Now, this gig would have originally been on Guy Fawkes Night last year… but Matt Skiba’s foot got run over by a truck or something so obviously it had to be rescheduled and the best date to do it was the day before my birthday. Clearly, they love me.

The Dear & Departed were on earlier than I was expecting so I only heard like… the last 3 songs of their set. They were awesome enough that I was crushingly disappointed to discover they’d sold all their CDs already and had to console myself with a Dave Hause T-shirt. I know, I know.

Dave Hause

Dave Hause however was just as awesome as I was expecting. If a tad unnerved by the quiet crowd. I reckon we were all a bit dazed from the sunny weather during the day. Totally explains it. Randomly, in the last month I’ve managed to see Dave perform three times – first at the Twas the Night Before Wembley  gig on 12th April before Frank Turner’s awesome …uh… Wembley gig (did I write about that one? Possibly not). Then there was 11th May at the Black Heart annnnd of course, this gig supporting Alkaline Trio. Don’t ask me to remember what he played – I only know that I could sing along to only half of them, which clearly means that I need to listen to the album more. He also played two new songs – one of which (the “shine on” one) he played back in April and I really love.  Dan Andriano came out to sing with him for a bit before disappearing off for a costume change for later (really). Every time I see Dave perform I wish that I had thrown caution to the wind and stayed for the whole of his gig at the Windmill in Brixton last year. Although on the other hand, poor weather and dodgy trains aren’t things that go together (coupled with a longer than expected walk to the train station, I know, I’m kind of lame)…

Dave Hause and Dan Andriano

Then it was time for Alkaline Trio. Who proceeded to saunter on stage and announce that in the interests of saving the planet or something, they’d not printed a setlist and that it was going to be an all-requests show. I prefer to think that they decided to do it because they’re awesome. If inviting a logistical nightmare – I have no idea how they managed to hear any of the requests (that and Matt can’t remember some of the songs – oops).

Clavicle, Cooking Wine, Queen of Pain, This Could Be Love, In Vein, Mercy Me and Blue Carolina were all highlights (but is it a highlight when you’ve included nearly half the setlist?) as was Emma, with added Dave Hause.

Dave Hause, Matt Skiba and Derek Grant

Radio was, as always, a cracker of a song to end the set on. I think I would have liked to hear Sadie, Crawl and Dine, Dine My Darling or perhaps Love Love Kiss Kiss. Or just more songs where Dan took the lead because he does have a lovely voice, even though Matt’s songs are pretty kickass. In fact, I think I could have listened to them for a couple of hours more. All in all, it was probably the most fun gig I’ve been to recently.

Randomly, either Alkaline Trio have a high ratio of attractive female fans or drinking gives Skiba the horn. Either way, it was entertaining.

That aces setlist:

I don’t know whether I liked it or  not. There were bits that got a bit slow, I didn’t really sympathise with any of the characters and many of the horrific actions of Charlie, the main character,…didn’t really horrify me at all. It probably says something about my expectations of a sociopathic character, the way my imagination works and the kind of media that I consume on a regular basis (and have done since I was very young). Admittedly, I used to hear about these kind of actions on a regular basis from my Dad, who was a psychiatric nurse on a locked ward for violent, mentally ill people – so as soon as I realised that Charlie was a serious nutjob (not a technical term), then none of his actions were that much of a surprise or a shock.

Charlie is both fascinating and hateful all at once – the kind of creature that’s interesting to watch like a science experiment, but someone you wouldn’t want to know in real life. I didn’t understand why his wife or friends stuck with him, from his normal dinner-table kind of behaviour or exactly how he came into their lives and remained there for so long ( I suppose, I only really get it in the case of his best friend from childhood). Is it a case of being too close to someone to see how awful they are or being able to excuse their behaviour because you’re already close and it reflects badly on your judgement if you admit it? More interesting than Charlie on his own, was the way he was able to egg on his seemingly regular, normal-ish friends to do things they would never do under “normal” circumstances. There’s something in there about abdication of responsibility and the sort of general trend there seems to be in stuff I read about in the news (banks, corporations, various people etc) of not being responsible for something that’s gone wrong.

However, I’m too fuzzy-brained to really talk about that now.

I’m not too fuzzy-brained, on the other hand, to boggle at the woman sitting to my right in the cinema that was BROWSING FACEBOOK ON HER PHONE during the film. Seriously. We’re in the smallest cinema screen ever – how is that not going to be noticeable?

Which is really weird because back when HWM did that split with Alkaline Trio, I got hold of all the Alk3 tracks and liked them and thought “well, you know, the HWM tracks will probably be good too right?” AND THEN JUST NEVER LISTENED TO THEM.

Weird. I know. I even saw Chuck Ragan on The Revival Tour last year and once again (like.. a decade after that Alk3 moment) thought “I should really listen to Hot Water Music, I like all of their friends’ music…”

So yeah. I jumped on getting a ticket for this because…I figured that it was as good a time as any to really listen to a band for the first time and OMGOMGOMG IT WAS AWESOME. :D:D:D

Admittedly, that’s somewhat similar to my reaction to the Avengers film when I saw it last week. You get the point though.

And they played the two songs I was vaguely familiar with, so bonus.

HildaMay were cool. I confess here that I didn’t look them up online anywhere so was genuinely expecting a girl band because of the name. I still liked them though.

Sharks were the same as they usually are. I’ve realised that I keep seeing Sharks when they’re supporting someone else. I don’t think I’d put the effort in to see them headline, but they’re ok.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Something a little tangential to start with.

I was thinking about this quote I had rattling around in my head and knew that the original piece was said by a man to a woman but I couldn’t quite remember if it was in text or on film, in real life or in fiction but that I had heard/read it twice. In the end my google-fu turned up the film Bright Star which covers the relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne.

So.

That quote:

“The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”

Keats says this to Brawne after she turns up for her first lesson in poetry and he starts to wonder if he’s really up to that kind of task or if it can really be taught.

Anyway, having finished The City & The City, that line got me thinking about something Mieville said in the past about monsters.

“So I want to have monsters as a metaphor but I also want monsters because monsters are cool. There’s no contradiction.”

AND THEN, also about something that I occasionally hear from my favourite DJ on my favourite radio station, what seems like one or two people on tumblr and a handful of my music-loving friends on twitter…which is usually some variation on “Participate, not document” in regard to going to gigs and the sea of fellow attendees with cameraphones held aloft videoing the proceedings (I’m a phone Luddite, so generally I may take an actual camera with me but I still treat my digital camera like it’s a disposable film camera and if I do take pictures, I tend to end up with about 5 or 6 choice moments that may or may not be a little blurry).

(And no, I don’t entirely know what my point with that tangent was.)

The sort of general theme of wallowing in the experience probably applies to most of my take on existence. Which, I suppose, makes sense. I wallow in it. I don’t think too much about what the lyrics to a song might mean, but I enjoy the feel of them in my mouth.

And that’s the kind of approach I had with this book. I realise that, yes, there must be undertones of various messages threaded throughout…but for me that’s not the point. When I’m there, inhabiting the brainspace of the main character Borlu, I’m there. In Beszel or Ul Qoma. Unseeing and seeing. Weirdly (or not) I hear Borlu’s dialogue in Mieville’s voice. Another thing that occurred to me was that I regard both cities as somewhere much like Istanbul, but not. More almost but not quite, which I guess may be the point since any place mentioned in a detective story automatically becomes the alternate reality of whatever real place it might have been set in.

I liked it though. At one point I thought that Yolanda and Mahalia were the same person. I wondered if fic had been written of Corwi and Dhatt working together. I was highly suspicious of that one character who asked those very insistent, pointed questions. Other things.

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love books that deal with religions. Especially made up ones. I love books that deal with the whole world within a world/city within a city/otherside/invisible reality trope.

This kind of SMOOSHES them together. Which is ideal really.

I did read a few reviews where Mieville is accused of sticking in too many made up words and that making it harder to understand. I didn’t get that at all. If you need a word or term for something and there isn’t one, then make it up. At lease he draws on existing language to actually make the new terms make sense.

Although that might just be me, as I learnt a good deal of the vocabulary I possess by figuring out what words meant in context. It’s a pain in the next when I actually have to explain something to my mum, but it does come in handy with crosswords.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked the theme of reconciliation being a journey in this books and the discussion of the various methods that can be used to make this journey. Lederach has very easy to read, almost conversational style – which definitely helped. So often I’ve found that the texts I have to read for my course are an awful slog. This is far from that.
Peppered throughout are stories – from Lederach’s personal experience, from the Bible or ones that have been told to him. This offered a nice break from the more “thinky” parts of the book and offered their own points to consider in a different way.

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ll admit that I am terribly biased when it comes to Stewart Lee because I loved him when I was a teenager and he was skinny and not old. Luckily for me, Lee is still incredibly funny (and admittedly, still adorably cute – though that’s possibly not an adjective normally attributed to him).
This book is basically a transcript of his “If you prefer a milder comedian, please ask for one” show but with DVD extras (aka, the best footnotes of any author ever). It’s probably not the thing if you’re not familiar with Lee’s style or his delivery – you won’t hear his voice when you’re reading and I think that’s important because. Well. It’s a transcript isn’t it? The awkward pauses and repetition and failboatiness of his style is an integral part of what makes Stewart Lee funny and without prior knowledge of this…well, maybe get a DVD rather than a book.

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Some of you who know me in real life (and probably a few who only know me online) might be aware that I suffer from what I would call fairly mild tinnitus or that whenever I go to gigs or sing-a-long movies or anything potentially loud, I wear earplugs. My tinnitus is pretty much down to going to gigs and rocking out at the front and totally not looking after my hearing while I was at university. Looking back, I remember seeing Alec Empire at Reading when I was about 17 and being almost completely deaf for a little over an hour after leaving the tent he was performing in. Alec Empire was great and with all the excitement of seeing all the other bands I wanted to check out at the festival, I didn’t really give my hearing any real thought – other than it was a bit inconvenient that I couldn’t hear how much credit I had left on my mobile. I was young and invincible, right?

After that I went to other gigs. I remember marvelling that coming home after seeing Queens of the Stone age, my ears didn’t ring half so much as they did after I’d been to see Idlewild. Incidentally, that Idlewild gig left my ears ringing constantly for over a week. Again, I was young and invincible.

Until, after one gig I went to (and I don’t remember which one) the ringing didn’t go away. It just stuck about. Pretty quietly, but there.

Most of the time, I don’t notice it. I’m doing other things or listening to music and so long as my hearing hasn’t really been overstimulated during the day… I can go to bed and it’ll still be very quiet and I can just go to sleep like most people. Sometimes though, if I’ve been somewhere loud or right after doing the vacuuming, the ringing in my ears dials up to 11 and stops me from being able to get to sleep. Now, there are ways of dealing with it and I tend to turn the radio on very quietly and then my brain can latch on to that sound as something to pay attention to, instead of the riiiiiiing in my head (I find Ancient Faith radio or Classic FM to be pretty good for this).

The best thing is not to get to that stage in the first place and that’s why I now wear earplugs at gigs. Also, when I vacuum. It always feels like my hearing’s been pretty sharp anyway so I carry my earplugs everywhere and if I think something’s too loud, regardless of what it is? In they go. Best investment ever. I have custom earplugs which are moulded to fit my ears exactly and they are great. They live in a little purse in my handbag and I take them everywhere.

So. If you like going to gigs, wear earplugs. They don’t have to be the custom fancy pants expensive kind – for years I used to pop into Superdrug every so often and pick up a box of the foam kind. They don’t tone down the sound with the same kind of quality, but they still protect your ears and really, that’s the important part.

And finally, a word from Eddy Temple-Morris on Tinnitus, because he’s a boss and I got a discount on my earplugs thanks to him.

British Tinnitus Association

If this SOPA thing actually went into effect, does that mean all the free advertising and hype-making from rabid fangirls gets banninated? If so, how is that good for the film industry?

What I hate most is when I am too sick to carry on with what I am doing and yet not tired or lethargic or whatever enough to be content with doing nothing. It sucks.

On the other hand, at least I don’t get throat infections every year, now that I have grown into my tonsils.