Ghostland at the Opera

Remember how I was gonna be a music critic? Well... I still am. I just can't resist. I saw what I would comfortably describe as the second worst band ever, the worst band ever naturally being the Plastic Ono Band. I'll be somewhat lenient and suggest the possibility that, because I had seen them once before, my negative views on the Black Angels are mildly excessive, but I say that without any real conviction. Any six-piece band should be able to, if nothing else, produce one hell of a wall of sound. But oh no. Not this six-piece. For two of the members did absolutely fuck all. One fellow on the right spent near the entirety of the set, barring two songs he was allowed to play bass on, beating a single floor tom, to the exact same rhythm as the real drummer, while on the left side of the stage, some chick on the synth took part in about three songs, the extent of her playing being to press one note and hold it for the duration of the song, performing some intricate fag dance behind her machine. Chicks don't fag dance. Right. Fine. Go tell it on the mountain. I could further expound on the inadequacies of this bands set, but then I'd be forced to take a frying pan to my face, and I'm just not in the mood for self-righteous martyrdom.

Happily though, and I say this with an exceeding amount of excitement, happily, the Black Angels were not the headliners. And so after they surrendered the stage, and thirty minutes of house music had lulled us, the world suddenly became a magical, wonderful place full of... magic and wonder? Yes! Correct answer. Five points for Gryffindor. Ghostland Observatory were gods, are gods, and will forever be gods. An hour and a half drifted by with the world in a state of grace and I forgot entirely about the disappointment of the beginning of the night. The sound was brilliant, the dancing was hilariously bizarre, the superhero cape cheesily classy, and the light show... Ahh, I wanted to throw myself from the balcony and surf through the blinding colours, and I say that in the best possible way. Felt as though I was in a Windows Media Player random display skipping along to the music. And trust me, I've always wanted to be in one of those.

Funny how I feel as though I have more to say being critical of one band, than praising the other. Maybe that's why critics are such jackasses. It's easier to write negative reviews than positive. Easier to trash talk than idolize.

Or maybe I'm just cynical.

Sugar Free Tibet!

Do you ever feel the world's just waiting for you to do something wonderful? I don't know what gives me that feeling. Whether it's the repressed egotistical side of me who feels he will one day change the world, or the more casually expressed insecure me who'd also like to change the world, but is too afraid of stepping on someone's toes to do it. 'Oh, what's that? Oh you're changing the world too? You go ahead then... I'll wait.'

Maybe that's all too much. Maybe I should aim lower. I want to be a superhero. I want to put on tights and a cape and fight crime syndicates. And I want to fly a jet plane. Or one of those planes that writes letters in the sky. And I want to be a painter, and bleed my life onto canvas. I want to be that person that everyone thinks back on and says, 'What a cool guy he was.' And I want to build a palace on the moon, and own a spaceship. I want to be a songwriter, and live on the Californian coast. Or I want to be a music critic and spend my life listening to records and then being an absolute snob about them. I want to build a grass hut in Tahiti, and then give up architecture forever.

But really, really I want to change the world.

Deja Vu to You Too

So I was just reading an old email that I wrote to a friend, and, because I have strange compulsive disorders, I started clicking and highlighting the text repeatedly. Uncontrollably. And then I read the following: 'Why do I continually click on text to highlight and unhighlight it?' So then I spent a few moments tapping on my keys and mulling this puzzling coincidence over, before reading the next line, as follows: '...and then I tap on the keys without typing anything when I'm thinking.'

It was very much as though my past self was communicating with my current self and pointing out all his quirks. So having said that, I'll let my past-self continue his analysis of me, and then drop this whole pointless issue forever: 'I think fidgety would be a good word to describe me. A fidgety muppet. Nothing more. A fidgety jackasstic muppet. Maybe that. Sometimes.

Jackasstic's a better word than asinine, only not as real.'

My Golden Parachute

Somebody once told me I led a charmed life. That the world happily reorganized itself to suit me and make my life the most convenient possible. I don't remember who said it, or what exactly they said, but it was something like that. Well... whoever that person was, they're an absolute muppet, and had no idea of what they spoke. No idea. Do I really make it look easy? I resent that.

I work darn hard at this.

Another Coffee for Your Soul

Where did this all come from? Are we really supposed to believe that some fish-lookin' creature crawled from the primordial muck aeons ago and then, through a process of freakish happenstance, transormed itself into an even more bizarre creature capable of creating all of this? Cars, planes, skyscrapers, bridges, McDonald's, Starbuck's... But really, what's the point? Makes you wonder at least. 'Give us a reason!' they screamed into the sky. And tell me it's more than just being born, stumbling blindly through life, and dying, having hopefully, at some point, been successful enough to pass on those fickle codifiers of your existence, genes. Cosmically speaking though, it leaves us feeling pretty damn insignificant. Even those who change the world, in the grand scheme of things, are just blips beneath the surface. Life goes on. The world goes on. The universe goes on. But our lives, our worlds, our universes... don't. Change the world or no, we're all still bound for that silver tea tray in the sky. How's that for squashing ambition. 'I'm gonna change the world!' 'Yeah, but it won't mean a thing.' Maybe it's better to save the world. Then, even if you're not remembered, there'll at least be people left to forget you. Oh please don't forget me. I'm gonna write my name in the sky. Hundred foot tall letters to tell the world that I... I was significant.

Ever wonder what ants have to say about us? Or cats? Or birds? Probably that we're quite significant, but we can't fly. Same maybe as we think of elephants, or whales, or dinosaurs. But they haven't created this faux existence. Why's that? Is it solely because of the lack of an opposable thumb? Was that the fluke that instigated all this madness? Arguably. But it could also be claimed to be the capacity for language. Or maybe both simultaneously. Or one leading to the other over millions of years. And my head's spinning. Think of it, philosophize all you want, but it never becomes much clearer. How'd it all begin? When will it end? Can you comprehend infinity? Where do we fit in? How'd we begin? Are there others? The chicken or the egg? Well... that's easy. The egg. Obviously. An egg laid by something almost, but not entirely, like a chicken, and when it hatched, having cosmetically altered that last genetic hiccough et, voila, the first chicken.

Call me a liar, and that much at least is true. But it's only because the truth scares me. The truth that we're all composites in some minority of the universe's matter loosely clinging to our own conglomerate spinning rapidly around some enormous nuclear reactor and yet we don't even know who we are. Why am I here? Why am I granted a possible seventy or eighty years amidst all of this? Thrown headlong into a world I've had no part in shaping and told, quite simply, live. But what else? What else is it that I'm here for? And what's that answer everyone's been going on about, but no-one's found? And maybe most importantly, how am I aware enough of 'self' to question all of this? Maybe it doesn't matter.

Maybe it's enough that I do.