Whatever New Year

Been quiet around here for a while.

I won't cheapen my intentions by stapling the phrase "New Year's Resolution" to them, but I'm hoping to make a bit more use of this particular vertex of the blogohedron in 2019. With the first stretch of IDFC almost two thirds of the way through, that feels like it should be possible.

I guess we'll see, though. In any event; I hope everyone enjoys themselves today, and that 2019 finally breaks the grim run of increasingly indefensible orbits of that there Sun.

Best of luck to you all.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.7 - "Still Ill" (The Smiths)

I can't think of another Smiths song which begins so deliberately ugly. Marr's slashing. palm-muted collisions scrape the brain like the sound of a machine refusing to start. Once he swoops into a more standard Smiths riff (which is to say, an astonishingly good one) Morrissey contributes his own unpleasantness with a dead-eyed skewering of Little England assholes:

I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving
England is mine, it owes me a living
But ask me why and I'll spit in your eye
Ask me why, and I'll spit in your eye

It's a swipe that gets both more powerful and more baffling as time goes on. How did Morrissey go from so effortlessly nailing the sour entitlement of the EDLs recruitment pool to acting as their unofficial spokesperson? Who is ill here, and how?

It just wasn't like the old days any more
No, it wasn't like those days
Am I still ill?

"Still Ill" is a fever dream, a burning hallucination of things that don't exist, and never did. The tragedy here - the central mistake that warps and twists and burns and kills, the excuse grabbed for when waving England flags in immigrants' faces and pushing dogshit through their letterboxes - is that the patient believes it is the country that's sick. That one day they'll wake to find their fictitious, quasi-fascistic Britain (emphasise fascistic, rather than quasi-) has recovered its senses, and returned to what it was.

We might never know when Morrissey's chronic case of nationalism first became symptomatic. I'm not sure that's a question spending all that much time on, actually. All we can say is that he's still ill, and the fever he's helping spread shows no sign of breaking.

Back before it became impossible to miss what Morrissey had revealed himself as, though, this song meant something very different to me.

Under the iron bridge we kissed
And though I ended up with sore lips
It just wasn't like the old days anymore
No it wasn't like those days
Am I still ill?

It's been twenty-five years since I was first prescribed medication to aid my mental health. I've tried at least three different drugs, over at least four lengthy periods - most recently, an eight-year stint on citalopram, a state of affairs I'm hoping will last indefinitely, absent any actual sign of recovery.

It's not a perfect solution. The meds take away some of my sadness, and most of the white-hot unrelenting anger that used to give me jaw-ache from clenching my teeth so hard. But there are side-effects. Whether the limitations are pharmaceutical or neurological, it's not just the negative emotions that end up damped. The lows are more shallow, but the highs are flattened out. On my best days I can be aware my immediate situation is a pleasant one, as though I'm reading about a favourite fictional character being happy, and am feeling pleased for them. On the worst days, happy situations just make me sad.

(Though so does fear, in fairness, which can make watching horror films with me a rather odd experience.)

This can't possibly not have a knock-on effect regarding relationships. Without the drugs, love becomes anger, and lust becomes misery. With them, it often feels like something happening to someone else. I need you to understand that it isn't I'm incapable of love. It's that he way my mind expresses love would be unrecognisable to my younger self. "It just wasn't like the old days anymore", as the man said, irrespective of the number of kisses exchanged in the shadow of cold, dripping architecture.

Maybe this is simply part of growing old. It's hard to tell - I've got nothing to compare my interiority to. The closest I can come, for some reason, is music, which from time to time stirs up sensations in my head that I can recognise as essentially me.

As emotional stimulants go, an mp4 file is more fast-release than a swig of alcohol, and more reliable than literally anything else. Self-medication through music isn't entirely risk-free, though. Knowing you'll feel something is distinct from knowing what precisely you'll feel. There's a sense in which I'm playing (Russian) roulette with emotions I've lost the knack to processing. Sometimes "Still Ill" makes me feel understood. Other times, it makes me feel unsalvageable. Am I still ill? Fucking hell, yes, as it turns out. Still.

Morrissey can't seem to stop getting worse, and I can't seem to start getting any better. A song released before Morrissey was a joke and before I was a schoolboy continues to gather new layers over time. Like scar tissue. Like rust beneath an iron bridge. You can see what was originally there, but you can't get to it.

I'm too scared to check whether Brexit might result in disruptions to my med schedule.

Are these people still ill? Oh no.

------------------------------------------------

B-side:

(The live version on Rank is even better than the studio recording, which of course makes me hate Morrissey all the more.)

Retrial

Hey everyone, it's Christmas. Have a ghost story.

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‘It will be standing in the corner’, the dead man told her. ‘In the far-right of the room. That’s always where it starts.’

Jia found something persuasive in the dead man’s voice; an urgency that carried through the distance and metal of the phonograph recording. A need to be heard above the whir of the very machine delivering the message.

So she looked.

At first, she could see nothing in the thin light of her budget electric lantern. Books and folders stood stacked and decaying, dying messages from a century previous. Dust danced, but like people who’d rather just be going home to bed.

Jia narrowed her eyes, let her pupils widen. There.

It was standing in the corner.

The figure had its back to her. It stood in the shadow of boxes she’d not yet looked at. That and the weak light saved her from being able to make much out. A thin, grooved body, glistening and concave; an hourglass that demons might use to apportion their torture. A squat, creased head, swaying slowly from side to side as if searching the wall in front of it for an exit.

Or a meal.

‘Crap,’ she whispered.

‘Do not stop playing these recordings,’ the dead man told her. ‘Do NOT stop, or it will notice you.’
There was a click as the wax cylinder containing the message reached the end of its groove. With it no longer turning the number ‘1’ could once again be seen stencilled at one end.

The figure’s head began turning, very slowly, towards her.

Hands shaking, Jia reached for the phonograph, still balanced precariously atop the small table she’d found it on, beside the old furnace in the complex’s sealed basement. Sealed until she’d broken in, anyway, like a cat on its last life still determined to live up to its rep.

Jia removed the played cylinder, replaced it with the next, set the needle.

‘It will still mooove’ the dead man continued, his tinny voice slowing and deepening where time had warped the wax grooves into which he’d poured his words. ‘But this way, you can buuuy time for the others to reeeach you.’

Jia looked again. The figure had left the boxes now, shark-bulk muscle moving silently on insect limbs. Mucus glittered at its edges. It still did not turn to face her, looking instead down a short side passage leading off from the main basement.

‘It iiiiis imperative you make nooo other sound’, the dead man said. ‘We know now how tooo treat these cylinders so to stave off murderous rage from the subject. It will stiiill move, but slowly’.

A click signalled the end of another recording. Jia forced herself not to look at the monstrous figure as she set the next one spinning.

When she glanced hurriedly back, it had shifted once more.

‘The subject will now be approaching,’ the dead man told her. ‘Do not move, and dooo not panic. Avoid looking at its face, as this can cause alarm aaaand in some cases madness.’

Jia didn’t understand. The creature still had its back to her, and had moved away, entering a tunnel that led outside the wan light of her cheap lantern. It took another step away as she watched, a twisting lunge of glittering horror, fast and slow in all the wrong places. It didn’t so much walk as throw itself down a flight of stairs that didn’t actually exist.

‘We have reecorded many reactions to an incoming subject,’ the dead man said. ‘These incluuude goose-bumps, wailing and the gnashing of teeth, garment-rending, ichthyophobia, ichthyophilia, deeemands for compensation or danger money, and diarrhoea, listed iiiiin increasing likelihood of promptiiiing an attack.’

Jia felt frustration and confusion seep into her fear. It didn’t so much dilute it, as freeze along with it, ­bulking out her unrest. Just what the hell had these people been doing down here? How many lives had been lost so some smug prick could use their deaths to record a how-to guide on avoiding immediate murder? And why had this all simply been sealed away, instead of actually dealt with?

The monster was still tumbling away from her, thin and lurching and obviously unbound by the dead man’s narration. Suddenly it froze just outside the lantern’s circle, a darkness silhouetted against deeper darkness.

It was facing the right-hand wall, apparently staring at something there.

‘Survivors are reeequired to complete paperwork detailing any and aall psychological damage following the encounter, and tooo rate the experience out of ten, compared to previous interactions with suuupernatural horrors.’

Jia scooped up her lantern, turned the control that focussed the beam, and, taking great care not to spill light on the creature itself, passed her circle across the musty brick it appeared focussed on.
Her light bounced glinting off a switch, angular and upright.

The machine clicked once more, and the creature’s head again began to slowly swivel toward her.
Jia reached for the final cylinder, thinking desperately. The door behind her was too far away – she’d never reach it before the horror reached her. The door ahead was far closer, but she had no idea where it led, or even whether it was unlocked. Maybe the creature would start moving away again, and give her more time to run? Either way, once the last cylinder ran out she’d have to make her move.

Jia had almost inserted the cylinder when she felt it. Something attached to its end, just next to the number ‘4’. A small blob of wax, with a faint trail leading back to the main cylinder from which it had once dripped, liquid and warm.

Understanding hit like chain-shot, splintering, dragging down. The recordings hadn’t been warped by time. They’d been warped by heat.

Realisation and terror made her clumsy. She got the last cylinder running, but knocked all the others off the table in doing so. Instinctively she reached down to recover them, putting her hand on the phonograph’s table to steady herself.

Immediately the table shifted, creaking as it turned on a hidden axle until it settled with the phonograph facing away from her.

Jia barely even noticed the creature as it threw the switch and ignited the furnace.

It was a rotating table.

She’d been looking in the wrong corner.

The second creature had hold of her before she could move. Jia yelled in surprise and pain, tried to twist herself free. All she accomplished was turning to face what held her. She caught a blur of bone and sucker-mouths, and huge, sightless eyes.

‘Rescue should nooow have been enacted,’ the dead man told her. ‘Otherwise, death is certain.’

‘Screw all three of you’, Jia spat.

She heard a collapsing laugh, like the mockery of a battleship, and then simply darkness.

When Jia awoke, she was burning.

D CDs #474: Noise Of Summer

One of the nicest things about the D CDs project is how far it can force me out of my comfort zone. This is probably the furthest out from shore I've been yet, and the water is no less deep for the sea being gentle and sun-kissed.

It's not just the "Latin reggae" thing, either, though that's already at least a time zone away from my regular haunts. There's not even really any lyrics here for me to over-analyse. Even the songs in English here don't aim for anything past easy-sounding nonsense. I can't even get worked up by the careless linking of enjoying sex and criminal activity in "Promiscuity" (sorry, "promiskwity"). It just doesn't read as a slice of puritanical moralising, so much as a careless afternoon's leafing through a rhyming dictionary. There's no more weight to the lyrics here than the eclectic, gleefully silly choice of samples throughout. How are you supposed to fret about what could be read as an ill-judged puritanical lecture when it's delivered alongside what sounds like a chipmunk in mourning?

Without my standard crutch, then, what is there to talk about? Atmospherics, naturally. This is a summer record. I don't mean it's a record that belongs to summer, or one best played then (though I think both are true). I mean it's an album that generates summer. It doesn't matter if I'm playing "...Esperanza" over a beer on a warm day, or spinning it in the car during a drive through winter darkness and lashing rain. The mood it generates is inescapable, all breezy promenades and self-conscious-free boogying on sandy beaches. I listened to a sermon once where the minister talked about the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat. "One changes with the room's temperature, the other changes the temperature of a room".

"Poximon Estacion Esperanza" is a thermostat record. It evokes feelings of warmth and relaxation, and does this despite - or surely because of - the madness surging just beneath the surface. In Manu Chao's world, you're never more than a few seconds away from an interjection by a demented duck,  or a drunk in a midnight choir of Clangers. The result sounds like the inner soundtrack to David Lynch's head on the happiest, drunkest night of his life - the sadness is still there, but even that tastes sweet (the opening track "Merry Blues" puts this tension front and centre, from its title onwards).

A deceptively simple, smooth listen, then, enjoyable for the initial sparkle and commendably disciplined assembly alone (more than half the songs here last less than three minutes, and none last more than five). Dive under the surface of the glittering ocean, though, and you'll find hidden depths, and creatures of strange beauty uncoiling to sing to you.

 Seven and half tentacles.