On Saturday I Said My Goodbyes

Back when it was all happening, the Bluetones were one of those “also ran” Britpop bands. The ones who made the agreeable singles, but none that I felt were particularly noteworthy or exciting; I remember them most, from that era, because my friend Hannah loved them, and would make a point of playing me their singles when I’d be visiting her flat, trying to convince me that I should give them another try.


(That’s not to say that I didn’t like them; I did. I even owned “Slight Return” and “Cut Some Rug” as singles, even if I preferred the B-sides to both, because I was/am contrary like that.)

It took years, the death of Britpop and an unrequited something to get me to give them another chance. In an effort to spend more time with a friend whom I may or may not have had a crush on (I was never quite sure myself, to be honest), I agreed to go to a Bluetones gig one night, half-expecting disaster but found myself converted. Where, I wondered, had my brain been before? Sure, they may not have been the smartest, the sharpest or the funniest band of the era, but there was a solidity and sincerity to their songs that I had somehow missed before, and through the prisms of an enthusiastic Glaswegian crowd and heightened emotional somethings, that suddenly became enough to turn me around on their value.

These days, they’ve become this weird hybrid band – One that evokes some kind of second-hand nostalgia, for things that never happened and lives that weren’t lived, and also for the days when songs like this were ordinary enough to be ignored.

Dreams, They Complement My Viewing

One of the stranger things about my dreams are when I can remember with bizarre and unexpected clarity the movies or TV shows that I’ve seen in them after I’ve woken up. Last night, for example, I saw the (entirely fictional) movie The Bright Side of Eddie Darkness, which was a kind of dark comedy about a “dirty” cop trying to go straight for the love of a good woman and failing continually (Rhys Ifans played the title character, I think; it was alright). Occasionally, I think to myself, I should actually write these stories and then, as soon as that thought has entered my head, I inevitably forget all about the details of the stories.

It’s at times like these that I think that my brain is out to undermine my success wherever possible; I find it easier to do that than actually take responsibility for my own lack of completing fiction. There was a time, way back when, when I was working on a longform story that had a major plot point appear in, of all places, Bruce Almighty before I’d finished writing it. I took that as a sign of devine intervention that I should stop writing that story immediately. No wonder I went into blogging; the immediacy, deadlines and lack of likelihood of God stepping in all help me stay away from my neuroses.

That’s The Way We Got By

Monday nights and Thursday nights, we’d go out. For pretty much the entirety of my student life, Mondays and Thursdays were the nights where we’d meet up, maybe at the Wild Boar or some other pub, or at Hannah’s flat (Sometimes, it was Andy’s flat, sometimes Gabi’s, but if we were meeting where someone lived, more often than not, it was Hannah’s), and then go to the same club whose name I, appallingly, don’t remember anymore (The names of the nights I remember: The Mudd Club on Mondays, and Disco 2000 on Thursdays. I used to wonder what they’d call it when they reached the year 2000, and nowadays, that feels like such nostalgia that I feel like an old man). The music was a mix of indie and an odd selection of old stuff: A lot of punk, (very) little dance, and the theme music from Star Wars and Starksy and Hutch. We’d make requests and get shot down; we’d bring in CDs and ask for track 2, and the DJ would listen to it on headphones and pass judgment.

When we weren’t dancing, we’d sit around, try to talk and not get distracted by the other people, whether it was people-watching or new crushes (or old flames) or whatever was happening that night. We’d shout in each others’ ears to be heard over the music, and stand so close together you would think we were intimate. When we were dancing, we were shameless, taking the phrase “throwing shapes” to an absurd level. It was dancing as accidental performance art, throwing our arms throughout the air, prancing around. We were probably a sight to see, if one that I smile at now, completely embarrassed to imagine; an ex-girlfriend, when we first met, told me that her friends called me “dancey hands man” and not in a good way (if there even was a good way).

We’d dance all night, until 2am when the club closed, and then we’d walk home. For a couple of years of this period, I lived on the other side of town, and it’d take me an hour to walk back; I’d do it nonetheless, even in the middle of winter. There was something about walking through the empty streets at that time that felt like the proper ending to the night, a way to silence all the ringing in my ears and thoughts in my head. I’d get home and collapse on the bed, fall asleep and wake up the next morning, aching in a good way.

Right About Now: The Funk Soul Brother

Like most people of my age and nationality, I was a fan of Fatboy Slim. Along with the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy, Fatboy Slim was the unofficial official choice for “dance music it was okay for Britpop fans to like,” most likely because the genre they invented/mined/made mainstream, Big Beat, was essentially making rock music with samplers and senses of humor (The more popular Slim got, the more oddly gimmicky and “wacky” his public persona got, it seemed. “Look! Here’s a fake dance troupe dancing to one of my songs! Here’s Christopher Walken!”) – no surprise, perhaps, considering that Fatboy Slim was actually Norman Cook, onetime member of sincere indie band the Housemartins, and someone who’d been trying his hardest to make dance music mainstream in various guises for years before Fatboy Slim broke through.

The official version of the Fatboy story has him as an underground success until the release of “The Rockerfeller Skank,” the first single from his second album, but that’s not the way I remember it at all; it was earlier (less mainstream) single “Going Out Of My Head” that I always thought made him a success, although I wasn’t convinced until someone – my roommate at the time, I think? – played me the B-Side, “Michael Jackson.”

From there, it suddenly seemed like he was everywhere: remixing anyone and everyone, releasing single after single as Fatboy Slim, songs used in advertisements or TV shows or playing in shops; stories about him in magazines and in tabloid newspapers, as he wooed a much-beloved radio personality. There was no escape, and the more I heard his stuff, the more 2-dimensional it sounded. It was all flash and surface and emotionally empty, muzak for a hyperactive audience, and I just kind of… stopped being interested.

That’s not to say I have no Fatboy Slim on my iPhone. But the few songs that are on there are novelties of nostalgia: Something I listen to when it comes up on shuffle and remember earlier, simpler times. They’re not something I’d listen to out’ve choice, when there’s so much more out there.

I Clap My Hands Along

I’ve become weirdly nostalgic for the TV show Later with Jools Holland lately, in part due to watching re-runs on Ovation TV over here in America. For those unfamiliar with the show, it’s a (roughly) hour-long show wherein multiple musical acts of different genres and era perform live, each week – It’s not a particularly original format, but the choices of guests (and, in particular, the combination of, watching, say, Little Boots follow Eartha Kitt, who’s just herself followed Ladysmith Black Mombazo) and the performances make it required viewing. Even if it’s rare for an entire episode to keep my attention, it’s also rare for an episode to go by without me discovering a band or song I like, and didn’t know about before.

Here’re some examples of why I love the show so much:

(Dig Bernard rocking out at the end:)

And So, We Return And Begin Again

Well, firstly, I hope you all saw this. Yes, I am no longer with io9, although there’s more than a small chance that I’ll be back for occasional guest posts every now and then. Instead, I’m now living the freelance life with posts already up at Comics Alliance and Savage Critic, and more to come in many, many other places. It’s a shift, don’t get me wrong, but the oddest things so far have been reading the comments on the goodbye post at io9 – It was like attending my own funeral, with people I don’t know saying lovely things! – and waking up this morning without the pressure of knowing that I had five posts to finish that day. It all feels rather unreal, still. Give me a few days to get my head around this whole thing, and I’ll be fighting fit and able, as the song goes.

Who Said That?

I am, for reasons that will soon become obvious, continually drawn back to the idea of writing “voices” these days; the way in which writing – and, specifically, my writing, although obviously this happens to many, many people – takes on new shape and form depending on who and what I’m writing for. The writing that I did for myself, a decade back, wasn’t in the same voice as Fanboy Rampage!!!, for example, which wasn’t in the same voice as io9, and so on and so on.

For the most part, that’s a fairly natural, or at least instinctive, change; you don’t talk to everyone in your life in the same way, after all – your relationship and status and whatever feeds into the you you are at that point, and it’s a similar thing for me, when I write. But right now, I’m feeling kind of stuck in a voice that isn’t necessarily me.

The problem is twofold; on the one hand, there’s an uncertainty about the value of my writing that I simply have to get over – It’s an ego thing, or really, the opposite; my confidence in myself is shaken, which sounds like a plot for a crappy cowboy movie where the sheriff needs to get over himself in order to deal with whatever varmints are threatening the town, steady his shaking hand and take the shot – and on the other, there’s a more tangible reaction to having written, daily, in another “voice” – the io9 voice – for more than two years, and having been edited to sound more like that voice for more than two years, and having tried to reshape my words into a closer resemblance of that voice for more than two years, it’s kind of become second nature to just default into that voice. And, as fine as that voice is, it’s not really mine.

The answer, I guess, is simply to write my way out of it and rediscover the me-ness of my writing, or at least, a palatable and adaptable voice that I can use in multiple places. I’m reminded of writing for Newsarama’s blog, when it first started, and the odd manner in which I felt like I was growing up in public by doing so, letting everyone watch as my writing voice broke, or shifted in some way. Life sure was less embarrassing for all those writers starving in secret, way back in the distant pre-internet days…

Isms and Schisms, Arriving Helter Skelter

Is there such a thing as a dream that doesn’t offer outright foreboding, but instead bode at some foreboding ahead? A foreboding of forebodings yet to come? Because, if so, that’s the dream I’ve apparently just had, and it’s left me in a very disturbed mood as I start my day. If you’ve ever been in fear of something you know is unavoidable – a dentists’ appointment, a phone call, whatever – then you know the feeling I’m talking about… The strange unexplainable unease that makes ideas like “relaxing” and “trying not to be convinced that disaster is around the corner” seem endlessly exotic.

The truly unnerving thing, though, may be how easily I am (happily) assuming disaster. I have no logical reason for assuming the worst that I can think of, and yet, all it took was one dream starring friends both lost to death and to growing apart geographically talking about my job to have me convinced that Bristolian rapper Tricky was right: Hell is around the corner. As I type this, I can feel my shoulders tense up and my concentration steadfastly refuse to settle down and stay still. I blame recent events, and the way they’ve bred me to believe that something bad is really still about to happen, as soon as I let my guard down.

Of course, I also blame that for my finally cleaning my office yesterday, tidying away stacks of books, comics, DVDs and paperwork that’ve happily laid there untouched for months, so I may just be looking for easy scapegoats. But let me say this: Waking up primed for disaster is an easy way to make you feel like you’ve wasted an entire sleep. And my office looks fucking great now.

Endless Love

I honestly don’t know why this amuses me so much, but it really, really does. Is it the red band of obvious warning? The beautifully succinct subject line? Or the mysterious mention of a condition I don’t even know I have? I have no idea, but I don’t care. Thank you, spam emailer Carissa Guaglidaro. Thank you for early morning comedy.

That Goes In There, And That Goes In There

I can’t remember why I started carrying a sketchbook around with me everywhere.

This was the year after I’d finished art school – or, at least, studying in art school; I stayed for another couple of years to teach, on and off, but that’s another story – so it had nothing to do with impressing professors or trying to make a grade. And, to be honest, it’s not as if the sketchbooks were all about drawing, anyway. I was already getting disillusioned about that, in my young, jaded ways, and the majority of each book was writing: Notes, quotes, weird scribblings that were never meant to be seen by anyone else but read like mutated beat poetry nonetheless.

It went on for… a couple of years, maybe? But the height was 1999, when I decided with the zeal that only bad ideas bring that I would write at least one page a day, and draw quick, observational studies everytime I was out in public on my own. Again, I have no idea why this seemed like a good idea (The latter part, admittedly, may stem from my love of Dave McKean’s Cages, a comic about creativity that at times makes the idea of sketching in public if not quite a noble calling, then at least an agreeable pastime), but there it was. And so, for a year, I did just that: Recording the minutiae and detritus of my life in scrawls and scratches of people on buses I took, airports I waited in, details of parties and painted fingernails and loves longed for and lost.

I drifted away from all of this when I started blogging; there is only so much writing I could manage about myself without being so self-indulgent that I annoyed even myself, after all. But there are times when I think I should still have a sketchbook and pen on hand at all times, just in case my peoplewatching in coffee shops gets out of hand.