Over Christmas, I was thinking about documentation. A couple of weeks previously, someone had told me that it's something I seem to do fairly instinctively. From a professional point of view this makes me laugh, because documentation is always the least attractive aspect of any project for me. But when it comes to something that I've got more of a personal interest in, I take the point.

I remembered something that I used to do when I was young. When we went on long car journeys, I'd sit there with a pad of paper in my lap and a pencil in my hand, trying to move my wrist smoothly along each line, but letting myself be influenced by the bumps in the road. I imagined myself as a human seismograph, making a "recording" of our journey that I could then "play back" in future.

Weird kid. But it seems that impulse to document began early and it has persisted in numerous forms (including this blog) ever since. Ultimately, I guess it's part of an ongoing, life-long battle against loss. Whether you view that as a positive, healthy thing or something that springs more from anxiety and nerves is another matter. It depends on the extent to which it's carried out, I suppose.

"To remember everything is a form of madness, Owen."

- Brian Friel, Translations

You could also argue that trying consciously to forget seems like another form of insanity too. I document far less these days... too little, I sometimes think. I don't feel as driven to do it. Maybe I'm like a recovering addict, trying to avoid that adrenaline surge that comes with the perfect encapsulation of the moment. Maybe I'm just better at appreciating the moment, then letting it go.

I do think the video above (via Caroline) is utterly beautiful, though. The structure of a song, dissected and transcribed into another medium, then undermined and dissolved before your eyes. Coincidentally, my first full-time job was working with a specialist printing company that produced the paper charts onto which those pens describe the music so insistently, with such precise lunacy.

Posted by Hg on Thursday 07 January 2010 at 20:33.
Received 2 comments so far.

I read the dead man's e-mail messages again yesterday. I wondered exactly what it was that I was looking at. They had none of the immediacy or intimacy of a physical artifact. A letter or a postcard would have given me a direct connection back to a time when his warm hands had held the paper, pressed ink onto its surface. Instead, a collection of ones and zeroes formed a different kind of memento mori: a purer, more abstract preservation of thoughts, ideas and words.

My thoughts turned to myself. When I die - for I am now simply too old to keep using "if" to start that sentence, as though youthful hope itself could hold back the tide of time - what will I leave behind? What do these words mean without a "me" behind them? Are they my best chance at immortality, or merely the dry ashes of a fire that burns brightly and will ultimately consume itself? If so, why bother at all? Better, maybe, to burn with a cleaner flame that leaves no residue.

Posted by Hg on Saturday 02 January 2010 at 21:38.
Received 0 comments so far.

I found him, mute and staring, in front of the mirror. His face was older and sadder than I remembered. I asked him what was wrong, but he wouldn't say. He tried to push me away, but persistence is my speciality.

The mood was glass and reflection. It had been the oddest of days: a blockage, a breakdown and a broken promise being the least pressing concerns. No, the limbs were what had panicked him the most.

He had fought the urge for as long as possible, until every cell in his body screamed FLIGHT. He had run hard and fast until the darkness overwhelmed him, but in spite of everything he had still made it home.

I asked him if he understood. He did not. I asked him if he wanted to understand. He shook his head. I asked whether he wanted someone else to understand. His hollow laugh was the best answer he could give.

And then I remembered: eight times in and eight times further inward. I unfolded him slowly, but all I found at his centre was a tick, a cross and a question mark, blurred by the bloom of a solitary dried teardrop.

Posted by Hg on Saturday 19 December 2009 at 12:38.
Received 2 comments so far.

I writhe in fits and starts. Say something, don't do it. Do nothing, don't say it. A row of teeth in their chattering glasses: submerged, unable to be silent, but unwilling to be heard.

There is a picture that I must paint instead. A torrid collision of dried salt-spunk-shit, sealed in spittle. I bathe in cold grey light, sticky silver rivers and dirt-brown shivers.

Posted by Hg on Friday 18 December 2009 at 22:34.
Received 0 comments so far.


I got involved with DrunkenWerewolf towards the end of 2007. Having enjoyed issue 2, I wrote a handful of reviews for issue 3. With issue 4 I upped my game by submitting an interview with Michael McLinn and since then I've continued to contribute on a regular basis, only missing out on one issue when I was simply too busy to do the material justice.

This month, amazingly, DW celebrates its fifth birthday, a significant milestone in its progression from an online music blog to a well-respected print magazine. This coincides with its publication of issue 10, which in turn coincides with the end of the decade whose "underrated, under-funded and undiscovered [musical] artists" it has devoted itself to highlighting.

Issue 10 continues to focus on new music, but also features various pieces by (or about) some of the artists featured on the covers of previous issues. Many of the regular writers (including me) have also written about their most inspirational albums of the decade. It's not a "best of", more a summary of releases that have made a significant personal impact.

I chose Lifted or The Story Is The The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground by Bright Eyes, which I described as "a fierce, lonely beacon on the musical landscape of the 2000s". To find out more, you'll have to buy the magazine. It's bigger and bolder than ever - 50 pages this time round - and available free at certain outlets or by mail order from the magazine's website.

Posted by Hg on Tuesday 15 December 2009 at 15:22.
Received 0 comments so far.


As you might already be aware, over the course of this year I've become more involved with my favourite band of the past five years or so, Lupen Crook & The Murderbirds. It started off with a website, but then I got sucked into the band's Crooked Family and now my roles are numerous: Minister Of Propaganda, Holder Of The Purse Strings, Head Trainspotter, Spelling Fascist, Diviner Of Order Within Chaos, Sticker Of Stamps and Chief Nag, amongst many others.

The band members, both individually and together, have done many interesting and amazing things this year, but I'm particularly proud to be associated with their latest venture. When I started freelancing three years ago, I always had it in my head that I'd eventually end up doing some voluntary work for a charity. Until recently, this penniless band was the closest thing that seemed to fit the bill. But now we've got involved with a real, actual charity: YoungMinds.

YoungMinds is the UK's leading organisation promoting mental health and emotional well-being for children and young adults. The band has chosen to support YoungMinds based on Lupen Crook's own experiences of being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder as a teenager, approximately ten years ago. A free download EP was released on Monday containing six songs that cover the positives and negatives of living with such a disorder. Donations to YoungMinds are encouraged.

As well as being a fund-raising effort to help out the charity (the band is directing donations towards the YoungMinds parents helpline in particular), the aim of this project is to help raise awareness of mental health issues. The oft-quoted statistic is that one in ten people is "mentally ill" (always a loaded phrase) at any one time and one in four people experience some kind of mental health issue throughout the course of their lifetime. Yet the subject remains awkward.

As well as handling the overall communication strategy for this release, I interviewed both Lupen Crook and his partner Sam about the day-to-day reality of living with a mental health issue and supporting someone who is affected. I was also particularly interested in the relationship between Crook's disorder and his creativity, a long-term fascination of mine that has roots in numerous places, but probably my admiration and respect for Kristin Hersh and her work in particular.

And as for the music itself... what are you going to hear if you download this EP? Six songs, two of which were written last year and four very recently. Recorded live, acoustically, just three and a half weeks before the release date. Sparse and intense in parts, relentlessly catchy in others. Bob and Clayton providing a rock-solid rhythm section over which Tom's beautiful guitar work and Lupen Crook's ambivalent tales (and increasingly resonant vocals) can unfold.

When I look back over all of the things that I've done in 2009, helping to get this EP out into the world is one of the things that I'm most pleased with. It's something that has blurred the distinctions between my creative output, my social life, my professional skills and my interest in health and wellbeing, to an extent that I've never managed to achieve before. If you're interested in checking it out, I'd love to hear your feedback, either here or over on the band's website.


Download & Further Reading/Viewing:


Posted by Hg on Wednesday 18 November 2009 at 16:47.
Received 0 comments so far.

[ PDF version | trial transcript | strength & weakness ]

Posted by Hg on Thursday 05 November 2009 at 08:35.
Received 2 comments so far.

Street

Five days in New York. A fantasy lifestyle: a hotel suite in the Upper West Side, an unlimited use MetroCard, an empty diary and a bulging address book. A city to be enthusiastically explored and disdainfully ignored. Conversations round tables piled with food, coffee, beer. Intense music and companionable silence. Combinations of old and new friends shuffled and re-shuffled: hearts and diamonds, jokers and knaves.

"What was it like?" people ask me on my return. Fuck knows. There's no narrative, just a series of fragments. Dysconnection on the Long Island Rail Road. Greek food at Niko's (pasta and pizza available, feta cheese obligatory). The slow regaining of consciousness in Starbucks each morning. The strange perspective on a home life 6,000 miles away. Shopping. Drum & bass and an infinite selection of t-shirts.

Sticky heat and torrential downpour. A mountain of fries in L'Orange Bleue. The magnificence of Grand Central. Midtown and Rockefeller. Meatballs and mash at Hallo Berlin. An upmarket fleamarket peopled with stall-holding eccentrics. Cognitive dissonance in Central Park as skyscapers clashed with trees. The Boat Basin Café, a mini log.nu reunion of sorts. Piercing sunlight in the Amsterdam Ale House.

Local and express. Sam Adams. Carnegie Hall - "the most beautiful room in the world" - and the tangible evidence of decades of music obsession. A few words. High-gravity jetlag in the Parker Meridien restaurant. Taxi-cab confessions ("Forgive me father, it has been four hours since my last taxi..."). Street pizza, then rock 'n' roll on the High Line. Armchair-sinking in the elegant bohemia of the Gaslight Lounge.

Beers in the Macdougal Street Ale House over $2.50 Mamoun's falafels. F-line FAIL, then on to watch a Packers game at Angry Wade's in Brooklyn. Lunch at the Slaughtered Lamb, washed down with Grey Dog cappuccino in Washington Square Park afterwards. A rush-hour walk and a good-natured bicker over the aesthetic qualities of the Port Authority building (beautiful; don't let anyone tell you otherwise).

Rogue Dead Guy Ale and avoiding the meat sweats at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Harlem. The iron grandeur of the Riverside Drive bridge. Salad ("Just to let you know, the dressing is vegan"), gossip and comparison with with English Girl #1 in the West Village. Bumping into friends on the subway. A taxi to the airport, our driver missing other cars with millimetre precision. Checking in and checking out.

Life and laughter. Sunshine, sunshine, sunshine. There was much more, but I'm already forgetting. Who needs a story? These snapshots will do.

Posted by Hg on Friday 09 October 2009 at 22:37.
Received 8 comments so far.

Mrs Hg: Can you do that big pile of ironing today, because I'm going to stick another wash in the machine this evening.

Hg: Ah yes, the ironing. Actually, I've been saving it up as a treat.

Mrs Hg: Why?

Hg: I'm looking forward to a massive gushing orgasm of heat and steam. I love ironing with every molecule of my body, every atom of my soul.

Mrs Hg: It's a good job you're not Catholic.

Hg: What do you mean?

Mrs Hg: You'd have to go straight to confession after that.

Posted by Hg on Wednesday 23 September 2009 at 07:45.
Received 2 comments so far.

I was daydreaming on the train on the way home, after a night out with a friend. Slowly I started to focus on the conversation going on a few seats away. Two besuited guys and a smart, attractive woman with a voice like liquid honey.

They were clearly flirting with her. She was more than a match for them. The point at which I fell in love with her was when one of the men offered her "a quantum of solace" and she declared herself "shaken but not stirred".

Posted by Hg on Friday 18 September 2009 at 23:27.
Received 0 comments so far.

Caster Semenya - man or woman? Poor woman, because - however the medical evidence may decide to categorise her - that's clearly what she feels herself to be.

The world likes symmetry. Neat, binary divisions: yes/no, black/white, zero/one. I like symmetry too - the first band I ever loved was ABBA, for God's sake. It's satisfyingly neat and tidy, deceptively simple. But the process of becoming an adult taught me that it's not the entire truth. It's merely a starting point from which further questions emerge.

A wholly bipolar existence is a fantasy. As a teenager I discovered the philosophical concept of Hegelian dichtotomy and it instantly explained the world in a way that nothing had done previously. You have a thing, an idea (thesis) and then you have its opposite (antithesis). But they're inextricably connected, two sides of the same coin.

The coin has a name: synthesis. A bigger idea that unites two apparently irreconcilable differences into a convincing whole. A concrete example: left-wing vs right-wing. Together, they form part of a political system. Zoom out: political system vs anarchy. Two different modes of societal operation. Synthesis.

I've never liked the line that divides two extremes. It's always felt rather artificial to me. It's not a line; it's a continuum, a sliding scale. Shades of grey, if you like, though grey has negative associations with dullness, boredom, depression. A rainbow of colours, maybe. Building blocks: RGB, or CMYK. Just a starting point for infinite variety.

Go out onto the streets, observe your fellow wo/man. Speculate. Make judgements. Put people into boxes. Really, you have no idea what nestles between their legs, what squats in their heads. Man/woman. Mad/sane. Saint/sinner. Lover/destroyer. None of the above, or all of the above? Pigeonholes are for the birds. We're much more.

"Facebook says it forces people to give their real name and date of birth on the site to make the web more credible by preventing people from hiding behind pseudonyms or impersonating others. It wants people's profiles to be a genuine reflection of who they are offline."

Identity is such a rich and fascinating phenomenon. Who's to say that your "real" name and date of birth define who you truly are? Facebook's mono-faceted view echoes the dilemma faced by the IAAF, which suddenly finds that the principles on which it has organised its field of operation might not actually work in the real world.

We all do this. When our world-view comes up against something that doesn't fit our mental concept of how life should be structured, it's uncomfortable. But it's also incredibly healthy and that short-term discomfort is, in the long-run, one of the things that makes life vibrant, rather than merely a parade of familiar experiences.

As far as I'm concerned, the truth of Caster Semenya's gender is whatever she chooses it to be. The "problem" unfairly foisted upon her is the real lie.

Posted by Hg on Saturday 12 September 2009 at 12:17.
Received 5 comments so far.

It visits me first on the train. Go away, I tell it. Fuck off. You were due yesterday. You're late. I'm not interested.

It sits next to me on the seat and stares quizzically, deaf to my command. I ignore it. This is not a conversation I'm having today. It tries to summon the flies, but they do not come. Presumably they've found another corpse around which to hover. It pants and drools. Waves of nausea wash over me with each exhalation of its hot, rancid breath.

I flee to the calming presence of Lady Penelope and my travelling companion thankfully fails to keep pace. We examine portraits of startling technical proficiency. A world that contains these images can't be anything other than a good place. I start to feel human again. We cross the river and sit in the sunshine, until time comes to part.

I enter the Festival Hall. Normally a place of calm inspiration, today it feels brittle and arid. Music drifts out of the auditorium, sounding baleful and funereal. I hear a scuttling behind me, but there's nothing there. I feel haunted. Hunted. The phone rings. Conversation is awkward, stilted. I know who she wants, but he's not here today.

It's time to move. I head for the Portal of the Divine Martyr, the gateway to the madlands. I chase the ghost of John Betjeman around its interior for a while, before meeting my mother, father and wife. A sense of calmness and normality descends, shaken only by the recurring sensation that we're all characters in A Clockwork Orange.

My parents pass through the portal to the land of my birth. My wife and I head for home. I tell her belatedly how lovely it is to see her. She eyes me strangely, suspecting an ulterior motive. I can't get the words to make sense, so I hold her instead. She sits on the seat next to me, a more than welcome replacement for the earlier marauder.

It finds me again in the house. Go away, I tell it. Fuck off. You don't live here. You're lost. I'm not who you think I am.

"You're nobody," it chuckles maliciously, before slinking into the shadows, leaving its childish taunt hanging in the air.

Posted by Hg on Friday 11 September 2009 at 21:56.
Received 1 comments so far.

Previously

I've come across Esben & The Witch before and appreciated what they do, but I've never taken the time... »

Posted by Hg on Tuesday 08 September 2009 at 08:53.
Received 0 comments so far.

I've been blogging here for well over seven years now. My writing style has evolved, regular themes and subjects have... »

Posted by Hg on Monday 07 September 2009 at 14:24.
Received 6 comments so far.

Someone has proclaimed Her love for Him on the wall of the lift. Scrappy graffiti in crappy biro. It's clearly... »

Posted by Hg on Thursday 03 September 2009 at 22:14.
Received 3 comments so far.

Mr C: First the grey squirrels came for the red ones, now the black squirrels have come for the grey... »

Posted by Hg on Wednesday 19 August 2009 at 21:22.
Received 1 comments so far.

Hg: For fuck's sake... more junk mail. Mrs Hg: Don't be so negative all the time. Think of it as... »

Posted by Hg on Wednesday 05 August 2009 at 19:17.
Received 13 comments so far.

Bliss, space, burn... Summer words. And yet, as I turn the lamp on at two o'clock in the afternoon,... »

Posted by Hg on Tuesday 04 August 2009 at 16:46.
Received 0 comments so far.

Wired with high-tension energy, run screaming from the malls. Fall down flat on your face, kiss the pavement. Seep... »

Posted by Hg on Sunday 02 August 2009 at 12:53.
Received 0 comments so far.

»

Posted by Hg on Tuesday 28 July 2009 at 01:18.
Received 0 comments so far.

Earlier

Visit the archives for a detailed list of posts in reverse chronological order, or if you're looking for something specific, try a search:

Elsewhere

You can also find me on Twitter, Tumblr, Last.fm, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr.

If you want to get in touch with me, you can e-mail me at Hg At [The Name Of This Blog] Dot Com.

Copyright

All original material on this site is © Hydragenic, 2002-2010. Extracts of other people's work are used for the purpose of criticism, review or news reporting, in line with the "fair dealing" (or "fair use") principle.