Posted in Philosophy, Bored musings at Tue 1 Dec 2009 by Stavros
I’ve unceremoniously deleted the blog I started writing. I was going to compile a top ten albums of the last ten years, charts that are all the rage here at the fag end of the first decade. But I thought that ten years is too long a time. What I liked in the innocent bug-feared days of 2000 is not necessarily what I like now. So what would my ranking prove? Nowt. Even for a quantitive junkie like me, that’s just a list too far.
Also what put me off is the maudlin nature of these decade lists. Years are fine, they don’t hang around long enough to get attached to, but the passing of a decade is like the passing of an old family pet. You don’t realise just how long you’ve had it until it’s on its way out with a bit of a limp and a lot of gas.
The reasons for this includes the fact that I started this decade skint, single, in rented accommodation and not being able to drive. I won’t finish this point lest it turns into some emo’s livejournal.
Also, I have an aversion to nostalgia. I hide when the old photos make an appearance at family gatherings. I’m well aware that for some it’s a comfortable place to be, memories warming them like a worn old blanket. For me though, it’s the stench of a neglected milk bottle as the fridge door is opened. Just now though it’s a fridge door with a broken hinge, opening at inopportune moments embarrassing the dinner guests. It’s not that I have bad memories, far from it really. But, like the beer bottles in the salad crisper, they should have their place.
The odd symptom with this bout of time flu is that these uninvited images of the past aren’t really of people or incidents or half-remembered conversations. They are of rooms. I’ll be working away in the office staring at Excel’s blank canvas like the grid lined Gauguin my company want me to be, when my mind will suddenly fill with the kitchen from my first student flat, or an out room at my Grandparent’s old house, or the faded dignity of the sweeping staircase of a holiday club house.
What can it mean? Is my consciousness building its perfect house, like Dr Frankenstein presenting Grand Designs? Like a ship needs its bottle, perhaps the past need my mental building project. If it’s anything like TV it will go over budget and the builders will go on strike. Ghosts are supposed to haunt a room, yet the rooms are haunting me.
So, contrary to what I want to believe, I’m as shackled to my yesterdays as anyone. But most immediately I must stop daydreaming and get on with some proper work, this pie-chart won’t bake itself.
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Posted in Films, TV at Wed 11 Nov 2009 by Stavros
Good day. Welcome. You are currently reading the 1,514th most regularly updated blog in Shropshire. Make yourself comfortable. I hope you are a patient reader.
I often blog about music, obviously that’s in relative terms, but not so much the other arts. Let me change that. I used to watch lots of films when I was a student, and even arranged my course around some excellent Film Studies modules. However I can’t seem to get excited over movies these days. I rarely watch them at all truth be told. When people talk of a must-see film I silently scoff, snobbishly imagining an explosion-heavy high octane prequel of a sequel of a comic. It sometimes is of course. Either that or Barry Magic. But it’s not exactly as if I spend my time consuming the celluloid canons of La Nouvelle Vague or Italian neorealism in my spare time instead. I’m sure I’m missing out on shitloads of flicks, not least I suppose Up and The Bicycle Thief.
The Buggles were wrong. TV killed the Videostar. At least for me. See the everyday domesticity of the violent New Jersey underworld of The Sopranos, the all-immersive crime and corruption of The Wire’s Baltimore, the contradictory almost bipolar 1960s New York in Mad Men. The sheer hours of character and story (and location) development means to me these are worlds that no two-hour film has ever so completely submerged me. The mournfully cancelled Deadwood and brilliant gritty French series Spiral did similar things too.
Never having been a big watcher of television (again hear the snobbish snorts of derision at Eastenders or X-Factor or Gok fucking Wan), I am trying to catch up on drama that may have slipped below my radar - or EPG. In the last couple of weeks I’ve watched the Red Riding trilogy and State of Play, both excellent large scale British dramas. Both sadly and unlike their US equivalents, only a few episodes long.
Strap your good selves in, here comes a point to this rambling
So, I hoped you, yes you, the crowd-sourced mind of a million thoughts, could let me know if there’s any great drama I may have missed over the last ten years or so. Anything British and ambitious, or any imported series the calibre of The Sopranos or as all-emcompassing as The Wire or as fragrant with poetic cussing as Deadwood? Or shameless comment whore that I am, tell me why I’m so wrong about film.
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Posted in Philosophy, Internet, Bored musings at Wed 12 Aug 2009 by Stavros
Like a crap cat-burgler, I return to the scene of the crime. And in doing so, you find me in reflective mood. I was puzzling over why I hadn’t blogged for so long, and the few blogs I’ve written lately feel like catch-up, reading as they’d been written, somehow obligated to do so. So I read some of my first paragraphs on here from 2003, and 2004, trying to rediscover what if anything had fuelled that enthusiasm.
What was different then? Why did I feel the need, enjoy even, to write about everyday things and thoughts. I guess the obvious answer is the nature of the internet itself. Updating a blog was the easiest way to keep in touch with a few friends and let each other what we had been up to. Now of course everyone (and their dog, mum, boss and ex-girlfriend) is on facebook. Or Twitter. Microblogging. As apparently even writing a few paragraphs is too time-consuming for the nuevo-internetista. Sad indictment, but true all the same.
Blogging in 2009 can seem to be the prevail of the political types. Those activists bent on changing the world from the comfort of their office chair. Or much worse still those Party cheerleaders who somehow juggle flying the flag for the “new media order” while scrambling for acceptance infront of the cameras of the cosy Aunty Beeb or scribbling pieces for the crusty old Telegraph. Are we already squinting back at a sepia-tinged bygone era? Whither the “I got pissed and fell over and ripped me slacks in the street” blogs? Why blog when you can micro-blog?
Perhaps it’s none of this. Perhaps nothing’s changed but me. Perhaps there are blogs out there updated regularly by the bloody-kneed drunk documenting his last night out, extolling his latest music tastes, typing away in torn trousers. I’m certainly more aware, or more cautious as to who might be reading my blog now. For me the internet feels a much more open, less cliquey place. My ambling prose at the arse end of 2003 would have been read by (at least I imagined) just a handful of folk. Do I have to be more thoughtful and less candid? If so, is it worth it? Who am I writing for, you or me?
Anyway, I hope you bear with me, while I decide how to continue with this blog in the future. I won’t shut it down or stop updating it completely as I still like it being there. My own personal toilet wall to graffiti at will. And of course there’ll always be Stav’s Top 10 albums of the year. So throw it into your RSS reader or whatever app you use on your iPhone and put your feet up, because I could be a while yet. And if it really has been too long, you could always remind me via a tweet.
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Posted in Philosophy, Bored musings at Fri 15 May 2009 by Stavros
Needless to say, apologies for the hiatus.
I went to Manchester airport yesterday. Here’s what I learnt:
Officially the biggest airport I’ve ever been to. Which is a crap claim. I didn’t go in. Which makes it even crapper.
If I worked as a prostitute at an airport hotel I’d dress as an air hostess so I blended in.
People who work in banking look like Tory MPs or former head boys or vaguely like characters from sit-coms.
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Posted in Beer, Food & Drink at Fri 6 Feb 2009 by Stavros
Before I start this weekend allow me to write a few lines about the last one. After leaving work a bit early on Friday me and brother Merk took our old dear to The Old Orleton for her birthday/our payday nosh up. I had reservations about the menu, it all looked a bit posh for me. I’m more of your baked bean pasta bake or infamously a sausage and carrot balti kind of man, especially when left to my own devices in the kitchen. However I do like eating animals I’ve not eaten before (like a carnivorous Noah, “my plate is my Arc”). So I settled on the game casserole. It was really really good. I’d like to have know what was in it, but I think there may have been partridge, vennison, wood pigeon and I think rabbit. There may have been minotour and griffin in it too, I just don’t know. Anyway after that and a few nice pints of Town Crier and a couple of brandies it was off home. Full and content and a bit squiffy. Oh and a bit poorer too as it weren’t cheap.
Saturday night began with a short train trip to Shifnal for another birthday meal. This time for Suzie and the food was Greek. I had a huge plate of lamb. I mean a piled plateful of sheep. It beat me too, I couldn’t finish it. I got the meat fatigue which kept me out of the race for the puddings. After that we all waddled to the Seven, which was packed as ever. So we braved the outdoors for the most of the cold cold January evening, only venturing back inside for drinks and widdles. A bravery which I think traces a proud lineage back to Scott and Oates and the rest of them. Hmmm. Anyway it was a great night, with plenty of laughs and just a hint of showing off this time (I’m told there are some photos knocking about the depths of the web, but I haven’t dared look!). Because of the huge dinner I didn’t feel very drunk at all, so me and our Merk finished off the brandy we saved from the previous night, then decided to empty our supply of beers too! Cue a big hangover on Sunday morning (well, afternoon really). Even a charcoal burger and a pint of doghair at The Beacon couldn’t shift the bastard.
Right, that’s written, now let’s get to work on this weekend’s hangover.
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