Category Archives: Writing

How the command to have perpetual good times causes its opposite During the time I have kept this blog I have found myself annually writing a pretty messy and uncontrollably pessimistic piece around this time of the year, usually titled Crash-Landing of One’s Life at The End of The Year. This year [yes!] “to saveContinue reading “Share the Pain”

Being entombed in your own self-centeredness is not at all pleasurable, believe me. It’s a lonely prison cell, where the pass-code for exit is constantly altered, vapourising escape plans. But the likelihood is, if you’re a decade or so younger than I, you know exactly what I mean already. I can’t be sure I’m rightContinue reading “Entombed in Self-Centredness”

I’ve finally found out who the narrator of this lost gem was. Ian Douglas Nairn “a British architectural critic and topographer.” Although I come from an art, and ‘that bloke who walks everywhere [in the age of cars]” background, I find a lot similarities with this video and the documentation I’ve been doing of thisContinue reading “A lost gem (intelligent constructive criticism of Barnsley)”

At least until the time of their breakthrough, The Strokes were the most Self-consciously Retro band. However, is it just a self-conscious retrofication styled on past bands, and the accompanying fashions? Or is there also a massive absorption of other now-retro cultures, such as 8/16 bit computer game tunes? Games which were beginning to beContinue reading “The Strokes, and The Retrofication of 8 Bit”

There is something in the way that prevents me from reaching a wider philosophical enlightenment, and beyond what I thought was just a stage of melancholic existence; much desired (and much-needed), it feels like the inevitable next step that is forever delayed. For some years now my belief is that the ‘something in the way’Continue reading “Something in The Way”

The outdoors has become the factory. It has become that inhospitable environment that people were once relieved to clock off from. A few straggling pedestrians are battered by the production-line-motion of road transport noise, violent to the senses; repetitive noises once the preserve of the heavy industries and 20 century-style wars; floodlights that obliterate allContinue reading “The outdoors has become the factory”

The most lasting sensation from my late twenties right up to the early days in my thirties is one of being out of time. Like the gaps in which to pursue all the things that make me Me have been narrowed into very skinny pavements on which to manoeuvre next to a massive, busy andContinue reading “Out of time”

Here is a jumble of songs that defined by 20’s. In order of the years I have tried to list the ones that super-glued themselves to those times in my mind. Thanks to Lee Garforth for providing probably almost half of the CD’s from which these songs stuck themselves to me. Music has a phenomenologicalContinue reading “Sounds that made my 20’s”

A General disappointment with Charlie Brooker’s Yearly Roundup For somebody who highly values Charlie Brooker’s contributions to a post-millennial-television-palette in continual-deterioration (and as somebody who tunes into his television programmes with an unexamined ritualism you’d expect in well-trained church goers) I have slowly had to face the truth that his weekly and yearly Screenwipes haveContinue reading “Cynicism Has Had Its Day”