Screaming in the Trees

We met on mutual ground but you avoided my gaze,
until I lost your face in the next morning's haze.
Your shoes could've woken up the whole street.
They drowned out the birds screaming in the trees.

We sat down on the stone stairs
and I watched the scars on your knees.

We met on mutual ground, you fell out of your dress.
This bar's not open late enough, so let's go home and make a mess.
They smiled and left the room to leave us with more space,
But we stayed where we were and just had a drink to the chase.

A good night kiss equals a quick reaction,
but it's hard to believe I'm fully grown.

So as usual, we parted on vague terms,
so you could climb back on your throne.

Screaming in the Trees, byn Arab Strap.

The Beatles

For Shayan.

I like the Beatles. In fact, they are one of my favourite bands. They are in the top ten for sure, and most probably, in real terms, make it into the top five… at number five. I could give you the list of my favourite bands, and whilst the order changes a lot, the actual members of the distinguished group of artists rarely changes. This is a long in development post of mine. I’ll do it one day when I run out of ideas. However, The Beatles.

The Beatles then. Everyone knows who they are, if for one person didn’t recognise John Lennon from one of his most iconic photographs… but anyway, that’s besides the post. The thing is that this month they released The Beatles: Rock Band. Merging two of the things I love most about music: the band themselves, and the ability to play their music without any musical ability. This is a good combination.

However, it’s not the music, nor the playing that has me enthralled by the game – no siree, it’s the fact that I can lord it over my flat mate. He has had little or no exposure to the band at all, save for the most basic experiences, like most of the world, with their singles. This exposure is a generous number of some of their best material, but also a rather windowed look at the band.

They’re early stuff is blues-rock and the birth of pop. Their mid term work perfected the rock album and recording method (amazingly only touring for half of their career) and then their later experimental era which paved the way for concepts upon concepts and hundreds of bands for the next 40 years. The expansive nature of the back catalogue means that the game is a good introduction.

Though when playing I notice that he does know the songs. As does everyone. Even the more obscure tracks are familiar, and the well known ones (the ones that are rather worn out) are still exciting. Ringo Starr’s drumming aside; the game does a good job of approximating the music of the three guitarists. I say Ringo aside not because I deplore his musical prowess (though some do) but, like previous Rock Band games, you are not pretending to play the drums, because you actually are. It’s like an interactive drum trainer, and exactly the sort of thing I need to hone my “skills” as they are.

I suppose it should be a given that I appreciate the Beatles, even if I didn’t like them, as I am a “connoisseur” of music. They have influenced probably, to some degree, either through 3rd or 4th generation, almost all the material I listen to. Even the minimal techno, the post-rock, the folk, they have all been influenced some how, either in a good way or a bad way, by the fab-foursome. The kicker is that most of their work is still as fresh as it was then as it is now, and that is something that very few artists can achieve. I am not saying anything new, and I am not even making any real point, I just wanted to write about a band I like a lot, and also talk about computer games.

For the record, my favourite albums are, in order, Revolver, Rubber Soul, Please Please Me, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Abbey Road and my edited version of The Beatles (The White Album).

I once read an interview with Dave Grohl who stated “People who don’t like The Beatles… you gotta look at them as if they are from a different planet. I mean, who doesn’t like The Beatles?!”. I’m sure I could find some. But they’d be wrong. Obviously.

Angleesch.

As I understand it, diction is as important as grammar. The ability to say words correctly be it in the local accent, or the queen’s accent, is an integral part of speaking well, and thusly presenting your self correctly in a conversation. It smacks me of complete laziness when, talking to a fully grown man, that even though we are speaking English, the language of my country and birth, I can barely understand when the last syllable ends and the next one begins. It rolls into a clusterfuck of words and sounds that uttered in a sentence make no coherent string of syntax in any language.

It’s not my untrained ear at fault. Sometimes even I lapse into a Glaswegian patter, with words that some of my friends and co-workers, without context, would rightly be flummoxed with. But this is trained, you can be taught to understand me and my sayings. I say “like” a lot because, as you might be aware, I have been living in Aberdeen for the last 2 years and that’s a by product of that. Even I notice my “ba-ack” sounding voice when I say that word, complimenting an oft used joke of the Aberdonian speech.

But it’s not the Scots that I have trouble with, it’s the English. I don’t hate the English, they’re just wankers; we on the other hand have the tenacity to say that we pronounce their language better than them. The thing is that it would appear, from my experience, that we actually do – the Newcastle accent, the closest English approximation to Scottish, it one of ups and downs, and as such sounds like the speaker is constantly trying too hard to speak. But when I talk to someone from Birmingham, a Scouser or even someone from Yorkshire, I can barely grasp what they are saying.

It’s like they are talking a different language. In fact, it’s like they are using a whole new method of interaction, a new waveform, a new type of quantum theory. They could be telling me the same thing as I am telling them and we could both be at odds with each other because it just doesn’t compute. Apart from the fact that I am middle class, white, never really been that tough and partly deaf, but honestly I think that it’s my regard for speaking well (even when I don’t myself) that means that I struggle so much when others are talking to me.

We might be talking the same language, but we are not speaking the same language.

Campfire Songs Part 3: Sloop John B.

On holiday a few years ago I was sipping a beer after a day out in the shade hiding from the sun. The “entertainment” that the hotel had put on was singing his way through a few hits, and then pointed out that he had had a number 1 hit in Germany at some point in the past. I made a joke to my compatriot that I had probably had a number 1 hit in Germany at some point, to which she shushed me. He started to sing a song that suddenly had me rapt with attention – he was singing a Scout campfire song. And so were all these other punters. I was confused – how the hell do these German, Italian, Turkish and British tourists know this song? Are they going to jump up and start singing Ging Gang Goolie Goolie Wotcher in one songs time?

It turns out, much to my surprise, that the song I had been singing at Camfires was performed by The Beach Boys on their seminal record Pet Sounds. Obviously, since then, I’ve investigated the song much, and that album, but it still will to me be forever a campfire song, not Rolling Stones’ 271 Greatest Song of All Time.

We come on the sloop john b
My grandfather and me
Around nassau town we did roam
Drinking all night
Got into a fight
Well I feel so broke up
I want to go home

So hoist up the john bs sail
See how the mainsail sets
Call for the captain ashore
Let me go home, let me go home
I wanna go home, yeah yeah
Well I feel so broke up
I wanna go home

The first mate he got drunk
And broke in the capns trunk
The constable had to come and take him away
Sheriff john stone
Why dont you leave me alone, yeah yeah
Well I feel so broke up I wanna go home

So hoist up the john bs sail
See how the mainsail sets
Call for the captain ashore
Let me go home, let me go home
I wanna go home, let me go home
Why dont you let me go home
(hoist up the john bs sail)
Hoist up the john b
I feel so broke up I wanna go home
Let me go home

The poor cook he caught the fits
And threw away all my grits
And then he took and he ate up all of my corn
Let me go home
Why dont they let me go home
This is the worst trip Ive ever been on

So hoist up the john bs sail
See how the mainsail sets
Call for the captain ashore
Let me go home, let me go home
I wanna go home, let me go home
Why dont you let me go home

(More) Reasons Why Autumn Is the Best Time of the Year

Last Year.
- Scarfs, again

As I said last year I love scarves. I mean, they are great. They are like putting a warm hug right around your neck, and also make a suit look more daper. A good scarf can make a rubbish jumper so much better, and will finish off my new blkazer really well.

- The cold smell

The smell I am talking about is the one you get at night and early in the morning. It’s the sharp intake of breath in the morning that wakes the senses, the smell of the cold is such a remarkable feeling

- The Dark Nights
Some people, those who are unenlightened, seem to think that the dark nights are not nice. Wrong. The dark nights are what makes this country so amazing. The lights on Union Street (or Glasgow’s George Square) are as evocative of Christmas and drink than that of actual wrapping paper and carols. It’s the homely feeling of things building up to a proper holiday with family, rather than a disjointed weekend of glimpses and glances with friends.

- Tea and Coffee
Tea is elevated from being a lovely drink to an essential part of the nightly process. A cup of tea before bed is something I have almost without fail, but a cup of tea in the morning becomes wrote and is places, some mornings, even before I’ve had a shower. Coffee in a coffee house comes a close second to tea in this instance.

- Warm Jackets, again

As before Jackets are what makes Winter Winter. I love wearing them. I am going to buy a new one that’s going to chosen not for it’s warming qualities, but it’s ease of hugging.

- Hugs

Enough said.

Unconnected Miscellany

(With a title stolen from Jonathan)

- Travel is Dangerous as Mogwai once wrote, and it’s something I normally do only within the security of my car these days, though having been a student and a commuter for years, I can sympathise with anyone who has tales of terrible afflictions from travelling on them. When in Newcastle recently (for the second time in a year) we used the expansive Metro system to get around. It was quick, cheap, clean, and seemed to be actually quite well designed, and a good size for the city, apart from the mystifying lack of ticket barriers. In contrast, the Glasgow underground is one track, two directions, and has ticket gates akin to that of the sprawling New York Subway.

- Christopher Brookmyre’s latest novel, Pandaemonium, is a riot. It stars two story arcs that are about to smash into each other. The first is taken straight out the leafs of a Doom fan fiction or Half Life post-resonance cascade plot line. Scientists are exploring particle accelerators when the happen upon a portal that from which demon-like beings exit. They are heralded as the coming of an army from a gateway to hell, and the Vatican prove it by burning Holy Water on the beats’ skin. Less than 40 miles away, a group of school kids (catholic, none the less) are being taken to a weekend away at a Castle Toward like activity centre to help them deal with the double grief of a ned being stabbed by a bigger ned, and then the bigger ned committing suicide days later.

The resulting talk of science versus religion was fun, as Brookmyre writes it well enough, and it is also something that I really enjoy to talk and read about anyway. The lines drawn by the school kids are perfectly pitched, and the blood and gore ramps up to a level unseen before in his books. It’s a good novel, but not his best. That’s for another blog post though.

- The Twilight Sad – Forget the Night Ahead is my album of the year so far, so I recommend that you listen to it. You can listen to it here on their Label’s Website. It’s not on Spotify yet, but all other Fat Cat releases are so it’ll appear at some point.

- Staying with music, the new Muse album has came out. What. The. Fuck. What happened? I mean… one minute they are rocking my face off with Dead Star and Hyper Music, and now… well… this? R&B funk? Good god. Luckily the album has this on it, so that’s okay… one track that’s good though? Deary me.

- I am offshore this week, so I’ll be posting a lot more if I get the chance. Maybe that post about The Beatles that has been kicking around will appear.

(For the Want of a Better Word)

I was born into a world that was about to change forever. The internet is the greatest invention that our species have ever created, and this is a fact. If we assume that the wheel, speech and civilisation were just always going to happen, the technology required to create the internet is mind boggling and as awe inspiring as any major feat of engineering. I look longingly at the Forth Rail Bridge as the most incredible man made structure in our country, but under our feet there’s an imaginary world crafted out of switches and cables and geeks furiously keeping everything in check.

In this world there are things I expect to be the same. Like, when I drop something, it will fall down. If it were to suddenly go upwards, then fall down, I’d wonder why it had done such as Gravity’s theory disallows this from happening. This is the same as I expect things to be on a computer. This week I have been doing another one of the company training courses, this time centred on a simulation piece of software called HYSYS, and it is obviously a very complicated piece of software.

It models process plant and conditions quite accurately. It’s a tricky thing to get used to, mostly because it was obviously designed a few years ago by someone who doesn’t understand a good User Interface, and uses some annoying and blatantly wrong software design features which had myself, my colleagues, and my patience angry at the logical missteps. This post is not to point these out, but to point out something of my personality that I actually don’t like.

I am stubborn. When it comes to things that I expect to work, and work in a certain way, I get angry, confused and annoyed. This is because I am an engineer. I was brought up on computer games where it was run to the right, and you will achieve your goal. I was brought up on Lego which dictated everything fitted together perfectly. I was brought up in a State School which meant you were called gay for just standing still. These are the constants and expectations that shaped the way I think.

Is it silly for me to get annoyed about stuff not working the way I expect them to? Is it silly for me to expect something to work logically, in a way I want it to, rather in the way that it actually is? It sounds whilst I am typing this out that I am being stupid, as it’s obviously me being wrong for wanting something a different way... but then something clicks in my head and I go “Wait, no, this is just wrong for working this way. It’s not me, it’s you! Gah!”.

Obstinate is a better word.

Generation Why

Today is my birthday. I am 24. 24 years ago the World started. This is a plainly selfish view, and not true of course, as the whole of creation wasn’t brought into being because of my birth, but for me it was. I only know of 24 years of life, and everything else has been told to me. It might not have happened. Sure, World War II took place between 1939 and 1945, but I have only other peoples memories and good Wikipedia citations to go on.

That’s not the point of this post, nor is it to remind those people who have forgotten this hallowed day in the calendar, one I share with, as a guess, 18million people, or to compare it something more computational, 4.5 times the population of the country I live in. Or, 166,052 people in the UK. If we assume that the whole of Britain is 80k square miles, I share it with another person within a square mile of myself. It’s not that big a coincidence then, is it?

I don’t know what it means to be 24. 24 seemed so old, even only 5 years ago. I mean, at 19, I couldn’t imagine what 24 would be like. I had no idea what 24 would be like when I hit 21, barely 3 years ago. Being born in 1985 means I am part of Generation Y, or the Echo Boomers, or the MTV Generation. I’d call myself the Last Pre-Internet generation. My sister, 4 years younger than me, cannot remember School without it. True, it was when I was in 3rd year at School they hit us with computers that ran Windows and had fast internet, but before then I can remember how to do research before a computer. It involved this thing that has paper and words and is real called… an Encyclopedia.

So I suppose the place to look for comfort at this age is not at the stuff I haven’t done, but what I have done. I’ve got a well paid job. I’ve got a car. I’ve been able to travel a fair bit this year, and still have travels to go on. I have a good group of friends, all of which I’d happily shoot the shit with any time of the day, and probably most importantly of all, I’ve not met anyone that has the same birthday as me.

Yet.

The future then. 5 years? 29? Before the big 30? I can’t begin to imagine. If I am still working in Aberdeen it will be down to two factors: have I found someone to stay for (or not been able to convince them to leave) and secondly, maybe am I coming back from somewhere else. I have some plans for the next few years, Houston being one, London being another, Paris being the third. The future will come.

Nostalgia Part I: Streets of Rage

I grew up in the 1990s. I was a child of the 1980s, but I can’t remember anything really before 1989, as such kinda that doesn’t make my an 80s child. I grew up on the MegaDrive, not the Master System, I became a teenager whilst playing computer games on Windows 95 and Playstations in other peoples houses, after the morbid (an ever unforgivable) reluctance of my parents to buy me a Playstation console at any point during it’s reign. It’s testament to the strong willed nature of my parents to not give into my demands of each Christmas and Birthday to the grand grey sony machine. The console still has an air of mystery around it, having never owned a Playstation.

So when they got me my Dreamcast, 10 years ago next month, I could scarcely belive it. It was almost exactly 10 years ago when they said they would get it for me, at a dinner at the Crooked Lum Beefeater (my restaurant of choice) for my birthday. It was a momentous occasion. It will forver be a golden memory.

The one game from my childhood that I remember the most fondly, Sonic the Hedgehog games excepted, is the arcade classic Streets of Rage. It featured a trio of rebels who, in light of a massive crime wave headed by the Syndicate and the uber boss Mr. X, took the law into their own hands and set about going through 8 loosely linked areas in the city to beat the crap out of the hoodlums.

The cast was refreshing: Axel, the white body builder, Adam, the black boxer, and Axel the sexy ninja lady. The fun in the game didn’t come from palying it on your own, no – it was a co-op game before co-op was a major deal. You, as a team, worked thorugh the levels and bosses (twice of everything, to make it harder of course) and to the end, where you are asked to Join or Fight. If you say fight, he fights and you probably die. If you choose to join, he sends you back three levels to see if you can do it again, and then you fight. I’ve completed the game several times, mostly on hard, but only once with a friend.

Anyway, this bought of Nostalgia has been amplified for two reasons. Firstly, Youtube has all the theme music, which is as important to a game from the 1990s as the graphics were. The disco tunes are totally lost in the cinematic scores that are found the current generation games. Secondly, I recently picked up a game that reminds more and more as a play it of Streets of Rage: Left 4 Dead.

Left 4 Dead is a computer game for my Xbox where in a post apocalyptic world the Zombies are trying to munch your head off. So far so Romero, but the difference is that there are four survivors. This game cannot be played as a single player, there are always 4 players. Even if the computer has to play as them, they will still be there. The four of them are needed as the game chucks shitloads of zombies, bosses and events your way in varying waves meaning that no single game is the same as the last one – this is a brilliant feature. Also, the bosses, like the bosses in Streets of Rage, are testing – especially the terrifying Witch, who greets like a little girl, and moans, but if you wake her, in one swipe you are ruined.

The gameplay is brilliant, over Xbox Live, or just with Steve or Shayan. Better when it’s Steve and me on our tod, with Shayan and Kenny playing from their own houses. The team aspect of the game is perfectly balanced, as is the level of peril. It’s the best next generation co-op game I have ever played, and has actually stopped me from buying Beatles: Rock Band till I am sick of Left 4 Dead… which might take some time.

Fantasy Cast: The 87th Precinct

As with most blogs I do they start of either small, and then become grander, or I have massive plans for them and they never pay off. Recently, I toyed with the idea of starting a blog detailing every novel of the 87th Precinct, going so far as to make this.

Anyway, as part of this blog I started to think about my cast. How I would cast the series as I see it now. If they were to make it now… and this is what I have came up with.

Stephen “Steve” Louis Carella - Damian Lewis

Arthur “Artie” Brown - Roger Cross

Betram “Bert” Kling - myself (but really, Mark-Paul Gosselaar)

Cotton Hawes – Bradley Cooper

Hal Willis – Jeffery Nordling

Richard Genero – Matthew Settle

Eileen Burke – Gillian Anderson

Meyer Meyer – Stephen Tobolowsky

Tak Fujiwara – Hiroyuki Sanada

Andy Parker – Patrick Wilson

Oillie Weeks – Jeffery Tambor

Lt. Pete Byrnes – Xander Berkley

The Deaf Man – Robert Patrick

Teddy Carella – Alyssa Milano

Yeah. I’d be a brilliant Bert Kling.

USA: Hi! Good yeah thanks, but get to fuck. (and the rest of the World I suppose)

I rarely, if ever, have posted a blog post about anything that’s actually for reals important. This is because I first of all am rarely enthused into anything bordering beyond the “whatever” phrase, but also because I don’t think I have a position as to where it makes any contribution to the whole affair, or that my opinion is worth reading. Read my Weakness post for more on this meekness.

But recently my little country, the place of my birth, the country of my friends and family and the one that I love, has recently become the little bastard in the political world for an act of mercy. We released a man who is dying to die with his family in his home country after serving and being convicted of the heinous crime of terrorism. The terrorism that this specifically surrounds is the worst in recent Scottish history, and the largest mass killing this side of William Wallace.

First of all let me say that initially I didn’t agree with the release of Megrahi. The reason I was suspect of the release was because I didn’t know that there had been quite a long process in which the government of Scotland (distinct from the government of Great Britain in matters of law) had weighed up options, and indeed laws passed to overcome these tricky situations, and decided that under the compassionate grounds legislation, and the mercy of him dying, he has been released to his country. So I have changed my mind.

I am allowed to after all. On Friday I listened to Justice Secretary Kenny McAskill having to fend him self from all sides of the arena – his own countrymen, his own parliament, the media, an usually uneducated public, and more importantly, the great big bad bastard that is the USA. Finally, amazingly, Scotland has made Obama an angry prick, ready to start waving his large star spangled banner draped cock around the world drumming up animosity for the little puny nation of Scotland.

But wait. Wait a fucking minute. The man we convicted of the bombings has served 9 years in a Scottish jail, Greenock none the less. He was convicted of a crime under Scottish law. This means we gave him a Scottish sentence. These sentences can be cut sort in times of mercy, like if the person is dying of cancer. It’s called mercy because it gives us the chance to forgive, but not forget, the crime. We take the moral high ground by granting the criminal their wish to die not within the walls of a prison because we can. It’s being humanitarian. By shouting out from the roof tops that the cunt should’ve died in the cell is to ignore what makes our little, piddly nation so different from others.

The other thing that this whole affair smacks of is this horrible hypocrisy, namely coming from our big brother nation of the USA. The first thing that I should point out, as already mentioned in other treatments, is the rather amazing fact that the reason that the PanAm flight was bombed in the first place was because of the USA bombing Iran Air Flight 655. Never heard of it? Well the US bombed it out of the sky mistakenly, killing 290 people (the seventh worst Air “disaster” of all time) including 66 children. Whoops. This is directly responsible for the retaliation bombing of an American flight which is an eye for an eye. It means that the Scots are stuck in the middle of the tussle between two nations because it crashed over a small town in Scotland. The Iranian angle is played down because… well, who wants to bomb innocent people? The US has an amazing double standard going on here.

The second hypocrisy is that of Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber, who this year was released from an English jail on compassionate grounds. Don’t say that we are monsters for even considering releasing Megrahi when you’ve just released a criminal too.

The problem with above statements are pretty obvious though, aren’t they. I mean, Megrahi killed hundred of people and was caught, so he should serve his time. It was a mass murder on unimaginable scale, wasn’t it? So, surely that makes our compassion even greater? We know as a nation what he did was very wrong, and we as a nation know that, in other circumstances, he would be in the prison for the rest of his life. But he is dying and we can take the high ground, and I’m glad that our nation has done so.

With a proviso. A big fucking proviso. This is the motherload. Lybia isn’t exactly our best friends – Gaddafi is a bad person. He has admitted terrorism and such like, we made him. He gave us the prisoners in the first place to put on trial after hundreds of hours of negotiations. It wasn’t easy. So why have we gave him back? Construction? Engineering? Oil?

Anytime Oil is mentioned it becomes a big deal. Oil’s a dirty thing to trade for. Jobs and money is fine, but Oil? Gah! Those bastards. But that’s assuming that we did it for a trade deal, which I don’t think we did. McAskill has said it uses the compassionate grounds not the trade deals we have been trying to batter out to get it done. There will be letters revealed today that might explain it in detail a little more about the decision, but the decision that was made was important. It showed that our nation can take a stance, and is steadfast in it’s beliefs, right or wrong. Even if we chose to do it for a trade deal, it doesn’t erase the rabid hypocrisy that is emanating from the great Christian United States of America.

Mr Obama? We are Scotland. Hi there.