puritan blockade. Bet it would have been all over the place if Wee Charlie Kennedy were PM.
It's also a year since I saw the Indelicates launch the album of 2008, American Demo. And now they're back with some new stuff mixed in to the set - 'The Recession Song' has already been doing the rounds, ditto Simon's 'David Koresh Superstar' side-project (but what a perfect source for a song to spice up the Easter set). But the new song proper, 'Savages'...oh, it's lovely. More 'New Art For The People' or '...if Jeff Buckely had Lived' than 'We Hate The Kids', more beauty than bile (but with plenty of bitterness still because this is, after all, an Indelicates song).
Their Cargo show on Tuesday is a Club Attitude event, intended to encourage disabled people to attend gigs. Whether incapacity benefits would cover Cargo drinks prices is another question, but the photographer whizzing around in a pimped wheelchair is pretty swish, and the sign language guy...I'm used to sign language guys being expressionless berks in red sweaters who obscure a quarter of the screen when I'm trying to watch a late-night film, and who just make me think 'What's wrong with subtitles?' This man feels like part of the band from the start, getting into it, really conveying the spirit of the music as well as the words. He is an artist. Plus, he looks like Ming the Merciless crossed with
moleintheground, so watching him sign "but for the come in your hair" was always going to be classic.No signer on Saturday, but there is Mr Solo, in a more conventional gig format than I usually see him, and as such, with an audience who seemed less appreciative. I think they must have been the peons there en masse for the other band, whose name happily escapes me.
Between my own sluggish attempts at getting up after the Bank Holiday excesses, and the dearth of Uxbridge trains, it was apparent to me yesterday that I was going to be late enough for the Tubewalk that I couldn't in all conscience ask everyone to wait for me - I decided instead to trust to synchronicity, and set off on my own walk in the rough direction of Rayner's Lane. Which didn't bring me to the expeditionary force, but did find me a wonderful little streamside park, and a house so tumbledown and overgrown that rather than thinking 'slatterns' it makes you think 'Sleeping Beauty in Pinner', and a very confused mouse lost on a main road.
Dear Gordon - I know you're a bit busy at the moment on account of your aides being a shower of arses who can't even run a smear campaign without tripping over themselves, but you should still be aware that there is, by definition, no such thing as a 'compulsory volunteer'. Such work is not 'voluntary', it is simply 'unpaid'. And mandatory unpaid work is called 'slavery'.
(ETA: This article has been tidied up since it was first posted, and now uses 'voluntary' considerably less than it did. But it still uses it, so the point still stands)
Another great move by the party of labour there - getting back to the old socialist roots with work camps, while simultaneously depressing the job market by providing a free alternative!
Though arguably the whole issue is academic, given it hinges on Brown winning the next election.
Margaret Drabble, in a piece about coping with depression, wisely recommends walking. But more interestingly, she also mentions "I've met only one writer who frankly admits that if it hadn't been for the drink, he'd have committed suicide long ago. Nobody would publish his book on alcohol as life-saver, because everyone is keen to toe the safer party line that it's really a depressant." I'd like to read that book, if anyone fancies running the neo-Puritan blockade. Bet it would have been all over the place if Wee Charlie Kennedy were PM.