Musics I done

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

how to let down friends and disappoint people, by david cohen gradutard


the text runs:
panel 1: jobman: "so what areas of work are you looking for?"
panel 2: silence
panel 3: 20 years later. grilly: "good traffic today"

woman's hour got me out of bed again. the revelation that co-habiting heterosexual couples have fewer rights than homosexual ones is thouroughly upsetting. can't they just leave gender out of the equation? it's not discriminatory to have laws for everyone irrespective of differences, and then have commissions to ensure that equality is maintained where necessary. what this represents is a concrete, legal discrimination, and will be until the laws recognises people regardless of gender, and lets two persons of the same sex marry. it doesn't have to be in a church, or have some nonexistent terrorist god frowning upon it; just fill in a form if that's all you want to do, and get the right to your life-long partner's property, if it's so important to you.

i'm increasingly despairing of the world and it's people (yes, more than usual), especially with 'recent events'. the chief of the met police saying more civilians could be shot - well that's reasonable, how are we meant to identify suicide bombers if they don't have beards? i've not changed my ideals - it's better that some bombs slip through the net than the net is so tight that it constricts the people it is supposed to be there to protect. hmph. fascists on both sides of us, buoyed up by the stupidity of the average subject-izan. i also stand by another older prinicple - it success is not possible, it is still better to try and fail and to not try at all (no matter what master yoda says), because what if your information is wrong?

oh yeah, the weekend.

friday was a bloody riot. i graduated (!) on empty stomach then went for lunch with my darling family at the very nice quod (although creamy sundried tomato gnocchi did leave me farting raw red onion for the night). after lying on the beach and listening to michelle trying to moderate the relationship between her brother and his son, it was time to go home. some time during the graduation, as alisdair smith talked about the london bombs and the tsunami disaster in the same sentance, it occured to me that god is a terrorist. i mentioned this to laurence later in the evening. after i'd left my parents running for a train, i doubled back, met tommy katherine and l and we crashed back into the afternoon grad ceremony for as much free champange as we could fill inside our stomachs, and also our pockets. after throwing our topless selves round the living room to raggabba and metal, drinking vodka + irn bru, we threw on red tshirts (somehow we knew it was fancy dress) and went out to laura's friend's house party.
i met laura at one o'clock in the afternoon last thursday, when she woke up in our house. she's very nice, look here she is in the middle, below.
after writing 'live in fear' on their smoke alarm, l & i walked round to the house that tommy had popped round to, only he said it was left then right out of the house, not right then left (which he meant), which gave us a long walk and the perfect opportunity to try out the marker pens we took from the house.
i went home before the others (it was only round the corner), having taken an x-files mug that was sat on their garden wall (i'm not normally like this, honest). on l's way home, he wrote 'god is a terrorist' on a church hoarding. i know how he hates hotlinking images, so you'll just have to look at his site

the next morning, we packed and got picked up by the charming chris t-t to go to truck fest.


aimee

look, it's a truck!


tim,

and laurence, ready for a day in the wet.

i didn't take any photos of bands, so you'll have to take my word that sikth, yourcodenameis:milo, chris t-t, stuffy and the fuses, and fonda 500 were all great. brakes didn't really do it for me, martin grech was quite good, and patrick wolfe was, sorry fanboys, hilariously terrible. chris gave us the gossip: ten minutes before he was due to go on, wolfe's manager threw a wobbler about the lack of dressing room (although it was mentioned in the contract) and declared that without a full length mirror, the show wasn't going to happen. well, they told him to stuff it and patrick wolfe went on anyway. the highlight of the weekend was the start of sikth's set - as the fret-mental intro to 'hold my finger' (their first song, as i predicted) kicked in, two guys barged everyone out of the way and started moshing, about four joined in much to everyone else's chagrin, especially l and myself who were trying to dance, but after about 45 seconds the moshing petered out and a massive hole was left in the middle of the crowd. for a while no-one wanted to fill it (except one eager fan, who had the build, haircut, and jumper of thom), but then after a fashion we reclaimed and used the space to get funky. i've seen it happen before - you just can't dance to sikth. they're too good.

and finally..


look, it's a truck!

4 comments:

unimbued said...

I beat you in the getting up wars, since I was already in the shower by the time that homosexual marriage feature was on womans hour. since I'm neither gay nor interested in marriage, I couldn't help but not care in the slightest about "great injustices"/"legal paperwork that'll get straightened out eventually in ten years time".

I'm amused at your horror of the 'shoot to kill' policy of British police. What would you do if faced with a suicide bomber? Stand back and give him soom room?

Seriously though, the RUC and British Army have had, in certain situations, shoot-to-kill policies firmly set in place in Northern Ireland for the last thirty five years (not to mention Direct Rule, Political Injustice fans). And I haven't heard many (i.e. no) complaints from across the water about it. Not in my back yard, indeed.

On a lighter note, I finally tracked down my first non-signed musical love: Souler Rico. They played Muse-cor at Jam Nights years ago and Grilly and I used to twat about to their sets, usually among a seated (or should that read "sedated"?) audience. Well, did you notice the singer from SR is now the yourcodenameis:milo frontman? The glasses are a dead giveaway.

Anonymous said...

SOME PEOPLES LIVES ARE WORTH MORE THAN OTHERS

Grilly said...

wait, the army had a shoot-to-kill policy? you're pulling my leg, man!

sorry i haven't been commenting on the troubles in northern ireland. i'll just send this blog back in time 30 years, til before we had the internet, or computers. but for the record, NI is a despicabally occupied territory, proof as ever that the most charming government will not act in the interests of its subjects, let alone its neighbours. so how can you not give a fuck about partnership rights? it's exactly the same principle of exactly the same government that sells arms, invades its neighbours and denies its citizens their sexuality.

if plain clothes police are faced with a suicide bomber, of course they should shoot them, like they do in isreal when they get the chance. however, when the person in question isn't even suspected of being a suicide bomber, they shouldn't be shot, nor should a person be shot if there is uncertainty whether they are a terrorist or not. the chief of the met has basically said they will shoot suspects and this is not okay, because how does one avoid being a suspect?

a technical point i can't understand; to avoid hitting members of the public (it's difficult to shoot someone in the head who's running away), the police must force the person to the ground. that's what they did in this case, before shooting him nervously seven times in the head. at the point he was subdued, could the police men not have checked whether or not he was a danger to the public? i must be missing some information.

Anonymous said...

I am so horrified about the Brazilian guy, as you know from my blog...
Any way, I just wanted to say that I loved the photo of your friend tim, he looks like a marsupial baby cradled in the pouch of his marsupial tent-mother.