Just to change the pattern of the days

"Dust" by Ujin lee and Tom Edwards

"They'd admire the complexity of his plan, incomplete as it was. It had art and memory. It had a sense of responsibility, of moral force. And it was a picture in the world of their own guilty wishes... Astonish them, create coincidences so bizarre they have to believe it. Create a loneliness that beats with violent desire. This kind of man, an arrest, a false name, a stolen credit card. Stalking a victim can be a way of organising one's loneliness, making a network out of it, a fabric of connections, desperate men give their solitude a purpose, and a destiny"

I'm not sure if i enjoyed "Libra" as much as i did because i haven't completed a book for some time or whether I like being convinced of other people's guilty wishes. I found that sense of reconciliation in Iain Bank's "Wasp Room" as well (i had a conversation with someone about this book recently, really need to re-read it and actually i want to re-read Libra again because i felt short-changed and i could see through more of it if i tried again)....It's somewhat of an escape from morality and purely an insight into personal success, and the ways it can be achieved, told as a rehash of a pub story. It probably wasn't Delillo's intention to have readers feel sorry for Oswald, though paragraphs like the above suggest otherwise. But outside of just being a lonely man seeking a destiny and a purpose, Oswald was a falling man, 'tilting' maybe, and then he found the only way there was to strike a balance, to keep the scales level and you're tempted to feel relief, whether it's for him or something else. Some people just can't deal with lopsidedness. He was terrified, but of what we never really understand and a passive protagonist of what he believes (or what the author believes) as a presence greater than himself, greater than the historian Nicholas Branch. "Ideals", and often political ideals, grow into something uncontrollable, reality makes little sense and it's almost impossible to continue living in the same way; "if the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? we invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail"........

There's a sense of hilarity that works it's way through the whole book, the fact that the very concept of determinism or destiny doesn't exist for Oswald at all,at least not in the way he thinks it does, as he actively does something to put an end to his deterministic love affair by proliferating everything with interpretation, meaning, context and an overwhelming urge of creativity that he can't resist. I may be naive in saying its all a big guilt trip, but for what? Who is this boy with his hair messed up and his shirt sticking out of his trousers? "And he looked scared, and he looked wild........."

I suppose i know 'just enough' about the JFK assassination, and to be honest i don't really care that much about it, as compelling as it was, because Libra is as good a novel without having any real attachment to those events, just as Lee Harvey Oswald has little attachment to who he really was, he's a construct of a vision of who he really may have been, in history, in fiction, and who he thought he may have been in both.

Libra ends with a perfect restlessness;

"I stand here on this broken hearted earth and i look at the stones of the dead, a rolling field of dead, and the chapel on the hill, and the cedar trees leaning in the wind, and i know a funeral is supposed to console the family with the quality of the ceremony and the setting. But i am not consoled."

Im not sure if i've fully gathered by thoughts on this, maybe i should speak to Playing Pretend as i did borrow her copy (thankssssss). But there we are, life usually ends unfinished, and i have to make a start on Infinite Jest.

Stay Active

Been listening a lot more to "Curtis Lane EP" by Active Child (Pat Grossi) of late. It sucked me in dangerously quick, like how religion can be overwhelming if you've never heard of it before. Luckily you can still enjoy the best of a record like Curtis Lane without having to convert, pray and maintain practise; it's just really really pretty music fusing choral and dark, melancholic synths. It's not hard to imagine beautiful music with that description, but i think it would be difficult to 'get it right' if you were going to try. What i love best about Active Child is that Pat grew up listening to really dirty rap- (his dad used to work for the rap label Priority Records) but he was also in Philadelphia Boys Choir for the better part of his childhood, so little Pat was introduced to and met Snoop, Dr.Dre, Eminem and still ends up playing gospel music. That's remarkable.

Where on earth did the inspiration for songs like "Weight of the World" "She was a Vision" "Wilderness" come from when your favourite records growing up were mostly about cunts and guns. Weight of the World reminds me in a strange way of the title music for Ecco the Dolphin on Sega; a little heartbroken, lonely, but hopeful. Can't say Ecco was my favourite game to play, now that i think back on it, it was highly inappropriate for my age at the time! It's about a lonely, aggravated dolphin who tries to organise his grief stricken existence by travelling back in time through seas of chaos at a very poor level of physical fitness where you have approximately 3 minutes to complete a really difficult underwater maze because of your failing respiratory system which means you always invariably DIE!

Despite all that, I love Curtis Lane, and this video gets across that 'expansiveness' quite well

Active Child - Wilderness from Jheri Evans on Vimeo.

Live and Kicking with Bears and Japandroids

I've been knocked out pretty much all week. Days and days pass me by in bite size chunks; i look through a hole in the wall every morning i wake up, and see two hours in a 24 hour time span. Two hours spent numb after i've dragged my self around, kicking and screaming for so long that i can't even remember why anymore. And at those times of rare animation, it's pretty ridiculous to chew right when you've bitten off a little more than you can physically handle.

This week was different, because this time i was kicking for a different reason- the undeniable pleasure of great live music will always exist, no matter how dead you feel sometimes. I had travelled to Leeds on the Thursday for a mesmerising evening with Grizzly Bear. They came up and had a little taste, a little feel, and looked up at you with their big Grizzly Bear eyes and there was something special there (this is also what the camera crew on BBC's "Life" had said about the giant squid they were filming, i admit it, i plagiarised). ..


Under the blue and green light canopy, and the mock fire flies trapped in glass jars around them flickering their little wings, Veckatimest took on a whole new meaning for me. Ready, Able was astonishingly lovely, my favourite on that album. Cheerleader soared around the ceiling like birds in formation. The echoey vocals on Knife sounded like Romantic yetty calls up to the balcony where i was stood, and not for a second was i deterred by the ridiculous amounts of people that were rammed into Leeds Met Students Union (it's been a while since i've been to a gig this 'big'), and a good few of them were illuminated around the face with mobile elements (Boo).

As if this wasn't enough, the very noisy, very snazzy, very Sai's top 09 list of albums Japandroids were down in Nottingham supporting A Place To Bury Strangers at Bodega Social. After a rather depressing Friday of catching up on 2 weeks of lecture notes, i was almost too depressed to leave my room, but the very thought of missing Japandroids was a little painful- so i paid 8 quid just to see them support, since i'm not really a fan of APTBS.

Unfortunately, the two-piece only managed a 20 minute set, since they arrived late because their van broke down, but those 20 minutes were spit fire. Brian King the guitarist has a ridiculous amount of raucous energy about him; his enviably skinny guy frame in straight cut dark blue jeans jittered around on stage like a nervous cat. He says in his charming canadian slur that they used to think they were the loudest band ever until they toured with APTBS, and then they felt like a couple of girlies...."like your jeans" scoffed a punter, ZIINNNNGGG. Brian was not happy, and gave us all permission to spit on the guy- he was clearly some fat, rigid ugly person jealous that he wasn't sporting such a physique to prance on stage holding a guitar somewhat convincingly.


The Social crowds are always too cool for their own good (as my friend aptly mentioned after the gig), and remained relatively static despite the hysterical dance-worthy numbers in Hearts Sweats, Rockers East Vancouver, Young Hearts Spark Fire & Boys Are Leaving Town. I wasn't ashamed. I paid 8 quid for this god dammit and i'm gonna have a hip shake.

Got a drink while APTBS were on, went up for the last song. Strobe lighting gave me a fit. Loud. It's fucking loud up here. My ears, they're gone.

Light. all i could see was the fucking light- and this is why they cut Japandroids short???! Whatever. I bought their fucking t-shirt.

So anyway, i see drowned in sound did a ridiculously fucked up review of the Post-Nothing record.....no, it is not about suburban numbness, or blank interactions, or the modern Western malaise of personal and social detatchment. It's just not.

No Such Thing as Nosaj's Thing

The first listen i had of Nosaj Thing's album "Drift" was when i was driving down a relatively lonely dual carriage way on a dark afternoon with huge fat rain droplets pelting down on my windscreen. The sky had just about closed up and there was nothing but the stark distinction between wet and dry as i sat in my little car with the hard, starving rain threatening to break through my windows.

"Drift" sounds like that space between the wet and dry, the space that i feel relatively sheltered in but all the while i can feel the tension that builds as the rain gets harder. If i put down my window it will attack me, though i can't help but want to do it anyway.

The hugely exciting openers "Quest" and "Fog" sounds like what would happen eventually if i decided to open my windows and doors to a torrential downpour, and my car was consumed by rain water; dark and dank and delightfully distressing, and me stood in the midst of it, soaking through and through. By the time the glitchy synth action of "Caves" came around i would spiral into a state of mania, not contemplating my actions but reliving the necessity of them in denial.

On the first listen, i could only get up to track 6 and got impatient with the rest of the album- i thought most of the infectious swagger of this record and the 'drops' were already exhausted from tracks 1 to 6 . How wrong i was! Lords the last track "kicks 7 different types of ass" as one person put it on a album review comment on a site i was on earlier.

I do like this video a lot too- "Aquarium" from the Views/Octopus EP.