Rare new post

But fairly big news. Got my first full time job in eh oh a good good while. :-)

Starting full time gym instructor position in next couples of weeks once disclosure comes through.

Short and to the point. Though given I last posted in June and this is like my second post of year I don't think anyone will be reading. Do comment if you are and I will check in again sometime.

Update

nothing interesting, I was watching the end of the bourne ultimatum the other day and I like the Moby track that features on it, so I thought i'd pop over to my blog where I linked the tune via myplaylist.com.

I'm loathe to kill of the blog completely, though I only pop onto it now and again for as one means of listening to music I been to lazy to go and download onto my computer or mp3 player.

What a day!

I know this blog is almost dead but thought I'd post about the day I had yesterday.

Started off quietly enough I was going about my business tidying up a bit here and there and I could hear in the background the noise of grass being cut. There is a guy that goes about cutting peoples grass for them as a small business enterprise and who used to cut grass for us. Now to cut a longer story a bit shorter his services proved unreliable and after investment in a new lawnmower no longer required. This still doesn't put him off asking every so often and when the doorbell rang I knew who it was and choose to ignore. I just could not be bothered with him.

So later on I head downstairs and out on errands of my own and he is still there with the latest in a long line of dimwit sidekicks. I am asked if I want my grass cut, I politely refuse. Now the garden is shared between an upstairs and downstairs flat and the back garden is shared and with the downstairs flat designed for wheelchair use the tennat there gets a grass cutting service provided. Now the service is pretty poor but it has established the precedent that he gets a bit at the front cut for him and half the back. Now recently I tend to just cut all of the front and leave the back and well they have taken care of it. But yesterday as I was leaving and having politely refused the offer made I get hit upon for money for them doing the back. I explain that well they weren't asked to do it. Needless to say they were trying to get money off me, all of £5 and things began to get heated. The sidekick who was a ginger midget of a guy starts going mental, calling me all sorts. Saying what a snidey cunt I am leaving the poor wee handicapped boy to pay for the grass cutting. I am not having what is basically an attempt to extort money from me and tell him that I'll sort out with downstairs but he getting nothing. After more tirades he then threatens me, I tell him to fuck off. He then picks up his rake and waves it at us and says he is going to "set about me," just as I've went to walk away. I turn andd take a step back and invite him to come ahead and he does nothing other than call me names. So I head off down the street to get my bus, when I'm halfway along I can here him shouting at me again and brandishing his rake. I shake my head in general dismay for the human species and walk slowly on he was welcome to follow but I think his wee legs would only carry him so far.

I tell my partner about all this just so she warned about it and lo and behold as she gets home from her work he tries to get money out of her and not even by starting with a polite enquiry. It's a case of "haw you, you owe me fucking money," well she tore into him and despite more threats about doing her and visiting me in intensive care as a scene erupts he ends up surrounded by the neighbours. Not least the downstairs one who tear into him for upsetting my partner and for having the cheek to chase us for money when it turns out they were explicitly told that it had been made clear what they were paying for and if they wanted to cut the whole of the back as offered that was up to them but they were not to do it if it wasn't covered by what they were paying them. This scene leads ginger arse to get all upset and apologetic and he told to take a hike despite at one point holding out arms for some sort of apologetic hug.

I'm thinking what a day and blissfully unaware that there is more to come. To get straight to the point I was making my way home after playing football. I get off the bus at hamilton bus station and make my way across the road to catch another bus. As I make my way round putting on a bit of a jog some neddy looking guy asks me for a fag. I say sorry I don't smoke and he mouths something not that clear back, he mutters something about wanting a square go and I ignore him because funnily enough I don't actually want one. He shouts abuse at me calling me a tim and other stuff I don't really mind and I head to other bus stop. He decides to follow me over with a wee pal in tow and he starts hassling me again getting right in my face. Despite a brief distraction of some other guy having a cigarett to give him at the bus stop he won't be deterred and after pushing up close to us and trying to provoke me he takes a swing and lands one right on my jaw. It a fair old whack but I shrugged it off and just kept watching him as I still was not wanting to get into a brawl in the street, especially as you never know if cunts like these are carrying anything and he has one pal albeit a wee tiny dude just by and a couple of others not that far away across the street. Not satisfied though he swings at me again, I duck away and it only a glancing blow on forehead but well I not going to stand there and take a kicking so I swing for him and ladle in. He falls back as I try and pound away, not sure how clean my own punches are but doing enough to make sure he not getting at me. Fact that I left handed took him by surprise as he couldn't seem to get his own punches awya as I held him away with right while letting fly with my left. I thought I saw what might have been a tooth fly out, I do hope so least the cunt deserved but at this point his wee pal pulls at me from behind and lets him step back. At this point I decided to leg it, even just two against one seemed bad enough odds and I had room to grab my bag and run. I heard the first ned tell the wee one to chase after me and he managed to trip me up but I was on my feet in a flash as I could have been in big trouble if they'd got me on deck. Fortunately the bigger one hadn't followed in and the wee one as I got up didn't have the bottle to do anything, so I got a clear run at second time of asking and legged it up the street where I ended up calling a taxi and making my way home to end a overly eventful day!

off on holiday

so likely to be no new postings until I'm back.

think a revamp may be in order.

Can't be arsed posting lately

Not entirely because I not had any inclination but for some reason the only time I can think of htings worth posting is when I lying in bed trying to sleep. Not that I having a great deal of trouble sleeping but thoughts always seem to be much clearer then and it can be difficult recreating the lucidity of what I wanted to sya when I originally thought, so in the end I don't bother.

All that said, I saw this article and thought I had to post it and link to it. I know it easy bash pish like coldplay but this guy puts it across quite well I think!

Andy Gill: 'Why I hate Coldplay'

Pompous, mawkish, and unbearably smug, Coldplay have conquered the charts with the sonic equivalent of wilted spinach, argues Andy Gill. And in the process, they've poisoned an entire generation of British rock music

Without wanting for a moment to give the impression that it's anything other than a wonderful way to earn a living, there are times in a rock critic's life when the soul sighs, and one faces the blank screen with heavy heart and empty head. Last week was one such time.

A new Coldplay album.

When, all too frequently, people say how great it must be to earn one's corn writing about music, it's hard to disabuse them of that opinion. Of course it's great! But I tend to offer one small caveat: it's not just writing about music that you enjoy – often, duty makes demands beyond one's personal tastes. And while experience, or low cunning, might spare one unnecessary exposure to the reviewer's less vital duties – hip-hop album tracks entitled "Intro", "Interlude" or "Telephone Skit", triple-albums by Prince, or the solo projects of sundry Rolling Stones – sometimes an act is so huge, so current, that it's impossible to ignore their enervating new release.

A new Coldplay album.

"Well, at least I'm not dodging sniper bullets in Helmand," you tell yourself, and set about the task in hand, knowing it's going to be no more rewarding an experience than the last time you deliberately exposed yourself to their mawkish stadium-rock anthems. Though actually, who knows? After all, this one's produced by Brian Eno, and he even managed to make U2 bearable for an album or two.

But Eno's presence begs its own question, of course. I recall an occasion back in the Eighties, when the young Eddie Murphy, his career then in the ascendant, was drafted in to salvage an appalling Dudley Moore comedy called Best Defense, through the insertion of about 10 minutes of extraneous footage of him pootling about in an army tank. The film was still terrible, and when asked why on earth he had accepted the part, Murphy shrugged and said: "There was a knock at my door, and when I opened it four men came in bearing an enormous cheque."

One can only wonder how many musclebound oafs were required to carry the cheque that persuaded Eno to produce Coldplay's new album. I mean, given his rarefied cultural tastes, surely it can't have been the project highest on Eno's wish-list? And what with all the U2 royalties, he couldn't conceivably need the money.

In the event, the album is almost exactly as I expected, if a tad shorter on Big Anthems than the previous three. The rhythms are a bit busier, and a bit more ethnic, and Chris Martin's little falsetto catch – one of modern music's most irritating tropes – has been rationed out more parsimoniously. (Thanks, Eno!) Pop's favourite Brianiac has ensured the sonic prerequisites are all in good order. And in a few cases, the songs do seem to be about things, rather than just anaemic expressions of emotional indulgence and limp consolation, like X & Y. Things like death, and war, and power. It's... not much, really, but not so little as to be completely worthless. It's the new Gold Standard of Average Music. And given the competition currently battling for that dubious honour, this is no mean feat. Almost an achievement, in fact.

But don't just take my word for it. Tomorrow you can buy the album and hear for yourself – as will untold millions around the globe. Viva La Vida has already broken the record for iTune's biggest album presale, and will doubtless repeat the success of X & Y, which reached No 1 in all 15 territories surveyed in Wikipedia's comparative chart, and shifted upwards of 10 million units. Not Thriller, perhaps, but then... oh go on, you finish the joke.

The strange thing is, I can't seem to find anyone who bought X & Y, or who intends to buy Viva La Vida. For that matter, I have never encountered one person who has a kind word to say about Coldplay. None of my personal or professional acquaintances, nobody in the street or the local café, not a single soul will admit to liking Coldplay or purchasing their music. Indeed, most seem to agree that they epitomise everything that's wrong with modern rock music. So who's buying all their albums? Who are those masses politely arrayed in their thousands at stadiums when Coldplay play? Is it some secret society, an Opus Dei of dreary anthemic music? And where do they congregate, other than at stadiums and arenas? Do they have parties? And if so, how many slash their wrists at these parties? What's the attrition rate?

Yes, yes, I know, I shouldn't be so hard on them – after all, being Coldplay fans, they have it hard enough already. But it does seem to be the case that Coldplay have become one of those definitive cultural dividers, the twain of which shall never meet. They're sort of the anti-Sex Pistols, an act that repulses not through outrage, bad manners and poor grooming, but through their inoffensive niceness and emollient personableness. In 1977, EMI couldn't divest themselves of the troublesome Pistols quick enough, you might recall; but in February 2005, that same corporation's whopping share-price fall of 46.25p (to £2.35) was largely attributed to the announcement that Coldplay's X & Y would not be released during that fiscal year, as originally expected.

This corporate impact is especially ironic given Coldplay singer Chris Martin's highly publicised advocacy of anti-corporate, pro-Fair Trade principles, just one of several ways in which the band offers a pale reflection of their most obvious influence, Radiohead.

Their music sounds like Radiohead with all the spiky, difficult, interesting bits boiled out of it, resulting in something with the sonic consistency of wilted spinach; it retains the crowd-pleasing hooks and singalong choruses while dispensing with the more challenging, dissonant aspects and sudden, 90-degree shifts in direction. Chris Martin's decision to sing in a register that, at times, strains his vocal almost to a yodel brazenly apes Thom Yorke's more skilful and restrained use of a similar vocal gambit. But where Yorke's subtler employment brings soul into prog-rock, Martin's gauche overuse has become a cliché, which itself has been aped by the likes of James Blunt, perhaps the band's chief rival in musical mawkishness.

Another obvious comparison would be with Pink Floyd: they evoke much the same oceanic sense of unease and uplift, and employ the same type of widescreen arrangements, though as with their Radiohead influence, there's little hint that Coldplay share the Floyd's questing artistic temperament. Nor could they emulate the distinctive lyrical approaches of Yorke or Roger Waters, both of whose work is simply too acerbic and bitter, and frequently too twisted and ambivalent, for such innate populists to handle. So what Coldplay invariably fall back on is the disingenuous empathy of lines like, "Is there anybody out there who is lost and hurt and lonely, too?" and "Are you lost or incomplete... can't find your missing piece?", lines feeding off the soul-carrion of the insecure and lonely while offering no solutions, merely crumbs of solace expanded to wedding-cake size by the musical monumentalism within which they're set, so their fans can have their cake and eat themselves up at the same time.

Songs like "Trouble", from their debut album Parachutes, and "In My Place", from A Rush of Blood to the Head, are anthems of amorphous yearning designed to be as widely applicable as possible; all-purpose wallows whose self-pitying, apologetic tone sounds utterly bogus. When Martin sings, "If you go and leave me down here on my own, then I'll wait for you", it's clear that we're the ones missing out, that though he may be down, his smug self-sacrifice occupies the emotional high ground.

By 2005's X & Y, the band had shifted slightly from outright self-pity to broader misgivings, a move marked by the shift from first-person to second-person in songs like "Fix You" and "A Message", cunningly enlisting their audience as co-mopers through songs of solace articulating vague, windy concerns – "I'm scared about the future and I want to talk to you", "When you feel so tired and you can't sleep/Stuck in reverse", etc – invariably resolved in mealy-mouthed platitudes like "I will try to fix you" and "You don't have to be alone".

There's no real sense of grappling with the social or political causes of the problems, just a bland emotional poultice applied to the wound. They've become the sonic security-blanket for millions of fans, their tracks sweeping by with the epic solemnity of state funerals, their huge, heartbreaking chord changes sucker-punching you with emotional logic while sapping any anger or political engagement – in the existential sense – that you might otherwise experience. Instead, Chris Martin offers a consoling arm around the shoulder and a nice cup of tea. But rarely can a claim have been less borne out by circumstance than "I will fix you": with Coldplay, it's never more than cold comfort.

In this respect, the band's name is one of the most appropriate in rock. It's redolent of pale complexions and dead emotions: whenever I hear it, it always evokes a glassy-eyed fish on a fishmonger's slab, ice melting from its scales. Ironically, it was coined by Tim Rice-Oxley, who had stopped using it for his own band as he considered it "too depressing". Rice-Oxley was apparently invited to join Coldplay, but instead chose Keane, which suggests a serious frying pan/fire interface. Still, at least it wasn't Snow Patrol or Athlete, the weediest of the Coldplay copyists trailing in the band's wake.

Sometimes, it seems as if an entire generation of UK indie bands has been blighted by their slavish adoption of the Coldplay formula, with would-be anthemic hooks and choruses, gushing affectations of maudlin sincerity, and the sort of deracinated, wholefood 'n' soymilk attitudes that are steadily strangling the life out of rock'n'roll. With luck, the wheel will turn again and drop them in the dumper, as it did with the laddish Oasis copyists that preceded them. But at least Oasis promulgated the kind of spirit and energy that galvanises the soul, rather than the notion that all problems can be assuaged by impotent sympathy set to repetitive piano ostinatos.

The band's political emptiness is most glaring in the ironically titled "Politik", whose list of vague demands ("Give me time and give me space, give me real don't give me fake...") and call to "open up your eyes" betray a dismal lack of political coherence.

They're not entirely to blame, I concede, nor are they alone in their simpering revisionism: for just as Thatcherism brought a wave of arrogant, sod-you selfish celebrocracy to Eighties pop, so, too, did Blairism effectively wipe out the ideological component of modern pop, emptying it of grass-roots political impetus in favour of less troublesome, easily harnessed celebrity-gesture politics. Not even Tony Blair, though, could be as bereft of driving principle as a band who sing – as Coldplay have – "I'm going to buy a gun and start a war/If you can tell me something worth fighting for". So, just how long a list do you want, lads?

On another, possibly longer, list, there's plenty more to dislike about Coldplay – most of it, admittedly, concerning Chris Martin, the world's least impressive rock star by virtually any criteria connected with rock'n'roll as we know it. There's the celebrity-spouse syndrome that casts Chris 'n' Gwynnie as the scented-candle, low-fibre equivalent of Brad 'n' Ange; the scrubby non-beard that Chris Martin shares with Jensen Button (have you ever seen the two of them together in the same place?); calling a child Apple, rather than, say, Veal (far tastier, and less likely to get bullied at school); and much more besides.

But for me, it's the band's anguished professions of supposed political concern, while simultaneously indulging the rampant self-pity of the most cosseted, comfortable constituency of music fans the world has ever known – that's the most irritating aspect of Coldplay. Rock'n'roll used to be a rallying cry, a clarion call; now, in their hands, it's just a palliative.

Our manager stayeth(for now)

Very satisfying to get it right up the jambos who were dancing about thinking they had pinched our manager only for him to say "roon ye, I'm staying where I am!" You'd have to be mental to work over in Little Lithuania with the chairman interfering and calling all the shots. Just hope we keep playing the way we have been and we reap the reward of improving his contract before he moves onto bigger things at a less bonkers club!

Creative funk

I not been writing lately, there has been stuff going on that has been a distraction but to be honest some of it was almost welcome to avoid writing, I had came to the conclusion that what I was writing at the time wasn't satisfying and my heart wasn't in it. But in last day or two an idea has been forming that is giving me enthusiasm to try and develop it into something, what format I don't know. I had been trying to write something in screenplay form and that in itself wasn't the problem, indeed if anything it was simpler. To my mind a screenplay is like the skeleton of a story and I think in many ways it doesn't require as much skill with words themselves as it requires imagination to tell a story and the ability to visulise it. If you want to set something say in an area of London, you can set it there without having to have the same amount of knowledge of the place to describe it with same level of authenticity.

Backwaters of europe here we come!

Been rather quiet here on all fronts, but not had a great deal to say all season about Motherwell FC and here we've only went and qualified for europe for something like the 4th time in our history. If anything there has been to much going on to write about, from the dramatic turnaround in fortunes on the pitch, to tragic loss of a player also on the pitch, the dreadful state of the pitch itself and a bundle of call offs it seems quite appropriate that after our vital 2-1 win over Aberdeen at the weekend our Main stand and the pitch itself was struck by lightning cause both to be flooded. Fortunately only some carpets are needing replaced, our improved drainage making the pitch flooding a not to considerable problem for a change.

There isn't a rollercoaster yet built that could give you the same upss, downs, thrills and spills it has been that dramatic a season. Finishing 3rd is a well deserved reward at the end of it all, would like to think we can build on that but I understand all to well how Scottish football works and our own stature within it.