engine

pshew

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 15:58:00 -0400

i like to sniff my legs in summer

it reminds me of linen

and sunny evenings spent on the school fields

by the pavilion, trying to fit in

and when we performed lord of the flies

in the theatre by the brook

the first and last time i felt like a warrior

also, i like to sniff her neck, below the ear

and chomp her hair

(when she’s not looking)

yo la tengo

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 04:09:00 -0400

when i dropped out of university to pursue a means of funding my gambling habit, i felt a palpable joy at having severed the shackles of essays and exams. the receptionist job began at a set time and ended precisely seven hours and thirty minutes later. punch in, punch out, bring nothing in, take nothing home. at night, i was free of all anxieties, except the one that was blowing a chasm in my bank account.

come exam season, the gambling had stopped. my friends spent long days and restless nights cramming, practising and preparing, spent their hours stressing and complaining. i played xbox. the contrast made my liberty all the sweeter. coolio sang to me. the canteen gave me free breakfasts. i had stumbled upon the most important of revelations - that obligations hoover up all the joy, that the future is too remote and uncertain to plan. foremostly, that guilt-free pleasure is the greatest good to the mortal individual. immediacy, experience, presence, minimum pain, minimum cost, maximum benefit.

well it transpired that the reception desk itself sucked too much joy out of thirty eight hours of every week, so i canned it and ultimately wound up back at university. this time, though, i chose an easy degree that required only a small amount of effort to navigate. i was growing up.

now, four years since graduating, i find myself bound by a rather considerable set of obligations courtesy of teach first. why would i shelve good old lucrative brainless recruitment for essays, long days and work that follow me home on evenings and weekends? I have strong enough faith in my convictions - that is to say, the convictions that i will instinctively and successfully gravitate towards the path of least resistance - that i see no reason to answer that question. i must at some point have considered my options at great length and, perhaps using some kind of model to project the relative probabilities of mindless joy, have chosen to follow this path.

when a five thousand word essay looms, my faith does waver ever so slightly, but then i do a laughing gas or drink a beer or play a video game or eat a dinner and think yeah but. a couple of weeks ago i saw yo la tengo at the barbican with my brother. having watched them at primavera last summer, i expected something good but never great, like sex with a friend, familiar, worthwhile, an interesting point of discussion. however, it was incredible.

ira kaplan’s face looks like a waxwork, but his stage presence was fleshy and vibrant. they felt like your best friends between songs, and everything they played was immaculate. the venue is superb and i can’t wait to go back for whatever good they have going on in the near future, and yo la tengo were the perfect band for the setting. when they broke into sugarcube towards the end of the second set, i thought to myself i hope this never ends. that sounds clichéd but i swear just listen a moment, because usually i feel near the end of a show that i’ve got my money’s worth and i’m about ready to go home sit down reflect then sleep. with yo la tengo, i wanted to stay there forever. sure, the comfortable seat must have played some part, but boy oh boy did the music blow my comfortably seated body’s mind.

these experiences endure. they join the savings account in your joy-bank, easily accessed and withdrawn in an otherwise dull, empty moment waiting for a bus or stuck in a training session. this is an invaluable property for a thing to have.

the game i just completed, bioshock infinite, shares that property. kind of similarly to house of leaves, it weaves a dark, convoluted and shattering story around the love shared between a disfunctional parent and child. it ends extremely powerfully and leaves a note of melancholy hanging in the space it abruptly vacates. would it were that my abrupt endings could have such an effect.

what a year! i do not speak for everybody, let them say what they will about the year. i mean my...

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 15:36:00 -0500

what a year!

i do not speak for everybody, let them say what they will about the year. i mean my year, the 26th year of the james, the year in which this and that thing happened to change my life profoundly and so on and so forth.

this year had many answers! yes! no! the police lied! the gays are alright! guns!

but so many questions too.

what if someone terrible, say mr assad or mr rove, offered you a small fortune in return for nothing, only the knowledge that your small fortune came from a mr assad or a mr rove? would you take it? if not, why not?

does it matter?

or if you could go several hundred years forward in time, to be heralded as a relic of the past by a future civilisation, a celebrity of great significance, culturally, historically, philosophically? would you go? i decided to write a short story about this, but maybe it’s not too interesting. the short story is really about other things though, a cheap shot at pop culture above all else, which is one reason why i will never actually write it, the other reasons being that i am lazy and lazy.

i would choose to take cheap shots at easy targets if i could bring myself to do it, but any time i try i hate myself. how easy would it be to create an episode of dr who? or write a sitcom for bbc three? or perform love songs to a karaoke backing track, strumming three chords on a guitar, you’re beautiful, there’s only one love, oh baby, don’t break my heart.

i wonder about accomplishment, achievement. these words mean nothing out of context, but i wonder what is the context? in audition he asks the girls what are your accomplishments. i’d feel uneasy being asked that question, even more uneasy being asked what i hope to achieve in life. my only ever honest answer to that question is immortality, which of course sounds trite, lifted out of some manly novel with pretensions of grandeur (or maybe anything ever by woody fucking allen) but it’s true, woody fucking allen got it woody fucking right. but an achievement, i mean who cares really, fun is better, happiness is better.

that reminds me the other day i wondered whether parents who name their child sylvan ever call him woody as a nickname, because that would be quite clever but then i guess it’s a bit show-offy and actually is it really that clever? because i’m thinking of doing it.

i’m not really unhappy enough to be any good at this anymore.

stereolab - unpack yr romantic mind

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 09:09:52 -0500

stereolab - unpack yr romantic mind

old dave berman interview

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 07:00:39 -0400

old dave berman interview

Audio

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 17:12:41 -0400

week day

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 17:06:00 -0400

every day has many races,

to supermarket tills,

to shower in the morning, and so on.

i miss being that

drunk jogger in sweat-soaked pin-stripes

who got home slightly quicker.

RIP

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 11:25:00 -0400

i found out last night that bill doss of the olivia tremor control is dead.

this article is very lovely and sums up my feelings much better than i could: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/161821-we-have-been-floated-a-tribute-to-bill-doss/

his music has changed my life. i met him at atp in march, and his positivity was infectious.

he was such a fucking cool guy.

i hope for his sake that death is endless dreams, but it probably isn’t, so actually it’s just really sad.

keen on boys

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 19:29:00 -0400

fond memories are difficult to shake.

tonight i met a phd chemist who made a convincing argument in favour of voting conservative until the economy recovers. i disagree with him, but i found it hard to justify my disagreement. he was magnanimous in victory and i am a little frustrated at my ignorance.

back at warwick feels strange sometimes. i’ve resisted ‘back to my rootes’ puns until just now.

tonight john celebrated his birthday on the piazza. i met joe kirby, who was president here a few years back and who is now a teach firster too. his friend was the phd chemist.

i am looking forward to going home and taking my mushrooms.

i don’t know what kind of impression i give here. in my head i am a calm, sophisticated counter-culture representative, but i think the reality is closer to gareth from the office. we have learned much about the distinction between self perception and perception of others’ perceptions. we have also learned much about mindsets, specifically growth v fixed.

vain people lean towards the latter, and therefore i do too. it is proven through research to be a mistaken approach towards intelligence, to view it as an inherent and broadly unchangeable property. that is how i always pictured myself. but today i tried problem solving maths problems i would usually have shirked and it worked really well. a mosquito just bit my face.

i think i am vain even when i am trying to be modest.

well anyway.

quandary

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 16:26:28 -0400

does it count as cheating if the woman sticks a fleshlight in her vagina and you have sex with it? what if you wear a strap-on? need to know asap.

how to diss a peer completely

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 14:25:00 -0400

that would be the title of my autobiography if i were a literary critic.

a literary critic is something i will never be. i did not make the necessary choices as a younger incarnation of JEH to allow me to follow that career path. this fact does not upset me.

i do sigh to myself when a friend of a friend or whoever has an interesting sounding job. but then, everything interesting becomes routine eventually, and who wants to be defined by a job anyway? this is what i say to myself. the person with the job they like has no idea, but in simply enjoying what they do they have appointed themselves my adversary, created an avatar in my head, an interlocutor whose purpose is to bear the brunt of my bitterness. i argue against said avatar, point out flaws in arguments they never made, sneer at their foolish self-assurance, and ultimately feel much better about myself and my choices.

self-help books never really note that self-worth derives primarily from a feeling of superiority over others.

perhaps that could be my best-seller. a guide book on how-to-belittle-others-your-way-to-the-top. literary critics would smirk, thinking they were in on a clever pop culture joke. imagine ‘the secret’ had been written by dr house riding atop a snake in the garden of eden, is what stephen fry will be quoted as saying about my book on the tube poster. it would be like machiavelli for the 21st century. except instead of anything useful to say about the nature of governments and of people, it will contain meaningless acerbic nonsense in a dour lower-case. instead of the florentine republic, it will champion simon cowell. instead of satire, it will employ sarcasm - in italics, for emphasis. instead of a commentary on contemporary society, it will just be a bunch of uninformed opinions that i don’t even hold about things i don’t really understand.

it will be called something like ‘keeping on top of the joneses’ and the movie will star simon pegg and one of the voice actors from the simpsons and pheobe from friends and it will belly-flop its way to the bargain bin.

keeping up with the joneses is a phenomenon i never expected to impact me. i lived through ten years of boarding school having less and way uncooler stuff than all of my peers, and it never bothered me much. now i worry that two years of training to be a primary school teacher on a low salary (and possibly a lengthy career in said field on said salary level) might make me a less attractive proposition to friends and girlfriend. i have no good reason to feel that way. merely watching friends progress onwards and upwards in their careers while i bob around merrily in shallow waters. that’s all it takes.

ah, but you see, none of it really matters. death is the ultimate get-out clause. i always win every argument against the joneses, against the anybody who doesn’t know they’re arguing with me, because i know that everybody scrunches their face up funny when they shit and everybody is going to wind up buried in the earth or burned up in a tin can on the mantelpiece, and that’s all i need to know to feel superior until we all get there, and superior is all i need to feel to be the best person i or anyone else can be.

broken record

Thu, 24 May 2012 12:32:10 -0400

i don’t trust myself not to become one of those smug people who “has come to terms” with the idea of death and patronises all the sane people who haven’t.

Dinosaur Jr

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:37:00 -0400

This is the name of our new kitten. His mother has no name yet. I suggested Jugs but Simon was opposed and on reflection I agree with him.

Kitten ownership is one of those things that other people just do and get on with, but that I take to be some kind of significant life event. I regard waking up in the morning to go to work as a significant life event. A definite choice to carry on leading the same life as yesterday, in the same job, with the same things.

I don’t think I would sacrifice any of my things, actually, in that circumstance. Just my job and general level of financial comfort. Things are all there is, really. Things and feelings. But my waking feelings all come from things. At the moment the things that give me the most feelings are humans and my xbox, but mostly other humans playing their xbox against mine in the form of FIFA 12.

Last night I dreamed about having to go to work today. I felt relieved when I awoke and realised I did not have to go to work today.

I also rewatched eXistenZ yesterday. I still love it. Jennifer Jason Leigh was sexier this time than all the other times put together.

In one month’s time I will never have to work in recruitment ever again unless my life goes HORRIBLY WRONG.

Amris is baking cupcakes. They smell delicious. I have a mild cold and it is quite likely that I smell of clogged sinuses and bacteria breath.

Reading’s barnstorming run finally culminated in promotion and the league championship. It is a little trite to reflect on the strangeness of sports fandom, but I’m going to sort of do it anyway. I feel a sense of tribal unity with those players and that manager and even the others behind the scenes, all of whom have no idea who I am and have no real connection to me at all. Their victories make my life feel better. I view everything more positively. The anxiety I felt a few weeks ago, heading into our tough run-in, made it difficult for me to concentrate at work. That last bit was a lie. Work made it difficult for me to concentrate at work. Football made time pass quicker.

On Wednesday I am going to the Magnetic Fields with Amris. Then Amsterdam for my birthday. Then Primavera Sound at the end of May. I hope I don’t die any time soon.

atp

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 19:39:00 -0400

new friends i met over the weekend include bill and john from the olivia tremor control and robert schneider, who is the single nicest man in all of music. amris and sten also befriended the drummer from apples in stereo. atp blew my mind to bits. work reassembled the pieces into a sad, craggy jumble.

my only three regrets were that we missed most of low, that i slept through sebadoh, and that i didn’t have any weed or hash to share with john fernandes.

reality pales in comparison to the arcade games, tenpin bowling, splash waterworld, nitrous oxide, perfect music, great artists mingling with normal humans, friendly people everywhere, endless booze and (finite) powder, eighth consecutive reading win, england squeezing past france, and the guy who looked like a swastika.

i will definitely go again.

here is a very clever and funny comment about radiohead tickets: i notice that no logo is now a premium brand.

raise eyebrow, smile knowingly, drop casually into next relevant conversation.

Lin v US media

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:25:36 -0500

Lin v US media

Jessop jessop jessop jessop jessop

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:43:30 -0500

Drugs need U. If you take the ‘u’ out of drugs, what have you got? Drgs. Ever heard anyone get addicted to drgs?

Once again drug regulation is in the press.

I have nothing to say that has not already been said.

I wish only to state that I hate being reminded of the impotence of reason and the power that the outraged, ill-informed, media-sensationalised majority wield over us.

Elsewhere, a woman pinched thirty five pounds or bones or clams from my wallet in a café in Angel last Saturday. I pretended to have been outraged more at the principle of the theft, but in truth it was agonising over the fun things I could have bought with the money that really got me down.

Today is a sick day. Tomorrow I’ll head back to the office. There is a small chance that I may be able to appeal to get my Teach First placement moved to London. That would be amazing. I need to leave this job soon. Once I move to Walthamstow I’ll look at other options. Something secretarial, perhaps, or administrative. Essentially, a job that requires minimal effort and has no real accountability, where I can earn just about enough to get by. My patience with recruitment and sales in general has most definitely worn out.

I have this one hair that grows on my forehead, about half a centimetre below the roots of my fringe. Not enough to be noticeable to others, but enough to irritate me. I tried to yank it out but it hurt so I stopped and shaved it off instead, which just made it smaller and more annoying. There are four other stray hairs on my body. One at the back of either shoulder, one just below my chin, and another on my right nipple. These hairs go forgotten for months, until one day in the shower I spot one of them, long and ugly, and remember all the others. Perhaps there are more that I have never noticed. Perhaps I have one hair so long that it has run out of space to grow outwards, and has instead started to extend inwards, eventually piercing my internal organs and transforming them into blood-soaked furballs.

I hope not.

eeeeeeee

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:17:00 -0500

this afternoon i took the e-tray part of my civil service application. it went mediocrely. i am poor at estimating how well i have done in assessments, and how well i am expected to do in order to beat other people. but even with that in mind, i would be surprised if i were to be told that i had passed it successfully.

teach first really jammed a door wedge up the arse-crack of my future plans. i like to make plans. i like those plans to come to fruition. every new thing in my life that i like becomes incorporated into my plans. when our offer was accepted for that flat in stratford, i made many plans about what to do to it, what would go where, what furniture to buy, how i would feel sitting in the living room killing zombies with my brother and two strangers across the atlantic. then it fell through and i felt rudderless.

when teach first told me i had to go to the west midlands, i immediately knew that i needed to apply to something else. the end-goal of teach first was to get an easier route into civil service anyway, so it made sense to apply for the fast stream. once the initial application had been made, i assumed that i was destined to get in. i have therefore planned around my life as a civil servant. the question was not whether i would get in, but rather what departments i would end up in, and whether i might make it into the diplomatic corps. i did not entertain the prospect of failure.

now i fear that i must. of course, i still need to wait and see. but it felt a lot like my cambridge interview, where i could sense the opportunity slipping away more and more by the minute.

when the estate agent asked me the other day what i do for a living, i said i was a recruitment consultant for now, but that i would be starting in the civil service in september. no lie.

teach first is no longer an option. i’m happy in london. i’ve even been back in touch with old friends who i have really missed a lot, and i’m enjoying spending time with them. amris is still sexy and interested and greater-london-based. and now we have had an offer accepted on a flat in walthamstow (walthamstow!) (really!) my living arrangements are also pretty sweet here.

ahh i’m just complaining. i’m spoiled, i realised. i assume that because i want to be in the civil service, that it ought to happen. i know i could do a job there. but so what? i’m not so important that i can barge my way past countless other deserving graduates. i’m lucky anyway. there are a billion other jobs that aren’t recruitment. if i have to wait another year or so to get one, then so be it. that’s what i’ll do.

god recruitment gets me down though. it’s so stupid. every word uttered during my day is stupid. the shit-eating sales grin is stupid. the high target-setting dressed up as optimism is stupid. my colleagues are well-meaning but pretty stupid. i don’t give a fraction of a fifth of a fuck about money if it means acting like a monkey for eleven hours a day trying hard not to tell your conservative colleagues that they are textbook examples of right leaning ignorance and your liberal colleagues that they are actually conservatives with intellectual inferiority complexes.

anyway.

fingers crossed.

januhairy

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:57:00 -0500

the sun had disappeared,
and nobody knew why,
and i was particularly dismayed
because i had finally managed
to grow a manly beard,
but it was too dark to see,
plus, everyone was too cold
to give a shit about me

dream

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 04:44:00 -0500

the trojan war meets lord of the rings.

i am in a queue awaiting a video game simulation to prepare us for the pure evil of sauron. they refer to it as ‘the cloud’, and that his evil alone could destroy a man’s mind and literally scare him to death. sauron is a god on troy’s side. i reach the front of the queue and discover that the simulation simply involves playing fifa 12. i watch over jonny rodwell’s shoulder. he plays well, and the squadron leader acts impressed, but then the screen starts to change. a faint red eye appears in the bottom corner, and a cloud engulfs the screen.

a hideous, demonic face appears. his skin is charred and crimson. his barbed tail swishes as if it were batting off horseflies, gouging into the wall every time it hits. the screen follows him. he approaches a prisoner and barks out an order. his minions, some men, some orcs, proceed to tear the skin off the prisoner. the prisoner remains alive, his chains digging into his flesh, and as he leans backwards, the wire meshing behind him begins to sink an agonising pattern into his back.

next thing i know, i am in chains in one of these gruesome, bloody prisons, in the middle of the war. jonny rodwell explains to me that we had been readying ourselves to fight, but that sauron’s cloud had swept through the greek settlements, causing us all to feel disorientated and to develop short-term amnesia, but that he had been less affected by it.

guards come and order one of the men near me to get up and follow them. i know that he was about to be tortured. i feel terrified. helen of troy sits in front of me, wearing purple. she is chained as well, but the guards treat her kindly. somehow, i am able to choose to become her, like in a video game. so there i am, helen of troy, wife of menelaus, mistress of paris, chained up in a vile dungeon alongside a host of greek soldiers. one by one, though, all the men around me are taken off by the guards. some beg and plead, others go calmly, resigned to their fate.

a female guard approaches me and loosens my chains. she tells me that paris wants to see me. i have to meet a slave-girl with whom i am familiar by the old temple. i ask how to get there, and the guard gives me a set of unclear directions. i walk out of the dungeon into an even more hellish environment.

everything in the streets is mud and gore. the buildings are cavernous, bloody structures, almost shapeless. there are monsters everywhere. the road i need to follow is extremely dangerous, with obstacles at every turn, all kinds. giant hogs with razor-sharp teeth, tall amazonian women with smiling, playful looks on their faces and spears in their hands, enormous spiders, and of course the orcs and other demonic warriors.

there are normal people on the streets, trojan children (i walk past a nursery), men and women, as well as some greeks. i watch a creature garroting a group of women. discretion, clearly, is of the utmost importance, so i strafe and shuffle and crawl and hide my way past marauding gangs of bloodthirsty soldiers and enraged beasts.

it soon becomes clear that the journey is hopeless. i can not go any further without being spotted, and there is no chance that i can outrun the monsters. i find a good hiding place and slump down to the floor, terrified and defeated.

then i’m in my room. sarah has moved three beds into my room for her family, and it transpires that i slept on the wrong one the previous night. she acts like she doesn’t mind. i used her mum’s bedsheets by accident and sarah worries that i might have soiled them one way or another. i insist that i have done no such thing. then i’m back on those grimy trojan streets, and sarah is dancing with a group of her friends, alerting the beasts to my location. i try to run, but she and her friends block my escape. i duck and weave between them, sprinting for cover, but it feels futile, i sense the giant hog catching up with me, can feel its warm breath.

then i wake up.

Bradley Manning

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 05:37:00 -0500

I never want to die.

Last night I dreamed of drowning. My heart was beating heavily when I woke from the dream. Holding my aching chest, I convinced myself that my heart was coated in a layer of greasy breadcrumbs, and that my arteries were blocked by balls of fat.

I have never understood people who take comfort in the idea that their life-force or soul survives them. It is evident to me that we are the sum of our memories and experiences. “I” refers to a set of mindsets, local to a particular body, that have been uniquely shaped by “my” experiences. That is the part that dies, unquestionably. You need only slice a chunk out of somebody’s brain to see how dependent their character, or ‘essence’, is on the physical matter that comprises the material part of what they call ‘themselves’.

Even if your life-force outlives you, it isn’t you. It has nothing to do with you. You are the hard-drive, the processes, the applications, the music, the memory. Your ‘life-force’, if it exists, which it doesn’t, is - at best - the mains adaptor.

Which makes it all the more terrible that humans can treat other humans’ lives as their own playthings.

American soldiers execute defenceless Iraqi civilians, including women and children, and walk free after court martials. Their victims simply expire. And one of the key figures in exposing the atrocities of the liberators now sits in court, facing a life sentence for his crimes.

Whatever your opinions on the release of unredacted data, or of Julian Assange’s character, the fact remains that amongst all the diplomatic cables and international bickering contained in the documents that Bradley Manning supplied to Wikileaks, there is substantial evidence of almost entirely unpunished war crimes committed by US soldiers.

Let’s overlook the enormous resentment that these actions have fostered in the Iraqi community towards their American ‘saviours’ for now, and just focus on the basic facts. For no good reason, trigger-happy soldiers murdered innocent civilians. People with lives and memories and characters, erased purely to satisfy the whimsical bloodlust of an invading force.

What could be justifiable about that? What about that crime deserves anything other than the harshest possible punishment? But instead of spending their lives behind bars coming to terms with the hideous crimes they committed, they are given court martial hearings where they are discharged from the military and punished with little more than a slap on the wrist. Men whose actions flew in the face of the values that their nation claims to espouse are treated as petty criminals and given a second chance.

A man whose principles are very much in line with the liberty and justice that America proclaims vociferously, on the other hand, faces a lifetime in jail for an act of supposed treachery.

This has nothing to do with bleeding hearts, or liberals v conservatives, it is about consistency, justice, fairness, and the value of life.

If I were ever subjected to the injustice of a summary execution at the hands of an invading force, or to the injustice of spending the majority of my life in prison as a traitor for exposing atrocity, then I would have experienced a reality far worse than any hell you can imagine. My life is the most valuable thing I have. To lose it hopelessly at the hands of a mindless brute or a hypocritical regime would be the greatest injustice of all.