#100days days 3-15

I HAVE actually been writing 100 words per day, or at the very least catching up with them the following day, but in a note book, not online. I was away from wi-fi-ed up civilisation for a week and what with one thing and another you're not going to get the ramblings here. I'm analogue at heart and sometimes it's difficult to write stuff that people are going to read, no matter how few people or how random the stuff. I don't actually care if that doesn't make sense, this is supposed to make ME the better person isn't it?

I've got a load of thoughts about Spain, going on holiday with other people, a possible idea for a crime novel, a lot of obsessional ramblings about TV programmes and how much I love TV on demand, and god knows what all else, but I can't quite put it into straight lines at the moment.

I'll come back to you.

Advent Playlist (uncut)

My selection today on The List Advent playlist.
Here's the full piece:

Jimmy Witherspoon – How I Hate To See Christmas Come Around

If you’re allergic to sleigh bells and curse the annual decent into mawkish madness that is the general norm for Christmas music, December can feel like a very long month. For a Scrooge like myself, who resents anything resembling tinsel or a tree before December 24th, there is salvation from the usual carols and one hit wonders in the form of Mark Lamarr’s Rhythm & Blues Christmas album. This subtly seasonal selection of 1950s novelties is a genuine alternative to the relentlessly upbeat fair that is usually served up at this time of year.

My favourite track from a strong line up including Lightnin’ Hopkins and Louis Armstrong is Jimmy Witherspoon’s How I Hate To See Christmas Come Around. The Arkansas blues shouter turns Jingle Bells into a guitar lick and bemoans the arrival of another Christmas and it’s attendant expense. It gets so bad he tries to get a bank loan, tries to pawn his radio but is refused. No turkey, no tree and not even a stocking for Jimmy, but he’ll keep on singing the blues. No matter how bad you’ve got it, even in the credit crunch, it’s consoling to know there’s always a blues singer who’s got it worse.

Day 2 #100days Advent tunes/ Charity Shops

Today's 100 words or more should be available to read tomorrow on The List website. They're doing a spotify advent playlist and I sent a couple of suggestions.


Earlier on I got a couple of charity shop bargains including a pair of jeans for less than £4. This was after reading this morning that "Queen of Shops" Mary Portas has opened the first in her new chain of boutique charity shops in Stockbridge, Charrie capital of Edinburgh. Now don't get me wrong, I totally see what she is trying to do, and I watched her series Mary Queen Of Charity shops, but as was noted at the time, I don't think she really understands how charity shops work for the people who SHOP in them.

I have noticed that since Portas's series, a lot of charity shops, particularly those staffed by younger volunteers, or those with paid managers, have been revamping their lay out and otherwise smartening up their act. I notice this sort of thing, mainly because of my serious second hand book habit, which I have to feed with alarming regularity. I rarely pass a charity shop without going in to see if there are any lost classics or cult titles looking for a home, and I also occasionally look for clothes and have my eye out for other items. I don't go looking for designer labels (I think the jeans I bought today are from one ofs my favourite designers George d'Asda...), just things that I like the look of, that are in decent condition, and that fit me. I'm also looking to spend LESS than I would on a new garment.

I enjoy the satisfaction of finding a nugget among the dross. If the shops are minimally stocked and overpriced, too organised and over merchandised, you might as well be in a regular shop. Oxfam seem to have lead the way with this idea, they have three separate shops on the high street nearest to me - a music branch, a books branch and a clothes branch - the last one in particular tends to be an expensive shop, and seems to be following the Portas model with a vintage clothing section and lots of name brands. It's a pleasant shop but it's not really a great place to find a bargain.

I accept (grudgingly) that there are people in the world for whom spending £500 on a handbag constitutes a bargain, but I'll never be one of them. If this new type of shop means that Save The Children increases it's profits and the work that it can do - that's all to the good, but the charity shops' job is two fold; they provide a place for those who don't have much money to spend and those who want to be a bit more environmentally friendly (or like me, both) to have access to clothing, books and whatever else they might be looking for that they otherwise would not easily be able to buy. That the charity benefits from the sale is sometimes a secondary concern.

I prefer the Aladdin's Cave approach to charity shops, where there is always a copy of Shardick on the shelves, a stack of bizarre records to rummage through and the occasional amazing find for less than a fiver.

Day 1 #100days

So having promised to try and write more, here I am having one of those days when nothing much happened and there doesn't seem to be anything worth putting into type.

I spent the majority of the day finishing job applications and dealing with the attendant fall out that they always seems to cause. I absolutely hate doing them. I hate that they make you feel like nothing you've ever done counts for anything, that you will never be experienced enough, or precisely skilled enough. I'm too picky about which jobs I apply for because I feel like I have to imagine myself doing the job in question before I can summon up the necessary energy to write a convincing letter. I end up projecting myself into this magnificent future life where I'm a completely different person because of getting this dream job. All my failings are cancelled out, all my weaknesses miraculously disappear and I become the new job.

Reminds me of Staney Donwood's Small Thought New Job.

100 Days / Marooning Morrissey

I've decided to pledge that I'll write (at least) 100 a words a day for 100 days as part of One Hundred Days To Make Me A Better Person. When I can come up with something appropriate and I have access to the Interweb I'll put them here but otherwise I've christened a new note book and put some ink in my nice pen. I hope I can come up with something interesting or develop some ideas. Wish me luck. There's still time to join in - it all starts tomorrow.



Meanwhile, I took advantage of the fact that Radio 4's Desert Island Discs has become available as a podcast and listened to yesterday's edition featuring Morrissey while on the move. The playlist was just right, and the interview served as a reminder of why Morrissey is such a singular figure in so many people's cultural universe.

It was timely to be reminded how much one identifies with someone who has chosen to embrace their "difference" and live life on their own terms completely and utterly. And although there may be "comfort in nothing", perhaps there is a morsel of consolation in knowing that someone who does so can get to 50 and be "at one" with himself.

No Klaus Nomi or Nico on Spotify but here's a playlist of the other Discs.

I don't wanna grow up

At what point does one accept the fact that one is content to grow old disgracefully? I hit another birthday last week. It’s got a 5 in it. It makes me old enough to qualify for the middle aged bracket in some surveys. Following on from yesterday’s post where I mentioned using old diaries to compile a list for all the gigs I've ever been to for SongKick, I realised I’ve topped the 500 mark and I’m nowhere near finished yet. I’ve also been reading Simon Armitage’s book, Gig: Confessions Of A Rock Star Fantasist – which is full of flash backs to important gig-going moments in the poet’s life. (He also gives a pretty acurate survey of the structure of your average gig crowd, from front row, through mosh pit, to the guy with a dog at the back.)

At Mono for the Fence gig the other night, I had a nice little Glasgow gig moment with all the usual suspects in place, a good score on my Glasgow Indie Scene Bingo Card, standing near Stephen Pastel at the back of the room tapping my foot to the music. I wasn’t being pushed around, I was enjoying a nice quiet pint and thinking that this was the way it should be.

But haven’t we all been in this room before? Only ten years ago we didn’t have these bags under our eyes and this urge to sit down because our knees were starting to feel a bit stiff? When you get to the stage when you realise people who you know are leaving early because they’ve got to get back for the babysitter or you’re out on your own because your friends can’t afford babysitters… maybe it’s time to settle down to the fact that you can’t play at being an angst-ridden teenager anymore. It used to be that people would cry off coming out of an evening because they had an essay to finish, these days they’re more likely to stay at home because they’ve got marking to do. I often find myself at a gig looking around at all the balding Wire readers and wondering what all those old people are doing there. And then I have a moment of clarity and realise that these are the same people who were always out at gigs… The worst thing is being at a show and realising that the 14 year old kids have come with their mums or more usually their dads... and these parental minders aren’t much more long in the tooth than me.

It seems though that to some extent musicians have aged with their fanbase. When bands that you remember from the first time around start getting back together – Pavement and My Bloody Valentine being recent examples – should I be worried or feel happy that at least these days I can afford the tickets to see them? After all, the bands are of the same generation, it makes sense that they should still appeal to us. There is something frightening about liking a new song and finding out that the person who made wasn’t born until after you’d left school.

As an aging Indie Kid (or should that now be Indie Old Fart?) is it any wonder I feel uncomfortable with the idea of 1990s Brit Pop theme nights? The 1980s revival was bad enough. Was it like this for our parents back when we had a 1970s revival and started wearing flares and dangly flower pendants? If you can remember it the first time round then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it again.

There’s a whole other essay to be written here about mobile phone ringtones and the effect of the Internet on the consumption of music – I could download anything I like, but I still prefer to take satisfaction in nipping out for a pint of milk and at the same time popping into my local record shop so I can come back and bang a new album on my stereo at top hole while I drink my tea. (I bought and am now listening to the Moderat album, if you're interested, another act I've seen live this year. )

Maybe it’s endemic to my generation that we are trapped in a sort of limbo, not really growing up, putting off doing things that we can’t afford. Although for me it’s a conscious decision to spend what money I have on music and not a mortgage. My enthusiasm for live music changes and gets channeled into different things, but it doesn't seem to be getting any dimmer. These days, I just sometimes need to be enthusiastic while sitting down.

100 Lists of 100 Things.

After rounding up my Fence stuff yesterday I notified The Pictish Trail, and it turns out he's now on Twitter. I had a look at his feed and found his blog, from there I was linked to this idea, One Hundred Days To Make Yourself A Better Person, being curated by Comedian Josie Long. I'd also been randomly searching for some sort of lazy Internet-generated inspiration and trying to avoid all those "find your inner spiritual creativity" type books, when I came across the illustrator Keri Smith's blog and her list of 100 ideas for use with a journal. (There are loads of creativity- prodding ideas on the site, but I'm still getting around to them)

Much as my deeply cynical soul wants to resist the touchy-feely nature of much of this stuff, maybe there would be something to gain, if only in motivation, by some combination of the two ideas. I'd like for example to say that I could write something everyday for 100 days, but I can't promise it would be on any particular topic. Maybe I should keep it loose, the daily nature of the task would be pressure enough. I try to keep some kind of notebook, quite often very disorganized, just whatever pad or piece of paper that happens to be to hand. I also tend to hoard clippings and postcards.

I used to keep end-of-the-day diaries, but stopped around the same time I got my first full time job, because they just got too repetitive. I still keep some sort of appointment book (although I've been at my screen so much lately that iCal has started to supersede it, which for some reason worries me - I still like having things on paper).

I've also got a sort of scrap book, which I pick up and stick things into when the piles of stuff (maps, leaflets, quotes copied out of books, pictures from magazines that take my fancy) start to pile up and get in the way of the surface of my desk. It's not much of a journal, not really in any kind of order, not very organized. Maybe I let it remain loose on purpose.

Looking back at the oldest one there are themes that continue: I like to paste in Tube maps and situationist quotes, movie stills and odd lines of poetry, postcards from art exhibitions and the results of reading too much Douglas Coupland at an impressionable age.
Found objects are juxtaposed with borrowed wisdom and occasionally gain additional significance. If I'd ever been an art student I would probably have submitted it as work.




I've never really known how to integrate these idea books into a proper journal/diary - I've done that a couple of times when I've been on trips where I wanted to keep my own thoughts and things I've picked up along the way together. To some extent this blog replaced the "ideas" book, mainly due to my reading of newspapers etc being more online than in physical print in the last couple of years. It certainly has the same jumping off point (too much Coupland-ism and Situationist theory mixed into art Historical studies). I don't update it with any regularity and so it doesn't feel legitimate.

I always feel that I lack what I think of as Art School Permission to keep a proper integrated book where everything is together. Maybe that's what I should do for the 100 days project - see what appears if I concentrate... perhaps I can blog just the highlights as I've never really got my head around the journal part of this blog. Sometimes the whole point of a diary is that NO ONE ELSE reads it.

I've been going through some old diaries (again) recently in order to compile my list of gigs for SongKick. I'll end up with a disproportionate number of gigs on there purely because I've still got the tickets or I've got the names of the venues and bands written down. Maybe this is what has got me thinking about trying to record things in some way again.

Even if stuff seems inconsequential, with the addition of time, it can start to become illuminating.