Futuristic adj. 1.

denoting or relating to design etc. that is thought likely to be current or fashionable at some future time.

Life has an insistent inability to live up to the aspirations of the imagination: visions of the future stale quickly: the future arrives: appears just off the past: the off-white of the future: not silver: not fully automated. (The aspirations of an imagination whose only outlet was quasi-operatic spasmic tics: histrionically built up and broken down: higher up and further in.) What then of a futurism that isn't the mech-robot fetishism of Linkin Park or the Flaming Lips (though theirs is actually possibly retro-futurist chic, like Playstation 2)? A quiet futurism of return? A futurism which looks to the future rather than imagines it? A consciousness who knows there is. no. future. not one he could ever live in, just like he never found a present he could fully embrace: Billy Mackenzie. This is written in anticipation of Jonathon Dale's Associates epic: I have never heard the Associates and my only contact with Billy Mackenzie is one downloaded song: "When the World was Young": a cruel title: drenched in reflection: reflexiveness. I have never heard the Associates is a lie: I have heard one song: violently built-up urban pop-opera: sheer existential disco drama: pure release and flex: frightening, almost, in its lack of regard, it's lack of… reverence.

"Do-do-do-do, do-do-dooo-do-do-do, do-do-do-do" hardly complex or original: a doo-wop lead: such simplicity or sonic univentiveness can't hardly be futuristic, now, can it. Why must our futures be more complex and original? General trend? These are questions I hardly have answers for. I could probably further explanations for the various future-fictions that are common (robots, silver,Laptops etc) but that would be a felicity to far: stick to the song at hand: sweep up your room.

Backstop for the 'Magic of Pop' Metaphor # 6:

Nikolaus Gunther Nakszynski eventually grows up into equal parts Oliver Kahn and Gene Simmonds: one part Klaus Kinski: he gains his big break as Werner Herzog watches a film: he steals his attention by looking up: just looking up: relieving his head from his hand's rest and looking up: a second on a screen: a glitched glance: the slight look down as his head ascends is masterful: the eyes eventually moving up to meet the head's stop: a look].

"Do you ask a car crash for another take? Do you ask a volcano for another take?" No. I love Billy Mackenzie. Rest in peace.

Deerhoof - "Milk Man"

I forgot I had hairs on the back of my neck until I, until I... this music danced in my brain, just a woman’s voice and a guitar, a couple, with other stuff, between, then (recipe: half human, half japanese, some nothing-at-all, plus space, negative space, and dash upon dash after dash of happiness and excitement and joy, head up, legs apart, let’s dance!), then I start to want to know things, the first thing I want to know is why cleave a space in milkman, the second thing I want to know, it’s silly too, why marry deer and hoof, I know, I know, I have a psychopath’s view of the world, I’m not entirely sure what I mean, at any point in time, ever, I think, how do you guage the affordances of things, of objects, their weight, I know what I mean here, I mean books can buckle tables, that books have personal gravities or, songs can collapse a whole bedroom into dark distraction (‘distracted from distraction by distraction’), O no wonder I worry!, dense songs can torque time y’know, noses bleed, imaginary rail-tracks? they crack, I’ll walk a whole hour without moving, live a whole ‘our’ without living, deterioate, then die, destruction total, at the hands of a song, or band, almost, Deerhoof are sometimes this good, honestly that good, so good, sometimes not bad, then other times? bad, though never sad, yes I am aware I have a psychopath’s view of these things, commas? no, my worlds, not other worlds, I don’t look too closely to be honest, not at them, OK I do, but they sometimes have crotches full of patriotism (Toby Keith) or, so I can’t look, can’t stand to look; these are, actually, other Americas, I’m talking about other Americas, haha which I guess do count as worlds, I don’t mean it like that, anyway, Deerhoof, they didn’t discover slowness, and they’ll cede nothing to (that idea I liked from Farley:) the groundsman’s quiet by making, I mean scraping, noise developed over and over, in your (meaning ‘my’) memory’s darkroom, little stuck polaroids of streets you (meaning ‘we’) never walked, can you imagine we made sense of our cities, so hard!, perhaps, along ever-shifting Maginot Lines of taste and, we could, I mean maybe, maybe we could, maybe every city has a soundtrack, or each soundtrack finds a city, Los Angeles, London, Trieste, Luomo, these are all cities, with music - a light with no shadow cast onto emotions with no reserve - helps make sense, or comfort, of all of these cities, maybe, and happies you’ve never been, nor felt, you might feel them now, don’t sigh, Deerhoof aren’t worldweary, are you?, am I?, they’re an old springy mattress pummelled into the shape of a kid, and held firm, though political, by string, it’s so hot in here, I think I need a lie down.

Oh my

Good Year for Music

Bubba Spar KISSKISSKISS!; Joshua Selsky’s Digital Summer; that last verse of Jus’ A Rascal, voice almost getting away from body; Philip Sherburne’s ‘Needledrops’ AGAIN, a marriage proposal to everyone who reads; Ricardo Villalobos’ ‘Easy Lee’ not nearly long enough at 8 mins+; the Blue Nile in the Junior Boys’ ‘Birthday EP’, Aspera, and Coloma’s ‘Finery’; Closer Musik, Sascha Funke, Phantom/Ghost, Luciano, Komeit, Kaito, “Rough” Justus Kohncke; Blemish as redux of A Lover’s Discourse’ worst (absence, waiting, demons, I-love-you, madness, flaying, drama, &c); Barbara Morgenstern’s Nichts Muss; the Superpitcher remixes of Jim O’Rourke’s back catalogue oh so worth looking forward to!; asking ‘who are Josef K?’; Scott Walker on my telly; Animal Collective; I Luv Poney!!; Donae’O ‘Bounce’, ‘Farmer Yardie’; M. Ward; Sharkie Major ‘This Ain’t a Game’; Eve ‘Satisfaction’; OMG where was I when Enon?; Tara Jane O’Neill; Live - KaitO (light detonating inside glass), Liars, Melt Banana (WOWs and raw joy), Scatter; most things I love I haven’t written about; More Michael Mayer More More; (early) Simple Minds re-issues; Aztec Camera’s first for £1; Sticky feat. Lady Stush ‘Dollar $ign’; Wiley, obv.; Il Casio Immunitas; Don Paterson’s The Landing Light; !!! ‘Me & Giuliani...’; Rachel Stevens ‘Sweet Dreams My LA Ex’ (the first shuffletech-inflected pop song); Avril was 2003, right?; my friend Minna Sophie Wight; playing football with Sci-fi Stephen; Charlie ‘Space Woman’; Ken Laszlo ‘Hey Hey Guy’; all the paint stripped from her throat - Catherine Irwin’s voice; Ozu, Tarkovsky & Tati retros at the GFT; Isabelle Huppert (“the ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face!”); relentless unreasonable horribleness (Haneke’s Le Temps du Loup, Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1, which I’m still undecided on &c); F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night; Matthew Ryan’s Concussion released in Britain; MEGO; laziness; the most melancholy song ever finally recorded, a mystery Roll Deep White Label (“I wish I didn’t think so much”); Lumidee ‘Never Leave You’; E. Crunk’s line about how listening to lots of Sean Paul is like being prodded at by aliens tryna figure out feeling; being wrong quite often but who really cares?; discovering so many great writers (Charles Portis, Lorrie Moore, Donald Barthelme, W. G. Sebald, and finally reading Roland Barthes); ‘Cellular Minutes’, how could I forget?!; WHAT A BUSY YEAR!

Marriage & Lost Highway

I've spent so many of the last few months' moments part angry at Katy, part solemn and dumbed, part effervescent and excited about new futures but without really talking through with any one of my friends what Katy & I meant or means to me and to be honest without talking this through with myself. It's gone so long since with so little said, vocally or silently in writing or in words, that it's perhaps begun to feel that it might actually mean nothing. I'm so estranged from her now, drifted, after three years in each other's company almost every day, the division is maybe necessary (relationships inevitably lead to some messy fusing together of both into one thing bigger than itself) and I finally feel myself starting to form. What doesn't help is my laziness or creative ennui and my inability to talk, hardened like the angles of a door by Scotland's unspoken currencies: guilt & taciturnity.

I've just found a couple of presents Katy bought me last Christmas I believe; the truth is I can't remember, they may be old birthday presents. I'm awful at giving presents, almost always buy for the other person something that I would like to use myself. And to be honest when forced by the convention of dates to buy me a present Katy could be woeful too, not that it mattered what she bought me so long as she was there to buy it, but these are startling as a kind of unearthed artifact of something thought lost, something forgotten. I miss her you can tell, this post isn't for anyone to read but you've read this far without that knowledge so continue, I'm sure she doesn't miss me but this isn't a call for autopsy or engagement. Just in case you're reading, Katy, take care of yourself, we did love each other, that was something huh?, and I won't lie and say that's enough, "...better to have loved and lost..." gah, it's plainly not but you can know now and it's here to read: I don't think I will ever stop caring for you, that doesn't matter, I'll love again, but you should know it. Thank you for the presents (David Harsent's Marriage & Lost Highway).

Classic Nostalgia

Lavinia Greenlaw, A World Where News Travelled Slowly

It could take from Monday to Thursday
and three horses. The ink was unstable,
the characters cramped, the paper tore where it creased.
Stained with the leather and sweat of its journey,
the envelope absorbed each climatic shift,
as well as the salt and grease of the rider
who handed it over with a four-day chance
that by now things were different and while the head
had to listen, the heart could wait.

Semaphore was invented at a time of revolution;
the judgement of swing in a vertical arm.
News travelled letter by letter, along a chain of towers,
each built within telescopic distance of the next.
The clattering mechanics of the six-shutter telegraph
still took three men with all their variables
added to those of light and weather,
to read, record and pass the message on.

Now words are faster, smaller, harder
... we're almost talking in one another's arms.
Coded and squeezed, what chance has my voice
to reach your voice unaltered and to leave no trace?
Nets tighten across the sky and the sea bed.
When London made contact with New York,
there were such fireworks, City Hall caught light.
It could have burned to the ground.

M. Longley, Terezin

No room has ever been as silent as the room
Where hundreds of violins are hung in unison.