shout outs

belated tip of the hat to Geeta for her ‘women and noise’ entry and the great back page piece in The Wire.

And also to Beyond the Implode, Gutterbreakz, Dan Molex, Crumbling Loaf and Drip Drop Drap. And all you other fuckers out there, especially if you’ve left comments here.

And finally a heavily filtered and reverbed shout out of “easy now!” to Paul Meme and Comrade Dubversion for their forthcoming trials and tribulations. Dubversion will make an excellent father, and Paul will be proven innocent of all charges šŸ˜‰

Holiday Reading

Stewart Home – Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (The Do-Not Press)
Great – much more immediate than “69 Uses”. He’s got the drift from pulp into art crit, into “literature” locked down. Some laugh out loud moments for me, including the appearance of the International Communist Current in the middle of a long section of archaic wiccan prostitute ritual. And of course the true identity of Jack the Ripper, blended in expertly with tales of contemporary south hackney. One thing I’ve not seen mentioned in any of the reviews is that all of the paragraphs in the book are exactly one hundred words long. A bit like this one, in fact.

Alexander Baron – The Lowlife (The Harvill Press)
A proper anti-hero. They won’t ever make a film about this, because there’s very little theatre involved – just great musings, reflection, characters.

Needless to say, the irony of going to Spain and reading two books set in Hackney was not lost on me…

home

“I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream. That’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight… razor… and surviving.”

When I got home from my first day at work after the holiday, it had just finished raining heavily. A group of kids from my estate were chucking snails around and comparing the noises and shapes that they made after impact.

Dancehall Dreams by Tom Jennings

The new (latest, if not new) issue of Variant is great. You can pick it up free in loads of arty/lefty bookshops and “spaces” and they do it all online a few months after publication. Well worth checking…

Some issues have been too arty for my taste, but this is more cultural/political. Some nice stuff on Blairite culture/regen/language and stuff. Mark Pawson reviewing zines again. Some interesting projects highlighted also…

Plus: Dancehall Dreams by Tom Jennings, which will have Matt Woebotnik spluttering into his cornflakes with simultaneous indignation and delight when he sees all the footnotes…

HTBA

Hull was great – the Timebase crew are fantastic šŸ™‚

The talk went really well – I got very emotional and choked up in parts of it (notably when discussing Operation Spanner), which is most unlike me, but I guess brings home the intensity of those times.

I had some amazing conversations with people afterwards – there’s loads of great stuff going on up there – if you live in Hull and read this, you want to get yourself down to Timebase pronto. I found it all really inspiring, that there are these scenes of people quietly getting on with amazing work, and that there’s an interest in things I’ve been involved with as part of that.

I could only ever have done the talk the first time somewhere that wasn’t London and I know that probably pisses a lot of people off. But there’s some good news as well – Timebase should be sorting out some documentation – including an mp3 of it.

And I’ve been invited to do a similar talk towards the end of the year in London…