The future as seen from October 9th 2002

This evening I was sorting through the mass of papers and folders that I have accumulated over the years and stumbled upon a gem from the past. When I was thirteen, my new form tutor asked our class to write a short piece on where we saw ourselves in ten years time. Although it is not quite ten years later, here is what I wrote, transcribed verbatim:

Where I see myself in 10 years

In ten years I will be 23 and if I am not still at university I will have a job. I would like to have a job involved with IT at one point as I am fascinated by “concept PCs,” notebook and palmtop computers. I think that the idea of a tablet pc is great, as it is us like a large palmtop and uses a similar operating system, a kind of adapted Pocket PC format. The evolution of all technology is great as by the time I am an adult IT will be even more influential then it is today. I aim to do well in all my major tests including my upcoming SATs, GCSEs and A-Levels. Also I hope to gain a BA at university.

I would also like to be involved drama/theatre as this is one of my favourite hobbies. Reading and writing also play a big role in my life so I feel my love of literature will affect my decisions in the future. At present I have almost know idea what I want to do with my life, but I am not too worried as I know that my generation with be subject to a range of radical changes and opportunities by the time we leave. I will definitely invest in a laptop or desktop computer and I intent to look deeper into Broadband Internet (preferably ADSL.) I also think that the DVD is one of greatest inventions of the late 20th century/ early 21st and will get a DVD player and writer combo when the technology has improved.

I will probably travel at some point, focusing on the USA or Mediterranean as I have not visited either. I will have learnt to drive as it is almost essential and I hate waiting for buses. Also I would love to try all sorts of different cuisines beyond Indian, Chinese, American, Mexican and Thai. I love cooking so I will definitely experiment with meals when I am older, and I will have a modern kitchen with all the works.

In my GCSEs I know that I will most likely pick French as my modern language and I hope that I will continue learning it as an adult. Also, IT will definitely be one of my choices. I am not sure whether to do Drama A-Level or not but that is a long way ahead. I am most looking being able to buy things with my own money instead of saving my pocket money every week.

Harriett Feenstra

Mr Usher

PSHE

9C

09.10.02

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At 22 and a half I certainly do not want a job in IT, although I must commend my 13 year old self for being so attuned to the future potential of tablet computing (hello iPads). Happily I did do very well in all of my major tests, although SATs don’t exist any more. I got my BA at university, and even went on to get an MA too.

My theatre involvement continued to a minor extent, although these days I tend to sit in the audience rather than on the stage or behind it. My love of literature has absolutely affected my decisions, probably far more than my younger self anticipated. I have owned both a laptop and a desktop, but most of my day to day computing takes place on my phone – funnily enough that’s probably because my laptop is from 2003 and is terrible as a result. I am still a fan of DVDs.

I’ve travelled a little but not enough, although the USA and Mediterranean have both been graced by my presence a couple of times now. I did learn to drive, but haven’t done so in about four years. In light of this I’m a tad more tolerant of waiting for buses these days. No modern kitchen with all the works just yet.

I didn’t do Drama A-Level (or GCSE for that matter); I did English Literature, History and Biology, as well as Chemistry AS. I still look forward to being able to buy things with my own money – I probably have even less now than I did then!

In short, Harriett of roughly nine years ago, I’m still working on some of that stuff, but I hope you’re reasonably pleased with me. Next October I’ll try to remember to write a new version of where I see myself in 10 years, and I hope it makes for an equally amusing read in 2022.

The Garden of Network Realism

‘Time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures.’

Recently James Bridle sketched an outline of what he called ‘Network Realism‘; literature of and enabled by the network. His case-in-point was William Gibson’s latest novel, ‘Zero History’. Now I haven’t read Zero History so I can’t talk about that novel, but I can talk about a short story that Bridle’s piece got me thinking about. I’ll come to that. Firstly, though, it seems to me that there are two key issues here: the idea of the network and the concept of time. By taking the technological content of the novel and juxtaposing it with the time-related anxieties of its wider audience-reception, Bridle sets out a compelling position:

‘This writing exists on a timeline, but it’s not a simple line back-to-the-past and forward-to-the-future. It’s a gathering-together of many currently possible worldlines, seen from the near-omniscient superposition of the network.’

The network as an almost-panopticon, a mode of surveying and surveillance, interconnected and largely invisible unless you look for it. Both in the midst and out among of all these tendrils of possibility is the network, fundamental to how we live our lives today, and essential to any kind of fiction, that is to say realist fiction that thinks it has a chance of saying something significant about How We Live Now. What Bridle is suggesting is that we can detect in particular kinds of writing a new set of approaches for examining a very particular kind of cultural product, that can and is being produced in the very particular moment of Now. ‘Writing that is of and about the network.’

I want to begin to unpick the relationship between the network and time. Time, it seems to me, is prevalent in the conversations around Zero History, and around Network Realism, but I would argue that that’s not just because people are talking and thinking about a work of ‘science fiction’. Time and the network are indivisible, and by extension time and Network Realism are deeply entwined, the multifarious nature of the network demanding a flexible conception of time.  Bridle embraces the opportunity to engage with non-linear attitudes towards time – ‘many currently possible worldlines’ – and as result, invoked a name inside my head: ‘Borges! Borges!’ Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ is not Network Realism. But look at this passage from it:

‘In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.’

Time is the original network, and literature of and enabled by time’s myriad possibilities is where Network Realism is coming from. Network realism, indeed, networked living is developing out of an increasing realization that we don’t have to be doing just one thing at any one time, that time and lived experience isn’t linear and one-thing-after-the-other, but that it is a constant barrage of sensory data, a never-ending flow of cultural input and emotional output, a thousand and one impressions and connections and stimulations and ideas all at once. The way we use technology is beginning to reflect our cognitive processing of the physical world, and the way we build networks of contact and connection, of possibility and chance is increasingly mirroring the ways we exist in time, and the manner in which time acts upon us.

‘I imagined as well a Platonic, hereditary work, transmitted from father to son, in which each new individual adds a chapter or corrects with pious care the pages of his elders.’

Borges would have liked Wikipedia.

There’s that network-interface again. Networks of transferred knowledge, of inherited responsibilities, of layers of time and revision. Human beings have been building networks since beginning civilisation; networks of roads, of languages, of blood-ties, of postal services and computer servers and satellites and mobile phone masts. We have weaved our physical networks around ourselves and knitted them into the fabric networks of time. Connecting ourselves to the past and networking ourselves into the future is the inevitable result of being plugged into the present.

In ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, the titular garden is in fact a book that the protagonist’s ancestor, Ts’ui Pên, began writing; a book that he referred to as an infinite labyrinth. The book is never completed, but its manuscripts all aim towards a fiction that encapsulates all narrative possibilities, rendering the text a labyrinth ‘forking in time, not space’. Borges does not offer us any samples of this hypothetical literary web, but describes it thus:

‘In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He creates in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.’

Technological networks still require us to make choices at the expense of others, and it’s a rare opportunity to ever be able to simultaneously choose all choices at once. But the greatest technological network of all, the internet, strives to offer up all of those possible choices if you ask for them. The sandpit nature of emerging network infrastructures increasingly encourages the kind of inventiveness and playfulness that leads to diverse futures, proliferating and forking ideas and possibilities.

In Gibson’s literary mode, hyperlinks, communication and interconnectedness are all innate qualities of the text. If that’s even something approaching what Network Realism could be – drawing on the branching, mitosis-like configurations of time and how it envelopes twenty-first century human life in the western world – then we have the potential here for an exciting and relevant new approach to fiction. Literary realism strives to reflect contemporary life and society, and a new realism that does so with a sensitivity to the ethereal force of time as well as to the electronic force of technology, will emerge a more nuanced, a more speculative, and an altogether more interesting cultural force.

The Dalek, The Short Story and the Telephone Kiosks

It was a small but pleasant coincidence that Sheret posted a Time Lord themed post on the same day that I stuck a new poster to my bedroom wall:

Not that I want to align myself with a Dalek’s attitude to the future. It’s just a great image, and a decent enough message to wake up to in the morning. A message, to put it in less imperious terms, that says Make Today Awesome. I’d even go as far as arguing that all of Doctor Who’s rhetoric, subliminal or otherwise, boils down to that basic principle.

But the TARDIS isn’t the only phonebox I’ve encountered recently. I spent August in Scotland, working at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Walking around that city for a month, you pass many a phonebox in the street:

The thing is, if you take a look closer, it’s not just any old phonebox. This phonebox, and three others that were scattered around Edinburgh for the duration of August, is owned by a organization with the sort of name that the Doctor tends to run into, on a space station somewhere miles into the future:

Upon entering the telephone booth, for absolutely no cost at all, anyone can listen to a short story, written by a comedian or an author, delivered via a ‘bespoke high tech automated handset’:

I loved this. I loved passing the phoneboxes and almost always seeing someone inside, sitting, standing or leaning, phone pressed to ear as a story was piped down the line, seemingly from afar. At the height of the festival’s mania, when the streets were packed and the venues were full, when my feet ached from flyering every day and my head ached from tearing tickets every night, I loved seeing people in the phoneboxes, calm little isolated units physically shut off from the rest of the crowded pavement. Five, ten or twenty minutes just listening, listening to a story.

But (and there’s always a but, isn’t there?), I would have changed one thing. I would have introduced more locational specificity. Or, to put it bluntly, I would have made each telephone box a bit more unique. You see, each box had 9 stories available, from a total possible selection of about 13:

At a glance, those four lists look fairly identical. It took me a couple of visits until I realised that there were slight variations in the stories on offer. But imagine if there had been four completely different sets of stories? So, if you had the time and the inclination, you would then have the incentive to travel to each of the four kiosks and listen to a completely different set of stories. Incentive beyond a completionist attitude, that is. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to purposefully visit all four kiosks across the city just to complete the set. Besides, it’s a very pretty map:

Had each telephone box had an entirely different set of stories, had each location provided more of a unique, specific selection, I’m almost certain more people would have visited individual kiosks for their particular offerings. Picture a Will Self fan stumbling across the phonebox outside of Pleasance and scanning the list, only to discover that they need to trek across the city to George St to hear his dulcet tones. I bet they would.

Inconvenient? Perhaps. Ultimately the telephone box is little more than an overblown story-tape. But I kind of like that inconvenience. Having to travel somewhere physically, to receive that age-old thing, the humble short story, via a phonebox of all things. Physical format fetishism taken to the extreme. It’s a far cry from a click and a download, and even from the paper pages of a book. I like that something so solid and durable dispenses something so fleeting and intangible. And most of all, I like that it happens on the street. I like that someone, anyone can just be passing by, slip into the kiosk and listen to a story, receive a bitesized chunk of culture for free. There needs to be more of this kind of disposable, easily accessible culture-in-the-wild. I don’t know that listening to a short story in a telephone booth can Make Today Awesome, but I think it can probably Make Today Marginally Nicer.

http://www.theinvisibledot.com/1693/

Ten Pop, Ten Not

Starting university in autumn 2007 propelled me back into the mainstream when it came to music; for a few years prior to that I was hardly aware of anything outside of my very selective listening habits, chasing links across the internet and bands across the country, browsing CDs and relying upon word-of-mouth or reliable music writing to find new and interesting music. My re-induction into mainstream pop has produced a variety of listening experiences, both good and bad, enduring and fleeting. Overall, though, I don’t regret it, and Ten Pop, Ten Not is a tribute to the typical two-pronged listening habits that I have fallen into over the past few years. Ten songs that are pure pop, ten that are… not.

Obviously I abuse the term ‘pop’ – half of the ‘not’ list are arguably pop in some form or other, but I wanted to distinguish between the sort radio-friendly music I was oblivious to a few years ago, and the other sort of music that I suppose I would have listened to last year anyway. Quibble all you like, but it’s a nice title, okay? Plus this way I get to pick two top tens.

The guidelines are as follows – the song had to be released in the UK between 1st Jan and 31st December 2009 (a rule which complicated matters hugely because of downloads and hearing songs in clubs and all that jazz). One song per band. If it’s an album track the album must have come out in 2009 in the UK, if it’s a single then it must have been released in 2009. The thinking here is that list-compiling would be so much more difficult it I had to pick from all the songs I’ve loved this year, regardless of when they were released.
I’ve included Youtube links to each song, and compiled as complete a Spotify playlist as possible, which is available at the end of the post. Enjoy!

Ten Pop

10. Get Sexy – Sugababes

It is, of course, the last ever true Sugababes song and whilst the Right Said Fred sampling is a little suspect, and the lyrics leave something to be desired, sometimes that just doesn’t matter. It certainly doesn’t when there’s as many attitude power-ups and consistently satisfying ‘dancey-bits’ as there are here.

9. Beyonce – Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)

It’s no Crazy In Love, but Single Ladies definitely hung out in the same gang at school and went for sleep-overs at Crazy In Love’s house. I have little time for Beyonce’s ballads but I do admit that every year since 2003 I have felt a Crazy In Love-shaped gap in my life. What else but Beyonce’s particular brand of feist could fill it?

8. Riverside – Sidney Samson

Riverside, Motherfucker!

7. Holiday – Dizzee Rascal

This trundles along in a fairly unremarkable way until the very end, where the underlying synth-edged beats break free and wreak havoc upon all that has gone before. The genius of Holiday is perhaps that restraint and moderation – it lacks the explosive immediacy of Bonkers, and works better because of that. Bonkers is a binge of ‘electro-hop’ that leaves you feeling a bit greasy and regretful. Holiday is a short, sharp, addictive hit of synth-pop-meets-grime, the all-too-short climax begging a repeat play as it is just not long enough.

6. Ready for the Weekend – Calvin Harris

This song never fails to make me feel ready for the weekend.

5. Remedy – Little Boots

This just feels so confident and effortless. I have heard a lot of love directed at New In Town but I find something about this little pop gem very compelling. It is very much a song to play loudly as you drink too much vodka and dance in your housemate’s bedroom before launching out into the night. It also helps that it allows me to almost credibly yell ‘Yes, dancing IS my remedy!’ mid-song. Almost.

4. Drumming Song – Florence + The Machine

My housemate adores Florence and her musical output. Consequently I spent much of 2009 unwittingly absorbing demos and covers and live versions and finally the album proper. Nothing really stuck until Drumming Song – there’s something a little bit delicious about the interplay between pounding drums and soaring vocals here, Florence darting between ritualistic chanting and hypnotic crooning, refusing to settle for a straightforward structure or predictable pattern. It works.

3. Bulletproof – La Roux

A song for dancing to. In For The Kill is a close second, but as ice-cool and retro-futuristic as that song may be, Bulletproof pops and bounces like nobody’s business and doesn’t leave you feeling a bit self-conscious and high-pitched two minutes in.

2. Boom Boom Pow – Black Eyed Peas

‘Here we go, here we go, satellite, radio, y’all getting hit with the BOOM BOOM.’

No, I don’t know what it means. Yes, I’m far too white and geeky to pull it off. But for weeks this song fuelled and soundtracked my every move. I am a sucker for those beats.

1. Bad Romance – Lady Gaga

It should be Poker Face. Hell, it was Poker Face for the majority of the year. Beats and synths layered in perfect combination, vocals snapping back and forth between defiance and ridiculousness. Pure Lady Gaga. But then came Bad Romance.
Bad Romance is mental. No longer a mere alter-ego, Lady Gaga eats Stefani Germanotta and spits out the bones. Everything about Bad Romance seizes the mythology of ‘Lady Gaga’ and transfigures it into reality. Just Dance was Gaga setting out, Poker Face was Gaga proving more than a one hit wonder, Paparazzi was Gaga’s manifesto outright and LoveGame was Gaga, well, talking about sex. Bad Romance is Lady Gaga sounding more like how Lady Gaga should sound than ever before. It’s a potent popstar that can produce such a natural-sounding musical progression in their fifth single in two years.
I could go on about the song’s bizarre intro, I could hold forth on how Gaga invokes Andy Warhol, Liza Minelli-in-Cabaret, Vogue-era Madonna, Edith Piaf, and Nina Simone all at once. I could wax lyrical about how she sounds drunk and angry and glorious and depressed and aroused and high and hung-over and elated within one song. But no amount of reading or writing about Bad Romance could ever do it justice; you just have to listen to it.

Ten Not

10. Little Secrets – Passion Pit

Usually children’s choirs irritate me. But I would forgive this zany electronic jamboree far worse crimes. It is just so happy!

9. Stranger – Noah and the Whale

Charlie Fink has his heart on display throughout the entirety of ‘The First Days of Spring’, the entire album charting his breakup with former band-member Laura Marling. Of all the songs on it, Stranger always lingers in my mind for the lyrical attention to detail backed up by beautiful folksy melodies. ‘Last night I slept with a stranger / for the first time, since you’ve gone’, Fink mournfully recalls, and the song is off, unflinchingly exploring all of the emotional baggage surrounding the encounter.
Noah and the Whale have managed to transform themselves into able story-tellers, each song on the album building into the larger tale whilst managing to stand alone as fully-formed pieces of music. The best part is that Stranger avoids the dangers of wallowing and self-indulgence, achieving a sense a progress through the beautiful five minutes it lasts and delivering some sense of hope by the song’s finish. Voyeurism never felt this good.

8. Damaris – Patrick Wolf

I’ve been a fan of Patrick Wolf for a few years now and I am always impressed by the distinctive sound that he imbues each new record with. Whilst 2009′s ‘The Bachelor’ is not my favourite of his albums (plaudits there go to 2005′s ‘Wind in the Wires’), it is a fine effort, displaying a now typical multitude of new ideas and sounds. Damaris is particularly interesting as Wolf takes on a challenge that he has thus far avoided – sounding epic. Oh, doubtless he has had string-sections and imposing drums aplenty, but here he reaches further than before, here the sound and scope encompasses far more than his already usual orchestral set-up.

The ambitious tone of the song is present on other tracks throughout the album, but Damaris in particular retains the kind of deeply personal narrative that has long been a staple in Wolf’s musical arsenal. For all its ostentatiousness, Damaris could work played on a ukulele by Wolf alone. It wouldn’t surprise me if he tried it.

7. Possibility – Lykke Li

Some music I latch onto for the lyrics, for interpretation and meaning. This song I latch onto because her voice sounds like heartbreak.

6. Young Adult Friction – The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart are the kind of band you accidentally discover playing a late afternoon slot at a one-day festival. Young Adult Friction is the sort of song that lingers in your mind long after their set is over and everyone has gone home. The sort of song that you end up humming the refrain of for hours without realising what it is. The sort of song that you stick on repeat and churn through your earphones all the way down the road, wishing that every journey could be so competently and buoyantly sound-tracked.

5. Musician, Please Take Heed – God Help The Girl

Oh Stuart Murdoch. You just get it so right, don’t you? This infinitely quotable track stands out in an otherwise slightly inconsistent soundtrack for its sheer craft. Within one song Belle & Sebastian’s front-man deftly ties together a delicate yet flourishing musical aesthetic with the kind of razor-sharp literate story-telling lyrics he has churned out since 1996. A perfect example of Murdoch’s ability to summon up resonant characters and their lives in a few short minutes, something some writers can’t achieve within entire novels.

4. Out of the Don Valley – We Aeronauts

We Aeronauts are the most obscure choice on these two lists – referring to themselves as a ‘marginally signed band’ this eight-piece folk/indie hybrid channel the likes of Okkervil River, Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene and any other multi-instrumental folk-tinged outfit you’d care to name. Out of the Don Valley is a gorgeous piece of music, built around an intricate instrumental arrangement and heavenly boy-girl harmonies. That something this good was produced by such an (as yet) unknown band excites me to no end.

3. Sea Within A Sea – The Horrors

I feel rather isolated when it comes to the Horrors these days – I actually quite like both of their eras of material. I mostly ignored their debut effort Strange House after one listen, but I do have a fondness for some of the early demos and singles. Nevertheless their new album, particularly closer Sea Within A Sea, is an entirely different entity. An 8 minute long song needs to do a lot to retain my interest, and Sea Within A Sea excels at the task. The Horrors bring a lot to the table; carefully considered layers of sound, excellent pacing, and a sinister lyricism that avoids resorting to hyperbole.

I can see the argument that says it lacks the raw adrenaline of their earlier work, and I hear the assessment that Primary Colours is an altogether more mature, more consistent record. Ultimately, whichever camp you fall into is irrelevant, because Sea Within A Sea is the best thing they’ve ever produced, not least because it now marks the band down as artistically aspiring higher than the top 40 and the cover of the NME.

2. Zero – Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Exciting, giddy and a little bit unhinged, at the end of Zero you collapse back into your chair, run through the past 4.25 minutes in your head and wonder where in the galloping rush of instruments and whooping you can begin to get a hold on what made that sound so good.

What I like about this song, compared to something like Gold Lion for instance, is that Zero is almost a big sprawling mess. Not quite, though, for there is undoubtedly method in the seeming madness of this eclectic affair. Quite what that genius method entails is beyond me, but then again, I couldn’t ever produce a song like Zero.

1. No You Girls – Franz Ferdinand

Five, almost six years on and Franz Ferdinand still work on me. Sexy, flirtatious, and as tight and catchy as anything they’ve ever produced. A song for several occasions, I delight in the different angles you can take on this lyrically. Kapranos is just as easily cast as the wry social observer as the gently amused mediator, and a dozen other roles to boot. Yes, it’s oh so very hip with all the knowing winks and seductive smiles that the band practically trademarked as their own. But fuck it, they are the original and the best, and they never fail to charm me.

And that’s your lot. Thanks for reading, here’s the Spotify playlist.

In Search of Lost Intimacy

The mirror is impenetrable, of course, an impatient handswipe dissolving steam into drops and trickles; clarity barely achieved.

Toothbrush,

toothpaste,

water.

This almost-ritual is mechanical in its sameness. I pace, I pace, I always pace when I brush my teeth, and my thoughts wander. I enjoy the contrast, the cold water tickling a thirst I’d not noticed. The steamy roo– ah, there, a reflection at last. I wipe away more water and am almost surprised by my body.

I trace the lines with my eyes, cooling water droplets like fingertips along my skin.

What does nakedness remind me of?

Clenched hands, arched back, lips and teeth and sweat. The gasps I tried to suppress and the suggestive caresses we didn’t. I edit and vary, replaying the sex in my head from new angles, indulging in perspectives that were impossible at the time. It’s all here, suspended in the infinite possibilities of my unclothed body, a thousand nights that did and didn’t happen. A thous–stop.

Stop that.

Cotton-buds, shower gel, white tiles, a damp towel. Sterile things to fix my mind upon.

I spit out blood and worry about my teeth.

The Cooper Temple Clause

Let me tell you about The Cooper Temple Clause. I didn’t bother with them at first. Sure they were vaguely on my musical radar but then so much else was. Someone else bothered for me. “You remember The Cooper Temple Clause? Their new album is good.”

It was, but their first two albums were better.

The Cooper Temple Clause are an angry band. At times Ben Gautrey snarls rather than sings, all the rage and frustration of small-town life pummeled through speakers. Hot-headed elation and boozy depression emerge from track to track, sometimes squatting side by side in the space of a single song. Theirs is a cigarette-filled hazy reality of alcohol and sex, Gautrey spitting hate and lust in equal measures on debut album’s opener ‘Did You Miss Me?’ As an introduction to the band it is both misleading and perfect. I hated it for a long time – the first minute a deliberately irritating prolonged whine of high-pitched synths and drumbeats. Gradually, this meanders into a rapid swirl of electronic noise and cymbals, the drums and bleeps relentless until they eventually collapse under their own urgency and resurge with the simultaneous snarl of guitars and Gautrey.

That is not to say that the band are a pack of one trick ponies concerned with fury alone. Quite the opposite. ‘The Same Mistakes’, opener on second album Kick Up The Fire, and Let The Flames Break Loose situates the band in an altogether different state of mind. The song is a regretful, melancholy affair; we find Gautrey brooding over inevitable screw-ups and bad decisions, ruing words that will be left unsaid. It is also, of course, typically defiant. We are nothing but ourselves, say the band, we offer you nothing more than we promised, so let’s get on with it. ‘Let’s Kill Music’ is wrapped up in the ecstasy and mania of being young and feeling like the world is yours for the taking. ‘Amber’ wallows in self pity. ‘Blind Pilots’ is cynically realistic yet quietly hopeful. ‘Damage’ sneers, ‘All I See Is You’ obsesses and ‘House of Cards’ is as fragile and tenuous as any self-penned epitaph should be.

And that’s the heart of it. The Cooper Temple Clause are a band of youth and defiance, of imperfections and desperation. Never easily categorized, their blend of guitars, keyboard and synths ensured they always had the elbow room to experiment with the idea of what an album should sound like. If ever they came to anything near an answer to that question, it was this: diverse. The three-part layered vocals on ‘Let’s Kill Music’, the unlikely segue from soft despair into electronic rage in ‘Into My Arms’, the paranoia and isolation and bitter resignation that sometimes plagues their lyrics. They are a band of many faces; sometimes their music is a six-part multi-instrumental cacophony, sometimes it is just one man and an acoustic guitar. Either way, it is furious and it is youthful, and for these reasons alone, in bedrooms and through earphones, it is eternal.

Returning Home (I)

I become obsessed with space; the experience and the idea and the availability of it. Returning home is always an exercise in expanding borders, the densely developed streets climbing taller to alleviate the lack of breathing room between buildings. Gone is my pokey little house in the East Midlands, steep and narrow stairs replaced by a more gradual ascent. Double glazing, a dishwasher, spacious rooms and a dinner table. Carpets and surfaces regularly scrubbed, bereft of the grimy debris of student living. Yes, this is my other home – a modest, unassuming house nestled in the western reaches of Zone 3. Teenage years spent in a loft conversion overlooking a park. Very pedestrian occupants for this 90 year old structure, a survivor of the Blitz no less.

You see, there is a mode and mindset I often fall into, upon returning to London, upon returning to the respectable postcode. Lethargy. The thin navy-blue trail of the Piccadilly line leads me here, winding through so much history and life, past and present, carrying the future-forming thoughts and actions of a million people. Commuters, tourists, travellers, residents. Lethargy.

It is so easy to sneer, as a student, as a young person, as someone not engaged in a nine-to-five drudge, at the refrains of the jazz band drifting through the window of my local pub. How bourgeois. How typically perverse. Jazz, that New Orleans musical metamorphosis from plantation chants and dance repacked and recommodified to delight the cultural palates of Middle England.

But that’s just posturing. Just another cliched statement uttered with little conviction. The comfortable houses, the schools, the parks, the well-maintained war-memorials. All equally valid modes of existence, all equally valid communities constituting the larger urban sprawl. Really I’m just bored, suffering the anti-climactic comedown that returning home always presents to me. I need money on my Oyster card and dates in my diary – solid, physical prompts expelling me from the stasis of my bedroom and delivering me instead into the liberating chaos of tube tunnels.

Two trips to New York

Twice in the last five years my obliterated eyes have dealt with the sight and sounds of New York city. Even within the constraints of those two visits, (cumulatively amounting to less than a month spent in the city) there are fragments of the town that I too, know off by heart. More importantly, there’s so much I don’t know, so much hovering on the horizon, unfulfilled promises.

First – it was my 15th birthday, and I stumbled off a Greyhound bus, hot and bothered after a four-hour journey straight from Washington DC. My ears still echoed the Red Hot Chili Peppers CD I’d had on repeat for the duration.15 seemed like a significant age, my first year post-parental divorce – yet also a blank – just another fucking teenage year in the long road to adulthood. As it turned out, I was two years away from being 17 and properly beginning to get to grips with my self-identity, but that’s a story mostly set in London.

After a day New York said to me: “Hello. We’ve not met before, but you recognise in me a thousand parts of where you’ve come from, where you love, where you thrive. I recognise in you a love of big, fuck-off cities. We’re going to get along like a house on fire. A big old blaze from back in 1666.”

And we did.

Second – 19 years old, carried by train and plane from Florida, best friend in tow. Fresh from a week of heat and sweat and sunshine and almost too much wide open space. The roads were too big in Florida, it felt like there was all this land that they didn’t have enough stuff to fill it with. Everything was oversized and stretched on the outside, too tall and air-conditioned on the inside. But New York, New York was grey, urban, concrete. Significantly less American. Significantly more resonant, drawing upon the roar of traffic and boisterous crowds that underpinned my younger years. Just how I remembered it. Just why I came back. More than anything I was pleased, pleased that it felt the same, that recognition and familiarity, the mapping of my original urban incubator onto another. Alien and unknown yet recognisable, resonant. It offered me that vibe and cityscape that had, five years previous, caused me to nod and decide that this was a place for me.

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Written straight through just before midnight on June 23rd 2009, as a response to Matthew Sheret’s Sutphin Boulevard, New York, NY.

Beginning with a placeholder.

So here we are. Summer 2009, twenty years old, back and forth between London and Nottingham. Livejournal, my companion of 5 years no longer fits the bill, but I do so like to reach across the electronic oceans and send out words in the same way that I take them in. Less diary-slanted than my previous online efforts and less focused around communities and groups with shared interests. Blogging, then.