Oblique Strategy of the day

"Question the heroic approach."

Love Love Love This

Oblique Strategy of the day

"Breathe more deeply."

Catholic Guilt Guilt Guilt

I found my goldfish dead when I came home from school today. I'd had it for about three and a half years, and it's shubunkin friend committed suicide by leaping from the tank over a year ago.

I was a terrible owner. I didn't have a filter or anything, and I spent the last two years wishing the little buggers would just die because I was too lazy to clean them out as much as I should have.

Now, of course, after wishing it dead for so long, I feel profoundly guilty. (Perhaps not profoundly, actually.) It looked weird lying there on the newspaper after I fished it out with the net. I only knew it as a moving being beyond the prism of plastic and water.

RIP fish. I'm sad you're dead, but I'm not sad I don't have to look after you any more.

(The fish only had names as a pair, and I couldn't remember which was which when one died. They were called Fizz (or "Phys") and Imp, after Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Something Living (you know, the big shark). I was looking at them when I first got them, and was struck by how the fact of little perfect examples of life were much harder to comprehend than death. Take that, Hirst.)

Oblique Strategy of the day

"Don't stress on thing more than another."

Oblique Strategy of the day

"Twist the spine."

Oblique Strategy of the day

"Short circuit (example: a man eating peas with the idea that they will improve his virility shovels them straight into his lap)"

I have my doubts about this one, or perhaps it's just his example. Reminds me of toilet roll with Aloe Vera extract.

I love Fight Club. I wish I'd read the book before I saw the film though - the book read like the film, but I'm not sure if that's because Ed Norton's voice in the film is so powerful . . .

Oblique Strategy of the day

"Don't break the silence."

Re: oblique strategies

I've been getting these Oblique Strategies from http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/oblique/oblique.html which has a random generator. There's 127 of them in total, and some of them are more oblique than others. Bizarrely though, they almost always seem to make pretty good sense to me or carry some greater than usual significance. I've been working on a screenplay, and "Just carry on" is definitely the best advice at the moment.

Apparently, Alfred Hitchcock said, "Once we have worked out the story in full, then we begin the screenplay," or words to that effect. It seems to me that different genres require different methods. TV and film are so unforgiving, over-structured and busy that I can imagine a series falling apart if you tried to just work through from start to finish. Stage plays and prose on the other hand, allow so much more freedom and creativity on the part of the writer, that I think the more you let your mind wander around the better (and then get to the editing afterwards). Much of the inspirational steps in art have come about due to mistakes or accidents, and yet the film/TV business seems to want to eradicate any originality.

I've been visiting a lot of writing blogs recently, and the diversity of opinion and technique differs wildly, from the institutionalised "you might think that sounds like selling out, but you DO want people to see your work, don't you?" approach, to the fresh and original voice of a talented playwright who isn't prepared to compromise his writing for commercial success. (And lots of opinions in between.)

Frankly, though, if I hear another word about "practical aesthetics" and "super objectives" I think I'll have an electronic paddy.

Oblique Strategy of the day

"Just carry on."

Oblique Strategy of the day

"You are an engineer."

Oblique Strategy of the day

"Look at the order in which you do things."

Allotment

Picture post - attempts to capture the Autumn light

Oblique Strategy of the day

"Cut a vital connection."

Oblique Strategy of the day

"Imagine the piece as a set of disconnected events."

How to spoil a nice cup of tea

The latest government suggestion on carbon-cutting is that we all drink UHT milk so that supermarkets won't have to refrigerate it, thus cutting down on energy. I kid you not.

There is not a right-minded person who would come up with this suggestion, and yet it's getting discussed! Have they ever had UHT milk on their cereal or in their tea? Would they make custard or cheese sauce with this disgusting fluid?

I can imagine life without my own private transport, or a life spent in the dimness of a energy-saving-lightbulbed world, or a life without exotic fruits (or unexotic fruit & veg) grown in South Africa and Kenya . . . but a life without fresh milk?

The tea council should put a price on the head of the dimwit who came up with this. It's oddly reminiscent of the Natwest adverts, with junior executives coming up with the most "out-of-the-box" ideas possible . . .

Read the text on the milk portions: "tastes like fresh milk", apparently.

Facebook features

You have to hand it to them, Facebook are pretty good in letting people create new ideas that keep facebookers from getting bored. The newest application I've added to my profile is the Southpark Character Creator. Unfortunately, it's pretty limited in what you can change about the head, so the version of me I created looks nothing like me, but I think it's cool nonetheless:

I also made one of Ian, which looks a little bit like him:


I think I might make Michael Jackson next . . .

Reviews and stuff

How come it's de rigour to record one's album in the USA at the moment? New York, Chicago, . . . they're all at it. It's not like there aren't recording facilities in the British Isles. And surely it's nothing to do with inspiration - because the album should already be written, to a large extent, before the band even gets to the studio.

Anyway.

I saw Control - the Ian Curtis biopic - yesterday evening, and found it to be superficial and disappointing. It really made sense to me that it had been directed by a rock photographer (Anton Corbijn), because there was no depth to the film at all. There was no sense of the tragic in the film at all, and no over-arching narrative either: it seemed to be a series of unrelated events, rather than a story. If there were some themes there, then I didn't find them, and Heather said that she spotted loads of anachronisms in it too: a modern No Smoking sign and a modern litter bin.

There were so many directions that someone could have taken this film, but it did nothing. A music film should have you coming out of the theatre wanting to go home and write songs, but all that was in my head as I walked out was, "Ian Curtis: what a prick." I don't think I should've been thinking, "When's he going to bloody hang himself? I wish he'd get on with it."

All four of us felt this way, which is absolutely contrary to all the reviews, but there you go.

I've also just invested in two new albums: Gulag Orkestar by Beirut (who I'm going to see in Leeds next month) and Fur and Gold by Bat for Lashes.

I already knew and liked some Beirut songs, and while Zach Condon's voice grates on me after an album's worth of songs, there's enough changes in tempo and style to keep you interested. He seems interested in innovation, rather than being quirky for the sake of it, which isn't how Natasha Khan from Bat for Lashes strikes me. Ian had told me that he thought I'd find it very derivative of Bjork and P J Harvey, and he was completely right. Her whispered Standard English voice on EVERY song quickly drove me mad, and I don't think anything she's done struck me as new or interesting. Then again, I haven't bought either Volta by Bjork or White Chalk by PJ Harvey, so perhaps I'm just not into dark, meandering (tuneless?) female vocals at the moment.

What I am looking forward to buying, however, is the new Radiohead album. Like the geek that I am, I will probably part with the £40 required to get the proper boxed edition with all the extras, rather than paying the 49p minimum for a download. I know a lot of less ardent (or less moneyed) fans are annoyed about the lack of a middle-way, but the reason Radiohead are doing this release is to avoid having to wait another few months until their fans can hear the album. A "normal" CD will be out sometime next year, having gone through the usual procedure.

Can't wait.

Oh.my.god.

This is both the funniest and most terrifying advert I've ever ever seen:

http://www.shockabsorber.co.uk/bounceometer/shock.html

Sundays

I hate them.

Sundays are like a strange suspension of time . . .

If only the TV was a little better, it might ease the pain.

Instead I seem to be spending far too much time watching music videos on YouTube.

A Wee Round-Up

Another series of Strictly Come Dancing, another collection of unrecognisable "celebrities" who only inspire outbursts of, "But who the hell is that?" I have to confess that I've been completely addicted to Strictly in the past, but only because I could actually root for someone I already admired - I still think it's a travesty that Colin Jackson didn't win the series before last: that splits-in-the-air move was legendary.

So, let's look at the line-up . . . the only contestants I recognise are Alesha from Mis-teeq, John Barnes, Kelly Brook, Letitia "Sharon" Dean and Willie Thorne. Hardly an A-list cast. Rubbish! At least the judges are worth watching.

Anyway, I don't think I'm alone in saying I'm already suffering from Election Fatigue, and the election isn't even bleedin' happening this year! The Tories did a pretty good job of applying the pressure and now GB really does look like a bottler. In my opinion, he should have gone with it: in these situations, the likelihood of there being a better time is negligible. The economic crash has to happen some time, and the longer Brown leaves it, the more he's pushing his look.

Back to the personal. I spent an hour or so at the NHS walk-in centre this morning. For the second morning in a row I was struck down with an agonising pain in my lower abdomen. Bizarrely it goes away after the ibuprofen kicks in and doesn't return, but the 20 minutes of pain has me writhing around in agony. So Ian drove me to the hospital.

I gave a urine sample, and they ruled out any urinary tract infection or anything like that (they can test for those things in 3 minutes - crazy); I had my bowels listened to, and anything wrong with them was ruled out too; so the only thing it could be is something to do with my uterus. Hilariously, the nurse was looking up potential things by googling "lower abdominal pain", and none of the possibilities are particularly serious, so there you are. I have orders to see my GP if the problem persists, but yet again, I seem to have a mystery illness.

I'm off to bake some brownies.

Ill and stuff

I've been off school, and slept till about 2.30pm. I have such problems determining whether I'm too ill to go to school or not, even when it's really obvious. But then, with school, there's so much guilt attached to being off, because other people have to bear the brunt. I also have no one's contact details from my department, so even though I'd prepared some cover tasks for my classes, I have no idea what to do with them.

Anyway, I started browsing on the internet, and this actually made me laugh. It was on the imdb entry for Chris Farley:

'Innovator of "anti-slapstick" comedy style; ie. man walks into doorframe, curses and screams in pain for long period of time.'

lame lame lame

I've been tired and ill, hence my lack of blogging. My head feels like it's on a spring - I'm disorientated and dizzy most of the time. Which isn't a great way to be feeling when you're stood in front of a class. Unfortunately, my week gets harder and harder, with fewer and fewer free periods, culminating in the most horrific moment of the week: double period with Year 9, last thing on Friday. Nice.

School's ok apart from that and my department is really nice and supportive, but I don't feel like I've gelled there . . . but it could be so much worse. And it's nice not to be waking up hoping I'm too ill to go in (which was the case at my last placement school).

I think I need a nap.