This story, which I found linked to on Gaurav’s blog, pleased me greatly.
Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets.
With an estimated 13 million CCTV cameras in Britain, suitable locations were not hard to come by.
…Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.
It is joyous!
I do not dance, as I have said here before. I sit/stand in corners with groups of people and make scintillating conversation (for I am a scintillating conversationalist) instead.
A friend just directed me to this post on Stephen Fry’s blog for this gem:
I hate dancing more than I can possibly explain. I hate doing it myself, which I can’t anyway, but I loathe and resent the necessity to try. I hate watching other people do it. I hate the way it breaks up conversation. I hate the slovenly mixture of sexual exhibitionism, strutting contempt and repellent narcissism that it involves. I hate it when it is formless, meaningless bopping and I hate it (if anything even more) when it is formal and choreographed into genres like ballroom or schooled disco. Those cavortings are so embarrassing and dreadful as to force my hand to my mouth.
If I listen to music, I like either to do it completely alone, so that if I am taken by the desire to move my feet and body (which is inevitable with so much music) I can do it unwitnessed, or I like to LISTEN to it, to hear the line of it, to follow the lyrics and to allow it work inside me. I do not want to use it as an exercise track for a farcical, meaningless, disgusting, brainless physical public exhibition of windmilling, gyrating and thrashing in a hot, loud room or hall. I do not want to use music as the medium for a mating or courting ritual. No one would ever select me as a sexual partner on the basis of my ability to froth, frolic and gibber in time to music anyway, and nor would I ever choose a partner by such desperate and useless criteria.
I can’t dance. It may well be true that guilty feet have no rhythm, but it is also true that perfectly innocent feet can also be unable to move persuasively or happily to the beat. I can’t dance and I SO do not want to. Or is it that I don’t want to because I can’t? No, I don’t think so. I can’t play football, golf, cricket to anything like a human standard and I want to desperately. Desperately. It really isn’t a question of being truculent and captious about it. I really, really, really hate dancing and have not the slightest milligram of envy for those who can do it. If there is such a thing as ‘being able to do’ the kind of dancing people routinely engage in. Not so much an accomplishment as an affliction.
The unhappy self-consciousness of the adolescent on the dance floor at school, or in the village barn dance or local disco is too well known a standard hero of rueful dissection for me to need to describe myself in that guise in too much detail. Here were boys and girls my age twisting, spinning and jumping at each other and they all seemed to know what they were doing. Had I been confined to the sick room with an asthma attack the day disco dancing was covered in the syllabus? How did they know which way to move,when to fling up a hand, when to spin, when to jump? When to look into their “partner’s” eyes, when to look at the floor? There was nothing written down, did it accord to some chord change or eight bar measure that I, in my hot discomfort and pop illiteracy simply could not hear?
I do love that man.
Living with Roswitha has certain…advantages. One of them is the joy of unashamedly listening to the sort of music that one generally has to pretend to be embarrassed about. I have been introduced, for example, to this:
From here:
Oscar Peterson, who sat atop the world of jazz piano for decades with his driving two-handed swing, technical wizardry and rapid-fire solos, has died, a friend of the musician said on Monday. He was 82.
I only discovered him a couple of years ago, when D made me a wonderful jazz piano mix CD. The man was brilliant, and I’m sorry he’s gone. 2007 continues to be a bad year for the arts… I’m glad there’s very little of it left.
Some of us cannot study without music. Forced to work in silence we decide after about a page and a half that a power nap (15 minutes, max) couldn’t hurt and we’re out for the next few hours.
But. Music must be listened to properly. This means it must be very loud, preferably the only thing you can hear. This leads to all sorts of problems – angry neighbours (who, however, will have strange pujas in their houses the night before an important exam. With women singing in loud nasal voices), parents who strive to be thought responsible citizens, and the like. A friend’s father has soundproofed a room in his house so he can listen to his music without being a public menace. Those of us who cannot do this are asked to use headphones or earphones.
The thing is, though, headphones go against everything we’ve ever learnt about music. We have listened to music out of speakers, knowing that the sound will fill a room, that no one will hear us if we let ourselves sing along. Loud music from speakers allows you a certain privacy that way – no one will ever know you can’t sing the simplest chorus without changing scale three times. It’s a privacy you come to take for granted.
Then they make you use the earphones. They even create shiny technological things to use said earphones with and make you lust after them with cunning advertising campaigns. And suddenly, all that security is gone. No one else can hear the music, but they can hear YOU yowling away very clearly. If you’re a good singer this may not worry you much. I myself am rather…creative when I sing. I refuse to tamely follow a tune but attempt to harmonize with it instead. The results can be embarrassing.
What makes it worse is your sheer helplessness. (You could, perhaps, stop yourself from singing along by sitting up and forcing your mouth shut, but I’m not sure you’d actually be able to listen if you did). People who talk in their sleep might perhaps understand this insecurity – not being able to control what other people might hear you say.
I have had some disastrous headphone experiences myself. Iron Maiden and elderly dinner guests (bring your daughter to the slaughter), a rendition of Clapton’s Layla years ago that still causes Shikha endless amusement, and most recently my version of You Flesh is so Nice by Jeff Buckley. This last was pretty bad, but I maintain that The Goldfrapp Incident (the song in question was Twist, if you must know) remains the worst of the lot.
I am informed, however, that when I talk in my sleep I am completely incomprehensible. This, at least, is comforting. Sigh. One takes what one can get.
An ending fitting for the start
You twist and tore our love apart
Your light fingers threw the dark
that shattered the lamp and into darkness cast us
No you’ve got it the wrong way round
You shut me up, and blamed it on the brown
Cornered the boy, kicked out at the world…
The world kicked back a lot fucking harder now…
If you wanna try
If you wanna try
There’s no worse you could do
Uh oh oh
I know you lie
I know you lie
I’m still in love with you
Uh oh oh
Can’t take me anywhere (I’ll take you anywhere)
Can’t take me anywhere, (i can’t take you anywhere)
I’ll take you anywhere you wanna go
You can’t stand me now
You can’t stand me now
You can’t stand me now
You can’t stand me now
You can’t stand me now
You can’t stand me now
You can’t stand me now
You can’t stand me now
Have we enough to keep it together?
Or do we just keep on pretending
(And hope our luck is never ending)…
You tried to pull the wool,
I wasn’t feeling too clever
And you take all that they’re lending
Until you needed mending…
If you wanna try
If you wanna try
There’s no worse you could do
Uh oh oh
I know you lie
All ya do is make me cry
All these words they ain’t true
Uh oh oh
Can’t take me anywhere (I’ll take you anywhere)
Can’t take me anywhere, (i can’t take you anywhere)
I’ll take you anywhere you wanna go
You can’t stand me now
You can’t stand me now
You can’t stand me now
You can’t stand me now
You can’t stand me now
You can’t stand me now
You can’t stand me now
You can’t stand me now…
Dammit, June you’ve got it stuck in my head permanently now. Growl.
In conversation with a friend, I decided that Godslash is a fiction genre that really needs to be attempted more often. Think about it. Gods are not people and are therefore completely ungendered. Now, while people may be attracted to other people regardless of gender, the sexual act is always a gendered one. This would be completely different, unknowable. A friend once said that heterosexual love was an exploring of differences, and homosexual love an exploration of similarities. God/God would be…what…omnisexual?
Plus, it’d get you lots of attention. There’d be the “Blasphemy, OMG!” types. And if it got too bad you could always point out that it wasn’t really slash, per se, since Gods are not really male or female.
In other news, I bought myself the DVD of Jeff Buckley Live in Chicago. I have been patting it and crooning every few minutes. *patcroon*